Q. As time has gone on, I have found the translation as kingdom for malkuta/baseleia less and less plausible and helpful. The English word always conveys a place, whereas often the word seems to refer to an activity, on Jesus’ lips the final divine saving activity at last breaking into human history, particularly the history of God’s people. I don’t find the term ‘reign’ which is more static as helpful as ‘saving activity’ because the term is not talking about the ongoing sovereign reign of God. For this reason I’ve preferred the term dominion, because in English it can have both a verbal aspect (a king can take dominion over some people) and a noun aspect ( one can enter, obtain, inherit a dominion which is a place). In sum, when Jesus and also Paul refer to entering, obtaining, inheriting the dominion they are referring to something future, when the dominion comes on earth as it is in heaven, but when the subject is the divine saving activity it refers to something happening again and again in the present— happening to people who are being saved. So the dominion is in one sense ‘already’ here and in another sense ‘not yet’ come, hence the Lord’s Prayer. This of course implies that we live at a time when God’s will is often not done on earth, indeed quite the opposite. Paul would not have to talk about God working all things together for good for those who love him, if everything that was happening was already good and reflected the will of God. Does this make sense? How would you respond?

A. I am glad to meet another translation or paraphrase for malkuta/baseleia! Dick France entitled a book Divine Government, and I quite like that. Jesus saw himself as bringing an end to the devil’s hijacked and evil rule of the world (John 14:30), and restoring God’s government. Tom Wright entitled a book The Victory of God, and that has a positive dynamic feel. I went for ‘the revolution of God’, again because of the dynamism (contrast static or simply constitutional ideas of a monarchy) and because ‘the revolution’ is something you can join and that has a present and a future aspect. Your ‘dominion’ is another real contender, though I wonder if you and I both lose something in that neither the abstract term ‘dominion’ nor especially ‘revolution’ suggests a personal king, contrast the Psalms that say ‘Yahweh reigns’ (e.g. 97). Jesus is God’s king, indeed embodies God coming as king.

Q. In his recent book History and Eschatology Tom Wright chronicles how the Enlightenment, though in some ways helpful in getting the West beyond some aspect of the obscurantism of the Medieval period, did us no favors in setting up binaries like the natural vs. the supernatural, or miracles vs. mundane activities readily explained by empirical science, or even sacred vs. secular realms of human existence. I think he is absolutely right about this, and of course the NT never uses a term like miracle— Jesus’ special deeds are called mighty or powerful works or signs in the 4th Gospel especially. The question is raised as to what sense it makes to call miracles violations of the natural laws, which God in turn set up, the same God credited with miracles. Do you think it is possible that we could discuss the mighty works of the NT without resorting to Enlightenment categories and could assess their historical authenticity without such pigeon holes? I was reading a work by the philosopher Thomas V. Morris, and he suggested that we think of ‘miracles’ as things that go beyond what we know of natural laws (which of course is not exhaustive knowledge anyway) rather than going against them. Do you find this a helpful distinction?

A. Yes, I do see that as helpful, though I am no philosopher. I am in regular discussion with a friend who is a disciple of Richard Dawkins, the sceptical Oxford scientist, and he wants to explain absolutely everything in terms of natural causality. That sort of reductionism is not persuasive biblically or experientially. On the other hand, the Bible, though pre-modern-science, does know that there are ordinary and extraordinary events and acts of God: people were astonished at Jesus’ powerful deeds and asked: what is this? Even his opponents commenting on his exorcisms described them as the work of the ‘prince’ of demons. And as for his resurrection, people had doubts. It was virtually unbelievable, and John’s description of Thomas’ demand for what we would call empirical evidence is explicitly linked by John to the purpose of his writing of his gospel. It was the extra-ordinary things about Jesus that made him such persuasively good news in the first century. A book that I enjoyed reading recently is the collection of essays Raised on the Third Day, edited by David Beck and Michael Licona.

A very long time ago, there were a couple of songs by the Doors that suit this movie to a T— ‘People are Strange’ and ‘Strange Days’.  On the basis of the last Spiderman movie I was prepared for the confusions involving the multiverse.  That didn’t bother me. I was also prepared for Benedict Cumberbatch to do a good job playing a difficult role— Stephen Strange, as he had before.  And he did do a good job, although making him call the young lady America Chavez ‘kid’ as if he was Humphrey Bogart talking to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca was beyond phony, it actually was belittling to that powerful young woman.  Boo.

