Atomizing the text vs longitudinal analysis

[The Liturgist]

Even though the truth is there and some with excellent academics might find it, the right motive, desire, taking the time and the help of the indwelling Holy Spirit can do a better job.

This kind of Pietistic anti-intellectual view has produced a string of radically inconsistent and incoherent theologies, and new denominations to to with them, for example, the Rapture concept of John Nelson Darby, the Millerite Adventists and the subsequent effort by Ellen White to compensate for the Great Disappointment, as well as extremely heterodox interpretations such as that of Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Science community, which actually cost lives.

My favorite theologians are the heresiologists such as St. Irenaeus or Lyons, St. Isidore of Seville, St. Epiphanius of Salamis, and St. Vincent of Lerins, the great Liturgists such as St. Ambrose of Milan, St. Romanos the Melodist, St. Andrew of Crete, St. Gregory Diologos, St. Theodore the Studite and Mar Dionysius bar Salibi, Levantine theologians such as Theodore of Mopsuestia, St. John Chrysostom, and St. John of Damascus, Alexandrians like Origen, St. Athanasius, St. Anthony the Great, and the related community of Desert Fathers like Abba Sisoes, the Cappodacians such as St. Gregory the Theologian, his best friend St. Basil the Great and Basil’s younger brother Gregory of Nysea, the Syrians, such as St. Ephrem, Jacob of Sarugh, Severus of Antioch, Isaac the Syrian, and Gregorios bar Hebraeus, and the Hesychasts such as St. Symeon the New Theologian, and St. Gregory of Palamas, and the 19th and 20th century Russians like St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, St. Seraphim of Sarov and St. John of Kronstadt.

What do all these have in common? They synthesized fervent prayer, asceticism and true theology - knowledge of God, through the uncreated grace of the Holy Spirit, with the intellectual gifts given by God, using the latter to explain the former.

 

[bling]

This kind of Pietistic anti-intellectual view has produced a string of radically inconsistent and incoherent theologies, and new denominations to to with them, for example, the Rapture concept of John Nelson Darby, the Millerite Adventists and the subsequent effort by Ellen White to compensate for the Great Disappointment, as well as extremely heterodox interpretations such as that of Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Science community, which actually cost lives.

My favorite theologians are the heresiologists such as St. Irenaeus or Lyons, St. Isidore of Seville, St. Epiphanius of Salamis, and St. Vincent of Lerins, the great Liturgists such as St. Ambrose of Milan, St. Romanos the Melodist, St. Andrew of Crete, St. Gregory Diologos, St. Theodore the Studite and Mar Dionysius bar Salibi, Levantine theologians such as Theodore of Mopsuestia, St. John Chrysostom, and St. John of Damascus, Alexandrians like Origen, St. Athanasius, St. Anthony the Great, and the related community of Desert Fathers like Abba Sisoes, the Cappodacians such as St. Gregory the Theologian, his best friend St. Basil the Great and Basil’s younger brother Gregory of Nysea, the Syrians, such as St. Ephrem, Jacob of Sarugh, Severus of Antioch, Isaac the Syrian, and Gregorios bar Hebraeus, and the Hesychasts such as St. Symeon the New Theologian, and St. Gregory of Palamas, and the 19th and 20th century Russians like St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, St. Seraphim of Sarov and St. John of Kronstadt.

What do all these have in common? They synthesized fervent prayer, asceticism and true theology - knowledge of God, through the uncreated grace of the Holy Spirit, with the intellectual gifts given by God, using the latter to explain the former.

What did I say about listening and accepting what other's say about a verse in scripture?

 

[Fervent]

Even though the truth is there and some with excellent academics might find it, the right motive, desire, taking the time and the help of the indwelling Holy Spirit can do a better job.

I don't really think it's an either/or proposition. Engaging the Bible in a solidly academic way can be done with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit just the same as ignorant readings. Solid academics simply gives us a common ground to discuss the topic rather than invoking some special communion with the Lord. So certainly we should not neglect the centrality of reading with the Holy Spirit, but doing so in no way excludes scholarly inquiry.

 

[pescador]

Actually, it doesn’t literally mean that. In the Greco-Roman culture of the First Century, it was the custom to recline on couches facing sideways at dinner parties, and those couches in the lowest tier of the triclinium were reserved for the most distinguished guests. Your preferred translation destroys not only semantic information but important cultural context which is particularly useful for understanding much of the dialogue our Lord engages in in the Gospel of Luke.

