Daniel Kirk at Storied Theology has a great post up in which he’s critical of an article in the current Christianity Today theme this month by J. I. Packer and Gary A. Parrett in praise of catechism.
Now I must say, since we’re attending a Presbyterian church now (I’m actually serious), my kids have recently been learning the children’s version of the Westminster Shorter Catechism for Sunday School. While I’ll certainly need to start shaking loose some of the stuff I have problems with in the WCF before it hardens permanently in their minds, it’s both a good exercise for their brains and a way of learning historical Protestant theology. What I’m just saying is that although I certainly have a problem with overly and artificially systematized theology, I’m not really necessarily anti-catechism.
But I also must say, the following remarks from Daniel Kirk are spot on:
I could not disagree more with the claims being asserted [in the article by Packer and Parrett]: that the real thing we need is theology, and all those stories in the Bible (you know, the actual Bible God, in God’s wisdom, decided to give to the church) are second-rate tools the learning of which makes us less competent Christians.
This is the classic inversion of sola scriptura: no longer do we really want you to do what the Reformers did (read your Bible), we want you instead to read and memorize what they said after they had read their Bibles.
Wow. That last sentence was a home run, with bases loaded. What do you think the Hebrews did before they had a Calvin or a Beza? Do we really want to take the ancient Jewish commentaries as seriously as we’re to take, e.g., the Westminster Confession of Faith? Why the heck would the Bible come loaded with stories of people encountering God, often coming away with differing ideas about what they learned about Him, and very little that even resembles systematic theology? Couldn’t God have provided an inspired, inerrant commentary or hermeneutic key if He really wanted to?
Certainly we should teach our kids our beliefs about what the authors of the Bible believed; it can even take the form of a catechism. But whatever we do, we don’t want to give them the impression that we are teaching them unquestionable Approved and Authorized Theology®. We should be instructing and encouraging them that good theology isn’t learned by rote, but painstakingly cultivated.
Recently I mentioned to some friends the fact that Mark 16.9-20 should not be used as a proof text for anything given the near certainty that it was a later addition to Mark. One close friend responded that he’d give the benefit of the doubt to that passage under the professed belief that the Church has been using it for two millennia. I responded that this particular passage was not even explictly affirmed as canonical until Trent, which took place after our own tradition of Protestantism had rejected other of the Church’s more central beliefs that also go back to antiquity.
Even conservative Christian apologist James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries, who has debated Bart Ehrman on the subject of the Bible’s reliability vis-à-vis text-critical issues, made this important observation on Unbelieveable (3/6/2010):
Most Christians tend to think the Bible floated down out of heaven in a calfskin cover with gold edges and thumb, replete the first time it appeared. That’s not how it came to us. That’s not how it’s been transmitted to us…Any book that has come to us from antiquity has a history to it.
…and a little later,
The books of the New Testament had a life of their own before they became collected into one edition.
Now, my friend knows all this in his head, but in practice, most of us tend to trust whatever our editions of the Bible lay before us and default to a distrust of any further revision to them. But there’s a justified collective facepalm among these same Christians when that very tendency results in KJV-onlyism. The fact is, unless you’ve got a KJV, you’re probably reading a text that significantly depends on the discipline of textual criticism from the last couple centuries, scholarship that has virtually rendered unanimous judgment against Mark 16.9-20’s status as original to that Gospel (although many conservatives propose the credulity-straining caveat that this passage was an accurate historical document itself that just got tacked on to Mark in later centuries).
None of this is a secret among those who pay attention to respected evangelical scholars like Dan Wallace, but given White’s quoted remarks, it bears pointing out to a wider audience. Even “inerrant in the original manuscripts” is only of value if we have a reasonable assurance that what we’ve got is representative of original manuscripts, and we do that by coming to grips with scholarship on textual criticism.
I think every church should have a Sunday School class that discusses (perhaps among other things) textual criticism. I’m sure it would be geared in most churches to demonstrating the “reliability” of Scripture based upon the consistency of the bulk of the texts, as White and Wallace are very much interested to affirm, but at very least it would scale back misconceptions and emphasize the need for a little humility in our assumptions about the text.
All right, here’s a rant for you.
There’s a news story circulating about the well-known fact that homeschooling texts are ignoring or even (the audacity!) criticizing mainstream science in favor of creationism. The usual suspects have emerged to show their disgust of the benighted institution of homeschooling. There’s a poll up at MSNBC asking the question, “Is it OK for home-school textbooks to dismiss the theory of evolution?” Wait, what does “OK” mean here? Are they asking, “Do you think it’s good that home-school textbooks do this?” or “Is it healthy for society that they do this?” The ambiguity in the question itself implies that what they really want to know is, “Should the authorities allow parents to teach their kids this stuff?” The mantra among most secularists that I’ve heard on this issue is that homeschooling should be, preferably, illegal or, at very least, strictly regulated for content by the state. Thus, the following rant.
You’ll not find a stauncher advocate of teaching mainstream science in homeschool curricula than me, nor anyone who is more disturbed that homeschooling is usually used as a shelter from science education. But parents indubitably have more of a right to teach their children creationism than the state has to teach its belief systems. And don’t try to tell me that public education is not teaching belief systems: no one has the absolute truth, so whether it’s parent-approved, community-approved, or state-approved, there are beliefs and value judgments about what the truth is, some of them surely quite accurate, that are being taught. Claiming a monopoly on truth enforceable against other people’s children is nothing short of intellectual fascism, the rule of the thought police instituted by those who think better than the ignorant masses. But until the state assumes the role of deciding whether or not people can produce their own offspring and raise them from birth and as long as no ideologies are being taught that directly advocate violence or other tangible abuse, education must also be left in the hands of the parents. At least homeschoolers aren’t using taxpayer dollars to teach their agendas.
Homeschool critics often compare teaching creationism to teaching 2+2=5; I happen to think they’re not so far off. But this doesn’t mean the state has a right to stick its Cyrano de Bergerac into things. Most of the homeschooled, like me, will eventually learn better (and more’s the pity for them if their faith is tied to creationism), but even if they don’t, life will somehow go on. It really will.