Of course with all Marvel movies you have to be prepared for suspending your disbelief at points, but this movie was one long requirement for such an approach.   Missing entirely was any of the usual wry wit of a Marvel movie, any of the non-sinister light hearted moments. Instead, we got Sam Raimi horror, and demons, and a scarlet witch that turns Wanda of Wanda vision into someone you loathe.   Again, Boo.   There are many CG special effects, but most of them have to do with adding more wow factor to the violence.   Considering the amount of violence and horror in this movie, I do not recommend it for young people under 13.  Nope.

And may I just say I am already quite tired of the tendency to interweave all the Marvel story lines into one ongoing story line so that basically you have to watch all their new movies now to keep up with the characters etc.  Boo again.  This is way over the top.    I agree with the increasing number of critics who have panned this sequel to the 2016 Dr. Strange film, which I liked.   It was 2 hours and 6 minutes of kaboom and oh no, one right after the other, without a real good plot or character development…. and then there is the trailer in which we run into the three eyed Dr. Strange. Not reassuring.  And even the Illuminati, which turned out to be just some other Marvel characters, including Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four (please do not rent or stream the previous Fantastic Four movie— it’s a bomb) do not illumine us about what’s really going on. Their cameo appearance is a waste.

Well you can’t win them all, but let’s hope the Thor movie this summer doesn’t produce the same less than Marvelous effect.  This movie was more like something that  came from Tales from the Crypt.

Q. I wonder if you have read Bruce Winter’s monograph. Is Paul among the Sophists?  What Winter demonstrates, at least to my satisfaction is that Paul is not claiming he is not a rhetorician, he is claiming he is not like the orators of the 2^nd Sophistic, who focused on mere verbal eloquence and flattery, overcome by the exuberance for their own verbosity.  Larry Welborn and others have rightly warned that the hints in 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians have to be read within the context of the popular sophistic rhetoric of the day, which Paul eschews.  Welborn is especially helpful with the ‘his letters are heavy but his ethos is weak or miserable’.   I think Winter and Welborn are right about this, and surely the evidence of Paul’s use of speech in character in Rom. 7 makes quite clear he knows advanced rhetorical devices, wherever he got the education. In a dialogue with Stan Porter, which continued into some articles back and forth in JETS, one of the things that bewildered me is that Porter came to the point of basically repudiating the detailed work of Margaret Mitchell, Duane Watson, Kennedy and others and without good reason.  I wonder how you have evaluated all the recent back and forth about Paul and rhetoric in some of these discussions?

A. I suppose Paul had the kind of rhetorical education that anyone would have who had received a secondary or tertiary education. One learns much rhetoric simply by listening to good speakers. Undoubtedly, Paul learned rhetoric by listening. He sometimes uses rhetorical terms. I suspect that his comment that he is an idiotes in word may be an exaggeration (“I’m just a country boy” routine), and I assume that his oratory was not in the class of those in the second sophistic. Some of the church fathers acknowledged that Paul’s speech did not measure up to the highest standards. I am less convinced about Margaret Mitchell’s analysis and Hans Dieter Betz’s commentary than I was previously. I think both tried to “shoe horn” rhetorical arrangement into Paul’s letters. Betz even invented a category exhortatio to fit his scheme. I also see quite a bit of parallelomania in his use of classical parallels.

As I recall, Kennedy has said that one can do rhetorical analysis of any document, whether the writer was consciously using rhetorical tools or not. Schellenberg has an interesting chapter in which he finds many of the characteristics commended by the rhetoricians in the speeches of the Seneca chief Red Jacket (argument from ethos, exordium, self-praise) and Billy Sunday. That is, rhetoric comes largely from socialization. Nevertheless, as you can see in my book, I think attention to Greek rhetorical terms is a useful tool for analyzing an argument.

Q. About the work de elocutione which as you say is falsely attributed to Demetrius, the recent scholarly work on that indicates that the work comes from the first century A.D. if not a bit later (see the monograph by Rhys Roberts). I mention this because I don’t think we have evidence for a handbook on writing various kinds of letters before the time of Paul.  In any case this development considerably post-dates the teaching of rhetoric and handbooks on it.   Does the dating of de elocutione later than you suggest (p. 21), make any difference to the case you are presenting or does it not matter?  I raise this question because in fact, even a document like 1 Thessalonians is far closer to epideictic funeral oratory of the period before and during the NT era, as recently demonstrated in a PhD thesis here at Asbury, than it is to any sort assumed parenetic letter form.  I think your quote from Schellenberg is right on the mark (p. 23). I don’t think Paul is following any letter conventions apart from the beginning and the ending of his documents.

