Archive - September, 2010

The Righteousness of God (part 3a of 4)

September 30, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

Some time ago, I came to the conclusion that the fracas over the righteousness of God could not be separated from another favorite perennial NT question: the meaning of pistis, and the pistis Christou debate in particular.

Romans 1:17 reads: “For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed by faith unto faith as it is written, ‘But the one who is righteous by faith will live.”

Somehow, the good news reveals God’s righteousness “by faith”, as it is written, “But the one who is righteous ‘by faith’ will live.”

The ideas are brought together again at the end of Romans 3:

But now, without law, the righteousness of God has been made manifest (being witnessed by the law and the prophets), the righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ (or, through faith in Jesus Christ) unto all who exercise faith. For there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being righteoused freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement through faith, by his blood, in order to show forth his righteousness, because in his forbearance he passed over the previously committed sins, to show forth his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who is of the faith of Jesus.

That is one mean sentence! Notice again that the way in which God’s righteous is made known is through faith: either the faith of Jesus in going to the cross or our faith in Jesus (3:22), depending on how you interpret the Greek, it is made manifest through faith and goes out unto the faith of all who believe. The pattern from Romans 1:17 is repeated: from faith unto faith.

But whose faith is it? Christ’s faith in going to death on the cross or our faith in Christ?

Later in the paragraph we’re told: it’s God’s putting forward of Jesus as a sacrifice in his blood that is the act of faith by which God’s righteousness is made known. So when we’re told that the righteousness of God is witnessed to by the law and prophets, it seems that the death and subsequent resurrection of Jesus is the event which they foreshadow.

Thus, when we read in the very first scripture citation in the book of Romans, “the righteous one ‘by faith’ will live”, we do well to read this as a reference to the faithful Christ who was raised because of his fidelity.

This then brings us back to the question of what, exactly, this faithful death of Jesus has to do with the righteousness of God. How does the death of Jesus reveal the righteousness of God?

The passage in Romans 3 tells us that this death of Jesus reveals God’s righteousness because it enables him to justly justify his people.

So what?

Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you.

The Dude Abides–This Christmas

September 30, 2010 in Culture, Uncategorized with 4 Comments

True Grit, the Coens’ version.

I. Can’t. Wait.

HT: Carmen Andres

The Righteousness of God (2 of 4)

September 29, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 18 Comments

It’s time to pick up on yesterday’ post on the Righteousness of God. The current debate between Piper and Wright is tied to how we understand this concept. Is “righteousness” tied to covenant (Wright) or is it more an atemporal idea, tied simply to God (Piper).

Piper is adamant that righteousness is not connected to anything in history. He says, “The essence of the righteousness of God is his unwavering faithfulness to uphold the glory of his name.” This connection to God’s name is seen as an alternative to Wright’s construal that ties it more specifically to the people of Israel and God’s covenant with them.

Appeal is made to numerous passages in support of this position. Psalm 145 says that the Lord is righteous in all his ways–not just his covenant relationship with Israel (p. 64). This means that God’s allegiance to his own glory is more basic than covenant keeping. Piper will further connect this to passages in which God speaks of the importance of glorifying God’s name.

Piper suggests that expounding righteousness as “covenant faithfulness” puts too much historical specificity into the word that has a much more general meaning.

Wright turns the tables on him.

“I am not aware of any other scholar, old perspective, new perspective, Catholic, Reformed, Evangelical, anyone, who thinks that tsedaqah elohim [=righteousness of God] in Hebrew or dikaiosune theou [=righteousness of God] in Greek actually means “God’s concern for God’s own glory.”

Wright goes on to suggest that righteousness means conforming to a norm, and God’s righteousness is God’s conforming to the norm God himself has established. Wright invokes the ultimate New Perspective poster child </sarcasm> J. I. Packer to illustrate this position (64-65).

Both Piper and Wright actually agree that “righteousness” in and of itself, its lexical definition, is not going to solve this conundrum. The question is, what sort of biblical / theological framework helps us understand what it means for God to do what is right.

The challenge that faces both exegetes as they turn to Paul is that the larger frameworks are often what must come into play when the specific term “righteousness” or “righteousness of God” appears.

