The quiet King

kw: spiritual musings, human personality

I am reading a book about personality, and a comment made by someone the author interviewed set off a train of thought. When someone interviews for a job as a pastor at a certain church, if their Myers-Briggs score starts with an "I", they are told, "think twice…I am sure our Lord was an Extrovert."

I immediately thought, "Really? Read your Gospels again, fool!" Jesus frequently withdrew from the crowds that came to hear him speak, to "desert places". He often arose early to pray alone, and more than once the disciples went out looking for him. He avoided the crowds when his miracles made him popular, but spent half the night talking privately to Nicodemus. At Sychar in Samaria, he refrained from going into the city, sending his disciples to buy food.

The extroverts I know avoid time alone. Those extroverts who are spiritual much prefer prayer in a group to private prayer. A defining characteristic of an introvert is, not total avoidance of people, but the need to recharge from time spent socially, by time spent alone. Extroverts get a charge out of social contact. Some almost cannot abide periods of solitude, while introverts require them.

Jesus an introvert? Yes, most assuredly. The Bible is full of effective, introverted leaders. Moses comes first, terrified of being sent to Pharaoh. Isaiah preferred writing to speaking. Jeremiah, the "weeping prophet", tried to avoid public speaking, but found that the word of God was "a fire in my bones". Even Paul the Apostle wrote that he was despised when he spoke, and that his writing was more effective. I sympathize with that; my father trained all of us boys to speak publicly, but my experience is, I need downtime after a speech, where my more extroverted boss loves to jump right into a glad-handing working of the crowd.

In our local church, I am considered the leader (we don't have formal pastorship), yet I find delegation of almost everything suits me better than "running the show". Now being in my mid-sixties, I'd retire from it if I could. Fortunately, the congregation seems to be mainly stamped in my mold, so they understand my quietness. I think of the church here as a protected enclave from an "Olympic athlete" model of Christian life that has come to be the norm. I'd rather be in the "upper room" with a few, than in the crowded marketplace, though I can handle either one. Am I like Jesus? I don't know, but I recognize that his personality was best suited to private teaching, once a public speech had got the attention of a curious few.

An apostle's education

kw: spiritual musings, scriptures

I decided at the beginning to avoid discussing Bible studies in this blog. Today I will make a rare exception.

Acts chapters 13 and 14 narrate the first apostolic journey of Paul and Barnabas. Traveling quickly to the seacoast west of Antioch, the two plus John Mark sailed first to Cyprus, Barnabas's home country. Very little is recorded there; only the miraculous blinding of a sorcerer named Elymas and subsequent conversion of Sergius Paulus the Roman consul. They soon found themselves in Asia Minor, where in Pisidia, in another Antioch, Paul spoke in a synagogue, the first message of his that we have in any detail. Some disciples were made, but also some enemies.

Along the way it had become clear that, while both Paul and Barnabas had miraculous gifts, Paul's was much more active, or that he was much more prone to use it. He performed many healings. As it happened, he may have been just a bit too eager to use his gift. It seems to have got him into trouble in Lystra.

The first thing recorded about the apostles' visit to Lystra is that Paul, speaking to the crowd, saw a crippled man who evidently believed what he was hearing. Paul called out to him loudly to get up and walk, which he did. The people, who were pagans with only a thin veneer of Greek and Roman culture, naturally thought that they'd been visited by gods. Speaking their own language, which the apostles didn't understand, they began to arrange a sacrifice honor Paul and Barnabas. When they understood what was happening, the apostles, horrified, rather roughly restrained the crowd, refusing the honor.

It is clear that they two made some serious mistakes here. They were on the fringe of the Empire, among people whose culture and history were opaque to them. Being brought up in Judaism, they didn't understand how serious an insult they committed in refusing the sacrifice, nor were they clearly aware how serious their enemies from Pisidia were. These enemies had followed them and now stirred up the people against them. Paul was stoned, though the job was fortunately botched. He lived through it.

But what was the original mistake? Not understanding how superstitious the people were, compared to those in their 'home towns', Paul didn't realize that he could not simply do a healing here or there to convince people of the gospel of Christ. While Jews and cultured Romans responded to miracles as Paul might expect, the Lystrans did not. Paul had misused his gift. He survived the experience, barely, and learned from it.

We find that the apostles' success was greater after they left Lystra. There is no record of raising up any churches in Cyprus. There is a hint that churches arose in Pisidian Antioch and Lystra, but Iconium and Derbe were clear successes, and the apostles spent some time in that region.

