In þe bigynnyng was þe word

In þe bigynnyng was þe word, and þe word was at God, and God was þe word.
Þis was in þe bigynnyng at God.
Alle þingis weren maad bi hym, and wiþouten hym was maad no þing, þat þing þat was maad.
In hym was lijf, and þe lijf was þe liyt of men; and þe liyt schyneþ in derknessis,
and derknessis comprehendiden not it.

John 1:1-5 (Wycliffe translation)

Murdoch's good news of the world

A newsworthy item from the CNN Belief Blog:

It just so happens that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which is weathering a storm of criticism around newspaper ethics, also owns the rights to the world's best-selling English Bible, the New International Version.

Could this lead to an explosion in sales of the NRSV or ESV?

A family bible

My great-grandmother, Lucy Jane Bentley Hyder, died several years before I was born, so I have no personal memories of her. However, I do have her family Bible, a hefty King James version printed in 1892 that has been passed down the generations and came into my possession not quite twenty years ago. I cannot say whether her family read from it regularly, but, like so many other bible owners, she recorded births and deaths in its pages – something giving it inestimable value to her descendants.

Lucy Jane and her husband Nelson were both born in 1875 and married in 1896. The first event she recorded was the birth of their eldest child, Mary E. Hyder, later that year. The most poignant record in her handwriting was the birth of twins Emmet and Emma in 1901, followed a day later by a record of their deaths. One suspects they were born — perhaps premature — at home before the days of hospital neonatal intensive care units. Apparently there was a page listing marriages as well, but at some point one of their sons seems to have torn it out to expunge evidence of an earlier matrimonial moment he preferred to forget.

Lucy Jane was a Virginian by birth, growing up and living in East Stone Gap, Virginia, until around 1914, when she and Nelson moved to a farm outside Adrian, Michigan. They were members of the local Friends Church, not because they were Quakers, but because it was nearest their home. A cousin assures me that Lucy Jane believed the world was flat until her dying day. My mother tells me she spoke with a distinctive southern accent, pronouncing the neuter third-person pronoun as hit, a holdover from Anglo-Saxon and Chaucer’s Middle English, with an obvious family resemblance to the Dutch het.


Though she had little formal education, Lucy Jane had the presence of mind to record two reminiscences of her own ancestry extending back to the end of the eighteenth century. One of these was dictated to my mother’s elder sister and is still found between the pages of the Bible in the book of Daniel. Armed with this information, I was easily able to find myriad connections with the so-called World Family Tree, containing the various European noble and royal figures from which virtually everyone we might chance to meet on the street is descended in some fashion. The results of my research I posted here nearly a decade ago: The Ancestry of Nelson Hyder and Lucy Jane Bentley Hyder, along with entries from the Bible itself.

There are no underscorings in the text of this Bible. Whether it was read in the course of daily family prayers I cannot say. I wish I had thought to ask her daughter, my grandmother, while she was still alive. Yet it was obviously an important part of the family’s life together, collecting over the years newspaper clippings, personal letters and pressed leaves. The binding is intact, although the front cover is loose and some of the cloth has clearly worn away near the spine. I hope that my own daughter will treasure this volume, as have more than a century of her ancestors.

Incidentally, during a recent visit with relatives, I rediscovered a family bible dating to 1841 belonging to the first settlers in a region of Michigan where my cousins were born and raised. I can no longer recall how it came into my possession some thirty years ago. But when I found it again and recognized what it was, I typed the original owners' names into the ubiquitous Google and quickly discovered that a descendant had posted their information on a popular genealogical website. I was able to contact her and return the volume to a family member who would value it more than I. This would not have been possible two or three decades ago.

My curiosity is piqued. In an age of mass printing and the easy availability of books, does anyone keep a family bible anymore? The people I know have scores of individually-owned bibles in their homes, but does any have the clear status of family bible? Responses are welcome.

The Geneva Bible's influence

This passage from Marilynne Robinson’s The Death of Adam makes me wonder whether we should have celebrated the 450th anniversary of the Geneva Bible last year in preference to observing the 400th of the King James Version this year:

“The Geneva Bible, first published in 1560, was a very great influence on political thought in England and America. It was the Bible of Shakespeare and Milton, the Bible one hears referred to sometimes as the ‘breeches’ Bible, because its Adam and Eve, unlike the Adam and Eve of the King James Bible, did not have the presence of mind to fashion their fig leaves into ‘aprons.’ The implication is that it was a crude or naive translation, but in fact it is largely identical with the King James Bible, which was published in 1611. . . . The great difference is that the copious interpretive notes that fill the margins of the Geneva Bible are gone from the King’s Authorized Version. . . . Printing of this Bible in England was forbidden, and it was gradually driven out of circulation in England and America by the King James Version, which basks in the legend that it is a masterpiece created by a committee, and enjoys the reputation of having been the great watershed of English-language literature” (The Death of Adam, p. 197).

