C. Michael Patton has a way of serving up spiritual and theological depth in bite-sized nuggets. As you know, I heartily commend his blog. Today he tackles some of the pitfalls that can ensnare any reader of the Bible regardless his level of sophistication. He offers seven for your consideration:
1. Preunderstanding fallacy: Believing you can interpret with complete objectivity, not recognizing that you have preunderstandings that influence your interpretation.
2. Incidental fallacy: Reading incidental historical texts as prescriptive rather than descriptive.
3. Obscurity fallacy: Building theology from obscure material.
4. Etymological root fallacy: Looking to the root etymology of a word to discover its meaning.
5. Illegitimate totality transfer: Bringing the full meaning of a word with all its nuances to the present usage.
6. Selective use of meaning: Selecting the meaning you like best.
7. Maverick fallacy: Believing that you don’t need anyone but the Holy Spirit to interpret the text.
For an extended explanation of each of these fallacies, read the whole thing.
If you don’t know Bollywood, this is what you’re missing (apart from the hypnotizing musicals, of course).
HT: Abraham Piper
James Emery White writes:
But for me, it’s not just about reading – it’s about books. I agree with the monk in Normandy who, in 1170, wrote that “A monastery without a library is like a castle without an armory. Our library is our armory.”
This means we should engage in building it, fortifying it, at every opportunity. When I was in graduate school, I recall one of my professors saying that we should have a line-item in our budget for books. That building a good library is one of the most important things we can do in ministry and for impact.
I tell my own graduate students the same thing – to invest in books. They are our tools. A mechanic has his set of wrenches; a doctor has his stethoscope; a chef has his cookware. Those of us in ministry, or scholarship (and ideally they are joined at the hip), have our books.
When I “require” books for my students, my intent is simple: these are worth not only reading, but owning.
Buy them. Build your library. It is your armory.
Amen, amen. You should have seen the look on Ginger’s face the first month we were married and I forthrightly (at the time; presumptively and arrogantly in hindsight) declared that we would need to set aside $50 each month for the purchase of books. I was making $8.50 an hour. Thankfully, books seem to find their way to those who love them.
Of course, if you have a good number of books, it’s a great idea to keep them organized. I recommend LibraryThing. LibraryThing is an interactive book organizing database. The site has a number of features, but two key features I use it for are 1) keeping track of books I loan out and 2) the Early Reviewers’ Club which distributes free advance copies of books each month for review. If you are already a member, friend me here.
From the New York Times:
Hitler’s copyright on “Mein Kampf,” in the hands of the Bavarian government since the end of the Nazi regime, has long been used to keep his inflammatory manifesto off the shelves in Germany. But with the expiration date looming in 2015, there is a developing showdown here over the first German publication of the book since the end of World War II.
Experts at the respected Institute of Contemporary History in Munich say they want to prepare a critical, annotated version of the book for release when the copyright expires 70 years after Hitler’s suicide in his Berlin bunker.
The German government isn’t budging, however, on its commitment to keep all Nazi literature including Mein Kampf out of print.
I understand the intention and that Germans aren’t guaranteed the same freedom of speech, but the effort to suppress the book seems unrealistic IMO, especially given the realities of new media. The German edition of Mein Kampf is of course out there to anyone who wants to get it, so why not let these historians put out a new critical edition? It may be a naïve American viewpoint, but I simply believe that we are better served when we evaluate stupid ideas and dismiss them for their folly than when we suppress them or try to run from them.
There is a clever little video at the the DG blog that takes as its script this much-quoted passage from Lewis’ Weight of Glory:
If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
Here is an ironic quotation for a blog, but tremendously refreshing. From John Piper’s message on C.S. Lewis at the DG pastors’ conference:
He loved the wisdom of the ages, not the whimsy of the passing present. He called himself a Neanderthaler and a dinosaur. He didn’t read newspapers. He never wore a watch. He never learned to type. He did not own or drive a car. He cared nothing about cutting a good appearance and wore the same old clothes until they were threadbare. He was incredibly free from the addicting powers of the present moment.
HT: Justin Taylor
Warning: Tears ahead.
There are many moving stories coming out of Haiti and this is one of those. The story begins:
After a tortuous adoption process lasting five years, Rowena and Richard Pet finally knew that their long wait was over when they saw Arno toddle nervously towards them for the first time. To their delight, the little boy’s favourite possession was a distinctive blue and yellow fluffy toy that the couple had sent to the orphanage in Haiti almost two years earlier to start building a special bond between them. Mr Penguin was inscribed with a single word: “Love.”
Arno was shy at first but within 30 minutes of meeting his adoptive parents he reached for Rowena’s hand and took the Dutch couple on a tour of the orphanage in Port-au-Prince where he had spent most of his short life. He began to call them Mummy and Daddy.
Read the story here and Albert Mohler’s reflection on it here.
David Neff of CT relates how the late Robert Webber came to turn toward the insights of the early church fathers.
Like the members of my congregation, the late theologian Robert Webber had been taught to mine the Bible for doctrinal facts.
This intellectual spirituality colored every aspect of Bob’s Christianity, including his way of reading the Bible. He eventually came to realize that “an intellectual spirituality is situated not in God’s story, but in my knowledge about God’s story …. This quest to know God through the mind was just another self-focused spirituality.” When he realized that narcissistic potential, Bob headed in a different direction: to the early church and its typological way of understanding Scripture.
The early church was as thoroughly convinced of the Bible’s historical reliability as modern evangelicals are. Yet, thought Bob, those Christians were in better tune with the way the Bible tells its own story: focusing on images that reveal the repeated patterns of God’s activity.
Reading the early fathers is tremendously edifying. Their ability to capture the breadth and depth of the Scriptures has been largely lost, or at least under-appreciated in our modern age. In a previous post, I shared some additional thoughts along these lines.
By all means, Christians providing relief in Haiti must take the opportunity to share the good news of Jesus Christ with all who they encounter. But stories like this and this are a reminder to us that a skeptical, and even cynical world is watching.
This does not mean that we should set aside the priority of evangelizing Haiti or anywhere else for that matter. The reality is that evangelicals have been moved to compassion. They have been ministering to folks in Haiti long before the earthquake hit and they will be there long after the earthquake is forgotten. Millions of Christians have given funds to provide for physical needs. Dozens have gone to meet the needs of all peoples there. Dozens more have legitimately welcomed orphans into their families as sons and daughters. We should not apologize that we go in Jesus’ name and that we want all peoples to know him. But we must be thoughtful and extra diligent that we do not give the world good cause to justify its skepticism.
Many folks are annoyed that the new iPad represents a continuing move on the part of Apple toward a future of computer systems that are closed on the back end. I agree with these criticisms, but I’m also intrigued by the argument made by Fraser Speirs that such systems represent an advance for normal computer users. He writes:
The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get “real work” done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the “real work”.
It’s not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.
The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.
Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.
If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people’s perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.
HT: Alan Jacobs
