#125 CNNs Burma Coverage

The most significant current event happening right now is going on in Burma where 20,000 red-robed monks took to the streets about four days ago to protest the totalitarian regime. About 80,000 peaceful protesters followed as they marched through the streets. The government began it's crackdown a few days ago and now we are starting to see signs of revolution as there are reports leaking out that at least one unit of soldiers has turned on government forces. This is definitely the news story of the year. What is happening is nothing short of the labor pains of democracy and it's pretty exciting. After all, the Myanmar regime is ranked as tied with Somalia as the most corrupt government on earth. The popularly elected leader, Aung Sun Suu Kyi, the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner has been under house arrest off and on since 1989.

And yet, CNN is treating the event a lot like "Myanmar" state-run propaganda TV is treating the event as a small local disturbance. I'm sure this epidemic isn't limited to CNN but all mainstream news sources. After all, they always miss the important news stories in favor of Paris Hilton and OJ Simpson. The second day of marches, CNN didn't have a single link on their main page to any stories about the protests. Every other day, they have had exactly one. Today it is pushed off to the side. Make no mistake. What is happening in Burma is epic and the money-driven media is missing the boat.

In comparing The Saffron Revolution (named for the color of the protesting monks robes) to the type of democracy we are trying to force in Iraq, a reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog writes this:

"What I find amazing, is the stark contrast between real democracy in action (Burma) and the staged theater in Iraq. For those of us who witnessed Tiananmen and the fall of the Wall…not to mention Ukraine, etc., the lesson is that true democracy is an organic event that arises from the people. It can not be bestowed, bequeathed or imposed. As you say, know hope."

Protesters have begun to be killed. The government has cut off the internet so reports and blogs cannot get the word out. The phone lines have been cut. Again from Sullivan's website:

"Another witness said the soldiers were led by a two-star general who beat some of the soldiers who were reluctant to harm the monks. The attack lasted about 90 minutes, ending when about 60 monks and 40 laypeople were tossed into waiting trucks and driven to an unknown destination."

As Andrew says, pray for them all. And read some of the reports he has passed on here, here, here, and here.

#124 Witherington on Innerrancy, Inspiration, & Scripture

Ben Witherington was interview here and gave the following response to the question of innerrancy,

"The terms inerrant and infallible are modern ways of attempting to make clear that the Bible tells the truth about whatever it intends to teach us about. I much prefer the positive terms truthful and trustworthy. When you start defining something negatively (saying what it is not) then you often die the death of a thousand qualifications, not to mention you have to define what constitutes an error. I am happy to say that the Bible has three main subjects-- history, theology, and ethics, and that it tells us the truth about all three."

I take this view as well. The Bible is accurate in exactly the details it intended to get accurate. We wouldn't discount Herodotus' history of the Persian and Greek wars because he had a bunch of details wrong. His mission was not to document the details but rather to pass along the larger, and arguably more important story and its lessons. The same goes for the Bible.

So I'm comfortable with my views on the concept of innerrancy. However the idea of inspiration and the genre called Scripture is where I still get hung and don't quite understand what 2 Tim. 3:16 is really trying to say nearly as well as I'd like to. On inspiration and Scripture Witherington says this,

"It is true to say that Scripture is one form of tradition that has become a sacred text. So yes, Scripture contains a plethora of different traditions. But to say this is not enough. What was believed about these sacred texts is that they were God-breathed, and so different in various ways from other traditions which were more mundane or purely human. Without an adequate understanding of ancient views of inspiration and how they effects texts, we can't get very far in discussing the relationship of ordinary traditions to inspired or sacred ones."

So out of all the traditions, what was so special about Scripture that it became, well, Scripture? In other words, when and why did the text become sacred? Clearly they viewed as different, influenced by God in some way. But what caused them to become viewed this way over and above other texts? As Witherington points out, what we are missing is an informed knowledge of what inspiration meant in an ancient Pauline context. Anyone who can help provide this information is encouraged to share it with the rest of us.

