Professor Liviu Librescu gave his life for his students (Jerusalem Post). It’s worth remembering. I’m sure there were many others. In the midst of this terrible act, there are also people who showed true heroism.
Author: henry
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You are a Bible Translator
Some readers here may be interested in a devotional I wrote for my wife Jody’s devotional list, titled You are a Bible Translator. Not the normal exegesis, but a thought! 🙂 Enjoy!
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Responding to Tragedy
Many of us right now are thinking about and praying for the folks at Virginia Tech. Others closer to the scene are responding as their duty calls them. But it’s an ill wind that blows no one good, and there are two groups of people who thrive on this sort of thing: The news media, and political activists.
One can’t blame the media for thriving on disaster, because so many of us glue our eyes to the TV during an event like this, just looking for the latest tidbit of information that they can dig up. Our tendency is to criticize the media for overplaying the situation, finding everyone who may have heard a gunshot and interviewing them, and bringing in commentators to make lengthy comments on things they cannot possibly no. The media provides it because we watch it. They even got me for about 15 minutes, but after that I moved on, and I’ll keep up with written stories on the internet (MSNBC story).
For political activists a tragedy like this is a godsend. People’s emotions are stirred up. They want a solution and are less anxious to spend time considering how effective a course of action will be. If it looks good, they’re liking to jump on board. So for people with pet projects, this is the time to get out there and pitch them if there is any possibility that someone might think they’re related to the cause of the tragedy.
Whether it’s gun control, or increased gun ownership, censorship of violent movies or video games, greater police presence, less restrictions on police monitoring of citizens, increased education, drug legalization or greater drug enforcement, restriction or increase of immigration, or whatever it is, people will [immoderate metaphor stricken with apologies, see comments-HN] quickly appear on television/radio with their pet projects. I’m sure there are readers for whom many of these things are pet issues, and they may well be offended at my list. I’m not sure it is balanced between conservative and liberal causes, but it could be if I thought some more.
What the rest of us need to do is demand that as actions are taken they are carefully chosen for their effectiveness. Just because something looks like it will doesn’t mean that it will. Politicians will be glad to pass legislation that will make their constituents feel better. It’s quite irrelevant whether it actually works. In fact, it’s very difficult to get government projects tested for their efficacy. Generally we assume that if the government has an Office for Making Everyone Safer, that office will actually make everyone safer.
So let the sympathy flow to the families, but keep your other emotions under control. Check out what is and isn’t done and check out just how effective it is. After all just because there are violent video games and there are violent people doesn’t mean that one caused the other. It’s a connection that has to be checked.
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More on the Atonement
Peter Kirk has collected a series of his comments into a single post along with links to various blogs that can bring you up to date on the atonement wars. I weighed in with a post over on my Participatory Bible Study blog. I see that Coops hasn’t posted in his atonement series since March 19th.
I know how it can go. One can get really, really tangled discussing the atonement!
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What Embarrasses me About Christianity
A discussion has been raging over on the Religion Forum, and Tom Sims has taken it up on his blog regarding Bishop Spong and a quote (Rochester, MN Post-Bulletin) in which he says:
“Religion in America today embarrasses me,” said Spong, 75, who will speak in Rochester next week. “If that’s what Christianity is all about, then I’m not really interested in that.”
Of course the question is clearly just what Bishop Spong thinks Christianity is actually about. Frankly, while Spong is one of the more popular characters in modern liberal Christianity, he is by no means the most thoughtful, in my view. In fact, when it gets right down to it, I don’t find his historical reconstructions I find him one of the least credible of the writers on the historical Jesus.
He makes one excellent point, however, in the interview I cited, when he tells us that the problem comes in when someone claims that their way is the only way it can be. I’m one of those “embarrassments” who believes in the resurrection. Once I’ve swallowed a doctrine like the incarnation, it hardly seems a matter of concern. Could I be wrong? Of course I could! I’ve been wrong before, am quite probably wrong about many things right now, and I suspect I will go right on being wrong until I die.
