Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Sacrifice then and Now

    What meaning is evoked in people’s minds by the word “sacrifice?”  One of the things I like to do when teaching is to simply write a word on the board that is commonly used in Biblical and/or Christian discourse and get people to give me various things that this word means to them.  I try not to specify the context too closely.

    The other day I did this while teaching a bit on the tabernacle service, and its relation to the theme of Hebrews 7-9.  Yes, I know, big subject.  But I started by writing the three words “temple”, “priest”, and “sacrifice.”

    The result was not entirely unexpected, but was instructive.  I’m going to stick with the word “sacrifice.”  The group focused on giving up things for others or for some benefit for oneself.  For example, one person talked about giving up certain things in life in order to pursue an avocation for tennis.  Others talked about sacrificing in order to help the poor.

    It is probably indicative of the group involved that, even though we were in Sunday School class, the “church” meanings did not come up.  When I brought up the idea of sacrifice for sin and the various ways in which that might be understood, people acknowledged it with an “oh yeah.”

    Now this was not a stupid group of people. Far from it.  They were one of the most interactive and constructive groups with whom I have had the privilege to work recently.  But what was uppermost in their minds was not quite entirely unlike a picture of sacrifice in the ancient world, but it was pretty close.

    The idea of offering a sacrifice “to” anyone–God, for example–again did not come up.

    When I have done a similar exercise with more conservative groups I will likely get all the words that relate to sin and atonement, but they will often miss the idea of a sacrifice in order to accomplish something, a simple offering for thankfulness, or the fairly common purification sacrifices.  Those are ideas that are not part of either the liberal or conservative universes.

    So how does one read and/or teach Hebrews in such a context?  First, I consider my use of that exercise completely justified.  I can get an idea of where people are, and then point out the differences and similarities between their view of sacrifice and that of the ancient world.

    Elements that may be missed by various groups include:

    • Any concept of substitution
    • Purification (clean and unclean)
    • Thankfulness
    • Appeasement
    • Magical rituals in which the animal is slaughtered less as a sacrifice and more as a part of the magical ritual.
    • Sacrifice as part of the continuing liturgy.

    There is a difficulty here, I think, in teaching a book like Hebrews without having some exposure to sacrifice, priesthood, and temples in the ancient world.  A good start on that exposure would be to look at the sacrifices as taught in Leviticus especially, but such a process tests the patience of the best of classes.

    I’m not one to maintain that the author of Hebrews was some kind of expert on the Torah.  On the other hand he certainly did have a working acquaintance, at least with the LXX version of it, and he would not necessarily see sacrifice in the same way we do.  In order to get some portion of his perspective, we need to do some reading of that same literature.

    Even simply looking at each of his quotes and perhaps their Old Testament context will be inadequate.  We need somewhat of a picture of how ancient Israelite religion worked, placed in an ancient near eastern context, before we can learn how one New Testament author wanted to change, or better, <em>transform</em> it.

  • Colin Powell Endorses Barack Obama

    I know this is old news by now, but I particularly appreciated the tone of the endorsement. As one who has some policy disagreements with Barack Obama, but who nonetheless supports him on balance, I was glad to hear a nuanced endorsement.

    Here’s the video:

    PS: I particularly appreciated his comment on the question of Obama being a Muslim. He’s not, he’s a Christian, but being a Muslim should not disqualify someone from becoming president of the United States.

  • So Long to Public Campaign Financing?

    I had mixed emotions about Barack Obama’s choice not to accept public financing of campaigns. On the one hand, as an advocate of free speech, I believe that public financing and campaign spending limits are a threat to free speech precisely where it needs to be most free. But on the other hand, I dislike flip-flops, and this was.

    What I would have liked to have heard was Obama or his spokesman tell us that, having seen how individuals, when fired up, can produce the necessary campaign cash, he had realized just how important freedom was in a political campaign, and thus changed his position. I don’t regard changing your mind for good, publicly stated reasons to be a bad flip-flop. Doing so for political expediency is another matter.

    But I do welcome the fact that Obama’s campaign has underlined already existing questions about public financing. CQPolitics has an article on the $150 million Obama raised in September:

    Obama had initially promised to accept public financing if McCain did, but changed his mind after setting primary fundraising records. His extraordinary fundraising is bound to set a new standard in politics that could doom the taxpayer-paid system. Many Republicans have begun to second-guess McCain’s decision to participate in the program.

    In a way it’s nice to see this campaign highlight the problems with public financing, an issue on which I believe both candidates are wrong.

  • Valuable Summary Post on Bible Translation

    Brian Russell of Real Meal Ministries has posted a summary on Bible translation that is quite good.  It’s hard to keep things straight in a short, readable essay.  (HT:  Methodist Blogs Weekly Roundup by Allan Bevere.)

