Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Why I Dislike Both Major Parties

    One of the few things the Democrats and Republicans can agree on is measures to keep themselves in power. This includes limiting access to the ballot and making sure that the election system continues to favor the two major parties.

    Thus, it’s good news that the supreme court has agreed to review the appeals court decision that has set aside the voting system in Washington state as unconstitutional (scotusblog and story on CQPolitics).

    I lived in Washington in the good old days of the pre-2003 open primary system, and I truly appreciated it. Anyone could get on the initial ballot, but you were guaranteed a general election ballot with a limited number of candidates. That system was abandoned earlier as unconstitutional.

    I’m not going to get into the details of constitutional law on this one, but I believe it’s a stretch to call these unconstitutional. The 9 robed ones in the other Washington get to make that decision. But from a political point of view, I believe the country would benefit from this type of system nationwide. The idea that we must choose between an abominable Republican and an obnoxious Democrat (or vice versa) is one of the causes of political apathy, not that I allow such an excuse–in a democracy all should get involved and have only themselves to blame for the result if they don’t.

    I believe the problem the two parties have with this is not that someone who is not really a Republican or really a Democrat (who can tell?) might get on the ballot against the will of the party. Rather, their problem is that in the initial election everyone starts equal. There is no automatical appearance for a Democratic or Republican candidate. There is no particular benefit, except for the effort a party can make for the candidate, to being affiliated with a party.

    The Washington state system solves many perceived problems of minor party participation. What about the multiplicity of parties diluting the vote so that a candidate who actually only represents a minority of the constituency can be elected? Ignoring the fact that in many cases the “hold your nose” vote probably means much the same thing, the Washington system still provides only two candidates for the general election. The legal issues may be a bit thornier, but in practical terms, I think it’s an excellent solution. Opposition by both the Democratic and Republican parties of Washtingon only makes me more certain. Anything those guys can agree on, I’m probably against!

  • Journalistic Duty and the Jesus Ossuary

    Carl Zimmer has an excellent short post at The Loom commenting on the journalistic duties involved. Go read it–it will only take a few moments, but it makes a critical point.

    One of the failures of the Christian response to this is to get over-the-top about attacks on Christianity, when what we are actually dealing with is an unscientific report irresponsibly presented. Zimmer has hit the nail directly on the head on this one.

  • Is it a Hoax?

    Rev. Rob Schenck of the National Clergy Council issued a statement attacking the forthcoming documentary on the grave of Jesus and his family. It was titled TV Special on Jesus’ Grave — a Hoax?. Though I have already commented on what I see is a completely unscientific and unscholarly hype, this is not terribly surprising in terms of the shallow reporting the media gives to historical projects. “Hoax” is probably too strong a word. One must, after all, take into account the standards (such as they are) of the industry before condemning a single individual. The documentary will probably have as much truth as one would expect–very little.

    But Rev. Schenck himself engaged in some similarly unscientific and unscholarly rhetoric himself:

    “Media outlets should exercise restraint in reporting Cameron’s Hollywood fiction masquerading as scientific fact. All of Jesus’ contemporaries recorded Christ rose after being dead for three days and ascended into Heaven. For 2,000 years people of faith along and countless scholars have pored over the Scriptures, confirming their veracity. A Hollywood director is the least qualified to render any determination of Biblical truth. Not only so, but the people Mr. Cameron has partnered with completely lack credibility. One has been discredited by experts as a charlatan. This is nothing more than a modern day circus sideshow. At best it is pure presumption. At worst, it is pure chicanery.” [Emphasis mine]

    Instead of responding with a more reasoned approach to the evidence, Schenck responds with hyped rhetoric. It is plainly obvious that not every contemporary recorded that Jesus rose and ascended into heaven. That might be good advertising copy, but it is not good scholarship, nor does it do anything to promote a Christian understanding. The second sentence I emphasized simply affirms that Christians have believed in the resurrection. It is certainly debatable from a historical point of view. It’s interesting also that the National Clergy Council chooses to present a response from a person whose bio shows no signs of any qualifications in archeology or history at all.

