The Top 10 Numbers

10.
9.
8.
7.
6.
5.
4.
3.
2.
And the number 1 number is:
1.

First Intensive Week done

Very thankful for a great first week of the year at Wesley Seminary.  Very grateful to my Scripture class for good engagement, good questions, good spirits.  From what I have heard, the other classes went very well also (theology, Bonhoeffer, Pastor in English and Spanish, Bible in Spanish, cultural contexts of ministry, and global church history).

Next week it starts up all over again...

I Love the Bible!

I may certainly be self-deceived about how much I understand about the Bible. But I love it.  I love the God I understand from it, a God who meets humanity where they are at, a God who is gracious, compassionate, slow to anger, and full of mercy, quick to change his mind about the consequences of our wrongdoing.  I see in the Bible a God who is interested in us loving one another and in us reconciling with our enemies, a God who wants us to overcome our abuse and oppression of each other.  I see a God who is interested in our hearts and actions toward one another (and very little concerned at all about what we say is going on in our heads). I see in the Bible God's Son who is willing to die for us. I see in the Bible the hope that the world will be set right and that we are part of that mission.

I don't begrudge anyone who doesn't quite get to the paragraph above the way I do, but I think most will find little to object to in it.

One more day

I've been leading the basic Bible course this week so have had little time/energy for anything else this week.  I don't know how the class has felt, but I've been happier with this time around than ever.

The flow of the week has been:
Monday: Surveying larger sections of a biblical book
Tuesday: The text of the Bible and following a train of thought
Wednesday: Word studies
Today: Formulating a biblical theology

We have 8 seminary classes going on campus this week, two of which are in Spanish. We are also very privileged to have J. Cameron Carter here from Duke doing a class on Bonhoeffer.

Great Worship at Wesley Yesterday

Yesterday was the yearly worship convocation at Wesley to kick off the new year.  We have 8 classes going this week including a lead off class in English for about 18 new students and we have about 8 students I think in a lead off class in Spanish. It was a very lively and multi-ethnic service, with our new professor Kwasi Kena on the piano and new professor Safiyah Fosua leading.

Very exciting!

Why do you believe?

I'm in the middle of a second edit of the philosophy book I've written.  I've been doing a chapter a day.  Today I am reading through the chapter on the existence of God.  I thought I'd ask you, whoever you are, Why do you believe in God?  What books or resources have been meaningful to you in this regard?

5. Postlude: The Effect of Scripture

With this post I end the long hermeneutical autobiography I started two months ago.   Here are the "chapters":

1. Learning to Read in Context
2. The Text of the New Testament
3. The NT Use of the OT
4. Sources behind the Bible

Now the conclusion:
________________
Where am I today in my hermeneutical pilgrimage?   I once heard Keith Drury say something to the effect of "The fundamental purpose of Scripture is to form a holy people."  As usual, he intuitively senses a position that can be backed up with an immensity of scholarship

1. Scripture is for us today.
It is fascinating to reflect at how deeply ingrained the sense is that what we are to do with Scripture is to uncover the hidden, to "get back." Prior to modern times, there was the impulse to find the secret meaning.  "Here's what God is really saying here."  There was a penchant for the allegorical, the mystical, or the spiritual meaning.

The modern era didn't change the impulse, it only channeled it. So now the pre-modern person studies Greek and Hebrew to get a secret meaning, or Rob Bell knows something about ancient Jewish tradition that you've never heard of.  Or we do a word study to get some secret truth. Often these impulses are no more modern than before historical criticism. They are just new expressions of the medieval drive to find secret meanings.

For those who truly understood history, the impulse became to "get back" to the original meaning. The pre-modern meanings above became anathema. Now we are on a quest for the historical Jesus, not the Jesus of Nicaea, not even the Jesus of the gospels. The Bible became a dissected frog.

We are now in a better position to reflect on our prior selves. If the Bible is either communication to us or action on us from God, then Scripture is Scripture when it has some effect on us. That simple observation puts the focus of Scripture's function not on the past but on the present. Scripture is Scripture when it has an effect on us today. That means that, as Scripture, whatever has happened in the past is only as effective as what happens in the present.

Let's say there was a perfect play back on your own 20 yard line in football.  Maybe there was a perfect pass or a perfect sneak. Maybe your team rushed up the field to the opposing team's 10 yard line with plays that will be put in textbooks and played over and over again on TV. But if you never get into the end zone, there won't be any score. Scripture as Scripture for us is only effective to the extent it communicates or has the proper effect on us.

