Notes Along the Way 3.3 A Summer of Nietzsche

Continued from previous posts
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13. After my dissertation was submitted, I had a little time in the summer to finish out my time as a
residential (or what they used to call a "moral") tutor. Principal Day had hatched a writing project that would draw on several of us in the neighborhood. 

(I don't think I have mentioned that Robert Song had come to Cranmer by then. I believe he had replaced Michael Vasey for theology/ethics. He would go on to marry Margaret Masson, who would eventually become the Principal of St. Chads. Robert would go on to teach for the university faculty of theology.)

The project was to create something like a dictionary with an apologetics flavor. I can't remember all the details (probably never knew them). The book never happened in the end.

I took three entries: Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Foucault. I had never really read much of any of them. I'd talked a fair amount about Foucault with David Mossley (philosophy PhD student) and was quite intrigued with his work. I of course knew the stereotypical version of Nietzsche.

There was no Google. There was no AI. I would spend the better part of the summer reading Nietzsche.

14. Thus Spake Zarathustra. What a horrible novel, I thought. A madman comes to the marketplace. Everyone is celebrating because God is dead. But the madman sees the implications. The death of God means that morality is up for grabs. It is no surprise to me that Nietzsche is sometimes thought to be a prophet of the Holocaust. 

Some of Nietzsche built on those before him. Dostoevsky seems to have presented the morality of a world without God. But he stepped back from the precipice. In Crime and Punishment -- which I would make myself read the year after my PhD -- Raskolnikov can't live with himself after murdering someone for a greater good. He confesses.

(In two years, I would show my philosophy classes at IWU a clip from Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors. In that echo of Dostoevsky, a man commits a murder. Is initially troubled. But he gets over it. Typical Woody Allen. By the way, in those early days of my teaching, I often showed clips like that from movies -- on VHS -- to raise the philosophical issue of the day.)

In this novel, he also presents his idea of the "superman," the person who can create morality out of the ashes of a world without God. It didn't matter too much for him what that morality was as long as it was strong, the morality of a master -- not like Christianity with its weak slave morality.

15. Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals. In these classic works of ethics, Nietzsche develops his concept of Christianity as a "slave morality." A line from his preface has always stuck with me. Going from memory, it's something like "As a young person, I early realized that if you were going to give God credit for the good in the world, you would also have to give him credit for the evil."

Certainly I think this is a problem for the Calvinist, less so for the Arminian (and even less so for Tom Oord.) In any case, Nietzsche basically treats Christianity as a classic, "You can't hit me because I'm wearing glasses" argument. The weak invent a system where you'll go to hell if you oppress me, even though you have the power to do so. It's a tool that a slave might use to try to manipulate his or her master into treating them well.

But Nietzsche basically says, "No, you should hit him whether he has glasses or not." The superman doesn't worry about the made-up rules of the weak.

I might point out here that MAGA Christianity is basically Nietzschian "Christianity." It is an anti-Christian philosophy. The way of Christ is the way of the cross, which Nietzsche and Trump vehemently reject.

16. At that time, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche resonated with my sense of a world without God. If there is no God, then I had trouble seeing a transcendent basis for morality. There could be social bases. There could be evolutionary bases. But what absolute basis would there be beyond advantage?

For this reason, I have not resonated with the moral argument for the existence of God. I believe morality objectively exists because of God. But it's existence does not seem obvious to me apart from prior belief in God's existence. God's existence is a tremendous boon for morality. 

But, from an evidentiary perspective, I find no obvious, intrinsic morality in the world that points to a transcendent goodness. We have a deep longing for one and perhaps that is the "God-shaped vacuum" talking. 

This of course was the basis for C. S. Lewis and Francis Collins' conversion. We can be thankful that God is good, believed by faith, nonetheless! 

For a long time, I had trouble seeing what the point was for individuals who diverted to some unorthodox conception of God. If God is not God, what's the point? In more recent years, I have at least wondered if there could be non-theistic reasons why people would believe in a spiritual dimension. 

Probably some time during my second year, I noticed that a student had put a discussion question on her door: "If evolution is true, then animals matter just as much as humans. Discuss." I was tempted to write a response: "If atheistic evolution is true, then humans matter just as little as animals."

I haven't mentioned Will yet. Will was a bright atheist who came as a fresher my first year in Durham. I remember asking him that first term what I thought was an innocent question. "So, are you a Christian?" I wasn't trying to proselytize or evangelize. St. John's was an evangelical Anglican college. There was a fair chance he identified as a Christian.

The answer was strong. "No. I'm an atheist--the thinking kind."

I would like to think that we were friends that whole time, although perhaps I have disappointed some of my Durham friends since. 

17. I didn't spend much time on Feuerbach. His argument was basically that God is a projection of all the ideal human traits. Take our best traits: wisdom, knowledge, goodness. Now imagine the perfect version of them. That, he argued, was where the idea of God came from.

I've tried to think of what a naturalist hypothesis of God's origins might be. Were many ancient beliefs in a non-personal spiritual dimension? Animism? A longing to be able to manipulate that which is beyond human control? I do think that the ancient Greeks and that layer of human history often personified various abstract categories like war, wisdom, or love.

Monotheism developed slowly, it would seem, but significant movement seems to have taken place around the sixth century BC. Scholastic conceptions of God in the middle age perhaps come closest to Feuerbach's ideas.

Still, I like to start with creation. If we assume God is the creator of the universe out of nothing, what conception of God results? I would say it comes very close to the classic view, which is also my own.

18. I found Foucault to be very enlightening, although I don't share his ultimate framework. I give credit to David Mossley for cluing me into him, although I imagine I had heard of him before.

What I find helpful is to think of Foucault as an extension of Kuhn. Paradigms are always changing. Power is inevitably associated with the dominant paradigms. This all seems overwhelmingly obvious to me. Where I would differ is his apparent sense that there is no ultimate reality or truth behind these shifting sands. I am a critical realist. 

Foucault wrote a series of historical studies -- on madness, on crime and punishment, on sexuality. I bought them all. I tried to read his three volume history of sexuality -- you'd think they'd be enaging. Not so. The French seem to obfuscate deliberately as a matter of principle.

But I can give you the comic book version. We do not have the same conception of these things as the generations before us. For example, punishment had a primary function of shaming. You behead in public so everyone can see. But in the 20th century, it became a tribute to absolute justice, held in a private ceremony.

Madness in ancient times could be a sign of interaction with the gods. "Whom the gods love, they first make mad." Then there was the concept of the Ship of Fools. The minds of these individuals are seeking their place and need to be free to find it. In the twentieth century, insanity becomes a disease and we hide such individuals away in "cuckoo's nests."

Sexuality as a category of being did not exist until the 1800s. "What orientation are you?" In older times, it was something people did on the side as a deviant activity. They were likely married and had children, but some did this activity "on the down low."

Then it became a sickness. It was put in the DSM.  Now it's an orientation.

I found this deep paradigm framework helpful in analyzing biblical culture. I was always enamored with Mary Douglas' "Dirt is matter out of place." The explanatory power of such understandings unlocked a much more profound sense of the biblical worlds to me. And I really couldn't see much to object to in these frameworks.

19. I believe it was also in my third year that I devised the following soul thought experiment, although I'm sure others have thought the same. I remember coming up with it while walking up the Bailey to Neil's flat.

Let's say that we have no soul. What then would the resurrection be? It is presumbly a re-creation of a body -- using whatever remnants of my previous body as a starting point. Then, that body would be given my memories and personality.

Now consider the possibility that you might make a 3-D scan of my brain. I do not know the particulars of how the brain "stores" memory and personality, but let's say you could re-create the physical and chemical structures of my brain at a certain point in time within some appropriate set of Ken parameters.

Next, let's say we could clone my body and, at an appropriate time, reformat its brain structures to the 3-D scan of my current brain. The resultant Ken would have my body, my memories, my personality. It would think itself Ken in the same way that I think myself Ken.

Yet, we could, in theory, both exist at the same time. Our stories could from that point diverge.

In short, that Ken is not me. It is a copy of me. I came first.

20. If there is no soul, then how would a resurrected Ken be any different? And here is the point. "Existence without continuity is not identity." (You'll recognize this as a similar question to the Ship of Theseus, although my experiment is clearer.)

This is not a proof of the soul, but it does display--I think--why the existence of something like the soul is very important for the notion of afterlife to be coherent.

After I wrote a philosophy textbook on philosophy, I pre-tended this thought experiment on the soul, but it can wait till a post many months from now.

