Greek

The Problem of Hina: Theodicy in John 9

~ Mike Skinner ~ 12 Comments

Small exegetical decisions often result in radically different theologies.

Consider the implications of John 9:1-3 (NIV):

As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.

For many, this passage implies that God gives people sicknesses (like blindness or cancer) in order to work towards a greater good.

In this popular understanding, evil (like sickness) is an unfortunate but necessary part of God’s will. God gave this man blindness so that Jesus would be able to perform this miracle later in his life. Perhaps you have heard this common refrain: “You might not understand right now why God allowed [X] to happen, but it is all a part of His plan.” Representing this view, Matt Chandler (an influential evangelical preacher) found personal comfort during his own fight with cancer knowing that it was part of the pre-determined will of God.[1]

Yet, is this an acceptable view of God and his relationship to evil?

The problem of evil is one of the many issues highlighted in passages like this one. How is God “good” if he causes/allows suffering? Why can’t an all-powerful and all-wise God find ways to accomplish his purposes that do not involve evil and suffering?

For some, like myself, the theology presented above costs too much. It safeguards the sovereignty of God (everything that happens is a result of his will), but at what price? It paints a picture of a God whose character is at best drenched in moral ambiguity. How can we legitimately call such a God “good”? Theodicies such as these also seem to distort the biblical logic of creation and redemption. The biblical narrative portrays a God who does not create nor desire evil (such as death, sickness, and suffering). It also portrays a God at work in history in order to abolish all evil as he establishes a new, eternal creation. Why then would God, in the present, be working against his own purposes?

Is there another way to read John 9:1-3?

Yes! In fact, I think this passage has been mistranslated and thus misinterpreted. It serves as a perfect example of how small exegetical details can end up exerting an enormous amount of influence over important theological conclusions [See also: “N.T. Wright on Matthew 10:28 – Satan or God?”].
How so?

A closer reading of John 9:2-3 reveals that the problem of evil is actually a problem of hina.

Hina ( ἵνα ) is a greek particle commonly seen as a form which functions to introduce purpose clauses. Most first-year Greek students have already memorized the primary semantic meaning of hina: “in order that” or “so that” [see this excellent post – Greek Vocabulary: Are We Cooking The Books?).

Let’s look closely at the greek construction of John 9:2-3.

[9:2] καὶ ἠρώτησαν αὐτὸν οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτοῦ λέγοντες,
Ῥαββί, τίς ἥμαρτεν, οὗτος ἢ οἱγονεῖς αὐτοῦ, ἵνα τυφλὸς γεννηθῇ;
[9:3] ἀπεκρίθη Ἰησοῦς, Οὔτε οὗτος ἥμαρτεν οὔτε οἱ γονεῖς αὐτοῦ,
ἀλλ’ ἵνα φανερωθῇτὰ ἔργα τοῦ θεοῦ ἐν αὐτῷ.

There are actually two hina clauses, one in each verse. The first occurrence of the particle cannot logically be indicating purpose (that the man or his parents sinned in order that he would be born blind). Thus, most translators render it as a “result clause” – a perfectly acceptable reading. In fact, throughout the New Testament and other early Greek literature, hina is regularly used in ways that cannot be understood as introducing a purpose clause. This is why it’s so important to remember that the context and function of a form is more important than any pre-determined semantical meanings.

Margaret Sim has argued persuasively that we should abandon our attachment to associating hina clauses with purpose statements.[2] By her count, only 40% of hina clauses in Luke and 62% in John indicate purpose. This evidence leads her to suggest that we begin to rethink the usage of this particle – not as a container of semantic content, but as a particle that functions to represent what the speaker thinks or expects. Thus, hina can (and does) regularly function to indicate purpose, but it also (not infrequently) indicates commands or wishes.[3]

The second hina clause, in John 9:3, is an independent clause. This creates a problem for reading it as expressing purpose. Most English translations skip over this grammatical conundrum by providing the phrase “it happened.” But this is not necessary or advisable, and as Sim says, “if the primary function of hina is seen as indicating the purpose of the main verb, then it is essential that a main verb in fact be present so that the reader can access such a function. If the main verb or clause is absent, then there is no syntactic context in which purpose can be expressed in a grammatical sentence.” We must let the actual function of the particle and the context of the clause (not a fixed semantical meaning) determine our readings. Thus, Sim renders the verse:

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but the works of God must/should be revealed in him.” 

The theological implications of this translation are staggering:

“The hypothesis of the imperatival hina . . . releases the text from the fatalism which had obsessed it, and dissolves the picture which had become familiar through all our English versions, a man destined from birth to suffer for the sole purpose of glorifying God when he was healed.”[4]

What if John 9:3 is not a statement about God’s mysterious sovereignty, but about his clear desire to overcome any and all evil that has invaded his world. Such an interpretation would have the advantage of the lager context of the Gospels – where the clear assumption is that sickness and disease are the works of the devil, not God.

David Bentley Hart summarizes the Gospel’s portrayal of Jesus’s relationship to evil nicely:
“It is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death. It would seem that he provides us with little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.”[5]

What sort of fragmented view of the Trinity results if we try to reconcile that 1) Jesus establishes the Kingdom (in part) by healing sicknesses (cf. Luke 10:9), yet 2) the Father is the one who has caused these ailments in the first place. Is the Father working against the Son? Perhaps this is why it has taken so long for the Kingdom to be consummated, the Trinity is not yet on the same page! On the other hand, what if Jesus’ opposition to evil is an expression of God’s true will – his desire to bring his reign to earth as it is in heaven? We could then understand the nature of the Triune God as unequivocally good and wholly opposed to all evil. This would require many of us to rethink our concept of “sovereignty” – perhaps sovereignty does not mean that God controls and dictates every action and event of history. Perhaps his sovereignty is more like that of an all-wise, master chess player, who is working towards a goal in which he cannot be stopped, no matter the opponent or challenge.

[1] See this AP article by Eric Gorski on Chandler’s attitude toward his cancer: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/2010-02-01-pastor31_ST_N.htm.
[2] The full paper can be read here: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/docs/RT%20and%20independent%20ina%20clauses.pdf.
[3] See Zerwick, Biblical Greek, 141-142; see also Blass, Debrunner, & Funk, A Greek Grammar, 195-196 (“F – The Imperative, 3).
[4] Nigel Turner, Grammatical Insights, 145.
[5] David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?, 87.

The man who hunts ducks out on the weekends.

~ Jimmy Parks ~ Leave a comment

In my last post I introduced construction grammar with the help of Benjamin Bergen and his book Louder than Words. Bergen’s book, as a reminder, is an introduction to the way humans process language. In this post I want to jump to the next chapter in Bergen’s work (chapter 6) where he discusses the cause and effect of real time language processing.

Did you know that you and I can only take in language one piece of information (syllable, letter, word, etc.) at a time? I guess I knew this–it’s an observable fact. But, I never really thought about it until I started reading up on Information Structure.  Information Structure, or IS, is the interaction of pragmatics and syntax. Bergen’s work deals, not with IS, but with processes that our brains go through as we encounter language in real time.

The big idea is that there are limitations on our ability to process language due to our uptake capacity. Whenever we read or hear language we can only take it in as the string of words and sentences that it is. Our eyes have to pass over each word on down the line as we read, and our ears have to hear each syllable as it is spoken. There’s no way to mass download language. Say it ain’t so, Morpheus! This means we hear some words before others and that we can, potentially, read a bunch of words before we get the complete idea of a sentence.

The way our brains deal with this limitation is to try and figure out the whole sentence as soon as we start getting the pieces. We don’t wait to get all the words of a sentence and then process it. We process “incrementally,” making best guesses, and updating as we get more information. The process is like informed guess work where we start off with very little, but continually update as we take in–that is, read or hear–the string of language.

