First, as we discussed previously (here and here), Barth draws us back to revelation, claiming that God is only known as God has revealed himself in and by the word.

In §26.2, Barth takes up the same question from the human side. If God is knowable, there must not only be a God who makes Godself known, but a humanity capable of receiving this knowledge.

Who, then, or perhaps what, is this humanity?

First, Barth returns to the question of natural theology, applying his previous arguments about God as knowable through the natural order to humanity as those who can know as they are by nature.

Well, not exactly as humanity is “by nature.” What humanity is in its “fallen nature” is more to the point. We’ll come back to this in a second. At any rate, humans as we actually are cannot truly know the true God through a natural theology, but only through God’s revelation.

“Anthropology” is not the route to humanity’s ability to know God.

Interestingly, and again, perhaps, surprisingly, Barth is equally insistent that ecclesiology, humanity as addressed by the church, is not the humanity able to receive the revelation of God. Humanity in the church is as liable to deception about its understanding of God as humanity in general. It is as liable to control it for its own purposes, as humanity in general.

Though I don’t recall Barth saying so explicitly, I wonder if this twin denial isn’t a recurrence of Barth’s regular two-sided glance: on the one hand he wants to show how evangelical dogmatics stands over against Christian liberalism; on the other he wants to show how it stands over against Roman Catholicism.

If not anthropology or ecclesiology, then on what basis can we discover humanity’s readiness for God? Unsurprisingly, it comes from Christology.

God is known knower in the triune, eternal relationship between Father and Son. This Son who has eternally known God, becomes human, thus joining the eternal self-knowing God with human flesh. How can people know God? Because, on the human side as well as the divine, God knows Godself. “On the human side” meaning, in this case, the humanity of the God-man.

I have a couple of questions about Barth’s construction.

First, do his stances against anthropology and ecclesiology as means by which we might see that God is knowable to people underplay the significance of Christ as The Human One and of the church as the Body of Christ? In the salvation story, there is a redefinition of humanity, of “image of God,” of the people of God, of “the church,” that is derivative from Christ himself.

Does Barth take this incorporation into Christ seriously enough in his denial that as humans or as the church we can know God?

Second, and related, does Barth give too much play to sin as a defining element in our human nature? Not that all humans aren’t born in sin and all the rest. But being sinful isn’t at the core of what it means to be human. Yes, it’s the reality that we are born into and from which Christ ushers us into a better future.

But Christ was fully human, and yet without sin. So if it’s sinfulness that keeps us from knowing God, it’s not our humanness that keeps us from God, but instead it’s the lack of true humanness that keeps us from knowing God.

So then, third, why is it that Christ offers a new humanity in which God is knowable? Is it because Christ is God? Or is it because Christ is truly human? Has Barth retreated too quickly to the Trinity rather than taking full stock of the inherent value of humanity as created in God’s image and recreated in the image of God in Christ?

That’s the real fun stuff. On a side note: is there a difference between natural theology and general revelation? The latter phrase keeps the requirement of “revelation” on the table, as Barth says is necessary, but allows for a broader compass of revelation than we find in only scripture, Christ, and preaching.

Yesterday, I posted the first of two responses I wanted to make to John Piper’s description of Christianity as a “masculine” religion. Rachel Held Evans has issued the summons for replies, and I think this is an important moment to inject a more biblically sound reading of gender issues in the church. Thanks, Rachel, for stirring us to positive response.

Today’s issue has to do with the significance of Jesus’ choosing of twelve men to be his disciples. This is one of several issues I take up in Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul?.

The story within which this selection of the twelve is embedded leads us to draw a very different point from Piper’s.

Jesus chooses twelve men. These twelve Jesus specially commissions. Jesus came preaching, casting out demons, and healing. The disciples are sent to preach and heal and cast out demons.

Jesus comes proclaiming and inaugurating the reign of God, and these men are sent out to participate in that coming. When Jesus feeds the 5,000, he hands the bread to them. They are the chosen. They are the insiders.

