2015-03-13T22:54:36-04:00

The discussion which begins on p. 634 on how exactly Paul reformed and reaffirmed Jewish monotheism is interesting in various ways. Tom begins by discussing texts such as the cause celebre Rom.8.18-30. His translation of key phrases is interesting (on which see his earlier Romans commentary). Instead of the word predestined, he prefers ‘marked out in advance to be shaped according to the model of the image of the Son’. He also prefers the translation ‘called according to his purpose’ even though the word ‘his’ is nowhere in any Greek manuscript, and as Chrysostom says, the word itself can mean choice. Then one has to ask— Whose chose, God’s or the responders? This is indeed a viable question here because the ‘ous’ in vs. 29a has as its antecedent ‘those who love God’. In other words, the text reads ‘for those who love God, whom God foreknew, he also destined or marked out in advance. The discussion then is about the destiny of believers, not about how persons came to be believers in the first place. Their destiny is to be conformed to the image of the Son. And again, Paul is referring to a group of people— ‘those who love God, who were called according to choice/purpose’. Those folks whom God foreknew would love him (making clear that God’s choice was not mere fiat, or arbitrary but on the basis of God’s clear advance knowledge of how these people would respond). None of this is really dealt with at this juncture in the book, but we may hope for more later. Tom is certainly right here that we have a clear affirmation that the God who created it all is also the God who is in the process of recreating it all. This is an expression of creational monotheism, now reconfigured to include the Son and conformity to the Son’s image (p. 636).

But there are more implications to an affirmation of creational monotheism: “This positive view of creation also explains the passages where Paul indicates that, even among pagans, there is a moral sense which will recognize the good behavior of the Messiah’s people, and from which, in turn one can even learn by example. It is this too which enables Paul exactly in line with at least one regular second Temple viewpoint, to affirm the goodness and God-givenness of governments and authorities…even while reserving the right both to remind them of their God-given duty and to hold them to account in relation to it” (p. 639).

p. 640 finds Tom affirming an interesting connection— no idols also means there is only one true ‘image’ of God that has ever been on earth since the Fall, that is Jesus the Messiah, himself the truly human one. Those who are in the Messiah are to be renewed according to that image. What Tom does not say, but could have done is that this fits nicely with Paul’s contention that Christ is the last Adam, remembering that the first one was also created in the image of God.

On p. 644 Tom turns more specifically to the discussion of Jesus and monotheism. He is not happy with either the traditional liberal notion that high christology is late and therefore tells us nothing about the historical Jesus, nor is he simply happy with the attempts ala Hengel and company to demonstrate high Christology was thoroughly Jewish and early. He rejects the analysis of modernity saying “At the same time Romanticism constantly implyied that the ‘primitive’ form of any movement was the genuine,inspired article, the original vision which would fade over time as people moved from charisma to committees, from adoration to administration, from spontaneous and subversive spirituality to stable structures and a salaried sacerdotalism.” (p. 646). Nice turns of phrase, and there are many such in these volumes.

I found ironic Wright’s pronouncement on p. 647 that the work of Hengel, Bauckham, Hurtado makes it “almost inconceivable that one would go back to the old days of Bousset and Bultmann (or even Dunn, Casey, and Vermes).” (p. 647). Obviously, he was not aware that Bart Ehrman was about to launch yet another salvo based on such assumptions with a title something like How Jesus became the divine Son of God, or the like. Nonetheless, Tom is right that the idea that high Christology must be late has been so widely rejected that even Jewish scholars like Daniel Boyarin “have swung round in the opposite direction, arguing that most if not all of the elements of early Christology, not least the divinity of the expected Messiah, were in fact present within pre-Christian Judaism itself” (p. 648— see e.g. the recent flap over the Gabriel Stone). Wright’s judgment is that Boyarin has claimed much more than the early Jewish texts will support.

More importantly Wright is correct about noticing what Paul does NOT have to argue for— “”early Christians, already by the time of Paul, had articulated a belief in the ‘divinity’ of Jesus far more powerfully and indeed poetically than anyone had previously imagined. Paul can in fact assume his (very ‘high’) view of Jesus as a given. He never says, even to Corinth ‘How then can some of you be saying that Jesus was simply a wonderful human being and nothing more?’ Nor does christology seem to be a point of contention between him and (say) the church of Jerusalem. Despite regular assumptions and assertions, there is no historical evidence for an ‘early Jewish Christianity which (like the later Ebionites) denied identification between Jesus and Israel’s God.” (p. 648). Tom thus concludes that Paul’s view of Jesus couldn’t all have come from that revelatory moment on Damascus Road.

Thus the question remains, what pushed Jesus’ earliest followers after Easter in the direction of a high Christology. Tom is not satisfied with the older view that Jesus himself made such a thing possible and clear by the use of Son of Man language, thereby some kind of equality with Israel’s God, and that the early church saw the resurrection as the confirmation of Jesus’ claim. Tom oddly says about this view “I regard such a view as hopelessly short-circuited though not entirely misleading and mistaken” (p. 649). He does not explain what he means by short-circuited.

Tom is more impressed with the proposal of Larry Hurtado that “it was the sense and experience of the personal presence of the exalted Jesus, in the way that one might expect to experience the presence of the living God, that led Jesus’s earliest disciples first to worship him (without any sense of compromising monotheism) then to re-read Israel’s Scriptures in such a way as to discover him in passages which were about the one God”… In other words it was “‘early Christian experience’ of the risen lord in their midst that compelled them to the first stirrings of what would later becoming trinitarian and incarnational theology.” (p. 650). Wright things Hurtado is basically correct in his presentation and analysis of the phenomena and he sees it as completely ruling out the Bousset hypothesis (namely that when Christianity full engaged with the pagan world it absorbed pagan notions about deities and lords and applied them to Christ). In addition, Wright points to the recent work of Chris Tilling which demonstrates that Paul’s descriptions of the relationship between the early Christians and Jesus match the scriptural descriptions of the relationship between Israel and the one God (C. Tilling, Paul’s Divine Christology, Mohr, 2012). For example Paul’s passages about Christ being married to his believers (2 Cor. 11.2;Rom. 7.4-6, never mind Ephes. 5) relate directly to the OT theme of Israel being Yahweh’s bride.

