Politicians want to reach independents? OK:
This and this are a waste of time. You won’t attract my vote with image ads or arguing about inadvertent statements.
This is a bit better. Puncture the image. It also led me to factcheck.org, which I will be visiting frequently.
Analyzing policy statements and proposals would be better. Though I must admit the economic policy statements are pretty discouraging thus far.
Those who believe in the doctrine of Christian perfection (on which I’m a bit wobbly myself) might consider this:
“He learned,” he saith, to obey God. Here again he shows how great is the gain of sufferings. “And having been made perfect,” he says, “He became the Author of salvation to them that obey Him.” (Cf. supra, pp. 384, 391.) But if He, being the Son, gained obedience from His sufferings, much more shall we. Dost thou see how many things he discourses about obedience, that they might be persuaded to it? For it seems to me that they would not be restrained. “From the things,” he says, “which He suffered He” continually “learned” to obey God. And being “made perfect” through sufferings. This then is perfection, and by this means must we arrive at perfection. For not only was He Himself saved, but became to others also an abundant supply of salvation. For “being made perfect He became the Author of salvation to them that obey Him.”
From: CCEL
I think a few modern evangelicals might regard this as heretical, being contrary to the pure penal substitutionary atonement or forensic justification. But he sure does seem to have a finger on precisely what Hebrews has to say.
[1.] Faith is indeed great and bringeth salvation, and without it, it is not possible ever to be saved. It suffices not however of itself to accomplish this, but there is need of a right conversation also. So that on this account Paul also exhorts those who had already been counted worthy of the mysteries; saying, “Let us labor to enter into that rest.” “Let us labor” (he says), Faith not sufficing, the life also ought to be added thereto, and our earnestness to be great; for truly there is need of much earnestness too, in order to go up into Heaven. For if they who suffered so great distress in the Wilderness, were not counted worthy of [the promised] land, and were not able to attain [that] land, because they murmured and because they committed fornication: how shall we be counted worthy of Heaven, if we live carelessly and indolently? We then have need of much earnestness.
And observe, the punishment does not extend to this only, the not entering in (for he said not, “Let us labor to enter into the rest,” lest we fail of so great blessings), but he added what most of all arouses men. What then is this? “Lest any man fall, after the same example of unbelief.” What means this? It means that we should have our mind, our hope, our expectation, yonder, lest we should fail. For that [otherwise] we shall fail, the example shows, “lest [&c.] after the same,” he says.
From: CCEL
I was planning to write something on this, because I believe this kind of censorship is an egregious violation of human rights, but it appears the man himself can tell his own story just fine. (HT: Pursuing Holiness.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzVJTHIvqw8.
Just so.
I really wasn’t going to blog about my blogroll today, but An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution had such a good post that I wanted to link to it, and at the same time I can check off another blog from my blogroll for this round of linking.
He also links to a post on Through a Glass Darkly (got to love that name!), a fellow member of the Moderate Christian Blogroll. Both of those posts are well worth watching. While I’m at it, I should mention both a disclaimer and a sneaky commercial. My company publishes a set of books on Christian apologetics, the Consider Christianity Series. Having had the experience of editing that set, I would see some points of agreement and disagreement between what these two authors had to say and that series.
That aside, I think both authors make important points. I am only going to add a couple of things. Apologetics by nature tends to operate quite differently from science. In apologetics, we have our beliefs, and then we try to back them up. The question is how we will back them up. That, of course, interacts with what those beliefs are in the first place.
An inflexible belief system will tend to produce apologetics that is questionable, simply because one has to work to stretch the facts to accommodate the belief system. A purely evidentiary apologetics will run into this problem, unless it can alter details of that which it defends, and even then it may be difficult simply due to the nature of reality. We simply can’t know enough to tuck in all the loose ends. On the other end of the spectrum, purely presuppositional apologetics often tends to make too many things into presuppositions, and one ends up with a very well ordered package of beliefs and defenses, but very little connection to the real world. Some presuppositionalists will consider that a good thing!
Between those two extremes, however, are various views that recognize both faith and evidence, and in evidence recognize subjective elements that go into a belief system. For example, I would claim to commune with God pretty much on a daily basis. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think this makes me inerrant, nor does it mean you should believe me more than the next person. I’m not making any claims based on it–it’s just part of my spiritual life, and is something I think can be part of anyone’s spiritual life, should they so desire. Is that evidence? Well, it certainly isn’t objective evidence. I’m not going to tell you where your dog ran away to, or what the stock market will do during the day because of my mediations. There is no special light that gathers around my head. Yet that has a great deal to do with my own belief system, rational or not.
I like works on apologetics that show some struggle with the issues (both posts I reference make good recommendations) without claiming to finally solve all of the problems. That fits with the universe as I experience it, and with God as I experience him. Neither can be tied up neatly and labeled “closed,” and I think neither is likely to go that way. But both invite me to experience them, think about them, argue about them, and look for evidence as to their nature.
