A couple of stunning quotations

While reading the Wall Street Journal, I came across a couple of amazing statements I wanted to share with you regarding global warming and how it's reported to Americans.

Here's Al Gore, in a 2006 interview with Grist.com.

Question to Gore: There's a lot of debate right now over the best way to communicate about global warming and get people motivated. Do you scare people or give them hope? What's the right mix?

Gore's answer: I think the answer to that depends on where your audience's head is. In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

So, what's he saying here? Gore seems to believe hype is OK; he needs to give us speculations dressed up as scary facts. Keep in mind that Gore stands to get very rich off these tactics since he is an investor with green companies.


This is a quote from Stephen H. Schneider of Stanford University, in a 1989 Discover interview:

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but--which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This "double ethical bind" we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.

Sounds like Schneider is admitting scientists have biases just like the rest of us. I like his reference to capturing our attention by scary scenarios and simplified statements. Mighty close to hype again, huh?

Global-warming theories take a hit

A new column by George Will pokes another hole in the balloon of the global-warming crowd. He starts by quoting a New York Times story, which says "global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years." That phrase "few years" later on in the article turns into "the next decade or so."

What's going on here? We have had an absence of significant warming since 1998, and now we're facing the possibility of the least another 10 years without any sign of increased warming. But the newspaper says the years of temperature stability do not indicate global warming is an invalid theory. Cool stretches are “inevitable,” and the growth of Arctic ice will be “temporary.” So, lack of proof of global warming is shrugged off as mere aberrations. As George Will says, “what makes skeptics skeptical is the accumulating evidence that theories predicting catastrophe from man-made climate change are impervious to evidence.”

The goals announced to combat this phantom global warming are scary. The U.S. is on record as attempting to have an 80 percent reduction of carbon emissions by 2050. If so, we would end up with greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to our 1910 level. George Will says this means emissions on a per-capita basis would equal those in 1875. Buggy whips, anyone??

He argues for the creation of a national commission to evaluate the evidence about climate change. He doesn’t believe this will happen because it would destroy the global warming crowd’s carefully crafted myth that no reputable scientist disagrees with their side. Would President Obama support such a commission? No, he is firmly on the side of the alarmists, having declared at a United Nations climate change summit that nations need to act quickly because "time... is running out," to coin a new phrase (is it my imagination, or does the President spend a lot of time using cliches?).

This debate is far from over. Until there is overwhelming proof, let's not jeopardize our nation's economy and its people by making uncalled-for changes.

Christianity's decline (?)

Recent headlines trumpet news about a Christian decline in the United States, which makes it sound like things are spiraling down for religious people. But like so much that appears in the mainstream media, it is not all bad news. In fact, there is much positive that is going on in the world of religion.

These negative reports talk about Christians becoming fewer in our society and those with no religious affiliation doubling in percent of the population. But almost all of that change occurred between 1990 and 2001. There's been no change since then. Nearly two-thirds of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation also say they believe in God, so this is not some hard core secular group. In fact, a recent study found that two out of every five religiously unaffiliated people still say religion is important in their lives. In addition, these unaffiliated people have a very low retention rate, meaning that people don't stay unaffiliated for long. Most people who were raised without any religious affiliation now belong to one religion or another. In comparison, over three-fourths of all people raised as Protestants are still Protestant.

A new book offers much encouraging news. It's called God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World written by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. They say Christianity helps newcomers to the Sunbelt form communities, helps ordinary people deal with alcoholism and divorce among other problems, and helps people in the inner cities deal with trouble around them. They say it is the Christians who are looking after the homeless and the drug-addicted: "Where is the atheist homeless shelter? Atheists are only interested in themselves." They believe modernization does not lead to secularization; instead, it leads to a search for meaning, which includes an emphasis on God. They have found that evangelicals are rediscovering the life of the mind and starting to produce intellectually stimulating work again. In addition, they discovered the number of people saying that God is central to their lives is going up. In other words, there are more people serious about their faith.

Other findings are also inspiring for religious people. One author notes that young people are getting more involved in the fight against abortion. The Gallup organization recently reported that for the first time since it began asking in 1995, the majority of Americans have embraced the pro-life position. Immigration has helped the Christian faith in America. Asians and Hispanics have flocked to theologically conservative churches.