But even beyond a basic agreement with Hurtado, Wright finds the proposals of Richard Bauckham even more important. The major point is that you can’t get to divine worship of Jesus as divine, from what is said in early Judaism about exalted angels or mediators. For example, notice the fierce rejection of the worship of an angel in Revelation coupled with the clear worship of God and the lamb. “Bauckham’s main proposal is that the NT, Paul included offered a christology of divine identity in which Jesus is included in the unique identity of this one God” (p. 651). So Bauckham stresses that identity concerns who God is, to be distinguished from ‘nature’ which concerns what God is. Thus he distinguishes what is going on in the NT from later debates about Jesus’ divine and human natures. (Bauckham notes however there is one exception to the rejection of the worship of intermediary figures— namely what is said about the Son of Man in the parables of Enoch).

Thus Bauckham concludes “the highest possible Christology– the inclusion of Jesus in the unique divine identity–was central to the faith of the early church even before any of the NT writings were written, since it occurs in all of them” (p. 652– quoted approvingly by Wright). Bauckham stresses there are three key aspects to Jewish monotheism– God is the sole creator, he will at last establish his kingdom, and he and he alone is to be worshipped. He then proceeds (in ‘God Crucified’) to demonstrate that in the NT Christ is portrayed as the agent of creation, the one through whom all things are reconciled and kingdom comes, and he is to be worshipped.

Tom’s own proposal is to build on Bauckham, but to add another component to eschatological monotheism, namely that the God who abandoned the Temple when it became corrupt, had also promised to return to Jerusalem and his Temple after the exile, come back to be king once more in Zion and set his people free from bondage. We will continue this discussion in the next blog post on this book.

2015-03-13T22:54:42-04:00

Much of chapter five is spent demonstrating the evidence for and growth of the Imperial Cult during the first century A.D. Of this there is no lack of evidence. What we cannot directly tell from the archaeological remains is the effect this specific cult had on the mentality of Jews and Christians living in the Roman Empire. We know of course of the repugnance felt about what Jews and Christians called idolatry of any and all sorts. We also hear the lament of Plutarch that ‘nowadays Olympus is over-crowded’. Yet there is sometimes more specific evidence, like that found in Wis. Sol. 14.17-21 that there was an especial repugnance of the Jews to the worship of a king or an emperor. This is of particular interest to us because of course one would imagine the exact same revulsion when it became clear to non-Christian Jews that a crucified manual worker from Nazareth was being worshipped as well. Jews did not anticipate messiah being worshipped much less a crucified ‘messianic figure’. The question becomes— Is there enough evidence in the remains, and perhaps in the NT to justify the suggestion that Christians were regularly contrasting Jesus with the Emperor, with the latter being the divine reality of which the former was just a parody? Wright, does not yet try to answer the question in regard to the NT in this chapter, but rather is content to build up an impressive picture of the proliferation of the Imperial cult in the eastern and the western Empire. Wright is well aware that the evidence is complex.

For example, on p. 313, Wright cites the study of Price which concludes in part: “The religion of place was now restructured around a person. But it is misleading to categorize this as ‘the imperial cult’. The term arbitrarily separates honours to the emperor from the full range of his religious activities, and it assumes that there was a single institution of his cult throughout the empire.” On the same page in a note it is stressed that there were a series of different cults sharing a common focus in the worship of the emperor, his family, or predecessors, but operating in various ways in various locales (sometimes combined with the cults of other gods like Demeter, sometimes just a special altar, rather than a constructed temple. Price and his colleagues go on to say that Romanization was often more advanced even in its religion by the establishing of Roman colony cities than by the establishment of the imperial cult itself. Wright is content to say that so long as one recognizes that there was no single uniform reality that corresponded to the phrase ‘imperial cult’ it is still an important factor to consider in evaluating the NT. This is a more nuanced view than in some of his previous writings. The challenge, in my view is to get the balance right, between too much minimizing of the impact of the pluriform imperial cult and too much hyperbole about its effect on NT writers. Were these writers really often or always looking over their shoulders and writing over against the imperial cult? I would say they sometimes seem to have been doing this, but not as extensively as most of the enthusiasts for this approach to the NT have suggested (see again the volume mentioned in the previous note by McKnight and Modica). I will give one example. It is not an easy thing to decide when a phrase like ‘the ruler/rulers’ of this world’ refers to Caesar and/or other human figures and when it refers to Satan and his minions. Sometimes it seem more likely to be the former (see e.g. 1 Cor. 2.6-8 where we hear about rulers that crucified Jesus), sometimes more likely to be the latter (Col. 1.16ff. where names used for ranks of angels appear, and seem to refer to heavenly beings). And then too, one can make a case for the Satanic influence on human institutions, indeed on the Emperor himself (see e.g. MR. 666 in Revelation). On the whole however, when one reads a text like Ephes. 6.10ff. it seems clear that the major emphasis is that Christians are not mainly busy fighting off the Emperor cult devotees or idea or the Roman Empire, but rather the powers of darkness and the kingdom of night. The narrative in the NT is more like the Lord of the Rings, and less like a movie about Caligula. I think that Tom has made as strong a case as can be made for a strong influence of the rising tide of Imperial cult across the Empire, the question still remains the degree to which the NT is a response of counter volley to that rising tide. One can see for example, how a bad emperor, a crazy emperor, a persecuting emperor like Nero or Domitian or Caligula might well call for even a written, if veiled response from Christians, and they did so. I think we do see this for example in 2 Thess. 2 or Revelation, and a few other places. And as Tom points out…. “The discourse of imperial cults was committed to preventing the imagination from imagining the end of the world” (Quoting S.Friesen). To which Tom adds “No declared Paul: God has fixed a day on which he will have the world brought to justice” (p. 342). In other words, imperial eschatology would be a target for critique, and not just imperial cult writ large. Yet Christians absolutely did not go in for the sort of violent response to Rome that we find in the two Jewish revolts in A.D. 66 and again in the second century with Bar Kokba. This could partly be attributed to imbibing Jesus’s ethic of non-violence (see Matt. 5-7 and comp. Rom. 12-13), but there is something else at work as well. Christians saw the real enemy as not made of flesh and blood, but rather as spiritual forces, including ‘the prince of the power of the air’. This is why despite troubles from human officials, we still have texts like Rom. 13, or sayings like pray for kings and rulers and honor the Emperor in 1 Peter.

