ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ

It’d be such an incredibly translation if it would be willing to use “brothers and sisters” every once in a while!

So many things I like otherwise…

Translate ἀδελφοι as “brothers and sisters” when the context would necessitate it. Why? Because when you translate lexis rather than reference you remove the text from it’s historical setting. Last time I checked, Christians believe they had a historical faith, a faith grounded in history.

So why doesn’t that history matter for the HCSB?

Ark Art Boulet popped up in my google reader this morning with a video and comments on Discoll’s use of Targum Neofiti, which is pricariously uses to show that the Trinity is in Genesis 1:1.

Now granted its definitely a better argument than saying that Jesus, the Alef & Tav are in Genesis 1:1 in the Hebrew Object marker, BUT. Its still a poor argument.

[WARNING: THEOLOGY POST]

Truly, is there any better summary and symbol of the gospel message like the Eucharist?  –I’m mean Lord’s Supper, uhm, Communion, uh, the Table of Remembrance?

I mean really.

[Okay, back to Greek]

The Gender Blog has written a post on some “rules of engagement” that they think every Christian should follow:

1. If I find something with which I cannot agree, I am wrong.
2. If I find something which I cannot understand, I am wrong to judge it on that account. Here Lyons gives an unforgettable quote from the great D.M. Lloyd-Jones: “You have a very small brain and you have a very poor spirit within you; do not be surprised that you cannot understand.”
3. If I find something which would contradict the clear teaching of Scripture elsewhere, I cannot be right.
4. If I find something which would slander the revealed character of God, I am certainly wrong.
5. If I find something which brings up an apparent contradiction, I am wrong not to face it squarely.
6. If I find something which leads to a summary principle, I am wrong if I do not follow it to its conclusion.
7. If I find something which disturbs my settled convictions, I am wrong to dismiss it on that account.
8. If I find something which calls for decisive action and I remain inert, I am fatally wrong.
9. If I find something which I dare not follow in its practical drift, I am destructively wrong.
10. If I find something which others blush to admit or struggle to avoid, I am unwise to follow them at that point. A great quote from Calvin: “The delicacy of those who affect an appearance of greater prudence than the Holy Spirit in removing or resolving difficulties, is quite intolerable.”
11. If I find something upon which popular religion frowns, I may presume I am on the right track. C.H. Spurgeon famously said, “Be assured there is nothing new in theology except that which is false.”
12. If I find something which would tend to humble man and glorify God, I am most probably right.

Unfortunately, they’ve forgotten rule 13, which everyone already does follow (unfortunately without awareness typically):

13. If I find a text in scripture that doesn’t fit with another text of scripture then I go with the one I like and explain away the other.

We like to pretend that we don’t do this. But we do it all the time – both Complementarians, Egalitarians, and every other theological debate. The irony is that when both sides follow #13 – and they typically do, they accidentally break #5.*

There’s a tension that we don’t like between Galatians 3:28 and passages like 1 Cor 14:34-35 that both side pretend (often unknowingly) doesn’t exist.

* To be honest, I also find these twelve rules overly simplistic and almost naive as if we can understand and interpret scripture so obnoxiously mechanically (e.g. on #6, what one person calls a “summary principle,” another person may very well call bad exegesis).

There’s been a good amount of discussion about the trinity at several different blogs:

Paul and Monotheism

1 Cor 3.23: Our Subordination to Christ; Christ’s to God (Monotheism in 1 Corinthians, 1)

The Subordination of Christ to God in 1 Cor 3? – A Response to Ecce Homo

Trinitarian and Historical Theological Ignorance

Great Minds…

In light of all of this, I thought I would share a few things I’ve read/written. The first is actually a post I wrote some time ago, which then turned into a post for the 2009 Trinity Blogging Summit: Exegetical Implications of NP Focus – its title for the Blogging summit was rather different.

The second is actually a Note from Facebook with some musings of Dan Wallaces’ very excellent book. I’ve reproduced the majority of the note below. I’m not sure you could consider this a review of the book, its just some random notes. But this is one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Book Musings: Granville Sharp’s Canon and Its Kin: Semantics and Significance (Studies in Biblical Greek) by Daniel B. Wallace.

