Sunday Romans: 1:1-7 (Wk3: Dunn, Wright, Fitz, W3)

Today I glance at another set of commentaries. I'll do one more week after this one, since I have several more I haven't glanced at yet (like Stuhlmacher, Barth, Stott). With today's I hit what I consider some of the key original meaning commentaries. As such they may not contribute too much to the Arminian-Calvinist issue.

J. D. G. Dunn (Romans 1-8, Word Biblical)
Dunn has some interesting things to say about what it might mean to be called. The word in a weak form could mean to invite, such as to invite to dinner. A stronger meaning would be to summons, and certainly the call of God is much stronger than an invitation. Dunn goes further to suggest that "the called" in Paul's parlance are "those whose lives had been determined by God's summons" (8).

As to Paul being called as an apostle, Dunn says, "Within that [broader] calling, which is one of the features of all those belonging to Christ, Paul thinks of a calling to a specific task (1:1; 1 Cor. 1:1), though in both cases he takes care to ensure that the idea of a specific calling cannot be separated from the calling of all (1:6-7; 1 Cor. 1:2...)" (8-9).

Dunn has some very interesting thoughts on the phrase "called to be saints" also. He points out how striking it would have been to Jews to call uncircumcised Gentiles as "set apart as holy" in the way sacrificial items were set apart for God.

N. T. Wright (New Interpreter's Bible, Abingdon)
I found Wright's discussion of these verses excellent and relatively clear (which he isn't always). We will discuss some of his thoughts on what the gospel is tomorrow in our coverage of Piper.

Particularly interesting was his discussion of what "according to the flesh" might mean. Wright strongly disagrees that this might mean merely that Jesus was of the seed of David in terms of his humanity. Flesh, Wright argues, always has some negative connotation for Paul.


For our purposes, I am mainly interested in what he does with the language of calling in this section. For 1:2 he takes Paul's calling as a matter of his "conversion." " 'Call' in Paul's writings usually refers, not to the specific vocation of which a Christian may gradually become aware, but to the moment when the gospel message of Jesus first makes its saving impact on him or her" (415). "Here," Wright argues, "Paul's 'conversion' was also his 'vocation' to be the apostle to the nations." In other words, it refers not to some decree before creation but to something God did at a particular point of Paul's life.


In 1:7, Wright takes calling as "called to belong to Jesus Christ" (420). As before, Wright takes this calling in relation to the point in time when the audience was called: "the 'call' was God's powerful word, creating new life--creating, indeed, the response it sought, as a word of love is always capable of doing."


Joseph Fitzmyer (Romans, Anchor Bible)
Fitzmyer has some good thoughts on the name "Paul" in a Roman context, as well as other good thoughts on the "creed" of 1:2-3.

But for our purposes, his most significant thoughts are his understanding of "among whom you too were called to belong to Jesus Christ." Fitzmeyer takes this in terms of the fact that "their vocation is to belong to Christ along with Israel."

Witherington (Paul's Letter to the Romans) also notes that Paul "uses terms formerly used of Israel, namely 'beloved' and 'called,' even of his largely Gentile audience, because he believes that Jew and Gentile united in Christ and in his gospel are the eschatological people of God and stand in continuity with Abraham and OT Israel" (37).

I think Fitzmyer and Witherington are on to something here, namely, that when Paul says the Romans are "called as saints," the most striking thing is that he primarily has Gentiles in mind. These Gentiles are a part of God's holy people just as Jewish believers are. The point is not that they are called and others aren't, but that along with others God has summoned, they are too.

Review 6: Piper's The Future of Justification

Chapter 4 is called, "The Law-Court Dynamics of Justification and the Necessity of Real Moral Righteousness"

1. Piper's preceding chapter, chapter 3, made me think. In it Piper did some good exegetical spade work. He showed that there was a connection in Paul's mind between God's glory and His righteousness (chiefly Romans 3:5 and 7). He made a case for the "glory of God" in Romans 3:23 being us falling short [of recognizing] the glory of God--at least I think that's the case he was making. I didn't end up agreeing with him on this point, but he rightly pointed out how significant the category "the glory of God" is in Paul's language.

But then I believe Piper went over the top. It is one thing to recognize God's righteousness as glorious. It is quite another to jump to the conclusion that God's righteousness is "his unwavering allegiance to uphold the worth of his glory" (e.g., 79 in recap). With a night of sleep under my belt, here is a list of exceptions I take to this jump:

a. For one, Piper has not really given us any more of a definition of what the "right" in God's righteousness any more than Wright has. I put a smiley face in the margin of my book on page 78 after he recaps his critique that Wright tells us what God's righteousness does rather than what it is. Then Piper says it "is his unwavering allegiance to do what is right." HA! Physician heal thyself.

By the way, lest anyone get the wrong impression, I don't have a horse in that race. I am not concerned to define what the essence of "right" is in God's righteousness. There's so much extraneous philosophical baggage and presupposition in Piper's whole logic here that in my mind is foreign to Paul. I am content to define God's righteousness in Paul as God's propensity not only to judge sin but to save His people and, indeed, the whole world. And yes, His righteousness is glorious. I'm sure I could improve on the definition, make it neater. But as far as accounting for how Paul uses the concept, this definition seems to account for all the ways Paul uses the phrase and concept.

b. I do not believe that Piper has shown that the key to understanding sin in Paul's thought is a failure to acknowledge God's glory. He has shown us Romans 1:23--they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for the images of.... But Paul is not defining sin here. Piper has taken one aspect of human sinfulness and made it the fundamental definition of human sinfulness. He's shifted Paul's emphasis. We do much better to operate with a basic definition of sin in Paul's writings as "doing wrong" and go from there, rather than starting eisegetically with some very well developed theology of sin and reading it into all the other places where the word group is used.

Piper has shown us Romans 3:10-11--No one is righteous... no one seeks God... But Paul is not defining the nature of sin here. In fact, it's not even him freely composing these words--he's quoting the OT. The dot-dot-dot shows that Piper has taken one element in a poetic presentation of human sinfulness and in so doing has placed undo emphasis on it.

c. Piper predictably underestimates the most important part of God's righteousness in Paul's writings, namely, God's propensity to save His people. Yes, God's righteousness also involves His wrath and justice... oh, and it is glorious. But Paul is not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God for salvation (Rom. 1:16). You see, he says, the gospel reveals the righteousness of God (Rom. 1:17).

2. With Piper having gone over the top in chapter 3, I found myself unable to find anything helpful at all in chapter 4. This is the first chapter where this has been the case. In all the other chapters I have at least partially agreed with him or found something of exegetical merit. Not chapter 4.

Piper's subconscious knew what people like me would say (or else one of his many proofreaders pointed it out to him). He protests on p.76: "This question is not driven by logic."

It is. In fact, the entire chapter is driven by Piper's reasoning rather than by anything Paul has to say. And I'm going to have to start counting the number of times he mentions the 1500 years thing. Are we at 3 or 4 times now. The discussion just can't have been that off track for 1500 years (80 n.5)! Celibacy of priests and purgatory, anyone?

His reasoning is this:
1. Judges can't give a verdict of "not guilty" when the defendant is guilty. They can show clemency, but this is not what it means "to justify."

2. Since God is omniscient, He knows the true status of the defendant.

3. Therefore, God can only justify the human defendant if He finds true moral righteousness in him (or her, Piper predictably assumes the defendant is a him but no doubt would on follow up admit that there are also female defendants as well).

4. This true moral righteousness results from the imputation of Christ's righteousness to the defendant.

There's not much Scriptural argument in this chapter. It is rather a presentation of Piper's theological reasoning. I don't think Paul would recognize most of it.

Point #1 reflects Piper's extreme understanding of penal substitution. God just can't pronounce someone not guilty if they're guilty. He's not sovereign enough to do that (note to those who didn't recognize this sentence as sarcasm: this sentence was sarcasm).

The primary Pauline Scripture that Piper brings into discussion in this chapter is Romans 4:6-8:

Just as also David speaks of the blessedness of the person to whom God reckons righteousness apart from works:

Blessed are those whose lawless acts have been forgiven
And whose sins have been covered.
Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not reckon sin.

There is no mention of Christ in these verses. Indeed, it is faith in God that Paul consistently discusses throughout this chapter, not faith in Christ. Similarly, Christ does not do anything in this chapter. God does it to Christ--God raises him up for our justification.

Note: God doesn't deliver him up for our justification!!! God raises him for our justification. Piper would of course want to word it differently: God sacrificed Christ so that he could justify us.

The mechanism of righteousness in Romans 4 is not Christ's imputed moral righteousness--where is THAT in this chapter? It is human faith in God, faith in a God who justifies the ungodly (4:5), gives life to the dead (4:17), and who raised Jesus from the dead (4:24). That faith is reckoned for righteousness (4:5).

Paul does use penal imagery, sometimes. But it is not even the dominant image in his logic. We skew Paul's logic elsewhere when it is not a part of his argument and we make it a part of his argument.

Piper has already shown us in an earlier chapter the parallel between "reckoning righteousness" in 4:6 and justification in 3:28. Here in 4:8 Paul thus explains what justification means in negative terms--not to reckon sin. To find the defendant "not guilty" or "innocent." Nothing is said of Christ's innocence being necessary in the process.