Maybe one day everyone will accept mainstream science and reject creationism. No doubt by that time some subgroup or other will reject some other commonly accepted truth for some reason; it’s only human to do so (so evolution tells us). But I refuse to accept that our ruling intelligentsia should manage society like some intellectual Gestapo by the bully force of the government. Maybe we should just do our best for those over whom we have influence. Maybe we should trust that the truly better ideas will win the day. And maybe, in the meantime, we should learn to exercise a little patience with those who don’t understand as much as we think we do now.
Nah…that sounds a little too Christian.
Under the typical Protestant understanding of “faith” as “not doubting something that one believes without proof”, I as a young Protestant could never fathom why God would be so tickled by us believing in what we had almost no evidence for. This question came home to me most clearly whenever I heard informal apologetics arguing that the reason God doesn’t just show Himself to us is that if He did, no faith would be necessary, and God really wants us to have faith. Obviously this is quite circular, akin to being asked, “Why do we have to have faith?” and answering, “Because faith is necessary.”
So when I found out in third-year Greek (undergrad) about a related discussion that had been going on in scholarly academic circles, I was intrigued. The main question was about the Pauline expression ek/dia pisteos iesou christou (e.g. Philippians 3.9), customarily, but probably inaccurately, translated as “faith in Jesus Christ”, whereas scholars such as Richard Hayes have argued for the reading “faith(fulness) of Jesus Christ”; I just posted my exploratory paper on this topic yesterday. As I described in another recent post, the Greek word that we translate as “faith” also carried the meaning faithfulness (notice that English uses the root “faith-” in both “faith” and “faithfulness” as well). In fact, there is no other word in NT Greek that translates as “faithfulness” as directly as pistis. So theoretically, whether Paul had meant to describe a concept more on the “faithfulness” side or on the “belief” side of pistis, or some hybrid of both “belief” and “faithfulness, he would have in all likelihood used the word pistis in any case. “Belief” and “faithfulness” are two very different English words and markedly different conceptually in our modern understanding, but the fact that the NT often uses them in their divergent semantics in places where the meaning is ambiguous suggests that pistis meant not either/or but indicated a concept closely related to both of them. After all, belief is in a sense a commitment to an idea, and I recognize this usage for “faith” and “believing” (Gk pist-euo) in the NT as well.
But rather than mere cognitive assent to an unproved proposition, I think the best way of viewing the semantic center of pistis is in the words commitment, dependence, trust, and devotion. As I said, “belief” plays a part, since we devote ourselves to things we believe in, and believe in things we are devoted to. But because no facts are unfiltered and uninterpreted by our minds, holding fast to beliefs is in essence dependence upon ourselves and our ability to properly parse those facts. What God requires is commitment to and dependence upon Him, amounting to total surrender. At very least, surely it is obvious that the faith that pleases God is not the type that is taken up and held to without a basis; above all, faith is not about being dogmatic about something we have no evidence for, nor likewise something we have mounds of evidence against.
Paul is the one whose teaching is the source of the common focus on belief in certain propositions. But I am coming to think that he instead was more concerned (at least in some of his writing) that we depend on our identification with Christ, whose surpassing faithfulness to God was displayed by his surrender to the point of death. It is for the sake of his faithfulness that we are saved. In turn, we identify with Christ by sacrificing ourselves (Rom 12.1). Paul’s view was shared by the author of Hebrews, who more clearly articulated it in Hebrews 3.1-6:
Therefore, holy brothers and companions in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession; He was faithful to the One who appointed Him, just as Moses was in all God’s household. For Jesus is considered worthy of more glory than Moses, just as the builder has more honor than the house. Now every house is built by someone, but the One who built everything is God. Moses was faithful as a servant in all God’s household, as a testimony to what would be said [in the future]. But Christ was faithful as a Son over His household, whose household we are if we hold on to the courage and the confidence of our hope. [HCS]
Paul seems to have argued that God grants us grace by associating us with Christ’s work. God graciously identifies us as faithful to Himself through our identification with Jesus in a relationship of joint commitment, not from our accomplishment of the works of the Law, which was regarded as within the bounds of human ability alone. Our faithfulness is not the prerequisite to this grace, but its goal. In fact, one reason why many Protestant biblical scholars are not at all happy with Hays’s reading of pistis christou is the extremely close association in Philippians 3.4-14 between our being identified with Christ’s faithfulness and our participation in His faithfulness:
…and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through (the) faith(fulness) [of] Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith(fulness). I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this… [Philippians 3.9-12a NRSV]
Notice how Paul explicitly states that his participation is not complete and that, inasmuch as it is not, he entertains the possibility of his own failure to attain to the resurrection from the dead! Notice also that this possibility acknowledged by Paul does not disappear no matter how you interpret pistis christou. The author Ephesians 2.8-10 put it this way:
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
If we take the view of I outlined above seriously, we notice that these verses essentially equate pistis with good works. A paraphrase of the verse reveals this: “By God’s grace you are saved through faithfulness, and this faithfulness is God’s gift as well, and not something the Law could have brought about. For it is God who has crafted us into instruments of doing good works [faithfulness] that He desires.” The key distinction is between “works” and “good works”. Paul never devalues “good works”; his criticism is of works of the Law (this post discusses what he probably meant by that), which is what Paul means by “works” when it is not qualified (unlike James). In fact, we are told that performing “good works” is what we are supposed to be about doing (2 Cor 9.8). This understanding of what “faith” is becomes clearest when we look outside of the epistles recognized by scholars today as authentic Pauline epistles: see Col 1.10, 2 Tim 2.21, 2 Tim 3.17; cf. also Hebrews (discussed above) and James (discussed below). Ephesians 2.8-10 isn’t saying that good works are not necessary — indeed, the opposite — but that no one is able to hold up his/her end of the bargain by doing good works apart from God’s grace, simply by following the Law. Reading “faith” and “works” in this light actually reconciles an apparent conflict between the theology of Paul and James, who wrote, “Faith without works is dead”. James seems to be arguing against precisely the sort of misinterpretation of Paul that Luther championed; this is why Luther famously rejected the book of James and called it an “epistle of straw”. It is important to realize that unlike Paul, James does not use “works” to refer specifically to any ritual “works of the Law”. He clearly articulates the kind of works he expects that are part and parcel of “faith(fulness)”:
If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. [James 2.15-17]
He seems to be referring to the “good works” of Ep 2.10, doesn’t he? And as if this weren’t obvious enough, James next appeals to the example of two individuals who lived outside the Law, Abraham and Rahab (vv. 21-26). I find myself under the impression that whether we are to try to please God by works of devotion or not wasn’t even an issue for Paul; this was taken for granted. Rather, he sought to emphasize that inasmuch as we accomplish good works, God is fulfilling His purposes through us:
Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose. [Phil 2.12]
Paul certainly contends that we don’t depend on our good works to please God; rather, we depend upon (=”have faith in”) God, submitting and surrendering to (=”having faith in”) Him to follow Him in faithfulness. It seems that, although energized by God’s grace, Paul expected believers to take the maintenance of faith in its true sense as a responsibility.
I’ve known many Christians so afraid of trampling on the work of Christ by depending on good works for salvation that they, in effect, looked down their nose at good works, chastising congregations that spend “too much” time and effort with ministries and programs and not enough with “worship”, by which they meant praising God and basking in His love (especially with music). I understand that many of them spend so much of their lives trying to earn favor with God by proving their own merit that once they encounter the grace that is Christ’s meritorious faithfulness they become intoxicated by it, with the result that they neglect their own “reasonable service” in response. Others find the notion of mental assent to true propositions to be the core framework for faith based on their misapprehension of what faith meant to the biblical authors, and understandably spend the bulk of their time in developing the perfect set of beliefs and disparaging those who don’t do likewise. I think these are all distractions at best, and outright perversions of biblical faith at worst. We are to show true worship to God not only by thanking Him, but by committing our best effort to modeling the faithfulness set before us by Jesus.
No soteriological answers here. But it’s fertile ground for discussion, isn’t it?
Originally inspired by this recent post by Doug Chaplin, I exhumed a paper I wrote in third year Greek while an undergrad (I estimate this to be c. 2000-2001). As a segue between my last post and my next, I thought I’d present it here with minimal edits. Please realize that the scholarship within this is a good decade behind, but given the modesty of the claims in this overview, I sincerely doubt that much of what is argued below has been soundly defeated.
The interpretation of Iesou Christou as an objective genitive (faith in Jesus Christ) in Galatians 2.16 and 3.22 (cf. Php 3.9) is the overwhelmingly pervasive reading of that construction. Fairly recently, however, scholarship has had to come to terms with the work of many scholars such as Richard B. Hays, who argues most strenuously that our modern fixation on the freedom of the individual conscience distorts Paul’s concerns. In his article, “Jesus’ Faith and Ours” (Theological Students Fellowship Bulletin, 7 No. 1 [S-O 1983], 2-6), Hays argued that nowhere in Galatians 3 does Paul place any emphasis on the salvific efficacy of “believing,” and nor does he speak of Jesus Christ as the object of human faith. Paul insists that we are redeemed/justified by Jesus Christ’s faithfulness (pistis Iesou Christou) on our behalf, not by our believing.
What must be demonstrated to make this minority view plausible?
The case for the subjective genitive interpretation (faith/faithfulness of Christ Jesus) is grammatically the most obvious. BAGD notes that translating the genitive as “in” is possible with reference to pistis, but acknowledges that pistis is usually found without an object. Moreover, translating the genitive as “of” is most commonly preferable with most other words. Noteworthy among the arguments for the subjective genitive view is that when pistis takes a personal genitive it is almost never an objective genitive (cf. Matt 9:2, 22, 29; Mark 2:5; 5:34; 10:52; Luke 5:20; 7:50; 8:25, 48; 17:19; 18:42; 22:32; Rom 1:8; 12; 3:3; 4:5, 12, 16; 1 Cor 2:5; 15:14, 17; 2 Cor 10:15; Phil 2:17; Col 1:4; 2:5; 1 Thess 1:8; 3:2, 5, 10; 2 Thess 1:3; Titus 1:1; Phlm 6; 1 Pet 1:9, 21; 2 Pet 1:5). Douglas Campbell, an advocate of the subjective usage, has been accused of being too dogmatic or dramatic by Brian Dodd, who has sympathies with the subjective camp, because Campbell makes the statement that how we take Paul’s usage of pistis Christou Iesou might “open up the possibility of a major reevaluation of Paul’s . . . theology as a whole.” However, Hays in both the article mentioned above and his dissertation, The Faith of Jesus Christ, highlights the significance of this alternative translation when he makes the statement that in Galatians, Paul insists we are justified by Christ’s faith/faithfulness, not our believing.
Much research and study has gone into this debate, with conservative scholars even delving into the ranks of those who see Christ’s faith/faithfulness as Paul’s intended meaning in such phrases as dia pisteos and ek pisteos, even in passages where the specifier Christou Iesou is not present. The likeliest loci for this scenario are Romans 1:17 and 3:25-26.
Romans 1:17 is Paul’s quotation of Habakkuk 2:4, “The righteous one shall live by faith/faithfulness.” Campbell took this statement as Messianic, so better to be translated, “The Righteous One shall live by His faithfulness.” One could still argue for the faithfulness of Christ being the basis for life (rather than believing faith on the part of the believer) if one takes the “righteous one” to be any number of people who now have the opportunity to live rather than a reference to Christ, and therefore, “The righteous one shall live by His faith/faithfulness.”
Paul in Romans 3:25-26 states, as the New English Translation translates it, “God publicly displayed him as a satisfaction for sin by his blood through faith. This was to demonstrate his righteousness, because God in his forbearance had passed over the sins previously committed. This was also to demonstrate his righteousness in the present time, so that he would be just and the justifier of the one who lives because of Jesus’ faithfulness,” or ek pisteos Iesou. This passage shows the value of such an interpretation: Jesus was put on display as a satisfaction for sin by his blood through faith (dia pisteos); in other words, Jesus was capable of demonstrating God’s righteousness in being publicly displayed because Jesus had faith or was faithful, not because of our faith in Him.
