Biblical Studies Carnival and Biblioblog Rankings

Posted on December 3, 2011 by Henry Neufeld

The biblioblog rankings have been posted, with this blog at #18. Of course, the rankings are available live all the time these days, so I guess the end of month rankings are less important than they used to be, but still …. What surprised me, after not looking at the rankings for some time, was to find my blog at #18 when my posting has been sporadic, to put it mildly. I’m always amazed at the older posts that are popular.

The Biblical Studies Carnival has also been posted, and it is, umm, Giant. I am not cited therein. See first paragraph re sporadic posting.

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Book Review: Learning God’s Story of Grace

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Henry Neufeld

A great deal of the Bible comes to us in the form of stories, and even the parts filled with propositions have their background in the story of God’s action in history. I believe this is central to the way we should read and apply scripture, and thus I am delighted to have the opportunity to review the book Learning God’s Story of Grace by Elizabeth Reynolds Turnage.

But first, disclosures. Elizabeth took both Greek and Hebrew from me, and the publisher provided me with a free review copy of the book. I want to thank both author and publisher for this opportunity.

Including front and back matter, this book is just 128 pages. It’s spiral bound, which is helpful in a book which is likely to be used as a workbook. It is divided into seven lessons plus an epilogue. Each lesson (except for one) is divided into activities for five days. I might have preferred a few more notes on working as a group, which is clearly the place to use this material. Nonetheless, readers should have no problem either leading or participating in a small group using this study.

The approach begins with engaging a passage of scripture (you can find the details on page 14), and ends with living and then praying the story, thus making it part of your life. From my own experience with small groups, this latter part will be the most challenging as people often shy away from directly moving to action and prayer from what they learn in scripture. Combining both living and praying drives the student to truly make the scripture story part of his or her own life.

The first lesson uses Psalm 78. I must admit that using that Psalm gives any work on Bible study bonus points. Following that Elizabeth takes on the creation story, but not in the way you might expect. She bypasses all the debates we may have about technical details and brings the story right into our lives. This theme runs through the rest of the book, tying creation with the new creation. I’m reading two manuscripts on creation for my own company, both to be released next year, and each of those authors emphasizes that for a doctrine of creation to be truly Christian it must be Christ-centered, and join creation and new creation.

At the same time as she leads students through an approach to Bible study, Elizabeth also leads them through the overarching story of scripture, the story that contains all the rest of our stories.

I believe that any Bible student, Sunday School class, or small group would benefit from this study. Much of it is extremely simple in its intellectual content, and rightly so, but at the same time it is very challenging as a spiritual discipline. It is so easy to become very educated on complex details of theology without making it part of one’s own life. This book provides an antidote to that problem.

I enthusiastically recommend this little book to those who want to let God’s Word change their lives.

 

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Careful Where You Point Your Bible

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Henry Neufeld

At the beginning of the month I wrote a post about pointing texts at yourself first. I think it’s important to do so both in order to avoid misinterpretation or unbalanced emphasis, but also because in communicating the message you will do better in expressing something that has convicted you first. The temptation, of course, is to major on the texts that don’t get under my own skin, but which tell other people what they need to change. But I think that’s a dangerous course of action.

Coincidentally, I received some e-mails shortly after I posted that. The person in question was not responding to my post, but rather to my position on Bible versions (he is KJV-Only) and on the creation/evolution controversy (he’s a young earth creationist). Though I do reserve the right to post e-mails that are sent to me, I’m going to leave this individual anonymous.

We went through one exchange of e-mails, i.e. he e-mailed me to tell me I was wrong, though providing nothing but his own statements to back that up, and then I responded to that e-mail. I mentioned that I would normally carry on a private correspondence on a topic such as this only through one exchange, but that I’d be delighted to carry on the discussion in public. That’s my policy when someone’s question isn’t personal or at least unique. I also gave a few references dealing with why I hold the positions I do, though again, these are all available through my various web sites.

Having engaged in all of several paragraphs of communication, he then quoted 2 Peter 3:3-7 at me (and I use the preposition deliberately) and extracted from it the following terms:

“there shall come … scoffers … willingly …ignorant” (I couldn’t say it any better.)

