Undeception

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.

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.

________________________________________________

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?