This cultural context, which you apparently regard as irrelevant, also radically alters our view of what the Lord’s Supper would have looked like, and thus puts paid people like the Plymouth Brethren who want their Holy Communion liturgy to look like a simplified version of the traditional iconography, and vindicates the Early Church in adopting the liturgical norms of the Eucharist for reasons of practicality.

Absurd... The KJV says "When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room; lest a more honourable man than thou be bidden of him" and "But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room" The KJV translation destroys not only semantic information but important cultural context.

The NET, which I quoted after the KJV, says "When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor ... So the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this man your place.’ ... Then, ashamed, you will begin to move to the least important place. But when you are invited, go and take the least important place, so that when your host approaches he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up here to a better place.’

Clearly, the NET is a better rendition of the situation than the KJV. So ... what's your point (other than agreeing that the KJV is translated poorly, which I agree with)?

 

[Fervent]

Absurd... The KJV says "When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room; lest a more honourable man than thou be bidden of him" and "But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room" The KJV translation destroys not only semantic information but important cultural context.

The NET, which I quoted after the KJV, says "When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor ... So the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this man your place.’ ... Then, ashamed, you will begin to move to the least important place. But when you are invited, go and take the least important place, so that when your host approaches he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up here to a better place.’

Clearly, the NET is a better rendition of the situation than the KJV. So ... what's your point (other than agreeing that the KJV is translated poorly, which I agree with)?

I like to think that every Bible has a different tune, they play the same song but with a different tempo or melody, different harmonies, different instrumental sections. Some people grew up with the KJV and so the only tune that sounds right to them is the KJV. It's a good translation that's gotten a little long in the tooth, but it is still extremely valuable and plays the tune beautifully.

More modern translations don't have that orchestral quality, though, so people who like the chamber music just can't understand it. People who didn't grow up with it, though, don't get it. There's too much t follow and its archaic and cumbersome. So more readable translations work better. Something like an NLT or an ESV. Even an NIV.

And then there's people who like pop music and need somehting like a Message or another paraphrase Bible...though those should never be read alone and should always be supplemented with a proper translation.

 

[pescador]

I like to think that every Bible has a different tune, they play the same song but with a different tempo or melody, different harmonies, different instrumental sections. Some people grew up with the KJV and so the only tune that sounds right to them is the KJV. It's a good translation that's gotten a little long in the tooth, but it is still extremely valuable and plays the tune beautifully.

More modern translations don't have that orchestral quality, though, so people who like the chamber music just can't understand it. People who didn't grow up with it, though, don't get it. There's too much t follow and its archaic and cumbersome. So more readable translations work better. Something like an NLT or an ESV. Even an NIV.

And then there's people who like pop music and need somehting like a Message or another paraphrase Bible...though those should never be read alone and should always be supplemented with a proper translation.

You wrote that the KJV is "a good translation that's gotten a little long in the tooth, but it is still extremely valuable and plays the tune beautifully" and "More modern translations don't have that orchestral quality", which is closer to character of the source languages. They weren't "symphonies" but, to continue the analogy, "folk music".

I agree with the rest of your post.

 

[Fervent]

You wrote that the KJV is "a good translation that's gotten a little long in the tooth, but it is still extremely valuable and plays the tune beautifully" and "More modern translations don't have that orchestral quality", which is closer to character of the source languages. They weren't "symphonies" but, to continue the analogy, "folk music".

I agree with the rest of your post.

It depends on the particular letter. 2 Peter is absolutely atrocious in its literary quality, but 1 Peter is poetic. Ephesians is absolutely glorious in its literary quality, almost to the point of being Attic Greek. The prophetic books and psalms also have a high literary content, while a lot of the rest of the books are vernacular. Though when the KJV was translated it was largely vernacular, it only sounds majestic in to the modern ear. The quality of the Bible's literature is as varied as the people that it appeals to.

 

[bling]

I don't really think it's an either/or proposition. Engaging the Bible in a solidly academic way can be done with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit just the same as ignorant readings. Solid academics simply gives us a common ground to discuss the topic rather than invoking some special communion with the Lord. So certainly we should not neglect the centrality of reading with the Holy Spirit, but doing so in no way excludes scholarly inquiry.

If you aproach the scripture for academic "knowledge" the Spirit is not going to be helping you, since you need to be using that time to learn what can change your life and help others. Motive is extremely important and if you are doing it for the wrong motive the Spirit will not be helping you.

 

[Fervent]

If you aproach the scripture for academic "knowledge" the Spirit is not going to be helping you, since you need to be using that time to learn what can change your life and help others. Motive is extremely important and if you are doing it for the wrong motive the Spirit will not be helping you.

