(Note: All spoilers are flagged, so if you haven’t seen the film, you can skip the “spoiler” parts.)
With all the hype surrounding the new Avatar film, I simply had to see it. It is being heralded as the film that has “upped the ante” in all film-making, and has set a whole new standard for the future. I thought the movie was very, very, good; but not without some caveats. Because everyone was excitedly shouting from the mountaintops that the movie was “absolutely the greatest film ever made,” I very excitedly put on my film-critic-goggles in anticipation for seeing the greatest film ever. While the film fell short of my expectations, it was still quite the thrilling adventure.
The Good:
What makes the movie so tremendously awe-inspiring is the wonder of the magical world of Pandora. The native Navi people, the environment and plantlife, the imaginative creatures—everything builds up into a whirlwind that takes your breath away. Director James Cameron intentionally waited to make the film until the technology was available to pull it off, and the visuals are simply stunning. It invokes a kind of bewilderment, and literally makes your jaw drop.
The Bad:
However, the film is not without its shortcomings. The plot is downright elementary, and is pretty much as cliché as it gets. It’s a cookie-cutter story with absolutely no unexpected plot twists whatsoever. (James Cameron says he wrote it something like a decade before even Titanic, and it is pretty evident that it was early in his career.) The characters are one-dimensional archetypes, who pretty much have as much sophistication as a poop-joke. (That being said, everyone knows that poop jokes are still funny.) And while I am sympathetic with most of the film’s core themes (spoiler: the pitfalls of capitalism, the need to be ‘green’, etc.), it was less-than-subtle, and actually was put on a little too thick.
Even from a film-making perspective, small snippets of the movie looked downright amateur: strange and unnecessary closeups of people’s faces or grimaces (and no, I’m not referring to the actually important facial close-ups, of which there were some as well), and other anomalies thrown in. (Think of the frustratingly distracting product-placement closeups in a Michael Bay movie like Transformers, and you start to get the idea. “Rush out and buy a Sandisk-branded memory card and GM vehicle, right now! And buy them on eBay!”)
These random shots built the movie up to its 2:40 film-length, which felt like it could cut a good 10-15 minutes (the film only got slow toward the end of Act 1, before Act 2). When you consider sitting in the theater for an additional 45 minutes before that in order to get a good seat, by the end of the film you can actually identify with the main character quite a lot — (spoiler) a person imprisoned in a chair, trying to relearn how to use their legs.
Thoughts on the Film’s Themes (Spoilers):
The core themes of the movie are the pitfalls of capitalism, oppressive colonial expansion, the need to be green, the limits of a naturalistic worldview, and pantheism (God as part of creation). Strangely, I had read somewhere that some Christians were up in arms over the themes, but in fact I think that they are all strongly resonant with the Christian message (obviously with some qualifications, such as pantheism). For example, “the love of money is the root of all evil.” We are also called to be good stewards of creation. And while the movie may be promoting pantheism, Christians do indeed maintain that God is omnipresent, and “in him we live and move and have our being.” The film has an undercurrent of naturalism vs. theism, and it clearly sides with (watered-down) theism. Despite it feeling a bit preachy, I would think that Christians should be the last people to denounce the film’s themes, but rather promote them.
I also think that the beauty of the world of Pandora can be an important, refreshing look at the beauty of our own world. We are so accustomed to our own exotic world that it has become less alluring, less enchanting. From a young age we learn about zebras and jellyfish and giraffes, but familiarity breeds contempt. The film does a magnificent job of reawakening the splendor of creation, and its important ties with its creator.
In Sum:
I know this review may sound overly-critical, but I guess it’s just because everyone had built my expectations so high. I was practically expecting the return of Jesus and the ushering in of the eschaton, right there in my theater chair. The various weak parts of the film scattered throughout kept me from being fully captivated and immersed. I can’t even imagine how outstanding the film would’ve been with not only the magnificent setting it’s in, but also a great team of writers.
I always feel bad giving critiques of movies that everyone loves, because it seems like I’m saying that it was “bad.” But let me be clear: the film was really, really good. However, I do not think that it is the game-changer that it has been called.
Avatar is an extremely fun and entertaining movie. Temper your expectations from all the hype, and you will have a wild ride =).
I saw this cartoon the other day, and thought it fitting for the new year and the themes of my blog:
I’m tempted to delve into philosophical exposition, but I’ll let the cartoon be a cartoon =).
‘Nuff said. =)
I thought these were pretty hysterical:
Wow. This is probably the longest I have gone without posting here, sorry about that. I have been going full-tilt since the academic semester started, and have been doing a few other time-sensitive projects on top of that as well. What little free time I have left, I have been trying to not twist my brain too hard, which means I have neglected to write here!
Despite being busy, I’ll try and at least post various links or things here in the meantime. Hopefully when things lighten up, I’ll have some breathing room again!
Perspicuity refers to the clarity and “understandable-ness” of scripture.
Augustine, in his De Doctrina Christiana 2.6.7, writes:
What the scriptures are; in what way they are written; what is required in order to understand them:
But those who read them in a light-minded spirit are liable to be misled by innumerable obscurities and ambiguities, and to mistake the meaning entirely, while in some places they cannot even guess at a wrong meaning, so dense and dark is the fog that some passages are wrapped in. This is all due, I have no doubt at all, to divine providence, in order to break in pride with hard labor, and to save the intelligence from boredom, since it readily forms a low opinion of things that are too easy to work out.
To be fair, Augustine employs an allegorical hermeneutic, so nothing really means what it appears to mean 
.
You may or may not have realized that today is 09/09/09.
Also, 09 + 09 + 09 = 27.
Why is this significant?
Because 09/09/09 is my wonderful wife’s birthday! And as crazy as it sounds, it’s her 27th birthday, to boot!
Happy Birthday, Hunnybunch 
. I love you very much.
Here is a photo of our newly-wed-selves, back in the day:
This is a segment in my “Defining Radical Orthodoxy” series.
Rather than a “movement” with well-defined boundaries or doctrines, Radical Orthodoxy is more of an ethos—or, “sensibility” as it’s called—shared between many similar thinkers across Christian traditions. James K.A. Smith, in his excellent book Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, helpfully highlights five common key themes to help understand the broad contours that shape the thought of Radical Orthodoxy (abbreviated as “RO”).
1) Postmodern: A critique of modernity and Liberalism.
Smith writes:
“[...] RO is a trenchant critique of modernity as a flawed, imploding project. The key figures in RO see in modernity the institution of dualisms that are grounds for excluding the divine and the transcendent, hence modernity’s implosion, or what others have called the “end” of metaphysics. “The end of modernity,” Milbank argues, “which is not accomplished, yet continues to arrive, means the end of a single system of truth based on universal reason, which tells us what reality is like.” Modern dualisms, such as the opposition between faith and reason, became the rules of the game in which Modern theology had to play. RO, instead of operating within those confines, questions the very rules of the game by calling into question the assumptions of modernity itself.
“[...] RO criticizes theological liberalism, which it views as accommodating theology to modernity, rather than grounding itself in revelation… RO is also a strident critic of classical political liberalism because of its assumptions regarding human nature (as in Thomas Hobbes, for instance) and its atomistic account of the social sphere.
“However, though RO is grounded in a critique of modernity, it is not antimodern. To be antimodern in the sense of Protestant fundamentalism is to be the simple negation of modernity and hence still within a modern paradigm. RO is critical of modernity in a way that seeks to circumvent its assumptions; thus, as some proponents of RO suggest, only RO is truly postmodern because it is precisely other than modern. “Hence Radical Orthodoxy, although it opposes the modern, it also seeks to save it. It espouses not the pre-modern, but an alternative version of modernity” [John Milbank].
“What this means is that Christian theologians and theoreticians are, in a sense, empowered to call into question the foundational metaphysical, epistemological, and anthropological assumptions—or faith commitments—that undergird modernity. [...] In Milbank, for instance, this means calling into question the “ontology of violence,” which construes human intersubjective relationships as governed by power and war. But he does more than just call this into question; he seeks to show the internal inconsistencies of such a construal. Further, he then offers an “ontology of peace,” which considers human intersubjective relationships as grounded in a fundamental harmony. This is confessedly and unapologetically grounded in a Christian, particularly Augustinian, metaphysics—which, of course, the modern academy claims must be excluded because it operates from a particular faith perspective. But Milbank’s analysis has demonstrated that even these modern, supposedly “secular,” accounts of intersubjectivity are founded on particular faith perspectives. The “fundamental shifts” that characterize modern, secular social theory—which Milbank argues are in fact simply modifications or rejections of Christian orthodoxy—are “no more rationally ‘justifiable’ than the Christian positions themselves” [Milbank].
