Saturday, June 24, 2006
Dare pondus idonea fumo
If you believe the media, everything that happens in this country is going to have long-lasting ramifications, effects that will last well into the 2010s and 2020s. People charge the president with ruining the country, with permanently dismantling the American dream, and with diverse varieties of high crime. People call him "the worst president of all time", and they insist that he will be the next Nero, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, or, even worse, John Adams. "The world is laughing at us", is the cry on the street. Republicans fear the fall of the country to terrorists, while Democrats fear the fall of the country in general! Each party, with their associated members and commentators, accuses the other group of crimes, scandals, and, if you believe the papers, the worst case of idiocy since people decided that the world was flat. America, they say, is about to fall. Or not. It depends on who's commenting.
Every couple of weeks, the 24-hour cable news networks have a new scandal for us, or a new horror, which they claim will be variously the downfall of Republicans, Democrats, America, the terrorists, Iraq, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, the president, former presidents, religion, politics, America's sense of decency, our place in the civilized world, and, last but not least, the economy. Political commentators denounce various groups with carefully worded, exquisitely quotable rants and speeches, designed to incense their viewers, who, of course, already agree with them.
People have threatened to move to Canada over it. Computer users spend hours of their lives on the Internet arguing about these topics, as though convincing other Internet users of their political views will change the fate of the world. While I don't personally know of such a case, I would not be at all surprised to hear that people have gone on antidepressant and antianxiety medications, or become alcoholics, because of their addiction to political and religious media melodrama.
And it's getting worse. Listening to the media recite horror stories of war and politics day after day, can lead one to believe that our time is worse than all other times. After all, don't we have more political scandals today than any other time? Hasn't the economy gone downhill for a longer period of time than any other time in history? Aren't world events more ominous than the Cuban missile crisis or World War II? Hasn't the President decreed that habeus corpus is no longer the law of the land, and that national security trumps personal welfare? Didn't somebody who lived next to Hitler's or Stalin's or Mussolini's great-uncle's brother-in-law say the same things?
While you're experiencing the political uproar around an election or war, the three weeks the media spends on each event may seem like a very long time. Sometimes, the period is a bit longer, like the year leading up to the election in 2004. When faced with these tales of political ineptitude, images of death, and predictions of never-ending and uninterruptible woe, it is understandable that some people might become distressed. When these things come back-to-back, as they have recently, the position that we are now living in the worst of times becomes slightly more defensible.
I'm going to ask you a very interesting question. You may be amazed by your own answer to the question. Are you ready? Here we go:
One year ago
What was the media crisis at this time last year (July 2005)? I'll even give you points if you can remember any earlier crises.
Katrina had not yet occurred. The 2005 hurricane season was not looking terrible. Bird flu was a murmur in the wind.
Do you remember? Do you even have a vague idea? Certainly, you might come up with some vague answer involving George Bush and the war in Iraq, and you might be right, but I'm looking for specifics. Do you even remember what the political crisis was in March 2006, less than three months ago? Do you remember thinking that this crisis, unlike all the others, would irrevocably change the landscape of American freedom? Do you remember thinking that it was different in some way from all the other crises? Did you wonder whether this was the one that would finally bring about the inevitable fall of one of those groups mentioned in the first paragraph?
Did you remember the Live-8 concert that was simulcast in 10 countries around the world seeking donations in the fight against poverty? If you're a fan, it may not seem like it's been a year since the sixth Harry Potter book was released. Do you remember the bombings in the London underground that killed 56 people? In politics, Justice O'Connor has just retired and Bush has just nominated John Roberts to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, in a reversal of corporate media law from the 1980s, voted that peer-to-peer file sharing application developers can be held liable for illegal actions by their users. Did you remember the election of hardline Iranian president Ahmadinejad or the succession of kings in Saudi Arabia? Did you remember that Bush promised to fire anybody connected with the Valerie Plame leak? Do you remember the imminent domain Supreme Court ruling? How about the life, fame, and death of Terri Schiavo? How about the new Pope's past in the Nazi Youth, revealed at the end of April?
Two years ago
Try thinking of the crisis two years ago, twice the length between now and that time in which you couldn't name anything. That would be July 2004. At the time the Swift boat veterans were busy slamming presidential candidates. People were busy calling John Kerry a flip flopper. Jon Stewart on the Daily Show was busy with his Indecision 2004 coverage in which he repeatedly slammed both candidates for their ineptitude to the delight (and horror) of his overwhelmingly liberal audience. Space buffs may remember that the Cassini probe finally arrived at Saturn and took some photos of its moon Titan. Hundreds of thousands of people have only six more months to live in Indonesia's fishing villages. Soccer fans may remember that Greece beat Portugal to win the 2004 European football championship. Did you remember that George Tenet, the head of the CIA, resigned? Are you sure that wasn't a few years earlier? Could you have told me that on June 28, 2004, the coalition forces in Iraq transferred power to an interim government?