Especially in matters of theology we do well to walk and talk humbly, simply because when dealing with the infinite we are by definition infinitely ignorant. We have to recognize that very often the more rational option is to simply admit that we don’t really know. But I, and others like me, have a category of experience to describe, and it is religious language and even religious doctrines that describes it.
For Bishop Spong, however, and for many in the Jesus Seminar, one has to ask just how Christian their Jesus actually is. I do not arrogate to myself the right to judge whether they are Christians or not, or what their relationship to God might be. My question is simply one of picking up their views and making them my own.
I recall the series of stories by Isaac Asimov which are set at the dinners of the Black Widowers. Each guest was asked one major question: How do you justify your existence? I think the question that needs to be asked of Spong’s Jesus is the same one: How do you justify your existence? When one limits oneself to a purely historical reconstruction, and one done with a seriously skeptical turn of mind, then the resulting “Jesus” is often rather weak, and one has to wonder why anyone should care whether such a person lived.
In the historical sense, one might make the question instead whether the Jesus one has discovered by historical research would be likely to have had the impact that he had. The one thing I always find when I think about Jesus in purely historical terms is that in the end I’m certain that Jesus must be more than what I can prove him to be historically, otherwise there is an excessive effect for the cause involved. In some ways, however, the Jesus of Spong fits well with American Christianity–tepid and not terribly challenging.
There are a number of things about American Christianity that do embarrass me, though they don’t primarily have to do with doctrinal beliefs.
I’m embarrassed
- that we have so many buildings and so much real estate that tends to be idle during the week. I believe we could improve our use of that property for building up our communities.
- that we now have almost as many definitions of heresy and orthodoxy as there are denominations. At least the inquisition worked from one script. Now I can be fundamentalist, orthodox, heretical, and an atheist all at the same time. Just ask my critics!
- that we still permit discrimination and even foster it in our society–any discrimination that considers something other than the ability of the person in question.
- that we are depending more on political and temporal means than on the transforming power of the gospel.
- that for so many Christians church is just a social club. We debate the spiritual gospel and the social gospel, but while we do so the “comfy chair” gospel is often winning in churches.
- that so many of us couldn’t even discuss the issues that Spong is raising, because we have no clue what we believe or what our church claims to believe in the first place.
- that our faith is so weak and so poorly grounded that we have to get into a real tizzy about every new book that comes out about Christianity.
I’m embarrassed, but I don’t dwell on it, except for posts like this. Mostly I just try to help alleviate that situation in the little corner where I am.
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Galatians 3:2: AKOE PISTEOS
Or should I make that AKOH PISTEWS? Note that a similar question can be asked in Galatians 3:5, but I will assume due to theme that one will give the same answer in both places.
Writing an exegetical article on this verse could be quite lengthy, but I agree with J. Louis Martyn in his commentary on Galatians when he says:
. . . Paul is not asking the Galatians which of two human acts served as the generative locus in which they received the Spirit, a decision on their part to keep the Law or a decision on their part to hear with faith. On the contrary, he is asking rhetorically whether that generative locus was
- their act in becoming observant of the Law or
- God’s message (akoh).
— page 288 [some punctuation/formatting including Greek rather than transliterated text is mine-HN]
The specific translation of akoh pistewj depends on two factors. First, should the word “hearing” be active or passive, in other words is the thing that generates the reception of the Spirit the act of hearing, or the content of what is heard, the message? The second is how does faith relate to the message. Is it a message that is faith, or is it a message that elicits faith? Martyn (op. cit.) Romans 10:16-17, where the message is much more clearly established as that which elicits faith, and the word akoh is also pretty clearly established as passive in intent.
So how do translations compare on this. Here are some examples, showing the variety on these two points:
- TNIV – Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard. [This agrees with the NIV, which is surprising considering the accusations of Calvinist bias in the NIV translation.]
