Fattening beef, commercial "farming" (photo from Animal farm Life)

I was recently asked about the ethics of animal testing. While I’m aware that it is a very contentious issue for “animal rights activists” it is not one I have thought much about. Though, since I grow animals to eat, I am closer existentially to that related issue than someone who gets their meat from the supermarket.

It seems to me there are some simple principles that provide guidance:

• God made animals so we have a general responsibility to care for them like for the rest of creation (see Gen 1)
• God explicitly allowed the use of animals for human benefit including killing them to eat (see Gen 9:3) n.b. I’d see this extending to the next line…
• Research and testing which is of other great benefit for humans should also therefore be considered within God’s will.

We have a duty to care for God's creation - including other creatures we use for food.

This leads to the tentative conclusions:

If you would like a review copy of the print version of my new book:

Tim Bulkeley, Not Only a Father: Talk of God as Mother in the Bible & Christian Tradition (Signs) Auckland: Archer Press, 2011 ISBN: 978-1468091373

Please contact me, please say both where you expect to publish the review (blogs are quite acceptable though a full review rather than a short note would be good) and when you are expect to write it. There are no conditions and you should be as critical as you normally would.

Facebook does not seen good at giving attributions, so I don't know who produced this, if it was you write to me and I'll gladly attribute it :)

I’ve seen several peopl, including Rowland Crowcher, post this ”infographic” on Facebook. Since I’ve spoken quite a bit on “Family in the Bible”, and am due to speak to a leaders group from the NZ Christian Network on the “Theology of Marriage” really soon it makes me hopping mad!

In one sense the graphic is “true”. The Bible does present all these, and more (some arguably worse) patterns of marriage. It is also true that God chose to work in and through many of these. Just looking at Abraham (the “father” of the three monotheistic religions) or Jacob (aka “Israel”) makes it clear that God does not turn aside from some convoluted and perverse human arrangements in choosing who to use as a channel of grace.

But, do any of these represent “a biblical view of marriage”. Hell no! It is time for some stakes in the ground. In terms of the teaching of Scripture it is clear that Gen 2 is a privileged text (Jesus and Paul both cite it when discussing marriage). This passage, and the teaching of Jesus and Paul make some basics clear:

Marriage:

• was ordained by God
• is the union of a man and a woman
• produces and nurtures the next generation
• provides necessary partnership

However, in this (as in everything else) human sinfulness warps and twists God’s intent. All of the “biblical” marriages listed in the graphic reflect this.

See some of my earlier posts for background to this one:

•  What is a family?
• Does the Bible present a preferred pattern of family
• Reading the Bible: seeking teaching on family

I am aware that what I have written in the very short and angry post here will be understood by some people as endorsing particular views on the currently hot and vexed topic of “Gay marriages”. It does. Gay marriage is an oxymoron since not only is marriage the partnership of a man and a woman, but also intended to produce as well as nurture the next generation. However, the view endorsed above says nothing about either Civil Unions, or about the possibility of blessing (or even solemnising) them in churches. As far as I am concerned that seem to be separate issues, and ones on which my view of marriage does not entail any particular position. I wish that we (Christians of all stripes, marriage activists of every opinion, and especially the authorities of both states and churches) would just sit back and separate the two things and issues.

Until more complex theories of aerodynamics were developed accepting the possibility of "the flight of the bumblebee" required a suspension of disbelief - Photo by by stuant63

Yesterday I was asked: If Noah lived before the law was revealed to Moses, how did he know how to distinguish “clean” and “unclean” animals?

It is still holiday time (it’s the summer in NZ, though with all the rain and cold in recent weeks you wouldn’t believe it) so my answer was less full than it ought to have been:

Hmm… on Noah, Moses and the animals, there are two likely lines for an answer (a) the story of Noah is being told after the delivery of the law and so the telling reflects those categories; (b) there was perhaps a cultural practice of distinguishing clean and unclean animals even before the law was revealed to Moses (as there was already such a practice of not eating pork).

Of course the short simple answer is “we really don’t know” but people don’t like that one ;)

But it’s not as simple as that¹ behind any attempt to answer such a question lie two fundamentally different ways to read.

