Theodicius
Good. Evil. Bratwurst.

Joel Johnson writes a familiar but sad story. Malfeasance from a pastor drove him out of Christianity. He’s not alone; writer Sue Monk Kidd tells a tragically similar story. I’m absolutely certain the two are not alone in their experience. And they pose a conundrum, to believers and to those who have left because of this sort of thing.

As believers these sort of stories should serve to remind us of the burden we bear. We know we’re far from perfect. We know we’ll do things that offend others, sometimes egregiously, and even sometimes intentionally. There’s always that possibility; it comes from being human. And the burden is that when we do so, the world around us will blame our church, our faith, our Lord, rather than put the blame where it belongs — on us.

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When I saw this, I just couldn’t help myself. Lift and enjoy, Dr Witherington!

I don’t like books “exposing” flaws in The DaVinci Code, if for no other reason than they display a lack of sportsmanship. Finding errors in that book is like fishing at a trout farm; the only real question is how many minutes will it take to catch one. That having been said, I’d like to offer a solid recommendation for Ben Witherington’s The Gospel Code.

The major difference between Witherington’s work and the rest is that he limits himself to pointing out just seven major errors, occupying less than the first third of his book. The rest of his book is spent in analysing the deeper errors, made by some more renowned scholars, which tend to feed into books like The DVC.
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…, a book by Robert J Sawyer, was the latest to leave its imprint on the wall.

You know how it is, the story is going along nicely, you’re getting in to the characters when suddently the author slips, and destroys the illusion that he’s been building up and that you’ve been enjoying. You want to scream, but settle instead for throwing the book across the room. (more…)

I suppose I should mention something about the Da Vinci Code, as everyone else seems to be getting drawn in, so here I go.

It’s a well-written thriller, in general, but the historical research is amazingly shoddy. As fiction, I’d give it a B, but if he submitted the “research” behind it as a term paper, it’d get an “F” at most, and we might even have to invent a lower grade for it. He begins with a page stating “facts”, virtually none of which is actually true in the strictest sense, though a few items you could “spin” into being acceptably true, in the sense that claims made in TV commercials are “true.”

You see, I’ve been down this “historical” road a few decades ago, when I read “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, but it seems Dan Brown lacks the critical skills required to be a researcher or historian. He seems to believe everything he reads (’it’s in a book, therefore it must be true”) which is a fatal flaw when doing research, though quite essential, if only in a temporary sense, when reading fiction.
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At my father-in-law’s for his 90th birthday bash, but with my left hand rendered inoperable by my table saw and my right side impaired by a strained neck muscle, I got to feeling mighty useless. And that, in turn got me thinking in general about the question of the value of a man.

I’m not sure when it started, but here in the US we’ve fallen hook, line and sinker for the old utilitarian definition of value. Your worth is what you do. A person’s value is directly related to what they do and have done.

Don’t believe me? Try this sinmple test: Ask anyone what they do (ask yourself, even). It’s nearly certain the response will be phrased “I *am* a(n) blank” with the blank replaced by the name of an occupation. In other words, they are defining themselves by their occupation. (more…)

“I bid good-by to a friend last night,” she said through her tears in the morning. “I loved him well, and he loved me, but he is gone today and will not return.”
Why? We sought for an answer to the question, “Why?”
“The question is vexed,” said the first. “There is no ‘why.’ There is only what is. Like life, death does not need a reason. You cannot expect meaning from an impersonal universe.”
“It is the way of things,” said the second. “Death is natural, as is life. It is the doorway through which we leave life. Less than that, it is but the name we give to that doorway. It is not the end, it is but a passageway.”
“You did not deserve him,” said the third. “He was taken from you because of that.”
“This is but another test,” said the fourth. “You will be judged by how you respond to it.”
Less than satisfied by the answers proffered (though the third had a point; we certainly didn’t deserve him) I turned, as always, to the Throne.
“Why?” I shouted through my tears. “Why have you done this to us?”
The echoes of my whisper were still reverberating, when the question returned. “Why?”
I looked up, “Yes, that is my question.”
“And that is my answer. Why do you ask me only now? When I first sent him to you, you didn’t ask me why. When, for over a decade, I let you keep him, you did not ask me why. Every day he was there he was doing my bidding, listening to you, caring for you. Every day he soothed your mind.
“And only now, after he’s faithfully toiled ten years and more at the task I gave him. Only now, after I have finally chosen to release him from that task. Only now, my child, you think to bring me the question you should have been asking every day. Only now, ‘Why?’”
He’s right, of course. Just over a decade ago, by a circuitous route that could only be ascribed to divine intervention, Patches entered our household. He was a delight, and an anchor. His graceful acrobatics entertained us. Whenever we spent too long with our heads bent over a book or a keyboard, he would swoop down upon us, enforcing a break time. He taught us that nothing was so important that it should interrupt play time. When our problems became overwhelming, he would be there to take us out of ourselves, to remind us we were not alone. Friend, confidant, taskmaster; a stern critic with a bent for sarcasm. He kept us laughing, smiling, and loving. He kept us sane. He was indeed just what we needed, Father. Thank you.
Patches, a 17-pound British Shorthair cat, dead at the age of 15, after a month-long illness that left him weighing only 6 pounds at the end. Gone, but not forgotten. No, never forgotten.

