Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Book Review: Learning God’s Story of Grace

    A great deal of the Bible comes to us in the form of stories, and even the parts filled with propositions have their background in the story of God’s action in history. I believe this is central to the way we should read and apply scripture, and thus I am delighted to have the opportunity to review the book Learning God’s Story of Grace by Elizabeth Reynolds Turnage.

    But first, disclosures. Elizabeth took both Greek and Hebrew from me, and the publisher provided me with a free review copy of the book. I want to thank both author and publisher for this opportunity.

    Including front and back matter, this book is just 128 pages. It’s spiral bound, which is helpful in a book which is likely to be used as a workbook. It is divided into seven lessons plus an epilogue. Each lesson (except for one) is divided into activities for five days. I might have preferred a few more notes on working as a group, which is clearly the place to use this material. Nonetheless, readers should have no problem either leading or participating in a small group using this study.

    The approach begins with engaging a passage of scripture (you can find the details on page 14), and ends with living and then praying the story, thus making it part of your life. From my own experience with small groups, this latter part will be the most challenging as people often shy away from directly moving to action and prayer from what they learn in scripture. Combining both living and praying drives the student to truly make the scripture story part of his or her own life.

    The first lesson uses Psalm 78. I must admit that using that Psalm gives any work on Bible study bonus points. Following that Elizabeth takes on the creation story, but not in the way you might expect. She bypasses all the debates we may have about technical details and brings the story right into our lives. This theme runs through the rest of the book, tying creation with the new creation. I’m reading two manuscripts on creation for my own company, both to be released next year, and each of those authors emphasizes that for a doctrine of creation to be truly Christian it must be Christ-centered, and join creation and new creation.

    At the same time as she leads students through an approach to Bible study, Elizabeth also leads them through the overarching story of scripture, the story that contains all the rest of our stories.

    I believe that any Bible student, Sunday School class, or small group would benefit from this study. Much of it is extremely simple in its intellectual content, and rightly so, but at the same time it is very challenging as a spiritual discipline. It is so easy to become very educated on complex details of theology without making it part of one’s own life. This book provides an antidote to that problem.

    I enthusiastically recommend this little book to those who want to let God’s Word change their lives.

     

  • Careful Where You Point Your Bible

    At the beginning of the month I wrote a post about pointing texts at yourself first. I think it’s important to do so both in order to avoid misinterpretation or unbalanced emphasis, but also because in communicating the message you will do better in expressing something that has convicted you first. The temptation, of course, is to major on the texts that don’t get under my own skin, but which tell other people what they need to change. But I think that’s a dangerous course of action.

    Coincidentally, I received some e-mails shortly after I posted that. The person in question was not responding to my post, but rather to my position on Bible versions (he is KJV-Only) and on the creation/evolution controversy (he’s a young earth creationist). Though I do reserve the right to post e-mails that are sent to me, I’m going to leave this individual anonymous.

    We went through one exchange of e-mails, i.e. he e-mailed me to tell me I was wrong, though providing nothing but his own statements to back that up, and then I responded to that e-mail. I mentioned that I would normally carry on a private correspondence on a topic such as this only through one exchange, but that I’d be delighted to carry on the discussion in public. That’s my policy when someone’s question isn’t personal or at least unique. I also gave a few references dealing with why I hold the positions I do, though again, these are all available through my various web sites.

    Having engaged in all of several paragraphs of communication, he then quoted 2 Peter 3:3-7 at me (and I use the preposition deliberately) and extracted from it the following terms:

    “there shall come … scoffers … willingly …ignorant” (I couldn’t say it any better.)

    Now admittedly my views on creation and evolution are somewhat controversial, but being called “willingly ignorant” by a KJV-Only advocate is, shall we say, special.

    And herewith ends another example of how not to communicate!

  • The Top of a Reading List

    Dave Black is offering a workshop on Dec. 4, 2011, and he’s posted a reading list on his blog. I extracted the list and posted it on The Jesus Paradigm, since Dave’s blog doesn’t allow for linking to a specific post.

    Why am I making a point of a reading list? There are a number of very good things to read on that list, but that’s not it. It’s because of the first item: The Book of Acts. I commend Dave for putting it at the top of the list because that’s precisely where it should be on this topic.

    I recall a few years ago when I was teaching a class about how to study the Bible that I offered a reading list that involved about 200 pages from various non-biblical sources and the book of Joshua. The book of Joshua is 20 or so pages, depending on your particular edition. In any case, it’s substantially less reading than the 200 pages.

    I got not a single complaint or even a moan regarding the 200 pages, but someone immediately said, “Do we have to read the whole book of Joshua?”

