"Son" or "Child"?

It's always slightly odd singing the song “Father God, I wonder”. In the chorus, there's a line with two different versions. It's either “Now I am your child, I am adopted in your family” or “Now I am your son, I am adopted in your family.” And there are some people who will always insist on singing “child”, and some people will always insist on singing “son”, regardless of what the hymn book / song sheet / screen says.

The arguments goes to an interesting issue in Bible translation, especially Romans 8:14-17 and Galatians 4:4-7. Here's Galatians in the 2011 NIV:

But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship. Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father.’ So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.

The words “Son”, “sons”, “adoption to sonship” and “child” are all basically the same word – huios. Here's the same passage in the NASB:

But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God.

Why does Paul say “sons”?

It's important to remember that these verses in Galatians 4 come just a few verses after Paul has made his famous declaration that there is no male or female in Christ Jesus, because we all clothe ourselves with Christ through faith.

Adoption as sons, not just as children, really matters. In the Roman world which Paul was writing to, daughters did not have proper inheritance rights, but sons did. To be a “son” was to be a “top status child”; to be a daughter was to have a lesser status. So for Paul to declare that all the Galatian Christians: male and female, black and white, Jew and Gentile, gay and straight, slave and free were sons was an incredibly egalitarian thing to say. He was using an illustration from his time, of Roman family law, and making a powerfully egalitarian statement from a powerfully non-egalitarian structure.

Why should we translate it as “children”?

But that's not the situation today. The situation today is that sons and daughters are equal, and inherit equally, but that there's a lingering suspicion of gender bias hanging around in society. In that culture, to insist that we're all sons is to suggest that being a daughter isn't good enough, which it wasn't in Roman culture, but it is with Jesus.

When we retell Bible stories into contexts where some elements are unfamiliar, we often change the details and idioms so that they fit better. I understand that where bread is not the staple food, the Lord's Prayer sometimes reads “Give us today our daily rice” for example.

This even happens with the people who wrote the Bible! For example, in Mark 2:4, a paralysed man is brought to Jesus by his friends, who dig through the roof. That makes perfect sense in the original context, where houses were made of mud and wood, and it makes sense in a story told by Peter or Mark, who grew up in that world. But when Luke, who was from a much more “developed” urban background, tells the story in Luke 5:19, the friends lower the man “through the tiles”. Those are the roofs that Luke and his readers are used to, so he accommodates the story to the readers, even though it's still set in a village in Galilee.

In writing Galatians 4, Paul uses an analogy from his day – the analogy of adoption into a noble family as a son. If we're just trying to translate his words into English, then I guess it's correct to translate as “sons”, like the NASB does. But if we're trying to translate the analogy and get a Bible that is readable and makes sense to people who haven't studied Roman inheritance law, then it makes more sense to translate the whole analogy into present thought and use “children” throughout, as the NLT does:

But when the right time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, subject to the law. God sent him to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law, so that he could adopt us as his very own children. And because we are his children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, prompting us to call out, “Abba, Father.” Now you are no longer a slave but God’s own child. And since you are his child, God has made you his heir.

The NIV goes for a weird middle route, but tries to explain it with a footnote:

The Greek word for adoption to sonship is a legal term referring to the full legal standing of an adopted male heir in Roman culture.

Back to the song

But when we're singing “Father God, I wonder”, we don't have that explanation. All we have is a song. And without the explanation, I think it makes far more sense to sing “child”.

How I File Sermon Notes

I'm a little obsessive when it comes to organising things on my computer. That's in complete contrast to organising things on my desk, but that's another story...
Here's a system I've found easy to use and helpful for filing sermon notes on the computer.

1. Have a computer folder for upcoming talks, with a subfolder for each talk and event. Here's mine:

Note that the subfolder names have the date of the event first, in yymmdd format. It used to be yyyymmdd, but I figure I'm not going to be preaching still in the year 2100, so I don't need the first two digits.

That means that if I sort the folders alphabetically, they sort into chronological order, and I can see what's coming up.

I create this folder about once a term, and clear out the old one into my filing system. I find it much easier to keep this folder on a cloud drive, so I can access it from anywhere. I keep all the files related to each talk in the appropriate folder.

2. Have a folder for each book of the Bible. I find a list of 66 quite hard to work with, so I subdivide into genres, then by books, putting a number in front of the book name so that sorting by name also sorts by book order.

For example, the book of Psalms is at Bible/3. Poetry-Wisdom/2. Psalms

3. File notes in the appropriate folder, with a title that looks like this:
Matthew 05v01-16 140621

Having a file title like that means that sorting by name sorts by order within the book, and lets you see immediately when the talk was done as well. Note the importance of trailing zeros – otherwise it would sort Matthew 1, Matthew 15, Matthew 2. In Psalms you need more trailing zeros – so it's Psalm 008 or Psalm 037 because there are more than 100 chapters.

I file notes from sermons that I've preached (still in folders with appropriate files); interesting articles that I've read online; notes I took in lectures in college; notes from talks I've listened to (scanned in), and so on. Here's an example from my folder on John.

4. Show cross-references with shortcuts
One of the beauties of an electronic filing system is that shortcuts are easy to create. If I preached a sermon on Acts 2, for example, that strongly referred to the Tower of Babel, I could create a shortcut to the Acts 2 folder and rename the shortcut as Genesis 11, and file it appropriately.

It makes things really easy to file and to find again. I guess it took a couple of hours to set up in the first place, but it didn't take long to more than recover that time back!

What about the Apocrypha?

The first record of the process of writing the Old Testament is God writing the 10 Commandments on stone tablets on Mount Sinai in Exodus 20. But only a few chapters later, in Ex 24:7, Moses has something which is described as the “book of the covenant”, which is probably Exodus 20-23, written down by Moses. From then, the Old Testament grew, through a process of editing and compiling various accounts, and people writing down messages given by God to inspired prophets, and so on. There's lots of detail, but it's very dull and the kind of thing boring academics argue about. It's far more interesting and helpful to talk about what the text means than try to come up with novel theories for how it came to be the way it is.

Peter sums up the overall process well:

Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.2 Peter 1:20-21

The result, over a period of 1000 years or so, was the Tanakh. Tanakh is the Hebrew name for Torah (law) + Naviim (prophets) + Khetuvim (writings), and is pretty much exactly the 39 books of the Old Testament in most modern Protestant Bibles, but in a different order. It's written in Hebrew, with a few bits in Aramaic, which is closely related to Hebrew. It's possible a few bits (Daniel?) might have been written after the Greek conquest, but if so they were written in the old language, for the old culture and set before the conquest.

After the Exile to Babylon, the Jews gained a degree of independence under the Persian Empire, the beginnings of which are seen in Ezra and Nehemiah. But the Persian empire fell to Alexander the Great in 332BC, and over time Greek rule transformed Israel. Tensions occasionally rose as high as violent revolt, especially the one led by the Maccabees in 164BC, which led to an independent Jewish state until it was swallowed up by the Roman Empire.

However, most Jews lived outside Israel, in what is now Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Iraq, they spoke Greek rather than Hebrew as a first language and were heavily influenced by Greek culture in a way that the Palestinian Jews had largely resisted. These Jews translated the Tanakh into Greek, so they could read and study it more easily, with the result being the Septuagint (usually abbreviated to LXX). The LXX isn't quite a straight translation though. Some books (Jeremiah) are a bit shorter in the LXX. Others (Daniel, Esther) are a bit longer, with the addition of new stories to Daniel and explicit references to God and prayer in Esther. Some new books were added too - some stories (Tobit, Judith), some history (Maccabees), and some which fit the Greek/Jewish culture, like Wisdom of Solomon, which says how wonderful Greek philosophy is, then points out it's all there and even better in the Tanakh. The books were also in a different order, with the LXX closer to the order you'd find in most Bibles today.

That meant there were some striking differences between the Hebrew Scriptures, used by Palestinian Jews, and the standard Greek translation of it, used by Grecian Jews.

What about Jesus and the apostles?

Jesus and the first apostles were Palestinian Jews and therefore used the Hebrew Tanakh. Paul was at home in either culture – he was brought up in Turkey, but studied in Jerusalem – and although he quotes from the LXX when writing to Greek-speaking Christians, he only quotes from the bits which were translations of the Hebrew/Aramaic original.

By the end of Acts, however, the majority of Christians didn't speak Hebrew or Aramaic, only Greek, and this was stronger still after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70. After that, the early church almost exclusively used the LXX for their Old Testament.

And the Jews?

Meanwhile, the Jews met to discuss the problem at the council of Jamnia, which is often seen as the start of Rabbinic Judaism (i.e. after the temple and the destruction of Israel). They agreed that the Hebrew Tanakh was indeed Scripture, but the extra bits in the Greek LXX weren't.

St Jerome

During the centuries of persecution, the LXX seems to have been fairly readily available. Judaism wasn't persecuted in the same way that Christianity was, and most churches seem to have owned and used the LXX as Scripture. When St Jerome was commissioned to translate the Bible into Latin in 382, he found the problems, and argued against the use of the extra bits in the LXX. Augustine countered, arguing that the LXX itself was inspired by God, even where it got the translation of the underlying Hebrew wrong. Jerome made some compromises and his translation (the Vulgate) became the standard translation in the Latin-speaking world. The Vulgate:

• Translated the Hebrew text of the books in the Tanakh, but noted where the Greek disagreed.
  
• Where there were extra bits in the LXX, translated them too but mostly tagged them on at the end of each book.
  
• Kept the LXX book order, including the extra books.

And so it stayed for 1000 years.

The Reformation

In the 1500s, the Reformers rebelled against the established Latin Church. As part of this, they looked again at the question of which books should be in the Bible, and almost all of them concluded that the Old Testament we use should be the Hebrew Tanakh, not the Greek Septuagint. Luther, for example, translated the Old Testament from Hebrew into German, and relegated the books that were only in the LXX to an appendix to the OT entitled “Apocrypha: These Books Are Not Held Equal to the Scriptures, but Are Useful and Good to Read”. Luther's idea was widely copied. In the Church of England, the policy was (and remains) as follows:

And the other Books (as Jerome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.

Over time, the Apocrypha was dropped from most Bibles to save on printing costs and to make it clear that they aren't on the same level as Scripture.

Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church met at the Council of Trent to decide how to respond to the Reformation. One of the items on the agenda was which books should be in the Bibles, and Trent ruled that all the books in the LXX were Scripture.

The Situation Today

By and large, the situation today is as follows:

• The Protestant Old Testament is the Hebrew Tanakh, but with the Greek order of books.
  
• The Catholic Old Testament is the slightly weird Jerome-compromise of a combination between the Hebrew and Greek Old Testaments, but all held to be authoritative.
  
• The Orthodox Old Testament is the LXX, with various slight variations among different groups.

And for those who are interested, the order of books in the Hebrew Tanakh is as follows:

• Genesis – Deuteronomy (the Torah)
  
• Joshua - 2 Kings, but missing out Ruth (the Former Prophets)
  
• Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel (the Major Prophets)
  
• Hosea – Malachi (the Minor Prophets)
  
• Psalms
  
• Job
  
• Proverbs
  
• Ruth
  
• Song of Songs
  
• Ecclesiastes
  
• Lamentations
  
• Esther
  
• Daniel
  
• Ezra - Nehemiah
  
• 1& 2 Chronicles

(And that was the simplified version!)

Where did the New Testament Come From?

“prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” 2 Pet 1:21

Jesus was crucified and raised from the dead in either AD 30 or 33. By AD50, the church had grown enough that some of the leaders of the church needed to write to other bits of it (Galatians written in 48, 1 Thessalonians in 51, James maybe even earlier). The churches found these letters so valuable that they made copies of them, and circulated them to other churches as well, and reading them alongside the Old Testament. Even by the time 2 Peter was written (mid-late 60s?), people were evidently reading Paul's letters as Scripture (2 Pet 3:16).

Also in the 60s, the apostles started to realise that they were probably going to die before Jesus returned. Some of the apostles who had known Jesus (Peter, via his friend Mark; Matthew; John) wrote down accounts of what Jesus had done and said. They'd already been preaching this for 30 years; it's like writing an account of the Falklands War today, using the accounts of soldiers who fought there – the same sort of timescale. Books weren't in common use yet, but the early church very quickly created a scroll of the four gospels, which almost every early Christian church seems to have had access to, along with another scroll of the Letters of Paul.

For the next few hundred years, Christianity was illegal, and often persecuted. Printing, of course, hadn't been invented, and so churches tended to have a collection of scrolls of New Testament writings which they used. Besides Paul and the Gospels, they might well have some of the other NT letters (Hebrews-Revelation, especially 1 John), and maybe some other books like the letters of Clement, Bishop of Rome in the 90s.

In the 100s, lots of false teachers arose, just like Jesus said they would. Some of them (e.g. Marcion) tried cutting bits out of the Bible because they wanted to cut off any hints of Jewish roots. Others (e.g. the author of the Gospel of Thomas) wrote fake “gospels” to try to add things into the Bible which fit their own agenda. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons in about 180, wrote about them and pointed out that the church had always had the 4 gospels and that they shouldn't accept any of the new nonsense. [If you want to, why not try reading some of these fake “gnostic” gospels – they're very different to the real thing, and can be quite funny in an awful way. They tell us far more about what the authors liked (secret knowledge, petty magic tricks) or didn't like (women) than about Jesus though.]

When Christianity eventually became legal, in the early 300s, the church started to compare notes on which books they had, and which ones were Scripture. Interestingly, they didn't discuss it at the Council of Nicea, which was the first big Christian get-together after Christianity was made legal – there were more pressing things to discuss like Jesus being God and the date of Easter. It wasn't so much a process of deciding which books were Scripture as recognising. If I pick someone out of a police line up, I'm not deciding that that person robbed my house; I'm recognising the person who did it.

The criteria the Church used were roughly:

• Is it either by an apostle (leader of the early church personally commissioned by Jesus – Peter, John, Paul, James, etc), or was it approved of by an apostle (Luke, Mark)?
• Does it fit with the rest of the apostolic teaching? (“Acts of Paul” was ditched as it clearly wasn't by Paul because it didn't fit with the rest of his teaching.)
• Has it been used by a lot of Christians, and tested to see that it has the effects that we expect Scripture to have?

Using these criteria, Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, wrote the list we've got today in his Easter Sunday letter of 367, and this was ratified by the Council of Carthage in 397. It's easy enough to find copies of the books that they decided to leave out – Shepherd of Hermas, 1 Clement, the Didache, and so on. They don't add much.

There's a different question, about how sure we can be that the New Testament we read today is what was originally written. Ian Paul, who knows more about these things than me, has some helpful comments.

As a consequence of all this, we can be very sure that what we have as the New Testament now is pretty much exactly what those who knew Jesus personally were saying and teaching about him in the Early Church.

Knowledge, Quizzes and Knowing God

“Knowledge puffs up but love builds up”

I'm a bit of a geek for facts, especially Bible facts. When I was 6 or 7, my school teacher asked which king was killed by an arrow to the eye. I answered “Josiah”, because my cartoon Bible had Josiah being shot in the eye with an arrow. The actual Bible says that Josiah was shot with an arrow (2 Chron 35:23), but doesn't say he was shot in the eye. Then again, no contemporary accounts say King Harold II Godwinson was shot in the eye either.

For years, my knowledge held me back from knowing God. I thought that because I knew lots of stuff about God that I actually knew him. Head knowledge is not a substitute for relationship.

Head knowledge can also get in the way when it leads to pride or when we start finding our identity or our sense of self-worth in what we know rather than in the fact we are known and accepted by God.

But in its right place, knowledge can be useful – even geeky Bible trivia. Knowing which order events occur in in the gospel of Mark, for example, helps you see how the story fits together which helps you understand better some of the significance of the individual events. Or knowing small details in one story helps you see resonances and connections with other, seemingly unconnected stories.

One of the best ways I've found of learning facts, especially for people like me, is quizzes. There's nothing quite like an internet quiz for helping me to learn (say) the capitals of Caribbean countries. So here are some helpful internet quizzes I've found for getting to know Bible facts:

Books of the Bible: OT | NT | all.

OT events | Psalm 23 | Bible quotes

Bible events in order (tricky)

Resources for Daily Bible Reading

Here are some of the best online resources for daily Bible reading...

• Explore do a free app for iPhone / Android.
• The King's English works through famous phrases from the King James Bible
• Robert Murray M'Cheyne's Bible reading plan is a good way of working through the Bible in a year (New Testament twice). Or you can do it at half speed and cover the NT once a year and the OT once every 2 years.
• For the Love of God is a brilliant series of books which provide helpful devotional thoughts on one of the passages from M'Cheyne's plan as a blog. It lets you do the plan at either full speed or half speed.
• You version is a Bible reading app for mobile phones with built in Bible reading plans.

I don't use any of those. Personally, I find internet-enabled devices too much of a distraction when trying to read the Bible. But I know some people might find them helpful...

Walking Well - Ephesians 4:17-5:17

I've recently been reading Ephesians 4 and 5, and have been really struck by the number of reasons Paul gives for avoiding sin. I found it a real encouragement to avoid sin better in my own life, and I'm not sure I've ever seen a list of them worked through properly, so here goes...

