This episode, focusing on Proverbs 26:4-5, admonishes believers to engage fools without being carnal. Fools are naturally defensive in regards to correction, since their identity is virtually synonymous with the lusts they pursue. Potential correction is threatening to their identity. The identity of Christians, by contrast, is Christ Himself, so believers SHOULD more easily abandon behaviors upon correction, because they are not reflective of their true holy identity. That being said, the Christian's old fleshly nature is often provoked by fools through personal attacks and verbal abuse designed to draw us into fleshly combat. Upon encountering fools, we need to find rest and peace in our secure positional identity in Christ, acknowledging that fools are insecure by nature, depending as they are on the world and its lusts that are passing away. (1 John 2:17)
Steering between the Scylla of Skepticism and the Charybdis of Presumption
This episode contends that believers should abandon an "all-or-nothing" approach to the reliability of translations of the Bible. As stated in the previous episode, the large number of textual variants is a natural bi-product of the more than 5,500 copies of the New Testament. Since most of the textual variants don't affect meaning (spelling, word-order, etc.), Christians can be confident that English translations of the Greek and Hebrew text are 99.9% faithful to the original autograph. Some are concerned that admission of doubt over the translation of ANY text places one on the slippery slope of skepticism leading to a shipwrecked faith. Miles Smith, one of the translators of the KJV, insisted in the preface that doubt was preferable to dogmatic claims of certainty where the meaning of a text was uncertain. "It is better to make doubt of those things which are secret, then to strive about those things that are uncertain." He acknowledges some room for doubt about the appropriate translation of a few passages, and this posture is preferable to unfounded confidence where "things are uncertain." He nevertheless affirmed the reliability of the KJV in the vast majority of translations, whose renderings amounted to "rubbing and polishing." The episode warns against unhealthy skepticism that quibbles over total certainty where compelling evidence is everywhere. Mark Twain remarked, "It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand."