Poythress Kan’t Wright… j/k
I was reading Vern Poythress’ Symphonic Theology for a little help on linguistics and biblical hermeneutics, and he quoted Immanuel Kant:
This debt [of radically evil disposition] can never be discharged by another person, so far as we can judge according to the justice of our human reason. For this is no transmissible liability which can be made over to another like a financial indebtedness (where it is all one to the creditor whether the debtor himself pays the debt or whether some one else pays it for him); rather is it the most personal of all debts, namely a debt of sins, which only the culprit can bear and which no innocent person can assume even though he be magnanimous enough to wish to take it upon himself for the sake of another. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (Chicago and London: Open Court, 1934), 66.
Immediately I thought of N.T. Wright. Aren’t they saying the same thing?
If we use the language of the law court, it makes no sense whatever to say that the judge imputes, imparts, bequeaths, conveys or otherwise transfers his righteousness to either the plaintiff or the defendant. Righteousness is not an object, a substance or a gas which can be passed across the courtroom. What Saint Paul Really Said (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 98.
Wright isn’t wrong just because he echoes Kant. But it is interesting to note that what Wright is saying isn’t new.
Digital Pacifiers
I have a 9 lb. 4 oz. excuse for everything these days. It really is remarkable how such a little bundle of needs can dominate the schedules of two full-grown adults.
But he sure is a cute little bundle of needs. I’m surprised how fascinating he is. Every facial expression (well, except one) is so interesting. What is going on inside that little unfused skull?
The upshot of it is that my blog drought will likely continue till my paternity leave ends. But to tide both of you over, here is a real-world study in economics: my Kindle purchases and how much I’ve saved.
These are all books I wanted for my dissertation, with the exception of Wilson and Carson. Now, you might wonder whether it was worth it to spend several hundred dollars on a wedge of electronics and then buy just seven books for it, even if I did save $46.90, and even if they did serve the dissertation. A fair question.
The story isn’t that simple. There are currently 112 items on my Kindle. All but those you see on this list I either got for free or already owned in some other format. Crossway has given away a fair number of their titles, including the whole ESV Bible, which I use in church. I also have a few Jonathan Edwards books on the Kindle, courtesy of the JEC at Yale. And I have a good number of articles and electronic books from Logos and from Internet sources. The Kindle has been worth it, because I can take it with me wherever I go, it doesn’t hurt my eyes like an LCD, and everything I highlight is saved to a file for later use in my dissertation or BibleWorks notes. That has been invaluable. Good filing practices have been a major contributor to my progress.
And now back to that little bundle of joy/needs. It’s hard to do dissertation work when Aden is upset, and that means, to my shame, that there are sometimes two upset redheads in the home. But I found the solution: each of us gets a digital pacifier:
(Ten Mr. Mark points and one cute baby picture to whoever can explain that pun to others!)
Because the Kindle can display any of my books (except those which have Hebrew text, at this point), I can read the GNT or any number of dissertation-related books or articles while Aden happily sucks away. And because it’s one small wedge of electronics, I can hold it in one hand. That’s the best feature, as you can see. Without the Kindle I would miss some great reading time because of newborn-related ergonomic logistics.
I pray that the Lord would help me be a good steward of this little gift. And that one!
Getting Obama Right, Left and Right
I can’t claim very much insight and experience when it comes to politics, but I can say that I’ve sensed that the right-wingers around me don’t have Obama pegged. They tend to view him as the socialist antichrist, someone who can do no right, the most dangerous man in America—if he’s truly in America and not a hologram projected from Saudi Arabia. I had thought that the left-wingers—I hear from NPR and the NY Times—were frustrated that Obama isn’t coming far enough their way. But David Brooks of the NY Times seems to think that the left doesn’t understand him any better than the right does.
What Brooks has written seems quite sensible to me:
In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.
Frame / Φρειμ / פרֵם
I wrote this for a Bible Truths lesson on evangelism:
…that’s the extent of your responsibility—just faithfully, clearly, and lovingly deliver the message. The Bible compares evangelists to heralds, people whose job it was to journey to a faraway place and announce what the king had said.
After I wrote that I realized that John Frame was getting to me. “Faithfully, clearly, and lovingly” are Frame’s three perspectives: normative, situational, and existential. To deliver the message faithfully is to make it adhere to the norm of what God actually said. To communicate the message clearly is to speak appropriately to your situation—whether a doorstep in West Greenville or a cellphone call to a friend. To give the gospel lovingly is the only appropriate existential state for you to be in: the Great Commission must go hand in hand with the Great Commandments.
I picked up the huge Frame festschrift the other day, and my leafing so far has led me to several others who have made Frame’s perspectives a little mental checklist for completeness when talking about anything ethical or moral.
