Elliot Ritzema

Author: Elliot

  • Dog Person or Cat Person?

    While I was growing up, my family always had dogs. If I am counting correctly, we had six different ones between when I was born and when I went away to college. I grew up used to dogs, and liking dogs.

    We never had cats, and I never liked cats much. I had a friend in elementary school who had two cats named Jinx and Leo. They never seemed interested in people, and in fact seemed positively hostile at times. My aunt and uncle used to have a large, fluffy, orange cat named Carmela, who I liked a little better simply because she had such personality (which mostly centered around her insatiable desire for food and dislike of having her belly or feet touched). In addition, I have been allergic to cat hair my whole life.

    Since I’ve been living with Mary’s parents, though, things have started to change. They have two dogs and four cats, and I must admit that I didn’t like either the dogs or the cats at first. I didn’t like the cats mostly because of my prior dislike of cats and my allergy (plus my self-identification as a “dog person”), and I didn’t like the dogs because they are far more neurotic than any other dog I have ever known.
    One of them also is very independent and has a bark so high-pitched that it could activate a garage-door opener. I can’t blame them, since their breed and upbringing are not their fault, but I don’t have to like them.

    october-2008-003
    More recently, though, I have taken a liking to one of the cats, named Chloe. She is an indoor cat , doesn’t particularly care for the other three cats, and is extremely affectionate. For many months I would have nothing to do with her, but she persistently kept trying to crawl onto my lap or put her head under my hand. Eventually, I found that I actually liked a cat.

    This nearly caused an identity crisis. Could I be a “cat person” now? Thankfully, I came across this study conducted by Ball State University before I had to seek therapy. According to the study, what “cat people” love about most cats is that they are independent and not submissive, and what “dog people” love about dogs is that they tend to be more friendly and submissive.

    Surveys and interviews of 266 college-age pet guardians found the majority of cat owners see themselves as having personalities similar to felines such as being less submissive and more independent while most dog owners believe they are friendly and dominant and suit the characteristics of their canine friends.

    “Yet, not all dogs and cats have traditionally perceived personalities,” [Lucinda] Woodward [, a psychology professor] noted. “There are friendly cats that want to be around their guardians all the time and dogs that don’t crave constant attention.”

    Basically, not all animals fit the stereotypes about them. I can still be a “dog person” if I like a cat, because what I like about this cat is that she is friendly. I can also still be a “dog person” if I don’t like particular dogs because of their independence and neuroses.

    Well, that’s a relief.

    kitty-suitcase

  • New Blog Name

    It’s a new year – time for a new blog name. I didn’t change my blog’s name last year, and I’m not planning on changing the name annually in the future, but I have been thinking about changing the name for a while.

    Why?

    Because I was never all that sold on “Wordspew” in the first place. When I came up with it, I thought it was just a neat portmanteau that conveyed what I thought I would do on this blog: spew words.

    Because, after naming the blog, I found out that “Wordspew” is the name of a program that allows people to instant message on your blog’s home page. Every now and then, I take a look at the search engine terms that people use to get here, and “wordspew” is often one of them. I’d hate for people to be looking for that program and end up at my blog.

    So Why “All is Grist”?

    It comes from the saying, “All is grist that comes to the mill,” which means that everything that is received or obtained is put to use. What I do on this blog, which is I suppose what happens on most blogs, is that I write my thoughts about what I see, read or experience. Things go in, and the blog comes out. It seemed appropriate.

    Also, G.K. Chesterton is one of my favorite authors, and he wrote a collection of essays with the title All is Grist. I’ve never read that particular essay collection, but it sure seems like a good title for an essay collection, and a good name for a blog. It also doesn’t seem to be a blog name that is overused, like many clever blog names.

    For a little while I thought about trying to sound educated by putting my blog title in Latin. After looking at Wikipedia’s list of Latin phrases, nothing really jumped out at me aside from “surdo oppedere” – “to belch before the deaf.” This could just as easily sum up what this blog is about, but I decided against going that route.

  • 1509-2009

    John Calvin, the famous French theologian and Genevan reformer, was born on July 10, 1509, which makes 2009 the 500th anniversary of his birth year. Princeton Seminary is celebrating this anniversary by, among other things, encouraging people to read his monumental work The Institutes of the Christian Religion throughout this year. I’ve only read sections of the Institutes, and I have often wanted to read the whole thing, so now seems like as good a time as any to pull down my copy from the shelf and open it up.