Since we put together sentences incrementally by making informed guesses, we have the ability to make mistakes and have to reevaluate language as we get more input. Bergen provides a few example sentences, designed to be unpredictable, called “garden path sentences” which prove this point.

(1) Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
(2) The lawyer cross-examined by the prosecutor confessed.
(3) The horse raced past the barn fell.
(4) The old man the boat.

These examples trip us up because there are pieces that we analyze one way (‘raced’ in (3) as a verb) which end up needing to be reanalyzed (the verb in (3) is ‘fell’… ‘raced’ is a passive participle modifying the noun ‘horse’). Because we guess at what a sentence will be as we encounter each word, we build expectations of what the entire sentence will be as we process it. When we run into something that doesn’t match what we expect to come next, if it doesn’t fit the guessed pattern, we have to go back and reevaluate everything that we have taken in.

This phenomena is not limited to English, or to modern languages. It even happens in scripture.  I would like to look at an example from the book of James which uses this very phenomena on purpose.

James 1:2
Πᾶσαν χαρὰν ἡγήσασθε, ἀδελφοί μου, ὅταν πειρασμοῖς περιπέσητε ποικίλοις,

Consider it all joy, my siblings, when you encounter various trials

The word order of the original greek is extremely important here (as if it’s not important everywhere!). In fact, the word order is actually what creates the effect that I want to look at. Now, I am not talking about information structure. I only want to look at the expectations that are created by incremental processing. The very first words that we encounter are πᾶσαν χαρὰν (all/complete joy) which is followed by the verb ἡγήσασθε (BDAG sense 2: to think/consider). Next is a phrase directed directly to the audience (ἀδελφοί μου my siblings). Last of all is the subordinate clause ὅταν πειρασμοῖς περιπέσητε ποικίλοις (whenever you fall among various trials).

The noun phrase πᾶσαν χαρὰν (all/complete joy) is first in the sentence, and that doesn’t provide a whole lot to go off of for a reader or hearer. Being a Greek reader–I am assuming the intended readers of James held fluency in Koine and could read Greek in the same manner that you and I can read English–the reader’s mind is constrained to start filling in some of the empty information. The reader knows that this is probably the object of a verb since it is in the accusative case. So, somebody or something is doing some action where complete joy is the direct object.

Next comes ἡγήσασθε. Now the reader knows who is doing the action (s/he is), and what is being done (s/he is being commanded to ‘consider’ something). ἡγέομαι is a verb that takes two accusative nouns. In my last post I used English examples of the ditransitive construction. That construction can be divided into two patterns. The first indicates that one object noun is changing possession from the subject to the second object noun.

(5) John sent his landlord the check.

The second indicates that there is a predication between the two object nouns.

(6a) I found the guard sleeping
(6b) The guard is sleeping, and I found him.

(7a) We painted the room red.
(7b) The room is red because we painted it.

ἡγέομαι follows this second pattern. It takes two accusative nouns, and indicates that there is a predication between them. Phillipians provides several examples of this pattern and ἡγέομαι.

Phil 3:7
[Ἀλλὰ] ἅτινα ἦν μοι κέρδη, ταῦτα ἥγημαι διὰ τὸν Χριστὸν ζημίαν.
Yet, whatever gains I had, I consider these things loss because of Christ.

Here there is a a predication between ταῦτα and ζημίαν. “I consider these things to be loss.”

What we have so far in James 1:2 is, “Consider ____ complete joy.” There is only one noun phrase mentioned. We learned from Bergen that a reader will fill in these sorts of gaps with something that s/he thinks fits this space while reading. We don’t wait until we have all the information to put things together. We build with what we have and fill in the gaps with what we expect to fit until we come to that information.

