Adventures in Predestination

I am not an open theist. Open theism is the idea that the potentially omniscient God has intentionally set aside His foreknowledge for the time being so that we can have free will. To me, this is simply an Arminian counterpart to multiple point Calvinism, just as "this universe" think. It takes the beef of Calvinism with free will too seriously.

On the other hand, I don't quite get why it ticks so many conservatives off. In some cases, it's probably because the person in question confuses it with process theology (which involves the idea that God is evolving with the world). But, seriously, as far as taking the Bible literally, open theists take the Bible way literally.

"And God repented that He had made humanity" (Gen. 6:6)

Taken literally, this implies that God changed His mind. Open theists take this as it appears. And for this "take the Bible as it appears" approach, places like Huntington College fire a person? I feel sorry for these people. My advice to any budding open theists out there? Don't tell anyone. You're way too conservative for a liberal to hire you, and other conservatives have blacklisted you.

For me, God knew the Flood generation would do these things, and He knew what He would do in response, but He did not force humanity to behave as it did and there is a possible world in which humanity did not. For the Calvinist, neither the changing of His mind or the opportunity of humanity to do differently ever existed.

Now which of these interpretations is most biblical? Answer: the open theist's interpretation. The author of Genesis (I'll respect the text and listen to the fact that it nowhere tells who its author is), writing way before anyone understood omniscience the way we do, probably did think that God changed His mind here.

Now me, I believe that the flow of revelation on omniscience has continued beyond the days of Genesis. It is the consensus of Christendom that God knows all things. He cannot thus literally change His mind because He knew exactly what the Flood generation would do. But the statement, "he repented" is a true metaphor. It is a true expression of the value God assigned to the actions of the Flood generation. For me, God's script was written before the creation of the world outside of time, but He did not write this part of the script for humanity in time. For the multipoint Calvinist, God wrote the script for both Himself and humanity before the creation, before time. God is playing chess with Himself.

Of the three groups, only the first could authentically hold to sola scriptura at this point (but of course would have to abandon it once they moved beyond this verse). I have never claimed it, and the paleo-orthodox Calvinist system, once again, explodes in incoherence. The text itself here does not at all suggest their theology, so clearly it is something outside the text that is driving their appropriation of this text. I recognize these extra-scriptural elements, so I'm still coherent. They deny it, and their theology deconstructs.

But there are passages that, if taken at least in a superficially literal way, seem to imply a straightforward predestination without human choice. What about these passages? Since these are "controlling verses" for the multi-pointer, the Calvinist on these verses does not reinterpret them the way they do verses like Genesis 6:6.

And not only [this], but Rebecca also, having the bed of one man, Isaac our father. For not yet having been born, and not having done something good or bad, in order that the purpose of God according to election might remain not from works but from the One who calls, it was said to her, "The greater will serve the lesser, just as it is written, "I have loved Jacob, but Esau I hated."

What will we say then? There isn't injustice with God, is there? God forbid! For to Moses He says, "I will have mercy on whomever I have mercy and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion."

So then it is not of the one who will nor of the one who runs but of God who shows mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharoah, "I have raised you up for this itself, so that I might demonstrate my power in you and so that I might proclaim my name in all the earth. So then He has mercy on the one He wills and He hardens the one whom He wills.

Then you will say to me, "Why then does He still find fault? For who has resisted His will?" O human, indeed, who are you who are accusing God? "The moulded won't say to the moulder, why have you made me this way, will it?" Or doesn't the potter have authority over the clay to make from the same lump one vessel to honor and another to dishonor? And [what] if God bore with great patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction to demonstrate wrath and to make known His power and in order to make known the wealth of His glory on the vessels of mercy which He prepared for glory? (Romans 9:10-23).

Wow! Difficult verses! In fact, I have serious questions about your Christianity if you don't find these verses difficult. Why? Because they, at least on an isolated first read, sound as if they contradict the very essence of the gospel: "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life."

Let's dig a little deeper here though. Like God repenting that He made humanity, there are strong reasons to be very careful about making this the controlling passage on your understanding of God.

1. What is the context?
The context is that Paul has been arguing throughout Romans that Gentiles can be justified before God without converting to Judaism, without engaging in works of law. You can see why a Jew would complain about Paul's theology: "I follow all these rules--they're in the Bible for goodness sakes Paul! Now you're telling me a Gentile can be okie dokie with God just by trusting in what God has done in Christ? That's not fair at all!"

Paul's answer? "Shut up, clay, God can do what He wants." If God wants to declare the Gentiles righteous on the basis of their faith, He's allowed because He's God.

Now I agree with this. Does the Calvinist? Can God give humans free will if He wants? What if God wanting to show His love for the world, gave everyone a chance to be saved? Could He do it? I say yes he could. The Calvinist says no. So I respond, but who are you, clay, to tell God "why have you acted thus?"

Could God have forgiven all humans by divine command, without any sacrifice at all if He wanted to? The Calvinist responds no. I respond, but who are you, clay to tell God what He can and cannot do?

My first point is that the multi-pointer has seized on the wrong point in interpretation. The right point is that God is allowed to will whatever He wills. The Calvinist, instead, seized on the point, "we cannot do whatever we will." My second is that the Calvinist use of this passage is incoherent, because in the end they do the same thing as the clay in a different way.

To be sure, Paul is using OT individuals to make his points (Pharoah, Jacob, Esau), but his point is not about individual predestination here. Paul's point is that God can let the Gentiles in if He wants to, period. He's God.

I deliberately ripped these verses from that context because that's what most Calvinist readers of this passage do. But now let's look at the verses that surround it. For example, the next verse after I left off reads:

"With regard to whom [vessels He prepared for glory] He also called us, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles, as also He says in Hosea, 'I will call the not my people, my people,' ... and Isaiah cries out about Israel, '... the remnant will be saved...'

What then will we say? That Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness received righteousness ... and Israel, who pursued a rule of righteousness, did not attain the rule.

Paul is thus not laying down a theology of individual predestination here, even if the passage raises those questions for us. Paul is arguing over the inclusion of the Gentiles into the people of God in the way God is including them.

2. When we place the "naughty verses" in the context of the whole of Romans 9-11, their entire tone changes. Is Paul arguing, "So, yeah, the Jews are toast because God has sovereignly decided to waste them"? God forbid. What is Paul's feeling toward them?

"Brothers, the good pleasure of my heart and petition to God about them is for salvation" (Rom. 10:1).

Notice that Paul does not treat their fate as fixed already here. The tone is one of wanting them to be saved, not of their destiny being fixed.

In fact, Paul believes the currently hardened will be saved (Rom. 11:26). Throughout Romans 11, the possibility of Israel's salvation, of being grafted back in, is present throughout. This does not at all fit the conclusion the multi-pointer usually takes from Romans 9, that God has set all these things in stone before the foundation of the world. Even those who are hardened can become unhardened!

This is not Calvinist theology.

3. Biblical predestination language functions biblically as a posteriori rather than a priori language.
Paul's writings would not say the things they say if predestination language functioned for Paul the way the multi-pointer thinks it does. If the Calvinist "language game" of predestination was Paul's game, then predestination language would have predictive force. We would expect Paul to give up on Israel, because their hardened hearts indicate God did not predestine them.

Certainly if Paul thought the way Calvin did, he would not say, "They haven't stumbled so as to fall have they? God forbid! But by their stumbling salvation [has come] to the Jews to make them jealous. But if their stumbling [was] wealth to the world and their defeat wealth to the Gentiles, how much more [wealth will be] their inclusion."

See, the predestined can be repredestined! How do we know God has hardened Pharaoh? Because we see a hardened Pharaoh. But a hardened Pharaoh can also become an unhardened Pharaoh.

Paul's arguments thus do not reflect the presuppositions of Augustine and Calvin. These theologians connected predestination to a prior determinism--they moved theoretically from before to after. Paul connects this it to a subsequent state of affairs--he moves practically from after to before. This is true of how he uses the language, despite the sound of his words in this part of Romans 9. Augustine is the one who connected before and after using logic. Paul's language of predestination, on the other hand, does not govern the rest of his theology. He does not logically follow some of the comments in this chapter through to a straightforward logical conclusion.

In the words of Inigo Mantoia of the Princess Bride, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Conclusion
In conclusion, however, I want to remind us that the entirety of Calvinist theology falls apart on one verse (actually, many verses, but who's counting?)

"If we continue to sin willfully after we have received a knowledge of the truth, there remains no more sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment."

If a person can have appropriated Christ's sacrifice, and then end up facing judgment, then it is possible for a saint not to persevere. But if a Christian might not persevere, then grace is resistable and election is not unconditional, in fact election is changable. And the Calvinist system, so admirable for its logic, unfortunately turns out not to be God's logic.

So in the words of 2 Peter 1:10, "So, brothers [and sisters], be diligent to make your calling and election firm, for if you do this, you will never stumble at some time." But if one's election can be unfirm, then I don't think that word means what you think it means.

Addenda: What I Have Gained

First, CONGRATS TO THE LADY WILDCATS!!! They won for the first time the NAIA, section 2 championship. Woo-hoo! They had a 38 and 0 record. Outstanding! Ausgezeichnet! Tres manifique!

And I thought I would reflect on what became a week of arguing Arminianism versus Calvinism. Thanks to Once a Wesleyan for taking me to task.

What have I gained?

1. I like Baptists, especially if they would say that Christians who become serial killers were unlikely to have ever been Christians at all. I agree with you that it is really, really hard to miss it if you are truly converted. And I believe it surely breaks God's heart for those who "expose him to public disgrace."

2. I really respect Calvin and I respect Barth even more. Calvin was not a double predestinarian. He did not believe that God predestined those who were going to be damned. And Barth made the most sense of any Calvinist I have ever heard. He recognized that if God determines who will be saved and if God wants everyone to be saved then perhaps all will be saved. Barth resisted to his death saying that he was a universalist. But he added, "perhaps God is."

Am I neo-orthodox? I refuse to say I am because I'm not quite sure what anyone would infer thereby that I was saying about myself. There are some similarities between my thought and Barth's, but then again, he would detest other parts of my thinking, perhaps call me a Schleiermacher or a Brunner. I am orthodox, save a few tolerable heresy, according to Bounds.

3. What OAW has particularly catalysed for me is a good taste of how he understands sovereignty. In his view, and I don't know how representative he is, God's sovereignty could never stomach a human even He empowered to be able to disobey him. I am therefore assuming that OAW is a double predestinarian. That those who disobey God do so because God has caused them to disobey Him.

I am also assuming, therefore, that OAW must be a 7 point Calvinist. If God's sovereignty would be threatened by me being able to disobey Him, then it would have been threatened by Adam being able to disobey Him or for Satan to be able to disobey Him.

Thus,
6. God predestined Adam to fall and
7. God predestined Satan to rebel.

Perhaps some 5 point Calvinists have a slightly different understanding of sovereignty than OAW. But if he is standard, then you cannot logically stop half way. If his understanding is the 5 point understanding, then all 5 pointers must spit on Calvin's effeminate God and become 7 pointers.

But what are we left with if this is true? We are left with a God who could have created everyone to be predestined to serve him completely and absolutely. But, in His sovereignty, He decided to create a universe where He would absolutely destroy almost everything He created. He is a skeet shooting God, who created most things so that He could shoot them to pieces, and He did it purely for His pleasure.

We must now redefine so many words in the Bible.

"And God saw all that He had created, that it was good." Note: good here means good for hunting, good for destroying. Or good for messing up, like a child who stacks a whole bunch of blocks up carefully so he can enjoy knocking them all down.

"God is love." That is, God loves burning things. He's a pyromaniac, but He can burn those houses down because that's why He built them in the first place. On a whim, some days He doesn't burn down the odd or the even ones. Some days he leaves the prime numbered houses stand. The universe is one big romper room of His delight.

What have I learned this week? That I love Baptists.

The Bible and Eternal Security

My purpose in this post is to examine the doctrine of eternal security, mostly from a biblical perspective. I'll be nice ;-) Dialog welcome.

Definitions: Eternal security is the idea that once a person has been truly assured of their salvation, they will certainly be saved--in other words, "once saved, always saved." It is related to Calvin's idea of the perseverence of the saints, which presupposed the logic of the so called TULIP (although Calvin himself never called it the TULIP). If humanity is totally depraved, then God chooses whom He chooses unconditionally. His grace is thus irresistible. In consequence, if a person is elect, they will certainly persevere to the end.

I once found John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress puzzling because he was a Puritan. In other words, he was a Calvinist. What puzzled me was the fact that in the story, Christian does not know he will make it to the celestial city until he gets there. Yet he has already received the name Christian! How can this be?

The answer I have (to which I welcome correction if I am wrong) is that Calvinists did not have a sense of assurance of salvation until after Wesley's day. In other words, the Puritans of New England believed that the elect would certainly persevere, but they had no doctrine of knowing you were elect. Some of them lived squeeky clean lives in hopes of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Clearly a murderer demonstrated that he or she was not elect by the very fact that he or she was a murder. Only the godliest of Christian individuals were at all likely to be the elect ones!

Contrast this with the idea of eternal security, which combines the doctrine of perseverence with the idea of assurance. I can know now that I am saved. And if I am saved, then I will be saved. Most Baptists today are what we might call "one point Calvinists"--they believe only in eternal security as a form of the Reformed fifth point.

Strategies: All "interpretive groups"--Wesleyan, Calvinist, etc.--have what we might call "controlling verses" that fit most easily into their interpretive paradigm (these are usually the favorite verses, the ones they have their children memorize in Sunday School). On the other hand, they also always have what I call "naughty verses," verses that at least on the surface seem to conflict with their theology or practice (and these in turn are usually the controlling verses of the interpretive groups with which they disagree). In short, the controlling verses trump and lead to the reinterpretation of the naughty verses.

So you will not be surprised to find that this post, written by a Wesleyan, will focus on verses that are "naughty passages" for interpretive groups that affirm eternal security, while some of these verses are controlling verses on this issue for Arminians. Further, you will not be surprised to find that an educated Calvinist is well aware of these verses and could predict, for example, that I will probably bring up Hebrews 6 and 10. All credible interpretive groups have "interpretive strategies" for explaining difficult verses. Of course we should not assume that all the explanations a group makes for a difficult verse is wrong. Surely some explanations are correct!

A typical Arminian question about eternal security is as follows: "What if a person prays the sinner's prayer, looks to have become a Christian, lives like a Christian for some time, and then becomes a serial killer? Will that person go to heaven?"

You can imagine a variety of answers to this question. Least pleasing is the one that this person will indeed go to heaven. Perhaps God will cause them to die or suffer so that they pay a price with their body, but their spirit might be saved (1 Cor. 5), their work will be burned up but they will be saved as through the fire (1 Cor. 3).

Calvin of course would not have bought such an answer. I feel very confident that Calvin himself would have responded, "That person was never one of the elect." Someone today might modify this language slightly, "That person was never truly saved."

I can respect that position if maintained with a real sense of God's revealed nature as love (in other words, one that offers a real possibility of salvation to all humanity). The Christian life expected ends up looking the same. And I can even see some support for it in 1 John 2:19. Here [John] the elder indicates that a group that left them was never "from them" or they wouldn't have left.

On the other hand, what are we then to do with John's later statement that there is a "sin unto death" for which one shouldn't bother to pray (1 John 5:16-17)? I believe some Calvinists argue that this is a Christian who sins so significantly that God causes them to die in consequence. Their soul is saved but their body destroyed.

But if this is the right interpretation, the context gives us no clues to this end. John has said several things about sin in this short sermon. He has indicated that all have sin and therefore need Christ's blood. But he has also argued strongly that those born of God do not continue sinning (3:9; 5:18). I personally think the group that left is a strong candidate for the kind of sins John has in mind throughout (including their "hatred" for John's own group--3:11-15). Surely this imagery that is so abstract to us was concrete for John and his audience.

When we hear of the sins to death and the sins not to death, the simplest explanation is thus that John continues to have the things in mind he has apparently had throughout. The sins not to death are the sins he mentions in 2:1, and clearly Jesus Christ the righteous stands ready as lawyer for John's group (those who remained). The sin to death surely relates in some way to those to whom he has alluded throughout: "antichrists" who deny Jesus is the Messiah who went out from them (2:18), the spirits (read Gnostics) who deny that Jesus came in the flesh (4:2-3), who deny that the Messiah came by both water and blood (9:6), those who show hatred to their brothers like Cain? Without further details it is difficult to know exactly how, but this seems more than possible given the lay of the text.

This interpretation of 1 John 5:16 is constructed out of the biblical materials of 1 John rather than by treating the verse as a memory verse whose words are defined from my existing theology. In other words, I have tried to construct an interpretation from the "Bible alone," rather than one based on the Bible in dialog with my theology (important footnote: the text alone is actually just squiggles. By 1 John alone I mean the text in its original historical and literary contexts, even here a small fudge on the concept).

But if there is a sin to death you can commit and still be physically alive, then it would appear that a person can be "alive" and later become spiritually dead. Like Hebrews, however, John seems to imply doubt that one can come back to life once one has committed it. This interpretation of course reeks havoc with many different Christian traditions, including the Wesleyan. Tough cookies! We need to let the Bible say what it says and then let Chris Bounds work out the problems in theology class.

My point here was not really to start going through Scriptures, although, fine, I did it anyway. My purpose was to show the dynamics of how interpretive groups cope with problem passages. I believe that the only strategy that really has integrity is to admit that our theology is ultimately a superstructure we all build over or alongside the text. We ideally try to prop up the superstructure with as much of the text as we can.

But the most crucial and definitive parts will usually be extra scripturam, outside Scripture. It seems to me impossible to let all the biblical texts say what they seem to say and not run into theological conflicts that can only be resolved in the court of theological arbitration. Denial of this fact results in shoving one passage down another one's throat. Interpretive groups do this in the name of the Bible. But it is done at the expense of the Bible.

So I would argue that if the Reformed interpretive group is to have integrity, it must adopt a view that the NT authors simply did not have a full understanding of harmartiology (doctrine of sin) and soteriology (doctrine of salvation). Reformed theology could be correct as a development of doctrine beyond the Bible, a product of progressive revelation. This will require significant modification to their usual view of sola scriptura, but this is necessary anyway. This would bring greater coherence to their theology.

Barth's Reformed theology actually approaches this, for he does in his own way what I have called "finding the text in the word of God rather than getting the word of God from the text." I think what he lacks is a transferable model of how to identify this broader word of God. He does interact heavily with tradition, especially Protestant traditions. However, ultimately he is the arbiter of the Word of God, the word event for him is the true word event in many respects, at least in providing its broad outline.

Background
Certainly the meaning of the New Testament is not predestined by either the Old Testament or Jewish intertestamental period, or the Greco-Roman world. However, if the NT operated on a significantly different wavelength than these, we would expect it to make such distinctions clear.

For example, in the Old Testament, a person could be expelled from Israel, from the people of God. Apart from Daniel 12:1-3 and a very short list of contested passages, the OT has no sense of personal, conscious existence after death (e.g., Psalm 6). So expulsion from Israel was tantamount to "losing one's salvation" in the NT. So if the NT operated on significantly different assumptions--that once a person was in the people of God, they could never not be in the people of God--we would expect a pretty clear statement somewhere pointing out this clear difference between the old and new covenants. Certainly if a Calvinist were writing the NT, this would be spelled out loud and clear. Where is this?

Secondly, I pointed out in an earlier post that grace language was language of patronage. In the Greco-Roman world, a patron might be forgiving, might give a second chance to a client that disappointed them. But the idea that Lazarus might moon the servant bringing him his daily dole outside the rich man's gate and still get the dole tomorrow. Well I doubt that would have made any sense to someone in the Mediterrean world. If Paul was saying something that contrasted widely with these assumptions, we would expect to hear him spell that out somewhere clearly. Where is this?

