I've just heard that Dick France died late last week. R T (Dick) France taught me New Testament at London Bible College. It is from him that I gained my love of biblical scholarship done in the service of the church. I'm reading Richard Sennett's exposition of the craftsman at the moment and if ever there was a craftsman in the world of NT studies, it was Dick France.
His lectures were models of good learning, packed full of information and pitched at a level that undergraduates found gently stretching. He whetted our appetite for more and gave us the tools to find it for ourselves. As a personal tutor he was wonderful, listening carefully to your ideas, steering you away from the rocks but encouraging you to follow your passion.
His commentaries on Matthew and Mark are my go-to texts on those two gospels. They are full of godly learning, erudite, well-informed with a light touch that allows the text itself to breathe and offer up its treasures. As you read them, you feel that you are being ushered into the presence of the authors of Matthew and Mark and not shown how much secondary reading Dick himself has mastered (though he had mastered everything worth reading).
His book Divine Government: God's Kingship in the Gospel of Mark is an over-looked gem of insight and scholarship. His 1966 Bristol PhD, published as Jesus and the Old Testament, is still a model of how to understand Jesus' mission in the light of the Old Testament. It was this book that opened my eyes to how to read the apocalyptic discourse in the gospels as concerning both the fall of Jerusalem and the return of the king; a path Dick trod two decades before Tom Wright followed him down it.
And his book The Evidence for Jesus in the Jesus Library is an excellent, short introduction to the evidence both within and beyond the NT to the life of Jesus; and more importantly, how best to read that evidence.
He is a man who has made an enormous contribution to scholarship and helped shape the lives of every student privileged to study with him, of whom I am one. Thank you Dick for your faithfulness, good humour, skill and godly learning.
Showing posts with label New Testament. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Testament. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Reading to give ideas a fresh hearing
Today I have finally acquired a copy of Douglas Campbell's The Deliverance of God. I have resisted until now because of the sheer size and the vast price, so when I found a pristine copy going for a comparative song at a second hand book shop this morning, I thought 'oh, go on, then...'
I am due to teach a course on Romans from the beginning of February and since Campbell's book is seeking to make an argument about Romans, I thought it would be good to have it to refer to. I have read some bits and pieces of it before (in library copies) and remain to be convinced that his central suggestion that not all of Romans 1-4 represents the thinking of Paul but rather that of a rival teacher he is seeking to correct holds any water.
It's an intimidating read - there are 300 pages of thicket clearing before he actually gets to Romans! The introduction does contain one insight that has set me thinking, however - and augurs well for the journey ahead. He argues that 'at the heart of the conventional "Lutheran" approach to these texts...are powerful commitments to individualism, to rationalism, and to consent.' He goes on to suggest that Luther's reading of Romans (and Galatians) were heavily influenced by the prevailing renaissance culture with its strong attachment to humanism and individualism.
It is of course not new to suggest that protestant and evangelical formulations of the faith are deeply indebted to modern and even enlightenment thinking. But it is new (at least, it is to me) to have a scholar arguing that the very reading of the core texts of protestant Christianity owe more to the renaissance than they do to the apostle Paul.
I am interested to see what Campbell makes of this because one of my current study interests is the whole area of the relationship between literacy and spirituality - both in the NT world (where literacy rates were very low) and in our context (where literacy rates are high but people read less and less - especially in the areas of theology and Christian spirituality).I am wondering if we need to develop a hermeneutics of the faith that is based on oral culture rather than reading, much as the one Paul operated in; wondering if evangelical renewal will come via hearing rather than reading.
And I wondering if a 1200+ page book is going to help me!
I am due to teach a course on Romans from the beginning of February and since Campbell's book is seeking to make an argument about Romans, I thought it would be good to have it to refer to. I have read some bits and pieces of it before (in library copies) and remain to be convinced that his central suggestion that not all of Romans 1-4 represents the thinking of Paul but rather that of a rival teacher he is seeking to correct holds any water.
It's an intimidating read - there are 300 pages of thicket clearing before he actually gets to Romans! The introduction does contain one insight that has set me thinking, however - and augurs well for the journey ahead. He argues that 'at the heart of the conventional "Lutheran" approach to these texts...are powerful commitments to individualism, to rationalism, and to consent.' He goes on to suggest that Luther's reading of Romans (and Galatians) were heavily influenced by the prevailing renaissance culture with its strong attachment to humanism and individualism.
It is of course not new to suggest that protestant and evangelical formulations of the faith are deeply indebted to modern and even enlightenment thinking. But it is new (at least, it is to me) to have a scholar arguing that the very reading of the core texts of protestant Christianity owe more to the renaissance than they do to the apostle Paul.
I am interested to see what Campbell makes of this because one of my current study interests is the whole area of the relationship between literacy and spirituality - both in the NT world (where literacy rates were very low) and in our context (where literacy rates are high but people read less and less - especially in the areas of theology and Christian spirituality).I am wondering if we need to develop a hermeneutics of the faith that is based on oral culture rather than reading, much as the one Paul operated in; wondering if evangelical renewal will come via hearing rather than reading.
And I wondering if a 1200+ page book is going to help me!
Thursday, January 05, 2012
Would St Paul the Tentmaker have camped with Occupy?
As promised, here's the full version of my presentation at the Bank of Ideas this afternoon. We had an excellent time with some lively and imaginative thinkers who were keen to explore whether Paul the tent maker had any wisdom to share relating to changing the world. None of them were church-goers but all found Paul more interesting than they were expecting!
Anyway, here's what I said:
If St Paul walked into the building in the churchyard that bears his name, he’d struggle to make the connection between it and the movement he belonged to. So maybe he’d make a tent and pitch it alongside the others outside the Cathedral and pondered the paradox.
Paul was a craftworker who lived by making tents, shop awnings and other canvas and leather goods. He was never a religious professional; if he didn’t make and sell his goods, he didn’t eat and couldn’t pay his rent.
He lived like other craftworkers in the empire in a rented workshop, sleeping on a mezzanine floor above his bench, tools and canvas or in a room behind his workspace. He bought his food at a street café – a popina – if he’d made a sale and shared it with fellow craftworkers as they talked about Jesus and how they might embody his values in their lives.
Paul lived in a world where an elite 1-3% owned pretty much everything, called the shots and lived lives of hitherto unknown luxury. The other 97-99% got by as best they could. A few earned enough to enjoy a modest surplus – maybe a week’s cushion, a month’s in boom times; most scraped by a day at a time – if they got work today, they ate and kept the landlord happy til tomorrow.
So everything Paul says about money, he says against this background – a context that has a curiously modern ring to it.
Paul also joined a movement that already had some firm views about how the economy ought to be organised – certainly the economy over which they had a measure of control, namely their own churches. There were two abiding principles that seem to have been at work among those early followers of Jesus – mutualism and equality (the former arising from the latter).
In the opening scene of his story of the Jesus community in Acts, Luke twice tells us that the believers had everything in common and distributed to those who were in need (2:44f; 4:32, 34f). This form of social organisation is sometimes called 'love communalism', a community of shared or pooled resources motivated by love between its members. It is mutualism in practice, ‘the implicit or explicit belief that individual and collective well-being is attainable above all by mutual interdependence’ (as Justin Meggitt puts it)
Some scholars suggest that this was a social experiment that failed. Their argument hinges on the fact that when famine came to the region in the mid-40s, the Jerusalem and Judean believers did not have the resources to cope and were therefore dependent on support from elsewhere.
But such a view completely misunderstands the precarious nature of life in the first century. Few people had the resources to be able to cope with food shortages – the result of the prices of staple foods going up beyond their reach – let alone famines. The majority of Jesus followers were middling to poor people who lived at or just a little above subsistence and who were vulnerable to economic downturns.
It also fails to grasp the consistent teaching of the Bible, taken up and reinforced by Jesus and sitting at the heart of the movement that bears his name.
Economic justice, in the form of frequent acts of redistribution to ensure equality among his people – was at the heart of God’s agenda for his people from the earliest days on.