Thus, Piper will turn to Rom 3:23 and say, “All sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” and there show how God’s own glory must be to make up for the deficit of glory-rendering due his name. So God will manifest his righteousness in the death of Jesus, condemning him representatively for all who failed to glorify him.

Alternatively, Wright will ask us to take stock of how all of chs. 3-4 or Romans (and reaching back into ch. 2 at points) are about how God will fulfill the promise to Abraham to make one world-wide family. Within this covenant promise, God has to overcome Israel’s own faithlessness to be a missionary people, and provide an alternate means for the blessing of Abraham to come to the nations.

That, in fact, is the covenant that Wright sees controlling so much of Paul’s “righteousness of God” language: God promised Abraham in Genesis 15 that he would be the father of many nations. And this obligation upon God is fulfilled when “Christ becomes a servant, on behalf of the truth of God, to confirm the promises given to the fathers and for the gentiles to glorify God for his mercy” (Romans 15).

Romans does couch the problem of humanity as a failure to glorify God. And, it recounts the righteousness of God as the divine provision to make up for this lack.

As I read these two dueling theologies, it suggests itself repeatedly that Piper’s concerns about God’s glory, and the preservation of the name of God, are met precisely through God’s meeting God’s covenantal obligations to Israel, as Wright proposes.

Romans begins with Paul saying that the gospel he proclaims was prepromised by God in the scriptures concerning God’s son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, appointed son of God with power by the resurrection of the dead by the Holy Spirit, and this gospel is what Paul is entrusted to take to the gentiles so they will obey with faith.

These verses present a cluster of themes that Paul takes up in the so-called thesis statement later on: the gospel is for Jew first but also for the Greek; it concerns the faithful son who now lives having been raised from the dead, and it is the story in which God’s righteousness is revealed (Rom 1:16-17).

What, then, is this righteousness? In the context of Romans 1 we have already been told: God’s fidelity to bring about what was promised beforehand in the prophets.

Although I sometimes fear that Wright makes too much of “covenant” as a category for making sense of Paul, nonetheless he is correct that what is “right” for God to do is, in the biblical story to which God has bound Godself, nothing less than fulfilling the promises made in scripture. This is how the letter begins (1:1ff; and this is how its argument is drawn to its conclusion (Rom 15:7ff.).

Adam Theology Hits the Evolutionary Fan at Calvin

September 29, 2010 in Academia, Science with 14 Comments

In the Chronicle of Higher Education there is an editorial about the recent work of Calvin College professors on the issue of scripture and science. In particular, this makes public the rumor that I have heard from other quarters as well: these research projects, that were approved by the administration, are now coming under fire from Calvin’s president.

The work comes out of a sabbatical project, validated by his college (at a committee which included the provost).  The president however was absent and now he has returned and read what Schneider has written and published does not like it at all.  He thinks that Schneider is going against the strict understanding of what it is to be a Calvinist, and as such is grounds for dismissal, which is his aim.

This is disheartening, to say the least.

I am wary of Christian college in general, but have had my confidence in Calvin bolstered by several friends whose children have recently attended. The atmosphere at the school, in particular its willingness to teach science in a way that would allow a science graduate to continue doing main stream scientific research, has a reputation for being both deeply Christian and rigorously and honestly academic.

If these rumors are true, if this is what the president is aiming to do, then that atmosphere has been changed and Calvin has become yet another casualty of the rigorous scholarship of its faculty.

The editorial focused on John Schneider. I don’t know if the same heat is being applied to Daniel Harlow who has commented here a couple of times in the past week.

Either way, I hope that this course is reversed, not because I necessarily agree with the projects of either scholar but because we need faithful, even confessional Christians working out the issues of faith and science. Too many people are saying have to go one way or the other if we are going to keep affirming the Bible as the word of God or the Christian confessions as our faith tradition.

When will we as evangelical Christians get it through our heads that as long as we force people to choose between science and the Bible that we are going to lose more and more as we lose our ability to control the narrative within which scientific data is assimilated and interpreted? We don’t live in Christendom anymore. We don’t have that kind of control. If we force people to choose, and tell them that only one can be true, they will, more and more, go with science.

If you have a minute, I’d encourage you to drop an email to the president’s office at Calvin (offcpres@calvin.edu) and tell them how important it is that the work of such professors be allowed to continue–not necessarily because you agree with the conclusions of these professors, but because academically rigorous Christianity, and the Christianity our children will grow up to either accept or reject, needs to affirm the process in which they are involved.

Ignorant about Religion?

September 29, 2010 in Church, Culture with 8 Comments

Yesterday the interwebs were all abuzz with the report that American people of faith know less about religions than agnostics.

Today, the rumor is that you can find out how you measure up by taking the U.S. Religious Knowledge Quiz at the Pew Forum.

15 Questions. Have at it!

CT on Mohler (and me on the gospel story)

September 28, 2010 in Academia, Church with 21 Comments

Today I got an e-mail informing me that I could now access the latest edition of Christianity Today online in a cool, magazine-layout format. I confess to opening the ezine with some trepidation, inasmuch as the cover story was “Reformer”, and the subject was Al Mohler, president of Southern Seminary.

I grew up Southern Baptist. As I was coming through elementary school and into high school I heard of how things were going at the annual Southern Baptist Convention–complete with rumors about bussing people in to stack the key votes.

I lived in North Carolina and so got to hear tales of “the revival at Southeastern Seminary”, which was the winning side’s way of talking about “the fundamentalist takeover” that the losers mourned in retrospect.

So I was worried about whether this article, bearing a title that struck me as positive, might be unduly adulatory.

But it wasn’t.

Nor was it unduly condemnatory.

It struck me as striking just the right tone, in fact. It highlights Mohler’s reformed commitments (hence “Reformer”), speaks to how these are crucial in his theology, and allows for other voices to distance themselves from that as a baptist commitment.

The article talks about Mohler’s early seminary years in which he had been willing for a time to embrace an egalitarian position on gender–until he got caught not being able to give a biblical defense of it. It outlines how this and other interpretive decisions are wedded to his commitment to inerrancy.

The article also speaks of Mohler’s commitment to reading and learning and offering a thoughtful, articulate response to the challenges our culture is facing.

I know that you are all going to find this hard to believe, but I do get worked up about some things pretty easily. One of those things is when Christians engage in power-grabbing. This ruffles my feathers to the right and to the left.

Although the article did not major on the dynamics of the Mohler-led house-cleaning at Southern or the precedent conservative takeover of the SBC, both of those rankle me. (And yes, I know that folks on the left do and/or attempt the same things in various ecclessial contexts and that ruffles my feathers just as much–but this article was about Mohler within the SBC!)

And this is where the questions about our commitment to the gospel get deadly serious for me.

When Jesus predicted his death, the next thing his disciples would do, inevitably, would be to shove that aside and start working out other paths to glory. “Which is going to be greatest?” they argued. “Can we sit at your right and left?” they asked. “Never Lord, you can’t die–God rebuke you!” Peter protested.

And, each time, Jesus said to them, “The cross is not just about me, it’s also about my followers.”

More than any theological system might uphold or implicitly deny the gospel, I worry that our pursuit of power by means other than the self-sacrifice–the kind of cruciform life that even allows our enemies to think that they have won–corrodes the faith, indicating that, in fact, the faith which we are living is not the following of Jesus to which we’re called.

While Mohler’s colleagues voice concerns about his Calvinism and its effects on evangelism, and while Mohler worries about their non-Calvinism and the intellectual integrity with which they can consistently articulate the gospel, I worry that the actions of pursuing power by the means of the world blows over the whole house.

This is not to question Mohler’s salvation, or that of the other architects of the SBC transtion over the past 30 years, but to suggest that we in America have certain ways of getting our gospel story wrong. And Jesus-backed power grabbing seems to be one of our collective, besetting sins.

The Righteousness of God (1 of 4)

September 28, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 14 Comments

A couple of times over the past month or so I’ve been asked in one way or another to weigh in on what is becoming the Piper v. Wright showdown, what before that was the Presbyterian v. Wright showdown, what before that was a vigorous conversation in New Testament scholarship. Since I discovered just yesterday that Piper has been selected as the “leading exegete” to represent North America at the Lausanne Conference in South Africa, I figured now was the time.

Here’s how I dissect the different positions on offer by Piper and Wright: Piper’s understanding of righteousness and justification flows from an understanding of the cosmos in which the law of God (an essentially timeless entity, but with some historical representations such as the Decalogue) regulates humanity’s standing before God. Wright’s understanding of righteousness and justification flows from an understanding of the cosmos in which the in-time story of Israel, and God’s covenants with this particular people, regulates humanity’s standing before God.

It may be that Piper will at times express his understanding in terms of “covenant,” akin to what we find in classic covenant theology that developed at the time of the Reformation. But even then it is viewed as an instrument to regulate the essentially transhistorical law of God.

The difference in the kind of covenant theology that Wright has on offer is that it is tied to specific stipulations and promises for particular people in particular times and places.

This difference between an essentially timeless law of God and a historicized development of a covenantal relationship gives rise to their different understandings of righteousness, justification, and faith.

When trying to understand the connotations of “righteousness” in the Bible, we need to remember that the connotations about which people differ in these debates will not be found in a dictionary or lexicon entry. “Righteousness” essentially means the characteristic of someone who does what is right or just.

But the whole source of difference between Wright and Piper is this: What, exactly, is the “right” thing that God must do in order to be righteous? Or, what is it for us to be a person who can be judged as “right”?

In other words, this is not a debate about the lexicon, it’s a debate about the theological framework within which the word righteousness gets used, and what it therefore connotes.

We don’t use the word “righteousness” all that much in normal language, so let me illustrate with a word that we’re more comfortable with: faithfulness.

Faithfulness will always mean loyally performing what we are bound to do on the basis of some relationship. But this also means there there will be an inherent level of relational relativism. In fact, being “faithful” can mean the exact opposite course of action depending on which relationship I’m talking about. For example, what it means for me to be a “faithful” husband will entail performance of certain actions that my role as “faithful” professor will entail abstaining from. To take the obvious example of sex, being a faithful and righteous husband entails engaging, being a faithful and righteous professor requires abstaining.

The move in Piper’s Reformed theology is to say that the entire world is under the same law, will be judged by the same law, and requires fulfillment of that law in order to be justified. This transhistorical narrative places all of us on the same footing, and sees God as simply the judge who judges based on our failure to attain to the standard.

Wright’s biblical theology suggests instead that righteousness is more closely tied to the specific relationship God has with Israel. Israel is required to perform certain actions, to fill certain roles, and God has bound himself to respond in certain ways. The work of Jesus is about a surprising fulfillment of Israel’s calling to obedience (in the cross), and God’s fulfillment of his covenant obligations comes in vindicating those who faithfully join themselves to this crucified and risen king.

Tomorrow we’ll work out a bit of the exegetical basis for making the decision one way or the other. Then Thursday I’ll see if I can’t work through a few of conundrums Wright hopes to solve with his revision of the story; specifically, how does the life of Jesus fit into the story? And I’m sure that by Friday we’ll have had enough chaotic back and forth that some further triumphant declaration of some sort will be in order (maybe something like: Why New Testament scholars don’t care about this debate). Stay tuned!

ATS School Size–And Fuller Nor Cal

September 27, 2010 in Academia with 4 Comments

Andy Rowell drew my attention to the latest Association of Theological Schools Annual Data Tables. Some of you couldn’t care less, some of you will kill be because you’ll kill a whole afternoon looking at stats. Apologies!

One thing that struck me as I was looking over the list: In the U.S. and Canada, 62.2% of member schools have a full-time equivalent enrollment of less than 150 students.

At Fuller’s Northern California Campus (Bay Area & Sacramento) where I work, we have an FTE of about 190. Fuller Northern Cal has more students than over 60% of the seminaries in the U.S. and Canada.

More Sabbath Shenanigans

September 27, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 5 Comments

Yesterday we reflected a bit on Jesus’ healing of the bent-over woman. The healing was not only a loosing of her bonds, but a rebuke of the leaders who would have left her in bondage in purported obedience to God.

There seems to be a bit a reprise in the next chapter, Luke 14, where Jesus once again has the audacity to heal on the Sabbath–and to contrast the willingness of the religious leaders to tend to an animal with their adamance that people be left to tend to themselves.

In this case, the people are gathered at a Pharisee’s house for Sabbath dinner. And, we’re told, they were watching Jesus closely (Luke 14:1).

The fantastic part about this story, however, is how Jesus slowly turns the tables on the Pharisees and ends up showing them themselves.

After the healing story, the leaders are silenced. And so Jesus now watches how they are handling themselves at this dinner party.

First, Jesus has observed them selecting the best seats and instructs them to choose the humble seats instead: better to be glorified in the eyes of the company by being asked to come forward than to be shamed in their eyes by having to surrender your self-selected place of honor. Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.

I can almost hear the great old praise chorus: “Humble thyself in the sight of the Lord. Or He will humble you! Lower and lower! Or He will humble you!”

In the next set of instructions, Jesus warns against throwing parties for folks who will invite you back. Instead of seeking earthly paybacks, invite folks who can never pay you back and then you’ll receive your payback at the resurrection of the righteous. In fact, one might begin to wonder, does the very fact of inviting the wrong folks to dinner qualify one for the resurrection of the righteous?

All of a sudden this dinner party isn’t looking as innocuous as it began. Dinner is great. Dinner thrown to spy on Jesus is bad. But dinner party that shows up its guests and host as those who are storing up a humbling on the Great Day of Reckoning is a dangerous business indeed.

A final story of dinner parties is the parable of the wedding feast whose guests will not come. Those rich enough to buy fields and oxen are not interested in the feast. Neither is the man whose conjugal interests are currently his focus. Ahem.

But the people who will come are the blind, the lame, the poor. The very people whom Jesus has just instructed should be invited instead of the rich who can pay you back are now shown to be the only ones willing even to be compelled to partake of the lavish banquet. More must be compelled, in fact, just to make sure that there’s no space for those who spurned the invitation at first.

And here we begin to wonder: are these stories connected? Is the reason that we are to invite the poor, and the reason why this will reap a reward on the Day of Reward, because these are the same people who are willing to receive the invitation of the great Master of the Banquet? Do we invite these, not only because there is a reward laid up for us in it, but because in so doing we are foreshadowing the coming blessing God will rain down upon those who would be blessed by such an earthly invitation? Is this a part of taking hold of the future Kingdom of God and bringing it to bear on the present?

And where does this parable leave the master of the feast that Jesus is participating in? By the end of this third story about feasts, the fact that people who think highly of themselves are present, the fact that those who might reciprocate are present, the fact that the needy was to have been sent away unchanged–and that he was sent away from the meal!–turn the whole “let’s keep an eye on Jesus” meal into Jesus turning their eyes on themselves.

By the end, if they have eyes to see, they’ve discovered that the Master of the Kingdom Banquet is throwing a feast and they are excluding themselves from its bounty. The ox can be dragged from a ditch. The poor can be dragged to the banquet. But will the rich stroll in?

CRC on Scripture and Science

September 26, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Science with 10 Comments

After I posted last week about the recent publications by a couple of Calvin College professors on the issues of evolution and biblical interpretation, a friend linked me to the Christian Reformed Church’s statement on this issue. It reads:

Position

All of life, including scientific endeavor, must be lived in obedience to God and in subjection to his Word. Therefore we encourage Christian scholarship that integrates faith and learning. The church does not impose an authorized interpretation of specific passages in Scripture; nor does it canonize certain scientific hypotheses. Instead, it insists that all theological interpretations and all scientific theories be subject to Scripture and the confessions.

Humanity is created in the image of God; all theorizing that minimizes this fact and all theories of evolution that deny the creative activity of God are rejected.

There is quite a history behind this, but the minimalism of the statement leaves a lot of room to ask questions and explores possible answers within a biblical framework.

In a comment over the weekend, Daniel Harlow brought it back to that biblical framework. “I’ve been discussing Genesis.” Indeed. That’s the point in a number of these discussions: how do we best read Genesis, how do we best understand its genre, how do we best understand why these stories begin our Bible and what we are intended to learn from them?

The CRC has determined that the statement of humanity in the image of God is at the heart of what is true about these creation narratives.

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