I have been prepping for a sermon on the church post-Easter celebration. Some have been asking questions like, “What is God doing during the pandemic? Why isn’t he answering our prayers?” and saying things like, “I am sharing this fake news because I want people to have hope that there is life post-COVID.” These are certainly important and serious issues. Since some of the comments talked about government and its role in the pandemic, my study (naturally) brought me to the word “beast” as used in the Bible.
Theology is sometimes based on archaic words and untranslated words. The problem with both is that it is possible to give them meanings that are different from what they really mean.
Transliterations are the words in the Bible that aren’t translated. Rather the Greek letters are switched into english letters and that new word is put into the Bible. I can think of two examples, angel and baptism.
Angel is a word that really means messenger but because it is not translated we have come up with a white-robed, halo-wearing, person with wings that has no connection to reality.
Baptism is a word that really means immersed or submerged but because it is merely transliterated we can take it to mean anything we want, whether that is sprinkling, pouring, or dunking. Of course what really messes us up is when this word is connected to the Holy Spirit đ
Translations are words where the same meaning from the original language is found in another language. I think it was Andrew Walls who said, “All translation is betrayal.” This is partly because concepts between languages often don’t precisely overlap. It is also partly because often translations don’t change as quickly as language itself changes.
For example, the Tagalog word ulam is often translated as viand in English. Put up your hand if you know what viand means đ It may be an accurate translation but it isn’t a very helpful one. (Having said that, what is a modern English word for viand I wonder?)
There are also biblical examples of the same thing.
Tongues. This is a old way of saying “languages.” Speaking in languages. The gift of languages.
Beast. This word can also mean animal, which is the most common way this word is said in today’s usage. But see what happens when we use it instead of beast? Mark of the animal. The Animals of Revelation.
Can you think of any other biblical words that could be replaced by more normal words?
One point brought me back to the most memorable preaching experience I ever had.
“3. Limited format. A sermon is a monologue and rarely more.”
I was visiting a small church in Northwestern Ontario (I think it was Upper Falls Baptist in Vermillion Bay). I was basically on a tour of BGC Canada churches across Canada, which meant this was not the first time I had preached this particular sermon. I got started into the message and asked my first (rhetorical) question, prepared to answer it myself and then continue. To my surprise a woman in the congregation spoke up with her answer! I was taken aback at first but then I realised that it was ok to do things differently. We continued the sermon in dialogue format with the various members of the congregation engaging with what I was saying. It was great!
Which brings us to another point Nieuwhof makes,
“Without intentionally doing this, most of us who preach self-censor what we say and do on Sundays. There is a silent but prevalent belief that certain things are âacceptableâ for a Sunday morning format and some things are not.”
Not every congregation appreciates the give and take nature of a dialogic sermon — for some it appears disrespectful. I wonder if it’s time to change this attitude?
What was your most memorable preaching experience? Have you even tried preaching in dialogue form rather than monologue?
“Politically, economically, socially and culturally, normal was dying long before COVID. The disruption of a global pandemic was the final nail in normalâs coffin.”
There has been a lot of talk about the “new normal” of late. Some are looking forward to it while others are waiting to get back to the old normal. Those advocating the creation of a new normal acknowledge that things haven’t always been great for many people in society.
For example, even though it’s called civil society doesn’t mean that it is very civil. Related to this is the fragmentation of society that gets more and more obvious each day. The general population’s introduction to lockdown-related isolation reveals that many people were already isolated in the old normal — it’s just that no one really paid them much attention.
In the church, there was an emphasis on what can be called Temple Spirituality — where church is what happens inside the four walls of the church — rather than realizing that the functionality of the church happens outside the four walls too. Related to this is the fact that the church has often outsourced its pastoring to professionals and neglected the priesthood of all believers.
What parts of normal are you not looking forward to returning?
What parts of the new normal are you looking forward to embracing?
âLanguage is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populatedâoverpopulatedâwith the intentions of others.â
Mikhail Bahktin, Discourse in the Novel, 1935
What if I intended to get to Dialogue but only arrived at Monologue?
