David Treier's Introducing the Theological Interpretation of Scripture

This is a great little book. I skimmed it yesterday. The value of a book like this one is to give you a sense of the lay of the land. What was gratifying is the fact that he managed to mention just about every book I have on my shelf about biblical hermeneutics in relation to theological interpretation and generally locate each one. With so many variations among individual scholars, this is quite a task to do without drastically oversimplifying.

No doubt his book could be improved on, but this is the best overview of biblical hermeneutics as it relates to theological interpretation out there right now that I know of (do tell if you know another).

How do you experience this song?

The psychology of hymns, songs, and worship intrigues me. I know it is my childhood that makes singing/listening to a song like "Open My Eyes" rich and meaningful to me. Do others find the same richness in contemporary worship choruses? If you don't know the hymn, I'd be interested in how you experience it when you hear it for the first time. Does it have any pathos to you? Is worship and music, for that matter, mostly cultural?

Grandparents become the parents...

I take my elementary school age kids to school most mornings and pick them up a good number as well. This morning I saw a familiar sight. A good natured grandfather pulled up and dropped off two kids, smiling as he watched them run into school.

What caught my attention was that the second one was doing a quasi-"Home Alone" scream as he ran in. At first I thought he might be crying. Nope, grandpa was smiling, although with a look of curiosity on his face. "Why is he yelling?" the look said.

Yesterday when I picked my kids up, I watched a girl who had been talking to one of my children get in the back seat of an old car with two other siblings and, again, grandpa drove them off. There's nothing unusual about this scene I've seen repeated over and over--except that the parents are often in their early twenties, meaning they had these children in high school, sometimes middle school. They're 25; their child is 10. The grandparents become the parents.

Some of the parents are back on track. The girl eventually dumped the loser who got her pregnant. She got an education. She married a winner. Now in her early thirties she's beginning the life she might have had ten years earlier.

Some of the parents aren't on track. They're strung out on drugs, unemployed, living off of welfare, making more money from the government by far than she could earn with a minimum wage job. Their children are on meds... except when mom or dad have sold their meds for money. They might barely hold it together at school when they're on their meds.

But you can be sure no one in their class is going to learn anything if they haven't had their meds. And chances are the school has cut from their budget some of the key people who used to help deal with the out-of-control so that the teacher can at least try to teach the rest.

Where is the shining light? The shining light are the lives that emerge from the abyss. The shining light are the children whose brains are redeemable (some of these children's brains will never be anything close to normal because of what the mother was doing during pregnancy).

The hope are the many volunteers who come to these schools from local churches and the community to work one-on-one with these kids. The hope are the teachers and social workers who for some reason stick with this incredibly difficult job, only to be told by politicians (and here I refer both to Bush and Obama) that they are the problem rather than the broken homes and the society from which these children have emerged.

The hope are the grandparents, who are picking up the pieces for their grandchildren. Sometimes they are redeeming themselves for their own mistakes...

A Prayer in Death

Father, strengthen our hearts to have hope. When all our senses and innate fears tell us that death is the end, make our hearts see beyond our eyes to eternity.

Continuity of Identity

I have a couple of writing tasks soaking up my time. I might write a little on one here tomorrow. But I wanted to put a pulse through the blog. First, this week's Lenten post is up on my Dean's blog (http://wesleyanseminary.wordpress.com).

I notice that they have a session at the Wesleyan Theological Society on Friday at Azusa Pacific University over Joel Green's book, Body, Soul, and Human Life. I'll be there and may Twitter the conference. In general, Twitter hasn't worked much for me because I don't do much that is worth tweeting hour by hour, but I might use it on Friday.

In any case, one of the benefits of the idea of a soul is that it can provide for continuity of existence between now and resurrection. Indeed, it can provide for continuity of existence even in life, since I may lose memory or like Phineas Gage can have a personality-changing rod blow through my frontal lobe.

Time has fascinated me since high school. I remember chilly mornings in Florida of 60 degrees (oh, those were the days! oh me, oh Indiana!) walking across a breezeway to a classroom building wondering how it happened to be "now" and knowing there would be another "now" the next day but wondering how I got from one now to the next.

I have felt that strange feeling often. I have some writing assignments due. How strange that it is "now," here in bed early in the morning. How do I get to submission late afternoon today or to California on Friday?

The thought struck me last week that my strange feeling of "now-ness" was part of the continuity of identity question. Continuity of identity is not simply a question of now and resurrection in the future. It is a question of now and tomorrow. Sleeping is truly like a death. I cease to exist and then resurrect in the morning. Is it "me" that wakes up? What makes it me?

I count it as me. Tomorrow's me has memories of me. Tomorrow me's body has occupied continuous space in the intervening time (whatever that means). But isn't there a sense that if you don't do something for me now, you are doing it for someone else tomorrow?

These are mysteries to me. If my question before was, "How do I get from this moment to later?" My question this morning is, "Is it even really me in that later moment?"

P.S. I promise that I have not been doing drugs this morning :-)

God in the Old Testament

I got this question from a friend yesterday that went something like this: "I was asked today how I could reconcile the picture of God in the Old Testament with God in the New Testament. The question was along the lines of why God is vindictive and punishing in the Old Testament and yes forgiving and loving in the New Testament."