In contrast (let’s stick to Mark’s Gospel here), the women in the story are marginal. There are small handfuls of nameless women. They touch Jesus’ robe, they ask for healing for their daughters, they throw a few coins in a box in the temple, they anoint Jesus’ head with oil.

So while the women are coming in and going out, acting on faith and finding praise for their faith, it’s the boys who are getting it done!

Getting it done, that is, right up until the great, transitional moment in the story.

“Who do you say that I am?” “You are the Christ.” Ok, so far so good. Then, Jesus begins to tell them what this title entails: “The Messiah must be rejected, suffer, and die. Then he’ll be raised.”

Peter rebukes Jesus. Jesus rebukes him back: “Get behind me Satan.”

What happens then?

Move on to ch. 9, and the disciples who had been empowered to exorcise are unable to cast out a demon. The disciples who had been given the charge to proclaim cannot overcome the mute-making spirit.

Later that same chapter Jesus again predicts his death. The disciples’ reaction? They walk along debating with each other about who is going to be greatest in God’s coming kingdom.

We begin to see what they don’t get about Jesus’ ministry: the cross turns the economy of the world on its head. They have a standard of greatness that entails a certain kind of leadership and power, but Jesus wants to transform their ideas. He wants them to see greatness in the cross and the child.

As if Mark, or Jesus, thought we might miss the point, we get the whole thing a third time.

Jesus predicts his death, and this time the subsequent response of the disciples is James’ and John’s request to sit at Jesus’ right and left hand. Again, Jesus has to combat not merely the request, but the wrongheaded assumption about what greatness in the kingdom of God looks like:

Jesus called them over and said, “ You know that the ones who are considered the rulers by the Gentiles show off their authority over them and their high-ranking officials order them around. But that’s not the way it will be with you. Whoever wants to be great among you will be your servant. Whoever wants to be first among you will be the slave of all, for the Human One didn’t come to be served but rather to serve and to give his life to liberate many people.” (Mark 10:42-44, CEB)

In the story, the disciples do not understand what is entailed in leading the people of God. They think it is about greatness and power rather than service and death.

And so, we have the group represented by Peter. The rock. Is being “the rock” a good thing? In Mark, the rocky soil indicates plants that spring up well, but fall away when danger or persecution arise on account of the word. Mark repeats the language of “falling away” when the disciples scatter, leaving Jesus to die alone.

The Twelve were committed to Jesus, and happy with him–but only as one who came with power. They had no faith in their calling to participate in his way of death. They did not have eyes to see that the ministry of Jesus turned the economy of the world on its head.

Shall we return to the women now?

How are we to assess these women who, in the narrative world, are outsiders, on the margins?

Unlike the disciples who are rebuked for being of little faith, Jesus commends these women as having great faith: “Daughter, go in peace, your faith has made you well.”

Moreover, there is one episode where Jesus ties a human inseparably to the gospel story. It is the episode of the woman who pours out oil over Jesus’ head. This looks to be a royal anointing! But when Jesus defends her he says, “Leave her alone, she has prepared my body beforehand for burial.”

The act of anointing prepares Jesus for burial: Messiahship and death are held together, and here is the only person in the whole story to get it. This is why “wherever the gospel is preached what she has done will also be told in memory of her.”

What does it mean to live at the margins, to be unnamed? How does this compare with being the twelve, the dudes, the insiders?

According to the economy of the world, with its measures of greatness, to be the twelve is to be exemplary, in the place to lead, to exclude others from leadership, to stand close to Jesus and guard the gates of who else can draw near.

And to the extent that we look to Jesus’ selection of them, and the apparent marginalization of the women, as paradigmatic for male leadership in the church, we show ourselves to be people whose minds have not yet been transformed by the very story to which we are appealing.

It is only by agreeing with the disciples’ way of assessing the world that we can see their “insider status” as a true insider status, to be replicated by other men in church history.