Did you remember that on February 3, 2004, the CIA admitted that Iraq had no readily available weapons of mass destruction? Did you remember the March 11 bombings on a train in Madrid, which killed 190 civilians? Did you remember the May 19 confession of a soldier involved with prisoner abuse at Abu Gharib? Did you remember the video depicting the decapitation of Nick Berg? Did you remember the July 1st capture of Saddam Hussein, widely touted as an early "October Surprise"? Did you remember the surprise resignation of the Republican governor of New Jersey after he came out of the closet? Did you remember the November resignation of Colin Powell?
Four years ago
Now we're in the year 2002. The mad shoe bomber has just been captured! Nobody has even heard of SARS yet. Saddam Hussein has just rejected another United Nations disarmament proposal. The war in Afghanistan is just beginning. On July 1, the United States accidentally bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan, believing the group to be a legitimate target. Political gears of blame are spinning in Washington DC as the FBI and CIA tried to downplay on their own role in the 9/11 attacks. Somebody tried to assassinate the president of France. The American Taliban, John Walker Lindh (did you remember him?), pled guilty on July 15th. A month earlier, the accounting firm Arthur Andersen was convicted of obstruction for shredding the Enron financial documents.
On June 5th, American's favorite missing Mormon, Elizabeth Smart, is kidnapped from her home. There was a solar eclipse on June 10 of that year, recorded in some scientist's journal, and then forgotten. In August of that year, Europe was traumatized by massive floods. Dozens of people were killed and thousands were moved out of their homes. The space shuttle Columbia is still intact. That newfangled reality show, American Idol, premiered on Fox this year.
Eight years ago
1998.
The children of this year have just been afflicted with the infamous Pokémon cartoon for the first time. Google began its run for dominance in September of this year. The first home broadband connections are just beginning to creep into the marketplace. MySpace is released as a beta this year, a proposition that may seem anachronistic to the Internet's trendy. Nobody is downloading music, because Napster doesn't exist yet. 64 megabytes of RAM is considered astounding and more than enough. DVD players have only been sold in the United States for about a year. Daimler-Chrysler was formed by a merger this year. Exxon Mobil was created by a similar merger in December.
Bill Clinton's administration is at the height of the Monica Lewinsky impeachment scandal in which the president was charged with perjury. The Catholic sex abuse scandal has just begun when nine men were paid $23 million in damages for alleged abuse when the men were altar boys. On July 17 of this year, a tsunami struck the island of Papua New Guinea, killing and wounding nearly 4000 people. In Russia, the ruble has lost almost 70 percent of its value since the beginning of the year leading to the collapse of banks and general mass financial distress in that country. Millions of people lost their savings. Jesse Ventura has just been elected governor of Minnesota.
In the foreshadowing department, Iraq suspended all ties with the UN disarmament investigation team this August. Osama bin Laden bombed the United States embassies in this year, killing or injuring almost 5000 people. On August 28 of this year, the head of the UN investigation committee resigned from his post claiming that the UN was not doing enough to ensure that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were destroyed. A month later, the United States Congress passed the "Iraq liberation act" which claimed that the United States wanted to remove Saddam Hussein from power and replace his regime with a democratic government!
That was only eight years ago. As you can see, under a constant barrage of crisis, time can become a little distorted. We tend to think that our current crises will go on forever, and that past crises are not relevant. Remember though, there's as much temporal distance between us and the Monica Lewinsky scandal as there will be between the year 2014 and now. If the political and economic details of 1998 are shadowy to us in 2006, the political and economic details of 2006 will probably be murky to the people of 2014. Software companies founded this year could supplant both Google and Microsoft by 2014!
If you wish to keep carrying on this time-span doubling:
16 years ago/from now (1990/2022): There's as much time between the Gulf War and the Lewinsky scandal as there is between the Lewinsky scandal and today. What happened during those 8 years? Do you remember? Were there no political scandals or crises of law until 1998?
The Cold War officially ends in 1990! Manuel Noriega (remember him?) surrenders to American forces in Panama. The Exxon Valdez oil spill pollutes an Alaskan shoreline and lines the pockets of environmentalists everywhere. The Berlin Wall has only been demolished for about a month. East Germany holds its first free elections this year in six decades. People are still raving about the recent Tiananmen Square incident in China. Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, infamous for his war crimes during the Clinton administration, is elected on December 9th. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela is freed and decades of apartheid are ended after significant international pressure.
You'll notice that I've not even mentioned minor political scandals, media spasms, and other temporary panics. For instance, the Bush administration response to the Valdez spill was less than stellar, fueling several weeks worth of daytime talk shows. I didn't even recognize minor Israeli-Palestinian skirmishes like the one near the Dome of the Rock on October 8th. I didn't note the election of (now overthrown) Haitian President Aristide, which ended three decades of military dictatorship. I neglected George Bush's failure to keep his "no new taxes" campaign promise or his signature of the Americans with Disabilities Act. (Admit it - you thought that had been around forever!)
I somehow missed the classified military mission of the space shuttle Atlantis, which probably caused a great deal of suspicious speculation at the time. Also missing are the giant poll-tax protest in London which caused almost 500 injuries, the details of the West and East German merger, and the details of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Time Inc and Warner Communications merged this year to become Time Warner.
