Bravus, where are you getting the idea that your ideological …

Comment on Board requests progress reports from LSU administration by David Read.

Bravus, where are you getting the idea that your ideological opponents think they know everything? Where does this come from?

I’ve never claimed to know it all, but what does that have to do with our faith differences? Obviously, nobody knows anything about origins. It is all a matter of faith. I read the Bible the way Adventists have always read it, and you think that reading can’t possibly be correct. So we have a faith difference, or a difference of opinion. How does my opinion make me a know-it-all? Why doesn’t your opinion make you a know-it-all?

I’m not following your logic at all, nor Ervin’s, and I’m really trying to. I think perhaps the conservative mind is cast in such an utterly different modality than the liberal mind that meaningful dialog is all but impossible.

David Read Also Commented

Board requests progress reports from LSU administration
Bravus: “Recognising that *both* our reading of Scripture and our reading of the natural world might need work” sounds like a reasonable idea. But it is not sound exegesis to adopt a certain reading of Scripture merely so that Scripture accommodates some theory of origins. “The Bible is not to be tested by men’s ideas of science.” PP 114. Rather, the Bible should be interpreted using its own internal evidence. The Bible should be read and interpreted by comparing passage with passage, verse with verse, chapter with chapter, and thereby getting a sense of what God was trying to communicate to us in His word. An astonishing consistency emerges from that kind of Bible study.

It is especially unsound and illogical to interpret Scripture so as to accommodate theories of origins that have been developed in accordance with the philosophy of naturalism. Scripture is written from a supernaturalistic point of view, and assumes that God, angels, demons and Satan exist, that God created, and upholds and sustains His creation, and that God has often miraculously intervened in His created universe. So the philosophical foundation of Scripture is contrary to the philosophy underpinning Darwinism and long ages geology. It is exegetically senseless to strain to interpret Scripture, which is marinated in the supernatural, so as to accommodate theories of origins that are premised upon naturalistic (functionally atheistic) philosophical foundations.

You mention that history proved Wm. Miller’s reading of Scripture wrong, and your point seems to be that the facts of nature can prove that a literal reading of Genesis 1 and Exodus 20 is also wrong. This isn’t the case. The data of nature do not interpret themselves, but must be interpreted according to a theory or hypothesis. Those who believe that the facts of nature themselves disprove a literal reading of Scripture suffer from a lack of imagination, an inability to interpret the facts in any way other than along Lyellian and Darwinian lines. To paraphrase Ervin Taylor, they suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding, in many ways, a kind of disease that appears often among the highly scientifically indoctrinated.


Board requests progress reports from LSU administration
Bravus, I think the terms “liberal” and “conservative” are used because they are economical. Clusters of beliefs, attitudes, and views so often reside together in the same individual that it is much more efficient to name the cluster than to go through a long laundry list of all of the constituent beliefs, attitudes and views.

Speaking for myself, I do not claim to know anything about origins, much less to know anything “definitively, finally, and objectively.” I do read Scripture in a certain way (the traditional Adventist reading), and based upon that reading, I explore various hypotheses and theories about origins. I do not hold dogmatically the various hypotheses and theories through which I seek to correlate what I believe from Scripture with the data found in the world (and the universe).

But I DO hold dogmatically to my reading of Scripture, and I think that is the heart of our disagreement. I think it bothers you that I am (as are most of us who post here) so unbending and uncompromising in my faith. Again speaking for myself, my faith in Scripture, as God has given me to understand Scripture, is firm, steadfast, unbending, uncompromising, and non-negotiable. I think it is this attitude that you are interpreting as lack of humility, arrogance, pride, hubris, etc., but to me it is just strongly held faith. I know what I believe, and it isn’t up for debate. If that makes me seem arrogant, then I will just have to seem arrogant.


Board requests progress reports from LSU administration
@Ervin Taylor:

Ervin, it is interesting that you continue to assert that strong, steadfast faith equals hubris, without specifically addressing the counter-arguments that Sean, I, and others posted in response to Bravus’s taking the same position.

