Some of my students brought this video to my attention yesterday. It is James White, a well-known apologist and debater in the States, discussing the CBGM on his show The Dividing Line. Starting at about the 19:19 mark (video below), he mentions the Text und Textwert volumes, the difficulty of grasping the CBGM, the new THGNT as a kind of methodological push back against the CBGM, the correct (longer) reading at Mark 1.1, James Royse and singular readings, his own dissertation on P45, and some of the apologetic value of the CBGM and its data. He covers quite a bit.
Along the way, he says that the primary problem of the CBGM for most people is still the basic one of understanding it. I think he’s right about this and I have obviously been working to remedy that problem in my writing. But there is more work to be done, especially in explaining the method to pastors and laypeople. I will keep trying and, in the meantime, I say kudos to White for his efforts to understand the CBGM and explain it to his audience. For an “unanticipated” discussion of the method, he does a pretty good job describing it. May his tribe increase.
Along the way, he says that the primary problem of the CBGM for most people is still the basic one of understanding it. I think he’s right about this and I have obviously been working to remedy that problem in my writing. But there is more work to be done, especially in explaining the method to pastors and laypeople. I will keep trying and, in the meantime, I say kudos to White for his efforts to understand the CBGM and explain it to his audience. For an “unanticipated” discussion of the method, he does a pretty good job describing it. May his tribe increase.
When he was talking about your book I thought he was going to say that it was really really difficult to stay awake to the end!
ReplyDeleteNo. But did you hear what he did say?? “It is just simply extremely difficult even to follow what is meant to be the most simplified possible presentation of CBGM.” In our defense, we never claimed it was the most simplified possible! But maybe I need to find a new line of work :)
DeleteThe next step is the text-book challenge, and then the 'Christian in the pew' challenge.
DeleteIn other words—you need to write a Grove booklet...
DeleteA Grove booklet on the CBGM would be awesome. I'm not sure it would sell though ;)
DeletePG,
DeleteI am convinced that the more attempts at explaining the CBGM the better off we are. I have found this to be true for me. Having read Mink, you, TW and listening to White has contributed to what seemed like an unknowable darkness to becoming a murky gray. Even reading those who have lead the pushback has cleared up much.
I hope to see your doctoral thesis in print soon.
Tim
You should reach out to James. He has guests on the show from time to time. I think a conversation with him would be really helpful to introduce a large swath of laymen to CBGM.
ReplyDeleteGreat idea. I believe White lives in the Phoenix area.
DeleteThat might be fun. In the meantime, I was on the Reformed Forum podcast back in February (see here).
DeleteThis presentation was *way* better than I expected.
ReplyDelete(Also I have great love for 1739, so that was a nice mention for me.)
I feel like we should all be expecting the development of more complex theories, more complex methods, and that they will be increasingly hard to grasp without specialization. As a Liberal and not an Evangelical, nobody ever tried to sell me on the idea that the Bible was and ought to remain simple. Without that, if you teach people about the proliferation of manuscript witnesses and the variety of them, and the absence of any obvious "originals," why shouldn't we expect theories and methods appropriate to that complexity? Why shouldn't we expect a field that already required significant specialization to require more, even as the materials have become more accessible to do that work?
And y'all have done great work to make the method more accessible, but just like the languages in the first place, it only clicked for me (having had some of the training required) when I started trying to use it on a text. But that was true of the older NA method, too.
Keep up the good work!