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Encore Presentation: The Structure of the Universe (part 7: revealed)

April 22, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 1 Comment

Note: this is the final installment of a series that was much sought after following the demise of my dearly beloved Sibboleth blog.

The Structure of the Universe (Part 7: Revealed)

I thought I was done with the structure of the universe series, but then an e-mail I received and my current trek through 1 Corinthians brought up something else.

One reason why it is crucial that we not lose sight of the deeply contingent nature of the biblical narrative is that the cross demands that Christians affirm the need for revelation–not in the sense of “scripture”, but in the sense of God, by Christ and the Spirit, making known to us things that were truly unknowable before. That includes things that scripture itself teaches that were previously unknowable even from scripture itself.

For example, do we really believe that in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed? This is a point at which I don’t think the Lutheran and Reformed Traditions have taken the Bible seriously enough. Paul contends, and the Gospels testify, that the true content of the righteousness of God is not made known to us until Jesus dies on the cross and rises again. Revelation.

On a “Law as structure of the cosmos” view of things, we know what the righteousness of God is, as everyone always has, and so we simply await the day when someone comes to make that available in an account from which we can withdraw. But Paul takes the surprise of the Christ event with the utmost seriousness: it reveals God’s righteousness–even as it is the fulfillment of God’s promises in scripture. There is something truly unknowable before the Christ event makes it known. Revelation.

This differing set of ideas about the cosmos is at the heart of debates (such as Beale v. Enns) over the NT’s use of the OT. When the scriptures are simply containers for revealing truths, then the coming of Jesus is just one more truth they witness to. Scriptures are de-historicized in order to attest to a transhistorical God who reveals things that are true.

But the NT writers cry out in the streets that the Law and even the scriptures are not ultimate. Christ is ultimate–therefore the scriptures are only of value insofar as they are read as pointing beyond themselves to the Christ to come. “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have life–yet it is these that testify about me!” (John 5). Scripture and Law are of value only insofar as they are reconfigured onto a grid of history in which Christ, rather than Law, is ultimate. This means, as Paul demonstrates clearly in Rom 10, that the Law and the scriptures in general must be reread, reinterpreted, given new and previously unseen and unseeable meaning, in light of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Revelation.

This also gets to that little bit about the Spirit. The job of the Spirit, says Paul in 1 Cor 2, is to reveal to us that the economy of God, of God’s wisdom and power, as demonstrated in the cross of Christ, is true wisdom in contrast to the structures by which the world functions. This takes us back to my prior series on ethics: the cross reveals the mind of God in a way that subverts the power games of this world. That is something previously unknowable, but God, by the Spirit, makes it known that his way, and his power, are found in weakness. Revelation.

Here, it seems to me, we are up against a couple of foundational presuppositions that are keeping the conservative Reformed world from catching up with the broader world’s understanding of what is going on in scripture:

(1) The Reformed tradition teaches that its theology is the system of doctrine contained in the scripture. What is the Bible? It’s a receptacle of data which we are called to assemble into the system. This is what every pastor in the PCA, OPC, professor at Westminster or an RTS has to sign off on. In this view of theological systems, the revelation of God in Christ is no more central than any other piece of data, it simply shows that the covenants that have always been in place and the law that has always been in place continue to be God’s way of making things right with the world.

(2) The historical contingencies that deeply effect how scripture was written and read, and affect how we read earlier in light of later moments in the story (including our own) must remain forever off the table. The meaning of any passage of scripture, claims the Westminster Confession, is one. But what, then, of passages that were never messianic prophecies (Isa 7 comes to mind) that are then invoked as being fulfilled in Jesus? We must contort our readings of such OT passages to claim that they always spoke of the coming messiah. This is the fruit of a deep-level commitment to a scripture that is free from the taints of history. It is the upshot of a way of understanding who God is, and how the cosmos is stitched together, that has no need of the kind of revelation that comes with and after the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Is there a true, earth-shattering event that happens at the turn of the era with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus? Is there a Revelation? I believe so, and I believe that it introduces a level of disjunction in the Story that requires radical reappraisal, rereading, of all that came before. In that Revelation we are confronted with the surprising truth about the fabric of the universe: even the Law which proceeded from the very mouth of God becomes penultimate when the Logos who proceeds from the Father from all eternity appears as the ultimate Revelation of who God is and how this God communes with His cosmos.

