Confessions of a Conservative Seminarian

The Difference Between Catholics and Protestants

2007-10-27T00:11:00.001-05:00

I've gained a lot of respect for the Catholic Church over the years. So why is there such a sharp division between Catholics and Protestants? Why is the divide between Protestant and Catholic so much larger than between Protestant denominations?

The answer may be obvious to many of you, but it was not to me. It isn't about Mary, or the Eucharist, or the Pope, or the Church leadership. It isn't about a Latin mass, or faith, or anything like that. These are all issues, but in fact there is more diversity and allowance for diversity than people think in the Catholic Church.

You can be Catholic and believe all sorts of things on various issues.
For instance, you can be Catholic and think that the Pope is evil. In fact, this makes a great segue into what the real issue is. Here is a great case in point:

As a Catholic, you can believe and talk about the Pope being evil.
As a Catholic, you must believe that the Pope is the Vicar of Christ on earth, and that he is most holy.

You might find these two statements contradictory. But for a Catholic they are not.

Think about it this way. If you are having communion, and the preacher serving communion is sleeping around on his wife, does that make the communion less of a communion? The answer is no, because God's grace is God's grace whether the person mediating it is acting within God's will or not. In Catholicism, it is the institution of the Church which is the mediating power of God on Earth. Therefore, it is the office of the Pope that is holy, whether or not the Pope himself is holy.

In Catholic theology, grace is mediated through the Catholic Church. Therefore, questioning the validity of an office is questioning the entire efficacy of the Church's work in the world. If you were to say "God does not work through the Pope" then to a Catholic that would impugn the entire work of the Church. In Protestant thought, God's grace is to an individual. Therefore, there are no offices or validity of offices. In Protestantism, in effect, all offices are artificial, and can be neither valid or invalid. God's work is always efficacious, even without the mediation of a Church office.

Anyway, at least as I see it from what I've read and heard, these are the main divides:

1) What is the Church -- an institution or a gathering of believers?
2) Is God's primary way of interacting through the Church or directly to individuals?

If you are a Catholic reader, I would urge you to respond and let me know if you think I understand the differences between us correctly. I have very few Catholic friends, and therefore most of this comes from reading and not personal interactions.

As a final note, I will leave you with some words of Henry of Kalteisen (I think this is a quote):

"a Pope may be both wicked and holy, as long as he is faithful in his office. Similarly, the Catholic Church is called holy even though it has sinners in it, because of its holy offices and the holiness of the sacraments that are present in it."

Great List of Old Testament Resources Onlines

2007-09-20T09:30:00.000-05:00

http://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/Ted_Hildebrandt/

The Hebrew Keyboard Map for Mac OS X

2007-09-05T14:07:00.000-05:00

For those of you OSX users wanting to write Hebrew, here is how to use the Hebrew-QWERTY input method (I have not messed with the straight Hebrew input method much). There are some symbols such as the Maqqef that I have not found, but this will do you for the most part. I have also named the symbols in case they don't show up. I didn't even try to type the vowels since they require a letter to go beneath and are hard to type on their own. I'm using OSX 10.4 on PowerPC, but it should work for other versions of OSX. Note that capital letters imply using the shift key:

א (aleph) - a
ב (bet) – b
ג (gimel) – g
ד (dalet) – d
ה (he) – h
ו (vav) – v
ז (zayin)– z
ח (het)– H
ט (tet) – T or y
י (yod) – i
כ (kaph) – k
ל (lamed) – l
מ (mem) – m
נ (nun) – n
ס (samec) – s
ע (ayin) – e
פ (pe) – p
צ (tsade) – c
ק (kaph) – q
ר (resh) – r
שׂ (sin) – alt-w
שׁ (shin) – shift-w
ת (tav) – t

B - dagesh

Final forms:
ך (kaph) – K
ם (mem) – M
ן (nun) – N
ף (pe) – P
ץ (tsade) – C

Vowels:
sheva - alt+color or alt+0
qamets/qamets-hatuf - A
compound-qamets – alt+2
patah - alt+a
compound-patah - alt+1
hireq - alt+i
tsere - E
segol - alt+e
compound-segol - alt+3
holem-vav - O
holem - alt+o
shureq - U
qibbuts - alt+u

Other characters:
ש – S or w

Lord/Liar/Lunatic -- or something else? Lewis's Trilemma and the Historical Jesus

2007-08-07T00:06:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine emailed me because he had some questions on C.S. Lewis's trilemma. For those who don't know, the trilemma that Lewis presents is that it is absolutely bogus to called Jesus a "great moral teacher". Because of Jesus's claims to be God, he must be either (a) correct (which would make him Lord), (b) intentionally incorrect (then he would be a Liar), or (c) unintentionally incorrect (a Lunatic). He had been challenged on this, but wasn't quite sure what the issues were, and what invalidated the trilemma. Anyway, this is what I wrote to him, almost verbatim, and hopefully it will help clarify the issues for some of you, as well as provide an introduction to "historical Jesus" studies.

The criticisms of the Lewis' trilemma all boil down to one question - did Jesus actually say what the gospels say that he did? That is the escape from the Trilemma - that Jesus didn't say the things that the gospels report him saying. So the trilemma becomes a quadrilemma:

1) Lord
2) Liar
3) Lunatic
4) You (and/or the gospels) are misrepresenting what Jesus actually said

A popular idea in Biblical scholarship today is the idea that much of what Jesus "said" in the gospels is actually put in his mouth by his followers that came afterward that totally misunderstood what he was about or that created a story about him that matched their own theological desires.

Many conservative scholars have noted the absurdity of this idea -- that Jesus' immediate followers knew less about what Jesus was about than a group of scholars 2,000 years later who were raised in a completely different language and culture :)

The Jesus Seminar, in particular, has been the origin of a lot of this commentary in recent years. My New Testament professor was one of the founding members of the Jesus Seminar, so I've had to interact with it quite a bit. On the surface, they say that they are simply trying to bring traditional historical scholarship to bear on the life of Jesus, but the fact is that no historical document on earth goes through the same amount of skepticism that the Jesus Seminar applies to the Bible. And, surprise!, the results match exactly the theology of the founder of the Jesus Seminar (Robert Funk). Below is a basic summary of how historical Jesus research operates. Now a lot of what is below is not specific to the Jesus Seminar, and is in fact used in a lot of Biblical scholarship that is unrelated to the Seminar, in both conservative and liberal circles.

The Jesus Seminar (and many others) uses the following textual assumptions:
1) Following Jesus' death, the stories about Jesus were told orally by his original disciples
2) Essentially the next generation of followers started writing down these stories as short fragments, often times a simple one- sentence saying. A hypothetical document known as Q was one of these original sources that is believed to lay at the base of Matthew and Luke. Matthew and Luke were also believed to have relied heavily on Mark.
3) The gospel authors, took these short fragments and wove them into the works that we know as the gospels. Since they were only working with short fragments, the larger narrative is largely an invention of the author. The gospel authors incorporated existing written sources, oral material they have heard, and their own imaginations in composing the gospels.
4) In addition, the Jesus Seminar (and some others) view the "Gospel of Thomas" as being on par with the other gospels from a reliability standpoint.

