Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Rick Mansfield on the ESV

    Rick Mansfield has made an excellent post on the controversy with the ESV. He makes a number of excellent points, but I’d like to quote one paragraph from near the end:

    My contention is not with the ESV. But I do have great problems with the inaccurate rhetoric that I often hear from proponents and endorsers of this translation. I have favorite translations, and I have written about a number of them on this blog. While I talk of their qualities that I like and appropriate uses for them, I go out of my way to try to do so without needlessly putting down other versions of the Bible. I’ve probably been harder on the ESV on this blog than on any translation, but usually it’s been in a context of addressing the audacious and often fallacious claims made for it by ESV supporters. This idea that literalness equals greater accuracy or literalness equals greater faithfulness to the original text is pure nonsense if the rendering is so literal that the author’s intent and meaning is unintelligible to readers and hearers. Antiquated vocabulary and sentence structure do not give a translation greater authority–it merely limits readership in an contemporary setting.

    I actually have very little against the ESV. It does have some awkward readings, but none of them are things that make it hard for me to use. I’ve recommended it to pastors who are uncomfortable with some of the gender-accurate (which they will call gender-inclusive) language in the NRSV. It provides an option to avoid the archaic language used in the RSV for prayer, and still keep to that general tradition.

    But it is currently being pushed forward by some people almost as a new “one true version” and this is more than questionable, it’s potentially dangerous. I too have my favorite versions, but no single version becomes the standard. The particular reasons used in support of the ESV are often inaccurate as well.

  • Rounding Up the Moderate Christian Blogroll

    Well, here I go again. These are a bit irregular, but I do like to call attention to particular post. As usual the blogs are listed in the order they appears on the aggregator when I displayed it, except that my own blogs are listed at the end. Most blogs have only one post listed, but I may list more than one where they are of particular interest. This post will be cross-posted on the Pacesetters Bible School Newsletter and Threads from Henry’s Web. This one’s going to be a bit briefer than normal, so if I get the point wrong, be sure to comment. I know you will anyhow!

    Peter Kirk and I have already linked to one another quite a bit on the ESV and Pastor Mark Driscoll’s explanation of the theological basis for its use at Mars Hill Church. Peter has also written something more favorable to Driscoll regarding God’s “maleness” as metaphor.

    Donny Prater is talking about his son’s reaction to the power rangers.

    Allan Casilao is Celebrating Marriage.

    Jay Voorhees reports on a gathering of Methobloggers at The Internet is our Parish.

    Jedidiah at Everyday Liturgy is still meditating on the wonder of the incarnation.

    Donny Pauling explains to us how his house has become a God Den.

    Bill Vernick thinks a number of regulations that government claims are to protect us are perhaps less beneficial than one might wish in Is the Cart Before the Horse?.

    Kievas Fargo reflects on the first week of the New Year, and rejoices that his church is recognizing that prayer should be at the center of everything they do.

    Molly has joined the discussion of literal translation and also some of the gender language involved, and considering she says some nice things about my own posts I really had to link to it!

    Eddie Arthur was glad to hear an old song, but while he has “no objection to people having the liberty to proclaim any sort of lifestyle or religion they want” he is concerned that Christians also be able to freely express their views.

    The Pen of the Wayfarer tells us about the Martyrdom of Polycarp.

    gavin richardson reports on the internet is our parish conference in this a several more posts.

    Bruce Alderman has started bringing us his principles of interpretation.

    My own time has been occupied bringing reports of the new by-laws adopted at the November annual board meeting for Pacesetters Bible School, and calling for nominations from Pacesetters members for the Bible Pacesetter Award, now to be given annually. On Threads from Henry’s Web, I jumped into the discussion of theology and the ESV, pretty much with both feet, and I added something to that debate on my Participatory Bible Study Blog. Finally, on the Jevlir Caravansary, I provided a brief note on the Lord Meren Mysteries by Lynda S. Robinson, and which are set in ancient Egypt.

  • Maintaining and Improving Biblical Languages Skills

    This post is for a rather limited subset of what (I hope) my audience is here–those who have some knowledge of Biblical Greek, Hebrew, or both. Tragically, many seminary students learn a little bit of Greek or Hebrew but not enough to really put to use, and then they spend the rest of the career (or at least the next couple of weeks) forgetting what they learned. There are two common results–either a pastor/teacher who presents inaccurate information about Biblical languages in teaching, or one who simply leaves out Biblical languages in study altogether. In the former case we have the tragedy of misinformation confidently presented by an authority figure. In the latter, we have the waste of seminary and seminarian time and money.

    I’m going to post a few short entries here about maintaing and improving your Biblical languages skills. Most of these suggestions are equally applicable to both Hebrew and Greek, or even to Aramaic if you have it. Specific tools, of course, will generally apply to one or the other.

    My first general suggestion is simply that you continue to read material in the Biblical language that you studied. There are several things that tend to prevent students from doing this. You may be overwhelmed and disgusted, and never want to see the material again. You may feel that you can’t really read, so what’s the use in trying. You may decide to try, but set excessively ambitious goals.