#123 Injustice, Totalitarianism, and Genocide

I often get the impression that when Jesus came he uncritically took the side of the weak and the powerless. This is certainly the picture I've gotten in the past four years or so and have enjoyed it immensely: the undaunted fighter for social justice who sacrificed himself to the powerful for the sake of the weak. Someone who took sides and righted the wrongs. However, I think I've gotten a clearer picture lately: a picture of Jesus who called all sinners to account. For Jesus, taking sides in a battle against structural injustice was not primarily what he was about. First and foremost, his mission was to change hearts. Then and only then could true structural wrongs be made right.

To quote Miroslav Volf in Exclusion and Embrace,

"Central to... fighting exclusion is the belief that the source of evil does not lie outside of a person, in impure things, but inside a person, in the impure heart (Mark 7:15)."

Volf goes on to argue that Jesus set out to achieve this through a duel strategy of renaming and remaking. He renamed that which was unclean clean and remade that which was impure pure. He did this because as the gospels point out, he spoke with authority.

This was not a simple reversal of roles where those who were in are now out and those who were out are now in (a "Modern" solution). Nor was it a simple destruction of boundary lines altogether (the "post-Modern" solution). Rather, this was a redrawing of the boundary lines around Jesus, Christ, the Word of God, the authority of God. The mission, then, of those who are "in" is to seek hard after those who are out. The ultimate mission of the king and his subjects is to bring all in.

According to Volf, sin in Jesus' definition is,

"the kind of purity that wants the world cleansed of the other rather than the heart cleansed of the evil that drives people out by calling those who are clean 'unclean' and refusing to help make clean those who are unclean. Put more formally, sin is 'the will to purity' turned away from the 'spiritual' life of the self to the cultural world of the other, transmuted from spirituality into 'politics' broadly conceived..."

To show how this poor understanding of sin manifests itself in practice, I'll again quote Volf,

"Consider the deadly logic of the 'politics of purity.' The blood must be pure: German blood alone should run through German veins, free from all nonAryan contamination. The territory must be pure: Serbian soil must belong to Serbs alone, cleansed of all nonSerbian intruders. The origins must be pure: we must go back to the pristine purity of our linguistic, religious, or cultural past, shake away the dirt of otherness collected our our march through history. The goal must be pure: we must let the light of reason shine into every dark corner or we must create a world of total virtue so as to render all moral effort unnecessary. The origin and the goal, the inside and the outside, everything must be pure: plurality and heterogeneity must give way to homogeneity and unity. One people, one culture, one language, one book, one goal; what does not fall under this all-encompasing 'one' is ambivalent, polluting, and dangerous. It must be removed. We want a pure world and push the 'others' out of our world; we want to be pure ourselves and eject 'otherness' from within ourselves. The 'will to purity' contains a whole program for arranging our social worlds -- from the inner worlds of our selves to the outer worlds of our families, neighborhoods, and nations. It is a dangerous program because it is a totalitarian program, governed by a logic that reduces, ejects, and segregates."

I can think of two other examples of this politics of purity. The land must be pure: this mindset can be seen in the case of modern day Israel. The other is the Rwandan genocide where the country must be pure: pure of the elitist Tutsis. What all of these cases have in common is a people who started out oppressed that set out to right a wrong. In order to justify the Holocaust, the German people had to see themselves as victims first. In order to justify the genocide in Rwanda, the Hutus had to do the same and only look at how they were wronged. To do this, each "victim" took power, without fail a totalitarian form of power. Then a program of genocide or at the very least racial "discrimination" ensued. It is a repetitive cycle throughout history: the oppressed end up becoming the oppressors all in the name of justice.

Speaking of Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch who wrote a New York Times bestseller about the genocide there quotes Ralph Ellison in the Invisible Man:

"Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy."

Until we understand how historically attested that quote is and how it continues to play itself out, we will have many more genocides, revolutions, and totalitarian regimes coming our way.

We should also be careful to heed Gourevitch's warning that,

"Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building. A vigorous totalitarian order requires that the people be invested in the leaders' scheme, and while genocide may be the most perverse and ambitious means to this end, it is also the most comprehensive. In 1994, Rwanda was regarded in much of the rest of the world as the exemplary instance of the chaos and anarchy associated with collapsed states. In fact, the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorizing and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously administered states in history. As strange as it may sound -- the ideology -- or what Rwandans call 'the logic' -- of genocide was promoted as a way not to create suffering but to alleviate it. The specter of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic Utopian embrace, and the individual -- always an annoyance to totality -- ceases to exist."

