Political Science

When scientists start behaving like politicians, it's a sure bet that the "science" they promulgate has been thoroughly politicized.

Now that "Global Warming" has assisted in trashing the U.S. economy, and destroying all semblence of a rational energy policy, it is at least gratifying that the politics behind the "science" are finally being exposed: see Jim Lacey's article here.

Some of us have known for years that the "science" was junk. There is a reason why Greenland is so-named, and I doubt that the emissions of internal combustion engines were involved. Long live real science!

[added 11/29/2011] See also here.

Outlander is available for Kindle!

Yahoo! Outlander Chronicles: Phoenix is now available for Kindle!

The print edition is coming out in a few weeks, and will be available on Amazon. The Barnes and Noble Nook edition will be available within a week or so. Knowing me, I'll probably crow about each of these releases, so if you are following my blog you'll hear about it.

Speaking of crowing, let me do a little right now: my daughter Dani has done a gorgeous job on the cover. It really captures the essence of the story. She applied some digital wizardry to a photo I purchased, extending the sky upward significantly, adding the foreboding city skyline, as well as picking the font style and placement. I love it! Thanks, Dani!!!

The Washing Machine and I

We are having. . . issues. It's complicated, as they say. You see, my washer insists on disgorging itself of water through the drain-pipe as though it's running a turbine on the Hoover dam. I could probably sell my washer to the Greenville Fire Dept, and they could mount it in a pickup truck and have a cheap, second pumper.

Oh, it looks innocent enough, just sitting there. Trust me, it's quite guilty. The drainpipe behind the washer likes to drink it's water at roughly the rate of an IV drip. As you might imagine, the washer and the drain don't get along. We would regularly find water running across the basement floor. Some folks have water in their basement when a hurricane comes through. We have water in our basement when we do laundry.

Like most good husbands, I sort of figured if I pretended not to notice it, the problem would simply go away. After it became clear that this was not an acceptable solution (Doris made that clear to me), I tried the good husband's next ploy: the minimal effort solution.

See that orange thingy? Its the handle of an in-line valve. I could throttle that baby back, and what was once the Hoover Dam turbine room at flood stage became a good, well-behaved washing machine once again. No more water on the floor. Dor's happy, the drainpipe's happy, I'm happy, and I get to wear clean clothes again.

There's just two minor problems with it. First, the lint continues to build up in the old drain pipe, and that stinking thing starts to overflow again (in case you're wondering, this little saga spans about two years). No matter how many bottles of draino I feed it, it reclogs in a matter of weeks. Nor does it respond to my handy-dandy little snake, or eel, or whatever plumbers call it.

Second, when I throttle it back farther (the good-husband-minimal-effort solution applied with a vengeance), the washing machine gets confused. The timer dial gives it only so much time to get rid of the water before it goes on to the next cycle. For some stupid reason, it thinks that three days is simply too long to be pumping the water out of the basket.

So, I'm faced with a dilemma. No longer am I able work a compromise between the washer and the drainpipe (I imagine that this is somehow vaguely analagous to the impasse between Republicans and Democrats on the budget committee). I have no more good-husband tricks up my sleeve. This calls for some actual work.

Notice the requisite speakers in the tool box, for listening to political talk radio whilst pretending to be a plumber.

I've got to get through this wall. . .   to this side, where a larger drain awaits. . .

And I need to do it without bringing the house down, flooding the basement with sewage, or destroying the washing machine. All in all, it's a tall order (hey, it's me!).

After a trip to Lowes that included much head-scratching and cogitating, I managed to find my way back home (Dor was with me), with the requisite pieces of plumbing paraphenalia, and I dove in. Well, not literally, as I had thought to turn the Hoover Dam off before leaving the house.

Hours later (many, many hours), I stand back and admire my handiwork.

What's amazing is that I still have my sanctification, all ten fingers, and a washer that works at full throttle. . .

and an oversize hole in the wall, but I won't worry about that; maybe if I pretend not to notice, it will go away.

I love You, Lord, because. . .

This is how Psalm 116 begins. The psalmist goes on to say that he loves the Lord because God answers his prayers, because God has delivered him, and so on.

When you stop to think about it, the psalmist sounds like the ultimate user: “I love you because of what you do for me.”

Of all potential targets of love, surely Almighty God is the most worthy. He is consummately merciful, just, good, giving, righteous, holy, faithful, longsuffering, generous, of unparalleled skill and beauty in His artistry, and much more. Surely we ought to love Him simply because of His glorious perfections of character! Of all that is, He is the most, well, lovable.

Does there have to be a self-interest on our part? Does that not, sort of, grind on your good ‘ol human pride? Do we only love God for what we get from Him?

