Pericope Adulterae

The story of the woman caught in adultery is obviously later than the New Testament, if you accept the fact that the earliest Greek manuscripts are the most reliable.

But this lovely story sounds so much like the Jesus we meet in the rest of the gospels that I cannot give it up.

I cling to the Jesus who condemns religious hypocrites, forgives sins AND says Go and sin no more.

Is it wrong to take the story as genuine and believe it be part of the Christian gospel although it is not part of any of the original gospels?

It seems to be a very different kettle of fish to the longer ending of Mark, which would appear to have been written to harmonise Mark with Acts and which could be taken to be encouraging us to drink poison and pick up deadly snakes.

Can Christians fall away? asks Andrew Heard

Andrew Heard wrote a very good article for The Briefing, issue 299, in which he addresses the issue of whether Christians can fall away and be lost. This is his summary, posted in a later issue:

I believe born again Christians can fall away, but I am convinced God won't let them, by making them take heed to the warnings. Although this statement appears contradictory, I think it not only does best justice to the full revelation given us in the New Testament, but also reflects the experience of Christ during his earthly life. The fact that Christ suffered when he was tempted surely meant that he could have fallen into sin. But God's promises concerning his victory must have meant he wasn't going to. It may be difficult to hold together but I cannot see how we can avoid this tension.

Just as Jesus lived knowing each temptation was make or break, born again Christians must live knowing that they cannot take their genuine repentance and faith for granted.

If this understanding is right, then there is no need to resort to the intricacies of exegesis that Wayne Grudem, and others, must resort to in order to avoid a plain reading of Scripture. The writer of Hebrews is speaking to those he believed to be born again Christians and warning them of the real possibility of falling away. Significantly, in 2:1, he includes himself in the warning. He is aware in his own life of the danger of genuine Christians drifting. It is my conviction that even if the author knew that all of his audience were born again Christians he would still issue exactly the same warnings because this is the means by which God keeps his people.

Now, I hasten to say again, I don't believe this means genuine Christians will fall away. They won't. My point is rather that they won't fall away because genuine Christians will recognise the warnings as real warnings to genuine Christians and take heed of them.

Great rejoicing in Outer Galukistan over new NIV

I'm looking forward to the New NIV in 2011, but I did have a chuckle over this from Tominthebox news network:

From the deepest recesses of South American Jungles to the coldest corners of Siberia, native people groups everywhere are rejoicing over the latest announcement that the English-speaking world will be spending millions of dollars for yet another English translation of the Bible. The excitement erupted after Zondervan Publishers announced that it would be making a major revision and update to its New International Version, first released in 1978

"Our goal is to put the NIV into modern English so that people born after 1988 can understand the Scriptures," said Ronald Overbeck, head of research at Zondervan. "We're going to spare no expense to make sure we update the archaic terms and references so that people can read the Bible clearly and easily."

Celebrations erupted throughout the world at the announcement. In some parts people took to the streets for celebrations that went on for days.

"This brings much joy to our hearts," commented Elena Namaeeva, a native Sakha from the Far Eastern Siberian region of Yakutia. "We just got the New Testament in our Sakha language about 3 years ago. We are waiting anxiously for the Old Testament to be released, though they tell us it could still be a while because of a lack of funding. But I'm so happy for our American friends that they will have yet another Bible in their language."

"We are happy for our brothers and sisters in the English-speaking world and rejoice with them," said Amin Modu of the Kanuri people of Nigeria. "While 4 million of my people are still waiting on the complete Bible in our language, it always brings joy to our hearts to know that the Americans will be spending millions of dollars to have yet another Bible in the English language."

With over 100 known complete translations, English Bibles by far dominate the world of Bible publications.

"If you just think of the number of people out there born after 1988, it's staggering" noted Overbeck. "This is virtually an unreached people group in and of itself, a whole generation of x-box playing college dropouts still living with their parents who can't understand the Bible because it's so archaic and hard to read. I think it's high time someone reached out to them."

