Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • The Trials of Mike Licona

    I actually didn’t know who Mike Licona was until a few weeks ago, but I’ve discovered that he is a Christian writer who is a strong supporter of the historicity of the resurrection and generally defends the historicity of the Bible.

    Unfortunately for him, he recently suggested the possibility—just the possibility, mind you—that Matthew 27:51-53 (the raising of the dead saints) is apocalyptic language rather than intending to portray a historical event. I’m very pleased to see that Michael Patton has been defending Licona and calling for a great deal more generosity concerning this disagreement.

    And this brings up an issue that I have with many arguments regarding biblical interpretation. Too many people are very quick to argue that their opponents are denying scripture, when they are simply interpreting it differently. There are interpretations that are so lacking in legitimacy that one may suspect that even the person who concocted them doesn’t believe them. But many arguments are between people who both have a great deal of respect for scripture, but who disagree on what scripture actually intends to communicate.

    This passage is an excellent example. I can certainly how one can legitimately disagree about what Matthew is trying to convey here, starting with the veil in the temple being torn in two. Is that literal or figurative language? (I’m speaking here of Matthew’s intent in writing it, not whether one believes he is historically accurate.) Did Matthew mean that this literally happened, or was it something that happened in the spiritual realm?

    It is doubtless an incredibly important spiritual point that is being made, whether the language is intended historically or not. It’s a point that can be made in either case.

    I don’t think that the argument that either party (or parties) in this dispute doesn’t care about scripture. All involved are committed to the inerrancy of scripture, and understand it in a similar way, as requiring historical accuracy. There is apocalyptic language in the Bible. It’s not impossible that this language is. Indeed there are some indications that it is.

    Similarly, debates about creation hinge on just how one reads the texts. If one reads the text as historical narrative, one has one set of options (accepting it as accurate, or assuming it’s pretty much useless). On the other hand, there are many elements of the creation stories (pretty much all of them) that would suggest something other than historical narrative. Yet many will accuse anyone who doesn’t take these texts as historical narrative of not believing what the Bible has to say.

    My point here is simply this: You can’t tell whether someone is ignoring the meaning of scripture until you have determined its meaning. Differing regarding interpretation, as long as the interpretation is an honest attempt to understand the text, does not constitute rejection of scripture.

  • How Charismatic Am I?

    Adrian Warnock is working on a spectrum for determining just how charismatic one is in belief and practice. His initial test seemed to make people more charismatic than they actually are, or perhaps than they consider themselves to be.

    I took the test, and came out strongly charismatic in belief and mildly charismatic in practice. Some of my negatives include “I have prophesied” and “I have asked God to give me the gift of prophecy.” These two questions are legitimate measures of charismatic belief, but while I believe that the gift of prophecy continues in theory, I am very hesitant to point to any particular person I would regard as a prophet. In other words, God could call someone to be a prophet, but I have not identified one.

    Another interesting one was regarding speaking in tongues. Under beliefs I indicated I believed this gift was available in modern times, and under practice that I have spoken in tongues, by which I refer to what is commonly called “praying in the Spirit,” though I don’t prefer that title. As closely I can describe the experience, it’s a bit like meditating. But that is for another article. But under practice, I had to note that I had never prayed to receive the gift of tongues, and in fact never desired it. It just happened. That is a valid distinction. If I believed that receiving the gift of tongues, or more specifically a prayer language, was a required, singular evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and that the baptism is an event always or most commonly separate from conversion, then I’d presumably be answering ‘yes’ to all of these.

    On the positive side I checked off praying for or receiving healing, raising and clapping my hands during worship, and getting emotional during worship, amongst others.

    After presenting some results, he followed up with some questions that needed to be reworded. Amongst these he changed the question on healing to include the word “supernaturally.” On dancing, raising, and clapping hands, the questions indicated a biblical requirement rather than simply whether it is acceptable.

    I really have little problem with the spectrum in general, but I would note the difficulty I have in answering these questions. In fact, I thought of some of these issues when responding to the questionnaire the first time. How closely do my definitions of these terms match the ones Adrian is using in asking the questions. When he added the word “supernaturally” to the healing question, the definition question came back to me.

    I’m willing to answer supernatural healing positively, if that means that through prayer healing occurs that would not have occurred in the natural order of things. But there are two issues. First is the definition of “supernatural.” I don’t make as clear a distinction between supernatural and natural as some do. Yes, there are natural laws, but I see God in everything, so I consider all healing (and all truth) to come from God. I think also that most of what God does in the world is subtle and generally mediated through His people. This isn’t because God cannot act. I do not deny miracles. It is because God likes the way he designed the universe, and for the most part it works by natural law.