The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin spoke a lot about language and truth in the early part of the 20th century. Since one of the foundational concepts of this blog is the function of truth telling, itâs important to see what Bakhtin can contribute to the discourse of truth discovery.
For Bakhtin, the discovery of truth happens in dialogue. That means that many voices all come together and as they interact with each other they discover truth. This is common knowledge. After all, who doesn’t appreciate the ability of a good debate to get to the core of an issue.
Now we get to the hard part. What if I know something is true already? What if, because of my religious affiliations, or my family traditions, or the advice of significant and influential people, I have developed an understanding if the truth that I feel is right? Does the purpose of dialogue then become trying to convince others of my truth?
I recently responded to a meme posted by a friend on Facebook. The meme pointed out that offence is not always a marker for truth. Of course me being me I had to comment and use the moment to teach something (not perhaps my best trait). I had two motives, the first being a genuine desire to enter into dialogue with my friend. The second was of course to be right :-p
I even had a Bible verse to back up my truth claims. I couched the reply in the form of a question on how to interpret the weaker brother verse from Corinthians in an age where it seems many get easily offended.
But the dialogue didnât happen.
According to Bakhtin, if it’s not dialogue then it’s monologue, which for Bakhtin is the gravest of sins. My interaction with my FB friend was intended to start dialogue, wasn’t it? Are there forms of “dialogue” that are in effect “monologue”? What factors contribute to fostering dialogue? Is merely saying that “I want to dialogue on this” enough? Or is there more to it than that? Is it simply because it’s on social media that it becomes monologue?
Like most churches that I know, Pingkian Family Worship embraced the idea of a pre-recorded or live-streamed church service early on in the days of the pandemic. Now of course we are so used to that kind of worship that some wonder if there will always be a segment of society that wants to continue to do church virtually. But what if for some reason doing a hybrid live + online service is less than ideal? What options are available?
I was reading Carey Nieuwhof’s blog the other day and he talked about what we need to do when the pandemic is over [5 CRITICAL MISTAKES CHURCH LEADERS SHOULD AVOID IN THE POST-COVID WORLD]. Point #3 was that we can’t resume in-person services exactly as they were pre-COVID. He says,Â
“But many church leaders are considering running two kinds of services: in-person and then a separate one devoted to online. In other words, online will become something other than just a live-stream of whatever is happening in the auditorium or sanctuary on Sunday.”Â
Carey Nieuwhof
He got me thinking about Pingkian Family Worship and & the applicability of a hybrid church service. Once we can gather face-to-face again, what is the ability or desire of people in our community to watch something online? Is that something that’s even applicable in a place like Pingkian?I was listening to our class on applied leadership and Pastor Oliver from Cagayan de Oro talked about what they are doing in their church. He called it “simbalay,” which is a blending of the words “simba” [worship] and “balay/bahay” [home] together and is the idea that people are doing church in their own homes. That got me thinking that perhaps in the Philippine context a hybrid service isn’t an in person service + an online presence but rather an in person service + a worship-at-home kind of service.
So how would this fit in Pingkian? If in COVID-times an online service can serve as a means of equipping people to lead church in their bubbles, perhaps a face-to-face service can be a way of equipping people to lead their families in worship at home as well.Â
I guess we need to do some kind of survey among our members. We can ask them questions such as:Â
What do you enjoy about worship?Â
What do you need from worship?Â
And what can you give in worship?Â
This will help us know how we can better prepare them for leading their families at home. But there would be a continued corporate portion to our twice-a-month services as well. Perhaps there could be an online component for those who can’t make it, such as people who are isolated at home, people who are working and can’t come, and other people.
I guess we need to identify those people who have previously fallen through the cracks when it comes to being able to attend a corporate worship service in person. I’m thinking about people who because of their work aren’t able to attend. Perhaps people who are sick or bedridden or or need to stay home are also not able to attend. I wonder what other forms of isolation people experience that keeps them from attending a face-to-face service?