“[...] Graham Ward’s analysis of secular utopias in the work and thought of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier unveils the way in which their “cities of eternal aspiration”—whether Wright’s ideal community of Broadacres or Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City”—are in fact parodies of the eschatological city. As such, urban planners and architects become priests of this immanentized New Jerusalem, and city planning is, in fact, a covert natural theology. The proper response to this unveiling of the theologies at work in the secular city is a more radical and integral theological account of urban reality, particularly the nature of relationships within this city.”
I’ll followup with Smith’s remaining 4 key themes that help shape the thought of Radical Orthodoxy.
Radical Orthodoxy is a new-ish theological “movement” of sorts, that has stormed onto the scene. But similar to the ecclesial terms “evangelical” and “(r)emerg/ing/ent,”¹ Radical Orthodoxy can be a bit difficult to clearly articulate or define.
So what, exactly, is this “Radical Orthodoxy”?
The name is a bit of a misnomer—or a very clever double entendre. The “Radical” is meant to be taken in its Latin sense radix, which means root or source. But of course, anything labeled “radical” sounds very…well, radical. And radical indeed it is, in the “extreme” sense of the word.²
James K.A. Smith, in his excellent book Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, helpfully clarifies the ambiguities.
Rather than a “movement” with well-defined boundaries or doctrines, Radical Orthodoxy is more of an ethos—or, “sensibility” as it’s called—shared between many similar thinkers across Christian traditions. As a result, there are varying degrees of agreement and disagreement between the leading voices.
Despite this variation, Smith highlights five common key themes to help understand the broad contours that shape the thought of Radical Orthodoxy (abbreviated as “RO”).
1) Post-Modern: A critique of modernity and Liberalism.
2) Post-secular: A critique of the sacred/secular, private/public dualism.
3) Neoplatonist: A “participatory” or “incarnational” ontology of being.
4) Aesthetics: An affirmation of embodiment and materiality.
5) Kulturkritik: Cultural critique and transformation.
(After writing this up and seeing how long it is, I’ve instead decided to post it in a short series of bite-sized chunks. Stay tuned.)
____________
¹ That is, the “emerging church” movement.
² Radical Orthodoxy is also “radical” in the Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtle sense of the word. That is to say, Radical Orthodoxy is “radical” insofar as it is “totally tubular” and “bodacious.”
The NYT has an interesting piece about the latest trend in high fashion: the macabre.
Rick Owens's Reimagined Biker Jacket, for $2,700
Perhaps “macabre” is too strong a word, but it definitely has a distinct “goth” feel about it. The designer spearheading this new veritable movement sweeping the fashion scene is Los Angeles-based Rick Owens.
What’s interesting about Owens is that rather than pop-culture’s recent obsession with “goth” influencing his work and the fashion industry on the whole, it’s the polar opposite. While the fashion industry has been reincarnating various trends from the past in recent years—such as bell-bottoms a few years ago, and now bringing the 80’s back today—Owens has been beating a steady drum for many years that has been more forward-looking and visionary than nostalgic.
Once thought of as a fashion “outsider,” on the fringe of quirky design, Owens is now in the spotlight, being copied and mimicked not only by other designers in the industry, but also popular retail outlets for the marketplace. Zig-zagged zippers and elongated, shrunken sleeves are cropping up everywhere they can be “copied-and-pasted.”
But despite the copycats, Owens has a positive outlook. After all, imitation is the highest form of flattery.
From New Testament scholar Michael Bird:
My name is Jose Samblanco and I live in a rural village of Peru and, most imporantly, I am the apostle to the Internet. I’m here, on-line, proclaiming to you the good news about Carlos Hernandez.
Carlos Hernandez was a Peruvian peasant. He was a prophet mighty in word and deed as attested by many miraculous signs. But his own people did not recieve him. Carlos was accused of being an Al-Qaeda terrorist, he was handed over to the authorities, and was executed on the electric chair. But God did not let Carlos languish in death and decay, but Carlos has been raised by God and is now the exalted Lord of the Cosmos. I am here to tell you that Carlos was electrocuted for your sins. Furthermore, it is exclusively by faith in King Carlos that you receive the hope of redemption.
This is why we Reformed-types put so much emphasis on the regenerative work of the Spirit prior to human “saving faith” .
(I’ve also posted Mike’s illustration of a hymn to “King Carlos” as well!)
The Evangelical Theological Society made a move a couple years ago to try and oust Clark Pinnock & Co. from membership, due to them holding the unconventional position of Open Theism (“God doesn’t know the future, because the future doesn’t exist yet,” etc). Pete Enns was forced from his professorship at Westminster Theological Seminary due to trying to reevaluate our presuppositions about the nature of the Bible, and let the Bible define itself on its own terms (redefine inerrancy).
At Calvin College, the board of trustees has recently issued a memo to the faculty that no one will be allowed to teach, write, or advocate on behalf of homosexuality. Now, the professors are calling for a campus meeting on “academic freedom.”
Here is the problem:
To what degree can there be true “academic freedom” (and the expression of ideas) at a credal, confessional institution, that submits to the kingship of Christ?
How can one have “academic freedom” while being a slave to Christ? I think this is a genuine dilemma, and I don’t pose this question rhetorically.
On the one hand, freedom of ideas is crucial. Without the freedom of ideas, we wouldn’t have the Copernican Revolution, the Protestant Reformation, et al. We need to be ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda—the church reformed, always reforming. Without this academic freedom of ideas, we lose the ability to critically evaluate conventionally held positions.
But on the other hand, the so-called freedom of ideas is explicitly prohibited in the New Testament. We have verses everywhere commanding the upholding of sound doctrine, the condemnation of false teachers, holding fast to the truth, etc. So when we have confessional, credal institutions (ETS, WTS, Calvin) putting prohibition on the “freedom of ideas,” it is generally in the spirit of trying to uphold sound doctrine for the Body of Christ.
So where is the solution? How broad is “sound doctrine”? How generous is orthodoxy?
The two examples in the introduction are important. I am sympathetic to Pete Enns and his project, and believe he is onto something important for us to consider. However, while I am sympathetic to the Open Theist project of similarly reevaluating our presuppositions on God, I remain unconvinced—and would not encourage the promotion of their ideas. But in these two examples, I side with “academic freedom” on the one hand, and “upholding sound doctrine” on the other. So what is the solution?
Of course, it’s all a matter of perspective. One person’s heresy is another person’s orthodoxy. Conservatives think I’m liberal because I read the Bible literarily rather than literally, while liberals think I’m conservative because I believe in the authority of the Bible and resurrection.
And going back to the situation with Calvin College on homosexuality, how do we reconcile “academic freedom” while submitting to a confessional institution? To what degree should this “freedom” be allowed? And more broadly, are we operating from a misdirected understanding of “freedom,” inherited from liberal democracy, rather than freedom in Christ?
How do we have “academic freedom” while being a slave to Christ?
The video of the hell-fire vicar was a big hit, so I thought I’d share this video from the same British comedy show. This one features a new perspective on Jesus telling the parable of the Good Samaritan.
(Only watch this if you can have a good laugh at yourself and what you believe in. Many Christians more pious than I will find this deplorable. Shame on me.)
From the NY Times:
U.S. Raises Estimate for 10-Year Deficit to $9 Trillion
The Obama administration, citing an economic downturn that has been deeper than it had first thought, raised its estimate on Tuesday of the government’s deficit over the next decade to $9 trillion from $7.1 trillion.
One day while I was reading Hebrews in the ESV, the first introductory line stuck out to me: “Long ago, at many times and in many ways…” This seemed to ring a little bell…
“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”
“Long ago, at many times and in many ways…”
Eureka!
One thing led to another, and I made this video as the final result!
As Paul would say: May grace, peace, and the Force be with you, in the name of the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
(…or something like that.)
What is ‘evil’?
Philosophers and theologians have asked this question for millennia. Augustine posited that if God is the creator of all things, then evil cannot be a “thing” as such, because that would implicate God as the creator of evil. For Augustine then, rather than evil being a polar opposite substance than good, evil is instead the complete absence of good. In the same way that darkness is nothing in itself but an absence of light, evil is nihil—ontological nothingness.
Scientific American has a piece looking at philosopher Selmer Bringsjord, who is working with a team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to develop an artificial intelligence—a computerized person—that represents pure evil.
Read the rest of my synopsis and thoughts on the experiment at the collaborative blog, dust and light.
