Quadrilateral Thoughts

Exorcisms 6

2012-01-29T16:14:00.000-05:00

... continued from here
________
Another activity that Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell us about Jesus doing is casting out demons, exorcism. Not only did they bring Jesus the sick, but the demon possessed as well (e.g., Mark 1:32). Interestingly, this is one aspect of Jesus' earthly ministry that John tells us nothing about, but it permeates the synoptic gospels.

Situations in the gospels where people are possessed by spirits are different from those where they are healed of sickness. In almost every case, the evil spirits speak and they are beings distinct from the person whose body they inhabit. Jesus heals many people where no connection is made to an evil spirit, and most of the times where a demon is mentioned there is no clear physical sickness involved.

There are only a couple instances where we might wonder if something was described as demon possession that we might describe differently today. For example, on one occasion Jesus heals a man who was mute (Matt. 9:32-33). The demon does not speak. In another well known instance, a boy has symptoms that would make us think of epilepsy (Mark 9:17-20). The boy has seizures and foams at the mouth. Again, the demon does not speak.

The important point is that Jesus healed them more than their precise diagnosis. Were there instances where the people Jesus healed were schizophrenic rather than truly demon possessed? The reason I ask this question is because we know that there are people today who speak in voices who are mentally ill rather than demon possessed. At the same time, Christians in the two-thirds world continue to report numerous incidents of demon possession where people act in ways that seem well beyond normal schizophrenia.

We do not have to pick one or the other. We can believe both in schizophrenia and in demon possession. But we must be very careful. Very few if any individuals reading this blog are qualified to make this sort of diagnosis. Throughout history, numerous individuals have been put to death who were mentally ill rather than possessed.

We should exhaust every possible medical avenue before we conclude someone is possessed. We do not need to know exactly what is wrong with a person to pray for them, even to lay hands on them. God knows the precise diagnosis, and it is the Spirit who does the healing or performs the exorcism. This issue should not be something that causes you to have doubts, nor should we ever hesitate to pray for someone no matter what their problem...

Moon colonies

2012-01-28T20:57:00.002-05:00

I only intend to post on politics this year when it's clear I'm not going to offend anyone...

Let me just say how it warms my heart in so many ways to hear Newt Gingrich talk about a colony on the moon. First, I'd love to have a colony on the moon. Second, what a hilarious thing to say in a Republican presidential debate!

My heart was strangely warmed... ;-)

Reflections on his daughter's death

2012-01-28T09:11:00.000-05:00

Our hearts go out to Ben Witherington and his family, who unexpectedly lost their daughter earlier in the month. His reflections are very valuable, especially for pastors.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Science Friday: Evolution of Adam

2012-01-27T13:19:00.002-05:00

Normally I want to post more pure science or culture on Friday, but since I haven't come to anything really interesting to me in the biography I'm reading about James Clerk Maxwell, I thought I would post about the introduction to the new book by Peter Enns I'm also reading, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins.

This is going to be a hard book to read, not because Enns himself is caustic or confrontational. In fact, quite the opposite. I have been impressed with how sensitive and "exploratory" a tone he has adopted in this book. His evangelical background as an OT scholar comes through clearly, not as someone who has been burned (Westminster Theological Seminary effectively pushed him out, even if he did the resigning), not as someone bitter because they feel stupid from the past (very, very common). The tone is thoroughly respectful and truth seeking. It doesn't have the condescending tone Giberson and even Collins sometimes seem to have.

His audience is Christian, especially evangelicals, and especially American evangelicals. Yet he is also addressing those who believe evolution must be taken seriously. Respect of Scripture is a primary value, although he clarifies that "the most faithful, Christian reading of sacred Scripture is one that recognizes Scripture as a product of the times in which it was written and/or the events took place--not merely so, but unalterably so" (xi).

I will not debate this claim, although I think there may be more to Christian hermeneutics than the original meaning. Nevertheless, I agree it does no honor to the Bible to pretend that it meant something different than it did (even if I think there is room for self-consciously different readings).

In any case, the reason the book will be a hard read is because of his conclusion: "If evolution is correct, one can no longer accept, in any true sense of the word "historical," the instantaneous and special creation of humanity described in Genesis, specifically 1:26-31 and 2:7,22" (xiv). In particular, he does not believe we should speculate about Adam in ways foreign to the original meaning of Genesis. For example, he will not let us say that Adam and Eve were the first two homo sapiens in which God put a soul because that is certainly not anything Genesis itself was thinking.

Enns does not believe, rightly I think, that Genesis is, in the end, the real point of conflict between evolution and the Bible. Paul is. He sees four options:

1. Accept evolution and reject Christianity (he will say no to this).
2. Accept Paul's view of Adam as binding and reject evolution (he will say no to this as well).
3. Reconcile evolution and Christianity by positing a first human pair (or group) at some point in the evolutionary process (he thinks this doesn't respect Genesis enough in terms of its original meaning).
4. Rethink Genesis and Paul (clearly the option he believes has the most integrity).

So the book begins.

Healing People 5

2012-01-27T07:12:00.000-05:00

... continued from here.
___________
Another important aspect of Jesus' miracles is their purpose. Sure, Jesus' miracles reflected the power of God and God's approval of his mission. They showed his authority and power. But Jesus arguably did not primarily perform miracles to show off. Jesus performed miracles to help people.

In fact, Mark implies that many of Jesus' miracles happened after people brought those in need to Jesus. In other words, Jesus healed many in response to others who came to him with needs. A man with leprosy comes to Jesus (Mark 1:40). Some men dig open a roof to bring a paralyzed man to Jesus (Mark 2:4).

In one familiar story, Jesus is in a crowd and a woman manages to touch him and is healed of a bleeding problem (Mark 5:27-29). This story highlights another important element in Jesus' healing ministry. Healing usually was closely connected to the faith of the person healed. In this instance, Jesus doesn't even know who has just been healed. He just knows that someone has touched him (Mark 5:30).

Similarly, Jesus is not able to do many miracles in his home village of Nazareth because the people there do not have faith (Mark 6:5). This incident again highlights the fact that Jesus played by the human rules and healed in the way someone might heal today through the Spirit's power. In such instances, Jesus was more the catalyst for healing, the mediator in a transaction between the faith of the individual healed and the power of God to heal.

It seems hard today for Christians to find a balance on topics like healing. We as humans seem prone to extremes on every side. So there are some Christians and traditions that tend to deny the miraculous altogether. Even if Jesus did them, that was something just for their day. Others go to the other extreme and say that if you had enough faith, you would always be healed.

It is both dangerous and wrongheaded to think that you will always be healed if you have enough faith. God does not always heal. God did not remove Paul's thorn in the flesh (2 Cor. 12:7-10), perhaps eye problems of some sort. Paul leaves Trophimus sick at Miletus (2 Tim. 4:20). The idea that healing is only a matter of faith has almost certainly kept individuals from seeking medical attention that might have otherwise saved their lives. It in effect tells God how he can heal and how he cannot.

It seems to me that we should stay somewhere in the middle. Miracles happen, however you want to define them. Perhaps God sometimes heals us through medicine. Perhaps God sometimes intervenes directly in our physical situations. We can be thankful either way, and we can be hopeful either way. Faith does make a difference. It is not closed minded to believe that miracles can happen, quite the opposite.

Wine Making in Ancient Israel

2012-01-27T06:19:00.000-05:00

Jim Davila of St. Andrews, Scotland, noticed this article in the Jerusalem Post today on wine and wine making in ancient Israel: http://www.jpost.com/ArtsAndCulture/FoodAndWine/Article.aspx?id=255308

Psalm 3 Translation

2012-01-26T00:08:00.000-05:00

Psalm 1
Psalm 2
Now Psalm 3
______________
[A psalm attributed to David when he fled from the face of Absalom his son]
1 LORD, how are my troubles multiplying,
the multitudes of those rising against me!
2 Multitudes are saying of my person,
"There will be no help for him with God."
Music

3 But you, YHWH, [are] a shield for me,
my glory, and one who lifts up my head.
4 [With] my voice to YHWH I called,
and he answered me from the hill of his holiness.
Music

5 I myself lay down and slept.
I awoke because YHWH helped me.
6 I will not fear the multitudes of people
who surround and set themselves against me.
7 Arise, YHWH,
save me, O God,
for you strike all my enemies on the cheek,
the teeth of the wicked you shatter.
8 To YHWH is the salvation,
over your people, your blessing.
Music
_________
Not much to say about this psalm. The title was certainly not original, since David would not attribute a psalm to David. It is rather a context against which later readers read the psalm. We can read it that way, but we might also fruitfully read the psalm on its own terms.

No one knows what Selah meant, other than the fact that it was probably some sort of musical or reading instruction. I originally rendered it as "Pause," but have decided instead simply to put "Music."

Biblical Relationships and Ancient Culture

2012-01-25T10:34:00.000-05:00

Here's a 26 minute vidcast I created for our online Congregational Relationships class at Wesley.

http://www.screencast.com/t/mk8ObXZX1F

Jesus' Humanity 4

2012-01-25T06:48:00.001-05:00

continued again...
___________
... Similarly, we should not think that Jesus was able to live without sin because he was God, while we cannot because we are mortal. Hiding behind this view is partly a wrong view of sin and partly a wrong view of Jesus. The wrong view of sin is the one that views sin in terms of absolute perfection against an absolute standard, as if God is a legalistic accountant of some kind.

Did Jesus ever accidentally "wrong" someone by forgetting to meet them at sunrise to fish on the Sea of Galilee? Did he make them wait? Obviously we don't know. But if he did, this is probably not what Hebrews had in mind when it said Jesus was without sin (Heb. 4:15). Paul does at some points at least seem to invoke an absolute standard in order to do away with it (e.g., Gal. 3:10), but this is not the primary standard of sin in Scripture--or within Judaism at the time.

The normal sense of sin was that of intentionally wronging God or another, intentional wrongdoing. This is surely the sense of sin that is primary in Scripture, and it is arguably this sense of sin that Paul had in mind when he said that Jesus "had no sin" (2 Cor. 5:21). Arguably Jesus was a model for us in this sense of sin--that by the power of the Holy Spirit we can also follow Jesus' example. As 1 John 3:9 puts it: "No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God's seed remains in them." This is not an expectation of absolute perfection. It is about being able to follow through with a heart that intends to do the right thing.

Can we do miracles today? The perspective of Scripture and Christian history gives a "yes" answer. From a Christian perspective, we live in the same part of history that Jesus inaugurated. Jesus may not appear to people in the same way today as he did the apostles. In that sense we can question whether there are any apostles today of the sort we find in the New Testament. But the Spirit has arguably continued to work miracles throughout history, and Christians believe we have that same Spirit today.

A person can both over- and under-emphasize such things. A person can miss opportunities because of a lack of faith, and a person can get preoccupied with "signs and wonders." Jesus flatly refused to do signs on demands. "No sign will be given," he flatly says at one point (Mark 8:12). Similarly, those who refuse obvious medical treatment arguably reject an offer of healing God has brought through a knowledge of his own creation.

The key is to recognize that Jesus' humanity was not only a true humanity, but a perfect indication of what humanity can be and was supposed to be. We should not read the story of Jesus as something beyond the reach of the rest of us through the power of the Spirit. And we should not idealize him in a way that takes him beyond the realm of true humanity...

Miracles Today? 3

2012-01-24T17:04:00.000-05:00

... continued from yesterday.
______________
There were others both in the Jewish and Roman world who were thought to perform miracles. This is a significant thing to know if we are to see Jesus as they saw Jesus. No one would have assumed that Jesus was God or a god simply because he performed miracles. Judaism had its own stories of individuals past and present who could do wonders. Not only were there the prophets of the past in the Bible, but such people popped up from time to time in Israel as well.

One such individual was Honi "the circle drawer," who lived some time before the Romans took over Israel in 63BC. [1] He was famous for drawing a circle during a time of drought and standing in it to pray for rain. Although he was going to stay in it until God answered prayer, it rained almost immediately. Hanina ben Dosa was also known for his ability to work miracles, and he came from Galilee in the period perhaps just after Jesus. Like Jesus, he is known for healing from a distance and having authority over evil spirits causing sickness.

And it is significant that more than one New Testament book frames Jesus' miracles in terms of the power of the Holy Spirit working through him. Jesus was "a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him"(Acts 2:22). Something arguably happens to Jesus both after the Spirit descends on him at the river Jordan and after his temptation in the desert--he returns to Galilee "in the power of the Spirit" (Luke 4:14). Even after he dies on the cross, both Acts and Paul word the event of Jesus' resurrection in terms of God's power: "God raised him from the dead" (e.g., Acts 2:24).

There is probably a subtle message for us here, namely, that Jesus did not merely show us God's power while he was on earth. Jesus arguably modeled what any believer can be or do by the power of the Holy Spirit, from his power to do miracles to his power not to sin. We are forced to go a little beyond what the biblical text says to take a position on such questions, but we can make some reasonable suggestions nonetheless.

So Christians believe that Jesus was both fully human and fully God. We do not believe he was half man and half God. And from a historical perspective, Christians clearly understood his humanness long before they worked out the details of his divinity. Up until the year 400, many Christians still believed that Jesus was the first creation God made rather than him being fully God.

So it is no stretch to suggest that, while we believe Jesus was fully God from eternity past, he played it by the human rules while he was on earth. In other words, he lived in such a way as to show us what humanity could be. It should not be odd to suggest that, through the Spirit, we can do miracles today like the ones Jesus did then. In fact, Jesus tells his disciples in John 14:12 that they will do even greater miracles than he did. He himself will empower them.

Similarly, we should not think that Jesus was able to live without sin because he was God, while we cannot because we are mortal. Hiding behind this view is partly a wrong view of sin and partly a wrong view of Jesus...

[1] I first learned about Honi from a book on Jesus written from a Jewish perspective, Geza Vermes' Jesus the Jew: A Historian's Reading of the Gospels, 2nd ed. (London: SCM, 1983), 69-72. See also his material on Hanina ben Dosa, pp. 72-78.

Jim Luttrull on Justice, Recidivism

2012-01-23T18:27:00.003-05:00

Heard Jim Luttrell, Grant County Prosecutor, talk today at IWU about the question of what the primary element should be in determining the punishment for a crime. It was a wonderful dip into the complexity of such issues. In ethics we cover the four key factors in making moral determinations: 1) the act itself, 2) the consequences of the act, 3) motive, and 4) character. All of them surfaced at some point in his presentation.

But the main issue he was addressing is the question of justice oriented punishment versus punishment based on likely recidivism, likely repeat offense. There is a significant trend in many judicial circles to see the reform of the criminal as the primary factor in sentencing. Jim clearly senses this is a mistake, although I don't think his presentation aimed to be a straightforward argument.

But I strongly resonate with his sense that the starting point for sentencing should be justice. I also agree with him that "mitigating circumstances" should focus on motive and intent in conjunction with criminal acts, not on likely recidivism. But these are clearly very complex issues that involve multiple variables, all of which have their place.

Luttrell would agree.

What is a Miracle 2

2012-01-22T07:06:00.001-05:00

continued from yesterday
_______
... Most of Jesus' miracles had to do with people. In itself, this is a key insight. Sure, he walked on water (Mark 6:47-50; Matt. 14:25-33; John 6:16-21). He calmed storms (Mark 4:35-40; Matt. 8:23-27; Luke 8:22-25). He multiplied bread and fish (Mark 6:30-44; Matt. 14:13-21; John 6:1-13). Such events tell us that Jesus had power over what we think of as "nature."

And perhaps it is worthwhile to remind ourselves that the distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" is a fairly recent one. It has only been since the rise of science in the 1600's that Western culture came to draw a sharp distinction between events that follow the "laws of nature" and events we might call miracles or the supernatural. Even just 500 years ago, Martin Luther--the one who started Protestantism--still thought of storms as God expressing his anger rather than the result of high and low pressure systems meeting, the exchange of electricity from one polarity to another, and so forth.

We have come to define a miracle as a divine intervention into the natural sequence of events that would have happened in the normal flow of causes and effects following the rules of science. In Jesus' day, they thought spiritual forces were constantly causing things. They did not think in terms of nature following rules like a machine. When the sailors on Jonah's boat encountered the storm, they figured someone on board had ticked off his god.

Today we would give thanks to God not only for the inexplicable but for what seems explicable as well. Sometimes doctors do surgery and it works. Sometimes we take medicine and it works. Sometimes we undergo chemotherapy, and it works. In such situations, is usually impossible for us to know where the hands of science and any direct intervention of God begin and end, but we are thankful nonetheless. God created the science.

Some Christians have a sense that God directs the minutest details of how such things turn out. I personally think that we must keep God distinct in our minds from his creation. Otherwise, we will have to explain how a God who says he is love causes so many bad things to happen. It is much easier to think that God allows many bad things to happen but that he has given his creation rules and largely allowed it to continue on its own path of cause and effect. God sees, God knows, God allows. Sometimes God intervenes. But he is not directly responsible for all the pain, evil, and suffering that happen in the world.

So our sense that Jesus could do things that do not follow the laws of nature is a fairly modern way of looking at them. For them, he was able to do the kinds of wonders that God, angels, demons, and Satan did. Jesus' enemies claimed that he took some of his powers from Satan (e.g., Mark 3:22). Others clearly thought he received his powers from God (e.g., John 3:2).

There were others both in the Jewish and Roman world who were thought to perform miracles...

Jesus and Miracles 1

2012-01-21T06:44:00.000-05:00

Returning to writing on Jesus. I'm thinking this might be chapter 3.
___________
Herod Antipas, son of the notorious Herod the Great, threw John the Baptist into prison, no doubt recognizing the political danger his movement represented. From the location John baptized to the very notion of what a messiah is, John's preaching shouted revolution. It said, God is about to conquer the land and place his king in control. Repent of your sins and wash yourselves, because judgment is coming on those who are not ready for a restored and purified kingdom.

If we forget Luke 1 for a minute, we would read Luke 7 and Matthew 11 easily enough. John the Baptist is in prison and hears about what Jesus is doing. He sends some of his followers to Jesus to ask if Jesus is the coming messiah or if they should continue to look for someone else. The complication comes if John already knows Jesus, either because he is his relative or because of the Spirit at Jesus' baptism. [1]

What is more important is Jesus' response to John's followers. What are the signs that Jesus is the messiah, the coming king? He is healing the blind and the lame. Lepers are cleansed. The deaf hear. The dead are raised, and he is preaching good news to the poor (Matt. 11:5; Luke 7:22).

Miracles were clearly a key element of Jesus' brief ministry in Galilee. This memory is so strong in all the traces Jesus has left on history that even historians who don't believe in miracles generally accept that Jesus at least seemed to perform them--a lot of them. Mark 1:32-34 summarizes Jesus' activities like this: "That evening after sunset the people brought to Jesus all the sick and demon-possessed. The whole town gathered at the door, and Jesus healed many who had various diseases. He also drove out many demons, but he would not let the demons speak because they knew who he was."

Jesus apparently did most of his miracles in the far north, north of the Sea of Galilee. Matthew 11 tells us that "Jesus began to denounce the towns in which most of his miracles had been performed, because they did not repent.'Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.'"(Matt. 11:20-21). These are very interesting comments, since none of the gospels really tell us about any of these miracles. It's also interesting that miracles don't necessarily convince others, even though you would think they would.

[map]

Most of Jesus' miracles had to do with people...

[1] Thus the speculation of some that John was helping his own followers discover who Jesus was and of others that Jesus wasn't doing the things John expected the messiah to do.

Science Friday: Maxwell

2012-01-20T02:54:00.002-05:00

I have been reading from a biography of James Clerk Maxwell. He was by most accounts the most important scientist of the 1800's, whose work with electricity and magnetism more than anyone else opened the door for the radio, television, cell phones, etc. The book I'm reading is The Man Who Changed Everything.

Unfortunately, today I have little to say but that I am giving notice that I'm reading the book. I'm up to about the point where he goes to college. He's about 16 and has had a paper presented for him (he wasn't considered old enough to read it himself) on making ellipse shapes in new ways by tying the strings around the foci differently.

The author, Basil Mahon's style gnaws at me a little because it reminds me of a certain style that is too flattering. In ancient biography, for example, there was a sense that if a person became great, there must have been great signs of this destiny in childhood. Mahon just feels like he's grasping at greatness in childhood sometimes, maybe even glossing over weaknesses.

We all know Maxwell turned out to be brilliant and a nice guy. That doesn't mean he had to be perfect or great as a child. He sounds like a fairly normal, upper class Scottish kid of the time to me.

Oldest fragment of Romans?

2012-01-19T13:44:00.003-05:00

John Byron over at The Biblical World has drawn our attention to a CNN clip with Steve Green of Hobby Lobby presenting some of the manuscripts of his collection including a fragment of Romans that Scott Carroll dates to the mid-second century. That would be about 50 years earlier than the Chester Beatty papyrus p46 (ca. AD200) and would thus be the oldest fragment of Romans to date (about the size of the oldest NT manuscript of all, p52 of John, which dates to about AD125).

IWU's Jerry Pattengale is heavily involved in the administration of the Green Collection as well, and Green is the principal donor for Wesley Seminary's upcoming new building.

Faith in Jesus/Faith of Jesus

2012-01-19T03:19:00.001-05:00

Dave Larsen asked me on Twitter where I stood on the "faith in Jesus"/"faith of Jesus" debate but realized 140 characters might not do it. Frankly, there's no silver bullet so several books wouldn't do it. Here's the skinny on my thoughts.

1. First, most probably don't even know what we're talking about. In a number of key places in Paul, the literal expression Paul uses is "faith of Jesus Christ," even though most translations thus far have translated it "faith in Jesus Christ." Rom. 3:22; Gal. 2:16, 20 are a couple for starters.

2. I believe that in most of Paul's discussion in Rom. 4 and Gal. 3, as well as verses like Rom. 3:28, Paul has human faith in view. These are not places where he uses the expression "faith of Jesus" but speaks of faith in general as the mechanism of justification. However, such faith is primarily directed toward God, not Jesus (e.g., Rom. 4:17).

I disagree with Wright that faith is a "badge" of membership in God's people for Paul. I wrestled with this for a good long while. What is Wright saying? He's so smart and deep. As has happened with many such things I have struggled with, I finally decided the problem was not that I was stupid but that Wright (in this case) is just wrong. He's a Reformed Anglican and Paul isn't. Faith is a mechanism of justification for Paul, despite later debates about monergism, synergism, etc.

I might add, however, that I agree with Wright on many other things.

3. Romans 5:19 and Luke Timothy Johnson gnawed at me for a good long while. The language is almost exactly parallel to Romans 3:22. Obedience of one man is similar to what the faith of Jesus would mean. Many will be made righteous is pretty much the same as to be justified (same exact word). Strangely, 2 Corinthians 4:13 pushed me over the edge and I have an article in CBQ about it. The train of thought makes most sense if Paul there speaks of our faith imitating the faith of Jesus.

4. So my hunch is that the "faithfulness of Jesus" was a tradition of the earliest church coming out of Jerusalem. Paul seems to use the phrase, "through the faith of Jesus Christ" in a formulaic way, as if he is presenting tradition. And my sense of the development of early Christian soteriology, the topic I started writing on during my sabbatical, sees this phrase as corresponding directly to the earliest understandings of Jesus' death--the death of a righteous person that satisfies God's wrath toward Israel and thus catalyzes Israel's redemption from enslavement. As Philippians 2 puts it, "obedience to the death," the "faithfulness of Jesus Christ" that is an atoning sacrifice. On that half I agree with Hays.

5. But I agree with Dunn that Paul quickly moves to our faith... in God though more than in Christ. Paul does have a place for faith in Christ in his theology (e.g., Rom. 9:33) but it is subsidiary to faith in God. I've argued that he may exploit the ambiguity of the phrase "faith of Christ" to move from what traditionally referred to Jesus' faithfulness to his emphasis on the necessity of our faith.

As I put it in the article, Paul moves "from Hays to Dunn," "from faith to faith." This is a very complex argument and unprovable, but it makes sense of all the data in an elegant way, in my opinion.

Psalm 2 translation

2012-01-18T05:27:00.001-05:00

My translation of Psalm 2 is now finished (see Psalm 1):

1 Why are nations in an uproar
and peoples contemplating pointlessness?
2 Kings of the land seat themselves
and princes are conferring together
against YHWH and against his anointed.
3 "Let us break apart their bonds
and let us throw from us their ropes."
4 The one who sits in the skies will laugh,
the master will make fun of them.
5 Then he will speak to them with his nose [i.e., in his anger]
and with his burning he will make them terrified.
6 "But I myself have anointed my king upon Zion, hill of my holiness.
7 Let me pronounce a decree,"
says YHWH to me.
"My Son [are] you.
I today have given birth to you.
8 Ask from me, and let me give the nations as your inheritance,
and as your possession, the ends of the earth.
9 You will break them with a rod of iron,
like a vessel of a potter, you will shatter them."
10 But now, kings, be wise;
receive correction, you judges of the earth.
11 Serve YHWH with fear
and shake with trembling
12 Kiss the Son so he will not huff his nose [i.e., be angry]
and you perish from the way,
For his fury burns quickly.
Blessed are all who flee to him.
__________
This of course was originally a psalm in honor of the king of Judah and thus must date to the period of the monarchy (pre-586BC). Some think it is an enthronement psalm, a psalm sung when a king of Judah was anointed as king. Thus "I today have given birth to you."

The NT of course then applies the verse with a secondary meaning to Christ's enthronement to God's right hand when he is exalted after the resurrection. The NT of course does not show interest in the whole psalm but only in the part it relates to Jesus (2:7-8). We cannot prove or disprove whether they also related the "breaking with a rod" parts to Jesus' second coming, although it is possible.

Why we need theology...

2012-01-17T06:58:00.000-05:00

I'm writing a piece for some Sunday School literature titled, "Why we need theology?" Here's what I'm thinking.

1. Theology gives us a starting point.
A college freshmen once came to me, completely enamored with the excitement of the new thoughts filling his head. He was seeing new ways to look at issues that had never occurred to him. In his enthusiasm, he exclaimed that he wanted to start all over from scratch in what he believed. He was going to throw everything out the window and make no assumptions about anything.

I suggested that this was not only a bad idea. It was impossible. Understanding the world is a circle that starts with certain assumptions and then goes to pondering things in dialog with the world. We find out some of our assumptions are inconsistent. We find some of them may not match up. We revise them. Then we do it all over again.

Christians have always believed that at least some key truths are a matter of revelation rather than discovery. We may vary in what the precise formula is. Some have thought truth is so much a matter of God revealing himself to us in the Bible that we could never discover half the truth if we tried to go find it in the world itself. Others have thought we can discover most Christian truth just by good thinking on the evidence out there in the world.

Whatever the precise formula, Christian theology gives the believer a place to begin when it comes to the question of what is right and what is true. Some elements of theology are more negotiable than others, but it would be foolish to try to start from scratch when God has been helping humanity find its way from the very beginning. Christians believe that he especially started helping us find our way through ancient Israel and then definitively helped us find our way through Christ and the church that followed. Human understanding is never infallible, but it would be foolish to try to start our quest for truth from scratch. For Christians, Christian theology is by far the best place to start.

2. Theology helps us know what is important.
We have a lot of things we believe and a lot of ways we do things in the world. For example, I personally believe that the front of my house looked better with the pine trees my wife cut down than it does without them. I also believe that it is wrong to murder innocent people you happen to meet on the sidewalk. These two beliefs are not of the same importance at all. The second belief is quite important. The first is rather insignificant.

We have to prioritize our beliefs and practices in this way because they inevitably come into conflict with each other. Despite some popular rhetoric, right and wrong cannot simply be a matter of absolutes because situations arise in which we have to choose between our principles, when we have to make exceptions. "Should I obey God or human authority in this situation?" Both are Christian values, but when they come into conflict, we have to obey God and disobey human authority.

