Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Time for Church Accountability

    Quite frequently I receive appeals for funds from various ministries. This is probably because I head an all-volunteer ministry, Pacesetters Bible School, Inc. and thus am readily connection with Christianity, non-profits, and thus charitable contributions. Now I have no problem with charitable organizations making appeals for funds, though my group limits appeals to people who have attended an event we sponsor or in some way asked to be on the mailing list.

    I got one of these appeals today, and the thing that bother me about it, and triggered this post, was that the pledge card inside invited me to pledge some tithe to go to support pastors in this group’s various mission locations. The question comes to mind immediately as to just why I should send tithe to them, and since I have no personal or business connection with them, other than their mailout, why I should regard them as trustworthy. In fact, reading their magazine I’m pretty sure I would not support them were I to make a full investigation. Since my default is to support things I know about, I won’t bother with that lengthier investigation.

    Now I’m not a really strict person about tithe. I do believe it’s a good general standard of stewardship, but I believe each person must deal with their own conscience on charitable giving and service. But I also think that the local church is potentially a wonderful institution for giving and carrying out charity. Here’s a group of people you meet with every week (hopefully), and get to know (ideally), and trust (possibly). You can get the idea over a period of time of how they will spend your money.

    In principle, it seems to be that a great way to do your basic charitable giving is through a congregation or local group. Taking that principle and asking you to apply it to essentially random people far away, without accountability is questionable at best. I’m assuming that most people who receive such solicitations treat them as I do. But inevitably, just as a few people get caught by “African dictator” scams in e-mail, so some people get caught by various ministries asking for money.

    But as a follow-up thought, I have to ask just how accountable your local church is. Do they, in fact, spend your money in a way that you would regard as good stewardship? I’ve written recently about authority and accountability (Why Authority Issues are Important), and like many, I spoke more of accountability from above. But I think the focus needs to be a general accountability to the members–the people who produce the cash and suffer through failures of leadership.

    In Christian churches we have too long lived with the idea that the pastor and the elders are above the rest, and should not be questioned. Even in churches with very democratic structures you will generally find a group of people in leadership who are informally considered above reproach and questioning. I believe that there should be no such time. Everyone should be accountable in what they do, whether they have served the church for 5 minutes or 5 decades.

    This is true of financial accountability, of one’s moral life as a church leader, and of teaching and doctrine. In one church I attended I found that people were running around passing on things that I had said about the Bible. Now the fact was that I did have the strongest credentials in Biblical studies in the church, and I had often been able to provide answers and references. I was criticized for giving too carefully qualified of answers (people don’t want all that detail, just give them the answer). Some people even misquoted me back at myself, so that I was the authority behind something I never said.

    I would regularly say, “Don’t take my word for it. Study it out and come to your own conclusions.” Some people in the church leadership told me I was unreasonable. Why shouldn’t folks depend on the Bible “expert” among them? Well, there is a simple problem there–accountability. There was nobody else in the church who knew Biblical languages, or who had studied the history of the ancient near east, or Biblical exegesis, or a number of other fields as I did. If I was in a seminary setting, there would be someone questioning what I said all the time, and justly so. I should be prepared to defend what I say. But in that local congregation, it was just one man–me–and my errors were getting perpetuated. I might correct them later, but they were already a tradition for some people.

    The same thing happens with the finance committee. It’s too complicated and time consuming to check up on what they’re doing and to see how my money is being spent, so I just assume it’s being done well. But I think that’s irresponsible, and it denies accountability to those leaders.

    Check your chuch budget. Find out, for example, how much is being spent on service to the community, and how much on maintaining the church structure. Consider whether those are appropriate numbers and what might be done about it. Consider how much is spent on children and youth, the future of the church, and how much is spent entertaining the older members. (As a grandfather approaching age 50, I think I can say that!) Don’t forget that taking care of the church facility and existing members does cost money, but consider how the church can maximize outreach and service.

