Round the Sphere Again: On Bible Study

Arc Blogging
Or is is blog arcing? Have you seen the blogs at BibleArc? They “allow you to view the work of a proficient arcer” as he blogs through a book of the Bible. There are two running currently, one for 2 Peter and one for Phillippians. There’s a completed blog for Colossians and a new one starting soon for 1 Peter. What’s more, you don’t need to be a registered user to access these, and you can subscribe  by email or RSS feed.

Word Meaning
Our English language changes and so did Greek. This means we can’t just take a word’s Classical Greek meaning and “insist that it is the word’s meaning in a specific biblical context.” (Bill Mounce at Koinonia)

Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy 12

What do Christians mean when they say the Bible is inerrant? The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy tells us what leading inerrantist mean by inerrancy. I’ll be posting a section of this statement each week until I’ve posted the whole thing.

You can read previously posted sections of this statement in by clicking here. After a preface and a short statement, the Chicago Statement contains a section called Articles of Affirmation and Denial.

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Article X.

We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.

We deny that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of Biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant.

Relishing Rhubarb

Learning to Love It
I love rhubarb now, but I haven’t always. When I was a child, rhubarb was the one fruit we had more of than we needed, so my mother was always finding ways to “use it up,” a phrase one should not use around children when referring to food you want them to like. Yes, there’s something about having an abundance of something that makes it seem ordinary and boring, or maybe even yucky.

But then I married a man who loved anything rhubarb. He grew up in a home without a mother grew things or baked things—or used things up, for that matter—so rhubarb treats were a rare thing. Instead of birthday cake, he’d request a rhubarb pie with half the called-for sugar. He was someone who relished his rhubarb.

For the first years of our marriage, we had no supply of fresh rhubarb, which meant that birthday pie was the only rhubarb we ate, and even that took some careful planning to accomplish. Struggling to have something can turn the ordinary into something cherished, and before long, I was anticipating the birthday pie as much as he was. I was starting to relish my rhubarb, too.

While it was it’s scarcity that made me love it more, I think rhubarb is also an acquired taste. Nothing else is quite like it, and it’s very tart. A Korean student I knew learned to stomach almost every North American food except rhubarb; even the sound of the word caused her face to crinkle up. Rhubarb was an acquired taste she had no intention acquiring. (I could sympathize: It turns out I felt the same way about her Korean fish soup.)

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