“My wife and I were recently on vacation, and being strangers in a strange land, we sought out a place to worship while there. We picked a place that, judging by the name, seemed safe enough. But the service started out with a thumping worship band playing some up-beat pep rally songs. One of these …
Translation As Interpretation
“In Scripture, translation is interpretation. The activities here range from what we would call translation to what we would call interpretive etymology. The rationalistic mind sees this as far too sloppy and wants a master key — and three point landings every time. But they cannot have it; God did not make language the way …
Rock and Roll Samurai
“Despite the whirlwind of trends, Details retains a unifying philosophical viewpoint — the archetypical American male is a rebel consumer . . . ‘These guys are not only musicians, or even rock stars,’ the magazine affirmed, ‘but modern men, emblems of a new masculinity.’ These ‘rock and roll samurai live outside the law, but are …
Don’t Sugar Coat It. Just Tell Them.
“The late Joseph Bayly wrote a delightful little book some years ago called The Gospel Blimp, which lampooned the earlier forms of this kind of evangelistic absurdity, back when inane evangelicalism was still slogging it out in the minors. It is hard to imagine what a man of his gifts would do with the embarrassment …
Ethereal Hermit Crabs
“The authoritas verborum is an external and ‘accidental’ authority that falls away in the process of any interpretation, however good. But in considering this we must be careful not to think of a naked, internal essence of a given word, a wordless word, and an outer accidental clothing. It would be better, I think, to …
Department of Hip Resources
“The people who staff the Combine aren’t like Nurse Ratched. They aren’t Frank Burns, they aren’t the Church Lady, they aren’t Dean Wormer from Animal House, they are not those repressed old folks in the commercials who want to ban Tropicana Fruit Twisters. They’re hipper than you can ever hope to be because hip is …
Repenting of Virtues
“So one of the central points of biblical satire is that we must not only repent of our sins, but also of those ‘virtues’ for which we preen ourselves. We have trouble seeing such virtues as sinful, because we have neglected the essential practice of bringing the Word of God to bear on ourselves — …
Language Is Not Mathematics
“We must come to understand incarnational translation, which is to say, understanding translation as interpretation. There are two ways an interpreter can fail. One is through assuming that the languages he works with are like mathematics and that any deviance from that standard should be considered as a failing. This is the way of the …
Dreadlocks at Taco Bell
“But one hardly has to go to a poetry reading to see the countercultural idea acted out. Its frenzied ecstasies have long since become an official aesthetic of consumer society, a monotheme of mass as well as adversarial culture. Turn on the TV and there it is instantly: the unending drama of consumer unbound and …
Different Temple, Same Moneychangers
“In the same way, the critic of Jesus junk stores is assumed to be a critic of Jesus. But of course, scriptural satire assumes that the foremost critic of Jesus junk stores would be Jesus Himself. If Christ were to go to the Christian Booksellers convention (CBA) and see all the crap being hawked with …