Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Selling Christianity

    Laura has an excellent post on this. She links back to an earlier post I wrote, but that’s not why I’m calling it excellent. She also makes a number of good points, and links to a number of good posts.

    Some Christians make the assumption that if you’re not “in your face” about your faith, you’re not serious about your faith. After all, how can you be quiet when people are going to hell? That’s one reason a number of people complain when I call myself a moderate Christian. How can one be moderate about Christianity? You’ve got to be on fire!

    But regarding your faith as important does not mean you need to embrace ineffective or unethical methods of witnessing. Under unethical I would include any means of witnessing that doesn’t recognize the person to whom you witness as a child of God, endowed with the ability to make his or her own choices. Thus a Christian witness should try to look at God’s children the way God does, and God not only cares about us, but respects our choices.

    Any approach to witnessing that drives people away is ineffective. I recall one teacher saying once that we should make sure that when we are done conversing with someone that it will be easier, not harder, for the next Christian to talk to that person. Sometimes that will mean that I have to shut up completely, because anything I say will make things worse.

    The most important thing to remember, I think, is that God is responsible for conversions. You are not. I am not. God is responsible for heaven and hell. You and I don’t get to make those calls. God is also sovereign, and he doesn’t need our help running the universe. What does that leave us? Well, we simply are called to give witness.

    There’s always the “gospel offends” excuse. Now I do believe that the gospel offends. Grace is unfair. God’s grace is going to let people into heaven that I don’t really like all that much. But much of the actual offense people have against Christians is not due to the gospel. Often it is something precisely the opposite of God’s grace that offends them. When Christians are unforgiving and judgmental, when they arrogate to themselves God’s prerogatives of judgment, when they treat non-Christians with disrespect, those people are offended. Even though Christians have done the offending, the gospel was not at issue.

    There are two elements to a Christian witness. First is a Christian life. Not a perfect life, mind you, but a life aimed at discipleship. Second is the confession. The reason I put the confession second is that a transformed life will draw questions. The confession comes in answer.

  • Biblical Studies Carnival XX Posted

    . . . at Claude Mariottini – Old Testament Professor. I’m in there, for this post on the Nebo-Sarsekim Tablet.

    PS: I haven’t been blogging regularly here for about the last week. I have been extraordinarily busy. I have written a number of posts elsewhere, and I’ll kind of do a roundup and then get on with some new stuff later today.

  • Notes on Mark 12:13-17

    These notes accompany my podcast Caesar’s Stuff.

    Translation and Notes

    It’s important in reading any of these challenge stories to consider the challengers, the situation in which Jesus finds himself, and the goals he is trying to accomplish. For example, here he needs to respond to the questioners in such a way as to keep from taking the focus off of the kingdom. If he starts talking about the legality of the Roman tax, the topic will become temporal rule, and people will no longer be interested in talking about the type of people they are to become.

    13Some Pharisees and Herodians were sent to trap him with a controversial issue.

    This was not a usual alliance, but it was an alliance of two groups who would want Jesus to fail. His agenda of compassion as the guiding principle of holiness would challenge either of their agendas. For this particular mixed group it would be likely that no matter what Jesus said somebody would be happy and many people would be angry, and for them that would be a good thing.

    14When they got there they said to him, “Teacher, we know that you are honest, and you don’t concern yourself with what others think, because you don’t look at a person’s face, but you sincerely teach God’s way of life. Is it proper to pay taxes to Caesar or not? Should we pay them or not?”

    Flattery is a dangerous thing. If they had really believed that Jesus didn’t care what other people thought, however, they might have realized that flattery would not work for him. I have seen this type of flattery used on a visiting speaker. In his introduction he may be praised for certain views that the leadership certainly hope he has, and which they desire him to emphasize. Those who speak the truth must have the discernment to recognize flattery.

    15But knowing their trickery he said to them, “Why do you test me? Bring me a denarius so I can look at it.” 16So they brought him one. Then he asked them, “Whose image and inscription is this?” They said, “Caesar’s.”

    Caesar made the money, and Caesar gave the money value. Even coinage gains value through the authority of the person who mints it. The metal itself may have value, but it’s not the same as a coin. The better question was which kingdom would get allegiance. For Jesus, the importance of paying the Roman tax was of less importance, because he was not so much challenging the earthly kingdom with an alternate form of government. He was challenging it with a way of life and an allegiance to God and his principles.