In short, the world in which the NT language operated, the dictionaries of the NT audiences, these things set the default expectation of the NT words not to be eternal security. The NT is not bound to hold the same default, but at some point, whether on site or in these books, the NT authors and apostles would have to make the difference clear. Where is this?

Some Naughty Passages
Certainly there are passages where someone might superficially seem to be "in' and then seem to be "out." So Demas forsook Paul after being a key player (2 Tim. 4:10). But it is easy to say, "He was never a true Christian." Or, "even though he sinned here, he was still saved." Judas is a poor example, for he belongs to the old covenant, the age before the Spirit. We cannot really call him a Christian in the first place because he followed Jesus before Pentecost.

The same applies to Matthew's imagery about weeds and wheat that grow up together (Matt. 13) or the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matt. 25). It is very easy for the Calvinist to say that in these cases, the goats were never sheep and the weeds were never wheat. Of course by now we are arguing over things that were not the point of these parables. We would not be reading any of these parables within their original boundaries and scope to begin talking about them in these ways.

This is a very important point, because some arguments for eternal security are based on metaphors. Once a person is a son, do they ever stop being a son? But where in the Bible do we find this metaphor played out in this way? It is another example of a logic outside the text--it is not biblical logic. We must all alike beware of reading metaphors and figurative language within their intended limits. The point of the Parable of the Unjust Steward is surely not to go and embezzle from your bosses.

On the other hand, if Paul himself could express uncertainty about his ultimate salvation. If he really considered it possible that he could fail to be saved in the end, that would undermine the entire Calvinist system. The book of Acts holds that he did receive the Spirit at one time (Acts 9) and thus that he was truly a believer. He says the same (1 Cor. 7:40). I doubt anyone would doubt his true Christianity.

The reason why this would undermine the entire Calvinist system is because the perseverence of the saints is a direct consequence of TULIP logic. The elect will persevere because grace is irresistance and election is unconditional. If Paul could be truly "in" and then truly "out," then God would have to change His mind with regard to Paul's election for the logic to continue working. But this is surely also anathema. Thus the entire deck of cards comes falling down. 5 point Calvinism would then prove to be very logical, but simply not true.

To be sure, the Calvinist interpretive system immediately suspects at least some, probably all of the naughty verses I have in mind.

1 Corinthians 9:24-27:

"Do you not know that those who run in a stadium all run, but one receives the prize? So run so that you might receive [it]. Everyone who competes exercises control in all things. Those, therefore, [do it] so they might receive a corruptible crown. But we [exercise control so we might receive] an incorruptible one. Therefore, I myself so run, not without a goal. I so box not as striking the air. But I keep my body under control and I make it a slave lest somehow I myself might become disqualified, although I have preached to others."

The debate between Arminians and Calvinists here is on the meaning of "disqualified." Does the crown here merely imply a prize for being an especially worthy Christian? Paul's afraid that he won't get as many awards as some other Christians?

In 1 Corinthians 9, Paul has been talking about the sacrifices he has made while proclaiming the gospel. He has made it clear that he does not have room to boast just because he has sacrificed (9:16). So how could Paul be talking about prizes he might win here for being particularly worthy? He wants to beat all the others so they don't get the prize?

I will not stake the whole cheese on this passage, but it just seems to me that with his talk of preaching to others and the broader context of sharing the good news, surely the most likely meaning is that it is possible that after sharing the good news of salvation to others, it was at least possible that Paul himself might not be saved in the end. I don't think there was ever any doubt, but it is really hard to believe Paul would say something like this if it wasn't at least possible. A Calvinist would not have written it this way.

Philippians 3:12:

"Not that I have already received [x] or have already been perfected. But I pursue if also I might apprehend that for which I was apprehended by Christ Jesus."

What is Paul talking about? It sure is difficult for me to see how Paul is talking about anything but resurrection. In fact, I regularly use this passage to teach how to interpret the words of the text in context. Look at the train of thought:

1. Verse 8: The things I mentioned earlier in the chapter that from a human perspective I might boast about, I count these as dung in comparison to knowing Christ.

2. Verse 9: I want to be found in him with a righteousness from God.

3. Verse 10: in order to know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, being conformed to his death...

4. Verse 11: "if somehow I might attain to the resurrection of the dead."

It is this verse that occurs right before verse 12: "not that I have received [the resurrection of the dead]." With no expressed object of the verb to tell us what Paul has not received, we have to assume that the object comes from the previous verse.

The context that follows confirms this reading.

5. Verse 13: "Not that I reckon myself to have received. But one thing [I do], forgetting the behind [the human badges he has mentioned earlier in the chapter], and reaching out to what is before, I pursue toward the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus.

In other words, the context that follows confirms that it is the upward calling, the resurrection, that Paul has had in mind.

Again, what is the most natural way of reading these words in context, not one that is driven by preconceived theology? It is that Paul reiterates twice that he is not already guaranteed an upward call. He is not already guaranteed resurrection. To read it any differently, you have to want to. The context screams this interpretation.

Some Naughty Ones for Me
Two verses in 1 Corinthians that I personally find puzzling are 1 Corinthians 3:15 and 5:5. The first says that a minister who builds the church out of inferior materials will be saved through fire, even though the work he might build on it will be consumed. The second speaks of the spirit of the man delivered to Satan being saved on the Day of the Lord, even though his flesh would be destroyed.

These are puzzling passages to me, and I will confess that I'm not quite sure what to do with them. But I'm not sure that they are much more attractive to Reformed or mainstream Baptist interpretation either. If I try to imagine possible literal meanings that are not figurative (my preferred interpretations here), I note that Paul at this point in his ministry likely believed that those to whom he wrote would still be alive on the Day of the Lord. An unwelcome but possible meaning might then be that these individuals would face some of the judgment, but that they would still end up as part of the kingdom, which Paul may have pictured to be on earth, since that's where the judgment apparently would take place (1 Cor. 6:2-3).

That would be a kind of security, but it would hardly fit any mainstream Christian theology. I doubt anyone here wants to opt for purgatory, and does anyone really think Paul is talking about the death of these individuals?

Hebrews
I've saved Hebrews because this is where everyone would expect me to go. You know the drill:

For it is impossible for those once having been enlightened, and who have tasted of the heavenly gift and have become partakers of Holy Spirit and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the coming age and having fallen away... [it is impossible] to renew to repentance, since they crucify to themselves the Son of God again and expose him to disgrace.

The argument that to "taste" here is not truly to become a Christian is a real stretch. For one thing, it just isn't the way the passage reads. The author is chastising the audience for not maturing to the point they should be. He is of course shaming them--he is persuaded of better things with regard to them, of their salvation (6:9).

But they have done the drill. They have repented from dead works, had faith toward God, have been baptized, etc... (6:1-2). The description of them in 6:10-12 gives us no sense that they are not truly "in." The only reason someone would think that is to get out of the clear implication of 6:4-8. And Hebrews makes no distinction between certain unelect individuals to which these would apply and the bulk to which it would not. Again, the text gives no evidence at all of any distinction like this. They have tasted Holy Spirit; they are Christians.

Another suggestion sometimes made is that these are not really possibilities. They are meant to get the audience to where they are supposed to be, but the warnings could never come to pass. Now tell me, does this make any sense at all? Simply put, no Calvinist would write this and mean this--given how important eternal security and perseverence are to their system, there's not a chance they would write something that could be so easily misinterpreted. Or maybe the apparent meaning is the real meaning!

Remember, if they were to fall away, they would not be able to renew to repentance. That implies they have repented before. And what they would have been doing to come back is to crucify Christ again! The clear implication is that they had already appropriated his crucifixion before.

The image of leaving Egypt and entering Canaan implies exactly the same paradigm.

"We have become partakers of the Christ, if indeed we hold fast the beginning of substance firm until the end" (3:14).

"Whose house are we if indeed we hold fast the boldness and boasting of hope" (3:7).

The entire point of this argument is to continue to Canaan. "Who that heard rebelled? But was it not all of those who left Egypt through Moses? And with whom was [God] angry for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose corpses fell in the desert?" (3:16-17).

The most obvious way to take this passage is as a warning that not all those who leave Egypt make it to Canaan, not all of those who start with the Christ will be saved, particularly those who sin in the manner the author has in mind. A person might bicker with this interpretation if we did not have the other verses. But this interpretation fits hand in glove with the other passages.

So next we look at Hebrews 10:26-27, which picks up this theme of sinning after leaving Egypt: "If we continue to sin willfully after receiving a knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins but a certain fearful expectation of judgment and of a zealous fire that is about to eat the enemies."

Notice the image of knowledge as we saw in 6:4--"it is impossible for those have once been enlightened." The sense of a sacrifice remaining implies that Christ's sacrifice had been in force. We are reminded of the earlier comment that they crucify the Son of God again.

It does not matter for our purposes what specific kind of sin the author has in mind. He is not simply talking about post-baptismal sin. He has a certain kind of apostacy in mind, not a single act of sin. This is a big deal that has been some time coming. And I do not think that he really believes anything like this is really going to happen to the audience. But unless it is a real possibility, this line of argument is not only ineffective, it is deceptive and manipulative.

But perhaps the scariest verses in the NT are Hebrews 12:16-17:

Watching ... "lest someone be sexually immoral or Godless like Esau, who traded his birthright for one bit of food. For know that afterwards, when he wanted to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he did not find a place of repentance, although he sought it with tears."

I have been rebuked by a reviewer for thinking that what Esau was seeking with tears here was repentance, and indeed, some Hebrews commentaries by authors I deeply respect believe that the "it" here is the blessing. Although Esau sought the blessing with tears, he did not find a place of repentance.

This is possible, but not at all the most likely interpretation. Why? Because the nearest feminine antecedent is the Greek word for repentance. The word for blessing is feminine, but is further back in the sentence. What is even more compelling is the similarity of this statement to 6:6, which says it is impossible to renew to repentance. Once again, only a desire to opt for one's preconceived theology rather than listen to the text explains this interpretive move.