A. I suppose it does not matter about the dating of de elocutione. The letter types have some analogies to Paul’s letters, but these have been greatly exaggerated. The examples of parenetic or friendship letters, for example, have only a few phrases that they share with Paul. After all, Philemon is longer than the letters given as evidence that Paul’s letters fit a particular type. The same is true, I think for an overly wooden categorization of Paul’s letters in rhetorical terms. I have seen some of the literature on 1 Thessalonians as a funeral oration, but I am not convinced that his letters fit any specific type. With its emphasis on future conduct, it appears to approximate deliberative rhetoric more, although I think Paul’s letters have only a partial resemblance to the ancient rhetorical types. Schellenberg, by the way, is also very skeptical about fitting Paul’s rhetoric with any Greco-Roman types.

Q. You say that Paul offers a new sort of prophetic rhetoric. New in both form and content, or simply new in that it is a rhetoric with Christian content?  Can you explain what you mean a bit as we get going on this dialogue?

A. Although Paul’s facility with Greek and his upbringing in the diaspora acquaint him with good orators, many of his proofs would not have been persuasive outside the group because he speaks for God and begins with premises that only the in-group would accept. He tells about mysteries only known through revelation (1 Cor. 2; Rom. 11:25-26), sometimes commands his audience (1 Cor. 5:1-11), demonstrating an authority not found in ancient speeches, and even threatens them when they do not comply (1 Cor. 4:21; 2 Cor. 13). This, I think, is not a form of rhetoric that one finds in the handbooks.

Q. You say in the Introduction that theology and rhetoric are inseparable parts of Paul’s effort to convince or persuade his audience in regard to their behavior (and I would add in regard to various of their beliefs as well— e.g. about resurrection in 1 Cor. 15). I entirely agree with you about this— the goal is the moral transformation of the audience.  This also means that theology and ethics are also not neat discreet categories for Paul.  His ethics are inherently theological in character, and his theology has ethical goals.  I was once taught by a Calvinist that all theology is grace, and so all ethics is just our response in gratitude for what ‘God hath wrought’. This always struck me as not quite right if indeed working out one’s salvation with fear and trembling’ is one part theological and one part ethical, involving the believers co-operation and efforts.   Would you agree?  Do you think various Reformation theological categories have skewed the way we look at Paul’s theology and rhetoric?

A. Yes, the division of theology and ethics cannot be made in Paul’s letters. One only needs to look at his thanksgivings/prayers at the opening of his letters. They express thanks for the listeners’ faith, hope, and love (1 Thess.), and they pray that the readers will be blameless at the day of Christ. The ethical sections are integrated throughout the letters. In neither Corinthian letters can we make a sharp distinction between theology and ethics. In 2 Corinthians, for example, we learn our ethics from Paul’s own autobiographical statements that demonstrate how his moral life is intertwined with his theology of the cross.

In this post we are dealing with the chapter by Prof. T.M. Lemnos, yet another OT professor (of which there is a plurality in this study, with NT scholars under-represented) whose concern is about the interface between weapon and hunting images combined with sexual imagery in the OT.  The chapter is entitled “Israelite Bows and American Guns”.  She is right that the representation of these things involves a variety of mingled together factors, and hyper-masculinity comes into the picture as well— the warriors are men, the weapons are in their hands, the enemy is dehumanized by the use of animal images, and war or battle is depicted like going on a hunt after predatory animals. Lemnos easily enough demonstrates the connections between these things in the OT. But what is the connection with American gun culture?  Interestingly, a 2016 report showed that only 11.6 million Americans could be categorized as hunters (about 3.5% of the total population), a very small minority of gun owners.   And there is a wide divergence from state to state in the number of persons owning hunting licenses– only 1% in Rhode Island, but 26% in South Dakota, 25% in Montana, but surprisingly only 1% in Texas (though that amounts to over a million people).   Some 32% of all gun owners are males (overwhelmingly white male) whereas only 12% of women are. Part of this has to do with the ongoing associate of gun ownership with ideas about strong masculinity, and indeed, as has been pointed out— guns are shaped like the male sexual organ in erection, and both guns and that organ involve shooting out a projectile.  This explains the frequent complaint by male gun owners that if they take away our guns, we’ve been emasculated, so much is gun possession associated with feeling like and being a male in America.  And behind all of that is the desire of men to dominate their situation and other people, a problem that goes all the way back to the garden where Eve is told ‘your desire will be for your husband and he will lord it over you’.  Domination culture, including fallen patriarchy itself is a result of human sin then and now.