Do Not Judge–Except for Pigs & Dogs!

April 21, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 2 Comments

The Sermon on the Mount is full of little conundrums. One of my favorite is in the flow that goes: Don’t judge; after you take out your log attend to the other person’s splinter; and don’t throw your pearls before swine or give what’s holy to dogs.

The jump from “don’t judge” to “don’t forget to judge whether or not a person is a pig or dog” seems rather stark.

I’ve been playing with this passage for a couple of days, noting one thing and wondering another.

The note: the first chapter on judgment is clearly for insiders-how we deal with one another in the “family of God.” In fact, I find that markers of familial ties are one of the most important navigational tools to understand what Jesus is going on about in the Sermon.

In this case, the command not to judge is contextualized within a paragraph that simultaneously highlights the dangers of passing judgment, and the idea that “one anothering” in the church will entail assisting other people with their shortcomings after attending to our own. After removing the log, then one can see clearly the speck in the eye of a sister or brother (and not knock him or her unconscious!). The warning is important, but so is the loving care of helping get the splinter out.

In the warning about pearls before swine, a perennial question is, “What is the holy thing? What are the pearls?” This is an image, a metaphor, so we probably shouldn’t push too strongly for one single answer. The idea that the gospel is both to be proclaimed to all nations is supplemented with the idea that when it is rejected the disciples are to shake the dust of a town off their feet as a testimony against them (so Davies and Allison).

But I wonder if we are not to read it more directly in the context of the admonitions against judgment–which are followed by a “procedure” of sorts for dealing with another’s shortcoming. Is the “pearl” that would be trampled this sort of confrontation with particular matters of sin/shortcoming? Is the “holy thing” the intimate family business of getting up close and personal to remove one another’s eye specks after we have dealt with our own logs?

[Picture credit: Anthony Gonzales]

Encore Presentation: The Structure of the Universe (part 6: Why Israel?)

April 21, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

Note: This is the 6th installment of a series of posts making an encore presentation after their previous happy home, Sibboleth, was unceremoniously executed this past fall.

The Structure of the Universe (Part 6: Why Israel?)

“There is the first Adam and the Second Adam, and there is none in between.” Those frightening words, uttered in the context of a course on Christology in a Reformed seminary setting, starkly raise the question: why Israel?

In Westminster Calvinism, the Law is the structuring principle for the universe–at least as pertains to the relationship between God and humanity. When people, through Adam’s sin, became incapable of attaining to the Law, God created a co-context of a covenant of grace which would be good for us so long as God brought Jesus into the equation to keep the Law for us so that we could be saved on the basis of the covenant of works.

All of this supposedly happens in Genesis 1-3.

But once the Reformed Tradition has taken the notion of Law and teleported it back from Sinai to the Garden; and once it has taken the notion of world-blessing covenant and teleported it back from Abraham to the gates east of Eden, there is no reason why Israel has to exist except as a contingent container for receiving the truth of God as God saw fit to reveal it from time to time.

Once again I invite you to study the footnotes of the Westminster Confession. Every place where the Confession footnotes scripture to support its idea of a “covenant of works,” what scripture is talking about is the Law God gave at Sinai. And every place where the Confession footnotes scripture in support of its idea of a “covenant of grace,” what scripture is talking about is an actual covenant made in time with Abraham and/or his descendants. For this moment in the scholastic Reformed Tradition, what is “real” is not what happens in history, but the transhistorical entities that hover beyond space and time–abstract concepts of works and grace.

In such a world, there is no inherent value in the story of Israel. It is simply a place-holder until the non-Israel-bound covenant of works can be fulfilled so that the non-Israel-bound covenant of grace might be consummated so that the non-Israel-tied Law by which all are judged alike might have its fulfillment imputed to some and its condemnation wrought in others.

Tellingly, when the Reformed Tradition began to dabble in Biblical Theology with the work of Geerhardus Vos, it fancied itself studying “the history of special revelation.” See what that’s saying: the story of Israel is merely a container for what’s really important: the increasing revelation of the knowledge of transhistorical truths about God (that would find their consummation when Jesus comes to do the Law and thereby show us who God really is: the righteous law-keeping One).