As I've said in other contexts about other things, Piper would not have written Romans 4 this way. If his understanding of imputation was as important to Paul as it is for him, it would be here as part of the argument.

So Piper has not read this chapter at all on Paul's terms but has instead foisted his foreign theological baggage on Paul.

Without his first point, the rest of his argument is irrelevant. Chapter 5 to come...

Hermeneutics Review for Final

Here is some review material for the final exam of my advanced hermeneutics class at IWU:

1. "autonomy of the text"
Paul Ricoeur. He suggests that once a discourse has been fixed in writing, the author loses control over its meaning. Vanhoozer disagrees because he views texts as "communicative acts." The text thus bears the intended (illocutionary) force of the author. Schenck is not as pessimistic about recovering the intended meaning of an author as Ricoeur, but he accepts the reality of the text's detachment from intended meaning far more than Vanhoozer.

2. "surplus of meaning"
Ricoeur. Because texts don't have their author's intent to "fix" their meaning, they are susceptible to multiple interpretations. Vanhoozer agrees that there are "gaps" (see next entry) that can make the meaning of texts ambiguous, but argues that the goal in filling those gaps should be to recover the author's intended communicative act. Schenck agrees with Ricoeur that texts have a surplus of meaning and with Vanhoozer that one such meaning is the intended meaning of the author.

3. "gaps of indeterminacy"
Wolfgang Iser. All texts make assumptions, assumptions that are gaps of meaning that the reader must fill in. Iser was what Vanhoozer calls a "conservative" reader-response critic, because his goal in reading was to fill in the gaps in terms of the intended meaning. Vanhoozer accepts the necessity of this task. Schenck agrees that these gaps are the source of Ricoeur's "surplus of meaning." He thinks that filling the gaps with our best guess at the intended meaning is legitimate, although that there are other legitimate "fillings" in other contexts.

4. meaning as a function of "interpretive communities"
Stanley Fish. Fish does not believe that texts in themselves have any stable meaning. Rather, the meaning of a text is a function of the interpretive community reading that text. Vanhoozer disagrees and would consider Fish a radical reader-response critic. If a text only mirrored the beliefs and values of the community reading, then a person/community could never come away from a text changed from when they came to it. But this often happens. Vanhoozer believes that a text has a single legitimate meaning. Schenck agrees with Vanhoozer that it is possible to be changed by texts and is not as "pessimistic" as Fish. Nevertheless, the interpretive communities to which we belong often has a far greater impact on how we read texts than anything else, including the intended meaning.

5. ideological criticism
Ideological criticism is the name we give to approaches to the text that embrace the ideas of specific ideological communities such as feminist critics, liberation critics, African-American critics, etc... Vanhoozer would disagree with these approaches just as he disagrees with Fish. Schenck recognizes the possibility of such approaches in such contexts. He would merely note that such readings stand in a nebulous relationship to Christian readings of the text.

6. "fusion of horizons"
Hans Georg Gadamer. The two horizons are the horizon of the text and the horizon of the reader. On the one hand, the author of a text does not play any role in interpretation distinct from the text itself. The reader, on the other hand, does not come to the text as a neutral or objective observer or as an all-knowing "subject." A reader comes to a text with pre-understandings, with the effect of traditions in his or her thinking. Text and reader meet and their horizons fuse. The reader reads the text and, in a sense, the text reads the reader. Both are changed in the process.

Vanhoozer critiques Gadamer on both horizons. The text, V believes, is the communicative act of an author and thus bears within it the intended meaning of an author. Meanwhile, V does not believe we are simply doomed to read texts with traditional glasses but believes we can more or less determine the intended meaning of a text.

Schenck believes we can at least try to supercede traditional pre-understandings and to grasp the intended meaning of authors. It is not always necessary to do so--sometimes traditional readings are more important. He is not as pessimistic as Gadamer about intended meanings.

7. subject-object distinction
René Descartes. Traditionally Descartes is blamed for setting up the modern era with a sharp distinction between the "I" as an all-knowing and objective knower who looks out at the world as object. Vanhoozer rejects the possibility for anyone to approach the world neutrally without some pre-understanding, something that can be a plus rather than a minus if it is the right pre-understanding. Schenck has less aversion to the language of subject and object, although he agrees that none of us have a God's eye, neutral, or objective apprehension of the world or truth.

8. "properly basic"
Alvin Plantinga. As one of the key figures in Reformed epistemology, Plantinga suggests that a number of beliefs are "properly basic" and do not need to be justified. These include things like the existence of the world outside ourselves, the existence of other minds, and for Plantinga it includes the existence of God, which he does not believe needs to be defended but inherently is a reasonable thing to assume. Vanhoozer agrees and adds to the list meaning in texts as properly basic. Schenck believes that such things are reasonable to believe in by faith, although he does not consider them immune to examination.

9. Reformed epistemology
Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff. Reformed epistemology is based on the idea that certain beliefs are "properly basic" and do not need to be argued for or defended. This is particularly true of Christian perspectives, which (elect) Christians should recognize to be true intuitively. Vanhoozer agrees. Schenck has a hunch that Arminian theology will emphasize the need for personal response before some intuitions will come, and that in the end God is more concerned to move our hearts than our heads.

10. critical realism
[Ben Meyer, not on the test] Critical realism holds by faith that reality exists outside ourselves, but that our apprehension of that reality is never fully objective or neutral. We see that reality from where we stand looking. Vanhoozer is okay with this, although I suspect he prefers the term regulative realism (see next). Schenck is also okay with this, although he suspects that the typical "critical realist" is more optimistic than he is about the degree of literal correspondance between our perspective and reality.

11. regulative realism
[not sure] Vanhoozer likes the idea that we guide our apprehension of reality by assuming the truth of "properly basic" ideas about reality. Schenck prefers a view of reality that is critical realist by faith, pragmatic realist (see next) by practice.

12. pragmatic realism
Richard Rorty. Rorty is a non-realist. He does not affirm the existence of any reality for us to know. However, he believes that certain assumptions about reality work, help us to function in the world. The world is thus "real" for pragmatic purposes. Vanhoozer thus classifies him as a "user" and "unbeliever." Certainly V disagrees with him. Schenck things that Rorty gives us the best "rational" perspective on us as knowers of reality, but that as believers we can make affirmations about reality by faith as well.

13. "There are no facts, only interpretations."
Friedrich Nietzsche, late 1800's. As a prophet of many things, Nietzsche recognized where Immanuel Kant's particular version of the subject-object distinction might lead. Kant believed that we could not know things-in-themselves, the world as it is outside of our apprehension of it. We could only know the world as it appeared to us. He reached this point when he concluded that the content of our knowledge comes from our senses, but that the organization of that content into meaning was a function of our minds.

In the case of Kant, he believed that the truthfulness of God guaranteed that the categories of our mind did in fact correspond to truth about the world (not dissimilar to the earlier perspectives of Descartes and Locke in their own ways). Nietzsche of course did not believe in God, so he was left with the conclusion that all we know are the interpretations of our minds, not facts about the world.

Vanhoozer sees Nietzsche as the consummate "unbeliever," whose failure to believe in God is reflected in his failure to believe in interpretive facts. Schenck once again sees faith as essential to any beliefs about the world outside ourselves.

14. "There is nothing outside the text."
Jacques Derrida. Derrida basically is packaging Nietzsche's claim on his own terms. When he says there is nothing outside the text, he is saying something very similar. All reality is something like a text we are reading. But there is nothing outside the text, no reality apart from words. And we shouldn't think that Derrida thinks this is a text with a certain meaning. Derrida is thus one step further than Fish, who at least sees meaning in interpretive communities.

Vanhoozer disagrees and considers Derrida the consummate "undoer" who is also an "unbeliever." Our belief in God includes our belief in things beyond ourselves and beyond texts. Schenck agrees with Vanhoozer by faith.

15. Deconstruction
Derrida and a/friends. Deconstruction is the idea that there are no stable meanings in texts. As soon as one tries to "contruct" meaning that meaning unravels. All texts, no matter how apparently clear in meaning, can be misunderstood and taken differently. Vanhoozer disagrees. Communication happens all the time and is a properly basic concept. Schenck agrees with Vanhoozer, although he also accepts Derrida's very important footnote that even the most obvious texts can be taken differently than intended.

16. "logocentrism"
Derrida. This is the word Derrida coined for the idea that "Platonic" truths underwrite the meaning of words. Derrida of course disagrees. Truth is not behind words--more words are. There is nothing outside the text. Vanhoozer of course disagrees and labels Derrida an unbeliever, an undoer of meaning and truth. Schenck believes that God knows absolute truth and that He underwrites truth. However, Schenck believes there is a significant divide between our language and that truth. Human words do not correspond in any direct or straightforward way to God's truths.

17. différance
Derrida. He coined this word by combining the French words différence with deferance. Words do not point to meanings for Derrida, they "defer" to other words. We find meaning in the space or "difference" between different words which are only signifiers, never signifieds. Vanhoozer disagrees for all the same reasons. Schenck also believes there is more to words than just signifiers.

