Tag: Bible study

What do you do, when swindled by a “Christian company”?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An interesting ethical question reached me today, and although it has never happened to me — mostly because I don’t do much business with Christian businesses, I suspect, it raises all sorts of issues.

Someone purchased a subscription for a service from a Christian company back in February. But he finds, now the first month’s materials have been delivered, that they aren’t fit for purpose, because of a condition unmentioned in the advertising. Basically he’s lost his money, and what they are sending him, although perhaps useful to someone else, is no use to him.

He could perhaps go to the credit card company, and ask for redress.  He could also go to the Advertising Standards Authority and complain that he wasn’t told.  (The ASA is the body that recently decided that mainstream Christian group Healing on the Streets were not allowed to say on their website that God can heal, by the way).  In short he could bring the Christian company before the authorities.  If he was dealing with someone like Amazon, he would do just that.

But should he do this for a business which provides Christian services for Christians?  What about 1 Corinthians 6:7:

The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?

ἤδη μὲν οὖν ὅλως ἥττημα ὑμῖν ἐστιν ὅτι κρίματα ἔχετε μεθ’ ἑαυτῶν. διὰ τί οὐχὶ μᾶλλον ἀδικεῖσθε; διὰ τί οὐχὶ μᾶλλον ἀποστερεῖσθε;

Perhaps so.  Perhaps the best thing to do is ask politely for a refund; and to bear the loss patiently if necessary; and to hand the company over to God and think no more about it.  The sum is large, but bearable.

Or does this verse refer to circumstances rather different than those envisaged here; more to disputes between individuals rather than modern  business methods?  Or is there some other reason not to take this view?

Note that possibly there are extenuating circumstances also that have not reached me.  But  imagine that there are not, just for the sake of argument; and that the Christian company has got greedy.

What do you think?

Share

The curse of too much reading

Posted on by Roger Pearse

JPS points us to a post by Kevin Edgcomb:

I curse my studies. Sometimes, anyway. What good is it to be following a Bible reading plan for the faithful when half of what is going on during my reading is (Lord, have mercy!) a critique of the translation, a mental retroversion to the Hebrew and/or Greek involved, mental notes on historical illumination and literary parallels, and all manner of distractions. The wonder is often gone. I hate that.

The same experience can afflict the classicist, who can no longer sail with Telemachus in a black ship across the wine-dark sea to see fair-haired Menelaus, for all the scholarly footnotes that howl in his head. 

Is there much practical difference between this and being unable any longer to read the book in question?  Is a textual scholar — let us say one with perfect command of Homeric Greek, who has memorised the scholia and knows every volume of important scholarship published in the last millennium — perhaps the least able, of all men, to read the Odyssey any more?

Kevin rightly observes the problems in bible reading for those with too much head knowledge.  It has been many years since the ordinary off-the-shelf bible-reading guides have been of much service to me.  They are aimed at some common average, of sympathies and intellect and attitude; and perhaps few of those inclined to study, even as amateurs, will fall into that group.

I say this with regret, not pride.  I am the loser, not the gainer thereby.  I have not gained in knowledge of God; I have merely become unable to learn from some who know more than me on every important point, except in matters of manuscript studies.

How easy it is for the less perceptive to suppose that they have “risen above” this sort of guide, when in truth they have merely become  unable to read it and profit from it, for all intents and purposes.

What shall it profit a man, if he knows every footnote in Nestle-Aland, and loses his soul?  In my time of dying, which may be very much sooner than I suppose, how much of that to which I have devoted my life will seem other than dry and dusty shreds of paper?

Share