    One last thing–this isn’t a call for whiners and complainers. Quite the opposite! Whiners and complainers don’t hold people accountable, they just have fun complaining and gossiping. The difference is in who you talk to and how you do it. If you go to your finance committee to talk about the budget with some specific point in mind and a suggestion for positive action, that’s accountability. It’s still accountability if you go to them with a specific problem, along with evidence to support your claim. If you go to them just to say, “I hate this budget,” but don’t have anything concrete to suggest, that’s just complaining. No matter what you have, if you gossip about it around the table at Wednesday night dinner, that’s whining and complaining. Don’t do it. If you hear it happening, hold people accountable. Say, “I don’t think we should talk about this here and in this way. Let’s take any issues we have to the right people.”

    That’s enough time on the soapbox for me today.

  • Libby Found Guilty

    Of course, if I reversed the numbers, I could say, “found not guilty.” He was found guilty of 4 of 5 counts, according to the Washington Post. I would hate to second-guess the jury, even though I have grave doubts on the average IQ of a jury that could survive voir dire under the circumstances.

    But what made me want to comment was this (from the same story):

    Libby, 56, was the only person charged in a three-year federal investigation that reached the highest echelons of the Bush White House. The central question in the probe was whether anyone in the administration illegally disclosed classified information during the late spring and early summer of 2003, when they told several journalists that an early critic of the Iraq war was married to undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame.

    No one was ever charged with the leak, but the results of the investigation, led by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, ultimately tarnished both the administration and the Washington press corps.

    So we can’t actually prove that a crime was committed by any specific person, but we can get someone for lying about it. This kind of investigation and its result disgusts me. I think Cheney is not a very good public official. I think there are plenty of liars in Washington, but too many special prosecutor probes end up simply chasing round and round, and finally charging people with something else. Once you have an investigation such as this in progress, it’s likely you’ll catch somebody lying about something, and the resulting conviction helps make the whole exercise seem worthwhile.

    At least in this case there was a crime to investigate. And make no mistake–leaking classified information is and should be a serious crime. Nonetheless, you have to convict someone of it before you can throw them in jail, and in Washington DC, leaks are the order of the day. But a special prosecutor should, in my view, be able to charge someone with a crime before he can charge someone with lying about it. After all, if you have enough evidence to prove someone was lying, that should mean you have a good idea what did happen.

    This time it’s a conservative who is likely going to jail. Another time this happened, it was Bill Clinton. In that case he was lying about his sex life. A different set of people was talking of witch hunts then, but I find both cases troubling. I do regard marital fidelity as a factor in how I regard a candidate’s character. I do consider it ethically questionable, at a minimum, for a person in authority to have any kind of sexual contact with a young aide. But the proper people to enforce that are the voters. In the end, he agreed to a plea bargain because of the perjury.

    I dislike both of these results. The voters can act in both cases, but convicting people of lying about their sex life, or of having faulty memory (as I’m characterising it) is hardly a worthwhile close to years of investigation. I suspect that these special prosecutors are simply a fine way to keep a scandal alive so the politicians can do some more lying about it.

  • Word Study Dangers: Your Dependence on Scholars

    A young man in one of my classes once told me that he didn’t want to depend on scholars. His aim in attending my class on Bible study was to know for himself.

    Now this young man has an admirable goal, provided that you use “goal” in the same sense as one uses “north star” in navigating toward the north. One will never reach Polaris, but one will continue traveling something close to north while using that star as a guide.

    The problem for the average student of the Bible is that you can’t know everything related to your study, so you will always be dependent, in some way, on the scholarship of others. For those who think that taking Greek and Hebrew removes that problem, let me tell you that it does not. After learning Biblical languages, I am still constantly depending on the work of others, and I’m much more aware of it now than I used to be. Once you get to reading the text in the original languages, for example, you then have to ask which text to read. This introduces textual criticism. While I have studied textual criticism to some extent, I am not nearly at the point where I would edit the text of a New Testament book for public use.

    The same thing is true of word studies and finding the definitions of words. If you will first accept the fact that you are going to be basing some of what you do on the work of others, it will help you more intelligently choose where to depend on someone else and where to try to do original research. You will want to consider just how objective the scholarship involved is, and how qualified you are to check the work.

