Hebrews 7 Midrash and Paradigm Shifts

One of the assignments in the seminary's MA Biblical Interpretation course is to identify what kind of midrash Hebrews 7 is. The three possibilities are:

1. prophetic--where an OT text is taken as a prophecy of some current event
2. paraphrase--where an author expands on the meaning of an OT text
3. parable--where an author takes an OT text symbolically or allegorically

Interestingly, many students take Hebrews 7 as prophetic, with Melchizedek as a prophecy about Christ. This usually is expressed in pre-modern terms where the texts are read in terms of the way it looks to me rather than from listening to what the texts themselves say (thus someone might see Melchizedek as a Christophany, something unsupported by the texts themselves but nevertheless a traditional Christian interpretation). I do think there is an element of prophetic midrash in Hebrews 7, but it is more subtle than this.

Certainly Genesis 14 is not prophetic on its own terms. Nothing in this text speaks of any future fulfillment. Hebrews 7 also does not explicitly speak of Genesis 14 as a prophecy fulfilled in Christ, even though it does relate Genesis 14 to a recent event.

The subtle element of prophetic midrash comes in the use of Psalm 110:4, which the author takes as implying that the messiah will be a priest after the order of Melchizedek. It thus implies for the author that the arrival of a Melchizedekian priest brings a change of priesthood. In that sense he does seem to take Psalm 110 as prophetic and thus probably implicitly considers Genesis 14 to be prophetic.

But the primary form of midrash in Hebrews 7 is paraphrase midrash. It expands on what a priest after the order of Melchizedek might be by exploring features of Genesis 14. It uses interpretive techniques like "it doesn't exist if it is not in the Torah."

It also has elements of parable midrash. The interpretation of Melchizedek's name and the name of the town of Salem are clearly allegorical, for example.

The Rise of the Independents?

Charlie Crist, as everyone will know, has gone independent in Florida. The political climate can change so quickly, who knows if the current conditions will continue for long. But I for one greet a world where we see more and more independents running and winning--whatever you might say of Crist's motives.

It feels like you have to be extreme in either party to win a primary these days. Bring on the sane independents, as far as I'm concerned!

Wesley's "End of Christ's Coming"

Chris Bounds put me on to John Wesley's sermon, "The End (or purpose) of Christ's Coming" as a good place to see his breakdown of the image of God. I was looking for his sense of what the image of God in humanity consists of.

The sermon is quite interesting. Wesley's knowledge of Latin literature is impressive, which he quotes in Latin. He has the right understanding of Romans 7 as far as he goes ("Personating a man convinced of sin, but not conquering it").

He seems to demonstrate the "modern" sense of human will as found aptly in, for example, the philosophy of John Locke (Adam "was endued with a will, with various affections [which are only the will exerting itself in various ways]"). Augustine also of course talked about two wills, but not in terms of human understanding making choices, at least as I understand it. For Augustine these wills are a matter of God's choosing rather than ours.

His reading of the Genesis text is fully pre-modern a mirror reading of the text from within his own worldview, while at the same time incorporating the questions of old ("whence the origin of sin"). Important to realize that we often reinterpret the words of the ancients without realizing it, putting our thoughts into their words. So the comment that Satan "sinneth from the beginning" means that Satan was the first one to sin.

Wesley mentions two elements of the image of God in this sermon--the natural image and the moral image. I didn't find the political image in this sermon. Wesley includes within the natural image 1) understanding, 2) will, and 3) liberty. This framework seems decidedly impacted by the post-Cartesian paradigm shift.

The moral image has to do with the original "righteousness and true holiness" that Adam had and we have lost entirely apart from Christ. The political image is humanity's commission to rule the earth, impacted decidedly by the Fall.

In Genesis, I find only the third sense of the image of God, that humanity was intended to rule the creation as God rules His creation. In the NT, the image seems understandably to have a sense of reflecting the honor of God or the glory of God. I can't think of any places where it has anything to do with understanding, free will, or volition. I can't think off hand of any places where it has to do with an original moral righteousness either--this is all post-biblical expansion of Paul expanding on Genesis, for all I can tell.

These things are of interest to me, but I am more interested in how we today might conceptualize human beings as being in the image of God. The two key biblical senses of the phrase still seem most pertinent:

1) God has appointed us stewards of His creation. We are the most empowered of his creatures--which of course includes our greater understanding, our greater liberty, our greater sense of choices to make. We thus have the greatest responsibility among God's creatures.

2) Every human individual reflects the greatness of God. To harm any individual (here I am not speaking to issues of justice) is to mess with God's stuff.

I am the greatest of novices when it comes to image discussion after the New Testament. I welcome enlightenment of fundamental discussions I do not know.

