Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Biblical Inspiration

  • How God Impacts Science

    There’s been a bit of a dust-up around the blogosphere about this over the last few days to a large extent amongst people involved in science professionally in one way or another. Since I’m not responding directly, I will only note that I read of this debate through Dispatches from the Culture Wars, and you can find links at Ed’s current post, Clarifying the Moran Debate.

    Since I’m called a theistic evolutionist, though it is a term to which I have previously objected, I thought I’d make a few comments on how God and scripture impact the way I look at science. I can’t say “the way I do science, because my field is Biblical studies, and not one of the natural sciences.

    My answer to the question could be either “lots, in every way” (to paraphrase Paul in Romans 3:2), or “not at all.”

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  • Conceptual Idolatry

    Paul tells us that we now “see dimly in a mrror” (1 Corinthians 13:12), but some of us are quite certain that we see clearly. While I believe we should make every effort to get closer to the truth, it’s important that we understand that God’s ways are not our ways, and thus we will never get precisely to a “God’s eye view” of any problem or issue. In a recent comment Oloryn noted that:

    . . . in reading scripture, we are in the position of listing to One who does not share our outlook. If we haven’t learned to do that with people, are we going to be able to do that with God?

    Now he was responding to some comments I made about listening to God in scripture, and those were some good points, but in making that point he has also noted that God does not share our outlook. And that’s an important point to remember.

    This post was triggered by a post by Joe Carter over on Evangelical Outpost. In that post he accuses Bart Campolo (son of Tony) of idolatry:

    Still, it is rather shocking to hear someone be unabashedly open about their idolatry as Bart Campolo, son of Tony Campolo, is in a recent article for The Journal of Student Ministries*:

    [Carter continues by quoting Campolo]

    Now my intention is not to respond in detail to Joe Carter on this. It’s simply that his post came at a time when I was thinking about this sort of thing and struck me as just plain wrong. There are some points on which I disagree with Campolo as well, though my primary intention is not to defend him either.

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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

  • Baseball Rules and Bible Study

    Over the last few years I’ve tried to learn a great deal about baseball, because I have a stepson who is a professional pitcher. It has taken me some time to learn, because I didn’t grow up with baseball, and there are quite a number of subtleties. When I first started watching, for example, I thought that the one big thing about pitching was strikeouts, and I assumed that all pitches would be aimed for the strike zone. Over time I’ve learned about many other options. The rules seem simple, but they give rise to a huge number of options.

    A while back I found a quiz on difficult calls an umpire might face. I recall being quite pleased with myself as a relative nephyte, to be able to get 50% of those calls right. You see there are the basic rules, then there are more detailed rules, and then you have to deal with all of the various options that players have while playing within the rules. The rules tell me that if a ball passes over any part of the plate at the appropriate height range, it’s a strike. It’s also a strike if the batter swings and misses, or for the first two strikes if it’s a foul ball. That doesn’t tell the pitcher what kind of a pitch to throw on a full count, however. For that one needs to know one’s own abilities, the batter, the abilities of the catcher, and the current state of the game.

    What does all of this have to do with the Bible?

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  • Just What the Bible Says

    More than a year ago I wrote a post titled Just Your Interpretation. In it I challenge the idea that just any interpretation will do, and suggested that there are right and wrong interpretations, and we should aim for right interpretations. I know this goes contrary to the post-modern trend.

    But I also mentioned another side to the issue. There are those who regularly claim that they are not presenting an interpretation, but rather are presenting “just what the Bible says.” They despise and reject any appeal to resources other than the scriptures, and urge all correspondents to support everything with specific texts.

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  • Finding Good Role Models for Girls in the Bible

    A post by Peter Kirk over on Speaker of Truth, titled Deborah and a woman from Bethlehem, and some interesting comments made there suggests to me some more writing about my favorite topic: the SHARING stage of Bible study. (For an outline of my method, see The Participatory Study Method. Some of the foundation for this is contained in my essay Interpreting Stories.)

