Some thoughts on "Atheism"

What if words are just human inventions that help us survive? I believe that might be possible, but let's have a think about the implications for "atheists".

What might 'theism' mean? That a person believes in a form of divine consciousness independent of humankind? What would define that consciousness as divine? Eternal? Maybe, let's go with that. Now what if a person considers such a being or beings to exist, but feels that they are not relational gods. This "theist" feels and practices no allegiance to the gods. This would be a distinctly narrow view of theism that bypasses the social dynamics that seem to have turbo-powered the development and evolution of our human brains. True theism is always attached to a larger social religious landscape informed by the religions of today.

In parallel, you might have a person who feels belonging and relationship within the context of a faith community. The second person is governed to an equal degree by the communal values as all other members, their only difference being that this person has a sneaky feeling that actual existence of a god may not be necessary beyond the collective symbolism clearly at work binding the community in its values and goals. The values and goals are of maximal importance and the person feels strong allegiance to both the community and the values. They even can experience powerful cathartic sensations as they worship and pray with other believers. They consider life and relationships a privilege to be treasured and would never want to suggest that a person should stop their religious convictions if they were clearly the means by which a person understands, improves and fits into the world.

This last part: about treasuring life and not opposing those with literal religious convictions is key to understanding why the term generates misunderstanding. "The atheist" is commonly understood to mean opposing religious conviction: "you should not believe it, it's nothing but a bunch of lies and contradictions"!

Here, there are commonly a couple of dynamics at play. Firstly, a person may commonly have experienced, as mild as it might appear, a form of power abuse at the hands of those in charge in a religious institution and be reacting against that. Secondly, in light of plausible explanatory alternatives for the existence of all things, there is no reason given as to why the first form of theism as defined above could not be granted (an uninvolved deity). In light of these problems I want to ask:

1. What does it even mean to assert that a religion is "true" or even "real", when the adopted stories are indisputably held authentically and prove powerful to unite a community to positive action?
2. Why even bother to assert that you are an atheist? Why even enter the conversation?

In my next post, I want to address the possibility of "lies and contradictions" in the Christian faith.

Ethics of grace: the key Christian USP?

When I think about my experience of what is uniquely special to me about my Christian faith, the one thing I'd like to incarnate more and see multiplied around me, I think it might be best described as grace. That's not to say that I think that grace might trump love, but I do also happen to agree with some skeptics who consider love to run the risk of being so broad, multidimensional and cultural that it can and does leave the communicative task profoundly unfinished.  Grace less so. It too might well need some clarification, but not so much as to sideline the 100 or so competing ideas of what "love" might mean in a given context.

The best definition I can come up with is that it's like goodness on steroids! A window of hopeful confidence on a future potential good despite an unsure or even absurd human context.

The next morning I had time to read something for guidance in my reflection and installed the 2019 Bonne Semance app. 6 March was a simple testimony resting on Romans 10:9 if you believe God raised Jesus back to life and acknowledge him (Jesus) as Lord, then you'll be saved.

At first I was like, how can I fit this into my new progressive grid? Then it dawned on me. Jesus is the symbol of this raw Goodness of God, not because God is a savage endorsing child sacrifice, but because there is an historic exemplar of the group-imagined kindness of God to us. "Paying the price for us" is thus super powerful if understood through the lens of Grace. Any human can look at the great act of grace to us as humanity's new option for goodness that is not content to mete out justice and rights alone. Someone believes in me, my goodness, my inherent value, my own potential not just to live better but to love and restore as I was "designed" to do. The Christian story of Jesus gives us a powerful narrative to hang all this on and a loving gaze through which to view this exciting new twist of Goodness-perception in our species' history.

First-century Christians not responsible for solving the Tetragrammaton conundrum with kyrios

Some scholars have argued for a “later” Christian convention on naming the Tetragrammaton (Yahweh) kyrios, on the basis of a lack of extant Jewish manuscripts from the period. Unfortunately, not only is this presupposition terribly vague, but it fails to account for a) the general scarcity of pre-Christian LXX manuscripts b) the fact that this convention would have had to have been established by a very small and early pre-Pauline Jewish-Christian community for Paul to use it without any worry from 1 Corinthians onward (approx. 53 AD) contra the pattern received by Paul from his great Jewish rabbi Gamaliel, c) this community undertaking the vast project of revising the entire Septuagint with their important update to the perennial Tetragrammaton pronunciation problem, and d) this revision confusingly mimicking evidence of a more piecemeal translation process spanning many decades.

