Archives for “Personal”
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.
- The place of fear in our bibliology The other night, a friend and I reiterated our independent observations that, despite all nuances, what ultimately stands behind most of American Christianity’s implacable dedication to inerrancy is fear. Dr. Jim...
- Human interpretations of Scripture and nature 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...
- The Truth Project and critical thinking 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...
First of all, I have decided to try to use this blog as something other than a distraction from my doctoral work. Specifically, I’m going to try to figure out ways of including aspects of my research for my dissertation here (but not so much that I get ripped off, of course). For those who don’t know, I am ABD in a PhD program in historical linguistics at the University of Georgia. My dissertation involves translations of the Gospels into a few languages for whom those translations are among the earliest attestations. It’s more interested in linguistic aspects of those translation languages than the Gospels qua biblical literature, but my interaction with them is bound to bleed over, at least in my understanding and familiarity with them. So we’ll see how that goes.
Related posts:- Dialectology and the Gospels Since starting my research of the Gospels for my dissertation, I have repeatedly wondered (as I idly mused earlier) if there have been any attempts to identify where the Gospels...
- Meandering through the Synoptics Ok, I promised to write stuff I find interesting as I go through my diss research, so here’s a couple thoughts I had tonight as I was researching. These will...
What an…honor(?) to be tagged with the Honest Scrap Meme by one Joshua Cecil Horne at the Smoak House.
Honest Scrap Award
I’ll let Josh tell you about it:
When accepting this auspicious award, you must write a post bragging about it (hence my over-the-top cocky title for this post), including the name of the misguided soul who thinks you deserve such acclaim, and link back to said person so everyone knows he or she is real. Choose a minimum of 7 blogs that you find brilliant in content or design. Or improvise by including bloggers who have no idea who you are because you don’t have 7 friends. Show the 7 random victims’ names and links and leave a harassing comment informing them that they were prized with “Honest Weblog.” Well, there’s no prize, but they can keep the nifty icon. List at least ten honest things about yourself. Then, pass it on!
So without any further ado, here I go…
Looking through this site, you’ll probably notice that there is a minimum of personal info about myself. It’s largely unintentional, since this site is about ideas more than about me as a person living a normal life. I just don’t have much to say about me here on this blog.
One area of my personal life that I’ve purposefully let bleed over into posts and comments, mostly in attempts to explain my absence this last summer and the past few weeks, has been my request for prayer, but I’ve also been purposefully obscure about what exactly was going on. This reticence was caused by personal insecurity. Now that the storm has passed, I thought I’d share for the record what it has been all about.
Related posts:- Audience relevance = personal relevance I agree with the bulk of what’s written on Josh’s post, “Interpreting the Bible” at the Smoak House. To his well-stated comments I would like to add the following thoughts....
My long-time friend Heather has tagged me with a meme listing my five favorite things (in no particular order). So here we go!
1) Receiving and spreading knowledge. I am an education nut (read: “nerd”); I love to receive it, and welcome opportunities to share it.
2) Discussing important topics. I want real back-and-forth dialogue on things that I’m interested in. I’m not much of a small talk guy. I like big talk: theology, politics, pressing interpersonal problems, anything that matters or strikes my fancy as unique. Discussion of sports does not qualify.
3) Studying origins. I’m not primarily talking about the evolution/creation controversy here: I like to know about the beginning of almost anything. This has led to almost choosing ancient history as my postgraduate field, and it did lead to my choice of Indo-European/Germanic linguistics, which seeks to uncover the details of the origin of each language family. I like visiting historical sites so that I can experience, as much as possible, times and circumstances anterior to my own – and the earlier, the better.
Effective this post, I’m going into radio silence for approximately one month. Well, not exactly. I mean, for one thing, this isn’t radio. And for another, I hope I’ll not be altogether silent over the next month, but there are no promises, either.
What’s the occasion? Well, let’s just say that the outcome of the event that transpires in the next month is the single most definitive turning point for me so far and will largely determine what I do for the rest of my life. Am I overstating things? Hardly.
I hate that this comes now when my blog traffic is at a record high. But as I said above, I’m not planning on unplugging completely: I will still be on to respond to comments as necessary, maybe put up a link I’ve found, summarize a thought going through my head, etc. So don’t take me off your blogroll yet. 
I was in college. In my fourth of five years, I heard about a professor who was fairly “liberal” in theology. A friend of mind took his class on Revelation, and was disturbed by how good the arguments were that Revelation was written about first century events. When my friend explained to me in brief terms the professor’s argument, I, too, was apalled – and intrigued. Something about the whole thing rang true. However, I would put it somewhat on the backburner for a little while.