But that’s who we are. We are totally dependent upon God’s continuing grace (be it common or special), for our very existence. We are weak, contingent creatures, who draw breath only because He upholds all things by the word of His awesome power. We are also sinners, consumed by our ungodly project to supplant the true and mighty God with our pompous selves. Left to our natural selves we are hostile against God, self-declared enemies. We want to think of ourselves as gods, usurping His rule. All the while the truth remains that if He were to turn from us, in an instant our frail little house of cards would collapse.

He alone is self-existent, needing nothing, needing no one’s approval, no one’s love, no one’s acknowlegement. He is complete in Himself, separate from and transcendent above creation and all of its creatures.

But He loves us dearly, because it is His nature to do so. And He has walked among us in the Person of His Son. And we love Him, but only because . . . He first loved us (1 John 4:19).

Greenville owes me. . .

I am READY, baby! For snow, that is. Got me a new snow shovel. Got scrapers for the cars, and de-icing washer fluid. Got a pair of stretch-on crampons for my boots, to keep me from skating down my steep driveway (I could put a ski-lift on my driveway and live off the income, it’s that steep; it's the sort of thing that helicopters will drop snowboarders off on the top; okay, that might be a slight exaggeration).

Woke up my snow-blower from it’s long summer nap, fired it up, make sure I don’t have to yank my arm off when I really need that sucker to start.

Got two 50 lb. bags of ice-melt from Walmart. Get ‘em now before prices go up, only $7.49 per bag.

On second thought, don’t get ‘em. There’s no way on God’s green earth we’ll get measurable snow-fall this winter; not when I’m all ready for it.

Probably be, maybe, 70 degrees in January. Nuts. Wish I’d thought of that first. Ought to take all this stuff back to the store, but it’s too late now.

Gonna have a warm winter, Greenville. You owe me. . .

Status update on Outlander Chronicles: Phoenix

I took a vacation day today for a "writing marathon" and at long last completed my re-write of Outlander Chronicles: Phoenix. I am very pleased with the final product; many thanks to my son, Joshua, for a long but needed list of recommended corrections and changes, nearly all of which found their way into the final version.

The changes include grammatical (I probably wacked 30% of the adverbs I had used in earlier versions and used more contractions); stylistic (I tried to eliminate my tendency to over-explain and tightened up the dialog); technical (M4s use magazines, not clips); characterization (Jacen is no longer so naive and there is more lead-up to some of his blowups); and structure (there are some deleted scenes and some added scenes).

Next up: I need to select an independent publisher, get the cover designed, reformat the files for E-readers as well as print-on-demand format, secure an ISBN and Library of Congress catalog number, and that's about it.

My next project is The Candidate, and I can't wait to get started on it.

Got problems?

Been helping some people work through some issues - sorry, I can't get any more specific than that. But this morning I am feeling the desperation of someone who knows that someone is about to drive a car off a cliff (metaphorically) and is headed for deep difficulties, and you've done what you can, and hearts are not changing.

As I was wrestling with that, I ran across Exodus 4:31, and was struck by it's simple statement. First, the background:

The Israelites were slaves, in cruel bondage, in Egypt. Egyptian task-masters were carving furrows in the backs of Hebrew slaves with their whips. The Egyptians were practicing infanticide, killing all the male Jewish newborns they could get their hands on. It was an outwardly hopeless situation. But God had made some promises, hundreds of years earlier, and now those promises were coming due, so He sends Moses to deliver His people. Moses has just arrived on the scene, and shared with the people God's plans to deliver them:

So the people believed; and when they heard that the Lord was concerned about the sons of Israel and that He had seen their affliction, then they bowed low and worshiped. Exodus 4:31 (NASB)

Got problems, Christian? Meditate on that verse a little while, and see if it does not produce hope and worship.

Source of Authority #5: Paul was 'a man of his times.'

This is an admittedly long post. I beg you to stay with it until the end, because it reveals the potential danger of the kind of hermeneutics employed by scholars sympathetic to BioLogos.

When Christianity Today (CT) printed an article in the June issue that questioned whether or not Adam and Eve were historical figures, they were revealing the desperate state of mainstream evangelical theology. The reason for the doubts did not arise from the biblical text, but from the conclusions that Dr. Francis Collins arrived at as a result of his groundbreaking work on the Human Genome Project. In effect, greater confidence was being placed in the results of science, than in the plain statements of Scripture.

Dr. Francis Collins is part of BioLogos, an organization of scientists and biblical scholars who seek to show that there is no essential conflict between the Bible and science. I agree with them in that one limited sense; I don’t think there is any conflict either. But my reasons are different from theirs. There is no conflict, so far as I am concerned, because science is incompetent to comment on events in history when God supernaturally intrudes into the natural world. Genesis 1-3 is an accurate historic account of the supernatural origin of the cosmos in six days, and the ensuing Fall. When science contradicts biblical testimony, I am unconcerned since the results of science will be unreliable when dealing with events of supernatural origin.

BioLogos eliminates the supposed conflicts by deconstructing Scripture, so as to twist it into conformity with what they view as the conclusions of science, and in particular, theistic evolution. This is done by reducing portions of the biblical narrative to figurative language or mythical accounts. The point of these texts, it is said, is found in the spiritual principles they teach and not in their relationship to actual history. The source of authority, for BioLogos, is science; therefore the Bible must be made to agree with science.

Today’s post concerns one of the principles of interpretation, the ‘man of his times’ argument, employed by biblical scholars who wish to avoid dealing with Genesis as history. This principle enables scholars sympathetic to BioLogos’ commitments to embrace theistic evolution while claiming to remain faithful to the Bible and its teachings.

In CT’s June article, The Search for the Historical Adam, you will find the following statement: “[Pete] Enns has little doubt that Paul indeed thought Adam was ‘a real person.’ But Enns suggests that the apostle was reflecting beliefs about human origins that were common among the ancients” [emphasis mine].

Later in the article, Daniel Harlow is cited in much the same vein: “Whether or not Adam was historical, [Harlow] asserted, is ‘not central to biblical theology.’ Paul and Luke may have thought Adam was a literal man because they had no reason not to, he explained. But ‘we have many reasons’ to interpret Adam as a literary [meaning, non-historical] figure” [emphasis mine].

What both these scholars are saying is this: Paul was a ‘man of his times.’ He was educated in contemporary Jewish theology, and acculturated to the beliefs held by the society of which he was part. Consequently, he believed what he had been taught. Paul’s view of Adam as an actual, historical, first man, was something he had absorbed from the educational, social and religious influences around him.

From one perspective they are correct. Paul certainly was a man of his times, and undoubtedly entertained many notions, especially about the natural world, that were simply wrong. Where I depart from them is that I believe that Paul’s canonical writings are inspired, and therefore inerrant and infallible (a ‘canonical writing’ would be one found in our Bible, thus, in the canon of Scripture). If Paul (or Moses, etc.) writes about Adam as an actual man, then he is an actual, historical man.

According to the ‘man of his times’ principle as these scholars employ it, when Paul writes 1 Corinthians 15:45-49 (Adam’s headship of fallen humanity), or Romans 5:12-21 (Adam’s fall into sin and the resulting penalty of death imputed to all his progeny), or 1 Timothy 2:13-14 (the order of creation—Adam first, then Eve—and the shades of difference between Adam and Eve’s sin—she was deceived, he was not), he is simply alluding to what he thinks is true, as a man of his times. He’s wrong, according to BioLogos and its supporters, but poor Paul is too primitive in his scientific understandings to realize it.

The point is often made that it is the words of Scripture that are inspired, not the authors. As mentioned previously, Paul undoubtedly did hold opinions on different extra-biblical subjects that were in error. But if the words of Scripture are inspired, then the canonical documents Paul wrote carry divine authority and are inerrant and infallible. And Paul, in his writings, does represent Adam as an historical character; as do, indeed, the other writers of Scripture. Those who mention him at all write of him as an actual person, and plainly refer to the Genesis account of the creation event as a reliable representation of what happened. There’s not the slightest hint that any considered the Genesis account to be figurative.

If you allow for the notion that the biblical writers’ own mistaken views became part of the warp and woof of Scripture, as the scholars sympathetic to BioLogos do, you no longer have a meaningful doctrine of inspiration: Scripture can be stretched like a rubber band to accommodate any idea or avoid any difficulty.

A couple of actual examples will suffice to make this point:

• Some modern interpreters use the ‘man of his times’ argument to claim that Paul’s bias against homosexuality was nothing more than his expressing the prejudice of the day.
• Some modern interpreters use the argument to claim that Paul’s view of women in the church and the home was nothing more than an expression of the bias of first-century culture.
• Some modern interpreters use the argument to claim that Jude 9 is mythical, that Jude only mentioned it because it was what he had been taught. Others use the same argument to dispense with various miracles in the Old Testament.

Once we allow the ‘man of his times’ argument to judge portions of the Scripture as historically inaccurate, modern theology is placed once again on the same lethal trajectory as that of the naturalistic theological liberalism of the 19th and 20th centuries. It opens the door to an eventual attack on the very foundations of redemption.