Jesus offers another way: You guys don’t get it! It’s the rulers of the Gentiles who lord authority over people. It shall not be so among you.

There is another way. It is the way of the cross.

There is another way. It is the way of the “marginalized” in the worlds eyes lying closest to Jesus in faith and understanding.

Are we really supposed to hold up as our model the “Satan” who denied the gospel of the crucified Christ, and claim that Peter is paradigmatic of the place of men as insiders and faithful leaders in the church?

Or should we not seek out the one who did the good deed for Jesus, holding together Messiah and death from her place at the margins? Should we not seek out the one who sought out Jesus merely to touch the fringe of his garment and learn from her what it means to walk in faith?

The irony of appealing to the boys as insiders is that in so doing we show ourselves to be adopting the boys’ understanding of power, privilege, and leadership in the kingdom.

And this view is roundly rebuked by Jesus in words of dissuasion and the work of the cross.

A random drawing has produced the following results:

Joel Green, Practicing Theological Interpretation goes to…

Greg McMurphy!

Jenell Williams Paris, The End of Sexual Identity goes to…

Brian Robinson!

3. Mark Yarhouse, Homosexuality and the Christian goes to…

Gary L Lake Dillensnyder!

Thanks to everyone for your outstanding, helpful questions for my Colossians writing. The product has been immeasurably improved by your participation in the process.

Piper’s point is that God intentionally depicted Himself in masculine imagery, and that this sets the character for what Christianity is: God is Father and Son, God is King not queen.

In this post I want to outline some ways that scripture leads us to see that Piper’s view is selective to the point of being misleading. Tomorrow I want to tackle a much more serious issue: the way that Piper reads the Gospels as underpinning his theology demonstrates a fundamental failure to understand the stories themselves.

The very first indication we get in scripture of how the nature of God maps onto human gender is Genesis 1. When God creates humanity in God’s own image, we read, “Male and female he created them.”

This is significant for two reasons. First, in what is the clearest connection of God to human gender, perhaps the only clear and intentional such connection in all of scripture, it is both male and female, together, who mirror God to the world.

This means that a “masculine” church or a church with a “masculine feel” is inherently lacking in its ability to reflect the image of God to the world.

But Genesis 1 isn’t simply about “being like” God in some general way.

To bear the image of God is to be the person to whom God has entrusted the rule of the world on God’s behalf. The purpose of humanity, “Let them rule the world on our behalf,” is inseparable from the categorization of these creatures as those made “in the image of God.”

In other words: it is not merely as humans that we reflect God together as male and female, but as those who rule over the world as male and female we bear the image of God. The kind of rule God has in mind is not a “masculine” rule, but a masculine plus feminine, male plus female, rule. Only this kind of shared participation in representing God’s reign to the world is capable of doing justice to the God whose image we bear.

Another dynamic of God, as God is reflected in the story of ancient Israel, is worth considering. As a religion without official goddesses, it falls to the one God to do the typically “feminine” duty of ensuring fertility.

In the ancient world, where being a woman was specially tied to bearing, nurturing, and rearing children, feminine images of God (and, of course, goddesses) were often tied to either literal or figurative bearing and nurturing of a people and/or of children.

This may lend some credibility to the idea that when the OT speaks of God as El-Shaddai. Although this is sometimes translated “God almighty,” other options have been suggested, including “God of the mountain.” But it’s worth noting that El-Shaddai is a term that appears in tandem with the covenant blessing of seed, offspring.

In Gen 17:1, God self-identifies as El-Shaddai and then institutes the covenant of circumcision which is tied to the covenant promise of offspring. Why does Genesis 35:11 say, “I am El-Shaddai, be fruitful and multiply” (cf. Gen 28:3)? Why this title for the God of fruitfulness and multiplication?

It has been argued that El-Shaddai is less a reference to God as all-powerful and more a reference to God as the one who grants fertility.

