Now that I no longer preach every week, when I do get the chance to preach, I often take my text from the Old Testament. I've always been a bit more OT oriented than my classmates and colleagues. (Maybe it's my Jewish blood-my great-great grandfather was a Jewish convert to Christianity who became a Baptist minister.) This morning I started a short, spread-out series of messages from the book of Daniel.
As part of my study, I read the usual discussion on the historicity of the events in Daniel and the date of its writing. There are a few technical issues that are raised by some scholars, but much of the rejection of the historicity of the book revolves around two major issues: the presence of the miraculous and the uncanny accuracy of the prophetic visions. So the miracle stories are written off as legends (or sometimes fiction), while the prophecies are posited to have been written after the events they predict.
Many scholars have dealt with these issues in far more depth than I can go into here. There is another way to deal with these objections, however. These two issues reveal the philosophical inclinations of the student by the way they begin their investigation into them. While the two positions I note here aren't necessarily the entire spectrum of belief, they do break scholarship into two broad camps.
The skeptical camp, which denies the historicity of Daniel and gives it a late date, finds belief in miracles and prophetic prophecy to be problematic. Both of these lie outside the realm of our normal experience, and because they are not subject to "scientific" study they are rejected out of hand. Given a commitment to a purely natural worldview, the ideas that the stories are legends and the prophecies were composed after the facts are really the only solutions to the problems.
I think this view has a serious theological flaw. I don't deny that some who hold to this position are genuine believers in God. (I have an evangelical commentary on Daniel on my shelf that takes a view similar to this.) But if I were to have the chance to speak with them, I might ask them what kind of a God they believe in. If God isn't capable of performing miracles or providing visions that accurately address the future, is He really an omnipotent, omniscient God? If He can't save Daniel from a den of lions, how could He raise Jesus from the dead?
I would put myself into the supernatural camp. I believe in a God who can perform miracles, and who clearly sees and can reveal the future. If you accept the premise that God is like this, there's nothing in the book of Daniel that should give you any pause. The events recorded in the book are quite possible, so there is no insurmountable objection to its historicity. (As I noted above, there are a few other issues, but they can be discussed and answered fairly well.) The accuracy of Daniel's visions is also perfectly in line with what God can do.
When you read Daniel, I believe you can have confidence that what you are reading is an accurate account of events that really happened, and that Daniel's visions, while perplexing to him, can be seen as actual predictions of what God planned to do in the future. That doesn't mean that we find them easy to understand or interpret, even after the fact, but that we can be sure that they came the way the book recounts them.
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