I read an interesting article the other day, discussing the Creation Museum. It begins:
Driving into the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, the first thing we saw wasn’t biblical at all: two model dinosaurs guarding the front gates. In fact, there are dinosaurs everywhere. There’s a “dinosaur dig site”; you can get your photo taken with dinosaurs; a bumper sticker tells the world that the Museum is “Taking Dinosaurs Back.” My favorite, an orange, diamond-shaped “T-Rex crossing” sign, reminds us that according to the Museum, humans and dinosaurs used to interact.
The article offers an inside, critical look into the museum—both its features, but also its fatal flaws.
It’s a long article, but I found the detailed recounting of different exhibits and aesthetics very interesting. It’s definitely well worth the read, for a look into the overly-literal reading of Genesis 1-11.
My 2-year-old already knows the Bible better than I do.
Every night before bed, my wife and I read a couple stories to my daughter, Nev. First we read from her children’s Bible, then we pray, and finally we read one of her other storybooks.
The past couple of nights we’ve been reading about Elijah, and tonight we read about Elisha. After finishing the story, my daughter asked me, “Daddy, where’s shee-buh?”
Not knowing exactly what she was talking about, I started guessing. “Do you mean eee-lie-juh?”
She wrinkled her face. “No Daddy, shee-buh in duh Bible.” (She obviously knew that I didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.)
I guessed again: “Do you mean a zee-bra?” I began flipping through pages, and found an illustration of some (non-Zebra) horses.
She politely considered the pictures. “No Daddy, shee-buh.”
At a loss, I simply began thumbing through illustrations from the past handful of nights.
“Right der!” she exclaimed, pointing at a page.
Sure enough, right there riding on a camel was the Queen of Sheba, visiting with King Solomon. “Ohh, shee-buh.“
She smiled. “That’s right, Daddy!”
(I guess that’s what happens when her first year of life was spent at a Bible college!)
There were a couple of pieces in yesterday’s NYTimes that caught my eye, so I thought I’d pass them along. One is written by Barack Obama himself!
Believers Invest in the Gospel of Getting Rich
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Even in a downturn, preachers in the “prosperity gospel” movement are drawing sizable, adoring audiences.
The Gap Between Google and Rivals May Be Smaller Than You Think
By MIGUEL HELFT
The gap in search between Google and the combined Yahoo-Microsoft is, by some measures, not that large, suggesting Microsoft needs to improve Bing, not market it.
Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?
By CLIVE THOMPSON
A political scientist has become wealthy (and controversial) by forecasting for governments and corporations. So what’s his game?
Why We Need Health Care Reform
By BARACK OBAMA
In the end, health care reform isn’t about politics and fear. It’s about changing a system that often works better for the health-insurance companies than it does for millions of Americans.
They say that the human brain is like a sponge at a young age. And of course, this is the age that children begin to first learn language. So I figured, what better time than now to begin teaching my daughter ancient Greek!
Here is my daughter Nev, at age 2 years and 3 months, reciting the Greek alphabet:
The girl is a genius!
Richard Dawkins’s site has a scoop on Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and their Intelligent Design and Christian Apologetics classes taught by a William Dembski.
From the article:
[Their] website…outlines the rigorous academic standards [Quote-miners, please note: this is sarcasm] which William Dembski’s students have to achieve in his courses on Intelligent Design and Christian Apologetics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary:
http://www.designinference.com/teaching/teaching.htm
If you follow the links, you will see that it is full of gems: we won’t spoil them for you by flagging them all up, but – just to whet your appetite – you will notice that, at both undergrad and masters level, there are courses for which 20% of the final marks come from having made 10 posts defending ID on ‘hostile’ websites! This could explain a lot.
Some reflections on the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:
The Good:
(1) If a class is attempting to teach people how to critically engage with others who hold alternative views, it is actually commendable that it is built into the curriculum that students should have to engage in debate. What would we think of a “Public Speaking” class where students never had to deliver speeches?
(2) I have taken many classes where in-class participation makes up at least 10% of the final grade. I’ve also had numerous classes where online discussion-board participation constitutes a student’s “in-class” participation. It seems legitimate that an additional 10% (to make a total of 20%) would be warranted for outside-of-class participation, especially engaging in the core material of the class (debate).
The Bad:
Intelligent Design is likely not the bandwagon Christians should be jumping onto. Intelligent Design has much more in common with deism (a distant, uninterested God) than it does with Christian theism. At least Christian proponents of theistic evolution propose a creating God that is intimately involved in creation, from beginning to end.
The Ugly:
Dawkins also highlights on his site a couple questions taken from an exam on Christian Faith and Science:
Trace the connections between Darwinian evolution, eugenics, abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. Why are materialists so ready to embrace these as a package deal? What view of humanity and reality is required to resist them?
and,
You are the Templeton Foundation’s new program director and are charged with overseeing its programs and directing its funds. Sketch out a 20-year plan for defeating scientific materialism and the evolutionary worldview it has fostered if you had $50,000,000 per year in current value to do so. What sorts of programs would you institute? How would you spend the money?
Hmmm…
My dear old Japanese grandmother asked me the other day: What is ‘wisdom,’ according to the Bible?
Anyone have any thoughts to share?
(P.S. If you don’t have any, you’re not wise! Or something…)
Raymond A. Blacketer:
"The Young Calvin" by Oliver Crisp
The frequency with which Old Testament figures use mendacious means to achieve good and even holy ends presents a challenge to Jean Calvin’s exegesis of the Hebrew Scriptures. Following Augustine, Calvin takes a hard line against all forms of intentional deception. He rejects the solution offered by some in the Christian tradition that there are situations that call for a “dutiful lie” (mendacium officiosum).
This necessitates some exegetical acrobatics on Calvin’s part when he interprets texts in which liars are blessed, rewarded, and praised for their actions. Calvin does not, however, reject all forms of issimulation—all the more surprising given his opposition to the half-truths employed by the Nicodemites. While Calvin strives for a consistent ethic of veracity in his exegesis, however, there remains the question of how consistently truthful Calvin was in his own practices, particularly in his use of Renaissance flattery and pseudonyms.
Mike Whitenton runs a very excellent biblioblog. He has has posed the question:
Can one do authentic, intellectually honest, biblical scholarship and also hold to, say, a full-blown trinitarianism… even if one believes that the Bible doesn’t teach such a doctrine?
Among circles of biblical scholarship, it’s certainly a debated topic as to whether the Bible does in fact teach the Trinity.
Even if we assume that the Bible is not Trinitarian in its general teaching (which is debatable), a person can still hold to Trinitarianism. In fact, I would argue that it is more intellectually robust to hold to Trinitarianism even if the Bible doesn’t teach it.
So my answer is “Yes,” for two reasons:
1) A negative answer to the question incorrectly assumes the position of “sola scriptura.”
I am a Protestant. But in the Reformer’s zeal to throw out Papal infallibility (and more), Protestants have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. It is a distinctly Protestant position to pit the Bible over and against the Creeds, as if they are separate products from separate sources.
However, a more “authentic, intellectually honest” position would be to realize that rather than the Creeds being a product of the Bible, perhaps we have the picture upside down: Perhaps a better understanding is that the Bible is, in fact, a product of the Creeds.
Obviously I do not mean chronologically; the creeds came much later than the writings we now call scripture. However, the canon of scripture that we call “the Books” (“Ta biblia,“ the Bible) was not settled on until many centuries after the advent of Christianity. In fact, it is the very same church that penned the creeds that chose which writings should be collected into a kanon.
If the New Testament didn’t exist, how could Christianity? The standard was the Regula Fide, the “Rule of Faith.” This referred to the apostle’s teaching and tradition. This is also why we see so much emphasis in the New Testament on holding to proper doctrine, and casting aside false teachers and distorted gospels.
The Regula Fide was the standard to which the canon had to measure up to. It was on the basis of tradition as to whether or not a writing would be accepted as canon.
So by this understanding, the canonical “Biblia” is a representative collection of writings that faithfully reflects the regula fide. Augustine emphasized the helpfulness of critically reading non-canonical writings, in order to better understand the canonical.
Therefore, the selection of writings that now form the Bible should be considered a faithful witness to Christ and the teachings of the church; a means to an end, as it were, but not an end unto itself.
2) A negative answer to the question assumes a “verbal plenary” doctrine of the nature of inspiration of scripture.
Scripture is called theopneustos, “God-breathed.” But what does this mean?
Even though the canon only uses this word once (2 Timothy 3:16), the word is used more abundantly in the writings of the early Patristics. The canon was considered theopneustos, but interestingly, so were the writings outside of the canon. “God-breathed” was not synonymous with “canon,” and non-canonical works were still considered theopneustos.