Even for Vos, the story isn’t the thing, the revelation of the propositional truths about who God is, that’s the thing.

So once again we step back to ask what difference it makes whether or not one sees the cosmos structured on a system of law.

It makes a difference for how we see the place of Israel within God’s story. Why did it take 2,000 years for Christians in the West to see that Paul really means Rom 9-11? Our idea of the gospel was too far removed from the narrative of Israel.

Why does the New Perspective, with its insistence on seeing the story of Israel at the middle of everything, garner such harsh opposition? Because to say that Israel is at the middle of everything means that God’s relationship with the cosmos and humans in particular is tied to deeply contingent and historical factors: actual covenants in space and time, eras of history within which God acts differently toward different people, an identity for God that is tied to events and people within history rather than abstract, absolute categories.

Once you have said that Israel matters–that the actual covenants with Abraham and Moses and David matter–then you have cut away the exegetical moorings by which Reformed theology has created its Works versus Grace antithesis, cut away the scriptural “proof” for the Reformed version of the covenantal structure of the cosmos, and thereby undermined the way in which the early Reformed Tradition opposed Roman Catholicism and articulated its doctrine of justification.

This does not mean that Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again; and it doesn’t mean that in the framework of the 16th century debates that the Roman Catholics were right about everything after all. But it does mean that the recognition that Israel really matters, like the recognition that Jesus’ humanity is richly textured in its importance, like the recognition that “atonement” is about more (not less!) than the law court, like the recognition that Christ is the goal of the Law and not vice versa–this recognition sends us back to the beginning to ask afresh: What is the world and God’s intention for it? What’s wrong with the world? Is God’s purpose to rescue from or redeem the world with these sets of problems? And what, if the latter, must God do to affect that redemption?

Hays v. Wright at Wheaton (Part 3 of 2!)

April 20, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 4 Comments

Update: I’m just now listening to N. T. Wright’s speech from Friday night. He says pretty much exactly what I said in “Hays v. Wright” part 2. Glad somebody listens to me… Ok, so, it’s the other way ’round. So sue me…

Hays v. Wright at Wheaton (part 2 of 2)

April 20, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 47 Comments

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.

Encore Presentation: The Structure of the Universe (part 5: Cur Homo?)

April 20, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 5 Comments

Note: the following is part 5 of an ongoing series reprising posts from my former blog, Sibboleth.

The Structure of the Universe (Part 5: Cur Homo?)

Ever get the sense that Christians are apologetic about the fact that Jesus was a human? We so often act as though the cardinal element of the Christian confession is “Jesus is God” rather than “Jesus is Lord.” We read the Gospels as though the point of each story is to show how Jesus is God: Look! He cast out demons, must be God! Look! He forgives sins–must be God! Look! He walked on water–must be God! Look! He died! Must be God in life, man in death–that’s how, all too often, we parse the significance of the God-man in our reading of the Gospels.

This is not a problem created by the Reformed Tradition, but the vision of the universe as structured on Law and Law-keeping reinforces this truncated view of Jesus’ humanity–one that needs God wrapped up in flesh so that the flesh could eventually die.

But what if God’s commitment to the cosmos he created is more foundational than God’s desire to see the Law maintained? What if there is a more basic fabric of creation being unraveled and God doesn’t simply want to punish the person who pulled the thread that caused it to come apart but wants to see that fabric remade? And what if the remaking itself is as much the mission of Jesus as the punishment of the offender?

This is the ancient idea of “recapitulation”, though it needs to be reworked through a better understanding of “image of God” than Irenaeus had at his disposal. The point is that God creates humanity for one magnificent purpose: that people should rule the world on God’s behalf (Gen 1)–and Jesus comes to reestablish that rule, God’s primal purpose for people.

Why “human”? Because humanity was created to rule the world on God’s behalf; because humanity ceded that calling and lives in rebellion against God; because the dominion of humanity has gone the way of its ruler–and because God has determined that he is not going to give up on this creation but, instead, restore it. God will be victorious over this rebellion.

In order for that to happen, though, a man must rule, a man must restore, a man must be the faithful mediator of the word, presence, and power of God. In the Synoptic tradition, it is not as God but as man that Jesus casts out demons: the Messiah is ruling the world of the Spirits by the power of God.