In that light, how bizarre is the obsession and myopia involved in "getting back." So we say the Bible is inspired in the "original manuscripts" that we do not have.  But can I be inspired when I read it? For me as a reader, it doesn't matter how inspired it was 2000 years ago if I don't hear or experience it rightly today. Why are we so inculturated to ask about matters of its original moment?

This lays bare how anemic past debates about historicity and authorship have been. They are drives not to hear God today or experience God through the Bible today but to put an artifact from the past on a pedestal.  What becomes important is not so much what is in it but the high idea of it in itself. Indeed, we are willing to ignore its plain meaning over and over again to preserve the lighting in the museum show room. We want to bow before an icon of God's past action and marvel at its glory.

But the Bible is not to be worshiped. It is to be experienced. God is to be worshiped through the Bible. God is to heard through the Bible. God is to be experienced through the Bible. All those things happen now, not in the original manuscripts.

That brings us to bolster our sense of the role the Holy Spirit and the Church inevitably must play in our use of the Bible. Perhaps God did implant hidden meanings in the past in the Bible. But I think we would be far more on point if we recognized that God can inspire us in the moment of reading to hear and experience him. Similarly, most Christians are unaware of how much Christian tradition impacts the way they read the Bible and, presumably, this is also part of God steering Scripture to its desired effect on us. The Bible is a sacrament of divine encounter.

2. Scripture is formative.
There is a tendency to think about the Bible only in cognitive terms. I read the Bible to know things. This is also a shallow sense of Scripture. God wants to do things to us through Scripture. Human understanding is a flimsy thing. It changes so often without us even realizing it. For most of us the words of "truth" we say are a game we play to express our irrational feelings and justify our desired actions.

By contrast, it is the very nature of narrative to draw us into the story and this is a predominant genre in the Bible. So it is easy for God to expose our hidden motives as we get in the story and see ourselves. Even the instruction and prophecy of Scripture come in the stories of ancient Israel and the early church and God can find us in those stories as well if we don't rip the words out as self-standing timeless propositions of philosophical truth. I can identify with the emotions of the Psalms and find myself soothed.

The primary function of Scripture is thus to form us.  First, it is to form us more than me, although forming me is part of forming us. We read Scripture in communities of faith. Second, our hearts are the primary target of formation because the heart is God's primary concern. God is primarily concerned with making us people who love him and love others through Scripture.

As God forms our attitudes he also is forming our actions, the way we live together in this world. How shallow is the "answer book" sense of the Bible in this light, whose focus is on certainty in understanding. But my understanding is only as important as it joins with a right heart and right actions. I believe in truth, but for most of us, our understandings are only epiphenomena, a front for our emotions and wills. The most important truths have always been existential.

3. Scripture is historical.
For all my attempt to get into proper focus what is really going on and should be going on in our reading of Scripture, the Bible does in fact come from the past.  To set the proper focus on what Scripture does today does not negate the fact that God has spoken in the past, and the Bible is the primary place for us to see what God hath wrought upon the earth.

The Bible in its original meaning is history. Most profoundly, its books are part of the history of God walking with humanity. The pre-modern constructs history out of the biblical text.  The modern sees the texts as part of history. The post-modern recognizes that the texts were part of history and yet affirms the importance of us getting inside the stories within the texts.

So there is much to learn about God from the way he spoke to ancient audiences through each of these individual texts. There is much to learn about us from the way God formed the people of God in the past. I can be formed as I observe the past formation of others, and I am the people of God just as they were.

So God inspired, spoke, and formed the people of God in the past through the individual books of the Bible and he inspires, speaks, and forms us as the people of God in the present through the Bible. God does not err in what he speaks or in how he forms. It thus goes without saying that the Bible is inerrant in all that it affirms and infallible in what it does, for it is God that affirms and acts through it.

But we should not get it out of focus. Scripture is not an end in itself.  It is a means, an instrument through which God speaks and acts on us. We submit to God and Christ, and the Bible is the messenger.     We must resist bibliolatry, trying to encapsulate God in a tangible object. God is not contained by the Bible, nor can the depth of his understanding be captured in human language.

CNN in Trouble

I was listening to a piece about how CNN has drastically lost market share.  The general reason identified is that while FOX appeals to conservatives and NBCNews (formerly MSNBC) appeals to liberals, CNN has at least had the aim of neutrality.

But most people aren't interested in neutrality. It's not exciting.  Where's the passion in Spock as a host?  People want to hear someone who foments the passions they already have.

