4:01 PM
@WadCheber In your statement of disagreement, I would say you already proved my point that you disagree with. At least one reason you are "not interested in whether the text actually describes reality" is because you do not believe there is a God behind it, so it is not as important to you whether it describes reality or not. Your approach to the text is not, therefore, neutral.
Further, by being "only" interested in what "the author had in mind," you have already taken a position that does not consider dual authorship of the text as plausible (i.e. the word of God and of men; as various texts claim for themselves).
So you are no more neutral than the Christian, you are just coming from different presuppositions of what is allowed.
@WadCheber Tolkien's works do not claim to be truth, so yes, such a stance about whether it is true or not is irrelevant for criticizing his texts. But the Bible claims otherwise, placing it in a category other than mere "story." So whether it is true or not to reality becomes an important point.
@WadCheber Again, everyone is apologizing for their particular view (you are doing so here in this discussion), yet people change views all the time from where they may have once stood on a subject (even within Christian circles), so having an apologetic does not disqualify one from being allowed to be proven wrong.
@WadCheber Forgive me for misrepresenting, if I did, but by saying you "don't believe that a god or gods exist right now," then you are automatically not in a neutral position of evaluating the assertions about an eternal God from the text of Scripture; you have eliminated the possibility that there may be an eternal God existent right now, because you do not believe there is.
@WadCheber To highlight how your "pseudo-neutrality" lives up to the name, you are not, I suppose, defending also a view "that it is acceptable for Jews to hold" a positive view that the real Jesus is God and Messiah on Mi Yodeya, correct? That is, you have not taken a true neutral position willing to examine all sides.
@WadCheber There are many Christian (self-claimed anyway) apologists who do not take the Bible as literally true and infallible. And atheist apologists do not "celebrate the former [literally true and infallible]," so again, it depends on what one is defending regarding the text.
(3) but it does limit what one allows as credible evidence/argument (based on the presupposed position),
(5) but one can change position by challenging their own presuppositions (i.e. an atheist honestly considering the text from the perspective there is [or at least may be] a God and the text to be His word; a Christian honestly considering the text from a perspective there is not or may not be a God, etc.).
Then one enters, not a neutral state, but looking at the text from at least an opposite viewpoint, which can either cause one to change views or cause one to confirm further their view; but that all depends still upon what evidence one allows as credible (or as more credible).
So every answer on BH.SE is an apologetic for a particular viewpoint of the text; some have Christian presuppositions (of varying types), some atheistic, some Jewish, and on and on. But no one is approaching it neutrally, and so giving some idea of the perspective one is coming from helps readers to at least process within that framework (and potentially argue against it).
@Dan Fair enough, though I tend to consider the term agnostic in a more technical sense of "knowability" or not of something, not as a term to be used for personal knowledge of "I simply do not know." As Wikipedia: "the view that the truth values of certain claims ... are unknown and perhaps unknowable." If one holds the "truth" of "claims" as "unknown," then it is a more general statement toward anyone.
However, your view of agnostic theism does have one of its definitions as you stated, "It can also mean that there is one high ruler, but it is unknowable or unknown who or what it is." So I accept your clarification, while I was using the term in a more general sense about one's view on truth claims.
1 hour later…
5:10 PM
@ScottS Tolkien was actually very clear in saying that Middle-earth was Europe about 6,000 years ago.
@ScottS You're still misrepresenting my position. I am saying that as of right now, I am not convinced that god(s) exist(s).
@ScottS Mi Yodeya isn't designed for neutral positions, it presupposes that Judaism is correct. As such, I have to adopt that position while I am there. Which I do.
My own views are also contrary to the core beliefs of Judaism, so I have to leave my views at the door.
1 hour later…
6:29 PM
@ThaddeusB Hm...I think I would go for analogy before anatomy, but OK. We’re not running out of space for tags or anything. :-) We need things like metonymy too. Looks like all of our tagging in the “rhetoric” department could use some tidying+augmenting. Ah, we have figure-of-speech and metaphor (I guess a subset?) but not much else I find. Not even parallelism.
6:43 PM
@Susan :) I have created many tags at C.SE. I tend to create them as a question pops up and I think "a good tag for this would be" and see it doesn't exist. There have been a fair number of anatomy questions lately, so I decided to finally create it. Naturally, analogy would also work on such questions (didn't think of it), but understanding the Greek/Hebrew conception of what body parts did is also key to some passages.
