a priesthood of scholars?

Someone intimated tonight at the Westminster Emerging Church conference that the trouble with the Church’s leaning upon academic Bible scholars, learned in the languages, texts, and the historical, literary and cultural contexts of the Scriptures, is that it risks creating (or does create) a priesthood or magisterium of scholars who take the Bible out of the hands of Christians who haven’t such education. I found it fascinating that that would be a concern raised in a conference on the emerging church movement simply because this notion that the Bible must be equally understandable for all Christians seems to be a distinctively American phenomenon. The idea of the “priesthood of all believers” was not, for the Reformers at least, intended as the democratization of Biblical interpretation, the idea that “I can understand my Bible just as well as you can,” but rather as the acknowledgment of the sanctity, dignity and necessity of all professions, whether pastor or plumber, bishop or bricklayer. It was intended to acknowledge the distinct and vital role that each respective occupation plays in the building of the Kingdom. Ironically, some these days often invoke the “priesthood of all believers” so as to do precisely what that doctrine was intended to prevent, stripping a particular profession and area of expertise, namely academic Biblical scholarship, of its distinctive dignity and the necessity of its contribution to the health of the Body of Christ.
The fact is, most folks in the Church in America who are seriously concerned to understand their Bible’s better get study Bibles and popular level commentaries and books to help them do it. People rely on aids in Bible study precisely because they know in their heart of hearts that some folks are better equipped to understand and unpack the Scriptures than they are. I, for one, prefer study aids informed by the labors of academic Bible scholars, people who have devoted their lives to understanding the Scriptures in their historical contexts; study aids that can reliably help me to get a handle on what John or Paul or Micah was trying to communicate to his primary intended audience. I greatly prefer them to Bible studies written by hermeneutically naïve, self-appointed “Bible experts.”
It is sometimes protested that the Church in the 2/3 World and some less fortunate folks in the West haven’t the resources to have access to such material. I would say that the appropriate response to such a lack of resources is not for us to indulge in the fantasy that all are equally well positioned to read their Bibles well, but rather for us to give sacrificially so as to remedy their lack of resources. Perhaps if we used our tithes and offerings less for purchasing flowers for our altars (or scented candles and incense, I guess, for all you emerging types) and gave generously like the Macedonians to close the economic and educational gap between us and them (2 Cor. 8:13-15), our brothers and sisters elsewhere in the world might flourish even more. What’s more, folks from the 2/3 World who have been able to do academic Bible scholarship have added a much needed and welcome voice to the Church’s choir. You would expect that we would allot our resources so as to get more of the same. Anyways, the answer, it seems to me is not to democratize Biblical interpretation. (Besides, not every culture shares our impulse towards democracy and to think they should is an outworking of the Enlightenment, not the Resurrection)
I would suggest that it is our American impulse towards individualism (“just me and my Bible”) and democracy (“anything you can do, I can do”) that makes us so concerned about relying on the aid of solid Bible scholarship for sound understanding of the Scriptures. I would go even further and say that the theological struggle to figure out how to maintain a democratic view of exegesis without rendering academic Scripture study superfluous is ultimately unnecessary. The fact is the Church needs Bible scholars just like the Church needs pastors and carpenters and doctors and real estate agents and banana farmers and accountants. 14 For the body does not consist of one member but of many. 15 If the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. 16 And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. 17 If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? 18 But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. 19 If all were a single member, where would the body be? 20 As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. 21 The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you."