Now, don't be too incredulous at this point, there actually is some evidence for some degrees of these positions. And, in fact, some degree of many of these positions are not in conflict with Biblical Christianity. This does not make them true or false, but it is good to know.

Based on these assumptions, there are some higher-level ideas:

1) If two documents use the exact same wording of something, then it is likely that they derived from the same written source.
2) If two documents use the same source, and have the same situation or saying written in different ways, then those changes reflect the theological perspectives of the authors.
3) If two documents have the same saying, with different wordings, and are not based on the same source, then that indicates that the saying is "multiply attested" -- that is, we are truly dealing with two independent sources.

Now, based on the above, it is believed that if a saying is "multiply attested", then that is strong evidence that the saying is real rather than an invention. Think about it this way -- if one person saw an event, and three people heard that one person talking about it, then the fact that you hear about it from three people doesn't make it more likely to be real -- it still has only one person behind it. On the other hand, if three different people witnessed an event, then that has a lot more weight for belief than three people repeating the claims of a single person. Therefore, events and sayings of Jesus which are truly multiply attested by the criteria above have a higher likelihood of being true. Now the Jesus Seminar goes further, and says that things which are not multiply attested are likely _not_ to have been said by Jesus. In addition, they have a number of other rules which are _highly_ questionable:

* They view as suspect anything that the gospels have Jesus saying or doing that matched with Christian thought of the early Church
* They view as suspect anything that the gospels have Jesus saying or doing which would have been important to the situation of the early Church (they view that as evidence that the later Church put the words in Jesus' mouth in order to provide authority for what they wanted to do in their present situation).
* There are several others, but they are not nearly as widely used, or considered to the same regard.

Now, even if you agree with the assumptions above, the results you get are highly variable - to the point that you can make the evidence say all sorts of things. For instance, I did my paper on Matthew 15:1-20 (which is paralleled in Mark 7, which is usually considered more original in these sorts of studies). I've attached it if you're interested [I don't have a place to upload this at the moment, but will try to stick it on the web soon], but before reading you should know that it was done based on the assumptions of the class, which I don't necessarily hold.

Anyway, some hold that the "original" oral story is Mark 7 verses 1,2,5,15. If you stitch these together, it says

"Now when the Pharisees gathered to him, with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, 'Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?' 'There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.'"

This makes a nice, small, passage that could be handed down orally very easily, and so some think that this was the original, and everything else was tacked on from either other sources or made up to fit the story. On the other hand, I argued that Mark 7:8 was the most original part of the story, since it was a direct confrontation of the Pharisees to answer their question (which is the most in keeping with all sources of Jesus' life), and from that was able to tie in the whole story from 7:5-7:13 as being one piece in the tradition (7:1-4 doesn't really deal with Jesus - it is simply Mark giving some background on the story). I also argue that this is likely a true Jesus story because while this particular story isn't attested to elsewhere (under this paradigm Matthew is believed to simply be following Mark), the fact that they don't wash hands and it causes controversy is corroborated by Luke 11:37-41.

If I remeber correctly, the Jesus Seminar threw out this entire passage. I don't remember why.

So, as you can see, even if you assume that their rules of evidence and assumptions about the text are correct, there are an uncountable number of different configurations you might suppose was "originally Jesus", each having decent argumentation in favor of it.

Okay, so what does all of this have to do with the Lord/Liar/Lunatic? The Jesus Seminar and other historical Jesus research spearheaded the idea that Jesus did not view himself in any sort of elevated manner, and thus renders the Trilemma invalid, since Jesus never made any of those high claims of himself. However, a lot of scholarship today has been going back to the idea that Jesus saw himself as a Messiah figure (note that Messiah just means "savior" -- David was considered a Messiah as well). The Jesus Seminar has been in large part rejected because it was indeed both extreme in its cutting of the Bible, and extremely prejudiced towards the religious view of its founder. This doesn't mean that now all scholars would agree that Jesus thought of himself as divine, but it does mean that the overall consensus is coming back to the idea that he saw himself in some sort of apocalyptic fashion. So, while it is still true that there is a fourth option, it is still does not quite put Jesus into the "moral teacher" category. It perhaps allows for Jesus to be a "moral teacher with an apocalyptic vision of himself".

If you want a good book that covers both a traditional and "Jesus Seminar-ish" view of Jesus from two excellent scholars, I would check out the book "The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions" by Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright. Borg is straight from the Jesus Seminar, and N.T. Wright is considered by many the modern C.S. Lewis. The two conservative scholars at the forefront of historical Jesus research are N.T. Wright and Scot McKnight, and anything by either of them is sure to be good material. Scot McKnight also has a blog, jesuscreed.org.

Francis Beckwith

2007-05-23T23:31:00.000-05:00

Since everyone else is talking about Francis Beckwith, I guess I might as well, too :)

Being a far right-wing Protestant, you might expect me to howl about what a great travesty this is. But, in fact, I actually share quite a bit of Beckwith's sentiment towards the Catholic church.

There is a lot that I like in Catholicism. There are a huge number of wonderful theologians, missionaries, and thinkers that have come from the Catholic church. It is a reversal of the endless church-splitting that occurs in the Protestant arena. The theology in the Catholic church is surprisingly diverse, and most Protestant theology exists somewhere in the Catholic church.

But ultimately what leads me away from the Catholic church is historical -- the Catholic church has had some hideous leadership in the past, and there is no reason to believe it won't happen again. Now, that's true of every organization, but not every organization makes the same claims about their leader that the Catholic church does.

And then there are a number of other doctrines that I stumble on (and I don't know how many of these are essential to being Catholic, but I stumble on them anyway), like the immaculate conception of Mary and other Mary-stuff. Likewise, the over-use of icons.

Perhaps what I really am is Orthodox. I don't know, but right now I'm looking to Evangelical Covenant.

If this entry makes little sense it's because I've had little sleep.

Feminism and Socialism

2007-05-15T23:37:00.000-05:00

I used to be very confused on the relationship between feminism and socialism. On the one hand, I observed that most hardcore feminists are socialists, but I never understood why. However, I have now read a book that makes that connection much more clear.

The book is Sexism and God-Talk.

This is an excellent book, not because I agree with its contents, but rather because it makes so many things in current society so much clearer.

If you wanted to pick on chapter to read, I would read "The New Earth". There Ruether paints a picture of possible solutions to the patriarchal society. The "problem" in Ruether's view is not only unequal pay for equal work, but also the expectations that women should do housework and raise children. So what is the solution for societal expectations? Socialism! If "women's work" (housekeeping, raising children, etc.) is socialized, that means that the government can hire men and women equally, and relieve women of their burdens. By socializing everything, they can force the share of work to be equal, and force equal participation in the roles which they wish to modify.

Anyway, this might be obvious for some people, but it was quite a revelation for me.

