Notes of my first Year at Asbury -- Reading the Bible Inductively

This is another Monday, "Notes Along the Way" post. Chronologically, the material here is just prior. My last Monday post is here.
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1. Asbury Seminary introduced me to a whole new level of professors. The professor who most took me under his wing was David Bauer. His intellect was so incisive. His approach so objective, comparatively speaking. He modeled a scientific rigor in pursuing the meaning of the biblical text that I found excilarating.

Teaching at IWU for some twenty years, I often felt the pressure of boundaries -- landmine topics to avoid. Much of this was probably self-inflicted, but I felt like I knew what subjects were most dangerous. I was always amazed at how Steve Lennox could march into a controversial subject with such confidence and emerge unscathed. Bud Bence, with a 1990s Houghton mindset dancing in his head, almost felt like he had to shake you some or you weren't getting your money's worth.

At the same time, he also had the fairly recent David Meade affair in the back of his head. A professor at Houghton, Meade had taken the position that Paul did not write the Pastorals and that several other books of the Bible were not written by the names on them. Harold Lindsell, of the Battle for the Bible fame, had written someone on the board (I think) sounding the alarm that Houghton was deviating from its evangelical glory.

When President Dan Chamberlain went to China for a semester, I understand he left instructions with Bud to fire Meade. (He himself was under pressure from the GBA of The Wesleyan Church, I believe.) Bud was the VPAA at Houghton at the time. Bud carried out the charge. From what I understand, Meade and the faculty fought back under the banner of academic freedom. That's a losing battle at a confessional school where the creed of the school is part of an agreement to come teach there. 

[Admittedly, the Wesleyan Church has no creedal line on pseudonymity. In theory, Meade only needed to affirm that the Pastoral letters were truthful and that it was a genre question not a true/false question. But instead, I understand he took the position "I'm the expert and should be allowed to follow the truth wherever it leads." Lennox, also a Houghton grad, has suggested to me that Meade's attitude tanked him more than his position. I of course was not present for any of those controversies to have a first hand opinion.]

The faculty never forgave Bud for firing Meade, and the next chance they got, they pressured Chamberlain into pushing him out. All the way around, he seemed a scapegoat. Bud felt deeply wounded and betrayed. Of course, IWU was so much the better for it. I apologize if I have massacred any of these details.

So Bud was a little nervous hiring me at IWU. He was the Division Chair of Religion when I was hired at IWU. I had also studied at Durham with Jimmy Dunn just as Meade had. (I've never met Meade. Dunn said he would never write a reference for me if Houghton ever wanted to hire me. It was a little bit of a joke when I went to work there in 2019.) 

Years later, Bud would apologize to me for his fears about me (he of course had no reason to apologize). He indicated it turned out I am much more conservative than he is. :-) 

All of that is to say that, in teaching, my hope was that if I taught students how to read the Bible in context -- how to listen to it and let it tell you what it meant -- then I wouldn't have to make controversial claims about what it meant. It would make all its claims for itself.

In practice, of course, few of my students really became fully inductive. Some did. The bread crumbs I thought I left for them to follow rarely led them anywhere different from where they started. Our paradigms are persistent. We see what our paradigms want us to see. This applies to scholars as well.

2. This "scientific method" approach to the Bible was very attractive to me at Asbury. It fit with my love of science in high school and my first year of college. And the "English Bible" method at Asbury, so ably modeled by Bauer, was quintessentially scientific in its approach.

First, you ask what the text says. You don't ask what it means yet. You absolutely do not apply it yet. You start by simply observing. What does the text say?

Then you ask what the words meant. This is a matter of its first meaning, not what the words seem to mean today. You do a word study, looking at the other places a word is used in the same language (Greek, Hebrew. or Aramaic). On a more general question, you gather evidence. In good Baconian fashion, you create a table with evidence and possible inferences. 

After exhausting evidence from the text itself, you now bring in possible historical background. You need to be careful, because the ancient world was a vast foreign country, and we only have the barest of artifacts from it. It is incredibly easy to see parallels that aren't really parallels. Only after you have done all the inductive work yourself do you bring in commentaries, which are just as likely to cloud your mind.