1. Walking badly is what the Gentiles do (4v17). One of Paul's big themes in the letters is Christian identity. Those Christians (like me) who were Gentiles ethnically are no longer Gentiles because of what God has done for them in bringing them near in Christ. So we shouldn't walk as the Gentiles do.
2. Walking as the Gentiles do stems from having minds that are futile (4v17) – the word is the same one translated “meaningless” in Ecclesiastes. The way they think and the things they think about are passing away. So don't live like they do.
3. Not only do their actions stem from ways of thinking that are passing away, they also stem from ignorance (4v18). Sinning is an ignorant way to act.
4. Sin stems from hard-heartedness (4v19)
5. Sin is giving yourself away to licentiousness (4v19)
6. Sin leads to the pursuit of every uncleanness in excess (4v19)
7. It's not how we were taught and discipled as Christians (4v20)
8. It's not according to the truth in Jesus (4v21-22)
9. Sin belongs to the old person, which is being destroyed (4v22)
10. We should put off the old person and put on the new person (4v23)
11. Our new selves were created according to God in righteousness and devoutness of truth (4v24)
12. We are members of each other, so should be speaking truth to one another rather than falsehood (4v25)
13. Sinning can give the devil a foothold in our lives (4v27)
14. Our actions should be motivated by the needs of others (4v28-29).
15. Doing good means that we can give to the needy (4v28)
16. Our speech should be motivated by building up the needy (4v29)
17. Sin grieves the Spirit of God (4v30)
18. We have been sealed by the Spirit aiming for the day of redemption. We should therefore remember that we are heading for redemption and live accordingly (4v30)
19. We should show grace to each other rather than evil because God has showed grace to us rather than evil (4v31-32)
20. We should imitate God (5v1)
21. Because we are God's children (5v1)
22. Christ loved us and gave himself up for us – we should follow his example (5v2)
23. We are “holy ones” and therefore should live in a fitting way (5v3-4)
24. Sin is a form of idolatry, because we are acting as if God is really just our imagined version of God rather than the real one. (5v5)
25. Idolaters (and therefore sinners) don't get an inheritance in God's kingdom (5v5)
26. Saying that sinners won't be punished is just empty words (5v6)
27. God's wrath really is coming on those whose identity is tied up with sin (5v6)
28. We shouldn't partner with those who are heading towards God's wrath. (5v7)
29. We were darkness, but now we are light. Therefore we should live like it. (5v8)
30. God's light at work in us should produce goodness, righteousness and truth (5v9)
31. We should test out what pleases God (5v10)
32. The works of darkness are futile – they don't lead anywhere good. (5v11)
33. It is shameful even to talk about deeds of darkness (5v12)
34. God's transforming power is available to change the dark things in our pasts into light and use them for his glory (5v13-14)
35. Walking well is wise; walking badly is foolish (5v15)
36. The days are evil, therefore we need to make an effort to live wisely (5v16)
37. It's important to understand what God wants us to do rather than be foolish (5v17)

Remaking a Broken World - Chris Ash

One of the things that winds me up about Bible overviews is that they always seem to take the same point of view, usually based on Graeme Goldsworthy's People / Place / Presence idea. It's a good way to do a Bible overview, but it only gives one perspective and there's so much more to see! Chris Ash here chooses a different point of view - the point of view of scattering and gathering.

I'd strongly recommend the book to anyone who has done a Bible overview from the Goldsworthy point of view (or read its best write-up in God's Big Picture by Vaughan Roberts) and wants something a bit different. From my point of view as a Bible teacher, the first two thirds was good but not much new except for his wonderful treatment of Babel. The last third or so of the book, where he gets on to talking about the Church, was spectacular.

The thesis of this chapter, indeed the theme of the book, is precisely this: the ordinary local church with all its imperfections, weaknesses, oddities and problems, has within in the seeds, the spiritual and relational genetic blueprint, of a broken world remade.
p.138

When I walk in Jesus' footsteps and become 'like a child' I will willingly receive 'a child' into my group. Only when my self-perception is that I am a despised nobody will I welcome other despised nobodies into my fellowship. Only when I am deeply humbled will my door be open to the lost, the struggling and the desperate.

If we do not receive nobodies, we do not receive Jesus Christ. That is why putting up barriers of pride is so serious. That is why it would be better to have a quick and early death by drowning than to do something like that. That is why it is so desperately important that a church be a church of 'children', a church in which status is zero and agreed to be zero and proclaimed to be zero.
p.150

Orienting Ourselves Right

We ask "Where does God fit into the story of my life?" when the real question is "Where does my little life fit into the great story of God's mission?"