But if victims by acting out just end up becoming oppressors, how can justice ever be done? Should the guilty just be let off the hook to go free? Volf says no,

"The one thing worse than terror resulting from a system of judgment is terror without any judgment: heads roll, but you can tell neither when, nor where, nor why. Moreover, without system of judgment we would have no way of struggling against oppression and deception because we could not distinguish between the Butcher of Lyon and Mother Teresa."

Volf points out that "the Anabaptist tradition, consistently the most pacifist tradition in the history of the Christian church, has traditionally had no hesitation about speaking of God's wrath and judgment, and with good reasons. There is no trace of this nonindignant God in the biblical texts..." And as he says elsewhere, nonviolence, or the willingness to absorb violence is essential strategy in the path to breaking the cycle of violence. Unlike humans, "God will judge, not because God gives people what they deserve, but because some people... have resisted to the end the powerful lure of the open arms of the crucified Messiah."

And in a quote that sums up the necessity of the willingness to suspend violence and revenge, he says, "The certainty of God's just judgment at the end of history is the presupposition for the renunciation of violence in the middle of it." Here is the paradox of his thesis that "the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance." Think his thesis sounds hypocritical and two-faced? He responds in this way,

"To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this chapter was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God's refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind."

The key point to remember is that God's vengeance corresponds to our nonviolence. When man attempts to create justice through violence, he only ends up creating more injustice. On the final page, Volf says, "Assured of God's justice and undergirded by God's presence, they are to break the cycle of violence by refusing to be caught in the automatism of revenge. It cannot be denied that the prospects are good that by trying to love their enemies they may end up hanging on a cross. Yet often enough, the costly acts of nonretaliation become a seed from which the fragile peace of Pentecost peace grows -- a peace between people from different cultural spaces gathered together in one place who understand each other's languages and share in each others' goods."

#122 Textual Criticism and Greek New Testament

I just finished reading David Alan Black's New Testament Textual Criticism: A Concise Guide and it is one of the best and most educational books I've read this year. Coming in at just 57 pages it feels like a pamphlet in your hand. As I read through it, I couldn't help but ask myself why I was never taught this stuff in church or school growing up. Did they not think we could handle it? I think the failure to educate us has been one of the major contributors to "The Da Vinci Code" phenomenon where orthodox teaching was questioned a couple of years ago. Things have been "hidden" that frankly aren't worth hiding and the church has gotten a black eye as a result.

I actually found my faith strengthened because the historicity of the New Testament and the events therein became more real and more historic to me as I learned of all the different types of manuscripts, where they come from, and how they are used. For anyone who wishes to learn Greek, learn history, or strengthen their faith I recommend this book. I also hope churches and Christian schools and colleges will pass this exciting information along to our young people.

For those of you who are trying to decide between Greek New Testaments, as I was a while back, there are two commonly used editions out there. Though there are tens of thousands of manuscripts running around out there, these two have employed textual criticism to come to their best representation of what the original "autographs" may have been. At this point, 2000 years later, textual criticism is the best we can do considering the numerous variations that exist.

First, there is the United Bible Societies Greek New Testament, which is what I ended up purchasing, and then there is the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece. As Black's says, "Of course, neither of these editions covers all of the available manuscripts, versions, and patristic citations. Instead, representatives of larger groups of witnesses are given. This is the best that a handy edition of the Greek New Testament can do." (p. 44)

Most helpful as it relates to choosing between Greek New Testaments is when Black says, "[The Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece] is considerably more complicated than that found in the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament, and it also contains many more variants (the ratio is about 5:1). The coverage of manuscripts is less full, and usually only those readings not adopted in the text are cited. The Nestle-Aland edition of the Greek New Testament is preferred by scholars and serious students because it affords a glimpse at more variants and because the reader can easily identify the types of variants involved simply by noting the symbols used in the text." (p. 45)

From my perspective I really like the UBS GNT that I have. I do not think think the types of variants are the most important thing unless you get very seriously into textual criticism. I think what is more important is the support behind the variant that was chosen for presentation and the most significant alternates. Then if you want to see more variants you can always look at the lately late Bruce Metzger's A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament which gives a rational for the readings printed in the UBS GNT. Start with the UBS GNT and then after a couple of years working with it and becoming familiar with it pick up the NA NTG, if you even get that far.