On the propaganda front, the US began broadcasting American television station TV Marti to Cuba. In politics, Rear Admiral John Poindexter, responsible for covering up the Iran-Contra scandal, was sentenced on multiple felony counts of obstruction, conspiracy, etc. (By 2003, he was leading the Department of Defense's controversial Information Awareness and Policy Analysis Market programs - did you remember those?)
All of these, weighty international issues in 1990, are barely memories today.
Moving to the future: In 2022, people born in 2006 will be receiving their driver's licenses. People who graduated from college in May 2006 will be the parents of those teenagers. People in 2022 will be as concerned with the politics of the present as we are today with the politics of the first Bush administration.
32 years ago/from now (1974/2038): There was as much time between the end of the Vietnam War and the Gulf War as there is between the first Gulf War and today.
In 2038, most people graduating from college in 2006 will be considering retirement. The last of the baby boomers, the parents of those graduates, will be in their nineties. The unruly teenagers from 2022 could be raising their own unruly teenagers in 2038.
In 1974 the OPEC energy crisis is still taking place. American citizens are waiting in line for hours to get gas, and fuel is being carefully rationed among drivers. People magazine is published for the first time this year. Seven people are indicted for their roles in the Watergate scandal; a few months later, Richard Nixon resigns. Much to the dismay of the defeated party, a prime minister is elected in England with fewer votes than his opponent. The last American soldiers are evacuated from Vietnam at the end of April this year.
Fascist supporters are still a worldwide threat and perform terrorist bombings, killing 6 people. The fossil hominid Lucy is discovered in Africa. The town of Darwin, Australia, is devasted by a cyclone. The militant leaders of Greece and Cyprus are overthrown. Chemical explosions kill 28 plant workers. An outbreak of 148 tornadoes kills 300 and injures over 5000 people. In other news, this year marks the 10th birthday of the United States civil rights act that banned discrimination based on race. Millions of people are still immensely unhappy that their children can attend schools with "colored" children.
Conclusion
Things you consider exceedingly crucial today will probably be meaningless historical artifacts to your children and their children in 2022 and 2038. So don't pretend that every new political crisis is the end of the world, or that it will finally bring about the downfall of your particular political enemies. They thought the same thing in 1974.
Every couple of weeks, the 24-hour cable news networks have a new scandal for us, or a new horror, which they claim will be variously the downfall of Republicans, Democrats, America, the terrorists, Iraq, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, the president, former presidents, religion, politics, America's sense of decency, our place in the civilized world, and, last but not least, the economy. Political commentators denounce various groups with carefully worded, exquisitely quotable rants and speeches, designed to incense their viewers, who, of course, already agree with them.
People have threatened to move to Canada over it. Computer users spend hours of their lives on the Internet arguing about these topics, as though convincing other Internet users of their political views will change the fate of the world. While I don't personally know of such a case, I would not be at all surprised to hear that people have gone on antidepressant and antianxiety medications, or become alcoholics, because of their addiction to political and religious media melodrama.
And it's getting worse. Listening to the media recite horror stories of war and politics day after day, can lead one to believe that our time is worse than all other times. After all, don't we have more political scandals today than any other time? Hasn't the economy gone downhill for a longer period of time than any other time in history? Aren't world events more ominous than the Cuban missile crisis or World War II? Hasn't the President decreed that habeus corpus is no longer the law of the land, and that national security trumps personal welfare? Didn't somebody who lived next to Hitler's or Stalin's or Mussolini's great-uncle's brother-in-law say the same things?
While you're experiencing the political uproar around an election or war, the three weeks the media spends on each event may seem like a very long time. Sometimes, the period is a bit longer, like the year leading up to the election in 2004. When faced with these tales of political ineptitude, images of death, and predictions of never-ending and uninterruptible woe, it is understandable that some people might become distressed. When these things come back-to-back, as they have recently, the position that we are now living in the worst of times becomes slightly more defensible.
I'm going to ask you a very interesting question. You may be amazed by your own answer to the question. Are you ready? Here we go:
One year ago
What was the media crisis at this time last year (July 2005)? I'll even give you points if you can remember any earlier crises.
Katrina had not yet occurred. The 2005 hurricane season was not looking terrible. Bird flu was a murmur in the wind.
Do you remember? Do you even have a vague idea? Certainly, you might come up with some vague answer involving George Bush and the war in Iraq, and you might be right, but I'm looking for specifics. Do you even remember what the political crisis was in March 2006, less than three months ago? Do you remember thinking that this crisis, unlike all the others, would irrevocably change the landscape of American freedom? Do you remember thinking that it was different in some way from all the other crises? Did you wonder whether this was the one that would finally bring about the inevitable fall of one of those groups mentioned in the first paragraph?