This concept is similar to that in Galatians 3:13-14, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us (because it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’) in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham would come to the Gentiles, so that we could receive the promise of the Spirit by faith.” Longenecker’s commentary on Galatians discusses Paul’s paradigm of Abraham’s faith and our justification by looking at the perception of Jewish writers concerning Abraham’s faith/faithfulness. Jewish scholars tended to view Abraham’s extreme faith and faithfulness as being their very salvation, much as the Church of Rome would much later come to proclaim with the idea of “works of supererogation.” In other words, Abraham’s merit was so exceedingly worthy of God’s favor that those who are Abraham’s seed are worthy of God’s favor by virtue of Abraham’s merit. Another common picture was that of Abraham’s ten trials through which he remained faithful. If one sees Paul’s use of the term pistis in this passage as referring to Christ’s faith being that wih which we must be identified for justification, a faithfulness that was consistent enough even to submit to being cursed by hanging on a tree, then we see that it is Christ’s work of supererogation that justified Abraham and therefore us as well. Galatians 2:16 contrasts those who seek to be justified by works of the Law and those who seek to be justified dia pisteos Iesou Christou. Instead of the common translation of being “justified through faith in Jesus Christ,” read “justified through Jesus Christ’s merit,” or “Jesus Christ’s work of supererogation” (which means, after all, “a work above or beyond”). This merit can be seen by his death, being publicly placarded as Paul reminds the Galatians in 3:1. Jesus’ obedience unto death providing for redemption is also strongly demonstrated in Romans 5:19: “For just as through the disobedience of the one man many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of one man many will be made righteous.”
The case is, then, rather strong for the belief that the faith that we stand upon is not our own, but that of Jesus, upon whose merit alone we may hope to be justified.
_________________________
I just came across this bibliography devoted to this topic. I used a few of those sources for my paper, although inexplicably the copy of the paper that I have doesn’t show them.
Enjoy these latest videos from the very creative Gordon J. Glover, the first in a series of videos having a little fun critiquing Intelligent Design.
http://www.youtube.com/v/iE5JIzJ0yUs
http://www.youtube.com/v/pqVJsmYJvDQ
And while I’m linking around, check out Tom Jefferson’s Mike Beidler’s witty and semi-satirical Evolutionary Creationist’s Declaration of Independence.
I have always thought that Hebrews 11.1 sounded beautiful, with a mystical air to it:
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (KJV)
Some of the mystery surrounding it resulted from its sounding so much like a riddle: a verse whose first few words signal a definition (“Now faith is…”) ends up leaving you more questions than the one you had about “faith” to begin with. What’s all this stuff about substance and evidence of the unseen? Faith is just “believing”, right?
Well, no. But this is the way many modern translations make it sound. When it’s said that “faith is the ὑπόστᾰσις of things hoped for,” a lot hinges on how one translates the word with funny letters, transliterated as hypostasis.
I could go way back into church history and show how this word is used by Christians to refer to how God was “grounded” or realized in the person of Jesus so that the man Jesus was also fully God (the “hypostatic union”). Or I could go much further back and break down its etymological constituents (Gk hypo- ‘below’ + stasis ’standing’). But what do either have to do with Hebrews 11.1?
More helpful by far it is to make note of that term’s usage in pre-Christian Stoicism to distinguish actual existence, substance, from abstract existence. This is where the “substance of things hoped for” comes into play. Faith is the realization, the proof in the pudding of things hoped for, which not coincidentally is more or less equivalent to “the evidence of things not seen.” It’s parallelism.
So why, then, is hypostasis translated as “being sure” in the (T)NIV, “assurance” in the NASB, or “confidence” in the ESV? I mean, it’s obvious that there will be some “confidence/assurance/being sure” resulting from having evidence or proof, but is that rendering not heavily reliant on the idea of faith as “belief”? This verse in those translations leads to the impression that, “Faith is placing your hope in things that haven’t been proved yet.” That is not what faith is, in Hebrews or anywhere.
But especially in Hebrews: try inserting any of the above translations of hypostasis in Heb 1.3, where it is usually translated “nature” (which is…well, closer to the right meaning) or “being” (that’s much more like it). Let’s try plugging those words from Heb 11.1 into the NASB of 1.3 (which actually reads “nature”):
And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His being-sure…
And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His assurance…
And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His confidence…
These highlight the eisegetical problem of the (T)NIV, NASB, and ESV translations of Heb 11.1; they translated it based upon what they thought we knew about what faith is, not what the author of Hebrews was telling us it is.
Next, look at the only other use of hypostasis in Hebrews, viz. Heb 3.14:
(T)NIV: We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first.
NASB: For we have become partakers of Christ, if we hold fast the beginning of our assurance firm until the end,
ESV: For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.
These translations make a lot of sense to us on first blush due to our belief in the importance of persistent belief, which, it must be noted, is in no small part attributable to this verse (not exactly a favorite of Calvinists).
No doubt the “confidence/assurance” reading was influenced in v. 14 by the close parallel in v. 3, which happens to include a different word more consistently translated as confidence. But the parallelism between the verses cannot be credibly sustained upon close analysis: they’re saying different things, even though they use a similar construction.
It’s not “the beginning of our confidence” that must be held firm; this suggests “unwaveringly believing the same thing we did in the beginning,” placing the onus on uncompromising mental assent that’s easily extended to all kinds of doctrines and traditions learned “in the beginning” of our Christian walk. That interpretation’s great for keeping Christians in lockstep theologically. Here again, “confidence” and indeed persistence are involved, but in a more subtle way. Read the Holman Christian Standard version of this verse:
For we have become companions of the Messiah if we hold firmly until the end the reality that we had at the start.
[Unfortunately, then they go and legitimize the "confidence" translation by including it in a footnote.]
In other words, we may indeed be confident, but it’s confidence in the reality or substance we experienced at the beginning.
I think you can see that hypostasis hardly means confidence, particularly in Hebrews. It means ’substance, reality, being, realization’ and other such.