Moreover, written sources were not the only things considered God-breathed. Some Patristics spoke authoritatively and considered themselves theopneustos, and ecclesiastical offices were considered inspired and authoritative.
In light of this, we can also deduce a more broad understanding of “inspiration” on the whole, and then similarly apply that to how we understand the “inspiration” of the canon.
This would lead us away from the “verbal plenary” doctrine of inspiration, which assumes that the very wording is inspired and authoritative, down to each word. Perhaps a better understanding is a broad notion of “authoritative.”
Therefore, if Paul has certain writings that appear non-Trinitarian, this does not mean that the “inspiration” should be understood as to necessitate this view. Combining point (1) above, Paul’s writings are representative of the regula fide (which is Trinitarian) and authoritative, but perhaps not down to the minutiae (verbal plenary).
In sum, can one be Trinitarian even if the Bible isn’t?
Should we discard the doctrine of the Trinity? No, because our canon is merely a selected reflection of the regula fide, which is Trinitarian, and because scripture is authoritative and “God-breathed,” but a comparitive study with contemporary literature doesn’t lead us to understand this down to a verbal plenary way.
(Now on a similar train of thought, why did the Reformers throw out so many books of the Bible that we had used for a millennium and a half?!)
Here is a list of Augustine’s Old Testament canon (393 CE):
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1-4 Kings (1-2 Samual, 1-2 Kings), 1-2 Chronicles, Job, Tobias, Esther, Judith, 1-2 Maccabees, 1-2 Ezra (Ezra-Nehemiah), Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel
Notably absent from the Protestant canon is Lamentations. (Augustine has the same New Testament canon as the present.)
This list was presented at the Council of Hippo (393 CE), and was affirmed at the Council of Carthage (397 CE).
In his book On Christian Doctrine, Augustine shares some thoughts on the scriptures and canon (II.8). It’s a fascinating look into the early church’s development of scripture and canon:
But let us now go back to consider the third step here mentioned, for it is about it that I have set myself to speak and reason as the Lord shall grant me wisdom. The most skillful interpreter of the sacred writings, then, will be he who in the first place has read them all and retained them in his knowledge, if not yet with full understanding, still with such knowledge as reading gives, — those of them, at least, that are called canonical.
For he will read the others with greater safety when built up in the belief of the truth, so that they will not take first possession of a weak mind, nor, cheating it with dangerous falsehoods and delusions, fill it with prejudices adverse to a sound understanding.
Now, in regard to the canonical Scriptures, he must follow the judgment of the greater number of catholic churches; and among these, of course, a high place must be given to such as have been thought worthy to be the seat of an apostle and to receive epistles.
Accordingly, among the canonical Scriptures he will judge according to the following standard: to prefer those that are received by all the catholic churches to those which some do not receive. Among those, again, which are not received by all, he will prefer such as have the sanction of the greater number and those of greater authority, to such as are held by the smaller number and those of less authority. If, however, he shall find that some books are held by the greater number of churches, and others by the churches of greater authority (though this is not a very likely thing to happen), I think that in such a case the authority on the two sides is to be looked upon as equal.
Now the whole canon of Scripture on which we say this judgment is to be exercised, is contained in the following books: — Five books of Moses, that is, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy; one book of Joshua the son of Nun; one of Judges; one short book called Ruth, which seems rather to belong to the beginning of Kings; next, four books of Kings, and two of Chronicles— these last not following one another, but running parallel, so to speak, and going over the same ground. The books now mentioned are history, which contains a connected narrative of the times, and follows the order of the events.
There are other books which seem to follow no regular order, and are connected neither with the order of the preceding books nor with one another, such as Job, and Tobias, and Esther, and Judith, and the two books of Maccabees, and the two of Ezra, which last look more like a sequel to the continuous regular history which terminates with the books of Kings and Chronicles.
Next are the Prophets, in which there is one book of the Psalms of David; and three books of Solomon, viz., Proverbs, Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes. For two books, one called Wisdom and the other Ecclesiasticus, are ascribed to Solomon from a certain resemblance of style, but the most likely opinion is that they were written by Jesus the son of Sirach. Still they are to be reckoned among the prophetical books, since they have attained recognition as being authoritative.
The remainder are the books which are strictly called the Prophets: twelve separate books of the prophets which are connected with one another, and having never been disjoined, are reckoned as one book; the names of these prophets are as follows: — Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi; then there are the four greater prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel. The authority of the Old Testament is contained within the limits of these forty-four books.
That of the New Testament, again, is contained within the following: — Four books of the Gospel, according to Matthew, according to Mark, according to Luke, according to John; fourteen epistles of the Apostle Paul — one to the Romans, two to the Corinthians, one to the Galatians, to the Ephesians, to the Philippians, two to the Thessalonians, one to the Colossians, two to Timothy, one to Titus, to Philemon, to the Hebrews: two of Peter; three of John; one of Jude; and one of James; one book of the Acts of the Apostles; and one of the Revelation of John.
Thoughts?
Get ready for commercial space flights:
“Sir Richard Branson was at the annual Experimental Aircraft Assoc Fly-in to show off EVE (previously known as White Knight Two), the launch vehicle for Virgin Galactic’s commercial space operation. Test flights for the vehicle are slated for next year, with the first paying passengers going up in 2011. A quote from the article: ‘So many people have signed up already, Whitehorn said, that the company has collected $40 million in deposits with orders to build five spaceships to meet the demand.’ Will this mean that the $200k price tag may be dropping?”
Within a mere 60 years of humanity’s first flight off the ground, we were flying in outer space. Only a few years after that, we were on the moon.
In case anyone missed it, last month we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. The most interesting story I read was that of Buzz Aldrin celebrating communion on the moon:
On Sunday July 20, 1969 the first people landed on the moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were in the lunar lander which touched down at 3:17 Eastern Standard Time.
Buzz Aldrin had with him the Reserved Sacrament. He radioed: “Houston, this is Eagle. This is the LM pilot speaking. I would like to request a few moments of silence. I would like to invite each person listening in, whoever or wherever he may be, to contemplate for a moment the events of the last few hours, and to give thanks in his own individual way.”
Later he wrote: “In the radio blackout, I opened the little plastic packages which contained the bread and the wine. I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine slowly curled and gracefully came up the side of the cup. Then I read the Scripture, ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit.’ I had intended to read my communion passage back to earth, but at the last minute Deke Slayton had requested that I not do this. NASA was already embroiled in a legal battle with Madelyn Murray O’Hare, the celebrated opponent of religion, over the Apollo 8 crew reading from Genesis while orbiting the moon at Christmas. I agreed reluctantly…Eagle’s metal body creaked. I ate the tiny Host and swallowed the wine. I gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquility. It was interesting for me to think: the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the very first food eaten there, were the communion elements.”
Here is a video of Armstrong first touching foot on the moon, and his now-famous line:
Now, civilians will be able to travel in space. What will we see in the next 50 years?
It seems like only a handful of days ago that I was added to the large index of blogs at the Biblioblog Top 50 site. Well, the stats are in, and where do I rank for July?
Ranked 55th, my first month in!! Only 5 spaces to climb to the top 50!
As you can see, I’ve already trounced Bill Mounce. Considering he’s a biggie in New Testament work, I will hand out autographs for anyone interested. (Bueller? Bueller?)
Mike Bird is only a few steps above me, so if I can take him down, I’ll be set.
But then again, statistics aren’t always what they seem…
From the New York Times:
America Hears a Gaffe, Russia Sees a Plot, Ellen Barry
AFTER Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal portraying Russia as a limping and humbled nation, many in Washington responded last week with a helpless shrug: There’s crazy Joe, they said, the guy who once told a wheelchair-bound state senator to stand up for a round of applause.
But in Russia, they weren’t shrugging. Within hours, a top Kremlin aide had released a barbed statement comparing Mr. Biden to Dick Cheney. Commentators announced Mr. Biden’s emergence as Washington’s new “gray cardinal” — the figure who, from the shadows, makes all the decisions that matter. Others said Washington’s mask had been torn off, revealing Mr. Obama’s “reset” as at best insubstantial and at worst duplicitous.
Relations with Russia are always pretty touchy. But when you’re the vice president—the second in command—wouldn’t you know better than to make off-the-cuff comments on diplomatic foreign relations?
SUSPICION: Russians noticed when Biden visited Georgia’s President, Mikheil Saakashvili, July 22, a year after the Russia-Georgia war.
American officials spent several days trying to convince their Russian counterparts that Mr. Biden’s words were, for lack of a better label, a gaffe. Russia’s highest officials have kept silent on the matter, but their initial responses were skeptical. “Biden has said this in such a way that the whole world heard it,” said Alexei K. Pushkov, who is the anchor of the current events show “Post-Scriptum.” [...]
