bible haiku

I was tagged by Kay from Ephemeral Thoughts with this blog meme called “The Bible in 5 Statements”:

Summarize the Bible in five statements, the first one word long, the second two words long, the third three words long, the fourth four words long and the last five words long. Or possibly you could do this in descending order. Tag five people.

I’m sticking with her “bible haiku” label because it sounds that way to me too. I found it hard to write without being glib and it makes me realize how divided my perspectives on the bible are. But here’s mine:

secrets forever hidden in time
beautiful, cruel, and tedious
cleverly spun tales
man’s yearning
hegemony

Profound, huh?  :P

I couldn’t figure who would want to be tagged, so consider yourself tagged if you want to be. Below are other participants Kay listed. There are a number of great blogs there, only a few of which I have read before, definitely worth checking out.

Episcopalifem

The Websight of Unknowing

Eternal Echoes

Glocal Christianity

Steve Hayes

Yewtree

Zoecarnate

The Hopeful Skeptic

Homebrewed Christianity

The Girl Who Cried Epiphany

Tanzania and James

Carpenter’s Shoes

Him Called Bean

A Spirit Like the Wind

Missio Dei

Wondering Wandering Thoughts

Gentle Wisdom

Lingamish

Mystikos

Stranger in a Strange Land

Ben’s Blog

Light and Storm

ghosts from the past

When I entered 7th grade our school guidance counselor gave an introductory talk to incoming students that in some way invoked the topic of the supernatural. I think he was making a general point that there are things out there in life which are bigger than we realize, but I do not remember the details, it did not make much of an impression on me at the time. I only remembered the talk several years later when other events brought it to mind.

For several years in high school I participated in a creative problem solving competition and the same guidance counselor was our coach. Through the time we spent together travelling to events we developed a nice friendship. When I was in eleventh grade we traveled to the University of Akron in Ohio for the national competition and roomed in a dormitory at Kent State University, just outside the city of Akron. While we were there he told an interesting story to our team of four guys.

His wife had attended Kent State University and was there in the May of 1970 at the time of the Kent State shootings when four students were killed by rifle fire from members of the Ohio State National Guard. My guidance counselor and his wife were friends of one of the victims. Returning to the campus was a traumatic experience for him. Earlier that evening he had met some other coaches who were close in age to him and they visited the site of the shootings. I remember him describing a sculpture there which has bullet holes from that day. When they were at the sculpture they started yelling into the night sky in an expression of anger and anguish as they remembered those events and that time in their lives.

Somehow that story transitioned to another college memory of his, I think because he was in an introspective mood following his experiences that evening. When he was in college his best friend had a roommate who would wake up in the night and say things in his sleep. Allegedly he would sit up in bed and say, “Mommy, Daddy, Joey’s on fire!” in a high pitched, child like voice. When awoken he would not remember any details at all. Further connecting the behavior with the supernatural, he described one night when a group of students was playing with a ouija board down the hall and the sleep talker sat up in bed and added more details to his usual mantra, including the name of a town.

The following summer my guidance counselor and his friend took a road trip after graduating college and stopped at that town. They somehow looked up records of fires in the town, or perhaps it was some other detail they used to connect the sleep talking with an actual event, I no longer remember the details. They were able to locate the name of a boy named Joseph who had been killed in a fire along with his family. The two guys found the address and stopped to take some pictures. When they returned home after the trip and had the film developed, all the pictures but those of the fire location turned out fine, only the pictures of the fire location turned out overexposed.

Pretty scary stuff to be hearing from an adult late at night, but for me it got worse. One of my friends on the trip was a Christian and had been sharing his testimony with me for years. The thing that always surprised me was the way he described Christianity in very manner of fact terms. It was never, “I believe this or that…” but rather, “This is why this happens…” kind of explanations based on the bible and his fundamentalist religion. He was someone I really looked up and to this day may be the most intelligent person I have ever met. I asked him what he made of the story and in his matter of fact way he explained that the boys’ mother was a witch who deliberately started the fire the boy died in. The sleep talker had been possessed by demons with knowledge of the event.

While somewhat incredulous that he could know with a degree of certainty what happened in the spiritual realm, I was none the less convinced that something very real was going on in this spiritual realm he described, which up to that point I had been rather skeptical of. I did not sleep very well alone in my concrete block dorm room I was so scared. That is likely the first time I ever prayed for help from God.

