Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Galatians and Penal Substitutionary Atonement

    It will generally surprise nobody that I am not a fan of penal substitutionary atonement, as I’ve written about it before. I do believe that PSA is one valid metaphor that helps us understand the greater truth that is the atonement. What I object to is making this particular metaphor the central fact of the atonement.

    One pillar on which PSA stands is the idea that justification should be understood primarily in a judicial sense. In commenting on this on Compuserve Religion Forum, I brought material in from J. Louis Martyn. The following is quoted from my message there:

    At an earlier time I would have granted the notion that Paul’s use of “justification/justify/righteousness” was related to the language of the courtroom, but I am changing my mind on that point.  I have been reading Galatians through in Greek for my devotions, along with J. Louis Martyn’s commentary from the Anchor Bible series.  He makes some serious points on understanding Paul’s usage of the terms, starting from the basic early Jewish-Christian (Christians of Jewish birth) understanding, through the concord between the Jewish and Gentile missions, and from there to the specific approach of the teachers against whom Paul argues in Galatians.

    Let me just quote a short portion:

    “. . . All of the translation options listed above [he has listed the major English translations-HN] have one weighty liability: they are at home either in the language of the law– where “to justify” implies the existence of a definable legal norm–or in the language of religion and morality–where “righteousness” implies a definable religious or moral norm.  As we will see, Paul intends his term to be taken into neither of these linguistic realms. . . . ”  — p. 249-250, commenting on Galatians 2:16

    It would be well beyond the sort of effort I’m willing to put in to quote all the relevant arguments, not to mention it would bring up questions of copyright, but I think Martyn does an excellent job of discussing these points.  In fact, those who read “justify” in a legal context fall into part of the error of the teachers who are the target of Paul’s wrath.

    I would commend reading Martyn’s work on Galatians and also from his collection of essays Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul.  I have to admit that I have had to shift a number of my previous viewpoints on Paul’s views through reading these two books.  As another example, Martyn argues convincingly that Paul never speaks of Judaism as such in Galatians.  When he refers to Jerusalem as Hagar (Galatians 4:21-31) he does not mean Jews and Judaism, but rather the church of Jerusalem and specifically the mission that was claiming its support in a mission to the gentiles that required Torah observance of gentiles.

    I have to add this now to my short list of books that have fundamentally shifted some portion of my Biblical understanding.  Jacob Milgrom’s Leviticus is first, then Gordon Fee’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, Brevard Childs’ Isaiah, and now Martyn’s Galatians.  All of them powerful pieces of writing.

    Feel free to comment either here or in the Religion Forum thread as linked above.

  • Methodist Blog Weekly Roundup 4/13/07

    . . . has been posted by Allan Bevere.

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus – II

    I found the second chapter of Misquoting Jesus generally very helpful. I can summarize my response to the chapter by saying that there is nothing very radical about its contents, and that it contains material everyone should consider.

    Ehrman has to go light on some things simply because of the size of the topic as opposed to the reasonable size of a popular book on the subject. For a little more background on critical methodologies and the process of composition, let me refer to my pamphlets What is Biblical Criticism? and Understanding the Search for the Historical Jesus.

    Canonization is another topic that is often viewed in extremes. On the one hand we have those who picture the folks who put together the orthodox canon sitting around in back rooms cynically decided what would be scripture and what would not, and often arranging the death of those who disagreed. On the other hand we have those who assume that there was a list of criteria, and that every piece of literature that fit got into the canon, while all those that did not were left out.

    The truth is somewhere between. There were plenty of shameful episodes in which one Christian leader was involved in the death of another. There were also criteria, at least in principle. But in fact there were certain books that had become standard in Christian worship, and these were going to be “in” no matter what the evidence. So to some extent canonization was a popularity contest with a number of serious twists and turns. Ehrman gives a pretty good summary.

    Ehrman does make one comment that sets me to thinking, and I hope to find some time to do reading on this. On page 18 he says:

    For modern people intimately familiar with any of the major contemporary Western religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), it may be hard to imagine, but books played virtually no role in the polytheistic religions of the ancient Western world. These religions were almost exclusively concerned with nonoring the gods through ritual acts of sacrifice. There were no doctrines to be learned, as explained in books, and almost no ethical principles to be followed, as laid out in books. . . .

