Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Study Your Bible in English

    Study Your Bible in English

    Study Bibles Galore!
    Despite My Dislike, All These Bibles were within Arm’s Reach of My Desk

    That is, study it in English if English is your native language, and when your knowledge of biblical languages isn’t up to the task. Face it. For most people, even those who have some study of biblical languages. Different levels of study of the languages provide different levels of benefits. But for most people, the best idea is to study the Bible more carefully and thoroughly in the language they actually know.

    There’s a sense among people in the pews that knowledge of Greek or Hebrew provides some sort of magic key. This even affects pastors, who want to look up a particular Greek or Hebrew word in order to spice up their sermons or  to find the real meaning of a text. The problem is that looking up a particular Greek or Hebrew word and then wielding that definition like an axe, chopping chips out of the text, more often misleads than enlightens.

    For laypeople, the approach is often to find “the meaning of the Greek” through a commentary, or even worse through a concordance such as Strong’s. A correspondent once sent me a complete translation of a verse derived from glosses (single word or short phrase translations of a term) in Strong’s, in which not one single word was translated correctly in the context. One could, however, track the English words back through the concordance to a Greek word which did, in fact, occur in the verse.

    Words do not have singular meanings. It is more accurate to say they have fields of meaning, sometimes called semantic ranges. I look out the window in front of me and I see a number of things that I would call “trees,” yet they are not identical. Some are larger, some are smaller. At some point there is the transition between “bush” and “tree,” and “bush,” again, covers a range of items. The actual boundary is set by usage. Now that I live in Florida, I have to realize that Floridians call things “hills” that northwesterners would call mounds or bumps, while there’s nothing in easy range of here that a northwesterner would call a mountain.

    If you have the time and inclination to learn the biblical languages, by all means do so. But if you don’t, what can you do?

    Here are some suggestions:

    1. Don’t just go to the most literal translation you can find. People often believe that by using the New American Standard Bible, the English Standard Version, the New Revised Standard Version, or something similar, they are getting closer to the source language. In one way, these versions do get you closer to the original, an I don’t have a problem with using any of them. Just don’t assume that they take care of getting you closer to the original.
    2. Instead of #1, choose 3 or more translations. Try to find translations that are committee translations and represent different theological backgrounds. For example, the NASB, NIV, and NLT are all done by evangelical translation committees. They represent three different approaches to translation, but their committees are all conservative. The NASB is formal, the NIV is a kind of compromise version, while the NLT is dynamic or functional. (There are many more differences in approach to translation. Check my site mybibleversion.com and/or my book What’s in a Version?.) On the other hand, the NRSV is quite formal/literal while the Revised English Bible is quite functional/dynamic, yet the committees involved are from mainline denominations and thus more liberal. I recommend choosing your three translations to represent different theological traditions and different styles of translating. For protestants, I’d recommend including the New American Bible or the New Jerusalem Bible, which are translated by Catholic committees. The NAB is probably a bit more literal/formal than the NIV and the NJB is dynamic/functional like the NLT or REB.
    3. Instead of spending your time looking for glosses to Greek words in a concordance like Strong’s, spend more time studying relevant passages in English. Don’t find a gloss and then force it into all the verses. Rather, study each passage and look for definitions from the context. I mean definitions of the English words provided by the English context in your English Bible. So if you want to know what the “church” is, don’t worry about the definition of ekklesia in Greek. (Dave Black wrote some good notes on this the other day. If you read what he wrote about the Greek words carefully, you will see some of the difficulties in doing this sort of study unless you are very well versed in the language.) Worry about the definition of “church” (and related terms like “body of Christ”)  in English verses. How does Paul view this in Ephesians 4, for example?
    4. In order to keep from getting stuck with the work of just one committee, compare those translations. While the formal translations may be closer to the form of the Greek or Hebrew, you may not correctly comprehend what that form means. Try the options in one of the dynamic/functional versions. Then listen to the context. Many, many misinterpretations are produced by deciding what a word in the original language is suppose to mean and then forcing the verse to fit that meaning. Ask instead whether the definition you have in mind truly fits. In English, for example, the word “car” might refer to an automobile, the part of an elevator you ride in, or one element of a train. You wouldn’t take the elevator-related definition and force it into a passage about automobiles, would you? Don’t do it to the biblical text either. Consider words like “salvation,” which may refer to a moment of new birth, a continuous process of God’s work in the believer, or the eventual salvation from final death, among other things.
    5. Don’t be afraid of surface reading. Surface reading is a good starting point for study. I like to read an entire book of the Bible through before focusing on a section. That’s harder to do if we’re talking Isaiah or Ezekiel, but for most of the New Testament it’s not that hard. It’s a bit like standing on a mountain looking across a forest before trying to hike through it. You can read rapidly and you don’t need to understand everything. That’s what your later study is for.
    6. Don’t be intimidated. Those of us who read the languages also make plenty of mistakes. We’re subject to all the same human biases. I thank the Lord for the opportunity I’ve had to learn and for the gift of reading the Bible in its original languages. But none of that work gave me the right to lord it over others or to demand that they accept my view because of my study.

