Painting Fakes

For a short time, David Warner's Aussie cricketing mates called him 'The Rev', short for Reverend, after he announced his intention to moderate his combative on-field behaviour.  Over the last year that's gone out the window, and now he has been caught cheating  along with some other team-mates and banned for 12 months.  So definitely not 'the Rev' now.  Much less a prophet. Still, I can't help noticing the resemblance with Moses, the Hebrew stolen generation kid who ended up leading his people out of their Egyptian slavery. There's a lot to Moses' story but you could see it as a spiritual journey in four phases.  In the first, he is oblivious to his true identity.  Not that he is necessarily ignorant of his Hebrew heritage, but he has grown up in a high-status Egyptian household and can confidently look forward to a career in the Egyptian hierarchy and a comfortable, successful life.   In the second phase, he is awakened to the...

A few years ago I wrote a series of posts  on the four fall stories in Genesis.  Ever since, I've been thinking about writing a series on the Patriarchs, the cunning tricksters who are the forefathers of the nation of Israel. Before I do I thought I'd write about Abram/Abraham's nephew and foster son Lot and the divine destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The city of Sodom provides the source for our English word "sodomy", meaning anal sex, because of the incident in this tale where the men of Sodom threaten to pack-rape their male visitors.  However, this is not a story about homosexuality, it is a story about hospitality. Our story begins in Genesis 18 with Abraham sitting at the door of his tent, pitched in a shady spot under a grove of oak trees.  It starts by telling the reader that 'the Lord appeared to Abraham'.  However, when Abraham looks up he sees three men.  Does he know that this is the Lord and his two angels?  The story is ambiguous on...

A few years ago I wrote a series of posts on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy , and for a while after that I kept coming back to the subject.  I stopped eventually, partly because I ran out of things to say, and partly because it was like shooting fish in a barrel.  The idea of an inerrant Bible just doesn't make any sense once you've read it and realised what kind of book (or collection of books) it actually is. However, at the risk of going over old ground and boring everyone, I've just read a fantastic book by Peter Enns called The Bible Tells Me So...Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It.   Don't bother reading my laboured posts on the subject, just read this book instead. Enns is an Old Testament scholar.  He currently holds a chair in Biblical Studies at Eastern University in Pennsylvania.  His book jacket also tells us that he has taught at Harvard, Princeton and Fuller.  Interestingly it doesn't mention Westminster The...

This evening I get to preach on what for me is one of the most intriguing passages in the Bible, the first two chapters of Paul's letter to the Galatians.  Here's roughly what I'm going to say. Galatians is a passionate letter written by Paul to a group of churches in Galatia, shown on the map.  It's not entirely clear who he's writing to but the explanation that makes the most sense to me is that the recipients were the churches in the south of the province - at Iconium, Lystra, Derbe and Pisidian Antioch - which he and Barnabas founded on the first journey they took after being commissioned by the church in Syrian Antioch.  He certainly seems to have known his correspondents personally and talks to them as a spiritual father.  These cities were multicultural communities, Greek colonies in a region inhabited by Celts, ruled by Roman overlords, and the churches there would almost certainly have been multiracial. The letter addresses one of the most cruc...

Bart Ehrman is that most valuable type of person, a serious scholar who loves to explain his complex field in plain English for non-specialists.  He has an extremely fancy academic title - the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina.  He is an expert on early Christian texts, including the New Testament and various other early writings that were not included in the canon of scripture. His spiritual journey is like that of so many sceptical Biblical scholars and writers.  He started on the path of Christian fundamentalism, heading off to Moody Bible Institute straight from high school to study scripture, then wending his way through the slightly less conservative Wheaton College before finally heading for the quite sceptical faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary.  Along the way he became adept at Greek and Hebrew and developed a passion for analysing original texts of ancient documents. I've been...

So, I get to preach again after a long break, and my subject this Sunday is Psalm 116.  Here's what I think I'm going to say, or something like it. The Book of Psalms is a song book, an anthology of works by different authors written at different times in Israel's history.  It probably came together in its current form in the post-exilic period, but many of the songs it contains are pre-exilic, with a lot attributed to King David.  No musical notation has survived (it's possible that none ever existed) and we have no way of knowing how the songs were sung, but what appear to be musical instructions appear in some of the psalms and the title of the book itself comes from the Greek word for songs accompanied by stringed instruments. In principle, this collection is similar to the collections we use today for church worship - The Australian Hymn Book, say, or the various collections of Scripture in Song or The Source.   Like these contemporary collections, ...

The final fall story in Genesis is the story of the Tower of Babel, found in Genesis 11:1-9.  Here it is. 1 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. 3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” 5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” 8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they...

Sandwiched between the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden and the story of Noah and the flood is a very different kind of fall story - the story of Cain and Abel.  Here's the story as it appears in Genesis 4. Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. 3 In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the LORD. 4 And Abel also brought an offering—fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The LORD looked with favor on Abel and his offering, 5 but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast. 6 Then the LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? 7 If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” 8 Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Ab...

Finkelstein and Silberman  suggest that the book of Genesis began life as a series of orally transmitted stories which were turned into literary form relatively late in the piece.  It is possible that the first eleven chapters, in particular, consist of orginally unconnected material, with the genealogies serving as a literary device to tie them together. If this is true, then it is possible to see that there is not one but four stories of the Fall in Genesis.  There is the one we usually associate with it, found in Genesis 2 and 3 .  Then there are the stories of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4), the Great Flood (Genesis 6-8) and the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11).  All four stories feature the same core elements - humans fail to live up to God's standard, God intervenes to punish them or prevent them from doing more harm, and there is a form of redemption at the end.  I'll talk about Cain and Abel and Babel later, but first the Flo...

Prompted by reading an essay by Wendell Berry, I've been thinking about the second and third chapters of Genesis and what they have to say about our current environmental predicament. Many scholars think these two chapters represent the earliest Hebrew version of the creation account, with the opening chapter added at a later date.  They record the creation of humanity, and the fall of the first humans from their state of innocence. We are accustomed to think of ourselves as somewhat separate from nature, as shown in the diagram below. We understand that we are, to some extent, natural beings.  We know we need to eat and drink, that we get sick.  However, we see ourselves as fundamentally different from the rest of creation.  Hence, we see "nature" as something to be conserved, managed or exploited by us.  This is why we are able to talk so easily about balancing environmental and economic factors, for instance, as if the economy was something seper...