Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Gleaning from the Christian Carnival

    A good start for blogging on my return after a few days out is to link to a few of the entries from the Christian Carnival CXLI that caught my attention. As always, I’d love to read and comment on more of these entries, but I don’t have time to essentially redo the carnival. Go check it out yourself.

    Here are some entries that particularly caught my attention:

    • Revelation Introduction
      Michele of Life Under the Sun began a series on the book of Revelation. Based on the thoroughness of her introduction (I have a tendency to tell people to grab a commentary for this sort of thing) I suspect we will get some interesting and substantial material as she works her way through. I’m planning to follow this. I’ve been thinking in terms of doing some blogging on prophecy, so there may be a connection.
    • The First Fantasy of the Bible
      Here Adam Graham talks about the Parable of the Trees (Judges 9) and makes some interesting and helpful comments on the value of this genre of literature. This entry is a definite highlight in my blog reading.
    • Brothers and Sisters in Christ, Not Political Parties
      OK, this is the third time in a row I’ve highlighted a post from Laura on Pursing Holiness, but how could I possibly resist this excellent post? I think some of my views would make her wish to “crush [my] argument into oblivion” and vice versa. But it is a good idea to remember that “brother and sister” thing that goes with the “love” thing!
    • Collins – A Believer Looks at the Human Genome – Epilogue
      This is the conclusion of a series, and it’s worthwhile reading the whole thing. I would simply comment here that I think the effort to find evolution in the Bible is not a constructive one, though the effort at seeing how it might be possible is really well done. I think that the Bible comments on God’s place in creation and the fact of creation. Evolution is derived from the physical evidence and comments on the “how.” Nonetheless, this is good reading and will challenge your thinking no matter what position you start from.
    • Faith and Conversion
      This little article discusses the problem of attempting conversion by force. It is good to remember that Christians have tried to do this in the past. Some Muslims would like to do it in the present, and in neither case was it right. This post addresses this issue from the Chrsitian perspective.

  • Christian Carnival CXLI

    This is just a bit late, because I was out of town. Christian Carnival CLI is now up at A Penitent Blogger. I will try to take a look through and highlight some posts that attract my attention before the next one is posted.

    You can expect to find some impressions from the Charisma Book Expo that I just attended over on Energion Publications Announcements and Pacesetters Bible School Newsletter.

  • Christian Carnival CXLI Posted

    This is just a bit late, because I was out of town. Christian Carnival CLI is now up at A Penitent Blogger. Thanks to Penitens for a good job.

  • Out of Town – at Charisma Book Expo

    I’ll be out of town at the Charisma Book Expo in Atlanta Georgia from today, September 26 through Monday October 2. I will be stopping by to check comments and so forth as I have time, but I don’t expect to make new entries.

    As the owner of a small and new business, Energion Publications, I’m afraid I can’t afford to hire any wage-slaves to do this kind of work for me, so my wife and I will be running our booth.

  • Out of Town – at Charisma Book Expo

    I’ll be out of town at the Charisma Book Expo in Atlanta Georgia from today, September 26 through Monday October 2. I will be stopping by to check comments and so forth as I have time, but I don’t expect to make new entries. The Christian Blog Carnival should be posted tomorrow, and I do plan to link to that.

    As the owner of a small and new business, Energion Publications, I’m afraid I can’t afford to hire any wage-slaves to do this kind of work for me, so my wife and I will be running our booth.

  • Distinguishing Ideology and Linguistic Differences

    I located a post on Bible translations through the Methodist Blogs Weekly Roundup (for which I thank John the Methodist for his usual good job). The post is Ideology in Translations, but while I certainly believe ideology is involved in translations, I don’t see a battle of liberal vs conservative ideology here, and I also see some potential problems in the understanding of the linguistics involved.

    Conservative Seminarian points to the NIV translation of Genesis 2:19 “had formed,” rather than “formed” as it is in many translations, and seems to believe that this is evidence of bias in the translation committees:

    The difference is that the second one seems to have a time order contradiction to the Genesis 1 story (God made man, then the beasts), while the first one switches the verb tense slightly to make it fit (God made man, and had already made the beasts).

