Who can name the author of this quote?

The Christian church has off and on, sufficiently or insufficiently been aware of that [the church's continuity with Israel]. Sometimes she has regularly related the New Testament to the Old, but at other times (unfortunately, more often) she has read the New separate from the Old. In some respects she is intensely concerned with the Old Testament; think of the important place Israel has in her instruction or the Psalms in her liturgy. In other respects she seems to forget Israel almost completely and not need her at all. The latter is especially the case in the creedal statements and systematic theology handbooks. An example is the structure of the Apostles’ Creed: the confession jumps directly from Creator to Christ. This happens especially with an unhistorically veritical trinitarian mode of thinking; beginning with the Father who is the creator, one continues with the Son who is the redeemer. In the study of the faith this can never be consistently maintained, for in between creation and redemption one must assume the fact of sin. But usually one proceeds then directly from the doctrine of sin to Christology. There is hardly room and interest for God’s history with Israel. The impression is given that after a long period of divine inactivity, Jesus drops out of heaven.

After the 9/11 anniversary and teaching about the doctrine of sin, I’ve been thinking about God and evil. The truth is that much Christian theology is really an attempt at theodicy (i.e., explaining the compatibility of the co-existence of an all-good and all-powerful God with evil and suffering in our world). Romans to Revelation deal with this issue in the New Testament – Christians take evil very seriously. And constructing a theodicy is an odyssey in philosophical theology as well as an existential and pastoral imperative. However, I think it is possible, philosophically speaking, to cut down the logical problem of evil at the knees. It is possible to demonstrate that the argument from evil presupposes precisely what it intends to refute. In order to believe that “evil” exists, one needs an absolute standard by which evil is judged to be. Or else we are simply left with competing views and voices about who or what is evil. The argument from evil is only valid if we assume that evil is an objective moral entity, yet we can only have objective moral values if there is an absolute moral law and perhaps a law-giver in the first place (i.e., the moral argument for God’s existence a la C.S. Lewis and C. Stephen Evans). In the absence of God, pushing an old lady in front of a bus is as equally meaningless as helping her walk across the street. We can pretend or decide that one is wrong, but this is no more than an opinion that has no power of value beyond the subscription of a collective will. After all, on what basis or upon what authority does one describe one deed as “good” and another deed as “evil”? In the absence of God, ethics is reduced aesthetics. To say that killing old ladies is wrong describes a certain sociological position that ascribes relative value to human life, but it is not scientifically prescriptive. As David Hume noted, you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is”. Good and evil are prescribed values, not detectable natural qualities. To say that “killing old ladies is wrong” has no more truth value than saying, “I don’t like cabbage flavored ice cream”. Killing a human being is a morally meaningless act. We can ascribe meaning to it if we wish, but this is nothing more than a language-game, a sociological construct, with no objective or scientific quality. Atheist philosophers from Friedrich Nietzsche to J.L. Mackie were right: atheism entails nihilism, so let’s try to make the best of it. Jeffery B. Russell comments: “The argument from evil, if it is valid, destroys the notion of all order and all cosmic principles, not just the one we call God. By destroying order and principle it renders all value judgments completely subjective … If no order or purpose exists, then all human values and aspirations are absurd, and consequently good and evil are only subjective constructs. But since evil then cannot exist objectively, it cannot be adduced against the existence of God.”

By the end of chapter 8 in Scot McKnight’s new book The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited, unless you’re not paying attention, you have no doubt what is his argument: The gospel is the Story of Jesus as the completion of the Story of Israel.

Each of these four witnesses [apostolic gospel tradition, the gospel in the four Gospels, the gospel of Jesus, and the sermons in Acts] tell us the same thing about the gospel. It is the Story of Israel that comes to its completion in the Story of Jesus, who is Messiah of Israel, Lord over all, and the Davidic Savior. There is one and only one gospel, and it was preached by Jesus, by Paul, and by Peter. To gospel is to tell that story about Jesus. Salvation flows from that sotry, but the story is both bigger than and framed differently from the Plan of Salvation approach to the gospel. The apostles were the original evangelicals (131).

The gospel according to Scot’s reading is a Story which has a beginning, middle and end. One more quote:

This gospel culture does not displace salvation but puts salvation in the context of a gospel story that has a beginning (in creation and covenant with Israel), a middle (David), and a resolution (Jesus and final redemption) (131).

The last two chapters of the book address the question of evangelism and will allow us to see how Scot envisages contemporary proclamation of the gospel.  Before we look at those pragmatic questions what should be said of his thesis? How do we assess Scot’s view?

