Geoff

If you’ve learned New Testament Greek, the hope is that the effort has made it worth keeping. It’s similar to karate. Everybody who’s done martial arts for several years of their lives, finds some way to practice every now and then. My wife caught me doing a kata on Saturday. I haven’t been to karate class in 6 years. The problem is that if you get busy you’ll think that you couldn’t possibly keep your Greek in just a few minutes a day. But this is not true. You can.

I’m majoring in Engineering and teaching. I’m having to learn Calculus, C++, Vector Physics, and other weird stuff. Yet, I’ve found strategies for keeping my Greek. Here are some pro-tips:

1. Read for speed.
   1. Purchase an audio Greek Testament and just read one chapter a day while listening. There are some free downloads too. The one I linked to is pronounced like modern Greek. You can find the Erasmian pronunciation too.
   2. Do not pause to catch what you missed. Instead, make it through 3-5 chapters, then in the next 3-5 days, listen to an English audio Bible while you read the same passages. I’ve been listening to Philippians. I’ll start translating a paragraph a day once my ability to read it quickly improves.
   3. Remember, fluency requires that you learn to think in Greek and do so quickly.
2. Memorize Little Bits
   1. Re-sing the songs you learned for your endings.
   2. Memorize favorite verses in Greek. Write them on note cards and practice them throughout the day.
   3. If you are doing exercise one, add a step of underlining one word you do not know each time. Look it up and memorize it throughout the day.
3. Learn Modern Greek
   1. I was a Greek tutor for a Greek family who wanted their child to practice modern Greek. They knew I wasn’t proficient, but they also knew I knew Koine Greek and would be able to grade her work. Learning to read and speak basic contemporary Greek helped me a great deal.
   2. Learning the modern pronunciation makes Greek sound more like a language and less like magic.
4. Read the LXX, the Fathers, and the Pagans
   1. Reading the LXX in Greek, maybe just one Proverb a day can help your vocabulary tremendously.
   2. Plan your week with time to read just one paragraph on the Apostolic Fathers in Greek each week. Set aside 30 minutes and read the whole paragraph, write it, then translate it. If you’re fluent enough to read it without decoding then read a whole chapter.
   3. Go to the Loeb section in your local public library and check out some Greek-English version of a classical author and dig in.

 

 

My recent post on Romans has a bit in common with Andrew Perriman’s method outlined here.

Perriman makes this claim about his method for interpreting the New Testament from a narrative-historical frame:

10. If we are to be consistent hermeneutically, I suggest that what principally connects the New Testament with the church today is the continuing historical narrative of God’s people. I think it is misleading to accommodate the historical distance by differentiating between what the text meant and what the text means. It means what it meant. Within the narrative frame there are certainly direct lessons to be learnt, and I do not discount analogical reading, but the New Testament is formative for the church today primarily because it explains what happened at a critical moment in the history of the people of God.

 

I think over all he is correct here, but perhaps what he does not address is that the texts really do “meant what they meant” but their significance for the community that canonized them can change from time period to time period. Paul’s theory of justification did not change during the reformation, it’s significance (rightly or wrongly) became different for the church. Similarly, the Old Testament, despite its historical and literary meaning for its author and original audience, still has a tropological or spiritual function and significance to God’s people today. Bruce Charlton (who is not a Bible scholar, but a Medical Doctor and read in evolutionary theory) points this out very elegantly here.

I think my approach to the New Testament very much mirrors Perriman’s, but I also think that the Scripture carries a significance to believers that is based upon but goes beyond their initial meaning. The very act of canonizing the bible indicates that the books therein are now a collection for the church rather than writings to individual churches.

I think one of the chief problems we (modern Christians) have with reading Romans is that we do not read with with a sufficiently historical mindset. We want to read Romans theologically and spiritually (as a document about God and our spiritual relationship to God) and this is good.