Among the reasons for their skepticism: In today’s Russia, politicians just don’t run off at the mouth. Mr. Putin, now Russia’s prime minister, occasionally departs from statesmanlike language, as when he threatened to hang the Georgian president by his testicles or offered a French reporter an especially thorough circumcision. But coming from Mr. Putin, these statements are expressions of Russian might, something like a political philosophy — never, ever mistakes.
For anyone subordinate to the president to allow themselves that freedom is inconceivable, said Vladimir V. Pozner, the host of a talk show on state television. “If it’s not the No. 1 man or woman, clearly that person has been instructed to say what he or she said,” Mr. Pozner said. “It’s psychologically very difficult for a Russian to believe otherwise. If you write in The New York Times whatever you write, I’m sure Mr. Putin will say, ‘Of course. It was ordered.’ ”
It’s very interesting to get an inside look into the cultural differences between the U.S. and Russian political atmospheres. But if that wasn’t enough, just wait ’til you read this:
It will also be hard to convince the Kremlin that the comments don’t indicate a deeper drama. Russians have spent months searching for clues to Mr. Obama’s true intentions; when Mr. Obama killed a fly during a television interview shortly before traveling to Moscow, for example, several analysts here interpreted it as a message to Russia. [!!]
Mr. Biden has now supplied evidence for two plotlines — a deep rift within the administration, or a “sophisticated game,” said Andrei V. Ryabov, a political analyst at Moscow’s Carnegie Center. This ambiguity, he said, plays into the conviction of Mr. Putin and his team that real events take place far from view, among a handful of powerful individuals, and that public politics are “no more than puppetry, decoration in the theater.”
“Nothing accidental can happen in this system,” Mr. Ryabov said. “Everything has a hidden meaning.” Even accidental words from officials are likely to be read closely; as a Russian proverb has it, “What a sober man has on his mind, a drunk puts on his tongue.”
In our unfortunate case, it appears that Biden is always drunk.
It certainly makes one wonder: How in the world did Biden survive this long in the political system? But then, that only begs the followup question: What in the world is wrong with our political system that it’s possible for a person like Biden to even survive through it?!
Detail of a Thing and Deception
Enrique Martínez Celaya (1964 — )
96 x 84 inches
Oil on canvas, 1997
Here is a piece of modern art that invites the viewer into an allegorical reading:
- The Easter Rabbit is the secular equivalent of Jesus; what is its significance?
- What does it mean that the “thing” is broken, yet reassembled?
- Why is it veiled?
- Below the bunny are the words “Needed Proof.” Proof of what?
- What, then, is the significance of the title, “Detail of a Thing and Deception”?
You can find in-depth Christian commentary at the church and postmodern culture blog. The team there is doing a symposium chapter-by-chapter on the new book by Dan Siedell, God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art.
While watching Zondervan’s latest video on their tour with New Testament scholar Mike Bird, I had to briefly pause it. As fortune would have it, I paused on exactly this frame:
Fantastic.
After my previous post on Dawkins, my good friend sent me an article, highlighting some of the drivel Dawkins posted on his own blog’s comments section. Dawkins writes:
I think we should probably abandon the irremediably religious precisely because that is what they are – irremediable. I am more interested in the fence-sitters who haven’t really considered the question very long or very carefully. And I think that they are likely to be swayed by a display of naked contempt. Nobody likes to be laughed at. Nobody wants to be the butt of contempt.
You might say that two can play at that game. Suppose the religious start treating us with naked contempt, how would we like it? I think the answer is that there is a real asymmetry here. We have so much more to be contemptuous about! And we are so much better at it. We have scathingly witty spokesmen of the calibre of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Who have the faith-heads got, by comparison? Ann Coulter is about as good as it gets. We can’t lose!
If you can bear to listen to him, take, as an example of a typical faith-head trying to be contemptuous, David Bentley Hart, whose radio interview happened to be posted here at the same time as Jerry’s article.
Listen to the stumbling, droning inarticulacy, the abysmal lack of anything approaching wit or intelligence. Imagine this yammering fumblewit coming up against Christopher Hitchens, or Dan Dennett, or PZ Myers – doesn’t it make your mouth water? [...]
Maybe I’m wrong. I’m only thinking aloud, among friends. Is it gloves off time? Or should we continue to go along with the appeasers and be all nice and cuddly, like Eugenie and the National Academy?
I wonder if Dawkins realizes that he doesn’t get it and is just angry about it, or if he really is just this stupid. As the author of the article notes, “The really extraordinary thing is that it is is marketed under the banner of “science and reason” and that he supposes that displays of “naked contempt“ are the way to win over agnostics.” No kidding.
One commenter on the article had a excellent point: The fact that Dawkins even said “Nobody likes to be laughed at. Nobody wants to be the butt of contempt” is a bit of a revealing comment from Dawkins, who is on such a short fuse, himself!
What a clown.
From the Times Online:
Dawkins sets up kids’ camp to groom atheists
GIVE Richard Dawkins a child for a week’s summer camp and he will try to give you an atheist for life.
The author of The God Delusion is helping to launch Britain’s first summer retreat for non-believers, where children will have lessons in evolution and sing along to John Lennon’s Imagine.
The five-day camp in Somerset (motto: “It’s beyond belief”) is for children aged eight to 17 and will rival traditional faith-based breaks run by the Scouts and church groups.
Budding atheists will be given lessons to arm themselves in the ways of rational scepticism. There will be sessions in moral philosophy and evolutionary biology along with more conventional pursuits such as trekking and tug-of-war. There will also be a £10 prize for the child who can disprove the existence of the mythical unicorn.
Instead of singing Kumbiya and other campfire favourites, they will sit around the embers belting out “Imagine there’s no heaven . . . and no religion too”.
Dawkins, who is subsidising the camp, said it was designed to “encourage children to think for themselves, sceptically and rationally”. All 24 places at the retreat, which runs from July 27-31, have been taken.
Afternoons will be filled with familiar camp activities such as canoeing and swimming but the mornings will be spent debunking phenomena such as crop circles and telepathy.
This isn’t a bad idea. It only proves all the more Dawkins’s point wrong, that atheism is in fact a “religion,” in the epistemological sense. This does not train children to be critical thinkers—it only indoctrinates them with an alternative faith in which to interpret the world.
I can’t understand why someone as smart as Dawkins is as stupid as he is.
I finished the introduction to James K.A. Smith’s latest, The Devil Reads Derrida—and Other Essays on the University, the Church, Politics, and the Arts. In it, he offers a hypothesis as to why popular evangelicalism is so consumed with books from the likes of Joel Osteen, T.D. Jakes, and true Christian scholarship is so disconnected from the Christian public:
While one could cite other factors, I’m convinced that one significant reason for this disconnect and distance [between Christian scholars and the Christian public] has been a slow but steady isolation of the scholars from the broader Christian community [...] In a strange way, the scholars and the “laity” (so to speak) seemed to inhabit parallel worlds that rarely, if ever, intersected.
There are a couple of layers to this phenomenon. First, since the late 1970s and 1980s, Christian scholars have recognized the importance of breaking out of our Christian ghettoes and speaking to the academic mainstream. Rather than just being teachers at a Christian liberal arts college, there was a sense of obligation—even mission—that demanded much more energy and resources be devoted to making a mark on (“transforming!”) the academy as such. Thus Christian scholars at institutions such as my own [Calvin College] sought to move from the fringe to the center of their various guilds within the academy. This was undertaken both with a missional emphassis and with at least an implied desire to win respectability for Christian scholarship. And the campaign, one must conclude, has been remarkably successful, particularly in certain disciplines. But one of the prices to pay for such respectability was to adopt a staple stance of academic elitism: an allergic abhorrence for anything “popular,” especially popular writing. (One of the worst epithets that a scholar can come up with is to describe a colleague as a “popularizer.”)
The second layer is a direct result of the first: because all of their energy was devoted to making a impact on the narrower “public” of the academy, ad because the allergy to “popular” writing had seeped into their guild-influenced immune systems, Christian scholars made fewer appearances in the spaces inhabited by, well, “normal” Christians. More time spent at academic conferences meant less time available to speak to adult education classes; more time devoted to publication in specialized scholarly journals meant less time for (and less interest in) publishing in more popular and denominational magazines. And fears of being reduced to a “popularizer” fueled further distance of Christian scholars from the broader Christian community—including even rather proximate communities such as a college’s own (denominational) constituency. The result was the creation of a popular vacuum. And nature, we’re told, abhors a vacuum—they inevitably demand to be filled.
