Interesting! What People at My Alma Mater Are Reading!
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Books on February 8, 2010
Ripping Off Moisés Silva
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Dissertation, Exegesis, Humor, NTScholarship on February 6, 2010
I’m stealing brazenly from Moisés Silva (see my previous post quoting him at length), but perhaps this post may still amuse and inform you. Silva provides the set-up, I the made-up text and exegesis. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Silva: "It is approximately the year 2790. The most powerful nation on earth occupies a large territory in Central Africa, and its citizens speak Swahili. The United States and other English-speaking countries have long ceased to exist, and much of the literature prior to 2012 (the year of the Great Conflagration) is not extant. Some archaeologists digging in the western regions of North America discover a short but well-preserved text that can confidently be dated to the last quarter of the twentieth century. It reads thus:"
mlwj: Because of my interest in all forms of dance—I worship Martha Graham and Mikhail ….shnikov—I decided to take a course in aesthetics. I hoped that my new class wouldn’t burden me too heavily with responsibilities, because my daily peace was already being disturbed by incessant cries from my colicky baby. I loved the textbook and the lectures, and I deployed all my best writing tricks to produce papers that would impress my professor.
Silva again: "The archaeologists know just enough English to realize that this fragment is a major literary find that deserves closer inspection, so they rush the piece to one of the finest philologists in their home country. This scholar dedicates his next sabbatical to a thorough study of the text and decides to publish an exegetical commentary on it, as follows:"
Mlwj:
• This small piece, probably part of a ritual (note the word "worship" in a place of prominence in the very first line), is a fascinating example of 20th century American religious prose. The writer is afraid of having a heavy burden, probably of sin (notice the threat to her "peace"), by entering a new social "class," namely the "aesthetic" class. This was a group of writers, musicians, artists, dancers (as here), and general aesthetes who valued visual and aural beauty religiously. Scholars now generally regard them as a separate religion within American culture. Babies apparently played some unknown role in that class.
• The text is slightly damaged after the word "Mikhail," but the remaining letters likely were part of the word "Kalashnikov," a type of military fire-arm very popular in that day (notice the clever use of the military term "deployed" later in the piece).
• "Cries" denotes anguish, but not emotional anguish, for King Lear in Shakespeare’s play of that name is said to have "cried out loudly to find out if anyone was at home."
• "Love," too was a beloved 20th century concept. Literally dozens of so-called "love songs" were written during that period, and love was broadly considered the highest virtue. A large cache of ballpoint pens bearing the phrase "Love is a Choice" were recently found in what was once the city of Colorado Springs—with the name "Gary Smalley," a religious preacher, beneath. For the writer to say that he or she "loved" her textbook and lectures shows again the religious devotion she chose to have toward the Aesthetic Class.
• "Produce" is a term used in all sorts of places, but pre-eminently the grocery store, where it denoted a specific set of food items which were "produced" (led or brought forth, from the Latin pro- [forward] + ducere [to lead]) directly from the ground rather than processed. This is probably what the writer has in mind here: she did not use a "paper mill" to write her assignments but did them herself.
• An interesting consonance and assonance develops toward the end of the piece: "impress my professor." This writer had a masterful command of her language.
Romans 12:3–21
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Exegesis, Piety on February 5, 2010
My good pastor has been urging his congregation with more heart even than usual to read their Bibles this year. As part of his exhortation to do that, he gave some practical examples from his own Bible reading of what he does to study. I think that was an excellent idea because I, for one, struggled for a long time to know just what to do during my Bible-reading times. I wish I could say those struggles are all over.
What I can say is that I have discovered a few little methods which really do help me. Methods aren’t saviors; they can even be slavers, pushing me in unhelpful directions. But you’re going to have some method for study, so you might as well pick a good one.
For what it is worth (in fact, take that phrase as a preface to every one of my blog posts), here is what I often do. I ask BibleWorks (Ctrl+Shift+B) or Logos (Ctrl+Alt+B) to copy a passage into Microsoft Word for me. You could use esv.org, too. That’s a nice site.
Then I strip out all of the numbers (esv.org can actually do that for you; it’s under “Options”). Find ^# and replace it with nothing; then replace double spaces with single ones—that should do it.
I’m left with a block of text that looks like this:
Then I start reading through the passage, hitting Enter after every major phrase or thought I see. I go fast, trying to keep the flow going in my mind. I hit Enter, and then I often hit Tab in order to subordinate one line to another. Later I might go through and try to think about those subordinate relationships (is this a grounds, a contrast?), but I don’t worry about that too much right off. I want to know the overall flow.
Below is what I did today while studying Romans 12. It certainly calls for refinement, and that refinement will cause me to ask yet more questions I wouldn’t otherwise. It helps me follow the thought flow. It helps me study.
This works mainly for epistolary literature and perhaps Jesus’ longer discourses in the Gospels.
For What It’s Worth.
“Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love,” Romans 12:10.
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Exegesis, NTScholarship on February 5, 2010
Leon Morris makes an interesting note on φιλόστοργοι (philostorgoi—a combination of φίλος [philos] and στοργή [storge]) in Romans 12:10:
KJV has “Be kindly affectioned”, where “kindly” is used in its original sense, “referring to kin.”
—The Epistle to the Romans, Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 445.
If he’s right, I can add one more to the list of verses I never understood in the KJV because of the changes English has undergone in the last 400 years. I suspect that few people outside English philologists understood it either.
To be perfectly fair, I’m not sure that the OED supports Morris’s reading, but his argument still seems likely to be true since στοργή (storge) refers to a love for one’s kin, something that the KJV would otherwise not be reflecting.