Christian theology is what helps me set these priorities. Which is more important, what I think or how I live? Which Christian beliefs are the absolute core and which ones are a matter of personal conviction? When should I make an exception to a rule or practice and when must I stand firm to the death? We all would answer these questions with our actions in certain situations. We all would have a "theology" when the moment of decision came. The question is whether it would be a good theology.

3. Theology helps us appropriate the Bible.
This is an extremely important point because so many think that they simply read the Bible and do what it says. It is exactly this misunderstanding that stands behind the tens of thousands of different Christian groups who think they are all just believing and doing what the Bible says. It is, in short, a self-deception that is innocent enough in most cases but that can lead to catastrophe in others.

For example, it is not really troublesome that Seventh Day Adventists do not eat pork. Now of course it might be rather annoying to someone who absolutely loves pork, but no great harm is done in general. Underlying this practice is a Seventh Day Adventist theology that does not read the Old Testament prohibitions on pork in the light of New Testament comments on God declaring all foods clean. This is a theological decision between comments in the Bible that say different things. Leviticus says not to eat pork. Mark 7:19 and other passages seem to abolish the Old Testament food laws. Our theology is what helps us arbitrate between such passages.

Most Christians find the issue of pork rather straightforward, but there are countless other issues where we do not agree. Can women be senior pastors? One segment of the church says no and points to certain passages. Another segment says yes and points to other passages. Another segment says it is not just about passages but about the difference between our time and the time God was addressing at the time of the Bible.

On many issues, we disagree on what individual passages meant as well as on how to map individual passages to each other. The Bible ultimately cannot make some of these decisions for us. James does not tell us how to fit its comments with Paul. Paul may have told the Thessalonians all about the man of lawlessness when he was there (2 Thess. 2:5), but he did not write it down and the rest of Bible does not fill in the blank.

The Bible gives us the starting material for our beliefs and practices, but whether we admit it to ourselves or not, it is far more our theology that organizes the biblical material and appropriates it in our lives. Individuals who do not realize this fact are prone to float adrift on whatever tide happens to catch them. This is how cults form and gain followers. If we are not conscious of the theology at work in our use of the Bible, then we are inevitably driven and tossed about by whatever wind catches our sail. We think we are following the Bible when we are just as likely riding the wave of some subculture.

4. Theology clarifies the boundaries of Christian faith and action.
Whether we are fully conscious of the ambiguities of the biblical text, our theology is always with us, setting the boundaries of our thinking and action, steering us in the right (or wrong) direction. The early Christians spoke of something they called the "rule of faith," the most fundamental Christian principles drawn from the Bible boiled down as guidelines. It is a basic theology and we all function with one.

The most important of these sorts of guidelines are the core beliefs and practices that the Holy Spirit has unfolded and clarified in the church these last two thousand years, the "faith once delivered to the saints" (Jude 1:3). They are in the creeds of historic Christianity and generally held in common by Christians across denominations and traditions, Catholic or Protestant. "I believe in God the Father Almighty..." The core Christian ethic is the "law of love," the absolute principle of loving your neighbor as yourself.

Beyond these basics our theology also determines to a high degree which passages of Scripture we will find "clear" and which ones we will find "unclear." We read a verse about bashing Babylonian babies and immediately sense that this is not something I should do (Ps. 137:9). Of course there are countless other issues in life today that the Bible does not directly address. Who should I vote for in the next election? What should I think about stem cell research or a contraceptive that stops a fertilized egg from implanting itself in the uterine wall?

On many such issues we act or think inconsistently with our theology, which either means that our theology is wrong or our thoughts and actions on that particular theology is wrong. Our lives are full of such contradictions and they are often harmless, but they can also be very dangerous. I may say I love my neighbor and yet act or vote in ways that contradicts what I say my theology is. In this particular case my theology is absolute, and I am bound to make my life conform to it. When good theology is doing what it is supposed to do, it will help me live a life that is truly pleasing to God.

5. Truth is beautiful in itself.
Theology has a bad reputation among some. To some, theology is mostly irrelevant nonsense, "How many angels can fit on the head of a pin?" Hopefully, what we have said so far makes it clear that theology at its best is not only relevant, it is essential. We can debate the stereotype some theologians have of being fascinated by aspects of theology that are not as obviously relevant, but we cannot do away with theology. It is there whether we realize it or not.

At the same time, truth is beautiful for its own sake. The most significant truths may be the ones that have the most impact and relevance, but truth for its own sake is beautiful because it is a reflection of God's mind. We do not all have to love truth for its own sake, but it is perfectly legitimate for those who love it.

The relevance of such truths may not always seem immediately relevant, but they often become relevant over time. Ongoing reflection about truth can form patterns of thinking that help us mature. We may eventually find ourselves with the right intuitions because we have meditated on truth over time. Truth gets into our bones even when it is not fully in our conscious minds. This is some of the best theology we can have.

Confessions on MLK Day

2012-01-16T11:32:00.000-05:00

OK, I'm not going to confess. I started to confess the way I used to feel about MLK day, growing up as a standard issue American fundamentalist. It sounded so bad that I couldn't do it. Suffice it to say, for those in the image of my former self, there will be only snide remarks and grumbling around many a "Christian" dinner table and house.

I believe that there is a disconnect between the way many of these individuals would treat any individual African-American and the way they "feel" about a day like today culturally and politically.

I offer just two thoughts.

1. Today is not just about one individual, MLK. It's about years and years of injustice to African Americans. Can anyone seriously deny it? Does anyone really want to argue that slavery was just? Does anyone really want to argue that making blacks drink from a different water fountain or sit in the back of the bus was right?

We grumbled during the civil rights era. Those protesters weren't law abiding citizens, after all. And we were wrong, plain and simple. I remain convinced after making the comment many times that a lot of our quest to elect people who will put "good judges" on the Supreme Court is not really about what we say it is (abortion) but residual resentment for being forced to integrate in the 60's by judges.

It's worth a day to remember the sins of the past, isn't it? I certainly think so. It's not that we shouldn't move on with even handed lives today. It's not that it would be healthy to feel like anyone owes anyone anything (that doesn't help us move forward). It's about remembering so that no one repeats or perpetuates the past. It's about continuing to address the inequalities that still exist in all sorts of areas and defying them as we move forward.

2. I believe Jesus would fully participate in today. There are all sorts of issues that many of us grumble about that we collect under the heading "political correctness." Despite the fact that "we all know" political correctness is bad, I frankly have a hard time seeing much wrong with its level headed version. That's basically being sensitive to those who are disadvantaged or tend to be excluded in our culture. Just because some might overdo it doesn't negate the general principle.

And the general principle has Jesus written all over it. Jesus was not an "anti-liberal" conservative prophet. Wow, who can really understand Jesus at all and think of him that way?! Jesus was about including those who weren't included and about not letting rules trump people.

There was one very significant Easter morning in college when I read through Galatians and realized Ken the fundamentalist was not on the Paul side of things... and he wasn't on the Jesus side of things either. It would be funny if it weren't so serious that so many of us Christians are so completely convinced of so many intuitions that are quite different from Jesus' own values.

Jesus would work for equal status and opportunity for everyone. Those who overdo it are thus closer to Jesus than those who resist because... frankly I can't think of a good "because" even to suggest. Some misguided sense of justice?

If you are tempted to make fun of today, ask yourself if Jesus would do it. Then go somewhere and talk to him about it.

Science/Culture Friday: Munich in Fall 2011

2012-01-13T07:40:00.000-05:00

NPR has a show every Friday called science Friday. I thought I might start something similar, but a little broader than just science. For example, I've started reading a book called, The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century. But today I thought I would give some final reflections on the city of Munich as I experienced it in the Fall of 2011.

Any number of words and adjectives might immediately come to mind: Bavarian, artistic, historical, beer, catholic, cultured, scientific, expensive, bursting with people and foreigners, uncrowded for a big city. But the peril of such words and phrases is always close at hand. A place has a past--things happened there, people wandered through there--but it is not inevitable that the past determine the future, at least not as far as conceptions are concerned.

And designations like this are often at best majority reports. At worst they are individual impressions or the perceptions of those with the power to communicate their points of view. There were Germans here who despised Hitler in the 40's, Germans who went to Dachau. University students who were beheaded. They just weren't the ones calling the shots at the time... literally.

So Munich is in Bavaria, and Bavaria is typically conservative. But Munich is full of foreigners like myself as well. Sometimes I have wondered how many actual Bavarians have handed me those precious baguettes, Schokocroissants, and Kirchtaschen. It's not unfriendly for a big city. I've experienced both friendly and unfriendly. I've both had someone switch into Bavarian dialect to give me a hard time, and I've had a hard time getting away from an enthusiastic Elvis fan on a tram.

I loved the Pinakotheken, the art museums. Munich is full of art from the Greeks to Cy Twombly, but I met a very educated German fellow here who has never visited them. The buildings are marvelous; the churches are everywhere, and they are all magnificent. I am glad for the penchant the Bavarians of the past had to build them. They are beautiful... and unused, and no doubt a less than helpful use of money the many centuries during which Bavaria was in horrible debt.

Munich is a great place to live if you have a good job, like big cities, and have the leisure to enjoy soccer ("football"), art, opera, history, ballet, theater, and like to reflect on culture and the meaning of life. It's a good place to put a scientific research company. It's a nice place to visit if you like Oktoberfest and Fasching. It has great public transportation, great suburbs, and plenty of reasonably priced restaurants to fill your stomach with every form of pig intestine imaginable.

It is a place like no other place I've visited on earth.

Hell in the Bible (10)

2012-01-12T04:54:00.000-05:00

continued from yesterday
_________
It is well above my--or your--pay grade to determine what God does with hell. What we might do is clarify a little what the Bible seems to say and what it doesn't likely say about it. First, as far as the Bible is concerned, hell is a distinctly New Testament idea. The vast majority of the Old Testament is either silent about the afterlife or explicitly denies any meaningful existence after death.

Job 7:9-10 captures the Old Testament understanding well: "one who goes down to the grave does not return. He will never come to his house again; his place will know him no more." I used to think that Job's wife was horrible when she was urging Job to curse God and die. To me, she was wishing him to go into hell forever. But she actually was urging him to put himself out of his misery. In her way of thinking, after he cursed God, God would kill him and then he would no longer be in pain.

"Sheol" in the Old Testament is thus not a place of eternal torment. It is merely the place where all the dead go when they die. It is a place of generally mindless, shadowy existence. Psalm 6 prays, "save me because of your unfailing love. Among the dead no one proclaims your name. Who praises you from the grave?"(Ps. 6:4-5). Ecclesiastes of course puts it in its starkest terms, "The dead know nothing... never again will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun" (Eccl. 9:5-6).

Death in the Old Testament can thus be a punishment for sins in life, but it was not understood at that time as a gateway to eternal punishment. When Achan and his family are stoned in Joshua, that is the end of the matter as far as Joshua is concerned. The Israelites did not think they were sending Achan's family to hell. Their death took care of the sin.

The only real exception is Daniel 12:2-3, the only passage in the Old Testament that everyone agrees clearly teaches resurrection. [1] In Daniel, some (not all) are resurrected for reward and some (not all) are resurrected for "everlasting contempt." Daniel does not tell us what everlasting contempt is. I hold many individuals from the past in everlasting contempt as a category of shame.

As with so many key Christian concepts, the crucial background to the New Testament came in the two to three hundred years immediately preceding Christ. It is during this time that an understanding of hell developed in Jewish apocalyptic literature (1 Enoch, the Dead Sea Scrolls). And it is this literature rather than the Old Testament that is the primary background for the kind of imagery of Gehenna that we find in the New Testament.

We have already seen some of the imagery of hell in the gospels. The gospels clearly teach that there will be a judgment of the wicked dead at the judgment. However, given some of the questions people are asking about hell right now, it might be useful to revisit them with the question of "how long" they say hell will last. And here we only find the one statement in Matthew 25:46 about eternal punishment.

What is eternal punishment? We probably rightly take it to mean a punishment that goes on in real time forever. Others might try to interpret it differently. For example, annihilation is a final punishment that continues forever. It is a kind of eternal punishment. I doubt that is what Matthew 25 means, but I can see someone trying to interpret the statement in that way.

The other passages are more ambiguous when it comes to duration. The other references to Gehenna in Matthew and Luke talk about being thrown into hell but don't mention how long the torment lasts. Mark 9:43 and 45 speak of the fire of Gehenna never being quenched. Does this mean that the torment of an individual never ends? It probably does.

The word "Hades," on the other hand, is the Greek equivalent of Sheol and refers to the place of the dead in general without specific reference to reward or punishment. The fact that Capernaum will be brought down to Hades could only mean that it will be destroyed in the judgment (Matt. 11:23). However, despite the generality of the word, the overall context of Matthew probably implies everlasting punishment.

Paul never mentions hell in any of his writings. Revelation of course speaks of the lake of fire, into which the beast and those who worshiped him are thrown alive (19:20). Similarly, all the dead rise and are judged, with the wicked thrown into the lake of fire, along with death itself. It is specifically stated that Satan and the beasts of Revelation are then tormented day and night forever (Rev. 20:10). The best assumption is that this is also true of the other wicked, although Revelation does not explicitly say so.

Therefore, after looking at the Bible on hell, we find at least two instances where the punishment seems to be never-ending (Matt. 25:46; Rev. 20:10). Over the centuries, this understanding of hell has crystallized and solidified in Christian teaching. Indeed, the place hell holds in our thinking may come as much from medieval Christianity as from the role it plays in the Bible itself. In the end, you and I cannot decide what hell is, so our best bet is to avoid it at all costs and to share the good news of Christ to as many others as possible in hope that they will avoid it as well.

[1] Other passages are debated, of course, like Isaiah 26 and Ezekiel 37.

Christians and hell (9)

2012-01-11T08:20:00.001-05:00

Continued from yesterday
__________
A serious question, however, is what "eternal punishment" is. Does Matthew want us to see the wicked suffering forever and ever? Certainly this is the understanding of hell that most of us have grown up hearing. Hell is a place where those who do not believe in Jesus suffer forever.

This is a very sensitive topic, and we should make a couple things very clear from the very beginning. First, there is a right or wrong answer, and it is not a matter of a vote. Like the question of whether God literally exists as a being who thinks, acts, and exists completely independent of us, the answer has nothing to do with us. Either God literally exists or he doesn't. In the same way, hell is either a place of never ending torment or it isn't. Whether I like it or not has nothing to do with it.

The second point is that the questions so many seem to be asking right now about hell are not simply some problem with our culture or lack of spirituality. They are real and difficult questions. Hell as we traditionally think of it is a place of infinite punishment. But even the sins of Hitler, Stalin, or the worse serial killer of all time at least seem finite. How could hell be just if God gives an endless punishment for finite crimes?

Some Christians have coherently answered that even one sin against God is an infinite sin and thus that even one violation of God's law is worthy of eternal hell. Yet this is an idea that comes from someone reading between the lines. The Bible doesn't actually say this.

It's even harder for us to put ourselves in God's place and imagine sending someone to never ending torment. How long would any of us let our worse enemy suffer in a fire, and what state of mind would it take for us to prolong it? If someone murdered my daughter, how long would I let them suffer in a fire before I mercifully told the executioner to put them out of their misery? An hour? What attitude would it take me to let that murderer go on suffering in a fire for a day or a week? It's hard for me to imagine how much hate I would have to have to let my enemy burn for a year.

Of course God is not a man. We at least must think of hell more in terms of justice than of vengeance. But again, in human terms, how cold and unfeeling would I have to be to let someone burn in torment for a whole month, even as a punishment for horrible crimes? We like to think that God is sad for people to go to hell--"I'm not sending you there. You're sending yourself, and I'm sad to see you go." But is God not God? Is he a slave to some abstract concept of justice? Does he not have the authority to pardon someone after a thousand years of torment, after a million or a billion years of torment?

What we are saying is that these are not just the questions of an unbeliever. They are the kinds of questions a believer might ask precisely because they believe God is "a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity" (Jonah 4:2). We cannotwish hell away. We cannot get together and vote it into non-existence. But it is at the very least understandable if we find some tension between our belief that "mercy triumphs over judgment" (James 2:13) and the traditional interpretation of eternal punishment.

It is well above my--or your--pay grade to determine what God does with hell. What we might do is clarify a little what the Bible seems to say and what it doesn't likely say about it...

Christian Teaching Today...

2012-01-11T00:39:00.001-05:00

Very interesting piece by Jenell Williams Paris in Christianity Today in response to Mark Noll's book, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind. It really gives a good sense of the thousand different ways a Christian professor is pulled at a Christian college.

The body of Christ imagery is as always so simple and yet very helpful. Even among professors you will find different gifts. Some are gifted to lead the way in thought. Some are gifted to lead the way in service and application. Some are good at organizing the very place of learning. Some are good mentoring students. Some can do several of these things well.

A robust institution wants a little of everything and, even in the spread of universities, we also have the possibility of differing emphases.

Jesus and Hell (8)

2012-01-10T05:20:00.000-05:00

continued from here.
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The traditions of Jesus as we have them thus do not focus on hell, but clearly indicate that he believed it existed and that many would end up there. Of course we might debate the potential difference between what Jesus said historically and the way the gospel writers present him, but in this particular case such debates will likely end up in speculation rather than clear certainty. The comments on hell in the Jesus tradition go deep.

For example, there are the statements we mentioned earlier in the chapter about those among the living who will be thrown directly into Gehenna from the earth (Mark 9:47; Matt. 10:28). These two statements fit some of the criteria that the most skeptical historians have used to try to distinguish between things Jesus said and things they do not think he said. Here, these two sayings come from what most experts would consider two different layers of Jesus tradition, two separate sources of material. Mark is one source. Then Matthew 10:28 and Luke 12:4 represent some other, different source. [1]

Matthew and Luke have other material about hell in common. The queen of the south and the Ninevites who repented will rise from the dead at the judgment and condemn Jesus' generation for not repenting and believing (Matt. 12:41-42; Luke 11:31-32). Things will go better for ancient Tyre, Sidon, and Sodom in the judgment than for Bethsaida, Chorazin, and Capernaum, which largely did not accept Jesus (Matt. 11:20-24; Luke 10:13-14). They all will rise for the final verdict. Interestingly, there seem to be levels of punishment.

Matthew in particular repeats numerous times the imagery of "weeping and gnashing of teeth" for the condemned, often taking place after being cast out into "outer darkness" (Matt. 8:12; 13:42, 50; 22:13; 24:51; 25:30). In one place, we hear that this is an eternal punishment (Matt. 25:46; cf. 18:8), that the wicked are going to a place that was originally prepared for the Devil and his angels (25:41). The other gospels do not mention that hell is a place where the wicked go forever...

[1] This other source is sometimes called "Q," which is short for the German word for source, "Quelle." However, it is not important for us here that Q be a real document. Clearly Matthew got this saying from some source other than Mark, because the saying is not in Mark.

Monday Review: Resurrection in the Testaments

2012-01-09T05:20:00.000-05:00

I have started off the year reading James Charlesworth's (editor), Resurrection: The Origin and Future of a Biblical Doctrine. I'm playing with the idea of designating Mondays for a post on something I'm reading, and I'll try to move between categories.

The first chapter is by Charlesworth himself, of Princeton Seminary. I almost said formerly because he is perhaps the last vestige of a past, historically oriented biblical studies program there. From what I hear, don't go there any more if you're interested in this sort of stuff. It's all theological interpretation now with a rapidly diminishing number of doctoral students in biblical studies.

Charlesworth's chapter gives a helpful catalog of how resurrection language in Jewish literature can mean a lot of things, ranging from national restoration to recovery from embarrassment. The second chapter is by C. D. Elledge (who also has a book analyzing Josephus on the subject). I found it the most concise and clear overview of the topic I've ever seen.

But my intention today is not to be helpful ;-) I wanted to jot down some notes for my own research. In chapter 4, Elledge overviews passages in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs that show belief in resurrection. Here are some strings for my fingers:

Because the book has obvious Christian interpolations and yet a soundly Jewish base, it surely represents Christian Judaism of the late first or early second century. The documents likely started as pre-Christian Jewish documents, perhaps Essene in provenance, but they were preserved and expanded by Christian Jews even after the destruction of Jerusalem.
This plays into my hunch that a good deal of early Christian Judaism flowed directly from an Essene background, including John the Baptist. I'd love one day before I die to write up a hypothesis.
The fact that Testament of Benjamin is one of the most clearly edited by Christians and yet looks to a restored temple (Benj 9.2) corroborates my theory elsewhere that Christians did not see a contradiction between the temple system and belief that Christ's death had decisive atoning significance for Israel. Similarly, it shows that the political restoration of Israel was important in some early Christian belief after Jerusalem's destruction.
As far as the afterlife, the Testament of Judah 25.4 has no resurrection for the wicked (who suffer in Gehenna in Zebulon 10.1-4). While it does not preclude a total resurrection of the righteous, it focuses on resurrection for those who died in sorrow, poverty, hungry, and for the Lord.
Judah 25.1 is very interesting because it mentions the resurrection of the patriarchs, as in the gospels (e.g., Matt. 8:11; Luke 13:28 ). The resurrected sons of Jacob rule over the twelve tribes of Israel, which is interestingly what the twelve disciples do in Matt. 19:28.

Munich's Brandhorst Museum

2012-01-07T13:38:00.000-05:00

Went with Angie today to the Brandhorst Museum while Tom and Sophie went bowling with the church. Few know that Angie really likes art and has always "delighted" the children with a slew of art museums in our travels. I think if she could do anything she liked would get an advanced degree in art history and try to teach somewhere.

It's a museum of modern art featuring individuals like Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke, and Cy Twonbly. I don't usually enjoy this sort of art, unless someone can explain something about it to me that is clever. To be honest, a good deal of the museum confirmed the stereotype to me--even the audio guide explanation of some of them sounded completely goofy. I wouldn't hang anything from Cy Twonbly in my house unless you paid me (then I would--actually, Angie was reminding we do have one of the better Twombly's already in our home from when Stacy painted her own room).

However, there were some pieces I considered quite clever and stimulating, especially with explanation. I liked this Warhol, for example:

It's meant (so the audio guide said) to show the faded reality of the communist dream of the hammer and sickle, and the sickle handle in the bottom left has the kind of stamp you would see in a US tool store.

I liked this piece by Sigmar Polke:

It's called Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité, the cry of the French Revolution. You can see what that turned out to mean in France. Polke insisted that it only be bought by a French museum, but no French museum would take it. ;-)

There were a couple other things I thought were clever. I thought clever the idea of a piece of art being a showcase with stuff in it--the showcase being part of the art rather than art being in a meaningless museum showcase. But what Joseph Beuys put in the showcase completely made the piece uninteresting.

A couple of Cy Twombly's stuff could have been clever, if he hadn't completely trivialized the spark. I thought the idea of a piece of art being a classroom chalkboard had great potential... if it didn't have his meaningless scribble on it. I kept thinking of the scene from White Chicks where all the paint falls on the stage and splashes the audience and one of the artists in the audience thinks it is so bold, so revolutionary.

Finally, the museum currently has a couple of exhibits by Isaac Julien. This is video art. The second exhibit, One Thousand Waves, had 9 screens of video going on. They juxtaposed themes ancient and modern but what I thought was fascinating was the way the screens created a panorama.

I thought of my own friend Dan Steller and how a whole new kind of movie could be shown where you had different screens going with different parts of each scene. Some could be background (like the background Chinese forest in Julien) or with features of the scene (like the temple on some of the screens in Julien's, taken from different distances). Some could involve the center stage, but other screens could involve side conversations or even a narrator looking on (like the goddess of safety looking on in Julien).

So there were some things in the museum that, after being explained, I thought were quite clever, at least to me. As for the rest...

Jesus and Gehenna (7)

2012-01-07T06:50:00.000-05:00

... continued series on Jesus and judgment.
________
So Jesus preached that judgment was coming for those living on the earth, including the wicked within Israel. My hunch is that Jesus did not emphasize this judgment in his teaching, even though it was always there in the background. It makes sense that it may have featured more prominently in Jesus' final days on earth than it did in the bulk of his ministry. In this last section, I want to discuss another element in Jesus' equation of judgment, namely, resurrection and hell.

Again, Jesus probably didn't speak very much on either topic. For example, we don't have too many statements by Jesus in the gospels about the resurrection. There is his well known debate with some Sadducees in Mark 12:18-27. The Sadducees were "conservative" when it came to the subject and sided with the silence of the bulk of the Old Testament. They rejected the fairly new idea of resurrection and its sometimes revolutionary implications. [1]

Jesus disagreed. The gospels remember him teaching that there would be a resurrection involving Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (e.g., Matt. 8:11; Luke 13:28). Certainly he also speaks of his own resurrection at points in the gospels. Interestingly, this is surprisingly little from Jesus on a subject that is a core item of our faith. But of course the resurrection had not begun yet at that point. Jesus was the beginning of the resurrection (1 Cor. 15:20), and so the resurrection has now started.

The gospels have more to say about hell, especially Matthew. We saw a couple passages earlier in the chapter where Jesus talked about those who die in the judgment being cast, body and soul, into Gehenna (e.g., Matt. 10:28; Mark 9:47). It is tempting for some to see Jesus only referring to the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem. [2] It is where they burned trash so that its fire never went out and its worms always he something to fee on (Mark 9:48).

The word ge-hinnom in Aramaic originally meant "Valley of Hinnom"--this is where the word "Gehenna" originally came from. At first, some time before Jesus came to earth, the word perhaps was used of the place where the bodies of those who died in the final conflict between good and evil would be burned. However, words usually do not stand still in their meanings, and this word went on to refer to a place of eternal torment for the wicked beneath the surface of the earth...

[1] The only place in the Old Testament that all agree refers to resurrection is Daniel 12:2-3, although there are other possibilities (e.g., Isa. 26:19). Other passages explicitly deny a meaningful afterlife (e.g., Job 3:16-19; 7:9-10; 14:14, 21; Ps. 6:4-5; 30:9; 88:3-6; and Eccl. 3:19; 9:4-5). The idea of resurrection probably did not really gain force within Judaism until the 100's BC. There it was perhaps first associated with those who die a martyr's death out of faithfulness to the Law (e.g., 2 Maccabees 7). It meant that those who stand up to foreign powers out of devotion to God will come back and see the judgment of their adversaries. Cf. J. H. Charlesworth, ed. Resurrection: The Origin and Future of a Biblical Doctrine (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2006).

[2] Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (San Francisco: HarperOne), 67-68.

Psalm 1 translation

2012-01-06T11:51:00.000-05:00

I am much better at Greek than Hebrew, but I've kept my resolution to translate a verse of the Psalms a day this year. I'm tweeting the verses but I finished Psalm 1 today and thought I would collect them here. This isn't anything like a finished translation, but it gives a little sense of the Hebrew.
______________
1 Oh the delights of the man
who does not walk by the counsel of wicked people,
and in the way of sinners does not stand
and in the seat of mockers does not sit.

2 Rather, in the Law of the LORD [is] his pleasure,
and on his Law he will reflect daily and nightly.

3 And he will be like a tree being planted by the rivers of waters,
which will give its fruit in its time,
and its leaf will not wither,
and everything he does will be successful.

4 Not so [are] the wicked.
Rather [they are] like chaff
that the wind will drive away.

5Therefore, wicked people will not prevail in [their] sentencing
or sinners with the jury of the righteous.

6 For the LORD knows the way of righteous people,
but the way of wicked ones will perish.
____________
This was perhaps a psalm written as a "cover letter" for the whole Psalm collection or perhaps at least "Book 1" of the Psalms (1-41). The Law is of course the Pentateuch. All in all, these factors suggest a rather late date in the post-exilic period, I suspect.

Remember Epiphany!

2012-01-06T05:11:00.000-05:00

Today is Epiphany, often celebrated as the day when the wise men came to Jesus in Bethlehem...

(Although the impression we get from Matthew is that Jesus would be much older that 13 days when they come. Herod kills the babies under 2 years of age based on when the star appeared and giving enough time for travel from the east and for Herod to conclude they weren't coming back to him. That sounds more like Jesus being at least a year old to me.)

