Praying Hands

阿尔布雷特·丢勒的名画《祷告的手》，其背后蕴含着两个好朋友的故事。

据说1490年有两位新进的艺术家，他们是好朋友，其中一位是丢勒，另一位是耐斯坦。当时两人的生活相当穷困，为了成为艺术家，必须充分利用时间干活维生。然而工作的辛苦和忙碌，影响了他们的艺术训练。

面对困境的无奈，他俩抽签决定一人去谋生赚钱，支持另一人到艺术学校进修。丢勒中签，得以随名师习艺，耐斯坦只好更加辛苦地挑起养活两人的担子。

日后丢勒达成梦想，成为相当有名气的艺术家，这时他已有能力支持耐斯坦去进修学画。然而，令丢勒大为震惊的是，他发现耐斯坦在吃重的工作下已使双手扭曲变形。耐斯坦不可能成为艺术家了，他为了信守和朋友之间的约定，牺牲了自己的艺术前途。

有一天，丢勒看见耐斯坦合起双手，屈膝跪下祷告，扭曲的双手象征着爱的祭献给上帝，丢勒将眼前所看到那象征祷告意义的一幕，立刻画成素描。自此以后，那幅象征代祷意义的杰作，不断提醒我们：祷告与友谊彼此相属。然而，更美的是，听我们祷告的那位，他的双手也曾为我们被刺穿。

——侯士庭，《转化生命的友谊》，18-19。

To believe in Jesus

 Note on “believing” in the Fourth Gospel The noun “belief” (πίστις) and the verb “believe” (πιστεύω) are each used (by a strange coincidence) 243 times in the NT. Neither word occurs in 2 John or 3 John, while Col, Phlm, 2 Pet and Rev use only the noun. These two terms represent the appropriate human relationship to God and Christ, and they point to the essence of Christianity and its most distinctive feature in comparison with Greek and Jewish thought.
 
John never uses πίστις in the Four Gospel, although it is found once in 1 John (5: 4) and four times in Revelation (2: 13, 19; 13: 10; 14: 12). His preference for πιστεύω over πίστις illustrates his preference for verbs over nouns. The verb “believe” (πιστεύω) is very common in the Four Gospel (98 uses), so it is not surprising this Gospel has been called “the Gospel of Belief.” Sometimes the verb refers to facts (“ believe that,” “be convinced that/ of,” 9: 18; 11: 26b; 16: 27; 20: 31a) and sometimes things (4: 50), but often it is a person who is believed (πιστεύω with dative) where “believe” means “give intellectual credence to (the testimony of)” (4: 21; 6: 30) or “entrust oneself to” (5: 24, 38; 8: 31).
 
But John has a characteristic idiom, “believe in” (πιστεύω with the prep. εἰς; only 9 of the 45 NT uses are outside the Four Gospel and 1 John), used only of a divine object of faith (surprisingly, of God only in 12: 44c; 14: 1a, but usually of Christ), never of a human object of faith. It is in Christ that God meets the individual in salvation so there are not two competing objects of human faith. 
 
This distinctive prepositional phrase “believe in” depicts the total committal of one’s total self to the person of Christ as Messiah and Lord, something more than an intellectual acceptance of the message of the gospel and a recognition of the truth about Christ, although these aspects are involved. For John, belief involves not only recognition and acceptance of the truth but also adherence and allegiance to Jesus as the Truth (14: 6).

 To believe in Jesus is
to come to him (5: 40; 6: 35, 37, 44– 45, 65; 7: 37),
to receive him (1: 12),
to drink the water he offers (4: 13– 14),
to follow him (8: 12), 
to love him (14: 5, 21, 23; 16: 27).
 

---  Murray J. Harris, John, B&H Publishing.

What is the Gospel?

We need a more biblical understanding of the gospel. I suspect if I were to ask you what the gospel is, a number of you would say it's forgiveness of sins. Or, if you're in the divinity school, you'd say justification by faith alone. Thank God, forgiveness of sins is one very important part of the gospel. I never want to stand before our holy God on any basis other than the fact that Jesus died on the cross for my sins. But if the gospel is no more than forgiveness of sins, then you and I can accept Jesus Christ, get our one-way ticket to heaven, and go on being exactly the same racist, environmentally unconcerned, unjust people we've always been.
 
