2015-06-15T19:09:36-04:00

arminius

BEN: Would it be correct to say that Arminius rejects Calvin’s strong distinction between the secret decrees and will of God and the revealed will of God, which allowed for the possibility that God’s revealed will might appear to contradict his secret or hidden will (e.g. it might appear from Scripture that God desires for none to perish and all to be saved, but in fact in his secret will and decrees God predetermined some to be reprobated)? In other words, because of Arminius’ belief in the ‘simplicity’ and consistency of God’s nature, there could not be even an apparent contradiction between his revealed will and any other hidden will God might have?

KEITH: That’s correct. Arminius did acknowledge a distinction between, on the one hand, God’s partly revealed will (of God’s pleasure), that is, what God wills to do himself, and, on the other hand, the revealed will (of the sign), what God intends for the creature to do. With regard to the secret will of God’s pleasure, there are some matters that are revealed, and others that are hidden from the human mind and remain mysterious. But, for Arminius, God’s good pleasure with regard to salvation is one of those matters that has been clearly revealed—namely, he wants all to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. In comparison with his Reformed contemporaries, Arminius is less willing to ascribe to mystery the salvific intent of God. And whatever those mysteries may be that certainly do remain in God’s hidden will, they cannot be contrary to God’s supreme goodness and express desire to save all, which desire is his good pleasure (beneplacitum).

BEN: One of the more interesting aspects of Arminius’ thought has to do with what he thinks the image of God in human beings entails. Explain to us what he means by the natural as opposed to the supernatural aspects of the ‘image’ (p. 148). Does he really think that there are humans without any knowledge of God, an idea which would seem to be ruled out by Rom. 1.18-32?

KEITH: Arminius definitely would agree with an innate knowledge of God’s existence that is consistent both with Romans 1 and with Calvin’s sensus divinitatis. In fact, in one of his disputations, Arminius offers ten axioms or arguments that demonstrate God’s existence.

The image of God includes aspects that are essential or natural to human nature, such as the faculties of the soul, especially the human intellect, will, and affections. The supernatural, or accidental (that is, non-essential), qualities of the image include righteousness and holiness. In this context, “knowledge of God” means the saving knowledge of God, more than simply an awareness of his existence. Although the whole image was negatively affected by the fall, these supernatural aspects of the image were lost in the fall, to be regained through regeneration by the Holy Spirit. If it helps, think of Arminius’ distinction between the natural and supernatural aspects of the image as analogous to the patristic (Irenaean) distinction between the image and likeness of God. The likeness was lost and needs restoration.

2015-06-14T16:51:24-04:00

olsen

BEN: When the Gospel of Matthew presents us with Jesus saying that he is submitting to baptism to ‘fulfill all righteousness’ he is of course talking about the righteousness that comes from obedience to the Mosaic Law. He is not talking about his righteousness acting as a substitute for his later disciples righteousness in the new covenant. Indeed, he is talking about the fulfilling of the Mosaic Law because Israel didn’t. In other words, this has little or nothing to do with what Paul is talking about in Romans. Christ’s obedience, even unto death on the cross pays the price for all sins, including the failures of Israel to fulfill the Mosaic Law. To suggest that Christ’s obedient life or his obedience to the Mosaic Law is somehow a substitute for the obedience of Christ’s followers is simply not to be found in the NT. It’s an idea even the Puritans found problematic, and rightly so. 2 Cor. 5.21 says that we ‘become the righteousness of God in or through him’. This cannot merely be about having right standing with God (see my Corinthians commentary).

ROGER: But it can include having a right standing with God. I am not settled in my own mind about the “justification controversy.” I find good reasons for both the classical Lutheran-Protestant view and N. T. Wright’s thesis. In the end, I don’t think it matters very much. What we need is forgiveness and reconciliation with God. That we have through Christ by faith in him.

