Do not thump the book of G’Quan. It is disrespectful.

Many discussions around the Bible founder on the shoals of factual accuracy. The “facts of the matter”, and claims that they are either accurately or inaccurately reported, generate much heat (and for those who like good knock down arguments¹ delight). This should not surprise us, for since the Enlightenment, we have worshiped “facts”.

Indeed respect for the facts has served us well. Truth is found when the facts are reported and marshaled into arguments accurately.

Yet, always, but especially in matters of relationship, there is another sort of truth. Faithfulness too can be truth. In fiction when a character acts in ways which ring true to their nature (as built up elsewhere in the story or the corpus) and to the relevant aspects of the world as we know it (remembering that willing suspension of disbelief plays a role in all poetics) we say the story is “true”. Likewise when the other things all good fictions communicate, the attitudes and elements of worldview “fit” with (i.e. are faithful to) what we believe, we say the story is true. Similarly, in the ancient world,² when an ambassador spoke a message that represented faithfully what his lord would have intended, his words were true. This would have been so even if the message was in fact contradicted by a written communication that spoke differently – if the lord would indeed have spoken differently in the changed circumstances.

To expect the Bible to conform to the first sort of truth, in a world which lived by the second, is mere fundamentalism (a thoroughly modern system).

Of course, to interpret a text which seeks to be faithful requires more skill and judgement than to interpret one which aims at the facts. And isn’t it interesting how often “the facts” serve to support and sustain the status quo?³

Amanda at Cheese-Wearing Theology has posted this month’s Biblical Studies Carnival, in what ways is the “world” (of bibliobloggery) it presents true?

1. What H. Dumpty described as “glory”.
2. Before modern technologies made swift or even almost instant communication at a distance possible.
3. At least until the pressure for change becomes almost irresistible, at which point somehow those flighty facts change sides.

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 ;)

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.

My ex-boss has been reading John Piper & DA Carson’s The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor. These two are among the most prominent poster-boys for Conservative Evangelical (with very big Cs and Es) views. I have more sympathy for what I’ve read of Carson, but neither really connects with the things that interest me most of the time. Yet Paul’s summary of their ‘twelve lessons for the scholar as pastor with brief quotations includes this gem:

Fight a common disjunction (the ‘critical’ vs the the devotional reading of Scripture)
“My response, forcefully put, is to resist this disjunction, to eschew it, to do everything in your power to destroy it … when you read ‘devotionally’, keep your mind engaged; when you read ‘critically’ (ie with more diligent and focused study, deploying a panoply of ‘tools’), never, ever forget whose Word it is. The aim is never to become a master of the Word, but to be mastered by it.” (91)

That is SO true. One of the biggest problems with theological education in the last fifty years is that too often we have failed to help our students to “get” this. We’ve allowed them to develop schizophrenic lives where intellectual understanding and lived faith fail to meet. And that has been killing churches.

I’d disagree fundamentally and at almost every turn with Carson and with Piper on the conclusions of critical reading, but I agree 100% with this quote. It (together with Paul’s other extracts) is so good, it almost makes me want to read the book!

By English 090 http://english090.wikispaces.com/ CC-BY-SA-3.0 - www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

One of the interesting results of nearing retirement from Carey is that I find myself becoming more aware of “elephants in the room”. Somehow while I was still counting my remaining teaching at Carey in multiple years they remained, by and large, unnoticed.

In this post I’d like to address the “elephant” of struggling students. Like many, perhaps most, theological institutions in Western traditionally English-speaking countries Carey has an increasing number of students whose origin or previous education have been in non-Western contexts. Some of these students, picked for intelligence and ability, perform excellently. Others, despite their intelligence, diligence and other qualities frankly do not perform well.

Their difficulties are varied, but often some or all of these elements are present:

• poor command of English, or at least of that strange dialect of English used in the academic world:
• this sometimes leads to complex sentences with strange (to a native anglophone teacher) word-choices or uses
• on other occasions it results in a student who fails to understand something, but who the teacher assumes does understand because they can echo the “right” words and phrases (often it is only in more complex situations like a final essay where the misunderstanding becomes clear)
• some students, believing that education is about the ability to know and repeat certain key information and ideas, will “plagiarise” copying the words or ideas of a perceived authority (which may be a textbook, academic article or item found through googling – for such students are often not well-equipped to judge the quality of material they access)
• poor quality work produced with good intentions after a hard struggle by the student leads teachers (and not only the erroneously soft-hearted teachers ;) to award a passing grade (just) to work which ought to fail.

Our standard procedures and mechanisms would lead to either a poor pass for a student who should be getting good or excellent results, a mention on the institution’s plaigiarism register, or a fail. Because teachers workloads (in terms of numbers of student-classes and assignments) have roughly doubled in the last twenty years¹ we do not have enough time to provide sufficient help to assist the student to overcome their difficulty (or, e.g. in the case of language knowledge, we do not have the skills needed to help).