Lemnos stresses that “One of the primary messages of the Gospels is the refutation of the idea that status should be based on violence, hypermasculine domination, and the dehumanization of subordinate people. One of the main theological points of the crucifixion is to refute this concept of status. Jesus… was a member of a group of people who had been conquered again and again in antiquity. [and yet] He did not rise up and slay his attackers” (p. 88). In fact he forgave his tormentors from the cross!  Think on these things.

The Fourth Sunday in Advent is of course rarely Christmas day itself and this year that Sunday is December 19th. 

THE SECRET

Hidden reality

Like life in the womb

Hidden reality

Like death in the tomb

Hidden away

For the appropriate day

Wrapped in enigma, cloaked in secrecy,

Awaiting a wake-up call with urgency.

But how shall such a song be sung?

A tale that’s never told,

A trail that’s long gone cold,

A mystery unrevealed,

A truth that is concealed,

Seems useless on first glance.

Who said there was a secret,

Who told us we must keep it

Who set the search in motion

And stirred up our devotion

If ‘clueless’ was our stance?

Call forth the revelator,

Who hinted something greater

A light that has been hidden

A thought that comes unbidden

And is not mere romance.

Go to the old gate keeper,

And wake the guardian sleeper,

Arouse the storyteller

Seek out the boundary dweller

Lulled into tragic trance.

For sometimes revelation

Awaits the new creation

Propitious point in time

When insight is sublime

And we’re prepared to dance.

The time may fully come

The race be fully run,

The truth could then be heard,

And taken at its word,

As happy happenstance.

Thus mystery has a point

When times are out of joint

And no one wants to hear

About the truth they fear

Because of circumstance.

In one sense all of history

Apocalyptic mystery

With secrets kept and told

By prophets young or old

Who speak, suggest, recant.

For too much information

Obscures the revelation

Prevents a clear reception

May even cause deception

Instead of some advance.

So let us treasure mystery

And truths that unveil history

Spoken in due season

Reflecting divine reason,

And never left to chance.

There is a famous saying attributed to Alfred Lord Tennyson which stresses that there is a tide in the affairs of humankind which if taken at the flood leads on to great things. There can be no doubt that this is a Biblical idea.  We see it for example in Gal. 4.4—“But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son…”  There is a sense in which there are certain propitious moments in history which, when something happens it really matters.  One way people express this concept is when they say  “timing is everything”.   For example,  the invention of the automobile would not have amounted to much if it had not been preceded by several other inventions, such as the internal combustion engine, and various sorts of technology first used with trains.

In this Christmas season, one of the things most worth contemplating is why it was that Jesus came when he did.  In what sense had the time fully come?   We might even ask— Why wouldn’t God have waited until an era of mass communication if Jesus was to be the savior of the world in all generations?  Several things come to mind.

Firstly, it has been widely recognized that Jesus was borne at a time when there was something of a unified culture in the known world, with a language all could use, and roads and government that reach from far east of Israel to the western most part of Spain to Scotland in the north, and to Africa in the south.  Thanks to the spread of Hellenism and Greek by Alexander the Great and his successors even Israelites could speak Greek and relate well in the Greco-Roman world.   Thanks to Roman engineering there were durable roads in all directions, and thanks to the Roman military might the seas had largely been swept clean of pirates and brigands. Even just a little before the birth of  Jesus in the time of Julius Caesar, Rome was just a Republic, and there were many competing forces in  the Mediterranean world.   Jesus could hardly have come at a time more propitious for starting a new world religion if we were to evaluate the previous 2,000 years before Jesus’ birth.   Then too he was borne in the land that was the land bridge between three continents—Asia, Africa, and the regions in the north that led to what we call Europe.   Suppose, for example, Jesus had been borne while the Jews were in the Babylonian exile.  It would have been far more difficult for a Jewish messianic movement to start then and in such a locale.