    17So he said to them, “Give Caesar’s things to Caesar and God’s things to God.” And they were amazed at him. — Mark 12:13-17

    A less satisfactory answer, from the point of view of those who asked the question, can hardly be imagined. No wonder they were amazed! Jesus had really told them nothing. Those who try to make theologies of Christian involvement or non-involvement in politics out of this passage seem not to realize that Jesus intended NOT to answer the question.

    One point we might take from this incident is that Jesus kept the focus on his mission, and not on temporal things. It was more important to him to help make holy people than it was to solve their political problems. This doesn’t mean that, under the right circumstances, Jesus might not have given a clearer and more precise answer. It does mean that he subordinated this issue the the more pressing things he was trying to teach. Note the definite answer he gives to the question in verses 28-34. I’ve often heard folks say that the reason the scribe got a straightforward answer was that his was a sincere question. I don’t know how sincere it was, but I would note that it was centered on Jesus’ primary agenda.

  • Book: Conflict Holiness and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus

    This will not even be an attempt at a full review of this book by Marcus Borg. I just want to present a few notes. Such a review would take more time and more skill that I believe I can bring to bear.

    I generally find myself appreciating the spiritual implications that Borg finds in the teachings of Jesus, but I’m not always on the same wavelength in a historical sense. After reading N. T. Wright and Borg side by side, something they have made easy to do, I often feel more in tune with Borg’s conclusions and at the same time more in agreement with Wright’s arguments. There has to be something wrong with this, and perhaps in time I’ll get more clear on the issue. I have a strong streak of agnosticism regarding the details of any portrayal of the life of Jesus.

    But Conflict is a book that will be of value to you irrespective of your position on the historical details, because in it Borg goes into detail on the background for his conclusions about a considerable number of sayings of Jesus and even a few miracle reports, especially the healings on the Sabbath.

    He contends that the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees is often misunderstood. To put it simplistically, it is often seen as one of hypocrisy vs sincerity or surface vs. heart religion. Borg sees it as two different conceptions of the identify of Israel. In supporting this position he provides some wonderful fodder even for those who may come to different conclusions. I was particularly helped by the material on the temple, the meaning of the cleansing incident, and the predictions of its destruction.

    N. T. Wright provides an excellent introduction (15 pages) to the current edition, which is valuable in pointing out where Wright would disagree. The disagreements are not extensive, however, on this topic, and Wright strongly commends the book overall.

    I am glad I picked this volume up.

    Numerical rating: 4

  • Space Industry Accident

    There are a number of news areas I follow regularly but don’t comment on, and space flight is one of them. Nonetheless as both a science fiction fan, and an advocate of sound science, I have been very excited to see the development of the private space industry.

    Today, in catching up on news reading, I encountered the reports and some discussion of the tragic accident at a Scaled Composites (note that I couldn’t access this site, presumably because of high traffic volume test site. Three men died. I didn’t knew these men, and I didn’t know of them. But in every pioneer effort, there will be accidents, and there will be those who pay with their lives. They weren’t doing some massively heroic thing; they were just doing their jobs. But that’s how most of those who pay do so. It’s not in going out of one’s way and doing some extraordinary thing, but rather in getting caught doing everyday, routine things.

    There’s a good deal of speculation as well as to how this will impact the new revolution in private space flight. I hope it will not have a chilling effect. It shouldn’t. As tragic as such accidents are, they are going to be part of any pioneering effort. I’m certain the folks involved will investigate, find the causes, make necessary corrections and go forward. That’s how it should be.

    The best way to honor pioneers is to keep right on pioneering, and I’m thankful to those who work to pave the way.

  • Notes on Mark 12:1-12

    These notes accompany and supplement my podcast on the same passage.

    This parable is normally seen as a discussion of God’s relationship with the nation of Israel. Doubtless in the original context, with Jesus talking to Jews about how they had rejected prophets, and now were rejecting him, this was the meaning. Having noticed that, however, in my podcast on the passage I intend to focus on how this parable can apply to us in principle today. Here I’ll provide cross-references and a few historical notes. UBSIV lists no significant textual variants for this pericope.

    Parallel passages are Matthew 21:33-46 and Luke 20:9-19.

    This passage finds parts of its background in Isaiah 5:1-7, Isaiah 27:1-6, and perhaps Jeremiah 12:10-13.

    Translation and Notes

    1He began to speak to them in parables. “A man planted a vineyard, put a wall around it, dug a winepress in it, and built a tower. He rented it out to tenants and left on a journey.

