Welcome to my website. My goal is to help you & me grow in our ability to understand, love & live the Bible. On this site you can find training help, resources for your church, and inspiration for engaging the Scriptures. Enjoy!
Just yesterday a reader named Scott, from Salt Lake City, Utah, wrote me with a question that offers a helpful launch point for this blog post. A fan of the NLT translation (which I have done work on), Scott has “a KJV enthusiast friend” who challenged him to take a look at Mark 6:11, which he did. This is how Scott’s email to me continued:
Scripture presents us with a beautiful, powerful, overarching story. It has a meganarrative “backbone” that takes the reader of the whole Bible from the rhythmic beauty and order of creation, through the chaotic crisis of the fall, to the climax of the cross, and finally to the renewal of all things in the new heavens and earth. That “story” is at the heart of what God is up to in the universe, and at the heart of God’s story, we find our purpose in life.
In my last post I discussed briefly two wonky things we do with words: the root fallacy and the time-frame fallacy. In this post let’s discuss two other ways we throw Bible terms under the linguistic bus.
The words of the Bible are your friends. Some are extroverted, linking arms with the words around them they communicate fairly clearly and openly. Other words are complex introverts, shying away from speaking the obvious. Still others seem clear but reward the time spent getting to know them. Suddenly you see that they are not who you thought they were at first blush. But all of the Bible’s words are your friends. Be kind to them.
Do you know what you call a person who speaks 3 languages? Trilingual. Do you know what you call a person who speaks 2 languages? Bilingual. Do you know what you call a person who speaks 1 language? An American! (My European friends, most of whom are bi- or trilingual, love that joke).
