. . . has been posted. There’s a link to one of mine and there are also links to many very substantive posts which is what I go to this particular carnival to find. As I have time after this weekend of the John Webb Winter Golf Tournament, I will try to link to some specific posts both here and at the Pacesetters Bible School blog as it seems appropriate.
Tag: Bible Study
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Doctrinal Statements and Bible Use
A friend e-mailed me about a post which caught my attention. It seems that a blogger wanted to use the feed of the ESV Bible from the official web site, but found that the terms of service required him to accept a doctrinal statement first (relevant links are in his entry).
Personally, I think that the blogger, Kevin Wilson, was pretty nice about the whole thing. He’s correct, of course, that they have the right to make any terms of service they wish. But the fact that they do have a doctrinal statement in their terms of service does lead me to ask something about the priority of doctrine over scripture–or the reverse.
Personally, I’m convinced that getting people to read the Bible for themselves is a good thing. For one thing, there’s nothing like exposure to actual Bible passages in context to convince one that inerrancy isn’t a very viable approach. (Yes, I know that intelligent, educated people agree with me. They’ll say that I’m wrong, and I say that they’re wrong, which is as it should be.) Further, however, I do believe that the Holy Spirit works through the study of scripture in reaching individual minds. So I’m not even content with Wilson’s acceptance that one might not want the service used on a site that mocked the Bible.
What better benefit could a site have than to have multiple links back to their own work from sites that opposed them? Who do they want to have reading their Bible? Perhaps this is the true confirmation of what I keep hearing from some defenders of the ESV–it was not really designed to be understood by unchurched people, so the doctrinal statement makes sure that readers will know the language into which the ESV is translated.
But I suspect it’s more likely simply that this is an attack of random exclusivism. The site provides a translation for people who agree with them. Surely people who don’t believe in inerrancy and the several other doctrines they list will not even be able to comprehend the Bible anyhow, so what good would it be to them?
Personally, I’m going to keep advocating easily read translations that are made as widely available as possible. It just seems like the Christ-like thing to do.
This leads me to ask something about the priority of doctrine over scripture.
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Can a Translation be Completely Accurate
There’s an interesting thread in the Religion Forum right now, What is a Biblical Translation?, which goes into the issue of whether one can create a 100% accurate Bible translation.
Of course, the answer is “no.” If you want 100% accuracy, you need to go to the source language. But even there you bring yourself into the process, and because you bring yourself, a fallible, finite human (unless you’re special), into the process, your reading will never be 100% accurate.
In a later message, one member asks the question of whether God could make a translation 100% accurate. I sense that all theists are supposed to automatically respond with “yes!” But I disagree. Only by changing the very nature of language could God create a 100% accurate translation. Only by changing the very nature of humans, making us non-finite and not just sinless, could God make us understand such an accurate translation with 100% accuracy.
The bottom line is this: If you use a translation, you will indeed lose something. I’ve commented before about the need to compare translations and be very careful with context in order to alleviate this problem. But none of those options are equal to knowing how to read the source languages.
But beyond this, we must face the fact that no matter how versed one becomes in the source languages one is still human, still fallible, and still well removed by history and culture from the writers of the source. We have a drive to find the one and only totally accurate revelation, but we really have no mechanism for understanding such a thing. We see dimly in a mirror, and we’re going to have to get used to the humbling reality of living with that.
If you comment, please go to the thread there.
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Interpreting Away what is Clearly Taught
In this week’s Christian Blog Carnival #CL, now posted at Brain Cramps for God, I found an excellent post from Amanda on Imago Dei titled The Limits to God’s Grace This goes back to an article by Bart Campolo on which I commented about a week ago in my post Conceptual Idolatry.
Amanda has written a thoughtful post which is well worth reading. She has avoided some of the rhetorical heat and settled for a great deal more light than the average post on this topic does. But my interest here is not on the correct answer to the question of grace, heaven, and hell and the nature of God that Campolo presented (though in general that is a central, perhaps the central question), but rather on the issue of who in this debate is more Biblical, and how we can know such a thing.
