A common assumption among critics of Christianity is that the New Testament was standardized after a long period of textual flux. Only by the fourth century A.D., it is argued, were the competing texts consolidated into standard recensions that became the Alexandrian text and later the Byzantine text. This two to three hundred year period of textual flux gives skeptics room to assume that along with the text, received doctrines such as the deity of Christ and the role of subsitutionary atonement were also only lately agreed upon.
While there had been textual evidence that seemed to suggest great textual fluidity in the first two centuries after Christ, the more we study the early NT papyrii (over 60 significant portions of NT manuscripts that date from the apx. A.D. 125 to the 400s) the shorter any period of textual flux becomes. Last year, Dr. Charles E. Hill delivered the Spring academic lecture at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando on the topic of the early development of the New Testament text. And his lecture which is available online, does much to clear up this question (see the lecture description here). In 53 minutes (he begins at the 6 minute mark) he gives an overview of the history of textual criticism and details how the scholastic consensus from textual critics familiar with the evidence has shifted in the last few decades. The takeaway from his lecture is that the New Testament text is much more solid than skeptics would have us believe.
If you are interested in textual debates, the new atheism, or textual criticism, this lecture will be informative. Even for those who may be majority text proponents, the recounting of the current state of textual criticism today will prove instructive. Hill is the John R. Richardson Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary Orlando, and has graduate degrees from Westminster Theological Seminary California (M.Div.) and the University of Cambridge (Ph.D.). He is the author of several books, and was co-editor and contributor to The Early Text of the New Testament (Oxford University Press, 2012).
This past Sunday, I had the privilege of preaching at our church again. My text was Ezekiel 47:1-12 and the theme was living water. I had so much fun exploring the biblical theological theme of life-giving water. My sermon borrowed from the ideas I gleaned from G.K. Beale on how Jesus in both John 4 and John 7, alludes to Ezekiel’s eschatological temple and specifically chapter 47, where the river of life flows from the center of the temple. See an earlier post with relevant excerpts from Beale.
Ezekiel is not often the focus of a sermon, so I took time to introduce the book and situate the hearers to the context of chapter 47, particularly. John 7:37-39 provided the application and somehow I managed to get this all done in about 50 minutes! I am thankful for the opportunity and for how the Lord helped my scattered thoughts make sense. There was a good reception of the message and I pray it continues to bless those who hear it. Grasping the beauty of biblical theology has the potential to be truly transformative (it has been for me).
I’m sharing the sermon here, and you can find all my recent sermons from The Heights Church, St. Paul, here.
If you don’t have time to listen to the entire sermon (52 minutes), please do look over my notes.
Lauren Green is a religion correspondent for Fox News, and also an accomplished pianist and former Miss Minnesota. She shares lessons from her faith journey in her new book Lighthouse Faith.
The book is a compilation of thoughts and reflections on life and spirituality and includes insights from some of the many scientists and religious leaders that she has interviewed over the years. She compares the Christian life to a lighthouse but switches metaphors often in her intriguing book. She finds spiritual power in places and poignant metaphors, and leads us from a quiet cottage, to a rocky shore and on to a vineyard and then into a musical analysis of none other than Handel’s Messiah.
The book does go in circles but the reflections and thoughts shared are honest, heart-warming and rooted in a simple Christian faith. Green attends Redeemer Presbyterian Church pastored by Tim Keller as she notes in her acknowledgements and throughout the book, but her roots are in an AME church and her work brings her in touch with Christians of all stripes.
I was not moved by some of her observations. She finds the cross in the Pythagorean theorem (4 right angles = a cross in the middle) — and so to her, every building that stands, does so by power of the cross. Even in blood some of the molecules have a shape of the cross in them, she observes. She also leans on biblical numerology and makes tenuous connections. Perhaps even more troubling is her attempt to read motives into tragic events and look for a deeper meaning.
That said, her meditations make for interesting reading and no great damage is done. The eye of faith stands behind her work and many will benefit from her simple approach and sometimes deeply personal life-lessons.
Blurbs:
“Though many in the media and the academy portray belief in God as passé in our modern world, Lauren Green astutely observes that the heartfelt question, ‘Where is God in my hour of need?’ is universal. In more than forty years of travel I have heard this plea countless times, whether from students in university forums or corporate leaders in private conversations. A seasoned journalist and an accomplished pianist, Lauren interviews scholars and discloses her own journey to understand God as a living reality. She has lived out her faith with courage and grace in a difficult arena. Her words will encourage and challenge you.”
—Ravi Zacharias, Founder and President of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries; Author and Speaker
“I have known Lauren Green since she played piano on my old Fox News show After Hours. Her discovery of who God is and what it means to be loved and find meaning in a relationship with him will help the reader find meaning and purpose in his or her own life. Isn’t that what we all seek?”
—Cal Thomas, Syndicated Columnist
“Lauren Green is one of the bright lights in American journalism, and she has distinguished herself as an astute analyst of religion and culture. Lighthouse Faith is her new book, and, in it, she brings fresh insights and perspectives that readers will not have heard anywhere else! Her voice is thoroughly original, solidly biblical, and consistently inspiring. having personally interviewed the world’s leading figures in religion, plus drawing from her own knowledge of history and current events, Green introduces timeless truths in fresh new ways. her explanation of how music theory relates to God (specifically as used by G.F. Handel) is absolutely riveting. In Lighthouse Faith Lauren Green brings readers content that truly is unique.”
—Alex McFarland, Director of the Center for Apologetics and Christian Worldview, North Greenville University
Disclaimer: This book was provided by the publisher for review. The reviewer was under no obligation to offer a positive review.
About Book Briefs: Book Briefs are book notes, or short-form book reviews. They are my informed evaluation of a book, but stop short of being a full-length book review.
In the timeless Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis speaks of what he calls “the three parts of morality” — the social, the internal, and the spiritual. He employs the image of a fleet of ships that must get all three things right in order to function effectively:
There are two ways in which the human machine goes wrong. One is when human individuals drift apart from one another, or else collide with one another and do one another damage, by cheating or bullying. The other is when things go wrong inside the individual — when the different parts of him (his different faculties and desires and so on) either drift apart or interfere with one another. You can get the idea plain if you think of us as a fleet of ships sailing in formation. The voyage will be a success only, in the first place, if the ships do not collide and get in one another’s way; and, secondly, if each ship is seaworthy and has her engines in good order. As a matter of fact, you cannot have either of these two things without the other. But there is one thing we have not yet taken into account. We have not asked where the fleet is trying to get to. However well the fleet sailed, its voyage would be a failure if it were meant to reach New York and actually arrived at Calcutta. Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonising the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for; what course the whole fleet ought to be on. (Mere Christianity, 58-59).
Secular ethics tend to focus on the social dimension. If it doesn’t hurt another person, it must be fine. This approach tends to ignore the question of the goal of human life, in Lewis’s image where the whole thing is headed. Sometimes there is also a neglect of virtue or the internal character of a person. It is common now to hear people say that a public leader can be a complete rat-bag in private life, so long as he serves well for the public good. This has not always been the case. There was a time when, for example, a leader’s marital betrayal was seen as reason enough for someone to step down from high office. This was not mere moralism. The logic was: If “faithfulness” and “discipline” are not inner qualities of this leader, how can the public have confidence that such virtues will guide wider social decisions? It is true this old-fashioned rationale can be oppressive and unfairly employed, but there is something to it.
Religious ethics have their own, equally problematic, flaws. They are often strong on the spiritual dimension, what we are made for. But they can very frequently go astray on both the internal and the social dimensions. Religion can promote mere external piety, divorced from genuine virtue and love for others. Hence our distaste for the “religious hypocrite” I have talked so much about in this book.
The Ten Commandments are concerned with all three parts of the ethical enterprise. We are urged to find satisfaction in our Creator and his blessings. Then we are guided to honour our family and our neighbours. And, finally, the strange tenth commandment drills down to the engine room of our soul and asks, What do we truly desire?