BEN: Roger I think you do an excellent job of demonstrating that Arminians don’t simply subscribe to a governmental theory of the atonement. Indeed, many Arminian theologians including Arminius and Wesley strongly emphasized the penal substitutionary theory, as do various modern Methodist theologians (including myself). I wonder if you would like to address one of the major objections to Arminians embracing the penal substitutionary theory, and at the same time arguing that the atoning death of Jesus covers the sins of all the world. According to Calvinist objectors, this leads to the logical conclusion of universal salvation. I must say I find that odd. Christ’s death is sufficient for all, but only efficient for those who accept the benefits of it through faith. I like to use the example of a large deposit in the bank. Suppose I deposited a million dollars in a bank account for you. It’s there, it is accruing interest, and so on. But suppose I never told you which bank it was in, and you never drew on the account. Would you get any benefit from it? Absolutely not, even though it was meant for you. The fact that the depositor knows it is there is of no help unless the beneficiary also knows it and draws on the account. At the end of the day salvation involve the restoration of a personal love relationship, and as such it involves two parties participating, not on anything like equal terms, but nonetheless two parties participating freely. Why do you think it is that so many Calvinists just haven’t spent the time to figure out what real Arminian theologians have said about things like penal substitutionary atonement? Why is it that everyone knows about Calvin and Barth etc. but most Calvinists I know have never heard of, much less read Watson’s Institutes, or even Oden? I find this very puzzling, and frustrating.
ROGER: I also find that puzzling and frustrating. Even now, long after the publication of Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities many Reformed critics of Arminianism continue to promote the myths I dispelled there. I agree that the argument that universal atonement requires universal salvation is fallacious. Your illustration shows that. However, I don’t personally find anything objectionable in the governmental theory rightly understood. It’s also an objective and even substitutionary theory of the atonement. It’s usually misrepresented by critics (e.g., as “merely educational”).

Thanks for a good dialogue on important matters,

Grace and peace,

ROGER: And also to you!

2015-06-14T16:51:44-04:00

olsen

BEN: Your discussion of open theism is interesting, and I wonder if since your book was published (2006), you’ve settled the matter in your mind. For my part, I have rejected open theism. I think there is a way around the paradox. Suppose God has what I will call teleological knowledge of all things both possible and real. To put it another way, suppose all God’s knowledge of things that do or may happen in space in time is a form of hindsight. Now no one would argue that hindsight knowledge determines anything or makes anything possible or impossible. It is simply a form of knowledge of what has or hasn’t happened. And thus in a sense it is also a knowledge of possible things that, in the end, did not happen. There has always been a problem with connecting God’s knowledge with God’s destining of things even for Calvinists for Rom. 9 makes perfectly clear that God knew in advance about some things, including evil, but did not cause it to happen. He foreknew Esau, for example but did not choose him or destine him to be that way. My point would be that Paul views God’s knowledge as eschatological character seeing all things from the end backwards. While in some cases it may appear to timed beings like us as ‘fore-knowledge’ strictly speaking God just knows it as if he were looking back on it all. Does this help?

ROGER: It doesn’t help me because I have settled in my own mind that God is temporal with us (by his own self-limiting decision and action). I was instantly persuaded by Nicholas Wolterstorff’s excellent essay “God Everlasting” (which has been published in several collections of his and others’ essay). And I see nothing in the biblical narrative that implies a “timeless” God (or God “above time”). I think the Boethian view of God’s eternity is philosophical, not biblical. IF God exists above or outside of time (or ahead of time) I don’t know how to talk about that. So, for me, God is “in time” with us (as affirmed by many theologians including Thomas Torrance in Space, Time and Incarnation and Dallas Willard in The Divine Conspiracy). However, I have NOT settled in my mind whether God knows the future exhaustively and infallibly as already settled or not. In other words, I am not an open theist but remain “open to open theism.”

