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 started this blog, one of the things I wanted to talk about was the relationship between Good and Evil. Not in any sterile, merely philosophical way. I wanted to talk about the effect they have on each other, the responses they call forth from each other.

Ben Witherington, author of the Gospel Code, which I wrote about earlier has located a stellar example in the events in Amish schoolhouse.

We can learn much from the example of the Fishers, mother and daughter. Both of them stood up, at a time when the rest of us would have excused them from the duty, for what they knew to be Right, to be Good.
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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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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…)

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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The Cat is bemoaning conversations with someone who doesn’t believe in evolution. It’s a topic I’ve grown tired of “debating” on the net, but I’ll visit it One More Time, in the hope that perhaps I can shed some light.

A big problem, as evidenced by the comment thread, is that both sides never tire of turning the opposition into a straw man, and both keep trying to win the argument by definition. A good case in point is the description of the “anthropomorphic all-God” in the comments. It’s a misstatement of Christian positions to say God is “man-like.” Man is, in fact, God-like. (”Let us make man in our image” — KJV) Is “theomorphic” a word? The point is God is the original, man the derivative being. Characterizing God as “anthropomorphic” is a good way to antagonize your respondent.

What’s my position?

1) I find many of the suppositions made following the theory to be suspicious, to say the least. They may be true, but they don’t make sense to me, and there really isn’t way to test them. They are assertions, which make a sincere (at least most of them do) attempt to cover/explain the currently known facts. But several explanations can manage that, so without being able to test the theories, I don’t see a compelling reason to select one over another.

2) Just because I find it unlikely, I’m not going to tell you that you can’t believe it (there’s another problem in terminology — one doesn’t believe in evolution, one believes evolution; there’s no person there to believe in, after all) and forbid you telling other people about it. This attitude, alas, sets off the howler monkeys on both sides of the question.

3) Also, simply because I don’t see it as true doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. I’ve learned long ago not to limit God’s behavior by my own understanding. I don’t have His brainpower; when I know more, I’ll understand more.

Just to explain more about my point #1 above: Let’s say you know nothing at all about the world. You see a video which shows someone entering rooms in a house and turning on lights. Without being able to set up an experiment to test, you can theorize:

1) There is pressure plate under the floor which turns on the light.
2) There is a motion sensor which turns on the light.
3) The house demands you scratch it on a sensitive area and the light is its pleasure response.
4) The beings in the house have an abundance of energy and they power the lights by touching a contact plate.

(I’m sure there are other theories possible, but that’s enough, I think, to make the point.)

There isn’t an experiment we can perform that will *prove* that life on this planet emerged and developed according to the current theories (I use the plural, because there’s not complete agreement among those who accept evolution — nor is there agreement among those who do not, for that matter) this side of time travel. At best we could demonstrate that it could have happened that way, but even that hasn’t been done, yet.

We look at old bones, and we build fleshy creatures that may only vaguely resemble the actual being in question. You would, for example, have a hard time reconstructing my fleshly body from just my bones. I’ve had the same bones all my adult life, yet my height varies by 5% or more routinely, and occasionally by more. My weight has varied by 60% and more. Now imagine you’ve never seen a human and explain where they carry their body fat. They’re just guesses. Do they hold tegether, yes (for the most part) they do, but so does the future histoy of Miles Vorkosigan, does that mean he’s real? Or the Tharks? How about the Puppeteers and the Kzinti?

You see what I mean? Evolutionary theory is largely guesswork and suppositions, unproven and unprovable. (I once ran in to someone who claimed a computer simulation could prove it. Try as I might, I couldn’t get him to see it was tautaulogical: You build a simulation that runs according to the rules of evolutionary theory and behold, the result supports evolutionary theory! Yah think? Computer simulations are useful tools when we understand the problem domain; we don’t know enough about this one. The problem is when you build the solution into the test, you never can learn anything.) It’s just a case of choosing the set you find yourself comfortable living with.

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.