Matthew Henry John Bartlett

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Thursday 20 May, 02004

by Matthew Bartlett @ 12:50 pm

Lyrics: Belle & Sebastian/Roy Walker
BMcL: The Passion, America, Lent, Ps 73 [RA]
Current Welly waterfront Artbox

4 responses to “”

  1. Sternum says:

    in response to Aaron’s #34 from previous long discussion: You say we should convey the meanings of words in the Bible. The meaning of scripture is given in the Bible itself. We don’t need to think up new ways of explaining it like ‘cosmic’. The Bible explains itself. That’s what I meant by ‘self-explanatory’. If we think we need to think up new words to describe it we are being rather arrogant, I think, and it becomes dangerous.

  2. jono says:

    On another note, that Artbox is stupid. It was already done by David Blaine the ilusionist

  3. aaron says:

    tim, it’s not quite true that the bible explains itself. We need help from outside to understand even what the original words meant. The most obvious examples are words that only occur once, but are understood from secular sources. Also, some things that were understood at the time of writing aren’t understood now, so we have to find them out before getting a full grasp on the text.

    This is why we use lexicons and dictionaries and so on.

    The ‘new words to describe it’ are no different from a minister in the pulpit, who preaches with a whole bunch of non-textual words, all to help us understand it. Surely that’s not ‘arrogance’, it’s just ‘translation’.

    If I was saying that we need to re-write the bible, beacuse it didn’t do a good job of transmitting meaning, THEN I would be arrogant. But I’m not saying that. I’m simply saying that we can and should use more than the text itself to pass on the meaning of the text.

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