This situation is not new, but I think it is getting worse. The result is students who receive diplomas but who do not really exhibit the qualities and understanding that the institution’s graduate profile would suggest.

A quarter of a century ago in another place we used to sometimes refer scathingly to certain European and American institution’s habit of granting “African Doctorates”. Such awards, given with the best of motives, do not help the “developing world” or minority cultures. They are dangerous lies!

1. This is a very rough figure, and is based only on my experience and observations, but I believe is at least approximately representative at least of the situation in NZ.

Photo by unaesthetic

David Lamb has a fine rant: I hate Study Bibles. Here’s the heart of it:

Study Bible comments are kind of like stuff on the internet. Sometimes the information is good, sometimes it’s junk. But at least when you go to the internet, you know you’re going to find some junk. You don’t expect to find junk in your Bible. At least you shouldn’t.

Some Study Bibles are relatively harmless, and even helpful at times. The notes are limited and just provide context and background that most typical Bible readers just don’t know.

The curse in Rev 21:18 is fairly explicit:

I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll.

A charitable interpretation would be that the curse only applies to Revelation (“this scroll”) in which case I suppose a “study bible” with ZERO additions to Revelation escapes the curse. But friends your trusty NIV Study Bible is cursed with all the plagues described in Revelation!

Image used by Barna to illustrate the article being commented on

The Barna group have a new book reporting a five year project on why the young are leaving church.

The study of young adults focused on those who were regular churchgoers Christian church during their teen years and explored their reasons for disconnection from church life after age 15.

From this study theyextract a brief summary of  Six Reasons Young Christians Leave Church. The six reasons they give are:¹

• Churches seem overprotective.
• Teens’ and twentysomethings’ experience of Christianity is shallow.
• Churches come across as antagonistic to science.
• Young Christians’ church experiences related to sexuality are often simplistic, judgmental.
• They wrestle with the exclusive nature of Christianity.
• The church feels unfriendly to those who doubt.

I’d see a clustering in these reasons, especially in the light of the comments they make in the article below each. Together they describe a mindless defensive faith. Several express a sort of mindless, anti-science, be afraid of Harry Potter because the stories have “magic” in them… Christianity. This tendency almost caused me to “lose my faith” back when I was a teenager. Things have changed but not for the better, “Evangelical” churches today are even less healthy places to be young, intelligent and questionning :( But it’s not just the young who have difficulty with that, it’s anyone with a brain who enjoys using it!

Five answers for church leaderships:

• Churches seem overprotective.

If Christianity is true, and good, if it helps one to be in communion with the maker of everything then loosen up!

• Teens’ and twentysomethings’ experience of Christianity is shallow.

OK, it’s true that no one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of a TV audience. But churches are not (whatever the latest multi-mega-pastor tells us) in the business of bums on seats, or entertaining… If you offer your congregation milk instead of steak and chips with broccoli don’t expect them to find this pablum spiritually nourishing!

• Churches come across as antagonistic to science.

The world was made in seven days in 4004BC it says so in the Bible, the sun goes round the earth otherwise Joshua could not have stopped the sun… Duh! Scripture is richer, deeper and not at all limited to being a “how things work” manual. Wake up and see the beauty of the poetry, the meaning in the stories, the God behind the marvelous everything we inhabit!

• Young Christians’ church experiences related to sexuality are often simplistic, judgmental.

Let me get this straight… Divorce is OK, serial polygamy is fine, even the odd case of sexual abuse of children can be quietly hushed up, but if hormone crazy kids do more than kiss the sky falls in? Why can’t we start to be consistent, honest and welcoming of sinners, as well as clear on what is sinful?²

• They wrestle with the exclusive nature of Christianity.

Frankly I don’t think this one is expressed well. The post says:

Three out of ten young Christians (29%) said “churches are afraid of the beliefs of other faiths” and an identical proportion felt they are “forced to choose between my faith and my friends.” One-fifth of young adults with a Christian background said “church is like a country club, only for insiders” (22%).

This is more of that ghetto mentality, fearful of the big bad world outside the church doors. It is not a confident understanding that Jesus is the answer to the brokenness of the world, that God is the maker of everything and that the Spirit is the Lord the giver of life that the kids dislike, it is seeing their elders hiding together in a cupboard in case the evil monsters get them that turns them off church.

• The church feels unfriendly to those who doubt.

Unfriendly? The defensive ghettoised narrow-minded strand that is so vocal in Evangelical Christianity is not just “unfriendly” to those who doubt, it’s so terrified that it will wage total war, with no holds barred… the only answer is to open up, trust the God who made you, who loved the world so much he became flesh and dwelt among us and even died on a cross, who empowers and inspires all who seek him. If you trust such a God perfect love will cast out your fears.

