The Internet Monk Archives

The Lost World of the Flood: Mythology, Theology, and the Deluge Debate by Tremper Longman III and John H. Walton, Part 1- Proposition 2

The Lost World of the Flood: Mythology, Theology, and the Deluge Debate by Tremper Longman III and John H. Walton, Part 1- Proposition 2

We are blogging through the book: The Lost World of the Flood: Mythology, Theology, and the Deluge Debate by Tremper Longman III and John H. Walton. Today we will look at Proposition 2- Genesis 1-11 Makes Claims About Real Events in a Real Past. The purpose of the book, according to its authors, is to come to an understanding of the proper interpretation of the story of the flood in Genesis 6-9. Although that includes whether it is describing a worldwide flood or a local one, or something else, the larger issue is whether the author(s) intended his readers to take them as referring to events that happened in space-time. This investigation is going to necessarily involve the identification of genre or literary type of Genesis 1-11 in the context of the whole book. Did the biblical author intend or not intend to tell us about past events; and what reasons do we have to come to any conclusion.

One piece of evidence is the toledot formula that is continuous throughout Genesis. Toledot is a Hebrew word that is variously translated as “generations” (KJV & ESV), “account” (NIV & NLT), and “descendants” (RSV). The authors think the word occurs in phrases that can best be translated as, “This is the account of X” where X is, with the first exception, a personal name. They point out that “the account of X” is therefore, about the offspring of X.

The first toledot occurs in Genesis 2:4, four times again in Genesis 1-11 and six times in Genesis 12-50. So in the author’s opinion, the toledot formula does show a literary continuity between Genesis 1-11 and the rest of the book, as well as a consistent interest in a carefully selected sequence of past events. The authors say:

Discussion about the early chapters of Genesis often focus on whether the accounts are mythology or history. It is an important question, but framing it this way may not be the best approach. Today, we often consider the label mythology to imply that what is reported is “not real”. But in the ancient world, they did not consider what we call their mythology to be not real. To the contrary, they believed their mythology to represent the most important reality—deep reality, which transcends what could be reported in terms of events that have transpired in the strictly human realm. Indeed, they further considered that even the events in the human realm, which we might label history, found their greatest significance in aspects of the event that human eyewitnesses could not see—the involvement of the divine hand.

The modern dichotomy of history = real and mythology = not real is too overburdened with our modern categories to do justice to ancient literature, biblical or otherwise. The events in Genesis 1-11 have reference to real events, but the significance of those events is in the interpretation given them in the biblical text. In other words, that significance is not found in their historicity, but in their theology. It is not about what happened, but why did it happen. What was God doing, that is what was significant.

The problem with us moderns is we have come to believe only the empirical is real. This is the underlying reason for groups like Answers in Genesis. They are so desperate to have their interpretation of the Bible validated by science that they will make up the science. You see this all the time with the popular “science-confirms-the-Bible-was-right-all-along” type articles. “Noah’s ark finally found on Mt. Ararat”, or “this archeological find confirms the Bible’s account”, or “some cosmological or astronomical phenomenon (like quantum physics) found to have been described in the Bible all along”. This mindset is also the reason for the enduring popularity of “God-of the-gaps” type arguments. If science can’t explain some phenomenon, then God must be directly responsible for it in a miraculous way. There is a strong and powerful emotional riptide pulling at Christians to empirically demonstrate God’s existence and the faith. I know I have felt the tug of this current at times.

The authors propose that the ancients simply did not think about events the same way we moderns do. They viewed reality as metaphysical (spiritual) and not just empirical. Consequently, the role of the eyewitness was not as highly valued. Seeing events through a lens that included the spiritual world, and not just the human world, meant that categories we might label mystical or mythical overlapped in indiscernible and inseparable ways with what we call the real world. Events in their view, therefore, consist of more than what we refer to as history.

When talking about events—and more importantly, event reports—it will be helpful to imagine a spectrum or sliding scale between metaphysical and empirical. Event reports are on a sliding scale. In our modern cultural river, history is considered entirely empirical, and, in fact, only the empirical is considered to be real. However, in the ancient cultural river, the metaphysical aspects were considered just as important, and sometimes, even more important. Frequent commenter, Headless Unicorn Guy, often expresses this as the difference between Poem Truth and Math Truth. The authors assert that event reports from Genesis 1-11 fall closer to the metaphysical aspect than the empirical. They say the events reported in Genesis 1-11, while retaining some empirical aspects, fall further to the metaphysical side of the spectrum. The authors further assert that even the use of the spectrum for communicating these ideas is misleading because in the ancient world they would not have distinguished them as opposite poles. They would be fully integrated into one another. The spectrum way of representation is simply for purposes of explaining the issue to us moderns.

Consequently, even though Walton and Longman affirm the Bible authors envisioned these accounts as real events in the real past, they recognize the Bible authors viewed events and reality different from us moderns and therefore they provided testimony that is different from how we would do it today. Their testimony was predominantly interested in the metaphysical or spiritual aspect. The authors say this needs to be kept in mind as we decide what should be the most appropriate focus of our textual analysis.

More of Richard Beck on Tribes: Liberalism is Loneliness

Richard Beck recently posted another in his excellent series of posts on how liberal or progressive types move, by nature, beyond tribal affiliations and thus lose something very important that they long for but cannot find.

