Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Bible Backgrounds

  • Stories in a Chronological Context

    Several things over the last couple of weeks have called my attention to time.  My pastor preached about it last week, speaking of times of God’s extended silence.  I lost some of it while being sick this week which always makes me a bit tense.  Then I received a copy of 24/7:  A One Year Chronological Bible, which puts Bible readings into a chronological framework.  (I’ll get around to reviewing the Bible in a later post.)  Finally I was asked about God’s answers to prayer and the frequencies of his miraculous intervention.

    As Christians when we read scripture we need to be aware of these long periods of time.  There are times to lose our sense of times, especially when our liturgy calls us to become more aware of eternity and less aware of the present.  It is rare in my experience that the liturgy is successful in this call, but it is certainly worth it, and should be more frequent.  But the very experience of eternity impinging on our limited, dare I say puny, time requires that we be aware of time.

    Stories, on the other hand, tend naturally to give a false impression of time.  You cannot tell a story of a long period of time whilst truly giving the full impression of the extended time of waiting involved.  Frequently you’ll see phrases like “after a long time” or “after several months” or even “years passed.”  For the reader, whether it is a few days or a few years, they are passed in just a moment.

    Which in the ordinary course of reading a story is a minor issue.  You know that time passed for the characters, and you’re glad you don’t have hundreds of pages narrating when they ate, went to bed, got up, or went to the toilet.

    But when you go to reading scriptural stories, which provide us with an example (1 Corinthians 10:6), you need to think about this.  How long was it between one thing and the next.  Consider for a moment Judges 13:1:

    The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, and the LORD gave them into the hand of teh Philistines forty years.  (NRSV)

    Now how do we normally read this story?  Well, when I got it in church, I heard immediately about the arrival of the angel and then we wandered through the story of Samson as one overwhelming chain of miracles.  Of course, with all this miraculous intervention by God, we also shook our heads over Samson’s terrible failures.  How could he, when God was so obviously with him?

    But that view of the story misses two important things.  First, those forty years.  Forty years ago it was 1978, and Jimmy Carter had been president for nearly two years.  Forty years ago I was in college.  Forty years ago the PC was a pretty marginal idea.  Forty years ago there was no internet.  Forty years is a long time, and the Israelites had been under foreign domination for that length of time.

    Second, there’s the lifetime of Samson.  While the story of Samson can be covered in a Sunday School lesson or so, at least as stories are commonly covered in Sunday School, we’re told that Samson judged Israel for 20 years (Judges 16:31).  Twenty years is an awful lot of lifetime in which to hide those miracle stories.  It may be that Samson spent years between those miraculous interventions wondering whether God was going to do things for him.  Yes, we’re told he always had his strength, but it seems to have come into play only rarely.  All things considered, I would guess that Sampson did often long for God’s more direct intervention

    We can apply this principle to the entire Bible story.  I’m frequently asked why God doesn’t act today in the way he acted in Bible times.  Which Bible times?  Do we refer to the hundreds of hears the Israelites spent in slavery in Egypt?  Or perhaps we’re looking for century after century of the divided kingdom.  Maybe instead we should think about the 400 years or so from the time of the return from the exile to the opening pages of the New Testament.  Sure, we have a few interventions under the Maccabbees, but would you really want to suffer what those guys did in order to get a couple of divine interventions?

    My point here is certainly not that we should pray less, or ask less of God, nor is it to cut off hope.  More importantly, I think we need to cut off excuses.  We shouldn’t claim that God is more absent from our lives than he was from the lives of people in “Bible times.”

    Yes, there are moments in time when God’s intervention is pretty frequent, but even then remember that we are being told a few stories that cover a long time.  The book of Acts, for example, relates around 30 years of the history of the early church.  If we spread the number of miracles recorded in Acts over 30 years of the modern church, is it possible that people would complain bitterly about God’s absence?

    Stories are wonderful.  They can be encouraging or instructive.  But in the Bible they form part of a history of how God has intervened.  Understanding how they fit into time can be very important as we try to learn the lessons they offer for our lives.