Genesis 49:25 reads:

by God, your father, who supports you,
by the Almighty (shaddai) who blesses you
with blessings from the skies above
and blessings
from the deep sea below,
blessings from breasts (shadayim) and womb.

It has been argued that Shaddai is related to the Hebrew word for breasts. Although alternative translation of “shaddai” has been “God of the mountains”–as someone who lives in a city with “twin peaks,” it seems to me that the options of “God of the mountains” and “God of the breasts” are not mutually exclusive.

In Gen 49:25 we may very well have an intentional juxtaposition of God as Father and God as nursing mother. The God of Israel is the God of womb and breast as much as this is the God of war and rain.

El Shaddai is the God who makes God’s people fruitful and multiples them. This is the God of fertility.

Good on the bra, but more "mountains" needed...

And so, when we see the Son appear in all His glory in Revelation, we are, perhaps, not entirely surprised to find this:

“His breasts are girt up with a golden girdle” (Revelation 1:13)

Ok, we are surprised to find it. So surprised, in fact, that the translations won’t have it! But mastoi are breasts. (Thanks are due to Jesse Rainbow for his article on the Son of Man’s breasts in JSNT 30 [2007] 249-53.) The great warrior king of Revelation? It’s the Son of Man, prepared to be nursing mother.

So when Paul says that he and his fellow apostles were present among the Thessalonians like a nurse or mother, perhaps we should understand that there is something distinctly “feminine” about leading the church of God. And, that this femininity is part of what it means to bear the image of God and manifest the presence of Christ.

Who is the Father of our Bible? Who is the Son? It is not only the king and conqueror, but the nurturer and nourisher, the one who cares for and holds close. Not only (I should say, stereotypically) “masculine” but also the (stereotypically) feminine.

It is the God who is only rightly and fully imaged as male and female. Together.

Want to be part of God’s great reconciliation project? It was in Christ that God was reconciling the world to Himself–look to union with Christ.

Want to be part of God’s family? You are all children of God, in Christ Jesus, by faith.

Increasingly, I have been thinking of this as a sub-set of a larger theological idea: that Christ is the Second and Last Adam (1 Cor 15).

Image: Evgeni Dinev / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

So how does this new humanity come to define each one of us? When by Spirit, faith, and baptism we are united to Christ. Responding to the message of this Christ, crucified and raised, we become his people, and his destiny determines our own.

In other words, union with Christ is the means by which we become part of the new humanity of which Christ is the first. The second Adam becomes our own.

Christ also represents the destiny of the cosmic order. As Adam and Eve’s disobedience was met with a cursing of the ground and animosity between humanity and animals and ruptured relationship with God–a cosmic disruption–Christ’s obedience means new creation in all its facets.

How do we come to participate in such a new creation? “If anyone is in Christ–new creation! The old things have passed away–behold! new things have come!”

In Christ, we participate in the new creation.

New creation is a facet of Paul’s Adam Christology. The firstborn of a new creation is revealed. And “in Christ” we come to occupy that newly reconciled cosmic space.

This may provide a way forward in dealing with the “all” passages in Paul that are in themselves universalistic, and that also sit side-by-side with clear indications that not all participate in this universal embrace offered by God.

Christ is the second and last Adam: all things are made new in him. And, one must be in him in order to know and participate in this new creation.

Mystery Number 1

It is widely celebrated these days that the proper method for measuring coffee is by weight.

Image: zirconicusso / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Thus, each day I measure out 20 grams of coffee for my single-cup, hand-poured morning ritual, ere I throw said beans into the burr grinder which has been carefully calibrated to grind just the right sized beans for my #2 cone filter.

However, coffee bean weight is determined, to no little extent, by the water naturally present in the bean. When you roast a coffee bean, one effect of the roasting process is that the bean dries out.

The longer you roast the bean, the drier–and therefore lighter!–the bean becomes.

This means that the darker your roast, the greater volume of beans necessary to add up to the same weight.

You following all this?