January 6, along with December 25, was an early date of celebrating Jesus birth. This piece suggests that the way some early Christians (before Constantine, mind you) tried to calculate Jesus' birth date was based on:

When he might have died, with April 6 and March 25 being two dates we early find attested
The sense that Jesus was conceived on the same day that he died, giving a birth date nine months later of January 6 and December 25 respectively

If this is right, we cannot give Constantine the blame for the date of Christmas. The twelve days in between December 25 and January 6 then became the twelve days of Christmas.

We don't know what date Jesus was born, but meaning is not just a matter of origin. A tradition is only as meaningful to us as, well, it is to us. Christians have taken today as a day to think about the wise men for long over a thousand years. It's actually a bank holiday here in Germany.

There's nothing wrong with reading Matthew 2 today!

Christians and Israel today (6)

2012-01-05T04:53:00.000-05:00

... continued from Tuesday.
_____________
... How should we asChristians today appropriate this teaching? For one thing, the temple and Jerusalem were in fact destroyed within a generation. Contrary to Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsey, and a host of prophecy teachers, the gospels were not talking about some temple that is yet to be rebuilt. [1] Although parts of these "end times" sermons have not yet happened, the bulk of them have.

This is a very important point. As far as political Israel isconcerned, this teaching is almost completely a matter of the past. Generally speaking, we should not use the material in the gospels in our thinking about the politics of the Middle East. People calling themselves Christians have of course in the past had both inappropriately negative and positive views on Jews and Israel. For much of Christian history, people calling themselves Christians used material in the gospels as an excuse to hate and even persecuteJews. It seems beyondquestion that these sorts of forces within Christianity are importantbackground to the Holocaust.

But Jesus could not beanti-semitic because he was a Jew himself--for that matter his humanity remains a Jew for all eternity. [2] We have seen in previous chapters that Jesus’ earthly ministry had asone of its top priorities the restoration of the lost sheep of Israel, not theabandonment of Israel. He surelydirected his action in the temple toward the leadership of Israel, especially its priestly establishment, not Israel itself as a nation. His critique was a prophetic critique from the inside, not a finalcondemnation from the outside. [3]

It is not controversial to think that the four gospels as we have them all date from the time afterJerusalem was destroyed. Words that sound quite combative in foresight do not sound the same in hindsight. It is thusquite possible that some of the words that sound most anti-Jew were originally more explanations of Jerusalem's destruction looking back. “His blood is on us and on our children” (Matt. 27:25) reads best as a foreshadowing of what happened forty years later when Jerusalem was destroyed. Itcertainly did not give a green light for all history to kill any Jews you find because ofsome racial guilt.

By the same token, other Christians today show an inordinate amount of favoritism for the political nation of Israel. I think it is appropriate for us to honor Jews today because "Theirs is the adoption to sonship; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah (Rom. 9:4-5). However, we cannot confuse political Israel today with the Israel about which Paul said, "all Israel will be saved" (Rom. 11:26). Israel's state of belief today is no different than it was at the time of Paul.

My point is that while it is appropriate for Christians to give a certain kind of honor to Jews, both Jews as individuals and as a nation are to be treated with the same expectations and obligations of any other person or nation. We and they must love their neighbor as themselves, including the Muslim Arab world. Israel as a nation must be expected to live in the world with justice the same as the Palestinians and all other peoples. Injustice does not get a pass because of your race. It is ironic to realize that, at least until recent times, there were far more Christians among Palestinians than among the Israelis, yet so many American fundamentalist churches effectively hate the one and blindly support the other.

For historic Christians, of course the greatest point of application in the "end times" passages in the gospels is the continued expectation that Christ will again return to earth. It is a faith that we not only have to wait until the next world to see justice done but that, in God's good time, Christ will return and hit the reset button on humanity as well. Since prophecy usually only becomes clear in hindsight, we will have to wait to see what all that entails in relation to Israel at that point.

[1] Tim LaHaye, Left Behind series; Hal Lindsey, Late Great Planet Earth.

[2] See Terence Donaldson, Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament: Decision Points and Divergent Interpretations (Waco, TX: Baylor University, 2010) for a survey of interpretive issues.

[3] Cf. Luke 13:31-35.

Traveling Europe Cheaply with Family

2012-01-04T20:50:00.000-05:00

In the last four months my wife, myself, and two of our kids have managed to visit Berlin, Florence, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Budapest, and Prague pretty much on a shoestring budget. We haven't bought a lot of souvenirs to be sure, but we have the pictures and memories. Much of the time, we were on a $100-200 budget a day for 4 people. Here's our formula.

Transportation
1. First you have to get there. The plane tickets will be the biggest expense. Most will know Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity, Air Gorilla, Priceline, etc.

2. Eurail is of course ideal for long trips (e.g., to Italy from Munich or from Paris to Stuttgart). Depending on which kind of ticket you get, they are good for several days in the countries you select within a 2 month window. They must be purchased in the States before you go. You do get to travel first class.

Reservations for specific seats are separate and important for the high speed trains (not necessary for the locals). In Italy, they'll fine you if you haven't made a reservation at a train station, even though you have a ticket. In other places you just have to find an seat that isn't reserved. It can cost almost 10 Euros a person sometimes for a reservation, but it saves the hassle of trying to find an open seat--especially one where your family can sit together. There are overnight trains for long hauls but don't do it unless you can reserve a sleeping compartment--trust me.

3. We found buses to be very nice when going into eastern Europe. We took buses from Vienna to Budapest and from Munich to Prague. Eurolines is dependable and has nice buses. We noticed a Eurolines going from Budapest down to Athens and were jealous. You can often make round trips for less than 50 Euros a person on these sorts of bus lines.

4. Twice we rented a car. It can be fairly inexpensive (e.g., 50 some Euros) but you must have a credit card and they will usually block three times the rental amount until the car gets back safely and they get it through the system (which can take some time). As in the States, they may or may not take a debit card.

Also, they often won't let you go to eastern Europe with one. The cheapest will be manual transmission. Diesel ones are of course cheap on gas (you can spend a 100 Euros easily on normal even in a day). I used Orbitz both times. The insurance may be worth it.

5. Know the local deals. The Bayern ticket in Munich can be purchased for less than 30 Euros and will take up to 5 people anywhere in Bavaria and even to Salzburg--6 if two of them are children. In Budapest you can get a two day family ticket for something like 12 Euros (I forget how many Florints).

6. Google maps is awesome. We walked straight from the international bus station to our hostel in Prague following the clear path Google maps worked out for us before we left home. You will almost certainly want a map of any city, though, once you get there. Many hostels give them out for free.

7. For a lot of Americans, the amount of walking the Europeans are used to can be a big adjustment. If you're not prepared to walk a lot and take public transportation, forget about doing it cheaply. There are usually tickets to be bought in the big cities that will allow you to hop on and off any subway, tram, or bus for the day (or several days). Most Americans aren't used to subway and tram charts, but once you get the hang of them they're pretty much the same everywhere in Europe.

Beware of pick pockets, especially in Rome. The subway there is horrible and squashes everyone like a sardine. Keep your wallet in a front pocket or somewhere inaccessible. Don't be loud Americans. Don't expect everyone to do it your kind of normal. Just knowing please and thank you in whatever language will get you miles in better attitudes and service.

Money
By now most know that the best way to get money in a foreign country is at an ATM. Most of the conversion stands are a cheat. If the rate is reasonable (check Google before you go), they'll slap on a commission. If they don't have a commission, the rate may be bad.

Make sure your bank lets you take money from a debit card overseas (not all do) and warn them you're traveling in advance (or they may block it and try to call you at home, which would be unfortunate if you're half way around the world). Also be aware that banks often only let you take out a certain amount of cash each day electronically (e.g., $200). That can be a nice budget... or it can cause serious problems if, as is often the case, no one seems to take credit cards.

Housing
1. Housing is a major expenditure if you stay at a normal Western style hotel. Orbitz and those sorts of sites again will find you good deals. Certainly Rick Steve's and the travel books can give suggestions too.

2. With four of us, however, we ended up doing several hostels (Florence, Budapest, Vienna, Prague). There are sites like hostelbookers.com. But just doing a google search "Hostels Prague" and you'll find the roads most traveled. Make sure the hostel will take older people. Usually they want paid in cash up front. But if you have four people, you can usually book a whole room for your family (rather than sharing one). It's en suite.

We had great experiences at the hostels we stayed at in Florence, Vienna, and Prague. The one in Budapest seemed a little dodgy, but we survived intact. They can be noisy. Most of the time the en suite ones have a private bathroom but not always. The breakfast also may not be overwhelming, but you can often get some sort of breakfast included.

We stayed in Prague for about 65 Euros as a family. I think it was something like 45 Euros in Budapest. Vienna and Florence were higher but still well less than 100 a night for four people, I believe.

Food
It's horrible to say but you can always count on McDonalds for a predictably priced meal... and language is usually not a problem. In any language, a family of four can eat at McDonalds for about 25 Euros.

Italian is fairly predictable in price too. A "pizza margarita" or cheese pizza for one or two will cost 6 or 7 Euros. Spaghetti bolognese, napoli, or carbonara will usually be less than 10. Watch how much the drinks cost, even water. 50 Euros for a family of 4 is not surprising.

You'll want to try some local food. Beware the restaurants in the middle of things. The restaurant on the town square will cost you. Find the restaurant on the side alley or a good half a kilometer from the city center. A hostel may very well have advertisements up. We ate at the "Iron Curtain" in Prague following a flier in the hostel at 6 Euros a person (600 Crowns for four of us).

Touring
Another big expense are any museums or entrance fees. Plan on it. There are usually lots of things to see wherever you're going... and almost all of them will want their pound of flesh.

Some advice hot off of Prague and the secret to my family's own shoestring tourism.

Jan Hus, Prague, and Random Thoughts

2012-01-04T05:38:00.000-05:00

One of the last things on my hubby to-do list was to take my wife to Prague before we left Germany (the others included Rome and Budapest). So we've made a quick 5 hour trip here from Munich.

So here's the Jan Hus part. He was burned at the stake in the early 1400's for translating the Bible into Czech and arguing for a number of reforms. 100 years later, maybe he like Luther would have survived. Then again, perhaps not. The Catholic Hapsburgs put the brakes on the Hussites here in the early 1620's.

The Hussites, I believe, remain a catholic church but one that is not connected with the Roman Catholic Church.

Now for random thoughts I've had today:

The lines we humans draw around land are funny. The trees know no lines. A walk in the forest knows of no "countries," yet suddenly the languages change and the letters on the signs.
As with Hungary, it is fascinating and sad to think that this region was pretty much the same as Germany or Austria up until the days of the Soviet Union. I saw a house built in the 1700s' in the pre-Napolean Holy Roman Empire days and it pretty much looked like a German house. In fact the architecture reminds me a lot of Bavaria. The Soviets pretty much killed its economic and technological development.
The Moravians were from even east of here. Again, this wasn't a "backward" part of the world until the ignoramic communists took over.
Czech seems further along with post-communist development than Hungary to me. Nevertheless, I see the faces of people and marvel that I live such a good life as an American. There are Americans in need to be sure, but it boggles the mind to think of how different your life is through no merit of your own--just where you were born.
Glad this place wasn't bombed to heck in WW2.

Judgment of Israel (5)

2012-01-03T04:48:00.000-05:00

... continued from last year. ;-)
____________
Some have suggested that Jesus' action in the temple meant to enact its coming destruction symbolically. [1] No doubt at least looking back many Christians understood it this way. The Synoptic gospels remember Jesus predicting the temple's destruction. Whether it was entirely clear to them at the time is another question.

The key passage here is Jesus' "end times" sermon in Mark 13, Matthew 24, and Luke 21. These gospels all present Jesus' teaching on coming judgment in the context of the Jerusalem temple and a prediction that its stones will all be torn down (e.g., Mark 13:2). Jesus begins to tell of a coming distress and then of the coming of the Son of Man.

The first part of the sermon is about a distress that is coming on Israel. Given the way Mark introduces this teaching, we know that it involves the destruction of the temple. In fact, Luke 21:20 paraphrases Jesus' teaching to make it clear that the destruction of Jerusalem is the desecration Jesus is predicting. The way Mark puts it is much more ambiguous: "when you see 'the abomination that causes desolation' standing where it does not belong" (Mark 13:14).

So there may be some element of hindsight in the way the gospels present Jesus' teaching here. The sermon itself does not actually mention the temple's destruction--only its desecration is implied. [2] The Jerusalem Christians in Acts worship in the temple without much of a sense of its impending doom, and Paul's enigmatic teaching in 2 Thessalonians 2 only speaks of a man of lawlessness setting himself up in the temple as god (2:4).

The second part of the sermon concerns the coming of the Son of Man and presumably the final judgment (e.g., Mark 13:24-31). We know now--as the early Christians came to know--that there is a significant gap of time between the first and the second part of the sermon. The temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in AD70, but we still wait for Christ's return. Luke in particular seems to bring out this distinction in the way he paraphrases the teaching. He speaks of a "times of the Gentiles" that intervenes (Luke 21:24).

How should we as Christians today appropriate this teaching? ...

[1] E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism...

[2] So John Kloppenborg, "Evocatio Deorum and ***) JBL.

Acts 23:8 and Resurrection

2012-01-02T03:37:00.000-05:00

"For the Sadducees say there is no resurrection--neither angel nor spirit--but Pharisees confess both."

This verse is a surprisingly scarce comment in ancient literature about the beliefs of Sadducees and Pharisees on resurrection, and it has engendered some interesting discussion. Here are my positions.

1. First, I agree with David Daube (1990 article) that the grammar points to angel and spirit modifying resurrection, implying that Acts thinks of angel and spirit as forms of resurrection. Since this is pretty much the only verse people use to say Sadducees didn't believe in angels, that old story goes down the tubes. Sadducees probably did believe in angels--just not angels that were resurrected people.

2. Second, I agree with N. T. Wright (Resurrection) that the use of angel elsewhere in Acts points to angel here potentially relating to the dead prior to some future resurrection event (the "intermediate state"). When Peter showed up at the door of the prayer meeting, they wondered if it might be his angel (Acts 12:15), meaning that an angelic form for Acts can be an after death/pre-future resurrection event form.

3. Finally, passages like this one are leading me to reject the common wisdom on what the word "resurrection" meant. I strongly suspect that we must close the chapter of recent scholarship (especially that of Wright) that insists resurrection as a word always implied a physical body in continuity with the previous corpse.

4. So here is where I'm at. I suspect that the word "resurrection" cannot be so neatly pinned down as so many have wanted to. It implies a rising but it cannot as a word be limited in use to an embodied rising or some future rising event at the end of history. While Luke-Acts seems to look to a future resurrection of the dead at the end of time, it apparently can also call intermediate rising in angelic form as "resurrection" and it can speak of disembodied spirit risings as "resurrection." These are both prior to the biggie resurrection, which Acts also apparently teaches.

Rather messy... as the truth usually is.

Obligatory Resolutions Post

2012-01-01T05:11:00.000-05:00

Wow, I remember writing last year's post... doesn't seem like a year! Similar feelings, with some differences. For one, with the grace of a sabbatical I actually caught up with all my delinquent writing this year. Philosophy's off. I'm not behind on anything with WPH. I'm actually on the front end of any new books and have chapters written ahead of any new contracts...

1. I come back from Germany quite determined not to live the way I was living before. Because I wanted the curricular dream of the seminary to make it to reality (including onto Blackboard), I funneled all the design down to the details through myself the last two and a half years. No more. The baby is birthed and, for good or ill, the umbilical cord is cut. I can die now...

Or at least, I do not intend to kill myself any more. That means I resolve this year to do the administrative half of the Dean's job during daylight hours. That means delegation. It means a new approach to emails. It means discipline and focus.

For example,

manageable to do list each morning, broken down into micro-tasks of about 20-30 minutes each
work on one pressing but not "must do today" task a day
only reading/answering emails in between micro-tasks

2. Last year I resolved not to try to write more than 6 pages toward writing projects a week. Wow. What a good idea... that I somehow forgot. I need to renew that one. It probably means less blogging. It will be hard not to want to try to write more but my goal for this year is to slow down and set manageable goals.

3. Last year I resolved to read about 30 pages a week of something scholarly. Failed that one too. This year I'd like to say 30 pages a week of something. It's not really a lot of reading. In fact, it's a depressingly small amount. But I've learned that the turtle goes a lot further by slow, consistent movement than the hare sitting around thinking about big goals but not doing a lot of running.

4. Here's a new one. I was thinking I might start trying to read through Psalms in Hebrew this year, just a verse a day at first. I'm not sure how far I'll get but why not start.

Do any of you have a major New Year's resolution to share?

Happy New Year from Germany!

2011-12-31T19:23:00.000-05:00

We brought in the new year with the Blakes over at their almost 20 story high rise. The fireworks were amazing all over the city. In fact, at 1:22am they are still going strong outside our flat. It struck me as what a war zone must sound like. I thought of "shock and awe" in Iraq, although it obviously wasn't quite that powerful. Never seen anything like it.Then I experimented with time travel and was successfully able to call into the past. I called my parents in last year. I'm thinking of patenting the time machine.Happy New Year, America, from the future year 2012!

Jesus in the temple (4)

2011-12-31T05:03:00.000-05:00

... continued from yesterday. This series is on Jesus and Judgment.
_________
3. Judgment of Israel
So far in the chapter, I've argued that Jesus did likely teach that judgment was coming to those alive on the earth, even if it was not the focus of his preaching. Additionally, Jesus seems to have had a prophetic message of judgment against the temple leadership of Israel, at least in the final week of his ministry. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all understood Jesus' words and actions in this regard to predict the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.

More than anything else, it was probably Jesus' action in the temple during passion week that set in motion the concrete political mechanisms that ended in the crucifixion. Jesus certainly came into conflict with various people during his ministry, as we saw back in chapter 4. But it doesn't seem likely that he tangled much with the temple leaders or chief priests until that day he walked into the temple courts and overthrew the tables of those who were changing money and selling animals for sacrifice. More than anyone else, these were the people who had the kinds of connections with the Romans that could get a person killed.

On the one hand, it was generally necessary to have such a service. [1] It simply wasn't practical for someone to bring a goat or lamb with them for sacrifice from half way around the Mediterranean. And to buy such things, money was needed (again, bringing something with you to trade from around the world wasn't practical) and it would need to be exchanged to the right currency. Clearly something about the scene angered Jesus, but it surely was not the practice of buying and selling itself. Surely it was the way they were doing it--or where--that angered him.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all link Jesus' action to two Scriptures. The first is Isaiah 56:7, "My house will be called a house of prayer." Instead, what Jesus saw was Jeremiah 7:11: "a den of robbers." Some focus primarily on the first verse to explain what angered Jesus. The context of Isaiah 56:7 is all the nations of the world coming to worship at the temple. In fact, Mark 11:17 gives the part of the quote that says the temple should be a house of prayer for all nations.

So some see Jesus angry primarily because of where they were selling things. Foreigners who might otherwise worship God in the temple courts were instead confronted by buying and selling there. At the same time, it is surely significant that neither Matthew nor Luke give the part of the quote that says, "for all nations." They were likely using Mark as a source and yet seem to have deliberately left this part of the quote out. Also, the Gentiles were arguably not the focus of Jesus' earthly ministry (cf. Matt. 10:5).

So others might focus more on the second Scripture from Jeremiah. It comes in the context of the approaching destruction of the temple in 586BC. There is of course a striking similarity here in the sense that Jesus is also remembered as predicting the destruction of the temple, which took place in AD70. Jeremiah's complaint is the the priests of his day had made the temple into a "den of robbers." Jeremiah accused the leaders of day of hiding their injustice behind the temple. They were murderers, adulterers, thieves, perjurers, idolaters, and yet somehow thought the fact that they ran the temple would protect them from coming judgment (Jer. 7:9-10).

This second focus does indeed fit the emphases of Jesus ministry very well, as we have seen. Of course the gospels are not video recorders. They are unpacking the event. One may or may not talk too much when you are angrily overturning tables and chasing people. And the kinds of things that spark anger are usually more complex and emotional than a matter of logical argument and ideas.

Accordingly, both the answers above may have some truth to them. Jesus is confronted by a scene of merchandising when the temple should be for worshiping God. And it should be for everyone, not just for those who have the coinage necessary to buy sheep and doves. The situation evokes key elements of his prophetic message for Israel, especially the way those who are rich and powerful couldn't care less about the vast majority of the people, the lost sheep of Israel...

[1] So E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism ***.

What should I read?

2011-12-30T05:57:00.003-05:00

A number of blogs and sites have posted their best reads of 2011. I thought I would ask you, whoever you are, what you would like me to read and blog through this year. I'm up for a wide variety of possibilities but I want to spend some time this year reading.

Here are three I have in mind so far as an example of diverse interests:

Others have floated through my head. What would you like to see discussed here? No promises ;-)

Son of Man (3)

2011-12-30T05:11:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I jotted down a few thoughts on Jesus and the judgment of the earth. By the way, I edited the last couple paragraphs of yesterday's to fill out my impression a bit. Today I continue that train of thought.
_______
... Perhaps the best evidence for a judgment on earth comes from the "Son of Man" imagery of the first three gospels. There is a remarkable agreement among even many who are very skeptical that Jesus used this phrase as a way of talking about himself. Take Luke 9:58: "Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head." There is no special meaning to the phrase "Son of Man" here. It just seems to be the way Jesus often referred to himself as if to say, "I have no place to lay my head."

And Jesus is almost the only one who calls himself "Son of Man" in the New Testament. The phrase is almost never found outside Matthew, Mark, and Luke and even then it was not a title by which others referred to Jesus. No one seems to get upset that Jesus calls himself this name, which probably means it was not a phrase widely used at the time for anything. It is a puzzle.

However, it gets even more puzzling when we get to some of the connotations the phrase has in some parts of the gospels and some contemporary Jewish literature. Take what Jesus says to the high priest when he is on trial in Mark 14:62, "You will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven." This verse is a clear allusion to Daniel 7:13, where someone like a "son of man" comes with the clouds of heaven. This figure receives power and authority from God so that all nations and peoples worship him and he brings a kingdom that will never be destroyed.

We find a lot of potentially troubling verses when we get to this topic. What does Mark 7:1 mean, which says that some standing there with Jesus will not die before the kingdom has come with power? What does Mark 13:30 mean when it says that generation will not pass before things like the coming of the Son of Man takes place? It sounds similar to what Jesus tells the high priest: YOU will see it. What I want to point out here is merely that these pictures of things that are coming seem to involve the living on the earth.

One of the most striking Son of Man passages is in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matt 25:31-46). The Son of Man comes, the nations are gathered for judgment. There is no mention of resurrection. The picture is of the Son of Man coming from heaven to earth and gathering all those of the earth to be judged, with the kingdom of the Son of Man immediately commencing thereafter. I mentioned this picture back in chapter 3 on Jesus and the Poor.

What is interesting is that the imagery here is very similar to something found in another Jewish book of the period, 1 Enoch. [1] In 1 Enoch 62, the "Son of Man" sits on a throne and judges the world as well. It is such a strikingly similar picture that some connection seems almost certain. Was Jesus alluding to this tradition when he called himself the Son of Man? Did those who wrote this part of 1 Enoch know about Jesus? Did Matthew paraphrase this passage because he knew this tradition or did those who wrote this part of 1 Enoch know Matthew?

These are difficult questions to answer. On the one hand, the tradition of 1 Enoch could not have been widely known at the time of Jesus or it would have provoked more of a reaction and Jesus wouldn't have used the phrase casually so often. Does Jesus' use of this expression fall in the category of hiding his messianic identity from the crowds? The inner circle would know what Son of Man meant, but it would be an ambiguous phrase to most outsiders.

I merely want to draw two conclusions. The one is that Jesus was remembered as preaching that a judgment was going to come to the earth. The other is that at least the gospel writers compared Jesus' role in that judgment to the role of the Son of Man in the traditions of Enoch. Jesus would be God's agent of judgment when he returned from heaven, the king-judge of Daniel 7.

[1] In particular, a section of 1 Enoch called "The Parables of Enoch." This part of the book was not present among the Dead Sea Scrolls, leading most experts to think it was written later than the other scrolls, perhaps as late as the first century AD.

Coming Judgment 2

2011-12-29T08:57:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I wrote on Judging Others. Today I want to look on what Jesus likely preached about the coming judgment.
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Way back in chapter 1 I argued that John the Baptist's baptism of repentance was not only in preparation for the coming restoration of Israel but also to ensure salvation in a coming judgment. I don't think Jesus' message to the crowds focused on this judgment nearly as much as John's did, but it was almost certainly part of his message. After all, Jesus endorsed John's teaching when he was baptized, and we do find this teaching in the gospels.

It makes sense to think that most of Jesus' teaching on the coming judgment took place in his final days, particularly in Jerusalem. This is how the first three gospels remember it. [1] They connect Jesus' action in the temple with the impending destruction of Jerusalem and each includes a final sermon on coming judgment in Jesus' final week.

In fact, the Gospel of Mark is arranged so that it has a turning point just before Jesus heads for Jerusalem at the end of his ministry. Up to that point, the tone is optimistic and Jesus tells good news to the crowds that flock to him. After Mark 8, however, Jesus looks toward Jerusalem and the gospel takes on a tone of foreboding. Jesus seems to withdraw more from the crowds and spend more time privately with his key followers.

So what was this coming judgment? The next section looks at Jesus and the judgment of Israel. In this one, I'm arguing that Jesus focused on the coming judgment of the earth. The final section of this chapter looks at what Jesus might have said about the afterlife. But I don't think that Jesus actually preached much on that topic. Rather, like the rest of the New Testament, he focused on something that was going to happen on earth.

Some of the verses I most enjoy in the Bible are the weird ones. The reason is because I suspect that these are the passages that most expose the spots where our own assumptions are slightly off, where our own glasses make it difficult for us to see the original meaning as it actually was. Take Mark 9:47: "If your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell." A couple things strike me about this verse.

First, will the kingdom really involve one eyed people? To be sure, Jesus is not speaking literally here. It's hyperbole--making a point with exaggeration. Paul makes it clear that we will have transformed bodies in the kingdom (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:50). But the very concept of entering into the kingdom with one eye sounds like my body is entering in right here from earth. It doesn't sound like I'm going up to heaven to enter it and it certainly doesn't sound like something that happens after I die.

In other words, the judgment sounds like an event that will take place on earth. I get the same impression from the other person with two eyes who is thrown into hell, into "Gehenna." It reminds me of another verse in Matthew where Jesus says that his followers should not fear the person who can only kill their bodies. Rather they should fear the God who can destroy both their souls and bodies in Gehenna (Matt. 10:28). We at least get the impression that the judgment starts right here on earth and involves the physical bodies of the wicked. [2]

[1] John does not have an "end times" sermon like Matthew, Mark, and Luke do.

[2] Most translations rightly translate Gehenna as hell, but it is interesting to wonder if any of Jesus' audience thought of the valley gehinnom just outside Jerusalem, where they burned the trash of the city. This is the place from which Gehenna in fact got its name.

To Judge or Not to Judge 1

2011-12-28T15:18:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about what Jesus had to say about the afterlife, so I thought I would jump to my thoughts on Jesus and judgment, maybe the second to last chapter. It seems a chapter like this one should start with the well known passage in Matthew 7 on not judging.
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In the not too distant past, Matthew 7:1 was probably one of the best known sayings of Jesus in all the gospels: "Do not judge, or you too will be judged." I say "past" because the tone of much of American Christianity has arguably changed in the aftermath of 9-11 and other events thereafter. Very many Christians today feel quite comfortable drawing conclusions about the righteousness of others, especially those in the public sphere.

However, there was a time not too long ago when many Christians were at the opposite extreme. The logic went like this. Jesus tells us not to judge others. After all, we're all sinners and "all sin is sin," so I'm as guilty as the next person. I have no right to be down on others for the problems I think they have because my problems are basically the same. I would be a hypocrite to point out someone else's sin.

