Book Review: The Lost World of Scripture, by Walton and Sandy, Parts 1-3

Review of The Lost World of Scripture
by John H. Walton and D. Brent Sandy

Part 1

Review by Carlos Bovell

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2014/01/review-of-the-lost-world-of-scripture-walton-and-sandy-by-carlos-bovell/

by Peter Enns

January 20, 2014

Comments

Today’s post is the first part of a book review by Carlos Bovell, who has been a guest here numerous times (most recently here). Carlos is a graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary and The Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto. He is the author of Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation of Younger Evangelicals (2007), By Good and Necessary Consequence: A Preliminary Genealogy of Biblical Foundationalism (2009), an edited volume, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Authority of Scripture (2011), and Rehabilitating Inerrancy in a Culture of Fear (2012).

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There’s a new book on the authority of scripture by John Walton and D. Brent Sandy (OT and NT professors respectively at Wheaton College) that I would encourage inerrantists to take the time to read: The Lost World of Scripture: Ancient Literary Culture and Biblical Authority.

The authors explain up front their motive for writing the book. When they talk about the literary world of the Bible in class, students would stay after to ask privately “the” question: “Why do we still use the word inerrancy?”

“It’s an inevitable question,” Walton and Sandy observe, “which the evidence raises on its own” (9). Their aim in writing the book, they explain, is to convince students not to give up on the authority of scripture, especially those who may be on “the brink of turning away” (9).

This is the same reason I began to write about inerrancy, although my concern was not to change the minds of students who were about to “turn away,” but rather to address evangelical leaders and teachers and warn them that they need to be more careful in the ways they teach students about inerrancy.

In my first book, Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation of Younger Evangelicals, I described six things students learn about the Bible that inerrancy has great difficulty accounting for. It is reassuring that the topic that I considered to be the most pressing at the time—the incredibly complex process that gradually produced the collection of literature we call the Bible—is the same topic that Walton and Sandy center their book on.

Only recently has scholarly literature on orality in ancient Israel been incorporated into evangelical discussions of biblical authority. Walton and Sandy are, therefore, breaking new ground in evangelical culture by having orality in both the NT and OT play such a central role in their study of biblical authority.

For example, we read that the OT developed in a “hearing-dominant” society where documents were mostly written for “storage and consultation in archives.” This means that “[t]he general population did not own documents, had little access to documents and would be largely incapable of reading documents.” As a result, “they did not have a major role in the functions of society or in the transmission of the traditions they held” (27).

This observation cannot be emphasized enough. In a hearing-dominant culture, an “autograph” would not have had the same kind of significance as in a text-dominant culture, which means that the focus on the autographs of documents, which dominates the evangelical discussion of biblical authority and inerrancy, is anachronistic [sic,"something, or someone, that is not in its correct historical or chronological time, especially a thing or person that belongs to an earlier time. Ex: The sword is an anachronism in modern warfare - dictionary.com].

As a result, Walton and Sandy have come to understand that evangelical believers need to begin appreciating just how thoroughly immersed the Bible is in the cultural conventions of its time. Once readers see this, they will also begin to appreciate that the evangelical doctrine of inerrancy does not really get at the kind of authority the Bible has for Christian churches today.

This is a very important—and perhaps somewhat risky—point to make, one that evangelical scholars on the whole need to communicate to the evangelical public.

Despite their protests, however, Walton and Sandy are still interested in remaining inerrantists—perhaps awkwardly so. Their introductory section goes to great lengths to keep their firm commitment to inerrancy before their readers, including a lengthy quotation from the text-autograph-centered Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. For example:

“Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives” (14).

In my opinion, a rather obvious doctrinal conflict presents itself between the authors’ desire to affirm these parts of the Chicago Statement and what they find through the fruits of their scholarship:

“When we talk about the authority of Scripture, we can now see that we cannot construe authority around the idea that each book of the Bible was first constructed as a literary document—a book, by an author. . . . Some community of people, we believe under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, determined that certain individuals, as well as certain traditions unattached to specific individuals, had authority—God’s authority” (63).

It becomes difficult to see what can be understood by “verbally God-given” when in the case of the NT, for example, the authors observe:

“In the general epistles, we find no evidence that written texts began to replace oral texts. Records of things said were still being passed along orally. Oral texts were fully authoritative and were repositories of divine truth. Proclaiming the truth orally, along with people remembering what they heard, continued to be the basis of the church’s preservation of truth, propagation of the gospel and resistance to false teaching” (165–66).

Walton and Sandy are right to have us think again about what inerrancy can and can’t realistically accomplish theologically in light of orality in ancient cultures. They are also right to submit, for example, that inerrancy must allow for textual variants “even in initial editions of [Paul’s] letters” (250).

They are wrong, however, to conclude that “it is not safe to believe that inerrancy is falsified by the orality of Scripture” (303), because the type of inerrancy that the authors themselves are committed to, the one delimited by the Chicago Statement, is an entirely text-centered statement, resting entirely on the notion of a literary culture, the very culture Walton and Sandy have spent considerable effort in correcting.

It would have made more sense for them to simply assert that inerrancy, given its privileging of text-centered ways of thinking about the production of scripture, now needs to be rethought in terms of orality—and then give us models of how they think inerrancy works today given the realities of ancient oral culture.

