Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Missing from Lent 2B

    One thing that always interests me in the lectionary is the passages we don’t read.  Often these are signaled by commas indicating a number of verses left out.  At other times it may be interesting portions before and after.  I see three interesting cases in the lectionary for Lent 2B.

    The first is in Genesis 17, where part of the omission is obvious.  We are told to read Genesis 17:1-7 and then skip to 15 and 16.  What happens in the intervening verses?  The sign of circumcision is instituted.  Christians don’t comprehend circumcision all that well, and perhaps it is good that the pastor won’t have to explain that portion, but I find the omission interesting, considering that we will also read Romans 4 in which Paul will use this passage for something quite different than what it was originally intended for.  In fact, he uses quotes from it mixed with those from Genesis 15 to point away from the sign of circumcision.

    A few years ago I wrote an essay, Was Paul an Exegete?, in which I maintain that clearly he was not.  The problem is that the word “exegesis” has so positive of a connotation amongst many pastors and Bible scholars that suggesting Paul isn’t an exegete sounds positively sacriligious.  Paul isn’t doing exegesis when he uses Hebrew scripture, but that doesn’t mean that he’s either a liar or a bad person.  Rather, he’s doing something else entirely.  Shouldn’t we be interested in seeing just what?  Reading the whole passage will help.  I would suggest at least reading Genesis 17:1-16 straight through if you are using the lectionary in a Bible study group.  For a scripture reading, it’s possible you should use it as is.

    But there’s more!  If we read forward, verse 17 informs us that Abraham fell on his face and laughed.  He didn’t believe the promise.  We see that also in chapter 18, where it is Sarah who laughs.  Yet in Romans 4:20-21 we’re informed that Abraham’s faith was strong and he was convinced God could do what he had promised.  I call this the “faith” view, one that makes the heroes of the faith look better as we give them credit for what they grew into, not what they were at the time.  But Paul’s view and that of the author of Genesis are not quite in line, and we miss that if we don’t read the whole passage.

    Then there is Psalm 22:23-31.  Here we have a contiguous block of praise, but we lack the reason for the praise, which is that the Psalmist has been ill and suffering and prayed for healing.  The praise is thanks to God for bringing him through (possibly prospectively) that situation.  Now we will read the rest of the Psalm on another day in the lectionary, but it’s omitted here.

    Finally, in Mark, we have Peter’s rebuke of Jesus and Jesus’ rebuke of Peter in return, but we don’t have the story that brought it on.  The positive part of Mark’s passage is removed, while the negative part of the Psalm is removed.

    The Romans passage is in good shape, other than the fact that it is well-nigh impossible to get the right balance from any small portion of Romans.  Yet we could hardly read the whole book, could we?

     

  • Interpreting the Bible VI – Introducing some Test Passages

    I’ve been delinquent on this series since January 24, but here goes again. My major point has been to show first that there is no obvious interpretation which one should take from the Bible, but rather that how one applies the Bible to one’s life, if at all, is based on an interpretive framework.

    It’s generally not so much that we cannot determine what a particular author meant to say, though that can be difficult. For example, the arguments over how literally one should take the first 11 chapters of Genesis are all based on a certain amount of evidence. The literary form is debatable, which is demonstrated by the number of people who debate it.

    What is most difficult, however, is determining how something applies to another time, if at all. We all have things we ignore from scripture. I’m blogging through Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy over on my Participatory Bible Study Blog right now, and those books contain many things that Christians do not do, and do not believe they have to do. In fact, it is so ingrained in Christian thought that animal sacrifices, for example, don’t apply to us, that often people don’t even think of it as something they ignore. They will tell me that’s not a real example–it’s too obvious. But the fact that Seventh-day Adventists, for example, keep Saturday as the Sabbath shows that we don’t all agree on where the line is drawn. Further, other small groups keep certain other laws or observe feasts.

    But to get to the idea of test examples, there are two very interesting topics on which Christians debate, but which tend to result in some interesting interpretation.

    The first of these examples is homosexuality. In almost any discussion of gay and lesbian rights in the church, Leviticus 18:22 will surface somewhere. It’s one of those, “But it’s obvious! The Bible says it right here!” sorts of texts. Now my purpose is not to try to tie the entire issue to this one text.

    In my experience, however, I’ve encountered an interesting phenomenon. If I ask the person who has just referred to Leviticus to read Leviticus 19:33-34, which is often just across the page–it is in the Bible I’m using right now–the tone changes. “Well,” I am told, “that passage obviously doesn’t apply today.” The argument usually has to do with welfare and how aliens might get government money to which they are not entitled.