Let me show you how this works.

Paul was surrounded by a religious culture (Jew and Gentile) that was wholly taken up with blood sacrifice. Throughout history blood sacrifice has been a basic staple of many religions, whether you are talking about the Aztecs, the Canaanites, Israel, the Greeks, etc. The first-century butcher shops of Corinth, for example, were filled with meat from animals slaughtered in sacrifice to the Greek gods. Since Paul was a man of his times, then perhaps Paul’s belief about the blood atonement of Christ was unduly influenced by his acculturation to the bloody practices of the first century.

“Oh, Chris, relax!" you respond. "Give your fevered imagination a rest! BioLogos is just talking about Adam here, no one is denying the atonement!”

Really? BioLogos is not the only player in this game. Let’s all exercise our fevered imaginations together, for a moment. In fact, let’s just pretend that there is an imaginary British Baptist pastor, we’ll give him a name, maybe ‘Steve Chalke,’ and let’s pretend he employs this very ‘man of his times’ argument. Let’s just pretend that Chalke says that Moses was a man of his times and wrote all those instructions for animal sacrifice, having been unduly influenced by the pagan nations surrounding Israel.

Then let’s imagine that Chalke begins to deconstruct the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God [gee, wonder what that means?], in part by saying that Moses was actually wrong regarding all those bloody sacrifices. Therefore the atoning sacrifice of Christ, our understanding of which has been anchored to the Mosaic sacrifices (see the book of Hebrews), can not actually be the sacrifice of a substitute, since Moses was wrong to begin with. In fact, lets pretend that Chalke’s new understanding of Moses’ mistaken view of sacrifice leads him to label the theology of the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ as a case of “divine child abuse.”

But, of course, that’s just the product of my fevered imagination, using the slippery-slope straw man against those who disagree with me. Right? Wrong. None of this is imaginary. Steve Chalke’s ideas are garnering serious consideration, and are anchored, in part, on viewing Moses as ‘a man of his times,’ acculturated in a primitive, pagan world. Here’s what Chalke says:

“The emphasis on Yahweh’s apparent appetite for continuous appeasement through blood sacrifice, present within some Pentateuchal texts, is to be understood in the light of later prophetic writings as a reflection of the worship practices of the pagan cults of the nations that surrounded the people of Israel. However, the story of Israel’s salvation is the story of her journey away from these primal practices towards a new and more enlightened understanding by way of Yahweh’s self-revelation.”

[Emphasis mine. Quote is from Steve Chalke’s article, The Redemption of the Cross, from page 38, The Atonement Debate, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008. Disclaimer: I have not read The Atonement Debate; I copied this citation from Adrian Warnock’s blog at http://adrianwarnock.com/2008/11/atonement-debate-steve-chalke-argues/. Any errors of understanding are mine, not Warnock’s. Accessed 10/18/2011]

Here is the bottom line: when we use the “man of his times” principle to find factual error in the inspired biblical text, as Enns has, as Chalke has, no doctrine is safe from deconstruction. The foundations of the faith of Christianity are wide-open for a free-wheeling reinterpretation, according to the ultimate source of authority recognized by the interpreter. And in BioLogos’ case, that source of authority is science, not Scripture.

Book Review: C. H. Bullock's Encountering the Book of Psalms

Encountering the Book of Psalms is an excellent, single-volume, introduction to the Psalms. The author writes from a thoroughly conservative standpoint, but at appropriate junctures demonstrates his awareness of liberal speculations scattered throughout the recent history of psalms studies that arise from the various schools of higher criticism. Although he deals with these respectfully and intelligently, he ultimately dismisses them and moves into a scholarly examination of the content of the psalms themselves. Overall, the text is college level but should not be found difficult by readers with a solid high-school education. The pedagogy of the text is excellent: each chapter opens with an outline of the chapter and a set of objectives for the student. The chapter closes with a list of key terms encountered, as well as questions for further study. The book can be used very profitably for individual or group study settings.

Bullock divides his examination of the psalms into three major pieces. The first part deals with the literary and hermeneutical issues of psalms studies. Captions (superscriptions) and the difficult terms found in some of them, the relationship of the psalms to music, the literary structure of the book on a macro level (the five books within the Psalms) and micro level (the structure of Hebrew poetry) are all considered in a scholarly but accessible manner.

In the second section, the author examines the uses of the psalms in worship and faith, considering the different ways in which they can be approached, as well as a history of the use of the psalms, ranging from the original readers through to modern times. Bullock also explores key theological and historical themes that appear in Psalms.