The most obvious meaning of this text, as the most obvious meaning of all these other texts in Hebrews, is that person can have a Christian "birthright" and be a firstborn Son, yet fall away, sell one's birthright. And what is a naughty theology for both Wesleyan and Calvinist is left. It may not be easy to fall away. In fact, it may be doggone unlikely. But if one falls away in the way that Hebrews discusses, one is gone forever.

I'll let Bounds work out this difficult teaching in theology class. But this is what the text seems to want us to hear, in fact the message comes through with remarkable clarity.

Conclusion
I believe that Paul expresses very clearly in Philippians the fact that he did not consider his resurrection to be yet fully assured. In 1 Corinthians he expresses the importance of himself persevering in order not to be disqualified. And Hebrews is extremely clear, even if difficult for pretty much any tradition. The clear teaching of Scripture, as the background to the NT led us to expect, has no concept of absolute certainty of salvation, even after one has appropriated Christ's death and has the Spirit.

Eternal security can make a few small modifications and survive. Namely, one might suggest that it is very, very unlikely that a true Christian will ever fall away. In fact, I believe that myself! But I believe it is possible.

On the other hand, 5 point Calvinism cannot survive the plain teaching of Scripture on these points. And 7 point Calvinism--that God predestined the Fall of Satan and Adam. The God of that system is an evil God. I'll take Grudem every day over them!

Galatians 2:15-16

I was dialoguing with Glen Robinson on the translation of Galatians 2:16 under the post "By Faith Alone." I've spent a lot of time reflecting on this verse and actually have an article coming out this year with CBQ that ends with my understanding of it. I thought I might make this a commentary post.

1. We who are Jews by nature and not sinners from the Gentiles...

As the next statement makes clear, Paul is referring to "we Jewish believers" and although I don't think he is still telling us what he said to Peter, the "we" refers to people like him and Peter--Jewish believers.

Sinners from the Gentiles is not tongue in cheek. What is a sinner if not a law breaker and what other law would be in view other than the Jewish law. Clearly Gentiles don't keep the Jewish law, so sinners is quite literal here. Gentiles are clearly sinners. Paul plays out this idea in the whole of Romans 1:18-32--"Gentiles are sinners."

To some extent, we should think of Paul as starting out with common ground between him and Jewish believers like Peter. As we will see, however, he considers Peter's perspective to be incomplete because Peter only sees half of the equation. Paul will round out the argument when he gets to 2:17--we Jews, even Jewish believers, are sinners too. That is reminiscent to the progression of thought in Romans 2:1-3:20, namely, that Jews have sinned too. In fact, all [both Gentile and Jew] have sinned and lack the glory of God (Rom. 3:23).

2. since we know that a person is not justified...

Justification here is a legal term. The issue is on what basis a person might be considered righteous or "not guilty" in the divine court. Perhaps more to the point, the issue is on what basis a person might not face God's judgment. While the question is primarily a judicial question, its most crucial relevance pertains to the Day of Judgment and is thus eschatological.

I remain unconvinced of N. T. Wright's claim that it is also covenantal, meaning that a primary part of the meaning is whether or not a person is a member of the people of God and Israel in particular. Certainly Paul's language should be read as corporately as possible, rather than individualistically ("we" since "we" know "we" have placed faith...). But the Israel angle has not yet "clicked" for me. I don't see it.

3. ...since we know that a person is not justified on the basis of works of law except through the faith of Jesus Christ...

"Works of law" must certainly refer to works of the Jewish law. Paul is still stating common ground between himself, Peter, and other "conservative" Jewish believers. None of them, in fact no Jew at all, would claim that they deserved God's favor. They of course did believe that works of the law were an essential part of the equation, but all would have agreed with Paul that deeds of the law, apart from God's graciousness, did not earn God's acceptance of them.

"Works of law" might have had a strong connotation of the kinds of issues Jewish sects are notorious for debating. Rabbi so and so says that such and such makes the hand unclean, while so and so other rabbi says it doesn't. 4QMMT is a Dead Sea document in which, perhaps, the leader of one Jewish sect argues for his understanding of various temple issues to one of the Maccabean high priests. The title of this document is "some of the works of the law." Accordingly, Dunn argues that while "works of law" likely refers to any deed of the Jewish law, it probably had overtones of the elements in the Jewish law that distinguished Jew from Gentile.

The natural force of the word usually translated as "but" is more naturally translated "except" or "unless" (ei me). Since Paul is still laying out common ground between himself and Peter/conservative Jewish Christianity, this perspective is perfectly natural. Peter believes that the faithfulness of Jesus unto death (in other words, the atonement afforded through his death) is an essential element in justification before God. BUT, works of law are also an essential part of the equation for James and friends.

To take the phrase "faith of Jesus Christ" as a reference to the faithfulness of Jesus and in particular his faithful death is to take a particular position in a long and well documented debate. I personally became finally convinced when I came to a particular conclusion on the logic of 2 Cor. 4:13. That was the straw that tipped the scales for me. However, a more obvious argument is the similarity between Rom. 5:19 and 3:22. The parallel is striking, as pointed out by Luke Timothy Johnson:

"Just as through the disobedience of the one man many became sinners,
so also through the obedience of the one man many will become righteous"

"through the faith of Jesus Christ ... being justified [declared righteous]"

The faith of Jesus Christ here refers to his obedience to death (Phil. 2:8) and thus is a shorthand way of referring to Jesus' atoning death, the redemption provided through the atoning sacrifice God made through Jesus' blood.

4. We Jews ... since we know that a person is not justified by works of [Jewish] law except through the faith[ful death] of Jesus Christ, even we have put our faith in Messiah Jesus...

The novelty here for Paul is to point out that in fact Jewish believers have not only put their faith in God and what God has done through Jesus, they have in a sense put their faith in Jesus as Messiah. We are so programmed to think of faith in Christ that we miss that this is in fact the more unusual way of thinking of faith both for Paul and even moreso for other Jewish Christians. Rather, their faith was primarily in God and in what God had done through Jesus. Romans 4 is all about faith in God, not faith in Christ. And in 1 Thessalonians, in my view before Paul started getting really thick into these debates, he speaks of faith toward God (1 Thess. 1:8). God remains throughout Paul's writings, in my view, the primary object of faith.

But Paul certainly can also speak of placing faith in Christ, as this verse and other places where he uses the verb form pisteuo. We are prone to draw false distinctions between the verb "to believe" and the noun "faith" because they look different in English. But it is the same root: pisteuo (believe) and pistis (faith). To believe thus often means to have faith, although we have to be careful because these words have a range of meanings and should not be translated the same in every instance.

Hopefully everyone knows that the word Christ is the Greek translation of Messiah. Most of the time, the word lurks without Paul drawing much attention to it. But I think it has meaning for him (see, for example, Rom. 9:5) and I think the word order here in Gal. 2 means something. When referring to the faithfulness of Jesus, Messiah, Jesus comes first. But now that Paul speaks of putting faith in him, he puts Messiah first because it is primarily as Messiah, as Christ, that we place our faith in him.

5. ... we have put our faith in Christ Jesus in order that we might be justifed by faith of Christ and not by works of law...

I think Paul is having a little fun here. The expression "faith of Christ" is deliciously ambiguous, as the history of the scholarly debate shows. Is it faith in Christ or the faith of Christ? I think given the lead up it must be both, a clever double entendre. But I think that given his comment to faith in Christ that has just preceded, it has the upper hand. In other words, if I gave the tie to Richard Hays in 2:16a, I'm going to give it primarily to Dunn here in 2:16c.

So Paul sets up a contrast. The balance of the phrases with what are called "objective genitives" speaks against seeing Hays' interpretation here: faithfulness of Jesus and not doing the law. We are justified by trusting Christ and not by doing law. The principle of justification by faith will then play itself out throughout Paul's subsequent argument.

6. ...for by works of law no flesh will be justified.

Here Paul cites and modifies Psalm 143:2. The verse says that no one living is righteous before God. Paul changes "no one living" to "no flesh." Flesh is of course a characteristic category for Paul, as we have seen. "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God" (1 Cor. 15:50). The key is therefore to get out of the flesh ;-), which we can due through the Spirit (Rom. 8:8).

Paul also adds the phrase "works of law" to the quote. In this way again those living can be justified through faith of Christ, even if not by works of law. Just as a final parting blow, Paul's use of Scripture here is the death blow to fundamentalist and biblicist interpretation. As I've argued elsewhere, we cannot use Scripture as Paul if we do not see the Word of God as something bigger than the words of the text. Paul found the text in the Word of God, he did not find the Word of God in the text.

Final Translation
"We who are Jews by nature and not sinners from the Gentiles, since we know that a person is not justified by deeds of law except through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, even we have placed our faith in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not deeds of law, for no flesh will be justified by deeds of law."

Wesley, Wesleyans, Scripture, Etc...

So the week comes to an end, a week of meanderings largely on developments in Pauline scholarship relative the doctrines of the Reformation. I've dialoged enough here over time on sola scriptura, prima scriptura, etc. that perhaps I need not say much on that topic.

Basically,
1. Because the books of the Bible were written to multiple ancient contexts, they were not written directly to any of us. To apply the words directly to ourselves without further ado is thus to rip them from their contexts and falsely and dangerously apply them. We are just as likely to distort God's voice by doing this than to hear it.

That means, however, that reasoning is involved with the correct appropriation of Scripture--reasoning beyond Scripture.

2. Because the varied books of Scripture were themselves written to diverse contexts, we must synthesize and integrate their teachings before we can even say "the Bible" says such and such. This again involves a process of prioritizing and connecting that we are forced to do outside the Bible, beyond the Bible, extra scripturam. It involves reasoning.

3. My arguments this week have shown that I believe a good deal of what we think we get from the Bible in fact comes from Christian tradition. This is surely not all bad. Indeed, I believe that close scrutiny shows that Luther did not really get all the way back to the Bible in his pruning of tradition. Instead, he basically pruned off traditions from about 500 on.