The revision is expected to take 3 years. Incidentally, there remains some 200 million people worldwide who do not yet have a Bible in their own language.

Why Churches have tax free status

This letter to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald explains why churches have tax-free status in Australia.

Tax and religion

Allan Lewis (Letters, November 20) suspects the tax-exempt status of religious bodies is a function of the ''socially beneficial works they undertake''. That is incorrect. The tax status of religions relies on the 1891 Privy Council Pemsel case, which confirmed four categories of charitable purpose: relief of poverty; advancement of education; other purposes beneficial to the community; advancement of religion.

This was confirmed in Parliament by Senator Peter Walsh on May 1, 1984, when he said: ''Legally, the advancement of religion is a charitable activity.'' It follows that religions, including Scientology, are charities in themselves, because they ''advance religion''. This means taxpayers are subsidising religions to proselytise.

This should be abandoned on the grounds that religion is a private matter. At the same time, as Mr Lewis recognises, activities by religious bodies that are of public benefit could continue to have tax-exempt status as ''other purposes beneficial to the community''.

Max Wallace Australia New Zealand Secular Association, Gosford

Charles Darwin and the Children of the Evolution

TIMES ONLINE has a fascinating account of some of Darwin's other ideas, often linked to his big idea, and the way that some psychopaths have eagerly adopted them.

The naturalist outraged the church, prompting a bitter debate that still sets creationists against evolutionists. Now a sinister link has emerged between his work and the recent spate of high-school killings by crazed, nihilistic teenagers.

You wouldn’t know from the celebrations of Charles Darwin’s life this year that the amiable Victorian gent portrayed in those TV drama-docs pottering around the garden of his home in Kent has been fingered as a racist, an apologist for genocide, and the inspiration of a string of psychopathic killers.

The Darwin double anniversary (2009 marks both the bicentenary of his birth and 150 years since the first publication of On the Origin of Species) has featured much vanilla hoopla: the Royal Mail issued commemorative stamps; Damien Hirst designed the dust jacket for a special edition of Darwin’s masterpiece; Bristol Zoo offered free admission to men with beards, and the Natural History Museum served pea soup made to a recipe devised by Darwin’s wife, Emma. The conclusion of dozens of lectures, articles and education packs for schools has been that Darwin wasn’t just a brilliant scientist, but a thoroughly good egg.

With hardly a mention that his name has been associated with some of the most infamous crimes of modern history, it is as if there has been an unspoken agreement to accentuate the positive. Certainly, the milquetoast Darwin played by Paul Bettany in the recent film Creation provided little hint that there might be a dark side to the great man’s bequest to posterity. The film focuses on Darwin’s inner conflicts in the years leading up to the publication of On the Origin of Species. The scientist is reluctant to make his ideas public, not because he has foreseen dire social consequences, but chiefly because he fears that the theory of evolution will upset his wife and the Church of England.

In America, where Darwin’s writings on morality and race have come under particularly intense critical scrutiny because of the enduring creationist debate, he has been accused of fostering moral nihilism and scientific racism, and even of promoting an ethic that found its ultimate expression in the Holocaust. Most startling of all, a connection has now been drawn between Darwin’s theories and a rash of school shootings. In April, 1,000 people gathered at sunset in Littleton, Colorado, to commemorate the victims of the Columbine high school massacre, 10 years on. Darrell Scott, whose daughter Rachel was the first of the 13 children to be murdered, and whose son Craig narrowly escaped being shot, cannot understand why so little attention has been paid to the motivation of the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and their interest in Charles Darwin’s ideas. “Harris wore a ‘Natural Selection’ T-shirt on the day of the killings. They made remarks on video about helping out the process of natural selection by eliminating the weak. They also professed that they had evolved to a higher level than their classmates. I was amazed at the frequent references to evolution, and that the press completely ignored that aspect of the tapes.”

Much of the evidence remains sealed under a court order issued to minimise the risk of copycat killings, but from those documents that are in the public domain, it is clear that Eric Harris fantasised about putting everyone into a violent computer game that only the fittest could survive. And, like Darwin himself, he noted how vaccination might be interfering with nature’s weeding process. In his rantings Harris said he wished there were no vaccines, or even warning labels on dangerous goods, “and let natural selection take its course. All the fat, ugly, retarded, crippled dumbass, stupid f***heads in the world would die… Maybe then the human race can actually be proud of itself”.

As the attorney for the families of six of the students killed at Columbine, the Denver lawyer Barry Arrington has come across more in a similar vein. “I read through every single page of Eric Harris’s journals; I listened to all of the audio tapes and watched the videotapes… It became evident to me that Harris consciously saw his actions as logically arising from what he had learnt about evolution. Darwinism served as his personal intellectual rationale for what he did. There cannot be the slightest doubt that Harris was a worshipper of Darwin and saw himself as acting on Darwinian principles.”

In 2007, detectives following up a tip-off about a planned school shooting in Pennsylvania discovered that their suspect often logged on to a social networking site called Natural Selection’s Army and a number of related chatrooms that were later tagged by the media as the “cyber school for killers”. These sites were quickly shut down by their service providers, but today “Natural Selection” is the name of a popular computer game in which competing teams attempt to annihilate one another — a sign that Darwin’s term is still associated by many teenagers with sudden and extreme violence.

“Natural Selection” T-shirts have proved a popular line through web-based outlets, and it seems that the Columbine killers have spawned a gruesome personality cult — there is even a computer game in which players adopt the roles of Harris and Klebold, which features original CCTV footage of the killings.

Among those reported to have frequented the original Natural Selection’s Army website was an 18-year-old Finnish student, Pekka-Eric Auvinen. On November 7, 2007, in Tuusula, Finland, Auvinen forced his head teacher to kneel down in front of him before he shot her with his pistol. He slaughtered a further seven victims before turning the gun on himself. Some of the Jokela high school students afterwards described the way Auvinen prowled through the building pointing his gun at people’s heads. Sometimes he would squeeze the trigger and kill them; sometimes, after looking long and hard through the sights, he would suddenly turn away and let his terrified target go free. One witness said he seemed to be choosing his victims at random, but in fact he was making a very deliberate selection. He was trying to weed out the “unfit”.

Before he embarked on his shooting spree, Auvinen posted a lengthy apologia on the internet. Styling himself a “social Darwinist”, he said that natural selection appeared not to be working any more — had maybe even gone into reverse. He had noticed that “stupid, weak-minded people reproduce faster than intelligent, strong-minded ones”. The gene pool was sure to deteriorate if society continued to guarantee the survival of the second-rate. He had pondered what to do about this problem. He understood that life was just a meaningless coincidence, the outcome of a long series of random mutations, so there might not be much point in doing anything at all. But eventually he had decided he would do his bit by becoming a natural selector, aping the pitiless indifference of nature.

Auvinen left a special plea for his motivation to be taken seriously and for the world not merely to write him off as a psychopath, or to blame cult movies, computer games, television or heavy metal music, before concluding: “No mercy for the scum of the Earth! Humanity is overrated. It’s time to put natural selection and survival of the fittest back on track.”

Of course, it is not unusual for homicidal maniacs to cite great writers when seeking to justify their crimes. The Chicago spree-killers Leopold and Loeb (the models for Hitchcock’s 1948 film, Rope) claimed Friedrich Nietzsche as their muse, as did the Moors murderer Ian Brady. Other deranged misfits have nominated Albert Camus, Jean Genet and André Gide. But it may take a keener intellect than was possessed by Harris, Klebold or Auvinen to negotiate such a reading list. The basics of evolution are much more accessible and are taught in every high school, so it should not be surprising that Darwin seems to be emerging as the inspiration for the more dim-witted schoolboy sociopath.

