Thursday, September 22nd, 2011

Original Scenes

There are some stories that get made into movies over and over again. Robin Hood, King Arthur, the Life of Christ, Sherlock Holmes, the O.K. Coral, Dracula. When we see a movie and it doesn't remind us of the earlier movies we're familiar with, we imagine we're seeing a new scene. Then we find out later it isn't new.

This has happened to me twice in the past month.

First it happened with Dracula. I have probably told the story of walking into the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula at a friend's house, and deciding that scenes that were not familiar to me from the old black-and-white or color films that I knew must have been concocted to appeal to a more modern audience. One scene involved the count's interest in a shaving wound. Another involved Jonathan Harker being kept by three female vampires when he wandered away from his guest room in the castle. Then when I finally read the novel, I found the story had been in the original. Well, I finally watched the silent movie Nosferatu (1922). The shaving scene included all the way back here, as well as the count's interest in the picture of the visitor's love interest.

Then it happened with the Tombstone story. Surely Wyatt's dallyings with the other woman were made up recently. But no, the scene of him riding horses with the lady are found in Gunfight at the O.K. Coral .

I'm pretty bad at guessing what's of recent invention.

Some of my biggest surprises in recent years came when I was reading a book titled Knight at the Movies. The author found Monty Python and the Holy Grail to be the most intelligent retelling of the King Arthur stories. He found bits of Arthurian lore behind the most outlandish sequences.

9:02 am Pacific Standard Time

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Friday, September 9th, 2011

Repentance and Change of Mind

Way back in seminary, I chose to do an exegesis paper on a passage that used the Greek word often rendered "repent." I wanted to see the options available for the term. One of the options I liked was change of mind. The noun was METANOIA, which was a compound word made of the two parts META, which means, well, beyond or something.

Back in seminary, they had us read a great book called Exegetical Fallacies by D.A. Carson. I couldn't believe how many of the examples of errors I had run into in sermons I had heard. But one of Carson's fallacies was the etymological fallacy where you could figure out what a word meant by its parts. (His examples from English were butterfly and pineapple. Though since that time, I found that pineapple actually does have this kind of etymology.) So the idea that the meaning of METANOIA could be determined by breaking it apart went under some suspicion. Still, I liked the idea, as it seemed more in line with Grace Alone and Faith Alone than some of the ideas of repentance I had heard, that is, ideas that make repentance into some giant New Years resolution or twelve step program.

I like doing some checking inductively. Try on several suggested meanings for a term in various sentences where the term is used. Certain ones tend to rise to the top, and others become less plausible.

But there is also the possibility that over time a term has more than one meaning. Or that it has a common meaning and a technical one.

Anyway, today we were translating from the Shepherd of Hermas, and I ran into a passage where repentance clearly meant to change one's mind. "But those who are double-minded and frequently change their minds practice fortune telling like pagans and bring greater sin upon themselves by their idolatries." This is not speaking of those who frequently come to true repentance. Being double-minded, these people vacillate.

This doesn't finally solve what METANOIA means in the New Testament. But it does demonstrate that the idea that this word's etymology could be determined by picking it apart does not suffer from the Etymological fallacy described by Carson. This meaning is a live option.

11:55 am Pacific Standard Time

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