Certainly God is forgiving and loving in the Old Testament too (e.g., the story of Jonah, God sparing Israel) and God judges with punishment in the New Testament (e.g., Ananias and Sapphira; final judgment). But I don't think we can completely deflect this observation. In Joshua and Numbers, God has Israel in effect try to commit genocide down to children and even animals. In Ezra God commands Israelite men to divorce their non-Israelite wives and children. There are puzzling things in the OT from a Christian standpoint.

There are also things like the stoning of a man for gathering sticks on the Sabbath (Saturday). Remember that strange story at the beginning of Exodus where God tries to kill Moses until Zipporah quickly circumcises his son? Moses intercedes for Israel like you would someone almost out of control trying to beat someone else up. God is sorry he created humanity just before the Flood--not possible if God is omniscient. God sits in council with the gods of the other nations in Psalm 82, having assigned them to those nations in the first place in Deuteronomy 32--sounds like Zeus in the Lightning Thief.

A point of growth here, in my opinion, is to realize that every word of the Bible is "incarnated" revelation. God reveals himself in the categories of those to whom He reveals himself. And why not? This makes perfect sense if He wants to be understood! If God revealed himself in my categories, then no one would have really understood Him in the Bible until now, when people started looking at the world through contemporary categories.

Strangely, that's how we often treat the Bible. When we say, "God revealed the Bible as timeless, absolute truth for all time," we are really saying, "God revealed the Bible in my categories, which are the same as the categories of everyone else who has ever lived." However, this is not true. The paradigms of other times and places have differed wildly from my Western categories. The person who wants the Bible to give revelation that is unparticular to the times of its original audiences is certainly unaware of how differently those of other times and places have understood the world. Myopically, we make our time the time finally when the Bible can be understood properly, which of course is wrong and rather inadvertently self-centered.

Some will remember those denominations who used to make a distinction between infallibility and inerrancy by saying that infallible meant the Bible was without error in matters of faith and doctrine, but not necessarily science or history. This was naive, for the nature of thought and language--as I have just been saying--is for all of it to be incarnated, to take on the flesh of its time. It is thus misguided to try to consider the biblical revelation transcendent, removed from human categories, in some areas and time-conditioned in others, even in those areas related to God himself.

The necessary corollary is that even the picture of God in the Old and New Testaments is time-conditioned in the sense that it relates directly to the categories of their day. Frankly, this becomes true of the "revelations" we find in the Nicene Creed as well, meaning that theology must forever be represented in new categories, realizing that my current categories are not absolute either.

It is no surprise to me, therefore, that the Old Testament is by and large more henotheistic than purely monotheistic, meaning that God is treated as the only legitimate God to worship, though not as the only God. God also cannot change His mind if He is omniscient, meaning that I find open theism naive. I will say also that I am equally perplexed by Wesleyan-Arminians who vigorously oppose it. You you have to be conservative to be an open theist because it takes the OT picture of God very literally--more literally in fact than its opponents. It also is not process theology, as some confuse it. I understand why Calvinists would oppose it, because it emphasizes free will to the exclusion of God's determinism. But why Wesleyan-Arminians have gotten up in arms about it seems likely because of ignorance on their part.

In the end, the biblical images of God must be integrated with each other and organized from a theological fulchrum point outside the text just as all other biblical teaching. A friend of mine has as his fundamental hermeneutic "What does this text tell me about God?" This is a wonderful lens for appropriating Scripture. And we must, as with all biblical teaching, also recognize that no one biblical passage has autonomy on the answer. It is what the Bible as a whole has to tell us about God, processed through the rule of faith as encapsulated in the consensus of Christian faith, that is determinative--not the localized, time-conditioned picture of God presented by an individual passage.

Perfect Arminianism...

Actually, I can strategize a little for Calvinists reading Hebrews. What you have to do is take a "phenomenological" approach. You have to say that not all Hebrews thinks as being "in" are really in. They only appear to be "in" from the author of Hebrews' perspective.

But the language and argument of Hebrews reflects an unambiguously Arminian perspective on the part of the author, "perfectly" expressed in the perfect tense in Hebrews 3:14: "We have become and remain partakers of the Christ if indeed we hold fast the beginning of substance firm until the end."

There is no wiggle room here on what the author is thinking, although again, if I were a Calvinist I would suggest that he is expressing this truth in his own paradigm, not fully understanding how predestination works. But I am not a Calvinist, so I can take what he says at face value.

To partake is not to dabble, any more than Jesus only dabbles with flesh and blood in 2:14. It is to become or assume what you are talking about. Jesus fully became human. These individuals have fully become "Christians."

The perfect tense implies something that was completed in the past. They partook of the Christ and it was done, like someone who gets married, and you are married. It is the remaining married or the remaining partakers that is in question in the verse. The perfect tense implies not only that you were married, a completed act, but that you have remained married ever since. So this verse says that they became a partaker of the Christ and so remained ever since, if indeed they hold fast.

What this verse clearly states, as does the image of the wilderness generation it talks about, is that one's continuance as a partaker of the Christ is contingent on holding fast, on going all the way to Canaan. Those who disbelieved in process, they did not make it, did not persevere to the end.