By the time I was out of college, I was ready to dive in and find out if there was anything to this belief system. A few internet searches, and I found that the name for this scandalous view was “preterism”. I looked at a lot of arguments, asked a lot of questions. I discovered that there are two main types of preterists. Partial preterists see only some of prophecy as related to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 and hold out for a future something or other (usually the Second Coming and the Resurrection) in the future. Full preterists, the main type of preterist with whom I corresponded on the theological forums, believe that all eschatological events were fulfilled in those events of the first century. Around this time I was starting to see the Bible as literature rather than as a magic text independent of its original cultural context. I saw that the prophetic diction in the New Testament was not a brand new creation, but that it was built upon the tradition of the Old Testament prophecies, and with this revelation and what it did to the Olivet Discourse (Mat 24-25), I was a preterist. Of some sort, anyway.
Then came to a momentous (and stupid) decision: I would decide whether full preterism was true or not by praying and then reading through all the epistles, trying to see if it all made sense from a full preterist standpoint. I didn’t get all the way through before the inevitable happened: I could not reconcile the relevant eschatological passages as I understood them in my fully dispensationalist mindset with the view of preterism. Surprise, surprise, huh?
Related posts:- Common objections to full preterism: below the surface (Preterism is the belief that there are no prophecies in Scripture that await a fulfillment in the future. Hereafter I will use the term “futurist” to describe anyone who believes...
- Is full preterism a new doctrine? (revised) Who said this? But the things which took place afterwards, did our Saviour, from his foreknowledge as THE WORD or GOD, foretell should come to pass, by means of those...
- You contribute: is Jesus coming back? I’ve had a poll running for a couple months asking Undeception readers what topics they’re interested in seeing me address. I decided to give it a while and see if...
Ok, it’s been long enough for me to do another meme, and because I am a good sport, I will respond to both memes I was tagged with by one merciless (mercilessly funny, that is) blogger friend of mine, Kev at Special Kind of Stupid (you want a laugh? check him out!). Unfortunately, my answers will not be particularly funny. But come on, Kev, just be glad I’m doing these at all
Well, I got a Macbook. I’ve been spending a lot of time getting acquainted with it, and no time on my PC. My blog has suffered, because instead of posting online I had been using blog editing software called Zoundry. Great program. Well, it doesn’t offer Mac support, so I’ve been looking into other options. Then it occurred to me that I might as well post this one here within my browser. Trouble is, I’m somewhat addicted to having a stand-alone editor, so I can hardly stand to write any more right now. I will tell you that Qumana, which is free, works ok, but it has no support for the <—more—> tag that allows the first part of the post to appear on the main page with a link to the full post at the end. Because I have frequently used and fully intend to continue using this feature, due to my extra long posts, I cannot stick with Quamana. I haven’t really found any other free options that work. Any suggestions?
This is the fifth of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.
The Importance of Determining Genre
Because the Bible is a compilation of literary works, in order to get the sense of it, we must interpret each of them in the manner in which it was intended, viz. according to the appropriate literary category. Surely the principle of interpreting things in the manner in which there were intended approaches tautology, but how many Christians ever really follow it through? As mentioned before, the assumptions that determine the “manner in which it was intended” are too often based on what meets the eye alone. So what do I mean by interpreting the Bible as literature?
You read a novel in much the same way that you read the newspaper, realizing that they are both forms of narrative. How you interpret the narratives in each, however, depends on your recognition of the type of literature you are reading. No one would say that Great Expectations was “errant” or “a pack of lies” unless he thought it was written as history. The same goes for the Bible, which is far from uniform in literary genre. We have farmers, shepherds, doctors, and kings for authors; what thoughtful person, recognizing that God chose this diverse crowd rather than three or four prophets or priests to bear witness to Himself, would conclude that God would homogenize their testimonies into one nameless genre, erasing the distinctiveness of each one in His quest to dole out a series of unanalyzable propositions? Instead, within the pages of Scripture we find a broad range of writing styles that includes poetry, wisdom literature, prophecy, apocalyptic, and epistle.
Moreover, there is not always a one-to-one genre-to-book correlation. Not every segment within the book of Genesis, for example, is to be interpreted as the same sort of narrative, as is somewhat obvious to someone doing comparative literary analysis on the type of stories being told. The Creation part of Genesis shares many characteristics of Ancient Near Eastern mythology, whereas the stories of the Patriarchs remind us of the Icelandic sagas, collections of family stories that give a group of people a common heritage.