Darwin would no doubt have been horrified by all this, but it’s easy to see why some of his ideas might appeal to the disturbed adolescent mind. One conclusion implicit in evolutionary theory is that human existence has no ultimate purpose or special significance. Any psychologically well-adjusted person would regard this as regrettable, if true. But some people get a thrill from peering into the void and acknowledging that life is utterly meaningless.

Darwin also taught that morality has no essential authority, but is something that itself evolved — a set of sentiments or intuitions that developed from adaptive responses to environmental pressures tens of thousands of years ago. This does not merely explain the origin of morals, it totally explains them away. Whether an individual opts to obey a particular ethical precept, or to regard it as a redundant evolutionary carry-over, thus becomes a matter of personal choice. Cheerleaders celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday in colleges across America last February sang “Randomness is good enough for me, If there’s no design it means I’m free” — lines from a song by the band Scientific Gospel. Clearly they see evolution as something that emancipates them from the strict sexual morality insisted upon by their parents. But wackos such as Harris and Auvinen can just as readily interpret it as a licence to kill.

The American conservative controversialist Ann Coulter is one of Darwin’s fiercest critics, lambasting him in her book Godless and via cable TV. Coulter claims she is not surprised that psychopaths gravitate towards Darwin’s ideas. “Instead of enshrining moral values,” she says, Darwin “enshrined biological instincts.” Coulter believes Darwin’s theory appeals to liberals because it “lets them off the hook morally. Do whatever you feel like doing — screw your secretary, kill Grandma, abort your defective child — Darwin says it will benefit humanity”.

Today’s evolutionary scientists go some way towards Coulter’s view when they describe ethics as merely an illusion produced by genes. From a Darwinian perspective, there is nothing objectively wrong with shooting your classmates; it’s just that most of us have an inherited tendency to kid ourselves that it’s wrong — and that’s something that helps our species in the longer run by keeping playground massacres to an acceptable minimum.

Darwin looked forward to a time when Europeans and Americans would exterminate those he termed “savages”. Many of the anthropomorphous apes would also be wiped out, he predicted, and the break between man and beast would then occur “between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon; instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla”. He took a sanguine view of genocide, believing it to be imminent and inevitable. “Looking to the world at no very distant date,” he wrote to a friend in 1881, “what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”

Convinced that the various races of mankind had travelled different distances down the evolutionary highway, and that two races could be fairly described as more or less evolved even when both had a track record of cultural achievement, Darwin insisted that natural selection explained why the Europeans had been able to see off serial invasions by the Ottoman Turks. Some of today’s Turks understandably resent being designated as genetically second-rate, which perhaps explains why the editor of Turkey’s most popular science magazine was instructed by his proprietor to cancel a special edition celebrating Darwin’s anniversary.

For many years after his death, Darwin’s racial theories remained the consensus position of the international scientific community. In 1906, the director of the Bronx Zoo decided to give New Yorkers an object lesson in human evolution by putting a 23-year-old Congolese pygmy on public display in his monkey house. The pygmy, Ota Benga, shared his cage with an orang-utan. The spectacle drew enormous crowds. Before long, they were asking the questions the exhibitors hoped they would: was Ota Benga an ape or a man? Or, as the zoo-keeper himself speculated, was this perhaps a transitional form between the two, the elusive missing link?

When a group of African-American clergymen objected to a human being being put on show, they were told that Darwin’s theories were now accepted scientific facts, that the “lower races” were psychologically closer to pigs and dogs than to human beings, and that a different value should be put on their lives. Truths that the founders of the United States had held to be self-evident — that all men are created equal and had certain inalienable rights — were being denied by the promoters of Darwinian science. By the end of the first world war, it was not only blacks who were deemed genetically inferior by many of America’s top geneticists and biologists, but Italian, Greek and Jewish immigrants too.