    Now, the professor admits that “had formed” is within the semantic range of the verb (יצר). But apparently, it is invalid to use that even though it makes the most sense within the text.

    . . . [snip]

    Now, the question is, doesn’t this make his determination of the verb form actually the one that has a theological axe to grind? The NIV committee seems to have simply chosen the tense of the verb (of the range of valid choices) that makes the most sense within the text. He wants to choose the one that makes the least sense, which just so happens to coincide with what he likes about the way the Hebrews collected scripture.

    Now I’m not writing this to beat up on Conservative Seminarian. I congratulate him on choosing to attend a liberal seminary and to learn better to defend his point of view. I also congratulate him on challenging any notion his professor might have that he responds to this topic without any ideological concerns. But the references that he provides also argue this largely on the basis of ideology, taking an apologetic approach. Now there’s nothing wrong with an apologetic approach where appropriate, but it works much better when the problems are correctly identified.

    The translations cited here, NIV and NASB, are both very conservative translations. In fact, quite a number of conservative translations support the position of the NASB. A quick list gathered from my Logos software includes CEV, TEV, ASV, ESV, KJV, The Message, NCV, NKJV, NLT, NRSV, YLT. Note that the TNIV continues the NIV translation, and Darby also supports it. From my bookshelves let me add that the JPS Tanakh and HCSB support the translation “formed” while God’s Word translation uses “had formed.” Now please don’t count these versions in order to determine which is the best translation. The question is this: Why do quite a number of conservative translations, such as the NLT, NKJV, ESV, and NASB, not take this easy option, and translate with something that “makes the most sense within the text?”

    There is another problem. One cannot simply take the semantic range of a word and choose whatever particular gloss one prefers in a particular context. One must consider the syntax involved. Now I’m not going to get into the technical details. One of many excellent sources on the topic would be Paul Jouon’s A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, Part Three: Syntax, pp. 389-396. The syntax here–a sequence of uses of the “wayyiqtol” form of the verb–is normally used in Hebrew to portray a series of events in sequence. It is not impossible for the sequence to be broken, but this is not normally the way it would be done. The normal procedure would be to interrupt the sequence with a simple perfect, and then continue with the consecutive presentation until the next break in time.

    There is one excellent way to alter the translation here, and that is to alter the pointing of the Hebrew text, preserving the older consonantal text, but altering the vowel pointings. Thus one could, simply by changing the vowels, produce the past perfect (English term) meaning here, and create the good order. I would note that there is a certain amount of difficulty with that option, in that the next “wayyiqtol” form “brought” would normally also be translated past perfect, which doesn’t fit nearly as well. But it is a workable option.

    And here is the ideological catch. I’ve expressed my ideology in the sentence above, in which I see the vowel pointings of the Hebrew text as having less authority than the consonants. There are many people who would disagree with me, including Orthodox Jews at least. Many conservative scholars are very hesitant to alter the pointing and word spacing of the Massoretic Text without stronger evidence than the fact that it fits better. What they are doing, in fact, is being faithful to their ideology of the sacredness of the text, and putting their best effort at providing an accurate translation of the text they have in front of them ahead of further theological considerations.

    What is clear, I think, from the list of translations on each side of this issue, is that this is not a liberal/conservative issue, however much some particular professor may portray it in that way. It is a linguistic issue on which one’s ideology can impact in a variety of ways.

  • Finding Good Role Models for Girls in the Bible

    A post by Peter Kirk over on Speaker of Truth, titled Deborah and a woman from Bethlehem, and some interesting comments made there suggests to me some more writing about my favorite topic: the SHARING stage of Bible study. (For an outline of my method, see The Participatory Study Method. Some of the foundation for this is contained in my essay Interpreting Stories.)

    The difficulty I address in my main essay on interpreting stories is the fact that the Bible writers do not present only heroes, and do not gloss over the weakness of their characters. In modern storytelling we tend to prefer clear villains and heroes, and I find that most of the time when Christians recommend a book or a movie, that is one of the characteristics. We like to have people in our stories that fit in well with either “I’d like to be just like him/her” or “I hope he/she gets it in the end!”