Jesus tells us that the gospel is more than that. Have you ever gone through the Gospels and noticed how Jesus defines the gospel, the good news? Mark 1:14-15 says, and it's a summary of Jesus' whole preaching:
 
After John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying [in other words, here's the definition of the gospel], "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news."
 
Virtually every time Jesus defines the gospel, he defines it as the good news of the kingdom. What on earth does he mean?
 
Remember what the prophets had said? They looked ahead to a time in the future, beyond the injustice and disobedience of the people of Israel, and they said, "Some time in the future, the Messiah will come. The messianic order will break in, and God will bring a new right relationship with himself. Our sins will be forgiven and the law will be written on our hearts, and there will be a new right relationship with neighbors. There will be transformation vertically and horizontally, and there will be shalom, justice, and wholeness in society."
 
Then, Jesus comes along and claims to be the Messiah, and says that the messianic kingdom the prophets had predicted was breaking into the present, in his own person and word. He meant the two things the prophets had talked about. He meant a vertical thing. He meant that we get into his kingdom not by good works, not by any kind of works righteousness. We get into his kingdom by sheer grace, because God loves even sinners, and eagerly wants them to change.
 
But there's more to this good news of the kingdom than that, because Jesus goes on to call a circle of disciples, a new community. He wasn't an isolated, individualistic prophet. He formed a new society, and this new society began to live differently, to live his kingdom ways. They began to challenge society at all the points that society was wrong, and they cared about the whole person, not just the soul.
 
So what is the gospel then? It's not just forgiveness of sins, although thank God, it includes that. I am still a sinner, and I want to trust in the cross, but it's more than that. It's the fantastic news that the messianic kingdom has broken into history. Now, in the power of the Holy Spirit, you and I can begin to live differently. And in that new community, all of the brokenness, the social, the economic, the ethnic and the emotional brokenness of this old world is being overcome in Jesus' new community. Matthew 9:35 summarizes this: "Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness."
 
Teaching, preaching, and healing. That's what Jesus was about. That's what I'm pleading for. He cared about the whole person. Jesus never thought that all you needed was a good life here on earth, and then everything would be fine. In fact, he said that it's better to lose the whole world than lose your relationship with God and Christ. But he never drew the conclusion that we Christians sometimes do. Sometimes Christians today say, "Well, that means that we should spend most of our time on evangelism, and if we've got a little bit of time left over we can care about the poor, and so on." Jesus never drew that conclusion.
 

--- Ronald J. Sider, “The Whole Gospel for The Whole Person” 

in A Place for Truth: Leading Thinkers Explore Life's Hardest Questions, 2010.

 

Have You No Shame (2)

The vocabulary for honor and shame is difficult for Westerners to keep straight, not least because though we still use the terms honor and shame, we use them differently.
 
First, shame is not negative in honor/shame cultures; shaming is. Technically, in these cultures, shame is a good thing: it indicates that you and your community know the proper way to behave. You have a sense of shame; if you didn’t, you would have no shame. You would be shameless. This is different from being shamed. When an older American asks, “Have you no shame?” they mean, “Don’t you know the proper thing to do?” When one is censured for not having a sense of shame, for being shameless, then one is shamed.
 
We know that all this can be confusing. But remember that languages tend not to have words for ideas that are not considered important. Since honor/shame isn’t important in English, we are lacking in the words we need. Make no mistake, though: shame is important. It was why the Jewish officials killed Jesus. They didn’t kill him for going around preaching “love one another” or for healing the sick or for performing miracles. They killed him because he had taken their honor—a limited resource.
 
Actually, the Spirit uses both inner conviction (a sense of guilt) and external conviction (a sense of shame). While the ancient world and most of the non-Western world contain honor/shame cultures and the West is made up of innocence/guilt cultures, God can work effectively in both.

- E. Richards & Brandon J O'Brien, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: 

Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible, 2012.

Have You No Shame (1)

In an innocence/guilt culture (which includes most Western societies), the laws of society, the rules of the church, local mores and the code of the home are all internalized in the person. The goal is that when a person breaks one of these, her or his conscience will be pricked. In fact, it is hoped that the conscience will discourage the person from breaking the rule in the first place. The battle is fought on the inside.
 
