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Thom Stark
Goodreads Author
Member Since
December 2010
URL
https://www.goodreads.com/thomstark
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“Proponents of canonical hermeneutics are either unintentionally or willfully naive here-in most cases the naivete is willful. Canonical readings simply act as if the evolution of the text is irrelevant to its meaning; usually this is because it is deemed to be more expedient for the purpose of exhorting a faith community if such considerations are put aside.”
― The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong
― The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong
“A good teacher does not issue orders one after the other and demand assent from her students; a good teacher shows the students how to come to the right conclusions on their own. If God were to have given us an infallible set of answers to our moral questions, God would have been consigning us to moral immaturity and ignorance. That kind of unassailable source of moral knowledge at our fingertips is a way of evading the kind of moral struggle that produces virtuous people and virtuous communities. A book dropped from heaven takes all of the hard work out of it for us. That construct promises us certainty, it promises us hard and fast solutions to moral enigmas, but what it delivers is dependence, lethargy, and self-righteousness. This construct is held up as God’s very word to us, but it is a cheat sheet; it is the answers in the back of the book. Precisely by offering us an unassailable set of moral axioms - ready-made - it removes the necessity of the only thing that can make us moral and virtuous people: struggle.”
― The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong
― The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong
“Jesus never taught that David wrote Psalm 110, or that Daniel wrote the book of Daniel, or that the book of Jonah is historically accurate. At the very most, he assumed these things. But not even this is guaranteed. It is quite possible that by alluding to these traditions, Jesus was simply conceding to standard assumptions. He may have known better, he may not have. As I showed in chapter 1, perhaps Jesus was aware that Jonah was an example of a fictional short story. By alluding to the story, he does not commit himself to its historicity, any more than Evangelicals commit themselves to the historicity of the Chronicles of Narnia when they say, reverently, that “Aslan is not a tame lion.” A preacher may confess from the pulpit that after his visit to Las Vegas, he knows what Frodo must have felt like carrying that ring, but no one assumes the preacher has confused fantasy and reality. Factual theological claims are made all the time by reference to fictional narratives, and no one gets in trouble for it. Jesus may simply have been working within the assumptions of his tradition, even if he knew better. On the other hand, he may not have known better; in all likelihood, Jesus assumed the traditions with which he was raised.”
― The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong
― The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong
