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Weekly Sampler Platter: Friday, October 3, 2014

10/3/2014

2 Comments

 
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Here's a sampling of some of the things I've been reading and reviewing this week.  The hope is that these bite-sized sections of books, articles, blog posts, etc will stand on their own and be beneficial in-and-of-themselves.  But I also hope that some of you will like these excerpts enough that they pull you into the larger work from which they've been taken.

Let's start sampling: 

Craig Groeschel, Fight: Winning the Battles that Matter Most.  Zondervan, 2013. p. 111:

We doom ourselves when we taunt the enemy [Satan], when we rationalize our sin, and then when we assume that our disobedience isn't going to cost us anything.  We forget that our sin always takes us further than we want to go and costs us more than we want to pay."

Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin.  Eerdmans, 1995.  pp. ix, xiii:

“In this book I am trying to retrieve an old awareness that has slipped and changed in recent decades.  The awareness of sin used to be our shadow.  Christians hated sin, feared it, fled from it, grieved over it.  Some of our grandparents agonized over their sins.  A man who lost his temper might wonder whether he could still go to Holy Communion.  A woman who for years envied her more attractive and intelligent sister might worry that this sin threatened her very salvation.

“But the shadow has dimmed.  Nowadays, the accusation you have sinned is often said with a grin, and with a tone that signals an inside joke.  At one time, this accusation still had the power to jolt people.  Catholics lined up to confess their sins; Protestant preachers rose up to confess our sins.  And they did it regularly.  As a child growing up in the fifties among Western Michigan Calvinists, I think I heard as many sermons about sin as I did about grace.  The assumption in those days seemed to be that you couldn’t understand either without understanding both....”

“....My goal, then, is to renew the knowledge of a persistent reality that used to invoke in us fear, hatred, and grief.  Many of us have lost this knowledge, and we ought to regret the loss.  For slippage in our consciousness of sin, like most fashionable follies, may be pleasant, but it is also devastating.  Self-deception about our sin is a narcotic, a tranquilizing and disorienting suppression of our central nervous system.  What’s devastating about it is that when we lack an ear for wrong notes in our lives, we cannot play the right ones or even recognize them in the performances of others.  Eventually we make ourselves religiously so unmusical that we miss both the exposition and the recapitulation of the main themes God plays in human life.  The music of creation and the still greater music of grace whistle right through our skulls, causing no catch of breath and leaving no residue.  Moral beauty begins to bore us.  The idea that the human race needs a Savior sounds quaint.”

Craig Blomberg, "Can We Trust Any of Our Translations of the Bible?" in Can We Still Believe the Bible? An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions.  Brazos Press, 2014.  p. 85:



"Except for aberrant translations produced by sects or cults to promote their distinctive doctrines, every Bible on the market today is sufficiently faithful in its translation so that its readers can learn all of the fundamental truths of Christianity accurately....The differences [between translations] are exceedingly minor compared with the overall similarities" (italics original).
2 Comments
Bruce
10/3/2014 07:14:56 am

The translations themselves might not differ that much but how we read it does. Comparing what the different writters have to say is very enlightening though. Mark is different from Luke (Mark, for example, portrays Jesus as not feeling very assured of God’s presence when he died). Luke is different from Matthew (Luke, for example, doesn’t have a doctrine of atonement). Matthew is different from Paul (Matthew thinks that followers of Jesus DO have to keep the Jewish law!). Paul is different from James (James thinks that a person Does have to do “good works” in order to be justified). Revelation is different from John (John does seems to hold to the future climax of history in an apocalyptic overthrow of the powers of this world). Most evangelicals don't see or know about these differences because we don't use a historical or comparative approach when we read the bible. We use a devotional approach.
One other thing I find interesting is that there are interpolations where a text has been added to the bible by scribes. For example the woman caught in adultry ( John 8: 1- 11). Most textual scholars ( Dan Wallace etc) agree that this text has been added into our bible by later scribes. It's not in our oldest manuscripts. Your own bible may have this text in brackets with it noted as such. At least it should. The funny thing is I've heard four sermons at Brookside based on these verses. Steve even making a comment during one that he thinks he knows what Jesus was probably writing. So while the translations may be trust worthy understanding the historical
context, and how the texts compare are most crucial. The bible is an anthology of different writtings by different authors with different viewpoints.

Reply
Tim Wiebe
10/9/2014 01:50:43 am

Thanks (as always) for your comments, Bruce. Your comment touches on lots of issues - e.g. form and redaction criticism, harmonization, hermeneutics, textual criticism, and more! Definitely all areas that deserve attention in the right setting! Blomberg's book (_Can We Still Believe the Bible?_) touches on many of these issues - I highly recommend it.

Just to make my own stance clear, the one comment you make that I want to piggy back off of is your ending sentence: "The Bible is an anthology of different writings by different authors with different viewpoints." While I very much agree with the diversity of biblical writings (written over appx 1500 years, by authors from very different backgrounds and cultural settings, in multiple languages, wanting to communicate various emphases, etc.), I don't want this acknowledgement to detract from the UNITY of Scripture.

I don't believe the biblical writers are telling different stories; rather, in their own ways they are contributing to the one story of God's redemptive action in a broken world, and point us towards the future towards which God is moving (e.g. Luke 24:25-27, 44-48). I believe the superintending and inspiring power of the Holy Spirit provides a unity to the biblical writers and their message, such that they aren't working independently from each other (e.g. 2 Peter 1:20-21).

In other words, the biblical writings are certainly diverse. But they are also certainly unified. In my opinion, we need to keep both of these statements in mind. When we over-emphasize one and completely neglect the other, we can tread into potentially dangerous territory.

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    Tim Wiebe

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