It is not as God but as man that Jesus cleanses lepers: the Messiah is ruling the world and reversing the contagion of unclean by his touch which makes clean.

It is not as God but as man that Jesus heals bodies: the Messiah is ruling the world of flesh and restoring the broken bodies that are tied to the curse of the the fall.

It is not as God but as man that Jesus forgives sins: the Messiah is ruling the world in the name of God, speaking for God and restoring people to right standing before God.

So yes, there is a crucial place for law and law-breaking and sin and transgression to be dealt with in the death of the Messiah. But if the ultimate structure of the universe is Law, then we miss out on the richness of what Jesus came to do, and the kind of victory that God is intent to bring about through the advent of God’s Messiah.

Why “human”? Because God is not about rescuing us out of this world but reconciling this rebellious world to himself–something that can only happen when the rightful representative of this world faithfully represents God’s rule to the world and the humanity’s subjection to God.

Hays v. Wright at Wheaton (part 1 of 2)

April 19, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 13 Comments

At the Wheaton Theology Conference on N. T. Wright, Richard Hays gave a critical assessment of Wright’s Jesus, as represented in Jesus and the Victory of God.

I want to respond to this lecture because it brings to the surface the passion behind my next major research project on the humanity of Jesus.

First off, I want to say where I agree with Hays. Jesus and the Victory of God is valuable as a “theology of the synoptic gospels,” and as something that gives us a historically contextualized reading of that sort of Jesus.

But our Jesus is the canonical Jesus, which means that we are not trying to look through the gospels at something that lies behind, but to understand the Jesus whom we meet in the canonical stories. I find JVG valuable as a help toward understanding these stories, not as an approximation of “the historical Jesus.”

Also, I agree with Hays that we are to read the gospels with a “resurrection hermeneutic,” because I believe that the gospels were written with a resurrection hermeneutic.

Without detracting from these base-hits, and in large part because of them, I call foul on a couple of other points. First, Hays spoke of “resurrection hermeneutics” in the same breath as “incarnational hermeneutics”. These are fundamentally different for one important reason: whereas all four gospels affirm the resurrection, only John has an incarnation. So, while reading these with a prior understanding of Jesus as resurrected Lord is a good reading of the gospels as written, reading them all as witnesses to the incarnate God is truly bringing in the theology of the church, and requires its own separate argument.

And I want to suggest that Hays has provided the strongest argument against an incarnation hermeneutic in his critique of JVG.

One place at which Hays finds JVG wanting is that it does not give due attention to the unique voices of each of the four Gospels we have in our New Testament canon. It is insufficiently attentive to the particular stories of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Wright’s sources). But this is the very reason why an incarnation hermeneutic is inappropriate for interpreting the same books! Hays is asking for a canonical reading that flattens out the polyvalent witness, the individual voices, of the Gospels.

Resurrection hermeneutic? Sure. Because the resurrection/ascension is Jesus’ enthronement (Matthew, Luke), so when Jesus comes proclaiming the reign of God, he is enacting something that we know more fully once he is enthroned as the one who reigns at God’s right hand.

Why is it that I am so resistant to allowing the church’s tradition to transform the witness of the Synoptic Gospels? Tune in tomorrow.

Encore Presentation: The Structure of the Universe (part 4: WDJD)

April 19, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 7 Comments

Note: the following is part 4 in an on-going encore presentation of a series that appeared last summer on my former blog, Sibboleth.

The Structure of the Universe (Part 4: WDJD?)

There you were, 12 years ago, having gotten your hands on a copy of Jesus and the Victory of God. You and all your cigar smokin’, whiskey drinkin’, Southern Presbyterian friends were starting to develop man crushes on N. T. Wright.

Then it happened: What Saint Paul Really Said came along, in close proximity to “The Shape of Justification,” and the hatred with which you hated him became greater than the love with which you loved him.

What happened?

The picture of the cosmos on offer in the conservative Reformed tradition is based almost entirely on a particular reading of Paul. (Check out the footnotes to the Westminster Confession sometime: the legal structure of the universe is a theological axiom built on reading Galatians 3 as referring to Adam where the text is clearly referring to Moses.) This picture of the cosmos is, of course, tied up with a reading of Paul’s view of the solution to humanity’s problem: we need to be justified in the heavenly courtroom, Jesus’ life and death enables that justification, Rom 3 says so, etc.