    If you visit the Princeton Seminary Web site, you can look at the reading schedule for the year. You can also subscribe to the podcast, which features various people reading the section for the day.

  • December 2008: Books Read

    1. Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile, by Rob Bell and Don Golden. Reviewed earlier here.

    2. The American Church in Crisis: Groundbreaking Research Based On a National Database of over 200,000 Churches by David T. Olson. My pastor lent me this book, and I found it to be very interesting. Olson, who is director of church planting for my denomination, the Evangelical Covenant Church, divides this book into four parts: Observation, Evaluation, Introspection and Action. The first three parts (as the title of the book indicates) are pretty depressing for Christians. He starts out by observing that things are worse than they seem. Even though 40-44% of Americans say that they go to church regularly, the actual number is around 17.5%. The reason for this discrepancy is the “halo effect”: people want other people to think that they engage in socially acceptable behavior. Olson also points out that the number of orthodox Christian churches might be growing, but this growth is not at all keeping up with population growth. Out of the three categories of evangelical, Catholic and mainline, the only category that has kept up with population growth in the last 15 years has been evangelical, with just over 9% of the population.

    In the second section, evaluation, he looks at why churches thrive or decline, concluding that a huge factor that makes churches and denominations thrive is dedication to planting new churches.

    In the third section, introspection, Olson asks, “What do we do now?” He looks at the changing cultural landscape of the United States, concluding that the church will soon die if it doesn’t change. His prescription for change is my favorite part of the book. The solution isn’t trying to be more relevant or more strategic (although he does think that those things have their proper place); it is to “restore Jesus’ words and actions to their place of centrality” (185).

    In the final section, action, he sets forth what restoring Jesus’ words and actions to their proper place looks like. He says that the gospel consists of five messages of Jesus, combined with five missions of Jesus. Those messages are:

    1. To forgive our sins and reconcile us with God.
    2. To destroy the power of Satan and deliver people from bondage.
    3. To change hearts of stone to hearts of flesh.
    4. To treat people with compassion and justice as God’s loved creation.
    5. To invite and summon followers to become the new people of God.

    Here are the missions:

    1. To be the sacrifice for the sins of the whole world on the cross.
    2. To fight the decisive battle with Satan, triumphing through the grave.
    3. To be authenticated as the Son of God through the Resurrection.
    4. To challenge earthly principalities and powers through his ascension.
    5. To establish his church as the new people of God through Pentecost.

    The church has its own message and mission which correlate to the above message and mission of Jesus:

    1. Evangelism
    2. Ministry
    3. Spiritual Formation
    4. Love
    5. True Community

    I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It is unflinching in its honesty about how bad things are for the church in America, but it is also ultimately hopeful because Olson knows that the gospel has power to change lives. As a final perk, it has lots of great graphs.

    3. August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I started to read this book back in August, shortly after Solzhenitsyn died. I’d had it on my shelf for a couple of years, and thought that reading it would be a good way to reflect on his life and work. I put it aside several times in order to focus on other books, but now it is finally finished.

    This is a very ambitious novel, with a length (714 pages in the original edition, published in the 1970s, which I read) to match its ambition. It is about the first month of World War I, and specifically the catastrophic Russian defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg in East Prussia. Solzhenitsyn uses the events of this month to criticize both the incompetence and unreadiness of the senior officers in the Russian army, as well as the leftist ideology rampant in Russia at the time that would eventually lead to the Russian Revolution a few years later. He tells the story primarily through the eyes of a fictional colonel in the Russian army, who is simultaneously awed by the spirit of the Russian people and disgusted by the behavior of their highest officers.

    There were some great passages in the book, but all in all I found it very difficult to slog through. Mostly this was because of the sheer scope of the novel, with so many characters, places and military maneuvers to keep track of. The list of characters at the beginning was helpful, but there were so many characters that it was hard to create an emotional attachment to all but a few. Also, Solzhenitsyn made it so clear throughout the narrative what his opinions were of the characters that his descriptions often came off as heavy-handed. I felt that the reader was not given the opportunity to come to his or her own conclusions. This would have been a better novel if Solzhenitsyn had just told the story and had been less manipulative of his readers.