In the final section, the Psalms are considered from the perspective of genre classification. This section is outstanding; the busy pastor or scholar will find plenty of helpful charts that map the genre characteristics to individual psalms. Not only has Bullock presented an excellent approach to classification, he has managed to do so in a manner that is sometimes richly devotional for the reader. Of particular excellence is the final chapter dealing with the imprecatory psalms.

The book concludes with a select bibliography, a handy glossary of terms encountered in psalms studies, and a comprehensive Scripture index. Although serious scholars will need to add more books than this to their Psalms library, if you can afford but one book of prolegomena on the Psalms, this one will serve you very well.

Source of Authority #4: Figurative Language

Moses writes in Genesis 1-2, in a straightforward fashion about God creating the earth in six days. He indicates what was created on each day. He provides specific details extraneous to a merely figurative account (notice, for instance, in verses 11-12, the details about the trees “bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind”, or the statement in 2:5-6 regarding the lack of rain and the function of the mist).

Obviously, Moses' account does not square with Darwinian theories of the origin of the species. Herein is the problem. For latter-day prophets of science, this round peg of creation won’t fit into the straight lines of the square hole of science’s competing view of the beginnings of the cosmos and its diverse life-forms.

So what do we do now? The answer to that question depends on your chosen Source of Authority. We all agree that Moses is not writing a science textbook. That’s a straw man raised by people hoping to score easy points on people who believe in the Genesis account of creation. What we don’t agree on is whether Moses is writing a historical account of an actual event, or a stylized, figurative account that functions as an etiological narrative of the origin of the cosmos, and of the origin of evil.

So what, you ask, is an etiological narrative? In answer to that, let me simply ask you to think of Paul Bunyan (yes, Paul, not John) and his blue ox Babe. Perhaps you have forgotten that this dynamic duo dug the Grand Canyon, created the Great Lakes, and left footprints behind them as they meandered through Minnesota, forming puddles known as the 10,000 lakes. The legend of Paul Bunyan is a piece of American folklore, an etiological narrative, a myth, that explains various features of the North American landscape. The etiological narrative Genesis presents, as BioLogos would have it, is a figurative creation myth that teaches higher spiritual truths.

So to what do some bible scholars resort when they wish to avoid conflicts between science and the Bible? They retreat to the “figurative language” argument. Genesis, they say, is highly figurative. Christianity Today cites Tremper Longman: “there is nothing that insists on a literal understanding of Adam in a passage [Gen. 1-3] so filled with obvious figurative description.”

Apparently, figurative language must exist in the eye of the beholder, because there is nothing obviously figurative to me, at all, in Genesis 1-3. Every word can be taken in its plain sense without violating any human sensibility, especially when you consider that any account of a supernatural origin will necessarily include features for which science can give no account. Having said that, there is nothing in Genesis 1-3 that even remotely approaches the jarring narratives of, say, Ezekiel 1 or Revelation, or the even the beautiful imagery of the Psalms.

Longman is comfortable with a mythical Adam (although in fairness to him, he states that he has not yet come to his own firm conclusions regarding Adam). In the CT article he is quoted as saying, “it is possible, even natural, to make an analogy between a literary figure and a historical one.” Yes, it is possible, but it does not carry near the force of an analogy between two actual, historical figures, nor do fictional figures establish that which is normative. Keller rebuts this dodge in the CT article, saying, “If Adam doesn’t exist, Paul’s whole argument—that both sin and grace work ‘covenantally’—falls apart.”

Why do some say that there is figurative language in Genesis 1-3? Because there must be, since science, so obviously true, renders a literal reading of Genesis impossible. It’s not a question of language, at all, in the end. It’s a question of what you trust, what your Source of Authority is.

After all, it is quite impossible to divide a sea below the waterline, walk on water or stop a meteorological event (think, storm on the sea of Galilee) with a simple spoken word. Are these features of Scripture also explained away as ‘figurative language,’ and if not, why not? On what grounds is the simple reading of Genesis rejected in favor of a figurative one, and the simple reading of Exodus 14:21-31 is allowed to stand. Surely the dividing of the sea as presented there is anathema to modern scientists.

The truth of the matter is that once you label as figurative a narrative that Paul did not consider figurative, you are setting yourself up as "more enlightened" than God's apostles. Tremper Longman, Pete Enns, and other BioLogos supporters are truly brilliant men, but I would not begin to compare their knowledge and skill at interpreting the Hebrew language with Paul's. We know from Galatians 4:24 that Paul was no stranger to figurative language (in that case, allegory). The claim of "figurative language" in Genesis 1-3 withers if the apostles did not see it that way.