snubnosed in alpha

overcoming writer's block

2007-11-09T23:01:00.000-05:00

I'm slogging away at a paper at the moment and getting nowhere. Oy vey! Writers block! What can cure it. I think I have just the thing...

i find myself again engaged in the most pointless activity ever foisted upon a seminarian

2007-10-22T22:18:00.000-04:00

I have, to say the least, better things I could be doing with my time.

as a matter of equality

2007-06-24T22:16:00.000-04:00

This coming Sunday, Lord willing, I will preach on 2 Corinthians 8:1-15. In this text Paul urges the Corinthian Christians to finally make good their offer of aid to their famine stricken brethren in Jerusalem. Like many of us, the Corinthians appear to have been the first to sign up and the last to pay up in this relief efforts. Paul goads the Corinthians to give by setting out the poor-as-dirt-yet-astonishingly-generous Macedonians as exemplars of Christ-likeness (thereby shaming the overproud, self-centered, penny-pinching Corinthians).

Perhaps, the most shocking thing Paul says in this passage concerns his conception of the overarching goal of this relief effort:

13 I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of equality (isotetos) 14 your abundance at the present time should supply their need, so that their abundance may supply your need, that there may be equality (isotes).

Now, of course, several English translations render isotetos and isotes as "fairness" rather than "equality" (e.g., ESV, NRSV). But, let's face it, this lexical group is pretty consistently translated as "equality" and the like in verses that are less likely to impinge upon our wallets (e.g., Revelation 21:16; John 5:18; 2 Peter 1:1; 2 Maccabees 9:15; Matthew 20:12, etc.). I suspect that this is one of those places where a self-directed hermeneutic of suspicion (or better "a hermeneutic of contrition") is in order. Why did Jerome (a monk who had taken a vow of poverty) find it so easy to translate these words into the Latin "aequalitate" and "aequalitas," and why do we find an equivalent translation so difficult?

And why should we not expect Paul's goal to be equality of resources amongst the churches? Does not Acts tell us that those of the Jerusalem church "had all things in common and they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need" (2:44-45)? Did not John the Baptist tell the crowds, "Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise" (Luke 3:10-11)?

Indeed, does it not seem to follow inevitably from the indicative-imperative structure of Paul's ethics that equality would be his goal? Become what you are! You are dead to sin, so reckon yourself dead to sin (Romans 6). You are one in Christ Jesus, so be as one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28). You are one body in Christ Jesus, so eat as one body and let there not be degrading divisions between haves and have-nots within the fellowship (1 Corinthians 11:17-33).

Beloved, what if we were to think this way with respect to the global Church? We ought not to forget that Paul's collection in 2 Corinthians and elsewhere was, in a sense, an international one. Macedonians and Corinthians helping far away, starving brethren in Jerusalem.

I think it's safe to say that our reluctance as American evangelicals to think along these lines owes a great deal to the fact that we are aware, deep-down of the disparity between our wealth and standard of living and that of our brethren in the 2/3 World (and poverty at home is not to be forgotten either). We know that it would cost us dearly to adopt Paul's goal and try to close that gap. I suspect that this is why Paul does not just prod the wealthy Corinthians with the good example of the Macedonians but reminds them of "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich" (2 Corinthians 8:9). Jesus' poverty cannot be relativized, for he emptied himself unto death. He bids us also to come and die that others might live. What remains to be seen is what remained to be seen for the Corinthians, whether our "love also is genuine" (8:8).

the locus of textual meaning

2007-05-28T21:05:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to get a bead on what constitutes the locus of textual meaning. What determines what a text means or doesn't mean? E.D. Hirsch wants to say that a text means whatever an author intended it to mean, plain and simple. Stanley Fish, if I remember correctly, thinks that the meaning of a text is whatever it does to a careful and competent reader. There are, of course, various and sundry other views of which I have only a sketchy, second-hand knowledge.

Now, I've never inclined much towards views that want to do away with what the author intended to communicate when speaking about meanings of texts. That the author's intention for her text is a (if not the) determiner of text's meaning has always struck me as just common sense.

But it's more complicated than Hirsch thinks. Whatever Alanis Morisette may have intended for the lyrics of "Ironic," none of them were instances of irony (at least not for the reasons Morisette thought).

Perhaps a better example would be a radio operator frantically trying to signal 'SOS' but repeatedly typing "...----..". Whatever he intends, the radio operator is saying to the world "SOD" over and over again. His intention does not seem sufficient to make "...----.." mean 'SOS' and certainly not sufficient to get him rescued.

But why? The reason "...----.." doesn't mean 'SOS' even though that's what the radio operator intends to communicate is not because of some sort of autonomy of the signal. It is, rather, because the signal is constrained by the rules or conventions of morse code. Given the rules of morse code, "...----.." can only mean 'SOD'. So it would seem that the meaning of the signal depends not just on the intention of the operator but on the operator's successfully encoding his intention into the signal.

If we think of a language as basically being a very complex (and transient!) code (a model which Umberto Eco seems to think is helpful), then may we say that the meaning of a bit of writing or speech depends upon the speaker or writer successfully encoding her intended message into the writing or speech, with success being determined by the (sometimes flexible, unspoken, and/or informal) rules of that language's grammar, literary conventions, idioms, etc. (i.e., the rules of that language's "code")?

Thoughts? Feelings? Snide remarks, anyone?

Spinal Tap reunites for LiveEarth '07

2007-05-06T16:28:00.000-04:00

Watch Marty DiBergi as he brings David St. Hubbins, Derek Smalls, and Nigel Tufnel together again to fight global warming. This is Spinal Tap.

Many thanks to the Foolish-Sage for directing me to this video.

on digesting and Hades

2007-05-04T00:52:00.000-04:00

The trouble with undertaking a Sisyphusian task like digesting when you're a Neo-Calvinist is that the whole time you are digesting, you are acutely aware that there is work of eternal value and redeeming benefit to be done in the world. Some tasks are more meaningful than others in a universe that has the potential for and promise of one day being bathed in the sacred incandescence of God's glory. But the flip side is that there are tasks that are less meaningful as well; tasks that have no discernible redeeming (or pedagogical value), like rolling a boulder repeatedly up a hill...or digesting. At times like these, the belief of atheistic existentialists that all tasks are alike pointless and the universe is ultimately absurd might begin to sound somewhat appealing. But since it would probably be unwise to abandon my belief in God just to make digesting more palatable, I, unlike Camus' Sisyphus, can hardly smile about my present task.

BREAKING NEWS

2007-05-01T22:16:00.000-04:00

Our correspondent in the field, Mark Traphagen, has the story.

writer's block

2007-04-30T11:38:00.000-04:00

At the moment, I am suffering from a rather severe case of writer's block. Having spent the past several weeks preparing to argue a thesis that I have now had to abandon, I am left scrambling to put together the pieces of the research that has essentially exploded in my very hands. The lesson to be learned, I suppose, is that when it comes to the study of Scripture, things are never quite as simple as they may at first appear. My research has raised about twenty questions and yielded, perhaps, three or four tentative answers which in turn have raised further questions. I am stumbling about in blind alleys and my time is short.

Since the source of my present anxiety is a paper on allegorical interpretations of the Song of Songs, I will offer my own allegory:

4 My beloved put his hand to the latch, and my heart was thrilled within me. 5 I arose to open to my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with liquid myrrh, on the handles of the bolt. 6 I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had turned and gone. My soul failed me when he spoke. I sought him, but found him not; I called him, but he gave no answer. 7 The watchmen found me as they went about in the city; they beat me, they bruised me, they took away my veil, those watchmen of the walls. 8 I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, that you tell him I am sick with love.

My beloved is the thesis that had seemed so near but that now eludes me. The night watchmen are the other assignments that are detaining me and hindering my pursuit of my beloved. (An alternative reading of the watchmen would be to understand them as Professor Enns, on account of the beatings.) You are the daughters of Jerusalem--if you have any ideas for how I might bring this paper home, please send them my way.
It looks like the final impetus towards finishing this paper is going to end up being last minute panic.