    I would note that he uses the popular rather than any of the technical definitions of “paraphrase,” but I find it necessary to deal with that term when publicly discussing Bible translations as well.  Many will find his answer to the question of what Bible translation he uses inadequate, but there’s no way around that!

    Overall, this is a good overview.

  • Added Caching

    Though the number of page views per day doesn’t seem to reflect it, I’ve had some database load problems, so I have added WP-SuperCache to this blog as well. As always, let me know about any problems you may have. This seems like overkill for the traffic on this blog, but if it works OK, I might as well lighten the database load.

    If comments are causing problems, e-mail pubs@energion.com.

  • Not About Joe the Plumber

    The furor over this poor guy has illustrated to me one of the problems of presidential campaigning in America. It’s not about analyzing policies to determine who they impact, to what extent, and for what purpose, nor indeed it is about whether the policies will accomplish that purpose. It’s rather all about engaging people’s emotions.

    I was reading AllahPundit over at HotAir who is quoting a report that Joe the Plumber may be in trouble for plumbing without a license. It’s not that I object to the law being enforced. I even think that someone who lives in a glass house and then invites the hail of rocks should be prepared for the results. That doesn’t mean I excuse either the people who point out the person in the glass house, while failing to mention, nor do I excuse the rock throwers.

    The proper issue here is tax policies and who they impact. Joe the Plumber was supposed to put a face on that issue. If the McCain campaign was doing their job, they would have figured out whether the business was worth $250,000 (or perhaps much less), or was bringing in $250,000, and they would have discovered whether that was gross receipts or profits. Then they could have determined whether Obama’s tax plan would make it impossible for this particular person to own a business or not.

    On the Democratic side, the proper response is simply that Obama’s tax plan does not tax this poor man to anything like the extent claimed by McCain, and that in fact his taxes will drop. So his complaint is that if he manages to make over $250,000 per year at some later time, he would be taxed more heavily on part of that income. Now that is a legitimate issue to discuss, because I want Joe the Plumbers all over the country to be interested in growing their businesses. It’s just not as emotional as the question of whether or not he can buy the business now.

    Here’s the thing. It can’t possibly be news to my conservative friends, but they sure are acting like it is. Businesses already have to pay taxes, and just like any other expense, those taxes might make it impossible for you to start or expand your business. That’s going to be true at any tax rate.

    You have to ask more about taxes than just whether they are bigger or smaller. What are they spent on? Who is getting taxed, and how much?

    We’re hearing a great deal about redistributing income. Some people are acting as though one candidate won’t redistribute while the other will. Actually, there is redistribution now and there will be redistribution then. The question is by how much, and what will it be spent on.

    I don’t hear Republican activists complaining about either taxes or budget deficits when the war in Iraq is on the line. Democrats are not complaining generally when it’s social programs that are involved.

    Now my pro-war friends will probably point out that the war in Iraq was, according to them, a necessity. We have to defend ourselves; we don’t have to provide health care for everyone. So we will spend on an invasion of Iraq irrespective of income, but we won’t do so when people have no health insurance. We can pull together the money, or more accurately pretend we have the money (and a government can get by with pretending for a long time), for Wall Street, but not for individuals.

    But in fact any war, and the war on terror is no exception, involves deciding how to apply limited resources to accomplishing one’s goals in the war. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again–the war in Iraq was a horrible strategic decision. It wasted American and Iraqi lives, and it wasted resources that could have been spent better elsewhere. It was not a necessity.

    We need to start looking for the details in these kinds of issues. When we borrow as a government it’s important to ask what we’re borrowing for. If we’re raising taxes, we need to ask what we’re going to accomplish with the money. If we’re building infrastructure, that’s one thing, while if we’re borrowing just to keep the basics running, that’s another. It’s sort of like home finance. If you’re borrowing to buy a practical family vehicle, that’s very different from finding you have to put your electricity bill on a credit card.

    Both parties have been lying to the American people and pretending that we can have what they offer without having to pay for it. In this case, I find Republicans more guilty than Democrats recently, because they always propose lowering taxes, but are much less forthcoming on lowering expenditures. Then they spend their time throwing rocks at Democrats who propose modest increases to pay for a small portion. I’d be more inclined to defend the Democrats is they were proposing amounts that would actually pay for their programs, but if they did they wouldn’t need my defense; they’d be losing so badly that nothing could possible help.

    So while on the one hand this isn’t about Joe the Plumber, in another way it is, because politicians who believe that you, the voter, can’t handle a rational discussion of policy want the issue to be about whether that one guy can buy a business, one that turns out to have been out of reach in any case.

    So the tax policy discussion is bypassed and we can sling emotions around the blogosphere and a bit in the media, yet at the end of the day, few people know more about the actual tax proposals than they did before.