Relationships in the Bible

The "original meaning scholar" inside of me always cringes a little when I read about Moses' relationship with God... or David's or Peter's or Paul's. Frankly, I have the same reaction when people talk about the relationships between the persons of the Trinity. The reason? These sorts of comments strike me as vastly anachronistic.

Six months ago I would have tried to explain this "feeling" I get in terms of ancient personalities being "dyadic" or group embedded. I might have suggested that the modern, introspective self traces back to the Romantics and in some ways back to Augustine, who individualized our understanding of Paul's writings.

Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self has been filling in some of the details. I wish I had the time to encapsulate his massive tome in detail. One of the main shifts that I blogged on a few weeks back is a shift from seeing truth as something out there that is part of the order of the world to seeing truth as something that my mind has to sort out by sifting through all the particular evidence of my reason and senses.

Inadvertantly, "I" become the center of the universe. I can still affirm that God is the center, but I am keenly aware that I am concluding that God is the center. Before I simply assumed God was the center unthinkingly. (I sense that Taylor will go Heideggerian on me at the end, but I'm no fan of Heidegger, meaning that I find this Cartesian situation unavoidable to some extent).

Eventually, individual identity becomes more and more particular to me. "I" become more and more self-defined, determined, and differentiated. It thus entails the eventual birth of modern intimacy, where my vastly increased in size self connects with your vastly increased in size self.

What I'm getting at is that pre-moderns did not have nearly as developed senses of themselves as individuals as so many of us do. And as a result, their relationships were not nearly as deep or complex as ours can be. It is not simply that "abba" did not mean "Daddy" in Aramaic (it didn't). I am saying that there really weren't any "Daddys" of the modern sort. Love between individuals did not have the kind of differentiated complexity--or post-Romantic age feeling--that we often have in the Western world. Go look at relationships in Africa or Asia if you want to know what biblical relationships were like.

Now of course the Trinity is a realm of absolutes beyond cultural contexts. The Trinity did not change their interrelationships after Descartes, as far as I know. But I'm not sure any of us mortals could really fathom what their absolute relationships would be like. Nevertheless, I predict that most of the trendy trinitarian stuff right now will be completely abandoned within twenty or thirty years. I suspect that an aweful lot of it is yet more of the post-Cartesian, post-Romantic projection of the modern self on God.

Criteria for a good paper...

I'm beginning to grade position papers for my Hebrews class, probably the last undergraduate class I will teach at IWU for the foreseeable future. I always reinvent the wheel. Here is the list of criteria I've respun for grading:

Writing
• Has good organization
• Has a thesis
• Grammar/spelling

Hermeneutics
• Difference between their world and our world
• Difference between individual books
• Understands literary context
• Understands historical-cultural context
• Understands how words work

Balance
• Fair to opposing viewpoints

Depth
• Shows research
• X-cellence factor

Am I missing anything?

N.T. Wright going to St. Andrews

I'll add my post to the many announcing that N. T. Wright is headed to St. Andrews, leaving his role as the Bishop of Durham. The announcement is here. St. Andrews had recently lost both Richard Bauckham and Bruce Longenecker, so this is a real coup for them. It is also a real coup for those who have been waiting on Wright's Paul book for 15 years.

Introducing Lenny Luchetti...

... the newest hire at Wesley Seminary @IWU. For a proper introduction, see today's post on the seminary Dean's blog.

Descartes and the Soul 2

I seem insufferably unable to write something on Descartes and the soul. I don't know what's wrong with me.

Here is an attempt.
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Our current understanding of the soul probably has as much to do with René Descartes, the “father” of modern philosophy, as with the Bible or historic Christianity. Prior to Descartes, the soul was principally the seat of life, the life force. However, after Descartes the soul principally becomes the center of our thinking. The soul becomes the part of us where my “I” most truly resides. It becomes like a little escape pod with the real me in it, the part of me that detaches from my body at death and survives with my personality and memories intact.

We mentioned back in chapter 7 that people in the sixteen hundreds increasingly viewed the world as a machine that ran on its own according to natural laws. Before this time, people often saw the spiritual world as a material world like the physical world—only made up of much thinner material like ether or fire. So Descartes practically invented the distinction between the natural and the supernatural when he wrote the following:

"I am talking about 'nature' in a narrower sense than when it means the total of everything God has given me. In that meaning, nature includes things that only have to do with the mind (and I am not including those things when I use the word 'nature'). Descartes, Meditations 4 (2nd ed.)

Nature for him did not include the things of the mind or the soul, only the “narrower” sense of the machine of the world, governed by laws God had built into the world. The supernatural thus referred not to these sorts of material things but to immaterial things like God, angels, and the soul.

