Sanders, Dunn, NPP

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:02 am By Peter Leithart

As Watson goes on, he notes Dunn’s early and fundamental attacks on Sanders’s reading of Paul. Dunn argues that Sanders treats Paul as an un-Jewish theologian, rejecting not only covenant nomism but the whole apparatus of covenantal, biblical theology that the Jews built from. Dunn insists that Paul opposes covenant nomism (in Watson’s words) “on the basis of an expanded, inclusive, but still recognizably Jewish covenantal theology.” Wright has made similar criticisms of Sanders, adding that Sanders’s view is vitiated... Read more

Universal law

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:50 pm By Peter Leithart

In the introduction to his book, Watson summarizes the thesis of his unpublished doctoral thesis, on which the published book is based. His initiating observation is that “in virtually every passage where the Reformation tradition has found an attack on ‘earning salvation,’ there is a reference to the exclusiveness of the Jewish theology of the covenant as contrasted with the universality of Paul’s proclamation.” Paul’s attack does not, as Sanders claimed, arise from Christology per se, but from a “universalizing... Read more

NPP

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:09 am By Peter Leithart

In his recently revised Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles , Francis Watson offers a pithy summary of the agenda of the New Perspective. Sanders, he says, extended the critique that G. F. Moore mounted in 1921 against German Lutheran scholarship on Judaism; Moore basically argued that German scholarship was systematizing and apologetic rather than genuinely historical, and Watson suggests that Sanders’s work extended the Moore critique to the Strack-Billerbeck rabbinic collection and the scholarship that came from it. Watson summarizes... Read more

Eucharistic meditation, Fourth Advent

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:39 pm By Peter Leithart

Micah 4:9-10: Now, why do you cry loudly? Is there no king among you, or has your counselor perished, that agony has gripped you like a woman in childbirth? Writhe and labor to give birth, Daughter Zion, like a woman in childbirth. Micah 4-5 is a prophecy about the restoration of Jerusalem through the intervention of a king from Bethlehem who shepherd Israel and put Assyria to flight. The irony here is that the nations that want to snuff out... Read more

Exhortation, Fourth Advent

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:40 pm By Peter Leithart

Doctrine matters, and no doctrine matters more than the doctrine concerning Jesus Christ. Nestorius was the last of the major Christological heretics in the early church. He objected to the church’s declaration that Mary was the “God-bearer,” the “theotokos.” No human being can give birth to God, he thought, and he preferred to say that Mary was “Christ-bearer.” At the Council of Chalcedon, the church insisted on the term “God-bearer” and addressed the larger questions of Nestorianism by saying that... Read more

David and Goliath Redux

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:52 pm By Peter Leithart

Sweeney says that “to little to be among the thousands of Judah” (Micah 5:2) means “too young,” and alludes to the “younger son” theme of the Old Testament. This specifically refers to David, the younger son of Jesse. But why “too young to be among the thousands of Judah”? The allusion is to the David and Goliath story, where David is literally too young to be among the military units, the “thousands” (analogous to a Roman “century”). This fits the... Read more

Rachel Weeping

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:03 am By Peter Leithart

The following notes summarize M. A. Sweeney’s marvelous exegesis of Micah 4-5 (in the Berit Olam) series. In 4:8 and again in 5:2, Micah addresses particular places. The first, 4:8, is an address to “Daughter Zion” which is also identified as “Migdal-eder,” a phrase that means “tower of the flock.” This reminds Israel of Yahweh’s promise to be the shepherd to His people, replacing the false and oppressive shepherds, the cannibal kings that now rule Israel. But the place is... Read more

Remnant of Jacob

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:03 am By Peter Leithart

Commenting on Micah 4:6-8, M.A. Sweeney notes, “the return of the blind and lame remnant of Jacob to Jerusalem (Jer 31:8) points to the lame (solea) figure of Jacob in Gen 32:32. Jacob’s exile from the land of Israel to Aram in order to find a bride and to escape the wrath of his brother Esau and his eventual return (Gen 25-35) forms the basis for prophetic conceptualizations of the exile of Israel and its return to the land.” Read more

Book of the Twelve

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:48 pm By Peter Leithart

There are 12 minor prophets, but these 12 individual books also make up a single book, the “Book of the Twelve.” Like Israel, the minor prophets are both one and many, 12 books and one book. Not only do these prophets form a single book, but the book is neatly arranged, like the other prophetic books of the Old Testament. The Book of the Twelve begins with Hosea, whom Yahweh instructs to take a wife of harlotry as a portrait... Read more

Jewish/Non-Jewish Gnosis

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:45 pm By Peter Leithart

In his history of Christianity, August Neander distinguished between gnostics who arose from within Judaism and those whose inspiration came from “Oriental” modes of thought. Here is his description of the Jewish sources of gnosticism: In the following respect, all these Gnostics agree ; they all held . . . to a world consisting of the pure emanation of life from God, a creation evolved directly out of the divine essence, far exalted above the outward creation produced by God’s... Read more