    For me, the resurrection of Jesus is an article of faith. I welcome neither careless documentaries, as this one will almost doubtless turn out to be (it’s claims are clearly excessive), nor do I welcome hyped and careless defense of my faith.

  • Finding the Tomb of Jesus

    A documentary to be shown on the Discovery Channel purports to have discovered the tomb and the ossuary of Jesus (CNN story here).

    I’m amazed that something like this would be called a “documentary” since there is next to no possibility of sufficient evidence for such a claim. The sad thing is that archeological claims, when popularized, rarely resemble anything a trained archeologist would actually say. Archeology is not about searching for a specific person’s remains or some specific artifact, Indiana Jones movies notwithstanding.

    This is not, however, solely a province of opponents of Christianity. When archeological discoveries have even the slightest relationship to the Biblical text, Christians will portray them as new “proofs” of the accuracy of the Bible. Inevitably they do no such thing, but each side contributes to this attitude of proving or disproving. Then of course others make discoveries that disprove Christianity, but later these prove to be no such thing either.

    Scientific historical study doesn’t work this way. The point is not to prove or disprove an entire collection of documents, such as the Bible, but rather to determine historicity point by point and create a most probable reconstruction of historical events. That process involves a great deal of nuance, and a willingness to admit ignorance in many cases, or tentative conclusions in many others.

    Both the statements “archeology proves the Bible” and “archeology disproves the Bible” are silly. The Bible is not a single source from the historical point of view, and sources are not proven or disproven, rather, individual elements of a story will be determined to be more or less probable.

  • The Balance of Outrage

    Frequently I see the challenge to outrage on blogs or even occasionally in print media. It goes something like this: Group A has been very outraged by X, the horror of which is minimized by the writer. The writer describes something that outrages him or her, surely much more horrible than X, and wonders if Group A will be duly outraged by this new thing. If they don’t, they are inconsistent and possibly morally reprehensible.

    I’m not really aiming this at anyone in particular. I’m certainly guilty of this very behavior. The idea is that we have to expend appropriate amounts of outrage and the various bad things that happen. Our outrage should balance, and will say something about our true moral beliefs. A lack of expressed outrage is sometimes taken as an indication that someone secretly approves of the horrifying action, or perhaps is totally apathetic.

    Well, I’m resigning from this little game. I think it’s silly. I cannot be outraged about all the outrageous things that go on in the world. There are simply too many. I cannot express my outrage at all the things that do outrage me. Time at the keyboard would fail me.

    Many different things go into personal outrage, a personal connection being the most important. Other factors also enter into writing about such outrage. There are a number of issues that have angered me a great deal, but yet have not moved me to write. Often this is because I can’t think of anything to say that I feel would be constructive. In other cases, I don’t believe I can gather enough facts to back up whatever I say. (Sometimes that doesn’t stop me!) At other times I feel that so many people have expressed themselves on an issue that anything I might say would be superfluous.

    So when I express outrage at something here, it means nothing more or less than it says. It doesn’t mean that’s the only thing that annoys me at the moment. It doesn’t mean that I think other issues on which I have not commented are unimportant. It doesn’t mean that I have created a hierarchy of outrage, and am now blogging through the top 10. If you challenge me to outrage so as to prove my sincerity, I’ll evaluate it in the same way. If you think this makes me insincere, well, that’s you’re problem.

    Enjoy being outraged! 🙂

  • Word Study Dangers: Glosses and Definitions

    In my previous entry in this series I noted the difference between a gloss and a definition. To review:

    First, let me distinguish between a “gloss” and a “definition.” A “gloss” is a word or phrase proposed as a translation for a word in the source language. When a Greek student is taught that “pistis” means “faith” what he is learning is a “gloss.” Contrast that with the following from the Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains: “that which is completely believable—‘what can be fully believed, that which is worthy of belief, believable evidence, proof” [Louw, J. P., & Nida, E. A. (1996, c1989). Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament : Based on semantic domains (electronic ed. of the 2nd edition.) (Vol. 1, Page 370). New York: United Bible societies)]. While I could complain just a bit, the latter is a definition, rather than a mere gloss.