The perfect tense here is thus "perfect Arminianism," as is the entirety of the book of Hebrews.

Finished Body, Soul, and Human Life

We finished Green's Body, Soul, and Human Life in the Monday reading group. Our summary of the book was something like the following: "We can pretty much explain everything the soul used to explain by way of the brain, and the biblical evidence doesn't preclude a monistic perspective."

We did wonder why Green didn't use the worldview argument more, which is what I would use. The Bible presents humanity in the terms of its original audiences and as such it is more important to preserve the points of such passages rather than the particular ancient paradigms in which those points were conveyed.

Green has helped my understanding of 1 Peter develop. I used to hear 1 Peter 3:18 in terms of Jesus' human body and spirit. But I see clearly now that he was put to death in his flesh and that the enlivening in Spirit commenced after his death. Green even identifies spirit here with the stuff of heaven. I still think there is a good chance that 1 Peter might see the human person in dualistic terms, with the spirit inside us being made of the stuff of heaven, but 3:18 isn't talking about it.

P.S. I've started a Lenten series on the seminary Dean's blog.

Freelance Scholars?

The Wesleyan Church and Indiana Wesleyan University have found a way to tame my blog... they made me Dean of a seminary :-) You might have noticed not only that my blog posts are fewer but that they are probably less hard hitting. I am still writing, but my brain is stretched pretty thin.

I don't regret it. The seminary we've founded will minister to an awful lot of people who otherwise would not have gone to seminary. I believe we will raise the level of competency and depth among ministers not only of my own denomination, but of a host of denominations that do not require seminary. And we are piloting possible paths for the future of ministerial education. It's a good thing.

I did have an idea, not for me, not for now. You all may know that we are in a bit of a conundrum when it comes to musicians and writers. The internet has made so much available for free that, at some point, there will be no motivation for musicians to write songs or for writers to write. For example, the IWU book store rents my New Testament Survey to students. That means I get nothing from the 100s of on campus students who use my book.

Why blog then? Why read books and put my summaries out here for free? Why share my thoughts, especially the ones that reflect competencies I have that most of my readers would not (like my ability to read Greek and Hebrew)?

I think we bloggers do it because we love ideas and we like talking. An awful lot of us would teach for free as long as our living expenses are covered.

Well, here's the idea. What if some bloggers went freelance? For a dollar every 10 pages we'll summarize x book for you. For 300 words of blog explanation, we'll describe "game theory" for you or "Schroedinger's equation." A certain amount to post it publically; maybe double to send it to you privately.

We know of freelance writers for public institutions. What about freelance scholars for the public in general? You want to know something? We'll study it for you and report back.

Not me, not now... but an idea.

Bible and Spiritual Gifts Tests

Paul's writings have three well-known passages in which he lists a number of spiritual gifts.

1 Corinthians 12:4-8 (NRSV):
"To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses."

Romans 12:4-8:
"As in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness."

Ephesians 4:11-13:
"The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ."

These lists have made their way into spiritual gifts tests, where a person answers some questions, and then the test tells you which of the gifts above might be yours. A fundamental premise of the tests is the idea of 1 Corinthians 12:4--"to each" is given a manifestation of the Spirit. The idea is thus that everyone has at least one of these gifts, and the test is designed to tell you which one.

The popularity of these tests shows that Christians have found them beneficial or at least pleasurable. No doubt part of their popularity lies in the same fascination we might have with personality tests in general, the delight we experience to know and hear about ourselves. And how much more meaningful to hear about ourselves from God than from a psychologist! Like Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life, spiritual gift tests feed a sense that God has given us a clear cut destiny, purpose, and meaning in this world.

There is a great deal that is positive about this spiritual gift phenomenon. For example, we all do have a place in the body of Christ, as 1 Corinthians 12 clearly indicates. Some of us may seem to be "weaker" parts (12:22) or be thought "less honorable" (12:23), but God gives extra honor to these "inferior" members to make up for it (12:24). God loves us all equally, even though some gifts are more central and prominent than others.

At the same time, we might keep a number of considerations in mind as we think about spiritual gifts and spiritual gift tests. For one, the three lists are not the same. For example, Paul only mentions the gift of tongues in 1 Corinthians, as he addresses a church where tongues stands at the heart of disorderly worship (1 Cor. 14). Exhortation and compassion are only in Romans. In short, none of these lists are absolute lists.

Spiritual gift tests thus do several questionable things with these lists. Primarily, they do not recognize the contextual and situational nature of these lists. For example, we have no reason to think, either in 1 Corinthians or Romans, that Paul thought he was providing an exhaustive or timeless list of spiritual gifts. Further, we have no clear basis on which to treat each gift as fully distinguishable from the others. Is healing completely distinguishable from performing miracles? How much does pastoring, teaching, or ministering overlap?

So it would seem that spiritual gift tests sometimes mistake the scope of these passages. It treats the lists as exhaustive, when we have no reason to think Paul intended them that way. Another thing to keep in mind is that Paul was addressing ancient audiences, not modern ones. We would fairly quickly recognize that those who live in the United States will tend to think of themselves as individuals differently than a person from China, Africa, or Afghanistan. How much more, then, would those who lived two thousand years ago!

