Sometimes a speaker must adapt to their audience rather than wait for the audience to adapt to them. This has come to a real threshold the last couple of months. There is no vigilance by scholars or lay people on the topic of holy - the ability to hold a topic in the attention span long enough for it to make a difference. So this is one of those times that I must adapt to my audience and start equipping them further back in the process.
As I have dealt with holiness, I have noticed that Christian minds especially are not well-equipped to handle the topic. Their emotions and thinking are sloppy. I don't say this to insult anyone. But "the fear of Yahweh is the beginning of wisdom". So in this case, the fear that our thinking may be sloppy is the right place to begin. So I am taking a new approach.
I'm narrowing my focus in TEACHING AND MINISTRY (down from holiness) due to emotional aimlessness and due to a lack of mental focus or over-focus among Christians. So the solution, I figure, is to focus on the first health the US and Christians in the US need - mental health. I'll deal with world mental health later, since the issues are different across the globe. I'll also go back to other health areas under holiness later.
Please don't think that I have lost my vigilance on holiness. I am not at all distracted from the topic, but there comes a time as a teacher when adaption is your only option. Even my supervisor at my current seminary didn't seem to get what I was accomplishing. So I believe that there are basics that are missing. I need to provide those to those I teach.
If you go to my communication basics blog, I will be producing much more there than here for the time being. I am also under a self-imposed deadline to finish the transcript for my book by the end of July - "Mental Health for Everybody". It will focus on the mind and how it is supposed to work and how we should equip our minds as opposed to the current approach. That will then form a basis both emotionally and logically for what holiness means by definition, by implication and by significance.
Go there for more. Thank you for your understanding. I will say this, I have more and more reasons to believe from the biblical text and not from etymology or cognate languages that holy as translated from words in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek means ethical or moral wholeness. Have a blessed day.
In Christ,
Jon
Showing posts with label greater. Show all posts
Showing posts with label greater. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 09, 2014
Wednesday, February 05, 2014
Holy: Understanding it Better Through Understanding Context Errors
Perhaps no other discipline than anthropology warns about importing outsider ideas into insider ideas to interpret a context. Just yesterday, I read a fascinating article on how the Ancient Hebrew alphabet of 22 letters could possibly have been expanded into 66 letters at one time in its history. In other words, each letter could have been written 3 different ways to enhance communication. I don't think we do that in our context (English in my case). We can easily miss patterns like this one and then substitute our own.
My special concern when I mention that is the idea that we see words as synonymously parallel that may instead have a different relationship. I first became aware of this through a commentator (I'm sorry this older commentator now eludes me -- it could have been Adam Clarke) who explained the way our English translators dealt with the translation of righteousness and justice from the Hebrew and which contexts would the form for justice be translated instead as judgment and that judgment meant both righteousness and justice altogether.
The pattern here is somewhat rare in our contemporary thinking. I know I never was made aware of this pattern before. I had heard of the idea that the lesser can be used to refer to or mean the greater, but I had never thought of things in quite this way.
Then add to this that a Hebrew scholar years ago that had pointed out that righteousness and justice were not the same things. Suddenly, I began to see a pattern that did not come from my culture.
Two different words side by side that were not synonymous. That is not Shakespearean. Then these two words, I later discovered were actually perpendicular measurements to one another, not synonymous measurements through the analogy of carpentry and the plumb line and level line.
Then add to this the context of Hebrew where righteousness seems so far to always appear before justice and then Aramaic where justice seems to appear first instead. Here I am reminded how the Bible is able to cope in translation with grammatical systems that have different requirements and yet still send the same message.
All of this adds up to a different context than my own, with the danger that my context cannot be read into theirs. It appears now that there is a pattern that Hebrew at least likes to honor even on the surface level: 1) greater, 2) lesser, and 3) greatest (the two altogether). Righteousness would then be the greater, justice the lesser, and judgment the greatest.
So now let's apply that context rule to holy. What if blessed is the greater, what if holy is the lesser and what if "holiness" (the two altogether) is the greatest. Could that be the contextual rule that we have been lacking in place of synonymous parallelism too frequently applied? Could we be missing a major contextual indicator? I'm just asking in the spirit of my anthropology professors.
Sincerely,
Jon
My special concern when I mention that is the idea that we see words as synonymously parallel that may instead have a different relationship. I first became aware of this through a commentator (I'm sorry this older commentator now eludes me -- it could have been Adam Clarke) who explained the way our English translators dealt with the translation of righteousness and justice from the Hebrew and which contexts would the form for justice be translated instead as judgment and that judgment meant both righteousness and justice altogether.
The pattern here is somewhat rare in our contemporary thinking. I know I never was made aware of this pattern before. I had heard of the idea that the lesser can be used to refer to or mean the greater, but I had never thought of things in quite this way.
Then add to this that a Hebrew scholar years ago that had pointed out that righteousness and justice were not the same things. Suddenly, I began to see a pattern that did not come from my culture.
Two different words side by side that were not synonymous. That is not Shakespearean. Then these two words, I later discovered were actually perpendicular measurements to one another, not synonymous measurements through the analogy of carpentry and the plumb line and level line.