    Two pitfalls that are related must be avoided. The first is trying to create a single definition for a word that covers the whole range of meaning of a word. Most words actually have clusters of meaning and sometimes these don’t even overlap. Native speakers naturally apply the precise definition of a word for the particular circumstances. In American English, for example, we have the word trunk, which may reference the trunk of an elephant, a trunk in which one packs clothes, the rear compartment of one’s car, the main torso of a person’s body, or the main shaft of a tree. In British English you have a boot that you put on your foot, or the boot of a car, which is the same as the American trunk. These definitions are related, but are better defined separately.

    Now imagine how silly it would sound if someone reads me a passage about a tree, and then asks what the word trunk means in that passage, and I respond by reading the full list of definitions. Obviously the person asking wants the definition of trunk as it applies to trees, and that is the only definition to provide. Yet preachers regularly read a list of definitions from Webster’s (a favorite with American prechers), and proceed as though the congregation now understands the English word.

    Let’s think about the process here. First there is a word in the source language. Translators carefully choose an English word whose meaning adequately expresses a similar meaning. The semantic range of the two words will not be equivalent, but they overlap adequately to provide a meaningul sense in the translation. Now an English speaking preacher or teaching comes along and reads the full list of definitions of the English word, each of which represents a range of meaning for that word. The result is not clarity, but rather a fog. Because the listeners have seen the dictionary consulted, they feel that they have a meaning, but were you to ask them precisely what that was, they wouldn’t know, or even worse, they might know something that was just not so.

    The second is a kind of reverse of the above. In this case the preacher or teacher announces that the Greek word that we here have translated ____ actually means . . .” and then reads a list of glosses from the concordance or from a standard Greek lexicon. Again, only one of those meanings will be the center of the range of meaning.

    I’m going to keep this entry short. Let me just conclude by restating the key factor in word studies: The result should be finding a working definition that fits precisely in the specific context.

    Next: Word Study Dangers: Your Dependence on Scholars

  • With Reasons Like These . . .

    . . . who needs rationalizations? I refer to the article 7 Reasons Why (it’s title in the title bar) also titled “Key Issues Regarding Bible Translation.” This is on the domain genderneutralbibles.com, (yes, Virginia, there really is a genderneutralbibles.com!).

    A while back I blogged on Mark Driscoll’s reasons for using the ESV at his church. But with highly credentialed people to feed pastors misinformation, what should we expect? I am freshly astounded at the poor quality of argumentation and even of exegesis that is used in these articles, even though I shouldn’t be, because I have read these so many times before. Much of this is warmed over KJV-Only argumentation, just used a little bit more narrowly.

    Let’s look at some of the major problems with this essay.

    In discussing 1 Kings 2:10, the authors wax quite eloquent about the wonders of the metaphor “slept with his fathers” as opposed to “died,” preferring the Hebrew metaphor for death to a modern understanding. One should, of course, note that the metaphor is a Hebrew metaphor, and question whether the modern English reader in fact hears all of the things the translators expect. This underlines one of the common problems with the arguments of advocates for literal translation: They speak constantly of what meaning a word, phrase, or passage “contains” without asking what an audience will hear when reading that translation. What is lacking is any testing to see precisely what people will hear and understand.

    This is precisely how I was awakened out of my own apathy on the issue of translations. I was already a fan of dynamic equivalence translations, and thought the KJV was hopelessly out of date in terms of language. But I felt there was no great reason for me to argue with anyone else about this until I was invited to teach on the history of the Bible to a group of high school aged young people. A couple of the students used the KJV, and when they would read, nobody, including them, understood. Now I still see no problem with my mother using the KJV. She’s 87 years old, has read it all her life, and can understand it quite well. But those young people could not. Why should I spend my teaching time in teaching them how to understand 17th century language?

