Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Ephesians 3 in The Voice

    Well, I continue to read The Voice and it continues to annoy me.

    But first let me note that in reading Ephesians 3 I don’t find anything that will lead you astray in your understanding of the chapter. In many cases the material in italics just seems unnecessary. In other words, the translators have already clearly translated the message. You can leave the italicized material out of your reading and you’ll get pretty much the same message.

    For example, the first part of verse 20 reads: “Now to the God who can do so many awe-inspiring things, immeasurable things, things great than we ever could ask or imagine ….” Now read the verse without the italicized material. Has anything been contributed? It does make it a little more exhortative, and that might be the intention.

    On the other hand, breaking out the prayer of verses 16-19 as a prayer, rather than as a report of a prayer, does fulfill the goals of the translation and is helpful, in my view. Helpful, at least, if one’s goal is to get a more dramatic presentation, which is one of the purposes of The Voice.

    This prayer passage has a special place in my life, because I adapted it into a prayer some years ago and it was used as a blessing at my wedding. Our wedding bands have the reference inscribed inside as well.

  • Biblical Studies Carnival Posted

    … at Sansblogue, and an excellent and fun carnival it is. It even includes a link to this very blog, which is unusual for the Biblical Studies Carnival.

  • Ephesians 2: The Radical Nature of the Gospel

    As I’ve been reading this passage repeatedly this week, I have been repeatedly struck by the radical nature of what Paul is saying here. I’m surprised we don’t spend more time on it, because it seems to me to clarify many things that are left unclear in Galatians and Romans.

    Of course, considering the discussion of authorship, if one thinks Paul did not write the letter, one would hardly go there for a clear statement of Paul’s view. I think a similar corrective would be provided if one added the undoubtedly genuine 1 & 2 Corinthians to the mix when one wants to determine Paul’s theology.

    In the meantime, however, Ephesians 2 remains radical. There are two ways in which this impressed me.

    1) Contrary to what many modern readers imagine, the gospel message of grace received through faith does not treat works negatively, provided they are in their proper place. If I walk a couple of miles a day with a view to reaching Australia, I will likely be disappointed. There’s an ocean between here and there, and I keep winding up at my starting point. If I do the same thing for exercise, however, it’s a good thing.

    Works done to earn God’s favor are destined to fail. Since all that we do is by definition a result of God’s gift to us (of life, before salvation), we can’t actually create something that God needs in order to make God owe us something. But to fail to attempt good works, however imperfectly we may accomplish our mission, after we have received God’s grace, is not only ungrateful, it is a rejection of the gift. The gift of grace makes good works possible.

    For by grace you are saved through faith. Yet this is not from you. It is God’s gift. It’s not from works, so nobody can boast. For his creation is what you are, created in Christ Jesus for good works, so you can walk in them (2:8-10).

    I also note that the exclusion of boasting as a reason why works are not the source of our salvation also excludes an intellectual sense of achievement in grasping and accepting the gospel. We are also not saved through intellectually comprehending the theology of salvation. We are not better than the person who cannot comprehend the theology.

    2) This radical gospel could not have been produced using a modern hermeneutic. It must add to, and in some cases transform, what came before. I do not mean to suggest that Judaism was a graceless religion. I think it was filled with grace. I think the transformation is rooted in the Torah and developed in its early stages by the prophets.

    But that entire process required just that—a process. God’s message came at various times and at various places before God finally spoke to us through God’s Son (Hebrews 1:1-3). Is there a more profound way for God to speak than through the incarnation? I don’t think so. But there is the possibility that we will more and more deeply understand the implications of God’s message.

    In the face of this radical gospel, our hermeneutic of God’s entire revelation is often not radical enough to let us hear God calling us ever deeper.

    I apply this idea to my previous note on egalitarian and complementarian texts. Rather than seeking a filter for those commands that are eternal and those that are temporal (and I suggest that all commands are both eternal and temporal; always given for a time and place, always deriving their force from an eternal principle), we need to be asking how God’s revelation should continue transform our natures and attitudes, both individually and as Christ’s body.

    I think this is the failure both of many of us (definitely including myself) and of much of  the 21st century American church.