Did you remember the Live-8 concert that was simulcast in 10 countries around the world seeking donations in the fight against poverty? If you're a fan, it may not seem like it's been a year since the sixth Harry Potter book was released. Do you remember the bombings in the London underground that killed 56 people? In politics, Justice O'Connor has just retired and Bush has just nominated John Roberts to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, in a reversal of corporate media law from the 1980s, voted that peer-to-peer file sharing application developers can be held liable for illegal actions by their users. Did you remember the election of hardline Iranian president Ahmadinejad or the succession of kings in Saudi Arabia? Did you remember that Bush promised to fire anybody connected with the Valerie Plame leak? Do you remember the imminent domain Supreme Court ruling? How about the life, fame, and death of Terri Schiavo? How about the new Pope's past in the Nazi Youth, revealed at the end of April?
Two years ago
Try thinking of the crisis two years ago, twice the length between now and that time in which you couldn't name anything. That would be July 2004. At the time the Swift boat veterans were busy slamming presidential candidates. People were busy calling John Kerry a flip flopper. Jon Stewart on the Daily Show was busy with his Indecision 2004 coverage in which he repeatedly slammed both candidates for their ineptitude to the delight (and horror) of his overwhelmingly liberal audience. Space buffs may remember that the Cassini probe finally arrived at Saturn and took some photos of its moon Titan. Hundreds of thousands of people have only six more months to live in Indonesia's fishing villages. Soccer fans may remember that Greece beat Portugal to win the 2004 European football championship. Did you remember that George Tenet, the head of the CIA, resigned? Are you sure that wasn't a few years earlier? Could you have told me that on June 28, 2004, the coalition forces in Iraq transferred power to an interim government?
Did you remember that on February 3, 2004, the CIA admitted that Iraq had no readily available weapons of mass destruction? Did you remember the March 11 bombings on a train in Madrid, which killed 190 civilians? Did you remember the May 19 confession of a soldier involved with prisoner abuse at Abu Gharib? Did you remember the video depicting the decapitation of Nick Berg? Did you remember the July 1st capture of Saddam Hussein, widely touted as an early "October Surprise"? Did you remember the surprise resignation of the Republican governor of New Jersey after he came out of the closet? Did you remember the November resignation of Colin Powell?
Four years ago
Now we're in the year 2002. The mad shoe bomber has just been captured! Nobody has even heard of SARS yet. Saddam Hussein has just rejected another United Nations disarmament proposal. The war in Afghanistan is just beginning. On July 1, the United States accidentally bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan, believing the group to be a legitimate target. Political gears of blame are spinning in Washington DC as the FBI and CIA tried to downplay on their own role in the 9/11 attacks. Somebody tried to assassinate the president of France. The American Taliban, John Walker Lindh (did you remember him?), pled guilty on July 15th. A month earlier, the accounting firm Arthur Andersen was convicted of obstruction for shredding the Enron financial documents.
On June 5th, American's favorite missing Mormon, Elizabeth Smart, is kidnapped from her home. There was a solar eclipse on June 10 of that year, recorded in some scientist's journal, and then forgotten. In August of that year, Europe was traumatized by massive floods. Dozens of people were killed and thousands were moved out of their homes. The space shuttle Columbia is still intact. That newfangled reality show, American Idol, premiered on Fox this year.
Eight years ago
1998.
The children of this year have just been afflicted with the infamous Pokémon cartoon for the first time. Google began its run for dominance in September of this year. The first home broadband connections are just beginning to creep into the marketplace. MySpace is released as a beta this year, a proposition that may seem anachronistic to the Internet's trendy. Nobody is downloading music, because Napster doesn't exist yet. 64 megabytes of RAM is considered astounding and more than enough. DVD players have only been sold in the United States for about a year. Daimler-Chrysler was formed by a merger this year. Exxon Mobil was created by a similar merger in December.
Bill Clinton's administration is at the height of the Monica Lewinsky impeachment scandal in which the president was charged with perjury. The Catholic sex abuse scandal has just begun when nine men were paid $23 million in damages for alleged abuse when the men were altar boys. On July 17 of this year, a tsunami struck the island of Papua New Guinea, killing and wounding nearly 4000 people. In Russia, the ruble has lost almost 70 percent of its value since the beginning of the year leading to the collapse of banks and general mass financial distress in that country. Millions of people lost their savings. Jesse Ventura has just been elected governor of Minnesota.
In the foreshadowing department, Iraq suspended all ties with the UN disarmament investigation team this August. Osama bin Laden bombed the United States embassies in this year, killing or injuring almost 5000 people. On August 28 of this year, the head of the UN investigation committee resigned from his post claiming that the UN was not doing enough to ensure that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were destroyed. A month later, the United States Congress passed the "Iraq liberation act" which claimed that the United States wanted to remove Saddam Hussein from power and replace his regime with a democratic government!
That was only eight years ago. As you can see, under a constant barrage of crisis, time can become a little distorted. We tend to think that our current crises will go on forever, and that past crises are not relevant. Remember though, there's as much temporal distance between us and the Monica Lewinsky scandal as there will be between the year 2014 and now. If the political and economic details of 1998 are shadowy to us in 2006, the political and economic details of 2006 will probably be murky to the people of 2014. Software companies founded this year could supplant both Google and Microsoft by 2014!
