Something different, just because...
=Experts Warn of 'Terminator'-Style Military-Robot Rebellion
Sometimes I think scientists need to watch more movies.
=Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe
Things that make you go "holy crap!"
=What Makes Earth Special Compared to Other Planets
A survey of the amazing coincidences that make Earth great. If you don't believe they're coincidences, ... well, neither do I.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Thursday, June 25, 2009
A Blast from the Past on Theology
There is a segment of evangelicalism today that dislikes theology and theological orthodoxy and loves the church fathers. This is for them:
Let us keep in mind the sayings of the Lord and the letters of the apostles. They have both told us beforehand that there will be heresies, and in anticipation have given us warnings to avoid them. Since we aren't surprised that they exist, we shouldn't doubt that they are capable of doing shameful things. ... Heresies today won't tear apart the church by their perversion of doctrine any less than the Antichrist will persecute her by his cruel attacks (except persecution makes martyrs, but heresy only apostates). ... For the Apostle Paul says, "prove all things; hold fast that which is good." He considers heretics "not approved" and urges people to turn away from them.-Tertullian, Prescription Against Heretics
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Links
=Have you heard about Moral Accountability.com? All abortion news, all the time. Morbid, yes, but useful.
=On a related note, did you see Penelope Trunk's unexpectedly pro-life piece on abortion "for your career?"
=Complete shift in topic: Resurrection Probably Reported in Same Year It Happened (HT: STR)
=Let's cap off this heavy stuff with something light: Star Wars' Cantina song on the harp. Seriously.
=On a related note, did you see Penelope Trunk's unexpectedly pro-life piece on abortion "for your career?"
"You don’t need to get an abortion to have a big career. ... It doesn’t matter whether you have kids now or later, because they will always make your career more difficult. There is no time in your life when you are so stable in your work that kids won’t create an earthquake underneath that confidence. ... There is little certainty. But there are some certain truths: It’s very hard to have an abortion. And, there is not a perfect time to have kids."It's hard to read at times, but I recommend the whole thing.
=Complete shift in topic: Resurrection Probably Reported in Same Year It Happened (HT: STR)
=Let's cap off this heavy stuff with something light: Star Wars' Cantina song on the harp. Seriously.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
A Blast from the Past on the Atonement
There are those today who teach that both concern for personal salvation and the idea of substitutionary atonement were products of the Reformers. Mmm hmm...
"[God] sought to form a mind conscious of righteousness, so that being convinced in that time of our unworthiness of attaining life through our own works, it should now, through the kindness of God, be vouchsafed to us; and having made it manifest that in ourselves we were unable to enter into the kingdom of God, we might through the power of God be made able.-from the Epistle to Diognetus, Chapter IX.
"But when our wickedness had reached its height, and it had been clearly shown that its reward, punishment and death, was impending over us; and when the time had come which God had before appointed for manifesting His own kindness and power, how the one love of God, through exceeding regard for men, did not regard us with hatred, nor thrust us away, nor remember our iniquity against us, but showed great long-suffering, and bore with us, He Himself took on Him the burden of our iniquities, He gave His own Son as a ransom for us, the holy One for transgressors, the blameless One for the wicked, the righteous One for the unrighteous, the incorruptible One for the corruptible, the immortal One for them that are mortal. For what other thing was capable of covering our sins than His righteousness? By what other one was it possible that we, the wicked and ungodly, could be justified, than by the only Son of God?
"O sweet exchange! O unsearchable operation! O benefits surpassing all expectation! that the wickedness of many should be hid in a single righteous One, and that the righteousness of One should justify many transgressors!"
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Can We Trust the Gospels? 3
The origin of the gospels
We continue Mark D. Roberts’ Can We Trust the Gospels? by looking at three chapters that have closely related content.
When were the Gospels written?
Roberts offers dates for the composition of the Gospels that are later than many evangelicals would give, but he said early on he would use material that the broader scholarly world can agree on. He says the earliest we should expect Mark to have been written was AD60, with Matthew and Luke 65 or later, and John 75+. The dates you see more commonly are probably 3-5 years later for each of those.
Even though I think those dates are all unnecessarily late, they are not catastrophically so. These dates – even the more common ones – are within reasonable lifetimes of witnesses – so the second generation of the church could not just start making things up as both the older disciples and opponents were still around to correct the record.
It’s also worth noting that the Gospels were written well after Paul’s writings. Though there may be much in the Gospels that is hard to believe, the hardest to believe of all is the resurrection which was being taught in Christian circles by at least AD50 (c.f., 1Cor 15) and probably many years before.
What sources did Gospel writers use?
When the Gospels writers did their work, where did they get what they wrote down?
Luke mentions other writers and claims to have carefully investigated everything – suggesting he examined written documents and talked to witnesses, those “eyewitnesses and servants of the word.” Roberts uses this to launch into two kinds of sources: written and oral.
The written sources lead us to the so-called “two-source” hypothesis where Mark and “Q” plus other material were used to construct Matthew and Luke. And Mark is believed to have been constructed of earlier material too. This means there were earlier written sources that are closer to the events in question than the canonical Gospels.
As for the oral sources, we know within 20 years there was an oral tradition being passed down (again, e.g., 1Cor 15). If fact, we should expect a strong oral tradition because theirs was an oral, not a literary, culture – they were used to remembering things that were said. This oral tradition takes us back closer to the events of the Gospels than the canonical records.
Did early Christian oral tradition reliably pass down the truth about Jesus?
But what should we make of this oral tradition? How reliable is that? Wouldn’t that be open to corruption? And what about evolution due to misunderstanding or misremembering the tradition?
The latter is the “Telephone” objection: We’ve all played the game where everyone whispers a sentence down the line until it is garbled beyond recognition. Critics claim this is what would have happened to the Christian oral tradition.