We are so familiar with the words of Scripture that it is difficult for us to hear their foreignness. Our parents and traditions have naturalized them, reshaped their meaning to fit with who we are and our conceptions of the world. We feel like we are reading about people who were just like us, not realizing that a person from Africa or a two-thirds world country is much more likely to hear the original connotations of the biblical books than we are.

It may very well be, therefore, that we should use knowledge of our own time and culture to create gift lists for our own context. Are there really apostles today? Certainly there are not any who fit either the definition of Acts 1:21-22 or Paul's own implicit sense in 1 Corinthians 9:1. We may very well have prophets among us today, but none who are foundational to the church in the manner of Ephesians 2:20.

So the lists of spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians, Romans, and Ephesians are probably much more general and impressionistic than timeless or exhaustive. They are a snapshot of some of the spiritual gifts that were in play in the first century. But it is probably a bit skewed to make them into a fixed list of distinct gifts that you can test yourself for. The apostle Paul would likely find our tests not a little peculiar, and our tendency to universalize and absolutize these lists are symptomatic of our more general lack of awareness of the distance between us and the original meaning of these texts.

9.4 A Soul in a Body, Part 3

This is the third part of a second in a chapter called "What is a Human Being?" This section is called A Soul in a Body and the previous parts of the section are

Part 1
Part 2

And now the section continues...
__________
...Nevertheless, a number of New Testament authors do seem to use either “soul” or more often “spirit” in relation to a part inside us that is separable from our bodies. In 2 Corinthians 12:2-3 Paul is unsure whether he has had an “out of the body” experience or not. Paul so strongly assumes that we will have a resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15 that it is probably hard for him to imagine life without a body. [1] But he seems at least open to the possibility in 2 Corinthians 12. Philippians 1:23 also seems to imply continued existence at death in heaven in some way, prior to the resurrection (cf. Phil. 3:11). Revelation 6:9 speaks of the “souls” under the altar of heaven. These are individuals who were martyred, perhaps beheaded, while they were alive (Rev. 20:4). They apparently receive resurrection bodies and return to the living at the first resurrection (Rev. 20:6).

Because the Bible gives us varied pictures of human psychology and of the afterlife, we probably should not consider any of these pictures absolute. Clearly the New Testament teaches that believers will continue to exist in eternity, and several passages even point to continued existence immediately at death. The Gospel of Luke, for example, has its Parable of the Rich Man, who awakes in torment after death. His brothers are still alive, so he has not awakened after the resurrection. [2] He has not risen from the dead like Jesus, for Abraham denies him that possibility (Luke 16:31). He is thus conscious in an “intermediate state” between death and resurrection. But the rich man does not apparently have a resurrection body—a body that Luke pictures having flesh and bones (cf. Luke 24:39). We should probably infer the same state for Jesus and the thief on the cross between their deaths and resurrection (cf. Luke 23:43).

But it is not clear to what extent these are pictures, put in the categories of the ancients so that the original audiences of these texts could understand them. The books of the Bible give us differing images of human make-up and the particulars of the afterlife. These things relate to another world, another dimension, another universe. And just as Christians have not generally speculated what God is made of in His substance, what “Spirit” really is, probably we should sit loosely to our language of soul and spirit as pictures and metaphors of something that we probably could not literally understand while we are this side of death...

[1] Some (but not most) scholars even suggest that Paul underwent a development on his thinking on this subject. They suggest that Paul started in 1 Thessalonians 4 and 1 Corinthians 15 with a strong sense that we sleep until a point at the end of history where we are re-embodiment as part of the resurrection. Then they suggest that he switched to see us being re-embodied immediately at death in 2 Corinthians 5. Perhaps the most famous exponent of this interpretation was F. F. Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free

[2] I have often heard the ingenious suggestion that eternity is outside the time of our current universe and thus that the rich man could have been raised at the resurrection and still be “now” in relation to human time. He would thus be raised much later in regard to human time, but resurrected already in relation to otherworldly time. This suggestion is ingenious, but hardly something that the author of Luke would have been thinking.

9.5 A Soul in a Body, Part 2

The first part of this section of the chapter is here. I would love to finish this chapter finally this weekend. We'll see. I'm doing this section in bits to hold my interest...

Part 2: A Soul in a Body
At the time of Christ, most people in the world did not believe in much of a meaningful, personal afterlife for individuals. If the abbreviation R.I.P is somewhat well known today (“Rest in peace”), a common Roman epitaph translates as “I was not. I was. I am not. I care not.” When we read the ancient Greek epics of Homer and the Latin Aeneid, we primarily find an underworld where shadows wander mindlessly, lacking the flesh and blood necessary for them to have much of a meaningful or thoughtful existence. This is presumably the same sense of the afterlife we find in the Old Testament when we read statements like, “But when people die, they lose all strength. They breathe their last, and then where are they? … people lie down and do not rise again. Until the heavens are no more, they will not wake up nor be roused from their sleep… They never know if their sons grow up in honor or sink to insignificance” (Job 14:10, 12, 21).

