We will have people who visit our church from “KJV only” churches or churches that use just one translation and inevitably I will get asked, “Why do you use so many translations.” The underlying and unspoken concern for many who pose this question is this: a pastor who uses a variety of translations of Bible passages in a sermon is not being faithful to “The Bible”…he is somehow using them to make the points he wants to make with a slight disregard to what the Bible is actually saying. The other concern is the belief that you simply cannot trust the modern translations of the Bible; the only God inspired translation is the King James Version. Both of these assertions are completely false. What I believe most Christians(especially in our community) fail to understand is that none of us would be able to read the Bible were it not for a huge company(most of them anonymous) of translators. In fact, the translation of Scripture became necessary several hundred years BEFORE the time of Jesus and the early church when its original language, Hebrew, was gradually replaced in the everyday lives of the people of God by Aramaic and then by Greek. The Bible is the most translated book in the world. The Bible is so wonderfully complex not one translation could communicate it’s depth adequately. The most accurate way to read the Bible is to read multiple translations. The Bible was originally written using 11,280 Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew words. But the typical English translation uses around 6,000 words. Clearly, nuances and shades of meaning can be missed. So, if you are looking for one silver bullet translation, you won’t find it. The bottom line is this: the Jewish and later Christian community believed that the same Spirit of God at work in writing the Scripture is also at work in translating the Scripture.
Posted 8 months, 1 week ago at 11:21 pm. 2 comments
I picked up Alan Mann’s book, Atonement for a Sinless Society. It is very interesting. This book is about the encounter between two stories: the story of the passion of Jesus Christ and the story of the postmodern, post-industrialized “sinless” self. I have just started the book, but basically the book is about how to present the gospel to our society…a society that has radically changed in the last 20 years. Mann makes the case that “sin does not exist as a serious idea in modern life.” Sin is no longer a description of our actions. Instead the idea of sin is now caricatured by advertisers to suggest that a product is good and pleasurable. “Sin” is more of a way to make life more exciting. Because of this shift in thinking by a post-Christian culture, Mann makes a case that the gospel needs to be reread in light of this shift so that it can speak meaningfully and sufficiently to an increasingly sinless society. He is not saying to alter the gospel message. I believe he is making the case that Christians need to alter the way we communicate the gospel to this generation. My question is, have you noticed this shift in our culture’s perspective about sin? How do your non-Christians friends define the word “sin?”
Posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago at 12:03 am. 1 comment
Very interesting read on the spiritual value of Twitter!
By Leonard Sweet Special Contributor
I have been on Twitter for less than a year, but it has already changed my life.
Less than two years old, with fewer than 50 employees—and as far as anyone can tell, no business plan—Twitter has grown so fast that the site is rickety and unreliable. You get same feeling our ancestors must have had when they turned the crank of the model-T.
But I can’t imagine life without Twitter.
While a case can be made for Twitter on the basis of its role in the communications revolution (which would lead me to defend “tweets” during worship) or in political revolutions taking place around the world (Iran, for example), I want to make a more personal case.
Twitter makes me a better Jesus disciple, partly because Twitter is my laboratory for future ministry. Here’s why.
Followership. Twitter only knows two categories: who are you following and who are your followers. Twitter’s categorical imperative is one of followership, not leadership.
Jesus’ category is “leader;” my fundamental category is “follower.” Even when Jesus calls me up to the front of the line, I still lead “from behind.”
For the last 50 years, the church has made a fetish of a word that is hard to find even once in the New Testament (“leader”) and has ignored a word that is found hundreds of times (“mathetes” or “follower,” “disciple”).
Twitter is a daily reminder that everything doesn’t rise and fall on leadership but on followership—-who am I following, and who is following me.
The name “Christian” (“little Christ”) was given to believers in Antioch (Acts 11:26) because people saw in them the Christ they followed. Paul said, “Follow me as I follow Christ.”
In Twitter’s ethic of followership, I am constantly reframing reality in ways that are more Jesus—more grace-full, more forgiving, more loving, more humorous—and helping my “followers” to better follow Christ. I am constantly on the prowl for things that could encourage, enrich, inspire.
