Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • (Yet Another) Methodist Blogs Weekly Roundup

    Allan Bevere has posted the latest Methodist Blogs Weekly Roundup. I wanted to do more than a brief link to thank him for his efforts.

    Do you think of these roundups as the parenthetical part of my title would suggest? I can tell you from having done the Christian Carnival as well as various selections from the Moderate Christian Blogroll that they take some time, thought, and effort.

    Yes, but what good are they? All I can tell you is what they do for me. I have 108 feeds in my bloglines account. Given that about half a dozen of those are blogs to which I contribute and I just want to watch, that means around an even hundred that I’m following. I actually read the headlines for all of those, though I only read a scattering of stories. I often clip posts and then end up deleting them when they get too old. Once I’ve done that, I’m pretty much done!

    The roundups and carnivals introduce me to new blogs, new writers, and new topics. For example, the MBWR this week listed Richard Heyduck’s post Two Big Mistakes and rated it one of the two best in the Methodist blogosphere. I quite agree. I’m going to link to it from the Pacesetters Bible School Newsletter and try to get our membership to discuss the topic a bit.

    I’ve found numerous blogs in this way, and so I thank the folks who make such things possible.

  • The Pain of Reinterpreting Scripture

    In several recent posts I’ve been referring to the relationship between scripture and evolution, and particularly how I moved from young earth creationism toward theistic evolution not because I studied evolution and became convinced, but because I studied Genesis and became convinced it was not narrative history.

    At the same time I’m looking at bit at theodicy, specifically the question of how a God who employs violent means (or at least appears to do so) can also be seen as a good God. This also requires one to look in some perhaps disturbing ways at how we interpret scripture. For example, if I take the Genesis flood to be literal history and also as a direct action of God, then I have a level of violence in God’s behavior towards humans that is much harder to explain, in my view, than the mass extinctions that occurred millions of years ago, or than the ongoing struggle for survival in the natural world.

    Why is it so difficult to take a new look at scripture and to decide to take some things in some way other than as a factual historical account or as a transfer of data?

    In my own experience I would list fear first. This fear is of two types. There is one’s own fear that in the process of looking at scripture in a different way, one may become separated from one’s community and support structure. I remember sitting down in Hebrew class and encountering some of the classical problems in the way we understand scripture. What was around the next corner?

    One’s own fear of losing one’s anchor is bolstered and validated by the fear of one’s family and friends back at home. When I was still in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, I thought this was a feature of smaller, more isolated denominations. Now that I am a member of a United Methodist congregation I have come to realize that this is nearly universal. Even in conservative evangelical churches that are sending their young people to conservative evangelical schools there is a tension between the way they have been raised and what they might learn in seminary.

    The fact that some young people come back from seminary quite thoroughly altered, and not always to the good, simply feeds into this fear. I would suggest that we look at this differently, however. Might it be possible that less young people would lose their moorings in their community, if that community prepared those young people to joyfully undertake a voyage of discovery rather than repeatedly trying to make those moorings more secure?

    Let me illustrate from my programming experience. I recall an early effort written in C, in which I had had a serious bug in a function. I worked on the code but found nothing that I thought should cause the problem. When I tested it again, however, it started to work. There was something in what I had done that had fixed the problem without me knowing it. For some time I was afraid to tinker with that function, because I was afraid that I would break whatever unknown thing I had unknowingly fixed!

    I use words built on “unknown” intentionally. Part of the problem we have here is that preachers and teachers do not talk enough about how interpretation is accomplished. To many young people about to leave for college or seminary, Biblical interpretation is a black box. They have read a number of texts and they know how they are supposed to apply, but they aren’t all that sure why. The good thing about the black box is that it is acceptable to their friends and relatives.

    At seminary, a professor may ask them to take the black box apart, i.e. to make it no longer be a black box. The professor may suggest applying a different black box just to get the students to start asking what’s inside. There are many tricks of the trade for getting students to think.

    I think that there is a fear here on the other side–the fear of pastors that their parishioners won’t sit still to learn what went into interpretation, or that they will choose to get rid of a pastor so irreverent as to tinker with the nuts and bolts of Biblical interpretation. That’s why so frequently even in pulpits held by preachers who are skilled in historical-critical methodologies, we never hear the method, even if it has been applied in preparing the sermon. The results, such as sources, dating of documents, forms, and so forth are presented as the products of another black box.