Spinal Tap to reunite!

2007-04-25T09:27:00.000-04:00

The legendary rock group Spinal Tap is coming together to fight global warming at Live Earth '07! I repent of ever mocking global warming.

a reason for accepting the Solomonic authorship of Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs

2007-04-24T21:32:00.000-04:00

Ok, sure. Linguistic considerations make Solomonic authorship of Ecclesiastes more unlikely than the revival of Sanjaya's singing career. And, yeah, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs are about as explicit about Solomonic authorship as Clinton was about what else the definition of "is" might be. But you have to admit that there is something appealing about the thought that a single roguish writer is responsible for the two most mischievous books in the Bible. That's gotta count for something.

But I too have my doubts about Solomon's having penned either of these works. I don't have any suggestions as to who wrote Ecclesiastes. However, I do propose as an alternative to Solomonic authorship of Song of Songs the theory that the Song was written by Marvin Gaye. For further elaboration of this theory see my forthcoming monographs "What has Jerusalem to do with Motown?: Marvin Gaye and the Soul of Solomon" and "If You Feel Like I Feel, Baby: An R&B Re-Reading of the Song of Songs."

Mr. Deity, J.L. Mackie and Jonathan Edwards on evil

2007-04-21T10:38:00.000-04:00

Here Mr. Deity and Larry have put their fingers on the classic philosophical Problem of Evil. David Hume’s character, Philo, more succinctly but less entertainingly summarizes the problem thus:
Epicurus’ old questions are yet unanswered.
Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?[1]
At the end of the day the problem comes down to whether or not God has a sufficiently good reason for allowing, decreeing or permitting evil to (at least temporarily) be. The reason that Mr. Deity gives to Larry, that it would be too easy for people to believe in him without evil, is, needless to say, a little silly. But that hasn’t prevented some theologians from giving that basic answer.
Recently the most popular tactic amongst Christian theologians for fending off the problem of evil/suffering has been the ‘free will defense.’ Basically this view says that giving a sort of libertarian free will to humanity is a good or a necessary precondition of a good (like ‘genuine love’) sufficient to justify God’s permitting evil to be. Libertarian free will is so a great a thing that the attendant risk of absolutely free creatures falling into sin and unleashing all manner of evil and suffering upon the world was totally worth it. This strategy, however, is fraught with difficulties, as J.L. Mackie brilliantly demonstrates in his book, The Miracle of Theism. Just one of the difficulties with it is, as Mackie points out, the question: “If God has made men such that in their free choices they sometimes prefer what is good and sometimes what is evil, why could he not have made men such that they always freely choose the good?”[2] Mackie points out that for Christians who believe in Heaven, saying that it is impossible for men to be made such that they always choose the good is not really an option. He writes:

For at least some theists this difficulty is made even more acute by some of their other beliefs: I mean those who envisage a happier or more perfect state of affairs than now exists, whether they look forward to the kingdom of God on earth, or confine their optimisms to the expectation of heaven. In either case they are explicitly recognizing the possibility of a state of affairs in which created beings always freely choose the good. If such a state of affairs is coherent enough to be the object of a reasonable hope or faith, it is hard to explain why it does not obtain already.[3]

It would seem that this consideration alone should lead Christian theists to abandon the “free will defense.”
The problem that Mr. Deity and basically Arminian conceptions of God have in common is that God so conceived is, to borrow J.B. Phillips' phrase, “too small.” There is a vast difference between the petty and thoughtless Mr. Deity and the immeasurably excellent God of the Bible, whose ultimate reason for doing anything, including decreeing that evil be, is that his infinite glory would shine forth. Jonathan Edwards, the great American theologian, explains:

It is a proper and excellent thing for infinite glory to shine forth; and for the same reason, it is proper that the shining forth of God’s glory should be complete; that is, that all parts of His glory should shine forth, that every beauty should be proportionately effulgent, that the beholder may have a proper notion of God. It is not proper that one glory should be exceedingly manifested, and another not at all….
Thus it is necessary, that God’s awful majesty, His authority and dreadful greatness, justice, and holiness, should be manifested. But this could not be, unless sin and punishment had been decreed; so that the shining forth of God’s glory would be very imperfect, both because these parts of divine glory would not shine forth as the others do, and also the glory of His goodness, love, and holiness would be faint without them; nay, they could scarcely shine forth at all.
If it were not right that God should decree and permit and punish sin, there could be no manifestation of God’s holiness in hatred of sin, or in showing any preference, in His providence, of godliness before it. There would be no manifestation of God’s grace or true goodness, if there was no sin to be pardoned, no misery to be saved from. How much happiness soever He bestowed, His goodness would not be so much prized and admired….
So evil is necessary, in order to the highest of the creature, and the completeness of that communication of God, for which He made the world; because the creature’s happiness consists in the knowledge of God, and the sense of His love. And if the knowledge of Him be imperfect, the happiness of the creature must be proportionably imperfect.[4]

Thus, we may take heart that the evils before us, shootings and tsunamis, suicide bombings and cancer, are not gratuitous, aimless or without their place in the grand scheme of things. These light and momentary afflictions are a difficult but necessary part of God’s perfecting the happiness of his chosen people in the greatest thing there is: his glory. His glory is the end for which he made all things and the only reason sufficient to justify the permission of gross and unspeakable evils. And so we look forward with anxious hearts to the day when his great self-portrait will be complete, present evil will have served its purpose and been done away with and his majesty will finally be unambiguously writ large upon the New Heavens and Earth. For all who are gripped by God in all of his splendor, this is a word of hope. But, of course, this answer to our problem will not satisfy everyone or even fully satisfy the most devout Christian all of the time. The glory of God is an acquired taste and until that taste is acquired things are very hard.

[1] Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, p. 63
[2] Mackie, The Miracle of Theism, p. 164
[3] Ibid.
[4] Edwards, “Concerning the Divine Decrees,” p. 528

an inconvenient truth

2007-04-16T07:02:00.000-04:00

How's this for an inconvenient truth: it's April and it's snowing outside. Mr. Gore, I think the Academy may want their Oscar back.

my poem

2007-04-09T09:41:00.000-04:00

I figured that, in the spirit of Mike and Mark, I would post one of the poems I wrote my freshman year in college. I'm sure many of you have had similar experiences.

The girl I love, sent from above
Dragged me to a sushi bar
The time was ample, for me to sample
Delicacies from afar

She ordered hers, it couldn't be worse
It was rice, fish and wasabe
I took one look, it wasn't cooked
At least not the way it oughta be

Oh, no! Here it comes, "Here, try some,"
She said with a grin on her face
I began to wonder if my "heavenly" lover
Hadn't come from the other place

First I thought, "Hey, why not?"
But then sanity kicked in
I'd already saw that that stuff was raw
And could very well do me in

I wanted to say "no", to get up and go
I started looking for my coat and hat
But I caught her eye, sat down with a sigh.
How could I say "no" to that?

I grabbed my chopsticks and snatched up the toxic
Perilous piece of fish
I dipped it in sauce and prepared to toss
My cookies all over my dish

I put the thing in and started chewin'
I thought the end must be near
My stomach churned, the wasabe burned
I thought, "Farewell, my dear!"

I finally swallowed, I thought Death would follow
To take this poor, fish-eating lad
I reached for my drink. She asked, "What'd you think?"
I said, "Actually, not bad."

of digesting and Initech

2007-04-04T09:21:00.000-04:00

Peter: The thing is, Bob, it’s not that I’m lazy. It’s that I just don’t care.
Bob 1: Don’t…don’t care?
Peter: It’s a problem of motivation. Alright? Now if I work my a** off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don’t see another dime. So where’s the motivation?
*Bobs 1&2 shake their heads incapable of answering the question*
Peter: And here’s something else Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.
Bob 2: I beg your pardon?
Peter: Eight bosses.
Bob 2: Eight?
Peter: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That’s my only real motivation is not to be hassled. That and the fear of losing my job. But you know what, Bob? That’ll only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
- Office Space (1999, Mike Judge), scene 12

"The digests will not be graded; however, failure to complete and turn in the digests by the required date will result in one half of a letter grade deduction on the final exam. So, if a student were to fail to hand in all three digests, an A final exam would be a B, etc."

- ST 313 syllabus

Let the reader understand.

indigestion

2007-04-02T10:24:00.000-04:00

It's been some time now since I've posted anything due to the demands of my schoolwork and a general lack of inspiration all around. But at the moment I felt compelled to blog before throwing myself headlong into my next seminary related task.

I had been looking forward to Spring Break. I had thought that a week off from classes meant a week of uninhibited research and paper writing, which, to my mind, is the best of all seminary assignments. I enjoy researching for and writing papers. Grappling with and analyzing knotty texts and issues and creatively detailing the results of my enquiry are two of my favorite things to do. I personally invest myself in my papers, treating them as works of art, revising them again and again to make them just right. This is not to say that I'm a great writer or that my papers are anything special. It's just to say that I love to prepare and write them.

But, to my great dismay, I realized this morning that rather than enjoying the creative outlet of paper writing this week I shall be engaged in the soul siphoning, spirit shriveling, mind numbing task of digesting. In 11 days I will have to turn in my second round of digests for Salvation II and will thus be reading in rapid succession numerous theologians (who more or less all say the same thing) and summarizing each of their nigh indistinguishable formulations in a Word Document. Digesting is not my favorite thing to do. In fact, on my list of "Things that I Dread Most" digesting falls just below being forced chew up clay flower pots and sitting in a bath-tub full of scissors. No other task fills me with that sense of irony about seminary that I'd mentioned before. *Sigh*

Please pray that these digests don't undo me.

more inspiration and accommodation

2007-02-27T21:42:00.000-05:00

And God said, "Let there be an expanse/firmament/vault/dome (Heb., 'raqiya') in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." -Genesis 1:6

“Moses describes the special use of this expanse, “to divide the waters from the waters,” from which words arises a great difficulty. For it appears opposed to common sense, and quite incredible, that there should be waters above the heaven. Hence some resort to allegory, and philosophize concerning angels; but quite beside the purpose. For, to my mind, this is a certain principle, that nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world. He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere.”
- John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses called Genesis, 1:6

"It is a fundamental misunderstanding of Genesis to expect it to answer questions generated by a modern worldview, such as whether the days were literal or figurative, or whether the days of creation can be lined up with modern science, or whether the flood was local or universal. The question that Genesis is prepared to answer is whether Yahweh, the God of Israel, is worthy of worship. And that point is made not by allowing ancient Israelites to catch a glimpse of a spherical earth or a heliocentric universe. It is wholly incomprehensible to think that thousands of years ago God would have felt constrained to speak in a way that would be meaningful only to Westerners several thousand years later. To do so borders on modern, Western arrogance. Rather, Genesis makes its case in a way that ancient men and women would have readily understood--indeed, the only way."

- Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, p. 55

I just thought it'd be good to give some more examples of the affinities between Calvin's doctrine of divine accommodation in Scripture and the uses to which Calvin put this doctrine and examples of the uses to which Enns has put his incarnational analogy. Enns may have done some slightly different things with Genesis than did Calvin. Of course he did. Calvin didn't have available the ancient near eastern literature to set Genesis in its historical and literary context whereas we and Enns do. But isn't it obvious that there are at least striking, even familial, resemblances between Enns' approach and Calvin's here?

an irony of theological education

2007-02-27T20:11:00.000-05:00

One of the ironies of theological education (or at least in programs like the one I'm in at Westminster) is that you have to set your own theological questions, issues and struggles aside during the semester because all of your intellectual energy has to be devoted to meeting the demands of your course load. If you're at all like me, this state of affairs can put quite a strain you as you find yourself harboring questions of (seemingly) great personal importance, having to ignore them for the time being and getting on with the business of seeing how other men answered entirely different questions from your own. It can leave you with the sense that what you are studying is pointless and, what's worse, it is preventing you from pursuing the things for which you are truly passionate.

For my part, I've found my theological education thus far to be more valuable than I ever could have imagined. But, nevertheless, my time at Westminster has stirred up more longings than it has satisfied. But, then again, perhaps theological education is supposed to be all about stirring up longings....

inspiration and accommodation

2007-02-13T07:45:00.000-05:00

"And God made the two great lights- the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night- and the stars." Genesis 1:16

“I have said, that Moses does not here subtilely descant, as a philosopher, on the secrets of nature, as may be seen in these words…. Here lies the difference; Moses wrote in a popular style things which, without instruction, all ordinary persons, endued with common sense, are able to understand; but astronomers investigate with great labor whatever the sagacity of the human mind can comprehend…. Nor did Moses truly wish to withdraw us from [astronomy] in omitting such things as are peculiar to the art; but because he was ordained a teacher as well of the unlearned and rude as of the learned, he could not otherwise fulfill his office than by descending to this grosser method of instruction….. Moses, therefore, rather adapts his discourse to common usage.”
-John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses called Genesis, 1:16 (my italics)

In the spirit of kicking a dead horse, I thought I'd post some of my thoughts on Peter Enns' book, Inspiration and Incarnation. I haven’t quite understood why some folks have been so quick to declare Enns’ approach to Scripture to be outside the bounds of the Reformed tradition. I find myself wanting to say, “Have you never read the Institutes, ‘He accommodated diverse forms to different ages, as He knew would be expedient for each’?” or “Do you not know the tradition, that Calvin says, ‘He has accommodated Himself to men’s capacity, which is varied and changeable’?” (Institutes II:11:13)
To my mind, conceptually Enns has done nothing but taken up Calvin’s doctrine of divine accommodation and described it in the rhetoric of an ‘incarnational analogy.’ But the point of the incarnational analogy is in substance equivalent to Calvin’s doctrine of accommodation: In order to communicate to His people, God accommodated Himself to the communicational conventions of His people so that they might understand what He intends to communicate. As you might expect, the communicational conventions of God’s audience depend upon who His audience is, their time, location, cultural milieu, etc. In short, if the communicational conventions of God’s intended audience included mythic language as an effective mode of communication, why should God not speak to them in mythic language? If the communicational conventions of His audience include apocalyptic, why should God not speak in apocalyptic language?
Calvin used the concept of accommodation to explain various and sundry Biblical phenomena that would otherwise be considered “Bible difficulties.” The example I gave above is Calvin’s commentary on Genesis 1:16. The alleged difficulty with Genesis 1:16 is that it speaks of the sun and moon as the greater and lesser lights when the astronomers of Calvin’s knew full well that certain planets in our solar system (namely Saturn) were, despite appearances, actually larger than the moon. Calvin’s answer is not to come up with some cockamamie pseudo-scientific argument for the moon actually being larger than Saturn, nor does he do any sort of fancy exegetical footwork to show that this locution is some sort of upper-register spiritual metaphor. No. Rather, Calvin says that Moses does not subtilely descant as a philosopher but rather adapts his discourse to the common usage or communicational conventions of his audience. But, of course, that connects the language of Scripture to the varied and changeable diverse forms of human communication. Given that framework, what is the substantial difference between saying, “That the Bible, at every turn, shows how ‘connected’ it is to its own world is a necessary consequence of God accommodating Himself” and saying “That the Bible, at every turn, shows how ‘connected’ it is to its own world is a necessary consequence of God incarnating Himself” (I&I, p.20) given the way Enns uses the metaphor of 'incarnation'?

I cannot help thinking that those who try to push Enns outside the bounds of the Reformed tradition are as selectively engaged with the tradition as they are with the Biblical data. They ignore the bits of the tradition that do not square with their own personal theological convictions and dub the narrow stream of theological opinions with which they personally are comfortable as “the Tradition.” In my estimation, what such folk, in effect, do is form the Tradition in their own image.

handsome devils: part deux

2007-02-03T22:26:00.000-05:00

Yet another example of the acorn not falling far from the tree. The one on the left is my dad's senior picture and the one on the right is mine.

my accent...

2007-01-25T12:53:00.000-05:00

When I saw that Mark had taken this quiz on his blog I wondered what my accent would come out as. Here are my results:

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Northeast Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The South
The Midland
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

I know that the quiz asks too few questions to really be accurate, but the results are disturbing nonetheless. The troubling thing about this quiz is that it confirms what lots of people have said to me all of my life. I'm from North Carolina. I was born and raised there. But whenever I tell people that, I receive a puzzled look and the comment, "Really? You don't sound Southern." *Sigh* I suppose that that's the price I pay for having grown up in Cary (Containment Area for Relocated Yankees).

wrangling over words

2007-01-09T08:21:00.000-05:00

While I had not really intended to, it seems I have entered into a blogging slump over the past month or so. There are many reasons for this brief hiatus, not least of which was just that I felt no compulsion to write anything. After the emotionally, spiritually and intellectually draining finale of last semester I and several of my fellow WTS bloggers have entered a sort of lull.
That said, this month I’m going to be doing research on hermeneutics, linguistics, philosophy of language and philosophical theology in an effort to put together a paper impressive enough to serve as a writing sample when I start sending out applications to philosophy programs in the next year. As I’m still trying to narrow down my research to some sort of thesis, I figured I’d post some of my findings and initial thoughts to clear my head and to see if any of y’all had any suggestions for directions I could fruitfully take my paper in.
But as many of you have not got much of a background in the study of language, I thought I’d attach the following interview to serve as a sort of primer.

Some of the ideas I'm kicking around for my paper concern questions such as:

1. What is the relationship between "worldviews" and Biblical interpretation? Dr. McCartney argues in his essay on the NT's use of the OT that in order to be able to employ (not necessarily to understand) the Bible our worldview must be compatible with, although not necessarily identical with, the worldviews of the Biblical writers. One of the questions I would be trying to address is 'What constitutes compatibility between two worldviews?'

2. What is "Christian fundamentalism" and how does it affect the study of the Bible? I may just use my reflections on this question as a case study for working through question 1 above. Here I will try to interact with some of the major definitions of fundamentalism on offer (notably George Marsden's definition, "An evangelical who is angry about something," and Alvin Plantinga's definition, "A stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine" (I find both of these definitions somewhat wanting)), try to hammer out a definition of my own and attempt an analysis of the common patterns in fundamentalist Biblical interpretation using models from the philosophy of science (namely, the models offered by Imre Lakatos, Thomas Kuhn and Pierre Duhem).

3. What is the proper relationship between theology, Biblical scholarship and Christian Apologetics? This question too is connected with questions 1 and 2. This matter seems pressing to me because there is certainly a time for apologists to take up arms in defense of the faith against the deliverances of certain sectors of Biblical scholarship (e.g., the Jesus Seminar). But it is equally certain that at times apologists have taken up arms under the banner of defending the faith against genuine developments in understanding the Bible and have inadvertently done a disservice to the Church. Can these sorts of developments be avoided or are they just necessary growing pains?

4. Could God have given us an Bible written in a "perfect language" (i.e., a language that requires no context to be understood, is free of vagueness and ambiguity) and that could serve as an epistemic criterion or foundation (in the classical foundationalist sense)? I would want to run through some history of ideas and some thought-experiments to try to flesh some of my ideas on this question. Could an Edenic language have been a "perfect language"?

Let me know if you have any other ideas or if you think one of the above questions deserves more attention than the others.

handsome devils

2007-01-08T20:24:00.000-05:00

Yep.... The picture on the left is my dad in his circa 1970's frat portrait and the picture on the right is me from this past Christmas. I hope I end up being like my dad in more than just looks....

exam, bam, thankyou ma'am...

2006-12-28T16:54:00.000-05:00

Well, for those who are wondering where I've been for the past few weeks, I've been in North Carolina licking my wounds from the last volley of Westminster final exams. At this point I'm pretty convinced that from now on WTS professors need to wear rubber gloves when administering their examinations. I've also learned that the kindliness of a professor's classroom demeanor is no indicator of the difficulty his final exams.

After being man-handled by my finals I came home to NC to relax and recover by keeping up a pretty strict regimen of sleeping a minimum of eight hours a night, reading Ernest Hemingway, Wittgenstein and Umberto Eco, drinking lots of red wine and coffee, eating lots of chocolates and regularly smoking my pipe. Hopefully, by the time I return to Westminster I'll be back to my old underachieving self.

Sigh...

there's just more to it than that...

2006-12-08T16:31:00.000-05:00

“As one with a long experience of the difficulties of logic and of the deceptiveness of theories which seem irrefutable, I find myself unable to be sure of the rightness of a theory, merely on the ground that I cannot see any point on which it is wrong.”

-Bertrand Russell, in the introduction to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, xxv

Let’s say that I had an argument for the truth of Christianity to which there was no obvious objection. The argument looks logically valid and all of its premises seem unassailable. Now let’s say I present this argument to a fairly sophisticated non-believer (N). Would this argument’s coming to N’s attention necessarily warrant N’s immediate acquiescence to the demands of the gospel?
I doubt it. If you study philosophy for any length of time, you’ll be sure to find that arguments and theories that look bullet-proof aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Sometimes you’ll meet up with an argument with a conclusion that just seems utterly and obviously wrong, but you can’t for the life of you see anything wrong with the premises or the logic of the argument. So, for instance, Zeno of Elea (ca. 490 BCE) argued from a number of paradoxes (about 40 in all) that motion was impossible. One of his paradoxes, the Runner, goes like this: say a runner (R) attempts to run from point A to point B, a distance of 1 mile. But before he gets from A to B, R must get to the half-way mark, C. But before R can get to C, he must get to the half-way mark between A and C, D. But before reaching D, he’ll have to get to the half-way mark between A and D, E and so on. In order to get anywhere at all, R will have to traverse an infinite number of distances, for any distance is infinitely divisible. But traversing an infinite number of distances is impossible. Therefore, R can’t move anywhere, much less from A to B. Of course, one could reject the premise that any distance is infinitely divisible, thus defanging this paradox. But it seems intuitively correct that any distance can be infinitely divided, and even if one were to go against intuition and reject the premise, that just leads one into another, equally nettlesome paradox: the Stadium. Taken together, Zeno’s paradoxes provide an infuriating reductio ad absurdum for the concept of motion. I say infuriating because it is patently obvious that we can and do move.
Now, some dandy (and not so dandy) responses to Zeno have been offered over the millennia. But overturning Zeno is not so easy as one might think. In fact, Zeno’s paradoxes had to await certain 19th century developments in calculus in order to be resolved.[1] There’s no need to bore anyone with the details of that here. My point is that really viable refutations to Zeno’s argument against motion were simply unknown for more than two thousand years.
But, of course, someone presented with Zeno’s paradoxes in, say, 264 CE would have been quite irrational to abandon her belief in motion upon hearing Zeno’s arguments. Even if she has no good objection to Zeno’s argument, it would seem that she has not done anything irrational in rejecting the argument simply on the grounds that the conclusion seems unpersuasive (to say the least) to her.
Consider also a situation in which there is insufficient evidence to decide between two mutually exclusive, but equally plausible theories. This phenomena is called “undetermination of theory by evidence.” For example, currently the Copenhagen and Bohm schools of quantum mechanics are on equally good footing as far as their simplicity and ability to account for the evidence goes. But the two schools are mutually exclusive, thus forcing a decision between the two (for anyone who cares about quantum mechanics). Again, we are faced with two theories to which there are no obvious objections, but, nevertheless, we must reject at least one of them.[2]
Thus, lightly armed with a few examples, let us return to our initial question: faced with our seemingly watertight argument for Christianity, must N acquiesce to the force of the argument and accept the truth of the faith? Not really. For all N knows, our argument may, like Zeno’s paradoxes, contain faulty assumptions or premises which we do not currently have the necessary conceptual tools to dismantle. Or perhaps, the tools have been developed, but N is unaware of them, or is aware of them but just hasn’t yet seen how to apply them to the argument at hand. Or perhaps, from N’s vantage point, there are other theories on offer which seem to account for the data equally well, theories incompatible with Christianity.
What I’m trying to do is just raise awareness that slam-jam arguments are insufficient for doing successful Christian evangelism/apologetics. There’s just more to it than that. I say this because I so often read or hear both lay and professional Christian apologists talking as though anyone who doesn’t accept Christianity after hearing their arguments is just being intellectually dishonest or some such thing. I would say that someone who does not believe in God is intellectually dishonest, but not because they are not fully persuaded by some argument or other. Such folks are dishonest because by virtue of being created in God’s image they have a sense of the divine within them and they suppress the truth in unrighteousness. But they are not necessarily dishonest because they look askance at the cosmological, transcendental or ontological arguments or what have you.
The moral of the story is: even if we had an unassailable argument for Christianity (I’m not sure that we do, either), that’s not necessarily sufficient to require immediate assent from a given non-believer. There’s more to it than that. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but argumentation will necessarily and always in and of itself be insufficient for changing the minds and hearts of those outside of Christ. We cannot simply marshal our arguments and think our work is done, for arguments alone, however good they are, are insufficient. Clever syllogisms can only supplement and never replace prayer, consistent, unflinching displays of sincere Christian love and the work of the Holy Spirit when sharing Christ with others.

[1] See Wesley C. Salmon, “A Contemporary Look at Zeno’s Paradoxes,” from Space, Time and Motion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980)
[2] See Alister McGrath’s discussion in A Scientific Theology: Theory, volume III (Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdman's, 2003) pp. 229-31

The Mark of a Christian

2006-12-05T16:14:00.000-05:00

“Before a watching world, an observable love in the midst of difference will show a difference between Christians’ differences and other men’s differences. The world may not understand what the Christians are disagreeing about, but they will very quickly understand the difference of our differences from the world’s differences if they see us having our differences in an open and observable love on a practical level”
- Francis Schaeffer, The Mark of a Christian in The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer, IV. 201

When I read The Mark of a Christian in college, Schaeffer’s challenge to Christians to disagree in such a way as to make our mutual love and respect for one another palpable moved me to repentance. Many of us have been there, especially we Calvinists. By the time I read this little book of Schaeffer’s much of my young Calvinist arrogance had thankfully died away. But still enough of it lingered in my soul for conviction to set in upon the reading of The Mark of a Christian. Several passages have been weighing heavily upon my heart in these recent dark days.
Schaeffer goes on to say that though non-believers may not understand the contours of the Christians’ doctrinal disputes, they should still be able to see in our conduct something fundamentally different from the standard procedures of the world. “As a matter of fact, we have a greater possibility of showing what Jesus is speaking about here, in the midst of our differences, than we do if we are not differing. Obviously we ought not to go out looking for differences among Christians; there are enough without looking for more…. When everything is going well and we are all standing around in a nice little circle, there is not much to be seen by the world. But when we come to the place where there is a real difference, and we exhibit uncompromising principles but at the same time observable love, then there is something that the world can see, something they can use to judge that these really are Christians, and that Jesus has indeed been sent by the Father.”
Schaeffer continues, “There is only one kind of person who can fight the Lord’s battles in anywhere near a proper way, and that is the person who by nature is unbelligerent. A belligerent man tends to do it because he is belligerent; at least it looks that way. The world must observe that when we must differ with each other as true Christians, we do it not because we love the smell of blood, the smell of the arena, the smell of the bullfight, but because we must for God’s sake. If there are tears when we must speak, then something beautiful can be observed.”
This observable love and this eschewing of contentiousness is what Schaeffer calls “the final apologetic.” The world observing this behavior in us will know that the Father has indeed sent His Son and that we do indeed belong to Him (John 13:34-35). Schaeffer notes, “If, when we feel we must disagree as true Christians, we could simply guard our tongues and speak in love, then in five or ten years the bitterness could be gone. Instead of that, we leave scars—a curse for generations. Not just a curse in the church, but a curse in the world…. The world looks, shrugs its shoulders, and turns away. It has not seen even the beginning of what Jesus indicates is the final apologetic—observable oneness among true Christians who are truly brothers in Christ.”
If I could, I would produce the book in its entirety here on my blog, I think it so relevant to the current circumstances here at Westminster. Some of the goings on here as of late have mirrored the policies of the world almost to perfection. I find myself poring over Schaeffer’s words and thinking to myself again and again, “How did it come to this?” Brothers and sisters, here and now our conduct will decide whether we shall be salt and light or bitterness and darkness; a blessing or a curse. Let us repent of differing the way the world differs, weep for those who do “the work of the Lord” with a high look and a proud heart, and tremblingly prefer being quenched with our quenched King to being amongst the quenchers.
God have mercy on us.

discussion questions for better understanding Dr. Tipton's ETS lecture

2006-11-25T10:38:00.000-05:00

Well, I’m going to step out on a limb here and post some of my own reflections on the papers given last week at ETS by Westminster’s own Drs. Pete Enns and Lane Tipton. Before I incriminate myself, however, I do wish to echo the sentiments of my brother, Tony Stiff, in saying that both of these men are very dear to me. Studying under both of these men has been a joy and a privilege and I respect both of them as Christians. Initially I typed up these comments as a critique of Dr. Tipton’s proposal. But, having corresponded with Dr. Tipton, whom I consider a friend, it seems that I may have misunderstood his thesis. Nevertheless, I am aware that my (mis?)understanding of Dr. Tipton’s thesis is one shared pretty widely by those whose current area of study is Biblical studies and who have heard the lecture he delivered at ETS. This fact raises the question of whether the Biblical scholars and the systematicians have been largely talking past each other as of late? So I want to offer some questions, the sorts of questions that make up the meat and potatoes of Biblical scholarship, for which it would be helpful to see how Dr. Tipton’s proposal would specifically apply. If we can begin to try to work out how Dr. Tipton’s proposal bears on some of these specific questions, we may be able to begin to clear up some of the thick smog of miscommunication that has been choking our campus in recent days.

I had understood Dr. Tipton to be arguing that if we would appropriately employ the incarnation as an analogue for inspiration, we cannot stop with the assertion that, like Christ, the Bible is fully human and fully divine and leave it at that. Rather we must recognize also that the divine aspect of Scripture precedes, conditions, subordinates the human aspect of Scripture at every point. As with the incarnate Son of God, with the inscripturated Word of God, the divinity has priority over the humanity. So far, so good.

I also (mis?)understood him to be arguing that pneumatology and not anthropology (and, by “anthropology”, I presumed that he meant historical, philological, archaeological, paleographical, literary, and sociological study and the like of that) provides the ultimate context for navigating all hermeneutical questions. Specifically, he claims that this is the case with respect to questions concerning the New Testament’s use of the Old.

Now, I found this claim to be puzzling because it is really hard to see how the bare recognition that the humanity of Scripture is subordinate to the divinity of Scripture helps me to understand why it is that the author of Matthew does what he does with Hosea 11:1 (Matt. 2:15). Matthew is pretty clearly not doing grammatical-historical exegesis here. Why does he use Hosea in this way? While it is very helpful to recognize that this sort of employment of texts was common in the Second Temple period and that, therefore, Matthew’s practice was in accord with the standard hermeneutical practices of the day, it is unclear how recognition of the priority of the divinity of Scripture contributes to my understanding of why Matthew does what he does. In other words, it’s hard to see how that recognition helps me to read and understand Matthew better. What would be helpful for many of us is a clear delineation of exactly how the recognition of the priority of Scripture’s divinity sheds light on the way the New Testament uses the Old and a few examples (perhaps the one I suggested in Matthew 2:15).

Another puzzling piece of Tipton’s thesis is (what I understood to be) his claim that God’s writing of the Ten Commandments with His own finger and without a human mediator should serve as a paradigm for understanding Biblical revelation as a whole. I say that this is puzzling because to acknowledge that God wrote the Ten Commandments without a human mediator is not to remove all hermeneutical problems surrounding the Ten Commandments. For one thing, the Commandments were presumably written, as all writing is, in a language. What language might that have been? Was it the post-10th century-ish Jerusalemite dialect of our MT Pentateuchs? Or an earlier Semitic language that Moses and his contemporaries would actually have been able to understand? Or were the Commandments written in the King’s English? Regardless, the Commandments were not written, per impossible, in some sort of context-less, divine meta-language. To read the Commandments, whether written by the very finger of God or not, requires us to delve into the studies of linguistics, lexicography, grammatology, paleography and so forth. The very employment of human language by God, even without the use of a human mediator, is an incarnational action in that it necessitates our engagement with all of the messy historical questions that the recognition of divine priority was supposed to render superfluous.

What would the phrase, “kabbed et-abbika we’et-immika” have communicated, if anything, to an Israelite in Moses’ time? The only way to find out is to delve into the history of the Hebrew language. In fact, the evidence seems to point towards the Ten Commandments, if they come from the days of Moses, being a translation from an earlier Semitic dialect into the later Hebrew dialect of our BHSs. In other words, if we would read our Bibles, some historical work is inevitable. We often forget that this necessary historical work underlies our BHSs, UBSs, lexicons, Weingreen grammars, parsing guides and our English translations. Without that historical, linguistic, paleographical and lexicographical work, no amount of pneumatology is going to make "ha-asarah debarim" readable for you. So the question becomes, Does Tipton mean for his Sinaitic-paradigm for revelation to be a paradigm for hermeneutics? If so, what does that hermeneutic look like? If not, then what does Tipton understand the giving of priority to the divinity of Scripture over Scripture’s humanity to mean practically in the discipline of Biblical scholarship?

It should also be noticed that the sorts of research mentioned above must be applied beyond simple translation of words and phrases if we would understand how larger units of discourse functioned in their contexts. The meaning of discourse units does not lie simply at the level of the units’ words and phrases but extends also to figures of speech, semiotic systems that inform a culture’s figurative language, genres, literary standards and so on. This fact is the reason why comparative literature is another discipline vital for reading the Ten Commandments in their original context. Meredith Kline’s reading of Deuteronomy, and the place of the Ten Words therein, depends upon a knowledge of the structures of Hittite suzerainty treaties and a recognition of affinities between those structures and those of Deuteronomy. The identification of Deuteronomy’s genre as a suzerainty treaty requires, not a stronger awareness of the divinity of Scripture, but paleographic research and studies in comparative literature. Indeed, without such research, the genre and function of Deuteronomy would be significantly obscured. If it is legitimate to associate the Pentateuch with the legal writings of the Ancient Near East, is it also legitimate to associate the OT historical writings with the historiographical practices of the ANE, or the OT creation narratives with the creation narratives of the ANE, or the composition histories of our Scriptures with the compositional practices common to the ANE? Do such associations, per se, amount to prioritizing the humanity of Scripture? Many have (mis?)understood Dr. Tipton’s proposal to be attempting to tacitly demarcate the limits of legitimate literary comparison in Biblical scholarship. Is this perception an instance of miscommunication?

What remains to be done is the fleshing out of specifically what it means for hermeneutics and biblical scholarship to give priority to the divinity of Scripture over the humanity of Scripture. I think that this point was what some were trying to get at in the Q&As. As it stands, it is hard for some of us to see what the hermeneutical payoff of Dr. Tipton’s proposal is or if he meant for his proposal to be one for hermeneutics. I think these are the sorts of questions Biblical scholars would like to see Theologians squarely address and I’m sure there are also questions that Theologians would like to the Biblical scholars squarely address as well. Perhaps what would be helpful for communication at this juncture would be the direct addressing of each others concerns.
I will probably be posting more reflections on these issues out of my conviction that this is a conversation that is long overdue. These are the issues that we, as a church, must wrestle with and my prayer is that this blog may play some small part in our resolving them. I am especially thankful for Dr. Tipton’s taking time out of his holiday to correspond with me on these issues.

a lament for Westminster

2006-11-24T08:39:00.000-05:00

Lament

Weep, weep for those
Who do the work of the Lord
with a high look
And a proud heart.
Their voice is lifted up
In the streets, and their cry is heard.
The bruised reed they break
By their great strength, and the smoking flax
They trample.

Weep not for the quenched
(For their God will hear their cry
And the Lord will come to save them)
But weep, weep for the quenchers

For when the Day of the Lord
Is come, and the vales sing
And the hills clap their hands
And the light shines
Then their eyes shall be opened
On a waste place,
Smouldering,
The smoke of the flax bitter
In their nostrils,
Their feet pierced
By broken reed-stems...
Wood, hay, and stubble,
And no grass springing,
And all the birds flown.

Weep, weep for those
Who have made a desert
In the name of the Lord.

-Evangeline Patterson

And when He drew near and saw the city He wept over it, saying, "Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace!"

-Luke 19:41-42

musings on the perspicuity of Scripture

2006-11-16T09:20:00.000-05:00

“All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.” WCF 1:7
“The uncertainty lies always in the intellectual region, never in the practical. What Paul cares about is plain enough to the true heart, however far from plain to the man whose desire to understand goes ahead of his obedience.” -George Macdonald
Those things necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that only hardness of heart can obscure them. Note, this is not to say that the proper exegesis of a few key passages, like Romans 3 or Galatians 2 or John 10, is so universally plain that the only explanation for someone’s exegeting them otherwise is their wickedness.
Not all passages of nor things in Scripture are alike plain. But there are some things in Scripture that you cannot miss. Jesus is Lord. He is risen. He demands your allegiance and your obedience. If one’s heart is true, the call to discipleship and the sovereignty of Jesus will come through loud and clear. What the Bible cares about is plain enough to the true heart.
Isn’t it marvelous that our New Testaments are composed of a variety of literary genres? The Gospel narratives with Acts, the prosaic epistles which are peppered with hymns, creeds and poems, John’s hymn to the Logos, and, of course, the Apocalypse of John. I wonder if God, in His good providence, gave us such a set of Scriptures precisely so that someone from a culture unaccustomed to following dense argumentation of the Pauline sort, might hear Jesus’ call to discipleship loud and clear in, say, John’s apocalyptic imagery or in following Mark’s telling of Jesus’ story. When I went on a mission to Nepal, our method of gospel communication was not that of rigorous argumentation, a mode of discourse with which most mountain Nepalis were unfamiliar, but of telling the Gospel stories and parables. We engaged them, as best we could, in the manner of speaking they were used to. Perhaps those things which are necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place or sort of Scripture or other, that not only the Western, but the Nepali, the sub-Saharan African, the South American Indian, and many more, in a due use of the ordinary means available to them, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.
Of course, this way of understanding the perspicuity of Scripture assumes that a fairly simple trust in and obedience to Jesus is all that is necessary for salvation. This approach assumes that it is your faith in Christ alone that justifies you rather than your adherence to the doctrine of justification by faith alone. And, of course, many in my tradition, the Reformed, have been awfully muddled on this point, confusing our doctrinal distinctives with the borders of the invisible Church. Many evangelicals and fundamentalists do the same thing. The fruit of such confusion is that we worry endlessly about the intellectual region wherein we, whether we like it or not, find uncertainty, and we woefully neglect those things which Paul and the rest of the Scriptures so clearly care about. Could it be that often our desire to understand trumps our obedience so as to blind ourselves to what our Lord plainly requires of us?

To put it another way: the bounds of God’s mercy and the bounds of orthodoxy are not yet coextensive. How many of us could clearly articulate an orthodox Chalcedonian Christology when we first believed? The truth is something most of us have to grow into (2 Peter 3:17-18; Ephesians 4: 1-16). Perhaps we might think of those things necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation that are so clearly propounded in Scripture, the call to Christian discipleship and the declaration that He is risen, as being the seeds of orthodoxy which, once sown in the good soil of the true heart, will grow to different heights in this age but will not fully flower until we see Him face to face (1 Corinthians 3:5-9; 13:12).

sermons at Christ Community Church

2006-11-08T08:33:00.000-05:00

Christ Community Church in Wilmington, NC has just posted some of the sermons from this summer. One from my friend, Tyler Groff, from the Master's Seminary in California:

Soli Deo Gloria (Psalm 115)

And three from yours truly:

Abram: An Unlikely Candidate for a Fresh Start (Genesis 11:27-12:9; Galatians 3:7-14)

Not So With the Sons of Abraham (Genesis 33:1-11; 2 Corinthian 5:17-21; Galatians 3:28-29)

The Hope of the Resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:1-8, 50-58)

The first two represent my first cracks at the impossible ideal of the Westminsterian redemptive-historical sermon. The third was, I think, more for my own peace of mind than anything else.

hooray, election day!

2006-11-07T15:41:00.000-05:00

If you too feel like this year's campaigning techniques have hit new lows, you haven't seen anything yet.

Sigh...

guest post from up and coming horror writer, Devon Williams

2006-11-06T20:53:00.000-05:00

I am proud to introduce the following scary (belated) Halloween story written by the next Stephen King, R.L. Stine, or J.K. Rowling, my nephew, Devon C. Williams. This story was featured as the entire front page of the Kingswood Elementary School newspaper. [Be warned, this story is a bit creepy, so I would not advise anyone to read it who is prone to have nightmares or who is afraid of ghosts.]

The Kingswood Ghost

There was once a nice school named Kingswood and the kids were very nice.
Then on the day October 12, something happened. On that night all the windows
flashed!!! When the kids went to school the next day they all took turns riding the elevator except one boy named Hunter. He went up the stairs. One step broke and he fell into the basement. Hunter looked all around the basement to find a way out. Then, all of a sudden there was a noise coming from behind him. It got louder and louder. Then, Hunter saw a hand! It was white and he also saw red eyes. Then Hunter fainted. When he woke up, he realized he was only dreaming.
Hunter was curious about his dream so he decided to walk to Kingswood. He looked out the window. It was very black and there was a full moon. Hunter looked at the calendar and it was Friday the 13th! He went outside with his robe and went to the school. He saw a kid in the window but it was 1:30 in the morning. The kid was really a ghost and it flew out the window! Hunter screamed very loud. He decided to go into the school. He could not see anything it was so dark. Then, all of a sudden, he heard a scream. Hunter ran to the stairs. He stopped because he remembered what happened in his dream. So, he took the elevator. On the second floor, he saw a vampire. It started to chase after him. Hunter got the fire extinguisher and whacked the vampire in the head and ran into one of the classrooms. He saw the ghost come back in the window with another kid. Hunter looked on the internet to find out how to get rid of a ghost. It said you need to spray 3 gallons of mud on the ghost. And the ghost started to fly back out the window to get more children. So Hunter ran out of the classroom. The vampire started to wake up. So Hunter ran to the elevator. He was so worried he jammed the button. The elevator started to go sideways then up! He realized he was going up in the sky! The vampire jumped up on the elevator. The vampire made a big hole and Hunter jumped out and bounced off a trampoline in a backyard. Then the vampire fell and died and the ghost was never seen again……except on Friday the 13th at Kingswood Elementary School!!!

on papers, pipe-smoking, and the price of sparrows these days

2006-11-04T17:30:00.000-05:00

I suppose I haven't written much in the way of updating y'all on what I've been up to lately. Part of the reason for that is that there is just so little going on in my life that wouldn't bore most folks to tears. So instead I have usually opted for posting on far more engrossing subjects like Jonathan Edwards' view of the will, Goldbach's conjecture, the Jeremiah scrolls from Qumran and the like. Hasn't it been thrilling? But, just to try to balance things out a little bit, here's a little update on what I'm up to.

It's paper season here at Westminster and so for the past few weeks I've been ransacking mine and the school's libraries for information relevant to my paper topics. I'm writing two exegesis papers: one on Jesus weeping over Jerusalem in Luke 19 and one on the reconciliation of Jacob and Esau in Genesis 33 (a passage I preached this past summer). I'm also writing a church history paper for which I haven't quite settled on a subject. It'll almost certainly have something to do with evangelical, Reformed and/or Fundamentalist biblical scholarship in America in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Is everybody asleep yet?

On top of research for my essays, I'm having to do a lot of translating and reading and I'm helping out with the youth group at church. So things are a little hectic.

In youth group we've been reading through Don Miller's book, Blue Like Jazz. Well, correction: I've been reading through Don Miller's book, Blue Like Jazz. The high school guys that I'm discipling are just like I was at their age and so, since there are no Cliff's Notes for the book, none of them have really read it. But no worries. It's still a good time to hang out with them, if a little unstructured, and I'm really enjoying the book even if nobody else in my group is.

To help soothe my mind in this most chaotic of seasons, I've taken up pipe smoking. Pipe smoking has a certain ritualism to it. You have to pack the pipe just so and then light it just so. Every now and again you have to move the tobacco to the middle of the bowl with your tamper and sometimes you have to relight it. It's a bit like fiddling with a campfire on a backpacking trip, except on a much smaller scale...and it smells better...and I'm not in the woods somewhere...and I've showered recently. Ok, so it's not like that at all. But anyways, the smell is great! The aroma of the tobacco simultaneously restores and stimulates the mind haggard from being overworked. Even if the intellectual caliber of our conversations doesn't actually improve while we smoke, it sure feels like it does. The pipe goes well with Scotch, but a pitcher of lager and some good friends are probably the best complement for the pipe.

With paper and translation deadlines coming up and finals just on the horizon, I'm trying not to worry much. I just try to keep reminding myself that the going rate for sparrows is two for a penny and yet not one of them falls to the ground without my Father's say so. And I'm worth a lot more than a sparrow...

aren't I?

chronological snobbery & postmodernism

2006-11-02T22:17:00.000-05:00

“‘Why - damn it - it’s medieval’, I exclaimed; for I still had all the chronological snobbery of my period and used the names of earlier periods as abuse… Barfield made short work of what I have called my ‘chronological snobbery’, the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find out why it went out of date. Was it refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also ‘a period’, and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.”
-C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, chapter 13

Well, having had a week to cogitate on the things we heard at the WTS emerging church conference, I have to say that one thing which we who have some sympathy for the emerging church need to be on our guard against is a sort of chronological snobbery towards theologians and theologies of the past. Simply noting that a thinker did his or her work in the 4th century BC or the 17th century or the 19th century or whatever has never weighed heavily in my mind for or against the truth or falsehood of his or her claims nor the cogency or lack thereof of his or her arguments. Only as I found myself being swept up by the savvy and chic of making the “hermeneutical turn” and the glitz and glamour of being “relevant” did chronological snobbery begin to creep into my heart. You see, most of my college education consisted of studying arguments laid out by men from centuries and even millennia past that continue to vex and compel undergraduates and professors emeritus alike. Philosophical and theological arguments do not come with expiration dates on them, but rather they, unless refuted, have indefinite shelf-lives.
But our snobbery is often a tad more subtle than Lewis’ had been before Barfield laid into him. We tend to pay lip-service to those who have gone before us in the Christian theological tradition by saying that they “were good for their times” or that “I would have sided with him had I been there in his day,” and then, having given them this formal nod of approval, we proceed to ignore them, not unlike the teen who patiently pretends to hang on his Grandmother’s every word of advice while simultaneously discounting everything she says as quaint, antique, hopelessly behind the times and, therefore, utterly negligible. Often our recognition of past thinkers having been “bound by their contexts” is simply a means of justifying treating them with a sort of benign neglect and, though we would deny it, we do sometimes functionally use the names of earlier periods as terms of abuse (read, “you modernist/rationalist...jerk”). (Perhaps we need to be reminded that at the resurrection we may have occasion to personally explain to Calvin, Hodge, the Scholastics, Medievals and the like why we slandered and disregarded them so.) Of course, we will acknowledge in a show of epistemic humility that we too are “context bound” and that someday our notions may grow stale and useless as well. But what is important is that the contexts by which we are bound are the current ones and the contexts which bound our forebears are not. We tend to think of ideas as being like manna in the wilderness which, if eaten immediately, will nourish us, but, if stored, will be full of maggots by morning.
In my estimation this line of reasoning uncritically assumes the false premise that the contexts by which thinkers were bound in the past have nothing in common with the contexts by which we are bound presently. But a moment’s reflection upon this premise, once baldly stated, reveals it for the sham that it is. Is our context one of religious and philosophical pluralism wherein Christianity is but one (marginal) voice among many? So it was in the days of Justin Martyr. Is our context one in which we can look back upon a checkered history of an imperialism that is petering out before our very eyes? So it was in the days of Augustine. In fact, many of the arguments used by the Skeptics of Augustine’s day are essentially the same as some of the ones being dressed up and trotted out as critiques of Foundationalism today. We are neither so wise nor so special a case as to be able to afford ignoring those who have gone before us in the theological enterprise. Powdered wig or no, Jonathan Edwards said some things that continue to demand our attention and even our assent. We need to recognize that many elements of our own context have analogues in the contexts of the great Christian figures of the past and some of their ideas and arguments may well still be of service to the church. When we believe them to be faulty they deserve our respectful critique and straightforward disagreement rather than a patronizing tip of our the hats before we go on about our business as though they had never said anything worthy of our consideration.
I’m not advocating a sort of naïve traditionalism that makes theologically normative a figment of our historical imaginations but rather a critical interaction with the theological tradition that eschews prejudice against thinkers of different times as much as it eschews prejudice against contemporary thinkers of different nationalities and ethnicities, one that weighs arguments according to their respective merits rather than according to their currency. Only then will the Reformed or emerging Christian truly be like a householder who brings out of his treasure both what is new and what is old.

all your Amos are belong to us

2006-11-01T16:04:00.000-05:00

I just finished butchering Amos for my class on the Prophets and my translation sounds a bit like this:

a priesthood of scholars?

2006-10-28T07:52:00.000-04:00

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

2006-10-26T15:31:00.000-04:00

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

2006-10-23T07:30:00.000-04:00

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

scientia media and Jonathan Edwards on the will

2006-10-19T21:40:00.000-04:00

“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

2006-10-14T07:05:00.000-04:00

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

2006-10-09T17:06:00.000-04:00

“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

2006-10-08T07:29:00.000-04:00

"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

2006-10-07T19:17:00.000-04:00

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

2006-10-07T08:19:00.000-04:00

"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

2006-10-06T07:10:00.000-04:00

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

2006-10-05T22:41:00.000-04:00

"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

2006-10-02T16:45:00.000-04:00

"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...

2006-10-02T14:37:00.000-04:00

Scientific proof of what we already knew.

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

Inerrancy of "the autographs"?

2006-10-01T20:30:00.000-04:00

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."

The New Testament's use of the Old and Jesus

2006-09-29T06:53:00.000-04:00

In his article, "The New Testament's Use of the Old Testament," Dan McCartney argues that when the NT writers interpret the OT they did not follow the strict canons of grammatical-historical exegesis (i.e., attempt to discern what the OT author originally intended to communicate with the text by reading the text in its historical and literary context) but rather interpreted the NT with techniques akin to those used by the rabbis of the Second Temple Period and the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

An example would be Isaiah 40:3. McCartney writes:

The NT consistently applies this to John the Baptist. It is known by the gospel writers that the "coming of the Lord" is the coming of Jesus, so the preparation spoken of here must be John the Baptist, who is known to have been the forerunner of Jesus. In the NT, the words "in the wilderness" are taken (as in the LXX) with the preceding clause "the voice of one crying out." But the Hebrew parallelism suggests that it rather should go with "prepare."
Prepare in the wilderness the way of the Lord
Make straight in the desert a highway for our God

But the NT writers, having seen the fulfillment in John, know that it is not only the way of the Lord which was in the desert, but also the voice that was crying out. So the LXX interpretation fits well. Qumran, however, preserves the Hebrew parallelism because their community was literally in the desert wilderness and they "knew" that the passage referred to the founding of their community. They also explain "highway" or "path" as the "study of the Law..." (1 QS 8:13-16), whereas for the NT the "way" is the repentant hearts prepared to receive the coming Messiah. (McCartney in Havery Conn's Inerrancy and Hermeneutic, pp. 108-109)

According to McCartney, "hermeneutical method is subsevient to hermeneutical goal." The Qumran community and the NT writers used similar hermeneutical methods but those methods were used to achieve different hermeneutical goals, namely one group read the OT as pointing to the founding of their community and the other group read the OT as pointing to Jesus and the founding of His community.

Another example is Matthew's use of Hosea 11:1 in Matthew 2:15. Matthew says of this text that Jesus fulfilled it by going down into and subsequently coming up out of Egypt. But in the context of Hosea, 11:1 is not, strictly speaking, a prophecy about what God will do in the future but rather a recollection of what God has done in His dealings with Israel in the past:

Hosea 11:1-3 When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. 2 The more they were called, the more they went away; they kept sacrificing to the Baals and burning offerings to idols. 3 Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk; I took them up by their arms, but they did not know that I healed them.

Matthew is clearly not doing grammatical-historical exegesis here.

Now, as McCartney notes, the Biblical writers' "failure to conform to our [grammatical-historical exegetical] guidelines has been something of a 'skeleton in the closet' for evangelicals. And of course many who do not share our convictions regarding the Bible point to this skeleton with delight." (p.102)

But I would suggest that there may be a happier implication of the NT's use of the OT. It is sometimes alleged that the NT authors had a preconceived notion of what the Messiah was to look like constructed from a number of Messianic prophecies and when writing about Jesus they made up stories about Him to fit the prophecies. Now, while occasionally a subtler form of shaping narratives about Jesus to reflect OT passages can be observed in the NT, it would seem that the general hermeneutical approach of the NT writers points in the very opposite direction. Craig Blomberg observes that, rather than sculpting a Jesus to fit their OT's, it seems that the NT writers molded their OT's to fit what they knew about Jesus (The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, p.46). If this be the case, perhaps, the NT's use of the OT points to the NT's having given us a better portrait of the historical Jesus than is often acknowledged.

In the words R.T. France, "if the history were being created out of the text, there would be no need to adapt the text to fit the history."

Thinking out loud...

2006-09-28T18:39:00.000-04:00

Well, here is my first step into the blogosphere. It's a bit daunting. Long story made short, my name is David Williams. I'm from Cary, North Carolina. I'm a seminary student at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia pursuing a Masters in Biblical Studies. My hope is that this blog will be a way for me to better keep up with the people I love and a place for thinking out loud about God, Jesus, life, theology, philosophy, politics, history and whatever else comes up. My hope is that thinking out loud myself and listening to you do the same will help me to better take "every thought captive to the obedience of Christ" and, if I'm honest, provide a bit of an outlet.
The picture here is of my Dad and I in Cardiff, Wales.