To this day I do not know what to make of the story. While I am not especially inclined to defer to the supernatural for explanations of events, I do not know what happened either. Clearly there are many possibilities. I do know my guidance counselor was haunted by those events and they have affected him to this day. I know my friend with the supernatural answers has crazier supernatural answers now than when I knew him in high school. And I know I still do not care to delve into ghost stories or the occult, even apart from Christian injunctions against involvement with spiritualism. It is still a scary story to me to be honest. Man’s decent into darkness and madness can be very real regardless of its source.

thankfulness

I am thankful for many things this Thanksgiving, but would like to take a moment here to thank every single person who has posted a comment on this blog. I am grateful for the support, challenges, care, and friendships I have experienced through your contributions. Also to those who read and do not comment, I am thankful you find something worth visiting for and that you take the time to do so. You are AMAZING, the godless, the God full, and everyone in between.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

atheists in broom closets

One of my best friends had a gig a number of years ago working on an island in the Caribbean for a time. It was a pretty sweet deal; the job entailed monitoring a portable sludge dewatering belt press which did not need a lot of monitoring. Which meant making periodic adjustments to the equipment which was on the beach in between sessions of snorkeling. Adding to the sweetness, the visa he worked under only allowed for him to be in the country for two weeks at a time, with two weeks off required before he could return. So he “worked” two, eighty hour weeks at a time, accruing vast amounts of overtime pay, and then had two weeks off back home in the States, where he was working to start up his own business. Real nice.

At some point the bliss of the assignment was temporarily broken by the visitation of a hurricane to the island. Fortunately for him the housing his company had obtained for him was a concrete block structure. My friend and his co-worker took refuge in a very small broom closet during the storm and spent I think most of a day and night there together. The door was loose and would loudly slam back and forth as gusts of wind hit, accompanied by deafeningly loud wind noises. He felt quite certain they would not survive.

At some point he was feeling understandably desperate and considered praying to God for help. But at that point he reminded himself he did not believe in God and so it would be hypocritical to pray. He consiously went against instinct to resist praying, feeling the need to maintain some form of intellectual integrity even in the midst of a potentially life threatening circumstance.

I was a committed Christian when he told me the story and I am sure he told me about his lack of prayer in order to explain to me his own spiritual beliefs, or lack thereof. Some would attribute his desire to pray on an inward awareness of the reality of God that had been created within him, Romans 1:19: “…because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them…” (NASB). Of course it would also be easy to explain his thoughts in terms of a person needing help where no human help would be forthcoming.

He did obviously survive to tell the tale. While most of the residences in the area were flattened his concrete block house survived intact. A testimony to God’s intervention? Or perhaps safety due to the sturdier construction available to Americans on the island? I do not remember feeling inclined to favor either interpretation at the time. I think that is the point of this post, that faith should be something people can hold on to as a personal choice, but that it is valid as well to interpret evidence as it is presented to us, as what seems most likely. It has been said that there are no atheists in foxholes, which is a cliche has been amply disproven. It would appear that atheists reside in broom closets at times as well.

an inerrant bible

I have been muddling through the issue of biblical inerrancy recently, reading some articles and listening to some lectures. I do not find it surprising that people believe in the inerrancy of the bible, people hold beliefs like that at many different levels, and I held to some form of that belief myself at one time. But I am intrigued by the systems of biblical inerrancy contrived by theologians and they way they hold to these systems as essential elements of their faith. The more I study the issue of biblical inerrancy and the different ways people of faith read the bible, the more these systems of biblical inerrancy seem contrived and untenable. I want to better understand why highly intelligent and well educated theologians hold to these theories.

While the thelogians provide support for their theories and go to great lengths to harmonize “appearant contradictions” and defend their reading of the bible, at the end they typically include a profession that ultimately they believe the Holy Spirit provides them with an “inner witness” attesting to the inerrancy of the bible. Which is well and good perhaps, but then why the desire to create and defend a comprehensive doctrine of biblical inerrancy?