Accusations, and in Campolo’s case confessions, of picking and choosing, interpreting away, or just plain ignoring various scriptures or scriptural teachings are a dime a dozen, and they are rarely examined, especially by those who agree doctrinally with whoever is making the claim. In this case Campolo says outright that he will interpret away any text that disagrees with his basic conception of God. Quoting him as quoted by Amanda:
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Just What the Bible Says – Again
By reading the new Methoblog portal, I located an entry The Use and Misuse of the Bible . Most of this is a quote of a sermon by A. Allen Brindisi at Davidson College Presbyterian Church, which you can read here, though there is a substantial quote in the blog entry.
To quote from the sermon:
There is the rub: to distinguish between what the Bible seems to say, and what it really
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Violent God
As I approach the actual story of the flood in my series on Genesis 1-11 on the Participatory Bible Study blog, my attention is drawn to the problem of violence in the Bible generally, condoned by God, commanded by God, or even carried out by God.
Recently on the web I’ve seen quite a number of comments on this issue. On Adrian Warnock’s blog, Andree posts about God’s absolute hatred of sin. After reading a number of incidents from the Israelite wilderness wanderings, and adding in the death of Jesus on the cross, she concludes,
1. God hates sin more than anyone.
2. God is more merciful than anyone.And certainly one cannot read those passages without hearing at least the message that God deplores sin. God is clearly portrayed here as acting violently against sinners, often in what we might call an arbitrary and capricious manner. The context of hatred for sin certainly intensifies the meaning of the atonement. But is it enough to state that God truly hates sin, and to point out that God provides atonement? Does this explain why God behaves as he does?
In Genesis 6, on which I will be blogging shortly, we are told that God planned to wipe out all livingthings on the earth, though he made an exception for those who are saved in the ark. But I’d like you to ask yourself this question: If this story were told about a god from any religion other than Chrsitianity or Judaism would you think of the deity as good or evil?
Lingamish discusses a similar problem. He’s wondering how one can read the book of Judges devotionally. He said:
I just finished this book and I was amazed at the violence, idolatry, and misogyny it documents. One way of trying to not reject Judges is to see it at as a depiction of negative heroes. That is, Judges is not showing behavior to emulate, but rather behavior to avoid. But what do we do then about Hebrews 11 where many of the judges are held up as heroes of the faith?
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Revelation Before and After Jesus
Some time ago (September 5, 2005) Adrian Warnock wrote an excellent entry on the need for a Christian experience in the present (hat tip: Peter Kirk). As usual, whether I agree or disagree, Adrian does a fine job of presenting his position, and in this case, I do agree.
He continued that entry with another that discussed the nature of revelation both before and after Jesus. To get a clear picture of Adrian’s position you will need to read more than I can quote here, but the following should give the general flavor:
Such a widespread outpouring of the Spirit cannot ever be purely for Scripture-writing and authenticating. If “all flesh” can prophesy, it is inevitable that they must have something by which to judge those words, for they cannot all be of equal weight or authority. In fact, Jesus was the last true Prophet in the sense of being authoritative and inerrant in everything He said. So where, prior to Jesus, authority rested in a few people who prophesied, but did so inerrantly, in the new era authority rests solely with Jesus and operates through the Scriptures, but the Spirit is poured out so that “all flesh” can prophesy whilst those prophecies are to be judged by the authoritative revelation contained in the Bible.
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Brief Thoughts on Hebrew Poetry
A few days ago Wayne Leman blogged about translating Hebrew poetry, and referred to an article by Philip C. Stine Biblical Poetry and Translation. The article is really excellent, and nothing I’m about to say here is intended to criticize that article as such.
I’ve been very interested in translation of Hebrew poetry, but I think successful translation ranges from difficult to effectively impossible. The two translations I think do the best job into English are the Revised English Bible, and New Jerusalem Bible. One key feature of the NJB is the use of the Yahweh rather than “the LORD” for the name of God, which would obviously make it unacceptable to orthodox and conservative Jewish readers. In poetic terms, however, I think that helps just a bit.
Referring to James Kugel, Stine says:
In fact, he examines many traditional classifications of biblical parallelism, including the categories of Lowth, synonymous, antithetical, and synthetic, and finds them wanting. The ways of parallelism are numerous and varied, and the intensity of the semantic parallelism established between clauses might be said to range from zero perceivable correspondence to near perceivable differentiation.
