Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Christian Carnival #189

    . . . Deitrich Bonhoeffer edition has been posted.

  • 9-11 Links

    I want to link to a few posts from other blogs, both from the Moderate Christian Blogroll and from other blogs to which I subscribe.

    Crossinator remembers his day on 9/11/01.
    Through a Glass Darkly gives us a relevant quote from the Gettysburg address.
    Tom Sims reminds us of both positive and negative things that have come from that day.
    Levellers is observing a day of blogging silence.

    And the following don’t have anything to do with 9/11, but I wanted to mention them anyhow:

    Bruce Alderman is not going to be raptured and Christine is giving us more nifty poetry with a great picture.

    I wrote the devotional for my wife’s devotional list, and though I didn’t plan a 9/11 theme, one jumped out, grabbed me, and made me insert it. It is here.

  • Learning a Little Greek

    One of the major problems with seminary study of Biblical languages is that it is often short term and shallow. The seminarian, required to take a certain number of hours or just get by a particular test focuses all his efforts to getting past the hurdle. Precious few such students ever gain a real facility with the language. Some will have an exaggerated view of their own skills based on that study, but most will abandon what they have learned. Others will pop Greek and Hebrew words on their congregations, normally gleaned from commentaries and various articles of, often of questionable validity.

    In general, when you hear a pastor say “what the Greek really says,” prepare to be deceived. Not intentionally–the preacher really believes he knows, but actually he is probably missing the point. I have heard sermons in which the Greek word was completely wrong because the preacher simply provided the wrong Greek word. At other times, the error was one of context, when the preacher used a definition for a Greek word that was valid in some context, but not in the particular context in question. In one case, I heard a speaker recite the “real Greek” of a verse in four words. The only problem was that the verse was not, as he claimed, four words long in Greek, and not one of the four Greek words he used were actually in the verse he cited. I could just barely tell I was looking at the right verse based on the interpretation.

    I have a book in my library from the infamous Dr. Floyd Jones of KJV-Only fame. In the front of the book, on a page titled “TO THE READER – THE SOUNDING OF AN ALARM,” he cites a number of Hebrew words from Isaiah 14:12, in which he is giving the alarm regarding mistranslation. He should, however, be giving the alarm about his disastrous ignorance of Hebrew. I count no less than 8 errors in Hebrew in the course of a single paragraph. Now the KJV-Only position is so discredited that one might wonder why I bother to mention it. The reason is that most of the errors noted in that paragraph appear to result from the use of an interlinear in order to find the Hebrew form that is cited. Transliterations don’t match the Hebrew, though the translations match in the way an interlinear would.

    In both KJV-Only debates and discussion with lay “experts,” I have also encountered work done from Strong’s concordance. While it is more difficult to work with Strong’s than with an interlinear, it is even easier to be in error. Strong’s definitions are often out of date, and in fact they are generally not definitions at all but rather lists of glosses. I once was presented with a possible translation of a Hebrew text in which not a single word was translated correctly. On careful examination, however, every single word was translated by some word from Strong’s, and what was more, the resulting sentence was comprehensible in English though a bit stilted. It simply had no relationship to the meaning of the source text in Hebrew.

    We’ve probably heard that “to err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer.” Well, enter Logos Bible software, now with reverse interlinears (HT: Metacatholic–I recommend you read his entire post). Now don’t get me wrong. I own Logos with all the Biblical languages extensions I can get my hands on. But many wonderful tools have potentially bad uses.

    When a student uses tools that allow him to look up words more quickly so as to cover more ground in reading that’s a good thing. One way to actually gain facility in a foreign language is to work with it. Many students plow through one or two verses at a time and never go beyond that. They become specialists in individual leaves on individual trees, but they have no sense of how Greek or Hebrew reads or feels. Tools such as reader’s lexicons–works that give glosses by verses–can be very useful for rapid reading. But they don’t teach you Greek. Neither do interlinears, and neither do reverse interlinears. (Everything I say here about Greek is equally applicable to Hebrew.