BEN: Your next to last chapter is on justification by grace through faith. Let’s talk about it for a bit. I certainly agree that I know of no Arminian theologian or exegete who would not agree that Christ’s death on the cross and resurrection is the very basis of our salvation including our right standing with God, and whatever righteousness or sanctification the Holy Spirit works in us. There is more spectrum of opinions about the language of ‘imputation’ which actually is not used in the Scriptures in regard to this matter. Instead there is the language of ‘reckoning’ which is not the same thing, and in particular of Abraham’s faith being reckoned to him for righteousness (with no mention of Christ’s own righteousness in the discussion). Reckoning is business language and it is accompanied by the language of credits and debits, hence ‘credited to him for righteousness’. The real problem lies with the translation of dikaiosune. This word is not, in the first instance, a mere legal or forensic term. It just isn’t. It isn’t referring to a legal fiction. The language is used in a wide variety of contexts and when it occurs in the phrase ‘the righteousness of God’ (Rom. 1.16-17) it clearly does not refer to right-standing with God as a legal declaration. When Paul talks about a legal declaration he speaks of pardon. (see my Romans commentary on various of these matters). The long and short of it is that Phil. 3.7-11 is the really crucial text in this discussion. Paul says that he wants a righteousness that is not his own that would come from obedience to the Mosaic Law, but rather a righteousness that comes through the faithfulness of Christ (i.e. his faithfulness unto death on the cross), which is a righteousness that comes from God that is based on (epi with the dative case of the noun) faith’. This I think deals with the matter directly. Christ’s death is the means through which this righteousness not based in Mosaic law-keeping comes to the believer, but it comes FROM God. Again, this does not involve imputation it involves divine intervention that results in the righteousness of the believer in some sense. In other words we are talking about an actual righteousness, not merely a being reckoned as righteous because of what Christ has done. This actual righteousness not only sets right the believer in his relationship with God, but it begins the process of our being conformed to the image of Christ and so becoming actually righteous, sanctified etc. In part this whole discussion was messed up because of Calvin’s legal background and his insistence on the use of legal even Latin terms (iustitia) to explain what Paul was talking about. In Romans Paul rings the changes on a variety of terms that have a dikaio—root– ‘right’ righteous’ the verbal form ‘to righteous’ someone, righteousness , and so on, drawing on Habbakuk—‘the righteous from faith shall live’ which in its OT context clearly refers to someone who is actually righteous. Is this at variance with the Augustinian and later Lutheran and Calvinistic ways of reading Paul? Yes it is to varying extents, but it is certainly more faithful to what Paul a former Pharisaic Jew meant by his language addressing his mostly Gentile converts in Rome and Philippi. I take it as a fundamental Protestant principle that adherence to what the Bible says is the primary goal, and adherence to some form of Reformation theology only a secondary goal, which is pursued in so far as that theology conforms to the Biblical witness. If I am right or mostly right about the above, I don’t think it changes the notion that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone, but what it changes is the business about whether God expects actual righteousness from the believer and is working to that end from the beginning of salvation. In other words, right standing with God the new birth, sanctification glorification are all part of the process of conforming the believer to the image of Christ so that we reflect his character. In some ways, I think this is closer to what some Catholics have said about the matter, not in terms of meritorious works righteousness generated by us being substituted for alien righteousness, but rather in terms of God conveying his character to us. What do you think? (N.B. in regard to Wesley it seems clear enough to me your analysis of his take on justification is basically right. What Wesley was arguing against was ‘replacement righteousness’ the notion that once righteousness is imputed to the believer, then they don’t need to go on and be actually righteous. This idea made Wesley freak out, and so sometimes he is a critique of certain forms of the imputed righteousness argument).

ROGER: I am personally satisfied with viewing justification as pardon and reconciliation. That’s all that really matters. However, Arminius clearly believed in and affirmed the Reformed doctrine of justification as the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. I have demonstrated that in the chapter to which you refer. I simply cannot understand why Reformed critics continue to insist that Arminius’s doctrine of justification was “more Catholic” than Reformed. They cannot be reading Arminius himself!

2015-06-14T16:52:40-04:00

olsen

BEN: On p. 123 you say that sin does not thwart the will of God. I think this is a mistake. Surely any time evil or sin happens it goes against the will of God of a good God. I tend to find the phrase ‘permissive will’ something of an oxymoron—willing something is not merely allowing something it seems to me. If you will it, you want it to happen, even if reluctantly. In particular, if God really desires that all be saved, and has made available salvation for all, then surely that is in accord with God’s will! That being so, when creatures reject God’s salvation they are violating the will of God, at least for them! I’m not sure that it helps much to distinguish between the antecedent will of God and God’s revealed will, unless you are willing to put yourself in the same conundrum of contradiction as the Calvinists when they say God’s secret will can differ (or even appear to contradict) his revealed will. How do you respond?