It’s more like a theme park ride than it is like a train ride with a fixed destination.
The JPS Tanakh of Isaiah 49:7 reads, in part:
Thus said the LORD,
The Redeemer of Israel, his Holy One,
b-To the despised one,
To the abhorred nations,-b . . .
Note b reads: Meaning of Heb. uncertain. Emendation yields “Whose being is despised / Whose body is detested”; cf. 51.23.
I noticed this first when I read this in Hebrew, and found that I was not able to produce a translation that I found satisfactory. I remained in doubt. So I looked it up in a few translations. Note also that the reading adopted in the JPS text is itself an emendation.
. . . the things that you do believe? I’m not talking here about religious faith, though this could impact some aspects of faith. I’m talking about just about any topic on which you choose to believe one source over another.
I’ve seen a number of cases recently on blogs, in the mainstream media, in church, and in my daily life in which people have expressed very decided opinions that one person is right and another is wrong. In some cases, I believe the people knew where they had gotten their information and had made some judgment as to whether it was right or not. That doesn’t necessarily mean they agree with me. It does mean that their viewpoint was thoughtful. Others simply repeated what they had heard from a source they felt was credible.
But why do we feel certain sources are credible while others are not? Unfortunately, this is frequently not something we think about seriously. We just find ourselves believing what is written in periodicals we like, on blogs we like, or in books written by authors we like, and we haven’t really considered the reasons. I am not certain how one could survey this. The survey questions would be self-defeating. But I suspect that for many of us the choice is made based on whether the source agrees with our own opinions most of the time. That is likely the main, unconscious reason. (If you’re someone who carefully checks sources, this doesn’t apply to you!)
I believe we also tend to believe people who share our religious or political beliefs. We check our opponents out much more carefully than our friends. Finally, we tend to develop feelings based on who we associate with on a regular basis. I have observed this in many political campaigns. People who associated regularly with people who supported a particular candidate or party tended to believe their candidate or party would win despite all other evidence. They would remember polls that favored their candidates and forget those opposed.
Election season is a good time to ask yourself just how reliable your sources are. I’m not trying to tell you what or who to believe. I’m just suggesting that you make that choice conscious. Find the most objective data possible and evaluate who you listen to. Learn a bit more about learning.
It’s a good goal for election season.
I have blogged previously just a little bit about the A Reader’s Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament, and also made some negative comments about the use of interlinears, especially for Greek or Hebrew students.
I recommend this lexicon for use in reading rapidly in order to encounter a large body of text in Biblical Hebrew. It does have a small portion of the problems of an interlinear. It presents you with a gloss that is likely appropriate, according to the authors, for the passage in question. It’s easy to bypass the context in that case, and just accept their gloss as it is. That is something you should avoid.
I used this in doing some reading in Isaiah today myself. It has been a couple of years since I last used it. It is very convenient, because it does not include those words used 50 or more times in the Hebrew Bible, and then lists all other vocabulary items by verse. I found that the selected gloss was a good starting point. I’m not going to be making a habit of it, however, because generally if I find a word that I don’t know I want more information than that before I go on. But I can read text in this fashion if I want to.
I’m spoiled a bit by Logos, because there I can have my keylink hooked up to HALOT, and thus get a much more substantial rundown on any particular word. In addition, I have the invaluable lemma report which allows me to see how that word is used throughout the Hebrew scriptures. But in the absence of such tools, fast reading could be facilitated by use of the Reader’s Lexicon.
Some people question the value of such reading. Here’s why I recommend it as part, not all, of your reading in Biblical languages. There are at least two levels of “knowing” a vocabulary item from a language other than your native one. First, you may know a gloss, or a set of glosses that might be applied based on context. This is what is provided by normal vocabulary memorization, provided you memorize alternate options. You will build that type of vocabulary best by taking time to carefully study each word. The second is when you come to feel the range of a word’s meaning in it’s own language, because you have seen or heard it many times in many contexts, and you can select the range of meaning for the current context almost automatically.
When you deal with translation and exegesis, both are useful. You will only develop the second by reading large quantities of text or hearing large amounts of the language spoken. With a dead language, hearing is difficult, and you must substitute reading. Then when you encounter a word, you will remember having seen it in many contexts. This is one of the major values of rapid reading.
But there
I still have my Bible version selection tool active, and I’ve just added a directory of recent blog entries on the various versions to my Bible version detail pages. This substantially expands the amount of information available on each version page.
PamBG quotes a letter that using some wonderful phraseology with regard to the process of creation, but also related to theodicy. I can’t access the letter itself due to a subscription requirement, but the part Pam quotes is quite good.
I like these two sentences particularly well:
Suppose instead that he made the world make itself.
. . .
Be the incarnation suggests that, in Jesus, God knew by experience, not just observation, what it was to be rejected, and hunted down; . . .
Yes!