    4. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. The movie that was made of this book a few years ago is one of Mary’s favorite movies, and I have had a battered old copy of the Bantam Classics edition kicking around for years, so I decided to read it. I’m glad I did. This is an abridged edition of the book, but I liked it so much that I think it would be good to read the unabridged version someday.

    The story is about an innocent sailor, Edmond Dantes, who lives in Marseilles and is just starting out in life. He is scheduled for a promotion and has a girl that he wants to marry, so he couldn’t be happier. He is accidentally mixed up in the politics of Napoleon’s return from Elba, however, and his enemies (a sailor who is jealous of his promotion, a fisherman who is jealous of his romance with the girl Mercedes, a public prosecutor who wants to put Dantes in prison to secure political advancement, and a neighbor who is just greedy) conspire to have him thrown into prison at the Chateau d’If. Dantes is in solitary confinement for several years, but eventually meets another prisoner (the Abbe Faria) who educates him, tells him of an immense fortune buried on the Isle of Monte Cristo in the Mediterranean, and gives him hope of escape. Dantes, who had become bitter in his first years as a prisoner, eventually comes to faith in God. When he escapes (I won’t say how), he asks God to allow him to be God’s instrument of justice against those who had betrayed him. The rest of the novel features Dantes, who has adopted the alias the Count of Monte Cristo, exacting justice against his four enemies.

    No wonder this is such a popular book. It is a great adventure novel, and has beautiful themes woven throughout. Even though Dantes is attempting to ruin his enemies, I continued to root for him because he didn’t appear to be particularly dastardly about it. A lot of what he did to exact revenge was simply bring the devious actions of his enemies to light. He also gives his former neighbor two chances to change his wicked ways. When the neighbor continues in his life of crime and selfishness, Dantes takes his protecting hand away and allows him to be killed. Dantes also allows several of the public prosecutor’s family members to die, and has doubts about whether in doing this he has gone too far.

    I could say other things that I liked about the book, but that would be giving away too much of the plot. This was a fun read, and as I mentioned above, I hope to make it to the unabridged version someday. The movie makes some significant changes from the book (especially leaving out details and some characters), but I like the movie as well.

  • Book Review: Jesus Wants to Save Christians

    Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile by Rob Bell and Don Golden. This is the third book published by Rob Bell, the first one with a co-author (Golden was lead pastor of Bell’s church, Mars Hill, 2005-2008), and the second one I have read. In it, Bell and Golden encourage their readers to see the Bible and the church through a particular lens. That lens is “exile” (hence the subtitle).

    The first four chapters (“The Cry of the Oppressed,” “Get Down Your Harps,” “David’s Other Son” and “Genital-Free Africans”) give a quick overview of the Bible through this lens. In the first chapter we follow the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt, to encountering God at Sinai, to living in Jerusalem, to exile in Babylon. The second chapter deals with the hopes of the Israelites while in exile. The “David’s Other Son” of chapter three is Jesus, and Bell and Golden focus on Jesus walking with two disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke’s gospel. Jesus is the suffering servant referred to by Isaiah, and is also the new leader of a new exodus. The “Genital-Free African” of chapter four is the Ethiopian eunuch from Acts 8. His baptism by Philip is a sign that the “new exodus” has been extended beyond the Jewish people to everyone, since “Baptism is a picture of exodus” (p. 100).

    Chapter five is where the application (for lack of a better word) section of the book kicks in. For the first part of the book, Bell and Golden have been speeding through the Bible, and now they begin to talk about “Swollen-Bellied Black Babies, Soccer Moms on Prozac, and the Mark of the Beast.” (catchy chapter title, no?) In it, Bell and Golden connect the stuff they covered in the first four chapters to our own situation. And one of their most eye-catching assertions is this one:

    America is an empire.

    And the Bible has a lot to say about empires.

    Most of the Bible is a history told by people living in lands occupied by conquering superpowers. It’s a book written from the underside of power. It’s an oppression narrative. The majority of the Bible was written by a minority people living under the rule and reign of massive, mighty empires, from the Egyptian Empire to the Babylonian Empire to the Persian Empire to the Assyrian Empire to the Roman Empire.

