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.

  • Hebews 6:1-6 in Selected Translations

    Polycarp is comparing God’s Word to the Nations with some other translations and has come to Hebrews 6:1-6.  I must confess I prefer the way the NLT translates this passage, but GW is not bad.

    I’ve written on the passage before:  Hebrews 6:4-6:  Can Those Who Fall Return? and then St. John Chrysostom on Hebrews 6, and then in my book Not Ashamed of the Gospel: Confessions of a Liberal Charismatic from a more personal perspective.

    I do believe that trying to resolve the hard words through translation is misguided.  This is a difficult passage, not because of poor translation, but simply because it is a hard passage.


  • Totally Dependent

    I’m the guest blogger at Grace Through the Desert today with a post entitled You are Totally Dependent based on Ephesians 2:8-10 and a few others scriptures, especially my favorite Psalm 104.

  • If You Don’t Know Greek and Hebrew

    … you don’t know Greek and Hebrew, and there are certain things you cannot do, like, well, reading Greek and Hebrew.  I don’t think this means you can’t read the Bible, or that your opinions don’t matter, but it’s a simple fact.

    When people pretend to know the Biblical languages, as they often do using tools such as Strong’s Concordance and associated tools coded to Strong’s numbers, they tend to introduce many more errors than they would if they stuck to English, or whatever language it is that they actually do read.

    If they don’t know the languages, that doesn’t mean they are stupid or even ignorant.  There are simply some things they can’t do.  No big deal, right?

    Well, Douglas Mangum wrote a perfectly reasonable post on the topic, deploring some tools such as I’ve described, which are advertised in a way that is at least questionable, and it appears that he has been called an elitist.

    The only reason I jumped in here is that I’m a strong advocate of lay Bible study.  I don’t believe my knowledge of Biblical languages gives me an exclusive on Biblical interpretation.  I believe that anyone can get involved, and anyone can have valid opinions.  But that doesn’t make everyone’s opinion valid.  Use of Biblical languages tools without the proper training is one of the best ways to get nearly everything wrong.

    Let each use what knowledge and skill he or she has, and depend on the proper experts where such skill is lacking.

  • Is 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 an Interpolation?

    Well, somehow this post came out blank.  There really was something there.  Really!

    Here it is, rewritten:

    Philip Payne has written a post on the Koinonia blog defending the idea that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is an interpolation (HT: Evangelical Textual Criticism).  I have discussed this issue before (Does Gordon Fee Discard Part of the Bible), based on Gordon Fee’s comments in his commentary on 1 Corinthians.  Payne uses a different starting point–strictly manuscript evidence–than does Fee, but they come to the same conclusion.

    I confess that I am a fan of Gordon Fee.  I regard his commentary on 1 Corinthians (NICOT) to be the best single volume commentary on a New Testament book I have ever read.

  • A Devotional on Grace

    My wife chose to use an old devotional on grace that I wrote for today’s devotional on her list.  I don’t usually do this, but the devotional touched my heart again, as it did when I wrote it.  The devotionals I write always hit me first!

  • Prayer in a Public Meeting

    If I were invited to offer the invocation at a government event at which people of any faith should be welcome, I would have to refuse. This is a stand that has been misunderstood by both supporters and opponents of separation of church and state. I have been told that I lack the courage of my convictions because I would not go and utter a purely Christian prayer under those circumstances. Of course, I must note that it is not the courage of my convictions that is lacking, but rather I don’t have the courage of someone else’s convictions. On the other hand I have been told that I am intolerant because I will not offer an interfaith prayer.

    I was reminded of this issue today when Wesley Elsberry linked to this story about a council member in Tampa who chides speakers for offering too sectarian of prayers, which she believes violates the separation of church and state.

    I have an initial issue that I’m not going to address in detail, and that is how it can be that a prayer in general doesn’t violate church and state separation, yet a prayer in the name of Jesus does. The first would seem to exclude all those who either do not believe in God at all or do not believe in a way that includes the validity of prayer.