The Sabbath cycle ensured that the poor were not neglected. Every harvest was to be taken in such a way that the crops at the edge of the fields were to be left for the poor to glean. Every seven years, the land was to be left fallow, allowing anything that grew on them to be picked by those without fields to work (Exodus 23:10-11; Leviticus 25:2-7). On top of that, slaves were to be released (Exodus 23:10-11; Deuteronomy 15:12-18). And debts were to be cancelled (Deuteronomy 15:1-6). God’s idea seems to have been that no one, regardless of whether they’d brought it on themselves or not, was to be left in unsustainable debt and everlasting slavery. Grace was built into the economy.
Then every 50 years, everything was to return to how it was when the people entered the land. All the families would return to their portion of Israel. It was a reminder to the nation that the land belonged to God and they only worked it as tenants or stewards, managing it for their landlord, God (Leviticus 25:10-16).
The prophets emphasised the importance of the jubilee in the future God plans for his people (Isaiah 58, 61; Ezekiel 45:7-9; 46:16-18). At the heart of the prophetic critique of the people’s life was the fact that they had neglected justice in the land. For example, Ezekiel 16:48-50 likens Judah to Sodom, a city marked by greed and neglect of the poor; and Isaiah calls the leaders of Judah ‘Sodom’ (1:10) because they have neglected justice (1:17; 3:13-15 and especially 5:1-7).
Much of Jesus’ teaching about money and life in the Kingdom of God is rooted in the jubilee notions of release and restoration – especially his first sermon at Nazareth and the model prayer he taught his disciples with the line ‘forgive us our debts as we have already forgiven our debtors’.
Paul absorbed these radical economic values and they became the bedrock of his understanding of how the Christian community should work. And while he outlines how the principles of mutuality and equality should work within the Christian community, he does so because he believes this to be God’s blueprint for human society everywhere.
It’s interesting that Steve Keen, professor of economics and finance at the university of Western Sydney, has suggested total debt cancellation as a way of getting the global economy out of the mess it’s been pitched into by an over-reliance on debt-financing of everything! He argues that a debt jubilee is politically improbable because it would cause the failure of many banks. But the alternative is a decade of economic stagnation with the poor picking up the tab for the rich world over-dosing on debt.
I can see Paul nodding in the door of his tent…
When Paul talks about the mutualism of the small churches he wrote to, he has in mind the release from oppression at the heart of Old Testament jubilee ideas. In Galatians 2:10, 5:13-14 and 6:7-10 he outlines an ethic based on mutual sharing and seeking the good of others – especially those in the household of faith. In Philippians 2:1-4 he argues that we should seek one another’s interests rather than our own, since through Jesus we have been freed from sin and competition and he offers his own life as an example of being content with our economic circumstances because God will provide all that we need to live in the context of thanking them for sharing economically with him while he was in need (4:10-20).
And in 2 Corinthians 8:1-15 we have an outline of the heart of his thinking about money and mutualism that is based on the key jubilee principles of release and restoration. By the grace of God, the Macedonians have been released from the prevailing greed of the culture, freed to share their surplus with those in need, so that they in turn might have a measure of prosperity restored to them.
And at the heart of this vision is equality. Mutualism – which aims for those in surplus to share with those in need – is based on a fundamental principle that there should be equality between people. He says:
13Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality. 14At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. The goal is equality, 15as it is written: “The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.” (Ex 16:18)
For Paul the simple principle that everyone should have what they need and share what is left over with those who are in need determines our economic relationships. He was gathering support for believers in Judea because they were hammered by hunger and a crashing economy.
His model is that everyone should work to have something to share. So when he writes to a small group of believers in Thessalonica, he urges them to work with their hands rather than be dependent on hand-outs from wealthy patrons, so that they will have something to share. Indeed, his aim appears to be that everyone would want to be a benefactor, using their surplus for the good of those who were in need around them.
Paul’s economics are probably not directly transferable from his world to ours. But his was a world where government was weak and a wealthy minority called the shots; his was a world where the have-nots were hung out to dry by those who amassed wealth for themselves; and his was a world where the poor were squeezed by rising prices, high taxes and a lack of opportunity.
So perhaps his economic principles of mutualism and equality have something to say to our world. Perhaps he’d have spoken about this as he sat outside his tent in Paternoster Square.
Comments very welcome...
Tuesday, January 03, 2012
Would Paul join Occupy?
I am doing a gig with Juliet and Rob at the Bank of Ideas on Thursday at 1pm. Details here.
I'll be reflecting on what we can learn from Paul's ideas of equality and mutuality. He was keen to 'remember the poor' (Galatians 2:10), seen particularly in his raising a redistributive collection among his churches for the hard-pressed Judean believers.
If you work in the City, please come along, bring your lunch and join in the debate; if you know people who do, invite them along. It'd be good to have an audience!
I'll post what I say after the event.
I'll be reflecting on what we can learn from Paul's ideas of equality and mutuality. He was keen to 'remember the poor' (Galatians 2:10), seen particularly in his raising a redistributive collection among his churches for the hard-pressed Judean believers.
If you work in the City, please come along, bring your lunch and join in the debate; if you know people who do, invite them along. It'd be good to have an audience!
I'll post what I say after the event.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Getting to grips with holiness
Giles Fraser is at his mouth-watering best in today's Guardian, reflecting on where the church should be and whether we've understood holiness properly.
It reminded me why it matters what we think and say about Jesus. I have been putting the finishing touches to a session on Christology for Spurgeon's next week which has been a little like herding cats with material refusing to fit neatly in my pre-planned scheme. Ah well.
But Fraser's piece brought to mind some words of Richard Bauckham that I will be sharing with my students. Reflecting on Philippians 2:5-11, he says: 'the passage amounts to a Christological statement of the identity of God. The exaltation of Christ to participation in the unique divine sovereignty shows him to be included in the unique divine identity. But since the exalted Christ is first the humiliated Christ, since indeed it is because of his self-abnegation that he is exalted, his humiliation belongs to the identity of God as truly as his exaltation does…The God who is high can also be low, because God is God not in seeking his own advantage but in self-giving.'
The question is what does the self-abasement and cross of Christ tell us about God? The answer is eloquently given by Bauckham. But it begs another question what does it mean for us to have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus? The very question Paul asks as the introduction to this amazing portrait of our servant God.
And it seems to me that Giles Fraser has put in finger on where an answer begins.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Sorting out who we are devoted to
Sometimes something in a scholarly article that is otherwise dealing with rather arcane points of ancient history or Christian theology, leaps off the page and socks you between the eyes. It's a reminder that there is a close and vital link between academic study and Christian living.
I'm preparing a class on Christology, basing most of my reflections on the work of Richard Bauckham and Larry Hurtado who argue for a Christology of divine identity, derived from second temple Judaism. It's good stuff that helpfully moves beyond the rather arid discussion of ontological categories.
Towards the end of a review paper, where Larry Hurtado has assessed the impact that devotion to Jesus made on the first Christians and the surrounding society, he asserts 'In an understandable but probably misguided effort to make Christian faith as undemanding as possible, have churches by and large ill-prepared believers for anything in the nature of serious opposition, criticism, or worse? More positively, has the banal simulacrum that passes for Christian faith too widely today anything of the fervour and passion of the Jesus-devotion that empowered early believers to live, think, work, and even die for Jesus?'
And as we ministers are still smarting from that he adds: 'How well does the comfortable and low-demand Western Christianity of today (whether of ‘liberal’ or ‘Evangelical’ stripe) equip believers to engage their own social setting and political circumstances meaningfully and positively?'
Who says NT scholarship lives in an ivory tower, divorced from the reality of issues facing followers of Jesus today? Hurtado's observation that the power of the early church to leave a mark on its culture came from its devotion to Jesus. In a world of gods, the early Christians proclaimed that Jesus was the one through whom God had decisively acted, so God had shown him to be worthy of worship. And that devotion spilled over in their daily social, working and political lives. If Jesus is Lord, then no one else is. Such a profession cost many of these committed their livelihoods and even their lives. But from very early on, such a profession turned the world upside down (Acts 17:6).
If we want to do the same in our day, then maybe we need to sort out who we are really devoted to.
I'm preparing a class on Christology, basing most of my reflections on the work of Richard Bauckham and Larry Hurtado who argue for a Christology of divine identity, derived from second temple Judaism. It's good stuff that helpfully moves beyond the rather arid discussion of ontological categories.
