Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Finally Some Cover on Multiple Reading!

    Joe Carter at the evangelical outpost has written a post titled How to Change Your Mind. I’m not going to steal the thunder of his post, other than to say that it deals with reading passages multiple times.

    I have long been recommending reading a book of the Bible, or any passage you are about to study (to include a decent amount of context, and a logical selection) twelve times before going on to detailed study. I tell classes and study groups, normally over the shocked looks and nervous laughter that if they will follow this advice they will get an incredible blessing.

    The method Joe Carter is recommending is not precisely the same as mine. He’s talking about a slightly different number of times, though I’ll note that I tell people that they will get some significant blessing from increasing the number of times. I learned my method from my mother and have added to it.

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  • Tolerance or Homogenization

    I value tolerance. Even more, I value and celebrate diversity. But frequently I see definitions of tolerance that must be considered self-destructive.

    I usually encounter these in the form of straw-man arguments. Someone may ask me if I believe in tolerance. When I acknowledge that I do, they will ask me then whether I will tolerate some form of intolerance or another. The answer to that is, “It depends.” Whereupon I’m informed that I really don’t believe in tolerance because I don’t tolerate everything.

    I believe in tolerance as a value, not as an absolute. I don’t believe in tolerating everything, merely as much as it is possible to tolerate practically. If someone believes in firing a machine gun into a crowd of people, I find it quite appropriate not to tolerate his belief, at least if he has the intention and the means to act on it.

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  • Environmental Skepticism Where Appropriate

    The Evangelical Ecologist has an excellent post on the value of skepticism in the appropriate place, and also touches on where it is appropriate.

    He says:

    There is an important distinction, then, between aggressively promoting environmental stewardship as a God-ordained moral ethic (which it is), and aggressively promoting a particular area of human-derived environmental science as a moral ethic (which it is not).

    I think he makes a couple of excellent points in this post. I’ve been trying to find time to link to some of his stuff since I first found the site a few weeks ago, but I haven’t had the time. Go over and check it out.

  • MBWR To End

    John at Locusts and Honey, is bringing the Methodist Blogs Weekly Roundup to a close with this week’s edition. John has done a wonderful job of building up the Methodist blogosphere, and I have great sympathy for him as he lays aside this enormous task.

    I’ll miss the “human touch” in selecting the posts, but there is a new Methodist portal (the Methoblog) which has a good blogroll and some aggregation. So connection via the blogosphere continues.

    Thanks to John for his work. Onward and upward, folks!

  • Christian Carnival CXLVIII Posted

    Christian Carnival CXLVIII is now available at Crossroads for your reading pleasure.

    I will again try to post some links to some of the posts that catch my attention. I rarely get time to link to all of them.

  • Avoiding Shoot-First Apologetics

    My Christianity Today Connection e-mail this morning contained a link to an excellent article, Shoot-First Apologetics. I don’t want to steal the thunder from the article itself–go read it in place, but I do want to quote from the e-mail:

    And while defending the core elements of our faith is imperative, we sometimes shoot too hastily at those we’ve misidentified as enemies.

    I would like to note that the folks involved in this discussion are conservative evangelicals. The issue of courtesy in what we say, and care in determining friend and foe is one that cuts across the lines of the various parties in Christianity. It’s very easy to identify “different” as “hostile.”

    Of course we do need to remember that even if we identify someone as hostile, Jesus commands that we love that person, and not in the cartoon sense–“love those meeses to pieces!”

  • Hebrews 7:1-3: Reuniting Priesthood and Kingship

    1Now this Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of the Most High God, met Abraham when he was returning from the slaughter of the kings and blessed him. 2Abraham apportioned a tenth of everything to him. He is first “King of Righteousness” and then King of Salem which is “King of Peace.” 3He is without father, without mother, without genealogy, and has neither beginning of days nor end of life, but, in a way similar to the Son of God he remains forever. — Hebrews 7:1-3

    There is a critical element to the Melchizedek priesthood which is often neglected. It’s mentioned in the first verse of chapter 7: Melchizedek is both king and priest.

