Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Evangelicals and the Bible

Dennis Bratcher

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There is one other factor that we need to consider and take seriously in dealing with biblical texts: Scripture did not arise at a single time from a single place by a single author. And it did not emerge full grown and immutable from the head of Moses or Paul. Scripture is not just a book, but is a set of traditions that were dynamic across more than 1,500 years of human history (and in some ways are still dynamic). What we read in Scripture is a community of Faith in dialog with itself across a millennium and a half, through several epochs of human history. The biblical text cannot be flattened out and made to read as if it were written as a whole at one time, and certainly not as if it were addressed to us as it stands.

This means that all of Scripture, including the New Testament, is culturally conditioned, not just the parts that are hard to understand

http://www.crivoice.org/evangelicals%20bib.html

Just how much authority should the Bible be seen to hold? It's a conflict many evangelists face as, slowly yet surely, more, even within their own community, come to accept the Bible should be no
longer be seen simply as the world of the word-of-God, but that it actually has been, from the very beginning, fairly seen by others as a book of some actual human cultural invention. and content.