Towards the end of a review paper, where Larry Hurtado has assessed the impact that devotion to Jesus made on the first Christians and the surrounding society, he asserts 'In an understandable but probably misguided effort to make Christian faith as undemanding as possible, have churches by and large ill-prepared believers for anything in the nature of serious opposition, criticism, or worse? More positively, has the banal simulacrum that passes for Christian faith too widely today anything of the fervour and passion of the Jesus-devotion that empowered early believers to live, think, work, and even die for Jesus?'
And as we ministers are still smarting from that he adds: 'How well does the comfortable and low-demand Western Christianity of today (whether of ‘liberal’ or ‘Evangelical’ stripe) equip believers to engage their own social setting and political circumstances meaningfully and positively?'
Who says NT scholarship lives in an ivory tower, divorced from the reality of issues facing followers of Jesus today? Hurtado's observation that the power of the early church to leave a mark on its culture came from its devotion to Jesus. In a world of gods, the early Christians proclaimed that Jesus was the one through whom God had decisively acted, so God had shown him to be worthy of worship. And that devotion spilled over in their daily social, working and political lives. If Jesus is Lord, then no one else is. Such a profession cost many of these committed their livelihoods and even their lives. But from very early on, such a profession turned the world upside down (Acts 17:6).
If we want to do the same in our day, then maybe we need to sort out who we are really devoted to.
Monday, August 01, 2011
Sharp stories of a salty alternative to tower building and war mongering
A couple of weeks ago I was preaching on the end of Luke 14. At first sight it seems to be just a general call to discipleship, wrapped up in a couple of think-about-it stories. It comes after the parables of the great banquet but seems to have little connection with them. Furthermore, Jesus speaks off his own bat rather than in response to a question or observation from the crowd. Luke reminds us that Jesus still had a big audience and that they were 'travelling' - ie Jerusalem is getting closer and we all know what will happen there.
And maybe that should alert us to the fact that there's a sharper focus to these words than just a general call to serious discipleship. It also suggests the link with what's gone before. At the end of chapter 13 we have Jesus words about Herod and his tears for Jerusalem. Now we have stories about tower builders and war-mongers. Perhaps we are in the same territory. Tom Wright helpfully suggests that Herod the great was probably the tower builder and that the tower in question was the still unfinished temple and that those plotting rebellion against Rome were the war mongers. Suddenly the story is freighted with spiritual and political urgency.
The parables of the great banquet have strongly suggested that the party God will throw at the end time is for the poor, the marginalised, the dispossessed, those with no stake in the current order who are always being pushed around by what a writer in today's Guardian wonderfully called 'the feral elite'. Followers of Jesus ought to be concerned about the poor and not the dreams of the tower builders and war mongers.
This throws light on the puzzling little saying about salt in 14:34f. God's people were supposed to be showing the world a different set of values, an alternative lifestyle. They are meant to be - in the words of American historian and cultural critic Theodore Roszak who sadly died last week - a counter culture. The trouble is that Jesus looks around at Israel and he sees that it's anything but. That is why he weeps over the city, why he longs to be able to gather it to himself like a hen gathers her chicks. That is what lies behind his despairing comment that what should be salty is just bland and indistinguishable from the surrounding cultures; it's just another empire of tower builders and war mongers. And Jesus weeps.
Having told the story of the banquet, he calls people to join his revolution, his counter culture, his way of being that embodies the values of the God who reigns. Hence he ends by asking those with ears to hear what he's saying.I don't think it's an accident that this is immediately followed in Luke's account by the parables of lost things (sheep, coins, sons) that are kicked off by the Pharisees grumbling that Jesus models these values in who he offers his hospitality to; nor that the apparently mystifying parable of the unjust steward (the subject of another post to come) follows immediately on with no change of audience or pause for breath.
I was thinking all this when the postman arrived with my copy of Kavin Rowe's World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age. I've been looking forward to reading this for ages, having read a couple of Rowe's papers on Acts, because he argues a political reading of acts that is based on God's apocalypse in Jesus and treads the fine line between being a counter culture that turns the world upside down and fermenting a revolution that seeks to replace one tyranny with another. I'll keep you posted on how it shapes up.
And maybe that should alert us to the fact that there's a sharper focus to these words than just a general call to serious discipleship. It also suggests the link with what's gone before. At the end of chapter 13 we have Jesus words about Herod and his tears for Jerusalem. Now we have stories about tower builders and war-mongers. Perhaps we are in the same territory. Tom Wright helpfully suggests that Herod the great was probably the tower builder and that the tower in question was the still unfinished temple and that those plotting rebellion against Rome were the war mongers. Suddenly the story is freighted with spiritual and political urgency.
The parables of the great banquet have strongly suggested that the party God will throw at the end time is for the poor, the marginalised, the dispossessed, those with no stake in the current order who are always being pushed around by what a writer in today's Guardian wonderfully called 'the feral elite'. Followers of Jesus ought to be concerned about the poor and not the dreams of the tower builders and war mongers.
This throws light on the puzzling little saying about salt in 14:34f. God's people were supposed to be showing the world a different set of values, an alternative lifestyle. They are meant to be - in the words of American historian and cultural critic Theodore Roszak who sadly died last week - a counter culture. The trouble is that Jesus looks around at Israel and he sees that it's anything but. That is why he weeps over the city, why he longs to be able to gather it to himself like a hen gathers her chicks. That is what lies behind his despairing comment that what should be salty is just bland and indistinguishable from the surrounding cultures; it's just another empire of tower builders and war mongers. And Jesus weeps.
Having told the story of the banquet, he calls people to join his revolution, his counter culture, his way of being that embodies the values of the God who reigns. Hence he ends by asking those with ears to hear what he's saying.I don't think it's an accident that this is immediately followed in Luke's account by the parables of lost things (sheep, coins, sons) that are kicked off by the Pharisees grumbling that Jesus models these values in who he offers his hospitality to; nor that the apparently mystifying parable of the unjust steward (the subject of another post to come) follows immediately on with no change of audience or pause for breath.
I was thinking all this when the postman arrived with my copy of Kavin Rowe's World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age. I've been looking forward to reading this for ages, having read a couple of Rowe's papers on Acts, because he argues a political reading of acts that is based on God's apocalypse in Jesus and treads the fine line between being a counter culture that turns the world upside down and fermenting a revolution that seeks to replace one tyranny with another. I'll keep you posted on how it shapes up.
Thursday, June 02, 2011
Picking up the threads after my travels
Back safe and sound, sitting at my desk, sifting through the emails I didn't answer while I was away and opening the post. But most importantly, catching up with Linda and home. I love travelling, meeting new people and being involved in ministry in different cultures. But I also love coming home.
Among the goodies awaiting my return were two books. Richard Longenecker's Introducing Romans: Critical Issues in Paul's Most Famous Letter looks to be an essential addition to the bibliography for my Romans course at Spurgeons. It's a 500 page compendium of all the issues a reader of Romans has to consider and has been published ahead of his forthcoming commentary.
The other is The Blackwell Companion to Paul edited by Stephen Westerholm which I've been asked to review. I'm excited to see this for a couple of reasons. The first is that, not only does it deal with Paul and his letters against their first century cultural and historical background, but it also looks at how Paul has been read through the ages and a little bit across the cultures. The second is the sheer quality of scholars, established and rising, who have contributed to this volume - Rainer Riesner, Beverley Gaventa, Ross Wagner, Gerd Theissen, Tony Lane, Robin Jensen. I hope it lives up to its billing.
Among the goodies awaiting my return were two books. Richard Longenecker's Introducing Romans: Critical Issues in Paul's Most Famous Letter looks to be an essential addition to the bibliography for my Romans course at Spurgeons. It's a 500 page compendium of all the issues a reader of Romans has to consider and has been published ahead of his forthcoming commentary.
The other is The Blackwell Companion to Paul edited by Stephen Westerholm which I've been asked to review. I'm excited to see this for a couple of reasons. The first is that, not only does it deal with Paul and his letters against their first century cultural and historical background, but it also looks at how Paul has been read through the ages and a little bit across the cultures. The second is the sheer quality of scholars, established and rising, who have contributed to this volume - Rainer Riesner, Beverley Gaventa, Ross Wagner, Gerd Theissen, Tony Lane, Robin Jensen. I hope it lives up to its billing.
