Friend written up in the Bee

Heavy Metal Sermon: Pastor uses Metallica in his sermon

This is a good exercise for me in media because we often evaluate people and ministries through the funny lens of the media. In this case I know Ron well, he is a partner in ministry and a friend. Ron and I studied together for our oral exams at Seminary. We share each others lives and ministries in our little cluster meetings. I've been in his church, heard him preach, etc. He's a solid guy, no question about it. He also does solid ministry. Still, some church people will take pot shots at him for this.

Of course as a church planter this is the kind of publicity you can't buy. He'll get a few new contacts out of this article and perhaps a few new members. But what really has happened?

Listening to the Bible

Educators have known for a while that different people have different learning styles. I'm an auditory processor and learner. I can remember better things I hear than things I read. When I read I like to do so slowly to say the words in my head so I can absorb them. They say that in centuries past it was common for people to read aloud even just to themselves. I heard that Abraham Lincoln did this. I also heard Gordon Fee's lecture on Regent Bookstore Radio entitled "Why Christians Read their Bible Poorly" where he emphasizes the fact that the Bible is meant to be read as a book, not discrete nuggets of theological truth. He really makes a good case that our habits of Bible read distort the way the Bible was meant to be read and in fact the way we read it distorts the our understanding of it. Not only are we Biblically illiterate (even Christians who never miss their "quiet time"), but the manner in which we approach it warps and abuses our perspectives and understanding of the Bible. Good stuff. Catch it if you can or pick it up, or pick up his book How To Read The Bible Book By Book.

Anyway, even before I caught Fee's piece I decided to pick up the Bible on CD, rip it to MP3 and play it in my IRiver. Wow, what a terrific blessing for me. Before I preach I can pretty easily listen to an entire book that the text I am preaching in is found. I also find I more easily pick up the themes and repetitions when I listen to them rather than reading them. I think when I read I tend to edit with my eyes. I skip over names, I skip over what seems to be repetitive or redundant (in our cultural filter) instead of letting the intentional shaping of the book impact my hearing of the book. I actually listened to the whole last 20 chapter of the book of Exodus. Pretty interesting stuff in there really, but reading it is very difficult.

Frames

Seeing things in their proper frames are essential. Before the Nov. election "CNN Presents" did a piece on American Evangelicalism. The piece began with a small girl talking about Jesus. She very sweetly explained that if you believe in Jesus you go to heaven, and if you don't you go to hell. The frame of the story was striking. The presentation was such that the child appeared naive and many Americans would assume in some ways abused by the faith of her parents.

William D. Romanowski in his book "Eyes Wide Open" makes the point that all stories carry with them an assumed worldview beneath the surface. Every movie, every book, every frame, every assertion assumes a worldview, a governing story within which the assertion makes sense. All stories are also selective. CNN presented that little tidbit as part of their frame and worldview, the girl selected this assertion as part of her worldview. It's all about governing stories.

The little girl in CNN's piece (maybe, because of CNN's frame you can't really tell what the girl really understands...) as it is in harmony with much of what is portrayed and proposed in American Evangelicalism seems to present the story of the world as the great soul sorter. Planet earth's purpose is to separate the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff, the saved from the damned. Depending on the different doctrinal commitments behind it, whether Calvinist or Arminian, planet earth's purpose is essentially the playground, battlefield or sorting machine by which God chooses to save some and fry others. Within the CNN frame the worldview of the girl appears absurd and even offensive. "There are lots of religions, lots of beliefs, even lots of brands of Christianity. How intolerant this religion's picture of God must be to imagine that THIS is the governing story of the world." At this point the horrified or shocked onlookers quickly break ranks and subconsciously fragment into the diversity of their governing stories. Some are secular humanists who doubt there is any meta-narrative to existence. "The poor child is deluded by her religiously bigoted parents..." Others are pantheists who might think "The poor child doesn't know that she herself is part of god, she is a victim of confusion." Sympathetic Christians are cheering the little girl for her profession. Some pick up the implied mockery or sneer by the CNN frame and curse the liberal media, others are just pleased because they imagine that she has spread the "good news" and that in hearing about the hope of heaven and the threat of hell that someone will make a choice for Jesus.