    But that’s precisely what the Bible doesn’t give us. Often we take our lead in retelling Bible stories from Hebrews 11, and make them all into heroes in retelling their stories. But we should consider the goal of the author of Hebrews before we decide that this is the one and only, or even the best, way of retelling these stories. His point here is to focus totally on faithfulness. No matter what has happend, no matter what the weaknesses, the one key is to remain faithful to God throughout. And in that characteristic, all of the heroes mentioned in Hebrews 11 are truly heroes. But if you look at their broader stories as told in scripture, they come out as very human, with weaknesses and failings. In fact, they make very suitable examples.

    This leads me to a key point: Heroes can be destructive as well as challenging. The Proverbs 31 woman is a good example. There are some women out there who are encouraged by the way in which their role is honored in that passage. Others live in misery because they can’t live up to what they see as the Biblical standard on a daily basis. Jesus is an excellent and challenging example to us, but I find myself relating to Peter a lot better sometimes. Jesus may have been tested in all ways as I have been, but it was “without sin.” Jesus walked on the water; Peter took a plunge; I’m more like Peter! Now don’t get me wrong here. I believe in asking “what would Jesus do?” on a regular basis. But I also believe that there’s a reason Peter is in the Bible. When I try to walk on water and find myself in an unplanned deep sea dive instead, I can look back and say, “Peter was a leader amongst the disciples, and he had bad days too!”

    So role models don’t always have to be heroes in the sense that we use that term in modern times. As far as I can see, the Bible never whitewashes its lead characters. We can learn both from their good decisions and from their bad. The most important thing to note is that just because a Bible character does something, even if that character is a good person, does not mean that we should do likewise.

    Now let’s connect this to the simple issue of role models for girls. Anyone who can count can tell that there are less overt examples of female role models in the Bible than there are male. Because of that we tend to look carefully for the few really good role models that there are, and this can lead us to whitewash certain people even more. Some would say that the scarcity of female role models in scripture simply indicates that women are to be less active. But I would simply ask if everything that was common behavior in Bible times should be regarded as normative. There are many things we do not follow as norms today, including the fairly common occurrence of plural marriage, arranged marriages, forbidding marriage between Jews and gentiles, absolute monarchy, and on and on. Just because it happened doesn’t mean it’s a model for now.

    In addition, there are hints that more may be going on behind the scenes. For example, we have Huldah the prophetess who suddenly pops up in 2 Kings 22:14. Why would a group of leaders go to her with a question if she hadn’t already been exercising the prophetic office? So here we have an indication that women may have a public role, though in the patriarchal society their role was limited in scope.

    “But,” says some reader, “You still leave us with few role models for women!” And you are right. Now, I’m going to get to my point. The scriptural basis for this is found in Psalm 78, which I regard as an excellent charter document for religious education:

    1(A Wisdom Song by Asaph)
    Open your ears to my instruction
    Turn your ears toward the the words I speak.
    2I will open my mouth in a teaching song.
    I will speak hard sayings from ancient times.
    3Words which we have heard and known,
    and our ancestors have told us.
    4We will not hide them from their children,
    speaking YHWH’s praises to a later generation,
    His strength, and the wonderful things he has done.
    5And he raised a testimony in Jacob,
    and set instruction in Israel,
    Which he commanded our ancestors
    to teach to their children.
    6So that the later generation might know,
    The children to be born would rise up,
    and teach them to their children.
    7That they might set their hope in God,
    And might not forget his mighty deeds,
    But might observe his commands. — Psalm 78:1-7 (TFBV)

    Grab your favorite “easy reading” Bible version and read the whole chapter. The story of God’s activities has not stopped. We are responsible to pass that story from generation to generation and in turn, “put our trust in God” which itself will add to the story, just as the Psalmist is adding to the story through some of the incidents he relates.

    So my suggestion is to start your search for role models in the Biblical stories, but don’t stop there. My first set of sources is actually in the apocrypha. How about Susanna or Judith? Again, you need to read all stories with due consideration for the weaknesses of any human example. But even more than this, you need to continue through Christian history and into the present, telling the stories of faith.