The heart of the matter, as I wrote about two weeks ago, is how Western liberalism dissolves traditional and historical sources of connection and community. Liberalism dissolves group affiliations and treats us as rights-bearing individuals who stand alone before the state. In my posts I said that liberalism has an aerosolizing effect upon groups, it atomizes and then disperses us.

Here is [Christine] Emba summarizing this impact and its consequences:

As liberalism has progressed, it has done so by ever more efficiently liberating each individual from “particular places, relationships, memberships, and even identities — unless they have been chosen, are worn lightly, and can be revised or abandoned at will.” In the process, it has scoured anything that could hold stable meaning and connection from our modern landscape — culture has been disintegrated, family bonds devalued, connections to the past cut off, an understanding of the common good all but disappeared.

And in the end, we’ve all been left terribly alone.

That’s the heart of it, really. Liberalism is loneliness.

Many of us are lonely, desperately lonely in today’s American culture. The only solution, according to Beck and Emba, is for us to “become a whole lot more intentional about forming close knit communities.”

But this goes against the grain of the forces that make Western liberalism so attractive and vital to its adherents.

I have felt this in the depths of my being.

I am remarkably sentimental about my small town roots, about what I perceive to have been a sense of community, an organic connection in families and among neighbors that gave ballast to our lives. I found a form of this in the small churches we served over the years. At heart, I think of myself as a Mayberry guy.

But I have also felt this almost irresistible urge to rebel, to counter the narrative of the status quo, to find my own place in the world and distinguish myself from the herd.

Even today, I find myself appreciating and lauding a society that, imperfect as it was, could advance the freedom and abundance I grew up blessed with. My heart is saturated with the mythology of “the greatest generation” and the kind of communal oneness that many Americans felt in the post-war years.

And then, immediately, my liberal impulses react, protesting that the blessings I’ve known were not available to others. I get angry knowing that various tribes in power fought to keep others from those blessings in a thousand different ways. I miss the sense of community, but at the same time I despise the parochialism and downright meanness I’ve witnessed toward “outsiders.”

I struggle with loving my tribe, my people, and at the same time being able to speak about my sense of outrage at the small-mindedness that offends me. I want to feel the love. I want to stand apart.

Richard Beck ends his post with this quote from Christiane Emba, pointing out the challenge that lies before us:

Yet the deepest solution to the problem of liberalism is as personal in scale as its deepest quandary. To overhaul liberalism, we will have to overhaul ourselves, exchanging an easy drift toward selfish autonomy for a cultivated embrace of self-discipline and communal responsibility. As daunting a project as reforming a political order might seem, this internal shift may be just as hard.

• • •

Photo by jma.guimaraes at Flickr. Creative Commons License

Another Look: The Great Divide

To the bath and the table,
To the prayers and the word,
I call every seeking soul.

– Inscribed on a church bell in Wisconsin

• • •

I did a couple of talks at my church some time ago, discussing my transition from evangelicalism to the Lutheran tradition. As I talked, words from several iMonk commenters came into my mind. A number of you have observed that perhaps the greatest divide in Christendom is between those who take a sacramental view of life, faith, and worship, and those who take a non-sacramental view. This struck me with new force as I explained my journey.

Gordon Lathrop writes,

This fact [that we need “things” to worship] has often disturbed and offended some Christians. It seems as if we ought to be above such material crutches, as if a gathering come together to speak of God ought to be more spiritual. But that is just the point: for the great Christian tradition, the spiritual is intimately involved with the material, the truth about God inseparable from the ordinary, as inseparable as God was from humanity in Jesus. If these things are crutches, so be it. They will then be for us the very “ford, bridge, door, ship, and stretcher” that Luther said we need. These things will show us something about all things.

• Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology

Once, when I was visiting a woman who had come from an evangelical church to our Lutheran congregation, she complained that we didn’t talk more about the Holy Spirit. On one level she was probably correct. But her concern was not that we failed to name the Third Person of the Trinity often enough. Rather, she was saying we didn’t sufficiently emphasize the supernatural work of the Spirit in our midst.

Having lived in both worlds, I understood her point. My answer was, “But remember friend, we experience the supernatural every time we come together for worship. God literally speaks to us from the word. Jesus is present and real when we receive the bread and wine. When we celebrate baptism we are literally witnessing a new birth!” No church believes in the supernatural more than one that truly practices the sacraments.

Stuff of Life

Lathrop observes that the material things around which the church gathers not only provide a center for our community of faith, they also represent things that have long had a “centering power” among human beings. For example, he speaks of the rich imagery of bread:

…bread unites the fruitful goodness of the earth with the ancient history of human cultivation. Bread represents the earth and the rain, growing grains, sowing and reaping, milling and baking, together with the mystery of yeast, all presented in a single object. This loaf invites the participation of more than one person. In its most usual form, it is food for a group. It implies a community gathered around to eat together, to share in the breaking open of this compressed goodness.

Bread is the staple food, the fundamental provision that keeps us alive and enables us to overcome famine and death. We pray in humble dependence, “Give us this day our daily bread,” to remember that, despite the affluence many of us enjoy, in the end we live by grace from God’s hands. So with wine, around which we gather in festive joy. And water for washing. And a book filled with words. All invite us to contemplate the essentials of life through the utmost simplicity.

