Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: knowledge

  • Psalm 119:104 – Truth Matters

    Psalm 119:104 – Truth Matters

    From your precepts I improve my understanding.
    Therefore I hate every false path.

    It’s time to underline the difference between these meditations and exegesis. I study the verse first, looking at precisely what it says, and then I meditate on where that can lead me through the day. Sometimes that meditation leads me to other scripture, but often it leads me to other sources of knowledge and current events..

    In this case, the verse is really making a simple, straightforward contrast. There is a way defined by God’s precepts, and then there are alternatives. The psalmist accepts the wisdom that comes from God through those precepts. He rejects what does not. It is important to remember the breadth of what he sees in God’s law.

    But the direction my thinking took was this: How important is a firm commitment to truth? Now you can see how the verse suggests the topic for my meditation, but it doesn’t examine the details. It just lays out a contrast.

    In our postmodern world we have a tendency to say “in our postmodern world” a lot. Not necessarily in those words. We say it in a variety of words. “These young people are not like we were when we were young.” “In the good old days….” “It’s just getting so you can’t trust anyone any more.”

    One of these claims is that media, such as the internet and social media especially, have somehow made us less concerned with truth. The variety and volume of assorted voices makes it impossible to determine what is true and what is not. Falsehood and disinformation are entirely recent phenomena.

    We need to learn to hate every false way. Here are some examples.

    • I just don’t know what to believe. There have always been those who just don’t know what to believe. There have also been those who tended to believe convenient lies just because they were too lazy to seek out the truth, or they were afraid they wouldn’t like the truth. In the “good old days” you’d have to go to the library and consult an encyclopedia. Now, despite the multitude of voices, it’s quite possible to find information quickly. You have to want to find that information. You have to care. You have to be ready to spend the necessary time. If you don’t know, don’t blame others. Failing to take responsibility for your own beliefs is an excuse, and it’s one you can’t afford.
    • There are so many voices. Yes, there are many voices and many sources of misinformation. There are also, however, many sources of truth. Face it, most people who don’t bother to check on the truth of material on the internet wouldn’t have checked the gossip about their next door neighbor before believing it and passing it on. The problem isn’t the number of voices. It’s a refusal to be responsible and to take responsibility for what goes into your mind and what comes out of your mouth.
    • All of my friends believe it. This has been the tribal thing for years. We don’t want to differ from the people around us. When we do differ, we want to do it with a group behind us who will shout the other side down. It doesn’t matter what your friends believe. What matters is what they can support. If they can’t deal with disagreement, find better friends.
    • There are so many important issues! I have to take a stand! Yes, take a stand, but take a stand on what you’re going to regard as important, specifically important enough for you to express an opinion. There is a false standard that suggests you have to have and express an opinion on every topic. You don’t. You can choose your battles. As a publisher, I have a great option here. I can point people to an author I publish who provides a better discussion of a topic than I believe I could. Choose your ground and stand on that. Don’t allow anyone to force you to stand on theirs.
    • It’s not important what I believe, so why bother! You might think from the previous point that I think this. I do not. It is very important what you believe. That’s why you should choose carefully what you choose to debate. You should be sure you’re expressing something you can support as truth. I don’t mean you always need to be right. We will all make mistakes. But care in what we express and how we express it is important. Blathering on every topic even when we don’t have the needed knowledge is a very dangerous false way.
    • Confusing our opinion with the truth. This is a very common false way in Bible study. People present their view of the Bible or of a theological issue as though their interpretation is the very word of God and any who disagree are disagreeing with God. You and I are not the writers of scripture. We are not God’s special messengers blessed with infallibility. It is not humility to say, “This is just what the Bible teaches.” It’s dangerous arrogance. Let each person be taught by God. Show your work and speak in such a way that others can follow the steps and decide for themselves.
    • Fear of sources of knowledge. There are those who are afraid to look outside the Bible for their information. That is fear. It may sound godly, but it is not. There are those who find a human source of knowledge and then stick with it no matter what, because they are afraid of being confused. That is letting fear guide you. Hearing more than one viewpoint is part of checking the view you already have or building a new one.

    God speaks in many ways. Humans learn in many ways. Take control of what you take in. Take control of what you let out of your mouth or send through your keyboard.

    In loving truth and hating falsehood what will you speak today? On what will you keep silent?

