Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Textual Criticism Summary from Parchment and Pen

    C. Michael Patton presents Textual Criticism in a Nutshell, though what he means more precisely is New Testament textual criticism in a nutshell.

    It’s quite a good introduction giving a feel for the types of variants and why they might occur, and also why we might prefer not to call them “errors” considering that some are intentional, and some are stylistic variants and so forth.

    I would note only one caveat–I think he is a bit optimistic on how much impact the few substantial variants would have. I recall one correspondent who noted that of course variants in the New Testament text made no difference on doctrinal issues, since we don’t truly base our doctrines on the Bible in any case. That’s also overstating the case, in my view.

    Certainly there is a great deal more in the church’s doctrinal statements than is in the texts themselves. I regard this as a good thing. I think the church was supposed to grow and that the doctrinal statements express the church in that process. At the same time, they did take care within their approach to the study of texts, to provide some basis in scripture.

    We would hardly have the debates we do about some variants if there were no doctrinal issues. Thus it is good to realize that while the support orthodoxy may be strengthened or weakened by particular variants, there are no smoking guns that say “that doctrine is wrong,” or “this other doctrine should have been there.” It’s more a matter of the weight of textual support for the elements of doctrine.

  • Who Are We After 9-11?

    Any number of speakers and writers, myself certainly included, have talked about the various things we need to do to make our country safer from terrorist attacks. We’ve also sung the praises of rescue and relief workers and of various leaders during the time of crisis.

    Other countries of suffered greater losses proportionally than we did, but I’ve learned that one cannot compare one type of grief and loss with another. Besides the grief and the loss, the attacks of 9/11 made us feel vulnerable. I didn’t lose anyone I knew personally, so there is a bit of distance, but in the time immediately after the attacks we were united as a nation in a way very rarely seen.

    There’s a question that I think is more important than just how safe we are, how we will prevent such attacks in the future, and the general strategy of the war on terror. In what ways has 9/11 changes us as a nation and as people?

    An individual who goes through tragedy, loss, or extreme hardship may come out of it stronger and as a better person. He or she will undoubtedly come out changed, but that change can be for the better.

    But it is also possible for a person to come out changed for the worse.

    • Fear can grip one’s life, so that all focus is on preventing any such tragedy again. A parent who loses a child can constrict the lives of her other children so that there is as little risk as possible of a repetition.
    • Anger can take over, so that revenge is the only goal, and one can no longer deal reasonably with people who are related in any way to the cause of the tragedy.
    • Resentment can poison one’s mind, so that one cannot see clearly what needs to be done.
    • One can lose all sense of balance, resulting in a continued life of misery

    I think a nation or a group of people have many of the same options. What will you become as a result of what has happened? This question goes far beyond the immediate response to danger. I’m not chiding anyone for responding to danger. My own objections to the war in Iraq do not result from a conviction that we shouldn’t respond, but rather than Iraq was the wrong place and time for it.

    But there are other responses that I think we need to look at. About a year after the 9/11 attacks I visited my brother. I flew into Buffalo and took a taxi. The driver was a Sikh, wearing the traditional headgear. I asked him how it was for him right after the attacks. I recognized he was a Sikh, but was he mistaken for a Muslim (or Arab, unfortunately the same thing in some people’s eyes) and was he in any danger. He told me that he had to abandon the traditional headgear and wear a much smaller and less obvious head covering after the attacks, because he was taunted and had been in danger.

    Now it’s unrealistic to expect that there won’t be a minority of people who will react in inappropriate ways, often because they are already filled with rage and hate for other reasons. The major event simply provides them with an excuse to be who they are anyhow.

    We still have a certain strong tradition of freedom. It has been weakened by attacks from various directions. I don’t give either major party a “pass” on this issue. Constitutional freedoms are up for grabs when people are afraid. The one thing a politician can’t survive is appearing soft on terrorism.

    I think that is behind Obama’s vote for the FISA bill, a tragedy in my view, and the Republican sneers about making sure terrorists are read their rights.

    Those are both the result of fear, and they do not do us any credit as a people. In particular I was struck by the phrasing of “reading terrorists their rights.” The fact is that we don’t read “criminals” their rights, we read “people” their rights. Those people may be criminals, but they have rights so that we can determine whether they truly are criminals. People have rights so that we can accurately determine whether they are also terrorists.

    This idea of restricting the government from arbitrarily determining who is good and who is bad and acting on it without accountability is deeply enshrined in our constitution, and derives many of its elements from common law that goes much further back. There is no crime that is so heinous that we should punish an innocent person for it. The very idea that we would determine arbitrarily prior to any process just what sort of person an individual is should strike terror to our hearts.

    It’s quite possible for us to respond to external threats in such a way that we become our own worst enemies. Will we live in fear, or will we make a stand that says that no matter what external terror puts us through we will remain who we are?