Lenten Readings -- Jeremiah 11

Introduction to Jeremiah
Jeremiah 1
Jeremiah 2 
Jeremiah 3
Jeremiah 4
Jeremiah 5
Jeremiah 6
Jeremiah 7
Jeremiah 8
Jeremiah 9
Jeremiah 10
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1. Some suggest that at this point, the book of Jeremiah may shift from the days of Josiah (chaps. 1-10) to the reign of Jehoiakim after Josiah was killed in battle. Unlike Josiah, Jehoiakim did not serve Yahweh. He reversed Josiah's Yahwistic reforms.

Jehoiakim was placed on the throne by Pharoah Necho II. His brother Jehoahaz had initially ruled after Josiah's death, but Necho deposed him after only three months of ruling. After deposing him, Necho took Jehoahaz's brother Eliakim, renamed him "Jehoiakim," and put him on the throne. This suggests that Jehoiakim was more subservient to Necho's demands, perhaps almost a puppet in some ways.

2. Apart from the mention of the Ark of the Covenant in Jeremiah 3, the concept of God's covenant with Israel really appears first here in Jeremiah 11. Repeatedly in the chapter, Jeremiah warns Judah that they have broken the covenant. This warning would be all the more significant given that the Book of the Law had just recently been discovered in the temple (in 621BC) and Josiah had used Deuteronomy as the basis for widespread reform. 

The covenant in view is specifically the one God made with Israel at Sinai (11:4). The terms of the covenant were that 1) Yahweh would be Israel's God. 2) Israel would be Yahweh's dedicated people. 3) There were the stipulations of the arrangement which, if Israel kept them, 4) they would find blessing in their land, "milk and honey" (11:5). These correlate to what James Dunn called the "four pillars" of Judaism. [1]

3. In verses 6-13, Yahweh then brings charges against his people. They have violated the covenant. They have not kept the terms of the agreement. God has repeatedly and tirelessly warned them (11:7). They haven't listened. This is why they have experienced hardships as God's punishment (11:8).

Instead, Israel has returned to the sins of their ancestors by worshiping other gods (11:10). They have as many gods as they have towns. They have as many altars to Ba'al as there are streets in Jerusalem (11:13). No doubt they will call on them when the approaching disaster strikes, but they won't answer. They may even call out to Yahweh when disaster strikes, but he won't answer either (11:11).

4. The last part of the chapter Yahweh speaks to Jeremiah himself. He tells Jeremiah to stop praying for the people (11:14). God won't answer that prayer.

The priests think, "Let's offer more sacrifices." That's what wayward priests often seem to do. Sacrifices don't make up for unrepentant deeds of evil (11:15). Israel was a blossoming olive tree. But it will burn to the ground (11:16).

The LORD told these things to Jeremiah. As a result, the people of his own village, Anathoth, plotted against him (11:21). At first, he was naive. He didn't realize they were plotting to blot his family out entirely (11:19). Like the imprecatory psalms, he asks Yahweh to bring retribution on them (11:20).

They said, "Do not prophesy in the name of Yahweh, or you will die at our hands" (11:21). Jeremiah responded with a prophecy that their young men would die in war. Their children would die in famine. Anathoth would be obliterated when the coming disaster comes (11:22-23).

5. People don't like being told they are in the wrong -- especially when they are in the wrong. Indeed, the reaction to being spoken prophetically against can often bring insight. Those who truly want to follow God and the truth often turn to self-examination when they are indicted as wrongdoers. But those who are truly guilty typically lash out not only in their own defense but sometimes with violent threats against the prophetic voice.

This is the difference between a heart of flesh and a heart of stone. The hardened heart is violent. It lashes out. It is vindictive. It is hateful. The heart of flesh is open. It is surrendered to God and truth that is greater than itself. It is submitted. It seeks peace and reconciliation.

[1] Using slightly anachronistic terms, he titled these monotheism, election, Torah, and temple. 

On the seventh day of Jimmy...

James Dunn passed away a week ago today, We have been going through one of his key works each day. So far we have looked at...

1. The Evidence for Jesus (1985)
2. Baptism in the Holy Spirit (1970)
3. Unity and Diversity in the New Testament (1977)
4. Christology in the Making (1980)
5. "Once more, ΠΙΣΤΙΣ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΥ" (1991)
6. The New Perspective on Paul (2005)

I have also slipped in Jesus and the Spirit (1975), Romans 1 and 2 (1988), Jesus, Paul, and the Law (1990), Galatians (1993), and Paul and the Mosaic Law (1996).

1. The seventh book I want to mention is The Partings of the Ways: Between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity (1991).

The "new perspective" on Paul had at its core the surprisingly obvious realization that Paul was a Jew and, in his own mind, remained an Israelite his whole life. One of Dunn's final compilations was a 2011 book called Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels. Included in that volume is a great article from 1999 called, "Who Did Paul Think He Was?" It's just a perfect example of Dunn's lucidity, clarity, and evidence-based approach to questions.

So one side of the new perspective was a sense of the continuity between Paul and Judaism. The other side of the new perspective was a more balanced perspective on the nature of Judaism itself. Embarrassing stereotypes were called into question. For example, the writer of the Qumran hymns prays, "What is someone born of a woman among all your awesome works? ... His base is the guilt of sin... Only by your goodness is humanity acquitted" (1QH 5.20-21, 23). Sure doesn't sound like he thinks he can earn his salvation! [1]

2. This more accurate reassessment of Judaism was bound to prompt a similar reassessment of the historical Jesus. In the 1980s, Tom Wright coined the phrase, the "third quest" for the historical Jesus. It's core feature was, unsurprisingly, interpreting Jesus against a more accurate understanding of Judaism. For example, it has been all too easy over the years to function with a pretty cardboard sense of the Pharisees. Picture a cartoon villain with a long curly mustache. They just might have been a little more complex than that.

So the great trio of new perspectives--Sanders, Dunn, and Wright also made contributions to Jesus studies in the late twentieth century. Sanders' key work was Jesus and Judaism (1985). Wright's summative work on the historical Jesus was Jesus and the Victory of God (1997). I'll mention Dunn's work Jesus Remembered (2003) in three days.

3. The progression was all too predictable. Once Jesus, Paul, and Judaism were reassessed, the question arose--"If there was no immediate parting of Christianity from Judaism, when exactly was the 'parting of the ways'?" Dunn, once again, was right on top of the wave with our book d'jour, Partings of the Ways.

Even before Dunn gave his own answer to this question, there had been another Durham-Tübingen Symposium in 1989 on this topic. Dunn as usual sat in the driver's seat, about to assume the mantle in 1990 as Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at Durham. This chair was beyond the role of Professor, named after the greatest British New Testament scholar of the late nineteenth century. The conference volume was published as Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways AD70-135. 

4. Notice the slight difference in title between the conference volume and Dunn's 1991 book. The conference spoke of a "parting" in the singular, and located this parting to a specific time period between the destruction of Jerusalem and the bar Kokhba revolt. One take-away from that meeting must have been a sense on Dunn's part that it was more complicated than one monolithic parting: thus "partings" plural in the title.

This sentiment would follow in a number of other works by other authors in the years that ensued. Take, for example, the 2007 book, The Ways That Never Parted, edited by Becker and Reed. Daniel Boyarin would write a 2006 book called Border Lines, in which he uses the word "partitioning" of the ways, suggesting a much more complicated and fuzzy border between Judaism and Christianity in the centuries following Jesus. [2] I recently finished writing up my own thoughts on Hebrews on this question, finally published last year, A New Perspective on Hebrews: Rethinking the Parting of the Ways. Whether I am right or not on Hebrews, I'm proud of the summaries I gave in this book of the new perspective, the partings discussion, and debates over development of the worship of Jesus.

5. One might wonder when I am going to get to Dunn's book! His book is organized around what he calls the "four pillars" of Judaism. Of course he is going to get flack for this. I seem to remember that Jacob Neusner had at him, for example, just as he did at Sanders. Judaism is more a religion of practice than ideology, not to mention that Dunn here was echoing the concept of the five pillars of Islam.

The four are monotheism, election, covenant/law, and land/temple. The concept of monotheism itself has been deconstructed in the meantime, not least at a conference I attended at St. Andrews in 1998. It's essays were published as The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism.

Despite its imprecision, I often use this framework when I am explaining Deuteronomistic theology to students. There was one God for Israel, and one people for Yahweh. If they would serve him exclusively, he would bless them in their land. I think this is a fair summary of Deuteronomy 28-29 as well as Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.

6. Dunn proceeds to the temple. In chapter three he notes that "Jesus had a very positive attitude to the Temple" (49). On the other hand, it seems true that Jesus "did not share the concerns or degree of concern regarding purity" that Pharisees did (58). Perhaps in that regard he was regarded as a threat. Dunn thinks Jesus' action in the temple is what likely set in motion his arrest (69). Dunn believes Jesus anticipated his death (71). These positions all seem credible to me, as is Dunn's conclusion to this chapter: "Jesus appears on this subject to stand well within the diversity of second Temple Judaism" (74).