    But that incident started me on learning something very important, other than the realization that many people try to use the KJV even though they don’t really understand it. It suggested to me that the right way to discover how well a Bible translation functioned was to ask people to read it or hear it, and then to explain what they had heard. This applies to the use of gender language, or in this case to the particular metaphor, “slept with his fathers.” Does this metaphor mean all those things to actual church congregations, new believers, or non-Christians? I haven’t tested that particular one, though I suspect the answer is that few people would come up with all the wonderful meanings for the metaphor that our authors find. The problem is that those authors are blithely unconcerned with what people understand. For them, communication is all about what’s “in” the text, not about what readers actually understand from it.

    Thus we see the following:

    Supporters of essentially literal translations would agree that the dynamic equivalence rendering “then David died” does translate the main idea into contemporary English, but they would add that it is better to translate all of the words of the Hebrew original, including the word shakab (which means, “to lie down, sleep”), and the words ‘im (which means “with”), and

  • Welcome Seekism to the Moderate Christian Blogroll

    The latest addition is Seekism, with his latest post, Does the Old Testament Accurately Describe God.

  • Gifts Ministry and Blaspheming the Holy Spirit

    OK, that should be a sufficiently provocative title! 🙂

    Peter Kirk commented on an earlier post and gave me some advice–advice which I would normally consider quite good sense. Here it is:

    But maybe you are going a bit too far, at least to keep yourself out of trouble, in suggesting that those who do not accept women’s ministry may be guilty of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

    Now I would normally take that advice, because heating up a debate such as this is commonly quite unhelpful, but in this case, I’m not going to, and instead I’m going to make my reasoning explicit, paint a target on myself, and see who wishes to take target practice. I do not mean to destroy dialogue, but I have claimed repeatedly that there must be a balance between expressing one’s views forcefully and allowing room for conversation in any dialogue. Often what passes for dialogue consists entirely of watered down arguments and sentiments, and results in a mental fog rather than an exchange of opinions. I would reference my responses to the Adrian Warnock interviews with Wayne Grudem as an example. I responded with some vigor to a number of points, yet at no time was I actually angry with Adrian or with Wayne Grudem. I know that some things that I said did offend a couple of people, but I think I said what was necessary in order to be honest.

    Looking Back

    Now I’m going to refer back to my response to that interview on a couple of points. First, however, a correction. I quote from my own post:

    I would note however, that while I disagree with the idea of male-only church leadership, I am not particularly offended by churches that follow such a practice. Anyone who dislikes their view can go find another church, and there are plenty of those. What I object to is that this doctrine is made an essential of the faith. . . .

    I am going to refine that position in this post, because I don’t think I drew the line correctly, and I think that my response has become more vigorous due to some experiences since that time.

    In the same post, I also partially defend Grudem’s use of the term blasphemy for the views of another, from his viewpoint:

    Now I know that Dr. Grudem retracted his acceptance of the term “blasphemy” when used of Steve Chalke (with whom I am not acquainted). I’m a little less happy with that retraction than others are. Don’t get me wrong here please. I appreciate the humility and the willingness to dialogue that it represents. But I wonder if at root there isn’t some justification for the word form Dr. Grudem’s point of view on the atonement. Now I can’t speak for him, but what suggests this to me is my own reaction from the other side. The claim that penal substitutionary atonement is the essence of the atonement tempts me to use the word blasphemy because I believe it paints such a wrong picture of God, one different from the revealed and experienced God. Now I’m also going to resist use of the term, though my own use of anti-God could easily be as provocative. Thus I understand both John Piper’s desire to use the term, and Wayne Grudem’s initial agreement.

    Again, I want to refine that comment just a bit in this post by being more specific about why I use (and used) the term “blasphemy” in that particular context, and why I can understand its use by another against my own position. A bottom line point here, however, is that if anyone who is a part of the family of Jesus believes that I am in danger of blaspheming the Holy Spirit, my preference is that they say so. I may disagree with them, but I get the opportunity to examine my own beliefs and question myself, which is a good thing. I regard that as part of the attitude of repentance.

