A contemporary discussion on inerrancy and authority...

What role should the Bible have in society? A panel discussion with Tim Keller, Alister McGrath, and Brian McLaren. It's well worth a watch.

How do you say "balls of gold" in French? - Fiction - Salon.com

How do you say "balls of gold" in French? - Fiction - Salon.com

This is a nice article on the difficulties and subtleties of translating fiction while attempting to remain faithful to the author's intended meaning.

My favorite line: “You start with a text just like a musician starts with a composition, a work of music. And then your job is to play it for the listener so that they hear what the composer or the author intended. It takes a lot of practice to be able to do that.”

Catholic Hermeneutics

Vatican cardinal warns priests not to let humanity overshadow God :: Catholic News Agency (CNA)

This article, summarizing an address given by Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, offers a nice summary of a contemporary Catholic understanding of the place of sacred tradition and sacred scripture. "Scripture without tradition would be an historical book, and history tells us what others think, while theology seeks to tell us about God." I particularly loved this line from the Cardinal: "Nothing creates culture like the proclamation of the Word. In other words, it creates a new way of envisioning life, relationships, society, and even politics. The more evangelical this new way is, the more we discover how deeply and surprisingly it corresponds to the human heart."

Tribal Metanarrative

I include this video not for political reasons. I am no fan of Harry Belafonte - his music or his politics. I think that his viewpoint is caustic, dismissive, and laughable if it wasn't so racist.  I am also no fan of Henry Cain. I do typically vote conservative in most elections, but I simply don't know enough about Cain to have an informed opinion on him. I also don't believe that Belafonte represents the thoughts of most or even many African-Americans. His views are on the extreme fringe. The reason why I linked to this video is because of what it demonstrates. It demonstrates the dangers of the type of tribalistic thinking that often accompanies liberationist theologies. Tribalistic thinking allows us to handily separate people into "good blacks" and "bad blacks," "good women" and "bad women," "good evangelicals" and "bad evangelicals," etc. based on how faithful an individual is to the accepted narrative of their tribe. If you occupy a certain tribe (or rather, as is most often the case, if I have placed you into a certain tribe independant of your personal feelings), then you must think, act, and talk in a certain way in order to be "good." In this case, it turns blackness into nothing more than an ideology or dogma.

http://youtu.be/5fxjQ5h6Ri4

Scripture as missional and identity-shaping

The best way to describe Scripture is that it is identity-shaping. The Bible tells us who we are, where we are, and where we are going. In fact, its identity-shaping, Spirit-mentored direction propels its readers into a missional life. Eugene Peterson warns of the danger of making the Bible after our own Trinitarian image: my Holy Wants, Holy Needs, and Holy Feelings. Instead, if we read the Bible aright, we are remade--since the Bible as been sent as a word from God to us--into God's image, the perfect Eikon, Jesus Christ...

...This is what it is meant by Scripture being missional: Scripture is designed by God to work its story into persons of God so that they may become doers of the good.  Scripture is missional because it is designed to create restored Eikons who are in union with God and communion with others for the good of others and the world. Scripture, I somethings have to tell myself, is not designed just to be exegeted and probed and pulled apart until it yields its (gnostic-like) secrets to those who know its languages and its interpretative traditions and who can then divulge their gleanings behind pulpits on Sunday mornings or in monographs and academic journals (very few care to read).  Scripture is missional because it is designed to create missional people who learn from their missional praxis how to see Scripture as amissional text that shapes them so that they can live in the story that the church tells in Scripture.

Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 146-147.

Bibliolatry

Telford Work, a gifted scholar, makes just this point:

While the Bible is basic to Christianity, it is also marginal--in that God alone occupies the center of the faith, and that both belief in God and the believing community predate and will succeed Scripture's present form and roles.

At the center of the Christian faith is the Trinity, and the gospel and atonement are about restoring cracked Eikons to this Trinitarian God. Beginning our understanding of Scripture with the Trinity is to claim the personal nature of everything Christian.  Whenever the Bible replaces the Trinity, we have bibliolatry. The first Christians believed that God's story entered a new chapter with Jesus, and they were living in that story before they sat down to write it.  So we need to get this straight: our faith finds expression in Scripture but that faith is in the Trinitarian God and not in the Bible.  Our faith is in the Bible in the sense that in it we hear the Trinitarian God whom we have come to know.  I do not think that we can know the Trinitarian God apart from what we learn of him through the church's Bible, but even conceding this allows us to keep God front and center in terms of what Scripture is.

Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 143

The Double-Love Hermeneutic

Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand it at all.  Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived, nor is he lying in any way...However...if he is deceived in an interpretation which builds up charity...he is deceived in the same way as a man who leaves a road by mistake but passes through a field to the same place toward which the road itself leads.

Augustine in On Christian Doctrine from Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement, 142