    These black box results are often presented with great confidence, and become, to the parishioners, the true meaning of scripture. When someone else gets different results form the black box, for example dates for Mark that vary from 45 – 85 CE, that’s disturbing, and people begin to wonder if seminary ruined the pastor.

    It’s not that easy to solve, because it would require us to spend a little more time dealing with the nuts and bolts and a bit less time merely exhorting congregations to live more precisely according to the interpretations they have always held.

    But there would be a major benefit. When you know what goes into creating a new interpretation, you also know how to argue against something that doesn’t make sense, and so instead of a journey into the unknown without a map, you can explore with reasonable confidence, always knowing that there are some landmarks, and if the landmarks run out, you know how to survey the territory.

  • The God Exception – Excursus on Theodicy

    Theodicy is a relatively interesting thing, and I’m really going to discuss a popular aberration, so those of you who have real backgrounds in theology can tune out, or critique me for oversimplifications.

    One basic way of stating the entry point for Christian theodicy is that there are three key things we believe about God and the world: 1) He is good, 2) He is all-powerful, and 3) Evil exists. These three cannot be reconciled as normally defined, and thus much ink is spilled in trying to work with them. No, that’s not the whole of theodicy, nor does it always have to be stated that way, or derived from this irreconcilable (or more commonly inconsistent) triad.

    In popular discussions the details are often bypassed, and we get a simple argument against the existence of God because there is evil. “I don’t believe in God because so many people suffer,” someone announces. Believers often fail to look behind the statement in response.

    The argument from suffering really doesn’t go to the existence of God as such, but rather to the nature of God. I recall having this discussion in a philosophy of religion class in which I said simply, “What if God is evil?” I think now I would use “indifferent” as an example, but I used evil. “That would be too horrible to contemplate,” said one of my fellow students. But the fact is that “too horrible to contemplate” does nothing to establish that something isn’t true.

    This particular form of theodicy has to occur within a framework of religious views. The triad is only inconsistent because Christians believe that God is both good and omniscient. One possible way to reconcile these is by simply saying that God isn’t one thing or the other. For example, a dualist has no difficulty reconciling these points. God is good, but he isn’t all-powerful. He’s in conflict with an evil power.

    I encountered this the other day in discussing the book of Joshua. How can I question the command to kill all the Canaanites if it is a command given by God? It’s a good question. Is there some standard of good that is above God, and if so who made it? If God is the creator of everything, doesn’t he get to say what’s good? There’s a whole new can of worms! But the more direct question here is how do you reconcile God’s action here as recorded in scripture with God’s actions or statements elsewhere in scripture?

    That’s why it’s so important not to interpret scripture based on any narrow selection of passages. For example, what do I learn about God by reading Ezekiel 18:32 (for I have no pleasure in the death of anyone) and then comparing it to God’s action in the flood when God is sorry he made humanity and decided to wipe them all out except for eight people and start over. You may say that they were all wicked and deserved to die, which is indeed what the story says, but the action still seems extreme.

    If we turn then to Job, whose children are killed along with many of his servants, because God allows the adversary (the satan, but don’t read a Christian concept of “Devil” here) suggests that Job can’t take it. They may not be 100% innocent, yet the only reason given in the story for them to die is to help God prove a point.

    I’m not going to dig into these stories much right now, but this leads me to a point I feel I can discuss with more confidence than a philosophical question. How does one reconcile Biblical statements, stories, and their implications in such a way as to present God as just and good? Can this be done? When I’ve looked at a few incidents, I’m going to return to the question of whether evolution actually presents a more serious issue for theodicy than do many standard Biblical stories.

    In conclusion let me give one warning. As Christians we need to beware of answering one objection to God’s justice by making God look bad in another way. For example, if one suggests that God was simply carrying out justice in the flood because everyone other than Noah and his family was irredeemably evil, we should also ask why God didn’t intervene in a more successful way earlier. When dealing with a classroom, for example, I found that when one intervenes early, one will have greater success, whereas if one ignores a problem long enough, one loses control of the classroom. Is it not possible here to answer God’s justice problem by portraying God as inept?

  • Christian Carnival CCXXXII

    . . . has been posted.  This time my contribution was from my wife’s devotional list, but I’m still linking the carnival from here.