The historical-grammatical (or grammatico-historical) method of biblical interpretation is the practice of taking into account the original language and the culture of the original audience when researching the original meanings of Scripture. By and large, though, inerrantists have used this principle as a defensive and reactionary measure to clear up problems rather than as an active interpretive method: for instance, it is responsible for the observation mentioned before that Judah (and later Israel) used accession year dating, because Edwin Thiele looked at Persian (and that of other ANE cultures) record-keeping and saw that this explained a lot of long-supposed errors in the dating of the kings. The historical-grammatical method has been modified by many exegetes to act as a sort of middle-ground that suspends the value of a plain reading if by any means it helps to demonstrate the scientific inerrancy of the Bible. What is missing from that version of the historical-grammatical hermeneutic is the principle we have been discussing that insists upon interpreting the Bible in terms of the literary characteristics, devices, and genres that make it up. We may call this the literary-generic principle; this principle is a tool that cannot be neglected by anyone claiming to use the historical-grammatical method of interpretation and exegesis.
Related posts:- Case Study: the Fall This is the seventh in a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics. The traditional doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin teach that the first human’s first...
- Contextual interpretation in Genesis: Cain’s mark I suppose it goes without saying that approaching the Bible as contextually bound literature leaves you asking different questions and giving different answers. In the comments of one my posts...
- The Fallout This is the eighth and final post in a series on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics. So anyway what about the Fall? If no one human is the cause for our...
“Knowledge puffs up.” This phrase is customarily pulled out of the rest of 1 Corinthians 8:1 and cast as a slur upon those like myself intrinsically driven to seek more learning and understanding. Even the immediate context of this phrase in 1 Corinthians 8 shows, however, that not only is knowledge necessary, but that it is actually deficient, incomplete knowledge that puffs up, knowledge devoid of love (for more on this, see this great article from bible.org).
A lover of learning is the type of person who, while his eyes pass over the landscape, notices each glint and out-of-place shadow, and is all but incapable of resisting the urge to investigate. Sometimes I really don’t like being the type who questions things. I fear that it appears I’m doing it for fun, or because I think it’s cool to “question everything”, or because I assume everyone is wrong but I. I fear this because I’ve identified those motivations in other people who like the limelight of being unique; yet I can honestly say that I would hardly put myself through the hassle of critiquing views held by the majority or especially by those I love for no other reason than a little self-aggrandizement.
Many of you will be happy to hear that this post is not about preterism (check the category and tags!). It’s more about the importance of developing the Christian mind. It was, however, my recent discussion of preterism that brought this to my thoughts, so I will use my struggle with full preterism as an example.
I certainly didn’t come quietly into full preterism. Since my first encounter with it, I kicked against the goads for about five years before I could no longer say that I struggled against full preterism.
This is not to say that I do not still struggle with it. There are some things one cannot understand about a subject without first accepting it on its own terms. I have accepted full preterism fully, and will now continue to wrestle with it for the rest of my days. Even before being entirely convinced of preterism, I had to accept it provisionally in order to see more clearly what claims it was making and why. This sort of engagement with things we are at odds with is an important stage and a necessary component of maturing as a Christian. Read more…
I’ve always rolled my eyes when I encountered the “Revelation” nuts in the church: obsession with the day’s headlines, thinking that they elucidate the details of the fulfillment of end-times prophecy, this bugs the ever-loving stew out of me.
I realize I’ve been talking a lot of eschatology lately. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m a one-trick pony or that I’m unhealthily devoted to discussion of this particular doctrine. I thought I’d dedicate a post explaining why I’ve been talking about this, and why I am not likely to completely stop posting about eschatology in the future (although I’m sure it will slack off here and there).
I never could stomach codswallop, and especially widely celebrated codswallop. It’s always been natural for me to be critical of things handed to me to believe, even when I understand that the majority believes it. And then sometimes I discover that I have unquestioned, inaccurate presuppositions on a subject. Now, when I realize that I have been eating food with a hair in it, I make absolutely sure that I have purged my mouth by rinsing it with drink and stuffing it with a prodigious amount of uncontaminated food. So it was with my eschatology. Having long since rinsed my mouth out and cleared away the bunk I believed before, for the last few years I have been on the mission of preparing and chewing up the replacement meal. I am using this blog as a way of probing everything and getting my own ducks in a row, but also of answering the questions of some friends who have lately been asking questions.
Related posts:- You contribute: is Jesus coming back? I’ve had a poll running for a couple months asking Undeception readers what topics they’re interested in seeing me address. I decided to give it a while and see if...
- Iambic tetrameter The heavens and the earth have passed The new has dawned, the night complete, The day of judgment come. At last The rule of Death dies in defeat. The fear,...
- Caution: not for the close-minded It having recently come to my attention that a surprising number of my intimate acquaintances are uninformed of the specifics of my eschatological beliefs, and owing to my conviction that...