18. signs as combinations of signifiers and signifieds
Ferdinand de Saussure. In the background of Derrida's philosophy is Saussure's idea that a "sign" such as a word consists of two parts--a signifier, which is an arbitrary sound or image, and a signified, which is that to which the signifier refers. Derrida of course believed that we can never get beyond arbitrary signifiers to stable signifieds. Vanhoozer follows Ricoeur (see next) in believing that any workable concept of language must move beyond the level of the word to the level of the sentence. Schenck agrees, although he recognizes the basic usefulness of Saussure's approach in many cases, as well as its potential to "derail" intended meaning. However, Saussure's approach is seriously inadequate without some sense of Wittgenstein's language games.

19. the sentence as a higher order of meaning
Ricoeur. Ricoeur argued against Derrida chiefly by arguing that a sentence constitutes a higher order of meaning that is not simply the addition of individual words together. Aristotle of course argued that a proposition must have both a subject and a predicate. Vanhoozer agrees, as does Schenck with the further comment in the preceding note.

20. Langue and parole
de Saussure. Saussure argued that langue or language constituted a system of interrelated signs. Parole, on the other hand, refers to the specific use a speaker/writer puts the words of that langue to. As far as I can tell, Vanhoozer does not object to this distinction, nor do I.

21. Structuralism
[Claude Levi-Strauss, not on test] Structuralism was a passing phase of text-centered approaches to meaning that focused primarily on langue, language as a system or structure of binary oppositions. It tended to look for the universal aspects of a specific story or text's meaning rather than the specific meaning of a specific text or some intended meaning. Vanhoozer of course is much more interested in parole, the specific use to which an author puts language, rather than some abstract system to which all individual speech must conform. I similarly find some of the patterns of structuralism useful but only as one tool in a much broader toolbox.

22. Narrative Criticism
Narrative criticism was a much more useful application of the "deep structure" principals of structuralism to narratives. Rather than the rather complex structuralist model, narrative critics used categories like characters, events, settings, point of view, implied author, implied reader, story time versus discourse time, etc. which are more readily understandable. Vanhoozer would disagree with the early narrative critics of the 80's who tried to bracket historical and background knowledge as much as possible, making this method a text-centered approach to meaning. Schenck finds its tools useful for more than one approach to the meaning of narratives.

23. "world of the text"
Ricoeur. Since Ricoeur does not aim at the intended meaning of an author, some meaning "behind the text," he is not interested in the text as a reference to the real world. He believes that the "reference" of a text is a world that the text creates, a world within the text. Vanhoozer of course believes that this world does indeed have something to do with the world behind the text, principly the intended force of the text by an author. Schenck can see texts as extra-referential as well, but finds Ricoeur's concept of the world of the text a useful one when one is trying to methodically aim at the intended meaning of a text.

24. "intentional fallacy"
Wimsatt and Beardsley. In a famous article of the late 40's, these individuals argued that it was impossible and undesirable to think of the meaning of a text in terms of an author's intention. We do not have access, after all, to the mind of an author. They inaugurated what came to be known in literary circles as "new criticism." Vanhoozer recognizes the validity of some of their arguments, but follows the lead of Hirsch and Thiselton to develop a sense of authorial intent that is not fallacious. Schenck also agrees that W and B overstated their case.

25. New Criticism
An era of interpretation in literary criticism in which texts are read without concern for authorial intent. See above for Vanhoozer and Schenck.

26. "thinking the author's thoughts after him"
Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey. Around 1800, these scholars saw "getting into an author's head" as the proper goal of interpretion. A person should not only try to think the author's thoughts, but even think the author's thoughts better than he or she did, recognizing inconsistencies that the author was not able to recognize. Vanhoozer agrees with Wimsatt and Beardsley that this approach tries to do more than is possible. We simply do not have access to an author's psychology. We can only only know an author's intent on the basis of what has made it to a text. I agree, although feel free to speculate :-)

27. text as "object of consciousness"
E. D. Hirsch. Hirsch makes his way around the problems of Schleiermacher and Dilthey's approach by speaking of the "object" of an author's consciousness. This object as it were leaves the mother ship of the author and lodges in a text, where a reader is able to hold that object in common with the author. Vanhoozer largely agrees, although he is uncomfortable with the "subject-object" language Hirsch uses.

28. meaning as "performative act"
Kevin Vanhoozer. V prefers to think of the meaning of texts as a matter of an author's performative act, drawing on the speech-act theory of Austin and Searle (see below). Schenck accepts the validity of this model as it relates to the intended meaning of authors. In practice, however, Wittgenstein's more basic language game model proves a much more flexible explanation of how meaning actually works in practice.

29. "language games" in "forms of life"
Ludwig Wittgenstein. Words do not have meanings in themselves. The meaning of a word is a function of its use in a particular "language game" in a particular "form of life." We thus do not know what the word "fire" means unless we know what language game is being played--whether that of jobs, firing squads, pop songs, or something burning. Vanhoozer agrees with some of this, but clearly prefers to go on to Austin and Searle. Schenck things Wittgenstein's approach is more all-encompassing.

30. speech-act theory
Originated by J. L. Austin and further systematized by John Searle. Speech act theory recognizes that words do not only inform, but they "do" things. When a couple says "I do" at a wedding altar, they are not only informing each other of their willingness to marry--they indeed marry each other with the words. The words do something beyond informing. Vanhoozer strongly agrees and builds his hermeneutic on these principles. Schenck agrees that words can work this way.

31. locutionary content
Austin and Searle. The part of speech that is fairly obvious is the (propositional) content, the sense of the words. Vanhoozer agrees. Schenck says fine.

32. illocutionary force
Austin and Searle. The key to authorial intent for Vanhoozer is the illocutionary force of the words. This is what the author intended to do with the words--promise, command, assert, etc... Schenck says fine.

33. Vanhoozer's definition of infallibility and inerrancy
Using the concept above, Vanhoozer seems to process the above terms in the following way. To say the Bible is infallible is to say that it always does what it is intended by God to do--its illocutionary force is always accomplished. To say the Bible is inerrant is to say that when the illocutionary force of a Scripture is to make an assertion, the locutionary content of that assertion is always true.

34. perlocutionary force
Austin and Searle. If the locutionary dimension of a speech act is the sense of the words and the illocutionary force is what the words are intended to do, the perlocutionary force of a speech act is its effect. Authors of course usually intend for their words to have a certain effect on their audiences. Of course they do not always have that effect. Vanhoozer agrees. He does not consider the intended perlocutionary force of a speech act to be part of the meaning, but rather of the significance of the utterance. Schenck says fine.

35. meaning and significance
E. D. Hirsch. Hirsch makes a helpful distinction between the meaning of a word and its significance. An utterance will only have one legitimate meaning, the intended one, but it may have countless significances. Different readers thus change the significance of an utterance, but not its meaning. Vanhoozer agrees. Schenck thinks this distinction is very helpful, but ultimately believes there are potentially far more than a single meaning that may be found in the same words as well, depending on the "language game" a reader plays with them.

36. Vanhoozer on the role of the Spirit
Vanhoozer sees the role of the Spirit as one of illuminating a reader's mind as regards the meaning of a text, its intended locutionary content and illocutionary force. Yet the Spirit may bring about countless different significances to the text, perlocutionary forces, depending on the reader, audience, and situation. Schenck believes that the Holy Spirit certainly can do these things. But the NT and church history indicates that the Holy Spirit also plays with the potential meanings of biblical words as well.

37. typology versus allegory
An important distinction for modernist evangelical scholarship of the late twentieth century was to distinguish allegory from typology as interpretive methods. In particular, typology is said to build figural interpretations off of literal ones, while allegory is said not to be concerned about the literal meaning. Vanhoozer acknowledges that there are allegories in the biblical text, but sees these as explicit ones that recognize the literal meaning. He would distinguish sharply between allegory and allegorizing, where the latter is said to be an orientation around meanings that disregard the literal meaning or original intent of the words.

Schenck does not think the NT knows or cares about this distinction, which is more modern than ancient. Even the distinction between so called Antiochene and Alexandrian exegesis is overplayed as modern controversies have over-read the distinctions of another day.

38. Vanhoozer on literal versus literalistic
The literal meaning for Vanhoozer is the intended meaning in his locutionary and illocutionary force. A literalistic reading is one that insists on taking a text literally even when that is not the author's intent. Schenck says fair enough.

39. definitions of metaphor
For Aristotle, a metaphor was little more than the substitution of one thing for another. For Ricoeur, however, a metaphor involves the creation of new meaning by the juxtapositioning of two unlike things. Schenck agrees and thinks that Vanhoozer is okay with this as well.

There you have it. The second half of our advanced hermeneutics class at IWU in a nutshell.

Friday Review: Piper's Future of Justification 5

Today we summarize/evaluate chapter 3 of John Piper's The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright: "The Law-Court Dynamics of Justification and the Meaning of God's Righteousness."

1. Piper begins the chapter by touching on Wright's sense that justification language is "eschatological," that is, that it is most literally oriented around the final law-court scene at the judgment. By the way, here is the link to one of Wright's most direct treatment of this topic.

I imagine that Piper will return to this aspect of Wright's thought. The things that Paul has to say about "final justification," in my opinion, undermine Piper's theology, namely, Paul's indication that our works will play a role in our justification at the judgment. Indeed, I suspect Paul's comments may undermine Wright's theology as well on this point.

