Balancing Pose

The Bible in 90 Days

Download Schedule (.pdf) for reading the Bible in 90 days.

When I heard that my colleagues, Pastors Chris Enstad and Clint Schnekloth were starting on June 1 to read through the Bible in 90 days, I decided to make another attempt. I’ve never managed to read straight through the Bible. In fact, my attempts have led me to wonder where the idea is even all that useful a way to access Scripture. I love intensive reading of Scripture, focusing on a few sentences or paragraphs and relating those to the book they are in. Extensive reading is another matter: I feel simultaneously rushed and bored trying to gobble down big chunks of text each day. 

However, I really like Chris and Clint, and I respect their instincts for ministry and for living the Christian faith. “If they’re doing this,” I said to myself, “It must be worth doing.” So I’m trying again. Doubts about the project’s merit for me notwithstanding, I’ve just finished the reading for Day Two.

The Message?

I’ve chosen The Message as my version, mostly because when I have tried to read a real Bible translation, I get stuck in books like Leviticus or Numbers. I’m hoping the conversational style and popular vocabulary of Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase will help me make it all the way through the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments.

Today's Highlights

Genesis 1: "Lights! Camera! Action!"

The first chapter of Genesis is fun to read in The Message. God sounds like a play director, shouting direction to actors, stage manager, lighting guys. There are one-word sentences with exclamation points (e.g. “Light!”) and a count of the days whose form actually mirrors the Hebrew (e.g. “Day Four.”)

Genesis 18: Entertaining Angels Unawares

I have always loved the story in Genesis 18 about the three men coming to visit Abraham. These are the guys who elicit laughter from an eavesdropping Sarah when they tell Abraham that they will return “this time next year,” and Sarah will have borne a son.

The news of Isaac’s birth is both funny and joyful, but the part of the story I like best is the first part, when Abraham sees the strangers from a distance and runs out in the heat of the day to greet them. Won’t they stop for a while, he asks, just to rest in the shade perhaps? The strangers agree and (presumably) rest; meanwhile Abraham and Sarah shift into high gear, slaughtering and roasting a calf (how long must that have taken?), baking bread, getting milk, and otherwise working to put "a morsel" (18:5, KJV) before the travelers. This story is for everyone who ever over-prepared for a special meal; more profoundly, perhaps, it reminds an audience thousands of years removed from Abraham that by showing hospitality to strangers, we may, like him, “entertain angels unawares” (cf. Hebrews 13:2, KJV).

Retooling Greek for Parish Ministry

I'm teaching a Kairos continuing education class at Luther Seminary this month on how to get your Greek serviceable again if it's been a while since you worked with it. Here's the schedule, pending approval from the Kairos office. You can register here.

Retooling Greek for Parish Ministry

June 21-25, 2010

Luther Seminary - Stub Hall Lounge

Mary Hinkle Shore, professor of New Testament

________________________________________________________________________

Monday

                                                      1-2:30 p.m.     Welcome, Introductions, Shape of the Week; Vocabulary

                                                      2:30-2:45 p.m.      Break

                                                2:45-3:40 p.m.            The Article

                                                      3:40-3:50 p.m.      Break

                                                      3:50-4:40 p.m.      Verbs

                                                      4:40 p.m.     Class ends

________________________________________________________________________

Tuesday

                                                      8:30-9:45 a.m.      Participles

                                                      10 a.m.    Chapel and Break

                                                      10:45 a.m.    Little Words: Prepositions, Conjunctions, & Particles

                                                      12:15 p.m.    Class ends

   1:30-3:00 p.m.     Optional afternoon session on BibleWorks software

________________________________________________________________________

Wednesday

                                                      8:30-9:45 a.m.      Infinitives, Nouns & Adjectives, Pronouns

                                                      10 a.m.   Chapel and Break

                                                      10:45 a.m.     Studying Words: Using Concordance Tools & Lexicons

                                                      12:30 p.m.     Class ends

   1:30-3:00 p.m.      Optional afternoon session on Accordance Bible software

            ________________________________________________________________________

Thursday

                                                      8:30-9:45 a.m.      Process for Greek in Sermon Preparation (using texts for Fifth Sunday after Pentecost).

                                                      10 a.m.     Chapel and Break

                                                      10:45 a.m.   Process for Greek in Sermon Preparation, part two.