Yep, that's pretty much my sense of things.  I at least think I've noticed recently that Chris Matthews on NBC has started badgering conservatives on his show.  Sad.  I used to think he more or less tried to be neutral.  But you've got to earn a living...

Assad is Toast

You know it. I know it. It's been clear for a couple months now. It's just a matter of time. At some point, someone will pull him out of a drainage pipe and kill him. They never learn.

Then again, maybe he'll flee to Iran.

Rights aren't inalienable

Even Jefferson didn't really mean it in the Declaration of Independence.

"So Tom, life is an inalienable right?  What if a person murders someone?  Can we take his life in punishment?"

"No, I wasn't talking about that," Tom answers.

"What about in war, can I take someone else's life in war, especially if he's a British soldier about to shoot me?"

"No, I wasn't referring to war," Tom said, looking at me like I was stupid.

I'm not sure where I picked up the idea, but somehow I emerged from high school thinking that the rights of the Constitution were absolute, meaning without exception. Turns out this is not only wrong, it is impossible.

Freedom of religion is not absolute.  If my religion pushes me to kill other people, I can't practice it.

The right to bear arms is not absolute.  There's nothing to keep the government from prohibiting a criminal from having a gun... or from banning assault rifles from the general populace, since their sole existence is to kill lots of people as quickly as possible.

Freedom of speech is not absolute.  I am not free to blog plots against the government or say certain things about the president.

Living in society requires everyone involved to surrender some portion of their individual freedom for the common good.  Then we hire police to enforce the "social contract" we have made.  

No rights are absolute.  We are not living in a jungle or in some primitive culture where justice is administered by rogue individuals. There is no Batman.

Taxes are a given. We do not have the right to drive 100mph within the city limits as part of the contract because that wouldn't be good for other pedestrians who are part of the social contract with me.  The trick is the give and take.

What is the sweet spot between my individual freedom and the common good of society?  There is no right or wrong answer, only ones that benefit more or less people.

Some Important Greek Conjunctions

I don't have a snappy post for this morning, so here's a vidcast lecture I created for my Greek class. Some of the ones I've posted here were actually done live originally, but this one was canned to get through all the material.  17 minutes

Psalm 10 Translation

Psalm 10
10:1 Why, YHWH, do you stand at a distance? 
     [Why] do you hide for times in the distress?
2 In the pride of the wicked [man], he persecutes the poor;
     They are caught in the schemes that they devise.
3 For the wicked [one] brags about the lust of his soul;
     And blesses the one taking spoils, [whom] YHWH hates.
4 The wicked [man], like the pride of his nose, will not seek,
     God is not [in] all his schemes.
5 His ways are twisted every time;
     Your judgments are high from his sight; 
     At those who oppose [him], he snorts at them.
6 He said in his heart, "I will not be moved,
     From generation to generation that [I will not be] in harm."
7 Of cursing, his mouth is full, and deceits,
     And fraud is under his tongue, trouble and wickedness.
8 He sits in the blind spot of villages;
     In the hiding places he will murder the innocent;
His eyes against the unfortunate lurk.
     9 He lies in ambush in the secret place like a lion in a den;
He lies in ambush to seize the poor;
     He will seize the poor when he draws [him] in his net.
10 He crushes, he crouches,
     And he falls with his mighty ones [on] the poor.
11 He said in his heart, "God forgot.
     He has hidden his face.
     He will never see."

12 Arise, YHWH.
     God, lift up your hand.
     Do not forget the miserable.
13 Why do the wicked despise God?
     He says in his heart,
     "You will not come looking [for me]."
14 See that you, you have looked at trouble and grievance,
     To take [it] into your hand on you.
The poor person surrenders [to you].
     You are the helper of the orphan.
15 Break the arm of the wicked,
     And the evil one pursue in his wickedness
     [Until] you will not find [him any more].
16 YHWH [is] king for ever and ever;
     The nations perish from his land.
17 You hear the longing of the poor, YHWH;
     You prepare their heart;
     You attend your ear.
18 In order to judge the fatherless and crushed,
     Not allowing again the man from the land to terrify.

1.3 Mark continues

I sent off my draft of the first Jesus book to Wesleyan Publishing House yesterday.  It's probably a little too long which is a potential pain. It's sometimes easier to write from scratch than to edit down something, but we'll see what they say.

