This and That

On the beauty of English words.

Things You Always Wanted to Know About Graduation

From the Mental Floss blog (generally full of useless information along with some interesting quizzes over useless information).

Where did we get the idea of having baccalaureate services?

If you get bored during a baccalaureate service this month, blame Oxford. A 1432 statute required that every Oxford grad deliver a sermon in Latin before he got his sheepskin, and the service took its name from the practice of presenting the new Bachelors (bacca) with laurels (lauri). Since the first colonial colleges modeled themselves after the big-name schools back home in England and largely focused on educating clergymen, the tradition came to the United States. Just thank your lucky stars you only have to hear one sermon, not a Latin sermon from each member of the graduating class.

Sermons in Latin? Today’s seminaries are really slacking off.

Find our more interesting things at Mental Floss.

Vanhoozer on Morality and Hermeneutics

Justin Taylor, at Between Two Worlds, interviews professor and author Kevin Vanhoozer about his move to Wheaton. The end of the interview is about the tenth anniversary edition of Is There a Meaning in This Text?, a book about interpretation. Vanhoozer comments on the subtitle of his book, “The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge”:,

Let me begin by saying that my subtitle alludes to Van Harvey's important work, The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief. Harvey argues that it is immoral--always, everywhere, and by everyone--to believe something except on the basis of sufficient evidence. This makes criticism more "moral" than faith. So much for the modern morality of knowledge. What I wanted to call attention to was that some postmoderns move in the opposite direction, succumbing not to intellectual pride but sloth by maintaining that it is immoral (they say "violent") to make claims about a text's determinate meaning.

Hermeneutics is a subset of ethics because interpretation aims at a certain kind of good, namely, understanding. In my book I argue for the importance of what I call the interpretative virtues: habits of mind that are more conducive than not to getting understanding. In particular, humility is a key interpretive virtue without which readers cannot do justice to authors as "others." Other interpretive virtues include honesty, openness, and attentiveness. Ultimately, the interpretive virtues are not merely intellectual, nor even moral, but spiritual and theological. For truly to be honest, humble, self-critical, and open is to be a person with certain dispositions, many of which are related to the fruit of the Spirit.

Waltke and Enns on Enns

The recent edition of the Westminster Theological Journal has an exchange between OT scholars Bruce Waltke and Peter Enns on Enns’ book Inspiration and Incarnation, which I commented on recently here. (They are re-published at Peter Enns Online.)

Waltke concludes,

A theory that entails notions that holy Scripture contains flat out contradictions, ludicrous harmonization, earlier revelations that are misleading and/or less than truthful, and doctrines that are represented as based on historical fact, but in fact are based on fabricated history, in my judgment, is inconsistent with the doctrine that God inspired every word of holy Scripture. To be sure, the Scripture is fully human, but it is just as fully the Word of God, with whom there is no shadow of turning and who will not lie to or mislead his elect.

Waltke claims that his comments and conclusions are strictly exegetical and a posteriori, which is to say that he is not writing out of his pre-determined theological commitments. Enns, in his response, gently ribs Waltke for his “apparent claim to have achieved exegetical objectivity” (p. 97).

I have to agree with Enns on that point. Exegetical objectivity is a pipe-dream, IMO (although I am as close as anyone I know)*. We all live and study in the sometimes vicious turmoil of the hermeneutical spiral.

Of course, Enns is perhaps a bit condescending when he speaks of allowing a “a responsible reading of Scripture to challenge our own fallen notions of Scripture, God, the gospel, and so forth” (p. 100). It is hard to imagine that Enns means by “responsible reading” anything other than his own approach. His tenor, both in I&I and this response seems to indicate that anyone who doesn’t read it his way is not reading responsibly.