We want to br driven by a purpose that is tailored just right for our own individual lives, when we should be seeing the purpose of all life , including our own, wrapped up in the great mission of God for the whole of creation.

We talk about "applying the Bible to our lives". What would it mean to apply our lives to the Bible instead, assuming the Bible to be the reality - the real story - to which we are called to conform ourselves?

We wrestle with "making the gospel relevant to the world". But in this story, God is about transforming the world to fit the shape of the gospel.

We argue about what can legitimately be included in the mission that God expects from the church, when we should ask what kind of church God wants for the whole range of his mission.

I may wonder what kind of mission God has for me, when I should be asking what kind of me God wants for his mission.

CJH Wright, The Mission of God, quoted Total Church p.34

School of Theology 4

The audio of the fourth school of theology session, on God's promise to David, can be downloaded here.

"God is love" as primary?

There seems to be a common assumption in an awful lot of modern theology that the primary truth about God is that he is love. "God is love" is at least Biblical as a statement (1 John 4:8, 16), and there's a lot of important stuff that can be said about the Trinity from that statement.

But of course, people often load the word "love" with a lot of baggage it wasn't meant to carry, and interpret "God is love" in a way that contradicts large chunks of the rest of the Bible.

But why should "God is love" be primary at all? Why not "God is light; in him there is no darkness at all." (1 John 1:5). After all, it's in the same book. But I don't think either "God is love" or "God is light" is the number one candidate for a three word description beginning "God is...". Nor is "Truth", "Life" or "Wisdom", though there may be something to be said for each of those.

I think there are two possibilities much stronger than either. After all, we're never told that "God is love, love, love", but we are told that he is "holy, holy, holy." Actually, we're told that as many times as we are told that God is love (Isaiah 6:3, Rev 4:8), and we're told that God is holy quite a lot more (Lev 11:44, Lev 11:45; Josh 24:19; 1 Sam 6:20; Ps 22:3; 99:9; Isaiah 5:16; 1 Pe 1:16 for starters). So I'd say "God is holy" is much closer to being his primary attribute that "God is love" on the basis of the Biblical evidence.

The other possibility of course is "God is Jesus".

Now imagine what modern theology would be like if we started with the truth that God is holy rather than the truth that he is love.

School of Theology 3

The third School of Theology session was a Bible overview from the point of view of God's promise to Moses.

Audio available here, powerpoint here.

Shortened audio (CD length) available from the church office.

School of Theology 2

The second School of Theology session was on Saturday, this time looking at the whole Bible through the lens of God's promise to Abraham. The main problem that came up in feedback was the poor acoustics, which are reflected in the quality of the recording - sorry! It'll be sorted for next time!

Slides and audio available.

Love, Sin and Wrath

Today, I got into a bit of an argument about whether or not we should talk about sin when we tell people about Jesus, or just talk about the love of God. The person I was speaking to thought that God didn't show wrath, so we should only ever talk about God's love.

What this argument made me notice is this:

Virtually every major passage in Scripture that tells us how amazing God's love is shows it against the background of our sinfulness and/or the fact that by rights we deserve God's wrath.

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 5:8

This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
1 John 4:10

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
John 3:16

I don't by any means think we always need to tell people that they are sinners when we speak to them about Jesus - sometimes people already know it, for example. But they do need to know that things are in some sense broken before we can see why it is good that Jesus puts them right. In order for us to recognise Jesus as our saviour, we need to see that we need one. Yes, it's not just from sin, but sin is a big part of it.

School of Theology 1

As quite a few of you will know, yesterday I did the first in a series of Bible overviews, looking at the whole OT from the point of view of God's promise to Eve.

The MP3 audio can be downloaded from here, and the powerpoint from here.

Yet More Wordle

Continuing on from my last post, here are some more Wordle images from the text of the ESV translation of the Bible. I'm using the ESV because it's fairly literal - so it gives you a good idea of what the underlying words are in Hebrew and Greek. Although I'd rather use a translation which is gender-neutral when the underlying text is gender-neutral, the ESV is much more readily available in electronic format than the NRSV.

Anyway, here's a Wordle image for the gospels:

And here's Paul's letters:

Here's one for the rest of the New Testament:

Which can be subdivided into the General Letters:

And Revelation:

Here's one for the whole NT:

More Wordle Images

I've spent a bit of time today tinkering with Wordle, as previously featured here. Here are some of the results - all were created using Wordle, all use the ESV.

