Recently, searching my emails I came across this letter from 3 years ago: in Internet time, this is ancient history, of course, and what fun to share it.
William,
Bavink in "In the Beginning" makes the observation that materialism leads to occultism, and points to the late 19th C when it did just that... I'll hunt up the quote as its quite pithy.
Along those lines, thinking about Lankshear's jumble of ideas; particularly his joining of EE [Enuma Elish] and Gen 1: it seems that his fundamental take on reality in referring to a mythical view as having credibility; that is, an a-historical tale being able to meld with what is historical (or at least factual; as he seems to think for some reason that God is creator), must itself be mythical.
He is letting a source that is outside biblical revelation structure his world view... what is that source? Well, it could be either purely materialist (maybe provide links to Gisler's JETS paper on beware of philosophies and Mortensen's The Master's Seminary Journal paper on materialism and age of earth; I can give links if you don't have them) which means that he is judging the bible on the basis of a view that denies the world view of the bible: that is, a view that says "there is no god'; 'material is all there is' and 'man has no moral, generative or epistemological relationships outside himself' that is, is ethically and actually independent. So; Lankshear appears to base his thinking, at least by default' on this world view and uses it to analyse the Bible; from the get go he has prejudiced his thinking.
Alternatively, his view might be that consequence of materialism: mythological: that there are factors to consider that are not principally material, but have arisen culturally as a response by the imaginatively powerful to their situation in the material world...which reduces entertainingly to 'mere fiction'. If myth is a cultural response to a historical situation, then its interesting, but probably unimportant... Lankshear is then using the unimportant to assess the credibility of the Bible!
Another thing about ANE and other myths, they all take the cosmos as a given; effectively; even if they pretend to be a true cosmogony; they are not, as in EE they are either a theogony, or a story of the origin of something within the cosmos, not of the cosmos and its ontological implications for us...so, myths are pretty skinny; and they do not allow us to build anything of substance; thus mythologically referenced cultures have not produced natural science; nor objective history.
On this last point, he fails also to understand the critical importance in Jewish culture of objective history: Jewish thought regards objective history with bedrock importance; it is not a mythological culture at all, but a concretely historical one; for it to base this on a myth is both absurd and incoherent: cultures do not and cannot build objective historically referred structures on mythological foundations: the Jews have done the reverse: their culture is objectively historical and concretely real down to day 1.
Once Lankshear manages to reflect on the structure of his thought world he might be able to adopt a biblical noetical frame of reference which would instantly eliminate the explanatory dead ends of materialism and its cousin mythology.
BTW, I'll lend you Bavink: he's old fashioned (well...just old) but has some great ideas, including a wonderful logical critique of Darwinism as it then was.
