Honour, not asserting authority

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Some Christians are always going on about asserting authority – the authority which they claim to have as pastors over their congregations, as parents over their family, as husbands over their wives, etc.

This morning I heard a talk which turns this completely upside down. On a DVD, Danny Silk, from Bethel Church in Redding, California (where Bill Johnson is senior pastor), was talking about a Culture of Honour. Indeed he has written a book with this title (in the American spelling) – and like so many books these days it has its own website, which features the foreword by Bill Johnson, endorsements, and some video clips. I presume the series of talks, of which I have so far heard only the first of three, covers the same material as the book, which I have not yet read.

One thing which Danny said in the talk sounded shocking:

God is not in control of everything.

Really? Is this guy an orthodox Christian at all? Is this his response to questions like why God allowed the Haiti earthquake? (The DVD was in fact recorded a few months before that.) No, I don’t think so. Danny’s approach can help to explain such disasters, but that was not his main focus. After a pause he continued with this explanation:

He is charge, but doesn’t want to control. You can’t make someone love you. … God doesn’t want a bunch of obedient robots.

Indeed. Danny didn’t quote Psalm 32:9, but he could well have done, especially as he showed the major part of this astonishing video of a woman riding a horse not “controlled by bit and bridle”.

Now undoubtedly God has authority over everything, over the material universe which he created and over the whole spiritual world. But he chooses not to exercise that authority where it is incompatible with love – with his love for the people he created and with his desire to receive their love in return. Instead, as Danny put it, he shows honour towards human beings, as illustrated by the story of the woman taken in adultery.

The main point of Danny’s teaching, as I have heard it so far, is the application of this principle to ourselves. As Christians, who should we honour? In the New Testament (these are relevant occurrences of the Greek timao and time) we are taught to honour our parents (Matthew 15:4 etc), God and Jesus (John 5:23 etc), one another (Romans 12:10), governing authorities (Romans 13:7), widows (1 Timothy 5:3), elders (1 Timothy 5:17), masters (1 Timothy 6:1), the emperor (1 Peter 2:17) and (also in 1 Peter 2:17, but here for some unaccountable reason many translations avoid the word “honour”) EVERYONE.

So the Bible teaches us not just to honour those who expect honour because of their position or authority, or who deserve honour because of their good works, but to honour EVERYONE, whether or not they deserve it, even those in the lowest positions, even those caught in sin, like the adulterous woman whom Jesus honoured and forgave.

In this talk which was intended primarily for leaders, Danny defined honouring others as elevating the status of those around us, so that people feel valuable in our presence. He contrasted this with the attitude of trying to protect one’s own power. In particular, he saw ordering others around by using explicit or implicit threats as bringing dishonour into relationships, because it is based on fear rather than love. He quoted 1 John 4:18: “Perfect love casts out all fear”, because in love there is no fear of punishment. Thus, he said, honour is displayed when we elevate the status of those we have power to punish.

What does this mean in practice? I shared the scepticism of some parents who watched the DVD with me about how Danny seemed to apply this principle in passing to parenting of young children – is it possible to get them to behave well without punishments and threats of it? But as a model for relationships between adults in the church this makes a lot of sense, and has a good biblical basis. It ties up well with the model of leadership which Jesus taught:

You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. 43 Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. 45 For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Mark 10:42-45 (TNIV)

Yes, there is such a thing as authority in the church, in the kingdom of God. But it is not something to be asserted or used arbitrarily. God has given this authority not to tear his people down but to build them up (2 Corinthians 13:10). The way to build people up, to elevate their status, is to treat them with honour and with genuine love.

I will finish where Danny started his talk: Jesus said (John 13:35) that people will know us as Christians, as different from others, not by our teaching or the signs and wonders we perform but by the way we treat one another, that is, by our love.

Monks' brew linked to crime wave

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I just found an astonishing report at the BBC website. For over a century the Benedictine monks of Buckfast Abbey in Devon have been making their Buckfast tonic wine. One might expect this “Tonic with a smooth, rounded taste” to be a favoured tipple of retired clerics. But, according to the BBC, this drink has been linked to no fewer than 5,638 reported crimes, over a four year period, in the Strathclyde region of Scotland.

One in 10 of those offences were violent and the bottle was used as a weapon 114 times in that period.

This drink “made up just 0.5% of Scotland’s alcohol market”, but of one group of young offenders who had been drinking before they offended, as many as 40% reported that they had been drinking Buckfast.

Why should this be? Buckfast does contain high levels of caffeine as well as alcohol, but then so does rum and Coca-Cola, or fine wine followed by coffee. So it doesn’t make sense to claim that this mixture is causing crime. More likely it has simply become the fashionable drink among the particular section of Scottish society which are anyway most likely to offend while under the influence of alcohol.