So now back to the second book, toward which I've written two posts, the last of which is here.  The first book was about Jesus: The Essentials, the basics or core of Jesus. I'm sure WPH will come up with a better title. The second volume is then about the specific presentations of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. No doubt the outline will develop but here's my basic sense of the second volume:

1. Mark's Basic Story
2. The Hidden Jesus (special themes in Mark)
3. The Virgin Birth (Matthew and Luke)
4. The New Moses (Matthew's 5 sermons)
5. Jesus the Rabbi (special themes in Matthew)
6. God's Movement (Luke's history of God's doings)
7. Jesus the Savior (special themes in Luke)
8. Signs and Glory (John's different approach)
9. Jesus the Way (special themes in John)
10. Jesus the Divine Word (John and beyond)

Now to continue Mark...
____________
Mark 1:1 begins with a simple enough statement: "The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah." The NIV2011 translates the opening verse well for a couple reasons. First, the phrase "good news" is better than "gospel" because it would be easy for us to think that Mark is only saying that this verse was beginning the Gospel of Mark.  But when Mark wrote, the idea of a gospel book hadn't happened yet.

In fact, it may very well be that the idea of a gospel book started right here, with the way Mark worded this verse: "the beginning of the gospel."  Mark meant the beginning of the good news, but it's easy enough to see how some later reader would think of the whole book as a gospel, a new type of literature or genre. If an ancient person had found a scroll of Mark on the street and picked it up, no doubt they would have thought of it as some kind of biography.

Of course there is no birth story.  This might have seemed as odd to an ancient person as it does to us.  How do you have a biography without a birth story?

Then again, we look for different things in the childhood of a famous person than the ancients did. We live in the shadow of Freud, where we want to know the "formative influences" on a child. How did her parents treat her? What kind of a relationship did she have with her mother?

The ancients saw identity in much more fatalistic terms. If the child later became great, there must have been signs of greatness from the very beginning, surely. Were there notable omens at the time of birth? What early indications were there of the later greatness?

Mark simply begins with Jesus' baptism by John.  He hits the ground running with this compact, first gospel. In chapter 4, I'll give some of the reasons why most think Mark was the first of the gospels we now have. Of course we can speculate that some of the traditions about Jesus were written down before Mark, but Mark is the earliest we have for sure.

The good news is about Jesus, the Messiah.  The NIV2011 goes with the Hebrew version of the word "Christ."  Messiah means, "anointed one," and has clear connotations of Jesus' kingship.  Christ is simply the Greek translation of it. Many manuscripts also have "Son of God" here, which is also a royal title that comes from the Old Testament (e.g., Ps. 2; 2 Sam. 7:14)...

4.4 The Theology of the Gospel Writers

Apart from the conclusion, I'll wrap up my hermeneutical biography with this post.  This last clump of posts has roughly been on the subject of "Sources behind the Bible" and has included thus far:

a. Splicing the Gospels Together
b. Harmonizing not Advisable
c. Creativity in Telling the Story

I'm calling this last post, "The Theology of the Gospel Writers."
___________
... I want to end with the question of the theological point of view of biblical narratives.  If we are focused on the theology of the gospel writers, then we get back what fundamentalism took away from us in the twentieth century and more. Before the rise of historical criticism, Christians largely read the gospels theologically.  True, they assumed precise historicity too, but it was not the focus.  The truth, the theology of the text was the focus.

The rise of historical criticism forced the issue. Arguably, it was usually pushed in a way that was unhelpful, even hostile to faith.  The assumption was--this is not historical, it's false.  It is no surprise that fundamentalism responded in kind--this is historical, it's true. Neo-evangelicalism has been more sophisticated in its response, but often has still not freed itself from this dichotomy.

A more helpful response would have been that the standard "historical=true" was wrongheaded in the first place. The fundamentalist, like the modernist, both assumed that truth was a matter of history and that the goal was to get back to the original history. Again, I am not denying the fundamental historicity of the gospel story. If Jesus did not perform miracles, if Jesus did not rise from the dead, those would be serious issues.

But truth is not always a matter of "it happened exactly this way." For example, we have no reason to believe that the Parable of the Prodigal Son or the Parable of the Good Samaritan ever actually happened.  They are parables, not historical stories. Yet they are as true as any history book.

No one would ever criticize Charles Dickens for making up The Christmas Story. Can you imagine someone telling you in anger, "I can't believe it.  There never was a Tiny Tim!  What a liar that Dickens was!!!"  We would think this person was rather weird. I'm not suggesting that the biblical stories are novels. I'm suggesting that truth is not limited to history.