Many of the key, even essential beliefs of Christendom--the Trinity, the dual nature of Christ, the contours of the canon--took on their quasi-current form in the 300's and 400's. The contours of the canon are particularly poignant. The same drive that allowed Luther to resist the book of James also led him to remove the Apocrypha completely from the canon. They had been in use up to his day at least as deuterocanonical, even if they may not have had as full a status as what we would consider the protocanonical books.

In any case, the Bible alone cannot by its very nature cannot identify the limits of what should be in the Bible.

So both in the nature of language in relation to context, given the contexts of the books of the Bible and our different context, and in the very question of what the contours of the canon are, the Bible alone is insufficient to provide us either with a stable meaning for today or a stable set of words on which to base that meaning. The so called Wesleyan Quadrilateral is thus a far sounder hermeneutic. It is, however, more of a trilateral in reality. There are the biblical texts, there is the history of interpretation of those texts by the church, and there is contemporary experience. Reasoning is necessary to process all of these. It is the roundhouse through which all the trains of meaning inevitably pass, whether we like it or not.

But all that is passe stuff I have written often before. I can't see how any of it is even debatable, really. What is more difficult is to identify what Wesleyan theology even is in the first place.

When I ask myself, what was distinctive about John Wesley in his own day, I think of things like 1) the idea of prevenient grace, 2) the idea of the assurance of salvation, 3) his ordo salutis, which was characteristic both in its "methodist" character and particularly in relation to 4) the doctrine of Christian perfection that was a part of it (as also prevenient grace). But the Wesleyan tradition has not been static, even if some of its wandering has been unconscious movement.

So most Wesleyans, as most Baptists and others, have become semi-Pelagian to believe--or at least to operate as if--we have free will apart from some miraculous intervention of God. I'm not convinced it should be called semi-Pelagian, but the current Wesleyan (broad) sense of prevenient grace differs from Wesley's somewhat in that we tend to think of prevenient grace as the grace that makes it possible for us to choose God at any time. Wesley of course thought the opportunity only came on God's time.

Russ Gunsalus had a good "light" metaphor for the current way of thinking, extending my previous metaphors. If for the Calvinist, God turns the switch of salvation on or leaves it off, if for Wesley it was more like a dimmer switch that God at some point turns up enough for us to say we want more light, Russ suggested that the current understanding of prevenient grace is of a switch that God has wired to be hot so that we can throw the switch at any time. In other words, it is prevenient grace that makes the throwing of the switch possible, but we are empowered to throw it at any time. This prevailing understanding is different from Wesley's.

The doctrine of assurance is no longer distinctive. Most believe we can know now whether we are on the way to heaven or not. In fact, I believe the idea of eternal security is a variation on the original Calvinist "perseverence of the saints" in the sense that it brings assurance into the equation. Before, a Puritan didn't know if s/he was saved until s/he made it. But with assurance now, if you know you are saved now and those who are saved will persevere, then once you are saved you know you are going to be saved. It is a kind of one point Calvinism without the logical basis!

My sense is also that most Wesleyans have become very tentative about Christian perfection as an instantaneous experience. Here let me suggest that the following components of Wesley's soteriology remain essential Wesleyanism:

1. The importance of imparted righteousness in the life of the believer. In other words, Wesleyans in the broad sense continue to emphasize the need for victory over sin and the power of God to make it possible.

2. The possibility of losing one's assured salvation. Wesleyans continue to have a sense of sin as a matter of a relationship with God, a relationship that can be offended, broken, and even restored again.

3. Although you don't hear much preaching on sin natures and such these days, Wesleyans would continue to preach the need for entire consecration of oneself to God. And along with this, I think most Wesleyans would still agree that you can not only win over temptation, but you can like it. In other words, that you can be oriented toward doing the right thing rather than sinning.

Beyond soteriology, let me also add that

4. The Wesleyan tradition has increasingly seized on Wesley's method of using Scripture, summarized by Albert Outler as Wesley's Quadrilateral. This is a keeper. Wesley wouldn't have put it quite this way, but we can see him more objectively now than he could have in his day and categories.

This may seem like a watered down list of Wesley-an characteristics. As others have posed, it is a legitimate question as to whether we can even speak of an essence of Wesleyan theology without referencing Calvin and Augustine, to where Wesley's theology is a tweak rather than a free-standing theology. This suggestion bugs me. Chris Bounds also pointed out to me yesterday that my descriptions of Paul might actually be closer to the Eastern Orthodox tradition than to Wesley himself, which also bugs me.

So how might we describe a Wesley-an theology that is systematic in its own right today, not as a variation on Calvinism? I wonder if one direction such a theology might take is a somewhat pragmatist turn, one that fits with the death of conventional metaphysics. Wesleyan theology seems well suited in flavor to make certain theological statements that are in potential tension with each other but which we do not logically try to resolve, assuming the resolution of the tensions is in God.

1. God offers the opportunity of faith to all persons.
2. Those who have faith are elect of God, predestined by Him.
3. The default state of all humans is one of separation from God and the end thereof is death in the dual sense.
4. God's justification of those with faith is gracious and not by any obligation on His part.
5. Reconciliation with God is only possible on the basis of the atoning death of Christ.
6. God empowers those in Christ and thus expects fulfillment of his core ("moral") law thereafter.
7. Continued willful sin after adoption as God's child endangers one's relationship with God and can break it if one wrongs God enough.
8. Final justification will be based on the status of one's relationship with God on the Day of Judgment.

These bald affirmations raise all sorts of other questions, questions that have spawned the "mythologies" of various Christian traditions about natures and such. But it seems particularly appropriate in a postmodern age--and quite amenable to Wesley's practical nature--to leave the gaps.

Any suggestions?

By Faith Alone

All we need do to show that Luther's "by faith alone" is not the whole biblical picture is cite James 2:24: "so we see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone." Paul himself never uses the adverb "alone" when speaking of justification by faith. The closest he comes is in Romans 3:28 when he says, "a person is justified by faith and not by works of law."

As we might expect, the meaning of faith and its relationship to deeds in Paul is somewhat complex. We might summarize the landscape as follows:

1. We should not understand faith and works to be mutually exclusive concepts. In 1 Thess. 1:3, Paul commends the Thessalonians for their "work of faith." Also, faith by its very nature "works," as in Gal. 5:6, where Paul says that neither circumcision nor uncircumcision matters--only faith working through love. Eph. 2:8-10 can say from one verse to the next that we are saved by grace through faith, not of works, and then say in the next verse that we were created for good works--clearly the two concepts do not contradict each other.

2. Paul does teach that a person cannot merit justification by his or her works--no amount of deeds merits a "not-guilty" verdict. However, since Augustine we are prone to see this as an abstract faith versus works proposition. Paul surely processed the expression "works of law" by way of the Jewish law. And since Paul's primary topic of discussion is the differences between Jew and Gentile, arguing that Jews do not have a different path to justification than Gentiles do, we should primarily think of the phrase "works of law" as a reference to law observances that distinguished Jew from Gentile (circumcision, sabbath observance, food laws, etc...). Paul's point is thus that a Jew did not stand a better chance at justification simply because they were Jews. All have sinned--both Jew and Gentile. All need the faithful death of Jesus Christ in order that their sins might be atoned for and they might be redeemed.

3. The expression "through the faith of Jesus Christ" in Romans 3:22a and Galatians 2:16a is likely a reference to the faithfulness (to death) of Jesus, his obedience unto death. In that sense, the most important faith by which we are justified is not even our own. "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. And what I now live in the flesh, I live by trust/in the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal. 2:20). The word order suggests to me that Paul wants the audience to hear both connotations. First they hear, "in faith I live" and think of their own faith. Then Paul tacks on "the of the Son of God [faith]" and they think of his faithfulness unto death.

4. But Paul does move the train of thought in both Romans 3 and Galatians 3 to human faith as the principle for our justification. Romans 4 uses the example of Abraham's faith in the God who justifies the ungodly (4:5) and who raises the dead (4:17, 24) as a model for our justification.

The point of justification by faith in Christ versus works of law is thus not that works of law are bad. In fact, we would argue that for a Jew they remain important as part of their ongoing relationship with God. Paul never encourages Jews to stop observing the Jewish law in its ethnic particulars. Only when purity regulations came into conflict with more essential principles like the unity of the body of Christ did Paul "fudge" on aspects of the Jewish law (Gal. 2:11-14)

They simply are inadequate to justify. In fact, Paul explicitly denies that we make void law because of faith (3:31). Faith thus does not even remove the principle of law!

5. While works are not adequate to justify a person, faith expresses itself through appropriate works. On the Day of Judgment, God "will repay to each according to his works" (Rom. 2:6). On that day, "to those who from strife and who disobey the truth and to those persuaded by unrighteousness, wrath and anger..." (2:8). "It is necessary for us all to appear before the judgment seat of the Messiah so that each might receive the things [appropriate] to the things which s/he practiced in the body, whether good or bad" (2 Cor. 5:10).

Indeed, far from faith removing works as a basis for judgment and "final" justification, faith brings the Spirit which enables the works necessary for justification. "Do we cancel law therefore through faith? God forbid! But we establish law" (Rom. 3:31). "Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? God forbid! How will we who have died to sin still live in it?" (6:1-2). And of course Paul speaks of Gentiles who "demonstrate the work of the law written on their hearts" in Rom. 2:15. These individuals "by nature do the things of the law" (2:14). This language is reminiscent of Jer. 31 cited in Hebrews 8, 10 and alluded to in 2 Corinthians 3. It is new covenant language that pushes us to see these Gentiles as individuals who have the Spirit and are thus able to fulfill the righteous expectation of the law (Rom. 2:26; 8:4).

The confusing part of Paul's rhetoric is that he almost functions with two different conceptions of law here. Works of law have overtones of Jewish particularism and ethnic boundary issues. But in Romans 2 and 8, law seems to refer to a certain kind of core law that a Gentile might keep by nature even though uncircumcised. For our discussion, the important thing to notice is that Paul claims that the person who is unable to keep the law in Romans 7 is able to do so in Romans 6 and 8. And while works cannot justify in themselves, they are necessary for final justification in his thought.