The justification for the belief seems to come down not so much to the evidence they find for it but to a need they feel for it to exist, a need to believe that God must communicate clearly with people, hence the inerrant bible. Of course there needs to be a correlary assumption that the bible indeed speaks clearly, and also that we need the bible to speak clearly about God in the first place. I suspect that perceived need is related in a large degree to the belief that we will go to Hell if we don’t believe the right things. If God will send us to Hell for believing things incorrectly, then it goes to reason he would choose to communicate that clearly. But of course the belief that we will go to Hell for believing the wrong things comes from the bible itself in the first place… It becomes such a hopelessly circular set of arguments, spirals within spirals within spirals.

As is often the case, arguments that exist to defend something hoped for rather than something evidenced tend to fall short logically and factually. I have heard it asked, “Wouldn’t you want to be confident the contents of the bible are inerrant?” My answer is certainly yes, but unfortunately wishing for something does not make it demonstrably true. As with so many things in life, the reality is often more complicated and messier than we would desire. Black and white perspectives may be more comfortable, but that doesn’t always make them more truthful. If anything, wishing for something hard enough has the result of clouding our ability to see things clearly and rationally.

Reading some of these theologian’s arguments sounds to me at times like reading the writings of a Lord of the Rings afficionado arguing a point about the role of Hobbits in the history of Middle Earth, or something like that. In a way the theologian and the Tolkein afficionado are in similar positions, arguing for the reality of something only evidenced by human writings. Sure you can argue for logical consistency within the created system of doctrines, but that is not an indication of whether or not the created system is real or imaginary. And the further the theologian goes to support their doctrine, the more they sound as though they are defending something imaginary. Even if the imagined things were true there would not be an indication they were. And unfortunately belief in biblical inerrancy requires not only faith in the supernatural, but also a rejection of evidence from the material world we live in. At that point the belief is at best unevidenced, and at worst imaginary.

————————————————————————-
A few sources:

The Inerrancy of Scripture, Wayne Grudem (audio lecture)

Fundamentalism and the Word of God, J.I. Packer (book)

The Authority of Scripture, Mark Dever (brief transcript of talk)

The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?”, F.F. Bruce (book)

“Exploring Our Matrix”, James McGrath (blog). Here are a couple of examples.

are literary motifs true?

In a podcast about Paul’s conversion experience on the road to Damascus, Mark Goodacre (Professor of Religion, Duke University) asks the question: Was it really “on the Damascus Road?” He discusses how the author of Luke/Acts regularly uses the theme of travel on roads to bring up key events; the story of the good Samaritan who met his fellow man while on the road, the disciples being told of Jesus’ resurrection while they were on the road to Emmaus, and the Ethiopian eunuch meeting Phillip while travelling.

While hypothesizing about a literary motif, Goodacre notes that he is not saying that Luke was “making it all up out of whole cloth”, but rather that he seems to have crafted his stories around this motif of travelling. Perhaps Luke was a traveller himself and events often happened to him while on the road. Or maybe he saw the Christian walk as a journey and so describes events through that theme in his narratives, similar to the way he used the term “The Way” in describing Christianity.

Ultimately it shouldn’t matter where the event took place, and the story makes clear that an important event took place in Paul’s life wherever the locale. A progressive Christian who views the stories with the possibility of allegory can take home the message that Paul experienced a conversion just as can the literalist/inerrantist who believes the story is a verbatim, eyewitness account of the events. It doesn’t matter whether Paul being on a road at the time was a literary motif used by Luke, does it?

What can a literalist/inerrantist make of this literary motif? That since the disciples of Jesus were a travelling bunch it would be natural for key events to take place while on the road? That God supernaturally caused these key events to take place in a way that would ultimately form a literary motif? That there really is no literary motif, because Luke describes plenty of other events that do not take place on roads? That the Greek word for roads could really mean “place,” and therefore…

I don’t know if a classic conservative inerrantist could listen to this podcast and appreciate the inquiry Goodacre is making. Now no doubt Goodacre’s theory of literary motif is debatable even by a person who would allow for Luke to be creating a literary motif. It is just a theory which attempts to provide insight into the material. But isn’t a person better off if they can consider all the options available? Does the conservative approach really allow for intellectual freedom if one cannot consider certain options of a text? Is an appreciation for a certain richness in the texts lost? Is that what it means to be a slave to Christ, to shut off part of your mind and refrain from asking certain questions? That is how I felt when I started asking crazy questions about the bible.