T.D. Jakes? No.
In the case that hits closest to home for me, as scholars at the denomination’s college devoted their intellectual energy to their various guilds, Christians within the denomination found themselves looking for wisdom and guidance where they could get it. The result is that they picked up what was available—in Christian bookstores, magazines, and perhaps most significantly, on Christian radio. And since Christian intellectuals had pretty much vacated these spaces, the result is that the Christian public began to nourish themselves with what I have to say is a largely unhealthy diet. The irony, for instance, was that the everyday Reformed community that built and sustained Calvin College was actually more influenced by an Arminian Nazarene like James Dobson than they were by the Reformed vision of our best intellectuals. Celebrity pastors, radio evangelists, and Christian talk radio hosts filled the vacuum that was left by the evacuation of Christian intellectuals from the popular spaces of the Christian community. This, I’m convinced, explains the deep disconnect [...]
It’s interesting, and certainly explains my frustration every time I walk into the Christian bookstore. I hadn’t realized that scholarly “popularizers” were so disdained though, as this is exactly one niché that I have commented to my wife that I would like to do work in!
And despite Jim West’s (and my own!) disdain for dilettantes in biblical studies and theology, perhaps the problem is of our own making—and we are our own worst enemy.
So, there I was just perusing my blog stats the other day, and I noticed that a couple people visited my blog from a link at the Biblioblog Top 50 site. Curious as to why a link to my site would be there, I dropped by for a gander, and what did I find? A post highlighting my blog! The snippet is worth commentary, so here it is below:
We have also added longtime blogger Aaron Rathburn (Theology and Culture) to The Complete List of Biblioblogs, because – although we cannot recall him blogging so much about biblical studies a while back – the man now has become positively obssessed with biblical studies. Which is a good thing.
Now that I am beginning to mingle more within the “biblioblogosphere,” I thought it suiting to introduce myself and my project a bit.
As has been observed, there is a deep rift dividing the guilds of theology and biblical studies. Our left hand doesn’t know what our right hand is doing—and this cuts both ways.
Biblical scholars are only all-too-aware of how far our theology is from the textual data. But on the flip-side, I also think that biblical scholars have largely drank the kool-aid of Modernity, and a lot of our scholarship is based off of faulty philosophical (and theological!) presuppositions. All of this ultimately trickles down to the faith of the Church.
In between my musings on philosophy, theology, and biblical studies, hopefully something worthwhile will come!
And because I have been blogging for quite a while now, I decided to give my blog a first-ever-facelift, to boot! This new template doesn’t like my “tag”-overkill on my posts though, so I’ll have to be a bit more modest.
(I’d like to say that Jim West’s recent comments on my blog would have driven his 6-trillion-readers here. But alas, perhaps the numbers aren’t what they seem.
My friend showed me this video the other night, which is absolutely hysterical. It’s a comedy sketch, juxtaposing postmodern new-age spirituality with a particularly hellfire brand of conservative Christianity.
I absolutely love the vicar’s monologue against their “half-assed musings on the divine” and “internet-assembled philosophy,” HA!
I think I’m just gonna go ahead and start doing this to people.
In recent days, the “Biblioblogosphere” has been alight with the “news” that the Codex Sinaiticus is “now online.”
As everyone that’s been a longtime follower of my blog here knows (Bueller? Bueller?), I frequently post noteworthy news headlines. So I’d just like to draw everyone’s attention to one important thing: I wrote about the Codex Sinaiticus being online an entire YEAR AGO!
I submit to the jury Evidence A: “Some great online textual resources…”
You see that date? That’s right. August 2008.
One word: Boomshakalaka.
I’m reading an excellent book at the moment, A High View of Scripture?: The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon, by Craig Allert.
From the introduction, Allert describes Louis Hodges’s assessment of two options for approaching biblical studies: inductive and deductive.
Rarely do evangelical doctrines of scripture take these [canon-formation] historical issues seriously, assuming that a “high view” of scripture starts with the doctrine of inspiration. Consider, for example, one recent summary of the state of an evangelical doctrine of scripture. Louis Hodges states, “The starting point for the evangelical view of scripture is the doctrine of inspiration.” According to Hodges, one issue that arises in forming a doctrine of scripture is the relationship between the divine and the human in the authorship of the Bible. He argues that the evangelical must affirm both. Hodges then claims that there are two methodologies one may adopt with regard to tensions between the dual authorship of scripture; that is, between the divine and human elements in scripture.
First, there is the inerrantist perspective, which works “deductively from the self-teaching of Scripture . . . as well as the attributes of its divine author, and interpret[s] the phenomena associated with human authorship in light of scripture’s own claims. This method begins with certain theological assumptions and arranges the human phenomena within that grid.” The other perspectives are those of the noninerrantists, who begin “with their exegetical and historical understanding of the phenomena and work inductively toward a view of the nature of scripture, even if it requires modifications of its self-teaching.” For Hodges, the choice one makes between these two mutually exclusive methodologies is of “momentous importance.” “Deductivists, who begin with the express claims of scripture, inevitably end with a ‘high view’ of its authority, and inductivists, who begin with the phenomena, conclude with a correspondingly lower view.”
This is a fairly typical example of evangelical approaches to bibliology. In it, a certain view of inspiration is argued as the “high view of Scripture” with the implication, often explicitly stated [as is by Hodges], that failure to hold this verbal plenary view of inspiration results in the propagation of a corresponding “low view of scripture.” Essentially what has happened is that the definition of a high view of scripture has simply become synonymous with the verbal plenary doctrine of scripture. [...]
The problem here is [...] that a high view of scripture has been usurped by verbal plenary theorists—the determination of what is “high” and what is “low” comes from them. The difference between a high and low view of scripture has been reduced to the difference between what the Bible says or teaches (“high” view), and what the Bible is or its phenomena are (“low” view). Yet surely what the Bible is has much importance for what the Bible says, and a “high view” needs to take this into consideration.
[...] I am not here denying the inspiration of the Bible, but rather I am arguing that we evangelicals have come close to deifying this collection of texts with little to no understanding of how they came to be collected into the Bible. Even when evangelical treatments of scripture cover the issue of canonicity, this near-deification of the Bible sets the agenda. [...] The very real and important work and judgment of the early church is glossed over in favor of God virtually forcing these documents on the church so that even the process of canonization is deified. (pp.10-12)
Allert proposes that he will “build an argument for an alternative to Hodges’s two mutually exclusive perspectives.”
Here is also a good footnote: “N.T. Wright argues that most evangelical approaches to biblical authority are actually ‘low’ because the Bible is not taken on its own merit. That is, the Bible is made into something that it is not.”
I think that the last sentence in the extended quote above is very important. This is the same logic that King-James-Onlyists employ for saying that their translation is divinely and authoritatively guided by God.
This book is so fascinating that I could not put it down last night, I just kept reading and reading! The implications of canon formation are so fundamental that it was like reading a riveting and action-packed suspense novel or something—I had to know what comes next! I don’t know if this is a testimony to the book’s epic levels of awesomeness, or my epic level’s of theological nerdiness. I would argue the former, my wife would argue the latter.
This evening, it was lightly sprinkling outside as my family and I pulled up into the driveway. After getting out of the car, my 2-year-old daughter Nev began excitedly playing and jumping around. “Daddy, I’m playing in the rain!”
Seeing an opportunity, I enthusiastically asked, “Who makes it rain?”
She thought for a moment, and shouted “Clouds!” with a big grin.
“Yes, the rain comes from the clouds, but who makes the rain come from the clouds?”
She thought again for a moment. “Noah!”
In contrast to my formal philosophical studies, I’m focusing most of my private study in the area of biblical studies at the moment. In particular, I am studying textual criticism, the formation of the canon, and its implications on our theological doctrine of scripture. (I’m still a theology student at heart, so don’t pop-quiz me on any of this textual scholarship stuff
Anyway, in my canonical studies, obviously one issue that has come up is the apocryphal books—or as is perhaps preferred, the deuterocanon. This includes such books as Maccabees, Sirach, etc. The Catholic and Orthodox churches still use these, and the Protestants have chopped ‘em out.
I can still remember back when I was even a teenager being pretty annoyed by this development. Why, I asked, did some Christians (the Reformers) think it was actually okay to just chop large swaths of the Bible out that had been used for 1,500 years?! And moreover, the New Testament authors (and early church) even preferred the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint, “LXX”), which included all of these books. What was the deal?!