    I have to discipline myself to spend time reading without the tools to prevent dependence. Especially in reading the Septuagint, I like to go into Logos so that I can quickly look up some of the words that I don’t know from my New Testament reading. But to really dig in and learn the material, I need to read without those tools from time to time. Now I have taken an different approach from the normal seminarian (whoever that may be!). I started in Biblical languages as an undergraduate. I had several years of Greek before I got to Seminary. I had three years of Hebrew. I actually read the passages I use when I prepare sermons first from the original languages. I use all the Logos tools constantly–except for anything resembling an interlinear. That is something I won’t do to myself.

    The writer of the post on the Logos blog bemoans the passing of original languages requirements in seminaries. But I would suggest that it will not be an improvement if people who are not competent with Biblical languages start substituting their judgment for that of the trained translation committees and reviewers that produce our modern English versions.

    For more on this topic see my series Word Study Dangers and my post on my Threads blog What the Greek Really Says.

  • Just When I Think I’ve Seen Everything …

    … I find this: Marry Our Daughter. Hat tip: Hit the Back Button to Move Forward. Will someone please tell me that this is just a sick joke? I’m thinking that it would be considered illegal despite the claims on the web site.

    Update: I should have looked on snopes, as pointed out by commenter Black Knight:

    Sick joke:

    http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/marryourdaughter.asp

    I’ll leave the egg on my face for all to see and learn from.

  • Prison Book Censorship

    This program, as reported in the New York Times concerns me, not so much because I think the [tag]prison[/tag] officials are biased in their selections, but because the approach appears to be overkill–a massive and sweeping solution to a very small problem.

    I would hope the prison officials would reconsider and go instead to a list of books that are forbidden because they clearly incite violence. Limiting the list to 150 books on a religion category is ridiculous.

    HT: Crossinator

  • Of Necessity and Suffering

    I’ve appreciated much of what John Piper has said about the prosperity gospel. Prosperity theology strikes me as not just false (Biblically and experientially), but particularly dangerous because it either drives one from faith and its actual benefits, or creates a very shallow Christian at best, ready to be driven away at the first difficulty. “Come unto me, all you who want to get rich,” just doesn’t sound much like Jesus to me.

    Via Adrian Warnock’s blog ( PIPER FRIDAY – Suffering is Essential to Christians), I found this set of notes from a talk by John Piper.

    I’m going to use the same quote Adrian did:

    Let me underline one of the statements I’ve already made: Suffering is an essential part of your Christian existence. I choose the word essential very carefully. Paul said to new believers in Acts 14:22, “Through many tribulations we will enter the kingdom of heaven.” This is Christianity 101. Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 3:2-3 that we Christians are destined for suffering. This is your destiny—suffering. Think it not strange when the fiery ordeal comes upon you. And 2 Timothy 3:12: All who desire to live a godly life will be persecuted. And Romans 8:16: We are fellow heirs if we suffer with him. There is one God-appointed path to glorification—suffering. If you are making it your life ambition to avoid suffering, you will perish and suffer forever. And all this Pauline talk is based on Jesus’ talk.

    I am not in disagreement with this statement, but I would take a slightly different angle on the issue. Suffering is an essential part of the way that the universe is put together. The difference in suffering for a Christian is one of perspective, and not one either of suffering exclusively. I’m not in disagreement with Piper here. One commenter at Adrian’s blog seemed to think Piper was indicating that only Christians suffer, which would be a foolish thing to say, not to mention demonstrably false.

    There’s also a reverse link that I have heard frequently, the idea that suffering or receiving persecution indicates that one is right. I hear this frequently about great leaders of the past. If they hadn’t been right, why would they have been so persecuted? This sentiment reflects an awe-inspiring ignorance of history, in which people on all sides of various controversies have suffered persecutions. The trinitarians, who won, were persecuted until they did win. The Arians, however, also suffered for Christ. Gnostics suffered as well. In the reformation, Catholics and all varieties of protestants were persecuted at various times for their beliefs. Persecution is an indication of persistence on the one hand, and a severely overdone desire for control on the other, but it doesn’t tell you whether someone is right.

    Back in March, I wrote about Bill Dembski’s article on theodicy, in which he argues that though evil occurred later in humanity, that evil (the fall) was nonetheless the logical cause of death and suffering. (Note that the article was revised on March 15, 2007, and the date of that post was March 4, 2007. I have not reviewed the article since that revision.) Though I have often written negatively about Dr. Dembski’s work, I find this particular article intriguing and challenging.