    When I first returned to the church after my 12 years of “wilderness wandering” after graduate school, and started teaching, I was looking for this type of story. I found that the idea of telling our own stories about how God has worked in our lives was a bit foreign to the congregation of which I was a member. Stories of faith were about people in the Bible, and maybe on good days about people a few generations back, but never about today.

    So I got on the phone with my mother. Why? Because my mother told us stories of faith in her own life. Lots of stories of faith. When I wondered whether God could or would work in our lives, I wasn’t merely, pointed to the red sea or Elijah on Mt. Carmel or the resurrection, though my parents believed and taught those stories. I was referred to things in our own present life. So I asked my mother to write them down so I could use some as examples. She did, and the result was the booklet Directed Paths, stories of her life as a missionary nurse along with my father, who was a missionary doctor. As I write this my father is in intensive care after surgery, though the prognosis is good. He’s 85 years old, and as my mother and I talked before the surgery, all we could say was that if this was God’s time to take him, we knew that he had run a good race. I can say the same thing of my mother. But the key thing here is that she told me about God’s work in her life. Because she testified, she can serve as a role-model of faith.

    Now I publish the booklet I mentioned above, and I won’t deny that I’d love for you to buy and read it, but that isn’t the point of bringing it up. What you need to do is look at your own life, and the lives of your parents and other family members, discover those stories of God’s working, and tell them. Do what my mother did and make yourself a part of the ongoing story of God, in a sense part of the Bible story. You can find sources in the Bible, in the history of the church and communities of faith, and finally in the history of your own family. This is sharing and becoming a part of the story. If you don’t share it, you can’t be part of it. You’ll find that there are more and more stories of people that girls can use as role models as time moves forward.

    Of course, then there’s the hard part:

    11But they conquered him by means of the blood of the lamb,
    and by means of the testimony they spoke,
    And they did not love their lives even up to death. Revelation 12:11 (TFBV)

    We commonly quote the first two lines, but the last one is a bit harder. Getting to be a part of the story can involve hardship and can even involve death. My mother’s story includes a time of running for our lives in the middle of the night, and a time when I nearly died as a child due to circumstances involved in her ministry. I know of missionaries overseas and here at home who have lost more. But there are plenty of stories to work with.

    Become a part of the story!

  • Inreach and Outreach

    My previous post, The Most Wasted Piece of Architecture, didn’t generate discussion here, but it was picked up by Locusts and Honey with a substantial quote, and some interesting discussion took place there.

    The discussion seemed to center a good deal around the specific issue of church sanctuaries. But what I would hope we would consider would be the balance between inreach and outreach both in our personal lives and in the lives of others. Church sanctuaries are beautiful. I do appreciate them. But I have to ask whether they represent the best use of resources to build the kingdom. I’m writing this on Sunday morning. Once I hit the “publish” button I’ll be headed to church, where I’ll meet with the pastor and pray with him before he goes out to preach three services for the day. I’ll attend one in a very nice old sanctuary, and I will be spiritually fed there. All of this will do me good, but is it the best Sunday morning possible in terms of building the kingdom?

    I don’t question the need for inreach. Church members must be motivated, trained, empowered, and released for ministry. That will take resources, in space, time, and money. My question, however, is just where we will find the balance. How much do we spend maintaining the machine, and how much do we spend using it? We can come to different answers on sanctuary design and value, but I think none of us can avoid asking just how well we are stewarding the resources God provides us in the church.

    What I’m really asking of my fellow Christians is that we honestly evaluate our resources and our use of them, not asking what we like, but rather asking what will do kingdom work in the best way.

  • Asking Questions of a Biblical Text

    An excellent technique for digging deeper into a Bible text is to formulate questions about the text, and then look for answers to those questions. I discuss this briefly in my essay Reading the Text Precisely.

    A starting point for this is simply to ask basic fact questions about the text. Many difficult and angry debates about the meaning of a text result from one or more persons not carefully reading what the text says. Very frequently, a person is making a very good point, but the text they are quoting doesn’t explicitly support that point. Asking fact questions about your text can prevent you from making this error. In your sharing, you can also help defuse such arguments by suggesting that all parties go back and look at the text. That may not make you agree, but it will help clarify what you are discussing.