    Parables are often built around common situations that the audience would comprehend. A person who sets up a vineyard and then leases it out to others, expecting appropriate payment, was quite a comprehensible situation. In addition, the use of the vineyard in imagery by Isaiah, especially, would help tie this parable to Israel.

    Note the big difference between Isaiah’s parable and this one. In this case the rebuke is addressed to the leaders, to those who are supposed to tend to the vineyard. In Isaiah, the entire vineyard is addressed. It is supposed to bring forth fruit and does not. Jesus is carefully addressing a problem that is specific to the leadership of the time, and particularly the temple leadership.

    2And he sent a servant to his tenants at the appropriate time to receive the fruit from his vineyard. 3But they took him, beat him, and sent him away empty handed. 4And again he sent another servant to them. They beat this one on the head this one and insulted him. 5He sent another one, and the killed that one. Then he sent many others. Some the beat, some they killed.

    One of the principles for interpreting a parable is that we don’t try to get too much meaning out of the details. A parable tends to drive home a particular point, and details are often there merely to fill out the narrative. An allegory, on the other hand, attempts to match symbol to specific reality at all points. The fact is that there is more of a continuum between a parable and an allegory. In this case, we are dealing primarily with a parable, but it has some features of an allegory, with the various servants representing prophets, and of course the son representing Jesus himself. Thus Matthew puts in additional detail by having some servants stoned.

    The key message here is that there was an expectation of result from the planting of this vineyard, and that the appropriate return is refused to the owner.

    6He still had one other person he could send–a beloved son. He finally sent him to them, saying, ‘They will honor my son!’ 7But those tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir! Let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours!’

    It’s an odd sort of logic that is going on here. Did the tenants really expect to get by with this type of behavior? Did they hope, perhaps that the owner would decide this wasn’t worth the effort and risk, and never return? Speculation on that might go beyond the purpose of the parable, but I do think Jesus is placing an emphasis on the perverse nature of the behavior of the servants. They had every reason to hand over the fruit. It was their duty to do so, yet they determined not to, no matter what happened.

    8So they took him and killed him and threw him outside the vineyard. 9What then will the owner of that vineyard do? He will go and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.

    The punishment is severe, but in proportion to the offense. I would point out that while the parable in its original intent clearly applies to the Israelite leaders, it is specifically to the leaders that it does apply. There is no notion here that God is throwing out Israel. Rather, the corrupt temple leadership which is not fulfilling God’s mandate for his people is to be eliminated, and the vineyard will be otherwise cared for.

    10Have you never read this scripture:

    The stone that the builders rejected
    is the very one that has become the cornerstone?
    11This comes from the Lord
    And it looks marvelous to us!”

    This passage and quotation (Psalm 118:22-23) emphasize the topic of the rejection of Jesus. Jesus certainly does see himself here as a man with a mission from God, and he also sees rejection of his mission as a grave hazard to the nations. By missing his agenda, the leaders are flirting with disaster.

    With the hindsight of history, we can say that rejecting the peaceful way that Jesus espoused certainly did lead to disaster, as Judea and Galilee attempted twice in only a little more than a century to throw off the Roman yoke. Their efforts were paid for in blood. It is common to think of those revolutionaries as the true patriots. But they might have done well to try a different approach.

    12And they sought to seize him, but they were afraid of the crowd, for they knew that the parable was spoken against them. They left him and went away. — Mark 12:1-12

    Mar 12:12 – They feared the multitude – How wonderful is the providence of God, using all things for the good of his children! Generally the multitude is restrained from tearing them in pieces only by the fear of their rulers. And here the rulers themselves are restrained, through fear of the multitude! — John Wesley

  • Learning from the War

    Joe Carter caught my attention again today with his post This I No Longer Believe: 5 Lessons Learned from the Iraq War. Now he’s responding to this post by Rod Dreher, but I actually found his list more interesting.

    I’m not going to make my own list, because I don’t think I’ve learned five things from the Iraq war. I’m not usually terribly prescient, and I have a long line of bad calls on elections to prove it, but I thought this war was going to be a failure from the start. The one thing I have definitely learned is that the American voters in general, and the leadership in particular do not seem to be able to think in terms of strategy. We seem to manage one step at a time, with two at the outside. “Let’s withdraw from Iraq so American soldiers will quit dying.” That’s one step. “What do we do about the genocide that will result?” That’s two steps. A third might be to ask whether there will come a time we can withdraw without destabilization, and if so when that will be, and how much it will cost. We can continue on from there to ask what other things we might do with the same resources to change the future.