Nevertheless, even in Homer’s Iliad we find hints of a place among the dead for very special people, the Elysian Fields. The idea that the dead might return to the living in some way seems to have begun to emerge in the 500s BC. One of the oldest known Greek philosophers to think something of this sort was Pythagoras (ca. 520BC), who is best known for the Pythagorean Theorem in geometry. He believed in some form of reincarnation. A famous anecdote in Xenophanes says of him that “once when he passed a dog being mistreated, Pythagoras pitied the animal and told the person, ‘Stop! Don’t beat him! He is the soul of a friend I recognized immediately when I heard his voice.’”

Plato also held to the transmigration of the soul, a little over a century later. For Plato there are a fixed number of souls in existence, and they make their ways into various human bodies. While Plato did not think the body was evil, he thought of it as a “prison house” or tomb of the soul, from which the soul was freed at death. At death we drink from the river of forgetfulness (Lethe) and eventually our souls return to enter different bodies of various animals.

However, for most Greek thinkers, the soul was not completely distinguishable from the more animal part of a person, particularly whatever life force keeps us alive. For example, Democritus (ca.460-ca.370BC) taught that a person’s soul was made up of “soul atoms” that disintegrated with the body at death. He believed in a soul, but he did not believe in an afterlife! The soul was simply that which gave your body life, and it dissolved at death like the rest of you. It was material that blended back into the elements of the world just like your skin or hair does after death.

Democritus highlights a very important realization—just because the Bible or some other ancient source uses the word soul does not mean it is talking about exactly the same thing we are today. Indeed, the Old Testament in particular does not use its word for soul (nephesh) in the sense we do. “Soul” in Hebrew never refers to a detachable part of us. It refers to a living being in its entirety, both body and breath of life within it. So Adam becomes a “living soul” when God breathes into the dust (Gen. 2:7).

So Genesis uses the same word of the “living souls” in the water in Genesis 1:20. And even though the Old Testament speaks of the breath (ruach) inside living things, it never thinks of this spirit as the container of our personhood. It is simply the breath of life within us, and animals have the same breath we do (cf. Eccl. 3:19). In general, the Old Testament has little sense of a meaningful, personal afterlife. Indeed, Daniel 12:2-3 is the only passage in the Old Testament about which we would find general agreement among scholars that it actually refers to a meaningful life after death.

The New Testament also can use the word soul in this way. 1 Peter 3:20 uses the Greek word for soul (psyche) when it speaks of “eight souls in all” being saved on the ark. Translations usually translate the word as “eight people” or “eight persons” so we do not get confused. Jesus uses this word in Matthew 16:25 when he says that whoever “loses his soul will find it.” English translations rightly translate the verse as “loses his life.”

We cannot at all assume, therefore, that the word soul in our English translations of the New Testament always has the same thing in mind as we do when we use the word soul. And when New Testament authors did use the word similarly to the way we do (e.g., Matt. 10:28), they may not have had as much invested in the language as we do. I can talk of “being on cloud 9” without literally believing clouds are numbered.

Hebrews in Bullets

I told my students I might find myself unable not to go ahead and boil the first four chapters of Hebrews into bullets, especially since the first test is Tuesday.

Schenck thoughts on Hebrews 1-4:

Introduction (1:1-4)

• contrast between former age and current age in verses 1-2.
• contrast between the many and the one
• "in these last days" an allusion to Jeremiah and the age of the new covenant
• Son at beginning and end of creation in 1:2 (but is language of agency in creation literal or figurative for Christ as God's wisdom?)
• "reflection of glory," "image of substance" probable allusion to Wisdom 7:26
• timing of becoming greater than angels in 1:4 is time of Christ's exaltation to God's right hand (had been lower than them--2:9)

Christ versus Angels (1:5-14)

• Inherited name of 1:4 probably Son, because that's what Hebrews goes on to discuss, a royal title, "Son of God"
• Timing of Jesus most literally receiving the name, "Son," is at the time of exaltation, at the point of enthronement
• 1:6 probably refers to the exaltation as well, not Jesus' birth or parousia
• 1:7 is in a contrasting relationship with 1:8-12. The main points are 1) that angels' role is transitory; Jesus' is permanent and 2) angels are servants; Christ is king ("God")
• Angels were old age/old covenant ministers (1:14)

Take Heed (2:1-4)

• Exhortations in Hebrews are the logical consequences of the exposition, so these verses are a logical inference from 1:5-14).
• Point here: You better watch out! Those who disobeyed the word spoken through angels (Law) got it; those who neglect Christ's word--watch out!
• Lesser to greater argument (qal wahomer)--throughout Hebrews
• Law spoken through angels (compare Acts 7 and Galatians)
• Author puts himself as a second tier Christian in 2:3--heard from those who heard Jesus. This verse alone makes it very unlikely that Paul wrote Hebrews (style and thought would also be different from Paul)
• Audience experienced charismatic events at founding (2:4)

Humanity's Problem/Jesus' Solution (2:5-18)