    I would suggest, however, that in order for their to be free will there must be options with consequences. Those consequences must offer the full range of results of the choices. Further, if there is both free will and interaction with other creatures, not all consequences of any one creature’s choices will fall on that creature alone. To take a simple example, if I fail to pay my power bill, I’m not the only one who has to sit in the dark. My wife shares that problem with me. If one person takes an incomplete course of an antibiotic, and as a result helps release a resistant strain, the consequences fall on many, not just one.

    One can easily imagine a universe in which there is no suffering, or no negative consequences, but such a universe would simply be a machine. I think it’s difficult if not impossible to demonstrate that the universe is not a machine, though most of us persist in the belief that somehow it is not and that our choices matter.

    Which leads me to a brief excursus on free will. I have heard many folks say there is no free will only to discover that what they mean is that our will is not completely free, i.e. that there are options closed to me. What I am speaking about here is any departure from the purest determinism. If the universe is not perfectly deterministic, and more specifically if my actions are not 100% determined by knowable causes, then I would call that free will. I would imagine a continuum, from pure determinism through absolute freedom. On the one hand, there would be no responsibility, because there would be no I with an input into my decisions. On the other hand, there would be no order against which to observe freedom in action. I’m calling anywhere on the intervening continuum free will. My feeling is that the reality is much, much closer to determinism than to complete freedom.

    I would note with some humor that every time I discuss this I seem to get someone who will tell me that quantum theory demonstrates determinism, and someone else to tell me that it demonstrates that there is some indeterminacy. I don’t know enough about it to argue with either one, though I lean to some level of indeterminacy.

    In any case, let me get back to my point. Suffering exists in the world, and it is a necessity because there is freedom. While I do not understand the physics, I can affirm that the Biblical writers believed in some degree of human freedom and responsibility. The Bible also affirms that God’s servants, even God’s very good servants, suffer. Job is called righteous, and he suffered. Jesus, according to Christian theology, made all the right choices in his life, and he suffered. The question is not whether some form of hardship will come, but rather what will come of the hardship.

    And let me make a little point here. Suffering is hard to measure, and it is probably better not to even try. When our son was suffering from cancer, one of our friends complained to my wife about a problem she had, and then was embarrassed. “How could I complain to you about my tiny problem when you are facing such a big one?” she asked. Well, just what a particular problem does to you isn’t that easily measurable. Even the moment in a situation that is hardest to take differs. I recall my lowest point being when I spoke to the doctor and heard the word that cancer had spread and was not treatable. My wife was overseas leading a mission trip, and I knew it would take hours at best to contact her. I’ve never felt anything like that pain and isolation, even when he died. (It’s coming up on the anniversary of that, September 22, so it’s kind of running through my mind again.)

    My wife Jody has just written a book about grief (which also is making me remember), based on what she learned in 12 years as a hospice nurse and our own experience. In it she said:

    I believe that each loss is personal and the degree of grief or pain is personal and cannot be compared!

    (OK, here’s the shameless advertising plug. The book is Grief: Finding the Candle of Light and should be shipping September 21. She has also written about this on her blog here.)

    The question is not one of quantity or whether or not you will suffer. Suffering is an essential. The question is what you are going to do with it. One of the things both my wife and I have been able to do is to listen with sympathy to people who are undergoing loss, and occasionally even to talk to them. Many people were encouraged by the way that James faced death. That is a good thing that happened. I know a number of people who started to wear “Live Strong” bracelets because of what they saw in James’ life and the way he faced death. More importantly, they determined to “live strong” themselves.

    Those are good things. Now comes the odd question. Did God kill James in order to accomplish those good things? I’ve found that there are some Christians who seem to need to think of it like that in order to deal with what happened. Somehow it’s easier for them to handle if God is doing everything. For others, the thought that God did it is so repugnant that they will deny it with all their force, or alternatively abandon faith because they can’t deny it, and feel certain that God did it.