Now, finally, only after you have some sense of what it meant to its first audiences, do you begin to think about applying the text to today. You look for continuities between that time and our time. You also note the discontinuities. As Hays and Duvall put it, you "cross the principlizing bridge" by identifying biblical principles that you then reapply in contemporary contexts and situations.

This all smacks of modernism. This was the 80s, and postmodernism had not yet really hit. I'm all the more grateful it hadn't. Although I would come to appreciate the hermeneutical chastisement of postmodernism, it provides no real method for determining the meaning of the text. It is an incredibly helpful footnote but shouldn't be the main text. It's a muddle by its very nature. I suppose I'll get to that.

Although the inductive method I just set out is not foolproof -- not by far -- it is consummately reasonable.

3. It was also quite different from the method I grew up with, which I would come to categorize as "pre-modern." My mother's approach to interpretation -- without of course her ever knowing it -- amounted to "How can I make the evidence fit the conclusions I already have?" Her conclusions, of course, were provided by her tradition, the Pilgrim Holiness tradition.

The default for American Christians who have grown up in church is basically the same. How can we argue for the position of our group? It is a tribal hermeneutic, perfectly predictable. It's how if you're a Baptist, surprise, the Bible teaches Baptist things. If you're a Lutheran, the Bible teaches Lutheran things. And yes, if you're a Wesleyan, the Bible teaches Wesleyan things.

Of course in a Google, YouTube, Facebook, Tik Tok age, we hear a lot more than what my mother heard in her bubble growing up. In a world of verse quoting, it's easy to be affected by other traditions. The "non-denominational" church near you is basically Baptist. I always smile when some church naively thinks it's just following the Bible. Such comments simply show that the church is unreflective of its own influences and traditions.

But this would become the most important question of my first year at seminary. Would I read the Bible in a way that tried to make it say what I had grown up hearing it said? Or would I read it inductively and let it tell me what it said?

[Note that the Meade controversy didn't distinguish between the question of truth and the question of politics. Meade thought that teaching at a confessional school was a question of truth. It is -- within whatever the boundaries of the institution are. But the question of an institution is also a question of politics, which he failed at that time.]

4. Going back to college, I was struck by the clash between my pre-modern paradigm and the modernist paradigm that I would adopt at Asbury. While studying to test out of New Testament Survey, I was struck by the way Merrill Tenney's New Testament Survey talked about matters like where Thessalonica was located or what its place in the Roman Empire was. These things seemed completely irrelevant to me.

Why? Because reading the Bible at that time to me was a matter of taking an individual verse and reading the words in the light of my holiness theology. Without realizing, I understood reading the Bible to be a mirror reading of what I already thought. And I read in the King James version, as I'll soon discuss. Each verse was listed by number, not in paragraphs.

This led me to have what you might call a "memory verse" approach to the Bible. Each verse was ripped from its context and made into a philosophical proposition. The definitions I brought to each word were Pilgrim Holiness definitions -- not definitions from the Greek and Hebrew worlds in which those words were first written.

It was a completely sincere question I had back then. What does historical context matter in interpretation? Don't we just read the words and do what they say? If 1 Corinthians 11 says a woman shouldn't cut her hair, then shouldn't women not cut their hair? Funny how I didn't apply that question to greeting one another with a holy kiss!

5. A quick example of the paradigm shift I was about to undergo. My senior year of college, I wrote an honors project on the psychological aspects of holiness. It was quite impressive for the world of my background. I argued that the Spirit-fillings of Acts were second works of grace, experiences of entire sanctification. There was a day when you could still find it in the library at SWU.

At Asbury later on, under an independent study with Dr. Bauer, I would go through those same passages inductively and conclude they were all initial experiences of the Holy Spirit (except in Acts 4 of course). This was my transition from being a sectarian, traditional scholar to a more "objective," inductive scholar. I suspect that study helped me become a Teaching Fellow at Asbury. And it probably set me on a course to study with James Dunn at Durham.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

8 Week Romans Bible Study

Starting October 4 (Thursday), I will be doing an 8 week Bible study, going through Romans, with the Light and Life Wesleyan Church at Three Rivers, Michigan via Zoom. We will meet from 6:30-7:30 on the schedule below. If a church small group or you as an individual would like to join the Bible study, just email me (ken.schenck@indwes.edu).