Instead, they critique the anachronistic privileging of a literary culture, but then seem content to remain within what the Chicago Statement accepts as a simple matter of fact–the Bible as a product of a literary culture [when it was not - res]. The authors cannot tell us on the one hand that understanding orality is a corrective to assuming a literary culture for the Bible and then on the other assert the adequacy—even binding validity—of the Chicago Statement’s model of inerrancy.

The following proposition would be easier to defend in view of the book’s content: “Inerrancy as it is defined in the Chicago Statement is falsified by the orality of Scripture. And another way forward is needed that takes into account how the biblical writers, Old and New Testaments, thought.”

The question begs to be asked, why would Walton and Sandy work so hard to make clear that the Bible was produced in an oral culture, only to declare their commitment to a statement that clearly envisions a Bible that was produced in a text-dominated culture? It is difficult not to conclude that the reason has something to do with the restrictive academic culture that evangelical inerrantism has set in place. The same culture of fear that I complain about in Rehabilitating Inerrancy is severely limiting the extent that scholars like Walton and Sandy will be able to help evangelicals come to grips with the authority of the Bible.

- Carlos

[*res, re slater]

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Can speech act theory rehabilitate inerrancy?

by John H. Walton and D. Brent Sandy
Part 2

Review by Carlos Bovell

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2014/01/can-speech-act-theory-rehabilitate-inerrancy-part-2-of-carlos-bovells-review-of-the-lost-world-of-scripture/

by Peter Enns

January 31, 2014

Comments

Today, Carlos Bovell continues his review of The Lost World of Scripture: Ancient Literary Culture and Biblical Authority by John H. Walton and D. Brent Sandy (part 1 is here). Bovell is a graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary and The Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto. He is the author of Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation of Younger Evangelicals (2007), By Good and Necessary Consequence: A Preliminary Genealogy of Biblical Foundationalism (2009), an edited volume, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Authority of Scripture (2011), and Rehabilitating Inerrancy in a Culture of Fear(2012).

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The Lost World of Scripture is divided into three sections that bring to light features of the literary cultures of the OT world, the NT world, and the “biblical” world generally. In each section, the authors explain how the Bible came into being and, in light of this, how we may need to change our understanding of biblical authority.

In their introductory chapter, Walton and Sandy are clear in their intentions: at every point of the discussion they will set out to integrate the material discussed with the Chicago Statement of Inerrancy. I pointed out in my previous post that there is considerable tension between Walton and Sandy’s emphasizing of the Bible’s oral culture and their concomitant desire to adhere to the text-centered Chicago Statement of Inerrancy.

In this post, I suggest that the tension with inerrancy is also seen in Walton and Sandy’s valid observation that biblical authorship is a process “much richer and more sophisticated” than previously thought (293) and their embrace of speech act theory as a solution, insisting, for example, that “God’s authority in Scripture is… accessible through the illocution of the human communicator” (42; my emphasis).

Throughout the book, Walton and Sandy focus on how the Bible was produced in an oral culture and how the role the Bible came to play in that oral culture substantially differs from the role it later came to play in text-dominated cultures. They explain,

Given what we have learned about literary production in the ancient world, authorship and the process that led to the final form of the canonical book are simply not as relevant as we have thought to our understanding of biblical authority. We need to develop new models that are based on an understanding of the roles of authorities, the nature of documents, and the transmission of tradition in hearing-dominated societies (62).

In many ways, Walton and Sandy provide a great service for evangelicals by trying to bring critical biblical scholarship into genuine conversation with the evangelical doctrine of inerrancy. The way Walton and Sandy attempt to this is through an inerrantist appropriation of the speech act theory.

They affirm, for example:

We believe that God has inspired the locutions (words, whether spoken or written) that the communicator has used to accomplish with God their joint illocutions (which lead to an understanding of intentions, claims, affirmations and, ultimately, meaning), but that those locutions are tied to the communicator’s world (44).

Not a few inerrantist writers hold strong to the hope that speech act theory can preserve inerrancy. In my book Rehabilitating Inerrancy in a Culture of Fear, I suggest that, although this may be possible, the form that inerrancy winds up taking would hardly be recognizable to believers committed to the Chicago Statement.

Further, in light of what Walton and Sandy argue for regarding biblical authors (that there are none), not only will the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy not do, but speech act theory itself will be inadequate.

My understanding of a speech act is that in order for a communication to qualify as a speech act, someone, a person A, has to want to communicate something to a second person B. What Walton and Sandy have effectively done, in driving home the role of orality in the production of the Bible, it seems to me, is remove that “person A” from the equation:

1. If this is right, speech act theory would seem not to apply to scripture, at least not in the way that Walton and Sandy [may wish to] apply it.
2. Moreover, if speech act theory manages to collapse when applied to the oral nature of scripture, then Walton and Sandy should not appeal to speech act theory in their defense of inerrancy.

Don’t get me wrong, Christians have (and have had all along) the biblical texts to contend with hermeneutically.  Someone(s) had to have written them in order for there to be biblical texts for us to contemplate. It’s just that now, according to Walton and Sandy, the human communicator, the person A that is needed to appeal to for speech act theory to work, is not connected enough to the production of scripture for scripture to count as that person’s speech act.

It may be the case, then, that on account of the ancient cultures being oral cultures and not text-dominated as Walton and Sandy explain in their book, scripture should never have been construed as a speech act in the first place, or at the very least in the way that Walton and Sandy do in Lost World.