For the moment, however, Piper merely questions whether comments like these are too sweeping: "Justification ... in its Jewish context ... refers to the greatest lawsuit of all: that which will take place on the great day when God judges all the nations" (57). Piper responds that "it is misleading to create the impression that when the word justification is used, the first or main thought coming to anyone's mind would be final, eschatological judgment" (58).

Now of course the real question for us is not the most frequent use of the word justification in Webster's AD50 Jewish Dictionary. The question is how Paul used the word. I think Piper may be right that Wright sometimes makes sweeping generalizations like this that we might easily question. In this chapter, Piper only gives some examples--I presume from the Septuagint (I didn't look them up)--showing that Jews could use the word "to justify" in the present tense.

Like I said, I hope Piper doesn't sweep this topic under the rug in the rest of the book (I'm not expecting him to). In this chapter he merely says, "There are references in the future tense; however, not even all these are obviously a reference to the last judgment" (Rom. 2:13; 3:20; Gal. 2:16; Matt. 12:37). Instead, "in the theological sense in the New Testament, it far more often refers to the present reality of justification, not the future" (58).

I agree that it often refers to "initial" justification in the present and past tenses. At the same time, I believe Romans 2 and 2 Corinthians 5 will significantly undermine Piper's understanding, whenever he comes to treat them.

2. By far, however, Piper gives the bulk of the chapter to the question of God's righteousness. Using the law-court scene, Wright argues that it makes no sense to think of a judge in some way transferring or imputing or imparting his or her righteousness to the defendant. As Wright says, "That makes no sense at all" (60). It is a "category mistake." A judge might pronounce a verdict on the guilt or innocence of a defendant. A judge does not transfer his or her innocence--in actuality or theory--to a defendant.

Wright's illustration is powerful and convincing. It is of course another question when we ask whether it is the right illustration to unlock what Paul was thinking. But no doubt recognizing the power of Wright's claim, Piper immediately turns back to the Protestant magisterium. How could Christians for 1500 years since Augustine have been wrong on justification, "Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox" (60). Look, an appeal to the consensus fidei in Piper!

Further, Wright is setting himself up to be a kind of Martin Luther figure in Christian history, Piper argues, drawing on a comment Wright makes in the piece I linked above. So Piper might say in the words of Senator Lloyd Benson some years ago, "Son, I knew Martin Luther, and you're no Martin Luther."

In the end, of course, it is the text of Paul in dialog with his historical-cultural milieu that we are pursuing in this blog series.

Now Piper embarks on his own "common sense" thinking. It doesn't make sense, Piper argues, to define God's righteousness as the fact that God keeps covenant, judges impartially, deals properly with sin, and advocates for the helpless (62). Piper reasons, these are things that God's righteousness does, not what it is. They do not tell us what the "right" is in God's righteousness.

Piper then acts like he is going to tell us exactly what God's nature is, what stands behind His righteous actions. Here Piper presents several OT passages of key interest in his dissertation about God's glory and name, finally to conclude that "the righteousness of God consists most basically in God's unswerving commitment to preserve the honor of his name and display his glory" (66). (big surprise). No,wait, where is the nature of the "right" in God's righteousness Piper was going to tell us about?

But you have to give Piper credit for what he says next: "All of this would not matter much for interpreting Paul if there was no clear internal evidence that he thought this way about the righteousness of God" (66). I agree. In fact, this is why I am basically ignoring Piper's common sense argument and stroll through OT passages about how God blots out sin for his name's sake. Unless we have good reason to think Paul reasoned Piper's way, unless we have good reason to think these passages stand directly in the background of Paul's thoughts on the righteousness of God, Piper has just wasted three pages of my time.

On the one hand, Piper's study of the glory of God and the name of God in Romans is significant. Paul does refer to the glory of God in Romans 1:23 and the name of God in 2:23-24. We would not want to deny that God is glorious for Paul or that it is essential to honor His name.

Piper correctly demonstrates a connection between God's righteousness and His glory by showing the parallel between Romans 3:5 and 3:7 (69):

3:5--"If our unrighteousness shows the righteousness of God..."

3:7--"If through my lie God's truth abounds to his glory..."

Where I disagree is when Piper then equates God's righteousness with his glory (is glory finally the content of the "right" in righteousness Piper was going to tell us about?). God's righteousness is glorious to be sure, but it isn't his glory or the value of His name.

Indeed, we depart company with Piper when we get to the interpretation of Romans 3:23: "All [i.e., both Jew and Gentile] have sinned and are lacking the glory of God." Piper of course does not translate the verse in this way. For him, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," a statement that we lack the glory of God because we have exchanged it for the glory of corruptible humanity (66-67).

I appreciate the attention Piper has given here in tracing the word glory through Romans 1 to 3. But I'm not sure what it would mean to "fall short of" the glory of God in this vein. Is it a shorthand for "fall short of [recognizing] the glory of God"? Or does Piper mean to say that we fall short of attaining God's glorious standard of righteousness (similar to the NLT translation)?

In the end, I agree with Dunn that Paul has Psalm 8 in view here: "What are mortals, that you think of them; the sons of mortals, that you visit them? You crowned them with glory and honor and put everything under their feet." 1 Corinthians 15 shows that this passage forms a significant part of inner logic of the problem and solution of humanity. Indeed, this logic stands behind Hebrews 2:5-10.

So what Paul is saying in Romans 3:23 is that all have sinned and, as a result, lack the glory God intended humanity to have in the creation, the glory of God, a glory God created humanity initially to have (or in Piper's scheme, that God pretended to create humanity to have, only to take away). It is no surprise that Piper would not lean toward this interpretation, for it shows far too much true interest and investment in humanity on God's part for Piper's liking.

We observe a similar concept avoidance in Piper's understanding of Romans 9:23:

9:23--"To make known the riches of His glory for vessels of mercy, which he prepared beforehand for glory..."

Piper assumes that the glory for which God created humanity is God's own glory. No doubt that is true too. But the parallelism with 9:22 "vessels made for destruction" implies that here, as in 3:23, the vessels of mercy were prepared for them to have glory. In other words, it is the glory of humanity that Paul is thinking in the last part of this verse, not God's own glory.

As we said above, Piper's conclusion is that the righteousness of God is "God's unwavering commitment to his glory," "his unwavering allegiance to uphold the value of his glory" (70).

Now there's no question in my mind that no human deserves God's favor in Paul's theology. There's no question in my mind that everything for Paul ultimately must bring glory to God. But Piper has jumbled some things together here and made a big jump in the process.

First, the only textual evidence Piper has really presented to the effect that Paul used the phrase "the righteousness of God" in connection with God's glory is in Romans 3:5 and 7, where we might just as well see God's righteousness as glorious rather than as His glory itself. The most glaring omission in this discussion, understandably, is Romans 1:17.

And even if God's righteousness were His glory, this would be different from saying that His righteousness is His commitment to His glory. I imagine Piper might clarify some of these things for us. If so, let me say of him what he said of Wright--if I am wrongly understanding him, he sure could have represented the righteousness of God in a clearer manner.


3. It seems to me that Wright has shifted slightly over the years in the way he talks about the righteousness of God. In What Saint Paul Really Said, he clearly leans toward understanding the righteousness of God as God's covenant faithfulness in action. But I noticed in his more recent Paul in Fresh Perspective that he is now using the phrase "covenant justice" (e.g., p. 30).

Looking at Romans 3:25, Piper rightly recognizes that justice must be a part of what God's righteousness involves (67-68). God offers Christ as an atoning sacrifice to show His righteousness even though He passed over sins that had been committed. Indeed, although Piper doesn't mention it, the fact that Romans 1:18--

"the wrath of God is revealed from heaven"

--follows 1:17--

"in [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed"

shows that the wrath of God is associated with His righteousness (just as Piper points out his glory is associated with it). Piper wouldn't point this out, of course, because he no doubt takes Romans 1:16 in the Reformation way--not as a reference to God's righteousness, but to human righteousness from God.

So God's justice is indeed a part of God's righteousness. On this we agree with Piper. Of course, Wright does too. Piper dismisses Wright's claim that covenant fidelity is God's righteousness includes His justice (70 n.18). But I've already mentioned that Wright can use the phrase "covenant justice," by which He no doubt means that the covenant not only included God's merciful faithfulness to Israel but also His justice when they sinned.

With the mention of Romans 1:15-16, however, we get to the heart of the matter.

"I am not ashamed of the gospel [of Jesus Christ], for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith (Jew first, and also to the Greek). For in [the gospel], the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith..."

It is now the majority position of Pauline scholars that the phrase, "the righteousness of God" here refers not to a righteousness from God, as the NIV translates it, but to God's righteousness. The major turning point came with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The document called the Covenant of Damascus, for example, strikingly states that "My justification is in God's righteousness."

But Piper might question how relevant such a source is, which is a valid question. What convinced me was not the Dead Sea Scrolls, but Isaiah. How many times in Isaiah 40-66 is God's righteousness in synonymous parallelism with His salvation!

Here's just one example in Isaiah 51:5:

"My righteousness draws near. My salvation has gone forth."

Notice that, as in Romans 1:16-17, God's righteousness is connected to His propensity to save His people. Isaiah also connects it to His justice and His glory as well. Piper gets these latter connections. He would probably allow me to connect it to God's salvation too--as long as I made it clear that such salvation brought God glory in the process.