For a church, all you need is a laptop and the ability to project the internet on a screen. If you want a daily devotional to work through alongside the Bible study, I have two devotionals on Romans (Our Righteousness and Our Relationships)

Here is the schedule:

Oct. 4 – The Reasons for Romans
Oct. 11 – All Have Sinned
Break Week
Oct. 25 – Right with God by Faith
Nov. 1 – The Human Condition
Nov. 8 – How Salvation Works
Nov. 15 – All Part of the Plan
Break Week
Nov. 29 – Living Together in Peace
Dec. 6 – Debated Issues in the Church

This is somewhat of an experiment. If it works, the School of Theology and Ministry at Indiana Wesleyan University might do something like this regularly.

The Writing Experiment Begins

I'm trying a new experiment to write a book. I blogged through most of the books I wrote for Wesleyan Publishing House, but normal blogging doesn't seem appropriate for other books, especially scholarly ones.

So I have set up a mock course in coursesites. To get access, send me your email address at kennethschenck@gmail.com. If you want to give a free will offering, there is a donate button on the upper right hand part of this website, but you do not have to.

The plan is to upload a few paragraphs each day and do a chapter a week to finish in August. (I have already written bits and pieces).

Here's a paragraph from today, the first day of the writing:

"Everything I have written thus far may seem obvious. In fact, we process this evidence without hardly a thought when we are reading an email from someone or talking to a friend. It gets more complicated when we are further removed from the speaker or the conversation. Sometimes we hear a quote from someone and we do not know the words they said before the quote. We may end up hearing their words "out of context," which makes it likely we will misinterpret the meaning they intended."

Who was Job's Redeemer? (Job 19:25-26)

1. There is a beautiful Aria in Handel's Messiah based on these verses in Job:

"I know that my redeemer lives,
     and that in the end he will stand on the earth.
And after my skin has been destroyed,
     yet in my flesh I will see God."

It is a tremendously powerful picture!  Job is suffering. In one Christian reading of these verses, he faces potential death, but he knows that Jesus is alive, shall we even say that he will rise from the dead! I know that my Redeemer, Jesus, whom the Romans put to death, has risen and that he will come again. One day he will stand on the earth. Long after Job's skin has disintegrated and he is died, he will rise again from the dead. In his flesh, he will see God.

This is a powerful theological reading of Job. Although I can't think of any place where the New Testament actually interprets this verse from Job in this way, it is a fine theological reading of the verse.

2. The question in my mind is what the verse meant when it was first written? The default reading probably goes something like this:

• "I read the verse against my world and my definitions. As a Christian, Jesus is my Redeemer. "In the end he will stand on the earth," sounds like my belief in the second coming. Skin destroyed and then returning? Sounds like resurrection to me.

The problem is when I try to read the verse against its literary context (the rest of Job) and historical-cultural context (how words were being used in the Ancient Near East at the time, roughly).

a. For example, within Job, look at these verses in the literary context of Job:

• Job 14:12 come into play: "mortals lie down and do not rise again." 
• Job 7:9-10: "those who go down to Sheol do not come up; they return no more to their houses"
• And Job 3:16-19: "why was I not buried like a stillborn child... There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest... The small and the great are there, and the slaves are free from their masters."

In other words, Job does not yet seem to have any sense yet of resurrection or of a meaningful afterlife. For this reason alone, it is unlikely that Job 19:25-26 are about resurrection. The rest of Job does not seem to think in those categories yet.

b. When we expand to the historical-cultural context, the situation doesn't seem to change. The other wisdom books, whose final form I personally would date to the same period, have similar things to say:

• Psalm 88:3-6: "My soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. I am counted among those who go down to the Pit; I am like those who have no help, like those forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those who remember no more… in the regions dark and deep."
• Ecclesiastes 9:5: "The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost."

3. So what was Job saying originally? It seems to me that the most likely meaning is captured in the following paraphrase:

"I know that God, the one who is going to get me out of my current situation, is alive. I know that he is going to show up here in the land. My skin is rotting now with these boils. But he is going to vindicate and restore me. He is going to restore my skin to normal. In my restored flesh, I will see God."

Obviously I could be wrong. My point is merely to exercise the method one uses when the goal is what the text really meant originally. Then we are free, I believe, to hear true Holy Spirit meanings as well. For this reason, I will continue to prize the theological interpretation of Handel's Messiah! It is a Christological reading that is fully correct theologically.

