Bible meme

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Nick Norelli and Kevin Sam have both tagged me with a Bible meme. I wasn’t sure what to do about, and that is why I have delayed my response. But I will try to answer it in part, as I celebrate my 400th blog post (well, not quite, because WordPress counts some drafts which were never completed).

1. What translation of the Bible do you like best?

TNIV. It’s not ideal, but for my purposes it is the best single general purpose Bible. For 25 years before TNIV came out I used and liked NIV, but TNIV is a real improvement on NIV in the areas where it was weak: misleading gender language and reading the New Testament into the Old.

2. Old or New Testament?

What a choice? I am a New Testament believer, but in some ways I prefer the Old Testament.

3. Favorite Book of the Bible?

Difficult to say. If I have just one choice I will go for Isaiah.

4. Favorite Chapter?

Even more difficult, and especially because chapter divisions so often don’t match the boundaries of passages. In the Psalms they do, so I can safely go for Psalm 23.

5. Favorite Verse? (feel free to explain yourself if you have to)

John 3:16. This may sound hackneyed, but my reasons are implicit in my recent post on this verse.

6. Bible character you think you’re most like?

Again, I don’t really know. I would like to be most like Jesus. But sometimes I feel more like one of his very fallible disciples; perhaps someone else would like to suggest which of them.

7. One thing from the Bible that confuses you?

“And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.” (Matt. 11:12) I’ve heard this verse preached on and exegeted countless times and it has never made sense.

This was Nick’s answer to this question, and I can’t improve on it, except to put the quote in a modern version which is just as unclear.

8. Moses or Paul?

Definitely Paul.

9. A teaching from the Bible that you struggle with or don’t get?

Despite my attempt at confident answers to the comments on my previous post, the status and fate of Christians who continue in sin.

10. Coolest name in the Bible?

Zerubbabel.

Now tag five people.

Well, I can’t resist winding up John Hobbins again by tagging him. I don’t think Lingamish has done this one either, so I will pay him back for tagging me with The Room With A View, a meme which he seems to have invented as a way to show off how nice a life he is living in Africa. I would love to see Wayne Leman‘s answers if he can be tempted to join in here. Paul Trathen was so excited to be tagged the last time (when he tagged me, but for a meme I had already done) that I will tag him again. Finally, I will encourage Alastair Roberts to keep up the blogging he has recently returned to by tagging him as well.

PS For some reason this came up as post 402. The only reason I can think of for WordPress skipping 400 and 401 is that last night I upgraded to the latest version.

Apostasy, backsliding, and perseverance of the saints

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Since I use the word “apostasy” here, I want to acknowledge Ruth Gledhill’s very worrying post Sharia in Iran: ‘Death to converts’. It seems that the government of Iran wants to impose the death penalty for “apostasy” from Islam, which will apply to those of other religions who have even one Muslim parent. But this is not my real theme in this post.

I have been having an ongoing conversation with John Hobbins about the conditions for Christian salvation. As I reported here, it started in the comment thread of this post on John’s blog, and it continued in the comments on this post. I think the discussion is more or less finished. Now I want to present here some of my conclusions, although I don’t think John will agree with them.

Continue reading →

Churches must either change or decay

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Part of a slide from the presentation by Bob Jackson which I linked to a few days ago. I looked for this in response to a post by John Meunier which makes a similar point.

Usually, churches only grow when they change
• Surveys show that churches that don’t change are shrinking, churches that do change are not shrinking … usually the choice is change or decay

From his survey results, in the Church of England across theological boundaries, 17 churches which had made no changes shrank by an average 22% over 6 years, whereas 32 churches which had made at least one change, of any kind, on average grew by 4%.

Relevance Theory and the Translation of Scripture

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I must say I am somewhat confused about what Karen Jobes has been writing and saying.

A few days ago I reported on a paper “Bible Translation as Bilingual Quotation” which, according to the Zondervan blog, she presented “at the Fall 2007 Evangelical Theological Society Annual Meeting”. I wrote about this paper that I expected it to interact with Relevance Theory as presented by Ernst-August Gutt, but it did not.

Just now I have received a link to a blog post by “Chaka”, a 26-year-old man who is apparently linked with one of Zondervan’s rivals as a Bible publisher, Tyndale. In this post “Chaka” writes a review of an article by the same Karen Jobes, published in the same quarter of the same year in the journal of the same Evangelical Theological Society (in fact Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 50.4 (December 2007) 773-797). But it turns out that this is a different article with a different title, “Relevance Theory and the Translation of Scripture”. And, although there is some overlap in the subject matter in that both papers address the issue of verbosity in Bible translations, the paper “Chaka” refers to does in fact interact with Relevance Theory as presented by Ernst-August Gutt. (In fact “Chaka” also links to the Zondervan blog post referring to the first paper.)

But there is a further puzzle in that the verbosity statistics in the two papers, or two versions of the same paper, are inconsistent. For example, according to the paper linked to by Zondervan, NIV is 18.56% more verbose than the original Hebrew and Greek, NRSV is 21.72% more verbose, and ESV is 23.67% more verbose. But according to the figures Chaka quotes from the other paper, NIV is 33.18% more verbose than the original, ESV is 38.93% more verbose, and NRSV is an astonishing 64.43% more verbose.

So what is happening here? What is the relationship between these two papers? It is hard for me to tell without seeing the latter. But perhaps there is a need here to exercise the scholarly disciplines of source and redaction criticism.