1. BTW the study was done entirely with a US “national” sample, but I guess you can quickly get a feel for how/if things are different where you live. My take in for NZ the differences are less marked than one might expect.
2. BTW homosexuality is not the one sin against the Holy Spirit that will condemn people, without hope of redemption. If narrowminded, back-biting gossips can be held in God’s love, then people who have sex the wrong way probably can too, at least they don’t hurt others as deeply

Dr Southern Baptist Convention the famous blogger, biblical minimalist, pastor and insomniac

The Southern Baptist Convention is apparently considering a name change. Jim West is upset (about this, as he is about so many other things). He’s thinking himself  that he’d “like to follow suit and consider a name-change for myself “.

I have a great suggestion:

How about changing your name to “Southern Baptist Convention” the first name echoes your existing surname, the second reflects your adherence, and Convention reminds us that names are merely convenient conventions :)

And besides, that way we’ll still have a Southern Baptist Convention to moan about even after the existing one is gone West ;)

Physics professor Joe Redish at the University of Maryland. (Photo: Emily Hanford) from the AmericanRadioWorks post.

I’ve always had a sneaking envy of physics teachers. Their subject comes with such a neat set of well understood and widely agreed (almost universally¹ principles and concepts. In biblical studies everything is so frustratingly a matter of (almost always widely) different interpretations and approaches.

But now I have another reason to envy physics teachers. It may have taken all my life as a teacher, and more, but they now have a well-researched body of knowledge that demonstrates that “lectures” are nearly useless at communicating such ideas, and a nearly equally well-researched body of knowledge about how to do the job better :)

Of course, despite all this evidence most physics teachers are (like most biblical studies teachers) too much creatures of habit to actually change, but if I taught physics at least there’d be that body of research.

Take the simple principle that tells us that two metal balls dropped together at the same time will reach the ground at around the same time despite the fact that one weighs twice what the other does. You do know that principle? It’s called gravity, it’s breaking news, some guys called Newton and Galileo have done theoretical and practical research in the field.  Apparently a huge proportion of physics students, even at “good” universities, just don’t “get” it. Despite attending physics lectures and even passing physics exams. And it’s not because either (a) they are all Quantum Mechanics, or (b) because all physicists are thick ;) It is because lectures don’t work. What does work is the way most of us learned most of what we know.

But before I get to that here’s an anecdote from a post on the topic at AmericanRadioWorks:

Redish has been teaching at the University of Maryland since 1970. When he started, he lectured because that’s the way he had been taught. But after a few years in the classroom, Redish was meeting with one of his mentors, a famous physicist named Lewis Elton who had begun doing research on education.

“He asked me, ‘How’s your teaching?’”

Redish told him it was going well, but that he seemed to be most effective with the students “who do really well and are motivated” about physics.

Elton looked at Redish, smiled, and said, “They’re the ones who don’t really need you.”

“That was like an arrow to the breast!” says Redish.

So, what is this approach to education we (almost) all used as students that could revolutionise teaching and learning? It’s simple. I learned most of what I learned from my peers. The rest I got from books and journals, which I read because conversations with my fellow students over coffee had suggested I needed to read up more on a topic. The basic understanding though came from the chatting over coffee.²

For those who like formal technical language³ it is called Peer Instruction, and there is a whole website provided by Monash University dedicated to Peer Instruction in the Humanities. Read it! Or better still chat to your friends about it, here or over a cup of coffee ;)

1. At least in the metaphorical, not-literal, sense that all physics teachers on earth agree, I can’t be sure those who might perhaps be in other corners of the Universe really do, though i suspect it would be likely ;)
2. No wonder I like drinking coffee, I used to tell my students in Africa that at Oxford teachers and students ran on coffee like cars run on petroleum ;)
3. Perhaps because it makes things seem reassuringly “academic”.

Photo by aflcio

I realise that in my enthusiasm for the infographic I probably didn’t explain well what I meant in my last post: Flip, this is good.

• material prepared by the teacher(s)
• 5-10 minute videos (often made with presentations with voice over (using a screen capture tool – like CaptureFox)
• similar length audio segments (where the notes/visual elements were less important
• short written explanations of key ideas
• a glossary
• other material (both self-discovered and linked by the teacher)
• book chapters
• journal articles
• blog posts
• etc

Note that these resources would need to cover the same sorts of topics as we traditionally think of as the content of our courses, but the list might need some adjustments (in the light of how important/relevant a topic is really for student learning. Since students would discover their “need to know” they would be motivated to learn about arcane topics like intertextuality or the Hebrew verb system.

Many of the “resources” would be the same things (like my 5 Minute Bible podcasts) that I currently point students to when they email me with questions… though some would need preparation, and others might need preparing as the course unfolded.  The same approach would work with distance and onsite students, but in both cases the “class time” would focus on the problem or situation, not on the “content”, developing skills and thinking, and leaving the information to be delivered by less time intensive means.