Now admittedly my views on creation and evolution are somewhat controversial, but being called “willingly ignorant” by a KJV-Only advocate is, shall we say, special.

And herewith ends another example of how not to communicate!

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The Top of a Reading List

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Henry Neufeld

Dave Black is offering a workshop on Dec. 4, 2011, and he’s posted a reading list on his blog. I extracted the list and posted it on The Jesus Paradigm, since Dave’s blog doesn’t allow for linking to a specific post.

Why am I making a point of a reading list? There are a number of very good things to read on that list, but that’s not it. It’s because of the first item: The Book of Acts. I commend Dave for putting it at the top of the list because that’s precisely where it should be on this topic.

I recall a few years ago when I was teaching a class about how to study the Bible that I offered a reading list that involved about 200 pages from various non-biblical sources and the book of Joshua. The book of Joshua is 20 or so pages, depending on your particular edition. In any case, it’s substantially less reading than the 200 pages.

I got not a single complaint or even a moan regarding the 200 pages, but someone immediately said, “Do we have to read the whole book of Joshua?”

We’ve become less tolerant of just reading or hearing the Bible. Scripture readings are abbreviated. I encounter some surprise when I suggest it would be a good idea to read all four passages of the lectionary (many of which are already trimmed) during worship. I’m told people won’t tolerate it. (Churches who don’t use the lectionary might consider other readings.)

In general, however, we’d rather hear people talk about the Bible rather than read or hear it ourselves. We’d rather read hundreds of pages of someone else talking about the Bible, than spend the time getting fully acquainted with it ourselves. I think this is tragic.

(I know that some people question the value of public reading in the modern world, but I think there is still value in hearing scripture read in public worship. I’ll discuss it some other time.)

Our tendency is to read the Bible in bits and pieces and learn the context from other people who say they know. The only way to truly know the context is to read the material for yourself and to do so as a whole, by which I mean whole section, whole book, whole testament, and even whole Bible.

I don’t mean to minimize the importance of what we can learn from other Bible students, but in order to make judgments about what is valid and what is not, one has to be familiar with the text as a whole.

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Paul Was a Sexist Simpleton?

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Henry Neufeld

Well, no, I don’t think so, but in one of the best demonstrations I’ve seen of how not to argue, that is a view attributed to others by writer Andrew Wilson on the New Frontiers Theology Matters blog (HT: 42).

Within evangelicalism, four main lines of interpretation can be discerned. (Outside of evangelicalism, the response is fairly simple – Paul was a sexist simpleton who didn’t know any better; we’ve been enlightened now, so we should ignore him – although one wonders if the catastrophic track record of post-1960s white people when it comes to marriage will cause this approach to lose its lustre).

Now it’s hard to tell just who this statement refers to, because evangelicalism is so loosely defined these days. I know I’ve been accused of ignoring Paul. But I get part of the foundation of my egalitarianism from Paul, while at the same time looking to him as a master of working with the culture as he found it. In other words while I suppose someone might find reason to call Paul sexist, though I think they’d be wrong to do so, calling him a simpleton is utterly ridiculous.

(I’m not going to go through the rest of the article, but there are other, less glaring problems in characterizing the evangelical streams the author refers to.)

So who might we say, “resembles” that remark? I know of nobody who does. I’m not saying there aren’t any, but I am a member of a church that ordains women in leadership, and is egalitarian in its theology, and I’ve never encountered anyone who would say something like this about Paul.

What I have encountered are a few people who think all complementarians are either secretly sadistic tyrants or, at a minimum, enablers of the same, something that I again know from personal experience is not the case.

We’re going to make enough mistakes in understanding and characterizing one another’s positions. We need to avoid this kind of statement in Bible study.

 

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Point It at Yourself First

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Henry Neufeld

One recommendation I make for Bible study is simple: Look for what speaks to, and yes convicts, you first. It’s very easy to read the Bible and find all the things that other people ought—or ought not—to do. This results in our practice of having lists of “clean” sins and “dirty” sins.

