In John Howard Yoder’s Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community before the Watching World (Herald Press, 1992), the first practice he describes he calls “Binding and Loosing”- taken the phrase from Matt 18:18:

Whatever you bind on earth is bound in heaven”

The particular practice that Yoder has in mind is the practice of “winning”, that is restoring, an offender back into fellowship through a restorative dialogue.

If your brother or sister sins, go and reprove that person when the two of you are alone. If he or she listens you have won your brother or sister (Matt 18:15).

The community’s decision after this conversational process is divinely sanctioned. “The community’s action is God’s action”, says Yoder.

Moral discernment and forgiveness is the task of the church and these are captured in the dual vocation of “binding and loosing”. Yoder summarizes:

1. Believing men and women are empowered to act in God’s name.
2. What the believers do, God is doing, in and through human action
3. God will not normally do this without human action
4. If we receive forgiveness, we must give it.
5. This dialogical reconciling process must come first. Only then must we turn to talk of the set of standards that his process enforces. Much Christian debate about moral issues makes the mistake of concentrating on what the standards ought to be rather than on how they are to be discerned and implemented (6).

Of this apostolic approach Yoder says:

It gives more authority to the church than does Rome, trusts more to the Holy Spirit than does Pentecostalism, has more respect for the individual than does liberal humanism, makes moral standards more binding than did Puritanism, and is more  open to the new situation that was what some called “the new morality” a quarter century ago. If practiced, it would radically restructure the life of churches (6-7).

Yoder concludes:

To be human is to be in conflict, to offend and to be offended. To be human in the light of the gospel is to face conflict in redemptive dialogue. When we do that, it is God who does it. When we do that, we demonstrate that to process conflict is not merely a palliative strategy for tolerable survival or psychic hygiene, but a mode of truth-finding and community-building. That is true in the gospel; it is also true, mutatis mutandis, in the world (13).

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I’m reading through Roland Allen’s famous book Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? which celebrates the centenary anniversary of its first edition next year I believe. In reading through the book, I noticed this cute quote on how some missionaries tend to attribute their deliberately spontaneous and unplanned missionary strategies to Paul himself, but without ever studying Paul’s actual missionary methods:

It is due to the fact that every unworthy, idle and slip-shod method of missionary work has been fathered upon the Apostle. Men have wandered over the world, ‘preaching the Word’, laying no solid foundations, establishing nothign permanent, leaving no really instructed society behind them, and have claimed St Paul’s authority for their absurdities. They have gone through the world, spending their time in denouncing ancient religions, in the name of St Paul. They have wandered from place to place without any plan or method of any kind, guided in their movements by straws and shadows, persuaded they were imitating St Paul on his journey from Antioch to Troas. Almost every intolerable abuse that has ever been known in the mission field has claimed some sentence or act of St Paul as its original. (p. 5).

Harsh … but very true!

I’ve noticed that when I post on Paul there are usually lots of comments. There are usually a few comments when I post on something to do with Gospels. But posts on the Catholic letters seem to generate very few comments.

Any way, on the plane ride home I read David Trobisch’s The First Editionof the New Testament, and I came across this quote about the canonical function of 2 Peter.

When 2 Peter is read as an integrated part of the Canonical Edition of the Christian Bible, the apparent cross-references to the collection [of] units are quite astonishing. The Old Testament is quoted abundantly. Biblical prophecy is explicitly addressed, its relevance for the present time of readers id demonstrated, and it is related to a theology of divine inspiration formulated in a manner applied to other New Testament writers as well. The letter clearly refers to the canonical Gospel collection by pointing to John (Jn 21), Mark, and the synoptic account of the Transfiguration. The references to 1 Peter and Jude serve as links to the Praxapostolos. It presupposes that the readers have access to a comprehensive collection of Paul’s letters. In addition to these literary links, the treatment of Peter and Paul as equals is another trait 2 Peter shares with the editorial interest of the Canonical Edition. (David Trobisch, The First Edition of the New Testament, 95).

I doubt Trobisch’s main contention that there was a single archtype “edition” of the NT that became exemplary for later compilations of the NT writings. Most of the inner-canonical unities that he finds look like incidental post-compilation observations, rather than deliberate editorial creations by the formulators of the first New Testament collection.  That said, I think that Trobisch does show how 2 Peter gives us a virtual precis of the NT itself with interwoven OT themes, references to synoptic material, veneration of Paul’s letter collection, and incorporation of Jude. Interesting stuff.