Wallace’s new book on Granville Sharp and the significance of the Greek article in various KAI constructions is easily one of the best Greek monographs I’ve read this year (currently tied with Steve Runge’s Discourse Grammar. I read then entire book over a period of two days because I couldn’t put it down — though I must confess, the entire time I was traveling by car and plane.

I need to post a few more quotes. These are excellent and worth reading – still from the first article:

http://lsr.nellco.org/georgetown/fwps/papers/68/

My problem with consequentialism and utilitarianism has nothing to do with how they handle the hard cases and issues. Nor is my preference for deontological ethics based upon the hard cases either. My reasoning (pre-reading this article) has been identical to that of Luban, but he says it much, much better than I do:

“[A] familiar drawback to consequentialism: it always makes morality hostage to evil. ‘Would you torture to stop the ticking bomb from detonating?’ is no different in form from ‘Would you set up a torture bureaucracy in order to make sure you could torture effectively in a TBS?’; nor is it different in form from ‘Would you commit genocide to stop a larger genocide?’ or ‘Would you rape one child to prevent ten children from being raped?’  Consequentialism has easy answers to all these questions – Bernard Williams thought that fact is itself a fatal objection to consequentialism – and its answer is  that enormous evils can nevertheless be lesser evils, and lesser evils can be morally obligatory even though they are enormously evil.  The worse the world is, the worse the behavior that morality countenances to combat it, with no limit to how low we can sink.”

For many of us, however, a system that imposes no intrinsic limits on how low we can sink lacks the essential character of morality – call it the moral attractiveness of acting morally. What would be the point of morality if moral action no longer has any connection with elemental decency?

…

My argument here is not about personal integrity, that is, the special first-personal character of one’s own values, but about whether a system in which any atrocity, no matter how vile, can be permitted (or, worse, required) can count as a morality.  Consequentialists will not downplay the evils of torture, as I have described them above.  They cannot, because their system demands that they assign accurate weights to consequences.  But, without knowing what the alternatives are, consequentialists will likewise not believe that any moral conclusions whatever follow from identifying the evils of torture.  While their position is not a logical contradiction, it severs the ground of morality – the goodness and evil of states of affairs – from the ground of action.

There may simply be an unbridgeable gulf between the theoretical sensibilities of non-consequentialists, who regard compulsory choice among monstrous evils as morally pointless, the equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, and those of consequentialists, who patiently point out that the rearranged chairs actually would make the doomed passengers a tad more comfortable in their final minutes, and isn’t that a good thing?

Another indicator of the unbridgeable gulf is this.  To the non-consequentialist, recognizing the surpassing horror of torture provides an iron-clad reason not to engage in it.  To the consequentialist, recognizing the surpassing horror of torture provides an iron-clad reason to do anything to prevent it – including committing it in lesser degree.  Thus, in a variant of the TBS in which torturing one captive is the only way to learn the location where ten hostages are being held and tortured – not completely fanciful in today’s Iraq – the same revulsion toward torture that underwrites an absolute prohibition on torture also urges us to engage in it” (29-31; my emphasis).

I would continue quoting, but I’ve probably done too much already.

Rather, I would strongly encourage everyone to at least read pages 34-36 (marked as 35-37 on the PDF reader itself).

But just two more quotes – short summaries of the other two possible interpretations of Shue’s dictum:

(3) Ordinary practices of moral rationality fail in cases where all courses of action are monstrous.  The artificial cases ethicists cook up to control for monstrosity by isolating the right- and wrong-making characteristics of action are misleading.That is precisely because they cover over the monstrousness with a veneer of rationality.

…

(4) Artificial cases make bad ethics because their very artificiality makes the unthinkable thinkable (31-32, 36).

In my previous post, John Hobbins helpfully pointed to an old post where the subject was discussed. David Luban of the Georgetown University Law Center, in the article I linked to previously, discussed what he terms the “classic paper on torture” by Henry Shue from 1978. Shue essentially held Hobbin’s view that there is a circumstance where torture is acceptable, an exception in that worse of circumstances, i.e. the ticking bomb scenario where torturing the enemy will gain information and save many, many more lives. He has since changed his mind. In what follows, I’m going to discuss and summarize Luban’s essay because, well, let’s face it, very few of you are actually going to sit down and read all of its excellent 36 pages.