  • Perhaps it’s Time to Give Up

    . . . when you have to cite the Flintstones.

  • No Meaning without Interpretation

    You know, that title is so much worse than the one I’m going to link to — The Bible doesn’t say.  That makes the point.

    I frequently say that one can only call something “Biblical” when speaking from within a particular interpretive framework, which completely ruins the whole “Biblical” thing.  In my experience the use of “the Bible says” is generally manipulative.  It’s intended by the speaker to prevent you from objecting, because while you might argue with him or her, you won’t argue with the Bible, which inevitably means arguing with God.

    Doug says in the referenced post:

    There are two essential things that are meant by “the Bible says”. The first is, “I have read in my Bible the words X.” The second is, “My (or my tradition’s) theological interpretation of the overall tenor and thrust of the Bible is Y”. What happens quite often is that the two are combined, so that X is a shorthand statement for Y, and it seems to me that this then disguises the fact that Y is what is really happening.

    Now please go read the whole article.  I’m quoting this paragraph because I want to comment on one line.  It is this second line which is so often manipulative as I hear it used in church congregations.  The person speaking is generally reflecting a theological interpretation from within a tradition, but either doesn’t want to acknowledge it, doesn’t even recognize it in the first place, or adds the proviso “and my tradition is the only one that has it right!”

    That’s the problem on the flip side of the sola scriptura claim as often used in American protestantism.  It doesn’t just express a desire to go to the source, it expresses to others the notion that one has gone to the source.  Who dares to question?

  • Chuck Colson says Scripture Commands Limited Government

    Chuck Colson writes a guest column at the Christian Post, in which he argues in favor of limited government from the Bible.

    In it, he tells the story of a friend of his who bought some property to create a children’s camp for inner city children, surely a most desirable goal. Over the next two years, his friend was harassed by various regulators and bureaucrats with overlapping and incomprehensible regulations. The delay, he says, cost millions of dollars and considerable delay.

    Now assuming all the facts of this story are correct, I’m certainly in sympathy here. One of the major problems of modern government is the complexity of regulations as we solve problems with one set of standards by creating another, and create new federal jurisdiction, for example, where we see failure at the local government level.

    I would like to see the government forced to simplify things and to move out of numerous areas of regulation. In other words, I like limited government.

    But Colson finds a way to make his view the Christian view by claiming to take it from scripture. I wanted to say that he is prooftexting, because that is the best I can do imagining just how he might derive such a thing from scripture. In actuality, he doesn’t even prooftext–he just asserts conclusions about what is scriptural. While I can imagine where he might get these conclusions, I cannot be certain of the texts.

    He says:

    There is a profound Christian question at stake here. Scripture says government has just two objectives: to preserve order and do justice. How did we get from that simple function to a government that requires 18 different permits before you can build a new bathroom—or expand a campground for needy kids?

    I can imagine a hermeneutic that would derive part of that from Romans 13:1-4, but it wouldn’t do too well. There are numerous passages about justice in the prophets, but I don’t see the part about limiting the function of government.

    In fact, in Israel, where the prophets worked, there were regulations about what to eat (Leviticus 11), how to worship, even how to handle the blood of an animal you kill while hunting (Leviticus 17:13-14). Israel was, in addition, a monarchy, with only relatively informal constraints on the power of the king from prophets and sometimes people (the details are debatable). People’s sex lives were also intensely regulated (Leviticus 18), something that surely goes beyond the bounds of limited government. Oh, but I forgot. Modern conservatives think it’s a disaster if the government interferes with our economic freedom, but it’s open season on personal moral issues like sexuality.

    So in the context of such a government, just how much could the prophets be calling for “limited” government? It simply isn’t there. There are certainly discussions that condemn rulers for immoral acts, but still there is no limitation that says, for example, that the king can’t take in taxes and assign them to whatever he wants within the limits of moral behavior.

    But what about the New Testament? In Romans 13, for example, which I cited (and I confess I don’t know which scriptures in particular Colson is bending to his will on this matter), Paul is urging subjection to the Roman government, which was certainly not terribly limited as to its activities in the provinces, and only slightly so in Rome proper. Paul is calling for Christians to be subject to a government that was quite susceptible to not just overstepping it’s bounds a bit, but to rampant evil and destruction.