    Let’s consider an example. My knowledge of textual criticism allows me to read an edition of the New Testament and understand the textual footnotes. I’m acquainted with the major manuscripts, so that when I look at a footnote I can quickly see the range of dates involved in the manuscripts, and I often know something about the specific manuscripts involved–not a massive amount, but enough to follow the note and understand in general why the editors chose the variant they did for the text. I could ask to reduce my dependence on other scholars by getting a look at a high quality photograph of each manuscript for myself, or even by trying to visit the library or museum in which the manuscript itself is kept, so I can check a reading for myself.

    But this would be a foolish thing for me to do. First, the process of transcribing a manuscript and collating it (cataloging its variants) is a substantially objective process. In a small number of cases in which letters are partial, or correctors have gotten involved, there may be a dispute, but in that case you will generally have an indication in the edition itself or in the literature. Thus I can put a good deal of trust into the data provided to me in my edition of the New Testament in Greek. Second, my qualifications for deciphering the ancient manuscripts directly are definitely not first rate. I can read such manuscripts, but I have no exprience trying to fill in gaps, or judge disputed letters based on the copyists hand, and so forth. It is therefore not a good use of my resources to go check individual manuscripts for myself.

    If you take a step back from that, and consider someone who does not know Greek or Hebrew, then you may see the need to ask, “Is it a good use of my time to do a word study?” To answer that question, let me look at some of your alternatives.

    1. Using footnotes in your translation
      Most translations provide alternate renderings of passages in footnotes when a passage is controversial. For many people, a whole new world will open up if they will simply pay attention to the footnotes. Many times users of various Bible versions complain bitterly about a particular rendering and the damage done to “the truth” (as understood by the complainer) by a lousy rendering, and how the translators should at least give the reader the option of this alternate rendering. Frequently when I check such a complaint, I find the desired rendering given in a footnote.
    2. Comparing multiple translations
      As often as I find that footnotes resolve the problem, not all translation issues are noted in every translation–far from it. Try using multiple translations. Reading your passage in several translations will take you much less time than doing a thorough word study, and may provide you with all the information you need.
    3. Use various theological wordbooks in English.
      In this case you will be dependent on scholars for providing you with the options, but commonly such wordbooks provide a variety of potential definitions. Take each option offered and try it in the context of the passage you are studying.
    4. Commentaries and/or study notes
      These often provide alternate translations and discussions of why. It is important to realize that the discussion of the reasons behind a particular option is more important than simply listing the option. Those reasons allow you to check the work that has gone before you. Does it make sense? Does the resulting translation work in the context of your passage?
    5. Learn the script of the language in question and use lexicons
      Here you will often find the specific verse you are studying with the suggested gloss or definition for your word. You can get a strong head start by listing the available definitions and some key passages from the lexicon entry, and looking those up to check and see how well they work. You will probably be amazed at how often the lexicon is right on target.
    6. Always study a passage in context
      Most errors in interpretation come from focusing too narrowly on a single verse or even phrase. If you come up with an understanding of the meaning of a particular word that contradicts the teaching of that author in the rest of his writings, you might want to reconsider. Who is more likely to have made a mistake?

    Each of these options will provide you with a substantial amount of information about a particular word or passage, and will give you many options to choose from in your study. In this way you can depend on scholars, but do so intelligently.

  • Two Stories about Prayer in School

    . . . but they supposedly recount one incident.

    The first came to me via the Traditional Values Coalition alert e-mail, which is generally quite strident. It referred me to this story on Alain’s Newsletter, which tends to make the TVC alerts look calm, collected, and irenic.

    Now here’s another story, this time from The Columbian. You need to read both stories to get the picture here. I’m not going to quote extensively from them.

    I think one can get most of the facts out of these stories, if one ignores the hyperbole and possible reconstructions. But if you look at what is reported and what is emphasized in each story, you will see an excellent example of how to slant news. It’s not by actually concocting facts from thin air. I think completely fabricated data is quite rare, but creative selection is quite another matter. Rather, it’s by means of reporting certain specific things.

    You see, if a group of students were refused permission to pray outside of class time and without disrupting the activities of the school, in other words, in good discipline, I would certainly be angry at the school. This sort of thing does happen, but it’s generally the result of ignorant school officials, lacking good judgment and sometimes fearful of lawsuits, though if they’re that stupid they should be subject to lawsuits. On this point everyone from the ACLU to the ACLJ can agree.