Theseus' ship, Neurath's boat and the H.M.S Calvin

A classic problem of metaphysics concerns Theseus’ ship being repaired at sea. Theseus embarks on a long voyage and along the way he has to replace the planks of his ship one by one as they become damaged by rot, barnacles and so forth. But, so the story goes, by the time Theseus reaches his port of call he has replaced all of the planks of his ship. The question is: Is the ship in which Theseus arrived the same ship as the one in which he set out? The ship is no longer composed of any of the same pieces out of which it was originally composed. It’s still a ship, to be sure. But is it the same ship? Is the fact that Theseus owns the ship or the fact that this ship has been carrying Theseus along sufficient to make it the same ship as the one in which Theseus first shoved off? Some say ‘yes’. Some say ‘no’. Is the historical continuity between the ships different stages the locus of its identity or is it the ships material constitution or what?
Now consider this puzzle in connection with respects to noetic structures. What if Theseus were sailing in one of Neurath’s boats? Otto Neurath describes the way in which we form our worldviews as being like sailors making repairs at sea. “We cannot start from a tabula rasa as Descartes thought we could. We have to make do with words and concepts that we find when our reflections begin. [Pierre] Duhem has shown with special emphasis that every statement about any happening is saturated with hypotheses of all sorts and that these in the end are derived from our whole worldview. We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood, the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.” But that raises the question, if the ship has been constructed entirely anew, is it still the same ship? If every belief has been altered, every plank been replaced, have we the same worldview as when we began our reflections?
I puzzle over this question a great deal as I wrestle with what it means to say that I am part of a certain theological tradition, namely, the Reformed tradition. Now, while it is true that I may not have replaced every plank of the boat I purchased from Calvin (the keel, “He is risen,” remains as firmly fixed as ever) the hull and deck have certainly undergone a fair amount of repair and retooling. But how much reshaping can my Reformed worldview undergo before it is no longer a Reformed worldview?
Now of course the Reformed tradition has always taken a number of different forms. The theological, exegetical and methodological differences between Abraham Kuyper and B.B. Warfield, between Herman Ridderbos and Jonathan Edwards, John Calvin and Geerhardus Vos are not to be underestimated. Each of them had markedly different doctrinal formulations on major subjects, different exegeses of many important passages and often thoroughly different epistemological and methodological approaches. The Reformed tradition has always been changing out some boards, reshaping others while on this voyage to the far green country.
But how many planks may one adjust before we find ourselves in a different ship? Or is it even the planks, the material or doctrinal constitution, of the ship that matter ultimately? Perhaps one’s worldview is within the bounds of “the Reformed tradition” if one’s ideas are largely informed and shaped by figures we can all readily identify as being “within the tradition,” such as Calvin, Owen, Bavinck and the like, while seeing the tradition itself as being an amorphous abstract notion vaguely defined by historical institutional continuity with and continued veneration of, although not, per impossible, point for point agreement with, those great figures who are “within the tradition” and adherence to a few theological distinctives common to them all, such as adherence to the catholic creeds, a high view of God’s sovereignty over all that comes to pass, a belief in Scripture (demarcated as the Protestant Canon) as the principium theologia (however you define that), and so forth. Maybe. Maybe not.
So Theseus purchases a boat from Otto Neurath, the H.M.S. Calvin, and shoves off in the 16th century and docks in the 21st having made extensive repairs, replaced lots of planks, and having even redesigned portions of the hull, sails and deck throughout his voyage. Is the ship in which he ends his journey the same as the ship in which he began?

Stephen Colbert: Apologist Par Excellence

Is Stephen Colbert the next up and coming Christian apologist? Hilarious

scientia media and Jonathan Edwards on the will

“Thus an act of the will is commonly expressed by its pleasing a man to do thus or thus; and a man’s doing as he wills, and doing as he pleases, are the same thing in common speech….I trust it will be allowed by all, that in every act of will there is an act of choice; that in every volition there is a preference, or a prevailing inclination of the soul, whereby the soul, at that instant, is out of a state of perfect indifference, with respect to the direct object of the volition. So that in every act or going forth of the will, there is some preponderation of the mind or inclination, one way rather than another; and the soul had rather have or do one thing than another, or than not to have or do that thing; and that there, where there is absolutely no preferring or choosing, but a perfect continuing equilibrium, there is no volition.”
-Jonathan Edwards, A Careful and Strict Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of the Will, Which Is Supposed to Be Essential to Moral Agency, Virtue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame (1754), I.i

If Edwards has identified the will aright, the will just is one’s preferring more to have or do a thing than not to have or do that thing, and Leibniz’s Law holds, then it would seem that the multiplication of possible worlds, scientia media (i.e., middle knowledge) and all the rest are ultimately irrelevant for the question of free will. Leibniz’s Law, according to Alvin Plantinga, is “For any property P and any objects x and y, if x is identical with y, then x has P if and only if y has P.”[1] It follows from this Law and the principle (x)  (x = x) that for every object x and for every object y, if x is y, then necessarily x is y; (x) (y) (x = y ⊃  x = y).[2] Thus, if the will is one’s strongest preference, then necessarily the will is one’s strongest preference, ergo, in every possible world the will is one’s strongest preference. If your strongest preference is part of your nature or your disposition, then it would follow that your preference or will is causally determined in every possible world because your nature is causally determined in every possible world. Nobody causes their nature to be, ultimately.