Perhaps this post should have started here, but all Frame is saying is that every ethical/moral decision necessarily involves three elements (he calls them “perspectives” for reasons I can’t get into here!): a person applying a norm to a situation. That seems like a pedestrian observation until you see how helpful it is in analyzing your decisions.
“How do I evangelize?” is one of those decisions. “Faithfully, clearly, and lovingly” don’t exhaust my responsibilities, but they do exhaust the categories. They make sure I have thought about my person as well as my norm and my situation.
Perhaps the “situation” is the perspective that I most often failed to read until the last few years. Others evangelize without proper attention to the norm of what the gospel is or without due regard to the attitude of love they ought to have toward others. Blogging about such things may seem like a waste of time in light of the needs in the world, but without some reflection on the three perspectives our man-hours can be poorly invested.
Insight
An insightful comment on economics applying to all disciplines from Paul Collier, Oxford prof and author of The Bottom Billion:
Part of the reason single-factor theories about development failure are so common is that modern academics tend to specialize: they are trained to produce intense but narrow beams of light.
One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
I love Stanley Fish for his willingness and ability to see the bankruptcy of his employers. He regularly stands on the foundation which supports him and whacks at it with his prodigious intellectual sledgehammer. I admit I haven’t read enough to see if he ever tries finding another rock to build on, but I suspect he doesn’t and that’s his point.
His latest New York Times blog post is a must-read. It takes up presuppositionalist themes again by reviewing Steven Smith’s The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, a work wielding the same hammer Fish does. Secular reasons, Smith argues, are actually religious ones smuggled in. There is no safe secular arena where neutral arguments reign.
It is not, Smith tells us, that secular reason can’t do the job (of identifying ultimate meanings and values) we need religion to do; it’s worse; secular reason can’t do its own self-assigned job—of describing the world in ways that allow us to move forward in our projects—without importing, but not acknowledging, the very perspectives it pushes away in disdain.
And this from Smith’s book:
The secular vocabulary within which public discourse is constrained today is insufficient to convey our full set of normative convictions and commitments. We manage to debate normative matters anyway—but only by smuggling in notions that are formally inadmissible, and hence that cannot be openly acknowledged or adverted to.
And yet it seems most Christians don’t understand this. They have agreed with the intellectually bankrupt bullies that religious evidence has been ruled inadmissible. So Christians go on TV and talk about the horizontal, sociological effects of homosexuality or teen pregnancy. They never mention the vertical. Granted, in the world God made, horizontal effects are part of God’s general revelation. But no one can repent of their sins and trust creation. Christians are the only people who have a good answer for why the negative sociological effects of sin are in fact negative. We’ve got answers for Fish’s powerful questions!
It always amazes me to read the comments from readers after Fish’s essays. The very first comment:
As an atheist, I read this whole piece waiting for the part where Mr. Fish would explain how, without invoking a secular/religious distinction, a society can prevent the majority religion from imposing its creed on everyone else. However metaphysically unfulfilling it may be, “smuggling” sounds a lot better than “theocracy.”
The only appropriate response to that comment is sorrow. “I will not be ruled by God!”, she is saying. “I’d rather be ruled by a puppet with my own hand inside.”
The next commenter appeals back to his presuppositions: evolutionary naturalism explains all.
The next commenter simply asserts that “there is no ‘metaphysics’ only physics.” Only observable facts are true.
When the truth, or even a portion of it, comes into the house to burn it up, people run and get their valuables.
From the New Bible Truths F, the 12th Grade BJU Press Bible Textbook Due Out in 2011
It is helpful, even essential, to keep the storyline of Scripture in mind at all times as you read the Bible. If the Bible is about what God is doing to glorify Himself by redeeming His fallen creation, then you’d expect Scripture to point out over and over how God glorifies Himself by saving people from the power of sin. It should be no surprise that God’s standards are higher than we can possibly meet, because Scripture is not the story of man working harder and harder to achieve equality with God. Impossible standards like “Love your enemies” or even “Love your neighbor as yourself” are just reminders of how far we’ve fallen and how much divine power it’s going to take to buy us completely back from slavery to sin.
Linguistics, Homosexuality, and Friendship
Back in 2005, I wrote the following for the monthly newsletter I’m charged with producing:
Touchstone recently dedicated its cover story to the disintegration of male friendships in American society. In the article, perceptive cultural observer Anthony Esolen noted that the unceasing thrust for the normalization of homosexuality in America has pushed boys into heterosexual promiscuity (lest they be accused of homosexuality) and out of healthy male friendships. Men, too, simply could never express—and rarely have reason to anymore—what David did regarding his friend Jonathan: "Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." Even in the 19th century, Esolen shows, thoroughly heterosexual men knit their souls together. Today that sentence is difficult to write. "What do the paraders achieve, with their public promotion of homosexuality?" asks Esolen. "They come out of the closet, and hustle a lot of good and natural feelings back in." (Touchstone, 9/05)
I just re-read that essay, available here, and I must say that my rather pedestrian summary does no justice to the beauty of Esolen’s style and the power of his argument.