A Good Warning for Bloggers and Dissertation Writers
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Books, Dissertation, Piety, Theology on February 1, 2010
John Frame in “Machen’s Warrior Children,” regarding theological polemics in his community (and, let’s face it, ours):
Overall, the quality of thought displayed in these polemics has not been a credit to the Reformed tradition. Writers have gone to great lengths to read their opponents’ words and motivations in the worst possible sense (often worse than possible) and to present their own ideas as virtually perfect, rightly motivated and leaving no room for doubt. Such presentations are scarcely credible to anybody who looks at the debates with minimal objectivity.
Writing a dissertation presents many temptations to misrepresent one’s opponents. But, as Alan Jacobs has pointed out in his A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love, loving my neighbor as myself means working to understand him in the best light.
Jacobs opens his work with a description of a scene from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Don John has made it appear that Hero, who is to be married the next day to Claudio, is a fornicator. Jacobs comments:
Only Hero and Don John (the innocent victim and the villain) actually know that the charge of fornication is false.
Or do they alone know? That depends on what counts as knowledge. The first to speak on Hero’s behalf—after her own father, Leonato, has accepted the charges against her (“Would the two princes lie, and Claudio lie?” [l. 153]—is the Friar who was to officiate at the ceremony:
Hear me a little:
For I have only been silent so long,
And given way unto this course of fortune,
By noting of the lady. I have mark’d
A thousand blushing apparitions
To start into her face, a thousand innocent shames
In angel whiteness beat away those blushes,
And in her eye there hath appeared a fire
To burn the errors that these princes hold
Against her maiden truth. Call me a fool;
Trust not my reading nor my observations,
Which with experimental seal doth warrant
The tenure of my book ; trust not my age,
My reverence, calling, nor divinity,
If this sweet lady lie not guiltless here
Under some biting error. (ll. 155–169)It should register with us that the Friar lays no claim to some intuited gnosis or supernatural revelation divorced from the realm of the senses. Like Claudio and Don Pedro, he derives his judgment from what he sees, and he sees what they do: Claudio, as noted, has spoken of Hero’s blushes, but has interpreted them differently. And what the Friar calls attention to here is precisely the importance of interpreting the sensory phenomena correctly, and, moreover, the need for the interpreter to possess certain virtues in order to ‘read’ Hero’s blushes as they should be read—which is to say, in accordance with the truth of the situation and of her character.” 3–4
Jacobs points out that Beatrice is also certain of her friend’s innocence, but not for the same reasons as the friar. It is her “intimate personal knowledge of Hero” which makes her sure that Hero is blameless. 5
Benedick, for his part, trusts Claudio’s character and Beatrice’s. He eventually sides with Beatrice and the Friar. He “comes to share their conviction by acknowledging their claims to interpretive and moral discernment.” 8
“This scene from Much Ado About Nothing provides,” Jacobs says, “a remarkably comprehensive outline of a hermeneutics of love.” 8
So love believes the best, and love provides knowledge that empiricism misses. A high standard!
Frame Summarizes Van Til
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Mission, Theology on January 30, 2010
I really do not have a very good understanding of the Van Til/Clark debates or the Frame/Ligonier debates, but I hope to grow in that understanding. These are all serious men worth taking seriously.
For what it’s worth, here’s how Frame summarizes Van Til’s apologetic:
Van Til’s apologetics is essentially simple, however complicated its elaborations. It makes two basic assertions: (1) that human beings are obligated to presuppose God in all of their thinking, and (2) that unbelievers resist this obligation in every aspect of thought and life. (Westminster Theological Journal Volume 47, 1985: 282)
One thing I can say is that it has been incredibly useful to me in my work on What in the World! to recognize that everyone has presuppositions. That’s why, for example, people today are so quick to find evolutionary explanations for human behavior. Any questions they face—say, the reason for the existence of religion—are fed through the grid of their evolutionary presuppositions. It’s no surprise that out comes evolutionary explanations (e.g., “Religion evolved as a social mechanism for curtailing behavior detrimental to the group”).
I have presuppositions, too, but at least I admit it.
Star Trek and Richard Dawkins
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Culture, Theology on January 29, 2010
It was a beautiful fall day for a seven-year-old kid to be playing outside, but when I came back into the house my dad was watching people in weird pajamas striding around on a spaceship. That was 1990, I believe, and my first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. My dad and I immediately loved it, and we regularly watched the show together for the next several years. I was a particular fan of Commander Data. (Interestingly, I was fascinated with his quest for emotions, and now I’m writing a dissertation on emotions in the New Testament.) I even learned lifelong leadership lessons from Captain Picard.
Why did two conservatives like what is supposed to be a thinly disguised leftist polemic? It wasn’t just the explosions and Klingon fights. It was the transposition of today’s issues into interesting circumstances in our distant tomorrow. Issues of race, sex, class, culture, and religion were taken out of their 20th century light and placed in a 24th century light (OLEDs, I would guess).
The explosions and Klingon fights were also nice.
I recently succumbed to my curiosity to see a few episodes after a decade’s hiatus, and my wife and I picked up two Star Trek DVDs from the library. The early 1990s production values faded quickly out of view as we both got into the stories and characters.
My wife and I watched an episode called “The Chase,” in which Cardassians, Klingons, Romulans, and humans all converge on a remote planet to put together the last piece of an intergalactic archaeological puzzle. Some think they’ll find an incredible weapon. Others are sure it’s a massive power source. No one wants anyone else to get whatever it is. As they all squabble, Dr. Crusher secretly finds what they’re all looking for, and a holographic image suddenly appears before the assembled races. It’s a 4-billion-year-old recorded message from an alien humanoid who explains to her surprised guests that her race had “seeded” life on all of their planets—in fact, on many planets throughout the Alpha Quadrant. Her race, she explained, had evolved to a high level and decided to preserve their memory by this means. There’s more linking Klingons and Cardassians than either would care to admit.