Chapter 4 looks at evidence from the early church in Acts. He sees evidence here in Stephen as "the beginning of a radical critique of the Temple on the part of the infant Christian movement" (90). He sees here "the beginning of a breach between Christianity and the predominant Temple-centered Judaism of the mid-first century." He also suggests Hellenists like Stephen represented a split within the Jesus movement itself (99). I'm a little hesitant about this wording, but he was writing in 1991 (second edition 2006).

Chapter 5 then finishes the series of temple-related chapters. Dunn concludes that, with Paul's theology of sacrifice, "there is no longer a need for the sacrificial cult" (105). He takes the traditional view that Hebrews "was written to warn against the danger of a relapse into traditional Judaism" (117). Accordingly, he concludes that "it is difficult to avoid talking of a parting of the ways in the case of Hebrews" (121). He concludes similarly with John: "the movement for which he speaks has parted company with mainstream Judaism precisely at the point of the cult" (123). In scholarship, "cult" refers to the sacrificial system.

Well, I ended up parting with Jimmy on this chapter. If Hebrews and John were written after the destruction of the temple, it makes a difference. Rabbinic Judaism has not parted with Judaism because it doesn't need a physical temple! So if these books were written after the destruction of the temple, which I think they were, then they cannot be said to depart from Judaism on this score, in my opinion. Hebrews can then be seen as much as a consolation in the wake of the temple's destruction as a polemic against it.

As a side note, Dunn first delivered this book at a series of lectures at the Pontifical Institute in Rome (see p.119n.61). Let's just say that his teaching on Hebrews as precluding the need for any priest or human intermediary sparked some discussion! He was never in your face or had an animus to these things, but he was definitely a "T" personality who didn't shy away from saying what he thought, even if it was very controversial for the context. I remember the Q & A session at Asbury having a similar dynamic.

7. Chapters 6-8 deal with the question of covenant and land. Here Dunn brought his new perspective understandings to bear on the question of continuity and discontinuity. With regard to the Law, Dunn concludes that Jesus was not calling the Law itself into question but "the law understood in a factional or sectarian way" (149). With regard to Paul, Dunn saw the incident at Antioch in Galatians 2 as the beginning of a fissure that would eventually undermine the covenant pillar of Judaism (178). He concludes, "It was Paul who effectively undermined this third pillar of second Temple Judaism (183).

I might clarify that Paul himself did not see himself as undermining the Law (cf. Rom. 3:31), even if he started a trajectory that later Gentile Christianity would widen. As Dunn himself says, "Paul was attacking neither the law, nor the covenant... but the law as a boundary round Israel, marking off Jew from Gentile" (182).

Chapter 8 then looks at the New Testament in relation to Israel. He concludes, "they still wrote for those for whom the issue was not closed" (212). For example, "John was still fighting a factional battle within Judaism" (209). I have thus often said, along with others, that it is more accurate to speak of "Christian Jews" in the New Testament rather than "Jewish Christians." Indeed, I have even used the expression "Gentile Jews" for early Gentile Christians.

8. The next three chapters end the sequence with monotheism. He covers much of the same ground as Christology. He concludes chapter 9 on Jesus with a sense that "Jesus himself still stood well within the boundaries of second Temple Judaism at the point of Jewish monotheism" (240). Dunn ends chapter 10 with what I believe is a very important observation about Paul: "Had Paul's christology been equally, or more contentious [than his position on the Law] at this time for his fellow Jews, we would surely have heard of it from Paul's own letters" (270).

For John, Dunn draws a mixed inference. "John saw himself still as a monotheist" (299). But from the standpoint of emerging rabbinic Judaism, "Christian claims for Jesus had taken a step too far. From their perspective the parting of the ways had already happened" (300).

9. Dunn concludes the book with a sense that Judaism before AD70 was quite diverse and thus that something like a normative Judaism did not emerge until the rabbinic Judaism following the destruction of Jerusalem (312). Even this claim can be questioned, however. He would thus say that "the period between the two Jewish revolts (66-70 and 132-135) was decisive for the parting of the ways."

More significant, he would argue, was a parting of the ways "between mainstream Christianity and Jewish Christianity" (313). He would argue that what was more in continuity with earliest Christianity would become heretical Jewish Christianity in the second century (e.g., the Ebionites). He concludes, "By the end of the second Jewish revolt, Christian and Jew were clearly distinct and separate" (318). Again, the book mentioned above by Becker and Reed would dispute even this conclusion, as would Boyarin.

[1] If I might wend my wares a little, I suspect that some of the inaccurate assessment came from the fact that Lutheran and Reformed thinkers were doing it. These branches accuse Methodism of the same sort of works righteousness that they saw in Judaism. The irony is that this "works righteousness" is none other than what the New Testament teaches!

N. T. Wright has done a good job of showing the role of works even in justification in Paul's writings. See, for example, Justification. As a small sample, see 2 Corinthians 5:10: "It is necessary for us all to appear before the judgment seat of Christ for each to give an account for the things s/he did in the body, whether good or evil."

The two volume "the Reformation strikes back" was Justification and Variegated Nomism.

[2] I listened to the conclusion yesterday of the Enoch Seminar conference on the Origins of Evil. Boyarin was critiquing the too facile use of terms like Judaism, Gnosticism, monotheism, etc. He reminded me of Heikki Räisänen--so detailed oriented that he finds it difficult to label these entities. He sees only the differences. In his mind they all fall apart.

2.1 Biblical Theology of God: The Rule of Faith

Every time I teach biblical theology I think, "I should write my own book." So I might put some fragments here as I have opportunity. I have no book contract and have too many things to do to write extensively, but I want to put some depth probes here.
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Chapter 1: What is Biblical Theology?
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Basic Approaches
1.3 History of Biblical Theology
1.4 This Book's Approach

Chapter 2: Theology of God
2.1 Basic Beliefs
1. The Christian understanding of God is relatively uncontroversial in its most fundamental aspects. For example, the idea that "God is one" is fundamental not only to Christianity but to Judaism and even Islam. We will see later in the chapter that the understanding of what monotheism means developed some within the pages of Scripture and in the first couple centuries of the church. [textbox] Modern cosmology may help us refine our understanding even further. Nevertheless, the central doctrine goes back to Deuteronomy 6:4.

God's attributes or characteristics are often divided into two categories. These are his "communicable" attributes (characteristics that humans share to some degree) and his "incommunicable" attributes (characteristics that are unique to God alone). However, we might also divide his attributes into his transcendent and economic attributes. Transcendent means apart from or beyond the creation. "Economic" in this means God in relation to the creation, the way God administrates the universe. [1]

2. We might mention seven attributes as characteristic of God in his being apart from the creation: 1) holiness, 2) self-sufficiency, 3) triunity, 4) love, 5) freedom, 6) eternity, 7) immutability.

...

3. Similarly, we might mention six attributes of God that reflect the way God relates to the creation: 1) creator, 2) spirituality, 3) omnipresence, 4) omnipotence, 5) omniscience, 6) justice.

...

[textbox] Monotheism is the belief that there is only one God who stands alone and distinct from everything else that exists.

[1] As a side note, we might argue that all of our knowledge of God is in relation to his creation. That everything we know about God we know by analogy to the creation.

Gen Eds 10b: Ancient China

This is the second post in the Classical Civilizations" unit of my World History series.

This is part of my "General Education in a Nutshell" series. The series consists of ten subjects you might study in a general education or "liberal arts" core at a university or college. The first topic in the overall series was philosophy. So far in the world history section:

• World History Overview
• From 9-11 to the Present
• From the Cold War to the Millennium
• From Waterloo to World War II
• 5a. The French Revolution
• 5b. The Enlightenment to the American Revolution
• 5c. From Cromwell to the First Industrial Revolution
• 6a. Reformation and Scientific Revolution 
• 6b. The Renaissance and a New World
• 7a. Church Schisms in the Middle Ages
• 7b. Kings Rising in the Middle Ages
• 7c. Medieval Arabia, India, China, and South America
• 8a. The Roman Empire
• 8b. The Roman Republic
• 9a. Greeks and the Hellenistic Age
• 9b. Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians
• 10a. Ancient India

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1. The first dynasties in China go back to the 2000s BC (the Xia Dynasty, 2070-1600BC), although our first written records only go back to the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046BC). One of the four ancient cradles of civilization (India, China, Egypt, Mesopotamia), Chinese civilization originated along the Yellow River, just as Indian civilization arose along the Indus River. Ironically, the movement to a "civilization" is often marked by the beginning of slavery by the Xia Dynasty.