So the monks can hardly be blamed for the problem. Banning the drink would hardly help as young offenders, who are under 18, are already not allowed to purchase any alcohol. But perhaps greater efforts should be made to keep this concoction, and any other alcoholic drinks, out of the hands of people too young and irresponsible to handle them.

You Cannot Pastor for God and Mammon

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Essex vicars Sam Norton and Tim Goodbody have both posted about the difficulties of their tasks as Church of England incumbents. Sam memorably compares his job with piloting a plane and trying, not always successfully, to avoid crashing it. Tim, apparently facing similar issues, writes of the stresses of balancing “great new ideas” for the work of a parish with the preferences of “the elements of the congregation who make it their business to keep the church the same as it has always been.”

Tim also speaks of this as “the paradox of collaborative ministry”. But I disagree. I tried to disagree with a comment on his post, but Tim quite reasonably responded

Sorry mate, I reserve the right to be the only one who rants here; if you want to rant feel free to do so at GW

I wonder, would he have allowed Jesus to comment on his blog? Certainly not along the lines of Matthew 23! But I am taking his advice and responding here at Gentle Wisdom, and in more depth than in my rejected comment. Judge for yourselves whether this is balanced or a “rant”.

This is how it seems to me, from the limited details which they give and from my own experience of life in various Anglican churches: the problem which Sam and Tim have, and which probably nearly every Church of England incumbent (i.e. pastor in charge of a church) has, is that they are trying to reconcile the wishes of those who genuinely want to serve God with the wishes of people who do not. The latter are people who, while claiming to serve the true God, are in fact serving other gods like mammon (materialism), their families, their culture and traditions, or their personal comfort. For example, it is clear that Tim’s “elements of the congregation who make it their business to keep the church the same as it has always been” are not serving the God who makes it his business to make all things new.

Now this is not a peculiarly Anglican problem. Many other church congregations are mixed multitudes of the same kind. But it is perhaps especially serious in the established Church of England because of its parish system and its claim to represent in some way all the people of England. These make it all the harder for a vicar to suggest that a difficult congregation member find a different church where they might be more at home.

Of course I realise that it is not possible to divide congregations neatly into those who serve God and those who put other gods first. Any attempt to do this is bound to fail, not least because many people are genuinely torn between two different allegiances. Indeed we all need to examine ourselves to check that we are not slipping in this way.

Nevertheless there must be something wrong when an incumbent gets to the position that Tim is in, in which he has to reject “great new ideas” “because he knew he would get it in the neck from the elements of the congregation who make it their business to keep the church the same as it has always been.” Of course not every great new idea is from God. But if Tim is finding himself rejecting ideas which are from God to avoid criticism from people who quite clearly do not have in mind the things of God, then I would want to suggest that he has abandoned serving God for serving the gods of his congregation members. This is not at all to single Tim out, for his point is that this is what the Church of England system more or less forces incumbents like himself to do.

To put it bluntly, what is happening here is that the servants of mammon and of other idols are being given a veto over the work of God in his church. This cannot be! As Jesus said, it is impossible to serve both God and mammon, and that applies also when that service is directed through their worshippers. So every pastor, in the Church of England and elsewhere, needs to decide which they will serve, the true God or the idols of their congregation members. If they try to serve both, not only will God’s work be thwarted, but also a plane crash is inevitable.

Yes, of course a pastor needs to show love and be pastorally sensitive towards those difficult or unbelieving congregation members. But that is quite a different matter from allowing them to control the church. Jesus was pastorally sensitive to individual Pharisees like Nicodemus and Simon, but he didn’t bend an inch to their model of religious practice.

So I call on Tim, Sam and all others in similar positions to take a stand for the “great new ideas” which they really believe are from God, and ignore the protestations of the “keep the church the same as it has always been” brigade. Or if they are unable to do so because those people have a majority in the PCC or whatever, or because those in higher authority, bishops etc, intervene, then they should accept that their position is untenable and resign. Perhaps they will be forced to conclude that the Church of England is not the place for them if they are not to compromise their position.

Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? 15 What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? Or what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? 16 What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said:
“I will live with them
and walk among them,
and I will be their God,
and they will be my people.”
17 Therefore,
“Come out from them
and be separate,
says the Lord.
Touch no unclean thing,
and I will receive you.”
18 And,
“I will be a Father to you,
and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.”
7:1 Therefore, since we have these promises, dear friends, let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God.

