Discussion about the Trinity amongst Western Christians of all stripes tends to focus on the metaphysical issues raised by the oneness and threeness of God. Such speculation is of interest mainly to systematic theologians, with most other Christians content to accept the idea because that’s what Christians are supposed to believe (however irrational it may seem). The Trinity is therefore a matter for affirmation, but most leave it at that and focus on what seem to be more relevant matters, namely those that have to do with salvation. There are, of course, exceptions to this perspective, but I would contend that such exceptions prove the general rule among Protestants (and Catholics) in general and among Evangelicals in particular.

Read the rest of Onesimus’ excellent post here.

Men face different challenges than women do, and it is important for men to have a deep understanding of the Holy Scriptures. So the features and notes of this edition were written specifically for men. God created men and women with different strengths and different roles. Our desire in presenting the Every Man’s Bible is that it will help you better understand God’s general plan for masculinity as well as the special and unique role God has for you.

So runs the introduction to Every Man’s Bible by Tyndale publishers; a presentation of the New Living Translation which is aimed specifically at men (if you hadn’t worked that out yet).

First the good bits: I still think the NLT is the best translation available in English for the regular reader. Like all translations, it has its problems, but in my view it provides the best combination of good clear English and fidelity to the text that is currently available.  There are some good, if rather basic notes on the text at the foot of each page which will be a help to new readers.

Now, some of the bad bits: I know that I am older than the target generation for this bible, but I find the layout dreadful. I don’t know who thought that dirty brown was a good colour for the notes and subtitles, but they were wrong.

More importantly, the quality of some of the notes and much of the introductory material is quite simply not up to scratch. Perhaps the worst feature of this edition of the Bible is the one line introductory comments on each book of the Bible.

• What’s the point of Exodus? God loves his people enough to demand holiness.
• What’s the point of Luke? Jesus cares about the individual.

These sound bites are true, but they are hardly adequate or even accurate summations of the books they are describing. What is worse, comments like these shape the way that readers approach literature and will constrain people who are new to the Bible from getting the full message from the book. These little comments are reason enough not to buy this edition.

That brings us to the central concept of a Bible targeted at men (or women, or …….). I fully appreciate that there is a place for books, teaching, seminars or what have you that are aimed at particular groups of people. I am much less convinced that there is a place for Bibles which are so aimed. The only way that these demographic Bibles can really match up to their billing is if the study material starts to dominate over the text of Scripture and that is something that you really do not want to see. In this case, the Bible text does predominate, which is a good thing, but then I am left wondering how this is a Bible for men. There are a couple of little studies, for example on fatherhood, which are gender specific, but mostly the notes are as relevant to women as to men.

There are good quotes from luminaries such as Jim Elliot scattered through the text. It took me a while to work out what they were there for. Eventually, I realised that they all contained the word ‘man or ‘men’ and so presumably are relevant to the male gender, though all of the quotes I came across would equally apply to women.

The nice people at Tyndale provided me with a copy of Every Man’s Bible to review and I feel rather awkward giving it a strong thumbs down, but I do feel this is one to avoid. If you are looking for a Bible with study notes, just jump in and get yourself an NLT Study Bible (Bible Nlt).

Anyone who sets out to write an overview of the Bible has to find some sort of theme to tie to the work together, otherwise the whole thing will just spiral out of control.  Remaking a Broken World by Christopher Ash revolves around the themes of gathering and scattering.

The thesis of this chapter, indeed the theme of the book, is precisely this: the ordinary local church with all its imperfections, weaknesses, oddities and problems, has within it the seeds, the spiritual and relational generic blueprint of a broken world remade. Here at last is not just God restraining human strife, but God actively gathering. There is in the church not just a treatment delaying the onset of scattering, but a cure actively replacing scattering with gathering. (p.138)

The book consists of four sections, each composed of a few short chapters:

• A Broken World: Scattered without God
• The Assembly of Israel: Gathering Foreshadowed
• The Assembly of Jesus: Gathering Realized
• The New Creation: Gathering Consummated

What the section headings cannot convey is the quality of the writing, which is excellent, nor the pastoral approach which seeks to make everything in the book relevant to the contemporary situation. This is good, solid Biblical theology which is relatively easy to read and very heart warming. If you are only going to read one book about the Bible for Biblefresh; this would be a very good place to start. All in all, it comes strongly reccomended.