    Here are some good example questions:

    1. Who is speaking in this passage?
      We have a narrator who tells us what God observed (v. 5) and how God responded (v. 6). Then we have the words of God, reported by our narrator, saying God’s attitude and God’s intention to act (“I will wipe . . . humanity from the face of the ground”). Then we have the narrator again to inform us that Noah found grace (v. 8 ).
    2. What is God’s response?
      God repents or is sorry.
    3. What does God promise to do?
      To destroy human beings and all living things.
    4. Who finds grace?
      Noah.

    There are a few more possible questions and some of these are bound to seem overly simple to you. But it is a good idea to make sure that you notice precisely what the passage says.

    In addition, you need to look at questions about the meaning of the text from different perspectives. Let’s take as an example my previous entry on Genesis 6:5-8. Frequently when I am teaching from this passage the first question from the study group deals with God’s justice, and whether God would actually kill that many people. Were they all absolutely evil? Was there no way to save them? Those questions show a personal perspective–What is God telling me today from this verse? But you have to first ask what the passage meant originally, and then follow the track through.

    I can identify at least three viewpoints on this passage, and Bible students should be able to think of a fourth pretty quickly. First, we have Noah himself, to whom God first addresses these words. Noah is inside the story and things are happening to him. The second perspective is that of the Israelites, for whom the story was written. Whether you believe this was written by Moses himself, or produced later and compiled, it was still intended to address the people of Israel, presumably about some situation(s) that they faced. Finally, we must look at what this story means to us. (If you’re wondering, a fourth view that might be helpful would be that of Jesus (Matthew 24:38-39), who used the flood as an illustration of the last days, which also might suggest looking at the text from the perspective of one living in the very last time events.)

    In the first instance, we can ask what Noah’s situation might have been when God approached him. If we take the story as it stands, we might expect that Noah felt besieged and hopeless. It is possible that he was threatened by violence. You can ask yourself just what was Noah’s situation when God sent the flood. It’s OK to speculate on that, and in fact that is much better than to simply make an assumption without thinking about it. I find that most people assume a world that is carrying on quite nicely, but God doesn’t like it, and is upset about a little bit of bad behavior, so he gets Noah to go build an ark. Noah has no problems, builds it, and escapes.

    But supposing instead that there was a world on the edge of cataclysmic destruction. We don’t know what they were up to, but they could have been about to die in a plague, or they could have been about to wipe themselves out in wars, and take Noah with them. It’s not impossible to imagine that the flood, with the ark itself, simply saved one righteous family from a destruction that was going to happen one way or another. I don’t necessarily mean that they were going to bring a flood on themselves. They could have merely been about to go kill Noah and his family and then wipe each other out in wars over a period of time. Sometimes the application of a limited amount of violence (and the flood was limited, even though those limits were pretty broad) can be used to prevent even greater violence and destruction.

    With that thought in mind let’s move forward to the time of the Israelites who would be reading this story for the first time. I don’t care if you think they first read it during the Exodus itself, during the time of the judges, the monarchy, or even after the exile. A similar message can be heard. The crowd can go massively against God, and can get into sin (think “behavior that is destructive of self and of others) beyond the point of no return. God will judge and intervene at some point, but God will also provide a way of escape. Even if there is only one righteous family that needs rescue, God will provide a way of escape. Can you see how that message might have been heard as one of grace under those circumstances? (Consider Abraham’s argument with God over Sodom. He talked God down to 10 righteous people–if there were only 10 righteous people, then God would save Sodom. Do you notice that there are less people than that who are saved in the flood? God’s grace doesn’t require a certain number.)

    To look again from our perspective, what does this tell us? Well, ask how we are similar to the Israelites and how we are different? How much must the message change for this text to apply to your community, your church, your world?

    In reading a Bible story, ask the questions in that order, starting with the people who are inside the story, then looking for those for whom the story was first written, then looking at how your situation is similar to and/or different from the situation of those in the story or its first hearers/readers. You’ll be amazed at how often the story becomes directly relevant.