    We’ve become less tolerant of just reading or hearing the Bible. Scripture readings are abbreviated. I encounter some surprise when I suggest it would be a good idea to read all four passages of the lectionary (many of which are already trimmed) during worship. I’m told people won’t tolerate it. (Churches who don’t use the lectionary might consider other readings.)

    In general, however, we’d rather hear people talk about the Bible rather than read or hear it ourselves. We’d rather read hundreds of pages of someone else talking about the Bible, than spend the time getting fully acquainted with it ourselves. I think this is tragic.

    (I know that some people question the value of public reading in the modern world, but I think there is still value in hearing scripture read in public worship. I’ll discuss it some other time.)

    Our tendency is to read the Bible in bits and pieces and learn the context from other people who say they know. The only way to truly know the context is to read the material for yourself and to do so as a whole, by which I mean whole section, whole book, whole testament, and even whole Bible.

    I don’t mean to minimize the importance of what we can learn from other Bible students, but in order to make judgments about what is valid and what is not, one has to be familiar with the text as a whole.

  • Atheist Holiday Ads and Christian Freedom

    The Christian Post reports that the American Humanist Association has some holiday ads out. These ads have messages such as “Bias against atheists is naughty, not nice.” Such a message seems pretty straightforward to me.

    But the Christian Post writer chose to quote Matthew D. Staver:

    Mathew D. Staver, founder and chairman of the Liberty Counsel, said that the campaign was a crass attempt at restricting the religious freedom of Christians passionate about Christmas. As the birthdate of Christianity, he said no other holiday deserved more public worship.

    Now as a Christian, I’m fully in tune with the idea of being passionate about Christmas and in worshiping on this holiday. That is my choice as a Christian. In addition, there are a number of things I like to do about Christmas to make it more a matter of worship and less a matter of commercialism. This includes paying close attention to the advent season and the worship involved, and in also following the season, always noting that Christmas, as a liturgical season, begins and does not end on Christmas day.

    But all of that is my choice. I can be passionate about what I want to do. Nobody else can prevent me from worshiping during the Christmas season. Nobody can prevent me from being passionate about the incarnation during this season.

    But the incarnation does suggest something else to me. It suggests that I shouldn’t want to try to exclude others. The incarnation represents the greatest inclusion, or gap crossing, in religious thought. Infinite God reaches across the gulf to the finite, us, and draws us in.

    So should we, as does Mr. Staver, complain that our freedom is being limited or that these ads prevent us from passionately celebrating our own holiday? Or perhaps we should see this as an opportunity to treat people in a respectful way ourselves.

    They aren’t hurting Christians in any way by disagreeing with us. That’s their choice. Complaining about it just suggests that in this country we have a majority (Christians) who are so thin skinned that they can’t tolerate a very small minority asking for a little respect.

    And that’s pathetic.

     

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  • Through Difficulties to Ministry

    Shauna Hyde is one of the authors at Energion Publications, so I admit to bias, but I really did like this write-up in the Charleston (WV) Gazette-Mail. Her book, Victim No More! is mentioned in the article.

    I’m often critical of newspaper articles, not so much for being negative, but for being shallow. I think this one is pretty good.

     

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  • The Gospel in the Sermon on the Mount

    Scot McKnight asks the question: Is the Sermon on the Mount the Gospel? I think it’s an excellent question, and my answer would be yes. But I see this as similar to the question of whether the gospel can be found in the Old Testament, or in the law generally, to which I again answer yes. If we get law out of its place, and make it the means of salvation, it becomes bad news. Law in its place, following grace, is definitely good news.

    I wrote about this some time back in an essay titled A Fruitful Faith, which I originally published in my preblogging days (July 29, 2003), but have just moved to the Energion.com site.

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  • Polls and Headline Writing

    Margin of error
    Image via Wikipedia

    . . . or how to lie with headlines.

    I get very annoyed with the reporting of polls. One way to create news is to incorrectly headline or even incorrectly describe polling data.

    For example, CNN uses the headline Poll: Romney & Gingrich Tied for Top Spot in reporting on the latest USA Today/Gallup poll regarding the Republican presidential race. In the text they explain that Romney and Gingrich are at 20% and 19% respectively, that this is well within the margin of error of the poll (+/- four percentage points), and is thus essentially a tie. The number part of this is essentially correct.

    Then they say that Cain is following close behind, but they don’t point out at this point that Cain’s 16% is also within the sampling error of both of the leading candidates, or rather, that the probable range of Cain’s percentages largely overlaps those of the leading two candidates.

