Heresy

[psyham]

"But to want to affirm that... is a very dangerous thing, not only by irritating all the philosophers and scholastic theologians, but also by injuring our holy faith and rendering the Holy Scriptures false. For Your Reverence has demonstrated many ways of explaining Holy Scripture, but you have not applied them in particular, and without a doubt

Comments

[redundantcliche]

If there's one important thing that law school has taught me, it's that even the most explicit statement can still have ambiguities. Of course, the goal is always to try and find the best meaning from among those ambiguities, but our methods of finding the best meaning can change over time and the best meaning isn't always the correct meaning. The poetic and rhetorical traditions of 2000 years ago are hardly the same as those of today, and words are used differently, and things get lost in translation all the time.

Let's take, for example, that first verse. What is "the world"? Is it the physical planet in its entirety, the people and creatures within it, the surface world where we live? What is "stand in place"? Does it mean for the planet to literally not move, for the people on the planet to hold fast in their beliefs and traditions, for things to never change? And the same for the concept "moved" - does it mean literally a change in position, applying to the world as a planet or to the surface world, or does it mean something else within the possibility of "moved"? Obviously these possibilities will all be affected by context and the original meanings of the Hebrew words used at the time they were first written down (because Hebrew, like other languages, has grown and changed over time), but it's still pretty clear to me that there's a lot of wiggle room in a statement like that, depending on how you want to interpret it. A skillful scholar, minister, or politician (or a scarily potent combination of all three) would be able to manipulate that wiggle room in all sorts of directions.

Basically, my point is that sometimes, we may think something is painfully obvious from the language used to state it, only to discover later on that there was an unexplored ambiguity from which an entirely new, and more accurate, meaning can arise. One of the most beautiful and dangerous aspects of Scripture is that, if looked at from the right perspective, it can always be interpreted to support what we know to be true in the world, for better or worse. Sometimes certain people discover truths before others and the varying interpretations come into conflict, but from each one's perspective, the Scriptures are clear and perfectly in line with the truth.