Why does this matter? Because of what the other translations (“confidence”, “being sure”, etc.) have done to bolster the misunderstanding of “faith” parodied by Mark Twain: “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”
Generally speaking, faith, translating Gk pistis, is much better translated by “faithfulness” or “devotion”. This is especially true of Hebrews. Look at 3.2-6’s contrast of Moses’ faithfulness over little versus Christ’s faithfulness over much more. That’s where the whole “hold fast” aspect comes into play in both v. 6 and v. 14!
So let’s plug this back in to Hebrews 11.1. “Faith is the actualization of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Notice that belief in the unseen is almost present in this verse, but it’s parallel to “things hoped for/not seen”, not “substance/evidence”. The real meaning of pistis in this passage is the on-earth realization of what, or rather Whom, is believed. The author of Hebrews is describing belief and trust as the motivation for faith. He goes on in that chapter to describe people living out their belief and trust in God by their faithfulness. That’s why James was so baffled that people would say they “believed” (=had trust in) God while not presenting any substance or evidence.
What are your thoughts on these observations? I probably sound a bit more “confident” than I actually am on a lot of these points, but at this stage I’m convinced. I ask for your help in nuancing my understanding.
I haven’t yet had the talk RJS asks about with my inquisitive, but trusting, science nerd second-grader, but I think she’s become aware of the science/creationism conflict, particularly as regards the age of the earth. She reads all secular books about science and we talk about science as though there were no such thing as creationism, but she is taught an adamant and somewhat polemical version of YEC at church. It won’t be long before I’ll have to address these issues, but I’ve been preparing for it for years now and don’t dread it anymore. Here is how I’ve imagined it going down.
Well, the ancient Israelites didn’t really know how the world came about. They weren’t scientists and didn’t try very hard to be; they were more interested in how to live life obediently to God. This was a good thing for them, and something we can learn from them nowadays.
So more than talking about how the world began, they wanted to understand why the world began. They created stories very much like other people in ancient times about the beginning of the world, like the Greek and Norse myths we read together.* These stories about the beginning of the world didn’t actually happen that way, but they helped them understand that it was our God who created the world and all that’s in it, not those cruel, weak, and often wicked gods that other people worshipped. It taught them that God is in control of the world and the world isn’t in control of God. The Garden of Eden story explained that things go wrong in life because people do things that are wrong, that we will be happy and enjoy fellowship with God if we follow His guidance, and that our lives will be sad if we rely too much on whatever we think is right or wrong.
*In my opinion, this is an important prior step.
I’m not making any claims that this will work universally, but it will no doubt assuage some of the confusion among most young children. If the child is very much younger and asks, “Is this story true?” the answer would have to be, “It teaches us something true,” followed by a simplified version of what I said before; this wouldn’t answer their question, but rather begin to open their minds to the inadequacy of the question as framed.
Another conversation, or a later stage of the one above, will include a subtle acknowledgement that the Israelites weren’t always right, without implying that we should have expected them to be. If I don’t ever make unwarranted claims about the Bible’s nature and authority – or for the authority of any source of information, for that matter – this won’t ever cause the conflict it did for those of us who were taught inerrancy and only later came to find out differently. Disappointment resulting from false expectations and a haughty disposition toward the virtue of doubt have much more potential to displace one’s faith than a conscious recognition of the epistemological limits of any human endeavor, from science to history to theology.
But for some kids, like my daughter, my words above will probably be enough for now.
The most dangerous shyster is the one who has convinced himself to believe his own pitch.
Over at The Creation of an Evolutionist, Mike is continuing to blog through his weekly viewing of The Truth Project. He just completed Lesson Five. More so than the previous lessons, Lesson 5 focused on a critique of mainstream science, and evolution in particular. Bear in mind that Mike is about as fair-minded as they come, but he is shocked by Del Tackett’s blatant misrepresentations of clear facts and doesn’t hold anything back in his detailed analysis. Make sure you check it out, especially if you’ve seen TTP and didn’t notice anything wrong!
(Thinking about what Mike has told us about Lesson 5 has really gotten my dander up. You’ve been warned.)
In all honesty, it moves me to disgust to think of all the churches that purchase and publicize viewings of The Truth [sic] Project. I can just picture the viewers congregating, hoping to see the scientific disciplines and those who accept their consensus belittled in favor of their own half-baked, long since outdated, and yet completely unquestionable alternatives. I see them in my head, looking just like so many similar audiences of which I’ve been a part: sighing in relief at their growing confidence in their preset beliefs, grinning at one another as Tackett mocks his opposition with convenient lies and half-truths, laughing at all those simpleton atheistic outsiders as though their ears were being tickled with a feather reminiscent of his arguments’ combined intellectual weight.
This is what gets me: so many of these truly precious people live lives of humility and self-sacrifice out of genuine love for one another and for others in need, and yet here, in contradictory condescension, they accept wholesale dismissals of the virtual entirety of the scientific community and those convinced by their arguments.
Christians, self-professing lovers of truth, do you think “the church” is all about getting together to reaffirm your consensus just-so stories that you somehow suppose to be more valid because non-Christians cite actual evidence to the contrary? Despite the fact that hosts of other honest, truth-loving Christians acknowledge that evidence? Do you judge what’s true by what bolsters your inspired, inerrant, and infallible views on Scripture? Is it too much to ask that you examine all things to see if they are true?
I can understand believing in something despite a lack of evidence, something we all do in one way or another, believer and unbeliever alike. But it’s another thing entirely to invite people like Tackett into your churches and to uncritically accept all of his convenient “evidence” and characterizations of the opposition, disregarding even the mere possibility of actual contradictory evidence. Even if your predetermined conclusions are actually accurate, do you want to believe the right things for the wrong reasons? You can’t assume what these guys say is true any more than the Bereans blindly accepted what Paul said was true. This goes for much more than creationism/ID/evolutionism — it goes for anything your Christian teachers tell you. If you’re not going to fact check what they tell you, at least don’t dishonor the truth by gleefully accepting only what jibes with what you already believe and then feeling more enlightened than those who don’t.
As my 200th post, I’m going to give you a little insight into my background, how I think, and what led me to where I am right now. Of course I don’t think I’m really all that “screwed up”, but for those who do think I am, I thought I’d give you a bit of an explanation.
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While growing up in three different Southern Baptist churches, being involved mostly with other Christians living the Christian life, I saw little that made me think anything was missing about my own faith.
In high school I recognized the dangers of Fundamentalism (proper) through experiences with one of my school curricula, the Independent Baptist-based A Beka Book Publications. There writ large I saw a host of devout, well-meaning Christians who believed things that I found wholly incredible, despite the fact that by normal evangelical standards my church was quite conservative. I was amazed to think that this type of self-described Fundamentalists would think that I was teetering on the edge of damnation for believing the way I did. I knew that I, at least, was sincere and well considered in my beliefs, and that my relationship with God was as authentic as it could be and none the worse for rejecting what these sincere Christians believed.
As I got older and started jobs outside that tight-knit faith community, I began to see what “outsiders” thought about that community. Naturally, as someone genuinely sold on the faith as it had been presented me, I was defensive of what I thought was valid, yet I just couldn’t cook up enough hubris to simply chalk up everything the world thought about Christians to unregenerate, unenlightened, truth-despising nonsense. I stood firm on the general fabric of my faith; the enticements of the life of my unbelieving peers couldn’t sway someone who had so long enjoyed communion with God and seen His provision in the lives of his community. I remain a believer in the Christian God. But because of some intrinsic desire for intellectual honesty, possibly to distance myself from the dangers I was spooked by in Fundamentalism, I realized that those bedrock beliefs were not enough to sell me on everything else that my faith community had assumed to be true, particularly as I came across other sincere believers pointing out what they saw as errors in the stereotypical evangelical mindset. For instance, despite my highly entertaining Chick Publications’ magazines and tracts telling me otherwise, I personally came to the conclusion that Roman Catholics are not indirectly worshipping Satan with an entirely separate religion; Catholics do not even, as many Protestants believe, spit on Jesus’ sacrifice by worshipping Mary or deny the grace of God in favor of works. These sorts of things helped acclimate me to being at odds with many in my own community.
I went to a conservative Christian school for college. After a short stint in the music department, I was inspired by a teacher who brought out historical-grammatical aspects of the Old Testament. Looking back now, I see that these aspects were, as ever in the evangelical community, carefully selected so as to complement or bolster rather than refine or revise the typical conservative understanding. I switched my major to Bible and Theology. I learned the stuff they taught me, but I didn’t adopt much of it as my very own; nor, I should say, did I find overmuch at this time that I discarded outright. I put everything on the back shelf, and scrutinized it as I had the time.
As it would happen, a profound love for the Bible that I nurtured since early childhood continued to encourage me to understand it as well as I could. I certainly didn’t want to be wrong about what it actually is, and I had as yet been unconvinced, disappointed, and disgusted by some of the attempts at harmonization of niggling Bible conflicts that I had run across. But my encounters with Fundamentalism taught me that if you can find one flaw, you couldn’t trust that there weren’t more.
In a vital turning point for me, I ran across C. S. Lewis’s views on Scripture. Any longtime reader of this site will notice his influence, particularly in some cracking good quotes of his, all of which opened my eyes to how human the Scriptures were — were intended to be — and that they should be embraced warts and all; that to despise the Scriptures for being human is to reject God’s plan for those Scriptures.
This wasn’t the end of my journey, of course. I flirted with that realization for a few years, keeping it in the back of my mind as a back door I could use were I to run across any errors in Scripture that couldn’t be explained. But before I came to the point of admitting outright errors, I came to understand the vital importance of determining genre, which soon affected both my eschatology and my view of Genesis.
Please note: I’ve been accused of taking my stances on the nature of Scripture because of a desire to compromise for science. But It wasn’t until my view of Genesis changed somewhat late in the process that I really looked into evolution. Even though I had become skeptical and even critical of some creationists like Kent Hovind (of whom I must admit to being enamored when in high school), I was shocked in my Christian college that my biology professor taught the entire course without mentioning creationism once, explaining then-current scientific understandings of abiogenesis and evolution without so much as a disclaimer. It wasn’t until after I graduated from my undergrad college that I really settled down to look at the science/creationism debate with my new understanding of Scripture and Genesis in particular, under the influence of fellow believers who, like my biology professor, accepted evolution.
Anyway, that’s a start. And if I haven’t told you personally, I’d like to thank you warmly for reading this blog of mine.
The poll in my sidebar asking Christians how important they considered the faith/science debate to be ran for four months as of yesterday. In that time, 99 votes were cast. Today as I close it out, I add my own as the last vote.
I voted Critical. No surprise there.
What I do find surprising is that one of two choices that received almost no attention early on, Worse than unimportant, finished just a few votes behind one of the early contenders, Important, but not critical. Sure, it received a clear minority of votes, but given my blog’s audience, most of whom are at least vaguely aware of the debate’s importance, this is disturbing to me.
These people are asking why I should be wasting my time distracting Christians from what they really should be doing; none of them came on to the blog as requested to explain what exactly they thought I should be focusing on. Was it just a matter of, “Please, I’m uncomfortable with this topic — can we move on to something else already?” Perhaps, but I’m guessing that the evangelicals who would vote “Worse than unimportant” would genuinely feel that the debate is a distraction from what they consider to be one of the most important things on the evangelical’s to-do list: evangelism.
In an interesting coincidence, today is also the day Karl Giberson posted an essay entitled “Evolution Matters” that tells why he thinks it’s something we can’t ignore.
Most parishioners probably think evolution is false, but mainly they just don’t need to think about evolution at all. Why should a pastor engage a topic that seems irrelevant when it will certainly lead to controversy?
Despite these perspectives I think evolution is far more important than most Christians appreciate. The reason why it may seem like a back burner topic is that the people with the questions have left the church and taken their questions elsewhere. If they, and their questions were still in the church then their voices would be heard and the issue would seem more pressing.