I've never seen a more persuasive analysis and definition of what the will is than Edwards' and so I've never been able to see how all this talk of middle knowledge is at all relevant to the question of predestination. I can appreciate the impulse behind definitions like that of Alvin Plantinga, "If a person S is free with respect to a given action, then he is free to perform that action and free to refrain; no causal laws and antecedent conditions determine either that he will perform the action, or that he will not."[3] But being able to appreciate the impulse behind such defintions is not the same as being able to make sense of them. Such definitions never really grasp the nettle of why it is that a person S actually wills one thing rather than another. Edwards answers that question: S wills a thing x if and only if S prefers the having or doing of x to the not having or doing of x. In that case, one's nature, one's preferences, one's predilections and so forth are the antecedent conditions that causally determine what S wills. Freedom, or "significant freedom" as Plantinga and others like to call it, most naturally refers to the ability to do as you please (i.e., to act according to your preference). If you don't prefer one thing to another, you won't act. And that goes for every possible world. In every possible world S's will is causally determined. [4]

I can appreciate the impulse to shy away from definitions of the will like Edwards' because I suspect that it comes from a certain trembling introspective awareness of our own sinful nature. So often we look into our hearts and see that we prefer evil to good. If our will is bound to our sinful nature, to our evil preference, what hope can there be that we might do good and repent? That's easy. All you need is a new nature.

[1] Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity, p. 15.
[2] Kripke, Naming and Necessity,p. 3

[3] Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity, p. 166

[4] I cannot help but feel that it is necessary for me to express that Alvin Plantinga is one of my heroes and that I am greatly indebted to him for his writings. This is one of the very, very few points on which I am bold enough to differ with him.

A Van Tilian Non Sequitur

There was a time when I would have considered myself to be a full-blooded Van Tilian presuppositionalist. I was introduced to Van Til's writings in my sophomore year of college and found myself dazzled by what I perceived to be a the most consistent and penetrating apologetical system I had ever encountered. I was convinced by the end of my junior year that Van Til's apologetic was the only legitimate apologetical option and that all there was left to do was to translate his insights into more contemporary Anglo-American philosophical idiom and perhaps clarify some of his more recondite arguments.

But as I went along and tried to formulate Van Til's apologetic more rigorously I found that at crucial junctures the conclusions Van Til drew simply did not follow from his premises. I can't tell you how frustrating and disappointing this was for me.

Allow me to give an example. Van Til argues that it is improper to offer probabilistic arguments for Christianity thus, "How could one ever argue that there is greater probability for the truth of Christianity than for the truth of its opposite if the very meaning of the word probability rests upon the idea of Chance? On this basis nature and history would be no more than a series of pointer readings pointing into the blank….He is obviously thinking of such a God as could comfortably live in the realm of Chance. But the God of Scripture cannot live in the realm of Chance."[1]

Now, this criticism of probabilistic arguments for Christianity seems to me to be a simply mistaken. It is perfectly sensible to use the language of "probability" to describe the epistemic status a proposition has for you without implying that the truth of that proposition is contingent upon sheer "Chance." Take Goldbach's conjecture that every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes. So 4 is 3 and 1, 6 is 3 and 3 or 5 and 1, 8 is 7 and 1 and so on. Goldbach's conjecture has not been proven, but it must be either true or false. What's more, because it's a proposition about mathematical realities, it must be either necessarily true or necessarily false. The truth or falsehood of Goldbach's conjecture is not contingent and therefore cannot be determined by or contingent upon "Chance." But, like I said, it hasn't been proven (and Gödel has given us reason to suspect that it may not be provable at all).