#121 Videos II

What happened to conservatism?

#120 Pouring Out: Into and For the World

"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late."

I love the above quote free marketeer Thomas Sowell. It was quoted this week in an article from the Wall Street journal detailing why the article's author, Tony Woodlief, chose to home school his children.

It turned out to be a decent article describing the difference between utopian liberal ideas and restrained conservative ones. By making this contrast she excoriates the thought of those who eschew discipline in order to let their children express themselves by labeling them as liberal Utopians. His primary objective is to advocate discipline in order to tame the invasion of the barbarians. I agree with his simple point on the need for discipline and again love the quote above. I also have a good laugh at the Dr. Benjamin Spock quote she cites in which Spock said, "I can hardly bear to be around rude children. I have the impulse to spank them, and to give a lecture to their parents."

However, I think she confuses classical Utopian liberalism with Post-modernism on the subject of humans conditioning other humans. In other words she appears to have her political ideologies and definitions crossed.

For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the most influential liberal thinkers in history, the purpose of government was not to do the will of the people but rather to maintain liberty which for him was roughly equivalent to equality. I think it's especially helpful to contrast Rousseau's concept of liberty with that of Thomas Jefferson. For any type of liberty to thrive somebody's rights have to be limited. For example, my liberty to drive on the highway at 120mph must be restrained in order not to impinge on another's liberty to drive on the same highway without the fear of death. While for Jefferson, liberty primarily meant the freedom of individuals from government's restraint and only secondarily from other individual's restraint, for Rousseau liberty primarily meant the freedom of individuals from other individual's restraint and only secondarily from the government's restraint. To put it another way, for Jefferson, the best society was one in which individuals restrained government from restraining individuals. For Rousseau, the best society was one in which government restrained individuals from restraining other individuals.

As you read again that last sentence again, I know what you're thinking: "Sounds like Post-modernism to me!" But it wasn't yet and here's why. Rousseau’s signature, and most famous, quote about man being born free but everywhere in chains is in fact the ironic, though surely unforeseen, result of his liberal experiment. To free some, they put others in chains and end up perpetuating the cycle of violence. In Rousseau's case, government restraint, even a government with the noble goals of liberty, ended up manifesting itself in the form of the Reign of terror. Another example of government imposition to engineer the perfect society could be the Spanish Inquisition. Another could be the classic case of Hitler’s bitterness over the post WWI situation in Germany and thus his seeking utopia for the German people while “enslaving” another. Then the victors, as if to rectify the situation created a land in Palestine for these and other Jews with the ideal of “freedom” which only ends up starting a new cycle of violence by displaced Palestinians. If we attempt to rectify that situation, we only create more injustice by unsettling settled second and third generation Israelis. It seems that every time we try to do justice we end up creating more injustice. Every time we try to create liberty or "space" for one, we end up restraining liberty and impinging upon another. Is there any way to break the cycle?

Because I’m not a parent quite yet, I tend to first look at the political rather than parental side. The classical liberal experiment is indeed not all it was cracked up to be (another reason to vote for Ron Paul!). Giuliani (not to mention Bush, other neocons, Hillary and Edwards) certainly feel they are justified in “breaking a few million eggs while making the human omelet” to quote the article. But then again so were Hitler & Mussolini. That is the nature of Orwell’s Big Brother. Liberty as equality and peace for everyone ends up creating injustice in the process.

In a sense you can equate the “Utopians”, as the article calls them, with the Modernist/Enlightenment/Classical Liberal mindset who thought reason & science were the answer to all our problems and the “Realists”, as the article calls them, with the Post-Modern/Classical Conservative mindset who realized the mistake of the Moderns but overreacted by enthroning individualism and greed as the only viable modus operandi. Liberal utopia is a very different place than Post-modern reality. I can’t put myself firmly in either camp but I can say this: I think neither view completely captures the best picture but I think there are important characteristics that I take from both. Combine the hope of the Moderns with the humility of the Post-Moderns and you get what I’d like to call my position. You can call me a “Hopeful Realist”. This middle stance is especially formative for my view on the choice between public schooling and private/home-schooling to get back to subject of the Wall Street Journal article.

