Koinonia

Wednesday Giveaway - "Grasping God's Word" 3rd Edition

2012-05-16T09:34:33-04:00

Scott Duvall and Daniel Hays’ classic work on hermeneutics, Grasping God’s Word, is now being released in a revised third edition, and this week you have a chance to win a copy!

The core of the work, which has been embraced by students and teachers around the world, remains the same, but the new edition provides needed updates on the second edition which was published in 2005.

Changes in the third edition include updated cultural references, discussions of recent theological developments, the inclusion of a call to “cross into the rest of Scripture” as an additional step in the Interpretive Journey that emphasizes the Bible’s redemptive arc, and a rearrangement of the text for clarity.

One such rearrangement was the decision to move discussion of Bible translations up to the front of the book, as a way to set the stage for studying how we then go about interpreting the text.

“We have a chapter on Bible translations because translation itself is unavoidable. God has revealed himself and has asked his people to make that communication known to others. Unless everyone wants to learn Hebrew and Greek (the Bible’s original languages), we will need a translation. Translation is nothing more than transferring the message of one language into another language. We should not think of translation as a bad thing, since through translations we are able to hear what God has said. In other words, translations are necessary for people who speak a language other than Greek or Hebrew to understand what God is saying through his Word.”

To enter this week’s giveaway, comment below with your answer to this question: What hermeneutical/interpretive question would you hope to find answers for in a book like Grasping God’s Word?

Also, a bonus entry is available if you comment a second time letting us know that you shared a link to this giveaway on Facebook, Twitter, or your blog.

_________________

*If you are reading this via Facebook, email, or RSS, please visit the blog to enter. One winner will be determined by Random Integer Generator. Giveaway ends Thursday at midnight*

Longman and Dillard on the book of Samuel in the Septuagint and Masoretic Text

2012-05-15T06:48:42-04:00

How different is the book of Samuel in the Septuagint compared to the Masoretic Text? Turns out, they are quite different indeed – and Louis at Baker Church Connection has been studying these differences with the help of Longman and Dillard’s An Introduction to the Old Testament.

There is a great discussion of this in An Introduction to the Old Testament by Tremper Longman III and Raymond Dillard from Zondervan. The following is taken from them along with the charts provided.

“Scholars have long suspected that the Masoretic Text of Samuel, though comparatively intact, is nevertheless among the least well transmitted books of the Bible. At many places there are significant divergences from the Hebrew text that was used by the translators of the Septuagint, and when the writer of Chronicles quotes Samuel, he also often appears to follow a text of Samuel different from the Masoretic Text (MT). For generations scholars debated the merits of these variant readings. Was the Chronicler theologically editing the earlier text or following some independent source? Were the Septuagint translators incorporating their own theology, embellishing, or being careless—or were they carefully following a Hebrew text that differed from the MT?”

“With the discovery of the Qumran manuscripts and fragments, this debate was largely settled.”

You can read the rest of the post here.

Spiritual “Gifts” or “Things” - 1 Cor 12:1 (Monday with Mounce 144)

2012-05-14T07:15:27-04:00

Usually adjectives used substantivally (i.e., as nouns) are pretty easy to figure out. Between the meaning of the adjective and the context of the passage, the translator can figure out how to treat the word. But every once in a while things can confuse the picture, and one of those things are headings in modern Bibles.

The most notorious heading is the one before Eph 5:22 and I have already blogged on that, but another bothersome heading is the one at 1 Cor 12:1. The NIV has “Concerning Spiritual Gifts” and then starts with, “Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be uninformed.” “Spiritual gifts” is a translation of the adjective πνευματικῶν, a masculine or neuter plural adjective from πνευματικός, meaning “spiritual.” But spiritual what?

By the time you get to verse 4, you can see Paul is speaking about Spiritual gifts, but nothing in vv 1-3 is necessarily about gifts. But because Bibles put a heading before v 1, the assumption by many is that the entire chapter is about the gifts of the Spirit. “After all,” many would respond, “the Bible says, ‘Concerning Spiritual Gifts.’”

The ESV alerts us to an issue here. Their footnote on “gifts” reads, “Or spiritual persons,” reading πνευματικῶν as a masculine and not a neuter. The fact is that πνευματικῶν is an adjective used substantivally, and it is a matter of interpretation as to whether Paul is speaking of gifts of the Spirit 9 (cf. 1 Cor 14:1) or spiritual people (cf. 1 Cor 2:15; 3:1; 14:37).

Gordon Fee has long championed a third view, that Paul is talking about the “things of the Spirit,” almost a blending of the two views. He writes, “When the emphasis is on the manifestation, the ‘gift’ as such, Paul speaks of charismata; when the emphasis is on the Spirit, he speaks of pneumatika, and then concludes by translating, “the things of the Spirit” (note the capital “S”).

