bible – Page 5 – Christ the Truth

Christ no longer sinful or condemning, but men are still the problem

GlenMay 9, 2011Leave a comment

I've got some serious concerns about the new NIV's policy on the Psalms (here and here). But I'm very glad for some corrections they've made in Romans 8.

The Old NIV rendered verse 3:

For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man.

The New NIV says:

For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh,God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh.

"Sinful nature" as a translation of "flesh" was one of the worst things about the old NIV. I'm very glad they've corrected that. Not least because they've stopped calling Jesus sinful in Romans 8:3. Which is good.

Also in verse 34 they make another change - what do you think about this?

Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.

That opening question is expecting a negative answer. The old NIV does not have "No one". It goes on directly to speak about Christ Jesus who died. I suppose that has the advantage of communicating that the one person who could condemn you has infact condemned you at the cross in His own flesh. But the new NIV supplies the expected negative response so that no-one could get the impression that Jesus is the one who continues to condemn.

Thoughts?

I spotted another interesting update when preparing for yesterday morning on Acts 2. The new NIV policy of gender neutrality is not comprehensively followed!

“Fellow Israelites [old NIV said "Men of Israel"], listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross." (Acts 2:22-23)

Everything's gender neutral except responsibility for deicide!

100 King James Phrases in 3 minutes 10

GlenMay 5, 2011February 3, 201410 Comments

Why not share this around, see if it might drum up business for the book.

The words with references are below...

...continue reading "100 King James Phrases in 3 minutes"

A poetical, audio-visual, King-James-themed something or other… Help! 14

GlenMarch 12, 201114 Comments

I'm a bit stuck. I've written a poem to mark the 400th anniversary of the Authorized Version. It crams in 100 phrases that have passed into (more or less) common parlance in the space of about 3 minutes.

I'd like to turn it into a video where I speak it to screen and for that to be a quick "grabber" which will make people want to find out more - e.g. order my upcoming evangelistic book based on KJV, go to an evangelistic event based on KJV, or visit the King's English.

First I need you to cast a critical eye over the poem (below). If it's rubbish, there's no point going ahead with anything else. If it can be improved let me know how.

Next I'd need help with the video. I'm thinking of delivering it to camera - and a tally of the verses can go up as I speak. There are different ways I could film it. One that appeals to me, but it's technically difficult, begins in a pulpit just off Brighton's funky shopping district (the Lanes). Then I walk through the Lanes (cameraman with steady-cam walking backwards along with boom operator) to the pier. It gives the idea of the word of God going out into the world.

But, for that I'd need specialized kit - a steady-cam and a boom mic in particular. Any ideas about how I can lay hands on this and/or on any other video expertise?

Any better ideas about how to shoot it?

Help!

Poem below...

...continue reading "A poetical, audio-visual, King-James-themed something or other… Help!"

Moving away from morsels

GlenMarch 8, 2011Leave a comment

Last night we had a home group bible study with the folk who have graduated from Christianity Explored. Here's what we've been studying:

Week 1: Galatians

Week 2: Ephesians

Week 3: Philippians

Week 4: Colossians

Last night was week 5: Romans 1-4 (though we stopped at the end of 3 because everyone was blown away!)

When I tell them that the other home groups study half a chapter at a time they are amazed! "But that's like stopping after three paragraphs of a letter!" they exclaim. That is precisely what it is!

Everyone prints off the chapters for that week and reads them with a pen to hand. They circle things they don't understand and underline things they love so they come to the evening quite well prepared.

In the studies we just read a big chunk and then discuss, read a big chunk then discuss. We've been getting through 4-6 chapters in a night.

Some outside the group have been impressed by it, but also have raised valid concerns:

Question: How long can you keep this up?

Answer: The bible's a big book.

Question: Not many people could lead a study of a whole book of the bible, doesn't this concentrate leadership in the hands of the trained few?

Answer: Actually it puts the bible in the hands of everyone. People have really taken responsibility for trying to get a handle on the passage before the meeting and they've been great at answering each other's questions.

Question: Not many people could field the range of questions that would be generated by study of a whole book. Leaders might be caught out by the number of different topics that could arise in any given week.

Answer: Schedule in some weeks every now and again where you tackle the most recurring topics from the last couple of months.

Question: Won't this mean you miss nuances and details?

Answer: Maybe. But you'll be revisiting the same material a lot more often too.

Anyway, I commend it to you. Not least because last night was devastating. We began in chapter 15 to get some context and then moved through Romans 1 to 3 the way it was intended. It crushed us to dust and then lifted us up in Christ. I can't now imagine spacing that out over three weeks!

My advice: move away from the morsels. Get stuck in!

Application – the Evangelical Cure-All 4

GlenFebruary 24, 2011March 16, 20154 Comments

What is the bible for?

I've just read a prominent UK evangelical blogger answering: "Application"!

Time to repost this one then...

Like coathangers, we own a hundred bibles but have no idea how they came to be ours. One of them is called a "Life Application Bible."

