Quote:
Originally Posted by zeek
For me, Tomes didn't so much "bury" the Bible. He did state that Lee's method of etymological interpretation is invalid and made correct interpretation the province of linguistic experts, thus taking it out of the hands of amateurs like us. So, to me, it's more like Tomes placed the Bible out of my reach.
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Not sure that is the logical result of things. The idea that what the Bible basically says is my determination is to make it into something uncertain to everyone but me (from my perspective).
The ultimate example of that is Lee's dismissal of the words actually there because he had an overlay that said those words were not acceptable. But even if I reject Lee's overlays, if I lean strictly on my own understanding, I am still bringing an overlay. And it is one that is less outwardly declared and defined, but instead just makes it read like I think it should. And there are plenty of places where my version of what it says will not be truly what it says.
When you suggest that the Bible becomes out of your reach, what do you mean? Are you suggesting that it needs to be some kind of uncertain mass of words that you get to manipulate based on your personal biases and thoughts? That the only way it is accessible to you is that it be in a formless shape with no fixed meaning?
To me, if a somewhat large group of scholars from various backgrounds join to provide the best wisdom on the original languages as spoken and written at the time of the writing, then I have more certainty that what I read in whatever is my native tongue is more likely to bring the original writing to me. If left to my own devices, I may like what I create better than what the scholars would provides, but I have much less certainty that it is a faithful rendering of what was originally there.
In other words, relying on my own translation skills makes the actual Bible much less accessible than relying on the work of qualified scholars. While God surely can speak to us from either, he has to overcome our self-inflicted errors in what we think he has said that we need his speaking on. Since he tends not to speak in an audible voice, we don't have the opportunity for him to tell us "first, you translated it incorrectly and are therefore asking the wrong question."
And while I do not think that everything is where it should be in the overall scheme of things Christian, I do think that presuming that we should be second-guessing everything and presuming that we can do better than the scholars is a hold-over from our days in the LRC where everyone but the untrained Lee was getting it wrong. Somehow the little Chinaman doing better exegesis than well-trained biblical scholars seems more American because it has that rugged individualism, "by the bootstraps" feel to it.