Clearly Paul's thinking here is problematic for Lutheran theology in particular. On this point especially, Wesleyan-Arminian theology is beautifully situated between Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism in relation to Paul's thought. If medieval Catholicism did not have an appropriate sense in which grace asks for faith as its initiator, Lutheranism did not have an appropriate sense of how grace asks for particular works--here understood as the avoidance of sin rather than good deeds--as essential for final justification. Wesleyan-Arminian theology correctly holds to both: faith as the only effective solicitation of God's grace and works as a natural (and essential) by product of faith brought through the Spirit, where works are here understood more as the avoidance of sin rather than positive good deeds.

Total Depravity

I consider the doctrine of total depravity to be a near consensus of Christendom. I say near consensus because I'm not sure that the Eastern Church formulates human sinfulness quite the same way as the Western church has under the influence of Augustine (Bounds, are you out there?). Similarly, I'm not sure that the Roman Catholic tradition has always understood total depravity quite as extremely as most Protestant traditions have. Thus I don't think Thomas Aquinas thought that our minds were completely fallen.

But from the standpoint of both Wesleyan, Reformed, and Lutheran theology, humanity is totally depraved and can do no good in its own power. Contrary to popular belief, the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition is not Pelagian and does not believe that humans have free will independent of God's empowerment. The difference between the two traditions is the process of moving from total depravity to salvation. For the Calvinist, it is an all or nothing proposition, like a normal light switch. Either God turns the light on, and you move toward holiness and you are saved, or He doesn't. [I might add that I am a little uncomfortable with the way Protestants both Wesleyan and Reformed alike talk about holiness as something like righteous living, but that's another series]

By contrast, the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition thinks of the movement from depravity to holiness more on the model of a dimmer switch that can be on in varying degrees. At some point in every person's life, God turns the light up just enough for the person to indicate whether they would like more light or not. This is not a point of the person's choosing! If the person does not respond appropriately when God turns up the light, the person may not ever get another chance. There goes putting off repentance until your death bed!

On the other hand, if a person thus empowered by God signals a desire for further light, God will turn the light up further unto salvation. In theological terms, Wesley referred to the "just enough" dimmer light as God's preventing or as we say, "prevenient grace." It can lead in turn to "saving" or "justifying grace."

It is now my task to process these theological discussions in the light of Paul's own categories. I believe that much of our theological language is mythical, if you would, not thereby meaning that it is false, only meaning that we tend to process theological truths by way of metaphorical narratives. My dimmer switch "story" is a good example. I believe I am accurately representing a truth but I am doing it in a non-literal way.

A more palatable way of putting it is to say that all language is ultimately "incarnational" language. So Paul uses certain language in relation to human sinfulness. Augustine used a different set of images. We should not mistake either for the exact reality. But they both point toward the reality. I will try not mistake my own images for reality either, but I do want to try to get into Paul's head on the relevant issues here and then compare them with the head of Augustine, Calvin, Wesley, etc.

The idea of a sinful nature is, as I understand it, Augustinian. It is not Pauline, and I regularly complain in class about the NIV's translation of the Greek word for flesh, sarx, as "sinful nature." Here are some thoughts on Paul's use of the word flesh:

1. It is related to embodiment. After all, why else would Paul use the word for skin?

2. It tends to have a negative connotation. The word body, soma, does not tend to have a negative connotation. Even though these two words overlap in meaning at a certain point, "body" tends to have a somewhat more neutral sense, while "flesh" tends to have a negative one.

3. Flesh is often related to sin.

"I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh" Rom. 7:18.

"The law is spiritual, but I am made of flesh [sarkinos], enslaved under Sin" Rom. 7:14

Indeed, we might infer from these images that flesh is that part of me that is enslaved to sin.

4. It is possible not to be "in the flesh" in this life. In other words, one can get "out of the flesh" while still on earth.

"Those who are in the flesh are not able to please God. But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you" Rom. 8:8-9.

We see therefore that Paul can use the word "flesh" with varying degrees of literality, ranging from flesh as literal skin to flesh as a metaphor for a state of susceptibility to the power of sin.

Although not all agree [e.g., Dunn], perhaps the majority of Pauline scholars now recognize that Paul is not talking about some current and ongoing personal struggle with sin in Romans 7. The context argues overwhelmingly against such a reading. We have mentioned above both the fact that Paul speaks in Romans 7:14 of someone "enslaved to sin" because they are "made of flesh." Yet in the very next chapter he denies that a person "in the flesh" can please God. These comments would contradict each other if both were meant to refer to Paul's current state.

The dissonance of the "current struggle of Paul" interpretation only increases the more we look at the context. Romans 6:17 is particularly telling:

But thanks be to God because you were slaves of sin but you obeyed from the heart the type of teaching which you have received.

Here the timing of enslavement to sin is prior to coming to faith. For Paul to say that he is currently enslaved to sin would thus imply that he was not even a person of faith yet. Indeed, the wording of this statement is very similar to Paul's resolution at the end of Romans 7:

Who will rescue me from the body of this death? But thanks be to God--through Jesus Christ our Lord (7:24-25a).

We should thus read Romans 7:13-15 as a dramatic enactment of the process of going from being a slave to sin to being free from sin. We should have read it this way all along, given Paul's preface to this sequence of thought in 7:5-6:

For when we were in the flesh, the passions of sins which came through the law used to work in our members bearing fruit to death, but now we have been released from the law and have died in relation to that by which we were held so that we might serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.

So when we now come to the Augustinian imagery of a sinful nature, we recognize a certain skew from Paul's own imagery. The idea of a nature--particularly for us who now process human behavior in terms of DNA--raises questions about physical things inside of me, genetics, brain structure, and such. Before Christians thought about such things, we still found those in the Wesleyan tradition arguing over whether a person's sinful nature might be eradicated or perhaps could only be supressed.

We can see that these discussions are all somewhat wrong headed. Paul does not say that we all have a sinful nature. What he implies is that Sin holds power over this creation. So in Romans 8:20 Paul says that "the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but on account of the One who subjected it in hope." Our flesh is a part of this creation, and its default state in this realm is enslavement to the power of Sin.

But it is interesting to note what this state of affairs did not mean in Paul's own imagery. For example, notice how Paul argues in Romans 7:16-17 in relation to the person without the Spirit:

If I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. But now it is no longer I doing it but sin that dwells in me.

In Paul's formulation, the person wants to do good and wants to keep the law, but is unable to do so because of a foreign power over them. And Paul is not talking about a believer here. He is talking about a Jew who might want to keep the heart of the Jewish law, say the prohibition on coveting.

There is no sense here of depravity of the "I," although we might overlay Paul's own thoughts with our sense of will. Only then can we say that this person has a "bent" to sinning. But for Paul, this person's inclination is not to sin. The person is simply not empowered to do so.

What we find here is a quasi-dualistic sense of a human person. I am not totally depraved in my essential being but I may actually be inclined toward the good in my ego, in my "inner person" (7:22)!

Similarly, while Romans 5:12 speaks of sin and death entering the world through Adam, it says nothing of us acquiring a sin nature. In some way because of Adam, all now sin. But Paul leaves it to us to figure out the mechanism for why that happens. Reading between the lines, the answer that sticks closest to Paul's own categories is one that sees the power of Sin coming on the world and over human flesh because of Adam's sin. At the eschaton we will no longer have such flesh, because "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God" (1 Cor. 15:50).

Against this backdrop, we can see the Augustinian reading of Paul as an overreading. Sure, Paul does quote the psalm, "There is none righteous, not even one" (Rom. 3:10 quoting Ps. 14:1-3). To do so, he takes the psalm somewhat out of context because it was originally referring to fools who say there is no God! But note that Paul does not say that "there is no one with any good in them whatsoever" or "there is no one who has ever done one good thing." At the very few points where Paul's language might sound a little like this, we should understand Paul to be speaking somewhat hyperbolically, given his default mode of talking about human action.

As with other issues later theologians are to blame for this body of argumentative death. Paul talks about humans as if they have free will and as if they can desire good. He does not have a worked out theology of how this can be. He does not fit our apparent free will with the idea that we are elect--and to do so is not commendable when it ends up skewing one or the other pole of his thinking! He does not have some dark sense of total depravity. All are sinners, yes. All need God's grace to be saved, yes. No human is worthy of God, yes.

But he apparently does not think of humans as unable to want the good, and he can say of himself before he came to Christ that "according to the righteousness that is in the law, I was blameless" (Phil. 3:6). He doesn't cover his theological tale here by referencing prevenient grace. He is, to put it simply, talking like a Jew. Works do not justify, yes. But Paul talks as if unbelievers can do some good even though they do not have the Spirit.

So, I'll concede to Thomas Schreiner that the idea of prevenient grace is more Wesley than Paul. But in terms of which theology produces a "theological product" that looks more like the NT, Wesley wins over Calvin. Wesley's doctrine of prevenient grace accounts for good done by a person who is not regenerate. Calvin will largely deny it. Wesley's doctrine of sanctification implies that a person can live above sin after the Spirit. Calvin is far more pessimistic and Luther doesn't even want to talk about it (shh, it's God's secret, so Gerhard Forde).

Justification/Salvation by Grace

David deSilva makes a very relevant comment for my purposes in his recent book, Honor, Patronage, Kinship, & Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture. With regard to grace he writes, "Because we think about the grace of God through the lens of sixteenth-century Protestant polemics about 'earning salvation by means of pious works,' we have a difficult time hearing the New Testament's own affirmation of the simple, yet noble and beautiful, circle of grace" (141).

deSilva here alludes to what has now become commonly accepted, namely, that grace and gift language in the NT is language of patronage. Throughout the Greco-Roman world of Paul's day, informal relationships existed between the "have's" and "have nots" of society. The "have's," the patrons, would give to various other groups who were in need of resources. The "have not's" received their patronage as "clients" and in return gave their patrons honor, sometimes suffered for them, might perform various tasks for them, etc...