Tom has now completed his survey of context, and will finally turn to Paul more directly. We will begin the analysis of that in the next post.

2015-03-13T22:55:14-04:00

Qualifications of an important thesis are always crucial. At the end of his robust defense of his exile thesis we get some of these and they are worth noting. First it should be noted that Tom is arguing that Deut. 27-30 combined with Dan. 7-9 (especially 9), set up a narrative pattern which affected many early Jews in the way they thought about their past, present and future. Many, but not all, by any means. On p. 158, in a parenthetical comment Tom says this— “my case is not that all Jews throughout the period understood themselves to be living in a state of ‘continuing exile’ only that such an understanding was widespread, and was particularly likely to be true of zealous Pharisees” [i.e. Pharisees of the ilk of Saul of Tarsus]. Tom grants that a series of early Jewish texts are exceptions to what he calls ‘the basic pattern’ or the ‘controlling metaphor’ of exile, including Sirach, some of the Maccabean material. In response to Seifrid’s critique of his theory, Tom makes the following further qualifications (p. 160 n.335): 1) he grants that there are a variety of positions taken on this issue during the period; 2) the narrative locations of the texts in question vary widely. This he also grants. It is worth pointing out that it was perfectly possible for an early Jew to believe that the exile had long been over, but the full restoration had not yet happened. There had been some foreshadowings, and foretastes of it during the Maccabean period. Would these Jews have seen this as a false dawn as Tom repeatedly calls it, a mere premonition and not a foretaste? I think this is more than doubtful. It is probably just wrong. What exactly would they have been celebrating at Hanukkah with all the waving of the palm branches if they thought the Maccabean revolt was a false dawn, an exercise in futility? Just because the Maccabees were not the Messiahs, doesn’t mean they would not be seen as a partial fulfillment of God’s promises to his people, including the ones in Deut. 27-30, indeed they surely were seen as a sign that God had not abandoned his people to yet another exile, which explains why so many early Jews were named after these war heroes. At the same time they recognized that the full restoration was yet to come, when Messiah, resurrection etc. happened as Daniel suggested. Tobit, 2 Baruch, Testament Naphtali speak of what Tom calls a respite in the larger overall bleak and dire situation. This may give these texts too little credit. In other words, they don’t seem likely to fall into the category of people who viewed the respite as illusory or a false dawn. And here is where I say that the issue then becomes— what is the dominate view? Is it the basic pattern as Tom sees it, which allows him to call what was happening in Israel in Jesus’ day still an exile of sorts? It seems to me that the most he can demonstrate is that he has established an important pattern, but there is no way to know if it is the basic or dominant one. The evidence against such a strong conclusion is as substantial as the evidence for this. The most one can say on the basis of hard evidence is that some zealots, including some zealous Pharisees likely thought this way. It is not at all clear that Jesus agreed with them. Indeed, I think it is safe to say that Jesus would have had strong disagreements with Saul of Tarsus before be became a follower of the man from Nazareth. And last, but not least, not being in exile is one thing, experiencing full restoration is another. The fact that many Jews did not see themselves as still in exile, and so not in the worst possible state, doesn’t mean they saw themselves as already fully experiencing God’s highest and best for his people. Restoration is the beginning of positive things. The end of exile is the end of negative ones. These two things can be distinguished.

I think Tom has now made as strong a case as he can that some early Jews saw themselves as still suffering lingering effects of exile. That this is the dominant or controlling pattern or metaphor of early Jewish literature of the second temple period he has not established. We must examine in the next post what he says about restoration.

2015-03-13T22:55:15-04:00

There is a better way of conceptualizing what Tom Wright means when he says that Jews in the Holy Land saw themselves as still in exile. Following the schema of Steck and Koch, he means that many, perhaps most of them saw themselves as still under some sort of judgment of God for their sins. In the threefold pattern of sin leading to judgment, and after judgment comes restoration, ‘exile’ is seen as one paradigmatic form of judgment on Israel. I would prefer just saying that many Jews saw themselves as still under judgment, even in Israel, still under a dark cloud, and they knew that something was wrong. Some of them, for instance those at Qumran or some of the Zealots, were taking a more worst case scenario view of things. Some of them did not think things were entirely out of kilter, but knew things weren’t quite right, hence the large response to the call by John the Baptizer for repentance.

Tom explains things a bit further on pp. 150-51: “What then does exile mean in the continuing sense? Answer: the time of the curse spoken of in Deuteronomy and Leviticus, a curse that lasts as long as Israel is ‘the tail and not the head’, still subject to the rule, and often the abusive treatment of foreign nations with their blasphemous and wicked idolatry and immorality, not yet in possession of the promised…global sovereignty…as long as we are still in Deut. 29 hoping and praying that Daniel’s 490 years will soon be complete, that the Messiah will come at last…” Tom makes a good deal of the fact that in Ezra 9 the writer still talks about Israel beings slaves even though they have returned to the promised land. Fair enough. But it is impossible to ignore the Maccabean experience and period. The truth is, many Jews pointed to the Maccabean experience as demonstrating they had in part for a while returned to the good ole days in the land. They did not forget the exile, or even the sense of dependency and loss and danger even when back in the land, but different Jews viewed the situation differently. It is doubtful for example that the Sadducees were advocates of the ‘we’re still in exile’ attitude. There was a mixture of views in the time of Jesus about the actual spiritual state of Israel, just as their was a mixture of views about the coming Messiah or Messiahs (or lack thereof).