    Above all, I encourage you to study the scriptures for yourself and listen for God to speak to you. It is the privilege of everyone, not just of clergy or scholars. Many people have given their time and some have even given their lives so that you can have that Bible in your own language. Make the most of it!

  • Discerning Fake News

    Discerning Fake News

    Brooke Borel of FiveThirtyEight.com published an article recently titled Fact-Checking Won’t Save Us from Fake News. Headline readers will not be led too far astray by that headline, though they will miss some interesting reasoning on the topic. I agree with Borel that fact-checking won’t save us. It’s useful, but it’s just one element.

    A common reason to reject fact checkers is that we don’t agree with them or find inaccurate data in them. In other words, if we can’t trust the fact checkers to check the facts, what good are they?

    That is not, however, my concern with fact-checking is this: No amount of care in writing or in fact-checking can save us from readers who do not read with some sort of discernment. “Discernment” is more common in Christian usage. You can translate it to critical thinking if you wish.

    The reason fake news can be so successful is simple. Companies have been using the same tendency to build brand loyalty. An advertising slogan like “mothers who love their babies use …” goes a long way. As humans we start our lives depending on known authorities for information and the primary way we learn is through a combination of influence and authority. Once an authority is trusted, we tend to continue trusting it.

    So fact-checking sites (and how long will it be until we’re inundated with fake fact-checking?) go the same way that other news media sources have gone, i.e., one accepts them when they affirm what one wants affirmed, and one rejects them otherwise. Truth is a popularity contest. We shouldn’t be shocked at this. It always has been. We just get to see the work in progress more clearly now.

    One more thing militates against discerning reading and that’s time pressure. We simply don’t have time to be knowledgeable and informed about every topic, so we trust our health to the doctor, our soul to the pastor, our shelter to the builder, and so forth. And so we must. There’s more information out there than we can absorb and evaluate. Improved communication has made us more aware of competing claims. The pastor might once have been the one spiritual authority in a small community. Now he or she is challenged by hundreds of voices. How do we respond? By trusting the voices of those nearest us. In some ways it’s a survival trait. Often it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

    So what do you do? Well, let me suggest a couple of simple points about reading anything that might let you quickly figure out what you’re reading. Many people don’t even recognize warning signs.

    Here are some of those:

    1. Extraordinary claims.
    2. Faked credentials.
    3. Credentials similar to those of another site. I’ve seen “christiantoday.com” cited as Christianity Today magazine, which is christianitytoday.com. Now christiantoday.com doesn’t make any claim to be christianitytoday.com, but a reader should be sure of which site is actually referenced.
    4. Failure to provide sources.
    5. Sources that could not possibly know what they claim to know.
    6. Authorities cited from the wrong subject matter. One famous “claim-maker” in biblical archeology was actually a nurse by training, for example.