    I’m not precisely certain what he includes under “Western world” in this case, but my feel for the ancient near east suggests that certainly Mesopotamian, Hittite, and Egyptian religion depended to a great extent on texts. Israelite religion made the texts much more the province of the people as opposed to just the priests, but that was an incremental change. I’m wondering if there was such a substantial break between Greek and Roman religion and the eastern portions of the empire, even after a great deal of syncretism. I haven’t done any adequate study on this, so this is just a question this chapter raised for me.

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus – Ia

    I wanted to follow up briefly on my first post on Misquoting Jesus to provide a quotation and make a couple more comments on inspiration. The quotation comes from page 13:

    It is a radical shift from reading the Bible as an inerrant blueprint for our faith, life, and future to seeing it as a very human book, with very human points of view, many of which differ from one another and none of which provides the inerrant guide to how we should live. . . .

    This is certainly a shift that often occurs when someone with a very strict view of Biblical inspiration is confronted with the facts of Biblical history. But there is a huge amount of spin that is possible in circumstances like this. Discussions of Biblical inspiration, for various reasons, tend to be dominated by extremes. Either one can trust everything in the Bible, or one can trust nothing. Either it is without error on everything, or it has no valid information at all. I’m not accusing Bart Ehrman of taking such extreme views, though he has made a very radical shift in his own appreciation of the Bible.

    I could quite easily say that the Bible is “a very human book, with very human points of view, many of which differ from one another and none of which provides the inerrant guide to how we should live.” Yet at the same time, I regard the Bible as inspired. It seems to me that both fundamentalists and skeptics have a similar assumption about what a divinely inspired book must contain. Both agree that it must contain accurate information and precise instructions. The debate between them is over whether the Bible provides any such thing. But why should we assume that God wanted to provide us with that particular type of guide?

    Christians place strong emphasis on 1 Timothy 3:16 and “God-breathed (theopneustos).” In fact, in any discussion I’m involved with on Biblical inerrancy someone is sure to quote that text in support of the doctrine of inerrancy. Once they have quoted this verse, which they seem to think I will never have read, they look hopefully at me, assuming they have made their point. When I fail to see support for inerrancy in the text, I can see that they conclude that I must surely be a very perverse man. (In this paragraph I use the term “inerrancy” in the very loose form in which it is normally used. The Chicago Statement is generally a bit more nuanced.)

    But where is the definition of what happens to a speech, a text, or any form of message when it is breathed by God. A partial analogy might be found in Genesis 2:7, when God breathes the breath of life into the first human. The result was that the person became a living person, but Genesis 3 very quickly suggests that the man did not become inerrant.

    I tend to take my clue on this from he remainder of 2 Timothy 3:16, which tells us that the scripture is useful for training, rebuke, correcting faults, and training in righteousness. The Bible can be all of those things without also being inerrant. In fact, we regularly manage to live our lives and learn new things while using resources that are not totally without error.

    Of course a more nuanced view of inerrancy is normally included in doctrinal statements. That version applies only to the autographs. Ehrman mentions this issue a few times. The following question comes from page 11:

    Even so, what is one to make of all these differences? If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the very words of scripture?

    While I agree with Elgin Hushbeck that we truly have substantially recovered the original text of the New Testament, I think that Ehrman’s question is relevant. Why must the autographs be inerrant, if we do not possess them?

    Let me illustrate. (I discuss this in greater detail in the tract What is the Word of God?.) God speaks to a prophet, the prophet verbalizes the message, a scribe copies the message at the prophet’s dictation, then other scribes copy that. Not all of these steps occur every time, but that is a good general view. Let’s assume that God speaks the message correctly. If the prophet errs in hearing the message, then we have a problem with inerrancy. If a scribe to whom the prophet is dictating the message errs in hearing or writing, we have a problem with inerrancy. But once the text has gotten to paper, papyrus, or parchment, there is no problem if the next copyist makes an error.

    Why? This certainly seems like the view of a textual society, where the written form is given priority. But no matter where the error is introduced, the result for us is the same–an error in the text as we possess it. And as most supporters of Biblical inerrancy would agree, we can get everything necessary from the Bible as we have it. So why worry about the state of autographs that we have never had?

    Thus I think textual criticism itself makes it pretty clear that one can deal with a text in which there are errors, and in which we have doubtful readings in those few cases where the evidence is not extremely strong.

  • Sudan Missionary from Pensacola

    There was an encouraging story in the Pensacola News Journal titled Big difference in Sudan about Jim Esson who is returning to the Sudan and working on building a medical clinic. This is a very positive form of mission activity.