    The difficulty I address in my main essay on interpreting stories is the fact that the Bible writers do not present only heroes, and do not gloss over the weakness of their characters. In modern storytelling we tend to prefer clear villains and heroes, and I find that most of the time when Christians recommend a book or a movie, that is one of the characteristics. We like to have people in our stories that fit in well with either “I’d like to be just like him/her” or “I hope he/she gets it in the end!”

    But that’s precisely what the Bible doesn’t give us. Often we take our lead in retelling Bible stories from Hebrews 11, and make them all into heroes in retelling their stories. But we should consider the goal of the author of Hebrews before we decide that this is the one and only, or even the best, way of retelling these stories. His point here is to focus totally on faithfulness. No matter what has happend, no matter what the weaknesses, the one key is to remain faithful to God throughout. And in that characteristic, all of the heroes mentioned in Hebrews 11 are truly heroes. But if you look at their broader stories as told in scripture, they come out as very human, with weaknesses and failings. In fact, they make very suitable examples.

    This leads me to a key point: Heroes can be destructive as well as challenging. The Proverbs 31 woman is a good example. There are some women out there who are encouraged by the way in which their role is honored in that passage. Others live in misery because they can’t live up to what they see as the Biblical standard on a daily basis. Jesus is an excellent and challenging example to us, but I find myself relating to Peter a lot better sometimes. Jesus may have been tested in all ways as I have been, but it was “without sin.” Jesus walked on the water; Peter took a plunge; I’m more like Peter! Now don’t get me wrong here. I believe in asking “what would Jesus do?” on a regular basis. But I also believe that there’s a reason Peter is in the Bible. When I try to walk on water and find myself in an unplanned deep sea dive instead, I can look back and say, “Peter was a leader amongst the disciples, and he had bad days too!”

    So role models don’t always have to be heroes in the sense that we use that term in modern times. As far as I can see, the Bible never whitewashes its lead characters. We can learn both from their good decisions and from their bad. The most important thing to note is that just because a Bible character does something, even if that character is a good person, does not mean that we should do likewise.

    Now let’s connect this to the simple issue of role models for girls. Anyone who can count can tell that there are less overt examples of female role models in the Bible than there are male. Because of that we tend to look carefully for the few really good role models that there are, and this can lead us to whitewash certain people even more. Some would say that the scarcity of female role models in scripture simply indicates that women are to be less active. But I would simply ask if everything that was common behavior in Bible times should be regarded as normative. There are many things we do not follow as norms today, including the fairly common occurrence of plural marriage, arranged marriages, forbidding marriage between Jews and gentiles, absolute monarchy, and on and on. Just because it happened doesn’t mean it’s a model for now.

    In addition, there are hints that more may be going on behind the scenes. For example, we have Huldah the prophetess who suddenly pops up in 2 Kings 22:14. Why would a group of leaders go to her with a question if she hadn’t already been exercising the prophetic office? So here we have an indication that women may have a public role, though in the patriarchal society their role was limited in scope.

    “But,” says some reader, “You still leave us with few role models for women!” And you are right. Now, I’m going to get to my point. The scriptural basis for this is found in Psalm 78, which I regard as an excellent charter document for religious education:

    1(A Wisdom Song by Asaph)
    Open your ears to my instruction
    Turn your ears toward the the words I speak.
    2I will open my mouth in a teaching song.
    I will speak hard sayings from ancient times.
    3Words which we have heard and known,
    and our ancestors have told us.
    4We will not hide them from their children,
    speaking YHWH’s praises to a later generation,
    His strength, and the wonderful things he has done.
    5And he raised a testimony in Jacob,
    and set instruction in Israel,
    Which he commanded our ancestors
    to teach to their children.
    6So that the later generation might know,
    The children to be born would rise up,
    and teach them to their children.
    7That they might set their hope in God,
    And might not forget his mighty deeds,
    But might observe his commands. — Psalm 78:1-7 (TFBV)

    Grab your favorite “easy reading” Bible version and read the whole chapter. The story of God’s activities has not stopped. We are responsible to pass that story from generation to generation and in turn, “put our trust in God” which itself will add to the story, just as the Psalmist is adding to the story through some of the incidents he relates.