    I think in general both sets of lessons learned don’t look far enough into the context of each war and why people might have supported or opposed them. I know that many people expected the war in Iraq to be short and easy, and there was no reason to expect that. In fact this is one area where I personally give politicians little slack. I think anyone should have known that establishing a stable and democratic government in Iraq such that we could withdraw was going to be massively difficult.

    A couple of days ago I made a somewhat intemperate remark about the Lybian government with reference to the Lybia 6. Despite calling my remark intemperate, and despite the fact that I might well not have said it, I’m not apologizing for it, because it does reflect what I think in an unedited way. Yet the Iraq war has involved similarly stupid activities.

    I would suggest Guantanamo as a good combination of the immoral and the strategically stupid. Leaving aside the immoral, let me look at the strategically stupid part. Is it likely that the additional information gained by the controversial actions helped against terrorism enough to justify the political fallout, both domestic and foreign? I doubt it. There is a tendency amongst some people to think it’s patriotic to say “the hell with everyone else” and go it alone. I won’t debate “patriotic,” but that attitude is definitely dumb. We do need international cooperation to fight terrorism. In addition, the domestic political viability of a policy is also one of the considerations for whether a policy is strategically viable. In other words, the political support has to last until the policy is completed.

    But I wanted to respond to one particular point Carter said he learned:

    3. I no longer believe that Arab nations are capable of sustaining liberal democracies. The empirical evidence for this belief is overwhelming: Arab culture is currently unable to sustain democratic forms of government. Some people will decry this belief as racist or xenophobic. But it is simply being realistic. I used to think that Samuel Huntington was an intelligent crank; now I think he’s prophetic. As he once noted, the Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous. Thinking that freedom could take root in the blood-soaked soil of Arab culture was a naive assumption. Iraq has disabused me of such notions.

    It simply amazes me that anyone thought that they were capable of doing so, or that if they were, such a democracy could be imposed from outside. Iraq is an especially tricky case. We try to think of all the people of Iraq as “Iraqis” in the sense that we think of Americans as Americans. But the border lines that create Saudi Arabia, Syria, Kuwait, and Jordan, amongst many others, are the product of the activities of western powers. We start with the notion of having the majority rule, or something close to that. Well, for Sunnis, that means Shi’ite rule in Iraq. They are, understandably, not crazy about it. And that’s only the first of many, many problems.

    We have somehow gotten the idea that an American style democracy is the best thing for everyone, and that, if they are given the opportunity, everybody will embrace it. It’s a highly arrogant position for us to take. Might it not be better to suggest that a country’s government needs to arise out of its own history and culture? And perhaps we should extend that to the idea that a “country” should arise out of its own history and culture.

    A similar oddity occurred with the Palestinian election. We wanted a democratic election amongst the Palestinians. But then they went and elected the wrong people! All from our point of view, of course. So we cut off funding because now the Palestinian government was run by terrorists. I would suggest that we go back to the first step and ask whether it should be up to us to tell the Palestinian government that it must be democratic. Maybe we should only specify our requirements of them in terms of foreign policy goals, not their governmental forms.

    If we, as a country, could learn something from this war, I would hope it would be this. Be determined in defending ourselves, but lose the arrogance about telling other people how to run their countries. We don’t have enough troops available to pay for our arrogance.

  • Pope Benedict XVI on Creation-Evolution Controversy

    My sister e-mail me a link to this article on to me via e-mail.

    Pope Benedict XVI said the debate raging in some countries — particularly the United States and his native Germany — between creationism and evolution was an “absurdity,” saying that evolution can coexist with faith.

    The pontiff, speaking as he was concluding his holiday in northern Italy, also said that while there is much scientific proof to support evolution, the theory could not exclude a role by God.

    Now while I agree that there is much evidence for evolution (I think “scientific proof” is a poor use of terms), I have to say that I don’t think the debate is an absurdity. For folks like Dr. Kurt Wise (author of Faith, Form, and Time, who believes as an article of his faith that he must take Genesis 1-11 as accurate scientifically and historically, it does make a difference. I might call him bullheaded, but I shouldn’t call him stupid. Given that one assumption, the debate isn’t absurd, because from his point of view, the Bible must be false if evolutionary theory is true.