Churches Alive and Dead

2007-03-25T21:39:00.000-05:00

My wife and I have been visiting new churches lately. In fact, we've become quite regular attenders at one of them, and we don't even have to miss our current church! The new Church meets Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday morning, and Sunday night!

Why are we visiting new churches? It's very simple, we are tired of contributing effort to ours to just watch it waste away.

For instance, I started an Alpha course at our Church. It went well, but there was NO ONE who would help. I had ONE consistent helper. It frittered off because I didn't have anyone who could help me, and got tired of doing all the work myself.

A lot of other ministries in our church are like that -- no one will help out. We have a tough, tough time coming together and doing something great.

And, worship is terrible. Now, I do like contemporary worship. I like crunchy guitars and loud drums. That is what gets me in a worshipful spirit. But even with the old hymns - they don't have to sound like dirges.

I understand that a lot of people have very busy lives, for which Church is the one stable element. I understand that for Church to be changing, it means that these people who are often having frustrating lives as it is have to have one more frustration in their life. But here's the question - are people meeting God at Church.

So I've been going to a church on Sunday nights that offers a lot of what our church is presently missing. And that's not to say that the new church doesn't have its own problems. But it's like the parable of the talents. One group is _using_ it to make back an investment, and the other church is simply burying it in the sand.

Here's the sad part. My home church has so much more possibilities than the new church that I'm going to. They are just so stuck in the status quo that they can't see their way out. My home church could do everything even better than my new church. They have fantastic worship leaders, in fact every aspect of church life there is someone talented beyond measure within the Church.

So what's holding us back? There are several issues, but I think that it boils down to (a) leadership, (b) having the whole congregation willing to help out, (c) focus [which comes back to leadership], and (d) willingness to change. The talented folks are spread too thin on too many projects. The projects which are visionary are not planned into the way the church as a whole operates.

And so we run in circles. And die.

You can make up for a lack of talent with proper vision. You can't make up for a lack of vision and will.

Tinker's Missionary Conquest

2007-03-22T07:08:00.000-05:00

My midterm paper was on Tinker's Missionary Conquest. The end result -- Tinker undermines his own argument by letting his propaganda interfere with his scholarship.

In the first place, he notes on the outset that he, in the book, was free to "reinterpret" (i.e. rewrite) the Native American side of all exchanges without telling us. I can see the reason for this -- if the story is told by the oppressors, it is easy to see how the oppressed's story could get misinterpreted.

However, it goes further than this. It turns out that there isn't any part of history he doesn't feel free to rewrite to make his point. I only looked up one of his primary sources in the book to check him out, and it turns out that Tinker rewrote both sides of the exchange to make the missionary look bad.

The specific case is that of De Smet. Now, I must say, I had never heard of any of these missionaries before, so I felt no implicit need to defend them. I was fully ready to believe that they were the bastards that Tinker portrayed. However, I kept on noticing that in De Smet's case, Tinker was relying almost entirely on innuendo to make his case. Then, in his clenching argument, he notes a story about De Smet praying for rain. Tinker portrayed the situation as if De Smet was mocking the Indians. He basically said that De Smet had put on a false rain dance, took credit for it in front of the Indians, and then told his friends in private that he had hoodwinked the Indians.

But in fact, if you look at Tinker's primary source, this is what happened:

The Indians asked De Smet to ask God for rain

De Smet gathered the leaders and prayed for them, and told them that if God was pleased with them, He would send rain.

It rained that day.

De Smet told his friends that the Indians would not believe that it was God who did it, but rather think that De Smet had some secret trick for making rain that he was not telling them.

Sure enough, one of the Native Americans offered De Smet 10 horses to tell what his secret was, and never believed De Smet no matter how many times De Smet told him that it was based on being a Christian and praying.

De Smet said "Did I not tell you that they would say I did it?"

Tinker tries to convince the reader that this last quote was him taking credit for successfully pulling off a mockery of the Native Americans, but in fact it was that the Native Americans would not believe the truth that De Smet kept trying to tell them!

Anyway, it is clear that this book is pure propaganda. I'm sure a lot of the things it says are true, but it is tough to take anything at face value after that! I mean, really, how do I know he's not BS'ing on the other stuff, too? Anyway, if someone knows of a more academically honest person who has written on this issue, please let me know.

Another thing that annoys me about the book is the co-option of the word "genocide". There are a few instances in the book that truly count as "genocide", but Tinker's definition would actually make any successful conversion of a whole culture equivalent with genocide! That is unjust to true instances of genocide.

Tinker also fails to present a positive model for how missionary work should work. He rightly criticizes the missionaries for confusing culture and gospel, but offers no opinion on where that line should be drawn.

Finally, for people who want to read about a missionary who respects culture, take a look at Bruchko, and also the followup work (though I haven't read that one). It is a great read on how to reach a culture for Christ without forcing them into a Western mold.

Dear Republican Hopefuls - You Better Believe We Care About Your Personal Life

2007-03-21T11:12:00.000-05:00

It seems that the new set of Republican candidates for president think that we shouldn't be looking at the private lives of candidates. Well, all I can say is that this is TOTAL B.S.

I once heard someone say, "A man who will cheat on his wife will cheat on his men." I'm glad that Newt confessed his sins, but he's crazy if he doesn't think I'll take his philandering into account when he runs.

What scares me most is that there is not a single presidential front-runner who I would even _consider_ voting for. I like Giulliani, but not as a president. Chris Rock had an amusing comment which I think is true. It was something like "he's like a bulldog -- great to have in a crisis, but otherwise he'll eat your children."

There's one person who I don't know much about that I _might_ be interested in voting for. As I said, I don't know much about him. But it's Sam BrownBack.

If it comes down to Giulliani or Gingrich versus Obama, I'm going Obama. If it's Giulliana or Gingrich versus Hillary, I'm voting libertarian. Or just writing in someone that I _do_ think would be good for president.

As a conservative, the Republican party is starting to scare me. For information on why, you should check out Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders into Insiders. Tom Coburn is a stand up guy. He was the ONLY member of the Republican revolution to uphold his promise of voluntary term limits, and is quite critical of Republicans from a conservative perspective.

All that to say that conservatives are TIRED TIRED TIRED of the Republican party, and, to the politicians, YOU WILL NOT GET A FREE PASS ON YOUR PERSONAL LIVES NO MATTER WHAT IDIOT YOU HAPPEN TO BE RUNNING AGAINST. NOR DOES THAT (R) ON THE TICKET MEAN MUCH ANYMORE. YOU'VE DILUTED IT FAR TOO LONG AND NOW YOU WILL BE PAYING THE PRICE AT THE POLLS.

What annoys me about Creationists

2007-03-17T19:22:00.000-05:00

I thought I'd spend this blog post criticizing conservatives for a change :) Not that there hasn't been plenty of annoying stuff happening in seminary (for instance, Intro to Theology should be renamed to "why we shouldn't trust theology done by white people because of 'white privilege'"). However, my particular beef today is with Creationists.

Now let me start out by stating that I am, in fact, a Creationist. However, that should be read primarily as a statement about God, not a statement about evolution. Certainly there is much in evolutionary theory that is against the Bible (and against common sense, or even technical sense). However, I get annoyed when people who claim that they are "Creationists" want to spend all of their time talking about evolution!

Look, if you want to be an "anti-evolutionist", by all means do so. But please don't label yourself a "Creationist" if all you want to talk about is negative things about evolution.

For instance, we work hard to get reasonable things for our children to watch. One difficult thing is to get good nature shows that aren't peppered with mindless evolutionary speculation. However, the Creation nature videos talk about evolution _more_ than the secular ones! My wife brought home a fairly well-produced one, which will probably get some playing time in our DVD player. But even its title - "Incredible Creatures which Defy Evolution" -- incredibly annoying! Evolution gets play even in the title!

Why can't they call it "Incredible Creatures of Creation"? Wouldn't that honor God more than talking negatively about evolution? Yet that seems to be all a lot of Creationists are doing these days -- just talking up negative things about evolution rather than exploring what God has made under a paradigm that honors Him.

UPDATE!!!

My wife recently brought home the Marvels of Creation book series by Buddy Davis. This includes Breathtaking Birds, Sensational Sea Creatures (my favorite), and Magnificent Mammals. I am happy to say while it does discuss evolution in the books, it is only a tiny, tiny bit in the introduction. The book as a whole serves to be God-honoring rather than evolution-bashing. Fantastic series to educate my children with God's creation!

The Bible and Slavery

2007-02-02T10:53:00.000-06:00

AiG has an excellent overview of the Bible and slavery. Includes lots of stuff I've said to people over the years, in a nice concise yet comprehensive fashion.

Why I Hate Moderates

2007-01-21T20:42:00.000-06:00

The title sounds harsh, and, well, it is. But first, let me say that I don't dislike a position simply for being moderate. That is not the point of this entry. There are many instances where I would be considered "moderate". The issue I have is with people who consider being moderate as a somehow more rational or reasonable mode of being than either side of the issue.

The reason is simply this -- most moderates think of being "moderate" as a solution to extremism. But in fact, if you are intentionally trying to be "moderate", then in fact you are just serving two groups of extremists rather than one. The idea that there are just two sides to an issue is absurd anyway. So by being "moderate" you are simply abdigating your responsibility to make an informed choice and instead just choosing the middle of two essentially arbitrary sides.

This is also an issue I have with the idea of pragmatism that people like Bill O'Reilly advocate. If you are being "pragmatic" and not "ideological", you are contradicting yourself. Pragmatic is only pragmatic towards a specific end. And ends are ideological. If you are being pragmatic without an ideology, then you are either (a) being arbitrary, (b) falsely pretending to be non-ideological, or (c) serving an ideology that you aren't aware of. I find (c) to be both the most common and the most dangerous, because you are unable to see your ideologies and just take them as assumed givens.

Now, there is another mode of being which is sometimes taken for being "moderate" when in fact it isn't, and that is "peacemaking" (this term is fairly arbitrary, but it's the best I could come up with). Finding common ground between two parties, or helping communication between parties is neither pragmatic nor moderate. It is a facilitating mode. However, peacemaking itself cannot make decisions -- it simply helps other parties decide choices that suit them. As soon as a peacemaker persues their own independent solutions (which doesn't necessarily mean they are no longer peacemaking) they are being ideological.

Again, I don't want anyone to be confused. If you happen to fall into a moderate position (or many moderate positions) because that is what you really think, this post is not an attack on you. However, if you are being "moderate" thinking that it is a peacemaking role or is the solution to extremism, then you are even more controlled by extremists than even the extreme positions. And this is an especially dangerous position as far as being open to manipulation, because in fact you are explicitly giving yourself open to manipulation by two sides. And, because you are being "moderate" presumably between two sides, the two sides you are probably "moderate" between are those most public and pronounced. And how does a view get to be public and pronounced? That's right -- the media. So, by being moderate, you are basically telling the media to tell you what to believe. Whatever two sides they pick, you will be at the center. So, to manipulate you, all they have to do is move each side until they have you doing exactly what they want.

So, don't be moderate. Think for yourself.

The Rise of the Liberal Academy is the Conservatives' Fault

2006-11-15T22:29:00.000-06:00

I think that the rise in the academy of liberal seminary professors and students is almost entirely the fault of conservatives. Why? Very simple -- every hard-core liberal (especially the ones bent on attacking conservatives) often have one of two stories:

They came from a conservative family/church. They were alienated from their own Church for asking tough questions. The finally found a group of people who were willing to allow them to ask the tough questions in. This was a liberal group, and forever they then view conservatives as dumb, close-minded people and liberals as open-minded freethinkers.

They came from a conservative family/church. They were extraordinarily conservative or extraordinarily vocal about their conservatism. Then, usually in college, they get exposed to criticisms of the Bible. Then, it goes in one of two directions. Either:
- They get embarrassed and vilified by their liberal professors. This greatly affects their self-esteem. Because they have never faced tough faith questions, they are completely unable to respond, and then become militant liberals in an attempt to save their own faith, and to never feel embarrassed for being stupid. They feel (and their professors justify them in this feeling) that because they are now liberal they are "smart" and all their old conservative friends are "stupid".
- They feel betrayed by their home church for "keeping the truth from them", because they had never heard these questions before. They assume that their church has been lying to them, and then uniformly reject nearly everything they were raised to believe as a bunch of lies.

Anyway, this is the fault of conservative churches. I don't think that conservative churches necessarily have to change any of their beliefs. However, they absolutely must interact with the beliefs and questions of others. I understand the reason for not wanting to teach the best arguments against the faith or against a church's doctrine within a church -- it is viewed as an unjustified risk.

The question is, though, which is riskier:

Having children and students struggle with questions of the faith and the arguments against the faith in college surrounded by professors who often would prefer they simply give up their faith.

Having children and students struggle with questions of the faith and the arguments against the faith in the church and surrounded by other people of faith who have struggled through these same issues and can help them through it?

Especially in today's world, they are going to hear the issues. Isn't the best place for that to happen in the church where they can be lifted up by people of faith rather than when they are alone against the world?

If you want conservatism and fundamentalism to survive, the best thing you can do is introduce criticisms of the faith as a standard part of school-age curriculum. And not straw-man versions, either. The real thing, with the best arguments. At the end you will have students who are both more faithful and more knowledgeable, and even better -- if you have done a good job teaching about how presuppositions affect the way that evidence is viewed -- you have also given them a good background for understanding new arguments in the future.

So, if you are a Church member, encourage your kids to ask questions, and help them find good answers. Don't assume that just because an answer matches your preconceived notions that it is a good answer. Take the time to really search the issue out. Try to prove yourself wrong. This is tough to do, and it takes a bit of courage. But it is well worth it, because in the end you understand both yourself and those who disagree with you better.

And the children of the Church won't grow up thinking that you lied to them and turn away.

Theological Worldview

2006-10-30T14:00:00.000-06:00

You scored as Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan. You are an evangelical in the Wesleyan tradition. You believe that God's grace enables you to choose to believe in him, even though you yourself are totally depraved. The gift of the Holy Spirit gives you assurance of your salvation, and he also enables you to live the life of obedience to which God has called us. You are influenced heavly by John Wesley and the Methodists.

Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan

86%

Neo orthodox

68%

Reformed Evangelical

64%

Emergent/Postmodern

61%

Fundamentalist

57%

Charismatic/Pentecostal

54%

Roman Catholic

50%

Classical Liberal

29%

Modern Liberal

11%

What's your theological worldview?
created with QuizFarm.com

The Pacifism of Some Liberals

2006-10-28T20:36:00.000-05:00

I'm not going to take the time to go into the full subject of war and pacifism. Let's just leave it as that I think it's a complicated subject, and I see validity to both sides. Later I might go into it full-boar, but at the present time I just want to concentrate on one particular form of pacifism that I find particularly distasteful -- the pacifism of most of the outspoken modern liberals, especially liberal Christians.

There's two reasons why I find their brand of pacifism distasteful. The first one is the most obvious -- they are selective pacifists. They aren't like Quakers who are totally against war, but instead they pretend to be pacifists when it suits them. It's like they are using pacifism as a cover to make their own position seem more righteous than it really is. For every conflict they agree with, they want troops to be sent in, or at least a cruise missile launched. For every conflict they disagree with, it's a long speech about whether or not war is Christian and if Jesus would wage war. It's simply two-faced, and using "pacifism" not as a real position, but rather as a propoganda tool to be used or discarded as the situation merits. This simply prevents an actual discussion about the merits of the conflict, since you can simply paint yourself as being "for peace" and someone else "for war".

But that isn't really what I wanted to talk about. What really gets my goat, but almost no one mentions, is that the liberals who are wanting peace are the exact same people who think that any hint of Christianity within government is a violation of Church and state. This is a blatant contradiction to begin with -- they claim Christianity as the source of their anti-war position, but then do not tolerate anyone else to use Christianity as a basis for other policies. Even within pacifism, if you choose to be peaceful on behalf of Christ, then the government needs to be able to follow through with the rest what Christ calls us to do, and accomplish peace from even our enemies through Christ. This is fully untenable if our lawmaker's hands are tied in actively practicing the Christian faith.

I believe fully that pacifism can be what Christ calls a country to do. But, we aren't doing that if we stop there and do not use that instance to proclaim Christ to the nations. If pacifism is used without acknowledging Christ all the way through, it would be in vain and without effect. What gain for anyone would that lead? It would simply lead to being conquered by our enemies. If we push forward in Christ, we would be victorious even if we were conquered, and we could even be victorious in the flesh as well without conflict, if we relied on Christ to save us. But simply not going to war without proclaiming Christ through it is not the same thing.

Concerning the Poor

2006-10-22T15:17:00.000-05:00

Oloryn's Wordshop has an excellent post concerning the gospel and the poor.

Gospel as a Literary Genre

2006-10-13T23:55:00.000-05:00

I think that the gospel is its own literary genre. After all, how could one even possibly experience Christ in the flesh, and then go and write a biography? Or even a tribute? No, to tackle Christ requires a whole genre unto itself.

The problem I often see is that this idea is taken to an almost grotesque extreme. In academia, it seems that often the idea of the gospel as a unique literary genre is used to explain away its fantastic elements, rather than stemming from them. It's like they say "oh, well this or that apocalyptic or prophetic element was not historical, but rather was added by the later Christian community to explain something or other.

It's amazing to me that people who study scripture for a lifetime can become so sucked into the world's way of looking at things that they start disbelieving the resurrection, and start believing that the unexplainable is merely a literary device, rather than an act of God among us.

When you remove the supernatural as an available category, I guess all that you have left is false reports of the supernatural, the supernatural as a literary device, and supernatural occurrences which are best explained non-supernaturally. Oh, well.

Epistemology, the Consensus of Scholars, and Historical Truth

2006-10-01T08:04:00.000-05:00

One thing that people don't take time to think about -- but they really should -- is epistemology. How do we know what we know? How much can we know for sure? Well, I can answer that last question for you -- NOT MUC H. EVERYTHING we do in life takes a huge amount for granted, taking a whole host of assumptions and ideas more or less "by faith." This is not to mean we should be nihilistic about knowledge, but instead just recognize that our knowledge of the world is grossly limitted and bound because it just isn't possible to know with certainty the kind of stuff we would like to know with certainty.

This is why science doesn't "prove" anything. Instead, they show reasonable evidence. You only get to prove things in math and logic, because there it doesn't deal with the real world, only how your stated assumptions interact.

There are even more epistemological problems with history. First of all, we can't do rigorous, repeated experiments to test our knowledge Everyone we are interested in is dead, and we can't remake historical situations to test them out. Second of all, LIFE IS COMPLICATED! I sometimes have trouble telling people when they ask me a simple "why is X this way" in my job, because usually it takes about an hour to explain, and the history is so convoluted, someone would accuse me of making it up if I told them!

This is why, when reading history, I often take the side of the historians of the current time, even if they are in disagreement with other historians of their time. Life is complicated enough that just about any seemingly-contradictory happening might in fact be true -- we would need only to know the circumstances. Thus, historians seem to borrow the physicist's razor when talking about history, and that almost certainly leads to a false understanding.

For example, let's say that two biographers were studying my family. During the interview, let's say one asked me how many children my wife and I have had, and another biographer asked my wife. I would have told them 4, but my wife would have told them 2, and both numbers would be correct depending on how you look at it. In fact, 2, 3, and 4 would all have been correct answers to this seemingly simple question (I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out how all three numbers would have been valid -- and it has nothing to do with adoptions, twins, or other marriages).

Descartes attempted to construct knowledge from first principles. He failed totally. The only thing he actually managed to prove was his own existence (he thought he proved more, but really he was incorrect). Many people in the modern world try to base their epistemology on science. But if the goal is to only commit to knowing what is proven, then this is fully irrational exercise. What you are doing is simply taking the assumptions of others as your own, but without knowing it.

What's even more interesting is the history of science. Many people have the false assumption that good ideas flow directly from experimental results. But in fact this is not the case. Ideas often predate good evidence for them, and scientists have to essentially take the ideas "on faith," even when they are contrary to known laws, ideas, and empirical results, until they have explored it enough that they can convince others. This may sound grossly unscientific, but in fact many of our fundamental moves in science are based on this. For example, let's take heliocentrism. Most people are unaware how shaky the evidence for heliocentrism was when it was proposed by Gallileo. The fact is, at that time, most of the evidence was against it. One of the key observations needed to establish it -- parallax motion of the stars, was missing (it turns out it was just because their telescopes weren't powerful enough -- but they didn't know that until centuries laters). And it also turns out that the argument which Gallileo thought was the clenching argument -- that the tides are produced from the sloshing around of the earth as it moves through space -- is also completely false. So, one of the most fundamental shifts in astronomy had to be held "on faith" in contradiction to the empirical evidence (and supported by bad arguments) for over a century. But yet it seems despite his lack of knowledge about why heliocentrism is true, Galileo was right! Not only that, but this sort of history of an idea is not unusual. Good ideas usually have to be held by proponents in contradiction of facts for quite some time, until they can work out (or others can work out) how the idea can be true.