ROGER: I prefer the terms “antecedent will” and “consequent will” of God. Sin and evil are against the antecedent will of God but not the consequent will of God. They thwart the antecedent will of God—what God ideally wished would be the case. But only because God permits that.

BEN: The Arminian concept of providence raises a variety of questions in a modern world where Holocausts happen and we have nuclear weapons. It’s really hard to argue that God allows things like the Holocaust in order to bring a great good out of it. There was just nothing good about it, nor has much good come from it— only trials, recriminations etc. What strikes me is that when you attend closely to “God works all things together for good for those who love God” this does not suggest he does such things for just anyone! I have a hard time swallowing ‘God allows evil that clears the way for a great good’ when so often even in our lifetime that doesn’t seem to be the case. How would you respond?

ROGER: Oh, I completely agree with that. Nothing justifies the Holocaust except that God chooses to let us have our own way. Again, I strongly recommend Greg Boyd’s book Is God to Blame? as the best guess at why these things happen in God’s world.

BEN: Let’s talk for a minute about irresistible and resistible grace. Wesley allowed that while most of the time God’s grace is resistible, that nonetheless sometimes it is not. Frankly in a fallen world, there are surely times when divine intervention involves thwarting evil wills, rather than respecting their libertarian freedom. Even when we are talking about some good purpose willed by a human being, sometimes God thwarts it. I’m thinking for example of Paul in Acts when we are told the Holy Spirit wouldn’t allow him to go on to Bithynia. In other words, what would be the problem with admitting as an Arminian that sometimes God’s grace is irresistible, and sometimes God’s divine intervention violates our free will? Does it have to be all one way or the other? If I am a drowning man and am desperately trying to swim to a particular shore with all my will and might, but the life guard knows I won’t make it so he drags me against my will to another spot and pulls me out of the water, I should just thank him for violating my will! I suspect God does operate that way sometimes, and not just by gentle persuasion. Indeed, I think we can find quite a few examples to demonstrate the point from Scripture.

ROGER: Well, as I understand the Arminian concept of resistible grace it is simply that God never saves anyone (in the sense of justification and regeneration) without their consent. It doesn’t mean God never graciously intervenes on people’s behalf with temporal blessings and rescues.

2015-04-14T15:06:50-04:00

a.d

The third episode of A.D. the Bible Continues deals with the period between the Ascension and Pentecost, and then a bit beyond that into Acts 5. The centerpiece of this episode is of course the Pentecost event itself, which as it were is the bright foreground of the story, with the dark clouds of Roman and priestly machinations being the frame or backdrop of the story. For my money there is too much of the latter, including too much bloodshed, and too little focus on the former. One nice aspect of this episode however is the introduction of the relationship of Peter to his daughter Maya, which of course is fiction but presents us with another side of Peter as a married man (his wife is said to be dead), with at least one child. The violence and the dramatic music ratchet up the tension in the tale, while the introduction of Maya ratchets up the pathos, as Peter’s daughter follows him to dangerous Jerusalem.

Part of the goal of this series is of course to put human flesh on the bare bones narratives in Acts, but my principle would be that the fleshing out needs to comport with the bones which provide the structural outline on which the embellishment must either hang properly like true flesh or create a distortion. What we want with the ‘fleshing out’ is verisimilitude not plastic surgery that distorts. One way the narrative is woven together is by having a centurion named Cornelius be Pilate’s right hand man. Stay tuned to see if he is the same Cornelius that shows up in Acts 10 In the case of Peter’s marital state, we do know that Peter was married, and 1 Cor. 9.5 suggests his wife was in fact still alive in the A.D. 50s when Paul wrote 1 Corinthians. Nevertheless, the character of Maya is a believable one and it adds a nice dimension to the depiction of Peter.