No one knows what the first readers of James would fill in here, but if I was filling in the gap, I may think something like, “consider waffles complete joy”, “consider knowing Jesus complete joy”, “consider the love of God complete joy”, and so on. The presence of πᾶσαν χαρὰν constrains the reader to consider something, well, joyful! The reader will naturally fill in this space with something that they consider joyful. This builds an expectation for what is coming, and when it comes the reader is going to be befuddled.

But the reader has to wait to fill in the missing piece. James doesn’t fill in the gap immediately. What comes next in this string of words is a phrase addressing the audience directly, ἀδελφοί μου. Because this is the next set of words in the sentence, the reader has no choice but to continue to guess at what s/he is to consider total joy. The vocative phrase adds nothing new to the sentence, it only serves to delay the reader.

What fills the space in James 1:2 is the subordinate clause ὅταν πειρασμοῖς περιπέσητε ποικίλοις (whenever you  meet trials of various kinds). Wow! I wasn’t expecting that. And I’m willing to bet that the first readers weren’t expecting that either. Who would? To consider all kinds of trials to be total joy is counter intuitive. Trials and joy don’t go together…usually. But that is what James wants the readers to think. And as if the thought itself wasn’t dramatic enough, he uses the readers own expectations of what is joyful to add more effect to the command.

Had you ever thought about the limitations of language uptake and the way it affected meaning? It is something that I find fascinating, and hopefully I have demonstrated that it is useful in the study of scripture as well. I would love to go through other passages where this sort of devise is being used. If you have come across one please let me know.

Introducing Construction Grammar

~ Jimmy Parks ~ Leave a comment

Recently I’ve been reading “Louder Than Words” by Benjamin Bergen. It is a well written introductory work about how our brains create meaning. Bergen introduces several complex concepts concerning language and the brain in a way that is engaging and fun to read. I encourage you to go to a library and check it out. His initial chapter on language (chapter 5) will provide the ‘jumping off’ point for this post. The concept that I want to focus on is the basic idea of construction grammar.

Meaning is not only produced by the individual words of a language. Although words do contribute a large portion of meaning to a sentence, phrase, or passage, they are not the only meaning carrying instruments. The grammar of a sentence also contributes to the meaning. Grammar is not limited to the aspect of the verb (kind of action) or the connectors used to link clauses (and, also, but, etc.). Bergen provides some fun examples showing how argument structure constructions provide meaning to language.

Now the most common way to talk about argument structure is using the language of transitivity. A transitive clause contains two arguments (an argument is a noun that the verb requires to be complete), the subject and the object. Intransitive clauses only contain one argument, a subject. Examples used by Bergen belong to the ‘ditransitive construction’ which contain a subject and two objects.

The ditransitive
(1) John sent his landlord the check.
(2) The goalie kicked his defender the ball.

Bergen argues that there is a meaning associated with this construction. There is a form-meaning pairing where the individual parts (the words in the sentence) do not produce the meaning. In most cases the first noun transfers the third noun to the second noun, so that the basic semantic value is a transfer of possession. Some may argue that it is not the construction that conveys this meaning, but Bergen offers some fun examples to prove that this is the case, and that it is the construction which produces this meaning of [transfer of possession].

(3) The delivery boy motorcycled his clients some blueprints.
(4) Venus tennis racketed her sister the hair clip.
(5) Lyn crutched Tom her apple.

In these examples the meaning cannot be contributed by the verb alone because the verbs themselves (motorcycled, tennis racketed, and crutched) are unique to these sentences. These examples match the regular patterns found in (1) & (2), so Bergen assumes that the meaning [transfer of possession] is contributed by the construction itself. The form of the sentence is paired with the meaning much like words have a certain form that is paired with a meaning.