    I’m firmly in favor of prayer. I’ve written a couple of books on it, though only one is still in print. I teach weekend seminars on prayer. I’m not against prayer. Got that? So if the facts were solely as stated in the Alain’s Newsletter report, then no problem. Reinstate the students and let them pray.

    But there were certain things that defied probability, and so I looked for other stories to see if things would clarify themselves just a bit. I was doubtful of the claim that complaints came from “one Satanist” student. That’s one of those elements of a story that’s just too good (for the side of the writer) to be true. It might be, but I doubt it. Note that the offer of a classroom in which to offer prayer is missing from the Alain’s report.

    Now constitutionally I’m not 100% on the boundaries, but if the facts are as The Columbian reported them, I think the school officials will turn out to be within their rights, even though their reaction sounds excessive to me based on the provocation. Other facts could change my mind on that. On the other hand, if the disruption of traffic resulted from hecklers, and not from the actions of the praying students, I would be opposed to the actions of the school officials. The problem is that it is precisely key facts such as that one that are hard to dig out once emotions are high.

    I think the following facts are key:

    • The offer of a classroom and the appropriate supervision
    • Was it the praying students or hecklers who were disruptive (or a little of both)?
    • What was the response of the praying students to the school’s authority? If that authority was properly exercised, and yet resisted, that would explain greater sanctions.

    But more important than the legal issues, which are not my forte in any case, are the issues of Christian values. When we pray publicly, what message is it that we are trying to send? There is a good point here in Matthew 6:5-6. I don’t think we should read such a short message as condemning public prayer, as I have heard done, but the purpose of prayer should be questioned. If the purpose of the prayer is to make a show, to shove it in people’s face, then I think we need to reevaluate our actions. For example, if a classroom was indeed offered, as the school spokesman indicated, then the question would be why pray in the commons?

    Again, I think it is quite possible that more facts need to be brought out in this case, but based on what I have seen I would have serious concerns, both about the actions of the students and the sanctions imposed. I’ll have my eyes open for more clarification.

  • Moderate Christian Blogroll

    I’ve been way behind on giving alerts to what is happening on the blogs of the Moderate Christian blogroll, so today I did a bit of work, and I think I’ve improved the options for linking to one another by providing an aggregator that itself has an RSS feed. This only allows either titles or titles + summaries. It won’t copy your entire post, and it provides links back to your posts. If anyone is uncomfortable with this, please let me know. It is no more than the current aggregator prints, but it does add the aggregated RSS feed.

    I created a blog solely for the purpose of testing how these worked on wordpress.com blogs, so right now I’ve posted the instructions there. Check these out here. A copy of the aggregator is available as a page on this blog, here, along with the feed URL for the aggregated RSS feed.

    I am going to try using that blog for awhile to post updates from the blogroll, perhaps 5 blogs at a time, but I’m not sure that is even necessary, considering what the aggregator accomplishes. If I link to any posts from here it won’t be just because they’re on the blogroll, but rather because I want to comment on them. I might give up on this option, but that wordpress.com blog will stay up in any case to help me help those who have wordpress.com blogs.

  • Coops Series on the Atonement

    Coops is doing a series on the atonement. He says:

    Being the seasoned theologian and all (sarcastic), I thought it would be a fantastic topic to get to know better – especially since I’ve heard quite a bit about it in liberal and emergent circles lately. It may be good to really get my head around such an amazing concept (as best as I can, anyway).

    Yep! Sounds like a good topic to me. I’ll be reading.

  • Hebrews Audio Series

    Those who are following my irregular series on Hebrews on this blog may be interetest in the audio series that just started on the Pacesetters Bible School News Blog. This follows completion of the series on 1 Corinthians. This series has 15 messages, each about 20-25 minutes. They will be posted Monday through Friday in the morning.

    The first in the series is God’s Concept of Communication and deals with Hebrews 1:1-4.