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Taking the new perspective out of the classroom into the church
I've just finished preparing for tomorrow's Romans session at Spurgeon's tomorrow. We're looking at the new perspective and how we understand the term 'the righteousness of God'. The new perspective has now been around for so long that it really needs a different name. Yesterday evening I reread Krister Stendhal's essay 'The apostle Paul and the introspective conscience of the west' which first appeared in 1963. In many ways this was the spark that ignited the new perspective's fire - and it's still wonderfully fresh.
But it's Ed Sanders, whose book Paul and Palestinian Judaism, really opened a radical new way of reading Paul, dubbed 'the new perspective' by James Dunn in 1982. In fact, it wasn't so much a new way of reading Paul as a rereading of his Jewish context. If the Judaism in which Paul grew up was not the religion of works righteousness that Luther thought it was, then everything he says at the beginning of Romans needs to be reassessed. If Paul was not wracked with guilt as the young Luther was, then our understanding of justification needs to be rethought. That's basically what the new perspective is about.
It seems to me that it is a much more fruitful approach to Paul and, especially, to Romans, particularly in the way that it has been refined and fleshed out by Dunn, Tom Wright and even Francis Watson, whose Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles is the best book I've read on the New Testament this year.
But it leaves me with a huge question: if this approach is correct, how will we teach it in our churches? If it's correct, it calls into question a lot of what has been taught in evangelical and reformation tradition churches, in particular, because it shifts the focus of Paul's teaching from individual salvation to being the people of God.
As I've been tackling Romans in our church Bible studies over the past few months, I've lost count of the number of times that people have said 'this is so different from what I grew up with' and even 'am I supposed to regard all those teachers whose ministry I valued as wrong in the light of what you are saying?' I guess this applies to a lot of what is taught in theological colleges. there is always the temptation to leave the allegedly 'difficult' stuff behind and do what's always been done, say what's always been said. But are we robbing our people of the opportunity of hearing the fresh light and truth that God wants to bring forth from his word (something baptists have always thought important)? Answers on a post card, please...!
A good accompaniment to these musings has been Laura Veirs' Carbon Glacier album from 2004. Lovely stuff - like pretty much everything she's done.
But it's Ed Sanders, whose book Paul and Palestinian Judaism, really opened a radical new way of reading Paul, dubbed 'the new perspective' by James Dunn in 1982. In fact, it wasn't so much a new way of reading Paul as a rereading of his Jewish context. If the Judaism in which Paul grew up was not the religion of works righteousness that Luther thought it was, then everything he says at the beginning of Romans needs to be reassessed. If Paul was not wracked with guilt as the young Luther was, then our understanding of justification needs to be rethought. That's basically what the new perspective is about.
It seems to me that it is a much more fruitful approach to Paul and, especially, to Romans, particularly in the way that it has been refined and fleshed out by Dunn, Tom Wright and even Francis Watson, whose Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles is the best book I've read on the New Testament this year.
But it leaves me with a huge question: if this approach is correct, how will we teach it in our churches? If it's correct, it calls into question a lot of what has been taught in evangelical and reformation tradition churches, in particular, because it shifts the focus of Paul's teaching from individual salvation to being the people of God.
As I've been tackling Romans in our church Bible studies over the past few months, I've lost count of the number of times that people have said 'this is so different from what I grew up with' and even 'am I supposed to regard all those teachers whose ministry I valued as wrong in the light of what you are saying?' I guess this applies to a lot of what is taught in theological colleges. there is always the temptation to leave the allegedly 'difficult' stuff behind and do what's always been done, say what's always been said. But are we robbing our people of the opportunity of hearing the fresh light and truth that God wants to bring forth from his word (something baptists have always thought important)? Answers on a post card, please...!
A good accompaniment to these musings has been Laura Veirs' Carbon Glacier album from 2004. Lovely stuff - like pretty much everything she's done.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Making the (w)right move
Excellent news about Tom (N T) Wright: he is moving to St Andrews University to be professor of New Testament and Early Christianity.
This is excellent news because it will allow him to focus on completing his bold and brilliant series on Christian Origins and the Question of God as well as other projects that he's had on the go for too long.
He will be a loss to the Anglican hierarchy but a huge gain to the academic world. You can read all about it here and here.
This is excellent news because it will allow him to focus on completing his bold and brilliant series on Christian Origins and the Question of God as well as other projects that he's had on the go for too long.
He will be a loss to the Anglican hierarchy but a huge gain to the academic world. You can read all about it here and here.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Hearing the Bible as it really is
Well I have just completed the fifth of eight chapters of the book. So i am on track to finish by the end of February.
It's been a challenge but I think what I've written so far is good. Hopefully the publisher will agree!
I have to say that immersing myself in the culture of the Roman empire - albeit pretty superficially - has made me more aware of the need to see how the gospel earths itself in our culture.
we had a fascinating gathering at church last night. it was the first of three sessions on money matters. Last night was looking at the New Testament world and I shared the fruit of that day's writing.
What intrigued me about the questions was how they all came out of a Christendom heritage and not the New Testament as rooted in its culture. That's not a surprise I guess since it's how people have been trained!
It'll be fascinating to see what happens next time as we tackle issues that people are concerned about in the light of our understanding of the gospel. I guess my hope is that knowing a little of the context will help us to hear the New Testament as it was heard by its first hearers.
Of course, we'll never be able to do that perfectly but I'm hoping that its message will gain a fresh clarity and a fresh purchase in people's lives as a result of what we're thinking about.
We'll see...
It's been a challenge but I think what I've written so far is good. Hopefully the publisher will agree!
I have to say that immersing myself in the culture of the Roman empire - albeit pretty superficially - has made me more aware of the need to see how the gospel earths itself in our culture.
we had a fascinating gathering at church last night. it was the first of three sessions on money matters. Last night was looking at the New Testament world and I shared the fruit of that day's writing.
What intrigued me about the questions was how they all came out of a Christendom heritage and not the New Testament as rooted in its culture. That's not a surprise I guess since it's how people have been trained!
It'll be fascinating to see what happens next time as we tackle issues that people are concerned about in the light of our understanding of the gospel. I guess my hope is that knowing a little of the context will help us to hear the New Testament as it was heard by its first hearers.
Of course, we'll never be able to do that perfectly but I'm hoping that its message will gain a fresh clarity and a fresh purchase in people's lives as a result of what we're thinking about.
We'll see...
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Revelation's pastoral punch
The thing about Revelation 18 is that it is a withering attack on Roman economic power. Twinned with the wonderful satire of chapter 17, it makes for a powerful assault on imperial pretension. But it is placed where it is in John's Apocalypse, it seems to me, for maximum pastoral impact.
After all, the Apocalypse is a pastoral letter (among other things). And it struck me last night that John, having unwrapped the revelation he's received from the throne room in heaven, in the throes of spelling out the call of the followers of the Lamb to be the means through which the nations of the world are called to repentance, places this coruscating attack on Rome just before the denouement we're eagerly awaiting - namely the return of the Lamb and the restoration of creation.
And why place it there? For maximum pastoral impact, of course.
Having urged his hearers to loyalty in the seven brief message to each receiving church in chapters 2 and 3, he now asks them - the question is implied in how they respond to the lament over the fall of Rome - how would they feel if the empire was swept away?
Just how much are they plugged into the imperial way of life, how fat are they getting on its rich-pickings? How caught up in its buying and selling are they? Will they weep with the monarchs, merchants and mariners as they watch the city fall or will they rejoice with heaven that the enemy of the Lamb and persecutor of his people has had its come-uppance?
Couldn't help wondering what John would have made of the credit crunch, the collapse of Lehman Brothers bank and the market melt-down that followed... Of course, that was just a blip, a hiccough compared to what he describes in Revelation 18, but...
After all, the Apocalypse is a pastoral letter (among other things). And it struck me last night that John, having unwrapped the revelation he's received from the throne room in heaven, in the throes of spelling out the call of the followers of the Lamb to be the means through which the nations of the world are called to repentance, places this coruscating attack on Rome just before the denouement we're eagerly awaiting - namely the return of the Lamb and the restoration of creation.
And why place it there? For maximum pastoral impact, of course.