There is a problem with arguing on the basis of scenarios where torture is okay as long as it saves lives — one that Shue himself states in his original paper: “there is a saying in jurisprudence that hard cases make bad law, and there might well be one in philosophy that artificial cases make bad ethics” (Shue, “Torture,” 141; my emphasis). But what exactly does Shue’s adage mean?

Luban writes that it could either of the following:

(1) By focusing on improbable artificial cases, theorists misdirect readers’ attention from genuine issues in the real world to specious issues.  They illicitly change the subject from important and authentic questions about the limits of legitimate interrogation in non-TBS cases to intuition-mongering about a tendentious hypothetical.

Or it might mean (emphasizing the “hard cases make bad law” trope):

(2) Policies have to do with rules, procedures, protocols, and laws.  Lawmakers
should build policies and rules around typical cases and ignore the rare hard
cases; and moralists should ignore the weird ones.  Thus, even if there were rare
cases of morally justifiable torture, procedures and laws should not accommodate
them by making exceptions for them (Luban, 23).

Luban has already approached the issue from the perspective of #1 (HERE – which is also worth reading and its shorter). But in his paper quoted above, he argued in both directions. Perspective #1, according to Luban, says nothing about the validity of torture in the sort of scenario that Hobbins would allow. And regarding Shue, he writes,

In the 1978 paper, Shue argues that very little follows from [perspective #1], because all he has conceded is “the permissibility of torture in a case just like this” – that is, a case in which all the conditions in the TBS [ticking bomb scenario] are satisfied.

I am not so sure.  The problem is that once one has conceded the permissibility of torture in a TBS case, one has apparently admitted that the prohibition on torture is not moral bedrock.

. . .

What if one knows only that the captive is a high-ranking terrorist who might know something useful, but maybe nothing that prevents any particular ticking bomb – but, on the other hand, the mistreatment is “only” sleep deprivation?  This, after all, is very likely the reality of U.S. torture. After making the initial concession, any prohibition on torture faces significant dialectical pressure toward balancing tests and the unwelcome consequentialist conclusion that interrogational torture can be justified whenever the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs (25).

And according to Luban, this is exactly the sort of situation (and its where the US seems to be right now) where perspective #2 becomes very important and he illustrates it using the Israeli Supreme Court:

Some who agree that the ban on torture must stand may still object to the idea of punishing someone who has, in the rare case of a TBS, done the right thing by violating the ban.  That is why most proponents of (2) advocate leaving the anti-torture rule in place but permitting accused torturers to plead necessity in the rare authentic TBS, or, alternatively, to receive a sentencing discount or even a pardon if they are convicted of the crime of torture.  The first of these was the strategy adopted by the Israeli Supreme Court in its momentous 1999 decision banning torture.  The Court allowed that under Israeli law an accused torturer could plead necessity; but when the Israeli security services argued that in that case the court should create an ex ante permission to torture in ticking bomb cases, the Court refused.  An ex ante permission is a “general administrative power” – a rule, not an exception – whereas the necessity defense concerns “an individual reacting to a given set of facts; it is an ad hoc endeavour, inreaction to a event. It is the result of an improvisation given the unpredictable character of the events” and is not to be turned into a rule.43 [Note 43: Israel Supreme Court, Judgment Concerning the Legality of the General Security Service’s Interrogation Methods, 38 I.L.M. 1471 (1999), para. 36.  Oren Gross has offered a similar argument.] The Court perceived the trap it would fall into if it turned the possibility of an ex post defense into an ex ante permission: the ex ante permission would be a rule, not an exception.  With or without the necessity defense, interpretation (2) allows us to acknowledge the justifiability of torture in the TBS while maintaining rigid prohibitions against torture and CID (26-27).

I think that this perspective is one that John Hobbins would agree with this based on what I’ve read in his single post from last May (though I may be wrong…I don’t know)

But at the same time, both Luban and Shue argue that it is possible to go beyond both perspectives #1 & #2:

In his 2005 paper, Shue goes beyond (1) and (2) and renounces his earlier concession that torture would be justifiable even in a genuine TBS case. His reason is that he now believes that the true TBS is not merely improbable, it is actually impossible. That is because, among the key conditions defining the TBS, are the requirement that it is an exceptional emergency measure and not an institutionalized practice, and the related point that the torturer is a conscientious, reluctant interrogator who uses torture only in the rare cases where all the TBS conditions are met. But a torturer must be competent; he must have training and the opportunity to practice; his training requires teachers, and his equipment must have been acquired in advance. There will be a doctor present, to insure that the subject of interrogation does not die. The torturer is not Jack Bauer but an apparatchik in a torture bureaucracy. A TBS without a torture bureaucracy is impossible.