In that sense, Piper's understanding of God's righteousness is just plain too one-sided. It recognizes the punative side of God's righteousness and the fact that His righteousness is glorious. But it does so in a way that trivializes Paul's sense that God's righteousness includes His propensity to save.

I should also mention that Wright is more correct than wrong to process God's righteousness through Israel. I personally think to call it "covenant faithfulness" also involves one-sidedness. But Paul does process God's righteousness through Israel--Paul is not thinking in purely universal terms, as Ernst Käsemann argued. God is righteous in relation to Israel, and the Gentiles can be a part of God's saving righteousness in relation to Israel.

More tomorrow on chapter 4...

Summing Up a Semester of Inductive Bible Study

Today was the last day of Inductive Bible Study. I spent it going through the process we had learned all semester and asking, practically, which parts of the process they thought were useful for real ministry (as opposed to ivory tower academic classrooms).

Here is our review with comments:

1. Pray...

a. not just for God to help your mind correctly understand the original meaning (like what Paul was trying to say to the Corinthians),

b. but your mind to know what your audience (congregation/children/youth/self/family) needs to know and

c. how their/your heart needs to be formed (conversion of the imagination)

d. how their/your behavior (feet) needs to change/act.

2. Decide what text you are going to use.

a. This is not just a matter of which translation you will preach from (assuming you are not facile with Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic). I suggested that when you have in mind what the text meant and what your audience needs to hear, you use the translation that best expresses it.

b. This is also a matter of textual criticism. Using a text that has or doesn't have a certain reading or certain verses is also an implicit decision.

I did have a couple who wanted (unless they were yanking my chain) to use the KJV. I suggest three possible rationale for doing so: 1) it is the version the congregation uses, 2) you think it represents the truest textual tradition (one should probably still shift to the NKJV if one thinks this), and 3) you think it represents the church's tradition! If it was good for God for 1500 years, maybe it's not too bad :-)

3. Tool #1: Survey the book or unit the text is in (observation--what did the text say)
4. Tool #2: Do a detailed observation of the passage (also observation)

I now asked them to caucus on what benefit these tools might bring, really, when you don't have to turn in an assignment.

For surveying, one student suggested it was a useful tool at the beginning of a sermon series, getting the big picture of the material you will be preaching on for the next several weeks. I suggested the themes you observed in your survey could become the sermon topics.

For detailed observation, we agreed that "blowing up" a text and then circling key terms and making key observations was not time consuming and very helpful not just for the leader but for people in their devotions (minus of course the categories I had given them--syntax, grammar, etc...).

5. Identify the right questions for interpretation.

There are other right questions too, ones that are ultimately more determinative for any specific sermon. But when determining what it meant, good questions come straight from your observation of the text, whether you did it formally as in this method or informally by just reading it.

Good big picture questions have to do with the key themes and patterns your survey identified. Good questions of specific passages come from detailed observations.

6. The Interpretive Cycle 1: The Immediate Context
7. The Interpretive Cycle 2: The Broader Literary Context (including genre)
8. The Interpretive Cycle 3: The Historical-Cultural Context (including especially the rest of the relevant testament)

One can only proceed through layers of context in a cycle. You have to start with the immediate context of the passage that your are "questioning" (see 5). You inevitably bring certain pre-understandings and presuppositions to the text. This is not all bad, since otherwise you wouldn't be able to connect to the passage at all.

The immediate context may seem to answer your question adequately without need for any further investigation. However, you really should glance at the broader context, the rest of the book in question, to make sure. In instances like Romans 6-8 or 9-11, looking only at Romans 7 or Romans 9 will throw you off track. The broader context is necessary to keep you from false conclusions.

Part of the broader context is the genre context, which blurs into the final context category, historical-cultural context. This is the "world behind the text," both the cultural background and the specific situational background. Sometimes, again, one is convinced from the text alone that you know what the text means, only to find out from the background that you were looking at the text through anachronistic lenses. Commentaries are some of the best sources for such information.

We might also add that the most immediately important background context is the rest of the testament in question. If you are asking a question in the Old Testament, look at relevant background information from the OT. If you are asking a question in the NT, you have not only relevant background from the NT but from the OT as well.

We go through this cycle over and over again. Each time we pass around the circle, our pre-understanding is in theory either confirmed or changed. Then we proceed through the "hermeneutical circle" again.

A word study is simply a type of interpretive study that goes through the cycle to define a word. In other words, it follows this procedure where the question you are asking is one of definition--What does this word or phrase mean? So you look at the immediate context where the word is used. Then you look at places where the word is used in the broader context. Then you look to the background context, most prominently the rest of the NT or OT.

Other kinds of interpretive questions include how questions, why questions, and many more.

So then we caucused again. What of these tools might someone use in actual ministry?

We suggested that hopefully they would pay attention to the evidence of the immediate context. The counter method is called "proof-texting," where you simply read the words of a verse and pay no attention whatsoever to the words that come before and after.

They all showed enthusiasm for Blue Letter Bible and strongly indicated they would use it. I suggested they should at least hit the C button on a verse they were using to see if there was anything quirky about the Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic that jumped out at them.

I suggested they should all at least look at one commentary on the passage they were using to see if there were any blind spots about the text, something you couldn't possibly know without background information or because their pre-understanding was getting in the way. Of course we all know that no commentator can eliminate their own pre-understanding either.

9. Reach a Conclusion

on the answer to your interpretive question, at least as far as the original meaning of the text is concerned. We will be wrong very, very often. But fear not. As long as you preach the law of love (God and others) and the rule of faith (the consensus beliefs of the church), your audience will be edified. Misinterpret boldly that the Spirit may come. But preferably misinterpret unintentionally rather than on purpose :-)

10. Integration

a. Perhaps the first step toward integrating biblical texts is to understand each individual text fully in the light of its particular historical situation. We have already addressed this context in interpretation, but it is not the particular situational aspect of a text that we connect to other texts but its underlying dynamic, dare we even say principle.

Here we cannot move directly from any individual text to application because...

b. The texts of the Bible are in a "flow of revelation." The NT often sends us in a significantly different direction than the OT does. Even within a testament, we can find differing trajectories. Did God or Satan put it in the heart of David to number the children of Israel? Should Priscilla teach Apollos or shouldn't we let a woman teach a man?

This flow is not as simple as dispensationalism or covenantalism might suggest, at least not if we listen to the way the NT authors use biblical texts. We...

c. find the biblical center on a particular topic not simply from the Bible alone, which does not tell us how to prioritize its teaching. In general the NT gives us the authoritative lenses through which to read the OT. In ethics, it has set the final filter for behavior--love God and love your neighbor as yourself.

But to find the center of doctrine is more difficult. On issues like the sinfulness of humanity, the nature of the Messiah, the resurrection, the nature of suffering, the NT significantly redirects or modifies the OT. Yet on these topics God has continued to clarify and extend Christian understanding. Creation ex nihilo, the Trinity, our continued existence between death and resurrection, these are at best shadowy teachings in the biblical text. In such cases the tradition and consensus of Christendom help steer us to the proper texts as biblical centers on such topics.

But before these "orthodoxies" emerged, the other side had biblical texts at least equally supportive of their positions.

The class today agreed that everyone integrates biblical texts together whether they intend to or not. There are verses that seem to say conflicting things. Everyone choses, usually on the basis of the tradition they are from. In such cases it is best for us not to pretend that we are simply following the Bible but admit that we are Wesleyans or Baptists, Lutherans or Reformed, charismatic or Catholic.

11. Identify the right questions for appropriation/application

The right questions for your congregation, children, youth group, self, family are not only a matter of their needs and desires. God's word stands over us even when we don't want to listen.

But sermons and Bible lessons usually have an address, and this address has much to say about the questions with which we come to the Bible looking for answers.

a. What do I/we/you need to learn from the Bible this week?

b. How do I/we/you need to be formed and changed in my/our/your heart and imagination?

c. What do I/we/you need to do this week?

In practice we will come looking to the text for answers and begin the process here rather than with some arbitrary text. We will start asking the Spirit to bring us to the right text for the needs of our audiences.

Answering such questions is a matter of wisdom and the Holy Spirit. The Spirit just as often helps us through the wisdom of others rather than by investing us with wisdom that we do not normally possess. If you are a preacher without wisdom, you must seek out the wisdom of others.

12. Appropriation/Application

The goal of appropriation is to join the questions of appropriation with the relevant biblical center of integration. We too are in the flow of revelation. We too are the people of God. There are...

a. points of continuity and discontinuity between our time and the time of the biblical center. These can change the way teaching and ethics are appropriated today. These differences between then and now often help us clarify cultural aspects of biblical times and transcultural aspects. Aspects of biblical teaching that were different from the culture of the time seem particularly transcultural, while teaching that is the same as what everyone was saying at the time often turns out to be cultural.

On the other hand, there is always the danger of assuming that our culture is always right too. God's word ultimately has to stand over us.

b. Ultimately the task of appropriation is both a spiritual and an ecclesial task. The trajectory of Christendom is set by the Holy Spirit working through the church catholic. The lone Christian is less likely to recognize prophetic correction. We best decide the big issues in dialog with as many "Spirit-filled" believers as we can.

There's the whole course (and a little more, I fear)...