Having urged his hearers to loyalty in the seven brief message to each receiving church in chapters 2 and 3, he now asks them - the question is implied in how they respond to the lament over the fall of Rome - how would they feel if the empire was swept away?
Just how much are they plugged into the imperial way of life, how fat are they getting on its rich-pickings? How caught up in its buying and selling are they? Will they weep with the monarchs, merchants and mariners as they watch the city fall or will they rejoice with heaven that the enemy of the Lamb and persecutor of his people has had its come-uppance?
Couldn't help wondering what John would have made of the credit crunch, the collapse of Lehman Brothers bank and the market melt-down that followed... Of course, that was just a blip, a hiccough compared to what he describes in Revelation 18, but...
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
The fabulous swap of 2 Corinthians 5
One thought that didn't make the lecture on the atonement (because I ran out of space and didn't have time to work it out fully) is about the righteousness of God in 2 Corinthians 5:21. If this phrase means God's covenant faithfulness/saving action everywhere else it's used in Paul - principally in Romans and Galatians - is that what it means here? If it is, how can we become the covenant faithfulness of God as Paul suggests?
I haven't had a chance to explore this thought fully nor to read the N T Wright paper that I suspect might argue a version of it, but I've been wondering whether since Paul is talking about his ministry in 2 Corinthians 5:11-6:2, a ministry of reconciliation in partnership with God who has himself engaged in such a ministry in Christ, does the exchange of our sin for his righteousness mean that we too become messengers of reconciliation at that moment.
Paul starts his discussion proper 5:14 by pointing out that one died for all and those who live as a result no longer live for themselves but for Christ (v15). He then talks about experiencing new creation through being reconciled to God - something that happens as a result of the ministry of reconciliation that has been entrusted to the likes of Paul and his team - and by implication to anyone who is a new creation (16-18).
He then tells us that it was God working in Christ who brought about the reconciliation that we enjoy - that is that God is working according to his covenant faithfulness, his promise to Abraham that through his family all the nations of the earth would be blessed; in short that he is revealing his righteousness in the gospel exactly as Paul says in Romans 1:16-17 and 3:20f.
God co-opts us as ambassadors so he can make his appeal to the world through us (v20). And that appeal is that through faith in Christ we swap our sin - our state of being unreconciled and of being an ambassador or spokesman for non-reconciliation (as the Corinthians were turning out to be!) - for his righteousness, his saving activity in the world.
In 6:1 (remember there were no chapter divisions in the original letter!) he reiterates that he's working in partnership in urging the Corinthians to accept the grace of God for there's no time like the present (to paraphrase 6:2)..
Of course this in no way suggests that the cross is not an exchange of sin for right standing before God (though that is not the way Paul uses the term righteousness). He doesn't need to say it in v21 since he's already made it abundantly clear in v14-17 that it is by Christ's death for all that we are made new creations; the cross has brought about the turning of the ages. and if we are new creations, our sin (all that made up the old of v17) must have been dealt with by the action that turned the ages, the cross.
And the language of v21 is itself deeply substitutionary. The exchange of sin for righteousness happens because of a prior exchange. But note the exchange that Christ made on the cross was not his righteousness for sin. That's not what Paul says. He says that Christ exchanged his sinlessness for sin. Righteousness in paul is a term reserved for God's action in making good his promise to Abraham that he'd bless the nations through his seed (Galatians 3). the amazing thing is that as we put of faith in Christ and become new creatures in him so we swap our sin for a partnership with God in helping to put things right; we cease to be part of the problem and become part of the solution, in that we become messengers of God reconciling good news.
Does that make sense? Or have I missed something vital?
I haven't had a chance to explore this thought fully nor to read the N T Wright paper that I suspect might argue a version of it, but I've been wondering whether since Paul is talking about his ministry in 2 Corinthians 5:11-6:2, a ministry of reconciliation in partnership with God who has himself engaged in such a ministry in Christ, does the exchange of our sin for his righteousness mean that we too become messengers of reconciliation at that moment.
Paul starts his discussion proper 5:14 by pointing out that one died for all and those who live as a result no longer live for themselves but for Christ (v15). He then talks about experiencing new creation through being reconciled to God - something that happens as a result of the ministry of reconciliation that has been entrusted to the likes of Paul and his team - and by implication to anyone who is a new creation (16-18).
He then tells us that it was God working in Christ who brought about the reconciliation that we enjoy - that is that God is working according to his covenant faithfulness, his promise to Abraham that through his family all the nations of the earth would be blessed; in short that he is revealing his righteousness in the gospel exactly as Paul says in Romans 1:16-17 and 3:20f.
God co-opts us as ambassadors so he can make his appeal to the world through us (v20). And that appeal is that through faith in Christ we swap our sin - our state of being unreconciled and of being an ambassador or spokesman for non-reconciliation (as the Corinthians were turning out to be!) - for his righteousness, his saving activity in the world.
In 6:1 (remember there were no chapter divisions in the original letter!) he reiterates that he's working in partnership in urging the Corinthians to accept the grace of God for there's no time like the present (to paraphrase 6:2)..
Of course this in no way suggests that the cross is not an exchange of sin for right standing before God (though that is not the way Paul uses the term righteousness). He doesn't need to say it in v21 since he's already made it abundantly clear in v14-17 that it is by Christ's death for all that we are made new creations; the cross has brought about the turning of the ages. and if we are new creations, our sin (all that made up the old of v17) must have been dealt with by the action that turned the ages, the cross.
And the language of v21 is itself deeply substitutionary. The exchange of sin for righteousness happens because of a prior exchange. But note the exchange that Christ made on the cross was not his righteousness for sin. That's not what Paul says. He says that Christ exchanged his sinlessness for sin. Righteousness in paul is a term reserved for God's action in making good his promise to Abraham that he'd bless the nations through his seed (Galatians 3). the amazing thing is that as we put of faith in Christ and become new creatures in him so we swap our sin for a partnership with God in helping to put things right; we cease to be part of the problem and become part of the solution, in that we become messengers of God reconciling good news.
Does that make sense? Or have I missed something vital?
Friday, March 20, 2009
Grappling with the atonement
I've been getting to grips with the atonement this afternoon as I'm doing a lecture to a third year NT group at spurgeon's on it next week.
I shall be outlining and reflecting on Howard Marshall's paper The Theology of the Atonement which he produced for the recent LST/EA conference on the subject in the wake of controversy over Steve Chalke's The Lost Message of Jesus. I have to say, it's not Marshall's finest work but it is the text that the students have been given to read.
Then I'll be suggesting other approaches before doing a little exegetical work on Galatians 3 and Romans 3 in the light of the New Perspective on Paul (NPP) and seeing where we end up.
It's been interesting to see where the debate among evangelicals is. It isn't between those who hold to a penal substitutionary view and those who don't. there are so few evangelicals for whom that view is not at least part of their understanding of the atonement.
The key issue is where it fits in scripture - where Tom Wright takes issue with those reformed evangelicals who dismiss the NPP as hopelessly flawed - and what its consequences are in the world.
I've read some good stuff by Wright today and one or two other essays exploring other approaches that have not been quite so convincing. In particular Christopher Marshall's attempt to find a via media between more traditional models and the Narrative Christus victor model advocated by the Mennonite scholar J Denny Weaver is interesting but unconvincing - though not as unconvincing as Weaver's approach!
I found myself agreeing with Wright that while the Christus Victor model is the key one, penal substitution is an essential facet of it and to strip any idea of substitutionary atonement from one's overall approach suggests that we take neither sin nor God's love very seriously. I think this is a shift of position on my part - so preparing lectures is good for one's thinking!
In passing in a very good paper he wrote last year in response to Jeffrey John's Lent talk and the Oak Hill book Pierced for our Transgressions (neither of which he rated very highly), he made this nice observation: 'when I sing that interesting recent song In Christ Alone my hope is found, and we come to the line "And on the cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied", I believe it's more deeply true to sing "the love of God was satisfied". I commend that alteration to those who sing that song, which is in other respects one of the very few really solid recent additions to our repertoire.' (I love that last sentence for it doesn't say!).