    In reading, however, you can save yourself a lot of trouble by observing the difference between data and inferences from data. For example, in my business I might note that sales have increased by 10% for three months in a row. I infer from this that we are growing and that we will likely grow another 10% or so next month. The current growth is a claim of fact. The future growth is an inference from that. Whether my inference is good or bad depends on a number of factors.

    It is important to distinguish claims of fact from these inferences or predictions. Note the term “claims.” People often are misled by something that was never even claimed to be a fact. But even more often an inference built on theory is presented as though it is a fact. Let me give a hypothetical example.

    Let’s say that a news article says that the budget deficit 10 years from now will be $X trillion if a certain law is passed. If I disagree should I call that claim a lie? False? Or should I just say I disagree with the inference? In such an article the claims of fact will be the spending levels in the law, the revenue sources as stated in the law, and whatever other factors are included that might change the budget deficit. The actual budget deficit 10 years from now can only be determined based on predicting a wide variety of future events and deciding the impact of those events based on economic theory.

    I have seen fact checkers take a claim like that and state that it’s false, not because any number was cited incorrectly, but because the theory behind those predictions was not accepted by the majority of economists. It may surprise you to know that the majority of economists can be wrong. So can any minority.

    If you read any news article carefully, looking at what are claims of fact, and what are inferences from those facts, you can avoid a great deal of misinformation. I would be delighted if fact checkers limited themselves to determining whether politicians and other news sources cited facts correctly, and did not try to determine whether someone’s theory was valid or not, but again human nature steps in. We want to get to the final answer. We rarely want to take the time to tease out the details.

    I’m again reminded of the quote I’ve cited several times recently: “Philosophers sometimes appear to talk in obscure ways. They do so because they take into consideration what people often overlook” (Philosophy for Believers, 119).

    If you don’t want to be deceived, you will need to start taking “into consideration what people often overlook.” If you don’t do that, no amount of fact-checking will help you.

  • Experience, Authority, and Paul (Galatians 1:1-2:14)

    Experience, Authority, and Paul (Galatians 1:1-2:14)

    Last night for my perspectives on Paul series I reviewed what we’ve discussed so far and wrapped up my discussion of Paul’s claim to authority as an apostle. I can summarize this as follows: The Bible records religious experience, i.e., people’s experience of God in one way or another. (Even revelation, such as a vision, is an experience of the divine.) In order to understand, or even better, connect with the same narrative, one needs experience.

    Beyond the summary, let me note that my own personal experience of the moment is not decisive and authoritative. Yet experience does eventually become authoritative within a particular tradition.

    I mentioned some books I worked on at the end of last year as well as others I consulted. Here are some books and notes.

    Philosophy for Believers by Edward W. H. Vick. In particular, chapter 6, “Experience and God.”

    Inspiration: Hard Questions, Honest Answers by Alden Thompson. I was working on this in December. I think one of the key contributions Alden makes to the discussion is to focus so strongly on observing the process of inspiration in progress. One might say, “experiencing the experience.”

    The Ground of God: Contemplative Prayer for the Conteporary Spirit by Donna Marie Ennis. I brought this book in simply because it reflects spiritual experience. Often the intellectual approach reflected by biblical exegesis and systematic theology is contrasted and opposed to a mystical approach. I think an ideal will mix both experience and intellectual study. It was fun to read Alden’s and Donna’s books over the same period of time.

    Galatians: A Participatory Study Guide by Bruce Epperly. Bruce takes a fresh and refreshing approach to Paul. Often progressive writers dismiss Paul while more conservative writers read him in a narrow way. Bruce is a progressive, but he sees Paul as a creative, challenging, and exciting pioneer of theological thought.

    Meditations on the Letters of Paul by Herold Weiss. Herold’s approach to Paul is incredibly helpful with a series of essays on themes Paul addresses. This is his second book subtitled “Exercises in Biblical Theology.” The first was Meditations on According to John. One of the key contributions, I think, is to help bring together biblical exegesis and theological reflection, which are often divorced, unfortunately.