As far as I can tell, it exists in order to footnote every biblical indicative so that a moral imperative may be added. This is, we are assured, the cure to our spiritual malaise. Just listen to this endorsement on the back cover:

Evangelical Christianity is suffering from an acute case of spiritual malnutrition. The symptom is well known - defection in personal standards of living. The cure - Vitamin A - application of God's Word.

This remedy is both refreshing and realistic, calculated to change the will. Not merely satisfying curiosity or making us smarter sinners, the Scriptures were given to make us more like Jesus Christ.

Wha??

What's the understanding of the bible here? The Spirit's testimony to the Son? Christ's love-letter to His bride? The deposit of faith given to the church for the sake of proclaiming Christ to the world? No. At base the bible is, apparently, given for individual piety.

What kind of anthropology is this? Change the will and you'll correct the 'defection in standards of living.' !

What kind of salvation is offered? Apparently we are not to become merely 'smarter sinners' - well what then? Do we become subtler sinners? more self-righteous sinners? self-satisfied sinners? There's one option that is assuredly closed to us - that of ceasing to be sinners! So why not a smarter sinner?

This approach to Scripture and to Christian faith is not good. And yet, doesn't this kind of thinking throb away beneath much of what passes for evangelicalism? Isn't the majority of 'evangelical' preaching informed by just such beliefs? I'd say our spiritual malnutrition is not because of a lack of this kind of application. We're spiritually anaemic precisely because we have turned the Scriptures into moralistic or therapeutic self-help. No wonder other Christians deride us as simplistic legalists.

For a thought on what good application is, go here.

How Not To Read The Bible [repost]

GlenFebruary 3, 2011Leave a comment

A semi-imagined conversation

-- Right. Bible reading. Here we go - Speak Lord, your servant is listening. Ok, Matthew 11:28. Jesus said "Come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest." Ok, good verse. Well said Lord. Now let's get down to business. What's this verse really saying... Well of course "rest" is theologically loaded. Right from the seventh day of creation we see eschatological perfection modelled in Sabbath....

-- Glen!

-- Speak Lord, your servant is listening.

-- You've already said that. And I've already spoken...

-- ... Oh indeed you have Lord and now I'm allowing your word to inform and shape my theological precommitments that I might be transformed by the renewing... Well you know how the verse goes. Anyway I find it fascinating that you say v28 right after v27 when you declare the trinitarian, christocentric dynamic of all revel...

-- Glen!

-- Speak Lord, your servant is listening

-- Are you?

-- Well trying to. That's why I'm deploying all the hermeneutical tools in my considerable arsenal. It allows my whole theology to be shaped by these concepts...

-- Concepts? Glen, have you actually come to me for rest today?

-- Well... My plan is to get a properly nuanced theology of rest in place. And once I have this understanding I imagine the experience of rest will sort of, I don't know, umm....

-- Glen?

-- Speak Lord your servant is listening

-- Maybe later...

The literal IS the christocentric (repost)

GlenJanuary 20, 2011Leave a comment

I recently re-read Nathan Pitchford's excellent short article on the reformers' hermeneutic.

His basic point is that Sola Scriptura always leads to Solus Christus. The literal reading simply is the christocentric reading.

For Luther, the grammatical-historical hermeneutic was simply the interpretation of scripture that “drives home Christ.” As he once expressed it, “He who would read the Bible must simply take heed that he does not err, for the Scripture may permit itself to be stretched and led, but let no one lead it according to his own inclinations but let him lead it to its source, that is, the cross of Christ. Then he will surely strike the center.” To read the scriptures with a grammatical-historical sense is nothing other than to read them with Christ at the center.

And yet, claims Pitchford, many evangelicals today have a basically un-Christian reading of the OT.

[What I mean is]... they employ a hermeneutic that does not have as its goal to trace every verse to its ultimate reference point: the cross of Christ. All of creation, history, and reality was designed for the purpose of the unveiling and glorification of the triune God, by means of the work of redemption accomplished by the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. The bible is simply the book that tells us how to see Christ and his cross at the center of everything. It tells us who God is by showing us the person and work of Christ, who alone reveals the invisible God. If we do not intentionally ask ourselves, “How may I see Christ more clearly by this passage,” in our reading of every verse of scripture, then we are not operating under the guidance of Luther’s grammatical-historical hermeneutic. If we would follow in the steps of the reformers, we must realize that a literal reading of scriptures does not mean a naturalistic reading. A naturalistic reading says that the full extent of meaning in the account of Moses’ striking the rock is apprehended in understanding the historical event. The literal reading, in the Christ-centered sense of the Reformation, recognizes that this historical account is meaningless to us until we understand how the God of history was using it to reveal Christ to his people. The naturalistic reading of the Song of Solomon is content with the observation that it speaks of the marital-bliss of Solomon and his wife; the literal reading of the reformers recognizes that it has ultimately to do with the marital bliss between Christ and his bride, the Church. And so we could continue, citing example after example from the Old Testament.

