Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Biblical Studies Carnival LVIII Posted

    The Biblical Studies Carnival has always been somewhat above your average blog carnival, and the December carnival at kol-haadam is above the average even for a Biblical Studies carnival.

    One nice feature is a separate listing for book reviews, which I have to mention since it links to a review of Ephesians: A Participatory Study Guide (note the word “participatory”), which is about to be released by my company, Energion Publications. Of course there are reviews of many other valuable books and it’s nice to have a list.

  • December Biblioblog Rankings

    I choose to link to Jeremy’s list, for no better reason than that I’m on his list. I’m back up to #23, which is probably the result of actually writing a few posts.

    Thanks again to Jeremy for maintaining these rankings.

  • Spiritual Fitness in the Army

    I find the very phrase “spiritual fitness” in any context other than a voluntary group, such as a Bible study, prayer, or meditation group, very troubling. What makes one fit can find such incredibly odd definitions.

    When I was in the Air Force, I was told by a supervisor that if I did not go out to bars with the men, my career would be stunted because people wouldn’t want to help me if I wasn’t their friend. He said this quite seriously in front of a room full of people. Oddly enough, our unit was dealing with quite a number of DUI incidents at the time, and I was and am a non-drinker. (No, I don’t think it’s wrong to drink; I just think it’s a bad idea for me to drink.)

    I give this as an illustration of the way such authority works. “Different” becomes dangerous. “Unit cohesion” or “morale” can be the excuse for forcing people to conform to what the leadership wants. If you think the leadership will always want something sensible, then you live in dreamland.

    Now I’m reading that the army tests for spiritual fitness and has remedial training for those who don’t seem “spiritually fit” enough. I think Ed deals with the topic sufficiently from the point of view of the secular person. What I’m wondering is how a believer can think this is a good idea. As a veteran, the very idea of any of the military leaders under whom I served, and that includes some people I regard as stellar leaders, is terrifying. The military is simply not the place for it.

    Fellow Christians, when we take the power of the state to enforce something we like, the results will not be good. The results of this idea will not be good either.

  • Praying Without Ceasing and Hyperbole

    Mike Sangrey has a post on translating 1 Thessalonians 5:17 at Better Bibles Blog where he suggests “Don’t stop praying!” would be more accurate than “Pray without ceasing,” which is what most of us are used to hearing. He arrives at this conclusion by looking at various uses of the Greek word in question (adialeiptws). Nonetheless the key argument seems to be that:

    the words “without ceasing” carry the idea of “unending, continuous prayer” to the English mind.  I think such an action is impossible and others think so, too.

    Just so! I think it’s impossible as well. But as the first commenter notes, this is likely a form of hyperbole. Now I’m quite comfortable with interpretive translations that try to adapt one idiom into another, or take a rhetorical device from the source language that is absent (or different) in the target language and replace it with another.

    My concern in this case is that hyperbole is a perfectly good rhetorical device in English. We use it regularly. Sometimes our “holy filter” keeps us from seeing it in scripture, but that’s not because it’s absent from the language.

    My question is this: If Paul was using hyperbole here, then what is wrong with hyperbole in an English translation? To be more precise, I could ask whether a Greek speaking reader might have heard the passage as “unending, continuous prayer,” realize he had encountered hyperbole, and apply it appropriately. If so, why not let an English speaking reader do the same?

    If I might illustrate further, when Jesus says that if your right eye offends you, pluck it out (Matthew 5:29), is it not likely that we have just a small amount of hyperbole? If so, should I translate this verse into something non-hyperbolic, such as “it might be better to be blind than to have your eyes lead you into lust”? (I’m not proposing that as a good translation–just a pointer.)

    I’m leaving comments open, but suggesting you comment at Mike’s post or on your own blog to keep the discussion linked.

  • Father-Daughter Blogging …

    John Meunier and his daughter are blogging through the book Almost Christian. It looks like it will be worth reading.

  • Now THAT Would be an Interesting Presidential Race

    Obama vs who?

  • Another Note on Design

    Pocket watch, savonette-type.
    Image via Wikipedia

    Since I hadn’t commented on the Intelligent Design controversy for some time, I want to add a couple of notes to what I said yesterday.

    I absolutely believe in design. I believe everything is designed by God. I believe God is involved in everything. In teaching on this subject I have occasionally simply started dropping my pencil on the podium. Someone will surely ask me why I’m doing it. I then ask why the pencil always falls. The 20th or 21st century answer is, of course, gravity. Duh! “No,” I like to say, “The pencil falls because God wants it to.”

    What do I mean by that? Do I not believe in gravity? Oh absolutely! Like everything else, I do so because I believe in God. God’s desire is expressed so consistently that we can write it as a law.

    I followed the suggestion in one of the comments to the Science and the Sacred post I linked yesterday, and went and read the entire essay in PDF, thus avoiding the wait for the second half. I want to quote a couple of paragraphs.

    The first is this:

    The point is, different chance hypotheses give different results. Dembski writes, “…opposing chance to design requires that we be clear what chance processes could be operating to produce the event in question.”2 Dembski is very explicit about the necessity of the design inference eliminating all chance hypotheses. But this is a fatal flaw: except in very unusual cases, it is impossible to identify all possible chance hypotheses simply because finite human beings are unable to identify every chance scenario that might be operative. [link added]

    This is what I meant in my fumbling, non-mathematician’s statement that I reject the design inference on the grounds of garbage-in garbage-out. We don’t know how the creation of life or certain biological structures occurs, and thus it is not possible to determine the probability of such events.