  • Received: The Orthodox Study Bible

    . . . and it’s even more interesting than I anticipated.  This is obviously not the intended review, but I do find the idea of a Bible with a strong flavor of the Orthodox doctrine quite interesting, and the Bible looks fascinating.  The New Testament is NKJV, but the Old Testament uses the St. Athanasius Academy Septuagint, with which I am not too familiar.  I’ll probably have my Septuagint beside me as I study!

    I did write up a few descriptive notes on my Energion.com Book site.  They are just a description, not an evaluation.

    I expect I will be referencing this Bible quite a bit as I work my way through it.

  • Perspective – Talking As If

    And Joshua said, “By this you will know that the living God is among you, and that he will certainly drive out from before you the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Hivites, the Perizites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, and the Jebusites.” — Joshua 3:10

    The king and his men went to Jerusalem, against the Jebusites who were living in the area . . . — 2 Samuel 5:6

    So what happened?  God was surely going to drive them all out when the Israelites entered the land and then something happened, and things weren’t so sure.  In fact, gentiles were living in the land with the Israelites throughout their history.

    This isn’t any new sort of a problem.  We all know about it.  What’s more important is that the author of Joshua clearly knew it.  He was living at a time when all these people had not truly been driven from the land, yet he’s quite willing to write this promise into the text.

    We find an explanation of the change, of course, in the history that occurs in between in the rest of the book of Joshua and in the book of Judges especially.  The very firm statement is conditioned on the behavior of the Israelites who don’t carry out their part of the task.

    A modern tendency would be to “spin” this statement and make sure that everyone understands that God’s command was originally conditional.  But the author of Joshua sees no need for spin.  He allows Joshua to speak here as though something is absolutely certain even though he knows that it won’t have happened by his day.

    I think many ways of speaking about spiritual things are similar to this.  We speak “as though” even though sometimes we may not know for certain or may not really understand.

    One example of this is the way the Bible speaks about predestination and free will.  Despite the different answers of Arminians and Calvinists none of us really know how this works from a God’s eye view.  I really enjoy speculating, and my thinking leads me to be pretty heavily Arminian.  But a glimpse from somewhat nearer God’s perspective might change everything.

    In my own return to the church after some years away I felt very much like I was in a Calvinist experience.  It was like unwillingly following railroad tracks right back into the church.  I will even speak of it that way.  But you would be wrong to assume that I actually believe there is no choice.  That is what it felt like.

    Language in scripture and theology is often a distant reflection of the topic, because spiritual matters respond so poorly to the language of the material world.  But it’s all we have, so we need to make the best use of it that we can.

  • Living Biblically

    I could have told him this wouldn’t work:

    On the other hand, it appears to me that he learned a number of lessons that Christians would do well to learn, such as the fact that we all pick and choose.  The question is really whether our criteria for choosing are appropriate.

  • Fallible Bible

    I also Thank God for Blessing us with a Fallible Bible.

  • 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!

  • Good Theology – Bad Exegesis

    I’ve encountered this a few times, so I was delighted to find this little discussion, courtesy of John Hobbins, whose post on the educational value of reading biblioblogs is also good.  Awilum.com goes on my blogroll.

  • Peter Enns Writes on Inspiration and Incarnation

    Earlier this year I commented twice on Dr. Peter Enns and the actions by WTS regarding his theology and writings. Now he has posted some additional information on his views and some responses to prior reviews of his work. (HT: An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution, though I should note that this does not have to do with evolution.) I think it’s appropriate for me to provide a link to this newer material as well.

    You can find a collection of links to material he has posted at I&I – Inspiration & Incarnation. This material was extremely important for me in clarifying his views, since I have not yet managed to read his book, though I very much intend to. I found this response to a review particularly helpful, after reading all of the five essays he presents on I&I.

