Blue Cord

This is entirely unrelated to the Bible, but I had to post it for reasons of nostalgia.  For those who remember computing on a Commodore 64, a guy has written a WordPress theme based on the Commodore 64 screen.  It behaves just like the original.  If you had the Commodore 64, be sure to check it out.  Ah, it brings back memories of the days when owning a computer meant you actually had to know how to program one.

The New York Times has an article about those who are proposing a code of conduct for conversations on the web.  The purpose of this code is to help bring a measure of civility to the web, where ad hominim attacks and anonymous flames are commonplace.  The idea is that individual web sites would voluntarily subscribe to the code.

Whether or not this is a good idea is a topic that I may take up in a later post.  Most of the things they are proposing are just common sense ideas that anyone with manners and an ability to reason critically should already be following.  Of course, both those things are in short supply these days.  But the topic on which I want to focus in this post is the objection that people raise: any rules amount to censorship and an infringement on free speech.

Free speech, of course, is something that is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S.  Constitution, and so people think anything that prevents free speech is therefore somehow wrong.  But the problem is that the Constitution tells us what the government can and cannot do.  “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.”  This has no bearing on individuals, businesses, or any other non-governmental entity.  The First Amendment does not require me to allow anything and everything to be said on my blog.  If it did, blocking spam would be illegal (sorry, Akismet).  But as an individual, I am free to censor anything I feel is inappropriate, and that is perfectly within my right.  I rarely do it, but if someone engages in profanity, personal attacks, or flat out lies on my blog, it will be deleted without any qualms on my part.

One of the problems with the idea of free speech is that it often misunderstood.  People often think that we should have free speech because everyone’s opinion is valuable.  This, of course, is Grade A buffalo bagels (to quote Col. Potter).  Those who read much at all quickly find that there is a great deal of difference in the quality of opinions out there, especially on the Internet.

Instead, the idea behind free speech is that it should not be the government who decided which opinions are good and which are bad.  We also don’t want to silence good opinions a priori.  When free speech is abridged, it means that some good ideas may not be heard, and that means that society as a whole will be worse of for it.  But when we allow for the cacophony that free speech, we also have to decide critically which are the silver and which are the dross.

The problem is that the idea of free speech is commonly understood to mean that we cannot adjudicate between different ideas.  This is the only way that subscribing to a code of conduct could be seen as an attach on free speech.  But if individuals decide that their own personal blogs are going to follow a code of conduct, that is well within their rights.  Those of us who pay money to buy server space and run a blog are under no compulsion to provide a platform for people attack others and spew illogical arguments.

The first two approaches to Scripture that Kelsey discusses in Proving Doctrine are two that are probably the most widely used among non-specialists. These are approaches that focus on the doctrines of Scripture and those that center around the concepts in Scripture.

To illustrate the former, Kelsey uses the Calvinist theologian B.B. Warfield, who taught at Princeton. For Warfield, what is authoritative about Scripture is the doctrines it teaches. Warfield teaches the idea of the plenary inspiration of the Bible, which leads him to the hypothesis of inerrancy. This leads him to a position that can be termed biblical positivism. The job of theology is to determine the doctrines — explicit and implicit — of individual Scripture writers, then systematize these into a theology. This theology is then adopted by Christians.

To break this down by Kelsey’s four questions (see the first post in this series for the four questions):

• The aspect of Scripture that is authoritative is its doctrines.
• What makes this content authoritative is that it is inerrant.¹
• The logical force is a biblical positivism.
• Scripture is brought to bear in a very direct way on theology, with almost a one-to-one relationship between what Scripture says and the doctrines the believer should accept.

Similar to this is the idea of biblical concepts as authoritative. This was particularly popular in the 1930s-1950s, but continues even today. Kelsey points to Hans-Werner Bartsch as a practitioner of this method. Bartsch draws out particular ideas in Scripture through extensive word studies, a method criticized by James Barr in The Semantics of Biblical Language. Bartsch takes one concept, such as reconciliation, and studies it in all of its appearances in the Bible. He assumes that meanings of the concept found in one place are applicable whenever the idea arises (e.g., when Paul talks about the term, it can be assumed that he incorporated all the ideas that Matthew had about reconciliation).

To answer the four questions:

• Concept is authoritative.
• What makes the Scripture authoritative is the fact that its concepts are distinctive. In other words, no other faith centers on just these concepts.
• The logical force is that of a technical concept (i.e., an idea that is used with one particular meaning or groups of meaning every single time it is used).
• As with Warfield, Scripture impacts theology in a very direct way.

Obviously, these two approaches are related, although they are used by very different practitioners. Evangelicals often use the doctrinal approach, while Protestants and pre-Vatican II Roman Catholics often use the other. But although they define doctrine and concept very differently, in practice there is often little distinction between the two.

For both Warfield and Bartsch, what makes Scripture authoritative is an intrinsic property of the text (the Bible’s inerrancy for Warfield and the Bible’s distinctiveness for Bartsch). This will contrast with the functionality to which appeal will be made by subsequent approaches.

Next post in the series: History and Narrative

1. Interestingly, Warfield sees inerrancy as methodologically necessary to do theology, but does not see it as one of the central tenets of Christianity. It is logically dispensable for proving other doctrines. [back]

Part of the ashes of James Doohan were launched into space today.  Doohan, best remembered for his role as Scotty on the original Star Trek, died almost two years ago.  Today, one gram of his ashes, along with those of about 200 other people, were launched from New Mexico.  They ascended to an altitude of about 70 miles before returning to earth.

The service is provided by Space Services Inc., a private company that charges about $500 for one ounce of ashes.   The same company launched the ashes of Gene Roddenberry into space ten years ago.

For the record, I would like my ashes scattered on the pitchers mound at Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

David Kelsey’s The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology is an important work in the exploration of the intersection between the Bible and theology. Unfortunately, this book was out of print when I was in seminary. But a friend of mine and I convinced Dr. Kelsey to do an independent study course on the topic. In it, we explore the history of how different theologians throughout church history have used the Bible in their theology.

Several years ago, I noticed that Kelsey had a new book out on the same topic. It was entitled Proving Doctrine: The Uses of Scripture in Modern Theology. When I bought it, I found out it was actually a reprint of his earlier work but under a different title.¹ I am currently reading this book as a refresher in what I learned in the reading course. I thought I would post a series of blogs on the topic.

Kelsey’s method is fairly straightforward. He explores seven different ways of using Scripture in theology, using a modern theologian to illustrate each approach. He is quick to point out this this is not intended as a typology, but merely as a way to talk about common ways of using Scripture. He also notes that some theologians use more than one of the approaches in their theology.

Kelsey asks four questions of each of the approaches:²

• What aspect of Scripture is taken to be authoritative?
• What is it about this aspect of Scripture that makes it authoritative?
• What sort of logical force seems to be ascribed to the Scripture to which appeal is made?
• How is the Scripture that is cited brought to bear on theological proposals so as to authorize them?

In the next few posts, I will go over what he has to say about these seven different approaches.

Next post in the series: Doctrine and Concept

1. I talked with Kelsey about this at one of the SBL conferences. He said he felt the publisher was being somewhat dishonest by publishing it under a new title. He hoped no one would be fooled into buying the book if they already had the original work. [back]
2. Kelsey, Proving Doctrine, 15. [back]