The core elements of Descartes’ understanding of the soul probably look very familiar, even though they are largely foreign to the Bible. For him the soul is the part of me that is truly me, the part that thinks, has my personality, holds my memories, and that survives death. Other aspects of Descartes’ view will seem a little more bizarre. For example, he thought the soul largely engaged the body at a little gland in the brain called the pineal gland. It was not truly attached there and Descartes struggled to figure out how it could so influence the body when it was not really connected.

However, as our understanding of the brain has advanced, we have found a physical basis for every element in Descartes’ soul. Anyone who has known someone with Alzheimer’s disease has witnessed how closely connected memory is with the physical ganglia of our brains. Tangle those neurons and the memory goes away. Most psychology courses at some time also mention Phineas Gage (1823-60) as an example of how closely related the front part of our brain is related to our personalities. Gage was apparently a hardworking and responsible individual prior to an accident in which a rod blew through the front of his brain. Afterwards, he was rude and used profanity, showing little self-control.

In other words, brain research can identify various parts of the brain involved in everything from emotions, to choices, to memories, to thinking, indeed to religious experiences. Of course the fact that these parts of the brain are involved in such things does not necessarily mean that we do not have a soul. It is simply to say that it is not clear that we need to resort to a soul to explain these things. Further, we know that messing with the brain also messes with our thinking, feeling, choosing and so forth. What role a soul might play in these functions is unclear. In the final section of this chapter we will discuss what a Christian perspective on a human being might look like with and without recourse to us having a soul.

Influence of Romans on Wesley

I have permission to post the final piece that I was working on when I posted this on Wesley and Romans. Here it is:
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Introduction
No one particular book of the Bible served as the center of Wesley’s thought. If we simply go by his standard sermons, the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew gets the lion’s share. Nevertheless, nine of his first group of standard sermons were based on Romans, all of them focusing in some way on conversion. Together, they address 1) awakening to faith, the role of the law in making us aware of our inability to be righteous in our own power, 2) justification by faith, the idea that we become right with God only on the basis of our trust in Christ, and 3) the assurance of faith, confidence in our eternal destiny through the witness of the Holy Spirit with our spirit.

Awakening to Faith
Three of Wesley’s standard sermons deal with the question of the law in the progression of a person toward faith, based in Romans 7:12 and Romans 3:31. In his use of Romans 7, he surprisingly anticipates to a large degree the place to which contemporary scholars have only recently returned. Even in popular understanding today, it is extremely widespread for Christians to think that the latter part of Romans 7 refers to the inevitable struggle of the Christian with temptation: “what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing” (7:19). Few New Testament scholars today interpret Paul this way, since it requires us to ignore his entire train of thought from Romans 6 through Romans 8 (e.g., Rom. 6:17-18; 7:5-6; 8:1-4).

Wesley rightly understood that Paul is here talking about a person who is unable to keep the law because they do not have the Holy Spirit to empower them to do so. For Wesley, Paul refers to a person in the process of awakening to his or her sinfulness. Because they do not have the Holy Spirit, they are unable to keep the moral law. As we would expect, Wesley added some distinctively Christian elements to his interpretation that Paul probably was not thinking, and he makes Romans 7 a regular stop on every Christian’s pilgrimage. Yet the essence of his understanding is correct. The universal, timeless part of the Jewish Law is something we cannot keep in our own power, and God can use our powerlessness as a tool to awaken us to our condition, our need for God’s grace and the Holy Spirit’s power. Once we have that grace and power, God expects us to keep this “moral” part of the Law (Rom. 3:31).

Justification by Faith
It was of course while hearing Luther’s preface to Romans at a Bible study on Aldersgate Street that Wesley had his famous heart-warming experience. He would later write of that moment that, “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation.” The moment had been long in the making. Although the Anglican Church of his day was broadly Protestant, Wesley grew up largely with a sense that you tried to live a good life in order to be acceptable by God in the end. What he was missing was the fact that our initial acceptance before God is not something that we can bring about by our own goodness, that no amount of good and righteous deeds is sufficient to make us right with God.

It was this truth that God had so powerfully brought to Martin Luther in the early 1500s, the doctrine of “justification by faith.” Romans scholars today might question some of the specific interpretations of Luther and Wesley on specific verses, but their basic understanding of Paul is sound on this point. Paul taught that no human being can do enough good to be considered righteous or innocent in God’s eyes. For us to be in right standing with God, God must exercise grace, his willingness to accept us despite our sins. God decided to offer this grace on the basis of Christ’s death for our sins, and all God asks for us to receive this grace is our trust, our faith in Jesus as the exalted king he raised victoriously from the dead.