Piper Interlude: An Arminian Nutshell

In the midst of the final week of classes this semester, I didn't get my post on John Piper's third chapter up. But I wanted to share a great quote from my pastor, Steve deNeff's sermon this past Sunday, the first of Advent.

"God would have come to earth even if Adam had not sinned, He likes to be with us so much."

There you have in a nutshell the difference between Piper's theology and Wesleyan-Arminian theology. In Piper's theology, it was not possible for Adam not to sin (non posse non peccare). God had Adam's sin prearranged. I remember a then Anglican friend of mine in England showing me a hymn about Adam's "blessed sin" that led the way for Christ's atonement.

But, as a colleague of mine pointed out, God enjoyed meeting with Adam and Eve in the Garden even before Adam had sinned. This is what it means for God to love the world--He genuinely loves the world. He genuinely wants everyone to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4). He does not just love humanity because of how much humanity loves Him. He loves humanity, period, and likes hanging out with us.

Now since the Reformed tradition is so fond of logic, there are only three options for the theological appropriation of 1 Timothy 2:4: God "wants to save all persons and [for them] to come to a knowledge of the truth."

a) This is hyperbole of some kind, an exaggeration. Somehow the words don't mean what they say. Everyone really only means those who count, those he has elected. Maybe we shouldn't even consider non-believers to be human at all?

b) Everyone will be saved, the universalist option. Barth famously said that he was not a universalist, but maybe God was. This, in my opinion, would be the most coherent Calvinist view, although I do not object as much to those Calvinists who believe it was possible for Adam not to sin (posse non peccare) as I do to the Piperish stripe.

c) God does not force humans to be saved but in some way, enables or allows them to have a say in the process. And since God is Sovereign, I assume He can do this if He wants, that He is powerful enough and "Man" enough to let humans play a role in the process.

Clearly the last option is the one that makes the best sense of 1 Timothy. Any other option involves shoving extraneous theological propositions down its throat.

Chapter 3 of The Future of Justification tomorrow...

Review 4: Piper's Future of Justification

Chapter 2 of John Piper's book on N. T. Wright is entitled:
"The Relationship between Covenant and Law-Court Imagery for Justification"

Justification as Covenant Membership?
In this chapter Piper deals with what indeed is one of Wright's more idiosyncratic views, namely, "Justification is not how someone becomes a Christian. It is the declaration that they have become a Christian" (What Saint Paul Really Said, 122, 125). Or in another place Wright says, "Justification, for Paul, is not (in Sanders' terminology) how one 'gets into' God's people but about God's declaration that someone is in" ("New Perspectives on Paul," in Justification in Perspective, 261).

In other words, to use E. P. Sanders' words, N. T. Wright denies that "justification" is "transfer terminology," to "make righteous."

I agree with Piper that Wright's understanding of Paul on this topic is peculiar and confusing. Wright's varied ways of circling around this concept are like someone whose attempts to explain something only confuse you more.

Piper argues that Wright's understanding of justification, "conflates implication and definition." In other words, certainly justification implies that a person is now part of the people of God. But Wright doesn't want to say that. For Wright, justification seems to indicate that one is already in. For Wright, justification is the declaration that you are in.

At the same time, Wright sees justification as law-court language as well. Piper quotes Paul in Fresh Perspective when Wright says that "belonging to the covenant" (i.e., what Wright believes justification declares) means "forgiven sinner" (121). I find this confusing, and I am not alone.

Where I think the confusion lies is with Wright's idiosyncratic views of covenant, something I'm sure Piper will give us ample opportunity to examine. Let me try to "de-covenantify" Wright's language so that his views seem more plausible in relation to Paul.

What if Wright were to say that justification is a declaration of our innocence, the verdict of "not guilty" pronounced at our trial? In that sense, the verdict would presuppose forgiveness. The verdict would presuppose atonement. But the verdict would not be exactly identical to forgiveness or atonement. It would be the pronouncement of a legal verdict, a declaration if you would, that presupposed those things.

If this is what Wright is saying--but obfuscating by introducing his covenant ideas into the mix--then his comments begin to make more sense.

The problem is of course that legal language (from an illocutionary standpoint :-) is not simply language of assertion or declaration. The pronouncement of a verdict establishes that declaration as the official status of the defendant. In that sense, to limit justification to a declaration is inadequate. The innocence of the defendant is legally established in the declaration.

Piper does not express his objection to Wright with this clarity, but he rightly points out passages in Paul that redirect Wright's focus:

"God reckons righteousness [dikaiosyne] apart from works" (Rom. 4:6)
"A person is justified [dikaioo] by faith apart from works of law" (Rom. 3:28)

Piper rightly sees that these are roughly equivalent statements and thus that to justify is to "reckon righteous" (Piper prefers the NASB translation "credit righteousness"). Paul's use of Psalm 32 in Romans 4 further clarifies what this involves:

"Blessed are those whose lawless acts have been forgiven
And whose sins have been covered.
Blessed is the one to whom the Lord does not reckon sin" (Rom. 4:7-8).

Wright is probably correct to steer us away from seeing such language in isolation from the Jew-Gentile issue. But it remains to be seen whether he has done this in a way that helps or truly clarifies these nuances in Paul's thought. I'm sure there is more to come on this topic.

Penal Substitution
I'm sure it made great sense to Piper to discuss Wright in relation to penal substitution in this chapter. Penal substitution plays such a focal role in Piper's theology that he can hardly think of justification without thinking about who is paying the check for this "credit" we get. In that sense, I think the explanation of justification I have made above is not exactly the way Piper thinks of it.

Penal substitution is the idea that, in some way, Jesus took the punishment for our sins on the cross.

Piper takes some time in this chapter to discuss what has been a very controversial matter in his circles, namely, Wright's endorsement of a book by Steve Chalke entitled The Lost Message of Jesus. In a now famous line in that book, Chalke suggests that if the cross was a personal act of violence on God's part, it makes a mockery of Jesus' teaching to love your enemies and is tantamount to cosmic child abuse (182-83 of Chalke's book).

Wright has made a lengthy blog response to this controversy, indicating his support of penal substitution as a biblical idea and defending Chalke as a believer in it as well. Piper is skeptical whether Chalke believes in it and while accepting that Wright does, once again suggests that Wright's comments on the subject have been confusing.

Wright himself suggests that there is more than one understanding of penal substitution and that Chalke simply does not have the form most vigorously argued in certain evangelical circles (e.g., Piper's).

Certainly the idea of penal substitution is major for Piper's theology. Piper is a "7 point Calvinist," by which I mean he thinks God not only has predestined those who will be saved but also those who will be damned, Adam (6th point), and even Satan (7th point). The affirmation that God is love is devoid of any familiar meaning in this system.

We might summarize Piper's theology here as "God so loved himself that He sent His only Son (admiring Himself greatly for so doing), that whoever He has chosen to save will irresistably believe and so have eternal life." Love has no meaning whatsoever in Piper's system. It amounts to little more than divine masturbation.

So Piper will not be able to see the real tension between the biblical affirmation that God is love (presumably using that word in its normal sense rather than some convoluted way that alters it beyond recognition) and the orthodox perspective that God had to punish sin. This is the orthodox Christian perspective, although books such as Joel Green and Mark Baker's Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, show how Piper's version of it is an extreme form of the idea.

I personally think Green and Baker's book represents the opposite extreme. Nevertheless, they raise very important and significant questions. For example, it seems to contradict the sovereignty of God to suggest that He would not be allowed, by divine fiat, to forgive us of our sins without someone needing to pay. Jesus' parables do not in any way point to a doctrine of penal substitution. For example, the father of the prodigal son does not tell the prodigal that he'd be glad to welcome him back... as long as he can find someone to pay back the debt he has incurred. Rather, the father seems to have the authority to pronounce the son forgiven, period.

For this reason, it seems clear to me that while penal substitution is one appropriate way to understand Christ's atonement, it is not the only one or even the central Christian one. Piper's views on atonement are extreme and ultimately unbiblical in focus.

Review 3: Piper's Future of Justification

Finally we arrive at Chapter 1 of John Piper's book on N. T. Wright:

"Caution: Not All Biblical-Theological Methods and Categories Are Illuminating"

1. There is a truly ironic element that has peeked through a few times even in the brief 38 pages of this book I have read. The following statement is typical:

"I think we need a new generation of preachers who are not only open to new light that God may shed upon his word, but are also suspicious of their own love of novelty and are eager to test all their interpretations of the Bible by the wisdom of the centuries" (italics mine, 37-38).

In the context of this statement, Piper is discussing a quote from Wright in which Wright admits to being energized by his new reading of Paul. Piper suggests that Wright might unbeknowingly be fascinated with the new over the time-tested true.

Now of course Piper admits in a footnote that this is not how Wright perceives his delight at the "freshness" of his reading of Paul. I know what Wright is saying. Wright is saying that his interpretation works so well in reading the text in context that it is exciting in a way that the text wasn't to him before.

Piper's warning is fair enough to consider at some point--is Wright subconsciously enticed by the new when there was nothing wrong with the old interpretation. Wright of course would say no, this is not what's going on. I suspect that the freshness we will find in Wright is more light in a dark room than a quest for novelty for its own sake.

But what is so fascinating about Piper's comments is his appeal to the magisterium, to tradition as the arbiter of interpretation! Has Piper suddenly turned catholic?!