  • Psalm 119:102 – You Have Taught Me

    Psalm 119:102 – You Have Taught Me

    I do not turn aside from your judgments,
    for you have taught me.

    A couple of days ago, meditating on Psalm 119:99, I discussed teachers. I mentioned the idea briefly of allowing the Holy Spirit to be the teacher.

    I want you to notice the form of this verse. The second half is not an accomplishment that results from his good actions. Rather, the second line explains the first. The psalmist is faithful to God’s decisions, judgments, because it is God who has been doing the teaching.

    There is a line in the prophecy of the new covenant recorded in Jeremiah 31:31-34 that is often ignored. Verse 34 reads “No longer need they teach one another, neighbour or brother, to know the LORD; all of them, high and low alike, will know me, says the LORD….” (REB). We don’t see this now, but I think we need to recognize this as a goal in the church.

    Too much of our teaching energy is spent making sure people understand and accept the things that we, as teachers, believe. I definitely include myself in this. Too little time is spent helping people find their own relationship with God.

    No the word “relationship” has been used in some questionable ways, particularly as a way to avoid actually studying and thinking about God and the world in which we live. But no matter what we may feel or want, there is always a relationship between each of us and God as in created being to creator, and that relationship is important. Relationship doesn’t negate doctrine, understanding things. Rather, relationship is necessary to any learning about God.

    Consider Ephesians 3:18-19: “… may you, in company with all God’s people, be strong to grasp what is the breadth and length and height and depth (19) of Christ’s love, and to know it, though it is beyond knowledge.” Technical knowledge isn’t sufficient. Personal knowledge is required. But personal knowledge is not exclusively individual knowledge. We know “with all God’s people.”

    As teachers in the church, we should be constantly working ourselves out of a job, constantly relying on the Holy Spirit, and constantly expecting that the Holy Spirit will guide others. We live in a new creation. We are a new creation. So is everyone we teach.

    This means that while we still have a teaching and discipling role, that role is one that is mutual, that is, we learn along with all God’s people. We make it easier for everyone to learn from God. That means there is a difference in teaching and mentoring in the Christian community. We do not build a dependence on what we think or have to say. We look to join together and grow in our dependence on God.

    How can you encourage someone to grow in their knowledge of what is beyond knowledge today?

  • Psalm 119:96 – Ends

    Psalm 119:96 – Ends

    I have send the limits of all perfection,
    but your command is very broad.

    I have rarely seen as many different possible translations for a verse. Dahood (Anchor Bible Psalms) turns the words for “end” and “broad” into epithets for God. If I were to translate more loosely, I might, at this point suggest something like, “I have seen that everything in our world has a limit, but your commandment exceeds all of those.”

    But my project has been to meditate on the verse, not resolve all language and translation issues. Of course, getting a sense of what the verse means is important to that. Who knew?

    In fact, the verse may give a good example of the meaning I’m seeing in it. There’s an end to my ability to come up with a translation of which I can be certain!

    I recall just after I had received my BA, with a major in biblical languages, I was traveling with my brother to where I would attend graduate school. I stopped for a church service in Yellowstone park near the visitor center at Old Faithful. Inevitably, as a bunch of travelers gather for church we exchanged information on why we were there and where we were going.

    I told them what I had been studying and that I was traveling across country to go to graduate school in the same subject. Following the service a gentleman approached me to ask a question about the translation of a verse that had been bothering him. I talked to him for a bit and then my brother and I headed out walking around the geyser.

    It suddenly hit me and I started laughing. “What?” my brother asked. “Do you realize I just talked to that guy for 10 minutes and I never gave him an answer to his question?” “Well, what was the answer?” “I actually have no idea!”

    One of the problems of studying and learning is that you can forget along the way that there is an end to your knowledge. You can lose the ability to say, “I don’t know.” The best scholars I have known, and the best experts in any topic, are the ones who know their limits and can admit those limits.

    This is true whether you’re a biblical scholar, an auto mechanic, a farmer, or anything else. It’s a wise person who knows what he or she has and has not mastered.

    I think theology is one of the most tempting fields, because we want to be certain. We don’t want to be limited, and because there are so many things in theology that you can’t pin down like a lab result, we are often vastly more certain than our actual knowledge can justify.

    Did this meditation really come from the verse I quoted and (mis?)translated? To the best of my knowledge, yes. But I have seen the end of the best of my knowledge. Or at least I hope I have!