The Pentecost event is depicted in dramatic fashion, in the upper room but not thereafter, and one thing one can count on Burnett and Downey not to do is ignore or play down the miraculous. That’s the good news.

What’s missing in this episode? Unfortunately, we do not have the important story about the Ascension of Jesus, either in its Lk. 24 version or in its Acts 1 version, nor do we have the story of the filling up of the Twelve either. What we do have is a focus on Peter and John, and how they end up incarcerated after a beating. We could have used a good deal more focus on the Pentecost sermon of Peter and the response of the people to it, but this is mostly omitted by the screenplay writer in order to further dwell on Pilate and his brutality and Caiaphas and his machinations.

In terms of balance it would have been better to focus more on the bright foreground, and less on the dark rumblings in the background. There is however the interesting tidbit about the trial before the Sanhedrin of Jesus transpiring at night, and therefore being possibly illegal. We also continue to have the story of the Zealots, who in this episode are looking for an opportunity to do away with Pilate. In fact we do not know that Pilate was present for the feast of Pentecost in A.D. 30, much less that he invaded the sanctity of the Jewish temple. This would for sure have made the Zealots burn with rage, but in fact there is no basis for this conjecture at this point. Pilate made his mistakes in regard to the Temple much earlier in his reign in Judaea when he tried to introduce the Roman eagle standards into the temple precincts. He appears to have learned from these earlier mistakes by the time we get to A.D. 30. Notice how in the TV show the Zealots connect Pilate going into the Temple with ‘the abomination that makes desolate’ (a probable reference at least in Daniel to Antiochus Epiphanes and his profaning the temple in Jerusalem).

We are also introduced in this episode to Herod Antipas and his wife Herodias (complete with dancing girls), who did come to the earlier Passover feast, and may have come from Galilee for the Pentecost feast as well. What is not likely correct is the notion that Herod, the ruler of Galilee would have seen himself as the warden and guardian of the Temple! Not when he was a ruler in a non-Roman territory rather than in the province of Judaea.

One of the most interesting features of this episode is that while the miracle of Pentecost is played up, by contrast the miracle of healing the lame man seems very mundane and tame (Acts 3.1-10). That’s o.k. We can expect more miracles as the story goes along. Also interesting is the fact that the lame man is played by the same person who accused Jesus of having demons in the excellent Gospel of John film. I like him better as the lame man. Stay tuned for more revelation and surprises.

2015-03-29T15:02:07-04:00

ice

I grow weary of the nonsense that has as its lead lament ‘there is no Trinity in the NT’. Actually there is. There is plenty on the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit being part of the divine identity in the NT, and The Shadow of the Almighty demonstrates this. I wrote this with my friend and fellow Tar Heel and former Asbury student, Laura Michaels Ice. One of my more interesting theology books is the one entitled The Problem with Evangelical Theology. This book points out that among the various Evangelical theologies, all of them share one significant flaw— when they try to say something distinctive that varies from general orthodoxy on any given subject, it turns out to have poor or no proper exegetical support or involves a misreading of the Bible in various ways. problem

If you are interested in a careful study of the Christologies we find in the various books of the NT, then The Many Faces of the Christ is the book for you.
41vdBvaFigL We’ve already mentioned the detailed study The Indelible Image which comprehensively covers all of NT theology and ethics. I am happy to announce it will soon be out in an edited paperback edition, and so at a more reasonable price.

2015-03-13T22:46:08-04:00

benn

Careful, analytical reading of the Bible requires some training. As I say in the book pictured above, most people need to be trained on how to do proper detailed reading of an ancient text. One way to start being able to do that is to read the book How to Read a Book. Perhaps the most helpful thing to do in this post is to describe how I read books about the Bible, as well as reading the Bible itself. First of all, I avoid doing snippets. One of the real problems in doing ‘word studies’ is that you compile a bunch of texts where the word occurs, but then don’t study them in their original contexts. You just compare and contrast the particular verses where the word occurs. But words only have meaning in contexts. It is not true that ‘in the beginning was the dictionary’. Dictionaries are simply after the fact studies of how words have been used in a variety of contexts. So, careful contextual reading of the Bible is crucial, which means in the first place the original literary context.