    Then there’s the issue of a biblical mandate for particular acts of worship, whether singing, clapping hands, raising hands, or dancing. There would be two levels of distinction here. The first is whether such things are permitted. Many churches would reject the idea that people should dance in the church service, or even raise their hands or clap. Then there are those that consider this a valid part of worship, but wouldn’t require everything to do it. Then there are

    others who think that if you don’t dance, you aren’t truly worshiping.

    Neither set of questions truly distinguish all this, so I’m not sure how well the spectrum works. It’s especially difficult for someone who is a moderate or liberal charismatic. In that case, one would probably be open to many different approaches to worship, and might define various gifts (prophecy and healing, for example), in different ways, and still believe that the same gifts are available to the church today as ever were.

    Finally, while I consider this spectrum interesting, since I hold only a very small set of beliefs as essential (saying the Apostles’ Creed without crossing one’s fingers!), I see such a spectrum as more for interest and entertainment than to be taken seriously. Any spectrum examining just one belief set is likely to obscure some differences and overemphasize others.

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  • Imperfections in Scripture

    Lee at The Dubious Disciple generously and kindly reviewed my book When People Speak for God. In that review, he included the following sentence:

    A discussion of inerrancy follows, and how Henry’s recognition of the Bible’s imperfections has not disturbed his reverence for God’s Word.

    Now before I discuss this line, let me emphasize that this is not a critique or rebuttal of Lee’s review. I’m not saying he misunderstood me. What happened is that his particular phrasing suggested some clarifications to me, and I want to write about them now.

    Let’s start with an analogy. Supposing I’m viewing a sunset with one of my grandchildren. I might discuss imaginary shapes suggested by the clouds, the beauty of the colors, and the gift of beauty that God has given us. Were a scientist to hear my description, and think I was teaching my grandchild about the technical aspects of a sunset, he might well consider that there were serious imperfections in my talk on the sunset.

    In turn, if I was explaining the technical aspects to the same grandchild, discussing refraction, the composition of the atmosphere, cloud formation, the rotation of the earth, and so forth, while the scientists might be satisfied, if my wife heard the lecture, and supposed I was watching a pretty sunset, she might well consider that there were imperfections in my discussion of the sunset, which she would doubtless point out to me.

    Each of these ways of talking about the sunset is good and appropriate in its proper setting, and each is severely deficient when used in the wrong context.

    Now let me turn to the Bible. One of the points I endeavor to make regularly is that we must observe what the Bible is, rather than trying to predefine what the Bible should be. Instead, we often use texts such as 2 Peter 1:21 and 2 Timothy 3:16 (and if we’re lucky, 17) and construct our doctrine of what the scripture should be, whereupon we set to work trying to demonstrate that it is what it should be.

    I think it would be better to observe how the Bible came to be, and determine from that just how God speaks through scripture and how it is that we should hear his voice. My primary suggestion would be that everything in the Bible starts from God acting, and people experiencing God in action. From there, the writers report God’s actions in history.

    This necessarily involves their perceptions and their cultural backgrounds. This comes very strongly into play as we interpret Genesis 1 & 2 along with other creation stories. On the one hand we have objectors who see the creation story as deficient because it doesn’t tell a scientific story. On the other we have those who believe it must tell a scientific story, so therefore it does tell one.

    My question is just how we expect God to communicate to those who wrote this story. Should he first provide them with all the various scientific theories and data that would allow him to tell a story that we would take as scientifically accurate? What would happen then to believers a couple hundred years in the future? Might they not regard such a story as ridiculously primitive and therefore not divine?

    It’s my contention that God spoke to those people in the context of their culture and their cosmology. If I look at this as a scientific treatise or an historical record, I will, indeed, see imperfections. The Bible is very imperfect at being what it is not.

    While these elements of ancient cosmology may look like errors to us, they are actually “intentionals,” i.e., they are intentional elements of the way God chose to communicate with people and also chose to provide scripture.

    I would add further that the way in which the Bible was transmitted also points away from this kind of accurate fulfillment of our modern desires. I’d love to have good material on which to base precise dating of the kings of Judah and Israel. But if you try to line up those numbers you’ll find they don’t work so well. A massive effort of proposing co-regencies and various differences in recording accession years can bring much of it into line, but even Edwin R. Thiele (The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 1994) had to suggest that some of the final records of the northern kingdom had been lost. (I don’t have the page number, but I’ll hunt it down if anyone requests it.)

    The message of the books of Kings is not lost, however, because I can’t satisfy my curiosity. Thus what is an imperfection from my perspective is not an imperfection from another.