Where do you find that in Scripture?

 

[Soyeong]

So this post is somewhat meta-theological so I'm not sure where to place it, but I've been thinking about how we handle Scripture. Often there is an emphasis on an atomistic view of Scripture where we break the text into the smallest possible unit and analyze it that way. We break it down into propositions or grammatical units and attempt to build meaning from the bottom up.

Yet this doesn't really seem to agree with how we reach meaning normally, as there tends to be interplay between the higher level text with us understanding things as paragraphs and units of thought as well as on the unit level.

In my training I have seen almost nothing on building longitudinal themes that span larger blocks. I can understand why for practical reasons this would be, as it doesn't exactly lend itself to a methodological approach. Yet surely these longitudinal themes are as important as the fine details in getting an accurate picture of what the intended meaning of the Bible is.

So how do we ensure our methods and practices engage at all these levels? How do we build defenses against an atomistic view of Scripture that misses the forest for the trees, or an overly broad view of Scripture that does not interact with the details well? What sort of hermeneutical principles can we employ?

A chiasm is where the Bible expresses a sequence of thoughts and then repeats the same sequence in the reverse order. This was done to emphasize the center of the chiasm kind of like bold or italics, while the parts that mirror each other provide commentary on each other by expressing the same thought in two different ways. Chiasms can range in size from a sentence to multiple chapters to the entire length of a book. For example the story of Noah's flood is a chiasm from Genesis 6:9 to Genesis 9:29, which can been most easily be seen by following the numbers of 7, 7, 40, 150, God remembers Noah, 150, 40, 7, 7. Genesis is one giant chiasm that is composed of 81 smaller chiasms, and if you divide those chiasms into halves, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, tenths, and eighteenths, then each one of those fractions forms its own chiasm. For example, the disaster of Noah's flood of too much water mirrors the disaster of Joseph's famine of too little water, which also mirrors the famine of when Abraham went down to Egypt on a different section. This sort of pattern is found in all of the books of Moses, the Gospels, and a number of other books, such as with Luke being composed 145 chiasm, which also forms chiasm at twelfths and twenty-fourths. Here is a website with an index to help track where you are within multiple chiasms:

Patterns Of Life Bible

Furthermore, there is other parallelism, such as with the creation story being repeated a number of times, such as with the account of Noah's flood being a reaction story. In Genesis 1:1-2, there was chaotic darkness upon the face the deep and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters, and chaos, darkness, and water sounds a lot like a flood. In Genesis 8:1, God remembers Noah and sent the Spirit over the earth and the waters subsided. On day 2, God created the sky to divide between the waters above and the waters below, and in Genesis 8:2, the foundations of the deep and the widows of heaven were closes, and so forth it keeps paralleling the days of creation.

Then there are a number of themes that keep appear like goats and coats that redeems Jacob's story, where he put a coat of his brother and prepared a goat, then Joseph had a coat that was brought back with the blood of goat, then what Judah gave to Tamar as pledge for a for a goat.

 

[The Liturgist]

A chiasm is where the Bible expresses a sequence of thoughts and then repeats the same sequence in the reverse order. This was done to emphasize the center of the chiasm kind of like bold or italics, while the parts that mirror each other provide commentary on each other by expressing the same thought in two different ways. Chiasms can range in size from a sentence to multiple chapters to the entire length of a book. For example the story of Noah's flood is a chiasm from Genesis 6:9 to Genesis 9:29, which can been most easily be seen by following the numbers of 7, 7, 40, 150, God remembers Noah, 150, 40, 7, 7. Genesis is one giant chiasm that is composed of 81 smaller chiasms, and if you divide those chiasms into halves, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, tenths, and eighteenths, then each one of those fractions forms its own chiasm. For example, the disaster of Noah's flood of too much water mirrors the disaster of Joseph's famine of too little water, which also mirrors the famine of when Abraham went down to Egypt on a different section. This sort of pattern is found in all of the books of Moses, the Gospels, and a number of other books, such as with Luke being composed 145 chiasm, which also forms chiasm at twelfths and twenty-fourths. Here is a website with an index to help track where you are within multiple chiasms:

Patterns Of Life Bible

Furthermore, there is other parallelism, such as with the creation story being repeated a number of times, such as with the account of Noah's flood being a reaction story. In Genesis 1:1-2, there was chaotic darkness upon the face the deep and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters, and chaos, darkness, and water sounds a lot like a flood. In Genesis 8:1, God remembers Noah and sent the Spirit over the earth and the waters subsided. On day 2, God created the sky to divide between the waters above and the waters below, and in Genesis 8:2, the foundations of the deep and the widows of heaven were closes, and so forth it keeps paralleling the days of creation.