    So while I’d like to support the idea of limited government, and indeed might do so even more consistently than does Colson by including limitations on the government invasion of private sexual activity, I don’t see that the Bible explicitly espouses it, and in the only government directly commissioned by God the government was not terribly limited.

    Let me give one more example for those who doubt this. Compare the need to get permission to deal with wetlands, however small. That’s an issue that comes up regularly here in the Florida panhandle, and I think regulators are sometimes over the top and lack common sense on the issue. Landowners, however, also frequently lack good sense. But compare that to the sabbatical year and the year of Jubilee, when one would be ordered not to plant and harvest for an entire year. How does that relate to absolute control of one’s property?

    I absolutely do not want to argue that the Bible supports me rather than Chuck Colson. In fact, I don’t think the Bible provides us with any blueprint for a secular or religiously diverse state at all. To the extent that one can support limited government and civil liberties from scripture, it would be via the route of supporting the dignity of each person and their importance before God, and not by means of explicitly stating how government should function.

    I truly object to one major thing in this entire article, and that is contained in this next paragraph:

    When we go to the polls in November, we should beware of any candidate promising that government will solve all our problems. We need to work to keep government doing its right roles and no more, because if we do not, it will eventually cease to function at all.

    This paragraph follows immediately the paragraph stating that the Bible states the limited function of government which I quoted previously. Now we have it. If we vote for “that other guy,” you know, the one who wants to use government programs to solve problems, we are not behaving properly as Christians.

    Which is, bluntly, hogwash. As Christians we know how we should be motivated. I can argue with Chuck Colson or any other conservative about the means by which they would accomplish Christian goals, but unless I want to become a judge in the sense intended in Matthew 7:1, I should stick with criticizing the means and not try to pretend that my particular views on means or my particular candidate is the right one for all Christians to support, nor should I question the motives they claim.

  • Getting to the Biblical Side of Evolutionary Creationism?

    Steve Martin lists ten books that have been written since 2003 (and pretty much none before that) on evolutionary creationism, starting with my favorite, Richard Colling’s Random Designer.

    The good news is that there are so many new books looking at evangelical Christianity and evolutionary theory from a positive perspective. The bad news is that it is all coming from scientists.

    This comes as slightly surprising news to me since my own journey from young earth creationism to theistic evolution started from a change in my understanding of the Biblical materials, a change that resulted from things I learned form conservative professors in Biblical studies classes. They may not have intended the result, but it happened.

    But on thinking about it further, I’m wondering if the problem if the problem is not in how much about Biblical studies actually gets taught in churches, to lay members. Many of those involved in Biblical studies have no problem with evolutionary theory, but it is simply not their major area of interest. They don’t feel like discussing it because they don’t have time.

    I do it because I’m a popularizer and am not working professionally in the same field for which I trained. But one runs the risk, or more likely the certainty, of saying very embarrassing things from time to time, because one lacks training in many of the fields. I feel very uncomfortable when I write a post that discusses the science in any sort of detailed way, because it is very hard for me to do.

    Teaching Biblical studies broadly in the pew would be a very difficult thing, especially in American protestantism because we don’t exactly do Biblical studies in the same way as we profess. There is a large amount of tradition and experience in the way we apply the Biblical text, and one doesn’t get truly consistent results. What I mean by that is that the road to doctrine is not quite as direct as many of us would like to believe. It’s difficult to get people to take Genesis 1-2 figuratively if you want them to take Leviticus 18 literally, for example, if for no other reason than that the categories “literal” and “figurative” don’t directly apply in any case. They are dangerous oversimplifications.

    Of course, not being evangelical, I have my own perspective on this, but I would say that any hermeneutic that allows Genesis 1-2 to work with evolution will also allow a certain freedom with reading the rest of scripture. I think this is a good thing, and that the same freedom is necessary, if for no other purpose than to read Leviticus 18 in a more humane manner, or to realize that while genocide may have been a common goal in the ancient near east, fortunately not very efficiently accomplished, it is not an eternal principle.

    On the more liberal side, I would commend the work of John Haught in relating theology to evolution, but for evangelicals, I agree there will be more work.