Here is Piper again: "It is sobering to hear him [Wright] say, for example, 'The discussions of justification in much of the history of the church, certainly since Augustine, got off on the wrong foot--at least in terms of understanding Paul--and they have stayed there ever since" (37).

Ha! Didn't Erasmus say something like this about Luther--"It is sobering to hear Luther saying..."

I welcome Piper's recognition that the consensus of the church counts for something in the appropriation of Scripture. It cannot change the original meaning of the Bible, but in my theology it does have a strong say in how we read it as Christians.

But on this point a blind spot in Piper's own pre-modern approach to Scripture is exposed.

2. In a very brief four pages, Piper in his own way recognizes the problem of biblical theology. He is wrestling with the complications of reading the NT in the light of its first century background. His three brief warnings are fair enough:

a. What if you misunderstand the first century source?

Piper's argument here is that the first century texts are less studied than the NT ones and therefore are more prone to misunderstanding than the biblical ones, for which we also hopefully have the illumination of the Holy Spirit.

There is a legitimate warning here. Sometimes scholars have taken a hypothetical reconstruction of some extra-biblical text and then shoved it down the throat of a biblical text. However, we are just as prone to bring clearly anachronistic "definitions" to the biblical text that are simply part of our own tradition and have no clear connection to what people were thinking in the first century.

When there is so much disagreement among Christian groups, it behooves those who would be theological leaders in their traditions at some point in their life to examine the historical categories they have inherited. Most Christian traditions are, from a standpoint of probability, more likely to be wrong than right on the beliefs that are particular to their tradition, simply because they are in the minority on those ideas. This is not an argument for abandoning distinctives, only a pointing out that we as individual traditions are most likely to be eccentric at our points of uniqueness.

The idea of the illumination of the Spirit here is fascinating. I have come to a conclusion of late when it comes to a wide variety of Reformed thinkers from Barth to Van Til to Platinga and Wolterstorff to Vanhoozer to Smith to Piper. Here I am thinking of the way in which their "Reformed epistemologies" hang in air without support, without the need to be supported by argument or prop. I am speaking of their underlying sense that the Spirit illuminates to where their foundations are somewhat intuitive, "properly basic."

What occurred to me is that this approach to truth is of a piece with the spirit of their theology, namely, its predestinarian orientation. While they might not articulate it in this way, I believe there is at least a subconscious tendency to hang the foundations of their view on air because of the sense that God will cause the elect to resonate with these truths.

A recent conversation with a scholar from the Reformed tradition brought this home. This person has a colleague who would like to believe in Christianity, but simply cannot bring his mind to do so. This Reformed scholar was somewhat at a loss as to what to do with the colleague. All he knew to do was to give the individual things to read. But clearly the person knew enough already to respond. God simply had not led him to respond at this point, in this person's Reformed theology.

Now there are similar issues for Wesleyan-Arminians with regard to free will, so I am not claiming to be without difficulties. I am simply pointing out that the Reformed tradition lends itself to inaction when it comes to proofs because of its overall paradigm.

b. What if we assume a first century source represents a first century view when it was only one first century view among many?

Again, this is a fair enough warning. Whether it applies to Wright, however, we will have to see in specific cases.

c. What if an individual author departs from the first century view?

Now this comment, although Piper does not really explore it, is a crucial question for all biblical interpreters. After we have examined all the first century literature that we can, we have to leave room for innovation on the part of the NT author. More importantly, as Christians who believe in revelation, we must leave room for divine supervention in the meaning of the text.

For lack of better terms, we must leave open the possibility of the supernatural and not limit our interpretation to the natural. What I am calling a "natural" interpretation is one that asks, "What is the most likely meaning of this text in the light of the paradigms and definitions of the time?"

This issue arose recently in a paper I delivered on Hebrews. In that paper, I suggested it would be quite unlikely that the earliest Christians would have immediately thought that Christ's death atoned for all the sins of all time and that there was no longer any need for sacrifice. I suggested that this idea may not have coalesced until the time of Hebrews, although it is possible that Paul held this view as well.

Now my reading of early Christianity here is a natural one--it is based on the views we find in books like 2 and 4 Maccabees toward the "atoning" value a noble human death might have. A good question was asked by a Christian in the audience, however. If I might rephrase it, it went something like this: "Wouldn't we as Christians expect God to reveal the unprecedented nature of Christ's death to the apostles?"

This was a great question for a believer. Although he didn't put it in these terms, he was pointing out that the "natural" reading of the first century evidence might not be sufficient in the light of a "supernatural" situation.

My method is, first, to attempt a natural reading of a biblical text--its most likely meaning in its original historical-cultural context. When that interpretation differs from the traditional Christian reading of that text, caution lights go off that say to take care and double check.

[I might add as a sidenote that I can distinguish the original meaning from the canonical one, so I do not feel a need to choose between the two so that the text has a single correct meaning. For me it can have an original meaning that was appropriate for its place in the flow of revelation and a canonical one that has as much to do with the consensus of Christendom under the leadership of the Holy Spirit]

When the natural does not seem to account for what's going on, then I take recourse to supernatural explanations.

Let me put this method into perspective. It was once traditional to think that thunderstorms were spiritual storms in which either God was angry or demons were at play. It was once traditional to see sickness as punishment for sin. Perhaps sometimes God does direct storms or make people sick for sin. But most of the time, I suspect barometric pressures and fronts and germs and viruses are responsible.

The distinction between natural and supernatural is clearly a modern one and one that needs to be seriously questioned. But it was not born of whim or fancy, and we would not have cell phones or satellites if we continued to think that physical events are simply the whim and fancy of angels and demons.

The freshness of which Wright speaks is the realization that, most of the time, the biblical texts fit very well within their historical contexts. When at Ugarit they speak of a Lothan sea monster whose consonants are the same as the Hebrew Leviathon, am I to dismiss this close background parallel in lieu of some tradition centuries later that didn't have the benefit of modern archaeological discoveries?

What I have concluded is that God revealed the Bible in terms that the original audiences could understand. The words of the Bible are incarnated truths, not truths in some bubble. If these words were not intelligible within first century paradigms, then the very audiences they say they addressed could not have understood them.

Monday Thoughts: John Piper Review 2

Today we continue our review of John Piper's new book: The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright. For the first installment, click here.

"On Controversy"
Between the Introduction and Chapter 1, Piper has a brief section called "On Controversy," where he gives his perspective on a fight like this one.

First, he has a somewhat "Wesleyan" quote from John Owen (1655): "When the heart is cast indeed into the mould of the doctrine that the mind embraceth... when not the sense of the words only is in our heads, but hte sense of the thing abides in our hearts... then shall we be garrisoned by the grace of God against all assaults of men" (28).

I felt that I should point that out :-)

But of course he turns next to one of the fathers of twentieth century American fundamentalism, J. Gresham Machen, who left Princeton and was one of the founding faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. Previous generations of ministers will know Machen for his Greek textbook, which was unquestionably the best in the day when students already knew Latin and English grammar.

The Machen quotes of interest to Piper, however, are about his attitudes toward the controversies of his day:

"The New Testament is a polemic [attacking] book almost from beginning to end" (28).

"Every really great Christian utterance, it may almost be said, is born in controversy" (29).

"Controversy of the right sort is good; for out of such controversy ... there comes the salvation of souls" (29).

Piper runs with one of Machen's themes in the rest of this section. Machen was recounting a professor encouraging fellow teachers to focus on 1 Corinthians 13 as the essence of Paul's teaching and to avoid controversy. Machen then noted that 1 Corinthians 13 itself could not be understood without noting the controversy Paul was addressing over spiritual gifts in the chapters before and after.

So Piper follows this lead: "it is remarkable how many of Paul's letters were written to correct fellow Christians" (30).

"... truth frees us from the control of Satan" ... "For the sake of unity and peace, therefore, Paul labors to set the churches straight on numerous issues--including quite a few that do not in themselves involve heresy" (31).
___________

So how might we respond to Piper's thoughts here?

First, I am of course very interested in truth and would not be blogging on Piper's book if I did not desire to dismiss error. I also affirm orthodox Christian belief and am mindful of the serious line those cross who do not affirm it. I also believe at the same time that Piper (and Machen at least in these comments) have not accurately expressed the priorities of the apostle Paul.

So we must ask exactly what the nature of the controversies was that Paul attacked:

a. 1 Thessalonians--Paul does address a misunderstanding of doctrine, but he does not "attack" those who do not understand. He writes so that they will not be troubled about those who die before the second coming. His purpose is to encourage, not to fight.

b. 2 Thessalonians--Paul does indeed warn the audience about false information, but he does not "attack" anyone. He writes so that they will not be troubled by those with false teaching. His purpose again is to encourage the Thessalonians. His indirect response to a "rumor" about his thoughts is not in the form of a polemic.

c. Galatians--Paul is here polemical. He both attacks false teaching and shames the audience for their susceptibility to it.

But before we are deceived into thinking this instance is a straightforward illustration of Piper's orientation, let us remember a few very important aspects of Paul's argument in Galatians.

First, the issue is not abstract doctrine, but the manner in which Gentiles might not be accursed. In other words, the destiny of people is at issue, as well as Paul's own apostolic authority with his churches. Galatians is far more than a mere contention over doctrine.