     

  • Rachel Held Evans, Owen Strachan, and Adrian Warnock Went on a Radio Show

    It wasn’t as funny as if they’d gone into a bar, but it was considerably more enlightening. It might appear that having two complementarians against one egalitarian was unfair, but Rachel clearly had no problem with the format, and the host pointed out that, though he was playing neutral moderator, he was more inclined to Rachel’s position.

    I very rarely listen to something that long. I much prefer the written to the spoken word. If you want to get my attention, write. But the participants were enough to get me started and the quality of their discussion was enough to keep me listening.

    It will surprise nobody who reads this blog that I agree with Evans down the line, though I might be a bit more liberal than she is on hermeneutics. The important points on hermeneutics came out more toward the end, though you’ll miss some references if you skip to that point, where Owen Strachan talks about having to obey all of scripture and not pick and choose and warns of a slippery slope. Evans quickly points out that there are other things we don’t follow, yet somehow we don’t feel we’re on a slippery slope.

    The fact is that nobody obeys “all of scripture” in the sense of keeping every command. Everyone has some way to distinguish between commands that apply and those that don’t. It’s just that they generally tend to ignore the ones that they have, in their own view, really excellent reasons to ignore. In ignoring them, they hardly notice the fact that they are ignoring commands.

    So the question is whether one’s application of a scripture to a situation (or failure to do so) is justified or not. I commented some on this on my Participatory Bible Study blog.

    I would add to this discussion this note: When Owen Strachan refers to using the simple or plain portions of scripture to explain those that are more obscure, I find it interesting that he sees commands and theological statements as simple, while stories and history are apparently more obscure. I would see it as precisely the reverse. When Paul says in one place that he doesn’t allow a woman to speak, and in another we have a very clear indication of a woman in authority, I think it would be best to find an interpretation of the command (or theological statement) that doesn’t suggest that Paul was violating his own command, rather than trying to explain away the action and make it appear that it didn’t violate our view of the command.

    Thus if Junia stands out among the apostles in Rome, while women submit (and don’t speak) in Ephesus, I’m going to guess that the command has something to do with Ephesus.

     

  • Bleeding Heart Libertarians and Austrian Economics

    I found this video enlightening. I like to note that I read von Mises before I met (encountered her writings) Rand. Rand is a cultural phenomenon, but von Mises is a deep thinker. In any case, this is an interesting interview. The more libertarians pay attention to this, the better, in my view. I’m a regular reader of the website referenced in the video, Bleeding Heart Libertarians.

     

  • UMC Pastoral Accountability: What About Bishops?

    United Methodist Insight led me to Jeremy Smith’s article, Defeating the Dark Side of Church Metrics. I recommend the second link because of comments. Since one commenter talks about people who oppose accountability but who receive their paycheck from the church, let me note that I am a United Methodist layman, and I do not receive support from the church. I put those little pieces of paper in the offering plate, not vice-versa. (Read the comments to Jeremy’s post if you don’t get this!)

    I have been very interested in this debate because I believe strongly in accountability and at the same time don’t see conference dashboards providing the right sort of accountability. I have encountered United Methodist pastors that I thought shouldn’t be shepherding actual sheep, much less church-member-sheep. There are a few poor excuses for pastors out there. But at the same time there are churches that are more difficult to manage than others. (Out of This World describes one. Full disclosure – my company publishes that book.) There are also large numbers of wonderful pastors, trying to fulfill their call, and being hampered by a dying (perhaps suicidal?) church.

    So the first thing I noticed was that the metrics being used are not properly weighted. My initial impression is that our bishops are numerically challenged. But that’s not really the problem. They have the numbers. What they don’t have is enough context for the numbers. And while one can hope that when the cabinet discusses appointments, such context will be provided by people who are in the field, when one reads a conference dashboard—say North Alabama—one doesn’t have that context. So the public face of the metrics is without adequate context, in my view.

    But I’m just a Methodist layman. Jeremy Smith has looked into this and is suggesting we change the way we do metrics. Much of what he suggests resonates with me. I have to confess that I’m not connectional enough to care whether a particular local church is giving to United Methodist or non-UM projects for the most part. I have a tendency to call myself “a member of a United Methodist congregation” more often than I call myself United Methodist. But in general, he’s talking about the right things, and the charts he uses (see his post for sources) can be helpful in looking at those things.