• First thought at 2:5 is that the author is talking about Christ rather than angels as the one who will rule in the coming world.
• But 2:6-8 then talks about humanity. Sounds like humanity was supposed to rule the world. Schenck thinks something like the thinking of Rom. 3:23 stands in the background here--humanity was intended for glory, but we do not see humanity with glory because all have sinned and are lacking the glory of God.
• No evidence the author thinks of "Son of Man" as a Christological title in 2:6.
• Hebrews has a tendency to distance the biblical text from its human authors. "Someone, somewhere" has said (2:6). It's not that Hebrews doesn't know. It's that it emphasizes God and the Holy Spirit (and Christ) as the inspired speakers of Scripture.
• Jesus mentioned for the first time by name at 2:9. The word order builds to his name, first recapitulating the human situation (made lower than the angels for a little while)
• Jesus tastes death for all to lead many sons to glory, as the original intent was (2:9-10)
• 2:10 distinguishes God as agent of creation from Jesus, supporting the idea that 1:3 is figurative when it speaks of Jesus as agent of creation.
• Perfection in relation to Jesus has to do with completeness in relation to his salvific task (2:10).
• Rest of the chapter emphasizes the solidarity of Christ with humanity--he is just like us (except without sin).
• Devil as the one holding the power of death; death as the obstacle to glory.
• 2:17-18 may be key verses of the sermon. First time high priest is mentioned.

Christ versus Moses (3:1-6)

• May begin the argument proper of the letter (3:1-10:18). Consideration of Jesus as high priest begins, although it is frequently interrupted by exhortation. The thread, however, goes 3:1-6; 4:14-5:10; 7:1-10:18.
• Comparison of Jesus' faithfulness to Moses' faithfulness to our need for faithfulness the key theme of chapter 3, along with the implied contrast between how much worse it will be if we neglect Jesus than it was for those who did not heed Moses.
• House used in two ways in this section, of a household and of a house building.
• God as creator again distinguished from Jesus, again supporting the idea that 1:3 is figurative when it calls Jesus the agent of creation.
• Moses is a servant; Christ is a Son.
• We only remain part of Christ's household if we hold fast in faith. This is one of two signature ideas in Hebrews--it is essential to hold fast to the end in order to be saved.

The Wilderness Generation (3:7-19)

• Switch back to exhortation--holds attention; what follows is an implication of the contrast of Christ with Moses in 3:1-6. If what follows happened to those who disregarded Moses, then what will happen to those who disregard Christ?
• NT generally does not stick close to the original meanings of OT passages. One must not therefore bring any more of the OT context into one's interpretation than is demanded by the context of the NT passage (at least when aiming at the original meaning of the NT passage).
• The point of the comparison is well captured by the perfect tense of 3:14--"We have become (and remain) partakers of the Christ if indeed we hold fast." The ongoing state of being a partaker is contingent on holding fast. The wilderness generation did not hold fast and so didn't enter Canaan. Their corpses fell in the desert because of their disbelief.

Entering Rest (4:1-11)

• So there remains a "rest" for the people of God just as Canaan was initially a possibility for the wilderness generation. The parallel demands that we take this rest ultimately in relation to final salvation.
• The author wants the audience to contrast with the wilderness generation. They did not enter; they can if they remain faithful. They did not have faith.
• The catchword method of midrash used--Psalm 40 speaks of entering God's rest. Genesis 2 speaks of God resting. The two passages are brought together by the catchword (gezerah shewa). Obviously this is taking these texts out of context, but it's not a problem for ancient Jewish exegesis.
• Although the ultimate rest is at final salvation, we also, in another sense, enter God's rest every day, "Today." Every today we must make a decision for faith and endurance or we will fall like the wilderness generation. The rest is thus both present and future.

The Sword of the Word (4:12-13)

• The word is neither Christ nor the Bible here. It is God's will in action, in accordance with much Jewish background literature. Possible allusion to Wisdom 18 where God's word leaps from heaven with a sword to judge the Egyptians' firstborn.
• The focus in these verses remains on God's judgment to those who do not remain faithful. God sees everything and will judge those who do not hold fast in faith.
• The mention of soul and spirit may speak a tripartite division of the human person for the author of Hebrews--very rare in the New Testament. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 is probably the only other place with that conception (so Christians shouldn't consider it a "biblical" view of a person--it is just one picture, incarnated in just one ancient psychology).

National Health Care Conversations

This morning I was privileged to sit through the first "National Conversations" forum put together by Indiana Wesleyan University and co-sponsored by the Sagamore Institute, Christianity Today, and WFYI in Indianapolis. Here is the website, where you can watch the "civil conversation" today on health care.

It was very enjoyable. Knowledgeable people on multiple sides of the issue. Former Mayor Bart Peterson was the only one I had known of previously. There were advocates for removing state boundaries on buying insurance, advocates for reducing the way doctors are paid, advocates for innovation in rewarding wellness, advocates for a long term solution and not just a short term fix...

I really liked Peterson and am sorry he won't run to replace Evan Bayh. He basically said that both extremes are unconvincable and that we should be working with the moderates on both sides of the isle toward solutions.

I did have a typical dream, for which I would like to give credit for the inspiration to my nephew Alan Garcia. One of the complaints by the Dean of the IU Med School is that doctor's accumulate a debt of about $150,000 in school. Yikes! What about a med school that made you a nurse first and then a doctor? You would work as a nurse and get paid well for it while then going on to be a doctor.