Hearing the Word, seeking justice

Notre Dame’s Calvinist philosopher Alvin Plantinga published an insightful essay more than a dozen years ago: Two (or More) Kinds of Scripture Scholarship, which found its way into his book, Warranted Christian Belief. Here Plantinga distinguishes between two ways of approaching the Bible: (1) Traditional Christian Biblical Commentary (TCBC) and (2) Historical Biblical Criticism (HBC). The former has the following three characteristics:

First, Scripture itself is taken to be a wholly authoritative and trustworthy guide to faith and morals; it is authoritative and trustworthy, because it is a revelation from God, a matter of God speaking to us. . . . Secondly, an assumption of the enterprise is that the principal author of the Bible — the entire Bible — is God himself. . . . Thirdly . . . the fact that the principal author of the Bible is God himself means that one cannot always determine the meaning of a given passage by discovering what the human author had in mind.

HBC differs from TCBC in that the former “is fundamentally an enlightenment project; it is an effort to try to determine from the standpoint of reason alone what the Scriptural teachings are and whether they are true. Thus HBC eschews the authority and guidance of tradition, magisterium, creed, or any kind of ecclesial or ‘external’ epistemic authority.” HBC requires, among other things, that “faith commitments should play no role” and that a hermeneutic of suspicion should govern our reading of the text. We cannot simply affirm that the biblical text is true but must apply empirical scientific methods to discover, if possible, whether, e.g., the picture of Jesus painted in the gospels is historically accurate. This approach is obviously at variance with TCBC, which comes to Scripture believing it is indeed the Word of God and thus a reliable witness to Jesus Christ.

Plantinga is not wholly dismissive of HBC, which he admits has broadened our knowledge of the Bible and especially of the historical contexts in which it was written. However, HBC tends to view the Bible, not as a canonical whole, but as a collection of disparate texts with different human authors and thus conflicting emphases and teachings. Harmonizing these teachings is not the business of the biblical scholar, according to HBC, but to the theologian who is more evidently tethered to the church’s confession. What this means is that the practitioner of HBC “tends to deal especially with questions of composition and authorship, these being the questions most easily addressed by the methods employed.” Furthermore, he at least tacitly excludes the very question of most interest to believing Christians coming to the text, viz., what God is trying to tell us in his Word. There is thus some tension within the academy between the practitioners of biblical scholarship and theology, with the former often believing the latter to be naïvely precritical and thus unscientific.

I myself am neither a biblical scholar nor a theologian. Nevertheless, as a political scientist reading and pondering Plantinga’s essay, I cannot help but observe a similar cleavage within the discipline of political science, viz., that between the empirical political scientist and the political theorist or philosopher. Having taught political science at the undergraduate level for a quarter of a century, I can testify that students take an interest in it when they are either captivated by a vision of justice or scandalized by the reality of injustice. This was my own experience as a student, when I changed my major from music to political science after the Watergate scandal and the Turkish invasion of my father’s native island of Cyprus. Because virtually all my paternal relatives became refugees overnight, I sought desperately to understand why injustice seems to be such a persistent feature of human life. This is what animated my passion for politics.

However, the empirical political scientist would tell us that such concerns as the nature of justice should play no role in political science. Political philosophy, with its ongoing, millennia-old quest to discover the meanings of justice, statesmanship, good citizenship and civic friendship, is a subdiscipline of philosophy, or perhaps even of religion, and not of political science, which must necessarily limit itself to exploring those questions amenable to empirical methods. Political science can treat only political behaviour and must refrain from making normative statements about the good political order or the virtues conducive to it. Processing and analyzing voting statistics is political science. Exploring the relationship between electoral and party systems is political science. Debating the justice of proposed public policies or of a particular approach to the state is definitely not political science.

I have no intrinsic quarrel with either HBC or empirical political science, properly understood. There is much indeed to be said both for studying the Synoptic Problem and for analyzing how, e.g., different sociological groups voted in the 2008 presidential election. Nevertheless I strongly disagree with those who believe that these types of empirical academic pursuits by themselves constitute the disciplines of biblical scholarship and political science respectively. There is little to be said for the assumption that reason functions apart from basic worldview convictions. The belief that Scripture is not much more than a collection of literary texts with no overall meaning or message is itself borne of a conviction that it — or rather, they — are not essentially different from any other texts. The notion that we should bracket our faith commitments in studying the Bible is rooted in a (nonfalsifiable) belief that it is possible for human beings to reason apart from these commitments and to obtain some form of religiously neutral objectivity.

Something similar could be said of empirical political science as well. The claim of those following the behavioural methods is that they are simply observing the facts of political behaviour. Nevertheless they fail to recognize that this very term presupposes general agreement on what is political and what is not. This general agreement implicitly presupposes a normative order in which the distinction between political and nonpolitical makes sense. What is it that makes setting a country’s foreign policy political while a mother reading to her child before bed is nonpolitical? I would suggest that it has something to do with the jural aspect of the former. By its very nature, the state is called to balance legitimate interests within its jurisdictional sphere. It is, of course, all too common for states in the real world to get this balance wrong, sometimes spectacularly so, as in the Soviet Union and Germany between 1933 and 1945. Yet this entails, not an absence of justice as such, but its distortion or miscarriage. Justice, in short, is central to the very definition of politics, which behavioural political scientists cannot adequately grasp with their methods, however useful they might otherwise be.