Of course our author thinks as well that it isn’t just natural factors we should consider, but also the divine plan, as promised and predicted in the OT.   When Paul says the time had fully come, he is thinking of the fulfillment of prophecy, and of the divine time table for things.  He believes as well that God has a sense of timing, and that there is such a thing as a timely truth.  Many things are kept secret until just the right moment when they need to be revealed.  Sometimes God waits until we are prepared to receive a certain truth or message or revelation.

We in our age of ‘freedom of information’ and all access passes to the Internet have difficulty with the concept of  information being revealed on a need to know basis, or secrets needing to be kept, until the timing is right for their revelation.  We simply assume that all information should be available to us at all times, because “the people have a right to know”.  This assumption is of course rather naïve.  It assumes a lot about our powers to comprehend most anything if we study it long enough.  But in fact it is sometimes the case that “we can’t handle the truth”, and God knows this.   God knows our weaknesses, and God also knows when the time is ripe and right to share new revelation.    There is another factor as well.

T.S. Eliot famously asked where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge and where is the knowledge we have lost in the sea of information.  One of the problems with living in the age of Google and the Internet, is that there is frankly too much information available and much of it unreliable or even untrue.  I have this problem all the time with my students who take ideas or articles or information off the Internet assuming that it must be true since someone made it publicly available, but alas much of it is what the Rolling Stones once called “useless information supposed to fire my imagination”.  We may live in the information age, but it would surely be better to live in the revelation or even the wisdom age.  It is not only possible to get lost in the forest looking for the right tree of knowledge, but it is also the case that we may well mistake pulp fiction for a cedar of Lebanon, so to speak.  One needs some criteria, some guidance, some wisdom, some kind of road map to recognize the truth when we see it.  And sometimes its not a matter of finding the right wise man or expert. Sometimes its just a matter of being patient and waiting until God chooses to make the truth known, and the light finally dawns on us.  Some realities and truths need to be hidden away, like a baby in a womb, “until the time had fully come”.  We must come to terms with the fact that some times we must wait until the truth “comes to full term” and then is brought forth into the world.  Patience is not a virtue much practiced in the information and Internet age.  Sometimes a secret needs to be ‘kept’ until the appropriate time for it to be revealed.

One of my favorite Christmas stories is O’Henry’s famous tale “The Gift of the Magi”. O’ Henry was one of my childhood favorites as he grew up in the town right next to my home town— High Point N.C.  The story hangs on two things—the great love a couple has for each other and their willingness to sacrifice much to get the other a precious  Christmas gift, but it also hangs on the fact that the truth about the gifts must be kept secret until the appropriate day comes.  Thus, unbeknownst to his girl, the young man pawns his precious heirloom pocket watch to buy beautiful combs for his beloved’s beautiful long hair, and unbeknownst to the young man the girl has cut off and sold her hair so she could buy him a beautiful gold chain for the pocket watch.  Imagine their surprise when Christmas comes and both unwrap gifts they cannot at the present moment use, but which demonstrate the great love they have for each other.   The Christmas story in our Gospels goes this story one better, as it not only reveals God’s sacrificial love, but it offers a timely and timeless truth that is always helpful and useful to anyone from the very minute it is unveiled.  Indeed, there is a tide in human affairs, and God has a perfect sense of timing when it comes to revealing and healing, saving and restoring, reconciling and justifying us all.

There is not a good deal of Biblical or Christian art in this museum, indeed there is more Greco-Roman art objects and mythological paintings and we will look at both in this post.

The flight into Egypt painting 2 pictures above is mildly interesting this painting of Abraham taking Isaac up the mountain for the sacrifice is more telling.

Certainly more colorful, with gold leaf, is the raising of Lazarus painting.

A fresh take on John 4 is found in Barbieri’s painting of Jesus and the Samaritan woman….

Certainly the most dramatic of the Christian paintings is the Torment of St. Anthony by demons.

Here’s a nice portrait of St. Matthew

There is one Christian sculpture I could find in the museum a bust of Christ….

Here’s a somewhat atypical Madonna and child…

Here’s the supper at Emmaus when who Jesus is doesn’t dawn on Cleopas and company until the end.

The commissioning of the 12 comes in for treatment.