Dwuhlizzle's response

I agree with Dr Hays. It's not a good move politically for the Socratic Round Table to (even indirectly) stage events in opposition to the going line among our faculty. Especially when the going line is a pretty great line, and certainly well within orthodoxy. I'm especially disinclined to go the route of these suggestions, given I find that line to be problematic on a number of points. Though I enjoy and benefit from Witherington a great deal, Evans and Habermas are more toward the fundamentalist end of the spectrum. By that, I do not mean "more conservative than Duke/myself" - though that is true. What I mean is the technical/historical sense of  fundamentalist. That is to say those who maintain an adversarial (antagonistic) relationship with historical-critical biblical scholarship.

But - unlike Hays, Davis, Childs, etc., they do so in a valence that accepts modernism &hbc's presuppositions. That is to say they develop their position with an assumption that if HBC turns out to be true, then the faith and the bible are bunk. Our profs rather object to HBC and modernism's presuppositions that historical study can be undertaken in the objective and utterly empirical manner it suggests. Heck, even Ehrman admits this is a fallacy and illusion. 

Now Nick went to Liberty, and may have a contrasting/better read on Habermas. But it seems to me that anybody who engages in an adjudicated debate Anthony Flew in order to prove/defend the bodily resurrection on strict empirical-historical and logical-philosophical grounds. This is a fundamentally modernist project (mixed-metaphor intended), one that the Yale school, postliberal, neo/radical orthodoxy strain (in which we are immersed here at Duke) rejects as wrong-headed.

Remember, JW Smith told us that he told his examination board that he could not preach "certainty" of the resurrection, but that he could preach the "hope" of the resurrection. The former is an empirical and philosophical claim; the latter is a biblical and theological one.


Anyone else want to weigh in here?

DWL