spot the scene-stealer…

…in this video, which we sent to our new church, updating them on our progress.

I defy you to pay attention to anything I’m saying.

are you sure about that?

Montaigne, Shakespeare, golf-ball potato crisps, Peter Allis commentating on primitive French golf, and climate change. Clive James’s A Point of View on Sunday was typically full of dry wit and wonderful turns of phrase. It was also a model of sanity, advocating a right scepticism in every day life, particularly in the face of increasingly shrill advocates of the view that global warming is man-made.

Against those who liken denying man-made global warming to denying the holocaust:

Really they should know better. The two events are not remotely comparable. The holocaust actually happened. The destruction of the earth by man-made global warming hasn’t happened yet.

On climate change models:

There are plenty of highly qualified scientists ready to say that the whole idea is a case of too many of their colleagues relying on models provided by computers that can’t even accurately predict the weather next week.

On his own ignorance, and that of others:

I know next to nothing about climate science. All I know is that many of the commentators in newspapers who are busy predicting catastrophe don’t know much about it either. Because they keep saying that the science is settled. But it isn’t…. Nobody can meaningfully say that the science is in.

It’s only ten minutes long. You can listen to it online, or download it as a podcast here.

no prizes this year for the nobel committee

Is it possible to be flabbergasted and entirely unsurprised at the same time?

I now have serious hopes that if I talk often enough and publicly enough about my desire to do a PhD that I’ll be awarded an Oxford D.D. before having to lift a pen.

eeeeyyyyyy….

I wonder what President Obama said next?

bad man indeed

These proposals, from the appropriately named Badman Report, accepted by the Government, provide yet more evidence that our government are statist control-freaks who are determined to destroy families and despise Christ.

More information about the proposals, and information on how to respond in the consultation process can be found on the Christian Institute website.

Children do not belong to the government. Of course, they don’t belong to their parents either. They belong to the One true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

But in his infinite wisdom, God has entrusted children to their parents, and in his Word has given parents the responsibility and authority, under him, to decide how to teach and train their children. The means they use to educate their children – homeschooling, Christian schooling, public schooling, state schooling – are matters of liberty, for each family to reach their own decisions about in the light of Scripture and how it applies in their own particular circumstances. But one thing is clear, the government has no authority to transgress in this way the boundaries of the authority that God has delegated to parents.

To ride roughshod over the authority of parents in this area is to ride roughshod over the authority of Jesus Christ.

I personally doubt that it’s possible to be a consistent, Christ-loving Christian and to support this government, which has set itself up in place of God. In the next general election, a vote for Labour will be a vote against Jesus Christ.

next they’ll be baptising sheep

I really hope that this recent letter to the Church Times is a satire. If it is, it’s seriously brilliant. If not, it may be a case for care in the community…

Sir, – I was interested to hear two of the three programmes The Atheist and the Bishop, broadcast recently on Radio 4. I became uneasy, however, when the Rt Revd Lord Harries referred to a book in which an individual is described as suddenly perceiving the other people on the bus as pigs.

The implication was the human beings have spirits, and animals do not, and that in being perceived as pigs the people observed were stripped of values and relationships. Later, the Bishop spoke of the birth of a human being as a spiritual being, “not just a cat or dog”.

Do others wonder how deep goes acceptance by the Anglican Communion of the theory of evolution? We reject racism and sexism; is it time that we reflected on speciesism, now that increasing evidence from animal-behaviour studies shows how closely related the human animal is to non-human animals?

In order to try to protect farm animals from abuse, the EU now recognises that farm animals are sentient beings – in other words, have feelings that matter to them. What leads us to assume that we are the only species that has a capacity for spirituality? Are we more concerned with a culture of reason, rationality, and the superior position of humans – a wish to split “us” from “them” – than to look to a world based on love, feelings, and affections?

When I think about these conundrums in our relations with animals, aspects of church life raise questions for me. Why, for example, do we focus on thanksgiving for crops at Harvest Festival, and overlook the source of meat we also enjoy?

no neutrality!

Gerald Hiestand of the Society for the Advancement of Ecclesial Theology has posted a really good brief critique of Richard Muller’s historiographical method.

Muller is one of the finest reformed scholars out there. His work on sixteenth and seventeenth century theology – most notably the four volume Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, but including a number of other fine works – has transformed the discipline, and rightly so. I have benefited greatly from his work.