That being said, I do have a couple of slight niggles about it. In following the theme of scattering and gathering; I don’t believe that the author has done full justice to the notion of diversity amongst the people of God. Linked to this, he has also fallen into the old trap of seeing Pentecost as a reversal of Babel. However, these are minor quibbles and probably wouldn’t occur to anyone who wasn’t involved in work with minority languages and groups.

These reservations apart, Remaking a Broken World along with The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story are the two Bible overviews that I would most strongly recommend.

I have to admit that I love cricket: test cricket in particular. I can understand why people don’t like the idea of a game that can last five days and still end in a draw, but for me the complexities, twists and turns of a five day test match are delightful. Life isn’t simple and doesn’t always produce simple endings and I enjoy a sport that mirrors this.

That being said, I have to admit that I was absolutely shocked on Saturday evening when the BBC news led with a story about corruption in the current England – Pakistan test series. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t shocked that cricket could be corrupt; I’m not that naive! Given the enormous sums that are generated by gambling on cricket, it is hardly surprising at all that some young Pakistani men have yielded to the temptation of some very fast money. It wasn’t as if they were throwing the match away. No, my problem was that the cricket scandal came top of the news, while the floods in Pakistan only came as the third item (number two was the miners awaiting rescue in Chile).

It seemed dreadful to me that a sporting scandal could be seen as more important than the lives of millions of people in Pakistan. I was all fired up to write an indignant blog post about how the Western media are so biased in their approach to world issues, when I learned that the cricket corruption story was also headline news in Pakistan at the moment!

I still find the relative priorities to be somewhat surprising; but I can’t lay the blame at the Western media if the same thing is happening in Pakistan, too.

A few days ago, Phil wrote about the problems of writing online articles which might be aimed at a local audience, but which may have a worldwide readership.

Once I could pick my target audience. Magazines and newspapers knew who their readers were, radio stations knew their listeners, everything could be targeted and tailored for the audience. We don’t have that luxury any more. I need to remember whenever I publish something it could go anywhere.

At first this might seem no more than a little problem for writers and bloggers who have to be careful about what they commit to paper or the internet, but as this article shows, the consequences can be far more serious.

Apparently a Christian Group in the US have decided to burn copies of the Qur’an on the anniversary of 9/11. Now, apart from this being a rather infantile act, it does actually have rather serious consequences.

The group, don’t seem to have understood for a single moment what the Qur’an means and signifies to Muslims. As a number of scholars have pointed out, in Muslim thought, the Qur’an is more akin to Jesus, the Eternal Word of God, than it is to the Bible. Burning copies of the Qur’an is extremely offensive.

And who is likely to suffer for this offensive, childish act? Certainly not the rich and well protected Christians who perpetrate the act; but this is likely to be a very uncomfortable time for believers in Iraq, Indonesia, India…

The irony of all this is that the group who are planning to burn the Qur’an are called the Dove World Outreach Centre. They certainly don’t seem to have adopted the Dove as a symbol of peace and their knowledge of the world seems to be very, very limited.

The Rev. Drayton Parslow of Frisby on Soar has weighed in on the King James only debate. Please excuse me if I quote him at some length.

But let us look closer. What does Paul mean when he says “all Scripture”? Does he mean all things that have been called the Bible, including the Vulgate, the Syriac Peshitta and the Good News? I hardly think so. For you know how it starts – a variant manuscript here, a dynamic equivalence here, a disagreement among scholars there and the next thing you know, you don’t know where you are. One slight nuance in translation, or another scroll dug out of a Palestinian hillside, and interpreting the clear and understandable word of God becomes a maze of sophistry and alternatives, like trying to ask someone for only one route out of Milton Keynes…

So our firm belief is that there can only be one authentic Scripture, and that is the King James Version. Of the Masoretic texts and the Textus Receptus that were used to write the Authorised version, we can say they are of secondary value as leading up to the uniquely inspired word.  And of the New International Version, I will say that I use it occasionally – and as a guide only – to see what the King James may be trying to say in its impenetrable and archaic English…

We plan to be the only school outside the United States in which all lessons will be conducted in 17th Century English. Once this principle catches on in other schools around the country, we can expect to see a flourishing of the study of the Word of God unseen since the Good Book itself was written. The NIV will no longer be needed. Men will lay down their Not Really Sexist Versions of the Bible, and read the pure words of the only genuine Scripture once more. Who knows, with the blessings that will be poured out by this return to Jacobean values, we might even get the American colonies back.