John 3:16 and limited atonement

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Yesterday I wrote about Bible Verses that Simply Can’t Mean What They Say, in response to Elder Eric’s satirical post on the same subject at Tominthebox News Network. I tried to keep what I wrote then in the same humorous vein. But the comment thread on Eric’s post has moved into a serious discussion of the issues I raised, and now I want to take this matter further.

Continue reading →

Some hints for getting rid of congregations

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About a year ago I went to a day conference on church growth, here in Chelmsford diocese, by Bob Jackson, Archdeacon of Lichfield. Now Andy Griffiths, my Rural Dean here in Chelmsford South deanery, has posted a link to an online copy (PDF) of Jackson’s notes from a similar talk. The first part of this is serious and excellent material on church growth. The latter part, the slides “some hints for getting rid of congregations” (pp. 17-21) and the spoof church noticeboards (pp. 22-26), are hilarious!

Swimming with sharks and crocodiles

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A few weeks ago Lingamish posted on Swimming with sharks, complete with a scary-looking picture of a shark jumping out of the water, supposedly near where he had been swimming in South Africa. But it turns out he never even saw a shark himself, he just got scared of them because of some pictures he saw in a British newspaper. In fact from this photo it looks as if he put on his swimming trunks but didn’t go within a mile of the sea.

This kind of wimpishness wouldn’t have gone down well in Australia where I spent six months in 2002-3. The sea all around the island continent was infested by sharks, but that didn’t stop everyone, including me, from spending as much as they could of the summer in it. The only sharks I actually saw were in an aquarium. But a friend of mine deliberately went diving with sharks, and showed me a video he had taken of his encounters. Apparently they are quite harmless if you know how to react to them: you should swim towards them and hit them on the nose!

Anyway, sharks are nothing to Australian crocodiles. And I went swimming with them as well – once in a place where there was a warning sign but we were assured it was in fact safe, and another time by mistake in a place which was not safe. I didn’t have any close encounters while swimming with them. But I did from a boat. These two pictures – full length photos with a normal lens – are not from a newspaper, I took them myself. Click to see them full size.

crocodile1crocodile2

These photos are taken on the Adelaide river in the Northern Territory. These saltwater crocs are living in the wild but are fed from tourist boats like the one I was on, in effect trained to jump out of the water to take lumps of meat off a kind of fishing rod. They were so close that I could almost have touched them – but we were warned to keep our hands inside the boat, in case the crocs thought they were lumps of meat being offered to them.

John Hobbins and the Galatian heresy

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I admire John Hobbins for attempting to build bridges with observant Jews, as is obviously his intention in this post and several other recent ones. Indeed his attempt has had some success, for the Jew David Guttmann has responded very positively.

Unfortunately I cannot give the same positive response. For John has made the same mistake, and a very serious one, as so many other Christians who have attempted dialogue with adherents of other religions. That is, in an attempt to find common ground with those other people, he has abandoned some of the basics of orthodox Christian teaching.

In John’s case, his error is made clear in the title of his post: Why Torah observance is rightly understood as a means of salvation. The problem is that in Christianity it is not – on any generally understood definition of Torah. John starts his post by claiming that

Most versions of Judaism and Christianity understand Torah as a means of salvation.

But, as I point out in my first comment, this is simply not true of any orthodox version of Christianity, Protestant, Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. Continue reading →

Bible Verses that Simply Can’t Mean What They Say

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Elder Eric of Tominthebox News Network reports the following:

Asbury Theological Seminary has published a statement that it hopes will assist evangelical churches fend off the increasing threat posed by Calvinism. Asbury, which according to its website “is rooted in the Wesleyan-Arminian theological tradition,” firmly stands against Reformed Theology. In order to stress this point, the faculty recently published a small pamphlet entitled, “72 Bible Verses that Simply Can’t Mean What They Say.”

The report goes on to list these 72 verses.

Not sure whether to believe this one? I’m sure I don’t.

But I can offer the following scoop:

In response to the statement from Asbury Theological Seminary, a spokesman for Tominthebox Reformed Calvinist Theological Seminary issued the following statement:

We are very concerned that our brethren in the Wesleyan-Arminian theological tradition have issued such a long list of “Bible Verses that Simply Can’t Mean What They Say”. We do not accept that any of these verses don’t mean what they say.

But we agree that there are some Bible verses which simply can’t mean what they say. We are currently working on a full list of these verses, but for the moment we will offer just one such verse as a sample:

John 3:16 “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.”

Clearly this verse cannot mean what it says, for as good Reformed Calvinists we know that God only loves the elect and that eternal life is only offered to these same elect people.

For some reason Elder Eric dissociated himself from these comments, but as I pointed out elsewhere Calvin himself would not have accepted his arguments.

Meanwhile Doug Chaplin has this irreverent thought (his words) about the following verse, John 3:17:

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world — he’s going to have a church to do that.

Rowan Williams remembers Charlie Moule

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A few months ago I reported the death of Prof Charlie Moule, whom I had known when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge and he was a distinguished professor.

I thank Doug Chaplin for reminding me that Charlie’s memorial service took place recently, on Saturday 9th February in Cambridge. The preacher was Archbishop Rowan Williams. This was at the height of the recent sharia law controversy, and it was after this service that Williams was briefly heckled, but he made no mention of that subject on this occasion. (I will resist the temptation to bring in connections between that subject and this memorial service, out of respect for Moule.)

Doug has provided a link to what Williams did say at this service: a moving tribute to his former tutor. Doug provided some extracts; here I make my own partially overlapping selections from the address. Continue reading →