Surveying Biblical Texts

Yesterday I sketched the outline of a chapter on following the train of thought of a passage. Since I went over this today with a class, I thought I'd sketch out:

Chapter 5
Surveying Biblical Texts

1. The Big Picture
In the last chapter, we mentioned that you should know a little something about what a text has said in the lead up to the passage you are most interested in interpreting. This is literary context. How do you get the big picture of a whole biblical book or a section of biblical text like the Sermon on the Mount? For that matter, how do you get a sense of the flow of a chapter?

We are good memory verse people. We're good at individual trees. We don't tend to be as good at the forest.

2. Content and Arrangement
The book of Proverbs is somewhat unusual in the Bible. It has some chapters here and there that go together but, in general, it does not really have an overall flow. It's not like a story that unfolds. It's not like an argument that moves from point to point. It is a collection of wise sayings that no doubt span a large period of time.

But most "discourses" have a structure. They are not just a collection of miscellaneous content. Rather, the content is arranged in a certain way intentionally so as to convey meaning. Books as a whole have a train of thought, not just individual passages. For example, most discourses have a beginning, a middle, and an end. So a great number of books of the Bible have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

For example, ancient letters tended to have a standard format that we see underlying the structure of most of the letters in the NT. There is an opening greeting, perhaps a thanksgiving to God, the body of a letter, perhaps closing greetings and a farewell.

The goal of surveying a biblical text is to get an overall sense of the basic content, as well as the overall way that content is arranged. So to survey a text we will:

• Give titles to the chapters (or paragraphs if we are surveying a smaller bit of text).
• Outline the book or section we are surveying.
• Get a sense of the way each part of the book/section connects to the one(s) that follows.
• Look for themes that run throughout the book or section.
• Ask questions that will help us dig into the specifics later.

3. Getting a Sense of the Content
Obviously to get a sense of the content of a book or section, you need to read it, probably several times. If a formal equivalence translation is best for following a train of thought in detail, a more dynamic translation is better for getting the big picture of a larger amount of text. The chapters and verses were added over a 1000 years after each book, but a good way to get into the content of a book or section of the Bible is to title each chapter...

4. Outlining a Text
A far more challenging task is to outline the way content is arranged in a text. Often there will be a beginning, a middle, and and end. Sometimes there are aspects of the type of text (genre) that suggest strong possibilities (see the genre chapters on letters and narratives in particular for more on outlining specific types of biblical literature).

The key is looking for major shifts in the train of thought. Some interpreters approach this more as an intuitive art. Others approach it like a science (e.g., discourse analysis). No doubt in both cases there is evidence:

• shift in topic - this is the biggie. The text was talking about one thing, then it started talking about another.
• major conjunctions - Connecting words can join words, phrases, clauses, paragraphs. But they can also transition from one section to another.
• introductory formulae (the word of the LORD came to...)
• shifts in tenses, shifts in point of view or speaker, shift in sub-genre (e.g., from exposition to exhortation)
• There are some literary devices that occasionally are used to arrange text (inclusion, interchange, intercalation, chiasm, acrostic).

Narratives often have turning points and climaxes, as well as background at the beginning. This helps a person ascertain the structure of the narrative. A special consideration is whether there might be composite texts in the Bible, texts where more than one source has been combined or a previous source has been edited. In such instances, there may be "fissures" left where the joining took place.

5. Looking for Patterns
a. relationships between units
As we saw in the previous chapter, there are a limited number of ways in which one piece of text can relate or connect to the next (repetition, comparison, contrast, movement from general to particular or vice versa, movement from cause to effect or explanation of effect from cause, etc.)  Understanding the overall flow of a text means having a sense of how each unit of a text flows into the next.

b. threads of thought that run throughout
These are recurring themes or recurring patterns. So you can have a recurrent theme of reconciliation, and you can also have a recurring contrast or a recurring sense of cause and effect.

6. Asking Questions to Follow-up
The Traina/Bauer method of inductive Bible study, from which this surveying method originates, suggests that there are certain key kinds of questions to ask about basic patterns you find in a text. This allows you to know the best way to continue your study deeper into a biblical text. These questions include questions of definition, why questions, how questions, and questions of implication for the original meaning.