One way looks at the text from the outside, and reads as a “critic”. For a couple of centuries, in academic biblical studies, the most frequent way to thus “objectify”² the text has been to examine it historically to see where it came from and how it got to us. Such an approach noticing that there seems to be a “continuity error” here suggests that the text was written at some time later than the events described, and uses this and other signs to work out when and by whom. We could objectify the text in other ways, by examining it as an example of a particular genre or class of texts, against its sociological background…

The other way enters the “world” of the text, and reads it from the inside. This is to behave like a “reader” for this is how we read novels and other stories, indeed it is how we read physics textbooks too ;) In the case of Noah’s distinction my second answer (though it depends on a historical hypothesis and so perhaps looks like the same kind of answer as the first) tends in this direction. It is asking how we might explain this, not as a continuity error (the critic’s approach), but within Noah’s world (a readerly approach).

The great medieval Jewish commentator Rashi took a different readerly approach he explained it thus:

Of all the clean animals: that are destined to be clean for Israel. We learn [from here] that Noah studied the Torah. (From Chabad.org)

Each basic direction of reading offers several different options or styles. But the basic question facing a reader of any text whether to read as critic or as reader. “Readers” must offer the text a willing suspension of disbelief³ Indeed the idea of a need to suspend disbelief can be helpful in thinking about the reading (as opposed to the criticism) of all narrative. For in a laboratory report also there are elements of the narration of the experiment that are omitted, or poorly described, where the reader must suspend disbelief. Despite the variety of both critical and readerly approaches, and despite the fact that they can even share approaches (as above either can examine the text historically), on the suspension of disbelief they differ fundamentally.

[Incidentally,⁴ Rabbi Yaakov Asher Sinclair has a really interesting meditation for Purim on "The Willing Suspension of Disbelief".]

1. Except the last answer, because we really do not know ;)
2. Make into the object of study and examination.
3. The phrase is Coleridge’s from the Biographia Literaria of 1817, to explain how readers might approach the fantastic or supernatural elements in his work, but has been widely used in thinking about how readers can read many sorts of fiction. (( JRR Tolkein has also nuanced it speaking about “secondary belief” based on an inner consistency to the reality described in the narrative. But that’s getting too complicated for a short blog post ;)
4. Though not at all a HT ;)

Photo from Soil-net

I have read the Bible professionally, and encouraged and taught others to read it, in three continents. The situations differed, including an African and a Western University, a Baptist theological college and a Bible School in a refugee camp. I have also supervised some exciting theses that develop interesting perspectives on understanding the Bible. So I am delighted to be participating in a project Global Perspectives on the Old Testament and Global Perspectives on the New Testament, I’ll be writing on Gender-bending as a male reader of Esther and on Jeremiah, possibly taking account of my current context (fencing a piggery and building a pig house ;)

Mark is looking for more contributors, so please read the Call for Contributions below, and think about writing something, or at least repost it on your blog and so share in an interesting project :)

Mark Roncace is seeking contributors for two volumes, Global Perspectives on the Old Testament and Global Perspectives on the New Testament. Pearson Prentice Hall is publishing Global Perspectives on the Bible this year. Next, separate OT and NT volumes, also to be published by Prentice Hall, will be produced. Both books will feature much of the same material as the original Bible volume, but with added essays.

The books—designed as entry level college textbooks—gather four different essays around one biblical text. The essays are brief (about 1,000 words and need not be “scholarly”) and articulate insights from a particular geographical, social, cultural, economic, religious, or ideological context/location. Here is the list of texts/books for which he need essays.

• Genesis 6-9
• Numbers 22-24
• Leviticus
• Judges
• 1-2 Kings
• Jeremiah
• Ezekiel 1-25
• Esther
• Ecclesiastes
• Daniel
• Crucifixion narratives
• Acts (other than chapter 2)
• Corinthians
• Galatians
• 1-2 Thessalonians
• James
• Pastorals (1-2 Timothy, Titus)
• 1-3 John
• 1-2 Peter

Please let Mark know if you are interested (mroncace@wingate.edu) in writing an essay on one (or two) of these texts and he will forward specific guidelines and a sample. In addition to scholars, Mark is particularly interested in gathering perspectives from non-professional readers. He is trying to run on a tight schedule: final OT essays are due April 1 and final NT essays are due June 1 (but remember they are only about 1,000 words).

Psalm 90 makes a fine reading for a new year. Through the psalm, time (and especially the haunting disparity between short brutish human time and the timeless divine reality) is a strong theme. The psalm is peppered with time words:

• dor generation in v.1 (x2)
• b’terem before in v.2
• shanah year in vv.4, 5, 9, 10 (x3), 15
• yom day in vv.4, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15
• ashmorah night watch in v.4
• boqer morning in v.5, 6, 14
• ereb evening in v.6
• chish quickly in v.10

The psalm opens in the distant past with a heading associating it with Moses the great leader from Israel’s pre-monarchic origins.¹

The rest of the first verse forefronts the two key ideas of the psalm, time and our relationship with God. The wording of the opening stresses the persons involved. Very literally it would read: “Lord, a dwelling, you, you have been for us from generation to generation.”

