22AR27-21
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AR 27:21 - Lies opposing Christian and classical liberal belief
In this issue:
FREE SPEECH - "Facebook offers every assurance it will undertake its work on the metaverse responsibly"
OLD TESTAMENT - "the 'networks' of passages that are frequently evoked and used throughout the Old Testament" and their interrelatedness with the New Testament
TOTALITARIANISM - we are "not fighting for a partisan line but for an entire civilization"
Apologia Report 27:21 (1,574)
June 9, 2022
FREE SPEECH
"The Antisocial Network: Frances Haugen's Facebook testimony" by Dominic Preziosi -- What have we learned from Haugen's courage as a whistle-blower? Looking back, it would seem not much, really. While it would appear that "The public surely benefited from hearing about Facebook's practices from a former insider, information the company would rather keep to itself. This included research showing the harmful effects of Instagram on the emotional and mental health of teenage girls."
Despite ongoing criticism, Facebook "still emphasizes a metric known as 'meaningful social interaction'" promoting controversial, hot-button posts - like divisive political speech and misinformation - that drive emotionally fueled engagement and are far more widely viewed. In short, Facebook prioritizes profit over safety."
What lies ahead is discomforting at an increasingly higher level. "Facebook is poised to hire ten thousand new employees to build the metaverse, a 'virtual environment," according to Zuckerberg, "where you can be present with people in digital spaces…an embodied internet that you're inside of rather than just looking at.' But not to worry: Facebook offers every assurance it will undertake its work on the metaverse responsibly." Commonweal, Oct 26 '21 <www.bit.ly/3PMYcsk>
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OLD TESTAMENT
Many of our readers look forward to something bigger and better than a metaverse. To help us grow more familiar with just that, one of the most important conservative Scripture reference works released in the past year, Old Testament Use of Old Testament: A Book-by-Book Guide, by Gary Edward Schnittjer <www.bit.ly/3wWYnZm> is reviewed by Andrew Messmer (Academic Dean, Seville Theological Seminary, Spain) for the Evangelical Review of Theology (46:1 - 2022, pp94-95).
Messmer calls this work "a first" for its "comprehensive, book-by-book treatment of the Old Testament's use of the Old Testament. ...
"Each chapter contains four main parts: (1) three lists, presenting the use of other Old Testament books in the particular book, the use of the particular book in other Old Testament books, and the use of the particular book in the New Testament; (2) the 'hermeneutical profile', which summarizes how the particular book uses other Old Testament books; (3) a text-by-text analysis of each use of other Old Testament books in the particular book; and (4) filters which include examples of non-exegetical and/or non-allusive parallels between the particular book and other books of the Old Testament. Two concluding chapters apply some of the book's findings to the New Testament and discuss 'networks' of passages that are frequently evoked and used throughout the Old Testament. ...
"The book's focus is not on simple quotations, allusions or echoes, but rather on 'interpretive interventions' - that is, how one text intentionally uses and (re)interprets another one. ... The objectivity that Schnittjer attempts to employ is balanced by his admission that 'many elements pivot more on art than science.' His transparency is greatly appreciated."
Messmer approvingly remarks that "the book has maintained the difficult tension between thorough academic research, on one hand, and accessibility to a wide readership on the other. The bibliography includes well over 1,000 works (almost all in English), and his multiple indices (spanning more than 100 pages) greatly facilitate the reader's ability to look up specific texts of interest. Citations of original languages are translated into English, with key Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary placed in bold to further assist the non-specialist." <www.bit.ly/3lRme7G>
Redemption is the major theme of the Old and New Testaments' writers. <www.bit.ly/scarlet-thread> Studying the broad internal referencing done by the Bible's original writers has long been a source of great interest and pleasure for me (RP). Schnittjer takes this to a much deeper level as he develops OT themes common to multiple writers, describing them as networks. In a consummate effort, Schnittjer charts the Bible's most "prominent" networks with chapter 37.
As you've probably gathered by now, Schnittjer's 1052-page, 8-by-10-inch format tome (hereafter OT-in-OT) represents a phenomenal effort of scope, assimilation and summation. OT-in-OT functions as an exegetical aid for the individual books of the OT. (Exegesis is summarized as "a broader sense of explain, enhance, expand, connect, adjust, and the like" [p xix]).
Schnittjer's impressively comprehensive work of genius "surveys the hundreds of Old Testament allusions within the Old Testament and provides hermeneutical guidance for interpreting these interrelated scriptures." Note the above emphasis on allusions. He underscores that the Bible's "Quotation, paraphrse, and allusion are intentional" (p xx). On page 889 he mentions the full range involved: "quotation, paraphrase, allusion, echo, [and] trace." To get at this, he strives to focus on what lies beyond the "horizontal context ... the surrounding scriptural setting of a cited text" (p 849). Thus, he emphasizes the "vertical context" which, "refers to cited scriptural texts that themselves feature exegesis of other Scriptures" (p 850). "This whole issue of vertical context leads [to] interpretive networks."
