I am still trying to wrap my head around this one. If you @TedDavis have any further comments or resources on this, I’m all ears. What happened between Reformation Wittenberg and early 20th century American Lutheranism regarding Copernicus? I can only assume that this had something to do with American fundamentalism and educational practice, but it still boggles my mind and I haven’t seen anybody really address it.
Generally, it seems that your forum is working to bring together a range of voices, academic and non-academic, concerning the various topics put forward by moderators. The fact that much of the conversations have remained civil (this doesn’t mean they aren’t heated) and that they do not seem to devolve into grandstanding is to your moderators credit. I hope it can continue as the forum continues to grow! People are really struggling to come to terms with each other; this is how it should be.
The examples that really stick in my mind were discussions with Ewert and Gauger. Of course there was a bit of disciplinary turf war or boundary disputes in play, but overall I thought the conversations were productive. It is rare to see somebody from one side of the tracks reach out to somebody on the other side of the tracks and make a conscious effort to improve each other’s thinking.
I’m not sure how to do it better except to keep doing it as differently as possible than the other sites.
Last academic year, a group of faculty members across the disciplines got together and read Jonathan Haidt’s, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. One thing that really stuck with me was something he mentions in the introduction. I paraphrase: Haidt used to yearn for world peace, but now he desires the more realistic goal of a world where conflicting ideologies are kept in balance, keeping us ALL from getting away with too much (p. xx). I don’t know if my students “want” this, but I think as a university professor I have a duty to NOT create ideologues. This doesn’t mean we give up on a robust and, ultimately, true sense of goodness, truth, and beauty, but that we come to terms with our pluralistic world and seek better ways to walk in wisdom toward outsiders (Col. 4:5).
You should check out Zoltan Istvan, he is a trip. He even wrote a book where he blows up all the dogmatic Christians (as well as Transhumanist deniers) in the end. I asked him about that when he was with us at Crosswise as he was/is also running for CA governor. He just smiled, making some claim about the fictional characters not representing reality… He really was a great guest to have on board.
It is an oddly worded statement. Lutherans do not deny the book of nature, but will always defer to the revealed Word regardless of what nature seems to be telling us about herself through scientific theory at any given time. The argumentative form of the statement is poor because the “since” signals a premise or reason why we should look to Scripture. However, “no man present” is not logically related to the conclusion “we must look…to the Bible.” Therefore, your intuition of a non sequitur is correct. A better phrasing would have been something like, “Since all scientific theory (or natural philosophy or theory of nature – pick your favorite expression) are contingent, we must look to the eternal Word of God to provide an accurate account of creation found in God’s own book, the Bible.”
I’ll let @CPArand definitively answer, but I read it as a dual warning. On the one hand, we have NOT been good about upholding the official “public position.” We, and I’m using a very corporate we, have continually pushed beyond what is required of any professional church worker. In other words, sides have been chosen where, perhaps, agnosticism was the more warranted stance according to official documents. Thus, certain conversations have been silenced or discouraged or downright afraid to be had due to an “unprofessional” acceptance of a certain way to understand the “professional” documents. This stifles, not encourages, open dialogue.
On the other hand, as we think through these issues, we must be careful to always control or account for what is our personal opinion, no matter how reflective, on these issues. One might have great arguments, practical and theoretical, for some position, but we must keep it in check against the “official” position as professional church workers are called to uphold the official positions. This isn’t to silence discussion, but to positively encourage it in the sense that the “official” position is more accommodating than any single pastor’s or professor’s or teacher’s opinion.