I came across this post I wrote almost exactly 10 years ago and I realised that God’s love and God’s justice are not a dichotomy but are in fact the same thing. i think that perhaps I was confused with some modern theological positions that somehow pit justice against love. What I realise now is that justice in the Bible is not some kind of punishment for sin but is in fact freedom from oppression.
I revisited this post today from 2012 and I think it has relevance today, especially in light of how COVID-19 restrictions have brought the discussion of what the church is to the forefront of society as a whole. Can you help me out? Do you have an answer to the question I pose here?
The Greeks used an everyday word to describe when they gathered together as Christians. We use a religious word to describe the same thing. And that fact has a tremendous impact upon how each of us understands the concept.
The funny thing is is that it is the same word: âChurch.â
I spend a lot of my time trying to define this word for leaders in the Christian movement. We look at how it is used in the Bible; we look at what it meant in the original Greek; we study how it has been used through the ages since the 1st century; and so on and so forth. And when we come to a conclusion we proclaim it from the hilltops: I know what âchurchâ means! (Of course, there is the corollary that if I know what it means then you probably donât. So you need me to tellâŚ
At this point it is important to discuss the concept of truth since one possible complaint of the above framework is that it promotes a concept of truth that is relative rather than absolute.
The basic goal of every person in every society is to try to understand Ultimate Truth, or whatâs called sometimes Ultimate Reality. This is the unadulterated pure truth that exists beyond human comprehension or human influence. This would be the Ultimate Truth that exists behind every reality that we know. This is the Truth that every system of truth we have in our human society is trying to approach.
Traditionally, there’ve been two different ways people have tried to understand or approach this ultimate reality. Certain people look to the past and say, âRemember how it used to be? Remember how things were so good? There was a simple past. Things were safer in our society. We didnât get caught up in technology so much as we do nowadays. I wish things were like the past.â
Other people look to the future and they have dreams for a better future. They say they say the past wasnât that great after all. And they would like to change some things to make a better future.
When evaluating these are two different ways of looking at how we can approach ultimate truth, itâs important to remember that we donât forget the goal is to become closer to that Ultimate Reality that exists somewhere beyond our perception. The Bible refers to our perceptions of Ultimate Reality as a “mystery” (Mk 4:11; Ro 16:24; etc.) or as seen “in a glass darkly” (1Co 13:12).
Post-Truth is a term thatâs become popular lately. It implies that somehow in the past we were closer to the truth than we are today. I wonder, however, if itâs not so much that weâre in a Post-Truth society in as much as the truths we thought that were closest to Ultimate Reality in the past have now been shown to be further from the truth than we thought? Part of this is because of the introduction of different perspectives due to a blending of different cultures in our society today. In the past societies were more monolithic and isolated from other societies and so they shaped truth based upon what they knew using their common language, frame of reference, and religion. But once the world got smaller because of changes in international travel, and as people started to understand the truths as other societies understood them, they realized that maybe their original perceptions and understandings needed adjustment.
So how do we tie this together? I think we often confuse the truth as we understand it with Ultimate Truth and we assume that weâve got it figured out: âThe things that I believe to be true are the right things and if you believe different things to be true, then youâre wrong and I have to convince you about that.â I think basically thatâs how we feel because thatâs part of human nature, but a realization that weâre all trying to approach human nature from a different perspective leads us to conversation with one another that can help each of us come closer to ultimate truth in a better way.
This idea of conversation opens us up to an evaluation of our own societies as well. We thought our societies were fairly monolithic, but we didnât realize that that our society is made up of a lot of disparity and a lot of divergence. Irigaray (in Hinton, 2013 & Hollywood, 1998) complained of how the ânormative subjectâ in society was a white middle-aged man and advocated for using different perspectives to better understand society. The ânormative subjectâ in âmost western philosophical and religious discoursesâ is âwhite, male, free, middle to upper class.â Irigaray credits Freud with developing this norm but critiques it by wondering if there is then room for the feminine. Since the feminine isnât ânormalâ then there must be âno sex difference.â
These this lack of difference diminishes the female voice because ânormatively there is a strong tendency to deny epistemic value to differences … which are therefore epistemically suppressed and must be suppressed by the subject if she is to gain epistemic authorityâ (Hollywood, 234).