This attention to time carries on through the psalm, and is straightaway extended in the next verse from a human timescale from “generation to generation” to extend from before the birth of the world into the “age”²  to come:

Before the mountains were born
or ever you had given birth to the earth and the world,
from age to age you are God.

From verse 3 to 11 the focus on time stresses time and again that the human and the divine timescales are incommensurable, and that humans suffer the divine wrath. This is not a psalm for the faint hearted, or for people living the comfortable smooth lives our TVs and magazines tell us should be ours. This psalm is not compatible with the Western dream.

But it “works” in a world full of natural disaster: earthquakes (still going on in Christchurch after over a year), floods (and even the minor ones in the Bay of Plenty yesterday cause pain and disruption), and all of man’s inhumanity to man (although 2011 was a year with more glimpses of hope for Burma that anyone expected as 2012 begins the Army is still attacking ethnic villages and destroying their crops, the political prisoners kept in inhuman conditions in the jails can still be counted as over a thousand).

Ps 90:10 is often quoted in something approximating to the fairly literal KJV: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years” this with its mention of strength suggests (or in the last few generations reminds us) that we might even live longer. However, in the psalm the effect is quite different, to quote the whole verse:

The days of our years are threescore years and ten;
and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,
yet is their strength labour and sorrow;
for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

The whole point of the verse is that even if our life is long it is marked (sooner or later) by toil and trouble, and in any case (by any measure but our own pitifully brief one) are so short. Anyone who has reached “a certain age”³ will recognise how the years begin to fly away faster and faster.

So far, if I have presented it as I think it should be read, Psalm 90 is as far from contemporary cheery upbeat “worship songs” as it is possible to be ;)

Yet, it was my grandmother’s favourite psalm. Perhaps because the hymn based on it “Our God, our help in ages past…” used to be sung every “Remembrance Sunday”, and she had cause to remember. Her groom, my father’s father, was killed in the first world war leaving his new wife and toddler. Psalm 90 is a good new year reading in such circumstances. For as well as human mortality it reminds us of the divine author and finisher of our lives. “…our hope for years to come!”

There are two more reasons why this psalm is a favourite of mine. It is one of the few passages in Scripture to deal seriously and in any depth with human aging. And it contains one of the Bible’s few descriptions of creation as birthing:

Before the mountains were born
or ever you had given birth to the earth and the world,
from age to age you are God. (Ps 90:2)

As a result it gets a brief appearance in my new book Not Only a Father,⁴ and will deserve much fuller treatment in the one on human aging, if I ever write it ;)

1. Although there is considerable evidence that the headings may have been added to psalms after they were first written and used, there is no textual evidence for them being absent from the psalms that have them in most modern translations. Rather the reverse the early Greek  translation and the Qumran psalms scrolls seem to have more of these headings, suggesting that they were later additions.
2. Whatever exactly ‘olam means.
3. 50, 40, 30…?
4. I will add a link to the print version soon, for now the text is already available online in discussable format.

I feel inordinately virtuous. Before a lesurely breakfast of porridge with blueberries and brazil nuts at 9, I had not only fed my animals before I fed myself (as my grandad taught me) and read the blogs and “done” my email, as usual, but I’d marked the last of the late assignments, cut a couple of fence posts and most of the panneling for the new vege garden, mulched two tea bushes and pulled up a wheelbarrowful of weeds from under the trellis.

No wonder I feel ordinately, if not inordinately virtuous!

Which introduces neatly my theological point. As I always say, but never hear, hard work is bad for the soul. Feeling virtuous is a form of pride, and pride is one of the (“seven deadly” even) sins.

Before anyone accuses me of preaching laziness I should turn to point out the proper response to such a start to the day… it’s the theological virtue (a true one this time) that Jack in the movie Titanic and Qoheleth (and/or his ambivalent narrator) preach. Thankfulness, such a morning should prompt me to give thanks to the creator for all these opportunities I enjoy. Life is (indeed, and overwhelmingly obviously on such a morning) a gift.

Bookends (photo by Kevin Grocki, and in honour of Jim West)

In previous posts in this series I have been critical of Wayne Grudem’s interpretations of Gen 1-3:

• Biblical understandings of human gender: Part One: Beginnings
• Biblical understandings of human gender: How to read the Bible: Larger passages trump verses
• Biblical understandings of human gender: Part Two: The creation of human gender
• Biblical understandings of human gender: Part Four: Grudem on Adam and Eve
• Biblical understandings of human gender: Part Five: Grudem on Adam and Eve ii

It is pleasant therefore to write a post in which we largely agree.