    I know this presents problems for some Christian apologists. The eternal effort to prove the Bible’s truthfulness, or at least make it highly probable, is very important to some. But the question is whether that enterprise matches God’s intent in scripture. As I mentioned earlier the benefit of 2 Timothy 3:17, which doesn’t say, “that the man of God may know history” or “that the man of God may know science.” Of course our understanding of how scripture is presented and how it came to be will impact the way we read that passage as well!

    Now just because the Bible is aiming to teach those subjects doesn’t mean it doesn’t have information on those topics. That is a separate investigation. What it does mean is that if we try to evaluate the Bible as a history or science book, we’ll find imperfections, since “perfect” always relates to a goal or standard. If we’re using the wrong standard, we’ll be misled.

  • Biblical Studies Carnival and Biblioblog Rankings

    The biblioblog rankings have been posted, with this blog at #18. Of course, the rankings are available live all the time these days, so I guess the end of month rankings are less important than they used to be, but still …. What surprised me, after not looking at the rankings for some time, was to find my blog at #18 when my posting has been sporadic, to put it mildly. I’m always amazed at the older posts that are popular.

    The Biblical Studies Carnival has also been posted, and it is, umm, Giant. I am not cited therein. See first paragraph re sporadic posting.

  • Review at The Dubious Disciple

    It’s a very nice review as well!

    I particularly like the emphasis on the idea that one can hear from God for oneself, which was one of my major points in the book. Other readers have focused on inerrancy, which is secondary, though one must deal with it in discussing prophecy, interpretation, and authority. But my critical concern in this book was that people get pushed around by other people who claim to speak for God.

    From Inspiration to UnderstandingI do not exclude the possibility of God giving a message to someone that is for someone else. That would fly in the face of the experience related in scripture and even my own personal experience. But I’m always skeptical of such messages, because in my experience, the vast majority of the time when someone tells you they heard something for God, and it wasn’t for them personally, it’s manipulative. They’re trying to make you do something they want. Is God in it? In most cases I doubt it.

    One thing I may have de-emphasized in my book that would deserve more discussion is the role of the community in the authority of any book. The new release From Inspiration to Understanding: Reading the Bible Seriously and Faithfully by Edward W. H. Vick corrects this deficiency, though I note that the book is somewhat more challenging to the reader than mine! There are numerous points that Dr. Vick makes that could have provided footnotes for mine, had the order of publication been reversed.

  • Brian Fulthorp

    . . . joins the fun.

  • On a Soterian Gospel

    “Some folks have reshaped the Bible and the gospel so that it is driven by the plan for personal salvation. The Greek word for salvation is soteria so it is accurate to refer to such thinkers as soterians and their gospel as the soterian gospel.” Thus Scot McKnight begins his discussion of salvation and judgment and the focus on personal salvation.

    I agree with him on the nature of the salvation described in the Bible, and the way it has been twisted, especially in American Christianity. We have created a gospel that is well designed to  mesh with our self-centeredness. The gospel becomes so personal that we don’t really care what happens to others, as long as we can be sure we’re “saved.”

    I suspect this is one of the reasons that we find so many American churches proclaiming a theology that would seem to imply missions, but at the same time not really being involved personally or financially with missions. In mainline denominations, such as my own, I think we’re much more susceptible to a complacency because we look at the judgment scenes and we decide that we’re not so bad. Both of these views fail because the concern is solely with ourselves. If we’re doing OK, even if we measure how ‘OK’ we are by our activities in service to those less fortunate, then we tend to neglect the Gospel Commission.

    And that leads to one text McKnight cites in the post I linked that I think may be easily misconstrued, Matthew 25:31-46. We frequently take this as a parable intended to answer the question “What happens at the judgment?”. I think it is actually a parable against complacency. Notice that nobody is actually right about their standing with God in this parable. All are surprised. I’d tie it most closely with Matthew 7:21-23. Just because you proclaim, just because you think you have it nailed down, doesn’t mean that you’re right with God. That is something God gets to judge.

    Now on first glance, one might think this points more to “social gospel” people, who think they’re doing what they should, when actually neglecting so much. A little bit of charity goes a long ways in salving one’s conscience, but God’s call is not to a little bit of charity. God’s call is to being a different type of person, the type of person who is focused on helping those in need, both spiritual and physical. And there’s no reason to neglect either. A church spending 5% of its budget on missions and outreach might be able to pat itself on its collective back and note that it’s doing better than other mainline denominations. But will that meet the standard?

    And to those whose focus is on theological correctness as the standard for salvation, where’s the difference? There are works of the hands and works of the intellect. The way I hear salvation described by some, one would think that it’s based on one’s intellectual understanding of complex doctrines. If you don’t understand imputation, let’s say, you might not be saved.

    But the sheep and the goats points against us finding ways to guarantee our own, separate salvation, and calls us to look to community. That says that the real question is whether God has worked and is working in us, and not whether we have correctly understood or carried out some program.