In so doing though, we can fail to realize that for Paul, God works through persons in history. Paul, of course, does not have the modern concept of history in mind. But what he does have in mind is a real change in the course of the world precisely because of certain concrete things that God has done, is doing, and will do. For instance, Romans 1:16:

Rom 1:16  For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

Paul here, and most commentators I have check agree, that Paul is referring to the beginning of the gospel. Christ preached to his own people first, the apostle’s also preached to Jews (or Judeans) first. Then the gospel went to the Greeks (hellenized Jews or Gentiles). Paul’s letter starts with mention of God’s work in history. But then, for some reason, when we get to Romans 6 and see applications of that history to individual believers, the whole focus in interpretation in popular preaching and writing is upon the individual life with Christ. Thus you hear/read quips like:

If you don’t preach grace in such a way that people think they do not have to do good works, then you’re not preaching grace.

But is Paul saying that in reference to an idea like “Since grace is free, is life a free for all?” Should we so preach grace that people really do not consider repentance? Is the conflict between law and grace truly a conflict between rules and freedom? Or is it rather like Romans 5:19-6:18:

(Rom 5:19) For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.  (20)  Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more,  (21)  so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Paul here is speaking about the law, not merely as a set of rules, but he means that in space-time, the law came to the Israelites in order to increase the trespass. Paul seems to mean the law, as in, the whole covenant that came through Moses. Not a purely graceless system of earning, but the law came partially to make sin worse. But where the sinfulness (among the Israelites) became all the worse, grace came in Christ. So just as death reigned prior to the law and after the law, Christ’s death and resurrection are precisely what it means for grace to abound. Thus, grace reigns through the righteousness of God revealed in the gospel (Romans 1:17). Paul is speaking of the story of Jesus here, not merely concepts in apparent conflict.

(6:1)  What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?  (2)  By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?  (3)  Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  (4)  We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.  (5)  For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.  (6)  We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.

As an historical principal then, sin is no longer in charge. People, particularly the faithful baptized, are positionally and progressively delivered from the clutching hands of sin. The question Paul is asking and answering is, “If the law came to increase the trespass and heightened trespass was precisely wherein grace abounded in the crucifixion of Jesus, the Lord of glory, by the corrupt leaders of the world, then why should we not continue under the law so that God’s grace can spread in a similarly powerful way? Is it not rational to stick with the set-up you have just established?” Paul’s answer is that baptism (read: accepting the gospel) is accepting that God’s grace has already abounded and that a break with sin’s reign has literally been established in history and now it has been established in your life! Paul is applying this real change in history to the lives of individual believers.

(7)  For one who has died has been set free from sin.  (8)  Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.  (9)  We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.  (10)  For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.  (11)  So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.  (12)  Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions.  (13)  Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.  (14)  For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.

Here Paul gives an application for how this can be true. If you have a master (death/sin), but you die you are free from that master. If we have union with Christ, such that he represents us (Romans 5:12-17), then his death is just as good as our own death. He died and was raised, so death and sin have no authority over him. Christians are positionally already in this state, thus they should live accordingly and make progress in overcoming personal sin precisely because one day God will make this positional reality actual. We should do this because we are not longer under law (the system designed to bring about increased sin…like Jesus’ death and its meaning), but under grace (the reign of Jesus who over came death).

(15)  What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!  (16)  Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?  (17)  But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed,  (18)  and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.

So, Paul asks his question again, but with a hint of sarcasm because of what he just established. The rhetorical effect seems to be, “How silly is it then, to live as though the era under the law was still primary even though we know that era has passed? Don’t you realize that you’ve committed yourselves to obey Jesus?” Paul may also be dealing with the potential charge from Christians who see the Jewish law as the primary moral norm, “But without the law, we have no rules…won’t people just sin it up?” One book I have implies that Paul is struggling with the allegedly serious problem of, “If grace, why commands?” But Paul isn’t struggling with that at all. He proposes the solution in Romans 6:17 when he says, in effect, “If you’ve believed the gospel, then you’ve agreed to live by the moral standards contained therein.” I propose, that Paul means the teachings of Jesus reflected in the gospel preached by the early church. Paul even says that the conflict, at the end of the day isn’t really between rules and forgiveness, but between sin and obedience (Romans 6:16). We know from elsewhere in Romans that the obedience is the obedience of faith, or the kind of obedience that is fueled by loyalty to God, and the Lord Jesus, whom he raised from the death (Romans 1:1-7).