The KJV rendered the last word in  Gen 2:18 knegdo as “meet for him” giving rise to the neologism “helpmeet” to describe women and their role with respect to men. The KJV translators did not create this neologism, they merely placed together the two words “help” and “meet” meaning “appropriate”, thus (as we’ll see) accurately rendering the Hebrew. The new conjoint word “helpmeet” was however in use before the end of the 17th century, and rewritten as “helpmate” in the next century.¹

The misappropriation of the KJV’s “help meet” to present a subservient role for women has led to a backlash, which Grudem’s book presents as typified by Aída Besançon Spencer’s claims in her 1989 work Beyond the Curse: Women Called to Ministry. Spenser (a New Testament scholar who ought therefore to have known better) translated “I will make for him a helper as if in front of him“. Then she leaped from this over-literal monstrosity to claim that “[f]ront or visible seems to suggest superiority or equality” the second is clearly true of any sensible rendering of the phrase, the first is evidently false, as Grudem notes.²

But on the other hand, and again as Grudem recognises knegdo does mean “corresponding to” and so implies equality and complementarity (i.e. mutuality) rather than some hierachy. In the second half of this sentence Grudem and I begin to part company, but since the reasons concern our understanding of “helper” ‘ezer rather than “meet” I’ll save that discussion for another post.

While it is true that knegdo is a rare construction found only in this chapter the core of the expression neged meaning beside or in front of, so here over-literally something like “as beside him” the implication of “corresponding to him” or “fitting for him” is fairly clear and the choice of all commonly accepted Bible translations in English.

The conclusion of this post is that knegdo means corresponding and implies that men and women are both equal and complementary (in the sense that we can fill out what the other lacks). It is in how these two truths can be held together without one in practice denying the other that the complexity of our topic lies. My next post on “helper” ‘ezer will begin to explore some aspects of this.

1. See Oxford Dictionaries Online.
2. Her appeal to nagid prince or leader to support her claims is disingenuous from a NT scholar, as Grudem notes. 

Open Bible has a fascinating on post Applying Sentiment Analysis to the Bible.

Sentiment analysis involves algorithmically determining if a piece of text is positive (“I like cheese”) or negative (“I hate cheese”). Think of it as Kurt Vonnegut’s story shapes backed by quantitative data.

The post started with a plot of the data for the whole Bible, which for anyone interested in the “big picture” of the Bible’s story is fascinating. But the data, calculated using available software on an English translation based on the calculated probability of a verse being positive or negative in sentiment, allows a closer look, and running a five verse running average gives really striking and thought provoking “pictures” of each Bible book.

While Jonah goes from bad to worse ;)

Ruth moves from negative to positive

Which both seem intuitively “right”. However, Esther needs some thought:

Esther: is the beginning really the happiest part?

I’m currently teaching the Song of Songs, and last week was Ecclesiastes, so these are interesting:

They both fit common preconceptions pretty well...

…but is it as simple as that? ;)

Previous posts about biblical teaching on family ( What is a family? and Does the Bible present a preferred pattern of family) led to lively discussion. How do we use the Bible rightly to establish teaching on family? This post addresses two aspects. The Bible uses different sorts of text to teach different ways. We also need to discern the direction or thrust of the Bible as a whole.

How the Bible teaches

The Bible is made up of many different sorts of text, and they do not all “work” the same. We understand a law from Leviticus differently from a Psalm, and both are read according to different rules from a proverb…

Some sorts of biblical passage intend to teach us something. Paul’s letters for example sought first to teach the early churches how to live, and so they also seek to teach us about Christian living.

A narrative does not teach in this direct way. When 2 Samuel 11ff. tells us about David’s adultery with Bathsheba, and subsequent executive murder of her husband Uriah. The purpose is not to teach the moral “adultery is wrong” nor even “murder is wrong”. It does want us to identify with David, and learn about temptation, sin and punishment from his mistakes. So when we read Ps 51 we will learn even more (but about God and ourselves rather than about “morals”).

Epistles and History are told in different ways and teach differently.

Narrative reaches deeper into our being, but we need to be more cautious in identifying its “teaching”. Epistles by contrast teach directly. When reading such direct teaching (and much of Jesus’ speech in the Gospels is like this – direct teaching) we need to be cautious about making the Bible say something different from what it intends. Using Jesus’ teaching about trying to fit a camel through the eye of a needle (Mat 19:24 etc.) to teach about the folly of over loading a beast of burden is simply a way to avoid what Jesus says “wealth is dangerous to our spiritual health”!