The distinct possibility of apostasy seen in so many cases following a convincing encounter with mainstream science is a concern of mine that I have repeatedly emphasized. Giberson elaborates on the E. O. Wilson example:
Wilson was raised a Southern Baptist and was quite devout as a child. But he was taught that his faith and evolution were incompatible. He went off to study biology at the University of Alabama and learned, to his surprise, that the evidence for evolution was compelling and, like virtually all serious biologists, he accepted it. This, of course, meant he had to reject the Christian faith of his childhood.
What I want to highlight is that those who view the evolution/creation debate as less important than evangelism are missing the forest for the trees: sure, you might get more people to “make a decision,” but what is it that you’re telling them they’re making a decision for? Surely the Christian life exists for more than replication: that’s more a characteristic of cancer than of a healthy organism, more like the Borg than the Federation. But more importantly, if you convince people that our faith in God is but a consequence of being right about certain important matters of history recorded in the Bible, then their becoming convinced at some later point that the mainline evangelical view is wrong on matters such as creation is surely going to rock the world of anyone you convert. Isn’t it best to teach them to put their faith in God alone and view theology as a fallible understanding of Him and His ways?
I am persuaded that those grounded in their faith, by which I mean those having experienced God through profound life experiences, not those cocksure of the infallibility of their theology, are less likely to reject God than those who have done as the creationists urge and hung the whole shebang on the reliability of their sources for theology, i.e. preachers, Sunday School teachers, and high-profile evangelicals who decry evolution as a mere “creation story for atheists” (Kirk Cameron).
But neither do I want to abandon my fellow believers to their fastidiously maintained blissful ignorance; this blog exists in large part as an attempt to provide an example of someone who seeks critical evaluation as an expression of faith rather than avoiding honest inquiry to preserve faith. I am convinced this can be done. I am of course aware that these are unlikely even to read my blog, but I also hope to encourage others like me to engage those threatened by critical inquiry of all sorts, including that which has wholly overthrown creationism.
The so-called Synoptic Problem in biblical studies results from the search for an explanation of the similarities in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) that even in a cursory analysis essentially necessitates that there was borrowing between them. In many cases there are entire sentences that are reproduced verbatim in two or even all three of the Synoptics. Although the first to formulate the problem, Johann Jakob Griesbach, posited that Matthew and Luke were the source of Mark, the reverse order is the dominant theory today: the “priority of Mark” is the leading theory that posits Mark as the first written Gospel, which Matthew and Luke then used as a source.
Lately I’ve been interested to learn of Mark Goodacre’s special contribution to the argument for Markan priority. In essence, Dr. Goodacre has demonstrated that in parallel pericopes, while the different Gospels may differ significantly near the beginning of the passage, by the end they tend to conform to much more similar wording. After Goodacre goes on to show that the wording that corresponds more closely toward the end of each passage is more consistent with the wording of Mark throughout the rest of the passage, this amounts to a strong argument for Markan priority. This suggests that Mark was being used as the source, and the redactors of the other two Gospels, after starting off strong in their objective to make the story their own, had a tendency to undergo the effects of what Goodacre calls ”editorial fatigue”, i.e. they lapse into less creative, more verbatim borrowing from Mark.
I’ve got an idea related to all this rattling around in my head. Please stay with me.
As the earliest attested Germanic language by close to two hundred years, and a remarkably archaic language besides, the language of the Goths is extremely valuable for reconstructing Proto-Germanic. Unfortunately, virtually the only texts we have in the Gothic language are manuscripts of Wulfila’s translation of the NT, only about half of which have survived. This is doubly unfortunate because, as the translator burdened with the sacred responsibility of translating a sacred text, Wulfila was extremely slavish to the source text, aping the Greek syntax wherever it was at all intelligible in Gothic. This means that we have very little that we can be confident is authentic Gothic syntax.
What this also means is that where we observe significant variation between the Greek text and Gothic, we may then rightly suspect that we are looking at an instance of native Gothic syntax overriding that of Greek. Studying the deviation of Gothic from the Vorlage (source text) is thus potentially instructive. Here again, an unfortunate limitation is that we only have a very small corpus, so it’s hard to tell how much stock to put into each treatment of Greek.
However, my long-standing interest in the Synoptics suggested to me that for each of the more verbatim parallel passages that survive in the Gothic texts, we actually have two or three shots at seeing how Wulfila might represent a single Greek text: one for each Gospel that translates the identical parallel texts. From what I’ve seen so far, there is indeed usually a difference in the Gothic translation from Gospel to Gospel, even when the underlying Vorlage is identical.
Now back to Dr. Goodacre: I think there may be an analogue of editorial fatigue in the “Gothic Problem” I just laid out. Whereas Matthew’s and Luke’s intents to add distinctiveness to their source material dwindled as the passages drew on, I suspect that Wulfila’s apparent intent to maintain as faithful a translation as possible regardless of how wooden it sounded would have resulted in progressively more latitude in his treatment of the Greek as he grew more confident and/or “fatigued”. This progressive latitude in translation would thus work in reverse of editorial fatigue in a way, since the latter resulted in less variation whilst Wulfila’s fatigue would ostensibly work in the opposite direction. I am unaware of what the literature says about translators’ habits, but anecdotally I have certainly noticed that when I am translating Greek, Old English, or whatever, my initial intent to translate as literally as possible certainly degrades as I progress through the piece I am translating, with gradually increasing inclusion of dynamic equivalents as I progress.
What can be learned from this? Well, because ancient biblical translators were unlikely to carefully sculpt each pericope separately as a redactor would, the points of laxity/fatigue would likely come in less systematic spurts. When comparing Synoptical parallels, we could at best hypothesize that the less slavish treatment of identical Greek passages would probably be a translation further down into that translation session. From where I sit, the most it could do for someone interested in recovering native Gothic syntax is to suggest a reason why one Gospel’s translation may more closely resemble the source: it was translated closer to the beginning of a session than the same passage in another Gospel. It’s an interesting idea nonetheless, and one I’ll be keeping one eye on as I continue my dissertation research in this area.
Any thoughts?