The reason for his emendation is that the cross satisfies God's love rather than his wrath. John tells us not that God was so angry with the world that he sent Jesus, but that he so loved it. God's wrath is provoked by human sin that requires judgment. His love is displayed, however, in him absorbing that judgment in himself in the person of his Son - the atonement is deeply, sublimely, mysteriously, wonderfully Trinitarian.
So, I'm enjoying myself and will be for a couple of days - it'll be interesting to see how it comes out. I wonder if the students will enjoy it as much!
I shall be outlining and reflecting on Howard Marshall's paper The Theology of the Atonement which he produced for the recent LST/EA conference on the subject in the wake of controversy over Steve Chalke's The Lost Message of Jesus. I have to say, it's not Marshall's finest work but it is the text that the students have been given to read.
Then I'll be suggesting other approaches before doing a little exegetical work on Galatians 3 and Romans 3 in the light of the New Perspective on Paul (NPP) and seeing where we end up.
It's been interesting to see where the debate among evangelicals is. It isn't between those who hold to a penal substitutionary view and those who don't. there are so few evangelicals for whom that view is not at least part of their understanding of the atonement.
The key issue is where it fits in scripture - where Tom Wright takes issue with those reformed evangelicals who dismiss the NPP as hopelessly flawed - and what its consequences are in the world.
I've read some good stuff by Wright today and one or two other essays exploring other approaches that have not been quite so convincing. In particular Christopher Marshall's attempt to find a via media between more traditional models and the Narrative Christus victor model advocated by the Mennonite scholar J Denny Weaver is interesting but unconvincing - though not as unconvincing as Weaver's approach!
I found myself agreeing with Wright that while the Christus Victor model is the key one, penal substitution is an essential facet of it and to strip any idea of substitutionary atonement from one's overall approach suggests that we take neither sin nor God's love very seriously. I think this is a shift of position on my part - so preparing lectures is good for one's thinking!
In passing in a very good paper he wrote last year in response to Jeffrey John's Lent talk and the Oak Hill book Pierced for our Transgressions (neither of which he rated very highly), he made this nice observation: 'when I sing that interesting recent song In Christ Alone my hope is found, and we come to the line "And on the cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied", I believe it's more deeply true to sing "the love of God was satisfied". I commend that alteration to those who sing that song, which is in other respects one of the very few really solid recent additions to our repertoire.' (I love that last sentence for it doesn't say!).
The reason for his emendation is that the cross satisfies God's love rather than his wrath. John tells us not that God was so angry with the world that he sent Jesus, but that he so loved it. God's wrath is provoked by human sin that requires judgment. His love is displayed, however, in him absorbing that judgment in himself in the person of his Son - the atonement is deeply, sublimely, mysteriously, wonderfully Trinitarian.
So, I'm enjoying myself and will be for a couple of days - it'll be interesting to see how it comes out. I wonder if the students will enjoy it as much!
Monday, March 09, 2009
Learning our ABCs
We had a good evening yesterday. We were completing Mark 6 - one of the key chapters in the first half of Mark's story. It marks the end of Jesus' public ministry in Galilee. From chapter 7 he'll be travelling in the further reaches of Israel, the mixed territories to the north and east of Herod's territory.
Full notes on the passage can be found here (click the downloads section and follow the link). I just want to comment on a couple of aspects of discipleship that I highlighted last night because I think they're interesting and often not prominent in our conversations about following Jesus.
Jesus uses the politically charged episode of the feeding to teach some intensely personal lessons about discipleship, one of which is that disciples need to learn to accept responsibility for what's going on around them.
Five thousand blokes had turned up spoiling for an uprising because the Twelve had been out preaching up a storm in the towns and villages of Galilee. But as soon as a need arises - these people need feeding - the disciples tell Jesus to send them away to find food somewhere else.
Jesus says to the twelve 'you give them something to eat'. This is, of course, not his last word on the issue. But it is important that it's his first word.
It highlights the fact that discipleship is as much about a new relationship with the world as it is about a new relationship with God. In Hebrews 2 the author reflects on Psalm 2, a picture of how people were created to steward, manage the creation but have clearly failed. The world is in a mess and human stewardship of it is largely to blame.
The author points to Jesus, however, who is a trail-blazer in the restoration of the human stewarding of creation. He doesn't do this alone, he brings others with him to share his rule(Hebrews 2:5-18). And that is what Jesus is doing in Mark 6:37. He is pointing out that part of being a disciple is to accept responsibility for what is happening in the world, responsibility for being part of the solution, having been rescued from being part of the problem.
We don't emphasise this aspect of discipleship often enough, preferring instead to play up those aspects of relating to God that result in good things coming into our lives - forgiveness, new life, hope, the holy Spirit, etc. And these are indeed good. But they are not the whole story.
The idea that we are called to accept responsibility for what is happening around us because we are called to share in Christ's reign, can be seen in Paul's emphasis on Christians being people who do good works (Eph 2:10; titus 2:11-14, etc), Peter's teaching on the soft difference being about doing work in the world that demonstrates the effectiveness of the gospel in creating a people who embody the good values that everyone aspires to but can't live out.
The rest of the ABC of discipleship flows those this acceptance of our responsibility, namely, that we bring to Jesus what we have (not what we don't have - so we're realistic about what we can do) and we co-operate with him in making a difference. All this grows from a deepening awareness of who Jesus is, something the 12 got a glimpse of in the next story, namely Jesus walking on the lake and revealing himself to be not just the one who distributes miraculously multiplied loaves, but the one who does the maths.
This why there's a twin references to loaves in 38 and 52. The depth of the disciples' incomprehension about Jesus is focused on what the loaves should have told them about him.
it seems to me that these are lessons about discipleship we need to learn for the times in which we live.
Full notes on the passage can be found here (click the downloads section and follow the link). I just want to comment on a couple of aspects of discipleship that I highlighted last night because I think they're interesting and often not prominent in our conversations about following Jesus.
Jesus uses the politically charged episode of the feeding to teach some intensely personal lessons about discipleship, one of which is that disciples need to learn to accept responsibility for what's going on around them.
Five thousand blokes had turned up spoiling for an uprising because the Twelve had been out preaching up a storm in the towns and villages of Galilee. But as soon as a need arises - these people need feeding - the disciples tell Jesus to send them away to find food somewhere else.
Jesus says to the twelve 'you give them something to eat'. This is, of course, not his last word on the issue. But it is important that it's his first word.
It highlights the fact that discipleship is as much about a new relationship with the world as it is about a new relationship with God. In Hebrews 2 the author reflects on Psalm 2, a picture of how people were created to steward, manage the creation but have clearly failed. The world is in a mess and human stewardship of it is largely to blame.
The author points to Jesus, however, who is a trail-blazer in the restoration of the human stewarding of creation. He doesn't do this alone, he brings others with him to share his rule(Hebrews 2:5-18). And that is what Jesus is doing in Mark 6:37. He is pointing out that part of being a disciple is to accept responsibility for what is happening in the world, responsibility for being part of the solution, having been rescued from being part of the problem.
We don't emphasise this aspect of discipleship often enough, preferring instead to play up those aspects of relating to God that result in good things coming into our lives - forgiveness, new life, hope, the holy Spirit, etc. And these are indeed good. But they are not the whole story.
The idea that we are called to accept responsibility for what is happening around us because we are called to share in Christ's reign, can be seen in Paul's emphasis on Christians being people who do good works (Eph 2:10; titus 2:11-14, etc), Peter's teaching on the soft difference being about doing work in the world that demonstrates the effectiveness of the gospel in creating a people who embody the good values that everyone aspires to but can't live out.
The rest of the ABC of discipleship flows those this acceptance of our responsibility, namely, that we bring to Jesus what we have (not what we don't have - so we're realistic about what we can do) and we co-operate with him in making a difference. All this grows from a deepening awareness of who Jesus is, something the 12 got a glimpse of in the next story, namely Jesus walking on the lake and revealing himself to be not just the one who distributes miraculously multiplied loaves, but the one who does the maths.
This why there's a twin references to loaves in 38 and 52. The depth of the disciples' incomprehension about Jesus is focused on what the loaves should have told them about him.
it seems to me that these are lessons about discipleship we need to learn for the times in which we live.
Monday, February 02, 2009
A little snow and a bit of reading
It's been amazing listening to the news broadcasts through today - everyone seems to be looking for someone to blame for the traffic chaos and the fact that London has pretty much ground to a halt in the snow today.