I’ve stumbled across an interesting article published in the Orthodox Study Bible, titled “Who Decides? Unraveling the Mystery of the Old Testament Canon.” It’s an interesting read, but here are some selected highlights:
The LXX is based on a very different text of the Old Testament from the Masoretic text, on which modern English translations are based. For instance, in many places the wording is quite different, and the content of the books also differs—generally the LXX text is longer, but there are also interesting additions to the Masoretic text that are not found in the LXX. [...]
[The Standardization of a Jewish vs. Christian Old Testament]
Judaism was quite fluid at the time of Christ. There were seven distinct sects of the Jews in the early first century, according to Eusebius. The different sects accepted the authority of different collections of books (e.g., the Sadducees and Samaritans accepted only the five books of the Prophet Moses, the Torah), and there were often significant differences in the composition of the books they accepted in common. Sometimes the same sect might even make use of multiple text bases, or as scholars call them, text traditions. For example, the Dead Sea scrolls, containing the sacred texts of the Essene sect of Judaism, show evidence of the Masoretic, Samaritan, and LXX text bases.
However, with the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, an intense standardization process began. Only the Pharisee and the Samaritan sects of Judaism survived this process. The collection of Old Testament books into what eventually became the Masoretic text was begun by the Pharisees at the Council of Jamnia, somewhere between AD 80 and 100, but was not completed until the sixth century. During this period, The Wisdom of Sirach, which was eventually excluded from the Masoretic text, was sometimes included in the Jewish canon, while Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Esther, all of which eventually found a place in that text, were sometimes excluded.
The Pharisees wanted a standardized Hebrew text of the Old Testament partly because of the large number of Christian Jews. The older LXX version of the Old Testament contained many messianic passages that the Christians could use to convince Jews that Jesus was the Messiah. In fact, the early Christians charged that the Pharisees had deliberately truncated the canon to avoid messianic prophecy pointing toward Jesus Christ (see Justin Martyr, Trypho 71–73).
For instance, Isaiah 7:14 in the LXX says, “A virgin shall conceive and bear a son”—this clearly refers to the Virgin Birth of the Messiah. On the other hand, the Pharisees’ version of Isaiah found in the Masoretic text only mentions a “young woman.” Moreover, many of the wisdom texts from the Deuterocanonical books, particularly Sirach, were commonly used by the Church as catechetical reading for converts. It is not surprising that the Pharisees would want to exclude these “Church texts” from their official Hebrew version of the Old Testament.
Since the Jews had never set an exact limit on the number of books in the Old Testament, it was not inconsistent with their own faith for the Pharisees to limit the books they wanted to include in their revised Hebrew canon. Like the early Church, the Jews of Christ’s time were not united around a particular set of texts (beyond the Torah, that is). They were organized around a liturgical life in the temple and synagogue. For this liturgical life, they came to use texts in the services. However, the liturgical life preceded the production of the texts and formed their context. Historically, as the Jewish faith developed in the synagogues and in temple worship during the postexilic period (the four to five hundred years preceding the coming of Messiah), texts came to be used in worship (e.g., the Psalms) and teaching. As mentioned above, the exact collection of texts varied depending on the sect.
However, with the loss of their center in Jerusalem and of unified temple worship (after AD 70), preserving the Jewish faith required greater standardization. The Jews could no longer afford divisions if they were to survive as a people. Thus, they needed a collection of unproblematic texts to use in their now dispersed population and synagogue-only worship. They needed to eliminate the use within their communities of texts useful to those whom they considered heretics (e.g., Christians, Gnostics, and Hellenizers). Particularly, they did not want to use in their services texts that the Christians could use to demonstrate that Jesus Christ is the Messiah promised by the Prophets of the Old Testament. The canon, or list of accepted texts, that the Jews produced as their standard is significantly shorter than the LXX and came to be known as the Masoretic text.
Interesting. Skipping a down a bit, the article later moves on to the very question of the Protestant Reformers:
[The Truncating of the Protestant Canon]
Most Bibles that are available in North America today are published by Protestants; consequently, the Old Testaments in these Bibles are translations based on the Jewish Masoretic text and omit the Deutero-canonical books. The historical reasons for this appear almost accidental, and most English-speaking Christians are unaware of them.
The Protestant Reformers’ emphasis on original languages (coming out of their Renaissance heritage [Humanism]) led most of the Reformers to insist on using the Old Testament canon available to them in Hebrew, which had become standard among the Jews (the Masoretic text). During the late Middle Ages, the Germans and Englishmen who began to translate the Bible into “the language of the people” were ignorant of the importance of the LXX (or in some cases even completely ignorant of its existence). They assumed that the Hebrew Masoretic text used by the European Jews of their day was more authentic than the Latin Vulgate, which in their mind was tainted by its association with the Latin Church based in Rome.
Although modern English translations of the Old Testament take into consideration the LXX and other text traditions, they have continued to rely principally on the Masoretic tradition. This has led to the sometimes embarrassing situation of an English Bible in which the New Testament quotations of the Old Testament are very different from the supposed “original” found in the Old Testament translation included in the same Bible.
[...] Until the mid-nineteenth century, most Protestants accepted the Deuterocanonical books as inspired in at least some limited sense. For example, the original version of the King James Bible, the most popular version of the Bible in English, included most of the Deuterocanonical books. And for many years in England, it was even illegal to publish a Bible without these books.
They continued to be included in almost all Protestant versions of the Bible until the missionary movement of the first part of the nineteenth century. In order to save on shipping costs, missionary Bible societies began publishing partial Bibles (New Testaments, Gospels, etc.). Converts and religious movements that were born out of this missionary movement came to believe that the thirty-nine books in the truncated, missionary-society–produced Old Testaments were the only “true” books of the Old Testament.
Isn’t that interesting? Be sure and check out the article [LINK], and post your thoughts/comments here.
I had the opportunity to order a couple new books last night, so here is what I picked up. I’ll just paste the synopses from Amazon beside each book.
The Hauerwas Reader, Stanley Hauerwas
Stanley Hauerwas is one of the most widely read and oft-cited theologians writing today. A prolific lecturer and author, he has been at the forefront of key developments in contemporary theology, ranging from narrative theology to the “recovery of virtue.” Yet despite his prominence and the esteem reserved for his thought, his work has never before been collected in a single volume that provides a sense of the totality of his vision.
The editors of The Hauerwas Reader, therefore, have compiled and edited a volume that represents all the different periods and phases of Hauerwas’s work. Highlighting both his constructive goals and penchant for polemic, the collection reflects the enormous variety of subjects he has engaged, the different genres in which he has written, and the diverse audiences he has addressed. It offers Hauerwas on ethics, virtue, medicine, and suffering; on euthanasia, abortion, and sexuality; and on war in relation to Catholic and Protestant thought. His essays on the role of religion in liberal democracies, the place of the family in capitalist societies, the inseparability of Christianity and Judaism, and on many other topics are included as well.
Perhaps more than any other author writing on religious topics today, Hauerwas speaks across lines of religious traditions, appealing to Methodists, Jews, Anabaptists or Mennonites, Catholics, Episcopalians, and others.
After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Alasdair MacIntyre
In this classic work, Alasdair MacIntyre examines the historical and conceptual roots of the idea of virtue, diagnoses the reasons for its absence in personal and public life, and offers a tentative proposal for its recovery. While the individual chapters are wide-ranging, once pieced together they comprise a penetrating and focused argument about the price of modernity. In the Third Edition prologue, MacIntyre revisits the central theses of the book and concludes that although he has learned a great deal and has supplemented and refined his theses and arguments in other works, he has “as yet found no reason for abandoning the major contentions” of this book. He remains “committed to the thesis that it is only from the standpoint of a very different tradition, one whose beliefs and presuppositions were articulated in their classical form by Aristotle, that we can understand both the genesis and the predicament of moral modernity.”
The Devil Reads Derrida—And Other Essays on the University, the Church, Politics, and the Arts, James K.A. Smith
(No blurb on Amazon, so this is from the ChurchAndPoMoCulture blog)
It brings together some of Smith’s most significant forays into the public arena, focusing especially on discipleship, the university, and politics and the church. It also provides a selection of his criticism, including essays on Harry Potter, A History of Violence, the poetry of Franz Wright.