Assurance of Faith
Wesley’s journal of the Aldersgate event goes on to say, “an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” This notion that you could know that you were right with God, that you could know you were converted, was perhaps Wesley’s key contribution to the flow of Christian theology. He did not get it from Luther but rather from his interaction with the Moravian, Peter Böhler. We are so used to this idea today that it is strange to realize how few Christians in Wesley’s day believed you could know for sure that you were “saved.”

Several of Wesley’s sermons from Romans reinforced this belief. His sermon on Romans 8:1 featured that we as Christians should no longer feel the condemnation of our past sins. Wesley’s sermon on Romans 8:16 focused on the witness of the Holy Spirit to us that we are indeed the children of God. One of his most interesting sermons was on the circumcision of the heart (Rom. 2:29) because Wesley first preached it before his Aldersgate experience and then he modified it after the experience. An added paragraph would point out to believers the “clear and cheerful confidence that their heart is upright toward God.”

So we see that while Wesley did not overly focus on Romans in his preaching and thinking, it played a fundamental role in his own conversion. It was while listening to Luther’s thoughts on Romans that the grand doctrines of justification by faith and the assurance of believers came together in his own thinking. It remained, however, for the nineteenth century holiness writers to hear in its words Wesley’s doctrine of entire sanctification.

Biblical-Theological Relationships

John Drury had an excellent probing of a post I did yesterday. I tend to emphasize the distinction between earlier meanings of biblical texts and later uses of them (NT use of OT, orthodoxy's use of NT). "What, however, is the appropriate conversation between the Bible and theology?" John probes. Surely we are more interested in the end with how the two connect rather than how they might separate.

Here's a first attempt at potential relationships between the Bible and Christian theology or, as I would put it, between earlier and later points in the flow of revelation:

1. A biblical meaning may be "mature" revelation on a certain point and thus equate to Christian theology.

• The "pre-modern" interpreter usually assumes that all points of Scripture reflect fully mature Christian theology and perceives no distance at all between the biblical text and Christian theology. Moses, David, and Isaiah all understand about the Christ. The Trinity is in Genesis 1:27, etc.
• The "covenantal" or dispensational interpreter usually has some sense of the development between the OT and NT but sees this not as a development of understanding but as a divinely intended implementation plan.
• A contextual interpreter recognizes a real and substantial development in understanding that takes place between the testaments and even between the NT and full Christian orthodoxy.
• Nevertheless, there are moments of "mature" revelation in the biblical texts. Faith in resurrection is barely present in the OT (Daniel 12) but arguably reaches a mature form in the NT.

2. An earlier meaning of a biblical text may be general, but "underdeveloped" in a sense that a later biblical text or later Christian theology "fills in" or provides greater specifics.

• The OT arguably reaches a point of maturity on monotheism in the middle part of Isaiah where revelation has moved beyond henotheism. But such monotheism is still "underdeveloped" in relation to the trinitarian Christian understanding.
• A passage like 2 Corinthians 13:13 mentions all three persons of the Trinity but does not specify the relationship between them. (I'm putting this here for illustration--it might go more under 3 and 4).

3. An earlier meaning may stand among other moment-points whose mean is on the kingdom trajectory but which in itself is not precisely on the kingdom trajectory.

• The idea here is that prior to a doctrine reaching "maturity," there can be a sampling of revelatory moments that have elements of the kingdom trajectory but also elements in tension with the kingdom trajectory. Alternatively, we might have a text that is further along on the path toward mature doctrine than another.
• A difficult example of this might be some of the NT Christology that played into the hands of sub-orthodox positions in the early Trinitarian and Christological debates. Paul clearly considers Christ to be subordinate to God, for example (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:28) and relating such verses to Christ's humanity (versus his divinity) introduces elements into the discussion completely foreign to Paul's own.

4. The wording of a biblical text may be subject to a polyvalence which, whatever it meant originally, can be reinterpreted in such a way as to fit with later revelation.

• The Spirit danced with the polyvalence of any number of OT texts to reflect mature doctrine, such as when Acts 2 uses Psalm 16 in reference to Christ's resurrection, even though this was not at all the likely original meaning of the psalm.
• Arguably the Spirit danced with the polyvalence of a number of OT and NT texts to reflect mature doctrine in the early church, such as the common sense that the "we" of Genesis 1:27 refers to the Trinity or the tendency to take "You are my Son, today I have begotten you" in relation to the eternal begetting of the Son by the Father.

5. An earlier meaning of a biblical text may be context-particular in a way that does not move forward on a kingdom trajectory.