Whether we like it or not, the situation we find ourselves in (in American at least) is a failing public school system designed by a utopia-minded government intent on providing an education to all. With this failure in mind, I’m certainly not for enslaving others by raising taxes to supposedly “free” their children’s minds through public education. But, neither am I for giving up and saying “flee with your kids while you still can” while the ship continues to sink as so many of the best parents have done and continue to do. The ship of the public school system is certainly sinking and while I am not for essentially polishing the brass on the Titanic by pouring more money into the system, I am for pouring more good parents into the system. I am for Christians pouring themselves out (with allusions to Jesus pouring himself out for us) for the children who stand there staring at us from the Titanic as we float away in rafts.

When dealt defeats such as loss of the freedom of assembly to pray in schools, the politically correct culture, the drug culture, and the poor quality of education in our schools, Christians have simply retreated into foxholes and allowed the system to tumble farther. Now, imagine for a second, a flood of Christian parents pouring their hearts and souls back into the public school system, back into PTA meetings, back into curriculum committees and board of education meetings. Imagine if the best parents in America, were to have a vested interest in the public school system. Instead we quickly bailed from the ship and said, "Women and children first my ass! Me and my progeny are getting off this thing!" They can literally go to hell for all we care.

In the end, I believe it takes a parent to raise a child and I resonate strongly with Dr. Spock’s quote. But no matter how hard we try, whether we notice it or not, whether we like it or not “the village” that is culture will end up being a large part of what shapes our children. I’m neither for a totalitarian Utopian village nor for shielding our children from the village, but rather pouring ourselves out as an offering for the village and into the village.

How’s that for an idealistic essay! Just wait till I get a rude awakening as a parent of a real child!

#119 Spectrum of Views on the Bible

I recently found what looks like it's going to be a really helpful site once it gets up and running. It's a site for reviews on bible commentaries located here. It appears to be a work in progress as part of a sermon series at the author's church and as such only Genesis has been completed so far. It offers recommendations, short reviews, and tags the reviews based on several categories such as readership (i.e. whether they are more technical in nature or more for the general reader) and views of Scripture held by the author (i.e. liberal conservative and stages in between.)

Below is his spectrum of possible views on Scripture. If you were to ask me before I had seen this list which of the labels I would like to pick for myself I would probably have said moderate evangelical, if any. But I'm surprised to learn that as I look through his definitions, I actually find myself more between his moderate evangelical and moderate mainliner categories.

Conservative evangelicals strongly support the verbal inspiration and authority of the scriptures, tend to accept and defend the authorship claims of the Bible and of ancient tradition, and to resist explaining away what the text claims about history and the supernatural.

Moderate evangelicals tend to adopt more complex views of authorship while still holding to the inspiration and authority of the scriptures; moderate evangelicals differ from conservative evangelicals in emphasis if not in substance by the heavier interpretive weight they give to the contrast between the ancient and modern world-views.

I am somewhere in here although I lean closer to the moderate mainliner position but I think I am firmly here. In other words, I can see myself in future wrestling with the two positions closest to me but feel that neither the conservative evangelical or liberal mainliners positions represent reality.

Moderate mainliners see the Bible consisting of historically-conditioned human descriptions of the saving and revelatory acts of God; while the primary revelatory initiative may still rest with God, moderate mainliners differ from moderate evangelicals in that they no longer describe God's initiative as verbal inspiration.

Liberal mainliners, while not necessarily eliminating God's revelatory role, see the Bible as consisting of the gradually evolving human search for God; this perspective emphasizes the theologizing and politicizing by the human writers.

Like the moderate mainliners, I shy away from words like inspiration because I feel that it carries a 21st century meaning that I'm not sure was Paul's meaning in his quote about the inspiration of the OT. The word authority has a bit of baggage as well but I think seen in the right light in can be a fine characterization of the Bible's role for the church. I also firmly believe that the Bible represents "historically-conditioned human descriptions of the saving and revelatory acts of God.

Where do you stand?