Doorway into the Story

However, there is more. Lathrop, again:

… the business of this assembly will look more than a little silly to us unless we know that the bread and wine, water and words are used here with historical intent. Bread and wine are ancient foods in Israel, figuring in many of the ancient stories and coming to frame the Jewish festive meal in the time of Jesus. Water for washing is important in Israel from the time of the crossing of the Red Sea and the washing and appointing of the newly constituted priests down to the apocalyptic expectations of the Qumran community and of the early Christians. And Israel was a community of the word from the time of the exile, when collecting, writing, and reading the stories and poems, oracles and laws became immensely important to Israel’s very existence. These things at the center of our assembly connect us to that history. The very choice of these things as the communal central symbols arises from that history.

By these means we enter the Story. Simple objects engage our senses and stimulate our imaginations and we find ourselves as though we had picked our way the through the wood, fur, and fabric in Lewis’s wardrobe and entered Narnia. There we remain ourselves and yet we are more, since we are breathing new air, experiencing new adventures, learning new lessons, and becoming what we never thought possible, under the tutelage of that land’s true Ruler.

Where God Meets Us

Thus, the sacramental elements are those “thin places,” those sites in the world where heaven and earth intersect and God himself meets us, inviting us to receive forgiveness and renewal. For these elements all focus on Christ and introduce us to Christ. Where we hear the words, “for you,” from our Host’s mouth, faith awakens within us, faith that reaches out to Jesus to receive a tangible gift of mercy and promise. In the sacraments, God washes us, God feeds us, God’s promises bring us life. They are not our works to be performed, but his gracious gifts to be received because of the work Jesus already did.

Nothing could be more simple, more earthly, more unexpectedly heavenly.

Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it! How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.(Gen. 28:16-17)

•

Originally posted in 2013

On Resurrection and Eternal Life (6)

Note from CM: As a hospice chaplain, my work revolves around supporting the dying and their families. I officiate many funerals. I deal with questions about death and what happens after people die. I am asked regularly about mysteries beyond our human experience in this life.

After a recent break, we are now getting back into this subject, considering what Gerhard Lohfink has to say in his excellent new book, Is This All There Is?: On Resurrection and Eternal Life.

• • •

This means that Christian faith must hold to Israel’s loving devotion to this world. It must not be spiritualized to its detriment. Everything Israel knew and knows about death and life retains its place in Christian belief in the resurrection of the dead. It would be a dangerous mistake to say that, because the church’s faith in resurrection simply knows more than ancient Israel knew, those older ideas about life and death are outmoded. No, anyone who wants to know what resurrection really means must accompany Israel on the whole journey on which it has been led. Christian theology must carry Israel’s this-worldly thought within it. (p. 89)

Today, we conclude our look at Gerhard Lohfink’s thoughts about the development of thought about the resurrection of the dead within Israel as it appears in the Hebrew Bible.

Last time we saw how, in the psalms in particular, we begin to read of “a confidence that extends beyond the borders of death.” Earlier in the story, Israel seems to have separated herself from the cults of death and the afterlife that were practiced by the nations around her. Her perspective, springing from belief in a creator God, was thoroughly this-wordly, an embrace of life here and now. However, her constant experiences of God’s saving grace led her to express a growing faith that God would be there to provide deliverance and security from death and Hades themselves.

Lohfink continues to show this developing belief by looking at four late Judaic texts.

Isaiah 24-27
Daniel 12:1-3
Ezekiel 37:1-14
A passage from a work called Biblical Antiquities

The Isaiah text envisions the world as a whole and portrays a worldwide judgment when God will take up rule over all the earth. In that context we read Isaiah 25:7-8 —

And he will destroy on this mountain
   the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
   the sheet that is spread over all nations;
he will swallow up death for ever.
Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
   and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,
   for the Lord has spoken.

Then, in 26:19, we read about those who had died earlier —

Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise.
O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy!
For your dew is a radiant dew,
and the earth will give birth to those long dead.

Lohfink comments:

Of course, we may ask whether this is not just a way of talking in a transferred sense about the preservation and protection of the people of Israel, whom God constantly raises up from perilous and life-threatening situations — or is the text really talking about those who have already died? The answer seems to be that throughout the whole text complex of Isaiah 24-27 the subject is the events of the end time; hence the text must be speaking of the eschatological raising of the dead. But it is an awakening of the dead for life on a renewed earth. (p. 83)

Gerhard Lohfink does similar analysis for the other texts mentioned and comes to this conclusion:

Thus the day will come when this age of the world reaches its end; then death will be destroyed and the dead will arise to judgment. They come from the underworld where they have been staying. Then there will come a new heaven and a new earth — though it remains open whether this new world will be pure transcendence or a transformed earth. Probably for the author the two were not mutually exclusive. (p. 86)

An important point he wants to make about Israel’s understanding of resurrection is that it is “firmly anchored in this world.” Indeed, many segments of Judaism do not believe or emphasize the resurrection of the dead and some leave it an open question.

Jewish prayers such as the Kaddish and the Eighteen Benedictions reflect a similar emphasis to Jesus’ “Lord’s Prayer” — “May your will be done on earth as in heaven.” Biblical Israel takes death seriously and does not attempt to “prettify” or sentimentalize it in any way, knowing that there is nothing in human nature itself that is immortal. If there is life after death, it is God’s gift, bestowed to people made from and destined to return to dust.