• Although in a very broad sense this might be a sub-category of three, we have in mind here accommodations God made to cultures and or moments in the flow of revelation that represent elements left behind rather than carried forward.
• Those parts of the OT that not only do not know about resurrection but that actually argue against any meaningful afterlife (e.g., Job 14:12; Ecclesiastes 3:19-20).
• So God allows for divorce in Deut. 24, even though it turns out not to be his ideal. The same might be argued for God's accommodations to slavery and patriarchy within the biblical text, perhaps even the genocide of various races.

In and Out Hermeneutics

I don't know if it's helpful to you (you can tell me), but nice little ditty came to mind this week to try to explain the difference between inductive Bible study and default pre-modern way Scripture is used (and I might throw in here the postmodern way it is used in theological interpretation). We were talking about the book of Matthew at the time.

"What I see you doing in this assignment is bringing the book of Matthew into your world. Inductive Bible study aims to get you into Matthew's world."

What I was trying to say here is what I have said elsewhere about the fact that we inevitably provide most of the "glue" that holds the individual bits of the Bible together into a coherent whole. The question that sparked this comment was an assignment in which we were going through the Great Commission and asking questions of Matthew's text like "When does Jesus receive all authority in this text?" I was expecting to have a dialog over whether the resurrection that has just taken place has brought Jesus this authority.

But understandably we got into a theological discussion about Jesus as the second person of the Trinity. Thus the comment, we can easily find ourselves bringing the words of Matthew into our theological world. The much more difficult skill--and one that often does not come naturally or easily--is to be able to get into the world of Matthew, to read Matthew as it stands in its own right without blurring its thought with thought from elsewhere.

This gets back at the question of theological interpretation. To me, it's perfectly appropriate--but don't confuse it with the original meaning.

Hays and Wright

Unfortunately I missed the Wheaton conference on N. T. Wright last week. There are some good reviews out there, particularly by Nijay Gupta and Michael Gorman. The key exchange was between Richard Hays and Tom Wright. Wright considers Hays too Barthian. Hays considers Wright too oriented around the historical.

Here is Gorman's summary.

Here is Gupta's summary.

To Get in Seminary...

Three times this morning I found myself giving feedback to students along the lines of "I would be very happy if by the time you graduate you know..." so I thought I would capture those three things here (there are more, but this is part of such a list):

1. A seminary graduate should be able to tell the difference between what one biblical text says and what another biblical text says and be able to distinguish between the two.

(So Matthew 28 says nothing about Paul's "over 500 brothers" in 1 Corinthians 15. Is this the same event? It could be, but make sure you understand Matthew in its own right before splicing things from other books into it. Matthew "knows" nothing about the 500 in its self-contained story)

2. A seminary graduate should be able to tell the difference between what a text actually says and interpretations that fill in gaps left by the text.

(This is closely related to the first one, but this one has more to do with the distinction between us as readers and the text, while the first one had to do with the distinction between one biblical text and another. Many legitimate Christian readings infer Trinitarian understandings into texts long before God unfolded those understandings in the first five centuries of the church)

3. A seminary graduate should know when they are reading a text "more than literally" and when they are reading it in its plain sense.

(So Moses' calling might be a model for God calling us, but this is a metaphorical use of the text, not something the text actually says).

Arminian Details

Thought I'd preserve some thoughts here in dialog with "Once a Wesleyan." We've had this discussion before, but I put my thoughts here so I can find them later:

1. OAW: There is no mystery whatsoever in the Arminian system as to why some people respond and some don’t. The reason that some respond and others don’t is that some are better/wiser or smarter. In the Arminian system the difference lies totally in the individual’s choice. (This is in contrast to the Biblical system where the difference lies totally in God’s choice.) Hence, in Arminianism, salvation is all to the individual’s glory for distinguishing themselves from those who were to stupid to choose correctly.

Ken: If God can create the world out of nothing, then He is certainly able to empower a person, by his prevenient grace, to reach the smallest point of volition ex nihilo, a point of the barest will either to remain depraved as they are or to signify ever so slightly a desire for more grace... leading to God's empowerment to signify a desire for more grace still. Would you suggest that God is not clever enough to figure out how to do this, to empower totally depraved humanity to begin to make a choice?

Surely not. Surely you would suggest only that God does not wish to empower humanity to begin to make such a choice because you believe it would contradict His sovereignty. But if He could in theory, then it is not in any way absurd to suggest that a person might, under God's power, be able to reach the barest point of volition ex nihilo. Why some respond and others don't is a mystery, but so is creatio ex nihilo.

2. OAW: Now add to this that God knew before-hand that this was going to be the distinguishing factor between two people. And w/that observation we now have the mystery as to how the Arminians could say “God is love.” How can a loving God, know in advance all the evil decisions that will occur and still determine to create a world where all those evil decisions will come to pass?