    There will be freedoms and conveniences we must give up. We must be prepared for more security at airports (I actually wish it was more vigorous than it is), and for more scrutiny when entering or leaving the country. There are justifiable shortcuts that are necessary. While I oppose FISA as passed, there is certainly a need for wiretapping as part of our security efforts.

    I also don’t think this is a Republican or Democratic issue. If we had had a Democratic president I suspect very similar things would have happened. It’s the result of being on the hot seat, which is not so easy, despite the fluency of some of us who criticize!

    But I think we need to reflect beyond remembering the loss and remembering the sorrow, and get a very clear vision of who we want to be. If we give up who we really are in exchange for security, just what are we securing?

  • Good Decisions on Education in California

    Christianity Today reports on two decisions regarding education in California. In one case, the courts upheld the University of California’s decision to reject certain courses when considering eligibility for admission. In the other, the right of parents without a teaching degree to homeschool.

    Some may see these decisions as contradictory, but that would only be true if you look at them as a question of the place of religion in education. Generally religious parents won in one case, though I should emphasize that not all homeschoolers are Christians, while in the other they lost.

    I think both are appropriate, and I think one makes the other even more important. I think homeschool parents generally do a good job with educating their children, as results on standardized tests tend to show. Yes, there is less exposure to the broader world, and yes, they often don’t learn everything I think they should learn, but they’re not my children.

    I believe evolution should be fully taught in science classes, and until such time as another consensus emerges, something I don’t expect, it should be exclusively taught. But that is for tax supported schools. I believe Christian schools should have the right to set their own curriculum, provided that students can pass the same standardized tests, if any, that are required of public school students.

    At the same time, a university, whether public or private, needs to control admissions and should be permitted to expect students to have studied certain things. Admission to a university is not the same thing as getting out of high school with the minimum effort. As I understand it, one way around these requirements is through passing standardized tests. If the students do know this material, then they can demonstrate it and gain admission.

    I think individual rights and educational responsibility are well-balanced in these rulings, and I hope they are both upheld on appeal.

  • Book Notes: Live to Tell

    Kallenberg, Brad J. Live to Tell: Evangelism for a Postmodern Age. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2002. ISBN 1-58743-050-9. 138 pages.

    One of our pastors handed this book to my wife because of her interest particularly in discipleship. You may ask why one should give a book on evangelism to someone primarily concerned with discipleship, but in this case the choice was good. This book combines discipleship with evangelism so that they are practically one topic.

    Kallenberg has a certain amount of courage just writing a book right now with the word “evangelism” in the subtitle, and perhaps it becomes even more of an act of courage when the word “postmodern” is also included. That combination can be a bit intimidating.

    My wife found the postmodern vocabulary and the style of the book in general just too much to plow through. She’s practical, writes and speaks briefly, and likes to get down to the point where the rubber meets the road. Kallenberg doesn’t write that way at all. Since she also wanted to honor her pastor’s request to read the book, that made things a bit difficult.

    But a solution was lurking right around the corner, in the person of her husband who will read practically anything–me! We try to get together at least once a week to do some kind of joint study, generally studying from a book one of us has chosen, which we then discuss. In this case I read the book, summarized the chapter and then read selections, after which we discussed the content.

    The content of the book is really quite good, though the presentation and also some of the examples remind me of much that I don’t like postmodernism, especially as popularly conceived. That’s another concept, but I would simply note that it seems very easy for postmodernists to get mired in a slough without map or compass, without any idea of where to go.

    That very miring seems to provide Kallenberg with his “hook” to reach a postmodern generation. He is by no means rejecting postmodernism–the whole miring thing is my comment. Rather, if I may use my own metaphor, he aims at leading people out of the mire they’re in by example, rather than teaching them all about how to get out of mires, where the edges are, where the dangers are, and so forth.

    If we find someone in the postmodern age who doesn’t know where to go, he suggests we avoid the “teach them what is right” approach and try a “show them how to live right” method. I know I am summarizing a great deal here, but that is the essence of the subject as I read it. And since Kallenberg (and I) believe that Christianity has a story that is truly efficacious, that approach is best. If people are looking for stories, bring them a good story. Even better, show them a good story.

    Of course, this story idea isn’t anything new to Christianity. When God needed to tell us about himself, he didn’t send a systematic theologian. He sent his Son, who showed us in person and in story form just what God was getting at. As I read it, Kallenberg is simply grabbing a page from God’s play book and applying it to the life of the church today.

    Kallenberg presents this in the vocabulary of postmodern philosophy. Even where I find that postmodernism correctly criticizes modern thought, I find that vocabulary annoying at best. But the book isn’t really aimed at making me like the vocabulary. If I’m to communicate with people steeped in that very vocabulary, I’ll need to learn to understand it. In fact, Kallenberg uses this very metaphor of language learning for the process of conversion and discipleship.

