Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Author Related

Posts that relate in some way to my books. Excludes administrative posts and most reviews of other people’s books.

  • An Answer for Mark: Death as a Divine Tool

    Mark responded to my post Dealing with the Theological Implications of Evolution, and in turn poses a question to me, well summarized in the last sentence of his last paragraph:

    What is the particular problem that is raised that Stegosaurus had a million or so years in the sun but now is no longer?

    Which reminds me that I get in the most trouble for the things I don’t say in a post. That question needs to be put into the context of the point I was trying to address in the post. Some Christians respond to evolution by saying that it doesn’t really make any difference. Genesis tells us that God created; evolution tells us how God created.

    Depending on your audience, that will mean substantially different things. In some ways I regret growing up and essentially completing my formal education as a young earth creationist. There are so many lines of inquiry I would have pursued. I don’t mean things that would have advanced knowledge generally, but that could have advanced my knowledge.

    At the same time, I understand how young earth creationists think, and telling them that evolution doesn’t make any difference is quite futile. You see a substantial part of the young earth creationist background involves an understanding of the fall. I’m not saying that every young earth creationist feels this way, but I personally haven’t encountered one who doesn’t.

    The fall of humanity happened at a specific historical point. There was no sin in the world before that, and there was sin afterward. The physical world suffered as a result of sin, and was, in fact, dramatically altered because physical death was introduced at that point. (Never mind how an ecology would function without death.) In the particular form in which I learned it, the deteriorating ages of the patriarchs in Genesis 5 & 11 indicates the deterioration of the very fabric of the universe, or at least of life, so that people became less and less long-lived as they separated from God.

    In that context, to say that evolution makes no difference theologically is nonsense. Evolution makes all the difference in the world. If God used evolution as his tool to create the world, not only is the chronology different, but the connection between sin and physical death is broken. There might be some deterioration of the world after sin, though no evidence of this is available, but the direct connection cannot exist.

    For people who hold the young earth creationist viewpoint, at least in the form I grew up with, evolution is a devastating blow to all they hold dear. If the fall did not cause deterioration, then how can redemption cause recreation? Remember here that they believe this does involve the physical world, all of creation (Romans 8:22). Everything from God’s personal care of everyone, to redemption, and finally to the life hereafter and the new creation falls under their system if evolution is true. The theological impact is massive.

    I would add a side note on the “gap theory” or “ruin and restoration creationism” which holds that the earth is very old, the same age as that held by mainstream science and by old earth creationists, yet that sin was brought to earth before the creation that occurred in Genesis 1. In their view sin caused death, but did so before Adam was created. Adam then participated in that death at the fall. For them successive extinction events can become successive acts of destruction by God intended to wipe out or punish evil. Evolution is still devastating to their theology and they would reject it vigorously.

    One other odd view is Bill Dembski’s view that death was introduced prospectively, i.e. God knew that evil would occur and dealt with it before the fact. Adam was thus responsible, even though he sinned much later. I blogged about it a bit here, and Dembski’s article can be found here. (Note that he has revised this several times, so quotes from it in any earlier articles may be wrong. I’ve tried to note the date, but I think I forgot a few times. I always used the version that was online as of the date I posted.)

    Old earth creationists and theistic evolutionists are in essentially the same place on this. Death must be seen as a natural part of the way the universe is designed, and death becomes God’s tool. I would say that the issue is even harder for old earth creationists. Let me digress for a moment to explain why.

    I’m not much impressed with the common argument that God didn’t create evil; God created Satan, who then rebelled. In other words, I don’t feel the separation between God taking action directly, God creating someone who has the option to take an action, or God creating a process that has that same effect. If God created Satan knowing he would do evil (a requirement if one accepts foreknowledge, which in the traditional sense I do not), then God is equally responsible. If God creates a world in which the holocaust can occur, he can’t evade responsibility. In scripture, I don’t see any great effort to avoid God’s responsibility for whatever happened. That seems to be mostly a later effort.

    Let me illustrate. Supposing I have responsibility for a group of children, and I let them loose in a room full of valuable but fragile items. I don’t set any parameters, but simply tell them to play and then I run off. I don’t come back, observe, and most importantly intervene when their play gets lively and the valuable items are broken.

    If the owner of the valuables comes to me and charges me with responsible, will he except the excuse that the children did it? I suspect not. I put the children there. I didn’t instruct them properly. I didn’t monitor them, and I didn’t intervene to stop them. I think most people would regard me as responsible for the breakage.

    In the same way I regard God as responsible for the universe. I think I have warrant to believe that God regards God as responsible for the universe.

    But the fact is that in my experience most people do not agree with me with regard to God. They do find “the devil did it” to exonerate God in some sense. In that context, I think the old earth creationists have a bit of a problem. As a theistic evolutionist I believe that God so ordered the universe that there would be processes that would bring about life and allow it to diversify. I must accept that God is thereby responsible for such things as scarcity of resources; no diversification would occur if there was no selective survival.

    The old earth creationist, it seems to me, must see God as creating an incomplete process. Variation and natural selections works some, but appears to be defective. Thus God allows the process to work and then steps in and creates greater variations from time to time. So God is not merely using a tool that is part of the fabric of the universe; he is also getting involved on a day to day (or more likely age to age or period to period basis. I think if they were consistent the same people who accept a devil based theodicy should regard this as God with dirty hands.

    I must restate, however, that I think theistic evolutions and old earth creationists are in the same boat on this one, and that evolution does not make a theological difference on this one point. But that is only true between old earth creationists and theistic evolutionists. Young earth creationists or ruin and restoration creationists would see it somewhat differently.

  • Dealing with the Theological Implications of Evolution

    There are two extremes in how Christians respond to the possible theological implications of evolutionary theory once they are convinced that the theory of evolution is valid. The first is to claim that there are no implications whatsoever. This is represented by the statement: “The Bible tells us that God created; science tells us how he did it.” The second is to grab evolutionary theory and run with it, extracting implications about God all over the place.

    The weakness of the first option, in my view, is that evolution does have implications for theology. Mass extinctions don’t go well with the idea that God created the world, put it in the care of humanity, and expected humanity to exercise responsible dominion over it. I’m not saying the two notions can’t be reconciled, but one has to stop at thing, at the very least.

    The weakness of the second option is the same as for those who draw philosophical implications from evolutionary theory. What is may not be the same as what ought to be. What we observe may not be a sufficient sample of God’s activity to allow us to extrapolate large amounts about his character.

    My inclination, nonetheless, is to the second option. Evolutionary theory has profoundly influenced elements of my theology, including my views of death, of the directness of God’s care and intervention, of the nature of the fall, and even of redemption. I don’t say they are altered to the point of being unrecognizable, though a critic or two might say so, but I don’t think the same thing about them as I did when I was a young earth creationist.

    Is cautious iconoclasm an oxymoron? Perhaps. Some people claim my self identification as a “passionate moderate” is as well. What good is language if you can’t play with it? (Don’t answer that!)

    Steve Martin posts about the problem of death as God’s tool for Christian theology. Let me note that Steve’s blog is a great source of information on theological controversies related to evolution and a great source for theistic evolutionists or evolutionary creationists.

    But I have a bit of a problem with something he quotes. He’s blogging on the book Paradigms on Pilgrimage, which I must surely get my hands on. Here I’m just responding to the single point, represented by this quote, which is Martin’s summary:

    It is not primarily evolutionary mechanisms like genetic mutations, or even natural selection, which is the problem. It is in fact, the limited amount of resources available to God’s creatures.

    (You can read more extended quotes in the post cited above.)

    I’m afraid I really don’t get this one. It’s a nice way of talking around the point, but the fact is that if there wasn’t a differential in the rates of survival, new mutations would not become fixed in the population. (Perhaps some of my more scientifically inclined readers can correct me on this.) Yes, it is the variation that allows creatures to survive changing environments, but it is the limitation of resources, and the changing environments that cause one set of characteristics to persist rather than another.

    In other words, death is a tool, whether inflicted by falling logs, lack of food, or changing environment. You can name the tool something else, but the same thing still occurs. If God was as concerned with the death of creatures as I believed he was when I was a young earth creationist (sparrows falling, though note that the scriptures just say God sees, not that he prevents), then he could not use this mechanism.

    It seems dangerous to me to try to brush past the implications, and on first glance this looks like an effort to do so, or at least an attempt to frame the issue in a more favorable light. The wording sounds nicer, but the creatures are still dying, and evolution would not occur if they didn’t. Similarly, I think, one could look at a hurricane as the cause of new life, and in fact such “disasters” have a role to play in the environment. But looking at them that way doesn’t cause them to leave less death behind.

  • Fundamentally Altered Viewpoint

    Alan Lenzi, of Bible and Ancient Near East, asks a simple question:

    Does awareness of the ANE archaeological, linguistic, cultural, and textual materials discovered in the last 150 years or so fundamentally alter our understanding of the Hebrew Bible?

    As soon as I’ve finished writing this short post I’m going to go to his blog and comment with the answer “yes.” (If you want to answer his question, please go there to do so. If you want to comment on my additional notes, do so here or as desired.)

    The problem, however, is that the question is not quite that simple, because he uses “our”. If he used “your”, I would be quite comfortable with just a yes. In my personal experience, I moved from believing that God more or less delivered the Bible intact to the various prophets and other authors, to one in which I see them each as recording their experiences with God. That is a fundamental shift, and it resulted from working with ancient near eastern material. It wasn’t a very comfortable process.

    But there are two concerns that I have with the answer. If I am to include the Christian church in general, I would say that even in mainline churches many if not most of the members are unaware of the comparative and textual material, and if they are aware, it is a fairly foggy sort of awareness. Just how much of “us” has been fundamentally changed?

    Many ministers are well aware of the comparative materials, yet they hesitate to truly educate congregations. One reason, true if not valid, is that some members are going to lose their faith based on this material. I don’t know precisely why different ways of dealing with the data appeal to different people. It’s easy for those on my side, the “faith” side so to speak, to accuse those who leave the church of doing so for reasons other than that they are following the data where it leads them.

    Many of those who leave Christianity look back at someone like me and suppose that I am rationalizing my faith. Having pretty much ditched all the fundamentals that got me into a Biblical Languages program in the first place, training to teach, I still try to construct a faith position that, to them at least, looks pretty flimsy.

    I’d prefer to allow that we all come to where we are in a substantially honest manner, though I would put an emphasis on the role of the Christian community. One is more likely to construct a workable faith position if one is supported in the community. That cuts both ways as I see it. One could blame departures on a failure of the community to support. I think that does happen. But one could also blame those who stay on the support of the community, rather than intellectual honesty.

    The church, in my experience, regularly fails to provide a good environment for intellectual and spiritual searching. Most church members want to see their church more as a destination than a journey, and they don’t want someone running around and shaking the foundations and the framework. In my view that is a weakness. While someone may search while in the church, and may find, it seems to me almost accidental.

    So in terms of the church as a whole I would say that many do not have a fundamentally altered viewpoint simply because they ignore the relevant data. I will ignore here those who simply challenge the data as such.

    Finally, it’s easy to project one’s personal experience onto the broader movement. My personal movement from a fundamentalist to a much more liberal view of inspiration reflects the historical journey of the church since reformation and enlightenment. Except that it doesn’t. I think there have always been at least hints of handling inspiration, and even those who rejected inspiration based solely on the information that they had at the time. The basic facts are much clearer now, and many more people have had the opportunity to see such material, but the actual impact is smaller than one would imagine.

    So, in order, for me, yes. For the church community in America today, not so much. For Christianity as a whole, maybe partially.

    Don’t worry. I’ll try to be even less clear next time!

  • TVUUC Shooting

    On Sunday, July 27, there was a shooting at Tennessee Value Unitarian-Universalist Church in which two people were killed.

    Moderate Christian Blogroll member Shuck and Jive is following this tragedy. I will be following it via his blog and the news stories he links to.

    I join my prayers with those already offered for the people of this congregation.

  • Newbigin: Proper Confidence

    With it’s subtitle, “Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship” this little big sets sail into a rather intense area of debate, and one which is very relevant to recent discussions on this blog. I’m not really going to try to summarize it. It is only 105 pages and those aren’t too terribly intense if you’ve done a bit of theological reading before. I’d suggest getting a copy and reading it. I got mine as a gift from a friend. Giving me books is a great way to get on my good side!

    I’m afraid to summarize. Newbigin boils down a great deal of material into those 105 pages, so setting out to summarize is difficult. But I would say briefly that he holds that all knowledge involves risk, as a subject makes a commitment to some thing. In the same way all knowledge is subjective, as it is known by a subject. There is no point in discussing knowledge without a subject who is doing the knowing. Nonetheless we can be confident of such subjective knowledge, and in fact we regularly are.

    I’m pretty certain I’ll be dissatisfied with that summary later, and I’m sure someone who has read the book will come back and point out how I have oversimplified everything, lost all the nuances, and perhaps even misrepresented some aspect. I guess I will take the risk of choosing to believe it will do to lay the groundwork for my response.

    I agree with Newbigin in broad outlines, but find myself coming to a different point on the spectrum as a result, always providing that I am correctly reading where he comes out within the outline. A key point here is simply that all knowledge is subjective to some extent. We do not know absolutely or from a perspectiveless framework. We know from who we are and where we are.

    In some postmodern thought, this results in the claim that all ideas are so subjective that we shouldn’t make truth claims between them at all. In the creation-evolution controversy, many people who would probably forcefully reject any idea that they are postmodern nonetheless use the “all stories are equal” approach to denigrate science and thereby make their own story look better. If scientists might be wrong and creationists might be wrong, then why privilege the results of scientific research over young earth creationism? (Note that the example is mine, not Newbigin’s.)

    Newbigin doesn’t leave us there, however. He does believe that there is a reality to be perceived, and that we do our best to perceive it, and in doing so take a risk through the commitments that we make. There is a certainty, not that we are right, but that we are going toward what is right, or so I interpret page 67, separated from its specifically Christian commitment.

    But the whole cannot be separated from its Christian commitment, because that is ultimately what Newbigin is talking about–the commitment to the one who is truth, a subjective commitment because it is a choice taken with risk, but not something of which one cannot be confident at all.

    I certainly agree that all knowledge is limited and subjective. The results of scientific research are not complete, and my theological wanderings are certainly not absolute. (I do believe there are things that are absolutely true, but they are so far from our perception that we have to be satisfied with doing our best to head that direction. It’s sort of like navigating by the north star. You’ll never get there, but if you keep on, you’ll arrive somewhere in the vicinity of the north pole.

    So in the sense that all knowledge is subjective and that one makes choices, takes risks, and can (indeed will) have confidence in things one does not know absolutely, I agree with Newbigin. Where I perceive that I differ is in the relative levels. I think it is very easy to overemphasize how relative certain elements of physical knowledge are, and to underemphasize just how relative certain spiritual issues are. The idea that all stories are equal results from such a confusion.

    In practical terms most of us treat “objective” as something that can be similarly perceived by multiple people. A scientific experiment that can be repeated by anyone with the proper supplies and equipment is considered objective. Fantasies in my own mind are subjective because nobody else can perceive them. While there is a subjective element in the most objective fact, and there is an objective element in the most subjective (neurons fire when I fantasize, I would imagine!), there’s a very valuable distinction there. I don’t think Newbigin misses that point; I do think he emphasizes is somewhat less than I would.

    As an example, let me relate three experiences, two of them singular and one that has been repeated many times. In the first, a couple of days after our son died, I was in my wife’s home office with her when I clearly heard our son speaking in the next room. It was clear enough to me that I actually got up and started to head over there to talk to him before I was jolted by the reality that he was dead. My wife heard nothing, of course, and a recorder would have recorded anything. In fact, the only evidence you have or can have of this event is that I relate it. I didn’t even tell my wife what happened at the time. She simply noticed me leave the room and decide to come back, and since such inconsistent behavior is not uncommon for me, she never noticed.

    In the second, we were both in the living room and I heard water running. I got up mumbling about having left the tap running in the bathroom (though it did sound oddly different). My wife starts laughing and says, “No, that’s my new screen saver with sounds of running water.” In this case there is an objective event, but I misperceive it.

    In the final case, which happens commonly, I hear the dog barking, and I assume something has happened. This is objectively demonstrable, as in anyone who goes to where the dog is will likely perceive him barking and almost as likely notice why. He generally only barks for some reason. It may not be a good one, but there will be a cause!

    My point in all those words is that there are many levels of confidence that we have in our knowledge, and the question here would be where we place certain matters of spirituality on this continuum. I think that on a day to day basis I rank them much more subjectively than does Newbigin, but we both rank them somewhere.

    Which leads to the point on which the preceding paragraph is completely wrong–or is it? Both Newbigin and I make a very fundamental choice, the choice to believe in the incarnation. This provides at the foundation of our thinking the believe in God as creator, in other words, that the universe makes sense, and second that we have placed our final confidence in a person. In my personal thinking, and as I read Newbigin in his as well, this becomes a central axiom in our way of thinking. Subordinate facts may fall wherever on the spectrum, but this choice remains at the core, and is the one to which we give our true confidence.

    To quote from page 66-67, and do so more faithfully to its context than my previous allusion:

    If we are to use the word “certainty” here, then it is not the certainty of Descartes. It is the kind of certainty expressed in such words as those of the Scriptures: “I know whom I have believed, and I am sure that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me” (2 Tim. 1:12). . . . The weight of confidence rests there and not here with us. Secondly, the phrase “until that day” reminds us that this is not a claim to possess final truth but to be on the way that leads to the fullness of truth. . . .

    That’s a pretty good expression, I think.

  • Using Reason to Judge Revelation

    One of my objections to inerrancy is that it is impossible to demonstrate. Lacking a perfect standard external to the Bible and also lacking perfect understanding, we are unable to actually demonstrate that the Bible is, in fact, without error. Some apologists seem to believe that if we just apply the right set of standards to all the literature before us, the Bible will stand out as inspired and inerrant as opposed to all other claimants.

    The problem is that if God reveals something to you that you cannot know in any other way, by what means do you determine that it is true?

    Previously I have written that determined what is an authoritative, inspired source is defined within a community, rather than in some externally objective fashion. Thus if one wanted to compare the revelations of Christianity and Islam, the Bible and the Qur’an respectively, one would need to compare the communities rather than the books. In practice the books are defined and judged by the communities involved. That sort of comparison is a daunting task, and neither of these communities (nor any others I know of) consistently seem to come out well. There is always the “everybody’s human” dodge, but that only makes it harder.

    Christopher Smith discusses some issues related to this in his post Some Objections to Newman’s Anti-Rationalist Polemics. There his main concern is applying our conscience to scripture. For example, what does one do about commands to genocide in scripture? This is a question closely related to my current series on theodicy.

    Referring to Newman’s claim that scripture is not to be judged by its contents, but rather by its credentials (an iffy proposition, to say the least!), Chris says:

    The kind of thinking described above may resolve the problem of divinely-ordained genocide in the Old Testament for the Bible inerrantist, but it also resolves the problem of divinely-ordained unbeliever-killing for the Muslim Brother. And of course, Newman applied it selectively. . . .

    I would add that if anything God commands is right by virtue of the fact that God commands it, a variation on this same statement, then how can one possibly tell the difference between divine and demonic? This is a major reason that I often equivocate (or some would probably use less charitable words) on the revelation aspect of scripture and dwell heavily on the experiential aspect. I tend to see scripture as a record of experience with God, revelatory in the sense that I judge it to be experience of the divine, but not in the sense that it provides extraordinary information that could not be acquired otherwise.

    Now there must be revelation in there if people are experiencing God, but we have a very imperfect idea of what is divine revelation and what is part of what we bring to the table. On the key question here, acts of God which seem to be morally reprehensible, I would say that we need to ask just how much of all of that was what God brought to the table, and how much was the result of what humans brought with them.

    I would submit that even when we have come through an experience that we say has profoundly changed us, we have only been changed a little at a time.

    Chris starts his concluding paragraph thus:

    Reason, of course, can lead people to differing beliefs, as well. I do not claim that reason is perfect, pure, or easy to use. . . .

    Good point, and that’s why we constantly put things to the test, both of reason and of experience. When someone comes out and says, “God told me to injure or kill people for no valid reason,” we can know that it’s wrong, and by definition, if wrong, it is not God.

  • Who Speaks for Religion?

    If I went around my neighborhood asking friends and neighbors just what evolutionary biology was all about, then went and found an evolutionary biologist and asked him to defend the comments of all the “evolutionists” in my neighborhood, I think he would be justly annoyed. He would probably tell me that these people didn’t understand the details of the field and in fact that most of them didn’t understand the broad outlines. He would certainly define terms differently than they did.

    Suppose, in turn, that I chastise him for using eccentric terminology and not understanding the real issues involved in the field because, after all, this is the way that regular people, folks who haven’t been to university and studied such stuff, understand the terms. How dare he refuse to defend their viewpoint? After all, one must defend this activity as it is actually understood out there among the masses.

    Pretty stupid of me, no? Well, that’s a slightly exaggerated version of how I felt upon reading the post Saving Religion from the Religion Scholars. What is a “religion scholar” anyhow? Can I start referring to evolutionary biologists as “science scholars”? Probably not. I’d get accused of failing to comprehend the many and various disciplines involved, the terminology used, and the interests and perspectives.

    I’m not here to defend the particular “religion scholar” referred to in the post (nor to attack him, for that matter). That’s not the major issue. I would point out that I could always find one biologist who says really dumb things (I think Answers in Genesis and Reasons to Believe could provide me with a couple), and declare as a result that we should rescue science from scientists in general.

    The simple fact is that religion is not a single entity, the study of religion is not a single field, and the arguments against one sort of religion are not effective as arguments against another sort. You may want to make it so for convenience, but it really doesn’t work. I don’t get worried when an atheist chooses to argue against someone else’s beliefs and then demand that I defend them. I simply shrug and move on to more productive pursuits.

    Now most atheists with whom I have interacted have taken the time to hear what I’m saying, just as I try to take the time to hear what they’re saying. It should shock nobody to discover that not every atheist has the same set of beliefs, and not every person who has some religious beliefs shares the same set.

    It should similarly come as no surprise that those who spend their time studying one scholarly discipline that is part of the broad field we call religion will have specific vocabulary and ways of talking about the subject that those who are not specialists don’t share.

    To use myself as an example, I am often called a “theologian” by laypeople. I’m not a theologian. I don’t claim this, as some think, because I don’t like theology, but because I am not trained as a theologian, and haven’t researched or taught in that broad set of disciplines grouped under “theology.” My actual training is in Biblical and cognate languages, a field which requires no religious commitment, just a scholarly one. My actual work, to the extent I’m involved in religion, is popularizing, but that still doesn’t make me a theologian.

    Within Biblical studies and theology there are again many subfields. Just as I am annoyed when a “scientist”–a physicist, for example (with reference to nobody in particular)–claims to speak authoritatively regarding biology, I am annoyed if someone whose training is in pastoral ministry claims to speak authoritatively on issues of Hebrew grammar. Each person will have some knowledge of other fields, but we must each be careful.

    Thus nobody speaks for religion, and it’s even less likely that anyone could than it is for science in general. If we are to have dialog on these issues, then we will have to take the time to find out the specific nuances of our opponents’ views. If those hardliners on either side of the issue don’t want to do so, that is their loss.

    (Note: James McGrath has also blogged on this issue.)

  • Horrors! A Plague of Bible Reading!

    . . . or so I might be led to believe by reading Christians Spend Too Much Time Studying the Bible (HT: JakeBouma.com). I don’t know enough about the pastor who wrote this, so I can’t say whether it provides an appropriate balance for his congregation. Perhaps he is plagued with church members whose noses are always in their Bibles causing them to neglect families, jobs, and service to their community.

    But I must say that I haven’t encountered many of the type of Christians to whom he seems to be speaking. Some liberals have a stereotype that sees evangelicals totally involved in doctrinal and Biblical studies, leaving no time for social action or for actually living the gospel. It’s balanced, I think, by those evangelicals who imagine liberals joyfully shedding orthodox doctrines for no better reason than that they don’t like the feel of orthodoxy. Yet I have actually met very few examples of these stereotypes. The overwhelming majority of evangelicals I know are very active living the gospel as they understand it, and most liberals reject doctrines for what seems to them, at least, good reasons.

    This post seems to imagine most Christians as being sort of like the Pharisees, studying doctrines and traditions in great detail, and presumably also tithing their “mint and dill and cumin” so to speak, while “neglecting the weightier matters of the law.” (That’s from Matthew 23:23 for you Biblically illiterate folks!) Perhaps someone could show me a survey or some other type of evidence as to where this is largely the case today. I certainly do believe many Christians neglect their duty to love others, but I fail to see where it happens because they are too busy studying the Bible.

    Perhaps I just haven’t been around enough, but I’d love to find the church that requires an admonition to study their Bibles less. Perhaps I could preach there and I could allude to Bible stories I imagine are well known, and not have to provide a summary.

    Brian Jones, the post author, makes some good points:

    1. There truly were no leather bound New Testaments dropping from the sky immediately after the resurrection.
    2. Christianity truly has prospered in times of limited literacy.
    3. Very few early Christians could have afforded the cost of a complete Bible in times when they had to be transcribed.
    4. It is quite possible to be a good Christian with limited Bible knowledge.

    But I believe that he has failed to truly think through any one of these possibly valid points. Let’s look at them briefly, one at a time.

    1. There truly were no leather bound New Testaments dropping from the sky immediately after the resurrection.

    Does anybody but me see at least one culturally conditioned error here? No, I don’t mean “leather bound.” I’m talking about the idea that one would have to have the Bible collected into one place before one could get busy studying it line by line and verse by verse. We have a prejudice toward collections and large volumes, but smaller manuscripts were common in Biblical times. It didn’t mean people studied less. It meant they studied differently.

    Further, he seems concerned only with the New Testament. While the New Testament canon was not settled for some years, there was considerable stability in the major portions of the Hebrew scriptures at that point, certainly the Torah and the Prophets. That made a considerable amount of Bible available for studying along the way.

    2. Christianity truly has prospered in times of limited literacy.

    I’m reminded of the testimony I heard from a Cambodian pastor. He told how they lived in a refugee camp along the Thai border, and they had only one Bible for thousands of Christians. One leader kept the Bible and they would all have times to go and study with him. Otherwise they worked from memory.

    We have very little tolerance today for long Bible readings, but in a time of limited literacy, public reading was a much more common practice. (By “public” I do not mean to imply large audiences, merely that a literate person would read to a group.)

    The importance that these people placed on the Bible is reflected in how quickly they translated portions of it into new languages as the gospel progressed. Again, they didn’t study less, the studied differently.

    3. Very few early Christians could have afforded the cost of a complete Bible in times when they had to be transcribed.

    Quite true. We should be very thankful that the Bible was preserved through times of such hardship and that it is so accessible today. It is a great blessing. It’s quite possible that one of the reasons we actually study it less is that it is so much more easily available. We would value our Bibles more if someone was trying to burn them all.

    4. It is quite possible to be a good Christian with limited Bible knowledge.

    Just so. It’s also quite possible to become a “good” Christian in the last moments of your life as you are being executed–witness the thief on the cross–but I wouldn’t recommend it if you have any alternative. Just because you can do something doesn’t make it the best thing to do.

    All this doesn’t support the conclusion:

    Most Christians today assume that to be a Christian means to have a personal relationship with the Bible instead of the risen Jesus.

    In this case at least I have met examples of the breed. They quite worship their Bibles, and fail almost completely to find the God of whom the Bible speaks. But they are not as common as the quoted paragraph implies.

    What we need is balance. The Christian life consists of many spiritual disciplines. Studying the Bible is just one of these. Bible study can also be a purely intellectual discipline. It can be practiced for the wrong reasons. But in my experience it is rarely those people who are actually dedicating large amounts of time and effort to Bible study who are actually missing out on the rest of the gospel.

    Most commonly it is those people who talk most about the Bible and study it least who also seem to practice bibliolatry–they worship their Bibles. Not really, you know. What they actually worship is themselves, and the ego stroking they get from those who believe they are studying their Bibles. They don’t have to actually study.

    A plague of Bible reading? Bring it on!

  • Going Back to the Original

    Sinaiticus, a 4th century manuscript of the New Testament and parts of the LXX Old Testament, will go on display, starting this July with some portions, and available completely by next year (MSNBC.com story).

    The story got me thinking about what it means to go back to “the original.”  KJV-Only advocates will tell you how hard it is to go back to the originals, since we have not one single autograph of any Biblical book, and then suggest the ridiculous conclusion that we should therefore use the KJV as our standard.  This would be analogous to going to a bowl of fruit, and determining that because all the fruit has some spoilage, we might as well take one of the most spoiled pieces.

    Once in a discussion on the <a href=””>Compuserve Religion Forum</a>, someone asked me if I had ever read the Dead Sea Scrolls.  I wasn’t precisely sure what he meant, so I responded that I had read some portions, which is quite true, though I have mostly read them in transcription.  The closest that I’ve gotten to an actual scroll or scroll fragment is a photograph.  What he expected, however, was that I had actually handled the original scroll, done the transcription myself, and then worked from that transcription.  To that I had to say, “No, even with the photographs the only thing I’ve done is to check a letter or two against the photograph, and even there I would leave the final word to the folks who are really experts in that area.”  That was a great disappointment to him.

    In my experience, “going back to the original” can mean looking up a text in your preferred translation, going to the original language in an appropriate critical edition, examining manuscripts, or having in one’s possession the autograph of a work.  For those involved in source and form criticism, it can mean going back to the sources from which the document we have was compiled.

    It is important to remember that we cannot completely eliminate our dependence on someone else’s work.  Whether you use an English translation or examine the individual characters on an ancient manuscript, you do not achieve your result independently of others.

    Nonetheless, going as far back as possible, and checking as carefully as possible is a positive thing, even though we know we will not achieve it perfectly.

  • Science with Pre-Ordained Conclusions

    One problem for creationists has been the lack of publications in peer-reviewed journals. In a typical attempt to bypass reality with labels, Answers in Genesis has duly produced a “peer-reviewed journal,” the Answers Research Journal.

    A major problem, of course, is that “peer-reviewed” tends to imply more than simply that there is a panel that reviews submissions. One can quite easily gather a panel of one’s family and friends and get them to “review” what one has written. Those who have tangled with the process of publication knows the difference between friendly and agreeable reviewers, and those not selected such as to favor your cause.