    So here’s the video:

  • Resuming Perspectives on Paul: Starting the New Year

    Resuming Perspectives on Paul: Starting the New Year

    I’ll review a bit of our material and where we are and then proceed with Lesson 2 of Bruce Epperly’s book, Galatians: A Participatory Study Guide.

    As I’ll be talking a bit about interpretation, let me also embed my chat with Elgin Hushbeck, Jr. from Tuesday night (01/03/2017).

  • God Perfected through Suffering

    God Perfected through Suffering

    For it was appropriate for
    him,
        for whom everything exists
            and
        through whom everything exists,
    in bringing many children to glory,
        the pioneer of their salvation
    to perfect
        through suffering

    (Hebrews 2:10, very literal)

    I wouldn’t suggest that any Greek students translate the way I just did, or your Greek teacher may suggest you learn English. I’m trying to bring the focus onto certain things and it’s sometimes hard to gauge what this is going to do for readers of the English text that results.

    I think this text is one of those that we tend to discount, because what it’s actually saying is a bit startling. In his commentary, Luke Timothy Johnson points out that this text forms a sort of envelope with 2:18, and that the verses between are a carefully structured argument. I quite agree, but I want to just bring your attention to the stark initial statement. Johnson emphasizes how outrageous this concept would be in the Greek world. I would suggest it would sound outrageous just about anywhere. When a Bible writer says something that sounds outrageous we have our defensive mechanisms: Discounting (take 20% or 30% off the rough edges), find a balancing text so we can believe that one instead, or just move on to something more edifying.

    In this case I think we tend to focus on the suffering, since we have heard the story of the cross so many times. That was something shocking to those who first heard it, but it has become routine now, not that when we’re called to suffer as Christ did, we take that very seriously. We  tend to think we’re suffering for Jesus every time we have a bad day. No, we’re just living in the world. Some days just aren’t as nice as others!

    But the idea that the Son, described in such majestic terms in Hebrews 1:1-4 is to be made perfect, or perhaps complete, through suffering is a little bit more difficult. Luke 2:52 notwithstanding, we tend to think of Jesus in majesty all the way through. Just look at all the halos around the baby Jesus in art. I suspect not so much halo spotting by Mary. In Hebrews, we’ll hear this theme many times, one of the key ones is 5:9, where “having been made complete he became the means of eternal salvation.

    I’d suggest two points here that we avoid, and we need to affirm and absorb instead:

    1. God is much more involve in and impacted by our lives and situation. The incarnation may have been an event in history, but it’s also an eternal reality. God is much more involved. We sometimes wobble between transcendence and immanence. God has no problem with both.
    2. The suffering and death of Jesus was a necessary part of atonement, in different ways. I do not affirm penal substitutionary atonement as the singular theory expressing the truth of the atonement. It is, in my view, just one metaphor that helps us think about our salvation. But if we think incarnation, to be complete it must be real, and, well, complete. Becoming human and then not facing death would be to become something other than human; rather, it would be a contradiction. So Jesus became complete as the means of our salvation by living and dying as we do.

    As difficult as it is sometimes to keep this in focus, salvation requires both the glory and the suffering. And when we are called to suffer, or even given the gift both of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him (Philippians 1:29).

    I don’t know about you, but I suspect that could involve more than some mild annoyances.

  • Jody on Resolutions for the New Year

    No Resolutions in 2017.

  • Quick Thought: Stewardship

    Preachers and teachers, myself included, frequently talk about how all that you own belongs to God, but most commonly it is in the context of getting more money for a particular church or ministry. Having led a non-profit ministry, I understand the pressures here.