In fact, I have come to see both the fundamentalist and modernist view of history as two-dimensional and impoverished.  What a richness to the gospels is missed! These stories were told for a reason. They were told in the way they were told for a reason.

I was privileged to begin serious study of the New Testament in the 80s.  Biblical studies at this point was at an interesting juncture.  First, the wave of trends was just leaving something called "redaction criticism."  Redaction criticism in itself was a move in the right direction.

For about 100 years, biblical studies had been obsessed with "getting back" to the historical Jesus. It was a little like the man who first excavated Jericho.  He was so preoccupied with getting back to the ruins of Jericho in Joshua's day that he plowed through layer after layer of earth. We now know that the ruins he finally got to were way older than Joshua's day and he had not too tidily discarded the relative layers in what I believe now is a huge pile off to the side.

So it had been for about 100 years.  John was discarded early on because it was so symbolic.  Matthew and Luke were boiled down to Mark and a hypothetical sayings source.  Then Mark was recognized as having a theology, so it was discarded.  Then a search started to piece together some picture of Jesus from individual sayings.  In all this quest, Jesus evaporated into a handful of unusual sayings that we knew Jesus had to say because they were so bizarre (e.g., "let the dead bury their dead").

Now don't get me wrong, there were a lot of discoveries that were part of this 100 year quest for the historical Jesus.  I dare anyone to go head to head with someone who knows their stuff on some of these things. To the point, my biggest problem with this quest is that it has a "got to get back" mentality that sees all as lost until we can get back to the history. Then, so the idea goes, we'll hit pay dirt.  It throws away what we have in lieu of some speculative thing we don't have.

Again, I'm not discounting the legitimacy of pursuing history nor am I denying the essential historicity of the gospels. I'm saying that truth is not limited to historical events.  In the 70s, even secular scholars were tired of the search for scraps of historical certainty. They began to ask a different question.  If Luke has used Mark as a source, then how does the way he has edited Mark reflect his theology? How does the way Matthew has edited Mark reflect his theology?

So Luke has a tendency to emphasize Jesus' good news to the poor.  For example, it is possible that he has taken Jesus' appearance in the synagogue of Nazareth in Mark 6:1-6 and creatively moved it to become something like an inaugural address (Luke 4:14-30).  He arguably makes it the frontispiece of Jesus' ministry.

What does this tell us about Luke's theology, if this is true?  It would tell us that Luke wanted to highlight Jesus' ministry to the poor, the enslaved, the disempowered as a key focus of his earthly ministry.  Is this true?  Absolutely. Is it historical--yes, even though Luke may show some creative licence in the way he presents and emphasizes it.

Now I'm not going to die for this interpretation.  I'm only saying it is a perfectly reasonable reconstruction given the overwhelming likelihood that Luke used Mark as a source. And I am saying that we gain a better understanding of truth by it rather than losing truth or, worse yet, thinking this would be an error of some kind.

Still, one of the potential problems with redaction criticism, such as in what I just mentioned, is that it is still somewhat speculative.  The 80s thus saw the rise in biblical studies of "narrative criticism." Narrative criticism leaves the question of sources behind almost altogether and asks, "What is the meaning of the text as we have it?"

Narrative criticism was a great boon for evangelicals getting their PhD's in the 80s.  Prior to the 70s, a lot of evangelicals ended up doing strange dissertations because they believed in the essential historicity of the Bible. So they might do a PhD on some aspect of Greek or Hebrew grammar, or they might study the history of how a text had been interpreted.

But with narrative criticism, it didn't matter whether you believed the text was historical or not.  The focus was the text as it stands.  So your PhD advisor might not believe any of the story actually happened and you could believe it all happened and it didn't matter, because you were both interpreting the text as it stands.

The only rule here is that you can't mix the gospels.  You have to interpret Mark's world as Mark's world and not let Matthew or Luke interfere with it.  But this is just good inductive Bible study anyway. So Matthew emphasizes Jesus as an apocalyptic teacher.  Mark emphasizes the hiddenness of who Jesus is and the centrality of his suffering.  Luke emphasizes Jesus ministry to the poor and downtrodden.  John gives us Jesus the Word and the importance of faith in him.

None of this takes away whatever was legitimate about the historical criticism that came before. What it does is that it puts the focus on the text as we have it.  Its goal is the truth of the text, not some quest for the truth hidden in the history buried within it. We are able to hear God in the text as it stands.