I’m thankful I grew up in a culture which still let me have close male friends, and I’m trying to hang on to that culture and maintain it for my now-gestational son.
Incidentally, Esolen also has some thoughtful objections to the idea often touted on this blog that usage determines meaning—at least the idea, not touted on this blog, that this statement is sufficient to describe the world as it is. Vern Poythress, in a book I’ve been reading on language, has made a similar point: usage may determine meaning, but God is still ultimate. He’s the one who guarantees that words have meaning and that we can understand one another at all. That’s a point from special revelation, and it’s one parallel to the Bible’s assertion of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility. Esolen, as a Catholic might be expected to do, makes his point from general revelation: the world is set up in such a way that some syntaxes and some syllables won’t work, and some meanings will never exist in language because they don’t exist in real life. That’s another pointer to God’s ultimacy, because He’s the one Who made the world as it is.
I encourage you to read the whole thing.
Andy Crouch on Postures and Gestures
Over the last few months since work (and baby!) deadlines led me to drop Andy Crouch’s Culture Making, waiting to pick it up again some day soon, I’ve thought many times about his model for describing typical Christian cultural engagement. He sees four typical “postures” toward culture among Christians:
- Fundamentalist Condemnation: this group just dismisses popular or secular culture as sinful, he says.
- Evangelical Critique: this group, a la Francis Schaeffer, evaluates culture, probing its worldview.
- Evangelical Copying: after Schaeffer, evangelicals began simply copying pop culture. CCM was one prominent result.
- Evangelical Consumption: today, however, most evangelicals are avid consumers of secular and pop culture.
Under that last point, he has some very sad things to say, especially coming from his position at the center of the evangelical world:
The dominant posture among self-described evangelicals today toward culture is neither condemnation nor critique, nor even CCM’s imitation, but simply consumption. . . . If anything, when I am among evangelical Christians I find that they seem to be more avidly consuming the latest offerings of commercial culture. . . than many of my non-Christian neighbors. They are content to be just like their fellow Americans, or perhaps, driven by a lingering sense of shame at their uncool forebears, just slightly more like their fellow Americans than anyone else. (p. 89)
Crouch makes the helpful point that condemnation, critique, copying, and consumption are all appropriate gestures toward culture, but none is appropriate as a default, ongoing posture. Some cultural products can only be condemned: sex-trafficking, pornography. Others are appropriately critiqued: a popular novel or piece of art or music. Some should be copied: we can’t start from scratch when we design church buildings; we’ve got to use some existing forms. Other cultural products should be consumed: hamburgers, for example. Especially if they have bacon. But when you start to make one gesture your default posture—as evangelicalism has typically done—you start justifying sin.
Crouch offers an alternative posture, creating/cultivating, but you’ll have to read the book to see what he means. And so will I!
Excellent Insights on Biblical Literacy
His set of buzzwords is a bit different from mine, but his insights are profoundly needed: David R. Nienhuis’ article in Modern Reformation on how to promote biblical literacy is a great read.
He points to our entertainment culture as one reason even evangelical kids don’t know the Bible well, coming up with a corker of a quote in the process. One of his students told him, “Reading a lot is not a part of my learning style”!
He also points to the proof-texting traditions we’ve built up in American evangelicalism, in which students fail to gain the skill of reading God’s words in their full depth and breadth, but only stock up on individual apologetic points. Here he also landed an insightful quote. One of his students “noted that all these years she had relied on someone else to tell her what snippets of the Bible were significant enough for her to know. But whenever she was alone with the text, she felt swamped.”
Nienhuis suggests three steps for changing the sad state of Bible knowledge in our own churches:
- schooling in the substance of the entire biblical story in all its literary diversity (not just an assortment of those verses deemed doctrinally relevant);
- training in the particular “orienteering” skills required to plot that narrative through the actual texts and canonical units of the Bible; and
- instruction in the complex theological task of interpreting Scripture in light of the tradition of the church and the experience of the saints.
I’d rather not put the third point that way, but I can affirm it if I get to define the terms. Reading in light of church history is at least suggested by Scripture (Heb. 13:7), and it’s certainly wise. You’re going to read in light of some history of interpretation; it might as well be a thorough and accurate one.
May I also suggest, as step zero, getting rid of all verse numbers and printing Bibles in paragraph format? That would go a long way.
BDAG Could Be a Much Bigger Book
This is what its entry on ἀγάπη looks like in BDAG, the standard Greek lexicon.
This is what it looks like uncompacted, with all of its separate points turned into descended bullets:
It’s like unfolding some incredible origami!
I find I can’t use the information nearly as well when it is not laid out visually this way. I don’t plan to do this for very many more BDAG entries, however…
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