Geoff's Miscellany

Throughout Scripture it seems that humanity is meant to do two things:

1. Be like God (Genesis 1:26-27)
2. Worship God (Genesis 4:1-4)

For instance, in Genesis 9:5, drinking and eating blood is prohibited. In ancient though, this was often supposed to give you life, which was why the gods were offered blood in sacrifices. Indeed, even the Israelite concept of sacrifice required blood. So, drinking blood was, in a real way, an attempt to be god-like. Similarly, the sin in Eden was made appealing because of fruit’s ability to make people like God (Gen 3:5).

Everything happens for a reason.

The phrase above is trivially true. Every thing that happens certainly has a cause. But it is often seen as a piece of centrally true theological reasoning. You lock your keys in your car, "God did it for a reason." You get gas from over-eating, "It happened for a reason." You make a bunch of bad decisions that hurt others and famously, "I learned something from it, therefore it must have happened for a reason."

1. Teaching people to be disciples of Jesus might actually take some wisdom literature/self-help classes on time management, goal seeking, and how to say no to feelings.
2. In the Old Testament, covenant seems to be the more important institution when compared with kinship.
3. Thinking about point 1, young Christians certainly need to understand the gospel before they understand Aristotle (as Luther said in Heidelberg), but, man o man, they really should read some Aristotle (ie, contemporary books on habit formation) if they wish to appropriate the character of Christ because modern evangelical teaching (not all, but much of it that I'm exposed to) does not help.
4. I've been making a list of engineering/mathematical problems to spend time on and I found two game theorists that look at the Biblical text using game theory to understand the narratives of the Old Testament. It's actually not that bad. The one I've actually spent time reading it Steven Brams.
5. Make a morning routine every evening before you go to bed if you wish to not regret the rest of your day. Seriously.
6. Thank God that Cal 3 and Physics are covering the exact same type of vectors right now.
7. I don't understand why kids will play for football coaches at the risk of their lives and not do 5 minutes of homework for people that want to help them get into college.
8. I recently made fun of a class mate for misspelling something in a lab report. Then I misspelled the first word in an email I sent to the lab group. Humble pie.
9. Read Udo Schnelle and Adolf Schlatter to understand your New Testament better. Seriously, what are you waiting for?
10. Oh, read your New Testament first, of course.
11. I've gotten to teach about Jesus' resurrection at church lately, looking at the marvels of the texts that focus on our Lord's rising from the dead has been riveting for me.

Joshua Foer, in his book on memory, Moonwalking with Einstein, observed this about adding versification to the Bible:

For the first time, a reader could refer to the Bible without having previously memorized it. One could find a passage without knowing it by heart or reading the text all the way through. (144)

This observation is quite important because when we notice obvious quotations of the Old Testament in the New Testament, it is likely that this rhetorical device was meant to bring a range of emotions, concepts, and themes to mind that were exemplified by the context of the passage quoted. It is certainly possible to over-read things when we make this realization. The opposite danger is more readily possible though. If we assume that ancient readers thought of the Bible in terms of discrete versified units, then we are contradicting a fact about human memory that has been documented by modern science and thousands of years of observations by practitioners of memorization. So, when you notice a quote of the Old Testament in your New Testament, go read the context or the whole book. You'll get a better picture of what the New Testament author is saying. 

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.

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 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:

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.

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

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.”