All this to point out that there is no good way to establish what is true. In fact, it seems that the primary mode of reasoning in all of this is not facts, physics, or anything at all except plain choice. You have to choose what you believe. You have to choose what your starting assumptions are. There are no paths around this. Knowledge is a product of choice. Facts and other things can influence you, but choice is the more fundamental component.

This is why I think that constant appeals to "scholarly consensus" or any other such nonsense in textbooks is silly.

First of all, in most cases, there is no way for an author to make such a statement. Did they do a poll? Probably not. It is probably based on the number of articles in the journals read by the author making that statement about each position, and how much weight the author gives to other authors in his field. Also, it could also be that the scholarly consensus is against the view that has the majority of publications, but the adherents to that view simply think that their case is already adequately covered by other scholarship, and are merely snickering to themselves about all of the new papers. This is additionally compounded by the fact that many scholars don't qualify anyone of faith as academic scholars (I don't have the reference at the moment, but will post it in the comments if I find it). So does that mean when those people talk about a "scholarly consensus," that they aren't including anyone of faith?

But that isn't even the point. A consensus of scholars doesn't get us any closer to the truth, it only gets us closer to the truth about what the scholar's preferences are. Take for instance the many claims of pseudonymous writing in the New Testament. If scholars are to be believed, most of the New Testament was written under false names. But there is a huge epistemological problem here. For example, let's just say that it is true that Peter did not know Greek well enough to write either 1 Peter. So what? What if he used a translator? A scribe? What of it? What if he gave someone the idea to argue, and that person argued it in good Greek style. Is that any different than an architect giving directions to workmen? In fact, we claim that architects "built" a structure even if they didn't lay a single stone! Scholars often argue that such opinions are ad hoc. They are not. They are only ad hoc if we had invented the idea that Peter wrote Peter. But instead it is attested to historically and in the text itself. The fact that it cannot simply be rectified with the known data is irrelevant -- this is LIFE we are talking about. Life is always full of the unexpected, and complex twists are a part of nearly every day. So this insistence that the data must all support a single conclusion or else that conclusion is wrong simply doesn't stand up to what we know about how life works. And the insistence that facts must support a simple explanation simply reflects the preferences of the scholars, and in fact is contrary to what we know about how life works.

The choice to think that Peter (this is just an example -- we could be talking about just about any book in the Bible or antiquity) is written under a falsely attributed name is just that -- a choice. It isn't _based_ on the data. The data we have is that the early church fathers thought that at least one of Peter's epistles (if not both) were authentic. The fact that a lot of scholars choose to believe this is more of a product of their shared values and prejudices than it is a rerflection of the epistles themselves. This doesn't mean they are incorrect or that their reasoning should be ignored, but rather we are fooling ourselves if we think too much of the "scholarly consensus" as a foundation of knowledge, or if we don't acknowledge that whatever our position on the subject will be as much of a reflection on us and our thought as it is on the truth. And this isn't just for authorship, this is any fact or reconciling of facts in ancient works.

I wish I could give you a better outline to ascertaining truth, but the fact is that ultimately you just have to choose. People who say otherwise are usually deceived, and are unknowingly following the choices of others, and pretending them to be objective truth.

It's not that I don't think that such things shouldn't be debated, but instead I think the facts should be given both their best and worst spin, and ultimately we have to make a choice about what to believe.

Ideology in Translations

2006-09-22T13:43:00.000-05:00

My OT professor is not a fan of the NIV. The problem, as he sees it, is that they had a "theological axe to grind" when translating. He made an admission that everyone "brings in suppositions," but somehow we were supposed to view the suppositions of the NIV translation committee with suspicion, while his own suppositions, while they may not be perfect are at least "scholarly."

Let's take a case that he mentions -- Genesis 2:19. Here is the NIV:

"Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them"

Here is the NASB:

"Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them"

The difference is that the second one seems to have a time order contradiction to the Genesis 1 story (God made man, then the beasts), while the first one switches the verb tense slightly to make it fit (God made man, and had already made the beasts).

Now, the professor admits that "had formed" is within the semantic range of the verb (יצר). But apparently, it is invalid to use that even though it makes the most sense within the text.

On another occasion, the professor has said that he finds it very interesting that the Hebrew people kept multiple versions of accounts, and even let them conflict with each other, because they were more interested in preserving a diversity of traditions than having them all work together.

Now, the question is, doesn't this make his determination of the verb form actually the one that has a theological axe to grind? The NIV committee seems to have simply chosen the tense of the verb (of the range of valid choices) that makes the most sense within the text. He wants to choose the one that makes the least sense, which just so happens to coincide with what he likes about the way the Hebrews collected scripture.

I don't mind that he claims the NIV committee had a theological perspective. It's the fact that he claims that they are translating according to a theological perspective and he himself is not (especially when his choice goes against what would make sense within the text) which really chaps my hide.

For more reading on why people like the NIV translation of this, see here (look under "Factual Contradiction #2") and here.

For more reading on why people do not like the NIV translation of this, see here (second half of posting -- if someone has a better reference for a "no NIV" let me know).

Of course, what's really silly is that in a language that deals so much less precisely in tense, we are arguing over precisely what tense is meant! Perhaps the point is that chronological order was not the main point. In that case, the specific verb tense is irrelevant. You have to pick one, but ultimately it doesn't matter, because all of them are going to be more specific than the Hebrew one. Harmonize with Gen. 1? Fine, but don't pretend that this is exactly what the Hebrew is saying. Don't harmonize? Fine, but don't pretend that the verb tense is specific enough to make a contradiction, either.

What is the Difference Between Conservatives and Liberals?

2006-09-19T23:54:00.000-05:00

Joel at Connexions attempted to make a distinction between conservatives and liberals. I think in his list he missed the core issues at hand. This post is a slightly modified version of what I posted in the comments over there.

-----

I would say that a “liberal” is someone who has decided that the constraints of the past are unnecessary. Whether in interpretation — historical interpretation is fairly meaningless; cannonization — the historical cannon decisions are not authoritative; or theology — everyone gets to write their own. It is re-interpretting the past as “well, that was okay for them, but this is today” as opposed to “we should continue on in the authority of the apostles”.

This stems from a completely different understanding of God’s work in the world. As a conservative, I view apostolicity as a primary determinant for what is valid in the canon. Why? Because the apostles were chosen by God in a major move of God in history. I don’t personally have a right to change those things, and it would take another similarly-major act of God to do so (with the signs demonstrating as such), and then those who had the closest connection to God’s movement would have the authority to do so. Perhaps someone may have the ability to write into the canon absent that if they had the same sort of multi-century evaluation process that our current canon went through. Maybe.