Tom has done a much better and more detailed job making his case for the ‘we are still in exile’ idea, and he is right that there was more than enough sense of dis-ease that lots of apocalyptic literature was being produced before and after the Maccabean period. Such literature manifests a state of heart and mind that believes something is badly wrong, but that after judgment God will restore things to order. We may say there is a dominant theme of ‘we are still under judgment, still awaiting the consummation and the messiah’ and in some cases this included the suggested of a double return from exile, or a fuller return from exile, as Tom suggests.

2015-03-13T22:56:11-04:00

The Conference sponsored by the Ratzinger Foundation (i.e. Pope Benedict) was designed to focus on the historical Jesus, with more particular focus on Pope Benedict’s three million selling books on Jesus of Nazareth (the last of which was on the Infancy Narratives in Lk. 1-2 and Mt. 1-2). Since I have already reviewed in detail these three books on this blog some time ago (the first book came out in 2005,but I reviewed them more recently), I will let you find and read those reviews. The reviews were quite positive, indeed the reviews of these books world-wide has been quite positive by scholars, many of whom were surprised Protestants. Joseph Ratzinger is a fine German scholar, in particular a theologian. He is the first scholarly Pope in a very long time. I would liken his work on the historical Jesus to that of another Continental Catholic theologian— Edward Schillebeeckx who wrote some excellent books on Jesus.

There were quite a few excellent papers at the conference. On Saturday morning there was an excellent summary paper by Thomas Soding from the University of Bochum, Germany analyzing ‘The Jesus of Nazareth’ by Joseph Ratzinger. Here are pictures of the Old Synod Hall with Soding lecturing and one of Soding’s powerpoints a picture of Ratzinger as a young theological student, before he helped shape the theological statements at Vatican II.



The papers given on the previous two days of the conference were mostly by Continental Catholic scholars, some of them quite excellent, and too many of them (for my language skills) in rapid fire Italian. The two previous sessions were held at Lateran University in a beautiful Aula or lecture hall.


Here is Richard Burridge of Kings College London, who won the Ratzinger prize, giving his paper on “The Greco-Roman Biographies and the Gospel Literary Genre”


What this paper did was compare the Christological work of Benedict with Richard’s own research on the Gospels as ancient biographies.
And here is Richard receiving his prize certificate from Pope Francis, later at the audience on Saturday.

There were other interesting papers by Juan Chapa of Navarra, Spain on the contribution of papyrology to the interpretation of the Gospels, by our host and new friend Bernardo Estrada of the Pontifical University recounting the historical of research on Jesus from Reimarus to Ratzinger, there was an excellent paper by Richard Bauckham on Luke’s Infancy Accounts as Oral History, focusing particularly on the presentation and purification scene in the Temple, which he demonstrated was perfectly historically plausible, and that much of the objection to the scene has been based on not knowing the OT background well enough to the practices involved. On Oct. 25th (Friday) Klaus Berger from the University of Heidelberg (who must be closing in on 80 or so by now) gave a paper on the Reliability of the Gospels, and how the criteria for deciding authenticity have essentially failed.

This was followed by a rather snarky and deliberately provocative paper by John Meir of Notre Dame (the only North American Catholic scholar presenting at the conference) arguing that the Parable of the Good Samaritan is an example of Lukan theology and does not go back to the historical Jesus, trying to claim that Pope Benedict’s books supported the bifurcation of history on the one hand and Christology on the other. They do not. What I found most unhelpful about this paper, was the idea that since Luke is in the canon, then the theology of Luke is canonical, and the historical questions don’t impinge on the value of his ‘theology’. This completely ignores the fact that there was no canon before the 4th century A.D. and no canonical theology. The Christians of the first four centuries believed, as did later Christians that Jesus told that parable, and that that was especially why it was of value. To this I would just add when it comes to a historical religion— nothing can be theologically true that is historically false. In this case, Luke preserved that parable because he believed it came from Jesus and reflected Jesus’ thought, however much Luke told the parable in his own diction. Here’s a picture of this paper being delivered.
There were other fine papers by Craig Evans on the Death of Jesus, and Stan Porter on the contribution of extra-Biblical sources to the discussion of the historical Jesus.

I also gave my paper on Friday morning and had to settle for just giving a summary abstract, due to time constraints. Here is the abstract:

JESUS THE SAGE AND HIS PROVOCATIVE PARABLES

Dr. Ben Witherington, III

Doctoral Faculty– Asbury Theological Seminary, Kentucky
and St. Andrews University, Scotland