Ancient Greek scholars have used the theoretical framework of construction grammar to show that Greek also possesses constructions which are non-compositional or idioms. This means that the individual parts do not account for the semantic value of the whole.  Jóhanna Barðdal & Serena Danesi cover two example constructions which are idiomatic, the “dative of agent” and the “infinitive with accusative subject” constructions. 1

Examples:

Luke 23:15 (dative of agent)
οὐδὲν ἄξιον θανάτου ἐστὶν πεπραγμένον αὐτῷ·
Nothing deserving death has been done by him

Mark 1:14 (infinitive with accusative subject)
Μετὰ δὲ τὸ παραδοθῆναι τὸν Ἰωάννην ἦλθεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἰς τὴν Γαλιλαίαν
Now after John was arrested Jesus came into Galilee.

In both of these constructions there is a break in the normal grammatical patterns of the Greek language. The dative case does not normally indicate the agent of an action, even with the passive voice. And the accusative case does not normally indicate the subject of a verbal action. Both of these constructions can only be accounted for by assuming that the constructions themselves indicate some semantic value.

I would like to look at two verses that I ran across in my daily reading which are very normal grammatically. The reason I want to look at these sentences is to show that even ‘normal’ sentences, while being compositional, follow patterns.

LXX Isaiah 7:18

καὶ ἔσται ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἐκείνῃ συριεῖ κύριος μυίαις, ὃ κυριεύει μέρους ποταμοῦ Αἰγύπτου, καὶ τῇ μελίσσῃ, ἥ ἐστιν ἐν χώρᾳ Ἀσσυρίων,

And It will be on that day, The Lord will whistle for the flies that rule part of the river of Egypt and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria. (NETS)

Ignoring the relative clauses, there is a simple sentence with one verb (συριζω) and three noun phrases (κύριος, μυίαις, τῇ μελίσσῃ).

(6) The Lord will whistle for the flies and bees.

The verb (συριζω) can be translated ‘to whistle or hiss like a snake’ and while the subject will be producing a whistling sound, the meaning of this sentence is more than production of a noise. The point of the sentence (what it means) is the purpose of the action, the reason the sound will be produced. The Lord κύριος is not going to whistle the bugs a tune. He is going to call them into the lands of Israel. The two noun phrases, μυίαις and τῇ μελίσσῃ, will be the recipients of the Lord’s whistle, and they will not just hear the call, but be affected by it. A translation which makes this idea more explicit would be something like; “the Lord will call the flies and bees over with a whistle.”

Isa 5:26
τοιγαροῦν ἀρεῖ σύσσημον ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν τοῖς μακρὰν καὶ συριεῖ αὐτοῖς ἀπ᾿ ἄκρου τῆς γῆς, καὶ ἰδοὺ ταχὺ κούφως ἔρχονται·

Therefore he will raise a signal among the nations that are far off, and whistle for them from the high place end of the earth. And behold, they are coming quickly, swiftly! (NETS)

Verse 5:26 follows the same pattern as 7:18; a subject noun, verb (συριζω), and the recipients of the whistle in the dative case. The context makes it clear that the recipients of the whistle are responding to it like it was a call to action and not just a noise or song. This is a common usage for the dative case. Smyth says that the dative is commonly used to denote “the person who is interested in or affected by the action.” 2

Again, grammatically these two examples are normal, but the use of συριζω is uncommon as far as I can tell. But it makes sense. I didn’t have to figure out what the text was trying to get at when I read these passages. Because I, like you, have seen westerns where the rough and tumble cowboy got out of a jam by using a sharp whistle to call his horse, and I have pets who I call by whistling. The performative sense of whistle makes sense to me. I assume that this is true of the ancient audience as well, but I don’t yet have any evidence to support that claim.

Could it be that this is a type of sentence pattern? I’m not really sure. It will take more searching on my part. If this were a kind of patten it should be productive. It should be used with different subjects and different recipients and maybe even different verbs. Remember the English construction Bergen used? The ditransitive construction is so productive that he could make up verbs to use in the construction. I’ll be on the look-out for more sentences that could fit this pattern. If you know of any please pass them along in the comments.

