Olive Tree Reader Beta

I did this video last week, and announced it on twitter.  The fact that I didn’t put it on my blog is a sign that my on-line activities are shifting a bit.  Though I would like to get in the habit of blogging more provided I have something to say, and don’t become a ranting loony looking for conspiracies in order to drive traffic.  We’ll see.

Anyway, if you have an iPhone or an iTouch, you really should consider picking up the OliveTree reader from the App Store.  Enjoy.

Wordle of Acts 10

 

http://www.wordle.net/. Images of Wordles are licensed CreativeCommons

I’m currently writing a retreat for Eastern’s Student Chaplains.  This year’s focus will be on the centrality of testimony to the Christian life and journey.  The first session will spend some time in Acts 10, detailing Peter’s encounter with both God and Cornelius.

On a whim I wondered what Acts 10 would look like as a wordle, and here are the results.  Isn’t that cool?

 

Talking Genesis with Peter Enns

I’m in a familiar place, McInnis Auditorium, getting ready for Peter Enns to start his talk on Genesis and the Ancient Near East context.

I already had to help him get his mac working with his laptop, glad I was hear (he traded me an autograph for it).  And here we go, Dwight Peterson is doing intros.

Peter Enns is preaching a class at Eastern now… yay for my old school.

Peter doesn’t sermon paint (hee hee hee).

Four important issues in the Modern Study of Genesis:

1. Philosophy: Enlightment
   • (suspician of ecclesiastical authority)
     • Spinoza tried to undermine the Church by undermining Scripture (to free up Judaism, btw)
2. Biblical Studies: Source Criticism
   • rethinking the Bible from within
     • People began asking questions about why there seems to be different and repeated stories.
     • Source Criticism tried to explain Genesis
   • the Bible is a product of a developmental process (post-exilic)
     • The idea of one author was no longer accepted
     • The Tanakh was put together over a long period of time as traditions were passed on, and written down.
   • e.g. Pentateuch, Isaiah, Psalms
     • Pentateuch is considered to be post-exilic product (Jerome around 400 AD already had the seeds of this idea in place)
     • What people freaked out about was the idea that the Law was post-exilic “fabrication”
     • How many Isaiahs?
     • Psalms are very clear in their compiled nature (DSS have variation late)
3. Biblical Stuides: Archaeology
   • Rethinking the Bible from without
   • Comparative religions
     • similar ancient texts to stories in the Bible
     • what to do with those texts (which are invariably older)
     • Comparing religions (setting Israel in context) – we ask, “What’s so special to our book?”
4. Science: Geology and Evolution
   • Everything got re-thought
     • Geology uprooted diluvialism (my research, not his)
     • Death was around before humanity was apparently on the earth.
   • Evolution seems to displace humanity as the pre-eminent species
   • Enns is not of the opinion that Science and Genesis need to be meshed (two different genres.

Enns, “For Christians, the 19th Century was a rough century.” (paraphrase George Wills)

Problem is that Christians work from a pre-modern standpoint – and so the four points were threats that had to be held at bay.  Genesis was always the focus – all the points of modern Biblical studies start there.

Enns is putting Hebrew into it’s Semitic context (Jim, you’d like this and could probably argue with it).

Out of the Northwest Semitic Lanugage family – a direct descendant of Canaanite.

Biblical Hebrew morphs into Mishnaic – Medieval – and Modern Hebrew.  It’s not a special language it’s quite common.

Temples, priests, sacrifices (like the Biblical ones) appeared long before Sinai (and even Abraham was sacrificing on altars pre-sinai).  Israel’s format for sacrifices was not significantly different.

Prophets were found in other cultures as well, they functioned central (in the court) and peripheral (yelling from without).  Book to read Prophesy and Society in Ancient Israel by Robert R. Wilson (1984).  One thing that was unusual in Israel was the presence of central prophets who were critical of kingship (a distinct trait).

Kings were similar to ANE ideologies:

• The king as “sons of God” – mediators of the high god of the culture
• They protected the people
• They maintained justice and mercy (not abstract)
• They modeled wisdom

In their modeling they tried to desplay the presence of Gods.

Laws were similar:

Moses and Hammurabi (1700 BCE) have similarities  – case laws were very similar.  The notions of law seem to be just the way that ANE cultures worked so when Israel came along they codified laws that reflected their setting.

Genesis Issues: Creation and the Flood

Creation: Enuma Elish (discovered in 19th Century – people went ???)

• 18th Century BCE (Hammurabi?)
• Marduk as the supreme God
• numerous similarities to Genesis 1, including the division of the waters above/below and the firmament (he needs to sermon paint, he just said he should have had an image of the cosmology of the Enuma Elish on a slide – I’m happy)

Gilgamish and Atrahasis Epics (Flood)

• Numerous similarities to the Genesis flood – including the building of an huge boat (with specific dimensions – the waterproofing with tar, the release of birds, the boat coming to rest on a mountain.

What the problem?  Genesis doesn’t to be unique, and so maybe it’s not inspired.

Three Responses

• Dismissive of Genesis (“liberal” position)

Modern scholars proved that genesis is myth, and that proves that Christianity is a lie

• Defensive of Genesis (“fundamentalist” position)

Since Genesis is the world of God, it doesnt’ matter what hte ANE texts are like, Genesis is different. (they always lose, it’s not either/or)

• Synthetic (are Hegelian dialectic, arrgh arrrgh)

Genesis fully participates in the mythic context of the ANE (Ancient Near East, btw), and it is also the word of God.  They are not antithetical – and Evangelicalism is changing.

Incarnational approach to the Bible’s non-Uniqueness

Jesus is divine:human

Jesus divinity: Birth, John 1, Equality with Father, Yahweh passages, authority

Jesus humanity:  Jesus was clothed, ate, breathed, slept, spoke aramaic, had limited knowledge, share ancient perspectives?, “faulty” knowledge? (mustard seed problem)

Jesus humanity (sinless): Is the fact that he shared ancient perspectives or had limited knowledge an example of his humanity or a reference to the fact that he wasn’t perfect (and was therefor sinful)?  People freak out there.

Bible is divine:human

Bible’s Humanity – everything in it refelcts eh historical context of the events of the author’s lives.  Does that extend to: historiography, faulty science, myth?

Enns, “No, it’s not a perfect model, it’s a model – they all break down.”

Enns, “Oh, and by the way, I didn’t make this up – this is old in the Church” (umm, examples would be nice – I’ll ask that later I hope)

Crud, the Eastern guest service timed me out at an hour! Arrrgh!

We’re taking questions now.

Someone’s askng the “If evolution is true when did sin happen? question….

Enns is ok with evolution (duh?) – unfortunately no one’s been doing the project of dealing with the “when did sin/death enter into the picture?” question because people have been working from a combative question.  There is a theological problem – what do you do with NT Adam typology.

Next question: what do you do with geneaology in Enn’s synthetic (I&I) approach?

Enns:  The purpose of Genesis 1-11 is theologically set up the narrative to reveal the people who would “reverse the curse.”  He believes that Genesis 1-11 is back-written from it’s later experiences and realities.

Someone is currently asking a question that reveals how the Evangelical™ methodology is bankrupt – “If it’s myth and shares ideas with the ancient world, then how I can get anything that’s applicable to me out of it?”

Enn’s is being gentle, I’d just respond with Martin Luther…

ROFL, Enns just made an off-hand reference to Spinal Tap!

Enn’s point is that this is accomadation – God speaks in the way people speak (Calvin, “God spoke baby talk to us”), BTW, that’s a theological term with one specific definition.

I would like to take a class with Enns… he’s fun. Or maybe I’d just like to drink coffee with him and talk for several hours…

I’m going to shut down now – I’ll try to ask my question and get it on this post later…

I’ve Converted

This is my Greek Studies layout

Ever since I’ve converted to Mac it’s really only been a matter of time until I finally made the switch.  I held out as long as I could, but then my VMware Fusion installation of Windows XP died (big shock) on me and it finally pushed me over the edge.  I was going to try to hold on for another year if I could, even though I wanted to convert, but I just got tired of increasingly diminished performance and pounding a square peg in a round hole.

I’ve converted to Accordance.

There, I’ve said it.  Now I feel better.

Look. I love BibleWorks.  In fact, there are many things about BibleWorks that I’d love to see implemented in Accordance.  BibleWorks kept my love of working with Greek and Hebrew alive and well long after most pastors decide that it’s just not “their thing.”  BibleWorks is powerful stuff, the UI isn’t bad, and what you get in their default package is truly remarkable.

It just doesn’t run on Mac.  I’ve begged BW to create a Mac version for years (it’s a perfect app to use QT 4 with), but they don’t have the resources to do that and support their Windows product – and I understand.  For years on Linux I was OK with that becuase I could just fire up a Virtual Machine, or run BW on WINE at about 80% functionality with only a few crashes.  Even when I switched to Mac I was running BW on VMware Fusion, but in the end I just had to give up.  When my friend Jamison transferred his Accordance License  to me I decided it was time to switch to a application that was actually designed for the platform I’m using.

After just over a week of using it, I’ve got to say I’m impressed.  There’s been some growing pains, but I’m getting used to the UI and I’m getting better with the tools at my disposal.  I’ve got BW installed using CodeWeavers for a couple of tools, but it’s less stable than on Linux (and in BW7 the functionality under Wine drops significantly).  Here’s some thoughts so far on the switch:

• I like how Accordance uses natural language for searches.  While having an honest-to-goodness command in BW thrills the Geek in me, I have to admit it’s easier to construct a complex search in Accordance than with BibleWorks.
• I actually prefer the way that BibleWorks uses characters in the search string to change the context of the search.  If not character appears before the first word, it automatically realizes that you’re looking for a verse.  If a symbol appears before the first word it knows that you’re searching a word or phrase. Accordance accomplishes the same using mouse clicks, I like less mouse clicks.
• I like the way that BibleWorks gives you the ability to have several searches open at once in different tabs, rather than windows as in Accordance.
• I like the single window interface of BibleWorks, it’s less to keep track of.  Though I like how Accordance has an auto-info window up by default (which Bibleworks makes you switch tabs for now).
• I like the way Accordance handles statistics, there seems to be more flexibility in how you arrange them.
• I like how Accordance will accept just about any decent shortening of a book name as valid – whereas in BibleWorks you could only use their three character abbreviations.
• I don’t like having to repay for modules I own in BibleWorks.  Isnt’ there a way I can transfer my BDAG license over to Accordance?  C’mon folks throw us a bone!
• I really didn’t like paying for the NIV so I could prepare worship slides, yick.
• I love the bang for the buck that BibleWorks gives it’s users.  Can we have the same person negotiate for both programs please?  Merge the companies and kick butt.
• I love being able to switch layouts to match my study goals easily.  That’s just cool.
• I’m still up in the air whether I prefer Accordance or BibleWorks for parallel version display.
• I love the way that Accordance handles version notes.
• I appreciate that both programs have active communities of users, because it adds so much support as you learn to use the program.
• Accordance needs an actual editor somewhere.  The tool editor isn’t as nice as BW’s near word-processor.
• At this point I prefer the way BW keeps search results in a box that swiches the context of the browse window when you click on each.  I think that’s less confusing than the way Accordance handles search results (throwing them into a glob and tossing them in the screen).
• Accordance has text critical apparatus, I’ve been wanting that for years.

So, I have growing pains, but it’s worth it.  I’ll have to wait until next year to get BDAG (at this rate I may never get HALOT) for Accordance, but if I really want it I can fire-up BW and hope it doesn’t crash under CodeWeavers).  I didn’t want to switch at all this year, given the economy, but I also had to stop spending so much time trouble-shooting why my tools weren’t working.  Now I have a new piece of software to learn, and I’m more productive to boot.  It pans out in the end.

Wonderfully Eye Opening Post

I came across this post at the Better Bibles Blog this morning.  It’s a wonderfully well-done example of the issues which come up as a translator moves from one language to another – in this case Koine Greek to Modern English.  It caught my interest because I mentioned the phrase, “No one knows the day or the hour”  of the Son of Man’s return in my sermon yesterday, and how people mistakingly believe that this means the year is still open for us to figure out (oh the headaches).  The fictional conversation between a translator and a scholar deals with a similar problem when they discuss potential figurative meanings.