In the same way, the canonical status of Scripture and its authority are precisely what give this ancient collection of writings scriptural status. The existence of a Society of Biblical Literature already in some fashion presupposes recognition of at least their historical unity, even if not all its members acknowledge the authority of the whole.

If the very things that draw students to biblical scholarship and to the study of politics are excluded from the two disciplines, then something is seriously amiss in the way both are conceptualized by their mainstream practitioners. If so, then our christian universities may be in the best position to bridge the cleavages between biblical studies and theology, on the one hand, and empirical political science and normative political theory, on the other.

Nevertheless, this will come about only if faculty in the relevant departments take the time to become aware of the historical forces – along with their spiritual roots – that have artificially driven apart the two sides of these disciplines. This requires recognition that the academic enterprise, normatively understood, is not only about specializing in a particular field or subfield, but also about seeing clearly – and with great delight – the interconnections among the disciplines and their respective modest places within the coherent whole that is God’s multifaceted creation.

Celebrating the Kimyal New Testament

Those of us who have grown up knowing and loving God's word in its plethora of English translations cannot but be moved by the following video. Praise God that the Kimyal people of West Papua at last have the complete New Testament in their own language. We share in their joy.

Kimyal New Testament launch in Indonesia
from United Bible Societies on Vimeo.

Government's divine mandate

I am not a fan of most politically-oriented sermons, especially when they undertake to pronounce on the specifics of public policy. However, a week ago our pastor, the Rev. Dr. W. J. Clyde Ervine, gave us all an excellent example of the right way to preach a political sermon. The title was King Solomon's Charge, based on I Kings 2. This is part of an ongoing lectio continua series on Solomon's reign. The Old Testament lesson recounted the circumstances that brought Solomon to the throne, including the execution of his father David's chief of staff, Joab, and his own half-brother Adonijah.

The episode raises a difficult issue: "is Solomon to be morally excused for killing the enemies who might have wanted to kill him?" Ervine admits that not everything scripture recounts does it necessarily approve. Yet he raises another possibility that ought not to be glossed over:

David is king and head of government, giving a charge not so much to a son, but to the incoming head of government. What he says is this: “Solomon, as king, you must deal with the State’s internal as well as external enemies. You may not want to, but you must confront those who mount treasonous attacks against the kingdom”. David mentions Joab as an example, while Solomon will later place Adonijah in the same category. Put like that, the issue isn’t whether or not Solomon was brutal, but whether the State may legitimately use force against its enemies. That’s the issue I Kings 2 poses; its answer is affirmative. I Kings 2 wants readers to conclude that Solomon was justified in hunting down State criminals, and further suggests that Solomon’s punishment of those criminals was endorsed by God. At verse 22, we’re told that as Solomon contemplates the punishment he believes Adonijah deserves, he says: “So may God do to me, and more also, for Adonijah has devised this scheme at the risk of his life! Now therefore as the Lord lives, who has established me and placed me on the throne...Adonijah shall be put to death”.The text presents Solomon’s blood-letting, not as the violence of a private thug but as the legal action of the head of state.

This, of course, raises the larger question of whether the state legitimately uses force, even to the extent of taking life. Although there is a long and honourable pacifist tradition within Christianity, we must nevertheless take seriously those biblical texts assigning the power of the sword to government.

Having been present as Dr. Ervine delivered this sermon (which can be heard here), I can testify that the congregation was unusually quiet throughout, perhaps wondering where he would be going next in his argument. It somehow felt like a controversial sermon, although his conclusion is entirely biblical and falls squarely in the centre of the larger Reformed tradition.

A powerful preacher, Dr. Ervine's sermons are worth listening to. If you are ever in the neighbourhood, please do come to Central Presbyterian Church, Hamilton, Ontario, at 10.30 sunday morning.

KJV quadricentenary

I am part of what may have been the last generation of English-speaking Christians to grow up with the King James Version of the Bible. This was the Bible we read in church and it shaped the liturgical patterns of our worship. We children memorized verses from it in sunday school, thereby giving it an intimate familiarity to us that has not been matched by any subsequent translation.

To be sure, the Revised Standard Version had come out three years before I was born, but our church, a confessionally Reformed church, did not read from it, perhaps because of such controversial translations as that for Isaiah 7:14, which substituted "young woman" for "virgin." What we did not know, of course, is that, when the KJV was first published back in 1611, the Geneva Bible was the translation preferred by our Reformed forebears, who were suspicious of the king's motives in commissioning a replacement. Nevertheless, over the long term the KJV won out over competing translations, retaining a cherished place in the hearts of English-speaking Christians for 350 years.