In their book Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond and James A Moore argue that, far from nursing racial prejudices, Darwin was driven to advance a theory of common descent by his hatred of slavery. But how can the idealistic abolitionist be reconciled with the man who so casually contemplated the extermination of entire races? Some argue that he grew more racist as he got older; others that his racism followed logically from his theories.

Nowhere was the toxic doctrine of racial superiority more enthusiastically taken up than in the Third Reich. The Nazis believed that the Aryan race was already the most highly evolved, but could evolve further if defective genes could be eliminated. To purify the German gene pool, they decided to exterminate all the physically and mentally handicapped.

Darwin summed up his moral philosophy by saying that a man could “only follow those ideas and impulses that seem best to him”. Darwinian ideas, eugenics and its ugly sister, eugenic euthanasia, were accepted by the mainstream of the German scientific and medical professions. Indeed, so convinced were the staff of the clinic at Kaufbeuren-Irsee in Bavaria that they were acting rationally that, even after Germany’s surrender in 1945, they carried on killing handicapped people under the American occupation, until a US officer led a squad of GIs to the hospital and ordered them to desist.

The connection between Darwin’s ideas and the Holocaust remains hugely controversial, not least because many creationists try to reduce it to a crude blame game. The writer David Klinghoffer, an advocate of intelligent design, which many regard as creationism in disguise, claims: “The key elements in the ideology that produced Auschwitz are moral relativism aligned with a rejection of the sacredness of human life, a belief that violent competition in nature creates greater and lesser races, that the greater will inevitably exterminate the lesser, and finally that the lesser race most in need of extermination is the Jews. All but the last of these ideas may be found in Darwin’s writing.”

The debate between Darwin’s bulldogs and religious fundamentalists over the truth of evolution and the existence of God has become a sterile one. There are, however, many interesting questions about how Darwin’s views chime with our values of liberal democracy and human rights, or the simple lessons of right and wrong that most of us teach our children. But our society cannot begin to address these issues while we are fed only a bowdlerised account of Darwin’s work. The more sinister implications of the world-view that has come to be called “Darwinism” — and the interpretation the teenage nihilists put on it — are as much part of the Darwin story as the theory of evolutions

The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics (Picador, £18.99) by Dennis Sewell is available at the BooksFirst price of £17.09, including p&p. Telephone: 0870 165 8585

Baptism: why so many different views?

I've just finished reading Baptism: three views, edited by David Wright, with contributions by Bruce Ware [Baptist], Sinclair Ferguson [Presbyterian] and Anthony Lane, who argues that both the paedobaptist and credobaptist views are acceptable.

All three authors had interesting points to make, though I found Sinclair Ferguson the least helpful.

I'm now reading Understanding Four Views on Baptism, edited by John Armstrong, with contributions from Tom Nettles [Baptist], Richard Pratt [Reformed], Robert Kolb [Lutheran] and John Castelein [Churches of Christ].

But these books do not cover all of the major views on baptism, because there would appear to be at least these:
Roman Catholic
Eastern Orthodox
Anglican
Lutheran
Baptist
Churches of Christ
Pentecostal
Salvation Army
popular evangelical "don't-rock-the-boat" view
ultra-dispensational baptism is not for this age view
Lane's dual-practice view [also held by David Wright]
Have I missed any?

Scripture Alone?

Wise words from Michael Jensen:

The Christian sitting at home reading their Bible should get out of their chair and go to church or Bible study, and sing God's praises and say the creed and have the Lord's Supper and listen to the sermon and talk to other Christians. The point is not that 'you need to be an expert in the whole 2000 years of reflection on the Bible', but rather to acknowledge that reading Scripture is a communal and corporate practice - and thank goodness it is.

William Tyndale translated the Bible into plain English so that the ploughboy could read it and understand it. But he always imagined the ploughboy coming in from the field and going to church to hear it read and explained.