7. Give examples

Following the Train of Thought of a Passage

I don't know if I will ever write a book on how to interpret and apply the Bible, but I have quite a bit of raw material accumulated. I put in a feeler with a publisher who was at least interested in seeing more. So on the huge assumption I meet other deadlines, this would be the big project for the second half of the year.

One of the chapters is tentatively titled, "Following a Train of Thought." Because of Snowpocalypse, I had to teach the first day of a class online today, but it covered this material. So the content of this chapter is well in my mind today and I thought I would jot down an outline.

Chapter 4
Following a Train of Thought

1. Starting in the Text
You need history and culture to have a full and deep understanding of a text, but you'd best start interpretation with a rough draft sense of the text itself. Start with the passage you want to interpret. Then gather more information. Then return to the text. This process is called the hermeneutical circle.

2. Things to Observe
a. A text gives evidence of its meaning in several ways.

• For example, there are the words and phrases themselves (semantics). Look for key terms when you are trying to interpret a passage.
• Then there are grammatical aspects of words, phrases, and clauses (grammar, syntax). Is a word singular or plural? You often need to know the original languages to see some of these clearly.
• Connecting words are incredibly helpful when trying to determine the meaning of a passage.
• Closely related to connecting words are the relationships between one thought and the next. Connecting words ideally tell you these, but sometimes there can be implicit relationships between one thought and the next without a conjunction (repetition, contrast, etc..).
• Miscellaneous things of interest (tone, figures of speech, allusions, points of view, items of historical interest).

Since we are making our way through the text as a rough draft the first time, we will need to remain very tentative. We may raise more questions to look at more deeply than answers at first.

b. How might a person dig up this raw material?  A first step might be to photocopy the text and mark it up, inventing your own symbols (e.g., a line under key terms, a circle around key connecting words, etc). You might make comments in the margin of an electronic document or track changes.

c. A note on what sort of translation to use. In the previous chapter, we argued that some types of translation are better for one sort of task and others for another. If you are wanting to follow the train of thought of a passage, you need details, so a formal equivalence translation works best for this assignment. Obviously the actual Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic text works best of all.

3. Organizing the Notes
You can write up your observations in a way that becomes the seed of a full blown interpretation. No need to write a full blown paper, because this is just the first draft:

• Paste the translation of the passage you are using.
• Locate your passage in the book - what is the broader literary context and the immediate literary context of the passage in question. The chapter that follows will help you know how to locate a passage more exactly in the overall flow of a book.
• Get a sense of the structure of the passage. Can you discern paragraph divisions, remembering that the chapters and verses weren't there in the original? Where are the clear cut sentences, which may span more than one verse (or there may be more than one in a verse).
• Proceed through the passage paragraph by paragraph. Within each paragraph, go sentence by sentence. 
• With each new paragraph, jot down your notes on how it relates to the one that came before it. Then jot down questions about which you will want to do some more research.
• With each new sentence, jot down notes on how it relates to the one that came before it. Jot down notes on the key items you observed in that sentence from your earlier spade work. Jot down questions on which you will want to do some more research (definitions, how questions, why questions, etc...).
• If you have any sense of diagramming or charting sentences, it will help you gain clarity down to the level of each individual word.
• When you finish the passage, jot down some notes in summary.

Give examples from each testament.

Exegetical Research Lecture

I did this 32 minute overview of exegetical research for a class I'm teaching.  It explains the domains of literary and historical-cultural evidence as they relate to exegetical conclusions.  The first ten minutes are hermeneutical in orientation, explaining what exegesis is and how it might differ from application or even theological interpretation.

The Literary Structure of the Sermon on the Mount

I'll be writing a devotional book on the Sermon on the Mount in the next couple months.  Although the structure of Matthew 5-6 gelled with me a long time ago (rightly or wrongly), it's only been in the last week that Matthew 6-7 have.  Although I use the Sermon on the Mount as an example of how to survey a text, I've always been a little less confident about the second half than the first.

Here's just a thumbnail of how I see the structure:

Matthew 5:3-16 Beatitudes
Kingdom Introduction--presents the values of the kingdom.  It involves some contrasts that will play out throughout the sermon--between now and not yet, between the visible and the heart, between true blessedness and superficial blessedness.