2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1 (TNIV)

P.S. In case any of you wonder why despite this I remain an Anglican, I will point you to this post. I wrote it nearly two years ago, but I stand by most of it now. The main change since then is that there is now a greater chance of me moving on from my current congregation in the rather near future.

Normal service may resume shortly

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Lorenza and I are safely home from Italy. In fact we have been for a week now. More about the trip later, perhaps. But it has taken that week to get back to a semblance of normal life, especially with things here being disrupted by snow and ice – which arrived, or returned, only after we did.

So I have no more good excuses not to blog. But I’m not sure if this blog will ever get back to normal service, of the kind my readers got used to before my wedding.. However, I am working on a post more like what I used to post, so watch this space!

Not a white Christmas, but a fun one!

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It seems that much of the northern hemisphere has been enjoying a white Christmas, even in places where this is rare like my home in southern England, and like a part of Texas where the last white Christmas was in 1926! Here in Italy the weather looked to be heading that way less than a week before the big day, with thick snow and daytime temperatures below freezing. Here are Lorenza and I on the Sunday before Christmas in the snow outside her cousins’ house, in a beautiful hilltop location on the edge of the Chianti and overlooking the city of Florence. My car only just made it through the ice and snow.

Lorenza and Peter in snow

But by two days later the weather had completely changed. All the snow had gone, and the temperatures started to feel almost summery – so much so that on Wednesday we decided to visit the beach, at Viareggio, and I even put my feet briefly in the sea.

Peter paddling at Viareggio

With the thaw and the rain came floods, and by Christmas Day the motorway to the beach was inundated and closed. Yesterday, with the weather still mild but briefly bright, we went back to Lorenza’s cousins, and were able to make the tour they had promised us of the hidden jewels of the Chianti – beautiful little hilltop towns and villages set in amazing countryside, enjoyed with a glass of the local Chianti Classico. The only snow in sight was on a distant Appennine peak.

So, as we heard a children’s choir singing yesterday in a Chianti village square, the Italians, or at least the Tuscans, are still only “dreaming of a white Christmas”.

But Lorenza and I have had enough adventures in less than a month here that I think I could write a book about them. Or maybe a series of blog posts – so watch this space!

A New Take on 1 Timothy 2:12

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I love the way that blogger Bill Heroman is prepared to think outside the box, and by doing so comes up with interpretations of Bible passages which just may be correct, even though they are quite different from the generally accepted ones. He is not a scholar of biblical languages, but he still manages to come up with exegesis which makes sense. I have previously linked to Bill’s posts here, here, here and here.

Bill has now thrown his hat into the ring on the controversial passage in 1 Timothy 2 which is often understood as banning women from having authority or teaching in the church. In Bill’s two posts (so far – part 1, part 2, and I suspect more to follow) he puts forward a new suggestion, based on the singular nouns “woman” and “man” in verse 12, that what Paul wants to ban here is one-to-one discipling of men on their own by women on their own.

Many churches today very sensibly ban mixed gender one-to-one ministry, because of sexual temptations and the danger of false accusations. Bill suggests that the apostle Paul was imposing just the same ban. He summarises this as

The male/female intimacy of a one-on-one discipling relationship may be all Paul is really afraid of.

In that case it is not clear why he didn’t also ban men teaching women one-to-one – perhaps because there weren’t enough women able to teach other women?

Does this suggestion make sense? It certainly explains the otherwise rather odd singular in this verse. It seems to make sense of the following reference to Eve leading Adam astray, which was in a one-to-one situation. But I’m not sure how the last part of verse 12, “she must be quiet” (TNIV), fits into the picture.

Bill’s suggestion certainly deserves further consideration. So read it on his blog, and comment there.

Off to Italy for Christmas

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With this post I have reached a milestone of 800 posts on this blog (the numbers in the URL are not a good guide). And I am marking it by going for Italy tomorrow morning. My beautiful bride and I will spend a month there, in her home town which is near Florence. I look forward to meeting more of her relatives and friends, and enjoying Italian hospitality over Christmas and the New Year.

We are going by car, and ferry across the English Channel. This takes two full days, about 900 miles of driving including crossing the Alps – at least u,nderneath them, through the St Gotthard tunnel in Switzerland. We are glad no snow is forecast for this weekend, and hoping the first weekend in January will also be clear.

We are taking my laptop and expect to have good Internet access. So you may not notice any slowdown in my blogging, from its already very slow rate of the last few months. I wonder if I will ever make it to 1000 posts? We will see.

