Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Family Pride and Amateur Radio

    I just got the news that my mother and older sister have passed their Amateur Extra examinations with flying colors. My sister received a 100% grade, making a clean sweep of the exams for her.

    This makes five extra class amateur radio operators in my immediate family:

    Dad – Ray Neufeld – KT4B – silent key (I inherited his call sign)
    Brother – Bob Neufeld – N3AU
    Mother – Myrtle Neufeld – WB7OIU
    Sister – Betty Nick – KC2TZO
    … and little ole me – KT4B (recently changed from KE0OY)

    There’s one more very special thing about this. My mother is 92 years old. I sure hope to be that active and still of such a sound mind when I’m 92!

  • The Problem with Revenge

    It’s 9/11 and the events eight years ago are on most people’s minds. Many Christians will be praying today, as my wife wrote in her devotional. What will those prayers consist of? What is a Christian response?

    Shortly before the second gulf war began, I wrote an essay simply titled Revenge! I want to quote from it here:

    As a nation, we have been living in the role of Michael Palin’s character. We see the bad guys in our sights and we shout “Revenge!” in the hope that when revenge has taken place we will be safer, life will return to pre-9/11 normalcy, and we can forget all about this extra security. Most of us know this won’t be the case, but that doesn’t stop the wishful thinking.

    This was illustrated during the bombing of Afghanistan, and later during the ground war. Repeatedly the reporters would ask various military spokesmen whether they had caught or killed Osama bin Laden yet. The answer? Nobody knew. But why was that the question? Did we really think that a bombing campaign could be so targeted as to kill a single individual? Sure, he might die, but bombs are not weapons of assassination in the normal course of events. Did we think that if Osama were caught or killed that the terrorism would end? Surely we aren’t that naive!

    But there is that little program in our brains that wants to yell “Revenge!” and expects that life will be a little sweeter when it is accomplished.

    In some ways we face a similar situation with Iraq. I know there is a powerful motivation for revenge. I am a veteran of the 1991-1992 gulf war. It annoys me every time I see Saddam Hussein expressing himself on television. I confess I wouldn’t mind having the driver’s seat of a steam roller with Saddam’s feet stuck in setting cement. I’d yell “Revenge!” and “Take that!” and roll over him, and on the other side I’d feel good!

    But then would my family be any safer? Would my country be more secure? Would anything be more normal when all was said and done? Very likely not.

    I need to let that resentment go. I need to tone down the shout “Revenge!” I need to consider what will actually make things more secure.

    Now my point here is not to reiterate my opposition to the war in Iraq. My point is simply this. The command of Jesus to love our enemies extends even to terrorists. While I don’t think that denies that there should be consequences for evil actions that people take, nor do I believe it prevents justice and security measures, what it should prevent, amongst Christians, is the idea that revenge can get us anywhere.

    Vengeful attitudes and fear distort our judgment and prevent us from seeing the best approach. I am not a pacifist, but I strongly believe that we are much too inclined to resort to violence and often to apply violence in the wrong way, often because what we are really seeking is not reasonable security but revenge and a diversion from our fears.

    As a follower of Jesus I think it is my duty to let forgiveness clarify my thinking and to let love guide my actions. That’s not easy in the world today, but I think it’s the call.

    A Response: Elgin Hushbeck has written a short response, but the trackback somehow didn’t happen. I always find Elgin an interesting and challenging dialog partner. I should note (full disclosure and all) that my company, Energion Publications, publishes his book, Preserving Democracy.

  • Lord Save Us From Your Followers – The Movie

    I think there are two major errors we can make as Christians: We can fail to have a message, and we can fail to be the message. If I follow the stereotypes I would say that liberals tend to fail in the first, and conservatives in the second. But I’m afraid we all tend to fail at both.

    Tom Sims posted this trailer on his blog The Dream Factory. I think the trailer, and hopefully the movie, should make us think, then make us do.

    The gospel will offend, but make sure it’s the gospel that is doing the offending and not your attitudes or prejudices.

  • Preaching until you Mean It

    Shane Raynor is again stirring things up with a post on a Toolkit for Radical Methodists. He has proposed the idea of preaching faith until you have it, rather than waiting for faith.

    Since I recently posted some about doubt, I was interested in his phrase “wearing [your] doubt as a straitjacket.” I wonder if one could distinguish acknowledging doubt as opposed to wearing it as a straitjacket. Might it be possible for there to be healthy doubts, doubts that lead you onward as opposed to unhealthy doubts that keep you from taking action?

    This is one I’m still thinking about.

  • Living Romans 12

    Alan Knox has reposted a series on how the church can live Romans 12:9-21 along with some current thoughts. He points out that Romans 1-11 are theological, but starting with Romans 12, Paul begins to speak about how the church can live out the theology of the first chapters.

    This all reminded me of one of my complaints about my biblical training, both undergraduate and graduate. While an undergraduate, I took Exegesis of Romans in Greek, a one quarter course designed to make sure that those of us with two years of Greek didn’t just stop there. It was wildly unsuccessful at that task, as the assignments that forced one to actually read Romans in Greek were minimal. But my greater complaint was that we didn’t follow a schedule and thus only got through Romans 8 in class.

    This did allow the very Arminian professor, also an advocate of the moral influence view of the atonement, to avoid some difficult passages in Romans 9-11, but it also meant that we stayed in the theological portions of the book.