    This can make the Bible a very difficult book to understand if you are reading it as a citizen of the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. Without careful study and reflection, and humility, it may even be possible to miss central themes of the Scriptures. (p. 121)

    In the next chapter, “Blood on the Doorposts of the Universe,” Bell and Golden give us a resource for resisting empire, and that resource is the Eucharist. God brought his people out of Egypt during the Exodus, Jesus became the new passover lamb, and the church celebrates this today:

    The Eucharist is about the church setting the table for the whole world.

    The Eucharist is about the new humanity.

    The Eucharist is about God’s dream for the world. (p. 167)

    The Epilogue wraps it all up:

    Jesus wants to save us from making the good news about another world and not this one.

    Jesus wants to save us from preaching a gospel that is only about individuals and not about the systems that enslave them.

    Jesus wants to save us from shrinking the gospel down to a transaction about the removal of sin and not about every single particle of creation being reconciled to its maker.

    Jesus wants to save us from religiously sanctioned despair, the kind that doesn’t believe that the world can be made better, the kind that either blatantly or subtly teaches people to just be quiet and behave and wait for something big to happen “someday.” (p. 179)

    I must say that I liked this book. I have heard critiques of Rob Bell, and I think some of them are valid, but in general I have to honor the guy for trying to make the gospel relevant to our culture. I think that Bell is mainly trying to reach two people groups: those who were raised in the church and are disillusioned by it, and those who don’t have any experience with church at all. It seems to me that some of the people making the loudest criticisms are people who are part of the church and are comfortable with the church the way it is. That doesn’t mean their criticisms are automatically not valid, but it does mean that they are not the audience Bell is shooting for.

    The “new exodus” theme was not new to me, especially after having taken a class on the gospel of Mark with Rikk Watts (whose thesis was published under the title Isaiah’s New Exodus in Mark). I do wish, though, that Bell and Golden had given their readers a few more resources for following up this line of thinking. The idea that the arc of redemptive history can be seen as a “new exodus” is probably foreign to most of the people who read this book, and nods to a few more scholars besides Tom Holland would be helpful.

    I also wish that Bell and Golden had fleshed out their reasons for opposition to violence more. Several times in the book, the way of Jesus is contrasted with the way of violence (p. 87-8 and 133, among others), but no mention is made of the ambiguous passages in the Bible with relation to violence (like the conquest of Canaan) or of the fact that many Christians through the centuries have not been categorically opposed to violence. Entire books could be and have been written on this subject, but perhaps just a nod in the direction of some good ones for the benefit of readers would be good.

    Third, I don’t think that America is an empire in exactly the same way as ancient empires were empires. That is not to say that America isn’t empire-ish in some things that it does. But obsession with security and self-preservation can be critiqued biblically without busting out the “E-word.” My concern here is that the word will start to lose its meaning if it is thrown around so much. If what is meant by “empire” is “a state bent on violent means of self-preservation,” or “a state which uses a disproportionately large amount of resources,” then use a different term (maybe “hegemonic state”), because that’s not what “empire” means. I wish the authors had been as specific in this book as Don Golden was when he later wrote an article at God’s Politics that took a different angle on this issue. He wrote,

    America is not an empire like Rome; it’s a nation contingent upon a Beast of its own creation.

    What is that Beast?

    Instead of arguing about empire, we should be talking about Beasts because history has a new one, and it’s not America.

    The force that accepts no boundaries to its acquisition of wealth, whose disregard for the poor is matched only by its betrayal of the wealthy, is not a political state at all. The power that rules planet earth in our age is the unrestrained force of raw capitalism.

    I really do appreciate the clarification, but it would have been nice for Golden to acknowledge that the reason people are arguing about empire is that he’s the one who brought it up in the first place. If he doesn’t want people to get exercised about whether America is an empire, or if he thinks it distracts from the main issue of unfettered capitalism, then he should be more careful about the words he uses.

    Finally, I wish that they would move away from this spaced-out typesetting style. It makes me feel good that I can get through a 218-page book quickly, but it does get a little annoying after a while. I sure hope Zondervan isn’t paying these guys by the page.

    Despite my quibbles about the book, I think that this is a book that is needed in 21st-century America. It calls attention to aspects of the gospel that have been ignored for too long. The trick now is to live out a complete gospel, instead of just focusing on different (but still incomplete) aspects.

    P.S. – Scot McKnight has written a good review here.

  • It’s a Festivus Miracle!