Read, enjoy.

Sometimes you just want to crawl into a corner and weep..

No, I’m not going to have a long pity party.

I’m just wondering if human beings are actually capable of communicating without feeling the need to bludgeon one another.

This past week I got an IM from my friend Jim.  It was one word, “NOVA.”  Apparently, PBS was running a Nova special on “Buried Secrets of the Bible.”  Don’t let the name fool you, this wasn’t a “DaVinci Code” conspiracy theory program.  Actually, the two hour program was one of the best discussions I’ve seen aout the origins of the Tanakh, Monothesism, and Archaelolgy that I’ve ever seen on TV.  In fact, I was so impressed with it that I pulled it off my DVR and made into a DVD so I wouldn’t loose the material.

Granted, I’d have to tread carefully bring a lot of the material in the special to Central, given that I doubt most folks have ever heard of the Documentary Hypothesis.  I have no problem stretching faith, that’s my job, but I do have a problem doing violence to the faith of the people I shepherd.  It’s a fine line, but I walk it as openly and boldly as I can.  Pastorally, I’m actually caught between a rock and a hard place.  Central has folks who would shrug and say, “OK, no worries” to the material in this special.  It also has folks who have been convinced that the authorship and dating of the Bible are part of the culture war and will wonder at my salvation if I shared a good portion of this material with them.  We also have a good amount of children growing up in a world where evangelical atheists are making a lot of claims about the Bible that are (loosely) based on work akin to what this Nova special presents – and when these kids get to college they are going to need more than a discontinuous string of “Bible Stories” to engage with folks respectfully and intelligently while still landing in their faith.  This is important to me, yet I wonder if it’s even possible to help folks engage this material without setting off a flame war.

Why do I say this?  I say it because I, decided that it might be fun to go on to Nova’s message boards and see what the discussion was like.  It turns out that the folks posting on the boards tend to think this excellent program was garbage.  Conservative Christians wanted people from “the other side” of the discussion the origins of the Bible – as though there were only two sides regarding the origins of the Tanakh.  Evangelical atheists as well as folks who seem to think that every opinion counts (no matter how fringe it is) complained that the show didn’t include the “revisionist” school (a school of thought that believes that the entire story of the pre-exilic kingdom is a made up tale), and that this lack of inclusion meant that Nova was just shilling for religious ideology.  The reality is, in scholarly circles the schools of thought trumpted by both Conservative Christians and Revisionists are considered fringe by the academy (Jim can share stories about revisionists from SBL).  Nova cut down the middle and gave an overview of what the mainstream academy is doing.  They did a good job, not perfect, but good.  I just wish people would stop being so thin skinned that they can’t even appreciate an attempt if it doesn’t agree with their views.

Anyway, the DVD is pretty nice (I had to put it on two disks).  I kinda wish I taught at an academic institution so I could interact with the material in a classroom setting.

Author’s Note:  I’m really not responsible for the titles of the automatically generated “possible links” titles.  So if you’re offended it’s not entirely my fault.  I’ll have to work on my tags a bit.

Making the Story “Relevant”

Here’s a good question posed in a recent comment by Mel:

…how can we make story – even one that isn’t always “factual” (aka not like a newspaper or history book) that was lived out by a people that are removed from us in every way be ours?

This is the The Million Dollar question.  Previously in that comment, Mel wonders at the seeming irrelevance of the story, considering that it happened so long ago and to other people.  This type of language often leads people to ask, “How do we make the Bible relevant?”  Here’s the thing, I don’t make the Bible “relevant.”    I don’t do this because it starts with the assumption that the Bible is somehow divorced from the Human experience and therefor needs to be tethered back to Earth so people can see Heaven in it’s pages.  One of the things that stands out about the Bible, however, is how incredibily rooted it is in the Human experience.  Any movie that is made from it’s pages, after all, would leave huges sections labelled “NC-17″ because for many “family friendly” folks it’s almost too rooted in the Human Experience.  So, rather than “relevant,” I attempt to show that the Bible is applicable to our lives – separated by time, distance, and language though we may be.