Postmodernism in the 90s only clarified and extended our sense of now as the moment of meaning.  No matter what the text has meant in the past, the only meaning it has for me is the meaning it has for me now.  I am not back then.  I am only here now.

Again, don't get me wrong. I believe the text had a meaning.  I believe that is a meaning not only worthy but important to try to identify.  But I can only understand that meaning--any meaning--from where I sit inside my head today, now.

In my final post(s) next weekend, I'll suggest some ultimate take-aways from this hermeneutical pilgrimage and how the Bible might best form us as Christians today.

4.3 Creativity in Telling the Story

I'm winding down my series for the last couple months on the weekends giving a bit of my hermeneutical autobiography.  The previous "chapters" have been:

1. Learning to Read in Context
2. The Text of the New Testament
3. The NT Use of the OT

This final group is on Sources behind the Bible and has included thus far:

a. Splicing the Gospels Together
b. Harmonizing not Advisable

Now for the next to last post in this "chapter" before the conclusion.
______________
... And what if a great deal more artistic license was allowed in telling the story in the ancient world than we would use today?  What if the gospel writers at times deliberately re-presented events in slightly different ways?  It's not an error if it is permissible according to the genre rules of the day.

To me, a comparison of Luke 24 with Acts 1 makes this point.  Both are written by the same author to the same audience and presumably without too long a time between them. Yet they give interestingly different impressions of the timing of things after Jesus' resurrection.

By the way, that leads me to another clarifying thought.  The impulse to harmonize is so in the weeds on harmonizing that it usually misses the big picture.  The gospel accounts sometimes seem to differ from one another in terms of the details of the story.  They give the impression of differing with each other.  The impulse to harmonize so assumes the importance and divine need to harmonize that it misses the obvious point--there is material that gives the impression of needing harmonized.

Which is more important, that I be able to hear the word of God or that somewhere, hidden beneath the surface, is some ingenious reconstruction that can resolve apparent tensions, even though no one else can see it?  It's the same mindset that leads a lone individual reading the Bible to think s/he has found a hidden, prophetic, meaning that no one in history has ever seen before. If the purpose of the Bible is in part for God to communicate with us (even this understanding of Scripture is deficient, since the primary purpose of Scripture is to form us), then the harmonizing impulse surely assumes God has failed on some level. If, on the other hand, God is completely unconcerned with harmonizing, then it isn't an issue (and it certainly is not an error).

Back to Luke 24 and Acts 1.  Luke 24 gives the impression that Jesus rises and ascends to heaven on the same day or at least very quickly. Jesus rises the first day of the week (24:1). Jesus meets the men on the road to Emmaus that same day (24:13). When they realize it is Jesus, they get up and return to Jerusalem immediately (24:33). While they are talking that night, Jesus appears to them (24:36). He leads them out to Bethany and is taken up to heaven (24:50-51).

This is an easy one for the harmonizing impulse.  Luke 24:50 doesn't give its timing.  So you could fit 40 days--or 30 years--through that verse. But the big picture person steps back and says, "But that's not really the impression the text gives. No one would have guessed there were 40 days there on the basis of Luke 24 alone, inductively." And of course there are 40 days when we get to Acts.

I have long since concluded from instances like this that the gospel writers did indeed feel the freedom to be creative in their re-presentation of the story of Jesus in order to bring out certain themes and, especially in Luke's case, to make the story artistically beautiful. This is an instance where the same author writing to the same audience seems to have felt that freedom.  And we get that impression all the more when we consider that Luke does not mention the trip of the disciples to Galilee and Jesus' appearance to them there in Matthew 28--a three day journey each way (the Great Commission is given in Galilee). I do not consider this omission an error in the slightest, since I believe Luke omitted the trip to Galilee to simplify the story and make it artistically smooth.

It seems very difficult to me, therefore, not to conclude that precise historicity was never the intention of the gospel presenters--or God's. And since error must be judged by the intended target, then the gospel writers did not err in doing so. We on the other hand do err if we demand that the gospels be harmonizable and if we read them as if they are videotapes of what happened. It shifts our reading of the gospels and other biblical narratives toward the point of view of the stories rather than the precise history of the story. I am not at all saying that they do not give us history or that the history behind them is unimportant. I am saying that the precise details of the history behind them was not the focus.

In the last post in this "chapter" I want to sketch out what it looks like to read the narratives of the Bible more for their theological point of view than for their precise history. I do want to mention, however, where an honest comparison of biblical narratives leads.  It leads to the conclusion of pretty much all experts on the gospels--that they have a literary relationship with each other.