7:11 PM
3 hours later…
10:02 PM
@WadCheber Tolkien was also very clear that the 'history' was "imaginary" and "mythical" of our Earth, and not asserting it as truth; which, ironically, your own answer clearly shows from his quotes. Having a story "set" in Earth history does not mean one asserts it is true history.
@WadCheber Ok, I understand your point. And my point is that everyone is an apologist, and whether one is scholarly or not has nothing to do with being an apologist, because all scholarly defenses of a view are an apologetic for that view.
@WadCheber Regarding "Whether or not it [the text] is true, the interpretation should be the same." The truth of the text does matter in interpretation, when the text asserts (or assumes) its truth and the author of it asserts (or assumes) its truth. As an example, taking your statement:
If I believe this is not a truth assertion, then I might interpret you as sarcastically blowing hot air about interpretation, to teach me not to be too serious about interpretation (or in some other way misinterpret you).
If I believe this is not really an assertion by someone with the user name of "Wad Cheber," then I might interpret it as a pseudynonmous statement attempting to use the authority of "Wad Cheber" to back it up (or smear his name), via some hi-jacking of the account.
If I believe, however, that it is by "Wad Cheber" and is intended to be a truth assertion about how he views reality, then I interpret it as reflecting what you believe.
But my belief about your statement drives my interpretation of it, and that determines whether I have correctly interpreted you (the author's) meaning for making it.
Now, I do not have to believe your assertion is absolutely true to have correctly interpreted it, just relatively true to you, that you are making a truth assertion about reality as you understand it. But to get to this point of understanding that your statement is a truth assertion about your view, I had to (1) acknowledge you made it, and (2) recognize it was intended as a truth assertion.
If I fail to recognize the correct author and correct intent, I fail to interpret correctly the meaning.
So with Scripture, the text starts with "In the beginning God created" (Gen 1:1; assuming God's existence), continues elsewhere with a statement He is the "everlasting God" (Gen 21:33), along with many other similar assertions outside of Genesis.
So you being "as of right now, I am not convinced that god(s) exist(s)," means you do not believe Genesis 1:1, which means you do not view it as possible to (1) be authored (via inspiration) by God, and (2) be history (because you do not believe it as a truth statement).
That presuppositional distinction affects how you approach the text to interpret it. Yes, you can know it says "In the beginning God created," but you will not believe the author means what I believe the author means (nor agree on how the text was authored), and therefore one of us (or both of us) is wrong about what the author means, and therefore has misinterpreted the meaning of text.
So I disagree with you, the reader's belief about the authorship and the author's intentions does affect what one understands the author to mean in the text itself, which does affect interpretation. And if the text itself makes assertions that are not believed about its authorship or its truth, then disregarding that as true affects interpretation.
@ScottS Myths weren't usually considered to be purely fictional, and I don't think Tolkien believed his story to be purely fictional.
@ScottS If our ability to interpret text was dependent upon our own beliefs, a Christian scholar couldn't interpret Hindu texts, and vice versa.
All that matters is that we understand the author's point of view as well as possible. When I am studying, I generally assume that the author isn't lying. Whether he's right or wrong is immaterial, as long as he's not lying.
10:36 PM
@ScottS some of these reasons are why I eventually abandoned pseudo-neutrality, despite my recognition that there is no truly neutral position
Essentially, I was asking, please take a starting point for questions as if you were an academic historical-critical scholar, regardless of your actual views
I don't think this is unreasonable given that seems to be the direction the site was intended, but that is because this view aligns closely with my own so it makes sense to me
What I had to learn the hard way was the some people are actually incapable of approaching the text in this manner and do not even understand the very premise of doing so
But I should also point out this position has more to do with site viability than my actual preference
I am really not interested in reading many answers that take the perspectives often seen around here
And I do believe an evangelical Christian can work yo from the text in this manner, stating biases along the way
But you're also a Ph.D. student, and many of the others whose answers I enjoy have a fairly strong academic background, even if not in the field of biblical studies
I've come to realize that the average reader who solely has a devotional interest in the text can barely grasp our site distinctives, let alone follow them
But should we hold higher standards, there would be even fewer questions and fewer answers than there already is
At the same time, I don't believe we should tolerate purely devotional responses, these should be reserved for sites devoted to specific religious traditions
Unfortunately it means I don't ask as many questions as if like because I know I won't get good answers in many cases, plus I know how to do my own research
But I still do ask question where I am open to hearing an evangelical perspective or where the question is purely linguistic / historical / literary
Such as my recent question - where I genuinely am not convinced by the theory that John 13-17 is a conflation of multiple sources. The book seems too well laid out and intentional for such a dismissal of (seemingly) nonsensical narrative
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