    In reading the Bible story we are accustomed to a substantial separation between royal authority and priestly activity. Though we have a brief hint at something different in the time of David (2 Samuel 8:18), there is a strong them of separation between the civil authority and the priesthood. This is emphasized by the experience of Uzziah, who tried to usurp priestly functions and became a leper for his efforts (2 Chronicles 26:16-21).

    But it’s easy to miss the significance of this element in the theology of the book of Hebrews. In Biblical history, this separation begins with Exodus 19 when the Isralites are afraid of hearing the voice of God from Mt. Sinai. They are invited to be a holy nation and a kingdom of priests, but they prefer to have a safer distance. In the New Testament, this theme is picked up in 1 Peter 2:9 in which Christians are referenced in the same terms. To someone acquainted with the Hebrew scriptures, this was a not so subtle way of suggesting that we have entered into the Messianic age.

    In Hebrews, the Melchizedek priesthood serves to make the same point. While civil power was separated from the priesthood from the time when the tabernacle was being built in the wilderness forward, the Melchizedek priesthood was also a royal priesthood. Thus besides being eternal, which is of great importance to our author, authority and priestly intercession are combined in one person, Jesus who is both king and priest.

    This connection is emphasized by the use of Psalm 110. In its original setting, Psalm 110 is an accession psalm, a poem or hymn celebrating the accession of the king to the throne, and thus YHWH says to “my lord” (the poet is speaking), sit at my right hand, vesting the king with divine authority and promising him victory.

    While by modern standards of exegesis, our author uses the wording of Psalm 110 in a substantially different way (I think he’s allowed that as an inspired writer), he still manages to pull in a great deal of meaning by using that precise reference.

    In the incarnation, God becomes human, experiences humanity, and at the same time royal authority (lawgiving, enforcement, sovereignty) with the priesthood (intercession, communication, connection) and God-become-man thus reaches us directly. As Jesus said, “On that day you will ask in my name. I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf;  for the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God” (John 16:26-27).

    Asking the Father himself, and knowing that the Father himself loves us, is one of the great gifts of the incarnation. Priestly and royal power have come together again.

  • Just What the Bible Says – Again

    By reading the new Methoblog portal, I located an entry The Use and Misuse of the Bible . Most of this is a quote of a sermon by A. Allen Brindisi at Davidson College Presbyterian Church, which you can read here, though there is a substantial quote in the blog entry.

    To quote from the sermon:

    There is the rub: to distinguish between what the Bible seems to say, and what it “really

  • Different Standards of Evidence

    In a post some time ago titled The Dog DID my Homework I commented on the odd inequity of intelligent design advocates asking for detailed evolutionary histories of each structure, while expecting no more than raw assertions of themselves.

    Carl Zimmer on The Loom has written a National Geographic article on the evolution of complex structures (I haven’t read it yet, but will get there soon). Casey Luskin responded (?) to the article, and Zimmer has in turn responded to him.

    Zimmer comments:

    It’s remarkable that he calls for an absurdly detailed reconstruction of history as evidence for evolution, while expecting nothing of the sort from advocates of intelligent design. Apparently the rules are different at the Discovery Institute. There you need only make vague references to a designer, claim some supposed shortfalls of evolution, and you’re done.

    I think this issue of the level of original research required of each side is the most telling point in the ID debate. ID advocates need to get down to doing and publishing original scientific research. Unfortunately, I don’t see any promising lines of such research, and apparently neither do the qualified scientists who should see them if there are some available.

  • Pseudo-Polymath Series on Genesis

    I’ve been intending to mention this since last week’s Christian Blog Carnival came out, but I’ve been distracted. Mark Olson at Pseudo-Polymath has started a series on Genesis from a philosophical perspective. The first entry is Reflections on Gensis: Chapter 1, and he has now posted the second entry, Reflections on Genesis: Chapters 2-3 (part 1).

    Right now I only want to make one comment and mention a couple of my own related posts. At the end of the first entry, Mark says:

    However, Kass suggests that scientific views evolution may deny the intelligibility and primacy of species (the separation noted in Genesis) and the importance and uniqueness of man. And in that sense it might be in opposition, but I’m not expert enough on evolution to know how notions “kind” and “species” which arise from Genesis are denied by evolutionary theory.

    I’d simply like to link to two of my previous posts that may relate; Design, Direction, and Evolution and An Evolutionary View of Kinds.