My point is saying that is not to impugn Enns. I do not know him. Waltke affirms his belief that Enns is a man of personal integrity and “unflinching honesty.” Fine. My point is simply to say that Enns, like Waltke (and all of us), can be too in love with our own thinking and not able to see that others might be as “responsible” or perhaps more “responsible” than we are in the reading of Scripture, and still come to different conclusions.**

Having said all that, I think Waltke is right, as I previously expressed. I  think Enns bibliology is woefully lacking. I do not think he has wrestled with inerrancy and inspiration (and incarnation for that matter) in a responsible way. (I recently heard someone say that even the metaphor of incarnation works against Enns because Christ, in human flesh, was sinless. He did not partake of these foibles that Enns would like to thrust on the Scriptures.)

I think Waltke has successfully shown that Enns’ proof-texts can be handled in responsible ways that do not arrive at Enns’ conclusion. I think Waltke has a more coherent view of inspiration.

Enns says he has arrived at this position because has has no other option. I have no problem with that. I am a soteriological Calvinist and a traditional dispensationalist for the same reason: My conscience in the study of Scripture leaves me no other option. But we all (myself and Enns included) must recognize that good-faith study does not make us right. We might mean well and still be wrong.

In this case, Enns makes some good points. I agree with his conclusion that many of these issues are not “open and shut cases” (p. 114). But I still think he is wrong.

______________________________

*I am kidding … Lighten up.

**Which reminds that I recently saw someone fairly young, obviously theologically and socially immature, accuse a more than 40-year veteran of seminary teaching of being clearly wrong. Having witnessed some of the exegetical process and conclusions of both, it is fair to say that some people would be better served by not speaking up, even when you think it.

Multi-Site Churches - Modern Day Bus Ministry

This article was started prior to my knowledge of the 9Marks EJournal. I have not read that yet. Any thoughts here are to be blamed solely on me.

I have mentioned multi-site churches before. A recent article about Mars Hill Church in Seattle going to its first out of state campus started me thinking again.

It used to be that the buses ran to bring the people to pastor. Now, the modern day bus ministry can take the pastor to the people. Is it bad? Perhaps not. But I think it deserves more thought.

Here’s a quick list of why I think that, some of which probably overlap, and all of which need some development, refinement, or answers as to why they should not be on this list:

1. Celebrity Preachers – Why listen to some local yokel when you can hear “the Big Guy”? This reminds me of Dan Phillips’ recent article on Porn and Paper Pastors.
2. Separation of the roles of pastor and preacher – One of the roles of the pastor is to shepherd his people through the preaching of the word. A DVD can’t do that. It ends up minimizing the role of pastoral ministry.
3. Minimization of local church emphasis – One of the main features of a local church (preaching) isn’t actually local.
4. Minimization of developing leaders – There is a decreasing need to develop biblical leaders who can teach the word effectively because you can download them. Qualifications for leadership begin to be boiled down to “Who can push play?”
5. Temptation to Kingdom building – Why do we need 100 campuses in different states?
6. Temptation to a belief in indispensability – “Smalltown USA doesn’t have a pastor who can preach like me. Let me send you a link so you can download a great church there.” Does Mark Driscoll really think God has no one these other cities who can preach the gospel? Is he really that indispensable? Yes, I know they have planted churches in many places, including local areas in Seattle. So why don’t they keep doing that? Train pastors and send them out.
7. Difficulty of pastoral training – You can’t learn to pastor by serving under a video pastor.
8. Separation of preaching and leadership – Local churches should be lead by … wait for it … local people. One of the key factors in church leadership is the pulpit ministry. When the pulpit ministry is hundreds of miles away, it seems hard to avoid a dichotomy between separation and leadership. A church essentially has a special speaker every week.
9. Difficulty in contextualization – Mars Hill (not the first multi-site, but the one that sparked my thinking here) is big on contextualization in ministry. How does Mark contextualize his preaching for a city he doesn’t live in and doesn’t know anything about? It will be hard to contextualize your message for a city you don’t live in and for a congregation you know nothing about.

I don’t think multi-site is always bad. But as Ed Stetzer recently said, there are some disturbing implications here.