Clean sins are the ones I’m personally tempted to. It’s just natural to fall for those temptations and I don’t really have to worry too much about them. For example, I’m overweight. I’m working on it, but I’m not a good example in that area. That’s my “clean” sin. Of course smoking, to which others are tempted but I’m not, is a “dirty” sin. It’s easy for me to condemn someone else for abusing their body by smoking when I have plenty of things to work on myself.

Of course, what I mean here by “clean” and “dirty” is the way we treat those sins, as though my sins are OK, but those of other people are horrible, not the actual nature of the sins, none of which are “clean.”

Today I read an excellent example of the right way to approach the application of a text of scripture Todd Wood is a creationist who teaches at Bryan College in Dayton, TN. I read his blog to get the perspective of an intelligent young age creationist who is also somewhat unusual in the exceptionally fair way he treats opponents.

He was looking at II Timothy 3:16-17, and decided to look at the broader context. He noted the phrase “having itching ears” and “They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.”

Now I’ve heard this verse any number of times, and generally teachers are prepared to point out the myths that other people believe, and explain how they believe that because of their itching ears. I’ve been the target of this, and I must confess I’ve done it myself.

Not a good plan! Not the right way to apply scripture!

I should look at myself first.

That’s what Todd did:

Now your average creationist reads that as a condemnation of evolution, right? That’s the myth what “itching ears want to hear,” or so we’ve been told.

But I’m not your average creationist, so I wondered what myth I’ve turned to instead of “sound doctrine.” I think the danger is ever present, or Paul wouldn’t have warned Timothy so sternly to avoid it. That means the warning is for everyone, especially for those who think they’ve got it all together doctrinally (like us creationists).

Precisely!

Now if you think my point is that finally a creationist looked at the possibility he might be getting his doctrinal positions out of order, you’re missing my point. Todd is providing us with an excellent example of how we should approach a scripture. I’m a theistic evolutionist. It’s easy for me to see the faults and failings of young age creationists.

In other words, the question to ask is what sort of myths am I going after? What do my itching ears want to hear? When you read this, ask what your itching ears want to hear.

I’m not arguing that we should be unwilling to consider that our doctrinal positions or our scriptural interpretations are right. In fact, after we’ve done our best to study out a position, we need to stand up for what we believe to be the truth. But we also need to constantly look at ourselves.

In addition to asking whether we’re believing myths, I think we need to ask whether we have placed some doctrinal position of our own in a place it doesn’t deserve, i.e. whether we have made an idol of some particular position. Have I made my position on origins, baptism, ecclesiology, education, or anything else more important than the good news of Jesus?

Amongst the things for which scripture is valuable presented in II Timothy 3:17, are reproof and correction. Let’s receive it for ourselves!

 

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Revelation Requires Interaction

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Henry Neufeld

In my book When People Speak for God I used the story of the one-ended telephone cord. Edward Vick makes the same point in much more profound language than I used.

But even should someone intend to make known to me what I would otherwise never come to discover by myself, I shall not in fact know it unless I respond. The intention to reveal oneself, and the intention to know the other are not sufficient in themselves. Revelation takes place when there is giving and responding, an interaction between agents who are both free and purposive. Revelation is communication. Revelation takes place when what is ‘provided’ is grasped, what is ‘offered’ is ‘taken’, what is spoken’ is ‘heard’ (From Inspiration to Understanding, 174 [in advance copy]).

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Revelation and a System of Doctrine

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Henry Neufeld

I really enjoy the last few days of work on a pending book release, because I include an opportunity to read the final form of the book at a more reasonable pace and without the constant distraction of working on editorial changes. Well, I should confess that I’m also always going crazy with production issues, but we’ll leave that to one side.

Right now I’m doing my final run through From Inspiration to Understanding: Reading the Bible Seriously and Faithfully by Edward Vick. It’s an enjoyable process. I’m going to comment on it a bit more later. Today I’m just going to use one quote, regarding revelation.

