Concordism and consequences

Concordism … is a hermeneutical approach to scripture. It is a hermeneutic which advocates interpreting scripture in light of modern science. One attempts to read modern science into the text. Concordism is a hermeneutic which may be adopted by Young Earthers or Old Earthers.

—Dr. William Lane Craig
Concordism | Reasonable Faith

With this definition, he also says:

Now I reject the hermeneutic of concordism. Instead we should adopt the hermeneutical approach of trying to determine how the original author and audience would have understood the text. Rather than trying to impose modern science onto the Genesis account of creation or to read it in light of modern science, we want to read the account as it would have been understood by the original people who read it. That requires us to bracket our knowledge of modern science and put ourselves in the shoes of these ancient Hebrews.

(By the way, concordism is not a heresy. It’s just bad hermeneutics which will obscure rather than illuminate the text.)

Thus, concordism is identified as “eisegesis,” the interpretation of a text (as of the Bible) by reading into it one’s own ideas.

While I respect this, I note that the sequence of events in Genesis 1 does nevertheless generally match the history of life on earth. But it was not written by us, or for us, it was written in the ancient past in the Near East, with a divine stamp of approval for teaching divine sovereignty over the creation.

But this also, consequently, produces a problem for Trinitarian theology. If reading modern science into Genesis 1 is concordism and eisegesis, then reading the post-biblically developed and formulized Trinitarian theology into the Bible would also be concordism and eisegesis. While Creation Concordism is rightly not heresy, Theological Concordism is not so fortunate. Thus, I will point out that the good doctor of philosophy has unintentionally categorized his theology as concordism and eisegesis.

See also:

• A startling admission on Trinitarianism
  jimspace3000.blogspot.com/2018/06/a-startling-admission-on-trinitarianism.html