Second, we should remember that Paul's debates in Galatians are not with non-believers but with other believers who do not agree with him. Indeed, he even recounts disagreements with Peter and James, and never says that they came to see it his way. It is canonically clear to us that he was right. But at the time it was perhaps just as likely that it looked to many he was wrong.

Third, Paul indicates in Galatians that the entire law is summed up in the word to love one's neighbor (Gal. 5:14). When all is said and done, love holds the ultimate place in his ethic, and his "doctrinal" treatments play a secondary role. Paul's correction of "doctrine" (in itself hardly the most appropriate word) is usually the servant of another, more affective goal like unity in fellowship (in contrast to unity of doctrine).

d. 1 and 2 Corinthians
While Machen's critique of a fellow scholar seemed justified, 1 Corinthians 13 is in fact Paul's solution to the Corinthian problem over spiritual gifts--love. Paul does in fact correct the Corinthians significantly. But his correction is not primarily about doctrine. The proposition of 1 Corinthians (1:10) is for them to be of the same mind, but anyone who thinks "mind" here is intellectual agreement or agreement on doctrine hasn't read very far into 1 Corinthians.

The disunity has to do with pride in leaders, boasts over spiritual knowledge and spiritual gifts, not disunity over doctrine. They do misunderstand resurrection, but Paul does not indicate that this is the key to the disunity in the congregation. There is a good deal of behavioral instruction in 1 Corinthians. In short, theology serves ethics and body cohesion in 1 Corinthians.

2 Corinthians has a majorly affective dimension. Related words referring to comfort are used almost 10 times in the space of about 5 verses in the first chapter.

e. Romans
Romans is Paul's most theological letter, and yet we misunderstand it if we see it as Melanchthon did--as a compendium of Christian doctrine. Paul is preparing to visit churches he has never visited before. He is hoping they will help him on his way to Spain. There are false rumors about his thinking (Rom. 3:8).

In other words, Romans is a defense of the gospel that Paul preaches as he introduces himself to the churches at Rome--on his terms. It is true, Paul does seem to know some things about conflict in the community, but these are the matters of chapters 12-15. In other words, the issues are practical and are about community disunity rather than doctrine per se.

It is mistaken to think of Romans primarily as a polemic on the topic of doctrine. It is more of an apologetic, a defense of his doctrine.

f. The Prison Epistles
Of Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon, only Colossians has majorly to do with issues of knowledge. Ephesians is primarily about the unity of Jew and Gentile, not doctrine per se. Philippians is about unity, but not unity of doctrine. When Paul urges them to have the same "mind" as Christ, it is the attitude of self-sacrifice (Phil. 2:3-4). Philemon is about forgiving the slave Onesimus. None of these books is fundamentally about Paul sparring over doctrine.

Even Colossians discourages far more than the adoption of a belief. "Philosophy" in Colossians cannot be taken in the sense we use it but is more of a set of religious beliefs and practices. Indeed, the group in question has visions and seems to follow certain ascetic practices.

g. The Pastoral Epistles
It is really in the Pastoral Epistles that we get a shift toward an emphasis on sound teaching. Yet 1-2 Timothy and Titus are hardly the place to start looking at Paul's theology. Even when we assume that Paul wrote them, we can't ignore how significantly their content differs from the teaching of Paul's other letters. Indeed, they scarcely contain any discussion of the doctrine of justification that drives Piper's book.

So while we have no problem with Piper defending his understanding of Paul, it is a serious defect of Piperism to think that it was all about the doctrines for Paul. Doctrine played a supporting role in the world of Paul's writings. More than anything else, Paul used theology in the service of things like ethics, body cohesion, and the inclusion of Gentiles within the body of Christ.

And that is the Wesleyan priority--heart first, head second. A personal relationship with Christ and a life lived that coheres with it, these are our priorities. We are interested in the head of course--but we have our priorities straight.

Sunday Romans: 1:1-7 (Week 2: Calvin, Moo, Schreiner)

This is my second week on Romans 1:1-7.

For my initial translation, see last week's post. I also started a Romans interlinear that I plan to fill out as we go. Last week I looked over John Wesley and Adam Clarke's thoughts on these verses. This week I am looking over 1) John Calvin on Romans 1:1-7, 2) Douglas Moo's The Epistle to the Romans, and Thomas Schreiner's Romans.

Calvin
I will be the second to last to admit that Calvin is a far superior interpreter of Scripture in context to Wesley. He did not of course have the tools available that we do. Nor did he have the benefits of this last century's discoveries and insights. So it is not difficult for a bright MDiv student today to be superior to him--after all, the MDiv student can read Calvin himself and then move beyond to all the subsequent interpreters. But there is the real possibility that, were he interpreting today, he would be counted among the greatest interpreters of our time.

Which does not of course mean that his theology was more correct than Wesley. But this is not my topic for today.

Calvin amazingly says this of Paul as "called apostle": "I cannot agree with those who refer this call of which he speaks to the eternal election of God; and who understand the separation, either that from his mother’s womb, which he mentions in Galatians 1:15, or that which Luke refers to, when Paul was appointed for the Gentiles: but I consider that he simply glories in having God as the author of his call, lest any one should think that he had through his own rashness taken this honor to himself."

So Calvin does not see the calling language of Paul's apostleship as a matter of his predestination to salvation.

On the other hand, Calvin says this of Romans 1:3:

"Ye are the called of Jesus Christ, etc.
He assigns a reason more nearly connected with them — because the Lord had already exhibited in them an evidence by which he had manifested that he had called them to a participation of the gospel. It hence followed, that if they wished their own calling to remain sure, they were not to reject the ministry of Paul, who had been chosen by the same election of God.

"I therefore take this clause, 'the called of Jesus Christ,' as explanatory, as though the particle 'even' were inserted; for he means, that they were by calling made partakers of Christ. For they who shall be heirs of eternal life, are chosen by the celestial Father to be children in Christ; and when chosen, they are committed to his care and protection as their shepherd."

As we will see, I question whether Paul, as Calvin, thought of predestination language primarily in "deductive" terms. God called before the foundation of the world these specific people; therefore, they became partakers of Christ. Predestination language in Paul, I would argue, functions "inductively" as it relates to specific people. You are here among the people of God; therefore, God chose you.

This distinction makes a great deal of difference when it comes to how we are to apply the doctrine of predestination. It cannot come first as the governing element in our theology. It rather must come last, as "after the fact" language.

Moo and Schreiner
Moo has lots of great little tidbits in his comments on Romans 1:1-7, and Schreiner's treatment is quite good too. The commentaries on Romans are so big it is exasperating, and they all cover much of the same material. My task here isn't to do anything like a full commentary (maybe I'll add links to the interlinear the final week of each cycle). I'm principally looking at issues relating to Calvinism and Arminianism.

1. Moo makes no real deal about language of calling in these verses. He gives ascent to Leon Morris' claim that Romans is ultimately a book about God (43). Schreiner similarly goes against the majority view that the phrase "the gospel of God" refers only to the gospel from God (a "genitive of source") (37). Schreiner thinks Paul also means his audience to hear that it is a "gospel about God," a double entendre.

Certainly God is for Paul the "all in all," and Paul spreads the gospel "on behalf of His name" (Schreiner, 35 in reference to Rom. 1:5). But I also wonder if these are reflections of "Westminster Catechism Colored Glasses" (the chief end of man is to glorify God..."). We'll have to track this question of emphasis, though let no one suggest we question that God is indeed all in all. The question is not whether God is in fact the only intrinsically Worthy of existence.

The question is
1) exegetical--what is the primary topic of Romans--God? salvation? Christ? and
2) the nature of God's love--what does it mean to say that God loves the world.

Could it be that Paul's focus in Romans 1-11 is not primarily on the glory or sovereignty of God but rather on defending his understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ, particularly as it relates to the Gentile?

2. Moo and Schreiner, following Calvin, consider the phrase "grace and apostleship" as what is called a hendiadys, "gracious apostleship." In other words, God's calling of Paul to be an apostle was an act of His grace. Fair enough.

3. Both take the phrase "obedience of faith" in much the way I do--"obedience that comes from faith," although Schreiner allows for additional nuances to this that are not problematic from my perspective (I refer to the idea of a genitive of apposition).

4. My chief question about their interpretation of these verses comes from their language of the redefinition of the people of God.

Moo: "Paul implies that they are God's chosen people; for both phrases echo OT designations of Israel. In so transferring language used of Israel in the OT to Christians" (54-55).

Schreiner: "Paul implicitly redraws the lines of what constitutes the true people of God" (45) and "Since Jesus is the true Israel... those who belong to him constitute the people of God" (36).

By the way, I've been intrigued by a number of positive statements by Schreiner in relation to N. T. Wright interpretations in the small space of his interpretation of verses 1 through 7. I'll be interested to track his relation to Wright. He dedicates his commentary to John Piper, who has just written a book against Wright. Interesting...

I agree with these commentators that Paul redefines the people of God in a way that is not limited to Israel. The question in my mind is whether ethnic Israel remains the "base" of the people of God or whether the people of God have been completely redefined as a "third race," a neutral race that truly shows no priority to ethnic Israel at all.

I have serious questions about whether this is the case or whether, as Schreiner and Wright believe, Jesus is the true Israel. I am open, but fail to find this theme in Paul.

Dunn, Wright, Fitzmeyer next week...