    There is a sense in which God does everything. He is that First Cause (logically, not temporally) that brought everything into being. If it were not for God there would be no cells, no DNA to have copying errors, and thus no cancer. At the same time, all of those things are results of that basic law of cause and effect without which freedom would have no meaning. Thus as I see it God didn’t give James cancer; James got cancer in God’s world.

    I have been asked how I kept my faith through this struggle. I would say two things about that.

    First, I never thought that my faith would make me exempt from the troubles that are in the world. In other words, my theological thinking about suffering was refined, but not essentially changed by this experience. This is a major reason I oppose prosperity theology. One’s faith is most needed when things are not going so well. Discipline is needed when they are going well.

    Second, however, it was my faith that helped me work my way through it. To ask me why I didn’t abandon my faith in the midst of this difficulty is to ask a man in danger of drowning in heavy seas why he doesn’t let go of the life preserver. He’s in heavy seas, after all! But anyone in that situation would say, “That’s precisely why I’m clinging to this life preserver.”

    Faith will be tested. How and when will vary. You may find it impossible to compare your suffering to someone else’s. The question is whether you will grow from it, or get destroyed by it.

    PS: For more information, see my three essays titled The Hand of God, part 1, part 2, and part 3. These three essays are edited and incorporated in my book Not Ashamed of the Gospel: Confessions of a Liberal Charismatic.

  • Great ID Cartoon

    It’s at Faith and Theology, with hat tip to Metacatholic. Enjoy!

    Also, I’ve added Metacatholic to my blogroll, and my RSS subscriptions. I’ll probably be linking there more in the weeks to come.

  • Defining Explicit Teaching

    Wayne Leman has published the first part of his report on the survey he has been taking on Biblical teachings about headship. While this was not a scientific poll it did point to some interesting things. I’d suggest reading it with a primary focus on what people understand as an “explicit teaching” of scripture. What does that phrase mean?

    It appears to me that people use the phrase without any concrete meaning, but that’s just my general, unscientific observation!

  • Arecibo Observatory

    MSNBC reports that funding may be cut off for the Arecibo Observatory.

    But among astronomers, Arecibo is an icon of hard science. Its instruments have netted a decades-long string of discoveries about the structure and evolution of the universe. Its high-powered radar has mapped in exquisite detail the surfaces and interiors of neighboring planets.

    . . . and later another interesting wrinkle:

    One is that Arecibo is home to what is widely regarded as the world’s foremost upper atmosphere and “space weather” research center. Funded at about $2 million by a separate NSF division, the center studies the impacts of solar flares on satellite and cellphone communication; evaluates climate change; and has developed methods for cleaning up the atmosphere after a nuclear attack.

    That one would have to close as well.

    I would think that this would rank high on the list of scientific projects that should be funded, what with its uses in weather studies as well as in studies of near objects in the solar system. Personally, I prefer that most scientific research be privately funded, and I welcome the increasing private participation in space research, but we are funding some projects, and this one seems like a good one with long term impact. Theoretical research may not be sexy for the politicians, but it is critical for the long term progress of science.

    It would be a good idea to start distinguishing between investment in the future and simple expenditure of money.

  • Christian Politics

    I appreciated this post from Monastic Mumblings. (HT: The Moderate Christian Blogroll [RSS])

    I would like two add just a couple of notes. First, I think we begin to depend on politics when we cease to depend on the gospel. If we truly believe that Jesus can change lives, then we also must believe that we have a better weapon to use fighting against evil than the law.

    Second, I think it’s dangerous when we place our focus on being right about information, rather than on living right and on being in right relationship. Do I mean righteousness by works? No. That is simply another form of being right about things. Our right relationship with God should not make us feel better than other people. We simply have received more grace.

    Finally, while the article I referenced is largely about the religious right, I think we must be careful never to make a political stance the equivalent of being Christian. There are activities we can definitely point to as un-Christlike, but we should not make a political philosophy–a strategy for living in this world–our criteria for one’s place in the next. That applies not just to [tag]right wing[/tag] politics (which I opposed), but to [tag]moderates[/tag] (with which I identify) and to [tag]liberals[/tag] (who make me more comfortable than the right wingers). None is a necessary aspect of faith, and none are excluded from the label “brother or sister” based on their view.