The Global Village Atheist
And that’s where Richard Dawkins came in. The climactic scene of “The Chase” brought Dawkins’ conversation with Ben Stein in Expelled to mind. It wasn’t quite fair of Stein, perhaps, but Dawkins was led to believe he was talking to a sympathetic ear. All the same, he said what he said:
BEN STEIN: How did [life] get created?
RICHARD DAWKINS: By a very slow process.
STEIN: Well, how did it start?
DAWKINS: Nobody knows how it got started. We know the kind of event that it must have been. We know the sort of event that must have happened for the origin of life.
STEIN: And what was that?
DAWKINS: It was the origin of the first self-replicating molecule.
STEIN: Right, and how did that happen?
DAWKINS: I told you, we don’t know.
. . .
STEIN: What do you think is the possibility that Intelligent Design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics or in Darwinian evolution?
DAWKINS: Well, it could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved, probably by some kind of Darwinian means, probably to a very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Um, now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.
. . .
And that Designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence would itself have had to have come about by some explicable, or ultimately explicable process. It couldn’t have just jumped into existence spontaneously. That’s the point.
The Point of This Post
There are two remarkable similarities between the Star Trek episode and the infamous global village atheist. Both are 1) willing to posit the existence of an intelligent designer behind evolution as long as it’s not God. And both 2) make sure to mention that this designer has to itself have evolved by naturalistic processes.
Everyone’s a fundamentalist. Everyone has presuppositions. Everyone believes some things he can’t prove except by appeal to his basic beliefs.
Love Your Neighborhood as Yourself
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in ChurchLife, Mission on January 28, 2010
At the turn of each new year, our whole church gathers together for Sunday School for several weeks. It’s a chance to touch special topics that the pastoral staff and elders want everyone to hear about. One of those is the set of outreach ministries we have to the neighborhoods surrounding our church. I was asked to provide a bird’s-eye view of our evangelism ministries by telling the story of my own personal history with them. Others’ names and details have been changed or removed.
I came Mount Calvary Baptist Church during my freshman year—in Romans 16 in 1997, and I joined not too long afterwards. I had never heard expository preaching in my life, but it immediately arrested me and I had to hear more. I started doing Awanas here my sophomore year, but I didn’t take part in any of our evangelism ministries until January of 2001 when the Church Internship Program required me to go out street witnessing in downtown Greenville.
It was God’s way of moving me along in many areas. I began to really enjoy reaching out and just talking with people. I made it a goal to have real conversations if at all possible, though I also handed out tracts to those who wouldn’t speak with me. I kept a list of everyone I spoke to in order to pray for them and try to remember the lessons I learned from our conversations. I always came away invigorated spiritually. I especially remember one man whose words were a real encouragement from the Lord: He said, "If someone is going to speak to me about stuff like this, I like the way you are doing it." The love God gave us as a church for these lost people had shined through to this man. Very few people were hostile.
After getting a taste of reaching out along with my fellow church members, I wanted to continue, and in 2001 one of my friends invited me to a new church Bible Club, held right over there in Century Oaks apartment complex. This is where I first really got to know people from our church’s mission field.
Among many other kids I got to know, there was our little drama queen, Milly, and Stephana, and Lauren. In fact, a picture I have of those girls (and one more whose name I can’t remember who wasn’t a regular attender) became the basis of our current Bible Club logo. Milly and Stephana would not like it, but they had to be boys in the picture for things to be fair (two boys and two girls). That logo is now on our club T-shirts, and, interestingly, my job of printing the T-shirts is how I met some of my and my wif’e’s best friends in the world—a couple who are now members at our church (the husband was a screen printer at the time).
Focus on the one little girl in the front of the group. Her name is Lauren, she was 4, and her dad’s name is Allen. One Saturday morning no other leaders could make it and it was raining, so I took some cookies made by a church teen around to some of our regulars. I had one left, and I stopped by Lauren’s house at 208 Martel St. No one came to the door, but I looked across the street to 209 and I saw a Mexican boy playing a GameBoy on the porch.
That’s how I met Angel and his family, who pulled up in the driveway in a few minutes. I invited them out to Bible club, and they came, but it was clear they were too old for a kids Bible club!
Providentially, that’s just when our church’s Teen Club was starting up on Friday nights in 2002, so I took them there. That began what is now an eight-year relationship with this family. Some of them even attend our Released Time ministry now.
And this is the focus of my testimony. The Lord used my relationship with these boys to open my eyes to a number of things. For the first time in my life, I had an ongoing ministry to lost people that I could really talk to. And we talked a lot, especially Mateo and me. He asked great questions. We had a lot of fun and a lot of good chats. I really loved these boys, and to tell you the truth, that love came pretty unexpectedly. I hadn’t felt it at all like that before in ministry.
But the sobering truth is that none of these boys seem to have come to Christ. They all heard the gospel dozens if not hundreds of times. I explained and urged over and over. And they listened. Pedro even came to church here and was impressed by the ushers because they looked like soldiers… The boys came to special events with me, visited my dorm room, and hiked Paris Mountain with me. One of my good friends became close to Angel and he had similar experiences. I learned that I must faithfully sow the message and water it, despite seeing no fruit, and that real ministry usually takes time. I learned that kids will improve their behavior radically out of love for a male authority figure but not out of love for God—and that I had to make that fact clear to them so they wouldn’t think they were fine with God because they pleased me.