  • Theodicy and Openness Theology

    Some time ago I made a few remarks on Dr. William Dembski’s article, Christian Theodicy in Light of Genesis and Modern Science (last accessed 3/4/07). I think it’s a wonderfully well-written article, though I disagree with his conclusions. I’m going to discuss this article a bit more, but first I want to cover one or two points (in separate posts) that are peripheral. The first one is Dembski’s treatment of openness theology. In general, Dembski is quite fair to his opponents in this article, but I think he misses the boat just a bit on dealing with openness theology, as one generally does when one attributes motivation to other people’s beliefs.

    The entire section to which I want to respond is contained in a single paragraph on page 34 of the essay, starting with this:

    The overwhelming reason for truncating divine foreknowledge in current theological discussion (especially among openness and process theologians) is to assist in the task of theodicy.

    This misses the point somewhat. I certainly did not come to favor openness theology because I needed it for theodicy. In fact, I regard theodicy as a generally doomed business. Theodicy has proven useless to me. When I watched my 17 year old son die after a five year fight with cancer, it was not any principled theodicy that kept my spiritual life alive. It was simple experience of the presence of God, even around the time of death. God is whatever God is.

    No, the problem for me is that there is simply a gap between God as portrayed in different passages of scripture and even the God I experience. I don’t mean that my experience of God challenges scripture. In fact, one of my major reasons for accepting the authority of the Bible is kind of in reverse. The God that I experience in prayer, meditation, and worship, is so effectively described by the vocabulary of the Bible, that I have to accept the probability that my experience is similar to the Biblical writers.

    In fact, my personal experience of God is fractured in similar was to what a surface reading of many Bible passages presents. Without going into great detail, one needs to reconcile the God who “declares the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10) is “the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow” (Hebrews 13:8) and yet “if a nation will turn from its evil, he will change his mind/relent” (Jeremiah 18:1-11). Many of us have become so theologically adept, whether we’re theologians or not, that we can reconcile those texts without thinking, bring the meaning of each into line with our theology.

    Similarly my personal experience of God goes through times of absolute sovereignty in which I feel carried forward without choice, and yet at other times places at which God allows me broad freedom. If my concept of God is too narrow for this experience, how likely is it to be broad enough for an actual infinite God who is the ground of all being?

    For openness theologians in general, and for me in particular, reconciliations of these aspects seem somewhat shallow, and seem to truncate one concept or another. The Bible speaks of humans having choices with consequences, consequences that would be different had humans behaved in a different manner. God repents frequently. In the book of Jonah, the prediction is that Nineveh will be destroyed in 40 days. The people repent, and God repents. God’s grace is given priority over at least the appearance of his foreknowledge.

    Thus my motivation in exploring openness theology is more an effort to give full weight to all of these aspects of scripture and personal experience of God in my theology. I have never seen free will or such broader approaches as openness as all that helpful. In the end, God created absolutely everything, good and bad, whether he did so directly as in special creation or indirectly as in an evolutionary model. If God is the ground of all being–a definition I like–then all chains of causation lead back to God, and all things happen because God wanted the universe to be that way. This remains true whether he limits his foreknowledge or not.

    In such theodicies, a limited God is absolved from having to remove evils for the simple reason that he is incapable of removing them.

    Well, no, not really. In such theologies God would be incapable of creating logical inconsistencies in the universe. Thus the finite beings cannot simultaneously have full freedom and yet be restricted from being evil. I recall interviewing Dr. Richard Rice, one proponent of openness theology a few years back for a conference on the Religion Forum, and he commented that it was not that God could not know everything, but that he chose to create the universe in such a way that he would not know everything. (I lost the transcript of that talk, so that is from memory, but I believe it is an accurate representation.)

    But why engage in such theodicies at all? No sound arguments show that divine foreknowledge is logically incoherent. To argue against God knowing future contingent propositions invariably involves questionable assumptions about how the world, though created by God, might nonetheless impede God’s knowledge of the future.

    Except that what is actually argued is that God impedes his own knowledge of the future. Now I have not read every exposition by openness theologians, and I imagine there are those who would limit God in the way Dembski describes, but that is not a necessary component of openness theology. Openness theology would best be expressed, in my view, solely as God’s approach to interaction with this finite universe. It’s a way in which various possibilities have been reconciled in the finite, when in the infinite they had no need of such reconciliation.

