Orginally posted February 20, 2012 @ 10:08 PM.
“In the big inning…” Proof there was baseball back in the Bible days. HA!
My “short” thought-drop here will certainly not change many people’s minds about the Bible. So let me start by saying that this isn’t an attempt to convince anyone of the Bible’s claims to absolute truth, but rather it is an encouragement to not be so quick to dismiss the Bible just because its claims may contradict with your own point of view on matters of truth and such. I’d like to simply ask you to consider the following, if you wouldn’t mind taking a few minutes…or maybe ten.
One of the best ways to understand the Bible’s message is to recognize that the writers wrote within their time and culture. They didn’t write necessarily (if at all) with people of the future - hundreds upon thousands of years from their own point in time – in mind. Thus, it was rightly assumed that many things would be understood – such as the people, locations, and various practices that were referenced.
Those things needed no detailed explanation. It was common place. To them, unless you were talking about specific details, if you talked about Jerusalem, everyone knew where that was. If you talked about King Herod or the Caesar of Rome, no one questioned who these people were. It would be like talking about going to Hawaii or discussing the politics and policies of (hopefully not second-term) President Obama.
Suppose you wrote to a friend about baseball. You don’t need to explain what baseball is because it is such a huge part of American (and even world) culture. It’s just taken for granted that virtually everyone in America is going to know precisely what you mean when you utter that compound word. Not everyone will know all the intricate details of the game, however, the basic idea is going to be understood without a second thought. Nine players position themselves on a field and try to throw a ball to each other to “tag out” the runner after he has hit the ball with a bat. The runner tries to tag all three bases on a diamond-shaped path before returned to home plate. Simple! Everyone’s on the same page.
Were baseball to ever fade out of popularity, though, someone many hundreds of years after that fact might enforce the need for an explanation when reading past articles referring to baseballs teams. (You might be surprised just how different games like soccer and American football were when they were first developed over 100 years ago.)
Imagine it. What kind of crazy game has people and animals swinging sticks at each other anyway?? And in red and white “sox”? They can’t even spell right! What a backwards people back then. [CUT-TAG="Take a peek at "historical" baseball by clicking here..."]
Then try explaining the deeper intricacies of the game from a future-looking-past perspective. A guy throws a ball at a player with stick, trying to hit him for some “ungodly” reason. The batter hits the ball out towards the mob of nine fielders who all converge on the ball like bloodhounds. The batter – who was being attacked by the pitcher – doesn’t run away from the mob, but towards them! The idiot runner loops around this square dirt path just daring and taunting the mob to throw the ball at him while he runs…back to where he was before?! Even more insane is how sometimes the runners will stop at the corners as if they’re on some magical safe base preventing the mob from touching him. Or maybe the mob can’t see the runners when they’re touching the white mounds on the ground. (They must have been really superstitious.)
Next, the ball gets tossed back to the guy in the center of the field and the mob takes their positions again… Why don’t they just attack the batter before the ball is thrown? What do they hope to accomplish by tossing the ball away if they’re just going to attack the batter when they’re the ones who threw it at him?!
Here’s the most ludicrous thing about it: After they capture three runners, they trade places!!! They actually take turns attacking each other. It’s like one of those old-school video games (you know, before the days of holodecks where you can beam yourself inside the game) called RPGs, where you take turns attacking each other. If I finally stopped some band of nit wits from hitting my ball, I would just give it to them! I’d claim victory right then and there.
As you can see, in trying to look back towards an “ancient” game almost completely forgotten with the past, baseball might seem rather absurd. Even today, baseball has its own variations depending on where it’s played. I remember watching a movie with Tom Seleck where he plays a major league player who is traded to a Japanese team. In America, no one bats an eye when a player spits in the dirt or kicks sand over the plate (a slight of…er, foot in order to make the strike zone over the plate difficult to judge by the pitcher). However, according to the movie, Japanese culture highly frowns upon these behaviors. It was quite a culture shock for Tom Seleck’s character.