                                                      12:15 p.m.    Class ends

   1:30-3:00 p.m.       Optional afternoon session on web tools for Greek study

                                                      ________________________________________________________________________

Friday

                                                      8:30-9:45 a.m.      Process for Using Greek in Bible Study Preparation

                                                      10 a.m.     Chapel and Break

                                                      10:45 a.m.    Resource Fair & Further Study Options

                                                      12:30 p.m.    Class ends

Required Reading

Webb, Joseph M. and Robert Kysar, Greek for Preachers. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2002.

Shore, Mary Hinkle. “How Do I Keep My Greek (or Get It Back)?” Working Preacher, posted 11/16/09. URL http://www.workingpreacher.org/texts.aspx?article_id=278, accessed May 31, 2010.

Other Resources

The bookstore will have two laminated Greek study guides on hand from Zondervan, an introductory one by William Mounce and an intermediate one by Daniel Wallace.

Shore on The Shack

On company time, I read this book. Students have asked what I thought of it, and I decided it was time I knew what people were talking about. Beyond that, two students in my Faith and Fiction class chose this book for their final project. So, I read it. 

"What is your image of God?"

The major benefit of the book is that it provides a way into theological conversations for people who might not otherwise have them, and for people who might not otherwise question their images and assumptions about God. The main character is shaken up by interacting with the Holy Trinity in the forms of an African American woman, a homely Jew who wears jeans and a button-down shirt, and an Asian woman. The book is fiction (though a fictional foreword might lead some readers astray on this point), and as fiction, it might be easier to talk about and disagree with than Scripture.

The story's news about God:

1. God is good and trustworthy, even in a world where little girls are stolen from their families, raped (?), and murdered.
2. God doesn't stop horrors like this because humans can choose independence and they have, to their peril.
3. The members of the Trinity love each other and want humans to share that love without being forced into it. To stop horrible things would be to force love.

Independence as the Problem

The answer to the problem of evil here seems to be that God limits God's self because God did not and does not want to force people to love him/her/them. The human quest for independence is the problem: "All evil flows from independence, and independence is your choice," Papa (the first person of the Trinity) says to Mack at one point (Kindle location 3040, about 3/4 of the way through the book).

How then to be connected to God?

The book does very little to answer the question about how one might seek to be in relationship with God and sustain that relationship. How might we humans, with all this free will, choose something besides independence if one wanted to? Not in the usual ways:

Ritual is a bad thing in this book, as if "empty" were its understood modifier. The narrator says of Mack and the Big Three that near the end of their time together, "Without any ritual, without ceremony, they savored the warm bread and shared the wine and laughed about the stranger moments of the weekend" (Kindle 3742, near p. 263).That is all we see or hear of anything that looks like the sacramental life of the church.

The Bible is never mentioned as a reliable source of information about how to be in relationship with God. 

Jesus is not meant to be an example of the godly life. "Seriously," Jesus says to Mack, "my life was not meant to be an example to copy. Being my follower is not trying to 'be like Jesus,' it means for your independence to be killed" (Kindle 2359, near p.166).

The only use of the Law is as something to convict people. "Papa" says about the commandments, "Actually, we wanted you to give up trying to be righteous on your own. It was a mirror to reveal just how filthy your face gets when you live independently" (Kindle 3234, near p. 228). Since Jesus has fulfilled the law, it has become, "a promise that we fulfill in you" (Kindle 3238, near p. 228). This is one of the few biblical allusions in the book, echoing Romans 8:4.

Religion, along with politics and economics, is part of the "man-created trinity of terrors that ravages the earth and deceives those I care about," Jesus says (Kindle 2854, near p. 201).

Trust = ?

So what is a God-lover to do? It is not clear how to connect, nor is it clear what connection with God would look like in real life. The God figures talk about trust as the hallmark of connection, specifically trust that God is good, but what difference does that make?

• Does trust mean not being mad at God?
• Does trust mean believing that "all things work together for good?"
• Does trust mean accepting our own and others' suffering peacefully?

The book is clear that judging is a bad thing and that forgiving is a good thing. (The best line in the book may be from Papa: "Forgiveness is not about forgetting, Mack. It is about letting go of another person's throat" [Kindle 3584, near p. 252]. Beyond these two values, it is not clear to me how Mack or anyone else's life would be lived differently if they chose trust in God over independence. 

Neither Dangerous Nor a Must-Read

Finally, I do not think The Shack is dangerous to Christian faith, nor do I think it is a book "not to be missed." In my reading, it leaves the questions about evil that it raises unanswered. The value of the book is that it has gotten people talking about God, and it has opened up the possibility for many that loving God is not about keeping rules or working hard to stay on a short-tempered God's good side.