A book for serious times

A couple of years ago, I read a powerful book that has continued to challenge me. It’s called Serious Times by James Emery White, a pastor and former president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. It's a book that has two primary points -- it explains what kind of world we live in and what we can do about it.

The first part is a historical overview of the forces that shaped our current world. In the Middle Ages a spiritual worldview dominated, only to be replaced during the Renaissance by a focus on this world. Then the Enlightenment came along with its stress on reason and empiricism.

White says our modern world has been shaped by secularization, pluralization, and privatization. Its secularization is the tendency to live life without much regard for religion. The pluralization of our society offers a huge number of faith options, a divine supermarket of sorts. Finally, privatization has created a huge gap between the public and private beliefs of an individual -- no religious faith is allowed in the public square.

What have these three things brought us in today's world? White ticks off four results. First, there's moral relativism in which everything is simply a matter of taste; there are no true rights and wrongs. Secondly, we now have the autonomous individual who is independent from all authority. In addition, we now have narcissistic hedonism characterized by the pursuit of pleasure and affluence. Finally, there is reductive naturalism claiming that nature is all there is.

These four currents in our world have not produced better human beings. Instead we now have a crisis in values, we lack vision, we have empty souls, and we feel unhappy with what we perceive to be an inadequate human experience; we know there should be more to life.

We live in a postmodern world, according to White. Modernism is exhausted. All is opinion now with no objectivity, no universal knowledge. The media shapes how we think. Texts are now deconstructed, allowing the reader to create the meaning. There is a reaction against rationality; spiritual ideas are more prominent.

Most of us understand this is the world we are part of. But instead of just complaining about where we are, White seeks to have us become players rather than observers of the situation. His second half of the book talks about things we must do to impact our society and possibly change it from the destructive course that it is on. I will use the next blog to talk about his solutions.

A change of pace

I've been going over important Biblical points, attacking Obama's poor choices, or undermining the global warming scam. How about a change here? I came across some clever things Ben Franklin said in his almanac. Some wisdom never goes out of style. Here's Ben:

who has deceive thee so often as thyself?

The family of fools is ancient

do me the favor to deny me at once

what you would seem to be, be really

how many observe Christ's birthday; how few his precepts! Oh, ‘tis easier to keep holidays than Commandments

how few there are who have courage enough to own their faults, or resolution enough to mend them

he that can compose himself is wiser than he that composes books

to err is human, to repent divine; to persist devilish

doing an injury puts you below your enemy; revenging one makes you but even with him; forgiving sets you above him

wealth is not his that has it but he that enjoys it

A dangerous and unnecessary decision

I've been reading about President Obama's decision to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York to try him in a civilian court. It was a dangerous and unnecessary choice for the President to make.

First, a reminder of what KSM has done. Together with Osama bin Laden, he selected the 9/11 terrorists, arranged their financing and training, and ran the whole operation from abroad. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan he became bin Laden's operations chief until he was captured.

Here's the dangerous part of Obama's decision. Trying KSM in civilian court will be an intelligence bonanza for al Qaeda and the hostile nations that will view the U.S. intelligence methods and sources that such a trial will reveal. KSM and his attorneys will yell for the right to demand that the government produce in open court all of the information that it has on them, and how it got it.
Prosecutors will be forced to reveal U.S. intelligence on KSM, the methods and sources for acquiring its information, and his relationships to fellow al Qaeda operatives. The information will enable al Qaeda to drop plans and personnel whose cover is blown. It will enable it to detect our means of intelligence-gathering, and to push forward into areas we know nothing about.

Here's the unnecessary part. We already have a tool designed to solve this tension between civilian trials and the demands of intelligence and military operations. In 2001, President George W. Bush established military commissions, which have a long history that includes World War II, the Civil War and the Revolutionary War.
The Supreme Court has upheld the use of commissions for war crimes. The procedures for these commissions received the approval of Congress in 2006 and 2009.

So, get ready for years of uproar, lengthy tirades by the accused, lawyerly tricks, huge bills to protect the buildings in New York where the trial will be held, and other unpleasant things. Is our President taking this war seriously?

One last look at Bible translations and Witherington's book

Here’s a final look at Ben Witherington’s book The Living Word of God. Let’s finish up on what he had to say about Bible translations.

He had some good general rules when looking for a useful translation of the Bible. First, he says if the translation has to have a lot of notes to explain just the meaning of the words and phrases used, then it’s either too literal or too much of a paraphrase. He also tells the reader to get a Bible that best conveys the meaning of the original inspired text to the particular target audience you have in mind. A third point is to realize a team translation usually will be better than an individual translation.

Witherington may get in trouble when he comments on the weaknesses of the King James Bible translation. There are those who claim to be "King James only" people--they believe this is the true, inspired word of God. I never understood why so many cling to this one dated version of the Bible. I know it’s beautifully written, but the meaning sure gets lost. Witherington says this translation from the early 1600s depended too heavily on outdated manuscripts. We now have far better and earlier manuscripts of both the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible than they did four hundred years ago. Someone once said he only used the King James Bible when he was dealing with a 400-year old person. The author says the New King James version does overcome a lot of the archaic language difficulties of the KJV, but it still does not take advantage of the better and earlier manuscripts.