I also had other brainstorms. Teaching hospitals associated with universities where this scheme was implemented, with salaries rather than pay according to how many tests you perform or patients you see.

One of the most interesting bits of data from the day was the fact that Americans pay more than any other nation for our health care and get significantly less health care for it. In other words, the amount of money we currently pay for health care would be enough to insure everyone in America if we had a health care system like any other developed nation in the world (Canada, Germany, Britain, France, etc...). Also, I forget the statistic, but some outrageous number of tests we have done here (30%?) are unnecessary.

NT Wright's Biblical Theology

I want to commend Kyle Fever for this piece on N. T. Wright's biblical theology, pointed out to us by Nijay Gupta. I want to commend Kyle because he has pieced this summary together from disparate comments by Wright here and there.

I have often found Wright, like Barth, in need of someone else to summarize him. They have their own language games where the words aren't always used the way I or the rest of us use words. Sometimes I feel like Wright explains himself over and over again, frustrated that we are not understanding. But he is using his own definitions for words with the light from his star bent by planets we cannot see with our visible eye--and perhaps that he cannot himself see.

In any case, Wright's biblical theology is beautiful and, in my opinion, a good Calvinist Anglican perspective. I hypothesize that he cannot completely see the influence of his own theological tradition on the way he practices the historical-critical method and filters intertestamental literature. I have no problem with him doing what he does, although I do it more from a Wesleyan-Arminian perspective. My problem is that he thinks his categories are actually intrinsic to the texts themselves, rather than theological organizations of the biblical texts, imposed as they all are through the lenses of a particular theological tradition.

Ash Wednesday

Most of you will know that today is Ash Wednesday, the day we begin the 40 days of Lent leading up to Passion Week and then the celebration of Easter. It is traditionally a period for us to look inside, to reassess our relationship with God, to educate ourselves about the faith (e.g., confirmation in preparation for baptism), etc.

I don't have time to do something special these next forty days, but I will be thinking about the gospels. Perhaps I will make some posts to that end.

Leadership Roles in NT Church

Second semester seminary students did a mini-word study on one of the following Greek terms. The following is my thumbnail. And, no, Jeff, you can't turn this in for the onsite class :-)

1. apostle (apostolos)

It seems to me that the word is used in at least three senses in the New Testament: a) of the Twelve--these are the apostles, b) a slightly broader group that included individuals like Paul and Barnabas or the husband-wife pair Andronicus and Junia in Romans 16--these could not have been in the Twelve according to Acts 1 because they had not been with Jesus since the baptism of John, c) a more basic sense of an apostle as one who is sent for some purpose.

2. prophet (prophetes)

Most of the NT references to prophets refer to OT prophets. One of the most interesting categories though is NT prophets. When Ephesians speaks of the church being built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, I believe it was thinking of NT prophets, not OT prophets. We can debate how much, but you could at least argue that a great deal of Christian self-understanding was generated by NT prophets. Prophecy usually involved bringing revelation about the present or near future, it would seem.

3. elder (presbyteros)

An elder is basically an "old guy." There are several special groups of "old guys" the NT mentions. The Jewish council the Sanhedrin was made up of old guys. The "tradition of the elders" was tradition on how to keep the Law passed down by old guys. And it would seem that at least many local assemblies were run by old guys, elders.

4. overseer (episkopos)

I personally suspect that "overseers" were pretty much the same group as elders. Philippians addresses the church at Philippi with its overseers and deacons. This is probably one church in the whole city, and with multiple overseers. So I'm not sure that we really have the idea of a senior pastor here--although I wonder if there were key individuals who took special leadership as well.

5. deacon (diakonos)

The word diakonos seems to have the possibility both to refer to a particular role and to ministry in general. In Philippians I just mentioned, the deacons seemed to play a fixed role in the church. It thus seems likely that Phoebe has this role at Cenchrea (Rom. 16:1). On the other hand, 1 Timothy 4:6 refers to Timothy as a "diakonos of Christ Jesus," but this is not in relation to a specific church. It thus seems likely that "servant" or "minister" here has a more general sense of one who serves the church.

Finishing Body, Soul, and Human Life

The infamous Monday reading group at IWU is now on the last chapter of Joel Green's Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible, so I will soon be able after many months to move on in the "Books I'm Reading" list on the right below. :-)

I would say in general that our group is very open to Green's form of non-reductive monism, although we have generated a number of questions, and some have doubted. Since the spirit of Green is known to hover over the waters of the blogosphere from time to time, I thought I might pose some of the "between the lines" questions we have and see if the spirit of Joel might rise from the LA area, interestingly the entrance to Hades in The Lightning Thief. :-)

What, for example, does the Incarnation mean from a Christian monistic perspective? For those just joining, I would define a Christian monist as someone who believes that humans cannot exist without some form of embodiment. Language of the soul and spirit would thus at best be a metaphorical way of referring to something that literally will always involve a body of some sort, whether our current ones or our coming resurrection bodies.