    I don’t have that same problem, because I don’t understand the Bible as a whole, or Genesis 1-11 in particular in the same way that he does. Yet while I continue to have a very low regard for scientific arguments in favor of young earth creationism, as I’ve indicated in several recent articles, and I object to young earth creationists identifying their one interpretation of Genesis as “the Christian faith,” it is obviously quite possible for people with substantial IQs to disagree.

    From the point of view of Catholic Biblical interpretation, it may, in fact, be absurd to come to a problem. I know that my wife, who was raised Catholic, never even saw this as an issue. I lack the knowledge of Catholic doctrine to comment intelligently on that fit. One assumes that Pope Benedict does not suffer from that deficiency, and that one can take his statement that the argument is absurd from that perspective as fairly definitive.

    The primary debate, however, is not between Catholic theologians. It is rather between Christian fundamentalists and some conservative evangelicals and other protestants for the most part. And there we have a simple divide.

    Tim LaHaye, in his book How to Study the Bible for Yourself states as his first rule of hermeneutics (p. 159), “Take the Bible literally.” In my copy of his book I have circled that statement and simply written “WRONG!” And there’s the key point of the debate. I don’t like the literal-figurative continuum as a single way of discussing how to take Biblical meaning. I prefer to discuss the types of literature involved, and what one might expect to get from those particular forms. As commonly understood, however, “literal” generally means “in the most concrete sense possible,” thus suggesting 7 literal 24 hour days, and accurate recording of all generations in the genealogies, for example. “Taking the Bible literally” in that sense of the word will result in support for young earth creationism.

    The controversy is real, and not absurd, however shocking certain positions in it may seem to any one of us.

  • Moderates Snubbed

    According to this story on MSNBC.com democratic presidential contenders are snubbing the DLC meeting in Tennessee this weekend. It’s a trend that I find annoying, though I do expect candidates to talk to the base of their parties during the campaign.

    I’m wondering this: Is the base of the democratic party so partisan that it would actually harm a candidate to attend a moderate event?

  • Notes on Mark 11:27-33

    These notes are intended to accompany my podcast A Question of Authority.

    Interpretations of this passage tend to focus on the conflict and how Jesus got out of it. He did, indeed, avoid a difficult situation in a very creative way. But there is an additional realm of discussion. Jesus suggested an entirely different way to think of authority.

    Working Translation and Notes

    27They entered Jerusalem again and while he was walking in the temple, the chief priests, scribes and elders came to him 28and said to him, “By what authority do you do these things? Or who gave you the authority to do these things?”

    These leaders quite naturally expect (or would require) an ordination or sending by an existing authority; Jesus is claiming to be an authority by authorization of God. Notice that questioning the authority of the temple hierarchy, which Jesus had done by casting out the money changers, was not an uncommon thing amongst Jews in the first century. This questioning would have been something Jesus had in common with the Pharisees, for example. Where he would differ with all of them would be in the solution.

    29But Jesus said to them, “I will ask you one thing, and if you answer me, I will tell you by what authority I’m doing these things. 30John’s baptism–was it from heaven, or from human sources? Answer me!”

    Besides the problem they think of (next verse), there is a simple problem here. If they answered this question they would imply something about how they thought authority could be verified. Their own authority rested partially on the Roman government, which had gotten involved in appointing the high priests, so there were any number of problems for them in this situation.

    31And they debated amongst themselves, saying, “If we say ‘From heaven’ he will say ‘then why didn’t you believe him?’ 32But if we say, ‘from human sources’”–they feared the crowd, because all held that John was a prophet.

    The crowd is neither an unmixed curse, nor an unmixed blessing. A crowd can often be led too easily. In fact, this precise question—the question of the source of authority—is very relevant to that particular issue. In his answer Jesus also suggested to the crowd something to consider. Why did they follow John the Baptist? Was it because of someone else’s authority, or because they recognized God speaking through him?

    33So they answered Jesus, “We don’t know.” And Jesus said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.” — Mark 11:27-33

    But in a sense Jesus did answer their question by implying the possibilities. John the Baptist did not have an ordination or a warrant from accepted leadership. He proclaimed God’s message and people listened. Jesus could have mentioned at this point that John had endorsed his ministry, but what would have been the point? Jesus did not derive his authority from things that John the Baptist said about him, but from his heavenly father.

    Jesus had a way of not answering a question that frustrated those who were not honest seekers, and yet went well beyond an answer for those who were truly seeking.