    Now it’s quite possible that one passage applies and one doesn’t, but that isn’t an adequate hermeneutical argument. It doesn’t deal with various reasons one might find to consider Leviticus 18:22 equally inapplicable, for example. And just where does the idea that having some of your money go to people who are not legally entitled to it come from? There are, after all, many other things called “abominations” in Leviticus, yet we don’t avoid them.

    This leads me to ask this of any set of principles of interpretation: Can these principles explain why one passage is applicable and one is not?

    You’ll find that disagreement on that point lies behind many, many debates about scripture, especially debates that are particularly intractable. One side accuses the other of ignoring scripture, while in turn the second side is quite certain the first is intentionally misrepresenting their position. This is because the two don’t use similar principles.

    Once you have identified the principles being used, the next good question is just how those principles are derived. Often, the practical principle that people apply is simply whether something sounds good. “Love your enemies (Matthew 5:44) is good and literally applicable (except when you really don’t want to), whereas cutting off your hand is not (Matthew 5:30).

    Which examples lead me to the second test case. Can your approach to interpretation deal with Numbers 31 in relation to Matthew 5, or perhaps more importantly 1 John 4:13-21. You’ll have to read Numbers 31 for yourself, but I’ll just let you know that in it Moses is quite angry at the way in which the Israelites have not killed an adequate number of women and children in battle.

    In the following posts, which I hope will follow more quickly than this one did, I will look at those two issues and the principles of interpretation that might be involved. For better or worse, I must tell you now that I doubt anyone will consider my approach “obvious.” But that’s OK. I don’t consider anyone else’s all that obvious either!

    Previous posts in this series:

  • Christian Carnival CCLXVI Posted

    … at C.Orthodoxy.

  • A Faith that is not Silent (Psalm 22:23-31, Lent 2B)

    Psalm 22:23-31 is an interesting passage of praise.  It’s easy to read these praise passages as kind of interchangeable–which Psalm shall we use to praise God today.  But there are generally some special features of each passage.

    I believe that we are to focus on God when we worship and praise him.  But at the same time, God is focused on us.  Keeping that in mind might help keep the balance.  There are many reasons to praise God, because he is our creator, because he’s great, because he’s good, and so forth.  Anyone in the congregation can list them.

    But there’s another reason illustrated in this passage. We need to praise God because other people need to hear us do it.  No, this is not because we need them to think better of us seeing as they have heard us offer praise to God.  Rather, it’s because they need to hear what God has done.  The classic Psalm based on this idea is Psalm 78, but it is equally well expressed in shorter form here in Psalm 22.

    Verse 30:  “our children will also serve him.  Future generations will hear about the wonders of the Lord.”  (NLT)

    Verse 31:  “His righteous acts will be told to those not yet born.” (NLT)

    The thing about a silent faith is that it is dead in the most important way–it doesn’t reproduce.  Reproduction is one of the key elements that defines biological life.  It is also a key element in defining spiritual life.

    Here’s a question for you and for your Sunday School class or congregation.  Have you provided enough of a basis for your faith to survive?  Is there anything known about it that would make people want to join your community of faith and carry on?

     

  • Lent 2B – Preliminary Thoughts

    I’m going to try to write something daily, even though I never intended this site to be blog-like.  I link to my blogs from here which have shorter thoughts on various passages, but I rarely get into the themes and the relationships between the passages in the lectionary in my blogging.  Over the last few weeks I have found it much easier to get notes on paper and in the margins of my Bibles than to get them into an article here.

    This week I was struck by several themes, so let me list them in order:

    1. God does it!  That comes through all the passages.  In Genesis 17, our lectionary reading skips Abraham’s response of laughter, and emphasizes God speaking of the blessing and how it will be done.  There is almost the sense that God intentionally waits until Abram (now renamed Abraham) is 99 and his wife Sarai (now Sarah) is 90 years old in order to emphasize that he is the one who does.  Psalm 22 ends on the words “he did” referring to divine action.  In Romans the focus is on the righteousness of faith as opposed to righteousness we manufacture ourselves.  I can’t help but think this righteousness must be real and manifest in the person in and on whom God works, and not merely transactional.
    2.  Death is no barrier.  One common question Christians ask is why Jesus had to die. There are so many answers.  But one is simply that for God death is no real barrier.  In Genesis 17 we have Abraham viewing himself as effectively dead–no longer able to produce life, something Paul picks up on in Romans 4:19.  (Note that our lectionary passage skips Genesis 17:17 in which Abraham laughs, and Paul seems to ignore it too, seeing Abraham as a perfect example of faith!)  In Psalm 22, God receives worship even of those who go down to the pit(v. 29).  Finally, while Jesus has his human reactions to his coming death in various places, when he discusses it with the disciples it is a simple necessity.  Death is no barrier to God.
    3. Sarah and Abraham are blessed together.  In a culture in which the man was seen as generating seed, and the woman was more or less a place for it to grow, God makes it clear that Sarah is part of this as well.  Thus we remember Abraham and Sarah together.  We might think of this when considering the difference between a God’s eye view and a culture eye view on men and women.
    4. God’s word and action is effective.  This is a big topic, but I would simply note that when God blessed Abraham, it wasn’t only transactional.  So when Paul speaks of the righteousness of faith, should it not also be effective and accomplish something in the life of the person who believes?  It is all God’s action, but God’s action is effective.