    Miraculously, I made it to Michigan for Christmas. On Sunday, dozens of flights from Seattle were cancelled, and thousands of people spent the night at the airport, mostly because airlines ran out of de-icing fluid (Here’s an article about it). Fortunately, I went to the airport late Monday night, and the change was amazing. Sure, there were still a few people passed out under blankets, and there were a few people on my flight who had been delayed for over 24 hours. But the shuttle I took to the airport was not delayed at all (even though on their Web site they said they were running 60 minutes late), my flight was not delayed at all (even though the first leg of the trip was through Minneapolis), and even the last leg of my flight was only delayed for about 45 minutes.

    When I say that “it’s a Festivus miracle,” I’m of course referring to the Seinfeld episode called “The Strike,” about Festivus. To me, calling something a Festivus miracle is saying that it is an instance of things turning out pretty well that may or may not have included divine intervention. Since part of celebrating Festivus is the “Airing of Grievances,” it is time to complain about my flying experience. Surprisingly, there isn’t all that much to complain about this time, but I usually am disgusted. And it wasn’t until I read this op-ed piece in the New York Times that I found out why flying is so typically an unpleasant experience these days. Here’s a quote:

    I have experienced the decline of service along with the rest of the flying public. But I believe I have felt it more acutely because I remember the days when to fly was to soar. The airlines, and their employees, took pride in how their passengers were treated. A friend who flew for Pan Am and I have a friendly rivalry over which airline was better. Friendly, yes. But we each believe we worked for the best.

    We tell stories about cooking lamb chops and dressing them in foil pantaloons; we debate the beauty of my Ralph Lauren uniform versus her Oleg Cassini. I like to tell her how we would have the children on board serve the after-dinner mints — delicious pale-green circles with T.W.A. stamped on them, arranged on a silver tray. We remember the service we provided — dare I say cheerfully? Happily? Proudly? And when my friend and I part ways, although we hold on to our allegiances, we know that all of our passengers were served well.

    After-dinner mints? My flight to Minneapolis didn’t even have beverage service. Okay, maybe this was because it was a red-eye flight and they figured everyone would be sleeping. Fine. So where’s my sleep mask?

    Now that I’m finished with the airing of grievances, I’m done celebrating Festivus for the year. On to Christmas!

  • How We Got the Bible: Translations

    “Translation… is a difficult, almost impossible, art to master. Languages vary so in their order of words, in their individual metaphors, and in their native idioms. The translator is thus faced with a choice between a literal, word-for-word rendering (which is certain to sound absurd and so be a travesty of the original) and something very much freer (in which cause he is liable to be accused of being unfaithful). – Jerome

    Philosophies of Translation

    Formal Equivalence (literal, or word-for-word)

    • These translations (like the NASB) try to use the same English word for a particular Greek or Hebrew word whenever possible. Their goal is to be comprehensible.
    • They also try to reproduce the grammar or syntax of the original language as closely as possible. For example, if the Greek or Hebrew has an infinitive, then an infinitive will be used in English.
    • These translations can help us to know when a particular word or phrase was important to a biblical author. For example, whenever Paul uses the Greek word sarx, a formal equivalent translation will use “flesh.”
    • However, formal equivalent translations can have problems translating idioms. Idioms are expressions whose meanings are not predictable from the usual meanings of the constituent words. For example, “to kick the bucket” doesn’t have anything to do with actually kicking buckets. Here’s a biblical example from 2 Samuel 18:25: “If he is alone, there is news in his mouth.” (NKJV, ESV) This is a Hebrew idiom that means “he has good news,” but it sounds strange and unnatural when translated into English. This is what Fee and Strauss call “Biblish,” which is an awkward cross between Bible language and real English.

    Functional Equivalence (idiomatic, or meaning-based)

    • These translations try to reproduce the meaning of the original in natural, easy-to-understand English. Their goal is to be natural. “Advocates of functional equivalence stress that the translation should sound as clear and natural to the contemporary reader as the original text sounded to the original readers.” – Fee and Strauss, 26
    • The guiding principle of functional equivalent translations is that accuracy concerns meaning rather than form. It’s not enough to reproduce the exact words of Greek and Hebrew (which is impossible, since something is always lost in translation). You need to convey what the words meant in the original languages as accurately as possible.
    • These translations, unlike formal equivalent translations, excel at translating idioms. They would translate the above passage “If he is alone, he is bringing good news.” (NCV, GNT) These translations are especially popular among young people and people who did not grow up in the church, because the words sound more natural to them than the “Biblish” that can be found in many more literal translations.
    • However, one drawback to these translations is that the reader has to rely more on the interpretations of the translator. Eugene Peterson is a great student of Biblical languages, but The Message is still the work of one imperfect person.