So things are not terrible for Christianity here in our country. In fact, those who maintain the faith seem more serious about it, a good sign.

The real story of how we got the New Testament

Ben Witherington, author of The Living Word of God, has a section in which he explains how the New Testament books were formed into the canon (books accepted as authoritative). It's important to know this story because many people today have mistaken ideas of how this all happened. Thanks to books like The Da Vinci Code, many readers assume a powerful church set up a council and picked which books they considered legitimate. However, it was not a matter of politics or powerful men sitting down in the fourth century A.D. to decide these issues. No one ruled out other books that had been previously considered legitimate. The truth is quite different.

The New Testament canon came about due to a process that actually started in the New Testament era. Take a look at 2 Peter 3: 16, where Peter describes Paul's writings as part of true scripture. The formation of the accepted New Testament writings was already happening in the primitive Christian community.

Some, including the author of The Da Vinci Code, will argue that Gnostic texts competed with traditional writings for inclusion in the canon. But Witherington says nobody argued for the inclusion of any of the Gnostic texts. They were seen as heresy in their own day as well as long afterward. As he notes, "Not even the earliest of the Gnostic texts, the Gospel of Thomas, was ever on a canon list or seriously considered for inclusion as a sacred text for Christians."

Most of the New Testament became accepted as sacred with no debate surrounding the various works. The ones accepted immediately were Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul's letters (except Hebrews, an anonymous letter).

Which works were debated? Hebrew was because it was anonymous. James and Jude were because they seemed so Jewish. Revelation was because of its prophecy.

What were the standards used to decide if a book belonged in the canon? Again, let Witherington describe this: "It needed to be an early witness, a first-century witness, one that went back directly or indirectly to the original eyewitnesses, apostles, and their co-workers or an early prophet like John of Patmos." So accepted books needed a combination of historical and theological factors to become part of the canon. Early church fathers said accepted books needed to have some sort of connection to an apostle and should involve orthodox teaching.

There was no single church gathering that created the current list of twenty-seven books in the New Testament. The process of sifting and choosing which books should belong in the Christian scriptures was going on throughout the second through the fourth centuries. A man named Marcion came to Rome around 144 A.D. He told the church there he had a list of acceptable books for a canon, but his list was extremely short. It included only Luke's gospel and a few of Paul's letters. The church rejected Marcion, claiming that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John should all be considered scripture.

By the end of the second century there was a list which looks a lot like what we have today. Only James, Hebrews, 1 and 2 Peter, and 3 John are missing. What's interesting is that eventually all geographical areas where Christianity was popular (the Eastern empire, Africa, the Western empire) independently concluded that these twenty-seven books should be recognized as the Christian scriptures. That's remarkable when you think about it: "The various parts of the church, without political or ecclesiastical coercion, and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, all came to the same conclusion about the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.”

What can we say to wrap this up? Here's the key fact -- it was not a matter of the church conducting a big meeting, drawing up a list of books to form the canon, and imposing this list on its members. Instead, the church simply recognized the list of books that had been forming since the time of Peter and Paul. Over the centuries Christians had found these books valuable for worship and instruction. As one person says in Witherington’s book, "The canon thus represents the collective experience of the Christian community during its formative centuries." So there was no conspiracy, no imposition of books, no hiding or destroying competing gospels, no huddled gathering of old men.

Some rules for examining biblical "errors"

In his book The Living Word of God , Ben Witherington wraps up the issue of errors in the New Testament. He has six points that are important to keep in mind when we hear complaints from critics who claim they have found errors in these documents.

First, it's not considered an error when an author intends to give a general report or the gist of something rather than a precise report. His generalizing is not falsifying the story.

Second, it's not considered an error if an author of ancient literature arranged, edited, or paraphrased what someone said. For example Matthew uses the term "kingdom of heaven" rather than the phrase "kingdom of God" used by Mark in the same passage. We should not impose a modern standard of precision which these ancient authors were not required to follow according to the writing customs of their day.

Third, it's not considered an error to present events out of chronological order. For example, John 2 puts the cleansing of the temple there for theological, not chronological reasons.

Fourth, it's not considered an error of the original author if a translator makes a mistake when rendering the original into another language.

Fifth, it's not considered an error when a New Testament author discusses the Old Testament text and appears to misrepresent it. In fact, they are often just paraphrasing the text rather than being concerned about a precise translation.