Furthermore, Jewish religion has always emphasized the joy of this life and what we know here. Whatever resurrection means, it does not signify some kind of escape or release from the world.

Christians are only with God when they are totally in this world; they only do the will of God when they love this world, help to build it up, and refuse to dream of worlds behind the world. (p. 90)

It is interesting that many, if not most, of the heresies that have attacked Christianity have also expressed a profound distrust in the Hebrew Bible, denying its worldliness as less than the esoteric spirituality they seek. On the other hand, Lohfink quotes a mature Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote from prison: “I notice more and more how much I am thinking and perceiving things in line with the Old Testament….Only when one loves life and the earth so much that with it everything seems to be lost and at its end may one believe in the resurrection of the dead and a new world.” (Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 192)

Indeed, Gerhard Lohfink argues that Israel “had to go through an epoch of pure worldliness” so that its earthy thinking would pervade both its faith and that of Christianity. Whatever “the resurrection of the dead” means and implies, it is not “pie in the sky, by and by.”

Sundays in Easter: The Very Good Gospel (2)

Onion Bottom Wetlands. Photo by David Cornwell

This is the promise of Genesis 1. The darkness is limited by the light. Suffering is not in perpetuity. The light may take generations to come, but it will come. There is always hope.

• Lisa Sharon Harper

• • •

On Sundays in Easter, we are hearing from Lisa Sharon Harper about The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right. Her book is about the fullness of the good news that Jesus lived, died, rose again, and ascended into heaven to give us. Harper tells us that this good news is about shalom, the opposite of our often “thin” understanding of the gospel.

In chapter two, Lisa Harper gives us an extended meditation on Genesis 1, to help us see God’s relationship to creation, the boundaries he placed upon chaos, the role of human beings as those created in his image and called to be stewards of creation, and the goodness of what God has made. Here is what she has to say about God pronouncing his creation and the relationships within creation “good,” indeed, “very good” or “forcefully good.”

At the end of the sixth day, the writers declare, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good [tov me’od]. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day” (Genesis 1: 31).

Tov is the Hebrew word for “good,” but the word does not refer only to the goodness of the object itself; it also refers to the ties between things. In the Hebrew conception of the world, all of creation is connected. The well-being of the whole depends on the well-being of each individual part. The Hebrews’ conception of goodness was different than the Greeks’. The Greeks located perfection within the object itself. A thing or a person strove toward perfection. But the Hebrews understood goodness to be located between things. As a result, the original hearers would have understood tov to refer to the goodness of the ties and relationships between things in creation.

Me’od is an adjective that means “forceful” or “vehement.” Biblical scholar Terry McGonigal has added to that definition: “abundant, flourishing, overflowing, and never ending.” McGonigal also explained that tov appears six times previously in this text. Here, the seventh time it is used, the word describes God’s creation, and the writers add the emphatic adjective me’od. In Hebrew culture, the numbers seven and ten symbolize perfection. The fact that the writers add me’od on the seventh occurrence of the word is significant. McGonigal holds that this usage indicates the writers are communicating the completeness and perfect interconnectedness of the web of creation. It is tov me’od because all the relationships between things overflow with goodness!

The original hearers and readers of Genesis 1 would have understood that the writers were not merely saying that each part of God’s creation was very good but rather that God’s mighty web of interconnected relationships was forcefully good, vehemently good, abundantly good!

The relationship between humanity and God was forcefully good.

Humanity’s relationship with self was forcefully good.

The relationship between humanity and the rest of creation was forcefully good.

The relationship between men and women was forcefully good.

The relationship within the first community— the community of creation (God, humanity, and the rest of creation)— was forcefully good.

The relationship between humanity and the systems that govern (the way things worked) was forcefully good. And the relationship between humanity and life itself was forcefully good.

It is forcefully good that God is supreme and distinct from humanity. It is forcefully good that the darkness has the boundary of the light.

It is forcefully good that the sun, moon, and stars help people know when to sleep and when to wake, when to sow and when to reap.

It is abundantly good that the fear-inducing surging waters are limited by the land. And it is utterly good that the sea monsters drive humanity back into God’s caring arms. It is vehemently good that humanity is made in the image of God, each soul carrying inherent dignity and the call and capacity to steward the rest of creation. It is beautifully good that Elohim provided for the needs of all creation, including humans and beasts and everything with breath that was given vegetables for food.

In the end, we see that God’s governance has transformed the world from a cesspool of overwhelming darkness, despair, sorrow, misery, destruction, and death into a world where darkness is limited by the light. Where Elohim is supreme over the waters and all that live in them. Where goodness springs forth from the commands of God. And where the relationships between all things are tov me’od!

The Saturday Monks Brunch: April 14, 2018

STILL WAITIN’ FOR REAL SPRING EDITION

I hate to talk about the weather all the time, but this has been a doozy of a spring. Yesterday and today, it finally felt like we’d turned a corner here in central Indiana, with temperatures up in the 70s. However, by Monday they’re calling for snow flurries again — and here we are, just past the midpoint of April.

I’m as confused as this guy…

• • •

MR. ZUCKERBERG GOES TO WASHINGTON

• • •

BYE BILL

From the Washington Post: Prominent pastor Bill Hybels announced Tuesday he is stepping down from his Chicago-area megachurch Willow Creek, just weeks after the Chicago Tribune published allegations of misconduct from several women….