The "Zhou" Dynasty is usually considered the period of the birthplace of Chinese culture, although the dynasty only had widespread control from 1046-771BC. In the second half of their time, they only had limited power in the east (771-221BC). This was a period with a collection of clans that warred off and on with each other.

The first half of this "Eastern Zhou" time is called the "Spring and Autumn Period" (771-476BC), during which there were four major clans: Qin in the west, Jin in the center, Chu in the south, and Qi in the east. [1] Then a split in the Jin clan led to the "Warring States Period" from 476-221BC.

There is something fascinating about the 500s BC around the world. Human cultures everywhere seem to have made some sort of a jump. Buddhism rises in India. This is the time of Isaiah 40-66, the center point of monotheism in the Old Testament. In China, this is when Confucianism (Confucius' given name was Kong Qiu) and Taoism (founded by Lao Tzu) originated.

2. The "Warring States Period" was brutal, with as many as eight different "states" vying for power (Qin, Chu, Qi, Yan, Han, Wei, Yue, and Zhao). The power that would emerge as the first real unifier of China as an empire was the Qin Dynasty (221-206BC), and the name "China" is thought to come from "Qin." They used iron swords. The Art of War was written in the Warring States period by Sun Tzu.

The Qin Dynasty was strongly autocratic, and they created a highly bureaucratic and centralized state. Their approach to governance is known as "Legalism" and every dissenter to the central authority was put to death. The diverse "One Hundred Schools of Thought" from the Spring and Autumn Period was purged, with only the schools of thought the Qin Dynasty approved of allowed to survive. All other literature was destroyed.

It was the shortest dynasty of all.

Nevertheless, it was during the Qin moment of history that Chinese writing was standardized for the first time. The Great Wall, although a wall was started earlier, received its first substantial building during the Qi Dynasty. The well-known "Terracotta Army" is a massive collection of life-size model soldiers, chariots, horses, and such in battle array, celebrating the victory of the Qin armies. It is located in the tomb of the Qin Dynasty.

3. The Qin Dynasty only lasted 15 years until it was defeated by the Han clan, which set up the Western Han Dynasty (206BC-AD9). Han was less oppressive. While the population under Qin rule was decimated, it expanded during the Han period. The Han empire was the first long-standing empire in the region.

It was during the Han Dynasty that the Silk Road began to take shape, the trading route for silk between China and the Western world. Also, a Confusion Academy was set up to train bureaucrats for the empire. Some subordinate rulers were empowered on the edges of the empire.

Remnants of the Han rule continued until AD220, mostly in the east. During this time, the Silk Road brought Buddhism into China. The Han period ended with natural disasters and decimation by war.

4. At the end of the Han Dynasty, the area of China was divided into three kingdoms (AD220-80), after which the Jin Dynasty began (AD265-420). Another dynasty called the Sui dynasty (AD581-618) built the Grand Canal, while extending the Great Wall. It is interesting that their rule was so short. It seems like the dynasties that focused on building projects were shorter than those that focused on war.

5. Ancient Chinese history is full of war between clans and factions, back and forth, back and forth. The highly disciplined and usually authoritarian bureaucracy is another feature.

Next Week: History 10c. Ancient Egypt

Take-Away:

• Extreme authoritarianism is often short lived, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
• Trade inevitably changes a culture because of the inevitable influences from the outside, but you change them too.

[1] Cf. http://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/chinese-history/spring-and-autumn-period.htm

Sanders' overview of Paul 2

I think in part because I have no real reason to read it, I'm finding myself reading E. P. Sanders new summative book on Paul in the gaps in my time. Another reason is that it is so light on the eyes. Yes, it's over 800 pages, but it's such an easy read (not like that torturer, N. T. Wright).

So I read the overview of Paul's life during lunch. Here's some highlights:

• Paul's was not from a rich or poor family. He was not a common laborer but not super-schooled either. Maybe his dad owned a small leather-working business.
• Smiled at this: "The revelatory experience that changed his life seems not to have altered his character and personality" (5). :-)
• May have died about AD62 (that would mean at the end of Acts). Sanders says that "most scholars" think this. :-) He's open to the possibility of a release after he first saw Nero.
• He makes it clear that Paul may not have won his arguments with Jerusalem at the time. I agree.
• This sentence was interesting (reminded me of Paula Fredriksen's recent article): "Paul argued vociferously that his converts could remain gentiles, though they had to accept Jewish monotheism and most aspects of Jewish ethics" (9).
• He ends by justifying two conventions he uses in his book. First, he's going to call the followers of Jesus "Christians" even though they largely didn't call themselves by this name at first.
• Second, he dismisses the rumor that the word Palestine was invented by Hadrian as a term of derision. In his typical matter of fact way, he says, "These terms are historical and have no reference to the modern world" (11). "Palestine" is at least as old as Herodotus. Aristotle uses it. It has nothing to do with contemporary arguments over Palestinian legitimacy. 
• Again I say, it's good to be retired! :-)

Grafting Gentiles into the Tree

In the first chapter, we saw that one aspect of the recently revised perspectives on Paul and Judaism was a greater sense of the continuity between Israel and earliest Christianity. Indeed, throughout the book I have argued that it is much more accurate to speak of Christian Jews than it is to speak of Jewish Christians. Even Gentile believers in Christ were, at the beginning, something along the lines of Gentile converts to Israel. When I speak of "Gentile Christians," I am in a sense speaking of a certain species of "Gentile Israelite."

In this chapter, we now want to look at Hebrews in relation to the Jewish sense of election, covenant, and the Law in its environment. The previous chapter looked at the Christology of Hebrews in relation to Jewish "monotheism." Earlier chapters have looked at Hebrews in relation to the temple, which speaks to Jewish conceptions of land and redemption. [1] Now we want to ask to what extent Hebrews might reflect a partitioning or parting of the ways with Judaism in relation to election, covenant, and Torah. [2]

At this point it is perilous to enter into Pauline waters, even though we must. Much like the first chapter, we will simply have to take certain positions and more or less by-pass the significant amount of debate that surrounds an issue such as this one. The amount of literature on Paul and the Law is staggering to the mind. To some extent, we will simply have to comfort ourselves with the fact that the position we will take here in relation to Paul has already been defended elsewhere by others, even though we cannot hope to rehearse an exhaustive argument.

So we begin with Paul as potentially relevant background to Hebrews on the question of election, covenant, and the Jewish Law...

[1] In Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood  Apostle (New York: HarperOne, 2009), Pamela Eisenbaum considers redemption one of three key components of Judaism at the time, along with worship and Torah (68). N. T. Wright considers her category of redemption to correspond loosely to his third element, "eschatology," alongside monotheism and election, in Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 612 **.

[2] See chapter 1. For language of "partitioning," see especially D. Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2004).

In the Wright

I've decided to take a Schencky approach to my depressing reading list. Since I know I can't read through the list from start to finish--simply the realities of my life--I'm going to pop in and out of them.

So tonight I popped into the Introduction to Part III of N. T. Wright's tome, Paul and the Faithfulness of God. This is the beginning to the second book of this "one book." This is where he gets to Paul. The first book is background and context.

1. His goal in this second book is to show the central concern and inner logic of Paul. He emphasizes the coherence of Paul's writings. I'll confess that I much prefer Dunn to Wright. Dunn builds up patterns from the text up. Wright has a tendency to presuppose a metanarrative and then see it everywhere, implicit in passages even at times when he can't point to a verse.

I actually wonder if his earlier work on Paul was more helpful before he had looked at Paul so long that he began to see all these complex patterns everywhere. Also I think his Paul articles on specific passages are more helpful.

2. His reduction of Second Temple Jewish theology to monotheism, election, and eschatology is interesting (Dunn had four pillars--monotheism, election, covenant, and land; Eisenbaum has worship, Torah, and redemption). I'm not sure how prevalent eschatology was at all times but it obviously plays a large role for Wright.

"Paul remained a thoroughly Jewish thinker" (611). Fair enough.

Early Christianity reworked monotheism, election, and eschatology around Jesus the Messiah and the Holy Spirit (612). Definitely on the first. I wait to see what he means by the second.

3. Wright and I will no doubt soon find ourselves in tension over how much of the OT context Paul presupposes in his use of Scripture. My dictum is, "As far as the intended meaning, see no more meaning in the words than is necessary." Wright will rather see lots of resonances and a deep theological richness. I have no problem with that as a reader response, a "theological interpretation." I just think it goes beyond what Paul himself was likely thinking. I call it promiscuous exegesis.

Hebrews and New Perspectives...