Then there are a number of themes that keep appear like goats and coats that redeems Jacob's story, where he put a coat of his brother and prepared a goat, then Joseph had a coat that was brought back with the blood of goat, then what Judah gave to Tamar as pledge for a for a goat.

Part of what you are seeing specifically in Genesis with the seeming repetition of the creation story is the result of the inspired integration of multiple older historical sources, in the case of Genesis, the three oldest and most important sources (the J, or Jahwist, E, or Elohimist, and P, or Priestly sources), although I believe there is some content from the Deuteronomist source and a definite influence from R, the editor/recensor. I would expect some apparent chiasms in Genesis are the result of happy accidents of this integration, although others certainly are evident as the Chiasm seems to be a popular literary device in the ancient Semitic languages in general, and in particular, within Scripture.

One thing we lose in translation are some of the acrostics, and this is a compelling reason to teach more people Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.

 

[bling]

Where do you find that in Scripture?

I am taking two concepts:
1. Deity cannot be involved in sinning, so the indwelling Holy Spirit is not going to be involved in your sins (you have to quench the Spirit first before going out and sinning).
2. Selfishness and doing stuff for the praises of man are sins, so you have to have an unselfish motive for the Spirit to help you.

 

[Fervent]

I am taking two concepts:
1. Deity cannot be involved in sinning, so the indwelling Holy Spirit is not going to be involved in your sins (you have to quench the Spirit first before going out and sinning).
2. Selfishness and doing stuff for the praises of man are sins, so you have to have an unselfish motive for the Spirit to help you.

Reading for academic knowledge doesn't imply doing so for the praises of men, first of all. And second, if our motives had to be absolutely pure to engender the Spirit's help none of us could be saved to begin with. The gospel is that God saves us before we are clean and then makes us whole, not that we have to be right in order for God to assist us. I see no reason too exclude the Spirit's assistance for reading for academic knowledge.

 

[bling]

Reading for academic knowledge doesn't imply doing so for the praises of men, first of all. And second, if our motives had to be absolutely pure to engender the Spirit's help none of us could be saved to begin with. The gospel is that God saves us before we are clean and then makes us whole, not that we have to be right in order for God to assist us. I see no reason too exclude the Spirit's assistance for reading for academic knowledge.

Why are you wasting your precious limited time here on earth reading for just academic reasons? There are so many people needing help including ourselves.
You bring up an entirely different topic with: “…if our motives had to be absolutely pure to engender the Spirit's help none of us could be saved to begin with.”

The indwelling Holy Spirit is not given to the nonbelieving sinner until after he/she are willing to humbly accept pure undeserved charity.

The unbelieving sinner cannot do anything righteous, holy, honorable, worthy or noble, but for sinful reasons (out of a selfish desire), the sinner can be willing to accept pure undeserved charity from his/her hated enemy (God). This is very similar to the prodigal son who wimped out, gave up and surrendered, not out of “love” for his father, but to just have a completely undeserved job (have some kind of undeserved live) from his father. There was nothing honorable, noble, worthy, righteous, or holy the prodigal son did. After just the willingness to accept pure undeserved charity was the young son and all of us showered with unbelievable wonderful gifts which for us includes eternal life, Godly type Love and the indwelling Holy Spirit.

 

[pescador]

Part of what you are seeing specifically in Genesis with the seeming repetition of the creation story is the result of the inspired integration of multiple older historical sources, in the case of Genesis, the three oldest and most important sources (the J, or Jahwist, E, or Elohimist, and P, or Priestly sources), although I believe there is some content from the Deuteronomist source and a definite influence from R, the editor/recensor. I would expect some apparent chiasms in Genesis are the result of happy accidents of this integration, although others certainly are evident as the Chiasm seems to be a popular literary device in the ancient Semitic languages in general, and in particular, within Scripture.

One thing we lose in translation are some of the acrostics, and this is a compelling reason to teach more people Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.

Good translations keep the acrostic quality of the source languages.

It takes a lot more than a basic knowledge of the Biblical source languages to correctly understand and/or translate them into modern English (or any language). I am firmly convinced that serious translation involves a lot more than knowing some Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, especially the knowledge of the cultures in which they were composed.

 

[Fervent]

Why are you wasting your precious limited time here on earth reading for just academic reasons? There are so many people needing help including ourselves.
You bring up an entirely different topic with: “…if our motives had to be absolutely pure to engender the Spirit's help none of us could be saved to begin with.”