    Passages:  Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22:23-31; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38.

     

  • Leviticus 3: Fellowship Offering

    I’m moving through this fairly quickly, paced by the Cornerstone Biblical Commentary: Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.  (See the last entry.)  The pace of reading is an interesting issue.   In order to study Leviticus with Milgrom’s Anchor Bible commentary, I spent time nearly daily for more than a year.  Now I’m covering about a chapter a day. [Note:  Links to all sources are at the end of the post.]

    The temptation, after having spent the longer period of time, is to be a bit dismissive of the faster reading, but I’ve found that various levels of detail in study are very helpful.  In the Pentateuch or Torah, I have read it through with individual major volumes, such as Milgrom’s.  Well, there really isn’t another commentary such as Milgrom’s in my experience.  That one remains a high point of all my studies.  But at least I have used commentaries that dedicate a full volume to a book.  I have also read along with commentaries that cover the whole Torah at once.  Each pass through has its own blessings.

    As I read chapter 3 and the comments on it in the three sources I’m reading through right now I was again impressed by the difference in viewpoint of the person whose focus is Biblical studies as opposed to the person whose focus is pastoral or on daily living.  I could easily get stuck on the technical terms.  Today I was playing around with the Greek words used to translate Hebrew technical terms.  I didn’t go far, as I quickly remembered my purpose, but I could cheerfully spend some hours playing with that topic.

    Ordinary church goers, including very intelligent and educated people, are often not going to be very interested in such things unless they are specialists.  What they want to hear is what connects and applies.  That seems to be the strength of Baker’s commentary.  Given two and a half pages of comment, I’m sure you can tell he doesn’t detail the technical terms.  What he does is bring the material home.

    Now I’ve used the term “fellowship offering” which, like pretty much every other term, is a bit weak as a translation.  It will do, however.  The fellowship offering again emphasizes how much of the sacrificial system did not have to do with atonement for specific sins.  Rather, it had to do with all aspects of worship, such as praise, celebration, thanksgiving, community, reconciliation, and indeed fellowship.

    Now while Baker is more Christological than your average critical commentary, he is not quite so much so as the OSB, which unabashedly connects everything with Jesus.  In this case, the fellowship offering illustrates the freely offered fellowship with God and connects to the service of communion in a different way than the preceding grain offerings.  We often ask why Jesus had to die.  One of many good answers is that he became one of us, like us, in fellowship with us, and that fellowship was complete.

    I think western evangelicalism often manages to be both excessively Christological, and not Christological enough.  What do I mean by such a contradictory statement?  First, in the west we try to connect rationally between specific predictions in the Old Testament and events in Christ’s life.  If we can’t rationally connect them, and assume that they were in the mind of the original writer (and not just in the mind of God), we don’t really want to assert them.  In this rational connection, prediction and accomplishment sense, we are often too quick to draw the connection, and we force the rational explanation.

    On the other hand, concepts like “sacrifice” and events like the Eucharist were formed by people who were well acquainted with passages such as the ones I’m reading right now.  Their minds were fertilized by these words and ideas.  There were connections in the way they understood these things that we will miss if we don’t have the same concepts fertilizing our own minds.  To say that Jesus is our fellowship offering does not necessarily mean that Moses or the Priestly writer were thinking, “Wow!  This points to the future Messiah who will die on the cross.”  What it does mean is that the two ideas are related.  Both are part of God’s interaction with his people in history, and both show these various principles.  How much you think God planned it all out may differ, but the ideological connection can be real in any case.

    All of my sources write in similar ways on this passage.  The NISB does not make the Eucharistic connection.  The OSB makes that most strongly.

    Abbreviations:

    OSB – Orthodox Study Bible

    NISB – New Interpreter’s Study Bible

    Milgrom – Milgrom, Jacob.  Anchor Bible:  Leviticus 1-16.