There was a great deal of truth in this line of thinking. While there are a few problems with the logic, it does indeed capture the spirit of Jesus fairly well. Human nature being what it is, we are more prone to be judgmental and critical in our spirit than to be generous and forgiving. In that sense, Jesus would surely rather us err on the side of not judging than on the side of judging.

But Jesus does judge and Paul also judges. That is, they draw conclusions about whether others are in the right or wrong. Matthew 23 is an incredibly strong pronouncement about the hearts of the Pharisees. And "discipline" is part of Christian community. Matthew 18 gives a process by which a member of the community is confronted and potentially shunned. Whatever it means not to judge in Matthew 7, it does not preclude the judgment of Matthew 18 and 23.

For example, you can know that someone has done something wrong and be loving about it, or you can know others have done wrong and have a bad attitude toward them. Similarly, a person can enjoy paying back someone who has done wrong or you can discipline with the sincere desire that a person be redeemed, reconciled and reclaimed. If we witness a murder, it is not judgmental to draw the conclusion that the murderer has done wrong. The difference is that Jesus is sad for the murderer as well as the victim, while the "judger" enjoys the thought of the murderer frying.

So there are both truths and problems with the popular interpretation of Jesus' instructions not to judge. You will not find anywhere in the Bible where it teaches that "all sin is sin." Some sins are worse than others because sin is primarily a matter of intent, not of the act itself. The more defiant your intent is against God or the more hateful your intent is against your neighbor, the greater the sin. [1]

Similarly, "judging" others is either good or bad depending on our intent. Here it gets very tricky. We are prone to lie not only to others but to ourselves about our intentions. "I'm talking about what they did because I'm concerned, not because I'm judging." If we are in doubt, we are best not to talk about the possible sins of others at all.

And this is a particularly important point. While in many cases we observe someone doing something wrong or perhaps they even confess to us that they have done something wrong, in far many more cases we do not know for sure what the motives or intentions of someone were. It is in such cases that Jesus' instructions not to judge become particularly important. We may know what we would have been thinking if we did something, but other people are different from us. We need to be very careful not to assume we know what someone else intended.

At the same time, the excuse that "we are all sinners" won't cut it with the New Testament. There is no verse in the New Testament, when rightly interpreted, that indicates that intentional wrongdoing is normal in the life of a Christian.[2] The words of Hebrews are some of the strongest in the New Testament: "If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left" (10:26). The "Christians are just as much sinners" line doesn't work for Paul and it certainly doesn't work for Jesus.

In the end, we take away at least three things from Jesus' instructions not to judge. First, we as humans are prone to hypocrisy. This is really what Jesus' statement is most about. The problem is that those who most like to point out the faults of others often have the same or worse problems themselves. Psychologists call it "projection." When we feel guilty for some fault, we may be very hard on others who have the same or similar ones. We make ourselves feel better by putting others down.

So Jesus tells the crowds in Matthew to take the "plank" out of their own eye before they worry about the "speck" in someone else's. Someone else once put it this way, for every one finger you point at someone else there are usually at least three pointing back at yourself. While we should never consider sin normal for a Christian, we all have faults and weaknesses. We would be wise not to spend too much time dwelling on the faults of others.

A second take away is to be extremely careful about how we "fill in the blanks" about the intentions and motives of others. We usually think we're smarter than we are when it comes to such things. And those of us who are used to being lied to can get hardened to where we don't trust anyone. Jesus surely doesn't want us to be gullible and stupid in our dealings with others ("be as shrewd as snakes," Matt. 10:16). But surely even more he wants us to look for the best in others and to give them the benefit of the doubt when at all possible.

Finally, as followers of Jesus we should be more interested in mercy than in justice. To be sure, it is not loving always to let someone out of the consequences of their actions. Justice can be loving when it is meant to protect society at large and when it tries to steer the lives of those off track in the right direction. But a Jesus follower should have no interest in justice for its own sake. "Mercy triumphs over judgment" (Jas. 2:13).

So there is a time to draw conclusions and administer discipline in the church. There is a time to draw conclusions about the actions of others. There is a time to confront, especially when we are in authority. However, most of the time we should presume the best of others and leave to others their own relationship with God. Most of the time the urge to judge comes from hypocrisy and faulty priorities.

I should spend significant time searching my own heart and motives before I ever confront. I should examine carefully whether it is my place to confront. Most of the time it is not my job. I must be aware that different Christians have different understandings and that in many respects I stand before God as an individual conscience. Am I willing for my motives and intentions to undergo the same scrutiny that I would bring to bear on others? If not, then I had best be silent.

[1] An easy example of this fact is 1 John 5's distinction between a "sin to death" and a "sin not to death." In addition, there is the differing way Paul treats different sins. The man sleeping with his step-mother is immediately kicked out of the church in 1 Corinthians 5, while the carnal Corinthians of chapter 3 merely are told to grow up.

Ultimately, the "all sin is sin" position likely comes from the popular belief in eternal security combined with Paul's "all have sinned." Before we believe, all sin means we need God's grace. The situation does not change after believing for those who believe in eternal security, for no sin knocks you out. However, Paul does not teach eternal security (cf. 1 Cor. 10).

[2] The case is quite to the contrary. Most experts on Romans now agree that Romans 7 is a dramatized expression of a Jew who wants to keep the essence of the Jewish Law but does not have the power of the Spirit to do so. Paul's position is rather that believers are no longer slaves to sin (Rom. 8:1), do not fulfill the desires of their sinful nature (Gal. 5:16), and that those in the flesh cannot please God (Rom. 8:8). 1 John 3:9 similarly says that those who are born of God will not live a life full of sin.

Reflections on John the Baptist

2011-12-27T05:09:00.000-05:00

Follows on yesterday.
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Probably the thing that strikes me most about John the Baptist is how much differently things must have seemed to him than they seem to us. Our understanding of John as the "opening act" before Jesus arrived is crystal clear. John was also clear that the messiah would follow him, but John probably wasn't expecting the messiah to get crucified.

John probably was looking for the almost immediate restoration of Israel as a political kingdom with its own king. It didn't happen. Even after Jesus rose from the dead, his followers were still expecting this sort of kingdom (Acts 1:6). It still hasn't happened some two thousand years later. [1] Some of the New Testament may still look to such a kingdom of Israel after Christ returns (e.g., Rom. 11:26).

Later Christians took John's message and made it universal, which may very well be what God wants us to do as well. For example, John's message was not directed at non-Jews. It is doubtful the thought ever popped into his head that a Gentile might get baptized. We now see his message of baptism played out in Christian baptism, where we prepare not for the restoration of Israel but we act out our inclusion in God's kingdom.

For the moment, this kingdom is not political but is a spiritual kingdom. We live in two kingdoms, the kingdom of our God and the kingdom of this world. Our loyalty is solidly to the first, and we choose it over the second when the two are in unresolvable conflict. But we also live in the second kingdom and we render to Caesar what is Caesar's.

The situation with baptism is slightly different than it was with John. When the movement started, no one was baptized. He called all Israel to baptism, even those trying to keep the covenant. After all, he was looking to the repentance of a whole people, even more than mere individuals. This is one reason we can participate in confessions of sin in church even when we have not intentionally done wrong all week--it is a corporate confession of the church as a whole.

Now of course we have children born into families of faith. Some thus would have them baptized as children, to claim them for Christ from the very beginning, knowing of course that they will have to appropriate that act personally as well later. Others focus on the individual and want the child to wait until he or she can understand at least a little of what baptism signifies. The eternal destiny of the child is of course something separate from these debates.

When we look at how differently our situation is than John's, it is a bit sobering to wonder how much of what we think we have figured out might be a little off on the details or out of perspective. Certainly most of us as Christians will believe that something unique was happening at the time of Jesus, a new revelation that will never come again. Someone might also point out that we now have the New Testament, which transcends the misunderstandings of any one early Christian.

But if we're honest with each other, Christians probably disagree more with each other today over what the Bible means than the early Jesus followers disagreed with each other. It calls for a certain humility. And it calls us back to first principles. Jesus would both express and model the two basic principles of Christian life, to which all our specific beliefs must submit. These are the twin principles of complete surrender to God's will, which more than anywhere else is seen in the second principle of concretely loving all others as we would normally want others to treat us.

[1] While a nation of Israel is currently restored, it is not a kingdom that affirms Jesus as messiah, which from a New Testament perspective would be an essential part of a truly restored Israel.

Visit to Dachau

2011-12-27T03:01:00.002-05:00

Went to Dachau with the family yesterday. Third time I've visited but had a guide this time. I shouldn't be surprised that a people could do such things. After all, it still goes on around the world today. It could happen anywhere under the right conditions--economic despair, someone who comes along and makes you feel special as a nation, someone who feeds your insecurity about all the foreigners around, a need to bring order to society and squelch rampant liberalism.

Then a communist burns down parliament. There's a declaration of martial law. Camps are set up to remove the lawless from the flow of society, to re-educate those who can be re-educated and put the rest to work. The sadists who are always present in society gravitate to such camps. Doctors do experiments on criminal guinea pigs for the benefit of the troops.

No modern society is so evolved that it could not happen again anywhere.

After John the Baptist...

2011-12-26T02:17:00.000-05:00

Continued from here.
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We know what happened to John. Herod Antipas arrested and then beheaded him. Rulers don't take nicely to those who announce that another king is coming who is going to replace their kingdom with a better one. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which are sometimes called the Synoptic gospels, Jesus does not start proclaiming the kingdom until John is arrested.

But the impact of John the Baptist seems to have continued for decades after he died. For example, there were some people who were still following his teaching at Ephesus in Acts 18-19. The first is Apollos in Acts 18:24-28. He is instructed in the "Way of the Lord" and proclaimed the coming of Jesus, but was only aware of the baptism of John. Apparently, John the Baptist must have proclaimed "the way of the Lord." It is interesting that both Isaiah 40 and Malachi 3 use the word "way." These are the passages the gospels remember in relation to John's prophetic ministry. So it is not a stretch to say that John must have proclaimed quite literally "the Way of the Lord" as one of his key messages.

Followers of the Way were thus individuals who believed John's message--whether they believed in Jesus or not. Apollos could be a follower of the Way and know very little about Jesus. What he knew was John the baptizer's prediction that the "anointed one," the messiah, was coming. The Gospels also remember this message as part of what John proclaimed: "The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals" (Mark 1:7, NRSV).

Acts 19:1-7 reinforces this interpretation. Paul finds certain "disciples" at Ephesus. These individuals only know the baptism of John. They do not seem to know much of anything about Jesus. When Acts calls them "disciples," it must not mean followers of Jesus but followers of the Way, followers of the movement started by John the Baptist.

For Acts, receiving the Spirit is the big distinction between the two movements. The Jesus movement was part of the Baptist movement. Both were followers of the Way. But the Jesus movement believed Jesus was the messiah John predicted, and it involved the Holy Spirit. Jesus' followers received the Holy Spirit. At some point, John's baptism became distinguished from baptism "in the name of Jesus," so much so that Paul has the followers of the Baptist get re-baptized so they will receive the Holy Spirit in Acts 19.

The Gospel of John indirectly supports interpretation. One of the intriguing features of the Gospel of John is the extent to which it downplays John the Baptist in relation to Jesus. John never actually mentions John baptizing Jesus. John's presentation implies that the Baptist's mission is basically over once Jesus arrives (e.g., 1:36-37; 3:30). Only John's gospel tells of Jesus' followers baptizing at the same time as the Baptist. Finally, in contrast to Matthew 11:14, the Gospel of John denies that John the Baptist is Elijah (1:21).

Why would the Gospel of John downplay John the Baptist so much more than the other gospels? A possible answer is that, as we see in Acts 18-19, there were followers of John the Baptist at Ephesus who not only did not follow Jesus. There may have been followers of the Way there who opposed the Jesus movement, who opposed the idea that Jesus was the messiah. John and Acts are thus written in such a way as to make it clear that Jesus is the one John predicted. [1]

So not only did John proclaim the coming judgment of God and the potential restoration of political Israel. He was one of those Jews who also predicted the coming of a king to rule Israel in this coming kingdom, the messiah. [2] In preparation, he called Israel to repent and to wash themselves in the Jordan, symbolizing the washing and forgiveness of their sins.

What a massive movement he must have started! We do not know much about it apart from those of his followers who went on to believe Jesus was the messiah John was predicting. But at the time his movement must have paralleled that of Jesus and may have been even bigger. Some in this movement of the Way may have known very little about Jesus at all. It must not have been clear at the time that John endorsed Jesus as the one he predicted.

In fact, we can read passages like Matthew 11:2-6 as the Baptist himself having some uncertainty. John is in prison but sends some of his followers to ask Jesus if he is the one. The things he is doing make him a prime candidate. But John must not have been entirely certain. [3] Perhaps John was expecting Jesus to be more "political" and "military" than he was.

What is clear is that all four gospels see Jesus' ministry in continuity with that of the Baptist. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus is baptized by John, which indicates that Jesus at least mostly endorsed John's message. As many Jesus scholars have argued, this fact has enormous implications for how we understand Jesus' own mission and message. [4] We must understand Jesus' words not as wise sayings a philosopher might say but as words said against this historical background.

[1] The incident in Acts 19 is thus not about entire sanctification (as many holiness revivalists preached in the late 1800s/early 1900s). Still less is it about the necessity of tongues as evidence of truly being converted (certain Pentecostal groups). Acts 19, including its added evidence of tongues, was originally a polemic against followers of John the Baptist who did not believe Jesus was the messiah.

[2] Again, if we have to pick a Jewish group his message best fits, it would be the Essenes.

[3] This scene has of course given rise to much speculation as to John's motives, especially if you bring Luke 1 and John 1 into the conversation.

[4] One of the first to point out this fact was A. E. Harvey, Jesus and the Constraints of History E. P. Sanders' Jesus and Judaism then built on this approach.

Christmas Reflections

2011-12-25T01:22:00.001-05:00

I was listening to a very old Christmas CD the other day and it had "Go Tell It on the Mountain" on it. One line in the recording explicitly mentioned Jesus being born on December 25. I suspect most people who would read this know that is not the real date, just the date we celebrate.

This piece in BAR is very interesting (I think I got the link from Allan Bevere). It suggests that some early Christians before Augustine started using the dates January 6 and December 25 because they were nine months after suggested dates for Jesus' crucifixion, the assumption being that Jesus was conceived and died on the same date. It argues that some Christians were already celebrating Christ's birth on Dec. 25 prior to Constantine.

The birth narratives in Matthew and Luke are quite different. They do have a common core. They both agree that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and ended up in Nazareth as a child. They both agree that Mary was a virgin when the Holy Spirit brought about her conception. That's about it.

Each gospel emphasizes in its presentation the kinds of things we would expect them to, given their emphases elsewhere. Matthew has overtones of Moses, which fits since Jesus gives the fulfilled understanding of the Law. As Pharaoh killed Israelite babies, Herod kills the boys of Bethlehem. Moses came out of Egypt; Jesus comes out of Egypt. Matthew connects Jesus' birth to the OT. The Magi remind us that the gospel is for the Gentiles too and that Jesus would become a king.

Luke gives prominence to women in the story of Jesus' birth, as he does elsewhere. Lowly shepherds come, fitting with Luke's emphasis on the poor and lost sheep. The temple features prominently, as it does elsewhere in Luke's presentation.

I suppose that different Christians take different things from Christmas. For me, Christmas is the incarnation. It is God coming to earth. It is the beginning of salvation for the whole world.

For me it is also Jesus being born amid scandal, yet another identification of Jesus with the lost sheep of the world. Was he ridiculed as a child for being born before his parents were married? Did his younger brother James think himself a little purer than his older brother?

For Matthew, the birth story revealed that Jesus birth was in continuity with who he came to be in life later. This was the expectation of ancient biography. So there were signs he was a king from the start. Did Luke want to balance this out, if Luke knew Matthew?

Interestingly, the New Testament does not make much of the virginal conception. [PS] Even Matthew and Luke themselves never mention it again and they give no interpretation to its meaning. It does not seem required for Jesus to be divine, since he is not half man and half God but fully human and fully divine.

So what do you celebrate at Christmas? I celebrate "the beginning of the gospel" (Mark 1:1), even though Mark is referring to Jesus' baptism.

[PS] We informally refer to the virginal conception as the virgin birth. Catholics do believe Mary miraculously remained a physical virgin even in birth, as well as that Joseph never had sex with her thereafter. Most Protestants believe Mary went on to have other children--James, Jude, etc...

Oh Holy Night

2011-12-24T05:44:00.002-05:00

Was struck by this verse to Oh Holy Night yesterday:

Truly He taught us to love one another
His law is love and his gospel is peace
Chains shall he break for the slave is our brother
And in His name all oppression shall cease
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
Let all within us praise His holy name

Christ is the Lord
Oh praise his name forever
His power and glory evermore proclaim
His power and glory evermore proclaim

Merry Christmas all!

Christians, Women, and Leadership

2011-12-22T03:13:00.003-05:00

I think I make a post like this one at least once a year. Here's a summary of my argument for total egalitarianism.

1. If we were starting from scratch, what would we think given only a few starting points like

God does not show favoritism.
God is love.
God wants the world to be reconciled to him.

Let's also throw in some obvious truths about men and women from experience and reason as well:

Gender is not a predictor of spirituality, insight, or leadership capacity.
Some women are more spiritual, have more insight, and have greater leadership gifts than some men. In other words, general trends in terms of gender are irrelevant when it comes to individual persons and situations. Even if you could show certain trends relating to gender in terms of spirituality, insight, and leadership capacity, such a finding is irrelevant to the question of whether an individual woman or man is more spiritual, has more insight, or is more gifted as a leader either in general or in terms of a specific.
In cultures where "the gig is up" on the idea that men are always smarter than women, that women can never lead as well as men, to take a position that assigns leadership roles purely on the basis of gender likely creates an obstacle to the gospel. If we take this position, we had better have a good reason.

So the stakes are high before I even come to the gospel. Male genitalia are not particularly known either for their spirituality, insight, or leadership capacity. Quite the contrary. And since "God is no respecter of persons," a person who starts without any bias would come to the Bible expecting it to affirm a fully egalitarian position.

2. Everyone finds some things strange in the Bible. Christians have always found some verses in the Bible that are "unclear." So you're telling me Jacob put striped branches in front of sheep and goats when they were mating so that they would have striped and speckled offspring? Whaaaat? So you're telling me a woman should veil her head when she is praying or prophesying because of the angels? Whaaaaat?

If a person really understands #1 above, passages like 1 Timothy 2:12-15 should have the same effect. So you're telling me that women have come to be in transgression because of the sin of Eve but they will be saved through childbearing? Whaaat? I thought we were saved through the blood of Jesus Christ!

When there are examples of women ministering in Acts and Paul (you know the drill--Priscilla, Phoebe, Junias...) and Paul lays down the principle that men and women are equally sons of God, when Acts 2:17 puts the prophesying of women as a sign of the age of the Spirit, verses are at hand for us to find "clear" on the principles. We know the original context impacts how we apply some verses. When #1 is so overwhelming, what perversity would lead us to see 1 Timothy 2:12 as the clear verse, when the principle of the kingdom is at hand?

3. We know where it's headed. In the kingdom, there will not be marriage. Women will not be "given" to men (Mark 12). In other words, there will be no differentiation of gender authority in the kingdom. If we can move things closer to the kingdom now, especially when it is makes overwhelming sense, why wouldn't we?

4. No verse prohibits a woman from leadership over men in general. I'm arguing for complete egalitarianism, but I want to start by separating out the argument. The household codes of Colossians, Ephesians, and 1 Peter have to do with, well, the household. They are about the relationship between wives and husbands. I believe the most likely interpretation in fact of all the notorious women passages in the New Testament fall into this category.

a. The only OT passage that explicitly subordinates wives to husbands is Genesis 3. This is a consequence of Eve's sin. Since Christ atoned for all sin, this is not a good argument for anything. You could argue that it is built into the creation but, as in #1, this is simply not the case. Naturally speaking, many individual women are regularly more intelligent, more spiritual, and have greater capacity to lead than many individual men. "Let's stick with the Fall when we can transition to the kingdom." That makes no sense at all.

b. I'll assume for the sake of argument that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 were originally in 1 Corinthians (there is an issue). "Let them ask their own husbands at home." Mention of the Law and subordination. OK, we're talking about wives here.

But what kind of talking are we talking about here? In 1 Corinthians 11, women prophesy in church. They are to veil their heads to show they are under their husband heads. So apparently, whatever silence 1 Corinthians 14 is talking about is not spiritual speech but disruptive speech. They are asking questions, questions they should ask their own husbands... rather than someone else's?

Whew. I'm glad I have an answer for that verse, because #1 is really making me sweat. I mean, I don't think God is stupid, but it's really hard to see any intelligence in the "men can only fly the plane because they have a penis" argument.

What's even more important about 1 Corinthians 11 is that wives are both speaking for God to a congregation while also being in proper relationship to their husband-head. This implies that subordination of a wife to a husband does not preclude women in spiritual leadership.

c. When we then see that 1 Timothy 2 is likely also talking about the husband-wife relationship, we reach our first egalitarian goal. We see that the Bible does not prohibit a woman from taking leadership--spiritual or otherwise--over men in general. We of course see women even in supreme leadership in the Bible. Huldah is the supreme spiritual authority in 2 Kings 22. Deborah is the supreme "political" leader in Judges 4-5.

1 Timothy uses words for man and woman in 2:12-15 that normally mean husband and wife when they are used in close proximity. Adam and Eve were husband and wife, and they are the supporting argument, both in terms of birth order and who was deceived. Wives are the ones who have babies. The relationship that 1 Timothy uses to support its instruction is thus framed in terms of a husband wife relationship.

I can't think of any verse that prohibits women from leading men in general elsewhere--the subordinate issue is always a husband-wife issue. I'm frankly puzzled that so many interpreters of this verse can't see it. It's pretty obvious if you're thinking like people thought in the first century.

Whew. I'm glad I have an answer for that verse, because #1 is really making me sweat. I mean, I don't think God is stupid, but pretty much anyone on the street is going to think he is if he sees genitals as the secret to competent leadership.

5. The real issue is thus the husband-wife relationship. With the previous point, there is no more argument against allowing those women whom God calls into leadership to take any role to which God calls them. "What if their husband-head disagrees?" Then he'd better repent because he has to obey God first. His soul is in danger. We have to be wise in the working out of principles. Sometimes the gospel is hindered when we are unbending--even when we are right!

In fact, Jesus says that God allowed divorce to be "on the books" in the OT because Israel was not ready. I guess God is pragmatic even in Scripture sometimes. I suppose that makes sense if he actually wanted to help the people he first sent Scripture to--ancient Israel, Corinthians, Thessalonians, Romans. I know from cultural anthropology that they didn't think like me and that actions had different meanings in different places. I guess, whether I like it or not, I can't just blindly apply the words of Scripture directly to me without considering such things, because it explicitly tells me it was written to them... and I'm not them.

My argument for full egalitarianism, including the home, involves many of the same points I made above:

the kingdom trajectory--There will be no husbands and wives in the kingdom.
spiritual common sense--In other words, #1 applies here just as much as in the previous section
the cultural argument--There was nothing distinctly Christian in the first century about wives being subordinate to their husbands. In fact, it won't be so in the kingdom. This was the assumption of the ancient context of the Bible. It is when the Bible empowers women and equalizes men to them that it was being unique.
the blinders argument--Those who argue against egalitarianism are blind to their own cultural situation.

a) Sincere opponents would be appalled if they heard the arguments against egalitarianism made 100 years ago and are thus blind to the fact that their position has already shifted considerably, in keeping with the common sense of #1. In other words, they have already violated their own "no accommodation" rule historically. They are now more sophisticated than before, but this is just feet dragging on the inevitable egalitarian conclusion.
b) The husband-wife subordination issue was massively impacted by the post WW2 era when women were empowered. So called "secular feminism" has pushed traditions like mine away from its historical positions and practices because of the association of egalitarianism with social groups its people tend to oppose. In short, complementarians are riding cultural waves every bit as much as egalitarians--they are simply riding a different wave.
c) They are unaware of the way in which we can get verses out of focus. I used to do this with jewelry verses. "No woman could possibly wear an earring without it being a matter of ungodly pride." "Any man wearing a wedding ring must really be proud of that gold jewelry." The truth is, I was so focused on an individual tree (verse) that I couldn't see the forest. I now realize how absurd my thoughts were. Complementarians are so fixated on some rather "Whaaat?" verses that they can't see the bigger principles of Christianity and how they would most naturally play out.

the stumbling block argument--It's a hindrance to the gospel.

I'm not worried. Our grandchildren will wonder why this was an issue. Were we stupid? We feel the same way about those fundamentalist Christians who argued for slavery as an institution 100 years ago. What were they thinking? How could they not see the obvious ideal?

Of course slavery continued for 1800 years after Christ. There is no guarantee of inevitable movement toward the kingdom. But let me speak prophetically. Even the Roman Catholic Church will be ordaining women by the year 2050.

Jesus Begins 2

2011-12-21T09:48:00.000-05:00

... continued from yesterday.
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John was baptizing people, dipping Jews in the river Jordan to symbolize the washing of their sins. I would have heard the message: we Jews need to prepare ourselves for what is coming. We need to clean ourselves to be ready or else we'll be swept up in the judgment along with everyone else.

Such ritual washings were of course a normal part of Jewish life. There were miqvaot around Jerusalem, for example at the temple. You purified yourself before offering sacrifices. The Essenes at the Dead Sea had a miqveh at each entrance to their camp. You walked down one side unclean and came up the other clean. If I had seen John as an onlooker, I probably would have pegged him to be an Essene of some sort.

What was different about John's baptism is that he wasn't dipping people as usual. His baptism wasn't something you did each year or each month. This was a preparation for a one time event, the coming judgment of God on the world in preparation for the restoration of Israel, God's coming kingdom.

Part of that message was a new king, a new "Son of David" to resume ruling Israel just like the kings of old. This "anointed one" or messiah (Christ in Greek) was an intimate part of the restored kingdom. It may take a little doing to get into the heads of the people alongside the Jordan and what they were expecting in a messiah because not everyone was.

First, the people by the river were not expecting the messiah to be divine in the normal sense of that word. True, there were Old Testament texts that referred to kings like Solomon as the "Son of God" (2 Sam. 7:14) and other texts that used very exalted language of the kings of Judah on various occasions (e.g., Ps. 2:7; 45:6-7; 89:27; 110:1). But no one took these verses to mean that the king was literally a god or that the messiah would be a god. They took it poetically.

It was perhaps the Essenes who first starting expecting God to anoint some special people in the process of restoring Israel. Some of their key documents look forward to two "messiahs," two anointed ones. One would be the new king of Israel. The other would be the new priest of Israel. But the group called the Sadducees weren't necessarily looking for a new king. For them, Israel had done just fine with the high priest basically in charge for five hundred years.

As for the rest of Israel, from time to time revolutionaries would crop up, probably with hopes of turning out to be the new "anointed one" of Israel. Acts mentions some of them. [1] A book called Psalms of Solomon, especially chapter 17, very strongly hopes for a messiah to come and destroy the Romans. [2] But we really can't say how prevalent the expectation of a messiah was at the time John baptized. Obviously he believed that a king was coming.

And here it is important to recognize that the Jews at the time of Jesus largely didn't read the verses of prophecy you might have learned in Sunday School the way we do. The New Testament authors, by and large, read the Old Testament "spiritually" rather than for what the words originally meant. It was only after the fact that Christians saw most of these Old Testament verses the way we do now. In other words, it was not at all obvious to everyone either that a messiah was coming and certainly not that he would come in the way Christians now believe Jesus did...

[1] E.g., Acts 5:36-37; 21:38.

[2] It was written not long after the Romans defiled the temple and took over Israel in 63BC.