The Pentateuch:

The "historical books" (Western classification rather than Hebrew one):

Wisdom literature:

Prophets (Western classification):

And here's the whole Old Testament:

The Parable of the Sower

Jesus was very good at telling stories. We are rather less good at understanding them. Some of the stories Jesus told were very clever and multi-layered. We are especially bad at understanding those. Two quick examples:

The Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15 has for a long time largely been understood as being about the "prodigal son". For such a long time, in fact, that the word prodigal has had time to change its meaning rather significantly, therefore making the title doubly inaccurate. It was pretty clear to people who looked at the context and the parable a bit that the elder brother was a more important character than he was often given credit for - he's the one whom the listeners were meant to be identifying with, and so on. But Tim Keller's excellent book The Prodigal God points out what should have been obvious all along - that the central character is the forgiving Father, but that the parable is challenging and illuminating on a whole series of levels - notably by looking at the three main characters in turn.

However, the popular understanding of the Parable of the Sower seems to be heading the other way. Far too many times in the last few weeks, and often by people who should have known better, I've heard it described as the Parable of the Soils. And of course, that is one valid level of interpretation. There is an important point there about how different types of soil respond to the message - which one are we going to be? That may well even be the primary meaning in Luke 8 - the same parable sometimes is used to make different points in different gospels (e.g. the parable of the lost sheep). But the parable is used three times, and it's usually preached from either Matthew 13 or Mark 4, and neither of those passages let us leave the interpretation there.

Matthew 13 doesn't even allow us to call it "The Parable of the Soils", because it is one of the very few parables that Jesus names for us. And he calls it "The Parable of the Sower" (Matt 13:18). And once we realise that it is primarily about the sower, not the soils, it makes more sense.

It's always a good idea to look for surprises (relative to the culture they were originally spoken in) in the parables. So in the badly-named parable of the Prodigal Son, the big surprise is that the Father was watching for his son to come home, and ran to greet him and welcome him back. The parable of the sower (in Matthew and Mark) has two big surprises. One is that the sower sows everywhere, not seeming to care what sort of soil the seed lands on. That is a silly way of sowing. The other is the result - getting a crop of "thirty, sixty or even a hundred times what was sown" (Mark 4:20) is a ridiculously high yield, especially for such a silly method of sowing.

In both Matthew and Mark, these make perfect sense when read in context, because in both gospels the parable follows straight on from people rejecting Jesus, and specifically from the incident where Jesus' mother and brothers try to get him back, but Jesus says that whoever follows him is his brother and sister and mother.

The natural question to ask in that situation and in that culture is this. "If Jesus is someone really special, why are so many people rejecting him?" That's why, too, in both Matt 13 and Mark 4, Jesus quotes a chunk of Isaiah 6 about God's people rejecting God's message. The focus then turns back to the character of the sower in the passage. Why is the sower sowing in such a way? Why is Jesus ministering to people, many of whom reject him. Why isn't he cherry picking the people who are most receptive?

And the parable's answer is that God's strategy is this mad sowing - the telling everyone sowing, and that that method of sowing produces the really abundant harvests. So we shouldn't get worried by people rejecting the message. Something like that, anyway...

Glo

Glo claims to be the next big thing in Bible study. It's a computer programme; it's quite expensive, but I got given a free copy with all the functionality and a fair bit of the content, so I thought I should probably review it.

The first thing to say is that it is a biiig programme. Like 18GB of hard drive, and needs a machine that can cope with Vista easily. I've got a fairly new computer with 3GB of RAM and an Intel T1600 Dual-Core processor, and Glo was pretty slow on it.

The interface does look very nice and kind of funky. It's clean and modern and looks good - the promotional video is just about right for that, except you probably need a very top-end computer to get that kind of performance. But I've seen websites with that kind of functionality which work much quicker, probably because they are using the greater power of servers. Which makes me wonder - wouldn't "the Bible for the digital age" be better working off some very fast servers somewhere? Kind of like BibleGateway, but maybe looking a bit funkier?

Glo seems to come with the KJV, NIV and CEV. But the search tools are fairly basic, and there doesn't seem to be any facility for using original languages or anything. And that's important because I was doing that stuff even before I went to theological college, thanks to e-sword, which is free, has Hebrew and Greek, and integrates Strong's numbers, unlike Glo, which is quite expensive.

Some of the resources that come with it are quite nice. Little video tours of places in Israel and so on. Study notes of a fairly comparable level to the NIV study Bible. A zoomable map interface that is very clearly based on Google Earth.