Fast forward a few years. The boys have been too old for teen club for a while, but because of all the time we as a church invested in them, we still have an open door with their whole family. They know us. I stop in every once in a while to their house on and they welcome me with very open arms. Some of them have gotten in some trouble, but because they know I love them, they let me rebuke them lovingly but openly and tell them what the Bible says about their sin. I wish to God that the purpose of our relationship will be their eventual salvation and not just my Christian growth. But I wouldn’t trade that growth in love and ministry experience for anything.
I loved teen club. (At least the Green Team, if not perhaps some people on the Orange Team. =) I really looked forward to it every week. God gave me, again unexpectedly, a real love for teens who are very different from me. And He built up a very solid team of others to love our neighborhood as ourselves together. I never had a week where I didn’t have at least one good conversation with a teen, and I usually had more. Love always bridged our huge cultural gap. We didn’t have to have driving music and video game consoles. Love does it for a lot less money.
Teen Club was an intro to many years of Cola Wars and my annual duty to pretend I like a particular soda—just another way to spend time with people, to love my neighborhood with my meager time investments.
Love is even a bridge to the biggest and scariest boys. They need love, and they usually eat it up. Usually.
Teen club was also an intro for me to Neighborhood Bible Class, a ministry also founded in 2002 to reach out on Sunday mornings. I’ve been in the teen class there for about five years, I think. I see a lot of the same kids from teen club. It’s another way our church is loving our neighborhood.
Getting married then opened up a new frontier of having people over. (My dorm room was generally inappropriate for hospitality.)
Teen club was one of the greatest experiences of my whole life. I hated to leave it after six years, but wives and dissertations need attention too, and I was allowed to move to Sunday ministries where I get to do a lot of the same things. Door-to-door visitation is a way of making initial contacts to form relationships, and I’ve been helping lead that and doing some evangelism training there since 2008.
God has given us a specific mission field, and it requires patient continuance in sowing the seed. The time our church has invested over at least nine years in some of the kids from that Bible club, one of whom I still see every week, seems to me to be the most likely way that God will bring people in our mission field to faith in Christ.
I have heard many people say there’s not much to do in a big church because so many people are already doing it. It’s true that you may never stand on the platform if that’s what you mean by being involved. But when it comes to evangelism there is no limit to how much time you could spend in our ministries. We’re looking for those willing to take personal ownership of their ministry, and we are looking for giftedness—which mostly means the gift God gives you to love your neighborhood as yourself.
Found!
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Books, ChurchLife on January 22, 2010
A friend sent my request for help to a friend, and the lost egalitarian/complementarian illustration has been found! (Thank you!) Only my memory didn’t serve me with 100% accuracy. Here’s the original:
David Gushee did not convert to complementarianism, but perhaps that makes his comments all the more powerful and interesting.
Carl Trueman States the Fundamentalist Position
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in ChurchLife on January 22, 2010
Carl Trueman is having a friendly but serious and important debate with Paul Helm. Both are conservative evangelical men, but as American conservative Christians tend to fall on either side of the Billy Graham issue, so British Christians like Trueman and Helm fall on either side of the Packer-Stott/Lloyd-Jones issue. (These UK luminaries split in 1966 over separatism.) Trueman, while expressing great appreciation for Packer (as I would), nonetheless firmly opposes his decision to stay in the Anglican church (as I would!):
It seems to me to be illogical to claim that the Church (as a whole; I am not speaking of individual ministers and congregations here) does not deny the authority of the Bible and the terms of the gospel when it has long since ceased to uphold its basic doctrinal standards through its ecclesiastical courts. After all, a nation that has a law against theft on the books but allows anyone to take anybody else’s property at will, with impunity and without fear of prosecution, permits theft and, indeed, arguably has, in practice, no real concept of theft, no matter what the statute book says. Thus, a church that has for many years ordained those who deny many basic elements of the gospel, and even promoted such to senior positions within its ranks, and which does not regulate public teaching by its official doctrinal standards, has in its practice clearly denied the authority of the Bible and the terms of the gospel as articulated in those standards, and perhaps has no concept of them in any real, meaningful sense. Talk of denial of the gospel on its own is thus too vague: there is a crucial distinction which needs to be made between a church which promotes and maintains the preaching of the gospel as non-negotiable and normative, and a church which merely tolerates the same, while allowing teaching which denies the gospel to go unchecked. It would seem that when Packer speaks of the Anglican Church not denying the gospel, he simply means that the Anglican Church tolerates the gospel. That is not the position envisaged by the Thirty-Nine Articles and is arguably not Reformation Anglicanism.
Incidentally…
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Exegesis, NTScholarship, Piety on January 21, 2010
While I was doing some research for a high school Bible lesson on gender roles, I ran across this article at the Council for Biblical Equality. The article includes this:
Theologian Wayne Grudem wants us to believe that the Greek word kephale (translated into English as “head”) always means a “person in authority over.” His premise is that words have one fixed meaning, the context does not matter. Virtually all linguists are of another opinion. Any given word has a range of meanings and the context is the most important indicator of that meaning.
This really bothered me, and not because of the apparent comma splice. I’m certain Grudem does not take it as a premise that “words have one fixed meaning.” No theologian and exegete of his stature could. This straw man argument was a reminder to me to try to be fair toward my theological opponents. That means, ideally, understanding their position as well as they do. Ouch. That’s part of the calling of a scholar.
You can see for yourself whether the author was fair to Grudem by reading Grudem’s article on kephale.
Please Help!