Pharisees, Afterlife, Paul

2011-12-21T04:04:00.001-05:00

I have been writing yesterday and today on what Pharisees likely believed about resurrection at the time of Paul. My argument is that Pharisees and the populace were moving toward a general resurrection of all the righteous in all history but that it is also likely that some Pharisees at the time only pictured a resurrection for those who died prematurely out of faithfulness to the Jewish Law.

My argument is also that while we find an increasing sense that the wicked suffer in the afterlife from about 200BC on, belief in a resurrected return to the land of Israel was at first restricted to those who died as "martyrs," so to speak. The premise is, for Essenes and others, that the "normal" righteous have a blessed afterlife under the earth or, perhaps for some, in the stars. Resurrection belief arises as a function of the problem of evil, against the backdrop of deuteronomistic theology, to explain how the righteous can die because they are righteous.

The question then comes to Paul. Does he think of resurrection in terms of Old Testament people like Abraham or only in terms of those "in Christ"? Does he picture a time when the wicked will return to the earth for judgment? It is a question of silence. He makes no comment on either topic.

When Jesus was baptized...

2011-12-20T03:54:00.001-05:00

So following from Sunday, I start the book over. Thanks to everyone for things I had missed or needed to be sure to cover under other headings!
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We don't know the exact year. Luke 3:1 says it was the 15th year of the Roman emperor Tiberius, around the year AD29. John "the baptizer" started baptizing people in the river Jordan just a few miles east of Jerusalem. Of course dating things is really complicated in the ancient world, so this is not a slam dunk.

Tiberius was the second Roman emperor (AD14-37), after Augustus (31BC-AD14). You probably remember that Augustus was emperor when Jesus was born. You've probably heard the verse at least at Christmas, "In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken" (Luke 2:1). Our best guess is that Jesus was born sometime around 6-4BC because Matthew 2 says Herod (the Great) was still king, and Herod the Great died in 4BC.

That means that Jesus would be about thirty, maybe a littleolder, when he showed up at the Jordan River to be baptized by John (Luke 3:23;cf. John 8:57). It is a little irritating not to know these things forcertain, but that's just the way it is with the evidence we have. Peoplecan get really angry when you mention uncertainty about things they've seenin every Christmas play since childhood. But the gospels do not always say exactlythe same thing when it comes to minor details, so we just can't know for sureon some of these questions. We just have to deal with it.

What was John doing out there in the middle of nowhere,baptizing? Jesus presumably came all theway from Galilee to see him, to participate. It’s about a three day journey. Jesus must have agreed with most or all of what John was saying to go through and getbaptized by him.

The gospels tell us that John the Baptist was preaching a “baptism of repentancefor the forgiveness of sins” (e.g., Mark 1:4). The Jewish historian Josephus, as we would expect, presents John’smessage in more general terms. John wasurging the crowds to become more virtuous. [1]

It's hard for us to get into the heads of John or the crowds. We've heard so much in church and other places. What would we have thought if we had been in those crowds who came to see John and maybe get baptized?

I think we would have heard something distinctly political both in John's message and symbolic action of baptism. It is no coincidence that a new Herod, Herod Antipas, arrested John and eventually beheaded him. He was no fool.

For example, where was John baptizing? He was baptizing on the east side of the Jordan River, right around the place where Joshua had led Israel to occupy the land. In the light of the rest of John's message, it was all too easy to see that John was preparing Israel for its restoration as a free kingdom.

The goal of repentance was to get the hearts of Israel ready for the return of God's kingdom on earth in Israel. It is again no coincidence that the gospels remember John in the light of Old Testament passages like Isaiah 40:1-3. While New Testament authors do not always read the Old Testament in context, the context of Isaiah fits John's message very well indeed: "a voice of one calling in the wilderness, 'Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him'" (Mark 1:3, quoting Isaiah 40:3).

The original context of Isaiah 40 was the return of Israel from captivity in Babylon. Babylon had destroyed Jerusalem and taken many Israelites back as slaves. But in 538BC, a new conquering king--Cyrus, king of Persia (cf. Isa. 45:1)--let those Jews who wanted to return go. Isaiah 40 originally was about making a straight line through the desert home to Jerusalem from Babylon. Flatten the hills, lift up the valleys, and straighten out any crooked roads because we're going home! [2]

So if we were there with John by the Jordan, I think we would have heard similar overtones in what he was doing. In a sense, Israel is still in exile. The Romans are in control. These texts in Isaiah point toward Israel regaining its independence and being restored (cf. Acts 1:6).

John probably also criticized the current leadership of Jerusalem. His message of repentance was a message of hope for those who participated. But it was a message of judgment for everyone else, including the current leaders in Jerusalem and people like Herod Antipas. For them it was a message of impending doom...

[1] Antiquities 18.5.2.

[2] Accordingly, in its original context, the Lord Isaiah has in mind is Yahweh, the LORD, rather than a king. However, as we will see, it was perfectly legitimate for the New Testament authors to read the Old Testament in a "spiritual" way that differed from the original meaning.

Just Five Languages...

2011-12-19T15:27:00.001-05:00

I've been away all day so wasn't able to put finishing touches on this morning's post. But on the way home I was asking myself this question. If a person was going to travel the world or be involved in the whole world in some way, maybe you were Secretary of State or something, what would be the most important languages to know? If a university had a "World Languages" major consisting of five languages, what would they be?

Here were my choices:

1. English
English seems the best single language to know. Not only is it the most important internet language, but it gets you North America, western Europe, Africa, and India better than any other language.

2. Russian
It may be of decreasing value in the days to come, but at the moment Russia will get you Russia, all the eastern European countries, and all the -istan countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union. It's the single biggest region covered by any language.

3. Spanish
Spanish gets you most of South America and Latin America. You can usually make yourself known in Brazil, Portugal, and even Italy if you know Spanish.

4. Chinese
I could be wrong but it seems to me that Chinese is the most important of the languages in Asia to know. It is also in the ascendancy and will likely take the place of Russian in the future as a lingua franca.

5. Arabic
Arabic will get you around in northern Africa and the Middle East all the way to Pakistan. If you were going to travel the whole world, Arabic is your best bet throughout the Muslim world.

I wonder if any university has a degree like this. I doubt it, since the university way is to focus on one language at a time...

The Essential Jesus

2011-12-18T07:09:00.000-05:00

I've been part of some online discussions recently that have made me really sad (and at times angry). It's one of those things where God's will seems pretty obvious to me and a lot of Christians but not to a number of others. But what most struck me is the differing picture of Jesus we have.

Since I've been trying to write a book on Jesus here, it struck me that I really need to stop writing the book I want to write and write the book my church needs me to write. I need to start over. Here's some brainstorming (not in the order I'll write them).

1. I need to write about Jesus and divorce.
2. I need to write about Jesus and money.
3. I need to write about how Jesus viewed rules, especially how he weighed them against people.
4. I need to write about Jesus and hell.
5. I need to write about Jesus' obedience to God's will when it wasn't easy.
6. I need to write about how the heart was more important to Jesus than the head.
7. I need to write about how Jesus was a liberal compared to his opponents.
8. I need to write about how Jesus discipled his followers.
9. I need to write about what the good news was for Jesus and what it wasn't (bringing people to a moment of decision before baptism).
10. I need to write about Jesus as an example of what we can be as humans.
11. I need to write about how much more important mercy was for Jesus than justice.
12. I need to write about how essential it was for Jesus that people live out loving others, even to the end of a person's life, and that your final destiny depended on it.
13. I need to write about Jesus and the poor.
14. I need to write about Jesus and women.
15. I need to write about Jesus' missions.
16. I need to write about Jesus' power.
17. I need to write about Jesus' death and resurrection.

What have I missed?

Parable of the Prodigal 3

2011-12-17T06:20:00.000-05:00

... continued from sometime.
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The Parable of the Prodigal Son is a case in point (Luke 15). In its current form in Luke, we hardly notice anything Jewish about it. If we know that Jews did not eat pork, then the fact that the prodigal ends up in a place where there are pigs might stand out to us (15:15). But the story in Luke very nicely reaches out to us across time without its original overtones having to do with Israel.

So we read the story in relation to how eager God is to forgive those who have left him. Any sinner, no matter how far he or she has strayed, can come back to God, and God will welcome them with open arms. It is absolutely true. It is a story about a God who is more interested in seeing us healed and restored than in making sure justice is done.

Many of us barely notice the elder brother. He might represent justice to us. It is not fair that the sinful son should get such an easy path back. He should have to pay. Of course the elder brother is really more concerned about himself. Where is his party? He deserves one.

This way of reading the parable is perfectly legitimate. It is perfectly Christian and fits with our values and thinking. At the same time, this parable likely had a much more specific and concrete meaning originally, in whatever exact form Jesus told it.

We hear hints of it in Luke 15. The Pharisees are upset that Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners (15:2). This is the context from which the parable springs. The sinners are the "lost sheep" (15:3-7), the "lost coin" (15:8-10), and the "lost son" (15:11-32). The implication is thus that the Pharisees are the elder brother, the sheep that stayed, and the coins the woman had not lost.

It is hard for us to take what Jesus says here as it is. We want to put "sinners" in quotation marks. Are we all not sinners? Were not the Pharisees sinners too? We want to do that, but Jesus did not, and Luke did not.

In a similar context in Luke 5:31-32, Jesus flatly tells the Pharisees that "those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance." Jesus does not contest that the tax collector was a sinner, and he places the Pharisees on the healthy/righteous side of the equation.

This is hard for us to handle. Surely Jesus was being sarcastic. We know the end of the story, so aptly captured in a mini-version of this parable. In Matthew 21:28-32, Jesus speaks of a man who had two sons. One said he would go work in the field but did not. Another said he would not, but did in the end. The one who did the will of the father was the one who ended up going in the end.

This is a parable of the reaction to Jesus' ministry. The Pharisees and others like them were like the son who said he would work, but did not in the end. We have such a bias built up against the Pharisees that it is hard for us to see that most of them were actually trying to do God's will.

We should not criticize the Pharisees for trying to keep the Law. Many of them were no more legalists than some of us are. You might say you do not observe Halloween out of conviction. They did not do certain things on the Sabbath out of conviction.

Of course some of them had their priorities out of order too, just like some of us do. Some of them were more interested in the rules than in people. And some of us are more interested in the rules than people to. However, as far as Matthew 21 is concerned, their problem was that they did not accept Jesus or the kingdom God was bringing through him.

But at the point of Luke 15, Jesus is still putting the Pharisees on the healthy, righteous side of the equation. Meanwhile, the tax collectors and prostitutes really are sinners. Jesus never accepted the sins of these individuals as okay. What he accepted was the possibility of their repentance and their importance to God.

Jesus was decades before Paul would write, "all have sinned." When Jesus calls them sinners, he reflects the fact that they were not even trying to keep the Scriptures. The father asked them to work in the fields, and they said no. What is important is that in the end they accepted Jesus and stopped sinning.

So the Parable of the Prodigal Son both speaks to us today powerfully and it had an original meaning in relation to the earthly ministry of Jesus. The earlier meaning had to do to the focus of Jesus' ministry and its end result. Jesus saw the "lost sheep" of Israel as the main target of his ministry. He meant to reclaim the sinners of Israel for the kingdom. They accepted. But ironically, those who initially were not lost, ended up lost.

We read it as a statement of God's willingness to forgive and reclaim us no matter how far we have strayed. It is also a warning for us not to begrudge others to whom God shows mercy. "Mercy triumphs over judgment" (Jas. 2:13).

Christianity in a Christopher Hitchens world

2011-12-16T03:34:00.000-05:00

Christopher Hitchens died early this morning. Notoriously outspoken on everything, notorious political conservative, those in my circles will know him most for his vocal role in the new atheism.

Figures like the triumvirate of Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris are on the poster of post-Christendom. Mind you, most Americans still believe in God. And a simple listening to the GOP debates will confirm that Christian fundamentalism and evangelicalism are far from dead. Those who like to tout how cool they are because they know we are now in an age of post-Christendom are likely a bit premature.

Belief of all kinds is persistent. It usually is not rational. People will believe in things they hold dear in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. No, I do not want to use Hitchens as an argument for post-Christendom.

What he and the other new atheists represent is a powerful force in Western society. They will not convince those over 30. The most long-standing front in the battle of ideas is with our children, teens, and twenty somethings. What impact will people like Hitchens have on them?

At one time, we could shield our children from ideas we didn't like. We still have home schooling, Christian high schools, and private Christian colleges. Then there's the internet, the great leveler. And there are movies and satellite.

Here are my suggestions, for what it's worth:

1. Focus on what is really central and important in Christian faith. Major on the major. God exists, loves, and is active in the world. Christ reconciles us to God and shows us how to love our neighbor. The rest is the details.

2. Learn something. Let's face it, we've earned the reputation we have for being stupid. Start listening to the experts on whatever subject--that's why they're called experts.

Don't get me wrong. Anger driven ignorance goes a long way. But you have to keep feeding the anger, and you have to work constantly to dodge the experts. Anger runs out and leaves you feeling empty. You get tired of trying to come up with new counter-experts.

It's your choice. I'm betting the strategy above has more staying power. I'm betting we'll keep more of our children in the faith. I'm betting we'll have healthier churches.

Parables of the Kingdom 2

2011-12-15T13:14:00.000-05:00

... continued from yesterday.
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Given the fact that these parables have traveled from Jesus through decades of Jesus-followers to the individual gospel writers, it is not surprising sometimes to find a "layered-ness" to them. For example, it is no coincidence that parables involving money and women stand out in Luke, because these are some of its emphases. It is not surprising to find more pronounced parables about judgment in Matthew, because Matthew specializes among the gospels in weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth.

Similarly, it is not surprising that we do not always pick up on the "political" overtones Jesus' parables probably had originally in terms of Israel as a "nation." In the next volume, I will argue that all four of the gospels in their current form likely date to after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70, so it is no surprise if we have to dig a little to hear them as the Galilean peasants on the countryside would have. The gospels were written to present Jesus to their audiences and so understandably focus on Jesus' ministry in terms that apply most to their communities of faith in the late first century.

For Luke, this was the "times of the Gentiles" (cf. Luke 21:24). For Matthew, this was the time when the mission had shifted to all the nations (cf. Matt. 28:19). By contrast, Jesus' primary focus on earth was surely on Israel and the Jews (cf. Matt. 10:5-6), and even then only on a subset of Israel. [1] The last chapter showed how likely it was that the restoration of Israel politically was part of John the Baptist's message, and it is not hard to find hints of this dynamic in the gospels even as they now stand (e.g., Matt. 19:28).

Originally, Jesus' audiences would not have distinguished the kingdom of God from the kingdom of re-established Israel, and it would have been understood undoubtedly as a kingdom to come on earth. In the period after Easter, it no doubt was clear to Jesus-followers that only those who accepted Jesus as the messiah would be part of this kingdom. Nevertheless, even Paul argues that the vast majority of Israel would eventually come to have this faith (cf. Rom. 11:25-32).

These observations remind us of how differently we read the Bible than its first audiences would have heard them. We tend to think of the church as something completely separate from Israel as a nation. Similarly, over the centuries Christians have tended to think more in terms of heaven and hell than in terms of a coming kingdom on earth. Recent days have seen a movement to recognize that the Bible primarily teaches about eternity on a restored earth after a resurrection of our bodies. [2]

And there is an increasing recognition that Christianity did not become a separate religion from Judaism perhaps until after all the books of the New Testament were written, [3] with some arguing they were not completely distinct even in the early 300s. [4] In the thinking of the New Testament, Gentiles were added to the kingdom of (true) Israel. Christianity was not some new religion, and Gentiles who converted to Christianity saw themselves converting to a form of Judaism. It was not until around AD200 that the Gentile Christian Tertullian made his famous comments about Christianity being a "third race," neither Jewish or Gentile. [5]

The point is that we can usually read Jesus' parables in more than one way. Originally, they had much to say to the Galilean Jews who came to hear him from the surrounding villages. Yet the gospel writers also "translated" them in ways that spoke to increasingly Gentile audiences in the late first century. And the way the gospels have sometimes generalized them has also helped us to hear truths that apply directly to us even today...

[1] The "lost sheep" of Israel, and even then, primarily the lost sheep in Galilee.

[2] E.g., N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008) and Joel B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008). Wright and Green may at times overstate their case, but their fundamental argument seems beyond reasonable doubt.

[3] Cf. James D. G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways: Between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity, 2nd ed. (London: SCM, 2011).

[4] Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007); also Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2006).

[5] To the Gentiles 1.8.

White Rose vs. Hitler

2011-12-14T14:56:00.000-05:00

Often mid-morning, I take the underground one station south of the university to Odeonsplatz, where I get my daily grande Filtercaffee at Starbucks with "kleinen Platz" for Kondensmilch. I liked Odeonsplatz the first time I saw it, with its gaudy gold church and the palisade behind Starbucks where there is the start of the Englisher Garten.

What I didn't realize till today was that it was here at Odeonsplatz that Hitler's fumbled "putsch" came to an end in 1923. And I also didn't realize that an area I regularly cross on my way to Starbucks was a cafe Hilter used to frequent before he came to power.

The garden with the palisades is the Hofgarten, which has a monument to the White Rose movement, a group of students (and a philosophy professor) from the University of Munich who distributed leaflets against Hitler from 1942-43.

All three of these were beheaded by guillotine after they were caught (Hans and Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst), along with others. A stupid janitor turned them in. Let his name stand here in disgrace: Jakob Schmidt. Sophie flung a last bit of leaflets into the air in the atrium of the university, again, a place I walked through even today. Janitor probably didn't like her making a mess... turned them into the Gestapo.

I thought it was a story worth telling. And how bizarre to move through places with such significance for three months and not know it! I think I'll seek out the White Rose monument tomorrow when I go for my daily Starbucks...

Parables of the Kingdom 1

2011-12-14T03:28:00.000-05:00

It has been October 6 since I posted on Jesus and the kingdom. I had been writing on "The Essential Jesus" before getting quite distracted. I now want to resume blogging about Jesus from now till the time he returns... or until I finish or am otherwise distracted ;-)
________
Parables of the Kingdom
Mark has this to say about the way Jesus taught the crowds that followed him: "he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples" (4:34, NRSV). It goes against the way most of us think about parables, but Jesus tells his disciples that his parables are meant to be something like riddles to the crowds, "in order that 'they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand'" (4:12, NRSV). These stories, that some use as an illustration of how clearly Jesus taught, sometimes had the effect of confusing, of distinguishing those who had faith from those who did not.

Now this way of looking at Jesus' parables fits especially with one of the special themes of Mark--the hiddenness of who Jesus was and the misunderstanding of his followers. Luke does not treat Jesus' parables in this way. The second Jesus volume in this series will explore unique features in each gospel like these. What I take away from Mark for now is that Jesus' followers--including his disciples--may have looked back at his teaching in hindsight with a somewhat different understanding than they had when he was on earth. Looking back, his parables may have looked somewhat like riddles that they could only really understand now.

Mark tells us that these parables or riddles were the main way Jesus spoke publicly. [1] The kinds of parables Jesus told are exactly the kinds of stories that fit an agricultural world: stories about seeds, farming, day laborers, feasts, muggers, not to mention economic and religious pressures from "outsiders." The parables in the gospels range from very short stories to one line comparisons (called similes). [2] Sometimes the same basic parable varies a little from gospel to gospel, a fact worth a quick moment of reflection.

It is true that Jesus likely retold the same parable on more than one occasion and that he may very well have varied them himself from time to time. However, this fact does not likely account for all the variation among the gospels for two reasons. First, these stories were likely told and retold from the moment Jesus shared them. [3] It seems almost certain that the gospel writers were not bothered by the sorts of minor variations that come from oral tradition. It is simply wrong to demand they follow modern expectations about how to do "investigative reporting."

A second factor is that they also felt free to edit their sources themselves in order to emphasize certain things. [4] They were oriented around the message. They were not antiquarians whose main goal was to make sure they told it exactly how it happened or to get the quotes exactly as they were originally said. The gospels are more like The Message than the King James Version. Detailed comparisons of the gospels demonstrate this fact over and over again beyond any reasonable doubt.

We cannot critique them for their focus on the message rather than on precise historical reconstruction. That is our problem and our hang-up, not theirs. They were not in error to do so. We are in error if we insist that our standard is the only correct standard!

...

[1] On the parables, I want to suggest two books that I consider very helpful: Craig Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1990) and Klyde Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). Older classics that are now less helpful include C. H. Dodd's, The Parables of the Kingdom (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1961) and Joachim Jeremias' The Parables of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972 [1958]).

[2] In an earlier day, the German scholar Adolf Jülicher put some very strange restrictions on what Jesus could or could not have really said based on the form a parable might take (Die Gleichnisreden Jesu 2 vols. [Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1888, 1899]). Famously, he thought a parable that really went back to Jesus could only have one point and certainly could not be in the form of an allegory, where the various elements of the story had some figurative significance. Scholars now rightly recognize that these claims, which were strangely influential for almost a century, have little basis at all.

[3] This is a key insight from the work of Kenneth Bailey, Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008). A nice overview of some of the implications is in James D. G. Dunn, A New Perspective on Jesus: What the Quest for the Historical Jesus Missed (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005).

[4] I will show why this is almost certainly the case in the second volume of this series.

Christ's death for all the past...

2011-12-13T04:56:00.000-05:00

I finished the main text of a chapter on Hebrews I hope to send off to a publisher later in the week. The publisher invited me to submit seven months ago--I hope they'll still take it. ;-) It needs a footnote glazing and then I'll send it off.

My argument prior to this chapter is that most scholars read Paul anachronistically to believe that Christ's atonement covered all people past, present, future. It's not that Paul says anything that contradicts this idea...

(which might get us into some interesting discussions of what meaning of Scripture is important. Is it what is in the bubble above Paul's head or the potentialities of the text in front of us? Others might say that such a discussion in itself is already too bibliolatrous. I'm happy to announce I will not be discussing any of these issues ;-)

My argument in this chapter is that Hebrews represents a crucial step in the development of early soteriology (thinking about salvation). I'm arguing that, in part catalyzed by the destruction of the temple, Hebrews argues shockingly that the Levitical system was never intended actually to take away sins. The audience need not be troubled by its destruction or by mainstream Jews enticing them to engage in synagogue means that, until the temple is rebuilt, serve as a kind of temporary substitute.

Christ's death was not merely an atonement for the recent sins of Israel, yet another reset button on God's relationship with Israel. Christ's death was not merely an atonement for anyone alive (or recently alive) who was baptized into his name, Jew or Gentile. Christ's death was an atonement for all the sins of all the Jews in the past who ever lived and were in right relationship with God.

The "Palestinian" Gag

2011-12-12T13:47:00.000-05:00

From The Associating Press:

In one of the longest running gags of recent times, the "Palestinians" have finally admitted to a joke started in 1948 when the United Nations created the nation of Israel. "We had just been hanging out in the countryside at the time," said one of the many Arabs who was in on the joke. "We saw that the 'Jordanians' had made up a name for themselves... (Don't tell anyone but they're really Arabs with a made up name too)... and the Jews were calling themselves Israelis.

"So my Dad and some other guys got together at a pub in Jericho and had this great idea of calling ourselves, 'Palestinians.' Get it, we were in Palestine," he continued with a chuckle. "For a while we thought we might actually get a whole country out of it.

"Then some crazies started bombing things and killing people and it all went Ramallah. Frankly, I'm glad it's all over. It's been hard keeping up the joke all these years. We'll all be abandoning the desert and going back to Arabia in the next week or two."

Afternoon at the Museum...

2011-12-12T06:36:00.000-05:00

Yesterday afternoon we checked another thing off our "do before leaving Munich" list. We went to the Deutsches Museum, which is full of actual planes, boats, submarines, space craft, etc. You could actually climb into a lot of them. I would have loved it as a child.

Maybe it's because I'm a little stressed in general but I was thoroughly depressed by the time I left for several reasons. Here are just a few:

1. My kids won't be going/didn't go on field trips to anything like this from Justice/McCullough, or Marion High School.
2. The vast majority of American kids don't care about this sort of stuff... meaning America has no future in the world.
3. The accumulated knowledge this museum represents is way beyond anything I know... and I mean pick any point in time from some 1800 ship to the 1960 jet to the 1980's space craft.

Just thought I'd cheer everyone up on a Monday morning. ;-)

Paul the Apostle 2

2011-12-11T11:35:00.001-05:00

Finishing up this intro to Paul, finishing up this section from yesterday.

... It is conventional to speak of Paul's three missionary journeys, although Acts does not actually number them. At some point while Paul was part of the ministry at Antioch, he and another apostle named Barnabas embarked on a missionary journey west to the island of Cyprus and then north to the south central part of Asia Minor--modern day Turkey. These cities in Asia Minor seem to be the places to which Paul would later send his letter to the Galatians.

But in between this "first" missionary journey and his second, several key things would happen. First, the question of whether Gentile believers needed to be circumcised to be saved came to a head. Both Paul and the leaders of Jerusalem--James and Peter--agree that they do not. Acts 15 portrays this decision as a fairly public one, while we get more the of a somewhat private agreement from Galatians 2.

However, this question was only one among many. Even if Gentiles could be saved without fully converting to Judaism, how could Jewish and Gentile believers fellowship together if Gentiles did not follow at least some purity rules? I believe that conflicts along these lines were also part of the reason why Paul and Barnabas did not embark on their second journey together, in addition to disagreement over whether Mark should accompany them. The Jerusalem church also seems to have disagreed with Paul as well.

So Paul embarked on his "second" journey with another co-worker, Silas, along with a young man called Timothy. The journey started with villages that they had visited before but before long they found themselves in Macedonia and Greece, where they founded churches in Thessalonica and Corinth. It was probably at Corinth that Paul wrote what would be the first of the letters we now find in the New Testament, 1 Thessalonians. [1] Paul would spend a year and a half in Corinth.

Paul did not likely write letters because he preferred to communicate in that way. Rather, his letters were a substitute for his presence and he sent them in the hands of individuals he knew would represent him well as they read them. The vast majority of people at the time could not read, so they would be dependent on others reading the letters out loud publicly, probably in worship. Paul's letters were thus "oral documents," written but meant to be read aloud.

On Paul's so called "third" journey focused on the city of Ephesus, on the west coast of Asia Minor. Paul would spend almost three years there. From there he certainly wrote 1 Corinthians, but I have argued that Paul also wrote Galatians and perhaps Philippians from Ephesus as well. I side with those who think Paul was actually imprisoned at Ephesus at least once and perhaps even twice, even though Acts does not mention it.

After leaving Ephesus, Paul would write both 2 Corinthians and Romans. He wrote 2 Corinthians on his way to Corinth and then Romans once he was there. He was on his way ultimately to Jerusalem with an offering he had been collecting for the church there. We do not fully know what happened, except that in Jerusalem he was arrested and that he used his Roman citizenship to get to Rome. This is the point of Paul's story where the previous volume ended and where this one begins.

[1] Many of course consider Galatians to be Paul's first letter, thinking he wrote it not long before the "Jerusalem Council" of Acts 15.

Paul the Apostle 1

2011-12-10T15:44:00.000-05:00

Paul may have described himself as a "Hebrew of Hebrews" and a Pharisee before he believed (e.g., Phil. 3:5; 2 Cor. 11:22), probably meaning that he spoke Aramaic as a first language. But we learn from Acts that he was born in Tarsus (Acts 22:3), in the Diaspora, among those Jews scattered throughout the world. Accordingly, Greek was also a first language for him.

We also learn from Acts that he was a Roman citizen (e.g., Acts 16:37), which probably meant that he came from a family of some wealth. He speaks of working with his hands as a step down for the sake of the gospel (e.g., 1 Cor. 4:12). He might have worked with leather and tent making in the mission field, but back home in Tarsus he more likely was the boss.

These elements in his background no doubt helped equip him to be the formidable apostle that he turned out to be. Paul was not one of the twelve apostles. For example, he did not fit the list of qualifications for Judas Iscariot's replacement in Acts 1:21-22. He had not followed Jesus from the time of John the Baptist.

