Bluffing a Beatenberger
I’ve been thinking of an experience that I had many years ago when I was a missionary based in Interlaken.
The Interpreter Foundation continues to be a fountain of productivity, thanks to generous people who give wonderfully of their time, talents, and energy. Here are the four most recently posted items on the website:
“Nibley Lectures: Time Vindicates the Prophets — Prophets and Crisis”
Between 7 March 1954 and 17 October 1954, Hugh Nibley delivered a series of thirty weekly lectures on KSL Radio that were also published as pamphlets. The series, called “Time Vindicates the Prophets,” was given in answer to those who were challenging the right of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to call themselves Christians.
This lecture discusses the weaknesses of judging prophets based on our experience of peaceful living and of the “quiet” life.
Interpreter Radio Show — July 17, 2022
In the first part of this episode of the Interpreter Radio Show, Martin Tanner, Kris Frederickson, and Mike Parker discussed the “Witnesses of the Book of Mormon — Insights Episode 13: Plural Marriage – Part 1” as well as the principle of forgiveness. During the second portion of the show they had a roundtable discussion centered on the upcoming Come Follow Me lesson #35 (Psalms 102–103; 110; 116–119; 127–128; 135–139; 146–150). Their comments during the 17 July 2022 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show have now been purified of interruptions, archived, and made available to you at no charge for your listening pleasure and edification. And you’ll want to be aware, once you’re hooked, that the Interpreter Radio Show can be heard every Sunday evening throughout the year from 7 to 9 PM (MDT), on K-TALK, AM 1640. It can also be heard live on the Internet at ktalkmedia.com.
The Interpreter Radio Roundtable for Come, Follow Me Old Testament Lesson 34, “I Will Declare What He Hath Done for My Soul,” on Psalms 49–51; 61–66; 69–72; 77–78; 85–86, featured Terry Hutchinson, John Gee, and Kevin Christensen. The roundtable has been extracted from the 10 July 2022 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show. That complete show may be heard — liberated, of course, from commercial and other extraneous interruptions — at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-radio-show-July-10-2022/. The Interpreter Radio Show can be heard live, without a net, each and every Sunday evening of the year, from 7 to 9 PM (MDT), on K-TALK, AM 1640. If, though, for whatever reason, that doesn’t work for you, you can listen to it live on the Internet at ktalkmedia.com.
Once again, Jonn Claybaugh has contributed a set of concise notes for students and teachers of the Come, Follow Me curriculum for scripture study.
And here are links to three new items on the indispensable Neville-Neville Landblog:
“The First Presidency reviewed Saints before publication”
“President Nelson and the attention to detail in Saints”
“Spencer Kraus: “A swing and a miss from Jonathan Neville”
We spent much of today up above Grindelwald, at the top of the Grindelwald-First cable tram line — First is pronounced feerst, not like the English word that is spelled the same way — and a little lower down at a stop called Bort. It was, of course, both gorgeous and spectacular. This is Switzerland, after all.
I’ve been thinking of an experience that I had many years ago when I was a missionary based in Interlaken. One day, my companion and I tracted out a woman who, having heard who we were, invited us into her home. Her husband, she told us, was a teacher at something called the Bibelschule Beatenberg (or, informally, the Beatenberg Bibelheim), or something of that sort. (Today, it’s called the Seminar für biblische Theologie Beatenberg.). It was, and it apparently still is, an evangelical Protestant training facility, perhaps with an especially conservative orientation. It sits up on a mountain ridge a little to the northwest of Interlaken. She said that, if we were willing to wait for just a few minutes, her husband would be home. And, she said, when he returned he would show us where we were wrong. (That’s exactly how she put it, very matter of factly and without any bravado.)
We elected to stay, and he was home within about ten or fifteen minutes. He took us into a kind of seminar room, with a long table. I had never seen anything quite like it in any Swiss home up until that time, and never saw one again. I assume that he sometimes taught classes in his private seminar room, which was full of books and bookshelves.
He grabbed a stack of books off of his shelves and motioned to us that we should sit down. He too sat down, placing a stack of about eight or ten books ahead of him on the table. He looked at us with what seemed to me a rather painfully obvious smirk and asked, in German of course, whether we knew any Greek. With some trepidation, I responded that my major at the university was Greek. And I pulled out of my coat pocket a small Greek New Testament that I happened to have with me that day. I placed it on the table in front of me.
His smirk disappeared. Suddenly. And, in the discussion that followed thereafter, he never mentioned Greek nor used any of the books that he had piled up on his seminar table. Not a single time.
It seemed to me then, and it still seems to me the most reasonable interpretation today, that he was hoping to intimidate us. Essentially, to bully us. We were, of course, ignorant young missionaries. When I pulled a Greek New Testament out of my pocket, though, he feared that his ploy might not work, and he abandoned it without so much as a test probe. He seems not to have noticed that I wassomewhat intimidated. Or, at least, nervous.
The fact is that I had studied only a single year of Greek by the time that I left on my mission, and that he very probably could have destroyed me in a debate about Greek semantics. But he wasn’t certain that he could. And I’ve laughed about that little episode ever since.
Posted from Matten bei Interlaken, Switzerland