    And that does relate to my problem a little bit. Personally I think prayer is largely personal. Now I don’t mean it can’t be public. Matthew 6:5-6 has been cited ad nauseum as a prohibition of all forms of public prayer, but I think that verse has been asked to bear an excessive weight. Jesus is addressing making a show of one’s piety. When might one pray publicly and not be making a show of one’s piety? In my view, that would be a case of corporate prayer, when a group of people join together in prayer.

    Corporate prayer involves a certain amount of agreement, a certain commonness of purpose in worship. When I am asked to pray publicly, I do not feel that I need to preach a sermon in prayer. I’m sometimes a bit amused when someone informs God of all the things that the congregation needs to know, normally while saying something like “you know Lord …”

    My conviction is that if I am offering my prayer publicly, but it is not a corporate prayer, it automatically becomes a show. I should not pray something corporately that I cannot fully invite everyone to participate in, as I would in a pastoral prayer, or an invocation in a Sunday School class, or in a group offering the blessing over a meal. I have even left out praying before a meal when meeting with non-believing friends. They know my convictions, and I don’t think God will miss the meal because I chose not to impose my beliefs on a group.

    I do think that invocations at governmental meetings are a public show. The council (or congress) as a whole is not going to seek God’s will. The meeting should be welcoming to all citizens, not just those who pray, and the prayer cannot be offered in real unity nor in any sort of expectation of obedience. I believe that a critical part of prayer is listening, something that should be included in our acts of prayer as congregations.

    Are there any ecumenical or interfaith circumstances under which I do believe I can pray? Yes, I believe so. I can do so in practically any ecumenical setting, though I will shape my prayer to the best of my ability so as to make it truly corporate. I can and have engaged in prayer in an interfaith setting where all believe in God and all believe in prayer.

    The latter is a bit difficult for me, as my view of both ecumenism and interfaith dialog is that it is a conversation between strongly held beliefs, not a least common denominator collection. I think that continuing constructive conversation is much more important than is some sort of structural unity.

    So I would say that the council member in the story is only half right. Were I invited to pray at that council, or any other, I would just say no. I’d pray for them at home or with others of like mind. I’d be happy if the individuals prayed according to their conscience and understanding of God.

    The public display? No.

  • Informed Bible Study and Creationism

    Bruce Alderman discusses a recent post by the Internet Monk on the topic of how learning to take the Bible more seriously (my summary) moved him away from young earth creationism.

    I empathize with the process. I find it interesting that people think that somehow the theory of evolution drove me to a less literal reading of Genesis. Now other than disliking the phrase “less literal,” I have to note that I changed my reading of Genesis before I took any time looking at evolution at all. I didn’t actually study geology or paleontology until after I completed my MA program, and then only on an informal basis.

    But I did study the Biblical material seriously and looked at it in relation to the literature of other ancient near eastern culture, and simply decided that it was not narrative history. I also don’t like the general category “myth” as I don’t think it’s helpful enough in understanding either the intent of the writers or the impact of the text over history. (It is helpful in some ways for some passages.) One has to get more specific than that in my view. For example, I would categorize Genesis 1:1-2:4a as liturgy.

    In any case, read the two posts to which I link, and then possibly connect them to my post today on my Participatory Bible Study blog, in which I urge those who can to teach their Bible study method when they have an opportunity in the church, which I think is the most constructive thing we can do.

  • FTC Disclosure Rules for Blogs

    Over on my company blog I indicated that these rules were generally common sense, as in if you make money off of something you should disclose the fact that you do.

    Of course, you can’t count on the government to use common sense even in implementing common sense. Thus somehow if print news organizations get free copies for review, they don’t have to disclose it, but bloggers must. Even an affiliate link is compensation and must be disclosed.

    I don’t have problem with the disclosure requirement. In fact, I try to be more forthcoming that is required. I do have a problem with the idea that we need government regulators to do this sort of thing. I think it’s a pretty clear example of how to waste taxpayer money while accomplishing less than good competition would manage.

    There’s a good article and discussion at Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits.

  • The Death of Good Judgment

    I’ve really been wanting to write something about this for some time, but I haven’t, and don’t, have time to do it justice. But I saw a couple of other posts that begin to address some of the issues.

    My deep concern is with ideas such as zero tolerance polices, the great push to make the foibles of youth into major crimes, and finally the equivalent push to move more and more juvenile crimes to adult courts.