Western Christians seek to avoid Jesus’ teaching about divorce and remarriage by turning it into “safe” teaching about families.

I am saying two things here:

1. When reading a Bible passage that “teaches” we should be very cautious of making it teach something more than it sets out to teach – avoid the temptation to make the Bible say more than it does!

2. When drawing teaching from a narrative text we should be careful. Scripture is not seeking to teach ideas to readers of such texts. 2 Sam 11ff. is not merely a warning to murderous adulterers. It is a warning to all of us about following our desires and becoming faithless people.

The thrust of biblical teaching

Granted that much of the Bible (especially most poems and many stories) does not set out directly to teach, we need a way to confirm what we suspect the Bible may be teaching us.

We are so used to hearing people quote Bible verses (and seeing this – as I did above!) that we forget that we need to look at the whole sweep of biblical teaching. I’ll use quotes from the comments to the previous article to try to explain what I mean. (The quotes are in italics.)

Matthew interprets Hosea 11:1 in “messianic” fashion in Matthew 2:15 and gives a meaning to the text that is not evident in its original context.

This use by Matthew of Hos 11:1 is a really good textbook example of some of the issues involved in Christian reading of the Old Testament. At first glance it seems as if Matthew has “played fast and loose” with the biblical text. “Out of Egypt I called my son.” In Hosea the son is Israel, who as the following verses show was less than faithful to God. Matthew says that Jesus “fulfills” this. What does he mean? He uses the verb “fill, make full”(as do other New Testament writers) to point to a relationship between Jesus and Scripture. What the NT means by fulfil is something like: What Israel was intended to be, Jesus is fully. So Jesus was intended to be God’s son, called from Egypt to reveal God. Israel failed at this task, but Jesus (as the rest of the Gospel will show) fills the calling fully. In other words Matthew is not making Scripture say something it did not intend, rather he points to a consequence or conclusion drawn from comparing this text with the experience he has of Jesus.

Similarly: “In 1 Corinthians 9:8-9 Paul quotes from Deuteronomy 25:4 and gives it a meaning that was clearly not intended in its First Testament context.” Paul is also drawing a principle out of Scripture, that even an animal that works deserves to benefit from their labour – and as Paul says how much more a human!

In Matthew 22:32 Jesus quotes Exodus 3:6 as proof to the Pharisees that there is a resurrection. The text he quotes in its original context has nothing to do with resurrection.

It is true that the Scripture Jesus quotes is not about resurrection. Though it is about the nature of God, and God does claim to be the God of Abraham, not to “have been” his God. He refers to a present reality. Here Jesus points to a hint that is already present in Scripture. A hint that the NT again fills out, fulfills for us. God’s self-revelation in the Bible is not static and timeless, but incarnate first in the story of Israel, and then fully in Christ and in the NT witness to what his coming means.

As you point out I did the same thing! Taking what was merely a hint in the Old Testament and recognising its fullness in the revelation of God in Christ, and even in the later doctrines that the Church developed to understand him!

In your first article Tim you say “Already the “preface to the Bible” expresses the equality, and complementarity, of men and women. Through the parallelism of Hebrew poetry we see that together they are “in the image of God”. Through this union of difference, human marriages picture the union of difference that Christian theology calls Trinity”. You of course are reading a ‘trinitarian’ meaning back into the Genesis text that can hardly be said to be intended in the original context. I’m quite comfortable with your approach however because it is consistent with broader themes within the unified canon of scripture.

So, at times the New Testament goes beyond (but builds on) the Old. Because God’s self-revelation in the Bible was “incarnate” like a human being it grows and develops. But the new builds on, and fills out, the old. So that there is a direction or trajectory of Scriptural teaching.

I do not see this happening with the topic of family. This is a surprise to me, I would have expected clear teaching on such an important topic. When Scripture is silent then I am cautious of claiming more than I read… What I think is going on (and here I am merely expressing a feeling, not claiming to teach with authority ;-) is that on this topic God recognised that human cultures are different. Different cultures would have different family and child rearing patterns. So the Bible does not impose one pattern (e.g. the Mediterranean “household”). Rather it shows and teaches us the virtues that we need to strengthen our families.

This piece, like: What is a family? and Does the Bible present a preferred pattern of family was first published on the Vision network site, but changes of URL have lost it there, so I am reposting it here.