Dan McClellan podcast has caused much concern....

[PseudoPaul]

Critical scholarship of the Bible never addresses faith directly. It's just that history doesn't confirm many of the traditional beliefs of Christianity.

For example, a historical critical approach to the Bible would generally invalidate the idea of the virgin birth (or even its existence as an early tradition), and the idea that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. It would invalidate the idea that Jesus went around claiming to be divine or talking about his atonement for humanity's sins.

There are lots of Christian Biblical scholars who know all this and will put out scholarship to that effect, but will still take things like the virgin birth on faith. Personal faith is different from what can be argued historically.

I am aware of the purpose of the historical critical approach. What I am saying is that the folks who post here generally look at what is not affirming as disaffirming and thus faith destroying, which is generally viewed as a good thing. That is why I entered this conversation. I did not enter the conversation because I am ignorant of critical scholarship and its purpose.

I see, I think I was misunderstanding what you were getting at. Sorry!

[Kishkumen]

I see, I think I was misunderstanding what you were getting at. Sorry!

Have you known me this long, PseudoPaul?

[Marcus]

...What I am saying is that the folks who post here generally look at what is not affirming as disaffirming and thus faith destroying, which is generally viewed as a good thing. That is why I entered this conversation...

As an alternate opinion, I think if you line up ten posters here and ask them if they are the ones who "look at what is not affirming as disaffirming and thus faith destroying, which is generally viewed as a good thing," you would get twelve different opinions, of which very very few would agree in full with that simplistic description.

I'm all for entering conversations, but I'm also all for leaving at the door the stereotyping about what other people think when one does so.

[Philo Sofee]

i think mcclellan has gone the way of pythagoras because he has clearly run afoul of the modern polycrates which means salt lake is samos social media is now his crotona and he bears the visage of being on a diet of poppy cucumber sesame seeds wild honey skins of sea onions and daffodils the easy manner which he carries his opinions you just know at night he embraces the animal consciousness and sheds the higher identity just like pythagoras when mcclellan hears the taps of the keyboard he can discern the holy music of spheres and when he writes of scriptures one can perceive mercury there is virility in this

Genius!

[huckelberry]

Perhaps Dr Stakhonovite doing a bit of lighthearted exaggeration.

At least I was reminded that way.

[Physics Guy]

There are lots of Christian Biblical scholars who know all this and will put out scholarship to that effect, but will still take things like the virgin birth on faith. Personal faith is different from what can be argued historically.

I think it's important to understand that this is not a matter of disproving something on Friday but then deliberately forgetting the disproof on Sunday. Sometimes it's just a matter of acknowledging, every day, that historical evidence falls short of proof of whatever tenet of faith is involved, while still believing, quite consistently, that historical evidence remains consistent with the possibility of the tenet.

Other times it's a matter of rejecting some traditional interpretation of the religious belief, while consistently retaining a different interpretation. This requires less mental gymnastics than people who don't have a lot of scholarly training might think. One of the biggest things one learns from studying many different kinds of human thought is that what things mean really has a lot of vagueness and flexibility, and that this is not just a matter of wriggling out of anything. Language changes, and people also routinely declare something firmly because it surely seems that way to them, yet they are not really denying alternatives that they have not even imagined. I may say that the case is definitely case A, just because I have ruled out cases B and C which are the only alternatives to A that I can conceive; I am not actually denying case D, which never entered my mind.

These considerations may seem ridiculously finicky and lawyer-ish if one is used to statements from within one's own cultural context, where implicit assumptions are shared, but as soon as one gets some broader exposure, these issues sit on the front-burner permanently. It is not artificial at all to bring them up on religious points about which one happens to care personally.

I do think that it must be hard to combine any scholarly expertise with the kind of naïvely conservative religious faith that ignores all of those kinds of subtleties before it even gets around to mentioning what exactly its miraculously context-free holy text happens to say. There is a really wide range of middle ground, however, between that kind of simple-minded faith and full rejection of faith.

Denying that this middle ground exists, or can possibly be tenable, is one of the common tactics of fundamentalist preaching: they'll tell you that nothing short of their simplistic system is consistent, or worth anything even if it were, but in fact this is just one of the many points on which fundamentalists are wrong. Suppose I tell you (a) that the sky is green and (b) that if you don't believe the sky is green then you can't believe the sky even exists. I'm actually using (b) as a way to convince you of (a), because I know you're reluctant to doubt the existence of sky. You should disagree with me about (a), however, because the sky is clearly not actually green. At the same time, you should also have doubts about (b). You only ever heard it from me, after all, and I'm the idiot who thinks the sky's green. Maybe there still is a sky, and it just isn't green.

[Kishkumen]

Excellent post, PG!

[Dr. Sunstoned]

On Dan's social media channels he primarily just reports out on the findings of mainstream Biblical scholarship in regards to various topics and claims by other social media channels. And it's just a fact that Biblical scholarship doesn't agree with LDS dogmas (or the dogmas of mainstream Christianity for that matter). The criticism you refer to above seems really like the typical fundamentalist's kneejerk reaction when confronted with academic Biblical scholarship.

This very thing shows itself in the eighteen-page thread over on the other board. Dan is the messenger the apologists are trying to shoot, when in fact, their beef is really with critical Bible scholarship.

[Moksha]

This very thing shows itself in the eighteen-page thread over on the other board. Dan is the messenger the apologists are trying to shoot, when in fact, their beef is really with critical Bible scholarship.

While I doubt Dan would place any stock in LDS apologetics, it does represent the vituperative side of the Church that could perhaps harm him and his family.

[PseudoPaul]

On Dan's social media channels he primarily just reports out on the findings of mainstream Biblical scholarship in regards to various topics and claims by other social media channels. And it's just a fact that Biblical scholarship doesn't agree with LDS dogmas (or the dogmas of mainstream Christianity for that matter). The criticism you refer to above seems really like the typical fundamentalist's kneejerk reaction when confronted with academic Biblical scholarship.

This very thing shows itself in the eighteen-page thread over on the other board. Dan is the messenger the apologists are trying to shoot, when in fact, their beef is really with critical Bible scholarship.

Indeed. And when they try to quote scholars who disagree with Dan, it's almost always fringe scholars who can only get their work published in devotional journals. The nature of apologetics is to shop for crank scholars that will support your biases rather than any kind of evidence based approach.