However, for all the valuable insights his method brings: his close attention to synchronic and diachronic readings of primary texts, carefully set in their historical contexts; the attention to the varieties within Reformed theology, and to the diverse and eclectic historical, theological, and philosophical influences on Reformed theologians; the refusal to allow anachronistic questions to distort his readings of historical texts; it is also flawed by his commitment to ‘neutrality’.

Even if such neutrality were possible, Christian thinkers, and especially pastors, who wish to serve the church and to take every thought captive for Christ, should find it deeply undesirable.

wading out from the shallows

Peter J. Leithart, Deep Exegesis: The Mystery of Reading Scripture (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009).

Peter Leithart is a reader of deep insight.  Here we are allowed into Rembrandt’s studio to see the master at work behind the scenes, theorising about interpretation, and demonstrating with a few deft strokes, and a rich palette how theory informs practice in surprising and illuminating ways.

In six chapters Leithart dismantles literalist exegetical reductionism, and reorients the interpretation of Scripture in a more biblical direction.  He traces a brief history of modern hermeneutics (chap 1); considers how typology works, most notably how the meaning of an event (such as a shooting, or the defenestration of Prague) changes with the passage of time, and subsequent events (chap 2); opens up the ways in which how words can take on ever richer, more complex meanings in some contexts (chap 3); explores the inevitability of intertextuality and the insights that come from understanding the intertextual webs in which any text exists (chap 4); examines the insights to be gained from understanding the way literary texts have as many structural layers as a baroque cantata (chap 5); and brings all of these observations down to earth with diverse considerations of application in the light of an Augustinian understanding of the totus Christus.

In each chapter, Leithart applies his insights to a remarkably enlightening reading of John 9.   Time and again he finds new layers of insight into this witty, allusive chapter.  However, not content with biblical exegesis alone, Leithart also shows how his hermeneutical method sheds light – or, perhaps, better, allows the True Light to enlighten – a range of non-biblical texts.

Few, if any, other writers would have the interpretative skills or the breadth of knowledge of Scripture, literature, history, and music to attempt let alone to succeed in such an undertaking.  But Leithart is a teacher of, and writer on, literature as well as exegesis and theology.  Occasionally, some of his other books have been somewhat impressionistic. Not so this time; Deep Exegesis is marked by careful scholarship and thorough argumentation. The breadth and depth of his reading is quite dazzling, and makes for a highly entertaining read as Joyce jostles for room with Bach; Homer’s Odysseus rubs shoulders with Shrek; and Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, and Sophocles compete for the limelight with No Country for Old Men, Atonement, and bad jokes from the Readers Digest.

An added pleasure is that Leithart not only reads well, he also writes beautifully; this text itself is almost poetic in its elegance, rhythm, pacing, verbal dexterity, allusions, and word-plays.  Indeed, if there is a criticism it is that sometimes the literary and intellectual virtuosity, the irony and wit became a little rich even for my taste.

Few will agree with everything Leithart says; doubtless many will think he over-reads at times.  But Leithart rightly warns that failing to hear all that God has to say in Scripture is as great a danger as reading in something that is not there.  For those who want to wade deeper into the life-giving waters of God’s Word, I cannot recommend Deep Exegesis highly enough.

enslaved to the church

This also applies to vicars, curates, pastors, and elders:

The church is not the property of the Apostles.  Apostles are ministers of the church.

Robertson and Plummer, 72, quoted in Garland, 1 Corinthians, 124, commenting on 3:21-23, cf. 1:12-14.

…leaders are enslaved to the [church] and must serve it from below.

Ben Witherington, quoted in Garland, 126.

esv: ‘essentially literal’?

Memo to self: work harder on the biblical languages; working with translations is inherently frustrating.

When it was published, the ESV was trumpeted as an ‘essentially literal’ word-for-word translation of the Hebrew and Greek, in contrast to the dynamic equivalence translational philosophy of the NIV.  Now, it should be said that the ESV is much, much better than the NIV.  And that I’ve found it perfectly acceptable to preach from in the past few years.  And that a perfectly consistent like-for-like translation is a pipe dream: I doubt that there are two languages in the world where every word in the target language has a semantic range that precisely matches that of its equivalent in the original language.  And Hebrew, Greek, and English certainly don’t match like that.  So, sometimes it will be necessary to use different English words to translate the same Hebrew or Greek word (nephesh is an obvious example in Hebrew, logos in Greek), or the same English word to translate different Greek words (philew and agapaw spring immediately to mind).