Irigaray is not advocating for some type of feminine norm but her critique opens us up to different perspectives beyond sex and gender including age, relationship status, health, language, ethnicity, economic and social strata, and more. We all have different perspectives and each of these perspectives is a different way for us to approach this truth in this reality.
It brings a couple of questions to mind. How do I know that my understanding of the truth is complete? Can I not learn from others whether right or wrong? Maybe somebody else has a different system of logic or a different understanding of reality, or a different system of hermeneutics than I do, and I can learn from them so that I can improve and that I can learn a new thing.
I am sure that everyone has heard of Yolanda, the massive typhoon that struck the central Philippines in early Nov 2013. The storm not only brought a lot of high winds to the area, it also pushed a 6m-high storm surge into the city of Tacloban. Reports say that this storm surge reached up to 700m inland destroying most of what lay in its path. The result was immense destruction and heartache that will continue for years to come.Â
Of course after a disaster of this magnitude assessments are made to find out what went wrong with the plans that were made and how can they be improved in the future. In this case, one of the issues appears to center around the warnings that were issued regarding the coming “storm surge.” Many apparently did not understand what a “storm surge” was and therefore did not take adequate precautions. Studies are now underway to find out what Filipino terms might be used in the future that would help people better understand the dangers that may be approaching. Current options include daluyong and humbak but the debate continues.
There is a similar issue in theology. The group I currently work with in the Philippines uses an Affirmation of Faith that is in English. This is because it was adopted from the Affirmation of Faith from the first missionaries to the area, who happened to be Americans. I recently had a discussion with one of my Filipino colleagues about this statement that seeks to express the faith of Filipinos in a language that is not entirely their own. Our discussion centered around making our faith understood. Of course, translating concepts between languages is fraught with danger. What if there are words that have no equivalents? What if concepts are not transferrable? Like the use of the word “storm surge” was not adequate to communication danger to those in Samar and Leyte, perhaps words like “grace,” “baptism” and “church,” which have no Filipino equivalents, are also inadequate to express God’s desire for Filipinos today. In fact the word “baptism” is itself not even adequately translated into English. Rather it is merely transliterated from the original Greek word.
It leaves us with the question: How do we make our beliefs understandable to those of other languages and cultures and how do those beliefs legitimately change when that translation occurs?
I had intended to end this post here until I was reminded of something. When I was a child in Canada, we had heard of tidal waves — massive surges of water that inundate the land. When I got older I found out that in fact “tidal wave” was not the correct term at all for that kind of wave. Rather it is “tsunami,” from the Japanese. I guess part of my misunderstanding lay in the fact that those kinds of events are quite far from Saskatchewan and therefore my frame of reference is skewed. In this case, a foreign word was needed to help me express a foreign experience.
I guess that leads to another question: How much of theology is a similar “foreign experience” that needs new words in order to be adequately expressed? Or must theology always be expressed in one’s heart language in order to be truly understood?
Enjoyed this video from Seth Godin regarding school. Take a look.
I have a similar question: What is church for?
We debate about what church is? Some would say, “A church is a big building that sits on the corner of our street.” Others would counter by saying, “No. It’s not a building. A church a group of people who gather together to worship God.” Actually both are true, if you look at the dictionary definition of “church” so there is no need for us to argue over that one anymore đ
But have you ever thought about what church is for? Can an understanding of why we do church help us in defining it? Millard Erickson talks about two aspects of defining church in his Christian Theology (Chapter 49). One is the essence of the church or the church’s nature. We use biblical and philosophical ways to answer this. The other is empirical. This is the church as it is lived out in the world. I think that perhaps we have focussed too much on trying to find the church’s essence that we have neglected its functionality.
Godin’s argument is that once we understand what school is for, we will be able to adapt/change what we are doing now so that we can actually meet our goal. I would argue the same for church. If we don’t know why we do church on Sunday (or whatever other day you do it — the concept is the same, just a different schedule đ then how will we know we are meeting our goal?
So, how would you answer the question, “What is church for?” Do you agree with your answers?