    So at the first level, let me suggest just making the opportunity to see some Greek several times a week. (I’m going to use “Greek” here for convenience, but this applies equally well to Hebrew.) There are a number of tools to help you do this. Bible software these days, from e-Sword to the source language texts from the NeXt Bible or Logos Bible Software include tools to take you quickly to the lexical entry on various Greek words. Your teacher probably told you not to do this while you were initially learning, but you’re out of class now, and the problem is maintaining and building. These tools allow you to see more Greek text.

    Then there’s the ultimate crib sheet–a good Bible version. I normally recommend dynamic equivalence translations, but for this purpose you will want a literal translation like the ESV, NRSV, or NASB. These are again available in the various software packages I’ve mentioned.

    If you don’t have the Bible software, take your Greek New Testament and get the Reader’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament. Again, this is a tool you wouldn’t be encouraged to use during first year Greek, but you’re away from the seminary now and trying to maintain your Greek.

    There are some other tools that can help, including grammars, but I’m going to discuss them in a later post. The idea here is that no matter how badly your Greek has faded, you can work your way through a passage. (You will, of course, need to refresh the alphabet.) Don’t be afraid even to just accept the translation in whatever English version you’re using if you don’t understand the material from the text. In later posts I’ll give you suggestions for getting beyond this, but for now you just want to dip your toes in the water.

    At this point don’t get too ambitious. If you can only manage one verse per day, do that. You may have heard of folks who read a chapter each of Greek and Hebrew every day. I read three or four of each besides whatever I read for current research projects. But I’ve been doing this for quite a few years, and I left seminary with five years of Greek and four of Hebrew to which I’ve now added nearly 25 years of reading on my own. Don’t get tangled up with grand goals. Be content to read a verse at a time, and do so several times per week.

    In later posts I’ll discuss solving grammatical issues, reference grammars, building vocabulary, and getting the immediate blessing for your devotional life and your teaching.

  • Man, Mankind, or People – Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 6:5-8

    On my Threads blog I comment on Pastor Mark Driscoll’s theological basis for using the ESV at Mars Hill Church. In that article Driscoll makes a special point of the translation of the Hebrew “‘adam” in Genesis 1:27 by the NRSV and NLT:

    Translations such as the New Revised Standard accommodate this by wrongly translating “male and female” in Genesis 1:27 as the androgynous “humankind.” The New Living Bible translates it as the genderless “people.”

    I commented in that previous post on this point, quoting the NRSV translation which does include the words “male and female” but which translates the Hebrew “‘adam” with “humankind” where the ESV uses the word “man.”

    Now I can see no indication that there is any special emphasis put on the masculine by the use of “‘adam” in Genesis 1:27. In fact, the verse is a clear case of both male and female being included in the definition of the word “‘adam.”

    But I wonder if Driscoll and other critics of the NRSV, NLT and many other versions who use this translation of “‘adam” think the same thing about Genesis 6:5-8:

    5 Now the Lord observed the extent of the people’s wickedness, and he saw that all their thoughts were consistently and totally evil. 6 So the Lord was sorry he had ever made them. It broke his heart. 7 And the Lord said, “I will completely wipe out this human race that I have created. Yes, and I will destroy [one instance of “‘adam” not directly translated] all the animals and birds, too. I am sorry I ever made them.” 8 But Noah found favor with the Lord. — Genesis 6:5-8 (NLT, emphasis mine)

    I’ve bolded each case of a translation of the word “‘adam.”

    Now my question is this: Is there a particular masculine component here as well? Was God much more angry at the men than at the women? Did he determine to destroy the men, and wipe out the women as a side-effect?

    Note: For more on translation methods, see also posts by Wayne Leman, Richard Rhodes and Peter Kirk. These were all posted since my initial post over on my Threads blog.

  • Mars Hill or Planet Mars

    Peter Kirk has weighed in on the subject of my previous post in his post Mars Hill Church: on a different Planet?

    He says:

    I have looked at the original text (well, a scholarly edition of the Greek text) of Romans 3:24 and cannot find the word “justification” there. There are no English words, only Greek ones. In fact this word is not in any of the translations Driscoll quotes, but I guess he is referring to the word “justified”.

    I guess I wasn’t the only one to see the problem there! All of Peter’s post is well worth reading.

  • The Impossibility of Verbal Plenary Translation

    I have heard many good things about Mars Hill Church in Seattle, despite some theological disagreements (with whom do I not have such disagreements?) so I was disappointed to receive the following via e-mail from a friend: Theological reasons for why Mars Hill preaches out of the ESV.

    This isn’t intended as an attack on the ESV. I put the slogan “the best Bible version is one you read.” If you find your Bible reading life lighting up when you read the ESV, then by all means use it for reading and study. If the carefully gender accurate language of such versions as the NRSV grates on your nerves, then by all means use it, but admit that it’s because of your language tastes, and not because of theology. If you’re reading the ESV because you think it is theologically more correct, or because it more accurately and clearly conveys the message of scripture to the populace in general, then I urge you to think again.

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  • Welcome Newest Moderate Christian Blogroll Member

    I have just added adventures in mercy to the Moderate Christian Blogroll and Aggregator.