    The Unpardonable Sin and Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit

    I need to say just a few words about the unpardonable sin. It is commonly equated, and quite scripturally so, with the phrase “blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.” I am not going to fully defend my position on this in a post that will already be quite long, but I do not believe that blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is a single act, nor is the unpardonable sin singular. I have commented on this briefly in the Participatory Study Series pamphlet Repentance and Rejoicing:

    One of the tasks of the Holy Spirit is to convict of sin. If we turn away the Holy Spirit so much that we no longer hear His voice, we will no longer ask for pardon and it will, in fact, be too late.

    I discuss this a bit further in my personal testimony, and also in a sermon which was broadcast on the radio here in Pensacola, and will be podcast via the Pacesetters Bible School New Blog within the next few weeks.

    In summary, I believe that we are all more or less on the path between pardon and the unpardonable sin, which elicits the stern warning of Hebrews 6:4-6. There is a point of standing up against the urging of the Holy Spirit at which you will no longer hear the Holy Spirit speaking. When you get to that point, you will no longer as forgiveness, and thus will no longer be forgiven. Thus the unpardonable sin is that sin for which you do not ask pardon, and every time you resist the Holy Spirit, you head that direction. Fortunately, God’s grace is greater than our sin, and constantly pushes us to listen.

    To go even further, however, I believe that every time we resist truth in any area of our life, we build habits of resistance that start to shut our ears to new light and to correction. If I become so angry with Wayne Grudem (see above), for example, or John Piper for their comments on penal substitutionary atonement, that I refuse in the future to hear anything they say, I have taken a step away from being corrected. Now obviously I can’t physically read or hear everything that anyone might desire. I’m talking about the attitude.

    Gifts, Women’s Ministry, and Blasphemy

    So this brings me to the actual point of this post. (I imagine you thought I was never going to manage that!) I start from the simple position that the Holy Spirit gives gifts in the church as he wills in order to do the work of ministry. Unlike our federal government, God doesn’t give unfunded mandates. The Holy Spirit can accomplish your call and your congregation’s call through you provided that you let him. The presence of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the church indicate God’s intention that those gifts be used in ministry.

    Every time I close myself off to that call, every time I place a barrier in the way of the Holy Spirit carrying out his ministry in and through me, my family, or my congregation, I am speaking against the Holy Spirit, putting up my views and my agenda as greater than God’s. That is not only a form of idolatry, but when done in the face of the conviction of the Holy Spirit it is, I belive, a step on the road to blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. That blasphemy will become unpardonable if I get to the point of being unable to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches (Revelation 2-3).

    Now one caveat here. While I am now more offended than I was previously by churches who deny women a place in ministry according to their gifts, I do believe there is a substantial difference between believing that something is right and failing to do it and not being aware that something is right. Both are dangerous, because our awareness of the Holy Spirit–God’s breath in Christ’s body–is key to our Christian life. But the first can be disastrous in a short period of time, while the second erodes. If completely honest, those with the second error correct their course.

    This does not merely apply to women’s ministry. It applies to all forms of restrictions on ministry. I have seen churches where ministry was artificially restricted based on age, on economic status, on whether one was part of the founding families of the church, on intellectual ability or lack thereof, or on a buddy system with the elders and pastor. All of these things are, I believe, a way of flying in the face of the work of the Holy Spirit.

    My bottom line is this: Be open to what the Holy Spirit is actually doing. While you need some structure from sound doctrinal beliefs, it’s easy to be wrong and to place your own agenda above God’s agenda. The one way to be safe is to maintain that attitude of repentace, to remain correctable.

  • MBWR

    . . . is posted. I want to thank Allan Bevere for his hard work is regularly posting the roundup. I’ll be praying for him as he goes to speak outside the country. The MBWR will be missing for the next two weeks.