Silent women and dotty manuscripts

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Many people seem to think that every interesting question about the Bible has been answered long ago. After all, it has been studied in depth for nearly 2000 years (more, of course, for the Hebrew Bible). For some of these people the best answers were given by their favourite Church Fathers, popes or Reformers. For others, the answers have come from 19th or 20th century biblical scholarship. Yet, it turns out, there are many questions still unanswered, and not just ones which cannot be answered for lack of data.

So the discipline of biblical studies is still alive and fairly well. Last week it had its annual jamboree in New Orleans, a double whammy of ETS and SBL, attended by many of my blogging buddies. I’m sure a lot of what was presented there was speculation on the basis of old evidence, or of no evidence at all. But at least a few really new things seem to have come up. And they are not all about purely academic matters; some actually have practical implications.

One of the latter, amazingly enough, has to do with some dots in an ancient biblical manuscript. These dots, occurring in pairs and so known as umlauts or distigmai (Greek for “two dots”), are in Codex Vaticanus, which is one of the oldest known manuscripts of the New Testament. They were (at least according to textual critic and Evangelical Textual Criticism blogger Tommy Wasserman) discovered by the biblical scholar Philip Payne. Payne himself blogged last month about his discovery and analysis of these dots, at Zondervan’s Koinonia blog, where he wrote:

The paper I will read at the ETS Annual Meeting at 8:30 AM, Thursday Nov. 19 in the Waterbury Ballroom on the 2nd floor of the Sheraton will establish with conclusive statistical evidence that the distigmai in Codex Vaticanus are marks of textual variants.

Now this might appear to be of little interest to anyone much except for the textual critics. But not so! These dots turn out to be major supporting evidence for the theory that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is an interpolation, not an original part of Paul’s letter. This is the notorious passage in which the apostle allegedly tells women to be silent in church. It is hardly surprising that egalitarian evangelicals, most notably the well known exegete and commentator Gordon Fee, have tended to conclude that this passage is not original. The evidence for this which Fee gives in his NICNT commentary on 1 Corinthians has not convinced everyone. So of course it was of great interest to many people when Payne claimed to have found further evidence of the passage being an interpolation.

Move on from ETS to SBL, still in New Orleans, probably in the same Sheraton hotel, and just two days later on Saturday 21st. A new scholar, Peter Head, who also blogs at Evangelical Textual Criticism, has arrived from England during the night, having put the finishing touches to his presentation on the plane. So he wasn’t at Payne’s presentation. Had he seen a report of it? I’m sure he had at least seen the kind of summary of arguments which Payne had already posted. But, as Wasserman reports, Payne was in the front row when Head presented his paper, and so witnessed his argument being thoroughly demolished – at least if Wasserman’s account (which continues here) is fair.

Payne dated the distigmai to the 4th century. Head turned this theory on its head by dating them a full 1200 years later, to the 16th century, and even suggested the name of the person responsible for adding them to the manuscript: Juan Ginés de Sepulveda (UPDATE: this name was first put froward by Curt Niccum, as Tommy Wasserman points out in a comment below). Part of Head’s argument was in the positioning of the dots, avoiding other marks dated to as late as the 15th century. But his main argument related to which textual variants are marked. Payne apparently claimed a 60-70% match between the locations of the distigmai and the locations of textual variants known to date back to the 4th century. Head claimed a 98% match between distigmai and textual variants known to Erasmus in the 16th century. And it is known that Erasmus corresponded with Sepulveda about the text of Vaticanus at these very locations. If Head’s findings can be confirmed (and analysis of the ink of the dots might allow this), it seems that the mystery of the distigmai has been solved.

So, does this undermine Payne’s argument? It certainly undermines his dating of the distigmai to the 4th century. Therefore he no longer has clear evidence that the textual variant in 1 Corinthians 14 was known as early as that. However, he has found evidence that this textual variant was known at some time, perhaps in the 16th century. Quite probably this relates to the fact, probably well known to Erasmus and Sepulveda as it is to modern scholars, that the passage in question, 1 Corinthians 14:34-45, is displaced to after 14:40 in many manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate as well as in the so-called Western Text of the Greek; in one Vulgate manuscript, Codex Fuldensis, the passage is actually a later addition. This is basically the same evidence which Fee used to claim that these two verses are an interpolation into the original letter. And Fee’s argument, even without added evidence from the distigmai, is a strong one.

However, even if the passage is not an interpolation, it should not be concluded that the apostle Paul was a misogynist or that the Bible teaches that women should not be allowed to say anything in gatherings of Christians. Paul cannot have written that because it would be in direct contradiction to what he had written in 11:5, that women may pray or prophesy (the latter at least must be out loud in a gathering) as long as their heads are covered. If he did write 14:34-35, his meaning must have been that women were not to disrupt meetings by chattering or asking questions.