The indwelling Holy Spirit is not given to the nonbelieving sinner until after he/she are willing to humbly accept pure undeserved charity.

The unbelieving sinner cannot do anything righteous, holy, honorable, worthy or noble, but for sinful reasons (out of a selfish desire), the sinner can be willing to accept pure undeserved charity from his/her hated enemy (God). This is very similar to the prodigal son who wimped out, gave up and surrendered, not out of “love” for his father, but to just have a completely undeserved job (have some kind of undeserved live) from his father. There was nothing honorable, noble, worthy, righteous, or holy the prodigal son did. After just the willingness to accept pure undeserved charity was the young son and all of us showered with unbelievable wonderful gifts which for us includes eternal life, Godly type Love and the indwelling Holy Spirit.

God is a God of knowledge. Seeking knowledge for knowledges sake is an act of worship, and time spent worshiping is never wasted.

As for your soteriology, well, I'll just leave that alone.

 

[Soyeong]

Part of what you are seeing specifically in Genesis with the seeming repetition of the creation story is the result of the inspired integration of multiple older historical sources, in the case of Genesis, the three oldest and most important sources (the J, or Jahwist, E, or Elohimist, and P, or Priestly sources), although I believe there is some content from the Deuteronomist source and a definite influence from R, the editor/recensor. I would expect some apparent chiasms in Genesis are the result of happy accidents of this integration, although others certainly are evident as the Chiasm seems to be a popular literary device in the ancient Semitic languages in general, and in particular, within Scripture.

One thing we lose in translation are some of the acrostics, and this is a compelling reason to teach more people Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.

Finding this complex chiastic pattern gave new meaning to Deuteronomy 4:2, which forbids adding or subtracting from what God commanded, because the pattern can reveal anything that has been added or subtracted. For example, some consider the authenticity of Mark 16:9-20 to be in question because it is not found in the earliest manuscripts, but the fact that Mark 1:1-16:8 forms a complex chiastic pattern that Mark 16:9-20 does not conform to I think conclusively proves that it was added by a later author. This complex pattern shows an extremely high degree of intentionality in regard to which stories they chose to write about, which details they chose to mention, and the order that they chose to mention them in, which in a way serves as a signature seal by a single author, so there is no way that any part of it is a happy accident. The way that Luke is ordered also has a high degree of intertextuality with the yearly parsha cycle.

 

[The Liturgist]

Good translations keep the acrostic quality of the source languages.

It takes a lot more than a basic knowledge of the Biblical source languages to correctly understand and/or translate them into modern English (or any language). I am firmly convinced that serious translation involves a lot more than knowing some Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, especially the knowledge of the cultures in which they were composed.

Also knowing what an acrostic is (and why they will break on translation, irreparably so if no words with comparable semantics exist in the output language) helps.

Finding this complex chiastic pattern gave new meaning to Deuteronomy 4:2, which forbids adding or subtracting from what God commanded, because the pattern can reveal anything that has been added or subtracted. For example, some consider the authenticity of Mark 16:9-20 to be in question because it is not found in the earliest manuscripts, but the fact that Mark 1:1-16:8 forms a complex chiastic pattern that Mark 16:9-20 does not conform to I think conclusively proves that it was added by a later author. This complex pattern shows an extremely high degree of intentionality in regard to which stories they chose to write about, which details they chose to mention, and the order that they chose to mention them in, which in a way serves as a signature seal by a single author, so there is no way that any part of it is a happy accident. The way that Luke is ordered also has a high degree of intertextuality with the yearly parsha cycle.

Except we know that to be more likely than not, grossly inaccurate, because Genesis consists of multiple strata added by multiple authors.

 

[Soyeong]

Except we know that to be more likely than not, grossly inaccurate, because Genesis consists of multiple strata added by multiple authors.

There are plausible reasons for the distinctions between using YHVH or Elohim that don't require positing additional authors, and it is extremely implausible that this complex chiastic pattern was created by multiple authors. Mark 16:9-20 is what it would look like if another author was appending their own material and that would stick out like a sore thumb.

 

[bling]

God is a God of knowledge. Seeking knowledge for knowledges sake is an act of worship, and time spent worshiping is never wasted.

As for your soteriology, well, I'll just leave that alone.

I do not agree with you on this. Knowledge itself would not be worship, if gathered for the wrong motive (reason). The Pharisees during Jesius time on earth were extremely knowledgable and were studying extensively, so were they "worshippers of God"?