What I also do is I read the whole text over several times. For instance, I read the whole story of Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush, which requires a very careful reading of both Exodus 3-4. A warning, the chapter and verse divisions in the Bible help us find things, but they are later additions to the text by Archbishop Langton, who had far too much time on his hands in the early middle ages. There is nothing inspired about the chapter and verse divisions. You should read the text on the basis of sense units, or complete stories. Of course when you are reading something like Proverbs, what you do is read a selection of aphorisms, and try and figure out why these proverbs were clustered together.

Having read the text carefully several times, and done some underlining and starring in the margins (yes it’s o.k. to mark up your Bible, the paper is not inherently sacrosanct, only the thoughts and ideas and teachings). Then you begin to ask some questions about the text. One of the real keys to understanding is knowing how to ask good questions of the text. For instance, in the story about Moses at the burning bush, who is it that is actually speaking to Moses? Is it God, directly? Or is it God through one of his FedEx messengers, such as ‘the angel of the Lord’? Does it matter? Why does Moses seem to be making excusing and trying to pass the buck? Are you buying his argument that he is ill prepared for the job of confronting Pharaoh liberating the Hebrew slaves, after he was educated in the palace in Egypt (see what Stephen says about Moses’ education in Acts 7)? What was the relationship between Moses and his brother Aaron? What roles would each play in the liberation? Why did Moses need miraculous demonstrations to convince him? What does this story reveal about Moses’ flaws? You begin to get the feel for the kind of questions one should ask of the text. And you don’t need to be afraid to do it, as the Bible has stood up to the most searching criticisms of the greatest minds over the ages, and is still God’s Word. One of the things I most love about the Bible is it is painfully honest about the flaws and foibles even of its hero figures. The only exception in the whole Bible is Jesus.

2015-03-13T22:46:14-04:00

rrh

12) In the second volume of the Lightfoot Legacy series, the volume on the Gospel of John to be published next year, Lightfoot says almost exactly the same thing you do about Jesus as Temple and the fulfillment of the Festivals etc. and about the backwards reading of the Scriptures as exhibited in John as well. It is interesting as well that he insists as you do on p. 131 n. 24 that the backwards reading does not negate the historical forward reading of Scripture but that one should see them as type and ante-type. The question this John chapter raised for me, is how exactly does John view differently the OT and its use from the Synoptic writers? Would you say it is in his focus on using the Psalms, or perhaps one his use of focal images and ideas like Temple, light, water etc. that come from the Pentateuch?

***Interesting. I will look forward to seeing Lightfoot’s treatment of John. (I am not unhappy to have my work mentioned in the same breath with his!) On the question of how John differs from the Synoptics, see my summary on pp. 100-102. Yes, heavier emphasis on Psalms is one feature, as is his focus on transformational symbolic readings of the Temple and Israel’s festivals.

13) On p. 94, in your summing up, after suggesting that figural readings of the OT are necessarily retrospective in character you say “from the perspective of figural interpretation, it would be a hermeneutical blunder to read the Law and the Prophets as deliberately predicting events in the life of Jesus” and instead you simply want to talk about foreshadowing. Does this mean you think there is no such thing as predictive prophecy in the OT? Were there not times when some of the prophets were given a glimpse, in their own day, of the more remote future especially when it was of relevance to their immediate audience and their need for hope about the future? And if so, doesn’t this mean that figural interpretation of the OT can’t be an all encompassing hermeneutic, but rather one of limited usefulness?

***To be sure, there are passages in the prophets that are predictive, in the sense of looking forward to a future eschatological fulfillment of Israel’s hopes. Isaiah 24-27 offers a good example. Or Daniel 12:1-3. On the whole, however, I don’t think they were consciously predicting specific events in the life of Jesus. The discovery of the scriptural prefiguration of such events is retrospective, as a text like John 2:22 clearly indicates. BUT, John 12:37-41 asserts that Isaiah “saw [Jesus’] glory and spoke about him.” (Probably an allusion to Isaiah’s Temple vision in Isaiah 6.)