Does the little girl's profession adequately express the Christian story? Again, you can't blame the little girl, she's young and CNN provided the frame. But the little girl's profession really does express a reductionistic articulation of the Christian faith, one that is popular in American evangelicalism and common in most churches. This articulation of Christianity it quintessentially American. It is pragmatic and marketable. What matters is where you end up (heaven or hell) and how many people you can sell it to. The shape of the governing story will by itself lead to certain subsequential conflicts down the road. If what the story is ultimately about is after life destination understanding the ultimate purpose of this world as processing the sorting of souls, then you will fight about the selection of the sorting (Arminian vs. Calvinist), (discipleship vs. "sinner's prayer") what Christian life really is, and whether the sorting itself is just (tolerance vs. exclusivity). Many in fact will question whether understanding existence as we know it as simply a sorting machine does justice to the existence we experience, especially on the terms the girl describes which according to most Americans is simply yet another expression of "brand preference" in the religious sphere.

NT Wright's Worldview

This is from his Wright's "The New Testament and the People of God". (The lower case g in "god" is intentional for specific reasons listed in the introduction of the book. He isn't intended to slight YHWH but merely making the point that "god" in most cases is not a proper name  but a type of being posited by many religions. "YHWH is the name of the god of the Old Testament." he might say. Technically, capitalizing as we normally do would be like saying "Paul Vander Klay is the name of the Human writing this e-mail." "Human" is not a name, it is what I am just like god is not primarily a name but rather what we understand YHWH to be. Generally according to our rules of grammar "human" would not be capitalized. It is a small point that is picky and technical which will annoy some people. Try not to get hung up on it.)

The quote:

"I find myself driven, both from my study of the New Testament and from a wide variety of other factors which contribute to my being who I am, to tell a story about reality which runs something like this. Reality as we know it is the result of a creator god bringing into being a world that is other than himself, and yet which is full of his glory. It was always the intention of this god that creation should one day be flooded with his own life, in a way for which it was prepared from the beginning. As part of he means to this end, the creator brought into being a creature which, by bearing the creator's image, would bring his wise and loving care to bear upon the creation. By a tragic irony, the creature in question has rebelled against this intention. But the creator has solved this problem in principle in an entirely appropriate way, an as a result is now moving the creation once more towards its originally intended goal. The implementation of this solution now involves the indwelling of this god within his human creatures and ultimately within the whole creation, transforming it into that for which it was made in the beginning. This story, whose similarity to the parable of the Wicked Tenants is scarcely accidental, obviously attempts to ground ontology, a view of what is really there, in the being and activity of the creator/redeemer god. It has, in my own case, already succeeded in subverting all sorts of other stories (including several 'Christian' ones) that I used to tell myself about reality. I find that it 'fits' with far more of the real world than the a usual post-Enlightenment ones."

NT Wright, "The New Testament and the People of God", p. 98

What I find interesting about this quote is how clear and I believe how Reformed his worldview is. Many "Christian" worldviews articulated by evangelicals tend to be far less specific about the important ontological aspects and flows of history. He clearly sees the flow of creation, fall, redemption and sees that "salvation" is not merely "getting to heaven" but rather the work of the creator God in redeeming his rebellious creation for his own glory. Pretty good stuff in my book. It is generally these foundational worldview issues that are vital to having the rest of one's theology flow in order. Get the foundation wrong and the house will always be crooked. So far at least in this book I find his foundation sound. I'm anxious to see what he does with it.

Interesting article on my CRC bretheren

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2005502060316

I've never been to Iowa. Fascinating article on a variety of levels.

On Translations

Wrote this for Voices and wanted to keep a copy of it.

All translations have their strengths and weaknesses depending on what you value. The KJV was created based upon the scholarship known in Europe in their day (1611). The Greek text they relied upon was constructed by Erasmus about a hundred years before and has been called the "Textus Receptus". His text was based upon the manuscripts available to him in his day. You've noticed I'm sure that the KJV has lots of verses the NIV doesn't have. Why? This gets us into the problem of manuscripts before the printing press. Manuscript were obviously more prone to errors than printed texts. We've found many more manuscripts in the last 400+ years than Erasmus had available to him. The Greek NT that you would use if you went to Calvin Seminary would be the best text based upon the scholarship of the manuscripts known today. In a discipline called "textual criticism" (sometimes called "lower criticism" as opposed to "higher criticism") scholars take their best educated guesses at what the autographs (what was written by the authors) said.

The KJV has value in its universality. It is weak in that it is based on old scholarship and written in an idiom that has long since passed.

The NKJV (I think) was an attempt to correct the problem of idiom but is based on the old, old scholarship and still the Textus Receptus. There are fundamentalist Christian groups that demand we ONLY use Bibles based on the Textus Receptus but that makes no sense to me.

As you noted many like the KJV and the NKJV for being more literal. You will also notice that other translations like the NASB and the RSV are also very literal. All of these translations understand "translation" to be a word for word type of thing. There are times when studying the Bible that this kind of literalism can be helpful, like if you are doing a word study. You can more easily track a specific word using the KJV than you can using the NIV. You will notice that specific words in Greek are in the NIV often rendered in different ways in different passages. This caused some people to be upset when it came out. (People always seem upset when a new translation comes out because cherished rendering of favorite passages get changed and they just don't feel familiar anymore.) This issue of word for word correspondence, however, gets into the knottiness of what translation means. A "paraphrase" like "The Living Bible" or "The Message" reads the text, interprets it and tries to give a succinct rendering of the meaning of the passage in contemporary idiom. When you see the Living Bible translating "salvation" as "getting to heaven" at least you understand how the scholar understands "salvation", but not all of us would simply equate the concept of "salvation" with "getting to heaven". This does, however, put us in the middle of the difficulties of translations. "Salvation" is the English word we often use to render certain Greek and Hebrew words, but how any specific English reader would understand "salvation" does not necessarily faithfully connect with what the author in Greek and Hebrew wanted to communicate by the word.

Translators of every sort have to deal with this. If I would to say "he was pulling her leg" and someone decided to translate that into another language just as it is, there is a considerable risk that this would not be understood in the way the original author or speaker intended. A larger context might be helpful. If it were a story of people swimming, "he was pulling her leg" might mean that he was literally pulling her leg. In that case a literal translation would be helpful and appropriate. If the story was about a brother and sister on a road trip and one was teasing or fooling the other a literal translation of leg pulling could prove to be highly confusing for those reading the translation. At this point the translator has to make a decision. There might be an idiom in the "receptor" language that approximates "he was pulling her leg". Should he use it or render instead a literal translation? Either way the translator goes there is loss. If someone wanted to do a word study of the times the verb "to pull" and "leg" are used together a rendering of the receptor language idiom would prove an obstacle.

The case with Biblical translation is far more difficult because we are separated by a huge amount of time and a far distance of culture. We can't always agree on what specific or nuanced language in the Bible always means. Then you still have to figure out, once you arrive at your decision on what a passage means in Greek or Hebrew (right or wrong) how you can best render it correctly to a broad audience who will read it through time in a way that hopefully will allow some sort of better transparency for word studies and the like. This is a very difficult thing indeed.

The NKJV fails at both levels. It is less "word for word" and it is based on an old scholarship. As you have noted a helpful way to try and get behind the dilemma of translations is to consult a variety of translations so at least you can be aware that something is going on when something is going on. Footnotes are also a dead give-away when scholars have to work hard to render a particular text well. If they are feeling skittish or feel they need to explain a bit more why they said what they did, they footnote. 