    Baker – Leviticus portion written by David H. Baker, of the Cornerstone Biblical Commentary on Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

  • Leviticus 2 – Offering Food

    There’s a bit of a change of gears in the second chapter of Leviticus, which contains only food sacrifices.  (See Leviticus 1.  Abbreviations at the end of the post.)  These sacrifices are most commonly not offered because of some sin or impurity, but rather as sacrifices of thanksgiving or for some celebration.

    I think that if most Christians were asked to do a word association, they would think of “animal” very quickly in relation to “sacrifice.”  That’s because they are very much used to the link between animal sacrifice, sin, and the sacrifice of Jesus.  That link is not without merit, but the temple services were so much more than animal sacrifices for sin.

    Baker gets less new out of this chapter than out of the first one, though he does mention the meticulous directions for the sacrifices because “it’s human nature for people to wriggle their way out of any obligation that might cost them something.”  That’s a good point about people in general, though I’m not sure it’s a major point to be drawn from this chapter.

    The difficulty for anyone trying to teach from these passages is that especially these first few chapters are much like notes for priests and presumably worshipers, though the latter might have gotten the answers indirectly.  Supposing you took all the liturgical directions for your church for a year and put them in a book.  This would probably be quite useful to the next worship leader, but it wouldn’t make engaging reading for most church members.

    Nonetheless, one could learn a great deal about liturgy by reading such a book.  But if you were going to use a portion as a text for a lecture on liturgy, what would you assign?  Doubtless the instructions for various weeks would contribute to the topic.

    This is similar to the problem of teaching from Leviticus.  You have quite a number of cryptic instructions, and many of the lessons don’t come through until you have the broader picture.  I’m thinking as I go through this book about using a more visual approach to teaching.  Certainly many people use tabernacle models and so forth, and that would help, but perhaps a study could start with an overview of key points, trying to produce a general picture of a year of worship, then focusing on individual aspects, and finally drawing lessons for specific aspects of worship, such as atonement and forgiveness, thanksgiving and celebration, characteristics of the worship experience, living in a way that is conscious of God’s presence, and connecting worship with history.

    I’ll continue to comment on these ideas as I continue to write, but there are a couple of thoughts from the resources I’m using that I’d like to mention.

    First, Baker comments that “the major difference between this sacrifice and the previous was that here there was no blood shed, and as a result, there was no atonement (1:4; Heb 9:22)” (p. 27).

    I find this rather interesting in consideration of Lev. 5:11-13, which provides an alternative of a grain offering for animal sacrifices, which clearly refers to both atonement and forgiveness.  I’ll discuss this more when we get to that chapter, though I did look ahead and did not see any discussion of the matter in Baker.  NISB notes that grain offerings could substitute for animal sacrifices for the poor with equally little discussion.

    Milgrom does discuss the issue of blood in atonement and various other uses and I will include some of his comments at the appropriate time.

    The OSB was quite interesting, with its unabashedly Christological interpretation.  The grain offering “pictures Christ as the totally acceptable grain offering to God” (p. 119), paralleled with John 12:24.  In addition, the grain offering is related to the faithful in Christ and their service.  Metaphors are wonderful that way–multiple meanings!  The oil is the Holy Spirit, and the salt represents the “whole spiritual meditation of the scriptures” (p. 120).

    While I would hardly see this passage as pointing forward in that sense, looking back I can see that the grain offering might will provide an excellent background for understanding some of the bread passages in the gospel of John.

    I also note for the record that again the OSB works out much better when I don’t read the translation!

    Abbreviations:

    OSB – Orthodox Study Bible

    NISB – New Interpreter’s Study Bible

    Milgrom – Milgrom, Jacob.  Anchor Bible:  Leviticus 1-16.

    Baker – Leviticus portion written by David H. Baker, of the Cornerstone Biblical Commentary on Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

  • Worship: Few Words, Boy Friends, and Girl Friends

    David Ker is complaining about modern worship songs (since the 90s), and Peter Kirk has partially taken him to task about it, wondering about the air down in Mozambique and whether it causes David to rant. (Personally I suspect it’s looking at too many hippos, but in non-essentials charity, I say!) David continues with a more in-depth piece, Droning, desymbolization and Christian mantra. I think the latter is especially well worth reading, though all three will help set the stage.

    Now I’m going to try to “let my words be few,” but I’ve already written quite a number of words, so that may not be easy. [Note after completing this–I failed.] Since I have an eclectic readership, let me note here that this is written to Christians. It’s internal shop talk and will probably be simply boring or weird to others.