Such patronage was of course "unmerited" in the sense that the client did not pay the patron for services rendered. And because the relationship was informal, there was no contract that constituted obligation on the part of either party. The client in that sense had no formal strings attached. On the other hand, a client that dishonored his or her patron could not assume that the patron would simply continue patronage as if nothing had happened.

If we look for modern illustrations of such grace, we might think of a donor for a college building. John Maxwell is not obligated in any way to donate funds to Indiana Wesleyan for a building. Such donation is gracious on his part, it demonstrates his willingness to act as a patron, it is an example of his charis, his grace. The gift is a charisma, the product of grace.

Now I don't know if IWU was obligated contractually to name the Maxwell building after Maxwell. I can at least imagine that the arrangment might be informal--a kind of mutual understanding. On the other hand, you can imagine that if IWU were to act ungrateful and say bad things about Maxwell, he probably would want to donate anything more to the university!

This is thus a fair example of patron-client relationships today, and it works a lot like it did in ancient times in the days of the NT.

The relevance of this cultural background for understanding grace in the NT is striking. From God comes "every good act of giving [dosis] and every perfect thing given [dorema]" (Jas. 1:17). The spiritual gifts of 1 Corinthians [charismata] are instances of grace that comes through the Holy Spirit [charis].

Therefore, when we approach certain key Pauline texts on grace, we should be careful about foreign assumptions about what it means to say that justification or salvation comes through grace.

Romans
God has dispensed His grace in Romans through Jesus Christ. God has shown his propensity to serve as our patron by offering Jesus as a means of our redemption (Rom. 3:24), offering him as a means of atonement (3:25), thus showing his love for us (5:8). These are the means and basis for our justification, our acquittal in the divine court--we are "justified as a gift [dorean] by his grace [charis] through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" (3:24).

Our Protestant propensity for confusion does not come so much in the discussion of God as patron. Rather, it comes when we begin to discuss the implications of grace for us as clients. Take Romans 4:3-5:

For what does the Scripture say, "Abraham had faith in God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness." Now to the one "working" the reward is not reckoned according to grace but according to debt. But to the one not working but having faith on the one who justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as righteousness."

Here again we see the key concepts of grace. Grace does not involve obligation on God's part to give. It is something that God does not have to give but something He gives "as a gift."

But at the same time, we should not make "working" a polar opposite to grace or faith. The point of the logic is not that God doesn't want works. The point is that no amount of works add up to an obligation on God's part.

I might add as a side note James Dunn's emphasis that what Paul is primarily discussing here is "works of law," that is, acts of the Jewish law and especially acts that tended to distinguish Jew from Gentile. These are matters of the Law like circumcision, food laws, Sabbath observance, etc... Dunn's classic article on this topic can be found in Jesus, Paul, and the Law. In his most recent mention of the topic The New Perspective on Paul (an expensive Mohr/Siebeck monograph that reprints his classic articles also on the topic, along with a some 70 page introduction, I believe), Dunn denies that he ever restricted the sense of the phrase "works of law" only to boundary matters.

My own sense is that Dunn's recent comment is the right balance. When Paul uses the phrase "works of law," he primarily has in mind the kinds of matters that intra-Jewish conflicts were made out of. The title of the Qumran document 4QMMT is surely relevant: "Some of the Works of the Law." It is a document that argues for the right way to live out the law with regard to the temple.

At the same time, Paul is talking of "deeds of law" and does at more than one point generalize in terms of works versus faith (e.g. 10:32, see Stephen Westerholm). So while Paul may be thinking primarily of "things in the law that distinguish Jew from Gentile," we cannot restrict his meaning to such things.

So also Romans 4:16:

For this reason, [justification is] on the basis of faith in order that it might be in accordance with grace...

At this point post-Augustinian denominations begin to wrankle over where the faith comes from. Is faith a work if it is something a human does? Is it a "badge of covenant membership" (N. T. Wright), something that shows a person is a member of the people of God rather than something that gets you in? Does it refer to Christ's faithfulness (Richard Hays) and not even human faith in verses like this one at all?

I agree with Hays that Paul refers to Christ's faithfulness in verses like Romans 3:22 and Galatians 2:16, but I agree with Dunn in Romans 4 and Galatians 3. Ek pisteos for Paul does come from Habakkuk 2:4, "the person righteous on the basis of faith will live." But I think Paul primarily has human faith in view (although I think he would apply the verse to Jesus as a human as well). So I believe Paul is talking about faith as something a human places in God and in Christ (see places where the verb is used, especially the sequence in Rom. 9:32-33), like Abraham did.

These Protestant debates are completely foreign to Paul. In my opinion, Paul says nothing about where some internal faith comes from (Rom. 10:17 is not talking about internal causes but external ones). He discusses it as a human act. It would not have contradicted the idea of patronage for the client to solicit patronage, any more than it would contradict the patronage of John Maxwell for IWU to ask if he would be willing to donate money to the university for a building. The dynamics of the internal causes of faith in a believer are of no concern to Paul.

Ephesians
Ephesians is of course different enough from Paul's other writings that the majority of non-evangelical scholars consider it pseudonymous. One minor place of such difference (although not of contradiction, in my opinion) is in the discussion of grace.

By grace you have been saved [and still are] through faith and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift [doron] of God not from works, so that someone cannot boast. For we are his product, having been created in Christ Jesus for good works that God has prepared so that we might walk in them (Eph. 2:8-10).

The main difference is the language of salvation rather than justification. Salvation language in Paul is usually future rather than past oriented, since no one has yet literally escaped God's wrath.

Notice that as new creations in Christ Jesus, we will live producing good works. This is significant for the second part of our discussion, the false opposition often made between salvation by faith and good works.

Disgracing the Patron
deSilva rightly turns to Hebrews 6 to discuss the potential consequences of dishonoring a patron.

It is impossible for those once enlightened, and who have tasted of the heavenly gift [dorea] and become partakers of Holy Spirit and who have tasted the word of God and the powers of the coming age and have fallen away, [it is impossible for them] again to be renewing for repentance, since they crucify again to themselves the Son of God and expose him to disgrace.

The author then illustrates with a field that has been watered often and yet yields thorns and thistles. In the words of James 1:7, "do not let that person think s/he will receive anything from the Lord."

Conclusion
The preoccupations of the Reformation with regard to God's grace--how it might be received apart from human work and the impossibility that it might in any way connect subsequently with human work--were none of Paul's concern in the manner of our discussion. For Paul, faith was something a human did and which a human must do to receive God's justifying/saving grace. Similarly, God's grace subsequent to justification was never understood to be compatible with a "client" who might flagrantly disgrace Him.

What we see here are points where the Calvinist tradition has often criticized the Wesleyan tradition as being incoherent or even Pelagian. But Paul doesn't care. Take it up with him.

A Great Time for Wesleyan Theology

A year or two back, Indiana Wesleyan was glad to have the editors of Christian Scholars Review on campus. The story was one that has been repeated several times recently. Scholar comes in with little knowledge of IWU, thinking it--perhaps without any blame to be given--a small and perhaps inferior college academically. Then they get here and see the enormity and beauty of our campus. They suddenly realize that we are the largest private school in Indiana--even bigger than Notre Dame when you take into account all our satellite campuses scattered throughout Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. Purists may snide, but the market wins. Welcome to reality!

Of course, we are not guaranteed continued success, and we don't have a corner on God's grace. We are genuinely thankful for this moment in history that God has extended to us and don't take it for granted. Dust we are, and to dust we shall return. I hope the success continues, but we know we don't deserve special favors from God, and we don't simply assume it will continue.

What irked some of us from the CSR visit was a comment by one of the editors of CSR (on the level of a Cheshire grin, no offence taken--it's just one of those comments that becomes a byword among the people, or at least among some of us in the religion division). I don't remember exactly how it went, but it basically implied that none of us at IWU were publishing because they had never seen an article from us in Christian Scholars Review. My thought at the time was, "Sorry, I have been sending my manuscripts to the Journal of Biblical Literature and the Catholic Biblical Quarterly"--in other words, the flagship journals of my discipline. I had never even heard of CSR until the year before they came to campus!

Now when their Google Alert clues them in on this post, or when they come across it doing a random Google search, maybe they won't publish anything from the likes of me ;-) But I thought I would throw them a bone sometime ;-) ... you know, let them know that there are some IWU who publish. I actually plan to spend most of my free time this spring break working on an article I plan to submit either to New Testament Studies or the Harvard Theological Review. Then there's a proposal I've been puttering around with I plan to send to Indiana University Press. But as a grudge match, I thought I might tinker about with a little piece to send CSR as well.

I hope you will read me as having fun here. I'm probably 50-50 with articles/proposals that get accepted and rejected. My last two submissions to NTS were rejected, at least without further work. So I fully realize that I am not on the top of the scholarly food chain. But, alas, if I ever have to stop having fun like this, then why would anyone continue to read this blog?

The piece I want to write is "A Great Time for Wesleyan Theology." This piece is also a grudge match in its own right. There is a long standing bias among academic Reformed and Calvinist types that those Wesleyan in theology are intellectually inferior. Wesley himself is regularly criticized for being an unsystematic thinker. Of course I am no worshipper of Wesley, and I'm not one of those people who pours over his writings. Although I am more sympathetic to his theology than to Barth's, I will readily concede that Wesley looks unsophisticated next to Barth.

The piece I'm thinking of writing for CSR will tout Wesleyan theology in broad terms as a splendid intermediary between Catholic and Protestant trajectories in the light of recent developments in biblical studies. I may write some seed thoughts here this week on the side. Of course the idea that Wesleyan theology stands between Catholicism and Protestantism is nothing new. I will not be arguing for this historically, for that is neither my purpose nor am I convinced I could win an argument that Wesley thought of himself that way. I am arguing for what the Wesleyan tradition might be now.