…Hybels has denied all the allegations and said on Tuesday again that the church’s investigations found no evidence of misconduct. However, he told his congregation he felt attacked and wished he had responded differently. “I apologize to you, my church, for a response that was defensive instead of one that invited conversation and learning,” he said.”

•

Here is Nancy Ortberg’s perspective on Hybels and the flawed process of investigation.

This opinion piece from Vox quotes Boz Tchividjian, founder of GRACE (Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment) about the dangers inherent in the American system of church, especially megachurches:

When a lead pastor is so closely identified with his church, Tchividjian said, whether in a small country church or a large megachurch, it creates a risky power imbalance between pastor and parishioner.

“In many communities … a pastor is one of God’s representatives of authority in the church,” Tchividjian said. “And it’s very difficult for anybody in those settings and report and disclose this behavior because what you’re doing is you’re actually indicting God’s representative. And oftentimes … that particular community doesn’t look too kindly on that.”

But Tchividjian expressed hope that the current cultural moment might provide avenues for parishioners to hold their spiritual authorities accountable.

“As Christians, we have to get back to the realization … that the church doesn’t belong to a pastor, a person, or even a congregation,” he said. “If we truly believe that, we should embrace transparency and truth.”

• • •

AND WELCOME BACK, GARRISON

From garrisonkeillor.com: Garrison Keillor and Minnesota Public Radio have reached an agreement reopening public access to thousands of past shows of A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac.

“MPR wants fans of A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac to have free access to the thousands of wonderful performers and artists, musicians and poets whose work is included in those archives, and we want your fans to have free access to the decades of terrific material you created,” MPR President Jon McTaggart wrote in a letter to Keillor on April 5. A full copy of the letter is available at http://www.garrisonkeillor.com.

“What the agreement means is that I won’t sue MPR for damages and they will allow A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac archives to be available to the public again,” commented Keillor. “And it means that we move on to more interesting things, namely writing stories and creating a podcast. Compared to sitting in mediation, writing is one of life’s great pleasures.”

Within the next 15 days, MPR will restore public access to the thousands of past A Prairie Home Companion shows and broadcasts of The Writer’s Almanac. The public can access these shows by way of a link at http://www.garrisonkeillor.com. After three years, Keillor and his production company expect to relocate the archives to another platform. MPR also agreed to reopening The Writer’s Almanac Facebook page and to provide Keillor monies owed him under prior contracts.

MPR blocked access to the archives in November after learning of allegations by a woman who had been a freelance writer with Keillor’s production company. Keillor said that MPR’s reaction to the allegations was disproportionate. The settlement agreement doesn’t provide for any payments to the woman or her colleague, a former producer of the Chris Thile show, who claimed he was let go because of his knowledge of the woman’s allegations against Keillor.

• • •

TAKE ME OUT TO THE BRAWL-GAME

From Will Leitch at MLB.com: If you take a step back from it, there really isn’t anything more ridiculous than a baseball brawl. Look at it like an alien might look at it. One human wearing a red uniform that some might confuse for pajamas takes a small round object and throws it at another human who’s carrying a wooden stick and wearing a blue uniform. The one in the blue uniform thinks the round object was too close to hitting him, or maybe even it did hit him, so he throws down the wooden stick and sprints toward the man in the red uniform, yelling and gesticulating wildly.

The two men then, oddly, do not proceed to fight, as much as they go through the motions of pretending to desperately want to fight, in what must look to the alien like a particularly awkward mating ritual. There’s a grab here and a push there, as well as a healthy smattering of scowls. Then a bunch of other men wearing the same uniform, none of whom were involved in the initial dispute, come running toward them from out of nowhere, also less interested in fighting than they are looking like they’d be willing to fight, as long as you give them a second to catch their breath — it’s a long run in from the bullpen.

Watching this, one imagines one alien turning to the other: “It will be very easy to conquer this planet.”

• • •

AS IF WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH TO WORRY ABOUT…

• • •

QUESTIONS OF THE WEEK

Can a Beatles tour convert a non-believer to the Fab 4?

Can a Canadian hotel ever forgive a guest whose room was destroyed by seagulls?

Why is “the boy who came back from heaven” suing his publisher?

Have you given any thought to the absurdity of camping?

Why…why…in the name of all that’s holy would you write such a thing before the funerals have even begun?

• • •

MUSIC OF THE WEEK

Our good friends Frank Lee and Allie Burbrink (who did a house concert in our home a year ago) have released their first studio album, and I commend it to you iMonks.

It’s called Roll On, Clouds, and it’s filled with the lively, old-timey mountain music and blues that Frank and Allie love and do so well.

Oh yes, and an extra piece of joy to me:

Frank and Allie announced their engagement when they visited Indiana recently, and asked your intrepid chaplain to perform the ceremony! Looking forward to one hootenanny of a wedding this fall!

Here’s a 2016 performance of “Can’t Nobody Hide,” a song that’s on the new album:

Friday with Michael Spencer: Warning! Be Careful!

From 2008

Is it just me, or are some Christians putting too much emphasis on the Gospels?

There’s a lot of talk about the Kingdom of God in the Gospels. That gets many people off on the wrong track entirely.