Schnittjer presents "Scripture allusions for each book and follows with an interpretive profile of how that book uses passages from elsewhere in the Old Testament. Specific criteria are applied to each allusion, providing readers with an evaluation of the significance of each interpretive allusion. Minor allusions caused by style, figures of speech, and other minor elements are not included. Responsible exegesis requires careful attention to interrelated scriptures, yet there are a host of interpretive difficulties related to Scripture's use of Scripture. Designed for ease-of-use for any serious student of the Bible, Old Testament Use of Old Testament offers a thorough, systematic tool to aid in evaluating scriptural interpretation of Scripture."
His thesis: "God has been pleased to reveal his will by the authors of Scripture, sometimes by immediate direct revelation and sometimes by scriptural exegesis of Scripture" (p xix). "The issue at hand concerns whether New Testament scholars adequately take advantage of vertical contexts within Israel's Scriptures [Schnittjer's preferred expression for the OT] or if they treat donor passages exclusively in relation to their horizontal contexts" (p 851). (Fascinating stuff this.)
"This dynamic tool equips students of the Bible to:
* - Grasp the complexity of Scripture's use of Scripture
* - Evaluate the significance of interpretive allusions
* - Gain exegetical insight into the study of interrelated Scriptures
* - Understand how later Old Testament passages use earlier Old Testament passages
* - Easily find the most important Old Testament allusions" (adapted from Zondervan's promo)
Last, here's a great line from Schnittjer. He finds that "these things require patience" (p xviii). How's that for understatement?
In his review above, Messmer finds that OT-in-OT's last chapter on networks "functions as a capstone to the entire work." I've really enjoyed taking some time to explore that chapter and have partially laid it out <www.bit.ly/OT-in-OT> to introduce the book's value and encourage its use by others as an aspect of what I've learned about the overall subject of the Bible's internal self-referencing gleaned from other resources.
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TOTALITARIANISM
Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, by Rod Dreher, is reviewed by Steven Wierenga (MA Apologetics and Ethics, Denver Seminary) for the 2022 Denver Journal. Wierenga broadly summarizes that the book <www.bit.ly/3axaapR> "examines the worldviews that are opposing Christian and classical liberal belief. The book also offers practical ways to resist the onslaught of progressive ideology." Specifically, it is "a brief but challenging examination of the parallels between totalitarianism in Soviet bloc countries and the rise of what Dreher <www.bit.ly/3PJUOyt> calls a soft totalitarianism in the United States." Wierenga emphasizes that "the new [postmodern, secular] worldview ... like the Marxist worldview that undergirds it, ... comes with brown-shirted brow-beating. ...
"The book title comes from a phrase used in an essay written by the Russian dissident and author of Gulag Archipelago Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn." The first of the book's two main sections "explores what soft totalitarianism means, why it's here, how it acts as a religion, and how Big Tech plays a major role. ... Dreher builds a case for parallels between the rise of soft totalitarianism in America and the rise of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe."
Wierenga reports that perhaps the strongest chapter in this section "highlights the cultural similarities between our times and the [Soviet] pre-October Revolution times." He explains, first, how Dreher appreciates Hannah Arendt's <www.bit.ly/3MeHD5L> conclusions in relation to how "loneliness and social atomization will precede a dictatorship [and, second, that] many Americans - the younger generations in particular - do not trust their institutions. ... "Third, people, as they become more isolated, are more willing to toe a party line, even if it means believing a lie. A good example of this is the 1619 Project. Though the project is full of outright lies and shoddy historiography, it has already been taught in forty-five hundred classrooms. ...
"The second part of the book is named 'How to Live in Truth' and gives practical ways that Christians can not only prepare to resist in the future but to resist in the now. Dreher offers some very helpful, practical ideas in this section. ... Dreher suggests that the American church will steadily have to move underground. ... The State may be able to take Bibles, guns, and other things, but it can't take memory." Something we've been working on that fits in quite well here: <www.bit.ly/IF-NOT-NOW>
"Dreher also stresses the importance of the family unit. ... Families should not let education happen at school only. Dreher tells of several Czech and Slovak families that resisted tyranny by fighting as a family. ...
"Dreher's approach leaves one feeling that he is not fighting for a partisan line but for an entire civilization." Wierenga concludes in part: "Dreher states his case firmly without overstating it. The reader will find it very compelling and alarming, but not panicky." <www.bit.ly/3a6PrsG>
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