    So: What if we talked about stewardship not less often, but more often, but did so in other contexts, such as:

    • Using and investing your money wisely so that you can carry out God’s mission to your family
    • The needs of other ministries
    • Concern that the way we produce wealth is consistent with being followers of Jesus
    • The realization that this planet and this universe belong to God just as we do
    • Care for those outside our church or ministry
    • Concern for the needs of someone else’s ministry, one that isn’t involved in paying my salary or increasing my prestige.

    Just some thoughts. I believe everything belongs to God and we should use what we have and who we are as God guides. But that is a 365/24/7 topic, not in the nature of a fund drive.

  • Saber-Tooth Everything

    Saber-Tooth Everything

    Source: Openclipart.org. I think this is the Cheshire saber-tooth tiger, fading toward his smile!

    I love the classic book The Saber-Tooth Curriculum, and I was reminded of it when I read The disposable academic in The Economist, I was reminded of it.

    In education we’re increasing the cost without increasing the benefits, and that’s not sustainable. Educators should be thinking of better ways to operate now, before unchosen and unwanted new ways are forced upon them.

    I think the whole system, which expects students to spend years and dollars getting degrees before they enter the workplace was designed for another time and is hopelessly unfitted for the 21st century.

  • You Don’t Have to Have an Opinion about Everything

    I posted a note from an article regarding the data released by DHS about Russian hacking, if it was Russian, and then I started wondering whether people would assume it is my opinion that the Russians were not involved.

    In fact, I do not have an opinion on that because I do not have enough information to support a reasonably informed one. The article simply notes that the evidence released by DHS doesn’t appear to point to Russian activity specifically. That doesn’t mean that this is the only software used, or the only IPs, nor does it mean that the understanding of the article writers is complete. Their conclusions are stated in admiral fashion. They note the nature of the evidence and what they can identify about who it points to.

    What amazes me, however, is the massive number of people who already have come to a conclusion on this. Either the Russians did it or they didn’t, and we make the determination based not on actual data but simply on which group of people we associate ourselves with. My guess is that not one in ten of those people with a firm opinion on this topic have even the tiny amount of information that I’ve collected, nor do they have my knowledge of computer security. Many of them couldn’t really tell you what “hacking” means, and what would be necessary to get the kinds of data involved. Yet they have firm opinions, loudly expressed.

    I note here that I’m not a security expert in the sense that the people who develop anti-virus software are. I simply know enough about how computers are attacked that I can select good software and suggest/apply good security practices. The people who have the expertise to actually make determinations are not all that numerous.

    It doesn’t hurt not to have an opinion. It doesn’t hurt to say, “I don’t know.” Which I say right now: I don’t know. I am not convinced it was a Russian government action, nor am I convinced it was not. Let’s look at the evidence.

    What really bothers me about all this, and what I do have an opinion about, is the threat that potential hacking presents to national security. A serious effort could disrupt an election and in ways that are much worse than some manipulation of information. Get used to it. Information is going to be manipulated. I don’t trust the government to be able to deal with the human factors that hamper good data security. In my experience, the most common problem is the password on a sticky note, often also easily guessed, and not the highly technical hacker.

    And of course I must note that I suspect rampant stupidity has a greater influence on U. S. elections than does foreign interference, assuming there was any.

    We might want to consider electing some more technically qualified leaders for a technical age … it’s just a thought.

    (FWIW, it’s bad writing style to conclude with something quite unrelated to your title and opening paragraph. But this is my blog and I’ll write badly if I want to.)

  • Similar and Different

    Similar and Different

    Dave Black has been posting some interesting things on his blog, and yesterday he wrote a bit about Greek and Hebrew language and culture. I’ve put this on jesusparadigm.com to provide a permanent link. Here’s the bottom line:

    The bottom line: I think it’s a bit misleading to insist that grammar and thought are inherently related. There are just too many philosophical difficulties inherent in any theory of mental representations.