Some people are always quoting the parables or Jesus’ sermons. All of these things need some further elaboration, footnotes or clarification, not to mention lots of additional verses from the rest of the Bible.

And what about all the things that Jesus keeps telling people to do? If you can’t do things perfectly, what are you supposed to do with them? Reading the Gospels could cause you to be deluded about the whole Christian life.

Then there’s all the things Jesus says are just true about his disciples. They ARE the salt and they ARE the light. All that. That makes some fans of good theology break into a cold sweat. Jesus can be all those things, but what’s the deal saying them about us?

Jesus seems to spend a lot of time accepting the unacceptable, elevating the oppressed, inviting the unwanted and including the excluded. Assuming that those things are just types and shadows of God accepting us, could someone explain exactly what we’re supposed to do with those kinds of commands and examples?

You could get a lot of wrong ideas reading the Gospels too much. You could start thinking that Jesus is in favor of some kind of social gospel where people give away lots of things, live in community, get in trouble for their radical compassion and stand outside of the religious establishment much of the time.

In fact, really….the Gospels have some good stories, but wouldn’t we be better off to study things like Romans 3 more often, so we really know what the Gospel is about?

Spending a lot of time in the Gospels could make you a person who is confused about discipleship as compared to grace. We should go to church, hear about grace, and leave much happier. If we read the Gospels too much, we’ll get the idea we’re supposed to do a lot of things that we really don’t have to do to be saved.

Let’s be careful with the Gospels. Don’t go overboard with them. They could mess up your whole religion.

I’m glad we talked about this. A lot of people could be easily confused.

The Lost World of the Flood: Mythology, Theology, and the Deluge Debate by Tremper Longman III and John H. Walton, Part 1- Proposition 1

The Lost World of the Flood: Mythology, Theology, and the Deluge Debate
by Tremper Longman III and John H. Walton, Part 1- Proposition 1

I am going to blog through the book: The Lost World of the Flood: Mythology, Theology, and the Deluge Debate by Tremper Longman III and John H. Walton. Walton has two other books in his Lost World series, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate and The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate. Both are excellent books, from which I have quoted extensively in the Thursday Science and the Faith posts here at Internet Monk. Walton is professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College. His Wheaton bio is here and his Wikipedia bio is here. Tremper Longman III is the Robert H. Gundry Professor of Biblical Studies at Westmont. His college bio is here and his Wikipedia bio is here.

Later in the book there is a contribution by geologist Stephen O. Moshier, a professor and chair of the Geology & Environmental Science Department at Wheaton College, whose college bio is here. Moshier is also a contributing author at BioLogos, and was a contributing author to The Grand Canyon, Monument to an Ancient Earth, which book I reviewed for Internet Monk starting here.

Longman and Walton examine the flood story exhaustively from the perspective of Old Testament experts. The examination takes place through a series of 4 parts and 17 propositions:

Part 1- Method: Perspectives on Interpretation

Proposition 1. Genesis is an Ancient Document

Proposition 2. Genesis 1-11 Makes Claims About Real Events in a Real Past

Proposition 3. Genesis 1-11 Uses Rhetorical Devices

Proposition 4. The Bible Uses Hyperbole to Describe Historical Events

Proposition 5. Genesis Appropriately Presents a Hyperbolic Account of the Flood

Proposition 6. Genesis Depicts the Flood as a Global Event

Part 2- Background: Ancient Near Eastern Texts

Proposition 7. Ancient Mesopotamia also has Stories of a Worldwide Flood

Proposition 8. The Biblical Flood Account Shares Similarities and Differences with Ancient Near Eastern Flood Accounts

Part 3- Text: Understanding the Biblical Text Literally and Theologically

Proposition 9. A Local Cataclysmic Flood is Intentionally Described as a Global Flood for Rhetorical Purposes and Theological Reasons

Proposition 10. The Flood Account is Part of a Sequence of Sin and Judgment Serving as a Backstory for the Covenant

Proposition 11. The Theological History is Focused on the Issue of Divine Presence, the Establishment of Order, and How Order is Undermined

Proposition 12. The “Sons of God” Episode is not Only a Prelude to the Flood; It is the Narrative Sequel to Cain and Abel

Proposition 13. The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) Is an Appropriate Conclusion to the Primeval Narrative

Part 4- The World: Thinking About Evidence for the Flood

Proposition 14. The Flood Story Has a Real Event Behind It

Proposition 15. Geology Does Not Support a Worldwide Flood

Proposition 16. Flood Stories From Around the World Do Not Prove a Worldwide Flood

Proposition 17. Science Can Purify Our Religion; Religion can Purify Science from Idolatry and False Absolutes

What I like about this book (and the other Lost World books) is that it is accessible to the layman through a discussion of a topic of current popular concern and not just academic concern. It moves through the topic in a logical progression and is based on a fresh close reading of the Hebrew text, which Longman and Walton are experts at. It is informed by knowledge of the Ancient Near East literature and perspective. Most importantly, the hermeneutic is respectful and even worshipful of the idea that God has spoken to us through Scripture authoritatively. It works out the principle that the Bible was written FOR us, but not TO us. As they say in the preface:

As always in the Lost World books, the intention is not to offer the single “correct” interpretation of the text. We seek, instead, to provide an interpretation based on a conviction that the Bible is the Word of God- Scripture that speaks truly… Our goal is not to convert the reader to our conclusion, or even to persuade the reader to adopt our way of thinking. Instead, we seek to bring information to the reader’s attention that has helped us as we have struggled with the passages. If readers deem that information useful and beneficial, we are gratified. But for readers who cannot accept our findings, believing that Scripture makes claims that require other conclusions, we hope that at least we have shown how our particular interpretation is the result of faithful interpretation.