Can you imagine the outcry from council tax payers if London bought the number of snow plows it'd need to clear the streets of what fell over the past 24 hours? We get a snow event of this magnitude of this magnitude once every 20 years or so. Can't we just take a day or two off, make sure the vulnerable have got everything they need and enjoy a snowball fight with bored kids in the streets?
Or am I missing something?
Anyway, I've been reading lots of stuff about 1 Thessalonians - getting ready for our men's Bible study (though it's been cancelled tonight because of the snow!); in particular stuff reconciling the Acts account of the founding of the church with what Paul says in his letter. Rainer Riesner makes a pretty good case for there being no contradiction between Luke's and Paul's versions of events.
It seems that 1 Thessalonians is not well-served in terms of studies looking at the social context of the community and the letter - certainly in comparison to 1 Corinthians or even Galatians. Richard Ascough has written some interesting stuff and Karl Donfried and Robert Jewett have too; Bruce Winter has written a couple of fascinating essays on the Greco-Roman background to some of what Paul says. But the literature is thin. if anyone knows of anything good, I'd love to hear about it.
I'm re-reading an essay by Justin hardin on the Acts account of the arrest of Justin which throws considerable light on the passage. One thing that intrigues me is that there seems to be a lot of attention paid to the political context Paul's mission in this section of Acts. Others have pointed out that Acts 16-18 contains a concentration of business language (Frederick Danker, in particular, in an essay I've not read but which looks really interesting), but it seems to me that there's an interesting study to be done on the use of political language in this section too.
Time for a hot toddy, I reckon - there are just so many good things about a cold snap...!
Can you imagine the outcry from council tax payers if London bought the number of snow plows it'd need to clear the streets of what fell over the past 24 hours? We get a snow event of this magnitude of this magnitude once every 20 years or so. Can't we just take a day or two off, make sure the vulnerable have got everything they need and enjoy a snowball fight with bored kids in the streets?
Or am I missing something?
Anyway, I've been reading lots of stuff about 1 Thessalonians - getting ready for our men's Bible study (though it's been cancelled tonight because of the snow!); in particular stuff reconciling the Acts account of the founding of the church with what Paul says in his letter. Rainer Riesner makes a pretty good case for there being no contradiction between Luke's and Paul's versions of events.
It seems that 1 Thessalonians is not well-served in terms of studies looking at the social context of the community and the letter - certainly in comparison to 1 Corinthians or even Galatians. Richard Ascough has written some interesting stuff and Karl Donfried and Robert Jewett have too; Bruce Winter has written a couple of fascinating essays on the Greco-Roman background to some of what Paul says. But the literature is thin. if anyone knows of anything good, I'd love to hear about it.
I'm re-reading an essay by Justin hardin on the Acts account of the arrest of Justin which throws considerable light on the passage. One thing that intrigues me is that there seems to be a lot of attention paid to the political context Paul's mission in this section of Acts. Others have pointed out that Acts 16-18 contains a concentration of business language (Frederick Danker, in particular, in an essay I've not read but which looks really interesting), but it seems to me that there's an interesting study to be done on the use of political language in this section too.
Time for a hot toddy, I reckon - there are just so many good things about a cold snap...!
Monday, December 08, 2008
Is reading a political act?
There's an interesting post over on Robin Parry's excellent blog about using God to serve our social agendas.
In effect the post is about the politics of interpretation. He suggests that a particular feminist scholar does her theology backwards - namely that she knows the kind of God her politics will tolerate, so finds him (or her) in scripture.
This might or might not be true (I've never read the scholar in question) but it does raise a key question about hermeneutics, it seems to me. Recently, scholars have rediscovered that the New Testament was written in a time of empire and that there is possibly counter-imperial language in the documents.
Now is this because these scholars are politically liberal - some suggest their motives have to do with being anti-American - or because they put two and two together and make four. It seems pretty obvious that people who are used to hearing that Caesar is Lord and saviour, upon hearing that Jesus is Lord and saviour might question what that says about Caesar as well as Jesus. Or that when Mark talks about 'a gospel' (Mark 1:1) his original hearers would have wondered how it was related to the other gospel they heard regularly concerning Caesar (especially Augustus).
Are the scholars making such connections, seeking them for political reasons, because they want to create the faith in the image of their own political creed? Or are those who say these scholars are wrong, doing so because they want to ensure that God's politics mirror theirs.
Isn't politics a bit like culture. we are so used to our political attitudes, they are so second nature to us that we do not see them and their effect on how we read texts? Politics affects the paper we choose to read, how we respond to news events - just look at the storm of disagreement over the rights and wrongs in the arrest of Damien Green.
So Robin Parry is right when he says 'She decided what political goals she wanted to achieve, worked out what kind of God would be needed to support that agenda, and then reverse-engineered a doctrine of God that serves the pre-decided political agenda. It is the very self-conscious, and blatant crafting of a God to serve our political ends that is ... worrying.' But wrong to imply that we don't all do it; indeed that it is to some extent inevitable.
What we need is a community of scholarship - gatherings of Christians generally - that gently and lovingly holds one another to account for our interpretations, especially in sensitive areas that spill over into the way we live as disciples in the real world.
I'm just embarking on a study of Ched Myers' Binding the Strong Man, a self confessed political reading of Mark that seeks to close the gap between the text and our discipleship in every area of life in our world - including politics. Is this a more tendentious reading that William Lane's or Morna Hooker's that merely claim to engage in historical-critical-literary criticism of the text?
Let me know what you think...
In effect the post is about the politics of interpretation. He suggests that a particular feminist scholar does her theology backwards - namely that she knows the kind of God her politics will tolerate, so finds him (or her) in scripture.
This might or might not be true (I've never read the scholar in question) but it does raise a key question about hermeneutics, it seems to me. Recently, scholars have rediscovered that the New Testament was written in a time of empire and that there is possibly counter-imperial language in the documents.
Now is this because these scholars are politically liberal - some suggest their motives have to do with being anti-American - or because they put two and two together and make four. It seems pretty obvious that people who are used to hearing that Caesar is Lord and saviour, upon hearing that Jesus is Lord and saviour might question what that says about Caesar as well as Jesus. Or that when Mark talks about 'a gospel' (Mark 1:1) his original hearers would have wondered how it was related to the other gospel they heard regularly concerning Caesar (especially Augustus).
Are the scholars making such connections, seeking them for political reasons, because they want to create the faith in the image of their own political creed? Or are those who say these scholars are wrong, doing so because they want to ensure that God's politics mirror theirs.
Isn't politics a bit like culture. we are so used to our political attitudes, they are so second nature to us that we do not see them and their effect on how we read texts? Politics affects the paper we choose to read, how we respond to news events - just look at the storm of disagreement over the rights and wrongs in the arrest of Damien Green.
So Robin Parry is right when he says 'She decided what political goals she wanted to achieve, worked out what kind of God would be needed to support that agenda, and then reverse-engineered a doctrine of God that serves the pre-decided political agenda. It is the very self-conscious, and blatant crafting of a God to serve our political ends that is ... worrying.' But wrong to imply that we don't all do it; indeed that it is to some extent inevitable.
What we need is a community of scholarship - gatherings of Christians generally - that gently and lovingly holds one another to account for our interpretations, especially in sensitive areas that spill over into the way we live as disciples in the real world.
I'm just embarking on a study of Ched Myers' Binding the Strong Man, a self confessed political reading of Mark that seeks to close the gap between the text and our discipleship in every area of life in our world - including politics. Is this a more tendentious reading that William Lane's or Morna Hooker's that merely claim to engage in historical-critical-literary criticism of the text?
Let me know what you think...
Thursday, November 27, 2008
1 Peter, end times thinking and Christian ethics
One of the things that I noticed - not for the first time - as I was preparing for last night is the innate conservatism and parochialism of much current end-times thinking.
The rapture is all about rescuing me from nasty world rulers and the events they unleash (though God hasn't seen fit to rescue any other generation of believers who must be equally deserving, I'd have thought...) And the perceived threat from heavily armed nations with evil intent just seems to be an excuse for upping military budgets at home and imposing our will on weaker nations abroad.
But having just finished our series on 1 Peter, a little part of me wonders whether being a follower of Jesus inclines us towards conservatism. Now not for a minute do I feel drawn to start supporting conservative causes or parties. I remain instinctively and sentimentally pink. But I found Volf's analysis of Peter's social ethics and its implications for us profoundly plausible - and therefore quite a challenge.
I think the New Testament shares a lot of its social ethics with the surrounding culture. In many ways Peter and Paul, James and John want the same thing as Greco-Roman social philosophers. But they believe that the only way to achieve them is in the power of the Spirit who is given by God in response to our faith in Jesus. This would appear to be a key plank in Paul's argument in Titus (yes, I believe he wrote it)
But at the same time, there is something profoundly egalitarian about Christian ethics - the fact that we are all siblings in the faith regardless of our social position, that the rich are expected to share their goods with the poor, that slaves and women could lead the gathering of believers: all these things point to an upsidedownness to Christian social ethics that is anything but conservative.
And if my reading of Revelation is right, it points to a strong streak of social resistance at the core of Christian ethics. John urges his hearers to see that loyalty to Jesus as king means that we cannot be wholeheartedly loyal to Caesar; we cannot join in economic and social practices that empower Rome at the expense of everyone else, that exalt Caesar as god over the claims of the true creator God and his chosen king, Jesus.
So christian ethics are at once conservative and communitarian, quietist and loudly destabilising of social inequities. Does that sound like a contradiction in terms?
More reflecting to follow...
The rapture is all about rescuing me from nasty world rulers and the events they unleash (though God hasn't seen fit to rescue any other generation of believers who must be equally deserving, I'd have thought...) And the perceived threat from heavily armed nations with evil intent just seems to be an excuse for upping military budgets at home and imposing our will on weaker nations abroad.
But having just finished our series on 1 Peter, a little part of me wonders whether being a follower of Jesus inclines us towards conservatism. Now not for a minute do I feel drawn to start supporting conservative causes or parties. I remain instinctively and sentimentally pink. But I found Volf's analysis of Peter's social ethics and its implications for us profoundly plausible - and therefore quite a challenge.
I think the New Testament shares a lot of its social ethics with the surrounding culture. In many ways Peter and Paul, James and John want the same thing as Greco-Roman social philosophers. But they believe that the only way to achieve them is in the power of the Spirit who is given by God in response to our faith in Jesus. This would appear to be a key plank in Paul's argument in Titus (yes, I believe he wrote it)
But at the same time, there is something profoundly egalitarian about Christian ethics - the fact that we are all siblings in the faith regardless of our social position, that the rich are expected to share their goods with the poor, that slaves and women could lead the gathering of believers: all these things point to an upsidedownness to Christian social ethics that is anything but conservative.
And if my reading of Revelation is right, it points to a strong streak of social resistance at the core of Christian ethics. John urges his hearers to see that loyalty to Jesus as king means that we cannot be wholeheartedly loyal to Caesar; we cannot join in economic and social practices that empower Rome at the expense of everyone else, that exalt Caesar as god over the claims of the true creator God and his chosen king, Jesus.
So christian ethics are at once conservative and communitarian, quietist and loudly destabilising of social inequities. Does that sound like a contradiction in terms?
More reflecting to follow...
Apocalyptic reflections
We had the second of our two mid-week gatherings devoted to the Apocalypse and end times stuff yesterday evening. It seemed to go well - people were engaged and asked intelligent questions afterwards.
Given that I was offering a somewhat different take to the one many of my hearers grew up with, some of the questions were about trust and change. They were along the lines of 'why was I to be trusted when what I was saying was different from some great preachers of the past?' and 'how hard it is to make the changes required in one's thinking when what I'm saying is so different from what people have believed up till now.'
I was reminded of the wonderful BBC film shown last weekend about Einstein and Eddington and Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For some people moving from the dispensationalist paradigm (which still shapes most popular end times thinking even if no one reckons they're a dispensationalist anymore) to something different is as enormous a step as moving from the Newtonian paradigm to Einstein's theory of relativity (so brilliantly conveyed in the BBC film).
Such revolutions happen because evidence piles up that questions the veracity of the previous paradigm. It doesn't happen overnight. Little pieces of evidence relating to one aspect of current thinking change our view of that aspect. This change has an influence over another aspect related to the first one. So if we change our minds about the synoptic apocalypse and see that some of it relates to the fall of Jerusalem, how does that change the way we read other apocalyptic material in the New Testament? Bit by bit our position shifts.
I was also reminded of that fairly naff hymn that contains the great line 'the Lord hath yet more light and truth to break forth from his word.' That remains a fantastic and seminal Baptist principle, it seems to me. we are all still lurking in the shadows hoping the Lord shines a little more light on us as we read, reflect and pray.
Well, we upped the wattage a little last night.
Given that I was offering a somewhat different take to the one many of my hearers grew up with, some of the questions were about trust and change. They were along the lines of 'why was I to be trusted when what I was saying was different from some great preachers of the past?' and 'how hard it is to make the changes required in one's thinking when what I'm saying is so different from what people have believed up till now.'
I was reminded of the wonderful BBC film shown last weekend about Einstein and Eddington and Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For some people moving from the dispensationalist paradigm (which still shapes most popular end times thinking even if no one reckons they're a dispensationalist anymore) to something different is as enormous a step as moving from the Newtonian paradigm to Einstein's theory of relativity (so brilliantly conveyed in the BBC film).
Such revolutions happen because evidence piles up that questions the veracity of the previous paradigm. It doesn't happen overnight. Little pieces of evidence relating to one aspect of current thinking change our view of that aspect. This change has an influence over another aspect related to the first one. So if we change our minds about the synoptic apocalypse and see that some of it relates to the fall of Jerusalem, how does that change the way we read other apocalyptic material in the New Testament? Bit by bit our position shifts.
I was also reminded of that fairly naff hymn that contains the great line 'the Lord hath yet more light and truth to break forth from his word.' That remains a fantastic and seminal Baptist principle, it seems to me. we are all still lurking in the shadows hoping the Lord shines a little more light on us as we read, reflect and pray.
Well, we upped the wattage a little last night.
Monday, November 17, 2008
More light on the Apocalypse
Well, there's no shortage of interest in Revelation! A big thank you to all who've commented - very helpful suggestions.
I remember looking at the spine of a CUP monograph that read 'The sayings of Jesus Boring'. It is the spine of Eugene Boring's book on the synoptic gospels but it's a tad unfortunate that a designer didn't notice! I've not read Boring on Revelation. I have read Bauckham - both his books are indeed excellent, as is Petersen's Reversed Thunder (though it is currently out of print).
I guess my recommendations are for easily accessible books for church members who will want to read Revelation after our two studies. My concern is that they read John's text with a good, reliable tour guide.
The Apocalypse, it seems to me, is one of those books where the gulf between the academy and the pew is as wide as it gets. Scholars debate the finer points of Revelation's literary structure and highlight the social background of John's original hearers. Meanwhile people in the pews either ignore the book altogether (apart from reading the letters to the seven churches) or fall prey to the lurid speculations of Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye et al.
It's possible that next year we'll tackle Revelation as a church, probably in a series of mid-week Bible studies. so, if anyone has pointers on how to do this well; or notes that they can email me, I'd be grateful...
I remember looking at the spine of a CUP monograph that read 'The sayings of Jesus Boring'. It is the spine of Eugene Boring's book on the synoptic gospels but it's a tad unfortunate that a designer didn't notice! I've not read Boring on Revelation. I have read Bauckham - both his books are indeed excellent, as is Petersen's Reversed Thunder (though it is currently out of print).
I guess my recommendations are for easily accessible books for church members who will want to read Revelation after our two studies. My concern is that they read John's text with a good, reliable tour guide.
The Apocalypse, it seems to me, is one of those books where the gulf between the academy and the pew is as wide as it gets. Scholars debate the finer points of Revelation's literary structure and highlight the social background of John's original hearers. Meanwhile people in the pews either ignore the book altogether (apart from reading the letters to the seven churches) or fall prey to the lurid speculations of Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye et al.
It's possible that next year we'll tackle Revelation as a church, probably in a series of mid-week Bible studies. so, if anyone has pointers on how to do this well; or notes that they can email me, I'd be grateful...
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