From Cafe Hayek:
Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine – the special pleading of selfish interests.
Bob Kauflin makes some pretty good points here, and I think it flows nicely with Doug Wilson’s discussion on church organs here. The key element for worship is apparently the words that we use, and in a church setting, they need to be the congregation’s words, not an event they just happened to witness.
Doug Wilson on being changed in to His image.
This is a thorough rebuttle.
Frankly, I’m getting tired of the Orthodox community responding to any criticism of their theology by saying that Protestants are ignorant, don’t understand, haven’t done their research, etc. It’s as though modern liberalism finds its ancient heritage in the Orthodox church. They can’t seem to tolerate the thought that thinking Christians can understand their theology and just call it wrong.
What Did Paul Really Say about Slavery? | Dr. Platypus.
This article (three deep, I’m afraid!) is less interesting than you’d hope for. It’s interesting that Luther pushed the meaning of “calling” in the wrong way because he didn’t want people thinking that they had to become monks to please God. And it’s interesting that translation has been a little off on this word (particularly for 1 Cor. 7) ever since. But I’d never heard of an uber-conservative Paul who wanted everyone to stay exactly where they were at. That’s a different religion entirely. People who convert, by definition, don’t stay where they’re at.
At the same time, the guy undermines any arguments he wants to make from here about slavery because he leaps off the text in favor of “of course nobody should be a slave! slavery is awful!” To which I supply, of course slavery is awful, but Paul was also clearly not preaching la revolucion! either. Anybody who unhesitatingly tells an engaged man to stay single probably wouldn’t bat an eye at telling slaves to stay slaves.
Meanwhile, the author takes Paul to task and tells us where he went wrong. Frankly, anybody who is willing to say Paul was wrong in the text of scripture probably isn’t somebody I’d trust to properly interpret the scripture.
When I went to college, it was at a school that had some affiliation with the Presbyterian Church, USA, but for all practical purposes, it was a private secular school with a chapel. It wasn’t as though there was a pervasive Christian atmosphere. Pretty much it was standard-issue multi-cultural liberalism.
A part of the core curriculum to graduate was a class in the senior year on Ethics. Of course, I almost failed.
It was really difficult for me to process their way of gauging right and wrong because they weren’t willing to pin themselves to any particular foundation. It should be pretty obvious that Ethics is the sort of thing that starts from a set of key principles and works the implications out from there. But being the sort of school they were, it wouldn’t do to just assert what these principles ought to be. What if I don’t like your principles?
Instead, they gave us some options. Apparently, it’s a modern pluralist idea to try to present ethics on a 3-legged stool, kind of as a “choose-your-own” morality. So they give you Kant, Mill, and Aristotle to teach Duty, Utility, and Virtue. You’re supposed to choose which system of reasoning best fits the situation and your taste. You’re even told that each form of reasoning has its flaws, so that you have to balance each against the others.
It really got me. Confused the daylights out of me. The problem was that in my heart of hearts, I didn’t believe in morally gray areas. Still don’t. There are things that are hard to do, but it’s not usually hard to determine the right thing to do. So how did they get this perfectly balanced porridge? It took me years to get an answer, and I wish I’d written down who it was that popped the bubble of my confusion.
It’s actually pretty pathetic. Every system has its flaws so long as man is the measure of all things. If there is no standard to hold to, there isn’t even any way to come to a wrong answer. And if there isn’t any wrong answer, there can’t be a right one either. But the very point of ethics is to determine right and wrong. If you set up the system so that the goal can’t be achieved, then there’s no wonder that no one ever achieves the goal.
Sin is determined to tie up moral knots because that twistedness deflects you from judgment. It takes a Champion to take the sword of authority to cut through those knots with a simple standard. Continue reading “3-leg porridge”
Just finished watching Kung Fu Panda, which I’ve been wanting to see for a while now, and I have to say, it’s a really cute movie. The writing is good; there’s an all-star cast of voice actors; the character arcs have good messages. But there’s this niggling little bit about the message that’s just begging to be deconstructed.
We have this thing about faith. I think it comes from having inherited a Christian culture but widely rejecting the faith itself within that culture. We believe in *Faith*. We take Jesus’ praise for powerful faith and derision for weak faith at face value without noticing that faith has to have an object that’s worthy of it. God likes faith because he wants us to trust him, so he sets up situations where trusting him isn’t the immediate obvious answer – otherwise it wouldn’t be faith. But here in post-Christianity, we’ve dropped the messiah bit, and we’re left with the general conviction that faith itself is some kind of power source, regardless of the object it’s connected to. And boy do we ever attach some weird objects.
And the weirdest one of all is nothing. Not the “heart in a blender” kind of nothing, but this idea that believing in itself makes the impossible real. I take the rope of faith, hook one end to myself and toss the other one up the side of an invisible precipice and **clinch!** It holds! If you believe it hard enough, it automatically becomes true.
And that, of course is the key message of “the dragon scroll.” It’s blank. There is no secret of ultimate power. You look in the reflective scroll and all you see is you. But if you **believe** in yourself, that belief itself will make you invincible.
The problem is that it’s not true. Even if I think about it every night and day, believing I can fly doesn’t make me able to touch the sky. Not only isn’t it true, they can’t even convey the message consistently in the movie. Believing in yourself apparently only works for pandas. The furious five may believe that together they can defeat Tai Lung, but believing don’t make it so. Similarly, Tai Lung may believe that he is the true Dragon Warrior, but somehow he ain’t, and I just don’t see how it could be from a lack of believing. Po the giant panda gets to believe in himself, and Shifu the red panda get’s to believe (in Po), and Oogway the turtle, because he’s infinitely wise, gets to believe whatever he wants. But ultimately, believing only really works if it’s actually true.
Just like in the real world.
I’m crossing my fingers and making another attempt at reading Calvin’s Institutes, this time the Henry Beveridge translation, which seems to actually be easier to read than the Ford Lewis Battles translation. I’m not sure if this is because Beveridge was a better translator than Battles, or if the publishers at Henderickson (whose edition I’m using) decided to provide the extra service of inserting more periods. Either way, the sentences are easier to read, because they’re shorter.
I come, however, across this passage on translating from the Preface of the original translation by Thomas Norton:
For I dared not presume to warrant myself to have his meaning without his words. And they that know what it is to translate well and faithfully, especially in matters of religion, do know that not only the grammatical construction of words suffices, but the very building and order to observe all advantages of vehemence or grace, by placing or accent of words, makes much to the true setting forth of a writer’s mind.
In the end, I rested upon this determination, to follow the words so near as the phrase of the English tongue would suffer me. …
Norton has been talking about how terse Calvin’s Latin original is. Calvin packed a lot of meaning into the original, and Norton found that the goal of putting out the same meaning in English required either a lot more words or a book that was a lot harder to read. His solution was to hue close to a word-for-word translation.
But what catches me is is phrase that “those that know what it is to translate well and faithfully” know that following the precise word order is important. Apparently the folks who prefer to translate in paraphrase know no such thing. Recent translation research proves otherwise.
It always struck me as something of a mystery when I was reading Mere Christianity, how often C. S. Lewis would prefix his thoughts on a theological subject with the disclaimer that he wasn’t a theologian or a pastor, so he couldn’t be precisely sure if his take on a topic was exactly right. On the one hand, I would think, “how humble.” On the other hand, I would think that there was something slightly disingenuous. Here’s an awfully smart guy, well versed in literature and theology, writing about theology. He has a PHD. What prevents him from going that little extra step and getting that theological certification? The fact that he kept stressing how unqualified he was both inspired me with how important it must be to get that training, and it daunted me to think that, if C.S. Lewis isn’t good enough, who then is qualified to teach?
Well, I think I’ve made a discovery. We’re in our new apartment, and I finally have access to all my old books again. What’s more, for the first time in over two years, I have the opportunity to actually read them. So I decided to go through some of my old stuff from seminary and try to read (or finish reading) all the stuff I didn’t get to while I was in school. And I know now why C.S. Lewis didn’t pursue a PHD in theology: To study theology means that a person must spend the fundamental majority of their time reading books by theologians, and theologians, by and large, are very bad writers. C.S. Lewis took his degrees in classical literature, which means he was forced to spend the majority of his time reading and talking about the best written and most uplifting literature known to man.
When you study the classics, most of the bad stuff has been lost or forgotten. But a pastor or a theologian has to spend his time sifting through the current issues of the day, where the unreadable is still somehow being read. So it’s with joy when you come upon a Augistine or a Luther or a Spurgeon, and you cling to those.
I really wanted to make some connection between bad writing and bad doctrine, but I really can’t. George Orwell talked about the tendency to use passive voice in political writing because it allows you to hide the agent doing the action, and of course there was a whole movement in French philosophy, directly after World War II, to work deliberately to undermine clear and powerful writing because of an express desire to destroy the Logos. But the truth is that we’re dealing with a 100-year plus problem, particularly in academia. So I think it has to do more with incentives.
Academic writing used to be read by everybody, and a bad writer could be sniffed by anybody. There was a definite advantage for writing well, and a definite disadvantage to writing poorly. But for 100 years or more, that’s been disconnected. Popular writers still must write well, even if they don’t bother to say anything worth reading, or even anything of substance at all. But an academic writer, though he may be very concerned with his content, he has no apparent motivation to write in a way that is easy or even pleasant to read. So each one presents his ideas with the clarity and precision of a theridiid.
My best hope for academic theology is that we appear to be at the beginning of something like another Great Awakening. And unlike former Awakenings, which seemed to pass from platinum to gold to silver, this movement seems to be an awakening, not merely of piety and religious feeling, but a general groundswell in theology. It may be only in my little niche, but it looks like the layman, in no little thanks to the Internet, is learning to read. He wants doctrine and systematics, not little topical epigrams. Increasingly our superstars are theologians, rather than televangelists. And if that is the case, then for the first time in a long time, a theologian has an incentive to write well.
Because if he doesn’t, even if what he has to say is good and true and Important, on the basis of his bad rhetoric alone, he’ll be thrashed in public.
I’ve been listening the past few days to the Sovereign Grace Leadership Interview series with Josh Harris, CJ Mahaney, and Jeff Purswell. Frankly, I’m having a hard time of it. CJ keeps strongly asserting things that I just don’t believe with.
We’ll slide over the first interview, on The Pastor and His reading, where I had to stop and shout “What planet are you on?” over the general agreement everybody had that it takes careful scheduling to make sure that you get enough time in for reading. Seriously? Next they’ll remind me to make space for food.
The one that’s really getting to me now is The Pastor and His Soul, in which CJ Mahaney insists that I am directly, morally, responsible for the way I feel. I’ve always been of the opinion that feelings sometime present me with useful information, but that they’re just as likely to lie to me about the way things are. CJ tells pastors that if, over a period of time, they detect that their passion, their devotion to Christ is flagging, they need to take immediate and sometimes drastic action. Clear away hours in your schedule, study books and bible verses that have the appropriate effect on the way you feel. Find some way to adjust the way you feel about Jesus, immediately.
Two thoughts, off the top of my head –
neumatikos 