At the end of the day, either a progressive or a conservative Christian should be able to take away the central tenet of the story, that Paul experienced a conversion. But wait, was it really a conversion? That is Goodacre’s second question. Listen to the podcast to find out! It is only about 12 minutes long. :^)

demanding conclusions

Shroud of Turin

In discussing what makes the bible special, Josh McDowell makes the claim that “although [the bible] was composed by men, its unity reveals the hand of the Almighty.” He writes about how the bible was composed across millennia, continents, and cultures by people of diverse backgrounds.

To make his point that this is a sign of the miraculous, he suggests this challenge:

“Find ten people from your local area having similar backgrounds, who speak the same language, and all are from basically the same culture. Then separate them and ask them to write their opinion on only one controversial subject, such as the meaning of life.”

When they have finished, compare the conclusions of these ten writers. Do they agree with each other? Of course not. But the Bible did not consist of merely ten authors, but forty. It was not written in one generation, but over a period of 1,500 years; not by authors with the same education, culture and language, but with vastly different education, many different cultures, from three continents and three different languages, and finally not just one subject but hundreds.”

I suggest this alternate scenario:

Find ten people who speak the same language and are all from basically the same culture. Ensure they all grew up in the same local church and assent to its basic creeds. Ask them to write their opinion on a particular controversial subject.

When you read these compositions, compare them to your own opinion about that subject. If a paper does not reflect your opinion, throw it in the trash. Then study the remaining documents . If you find any inconsistencies that can be changed with simple modifications to the text, go ahead and do so. Also feel free to make slight revisions for clarity if the writer’s opinion could potentially be construed as disagreeing with your belief.

Do they agree with each other? Of course they do! Do all four validate the initially held premise? Could it be said that the core message of the documents is unchanged despite any minor variations between the papers?

Now let’s see what McDowell concludes about the unity of the biblical texts:

“There is complete harmony, which cannot be explained by coincidence or collusion. The unity of the Bible is a strong argument in favor of its divine inspiration. The unity of the Scriptures is only one reason among many which supports the Bible’s claim to be the divine Word of God.”

McDowell is creating a false dilemma in claiming this type of unity for the bible. The only reason a skeptic would reject this view of biblical unity in the first place is because there are apologists making the claim. Is the evidence as strong as McDowell would make it out to be? And if the evidence is not that strong, should it be held onto so tightly as incontrovertible truth? Or can it be held to simply as humble faith, something a person believes while admitting the evidence for the belief is incomplete?

There are many Christians who view the bible as inspired and essential without accepting the assumptions that go into McDowell’s defense of scripture. The evidence he presents does not demand the verdict he wants it to, rather it is the apologist himself asserting the verdict while expecting people to accept his evidence at face value. People who find faith from the words of the bible should be working to get people to dig deeper than that, not to persuade them to accept evidence which has been tailored to fit the author’s initial assumptions.

saving darwin

Picked up this book at the library, Saving Darwin, How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, by Karl Giberson, after searching the card catalog on the words, “christian” and “evolution.” I ended up very impressed with it.

I’ll admit I find studying Christianity fascinating, enjoying learning about it in ways I wasn’t able to before, ways which would have been too unorthodox to consider. And I am past feeling a need to prove or disprove anything, it is great just to learn.

So authors like Giberson interest me in the way they work their faith around issues like evolution without falling prey to the false dichotomy that says one has to believe in a 6,000 year old earth in order to be a Christian. While my church did not make young earth creationism a statement of faith, in practice it was encouraged and is what the majority believed. The power of peer pressure and social influence can easily become the tyranny of the majority, and I always felt out of place believing in an old earth and evolution.

Giberson’s book focuses a lot on the history of fundamentalism and how creationism came to be incorporated in that particular and peculiar variety of beliefs. Which I like, because I am a history nut, and because I really, really don’t like fundamentalism. This book covers the ground between the extremes of theistic creationism and atheistic evolutionary theory. Evolution and belief in God do not need to be mutually exclusive, and there is a lot of room to work the middle ground. And the book does not hold back from criticism directed towards both those views.