For well over a hundred years, it has been the position of the overwhelming majority of experts on the gospels that Mark was the first gospel to be written and that Matthew and Luke then used Mark as a primary source.  The wording of the narratives is so similar to each other that this is beyond reasonable doubt. It is not just in the words of Jesus, which in any case are in Greek rather than his original Aramaic (and no two translations are the same). It is also in the narrative framing of his words and even at times in summaries of his doings. There is no reason why God would have dictated it in this way, since they are not exactly the same. Why would God dictate word for word and occasionally vary the word for "and"?

This is another reason why the harmonizing impulse to say "this similar even just happened twice" doesn't work.  From the standpoint of sources, it is Matthew or Luke's intentional re-presentation of the same story. I will spare you countless examples, but it makes my point about creativity in re-presentation.  And I will spare you further details on other consensuses or majority positions on sources elsewhere in Scripture.

I want to end with the question of the theological point of view of biblical narratives.  If we are focused on the theology of the gospel writers, then we get back what fundamentalism took away from us in the twentieth century, and more...

Edmundson on Online Education

Mark Edmundson has written an Op-Ed in the New York Times on online education that, from where I sit, is strangely out of touch with the cutting edge of online education.  Mind you, I don't know many professors who would rather teach online than onsite, and I don't know many students who would rather take classes online than onsite.

Doesn't matter.  The overwhelming majority of the adult college market right now is online and will be for the rest of history as far as I can tell.  The just out of high school crowd is a little different, since for them college is as much a social phenomenon as a learning one.

This line is very revealing: Online education "tends to be a monologue and not a real dialog."  Really?  Maybe if a professor videos a lecture of him/herself.  I can imagine that there are a lot of newbies to online education that are just trying to transfer the live classroom to recordings without actually adjusting the pedagogy.  Let's be clear here, from what I can tell Coursera is not state of the art online education.  It's recorded onsite education. It's great for a hobby on the side.

But that's not normally the way those of us who have been in the business for 15 years are doing it.  Any video pieces are usually limited to 10-20 minutes or less.  Lecture is anathema in online education.  Rather, it's about problem based and collaboratively-constructed knowledge.  Good online education requires great intentionality in design and great facilitators in implementation.

There is lots of discussion, way more than in a traditional classroom.  Everyone has to participate or else you're not counted as present.  There is way more writing than in a traditional class and teaching an online class is far more demanding than teaching a traditional one.  Students expect feedback and they expect it within a week.  No strolling into class and just talking.  No one paper at the end of the semester that the student never gets back.  It's massively demanding.

There are potential downsides we're working on.  Online teaching doesn't generally attract genius professors.  That requires new innovations. For example, I've heard of some courses that bring in world class scholars (who aren't the course professor) for a live 30 minute dialog via Adobe Connect, Skype, or some other platform. But let's be honest, most traditional college classes aren't taught by geniuses either.  In fact, most geniuses are actually pretty bad teachers.

I do agree with Edmundson a little about learning from students.  If a professor learns too much from students about the subject they're an expert in, they aren't much of an expert.  I don't learn much from students when I'm teaching Greek (although I do learn from questions I don't know the answer to, which in part is a sign that I'm not as much of an expert as I could be). Again, a comment more on the average professor in America perhaps than anything else.

All of that is to say that in these days of high bandwidth, there is almost nothing the traditional classroom does that can't be done online--including seeing the face of every student via Adobe Connect.

Have time for an MDiv on Tuesday?

We're gearing up for another group of new MDiv students here at Wesley Seminary this Fall.  Do you live in Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Kokomo, Warsaw... anywhere within a couple hours of Marion, Indiana?  If so, and you can free up your Tuesdays from 9-4 this Fall, you can start your Master of Divinity degree in a close-knit community of students face-to-face with Bob Whitesel in "The Missional Church."

There are two weeks of intensives that begin in a week here on campus July 30 (Pastor, Church, and World with Lenny Luchetti, Cultural Contexts of Ministry with Kwasi Kena). But not sure whether you want to dive in all the way?  Try Bob Whitesel's Missional Church class this Fall to dip your foot in the water.  Or just take the course to sharpen your sense of God's mission!

Wesleyan pastors who fully enroll can take courses at $202 per credit hour (after the Wesleyan pastor's scholarship)--an incredible deal for seminary.