In an honor/shame society, such as that of the Bible and much of the non-Western world today, the driving force is to not bring shame upon yourself, your family, your church, your village, your tribe or even your faith. The determining force is the expectations of your significant others (primarily your family). Their expectations don’t override morals or right/wrong; they actually are the ethical standards. In these cultures, you are shamed when you disappoint those whose expectations matter. “You did wrong”—not by breaking a law and having inner guilt but by failing to meet the expectations of your community. For our discussion here, the point to notice is that the verdict comes not from the inner conscience of the perpetrator but from the external response of his or her group. One’s actions are good or bad depending upon how the community interprets them.
 
As is clear from all this, non-Western and Western cultures have a difficult time understanding each other. Western readers of this book likely think the non-Western view of honor is strange and convoluted. Our non-Western friends find us equally confusing. Westerners like to think of ourselves as holding to the moral high ground that is found within ourselves; non-Westerners often view us as insensitive.

- E. Richards & Brandon J O'Brien, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: 

Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible, 2012.

  

The Corresponding Word for Makarios (2)

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (niv). The niv represents the traditional translation of this beatitude. “God blesses those who are poor and realize their need for him, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs” (nlt). The goal of the New Living Translation is to render the original languages in good, contemporary English. The translators appear to recognize that English readers want a clear subject and a verb in the active voice, so they supply a subject (God) and make the passive Greek verb active.
 
“The poor in spirit are blessed, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs” (Holman Christian Standard Bible). In contrast to the nlt, this translation preserves the passive voice of the original Greek. This is a less satisfying English sentence but more faithful to the original Greek.
 
“Blessed (happy, to be envied, and spiritually prosperous—with life-joy and satisfaction in God’s favor and salvation, regardless of their outward conditions) are the poor in spirit (the humble, who rate themselves insignificant), for theirs is the kingdom of heaven!” (Amplified Bible). It would probably be difficult to read long passages from the Amplified Bible. But the value of this translation is that it demonstrates how it sometimes takes many words in one language to approximate or capture the essence of a single word in another language.
“Happy are people who are hopeless, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs” (ceb). The Common English Bible abandons the traditional verb blessed altogether. This gives the verse a different feel.
 
When you read a passage in different translations, take a few moments to consider the implications of the different renderings. Does the meaning or application of the verse change depending on the translation? Sometimes. This exercise can help you become sensitive to what goes without being said behind the words we use.
 

- E. Richards & Brandon J O'Brien, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: 

Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible, 2012.

 

The Corresponding Word for Makarios (1)

Sociologists suggest that people have a difficult time describing or even identifying something that they don’t have the vocabulary for. Some even suggest that one can have a hard time experiencing something for which one has no corresponding word.
 
The Greeks had a word for the feeling one has when one is happy: makarios. It is a feeling of contentment, when one knows one’s place in the world and is satisfied with that place. If your life has been fortunate, you should feel makarios. We use idioms in English to try to approximate this experience. We’ll say, “My life has really come together,” or “I’m in a happy place,” or “Life has been good to me.” We are not really discussing the details of our life; we are trying to describe a feeling we have. Happy sounds trite, so we avoid it. Actually, we are makarios.
 
In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that if you are a peacemaker, then you are makarios. Since English doesn’t have a word for this feeling, translators have struggled to find one. What do you call it when you feel happy, content, balanced, harmonious and fortunate? Well, translators have concluded, you are blessed. Thus our English translations say, “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Mt 5:9). Unfortunately, this introduces another problem. The English language prefers clear subjects for its verbs. So the missing puzzle piece in the Beatitudes is, How is one blessed? What goes without saying in our culture is that God blesses people. Consequently, we often interpret this verse to mean, “If you are a peacemaker, then God will bless you.” But this isn’t what Jesus meant. Jesus meant, “If you are a peacemaker, then you are in your happy place.” It just doesn’t work well in English. Alas, here is the bigger problem: maybe the reason we North Americans struggle to find makarios in our personal lives is because we don’t have a word in our native language to denote it.
 
But English cries out for a subject. Because English “needs” a subject, we tend to provide one. This is why, as we pointed out above, “Blessed are the peacemakers” turns in our minds to “God blesses the peacemakers.” We don’t make this adjustment on purpose. But it goes to show how thoroughly our English language (even grammar, which we might not be able to explain) affects the way we think.
 

- E. Richards & Brandon J O'Brien, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: 

Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible, 2012.