If you wish to keep carrying on this time-span doubling:
16 years ago/from now (1990/2022): There's as much time between the Gulf War and the Lewinsky scandal as there is between the Lewinsky scandal and today. What happened during those 8 years? Do you remember? Were there no political scandals or crises of law until 1998?
The Cold War officially ends in 1990! Manuel Noriega (remember him?) surrenders to American forces in Panama. The Exxon Valdez oil spill pollutes an Alaskan shoreline and lines the pockets of environmentalists everywhere. The Berlin Wall has only been demolished for about a month. East Germany holds its first free elections this year in six decades. People are still raving about the recent Tiananmen Square incident in China. Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, infamous for his war crimes during the Clinton administration, is elected on December 9th. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela is freed and decades of apartheid are ended after significant international pressure.
You'll notice that I've not even mentioned minor political scandals, media spasms, and other temporary panics. For instance, the Bush administration response to the Valdez spill was less than stellar, fueling several weeks worth of daytime talk shows. I didn't even recognize minor Israeli-Palestinian skirmishes like the one near the Dome of the Rock on October 8th. I didn't note the election of (now overthrown) Haitian President Aristide, which ended three decades of military dictatorship. I neglected George Bush's failure to keep his "no new taxes" campaign promise or his signature of the Americans with Disabilities Act. (Admit it - you thought that had been around forever!)
I somehow missed the classified military mission of the space shuttle Atlantis, which probably caused a great deal of suspicious speculation at the time. Also missing are the giant poll-tax protest in London which caused almost 500 injuries, the details of the West and East German merger, and the details of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Time Inc and Warner Communications merged this year to become Time Warner.
On the propaganda front, the US began broadcasting American television station TV Marti to Cuba. In politics, Rear Admiral John Poindexter, responsible for covering up the Iran-Contra scandal, was sentenced on multiple felony counts of obstruction, conspiracy, etc. (By 2003, he was leading the Department of Defense's controversial Information Awareness and Policy Analysis Market programs - did you remember those?)
All of these, weighty international issues in 1990, are barely memories today.
Moving to the future: In 2022, people born in 2006 will be receiving their driver's licenses. People who graduated from college in May 2006 will be the parents of those teenagers. People in 2022 will be as concerned with the politics of the present as we are today with the politics of the first Bush administration.
32 years ago/from now (1974/2038): There was as much time between the end of the Vietnam War and the Gulf War as there is between the first Gulf War and today.
In 2038, most people graduating from college in 2006 will be considering retirement. The last of the baby boomers, the parents of those graduates, will be in their nineties. The unruly teenagers from 2022 could be raising their own unruly teenagers in 2038.
In 1974 the OPEC energy crisis is still taking place. American citizens are waiting in line for hours to get gas, and fuel is being carefully rationed among drivers. People magazine is published for the first time this year. Seven people are indicted for their roles in the Watergate scandal; a few months later, Richard Nixon resigns. Much to the dismay of the defeated party, a prime minister is elected in England with fewer votes than his opponent. The last American soldiers are evacuated from Vietnam at the end of April this year.
Fascist supporters are still a worldwide threat and perform terrorist bombings, killing 6 people. The fossil hominid Lucy is discovered in Africa. The town of Darwin, Australia, is devasted by a cyclone. The militant leaders of Greece and Cyprus are overthrown. Chemical explosions kill 28 plant workers. An outbreak of 148 tornadoes kills 300 and injures over 5000 people. In other news, this year marks the 10th birthday of the United States civil rights act that banned discrimination based on race. Millions of people are still immensely unhappy that their children can attend schools with "colored" children.
Conclusion
Things you consider exceedingly crucial today will probably be meaningless historical artifacts to your children and their children in 2022 and 2038. So don't pretend that every new political crisis is the end of the world, or that it will finally bring about the downfall of your particular political enemies. They thought the same thing in 1974.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
More majorum
The evangelical community is troubled by an unusual phenomenon. It isn't atheism, the defection of youth, or the death of pastoral staff. Instead, they are troubled by their own language or habits of speaking. The Christian world has developed its own idioms and metaphors that everybody uses but nobody can quite define. They are uniquely identifiable as belonging to the evangelical community and help to separate evangelicals from mainline or liberal churches. This, of course, may have been their intention. However, in trying to win members from other churches, using an alternative language is not always the best option.
Idioms in themselves have no bearing on the understandability of a language to those who actually speak or write the language. However, when one tries to translate between languages, or explain the meaning of an idiom to a person who speaks a different language, errors and misinterpretations ensue in the thousands.
Take a common sentence from the old British Empire: "It is time for tea." Teatime is very meaningful and more than a little bit delicious to anybody who happens to speak English. Of course, we mean that we will be drinking tea presently. However, to a German, this sentence is literally translated as "Es ist Zeit fur Tee". The German, then, not understanding the idiom, might ask what is time for tea? That is, to what does the pronoun it refer? How can it be time for tea if we don't know what it is? A Chinese person, whose language does not make assumptions about verbs (it is time to drink tea), might wonder what one is going to do with the tea. Matters become even more confusing if we specify that two o'clock is time for tea.