But this objection is weak for a number of reasons:
1. “Since they did their work in community gatherings, if they got the story substantially wrong, the community in which they functioned would hold them accountable for their mistake” (p73).
2. The early Christians thought Jesus was more than a mere teacher, His words were “uniquely true and more important than any other ideas in the world” (e.g., Matt 7:24, Mark 13:31), motivating them to remember what He said and to transmit it accurately (p74). And “…so much in the oral tradition about Jesus does not reflect the needs of the early church” (p78).
3. The words of Jesus seem to have been designed to be memorable.
4. Unlike “Telephone,” the rules of the game were designed to maximize accuracy, not errors.
“Sometimes you’ll hear skeptics talk about the oral period before the writing of the Gospels as if it were a free-for-all, a time when anybody could be inspired by the Spirit to put all sorts of words into Jesus’ mouth. But there is little evidence that this sort of thing actually happened, and plenty of evidence that it did not happen” (p77).
We do not live in an oral culture, and our memories seem to get more unreliable all the time. (I can barely remember by own phone number these days.) That leads us to be skeptical of the abilities of past cultures to remember large amounts of material, but even in our time there are those – in other cultures – who can and do commit large amounts of material to memory:
----------
The book in blog form: Are the NT Gospels Reliable?
The rest of this series:
Part 0, Part 1, Part 1.1, Part 2
We continue Mark D. Roberts’ Can We Trust the Gospels? by looking at three chapters that have closely related content.
When were the Gospels written?
Roberts offers dates for the composition of the Gospels that are later than many evangelicals would give, but he said early on he would use material that the broader scholarly world can agree on. He says the earliest we should expect Mark to have been written was AD60, with Matthew and Luke 65 or later, and John 75+. The dates you see more commonly are probably 3-5 years later for each of those.
Even though I think those dates are all unnecessarily late, they are not catastrophically so. These dates – even the more common ones – are within reasonable lifetimes of witnesses – so the second generation of the church could not just start making things up as both the older disciples and opponents were still around to correct the record.
It’s also worth noting that the Gospels were written well after Paul’s writings. Though there may be much in the Gospels that is hard to believe, the hardest to believe of all is the resurrection which was being taught in Christian circles by at least AD50 (c.f., 1Cor 15) and probably many years before.
What sources did Gospel writers use?
When the Gospels writers did their work, where did they get what they wrote down?
Luke mentions other writers and claims to have carefully investigated everything – suggesting he examined written documents and talked to witnesses, those “eyewitnesses and servants of the word.” Roberts uses this to launch into two kinds of sources: written and oral.
The written sources lead us to the so-called “two-source” hypothesis where Mark and “Q” plus other material were used to construct Matthew and Luke. And Mark is believed to have been constructed of earlier material too. This means there were earlier written sources that are closer to the events in question than the canonical Gospels.
As for the oral sources, we know within 20 years there was an oral tradition being passed down (again, e.g., 1Cor 15). If fact, we should expect a strong oral tradition because theirs was an oral, not a literary, culture – they were used to remembering things that were said. This oral tradition takes us back closer to the events of the Gospels than the canonical records.
Did early Christian oral tradition reliably pass down the truth about Jesus?
But what should we make of this oral tradition? How reliable is that? Wouldn’t that be open to corruption? And what about evolution due to misunderstanding or misremembering the tradition?
The latter is the “Telephone” objection: We’ve all played the game where everyone whispers a sentence down the line until it is garbled beyond recognition. Critics claim this is what would have happened to the Christian oral tradition.
But this objection is weak for a number of reasons:
1. “Since they did their work in community gatherings, if they got the story substantially wrong, the community in which they functioned would hold them accountable for their mistake” (p73).
2. The early Christians thought Jesus was more than a mere teacher, His words were “uniquely true and more important than any other ideas in the world” (e.g., Matt 7:24, Mark 13:31), motivating them to remember what He said and to transmit it accurately (p74). And “…so much in the oral tradition about Jesus does not reflect the needs of the early church” (p78).
3. The words of Jesus seem to have been designed to be memorable.
4. Unlike “Telephone,” the rules of the game were designed to maximize accuracy, not errors.
“Sometimes you’ll hear skeptics talk about the oral period before the writing of the Gospels as if it were a free-for-all, a time when anybody could be inspired by the Spirit to put all sorts of words into Jesus’ mouth. But there is little evidence that this sort of thing actually happened, and plenty of evidence that it did not happen” (p77).
We do not live in an oral culture, and our memories seem to get more unreliable all the time. (I can barely remember by own phone number these days.) That leads us to be skeptical of the abilities of past cultures to remember large amounts of material, but even in our time there are those – in other cultures – who can and do commit large amounts of material to memory:
“The idea of early Christians memorizing substantial traditions about Jesus may seem unrealistic, … but consider the following contemporary analogy. All Muslims are expected to memorize portions of the Qur’an. But many go on to memorize the entire book, which contains more than 80,000 Arabic words. … What enables a Muslim to memorize the entire Qur’an? … [T]he greatest motivation of all … is the belief that the Qur’an contains Allah’s own words. To memorize the Qur’an is to internalize the very words of God. In a similar vein, the early followers of Jesus had both the ability and the motivation to pass on oral tradition with accuracy” (p80-1).So what should we make of all of this? The first-century dating of the four Gospels, “combined with their use of earlier oral traditions combined with early Christian faithfulness in passing on these oral traditions, add up to a convincing rationale for trusting the Gospels” (p81).
----------
The book in blog form: Are the NT Gospels Reliable?
The rest of this series:
Part 0, Part 1, Part 1.1, Part 2
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