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Books, Piety, Solipsism on January 21, 2010
Several years ago, in something like 2005 (?), I read an article (?) by an evangelical theologian (?) who had been an egalitarian. His story was something like this:
I was an evangelical Christian egalitarian. My wife and I split our marriage in half: everything was fifty-fifty. Cooking, chores, work. But after 15 years of marriage and three kids, my wife came to me. “Honey, you’ve got to step up and take responsibility for our family. It’s just not working. You’ve got to take charge.” This came as quite a shock, but I loved the Lord and I knew she was right. The structure of the family works when everyone is fulfilling his or her particular role, and I needed to be the head. Whatever is true of other egalitarians, my egalitarianism had been an excuse not to do the work I knew God had called me to do.
At least, I think that’s what his story was… I cannot find this article. I’ve tried and tried, looking through all my indexed and organized files.
Can anyone help me? I’m presuming this was in a complementarian publication, and I want this illustration for a high school Bible lesson on gender roles.
I think the author’s last name started with “S.”
Humpty Dumpty on Ἀγάπη
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Dissertation, Exegesis, NTScholarship on January 21, 2010
Humpty Dumpty took the book and looked at it carefully. “That seems to be done right—” he began.
“You’re holding it upside down!” Alice interrupted.
“To be sure I was!” Humpty Dumpty said gaily as she turned it round for him. “I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that seems to be done right—though I haven’t time to look it over thoroughly just now—and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents—”
“Certainly,” said Alice.
“And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs: they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”
“Would you tell me please,” said Alice, “what that means?”
“Now you talk like a reasonable child,” said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. “I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.”
“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
The New York Times Censors Me for the Second Time [CORRECTION APPENDED!]
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Books, Culture on January 19, 2010
I love reading Stanley Fish’s long blog posts on the New York Times web site. A recent post of his reviewed a book which, apparently, repeats Stephen Jay Gould’s argument that religion and science are “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA)—that is, two separate things doing separate jobs which need not come in conflict so there.
Several times in the past, Fish has skewered sloppy thinking about science and faith, but this time his postmodern sensibilities (he’s a premier postmodern literary critic, author of Is There a Text in This Class and many other influential books) determined his read of the book. He cheered on the author for not taking sides, but of course she did. Everyone does in a world where there are only two real rulers.
Along the way he tried to summarize one leading argument from each side of the religion and science divide. He quotes the science side as challenging the religion side with this question:
“Well, if your philosophy tells you that facts are relative to belief systems, how come you don’t walk through walls or jump out of your apartment window?”
The faith side, he says, has this question for the science side:
“Well, if your philosophy tells you that religion and ethics are reducible to materialist evolutionary forces, why do you bother to be ethical at all?”
I think the first question is inaccurate and the second is unanswerable from within a secular materialists’s worldview. So I left a comment—only it hasn’t been posted [see update below], even though others were posted after mine. This is the second time this has happened to me at the Times, and the first was in a nearly identical situation. I do believe I have been censored.
Other comments tend to be like the following, from “Ehkzu”:
Magnum mysterium shmisterium.
Religion is entirely explainable via anthropology and sociobiology. So are ethics. Religion and ethics derive from us being pack animals that take a decade and a half to raise our young….
The message you get after commenting reads, “Thank you for your submission. Submissions are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive.” Judge for yourselves whether my comments were on-topic and not abusive:
Mark L. Ward, Jr.
Greenville, SC
January 19th, 2010
8:44 amQ: ”Well, if your philosophy tells you that facts are relative to belief systems, how come you don’t walk through walls or jump out of your apartment window?”
A: Because you didn’t represent the Christian position accurately—truth isn’t relative to belief, but to God. He constitutes the ultimate standard, the lodestone of inquiry. He even constitutes walls as physical barriers, “for by Him all things consist” (Colossians 1:17).
Q: “Well, if your philosophy tells you that religion and ethics are reducible to materialist evolutionary forces, why do you bother to be ethical at all?”
A: … I do not believe Smith has answered this question.
The only reason naturalistic materialists view the question as ridiculous on its face is that they have an innate moral sense planted in them by God (Romans 1:18–21). Otherwise they can’t get oughts from ises.
Smith did takes sides! She just pretended to be the umpire instead of one of the players on the field.
Update: Let me eat crow. Or at least a little. They did post my comment after three hours—and that might simply reflect the amount of time it took them to go through the comments in the queue. But they didn’t post my other comment from several months ago. Of that I’m sure, because I checked for several days afterwards.
You’re 1,300 in a Billion
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Culture on January 16, 2010
A clever line delivered by Bill Gates to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, pointing out that the Chinese have a large talent base: “In China, when you’re one-in-a-million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.”
The Courage to Be Catholic
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in ChurchLife, Theology on January 15, 2010
At the behest of a flashing sign on Wade Hampton, I’ve been listening to EWTN (Eternal World Television Network) radio. EWTN was founded in 1981 by a nun in full habit, Mother Angelica, and now broadcasts over both TV and radio. As you listen to their many radio programs, you get the feeling that American Catholicism—at least that brand represented by EWTN’s listernship—lives very self-consciously in the shadow of evangelicalism. Much more so than the other way around. There are many glowing stories about converts who crossed the Tiber, and callers to Catholic Answers Live ceaselessly bring up Protestantism and its problems.
The other day I heard a featured guest on that show who was trying to help a young Pentecostal. The young would-be convert to Rome was fielding objections from his Protestant uncle, who knew the Bible well, he said. I believe the uncle had charged that Catholicism follows man-made traditions while Protestants adhere to Scripture. The guest argued that, actually, Protestants are followers of the traditions of men (he named Luther and Calvin particularly) while Catholics follow traditions handed down from Christ and the apostles.