Anyhow, if we look, not just for “How does this passage in Romans apply directly to me?” But if we instead ask, “How does it fit into Paul’s argument about the epochal change that comes with the gospel story?” Then we get the personal application and coherent picture that does not leave us with silly notions that people have which cause them to say, “Law is imperative, gospel is blessing,” or other such nonsense.

One of the weird features of modern education is the marginalization of the lecture. I partially understand why. As a teacher, I find it frustrating to spend a great deal of time developing a lecture that would be interesting to a group of adults who came to see the lecture on purpose only to find high school students feigning interest. Yet, throughout history good lecturing ability has been associated with so many forms of social, institutional, and individual transformation that it is difficult to side with those who say that lectures are oh so passe. What is worse is that some books speak of the lecture as though it were invented by Voldemort or “the great Satan hisself.” While I fully understand and implement Socratic style teaching, active classroom practice, and various other teaching methods, I also appreciate the usefulness of lecturing and doing so well.

Even the most difficult subjects can be lectured about in a way that is simultaneously intellectually rigorous, rhetorically pleasant, and emotionally captivating. For instance, Ramamurti Shankar’s lectures on Electromagnetic Physics are excellent. I’m using them in advance of Physics 2 next semester because everybody tells me that it will be very difficult. So I watch these lectures and take notes. He is very entertaining:

Lecture’s can be done in almost any style and be captivating if the lecturer possesses the traits typically associated with charisma such as warmth, apparent expertise, and presence. If the lecturer is clearly engaged with the topic and the learners (presence) then listening will make sense because the lecture hall has become a group engagement with something outside the minds of those present (physics, history, the Bible, etc). If the lecturer presents the material in such a way that A) many examples and illustrations demonstrate the material’s truthfulness, usefulness, and if possible beauty, B) the lecture itself contains minimal errors of fact or reasoning (apparent expertise), then listening will make sense because the speaker displays superior authority in the matter than those present. If the lecturer enjoys the hearers and wishes their best (warmth), then listening will make sense because the leader in the room only wants to lead the hearers into a state similar to his own.

In this respect a good lecture must always be not merely informative, but argumentative and persuasive. It must be, not only a device for the delivery of facts but a device for shared apprehension of the world from a certain point of view (even if students eventually reject that point of view).

I really think that many pastors could use more deliberate practice with lectures. Many sermons at the end of the day are delivered without any evidence that it is a lecture worth remembering. There is a way to spiritualize this fact by stating something like this: “people remember what you do, not what you say” or “better that people remember Jesus rather than the message (1 Cor 2:1-2).” The problem with this line of thought is that Paul’s letters to the Corinthians for all his critique of rhetoric over substance, were not only remembered but preserved! They were preserved as ways of remembering Jesus. If somebody’s notes from a sermon end up influencing their devotional life in a positive way you’ve done them a service.

Few people are so expert at lecturing that all of their lectures are memorable, but anybody can make it a point to improve one or two of their lectures a week. I know it can be done, I deliver (including sermons) between 7 and 10 lectures of varying lengths a week. Anyhow, I hope that this post can revitalize your desire to lecture well.

Resources:

Itunes University has mountains of excellent classes on many subjects that could teach you to lecture well.

Carnegie’s books on public speaking really are good. Read one of them.

Aristotle’s On Rhetoric is something I make use of often.

The Art of Manliness has an excellent series on rhetoric.

 

George Lakoff writes about pretty much everything because he writes about the fundamentally metaphorical nature of human thought. I’ve read two of his books and when I was in the local university library today I noticed three of his other books:

1. Moral politics : how liberals and conservatives think

2. Philosophy in the flesh : the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought

3. Where mathematics comes from : how the embodied mind brings mathematics into being

These books, from the brief skimmings I gave them today are very interesting. But his book on politics seems confusing. I jumped to the end and read the last chapters prior to my physics class today because I know about Lakoff’s tendency to rehash old material at the beginnings of books. Anyhow, what he does is he shows the difference between conservatives and liberals by highlighting what he considers to be the controlling metaphor for their politics.