The expression "it is time" is an English idiom. It has inherent meaning that makes sense to those who speak British English or one of its descendants, but translation to other languages requires some interpretation.
Now consider a common expression in evangelical circles:
I will be doing these things during my walk with God. From this day forward, I will walk with God in all things.
This is an idiom directly taken from the Genesis 5:22 (or so). It is said that Enoch walked with God for 300 years. A few sentences later (6:9), we are told that Noah also walked with God. Nowhere else in Scripture is this phrase used to indicate any sort of relationship with God. However, modern evangelicals have seized it as their own. A Google search for "walk with God" returns 640,000 results and "walked with God" returns another 133,000. Every translation of the Bible from the King James Version to the New International Version to Young's Literal Translation includes some variant of walking with God. (Young's says that he "walketh habitually" with God.)
But what does it mean? An unreligious friend interpreted the phrase as implying death. Since you meet God when you die, a walk with God would naturally require death, wouldn't it? So a person who expresses a desire to walk with God may be suicidal! However, it's clear from the Scripture that Enoch is not yet dead; he dies two sentences later (or one, depending on your translation).
The truth is, we're dealing with an ancient idiom that requires some translation into English. In the ancient Middle East, it was common for people who were close and in agreement to take leisurely walks. To be seen walking with a person was almost a sure sign that you were friends with him and agreed with his views. Amos 3:3 mentions this cultural phenomenon directly. Knowing this, as most people do on some level, it's fairly easy to extract a fairly accurate meaning from the phrase.
Enoch and God were in agreement in all things. Since God cannot, by definition, be mistaken, anybody who disagrees with him must be wrong - so Enoch was right. More than that, he was righteous, somebody who could be considered a friend of the Creator God. But some theologians, and some churches, have further interpolated a context into this fairly simple phrase. John Wesley, founder of the Methodist and Wesleyan churches, writes about the Enoch verse:
Imagine that you are a non-Christian reading Genesis 5:22 or hearing somebody talk about his or her walk with God. Would you be able to weave Wesley's dissertation into those three words without a few moments of explanation? As evangelists, we don't usually get those moments of explanation! So why do we use these words in our writings and explanations that are packed full of meaning for us but make little to no sense to non-Christians?
Have you ever ended a prayer with in Christ we pray? Have you ever completed some action in God? What did you mean? A Christian songwriter wrote that, after being forgiven, only those actions you do in God will be remembered. What did he mean? A recent sermon instructed the congregation to stand firm in the faith.
This phrase first appears in the Old Testament in 1 Samuel 23:16. Jonathan goes to David to help him find strength in God. Later in the Old Testament, we find people putting their faith and hope in God. Habbukuk writes that he will be joyful in God. David rejoices in God in at least one psalm. Other people believe in God. None of these uses seem to have the same contextual meaning!
In the New Testament, it is used in the beginning of Luke's gospel to express Mary's song about God (Lk 1:47). Paul writes once that he rejoices in God (Rom 5:11). Things were hidden in God in past ages, according to the letter to the Ephesians (3:9), that are now made plain. A confusing theological statement at the beginning of Colossians 3 says that our own lives are hidden in God and will not be revealed until the Second Coming!
The truth is that I have no idea what this phrase actually means, and I suspect that you don't either. Sometimes, it appears to mean for God, other times to God, and other times with God. In the Jonathan and David usage, for instance, it appears to have the same contextual meaning as finding comfort in a bottle (of alcohol). Other times, such as belief in God, it has an idiomatic meaning in English that it probably didn't to the ancient Greeks. Evangelical Christians, including myself, throw it around as though it has some meaning, and most of the time we can assign some meaning to the words, but those meanings vary. Now, if I was a non-Christian reading a testimonial or sermon (or Bible verse) that included our elusive phrase, I would probably be thoroughly confused.
It's interesting to note that the King James Bible uses the same phrase in the same 35 places, despite its usual dependence on archaic language. It even appears in the 1611 edition so popular among some fundamentalists! This is one phrase that has not been touched in 400 years. It's probably somehow related to in God's name, but the connection seems variable and is definitely unclear. If anybody knows the origin of this phrase, please post a comment and let me know!
On that topic, in God's name presents another problem. People append this phrase and amen to the end of their prayers as a single term. "Please help me God in-Jesus'-name-amen!" What in the world do they mean by that? If you ask many people who mindlessly regurgitate the phrase, they probably wouldn't be able to tell you.
Fortunately, a bit of substitution makes the meaning of this idiom clear. A speaker once told my college's Campus Crusade group that praying in Jesus's name is the same as shopping in the speaker's name. If the speaker sends you to the grocery store with his credit card, you are making purchases in his name. If Jesus sends you into town for a mule, you are going into town in his name. If you have power of attorney, you can sign another person's legal documents in his name.
