withallyourmind.net

Mary Jo, of Confident Christainity, has reviewed Eckart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to your Life’s Purpose, here. This book has been touted by Oprah Winfrey in her promotion of her new age religious philosophy.

Mary Jo does a nice job explaining the basic premises of the book and pinpointing the major problems:

Though there are numerous problems with Tolle’s philosophy, there are three glaring issues that I will touch on in this review: 1) Tolle’s view of thought processes: Through excessive reliance on thinking, reality becomes fragmented (page 196) and Being must be felt. It can’t be thought (page 40), 2) The problem of special knowledge, and 3) The refuting of “either/or” logic using “either/or” logic.

She fleshes out these problems in more detail in her post. While acknowledging that Tolle is not wrong in everything he states in the book, she asserts that much more is wrong than is right. She further states:

This is only a brief review of some of the problems with Tolle’s book. There are many more issues to deal with such as the relativism problem, the revisionist history included, and the cherry-picking of arguments to make a better case. There are also numerous theological issues; such as Tolle’s concept of the Christian view of God, his exegesis of passages of Scripture, his doctrine of the nature of man, and his doctrine of Jesus.

Pagan Christianity, a new book by Frank Viola and George Barna claims that much of what we experience as church-goers these days has little to do with Christianity and lot to do with pagan practices. Here’s the quick Amazon editorial review:

Have you ever wondered why we Christians do what we do for church every Sunday morning? Why do we “dress up” for church? Why does the pastor preach a sermon each week? Why do we have pews, steeples, choirs, and seminaries? This volume reveals the startling truth: most of what Christians do in present-day churches is not rooted in the New Testament, but in pagan culture and rituals developed long after the death of the apostles. Coauthors Frank Viola and George Barna support their thesis with compelling historical evidence in the first-ever book to document the full story of modern Christian church practices.

Certainly, the modern American church is not without flaws. I’m certain we could improve on the way we do a lot of things. I might say that I have not yet read the book (although I’ve ordered it) so I cannot myself review or comment on anything which the book teaches. I will direct you to a review by New Testament expert, Ben Witherington. He has a five part review of the book, plus, an additional, related post yesterday on whether Christians should meet on Sunday and who should do the teaching. His insights and knowledge are helpful when considering the topic of this book.

A couple of excerpts from the first of his lengthy multi-part review:

Of course the big bad guy in Pagan Christianity is not going to be sin, suffering, the Devil, or any of those things. The big bad guy is going to be what is loosely called the Institutional Church and that other famous whipping boy—‘church tradition’ and oh yes— Greek philosophy. The particular animus is against the Roman Catholic Church for paganizing Christianity. Dan Brown would have liked this book.

One of the worst things that can happen to persons who are anti-institutionalists, and anti-sacramentalists, is that so angry are they about the excesses and bad theology that has sometimes come out of the ‘institutional church’ that they throw the baby right out with the sacramental baptismal waters. I understand this, but it is a colossal over-reaction. Desacralizing worship, the Lord’s Supper, and even persons is not something devout Christians should be about. The last thing the church needs is a more casual, less reverential approach to all these things which removes altogether the recognition that one is entering into the presence of the Holy One when one comes to worship, the One in whose presence we too become sanctified, something that happens through encountering God through prayers, praise, songs, sacraments, and of course the preaching as well.

I have just finished reading Virgil’s The Aeneid, a classical epic that was thouroughly enjoyable. I was pleased to come across this article, Joe Knows Latin, in which Joe Paterno, football coach of Penn State University (my alma mater), discusses the impact of The Aeneid on his football and on his life. He relates that one of the most significant moments of his time spent at Brooklyn Prep School in the 1940’s was at the beginning of this third year when he stepped into a Latin class taught by Father Bermingham. That year he and Father Bermingham together read The Aeneid in Latin.

The Aeneid is an epic poem composed by the Roman poet Virgil in the first century B.C. The work follows the adventures of Aeneas, a Trojan who was mentioned in Homer’s The Iliad. (By the way, it is in The Aeneid that we are told the story of the Trojan Horse.) Aeneas, among the few Trojans who escape from Troy, suffers numerous hardships before finally founding Rome.

Paterno states:

Virgil and his hero Aeneas, the founder of Rome, more than just entered my life; the adventures of Aeneas seeped into far corners of my mind, into my feelings about what is true and honorable and important. They helped shape everything I have since become. I don’t think anybody can get a handle on what makes me tick as a person, and certainly can’t get at the roots of how I coach football, without understanding what I learned from the deep relationship I formed with Virgil during those afternoons and later in my life.