However, even when not confronted with these problems inherent in translating from one language to another, the ESV does not always reach its own standards.  There are times when it would be perfectly clear and idiomatic to translate the same word or phrase the same way, but for reasons best known to themselves the translators decided not to (check out the mess they make of the two occurrences of ‘the righteousness of God’ (dikaiosyne theou) in Romans 10:3 as compared with 1:17; 3:5, 21, 22, thus partially obscuring the connection with the earlier part of Paul’s argument).

1 Corinthians 4 presents a particularly egregious example of a series of unhelpful translations.  I have discovered three examples today as I prepare to preach on the passage:

First, a fairly mild example.  Entirely unnecessarily, the ESV translates the same word in three different ways in the space of two short sentences:

Without us you have become kings (ebasileusate).  And would that you did reign (ebasileusate), so that we might share the rule (sumbasileusomen) with you. (v. 8 )

This is annoying, but in the end it doesn’t make a great difference – the conceptual connections between the English words are obvious enough.  In contrast, in this verse, the NIV (!) translates consistently:

You have become kings – and that without us!  How I wish that you really had become kings so that we might be kings with you!

More serious is a second example, which obscures an important connection for those who do not have Greek.

In 4:1, Paul describes apostolic ministers as ‘servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries (mysteriwn) of God.’   This is a continuation of the tightly knit argument from 1:18-4:21, and most obviously refers back to 2:7 – those who preach Christ and him crucified ‘impart a secret (en mysteriw) and hidden wisdom of God…’  This illustrates one of the difficulties of translating from one language into another.   It would not be as natural in English (at least to my ear), to render sophia en mysteriw as ‘a mysterious wisdom’, but at the same time it isn’t entirely ridiculous to do so.  Alternatively, if this really offended the translators’ sensibilities, why did they not, for consistency’s sake, translate mysteriwn tou theou (4:1) as ‘secrets of God’, although this would then obscure the links with other Pauline uses of mysterion.

The third example is the link between 4:2 and 4:17  In 4:2, the ESV translates ‘Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy (pistos).’  Later, in the context of urging the Corinthians to imitate his own example, Paul calls them his ‘beloved children’ (tekna agapeta).  To train them in following his example, Paul has sent Timothy, who is (ESV), ‘my beloved and faithful child in the Lord’ (v. 17).  This translates hos estin mou teknon egapeton kai piston en kuriw.  There are various ways this could be rendered: ‘my beloved and faithful child in the Lord’; ‘my beloved child who is faithful in the Lord (Thisleton’s translation); or, a third option, which I mildly prefer, ‘my child [who is] beloved and faithful in the Lord’.

Nevertheless, whichever word order on chooses for the translation, in the Greek it seems clear that Timothy is like the Corinthians – Paul’s beloved child (teknon agapeton).  However, more than a beloved child like the Corinthians, Timothy is also, like Paul, pistos en tw kuriw. He will therefore ‘remind’ them (v. 17) of Paul’s ‘ways in Christ’ (hodoi en Christw [Iesou])not so much by telling them of Paul’s ways, but by living in the same faithful-in-the-Lord way that Paul lived among them.  Thus the beloved children should learn from the faithful beloved child what it means to be faithful imitators of Paul the faithful (pistos) steward of Christ (the Lord).

Because of the way idiomatic English word order works, the description of Timothy is not entirely straightforward to render in English in a way that captures the overtones of the Greek in every respect.  And ‘faithful’ and ‘trustworthy’ do not carry exactly the same connotations, although to my ear they are very close.  But at the very least, by actually following through on their stated policy of word-for-word translations, and translating pistos either as ‘trustworthy’ or as ‘faithful’ in both instances, readers of the ESV would have been given a fighting chance of spotting the connection that Paul makes between Timothy and himself.

(All credit to Gordon Fee: of the commentaries I own (Barrett, Bruce, Fee, Garland, Hodge, Thiselton), he’s the only commentator to make explicit the link between vv. 2 and 17; but this, to my mind, makes it all the more important to have pedantically accurate English translations to work from.)