These examples from John nicely illustrate the difficulty of making generalizations about what the Evangelists thought about prophecy/prediction. Probably the sentence you quote on p. 94 (“…hermeneutical blunder”…) is oversimplified.

14) I very much like your ten points for interpretation in the last lecture. I do have one question though. At various points throughout, you have insisted that a figural reading does not go against a more historical reading, it supplements it without supplanting it. And on p. 104 you seem to give a nod in the direction of sensus plenior, a text of the OT with multiple senses. It thus sees strange on p. 105 you say “we must bid farewell to plodding literalism and rationalism in order to embrace a complex poetic sensibility”. I see no reason for the either/or here if the text has multiple senses, both a literal and deeper and perhaps figural sense when juxtaposed with later texts and stories.

***I would say that to embrace sensus plenior, acknowledging both literal and figural senses, is precisely to “bid farewell to plodding literalism and rationalism.”

And I would add that the literal sense of the text is what makes possible the figural sense. By this I mean, for instance that if the virginal conception literally and miraculously happened in the womb of Mary, and this isn’t merely a fancy metaphorical way of saying Jesus is special, this is a MORE astounding truth, not a less astounding one (which would be the Evangelists assigning a metaphorical value to an event that didn’t quite happen that way). In other words, the scandal of the Gospels is that they are making quite literal claims about Jesus actually be the incarnation of God, actually coming by way of virginal conception in space and time, actually dying on a cross and rising from the dead etc. The bedrock here is the historical reality, which is so astounding that it takes all the lexicon of description, literal and figural, we have to expresses it in even a somewhat adequate way. Reaction??? Have I misread you?

***I agree with what you say in this paragraph. This nicely illustrates how figural interpretation explodes our neat distinctions between “literal” and “metaphorical.” The “complex poetic sensibility” that I advocate embraces the astounding confluence of literal and figural that you so well describe here.

ASIDES– One thing that did surprise me about the book was your thinking that Mk. 14.62, grounded in Dan. 7.13-14 was about reigning from on high, rather than the second coming and reigning on earth. What especially surprised me about that conclusion (which I have heard from Tom as well) is that it goes flatly against the allusive phrase ‘coming on the clouds’ which in the OT refers to a theophany, and in some cases to the Yom Yahweh. The final judgment doesn’t take place somewhere up above. To the contrary, Yahweh comes to judge the world, and surely that is what Dan. 7.13-14 is about, after depicting a series of gnarly bad empires and emperors who rule the earth, they are superceded by a dominion ruled by the Son of Man who will rule on earth forever.

***I have found Tom Wright completely convincing on Daniel 7:13-14: this is a heavenly enthronement scene. Note that the “one like a son of man” comes to (not from) the Ancient of Days. To be sure, the Son of Man now rules over “all peoples, nations, and languages” eternally in an everlasting dominion. But there is no depiction here of a coming from the clouds to the earth. Indeed, it is the heavenly exaltation that guarantees that his everlasting dominion will not pass away.

One other thing that surprised me is that in your interpretation of Mark, you seem to neglect the demonstration by Ched Myers and others that there are periodic disclosure moments in the narrative, and not just an emphasis on the veiled messiah etc. While there is silencing, there is also publicity as Dunn once put it, and keeping the messianic secret is not the order of the day, especially after Easter (hence Mark 16.8 is not likely the original ending of this Gospel).

***I find this a puzzling objection. My whole discussion of Mark makes an argument that there are indeed periodic disclosure moments, though few if any of the human characters understand them rightly. (Mark 6:45-52 is a good example.) I don’t understand how this bears on the question of the original ending of the Gospel. Certainly I do not argue that the “messianic secret” is meant to be kept by the church after the resurrection. The question of the ending of the Gospel is both a textual problem and a question of literary/theological interpretation. I think 16:8 is the perfect ending for a Gospel that offers a subtle heralding of the divine mystery of Jesus as the crucified and risen Son of God.