Walton and Sandy articulate their view this way:

Some community of people, we believe under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, determined that certain individuals, as well as certain traditions unattached to specific individuals, had authority—God’s authority. (63)

These human communicators—“some community of people”—are authoritatively involved for some unspecified development in the biblical text, but whatever that development turns out to be, it is not in a capacity to communicate something to someone else, at least not in the way that speech act theory tends to assume.

The communicators act rather as tradents of a body of common knowledge that is “out of their hands,” so to speak: a tradition.

By showing how little involvement biblical “communicators” actually had with the biblical texts in an oral culture such as the one that produced the Bible, Walton and Sandy open the door for evangelicals to begin focusing both on what involvement believers who receive the biblical traditions have on what the texts accomplish, and on how God himself has had to constantly be active, working toward accomplishing his communicative act through biblical traditions.

This is a positive move, in my opinion, but we have also left any reasonable notion of an evangelical, inerrantist, doctrine of Scripture.

If Walton and Sandy want to appropriate speech act theory for a doctrine of scripture, however, they would be better served by opting for at least one of two scenarios.

First, uncouple God’s illocutionary act from that of the “human communicator.” This way, if the human communicator is removed from the picture, God’s speech act can still stand.

Second, they can, after arguing against an “author,” insist that there was some kind of final “redactor” who had a heavy hand in producing the Bible we now possess. This redactor could then act as the “person A” who is communicating something to person B.

Either view, if laid out carefully, would be a step forward, though whether either option would be compatible to inerrancy, at least as it is expressed in the Chicago Statement, is doubtful in my opinion.

In Lost World, Walton and Sandy have given inerrantists a new context for understanding what the Bible is. Let us hope that some will take seriously the orality of the Bible that Walton and Sandy have presented and work together to better integrate their findings into a more satisfying doctrine of scripture.

- Carlos

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Addendum

A third view, in my opinion, is to regard the "human communicator" and/or "scribe," as transmitting redactors (or editors) who are fully (as in, 100% fully) involved in the process of God's speech act. Not none, nor partially, as indicated above by Carlos. But fully. To be 100% personally involved in the communication act of God's authoritative speech act to humanity.

Otherwise we disallow for the phenomenological and existential importance of the holy communicator's life and societal cultural understanding in the transmission of biblical revelation.

And, we make such human communicators mere dictaphones, recording machines, or unthinking ditationists, to the very holy process that had consumed their life producing both the oral traditions - and the latter arising textual traditions - that necessarily accompanied their life force (or devotion, or passion) to communicating God's Word to their human culture.

Hence, within the hermeneutical paradigm of textual capture and transmission must likewise accompany an essential anthropologic, or societal, transcription of God's speech act. Otherwise we create for ourselves and unnecessary naivete about the biblical text when so simply assuming the lack of degrees of the human spirit in its creation and invention (as any oral tradition and written document must be so understood. But in this case, it is a Holy-Spirit driven creation or invention of the first magnitude).

For more discussion about this please refer to the sidebars under hermeneutics generally.

- R.E. Slater

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what is “safe” and “not safe” to think?

by John H. Walton and D. Brent Sandy

Part 3

Review by Carlos Bovell

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2014/02/what-is-safe-and-not-safe-to-think-part-3-of-bovells-review-of-the-lost-word-of-scripture/

by Peter Enns

February 10, 2014

Comments

Today’s post is the third and final part of Carlos Bovell’s review of The Lost World of Scripture: Ancient Literary Culture and Biblical Authority (previous post here).

Inerrantists are indebted to Walton and Sandy for the time and care they took in their new book Lost World to explain i) why the doctrine of inerrancy needs to be updated in light of development in biblical scholarship and, ii) for suggesting that inerrantists should begin thinking about ways to incorporate the Bible’s oral culture into their doctrinal schemes.

Today I conclude with a few remarks on how they decided to draw their discussion to a close.

I was disappointed to see that, rather than encouraging students in their research to critically pursue the leads proposed in the book, the authors seem intent to protect them from pursing the implications of the data they just presented. I understand that the authors are not at liberty to disagree openly with the Chicago Statement, and so perhaps this should come as no surprise.

The book ends with two lists for their readers to keep in mind as they think about scriptural authority. The lists explicitly advise students as to what is “safe” and “not safe” for them to believe.

So while on the one hand Walton and Sandy are trying to alleviate some of the pressures that students face when doing biblical studies, they also feel pastorally obliged to set express limits on what students can think about the Bible, putting them, in effect, right back where they started.

Walton and Sandy include some sensible items in their list of things that are “safe” for students to believe (293–303), for example:

• It is safe to believe there could be duplicate texts with variation.
• It is safe to believe Old World science permeates the Old Testament.

These are important points and need to be stressed. There are some other items, however, that Walton and Sandy present as “safe” for students to believe, but without sufficiently discussing them. For example:

• the inspiration of written texts of the New Testament is an inference based on the inspiration of the Old Testament.
• conventions for reporting events in the Bible differ from our contemporary conventions of history writing.
• Old Testament prophecy and New Testament identifications of fulfillment do not need to align.

On the first point, although the inspiration of the NT is hardly contested for their readership, the examination of the nature of the NT should probably have awaited a separate treatment rather than abruptly included in this list.

The second point is true, though “reporting events” already subtly privileges the evangelical assumption that events are being “reported.” I went to great lengths in my book Rehabilitating Inerrancy in a Culture of Fear to argue that nothing is restricting the biblical authors—even when they appear to us to be writing history—to be “reporting events.” They could very well have been intentionally creating a narrative, or thinking they were reporting history but weren’t, or operating under very different notions of what “reporting events” even means.