I was amazed. My several weeks of EWTN commutes had treated me to all sorts of ideas that have no basis in Scripture and, in fact, contradict it. Prayer and devotion to Mary were certainly at the top, but veneration of other saints, purgatory, transubstantiation, clerical celibacy, Mary’s perpetual virginity, and the authority of the papacy were all touted on EWTN. I was encouraged to purchase books on the Međugorje visions. I was told that if I made room in my heart for Mary, the Holy Spirit would “dive bomb” my soul because Mary is His spouse and He follows her everywhere.
I would think that Catholic Answers Live could at least grant that Protestants are basing their doctrine on divine revelation—even if we’re somehow missing out on traditions added later. But if you believe in apostolic succession, apparently later traditions supersede earlier ones.
If you want to know what Catholicism teaches, read the official Catholic catechism. If you want to know what active American Catholics believe, listen to EWTN.
No doubt there are many self-professed evangelicals who preach a watered-down gospel and are in danger of losing even that (if they haven’t already). I’m embarrassed by evangelical radio’s urge to be like the world. And no doubt there are many faithful Catholics who are truly regenerated. But, in the main, the two groups speak different languages because our edifices are built on different rocks. I continue to be saddened and angered by those evangelicals who think the Reformation is over and we can all beat our swords (Eph. 6:17) into shepherds crooks. I’m glad EWTN still thinks I’m wrong to be a Protestant!
The Love Chapter
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Dissertation, Exegesis, Piety on January 13, 2010
You could be the world’s foremost orator, but if you aren’t motivated by love, you’re like a car alarm going off in a parking lot.
You could give out God’s Word powerfully, know truth no one else does, and move mountains with your faith—but if you aren’t driven by love, you’re a spiritual zero.
You could sell the entire contents of your home to give to the homeless, and you could be tortured and martyred at the hand of terrorists, but if you don’t do it for love, you get nothing out of it.
Love will never be obsolete.
Love doesn’t mete out the full punishment someone else deserves.
Love is happy to see the next person succeed.
Love doesn’t carry an “I love others” sign around.
Love is substance more than appearance.
Love observes the social graces.
Love gives others the right of way.
Love absorbs a ton of grief.
Love doesn’t keep a list of past infractions.
Love doesn’t enjoy winning by cheating; it enjoys seeing truth in the winner’s circle.
Love can take it.
Love believes the best.
Love doesn’t pronounce someone else a hopeless case.
Love lasts.
Frame on Helm on Providence
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Books, Theology on January 12, 2010
John Frame in a review of Paul Helm’s The Providence of God (Leicester, U. K.: Inter-Varsity Press, 1993. 241pp.)
Doesn’t Scripture sometimes represent God as "taking risks," being ignorant, changing his mind, giving people the power to resist his will? Granted that Scripture also includes affirmations of God’s foreordination of all things, should we accommodate the latter expressions to the former, or vice versa? Helm responds to this question by pointing out the theological costs and benefits of the two alternatives. In the final analysis, the risk language must be accommodated to the no-risk teaching; else we would have to deny clear biblical teachings about God’s omniscience, will, efficacious grace. That would be a "theological reductionism in which God is distilled to human proportions" (52). He explains the "risk" language in terms of Calvin’s doctrine of accommodation, but with an insight of his own: God must represent his actions as temporal in order to demand a human response in space and time. This is a rather profound point, correct in my estimation.
The Greatest Preacher of the Century
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Books, Preaching on January 8, 2010
I was editing a lesson for the 12th grade Bible textbook put out by BJU Press, and I formulated a critical thinking question to go with the material:
“According to this lesson, what rule is Charles Spurgeon an exception to? Why was he an exception?”
The general rule I suggest in the lesson is something like this: Aspiring pastors should get some sort of formal theological training if it’s available to them. It would be foolish to spurn such an opportunity. The Bible has a lot to say about getting wisdom and holding on to it (Prov. 3:21-23, etc.).
Spurgeon is an exception who proves the rule because, though he didn’t get formal theological training, he trained himself informally by a voracious appetite for good theological books. I would suggest that a trained pastor who does not read is, especially in the long run, inferior to an untrained pastor who does.
My editor made a good comment: “(David Martyn) Lloyd-Jones was another exception. I guess the moral of their stories is that if you want to be a good preacher, get formal theological training. If you want to be the greatest preacher of the century, don’t!”
Pray for the Unborn
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Culture on January 7, 2010
I don’t find myself incredibly attentive to politics, but I do care about the unborn. I have one. Pray that Bart Stupak holds on.
God’s Will
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Exegesis, Piety, Theology on January 6, 2010
Kevin DeYoung argues in the best-titled book of 2009 that God has a sovereign will and a moral will, but He does not have what is typically thought of as an individual will of direction. He has an individual will only in the sense of those two other wills: He has in fact decreed whom you will marry, and in addition He has expressed moral guidelines for how to choose him or her. You don’t need to agonize through extra-scriptural means of finding out what His individual will of direction is, because the now-complete Bible is everything we need to know to make right decisions. God doesn’t tell us in advance what His will is with regard to two equally moral options. He doesn’t send us any messages about whether we should go to Fargo or Fiji.
I believe I’m representing DeYoung accurately, because I agreed with his view before I read his book!
But I recently ran into two passages cited against his position.
Romans 12:2 “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Colossians 1:9 “We have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding.” [cf. Ps. 143:8, 10]
These passages certainly fit a third “will of direction,” and in my reading of them through the years I’ve never thought to fit them into the one of the two categories of sovereign and moral will. Honestly, I never raised the question until today.
Does it Fit?
One strong clue that the two-wills paradigm still fits these verses is Romans 2:18, where Paul says of the Jews, “[You] know his will and approve what is excellent, because you are instructed from the law.” These are obviously some of the same words as Romans 12:2. Evidently, you know God’s will when you know God’s law.
The parallelism in Psalm 40:8 suggests something similar: “I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.”