Ken: The question of why God created the world knowing the world would rebel is a hard one, but the alternative that God orchestrates evil is not a better one. Indeed, that alternative results in such a heightened problem of evil that the better alternative would be that there simply is no God. If God orchestrates evil then He is as much an evil god as a good one and the basic categories of Christendom become meaningless. Christ on the cross becomes a game God is playing with himself.

The best alternative that keeps the fundamentals of Christianity intact is the suggestion that a world in which humans can choose, now by God's power after the Fall, between good and evil is a better world than one in which they are forced (predestined) to do one or the other. But if humans can make such choices, some will choose evil and evil will result.

Law Upheld (3)

Final installment of the piece...
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So Paul certainly wanted his Jewish and Gentile audiences to conclude that the Gentiles did not need to keep the parts of the Law that related to specifically Jewish practices like circumcision (e.g., Gal. 5:2). With regard to Jews, he insisted that they should not keep purity rules that divided the body of Christ, such as when Peter and Barnabas stopped eating with Gentile believers at Antioch (Gal. 2:11-13). In this sense, he no longer considered himself to be under the Law, even though he was a Jew (1 Cor. 9:20).

Nevertheless, Paul saw the Christian as still being under Christ’s law (1 Cor. 9:21), what later Christians would call the “moral” law. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, he affirmed that Christians could now keep the “righteous requirements” of the Law. They were not “under Law,” which for Paul implied being under the power of Sin and the curse of sinfulness. They were now empowered, “set free from sin” and now “slaves to righteousness” (Rom. 6:18).

So do we “nullify the law by this faith” (Rom. 3:31)? “Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law.” We now keep the “moral” essence of the Law through the power of the Spirit. We do not “sin because we are not under law but under grace” (Rom. 6:15). Rather, we “do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires” (6:12). In a strange paradox, Paul affirmed that it is only when we are not under the Law that we can actually keep its righteous requirements.

Not Under Law (2)

Paul mentions several functions that the Jewish Law had in the story of salvation. One is that it informed Jews of exactly what God’s expectations were (7:7). At the same time, it demonstrated to those same well-intentioned Jews that they were unable to meet those expectations (7:14-15). The Law was like a child’s guardian, who taught Israel until it was old enough not to need the instructor anymore (Gal. 3:24). The coming of Christ points to that “maturity” in the story of salvation.

Paul even considered the Jewish Law to be the “power” of Sin (1 Cor. 15:56). Knowing the Law somehow seemed to aggravate the situation. The power of Sin over weak, human flesh seemed to thrive in the face of the Law (Rom. 7:13). The very fact of knowing God’s expectations seemed to make it even harder not to fail them.

When Paul speaks in such terms, he generally had in mind a part of the Jewish Law that later Christians would call the “moral law.” Here we refer to basic dos and don’ts like not killing or coveting or committing sexual immorality. What is confusing to us is that Paul also used the word Law to refer to other parts of the Jewish Law that later Christians would call the “ceremonial” law. This part of the Law included things like what Jews could not eat, touch, or wear. For Paul the Jew, the Law was of one piece, and so he used the same word for both parts of the Law. It is thus no wonder how much confusion and variation in interpretation we find out there!

So it is true that Paul did not believe a person could “earn” a right standing with God. He taught that all had sinned and that no one deserved God’s favor. But we would argue that this valid Protestant point was not really the focus of Paul’s own arguments. For Paul, the main issue he was facing was not faith versus works but Jew versus Gentile. Most of the time when Paul said that “works of Law” could not make anyone right with God (e.g., Rom. 3:28), he arguably was primarily picturing in his mind the parts that most separated Jew from Gentile—the “ceremonial” parts.

After all, it was the question of whether Jew and Gentile believer could eat together that sparked Paul’s teaching on this subject in Galatians. Romans 4 goes on to talk about Abraham’s circumcision as the main illustration in Romans. Paul’s basic point was that specifically Jewish practices like circumcision or food laws did not earn Jews any more of a right standing with God than the standing Gentiles started out having.

What is thus confusing about Paul’s argument is that he is saying two slightly different things when he said believers were not under the Law. In part he was arguing that Gentile believers did not have to worry about things like circumcision or food laws. But in part he was also saying that the power of Sin over us through the Law was done so that through the Spirit we might actually keep its basic moral expectations.

Law and Faith Introduction

Take 2 (for Take 1, click here):
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Introduction
Romans 3:31 is one of those verses that sounds so strange to us that we are prone to skip right over it: "Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law." Wait a minute--is Paul not known for saying that we are "not under law, but under grace" (Rom. 6:14)? Does not even Ephesians 2:15 say that Christ has "abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances"? Did Paul really say that we do not nullify the law after we have faith but in fact uphold it?!