    In addition, peer-reviewed journals are generally associated with some center of the academic activity in question or some professional society that supports it. Thus publication in peer-reviewed journals also implies a level of acceptance in the community involved in that particular type of research. Other members of that community read the articles in such journals and might even cite them in their work.

    Of course, peer review could also result in censorship and elimination of good ideas that are out of the mainstream, but might become mainstream later. In that one point reside the hopes and dreams of intelligent design (ID) advocates everywhere. “Our day will come,” they say, “And you will all realize how right we were.” That view might have had some validity a few decades ago, but today if you have a truly good paper it will be very hard to suppress. Get it on the internet and someone or other will see it. If it’s of such good quality that it “shifts the paradigm,” then you’ll be able to show up all those stuffy peer reviewers.

    The creation of a “special” journal for a “special” group of researchers who aren’t acceptable to the broader scientific community doesn’t respond to the underlying problem. What it does is provide creationist debaters who are facing the general public with some ammunition, “smart PR bullets” if you please, targeted at those who don’t really understand the issues. “No peer-reviewed papers? I have five citations here, all from Answers Research Journal. See! It’s peer reviewed. It says so right here.”

    Once the PR point is scored, who cares what science is accomplished? I note the interesting line in the requirements for papers, mixed in with a bunch of format requirements:

    Papers should be no more than 10,000 words long. Color diagrams, figures, and photographs are encouraged. Papers can be in any relevant field of science, theology, history, or social science, but they must be from a young-earth and young-universe perspective. Rather than merely pointing out flaws in evolutionary theory, papers should aim to assist the development of the Creation and Flood model of origins. Papers should be submitted in a plain text, single-spaced Word or RTF file. Formatting should be kept to an absolute minimum. Do not embed graphics, tables, figures, or photographs in the text, but supply them in separate files, along with captions. [emphasis mine]

    Translation: Take that you scientists! You don’t want creationist papers? We don’t take any evolutionist papers, nor papers from folks who believe that the earth is old. We have our conclusions pre-ordained!

    One obvious thing that young earth creationists seem to miss is that not assuming that the earth is 6,000 years old is not the same type of bias as assuming it is. The age of the earth is not an assumption, rather it is the result of considerable research which one can review, challenge, and correct if one wants to.

    In the meantime, Answers in Genesis is also producing some “semi-technical” research. ERV reviews some of this over at the Panda’s Thumb and it doesn’t come out so well. She does a much better job and goes into greater detail than I possibly could. It is, after all, in her field.

    But I could help mentioning a couple of little problems with logic. Consider this paragraph:

    Antibiotic resistance is certainly an example of change, but it is hardly a fact of macroevolution (bacteria remain bacteria). Creation microbiologist, Dr. Kevin Anderson, states that such variation in bacteria is beneficial for their survival outcome in a clinical environment, but not a beneficial mutation. Anderson (2005) goes on to demonstrate how some “fitness” cost is often associated with mutations, although reversion mutations may eventually recover most, if not all, of this cost for some bacteria. A biological cost does occur in the loss of pre-existing cellular systems or functions. Such loss of cellular activity cannot legitimately be offered as a genetic means of demonstrating macroevolution. [all emphasis mine]

    Look at the first bolded portion: “Bacteria remain bacteria”? When are these people going to bring some sort of focus to the idea of a “kind”? The only definition I can see is that if one thing changed into another while somebody was watching they must be the same kind, otherwise not.

    Consider the second bolded portion. Here we are told that a mutation might be beneficial in a clinical environment, but it’s not a “beneficial mutation.” What would make it a beneficial mutation? I would suggest that the fact that more of the bacteria survive in a “clinical environment” than would otherwise is beneficial from the point of view of the bacteria involved. You see, they don’t live in this other theoretical environment, the non-clinical environment with which they are apparently supposed to be concerned.

    Is there some sort of ideal environment where bacteria should want to live and where they should desire to be most fit to live. “Unfortunately we have to survive here in this clinical environment,” say the bacterial philosophers, “but the mutation that allows us to do so isn’t really beneficial, because it doesn’t prepare us for our real home in a non-clinical environment.”

    So then we come to the conclusion of the paragraph where we’re told that because this other loss of functionality occurs, this can’t possibly be used as a case of macroevolution. I’d like to know what that has to do with the case at hand. In the clinical environment, you know, the one where the bacteria with antibiotic resistance have to live, it is a beneficial mutation.

    Go read ERV’s entire post at the Panda’s Thumb.