Painting Fakes

Just before Christmas we had great footage of chaos in European airports as snowstorms left travellers stranded in mid-Christmas journey.  Yesterday we had a lucky escape from the Australian version as storms saw planes turned back from Brisbane airport all morning.  Fortunately we flew in the evening and were only an hour late, but there was chaos in Sydney airport as passengers queued for hours and airline staff desperately pleaded for Sydney residents to go home and try again the next day. The British government is talking about whether it might have to upgrade its airports to make them snow-proof.  I don't think you can do the same for tropical storms.  There's no protection from wind, thunder and lightening except to stay indoors and wait it out.  If it blows hard enough even that doesn't help. In any case, I wonder how temporary this will all be.  It's not too many years ago that we would spend 24 hours on a bus to Sydney ...

It's nearly Christmas.  Most of us are getting ready to hang out with our extended family, while those of us who are a long way from family are most likely lining up surrogates to stave off the loneliness.  This has come to be what Christmas is about for most Australians.  So with that in mind, here's a little Christmas gem from Kenneth Bailey's marvellous book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes . In our traditional view of the Christmas story, based on Luke 2:1-7, Joseph and Mary set off for Bethelehem.  When they arrive, however, the inn is full and they are forced to sleep out in the stable, where Jesus is born.  The story has become a symbol of Jesus' poverty and his status as a social outcast.  In Bailey's view it is also very European, and is a very unlikely scenario in the context of Middle Eastern culture.  Firstly, Joseph was a descendent of David, going to the City of David.  Hence he almost certainly had relatives in town and these w...

For my last birthday my daughter gave me a selection  of booklets from the Penguin "Great Ideas" series.  They're extended extracts (100 or so pages each) from great works of literature or philosophy.  In my little pile are extracts from Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Fyodor Dostoevsky and this selection of essays by George Orwell.  Both Penguin and my daughter know me well - a full volume of Kant would wait on my shelf for years, but I can promise you the 100 page version will be read pretty soon.  They're also good for plane flights.  I read about half the Orwell on a flight to Sydney last week.   Orwell would have been a great blogger - he doesn't waste words, he draws you into the world he describes, he is prepared to live his art not just read about it, and he is interested in a wide range of things.   Here's something I thought was especially clever.  One of the essays is called The Art of Donald McGill. ...

Everyone who's on Facebook knows (I hope) that anything you post can become public property.  You may think that your privacy setting will protect you, but if you'd be embarassed to see that photo in your local newspaper, then don't post it. What's clear from the unfolding Wikileaks saga is that the same applies to diplomatic correspondence.  You may think your cables are confidential and sent through a secure network, but electronic data is so easily transportable that you have to expect that sooner or later it will get out. This is part of the reason why the focus on Julian Assange is misplaced.  You will have noticed that even though Assange is in prison, the leaks are still being published.  The internet is a dispersed medium, definitively a network, and if you cut off one person from it you damage that person, but the network just finds another pathway.  In response to the push in the US and elsewhere to prosecute Assange, many jounalists have pointed...

On the ABC News this evening we heard the Republican leader in the US Senate declaring that Julian Assange is a "hi-tech terrorist" and should be treated as an "enemy combatant".  Of course since we've been fighting a "war on terror" it's become a lot easier to say such things.  But just who is Assange and his Wiki-leaks army terrorising? Well, although new bombshells are exploding every day they seem to be entirely of the metaphorical sort, and I don't recall anyone ever being killed by a metaphor.  Of couse, it's possible that amongst the material there is confidential information which might compromise the safety of, say, an intelligence operative or informer, and this would be of some concern.  Australian Observer , a former senior Defence and Foreign Affairs official, strongly doubts it - the security of such contacts is much tighter than that. It seems that the main people being terrorised are diplomats and politicians, quaking i...

I guess this is a kind of addendum to all those posts on biblical inerrancy .  It's also the 100th post on Painting Fakes which is more than any of the Australians managed in the first innings in Adelaide (cricket joke, for the Americans among you).  The more I do it, the more I love it. Among the incredibly wide variety of types of people in the world, there are two that I'd like to mention in this post.  The first are "black and white people".  They like things to be clear.  It's right or it's wrong, it's true or it's false.  The second are "shades of grey" people.  They rarely see the world in absolute terms.  Something may be true in a certain sense and false in another sense.  It depends what you mean by "true". This distinction is a matter of psychology, not belief.  For instance, both Ken Ham and Richard Dawkins are black and white people.  The content of their beliefs differs, but they have a similar approach to belief...

During this series on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy , some people have suggested to me (with greater or lesser degrees of subtlety) that I should maybe explain what I think, not just what I don't.  Of course, I've been doing that all along to some degree, but as a closer for the series I'd like to spell it out as clearly as I can. Of course all along I've been using the Chigago Statements as a foil against which to work out what I think.  It's still developing.  Nor do I claim anything close to inerrancy for myself - I expect lots of people to disagree in various ways and I expect a lot of them will turn out to be right.  I'm no Bible scholar, and none of what I say here is original.  Still, here goes... 1. The Bible is the primary source for Christian belief Everything important that we believe as Christians is ultimately sourced back to Bible.  It's where we learn about God and about Christ, it's where we learn how to pray and how to...

A couple of times in this series on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy I've mentioned poetry in the Bible and I'd like to deal with this question a little more fully. Article VI of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics says WE AFFIRM   that the Bible expresses God's truth in propositional statements, and we declare that biblical truth is both objective and absolute. The problem with this affirmation is that it is simply and clearly wrong for large parts of the Bible.  Even the framers of the Statement on Inerrancy recognised this, saying in Article XVIII WE AFFIRM  that the text of Scripture is to be interpreted by grammatico-historical exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and devices.... They knew this to be the case, but they obviously didn't know what to do with it, or they couldn't have put their article about "propositional truth" in the follow-up statement. So what's propositional truth?  Mr Google defi...

After my brief mention of Richard Thompson's latest album, Dream Attic, in a recent article I received an e-mail from the man himself *.   He said You little s***, how dare you blow me off like that?  You've got a hide, using me as a stepping stone to a review of an album by that young upstart Martha Tilston.  I was sharing stages with her dad when she was still in nappies.  I may even have changed her nappies myself - I can't be sure, there was a lot going on at the time.  Anyway, did you even @#$% listen to my album, you *&^%$? I have to admit he has a point.  RT is one of my musical heroes .  And I had only listened to the cd a couple of times when I used it as a starting point for my review of Martha Tilston's beautiful album.  Kind of a march of the generations thing, you know.  So, with reverent apologies to the great man, here's a more mature reflection on his latest.  Thompson is known for three thi...

A little while ago I wrote about the way we tend to substitute intellectual works for moral ones , insisting that assent to various doctrinal positions is essential to be considered a "Christian".  I just finished reading Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time by Marcus Borg and was delighted to find a very similar thought, although expressed much better than mine.  He talks about Jesus as a teacher of wisdom, and how his wisdom was opposed to the conventional wisdom of his day.  He then reflects on his own experience. I grew up as a Lutheran, in a tradition that emphasised salvation by grace and not by "works of the law"....As Lutherans, we all knew that we weren't saved by "works". Rather, we were saved by "grace through faith". Yet this strong emphasis on grace got transformed into a new system of conventional wisdom, not only in my mind but, I think, in the minds of many Lutherans, and many Christians generally.  The emphasis was pla...

My relative and fellow blogger Luke has also been blogging on inerrancy, coming from quite a different standpoint to me.  Most recently he pointed to Jesus' parable of the mustard seed , in which some of the botanical details are not quite correct.  This is a clear case where literal truth is beside the point - indeed, Jesus' "errors" of fact appear to be quite deliberate and are used to heighten his message. I've been thinking about another Bible story this past week, in relation to the Chicago Statement's insistence on the  absence of contradication in the Bible.  This is one of my favourite Old Testament stories - the story of David's desire to build the temple.  The first part of this story is found in pretty much identical form in 2 Samuel 7, and in 1 Chronicles 17.  Quoting from the Chronicles version, here is what happens. After David was settled in his palace, he said to Nathan the prophet, “Here I am, living in a house of cedar, while...

We're having a lot of sound and fury about bank regulations at the moment, but I've been noticing another debate that's been going just a fiercely, although with slightly fewer headlines.  It's the debate about cutting spending. Apparently, in the "little red book" of briefings provided by Treasury and Finance to the incoming Labor government, they recommended substantial cuts to government spending.  This was needed, they said, to prevent the economy from growing too fast and putting upward pressure on inflation and interest rates. What occurred to me (and I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of this) is that Keynesian economics has left us with an inbuilt tension in the way we think about Government spending.  After the Great Depression governments in the developed world adopted Keynes' idea that government spending should be used to smooth out fluctuations in the market economy.  When there was a downturn, governments should increase t...

I have to confess that I have a soft spot for Ken Ham, a local boy who made it to the big stage.  He grew up in the same Brisbane suburb as me.  I had a slight friendship with his younger brother in my early teens, and Ken himself taught biology at the high school I attended.  In the year I graduated, he quit teaching to start the Creation Science Foundation here in Queensland, and a few years later joined forces with his friend and mentor Henry Morris to spread the idea of young earth creationism in the USA.  He is still doing it to this day. In my early 20s I went to a Creation Science event at which Ken shared the platform with an American biologist.  At the time I was very receptive to creationism and was impressed by the American's presentation on the mathematical improbability of evolution.  I remember being less impressed with Ken's presentation, but in hindsight it was probably more to the point.  The Book of Genesis, he said, is a...

A bit of cross posting here because I'm feeling self-satisfied.  Pride comes before a fall but I just finished writing some new Christmas songs that I'm feeling proud of.  Check them out over at my song site .