    He’s absolutely right. I think it’s difficult to get this sort of thing balanced because of two problems. First, there is a relationship between the forms of language an the culture that speaks it, and second, we like to find a theory that settles everything. So the New Testament must be either all Hebrew or all Greek in thought. Why? Because it’s easier to handle. If I know that the background must be Hebrew, then every time someone uses a background from Greek philosophy in interpreting a passage, I can declare them wrong and come up with one final and absolute answer.

    In fact, it’s necessary to check many things. Take Hebrews and “shadows of heavenly things,” for example. Is this an idea based on Plato’s philosophy, or do we adjust it to fit better into some idea of Hebrew thought? Perhaps we need to consider the possibility that the author of Hebrews actually has his own view of the relationship between earthly shadows and heavenly realities, and that it doesn’t derive entirely from the background.

    Which leads be to an aside. One thing that can suffer when we study the background of thought in order to categorize it, is that we can miss the original thought of an author. But we also need to balance that against the soil in which the thought germinated. There’s probably a reason that an author chooses specific words from those available to him in order to express his original thought.

    Similarly, we have the word hilasterion which either occurs or is closely related to words that occur in other Greek literature and is used in the LXX to translate some specific Hebrew terms. So when it’s used in Hebrews do we import the meaning of kapporeth, do we seek for meaning in its usage in Greek, do we spend our time on it’s etymology in Greek (surely an interesting subject!), or do we look strictly at its context in Hebrews?

    I’d suggest that we’re going to do some of all of the above, because it’s likely that the author of Hebrews was acquainted with all of that material. He was skilled in Greek, he was acquainted with the LXX, and he was capable of original thought and composition. The final arbiter needs to be the context of his specific usage, but all those other elements form the soil from which that particular meaning is nourished.

    I doubt that very many of those who argue the different positions really deny the role of other options. They just sound like they do as the press a theory. Sometimes, however, the main reason to press a theory is that it is distinctive and thus identifiable as our work. I recall hearing a sermon in which the preacher started by saying that he would show us how everyone got the story of the prodigal son wrong. He proceeded to present some good thoughts, though they were not nearly as revolutionary as his opening statement. He denied some other ideas, though his presentation had hardly made it clear that those ideas were wrong. After the sermon concluded, many people left talking about how they had been so enlightened by hearing the “real” meaning of the parable.

    I would have said, instead, that they had heard an interesting interpretation of the parable, one with some considerable value, yet neither so original, nor so revolutionary, nor so exclusive as everyone thought. I had to wonder, however, if things had been stated in my preferred way, with “one option for understanding” and “maybe we should consider” and “different understandings are possible” strewn about in the sermon.

    When we’re making a point, the temptation is to present all the evidence in favor of our viewpoint and try to downplay the things that are not in agreement. I encountered this in comparative literature. You could find those who thought that Genesis 1 & 2 were clearly copied from the Sumerian and Babylonian stories, and others who thought they were so different that they were clearly unrelated. The fact is that if you get to choose your elements you can make them appear to be very close or very distant. I’d suggest that the reality is that there is a relationship (I suggested in my work for my MA that this was one of sharing cosmological language more than one of literary borrowing/copying).

    Similarly I’ve mentioned the etymological fallacy a number of times on this blog. The idea that a word’s meaning is determined by etymology is a fallacy. But I’ve invented the anti-etymological fallacy to go with that. That’s the opposite error which assumes that any use of etymology in determining the meaning of a word is a fallacy. Determines, no. May have some relationship, yes. Thus I’m certain to look at hilasmos and hilaskomai (amongst others) when studying hilasterion. How much help do I get from etymology? That depends on the particular word, and the circumstances of its use.

    The pursuit of absolute and certain answers can tempt us to invent them when they don’t exist. It’s nice to settle back comfortably knowing that all words in the Greek New Testament should be understood as expressions of Hebrew thought. One can discard so many thick, multi-volume sets of references, and certainly one doesn’t need to read all those difficult classical Greek quotes to get ideas of the usage of the word. But comfortable and right are not the same thing.

    I can think of so many applications of this that I’d better just stop!