    In the comments someone complains that the mission is out of town while there are still people in need locally. But there are many different forms of service, and we don’t need to choose just one. There are plenty of resources available; what we need is the willingness to use them wherever there are needs.

  • Amazon.com UnSpun Best English Bible Translation

    I discovered Amazon.com UnSpun (and wrote a bit about it here) and of course immediately located a list of the best English Bible translations. Here it is:

    Update: I am going along with Peter Kirk as posted on the Better Bibles Blog and replacing this poll with the one he suggested.

    I think it would be interesting to get the votes of many of the well-informed folks in the blogosphere to vote on this one and perhaps change the rankings a bit. I suspect that with the votes, there’s a great deal of simple name recognition involved in the current rankings.

    So those of us who have nothing better to do than vote in useless polls–how about we give it a try? I notice the CEV and the TNIV, two of my favorites, are way down the list.

    PS: Actually I would note that the CEV, TNIV, and REB were significantly improved in ranking by my votes.

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus – I

    I have finally started reading Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman. It came in about a week ago via interlibrary loan, and I have now gotten through the introduction and the first chapter. Unlike my response to The God Delusion, I’m not going to post all sections at once, but rather I’ll just post my reactions a chapter at a time.

    Before I get started, however, I want to mention that Elgin Hushbeck, Jr. has joined the list of speakers at Running Toward the Goal, a 5 minute +/- audio podcast sponsored by Pacesetters Bible School, Inc.. Elgin will focus on Christian apologetics and chose to give his response to Misquoting Jesus in his first podcast. There is also a link to the transcript there. Elgin accepts the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, as he mentions in the show, so he will have a somewhat different perspective than I do, though his response is surprisingly similar.

    I read the introduction to Misquoting Jesus with a great deal of empathy. Going into college, I was in many ways where Bart Ehrman was. I benefited from three important differences, however. First, though my parents were very conservative in their own beliefs, they did not discourage me from questioning. Second, I had already seen the number of manuscript variations by looking at the New Testament in the old Nestle-Aland text (25th edition, I believe) that I started Greek with. Third, my undergraduate professors gave great attention to dealing with questions that arise because of the differences.

    Amongst my own experiences I would count a time when I was 12 years old and became concerned with just how one could prove that the Bible was true. This happened some time during Sabbath School (I was raised Seventh-day Adventist), and by the end of church I had found my solution–Bible prophecy. We could be certain the Bible was true because of prophecy. I proudly proclaimed my solution to my Dad who affirmed that prophecy was important, but pointed out that there were ways to get around prophecy. The bottom line was faith, he told me.

    In college I recall facing question after question. I confronted a young earth when studying the texts of the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11. I located the paper I wrote at that time when going through my files recently. The contents are hardly stunning, and my conclusions appear somewhat timid to me now, but I was raised on the 6000 years period–no 6-10 thousand variation for me–and the textual differences were the first break with the young earth view for me.

    So dealing with manuscript variations has played a huge role in my own development as it did for Dr. Ehrman, even though the outcome was not the same. I would note that I did leave the Seventh-day Adventist Church out of seminary, and didn’t return to church, now as a United Methodist, until 12 years later, but that didn’t have to do with doubts about the Bible. I was liberal enough by the time I was working on the MA degree to have some difficulties at the SDA Theological Seminary. They were rather minor problems, to be sure, and I managed to resolve them quite reasonably, but they made it clear to me that not everyone was primarily interested in finding the truth, particularly in Biblical studies.

    Since I do not believe in Biblical inerrancy myself, and have not almost from the time I formed a conscious view of inspiration, the fact that there are variations in the wording is not that major of an issue. (Note that while my views of a number of issues were altered as I discovered manuscript variations, I had not truly formulated my own view of inspiration before I was a college student. It was all sort of ad hoc.) But there is a certain shock in discovering the actual history of the Bible if one hasn’t spent serious time thinking about it.

    This is very important for Christian education. I think that we are wasting most of our available educational time in the church in the mistaken view that if we have reaffirmed the doctrines enough times as a young person is growing up, they will stay in the church. Of course at the same time, many church leaders complain about the number of young people who leave the church when they get to college. The shock, in my view, is not how many leave, it’s that any of them stay.

    The time is past when one can get by with providing only part of the truth. It was never right, but with the internet and the available of information generally, any young person who is reasonably curious will have access to all the negative information that the Sunday School teacher may be trying to avoid.