Proposition 1- Genesis Is An Ancient Document

The authors begin by assuming that readers of this book desire to be faithful interpreters of the Bible so they can receive the wisdom that God wishes to impart through sacred scripture and submit their lives to that revealed wisdom i.e. submit themselves to God’s authority. Biblical authority is tied inseparably to the author’s intention; God vests his authority in the human author. A proper understanding of inspiration is that two voices are speaking; the human author is the doorway into the room of God’s meaning and message. The human author(s) of Genesis are most assuredly situated in the ancient world; so the more we can learn of the ancient world, the more faithful our interpretation will be. We can expect an author to accommodate an audience that he knows, but we can’t expect an author to accommodate an audience he doesn’t know.

Walton illustrates this by giving the example of high context traffic reports we might hear if we were in Chicago. The traffic report will assume a familiarity of the listener with the highways and landmarks of the city. It might report that it will take 38 minutes to drive from “the Cave” to “the Junction” and that it is congested from “the Slip” to “the Nagle Curve”. Out-of-towners, of course, have no idea what they are talking about. By contrast, low context communication would have to give high levels of accommodation for unfamiliar commuters to understand. They would have to explain the shorthand terminology and what and where it referred to. The report would be long and drawn out and of little use to regular commuters.

Walton proposes that in the Bible, a human communicator is engaged in expressing an accommodating message to a high context (ancient Israelite) audience. The biblical author shares a history, a culture, a language, and the experiences of their contemporaneous lives with his intended audience, but not with us moderns. We must conduct research and study to fill in the information that would have been assumed by the biblical author and his audience. That is the only way modern readers can interact with an ancient text. We need the comparative studies in order to recognize the aspects of the biblical author’s cognitive environment that is foreign to us and read the text in the light of their worldview. This is not imposing something foreign on the text- the author and the audience are embedded in the ancient world. We are not imposing this on the text any more than we are imposing Hebrew on the text when we try to read it in the original language.

The authors illustrate by using the metaphor of a cultural river. The modern world cultural river is identified by such things as rights, freedoms, capitalism, democracy, individualism, globalism, naturalism, an expanding universe, empiricism, and natural laws. Some float with the current while others struggle to swim upstream against the current; but everyone in the modern world is inevitably located in its waters. In the ancient world a very different cultural river flowed through the Ancient Near East including Israel. The river would have currents of community identity, tribalism, the comprehensive and ubiquitous control of the gods, the role of kingships, divination, the centrality of the temple, the mediatory role of images, and the reality of the spirit world and magic.

The Israelites sometimes floated right along with the currents of that cultural river without resistance- a king like all the other nations, worship in the groves of the high places, household gods, and so on. At other times, the revelation of God encouraged them to swim furiously upstream against their own cultural currents. Whatever the extent of the Israelite interactions with the cultural river, it is important to remember they were situated in the ancient cultural river, not immersed in the currents of our modern cultural river.

If we are to interpret Scripture properly and receive the full impact of God’s authoritative message, we have to leave our cultural river behind and immerse ourselves in their ancient river. We cannot assume any component of our cultural currents are addressed in Scripture. The communicators that we encounter in the Old Testament are not aware of our cultural river- including all of its scientific aspects; they neither address our cultural river nor anticipate it. For example, they had no category for what we call natural laws. When they thought of cause and effect, even though they could make all the observations we do, they were more inclined to see the world’s operation in terms of divine agency. Everything worked the way it did because God set it up that way and maintained it that way. They would not have viewed the cosmos as a machine, but as a kingdom, and God communicated to them about the world in those terms. His revelation was not focused on giving them a more sophisticated understanding of the mechanics of the natural world. The authors say:

Everyone in the ancient world believed in a cosmic ocean suspended above a solid sky. Therefore, when the biblical text talks about “the waters above” it is not offering authoritative revelation of scientific facts. If we conclude that there are not, strictly speaking, waters above, we have not thereby identified error in Scripture. Rather, we have recognized that God vests the authority of the text elsewhere. Authority is tied to the message the author intends to communicate as an agent of God’s revelation. This communication by God initiates that revelation by piggybacking on communication by a human addressing the world of ancient Israel. Even though the Bible is written for us, it is not written to us. The revelation it provides can equip us to know God, his plan, and his purposes and therefore to participate with him in the world we face today. But it was not written with our world in mind. In its context, it is not communicated in our language; it is not addressed to our culture; it does not anticipate the questions about the world and its operations that stem from our modern situation and issues.