Now, let's say someone gives me a particularly impressive argument for Goldbach's conjecture. It's not a "proof" according to the most rigorous definitions of "proof," but it's a good argument. Upon considering the argument in light of all else that I know, it seems more probable than not that Goldbach's conjecture is true. 'Given the premises of the argument, it is probable that Goldbach's conjecture is true.' To say this sort of thing does not commit me to any particular view of the ontic or modal status of Goldbach's conjecture because, like I said, Goldbach's conjecture is either necessarily true or necessarily false. It's just a description of how I perceive the strength of the arguments available to me for the proposition or, put another way, a description of how strongly I am inclined to believe the proposition given what I know.[3]
If this be the case, it doesn't follow that if you argue that it is more probable than not that Christianity is true, that therefore you have conceded that God's existence is contingent upon "Chance" or that God "lives in a realm of Chance" or anything like that. Arguing thus doesn't really commit you to any particular stance on the modal status of God's existence any more than arguing thus commits you to a particular stance on the modal status of Goldbach's conjecture. One can believe that if God exists, He must exist necessarily and coherently speak of God's existence in terms of greater and lesser epistemic probabilities with respect to the evidence one has been given. This point is important because the line of argument that I'm criticizing is mainly used by Van Tilians to bash other Christian apologists for their usage of apologetical argument forms that deliver epistemic probability rather than absolute certainty.[2] In my estimation, Van Til's criticism of probabilistic arguments is a non sequitur and Van Tilians would do well to abandon it.

[3] This Goldbach’s conjecture example was inspired by the first lecture or two of Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity.
[2] I don’t really think Van Til’s so-called “transcendental argument” really gets you absolute (Cartesian) certainty either. At the end of the day it would seem Van Til's argument is not formally distinct from other apologetical arguments and gives only epistemic probability.

[1] Van Til, as quoted in Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, p. 584

C.S. Lewis on Worldview, Questions, and Evidence

“It is not impossible that our own Model [worldview] will die a violent death, ruthlessly smashed by an unprovoked assault of new facts—unprovoked as the nova of 1572. But I think it is more likely to change when, and because, far-reaching changes in the mental temper of our descendants demand that it should. The new Model will not be set up without evidence, but the evidence will turn up when the inner need for it becomes sufficiently great. It will be true evidence. But nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her. Here, as in the courts, the character of the evidence depends on the shape of the examination, and a good cross-examiner can do wonders. He will not indeed elicit falsehoods from an honest witness. But, in relation to the total truth in the witness’s mind, the structure of the examination is like a stencil. It determines how much of that total truth will appear and what pattern it will suggest.”
-C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, pp.222-223

Presuppositions beg certain questions, and sometimes the questions, once they’ve been pursued, turn up new evidence, true evidence. Once the evidence is turned up, you may criticize the presuppositions, you may even reframe the questions, but the evidence is revealed and will not simply go away. Evangelical engagement with biblical criticism has always attacked the often naturalistic presuppositions of the critics. And it may be true that the questions the critics have asked were raised on account of “far-reaching changes in the mental temper” of their and our generations, on account of shifts in presuppositions and assumptions. The presuppositions and assumptions may even turn out to be false. But the true evidence turned up in the pursuit of questions raised by those presuppositions becomes part of the common stock of human knowledge and must now be dealt with by anyone claiming intellectual integrity, whether they share the presuppositions that first led to the unearthing of the evidence or not.
It is not unlike the cross examiner in a movie who asks a question not strictly admissible in court. The flustered witness answers revealing a surprising detail on which the whole case turns. The judge may ask the jury to strike that testimony from their minds, but could the honest juror really forget the powerful evidence once it has been revealed simply because the cross-examiner proceeded improperly?

Attacking the critics’ presuppositions does not put the papyri back into the sand. Whether we like it or not the Oyrhynchus papyri, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Ebla Tablets and the like exist. It is not as though critical scholarship deduced them into being out of rationalistic assumptions. What’s more, these evidences come more and more into the public eye. Undergraduates study them in their religious studies classes. TV watchers hear about them on the History Channel, National Geographic and Peter Jennings documentaries. Casual readers can pick them up in $12 paperbacks in Barnes & Noble’s. The manifold connections and resemblances between such literature, artifacts and discoveries and the Scriptures are increasingly well documented and well publicized. To simply ignore them as though they had never come to light is to engage in a sort of perverse nostalgia that not only longs for “the good ol’ days” (whatever period one might see as “the good ol’ days”) but also pretends as though they were still here. It is to callously hurry past people languishing in darkness and doubt in the present in order to selfishly retreat into the imagined security of a private fantasy world that is all too often a tendentious caricature of the past one seeks to recapitulate.
Beloved, let us not continue rehearsing the same tired mantra of pointing out that much of critical scholarship has been conducted on the basis of false, naturalistic presuppositions as though that relieved us of the responsibility to engage with the facts. False presuppositions or not, critical scholarship, philological research and modern archaeology have turned up true evidence that intellectually responsible evangelical and Reformed Christians must consistently and honestly grapple with. In grappling with the evidence, our image of God may get shattered. But if all truth is God’s truth, it may be God Himself who shatters it. “He is the great iconoclast.”