    I think there is much more that can be said about the presentation of the flood story, and I intend to do so as I continue my series, but I think these few notes on asking questions points the way to a deeper understanding.

  • The Most Wasted Piece of Architecture

    As I was driving with my wife yesterday, I made a comment that had been bugging me all day.

    “You know,” I said, “A church sanctuary is the most wasted piece of architecture you’ll see on the landscape.”

    Now my wife knows not to go wild when I say things like that. She didn’t ask me if I’d started to hate church, or if I was giving up on Christianity. Some of you may want to do so, but bear with me.

    What is the purpose of our church sanctuaries? What are they designed for? Well, they’re a place where we go to worship. Indeed, I really enjoy church services. I’m one of those folks who will look up a nearby church when I’m traveling and go out of my way to be in worship on Sunday morning. It’s not because I have to, or because someone’s watching me. I simply enjoy worship services. I especially enjoy visiting a church I know nothing about and watching what their service is like. It’s no great merit; it’s just fun! (OK, I’m weird.)

    But picture the standard church sanctuary, steeple, pews, pulpit, altar area, and so forth. The building, the room, and the furniture all serve for a couple of hours per week. Many of you will point out that you have other meetings in that sanctuary–committee meetings, youth meetings, classes, and so forth. But notice that the room isn’t really designed for those things, and you’re actually working around the architecture and interior design in order to use that space for that purpose. It’s true that there are many newer buildings, especially amongst small, non-denominational churches that are much more flexible, and much better designed for multiple uses. Even so, I would ask you to look at the schedule of use for your office building, the conference room at your place of work, and similar structures, and consider the cost involved and the amount of use.

    I don’t have statistics in hand, but in my experience, churches spending as little as 5% of their money on outreach regard themselves as “mission oriented.” Add to that evangelism and budgeting for charitable projects, and you’ll get the total spending for outreach. (Don’t forget the salaries of staff members who are assigned to such tasks.) Look at your own church budget. How much of your money goes to maintaining facilities and paying people to maintain the membership. How much of the spending goes to people in the club?

    I had the privelege of speaking at a church a couple of years ago where the pastor told me their goal was to get to 50% spending for missions/outreach by the time their congregation was 10 years old. I know at the time they were working on acquiring a facility to use to house people coming out of drug rehabilitation to help them transition to the “real” world. They supported the Pacesetters Bible School mission to support orphans in eastern Europe. That was a small new church.

    Very often “spiritual people” don’t want to get involved in budget issues in your church. But when you’re going out and inviting people to church and they don’t seem very interested, you might consider what the appearance of your church and your church budget is telling them about your priorities. The good news of the gospel is not that there’s a church in your neighborhood and you can attend worship. It’s rather that God loves you enough to reach out to you, and according to James chapter 2, we’re supposed to be on the same program. In general, however, our church budgets don’t support that notion. If spiritual people want to be heard, they’re going to have to get involved in the money process and force a change.

    Please don’t hear a liberal vs conservative message here. My problem is not whether you are preaching the gospel or practicing it. I do believe you should be doing both, and that it’s very scriptural to do both. My problem is with the amount of money spent on maintenance, on keeping the members of the club happy vs the amount spent on outreach.

    I think that God has placed sufficient resources in the churches of America’s Christians that we could make a serious dent in the various problems we moan about when we get together and meet. In United Methodist churches (I’m Methodist, I fulfill my membership covenant, I get to complain!), we complain about declining membership while our budgets show pretty clearly that our concern is not with bringing people in, or helping people in general. Our concern is with maintaining the ones inside. It’s not an accident, however, that the gospel commission starts with the word “Go!” (For those who like to nitpick me, yes, I will defend this statement from the Greek.)

    If our budgets, our buildings, our activities, and our lives reflected the gospel, then we wouldn’t have so much trouble getting people to listen. We have the power to turn the world upside down, to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives (physical and spiritual), and to free the prisoners. Given what we have available, the state of our world is nothing short of scandalous.