So if we read modern ideas into the text, we skirt the authority of the text and in effect are compromising it. The authority and “inerrancy” of the text has always been attached to what it affirms. Those affirmations are not, nor could they be, of a modern scientific nature. We cannot derive a scientific explanation of the world from the Bible, and it would be misguided to try to find scientific evidence for that description. Nevertheless, the Bible does interpret the world authoritatively by describing God’s work in it and relationship to it. So the authors apply that paradigm to the flood:

There was a real cataclysmic event, but the Bible does not describe that event authoritatively. Its description is culturally conditioned (the flood tradition we all know) and rhetorically shaped (universalistic cosmic proportions). We cannot derive a scientific explanation of the flood from the Bible, and it would be misguided to try to find scientific evidence for that description. Nevertheless, the Bible does interpret that event authoritatively (what God was doing; why it happened: judgment, re-creation, non-order as response to disorder, covenant, etc.).

A Crazy, Holy Grace

A crazy, holy grace I have called it. Crazy because whoever could have predicted it? Who can ever foresee the crazy how and when and where of a grace that wells up out of the lostness and pain of the world and of our own inner worlds? And holy because these moments of grace come ultimately from farther away than Oz and deeper down than doom, holy because they heal and hallow. “For all thy blessings, known and unknown, remembered and forgotten, we give thee thanks,” runs an old prayer, and it is for all the unknown ones and the more than half-forgotten ones that we do well to look back over the journeys of our lives because it is their presence that makes the life of each of us a sacred journey. We have a hard time seeing such blessed and blessing moments as the gifts I choose to believe they are and a harder time still reaching out toward the hope of a giving hand, but part of the gift is to be able, at least from time to time, to be assured and convinced without seeing, as Hebrews says, because that is of the very style and substance of faith as well as what drives it always to seek a farther and a deeper seeing still.

• Frederick Buechner

Bad Press: The Circus Goes On

Christians, we can’t hide any more.

In this day when there are few secrets, and what secrets there may be are only one social media post away from the light of day, it’s time for Christians, churches, and Christian organizations to get their act together.

Forget the mostly bogus complaints about “persecution” and loss of “religious freedom.” Can we once practice a bit of humility and admit that we’ve done as much or more to drive people away by our own misbehavior?

It has gotten to a point where we are not talking about any duties that are specifically “Christian.” We are simply calling for human decency, honesty, maturity, and transparency.

Here are some recent examples of the circus stories prominent in the church today.

From Australia, Michael Frost, in an article called Paying for the Sins of Our Fathers, writes about how “the Anglican Diocese of Newcastle is going broke paying compensation to the victims of child sexual assault by their priests.” “If the Anglican Diocese of Newcastle goes broke and closes down it will be their own fault, not the prevailing headwinds of secularization and the ‘left-leaning mainstream media.’ We are all now paying for the sins of our fathers, men who betrayed their calling to serve the church, who inflicted dreadful suffering on their victims and whose crimes will be paid for by congregations like those at St James, Bungwahl for years to come.”

Dee at Wartburg Watch writes about Francis Chan and others who are warning church members about criticizing church leaders, as if what we should be doing is doubling down on the untouchability of our “anointed.” “We live in a time when people are quick to criticize church and leadership, with this assumption that they know better. It’s just a very, very difficult time for Christian leaders to lead,” he said. Seriously? This is the move to make right now in the current climate? Apparently “accountability” is for disciples not disciplers.

John Ortberg responds to the Bill Hybels controversy at Willow Creek. “I was approached over four years ago with disturbing information that I did not seek out. Along with others who received this information, I directed it to the elders of Willow Creek. The process that followed was, in my view, poorly designed and likely to expose any woman who came forward to grave risks….Anyone who may have been victimized by people in power needs to know that the church of Jesus is their refuge and champion. In this case, the tremendous courage of several women has been met with an inadequate process that has left them without a refuge and with no way to be assured of a fair hearing.” Meanwhile, Hybels, a Christian leader I’ve respected a great deal, sounds more like a certain politician in Washington than a pastor, claiming that the whole thing is “flat out lies.”

Meanwhile, speaking of said politician, “Nearly 8 in 10 white evangelicals approve of Trump’s job performance, compared with 39 per cent of all Americans, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.”

And yet another evangelical leader steps down because of an “inappropriate relationship.”

The Buffalo diocese of the Roman Catholic Church released the names of 42 priests accused of abusing minors. 27 of them are new names, not released previously.

Also, it’s been revealed that two Christian humanitarian charities have been involved in sexual misconduct allegations.

The Mormons are not exempt from all of this either.

Let’s not forget financial fraud.

Speaking of which, this Greek Orthodox Church allegedly mishandled millions of dollars in an “$80 million boondoggle” involving St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine, a rebuilding project undertaken after the 2001 terror attacks in New York City.

In an interview with Christianity Today, Rachael Denhollander, an evangelical Reformed Baptist and one of the victims of the USA Gymnastics scandal, has had a lot to say about the problems with regard to the abuse problems that have beset Sovereign Grace Ministries. “Church is one of the least safe places to acknowledge abuse because the way it is counseled is, more often than not, damaging to the victim. There is an abhorrent lack of knowledge for the damage and devastation that sexual assault brings. It is with deep regret that I say the church is one of the worst places to go for help. That’s a hard thing to say, because I am a very conservative evangelical, but that is the truth. There are very, very few who have ever found true help in the church.”

And the circus goes on. Deeds done in darkness are being brought to light. There’s no place to hide.

Meanwhile, this is some people’s idea of what we need to make us “strong” in these tumultuous days.

Michael is rolling over in his grave right now.