However, he considered himself an apostle of equal status to the other apostles (cf. 2 Cor. 12:11). "Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?" he told the Corinthians (1 Cor. 9:1). An apostle is someone sent on an official mission representing a greater authority. Paul received this commission, this role as ambassador, from Jesus himself. Jesus appeared to him and sent him to be a witness of the good news that Jesus is king (cf. 1 Cor. 15:1-8).

Paul would eventually understand his specific mission as apostle to the Gentiles, to non-Jews (e.g., Gal. 2:7). Acts regularly shows Paul going first to the Jewish synagogue when he entered a new city, but we know from Paul's own writings that the Jews in these synagogues were never his primary target (Rom. 15:16). He also felt led to places where the good news about Jesus' kingdom had not yet taken hold. For this reason, he never planned to spend long in Rome, because faith in Jesus was already well established there (Rom. 15:20).

It is hard to know exactly when Paul fully understood the nature of his calling, even though in hindsight Paul clearly understood this to be God's purpose for him from the start (cf. Acts 22:21; 26:17). It is possible it was very early indeed. He says that after Christ revealed himself to him, he went to the Nabatean kingdom of Arabia even before he returned to Jerusalem (cf. Gal. 1:17). Since he apparently stirred up controversy while he was there (cf. 2 Cor. 11:32-33), it seems likely that he was preaching to Gentiles from the very beginning.

Paul tells us it was about three years after he believed that he finally went back to Jerusalem (Gal. 1:18). Both Paul and Acts tell us he then spent about ten years thereafter back around his home city of Tarsus (Gal. 1:21; Acts 9:30). We can presume that he was preaching the good news during these years, even though we know very little about them. At some point, he became part of the exciting developments at the church of Antioch in Syria (cf. Acts 11:19-30)...

Simon the "Zealot"

2011-12-08T05:17:00.001-05:00

I'm intrigued again this morning by the epithet in Luke 6:15 and Acts 1:13 that one of Jesus' core disciples is called Simon the "Zealot." The majority position is that this term was used specifically of a group of the populace that played a key role in the Jewish War, not least taking over the temple (contra Hengel). It seems to me that it is not enough to argue that Simon had this epithet when it did not have this connotation because 1) the word had the connotations of the revolutionaries at the time when Luke wrote (post AD70) and 2) Luke specifically edits his Markan source with this word.

Why would Luke choose a word that specifically referred to a revolutionary party and do so at a time when that would have been the primary connotation unless Simon had been one?

Paul the Christ-Follower 2

2011-12-08T00:07:00.000-05:00

... continued from the previous post.
_________
At least initially, Paul seemed to expect Christ to return within his lifetime. We who are alive and remain will be caught up in the air, he tells the Thessalonians (1 Thess. 4:17). He advises the Corinthians that it is best not to marry because "the time is short" (1 Cor. 7:29). The question of what happens to believers who die does not even seem to have come up in the months he was at Thessalonica (cf. 1 Thess. 4:13). He must have focused almost entirely on escaping the coming judgment on the living (e.g., 1 Thess. 1:10) and hardly mentioned the dead. His focus was thus almost the opposite of many today, emphasizing Christ's return to the earth rather than what happens after you die.

Language of "salvation" in Paul thus focused overwhelmingly on an event that was coming rather than on some internal experience. The gospel was also the positive truth that God had enthroned Jesus as king and that God's kingdom was coming--it did not focus on some individual experience. Believers would still on the Day of judgment give an account for how they had lived, even after God had forgiven their sins (e.g., 2 Cor. 5:10). While there was no promise of salvation if a person did not continue in faithfulness (e.g., 1 Cor. 9:26-27; Phil. 3:11), other believers might only get a bit burned in that judgment, while still making it into the kingdom (e.g., 1 Cor. 3:13-15).

On the day when Christ returned, the material creation, including our physical bodies, would be transformed to become like Christ's body after he was resurrected (1 Cor. 15:49; Phil. 3:21). Currently, the creation is enslaved to corruption and decay (Rom. 8:20), probably since the time of Adam's sin. Our physical flesh, because it is a part of the creation, is also in its default state in subjection to the power of Sin. This is why those without the Spirit cannot do the good, even if they want to do so.

However, the Spirit frees us now from this power of sin, and when Christ returns the whole creation will be liberated. Paul likely located eternity on this renewed earth. This eternal kingdom of God on earth, where Christ would reign would thus not be a matter of "flesh and blood" (1 Cor. 15:50), but of transformed bodies.

In the meantime, believers live on earth as the "body of Christ" (1 Cor. 12:12-31). We each have different roles to play, but each is important. The Spirit lives in the local assemblies (churches) collectively as the temple of the Lord (e.g., 1 Cor. 3:16) far more importantly than within each person individually. Collectively as well as individually, a church presents its bodies to God as a singular living sacrifice (Rom. 12:2). Together as well as individually, the God of peace sets us apart and makes us his, "sanctified" and blameless (1 Thess. 5:23).

Paul the Christ-Follower 1

2011-12-07T04:08:00.000-05:00

Trying to summarize Paul under three headings: Paul the Jew, Paul the Christ-Follower, and Paul the Apostle. This is the first of "Paul the Christ-Follower."
________
Paul the Christ-Follower
Paul speaks of a time when God was pleased "to reveal his Son in me" (Gal. 1:16). In Acts 9 we get a fuller version of this event. On his way to Damascus, the risen Christ appeared to Paul and changed the trajectory of his life from someone zealous for the ethnic distinctives of the Jewish Law to someone who zealously proclaimed that Christ is king.

Like many Jews of his day, Paul may have already been looking for a messiah, a king, to come eventually to rule over a renewed nation of Israel. As a Pharisee, Paul would already have believed in a future resurrection at least for those killed because of their faithfulness to God. But initially, the idea that Jesus might be this king did not compute for Paul. Messiahs were not supposed to die, and the resurrection was supposed to happen all at once, not just to one individual.

Not only that, but this Jesus was not zealous for the Law the way he thought the messiah surely would be. Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners. He did not seem to pay much attention to the rules about the sabbath or matters of purity. He included people who were unclean in his fellowship.

All of that changed when Christ appeared to him, and Paul had to rethink his entire way of understanding. Jesus was the Messiah, the "anointed one," the "Christ" in Greek. He now confessed that "Jesus is Lord," perhaps the earliest Christian confession of faith. To say Jesus was Lord was to say that God raised him from the dead and enthroned him as king of the universe (Ps. 110:1). This is the heart of the gospel, the "good news," for Paul: Jesus has arrived as God's king to set up God's kingdom. He is the one Lord who goes with the one God (1 Cor. 8:6). He will come again to earth soon to finish what he started, to judge the earth while rescuing those who confess him as Lord.

However, Paul tells us that the focus of his preaching was the cross (e.g., 1 Cor. 1:23). In the cross, like the believers before him, Paul saw Christ's death as a sacrifice for sins. Through the "faith of Jesus," God showed his people his continuing faithfulness to them. But unlike most believers before him, Paul argued that this sacrifice could apply both to Jews and Gentiles. He believed that God graciously would accept Gentiles because of Christ's death, as well as Jews.

In fact, Paul came to believe that God accepted Jews on exactly the same basis, that no amount of keeping of the Jewish Law could establish a right relationship between a Jew and God. After all, he had been blameless at keeping the Law and still needed Christ. God must obviously be looking for something other than Law keeping, and it turned out to be the cross of Christ.

Paul follows through with the new revelation. The Jewish Law put the Jews under a curse. It only showed their inability to keep it. The death of Christ redeemed them from that curse. God in his grace had decided to reconcile the entire world to himself through Christ, apart from things like circumcision, the purity and food laws, or sabbath observance. These are things Paul primarily had in mind when he said a person could not be made right with God or "justified" by "works of Law" (e.g., 3:28), the things that most separated Jew from Gentile. God was both the God of the Jews and the Gentiles (Rom. 3:29). He was the God of all who had faith in him (4:16), those who have trusted in what he has done through Christ (9:33). All who call on the name of the Lord Jesus will be saved from God's coming judgment (10:13).

Key for Paul was that a person participate and "get inside" of Christ's death and resurrection. We are baptized into Christ. We are buried with him in baptism (Rom. 6:4), and we rise with him to live a new life in his resurrection (6:8; 8:11). The life that we now live, we live "in the faithfulness of the Son of God" (Gal. 2:20, my translation). God accomplishes this transformation through the Holy Spirit, whom God has given us as both a guarantee and down payment of our inheritance that is to come (2 Cor. 5:5).

The result is that we now live a life "according to the Spirit" rather than "according to the flesh," which is how we used to live (Gal. 5:16; Rom. 8:8), a life of love toward our neighbor. Paul's ethic for his Gentile converts is basically the Jewish Law stripped of its ethnic particulars. External matters like circumcision and purity rules, even sabbath observance are not part of God's expectation for Gentile believers. However, they remain under Christ's law (e.g., 1 Cor. 9:21). They remain, for example, under the sexual prohibition of the Jewish Scriptures, which Christians later came to call the "Old" Testament.

Paul the Jew 2

2011-12-06T09:53:00.000-05:00

Continued from yesterday...

... Nor is it likely that Paul viewed himself as a moral failure before he "discovered" justification by faith. This was also one version of the older story. Paul, plagued by his moral failures as revealed in Romans 7, finally realizes that he must depend entirely on Christ for his righteousness. Now that he believes, he still cannot do the good he wants to do (7:19), but God now looks at Christ's righteousness rather than his. Paul is both sinner and righteous, as long as he keeps repenting.

Again, this scenario is a fair description of Martin Luther's pilgrimage, but it is not Paul's. [1] In Philippians 3:6, Paul says that before he believed on Christ, he was faultless, "as for righteousness based on the law." Indeed, Paul regularly tells his churches confidently to imitate his way of living (e.g., 1 Cor. 4:16-17; Phil. 4:9), and the word repentance rarely leaps from his subconscious in his writings--in fact never in relation to himself. Paul was not a bad Pharisee. He simply had an encounter with Christ that led him in another direction!

The vast majority of experts on Romans now agree that Paul never meant Romans 7 to depict a never-ending struggle for believers to do the right thing. Indeed, we are reading this chapter exactly the opposite of how Paul meant it if we do not read it in the flow of Romans 6-8. In these chapters, Paul contrasts what it is like to be a slave to sin with what it is like to have the Spirit within. The end of the argument is Romans 8, where he talks about the Spirit setting a person free from the law of sin and death (8:2).

On the way there, Paul vividly dramatizes in Romans 7 the plight of the person, especially the Jew, who does not have the Spirit but wants to keep the essence of the Law, such as the command not to covet. At the dramatic climax, he pictures this poor person crying out, "Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?" (7:24) The answer quickly follows, "through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (7:25). Now by the power of the Spirit, we can fulfill the "just requirement of the law" (8:4, NRSV), which Paul later tells us is to love our neighbor (13:8-10).

Paul does say some things in his writings that paved the way for later Christians like Tertullian to consider Christians a "third race," neither Jew nor Gentile. [2] In 1 Corinthians 9:20-21, Paul says that "to the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews... to those not having the law I became like one not having the law." But this statement is really about keeping the Jewish Law--especially the parts like circumcision that distinguished Jew from Gentile--rather than about him abandoning his identity as an Israelite. Romans 11 gives us the bigger picture.

For a time, the hearts of many Jews are hardened not to believe. Certainly there remains a remnant of "true Israel" at present (e.g., Rom. 9:6), but most of ethnic Israel does not currently believe. God is instead at this time grafting into the tree of Abraham the "full number of the Gentiles" (11:25). Israel's lack of faith, in God's plan, has created an opportunity for the Gentiles to hear and believe the good news as well (e.g., 11:11). But once that full number of the Gentiles comes in, then Israel itself will believe too: "all Israel will be saved" (11:26). The "part" that is hardened (11:25) will become the "all" that believes (11:26).

For Paul, Israel thus remained the people of God. Jews who believed remained part of true Israel. Gentiles who believed could become a part of true Israel as well.

[1] We have Krister Stendahl, more than any other expert on Paul, to thank for these observations. See "Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," now in Paul Among Jews and Gentiles (***). I dedicated the second volume of this series to him and N. T. Wright.

[2] To the Gentiles 1.8.

Hebrews excerpt for the day...

2011-12-05T05:12:00.001-05:00

From a chapter I am writing on "Hebrews and the Temple":

"Indeed, part of the new perspective we areproposing is a recognition that this kind of argument usually has a certain implicitcircularity to it. It wonders whyHebrews does not mention the destruction of the temple when it is arguing againstrelying on the temple. If, however,Hebrews is not arguing against relying on the temple, the argument loses almostall of its intuitive power. True, it would make no sense to argue againstrelying on the temple’s sacrificial system if it were already destroyed. The audience could not rely on the temple theneven if they tried. If, however, Hebrewsis consoling a group of people troubled by the temple’s absence, thenthe question simply becomes why the author does not explicitly mention the centralcause of the audience’s wavering. Interestingly,we have to ask this question anyway, no matter what we think the underlyingsituation was. For whatever reason, theauthor chose to speak in generalities rather than in specifics."

Paul the Jew 1

2011-12-05T02:09:00.001-05:00

I am very grateful to Wesleyan Publishing House for publishing soon to be three books on Paul's letters. Although there is a wealth of books out there on Paul, I was convinced that a lot of the great insights on Paul these last thirty years have not made it to the pew, including the Wesleyan pew. What started out as a single book project, "Life Reflections on Paul's Life and Letters," has now become three books! The first reflects on Paul's Earlier Letters. The second ended up just being reflections on Romans.

Now the third one is being proofed, Paul: Prisoner of Hope. It will cover the later letters of the Pauline corpus. As often happens, I got long winded and these chapters, which were originally meant to be part of the second volume, became a third volume in their own right...

... which means I quickly need to write a new "first chapter" for the third volume that catches a reader up to speed with the other two books, just in case someone starts with this one. I've decided to do so in three sections: Paul the Jew, Paul the Christ-follower, and Paul the apostle. Today is Paul the Jew.
______________
Chapter 1: Introducing Paul
This is the last in a series of three volumes reflecting on Paul's life and letters. Accordingly, this book starts near the end of a discussion that has already extensively covered Paul's known ministry. The first volume, Paul: Messenger of Grace, reflected on Paul's early life, as well as on some of his early letters: 1 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and Philippians, since I wonder if it was written while Paul was at Ephesus. The second volume, Paul: Soldier of Peace, reflected extensively on his letter to the Romans.

In this book, we finish reflecting on the remaining letters of the Pauline collection: Ephesians, Colossians, the Pastoral letters, and we will cover 2 Thessalonians and Philemon here as well. However, since you may not have read the two previous books on Paul, I want to take a few pages to summarize some of the key dimensions of Paul's life and ministry up to this point. Most of the letters in this volume differ in some interesting ways from Paul's earlier ones, and it is helpful to have an idea of the starting point before looking at the variations!

1. Paul the Jew
Paul was a Jew, just as Jesus was a Jew. Christians throughout the centuries have often seen this fact as irrelevant, as if when Paul became a Christian, he abandoned his Jewishness entirely. He is thought to have changed religions and perhaps even become a model for anger or hatred against Jews today. It is unfortunate, but evil hearts throughout the centuries have often used such ideas as an excuse to persecute or even slaughter Jews. [1]

In part as a result of the Holocaust, the last few decades have seen a careful re-examination of some of these assumptions. What we have found is some glaring holes in this way of looking at Paul. For example, Paul identifies himself as an Israelite and a "Hebrew" in more than one place long after after he believed in Jesus (e.g., 2 Cor. 11:22; Phil. 3:5; Rom. 11:1). In fact, Acts 23:6 has Paul identifying himself as a Pharisee in the present tense over twenty years after he became a Christ follower! [2]

It is only because Christianity and Judaism are two distinct religions today that we tend to see Paul as changing religions or converting from one religion to another. Paul would not have seen it that way. For him, the Jews remained the natural branches of the tree, with Gentiles being grafted in (Rom. 11:17-21). One of the most obvious mistakes is to think of "Paul" as his Christian name, as if Paul threw away his Jewish name Saul when he "converted." Acts continues to call him "Saul" well over ten years after he believed on Jesus.

If the prevalent picture drawn of Paul's Jewishness has often been skewed, even more so has the picture of Judaism. [3] The old story was that Judaism was a legalistic religion that believed you had to earn your salvation by good works. Our hero Paul then comes along and realizes that works play no role at all in getting right with God. We are made right with God by faith alone, purely as a matter of God's grace.

This interpretation of Paul has of course everything to do with the argument between Martin Luther and the Roman Catholic Church in the 1500's. But it seriously skews Paul's argument with other Christians in the first century. The people Paul spars with in Galatians were other Christian Jews--including Peter and James--and, even then, he was arguing on the proper understanding of Jewish faith rather than in terms of Christianity versus Judaism as a separate religion. He was arguing over the proper interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures, the only Scriptures that existed at the time.

It is also important to recognize that these arguments are not the central topic of Paul's letters as a whole. They come up primarily in Romans and Galatians, where the question of how Gentiles can be incorporated into the people of God is at issue. Even there, the topic is not "Can a person earn their salvation?" but "Does a Gentile need to convert fully to Judaism to be saved?" The works under discussion are not primarily good works, but "works of law"--especially the ones like circumcision that separated Jew from Gentile ethnically.

A thorough look through all the Jewish literature of Paul's day reveals both that there was a wide spectrum of Jewish beliefs at the time and that all or nearly all of them saw God's grace as the ultimate basis for right standing before him. [4] Further, as the Wesleyan and other traditions have always argued, how one lives remains an element in final salvation for Paul, not in terms of how good a person is but in terms of walking in faithful relationship with God. The older Lutheran version of Paul was thus wrong on both ends--wrong about how grace-less Judaism was and wrong about how works-less Paul was. [5]

[1] An early reflection on this dynamic, written by a Jew in part while on the run from the Nazis in France, was Jules Isaac's Jesus and Israel (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971 [1948]).

[2] Of course, we have to interpret this fact carefully. Paul was a master at rhetoric, and Acts tends to give a "conservative" portrait of Paul. It is doubtful that Paul would have normally identified himself as a Pharisee at this point in his ministry.

[3] The work that broke the dam on this issue was E. P. Sanders' Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977).

[4] 4 Ezra, from about AD100 is sometimes mentioned as anexception.

[5] Like any tradition, present day Lutheran interpreters of Paul do not simply repeat the interpretations of Luther. They have assimilated the discussions of the last thirty years into their interpretations.

Review of new NIV

2011-12-05T02:08:00.001-05:00

Ben Witherington posted this link on his blog to an excellent review of the NIV. It's excellent because of the way it breaks down the issues of choosing a translation. If you're interested, have a look!

Second Sunday of Advent: Hebrews 11

2011-12-04T07:14:00.001-05:00

In one reckoning, the second Sunday of Advent thinks about hope. Hebrews 11 might seem like a strange place to go for Advent. It is more usually associated with faith. But hope and faith are intricately connected in Hebrews 11.

Hebrews 11 does not give a definition of faith but multiple descriptions of faith. It's opening proverb is that faith is the stuff we have now of things we are hoping will come to pass. Faith is the proof we have now of things we do not yet see. In keeping with the overall meaning of Hebrews, Hebrews connects faith with continuing on in our journey through this world even though Christ has not yet returned. In this context, faith is about endurance. It is believing in the things for which we hope even though they have not yet materialized.

In the context of Hebrews, the invisible has to do with promises God has given us for the future. These are not promises not to suffer. Quite the contrary--Hebrews 11 is full of examples of people who did suffer on this earth, though they looked to a city and country that was yet to come. But we can of course expand the meaning to things we cannot see now too.

We can believe this year that God is in control, despite the fact that he allows a lot of things to happen we might want to change if we were God. We can believe that it is right to love our enemies and to live a selfless life, even though our human intuition tells us this is stupidity. And we can believe that one day, God will play out the final reset on evil that he started on the cross.

The End of the Earth...

2011-12-03T19:29:00.001-05:00

I found it. It's at the International Bus Station in Vienna.

Not by a long shot really, of course. This is a brief thought on my psychology and sociology. I'm not sure people know what I mean when I say that we draw lines around reality. These lines usually relate to real things--like where rivers are located. But we construct boundaries in our minds well beyond.

When I went to the International Bus Station to buy bus tickets, it had the feel of getting ready to cross a line. An unfamilar subway to the industrial side of town. Down a side staircase and out into a none too friendly looking street. Then a bus station with a lot of Eastern European looking people, people headed to places like Belgrade and Serbia.

It was then the thought hit me. I was at the end of the earth. I don't know Hungarian or the host of languages spoken in relatively tiny patches of southeastern European lands. Then this morning we crossed the barrier to the East, leaving the "Western world."

The current line in my mind was drawn more than anything by the Soviet Union. It more than anything else is responsible for the difference between how the subway trains here look here in Budapest, Hungary where I write and how they look in Austria just a few kilometers to the west.

To think that Austria-Hungary used to be a unit! The buildings here are as beautiful as anywhere in Europe and more than most. To think that the oldest underground train is here--Hungary was not behind technologically a hundred years ago. And of course I'm using Wi-Fi as we speak and paid for the hostel with a credit card.

The lines are as much in my mind as in reality. We did not fall off the earth in the bus just after we crossed the border.

Which tax cuts?

2011-12-03T00:29:00.001-05:00

The payroll tax cut benefits the majority of people, especially the middle class. The tax cuts that were the big issue in the supercommittee were the ones primarily for those who make millions. If a person opposes one in the name of not raising taxes, doesn't a person have to oppose the other for the same reason?

It's legitimate to oppose raising one and not the other for economic reasons (and this argument has been used for not raising on both ends of the wealth spectrum). You might think one or the other cut benefits the economy more. But if your argument is not raising taxes, then there's something else driving your position, something you're not owning up to.

Obama kissing China's prime minister

2011-12-02T15:45:00.001-05:00

I'm pretty sure the pictures are doctored, but these were in Vienna advertising the United Colors of Benetton. ;-) The second one is Merkel of Germany kissing French Sarkozy.

Targum of Hebrews 13:9-16

2011-12-01T05:48:00.001-05:00

I love the idea of targum--an interpretive paraphrase of Scripture. The Jews did it. Arguably there is a significant element of this in the NT use of the OT, as well as in the early phase of copying the New Testament. The old idea that they counted line by line to make sure they didn't miss anything applied to the Masoretes 1000 years later, not to the biblical authors and early Christians. The Message was much more the name of the game than the ESV.

I'd love to do a targum on the whole New Testament, but I doubt any publisher would be interested. But here's my targum on Hebrews 13:9-16:

"Do not be carried away with the varied, strange,Levitical substitutes that have arisen since the temple’s destruction. We should be confident in God’s grace through the sacrifice of Christ rather than in whatever foods some are now suggesting represent the foods they used to eat in the temple. We have the altar of Christ, a sacrificial altar from which those who only rely on the “wilderness tabernacle” do not haveauthority to eat. When Israel was in thewilderness, they took the carcasses of sacrificial animals outside the camp andburned them. Jesus’ body was also takenoutside the gate of Jerusalem—our altar is not inside the camp, nor inside theearthly tent. Let us therefore gooutside the camp, outside Jerusalem, and bear the reproach that Jesus bore whenthe Romans crucified him, just as the Romans have brought shame on us again by destroying Jerusalem and the temple. The earthly Jerusalem is not our true city anyway, and weshould not expect it to remain forever. Webelong instead to the heavenly Jerusalem that is coming. The sacrifices we should be offering now aresacrifices of praise, doing good deeds, and fellowship. We should not worry about the old templesacrifices."

John and Anti-Judaism 4

2011-11-30T04:08:00.001-05:00

Reading through Terence Donaldson's Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament. For previous summaries:

Introduction
Matthew and Anti-Judaism
Luke-Acts and Anti-Judaism

Now chapter 4, John. Of all the books of the New Testament, John is the one most open to charges of antisemitism and anti-Judaism. "The Jews" in John are often synonymous with "the world" in John, which is diametrically opposed to God. The term is used some 70 times in John. They want to kill Jesus, and their father is the devil. Clearly it was easy enough at least for later readers to see in these words a completely negative designation of Jews not only as a religion (anti-Judaism) but as a race (antisemitism). As Gregory Baum once put it, "many generations of John's readers have perceived the Gospel as encouraging them to look with contempt on the Jewish people" (81).

There are some potentially mediating factors. The word sometimes has a neutral sense (about a dozen times). Sometimes the word means "Judean" rather than Jew. In a number of the most pejorative instances, "the Jews" seem to be the religious authorities in Jerusalem.

The relationship to Gentiles is not straightforward. The word Gentile never appears in John. Almost all of those who follow Jesus in John are themselves Jews. Still, John explains things that a Jew would know, implying that it is written so that Gentiles could read it. The majority position on the "sheep not of this fold" verse is that it refers to Gentiles.

I posted yesterday matters relating to the possible history of John both as a document and as a community. These sorts of issues potentially impact the way we understand John's use of language like "the Jews." For example, if the scholarly consensus is correct, then John's community at some point was forced out of mainstream Jewish synagogues. So Baum once argued that "the Gospel needs to be read as a response to a painful exclusion rather than as an attempt to force and hasten a separation" (84).

Donaldson concludes the chapter thinking about John rhetorically. He believes that 20:31 most likely should be rendered, "these are written so that you might continue to believe that Jesus is the Christ" and thus that John addressed an internal community (contra Bauckham). As such, we have an inner-Jewish debate rather than an externally driven anti-Judaism.

It would be fun to explore further, but this is where our discussion of Donaldson's chapter ends.

The History of John

2011-11-29T03:14:00.001-05:00

I've finished the next chapter in Terence Donaldson's Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament. It is on the Gospel of John and may be my post tomorrow. But I was struck by the gap between the church and the academy when I read Donaldson's description of the current consensus on the "two-level" nature of John's Gospel. I'm struck because I have to imagine that the vast majority of pastors in America, after reading this post, would say, "Consensus? I've never even heard of that." Or even more: "I completely disagree with that" or "That doesn't fit with the way I approach Scripture."

It is a microcosm of many issues, where the vast majority of experts in a particular subject who follow the standards of "objective" research have come to a particular perspective that is highly questioned on a popular level. Then usually a counter-community of experts arises with a primary goal of arguing that the evidence can be read in a different way. Such counter-guilds appear to be following the rules of research but they do so from a deductive rather than inductive perspective. They start with their conclusion and go to the evidence to support it rather than starting with the evidence and drawing conclusions that seem to fit the data most straightforwardly. [1 postmodern footnote]

Enough preface. And now, the "consensus" of experts on the history of the Gospel of John, forged primarily by Raymond Brown, a godly Roman Catholic who passed away a couple years ago. The consensus is that John has two interpretive layers. The one has to do with Jesus. The other has to do with the individuals who produced John and their "community."

1. The Gospel of John has some seams...
... that seem to indicate that it was not written in one sitting. Rather, it seems to have developed as a document over time. In 3:22 Jesus comes into Judea... but he has already been there since 2:13. In 6:1 Jesus goes to the other side of Galilee... but he was not on this side before but in Jerusalem. In 14:31 Jesus tells his disciples to get up... but he talks for three more chapters before they do. Chapter 20 ends the book... but then it goes on and tells about the author of John in the third person in chapter 21. One that Donaldson doesn't mention is the fact that Jesus performs many signs (2:23; 3:2) in between his first (2:11) and second (4:54) signs.

It thus seems quite likely that the Gospel of John was written in stages and, since the last chapter talks about the beloved disciple as author, it would seem that John himself (remembering that we don't actually know it was John--the text never identifies the beloved disciple) was not the one who put it into its current form.

As an inspiration break, I don't see any of this as contradicting the idea of inspiration. Editing can be inspired just as well as sitting down and writing. It might, however, mess with unexamined assumptions we have.

2. The Beloved Disciple
The majority of John experts do not think that this was John the son of Zebedee but another follower of Jesus who was not one of the Twelve (Hengel suggested someone we know of called John the elder). The Twelve do not play a major role in John and in fact Peter is subordinated to the beloved disciple in the narrative. Given the prominence of Judea and Jerusalem in John, the majority consider this disciple to be from Judea rather than Galilee.