So is this a case of the apparent complementarian Peter Head, formerly of Oak Hill College, winning an argument over the egalitarian Philip Payne? No, that would be a caricature. I’m sure Peter’s motivations for presenting his paper were entirely scholarly, concerning his field of textual criticism, and nothing to do with proving a point about women. Perhaps one speculative piece of support for the egalitarian position has been found wanting, but  the position as a whole has not been compromised at all. Certainly no one should use Peter’s SBL presentation as grounds for silencing women in their churches.

http://www.koinoniablog.net/2009/10/why-would-1-cor-143435-be-an-interpolation.html

Mounce Misunderstands "Man"

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Bill Mounce is a top expert on exegesis and translation of the Bible. He was a major contributor to the ESV translation, and a regular contributor to the Koinonia blog. It is good that, as I announced last month, he has joined the Committee on Bible Translation which is currently revising the NIV.

Unfortunately Bill Mounce is not an expert on advertising. As a result he has made himself look rather stupid by misunderstanding a car advertisement, and by repeatedly posting his misunderstanding. The first time he posted this on his personal blog:

But “mankind” continues to be used as a generic term in English, as does “man.” I know there are people who disagree with this point, but the fact that it is used generically over and over again cannot truly be debated; the evidence is everywhere. Have you noticed the new advertisement for the Prius: “Harmony Between Man, Nature And Machine.” I’ll bet Toyota would be glad to sell to women.

Yes, Bill, this “fact” can be debated, as I do below. (Joel Hoffman also blogged about this.)

Bill Mounce repeated his error this week in a summary he posted at Koinonia of his SBL paper on the ESV and the TNIV, in which he wrote, in support of his argument that “man” can have a gender generic meaning:

Just watch enough football and you will see the ad for the Prius: “Harmony between Man, Nature, and Machine.” A person may not like using “man” to mean “mankind”; a particular subculture may not like it, …

I assume the ad that Mounce has in mind is this:

See also this analysis of the advertising campaign.

Now I don’t claim to be an expert on advertising myself. But one thing that I do know is that advertising is highly gender specific, and targeted to particular groups. Now of course “Toyota would be glad to sell to women”; indeed the only Prius driver I know is a woman. Nevertheless the advertising for most cars is clearly directed towards men, meaning not women. The days may be past when nearly naked women were draped across them, but there are all kinds of subtleties of design and presentation designed to appeal to men. I’m sure that is true, and deliberately so, of the very shape of the Prius.

I accept that in this particular ad, with lots of flowers, the message is a bit sexually ambiguous and might attract women also. But I also see a clear sexually charged allusion at the end in the way the car rushes up a hill with a somewhat phallic shape, and this is when the words “Harmony between Man, Nature, and Machine” are used. Perhaps the message they are trying to drive home is that you can be a real man, with a manly car, and still love nature and flowers.

One thing is certain: the advertisers considered very carefully what message they were giving with the word “man”, and it was by no means a simple gender generic one. As such Bill Mounce, in quoting this as an example of generic “man”, had missed the point of the ad, and in the process made himself look a bit stupid.

Nevertheless Mounce does have some very good points to make in his SBL paper summary, especially this:

I am not convinced that non-academic celebrities should be making pronouncements on translation theory.

Indeed. Let those who have never studied translation theory stop criticising translations.

Five statement Bible summary

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Sorry for not much blogging recently. As a newly married man I have new responsibilities, and a new way of life to adjust to. Also I have been doing some temporary paid work, for the first time for some time, and on top of that I have been having serious computer problems. Now the work has come to an end, at least for this week, and the computer is just about working again. So I have had some time to catch up on blog reading, and have just found enough for a short post …

Doug Chaplin, a.k.a. Clayboy, has tagged me with The new five statement bible summary meme. He also tagged David Ker, whose response is the only other one I have seen. These are the rules for the meme, which seems to have originated with Doug:

Summarise the Bible in five statements, the first one word long, the second two, the third three, the fourth four and the last five words long. Or possibly you could do this in descending order. Tag five people.

I’ll try this in descending order.

  1. God created everything very good.
  2. Human beings messed up.
  3. Chosen people failed.
  4. Jesus succeeded.
  5. Wow!

Of course here I gloss over the entire church age, by no means a “wow” time, to the best one word summary I can think of for the ultimate Christian hope.

Like David Ker I will decline to tag five others. Part of my excuse for that is that I can’t find links easily on my newly restored but still not quite right computer. But the main reason is that I don’t want to put people on the spot to be original on this one. So instead I’ll tag all five people who actually read this. Or if the number is in fact 500, this could be the world’s fastest growing meme.