Wherever you settle on this question, be sure to ignore headings as much as possible. In fact, the best exegesis experience I ever had in the gospel of Mark was using a text without headings, paragraphs, or verses. Just 40 pages of a block of text with page and line numbers. A wonderful teaching tool I used for years and highly recommend.

William D. [Bill] Mounce posts about the Greek language, exegesis, and related topics at Koinonia. He is the author of numerous books, including the bestselling Basics of Biblical Greek, and is the general editor for Mounce's Complete Expository Dictionary of the Old and New Testament Words. He served as the New Testament chair of the English Standard Version Bible translation, and is currently on the Committee for Bible Translation for the NIV. Learn more about Bill at BillMounce.com, and visit his other blog on spiritual growth, Life is a Journey, at BiblicalTraining.org.

Extra-Curricular Activities 05/12/12

2012-05-12T10:14:13-04:00

Michael Bird - Book Notice: Journeys of Faith

Scot McKnight - Bonhoeffer on Telling the Truth

James K.A. Smith - An Engagement with "Two Kingdoms" Thought

Brian LePort - Craig A. Evans Talks Archaeology

Jen Wilkin - Why Bible Study Doesn't Transform Us

Mike Wittmer - student bloopers, more bloopers, and wait, there’s more!

Kevin DeYoung - What Sermon Prep Really Looks Like

Molly Worthen - John Stott, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien: Why American Evangelicals Love the British

Chelsey Doring - The Top 5 Things Introverts Dread About Church

and, How to Survive a Robot Apocalypse [HT: Marc Cortez]

The Ruthless Monk reviews "Think Christianly"

2012-05-11T08:00:00-04:00

Recently Leslie Keeney shared a very thoughtful review of Jonathan Morrow's Think Christianly at her blog, The Ruthless Monk.

Below is an excerpt, and you can read the rest of Leslie's review here.

"Jonathan Morrow thinks that “out there is already in here.” He writes in Think Christianly that “the thoughts, attitudes, perceptions, convictions, values, and lifestyles of those inside the church are rapidly growing indistinguishable from…those outside the church.” The author cites both research and on-the-ground observation to demonstrate that pretty much every age group within the church is not only immersed in the modern secular worldview, but doesn’t even know the basics of their own faith.

Morrow’s response is to admit that “the majority of Christians in America are not thinking or living like followers of Christ.” But rather than retreat to a bunker mentality, (which created this mess in the first place), Morrow sounds the call for the church to engage culture. First, he proclaims, the church must understand the world in which it lives, then it must “learn how to speak in a compassionate, winsome, and informed voice to our culture, starting with the questions they are asking.”

Morrow doesn’t hesitate to tackle pretty much every aspect of modern culture in this book. The first half of the book lays out the groundwork, giving Christians a big picture of what the secular world thinks, why they think it, and how it differs from what Morrow calls (for lack of a better term) a “biblical worldview.” This is heady stuff—dense and important. And Morrow does a fantastic job of making it clear, interesting, and readable."

And the winners are...?

2012-05-10T23:55:00-04:00

Congrats to Chris, and Salvador Gomez, who each won a copy of Bringing Jesus to the Desert!

Thanks to everyone who shared their experiences of solitude. I know that it has been incredibly formative for me when I have made time for solitude, yet setting aside that time in a culture so relentlessly fast-paced is quite a struggle.

But it is exactly because we live in such a fast-paced and complex world that the Desert Fathers and Mothers have something so valuable to offer us.

“Most of us know of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila, Bernard of Clairvaux, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other great leaders of the West. Some may well have heard about Anthony the Great, but what of Pachomius, Makarios of Egypt, Simeon the Stylite, Melania, John the Little, Moses the Ethiopian, and other desert dwellers we will meet in this book? If we know them at all, they appear as social dropouts, exiles from life — people who are culturally irrelevant to the modern world.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Their contemporary relevance is staggering. In the Desert Fathers and Mothers we discover a vibrant spiritual life that our modern world so desperately longs for. As we will see, their eccentric way of life in the desert was partly a response to the church’s spiritual poverty, the poverty of love. They protested that lack of knowledge was not the central problem of the church; the real problem was the poverty of love. Compared to them, our love for God and neighbor is also virtually bankrupt today. The intensity of love’s “holy fire” has died down to a mere flicker. Perhaps that is why, they argued, the core battleground of our earthly pilgrimage is the human heart.”

[Read the rest of this excerpt here]

Wednesday Giveaway - Bringing Jesus to the Desert

2012-05-09T10:04:42-04:00

Through the third to sixth centuries – as Christianity struggled with its new role as a legal (and soon official) religion, and the mix of opportunities and temptations that status offered - Christian men and women began to leave for the deserts of Palestine, Syria and Egypt, shaping the church through their examples of faith and devotion.

History now knows them as the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and their lives display an unswerving counter-cultural commitment to the love of Christ sorely needed in today’s world.

