Euangelion

My good friend and exegetical provocateur, Peter Enns, asks the question Would Paul Have Made a Good Evangelical? He answers, “No,” because Paul understood and used the Old Testament very different to the way that many evangelicals use and understand it.

According to Enns, the reasons why Paul would not find a welcome from many evangelical seminaries and Bible studies is because:

For Evangelicals, the Old Testament leads to the Gospel story. For Paul, the Old Testament is transformed by the Gospel.

For Evangelicals, the Old Testament, read pretty much at face value, anticipates Jesus. For Paul, the Old Testament is reshaped in order to conform to Jesus.

For Evangelicals, the Bible is God’s final authority. For Paul, Jesus is the final authority to which the Bible must bend.

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OBJECTIONS TO SAME SEX MARRIAGE

Okay, no surprises, I’m not a fan of gay marriage. I have two non-theological arguments against it:

(1) It reduces marriage to a legal fiction. Marriage has traditionally or historically been a union between man and woman for the purpose of preventing promiscuity and promoting procreation and life-long partnership. Marriage creates healthy families and healthy families creates healthy societies. Philosophers from Aristotle to Confucius have recognized the importance of the marriage-family bond for society. Same-sex marriage, however, supposes that marriage is simply a legal recognition of a citizen’s preferred relationship status, and marriage has no function, goal, or value for the state; marriage is something that just happens, and the state has no preferred policy whether marriages take place or who they take place among. Counter-response: Yes, indeed, marriage is nothing more than a legal contract; it has no inherent moral quality, it is no different from a business contract or a real estate lease. Thus govt. cannot prescribe some relationships to be more valid or more valuable than others (i.e., it cannot say that marriage is better than de facto relationships without prejudice to the latter) nor can it descriminate against type of relationships.  Counter-counter response: Exactly my point. This debate is not about who I chose to love, this debate is about the nature and function of marriage in our society. I concede that if one abandons the Christian/historical definition of marriage, then you can redefine it how you like. We just need clarification on whether this abandonment is a conscious departure from the Christian heritage and are you prepared for the consequences. [Read more...]

For the smart phone users out there (non-iPhone), Danny Zacharias’ useful app ParseGreek is now available on Android.

See Google Play for the details.

Things to click around the blogosophere:

Peter Leithart has much to say on Protestantism and Catholicism, esp. his Too catholic to be Catholic and the respond here.

Over at TGC, Tim Keller endorses Simon Gathercole’s essay on the Kingdom of God. And Justin Taylor promises us a book that will hopefully solve the dispensational vs. covenantal debate.

Tim Gombis makes the case against having lap tops in class (my students would riot if I ordered this).

Celucien Joseph also joins the crew at Rhetoric, Race, and Religion.

A 2,700 year old seal that has the name “Bethlehem” was found recently by Israeli archaeologists and announced today.

The tiny clay seal’s existence and age provide vivid evidence that Bethlehem was not just the name of a fabled biblical town, but also a bustling place of trade linked to the nearby city of Jerusalem, archaeologists said.

Source: ABC News

Famous quote from Oscar Cullmann:

“the f0untainhead of all false biblical interpretation and of all heresy is invariably the isolation and the absolutising of one single passage.” (Oscar Cullmann, The State in the New Testament, 47).

James K. A. Smith of Calvin College (who is actually in Australia right now to deliver the New College Lectures on “Imagining the Kingdom: On Christian Discipleship and Action”) has a provocative article in Calvin Theological Journal entitled, “Reforming Public Theology: Two Kingdoms or Two Cities.” You know it’s a provocative article because it commences with the words, “Based on voices emerging from some corners of the Reformed tradition, you would think that the future of Calvinism is Lutheran. At just the moment that neo-Calvinism has begun to be absorbed by wider evangelicalism and has become the de facto paradigm for Christian higher education in North America, scholars such as D.G. Hart, Michael Horton, and David Vandrunen argue that the neo-Calvinists are not really Calvinists. Curiously, the basis for this claim is the neo-Calvinist rejection of the Lutheran model of two kingdoms that they see in Calvin and ‘the earlier Reformed tradition.’” Whoa, okay, you have my attention! A very interesting read.

The proverbial late night college dorm room question, “Could Jesus have sinned?” (the question of Jesus’ impeccability), is one that I recently came across in a section of theology written by the preeminent Orthodox theologian Bishop Kallistos Ware of Oxford, who by the way gave lectures at North Park last year. In an essay entitled “Salvation and Theosis in Orthodox Theology” Bishop Ware writes

How far was Christ subject to temptation? The testimony of Scripture is explicit: ‘in every respect as we are, only without sinning’ (Heb. 4:15). A human will and human freedom imply liability to human temptation. We are to affirm of the incarnate Christ, not that he was incapable of sinning, but that he was capable of not sinning; not non posse peccare, but posse non peccare. His sinlessness was moral, not ontological; as regards his humanity, he was sinless by virtue of his will, not of his nature. Sin was a real possibility for him as man.

I find Ware’s remarks, particularly his preference for the idea of “capable of not sinning” over “incapable of sinning”, a useful statement on the matter that well reflects the New Testament witness to Christ’s humanity.