Third, the manner in which OT prophecy is “fulfilled” in the NT is also an issue that, again, most believers would agree on. But hermeneutically speaking, this “fulfillment” is a complex issue that cannot be tacked on like this, especially as it does not seem entirely germane to the topic of the book

Immediately following this list of what it is safe for students to believe, there is a list of what it is “not safe” for them to believe (303–306). And perhaps we can simply say “dangerous,” for that is the opposite of “safe.”

The following, according to Walton and Sandy, are “not safe” (i.e., dangerous) to believe:

• the Bible is just like any other book.
• inerrancy is falsified by the orality of Scripture.
• the Old Testament is derivative mythology combed from the ancient world.
• everything we find in the Bible can be explained in natural terms.
• people and events portrayed in narrative about the real past are fictional or literary constructs.
• biblical books have used pseudepigraphy, forgery, or false attribution.

Many students working through scholarly issues in these areas (orality, ANE mythology, documentary history of the Bible, the epic nature of some historical narratives, pseudepigraphy) will not likely be appeased by merely being told “it is not safe” to believe them.

This begs the question, “Why?” and the answer seems obvious: It is dangerous to believe them because they cause serious problems for the theory of inerrancy, and undermine particularly the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy.

I would also add that referring to these issues as “beliefs” rather than considered, intellectual conclusions aids, perhaps unwittingly, to removing them from the sphere of honest academic discussion.

Walton and Sandy end the book with one last list, a list of questions that they regard as safe for students to ask (306–309):

[In their opinion], it is safe to ask:

• whether our doctrine of the authority of Scripture has become too enmeshed in apologetics.
• whether some formulations of biblical inerrancy are faithful to biblical revelation itself in the historic understandings of the church.
• whether doctrinal discussions regarding the authority of Scripture should focus exclusively on written texts.
• about variants because they do not necessarily constitute errors as understood in the cultural context of the original communication.
• how the body of Christ would be best served by our formulations of biblical authority.
• what constitutes a robust evangelical doctrine of biblical authority.

These are all very good questions to ask. We should note, though, that not a few items in the “safe to believe” category would, just a few years ago, have appeared in most evangelicals’ “not safe to believe” category.

To take just one example, it has not long been acceptable for an evangelical to declare to fellow evangelical believers that the OT is permeated by Old World science. What drove that shift, which I can say without fear of contradiction, is the irony of the impact of critical biblical scholarship that showed evangelicals that not only was it safe to ask but also safe to believe in such things.

Without "critical scholars" doing the work that evangelicals have prematurely refused to do, evangelicals would not likely have learned what they have learned about the Bible. In Inerrancy and the Spiritual Formation of Younger Evangelicals, I suggest that critical scholars are owed an “I’m sorry” and a “Thank you” from evangelical scholars.

It would certainly seem wiser, then, especially for the sake of students to not tell them in advance what “it is not safe to believe.” Much rather, we would better serve them by encouraging them that it is always safe to ask and to test whether the Bible might turn out to be this or that.

Evangelicals need to get out in front of what’s happening in biblical studies instead of lagging a generation or two behind and waiting to see what critical scholarship discovers before deciding what sorts of things are safe or dangerous.

The problem, as many of us know, is that this has proved exceedingly difficult for evangelicalism to pull off.

Winter 2014 Church Events: Exploring Evolution

What I Learned at Exploring Origins

http://thomasjayoord.com/index.php/blog/archives/what_i_learned_at_exploring_origins/#.UungzPldX9w

by Thomas Jay Oord

January 28, 2014

The Exploring Origins conference at Point Loma Nazarene University was a great success! I’m grateful to the many who attended and to those who led in various ways. This aspect of the Nazarenes Exploring Evolution project, however, taught me some things.

My conference co-director, Mark Mann, and I put together a strong program and lineup of speakers. We emphasized table discussions, panels and workshops, and I’ve been hearing very positive reports indicating these were helpful. We included speakers from multiple perspectives. The spirits of those who left the event were, for the most part, positive and upbeat.

Now that the conference is over, I’ve been thinking about highlights, lessons learned, and prospects for the future. Here, in no particular order, are my reflections.

Nazarenes agree God is Creator but may disagree on how God creates.

The overwhelming majority of the 200+ conference attendees thought evolution was compatible with the idea that God creates. In fact, probably only a handful of young-earth creationists attended, although Answers in Genesis had a booktable and Georgia Purdom was a plenary and workshop speaker. While I’m sure the conference attendance numbers did not represent the overall percentage of young-earth creationists who are members of the Church of the Nazarene, I am confident that Christians stand united under the claim that God is our Creator.

Evolutionary creationists and young-earth creationists both care about the Bible.

I was pleased at how central the Bible was for so many speakers. It reminded me that what is really at stake are claims about how the Bible should be interpreted and what role it should play in relation to science. For instance, young-earth creationists typically interpret Genesis 1 and 2 in a rather straightforward, literal fashion. Evolutionary creationists tend to interpret the same Scripture as telling us theological truths but not necessarily scientific truths. They believe the genre of Genesis is different from the genre of science. Many Nazarenes Exploring Evolution essays posted online illustrate this point.

Most U.S. Nazarene scholars of ministry or science think evolution is compatible with believing God is Creator.

