Back in the early 1990s, The Humanist magazine interviewed the famous producer Gene Roddenberry, creator of the TV show Star Trek. The first series had been off the air for years and was long into syndication. Roddenberry was in the process of cranking out its eagerly-awaited sequel, Star Trek: The Next Generation — soon to prove yet another great hit.
The interviewer got the famous producer chatting about the relationship between the show and his own secular humanist beliefs.
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I’m on the fence about the compulsive need of Western Christian minds to harmonize every instance of apparent contradiction in the Bible’s historical accounts. On the one hand, the critics need to be defanged and each upcoming generation of young believers inoculated from the skepticism they breed. On the other, I am personally comfortable with the knowledge that the originals of these manuscripts passed muster with generations that lived much closer to or even during the events these accounts preserve.
If these believers did not find fault or write defenses to similar criticisms in their own day, why would we imagine we are better at spotting errors than they were?
From a literary perspective, I find the resolution of the book of Job perfectly satisfying. Sure, it’s a whole other world culturally, it’s translated from another language, and it’s incredibly ancient, which means the uncertainty of the Hebrew text for this word or that figure of speech is footnoted more often than in other scriptures. That said, it’s a tremendous piece of writing, and God’s four-chapter response to Job’s perplexity and distress is its epic and poetic climax.
From a theological perspective, however, modern Christian readers may walk away from the book’s conclusion feeling something significant about the problem of human suffering still needs addressing.
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“What does it mean that everything is meaningless?”
Today’s question comes from the NIV’s rendering of the second verse of Ecclesiastes. The NIV is one of only two English translations out of the most common 35 that has elected to go with the word “meaningless” in this context. People are far more familiar with the King James: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”
The vast majority of English translations (21 of 35) follow the KJV.
Matthew’s gospel is the very first thing we read in the New Testament, and we tend to think of it as coming early in church history; I know I used to before I looked into it. In fact, Matthew circulated his gospel close to three decades after the events it describes, long enough for Galatians, both Thessalonian epistles, both Corinthian epistles and Romans to predate it and make the rounds of the first century churches.
Question: Did Matthew understand the allegedly-Pauline doctrine of justification by faith when he recorded his version of the Lord’s genealogy in chapter 1 of his gospel? You betcha.
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Ahab listened to a lying spirit sent out from the presence of God. He consequently perished in battle. It was inevitable. The Lord had purposed to put him to death. He knew Ahab would follow the word of four hundred false prophets telling him exactly what he already wanted to hear rather than one lone man with the truth of God in his mouth.
Thus, the will of God profoundly influenced Ahab without Ahab having the slightest personal insight into it, and without him deriving any benefit from it.
As we will see, our twelfth judge had far too much in common with Ahab.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
In an article appropriately entitled “Premarital Sex: Is It A Sin Or Not?” Charles Toy of TheChristianLeft.org contends it’s … not:
“There is no passage of the Bible that references premarital sex as a sin against God. The association between sin and premarital sex is a new Christian idea. The only possible reference to premarital sex being a sin in the Bible is in the New Testament. This premise although, is generally dismissed by theologians because the Greek word pornei, or sexual immorality is commonly incorrectly translated into the English word fornication.”
Tom: Immanuel Can, what say you?
Some years ago, Dr. Gordon Marino, the ethicist, wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Before Teaching Ethics, Stop Kidding Yourself”.
In this article, Marino complained of the cottage industry of posers and pseudo-experts we have today who dispense advice to us about how we ought to conduct our moral lives. Ethics, he argued, are not so much a matter of specialized knowledge as of ordinary people doing what they already knew to do.
If you’ve been involved in many home Bible studies over the years, you have probably noticed that no two Christians read a verse or passage of scripture precisely the same way, draw the same conclusions from it, or see the same significance to it. The worst ideas you’ll hear are way out in left field or obviously wrong, pulled out of the air by people who likely haven’t read the passage more than once. The best of them correct you where you may have erred, or supplement your own understanding with nuances you may have missed.
Maturity, experience, gift, intellect and Bible study habits all factor into the differences. Whenever you ask folks what they think about a scripture, be prepared for an earful.
Men and women discuss their differences of opinion … well, differently.
Unless a woman is completely out of control, she will generally pepper her assertions with endless qualifications, disclaimers and occasional flattery. These allow her to walk back any criticism not well received. Men frequently just go at it hammer and tongs with little concern whether the other party finds it hurtful or offensive. We are trying to get at the truth, and we are often too careless of both feelings and fine detail in the process.
In our favor, we are not generally mealy mouthed.
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“Should Christians spank their children?”
I have experienced spanking from both ends. (Sorry.)
I have regularly spanked three children throughout their formative years, and maintain loving and mutually-beneficial relationships with each one to this day. I have also received the occasional judicious and quite necessary whack from a loving and reluctant parent during the lengthy period it took me to grow to maturity.
Both ways, spanking worked. I regret nothing.
“I went up … in order to make sure I was not running or had not run in vain.”
In the first two chapters of his earliest letter, the apostle Paul is concerned to establish the credentials of his gospel. The background: in Paul’s absence, religious Jews were encouraging the young Christians from the churches in Galatia to supplement their faith with vestiges of the now-obsolete Law of Moses. Paul recounts how, fourteen years after his first and only post-conversion visit to the birthplace of the Christian faith, he had chosen to return to Jerusalem once again. He also tells them why.
He wanted to make sure he “had not run in vain”.
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We have been examining the third and final appearance of the angel of the Lord in the book of Judges. In chapter 2, he rebuked Israel for its disobedience, setting the stage for both the judgments he would inflict on the nation throughout the book and the repeated miraculous deliverances these punishments would necessitate. In chapter 6, he appeared to Gideon, causing him to fear for his life. In this chapter, he appears to the woman who would shortly become Samson’s mother, and to her husband Manoah.
Manoah’s wife described the angel of the Lord as “very awesome”. She and her husband were shortly to discover he was much more than that.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
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Increasingly, studies like this one point to the strong possibility that a strictly vegan diet might actually be the healthiest for human beings, and that even consuming a small amount of meat in our diet is sufficient to increase our chances of diabetes, among other things.
These studies may well be accurate (though, as with all assertions of the scientific community these days, I tend to reserve judgment until we see all the consequences of a purely vegan diet in a representative sample of the human population over a generation or two). But for the sake of argument, let’s give these studies the benefit of the doubt and assume they represent truth and not simply another scientific boondoggle.
Tom: So, the obvious question ...