Then add to this the context of Hebrew where righteousness seems so far to always appear before justice and then Aramaic where justice seems to appear first instead. Here I am reminded how the Bible is able to cope in translation with grammatical systems that have different requirements and yet still send the same message.
All of this adds up to a different context than my own, with the danger that my context cannot be read into theirs. It appears now that there is a pattern that Hebrew at least likes to honor even on the surface level: 1) greater, 2) lesser, and 3) greatest (the two altogether). Righteousness would then be the greater, justice the lesser, and judgment the greatest.
So now let's apply that context rule to holy. What if blessed is the greater, what if holy is the lesser and what if "holiness" (the two altogether) is the greatest. Could that be the contextual rule that we have been lacking in place of synonymous parallelism too frequently applied? Could we be missing a major contextual indicator? I'm just asking in the spirit of my anthropology professors.
Sincerely,
Jon
Tuesday, February 04, 2014
Holy: Understanding it Better through Better Understanding the Greater, the Lesser, and the Greatest
The problem with a lot of Biblical scholarship is that it presumes the principle of synonymous parallelism in the Hebrew language too often. It is assumed that to witness something parallel in a text is to witness the synonymous supposedly. While in some contexts this may in fact be very true, I think it has been over applied to texts that actually are not trying to present a synonymous pair, but instead a set of two or three that are based on the distinctions between greater, lesser, and greatest.
My favorite example of this error is the idea that righteous and just are the same thing. Sometimes the greatest enemy to knowledge is not ignorance, but presumed knowledge. It is a laughable error, because no contemporary carpenter would argue that plumb and level are the same. The most novice carpenter quickly learns the obvious lesson that plumb and level are not the same thing. In Isaiah, the level of the carpenter is the illustration for the principle of justice. Likewise, the plumb line is used to illustrate the principle of righteous.
Maybe we need to bring carpenters into seminaries and lecture the Biblical scholars rather than the reverse. What do you think? In the early 80s, the idea that righteous and just are not synonymous, was expressed by one lone scholar of Hebrew. Now we can use one concrete example drawn from carpentry and publicized by the Bible to overturn what is not very good scholarship.
In Scripture, there is a set of principles that clear up some of the confusion both in determining the meaning of righteousness, etc. and also in determining the meaning of holy.
[This piece will be continued tomorrow. Sorry for the slight delay. Please stop back late tomorrow.]
In Christ,
Jon
My favorite example of this error is the idea that righteous and just are the same thing. Sometimes the greatest enemy to knowledge is not ignorance, but presumed knowledge. It is a laughable error, because no contemporary carpenter would argue that plumb and level are the same. The most novice carpenter quickly learns the obvious lesson that plumb and level are not the same thing. In Isaiah, the level of the carpenter is the illustration for the principle of justice. Likewise, the plumb line is used to illustrate the principle of righteous.
Maybe we need to bring carpenters into seminaries and lecture the Biblical scholars rather than the reverse. What do you think? In the early 80s, the idea that righteous and just are not synonymous, was expressed by one lone scholar of Hebrew. Now we can use one concrete example drawn from carpentry and publicized by the Bible to overturn what is not very good scholarship.
In Scripture, there is a set of principles that clear up some of the confusion both in determining the meaning of righteousness, etc. and also in determining the meaning of holy.
[This piece will be continued tomorrow. Sorry for the slight delay. Please stop back late tomorrow.]
In Christ,
Jon
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Holy: Understanding It and other Great Things Better
You've heard of the "Greatest Show on Earth". You've probably also heard of the "Greatest Commandment". The thing in common between both of these is "Greatest". My quest to determine the definition (the primary meaning) of holy has a lot to do with the idea of "Greatest". I thought at one time that "holy" might be the most important word in the Bible and in one sense it is . Well, it is one half of what is "greatest", so not way off. It is clearly as important as "holy, holy, holy" indicates in both Isaiah and Revelation. There are two words though that eclipse it in importance and they are: "Yahweh" and "blessed". So "holy" is for me the third greatest word in the Bible.
Let me add a bit more to this to drive home my point about holy's position of greatness or importance. "Yahweh" as in "holy is Yahweh" is more important than "holy". Also "Yahweh" as in "Blessed be His Name" is more important than "blessed". We also see holy combined with blessed in in "blessed and sanctified" or "blessed and holy" as found in Genesis 2:1-3 and in Revelation. What is missed is that in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek" there is a pattern in the order that shows importance.
In Hebrew as in Greek, the "greater" precedes the "lesser". That makes perfect sense even in English, but there is a VERY GREAT distinction that must be drawn. In English we often place a greater in front of a lesser in the sense of a greater number and a lower number on the same level plane. So we place 5 ahead of 4 on a numerical scale of what is greater. That is not the way "greater" and "lesser" and even "greatest" is being used in Hebrew, (likely Aramaic), or Greek. In this case it would be a good idea to draw from our memory of geometry where there is a vertical axis and a horizontal axis. In Hebrew, the idea is that of the "greater" corresponding to the vertical line and the "lesser" corresponding to the horizontal and the "greatest" corresponding to where the two lines intersect with one another. At that point the "greatest" may be at the point of 0,0 rather than out at 5.1, etc.