This is a thorny issue indeed and one that different Christian groups have interpreted differently over the years. We face two extremes on either side of the issue. On the one side are those who lock on to verses like this one and others (e.g., Matt. 5:17) and do not see clearly enough how the new covenant has transformed our use of Old Testament Law. These individuals face the perils of legalism and the mistake of trying to earn God's favor.

On the other side are those who see no place for "law" in the Christian life at all. They are not perfect, just forgiven. They do not expect to see any real difference between the way they live and the way unbelievers live. They are just thankful that God does not care what they do in life, only that they have asked him at least once in their lives for his forgiveness.

Paul steered a careful course on this question in Romans. On the one hand, he surely has the Jewish Law primarily in view--what other law would a Jew be thinking of at that time? However, he wandered from talking about parts of the Jewish Law that were very Jew-specific (e.g., circumcision) to parts that he believed still applied to everyone (e.g., sexual prohibitions). Not only that, but he wandered from talking about the Law as a standard by which a Jew was once measured before Christ—and one to which no one could measure up—to the Law as a standard to which a believer could attain through the power of the Holy Spirit. Carefully distinguishing between these different ways Paul talked about law helps us make sense of his seemingly conflicting arguments.

More to come...

The Righteousness of God (3:21-26)

Working on another small writing assignment. When what I had in mind as the first section hit 500 words (a little less than half the allotted words) I realized I can't use any of the below. Oh well, here it is for you, whoever you are... :-)
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Introduction
Romans 3:21-26 is the very heart of Romans. These six, extremely thick theological verses present in a nutshell both the problem Paul discusses in the first three chapters (1:18-3:20), as well the solution he discusses to the end of Romans 4. The problem is that “all have sinned” (3:23). We thus should expect the wrath of God to come on us when he soon judges the world (1:18). However, God has graciously provided a solution: first, he offered Jesus as a kind of “sacrifice of atonement” for our sins (3:25); second, he asks for our faith in the risen Christ as our sovereign Lord. God will consider us righteous if we only trust in what he has done for us through Messiah Jesus.

The Righteousness of God
One of the disadvantages of reading the Bible in English is that you sometimes miss aspects of the text that you cannot really see in English. For example, some variation on the root for "righteous" appears seven times in Romans 3:21-26, even though the NIV only uses the word righteousness (dikaiosyne) twice (3:21-22). What you cannot see in English is that the word justified (dikaioo) comes from the same root (3:24, 26), as does the word just in 3:26 (dikaios). Even more interestingly, the word for justice in 3:25 and 26 is the very same word the NIV translates as righteousness in 3:21-22.

The NIV was of course translated right before a new era in the study of Paul exploded, leading to a great deal of clarity on exactly what Paul was saying in these verses. For one, it is now generally realized that the phrase, "the righteousness of God" almost certainly would have immediately made any first century Jewish audience think of God's righteousness, the fact that God is a God who always comes through, who always keeps his promises. His character is well known, as is his love for his people. He brings justice for sure, but he also is a God of great mercy and salvation.

The "righteousness of God" that is revealed apart from the Jewish Law (3:21) is thus in part God showing a new way he is walking with the world in justice and mercy--a way that by-passes the Jewish Law. This new way involves God's offering of Jesus as an atoning sacrifice (3:25), whose blood provides redemption for our sins. It is understandable that the NIV focuses on the justice side of God's righteousness in 3:25 and 26, because Christ's offering demonstrates that God is in fact a just God. Even if God could have simply let us off the hook for our sins by divine command, his offering of Christ as a sacrifice certainly demonstrates that he stands for justice as well as mercy.

However, it is also possible that Paul had a double meaning in mind when he used the phrase "the righteousness of God" here, in fact that he was also thinking of something like the way Luther and Wesley took Romans 3:21. They took Paul to be speaking of a new way for us humans to become righteous that did not involve us keeping the law. Paul almost certainly was first thinking of God's righteousness, but he does go on to speak of our righteousness, that is, a way for us to be considered righteous or innocent in God's eyes. Even though we have sinned, we can be "justified freely" (3:26) because of God's gracious mercy he is offering through Jesus.

Paul thus has two "righteousnesses" in view in this passage, the righteousness of God himself, demonstrated in both his mercy and justice. The second is the righteous status ("not guilty," "innocent") he confers on us through Jesus Christ.

Properly Wesleyan Activism

Activism is one of David Bebbington's 4 pillars of evangelicalism. Of course, as a Wesleyan, I'm not too bothered whether we are "properly" evangelical or not. We are what we are. If the (neo)evangelicals want to call us evangelicals, fine. I'm not going to sweat too much if they don't want us in the club.

