This year NOSHA Vice-President, Jim Dugan, attended the annual Greer-Heard Forum. This is his report:
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The 2013
Greer-Heard Forum took place at the Baptist Theological Seminary in New Orleans
on February 15th and 16th. The forum is an annual event designed to present a
diversity of opinions on broad religious issues, and often includes a
point-counterpoint between a theist and a non-theist. This year's forum was
probably of less interest to most non-believers, as the various opinions
represented were all within the Christian tradition. Nevertheless, the topic
was one of broad interest: The Bible and Sex.
The
presenters were all highly qualified scholars able to read biblical texts in
their original languages. The more progressive among them emphasized that there
exists a vast cultural chasm between our culture and the cultures of the
writers of the Bible, that reading scripture always requires interpretation
(whether the reader wants to admit that or not), and that the interpreter must
always take responsibility for the interpretation given. More conservative
presenters asserted that biblical texts have correct meanings intended by the
original writers, that the reader's job is to extract those original meanings
from the text, and never to read modern meanings into it. Unsurprisingly, the
more progressive scholars were more supportive of equality for women and sexual
minorities, and more supportive of more flexible sexual ethics, while the
conservative scholars were not.
It was
interesting to see such a variety of opinions among Christian scholars. These
were not just disagreements of interpretation and application, but also
disagreements about the methods to be used in deriving those interpretations
and applications. To what degree may we understand scripture as allegory rather
than fact? How can we tell when a particular biblical narrative is merely a narrative,
or is intended to convey an ethical rule or precept? Can interpretation be
guided by on-going revelation? To what degree ought we seek to apply biblical
precepts to our own culture, rather than seek to structure our twenty-first
century society along first-century lines?
For the
non-believer, these scholars seem to be children arguing with each other over
whose invisible friend could beat up the others' invisible friends. But for the
non-believer who may often feel beleaguered in a society dominated by Christian
believers, there is an important lesson here: Christians can't agree with each
other on much of anything. The Bible is supposed at least to be divinely
inspired, and for more fundamentalist believers to be a perfect revelation of
divine will, yet interpretations of that inspired or revealed word vary
tremendously. Moreover, that variation in interpretation is not just something
we find among ordinary churchgoers; it is endemic to the high-powered biblical
scholars who influence, and maybe even guide, rank-and-file opinion.
The topic
of next year's Greer-Heard forum promises to be of more interest to unbelievers
of all types: God and Cosmology. The main presenters will be arch-theist
philosopher William Lane Craig and physicist Sean Carroll, author of From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the
Ultimate Theory of Time (2001). Save the date: Friday and Saturday,
February 21-22, 2014.
For more
information see: Greer-Heard
Forum - http://greerheard.com/