SUMMARY– In the last 30 years of New Testament scholarship about the historical Jesus and his teachings and ministry, one of the most fruitful avenues of study that has shed increasing light on the actual historical character of Jesus and his ministry is evaluating Jesus as a sage, a conveyor of godly wisdom, and evaluating his parables, aphorisms, and riddles as early Jewish wisdom speech. This paper further explores this trajectory of New Testament scholarship, focusing both on the issue of the character of sapiential language and how it should and should not be evaluated, and the unique use of that language by Jesus to talk about God’s coming eschatological Dominion or Kingdom. While previous Jewish sages had told parables about God’s eternal kingship or reign, before Jesus’ time, apparently none had used wisdom speech to describe God’s current in-breaking eschatological work of salvation among God’s people. And yet Jesus offers up a sort of revelatory wisdom that is not self-evident. He is not drawing wisdom from the analysis of nature or human nature (like e.g. the writers of Proverbs), but rather from God’s special revelation about his salvific purposes for humankind. Jesus then was an apocalyptic sage, much like Daniel, offering a wisdom that God had to reveal or else it could not be known, even through detailed study of nature and human nature.
Focusing on Mark 4 and the parable of the sower, this paper reveals how ancient parables work, and what they tell us about Jesus’ teaching ministry, and indeed his own intentions and self-understanding. In the words of Rudolph Bultmann, Jesus is the revealer of saving wisdom, and ultimately what he reveals is himself—he is both the conveyor of God’s Wisdom, and the substance of God’s Wisdom, come in person. Put another way, Jesus views himself as not just the means of God’s eschatological salvation, but the substance of that salvation as well. The narrative in Mark 4 helps us better understand both the wisdom of Jesus, and Jesus as Wisdom—the revelation of God’s mind, character, person. In particular this paper suggests that Jesus’s own self understanding was deeply indebted to Dan. 7.13-14, where a perpetual kingdom ruled by one person who is in fact the object of worship may be contrasted with the dynastic Davidic kingdom promised in 2 Sam. 7.14. Perhaps there was a good reason why Jesus deliberately chose to speak of the Kingdom of God, rather than the Kingdom of Israel, and of being Son of Man, rather than of being Son of David. The reason was, Jesus had intended all along a more inclusive nature to his ministry and mission—not just to the lost sheep of Israel, but to the nations as well, not just to fulfill Jewish messianic hopes, but more broadly to fulfill human needs for salvation and wisdom for living.
———

2015-03-13T22:56:47-04:00

Once you get inside the zebra cathedral, things change in some ways. First of all there is still the zebra look with the marble and the basalt alternating in the walls and columns.

But you also have beautiful stained glass windows, frescoes, and alcoves.


By far the most impressive part of the interior is the chapel of the apocalypse and its amazing frescoes, which in fact inspired Michaelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.. Here is some of the Wiki explanation….

Fra Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli began the decoration of the vault of the chapel in 1447. They painted only two sections: Christ in Judgment and Angels and prophets as they were summoned in the same year to the Vatican by Pope Nicholas V to paint the Niccoline Chapel. Work came to a halt until Perugino was approached in 1489. However, he never began. After being abandoned for about 50 years, the decoration of the rest of the vault was awarded to Luca Signorelli on 5 April 1499. He added the scenes with the Choir of the Apostles, of the Doctors, of the Martyrs, Virgins and Patriarchs.

His work pleased the board and they assigned him to paint frescoes in the large lunettes of the walls of the chapel. Work began in 1500 and was completed in 1503. (There was a break in 1502 because funds were lacking.) These frescoes in the chapel are considered the most complex and impressive work by Signorelli. He and his school spent two years creating a series of frescoes concerning the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment, starting with the Preaching of the Antichrist, continuing with tumultuous episodes of the End of the World, finding a counterpart in the Resurrection of the Flesh. The fourth scene is a frightening depiction of the Damned taken to Hell and received by Demons. On the wall behind the altar, Signorelli depicts on the left side the Elect being led to Paradise and on the right side the Reprobates driven to Hell. He added to these expressive scenes some striking details.
The Damned are taken to Hell and received by Demons.

The Preaching of the Antichrist was painted shortly after the execution of Savonarola in Florence on 23 May 1498. This friar had been judged guilty of heresy, and the Antichrist, preaching slander and calumny, is causing an uproar such as Savonarola did. The Antichrist is depicted resembling Christ, but is embraced by the Devil whispering in his ear. Among the crowd listening to the Antichrist Signorelli has painted some remarkable figures: a young Raphael in a striking pose, Dante, possibly Christopher Columbus, Boccaccio, Petrarch and Cesare Borgia. Remarkably, in the left corner of the fresco, he has painted himself, dressed in noble garments, and Fra Angelico in habit. In the left background the Antichrist is being chased from heavens by the archangel Michael, and his acolytes being killed by a rain of fire. In the right background he depicts a large Classical temple topped by a dome in Renaissance style. More likely is that the scenes reflect scripture readings called for in the liturgies for the Feast of All Saints and the four Sundays of Advent.
The End of the World is painted over the arch of the entrance to the chapel. Signorelli paints frightening scenes as cities collapse in ruins and people flee under darkened skies. On the right side below he shows the Sibyl with her book of prophesies, and King David with raised hand predicting the end of the world. In the left corner below, people are scrambling and lying in diverse positions on the ground, producing an illusion as if falling out of the painting. This successful attempt in foreshortening was striking in its day.

The Elect in Paradise.

The Resurrection of the Flesh is a study by Signorelli, exploring the possibilities of the male and female nude, while trying to recreate a three-dimensional setting. Signorelli shows his mastery in depicting the many positions of the human body. The risen, brought back to life, are crawling in an extreme effort from under the earth and are received by two angels in the sky blowing on a trumpet.
The Damned are taken to Hell and received by Demons is in stark contrast to the previous one. Signorelli has gone to the extremes of his fantasy and evocative powers to portray his cataclysmic vision of the horrible fate, the agony and the despair of the damned. He uses the naked human body as his only expressive element, showing the isolated bodies entangling each other, merging in a convoluted mass. They are overpowered by demons in near-human form, depicted in colours of every shade of decomposing flesh. Above them, a flying demon transports a woman. This is probably a depiction of the Whore of the Apocalypse.
The Elect in Paradise shows the elect in ecstasy looking up to music-making angels. The few extant drawings, made in preparation for this fresco, are kept in the Uffizi in Florence. They show each figure in various positions, indicating that Signorelli must have used real models in the nude to portray his figures.

For me the most dramatic part is the scene of the dead skeletons rising from the earth and then taking on flesh, and then walking around at the resurrection. It is certainly clear that these Renaissance artists, unlike many moderns were not squeamish about depicting either hell or heaven or the resurrection or damnation.