1. Liberals have a nurturing parent concept of government.
2. Conservatives have a strict father concept of government.

I don’t mean to do a review or anything like that. I just mean to point out how this seems to poison the well against conservatives. For instance, in chapter 22, Lakoff notes that there are ten assumptions that guide the “Strict Father Model” that he sees in conservative discourse and action. Here they are:

1. There is a universal, absolute, strict set of rules specifying what is right and what is wrong for all times, all cultures, and all stages of human development.
2. Each such rule has a fixed, clear, unequivocal, directly interpretable meaning which does not vary.
3. Each moral rule must be literal, and hence must make use of only literal concepts.
4. Each human being has access to the fixed, clear, unequivocal meaning of moral rules.
5. Each rule is general, in that it applies not just to specific people or actions but to whole categories of people and actions.
6. The categories mentioned in each rule must have fixed definitions of precise boundaries, set for all time and the same in all cultures.
7. All human beings must be able to understand such rules in order to have the free will to follow them or not.
8. These rules must be able to be communicated perfectly, from the legitimate authority responsible for enforcement to the person under the obligation to follow them. There must be no variation in  meaning between what is said and what is understood.
9. People do things they don’t want to do in order to get rewards and avoid punishments. This is just human nature and is part of what it means to be “rational.”
10. But, for this to be true, people must be able to understand precisely what constitutes a reward and what constitutes a punishment. There must be no meaning variation concerning what rewards and punishments are.

The problem with this list is that I’m quite conservative in outlook and almost none of these apply to how I think or have come to my conclusions and while those assumptions do match many conservatives that I know, they also match many people who don’t care about politics and they certainly match the assumptions of a giant stack of books I own about feminist theory (written by people who are not conservative at all).

If you ask many of my friends, you would find that I was quite ambivalent about politics and have only recently become interested in it as I’ve studied the history of western civilization in greater depth and spent time learning what it means to excel at both rhetoric and dialectic (because I teach both to high school students). Most of my conclusions aren’t so much default as steps along the way. Even then, as a disciple of Jesus I find being nurturing to others to be centrally important unless you’re trying to protect the weak or vulnerable from the strong.

The list and perhaps the entire book should probably be understood as Lakoff’s attempt to “reframe” the issues related to politics in such a way that not only his particular value set, but the entire constellation of specific positions he holds are seen as radical attempts to nurture people who have been damaged by conservative thinking. Lackoff has written a manifesto wherein he explains how and why to reframe things using rhetorical questions and redefinitions of issues based upon shared values (this is a good rhetorical tool and can indeed be used to find true things as well). His book antedates the manifesto, but the strategy is present.

My guess is that many conservatives, particularly Christians, do not buy into most things on that list. Libertarians often don’t care about any ethics except being left alone. Christians belief that whole chunks of Scripture were inspired precisely to be fulfilled in Jesus and become obsolete as literal moral or national guidance (Hebrews 8:13). Roman Catholic Christians do believe in absolute truth, but they subscribe to Aristotelian virtue ethics as a part of their theological system, so their conclusions allow for pragmatic based ethics because the absolutes are based upon the nature of things and the commands of God are provisional in their system, not absolute.

Anyhow, it was surreal to read his material couched in a sort of pseudoscientific language as he characterized conservatism as so frightening that he has become more liberal than ever (p 336).

Anyhow, despite my conservative leanings, I’m quite somewhere between Anabaptist and disinterested in the “culture war” because I find that many people I talk to on either side refuse to use reason. I know I should care about politics because they largely determine the future, but the most interesting things about the book aren’t so much political as they are deja vu-ish.