So what went wrong? How come the reformers' understanding of a "literal hermeneutic" gets used today to justify un -Christian interpretation? Well, historically the influence of academic liberalism turned 'the literal reading' into 'thenaturalistic reading'. And that's quite a different thing.

Nathan ends with 6 points at which the naturalistic reading fails:

1. A naturalistic hermeneutic effectively denies God’s ultimate authorship of the bible, by giving practical precedence to human authorial intent.

2. A naturalistic hermeneutic undercuts the typological significance which often inheres in the one story that God is telling in the bible (see Galatians 4:21-31, for example).

3. A naturalistic hermeneutic does not allow for Paul’s assertion that a natural man cannot know the spiritual things which the Holy Spirit teaches in the bible – that is, the things about Jesus Christ and him crucified (I Corinthians 2).

4. A naturalistic hermeneutic is at odds with the clear example of the New Testament authors and apostles as they interpret the Old Testament (cf. Peter’s sermon in Acts 2, Paul’s interpretations in Romans 4 and Galatians 4, James’ citing of Amos 9 during the Jerusalem council of Acts 15, the various Old Testament usages in Hebrews, etc.).

5. A naturalistic hermeneutic disallows a full-orbed operation of the analogy of faith principle of the Reformation, by its insistence that every text demands a reading “on its own terms”.

6. A naturalistic hermeneutic does not allow for everything to have its ultimate reference point in Christ, and is in direct opposition to Ephesians 1:10, Colossians 1:16-18, and Christ’s own teachings in John 5:39, Luke 24:25-27.

Really great stuff, go read the whole thing.

Interpretation is theology all the way down – a repost

GlenJanuary 6, 2011Leave a comment

It would be tempting to think of theology as a two stage process. First a pure biblical scholar can dispassionately read off the meaning of the Bible through the use of objective interpretive tools. Then a systematic theologian comes to co-ordinate these propositions into a logically cogent order.

But Ben Myers writes brilliantly against such a conception. 'It's theology all the way down', he writes. Theological pre-suppositions and commitments necessarily guide and shape all Christian activity from exegesis to exposition to pastoral work, to evangelism to hospitality to everything.

And yet the idea that the Bible can be neutrally read is so tempting. We would love to conceive of revelation as propositions deposited in a handy compendium simply to be extracted and applied. Yet the Word is a Person. And His book is Personal (John 5:39). It's not something we judge with our double edged swords - the Word judges us. (Heb 4:12)

Now Jesus thought the Scriptures were absolutely clear. He never made excuses for theological error. He never gave even the slightest bit of latitude by conceding a certain obscurity to the Bible. He never assumes that His theological opponents have just mis-applied an interpretive paradigm. If they get it wrong He assumes they've never read the Scriptures (e.g. Matt 21:16,42; Mark 2:25)! So the perspicuity of the Bible is not in dispute.

But Jesus tells the Pharisees why they get it wrong - "You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God." (Matt 22:29) And, again, "You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life." (John 5:39-40) They are wrongly oriented to the Power of God and the One of Whom the Scriptures testify - Jesus. This is not simply a wrong orientation of the intepreter but of the interpretation. Scripture reading must be oriented by the Power of God to the Son of God. Within this paradigm - a paradigm which the Scriptures themselves give us - the Bible makes itself abundantly clear.

But this paradigm is an unashamedly and irreducibly theological one. It is the result of exegesis (e.g. studying the verses given above) but it is also the pre-supposition of such exegesis. Theology is not the end of the process from exegesis to biblical studies and then to the systematician!

And yet, I have often been in discussions regarding the Old Testament where theologians will claim an obvious meaning to the OT text which is one not oriented by the Power of God to the Son of God. They will claim that this first level meaning is the literal meaning - one that is simply read off the text by a process of sound exegesis. And then they claim that the second meaning (it's sensus plenior - usually the christocentric meaning) is achieved by going back to the text but this time applying some extrinsic theological commitments.

What do we say to this? Well hopefully we see that whatever 'level' of meaning we assign to the biblical text it is not an obvious, literal meaning to be read off the Scriptures like a bar-code! Whatever you think that first-level meaning to be, such a meaning is inextricably linked to a whole web of theological pre-suppositions. The step from first level to second is not a step from exegesis to a theological re-reading. It is to view the text first through one set of pre-suppositions and then through another.

And that changes the direction of the conversation doesn't it? Because then we all admit that 'I have theological pre-suppositions at every level of my interpretation.' And we all come clean and say 'Even the basic, first-level meaning assigned to an OT text comes from some quite developed theological pre-commitments - pre-commitments that would never be universally endorsed by every Christian interpreter, let alone every Jewish one!' And then we ask 'Well why begin with pre-suppositions which you know to be inadequate? Why begin with pre-suppositions that are anything short of 'the Power of God' and 'the Son of God'? And if this is so, then why waste our time with a first-level paradigm that left even the post-incarnation Pharisees completely ignorant of the Word? In short, why don't we work out the implications of a biblical theology that is trinitarian all the way down? Why don't we, at all times, read the OT as inherently and irreducibly a trinitarian revelation of the Son?