Egyptian Gold

"If those, however, who are called philosophers happen to have said anything that is true, and agreeable to our faith, the Platonists above all, not only should we not be afraid of them, ut we should even claim back for our own use what they have said, as from its unjust possessors. It is like the Egyptians, who not only had idols and heavy burdens, which the people of Israel abominated and fled from, but also vessels and ornaments of gold and silver, and indeed better, use as they went forth from Egypt; and this not on their own initiative, but on God's own instructions, with the Egyptians unwittingly lending them things they were not themselves making good use of."

-St. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, §2.60

To Augustine, the truths discovered by unbelievers are like "their gold and silver, and not something they instituted themselves, but something which they mined, so to say, from the ore of divine providence, veins of which are everywhere to be found." As such, they belong to God and ought to be utilized by God's people. All truth is God's truth and God's people need not fear the truth no matter who discovers it nor how iconoclastic it may be. On the contrary, the people of God ought of all people to relentlessly pursue, explore and proclaim the truth.

Some would say that unbelievers can't have anything to say that Christians ought to appropriate because their unbelieving presuppositions somehow prevent them from obtaining any true knowledge. Somehow, it is sometimes thought that the noetic effects of sin manage to blind unbelievers to not only the truth of God's existence and character, but to any truth whatsoever. "What has Jerusalem to do with Athens?," asks Tertullian.

Interestingly, the Biblical writers seem to side with Augustine rather than Tertullian on this issue. Paul does not shy away from quoting and alluding to Pagan writers: Aratus' Phaenomena (or Cleanthes?) in Acts 17:28, Epimenides' de Oraculis in Titus 1:12, and Menander's Thais in 1 Corinthians 15:33. The Book of Proverbs also draws upon the stores of gold in Egyptian wisdom writings. For instance, compare Proverbs 22:17-18 and the Instruction of Amenope 3:9-16.

Instruction of Amenope___________________Proverbs

your ears__________________________________your ear

hear______________________________________hear

the sayings_________________________________the sayings

your heart_________________________________your heart

it is beneficial_______________________________it is pleasing

in the casket of your belly_______________________in your belly

for your tongue______________________________on your lips*

We could multiply examples, but these should suffice. Brothers and sisters, the tendency of evangelicals in America to isolate ourselves from secular and non-Christian academia is simply unbiblical. To only read books by evangelicals, go to schools run by evangelicals and wrestle with questions raised by evangelicals is simply wrong. If we would follow the example of Paul and many of the other Biblical authors, we must wisely appropriate the Egyptian gold mined from the ore of divine providence to be found in the works of non-Christian academia, just as the best of Christian thinkers have always done.

* you can find this chart in Peter Enns' Inspiration and Incarnation, p.38

Ben Witherington on the power of pacifism

Ben Witherington has posted on the Amish response to the recent tragedy.

http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2006/10/lessons-from-amish-power-of-pacifism.html

Great Articles on American Evangelicals in the Mission Field

"Missionaries skip fund raising, start tour guide companies"
http://www.larknews.com/november_2005/secondary.php?page=1

"Missionaries maintain obesity against long odds"
http://larknews.com/april_2005/secondary.php?page=5

"Poverty-Stricken Africans Receive Desperately Needed Bibles"
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/46226

Not to say that these are representative of all the missions efforts coming out of American evangelicalism, but we've all seen this sort of thing. Why is it that so many of America's Christian missionary efforts end up being a parody of the Great Commission? Is it because we cannot get beyond thinking of missions as baptized vacations? Is it because we have never learned the lesson of Philippians 4:11-12 so that we can actually live self-sacrificially when we go?
Go, but do not do likewise.

Jesus was faithful like Abraham was

In Old Testament History and Theology I Doug Green has recently been talking about the Abraham narrative as the story of Abraham's waffling between fidelity and infidelity to the Lord, his finally proving to be a covenant keeper after all and his securing the Lord's promised blessing for his descendents by his faithfulness to the covenant. The idea is that the promises made to Abraham in Genesis 12 are conditional upon his obedience to the Lord's summons to leave home and hearth for the land He would show him and to "be a blessing" ("wehayeh berakah" is an imperative, not a prediction) (Gen 12:1-2). Of course, as the story goes along Abraham ends up with a spotty record as far as his trusting the Lord goes and it is always an open question as to whether he will utimately be faithful to the Lord or not. The Lord makes a covenant with him in chapter 17, again demanding obedience from Abraham, "I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you, and may multiply you greatly." The story reaches its climax and resolution in chapter 22, the Akedah. Abraham finally proves faithful to the Lord when put to the greatest test he had ever faced, the command to sacrifice Isaac. Having proven faithful, Abraham receives the Lord's guarantee of blessing for Abraham's seed, "By myself I have sworn, declares the LORD, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice." (22:16-18) On account of Abraham's faithfulness, Israel's blessing is secured.

As we were talking about this in class I was reminded of Richard Hays's thesis in his book The Faith of Jesus Christ that Paul's argument in Galatians 3 and 4 is not intended to uphold Abraham as the prime example of an OT saint who was justified by his faith, the paradigm of Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone, but rather that just as Abraham secured the promised blessings of the Lord for Israel through his faithfulness so also (or even moreso) did Jesus, by His faithfulness, secure the promise made to Abraham for eschatological Israel, "the Israel of God," in which the Gentiles are fully included. Of course Paul's argument revolves around how Christ, by His faithfulness, resolved the problem that the Law/Torah poses in that it cuts the Gentiles off from the blessing that was to come to them in Abraham and in that it places all who rely on the works thereof under a curse. But Jesus, the Messiah, resolves the problem of the Torah by taking its curse upon Himself and exhausting its power on the cross and inaugurating in Himself and in His people a new creation wherein the distinctions made by the Torah, distinctions between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, no longer apply (3:28) and where the people of God are governed not by Torah but by the Spirit (5:4-5).

Such an interpretation of Galatians requires reading the phrases "pisteos Iesou Xristou" (2:16; 3:22) and "pistei zoe tei tou Huiou tou Theou" (2:20) as subjective rather than objective genitives. So 2:16 ends up as "yet we know that a person is not justified/vindicated by works of the Torah but through the faithfulness of Jesus Messiah" and so on. Jesus, by His faithfulness to sacrifice, not His son but Himself, secures the promised blessings for those who are His, Jew and Gentile alike. Praise be to our faithful Messiah!

Bonhoeffer on temptation

"The temptation of which the whole Bible speaks does not have to do with the testing of my strength, for it is of the very essence of temptation in the Bible that all my strength--to my horror, and without my being able to do anything about it--is turned against me; really all my powers, including my good and pious powers (the strength of my faith), fall into the hands of the enemy power and are now led into the field against me. Before there can be any testing of my powers, I have been robbed of them."
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall/Temptation: Two Biblical Studies, p. 112

Bonhoeffer's reflections on the nature of temptation and how to resist it are profound and if you haven't read them, you should. Temptation is such a horrific thing precisely because the enemy with which you are faced is you. You are your own Judas. You must combat your sinful desires with your holy ones and often, considering the strength of your holy desires, your prospects of overcoming temptation do not look good. It is not a matter of strength of will, for the will is the instrument, the modus operandi, of virtue and vice alike and the stronger the will, the more easily it can act in the face of conscience. Even your pious powers do not really overcome temptation for in overcoming your Corinthian self by reliance upon your piety alone you become your Pharisaical self instead.

The only antidote is being remade by Him who makes all things new.

Romans 7:24 "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

The Great Iconoclast

"Images of the Holy easily become holy images--sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are 'offended' by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not.... All reality is iconoclastic."

-C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, p. 66

I first read this passage as a senior in high school. I had come to love C.S. Lewis and eagerly devoured anything he had written that I could get my hands on. When I picked up A Grief Observed I had no idea what I had gotten myself into. The book turned out to be one of the most heart wrenching I've ever worked through. In it, for those of you who've never read it, Lewis simply reflects upon working through the grief of having lost his wife to cancer.

