Detailed Exposition

It is not in the interest of extravagant ambition that we trouble ourselves with this detailed exposition, but we hope through such painstaking interpretation to train you in the importance of not passing over even one slight word or syllable in the Sacred Scriptures.  For they are not ordinary utterances, but the very expression of the Holy Spirit, and for this reason it is possible to find great treasure even in a single syllable. – John Chrysostom 

Unity amidst Diversity - a tragic irony

Philip Melanchthon, one of the great theological minds of the Reformation, described Romans as “an outline and compendium of all Christian doctrine”, and its interpretation has often been driven by theological interests and debates. Indeed, until recently Romans has been read primarily as an essay in propositional theology, and interpreters have often lost sight of the concrete and specific set of circumstances and interests that called this letter into existence. Attempting to abstract the timeless theology of Romans, Christians have repeatedly broken off fellowship with other Christians over the interpretation of minute aspects of this letter, for example, the question of predestination versus free will, the degree of human depravity, the nature of “saving” faith and so forth. A tragic irony emerges when we consider that in Romans, Paul provides his fullest treatment of the way God has brought together people of diverse heritage and practice into the one body of the church, and he also gives several chapters of practical advice for preserving unity in the midst of this diversity.

David deSilva, An Introduction to the New Testament, 598.  Italics mine. 

A Christological Paradigm

When the first hearers of Matthew’s Gospel heard Jesus’ call to suffer rather than to inflict suffering, to accept death rather than to inflict death, to reject all efforts to save themselves from their plight by military action and to leave their deliverance to God, they knew that the one who gave such scandalous instruction had himself lived and died in accord with that call.

Gene Davenport, Into the Darkness: Discipleship and the Sermon on the Mount (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1988), 15.

Blessing the Revolution

Just as the Decalogue begins with a declaration of fact – God’s liberation of Israel from bondage in proof of his love (Ex 20:2) – so the Sermon on the Mount begins in the beatitudes with a declaration of fact – God’s compassionate turning towards the disadvantaged, bringing them into his liberating reign of peace and justice.

Chris Marshall, “Blessing the Revolution,” 5.

Beatitudes and Kingdom

When God’s kingdom comes, and God’s will is done, no one will have to be poor in Spirit, mourn, be meek, or hunger and thirst for righteousness, but everyone who is ruled by God and does God’s will is merciful, pure in heart, committed to peacemaking, and willing to suffer for the sake of righteousness.

Mark Allan Powell, “Matthew’s Beatitudes: Reversals and Rewards of the Kingdom” CBQ July (1996) 460-478, here 475.

This is quite possibly the best article I've read thus far on the Beatitudes. Powell convincingly makes the case that the beatitudes be read in two stanza's (5:3-6 & 7-10 - each containing 36 words, 11-12 contain 35 words. 5:6 & 10 both end with righteousness, and 5:3-6 is marked by alliteration in the Greek text). The first section deals with reversals of misfortune, and the second deals with rewards for virtues embodied in praxis. Thus moving forward the debate between those who see it primarily as reversals or primarily as rewards. He also widens the referent of God's blessing to include those beyond the community of disciples. According to Powell, when God's kingdom reigns, everyone marginalised will benefit, not just those within the community of faith.

If you're interested in this section of scripture, make sure you engage with this article.

Jesus of History vs. Christ of Faith

Against any attempt by pious Christians of a mystical or docetic bent to swallow up the real humanity of Jesus into an “orthodox” emphasis on his divinity, the quest affirms that the risen Jesus is the same person who lived and died as a Jew in 1st-century Palestine, a person as truly and fully human – with all the galling limitations that involves – as any other human being. Against any attempt to “domesticate” Jesus for a comfortable, respectable bourgeois Christianity, the quest for the historical Jesus, almost from its inception, has tended to emphasize the embarrassing, nonconformist aspects of Jesus: e.g., his association with the religious and social “lowlife” of Palestine, his prophetic critique of external religious observances that ignore or strangle the inner spirit of religion, his opposition to certain religious authorities, especially the Jerusalem priesthood.

Meier, A Marginal Jew, 1:199

God is no Spectator!

1 Peter 2:24 He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.

God is not a spectator, but a fellow-sufferer, who has himself absorbed the full force of evil. In the lonely figure hanging in the darkness and dereliction of Calvary the Christian believes that he sees God opening his arms to embrace the bitterness of the strange world he has made. The God revealed in the vulnerability of the incarnation and in the vulnerability of creation are one. He is the crucified God, whose paradoxical power is perfected in weakness, whose self-chosen symbol is the King reigning from the gallows.

Polkinghorne, Science and Providence, pg. 68

Compare this with yesterday's quote and one has a very interesting view of the atonement...