2015-03-13T22:56:49-04:00

[Here is a helpful essay by Timothy George on ‘the Hell House project’ among other things. As he says, scaring people into the Kingdom of God basically does not work, especially when in this age people actually are happy to pay to be scared out of their wits…. and never take it seriously. BW3]

I believe in hell. Not only the hell within, for there are those “private devils that hang like vampires on the soul,” to use the language of Thomas Merton—and not only the metaphorical hell around evident in war, violence, and destructive evil on a global scale—but also the hell to come. This orthodox Christian belief is firmly grounded in the teaching of Jesus, as well as in the inspired writings of the apostles. As Joseph Ratzinger said in a book on eschatology: “Dogma takes its stand on solid ground when it speaks of the existence of hell and of the eternity of its punishments.”

C. S. Lewis famously described two equal and opposite errors into which people fall when thinking about things infernal. The first is disbelief and denial, a familiar pattern in forms of rationalist religion. The other is to cultivate “an excessive and unhealthy interest” in Satan and his pomp. The latter is on full display in what has become a thriving phenomenon within the subculture of American fundamentalist and evangelical churches: the seasonal appearance of a Halloween alternative known as Hell House or Judgment House.

Hell Houses can be found from New England to the Northwest, though they thrive in those red states where Pentecostal and fundamentalist churches are strongest. Hundreds of thousands of teens and tweens will stand in line for hours and pay good money (about the price of a premium movie ticket) in order to be scared out of their wits by this bizarre form of entertainment evangelism.

There are many variations on this theme: a hayride through hell, a demon-guided stroll in a cemetery, a train trip of terror, and so on—but all presentations have three things in common. First, there is a series of mini-dramas, gruesome, death-centered tableaux always presented in lurid, edgy (some say cheesy), soap-opera style. These run the gamut from smoking-related cancer deaths to school shootings, teen suicides, fiery car crashes, botched abortions, homosexual teens dying of AIDS, and all kinds of family traumas—domestic violence, divorce, sex abuse (including incest), and the like. The aim of the skit is to show the truth of the New Testament dictum, “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23), not only physical death in this world, but also eternal punishment in hell in the next.

After the “incidents” come the consequences, namely, a visit to hell. “Hell” is a dark, smoke-filled room complete with strobe lights and the shrieks of tortured souls. The dénouement is a Mel Gibson-esque portrayal of the crucifixion followed by a personal appeal to accept Jesus Christ. Sometimes an actor impersonating Jesus makes the appeal himself in a breath-minted, nose-to-nose encounter with those presumably shaken by what they have seen.

If there is one thing the commercial side of American religion understands, it is supply and demand. The late Jerry Falwell is often credited with launching the current Hell House craze with his Scare Mare program back in 1972. But the demand for “sanctified” haunted houses has grown over the years. Providing resources for the thousands of churches that sponsor such events has become a minor industry.

Colorado-based Keenan Roberts has led the way with his publication of a how-to kit for pastors and youth ministers who want to put a little scare-mongering into their teen evangelism program. For several hundred dollars you can buy this resource with directions on how to construct an effective Hell House. There are scripts for seven rooms and instruction on how to present a graphic hell scene and a closing “come to Jesus” scenario. If you want some help putting on a sizzling evangelism event this Halloween, then Roberts’ Hell House Outreach Kit just might be what you are looking for! This kit, available in all fifty states and twenty-six countries around the world, is sold to church leaders who want to “get prayed up and powered up” and “prepared for the ride” of their ministry life. The kit comes with this admonition: Shake your city with the most “in-your-face, high-flyin’, no denyin’, death-defyin’, Satan-be-cryin’, keep-ya-from-fryin’, theatrical stylin’, no holds barred, cutting-edge” evangelism tool of the new millennium!

In her 2003 book, From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural, the University of Denver scholar Lynn Schofield Clark describes the Hell House phenomenon as part of “the dark side of evangelicalism”—inordinate interest in exorcism, the occult, and pop apocalypticism. Max Weber’s modern disenchanted world of no angels, demons, witches, miracles, devils, or hells has left a vacuum in the youth culture, and this has been filled by the revival of the graphic, the sensate, and the supernatural. Hell Houses are made for a generation unhappy with the demystified culture of a “world come of age” and yet a generation retaining just enough vestiges of a biblical worldview to know that, pace the dogmas of secular naturalism fed to them at school, there must be something more.

Whatever we make of Weber’s “disenchantment” thesis, it is well to remember that graphic depictions of hell have long been a part of Christian rhetoric. Both Ignatius Loyola and Jonathan Edwards left memorable specimens of such. Further, no fundamentalist evangelist could hold a candle to the Irish catechist whose preachments to young boys in nineteenth-century Dublin were depicted by James Joyce in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

Hell is a straight and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. . . . It is a fire which proceeds directly from the ire of God, working not of its own activity but as an instrument of divine vengeance. . . . Every sense of the flesh is tortured in every faculty of the soul therewith: the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with noisome odors, the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth, the touch with redhot goads and spikes with cruel tones of flame.

And on and on. So, Brother Roberts, get the kit!

The problem with this kind of approach to the afterlife is not that it says too much, but that it offers too little. It says what it does not know and thus falls prey to that most damning of theological temptations, what medieval scholars called vana curiositas. Theology should be done within the limits of revelation alone but what is shown in most modern-day Hell Houses is 90 percent speculation.

It may be that some young people will find their way to genuine faith through such ghoulish shenanigans, but their overall import is a distortion of the Gospel. Those who indulge in such displays are taking something serious, eternal, and consequential and treating it with a finesse of a butcher doing brain surgery. In the process, they trivialize evil and domesticate grace. I seriously doubt that the Old Fiend himself is much upset about how his wiles are portrayed in such faux-dramas. He knows that conversion without discipleship is not likely to be lasting or deep. He is well aware that evangelism as entertainment seldom, if ever, results in genuine repentance or transformation.