Prior to the conference, 10-question survey was sent to professors of ministry and professors of science in the universities, colleges, and seminary in the United States. A little more than half took this survey, and the full results are now available in the new book, Nazarenes Exploring Evolution.

Here, for instance are the results of one survey question: Eighty-four percent (84%) of ministry professors agreed or strongly agreed that the Church of the Nazarene should allow the theory that God creates through evolution as one acceptable view of creation among others, and only eight percent (8%) disagreed or strongly disagreed. Ninety-three percent (93%) of science professors agreed or strongly agreed that the Church of the Nazarene should allow the theory that God creates through evolution as one acceptable view of creation among others, and none (0%) disagreed or strongly disagreed.

Here is one of the ten sets of survey graphs I showed at the conference:

The conversation about evolution can be difficult but is important.

We began the Exploring Origins conference with worship and Eucharist. I think this set the right tone, because I heard few demeaning statements during the time we were together. In my opening presentation, I offered guidelines for conversation that urged attendees to be humble, discerning, kind, open to others, and respectful of authorities. The overwhelming majority followed these guidelines. But there were a few statements and materials that subtly sent demeaning messages about the views of others. I wished those had been otherwise. I had hoped for 100% affirmation of others even when we disagreed. I was reminded that we have work to do to speak well about those who hold contrary views.

The Church of the Nazarene needs a new statement about creation.

The current statement on creation in the appendix of the denomination’s Manual offers these brief words: “The Church of the Nazarene believes in the biblical account of creation (‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…’ --Genesis 1:1). We oppose any godless interpretation of the origin of the universe and of humankind (Hebrews 11:3).” A number of those at the recent Exploring Origins worked to suggest ways to enhance this statement. They offered brief but substantial ideas that seem helpful. Perhaps their work will eventually come to fruition.

We have more to explore and more conversations to be shared.

The Exploring Origins conference concluded with a brainstorming session about where things should go after we left PLNU. The suggestions were helpful and energizing. Many said we need ways to expand the conversation. Others emphasized the need to model Christ-like conversations on this difficult topic. The consensus was that the conversation was important not only for seeking truth, but also to encourage scientists in the pews and show young people that the denomination takes scientific and biblical truths seriously.

I’m not yet sure about the particulars of all of this. I plan to keep facilitating the conversation and offer proposals I hope others will find helpful. I am cheered that so many believe talking about evolution and Christian faith is a central concern for the growth and maturity of the Church of the Nazarene.

I conclude by expressing my heart-felt appreciation to Sherri Walker, my colleague in this overall project. She did nearly all the essay editing, she networked, and she organized the book we co-edited. Her project activities will taper off soon, but I want to acknowledge my great gratitude to her.

Thanks, Sherri!

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Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham: giving credibility to nonsense

(or, walking into an apologetic war machine)

site link here

by Peter Enns

January 29, 2014

Comments

Bill Nye will be debating Ken Ham in a week’s time–inexplicably, on Ham’s home turf, where he controls the terms and the crowd.

Nye is either going to get destroyed by Ken Ham or at least grow extremely frustrated with Ham’s tactics.

I hope I’m wrong, but I’m not (unless I am, but we’ll need to wait and see).

Nye seems to think he is walking into a debate of some sort over science, and that presenting the data will, if not prove victorious, at least put a dent into Ham’s armor.

It won’t. Nye is strolling into a well-tuned, battle-tested, apologetic war machine.

Nye and Ham won’t even be able to agree on what the data are, what science is, and what it means to interpret evidence. Ham will make sure of that.

This is a debate over worldviews, and they get nasty quickly and go nowhere.

Ham is a master of crowd manipulation, with a long and documented track record of interpreting his opponents in the worst possible light, twisting data and logic, and other passive-aggressive debate tactics (praise God).

Ham can’t and won’t give one square inch on his science because if he does his finely tuned worldview will crumble to the ground–a worldview that includes deeply held (and erroneous) views of God and the Bible.

No one who thinks he has a handle on reality as Ham feels he does is actually capable of debate. Such types only lecture, declare, and prophesy.

Ham needs his theology just the way it is in order to maintain his strong grip on his understanding of reality. His theology requires a science that supports biblical literalism. Failure in this regard is not an option for Ham.

If Nye wants to debate, he’s got a week to study theology and hermeneutics so he can address Ham’s unexamined and faulty premises that allow him to handle science as he does.

Nye is clear that he has no delusions of convincing Ham. The debate presumably is aimed at dissuading those who listen to Ham. That may work, for a small number who are already questioning Ham’s agenda, and that alone may be worth the effort.

That being said, this debate strikes me not simply as a general waste of time, but a win-win for Ham.

Ham is an immovable force. He will not in any conceivable universe “lose” the debate, and simply being debated by Nye will give Ham credibility in the eyes of those who might otherwise have successfully navigated past Ham’s treacherous port and found a true and living faith elsewhere.

The ideal opponent, if a debate were unavoidable, would be (1) a theistic evolutionist, who (2) doesn’t lose his/her cool, but (3) isn’t above giving hard punches to the gut, and who (4) knows his/her way around theology, hermeneutics, and the history of Christian thought to expose to a larger crowd was is self-evident to most everyone else:

Ham is not capable of true debate, and his views are not worth debating to begin with.