In this week’s giveaway, Bringing Jesus to the Desert, Bradley Nassif tells the story of how the deserts of the Holy Land forged a holy people and a lasting legacy of faith.

Surveying the lives of Anthony of Egypt, Pachomius, Melania and others, Nassif demonstrates how the wilderness experiences chronicled in Scripture guided the practice of Christian faith in biblical lands.

Bringing Jesus to the Desert will guide pastors, Bible students and lay learners as they trace God’s work in the past and draw on the power of God in the desert places of their own day and age.

To enter this week’s giveaway, comment below with your answer to this question: Has solitude or wilderness played a role in your spiritual formation, if so, how?

Also, a bonus entry is available if you comment a second time letting us know that you shared a link to this giveaway on Facebook, Twitter, or your blog.

_________________

*If you are reading this via Facebook, email, or RSS, please visit the blog to enter. Two winners will be determined by Random Integer Generator. Giveaway ends Thursday at midnight*

Why do Evangelicals Swim the Tiber?

2012-05-08T07:51:43-04:00

Recently Wheaton College hosted a discussion about Evangelicals converting to Roman Catholicism. The sessions featured authors of Journeys of Faith, and Gregg Allison’s and Craig Blaising’s lectures were in fact based on their respective contributions to the book.

You can listen to the sessions here, and below is the list of topics and contributors.

We are pleased to see that Journeys of Faith is sparking such thoughtful dialogue on an important issue for the church and the academy!

1. Dr. Gregg Allison – The Roman Road, or the Road to Rome? Why Some Protestants Drift to Catholicism.

2. Rev. Chris Castaldo - Crossing the Tiber: Why Catholics and Protestants Convert.

3. Dr. Craig Blaising – Does Accepting the Canon of Scripture Implicitly Affirm Rome’s Authority?

4. Dr. Robert Plummer – Moderator

“Law” or “the Law” - Rom 6:15 (Monday with Mounce 143)

2012-05-07T07:00:00-04:00

We all know that Greek uses ὁ differently than English uses “the.” In fact, I am hesitant to even talk about the Greek definite article, since ὁ functions so differently much of the time.

One of the more difficult constructions is the prepositional phrase where ὁ is regularly omitted. In fact, when you see ὁ before the object of the preposition, it should make you sit up and take notice.

But knowing when to include “the” is a matter of exegesis, and sometimes it can be tricky.

In Rom 3:21, “the” clearly needs to be added. “But now apart from the law (χωρὶς νόμου) the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify.” (NIV). Apart for the NRSV, all major translations see that Paul is speaking of “the” Mosaic covenant.

But in Rom 6:15, it is a little more difficult.

Paul concludes his prior argument by saying, “For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law (ὑπὸ νόμον), but under grace. ” He then starts a new but related argument with, “What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law (ὑπὸ νόμον) but under grace (ὑπὸ χάριν)? By no means!” (NIV).

In both these cases, there is no ὁ in the prepositional phrase. And it is certainly possible that Paul is thinking of the Mosaic covenant (see Moo’s commentary, KJV, NLT). But if you check the other translations, you can see there are other interpretations. The ESV reads, “Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace?” (see also the NASB, NRSV, HCSB, NET).

The question, though, is whether this makes a difference. What would “law” mean rather than “the law”? I suspect that either way “law” is the Mosaic covenant, but omitting “the” does leave the door open for other options.

As always, exegetical decisions are based on context and, if applicable, one’s theology.

William D. [Bill] Mounce posts about the Greek language, exegesis, and related topics at Koinonia. He is the author of numerous books, including the bestselling Basics of Biblical Greek, and is the general editor for Mounce's Complete Expository Dictionary of the Old and New Testament Words. He served as the New Testament chair of the English Standard Version Bible translation, and is currently on the Committee for Bible Translation for the NIV. Learn more and visit Bill's other blog on spiritual growth, Life is a Journey, at www.billmounce.com

Extra-Curricular Activities 05/05/12

2012-05-05T08:48:52-04:00

15 Spectacular European Libraries (or, my dream vacation)

Michael Bird - Evangelical Confessionalism and Academic Freedom

Mariam Kamell Appointed to Regent College

Tim Challies - Fiction & Literature: An Interview with Russell Moore

Louis McBride - How Many Times Did David Kill Goliath?

Justin Taylor - Science, Scripture, and the Age of the Universe

Scot McKnight at BioLogos - Thinking Aloud Together, Part 1

Michael Horton - Muscular Christianity

Kevin DeYoung - Hiding Above the Fray

Brian LePort - The Ivory Tower Fallacy

Mike Wittmer - the gospel according to Disney

Peter Enns - Walter Brueggemann and Scripture as Counter-Imagination to the Empires of Man

Christianity Today - Nontraditional Believers Recover Christian Community in the Post-War Balkans