    I realize it seems like a risk to expose children and young people to other religions, but a faith that cannot survive information is not going to be much of a faith. I have blogged on this before here.

    Since I have already read chapter 1, I believe I can fairly confidently say that I will post a few thoughts on it (canonization) tomorrow.

  • Dinosaur Protein

    If you’ve seen the information on T. Rex protein and are wondering what it does and doesn’t mean will problem find this post on Pharyngula helpful. There are already creationist misinterpretations of this information, such as this one:

    For the moment, let’s not ignore the importance of what has been found (and as will be declared in the soon-to-open Creation Museum): finding T. rex soft tissue is compelling evidence that it was not 65 million years ago that dinosaurs died out, as given on the evolutionary timeline.

    This looks like another example of excellent scientific work.

  • Freedom of Speech and People’s Feelings

    It appears a couple are threatened with offending Hindu sensibilities for their wedding, according to this story from the Evening Standard (London). (HT: Dispatches from the Culture Wars.) This is an Indian case, and due to the fame of one of the participants there is some indication India won’t pursue it.

    Those who approve of laws against “hate speech” or various similar restrictions on freedom of speech should be warned, however, that no matter what your views, this could be you.

    This is a serious danger to freedom, especially in cases of religion. When a government makes “offending” any class of religious people a legal offense, there is virtually no barrier before any speech whatsoever can be banned. What can I possibly say that will not blaspheme somebody’s religion. I do not believe Mohammed was a prophet. I’ve offended Muslims. That belief should be no surprise, however. I’m a Christian. I don’t think cartoons or art mocking Islam should be illegal, no matter how offensive Muslims find them. But note that at the same time I don’t think cartoons or art mocking Christianity, Christians, or major Christian figures should be illegal either. That’s freedom of speech. If you’re easy to offend, get used to being offended.

    Of course many non-Christians will agree with me on that point, but I again let me extend that further. Hate speech laws that target conservative Christian criticism of other religions or homosexuality, for example, are also anti-freedom. I often really don’t like the categories of speech they forbid, but that’s not the point.

    Let freedom of speech reign, and let’s all learn to be less offended by it.

  • God Delusion and The Bible

    The major complaint that I have about the treatment of the Bible in The God Delusion is that it is somewhat superficial. Particularly in the section on the Old Testament, Dawkins merely points out problems that we should recognize as real with scriptures. (For another approach see Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God?.) I would say that someone who can read Judges 17-21 or Numbers 31 without serious concern has a problem with their moral compass.

    Passages such as those are a key reason why I do not look at the Bible using the “boy scout manual” metaphor. The Bible is almost completely unlike a boy scout manual or the instruction book for your car or an appliance. It is, instead the story of people experiencing God. (See my essay Inspiration, Inerrancy, and Authority.)

    I do not believe the inspiration of the Bible can be successfully argued outside the concept of the community. That doesn’t mean that there is nothing that can be said for or against. It simply means that acceptance of the Bible as a source of authority, and appropriate use of it must occur in a community of faith.

    One might expect that this would be an area in which I would spend the greatest portion of my time, since it is my specialty, but it would be hard for me to emphasize enough how un-earthshaking Dawkins’ arguments about the Bible actually are to me. They do bring up a serious point in terms of Christian education, however. There are many, many Christians who don’t know about these things and have never taken them into consideration in their own understanding of the Bible. They loudly proclaim that they keep every command in the Bible and do everything the Bible says, but very fortunately they don’t actually do that.

    Preachers and teachers who don’t want to deal with the difficult questions have a tendency to read only those portions of scripture that are easy to understand and will comfort the congregation. Some versions of the lectionary, for example, leave off the last two verses of Psalm 137 in reading because they will obviously disturb some members of the congregation, or don’t appear to fit with the rest of the reading. But one needs to face the fact that the did fit to the original author.

    I have blogged on this topic before: Slavery and the Bible, Biblical Decision Making, Slavery and the Bible Condensed, and The Danger of Unchanging Truth.

    One last thing, and this is addressed more to my fellow Christians, especially moderates and liberals, than to Dawkins or other atheists. It is not sufficient to tell someone that they should not take the Bible literally. There are many varieties of not taking the Bible literally. Take Numbers 31, for example. If you say not to take it literally, you might be suggesting that the story never happened, or that it did happen, but that Moses imagined God’s commands, or that the entire story was intended as an allegory (meaning what?), or perhaps that it’s historical but not normative. Again, I’ve blogged on this before here and here.