At the heart of the paschal mystery is the descent of Christ into hell. This motif has been variously understood in the Christian tradition, but in essence it means that in the sending and self-sacrifice of his Son, God himself has absorbed not only the penalty of sin but also its eternal consequences, the “wailing and gnashing of teeth.” Jesus Christ has visited the original House of Hell, and this has rendered redundant all cheap imitations. As John Calvin said, “By his wrestling hand to hand with the devil’s power, with the dread of death, and with the pains of hell, Jesus Christ emerged victorious and triumphed over them, that in death we may not now fear those things which our Prince has swallowed up.”

Timothy George is dean of Beeson Divinity School of Samford University and chairman of the board of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. His email address is [email protected].

2015-03-13T22:56:54-04:00

BEN: Another major theme in several of these essays is justification, a subject which you have written a full book on, reviewed on this blog some years ago. Here I would like to ask— How has your mind changed over the years, or stayed the same, on this subject, if it has? If there is a constant thread for you in your thinking through this issue over thirty-five years what is it? Can you summarize for us how your view on the righteousness of God is similar to, or differs from the classic formulations on this subject by Luther and Calvin? How do you view the relationship between positional right standing with God and actually being righteous or holy in some sense? Another way of asking this is– How do you view the relationship between what has been called Justification and what is called the New Birth?
——

TOM: First, I had been suspicious for a long time of anything that seemed to be saying that ‘faith’ was ‘the right kind of religion’ (as opposed to ‘works’ which was ‘the wrong kind’) or ‘the kind of righteousness God wanted/approved’. I had heard that said many, many times and it never sounded right – and never made sense of the key texts. OK, that was a low-grade view, though some quite distinguished expositors used to say it. So I had always been disposed to a more Calvinist account: that faith, itself the gift of God, is our response to God’s grace and mercy rather than being ‘the thing we do to pin our flag on God’s map’. This is where, for instance, Richard Hays and I were always close, leading him to push hard for pistis Christou to refer to the faithfulness of Christ, to which our faith is a response. (Many other variations on this now abound, of course.)
I reacted against some earlier statements of the ‘subjective genitive’ (that of A. T. Hanson for instance), but am fully persuaded that at least in the line of thought from Romans 3.1-2 to Romans 3.21-22 the key thing is the unfaithfulness of Israel to the divine plan and the faithfulness of the Messiah, as Israel’s representative, to that same plan.

One breakthrough for me was when my teacher, George Caird, reviewed Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism, and mentioned the fourfold meaning of ‘God’s righteousness’ in the OT – that it’s the ‘righteousness’ of the judge in the lawcourt. I had in any case been reading Kaesemann’s commentary on Romans where he argues, against Bultmann, that God’s righteousness is God’s own righteousness, not the status which, whether from God or before God or anything else, is given/imputed/imparted to humans. My own combination of K’s rejection of B, and Caird’s exposition of the OT view, all coming together within a covenantal frame which K explicitly rejected and C never quite embraced, has been so exegetically fruitful – notably of course in Romans 3 and 9-10 – that I have seen no reason to change it.

What has developed, slowly but surely, is a sense of the integration of Paul’s exposition of justification with two other major features: first, the work of the Spirit (prominent in Gal 3—4, not in Rom 3—4, but when Paul restates justification in Rom 8.31-39 it is as a result of the whole Spirit-driven theme of ch 8); second, the ‘in Christ’ motif (see how, in Rom. 3.24, Gal. 2.17 and Phil 3.9, Paul can speak easily and naturally of being ‘justified in Christ’).

This cuts clean against the still-popular assumption, based on an atomizing reading of Romans (for which an older quasi-Lutheran reading must take the blame by its privileging of Rom 1-4 against 5-8 let alone 9-11), that ‘juristic’ and ‘participatory’ categories are different kinds of things which Paul never mixes and which must be played off against one another – Douglas Campbell’s massive and brilliant but to my mind utterly mistaken thesis being the most recent example. Galatians 2.12—4.11 shows that the two go completely together, as does Philippians 3.2-11; and a reading of Romans which takes seriously the entire sweep of the argument from 1.18 through to 8.39, not to mention the end of 11, demonstrates that ‘in the Messiah’ and ‘justification’ etc go together extremely closely. Far too many expositions of justification have tried to say everything that has to be said while leaving the Spirit out of it, and/or while pushing ‘in Christ’ language to one side. It can’t be done – or at least, it can’t be done by anyone wanting to be faithful to Paul.
In all this I have constantly been encouraged by reading more and more about the way that second-temple Jews were actually thinking, and were reading their scriptures.
The big thing to get across now, I think, is that the question ‘who then are the true family of Abraham’ and ‘how do I get my sins forgiven’ are not ultimately different questions. God called Abraham to undo the sin of Adam, so that to belong to Abraham’s family (Rom 4, Gal 3) is to be part of the family whose sins have been dealt with on the cross. Splitting these two themes apart, I now see in my old age, is the direct result of several false antitheses that have bedeviled western theology for long enough.

I think what I have learned through much of this is that a good many Protestants have forgotten that the primary thing Luther and Calvin did was to study and teach the scriptures, deliberately trying to generate a church that would go on doing the same rather than make their teachings into a new formal tradition against which scripture itself would have to be measured. The fact that some early varieties of the so-called ‘new perspective’, particularly of course that of Ed Sanders, were studying ‘patterns of religion’ rather than theology, particularly sociology, has provided an excuse for an unthinking backlash which has been even more unfortunate in its tone than in its content. Sadly, much Protestantism, of various sorts, has still clung to the view that since Paul’s gospel rejects a supposedly Jewish notion of ‘justification by works’, it must be opposed to Judaism itself and everything to do with it. That way lies Marcionism, of course.

That’s why, in much evangelicalism, the Old Testament is reduced to a book of types and patterns, lessons we can scoop up and transplant to our own day. It has thousands of those, of course, and we can learn from them. But the much bigger thing is the single story from Abraham to Jesus – NOT a smooth development or a steady crescendo but a dark and stormy passage with the sudden shaft of gospel light coming ‘when the time had fully come’ (Gal 4.4). All this needs a lot of spelling out still, but I hope I have pointed the way . . .