This means, that if you’re weighing your coffee, you will use more beans to make the same amount of coffee when those beans are darker and stronger to begin with–the very time you might think of backing off the volume in order to produce a well balanced cup of coffee.

So here’s the question: should we, in fact, measure coffee by volume rather than weight in order to produce more consistent coffee? Or, alternatively, should we vary the weight of coffee such that fewer grams are in play for darker roasts and more for lighter roasts?

Mystery Number 2

Do you find that your emotions run on a spectrum from good to bad? or on a parabola of intensity from high to low?

The way we normally talk about emotions is, I think, on a spectrum from good to bad: I’m so excited nothing could bring me down! and the like.

But I see in myself and certain little people I’m around regularly that emotions are often more like a parabola: there is an “up” of intensity that can one minute be excitement, another utter frustration.

Image: Mr. Pi

The slide isn’t from up to down, but a move from the “up” that we experience positively to the “upward intensity” of negative emotion. The “downward slide” from intense expectation to bitter disappointment isn’t a downward slide so much as it is a horizontal move from really intense eagerness to really intense disappointment.

Kids melting down on Christmas morning isn’t a crash so much as it’s a maintenance of the intensity without a positive direction to channel it.

Thoughts?

Mystery Number 3

How does a ballet bun with this much awesomeness end up falling out into a ponytail two minutes later?

These are great mysteries, my friends. Together, I think we can work them out.

What say you?

The Christian faith has numerous several heroes of uncertainty replaced by faith. There are the stories of Augustine and Luther, overcoming lust and guilt, respectively. There are the more modern stories of the likes of Josh McDowell examining the biblical “evidence” for its truthfulness.

Image: xedos4 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

So there are, apparently, lots of ways forward toward assurance, depending on your issues, your personality, and the like.

But there’s one that we don’t hear about so much. It’s the way that Colossians offers as the road to assurance. It’s the way of love:

My goal is that their hearts would be encouraged and united together in love so that they might have all the riches of assurance that come with understanding, so that they might have the knowledge of the secret plan of God, namely Christ. (Col 2:2, CEB)

While we so often put a premium on the knowledge we can gain, the understanding of complex matters for which we can muster an argument, as the means to assurance, we find a different route laid out by Paul here.

It is the hearts united in love that attain to assurance and understanding. Hearts united in love pave the road to full knowledge of Christ.

In John, Jesus tells his disciples, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples–if you love one another.”

Apparently, that love is not only a signpost for the outsiders, but for the insiders as well.

A community of heart-knit love is the way to full assurance.

All the blogs from the blog tour are linked on the blog tour website. If you missed any of the posts, head over and catch up! In addition, Tony Jones followed up with a second engagement of my chapter on homosexuality which led to my own post in response and a great conversation ensued.

So, let’s say that you’ve read the book and you liked what was going on there. If you’re so inclined, here is my shameless request for you to help me get the word out about the book:

First, if you’ve finished with the book (I mean, for the next couple weeks or something, before you read it again), would you give (I mean, loan) your copy to someone else to read? Putting the book in people’s hands may the single most important thing for an unknown person such as myself to have the book start finding some ciruclation.

Second, if you’re reading along and enjoying what you read, would you post a word or two to your social network? A quote from the book? A, “120 pages down, only 79 more to go #JHILBP” or something?

Third, if you read and enjoyed the book, would you write a short review on Amazon? As weird as it may sound in theory, people actually care what the Amazon reviews say, how many there are, etc.

Finally, if you’re in the Bay Area +/- 8 hours, when am I coming to speak to your church, fellowship group, school chapel…?

Thanks to everyone who is taking the time to read the book and critically engage its ideas. You honor me with your efforts.

You were looking at Acts 17, and pondering what statues to an unknown God there might be in your workplace or civic life.

You were studying Romans 1 and imagining that a knowledge of God persists among those who do not, as yet, know God in Christ.