- REB – did you receive the Spirit by keeping the law or by believing the gospel message?
- NLT – Did you receive the Holy Spirit by keeping the law? Of course not, for the Holy Spirit came upon you only after you believed the message you heard about Christ.
- ESV – Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?
- CEV – How were you given God’s Spirit? Was it by obeying the Law of Moses or by hearing about Christ and having faith in him?
- TEV – did you receive God’s Spirit by doing what the Law requires or by hearing the gospel and believing it?
I don’t see any translation that gets quite the nuance that I see in this passage, though perhaps I’m being a bit too tense. In this case, I think the NLT actually has the best translation with the CEV and TEV following very close after.
Of course, it’s hard for translations to get everything right. In this case, however, I think that formal equivalent translations, such as the ESV really leave the English reader hanging, because “hearing of faith” cannot possibly elicit the same semantic ranger as akoh pistews, with unfortunate results.
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Response to Misquoting Jesus – III
I’m continuing my chapter by chapter response to Misquoting Jesus with a discussion of chapter 2, “The Copyists of the Early Christian Writers.” I continue to see this book as a basic introduction to New Testament Criticism (in agreement with Elgin Husbheck, Jr.), though the hype connected with it tries to make it sound more controversial than it is.
The second chapter starts with the basic problem for texts in early Christianity–Christians were heavily oriented to texts, but they lacked professional scribes in general and a tradition or standards for proper copying. Thus manuscripts were copied generally by whoever needed them, or by whoever was literate and could do the job. As a result, there are numerous errors in the manuscripts. We can verify this assumption by observing the manuscripts we have and the tens of thousands of variants they display.
Here we get started on one of the key scholarly issues that lies behind this book. How many variants are the result of errors in copying and how many are the result of scribes trying to improve the text? On this issue Ehrman in his scholarly writing is an advocate of the view that there is a high proportion of variants that result from intentional changes. Those changes may have generally resulted from good motivations, but they nonetheless changed the text.
Ehrman continues with the issue of precisely what should be considered the “original text” of a document, using Galatians and the gospel of John as examples. Since Paul dictated the letter to the Galatians to a scribe, and then the letter was sent to more than one church, which probably necessitated copying that original, what precisely should be considered the “autograph?” There is room for error even in the dictation process (pp. 58-60). Add to that the fact that our earliest copy of Galatians comes from 150 years after the letter was written, and one begins to get an idea of the difficulties involved in textual criticism.
I would note in addition that the issue of finding just what we should call the “original” starts to cross the line into what is known as higher criticism, involving source and redaction criticism. Ehrman uses the gospel of John, but what about the synoptic gospels? In general, no matter which theory one assumes for authorship, at least two, and probably all three of the gospels largely consist of source material edited into a new form. Why should this new form be regarded as an autograph? Would not the earlier versions be more authoritative?
Ehrman tends to favor the work of the original author, as illustrated by this quote:
. . . As we saw in chapter 1, Christianity from the outset was a bookish religion that stressed certain texts as authoritative scripture. As we have seen in this chapter, however, we don’t actually have these authoritative texts. This is a textually oriented religion whose texts have been changed, surviving only in copies that vary from one another, sometimes in highly significant ways. The task of the textual critic is to try to recover the oldest form of these texts.
Modern Christians inclined to a conservative evangelical or fundamentalist position will certainly find Ehrman’s stated goal appropriate. What other option could there be? But I think it is not nearly so obvious as that. In fact, by the time the texts were officially designated as authoritative, they were already somewhat altered. In fact, due to the fact that early manuscripts were copied without standards by non-professionals, the greatest number of variants would occur early in the process, thus it would be a somewhat easier task to discover the text of the New Testament at the time when a document was finally designated as canonical. How God might act in the formation of a text is also not a finally settled matter.
I don’t intend to try to settle these questions, but rather simply to raise them. The boundary between higher and lower criticism is not as precisely defined as many would like to think.
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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.
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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.