The Human Question

All communication is at some basic level about how the messenger/receiver are to live.  This is like what Aquinas, when talking about scripture, calls either the tropological or the moral (methinks) sense.  And all moral communication is at a certain level about where we are heading, which is like what Aquinas calls the anagogical sense. I need to write up an allegory about what it would be like (in two cases) to find messages that don't match their contexts:  in both cases, the language used is foreign, so that the interpreter must try to figure out what it might mean on the basis of context.  tin the first case one finds a speculative message  on the beach of a desert island composed by a lone survivor; in the second one finds a message of immediate practical relevance in the pages of a reference book in a science library.  Use this to explore how expectation is based upon the practical social context in which something is communicated, and how that expectation is about goals a

One way to look at OT authors in relation to their sources is to recognize that, inasmuch as they made use of other traditions and combined them, they regarded those traditions as leading us toward the truth, but they also saw that these traditions needed to be judged. Might inspiration in such cases consist in the making of such a judgment? More later...

One way to understand the "canonical hermeneutic for scripture" is to note that the acceptance of the text by the community  as  part of sacred scripture  is like the promulgation of a law.  Just as the meaning of a law is what it means to the community at the time of promulgation, so too does the meaning of scripture may in some sense reflect what it means to the ecclesial community at the time of its approbation. Perhaps the German distinction between das Gesetz and das Recht figures in here--not sure.

The scientist, in seeking to discover propositions about reality that will, as much as possible, stand the test of time, shows a hunger for what is unchangingly true, and for an ultimate reality to which that truth leads us.  In regarding that reality as beautiful, the scientist shows a hunger for a genuine meaning, for the meaning we find in our lives is inseparable from that which we consider most beautiful.

The new atheists like to go on and on about how ancient man thought wrongly that Earth is the center of the cosmos, etc. and how this mistake supported anthropocentric teleology. A comment made by C S Lewsi in God in the Dock may address this claim.  He points out that the very first page of Ptolemy's Almagest  makes it quite clear that ancient man did not think the earth large in comparison to the rest of the cosmos.  Perhaps this point helps disabuse the new atheists of their view of teleology as being based upon an anthropocentric cosmology.

The defeater "the Gospels are inconsistent with each other therefore no need to take them seriously" is inappropriate because our initial question is whether they are historically reliable.  Witnesses to a crime can be reliable while disagreeing in minor details.  In fact, if they don't show a little inconsistency, the appearance is that they have all been coached by the prosecution... etc.

Part of what we need to recognize is that God, as such, is not the most moral finite being that there is, whose morality is achieved by conformity to standards.  Rather, God is the author of being.  That doesn't make God immoral or amoral.  But it tells us that you don't judge the target by the same standard as you do the flight of the arrow toward it.

It is unreasonable to abstract from the faith of the community when explicating the text.  After all, it is the community that accepts the text, not the text that creates the community.

Only the infinite can fascinate us forever.