Protestant Christians, that is. In that world of half a century ago our use of the KJV underscored our differences with Roman Catholics, who read the 16th/17th-century Douai-Rheims Bible, a translation from the Latin Vulgate. In the KJV we English-speaking protestants possessed a common Bible whose cadences we knew thoroughly and which constituted a shared heritage that in some sense we took for granted. This was our Bible and always would be. We had a duty to read it and hear it in church. To be sure, given its archaic language, the KJV was not always easy to understand. Moreover, despite the claim of some contemporary KJV loyalists to love its superb literary qualities, it is no longer clear to us whether its language really is poetic or whether it sounds poetic to us simply because it is from the KJV.

We all know the flaws in the KJV. It was translated from texts finalized in the 16th century, which have long since been superseded by superior Hebrew and Greek texts based on much earlier manuscripts. It contains numerous readings not attested to in the latter and of questionable authenticity — and presumably canonicity as well. I myself am far from urging a wholesale return to the KJV, although I believe it definitely worth celebrating during its 400th anniversary year.

The problem is that, while my generation of protestants grew up with a common Bible, no subsequent translation, however superior, has managed altogether to replace the KJV. By 1977 an expanded edition of the RSV had come to include the apocryphal/deuterocanonical books, thereby making it the closest we would come to a Common Bible for all Christians — protestants, Catholics and Orthodox. Yet ultimately it failed to catch on at the grassroots level. We now live with a ridiculously large number of Bible translations in English at the beginning of the second decade of this century. The multiplication of Bible versions shows no signs of slowing down, much less stopping.

For 30-some years the New International Version was the largest-selling Bible in the English-speaking world, considerably outpacing the RSV and KJV alike. But two months ago the International Bible Society released an updated version of the NIV which may fail to catch on, if recent controversies are any indication. Although I was initially sceptical that the English Standard Version would supplant the NIV, I now think it has a fighting chance if the NIV 1984 is no longer to be available, except online.

Will any of these translations still be read 400 years from now? It would be foolish to predict so far into the future, but it seems unlikely that any will equal the King James Version not only in terms of longevity, but in its capacity to shape the language and culture of the English-speaking peoples.

NIV update published

As of today the 2011 update of the New International Version Bible is available online here. Will it be accepted by longtime NIV aficionados, or will it suffer the fate of the TNIV? Time with tell.

Yet another English Bible . . .

. . . to fill what some persist in believing to be a desperate need for good translations of the Good Book. This one’s called the Common English Bible, which is an improvement over existing translations because of . . . what? I’m not sure, except that it appears to use more contractions than most other versions. Which prompts me to ask: after so many decades, is the runaway proliferation of bible translations in English still about making the Word of God more comprehensible to ordinary people? Or is it by now about niche marketing?

From Wellhausen to 'God's politics'?

Several years ago my friend and former colleague Paul Marshall wrote a review of Jim Wallis' God's Politics for The Review of Faith & International Affairs: Jim Wallis’ Politics — or Lack Thereof. Marshall's paragraph below is worth rereading:

Obviously, no popular book should be weighed down with ponderous theological reflection, but it should show some sign of having considered such reflection. For example, Wallis writes, “The place to begin to understand God is with the prophets.” There is no wisp of an argument justifying this unusual contention. He never asks why the Bible does not begin with the prophets, but with Genesis. He never mentions that the majority of Christian reflection on politics has begun with Genesis. He never carefully relates what the prophets say to the Torah, hence acknowledging that they challenge their rulers on the basis of God’s law, not on their own feelings of injustice. Maybe most of the church has been wrong for two millennia on how it addresses politics; it has certainly been wrong on other things. But Wallis never says why. He simply asserts a novel doctrine as indubitable fact.

This critique seemed obviously right to me when I read it. Of course the prophets were calling the people of Israel back to obey God's law. How could anyone doubt it?

Since reading this review, however, I've come to wonder whether there might be something else behind Wallis' "unusual contention" — one related to some of the more contestable assumptions of modern biblical scholarship. Since Julius Wellhausen and others articulated the Documentary Hypothesis on the origin of the Pentateuch more than a hundred years ago, it has generally been thought that the first five books of the Bible were written long after Moses. Indeed there are indications of later authorship embedded in the text itself (e.g., Genesis 36:31–43, Deuteronomy 34:5–10), as Spinoza pointed out already in the 17th century.



The Documentary Hypothesis ascribes the bulk of the Torah's legal code to the priestly source (or P), who ostensibly wrote around 500 BC during the Babylonian exile. Deuteronomy is similarly thought to have been written around the time of King Josiah, who is assumed to have instructed Hilkiah to "find" this in the temple to justify his reforms (2 Kings 22). These late dates are crucial because they imply that the law, so extolled in Psalm 119, was written well after such prophets as Isaiah and Amos had railed against the wickedness and injustices committed by the peoples of Israel and Judah. If so, then perhaps there was no actual law at that time to which the prophets could refer their hearers. Yet the prophets managed to demand forcefully that the people do justice, especially to the widow, the orphan and the sojourner — something that came to resonate with the people who codified these precepts a century or two later.

It is entirely possible that I am off base here, but I do wonder whether the Documentary Hypothesis might in part account for Wallis' "novel" approach of beginning his discussion with the prophets. If, on the other hand, one accepts the tradition that the bulk of the material in the Pentateuch is Mosaic in origin, one is more likely to start one's reflections on "God's politics" where the Bible itself starts: with Genesis.

Crossposted at First Things: Evangel

Chaput on creation, fall and redemption

Permit me to direct your attention to a wonderful article by Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, which, but for a few sentences here and there, could easily have been written by an evangelical Christian of the Reformed persuasion: Fire On The Earth: God’s New Creation and the Meaning of Our Lives. I am struck by his redemptive-historical reading of scripture, which many of us may tend to think is the exclusive preserve of the Reformed tradition. Archbishop Chaput is to be commended for disabusing us of this misconception. Here’s an excerpt:

There’s nothing tepid or routine about a real encounter with Sacred Scripture. In his Narnia tales, C.S. Lewis warned that Aslan is a good lion, but he is not a “tame” lion. Likewise, God’s Word is profoundly good, but it is never “tame.” Augustine thought Christian Scripture was vulgar, inelegant, and shallow—until he heard it preached by St. Ambrose; then it grabbed him by the soul, and turned his world and his life inside out. When Jesus said “I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled” (Lk 12:49) he spoke not as an interesting moral counselor, but as the restless, incarnate Word of God, the Scriptures in flesh and blood, on fire with his Father’s mission of salvation.

Scripture is passionate; it’s a love story, and it can only be absorbed by giving it everything we have: our mind, our heart and our will. It’s the one story that really matters; the story of God’s love for humanity. And like every great story, it has a structure. Talking about that structure and its meaning is my purpose here today.

A simple way of understanding God’s Word is to see that the beginning, middle and end of Scripture correspond to man’s creation, fall, and redemption. Creation opens Scripture, followed by the sin of Adam and the infidelity of Israel. This drama takes up the bulk of the biblical story until we reach a climax in the birth of Jesus and the redemption he brings. Thus, creation, fall, and redemption make up the three key acts of Scripture’s story, and they embody God’s plan for each of us.

To those intrigued by this article, I recommend a reading of Chaput’s Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life.

Nurtured on the Word

This is crossposted with First Things' Evangel blog:

Some Christians accept without reservation the teachings of their church, including the status of Scripture as the Word of God, but they nevertheless seldom read it and consequently do not know it very well. This is definitely not true of most evangelicals, who from an early age are taught to read and love the Bible. And even to collect bibles! As an adolescent I once went through our family home and counted all the bibles I could manage to locate, including those in Greek. (My parents had had a bible school education and my father had grown up speaking modern Greek.) When I had finished counting, I was astonished to discover that among the eight of us we owned more than 80 copies of the Bible! Our own experience was obviously quite different from those households that may own but a single copy gathering dust on one of the upper shelves of the home library.

I am part of the last generation to grow up with the King James version, although other translations were beginning to be published at the time. I recall with special fondness my mother reading to us from J. B. Phillips’ paraphrase of the New Testament, whose fresh and colloquial renderings made God’s Word come alive for us children. Nevertheless, when we undertook to memorize passages from the Bible, as we were taught to do in sunday school, the KJV still held sway.

It was in sunday school and church that we learned that the Bible is not merely a collection of legal codes, genealogies, moral advice and wise observations about life. Nor is it a series of episodic vignettes from the national experience of a people distant from us in both time and place. Rather, the Bible is a grand story covering the entirety of history from beginning to end, from creation through the fall into sin, to redemption in Jesus Christ, up to the final consummation of his everlasting kingdom, as recounted in the Revelation. This was our own story, and we identified with the foibles and struggles of persons who lived long ago, but whose lives and actions vividly manifested God’s mighty acts in history, culminating in the sending of Jesus into the world.

The late Bishop Lesslie Newbigin writes that Christians are those who indwell the biblical narrative, who make it their own and find their place within it. This indwelling conditions everything they do, in the full array of their life’s responsibilities. Furthermore, it is incompatible with finding one’s place in another pseudo-redemptive narrative, whether it be the liberal expectation of a progressive expansion of freedom or the Marxian expectation of a classless society. No one can serve two masters (Matthew 6:24).

Those of us who grew up steeped in Scripture early came to love it. Its world is intimately familiar to us and its worldview is not the least foreign to our apparently modern sensibilities. For myself this love has worked itself out in my praying a simple form of the Daily Office throughout the past 30 years and in singing the Psalms, about which I will have more to say in the near future.

Chanting the Psalms

Imagine, if you will, what it would be like if Christians were to hold competitions in chanting the Psalms similar to what we see below.



If Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura (1912-2000) is correct (which is disputed), it is possible that the entire Old Testament was once chanted. Listen to this NPR report below:



Here is Haïk-Vantoura's rendition of Psalm 23. Is her thesis plausible? I wouldn't presume to judge, but it is intriguing, if nothing else.

Thomas Nelson's bad idea

Americans have the reputation of being one of the most bible-reading nations on earth. There is a huge market in that country for specialty or niche bibles, which cater to certain sectors of the reading public. Some months ago I wrote of The Green Bible, which prints in green letters passages having to do with creation. Now Thomas Nelson has published The American Patriot’s Bible, something which, admittedly, makes my skin crawl:



One could pinpoint numerous errors and one-sided assertions in such a project, for example, the facile overstating of the christian beliefs of the founders. (The inclusion of Thomas Paine here is little short of ludicrous.)

But the principal reason this is such a misguided project is that it is based on a severe misunderstanding of the biblical covenant. In the Old Testament God entered into a special relationship with the children of Israel, promising them a homeland at the crossroads of three continents and giving them a law by which to order their lives as his peculiar people. When the psalmist says: "Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage!" (Psalm 33:12), he obviously has Israel in mind.

In the New Testament God continues to choose a people for himself, but on a different basis: the shed blood of Christ and his victory over death for their sins. The Apostle Peter says: "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light" (I Peter 2:9). The holy nation is not ethnic Israel, but the church, the Body of Christ, whose members are drawn from every nation on earth. One tires of having to remind people of this.

Perhaps it's time for a moratorium on niche bibles of all kinds. From now on there should be the biblical text only, bound in a plain black cover.

King David, a flawed ruler

I have always had an affinity for the biblical David, who is second only to Moses in the esteem of the people of Israel down through the centuries. Initially, of course, this personal affinity had everything to do with my sharing his name, an awareness that came already in early childhood. Furthermore, David not only founded a dynasty that ruled for some five centuries, but he was also the ancestor of Jesus himself, "great David's greater Son." 

Moreover, I have a great love for the Psalms, many of which are ascribed to David, who, like me, was a poet and musician. The struggles David expresses in these heartfelt stanzas are ones with which most of us can identify in some measure. Finally, I have inherited my namesake's interest in politics. Throughout much of scripture, David is seen as the paradigmatic monarch, a man after God's own heart (I Samuel 13:14), who sang God's praises and led his people to victory against their enemies. 

But as I've been reading through the Davidic episodes in I and II Samuel in recent weeks, I've been struck by the recognition that, in many respects, David was not that good a king. His reign was an exceedingly turbulent one, marked by warfare, rebellion and filial betrayal. He was a poor administrator and appears to have been propped up by his powerful nephew Joab, to whom he owed his political position. David loved his sons deeply but seemed unable to control them or to command their loyalty. He allowed his personal affections and private allegiances to overwhelm his public duties, especially as his mourning over Absalom's death appeared to manifest an ingratitude to those who had risked so much to save his throne. Once more Joab had to rescue him from his poor judgement (II Samuel 19:1-8). 

Worst of all, David had one of his own soldiers killed so he could take his wife for himself, which incurred the wrath of God as expressed through the prophet Nathan (I Samuel 11-12). Yet David repented and sought forgiveness (Psalm 51 is associated with this incident), which God freely granted while not exempting him from the consequences of this flagrant infraction of his law. 

Finally, David appears to have been given to snap judgements based on hearsay, as seen in the case of Ziba's slander of Jonathan's son Meribaal (II Samuel 16:1-5, 19:24-30). In short, even the justice of David's rule is in doubt, in stark contrast to the evident wisdom of his son Solomon (I Kings 3).

Nevertheless, somehow, through all this David remained a man after God's own heart. Despite his evident flaws, he was still chosen by God to rule his people, "for the LORD sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart" (I Samuel 16:7). Though most of David's descendants were wicked rulers, God remained faithful to his promise to him, maintaining a dynasty that would culminate in the King of kings, whose suffering and death we remember during this season of Lent. 

Of course Lent also reminds us of our own sins, which weigh upon us and poison our actions and relationships with others. I personally find it comforting that, if God could love so flawed a servant as David, he can and will love us too, despite our failings. It is this hope of salvation in Christ that sustains us as we near the feast of his Resurrection.

The Green Bible

Though some Christians style themselves "Red Letter Christians," I myself have never liked red letter editions of the Bible. There are two reasons for this. First, when the words of Christ are printed in red, the publisher seems to be elevating them above the remainder of Scripture, which explicitly states that "all scripture is given by inspiration of God" (II Timothy 3:16-17, emphasis mine). This is unwarranted and amounts to making a canon within the canon. Second, as I get older I find it increasingly difficult to read red text on a white background. These two issues cause me to avoid such editions.

Now we are being sold something called The Green Bible, which, as Brian McLaren tells us, "puts references to God’s creation in green." I've not yet seen this edition, but because Scripture is the story of creation, fall into sin and redemption of that creation in Jesus Christ, I should think that the entire Bible would have to be printed in green letters. Sorry, but I doubt that my eyes can handle that.