    Mediating (or a cross between A and B)

    • These translations (like the NIV and TNIV) try to strike a balance between formal and functional equivalence. Sometimes they are more literal, and sometimes they are more idiomatic. Their goal is to be clear.

    Gender and Translation (“gender neutrality” vs. “gender accuracy”)

    • Translation of anthropos – The primary meaning of this Greek word is “person,” not “man.” Greek has other words (like aner and arsen) when it means to say “man” or “male.” However, some Bible translations (like the TNIV) have caused controversy by the way they translate this word.
    Romans 3:28 (NIV): “for we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law…”
    Romans 3:28 (TNIV): “for we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from observing the law…”

    • Translation of adelphoi – this word can refer to brothers, siblings (brothers and sisters) or people in a close bond or association. It depends on the context. In I Corinthians 1:10, for example, Paul is clearly addressing the entire church, which includes women. Therefore, the TNIV (2005) made a change from the NIV (1978):
    I Cor. 1:10 (NIV): “I appeal to you, brothers…”
    I Cor. 1:10 (TNIV): “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters…”

    • Translation of banim (Hebrew) and huioi (Greek) – Both these words can mean “sons,” “children,” or “descendants,” depending on the context. Newer versions like the TNIV and NRSV are often accused of making changes based on a feminist agenda. However, it is not that simple, as we can see from this example:
    Matt. 5:44-45 (KJV): “Love your enemies… that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven.” The KJV was translated in 1611, long before feminism, and yet here it translates huioi as “children” rather than “sons.”
    Matt. 5:44-45 (TNIV): “Love your enemies… that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” The TNIV translators follow the KJV, because they thought that the context did not specifically indicate “sons.”
    Matt. 5:44-45 (ESV): “Love your enemies… so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.” The translators of the ESV (2001) were unhappy with the perceived liberalism of the NRSV (1990) when it came to gender language, so they have tended to translate huioi as “sons” and adelphoi as “brothers.”

    • Translation of masculine resumptive pronouns. These are pronouns (“he,” “she,” or “it”) that follow an indefinite noun or pronoun (“whoever,” “anyone”) and refer back to it.
    John 8:51 (NIV): “If anyone keeps my word, he will never see death.” The problem here is that the Greek is neuter, but English doesn’t have a neuter personal pronoun. All we have is “it,” which cannot refer to persons. The NIV translators chose to use “he,” even though there is nothing in the Greek to indicate the person who keeps Jesus’ word is specifically male.
    John 8:51 (TNIV): “whoever obeys my word will never see death.” The TNIV translators get around this by taking out the pronoun altogether. In other passages, they get around the problem of using masculine resumptive pronouns by using a singular “they.” An example of a singular “they” is “Everybody likes ice cream, don’t they?” Grammatically, “everybody” is singular, but most people use a singular “they” because the sentence “Everybody likes ice cream, doesn’t he or she?” sounds awkward. Because singular “they”s are becoming more accepted in contemporary English, it is more common to see them in recent Bible translations.

    The root issue here is that some translators believe that English usage with regard to gender is changing more than other translators. Thirty years ago, “man,” “mankind” and “brothers” could refer to both men and women, but many believe that is no longer the case, and alter their translations accordingly so that modern people can understand.

    The “King James Only” Controversy

    There are some people who will only use the King James Version for various reasons. Here are a few:
    • Because they just like its language best, and are used to it.
    • Because they believe that the manuscripts it is based on (the Masoretic Text for the OT and the Textus Receptus for the NT) are better than other manuscripts.
    • Because they believe the Masoretic Text and the Textus Receptus were supernaturally preserved over time.
    • Because they believe that the KJV translation is itself divinely inspired.
    • Because they believe that the KJV is a “new revelation” that can even correct the Greek and Hebrew texts.