So what is the point of divine continuity of Jesus with the pre-existent second person of the Trinity? I will say that I've only read part of the last chapter and it is possible Green addresses this question in the parts of that chapter I'll read for next week. I suspect he would invoke mystery, although I would be interested to know.

The same goes for the Holy Spirit--what does the NT mean when it speaks of the Holy Spirit? In the words of one person in our group, "What in the Dickens does the NT then mean when it speaks of the Holy Spirit?" If I were to hypothesize, I suppose I would suggest that the entire question of what God's substance might be outside this universe is a question of mystery that we cannot answer.

There's more of the same, what state was Jesus in during Holy Saturday?

One thing I've noticed about Lukan scholarship on conversion, whether it be Green in chapter 4 or Richard Peace's book or Gaventa's or apparently Nave or Mendez-Moratalla is an apparent intentional or unintentional omission of the Holy Spirit in conversion. In my reading of the narrative world of Acts, the Holy Spirit is the sine qua non of conversion. Repentance does not equal conversion in Acts. Baptism doesn't. Change of life doesn't. It is the event of the Holy Spirit's baptism, filling, receiving that a person becomes "in" in Acts.

My guess is that Green omits this intentionally, that he believes that a "series of transformations are compressed into a single moment, 'conversion'" (137). I take this to be a kind of "de-metaphorization" of Acts' narrative presentation on his part, that in his understanding, Acts has creatively portrayed what is in reality a process as an event.

Do you think I'm right?

There are all sorts of other thoughts we've had. What if we could do brain scans prior and after to conversion. Green seems to lean toward process, but could we not in theory witness a significantly altered brain structure as a result of an instantaneous change. Indeed, would we not think of the Holy Spirit introducing quantum level changes in all the right places to create human change and "free will" of a sort. Could we not consider the Holy Spirit's actions to be a metaphorical representation of quantum level changes?

Zeal vs. Knowledge

What is that strange phenomenon where those with the most zeal often seem to lack "knowledge," while those with the most "knowledge" often seem to lack zeal? Popular American Christian lore has of course romanticized the person with zeal who defies those with "knowledge." The idea is that this person intuits with the Spirit things the person with "knowledge" cannot. Correspondingly, the person with "knowledge" is villianized as an unspiritual person.

Surely it doesn't have to work this way. In the words of Jack Handy, "Sometimes I think the experts actually are experts." Mark Noll called it the "scandal of the evangelical mind," the sanctioning of ignorance in the name of truth. It hardly makes sense to think that knowledge and learning is in an inverse relationship with spirituality. Wouldn't this line of thought ultimately imply that the truth is contrary to spirituality? Wouldn't this imply, in the end, that Christianity isn't actually true? On the contrary, doesn't the first paragraph above sound an awful lot like a coping mechanism for ignorance, a way to justify not having to think or learn anything?

My own ignorance has no doubt been apparent to those with more knowledge than I from time to time. Was it when I was most zealous? Surely it doesn't always work the other way either, where zeal means a person's wrong!

So what got me thinking about this was a recent sermon I heard with a zealous speaker who has done way more for the kingdom of God than I have. But there was this typical tone too. "People ask me what my eschatology is... Look it up. Matthew 24--when the gospel is preached to all the nations Jesus will come back."

I fully accept the Christian mission to take the good news of Christ to everyone. But I would like to pose a few questions. I've created a new category I'm calling "Deepening Faith." The purpose of this category is to try to join zeal with knowledge. I want to pose questions, because it may very well be that I also lack knowledge. But just maybe over time we can all grow together, those with knowledge in zeal and those with zeal in knowledge.

The acquisition of knowledge can involve reversals, and perhaps this in part feeds the "those with knowledge don't know what we feel" sense. One bit of knowledge seems to lead in a new direction. But a slightly more advanced set of knowledge points back in the way of the one without the first bit of knowledge. And so it can be. The acquisition of knowledge can involve reversals.

So here are the questions. Colossians 1:23 says that the gospel has been preached to every creature under heaven. That was way back in the first century. In other words, Colossians seems to say Matthew 24:14 was already fulfilled 2000 years ago.

After all, what was "every nation" back then (Matt. 24:14; Mark 13:10)? Would not anyone in the first century hearing such words have thought of the Mediterranean world? In short, we can understand how Colossians could consider the gospel already proclaimed to every creature. The gospel had reached the "limits of the west" by the time of Paul, as 1 Clement says, probably in the 90s.

The idea that Christ would return when we finally brought the gospel to the deepest unreached tribe has never made sense to me. Hardly any of the "tribes" around today were here at the time of Christ. Those who were have long since died, unreached, if that were really what Matthew meant. Countless tribes have come into existence and passed out of existence unreached since the time of this verse.

It seems to me that our choice is either to consider these verses fulfilled in the first century, as Colossians 1:23 seems to say, or it would be a failed prediction. So let's continue to take the good news of Christ to the nations! But maybe eschatology is a little more complex than the simplistic answers of some zealous folk.

My Hebrews now in Paperback!

The expensive 95 dollar hardback of Cosmology and Eschatology in Hebrews: The Settings of the Sacrifice, is now available in paperback for $35! Don't everyone rush out at once to buy it!