As I mentioned yesterday, this leaves the question of Jesus’ ministry wide open as, in fact, we see that in the Reformed Tradition and the evangelical heritage it’s spawned we have traditionally had very little idea what to do with the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels.

So, when N. T. Wright stepped in, this is what he offered: (1) A reading of Jesus that connected his ministry deeply with the covenant(s) God had made with Israel. This was an instant point of affinity for Reformed types. (2) A reading of Jesus that emphasized the kingdom of God–something that Reformed types had been made aware of through the work of Herman Ridderbos et al. (3) A reading of Jesus that stuck it to the minimalist historical Jesus scholars–a purportedly “historical Jesus” work that never says that any piece of data from the NT isn’t historical. Here, surely, was a friend!

But the picture of salvation that Wright drew was dependent on a different view of the structure and order of the cosmos–one in which the particulars of God’s covenant relationship with Israel are the particulars through which God is going to exercise a universal saving action to restore the entire world to Godself. In other words, this reading of Jesus depends on a fundamentally different understanding of the cosmos than the law-based picture of Reformed Theology, but folks in the Reformed world were able to appropriate it unawares because conservative, traditional Reformed Theology did not have any stake in the Gospels. Its adherents didn’t see the crack in the door because they were only dealing with Jesus.

Because here’s the thing that happened with What Saint Paul Really Said: Wright simply took his understanding of the cosmos in need of restoration, Israel as God’s agent, and Jesus as the one fulfilling the destiny of Israel (i.e., his reading of the story of the Gospels) and read that same narrative off the pages of Paul. But now he was coming into direct conflict with passages in which the Reformed folk had a stake. And the jig was up.

When Wright wants to set the stage to answer the question, “What did Jesus do?”, he, in step with the Reformed tradition he came out of, began his answer with an assessment of the connection between creation and covenant. But…

There are two crucial differences: (1) Wright sees in the OT’s assessment of the “problem” not only sin but also injustice, persecution, groaning creation, etc. In other words, the restoration of the cosmos is going to have to deal with the powers that war against God’s good purposes–powers that are greater than the sum of the rebellion lodged in persons’ hearts.

(2) For Wright the covenants made by YHWH to deal with the problem are covenants established with people in time. This points to the most significant underlying difference in perspective: For scripture and for Wright what matter are the actual things that God does in history. Confessional Reformed Theology has taken the covenant language of scripture, translated it into extra-biblical ideas of non-historical covenants of works and of grace, and then read those extra-biblical ideas back into the biblical accounts of how salvation works. Israel doesn’t matter in the least, it all could have been done without her.

What did Jesus do? For Wright, Jesus restored the reign of God, overcoming the powers of sin and death, dying to absorb the penalty due for sin, replacing humanity in its seat as rightful ruler of the world on YHWH’s behalf–and all this as a way of saying, “Fulfilled Israel’s vocation to restore humanity, became the faithful God-honoring second Adam, and offered restoration from ‘exile’.”

For the Reformed world, Jesus kept the law for us, died to take our condemnation, and rises to… well… that doesn’t really matter. And all this as a way of saying, “Jesus fulfilled Adam’s vocation to be obedient so we could be rewarded under the provisions of the covenant of works.”

What does it mean to be second Adam? Does Israel have a place in the story? Is the original vision of humanity’s purpose being to rule the world on God’s behalf significant? Are the narrative threads of creation’s curse, of broken human relationships, of broken relations between humans and the created order–do these play into the work of Jesus? Are they part of the structure of God’s cosmos which Jesus came to restore?

When the universe is understood to be structured in a relationship to God that sustains all these other relationships, those questions become the heart of the question “What did Jesus do?” When the moral law is understood to be the structure of the universe, those are back-burner questions, questions that do not demand our attention as followers of Jesus, things for which we can simply wait and hope so long as we have been made right with God.

N. T. Wright is correctly drawing our attention to the fact that being made right with God comes hand in hand with the restoration of the cosmos. This is what Jesus did. We can’t have one without the other–and having both as our “gospel” should markedly affect how we view our vocation, and how we assess whether we and our communities are living faithfully.

Encore Presentation: Structure of the Universe (part 3: atonement)

April 18, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 0 Comments

Note: The following is part 3 in an encore presentation of a series that appeared on my former blog, Sibboleth.

The Structure of the Universe (Part 3: Atonement)

One thing that has been a source of continual puzzlement to me over the years is why Reformed Theology has come to put so much weight on theological ideas that are nowhere found in scripture. Two examples:

(1) I remember reading a passionate defense of the imputation of the active righteousness of Christ which said, among other things, when referring to this doctrine, “I know in my heart it’s taught on every page of the New Testament.” A similar comment was made with respect to Paul in particular in a Reformed NT professor’s review of my book.

The simplified explanation of “imputation the active righteousness of Christ” is that Jesus keeps the Law, and his record of Law-keeping is reckoned as the believers–and that’s why believers get to be justified. Jesus’ merit becomes our merit. We become Law-keepers through imputation.
So what’s the big deal? My pastor friend should stop looking in his heart and look instead to that NT he’s so convinced about, because no NT writer ever says such a thing, nor is it entailed as the deduction of anything else they say. This is a position required by a theological system, but not evidently the system the NT writers were working with (if they had such a thing).

(2) Limited atonement. This is the infamous “L” in the T-U-L-I-P of five-point Calvinism. The idea there is that the work of Jesus, in order to be effective, had to actually be done for those to whom it would be applied (and exclude those to whom it would not apply). If Jesus died for “your” sins, you can’t die for them again, so the calculus on Calvary has to be exact.

Once again, this is a notion that only finds scant scriptural support and whose main support is the theological system of which it is a part.

Both of these points are driven by the conviction of scholastic Reformed Theology that Law is the ordering principle of the universe, such that our own standing before God comes down, in its entirely, to the account we give for ourselves (as individuals) before God the judge. [I say "scholastic Reformed Theology" here to differentiate between both what preceded the English Reformation in Calvin & others and what came later in the Reformed Tradition through folks like Barth and the Torrances.]

Our standing before God as judge is important! And, our personal accountability for sin is important. And, justification before God’s throne as judge is vitally important.

But when it becomes everything, we start pressing questions that take us far afield from the gospel in our zeal for it.

Here’s one picture of the problem with breaking and fulfilling the Law being the entirety of the Christian message: this leaves the Gospels almost completely out of the equation. They are scoured for the 5 or 6 references to “faith” connected with “salvation” that we can use to substantiate justification by faith, and then we turn the rest into proofs that Jesus really is God.

The life of Jesus demands that we see the problem with the world, God’s commitment to the world, and the salvation brought by Jesus in more extensive terms than the Law, Law-keeping, justification.

Jesus heals sick people: he’s not only on mission to remit sin, but the death and decay that according to the biblical narrative were unleashed when humanity ceded its vocation to rule the world on God’s behalf.

Jesus casts out demons: he’s not only on mission to see that guilt is punished, but is restoring humanity’s rightful place as those who would rule the cosmos on God’s behalf.

Jesus feeds thousands: he’s not showing what great things we can do if we only believe, but giving evidence of the fecundity that comes to all of creation when God’s people are faithfully representing the God of Israel to the rest of the world.

Echoing the primal curse from Genesis 3, the great Christmas carol proclaims: “No more let sins and sorrows grow or thorns infest the ground: he comes to make his blessings known far as the curse is found.” That cosmic picture of restoration is what Jesus brings–not only atoning for guilt, but setting humans at one with God, each other, the powers, and creation. (If you’re interested in reading more in a very accessible book, check out Scot McKnight’s A Community Called Atonement.)

This broader picture of Jesus’ work opens a door for understanding why the extent of the atonement and the idea of Jesus’ law-keeping on our behalf are not questions that came up for the first-century Christians. But that will have to wait for next time. But I promise that part 4 will not only definitively answer these questions once and for all, but also disclose to you the real reason why N. T. Wright has become such a bogeyman for the conservative Reformed world. (Wow, I should charge for this stuff…)

N. T. Wright Conference Now Online

April 17, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 4 Comments

The Wheaton Theology Conference from this week is now online here (streaming video and everything)!

I just watched my Doktorvater Richard Hays give his response to Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God. I come down somewhere between the two, except in this: like Tom, I’ve escaped from the attic and I much of how I read the NT is done in studied refusal to return. (See Hays’ speech for the reference.)

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