    So my suggestion is to start your search for role models in the Biblical stories, but don’t stop there. My first set of sources is actually in the apocrypha. How about Susanna or Judith? Again, you need to read all stories with due consideration for the weaknesses of any human example. But even more than this, you need to continue through Christian history and into the present, telling the stories of faith.

    When I first returned to the church after my 12 years of “wilderness wandering” after graduate school, and started teaching, I was looking for this type of story. I found that the idea of telling our own stories about how God has worked in our lives was a bit foreign to the congregation of which I was a member. Stories of faith were about people in the Bible, and maybe on good days about people a few generations back, but never about today.

    So I got on the phone with my mother. Why? Because my mother told us stories of faith in her own life. Lots of stories of faith. When I wondered whether God could or would work in our lives, I wasn’t merely, pointed to the red sea or Elijah on Mt. Carmel or the resurrection, though my parents believed and taught those stories. I was referred to things in our own present life. So I asked my mother to write them down so I could use some as examples. She did, and the result was the booklet Directed Paths, stories of her life as a missionary nurse along with my father, who was a missionary doctor. As I write this my father is in intensive care after surgery, though the prognosis is good. He’s 85 years old, and as my mother and I talked before the surgery, all we could say was that if this was God’s time to take him, we knew that he had run a good race. I can say the same thing of my mother. But the key thing here is that she told me about God’s work in her life. Because she testified, she can serve as a role-model of faith.

    Now I publish the booklet I mentioned above, and I won’t deny that I’d love for you to buy and read it, but that isn’t the point of bringing it up. What you need to do is look at your own life, and the lives of your parents and other family members, discover those stories of God’s working, and tell them. Do what my mother did and make yourself a part of the ongoing story of God, in a sense part of the Bible story. You can find sources in the Bible, in the history of the church and communities of faith, and finally in the history of your own family. This is sharing and becoming a part of the story. If you don’t share it, you can’t be part of it. You’ll find that there are more and more stories of people that girls can use as role models as time moves forward.

    Of course, then there’s the hard part:

    11But they conquered him by means of the blood of the lamb,
    and by means of the testimony they spoke,
    And they did not love their lives even up to death. Revelation 12:11 (TFBV)

    We commonly quote the first two lines, but the last one is a bit harder. Getting to be a part of the story can involve hardship and can even involve death. My mother’s story includes a time of running for our lives in the middle of the night, and a time when I nearly died as a child due to circumstances involved in her ministry. I know of missionaries overseas and here at home who have lost more. But there are plenty of stories to work with.

    Become a part of the story!

  • 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?

  • 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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  • Bible as Conversation

    Daniel has an interesting post on E-Merging suggesting that we view the Bible as a conversation. He says:

    In real conversations, one participant doesn’t just sit back and agree with everything being said. There are tensions and resolutions, and some questions are simply left unanswered.

    I think this is an excellent approach to Bible study and is quite compatible with my notion of participatory Bible study, in which you get into, participate in, the story of God’s interaction with people.

  • Psalm 104: Presenting the Message

    Psalm 104 has a distinct message about God’s creation that has stuck with me strongly since I first studied the passage in graduate school. I have previously posted links to my prior study of the text and structure of this Psalm, done more than 25 years ago. I’m starting from that point now.

    When we deal with translation, the message can be presented in many ways. In this case it is presented through poetry. Previously, I worked with Psalm 46, showing how it has been presented in various ways, such as in Martin Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is our God.” I then tried to convert the message of the Psalm into the form of an Italian sonnet, at which I can be said to be no better than rank amateur.

    My point, however, is not to demonstrate my skill in transforming Biblical passages, rather it’s to suggest that we need to transform passages in various ways. For example, the message of Psalm 46 could be presented as:

    • A story built around the concept of God as our protector and defender
    • Multiple poetic forms
    • A hymn, as has been done, and in turn that hymn has been musically transformed many times
    • A praise song, or series of praise songs
    • A devotional or even theological essay
    • A drama presented at church

    I did some similar work with the story of Susanna from the apocrypha of Daniel. You can follow the links to related material there.