The liberal view is that God is active equally all the time. Therefore, we are just as able to make theological judgments for our time as the apostles were for their time, and there is no reason to harmonize these. We should listen to their advice, but ultimately we must construct our own theology, hopefully even better than theirs.

That's the fundamental issue, here's my take -- The difference is that in the conservative view, God has the ultimate authority, and we are obedient to His actions. In the liberal view, man is the ultimate authority, even on theological issues. It may be because we all have God’s spirit in us, but the reality of the situation is that liberals consider themselves to be responsible (and maybe even mandated) to construct their own theology. Conservatives believe that authoritative theology must be from God Himself, and must be likewise authenticated through God’s actions in the world.

I heard a little parable once, and I'm sure I'm going to botch it up, but I think it's relevant.

There was a man and a rabbi at the grocery store. The rabbi told the children with him, "go get these items," and immediately they did so. The man said to the rabbi, "I wish my children were so obedient." The rabbi said, "those aren't my children -- those are my students. If those were my children, then you would have _really_ seen service." The man asked, "why do your children respect you so much?" The rabbi said, "you see these children view me as one generation closer to Moses than they are, while your children see you as one generation closer to the apes than they are."

Can Acts Be Used as a Background for Paul?

2006-09-19T23:39:00.000-05:00

My NT professor is now claiming that Acts is not a legitimate source for information about Paul. I find this claim highly suspicious.

Apparently, what we are supposed to do is let Paul speak from his own words. THIS is supposed to be the sole influence on our thoughts about what Paul was like, and what his theology was like. Acts really only counts in the places where it is explicitly in agreement with Paul (in which case it is redundant anyway).

Now, let's think about this for a minute. What is the thing that they hammer into your head about hermeneutics?

CONTEXT, CONTEXT, CONTEXT!

Okay, what is the thing that they hammer into your head about the hermeneutics of epistles?

1) They are occasional (i.e. written in response to specific situations)
2) They are for the most part not general theological works
3) They were not intended by the author to be scripture

Now, I agree with all of these, except for perhaps 3 (does anyone want to argue that Paul didn't view his letters as normative?). So, if all we have are non-systematic, occasional works, why should we think that these are sufficient to produce a typical idea of how Paul thought and worked? Shouldn't these be viewed as being punctuations on a backdrop of a more "typical" Pauline style which isn't necessarily expressed in the letters?

Therefore, the idea that we should "let Paul speak in his own words" is going _against_ what is the most important hermeneutical principle -- CONTEXT! On a more general historical background, we don't use autobiographies as the only definitive source of information on an author. I believe it is well recognized that it takes an outsider to judge a person as a whole -- people often don't do a good job of that themselves. Therefore, rejecting Acts' depiction of Paul just because it doesn't mimmick exactly what you would get by reading the letters alone is counter to any legitimate claims of historical inquiry. The only purpose it seems to serve is to aid those who are attempting to de-legitimatize scripture by dicing it up and only viewing the parts individually, and in doing so, so overemphasize the details of difference as to make them seem contradictory. By removing Paul's letters from their context, it distorts Paul. Would any of you want the details of your life to be judged as true or false based on whether a scholar 2,000 years later thought that a letter you wrote someone made you sound like a different person?

Attack of the Straw Men

2006-09-19T23:13:00.000-05:00

I was annoyed with all of my teachers today at seminary. Not because they were liberal. Not because they argued against conservatism. Not because they didn't acknowledge the fact that "the scholarly consensus" depends on who you ask. No, my problem is that they presented two sides to the story -- the liberal side and the straw-man-conservative side. THAT is what really chaps my hide.

In Old Testament, the professor presented the choices as, basically, either accept the documentary hypothesis as true, or reject scripture because there are minor contradictions in the stories (no, I didn't understand it either). And more blatantly, the Torah could not have been written by Moses because (a) Deuteronomy talks about Moses' death and (b) there are many notes about current names of places after Moses in the Torah. Now, Mosaic authorship is a long conversation in and of itself. But let's just say for the time being that Moses was either the author or the primary redactor of the material in Genesis. Do EITHER of these claims do any harm to that fact? ABSOLUTELY NOT!!! As for (b), there is no reason to think that Joshua would not have seen it fit to end the story after Moses' death. So what? As for (a), think of it this way. Look in your favorite study Bible. Do you see all those footnotes giving you reading helps and current place names and money conversions? Well guess what -- ancient documents DON'T HAVE FOOTNOTES! So what do the scribes do? The insert the footnotes into the text itself. Why is this so hard to imagine?

I am sure that there are good arguments against Mosaic authorship, but THESE AREN'T THEM. These are INTELLECTUALLY LAZY ARGUMENTS. The big problem is that this is shaping the way that the rest of the students in the class will perceive theology. They will think, "OK, things aren't quite as simple as I originally supposed, so therefore whatever solution the teacher is proposing must in fact be the only reasonable alternative." An additional problem is that even at the graduate level, people have trouble questioning the underlying assumptions of their teachers, and accept WAY too much uncritically.

For the NT, it seems that the only alternatives (according to the professor) is either the four gospels must tell the story the exact same way or truth is relative. What? Here was how he stuctured his argument:

1) The four gospels each tell their own story (OK, I'm with you on this one)
2) Putting them together in a single harmonized version takes away from what the other stories were trying to convey, and actually create a new gospel that is different from the other four (OK, I'm still with you -- no disagreement here)
3) Therefore, you can't conclude that these are historical accounts (what the #@$@#$?!?!?)

He then proceeded to give the most idiotic "problems" in the NT that any third grader _should_ be able to see right through, and should not even be _considered_ to be problematic if one admits the possibility that not all of the gospels were arranged chronologically. The number of times passover was eaten was actually brought up to be a point of contention! I mean, puhleease!

There seems to be a general consensus that harmonizing biblical accounts is an a priori wrong thing to do. I find that just plain idiotic. ANY time I have two different accounts of ANYTHING, ANYWHERE in life, my first idea is to try to find a way to give both people the benefit of the doubt, and find a way they both can be right. Life is more complicated than even the most detailed books could show, so ANYONE who gives an account of ANYTHING will necessarily have to gloss over some details, and might even be mistaken on a detail or two. So the heck what? The most charitable thing to do is to find the reading that makes them both correct.

Apparently, however, in seminary, the point is to stretch the text -- not to harmony, but to disharmony. It is almost a command, FIND DISHARMONY WHEREVER YOU CAN AND EMPHASIZE IT!!! It's almost laughable the kinds of things the professors come out with that in their view can't be harmonized, or can't be harmonized except by fanatics who refuse to face reality. It makes me wonder if they have ever thought about their own descriptions of things in their own lives. I know that if you asked me to describe an event on two different occasions, on each one you would get a completely different description, and both of them would probably be completely true! I can just imagine a liberal professor trying to reconstruct the historical cseminarian, and what they might come up with!

Anyway, stuff like this drives me nuts. "Either you can be a stark-raving-mad-lunatic-right-winger, or you can be scholarly -- that's your choice." Give me a freakin break.

Removing Tradition -- Clarity of Original Intent or an Attempt to Rewrite Christianity?

2006-09-15T22:25:00.000-05:00

Often times in seminary one is asked to set aside one's preconceived ideas about the past, and about scripture, and read it again fresh, read it new. Read it without the constraints of two thousand years of commentators. Read it for how it originally was.

First of all, let me say that I am all for this practice -- it is genuinely helpful to approach a topic fresh, without carrying in all of the baggage that came before. HOWEVER, once one has done this, it is vitally important to reconnect with tradition. Why? Obviously we do not hold to tradition as being equal to scripture. However, sometimes we forget that our historical distance from the text prevents us from seeing some things which the ancients saw.

It's interesting, because a lot of time professors will want you to "read without preconceptions," but what they really mean is "read with the preconceptions imposed by the humanistic scholarship of the last two hundred years."

For example, the "mythic" status of Genesis. It has been suggested that we read this as the ancients would -- as a story that conveys universal truths, not historical truths. By why would he say that the ancients would regard it in this way? In fact, the weight of the evidence shows that this was regarded as history for as long as there has been commentary. Josephus certainly regards the Genesis history as real (even relating it to other ancient histories). Jesus likewise. So who are all of these ancients who thought that Genesis was not a real history but a "universal truth"?

What's even more amusing is that after pointing out that Genesis is scriptural because it is a universal truth instead of history, the professor then went on to say that it isn't so much "universal" as only applying to the society in which it was written. Of course, there were _some_ parts that were still useful today. So what is happening is that we are the judge of scripture, not the other way around. This is what scripture calls "being wise in one's own eye". We take the parts that we think are useful, and leave the rest. Frankly, you can do that with any writing.

At the same time, the professor had us look at Genesis 3:8, where God says "where are you?" Many of us in the class took this as God giving them time to fess up on their own -- much like we would treat children. But the professor called that "reading our own presuppositions about God into the text" (not exactly quoted). How ludicrous! It has nothing to do with presuppositions about God and everything to do with how you treat children who have done something wrong and are hiding. What the professor wanted us to see was that the God in Genesis did not know everything. This gets into a thorny theological bush that I don't want to get into right now, but let's just say no matter how that question turns out, what was clear was this: the professor did not want us to view it just with the lens of tradition off -- he wanted us to view it with the lens of the modern secularist view of ancient culture on.

Likewise, this happens a lot with the resurrection. Modern secular scholasticism has placed the resurrection idea as a late one, yet there are several psalms and even Job refer to the idea of resurrection. They would have us read the OT with our "blinders off" to grasp it as the author's audience would have heard it. But really they just want to give us their own set of blinders to work with.

I guess what I'm saying is that often times tradition is there because other scholars have invested a lot of time researching, and it is silly to throw it all away just for the latest fad in biblical scholarship. I agree that it is good to stop and go back to the text and read it how someone in the ancient culture would have read it, but sometimes the heavy push to do that comes from individuals wanting to impose their secular views on your reading, and the easiest way to do that is to remove all of the assumptions so that any assumption we do make while reading will be that of the professor, and not that of the testimony of Christianity thoughout the ages.

Our Non-Ideological Ideology

2006-09-14T02:43:00.000-05:00

The seminary I go to has a policy about gender-inclusive language. Now, I'm not a big fan of gender-inclusive language (come on, grow up people), but I don't mind it per se. If it was just a simple policy about gender-inclusive language, I wouldn't even bother blogging about it. But our gender-inclusive language policy is absolutely hilarious.

Now, I'm not going to quote it, because that might overly-identify the seminary. You might accuse me of making it sound worse than it is. Whatever. Here is the outline of how I read our gender-inclusive language policy.

Language is not inert, but defines an ideology (they did not use this word, but this is essentially what they were saying)

Here are some suggestions about gender-inclusive language

Here are some absolute requirements about gender-inclusive language in the seminary

This policy is not meant to push an ideology, but to increase awareness about gender-inclusive language

Did you see it? Point #1 is that language creates an ideology. Point #4 is that we are controlling your language, but it's not an ideology.

This is what drives me nuts about the liberal mindset. They freely point out everyone's ideological bias except their own. They can't even admit to when they are clearly establishing an ideology even by their own definitions. As I said, I have no problems with their guidelines at all (except as a general why-change-the-English-language-just-for-you type of thing), but they want to say that they aren't establishing an ideology.

This is real important for liberals. They want to be carriers of the truth, and therefore the idea that their thoughts and actions are constrained to an ideology just like everyone else's is an idea that they simply can't handle. They pride themselves on not requiring belief statements and not being fundamentalist. But they can't see that this is the same thing. They are just sneaking in a belief statement through the back door here. They just need to get over it, and admit that they have standards of belief. These aren't things that can be deduced from first principles, but they are required for participation. Just admit it! Is it really that hard!

Of course it is, because they can't be "respectable" academically and have a belief statement. But yet they have a required ideology. It even matches their own definition given in the policy itself!

The irony is amazing.

Historical Versus Scientific

2006-09-14T02:27:00.000-05:00

My OT professor is constantly harping on the fact that Genesis is not scientific. He points to many things about ancient Hebrew cosmology and how it is totally incompatible with science. For instance, he points out that the Hebrews probably thought of the sky as a literal dome into which the stars were more-or-less pasted on. I'm not going to argue with whether or not Israel had such a cosmology (though I do think he exaggerated a bit -- both on the epistemelogical side [how much we can know about ancient Israeli cosmology] and on the facts [much in the OT gives a much better view of cosmology than he was giving them credit for]). I have no ideological problems with believing that the Bible was written by people who had a cosmology that was incompatible with the facts. What I do have a problem with is his using this idea to argue against the idea that the creation story is history.

You see, he wanted to argue against Genesis' historicity by arguing against it's science. But not even Young-Earth Creationists generally argue for Genesis being a science textbook, but rather a book of history.

Look at it this way. Let's say I was living several centuries ago, and was describing events I saw in the sky. What if I said, "the meteor came in out of the ether and glowed for several minutes until it's phlogiston ran out." Note that the science in this statement is completely false, though that is irrelevant to whether or not it is describing a historical event.

You see, we always speak in categories. Our categories are very conditioned. So the fact that ancient Israelites used a set of categories which are not scientifically true is irrelevant. We still talk about sunrise and sunset. Whether or not ancient Israelites believed something bizzarre about the universe, and were describing creation in terms of the categories relative to their cosmology is irrelevant to whether or not it is historically true.

In fact, I'm sure that future generations will view our cosmology as similarly quaint. Does that mean that they should consider all of our statements about history as allegorical or mythical?

I am personally of the opinion that there are no "right" set of categories. In fact, you might say that ANY category is necessarily "wrong," because life is too messy to be put completely into well-defined categories. We must use categories to communicate, but all of them are going to be approximations of the world, not realities themselves.

There are other things about Genesis that I'll get to when I have more time.