    The margin of error provides a range within which the real percentage of the whole population is likely to fall. If you go to the Gallup site for this poll you’ll find that the confidence level is 95%, in other words, there is a 95% probability that each candidates percentage of the real population falls within +/- 4 percentage points of the poll’s result. Thus there is a 95% change that Cain’s percentage is between 12% & 20%, that Gingrich’s is between 15% & 23%, and that Romney’s is between 16% & 24%.

    If you’re wondering why the polls seem to swing quite a lot among the leaders, this would be your explanation. If in a future poll, the number varies by less than four percentage points, that number would not necessarily reflect any change in that particular candidate’s support.

    Essentially, the news writers can produce the story they want. It’s possible (though with multiple polls showing him dropping, it’s not likely) that Cain could still be leading this.

    Now this particular headline may seem minor. But if you examine the headlines after just about any poll you’ll find that different news services spin the results differently, and that by reading the headlines and the first few paragraphs, you’ll get a somewhat different picture than you would if you read to the end of the story, or even better, go to the source of the poll.

    In this story, while we are told that the difference between Romney and Gingrich falls “well within the poll’s sampling error” in the second paragraph, we don’t find the actual margin of error (+/- four percentage points) until the very last sentence. At that point, if we look back, we can see that Cain is also within that margin of error, or rather that the intervals of all three top candidates overlap considerably.

    (For a write-up on this, see the Wikipedia article Margin of Error.)

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  • Bruce Epperly Comments for the First Sunday of Advent (Cycle B)

    Bruce Epperly has an excellent set of comments on the texts for Advent 1B at Process and Faith. In particular take a look at the discussion of our perception that God has abandoned us in the comments on Isaiah 64.

    But are we abandoned, and what would it mean?

    Perhaps, as later Jewish mysticism suggests, God must withdraw for creation to burst forth in creativity and freedom.

    Read the rest . . .

  • Loving C. S. Lewis and Hating Rob Bell?

    Michael Patton, who often steps into controversial issues (which I do not mean as a criticism), asks why people love C. S. Lewis, but hate Rob Bell. His conclusion is that this is because Bell’s ideas that push the boundaries characterize his ministry, unlike those of C. S. Lewis.

    I must admit that I’ve read only a few lines of Rob Bell, while I’ve read just about everything related to Christianity that C. S. Lewis ever wrote. In addition, I’m not a universalist, though I don’t automatically call universalists heretics.

    But I ‘m going to suggest a different reason why people perceive these two men so differently. Rob Bell is contemporary. He may say many things other than what he said in his most recent book, but he has managed to become the poster boy for certain controversies. I’m not sure that his ministry is characterized by this one topic; it’s the publicity about him that bears that character.

    C. S. Lewis got started defending Christianity, and that certainly did make it easier for him to get accepted regarding other ideas. But he gets a pass on many doctrines that in others are regarded as heretical. In my view, other thinkers should get similarly gracious treatment.

    (Note: I ignore here issues of writing quality. In the little bit I’ve read, I’ve come to doubt I could tolerate reading an entire book by Rob Bell, whereas I really enjoy Lewis’s prose. But I haven’t read enough of Bell to make that a firm opinion of his writing.)

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  • Paul Was a Sexist Simpleton?

    Well, no, I don’t think so, but in one of the best demonstrations I’ve seen of how not to argue, that is a view attributed to others by writer Andrew Wilson on the New Frontiers Theology Matters blog (HT: 42).

    Within evangelicalism, four main lines of interpretation can be discerned. (Outside of evangelicalism, the response is fairly simple – Paul was a sexist simpleton who didn’t know any better; we’ve been enlightened now, so we should ignore him – although one wonders if the catastrophic track record of post-1960s white people when it comes to marriage will cause this approach to lose its lustre).

    Now it’s hard to tell just who this statement refers to, because evangelicalism is so loosely defined these days. I know I’ve been accused of ignoring Paul. But I get part of the foundation of my egalitarianism from Paul, while at the same time looking to him as a master of working with the culture as he found it. In other words while I suppose someone might find reason to call Paul sexist, though I think they’d be wrong to do so, calling him a simpleton is utterly ridiculous.

    (I’m not going to go through the rest of the article, but there are other, less glaring problems in characterizing the evangelical streams the author refers to.)

    So who might we say, “resembles” that remark? I know of nobody who does. I’m not saying there aren’t any, but I am a member of a church that ordains women in leadership, and is egalitarian in its theology, and I’ve never encountered anyone who would say something like this about Paul.

    What I have encountered are a few people who think all complementarians are either secretly sadistic tyrants or, at a minimum, enablers of the same, something that I again know from personal experience is not the case.

    We’re going to make enough mistakes in understanding and characterizing one another’s positions. We need to avoid this kind of statement in Bible study.