... As we look at the dialog these past decades since Sanders, some features of the discussion seem more directly relevant to the interpretation of Hebrews than others. In the next chapter, for example, we will look especially at Hebrews 6:1-2. There we will argue that the way in which Hebrews treats beliefs like repentance and resurrection--namely, as entry level beliefs--suggests that the bulk of the audience is not Jewish at all, but Gentile. [1] Before the new perspective, when it was easy to think of joining the Jesus movement as conversion to a new religion, it was easy to miss the fact that Jews would have already believed or practiced most if not all of the elementary principles mentioned in these verses.

While the extent to which Hebrews reflects a parting or partitioning of the ways from Judaism is a major feature of this book's inquiry, the new perspective puts the burden of proof on the one who argues for parting, rather than on continuity. That is to say, we should presume that the author of Hebrews located his sermon within the limits of Judaism unless the evidence clearly shows us otherwise. A Jew had faith in God and believed in repenting from "dead works." Jews practiced various forms of baptism and laid hands on people. Jews believed in resurrection and judgment. [2]

The expression, "dead works," is perhaps the most obvious place in Hebrews where the new perspective on Paul immediately called prior interpretations into question. Prior to Sanders, most commentaries on Hebrews assumed that the dead works here were something along the lines of works of Law in Romans and Galatians. So a person repented of trying to earn one's salvation. After the new perspective, however, it is obvious that one does not repent of works of Law. Indeed, Stendahl  pointed out that Paul rejected boasting about his works of the Jewish Law--he does not consider them to be sinful or to his discredit. The vast majority of commentaries now rightly suggest that Paul is talking about sins, here, acts that lead to death.

In the next chapter, we will also explore the phrase, "seed of Abraham." At first glance, we might easily miss the potential significance of this expression. The tendency of Christians to understand the church as the new Israel has made it easy to miss how striking it is that Hebrews never refers to the Gentiles. Are we to understand the phrase, "seed of Abraham" in the way that is Paul's default and certainly the default of the earliest believers: as a reference to ethnic Israel? Paul may raise the possibility that Gentiles can become the seed of Abraham (e.g., Rom. 2), but Hebrews seems to assume it. Hebrews gives no argument or explanation for the phrase but matter-of-factly can combine Jew and Gentile into this phrase, a fact that may suggest a time beyond that of Paul himself.

Nor is Hebrews in discontinuity with Judaism when it assumes that it is only by God's grace that believers can receive the forgiveness of sins. This was always the presumption of the Jewish sacrificial system as well. Further, it has proved just as problematic to Christian interpreters of a certain theological stripe to find that Hebrews does not treat God's grace as inexhaustible without an appropriate response. The new prospective renders that entire issue moot. Both the early Jesus movement and the Judaism from which it sprang both held that God's favor was a matter of grace and that it demanded a faithful response in order to be maintained.

Clearly discussions concerning the early partitionings between Judaism and incipient Christianity bear more directly on the interpretation of Hebrews than the new perspective on Paul or the third quest for the historical Jesus. Was the earliest Christology of Christian Judaism such a significant mutation that it almost immediately placed it outside the normal boundaries of Jewish monotheism? ...

[1] cf. DeSilva.

[2] Not all Jews believed all these things, of course, and not all Jews believed them in the same ways. We will return to this diversity in the chapter that follows.

Schrodinger's Doctrine

At the Theological Research Seminar at IWU yesterday, I was presenting a historical and theological response to Richard Bauckham called, "Jesus and the Identity of God." My basic conclusion was that Bauckham's theology is spot on and his readings of NT texts are appropriate Christian readings but that they seem a little too complex and convenient from a historical perspective.

But what really seemed to resonate was more a model of looking at Christian doctrine and orthodox readings of biblical texts I called "Schrodinger's Doctrine."

You may have heard of Schrodinger's cat. It is an illustration from quantum physics where we don't know if a cat in a box is alive or dead until we open the box. More profoundly, the cat in a sense is both alive and dead until it is observed. Quantum physicists call this "superposition." A particle can, for all intents and purposes, be in two different places at once until it is observed. It's position is undetermined up to that point.

So, I suggested, until the Church "opened the box" on key issues, the position of Christianity on that issue was not yet determined. In AD324, both Arius and Athanasius are in the box. In AD325, the Church opens the box and finds Athanasius.

I don't wish to suggest that Philippians 2:6-11 or 1 Corinthians 8:6 did not have an original, historical meaning prior to what would become the Christian reading of them. We can debate it if you wish. But I am suggesting that, for Christians, these texts did not have a determined meaning of sorts until they did, until the Church opened the box.

As my friend and colleague John Drury likes to say, quoting Hegel, "History is lived forward but understood backward."

One problem I see with our inquiries is that we almost seem to assume that ideology was the first order of business for the earliest believers. Rather, as Larry Hurtado has argued, practices wagged the dog.

The earliest Christians didn't stop to work out the fine nuances of monotheism or dig up some copy of Ezekiel the Tragedian. They sang. They praised. Theology came later, and what theology came later was as much rhetorical as ideological.

So did Christianity include Jesus within the identity of the one God? Yes! Did Christianity include Jesus within the eschatological monotheism of the one God? Yes! Did Christianity include Jesus within the worship of the one God? Yes! Did Christianity include Jesus within the creational monotheism of the one God? Yes!

When the box was opened, yes!

The Worship of Jesus, again

I'm trying to finish a piece on Hebrews and Christology, and I thought I'd use the blog to process some thoughts again. I wrote a piece in 2008 here on the spectrum of positions on the worship of Jesus and received some good feedback from friends. I want to try again.

1. First, let me name the individuals whom I consider to be key players in this discussion. That is to say, any categorization scheme I come up with needs to account with sufficient nuance for the positions of these scholars (I've thrown in some whom I want to be mentioned in the footnotes):

• Jarl Fossum
• Margaret Barker
• Peter Hayman
• Alan Segal
• Maurice Casey
• James D. G. Dunn
• Loren Stuckenbruck
• Larry Hurtado
• Richard Bauckham
• Paula Frederickson
• James McGrath
• Adela Yarbro Collins
• William Horbury
• Bart Ehrman

2. What are the key questions? In my 2008 post, I suggested that three questions suffice to adequately categorize these thinkers:

• Did those who believed Jesus was the Messiah worship him in the strictest sense of that term?
• If they did, did this worship stand outside the boundaries of mainstream Jewish monotheism?
• When did this worship of Jesus first take place and what factors facilitated it?

I am pondering whether it would be more precise to present these questions in a slightly more involved form:

a. Was the worship of YHWH exclusive within mainstream Judaism at the time of Christ? A fundamental question is of course what it means to "worship" a being.

b. If it was, to what extent did Judaism allow for the reverence or worship of subsidiary beings as a special case of the worship of the one God YHWH?

c. At what point did the early Christians begin to worship Jesus? Within incipient Christian Judaism? Within early Hellenistic Christianity? Within late first century Christianity or later?

d. Was this worship in continuity with Jewish precedents (especially in conjunction with the answer to #2 above), or did it mark an unprecedented innovation? Was that innovation a "parting" from Jewish monotheism or somehow a new variation on it?

3. So let me try to run Richard Bauckham through this series of questions.

a. He believes the worship of YHWH was exclusive.
b. He also believes that the Jews did not worship any other subsidiary being, even one closely associated with YHWH.
c. He believes the worship of Jesus was very, very early in incipient Christian Judaism.
d. He considers it a clear innovation, but not one that parted from Jewish monotheism. Rather, Jesus is understood to be within the identify of the one God, whose oneness is typified by his role in creation, in eschatology, and in being the sole recipient of sacrifices.

4. Now let me try Larry Hurtado, who perhaps will correct me if I'm wrong.

a. He believes the worship of YHWH was exclusive.
b. He does not believe that Jews actually worshiped any of the agents of God in early Judaism before Christ, although there was the rise of the two power heresy later.
c. He believes that the worship of Jesus was very, very early within incipient Christian Judaism.
d. He considers it a significant mutation, one helped by the traditions about divine agents in Judaism, but of a distinctly new form. Jesus is cultically worshiped in a way they were not. I believe he sees this as a significant discontinuity with mainstream Judaism, worthy of the name, "binitarian."

5. Now let me try James Dunn:

a. He believes the worship of YHWH was exclusive.
b. He does not believe that Jews worshiped any of the agents of God in early Judaism before Christ.
c. He believes that the worship of Jesus in any strong sense was slow to develop within early Christianity.
d. He thus believes that earliest Christianity remained in continuity with Jewish monotheism in the sense that the early veneration of Jesus was not in discontinuity with Jewish precedents.