To some, the extra interest in John the Baptist suggests the author might have started as a follower of him. At the same time, I would add, John de-emphasized the Baptist in a way that may say something about the situation at Ephesus and followers of JB even later when Paul was there (cf. Acts 19).

3. Expulsion from synagogue
The Gospel of John is quite distinct from the Synoptics in its theology. It is, for example, far more dualistic. Its Christology is more explicitly "high" than most of the rest of the New Testament. In Brown's hypothesis (supplemented by J. Louis Martyn), John's group is eventually expelled from the Jewish synagogue. In the majority hypothesis, it is unlikely at the time of Jesus that anyone would be expelled from a synagogue for believing Jesus was the Messiah. The incidents with the blind man and his parents in John would thus reflect the situation of the community that produced the Gospel rather than incidents from the historical Jesus.

4. Arrival in Ephesus
Tradition has John at Ephesus, and the majority hypothesis is comfortable with the idea that John and his community might have left Judea around the time of the Jewish War and moved to Ephesus.

5. John reaches its current form.
After John's death, John 21 was added as an epilog, while additional material like chapters 15-17 was added.

Something like the preceding is the majority hypothesis. Certainly it is subject to critique and evaluation. Some parts seem more solid to me than others. For example, that the Gospel of John developed in stages seems very likely to me because of the seams. It also seems likely to me that it reached its current form after the death of the Beloved Disciple. I am also very sympathetic to the idea that this disciple was not one of the Twelve, that he was from Judea, and that he died in Ephesus.

The two level reading of John is what I suspect may be the most controversial in pulpit and pew. It implies that John is not straightforward history but is highly symbolic and a mixture of two histories--that of Jesus and that of one group of early believers. I might mention that Richard Bauckham has recently questioned whether any of the gospels can be read as written for an individual community.

I thought you'd want to know ;-)

[1] No one is objective. The theories of inductive research are always subject to critique and revision. They often are at some point.

Date of Hebrews: Excerpt

2011-11-28T00:08:00.001-05:00

I was happy with how this paragraph came out. In context, I'm addressing arguments by David deSilva that 10:2 implies that sacrifices are still being offered at the time of writing, as well as Luke Timothy Johnson's argument that 8:13 implies that the cultus has not been destroyed yet. Of course the use of the present tense has long been shown to be irrelevant to the case because Josephus, Clement, and others do the same long after the temple was destroyed.
____________
...When we therefore tryto reconstruct the mindset of Jews toward the temple in the time between the destructionof the temple and the Bar Kochba revolt, we get a sense that the temple wasphysically destroyed but not permanently destroyed in their conceptualframework. If we want to evaluate thepossibility that Hebrews was written in this period, we have to forget that weknow the temple was never rebuilt. Wehave to picture a time when “various strange teachings” (13:9) might come intoplay as a coping mechanism until such time as the temple was re-established. God had allowed the temple to be destroyedbefore, but once Israel’s sins were purged, he had faithfully seen it rebuilt. So he would again. This is the way we must expect many Jews tohave thought in those years, and it is against such a backdrop that we mustevaluate the possibility that Hebrews comes from this period.

Advent 1: John 1

2011-11-27T10:35:00.001-05:00

Today is the first Sunday of Advent and it seemed appropriate to reflect these next few Sundays about the coming of Jesus. John 1 seemed a good place to start.

"In the beginning was the Logos. The Logos was with God, and the Logos was divine. This Logos was with God in the beginning. Everything came into existence through it, and apart from it, not even one thing came into existence. That which has come into existence by it was life, and the life was the light of mortals. And the light is shining in the darkness, and the darkness has not put it out."

It is not until verse 14 that we hear, "the Logos became flesh and tabernacled among us, and we beheld its glory, like the glory of the only born from the Father, full of grace and truth."

The Logos was the word of God, his will in action. When God created the world, he spoke. Everything came into existence when God spoke a word. To speak of Jesus as God's Logos come into the world is thus to say that Jesus is the instrument by which God accomplished his will for the world. That will was "full of grace and truth." His will was to make sons and daughters in the world of all who would receive him (1:12). His will was an expression of love, for it was because God so loved the world, that he sent his Son into it (3:16-17).

Jesus on earth "tabernacled," which is to say that he was a tent in which God was present in the world. Jesus on earth brought life to the dark in the world. The first Sunday of Advent is about expectation about foreshadowing, about prophetic anticipation. What are we to anticipate? This year I am anticipating the Spirit of Christ filling the world again this year and thus God's will coming into the world again this year. I am anticipating God's presence being in and among us, bringing grace and truth to the world once more.

CEB and Jesus' secret trip

2011-11-26T15:26:00.001-05:00

I don't know if you've ever noticed John 7:3-10. In 7:8, Jesus tells his brothers that he's not going up to the Feast of Tabernacles. Then in 7:10, he goes up secretly. The 1984 NIV actually added the word "yet" to 7:8 to avoid the issue: "I am not yet going up to the feast." The new NIV, as well as the ESV and other translations, swallow hard and leave "yet" out because it is unlikely.

So here's the CEB: 7:3 "Jesus’ brothers said to him, 'Leave Galilee and go to Judea, so that your disciples there may see the works you do. No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Since you are doing these things, show yourself to the world.' For even his own brothers did not believe in him.

"Therefore Jesus told them, 'My time is not yet here; for you any time will do. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that its works are evil. You go to the festival. I am not going up to this festival, because my time has not yet fully come.' After he had said this, he stayed in Galilee.

"However, after his brothers had left for the festival, he went also, not publicly, but in secret."

There are enough issues that surround this verse to make your head spin. There's the question of John presenting Jesus. Is this exactly how it happened? There's the question of what even John is saying. Then there's the question of what God expects in terms of truth-telling. Are we too "Victorian" to see what the expectations were in the first century?

Jesus at least seems to shade the truth a little in John's presentation. True, he does not go to Jerusalem to do what his brothers are making fun of. He goes up with a different purpose. At the very least, it isn't George Washington and the cherry tree, a lovely tale invented, you guessed it, in the 1800's... when Victoria was queen of England ;-)

Luke-Acts and Anti-Judaism.

2011-11-26T08:29:00.001-05:00

Next installment of Terence Donaldson's Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament. For previous summaries:

Introduction
Matthew and Anti-Judaism

Today is Luke-Acts and, once again, Donaldson does not disappoint in terms of giving us an excellent "lay of the land." Once again, he captures three basic perspectives:

1. Israel rejected and replaced by the church.
Luke does not have a verse like Matthew 27:25, but the book of Acts does end with a very strong turning away from the Jews to the Gentiles. Coming as it does at the climax of Acts, one could (and many have) easily argued that Luke-Acts is a story of a definitive rejection of Jesus by the Jews with a definitive turning away from Israel thereafter.

In this reading, Luke starts full of hope. Zechariah, Elizabeth, Simeon--they all looked to the consolation of Israel and the redemption of Jerusalem. But alas, Ernst Haenchen argued that by the end of Acts, Luke has written off the Jews in favor of the Gentiles. Luke-Acts taken in its totality pictures God as done with Israel.

2. Purged Israel joined by the Gentile church
The moderating view is that, following Jacob Jervell, the mission to Israel is a success and then the mission moves on to the Gentiles. Sure, not all Israel ends up saved, but those who are to be saved within Israel are. "The picture that Luke presents, then, is not of Israel's rejection but of its division" (65). A purged and repentant Israel thus fulfill the expectations of people like Zechariah and Simeon. Now the mission can continue to the Gentiles.

3. Israel and church in tension
I'm not sure that I like this way of titling the third option, but it is the one that I favor. In this interpretation, Luke-Acts looks to some future time for the fulfillment of some predictions.

[As an aside, I do not form this conclusion as a dispensationalist. I form it on the basis of inductive Bible study. I do enjoy the fact that, at least on one score, it vindicates the lowly Dallas types over the haughty WTS types]

Jesus answer to his disciples in Acts 1:6 is not, "You're wrong to think some earthly kingdom is still coming to Israel." His answer is, "in God's time." Similarly, mention of a "times of the Gentiles until..." in Luke 21:24. The implication is that, at the end of time, God will restore political Israel and the nation will turn to Christ. The turning away at the end of Acts signals the full advent of the times of the Gentiles, not a permanent abandonment. This interpretation, by the way, fits very well with Paul in Romans 11 as well.

[Again, I say this as a Bible-head, not as a modern prophecy teacher. Any attempt to equate modern Israel with the Israel of these texts is problematic because modern Israel does not accept Jesus as messiah.]

Some of the question of tone then has to do with the social location of "Luke" and his audience (remembering that the work never identifies its author). It is generally accepted that the author was a Gentile (although even here I think the case is not as clear as often assumed). It is generally accepted that the author is writing after the fall of Jerusalem, perhaps 80's.

As far as rhetorical features, Donaldson mentions a number, including that Luke-Acts is apologetic history, that it is favorable to the Romans, that it stresses continuity with Israel. Donaldson does not, however, give a conclusion on whether it aimed at outsiders or insiders. Is Theophilus a patron? A potential convert? A symbolic name? A Roman official?

As for me, I do think Acts has a tendency to blame "the Jews" for the trouble that followed early Christians like Paul, but at the same time it is very positive toward Christian Jews like James. Indeed, Luke-Acts favors a more "conservative" form of Christianity in relation to Judaism than Paul, in my opinion. I do not think anti-Judaism is an appropriate term, especially since the kingdom will be restored to Israel in the final time.

Excerpt: Hebrews 13:9-14

2011-11-25T03:44:00.001-05:00

Here's an excerpt from my writing today. I'm discussing 13:9 and whether it might refer to participation in the temple cultus: "With various strange teachings do not be carriedaway, for it is good for the heart to be confident in [God’s] grace, not infoods that do not benefit those who walk in them."
________
... Two considerations, however, point in a differentdirection in this instance. The first isthe way the author describes the teaching in question. Most interpreters render xenos in 13:9as “strange.” It is of course possible that, if the temple had continued to exist, a later Gentile Christian at some point might have described the normal operations of the temple cultus as "strange." The question is whether anyone prior to 70CE would have, Jew or Gentile believer. On the face of it, it does not seem very likely that any mainstream Christian--especially a Christian Jew--would describe the idea of the sacrifices in the Jerusalem temple as a "strange teaching."

Indeed, it seems unlikely that "strange teachings" relating to the Levitical cultus would have arisen while the temple was still standing. In itself, this warning not to participate in miscellaneous and peculiar practices of a Levitical nature is one piece of an overall puzzle that we are arguing points to a post-70CE date for the sermon. We can imagine that, in the absence of a temple, any number of synagogue and other practices might emerge intending to serve in some way as a substitute for the now defunct sanctuary. [1] It is neither possible nor necessary for us to know exactly what they were, only to recognize the forces that make their existence more than plausible.

A second argument against the exhortation of 13:9 referring to temple sacrifices is the way that it arises in its literary context. It is plausible enough that the central high priestly argument of Hebrews alludes to the operations of the Jerusalem temple in one way or another, even though it only refers explicitly to the wilderness tabernacle. Although 13:9-14 alludes back to those earlier arguments, it seems to bring up a new issue, even if it is related. These verses are part of a collection of miscellaneous instructions in the final chapter, the letter closing to the sermon. This admonition about strange teachings is neither at the beginning of these final exhortations nor is it the final one.

It thus does not arise in a way that makes it seem like the central point of the whole sermon, which it would presumably be if it were about the Jerusalem temple. Indeed, how odd it would be if, after so much generality in the bulk of the sermon, the author only got to the point in the letter conclusion, after the sermon part was already for all intents and purposes over! It seems much more likely that this later instruction is related to the central argument but only in a somewhat peripheral way.

Accordingly, 13:9-14 does not affect our argument that Hebrews never argues against participation in the mainstream Levitical cultus. Rather, its argument always urges the audience to rely positively on Christ as a means of atonement. The audience can be confident in relation to what Christ has done. While the author argues that the Levitical cultus did not take away sins and was ineffective as a means of atonement, he never then proceeds to say, "So do not participate in it."

[1] Jukka Thoren, Barnabas Lindars***

Matthew and anti-Judaism 2

2011-11-24T02:57:00.001-05:00

I'm reading through Terence Donaldson's Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament. My summary of the first chapter is here: Introduction.

Today I want to summarize his again excellent chapter 2 on Matthew.

Donaldson ends up laying out three basic positions on the issue. But it is worthwhile to get the mother of all potentially anti-semitic verses out on the table before giving them, as he does: "Then the people as a whole answered, 'His blood be on us and on our children!'" (Matt. 27:25, NRSV). This verse has often been taken in Christian history as an indication that Jews remain perpetually under blame for the death of Jesus. Throughout history, people who call themselves Christians have used the verse as an excuse to persecute and kill Jews, just as some people would do toward homosexuals today hiding behind other verses.

The three positions are:
1. Rejection of ethnic Israel and replacement by a Gentile Church
This interpretation of Matthew sees God having bent over backwards to give Israel every opportunity to respond so that their final rejection and replacement are finally justified. In the end, the Church is almost completely Gentile. The Great Commission is understood to say, "Go and make disciples of all the Gentiles"... and not the Jews, by implication. This is a possible translation.

This interpretation sees a transition within the Gospel of Matthew from a beginning that still holds out hope for Israel to an end that has completely abandoned Israel. The Gospel begins with a genealogy that firmly connects Jesus to Israel. The mission in Matthew 10 is to the lost sheep of Israel and excludes Gentiles and Samaritans. Initially, Matthew distinguishes the leaders of Israel from the crowds. Then, in this interpretation, the distinction falls away at the time of crucifixion, where the crowds join the leaders. In this interpretation, the Great Commission now excludes Israel and the mission is now toward the Gentiles, with the Church fully replacing ethnic Israel, which is now soundly rejected. Some with this position might even argue that Matthew was written by a Gentile to a Gentile church.

2. Rejection of ethnic Israel and replacement by a Church with both Jews and Gentiles
This is a somewhat softer version of the replacement interpretation. Israel is rejected and replaced by a "third race" that is neither Jew nor Gentile. So "even if--as is quite likely--Matthew sees the destruction of Jerusalem as divine punishment on 'this generation' for its persecution of the line of prophets that culminates with Jesus (23.29-36), the idea of definitive rejection does not necessarily follow" (41).

By the way, I wholeheartedly agree with this quote. The way Matthew has edited the Parable of the Wedding Banquet in 22:7 implies that Matthew was written after the destruction (compare the version in Luke 14). I see comments like 27:25 more as explanatory and backward looking than forward looking--this is why God allowed Jerusalem to be destroyed in the past. I can accept that it might also have functioned as a polemic against competing Jewish groups of the time (e.g., perhaps the Pharisees about to set up shop at Jamnia).

Against the "complete shift" version #1 above, this version argues that the people are once again distinguished from Israel's leaders after the crucifixion in 27:64. And throughout Matthew, the phrase "all the nations" presumably includes Israel (e.g., 25:32). Cannot the Great Commission be read as an extension of the mission to the nations rather than a shutting of the door to Israel?

3. The Church as the lost sheep of Israel, joined by Gentiles
This is my position and the one to which I believe Donaldson is most sympathetic. In this perspective, "Matthew has an Israel-centered view of the group to which he and his readers belong" (43). The author thus has a "remnant or sectarian outlook." The Gentiles thus join the restored portion of Israel rather than replacing them.

On the one hand, "Matthew seems to have little interest in those aspects of the law that would have differentiated Jew from Gentile (e.g., circumcision, food laws)" (44). On the other, he is quite keen to see Jesus bringing a fulfillment to the OT Scriptures, including its law. Matthew thus argues for the most meaningful kind of continuity between believers and the Israel of the past.

As far as the purpose of the rhetoric, most consider it "social formation." The goal is not so much to vilify others as to create internal group cohesion (kind of like when I go Wesleyan on the blog). Another interesting twist Donaldson mentions is the irony of Christ's blood being upon someone. Why yes, his blood is on us to save us from our sins (1:21)!

Kudos to Gingrich...

2011-11-23T14:41:00.001-05:00

... for not wanting to split up immigrant families who've been here for 25 years. I'd like to think that the influence of Jim Garlow is somewhere in the background of that comment!

I bet I'd actually like a lot of the candidates more if they could actually say and do what they really think.

One perspective on church splits...

2011-11-23T08:48:00.001-05:00

Caught an international service in English here in Munich Sunday afternoon. It was a church that has had one or two splits in the past (in good Protestant fashion). A gentleman stood up to greet the church who had been there since its beginning. His comments were interesting in the light of the church's history.

He said, if you have differences, try to come to an agreement. But don't waste too much time if you can't. We will need thousands more churches to spread the good news to everyone, so part company in peace and go start a new church.

Never heard it put that way before! ;-)

A "thick description" of truth-telling

2011-11-22T09:58:00.001-05:00

Leave it to David Drury and friends to get some of the best discussions in the Wesleyan Church going in years. To no one's surprise, it's on Facebook and the presenting excuse is the approaching general conference. One of the discussions going has to do with WIF (our money lending body) and, presumably because its a potentially sensitive post, the poster of the thread posted under a pseudonym.

Now of course no lying is involved because everyone knew that "Orange Scott" was not the person's real name (Orange Scott was one of the founders of the Wesleyan Methodist church). But a number of people took umbridge that the person did not have the guts to post his/her own name, as well as that s/he broke the rules of Facebook by registering under a false name.

I'll leave it to the person's conscience as to their intent, whether benign or spiteful. And, being who I am, I don't care much about the WIF question. And I accept the possibility that someone relatively connected, perhaps even "on the inside" might have legitimate concerns they could hardly bring up under their own name. I'm a philosopher, a Bible-head, and a hermeneutician. I'm interested in the question of what it means to tell the truth or to have integrity with regard to registering an account on Facebook.

It is an excellent illustration of what I meant in a previous post about "thick descriptions" of things in cultures. Here are two fundamental insights into meaning:

The meaning of language is in how it is used, not simply in defining each word.
The meaning of an action or an event is a function of its socio-cultural context. If an action has a universal significance, it is because of commonality between every such context.

If I say, "There's an elephant in the room," you cannot know what I mean without knowing the context. I could be a zoo-keeper. I could be using an idiom. Or it could be code for my sister to pour Cool-aid on your head. If turn my hand and make a V in America, who knows what I'm doing (victory symbol?). In England I am flipping you off.

So it is with truth telling. I remember being at a church where some of the leaders would get very upset that individuals from another culture would tell them they were going to be at church Sunday and then would never show up. To me, this was a cultural conflict rather than a matter of them being liars or, worse, it being typical of their "lying culture." I knew what they were doing with their words.

The use of the words, "Yes, I'll be there Sunday" had a social function rather than an informative one. "Yes, I'll be there Sunday" meant "I like you and don't want to offend you... even though I don't know if I'll come Sunday or not." I considered it the cultural ignorance of the church leaders to assume that the meaning of words is always propositional, that the meaning of the words must be straightforwardly and literally defined in order to be truthful (if you disagree with me, don't ever step anywhere near a mission field). The meaning of words has to do with what we are "doing" with them rather than some propositional content... unless of course what we're doing with them is in fact propositional.

It reminds me of sermons where a pastor chastises a congregation for saying, "How are you?" without waiting for an answer. You guessed it, ignorance of how that language functions in common parlance. "How are you?" often does not mean "How are you?" in some propositional sense. It is often closer to "Hi, I want to be on good social terms with you."

So Facebook normally does not care whether you're a 9 year old girl or not really Mahatma Gandhi. The function of that language is to keep their legal nose clean if you turn out to be a bad person. They don't really care unless someone takes them to court--or you actually do something bad or do something stupid. That's what the language really means because that's how it's used, how it works. It's a game.

It's why I just smiled when someone once chastised me for being willing to go 9 miles over the speed limit. If the police don't care, then the true meaning of the 55mph on the sign is really 64mph. In other countries, stop signs mean, "Be careful as you barrel through this intersection, and if you do hit someone, we may very well come after you and kill you." It's not a lack of integrity if you don't stop. You'll be rammed from behind if you do.

Again, I'm sure I could have done better, but these are the sorts of things I mean by a thick description. What does Colossians 3:9 mean when it says not to lie to each other? To answer it, we have to know the parameters of truth telling in the first century. We can't get the answer from Webster's Dictionary.

Jews and Anti-Judaism 1

2011-11-22T05:09:00.001-05:00

I have a book review to write on Terence Donaldson's, Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament: Decision Points and Divergent Interpretations. I read the first chapter yesterday and found it a delight. What a great presentation of the lay of the scholarly land! I'm also writing on related issues in Hebrews this week so the convergence is a great serendipity for me.

Chapter 1 is the Introduction, which gives the back discussion on the question of antisemitism and the New Testament. The issue became very pertinent after WW1, especially with Jules Isaac's book Jesus and Israel. Isaac had written much of the material on the run from Nazis. His wife and daughter died in concentration camps.

Isaac was not attacking Christian faith per se, but could legitimately point out that the Nazi perspective on the Jews grew easily from a centuries old tradition that was a Christian tradition. It included a scholarly and popular climate that painted Judaism as degenerate at the time of Christ, assigned collective guilt to the Jewish people for Christ's death, and considered the dispersion of the Jews a divine punishment for their crime.

The chapter cites other scholars who pursued the issue and some of the helpful distinctions that followed the later discussion. These included Gregory Baum, who initially put early Christian polemic in the category of denunciations of Israel carried out by the prophets... thus not anti-Semitic. Rosemary Ruether by contrast argued that there was no way to rid Christianity of anti-Judaism because its view of Christ demands a polemical interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures. James Parkes argued that it was not until after the war with Rome in AD66 that there ensued a "parting of the ways" (10).

The rest of the chapter is its brilliance. Donaldson carefully and insightfully divides the issue into its parts. He does not at this point so much give answers as present the discussion and its options.

Is the New Testament anti-semitic?
Because Christianity became overwhelmingly Gentile, we have to at least address this issue in the use of New Testament texts, but many have argued that it doesn't make much sense to say that documents themselves, since they were written by Jews, were anti-Jew. Edward Flannery, for example, sees anti-Judaism as different from anti-semitism, as theological. "It rejects Judaism as a way of salvation but not the Jews as a people" (14).

Is the New Testament anti-Judaic?
Or does it fall more in the category of the prophets or a sect like at Qumran? Douglas Hare identifies three types of anti-Judaism (what follows are my words): 1) prophetic, 2) sectarian, and 3) outsider. The prophets were clearly not anti-semitic or anti-Israel. They were trying to correct it. The Qumran sect was anti-the rest of Judaism, but were still Jews arguing for the right form of Judaism. In the second century then, with the outsider comments of Gentile Christians like Ignatius and Justin Martyr, we probably have hit a form of anti-Judaism proper.

Thus Donaldson concludes that the term anti-Judaism would fit the last type but not the first type (into which category Hare put Jesus and John the Baptist). Whether the second type fits the term Donaldson considers a matter of a spectrum.

Is the New Testament supercessionist?
That is, does the NT see the Christian church replacing and superseding ethnic Israel. For Donaldson, approaching the issue in this way misses out some pieces. For example, it formulates the issue negatively--what is the discontinuity--more than positively--what was the continuity. It also does not include individuals like Marcion or the Gnostics, who did not even believe the OT was legitimate in the first place.

Kendall Soulen has distinguished types of supercessionism, each of which has a different tone. "Punitive" supercessionism sees the replacement as a matter of punishment for Israel. "Economic" supercessionism has to do with God's plan for different periods of history. There is also a mixed view that only sees the Gentiles replacing the part of Israel that did not believe, while the part that did remains unsuperseded.

Does the NT reflect a painful parting of the ways?
A lively discussion has emerged in recent decades, with Ways That Never Parted arguing that Jewish and Christian social groups interpenetrated off and on even to the time of Constantine. Daniel Boyarin has argued that "partitioning" would be a better word than "parting," and James Dunn has argued for "partings" plural rather than singular. A key here is that since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we are far more aware of the diversity of first century Judaism (sometimes even put in the plural, Judaisms) than we were before.

Set up for the book
Early in the chapter, Donaldson gives three aspects of any document that need to be taken into account when assessing this issue. First is the identity of those who are expressing statements (the "subject"). Second is the identify of those to whom they are speaking (the "object"). Lastly there is the tone or the intention behind their expression. He will use this three fold rubric in the rest of the book, as he looks at the gospels and Paul.

Great start to the book!

"Thick Description": Elders

2011-11-21T14:36:00.001-05:00

I was having a discussion recently about the virtues of calling the local board of leaders in a local church a board of elders. My denomination currently calls them a local board of administration. The discussion plays into some remarks I've made earlier about the assumption that we should pattern ourselves in every way on the early church (primitivism) and the fact that my church faces potential identity confusion because of an influx of pastors from other traditions. For example, "elder" historically is a term for a minister in the Wesleyan tradition.

But that's really just background. In the discussion about elders, I was reminded of the great insight that has really only come into biblical studies in the last 30-40 years or so. The sociologist Clifford Geertz rightly suggested in 1973 that we should give a "thick description" to events that take place if we really want to understand them. I wish I could communicate the difference this would make in reading the Bible.

A lot of Bible readers can quote the Bible thoroughly and even tell you historical dates and events. But their understanding of such events and texts is two-dimensional or the words are brought into the three dimensional contours of their modern cultural context. By contrast, a "thick" understanding of biblical contexts understands the significance of words and events in the first century cultural matrix.

1. I don't think I can do the discussion justice, but I wanted to think a little about what a thick description of the role of elder might look like. First, we would situate the term in a culture where older was assumed to be wiser. The elders were in fact literally older and they were assumed to be wiser than the younger. So if we were really to be like the early church, we would not have anyone on a church's governing board who was not at least in their 50's, I would say.

2. But you can't make a culture think older people are wiser. In fact, in our day there may be ways in which younger people know more about many important things than the older people do. Again, a thick description of a NT "elder" would need to recognize that the ancient world didn't change much over time. There were no technological innovations.

3. Collections of elders were also situated an autocratically oriented culture. Is that style of leadership the ideal for today? I don't think so. It was an appropriate accommodation to ancient culture rather than a timeless model. Developments in the study of leadership are good, and we are not required to throw them out the window simply because the early church operated in a model appropriate to the ancient world.

4. Although you cannot prove to me that someone like Priscilla was not among the elders at Ephesus at some point, ancient collections of elders were probably overwhelmingly male. Again, this was to be expected given the culture of the time. It is, however, not appropriate for a kingdom-oriented church today, where we recognize that women have equal access to the Spirit just like men.

So maybe it's good that we have a different name for the governing board of a church, just so we don't get confused. We don't live in the ancient Mediterranean. Good leadership today will not play out the same as good leadership then.

Philosophy Text... Away!!

2011-11-21T06:02:00.001-05:00

After about six years of intermittent writing, I have finally sent off the first draft of a 410 page philosophy book with the working title, A Christian Philosophical Journey. I look forward to the many hands that will smooth its rough edges and make it a little less Schencky.

I also sent off my notes for the Hebrews part of the CEB Study Bible this morning. What a fun thing! If I could, I'd post the 8300 word "commentary" here, but alas...

Now I can finally begin my sabbatical! ... and only two and a half months late!

Woo-hoo!

Hebrews and Allegory

2011-11-20T06:01:00.000-05:00

I'm finishing up my draft of the study notes on Hebrews for the CEB Study Bible today. I am once again struck by the author's use of allegorical interpretation and dumbfounded by those interpreters who break out in a rash at the word. It starts in 7:2-3 with Melchizedek, but the real allegory central is in 9:8-9.

Two parts to the tent. The first part represents the old covenant and the present age that is waning (perhaps even the created realm), with its multiplicity of sacrifices. The second part represents the new covenant and the world that is coming, a heavenly age based on the one sacrifice of Christ.