This fourfold argument is, in my view, a slam-dunk for a pre-Christian solution to the Jewish Tetragrammaton issue. I will be defending in particular this fourth point in the fourth chapter of my upcoming book Bye-Bye Lord via the Septuagint research I am presenting there. It should push Septuagint scholars instead to ask what the few desert community Greco-Jewish LXX fragments mean when they deviate from kyrios, rather than assuming that they represent the Bible the apostle Paul read and cited.

A post-Christian era kyrios innovation just does not make any sense of the data.

God is Good

Probably the oldest song I can remember singing in the evangelical church I grew up in is "God Is Good". The chorus continues with further proclamation: "I sing and shout", "we celebrate", "we know it's true": every time interspersed with, God is good.

The purpose of today's post is to propose a new model for belief in God in order to diminish religious mistrust and foster a broader understanding of faith.

My daughter used to claim that almost any meat was "chicken". Sometimes she was correct, it really was chicken, and sometimes it was something else, maybe pork. Correct or incorrect, right? For Fiona, she was working with the set of categories at her disposal, which featured different labels to most of us. She thus could be said to be identifying each piece of "chicken-like" substance "correctly". When provided new categories, she revised her definitions. Today those meat categories are rapidly coming into line with where most of us are at.

"God" is an interesting one though. The word relates to a being or beings that no-one can usually see. Despite the great coming of the incarnated Word in Jesus Christ, first century Christians still affirmed with conviction that God is invisible and immortal. My translation of 1 Timothy 6:16 reads as adapted from the NIV:

To the only one who is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see - to him be honor and might forever. Amen.

Jesus was astonishingly the physical way in which that perfection would be glimpsed - eventually leading to an extraordinary idea of him joining the father in his divine coeternal status, despite some fairly clear distinctions made in earlier times. The point, however, is twofold. Firstly, that we humans desire in earnest to gaze upon the perfectly good. Our souls drink it up. That is what Jesus enabled (see Colossians 1:15). Secondly, to return to that classic hymn, God is Good. God defines goodness. It's actually a bit like saying: goodness is goodness. It's reflected in other mystical statements like God is Love. For Christians, Jews and Muslims he necessarily defines that which is perfect.

This might sound unacceptably vague or ambiguous, but actually, there is a beautiful simplicity on offer here to which we can all have access and from which I feel sure we can all benefit. If in fact God is goodness, defining goodness and love itself, then there can literally be no squabbles about his goodness, any more than we could complain that a sandwich is not a sandwich.

The dividing line is not whether God is good or not - almost everyone has a category for "good" and almost everyone knows instinctively that that perfect measure lies outside of themselves.

Where Christianity might be said to differ from Buddhism or Humanism, for instance, might be the notion that perfect goodness should be personified (as opposed to could be personified). I don't know Buddhist thought well enough to assert this for sure, but I assume that there is healthy accommodation for the personification of Goodness, whom we might refer to as "God". Of course, Christian doctrine actually muddies the water a little in staking the claim that perfect goodness is the Godhead, but not personified as only one person, since Father, Son and Holy Spirit each are persons possessing and personifying the divine Goodness. 

Indeed, it seems to me like there is a lot of common ground here between the current human perspectives. Here is another logical step for humanity: many people would like to benefit from greater Goodness in their life, even though they don't come close to defining it or personifying it. The ancient way we have interacted for millennia to invoke such Goodness is through meditative prayer and spiritual request. Doing so collectively enhances a sense of connection, community and belonging.

What I find so appealing in this realisation of the natural appeal to pray more is that there is a natural "fit" between our human needs for 1) goodness and 2) community. 

There is a third human need concerned by the recognition of a universal Good. We need to experience gratitude. Research shows not only that regular meditation provides powerful and sustained improvement to our brain states but also that it develops our brain structures, developing our physiological capacity to be compassionate. That level of benefit runs so deep we can describe it as a need to be grateful. What religious belief provides is something precious: someone to be grateful *toward*. However, I want to be really, really careful here not to be heard to say that humans need to thank a personified Goodness (a.k.a. God) in order to develop neurologically. That's clearly false since many traditions achieve this effect simply by practising a sense of gratitude and expressing it frequently around others. What I am saying however is that the personified/personal way is a great way to tick three boxes in a way we can agree is beneficial:

Enhancing our own goodness and love

Enhancing our sense of community

Enhancing and channelling our gratitude

God really is Good, unfalsifiably so. *He* defines it. In the next post, let's think more about the next steps of relating to God: how this appeal to his perfection requires we keep our requests broad and sensitive to what our senses are telling us. Of course, to do this we will necessarily be opening the ugly can of worms that is suffering.