Here are some of the books you might wander through: Emerging Churches (Dan Kimball), The Shaping of Things to Come (Alan Hirsch/Michael Frost), Sticky Church (Larry Osborne)...

If you're interested, fire me an email: ken.schenck@indwes.edu. 

Does pure math exist?

Sometimes I long to have a profound thought or to encounter one.  When I was doing my education, I encountered them often.  I don't know if you've ever felt the way I used to feel when something would blow my mind. I'm trying to think of an example. One that comes to mind is when I began to think that universals are aggregates of like-minded particulars (at least as we experience them) rather than Platonic absolutes expressed in the material world.

Those moments come less often these days. You get older.  You think you have stuff mostly figured out. I thought of another one, when I had the thought that scientific theories are really just very precise myths expressing the mystery of the world.  Still myths, just a lot more precise in their expression.

Why am I writing this? Because I couldn't think of anything interesting to blog today, let alone profound.  Sometimes when I can't sleep at night I'll google, "something profound."  It's not very consoling.

So here's a stupid question.  I've always tended to think of the kind of math they do in physics and other sciences as an imperfect version of pure math.  So in quantum physics they use "statistical mechanics."  You can't have a precise sense of things so you approximate using statistical methods and probabilities.

So I always viewed this sort of applied math as an inferior version of pure math, where everything is tidy and exact, an imperfect shadow of the Platonic ideal.  But is it possible pure math is only a simplistic shadow of applied math, an abstraction from the real world?

What do you think?  Hey, I had to write something to get us off the topic of health care... ;-)

Living the Love Command: Health Care

continued from yesterday
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...Another issue that has embroiled the United States in recent years has to do with whether the government should orchestrate a system that provides health care to all Americans as much as possible. Such laws are incredibly complex and involve multiple angles. For example, there is the question of whether such a system would break America financially and thus inadvertently cause far more harm than any good it might do. There is the question of whether the United States government would administer its part of such a system efficiently, or whether such programs tend to turn into cumbersome bureaucracies.

But there are also some philosophical and theological questions that are often raised for which we have clearer answers from the values of Jesus. Would Jesus object to a tax on me that would benefit others? Certainly he would object to an oppressive tax, one that did harm to me and especially one that primarily functioned to make someone else rich. But the New Testament unanimously teaches that believers should pay taxes (e.g., Mark 12:14-15; Rom. 13:7; 1 Pet. 2:13) and unanimously discourages hoarding personal wealth.

At the very least, Jesus would commend those who give to others who are truly in need. “Do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matt. 7:12). Surely a normal person, the person Jesus has in mind, would want medical help when he or she needs it. Giving so that others might have medical help is thus very much in keeping with Jesus’ values.

Most of us are not the sort of expert who could speak authoritatively about whether a particular law might be a good one or might be effective to provide health care to all people. But the initial bias of the Jesus follower will inevitably be that if it were possible for me to contribute in such a way that more people would have health care, then my spirit will want to do that. The bias of a Christian toward the goal is not ambiguous—it is toward helping others in need. Only the way in which that need might best be provided might be ambiguous for the Christian.

Although we shouldn’t have to provide further support, the New Testament is full of instruction that unequivocally endorses this attitude. “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2). “In humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others” (Phil. 2:3-4). “As we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers” (Gal. 6:10).

There are other questions of course. Even though this is the attitude Christians should have toward helping others, should a Christian support forcing those who do not have the mind of Christ to contribute to the help of others. I personally believe that God grants a good deal of freedom to others to disobey his will. He will set the world straight eventually, but for now he largely lets us self-destruct with our own selfish and sinful behaviors.

The case is different when my selfish behavior and freedom hurts someone else. So God surely would want me to stop a murderer from exercising his or her freedom to murder. So at what point does providing for the health of others, including saving the lives of others, move out of the realm of God’s allowance for personal freedom and move into the realm of moral obligation? At what point do we fine the priest and the Levite for not helping the mugged Israelite, and make it a law to be a good Samaritan?

The end of the whole discussion is that specific legislation will be complicated and will require the expertise of many to determine whether it is advisable or not. What is clear theologically is that Jesus would have supported a system that provided health care to those who did not have it. He would have spoken harshly to those who resisted it for selfish reasons, just as Matthew 25 speaks to those who could have helped the hungry and thirsty, but chose not to do so. The spirit of Jesus is clear, even if we might take different positions on how to work out those values.

How Greek Participles Work

Here's a 33 minute overview of how Greek participles work: