This is the second part of my engagement with Richard Hays’s critique of N. T. Wright at the Wheaton Theology Conference last week. I left off last time with a suggestion that we have to separate the idea of a “resurrection hermeneutic” (Yay!) from an “incarnation hermeneutic” (Boo!).
This time I need to say a bit more about why this distinction is necessary; in particular, today’s post indicates why I find no power whatsoever in the comment, “What? Like the church has been misreading the Bible for 2,000 years?”
In the short response to Hays that Wright makes at the end of the Marianne Meye Thompson (peace be upon her) video, one thing he says is that Jesus comes proclaiming the reign of God–something that the creeds of the church are entirely silent about.
And now I’m going to say something that I know will raise the hackles of so many of my good friends–who will, no doubt, fill the comments with quotes and indications about why I’m wrong. So be it. Enlighten me!
What Wright is pointing out is one sliver of a larger problem with “the church” as a guide to reading Jesus: when the church cared about Jesus as a Jewish man it gave us the Synoptic Gospels, when this became irrelevant and/or an embarrassment, it gave us the rule of faith.
The significance of Jesus’ humanity, according to the creeds, is that it allows God to die. And this is, of course, a tremendously important component in Christian theology.
But the silence of the creeds on the life of Jesus is more than telling. Questions of ontology so consumed the energies of early Christological debates, and the church fathers so quickly became Gentiles, that the story of Jesus as told in the Synoptics was essentially irrelevant for fundamental Christian belief–as irrelevant as the story of Israel itself.
The Christology of the church is not a careful reflection on, and integration of, the entirety of the NT canon. It is a reflection of the church’s prioritization of John in the midst of debates that pressed for clarity on Jesus’ ontology. But these debates ensued without a concomitant realization that the “ontology” of the Gospels is a storied ontology about, first and foremost, a first century Jewish man. This is why there remains a massive amount of work to be done, integrating a more robust human christology into the faith of the church.
So, do we read the Synoptic Gospels with a resurrection hermeneutic? Absolutely! Because the resurrected Lord is the one who came exercising power and authority with the advent of the Kingdom of God.
But do we read the Synoptic Gospels with an incarnational hermeneutic? No, because we realize that the Jesus of the creeds, the “incarnate God”, has no need of Mark 1-14. And this makes me highly skeptical that the tradition is a good guide for reading the story that Mark chose to write.
As Hays argued in his critique of Jesus and the Victory of God, the church chose to give us a four-fold Gospel canon. Honoring that polyphonic tradition means that we must not allow John’s Jesus (= the church’s Jesus plus a couple verses from Matthew 1 or Luke 1) to run roughshod over the very different stories that Matthew, Mark, and Luke chose to tell.
I actually think I, as a huge fanboy of the tradition of the Church, more or less agree with you here, Daniel. In my opinion, the witness of the Church fathers is absolutely fundamental to the Church keeping its bearings, but this topic is the single exception. The loss of the Jewish way of thinking was a real loss for our tradition. Now, I’d say the Church fathers retained a good deal more of this than they are given credit for, but it’s still a problem. Where we may disagree is that I do think the engagement and appropriation of all that was good in Greek thought to be, on the whole, a good thing – a masterful act of Christian mission. The problem is that important contextual debates were then abstracted and allowed to screen out some of the fundamental worldview.
Wow, Wonders. I’m taken aback! This is marvelous!
I actually agree with the importance of the Greek elements for contextualizing the gospel, the question is the extent to which these categories should continue to be normative for us and why.
Indeed that is the question. And here we may disagree. You see, I think there is certainly something to the approach to God in Greek thought – what we can know of God by reason, etc. That is, the best of their tradition – particularly the approach to the true, the good, and the beautiful as well as talking about ontology, etc. – is something that is not only important to latch onto as mission to their particular culture, but something important to integrate into the faith as a whole. Now, maybe I’m just seeing this as crucial because it just so happens to be important to my OWN modern western culture, but there we are with the unavoidable limitations we all face.
Interesting …. There could be something we are missing about church tradition. After all the NT scriptures did come out off church tradition. They did not do away with the synoptic gospels, thinking that it meant nothing to them. Maybe we need a better understanding what it meant to them, to be grafted into Israel. They may have felt a need to distance themselves from the Jews since Judaism remained to be a powerful influence in the Roman empire. Also that they used the LXX as their scripture gives me reason to not conclude that they gave up on the Jewish roots of Christianity.
Daniel:
“But do we read the Synoptic Gospels with an incarnational hermeneutic? No, because we realize that the Jesus of the creeds, the ‘incarnate God’, has no need of Mark 1-14. And this makes me highly skeptical that the tradition is a good guide for reading the story that Mark chose to write.”
Really??? If this is true, why does the incarnate God of John bother to teach, heal, raise the dead, etc. Is there really no way in your mind to see the life of Jesus, not merely the death, as the consequence of an incarnational hermeneutic? Isn’t it just as logical to claim that a resurrection hermeneutic only needs to presuppose the crucifixion?
It seems to me that your response begs the question. Yes, one can certainly read a story of Jesus doing such things as an indication that the incarnate God is on the scene. And surely that’s what John does. But is that Mark’s Jesus? It doesn’t seem to be so.
The point of affirming a resurrection hermeneutic is not that, a priori, it assumes the story we’ve been given, but that the ideal author of the story we’ve been given actually assumes the resurrection. The same cannot be said about the incarnation, it seems to me.
The question is, How do we best read the fourfold Gospel tradition that has come to us? This is not about how it can be read (to which there are numerous answers) but what does it mean to allow Mark, Matthew, and Luke to tell their own stories.
I can see telling the life of Jesus as a consequence of an incarnational hermeneutic–and I see it every time I open John. But that’s not the same as saying either (a) that this is what Mark has done; (b) that this is a good first reading of Mark; or (c) that the church had Jesus as inaugurator of the kingdom in mind when it skipped his ministry while laying out its rule of faith.
“The Christology of the church is not a careful reflection on, and integration of, the entirety of the NT canon. It is a reflection of the church’s prioritization of John in the midst of debates that pressed for clarity on Jesus’ ontology. But these debates ensued without a concomitant realization that the “ontology” of the Gospels is a storied ontology about, first and foremost, a first century Jewish man. This is why there remains a massive amount of work to be done, integrating a more robust human christology into the faith of the church.”
Ummm ….
MMT: You mistyped a bit. “Amen”?
I see you know and understand the tradition about as well as Wright does. Interpret that comment as you will.
I’ve had too many years of people telling me “if only you knew the tradition better.” What that has always boiled down to in the past is, “I disagree with your point.” Or, “We really should trust what they said…” I’m not going to give the church that a priori assent.
Finally! The responses I thought I’d get on this one! More serious reply later, after I feed my 2 hungry monsters.
Daniel,
Here is what I think you are saying. You want to approach the New Testament texts with the working assumption that “Jesus is resurrected” but not with the working assumption that “Jesus was God who became flesh.” You think the latter working assumption is less useful because (a) it is derived primarily from John not the rest of the New Testament; and (b) that the Christian tradition too often in its theology emphasizes the deity of Christ and not often enough Jesus’ humanity.
I think you are on much firmer ground to just say that you want to recover aspects of the tradition that emphasize the humanity of Jesus because you sense that at least in some parts of the Church this has been deemphasized or forgotten.
You tempt us to start naming names–fine I’ll take the bait–Aquinas (Virtues), Bonhoeffer (Discipleship), Yoder (Politics of Jesus) –are a few of mine and Duke’s favorites–all have had a similar interest in recovering the humanity of Christ.. I wonder if you learned a bit of your interest in the humanity of Christ from some people at Duke who were (gasp!) influenced by the tradition. But you are a New Testament scholar in the body of Christ so your work will understandably look different. “If the whole body were a [systematic theologian], where would the sense of [texture] be?” Your role is to help the Church reread the Scriptures and therefore like Wright, some of your passion will no doubt be fueled by your sense that lots of systematic theologians have gotten it wrong over the years. (I know of few New Testament scholars who are not fueled to some extent by that conviction). But still, “The [New Testament scholar] cannot say to the [theologian], ‘I don’t need you!’
The problem is that good Christian theology makes us bad readers of the Synoptic Gospels. What I mean by this is “readers” in the sense of being sensitive to what Mark (for example) is likely to have intended to encode in his text such that an ideal first reader might understand it.
That’s where I’m really resistant to the kinds of moves being made in much of the Theological Interpretation Movement, and some of where Richard is headed now. Yes, theology is my friend, but it makes a terrible boss.
The fear that the church’s theology runs roughshod over the text is not a bogeyman. It’s what happens when cultural and/or institutional pressure force us to arrive at conclusions that historical study of the text will not support. NT scholars who have never had their exegesis self-consciously negated and controlled by a theological system tend to be too laissez faire about “the tradition of the church” as a grid for doing NT exegesis. As one running in the opposite direction (away from the control of the theological conservers), I can tell you that there’s death on that road.
Back to the point at hand: not every book of the NT begins with the presupposition of Jesus’ deity. If it did, we would have a very different kind of book than we do. We mute the testimony of scripture when we make this a priori our hermeneutical key. We do scripture an injustice and we impoverish our theology when we make the church’s conclusion our presupposition rather than allowing Mark, Matthew, and Luke to speak in their own voices.
To JD’s point below, this does not mean that there is no place for stitching it all together, for synthesizing, etc., but I don’t feel we’re even ready to have that conversation because the tide is so strongly pulling theologically-oriented scholars away from a faithful first-reading of the divergent voices.
” not every book of the NT begins with the presupposition of Jesus’ deity. If it did, we would have a very different kind of book than we do.”
well, a presupposition can be in the background or foreground. I guess I can agree in some sense. Taught on Hebrews, and the point there is not that, WOW, Jesus is God, so of course he has a name above every name, but that some man, Jesus, has been given a name above every name as Man.
To paraphrase Gary North though, its not a question of incarnational hermeneutics or non-incarnational hermeneutics, but what kind of incarnational hermeneutics!
pduggie, Am I really in the middle of a comment thread where you are my closest ally? This is strange indeed!
“Hear, world! The end is nigh!”
Thinking about Andy’s comment brings me back to a theme at the NTW conference: some people are more right in what they affirm and less right in what they deny. That may have some relevance here. Just a thought.
I know, that’s what Rodrigo and Leroy keep telling me, too.
But the point is that if I’m right in what I affirm it takes away all the ground for reading the divine Christology as the Christology of the Synoptics. Perhaps my bar for affirming divinity is just too high, but you seem quite comfortable to give a reading based on its merely being possible, and I’m not comfortable with that. Again, personal biography comes into play here.
That doesn’t mean that there’s no place for turning around and coming back with a second, canonical reading (I’m a big fan of multiple readings) that reads more into the earlier texts based on the later reflections of John. But it does mean that it’s a theological move beyond what we could expect of Mark’s ideal author or first reader.
“As Hays argued in his critique of Jesus and the Victory of God, the church chose to give us a four-fold Gospel canon. Honoring that polyphonic tradition means that we must not allow John’s Jesus (= the church’s Jesus plus a couple verses from Matthew 1 or Luke 1) to run roughshod over the very different stories that Matthew, Mark, and Luke chose to tell.”
Yeah, I agree. But if you’re still interested in arriving at “a Christology of the NT” or some synthetic, positive assessment of Jesus’ relationship to God, you still need to do some picking and choosing, don’t you? That is, unless one’s simply happy to only talk about “John’s Jesus” and “Matthew’s Jesus” and just leave it there.
There is an integration that has to occur. I don’t think that insisting on Mark’s ignorance of Jesus’ deity means that Mark’s Christology is incompatible with John’s when it comes to painting a full picture of Jesus’ identity. Of course, you might be in for a special, um, challenge if you try to figure out what all this means about Jesus’ posture toward the cross or his actions and attitudes during the Passion…
It’s issues like the Passion and Birth narratives I specifically have in mind. I have no problem with the idea that 4 witnesses–even largely dependent witnesses–can be put together to offer a more holistic picture of who Jesus “was.” The interpretation of Jesus doesn’t necessarily invalidate the portrait of another. But sometimes they’re not compatible, strictly speaking.
“But the point is that if I’m right in what I affirm it takes away all the ground for reading the divine Christology as the Christology of the Synoptics.”
Again, I ask, really? You are assuming that we all know and agree that a “divine Christology,” whatever that means, is not already present in the gospels for a first-century reader, and even intended by the evangelists. I’m not prepared to grant that, and neither is Kavin or Richard or a host of other people—on exegetical grounds. “Truly this man was the Son of God” may not be an “ontological” affirmation, but it may very well say something about the nature of divinity and the relationship between Jesus and divinity in a profound way. If Joel Marcus is right, Paul certainly thought that Mark thought so.
We cannot avoid personal biography, and we all know the dangers of allowing a highly developed and detailed theological tradition to control exegesis, but I would (once again) not equate the creeds with the Westminster Confession. Moreover, if the Gospels are late-first-century documents, do you really think that the emerging theologies of Jesus’ identity as “more than a carpenter” (sorry; could not resis) somehow bypassed the evangelists and their audiences?
Thanks for sticking in the discussion, Mike. You raise what I see as the question most likely to sink my reading–the Christology of the church outside the Gospels in the mid-late first century. I don’t feel I have a good answer for that one. I’m also a bit more cautious about divine Christology in Paul than some…
On your first point. I’m not assuming divine Christology wasn’t there, but arguing that that the passages so often pointed to in support of such claims make different Christological points. In this, I confess to be stirred in my passion by Simon Gathercole’s Preexistent Son, which I see as the parade example of assumptions about divine Christology hindering our ability to ask the questions about Christology or hear other alternatives. I have exegetical differences with Kavin over several of these points…
I agree 100% with you when you say, that “son of God” says something profound about the relationship between Jesus and divinity–and that’s the positive passion that I’m bringing to the table in this discussion: there is something deeply profound and indispensable there that we too often dispense with because we jump to the ontology conclusion (or something like it).
On the autobiography issue: My concern is less with what the theology is that we hold and more with how we are holding it. I am afraid that the difference between the conservative Reformed world and what some are advocating in the academy is closer to a “quantitative” difference than a “qualitative” difference. That is to say, Yes, WCF says more things, and a lot of wrong things, which I wouldn’t say about the Rule of Faith; but I think that the real problem is not what it says but how it stands in relationship to our exegesis. When theology controls our reading of the Bible things go amiss…
“What Wright is pointing out is one sliver of a larger problem with ‘the church’ as a guide to reading Jesus: when the church cared about Jesus as a Jewish man it gave us the Synoptic Gospels, when this became irrelevant and/or an embarrassment, it gave us the rule of faith…and the church fathers so quickly became Gentiles, that the story of Jesus as told in the Synoptics was essentially irrelevant for fundamental Christian belief–as irrelevant as the story of Israel itself. The Christology of the church is not a careful reflection on, and integration of, the entirety of the NT canon. It is a reflection of the church’s prioritization of John in the midst of debates that pressed for clarity on Jesus’ ontology. But these debates ensued without a concomitant realization that the ‘ontology’ of the Gospels is a storied ontology about, first and foremost, a first century Jewish man.”
Daniel…I think you have most everything in the paragraphs from which I’ve excerpted fundamentally wrong. The Rule of Faith in all its varieties is essentially Jewish, in that it insisted upon a radical monotheism over and against Gnosticism, with its anti-Jewish, anti-creation, anti-OT tendencies. I also think your suggestion that early Christology is all about John is wrong; certainly the letters played a role, and Matthew — not John, except perhaps in Alexandria — was the favorite Gospel of the Church, and so figured prominently in Christological debates. Finally, it’s not so certain that the early Church separated from Judaism so cleanly as you suggest, as Stark (Rise of Christianity) and Boyarin have pointed out.
I’m worried I’m seeing more and more Harnack redivivus in you (which is ironic, given his antisemitism), and I’m reminded that while Wright might be fairly good with the first centuries (BC & AD) and the 19th and 20th centuries, he’s not so good with much in between.
Leroy,
You make some very helpful points, and good correctives to my generalizing blustering. Thanks!
First, you make a good point that the church is holding onto the God of the whole Bible (Creator = Good) over vs. Gnosticism, etc. There is an insistence that the whole Bible is about the same God. Where I think the silence of the creeds is a glaring deficiency is in what it means for this particular God to be at work in the world. The overall problem I have with what I see as over-reading of the Synoptics is tied to the absence of Israel in that both show a God whose identity is tied to a people/the world in ways other than ontological identity. That needs more fleshing out.
Second, you make a great point about Matthew, not John, being the church’s favorite Gospel. But I would still argue that the more readily seen Johannine Christology is still the lens for reading Matthew as a story about God incarnate.
With regard to the Judaism, a couple things: (1) doesn’t the dominant voice of the “heroes” of the early church indicate that even if Jews were there their voices weren’t influential?; and (2) Judaism after 70 and then after 135 was, itself, doing serious identity reconstructing and soul searching…
What Leroy said. And to add: the rule of faith is not simply identifiable as or with the creeds, though it lies behind the creeds; the creeds come later. The rule of faith includes those convictions and commitments that make shape the Christian faith to be what it is — but also what it was as it came to expression in the NT ( the unity of the canon, the goodness of creation, that “Jesus Christ our Lord” is the only Son of “God the Father Almighty” (goodbye Marcion!), and more).
To say that Jesus does the works of the Father (John) or that he “has to do and be for Israel what YHWH alone could do and be” (NTW) are both, in my view, doing “ontology” even if they do it differently than the creeds do.
Always a good thing to get support from a bona fide and brilliant established scholar…Good to see you at the conference, and your paper was wonderful, well-appreciated by my colleagues and (advanced) students.
Leroy makes another great point. I need to go hire some ringers to buoy me in this thread…
Gird up your loins!:) Don’t back down just because I have 120 pounds on you or so…
Leroy, you know that I’m ready to rumble whenever you are.
I actually agree here. But then we come back to the question of whether the Creeds’ way of doing ontology is a help or hindrance to our reading of the Gospels. I don’t think it’s the most helpful.
One difficult thing in this discussion is that it’s hard to progress very far without equivocating or question-begging, because we all agree on a number of points, including some general statements about Jesus’ identity, etc. But when it comes to asking what those statements mean as viable representations of the Gospels we start to part company. Then when we ask what those phrases might mean as articulations of Christian doctrine we largely reconverge. I think…
“But when it comes to asking what those statements mean as viable representations of the Gospels we start to part company.”
Which begs the question, I suppose, what we mean as a “viable representation” of the Gospels!
“Viable”: if someone learns your reading at church and then goes to University and takes NT Intro, will they come away thinking that their two choices are either (a) ignore critical scholarship or (b) keep reading the Bible like their pastor? If so, I would contend that we’re not dealing with a “viable” reading according to my standard. This is why I want to carefully distinguish between a historical reading and a theological rereading.
Given that choice, I’ll go with the pastor.
And our students in University will lose their faith.
But I don’t want to be teaching, or to teach my students to teach, in such a way that our students in University have to make this decision.
In answer to Kyle’s question below, this is a real pastoral issue behind giving historically viable readings of the Synoptic Gospels and not just telling people they can read the church’s theology into them all they want and it’s ok b/c it’s the church.
Yes, I agree with you here. But, still how do you answer the “so what?” question here? I mean, how does this distinction shake out “on the ground” for the everyday “Joe six-pack” (hee, hee)? Doesn’t the church give us faithful enough witness and interpretation of Scripture for her faith?
Kyle, I think that there are huge implications for how we tend to think about discipleship, being faithful followers of Jesus. Although you don’t necessarily NEED my reading to work this line of reasoning, it sure helps.
Here’s the generalization I’m thinking about: how do we respond to the things Jesus does in the Gospels? Are they just about what Jesus does, or are they a model for what it means to be faithful citizens of the kingdom of God?
If the point of the Gospels is simply, “Jesus is God,” then we see Jesus do x, y, and z, and we say, “Wow, so great Jesus could do that because he was God.” Even, “Well, Jesus could deal with the suffering of the cross because he knew what was going to happen.”
But what if Jesus does all those things because he’s the quintessential human? That changes our perspective of what Jesus means for me dramatically. It means that if I’m being remade into this kind of ideal human, if the church is the continuation of this man’s mission, then we should be doing precisely the same sorts of things: feeding, healing, etc. not just preaching but with authority.
Daniel’s 150% right. On the one hand, pastors aren’t generally trained to handle these questions; on the other, these days students are becoming increasingly suspicious of pat answers to tough questions.
Hey, thanks Leroy! It’s always after such conferences that you know what you should have said, or how to say it better/differently. I think that in a number of the conversations afterwards (panels, etc.), we were talking at cross purposes to one another. Oh well, another conference I guess! But this one really was extraordinary. (And now, done hijacking Daniel’s thread …)
Great discussion here. Allow me to do a little role-play. Perhaps this will take the discussion to another level too.
Imagine I am a regular church-going Luteran (no misspelling here, use your Norwegian voice!), Presbyterian, or other. Insert into this discussion the Brian Walsh question: So what?
In other words, what does all this matter for the lay person who reads Scripture faithfully, or who believes, as it seems you all do, that Jesus is the son of God, God’s Messiah? Take a step further and assume that she is a somewhat educated lay person who understands and agrees with Wright’s (and others’) general position that to understand Jesus you must also understand the “story” of God’s purposes through Israel.
How would you answer the “so what?” asked by this lay person in regard to what seems (from her perspective) to be an academic quibble about theology and history and Jesus’ divinity (who claimed it, when, and how they said it)? How would you do it without being the off-putting and arrogant academic who knows more? Isn’t this our big purpose anyway, to answer this “so what?” questions on these issues for those beyond the academy?
Hmm. I guess I read Mark as having a pretty “high” christology.
When John prepares “the way of the Lord” it’s Jesus who shows up on that way instead of Yahweh himself. Or rather, reading back from the end of the story, it turns our that what Jesus did along “the way” – which is the way of the cross – reveals who God really is, by showing Jesus “doing and being for Israel what Yahweh alone could do or be.” And only the Gentile centurion is depicted as “getting it.” Thus, Mark is Philippians 2 in the form of a long Jesus narrative.
Now, of course, you can do all the Gathercole stuff with the “son of God” passages and so forth. And, with out a birth narrative or Johannine prologue, it would be difficult to develop a Markan theology of “preexistence” (which isn’t to say that he doesn’t have one – it’s just not how he’s telling his version of the story).
But, I don’t find Gathercole terribly convincing on much of this – not so much in what he affirms, but in what he seems to deny. We need to think about the larger upshot of NT christology with all this “son of God” talk. Certainly Jesus’ identity as “son of God” points back to Israel and Israel’s kings and, beyond that, to God’s ultimate purposes for a true and glorious humanity in God’s image and likeness, enthroned over creation.
But looking through and beyond that storyline, it also points to something about the identity of God himself – so that humanity’s sonship before God reveals an eternal Sonship that exists within the life of God himself. And that’s why the more seemingly divine Jesus appears, the more truly human he remains.
I just don’t buy the notion that this mystery – which later came to expression in the Creeds – was somehow lost on the Gospel writers. Rather, it is the mystery of Jesus’ identity – and thus God’s identity – that they struggle to express within the rich and varied narratives they give us. Readings that flatten out the diversity of the Gospel witnesses or the rob those witnesses of the depth of significance they contain, seem to me to downplay the genuine fecundity of the texts.
Funny how I can agree with your conclusion while disagreeing with most of your argument to get there! Most of it comes down to differing exegesis: lots of people in the OT do what only YHWH can do, most often those “sons of God”: Adam, Israel, David[ic Kings]. I would call it a high, human Christology, I suppose, especially in light of the absence of pre-existence. The mystery wasn’t lost on Mark, but the portion he explored wasn’t the portion John explored.
Hey Daniel, this is a great discussion you got goin’ on here. Might I make a suggestion? The nested comments really end up making it hard to follow the overall discussion. Most of the time the conversations are generally related, and insisting they be in little subthreads ends up making it harder to follow the flow of discussion. I think just straight chronological comments – numbered if that’s possible – is almost always superior. Just my 2 cents.
I would like to make a suggestion, that we do not take a flat view approach to the early church creeds. What i mean is that we read those creeds as building upon scripture as opposed to a summary of scripture. We should also avoid expecting to early church to affirm all their doctrines all the time (something like this was mentioned by Wright at the conference, that he has say everything he believes all the time, otherwise people will believe he is denying something crucial). With this approach to make the claim that the creeds de-israelized Jesus or, a person would have bring out proof that they really did de-israelize Jesus as opposed to from what they did not affirm. So i guess the burden of proof is on Dr Kirk, to show us how the early church did not take into account the life of Jesus. In turn i would like to claim that the early church did take the life of Jesus seriously, hence their doctrine of theosis.
Sam, I’d take your last point to be quite to my own side: theosis (which I’m not denying) can be an indication that humanness per se is devalued in favor of divinity–perhaps itself a fruit of not having a sufficiently robust human Christology.
Re. the burden of proof: too much of the discussion and understanding of God moves in different directions. God’s identity gets worked out in ways that tie him to creation as creator (as Leroy rightly pointed out)–so in this sense he’s Jewish (or at least Platonic or Aristotelian) rather than gnostic/Marcionite. Yay! But the story-bound texture of God’s identity, its deeply contingent tie to the story of Israel, is not something that can be left aside in confessions about the divine identity without skewing the picture.
I agree that Christian theology is moving forward, not simply called to repeat the text of scripture. But the point of the rule of faith, and of many theologians’ theologies, was to tell people how to read the Bible, to create hermeneutical keys for reading the Bible rightly. And this is where the absences of Israel and Jesus’ humanness cause us to mis-read the scripture when these keys are applied.
You do make some interesting points. For me today i would like to tell people that nothing is written in a vacuum, but always in a context. There really are no timeless truths that enlightenment speaks off. We should read the Bible in the context of Israel and we should also be reading the church fathers in the context of the Bible and Rome. The reason i prefer this approach is from within scripture itself. If people were to read the letters of Paul, they might conclude that he was not dependent on Jesus’ teachings for his letters, after all he hardly quotes Jesus. One of NTW’s complaints about a certain group of people, is that they read Paul as if Jesus never preached the gospel. But the way to read Paul’s letters is to assume that all the churches he visited already had a foundation of one of the gospel stories, probably Luke’s gospel (according to Eusebius). With this kind of a reading, we will avoid the mistake of thinking that justification is the gospel. We should approach the early church creeds in the same way and our conclusion should be that the Jewish man, Jesus was divine.
Hi Daniel,
What do you think of the idea that the creedal church focused on their own philosophically ontologized view of the Gospel of John in part at least because they had just as little engagement with its Jewishness as they did with the Synoptics? I have often thought there was something more than an enigma embodied (no pun intended) in the phrase “and the word became flesh” being interpreted as “THE WORD BECAME INCARNATED” as though the LOGOS came into a human/flesh being rather than being manifested in human form. If “the WORD became flesh” is taken as the equivalent of the immaculate conception of the Synoptics there is far less distance between the two story types. I realize this is days past expiration in blog dating and interaction, but if you have a response, I’d love to see it.
All the best to all in Christ, Richard Worden Wilson