    I’m personally in sympathy with David on this from the point of view of music quality and what makes me worship. Over the years, however, I’ve tried to learn to be less critical. If I find it difficult to handle a song, I look around the congregation and inevitably I see plenty of other people who are quite deeply drawn into the crowd. If I focus on that community, I often find myself drawn in as well–to the worship, not really the music.

    After hearing from friends overseas who must drive a couple of hours to fellowship, and have no options, I have felt very convicted about my complaints regarding local worship services. If I don’t like the worship one place, I can easily move to another. Many Christians can’t. Thus read the following advice with reference to American Christians, and to others only where truly applicable.

    To worshipers, if you can’t stand the worship music, get over it. Worship is a communal activity, and it’s likely that if a particular style of music is repeatedly presented at your church, somebody is being attracted to it.

    I recall one church where my wife and I could barely stand some of the music. It always seemed out of harmony with the worship service itself. But then we noticed that there was almost half of a section of the sanctuary filled with kids, many of whom attended that church without their parents, and those kids were completely involved in the very music that was driving us nuts. We chose to get over it.

    If you can’t get over it, and I admit that this is quite possible, find another congregation. I can think of a few churches I’ve visited where I believe my best efforts to follow my own advice would fail. In that case, you need to find a place where you can become a part of the community.

    There is a third option I hesitate to mention, and that is to try to improve the worship experience of your own church. The problem with this approach is that, barring debates over the color of the carpet, debates over styles of worship can be the most divisive, and frequently lose the goal of the best worship for the community in efforts by individuals to have everything done in their personally favorite style. So if you try this option, do it prayerfully and make sure that you’re trying for the best for everybody and not just for yourself.

    Having said this to members of the congregation, I would like to emphasize a paragraph from David’s second post:

    But, worship leaders also have a key role in this. On the stage, it’s easy to get swept away in the beauty of the music and the enjoyment of the moment and not realize that a hundred people in the congregation have their hands in their pockets and are bored out of their minds. Open your eyes, worship leaders! Be aware of the temperature of the congregation. You are supposed to be leading others in worship not zoning out in the front.

    I send a separate message to leaders and congregants. Leaders, if you see your congregation bored, uninvolved, uninterested, or simply not worshiping, then you have some work to do. It’s fine for someone like me to tell people (especially myself!) to get over themselves and worship. But that’s not an excuse for some of the careless crap that goes on in worship.

    People treat a stumbling presentation of the liturgy as a joke, something nice and folksy about the church. Communion is done so frequently that many pastors don’t take time to connect it to the message and the rest of the liturgy. One gets the feeling of “oh yes, we’ve gotta hand out some bread and wine” from such presentations. Worship leaders don’t pay attention to scripture or theme.

    Rather than being folksy and fun, such things make the congregation treat worship as something unimportant and casual. If the minister can’t even find one sentence to insert in the communion liturgy at the appropriate points (marked conveniently with asterisks in the United Methodist hymnal), or the worship leader can’t be bothered to communicate with the minister and provide musical settings with a sense of connection, then the worshipers are justified in concluding that somebody doesn’t really care.

    But finally, what is this business about boy friends and girl friends? Yes, I finally got to that point. It has to do with “I am so in love with you.” (No, not YOU, someone else!) I believe that in scripture one of the strongest metaphors for the way in which God seeks people and for the bond between myself and God is sexual passion. I don’t mean sanitized, hand-holding, going on a date level passion. I mean the kind of passion that makes one unable to wait to get to the bedroom before the clothes are coming off. I imagine that image offends some. Enjoy being offended.

    Then read Ezekiel 16, for example, and see God’s passion for us represented as the passionate desire of a lover, while unfaithfulness is represented as the passion for someone other than our true spouse. There are many other texts. The problem with “lover” music, in my view, is not so much that we trivialize our love for God by expressing it in the form of cheap love lyrics; rather, it’s that our love for God is often so much more shallow than those cheap lyrics.

    Hmmm. I intend none of this as judgmental about any particular person. There are many of you, such as both David and Peter, whose service for God indicates that they speak from a depth of passion that most stay-at-home American Christians cannot hope to match. If you’re in that situation, please don’t be offended at my suggestions here.

    But if you’re just checking off the boxes of your supposed weekly activities, then give it some consideration. Is your relationship with God a casual date or a life-long covenant?

  • Biblical Studies Carnival XXXIX Posted

    … at Dr. Platypus.  There’s always good stuff in this carnival, though I never get around to reading everything I intend to!

  • What He Said

    Troy Britain has it absolutely right on freedom of speech, with the added bonus that I get to agree with Christopher Hitchens at the same time, which doesn’t happen nearly as often.