And then brother Karl comes along and opens up his can of Christological grace in the presence of totally depraved sinners.

Next thing you know, natural theology of every time is being denied. Points of contact are shown up as little more than ways to get people to see quickly that they do not, in fact, know God (and won’t likely be willing to). And you are sent to your room in tears.

The main line of biblical witness, Barth maintains, is that God is known, and can only be known, through His revelation of Himself in Christ. This consistently Christological frame of reference radically discounts claims that God is known otherwise than as God is revealed in what is often called “special revelation.”

Barth explores the “secondary line” of biblical witness that may seem to require us to acknowledge that God can be known, in some sense, in creation. But again and again he comes back to the point that what the text such as Ps 8 or Ps 19 or Rom 1 or Acts 17 depend upon is a prior conviction that God is truly known as the God of Israel.

And that’s at the heart of Barth’s point: God of Israel.

In order for God to be known, God must be known as God has bound himself to a particular people and a particular act of salvation. There is no idea of “God in general,” no abstracted knowledge of what a god is like that is simply true of our God because it’s true of some hypothetical being. God is known as God truly is, and that is tied to a particular revelation.

The God whom the Psalmists know is the God of Israel, the Lord of the Exodus and of the wandering in the wilderness, the Giver of the Law, the Hope of David, His wisdom , His power, His goodness, His righteousness, originally and conclusively this God alone. (Dogmatics §26.1, p. 109)

To me, the most interesting moments in this section were Barth’s wrestling matches with the apparent biblical counter-evidence.

Why does Acts 17 not establish the viability and significance of the “point of contact” for reaching new people? Because it is when he brings in the identity of the unknown God as the one who has raised Jesus and will judge the world–i.e., what is revealed of God in Christ–that Paul is mocked and rejected. Is this really an invitation to hold onto “in roads” for the gospel where people are ignorant in their so-called “knowledge”?

There are unanswered exegetical questions, but in this section we see the genius and consistency of Barth as he demands that the revelation of God always be a true disclosing of the true God–something unavailable to fallen human beings unless it come to us by grace.

Natural theology? No. Only theology of the revelation of God in Christ.

Writing study notes for a Bible is a huge challenge for me. I’m working on that for Colossians right now. Yesterday’s labor of love? A footnote for, “completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.” You pretty much have to say what you’re going to say in 40 words. Otherwise, you’ve used up your word count for the whole chapter.

Here was my attempt at that:

Paul sees his own suffering in ministry as an extension of the work of Christ on the cross (cf 2 Cor 4:10-12). He is working to complete (lit., “fill up”) the work of reconciliation by creating reconciled communities that participate in the reconciliation Christ has already accomplished.

You hope you’re giving folks enough tidbits and breadcrumbs to find their way to exegetical treasure.

One fascinating thread that runs through the description of Christ in Col 1: the connection with Wisdom. Here, I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said often by others.

The connection with Wisdom in the Jewish tradition helps fill in some otherwise puzzling details.

For example, what are we to make of the language of “fullness”?

Both God and Wisdom are said to fill the earth–indications of God’s presence and saving power. But in Colossians, it is Christ who becomes the focal point of the fullness of God.

God fills heaven and earth (Jer 23:24)–but Christ is now the fullness of God. Christ is that by which God fills the earth. God’s Spirit and Wisdom fill the earth (Wisdom 1:6-7), but that fulness has Christ as its substance.

These notions of God’s presence and power are focused on Christ–and Christ is revealed as the one in whom all things on earth hold together. That sovereign presence of God, known everywhere on earth, is now a reconciling presence in the crucified and risen Christ.

And, the hope of God’s final glory is that this Christ indwells us, making God’s fullness the filling received by all who are united to Him.

How is it that Christ can be sufficient? How is it that Colossians can consistently call people away from other sources of wisdom, power, fullness, and knowledge?

Because the Christ who bears the fullness of the cosmos-filling God indwells us–and we, too, are in Him.

There I go with 400 words again…