    Can you recognize your limitations? Can you still be joyful and fulfilled?

    (Featured image credit:Orla. LIcensed from iStockPhoto.com)

  • Psalm 119:66 – Teach Me

    Psalm 119:66 – Teach Me

    Beauty, order, and knowledge teach me,
    for I have put my trust in your commands.

    I went straight off on a rabbit trail thinking about this verse, because those first three words cover a very large area. They have overlapping semantic ranges, and a variety of possible glosses. I tried to choose three words to would combine the senses. As I read the three words they convey a combined sense of learning to see knowledge for multiple angles, looking for beauty, order, and data with understanding.

    We often see religious instruction as a matter for the church and for Bible study, while everything else is a secular activity. This is not the view that would have been held generally by those in Bible times. With God as the creator, everything is seen as part of God’s creation. So when you study the things in nature, you are studying divine beauty, order, and information.

    There is a danger in this sort of thinking, but let me say that we are always in danger when we study. Danger that we will quick seeking these three and start trying to force the information to take shapes of our own desires. Thus religion has often tried to control scientific research by reference to their interpretations of scripture.

    Thinking that scripture and also all of reality come from God, doesn’t mean that scripture teaches us about everything. Scripture should teach us to be truthful, to seek accurate knowledge, and then also to deal with that knowledge responsibly. It does not claim to be a text on any field of science. Rather, it points to a creator who created things and established an order for them such that objective study is possible.

    We miss that order when we try to force these elements to fit into a pre-conceived scheme and refuse to acknowledge what’s there.

    Recently there has been increasing skepticism of traditional sources of news and other data. This skepticism, in itself, is good. We should be skeptical of popular and official story lines. The problem is that we have all too frequently gone from a source that has failed in some ways to sources that don’t even attempt to be accurate. We judge the accuracy of the information by how pleasing it is to us.

    You may think I’m talking about current American politics. And I am, but not only that. I’m talking about the way we have handled scripture for a very long time. We step away from traditional institutions of the faith because they have failed us in some way. Martin Luther was driven to his break with church authority by very real problems. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before he and other reformers were ready to deny the journey to others. Having found a better place, they found it more comfortable and they felt the need to defend it

    But when we find our new comfort zone theologically and we fail to be constantly corrected by God’s Word and God’s Spirit. It’s a truthful Spirit, and doesn’t like us to lie, even, or especially, to ourselves.

    Whether you’re studying cutting edge scientific theories, reading the newspaper, or studying scripture, always beware of the comfortable rut and the safe, unchallenging mental vacation spot.

    Take the time to study, to meditate, and yes, to pray. Take time to listen. Be challenged. Be correctable, but only by solid material.

    There’s a beauty awaiting the determined traveler along paths of knowledge. Determine to take that journey!

    (Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)

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  • The Quest for Absolute Certainty

    When I was a teenager, I was very involved in electronics, something that has stuck with me. My first real efforts at understanding science came in working with electricity. One day I was discussing the theory of electricity, and specifically how it “moves” through a circuit with my father, also an electronics hobbyist. We had gone through electrons moving from one atom to the next, and the reasons why some things are better conductors than others, and why some things are so bad as conductors that they are insulators. This all applied to some circuit or another I wanted to build.

    Then my father dropped a bombshell. “You know this is all a theory,” he said.

    “What do you mean by theory?” I asked. To me at that point a theory was something not so well established. There were facts and then there were theories. Facts were good, theories were not so good.

    “Well,” he continued, “we don’t actually observe subatomic particles in motion. We don’t know that an atom looks like those drawings you have.”

    “So we don’t really know any of this? What good is it then?” Of course I well knew that I could build circuits based on it, but teenagers aren’t required to be logical with a parent.

    “The theory does what it’s supposed to. It explains what we observe. It works. That’s all it has to do.”

    “Oh.”

    But somewhere deep inside I was upset. I liked my little pictures of atoms. I wanted to believe that they were just that way, and that if I could get a good enough microscope, I could actually observe those little electrons doing their thing. Now electricity is based on very good theory, and it does work. My dad was himself a young earth creationist, though we never discussed that much. I suspect now that he was more along the Kurt Wise type–there may be substantial evidence for evolution, but the Bible says otherwise, so we must believe–only he never felt the need to work on a real theory.

    (more…)