At the risk of making an already overly long post even longer, perhaps each time we delve into the translation dilemma it is a good time to revisit basics about our presuppositions about what the Bible is and how it should function in our lives. Muslims hope to avoid these difficulties by declaring that any translation of the Koran is not really the Koran. There is a literalism at work there that seems alien to the way the authors of the New Testament handled the Old. Modern ideas about literalism tend to be built on the foundation of positivism which is an Enlightenment philosophical quest for certainty. Many western Christians who demand literalism unwittingly subscribe to this Enlightenment position and read it back onto the Bible. This if often done to confront the threat of relativism which threatens the church at the other end of the spectrum.  NT authors clearly had a high view of the OT but were often interestingly selective in their quotation schemes. Find a quote somewhere in the NT and find a commentary on that passage. You'll see the commentator trying to figure out if the author took the quote from the Hebrew, some version of it, or the Greek OT, or something else. Luke sat down to present a reliable account of Jesus, perhaps using Matthew and Mark, and or other sources yielding a telling of the Gospel that is faithful, yet sometimes unique book. Christians believe the message of the Bible trusting the Holy Spirit's power to preserve and grow Christ's church despite persecution, disaster, war, and the difficulties of human communication through time and culture.

The Story

Found it! It is called "The Story" and it is one of the chronological Bibles. Here is the Zondervan's link. Here is a page with links to the TNIV: http://www.geocities.com/bible_translation/tnivlinks.htm

OK, once I start

I've been waiting a bit for the TNIV to come out. I got a promo NT when that was released. It will be very interesting to watch this roll out. Zondervan is trying to make this the Bible for a younger generation of Christians. It's interesting how versions of the Bible are also going to be targetted, not just the packaging. Check out the TNIV at their website: http://www.tniv.info . You can download a free PDF version and even order a free copy.

I'm waiting for Logos to release a version of it. Then I'll have a much better chance to look it over carefully. There is also a NT version out there free from Laridian for your PDA if you already use their Bible software, which I do also.

I read someplace that they were going to do kind of an abridged version too targetted towards a younger generation. I'll have to see if I can find that again.

what's up

Haven't posted for a spell. I've been reading NT Wright's "The NT and the People of God". I'm about 100 pages into it and very much enjoying it. I really hadn't heard such a thorough treatment of the issues in epistemology, language, story, etc. Terrific stuff. Also noticed he'd read Woltersdorf. I've thought a lot about these kinds of issues and pretty much come down to where he has on many of these issues. I just really didn't have the language and the resources for it. I've greatly enjoyed it. Lots of talk about worldview, how they are formed, how story fits in. Really good stuff.

I've had a few other things mulling over in my mind to write, but I've spent most of my "spare time" reading instead of writing.

Resurrection and Exile

In today's NT Wright lecture on Regent Radio he handles Romans 11, a very difficult passage for many Reformed exegetes. I've found his treatment of Romans 9-11 very engaging. In 11 he reminds us of the connection between resurrection and the return from exile. That note struck me. Wright does a good job of not only making sure we are reading Romans in the light of the OT and the NT Jewish community but also drawing important connections between Jesus and Israel, something that continually needs to be done for American evangelicals who are so easily tempted towards disconnected dispensationalism. Wrights analysis of these chapter is interesting because the mission of the Jews is the mission of Jesus, not merely in terms of witness to righteousness, how we generally see it through Luther, but also seeing the history of the Jews in the light of the cross. I'm waiting to read this more clearly in his books and I've got some misgivings about some of this but the connections are tempting to make.

I very much liked the connection between resurrection and return from exile. For the Gentiles the ingrafting into Christ is like new birth. It is the fulfillment of the mission of Jesus and the mission of the Jews. For the Jews, ingrafting into Christ is resurrection and the final return from exile (as it is really for all of us.) I connect that with CS Lewis and the Great Divorce again in terms of the image of our resurrected states as becoming our truest selves. I think of the hymn "O Come O Come Immanuel" with us "morning in lowly exile here, until the Son of God appears". Advent is first and second coming and resurrection will be the return for us from this life of exile.