God and caesar

Robert Kraynak celebrates the life of a great man: Solzhenitsyn and the Battle for the Human Soul. However, in the course of his eulogy, he manages to misinterpret a key gospel teaching (Matthew 22:15-22, Mark 12:13-17 and Luke 20:20-26) concerning the place of government in God's world:

If we listen carefully to [Solzhenitsyn's] statements, they are based on the Gospel’s distinction between God’s realm and Caesar’s realm and the insistence that each realm has its proper role. Surprisingly, Solzhenitsyn uses the distinction of two realms in order to lower people’s expectations about the role of the state (Caesar’s realm) in people’s lives and to allow the higher, spiritual realm of God and the soul to flourish in conditions of political freedom.

Although there is no doubt that the commands of God and the demands of human beings come into conflict in the real world (Acts 4:19; 5:29), Jesus could hardly have intended to imply that God and caesar possess two distinct and parallel realms, each with its proper role, since that would contradict the universal sovereignty of God. In fact, the realm of government also belongs to God, as affirmed dramatically in Psalm 82. Leon Morris has it right: "The obligation to God covers all of life; we must serve Caesar in a way that is honoring to God."

Authority and servanthood, II

Young people typically experiment with their own identities, trying on different personae and worldviews to see how well they make sense of the new experiences they are confronting on a daily basis. The university undergraduate years see this sort of quest occurring at a high level of intensity, hopefully under the guidance of older mentors capable of bringing some order to this search. My own undergraduate years were a time of tremendous intellectual and spiritual growth.

To begin with, though I entered university a music major, intending to focus on vocal performance and composition, two related events pushed me towards a focussed study of politics: Watergate and the Cyprus crisis of 1974, the latter of which made refugees of my close relatives. Though the church of my youth (for all its considerable virtues) had given me little guidance on how to relate my faith in Jesus Christ to the great political events of the day, assuming that concern for politics might deflect one from the ostensibly higher calling of evangelizing the lost, I was becoming aware that there was a long tradition of Christian reflection on social and political life. Indeed there was more than one such tradition. The first of these was a variant of the Anabaptist vision, which was the initial influence on me around 19 years of age.

Accordingly, I flirted with the brand of Anabaptism associated with the Sojourners community, whose flagship periodical was then known as the Post-American. This is because, first, it resonated strongly with my burgeoning commitment to social justice, especially as manifested in public efforts to alleviate poverty. Second, at 19 I considered myself a pacifist and was briefly persuaded that Christians ought not to fight in wars — for any reason.

Founded by Jim Wallis and others, Sojourners grew out of the student movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Vietnam was the issue of the day, and many young people were disillusioned by the foreign and defence policies of the US government. The Christians among them were especially cynical about the role of churches in supporting these policies. Seeing evangelist Billy Graham fraternizing with the discredited President Richard Nixon in the White House was a continuing irritant. As a youthful baby-boomer with a developing social conscience, Sojourners touched a chord with me.

Nevertheless, it didn't take me long to run up against the limitations of their approach. In particular it seemed unable to envision a positive role for the state as a truly political community called by God to do public justice in his world. The ultimate solution to the power of sin on earth was to be found in the church as an alternative community, while earthly communities such as state and government belonged only to the order of providence. This order of providence was, to be sure, under God’s control, but it could never be a suitable venue for living the Christian life in an actively obedient way.

The Sojourners community had been influenced by the writings of Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, who would later come to influence the theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas. (Both of them were at Notre Dame in the early 1980s, while I was a graduate student there.) Yoder in turn had been a student of Karl Barth at Basel.

Yoder is perhaps best known for his book, The Politics of Jesus, which I read and reviewed for a course I was taking in the autumn of 1975. My undertaking of this project turned out to be a watershed experience for me, as it planted doubts in my mind as to the validity of his approach. Here are two typical passages from Yoder’s book:

God can in his own way, in his sovereign permissive providence, “use” idolatrous Assyria (Isa. 10) or Rome. This takes place, however, without his declaring that such action which he thus uses is morally good or that participation in it is incumbent upon his covenant people (1st ed., p. 199).

God is not said to create or institute or ordain the powers that be, but only to order them, to put them in order, sovereignly to tell them where they belong, what is their place. It is not as if there was a time when there was no government and then God made government through a new creative intervention; there has been hierarchy and authority and power since human society existed. Its exercise has involved domination, disrespect for human dignity, and real or potential violence ever since sin has existed. Nor is it that in his ordering of it he specifically, morally approves of what government does. The sergeant does not produce the soldiers he drills, the librarian does not create nor approve of the book he catalogs and shelves. Likewise God does not take the responsibility for the existence of the rebellious “powers that be” or for their shape or identity; they already are. What the text says is that he orders them, brings them into line, that by his permissive government he lines them up with his purpose (p. 203).