And this can be more than made to fit with Col. 1:9. To be filled with the wise knowledge of God’s will is to know how to make application of Scripture to your situation. The right application of Scripture to your circumstance could be called “God’s will,” because God desires not just that someone not steal, but that you not steal tax dollars through book-cooking this afternoon. Both are His moral will, even though the second one is not stated explicitly in Scripture.
Likewise, when Paul prays in Rom. 12:2 that the believers in Rome would be able by testing to discern God’s perfect will, He may mean that He wants New Covenant power to transform them into becoming better practiced at applying God’s revealed moral will in Scripture. It’s not always immediately and perfectly clear how the Bible applies in any given case. We need the spiritual insight of a renewed mind to know what goods God’s moral will is leading us to perform.
I have a good theological reason not to allow for another category of God’s will beside His moral and sovereign will: that would be a form of divine revelation outside Scripture. That’s dangerous, as DeYoung humorously demonstrates.
And I have a logical reason not to accept a third category: What if God opened all the right doors, moistened all the right fleeces, and impressed me deeply that I was to choose a certain girl for my wife—and I refused? Where would that leave the girl God had for me? How could she follow God’s will when I said no? God is not the God of Plans B (Isa. 46:10).
I read John Frame’s section on a “third will of God” in The Doctrine of God after going through this exercise. I believe I’m stating the same position he is, and he is as clear and compelling as ever. I commend it to you.
Towel-reading
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Piety on January 5, 2010
A true story from the teacher’s edition for a BJU Press Bible Truths textbook, which I’m now halfway through editing:
A Christian college student interested in a Christian girl at the same school couldn’t decide whether dating her was God’s will. In an attempt to discover God’s will, he decided to “put out a fleece.” He actually placed a towel on the street outside his dormitory. He had determined that if the towel was wet the next morning, he would keep dating the girl. If the towel was dry, he would break up with her. The young man was overjoyed when it rained that night. On rushing outside, however, he found that someone had parked a car over his towel. He broke up with the girl.
BJU Bible Truths official assessment of this story, which I left unedited because I agreed with it:
God’s will isn’t determined by such ridiculous methods.
My question: What if the car had been parked over only half the towel?
Just Do Something: How to Make a Decision without Cabbage-Reading
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Books, Humor, Theology on January 5, 2010
By [Jonathan] Edwards’ time witchcraft and the preternatural had almost disappeared from clerical attention. In 1690 Cotton Mather could preach about a prodigious cabbage root he had seen that had one branch shaped like a cutlass, another like a rapier, and another like an Indian club, and pronounce that this was a special providential warning to New England. By the next generation such interpretation of prodigies would be a bit of an embarrassment. —Marsden’s bio of JE, p. 69
Probably Not Funny
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Humor on January 4, 2010
What if the Scientologists took over the Wilds? What would the new Ken Collier’s favorite saying be?
Just two choices in the cupboard: pleasing self or L. Ron Hubbard.
The Most Influential Conservative Christian Thinker in America
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Culture, Theology on January 4, 2010
Robert P. George was recently christened by the New York Times as “this country’s most influential conservative Christian thinker”—and Richard John Neuhaus’ heir. But take a look at the foundation of his ethics:
In the American culture wars, George wants to redraw the lines. It is the liberals, he argues, who are slaves to a faith-based “secularist orthodoxy” of “feminism, multiculturalism, gay liberationism and lifestyle liberalism.” Conservatives, in contrast, speak from the high ground of nonsectarian public reason. George is the leading voice for a group of Catholic scholars known as the new natural lawyers. He argues for the enforcement of a moral code as strictly traditional as that of a religious fundamentalist. What makes his natural law “new” is that it disavows dependence on divine revelation or biblical Scripture — or even history and anthropology. Instead, George rests his ethics on a foundation of “practical reason”: “invoking no authority beyond the authority of reason itself,” as he put it in one essay.
He can build a truly remarkable edifice on the sand of human reason because in it are mixed rocks of general revelation and common grace. That is, God has revealed enough about Himself in creation (Rom. 1:19-20) and in the human conscience (Rom. 2:15–16) to provide some genuine moral light for the nations. That light is suppressed by a non-Christian world (Rom. 1:18), but—by God’s common grace—not completely (Matt. 5:45; Acts 14:17). Most people still get piqued when someone else takes more than his fair share of the orange.
George recognizes that there is one major part of his foundation which, if proved to be sand and not stone, would cause his whole project to collapse:
I asked George several times if he was really hoping to ground a mass movement in abstract principles of reason so at odds with the prevailing culture. It was a bet, he said, on his conviction about the innate human gift for reason. Still, he said, if there was one critique of his work that worried him, it was the charge that he puts too much faith in the power of reason, overlooking what Christians describe as original sin and what secular pessimists call history. It is a debate at least as old as the Reformation, when Martin Luther broke with the Catholic Church and insisted that reason was so corrupted that faith in the divine was humanity’s only hope of salvation. (Until relatively recently, contemporary evangelicals routinely leveled the same charge at modern Catholics.) “This is a serious issue, and if I am wrong, this is where I am wrong,” George acknowledges. Over lunch last month at the Princeton faculty club, George noted that many evangelicals had signed the Manhattan Declaration despite the traditional Protestant skepticism about the corruption of human reason. “I sold my view about reason!” he declared. He was especially pleased that, by signing onto the text, so many Catholic bishops had endorsed his new natural-law argument about marriage. “It really is the top leadership of the American church,” he said. “Obviously, I am gratified that view appears to have attracted a very strong following among the bishops,” he went on. “I just hope I am right. If they are going to buy my arguments, I don’t want to mislead the whole church.”