6. Now let me try Margaret Barker:

a. She did not believe that the worship of YHWH was exclusive. There was at least one other deity, Elohim. (I have always considered her positions bizarre in the extreme)
b. I suppose this makes the second question a bit moot.
c. She thus doesn't have a problem with the early worship of Jesus, I don't think.
d. And she sees the worship of Jesus in continuity with earlier Jewish tradition.

I'd be curious to know if other scholars find this way of approaching categorization helpful. Let me try James McGrath:

a. I believe he considers the worship of YHWH generally exclusive.
b. But he does believe there were precedents for a softer worship of other beings associated with YHWH within a Judaism whose understanding of monotheism changed over time.
c. He does not believe that the earliest worship of Jesus was as robust as Hurtado or Bauckham think. In particular, Jesus was never the recipient of sacrificial worship.
d. He thus does not see the early reverence of Jesus as any kind of departure from the monotheistic precedents within Judaism.

How'd I do, James?

Creational and Eschatological Monotheism...

I'd be interested in reactions to these paragraphs. Basically, I accept the logic of creational and eschatological formulations of God's oneness. But would most ordinary Jews of Jesus' day have come up with these ideas without prompting?
______________
... It is hard to know how extensively Jews at the time of Christ might have conceptualized the oneness of God in creational and eschatological terms. It is one thing to quote a text like Isaiah 45:18: "Thus says YHWH, the one who created the skies—he is the God who formed the earth and made it… 'I myself am YHWH and there is no other.'" This verse demonstrates a connection between God as creator and any other divine claimant. Logically it makes sense that the being who created other beings would have a claim to primacy over the beings he or she created. However, how often did Jews at the time of Christ actually conceptualize God’s oneness in these terms?

For example, did most Jews actually have a clear sense of the origins of evil powers? There does not seem to be a single Jewish narrative in this regard, although no scenario at the time of the New Testament saw any other gods in existence prior to the God of Israel. [1] We have a tendency today in our analysis of Jewish thought to systematize, connect dots, fill in gaps, when most people do not have a systematic, coherent theology. To what extent did God as creator play into ordinary Jewish thinking about God as the one God at all? Presumably an ordinary Jew might have be attracted to this notion if someone had suggested it to them, but how many ancient Jews would have volunteered this dimension as part of the oneness of God without suggestion?

Similarly, we should not assume that all Jews, especially ordinary Jews, had a strongly linear sense of history. Although G. B. Caird held that the biblical writers did believe in an ultimate end to the world in the future, he also indicated that, “they regularly used end-of-the-world language metaphorically to refer to that which they well knew was not the end of the world.” [2] Perhaps with the exception of Daniel 12:2-3, all the apocalyptic imagery of the Hebrew Bible should be understood in terms of world changing events rather than the end of history. N. T. Wright has captured this element of modern speech with examples like saying that the fall of the Berlin Wall was an “earth-shattering” event. [3] Similarly, he has used the example of someone who might say after a tragedy, “This is the end of the world for me.” Only some forms of Judaism at the time of Christ were apocalyptic, and some of them may not actually have looked for an end to history in the way we so commonly assume.

For example, it is not at all certain that all the Jews at the time of Christ looked to the coming of a messianic king, but even most of those that did probably expected this individual simply to restore Israel and give it pride of place among the nations of the earth. [4] The apocalyptic imagery and nationalistic fervor may have increased in times of Israel’s oppression, [5] but it remains that many if not most Jews at the time of Christ had no sense of a final cosmic battle between good and evil. [6] This observation raises the question. Assuming that most of those Jews without a strongly linear-oriented eschatology affirmed the oneness of God, how can we consider eschatological monotheism anything like a central factor in ancient Jewish monotheism in general?

[1] Later Gnostic thinking would, by contrast. We can say, however, that all the Jewish narratives we know, prior to the New Testament, saw evil powers either as fallen angelic powers or as a result of the fall of angels, all which they presumably thought God created. The Life of Adam and Eve saw Satan’s fall in conjunction with his refusal to bow before Adam in the Garden of Eden (13-16). By contrast, 1 Enoch saw the fall of the angels in relation to their lust after the daughters of men in Genesis 6:2-4 (e.g., 1 Enoch 10, 15).

[2] The Language and Imagery of the Bible (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1980), 256.

[3] New Testament and the People of God, 282-83.

[4] E.g., Psalms of Solomon 17. See James Charlesworth, ed. The Messiah: Developments in Earliest Judaism and Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992); John J. Collins, The Scepter and the Star: Messianism in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). Even the imagery of Revelation, as apocalyptic as it is, gives hints that its author may have seen history continuing in some way alongside the redeemed (e.g., Rev. 21:24-27).

[5] So even the generally philosophical and “vertical” Philo arguably became more “horizontal” and eschatological in lieu of the Jewish crisis during the reign of Caligula. See Rewards 95; cf. Peder Borgen, “There Shall Come Forth a Man, in The Messiah, 341-61, and Kenneth Schenck, A Brief Guide to Philo (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 37-41. Even here, however, Philo did not look for an end to history.

[6] We should keep in mind that Jewish thinking before the destruction of the temple in 70CE was considerably more diverse than it would become after Jewish thinking became somewhat standardized in the Rabbinic period. Even in rabbinic thought, however, there is no end to history, and rabbinic thought is far from apocalyptic in flavor.

Writing of the Day: Monotheism

Trying to write a chapter on "Hebrews and Christology" for a book I'm under contract for: A New Perspective on Hebrews.

Let me just say how amazed I am at how the accessibility of scholarship has changed. Google alone is fantastic. Good grief, when you think of how I scoured paper encyclopedias for some hint of knowledge about things in high school.

But this morning I went from thinking,

1. "I wish I could get my hands on Larry Hurtado's most recent article on monotheism" to

2. Doing a Google search on the journal it's in, "Journal of Ancient Judaism," published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht to

3. Realizing I can buy and download a copy for 6,20 €.

Reading Hurtado's summary, I was glad to see him saying things that I am also saying in the first part of my chapter. For example, he says in his summary, "It’s hard to find ancient Jews (or Christians) who denied the existence of all other divine beings. Instead, for them the issue was the validity of worshipping any deity other than the one deity of the biblical tradition."

I think I differ a little with Hurtado on the question of early Jewish and Christian worship, but I think he is spot on with this comment here.

Now off to read his article in all its 8 dollar glory...

Ehrman Chapter 2: Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism

I am working through Bart Ehrman's, How Jesus Became God, on Mondays.  Here are the posts so far:

Introduction
1. Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome

Today is chapter 2, "Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism."

In this chapter, Ehrman aims to show that there was a spectrum of "divinity" within Judaism just as within the Greco-Roman world. For most of this review, I want to take the examples he gives and put them into my own sense of the flow of Jewish thought.

A key point comes at the end of the chapter and is worth starting with: "It is absolutely the case that by the time of Jesus and his followers most Jews were almost certainly monotheists" (83). So what is his point in the chapter then?  It would seem to be this: Humans nonetheless, "could share some of the authority, status, and power of that one God." I am good with this assessment.

However, I'm not sure that is the same thing as the next sentence: "Even within a strict monotheism, there could be other divine beings and the possibility of a gradation of divinity." I don't think that's quite right. The sentence before shows that, in Judaism, it was really only when a being was representing God in a very, very narrow sense that we come anywhere close to saying such a being "shared" in the "authority, status, and power" of the one God.

That is to say, in Judaism we only get divine language used of other beings in a derivative way. No being comes close to such language on its own but only in some special relation to the one God, in a representative or reflective sense. And even then, it's not like we have a lot of examples of this sort of thing.

Old Testament Henotheism
So we start with some OT passages he mentions that reflect a henotheist view. Yes, Israel not only had its share of polytheists (the sort Elijah contended with). Yes, the Israelites were mosly henotheists and "monolaters" who only worshiped Yahweh while not denying the existence of other gods (e.g., Ps. 82; Deut. 32:8-9).

Nothing new here. Again, even he says, "by the time of Jesus and his followers most Jews were almost certainly monotheists" (54). So this is fun historical background... largely irrelevant to the question of what the earliest Christians thought about Jesus.

The Old Testament King 
It might shock you to know that the Israelites could refer to their earthly king as "God," but there's nothing to see here. This is well known. Psalm 45 was originally a wedding psalm for a king. But, as Michael Bird points out, there was no confusion for anyone in ancient Israel between the king and God himself (42). The king as God's representative on earth is clearly distinguished from the God in 45:7.

The question, again, is whether this aspect of Israelite thought centuries before Jesus is relevant to the time of Jesus. It does seem to me that the incident in the play by Ezekiel the Tragedian (ca. 200BC) does indicate that some Jews at the time of Christ could think of an earthly king "sharing" the honor due God in a derivative way. But I disagree with the way Ehrman puts it.

