AFTER retelling the Prodigal Son parable to yourself or someone else, read this, and then find the questions at the bottom of this page, and answer them back on Moodle forum.
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From the book, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes:
What goes without being said for us can lead us to miss important details in a Bible passage, even when the author is trying to make them obvious. Mark Allan Powell offers an excellent example of this phenomenon in “The Forgotten Famine,” an exploration of the theme of personal responsibility in what we call the parable of the prodigal son. Powell had twelve students in a seminary class read the story carefully from Luke’s Gospel, close their Bibles and then retell the story as faithfully as possible to a partner. None of the twelve American seminary students mentioned the famine in Luke 15:14, which precipitates the son’s eventual return. Powell found this omission interesting, so he organized a larger experiment in which he had one hundred people read the story and retell it, as accurately as possible, to a partner. Only six of the one hundred participants mentioned the famine. The group was ethnically, racially, socioeconomically and religiously diverse. The “famine-forgetters,” as Powell calls them, had only one thing in common:
they were from the United States!
Later, Powell had the opportunity to try the experiment again, this time outside the United States. In St. Petersburg, Russia, he gathered fifty participants to read and retell the prodigal son story. This time an overwhelming forty-two of the fifty participants mentioned the famine. Why? Just seventy years before, 670,000 people had died of starvation after a Nazi German siege of the capital city began a three-year famine. Famine was very much a part of the history and imagination of the Russian participants in Powell’s exercise. Based solely on cultural location, people from America and Russia disagreed about what they considered the crucial details of the story.
Americans tend to treat the mention of the famine as an unnecessary plot device. Sure, we think: the famine makes matters worse for the young son. He’s already penniless, and now there’s no food to buy even if he did have money. But he has already committed his sin, so it goes without being said for us that the main issue in the story is his wastefulness, not the famine. This is evident from our traditional title for the story: the parable of the prodigal (“wasteful”) son. We apply the story, then, as a lesson about willful rebellion and repentance. The boy is guilty, morally, of disrespecting his father and squandering his inheritance. He must now ask for forgiveness.
Christians in other parts of the world understand the story differently. In cultures more familiar with famine, like Russia, readers consider the boy’s spending less important than the famine. The application of the story has less to do with willful rebellion and more to do with God’s faithfulness to deliver his people from hopeless situations. The boy’s problem is not that he is wasteful but that he is lost.
Our goal in this book is not, first and foremost, to argue which interpretation of a biblical story like this one is correct. Our goal is to raise this question: if our cultural context and assumptions can cause us to overlook a famine, what else do we fail to notice? link
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Questions for Moodle:
First of all, don't feel dumb if you didn't mention the famine, Most FPU students miss it..and when I do this in the classroom, I actually have the word "famine" on the screen or on the whiteboard while they are doing the retelling, and they still miss it, even if they see the word.. And in the reading above, you see most American seminary students miss it..
Question 1: Did you mention the famine in your retelling? When you think back to your reading of the story, did you even notice it? Did you notice the word famine on the board behind Dave in class, and several times on 6.1b?
Question 2: What did you think about this experience, and the importance of Three Worlds and what we might miss in the Bible simply due to our culture and context? How might we overcome these cultural blinders?
Thursday, April 30, 2020
Liar, Lunatic, or Lord: the trilemma
From wikipedia:
C. S. Lewis, who you may know as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia and many Christan books., said:
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The trilemma has continued to be used in Christian apologetics since Lewis, notably by writers like Josh McDowell. Peter Kreeft describes the trilemma as "the most important argument in Christian apologetics"[19] and it forms a major part of the first talk in the Alpha Course and the book based on it, Questions of Life by Nicky Gumbel. Ronald Reagan also used this argument in 1978, in a written reply to a liberal Methodist minister who said that he did not believe Jesus was the son of God.[20] A variant has also been quoted by Bono.[21] The Lewis version was cited by Charles Colson as the basis of his conversion to Christianity.[22] Stephen Davis, a supporter of Lewis and of this argument,[23] argues that it can show belief in the Incarnation as rational.[24] Bruce M. Metzger argued that "It has often been pointed out that Jesus'[s] claim to be the only Son of God is either true or false. If it is false, he either knew the claim was false or he did not know that it was false. In the former case (2) he was a liar; in the latter case (3) he was a lunatic. No other conclusion beside these three is possible."[25] It has also been put forward by Catholic apologist Robert Barron.
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Here's the entire interview with Bono
C. S. Lewis, who you may know as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia and many Christan books., said:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.[14]
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This argument has been used in various forms throughout church history.[7] It was used by the American preacher Mark Hopkins in his book Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity (1846), based on lectures delivered in 1844.[8] Another early use of this approach was by the Scots preacher "Rabbi" John Duncan (1796–1870), around 1859–60:[9]
Other preachers who used this approach included Reuben Archer Torrey (1856–1928)[10] and W. E. Biederwolf (1867–1939).[11] The writer G.K. Chesterton used something similar to the trilemma in his book, The Everlasting Man (1925),[12] which Lewis cited in 1962 as the second book that most influenced him.[13]
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Lewis, who had spoken extensively on Christianity to Royal Air Force personnel, was aware many ordinary people did not believe Jesus was God, but saw him rather as "a 'great human teacher' who was deified by his supporters"; his argument is intended to overcome this.[1] It is based on a traditional assumption that, in his words and deeds, Jesus was asserting a claim to be God. For example, in Mere Christianity, Lewis refers to what he says are Jesus's claims:
- to have authority to forgive sins — behaving as if he really was "the person chiefly offended in all offences."[15]
- to have always existed, and
- to intend to come back to judge the world at the end of time.[16]
Lewis implies that these amount to a claim to be God and argues that they logically exclude the possibility that Jesus was merely "a great moral teacher", because he believes no ordinary human making such claims could possibly be rationally or morally reliable. Elsewhere, he refers to this argument as "the aut Deus aut malus homo" ("either God or a bad man"),[17] a reference to an earlier version of the argument used by Henry Parry Liddon in his 1866 Bampton Lectures, in which Liddon argued for the divinity of Jesus based on a number of grounds, including the claims he believed Jesus made.[18]
Influence
The trilemma has continued to be used in Christian apologetics since Lewis, notably by writers like Josh McDowell. Peter Kreeft describes the trilemma as "the most important argument in Christian apologetics"[19] and it forms a major part of the first talk in the Alpha Course and the book based on it, Questions of Life by Nicky Gumbel. Ronald Reagan also used this argument in 1978, in a written reply to a liberal Methodist minister who said that he did not believe Jesus was the son of God.[20] A variant has also been quoted by Bono.[21] The Lewis version was cited by Charles Colson as the basis of his conversion to Christianity.[22] Stephen Davis, a supporter of Lewis and of this argument,[23] argues that it can show belief in the Incarnation as rational.[24] Bruce M. Metzger argued that "It has often been pointed out that Jesus'[s] claim to be the only Son of God is either true or false. If it is false, he either knew the claim was false or he did not know that it was false. In the former case (2) he was a liar; in the latter case (3) he was a lunatic. No other conclusion beside these three is possible."[25] It has also been put forward by Catholic apologist Robert Barron.
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Here's the entire interview with Bono
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