    At the same time, he manages to erase the gap between the concepts of conversion and discipleship. Most of the people he uses as examples do not become Christians at some instant in time. The modern conception of conversion is that people becomes convinced that Christianity is true, that they are sinners, that Jesus is the one way to salvation, and then at some instant they pray a prayer and surrender their lives to Jesus. At that moment, discipleship begins, or at least should begin.

    In Kallenberg’s examples, it is much more likely that one will go to church and even participate in the life of the church before any specific “conversion” experience. What brings the person to Christ is their becoming a participant in the life of the church. In one case what convinces someone that God is personal is not theological argument but observing the congregation worshiping a personal God.

    I could wish that the many good points that are made in this book were divorced from some of the philosophical vocabulary. Perhaps there should be a Reader’s Digest version for practical people, but I’m not sure how one would write such a thing. There are so many elements of what Kallenberg is teaching that are simply good, practical ideas on being a good neighbor.

    But we have what we have, and for anyone who can make it through the first chapter, and occasional detours along the way, this will be a book well worth reading.

  • Critical Methods and Modern Tests

    Over the last few days there have been a flurry of posts at Language Log that could be related to Biblical criticism, though that is not the intent of their authors. What they are actually discussing is authorship identification and then spin spotting, with an interesting twist at the end.

    Here are some key posts to check:

    Why does this remind me of Biblical criticism? It seems to me that it demonstrates how easily one can be misled on things like this, and how important it is to thoroughly check such claims. It’s quite easy for an expert to say that, based on his careful study of certain criteria, a certain document was written (or not written) by a particular author. But when you go and ask for the basis of that claim, you may find that the expert has very little material with which to work.

    Noting that an author uses phrases that he doesn’t use elsewhere is significant if you have a large body of that author’s work. If you have only a small amount, you really have little to work with. Statistics work that way. You need significant samples before the numbers mean anything.

    I recall an experiment I did while a college student. I wanted to test my ability to decode something in a simple substitution cypher. I explained the process to my sister, and she created her cypher and then encoded some text using it. It was just a short paragraph, but I after an hour or so I gave up and asked her what it was.

    My problem? She had chosen a passage from Encyclopedia Britannica discussing the history of one of the Chinese dynasties. I don’t remember which, but the names of the emperors made all the probabilities off kilter. Even though the paragraph was in English, there were so many transliterated Chinese names that my probability charts were all off. I think I should have figured it out anyhow, but the fact is that I didn’t. A larger sample would have made the work quite trivial.

    Similarly the effort to automatically spot “spin” relies on sampling. Not every instance of the passive voice is intended to obscure agency, even if one correctly identifies the passive, as this program did not. One would have to find better criteria than simply passive voice.

    The ease with which some people are deceived on this is also very interesting. If someone talks authoritatively enough, provides enough technical sounding detail, people will tend to believe them. I think we build this view of expertise in many mystery shows today. How many people get their idea of what expert examination can accomplish from fiction? There the “expert” confidently points out a few items that make the case air tight. In reality, of course, such testimony will be placed in context, and alternative explanations will be provided by the defense. (See! I have indicated agency quite clearly in a passive sentence.)

    I like Biblical criticism, and I like to apply critical methodology to various texts. I’m not arguing against that. What I am suggesting is that in Biblical studies we generally have very small samples, and thus we are often drawing substantial conclusions from insubstantial evidence. You work with what you have. At the same time, we need to be very careful to state our conclusions with the appropriate humility.

    There are very few “assured results” in textual studies.

  • Using the NLTSB and NISB: Exodus 14:19-31

    Yesterday I looked at Romans 14:1-12 in these two versions. Today I’m looking at another of this week’s lectionary passages, Exodus 14:19-31. Those who aren’t seriously interested in these two study Bibles should probably skip this whole series. Watch for the first part of the title (Using the NLTSB [NLT] and NISB [NRSV]) and flee when you see it! Each of my notes will be short, however, so don’t panic.

    There is a greater difference in emphasis in this passage than there was on Romans 14:1-12. In that passage the theological themes emphasized in the notes were only slightly different. In this passage, we see more substantial emphases.

    Miracles: The NLTSB makes particular note of the miraculous aspect and comments that “. . . [a]s with the plagues, naturalistic explanations for this event are beside the point.” The NISB simply narrates the passage and looks at meaning without comment.

    Sources: The NISB notes differing interpretations of the rescue from Egypt according to sources. NLTSB does not mention this aspect. (This information involves reading beyond the limits of the notes on the specified verses, but such reading is necessary to place the notes in context for either edition.)