1. Construction Grammar and Greek Jóhanna Barðdal & Serena Danesi University of Bergen Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics (EAGLL), Brill
2. Smyth §1459

Meet Jimmy…

~ Jessica Parks ~ 4 Comments

Well, I finally convinced my husband Jimmy (@fakejimmy) to be a guest contributor here at Cataclysmic!  While he won’t be one of the regular Cataclysmic bloggers, he will be posting every now and then on his favorite subjects: linguistics and Biblical Greek.  Below is a short bio to help you get to know Jimmy:

jimJimmy Parks is a graduate of Houston Baptist University (MA in Biblical Languages) and will be pursing a PhD in the near future.  Jimmy currently works at a Maternal-Fetal Medicine office where he spends his lunch breaks reading Septuagintal Greek.  He also works as a student grader and occasionally substitutes for Greek, Hebrew, and Linguistics classes at HBU and SWBTS. During the summer he enjoys teaching Greek grammar classes at a local prison.  He is a deacon at First Colony Christian Church (Sugar Land, TX).  Jimmy is married to Jessica and they have two dogs – Charlie and Parker.

Jimmy is interested in Biblical Languages and Linguistics.  He loves reading books about language and the brain and is especially interested in how humans process language.

His first post will be up later this week so stay tuned!

Gender and the Incarnation

~ Jessica Parks ~ 11 Comments

We are currently reading through Thomas C. Oden’s Systematic Theology 3 Vol. Set
in my Biblical and Systematic Theology class (we started off with Christopher J.H. Wright’s The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative, an excellent resource for biblical theology).  One of our assignments for the class is to write a short catechism or personal credo on a subtopic in systematic theology (soteriology, Christology, etc.).  I have chosen to do a short catechism on anthropology, focusing on what it means to be human, created in the image of God, body and soul, male and female, etc. Since I have been thinking through a number of gender issues during my time at HBU, this will hopefully serve to catalog some of my conclusions.

Recently I’ve been particularly interested in gender and the Incarnation… probably because we’ve been reading on the Incarnation in our Patristics class.

What does it mean for Jesus to be male?  Are both genders represented in the Incarnation?  Many of the early patristic writers drew connections between Eve and Mary, the mother of Jesus (e.g., Irenaeus in Against Heresies, Book III).

Oden’s volume on the person of Christ has a relatively lengthy discussion on gender in the Incarnation. In his section Was the Incarnation Sexist? Oden writes,

Did God show sexist bias or partiality against females or males in the birth of the incarnate Lord? The classical exegetes reasoned that both maleness and femaleness were honored equally in the incarnation…

Mary is female, Jesus is male. God’s way of coming involves both genders in a particular way fitting to those genders: female, for the birthing of the God-man without human father, and male, for the mission of the anointed messianic servant, according to the Jewish expectation of a male of Davidic descent.

The core of this classic feminine/masculine incarnational equilibrium is found in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: ‘But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law’ (Gal. 4:4). Paul says: born of a woman, a particular woman, without male assistance, not born of woman and man.

If one takes the premise that the incarnation required birth and that giving birth cannot be done by males–there is no way physiologically–it forms a plausible hypothesis for explaining why the Savior was male: if the mother of the Savior must necessarily be female, the Savior must be male, if both sexes are to be rightly and equitably involved in the salvation event, according to classical interpretation. This hypothesis reverses the sexism argument by making the female birth-enabler the primary basis upon which the incarnate Lord was more plausibly to be male (this in addition to the Hebraic assumption that the Messiah would be of the male line of David). (p. 116)

It is no wonder Mary exclaimed, “Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.” (Luke 1:48-49)

Oden’s argument finds support from some of the early Christian writers (he quotes Augustine a number of times).  This is one area I think Protestant theology is lacking–we have sorely neglected the role of Mary, the Theotokos, in the Incarnation. We pretty much never talk about her (at least from my own experience)! But I, for one, would like to become better acquainted with the mother of my Lord.

I don’t know… maybe I’ve been spending too much time with the Church Fathers?

Nah.