I first got wind of this in the early 80s from an article on righteousness and justice and learning that they were not the same thing. This was first brought to my attention by a Hebrew scholar, but he never fully convinced me as to what they each meant in that case. That came 20 years later, when I was working in carpentry and noticed that Isaiah pointed out that righteousness corresponded to the plumb line and justice to the level line in carpentry. This was an astonishing confirmation of what the Hebrew scholar had convinced me of 20 years prior, that the two words were not entirely synonymous. This great scholar and my homely parable of carpentry experience verified a greater grasp of what these two words meant in definition. I also learned that when both righteous and justice were meant then the Hebrew for justice was used and then translated into judgment to mean both together. This was the practice that the early KJV translators saw practiced in the Old Testament by the Jews or Hebrews.
There is more to this. In Greek, they refer to narrow definitions for a word and broad definitions. This discussion is found in Aristotle among others. Righteousness would be a narrow definition. Justice would be a narrow definition. Judgment would be the broad use of the word for justice meaning both righteousness and justice altogether.
I think the thing that is holding the church back from anything "Great" happening like a "Great Awakening", another "The Reformation", another incredible revival, or another wonderful renewal movement is a failure to know and teach what things are great and what words point to that greatness in the Bible. The last example I would like to use is that the Bible in the opening creation story speaks of great things God created. Among then were the "greater light" to the light the day and the "lesser lights" to light the night. To me the greatest thing about each is that the combination of them both is what makes God's creation the "greatest" we can imagine or think. I hope and pray that the church especially can find its way back to the greatest things with admiration for both the greater and the lesser. We need to pay attention to those things that are truly greatest and avoid the distractions of lesser things in life. Poor judgment has become too common. Thank you for reading my humble thoughts that attempt to point others to the greatest things.
In Christ,
Jon
[I will be re-visiting this and making improvements as possible.12/11/13]
Let me add a bit more to this to drive home my point about holy's position of greatness or importance. "Yahweh" as in "holy is Yahweh" is more important than "holy". Also "Yahweh" as in "Blessed be His Name" is more important than "blessed". We also see holy combined with blessed in in "blessed and sanctified" or "blessed and holy" as found in Genesis 2:1-3 and in Revelation. What is missed is that in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek" there is a pattern in the order that shows importance.
In Hebrew as in Greek, the "greater" precedes the "lesser". That makes perfect sense even in English, but there is a VERY GREAT distinction that must be drawn. In English we often place a greater in front of a lesser in the sense of a greater number and a lower number on the same level plane. So we place 5 ahead of 4 on a numerical scale of what is greater. That is not the way "greater" and "lesser" and even "greatest" is being used in Hebrew, (likely Aramaic), or Greek. In this case it would be a good idea to draw from our memory of geometry where there is a vertical axis and a horizontal axis. In Hebrew, the idea is that of the "greater" corresponding to the vertical line and the "lesser" corresponding to the horizontal and the "greatest" corresponding to where the two lines intersect with one another. At that point the "greatest" may be at the point of 0,0 rather than out at 5.1, etc.
I first got wind of this in the early 80s from an article on righteousness and justice and learning that they were not the same thing. This was first brought to my attention by a Hebrew scholar, but he never fully convinced me as to what they each meant in that case. That came 20 years later, when I was working in carpentry and noticed that Isaiah pointed out that righteousness corresponded to the plumb line and justice to the level line in carpentry. This was an astonishing confirmation of what the Hebrew scholar had convinced me of 20 years prior, that the two words were not entirely synonymous. This great scholar and my homely parable of carpentry experience verified a greater grasp of what these two words meant in definition. I also learned that when both righteous and justice were meant then the Hebrew for justice was used and then translated into judgment to mean both together. This was the practice that the early KJV translators saw practiced in the Old Testament by the Jews or Hebrews.
There is more to this. In Greek, they refer to narrow definitions for a word and broad definitions. This discussion is found in Aristotle among others. Righteousness would be a narrow definition. Justice would be a narrow definition. Judgment would be the broad use of the word for justice meaning both righteousness and justice altogether.
I think the thing that is holding the church back from anything "Great" happening like a "Great Awakening", another "The Reformation", another incredible revival, or another wonderful renewal movement is a failure to know and teach what things are great and what words point to that greatness in the Bible. The last example I would like to use is that the Bible in the opening creation story speaks of great things God created. Among then were the "greater light" to the light the day and the "lesser lights" to light the night. To me the greatest thing about each is that the combination of them both is what makes God's creation the "greatest" we can imagine or think. I hope and pray that the church especially can find its way back to the greatest things with admiration for both the greater and the lesser. We need to pay attention to those things that are truly greatest and avoid the distractions of lesser things in life. Poor judgment has become too common. Thank you for reading my humble thoughts that attempt to point others to the greatest things.
In Christ,
Jon
[I will be re-visiting this and making improvements as possible.12/11/13]
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