Sixth, we need to understand what an error would look like. It would violate the principle of noncontradiction, which says that A and not-A cannot both be true at the same time in the same way. For example, it would be an error if one of the gospels said Jesus was born in Nazareth, and another said he was born in Bethlehem. They might both be wrong, but they can't both be right.

When we hear critics talk about errors in the Bible, we should remember something that Ben Witherington said: "I have yet to find a single example of a clear violation of the principal of noncontradiction anywhere in the New Testament."

Did they get it right??

Ben Witherington, in The Living Word of God, does more than just look at different types of literature that make up the New Testament. The next section of his book discusses the historical accuracy of a few disputed passages.

He starts with the differences of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke. Some people say it appears that Bethlehem is the hometown of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew while Luke seems to say it is Nazareth. He notes that both accounts stress the Jesus was born in Bethlehem even though both authors realize Jesus was called "Jesus of Nazareth" and that his family lived there after his birth. He points out how much of both gospels tell the same story, especially the fact that Jesus came into this world through a miracle of a virgin birth. Matthew’s gospel does not give us an account of Jesus’ life before his birth; it does not tell the reader where the family lived before his birth. One other difference concerns the flight into Egypt, which Matthew mentions but Luke does not. This does not mean the flight did not happen. Different authors chose different elements to stress.

Witherington tackles Luke 2: 1-4, which some believe contains a problem. Those who doubt the accuracy of Luke say that the famous census of Quirinius took place at a later time than the gospel indicates and that the census described in Luke 2: 1-4 is highly improbable (families having to go to their ancestral hometowns to register). He starts his answer by indicating that Luke obviously knew when the famous census took place – check out Acts 5:37. In addition, the Emperor Augustus set out to get tax revenues from all his provinces, this would mean a census would be necessary. Luke 2: 1 might well mean that Augustus decreed that all the rest of the Empire be enrolled, some of the work already having been done. Another point has to do with the Greek language of Luke 2: 2. It could mean, "This was the first census which happened during when Quirinius was ruler of Syria," or it might read, "This enrollment was before when Quirinius was ruler of Syria." Finally, there is evidence from Egypt that people were forced to go to their ancestral homes for registration.

Then there are the questions that surround the slaughter of the innocents reported in Matthew. The author of this gospel describes a paranoid King Herod, who attempts to end any potential threat to his kingdom by killing all the babies in Bethlehem. How can it be, the skeptics ask, that a horrible event like this would not be written up in other historical accounts? But we need to realize that Bethlehem was a very small town in the time of Jesus, so no more than a handful of infants in that town would have been two years or younger. Plus we know from other sources that King Herod was fully capable of such nastiness since he killed several of his own wives and offspring.

Of course, critics have attacked many other parts of the Bible. But Witherington has demonstrated in the above examples that initial problems may simply be the case of misunderstandings or ignorance. There are plenty of good books devoted to tackling these issues of apparent biblical difficulties, so don't accept the statement of a skeptic without researching it carefully.

So you think you know Revelation?

Besides the four gospels, a book of history (Acts) and a number of letters, the New Testament contains one book of mostly apocalyptic prophecy—Revelation. It’s a lot like the Old Testament books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Zechariah, but with some elements of a letter. No other book has confused so many people. Ben Witherington, in The Living Word of God, addresses the literary qualities and conventions of this puzzling book to show how badly treated it has been over the ages. His claim is that Revelation “has been stripped of its historical context and rhetorical setting.”

The author starts by distinguishing the kind of prophecy that exists in Revelation. It is a visionary prophecy much like Zechariah, Daniel, and Ezekiel. It may have elements of predicting the future, but that is not the main point. Instead, John uses a rhetoric which is clearly metaphorical and symbolic. For example, he mentions a person whose number is 666. This individual appears a lot like Nero, who was persecuting Christians in John’s day, but he is not named in the book. The key to the book is this use of coded language that made sense to people of his time, not to us today unless we are willing to put in a lot of study.

Witherington is upset that people claim Revelation is all about today's world. He says that "we must contend with the ridiculous ideas that this book was written especially for late-20th-and early-21st-century Christians, and no one could possibly have understood the book before now, since it's all coming to pass right now." Instead, chapters 2 and 3 of Revelation clearly say that this book was written for first-century Christians in western Asia Minor. John believes that "the sort of things he is writing about are already happening and will continue to happen right up to the point when Jesus returns." So, Revelation is relevant for all the ages since its inception.