Although I only ever get cited for my Paul stuff, I’m actually a Gospels specialist, and I think my best book to date is my little volume Are You the One Who is to Come? The Historical Jesus and the Messianic Question. Any way, Lawrence Garcia reviews the book over at The Pangea Blog.

Here is what I picked up, mostly for free, at SBL this year in San Francisco.

Advent begins this Sunday, Nov 27th. I’ve never celebrated Advent, so this is a first for me. A few weeks back I asked for help in finding family devotions for the Advent season. I had a good number of helpful suggestions; thanks to all who chimed in.

I have just completed reading Robert Webber’s chapter on Advent in his book Ancient-Future Time and here’s what I learned about the month long celebration.

• Advent is a time to prepare for the coming of the Messiah.
• The Messiah’s coming is understood in three different senses: (1) His coming to earth in Bethlehem, (3) His second-coming at the consummation of God’s purposes and (3) His coming in the present moment into my life.
• The coming of Messiah to me in this moment is predicated on repentance.
• Repentance is not something I can take, but it must be given me by God.
• Isaiah is the prophet of Advent because in his life and prophetic word he represented the hope of Advent.
• John the Baptist and Mary, Jesus mother, reveal Advent spirituality: the former by his single-minded mission and self-giving love, the latter by her willingness to yield her life to God’s will.
• The first candle of Advent is called “promise”.

Here’s how Webber summarizes the emphasis and challenge of Advent:

Emphasis. Readiness for the coming of Christ at the end of history and at Bethlehem (the four Sundays before Christmas day).

Spiritual Challenge. Repent and be ready for the second coming of Christ. Allow all eager longing for the coming of Messiah to be birthed in your heart.

The Prayer for the first Advent Sunday from the Book of Common Prayer:

Almighty God, give all of us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with the and the Holy Spirit, on God, now and for ever. Amen.

A couple weeks ago, Michael wrote a brief post noting the new book by Bruce Longenecker called Remember the Poor: Paul, Poverty and the Greco-Roman World. I picked a copy up at SBL and began reading it with great interest. This topic is important to me and very timely given the discussions being had on the mission of the church in response to Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert. One of the primary observations they and others of their ilk make is the lack of concern about issues of justice in Paul’s apostolic work. However,

If Bruce Longenecker is correct, then the thesis of the DeYoung and Gilbert book is baseless.

I can’t commend this book enough. It is a scholarly, yet accessible treatment of Paul’s views and practice of mercy among the urban poor. I hope that DeYoung and Gilbert, and others of like mind, will order this book immediately and read it carefully.

Here’s the most important insight the book makes that truly undermines a narrow understanding of the gospel and the mission of the church that does not include justice and acts of mercy: The Jewish social space into which Paul’s churches were born and continued to exist.

The Jewish context of the churches Paul and his partners founded in the Greco-Roman world should inform how we understand the work of the churches Paul left behind. Essential to the theological traditions of ancient Judaism and the Jesus-movement, was the concern for the poor. Jewish diaspora communities were active in charity as an essential expression of their worship of God and there is ample evidence in the Epistle of James to show the essential place of caring for the poor in the religion of early Christianity (Jam 1:27).

We need to show more sophistication in handling of the Pauline evidence. In my experience, one regularly omitted element of this is the recognition that Paul was not founding a new religion, but as the envoy of Israel’s Messiah, he was extending the promises of Abraham, Israel’s father, to the nations. The book of Acts clearly puts Paul’s work within the Jewish social space of the Greco-Roman world (cf. Acts 18:14-16). This should be our frame of reference when attempting to discern the apostolic communities both past and present.

It was through the vehicle of the gentile-friendly wing of the Jesus-movement (in which Paul was a key and instrumental player) that Judaism’s concern for the poor spread throughout the cultures of the ancient world, giving visibility to the poor in an unprecedented fashion. In that sense, the preceding chapters recount on crucial episode in the story of how Judaism bequeathed to the world a concern for the economically poor by way of the early Jesus-movement – an episode that features the controversial figure Paul. He imagined urban Jesus-groups to be miniature oases of eschatological refreshment amid the harsh economic conditions of the Greco-Roman world (300).

Remember the poor (Gal 2:10)!

The post is the full review of  What Is the Mission of the Church?: Making Sense of Social Justice, Shalom, and the Great Commission by Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert.

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