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.

Whilst in Fort Worth in November, I had the time between lecturing to go see the various exhibits at the Kimble Art Museum because I had heard about a special Turner exhibit curated from collections from all over the world.  Since he’s one of my favorite 19th century painters, especially of seascapes, I and my friend Gene Wilkes went to see the exhibits. It turns out there are other interesting exhibits there as well, the first of which is early Christian floor mosaics.

Mosaics were popular throughout the Greco-Roman world, before and during the Christian era. what is interesting is that in Christian homes, and later in churches as well, their morals meant that many of the mythological mosaic motifs that frequent pagan homes such as in Pompeii were avoided. Instead, Christians developed their own symbolic iconography as we will now demonstrate.  These mosaics are from an excavated household in Homs in Syria and are from the 4th or 5th centuries when Christianity was no longer an illicit religion and could be practiced openly.

In general, you would not depict Christian saints or Biblical figures on floors, as it was thought to be disrespectful to be treading on them. So they ended up on walls, and later in stained glass windows.  What is missing in this collection is a mosaic of the phoenix, which for obvious reasons became the symbol of the resurrected Christ.  In short, in Christian homes, the symbolic mosaics were not mere household decorations with no message, rather they were an indirect and subtle way of telling the Gospel and Christian story.

For those old enough to remember the original Ghostbusters movie from the early 1980s, including the unstoppable Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray combo, we said then, and I would still say now— it will take a lot to top the original. While this new Ghostbusters movie doesn’t quite do that, it is hands down the most fun movie of the holiday season, and good for the whole family, excluding small children.  There are many things to like about this movie– it has a coming of age story, it has romance, it has intrigue, it has the supernatural in a quirky but fun kind of way. And thankfully the script writers do not, and do not have to rely on one big action scene after another, or one big CG effect after another, all there are some of both in the movie. No, this movie is plot driven, develops the character appropriately and cooks nicely along like a good pot of gumbo, before boiling over and moving to a fitting and fun conclusion.  It has quirky humor (‘a grasshopper walks into a bar and the bartenders says ‘we have a drink named after you’ to which the grasshopper replies— you have a drink named Steve?’) and it has some heartwarming family drama as well. Not to mention the truly quirky character who is called Podcast because he’s constantly doing one. He is somewhat reminiscent of Ned in the Spiderman movies.

As for the exploration of the supernatural in this movie, it really isn’t about heaven and hell, its about ghosts, and pagan deities like Gosar that is associated with ancient Sumerian culture.  What is interesting about all this is that the ghosts are not really spirits of dead humans, but more like gluttonous demons who associate with mega-demons like Gosar. In ethos this movie, with its deadpan humor and the supernatural is rather like the first Men in Black film, and equally entertaining for 2 hours and 35 minutes. Both Ann and I enjoyed and laughed again and again.  The movie is not trying to make a serious statement about the supernatural or the afterlife, but does have some serious lessons about combatting evil, about the importance of not misjudging those you know and love, and the joy of watching children grow up and become brave in the face of evil.  There is no bad language or sexual scenes in the movie, but there are some Gosar scenes which are probably too scary for small children.  In the end, it would help if one had seen the original Ghostbusters movie from the 1980s, but it is not absolutely necessary to appreciate this film which has been so nicely put together by Producer/Director Reitman.

Q. I must confess that one of the things that has always bothered me is the absolute confidence many scientists and anthropologists, including Christian ones, place in their methods of dating. Even carbon 14 dating has a plus or minus that can be considerable, and furthermore, dating of stone objects is very iffy, especially if it is decided on the basis of: 1) the technology used to produce say a spear head (a technology which could have developed much sooner in some places and much later in others); or 2) the residue found this or that object, usually called patina or ancient patina. Chemical tests on patina can indeed demonstrate that the object in question is quite old, for example the patina in the inscription on the James ossuary which I wrote about and was involved with long ago. What it can’t do is give one a precise date in antiquity; 3) pottery shards and the like cannot give precise dates. So, I think it is not wrong to have a reasonable amount of skepticism about some of the claims of things going back 500,000 years B.C. or more, not least because we have no parallel evidence, no written records no etc. to confirm such a notion. Now I am not a young earther, and I do think evolutionary theory, at least at the micro level has a good deal of evidence to support it. But a theory is after all…. wait for it, a theory, and some aspects of it are questionable to say the least. I think Christians need to be careful and ask probing questions before committing themselves to a wholescale endorsement of this particular theory. Your thoughts?

A. I wrote this book, in large part, because evolutionary creationists were not responding truthfully to good faith questions from theology. Science does give us a real view into the past, and it has legitimate autonomy from theology. This is a good thing. But theologians are allowed to constructively resist scientific conclusions with good faith questions. On important matters of the faith, we should question scientists. Scientists, at our best, we respond to good faith questions with empathy, honesty, and rigor. Some of BioLogos’s claims were correct. I agree with them that the scientific evidence really does indicate humans share common ancestry with the great apes. Many of their claims, however, were not correct. But I also see why it will be very hard for many to trust them going forward from here.

This has set back public understanding of science substantially. Sorting out the correct and incorrect claims, now, is difficult. Rebuilding trust will be even more difficult.