In other words, when you do something in somebody's name, you are acting with the credentials of that person. You are performing some act either at his bequest or on his behalf (or both). Doing a thing in the name of God or Jesus is no different. When you pray in Jesus's name, you are talking to God using Jesus's credentials! You have this privilege because he specifically granted it to you during his earthly life and death. As an adopted child of God, you can pray with the full credentials of the begotten Son.
Are you a lukewarm Christian? Have you ever accused somebody of being a lukewarm Christian? This is another term with a long symbolic history. Accusing a person of being lukewarm without introducing that history is like me calling you bladed and a bugglewump without explaining the meanings of those terms. Of course, the term derives from the idea that a Christian should be on fire for God. That term, too, derives from a different symbol - the Holy Spirit as tongues of fire at Pentecost. A Christian who is on fire is experiencing the effects of the Holy Spirit. A lukewarm Christian is one who is only temperate. There is no fire in a lukewarm person.
The term is derived from the book of Revelation (3:16), where God threatens to spit a particular church (not a person!) out of his mouth because the organization (!) is lukewarm - "neither hot nor cold". The Greek word corresponding to our term is chliaros, which, according to one dictionary, is a metaphor of the condition of the soul wretchedly fluctuating between a torpor and a fervour of love. Torpor is another word for inactivity or hibernation, while fervor is great and intense heat. So, a lukewarm church is one that is ambivalent - with bursts of lethargy accompanied by flurries of energy - not one that is merely doctrinally unsound.
We've found a word that is almost exclusively applied to individuals - but was not in its original context! It does not imply a steady lack of interest but an almost manic depressive swing back and forth between furious love and sleep. Remember, in ancient times, it was very difficult to keep water lukewarm. They had neither refrigerators or stoves equipped with thermostats. It was either cold - a little bit colder than "room temperature" - or it was being actively heated over a fire. Lukewarm water was either in the process of heating up or cooling down. Think before you use this word - it doesn't mean what you think it means!
Idioms in themselves have no bearing on the understandability of a language to those who actually speak or write the language. However, when one tries to translate between languages, or explain the meaning of an idiom to a person who speaks a different language, errors and misinterpretations ensue in the thousands.
Take a common sentence from the old British Empire: "It is time for tea." Teatime is very meaningful and more than a little bit delicious to anybody who happens to speak English. Of course, we mean that we will be drinking tea presently. However, to a German, this sentence is literally translated as "Es ist Zeit fur Tee". The German, then, not understanding the idiom, might ask what is time for tea? That is, to what does the pronoun it refer? How can it be time for tea if we don't know what it is? A Chinese person, whose language does not make assumptions about verbs (it is time to drink tea), might wonder what one is going to do with the tea. Matters become even more confusing if we specify that two o'clock is time for tea.
The expression "it is time" is an English idiom. It has inherent meaning that makes sense to those who speak British English or one of its descendants, but translation to other languages requires some interpretation.
Now consider a common expression in evangelical circles:
I will be doing these things during my walk with God. From this day forward, I will walk with God in all things.
This is an idiom directly taken from the Genesis 5:22 (or so). It is said that Enoch walked with God for 300 years. A few sentences later (6:9), we are told that Noah also walked with God. Nowhere else in Scripture is this phrase used to indicate any sort of relationship with God. However, modern evangelicals have seized it as their own. A Google search for "walk with God" returns 640,000 results and "walked with God" returns another 133,000. Every translation of the Bible from the King James Version to the New International Version to Young's Literal Translation includes some variant of walking with God. (Young's says that he "walketh habitually" with God.)
But what does it mean? An unreligious friend interpreted the phrase as implying death. Since you meet God when you die, a walk with God would naturally require death, wouldn't it? So a person who expresses a desire to walk with God may be suicidal! However, it's clear from the Scripture that Enoch is not yet dead; he dies two sentences later (or one, depending on your translation).
The truth is, we're dealing with an ancient idiom that requires some translation into English. In the ancient Middle East, it was common for people who were close and in agreement to take leisurely walks. To be seen walking with a person was almost a sure sign that you were friends with him and agreed with his views. Amos 3:3 mentions this cultural phenomenon directly. Knowing this, as most people do on some level, it's fairly easy to extract a fairly accurate meaning from the phrase.
Enoch and God were in agreement in all things. Since God cannot, by definition, be mistaken, anybody who disagrees with him must be wrong - so Enoch was right. More than that, he was righteous, somebody who could be considered a friend of the Creator God. But some theologians, and some churches, have further interpolated a context into this fairly simple phrase. John Wesley, founder of the Methodist and Wesleyan churches, writes about the Enoch verse:
To walk with God, is to set God always before us, and to act as those that are always under his eye. It is to live a life of communion with God, both in ordinances and providences; it is to make God's word our rule, and his glory our end, in all our actions; it is to make it our constant care and endeavour in every thing to please God, and in nothing to offend him; it is to comply with his will, to concur with his designs, and to be workers together with him.That's an enormous leap from two friends walking together in fellowship! And it's the same huge leap made by many evangelical Christians today. When an evangelical Christian says he walks with God, or reads about Enoch walking with God, he understands something close to John Wesley's definition.