Generational Poverty in America: Bootstraps, Safety Nets, and Dave Ramsey

Rachel's sister Amanda

Bootstraps and Safety Nets: Some thoughts on generational poverty in America

http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/bootstraps-and-safety-nets-some-thoughts-on-generational-poverty-in-america

by Rachel Held Evans

January 27, 2014

You all are in for a treat today because my brilliant, compassionate, and wise little sister, Amanda Opelt, has contributed a guest post about generational poverty in America that is both powerful and practical. The post materialized after a long phone conversation between us in the wake of my controversial post about Dave Ramsey and poverty (see next article below), at which point I realized my sister knew way more about this topic than I did.

Amanda has spent most of her adult life working in the non-profit sector—first in India, then in inner-city Nashville, and now in Boone, North Carolina, as a field support coordinator for Samaritan’s Purse. But more than that, Amanda embodies more than anyone I know the principle of loving one’s neighbor. No matter where she finds herself, she is present and loving to the people around her, whether it’s an orphan suffering from TB in a slum in Hyderabad, India, or an elderly neighbor down the street from her home in Boone. When it comes to following Jesus, she’s the real deal. She's faithful in the little things.

I hope you learn as much from her post as I did!

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The biggest problem facing Christian theology is not translation but enactment...no clever

theological moves can be substituted for the necessity of a church being a community of 

people who embody our language about God, where talk about God is used without

apology because our life together does not mock our words.

- Hauerwas & Willimon

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Immediately after college, I packed my bags and moved to India because at age 22 I thought I "had a heart" for the poor.

I figured India was probably a pretty good place to find poor people, and I was right.  The poverty in that foreign land is pervasive, and in a country where corruption and ideological biases cultivate very little opportunity for upward mobility, it's not hard to see the orphans, beggars, and leprosy patients around you as one-dimensional victims of the sinful systems around them.  It is a fair assessment in some ways, and I must say, loving the people of India came easy. Though their stories were gut-wrenching, my heart felt no complication in its compulsion to serve them.

But after 6 months, I realized that my educational emphasis in philosophy made the relief and development work to which I aspired demanding on my skill sets.  I packed my bags again and came home to my moderately privileged lifestyle the US, confused about my calling and certain I was destined to live a life languishing apathetically in my middle-class routine.

A job search led me to a position as a ministry-based social worker for an organization that provided job skills, mentoring, childcare and Bible study for low income women in the inner city of Nashville.

I'll admit I was skeptical at first.  I didn't know the first thing about urban poverty. Like many Americans, I felt a certain sense of indifference towards poor in America, and there was maybe, buried deep in my subconscious, even a mild contempt.  I had this sneaking suspicion that the poor in my own country couldn't possibly be like the poor I had encountered in India.  This was the birthplace of the American Dream, a place where anyone who had a will to try and a strong work ethic could improve his or her lot in life.

Someone once told me that animal shelters have an easier time fundraising than homeless shelters, and sadly, I’m not surprised.  Animals aren't too complicated, and they are one-dimensional in their in-culpability. 

There is a more complex emotional reaction to the homeless in America.  There is the compulsion to wonder, "why can't they just get a job?!"  When one is born in the Land of Opportunity, it is easy to assume that the birthright of every American is to have and equal opportunity and a decent shot at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

What is opportunity?  What does it mean to be poor?

Most middle class Americans are familiar with circumstantial poverty—one bad investment or the loss of a job leads to a period of financial difficulty.  What I learned in the inner city is that to be caught in the cycle of generational poverty is to experience a bankruptcy of spirit, a deficit of hope.  It is poverty of education, community, safety, health, and spiritual guidance.

I met a woman whose first memories were of being locked up in a closet while her mother, a prostitute, "entertained" her guests. I met a woman who, as a little girl, watched a cross burn in her front yard and endured teachers at her new school shouting racial slurs at her because the community around her was angry about integration.  I cried with women who remember in excruciatingly vivid detail, sexual and physical abuse suffered at the hands of relatives and friends, abuse that would go on for years unstopped. These were children, many with developmental and learning disabilities due to instability during their earliest years, that were pushed through failing schools with burned out teachers and deteriorating textbooks and facilities.

Abuse, racism, corruption; we all experience these hardships to a varying degree.  But for the low-income women I worked with, their lives were a perpetual house of cards.  They had no resources, no safety nets to keep them from going under.  One step forward, two steps back.  A broken down car means you can't get to work, and missing even one day of work means you can’t make rent that month. A sick child means you can get fired from a job that keeps you at "part time" status because they don't want to pay you for sick days and holidays.  Finally getting out of the welfare system means losing any childcare assistance, and childcare costs often break the bank.  I knew a woman who wouldn't break up with her abusive boyfriend because he was her only ride to work.  I'm not saying there is no such thing as bad decisions, but we all make bad decisions and only some of us have to face the full force of their consequences.

When we hear the term “safety net,” most of us think of social safety nets like food stamps or medicaid.  But when I think of safety nets in my own life, I think of parents who were willing to pitch in a bit to help me pay rent my first month in my own place.  I think of a successful elementary school and several teachers who really cared and invested some extra time to make sure I didn't fail algebra.  I think of a safe and secure community where I could run and play outside.  I think of a caring doctor who helped when I was going through a difficult mental and physical health challenge (and health insurance that enabled me to pay him).

