Nate

True what you say. Borrowing can properly either way. I meant to note that we act surprised when non-Christians have twisted truth. There is such a thing as common grace, etc. But certainly counterfeiting is a real possibility.

Jeff

Yeah that’s what I’m talking about. Everything right down to the use of human language in revelation is used to ‘attack the truth of Christianity’ (postmodernism). So it’s not the use in and of itself of human language that is the problem–or concepts or images or experience or whatever. The problem is the implicit assumption that any one of these things is by nature out of God’s control or somehow dictates the terms of his use of it. It doesn’t really matter which place or what worldly thing you think marks the threshold of God’s sovereignty and your Christian interpretation of reality. If you interpret–implicitly or explicitly–anything ‘brutely’ or ‘neutrally’ (non-Christian-theistically), your methodologically has changed in principle.

I think it’s right to be wary of claims that the Bible borrows from ANE myths or whatever, but not because that fact in itself is dangerous. Who cares? In and of itself, so what. But those claims usually pack a serious compromise of Christian thought at the methodological level. That’s where the poison lies, I think.

But we’re talking about the specific, unique things and events of God’s plan of redemption. Things that get counterfeited by the Devil and his children (human divinities, resurrected, etc.), and things that get distorted in a dark, collected vague memory of humanity and individual cultures (animal sacrifice to appease gods in the Homeric epics), and things that are used by unbelieving academics to attack the truth of Christianity (Peter Enns, et al.).

What say ye?

“Sir James Frazer [author of the Golden Bough] was able to keep his beautiful rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge until his death by carefully and methodically sailing all around his dangerous subject, as if charting the coastline of a forbidden island without actually committing himself to a declaration that it existed. What he was saying-not-saying was that Christian legend, dogma and ritual are the refinement of a great body of primitive and even barbarous beliefs, and that almost the only original element in Christianity is the personality of Jesus.”

Don’t forget Grave’s White Goddess.

The fact that the pagan world borrowed, consciously or unconsciously from biblical truth (fragmentary, distorted, twisted, through a glass darkly for them) rather than the other way around…the fact that that is an epiphany when stated even as it was interjected into this conversation by Mr. Cassidy, is amazing. (I.e. that it isn’t foundational common knowledge that goes without saying at this point in these discussions is what is amazing.)

I noticed this when Peter Enns casually mentioned in some comment thread the possibility of the borrowing going the other way (pagan borrowing from biblical revelation or pre-biblical revelation); a fact that instantly makes his entire life work meaningless. “Oh, yeah, some people think it could have happened the other way around too. That would explain a lot for the Bible people’s side of things, yeah…” Paraphrasing.