What then is the political task of the Christian? Can the believing Christian, faithful to the gospel and obedient to the will of God, ever become a civil magistrate, seeking to do justice within the context of political community? Here is Yoder's answer, which comes in the midst of a discussion of the relationship between the 12th and 13th chapters of Romans:

There is a most specific dialectical interplay around the concepts of vengeance and wrath. Christians are told (12:19) never to exercise vengeance but to leave it to God and to wrath. Then the authorities are recognized (13:4) as executing the particular function which the Christian was to leave to God. It is inconceivable that these two verses, using such similar language, should be meant to be read independently of one another. This makes it clear that the function exercised by government is not the function to be exercised by Christians (p. 199, emphasis mine).

This, it seemed to me, failed to do justice to St. Paul's reference in Romans 13 to political authority as precisely God's servant. In the course of writing my review, I discovered that the Greek word the Apostle uses for servant, viz., διάκονος, is the same one used for a deacon in the church community. Romans 12:19 was thus not a prohibition against taking up the office of civil magistrate; it was rather a warning not to take personal vengeance.

This suggested to me that political authority, normatively speaking, is in principle more than an inadvertent doer of God’s will, along the lines of the Persian King Cyrus, but is called, like David and Solomon and their successors, to respond actively to God’s summons to do justice. A king now converted to faith in Christ does not cease to be a king; rather he now rules justly according to God's commands. He exercises the responsibilities of his office as an active doer of God's will. After making this discovery, I could no longer call myself an Anabaptist in any meaningful sense and began to look increasingly to the Reformed tradition in which I had been raised.

Because at least this particular strain of Anabaptism lacks a normative conception of political authority within God's world, it is difficult to find good reason for mounting a trenchant critique of the various secular ideologies that have infused its exercise over the past two to three centuries. If politics falls at best within the realm of God's providential sovereignty, and if one should focus one's redemptive efforts only on building up the institutional church, then the need for discerning the spirits (which was the title I had originally chosen for my first book) within the political realm becomes less significant.

This does not mean that Anabaptists will then become enthusiasts for, say, liberalism or socialism. Instead, following Yoder, Hendrik Berkhof, and ultimately Barth himself, there is a tendency to lump state authorities as such together with various spiritual forces into the catch-all category of "principalities and powers." There is, in other words, a tendency to conflate creational structure with spiritual direction. The net result is a tendency to truncate the full scope of Christ's redemption, which now involves breaking the sovereignty of the powers but not reclaiming them as such by reorienting their foundational religious direction.

Next: Authority and power.

Authority and servanthood

During the final meeting of the semester in my introductory-level courses I always read aloud Matthew 20:20-28, which tells of the outrageous request made by the mother of James and John to Jesus that he give her two sons the highest places of honour in his kingdom. This, of course, elicits protests from the other disciples, while Jesus himself indicates that his kingdom is about, not achieving human greatness, but practising servanthood.

One element of this passage puzzled me until recently. The New International Version renders verses 25-28 as follows:

Jesus called them together and said, "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave — just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (emphasis mine).

Could it really be that Jesus is deprecating authority and thus commanding his followers to refrain from exercising it so they can be servants instead? How can we square this with Peter and Paul's words in I Peter 2:13-17 and Romans 13:1-7 respectively? Might it be an example of semitic hyperbole along the lines of Luke 14:25-27? That was my conclusion.

Recently, however, I had the opportunity to sound out my esteemed friend and (soon to be emeritus) colleague, Al Wolters, about this passage, and especially the Greek word, κατεξουσιάζουσιν (κατεξουσιάζω), which is translated here as "exercise authority." (Thayer's Greek Lexicon agrees with the NIV's translation.) He pointed out that the word is rare, occurring only here and in the parallel passage in Mark 10:35-45. Apart from these, the word hardly occurs at all even outside the New Testament.

The construction of the word, however, may provide a clue to its meaning. The prefix κατα- is added to εξουσιάζω, the latter of which means simply to exercise authority. The use of this prefix, especially when the object of the verb is rendered in the genitive case (αὐτων), may imply that the compound verb has a negative connotation. This is certainly true of the immediately preceding verb, κατακυριεύουσιν (κατακυριεύω), which the NIV translates as "lord it over" and which is followed again by the genitive pronoun αὐτων. Thus it may be that the New Revised Standard Version best translates the passage as follows:

‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.’ (emphasis mine)

Servanthood does not stand in contrast to authority, as some believe. One need not relinquish authority to be a servant. (In fact, I would argue that it is impossible for human beings created in God's image not to have authority.) Those in authority, including kings, emperors, prime ministers, presidents and parliamentarians, are mandated by God to exercise their authority precisely as servants of God and neighbour. If they do not, then they abuse authority.

This is the first instalment in a series I will be posting in the coming weeks and months on the subject of authority, on which I am (all too slowly!) writing a book. Stay tuned for more.

Next: How at age 20 a reading of Romans 13 in the original Greek convinced me that I was not an anabaptist after all.