It is doubly interesting because this same debate recently surfaced on the Atoday website. One of the bloggers there, Kendra Perry wrote:

“I question whether theologically liberal Adventists (or theologically liberal Christians of any stripe, for that matter), can truly unite around the Great Commission. My vague impression seems to be that their attitude is “my view is fine for me; your view is fine for you; let’s leave each other alone.” There doesn’t seem to be a compelling need to introduce people to Christ or unique Adventist understandings of truth.”

I agreed with Kendra as follows:

“I second what Kendra Perry wrote. The idea of uniting behind the mission of the Adventist Church presupposes that our church has something worth selling, something that is better than what other people and denominations have. The theologically liberal mind is extremely uncomfortable with the idea that anyone’s religion is better than anyone else’s. . . . A strong commitment to evangelism presupposes theological conservatism, because it presupposes the idea that Christianity–and in our case, Seventh-day Adventist Protestant Christianity–is better than atheism, agnosticism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Methodism, Islam, etc., and so much better that people’s eternal destiny depends upon adopting our product and rejecting those others. That kind of attitude is absoutely hateful to the liberal mind. The arc of theological liberalism ends in an attitude of embarrassment and apology for one’s own beliefs, and the elevation of somebody, anybody, else’s beliefs over one’s own wretched superstitions. Or, I should say, it nears the end at that point. The end of the arc is the abandonment of any firmly held beliefs.”

Your post is triply interesting because it mirrors the arc of liberal religion in eschewing any doctrinal orthodoxy in favor of good works, or the “social gospel.” You are saying that, instead of evangelizing faith, just go do good works, go raise money for Haiti. What you don’t seem to understand is that belief goes hand in hand with good works. Post-Christian societies start to have the attitude of “I pay taxes; let the government send money to Haiti” and private giving declines markedly. This is the situation in Europe, whereas private giving in the U.S. remains relatively healthy (although not as healthy as it was just 20 or 30 years ago).

Theological liberalism is a dead end, as evidenced by the fact that the liberal churches have stopped growing and, in the past half-century, have begun to wither away. The reason is obvious: because they abandoned their own belief system. Obviously, they couldn’t get motivated to convince others of what they no longer believed themselves.

Do you have something constructive to add to this debate, or do you just want to keep chanting, “Faith equals hubris, faith equals hubris”?


Recent Comments by David Read

The Reptile King
Poor Larry Geraty! He can’t understand why anyone would think him sympathetic to theistic evolution. Well, for starters, he wrote this for Spectrum last year:

“Christ tells us they will know us by our love, not by our commitment to a seven literal historical, consecutive, contiguous 24-hour day week of creation 6,000 years ago which is NOT in Genesis no matter how much the fundamentalist wing of the church would like to see it there.”

“Fundamental Belief No. 6 uses Biblical language to which we can all agree; once you start interpreting it according to anyone’s preference you begin to cut out members who have a different interpretation. I wholeheartedly affirm Scripture, but NOT the extra-Biblical interpretation of the Michigan Conference.”

So the traditional Adventist interpretation of Genesis is an “extra-Biblical interpretation” put forward by “the fundamentalist wing” of the SDA Church? What are people supposed to think about Larry Geraty’s views?

It is no mystery how LaSierra got in the condition it is in.


The Reptile King
Professor Kent says:

“I don’t do ‘orgins science.’ Not a single publication on the topic. I study contemporary biology. Plenty of publications.”

So, if you did science that related to origins, you would do it pursuant to the biblical paradigm, that is pursuant to the assumption that Genesis 1-11 is true history, correct?


The Reptile King
Well, Jeff, would it work better for you if we just closed the biology and religion departments? I’m open to that as a possible solution.


The Reptile King
Larry Geraty really did a job on LaSierra. Personally I think it is way gone, compromised beyond hope. The SDA Church should just cut its ties to LaSierra, and cut its losses.

As to the discussion on this thread, round up the usual suspects and their usual arguments.


La Sierra University Resignation Saga: Stranger-than-Fiction
It is a remarkably fair and unbiased article, and a pretty fair summary of what was said in the recorded conversation.