I want my tweeps either to smile after reading one of my tweets, or to shake their head and sing, “What a Tweep We Have in Jesus.” In my ongoing battle with self-transcendence over self-absorption, Twitter has helped me become more others-focused.
For the One who taught us to be “in” the world but not “of” the world (or “out of it” either), the question is not “Would Jesus Tweet?” but “What Would Jesus Tweet?” The twitter question of “What are you doing?” has been replaced in my mind with “What is God doing?” and “Where do I see Jesus?” and “What am I paying attention to?”
With a new list of followers every day, and an unlimited number of potential followers, I am also reminded daily that the most important people in my life I haven’t met yet.
Sound bites that bite. If you can’t say it in everyday words, you probably don’t understand it yourself. And if you can’t say it in less than 140 characters, you can’t say it in a way that can connect with a Google world.
The first task of a missionary is to learn the language. Most of history’s greatest books and thinkers have distilled their thoughts into a 140-character tweet. In fact, the single killer sentence is what has changed the world.
No one was better at tweets than Jesus. Jesus was a master at sound bites that bite with terseness and immediacy. In fact, he was always twittering the gospel in pithy, memorable phrases, and even expressed his gospel in The Great Tweet: “Love one another as I have loved you.”
I suspect his followers would be well advised to RT (ReTweet) everything he said.
Surface. To say that someone is bubbling in or around the surface of a subject is not to say something nice. This is the greatest critique of Twitter: its numbing, crushing banality. Do I really need to know when you finished brushing your teeth this morning? Or what toothpaste you used?
But life is not just about the depths. Life is also about the surfaces. I spend large parts of my life with academics who spend their careers exploring the depths; many seldom come up.
People with highly sensitive seismographs for souls, like writers and artists, often rail against the shallowness of living and refuse to compromise and play in the spray. That’s my theory for the high incidence of suicidal behavior among artists and poets.
We need a theology of the surface in tandem with our theology of the depths. As Alice in Wonderland reminds us: “All this digging deep I dislike because if you dig deep all you dig is a pit into which you may fall yourself, or a well at the bottom of which there is nothing but treacle.”
In looking for something to tweet about, I find myself paying attention to life in heightened ways. With Twitter, every day is an awakening to things that never would have registered before.
Life is a bunch of little things. These little things add up, and Twitter reminds me to be grateful for the little things and to celebrate the little and the simple.
In my list of “50 Reasons Why I Love Twitter,” Reason No. 33 is “A place where serious people can think serious thoughts about trivial things.” A good beer is a subtle symmetry between froth and substance. A good life is a dance of depth and surface.
One of the highest compliments you can pay me? “Sweet, you do shallow well.”
Global Commons. This is what initially convinced me to enter the twitterverse. Social media guru Aaron Linne challenged me to think of Twitter as a medieval village green. If we were living a millennium ago, our lives would revolve around a village commons. In the course of a day, we would physically pass each other many times and exchange greetings: “How was your lunch?” “Who you working for now?” “What is in your hands?”
Wireless technology enables those multiplicity of personal exchanges to take place with people from around the world. Twitter is the new global commons.
Like soothsayers reading entrails, I conduct twea-leaf readings. Twitter both connects me to others and to what’s hot, what’s current, what’s the reigning gossip and styles of this new global village.
I like to think of myself as the “pastor” of this Twitter parish. In the course of a day’s passings (“postings”) on the village commons, I try to find ways to encourage my “parishioners” (Barnabas blasts, I call them), and be a positive, healing energy in their lives.
The question all social media pose is one easily answered: Are the residents of your global commons reflective of our global community or are they only mirrors of yourself? How many people of different races, classes, continents and religions are part of your social universe?
Social Solitude. I’m a hermit at heart. Twitter is made for hermits. It enables me to shut myself off without shutting anything or anybody out. It enables me to simultaneously give myself away and never stop hiding. You might call the twitterscape one of social solitude.
My life is like a barbell: lots of weight on the social end and lots of weight on solitude end—with not much in between other than the handle (read: long lines at airports) that connects the socialness with the solitude. Twitter now lets me do my solitude in society; it lets me be anonymous in groups.
For all of these reasons, Twitter has changed my life and made me into a better follower of Jesus.
Dr. Sweet is the E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism at Drew University, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at George Fox University.