Because of original sin, evangelical Protestants know that George is indeed misleading his followers. Original sin and its result, total depravity, make a natural law ethic impossible—or at least insufficient. But Catholic tradition has created an out, a depravity loophole. Original sin is more the absence of good, they say, than the presence of evil. And anyway, baptism erases it. The official Catholic Catechism reads this way:
Original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam’s descendants. It is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted…. Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ’s grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle.
The Church’s teaching on the transmission of original sin was articulated more precisely in the fifth century, especially under the impulse of St. Augustine’s reflections against Pelagianism, and in the sixteenth century, in opposition to the Protestant Reformation. Pelagius held that man could, by the natural power of free will and without the necessary help of God’s grace, lead a morally good life; he thus reduced the influence of Adam’s fault to bad example. The first Protestant reformers, on the contrary, taught that original sin has radically perverted man and destroyed his freedom; they identified the sin inherited by each man with the tendency to evil (concupiscentia), which would be insurmountable.
From a secular perspective (courtesy of the Huffington Post), natural law thinking is only religion warmed-over. And as the Huffington article I just linked to points out rather tartly, getting an ought from an is can be a tricky, uncertain business.
Carson on the Parables
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Exegesis on January 2, 2010
Pregnant wives sometimes simply cannot make it to church, so the last time we missed a Sunday sermon we listened to D. A. Carson on the purpose of Jesus’ parables.
Carson was, as always, biblically responsible and helpful.
He said that Jesus had many reasons for telling parables. He wasn’t anti-propositional. He wasn’t just being a good homiletician. He wasn’t merely judging some people or being enigmatic. He was doing a mix of things.
Carson argued from Matthew 13 that Jesus tells parables…
- Because in line with Scripture his message blinds, deafens, and hardens (Mt. 13:14; Is 6).
- Because, in line with Scripture, His message reveals things hidden in Scripture. Things that the prophets looked forward to are now clear. Mt 13:52 "Every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old."
Carson made three applications:
- We should gain wonder in worship where there is a fresh grasp of how God has put the Bible together.
- We should gain gratitude in humility for the gift of seeing the truth about Jesus and His gospel. The knowledge of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you and not to them. We should never tire of being overwhelmed by the sheer privilege of grace.
- We should gain discretion in witness where there is a hostile environment. Carson illustrated this by noting that in the Middle East Christians can be hurt or killed if they witness unwisely (or even if they witness wisely!). Jesus told us not to cast our pearls before swine. Part of what Jesus is doing in Mat 13 is distinguishing between swine and non-swine. All of the Bible does emphasize the importance of being candid, frank, and open in our witness. But we must also be wise as serpents, shrewd, winsome, discreet. We must not be lacking in courage where testimony must be given. But we shouldn’t slap people in the face and call it witnessing. The aroma of the gospel is a savor to some, but a stench to others.
I’ll be preaching the parable of the Hidden Treasure tomorrow at an evangelistic outreach at my church. I’ll be doing it with the help of a great short film—something I have never before done—in the Modern Parables series. The films are free on their site, and well worth your time. The filmmakers were careful in their biblical scholarship.
Righteousness and True Healthiness
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Books, ChurchLife, Exegesis, NTScholarship on December 31, 2009
James Barr in the iconoclastic The Semantics of Biblical Language:
A regular church-goer is likely sooner or later to hear an interpretation of the word “holy,” which is of course frequent in the English Bible, as “basically” or “originally” or “properly” meaning “healthy, sound.” Those alarmed by the suggestion of superhuman religious effort in the exhortation to “be holy” may thus be comforted, because what is being asked of them is simply the basic “healthiness” or “soundness” which no one would want to be without. All this is based on one fact or alleged fact: the words “holy” and “whole” or “healthy” are etymologically connected; they “come from the same root.” ¶ The fact that “holy” and “healthy” are etymologically “connected” does not mean, however, that they now mean the same thing, or indeed that they ever did mean the same thing. p.111
. . . .
The test of explanations of words is by their contexts. Supposing anyone to become convinced that “holy” in the English Bible really means something like “healthy, whole,” he will find in his reading of the Bible many contexts where this sense produces sore difficulty. He may find it possible to understand the Third Person of the Trinity as “the Healthy Spirit,” but he will have difficulty with those inanimate objects such as valuables gained by capture which are specially devoted to the divine possession and are thus apparently “healthy to the Lord”; and he will surely find it impossible to suppose that the rear chamber of the Temple usually called “the Holy of Holies” is in fact a space specially healthy. p.113
Yes, the Healthy of Healthies. Ah, those Brits.
I’m sometimes a bit depressed reading things like this. Errors like these are so prevalent—are Protestant pastors unknowingly fleecing their flocks? But Barr makes one comment that eases me a bit: one of the reasons that linguistic mistakes like this go undetected is that pastors are, in fact, using them to preach truths found in the Bible—just not in the portion of it where they happen to be grazing their flocks. That is a serious problem, but it is better for the sheep to get grass clippings from another part of the field than tares from the enemy’s field.
Web MD
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in ChurchLife, Preaching on December 30, 2009
The David Martyn Lloyd-Jones Recording Trust has got a new look since the last time I surfed over there.
Great With Flour
Posted by Mark L Ward Jr in Solipsism on December 29, 2009
Now I know what it’s like to be my wife at 8 mos.
Only she can’t put Aden Edwards Ward back in the cupboard when the experiment is over.
I wore the sacks of flour all around the house (I’m not allowed to tell you how many pounds it was). Laura cackled throughout the entire process, especially as I struggled to get out of a sitting position. Lying down was even worse.
I’m going to need a serious backrub after this. And I know someone who owes me about 50 of ‘em from the last few weeks!
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