    “Is there anyone learned or unlearned who, when he takes the [new translation] in his hands and perceives that what he reads does not suit his settled tastes, will not break out immediately into violent language and call me a forger and profane person for having the audacity to add anything to the ancient books, or to make any changes or corrections in them?” – Jerome, telling the pope that he did not want to translate the Vulgate, which went on to be the standard edition of the Bible for over 1000 years

    Further Reading:

    Gordon Fee and Mark Strauss, How to Choose a Translation for All Its Worth.

    On the KJV-Only Controversy:
    D.A. Carson, The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism

    On the Gender Controversy:
    http://no-tniv.com (anti-TNIV web site),
    http://www.tniv.info/light/genderaccurate.php (pro-TNIV web site)
    Mark Strauss, Distorting Scripture? The Challenge of Bible Translation and Gender Accuracy
    Wayne Grudem, The TNIV and the Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy

  • Go Spiders!


    Last night, my alma mater won their first national championship in any sport. They beat the Montana Grizzlies 24-7. The sport was football, but I had to do a little research before I knew exactly what kind of championship it was.

    Whereas the University of Richmond Spiders used to play in NCAA Division I-AA, it is not called that anymore. Instead of dividing teams into I-A and I-AA, now the teams are divided into Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly I-A) and Football Championship Subdivision (formerly I-AA). If you’re confused, you can read this article.

    So the Spiders are now the NCAA Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) national champions! They sure have come a long way since the time when I was a student (1997-2001). I remember schlepping down to the UR Stadium, a couple of miles from campus, to watch our mediocre football teams play. Now, not only is the team much better, but soon they’ll be playing on campus! If they keep having this kind of success, they’ll outgrow their new stadium before they move in!

  • Oh, the Weather Outside is Frightful…

    I’m not turning this exclusively into a weather blog, but with the craziness that has been going on lately, I just had to write this – my second post on the weather in three days.

    Here’s how this Wednesday went down:

    The forecast on Tuesday night called for snow overnight and into Wednesday morning, but it didn’t happen here. There was a light dusting as of 6 a.m., but really nothing to write home about. So as has been the case for Monday and Tuesday, the school district decided to delay school by just one hour. Between one and three inches was forecast for the rest of the day, but considering the beginning, this seemed manageable.

    When I was driving out to pick up high school and middle school students, it began to snow. Hard. Three hours later, by the time I had dropped the elementary kids off at school, it had snowed several inches and showed no signs of stopping. For effect, strong winds started blowing too. For most of the morning route I went very slowly. The bus slid a little bit when I was making a few stops, and I developed an eye twitch.

    I returned to the bus yard at about 10:50, and by 11:45 the powers that be had decided to get the kids back home as quickly as possible before weather conditions got worse. The high school let out at 1:20, and the elementary schools let out at 2:30. The mechanics spent the intervening time getting tire chains on as many buses as possible. (some buses have automatic chains, and those that don’t have sand-deploying mechanisms) I spent the time fortifying myself at the local Subway.

    When the buses lined up at the high school, we knew we were in for a rough afternoon. It was still snowing, the wind was still blowing, and on the two-way radio I could hear that a couple of bus drivers who were bringing middle-school students to the high school had already gotten stuck. Unbelievably, though, I made it all the way out to my stops without incident. True, on a normal day it takes me 20 minutes to get to my first stop whereas today it took closer to 30, but I just wanted us all to get there in one piece. On my third stop, I was going up a small hill and got stuck. The bus wouldn’t move forward.

    After trying to get unstuck for several minutes, and drifting backwards and to the right until the right rear wheels were wedged against the curb, I called in on the two-way radio and said I was stuck. I was told that a mechanic was coming out to help. Most of the students got off the bus right then and there, since most of them live within a 3-block radius of that stop. After digging out the snow behind the back wheels and burning off a little more rubber, I finally got unstuck and finished dropping off the remaining two students who were still on the bus. By the time I had finished, the transportation department had already gotten another driver to take over my elementary route.

    That was a good thing, because I would have been about 40 minutes late getting to the school. I also got stuck again when I was going back to the bus yard. It was the same situation: I approached a stop sign on an incline and couldn’t get going again. I had learned a little bit from my first experience, but not enough. I wasn’t planning on stopping, but the person in front of me did. So we were both stuck. Eventually I managed to turn around by hopping a curb to my left and cutting through a parking lot.