Robbed of a broader meaning to our lives, we appear to have entered an era of mass obsession, usually with ourselves: our appearance, our health and fitness, our work, our sex lives, our children’s performance, our personal development…. [We have created] a culture that gives [us] nothing greater than [ourselves] to believe in — no god, no king, no country.
These words were spoken 25 years ago by an Australian academic, but they still ring true today. If anything, social media and the internet has fueled that personal obsession. Now more than ever, our poverty is exposed: “nothing greater than ourselves to believe in.”
Dickson, is an Australian himself, and is a fellow of Ancient History at Macquarie University, the founding director of the Centre for Public Christianity, and senior minister of St. Andrew’s Roseville. He describes Eckersley’s essay as “a famous government report on Australian youth” and goes on to say: “I remember the report so well because it came out the year before my [book] A Sneaking Suspicion, an attempt to explain the relevance of Christianity for teenagers. The report helped frame some of my thinking, then and now” (A Doubter’s Guide, p. 161).
I want to share a longer excerpt from Eckersley’s essay, which I found is available online in a scan of the publication on Eckersley’s website, here.
Eckersley starts by recounting his reaction at coming back to Australia after several years in Africa, Asia and Europe:
My first reaction on flying into Sydney from Bangkok was one of wonder at the orderliness and cleanliness, the abundantly stocked shops, the clear-eyed children, so healthy and free of the cares of living. Later, however, this celebration of the material richness of life in Australia gave way to a growing apprehension about its emotional harshness and spiritual desiccation. By ‘spiritual’, I don’t necessarily mean believing in God (I am not myself a practicing member of any religion), but having a deep sense of relatedness to the world around us.
…I became aware of the cultural myths that define and support our society. For most of us in the west, the poverty of Africa and Asia is synonymous with misery and squalor; yet it is not. We see their people as crippled by ignorance, cowed by superstition, and oppressed by the harshness of their raw environment; we don’t see the extent to which we are crippled by our rationalism, cowed by our lack of superstition (spiritual beliefs) and oppressed by our artificial environment. (p. 3)
Eckersley goes on to paint a stark picture of the current age (in 1992). Later in the essay he gets to the section from which the opening quote above is taken.
When a society fails to imbue people’s lives with a sense of worth and meaning, then they must attempt to find these qualities as individuals. It is a task that many find extremely difficult, even impossible. People want to know what is expected of them; they need to have something to believe in.
This absence of belief in much beyond ourselves, and the consequent lack of faith in ourselves, are undermining our resilience, our capacity to cope with the more personal difficulties and hardships of everyday life.
Robbed of a broader meaning to our lives, we appear to have entered an era of mass obsession, usually with ourselves: our appearance, our health and fitness, our work, our sex lives, our children’s performance, our personal development.
The consequences of this loss of belief are more serious, I believe, for the young than for grown-ups… [They are] particularly vulnerable to the uncertain culture of our times. (p. 14)
He quotes a study exploring the state of Australia’s youth, and concludes:
But perhaps the most disturbing finding of the study concerns young people’s moral sense. Mackay found that they believed that moral values were in decline, and often found it hard to identify an accepted moral framework within the community — unless they were religious. Moral responsibility to ‘the group’ is much stronger than to ‘the community’, Mackay says:
“Thus the ethical sense is rooted in a social sense, but that social sense is very limited, very transient, and very fragile. Lacking a broader sense of ‘the community’, many young people have difficulty in establishing an ethical framework which has any application beyond the boundaries of their own immediate circle of friends.” [italics original to the article]
The picture that emerges from the Mackay study is of a youth culture that may be meeting the needs of its members in terms of providing them with meaning and an identity, but only just. It is of a culture that is barely holding together, certainly not enduring — a mass-media culture marked by frenetic fashions and polarisation between self-destructive recklessness and abandon, and a more insidiously debilitating cautiousness, social withdrawal and self-centredness. (p. 15)
He then turns to a July 1990 article in Time focusing on “a new generation of young American adults grappling with its values.”
…According to Time, a prime characteristic of today’s young adults is their desire to avoid risk, pain and rapid change. They feel paralysed by the social problems they see as their inheritance: racial strife, homelessness, AIDS, fractured families and federal deficits….