    Choosing Excurses: In the NLTSB we find an excursus title “A Hardened Heart” which deals with issues raised by the statement that “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart.” The discussion is really quite good, especially for the limited space provided and references a number of texts where one can look at the interplay between God’s sovereignty and human choice or human responsibility. In the NISB, there is also an excursus, but it is titled “Salvation and the Sea” and deals with the relationship between this passage and other ancient near eastern liturgy and symbols.

    I have a certain bias toward the emphasis of the NISB in this case, because I’m very conscious of comparative ancient near eastern materials, and I really like their introduction to the ideas involved. Apart from that bias, however, I would be hard pressed to call one of these better than the other. They choose different things to emphasize, but either choice is a good one and might be what a pastor or teacher would find most useful.

    Using these two study Bibles for a period of time is increasing my respect for both editions. I may have to add them to my reading more often!

  • Boon or Doom: Is That Really the Question?

    An article today on MSNBC.com asks the question:

    Will the Large Hadron Collider save the world, or destroy it?

    That, I think, is a major problem with the view of science held by way too many people. There are too reactions. First, we ask what it will do for us and how soon. Second, we ask whether it’s going to destroy us all.

    If we’re reasonably certain it won’t destroy us, then we don’t want to pay for it unless it produces immediate results.

    But knowledge doesn’t really work that way. Ideas that later turned into practical applications, such as radio and television, not to mention cell phones and various medical procedures (as noted in the MSNBC.com article) took a great deal of time to develop from much of the basic thinking and research that was necessary before they could become a reality. Nobody could have predicted what would happen when electricity was first observed.

    I’m reminded again of the comment by Henry Hazlitt in his little book Economics in One Lesson. He said that almost all errors in economics could be explained by looking at the problem over too short a term or over too narrow a range of people.

    If we are to continue scientific progress, money will have to be spent on things for which there is no immediate use. That’s what discovery is about, after all–discovering things. If they remain to be discovered, we don’t know what they are, and the scientists can’t tell you what they are. The have to find out.

    I expect neither salvation nor destruction tomorrow. I simply expect one very important new step in the gathering of knowledge.

    (Please note that the MSNBC.com article does not get hung up on the initial question. It does a fairly balanced job of discussing the issue. Personally, I had no intention of being balanced. Also, Peter Kirk wrote an interesting post on this today from a slightly different perspective.)

  • Using the NLTSB and NISB: Romans 14:1-12

    I thought it might be useful to look at the information available in each of these study guides for a few passages. Since I regularly read the lectionary passages during my personal devotions, I will compare the information available in each Bible for some selected passages from the current lectionary.

    I’m choosing to compare only the NISB and the NLTSB, because these two Bibles are the my most recent acquisitions, and also because they are the ones that interest me the most out of the numerous ones I consult.

    I chose Romans 14:1-12 today, and my post can be quite short, because there is remarkably little difference. The one surprise for me is that comments in the NLTSB use a few more words (around 600) than the ones in the NISB (a bit over 400). The layout makes the NISB look more dense, but the word count doesn’t bear out appearances.

    In terms of themes, both sets of notes are remarkably similar, even though one is largely from a mainline protestant perspective, and one evangelical.

    There are two divergences, though these are minor, and not contradictory. First, the NISB is at pains to point out that the adjectives “strong” and “weak” refer to faith, not character, which is, of course, part of the point. Second, in discussing the judgment based on days, the NISB says that “perhaps” this might refer to moving the Lord’s day from Saturday to Sunday, while the NLTSB makes the explicit statement “With Christ’s provision of salvation, observance of the Sabbath in its original form is not required of Christians.”

    Otherwise, had I chosen this text on which to base a sermon, I would glean pretty much the same outline points from it. Neither is comprehensive, but that is not expected in a study Bible. Both are solid in what they do say. I confess that in most areas I prefer the NLTse as a translation to the NRSV.

  • NCV Duct Tape Bible from Thomas Nelson

    There is some discussion of this edition of the NCV at Bryon’s Weblog (HT: Better Bibles.)

  • Added Bible Behemoth

    I’m not really too sure how this is going to work, but at a minimum, it will allow me to show links to a few Bible blogs that I haven’t even read. Thus, I have added a widget to my rightmost sidebar showing the last five posts featured on The Bible Behemoth (blog), the brainchild of David Ker of hippopotamus fame.

    Right now I can’t really manage to become a contributor, simply because I’m using my Google Reader account to test something else for my pages, and I would be favoriting a number of posts that would be quite inappropriate for the Behemoth, possibly even giving him (or readers) indigestion. I’m wondering if the Behemoth shouldn’t have some limit on the total number of contributors, but I will let the intrepid David figure out how it should work! He who ropes hippopotami can handle anything!

    In the meantime, however, I’m enjoying seeing what is posted there. Since I have become more systematic about reading I have been posting less; I thought I would be posting more. I hope to provide more useful content and better links in my sidebars as I play around with all these ideas.