Philgrim’s Blogress

I must admit that, despite my right-of-centre political views, I never watch Fox news, so the only time I have ever seen Glenn Beck was in an entertaining Youtube video back in early December 2009, featuring him in his fevered indignation  over scientists using a trick of the trade to reconcile historical tree ring proxy data with data from weather stations.

I came across the latest gem from Glenn Beck while browsing through The Holy Post.   According to opinion columnist Charles Lewis,

Glenn Beck, the Fox News commentator known for his tearful rants in defence of American liberty and against the evils of liberalism, has told his audience that it may be time to abandon most of the Christian churches.

In a recent radio show, that was broadcast on more than 400 affiliates, he told his listeners to leave any church that uses the phrases “social justice” or “economic justice.” “I beg you, look for the words ’social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site,” he said.

“If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!” He went on to say, “If you have a priest pushing social justice go find another parish. Go alert your bishop and tell them. [Ask them] are you down with this whole social justice thing?” …

The faith community that I’m involved with is part of the Evangelical Covenant Church.  Our denomination has a “Department of Compassion, Mercy and Justice“.  I went to the denomination’s website and did a search on “social justice”, which resulted in several pages of hits.

Clearly my denomination is on Glenn Beck’s naughty list.  But I like it so I’m staying put.

But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!  (Amos 5:24)

End Note 1: I don’t think that Beck is against justice, but is against “progressive liberal” ideas of justice involving government intervention.  Personally I believe that the primary responsibility of Christians is at the individual level, but the Bible also calls for the “king” to help those who need it;

End Note 2: Despite the fact that I’m a small-c conservative, I support “pinko” Canadian policies like universal health care and official bilingualism, so if I were ever transplanted to the U.S., I really don’t know how I’d vote.

I stumbled across this news story about a child pornography bust:

Tampa, Florida – Even veteran detectives call this crime “disgusting.” A Tampa man claiming to be a minister is behind bars, accused of selling child pornography out of his home.

43-year-old Eric Spandorf allegedly downloaded and sold dozens of DVD’s filled with horrific images of child pornography…

(full news article here)

Apparently the accused man claims to be a pastor at something called Biblical Ministries.

Since the article gave a link to their website, I checked it out.   Sure enough, it lists Reverend Eric M. Spandorf as Associate Pastor/Crisis Councilor (sp).

Naturally curious about where the Reverend had obtained his M. Div. degree, and where he had been ordained, I clicked on the link to “Church Staff”, where I found the following:

Eric Mitchell Spandorf was born in the year 1966 In Brooklyn N.Y.  He lived there up until the age of 2.  At which time he moved to Plainview long island.  He was one of three children he had an older sister and an identical twin brother that died at the age of 16.  He attended Plainview High School which he graduated in the year 1984.  At the age of 24 he made the move to Florida where he resided in Orlando for 12 years at which time he moved to Kissimmee and now finally laid down routes in Tampa Fl.  He turned to the church out of feeling despair and disappointment in life and he now is a teen counselor.

That’s it.  Nothing about seminary, nothing about the ordination process.

This guy wasn’t a pastor, but a predator taking advantage of a wide open Internet to take advantage of the defenceless. Unfortunately many people reading about this case will take the Reverend title at face value, and the reputation of the church of Jesus Christ takes another blow.

I don’t doubt that there is a place for online ministry.  But I also believe that pastors must be accountable.  Obtaining the title of Reverend in the denomination that I’m a part of is a long, hard process.  I think that is a good thing.

“In the end, coming to faith remains for all a sense of homecoming, of picking up the threads of a lost life, of responding to a bell that had long been ringing, of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant.”
— Malcolm Muggeridge

Few contemporary Bible translators translate word-for-word.  They instead often operate on the theory of “dynamic equivalence,” summed up by one of its advocates as the effort to find “in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent to the message of the source language, first in meaning and secondly in style.”

The theory is a bold expression of modern hubris.  Most obvious is the assumption that we know the “message of the source language” accurately enough to reproduce that message in the receptor language.  Armed with the tools of modern research, we can stitch together tatters of texts, bones and buildings into a three-dimensional model of the ancient world.

The subtler hubris is the more dangerous.  Older translators settled for word-for-word translations, often mangling the style and syntax of the receptor language to reproduce the source language (cf. the doubled Hebraisms – “dying you shall die” – of the Authorized Version) because they believed they were handling mysteries beyond their understanding.  As Stephen Prickett has pointed out, they rendered the “original in all its starkness and oddity” because they knew they didn’t have mastery of the text.

- Peter J. Leithart (in Touchstone)

Awhile back I posted about my experience of reading through an eight-version parallel New Testament.  I still like the NLT and some other dynamic equivalent versions for their readability, but I think Leithart’s argument for word-for-word translation has merit.  I’ll stick with a combination of the two.

And then think of ME! It would get all around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see anybody from that town again I’d be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame. That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide, it ain’t no disgrace. That was my fix exactly. The more I studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the  plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven,whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there’s One that’s always on the lookout, and ain’t a-going to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn’t so much to blame; but something inside of me kept saying, “There was the Sunday-school, you could a gone to it; and if you’d a done it they’d a learnt you there that people that acts as I’d been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.”

I recently finished re-reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that masterpiece of the satirist Mark Twain, for the first time since my boyhood, and the part that affected me the most was Huck’s moral dilemma over helping to free Jim, the runaway slave.  After resolving to change his ways, straighten up and turn in Jim,  and even going so far as to write a note to the owner betraying the runaway’s location,

I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell” — and tore it up.

Of course in retrospect it’s easy to say that Huck made the right moral choice, that slavery was wrong, and that the society that taught its children otherwise was not following Christian biblical teaching on equality.

But I can’t help but wonder what choice I’d have made if I were in Huck’s place in that society.