    Again:

    Also, suppose an intelligent agent designed a natural process that incorporated chance. Human beings do this frequently …

    Even if we accept, as I do, that God is the creator, we don’t know the process, so how precisely to we identify God’s fingerprint? I would also suggest that the claim that God cannot design a process that includes chance is just as limiting to God as any of the many other limitations we try to put on him.

    Dr. Bradley further argues that design is one of those points where theology can legitimately contribute to our knowledge of the world. It’s a great essay. I suggest reading it.

    I would note another issue I have with intelligent design, which is simply that it is detecting instances of design in a universe that is, I believe, designed. Thus, in some sense it is detecting “more” design in some portions of the universe than in others. This is the problem I have with the design argument going back to Paley. The watch is designed, yes. But the sand is also designed in some sense. (Note that I’m aware the analogy is between the watch and living organisms, not sand. That is, in fact, my problem with it.)  One could almost infer that the design argument tests for the absence of God’s designing work in other places in the universe. Almost, but not quite. This is, of course, a theological argument on my part, but then I have always thought this argument should be theological and philosophical, rather than scientific.

    Incidentally, it is my belief that God is involved at all points in the universe that makes theistic evolution a difficult thing for me. For many people it is simply a matter of saying that the Bible tells us God created but science tells us how God created–evolutionary processes. This said, we move on without examining our theological views based on the result. But the idea that the earth is old and that death occurred before before the fall seems to display a God who is quite willing to let sparrows, amongst many other things, fall. That is a challenging gulf to bridge. I cannot agree with many of my friends who say that evolution doesn’t really make much theological difference.

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  • On the Design Inference

    I’m definitely going to follow this new series on Science & the Sacred. The first post is Why Dembski’s Design Inference Doesn’t Work. Part 1.

    I’ve rejected the design inference on the grounds of garbage-in garbage-out. You can’t determine how likely a chain of events is when you don’t know what events constitute the chain. The probability of unknown events is, well, unknown, or so it seems to me.

    James Bradley is Professor of Mathematics emeritus at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, and is addressing the heart of the matter.

  • Wesley’s Rules for Preachers

    Joel gives us John Wesley’s Twelve Rules for Preachers. Which of us can live up to these?

  • Putting up Barriers to Ministry

    I empathize with Alan Knox’s post today, Help or Get Out of the Way. He relates two experiences of church leadership standing in the way because they required people to go through existing church programs. This is not the way to go about Christian ministry. Come to think of it, it’s not even the way to go about secular business.

    How about this as a rule of thumb: If you find yourself telling people that they cannot serve people because of program X, then program X needs to get out of the way. If you can say, “Yes, we can help you with program X, then maybe, just maybe, program X is something useful.

    Let me illustrate. When I first came to a United Methodist congregation, I had been out of the church–any church–for nearly 12 years. I had a strong work background and my education and experience–an MA degree in Biblical and Cognate Languages. It didn’t take long after I joined the church for them to put me to work. I was soon teaching Sunday School classes and various events for the youth. Now I don’t have a problem with a church being careful about who they have teaching. They should, and they did. I talked with various people in leadership about my experience, my beliefs, and what I would be teaching.

    Then the pastor invited me to preach one Sunday. An individual in the church, heavily involved in our United Methodist lay speaking program, was quite irate. I had not gone through the lay speaker training program, and thus shouldn’t be speaking in the church. The pastor ignored him.

    After this event I did go attend the lay speaker training, and while I have any number of problems with the content, I was glad to have the experience. I didn’t really learn new theology, and some of what I did hear was incorrect (John Wesley influenced by the writings of Karl Marx?), but I did get to know other United Methodists and how they worked, and that was helpful.

    My point here is that the program–lay speaking–can be a tremendous help, but when it becomes a means whereby “leaders” control the church members it can be a hindrance. To carry forward that thought, after I had become a Certified Lay Speaker, I was again approached because I was speaking at various places without coordinating with the lay speaker program. This individual thought that now that I was a lay speaker, any time I spoke anywhere I needed permission from the church’s coordinator and needed to report to him after I did, even when those events had nothing to do with the United Methodist Church at all. Again, something potentially helpful was being used as a barrier.

    What I’ve noticed in Methodist churches is a strong tendency to multiply programs. This results in overlapping and redundant people managing the programs, and often in a great deal of discouragement because people with good ideas find that there are nearly dead programs in the way. In one church people were tracked by three different programs with pastoral care looking at church attendance, Sunday School classes tracking one’s presence, and then a lay pastoral care ministry. About this time someone wanted to start a Stephen’s ministry. Each of these things would demand weekend training events (or longer), social events so that everyone could get together, statistics reported to the appropriate leadership or committee, and so forth. And you know what? People would still fall through the cracks while others were exhausted trying to get to all the events that allowed boxes to be checked off.

    Well, this is a longer rant than I intended. Head on over to Alan’s blog and check out the discussion.

    (HT: Dave Black Online)