  • Letter to Lifeway Christian Stores

    Rev. Geoffrey Lentz is a local United Methodist pastor. Some years ago before he went to seminary and learned better he was a student of mine. He sent a letter to Lifeway Christian Stores regarding their placement of a magazine about women pastors behind the counter. He sent me a copy and graciously gave permission to quote it.

    Dear Lifeway Christian Stores,

    I am a United Methodist Minister that believes in the importance of evangelism and the inspiration of the Bible. I have been a frequent customer at your store in Pensacola, FL. I have appreciated your good prices on many of the classics of our faith, but recently I have been concerned about your store pulling the last edition of Gospel Today: Female Pastors Share Their Joys, Struggles, and Victories off the shelves. I know that your store is run by the Southern Baptist Convention, but I thought you were interested in reaching out to and selling to Christians of other traditions.

    I regret that I will no longer support LCS with my patronage and will recommend my church members not do so as well. I think you should change the name of your store to Lifeway Right-wing of the Southern Baptist Convention Stores so it is not so confusing to people like me, who are looking for a regular Christian bookstore. I think your store is out of touch with your customers, the Church of Jesus Christ, and most importantly the Holy Spirit. But I do take heart that God has been calling women to ministry from the beginning and will continue to call even Baptist women to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, despite the church hierarchy’s best attempt to silence His voice.

    Peace in Christ,

    Geoffrey Lentz

    That’s telling them! You can find the story here.

  • The McCain Campaign and Comebacks

    In an article on MSNBC discussing how Obama is moving into some traditionally Republican territory, I found this quote:

    McCain, for his part, was returning to the argument that Obama’s credentials are too thin for the White House, his campaign and the Republican National Committee releasing ads focusing on experience and judgment.

    Here’s my problem with this: I’m asked to trust the running of the country to a man who can’t run a campaign. Oh, I know how the political operatives work, and I’m willing to discount some of the problems as a clash between McCain’s honorable inclinations and the demands of real life politics. But the bottom line is that a man who would be president needs to set the tone of his campaign and run it.

    I’m not talking about going negative in this case, though I dislike a nasty campaign. Some negatives are quite appropriate. It is not wrong to point out where your opponent has failed, and thus how you would presumably do better. But there are false negative themes and irrelevant negative themes, and one needs to be able to tell the difference. (Note: Just because your partisan supporters think something is true, doesn’t make it true.)

    But if one goes into a negative campaign, one needs at a minimum to do so competently. Just how far are we going to go? How are we going to handle the fallout if it doesn’t catch on?

    After clinching the nomination, McCain had a fairly strong environmental proposal. Where did it go? The twists and turns of his campaign have been quite entertaining, but not constructive. When you swing too many different ways you don’t satisfy all the different factions; you tend rather to anger them all.

    McCain wants to talk about judgment, but he doesn’t appear to have the judgment to choose a campaign focus and run with it. He should have noticed long ago that the “Obama isn’t up to the job” theme wasn’t really working all that well. Or maybe he just didn’t play it well enough. I’m not sure which. But he certainly hasn’t made it happen. And whether partisans on either side like it or not, the choice of Sarah Palin muddied the waters on the experience issue. I think the contortions of folks on both sides to try to explain how the experience issue goes their way are riotously funny. Democrats, presenting a young and relatively inexperienced candidate (something I don’t mind, by the way), should have just kept their mouths shut about Palin, and Republicans should have responded in kind.

    It seems to me that McCain should have decided who he was, decided just how far he might compromise to keep the base of the Republican party, and just how far he would compromise to attract others, and then stick with that theme. I don’t know if he would win with that approach, but it’s hard to imagine him doing much worse.

    Campaigning and governing may not be the same thing–indeed they are not. But keeping on message, managing a staff, setting the tone, and presenting oneself as in charge are all characteristics that are helpful to a president. McCain is arguing that he has better judgment and is a better leader, but he’s failing to demonstrate that.

    I recall a baseball coach talking to my son who is a pitcher. He frequently got into a jam around the 3rd or 4th inning, but then his pitching really picked up and he would pitch his way out of the jam and look good for the rest of the game. The coach noted that being able to pitch out of a jam was a good thing, but suggested he not go to that well too often!

    I think McCain has nobody but himself to blame for the position he is in now. It is not impossible for things to change, but thus far, he has displayed an almost uncanny talent for making things break the wrong way. He may be the comeback candidate, but if you try to come back from the brink too many times, you may find that it just doesn’t happen.

  • Trying WP-Spamfree

    I’m trying the WP-Spamfree plugin for a few days here. Please let me know if you have any problems posting comments. I’ll be watching the spam closely.

  • Quote of the Day – Elitism

    … A political strategy that depreciates the value of ideas in favor of some vague notion of the superiority of common sense and homespun, simple virtue undermines the foundations of democracy, the standing of the nation in the world, and the economic and technological prospects of a country.

    From: Madison Powers at CQ Politics. But read the whole thing. It’s not all on one side!