To show this, let me use one of the passages most often used by peopel to show how the Bible cannot possibly be relevant in a world ruled by Scientific methodology – Genesis 1.

This first creation myth (gasp, choak, scream) is broken up into the Hebrew pattern of “6 + 1,” like the days of the week.  The cosmology demonstrated in the chapter is not scientific, nor should we expect it to be so because it was compiled thousands of years before the scientific method was invented.  In the cosmology of Genesis 1 the earth is flat, what we call the “sky” is actually a solid dome (literally, “bowl”) that keeps the waters of chaos from crashing down upon the earth and joining the waters of chaos that reside below the earth.  The Sun, Moon, and Starts are inside the dome (which means that Genesis 1 isn’t referring to what we call the Atmosphere) and are actually pinned on it’s inner surface.  This ain’t science.

‘Ah HA!” those who say the Bible isn’t “relevant” shout, “You’ve just proved our case, science is about truth and you just said that your Bible isn’t true!”

“But wait,” the so-called scientific-creationists cry, “You’ve just said that the Bible isn’t science and so you said that the Bible isn’t true.”

I say to both of them, “I don’t agree with your shared premise that the scientific method is the sole arbitor of what is ‘true’”  (Scientific creationists would say that they say the Bible is the sole arbitor of Truth – but by demanding that it can be squeezed into a scientific cosmology they do otherwise).

Let’s look at the Structure of Genesis 1 the way an Ancient Hebrew might have read it:

1. Make a table with 4 rows and 2 columns.  Make the last row span both columns.
2. In the last row write “rest”
3. Open up to Genesis 1 and read the days of Creation (it’s actually goes into Genesis 2 – that’s OK, the verse numbers aren’t inspired – nor are the headings)
4. In each of the days, write down what is created on that day.  Fill in the first column first – putting days 1-3 on the left and 4-6 on the right.
5. Do you see any correlation on the rows?

When you’ve finished that, read on.

One of the reasons I’m still part of ABCNJ

Many of my former Protestant friends wonder why I bother staying in the Protestant fold (you know who you are!).  This is one of the reasons.  The leadership in our region is taking a long look at the state of our churches, and actually proactively moving to address the problems.  This is good work and, while I’m obviously “not your typical Baptist,” it’s work I feel compelled to support.

Central will be going through this book, Jesus Christ from Cover to Cover, at some point – I want to do some other ground work first (in the ideal world, I’d get people literated in the story before adding on the Messianic interpretive lense – but I know I don’t live in an ideal world).

A Note from a Friend…

I just found this piece on what one church is doing to help promote Biblical literacy over on ABCNJ.net.  Dee Dee is a person I consider a friend, and she’s doing a good thing with this.  Two points in commentary, but do yourself a favor and read them after you read the article, OK?

Written Up

Thanks to the dilligent work of Larry, one of Central’s members (and Blue Claws Member), Central Baptist Church was featured in the “Neighbors” section of the Philadelphia Inquirer this past Sunday.  I mention this not because I’m happy to have the free publicity for the Church (though it’s kinda nice, I have to say) – rather, I mention this because of the way that Larry described the mission of Central.

Central Baptist seeks to involve its members and friends in the continuing story of the gospel by learning, living and proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now, the latter line is from Central’s “offical” mission statement,  “Learning, Living, and Proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”  I like it, I can work with a statement like that as we all move forward together in Jesus Christ – I’m glad Larry saw that it was included.  The first part, however, are his own words – and it does a good job summing up the message I’ve been preaching at Central for the past five years.  A message that that story of the Bible is our story – that we live and move and breath in it’s narrative.  That Larry managed to describe this message, and also tie it into our “official” mission-statment, is a great joy to me.  In fact, as you may have picked up in a recent entry, if the folks of Central truly understand themselves to be intimately part of the Biblical Narrative by the time I leave here – I will consider my pastorate a “success.”

So, thanks Larry – you help keep me painfully hopeful.