1. In my younger years, before I understood things like categorizing people and treating them accordingly (I had no guile or malfeasance then…the world has hurt me so I’m more bitter and vicious than I used to be sadly), I found my college professors to sometimes treat me strangely when topics of dispute would come up in class discussion and I would state my view. But they did treat me like Lakoff recommends. I simply didn’t know the game and would try to cite facts or articulate arguments thinking we were having a discussion. They would “change the frame” and I wouldn’t know how to keep it. I still remember a psychology professor being pretty sure that the view of Christian character in marriage I articulated from the New Testament wasn’t actually in there precisely because it sounded appealing.
2. When I read Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God, many of his arguments seemed familiar. It’s because they were Lakoffian. Campbell does credit Lakoff’s ideas in a footnote on page 990. So that explains that.

Anyhow, moral of the story: This guy will probably help me understand the world better despite my disagreeing with him about everything related to math, philosophy, and politics. I suspect he figured that since those fields use words and he’s an expert in linguistics, that he could redefine all of the things that use words. We’ll see.

In the past, I wrote about Roger Olson’s mistake in interpreting what it means for God to be good. I made the point with classical theism in mind, which is called so because it was held by older theologians. Anyhow, Olson makes this point:

Here’s what I mean—to be specific. What ordinary lay Christian, just reading his or her Bible, without the help of any of the standard conservative evangelical systematic theologies, would ever arrive at the doctrines of divine simplicity, immutability, or impassibility as articulated by those systematic theologians (e.g., “without body, parts or passions” as the Westminster Confession has it)? Without body, okay. But without parts or passions? The average reader of Hosea, for example, gets the image of God as passionate. While “parts” isn’t exactly the best term for the persons of the Trinity, a biblical reader will probably think of God as complex and dynamic being rather than as “simple substance.”

I like to think of myself as a Biblically minded fellow. I really do understand what Olson is getting at here. But the rub comes in when you look at how inconsistent his own methodology is. On his blog he notes his adherence to evolutionary theory. But what ordinary lay Christian, just reading his or her bible, without the help of any of the standard moderate Christian biological arguments, would ever arrive at the doctrines of natural selection, an old earth, or speciation over time as articulated by these biologists?

Now, Olson’s nearly absurd double standard here is not clear evidence that his conclusions are wrong.

I would suspect that the problem lies in the fact that Olson, for whatever reason, feels he understands the biology well enough to accept the biologists at their word. Therefore, he has to reinterpret the Bible. But the problem is that he does not accept certain aspects of older Christian metaphysics. Since he does not take Aristotelian or Platonic philosophers at their word, he must reject certain conclusions that these thinkers find to be necessarily true about God. The problem with this is that Olson, as far as I know, is not a scientist, but he is a humanities professor. He can examine the Aristotelian claims to see if they’re logical (they are). But he cannot really examine the evolutionary claims in the same way. If I knew Olson, I would challenge him to read more on the topic, because I’m finding that Aristotle’s theory of causality makes sense of all cause and effect in ways that more recent theories do not. Because of that, Aristotle’s metaphysical reasonings seems to apply to the biblical God precisely because the Bible claims things about God that Aristotle’s metaphysics reasons toward: God is pan-causal, unchanging, a-temporal, etc.

The deal is that Olson is, perhaps innocently, appealing to simple biblicism when it suits what he is convinced of (Open theism/biblical personalism) and he is allowing a complicated hermeneutic to determine how he reads Scripture when that suits him.

The sum of the matter is that one need not be convinced of evolutionary theory or classical theism to be a disciple of Jesus. One certainly need not even know about either. The question is, in the realm of ideas where evangelism, apologetics, and good academic work must be done where does the logic lead? Of course Christians who read the Bible simply might come up with false conclusions. That’s true with anything. Paul said that as an apostle he only sees dimly. The argument that a simple view of things is best does not match with experience. A simple view of the Bible is adequate because Jesus doesn’t demand that we be right about everything, he demands that we love God, neighbor, and enemy in his name.  

Note: according to Bruce Charlton, evolutionary theory is largely metaphysical as well.

Also, Edward Feser deals with Olson here.