    Further, I think that the coherence of free will and foreknowledge is quite illusory. William Lane Craig’s lengthy exposition to the contrary notwithstanding, I would still regard a fixed future as incompatible with free will. That’s a long discussion in itself, however, so I will hold with just the assertion at this point.

    Moreover, divine foreknowledge does not preclude human freedom. If God foreknows what I shall choose, then I shall not choose otherwise. It doesn’t follow, however, that I can’t choose otherwise. As William Lane Craig puts it, “my freely chosen actions . . . supply the truth conditions for the future contingent propositions known by God.”62 In contrast to theodicies that attempt to justify God’s goodness/benevolence by looking to divine limitation, I’m going to argue that full divine foreknowledge of future contingent propositions is indispensable to a theodicy that preserves the traditional understanding of the Fall (i.e., one that traces all evil in the world back to human sin). [Citations in this passage are from from William Lane Craig. I reproduce footnote 59: William Lane Craig, “Divine Foreknowledge and Newcomb’s Paradox,” Philosophia 17 (1987): 331-350, available online at http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/newcomb.html (last accessed January 12, 2006). Access date is Dr. Dembski’s.]

    Here we see, I believe another example of the type of reconciliation I’m talking about. For Dembski, preserving a traditional understanding of the fall is important, and thus he looks for a reconciliation of the various elements that includes that traditional understanding. I believe that he operates in a way that is very similar to the openness theologians, and for that matter to most everyone else, in that he sees a number of teachings in scripture and hopes to provide an overarching theory that will account for them all. I have no problem with that. I simply point out that others are operating on the same motivation, and not simply moving the boundary markers in order to make themselves feel better about God.

    One option at all times is to reexamine our understanding of any particular point in the light of whatever evidence we have available. This means that the ideas of free will, of sovereignty, of evil, and yes, the traditional understanding of the fall can be examined again and again as we try to reconcile the various pieces of information available to us. There is no God-given general theory of divine sovereignty and human will. That is something we have to look for.

    In addition, we have to look at the sources. One difference between various approaches to theodicy is sources. What weight is given to scriptural statements over observations of the natural world? I would have to say, for example, that an observation of the history of life on this planet creates an interesting question about the God who “sees a sparrow fall” (Matthew 10:29) and the God who permits “survival of the fittest” as the driving force in the diversity of life.

  • Should a Pedophile be Welcome at Church?

    I’m not sure how to react to this story, but I think it’s a good one for discussion. On MSNBC I found the following story: Sex offender can worship – with conditions. I find the story troubling. As a grandparent of 5, I have to ask whether I would regard it as safe to have my grandchildren at church with him. At the same time, I would also have to ask what alternative I would propose to minister to such a person.

    The church made a covenant of restrictions on his activity, monitoring, and accountability. But one church member expressed the question quite well:

    Mary Carlson, a single mother of an 8-year-old girl, has fears despite the covenant. “He is a pedophile, and this pedophile might be fantasizing about this little girl across the aisle,” she said.

    As a United Methodist, I uphold “Open hearts, Open minds, Open doors,” at least insofar as I can make any real meaning of the slogan. But this open?

    Any thoughts?

  • Two New Gaps in the Fossil Record

    I love it when these kinds of news stories hit the popular media. A new species of dinosaur was discovered by Michael Ryan in Alberta while he was a graduate student, and the find has now been published in the Journal of Paleontology, according to MSNBC. The dinosaur species is named Albertaceratops nesmoi, and it provides an intermediate between earlier, long-horned dinosaurs and more recent, shorter horned forms. (Note: I am not a subscriber to the journal, nor a paleontologist, and do not have access to the original article.)

    To quote:

    That makes the newly found creature an intermediate between older forms with large horns and later small-horned relatives, said State of Utah paleontologist Jim Kirkland, who with Douglas Wolfe identified Zuniceratops in New Mexico in 1998. He predicted then that something like Ryan’s find would turn up.

    Of course, our creationist buddies will certainly both fail to see this as an intermediate, and point out that there are huge unfilled gaps to either side, thus inspiring my title after the fact. 🙂