A number of participants are viewing the sessions at partner sites throughout the United States and Canada, Nigeria, Panama, Sudan and South Africa. Others are attending via live webcast. During a panel discussion after Brueggemann’s presentation, questions came in via video conferencing from South Africa, Missouri, Connecticut and Toronto, in addition to those asked by New York participants.
Church Divinity School of the Pacific Dean and President Mark Richardson said in introducing Brueggemann that modern-day skeptics look for an “unfeeling God of the scripture that they find by treating the material of the Bible as if it can be flattened out into facts much as scientific inquiry is about discreet, quantifiable things and processes, and then they attack the God they think they have discovered in scriptures.”
Thus, he said, the Bible becomes “a symbol of what is past and what must make for a new spirituality.”
His observation that we need to get away from historical criticism is, I think, spot on (as is his observation that the Bible is far more interesting than many of the books written about it). His analysis, however, falls terrible short in His description of God, in whose image we were created. Too bad he does not understand that the conflict we experience is rooted in sin.
I think Dr. charles Raven really unravelled RW++ approaches to the Bible which sounds similar to this nonsense. If you understand this approach is to leave Bible criticism in the dust to be replaced by whatever the spirit moves you to believe, then you will fall for any interpretation of scripture. Then the natural consequence is that Scripture has no authority and if scripture has no authority, then you can conclude anything is holy if it makes one feel good which is of course what some want to believe. Now if they could just get the rest of us to go along, things would be swell ! NOT!
You should read Dr. Raven’s book, The Shadow Gospel. Quite an eye opener.
Quite a contrast to the approach taken by the speakers at the Mere Anglicanism Conference.