But Glo seems to be "all fur coat and no knickers" as the saying goes. The map interface doesn't seem to be searchable at all, and neither does the timeline (which I'd been hoping would be useful for teaching a Bible overview - nope). There's a basic search for the Bible text, but it's only a basic search. I tried searching for "Chronicles" in the search box, and it didn't even tell me there were two books of the Bible called "Chronicles". And the level of scholarship that has gone into this is pretty shoddy.

Don't get me wrong - I'm an evangelical who believes that Scripture (as originally given) is perfect, and I think that theological study is good and important when done rightly but all too often it's done badly. So let me give an example.

There's a video about Jesus' birth on Glo. And they visit the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. They seem to have only been there on a pretty crowded day - it was rammed with people - whereas when I went there it wasn't too full at all. There's a bit of film in the grotto under the church where Jesus was quite possibly born. But then they point out (rightly) that it wouldn't have been like that then, so the rest of the film is in a free-standing stable. Which misses something quite big. All the early post-Biblical accounts point to Jesus being born in a cave. The grotto under the Church of the Nativity is a cave. Archaeology tells us that Bethlehem had a fair few caves, and a lot of them had a little shelter built onto the front and were used either as houses or as barns. So Jesus was probably born in a cave which had been partly converted into a barn or something like that. The idea of Jesus being born in a free-standing stable just doesn't seem to exist for centuries afterwards. And yet they blithely go along with it. The message of the video - that Jesus went all the way to the bottom to get us - was pretty good though. It's just a shame they messed it up with poor scholarship.

Or take the Bible timeline. OK, so they don't give a date for Adam and Eve (though their position on the timeline does make it look like 4000BC). But they very clearly put the Exodus at 1400BC, and try treating the Judges as sequential. Now the only way of getting the Exodus to 1400BC is if we take 1 Kings 6:1 absolutely literally. But 1 Kings 6:1 says a certain period of time was 480 years, and 40 and 12 are both clearly symbolic in Israelite thought. The archaeology suggests 1200BC as a much better date for the Exodus. The Judges shouldn't be sequential for the following reasons:
1) almost all of them only seem to operate in a small area, and the areas mostly don't overlap.
2) if you add up the total time the Judges ruled for and the times of oppression between judges, you get some very big number which doesn't fit into any Biblical chronology
But Glo just seems to ignore all of this. It's as if they've taken a lot of their intellectual content from someone who thinks that academic study of the Bible is a bad thing.

To summarise, I'd recommend Glo for someone who has a very fast computer and wants stuff to look pretty. Or if you want a series of video clips of Americans looking around sites that come up in the Bible. Or if you want an electronic Bible that has notes at the level of a basic study Bible, but costs three times as much. But not if you want Bible study software.

It's a shame really, because this could have been so much better. Like by giving BibleGateway a new interface, putting a load of videos up of Israel and so on, done by someone who knows what they are talking about, and releasing a patch for Google Earth that displays Biblical locations while being searchable.

James 5 - praying for the sick

One of the most difficult passages in the New Testament in some ways is in James 5. Here's the NIV...

Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.
James 5:14-16, NIV

Any attempt to argue that this passage doesn't say that anyone who is sick will be healed sounds either like special pleading or like finding contradictions in the Bible. Of course, part of the problem is the translation, and pretty much no English translations manage the same nuances as the Greek...

Is anyone in you weak/sick (the Greek can mean either)? Let him call the elders of the church and let them pray on him, anointing with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the wearied / ill person (the Greek can mean either); and the Lord will raise him...

It looks to me as if the first bit is a general statement which is deliberately ambiguous. It might be talking about physical sickness; it might be talking about physical or moral weakness or weariness. And the promised help is salvation / raising, which might be talking about physical healing, or it might be talking about final salvation.

There is then a clear application to the case of people who are ill because of sin (for example because they rightly feel guilty, and the guilt has led to all kinds of stress-related problems), and they will be healed. By verses 19-20, the passage is all about bringing people who have sinned back.

My conclusion from this passage is that the passage itself does not promise immediate physical / medical healing for everyone who gets the elders to anoint and pray, except in the case of sickness that is directly due to sin. Of course, God still does sometimes heal physically and medically in other cases, but he doesn't promise here that he will do so. What is promised is something far better. What this passage promises is that God will sustain and keep his people going when they are weak and get the elders to pray for them, and that they will finally be saved and raised from the dead; if they ask the elders to pray for them then like this then no sickness or weariness or sin committed in the past can stop them from being saved.