After he continues to discuss the turmoil, struggle, and suffering of Aeneas as he continues on his journey, he makes this comparison between Aeneas and the heroes of Homer’s works:

To Homer—and, in fact, to most of the modern world—heroes are created through personal exploits and glorification, often through an ambitious drive for self-glorification. Heroes are superstars. The grandstands cheer them, and they throw their high fives up and slam the football down after a touchdown. Homer’s hero Achilles, in his pursuit of glory, ends up destroying his men and his cause and rotting at the end into a kind of monster.

Aeneas, as Virgil created him, was a totally new kind of epic hero. Like Homer’s heroes, he endures battles, storms, shipwrecks, and the rages of the gods. But the worst storm is the one that rages within himself. He yearns to be free of his tormenting duty, but he knows that his duty is to others, to his men. Through years of hardship and peril, Aeneas reluctantly but relentlessly heeds his fata until he founds Rome.

Aeneas is not a grandstanding superstar. He is, above all, a Trojan and a Roman. His first commitment is not to himself, for he is bugged constantly by the reminder, the fatum, “You must be a man for others.” He lives his life not for “me” and “I,” but for “us” and “we.” Aeneas is the ultimate team man. A hero of Aeneas’ kind does not wear his name on the back of his uniform. He doesn’t wear “Nittany Lions” on his helmet to claim star credit for touchdowns and tackles that were enabled by everybody doing his job. For Virgil’s kind of hero, the score belongs to the team.

I thank JoePa for his thoughts on The Aeneid and helping me to read this epic with more clarity and understanding.

The Shack is a work of theological fiction which has gone through multiple printings and has gone as high as #8 on the USA Today bestseller list. It is quite popular, receiving reviews such as this from Eugene Peterson, Professor Emeritus of Spiritual Theology, Regent College, Vancouver, B.C.:

When the imagination of a writer and the passion of a theologian cross-fertilize the result is a novel on the order of “The Shack.” This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” did for his. It’s that good!

Many churches have encouraged the reading of this book (including the one I attend) with the understanding that it may transform one’s spiritual life. Some Amazon reviewers have said:

The character of God in the book is from a point of view I never would have imagined, or thought of. But all the answers and conversations are right on. It really changes the way I view God, and the way I can related with him. My relationship is so much deeper now.

I truly believe that “The Shack” has the potential to shake up and alter the entire Church. This book will seriously mess with your theology — and you will be GLAD. Yeah, it’s really that good.

Wish I could take bakc all the years in seminary!… Systematic theology was never this good. Shack will be read again and agin. With relish.

I would highly recommend anyone reading The Shack (or planning to) to read this excellent review by Tim Challies. (Included in the review is a brief synopsis of the book itself.) There are some serious problems with the book from a theological perspective, which Challies does a good job explaining. Although many have obviously been positively impacted by the book, a little truth mixed with a little error (or perhaps a lot of error) can be a dangerous thing. Challies does not claim that the book is devoid of value, but that it leaves the reader with a potentially perilous misunderstanding of important scriptural truths. Here are some comments from near the end of his review (read the whole thing, if you can):

Focusing on just three of the subjects William Yound discusses in The Shack, we’ve seen that errors abound. He presents a false view of God and one that may well be described as heretical. He downplays the importance and uniqueness of the Bible, subjugating it or making it equal to other forms of subjective revelation. He misrepresents redemption and salvation, opening the door to the possibility of salvation outside of the completed work of Jesus Christ on the cross. We are left with an unbiblical understanding of the persons and nature of the God and of His work in the world.

He relies too little on Scripture and too much on his own theological imaginings.

That the Shack is a dangerous book should be obvious from this review. The book’s subversive undertones seek to dismantle many aspects of the faith and these are subsequently replaced with doctrine that is just plain wrong. Error abounds.

HT: Between Two Worlds

This concludes my 9-part review of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus.

Finally, Ehrman expresses his sentiment that one should not be too harsh on the scribes for their tendency to change the text. After all, we all do it! He informs us that he has now given up on his…

… rather unsophisticated view of reading: that the point of reading a text is simply to let the text ‘speak for itself,’ to uncover the meaning inherent in it words. The reality, I came to see, is that meaning is not inherent and texts do not speak for themselves.

In his conclusion, Ehrman espouses a postmodern worldview. Ehrman argues one creates his own meaning in the text as he reads it. Meaning is what the reader says it is, not what the author originally intended. Kruger comments:

Of course, if this is true, then one wonders why Ehrman wrote this book in the first place… Ehrman’s own book shows that he assumes some agreed-upon reality with his reader where words mean things and texts can be understood – including his own.

I conclude with Ben Witherington’s final assessment of Misquoting Jesus:

This author has a strong ax to grind, and the fact that he grinds it well in fluid prose makes it all the more beguiling. As my granny used to say – Don’t be so open minded that your brains fall out!