During the days of the Super Nintendo home video game system, I remember reading an article about one of Ken Griffey, Jr’s games. It was noted by the developers that localization was a big deal when taking the American version of the game and editing the graphics and sounds to accommodate for Japanese cultural traditions for the same game (or maybe it was the Japanese version to America…I can’t remember which was developed first). Such differences included large accordion-looking lanterns held by fans in the bleachers, and gongs and other Japanese-relevant songs played to celebrate a home run. I imagine it would be even more confusing for the same future-person to read two different accounts of baseball but lacked the clarification of the cultural differences between America and Japan. This would be because such articles assumed that readers back in that day would understand the variances. (Disclaimer: These are things I remember reading about long ago. I tried to find images of Japanese baseball that reflected these characteristics but could not find any. I might very well have been wrong. Hopefully, though, you understand that such differences do exist elsewhere in some fashion regarding a common trait like baseball…or even McDonald’s…or Disney.)
So it is when reading the Bible. The writers didn’t know what the cultures and technologies would be like in the future. God did not often reveal the future in such detail, let alone reveal the future at all.
It really shouldn’t be a surprise, either. After all, we don’t normally write stories and articles with whatever future cultures that might emerge in mind. We write for today’s culture(s). We write with the assumption that the vast majority of people are going to understand many (if not most) of the ideas and things we talk about. We talk about computers, cars, bicycles, hair dye, tampons, cell phones, and microwaves. We discuss issues of homosexuality, abortion, taxes, immigration, and health care. Who knows how things will develop and change as time moves on, especially hundreds and thousands of years from now. Take a moment and think about what kinds of ideas and things we had almost 20 years ago that we’ve all but forgotten about. Imagine how strange these things might seem to a child of 10 years of age. To such young ones, these “old forgotten” things are odd and weird. (You mean you actually had to get off the couch to change the TV? Does anyone remember what an eight-track is?)
Speaking of cultural differences, I moved to Texas for the first time in my life back in October 23, 2010. I had visited family in Okalahoma back when I was younger than five years old – barely a memory to me. So I’m otherwise still very new to the south. One of my first jobs here was working for a well-known local grocery store chain called Brookshire’s (brook-shurs, not as Shire from Lord of the Rings). During training, the manager kept referring to these things called “buggies”. I’d maybe heard of a baby buggy, before, but in a grocery store, I really didn’t know what he was referring to. Keep in mind that I’m from the west coast, mainly the Seattle area. I’ve lived from California all the way up to Alaska and a few places in the Mid-West. In all my 31 years, I’ve never heard of a “buggy”. I don’t recall how it finally became clear to me, but eventually I finally understood that the shopping carts in the South are most often called buggies! Here I am in the middle of the 21st century – not several hundred years removed – and I had no idea what a buggy was.
All because of such a slight difference of culture. Still the United States of America, but a minor variance in culture within. How much more so can we expect differences between today in American and way back then during early A.D. Israel, Egypt, Greece, and Arabia?
If we are to truly make valid arguments for or against the Bible, it’s in our best interest to understand that, first, we’re dealing with major differences between time and culture (which carries other factors like historical details, language, and more) and, second, we must step out of our own cultural biases. We must be careful not to apply our thinking and conclusions to the Bible’s stories and claims before understanding those stories and claims and why such were told as they were. Just like my example of how someone from the future might think critically against baseball as some absurd, violent mob attack, so, too, must we recognize that things are not always as they may seem when we read the Scriptures.
Context is everything, my friends and fellow humans. Read your Bible not with your own understanding (Proverbs 3:5b).
PART ONE: MAKING JUDGMENTS
There are many ideas that have been going on for centuries and more that try to explain why things happen. Many are simplistic and many are very complicated. But all attempt to grasp the notion that when we choose to do something – whether good or bad – there are consequences. Oddly enough, many have not failed to notice that even the most genuine of choices have seemed to result in far worse endings. Even stranger are the bad things done that have the reverse effects!
Trivia: I’ve reposted articles by updating the time stamps many times before, but this is my first article I’ve ever post-dated. It was began in the evening of Feb 4, 2012, and finished the morning of Feb 5, 2012, at 4:49am. I just thought that was interesting.
Originally written January 16, 2012.
“He was a frightening man no gun slinger would dare trade a glance with. He made strong men weak, and weak men dead. And the dead got out of their graves to run for their lives.” – by Michael Miller, Jr
This question is inspired from the book, Erasing Hell, by Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle (see pages 21-22).
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