    But ultimately I don’t think any set of numbers will do the job adequately. Numbers can be helpful, but in the end someone has to take responsibility, prayerfully discern the situation in each ministry situation, and make a call. I’d think the person to take that responsibility in our polity would be a bishop. That’s unfortunate, in a way, as bishops supervise too many churches to really understand all their local church communities, no matter how well one designs and then completes charts and reports. It would be better for such responsibility to fall on someone at the district superintendent level, but I don’t want to beat up on DS’s too much, as I perceive their job to involve taking all the blame, getting none of the credit, and having no actual authority to do anything about it. I exaggerate, but the DS does have to work largely by exhorting pastors below and bishops above.

    Bishops are elected for life, and we should imagine they are elected because their fellow pastors discern in them special gifts and a special call from God. But is there any point at which a person should no longer be called to account? I want to say there is no such point, but in our clumsy Methodist structure, I’m not sure if we’ve given bishops the authority to accomplish what they need to either. I’m no Book of Discipline expert, but I base this on observation.

    I would say the same thing for every level of the church.

    1) Provide responsibility with adequate authority to fulfill it

    2) Place those with the responsibility to hold one accountable in a position to evaluate and act

    3) Hold everyone accountable according to the authority given.

    Incidentally, this leaves us with the power vacuum at the top of the United Methodist Church. There is nobody to hold everyone from bishops to boards and agencies accountable. The members of the church at large should do this, but the authority structure is so bizarre that few Methodists know who is accountable for what. We obviously fear strong executive power, but the advantage to such power would be that the membership could understand that if the agencies don’t do what the general conference votes, there is one person, or one small group, who should be held accountable for failing in their task.

    Or—and it matters little to me, so long as we do one or the other—we could just become congregational and admit we have little control over what’s happening, and that such control as we do have is generally hampering the gospel rather than helping.

  • No to Blasphemy Trials

    I agree with Joel Watts. Christians must protest this charge of blasphemy against a Muslim for desecrating a Bible. Blasphemy laws, no matter which way they are targeted, are not good.

  • In Reporting Polls, Please …

    … always consider the sampling error when you report the difference between successive polls.

    News organizations have been getting some better, in my subjective view, in noting when a result is within the sampling error in a particular poll, but they still report increases or decreases in a lead without that note. If a candidate moves from 46% to 48% in successive polls where the margin is +/-4%, that is not a statistically significant change. If multiple polls show results that are all within their various sampling errors, the polls are not scattered all over the map or giving a different story.

    I also wish new stories would define the various terms they use to modify “lead” or “trail.” One has no idea from the headline just what has happened.

    OK, that’s my whining for the moment. 🙂

  • The Great Energion Political Roundtable Continues

    … with answers to Question #6 from four Energion authors and one other blogger/book reviewers. Remember that all are invited to join in!

  • Adrian Warnock – List of Complentarian and Egalitarian Texts

    Adrian Warnock has produced a list of texts that speak to the complementarian/egalitarian debate. Having looked over the list I don’t think it’s all that bad. In fact, it includes a number of key texts and stories that I would have included in any such list—had I been inclined to create one.

    The problem is that I don’t think this, or any issue, can be resolved by doing exegesis on a list of texts, much as I’d prefer that sort of a simple (simplistic) approach. The Bible just doesn’t seem to work that way. What generally results is a process of building one’s theology on one portion of the list and explaining the rest away. We have women speaking and not speaking. We have women leading and not leading.

    What’s needed is to form a theology based on scripture (and a hermeneutic capable of arriving at such a theology), and then ask what that theology says about the place of women (and men) in the church here and now. Getting to the root of things can resolve issues of time, place and context.

    There was no list of texts that made the church change its approach to gentiles in Acts 15. Oh, there were texts. But what really changed the day was God acting through the church. The scriptural fundamentalists of the day would have taken a list of texts, and said “no.”

    Come to think of it, that’s precisely what they did.