It may be, then, the greatest wrong we are doing to our children is not the broken families or the scarcity of jobs (damaging though these are), but the creation of a culture that gives them nothing greater than themselves to believe in — no god, no king, no country — and no cause for hope or optimism…. (p. 15)
Eckersley goes on to summarize the problems of society and looks for a cure in an optimistic embrace of science and technology — and, ironically, his hope rests ultimately in mankind = ourselves!
The growing crisis facing western societies is, then, deeply rooted in the culture of modern western societies: in the moral priority we give to the individual over the community, to rights over responsibilities, the present over the future (and the past), the ephemeral over the enduring, the material over the spiritual.
Our cultural flaws and confusion both reflect and reinforce our economic, social and environmental problems. They also undermine our ability to resolve them effectively. Unless we forge a new culture, then it is unlikely we will overcome these problems because we will lack the will, the moral courage, to confront them….
…I believe that the problem rests more with our immaturity in using a cultural tool as powerful as science, and I am hopeful that with growing experience and wisdom, together with advances in science itself, we can create a more benign and complete culture, and so a more equitable and harmonious society. (p. 19)
Eckersley explores physics and how “a more flexible approach” has arisen in “how we use science.” An approach he approves of that allows for finding “purpose — or ‘God’ — in the world described by science.” (p. 23). He hopes this scientific endeavor may:
allow us to create new concepts for expressing religious or spiritual beliefs, different from, say, the traditional notion of a supreme being ‘out there’ watching over us, and judging us — metaphysical metaphors more appropriate to our times and our understanding.
Even now, however, science and spirituality are not mutually exclusive. I think it is less science and the scientific view of the world that cripple us spiritually than it is the busyness and artificiality of our modern lives, the all pervasive manifestations of rationality — an environment that we have created through science. (p. 23-24)
He goes on to focus on environmentalism and how mainstream science is clarifying the need for care of the environment, a cause young people can rally around. His essay aims to change science too, but ultimately the solution is what we make of it. Believing in ourselves and our ability to create a better culture — that is all that people can cling to apart from a religious worldview, such as what we have in Christianity.
I share this long excerpt from this decades old article to make a point. The long decline of our culture has been happening for a long time. There is something missing, and Christians have found the answer in Jesus Christ.
We have a God, a King, and a Heavenly Country to believe in – and that gives us great cause for hope and optimism. We don’t ground our hope in creating a social and cultural dynamic that frees us from the self-obsession of our age. Our ultimate hope, instead, is found in the precious promises we have in Scripture — promises that our God-King, Jesus Christ pledges to fulfill on our behalf.
As citizens of a greater Country, we must resist the urge to focus our hopes only on this present age and our own country — whether Australia or America. We need to work for the good of our city, and shine the light of Christ as we brighten the corner where we are, but we must always remember our faith lies in Someone greater and Something grander. Our obsession must center on our God-King, Jesus Christ. He is the one who calls us to live out our lives with ultimate purpose and meaning as we journey toward our Heavenly Country.
A common assumption among critics of Christianity is that the New Testament was standardized after a long period of textual flux. Only by the fourth century A.D., it is argued, were the competing texts consolidated into standard recensions that became the Alexandrian text and later the Byzantine text. This two to three hundred year period of textual flux gives skeptics room to assume that along with the text, received doctrines such as the deity of Christ and the role of subsitutionary atonement were also only lately agreed upon.
This past Sunday, I had the privilege of preaching at our church again. My text was Ezekiel 47:1-12 and the theme was living water. I had so much fun exploring the biblical theological theme of life-giving water. My sermon borrowed from the ideas I gleaned from G.K. Beale on how Jesus in both John 4 and John 7, alludes to Ezekiel’s eschatological temple and specifically chapter 47, where the river of life flows from the center of the temple. See an 
Robbed of a broader meaning to our lives, we appear to have entered an era of mass obsession, usually with ourselves: our appearance, our health and fitness, our work, our sex lives, our children’s performance, our personal development…. [We have created] a culture that gives [us] nothing greater than [ourselves] to believe in — no god, no king, no country.