    All of this falls under the “Share” portion of my Bible study method. I think that Bible students are often the weakest at sharing, but that sharing can be one of the strongest aspects of your approach to Bible study. Thinking of different ways of sharing the message makes you think more about what the message actually is, while getting reactions from others tests the accuracy of your read of the message. Too often our idea of understanding the Bible is reducing it to theological propositions, and then sharing those propositions with others.

    Now don’t get me wrong here. Extracting theological propositions from your Bible study is not a bad thing. It’s just not the only thing. And sharing your theological propositions is not a bad thing either. But just as the Bible uses different ways of sharing, so you can use different ways of sharing. Consider that sharing part of your process of Bible study. It’s a way of exercising your understanding to discern good from evil (Hebrews 5:14).

    So what about Psalm 104? Well, I think this is a good illustration of precisely this point. Elsewhere, I’ve written about the two creation stories of Genesis–1:1-2:4a & 2:4bff. Now there are a number of approaches to these stories. Some people think they turn up a major Bible contradiction, and thus claim the fact that there are two creation stories as a challenge to the Bible’s inspiration and authority. Others defend against this charge by challenging the idea that there are two stories, thus preventing any contradiction.

    I have another suggestion: The story of God’s creation is much too broad and has way too many implications to be comprehended in any single telling. In Genesis 1, the theme is power and authority. God speaks and it happens. But at the same time God can seem very distant and other in that passage. Now these are part of the doctrine of God–transcendance. But what about God’s presence and care for us, immanence? Well, Genesis 2 and even the story of the fall in Genesis 3 present a God who is with us. Combine them, and we get a better picture of God than we would have had with either one. The stories, rather than contradicting, present two very different perspectives on one topic that’s large enough to allow both to present us with the truth of God and creation.

    But there is yet more that God needs to present to us. In reading Genesis 1-11, one could get the impression of a generally receding God, one who is getting more and more distant from us. That would be a sort of gradual deism, God the creator who is no longer present. Enter another perspective–Psalm 104. God is here, God is present, God is concerned with everything. At the same time God is ultimately powerful. (It would be good to go read Psalm 104 from your favorite Bible version about now.

    God’s power is shown in the first 8 verses. God is absolutely sovereign. God’s word sets the boundaries. The very foundations of the world (or the universe, as I understand it) are set by him. This part ties closely with Genesis 1–God of the powerful, absolute word.

    But then we turn in verse 9 to God’s attention to detail. Everything is beautiful. Everything works together. This culminates with the beautiful exclamation:

    (24) How marvelous are your works, O Lord!
    You made them all wisely.
    The earth is full of your created things.

    This is the detailed attention, the God who is present, providing food for everyone. It may be hard for us to comprehend this, but for God, who is infinite, there is no prioritizing. He can be the powerful God who sets the earth on its foundation and commands the water to be in a particular place, while at the same time being concerned with the food for a single particular lion, or a nesting place for a particular bird. We can’t manage that, because for every bit of attention we give to one thing, something else suffers. But not so with God. And here we have this theological principle about God presented in poetic form.

    But then we get down to the continuing nature of God’s presence.

    (27) All of them look to you,
    To give them their food on time.

    (28) You give to them, so they may gather;
    You open your hand, so they may be satisfied with good.

    (29) You hide your face, and they are disturbed;
    You bring their breath to an end,
    And they return to their dust.

    (30) You send forth your breath, and they are created;
    So you renew the face of the ground.

    It’s not just that God created, it’s that God creates. God is the ever-present creator. Every single move of every single subatomic particle is under God’s control. He doesn’t miss a thing. He doesn’t have a priority list. You are in no danger of falling off God’s radar screen, because nothing ever falls off of it.

    That’s why I call Psalm 104 the third creation story. There are a few other passages, but I think this one neatly ties together Genesis 1 and 2 and gives us the perspective of a God who is constantly present.

    Now the question I’m going to continue with in future posts on this topic is this: How do you share that concept in different ways? How do you catch the right way for you to really comprehend this and apply it? How can you find the right way for a friend?