Witherington is especially exasperated with those who look to Revelation for confirmation of the theory called "the rapture." He says the book does not speak of a pretribulation rapture of the faithful. Instead, it focuses on suffering and martyrdom of the believers. Witherington claims this idea of "the rapture" did not really exist in Christian history before the early 1800s. It is a recent idea that has become huge in evangelical circles, but the author calls it unbiblical. He asks the reader to consider 1 Thessalonians 4:16-18, where the return of Christ is compared to the actions of a king who comes to a city. A greeting committee comes out of the city to meet the dignitary (dead and living Christians rise to meet Jesus in the air); all then proceed back into the city (the Earth). They don't leave the city and depart to the king's domain (the view the rapture would require as an analogy). Witherington says this picture would have been clear to people in Paul's time when he wrote Thessalonians. He's pretty blunt in his assessment of this popular rapture business: "there is no such rapture theology anywhere in the New Testament, or in the Old Testament for that matter. The consistent witness of the New Testament is that Christians will continue to be martyrs throughout every church age."

The author sums it all up by saying we should not use Revelation for specific detailed prophecies of our times. Instead, the book gives us general warnings about the kind of events that will happen, which are common to every age of human history. His approach is useful to help us focus on living well rather than being tossed about with the latest end -times speculations.

Do I agree with his statements? Well, maybe. I read Hank Hanegraaff's The Apocaplypse Code that echoes the same skepticism toward the rapture. I just wish pastors and writers would be honest enough to preface their comments on Revelation by saying, "You know, there are a lot of ways of taking this book. i'm presenting one, but you should read up on the others and make up your own mind."

Letters from 2,000 years ago

This blog is another in a series on Ben Witherington's book called The Living Word of God, which examines the New Testament. Beside the four gospels covered in two previous blogs, Witherington talks about another portion of the New Testament--the letters that make up so much of it. It's obvious that they are written to specific audiences for specific purposes at a specific time using specific conventions popular during this time. We can gain much from them (and avoid misunderstandings) if we know more about these conventions.

Paul's letters are definitely oral documents meant to be read aloud in Greek to their intended audience. What does that mean for us today? We need to think about the kind of rhetorical devices we will encounter in them -- rhythm, parallelism, rhetorical questions, balanced sentences and phrases. You can see this in 1 Corinthians 13 if you read it aloud.

We need to also understand that these letters are attempts to persuade us. Paul, for example, uses all the tricks in his bag -- he tries to convince us, convict us, and even convert us to his points of view. Some may feel they are being manipulated, but he was simply conforming to the conventions of his own day. A good example of this is a lesser-known letter of Paul's called Philemon. In this letter he tries to convince a slave owner to free a slave who has run away from him. Read it sometime and notice the emotional appeals, the use of puns, the kind of pressure Paul puts on the slave owner.

Something else we need to consider when we read a letter is the fact that it is one long discourse. We tend to zoom in on a verse or a small passage rather than seeing the entire argument. Modern chapter and verse indications make it more difficult for us to see the big picture. It's often a mistake to isolate one chapter from the next when they both may be part of the same point. Look at Romans chapter 8 where the first word is "Therefore." We need to see what Paul covered in chapter 7 so we can understand why it is foundational to what he wants to express in the following chapter.

We must also distinguish between the purposes of these letters. Some attempt to solve a problem (Philemon and 1 Corinthians are examples). Others are there to report on progress, like Philippians, where Paul basically tells the people to keep going. Some letters are sermons meant to circulate through various churches, making them more generic in tone (Ephesians) while still others focus on specific problems in a specific church (Colossians and Galatians).

Probably the most difficult thing about these letters is determining what applies to us today. There's no doubt that much of the content dealt with specific situations in a specific culture two thousand years ago. For example, there are comments addressed to women telling them to have long hair. It would be useful to know that female worshippers of Dionysus often dressed like men and cut their hair very short. It appears that in this passage Paul simply wants the women of the early church to look different than pagan worshipers. We should be careful if we attempt to isolate a verse and apply it automatically to our world today.

We would have far fewer misconceptions if we treated the letters of the New Testament in a different way, acknowledging the style in which they were written.