Two days shy of four months ago I posted a poll that asked Christians how important the faith/science debate is. I was going to wait until there were 100 results to make a wrap-up post, but I’ve decided that in honor of Charles Darwins’s 201st birthday, I’d go ahead and comment on the 97 votes already in.
Christians, how important is the faith/science debate? Add comments here.
- Critical: Christians have got to pull their heads out of the sand, for the good of the Kingdom! (41%, 41 Votes)
- Pressing: This issue has too much visibility among those engaged in the general believer/unbeliever discussion. We need to deal with this head-on. (35%, 35 Votes)
- Important, but not pressing: I'm sure it's important for some people to address, for certain groups. But just give me the Readers' Digest version. (14%, 14 Votes)
- Unimportant: Totally a non-issue. Next! (2%, 2 Votes)
- Worse than unimportant: What a waste of time! An utter distraction from what really matters. (8%, 8 Votes)
Total Voters: 100
Loading ...It should be noted that I actually stopped looking at this poll’s results after around 50-60 votes. Until then, there had been a lead of five or ten votes (varying) in favor of “Pressing”, with “Critical” in second place. So now today when I looked at it, I was surprised to see that “Critical” had finally overtaken “Pressing”. The popularity of both answers could be read as a testament to the impact of Charles Darwin, but I find myself wondering, would he be pleased by this result?
Would Darwin be happy knowing that 128 years after his death, considering the virtually unanimous support his theory has garnered among specialists across the scientific disciplines, that so many of the general populace would still be rigorously debating how important it was to take his theory seriously? How content would he be with the fact that mainstream Christians throughout the world — people like his own wife — would only now (gradually) be coming around to the realization that, “Hey, maybe we should think this common descent stuff through before dismissing it…”?
Oh well. Better late than never, I guess.
This is long for a “quote of the day,” but it’s so well stated that I couldn’t resist. It’s from an article by Kenton Sparks, author of God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship
When the cosmos is understood in this way—as divine speech to humanity—then it is no longer possible to characterize Christian debates about science as a conflict that pits “God’s inerrant word in Scripture” against “errant human science.” Rather, any conflict between Scripture and science should be understood as a conflict between “human interpretations of God’s word in Scripture” and “human interpretations of God’s word in nature.”
When we understand the situation in this way, then in any apparent conflict between Scripture and science it is just as likely that we’ve misunderstood the biblical evidence as that we’ve misunderstood the science … in fact, one could make the theological argument that we’re more likely to misunderstand the Bible, as an instance of special revelation, than to misunderstand the general revelation available to everyone in creation.
Kudos to BioLogos once again for finding compelling material from credible and well-spoken/-written contributors.
I have recently been asked what I would consider a “liberal” Christian.
Well, for one thing, although I buck at calling myself as a liberal Christian, I recognize that I am more “liberal” than many others on certain issues. I think from a typical evangelical POV, a “liberal Christian” is thought of as not caring enough about sound theology; this makes me extremely uncomfortable given my hard-won theological views.
Another angle that might help is in evaluating one’s disposition toward traditional teaching. Please allow me to offer a categorization I’ve noticed, most phases of which I feel I have passed through, so bear in mind the probability of personal bias. Also note that I am aware I have not described every variety of Christian belief system.
1) Fundamentalists/conservative evangelicals assume that the main body of church teaching is correct. When they encounter opposition to that teaching, they tend to marshal their most trusted apologists to defend the teaching.
Distrust: All unbelievers and Christians who disagree with certain (varying) core teachings except for on matters not perceived as influencing worldviews.
Boundaries: Uncertainty is strongly resisted. Very stable; those who unwillingly stumble into doubt tend toward a treacherous disillusionment with faith. May become progressive if enticed to begin critical examination of their tradition.
2) Progressive evangelicals hold to the main body of church teaching somewhat more provisionally. When they encounter opposition to that teaching, they more open-mindedly and critically evaluate the evidence.
Distrust: Fundamentalists; anti-Christian secularists except on non-worldview matters.
Boundaries: Certainty is still largely assumed possible and sought out. Tends to be a transitional stage; an overriding “thrill of the hunt” has been aroused. May become post-evangelicals or liberal Christians when core traditional assumptions are rejected and/or the belief forms that highly formulated theology is artificial and limiting.
3) Post-evangelicals have identified a very few core teachings and hold somewhat loosely to others until they are problematized, which they find happens fairly easily. Characterized by a pronounced agnosticism (in the general sense) and distrust of any systematic theology purporting to be based on Scripture/tradition alone. The assumption is still present that the Bible in the main presents an adequate and accurate picture of spiritual reality, but the burden of proof is not as heavily weighted toward the opposition’s side as it is for progressive evangelicals.
Distrust: Strident conservative evangelicals and strident anti-religious secularists in matters of worldview.
Boundaries: Content with or resigned to uncertainty. A potentially stable position for those who are more content with uncertainty, but many move on to agnosticism or liberal Christianity.
4) Liberal Christians are those whose view of God and spirituality is shaped almost exclusively by the ethics of Jesus/the Christian tradition, clinging to no teaching of the Bible or tradition without subjecting it to thorough critical scrutiny. They have (to varying degrees) adopted the conviction that such critical scrutiny has proved virtually all traditional conceptions of the Bible’s origin, nature, and accuracy to have been inaccurate. Typically regard Scripture as fully human and merely reflective or suggestive of the spiritual realities to which its human authors attest, lacking any coherent theme imposed upon it by God. Needless to say, there are at least as many different varieties of liberal Christian as there are evangelicals.
Distrust: Fundamentalists and the more conservative evangelicals.
Boundaries: Bask in uncertainty. Extremely stable.
Please don’t be offended if I mischaracterized your position: just correct it below in the comments! I repeat: This is in no way intended to be an authoritative breakdown of all Christian positions. It’s heavily weighted toward the Protestant side of things, for instance. I just thought I’d throw it out there as a semi-autobiographical description of many of the categories of Christian belief with which I am familiar.
Once again, please pipe up if you have any major critiques. Also, if you could come up with an example of well-known Christian leaders who fall into these categories, please let me know and I’ll include them. Finally, just for kicks, tell me which one you think I am.
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