I've also been trying to work on a short paper on Mark 8 to try and connect my thoughts from the first half of the Gospel of Mark that I've been working through with my adult Sunday School class. As usual I've stumbled half way through. Through chapter 8 I've been seeing the connection between election and the cross. The definition of Messiah that Jesus is trying to connect his disciples to (with much frustration!) is that of the cross. Only in the cross is the heart of the problem of humanity dealt with, which is the sin of Adam. Jesus is "the Christ", "the elect" because he goes to the cross. He then teaches us that the only way to follow him into resurrection is also to embrace the cross and follow him. Our election is seen in our cross bearing just as his election (messiahship, Christship) is found in the cross. Messiah or Christ without the cross is a Satanic deceipt and temptation that wants to embrace Satan and humanity's lie that if we only had enough power then we would be God. The center of God is not his power (although he is all powerful), it is his heart, and so the path to God is not the elimination of limitation, but rather the scandal of embracing the cross for the good of the unrighteous. How different would the church be if we could truly see that we are elect into resurrection through the cross. We try to jump to resurrection without the cross and become ensnared by our own rebellion and the truth of our limitation. Jesus himself, though he be God, could not do so, yet we try every day. Phillipians 2.

Great teachers

Frederick Buechner has a little "daily mediation" book that I dip into now and then. I figure if I look at it once a week it will last me 7 years. :) Feb. 3 begins, "In the last analysis, I have always believed, it is not so much their subjects that the great teachers teach as it is themselves." Yeah, that's right. When I look back on my favorite teachers at Seminary and College I can still see them in my mind. I can't quote many of their words, verbatim anymore, but what remains is my sense of them.

For the last few days I've been on an NT Wright kick, enjoying the lectures on Regent radio and now beginning to enjoy his book. I've been impressed how through reading a book, or listening to a recording you can derive a large amount from the teacher. It isn't just "facts" or "information", it is the person themselves that comes through the work a bit. We learn from them not just the "product" of their studies, but the "product" of their lives. We all do this from people that impact us.

My wife and I talk together a lot about education because she teaches in a school where most of the children are immigrants or the poor. The challenge is great. Just last night we were talking about the value of books. Getting books in the hands of children, giving them the space (away from TV, etc.) to open the book and let it work its magic. The great teachers of the ages, sometimes with the important aid of a good translator or editor, pouring themselves through paper and ink through the God given miracle of language, through time and space, changing, mutating through culture and circumstance. Truly miraculous. But then again, it is through a book that for many of us God reveals himself and works that magic.

Polite people in a connected world

I was also struck by Wright's intro. He has to touch on all of the hot button topics before he can begin to write otherwise someone will flame him on some board over something. BC or BCE, God or god, Israel or Palestine, god or God as he or she or HE or YHWH. All of these issues have their importance and people certainly are willing to squabble. It is practical to at least note that he knows the issues and doesn't wish to do anyone any offense or harm over them. Ah, to try to be polite in a highly connected world. Can hardly say anything without someone, somewhere finding something to get upset over. :) pvk

Why fight about the Bible

After listening to some NT Wright on Regent Bookstore Radio (link on the sidebar) I decided to read some of his books. I've started "The NT and the People of God". Good introduction to the issues. I'm enjoying his writing and his thought. It is intersesting thinking about the different "camps" or approaches to reading and understanding the NT. He identifies the pre-critical, the historical, the theological and the postmodern approaches. All are interesting and have their spots in history. What strikes me, however, is that the pre-critical in many ways is the engine behind the rest. Without the pre-critical, the raw, simple, unschooled, motivated reader who is hungering for a bolt from the blue no one would even pay attention to the NT at all. The reason the historical, the theological and the post moderns want in the game is because the pre-criticals lay down their lives, build institutions, give money, blow up things, etc. bestowing upon the New Testament that thing most valued in our world, importance. If the pre-criticals had disappeared like many throughout the ages the rest of the readers would evaporate as well. Sure, there would be some obscure group of students and scholars that would study it for scholarly or historical interest. Perhaps if some bright shiny artifact were uncovered crowds would flock to museums to gaze upon them like King Tut's treasure, but outside academic circles it would generate little heat. The New Testament has life in this world because of the people that read it with fervor, read it with hope, read it with sinister motives, read it to beat someone up. Funny how this stuff work. pvk