This book by Frankie (son of Francis) Schaffer isn’t a new one, and it isn’t new to me. But I went back and reread it a little while ago.

It makes some very good and very interesting points. Frankie isn’t the thinker his father is, but who is? His main point is that Christians are ghetto-izing (that neologism is mine, so don’t blame him) themselves in the arts. Christians are creating subgenres of almost every art form by prepending the word “Christian” to it. And the entries in these subgenres aren’t very good. “Christian movies” (a subgenre close to his heart, as he is a movie maker himself) for example, have lower production values and the acting is worse than in their mainstream counterparts. And worse, the writing and plotting are stale.

Can his premises be argued with?
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Had some contact recently with a person who exemplifies one half of a disturbing dichotomy that is rising among church members.This person was nearly fixated on the devil as the cause of everything that went wrong, both in their own life and in everyone else’s.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised by this attitude; in a way it’s simply a religion-specific example of a more general attitude of shirking responsibility among the public. Whatever goes wrong is always the fault of an outside force; it’s never the repsonsibility of, or even within the control of, the person it afflicts.
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Went out to see Josh McDowell speak Thursday night. Have to admit a little trepidation: listening to one man speak for three hours can be daunting. But the time flew; the man is good at what he does.

He spoke of a thing he calls Relationship Apologetics, the main idea of which is that it’s the relationship you build that lets you get listened to. It goes deeper, but that’s the surface view.

If you get the chance to hear him in person, do it. He’s a very entertaining speaker, and if you’re not careful, he just might slip enough meat into the soup that you actually learn something as well.

I’m going to start getting into this topic a bit more, because, frankly, I’m tired of hearing about it from the mushy-minded who believe everything they’re told, as long as it’s derogative of the Bible:

“xxx (name your favorite idea) was dropped from the Bible because the church leaders were hostile to it.”

Let’s talk about the editing practice that went in to the current books in the Bible. We’ll leave out the Apochypha, because the original council didn’t grant them full scriptural status; that didn’t happen until the brew-up with Martin Luther about a millenium later.

Since Erasmus compiled the Textus Receptus (all six different editions of it) we’ve uncovered a boatload of manuscripts from all over the region, giving us looks at the 66 books at various stages going back, in the opinion of one scholar, 1900 years, and in the opinion of a majority of scholars, going back 17-1800 years. Is there even one documented case in the manuscript record of something substantial being dropped?
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It’s amusing sometimes, to see what lengths people go to in order to attack things they don’t believe in. In the case of Christianity, they often use strange interpretations of the Dead Sea Scrolls. You remember them? They were found near the ruins of Qumran, and there has been a project going since the late 40’s attempting to date them and translate them.

Anyway, the usual tactic I’ve run into is to assert they say things which they don’t, or to make other, similarly unsupported, speculations about the community of Essenes (for example, I’ve run into folks who proudly assert the Essenes were Christians, or were a sect which followed “True Christianity” — the intent of the last assertion is, of course, to support a claim that all current Christian sects are therefore false). Those who make arguments based upon these assertions manage to shut up their targets, not through the force of Truth, but in the main because the average Christian is notoriously uninformed about Christian history, often accepting rather bizarre revisions of history as fact simply through ignorance. (My daughter’s Advanced Placement European History teacher once stated baldly that the major difference of opinion between Martin Luther and John Calvin was that Martin Luther believed in free will while Calvin didn’t. We went out and bought my daughter an independent study guide for the AP European History exam, so the teacher’s ignorance didn’t hurt her. We’d both learned quite a bit earlier that pointing out errors to this teacher led only to reprisals, not truth, so there was no point in trying to educate the teacher.)

This is a rather long way round to introducing one of my current study topics, the Dead Sea Scrolls. The book is The Meaning Of The Dead Sea Scrolls by James Vanderkam and Peter Flint. It’s an excellent introduction to the scrolls themselves (the current “official” translation of the scrolls runs to 39 volumes; the nasty part of me thinks this is why they’re such fertile ground for fabrication — it’s not likely anyone you’re talking to has read them all). But more importantly, from my standpoint, is they tell the history of the project to translate the scrolls, and debunk a lot of the myths that have arisen around them.

The myths grew in part because of the speed (lack thereof) of publication. Many things slowed the pace of the scholarship, but to speculators outside the only real reason was that there must be something in the scrolls that would completely destroy the orthodoxy of the day, either Christian or Jewish (speculation on the latter rose sharply when Israel wrested control of the scrolls from Jordan after the Six-Day War). I mean it’s obvious that must be the reason for the delay — it can’t be because the work is difficult, or because there are so many things exploding around the scholars that it’s hard to remain there on the job, or any one of a hundred other, more innocuous reasons. It’s human nature to leap to the most malignant reason behind someone’s behavior.

This is a highly recommended read for anyone wanting to know something more (or just something, even) about the discoveries in Qumran. The authors have written a very approachable introduction to a very complex and important subject.