Ehrman puts it this way: The stars "bow down in worship to Moses, who has been transformed into a being even greater than they" (61). I don't agree. They bow down to Moses because he is sitting on God's throne, representing the one God. It is a derivative bowing, not an instance of Moses himself being transformed into the divine. I have argued this elsewhere.

The Angel of the Lord
The Angel of the Lord is an interesting figure in the early OT. Genesis and Exodus seem to consider this messenger of Yahweh so much to be identified with Yahweh that those who see the angel are said to see God. John Collins puts it this way, "there is no substantive difference between the deity and his agents" (57).

An interesting history lesson. But is it relevant to the time of Jesus? It was some 1000 years earlier or so.

Angels Having Sex
I'm not sure this is really relevant either to the topic of how the earliest Christians came to equate Jesus with God. Yes, many Jews did believe that angels could have sex with women. 1 Enoch explains Genesis 6:1-2 in this way. As a side note, Dale Martin might suggest that many Jews thought of angels as truly masculine such that they didn't have "to assume human shape" (63). Isn't it just as likely that these Jews assumed angels were literally male?

Exalted Angels
Ehrman mentions a number of exalted angels, but you can't blur Psalm 82 with the Prayer of Joseph or the Apocalypse of Abraham. They are separated by numerous centuries. Is Ehrman's implied argument:

• The word God is plural in OT Hebrew and can mean "angels."
• There are angels who come to earth in the Prayer of Joseph and Apocalypse of Abraham. 
• Therefore, we can say that these angels who come down to earth in later texts are gods come to earth.

Maybe I'm missing something but this logic doesn't seem to work. The meanings of words at any one point in time are a function of that point in time, not hundreds of years earlier.

Humans who become angels
Again, it feels like he's mixing up some different times and places. So Enoch doesn't become an angel in Genesis or in most of 1 Enoch. There are some texts from around the time of Christ where humans become angel-like (2 Baruch). I do believe there are places where the dead are thought of as becoming angels (Acts 12:15). Basically, it's all over the map.

I'm waiting to see, though, any evidence yet that the earliest Christians thought Jesus had become an angel.

Hypostases and Philo
I think Ehrman goes too far in thinking of wisdom and word in Jewish thought as hypostases. I think for the vast majority of Jewish literature, wisdom and logos are simply personifications of God's attributes, spoken of poetically and figuratively. For example, I disagree with him in thinking that the Wisdom of Solomon thinks of wisdom as an actual being. She's still just an attribute of God, referred to poetically.

Even in Philo, I believe the word and wisdom of God are, more often than not, personifications of God's attributes. True, there are times in Philo where I think the Logos crosses a line and becomes an actual entity, "created but not created like mortals" (Heir 205-6). But there is no question in Philo's mind, even in this case, that the Logos is not "uncreated like God."

Philo's use of allegory and figural language requires some care in reading his comments. Without a sense of his overall point, you can easily mistake an allegorical comment for a literal one. For example, is Philo really talking about the literal Moses or does Moses represent something else, such as a characteristic of God.

Ehrman is right that the rabbis of the second century began to clamp down on how exalted some Jews had come to think of there being "two powers" in heaven (67-69). He is also right that, whatever the official position of a religion, people are going to believe all sorts of things on a popular level (50). I personally question whether Colossians 2 is about worshiping angels, but I suspect there were Jews who crossed the line in their devotion to angelic beings.

Is he suggesting that the earliest Christians had precedents for crossing a similar line? I guess we'll find out.

The Son of Man
Ehrman introduces us to the heavenly figure of Daniel 7 known as the "Son of Man." He is right that, in 1 Enoch, this figure sits on God's throne and judges the nations. This picture may very well have influenced the picture of Jesus sitting on a throne in Matthew 25.

I do want to make a strong distinction, however, between parallels like these generating the heart of early Christian understandings of Jesus and the possibility that the earliest Christians drew on some images like these to find ways to express what they already had experienced in relation to Jesus. In other words, resurrection faith came first. Drawing on existing imagery to describe these unbelievable events came second.

Larry Hurtado
I may have missed it, but I haven't seen a direct response to Ehrman's book on Hurtado's blog. But Ehrman does quote the classic One God One Lord at one point in support of his thesis. Hurtado concludes that "principle angel speculation and other types of divine agency thinking... provided the earliest Christians with a basic scheme for accommodating the resurrected Christ next to God without having to depart from their monotheistic tradition" (61).

I might selectively agree with Hurtado here, but I wonder whether Hurtado likes the way Ehrman paraphrases this quote: "to make Jesus divine, one simply needs to think of him as an angel in human form" (61).

I really don't think that's what Hurtado said. Hurtado, like me, believes that the earliest believers drew on Jewish precedents to describe their recent experiences. As far as I can remember, I don't think he holds to any sort of "angelic Christology," the belief that the earliest Christians saw Jesus as a kind of angel.

Next week: "Did Jesus Think He Was God?"

G.11 There is only one God, but God is three persons.

Last post in the section on God in my ongoing series giving some thoughts on theology in bullet points. I may have missed something, but I believe this concludes my section on God. I'll post all the links in a separate post in a moment.
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G11. There is only one God, but God is three persons.

How can God only be one God and yet be three distinct persons? It is a mystery. Any attempt to explain this historic Christian belief is doomed to fall into something that has been considered a heresy at some point or another in Christian history. You might say that, at best, we might simply affirm everything we need to affirm and not try to figure out how it all fits together.

1. There is only one God.
This is a central pillar of the Jewish faith from which Christian faith emerged. Old Testament faith was of course more complicated in its Ancient Near Eastern context. The Israelites believed that Ba'al existed. They just didn't believe he was an appropriate god to worship nor anywhere near as powerful as Yahweh, the God of Israel. [1] The God of Israel was in fact God Most High, the Creator God, the one true God. The others were inferior beings who were nothing next to God. They were to put no god before Yahweh (Exod. 20:3).

We as Christians today would not even call such beings "gods." We might take Paul's lead and call them demons at best (1 Cor. 10:20)--perhaps even figments of the Canaanite imagination. The one true God is the sole Creator of the universe out of nothing. [2] He created all other spiritual powers, including those that were associated with other peoples in the Ancient Near East.

Paul puts it this way: "For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”), yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live" (1 Cor. 8:5-6a). This is a consistent teaching of Scripture. Ephesians clearly states that, "There is... one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all" (4:4, 6).

2. There are three persons who are the one God.
Here is where it gets complicated. Since the 300s, Christianity has affirmed not only that there is one God, but that God the Father is God, Jesus is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. As a creed from those early centuries puts it, we do not confuse the persons of the Trinity, this three-in-one. And we do not divide the one substance. [3]

As this creed puts it, "there is one person of the Father and one person of the Son, and one person of the Holy Spirit, but the divinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one." All three are uncreated. All three are eternal. All three are all powerful. "The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God. Yet there are not three gods, but one God."

The details of this belief were worked out in the first few centuries of Christianity as the Church tried to discern what the Bible indicated about God. So John 1:1 said that "the Word was God," meaning that Jesus was God. But did Jesus become God at his baptism or resurrection (adoptionism)? Was Jesus the first, most exalted of God's creation, but still part of the creation (Arianism)? Or perhaps Jesus was only similar in substance to God the Father (homoiousios) rather than "of the same substance" (homoousios).

On the other side of the equation, were the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit simply three different faces of God but not really three distinct persons (modalism)?  After Christianity became a legal religion in the Roman Empire, the leaders of Christianity came together at a city called Nicaea in the year AD325 to try to hammer out some of these disagreements. [4] It would take the better part of a century, but by about the year 400, the current belief had become the commonly accepted one on the Trinity.

The common belief of Christianity ever since is that all three persons of the Trinity are distinct persons but that they are only one God.

3. This is a difficult concept, and it has always been tempting to modify it or give it greater clarity than we are in a position to understand. It is also a position that required Christians to answer questions that are not entirely clear in the Bible, and the different groups who argued in the first centuries all used Scripture to argue for their positions.

Even today, there is a tendency to go into great detail about relationships between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit before the creation of the world. But in all of Scripture, the only passage to come anywhere close to saying anything along these lines is when Jesus speaks of the glory he shared with God the Father before the world began (John 17:5). In the Bible itself, we see the nature of Jesus' relationship with the Father while he is on earth but not so much before.