So, what are our best choices? He says Today’s New International Edition, the Jerusalem Bible, or the New Revised Standard Version. I'm planning to read the English Standard Version since it received a book of the year award from World magazine. Then there’s the updated New American Standard Bible—I was never a fan of the older one since I thought it was an awkward translation. But maybe the update is better.

Any thoughts? Your favorites?

Which Bible translation?

Ben Witherington has a great chapter title in his book The Living Word of God when he turns to the issue of Bible translations: “How to Pick a Translation Without Losing Your Religion.” He does a good job discussing why there are so many translations, the diversity of each translation, and the battle over gender-inclusive language.

First, he says we have a lot of translations for a very important reason. We have discovered so many manuscripts of various parts of the Bible that new translations allow us to get ever closer to the original text of both the Old and New Testaments. To give us an idea of the differences over time, he mentions the King James translators had only one Greek text, and it wasn’t all that old. Now we have over five thousand copies of parts or the whole of the New Testament in Greek—what a wealth of sources!

In addition, we have many translations because we are lucky enough to live where English is spoken. We have a rich and vibrant language that changes quickly. For example, Witherington quotes Acts 26:14 from the King James Bible, which says, “It hurts you to kick against the pricks.” For good reason, that has changed today. The N.I.V., for example, now reads, “It is hard for you to kick against the goad.” No wonder so many people struggle with the old translation--it's like reading Shakespeare.

He then goes over the amazing variety available. Different Bibles exist for different audiences. There are those translations that are very loose (The Message, The Living Bible), others that are more idiomatic (New International Version, Jerusalem Bible, New King James), and still others that attempt more literal translations (New American Standard, NET Bible). He points out there is no such thing as an absolute literal translation because English is so different from Greek and Hebrew.

I would point out that Witherington wrote his book before the English Standard Version came to market. It falls closer to being a more literal translation with many admirers, including R. C. Sproul, John Mark Reynolds, and Ravi Zacharias. It has done well with the public, and I’ve heard it may become the default Bible for most evangelicals some day.

Witherington has more to say about Bible translations—I’ll cover that next time.

Shelby Steele asks good questions

Here's another part of author Shelby Steele's article on Barack Obama. I'm hoping people ask questions like these as they consider the economic plans and the foreign policies of this administration:


But where is the economic logic behind a stimulus package that doesn't fully click in for a number of years? How is every stimulus dollar spent actually going to stimulate? Why bailouts to institutions that only hoard the money? How is vast government spending simultaneously a kind of prudence that will not "add to the deficit?" How can such spending not trigger smothering levels of taxation?
Mr. Obama's economic thinking (or lack thereof) adds up to a kind of rudderless cowboyism combined with wishful thinking. You would think that in the two solid years of daily campaigning leading up to his election this nakedness would have been seen.

On the foreign front he has been given much credit for his new policy on the Afghan war, and especially for the "rational" and "earnest" way he went about arriving at the decision to surge 30,000 new troops into battle. But here also were three months of presidential equivocation for all the world to see, only to end up essentially where he started out.

And here again was the lack of a larger framework of meaning. How is this surge of a piece with America's role in the world? Are we the world's exceptional power and thereby charged with enforcing a certain balance of power, or are we now embracing European self-effacement and nonengagement? Where is the clear center in all this?

Shelby Steele and a telling comparison

Shelby Steele has written a lot of good books and articles over the years dealing with race relations in this country. He is best known for The Content of Our Character. In a recent piece for The Wall Street Journal, he compares Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama in the following. It's powerful and insightful. See what you think:

I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.

The nature of this emptiness becomes clear in the contrast between him and Ronald Reagan. Reagan reached the White House through a great deal of what is called "individuating"—that is he took principled positions throughout his long career that jeopardized his popularity, and in so doing he came to know who he was as a man and what he truly believed.

He became Ronald Reagan through dissent, not conformity. And when he was finally elected president, it was because America at last wanted the vision that he had evolved over a lifetime of challenging conventional wisdom. By the time Reagan became president, he had fought his way to a remarkable certainty about who he was, what he believed, and where he wanted to lead the nation.

Mr. Obama's ascendancy to the presidency could not have been more different. There seems to have been very little individuation, no real argument with conventional wisdom, and no willingness to jeopardize popularity for principle. To the contrary, he has come forward in American politics by emptying himself of strong convictions, by rejecting principled stands as "ideological," and by promising to deliver us from the "tired" culture-war debates of the past. He aspires to be "post-ideological," "post-racial" and "post-partisan," which is to say that he defines himself by a series of "nots"—thus implying that being nothing is better than being something. He tries to make a politics out of emptiness itself.