This is part 8 of a critical review of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus.

Finally, even if all Ehrman’s illustrations are accepted as theologically motivated changes to the text, what does this accomplish? Kruger maintains that we have enough manuscripts in our hands to determine when these changes occurred and to spot them as additions. So, they in fact, accomplish little, if anything. Wallace concludes the following:

In sum, Ehrman’s latest book does not disappoint on the provocative scale. But it comes up short on genuine substance about his primary contention. Scholars bear a sacred duty not to alarm lay readers on issues that they have little understanding of. Unfortunately, the average layperson will leave this book with far greater doubts about the wording and teachings of the NT than any textual critic would ever entertain. A good teacher doesn’t hold back on telling his students what’s what, but he also knows how to package the material so they don’t let emotion get in the way of reason. A good teacher does not create Chicken Littles.

Before concluding this review I would like to address a couple of more issues. First, it seems Ehrman has reasoned erroneously to the conclusion that the Bible is merely the product of human effort, lacking divine inspiration. Here is how Ehrman explained he arrived at his conclusion:

If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the very words of scripture? …The fact that we don’t have the words surely must show, I reasoned, that [God] did not preserve them for us. And if he didn’t perform that miracle, there seemed to be no reason to think that he performed the earlier miracle of inspiring those words.

In response, it is a non sequitur to claim that God could not have inspired the text if it was not copied without error. His “inescapable conclusion” that God had not inspired the New Testament would also require that all translations into every language be errorless. Not only that, but since language changes over time, there would have to be continually updated errorless editions. Ehrman’s requirement would require that God miraculously intervene anytime a person writes or copies scripture for all of human history to make sure they do so without error. Does inspiration actually entail this? This seems obviously ludicrous.

This is the seventh post in a critical review of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus.

Ehrman’s next major contention, and perhaps the most interesting, is that the scribes not only made mistakes, but…

… that sometimes the texts of the New Testament were modified for theological reasons.”

New Testament scholars have long noted that there are good reasons to suspect that this is true. The issue is not whether or not this happened, but it is whether or not Ehrman’s conclusions concerning this practice are justified. Kruger once again raises three points on this issue. First of all, Ehrman does not at all address the numerical significance of these supposed alterations. Intentional alterations make up an extremely small amount of any variations in the text. The author conveniently fails to discuss numbers when it does not support his thesis.

Additionally, and very importantly, Ehrman makes too much of the theological significance of the passages he deals with. One of the passages Ehrman discusses is Mark 1:41 and the question of whether Jesus was compassionate or angry in this case. As New Testament scholar, Dan Wallace, points out in his review, it hardly matters if Mark 1:41 claims Jesus was angry since Mark 3:5 clearly states that he was angry. Another deals with Matthew 24:36, in which “nor the son” is found in some texts but not in others. Again, Wallace illustrates that Mark 13:32, a parallel account, clearly contains “nor the son”, so there is no issue here. Another deals with I John 5:7-8, in which is found an explicit statement about the Trinity. For centuries, scholars have known this passage was a later addition to the text and almost no modern translation includes this passage. The doctrine of the Trinity is not argued from I John 5:7-8. It stands or falls based on the whole teaching of Scripture.

Ehrman’s belaboring the fact that John 7:53-8:11 and the last 12 verses of Mark are almost certainly not part of the original text is also overblown, as this has been acknowledged by New Testament scholars for a long time. While Ehrman’s illustrations may serve to frighten the average layperson, nothing that alters central Christian doctrines is produced in Misquoting Jesus.

This is Part 6 of a critical review of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus.

Second, Kruger points out that Ehrman’s numbers also fail to take into account the incredibly large numbers of manuscripts we possess. Possessing more manuscripts will lead to a linear increase in the number of errors one finds. Ehrman appeals to John Mill’s 1707 work in which he examined 100 manuscripts and found 30,000 variants (300/manuscript on average). He then asserts how many more variants of which we are now aware. Daryl Wingerd, in his review, does an excellent job in showing that the larger number of total variants we now have actually prove the opposite of what Ehrman asserts. Wingerd states that we now have around 16,000 manuscripts. Using the high end of Ehrman’s estimates of textual variants, 400,000, would give us an average of only 25 variants/manuscript.

The increase in manuscript evidence has greatly reduced the problem. Far more difficulties have been resolved by the discovery of more manuscripts than have been created by it.

Another important point, noted by Wingerd, is that the comparison of the total number of variants to the number of words in the New Testament is completely arbitrary and irrelevant. This seems to be another attempt by Ehrman to mislead the reader. A more appropriate comparison would be to compare the number of variants with the number of words in all the manuscripts (around 1 billion, according to Wingerd).