Beyond Retribution

1 Peter 2:23 When he was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the One who judges justly.

Restorative justice cannot manufacture repentance and forgiveness. But by placing a concern for the healing of hurts, the renewal of relationships, and the re-creation of community at the heart of its agenda, it makes room for the miracle of forgiveness to occur and for a new future to dawn. Nothing could be more compatible with the message of the New Testament than this. For without diminishing the reality of evil, without denying the culpability of those who commit crime or minimizing the pain of those who suffer at their hands, and without dispensing with punishment as a mechanism for constraining evil and promoting change, the New Testament looks beyond retribution to a vision of justice that is finally satisfied only by the defeat of evil and the healing of its victims, by the repentance of sinners and the forgiveness of their sins, by the restoration of peace and the renewal of hope – a justice that manifests God’s redemptive work of making all things new.

Chris Marshall, Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime, and Punishment (Eerdmans, 2001) pg. 284

Importance of Apologetics

For my inaugural post, I thought I would share a quote which rightly captures the importance of the intellect in becoming a follower of Jesus. Although it is (slightly) outside the main focus of this blog (biblical studies), it is nevertheless tightly wed to it. In an atmosphere of sensationalism, conspiracy theories, and bad scholarship surrounding Jesus and the rise of the Christian movment, the area of Christian origins should (in my opinion) be the focal point of our dialogue with our contemporaries. So without further delay:

Commitment to Christ is a matter for the entire person, not for his mind alone; and intellectual conviction (if, indeed, it can be had at all without the whole person being involved) is not the whole business. But the whole business, precisely because it concerns the whole person, can never be achieved in defiance of the intellect. Reason, though not the whole, is a part of the personal response; and the attempt to bring to light the falseness of certain allegedly rational objections is therefore not unimportant.

-C. F. D. Moule, The Phenomenon of the New Testament: An Inquiry into the Implications of Certain Features of the New Testament (London: SCM, 1967), 2-3

Ezekiel 16

Ezekiel writes to shock and to shake, and reaches his most shocking so far here in his epic portrayal of the harrowing life story of Ms. Jerusalem. If it opens in the beguiling manner of a “rags-to-riches” fairy tale, it soon devastates the audience with the extend to which no one lives happily ever after as its camera moves from abandoned baby to nubile beauty to nymphomaniac whore to brazen adulteress to heartless child killer, a woman no better than her foreign parents and arguably worse than her sisters Samaria and Sodom. It is the prophetic equal to a four-hour movie blockbuster with repeated scenes of sexual violence and violence on children, which no one under 18 is allowed to see. It became another passage in Ezekiel which rabbinic leadership hesitated to have read in worship.

John Goldingay

Quote of Note

Bad exegesis is no less worse than bad conduct.

Tertullian, On Purity

Abba & Imperial Theology

I'm currently reading through The Historical Jesus in Context, making sure that I emerse myself in primary sources. It's a fascinating read, and one that I readily recommend. Check out this quote...

Jews of the time, including Jesus, and the early Christians who cherished his memory, found in their God a father and king immeasurably greater than Rome’s ruler of the world. To announce God’s kingdom, God’s reign, was to remind oneself and one’s fellow Jews that it is God an not the emperor who truly reigns, to call upon the divine Father is to place oneself under a protection far greater than the reach of Rome. This is not to say that Jewish understandings of God as father originated under Roman influence; it is quite clear that the divine Father appears in much earlier texts. Rather, the resistance inspired by Roman rule and the accommodations it required enhanced the urgency of calls upon the Father and maker of all.[1]

D'Angelo continues with a smackeral of quotes from Jewish and Gentile sources concerning Fatherhood and the Emperor. Very informative...

[1] Mary Rose D’Angelo “Abba and Father: Imperial Theology in the Contexts of Jesus and the Gospels” in The Historical Jesus in Context eds. A. J. Levine, D. C. Allison Jr. and J. D. Crossan (Princeton University Press, 2006) pg. 66.

See also: M.R. D’ANGELO, "Abba and ‘Father’: Imperial Theology and the Jesus Traditions", JBL 111 (1992) 611-630.

Concrete Kingdom!

Jesus stands out as one who performs miracles of healing and proclaims good news to the poor as he travels throughout Israel in fulfilment of Isaiah's prophecies. Implicitly we are prepared for the insight that this is how God's kingly rule of Israel in the end time operates concretely and is experienced right now, through the ministry of Jesus. Something new and different is occurring in the prophetic work of Jesus. Everyone, including the Baptists, is challenged to accept the truth that God is the ultimate agent at work in Jesus' words and actions, however much the events contradict one's preconceived ideas of what the end time would be like for Israel.[1]

The kingdom of God could not be suffering violent opposition as Jesus speaks if it had not taken on concrete, visible form in the words and deeds of Jesus. The very idea of the kingdom of God suffering from such violence is an astounding notion, foreign to the OT, the intertestamental literature, and the rest of the NT. The idea implies that what is in essence transcendent, eternal, invisible, and almighty - God's kingly rule - has somehow become immanent, temporal, visible, and vulnerable in Jesus' ministry. While the present kingdom appeared in a basically positive context in Matt 11:11b//Luke 7:28b, its context in Matt 11:12-13//Luke 16:16 is darker and more troubling.[2]

[1] Meier, A Marginal Jew II, pg. 401 [2] Meier, A Marginal Jew II, pg. 403

Factors & Forces

The real challenge in historical understanding is to figure our not only what happened, but also how it happened and why. The accurate logging and descriptions of the sources and all relevant data is crucial, of course, and is itself a fully worthy and demanding historical task. But the difficult intellectual tasks are to identify the forces and factors that prompted and shaped people and events, and to understand how these forces and factors operated.

Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, (Eerdmans, 2003) pg. 27

Where is God?

Where then is God in the War on Terror? Grieving and groaning within the pain and horror of his battered but still beautiful world. Stirring in the hearts of human beings the desire for a more credible structure of global justice and mercy. Burning into the imagination of human beings a hope that peace and reconciliation might eventually win out over suspicion and hatred, that the world may be put to rights and that we may anticipate that in the present time. My friends, we in our generation – and especially those of you in your teens and twenties – face a new world, full of possibilities for great good and great ill. I have argued this evening that the Christian gospel, revealing the mysterious God we discover in Jesus and the Spirit, offers a robust and rigorous framework for discerning where God is at work in the midst of the dangers and opportunities that confront us. All of us in our different callings are summoned to this task; some of you, perhaps, to make it your life’s work. Jesus is Lord. The Spirit is powerful. God is doing a new thing. Let’s get out there and join in.

N. T. Wright - Where is GOD in "the War on Terror"?

Propositions on Barth

Kim Fabricus sets out a beautiful propositional response to the great Rabbi of the Church, Karl Barth. He notes this delightful quote:

theology is the servant of the church, “called to perform the simple task of being the place where the church evaluates its own proclamation against its given norm, revelation” (John Webster).

I think this admirably captures a significant part of what it means to be an academic Christian. Be sure to read all the propositions and learn from a great teacher.

Quotes of the Day

The bible’s witness to its subject matter is always true; the interpreter’s witness to the text, by contrast, suffers from various forms of existential short-sightedness, confessional tunnel vision, and cultural myopia. Yet the vocation of the interpreter is to be nothing less than a witness to the truth of the text and hence to the subject matter that it attests...

To become a Christian is not to become a subscriber to a philosophy; it is to become an active participant in God’s triune mission to the world, following Jesus in the power of the Spirit to speak and act in ways that fit the new created order "in Christ."

Kevin Vanhoozer: “Lost In Interpretation? Truth, Scripture, and Hermeneutics” in Whatever Happened to Truth? ed. Andreas Kostenberger (Crossway, 2006) pg. 93-129

Quote of the Day

“There where other kingdoms. There was the kingdom of Herod, the kingdom of Caesar. Jesus spoke about the kingdom of God. And the kingdom of God is what life on earth would be like if God were king, and those other guys weren’t.”[1]

[1] Marcus Borg, from NBC Dateline and Jesus with Borg, Crossan, Evans and more...

Quote of the Day

John Dominic Crossan, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, DePaul University:

"The Kingdom of God is picking the one term that will make the Romans listen. They considered themselves the Kingdom of God. Theirs was the power and the glory, 25 legions or so, too. When Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God, he is saying as clearly as is possible in the 1st Century, ‘In your face, Caesar.’"

From the interesting NBC Dateline and Jesus with Borg, Crossan, Evans and more...

Colossian Hymn

Larry Hurtado briefly discusses the Colossian hymn/poem in his massive study: Lord Jesus Christ. Drawing on the work of Christian Stettler, Der Kolosserhymnus: Untersuchungen zu Form, traditionsgeschichtlichem Hintergrund und Aussage von Kol 1,15-20 WUNT 2/31 (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000) Hurtado comes to the following conclusions:

• On account of the self-contained nature of the passage, its compact phrasing, and its cadences (more evident in the Greek than in translation), 1:15-20 is widely thought to be a devotional poem or “hymn.”[1]
• Unity and coherence speak against adaptation of an existing hymn.
• Probably originated in the context of Christian worship.
• Conceptual categories most likely derived from Greek speaking Jewish circles [LXX].
• Stettler characterizes this as a “Christ-Psalm” lauding Jesus in the cadences of the Psalter.

What is most interesting to note is the lack of attention paid to προτοτοκος. Hurtado does not even entertain the thought that the mutation/explosion among early Christians as to the worship of Jesus, may have gone astray from monotheism to an adoptionistic Christology [a thought entertained by Dunn in Christology in the Making?]. Unless προτοτοκος is adequately dealt with, this conclusion remains a distinct possibility. Col 1:15-20 must be carefully exegeted to see if this conclusion is warranted. Failing that, an analysis of devotion to Jesus within a monotheistic framework remains incomplete.

I hope to address προτοτοκος in an upcoming blog...

Your thoughts?

[1] Hurdato, Lord Jesus Christ, pg. 505