    I do want to respond to part of his statement on inerrancy, since I have written some on that subject myself (see my book When People Speak for God). He says:

    I affirm that I am committed to the Bible’s inerrancy as a function of its divine origin. If I may offer a thumbnail definition, the Bible as it is is without error because the Bible as it is is God’s Word.

    To get directly to the point, if this is inerrancy, then what is there to argue about? I do not affirm the doctrine of inerrancy, yet I could say pretty much the same thing. I usually phrase it as “the Bible is precisely what God intended it to be.” Perhaps some of my readers could tell me if I’m missing something here, after reading all of Dr. Enns’ referenced essay, of course. (For more of my view without having to pay for it, see Inspiration, Biblical Authority, and Inerrancy.) Looking at it from clearly outside the inerrancy camp, that doesn’t look to me like what most people who espouse Biblical inerrancy are saying, however.

    As an example, I say that God speaks into the cultural matrix of the people who are addressed. He will work with what they believe on everything other than the truth he is trying to add. For a simple example, if one or both of the genealogies of Luke and Matthew are in error, one explanation could be simply that the communities involved would believe those particular genealogies and get the point–Jesus as human son of David and Adam. If one ancestor were wrong, for example, it would be harder to add something like, “Well, your genealogical records are incorrect, and the Holy Spirit is telling me to correct them.” That would uproot the teaching from history in the minds of the readers/hearers.

    Now please note that this is not something I am attributing to Dr. Enns–this is something I am saying. I’m simply not seeing where it would contradict his statement of inerrancy, yet I’m pretty sure that most who espouse the doctrine of inerrancy would find my explanation unacceptable.

  • Rapture Foolishness

    There is nothing that brings out quite so much strangeness as discussion of the end-times. Nonetheless, I consider it fun.

    It has been commercialized in books, movies, and a video game, and now there is a special web site, You’ve Been Left Behind, which offers to allow you to send e-mails and files to unsaved friends who miss the rapture. (News story here, HT: Adventures in Revland.) Apparently God doesn’t have things quite under control, and thus it is necessary to try to communicate after you’re in heaven. One wonders if God does not, perhaps, have a purpose in not making this a standard thing.

    One of the things I suggest when teaching from Daniel or Revelation is that one should never stop with one commentary. The same thing applies to someone who is teaching a lengthy and details timeline for the end-times. Any one person can sound convincing, but timelines are generally built up from a wide variety of texts, often used out of context, or more precisely in a contrived context. Reading another writer, equally convinced and possibly equally convincing will show you how many different scenarios can be supported if one is just

    As an exercise, I suggest taking passages that one is applying to the rapture, tribulation, and millenium, and study them as part of the whole book. This can be done fairly easily with a book like Joel, or with several visions from Daniel, such as Daniel 7-9 studied together. You may find it quite interesting to note the difference in how people will understand certain end-times texts based on the original context versus how they are presented as part of an end-times scheme.

  • Question Everything!

    Via Exploring Our Matrix, I found this post at Think Christian. Many Christians believe that one should never question the Bible, especially if one is a Bible teacher.

    I know this to be true, because I’m a Bible teacher, and I question the Bible with some vigor, and not only do I not answer all the questions I raise, I frequently emphasize that we don’t actually need answers to all our questions. Unanswered questions are the engine that drives an intellectually and spiritually full life.

    The claim that one does not question the Bible is often taken as an expression of great faith. The person who doesn’t question has anchored their faith so firmly that they no longer need or want to question. But I think it’s precisely the opposite. The person who has stopped questioning and wants to prevent others from doing so has become spiritually and intellectually dead. Their faith is not incredibly great; rather, it is weak and easily threatened by questions. It takes no faith to believe in an unquestioned God. Faith comes into play when we challenge God with our doubts, our fears, and our questions.

    Some of the greatest examples of faith in the Bible questioned God. Abraham did. Moses did. And what is questioning the Bible to questioning its ultimate divine source?

    I want to be a Bible teacher who questions and who challenges others to question. I want to study with other teachers who question and challenge me to question. I do not exclude anything in my life from examination and questioning.