Loren has posted a summation of his "dangerous ideas" meme applied to Biblical Studies. Check it out.

Some more links:

• Loren's original post. There are several updates and links to other folks' submissions of "dangerous ideas"
• A fairly weak effort of mine in response.

Though I still am convinced that the two things I listed are true and could be seen as relatively "dangerous", I understand they're not top-of-the-crop sorts of ideas and would've been surprised to see them on Loren's final list. But still, the idea that many NT authorship and style studies that rely only on similar word usage are overreaching is important to me and one I hope to be looking into in the future.

And the second idea I posted (here restated) that it is wrong to only pursue naturalistic or text-critical explanations for hard-to-reconcile events recorded in the Bible (particularly in the Gospels and Acts) is, I think, still something that requires dialogue and discussion.

If I read the Hebrew Bible and don't see YHWH acting powerfully to preserve his people, the ones he covenanted with, then I'm missing the whole story. I'm not saying everything has a supernatural explanation — I am saying, however, that we can't rule out, for example, that God really could have parted the Red Sea, or the Jordan, for the Israelites to cross.

And if I read the New Testament, and don't see that Jesus is God (read the first three or four chapters of Mark, and then dig into some of Hebrews — Jesus was making implicit and explicit claims to be God incarnate) then I'm really missing what is going on.

To examine the text of the Bible with the assumption that recorded supernatural events, prophecies and miracles need some sort of naturalistic explanation and perhaps even scientific-method-style reproducible proof of hypothesis in order to be satisfied — well, if that's the case, why bother? Then it's all an academic exercise.

I'll probably catch flack for this radical idea (that's sarcasm), but if one does not approach exegesis and interpretation of the Bible with the understanding that God is God, and He can and does act within history, outside of history, and through history in all sorts of ways; then we've missed the boat.

That's the gist of my point, really: Our default position can't be to say "well, no, [some event] seems impossible as recorded, there must be some other explanation". Maybe God really did stop the sun from moving in the sky while Moses' hands were raised, allowing the Israelites victory. Maybe Jesus really did feed 5000 people with a few loaves and some fish, and maybe he really did have 12 baskets of goodies left over for later. I'm saying we can't automatically rule these sorts of things out as the first step of evaluating a passage. Can we pursue the alternatives? Sure. We'd be foolish not to do so. But we'd be equally foolish to think that science and the wisdom of our own brains and intellect can figure it all out.* As I read some critical commentaries and other surveys and studies produced by academics and scholars, the underlying message seems to be: "Well, no, the text can't really be saying [some event] happened because that's unreasonable; something else must've been going on". Skepticism is healthy. But when the practice of the skeptics is the norm, it ceases to be skepticism and it is time for the pendulum to swing back the other way.

My "dangerous idea" in this area, then, is that we should catch the pendulum and start the swing in the other direction.

Update (2006-01-18): Loren Rosson offers a comment and some encouragement, which I greatly appreciate. And I greatly appreciate this whole "dangerous idea" meme; it does provoke some thought.

Don't mind me, I'll just keep beating the supernatural straw man into submission with scads of red herring. (heh ... sarcasm). I'll admit that there is plenty of work that accepts supernatural acts of God as possible and even as occurring within history. I guess I've been reading some stuff lately that, between the lines, seems to scoff at such things as preposterous. (no titles, no authors, I'll just leave this thread here and move on).

* cf. Ge 11.1-9.