Some further thoughts on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy .  Four years after the original Chicago Statement, the same group of conservative theologians had a follow-up summit and issued a second statement, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics .  This statement aimed to clarify some of the content of the original, and to explain a little more carefully how the participants meant the bible to be interpreted. Once again, the core of the statement is a series of affirmations and denials and each would be worthy of some comment.  I'd just like to highlight a couple.  Firstly from Article VI WE AFFIRM that the Bible expresses God's truth in propositional statements, and we declare that biblical truth is both objective and absolute. We further affirm that a statement is true if it represents matters as they actually are, but is an error if it misrepresents the facts. WE DENY that, while Scripture is able to make us wise unto salvation, ...

This morning in church we read the story of Jesus healing the centurion's slave from Luke 7:1-10.  I found it hard to listen to the sermon because I kept being distracted by the story.  Here's what was distracting me. This story takes place in the village of Capernaum and has three main characters - the centurion's slave, the centurion himself, and Jesus.  The slave is the trigger for the story: ...a centurion's servant, whom his master valued highly, was sick and about to die. Other translations say that the slave "was dear to him".  There's some ambiguity here - was the slave a loved member of his household, or a valuable piece of property?  Either way, what follows in the story indicates that when Jesus is asked to heal this slave it is not seen as an act of service towards the slave, but towards the centurion himself. This is not surprising when you think of who the centurion was.  He was a Roman army officer, roughly equivalent to a capt...

My birthday is long gone and finally the new Richard Thompson CD that I ordered with my birthday money has arrived.  Because it's my birthday I ordered the deluxe version which includes a set of acoustic demos and I'm glad I did because to my mind a band doesn't always add much to Thompson's amazing guitar playing.  I saw him live in Brisbane a few years ago, standing alone on the stage of the Tivoli, and didn't miss the rest of the band for a moment. I must admit though that the new album is a little patchy, and I'm getting more enjoyment out of the one that arrived earlier, Martha Tilston's Lucy and the Wolves.   I caught on to Tilston when I picked up a copy of Milkmaids and Architects in a second hand shop and couldn't understand how anyone could part with it.  If you've never heard her, listen to this beautiful performance of "Music of the Moon".  Lucy is better, if you need to make that kind of comparison. It has a quiet...

I've been really enjoying Australian Observer's coverage of the Afghanistan debate and other such matters.  One of the things he's highlighted is that while our politicians are talking about defeating the Taliban, the Afghani government, with the support of the US Military, is giving Taliban commanders safe conduct to attend negotiations aimed at ending their insurgency and bringing them into the political system. It reminded me of something I learnt way back in undergraduate politics.  Democracy is not secured by the will of the majority, but by the consent of the minority.  You can see this in our recent election dramas.  Despite the rhetoric and posturing, once Labor had secured the votes of enough independents the Liberals accepted that they were once more the Opposition.  They tried to disrupt and block, but only within the bounds of parliamentary procedure.  They kept turning up in Parliament, they debated, they sat down when the speaker told the...

Rupert Murdoch, one of Australia's most valuable exports, has recently taken his private jet to London to deliver the inaugural Baroness Thatcher Lecture .  Here's what he has to say about the woman who was British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. My words tonight will be flavoured by those of Margaret Thatcher herself. We sometimes forget how pithy she is – how wise her thoughts, and how pertinent they remain even though she left office long ago. And we cannot forget that she is no ideologue, but a person of pragmatism, an optimist whose optimism is founded in her faith in the individual.  Hers is a generous spirit, a spirit based in an appreciation of personal potential and not of an impersonal ideology. As she said: "With all due respect to the drafters of the American Declaration of Independence, all men and women are not created equal, at least in regard to their characters, abilities and aptitudes." It was that appreciation of individual aptitude and ab...

I was talking with someone on the Internet about Biblical inerrancy, and said as I often do that I didn't really understand properly what the term meant.  He referred me to a document called the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy .  This document was produced in 1978 at a conference sponsored by a group called the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy.  Its 300 signatories included a number of evangelical luminaries of the time including JI Packer, Francis Schaeffer and RC Sproule.  The same group produced two more statements in succeeding years and the second, The Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics , is a kind of follow up and explanation of the first. The core of the statement is a set of 19 articles, each of which is framed as an affirmation of what the authors believe, followed by a denial of the position they are refuting.  It's a pithy, elegant statement written by some highly intelligent men, and it certainly helped me to...

The news here in Australia is full of the canonisation of the first Australian Saint, Mary MacKillop , founder of the Order of St Joseph.  Being a Protestant, I've never quite got the whole sainthood thing.  We were taught that all of us are saints (sanctified ones) and that this comes about as a result of God's grace.  We were also taught that it's wrong to pray to anyone other than God himself - my evangelical teachers were very big on "there is one God, and one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ the Righteous" from 1 Timothy 2:5. As a result I've watched the whole thing with mixed emotions - not only bafflement, but pleasure, irony and cynicism. Pleasure because for a change we are celebrating a national hero whose life was dedicated to doing good.  Mary MacKillop was a woman whose mission was to care for poor women and children, found schools and lift people up out of poverty.  She wasn't afraid to take on the church to do so either, and...