Imagine that you are a non-Christian reading Genesis 5:22 or hearing somebody talk about his or her walk with God. Would you be able to weave Wesley's dissertation into those three words without a few moments of explanation? As evangelists, we don't usually get those moments of explanation! So why do we use these words in our writings and explanations that are packed full of meaning for us but make little to no sense to non-Christians?
Have you ever ended a prayer with in Christ we pray? Have you ever completed some action in God? What did you mean? A Christian songwriter wrote that, after being forgiven, only those actions you do in God will be remembered. What did he mean? A recent sermon instructed the congregation to stand firm in the faith.
This phrase first appears in the Old Testament in 1 Samuel 23:16. Jonathan goes to David to help him find strength in God. Later in the Old Testament, we find people putting their faith and hope in God. Habbukuk writes that he will be joyful in God. David rejoices in God in at least one psalm. Other people believe in God. None of these uses seem to have the same contextual meaning!
In the New Testament, it is used in the beginning of Luke's gospel to express Mary's song about God (Lk 1:47). Paul writes once that he rejoices in God (Rom 5:11). Things were hidden in God in past ages, according to the letter to the Ephesians (3:9), that are now made plain. A confusing theological statement at the beginning of Colossians 3 says that our own lives are hidden in God and will not be revealed until the Second Coming!
The truth is that I have no idea what this phrase actually means, and I suspect that you don't either. Sometimes, it appears to mean for God, other times to God, and other times with God. In the Jonathan and David usage, for instance, it appears to have the same contextual meaning as finding comfort in a bottle (of alcohol). Other times, such as belief in God, it has an idiomatic meaning in English that it probably didn't to the ancient Greeks. Evangelical Christians, including myself, throw it around as though it has some meaning, and most of the time we can assign some meaning to the words, but those meanings vary. Now, if I was a non-Christian reading a testimonial or sermon (or Bible verse) that included our elusive phrase, I would probably be thoroughly confused.
It's interesting to note that the King James Bible uses the same phrase in the same 35 places, despite its usual dependence on archaic language. It even appears in the 1611 edition so popular among some fundamentalists! This is one phrase that has not been touched in 400 years. It's probably somehow related to in God's name, but the connection seems variable and is definitely unclear. If anybody knows the origin of this phrase, please post a comment and let me know!
On that topic, in God's name presents another problem. People append this phrase and amen to the end of their prayers as a single term. "Please help me God in-Jesus'-name-amen!" What in the world do they mean by that? If you ask many people who mindlessly regurgitate the phrase, they probably wouldn't be able to tell you.
Fortunately, a bit of substitution makes the meaning of this idiom clear. A speaker once told my college's Campus Crusade group that praying in Jesus's name is the same as shopping in the speaker's name. If the speaker sends you to the grocery store with his credit card, you are making purchases in his name. If Jesus sends you into town for a mule, you are going into town in his name. If you have power of attorney, you can sign another person's legal documents in his name.
In other words, when you do something in somebody's name, you are acting with the credentials of that person. You are performing some act either at his bequest or on his behalf (or both). Doing a thing in the name of God or Jesus is no different. When you pray in Jesus's name, you are talking to God using Jesus's credentials! You have this privilege because he specifically granted it to you during his earthly life and death. As an adopted child of God, you can pray with the full credentials of the begotten Son.
Are you a lukewarm Christian? Have you ever accused somebody of being a lukewarm Christian? This is another term with a long symbolic history. Accusing a person of being lukewarm without introducing that history is like me calling you bladed and a bugglewump without explaining the meanings of those terms. Of course, the term derives from the idea that a Christian should be on fire for God. That term, too, derives from a different symbol - the Holy Spirit as tongues of fire at Pentecost. A Christian who is on fire is experiencing the effects of the Holy Spirit. A lukewarm Christian is one who is only temperate. There is no fire in a lukewarm person.
The term is derived from the book of Revelation (3:16), where God threatens to spit a particular church (not a person!) out of his mouth because the organization (!) is lukewarm - "neither hot nor cold". The Greek word corresponding to our term is chliaros, which, according to one dictionary, is a metaphor of the condition of the soul wretchedly fluctuating between a torpor and a fervour of love. Torpor is another word for inactivity or hibernation, while fervor is great and intense heat. So, a lukewarm church is one that is ambivalent - with bursts of lethargy accompanied by flurries of energy - not one that is merely doctrinally unsound.
We've found a word that is almost exclusively applied to individuals - but was not in its original context! It does not imply a steady lack of interest but an almost manic depressive swing back and forth between furious love and sleep. Remember, in ancient times, it was very difficult to keep water lukewarm. They had neither refrigerators or stoves equipped with thermostats. It was either cold - a little bit colder than "room temperature" - or it was being actively heated over a fire. Lukewarm water was either in the process of heating up or cooling down. Think before you use this word - it doesn't mean what you think it means!