I reckon that in his inimitable fashion, Rev. Parslow has just about said all that needs to be said on the King James Only debate. Though I suspect that more will be said – watch this space!

I keep promising myself that I won’t mention the King James Only movement again, but every now and then I come across a blog post that I can’t resist mentioning. This is from Dan Wallace:

I do not lie when I say that a friend of mine lost his job in a church back in the late 70s when he started using the NIV in a youth group. The senior pastor had him removed on the grounds that, “If the Queen’s English was good enough for Jesus then it is good enough for me”. I’ve met Independent Baptist Missionaries in Europe who are trying to translate the Bible into Spanish, not modern Spanish, but into 17th century Spanish so that it is comparable with the KJV. Then there is Grace Baptist College in Michigan that includes in its doctrinal statement the assertion that “We believe Greek study has been and will continue to be the downfall of Protestantism”.

Read more here. (Update: A comment from Daniel points out that the Grace Baptist College website makes no claim about the study of Greek. I won’t change the original quote above, but just give a warning: caveat lector).

I’ve been writing a little on the King James Version for the book I’m working on. This is part of what I have to say.

The simple fact is that on a world-wide scale, the King James Version is not really all that unusual. It wasn’t translated until 1611 or more than three quarters of the way through the Christian era. Many, many other nationalities had translations of the Bible available to them before the KJV rolled off the presses. Martin Luther’s German translation has had just as much impact on German life and literature as the KJV has had on English. English speakers are not unusual in having a favourite translation of the Bible; many others have something very like it.

At the time, the KJV was a remarkable work of scholarship; but by today’s standards it is not really a very good translation of the Bible. Over the intervening years we have learned a great deal more about the original manuscripts and we have a far greater understanding of how translation works. It isn’t just science and engineering that have developed in the last four hundred years; our academic understanding of the Bible and Biblical languages has grown by leaps and bounds. Quite simply, we can do much better translations today than they could in the early 1600s. You wouldn’t trust yourself to a surgeon who only had a 1611 level of training, would you?

Meanwhile, there are still 300,000,000 people, speaking 2,000 languages who don’t have a single word of Scripture available to them. Perhaps, just perhaps we should be more concerned for them than we are about which of our many translations we should use!

This is an introduction to Chris Wright’s eagerly awaited book, the Mission of the People of God.

From Koinonia

My friend Dave has written an extremely powerful piece for the Wycliffe Bible Translators Magazine; Words for Life.

Anée wept bitterly as she held her baby close to her chest. She was filled with a confusion of anger, grief and guilt. She was supposed to have taken the medicine herself and the baby would have benefitted through her milk. But she didn’t understand the doctor’s instructions, and she can’t read, so she gave the medicine directly to her baby. Her newborn daughter died from a tragic and avoidable overdose. Information poverty kills…

Children who learn to read and write in their mother tongue before bridging to the official language flourish and fly, while those who have to do it all in French often flounder and fail. It still troubles me that while in the UK only six children out of 1,000 live births die before the age of five, in Chad it’s 200 children. So many of those deaths are avoidable. There is a direct link between mothers being able to read and infant mortality. Mothers who can read have children who live longer.

I strongly encourage you to read the whole article, you won’t regret it. You can download the magazine here, the article starts on page 5

Many Christians that I have come across are fascinated, obsessed even, with discovering God’s plan for their lives. I must admit that I’ve never really had a sense of any plan in my life. I’ve gone from one thing to the other as it seemed right at the time, if there is a plan in there it escapes me completely. More to the point, I have observed Christians who became almost paralysed by their search for God’s plan; they seemed unable to take any obvious small steps because they were so concerned about the big plan. Tim Chester has some helpful quotes from a new book by Francis Chan which give an excellent alternative to all of that “God’s plan for my life” stuff.

I think a lot of us need to forget about God’s will for my life. God cares more about our response to his Spirit’s leading today, in this moment, than about what we intend to do next year. In fact, the decisions we make next year will be profoundly affected by the degree to which we submit to the Spirit right now, in today’s decisions. It is easy to use the phrase ‘God’s will for my life’ as an excuse for inaction or even disobedience. It’s much less demanding to think about God’s will for your future than it is to ask Him what He wants you to do in the next ten minutes.

Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit is just about to be added to my reading list.