But the meaning of the Bible is not exhausted by being made the basis of a system of doctrine. There is much that escapes when ‘Bible’ and ‘system of doctrine’ are conflated. In fact, while by no means denying the importance of doctrine (why should a theologian do that?), one must say that if the importance of the Bible is made to consist in its being construed as a source of doctrine, it is being severely reduced, misunderstood, and indeed distorted. Revelation is not reducible to the communication of propositions, and faith is not identical with assent to propositions, in this case propositions repeating biblical statements, or being inferred or worked out from them (emphasis mine).

Note that Dr. Vick is not suggesting, as the context makes even more plain, that there are no propositions involved or that propositions have no value. Rather, revelation is much more than and other than that.

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Battle over Inspiration or Interpretation

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Henry Neufeld

There’s an interesting article by Mark Galli on the Christianity Today web site, titled A New Bible Battle. Galli refers to the “old” battle, and Lindsell’s book. That battle was over inerrancy. But this new battle has to do with reading the Bible in what Galli calls “sub-biblical” ways, for example, as a self-help manual.

In my book When People Speak for God, I emphasized the importance of including interpretation when we talk about the reliability of the Bible. My point there is that describing how reliable a measuring instrument is would be pointless if nobody could read the reliable results. Thus when people get such varied results from reading the Bible, what is the point of speaking, in isolation, of the Bible’s reliability?

Of course those who speak in this way normally do include the additional caveat, “interpreted correctly.” But too often that caveat is simply dropped in, and the methods of interpretation don’t, in fact, handle what the text actually contains. Figuring out what is a “sub-biblical” method of reading the Bible will take a robust idea of inspiration from the earliest oral tradition to the latest printed text.

But getting us away from “self-help” readings is a good step or two in the right direction.

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An Amazingly Bad Article on THE MESSAGE

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Henry Neufeld

Well, not really so amazing. I’ve seen many like it, and it comes from the Worldview Weekend folks who have been spending their time being extraordinarily critical of other conservative Christian organizations.

The article is titled BRIEF (AND BY NO MEANS EXHAUSTIVE) SUMMARY OF PASSAGES CONTAINED WITHIN “THE MESSAGE” BY EUGENE PETERSON WHICH DIRECTLY COMPROMISE FUNDAMENTAL TENETS OF ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY. Well, at least we know the headline wasn’t brief.

I’m not going to run the article point by point. Rather, I’m interested in the general approach.

One common way of comparing Bible versions is to take a set of one’s favorite proof texts and determine whether one can still support one’s favorite doctrines using the translation in question. I want to distinguish this from the quite legitimate comparison of renderings for their quality. Orthodox doctrine is not created on the basis of a few lines of scripture and doesn’t fall based on one or two mistranslations. If it did, it would already have fallen.

I can’t find any translations on my shelves, including my favorites, that don’t have one rendering or another that I’d prefer were different. In many cases, I can get quite passionate about how a particular rendering is bad, and my preferred rendering is good. I consider such discussions entirely appropriate.

But in evaluating a translation, one needs to look at a number of things, including:

  1. The goals of the translation
  2. The method of translation employed
  3. A wide variety of texts, not just a few proof texts

In this analysis all of these items are ignored. Yes, the author says he could find many more issues, and doubtless he could. I found quite a number in my own reading of The Message, and personally I don’t like it all that much. At the same time, I’ve also found some exceptional renderings that are well worth reading.

More importantly, if a reader is using sound methods of biblical interpretation, one will still find orthodox doctrine in The Message. One may find certain texts don’t sound like what one expected in doctrinal terms, but in some cases, Peterson’s rendering is well justified.

The approach taken by Justin Peters in the referenced article is simply a failure. While I would not recommend using The Message as your sole Bible for study (I really wouldn’t recommend making any English translation exclusive), it can be a valuable tool in improving understanding. It is especially useful for reading large portions of scripture for an overview and for its cultural translation of the text.

Authors get their one idea of what a translation should be, and what information should be conveyed, and if they don’t find that, they think the translation is very bad. The fact is that all translations fail to convey part of the original, and do convey other parts. Which part is most important? Let the reader decide! This reader decides on variety.

 

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