    I was further disappointed when I took an exegesis class in Galatians in seminary. I was disappointed that it was done from the English text, but because of the graduate school/seminary agreement (I was in the grad school), I had to take on an extra assignment, and the professor agreed that I could simply do all of my work from the Greek text. (The value of two years of Greek after which one doesn’t actually study the New Testament from the Greek text largely escapes me.) But again I was disappointed, as we only completed through Galatians 4.

    Now I know that both professors would say that they were just trying to cover the text that they did cover in depth. I know this because I asked, and they did say that. But the risk here is that one gets an extremely skewed view of Paul–Paul the theologian, when he was really much more pastoral. His theology was the foundation for his practical teaching.

    I’m no expert on Paul. My primary study was in the Hebrew Scriptures and other ancient near eastern literature. But I am a firm advocate in all cases of studying whole pieces of literature and putting the appropriate weight on all portions. I can’t imagine Paul being happy when we read about salvation by faith and then miss Galatians 5:13 which tells us the results.

    How does your church and your life measure up to the practical, active portions of Paul’s epistles? What difference might it make in the way other people view Christians if we did so?

  • Theological German Blog

    Dave Black linked to this post today for the Barth quote, but I will be visiting the site frequently, I think.  To say that my theological German is rusty is an understatement, but I was surprised by how much I could get first pass.  The word lists fill in.

    This could help scrape off some of that rust!

  • Rick Mansfield on the TNIV and NIV2011

    He has some good thoughts here, more on the technical and marketing side.

  • New Revision of NIV Announced

    Everybody is writing about this so I might as well get on the bandwagon.  I’ll credit the hat tip to Better Bibles Blog.  I’m pretty sure that’s where I read about it first.  I’ll let you go there for the details.

    To be honest, though I’m obviously pretty intensively interested in Bible translation, having written a book, and created a web site on the subject, I’m getting a bit weary of new translation projects.  Zondervan has already done a rather poor job of supporting and marketing the TNIV, so what’s to say that this new version is going to do that much better?

    More importantly, though I’m aware there are flaws in all English translations, that’s simply a symptom of the fact that there are, and always will be, flaws in any translation.  I don’t see anything added to the process that will actually make more people satisfied with translations.  Any time a committee does the work, individuals such as myself will find something to complain about.

    It seems to me that there is a bit of excess in English Bible translation and marketing.  I don’t want to target any translation committee for being the “excess,” but my question is how much better things will get with each new translation.

    If the NIV revisers use gender neutral phrasing in their revision, they will become the target of the same folks who criticized the TNIV.  If they don’t, the audience for which the TNIV was intended are unlikely to appreciate the new version.

    So, folks, just how much further along will we be in Biblical scholarship when this new version is published?  How much will the kingdom be advanced?

    I think I need to add here a quote from Eddie Arthur on Kouya Chronicles:

    So English, a language which already has more scholarly translations of the Bible than you can shake a stick at, is to get yet another translation. No doubt the publishers will also make a small fortune.

    Meanwhile, there are still two thousand languages spoken by two hundred million people without a word of Scripture. Our priorities are all messed up!

    I love Bible editions.  I have a fair collection of them.  But I am wondering more and more whether some portion of our Bible translation and marketing process is a symptom of some of the things that are wrong with the western church.

  • Identifying Divine Revelation

    Alan Lenzi writes a post in response to John Hobbins in which he seems to find it surprising that more Biblical scholars don’t abandon faith, and that their failure to do so says something about their “unwillingness to think historically without being hamstrung to the implications of their work by the fear of divine judgment … or by the irrationality of mysticism.”

    You really need to read that in its full context to get the flavor, but I don’t like quoting somebody’s whole post, so you’ll have to go to Alan’s site to see it.  But here is the part to which I want to respond:

    … The problem is this: when one takes a close look at the Bible in its original context, there is no evidence that the Bible is such a historically-situated divine revelation, that it is somehow ontologically different than other texts from antiquity and should be privileged or treated in a special way. …

    Now don’t imagine that I have suddenly found a great answer to the question, but I don’t see anyone else finding one either.  What exactly does a divine revelation look like and in what fashion should it be “ontologically different” from other texts?  I’m not saying it shouldn’t be; I’m wondering how one identifies it.  I have never seen an answer to this question that is at all satisfying.

    For myself, I simply confess that my belief in inspiration is a faith confession, not one I can demonstrate.  I do not look elsewhere in order to identify inspired texts.  I look at the Bible as inspired and thus discover from it the shape of inspired texts.  I fully accept that this is circular in the logical sense.  A leap of faith is not rational in many ways, but it is nonetheless a leap that I have taken.

    On the other hand, this leap of faith tells me little about what the Bible is supposed to be.  That I must discover by studying it, and critical methodologies, pursued objectively to the best of my ability, are one of the ways in which I make that discovery.  Of course, I also know that I am never totally objective.

    Yet I do not believe my objectivity is hampered by a “fear of divine judgment.”  It may well be altered by the “irrationality of mysticism” as I doubtless have some of the mystic in me.

    I wonder, however, whether a militant anti-mystic will do better than I will at understanding the writings of people who had a great deal of mysticism in their makeup.

    (John Hobbins provides an expanded discussion of his claim, which is well worth reading, though it uses more big words than mine does.)

  • Biblical Studies Carnival #45 Posted

    … at The Golden Rule, Bible Theme Park edition.  Lots of good stuff here, and despite my usual delinquency in submitting anything, I got a link in there.