The third response of Kruger to the claim that the manuscripts we have are so full of errors that they cannot be trusted is that Ehrman does not consider that most of the variants are easily spotted and corrected. Robert Bowman provides an excellent table (which I cannot reproduce for reasons of space) illustrating how this process works in Scripture: Authority, Canon, and Criticism. Kruger makes the compelling point that…

… On the one hand, he needs to argue that text-critical methodologies are reliable and can show you what was original and what was not… but on the other hand, he wants the ‘original’ text of the New Testament to remain inaccessible and obscure, forcing him to argue that text-critical methodologies cannot really produce any certain conclusions.

So, Ehrman wishes to argue that we can, in fact, know which passages were changed, yet he also wants to argue that we cannot have confidence as to what is in the original text. It seems he would like to have his cake and eat it too.

Finally, Kruger points out that Ehrman’s appeal to Mill’s study in which 30,000 variants were found is misleading because Mill did not just compare manuscripts with manuscripts, but also with citations from Church Fathers and copies of the New Testament in other languages (which brings about many other possible variations in translation).

Next, I turn to Ehrman’s third main contention.

This is the Part 5 of a critical review of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus.

Before moving on the next argument Ehrman provides, I must share one of my favorite responses to one of Ehrman’s illustrations of the difficulty scribes encountered in accurately reading a text (which he claims makes mistakes more likely) by apologist, J. P. Holding. Ehrman addresses the Greek writing style called scripto continua in which no punctuation, spaces, or upper/lower case letters were found. For example, the phrase lastnightatdinnerisawabundanceonthetable is ambiguous and could refer to a normal or supernormal event. Holding, in his review, rightly points out the simple answer to such ambiguity readily available to any scribe – the context. He illustrates that…

… if the sentence is by itself there’s no reason to check any further either way. But if it is followed by unclehenrytriedtostabitwithhisforkbutthenitdidthewatusi, or by therewerelotsofmeatsandcheesesandbreads, then your reading problem is solved.

Ehrman’s next attempted task is to show how the manuscripts which exist today are utterly unreliable and filled with scribal errors. He emphatically declares:

Some say there are 200,000 variants known, some say 300,000, some say 400,000 or more! We do not know for sure because… no one has yet been able to count them all.

He further declares:

There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

Kruger’s response to Ehrman is four-fold. First, these numbers, obviously intended to shock the reader, are misleading. Ehrman himself admits in the last chapter that …

… of all the hundreds of thousands of textual changes found among our manuscripts, most of them are completely insignificant, immaterial, of no real importance for anything other than showing that scribes could not spell or keep focused any better than the rest of us.

Examples of these insignificant mistakes which are easily recognized include misspellings, omitted words, and changes in word order.

Next, a continued response to this argument of Ehrman.

This is part 4 of a critical review of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus.

First of all, let me be clear, mistakes were made in transcription. No knowledgeable Christian of whom I am aware claims that the scribes made errorless copies. Michael Kruger, a New Testament professor at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte. in his review, makes two responses to Ehrman’s assertions. First, if the overall copying of texts was as bad as Ehrman makes it out to be, we have no grounds to believe anything of ancient history. This would be especially the case, seeing how we have so few copies of secular works when compared with copies of Scripture. Furthermore, Ehrman bolsters his claims with quotes from ancient manuscripts, which he has already asserted are so full of errors that it is difficult to trust them. It seems Ehrman is quite selective about what texts he believes present accurately the words of the author.

Second, Kruger states that Ehrman must be able to show that Christian copying was worse than the efforts of others. Ehrman fails in this task, instead presenting us with a false dichotomy by claiming either copying was done by formal scriptoriums which were most accurate in their work or with haphazard, non-professional copying filled with errors. We have reason to believe that early Christian copying was reliable. Respected papyrologist, T. C. Skeats, claims that scribal features such as the nomina sacra (a method of abbreviating criticized by Ehrman) show…

… a degree of organization, of conscious planning, and uniformity of practice among the Christian communities which we have hitherto had little reason to suspect, and which throws a new light on the early history of the church.

Craig Blomberg, professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary, in his review, claims…

… the actual textual evidence of the second and third centuries, though notably sparser than for later centuries, does not demonstrate the sufficiently greater fluidity in the textual tradition that would be necessary to actually support the hypothesis that we cannot reconstruct the most likely originals with an exceedingly high probability of accuracy…

Gundry also makes the point:

Nor does he take account of the possibility, even probability that multiple copies of the originals were made and that in the 2nd century the originals themselves were still available for checking.