    Even though my bus driving day was over at 4, the adventure wasn’t over because I still had to drive home. And even though the snow was no longer snowing, the wind was still winding. I made it out of Ferndale just fine, but it was when I got out on the blustery county roads that I had problems. First I tried heading east on Axton Road, but the wind kept blowing huge billows of snow over the road so that I couldn’t see anything. Once when my view was obscured by one of these billows, the rear of my car started creeping around to the right. I skidded to the right, then to the left, then to the right again, and when I stopped I was turned 130 degrees to the right. Since I was most of the way turned around, I headed back in the direction of Ferndale and took a different road east. This road still had the big puffs of snow over the road from time to time, but when this happened I tried to just look for any points of reference that I could find – signs, telephone poles – to make sure that I was still on course.

    Finally I was on the home stretch, just a mile or so away from home. However, the home stretch is apparently prone to snowdrifts. And today, it was also prone to those puffs of snow over the road. Once, when another puff turned everything white, I hit a thick patch of snow, skidded again, and ended up in a shallow ditch on the left side of the road, perpendicular to the road and facing a white fence (that I had fortunately not run into). Since the rear of my car was still on the road, I was panicked about getting hit by any oncoming cars. But fortunately, I was able to rock back and forth enough to get the momentum I needed to get back on the road. Now I’m at home, thankful to God for preserving me through this day (and a little sheepish about all the swearing I’ve done under my breath).

    And there’s no school tomorrow.

  • Where am I? Nebraska?

    Beginning last Saturday and continuing until next weekend (at least) the Bellingham, WA area is experiencing its longest cold “snap” (“snap” is in quotes because this is way longer than a snap, but I don’t know what the word for an unusually long snap is. Maybe a zip, because a zipper is, like a snap, a device for fastening, except it is much longer. I am going to call this a cold zip from now on, and I am going to close this parenthesis now) since 1990, according to the local paper, the Bellingham Herald. The high today, Monday, was 26 and the low was 10. Right now, at 7:00 p.m., it is 21 degrees Fahrenheit, but it feels like -4 because of the windchill. The winds are NNE at 28 mph. Gusts today have been up to 60 mph.

    It has only snowed about three inches in some areas, and a light dusting in others. Because of the lack of snow, the school district I drive a bus for did not cancel school. There was a 1-hour delay because they didn’t want bus drivers to be driving (or students to be waiting) in the dark on potentially icy roads. My biggest adventure with the road conditions this morning was at a place called Finkbonner Hill, which all the local kids like to sled down when it snows. I never drive down it; only up. It is the steepest part of my route, and I am not supposed to go up it when I am driving the version of my route that I drive when it snows. But because of the small amount of snow, I was not driving the snow route. Against my better judgment, I decided to drive up it, despite the fact that it was nearly covered in about an inch of icy snow. There were six kids on board at the time, so I figured I was light enough to zip right up.

    I was wrong. I was about halfway up when my forward momentum completely stopped, and panic set in. I downshifted. I eased the accelerator up and down to see if I could get some traction. I looked desperately on the dashboard for the button which deploys, Batmobile-like, sand in front of the rear tires to improve traction in just such a situation (later I found it in the upper left-hand corner, obscured by a badly placed cleaning rag). There were concerned looks on the students’ faces as the smell of rubber filled the bus. Eventually (aided by the hand of God, I’m sure), the bus got traction and we went up the hill. I ignored the stop sign at the top of the hill for fear of repeating the slide, and continued on my route. This afternoon, I avoided Finkbonner Hill completely, even though avoiding it causes me to make an unusually sharp right turn and drop off one student 100 feet away from her house. She’ll live. But I’m not sure she would if I had to go up that hill again.

    I also had about a dozen extra students this morning because their regular bus was not able to make it out of the yard, but that is a different story. This story is about how unusually cold it is, and how unusually long this cold zip is going to be. It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the wind (which likes to bat the empty bus back and forth on the road like a cat playing with a mouse; but that, again, is a different story).

    In the end, though, I can’t complain. I have a warm place to stay, and I am also thankful for the shelters that have opened their doors to the homeless in this area. And when this is over, western Washington will go back to its usual mild-climate self. Even though it is colder now than it is in Nebraska (I checked: The windchill here, as I mentioned, is -4. In Lincoln, it’s -3), Nebraska is only going to get colder in January. Washington will get warmer. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.