PS. Justification and ‘new birth’. The only Pauline reference to the latter is in Titus 3.5, in a rich and dense context which contains almost everything else you could wish, so there’s really too much information for us to say ‘this is how Paul related justification to new birth’. What Paul does more regularly talk about is the powerful work of God, through the spirit, in the preaching of the gospel: folly to Greeks, a scandal to Jews, but to us who are being saved, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. So it looks as though he has a strong theology of the announcement of the word of the gospel (either: the Messiah died for our sins according to the scriptures… etc etc as in 1 Cor 15.3; or ‘the crucified and risen Jesus is Lord’, as in Rom. 1.3-5; or some combination!); when this message is announced, even though it makes no sense in the worlds of the hearers, the Holy Spirit works through it and people come to believe that Jesus is Lord and that God has raised him from the dead (Romans 10). When that happens, Paul declares – or rather God declares – that people who believe this are thereby marked out as the sin-forgiven new-covenant family he always promised to Abraham. This causes all sorts of further questions, of course, but that’s I think how Paul puts the package together.

2015-03-13T22:56:55-04:00

Here is a portion of a nice piece by Bill Wyman from last Sunday’s times. See What you think. BW3
—-
The Quotable Bob Dylan

Bill Wyman (no not the one who was the Stones bass player)

THIS year’s Nobel Prize in Literature should be announced in early October, and over on the tony British betting site Ladbrokes, Haruki Murakami of Japan, riding the waves of acclaim for his fantastical novel “1Q84,” is the favorite. Other well-known names — Milan Kundera, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates — are bandied about, but Mr. Murakami is unique: among perennial Nobel front-runners, it would be difficult to find a writer more influenced by the popular music and culture born of the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s.

That fact prompts a pressing question: why isn’t the most vital of the artistic catalysts of those upheavals himself a front-runner for the prize? I’m referring of course to Bob Dylan, a fierce and uncompromising poet whose writing, 50 years on, still crackles with relevance. Mr. Dylan’s work remains utterly lacking in conventionality, moral sleight of hand, pop pabulum or sops to his audience. His lyricism is exquisite; his concerns and subjects are demonstrably timeless; and few poets of any era have seen their work bear more influence.

I’m not the first to suggest it, but it’s time to take the idea seriously. The Nobel Prize in Literature is not awarded posthumously, and Mr. Dylan, now in his 70s, has battled heart disease. Alfred Nobel’s will decreed that the prize should go to a writer with “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” Why hasn’t Bob Dylan received one?

Given his medium (songwriting) and profession (rock star), Mr. Dylan may have some strikes against him:

Bob Dylan is not in the mold of the sober creator of “great literature.” He most certainly is not — but consider: in 1997, the literature prize went to Dario Fo, the incorrigible and profane Italian playwright, at whose selection the Roman Catholic Church in particular was amusingly aghast. The vast majority of literature prize recipients are world titans (Mario Vargas Llosa, Günter Grass) or less-well-known but established candidates (Orhan Pamuk of Turkey, the late Seamus Heaney of Ireland), with a relatively obscure recipient every so often (like Elfriede Jelinek of Austria nine years ago), just to keep us all on our toes. It has been too long since the Swedish Academy has honored a mind like Mr. Fo’s.

Mr. Dylan just writes pop lyrics. Actually, Mr. Dylan writes, full stop. Why discount what has been written because of where it ends up? Those who would use the word “pop” as a cudgel or tool of exclusion do so at their peril. Dickens and Twain, Hugo and Shakespeare and Euripides — all soaked up the acclaim of their day. Alfred Hitchcock, whose work at its height met critical condescension, would have some useful thoughts on the subject as well.

Still — his doggerel verses are not literature. In the 1950s in America, rock was a mongrel music, created out of the cultures of the downtrodden — people who built their lives around the blues, folk, gospel or country. Electric guitars got involved, and then some leers and hip thrusts. A new postwar generation of youth took notice, and a cultural revolution was born.

Mr. Dylan added literature. He was first, of course, a singer of folky loquacity, and a serious student of the music’s antediluvian influences: what the critic Greil Marcus calls “the old, weird America.” To this he wedded the yawp of the Beats and the austere intellectualism of the Symbolists. Drugs didn’t hurt, and passing but pungent imagery shows that Mr. Dylan had absorbed the Bible as well.

That disruptive mélange gave us the imagery and power of songs like “Chimes of Freedom” and “Desolation Row,” of “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” and “Visions of Johanna,” among scores of others. He has displayed a mastery of everything from the political jeremiad (“It’s Alright, Ma [I’m Only Bleeding])” to the romantic epic (“Tangled Up in Blue”), and lines like “Money doesn’t talk, it swears” show his way with the lancing aperçu. Mr. Dylan is neither a saint nor a moralist. Epic anger and personal petulance erupt out of his lyrics. But so do tender mercies, extravagant and deep love, self-castigation and what turns out to have been no little wisdom.

Pop lyrics are corrupted by the writer’s desire for popular acclaim. In fact, the record is clear that — whatever ambition lay in his breast — his is a personality, and his art is of a nature, that makes it difficult to chase popular approval or sanction. Mr. Dylan is no Solzhenitsyn, but he is a figure who genuinely challenges the established order.

He was surely the first pop artist to tell his audience things it didn’t want to hear. In 1963, from the dais at a civil rights dinner, he looked with some contempt at the well-dressed crowd and said, “My friends don’t wear suits.” The drama surrounding his lurch into electric music is perhaps overstated; “Like a Rolling Stone” was a huge hit. What’s really radical about the song is its derisive look at his privileged listeners. Mr. Dylan reveled in the comeuppance he saw on the horizon: “You said you’d never compromise” and now “… you stare into the vacuum of his eyes / And ask him do you want to make a deal?”

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