I will always be thankful to God for having, in His good providence, placed that book in my hands so early on in my Christian walk. The passage quoted above has been ever before me throughout the course of my theological meanderings. As I've gone along, again and again my image of God has had to be shattered and repieced together. It has always been helpful to remind myself that my idea of God is not a divine idea. As Paul says, "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known." So long as I see in a mirror dimly and know only in part, my understandings of God, the world and everything is subject to scrutiny and revision.

As over the years I've had the Wesleyanism of my youth and the fundamentalism of my college days shattered, it has been a constant source of encouragment to remind myself that such shatterings are perhaps the very marks of His presence. They are sometimes acts of mercy by the Great Iconoclast.

Guinness for strength...

Scientific proof of what we already knew.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3266819.stm

Inerrancy of "the autographs"?

Article X of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) says, "We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from the available manuscripts with great accuracy." Such a qualification of articulutions of the doctrines of the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture is pretty standard in Reformed and evangelical circles these days. But I have begun to doubt whether the notion of "the autographic text of Scripture" or "the autographs" is able to function in our doctrines of Scripture in the ways that we have been wanting it to.

It's not difficult to say that "inspiration, strictly speaking, applies to the autographic text" of, say, Paul's Epistle to the Romans, where there is something to which we can pretty clearly point as being "the autograph," namely, the letter that came from Tertius' pen at Paul's dictation. But what do you say about books of the Bible that do not seem to have had anything that can clearly be thought of as being "the autographs"?

Take Jeremiah, for instance. Dillard and Longman write, "For generations it has been recognized that the Septuagint [LXX] of the text of Jeremiah does not contain the equivalents for about 2,700 words in the Masoretic text [MT] of the book, about one-seventh of the total. Not only is the LXX shorter, but the materials are arranged in a different order; most notably, the oracles against the foreign nations (Jer. 46-51 in the MT) have been relocated to a position after Jeremiah 25:13, and the order in which the various nations are introduced has also been altered" (Dillard and Longman, An Introduction to the Old Testament, p. 291). The debate that pretty naturally arose from the examination of this data concerned the question of whether these differences between the MT and the LXX reflected gross scribal error or whether the Hebrew text from which the LXX was translated was just different from that of the MT, reflecting a different edition of the book of Jeremiah. Well, that question was pretty much settled when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Fragments of three manuscripts of Jeremiah were found in cave 4 at Qumran. The text of two of them, 4QJera and 4QJerc, resembled the MT a great deal. The third, 4QJerb, however, agreed with the Hebrew text type that was supposed to have been translated into the Greek LXX. Here it seems is overwhelming evidence that there were multiple editions and versions of Jeremiah floating around in the ancient world. One version survives in 4QJerb and the LXX and another survives in the MT and in most English translations.

Now the question becomes, "How do you assert the inerrancy of the autograph for a text that came together in multiple editions and versions? How can you say what would count as the autograph without just being arbitrary?"

The same sort of question arises in the case of the Pentateuch. The text of the Pentateuch gives evidence of having come together at dates later than the time of Moses. Texts such as Genesis 36:31, "These are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom, before any king reigned over the Israelites," make little or no sense in a Mosaic context but make all sorts of sense in the Monarchic period or later. If the Pentateuch came together, as is likely, over the course of a few centuries through multiple editions, additions, versions and translations, which edition counts as "the autograph"? How do you choose without being arbitrary? If you say that the bit that Moses wrote is the autograph, you may well end up with a Pentateuch that includes only the Book of the Covenant (or less). And what would give anyone the right to say that, anyways? It was the full MT Pentateuch that was accepted as canonical.

The point of all this is that it seems that evangelicals and Reformed may be leaning too heavily on this notion of "the autographs" in our articulations of the doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy. There are cases of Biblical books where there just might not have been anything that you could really call "the autographs" or where "the autographs" may be pretty drastically different from the versions that were recognized as canonical Scripture.

What would I suggest as a more sufficient notion than "the autographs"? The canonical versions? I'm not sure. I'm not so sure that there is going to be any one notion that's going to work for every book of the Bible. The Bible is a wonderfully complex and diverse book. "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets...." The Bible just might be irreducibly complex in such a way that no single notion is going to sum up what is the locus of God's inerrant, inspired word for every single book. For some books it may be their autographs, for others it may be their canonical versions, for others it may be something else, and so on. In principle, it would seem that God could inspire His word any way that He wants, with or without an "autograph."