In particular, I plan to structure the piece around the three cries of the Reformation: sola gratia (by grace alone), sola fide (by faith alone), and sola scriptura (by Scripture alone). I plan to show that each of these concepts as they have typically been formulated by Protestantism are problematic.

"By grace alone" is problematic in the way it is usually formulated because of a failure to grasp the nature of ancient patron-client relationships. Grace was certainly unmerited favor, but that did not mean that no solicitation was involved or that it came without strings. The NT reads most coherently against an understanding of grace that 1) involves the solicitation of the client and 2) requires appropriate response. Any notion of eternal security or of pervasive dishonor of God's patronage by sin after receiving His grace is an absurd misunderstanding of ancient patronal dynamics.

"By faith alone" is problematic particularly in its Lutheran form. The most basic perusal of Paul's own language shows that he did not see faith and works as polar opposites. Works in particular did not contradict faith for Paul; they were simply an inadequate basis for justification. Further, Paul expected fulfillment of a law core after reception of the Spirit. The notion that Paul (or 1 John) saw sin as an inevitable part of a believer's life is thoroughly dismantled.

"By Scripture alone" is an impossibility of language. The so called Wesleyan Quadrilateral, while itself needing some modification after modernism, is nevertheless a much more coherent model of biblical appropriation than the mirage that is sola scriptura. 25,000 Protestant denominations later, with a little postmodern reflection poured on top, Erasmus is pronounced the winner of his debate with Luther over whether the meaning of the Bible was sufficiently clear on its own for most people to grasp its meaning.

What these things imply is that it is a great time to be Wesleyan in theology, at least on these key points. I don't see how any sane person can look at the current denominational scene and not see the need for some strong ecclesiology to balance out our use of Scripture. And whatever we might think of total depravity theologically, the NT does not consider the Christian life to be one of unconditional election, irresistable grace, eternal security, or pervasive sin. The NT remains far more Jewish than most Protestants have imagined.

Book Review: Moral Vision, Divorce and Remarriage

The chapter of Hays' Moral Vision I read this week was on divorce and remarriage (chap. 15). In keeping with his general method, he begins with the descriptive task:

1. Mark 10:2-12
In this text, Jesus prohibits a husband or wife from divorcing the other spouse, and remarriage in either case is said to be to commit adultery.

There are two really intriguing aspects of this passage, both of which Hays mentions at least in passing.

a) The first is that Jesus tells the wife not to divorce her husband. This may not strike us as odd, but it is not at all clear that wives could legally divorce their husbands in Galilee at this time. For this reason, perhaps the majority of NT scholars do not believe that Jesus said it quite this way. Most think what Jesus said was that husbands should not divorce their wives. Then Mark and Paul, writing for a broader cultural context, expanded Jesus' prohibition to include wives divorcing their husbands, since this was possible in the Greco-Roman world. Christian tradition would thus have balanced out Jesus' historical teaching as the gospel expanded beyond the borders of Israel.

This will of course be a controversial claim, although I do not believe we can listen to the gospels and not conclude that the Spirit of Jesus has sometimes been conveyed in the gospels well beyond the things Jesus actually said while on earth. Nevertheless, the fact that Paul focuses first and I believe foremost on the wife divorcing the husband in his relating of what the Lord said (1 Cor. 7:10-16) must at least raise the question of whether scholars have correctly understood what was and wasn't possible at the time in Galilee.

b) The second striking thing about Jesus' words in Mark 10 is that he says that the husband who divorces and remarries commits adultery against his wife. This statement must have sounded very bizarre to Mark's and/or Jesus' audiences. I do not just mean that it was a really "liberal" "feminist" type statement that was revolutionary in the way it took the woman into account, although I imagine this is true as well. [I find it nearly impossible to read Jesus as a conservative in his world]

It is just that the word adultery at the time meant to shame a man by sleeping with his woman, with his "property," so to speak. One could not by definition commit adultery against a woman. I've tried to think of a way to convey the wierdness of the statement. Perhaps this starts us toward the connotations: "Anyone who trades in his dog for another steals himself away from the dog." So if the current understanding of ancient adultery is correct, this statement would be another example of Jesus' hyperbolic speech.

Hays' most important thought on Mark 10 is that Jesus places staying in marriage within the context of discipleship, following Jesus. This section of Mark is Jesus' trip to Jerusalem to die and Jesus is teaching his followers how to be true disciples in it. By implication, Hays thinks, staying within marriage comes to be part of following Jesus, even when it can involve suffering.

2. Matthew 19:3-12
Hays points out three ways in which Matthew's version of the Mark statement (assuming Markan priority) modifies Mark:

a. Matthew removes the "adultery against her" statement.

b. Matthew drops the prohibition of a woman divorcing her husband.

c. Matthew adds an exception clause: "except for porneia."

Overall, Hays believes that Matthew adapts Jesus' saying to make it more practiceable and brings it more closely into line with Jewish custom and the patriarchal assumptions of Jewish law. Thus no mention of a woman divorcing her husband is made and the kind of exception necessitated by purity rules in the Jewish law is made.

Hays also mentions that since Matthew deals with this issue twice, here and in Matthew 5:31-32, it may have been an issue of some concern in his community.

This section of Hays' chapter deals with two other matters of relevance: what porneia is and the two Pharisaic schools. Hays discusses the options that 1) porneia means adultery, 2) porneia means pre-marital unfaithfulness during the betrothal phase and 3) that it refers to incestuous relationships. I agree with him that we should probably 4) take it as a catch-all term that would include a large number of sexual sins, certainly including adultery and incest.

Hays rightly concludes that Matthew's Jesus lines up more closely with the School of Shammai than the School of Hillel. The School of Hillel allowed divorce for almost any reason. The School of Shammai only allowed it for porneia and thus for reasons of purity only. Hays, as most scholars, believes however that Jesus himself probably did not enumerate the exception clause and that it is a Matthean adaptation. [In this sense Jesus' words are more restrictive than either of these schools, yet more liberal in a way since he seems to disregard the concern for the purity of the man]

Hays on remarriage after divorce notes that Matthew does not explicitly prohibit a divorced man from remarrying a woman who has not previously been married (now looking at Matthew 5:31-32), while the divorced woman who remarries commits adultery. An interesting twist to note here, I think, is that Matthew's Jesus does not actually prohibit a woman from remarrying. Strikingly, he assumes a wife will remarry! Any man who divorces his wife forces her to commit adultery [against him]. In short, he is causing her to sin against himself by forcing her to marry another man!

This is again exactly the kind of hyperbolic speech we would expect of Jesus, even if we are less certain whether this is a historical statement or a distinctively Matthean adaptation.

An interesting part of Matthew 19 is the indication that staying in a marriage might involve some suffering of shame. Hays at least mentions the sometimes made suggestion (e.g., Malina) that to become a eunuch for the kingdom of God might refer to the figurative castration a husband can receive in terms of his honor by remaining in a marriage with a woman who disgraces him culturally.

3. Luke 16:18
I wonder if Luke gives Jesus' saying closest to its most original form? Anyone who divorces his wife commits adultery and whoever marries her commits adultery.

4. 1 Corinthians 7:10-16
Because Paul mentions the wife divorcing her husband, his version of the divorce logion is closest to Mark's. Of course Paul's statement is actually the closest to Jesus in time, since all the gospels were all written decades later than 1 Corinthians (I personally date the current form of Mark to the early 70's).

The main addition Paul makes is his allowance for an unbelieving spouse to depart--"if the unbelieving spouse departs, let her depart." This "pastoral improvisation," as Hays puts it, now comes into play as the gospel reaches a Gentile audience where we face the possibility that one spouse will become a believer and the other will not. It is surely noteworthy that Paul does not insist a Christian man force his wife to convert!

Also fascinating is Paul's statement that the unbelieving spouse and their children are sanctified and made holy by continguity with the believer. Hays reads this verse a little differently than I do. Hays thinks it is optimistic, "Who knows, maybe you will save them?" I read it more in the sense, "Let them depart, you ultimately can't save them for sure by staying with them..."

Hays' Synthesis
In Hays synthesis of these biblical data, he notes that despite some of the diversity, divorce is always seen as exceptional--"divorce is therefore flatly contrary to God's will" (372). He also notes, however, the principle of accommodation we see. Mark and Paul adjust Jesus' teaching to a Hellenistic context and Matthew brings it more into line with patriarchal Jewish customs.

Hays turns to Malachi where marriage is seen as a mirror of God's covenant with Israel. He turns to Ephesians where marriage is put in the context of the cross. The image of marriage is an image of redemption (e.g., Revelation) and of new creation. Divorce, by contrast, is an image moving in the wrong direction.

Because the church is a community, divorce can never be a private matter for a Christian. Paul's pastoral concerns in particular reflect the interests of the community of faith ("God has called us to peace").

Hermeneutics
Hays notes that love and justice are never brought into the equation of divorce in the NT. Christian tradition does not favor divorce, for it was hardly even possible until recent days (although the RC church used the idea of annullment to work with the exigencies of life). Hays suggests that experience currently is what has been used these days to trump all else (e.g., Spong), but without any basis in either Scripture or tradition.

He suggests six things about appropriating the biblical text on this issue:
1. Marriage is an aspect of discipleship, a reflection of God's faithfulness.

2. Divorce is contrary to God's will except in extraordinary circumstances. The NT mentions two: porneia and the will of an unbelieving spouse. But the NT itself models a process of reflection and adaptation with regard to what such exceptional circumstances might be. Hays suggests spousal abuse would likely be one obvious adaptation the church today might want to make.

3. Marriage is not grounded in feelings of love but in the practice of love. Lack of fulfillment is not a Christian basis for divorce.

4. Sometimes a spouse can deeply wrong the other, as Matthew implies, to the extent that the marriage cannot continue.

5. Remarriage cannot be excluded as a possibility not least because of the principle of redemption. He thinks the fact that it is better to marry than to burn with passion can apply here as well.

6. The community of the church must seek to find ways to provide koinonia for those divorced persons who choose not to remarry.

Once again, while we can always disagree on details, I find Hays once again a model of how to appropriate Scripture.