Is the NT gospel more than good news about individual salvation from sin? Is there a difference between the Plan of Salvation and the Method of Persuasion and the gospel?

Christian Smith’s new book The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture is nothing short of a frontal assault on the way we as Evangelicals read the Bible. I’ve been reading it in the evenings before bed the last couple of nights (I’m to ch 3) and Smith’s thesis is haunting me.

Biblicism is that approach to the Bible that posits theological assumptions about its nature, assumptions such as verbal and plenary inspiration, the perspicuity of Scripture, the internal harmony, the universal applicability, and the Bible is a compendium of divine teachings on a limitless range of subjects. The approach is most clearly illustrated, according to Smith, by Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology.

Have you read the book yet?

[Read more...]

Over at Spiegel on-line is an interesting interview in two parts (part 1, part 2) with Hans Kung on the current and future state of the Catholic Church. On the need for the reformation of the church, Kung states: “After 500 years, we are surprised that the popes and bishops of the day did not realize that a reform was necessary. Luther didn’t want to divide the Church, but the pope and the bishops were blind. It seems that a similar situation applies today”.

Scot McKnight’s central thesis in his new book The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited is that the gospel is “declaring the Story of Israel as resolved in the Story of Jesus”. In chapter 6, his thesis is the “the Gospels are the gospel” and the Gospels are neither shaped in the form of the Plan of Salvation nor do they offer a Method of Persuasion. The Gospels “the deeds of the Messiah Jesus” to use the words of John Dickson.

Scot points to the curious comment of Jesus recorded by Mark. In recounting the story of the anointing of Jesus by a nameless woman with extravagant perfume. Although being chastised by the disciples for neglecting to us the commodity for the poor, Jesus commends her and tells those around “wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her” (Mark 14:9). Scot muses over the fact that many of his students who know the gospel well have never heard of her. To him, this fact reflects a situation in which “the gospel and the four Gospels are not connected tightly enough” (91).

Question: do you think the shape of the Gospels should determine the shape of our gospeling?

J. Todd Billings
The Word of God for the People of God: An Entryway to the Theological Interpretation of Scripture
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010.
Available at Amazon.com

Theological interpretation is all the rage at the moment. One good port of entry into the discussion about what is theological interpretation is Todd Billing’s book The Word of God for the People of God. The objective of the book is to introduce readers to the practice of interpreting Scripture in the context of the triune activity of God, who uses Scripture to shape the church into Christ’s image by the power of the Spirit. According to Billings: “In light of the rule of faith, Christian scriptural interpretation takes place on the path of Jesus Christ, empowered by the Spirit to transform God’s people into Christ’s image, anticipating a transformative vision of the triune God” (p. xiv) and “Scripture is the Spirit’s instrument by which the living Christ speaks words of power to God’s people, bringing life where there is death and hope where there is despair” (p. xvii). It has some good chapters, especially chapter 2 on, “Learning to Read Scripture Closely,” which engages general hermeneutics and biblical criticism. He concludes in that chapter:

In the end, the renewal of theological interpretation means fusing together what modernity has torn apart: an attentiveness to creeds and hymns in interpreting Scripture, as well as behind-the-text issues; a receptivity to the challenging address of the Spirit through Scripture, and a facility in historical and linguistic analysis; the importance of tradition in reading Scripture, and the importance of critical inquiry. Both tradition and critical inquiry are important dimensions of a larger drama in which the Spirit is addressing God’s people through Scripture, calling us to stop attempting to control Scripture, and to receptively respond to God’s call through Scripture to enter into the Spirit’s work of making all things new in Jesus Christ” (p. 67).

Luke reports that during Paul’s time in Thessalonica, local Jews rounded up an unruly mob and seized Paul’s host, Jason and some other believers, and dragged them before a crowd on the grounds that:

These men who have caused trouble all over the world have now come here, and Jason has welcomed them into his house. They are all defying Caesar’s decrees, saying that there is another king, one called Jesus. (Act 17:6-7 NIV).

Indeed, the political problem in Acts’ version of the events in Thessalonica is unambiguous: there is a rival King. Lest there remain any doubt, Luke’s careful use of heteros should remove it. It the eyes of its opponents, Christian proclamation positions a King inescapably over against Caesar. There is another King. Precisely in such counter-claims, argue the opponents, do the Christians run afoul of the dogmata Kaisaros. Surely this is really the only sensible way to take the Greek sentence: the practice against the decrees of Caesar is saying that there is a contender for the imperial throne, namely, Jesus.