I know why some evangelical scholars resist these sorts of interpretations and why "liberal" scholars used to make fun of them. For evangelicals, they make it clear that inerrancy cannot be formulated exclusively in terms of the literal or plain meaning of the text. For "liberals," it was their assumption that such interpretations were stupid that made them laugh at them. For revivalists and charismatics, it's business as usual ;-)

P.S. This is another indication that the fundamentalists and modernists of the early 1900's based their debate on the same assumptions, assumptions that we should question today.

The Middle Majority

2011-11-20T03:04:00.000-05:00

I feel confident I could come up with a budget deal that most Americans would vote for... just not one that either Democrats or Republicans in Congress would vote for... or that anyone who could get elected to Congress from either party would be able to vote for and survive. I wish there were a third party for the middle majority, who are neither Occupants nor Tea Partiers.

resting from our "works": Hebrews 4:10

2011-11-19T03:52:00.001-05:00

I have long had difficulty figuring out Hebrews 4:10: "The one who has entered into his rest has also himself rested from his own works just as God from his own."

1. It's not that a number of easy interpretations don't jump out. Ah, first thought, this is the old Martin Luther "faith versus works" issue. We stop trying to be justified by works and instead rest in justification by faith.

The problem is that Hebrews doesn't say anything about the old faith versus works debate. That's an issue in a couple of Paul's writings. This is a great illustration of how you have to let each author, indeed each book of the Bible speak in its own terms.

Of course, even the old "faith versus works" debate is a skewed version of Paul. Paul believes in works. It's "works of [Jewish] law" that Paul is primarily concerned with. He makes no absolute distinction between the two.

2. Then there is a very local interpretation I grew up with. The passage is about entire sanctification, resting from the fight against sin, finding it easy to be righteous and do good.

3. If you want an example of repeated comments I make about very few people being able to read the Bible in context, here is one. We bring a dictionary of later church history and our traditions to the Bible and define the "obvious" meanings of the Bible without a clue. That doesn't mean we aren't preaching truth. It just means that half our preaching isn't really the Bible. This is why even at Wesley Seminary with its practical emphasis, we insist that the Bible, theology, and church history teaching be done by people who are experts in this area, people who are trained to be able to read the Bible exegetically as well as theologically.

Let me offer a suggestion for what resting from works here might mean in context:

a. The context is the image of Israel leaving Egypt but not making it to the Promised Land because of lack of faith. They did not enter God's rest. This image resonates with a recurring theme in Hebrews. If we do not continue in faith to the end of our earthly pilgrimage, we will not be part of the coming kingdom. As an exhortation, therefore, the exhortation to enter rest is about making it to the end (3:6, 14). We may enter in a sense "every day called today" (3:13), but the ultimate sense of entering has to do with the end of our journey, which does not come until death or Christ's return.

6. Hebrews characterizes the present of the audience as one of striving, of effort, of diligence. "Let us be diligent" (4:11). In Hebrews' thought world, we thus do not rest, do not ultimately enter rest while we are in this life.

7. Work is not negative in Hebrews, as in the "faith versus works" interpretation. God's work is the creation, and it is not a bad mark on his resume (4:3-4).

8. I am now in a position to argue that the "sabbath rest" of Hebrews refers to the ultimate rest from our striving, at the end of our persistence in faith, our endurance in obedience, one that will not ultimately come until God's unshakeable kingdom arrives. We will rest from our "works" when we finally make it to the end. In this world, however, Hebrews insists that we work our way through the wilderness, pilgrims and strangers on the earth looking for a city that is to come (11:13; 13:14), whose builder and maker is God.

Beware when your interpretation fits too tidily with the categories of later Christian traditions, whether they be those of the Roman Catholic Church, the Reformation, or the nineteenth century holiness movement for that matter. God inspired the authors of the New Testament in the categories of ancient Jews. The past is a foreign country.

Is the world getting better and better?

2011-11-18T03:22:00.001-05:00

I think Chris Bounds twice has corrected me on Augustine here... hopefully I've got it right the third time ;-) Thanks, Chris!
______________
The first individual we know toformulate an extensive, linear philosophy of history was St. Augustine (354-430). His work called, The City of God, addressedaccusations that the gods had allowed Rome to be sacked by the Goths in AD410because Rome had become an exclusively Christian nation. [1] Rather, Augustine claimed, what society waswitnessing was the ongoing conflict between two cities that existed side byside in the world. The one was the “cityof God,” a city of heaven made up of the righteous angels as well as the “elect,”those whom God has chosen to be saved. While the city of God has a special connection to the “visible church” (thepeople who gather together and call themselves “Christians”) you cannot seeclearly who is truly a citizen of the city of God and who is not. The visible church is like the Parable of theWeeds in Matthew 13—the wheat and the weeds are mixed together in this world, andwe cannot know definitively which is which until the judgment.

The other city mixed together with the“city of God” is thus the “city of humanity,” a city of earth made up of fallenangels and the majority of condemned humanity. Those who ultimately belong to this city are oriented around themselvesand their own pleasure, rather than God. These two cities are in constant conflict in this age until Christfinally returns, but the trajectory of history is toward the definitive separationof the two at the final judgment. Asignificant portion of Augustine’s work goes through biblical and secularhistory to demonstrate the progress of the two cities throughout history. The implication is that we should not besurprised when earthly cities like Rome fall, especially when they areassociated with the city of earth.

Augustine’s approach to history issometimes called amillennial, because he does not associate the thousandyear period in Revelation 20:4 with a literal thousand year period. For him the number is symbolic and refers tothe entire period between Christ and the final judgment. Augustine thus has a linear view of history—hesees it headed toward a particular destination. But he does not have a clear sense that things will develop in a certainway in the intervening time. He does notclearly indicate that the city of God will increasingly overcome the city ofearth or the contrary.

Two other Christian perspectivesdo. Premillennialism is aChristian perspective on history that tends to take the thousand year period ofRevelation 20 literally and believes that this millennium has not yet takenplace. Christ will reign on earth for athousand years after he returns to earth in the future. Generally, premillennialists tend to have apessimistic view of the trajectory of history. They tend to expect the forces of evil to fight harder and harderagainst God up until the time of the end. Passages like Mark 13:19 are sometimes invoked:“in those daysthere will be suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of thecreation that God created until now, no, and never will be” (NRSV).

By contrast, postmillennialismagrees with Augustine that the millennial age has begun, but tends to seethe city of God taking over the city of earth, as it were, as timeprogresses. Christ will thus returnafter the millennium is over. Since ithas been over a thousand years since Christ, postmillennialists may not takethe thousand year period literally either. The main point that distinguishes them from Augustine is thus the sensethat things will improve more and more leading up to Christ’s return.

It is perhapsnot surprising to find that Christians in different periods of time have tendedto lean in one direction or the other. Prior to Augustine, many though not all Christians were “chiliasts,”individuals who looked for a literal thousand year reign of Christ after hisreturn. From Augustine to recent times,postmillennial and amillennial approaches tended to dominate. It is perhaps not surprising to find that thesame optimistic spirit of human progress in the days after the Renaissance andReformation would find a postmillennial perspective attractive.

At the sametime, we should not be surprised to find that premillennialism would rise againin popular circles in the uncertain times of the Industrial Revolution. John Darby (1800-82) was an Britishevangelist who almost singlehandedly gave birth to dispensationalism, aChristian perspective that sees history divided up into a series of periods inwhich God had a unique relationship and expectations of his people. The culmination is usually a seven year “tribulation”leading up to Christ’s return and judgment, followed by a literal thousand yearreign of Christ on earth.

We thus cannotsay that there is a distinctive Christian perspective on the direction historywill take leading up to Christ’s return. Each position has favorite passages in the Bible, and each position hasexplanations for the favorite passages of the other positions. If we are good philosophers, we will be awareof the forces that have influenced us in the past and are influencing us in thepresent. We will be aware of our ownbiases and do our best to be reflective about them.

Perhaps most importantly, we will try not to let our biases become self-fulfillingprophecies. A self-fulfillingprophecy is when our expectations come true not because they were inevitable,but because our own actions, perhaps inadvertently, made them come true. If you expect things to get worse and worse,there is a fair chance you will do things that will make them get worse. And if you expect things to get better andbetter, you probably will do things that move them in that direction. Let God watch over history. Let us work for good in the world.

[1] By decree of the Roman emperor Theodosius I in AD380. Constantine had only made Christianity a legalreligion in AD313.

Christian View of History

2011-11-17T02:20:00.001-05:00

A critical thinker should always hesitate to say something like, "This is the Christian view of something." We usually find multiple viewpoints on issues by people who consider themselves Christians, and of course it is ultimately God who gets to decide who really is. We have seen briefly in this chapter that we do indeed find some variety of thinking about history among Christians. In particular, some see history primarily as a downward spiral till the end, while others look more to the potential of Christianity to change the world for the better leading up to Christ's return. Other Christians, perhaps without much thought, may operate more cyclically--you live, you die, you go to heaven or hell... next in line.

Nevertheless, among those who take the historic beliefs of Christendom somewhat straightforwardly, we can sketch out some general elements to a Christian view of history, despite disagreements on the details. First, let me suggest that perhaps the most helpful way to approach the question is to think of history as a story. Since I too as a textbook author cannot see my own blind spots, I hesitate to say that this is the way to view history. I can only say that I personally find it the most appropriate of all the approaches to history we have mentioned in this chapter.

To think of history as a story allows us to incorporate all the elements of historiography. For example, it reminds us that, although we are talking about things we think actually happened in the past, we inevitably have to be selective in what we choose to tell about. Think of the nearly infinite amount of data from the past! Only God could hold it all in his "mind," with every bit in properly relationship to every other bit. How ridiculous for us to think for a moment that we have it all sorted out!

When we tell or relive history as a story, we are inevitably skewing it by only selecting some data and "de-selecting" other data. But that is the nature of the game. There is no history that is not told from a perspective. There is always more than one way to tell a story, and there is always more than one way to tell about history.

A story has characters; it has events; and it has settings. [1] So does history. The characters are not only the people, but the "actors" in the drama. If we wanted, we could look at history playfully from the standpoint of certain ideas as characters, making their way through the story. For us as Christians, the most important character of all is God, and the hero of the story is Christ.

Events form the backbone of a story--its plot. What are the key events of a Christian understanding of history. Surely the creation is very important as the beginning of history for us. [2] And for those who are in continuity with Christianity historically, the central event of the plot has to do focally with Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection. Again, different Christians may emphasize one or another of these more than another, but historic Christians will see some or all of these events as the resolution to the tension of the plot.

A traditionally Christian view of history is thus a linear view of history. It sees the whole of human history starting from a beginning and headed toward a particular destination. The beginning is the creation. The historic destination for Christians is when God sets everything right in the world, leading to eternity. Traditionally, Christians have seen a fundamental problem to be resolved in the story as well, a problem that goes back at least to the first humans. It is this problem that Christ resolved, although the final working out of that resolution is yet to come.

We should be careful about the details. There are Christians who think of Adam and Eve as poetic expressions of the human situation. There are Christians who do not await a literal return of Jesus to the earth in judgment. They stand outside the historic beliefs of Christianity, but God will be the judge. "Blessed are those who have no reason to condemn themselves because of what they approve" (Romans 14:22, NRSV).

Since Christians believe that Christ was God come into history, Christians are not historically deists in the way they understand history. That is to say, Christians believe that God has and does intervene in the events of history. We are theists. We may differ in the extent to which God intervenes, but Christians believe that God can become part of the cause-effect flow of history. We believe at least that miracles have taken place in the past, and most of us believe they can take place in the present.

Historic Christians look to the Bible for the most important content of the story--its key characters, events, and settings. Christians differ on a multitude of interpretations of that content, but the story of Israel in the Old Testament and the story of Jesus and the early church are the most important elements of the overall story. As someone once put it somewhat cheesily, "History is "His-story," meaning the story of God.

We are part of that story too. So are all the people before and after the Bible. So are all the people who were not in Israel in ancient times. So are all the people who have not been part of the church after those times. So is all the creation and all the "settings" of the story in space in time. The rocks cry out in praise to God (cf. Luke 19:40); the heavens declare the glory of God (cf. Psalm 19:1). Or as the Nicene Creed says, God is the creator of all that is, "seen and unseen," which includes all spiritual powers.

Another way in which a "narrative" or story perspective on history is helpful for a Christian is the fact that stories are always told from a particular point of view. Inevitably, we are forced to tell the Christian story from our point of view. For this reason, no version of Christian history any of us give will be the Christian view. Any version we create will be inevitably partial and tainted, including this one.

Nevertheless, we believe by faith that the authoritative point of view on the story, what literary critics call the "evaluative point of view," is that of God. God's perspective on history is the Christian perspective on everything that has happened. By the end of this book, we will hopefully convince you that we do not have direct access to God's full perspective on the story for several reasons.

For one, Scripture only covers the core of the story. It does not cover World War 2 or the next presidential election. A bottom line is also that I am still the one interpreting Scripture and a trip down an average city street will quickly illustrate how many Christian denominational "I's" there are. Reading the Bible in context also reveals that the Bible itself has multiple narratives on the key events, each with a distinct perspective. Further, they were revealed in ancient categories, meaning that I am forced to translate them into our categories. Finally, because narratives are selective, they by their very nature cannot give an absolute perspective on any story.

We thus believe by faith that God has an evaluative point of view on the story. We believe Scripture gives us the most important indications of what that point of view is. But we will never have direct or complete access to God's point of view. We have to wait till the end of the story for him to reveal such things more clearly to us.

One key element in the ongoing Christian debate has to do with whether the key to understanding God in history is love or justice. While most of us would want to say that these two do not contradict each other, there are clear differences among Christians as they play out one or another in their sense of God's action in history. To simplify things, those who lean more toward the key to God's point of view as love tend to see God creating a world that is somewhat free to go its own way while longing for the world to move toward him. History is thus the story of God wooing the creation back to himself.

Those who lean more toward justice as the key to God's character tend to see the creation more in terms of its guilt and sin before God. History is God punishing humanity for the sin of the first human, while making a way through Christ for his justice to be satisfied, so that some of humanity can escape his judgment. It should be clear that this text book leans much more toward the first way of viewing God's point of view on history.

[1] An excellent overview of the elements of a story is Mark Allan Powell's, What is Narrative Criticism? (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990). An excellent examination of the Christian story from a similar point of view can be found in N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992).

[2] God's story no doubt preceded our story, but presumably it is mostly beyond our comprehension.

Myth of Progress 2

2011-11-16T03:53:00.001-05:00

Myth of Progress 1...
________
However, it is the more profound sense of the word "myth" that we want to explore in relation to the "myth of progress." Whether it actually turns out to be literally true, the idea that things will get better and better is real and has had a powerful effect on Western society. While we saw in the previous section that people in the ancient world were perhaps more likely to see history as a story of deterioration, the idea of progress was also present in the ancient world as a minority report. [1]

In this section, we want to look at some ways in which, in the last five hundred years, many in "the West" have conceptualized history in terms of the idea that European and American peoples in particular have stood at the front of the progress of humanity and civilization. I put "the West" in quotation marks because it would seem that even the very notion of "Western civilization" is part of this story we have told ourselves, part of the myth.

Again, when we use the word "myth" in this way, we are not saying that these ideas are complete fabrications with no relation to reality whatsoever. It surely cannot be denied that the scientific revolutions of the last few centuries took place overwhelmingly in Europe and North America in cultures that spoke Indo-European languages. It surely cannot be denied that the beginnings of these advances took place as the power of the church declined and as intellectuals began to think in terms of natural laws of cause and effect rather than in terms of a spirit-controlled world.

This says nothing about superiority of intelligence, and it certainly says nothing of moral superiority. And it says nothing about everyone in these places. It simply says that the conditions of these regions were fertile ground these last few centuries for massive scientific and technological advances. We have every reason to believe that individuals of the intelligence of Einstein have always lived in every region around the world, from ancient China, Egypt, and Africa to present day Afghanistan. [2]

Whatever the basis in actual fact, the "myth" of Western civilization has gone further to construct its history in such a way as to express its sense of superiority over both the past and others in the present. Even the language we use demonstrates such value judgments: the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment. These are not value-neutral terms but impose on the very diverse data of history very simplistic evaluations that exalt ourselves.

An early piece of this historical construct came in 1442 when theItalian historian Leonardo Bruni first called the period from the Fall of theRoman Empire to his day the "Middle"Ages or the medievalperiod. [3] There is animplicit condescension in this terminology. It implies that while thingswere good and “enlightened” during the Roman Empire, the intervening thousandyears were the "Dark"Ages, a period of cultural darkness.

The term"Dark Ages" is particularly biased. Even more, it ignores significant pieces of data, especially when weapply it to Europe as a whole. For example,several of the great universities of Europe quite possibly were alreadyoperating around the year 1200: Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of Paris.[4] The theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), not to mention the Arab Muslimphilosophers Avicenna (ca. 980-1037) and Averroes (1126-98), extensively appropriated the philosophy of Aristotle as theypresented their understanding of various theological issues.

Bruni built his three part division of Italian history out of somehints from the Italian humanist Petrarch (1304-74). In a letter Petrarchwrote in 1359, he calls the era in Italy since the Fall of the Roman Empire an"era of darkness." [5] To his credit, he considered himself stillpart of this darkness. But what was more or less a passing comment forhim became for Bruni a division of history into three parts: ancient, middle,and modern. Thus we have the idea of the "Renaissance,"the supposed "rebirth" of culture from around the time of Petrarch inthe 1300's, a return to the living past in contrast to the intervening deadyears. [6]

However, todemonstrate the degree to which this way of viewing history is a construct, astory we in part have created, the term "Renaissance" was not actuallyinvented until the 1800's. Its origins in English derive from JacobBurckhardt's 1867 book, TheCivilization of the Renaissance in Italy. [7] To be sure, theindividuals who lived in the 1400's and 1500's knew that momentous culturalchanges were taking place. There are facts behind the construct. But it was a later interpretation that labeledthese years in ways that evaluatedwhole periods of time. TheDark Ages are bad. The Renaissance is rebirth of the good.

The term Enlightenmentis yet another label that places avalue judgment on a period of history. It began as a term that certain French intellectuals used of the ideasthey were sharing with each other in public discussions and debates in themid-1700’s. [8] Doubtless the vast majority of people living in France at thetime were not involved in such discussions, and those who disagreed with theirideas did not consider themselves unenlightened. The identification of those years as adistinct period of history was both a matter of self-promotion by those who participatedin the movement and an interpretation that is highly selective.

None of this is to say thatthere was no concrete reason to say something was developing in the 1700’samong the most influential intellectuals in France, England, and Germany. There was an almost unprecedented rise ofcritical examination and reflection on things the vast majority of peoplepreviously had simply assumed in one way or another. But ideological invention was also involved,to where there is also some truth in Roger Chartier’s claim that the Enlightenmentwas in some ways invented by the French Revolution when it identified a “canon”or definitive list of Enlightenment thinkers, while excluding others. [9] It is in part an example of how history istold by the winners…

[1] Cf. J. B.Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origins andGrowth (19). Cf. also Robert A. Nisbet,History of the Idea of Progress,2nd ed. (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 1994).

[2] This claimfollows naturally from Herbert Spencer's critique of the "great man"theory of history we mentioned in a textbox earlier in the chapter. Greatleaders do not emerge simply because they are great but they emerge undercertain conditions and situations. A George Washington would have beenanother anonymous farmer in another period of history.

[3] History of the Florentine People,sometimes called the first modern history book. Because Bruni did notdivide up history with a clearly Christian view, he is sometimes called thefirst modern historian.

[4] Cf. Charles H. Haskins, The Rise of Universities(Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1923). In his TheRenaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1927),he questioned the stark division Burckhardt made between the “Dark” Ages andthe “Renaissance” (see below).

[5] Cf. TheodoreE. Mommsen, "Petrarch's Conception of 'The Dark Ages,'" Speculum 17.2 (1942): 226-42.

[6] Although historians debate the precise dates of the beginningand end of the Middle Ages, it will suffice for us to broadly them of them asthe years from 500-1500.

[7] And he drewthe term from Jules Michelet, who in 1855 used the word Renaissance in his book, Histoire de France.

[8] ***

[9] The Cultural Originsof the French Revolution(1991).

Epilog: Good News versus Soterian

2011-11-15T05:38:00.000-05:00

It seemed appropriate to sit back and reflect a little after finishing Scot McKnight's book, King Jesus Gospel. I had a sense of where I thought Scot would go with the book and in my mind he went half there. I suppose it has a lot to do with the question he was posing. What would a fuller sense of the gospel look like in contrast to what happens in an awful lot of American churches?

His answer is that the meaning of "gospel" is something much bigger than what he calls a "soterian" approach. Since he has invented the word, it is completely appropriate. A "soterian," as he defines it, is someone whose overwhelming focus is on getting people "saved." He has made it clear elsewhere that he doesn't actually think the word "salvation" is this narrow in the NT. What he is targeting is practices associated with a very narrow way of thinking about salvation.

To put it in my own way (which is much the same as Scot's), the gospel is, in the first instance, the good news about the inaugurated kingship of Jesus and the kingdom of God that he inaugurates. I'm not too sure why this is so controversial in some circles. People like Scot and Wright might debate some of the details, but it really isn't debatable. End of story.

This original sense of the gospel is not "me" focused. It doesn't center on me getting saved. It is much bigger, much more important than me and my individual salvation. I think what's really bugging McKnight (and Tom Wright before him) is the all-too-typical, shallow, self-centered focus of so much American Christianity, as if the center of the good news is me and what's in it for me.

Further, Scot is rightly concerned that so many Christians act like the whole deal is done once they "say the magic words." There are many who believe in eternal security and go on to take very seriously the lordship of Jesus for the rest of their lives. And there are some who act like once they've read the words on the card, they're done. Eternal oops there.

Here are two further thoughts upon reflection:
1. God's creational good news
Scot says in the early chapters that the gospel relates to the "Story of Jesus" part of the overall Christian story. I've hinted before that he is doing a dance between wanting to define words the way the NT does and doing theology, which almost always has to move beyond the specific words of specific biblical authors to formulate an integrated perspective.

The word "missional" does some of that. I wonder what this book would have looked like if Scot had posed the question "missional versus soterian." Then it would have more easily looked at a bigger version of the story. It would have allowed us to talk not only of good news for humanity but about good news for the creation as well. The NT doesn't actually use the word "gospel" in this way, but it is a valid theological broadening of the implications of the way the NT uses the word "gospel."

Missional has been somewhat of a buzz word, but it still seems to narrow God's purposes for the world to the area of saving. I personally believe that beauty remains in the world, even after the Fall. I find it hard to believe that every last bit of goodness flew out of the creation with Adam's sin, and the Bible certainly does not require us to believe that.

God thus has intentions for the creation that do not involve human beings and that are in addition to saving it. The biggest story we can comprehend is the "creational" story. I knew a student who pretty much lost his faith traveling the world after college (I've lost track of him). It seems to me there is a faith crisis waiting to happen if we must limit God's walk with the world to the incredibly narrow story of Israel and story of the church.

I don't think most people have a sense of how few people God must care about if this is it. We are so surrounded by Christianity that it is easy to assume that most people should know better. Take a few months and travel through Asia. Look at a map and compare the size of Judah to the rest of the ancient world. Then read the book of Jonah. There is at least a potential difference between what Christ has done for the world and what the world knows about Christ.

2. A full switch to what God has done
I came to an ironic realization this morning. In his chapter on salvation taking over the gospel, Scot pinpoints the Reformation as the point where salvation started on a trajectory to become more important than the gospel. He says there that it did not happen at once--not with Luther and Calvin--but that it took a while. It occurred to me where it most took place--with the Anabaptists!

It is the Anabaptist tradition that has been most influential on American Christianity and it is the Anabaptist tradition that has most focused on an event of faith once a person has reached an age of understanding. With deep respect, I believe this is why I ended the book feeling like it had only gone half way. As long as we are so focused on this event as the be-all-and-end-all of salvation, we will still ultimately be soterians.

Wesley was of course influenced by the Anabaptist tradition. But we are not hindered as Wesleyans from recognizing that for Paul, the most important moment of justification and salvation is the final one. Paul rarely--if even once--uses the word "salvation" in relation to anything but the final escape from God's judgment. Ephesians 2:8 is the only possible exception I can think of, and even it may speak proleptically (poetically speaking of something that is still to happen but is so certain to happen that we can speak of it as already happened).

It is true that Paul predominantly speaks of justification in the past tense. We can be justified now and this is incredibly important. BUT the most important thing is that we are justified when we stand in the judgment. "It is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God's sight, but the doers of the law will be justified" (Rom. 2:13). More important is the "day of wrath, when God's righteous judgment will be revealed. For he will repay according to each one's deeds" (Rom. 2:5-6). And this includes believers: "the work of each builder will become visible, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each has done" (1 Cor. 3:13).

Paul's theology was not focused on a justification event in mid-life. I personally don't think justification was the centerpiece of his theology overall--it was an issue that stood at the center of his debates with Judaizing believers and thus it comes up in Galatians and Romans. I believe the central focus of Paul's preaching was the cross and what Christ had done.

But even when Paul argued over justification, his concern was with ultimate justification before God, not with a mid-life crisis event. Certainly we should by all means seek God's justification ASAP. We can and should be justified now. But Paul was not arguing over the timing. He was arguing over the basis.

The role of Acts in our thinking is significant here. Scot takes the pattern "repent, believe, be baptized" as normative. An important question is the context of Acts. For example, these conversions are "first wave." They refer to places where the tsunami of the gospel is reaching for the first time. How might the process look different in a place where the wave is retreating? It is an unexamined assumption that it would look exactly the same.

Even more crucial is the most important element of Acts' equation and one I find that an awful lot of people miss, namely, the Holy Spirit. Repentance is incredibly important. Faith is incredibly important. Baptism is very significant. But the sine qua non, the most crucial ingredient of all, is the Holy Spirit. And here we have the precedent of John the Baptist to know that a child can have the Spirit long before they understand the gospel. These are at least things worth some reflection.

I'll end with a reflection my colleague Keith Drury once made. "There is no point in my life," he concluded, "at which I would have gone to hell." His reasoning was thus, put in my own words.

"When I was a child, I did not know what it meant to have faith in God or confess Jesus as Lord. If I had died at that point or if Christ had returned, God would have accepted me. The first time I half way understood my need for Christ, I accepted his death for me. I affirmed him as my king. If I had died then or Christ had returned, God would have accepted me. Although I have sinned since then, I have also confessed my sins without undue delay and asked God for forgiveness. I do not believe there has ever been a time since I confessed Jesus as Lord that God would not have received me if I had died or if Christ had returned."

I could muse more, but I'll stop there (I'll put in a shameless plug for my life reflections on Romans book if you want more ;-). Let me only say that we, and Wesleyans in particular, should do some significant reflection before we conclude the "soterian" path within broader evangelicalism is the right one for us.

Finishing King Jesus Gospel

2011-11-14T10:05:00.001-05:00

For all the preceding, check here.

The final chapter is called, "Creating a Gospel Culture." It has two basic parts. In the first part, Scot sketches the gospel story from creation to Jesus' return. The second is his take-away from the study, what would a "Gospel Culture" look like. Here are his points:

1. We become people of the story. We read Scripture. We become people of the Book.

2. We immerse ourselves in the story of Jesus. Here he interestingly suggests we follow a church calendar because "the church calendar is a gospeling event too" (154). The church calendar is all about the story of Jesus.

3. We learn from the model of how the apostle's took the story of Israel and the story of Jesus into the next generation and into a different culture... all the way to our generation.

4. We need to counter the stories that crowd out and re-frame the gospel story. Here he gives a list:

individualism
consumerism
nationalism
moral relativism
scientific naturalism
new age
postmodern tribalism
salvation by therapy

Ways to do this--emphasize baptism and communion.

5. We need to embrace the story so that we are saved and can be transformed by the story. To embrace the story involves a life of communication with God (prayer). It involves serving others in love and compassion.

Here endeth the reading.