This month marks the 50th anniversary of President Johnson's Declaration of the War on Poverty.  While we have come a long way since Johnson made that historic speech [in 1967], in 2011 the U.S Bureau of Labor conducted a study and found that 46.2 million Americans (roughly 15% of the population) lived at or below the poverty line. Many of those individuals are children (Poverty defined is a family of four making $23,021). And for anyone who ever wondered "why can't they just get a job?" you'll be interested to know that 10.4 million of these Americans are considered the working poor.  In fact, the working poor made up 7 % of the work force in the US.  Most of these were workers stuck in part time jobs, and women were more likely to be among the working poor, as were blacks and Hispanics (www.bls.gov).

I did the math and found that someone working full time at the current minimum wage (assuming they had paid sick days) would only make $15,080 a year.  This was the painful reality of so many of my students in the inner city of Nashville.  Bottom line: it's just not as simple as "stop being lazy" or "just get a job." I wish I could provide some clear-cut resolution, a silver bullet solution that churches across America could implement to serve the needy. A few women I really respect have showed me that the only way to cultivate effective change in the lives of those in need is to become, yourself, a sort of safety net for them. The resource, the friend, the positive voice, the math tutor, the spiritual mentor they never had. It's complicated, and it can be messy. But Jesus never seemed to mind a mess, and no one he ever healed or scolded or cried for or embraced had a simple story.

The complexity of the need of the human heart is something only God can know.  But perhaps the first step is to begin the process of tweaking your understanding, to realize that the playing field is not always level and not everyone was born with bootstraps.  Before you judge the circumstances of those around you, consider the humbling reality of a sovereign God who "sends poverty and wealth; He humbles and He exalts. He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap; he seats them with princes and has them inherit a throne of honor" (1 Samuel 2:7-8).

* * * * * * * * * *

To learn more about the organization Amanda served in Nashville, check out the Christian Women’s Job Corps of Middle Tennessee. CWJC empowers individuals to break harmful cycles caused by poverty by providing education, mentoring and resources. Their vision is “to create a community where all individuals can experience transformation of body, mind, heart, and spirit.”

Financial advisor Dave Ramsey is also an evangelical Christian.

What Dave Ramsey gets wrong about poverty

Opinion by Rachel Held Evans, special to CNN

November 30, 2013

(CNN)– Dave Ramsey is rich. And he makes his living telling other evangelical Christians how they can get rich, too.

Host of a nationally syndicated radio program and author of multiple best-selling books, Ramsey targets evangelical Christians with what he calls a “biblical” approach to financial planning, one that focuses primarily on the elimination of consumer debt. His for-profit Financial Peace University is billed as “a biblically based curriculum that teaches people how to handle money God's ways."

Much of what Ramsey teaches is sound, helpful advice, particularly for middle-class Americans struggling with mounting credit card bills. I have celebrated with friends as they’ve marked their first day of debt-free living, thanks in part to Dave Ramsey’s teachings and all those white envelopes of cash he urges his students to use instead of credit cards.

But while Ramsey may be a fine source of information on how to eliminate debt, his views on poverty are neither informed nor biblical.

Take, for example, a recent article by Tim Corley posted to Ramsey’s website. Entitled “20 Things the Rich Do Every Day,” the article presents some dubious statistics comparing the habits of the rich with the habits of the poor, including:

• “70% of wealthy eat less than 300 junk food calories per day. 97% of poor people eat more than 300 junk food calories per day.”

• “76% of wealthy exercise aerobically four days a week. 23% of poor do this.”

• “63% of wealthy listen to audio books during commute to work vs. 5% of poor people.”

One need not be a student of logic to observe that Corley and Ramsey have confused correlation with causation here by suggesting that these habits make people rich or poor.

For example, a poor person might not exercise four days a week because, unlike a rich person, she cannot afford a gym membership. Or perhaps she has to work two jobs to earn a living wage, which leaves her little time and energy for jogging around the park.

A poor family may eat more junk food, not because they are lazy and undisciplined, but because they live in an economically disadvantaged, urban setting where health food stores are not as available: a so-called “food desert.”

Critics were swift to point out these discrepancies and among the critics were some of Ramsey’s fellow evangelical Christians who also noted that, though the book of Proverbs certainly heralds success as a common return on faithful labor, nowhere does the Bible guarantee that good habits lead to wealth.

The writer of Ecclesiastes observed that "under the sun the race is not to the swift,

nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent,

nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all."

And far from having contempt for the poor, Jesus surrounded himself with the needy and challenged the excesses of the rich:

“Blessed are you who are poor,” he said, “for yours is the kingdom of God.

… But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort” (Luke 6:24).

"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle," Jesus famously said, "than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."

It’s hard for the wealthy to flourish in the kingdom that Jesus inaugurated because the economy of that kingdom runs so contrary to the economies of the world. It rewards the peacemakers over the powerful, the humble over the proud, the kind over the cruel, and those who hunger to do the right thing over those whose wealth has convinced them they already are.

Ramsey responded to the pushback with an addendum to the original post calling his critics “ignorant” and “immature” and instructing them to “grow up.”

“This list simply says your choices cause results,” he said, again committing the false cause fallacy. “You reap what you sow.”

The list, he said, applies only to people living in “first world” countries, where Ramsey believes economic injustices are essentially nonexistent. While the poor in developing countries are so as a result of external circumstances beyond their control, the poor in the United States have no one to blame but themselves.

“If you are broke or poor in the U.S. or a first-world economy, the only variable in the discussion you can personally control is YOU,” Ramsey says. “You can make better choices and have better results.”

America, he argues, has prospered as a direct result of its “understanding and application of biblical truths” which have led to “life-changing industry, inventions and a standard of living never known before on this planet.”

“There is a direct correlation,” he concludes, “between your habits, choices and character in Christ and your propensity to build wealth.”

For Christians, Ramsey’s perceived “direct correlation” between faith and wealth should be more troubling than his other confused correlations, for it flirts with what Christians refer to as the prosperity gospel, the teaching that God rewards faithfulness with wealth.

Ramsey’s particular brand of prosperity gospel elevates the American dream as God’s reward for America’s faithfulness, the spoils of which are readily available to anyone who works hard enough to receive them.

But such a view glosses over the reality that America was not, in fact, founded upon purely Christian principles (unless one counts slavery, ethnic cleansing, gender inequity, and Jim Crow as Christian principles), so we should be careful of assuming our relative wealth reflects God’s favor. (The Roman Empire was wealthy, too, after all.)

It also glosses over the reality that economic injustice is not, in fact, limited to the developing world but plagues our own country as well.

• When medical bills are the biggest cause of bankruptcy in the United States, there are systemic injustices at work.

• When people working 40-hour weeks at minimum wage jobs still can’t earn enough to support their families, there are systemic injustices at work.

• When approximately 1% of Americans hold 40% of the nation’s wealth, there are systemic injustices at work.

• When the black unemployment rate has consistently been twice as high as the white unemployment rate for the past 50 years, there are systemic injustices at work.

• And throughout Scripture, people of faith are called not simply to donate to charity, but to address such systemic injustices in substantive ways.

The 17-year-old girl who lives in a depressed neighborhood zoned for a failing school system who probably won’t graduate because her grades are suffering because she has to work part-time to help support her family needs more than a few audio books to turn things around.

People are poor for a lot of reasons, and choice is certainly a factor, but categorically blaming poverty on lack of faith or lack of initiative is not only un-informed, it’s un-biblical.

God does not divide the world into the deserving rich and the undeserving poor. In fact, the brother of Jesus wrote that God has “chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him” (James 2:5).

God does not bless people with money; God blesses people with the good and perfect gift of God’s presence, which is available to rich and poor alike.

And that’s good news.

Rachel Held Evans is the author of "Evolving in Monkey Town" and "A Year of Biblical Womanhood." She blogs at rachelheldevans.com. The views expressed in this column belong to Rachel Held Evans.

The Editors - CNN Belief Blog

When Christians Love Theology More Than People

Holding hands, Mats Bergström / Shutterstock.com

When Christians Love Theology More Than People

http://sojo.net/blogs/2014/01/22/when-christians-love-theology-more-people

by Stephen Mattson

January 22, 2014

Beyond the realm of churches, religious blogs, and bible colleges, nobody really cares about theology. What does matter is the way you treat other people.

Within Christendom, we’re often taught the exact opposite: that doctrines, traditions, theologies, and distinct beliefs are the only things that do matter. It’s what separates churches, denominations, theologians, and those who are “saved” and “unsaved.”

Historically, Christians have been tempted to categorize the Bible into numerous sets of beliefs that are either inspired or heretical, good or bad, right or wrong — with no room for doubt or questioning or uncertainty.

It’s easy to get caught up in theorizing about God, but within our everyday lives reality is what matters most to the people around us. Theorizing only becomes important once it becomes relevant and practical and applicable to our lives.

When I'm sick, and you bring me a meal, I don't care whether you're a Calvinist or Arminian.

When I'm poor, and you give me some food and money, I don't care if you're pre-millennial or post-millennial.

When I'm in the hospital, and you send me a get-well basket, I don't care what your church denomination is.

When you visit my grandparents in the nursing home, I don't care what style of worship music you listen to.

When you're kind enough to shovel my parent's driveway, I don't care what translation of the Bible you read.

When you give my friend a lift when their car breaks down, I don't care if you’re Baptist or Catholic.

When you help my grandmother carry a heavy load of groceries, I don't care what you believe about evolution.

When you protect my kids from getting hit by a car when they're running across the street, I don't care who your favorite theologian is.

When you’re celebrating my birthday with me, I don’t care about your views related to baptism.

When you grieve alongside me during the death of a family member, I don’t care if you tithe or not.

When you love me in deep and meaningful and authentic ways — nothing else really matters.

But when you idolize belief systems and turn theology into an agenda, it poisons the very idea of selfless love. 

The gospel message turns into propaganda, friends turn into customers, and your relationship with God turns into a religion.

You may have the most intellectually sound theology, but if it's not delivered with love, respect, and kindness — it's worthless.

The practical application of your love is just as important as the theology behind it. Our faith is evidenced by how we treat others. Does the reality of your life reflect the theory behind your spiritual beliefs?

We should never give up on theology, academic study, or the pursuit of understanding God, the Bible, and the history and traditions of the church, but these things should inspire us to emulate Christ — to selflessly, sacrificially, and holistically love others. Theology should reinforce our motivation for doing things to make the world a better place — not serve as platforms to berate, criticize, and attack others.

But too often, we’re guilty of failing to practically apply our beliefs in tangible ways that actually help others. 

In the end, this is what matters most to the world around us: that we simply love as Christ loved.

Stephen Mattson has contributed for Relevant Magazine and the Burnside Writer's Collective,and studied Youth Ministry at the Moody Bible Institute. He is now on staff at Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minn. Follow him on Twitter @mikta.

Image: Holding hands, Mats Bergström / Shutterstock.com