God engages in on-the-job training, and a strong-willed Pharisee like Saul/Paul needs strong teaching. As many apostles (missionaries) since have discovered, the devil uses real bullets, and we do well to learn our lessons early and clearly. A few years later, Paul drove out a demon in Philippi, which got him in a bit of trouble once again. It is another instance in which he'd have done better to make less of a public show. Thankfully, we see no other instances of this error being repeated. When Paul got in trouble later on, it was for his virtues, not his faults.

The good die young?

kw: musings, bible

I have read through the Bible several times, so I know I've seen Isaiah 57 before. It is the chapter that ends with the old memory verse, "There is no peace," says my God, "for the wicked." (v21). But the first two verses caught my eye:

1 The righteous perish, / and no one ponders it in his heart; / devout men are taken away, / and no one understands / that the righteous are taken away / to be spared from evil.

2 Those who walk uprightly / enter into peace; / they find rest as they lie in death.

Amazing! "...the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil." How this verse would have comforted me in 1978! In that year I was sent to work with a brother who'd found himself single-handedly taking care of a fledgling church in a rural city. Before we arrived, that brother and all his family died in an accident. I arrived to a church in shambles, needing much care.

Soon it became evident that a steady hand was crucial, a strong hand with a guiding vision. This place was in fellowship with a larger church in a city a few hours' drive away, a place that was poised for trouble, as a political struggle erupted between established leaders and newly-arrived upstarts with a different view, a very different view. The troubles took years to overcome, and we were viewed by some as a satellite church, a pawn to be played at will or discarded...or destroyed.

I don't like conflict, and it was a very painful time, but we retained our Biblical vision. Much later, I realized that the brother who had died was an innocent, a righteous man who would have been overwhelmed. Though his vision was even more clear than mine, his ability to stand, and his persistence, were lacking. I wish he didn't have to die to be spared the storm, and I wish he'd been able to help me withstand it...but it is God's wisdom, not mine, and I realize he might not have been a help at all.

And what of those who, wave after wave over several years, sought to subvert the larger church? Scattered, at war still among themselves, "living in defiance of [their] brothers" according to the prophecy over the fleshly Ishmael. There truly is no peace to the wicked.

And, is it true that the good die young? Not really; the oldest people alive, the 80's and older, contain a surprising dearth of the truly bad. (In the 1940 census, an astonishing number of men over 80 were former Methodist evangelists, who'd been involved in the revivals of the late 19th Century. the Gospel is good for you!) The good don't necessarily die young, but they do die in peace.

Two Libraries, two traditions, two principles of inspiration

kw: opinion, spiritual musings, scriptures, verbal inspiration

I have begun to read a book in which the author, a highly-acclaimed Bible scholar, describes for a lay audience the problems of textual criticism of New Testament manuscripts (I'll present details when I review the book). His introduction describes his conversion to a very conservative Evangelical tradition, and the transitions he went through as he learned the craft of determining what the Bible manuscripts really say, what the original words of the Bible really might have been.

His self-revelation made me think. Why does he have a note of betrayed zeal? I have been a much less scholarly student of the field for many years. I had to be, because the church produced a new translation of the Bible, and we frequently found ourselves confronted with "King James only" folks, and others who cast blame on our efforts. Fortunately, among the scholars was the one modern man who was raised as a native speaker of Koine Greek, by his parents, both Greek scholars. He didn't hear English until he was four.

Anyway, turning back to my experience and musings, I think I have a minim to offer in this matter. Why is it that there are so many thousands of differences among the eight or nine thousand manuscripts of the New Testament? Isn't the Bible supposed to be God's Word, inspired verbally, preserved through the ages, to be the one perfect book for our spiritual leading?

There is this verse in the Old Testament (Psa 12:6, KJV): "The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times." Other versions agree, many using the word "flawless" for "pure". So, people ask, where are these words to be found? [by the way, I'm using KJV because it is familiar, not because I prefer it. I don't]

I follow a dispensational theology. The dispensational premise is that God has one purpose, but the way he works out his purpose differs in different "dispensations", or "economies" to transliterate the Greek word. Thus, he worked in one way with Adam before the fall, another way with Adam and his descendants before the flood, another way yet after the flood, in quite a different way with Abraham, and yet another with Israel after the Testimony was given at Sinai. The books of the Old Testament, as Christians call it, record these several economies.

The life and ministry of Jesus was a transitional period. After the resurrection of Jesus, God has had an economy of dealing with his church, that is distinct, as different from the Jewish economy as it is from the way God dealt with Noah or Job.

I believe a key turning point in the Old Testament was the people's request at Sinai, before the Testimony was given (Exo 19:8): "All that the LORD hath spoken we will do." God had just made many promises to the people; he had not told them they had to do anything! So, the tone changes, thunder erupts, and Moses ascends to receive the Ten Commandments, the beginning of a flurry of "things to do".

I was quite impressed when I heard that, once they studied the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were made public when I was quite young, they found only a few tiny differences between them and the Masoretic text, which was a thousand years later. The masoretes were fanatical, obsessively exact copyists, so such near-perfection stands to reason. As a result, it is frequently not hard at all to know with great certainty what word was where in an original text of the Hebrew scriptures.

God had (in Deuteronomy) demanded 100% literacy of Israel, so all could read His Word, and it is clear to me that He took in hand to make sure every generation of Israel has had that word, unchanged.

There are clues to a great difference to come, hidden in that near-perfect text. My favorite example is Jeremiah 31:33-4: "But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more."

In the New Testament economy, God's Word, his written word, is critical, but even more crucial is that His people know Him. It is clear, from the way the scribes quote scripture in the Gospels, that those scriptures were nearly an idol to them. Jesus said to them (John 5:39-40): "Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me. 40 And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life."

To Jesus, life is more valuable than knowledge. He wants us to come to Him.

I have four different critical Greek texts of the New Testament, including the 23d and 26th Nestle-Aland editions, the Majority Text, and the Textus Receptus. The first and last differ the most from one another; the 23NA is most strongly influenced by the "Western" texts of the 4th-8th Centuries, and the TR by the "Eastern" texts of the 10th-12th Centuries.

The Eastern texts are from a translation made in the 10th Century, from 1st Century Greek into the vernacular of the time. The language had changed, as much change as that between Old English of 900 years ago and modern English. See this rendering of the Lord's Prayer as found in wikipedia. According to my (limited) study, the vast majority of textual differences are between any particular Eastern and any particular Western text. Within each body of texts, there is much less variation.

But even if we look only at the Western texts, there is considerable variation. Yet, on a closer look, the meaning is unchanged. One must still believe in the resurrection of Jesus and His sacrifice for our sins to become a Christian. To me, the New Testament is holographic. The crucial items are presented several times, and together they comprise a complete picture.

I see the NT as more human than the OT: more account is made for human foibles, and the writers are not mere tape recorders. I see God relating to people in a more consistently human way than He did from Moses until the Cross. It is more like the way he came to Abraham, as a traveler who ate under the sunshade before his tent. The style of inspiration in the Greek NT is different in kind from that of the Hebrew OT. Do some of the books in this marvelous Library show signs of editing? I say, "Why not?" If Paul did the best he could, but someone—wittingly or not—later "fixed things up a bit," could not the editor have been inspired also?

The way Paul wrote 1 Cor 7 is telling. Here he says, "I command, yet not I, but the Lord," there he says, "I have no commandment of the Lord: yet I give my judgment, as one that hath obtained mercy of the Lord to be faithful." And he concludes, "and I think also I have the spirit of the Lord." How many of the words in this chapter are God's words? Does that last phrase cover everything, even where he said, "I have no commandment"?

The men wrote according to their consciousness. Mark (recording Peter's homilies) wrote of "a blind man" at Jericho, whereas Matthew (an accountant) noted "two blind men". Is this a substantive difference? The meaning of the story is the same. God didn't bother to edit this... John provides a name for the man...or one of the men: Bartimaeus. I tend to view such instances as one account supplementing another. Cannot we also view both inadvertant and witting textual differences as God providing a stereo view of His meaning: several ways to say the same thing?

Jesus and the Apostles nearly always quoted the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the OT) rather than the Hebrew. Did this make a difference?

For the OT, the medium and the message are one. I don't think this is so for the NT; the medium is not the message, and indeed, the diversity of the medium gives us a better fix on the message.

God had Jeremiah predict that a day was coming when ALL will know Him. If you have the Person, the book is less critical. It is still critical, but is decidedly secondary: Jesus desired that those who "search the scriptures" would "come to Me". God will not allow anything, not even the scriptures, to become so perfect that we honor it more than knowing Him.