    I think there are genuine reasons to be concerned about the juvenile justice system. There are good reasons to put certain young offenders into the adult system. The problem is that the public seems to be much more concerned about being hard on criminals than about solving problems of crime.

    Making sex offenders out of teens involved in sexting is a good example of the legal system run amuck. This is much more properly a parental issue than one for the state. Only in extreme cases of parental neglect should the state get involved, and then I would suggest the involvement should be with parents. In no way do I want this to make things easier for purveyors of child porn–adult pornographers preying on children. They’re scum and we need to go after them. But using the same laws on teenagers playing around, even if one can stretch the letter of the statute to fit, is nothing other than malicious.

    Having said all that, let me link to a couple of recent blog posts that called my attention back to this.

    The first is a post on a new blog for me, AnotherThink, which I found via C.Orthodoxy. I find myself thoroughly in agreement with the sentiments expressed in that article, and have added the blog to my RSS reader.

    The second comes from the blog Classically Liberal, and describes the case of a six year old cub scout who brings, you probably guessed it, a multifunction knife to school. But instead of sanity, the school has a zero tolerance policy. Now they want the child taken to juvenile court. Sounds like an excellent reason to homeschool.

    Both of these cases illustrate a lack of willingness to permit and/or to exercise simple good judgment. One can determine not to tolerate a weapon at school without simultaneously overreacting to either mistakes or purely innocent actions. But we prefer to hide beyond a policy that requires merely the application of a detailed set of rules without any regard for how those rules work out in practice.

    I said two things, but here’s another I remembered, Hoosier Grandmother Arrested for Purchasing Cold Medication. This was surely a case for the application of some good judgment, which was not forthcoming. Of course, I would blame the legislators who passed the law in that form in the first place.

    I realize that criticism and court cases against people that exercise judgment make people afraid to do anything that’s not micromanaged by the book. I continue to believe that such an attitude will be ultimately very destructive.

  • Making a Sensation of the Ordinary

    John Hobbins has already commented on this, and I agree with what he had to say.  But my attention was called back to the issue from a Christian Post item in my reader account this morning titled First verse in Bible is mistranslation, say scholar.  There are just so many things wrong with that headline, not to mention the article it heads!  One would think that Genesis will never be the same again.

    We are used to sensationalizing of Biblical finds.  It’s unfortunate, but it sells papers.  First the finding gets an oversensationalized roll-out in the press, then it gets debunked, based not on what was actually found or said by the discoverers, but rather based on the hype, then finally it is forgotten, and many miss the real significance of a find or idea.  What is left is a vague idea that something happened.  Those inclined to be skeptical remember how yet more claims regarding the Bible have been debunked.  Supporters of the Bible (from whom it should quite likely be rescued) remember that there was an attack on their traditional beliefs, which was obviously turned back.

    Perhaps I exaggerate, but I think not by much.

    In this case I could say that I would be very happy if preachers and scholars would use the word “mistranslation” a bit less freely.  Too often it is simply a translation with which the writer disagrees, but which has sound scholarly support.  I think it would be a good idea to distinguish mistranslation in the sense that this is wrong, i.e. there is no sound, scholarly reason or support for it, and a controversial translation, in which qualified scholars disagree.

    When I listen to sermons I generally cringe when I hear “what the Greek really means” or “what the Hebrew really means.”  It is rare that this is followed by something that is truly well-considered.  It is often followed by a rehash of something read in a commentary which the speaker has not fully comprehended.  It’s off the topic of this post, but if you don’t know Hebrew or Greek, don’t pretend!

    In this case, based on the article iteslf and on John Hobbins’ comments, it seems that we are working through some new arguments regarding an old debate.  The word mistranslation is a misstep, and what we have going on in fact is simply a discussion of possible approaches to a particular word and a particular construction.  It’s interesting, presumably worth reading (I will get hold of it soon), but it’s not quite as sensational as the headline.

    And this is the way scholarship should be.  Only occasionally is a new discovery or a newly published idea truly revolutionary.  It’s wonderful when such a thing happens.  But most commonly one builds brick by brick on the work of others.  If the public would understand this about science and scholarship, it might be easier to get the right things financed.