It turns out that evangelicalism and fundamentalism were not always inexorably linked to creationism as they can seem to be today. According to the author the idea was asserted later by others (in particular 7th Day Adventists) and was eventually grafted into fundamentalist dogma.

Giberson discusses an early famous (infamous?) series of essays titled The Fundamentals:

What was remarkable about these discussions of evolution, however, was the almost total absence of the six-day creationist viewpoint. Leading “fundamentalist” thinkers spoke approvingly of progressive creationism, historical linkages between species, and an ancient earth.
…
Clearly, even leaders concerned with defining and protecting the fundamentals of Christianity shared no consensus on what Christians should think about evolution.

Critiques of this middle ground abound. Jerry Coyne, author of the book, Why Evolution is True, offers a review of the book (warning, it’s long). In reviewing this book and another on the same topic by Ken Miller, Coyne states:

“Both of their books are worth reading… yet in the end they fail to achieve their longed-for union between faith and evolution. And they fail for the same reason that people always fail: a true harmony between science and religion requires either doing away with most people’s religion and replacing it with a watered-down deism, or polluting science with unnecessary, untestable, and unreasonable spiritual claims.”

I can see where Coyne is coming from and why he draws those conclusions. I think his work on presenting the evidence for evolution is important, and I think Giberson’s book in helping Christians view that evidence is important as well. But presenting evidence for evolution wrapped in an atheistic package is not going to be palatable for young earth creationists, and I don’t think it is necessary. I guess Coyne doesn’t feel a dichotomy between science and religion is a false one any more than Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis does. But I am grateful for those seeking common ground in the middle. Even where I don’t agree with them I feel they are trying to reconcile people to more reasonable beliefs one way or another.

For further reading, Giberson’s own brief response to Coyne’s analyses can be read here. Mystery Seeker provides a thoughtful analysis of Coyne’s perspective. And Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine interviewed Giberson, the videos can be viewed viewed here. Giberson described his interaction with Michael Shermer very positively. I find Michael Shermer to be a fantastic interviewer. Here he conducts an amazing interview at the Creation Museum.

And no, I haven’t read all those articles in their entirety or watched the videos!

bread and wine

He who is not with Me is against Me; and he who does not gather with Me scatters.
Matthew 12:25

Years ago my wife and I attended a wedding of Catholic friends of ours. We were cautioned ahead of time by our friend that communion would be offered only to Catholics, she wanted to make sure we knew that ahead of time and would not be offended. So we remained seated in our pew with a number of other a-Catholics during communion. I remember feeling a bit put off, not by our friends choice to be Catholic but by a church that would practice exclusivity to the degree that we as True Believing Christians would not be able to join them in communion.

We didn’t practice communion that way at our old evangelical church. Well not until a few years ago anyway. At some point the invitation to communion was changed to include a phrase to the effect of, “As this communion meal is for those who believe in Jesus Christ and have given their lives to him, we ask that those who do not share our faith refrain from partaking…” Or something like that. I didn’t like when that change was made, always felt uncomfortable thinking of how it would make people feel, and didn’t like the division it communicated. Did God need to have his holiness defended that way? Would we be in danger of giving false assurance to those not saved? I’m sure there were reasons, at that point I was not engaged in a way to try to learn what they were or to try to resolve them.

I was reminded of all this when we were at the service last night of the new evangelical church we have been visiting. I had taken communion there previously once, the invitation was about shared community and I felt OK about that. But last night the invitation specifically excluded those who did not “believe in Jesus as Lord.” So I stayed in my seat. I didn’t really mind, to be honest it protected me from struggling with hypocrisy, after all, why would I partake in communion if that is not what I believed?

It was harder for my wife than for me, highlighting again that I don’t believe all the same things I used to. And I was made more aware of the church as a social institution that is not only about joining in a certain set of beliefs but also about enforcing them. And the rules at the heart of evangelical Christianity speak of exclusivity by design, and a message of bringing people into that exclusivity, not opening the doors to join with others inclusively. That’s fine with me, I don’t need to be making the rules. But it leaves me wanting to say, “That’s fine, I know where I’m not wanted.”

existential crises

I guess the good part about suffering through relational crises as my beliefs have changed is that they have overshadowed any existential crisis I might have experienced during the past year. Gotta look on the bright side. I wonder if those will come to the surface at some point.