To try to leave a constrained loophole for the competent “conscientious offender” is in fact to leave an expanding loophole for a bureaucracy of routinized torture, as I misguidedly did in the 1978 article.44 [Note 44: Shue, “Torture in Dreamland,” p. 238.  I offer similar arguments in “Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb,” pp. 47-51.]

The “moderate” position on torture represented by (2) is, in Shue’s words, torture in dreamland. “So I now take the most moderate position on torture, the position nearest to
the middle of the road, feasible in the real world: never again.  Never, ever, exactly as
international law indisputably requires”(page 28, my emphasis).

There is much, much more, but this is getting extremely long and my point was to condense the length, not extend it. Much of it deals with deontological ethics in relation to consequentialism. And in my view, I find it very, very difficult to justify a Christian holding to anything other than deontological ethics.

Bibliography:

David Luban, “Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb,” in Karen J. Greenberg, ed., The Torture Debate in America (Cambridge UP, 2006), pp. 55-68.

Luban, “Torture, American-Style,” Washington Post, Nov. 27, 2005, p. B1, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/25/AR2005112501552.html.

Luban, “Unthinking the Ticking Bomb” (July 1, 2008). Georgetown Law. Georgetown Law Faculty Working Papers. Paper 68. http://lsr.nellco.org/georgetown/fwps/papers/683939

Henry Shue, “Torture,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 7 (1978): 124-43.

Shue, “Torture in Dreamland: Disposing of the Ticking Bomb,” Case Western Reserve
Journal of International Law 37 (2006): 231-39.

For a discussion I’ve been having elsewhere on the internet, I translated Chrysostom’s discussion of John 3:14-16. Its powerful stuff and I thought I’d share it with you. The syntax here is pretty cool. Chrysostom is a great writer and what he’s done here is beautiful. I’ve treated quotations of scripture differently than other editions. I’ve treated them as intertextual. I think that Chrysostom has worked hard to maintain the flow of thought when he quote scripture and it seems evident here. And feel free to find and correct errors in my translation. This is a learning effort, as always.

God an author! – The inspiration of this Book is as much a grand humiliation and condescension of God as was the act of creation by the Father and the incarnation of the Son. Owing to this fact, humility of heart is the single dispositional condition inherent to rightly reading the Bible and is the sole indispensable trait of mind required in preparing to do so.

-Johann Georg Hamann, trans. Dr. Michael McDuffee

Reading John Hobbin’s recent post and the post at Compligalitarian, I must say that I don’t care for “plain sense” arguments. Appeals to the plain sense of scripture tend to either ignore or deny that what was the plain sense of a text for the original audience is not necessarily applicable to us today.

Appeals to the plain sense of scripture tend to forget that when it comes to Paul’s letters, we are literally reading other people’s mail. And thus any commands in Paul’s letters do not directly map to the modern day. If we are going to describe our faith as being a faith grounded in history, we must take that history seriously when interpreting historical and contextual texts such as Paul’s letters.

We treat Paul’s letters like a handbook for our lives today rather than historically conditioned, occassional texts, written for a specific purpose or need. We find it easy to ignore commands to Euodia and Syntyche in Philippians 4:2 because their names are explicitly mentioned. But we fail to recognize that all of Paul’s letters are just as specific and occassional as that single command in Philippians 4:2.

So if we’re going to appeal to the plain sense of scripture in our interpretation, we must first recognize that the plain sense is not necessarily directly applicable to the 21st century and in fact there’s often no reason to assume that the plain sense was applicable to anyone beyond the immediate situation Paul is addressing. Going back to Euodia and Syntyche, the plain sense of Paul’s command is applicable only directly to those two people. Of course there are theological implications, but those are separate from the command itself. The vast majority of commands in 1 Corinthians or 1 Timothy are only directly applicable to the the Corinthians or Timothy’s immediate situation. And for that reason, we’re safer building application from Paul’s statements about theology than on his commands to the original audience.

And it is for that reason that if I were to become a complimentarian again, I would have to be convinced by statements other than the commands of 1 Timothy 2:12.