  • When Neutrality isn’t Neutral

    The news of Chris Comer’s suit against the Texas Education Administration claiming she was forced out illegally should come as no surprise to anyone. The reasoning behind the dismissal clearly silly, and the explanations did not ring true as the real reasons she was asked to resign.

    But as a moderate who likes to see not just both sides of an issue, but all the various gradients between, I want to comment on the idea of neutrality as it applies in this case. While I like moderation, there are some very definite cases where the “right” position will be at one end of the spectrum or another.

    The essence of moderation as I use the term is to identify the full width of the spectrum of possibilities, and then intelligently select the appropriate point. I see at least two types of spectra one might find in such a case. One is a spectrum that balances several valid claims, with varying priority given to these various options. The other is a spectrum that may lead from valid to invalid, with the only necessary choice being to identify the valid end.

    I see health care policy as an example of the first kind of spectrum. There are a wide variety of ideas and you can even divide them up into various spectra, considering costs, who are the providers, who are the payers, and so forth. You have valid goals (providing health care to those who need it, making sure that finances are adequate, not forcing one person to pay for the foolishness of another) that need to be balanced, and you might find many positions for which good arguments can be made, but you have to decide on one policy. I think this is a good place to exercise moderate thinking.

    For a possibly non-controversial example of the other kind of spectrum, I would suggest an aircraft wing. Now I realize that more than one shape can produce lift, but if one assumes a particular general design there are going to be very few workable shapes, and there will be one that will provide the best lift in combination with other factors in that set of circumstances. You can create a spectrum from a large rock to a carefully shaped wing, but you wouldn’t want to be “moderate” or “neutral” about your choice.

    And therein lies the problem for the “neutrality” of the Texas Education Administration in this case. The issue is not between multiple equally scientific (tested, validated, published, etc.) ideas that might be taught. The conflict is between teaching mainstream science, the consensus scientific view of those who work in the appropriate fields, as opposed to picking up a variety of offbeat ideas.

    Now some will say this is not the case. It is a conflict between two equally scientific views, and they are only asking for this one view to be given equal time.

    But on what basis should a view that claims to be scientific be given a place in the public school science classroom? Should it be true if one guy with a PhD claims it is true? In that case we’d have a rather wild assortment of things to teach. There’s a guy who teaches geocentrism who has a PhD. Should it be anyone who has written a book on the topic? That wouldn’t exclude anything.

    How about a certain level of acceptance in the scientific community, specifically by those scientists working in the field in question? Without conducting scientific surveys, that is actually how we work, and if we apply to this topic (ID/intelligent desing vs. evolutionary theory) we will reject ID in the high school classroom and teach evolutionary theory.

    The “neutrality” that Chris Comer was expected to maintain was between teaching science and not teaching science, and all things considered, I would have to commend her for making the choice to advocate teaching science. Anything else seems horribly irresponsible.

    Which leaves one to wonder about the rest of the Texas Education Administration. One must assume that those in authority want those who coordinate science education in Texas to teach something else. That should make Texas residents–and Americans in general–very concerned.

  • NLT has a Blog

    Wayne Leman at Better Bibles Blog notes that there is now a blog for the NLT.

    I note with pleasure that the first post deals in a very balanced way with the widespread belief that dynamic equivalence translation is the same thing as paraphrasing.  (One should note that in this case “paraphrasing” is not used in its technical meaning, but rather for an excessively loose rendering that goes beyond the limits of translation.)

    Various approaches to translation convey various things well, and often other things poorly.  The CEV is easy to read, but doesn’t convey the literary style of the original.  A good example is the elimination of parallelism from Hebrew poetry in favor of clearly representing the meaning to English readers.

    The NLT is an important translation because it provides evangelical Christians with a clear, dynamic equivalence translation.  I personally prefer the REB, but for numerous reasons the NLT will be more acceptable to conservative, American churchgoers.  For the same reasons, however, it is more subject to attack.  Tim Challies, in the post to which Keith Williams is responding, attacks the CEV, the NLT, and The Message, all of which have a reach into evangelical circles.

    So I think it is very important that the NLT be properly defended, and I welcome this new blog.

    PS:  While I commend Keith Williams for his very balanced post in an irenic tone, I frankly think that Tim Challies’ post is simply riddled with misunderstandings of translation in general and many specific points.  But I’ve probably responded to enough such posts recently.