The prophet that failed?

Several of my colleagues have now weighed in on a post by exapologist regarding the prophet that failed. So I’ll guess I’ll throw my own two cents into the kitty.

Exapologist describes his deconversion as analogous to a paradigm shift. So let’s talk a bit about paradigms.

1.He discusses two apologetic paradigms: inference to the best explanation and Bayesian probability theory.

Speaking for myself, I regard the attempt to formalize historical evidence as a highly artificial exercise in the first place. Therefore, even if the evidence “failed” to meet this standard, that doesn’t affect my evidentiary paradigm since I wasn’t using this yardstick to begin with. It’s the wrong metric.

2.Apropos (1), exapologist fails to distinguish between the reasons we believe something and the reasons we give for believing something.

Now, in some cases, the reasons coincide. But in many cases, the reasons we give are far fewer than the reasons we have.

For much of what we believe is a result of experience. We form our beliefs at a largely subliminal level. The reasons are many, subtle, and circuitous.

Since, moreover, personal experience is person-variable, our reasons are, to some extent, intransitive. My reasons aren’t identity with your reasons, for my experience is not identical with your experience.

It isn’t possible to retrace all of the influences feeding into a particular belief, much less quantify those reasons. Hence, my apologetic paradigm follows in the tradition of Newman, Polanyi, Mitchell, and Mavrodes.

3.To put it another way, I’d distinguish between the reasons I have for what I believe, and the reasons I’d give an outsider. I may have many personal reasons which are inaccessible to an outsider. His experience is not interchangeable with my experience.

So the only reasons I can give him are rather impersonal reasons. This suffers from two limitations:

i) It’s fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t begin to exhaust my own reasons.

ii) Common ground depends on the paradigm of the opponent as well. There’s almost no common ground when dealing with an astute and ruthless unbeliever like Quine or Dawkins or Dennett. They are prepared to jettison any commitment which would come into conflict with a secular outlook.

4.Then there’s the question of prophetic paradigms. One paradigm which is popular in “fundamentalist” circles accentuates a pattern of prophecy and fulfillment involving a one-to-one correspondence between the prophecy and its fulfillment.

If you begin with that paradigm, then any attempt to qualify the terms of fulfillment will seem rather ad hoc, for the underlying paradigm is fairly inflexible.

5.I, however, don’t operate with that prophetic paradigm, and never did. I don’t think in narrow terms of prophecy and fulfillment. Rather, I think in terms of promise and fulfillment. Promise is a broader concept than prophecy. Prophecy is a subset of the promise and fulfillment scheme.

When I study the pattern of promise and fulfillment in Scripture, both at an intra-Testamental level as well as an inter-Testamental level, what I discern is a teleological, one-to-many correspondence rather than an equipollent relation.

6.Put another way, I don’t begin with “prophecies.” Rather, I begin with theological motifs. I then study the progressive, thematic unfolding of these theological motifs, where A is a means to B, B is a means to C, C is a means to D, &c.

7.Intertextuality is a pervasive feature of the Bible, both at an intra-Testamental level and an inter-Testamental level. Later writers allude to earlier writers. They see early promises in process of being realized in their own times.

But the fulfillment is phased in over time. Fulfillment is progressive rather than punctiliar. And that’s what we’d expect from historical revelation and historical redemption, since history involves a historical process.

There is an end-stage to this process. A point at which these themes culminate and converge. But within redemptive history, short of the consummation, these theological motifs are multiply-instantiable. Various events can exemplify the process of fulfillment. Eschatological fulfillment is just that—a process of becoming rather than a state of being.

There are a number of recent writers who explore the progressive unfolding of theological motifs in Scripture, viz., Motyer, Beale, Clines, O. P. Robertson, T. D. Alexander, and Sailhamer, to name a few.

8.This is a more organic approach. Instead of imposing a prophetic paradigm on Scripture, it listens to the text and studies the intra-Testamental and inter-Testamental hermeneutic you find in Scripture itself, as part of an ongoing dialogue and literary tradition between earlier and later writers.

9.I’ve not undergone a prophetic paradigm shift since I don’t operate with the prophetic paradigm of exapologist. And I’ve not undergone an apologetic paradigm shift since I don’t operate with his apologetic paradigm.

Moving from the paradigmatic level to some specific issues:

10.I agree with him that the Son of Man passages allude to the Danielic Son of Man. But as R. T. France has pointed out, these may refer to the Ascension rather than the Parousia.

11.The admonition in 1 Corinthians more likely has reference to famine conditions. For someone who brags about “mainstream” scholarship, exapologist hasn’t kept up with “mainstream” scholarship on 1 Corinthians.

12. The disciples didn’t “leave everything” to follow Jesus. What they did was to leave their regular jobs. And they had to be prepared to sacrifice everything for the cause. But there’s no evidence that they cut off all social ties. To the contrary, there is evidence that they maintained their social ties whenever possible.

13.One wonders what dates exapologist is assigning the Gospels. What would be the signal event which falsifies the dominical prophecies? The fall of Jerusalem?

But if he’s dating the gospels to a post-70 AD scenario, then why would a redactor put a false prophecy on the lips of Jesus?

14.Exapologist is selective and lopsided in his appeals to the parables of Jesus. Some stress the unpredictability of the Parousia while others stress the organic growth of the kingdom.

15.The reversal of fortunes is a stock theme throughout the Bible.

16.Exapologist is recycling old form critical theories about the formation of the gospels. This ignores the work of scholars like Bauckham, Casey, Millard, and Fox.

17.The fact that 666 may well be an allusion to Nero does not, of itself, imply a Neronic date for Revelation—anymore than its allusions to the Babylonian Exile imply an Exilic date for Revelation.

I could say a lot more, but that’s enough for now.