     

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  • My Desk

    My desk at studySince I got started with some personal notes yesterday, perhaps I’m now in the groove, or is it a rut?

    Those who know me quickly become aware that I work best just short of chaos. Well, some would actually claim that I cross over into chaos. The fact is that an excessively organized workspace (in appearance) makes me twitch. On the other hand, there is a point that gets beyond my toleration, and that is usually when all my flat surfaces get covered.

    I frequently take in dead computers, or even reasonably functioning machines that are just too old for their owners. Recently, I received a huge number from a client of my computer business and so for a period of time I had more than 20 computers, eight printers, and innumerable accessories from Computer for Top of the Bottom Ministrycables to mice. The machines took up all my flat space, not to mention all my floor space. I actually have two workstations (monitors, keyboards, network connection available) but of course there was much more than would fit in and around them.

    I have finally gotten far enough through the process of dividing what can be salvaged from what will be recycled, and I recovered my desk (picture at top left). From all of this, I managed to salvage three working systems that I will deliver to Top of the Bottom Ministry, an inner city ministry here in Pensacola. They’re just Windows XP systems with 512 MB each, but they will be useful where they are going. In addition, I rescued five printers out of the mess, so those will head out soon as well. Then will come the day when I load the rest into my van and haul it all off to recycling.

    Oh, and the picture at the bottom right is one of the machines at a workstation being prepared for its new home.

    Both pictures were taken with my Palm Pixi.

     

  • Fun (or Weird) Facts about Me

    Well, since Dave started it, and everybody else is doing it, I thought I’d provide a few facts about myself. I’m following Dave’s list except where it’s inapplicable

    • My favorite food is … broccoli. Really. The only way you can make me avoid it is by overcooking it.
    • I cannot stomach … okra.
    • My favorite TV show is … The Inspector Lynley Mysteries.
    • In my spare time I … read, light reading being science fiction, fantasy, and mysteries.
    • One word used to describe me when growing up … extreme introvert.
    • One word used to describe me today … active.
    • If I had a million dollars I’d … so many needs could be fulfilled, I couldn’t even list them. I get requests every day.
    • I send this many emails each day … 25-30 (should be more!).
    • Being a publisher/editor is … challenging.
    • My favorite book that I’ve written is … When People Speak for God.
    • My (earthly) hero is … my uncle Don Neufeld who got me started in biblical languages.
    • My favorite theologian is … Paul Tillich, even though I often disagree; I steal his vocabulary all the time.
    • I went to high school at … I’m a high school drop out.
    • My favorite spot on earth is … Sacajawea Peak, Wallowa Mountains, Oregon. I’ve only been there once.
    • If I wasn’t a publisher I would be… a teacher (if I could keep the job!).
    • My favorite Bible verse is … Jeremiah 18 (really).
    • My favorite pet is … currently I have only one, our cat, Cheena, but my favorite pet of all time was my goat Carroway, part of my herd of four when I was 12.
    • My favorite commentary on Leviticus is by … Jacob Milgrom.
    • I am embarrassed that I … can’t keep appointments straight.
    • I used to teach at … Country Garden School (elementary), while I was a college student.
    • I was a substitute teacher …  for a full two weeks for first graders in their first two weeks of the year–never again!.
    • Jody and I honeymooned in … North Carolina.
    • Our first mission trip together was to … eastern Hungary, serving children from the Ukraine.
    • My first mission trip ever … was on foot (cargo on two mules!) in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico when I was 8 years old. My job was to carry out the garbage and sweep floors for the medical team.
    • My first journal article appeared in … no journal articles. My first paid publication was an article in The Traveler’s Journal, regarding role playing. It’s even online now. (There’s nothing academic about it!)
    • I was once asked to … become the theological librarian for a seminary.
    • After completing my MA in Religion (concentrating in Biblical Languages), and one quarter post masters I … joined the U. S. Air Force.
    • Before I joined the Air Force, I lived … three countries, 5 states and 16 houses/apartments (that I remember)
    • In the Air Force … I was stationed at only one base for nine years after completing training.
    • Once they get to know me, most people are surprised that … I play war games, but am abysmal at chess.
    • Most people don’t know that I … really enjoy tinkering with old computer hardware and just about any electronic equipment. If I didn’t have work to do, I’d rather tinker than have working equipment.
    • I have never been in … Australia. And I want to go.
    • The number of states in the U.S. I’ve been in is … 42.
    • While in high school I made … spent all my time reading and traveling around Guyana, South America. Thus I have 2 1/2 credits by correspondence, and eventually took a GED.

    OK, that’s probably TMI. 🙂

  • Review: Learning God’s Story of Grace

    I have posted a review of this little book on my Participatory Bible Study Blog.