Matthew 25

OK, maybe this isn’t the funniest cartoon I’ve ever done, but it does illustrate a point: Upon seeing his friend the priest, the unbeliever Hux Lee immediately thinks of God and tries to make fun of him, whereas the priest is mostly concerned for the people in his parish.

Throughout history, many believers have recognized that God is to be met primarily by helping others. It’s the whole Matthew 25 thing – the parable about the sheep and the goats. You might want to read it sometime, if you haven’t already done so.

Amos: A Cry Against Social Injustice

A few years ago, a German magazine asked me to write a series of articles on the Minor Prophets in the Old Testament and to draw a picture for each article. Here’s the one about Amos, who lived in the eight century BC and preached passionately against social injustice. I think the picture needs no further explanation:

How TV Provides Nutritional “Education”

Here are some amazing (and very sad) facts:

I just learned that by the time the average American graduates from high school, he or she has watched 360,000 ads on television. Yes, three-hundred-sixty-thousand.

The majority of these are food ads, and now here it comes: 95 % of the advertised foods are actually unhealthy. Speak of nutritional education, or rather indoctrination. A bad ad or two might not influence a person right away, but thousands and thousands of junk-food ads? Who can withstand that kind of brainwashing, especially as a child?

Clearly, laissez-faire capitalism doesn’t have the answers here.

Introduction to Psychology

This is the first lecture of a really good course on psychology:

Everyone has to begin SOMEWHERE

The Reformation: Blessing or Curse?

Exactly 492 years ago, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg – or so Philipp Melanchthon tells us three decades later. This event is commonly seen as the spark that ignited the Reformation.

I’ve often asked myself whether the Reformation was mostly a curse or a blessing. Reformation was necessary at that time, yes, but the way it came about and all the horrors that followed …

I think it’s good to remember all of this and not celebrate Reformation Day as if it had been the only light after centuries of darkness. Such a picture, which is not unheard of in some Protestant circles, is certainly a very sad distortion of the past and does not bode well for the future.

Painting the Book of Genesis

Several years ago, I started painting pictures of various Bible books. One day, when I’m an old man with a long white beard, I might publish all 66 pictures with written explanations. But I’m still a long way off from completing the entire Bible, so I’ll post a picture every now and then on this blog – without written explanations for now.

Here’s the Book of Genesis:

A Brief History of Interpreting the Bible, Or: The Failure of the Historical Critical Method

Several Christians I know are still overly optimistic about the historical critical method of studying the Bible, without being willing to take the method to its logical conclusion. For those people, Prof. Dale Martin gives something to think about. Here’s a slightly edited transcript taken from one of his lectures:

Before the Reformation, basically the Bible was supposed to mean what the Catholic Church said it meant, what the Pope and bishops said it meant. The authority structure of the church was taken to be the way that you controlled wild interpretations.

People in the ancient world knew that you can interpret a text any way you want to. So what keeps heretics from interpreting this text in false ways? The institution of the church. So Ignatius said that you can’t just interpret scripture any you want to; you must be in agreement with your bishop. The rule of the bishop and the rule of the church was the way to keep control over the interpretation of the text.

Of course in the pre-Reformation time, you did have the rise of humanism and the Renaissance, which started questioning that a bit, and they started going back and looking at the original Hebrew, the original Greek, insisting that you should read these texts in their original languages and not just in Latin. That was before the Reformation. You already had this move toward history and reading the text in historical context in the humanist movement and the Renaissance.

With the Reformation, though, of course you really get it in the sixteenth century with Martin Luther, John Calvin, Melanchthon, different writers saying, “Well, we’re going to throw out this Catholic authority on the text. We’re going to get back to the text itself.” The only authority for the radical reformers was scripture. You know this as sola scriptura, scripture only; scripture only will be the guide for authority for Protestants.

Then they start realizing that different people can interpret scripture differently. They’re very familiar with medieval Christian ways of interpreting scripture to have several different meanings and layers of meanings. And so they say, “The predominant guide of scripture isn’t going to be just scripture; it’s going to be one particular meaning of scripture.” And that’s sensus literalis. The literal sense of scripture is what will be now the guide for the Reformation, not the Pope, not the bishops. Even the bishop must submit to the literal sense of scripture.

Now it’s rather debatable what they meant by “the literal sense” because some of these reformers said that the literal sense of scripture could even be a prophetic sense, so they still said that the literal sense of scripture could be in a Psalm when the Psalm says, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand.’” They knew that the  text would be referring to the Davidic King, but they also said that Psalm also could refer to Jesus, even in its literal sense. The literal sense that they were talking about in the Reformation was not necessarily what we would call the historical critical sense. It was what they took it to be the most fundamental plain sense meaning of the text.

So that was the literal sense. Then again they realized the more they did this that Protestant churches started splitting all over the place. Presbyterians and Calvinists split off from the Lutherans, the Anabaptists split off from the Reformation. And then you have a rise of so many Protestant movements that the idea that scripture alone could settle debates and give you a foundation started becoming questionable.

Beginning somewhat in the eighteenth century but mainly in the nineteenth century, and mainly in German speaking lands, scholars started pushing the historical reading of the text. They said, “We’ve got to get down to what the author meant. What did the historical Paul mean? How did we discover that?” That’s when you have the rise of the dominance of the historical critical method. It was elaborated and invented in the nineteenth century, and in some places it was precisely invented in order to try to make the text of the New Testament and the Bible a firm foundation for doctrine and ethics within Protestantism and within the wide of varieties of different kinds of Protestantism.

Then the last part of this — just in the last, say, thirty years — is that people like me come along and say, “You know, it hasn’t worked. This attempt to use historical criticism, to settle disputes about the meaning of the text, doesn’t work.” Because even the historical critical method can render wildly varying interpretations of these texts.

So you’ve got some people reading Romans 1 as a condemnation of modern homosexuality and thinking they’re doing a good historical reading of this text. You’ve got other people who read the same text, using the same methods of historical criticism, and say, “Are you crazy? He’s not talking about homosexuality, that’s not his concern. It’s talking about idolatry or something else.”

Even scholars using the same method of historical criticism, trained in the same schools, getting degrees from the same places, come up with different interpretations of these texts. And that’s why you have right now a lot of questioning of this method as not supplying the firm foundations that Protestants originally thought it might.

What We Eat, Why We Eat and the Key Role of Food in Modern Life

In the time of the health-care debate, the giant elephant in the room is clearly our actual health and the often self-inflicted lack thereof. Health care is important, but much more essential is food, our lifestyles, and how they affect society as a whole.

Yale offers a really good course on this topic, and it’s for free on the web. Here’s the first session: What We Eat, Why We Eat and the Key Role of Food in Modern Life.

Want to make the world a better place? Start with the plate right in front of you.

Life is a Hill

The other day, my six-year-old daughter Sophie summed up life like this:

“Tore [her newborn cousin] is like at the very bottom of the hill, we [i.e. Sophie and her siblings] are on the side of the hill, you [i.e. my wife and I] are at the very top of the hill, but soon you’ll start going DOWN!”

(The picture, by the way, is of me as a six-year old climbing the Harz Mountains in Germany.)