    Stop by and say hello, comment, trackback, whatever. While you’re at it, check out the following posts that caught my eye:

    Happy blogging!

  • Pat Robertson and the Meaning of Prophetic

    One of the dividing lines in Christian churches today is over the gifts of the Holy Spirit. While speaking in tongues gets most of the attention, the gift of prophecy is a close second. In terms of its potential to tear a church apart, it comes out ahead of tongues, I think. Currently there seem to be two major approaches. First, there are those who refuse to allow anything like prophecy, seeing safety in simple denial, while on the other hand we have many churches in which just about anyone who claims to speak words from God is at least tolerated.

    There is also a strong tendency not to want to say anything in opposition to anyone specific who claims to be a prophet, often under the idea that one should, like David, never speak against God’s anointed. The difficulty here is that one has to question the precise type of anointing and calling of someone who peddles nonsense as the word of God.

    Let me clarify quickly what I mean here by prophetic. There is a general popular sense of “prophetic” as a message that predicts the future. On the other hand, there is a religious or spiritual sense of prophetic that deals with correction and challenge to a group of people. A “prophetic voice” might call a community to greater social action, for example. The Biblical prophetic movement combined aspects of both. I would suggest, in fact, that you will find little or no prediction in Biblical prophecy that is intended simply to satisfy curiosity or to provide information about the future as its purpose. Rather, when a prophet speaks of the future he does so to challenge the community or individual to some form of action, or to rebuke or correct.

    Both of these aspects are tied together by the affirmation of the prophet that he speaks for God, and by the acceptance of the audience that he does so. Prophets did face rejection, but only rarely was this rejection based on the assumption that the prophet was false. The sense in which I’m using the word “prophetic” prophetic here includes those three elements: challenge or rebuke, prediction or promise, and an affirmation of divine guidance or content.

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  • Back to Elections

    I actually wrote this thing a couple of days ago because I was tired of all the hype about lobbying reform, which I expect will make much less difference to the way business is done than the hype about it suggests. Like pay as you go, it’s something that makes good headlines, but the question is always whether the people who pass it will live up to the expresse ideals. I didn’t post it immediately because I couldn’t find a good analysis of the bill or any nice incidents to link to.

    That is, until this morning, when MSNBC.com sent me a late Christmas gift. In an article titled So much for congressional lobby reform? they tell us about a great democratic celebration, similar to an earlier Republican celebration when they were in the same position. All of which goes to show that the lobbyists and the congressman are still going to be working closely together.

    Which leads me to what I think is the only possible solution: Elections. Elections would seem to be the basis of a republican form of government, but it seems that the basic responsibility of citizen’s to inform themselves and to vote are fading further and further into the background. But we already have elections and they don’t seem to work, you say? Indeed we do. But if elections don’t work, nothing else will. If we as voters don’t start turning out the people who behave in a corrupt manner, there is nothing that will do it.

    What will happen, of course, is lots of things that create headlines, so that we’ll feel like something has been done. That’s why laws are named as they are: “No Child Left Behind,” “A Bill to Simplify . . .,” etc. Nobody names a bill “Lots of regulations to make a marginal change, at best,” though that would be closer to the truth.

    Campaign finance reform, some aspects of lobbying reform, term limits, and other similar projects are often hailed as great benefits for democracy. We have some of it in the first 100 hour efforts of the new Democratic leadership in congress. But I think we need to ask whether passage of new rules is the proper response to violations of the old rules, and whether restricting people’s freedom is a proper response to a lack of responsibility. (See House Democrats Prepare to Tighten Lobbyist Rules.)

    I think it’s quite appropriate to place limitations on what elected leaders can accept, but I’m extremely worried about restrictive reporting requirements on lobbying organizations, and other methods that tend to restrict political commentary or restrict access of citizens to their government. In the flurry of reform legislation, one thing that seems to be neglected is that we’re talking about people who were caught, and very frequently punished for their violation of the old rules. Under those circumstances, I suspect the new packages have more to do with making people feel that their legislators are doing something substantive than with actually accomplishing anything new.

    I received an e-mail alert from the Traditional Values Coalition. The reason I bring up their alert in particular is that TVC is an organization with which I almost never agree. In fact, this particular alert is typically hysterical on a number of issues. In general, I do not wish the TVC well in their efforts. But I absolutely do not want to prevent them from having access to elected leaders to lobby. In reality, however, I doubt that lobbying groups will be more than inconvenienced.

    I’m going to be watching the results of this legislation. It’s hard to work through all the details and people disagree on what will apply and what will not. For example, will reporters who work for companies that have lobbyists still be permitted to go to lunch with congressional staffers? Some interpretations suggest not. The real question is this: Two years from now, or four or six, will we be able to say honestly that congress is less corrupt, more responsive and responsible?

  • More on Principles of Biblical Interpretation

    Bruce Alderman disagrees with some of the principles of interpretation from Trivium Pursuit, which I referenced earlier, and has started a series on the same topic. His first principle is:

    All this is a long way of introducing my first principle of biblical interpretation: “God, what are you trying to tell me through these scriptures?”

    That sounds like an excellent question. I’ll be watching for the continued discussion.