Knowing the tendency traditions have to grow, it is best for us to focus most on the Trinity in relation to the roles each play in Scripture and not to speculate too much about things we could not possibly comprehend. God the Father functions most in Scripture as the transcendent and sovereign Creator to whom all glory must ultimately go (e.g., Phil. 2:11). Jesus functions most in Scripture as the agent of God in the redemption of the world, the one in whom the world once again finds its intended meaning and purpose. The Spirit functions most in Scripture as the channel of God's presence and power on the earth.

In Scripture, God is three persons, even though there is only one God.

Next week: C.1 God created the universe out of nothing.

[1] The worship of one God while believing others exist is called "monolatry," and the position is called "henotheism."

[2] I am following the lead here of Richard Bauckham's description of Jewish monotheism at the time of Christ in Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament's Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 184. In addition to "creational" monotheism, he describes Jewish monotheism as "cultic monotheism" (meaning that only Yahweh was worthy of worship) and "eschatological monotheism" (only Yahweh would emerge victorious at the end of history).

[3] The so called Athansian Creed.

[4] The Roman emperor Constantine made Christianity a legal religion in AD313.

Wright: Philemon and Worldview

The journey through N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God continues. Thus far,

Preface
The Basics of Philemon

2. Philemon and the Study of Paul
Summary
Wright believes that there is a worldview coming to expression in Philemon (23). Here he draws on his earlier work especially in The New Testament and the People of God. "One of the extraordinary achievements of Paul was to turn 'theology' into a different kind of thing from what it had been before in the world either of the Jews or of the pagans. One of the central arguments of the present book is that this was the direct result and corollary of what had happened to Paul's worldview. Paul effectively invented 'Christian theology' to meet a previously unknown need, to do a job which had not, until then, been necessary" (26).

Wright's understanding of worldview involves four core components: 1) an underlying narrative or story, 2) habitual actions or praxis, 3) symbols, a symbolic universe, and 4) common answers to certain worldview questions like "Who are we?" "Where are we?" "What's wrong?" "What's the solution?" "What time is it?" He seems to add "Why?" with this book, and indicate that the why questions point to theology. As he has already set, he considers a mindset to be an individual or sub-cultural perspective within a broader worldview.

Wright is aiming at a "thick description" of Paul. This is a term from anthropologist Clifford Geertz that aims at understanding actions in their deepest, culturally embedded sense, "to attempt to discern those things which people knew easily and without effort even if such 'knowledge' is remote for us and hard to reconstruct" (29). Cultural assumptions are often those of which we are least aware and yet are generally held in common by a whole culture. These assumptions are most key to understanding someone from another culture and yet they are least likely to be stated explicitly because they are so deeply assumed.

The core elements of worldview are "not likely to be topics of regular conversation, whether in a family or in a culture; they are the presuppositions which enable people to make sense of everything else" (33). "Story, praxis, and symbol generate and sustain a set of implicit answers to the five questions. People normally do not talk about these four elements of their worldview... [except] when something has gone wrong [or] when an outsider issues a challenge or a new question..." (33-34).

"The study of Paul's worldview leads to a striking, dramatic conclusion: this worldview not only requires a particular 'theology' to sustain it, but also requires that 'theology' itself play a new role, integrated with the worldview itself" (30). The why question, when addressed to the components of worldview (story, praxis, symbol, basic answers) leads to an underlying theology. "This theology cannot be reduced to a system of ideas" (31).

Two other dimensions quickly come into play. First, culture draws together narrative, praxis, and symbol into particular patterns. Culture brings to expression beliefs and perceptions that either reinforce the prevailing worldview or stand in tension with it.

Second, Wright uses the word "worship" instead of religion so as not to assume the division of religious and secular created in the period of the Enlightenment. "'Worship' is a specific activity in which the other elements of the worldview are caught up, colouring praxis, shaping and influencing narrative, generating symbols, and frequently offering answers to the key questions" (36).

The next part of the chapter discusses how Paul's worldview could only be sustained by constantly, thoughtfully, and prayerfully addressing the question of who the one true God is, what he has done and is doing, and what his doings mean for the community of faith in the Messiah. At the center of this theology, for Wright, is a "Jewish-style (but christologically redefined) monotheism" (37). "I shall propose... that monotheism is indeed at the heart of Paul's theology... as the integrating theme which explains and gives depth to all the others."

The rest of this section goes through some of the "centers" of Paul's thought that have been proposed over the years. "Salvation" was implicitly the center for most of the time since the Reformation (justification by faith). Albert Schweitzer (and now Douglas Campbell) have emphasized participation in Christ as the center. Other "organizing" elements have also entered the scene, vying for attention (Wright has another entire volume coming out on the interpretation of Paul).

First there is the idea of salvation history, the idea that history is the outworking of God's plan of salvaiton. Second, there is the category of apocalyptic, the breaking in of the heavenly realm into the events of the earth. Third is the notion of covenant, that the events concerning Jesus are the fulfillment of ancient promises.

Then there are questions of how history impinges on Paul. Is Paul more a Hellenistic or Jewish thinker? Unfortunately, "he is so many-sided that he can be appealed to this way or that on all kinds of issues, not only in theology and ethics but in culture and philosophy..." (42).

Is Paul more doctrinal or ethical? Wright thinks this false distinction owes much to Kant. Wright himself thinks there was also a politically subversive dimension to Paul. All these aspects of Paul have to be brought into dialog with each other. Wright aims to jumble them all together, "like pieces of the same jigsaw puzle that had somehow found their way onto quite separate tables" (43).

We also need to distinguish between the derivation of Paul's ideas (where they came from) and how he used them in the confrontation of his world (where they were going to). How did Paul use elements of his "history-of-religions" world in the engagement of his world?

We can't choose between sharp antitheses any more. "There is indeed a way of analyzing and understanding Paul in which these several multi-layered dichotomies can be resolved..." (45).  "We are looking, not so much for a 'centre' to Paul's thought-world (and his worldview in the sense explained), as a vantage point, a summit from which we can survey, and see the way to explore, the landscape of the letters and their implicit worlds" (46).

What is this vantage point? First, "Paul remained a deeply Jewish theologian who had rethought and reworked every aspect of his native Jewish theology in the light of the Messiah and the spirit, resulting in his own vocational self-understanding as the apostle to the pagans" (46). Jews do not have a theology in the way Paul and subsequent Christian theology has. But derived from Paul's Jewishness, he confronts and engages his new context in a way that draws on three key elements of his native Jewish  world.

"The three categories are monotheism, election, and eschatology: one God, one people of God, one future for God's world" (46). Paul approaches his world from these three theological peaks, with creational monotheism at the center of his thinking. The either-or distinctions of the past focus on the valleys between rather than the key vantage points.

Reflections
You can easily see that Wright's desire to be all-encompassing has resulted in significant complexity. He is doing his best to take into account all the pitfalls of past discussion, and the result is indeed like a collection of puzzle pieces he has mixed together on a table--maybe even a mixture of several related puzzles. One of the most instructive aspects of the chapter, if you can see it, is the way he has tried to avoid every extreme.

So he does not want to treat Paul as just a thinker or a practitioner. He wants to take into account "thick descriptions" and "social imaginaries" of worldview and distinguish them from culture and individual mindsets. He does not want to limit Paul to his Jewishness or to Hellenism. He wants to avoid the old, "Is it justification by faith or participation in Christ" dichotomy. He wants to avoid the mistakes of so much "center of Paul" debates, choosing instead the more complicated model of peaks, ridges, and valleys.

All of this prolegomena is to get us ready, and we will see how it plays out. You wonder how this chapter would have been written if he wasn't, to some extent, bound by frameworks he set up twenty years ago. For example, he is too far along to shift comfortably from his earlier language of worldview to Charles Taylor's more sophisticated "social imaginary" (cf. 28, n.80).

It is ironic to me that while he recognizes and criticizes the pitfalls of idealism (27), of reducing reality to a set of ideas or privileging ideas over "real life," he still has a strong tendency to treat ideas in abstraction from the real world in which they are meant to help us operate. He does well to speak of thick descriptions and such, but in my opinion he still ultimately treats the structures of his method as more than heuristic tools. He tends to treat them as realities-in-themselves.

Nevertheless, Wright arguably has all the pieces here, in all their complexity. His categories are far superior to a lot of worldview talk that must surely be considered incredibly superficial and two-dimensional.  A lot of talk of ideas is really about social groups and traditional practices. As Wright implies, ideologies often emerge only when those traditional boundaries and practices are attacked or called into question.

Symbols, practices, stories that provide the significance of those symbols and practices, or the answers to the questions our group asks--these are all part of our "worldviews" and "mindsets." But the ideas are not primary. They are abstractions from our lived-lives in the world. They are the way we anticipate what is to come and how we process change. Ideas are the scaffolding some of us build from which to engage our world. Others simply climb the walls of the world without much scaffolding.