When 'Lord' might be OK: reading Adonai through NT glasses

WHILE I HAVE been seeking to establish a workable and scalable methodology for translating Kyrios (Greek for 'Lord') in the New Testament, I have increasingly wondered where some Lordship language might be allowed to be preserved.

I am critical of some of the shortcomings of the Eugene Nida-influenced dichotomy since it fails to account for original register and usage.

However, if we wanted to say replicate an experience of relating say 600 year-old sacred texts, such as the first century Jews were, then a scattering of understandable-yet-historical language might well be beneficial to communicate that experience. 600 years is the period separating those Jews from some super-significant events in their people's history, most notably their exile. 600 years is also the period separating us from the times in which 'Lord' was selected by Wycliffe and others as a suitable medieval title for translating Kyrios. That's an interesting parallel I'm not sure I've heard before and creates an interesting possibility.

Given the overarching desire to make the Word of God both holy and meaningful to a contemporary audience, primary titles for God and Yahweh should fulfil both criteria. However, secondary titles could be candidates for the aforementioned idea of communicating historical depth.

On these grounds, I find the idea of translating Adonai (when not occurring alongside other divine names or titles) by 'Lord' quite feasible. Once again I find myself endorsing Peterson's translation. Here is an important passage of Psalms, Ps 97:5, which reads in the NASB :

The mountains melted like wax at the presence of the Lord, 

At the presence of the Lord of the whole earth.

(Here the NASB reflects an identical reading between the two lines as translated into the Greek Septuagint: 

. . .ἀπὸ προσώπου κυρίου
    ἀπὸ προσώπου κυρίου . . . !)

The Message communicates my above concerns and 'Lord' opportunity best, however:

'The mountains take one look at God And melt, melt like wax before earth’s Lord.'

Psalm 97:5
https://my.bible.com/bible/97/PSA.97.5'The mountains take one look at God And melt, melt like wax before earth’s Lord.'

Psalm 97:5
https://my.bible.com/bible/97/PSA.97.5'The mountains take one look at God And melt, melt like wax before earth’s Lord.'

Psalm 97:5
https://my.bible.com/bible/97/PSA.97.5The mountains take one look at GOD

And melt, melt like wax before earth's Lord.

As Christians, we are sometimes exhorted to read the OT through NT glasses. Maintaining some scope for 'Lord' language when translating Adonai might align quite well with this objective.

How old is "Seigneur" in French?

Le Seigneur a quel âge?

This is an interesting question I was destined to stumble over at some point. I arrived at it following my decision to enlargen my quest for a publisher to the French-speaking market.

End November 2018, I already needed to know the history of "Lord" in English and shared my findings on the blog here: When did this "Lord" business begin?

I concluded that there was a shift at some point between the early 1000s and the late 1300s from Drihten to Lord in English.

There are some very old translations into French, the most famous and allegedly initial large-scale version was conducted by Guyart des Moulins in 1297. That is a hundred years before Wycliffe (used Lord). I don't know if the beautiful presentation of des Moulin's work is thanks to him or a scribe working under him, but it's well worth a look.

Guyard des Moulins uses Seigneur. Here's a passage I located in Proverbs 9:10 (which you can view online in full here):

In short, both Lord and Seigneur really do date back to the medieval times and demonstrate the sticking power of these sacred terms once translated, even in the face of contemporary redundancy.

Lord's entrenchment in summary (historical factors)

OUR PREVIOUS STUDY on the historical factors impacting Lord's entrenchment was a little in-depth. Here then are a few short words in summary:

The word we frequently translate by ‘Lord’ came to our Medieval translators drenched in sanctity, via prohibitions about the Name from the texts themselves, centuries of faithful copying and the special sanctifying shorthand of nomina sacra. Subsequent history indicates that once established, the translated terms would be slow or even impossible to evolve.

In my next post, we will examine the more contemporary factors that anchor 'Lord' into some of the most modern and dynamic Bible translations of our times.