Now this is a good point, and one that a couple of my professors made to me when I was in graduate school back in 1979-1980, though perhaps not so clearly as Stine has done. The problem is that in order to teach this material to Bible students a bit of terminology is necessary. One can’t just say, even to beginning Hebrew students, that there is “some relationship” between the clauses. Nonetheless, a number of errors result from oversimplification. One of these is the idea that one can determine the definition of an unknown word by finding it in parallel with another term. Now such parallelism can contribute to our understanding of a word, and can give us a starting point in studying it, but it doesn’t determine it, as some people think it does. Without knowing the meaning of the word, the very thing sought, one cannot be certain what type of parallelism one is dealing with.
So let me just suggest here that the terms synonymous, antithetical, and synthetic are quite useful. Like any labeling system, they oversimplify. Indeed, any system of labels is by nature less complex than reality and is provided precisely to allow such simplification. In order to improve accuracy, however, students should be taught that the actual parallelism will lie along a line from complete parallelism of thought to either complete opposition or through a synthetic combination.
Now translating this is much harder, and comes back to the issue of how much interpretation the translator should do, and how much should be left to the modern reader. I’ve been playing around with this before, and commented in Reading Psalm 46, in which I also link to a couple of “transformations.”
Hebrew parallelism does not have the same effect on English readers as it presumably did on readers of the Hebrew original. Thus I would suggest there is room for a broad range of translation possibilities, from a version that copies the poetic forms from Hebrew into English, to ones that might take the thought and express it in an English poetic form. I believe Bible translation and exposition would benefit from more transformations, re-presentations of Biblical material not only in new languages, but in new and/or different forms.
One further note on Stine. He goes through the problems of defining poetry, and that’s a standard problem with Biblical material. Without a solid, understandable definition it’s hard to discuss what is poetry and what’s not, and how to deal with it. I think the problem with this definition is precisely the same as the problem with labels for types of parallelism. We are putting a small number of labels on a continuum–synonymous, antithetical, and synthetic on the one hand, poetry and prose on the other. But poetry and prose do not exist in well defined pockets in real life, and thus our labels will be problematic. On encountering a Biblical passage one might ask, “Should this be presented divided into lines, or paragraphed?” rather than asking whether it’s poetry or prose. Whether it’s technically poetry or not, if it presents well in defined lines, it might be best to present it that way.
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As Christ Loved the Church
Lingamish has a wonderful post about Ephesians 5:22ff (if you don’t know about the part that is “ff” be sure to read his post!), and what this can mean in our relationship with our wives. (I do intentionally use purely male references, referring to the Lingamish and myself. You can adjust as necessary!)
This reminds me of what my mother did at my wedding. I married late in life and acquired three step-children, who have now brought 4 grandchildren (working on 5) into my life. (Note: Never miss a chance to mention the grandchildren.) Because of the unique circumstances, we arranged to have my mother speak a blessing (and read one from my father, who could not attend), and also the children. The children built their blessing around the text that was featured in the wedding service, Ephesians 3:14-21. They didn’t realize that reference is also inscribed inside our wedding bands.
When my mother spoke, she began with Proverbs 31. Jody got tense. She’s not really excited about Proverbs 31. But after reading a selection from it, she said, “Henry, I feel that this is really addressed to you. You have to deserve the Proverbs 31 wife.” That made Jody relax and turned the verse on its head. But I didn’t mind.
Anyhow, it must be the day for “improve your marriage” texts!
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Nitpicking Translations
Centuri0n responded, in a way to my post Conscience of a Christian Publisher. I posted a response once, and unfortunately that response was eaten by the server. I was able to restore everything else, but this I have to rewrite. I’m not trying to repeat the other post precisely, so if you read it, don’t look at this as a duplicate, though I am trying to cover the same ground.
There are a number of things I could respond to, such as his comments on my use of “conscience,” but I think I’ll skip to what I see as the major problem of logic, and it’s one that is not unique to centuri0n. It’s quite prevalent amongst advocates of literal translations. Consider the following quote:
My complaint about the TNIV, as you can read for yourself, is that it whitewashes the controversial nature of its methodology. Now, if the Bible is just a “signpost”, my complaint is, of course, nit-picking. What the Bible says isn’t actually of first importance but of far secondary importance