How to Read the [Hebrew] Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now, James L. Kugel
Kugel’s tour de force of biblical scholarship juxtaposes two different ways of reading the Bible: the ancient biblical interpretations, ranging from the Book of Jubilees to Augustine, that he explored in The Bible as It Was, and the modern historical approach that challenges the historical veracity of scripture and seeks instead to find its writers’ original sources and purposes. It can be a jarring journey for those schooled in traditional views, but what emerges is a fresh, even strange, and very rich view of everything from the Garden of Eden to Isaiah’s dream vision of God. Refreshingly undogmatic and often witty, Kugel brings an intimate knowledge of the Hebrew Bible to illuminate small points as well as large. He discusses who the ancient Israelites were; the resemblances between YHWH and Canaanite gods; the unique role of the prophet in Ancient Near Eastern religions; the nature of ancient wisdom literature; and what the Bible means when it calls Solomon the wisest of men. The result is a stunning narrative of the evolution of ancient Israel, of its God and of the entire Hebrew Bible, contrasted with ancient interpretations that aimed to uncover hidden meanings and moral lessons. So, for example, for the ancients, the story of Cain and Abel is a tale of good versus evil. For the moderns, it was originally a story of origin, about the relation between ancient Israelites and the fierce Kenites to their south. While Kugel is a traditional Jew, he sees the modern approach as compelling, so the dilemma is whether a person of faith can read scripture in both the old way and the new. Drawing on Judaism’s nonfundamentalist approach, Kugel’s proposed answer is that the original purpose of the texts and their lack of historical accuracy matters less than their underlying message: to serve God.
What do the Little Mermaid, postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida, and the Bible all have in common?
Mix them together, and you have a recipe for my latest writeup at the collaborative blog, Dust and Light. The post opens thus:
Mark Twain made famous the old quip, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” The point of the idiom is that even such supposedly “brute facts” as statistics can be interpreted to have multiple meanings.
As a tribute to Twain (and as a clever excuse to squeeze profanity into a blog title!), I named the article, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Hermeneutics: A Postmodern Take on Biblical Historiography.”
In essence, the post has four short parts:
(1) Modernity: Historiography according to the tenets of the Enlightenment
(2) Post-Modernity: Derrida’s critique of Modernity, and emphasis on interpretation
(3) Pre-Modernity: Historiography in the Bible and ancient Near East
(4) Application: How we should understand biblical historiography and interpretation
Come drop by the site and chime in with your thoughts! [LINK]
This is awesome.
I have to say that I am guilty of this scenario on more than one occasion. Sorry, wife!
Also check out the “Demotivation Poster” on blogging [LINK].
(HT: James McGrath)
I’ve always been a big reader. When I was a kid, my favorite genre of books to read was fantasy. But at about age 9, one particular type of book was especially irresistible to me: the choose-your-own-adventure. These were the stories where after reading about the hero’s latest predicament, you had a choice between two different page numbers to turn to, based on how you wanted the story to unfold. Turn to page 36 if you want to escape down into the troll’s cave, or to page 83 if you want to feign death. The protagonist’s fate was in your hands.
As a result of this compulsion for life-threatening decision-making, these books were the entire gamut of my 5th-grade reading diet. All the books came from my elementary school’s public library, but loaning the books wasn’t enough, of course. I had to own them. They had to be mine.
So, I stole them. Once a week or so, our class would venture to the library, to check out books. I would scour the shelves for the familiar-looking covers, then scurry to a table to begin the adventure. When it was time to leave the library, I would simply hold the book along with my other schoolbooks, as if I had checked it out like all the other students. “Hide in plain sight,” as they say!
This confession was prompted by an excellent post by Ben Myers, cataloging the history of book stealing, from basically the dawn of time. There are some excellent quotes peppered throughout, and it is an enjoyable read! Be sure and drop by for a look [LINK].
(The image here, for anyone that doesn’t know, is a parady image of the classic covers of the books. The title is poking fun at the fact that your decisions in the books frequently resulted in unexpected death!)
Remember when Google used to be that friendly, lovable startup?
The cuddly logo is reminiscent of childhood crayons, punctuated with an excited exclamation point (now removed).
I still remember the first time I used Google, nearly 10 years ago. Whenever Google would launch a new product/service, I would be an immediate early adopter and fervent zealot to convert the masses. They were the perfect remedy to the evil Microsoft monolithic empire that had dominated everything for years.
And the very best part? Google’s official motto: “Don’t be evil.”
However, this lovable nature of Google has caused it to grow aggressively. Very aggressively. And the more influence, control, and power that Google garners, the more the lines of “evil” have become blurred.
For example, in order for Google to compete in China, it has bowed to the communist government to censor search results, and not allow terms such as “democracy” to display proper organic results. The Chinese people will see only what the Chinese government wants them to see. And Google, with all of of its clout, rather than fighting for Chinese freedom, has instead pledged its allegiance to the almighty dollar.
The other day, I read this headline: “YouTube Removes New Undercover Student Video of Planned Parenthood without Explanation”
YouTube, of course, is owned by Google. Read these excerpts from the article:
Without offering any specific explanation, the video-sharing site YouTube [owned by Google] has removed a new video by the student group “Live Action” that shows dishonest counseling practices at Planned Parenthood. The video first plays undercover footage of a Planned Parenthood counselor from Tucson, AZ telling a patient that images of aborted fetuses “are not real” and then shows photographs of a completed abortion and documentation of their authenticity.
Lila Rose, 20-year-old president of Live Action, calls on YouTube to re-instate the video in accordance with its own guidelines: “Since the video we posted does not violate any terms of use, we expect YouTube to re-instate it immediately.” [...] YouTube has removed videos posted by Live Action without explanation before, including videos showing Planned Parenthood employees caught on tape sympathizing with donors with racist agendas to encourage the abortion of black babies. [...]
The most recent video [...] documents abusive practices in Planned Parenthood clinics across the nation. Footage released to date has caught on hidden camera six Planned Parenthood clinics in three states ignoring their mandatory reporting responsibilities for statutory rape and protecting adult-child sexual relationships. Recently the Tennessee State Legislature used undercover footage from Live Action to help divert nearly $1 million in taxpayer subsidies from Planned Parenthood clinics, and in California, the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted to end a nearly $300,000 contract with the abortion provider.
And Google is censoring these videos? “Don’t be evil”?
I used to like Google. But the China stuff, the corporate (financial) opposition to the California Proposition 8, the huge privacy concerns, and now this, have all gradually shifted my perspective on this once-lovable company.
Now, Google is coming under scrutiny for crossing the line into becoming an anti-competitive monopoly—exactly like Microsoft of yesteryear. And Google’s response, as of just days ago? NYT: “Google Makes a Case That It Isn’t So Big.”
Not so big? Give me a break.
So much for not being evil. It’s probably time for Google to amend it’s motto.
In the meantime, maybe I’ll switch to Microsoft’s Bing. (How’s that for ironic.)
Obama announced Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee for the next seat in the Supreme Court—a Puerto Rican racial activist for affirmative action (read: reverse racism).
When he made the announcement, I pointed out that Sotomayor is involved in a controversial case involving race, which was being re-evaluated by the Supreme Court itself. Here was the summary:
As part of a panel, [Sotomayor] voted to uphold New Haven’s decision to throw out a set of fire department promotion tests, because no minority candidates made the top of the list. White firefighters who scored high but were denied promotion are appealing that ruling.
Well, the headlines just hit the press:
New York Times: “Justices Rule for White Firefighters in Bias Case”
The Supreme Court has ruled that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.
Ouch!
How ironic that right when Sotomayor is maneuvering to get on the Supreme Court, the very court itself ruled against her decision-making on these racial issues.
Although, I don’t know what is more disturbing: the fact that Sotomayor is actually being considered for the high court, or the fact that her decision was only overturned in a 5-4 ruling!! From the Associated Press:
“Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer’s reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions,” Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his opinion for the court. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the white firefighters “understandably attract this court’s sympathy. But they had no vested right to promotion. Nor have other persons received promotions in preference to them.”
Justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter and John Paul Stevens signed onto Ginsburg’s dissent, which she read aloud in court Monday.
Maybe Sotomayor is exactly the type of material that half of the court is filled with, after all.
(Is it noteworthy that the headline didn’t instead read, “Sotomayor Overturned by Supreme Court”?)
Okay. So, I’ve thought about this in the past, but I just saw a photo and it brought it to my attention once again.
Doesn’t Tim Keller look EXACTLY like Patrick Stewart—i.e., Jean-Luc Picard?!?!
As you can see from this screenshot I took—(from episode 23 in season 4 of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” when the Klingons took over the U.S.S. Enterprise to set a trap for the Borg)—Tim Keller looks a spitting image of the good captain himself.
I predict that with the new release of J.J. Abrams’s latest Star Trek film, the attendance at Keller’s church will surely have a sharp influx of Trekkies. (Although, it’s unlikely to draw in the Trekkers, which is a slightly different demographic.)
My name is Aaron Rathburn. I am a senior in philosophy at Calvin College, and formerly studied at Trinity School of Theology (Wales, UK). I am a husband, and father of two. This site is a collection of musings on theology, culture, and more. 