2015-03-13T22:46:18-04:00

scot

This will be our last post on Scot McKnight’s fine book which came out last fall (Brazos Press). It has many merits, not least of which is it is very clearly written, gets right to the point, and has lots of memorable lines like “the Pharisees emphasized the love of Torah, contrasted with Jesus who emphasized the Torah of love”. In this post I want to sum up on a few points to makes clear where I think Scot and I differ.

The first of these points, which you should have gathered from reading the previous posts is that while I agree the kingdom involves all five elements that Scot stressed (see the previous posts), I do not think those things define the word basileia. I think it refers to God’s eschatological saving activity, which results in those five things and more. I think it also, when it is in a sentence discussing the future refers to a place which one enters, inherits, obtains. So the traditional tandem of reign (or divine saving incursion) and realm are a better definition of the word itself. I prefer the translation dominion both in its verbal and noun senses (to have dominion over, to enter the king’s dominion) over the translation kingdom.

Secondly, and related to the first point, Scot makes his case on the basis of the use of the term kingdom during and after the monarchy in reference to Israel or Judah. I think this is a mistake. The kingdom Jesus is referring to involves divine intervention. It is not a continuation of, nor the final perfect iteration of previous kingdoms. Indeed, the proper antecedent is the theocracy which preceded any Jewish kingdoms. We are talking here about the kingdom of God, not the kingdoms of Israel in the Gospels and in the rest of the NT. In part, Scot takes the view he does because he sees the church as ‘Israel expanded’ to use his phrase. This too I would say is a mistake. The church is not the continuation of Israel, nor the perfection of Israel. Israel clearly enough in the NT refers to Jews who are not followers of Jesus. This is especially clear in Roman 9-11 where Paul goes so far as to talk about Israel as those who have been temporarily broken off from the people of God so that the full number of Gentiles can be grafted into the people of God. He then goes on, at the end of Rom. 11 to insist that when Jesus returns, he will turn away the impiety of Jacob, and ‘all Israel will be saved’, by which is meant a large number of Jews who previously did not believe in Jesus. For Paul, the people of God, before the return of Christ, as Jew and Gentile united in Christ which he quite deliberately doesn’t call Israel, he calls it either the body of Christ or the ekklesia. And that brings us to the other important difference between Scot’s view and my own. We disagree about the church.

In my view the local church is not autonomous, but is rather part of the larger church of God referred to by Paul in various places (see Gal. 1). The local church is not independent nor does it have mere self-generating leadership structures. To the contrary there are apostles and their co-workers who are not merely the church planters of various churches, but the leaders over a whole variety of local churches, which also have elders and deacons as the local leaders. In other words, ecclesiology we find in the NT is not harmonious with Baptist views about the local church and its leadership structures. Local churches were answerable to their apostles, such as the letters of Peter and Paul demonstrate.

What Scot is absolutely right about is that all attempts to domesticate or secularize what kingdom means will not do. The Kingdom is neither merely the work of God in the souls of human beings, nor is it merely working for justice and peace in the public sector. The Gospel has both a spiritual and social dimension, as does the Dominion of God. One cannot separate the Kingdom from the King, or good works from the Gospel. I think Scot makes too sharp a distinction between Kingdom mission and good works in the public sphere. I would say any work done whether within the church or outside of it which is done for and unto and in the service of the Lord, is kingdom work. It is also good deeds. I also do not believe that the work of God should be seen as confined to what happens in and by the church, though I quite agree the church is the epicenter, paradigm, primary locale where we can see God in Christ at work. God of course is sovereign and he even works in places where the church does not exist and has not gone. I agree this is exceptional, but it makes the point. The divine saving activity of God which we call kingdom can not be simply equated with what is going on in the church. There is overlap between these two things, but kingdom and church are not simply synonyms, any more than the church is just people. The church is the assembly of God’s people gathered in the presence of the Lord for worship, fellowship and service with the Lord Jesus present in its midst.

Think on these things.

Follow Us!



Browse Our Archives