Matthew 5:17-20 Key Verses
These verses are ground zero in the sermon.  They are a general statement that plays itself out in the rest of it in two ways: 1) Jesus, as the new Moses, gives the fulfilled, the complete, perfected, and authoritative interpretation of the Law and the Prophets and 2) that fulfilled interpretation is true righteousness, a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees.  These verses also form an inclusio with 7:12, which returns to the theme of summing up the Law and the Prophets with the Golden Rule or what we know from Matthew 22 as the love commandment.

Matthew 5:21-48 The Fulfilled Law
In this series of contrasts, Jesus plays out what he means by fulfilling the Law.  It's not merely the superficial, external rule but the playing out of the love principle in the heart in each area.  In some cases, this shakes up and shuffles an OT law (e.g., eye for eye). The chapter climaxes with the general principle in 5:43-48.  The fulfilled law not only loves ones friends but one's enemies as well.  This is what it means to be complete or "perfect" as our heavenly Father is complete (5:48).

Matthew 6:1-7:12 True Righteousness
This section plays out 5:20 and what exceeding righteousness is in contrast to the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees.  First, their righteousness is only acting (6:1-18).  It is external rather than a righteousness of the heart.  It is a righteousness for now rather than for the kingdom.  It is a righteousness for the world rather than for God and the kingdom.

They lay up treasures on earth (6:19-24).  They judge others when in fact their heart is guilty of the same things (7:1-6). If they focus too much on receiving honor in the here and now, the visible (remember the topsy turvy values of the Beatitudes), one can also focus too much on the troubles of the visible and the moment.  The worrier is also wrongly focused on the current mourning (cf. 5:4), on the current crisis before the kingdom comes (6:25-34).

So the person in current need, before the kingdom comes, should ask and seek from God, who is a loving Father (7:7-12; cf. 5:43-48).  And we are to be complete as he is complete and do to others what we would wish them do to us (7:12).

Matthew 7:13-27 Be Wise!
The sermon now concludes with several warnings.  The most central one is to be a wise builder.  Someone might hear this sermon and do nothing with it.  That's like a foolish builder.  That person's house will fall.  The wise builder hears the "rock" of the sermon and applies it.

Relatively few will do that.  The gate to life is narrow.  Even some of those who pretend to hear are only faking.  There will be false prophets who, like the scribes and Pharisees, pretend to go along with the kingdom but whose heart isn't really with it. By the time Matthew was writing, this was probably a comment on people in his context.

Finally, like the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25, not everyone who claims Jesus as Lord on the Day of Judgment will make it. Those who are only playing at it will be cast out into outer darkness, even though they may have done spectacular external things.

Evidentiary versus Presuppositional Hermeneutics

I'm working on the Atlanta paper today, but thought I would drop this distinction I've been developing for dialog between varying scholars:

I'm afraid I'm not good enough at graphics to get the diagram quite the way I wanted in the time limits of this morning.  In theory, there might be a line right down the middle of the shaded area to make four basic interpretive approaches.

Broadly speaking, the two basic approaches are 1) an evidence-driven hermeneutic that tries to form its conclusions as much as possible on the basis of the evidence, following something like the scientific method and 2) a presupposition-driven hermeneutic that comes to the evidence with certain presuppositions that drive the limits of what can and cannot be concluded.

The overlap is an area where dialog can take place between those who take these contrasting approaches.  It is an area where those who are primarily presupposition oriented can talk evidence and those who are evidence oriented fall within the presuppositional parameters of those who are more presuppositionally oriented.

Outside the overlap are the points where no discussion can take place and someone in the shaded area or other circle cannot dialog.  For example, a person from the unshaded part of the evidence-driven hermeneutic might have a hard time approaching the text with a sense that miracles might take place or that God actually engages the world.

On the other hand, when a person is so presuppositional on an issue that no amount of evidence would bring a change of position, then a person approaching a topic from the standpoint of evidence will not be able to dialog with that person at all on that particular issue without ultimately discussing presuppositions.

It is impossible for anyone to be completely without presuppositions, and a presuppositionalist who does not engage evidence at some level will appear to be a lunatic.  But this is why, on so many religious topics, we can't talk to each other.  We should not be surprised.