Ideas have a tendency to simmer in my mind for a while. Then, something happens to coalesce them, and I have my position or decision. That happened a few minutes ago doing my homework from Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, in particular, his chapter titled, "God Loveth Adverbs." This chapter talks about some of the forces that have led the Western world to consider all "callings" in life to be of the same value to God. God is only interested in the "adverbs" of your work in life--how you do it and why you do it--not what you do. This is a post-Reformation perspective.

If you have followed my thought on what we might call, for lack of a better word, moral activism, you have seen my sense that Wesleyan activism, properly so called, would seem to focus on activism for others rather than activism against sin. To be sure, the legalistic phase of the Wesleyan Church in particular (second half of the twentieth century) focused on activism against sin, with the image of "Achan in the camp" a characteristic theme.

Since this approach has enjoyed the better part of a century within the Wesleyan movement, I can hardly say it is unWesleyan. I do today, however, wish to categorize it as what I call "Calvino-Wesleyan." By this I mean to say that it represents more the influence of the Calvinist tradition on us than an intrinsically Wesleyan-Arminian approach.

These excerpts from Taylor solidified my thinking here:

"Calvinist activism is not really paradoxical or even hard to understand. It would indeed be paradoxical if activism were meant to bring about the salvation of those whose lives were thus reordered...

"... while humans can do nothing to bring about reconciliation, the reconciled person feels the imperative need to repair the disorder of things, to put them right again in God's plan... To the Calvinist, it seemed self-evident that the properly regenerate person would above all be appalled at the offence done to God in a sinful, disordered world; and that therefore one of his foremost aims would be to put this right, to clean up the human mess of at least to mitigate the tremendous continuing insult done to God.

"That is why there is no contradiction in a Calvinist church order seeking to control the behaviour even of the unregenerate. If the aim were to effect their salvation, this would of course be senseless. Nothing can save these foreknown to damnation. But this is not the goal. The purpose is rather to combat a disorder which continuously stinks in God's nostrils" (228).

From a Wesleyan-Arminian perspective, however, the Calvinist has a defective understanding both of God's sovereignty and God's love. God has allowed humans to defy and disobey Him in the meantime. There will be a judgment, a final reckoning to be sure. But God is "big enough" to handle disobedience in the meantime (unlike the immature God of some forms of Calvinism who throws a hissy fit at the smallest sign of disobedience--a model that has had immensely ill effect on the parenting of those within its influence).

Some forms of this model have a defective theology of the OT, one that takes some of God's actions without consideration of the place of some of its teaching in the flow of salvation history. It also ignores the distinction even then between God's wrath toward impurity (which is certainly there is certain parts) and God's wrath toward oppression.

All of this is to say that a properly Wesleyan activism is overwhelmingly directed toward stopping oppression and promoting righteousness. It is an activism that is for slaves, for women, for the unborn, for the disempowered in all their forms. It is for economic health It is for moving the sinner toward righteousness. This is something quite different from trying to make sure that the sinner is punished or even that sin is stopped when that sin does not clearly harm others.

The application of this activism can certainly become tricky. For example, properly Wesleyan activism is not oriented around making sure an illegal immigrant is caught and punished. The properly Wesleyan concern is for the basic health and welfare of the illegal and their family, and the law of the land can handle the question of justice. Systemic consequences are difficult to predict. It may certainly be the case some times that maintaining the system will do more benefit for others than helping a specific individual case. But we get the suspicion that those who oppose helping individuals for this reason are often only using such answers as an excuse.

I'll largely leave it at that for now.

Debates over History

Woke up to an article on the history textbooks in Texas in Inside Higher Ed. Here are some excerpts from the article:

"About 800 college history professors from across the country have so far signed on to a letter circulated this week by seven academics from the University of Texas campuses in Austin and El Paso.

"The letter says that some board revisions undermine 'the study of the social sciences in our public schools by misrepresenting and even distorting the historical record and the functioning of American society.'

"The signatories mostly teach at Texas schools — including Baylor University, Texas A&M University and Abilene Christian University — but also come from out-of-state colleges such as Stanford University, Brigham Young University and the Virginia Military Institute.

"'You can quibble for and against this person or that event," said Emilio Zamora , a UT history professor. "But what is most important and glaring is that this revision does not come close to reflecting the state of historical research on the state of Texas.'"

Certainly "liberals" can be guilty of exactly the same thing. My hunch on what's happening here? Another example of American anti-intellectualism, what Mark Noll called the "scandal of the evangelical mind." It is a distrust of those most qualified to draw conclusions on a particular issue. Again, in the words of Jack Handy, "Sometimes I wonder if the experts might actually be experts."