Geering at 92

Late last year Lloyd Geering, New Zealand's best known progressive theologian (heck, the country's best known theologian full-stop), spoke with Finlay Macdonald at Auckland Museum.  The podcast is still available. Geering, now 92, has been disturbing the Christian comfort zone for many decades, and is the author of many books including Such Is Life!, discussed on Otagosh a year ago, and Christianity Without God.

McGrath on the Akedah

The Akedah is the incident involving Abraham, Isaac and a lethal knife. James McGrath makes some worthwhile observations.

Isn’t it time to stop attempting to harmonize what’s in the Bible, and allow that greatest of Biblical principles, the Golden Rule, to trump, invalidate, and expose as wrong those parts of the Bible that run counter to it? If we ask “What would Jesus do?”, surely the evidence from the sayings attributed to him in the New Testament suggest that he would allow one passage to override another, just as he allowed humanitarian concerns to take priority over the command to rest on the sabbath. Shouldn’t those who wish to call themselves Jesus’ followers approach the Bible in the same way?

The End quote

We run amok if we get involved in the details.  Almost all Biblical comment on the subject is metaphor--words in search of words to describe the indescribable... When you literalize it, though, everything turns kind of sour.  The Book of Revelation is actually a wonderful poem...  When you start fussing about how many horns the demons have, or the precise timetable of this or that, then, as we used to say on the farm, "Mister, you're driving your ducks to a mighty poor pond."

John Petty on Progressive Involvement

From Sabbath to Sunday

When and why did the Jewish believers in Jesus "cross the tracks" from a Sabbath-observant community to Sunday observance?  If you have a Seventh-day Adventist or Armstrong-influenced Church of God background, chances are you've read a lot of historical reconstruction on this issue.  Much of this, if your experience has been anything like mine, has been a cheap mixture of proof texting, wishful thinking, and blunt apologetics.

A generation ago the battle cry went up again when SDA scholar Samuele Bacchiocchi published a dissertation called From Sabbath to Sunday. It was a remarkable accomplishment considering Bacchiocchi carried out his studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Shortly thereafter screams of outrage emerged from the evangelical establishment, and Zondervan released a volume, edited by D. A. Carson, with the title From Sabbath to Lord's Day.  More recently Henry Sturcke, a former Worldwide Church of God minister, stirred the embers with his own dissertation, published by Theologischer Verlag Zurich (TVZ) entitled Encountering the Rest of God. 

As far as I recollect, none of these authors mentioned a possible Mandaean connection.

The Mandaeans are a little-known community that traces its origins back to John the Baptist.  While that claim is sometimes disputed by Christian and Islamic scholars, there's no doubting that the Mandaeans themselves believe it, and that they have long been a feature on the religious landscape in Iraq (though now increasingly forced into diaspora.)

Here's a brief excerpt from the second chapter of the Mandaean Book of John. The words are ascribed to John the Baptist.

I stand by the authority of my father and with the commendation of my creator, The Man. I have built no house in Judea, nor founded a throne in Jerusalem. I have no love for the rosy wreath, nor the company of beautiful women. I have not loved imperfection, nor the cup of the drunkard. I have not loved the food of the body, nor has envy any foothold in me. I have not neglected my vespers, nor left the wondrous Jordan. I have not shirked my baptizing, nor the sealing with the sign of purity.

So far, so gnostic. But then the text states.

I have not forgotten Sunday and its evening has not accused me of neglecting it. (Translation by Robert Price in The Pre-Nicene New Testament.)

An editorial footnote reads; "Sunday is the holy day of the Mandaeans, who follow the Essene custom of bowing to the rising sun each day. Christians came from the same sectarian matrix and seem to have retained Sunday worship, later locating the resurrection of Jesus on that day to give it a uniquely Christian meaning."

It is, to say the least, an intriguing suggestion.

It's 1844 all over again

Harold Camping is the William Miller of the early twenty first century.

Miller had a couple of flubs before hitting on October 22 1844. The faithful were "ready to rise" on April 18, and there had been a previous expectation a year before that.

Recalculations were made, and the date was adjusted. It didn't make any difference of course.

Miller seems to have been a sincere man. Can we say the same of Camping? Is it even faintly defensible for anyone today to build a doomsday doctrine based on the symbolic numbers in ancient texts, Hebrew, Greek or Mayan for that matter? Miller thought so, but he had few of the advantages available to those of us living today. Even a moron in a hurry now knows the Bible can't be read aside from some basic critical qualifications, just ask Al Mohler.

And Camping had the clear example of Miller's failure, along with a host of similar predictions since.

Now he's adopted the Miller strategy: He made a bit of a mistake by failing to factor in x. But no worries, it's still all good. And land-sakes, he's even come up with an October date! The 21st!

Unlike 1844, when it took time to spread "the good word" of the End, today news is communicated as it happens. Miller's final prediction is the one we all remember. But Camping has fired his cannon early, and the whole world heard it. His supporters have already spent their savings on billboards for the wrong date.

Miller was merely self-deluded; Camping is a fool.

Quotable

After a monogamous relationship with the KJB for so many centuries, when will the English-speaking Christian community stop its promiscuous affairs with so many Bible translations?

The "Rev. Dr." Peter Carrell
A Personage of some significance in the Anglican Church in New Zealand
Writing in Anglican Taonga.

Dear, sweet lord, where to begin with this one?

NIV - milestone or millstone?

This is the year the current incarnation of the New International Version of the Bible that we all know (and either love or detest) joins the dinosaurs. Also receiving the heave-ho is Today's New International Version. In their place let another arise, NIV 2011. It might not be obvious from the cover, but the text has had a major retread since the last one in 1984.

The NIV has always been an agenda-driven translation, and the agenda is evangelical. The introduction to the NIV Study Bible says it quite clearly:

All [scholars involved] confess the authority of the Bible as God's infallible word to humanity... Doctrinally, the NIV Study Bible reflects traditional evangelical theology.

Which is at least up-front. Beloved of evangelical Christians, the 1984 NIV has become the translation of choice for many, and perhaps most, and the officially sanctioned version of several denominations (including GCI). When the TNIV was launched in 2001 however, it was not received with a chorus of hallelujahs. Conservative evangelicals, knickers tightly knotted, were selectively appalled at the updated language, and especially the move to be more gender inclusive. Plans to replace the NIV with it were quickly withdrawn.

That said, the TNIV seems a far improved translation. Gender inclusive language is the way we speak today, whether the old NIV curmudgeons like it or not. The two versions were however still shackled together. The introduction to the NIV Study Bible (2008) begins: "The New International Version of the Bible (NIV) is unsurpassed in accuracy, clarity and literary grace." Be that as it may, the introduction to the TNIV Study Bible (2006) begins: "Today's New International Version of the Bible is unsurpassed in accuracy, clarity and literary grace." Uh? Okay... maybe someone can explain how that could be...

And of course, identical words to those first quoted above are also used to outline the excellencies of the TNIV's evangelical credentials. The new edition will be more of the same, but a more cautious foray into the twenty-first century than TNIV attempted. It's intended to replace both the existing NIV and TNIV, so get your copies while stocks last. But it must now compete with the ESV, another agenda-driven translation with even greater pretensions, despite being little more than a doctored rehash of the old 1950s RSV. Sadly, the really worthwhile English versions sell far fewer copies because they don't pander to biblicist insecurities.

The 2011 NIV has already hit the bookshelves, though I haven't seen one in my corner of the Antipodes yet. I suspect, though, that it too will be "unsurpassed in accuracy, clarity and literary grace."