My second post on the question of the historicity of Adam in light of Jesus and Adam in Paul is up on the Biologos blog.
Mostly, it’s about how Paul read the Bible: “[The] surprise ending often transforms how the Old Testament stories are read.”
Enjoy. Or fight with me in the comments. Either way!
In celebration of Earth Day, Julie Clawson has announced that you can get a free download of the Kindle version of Everyday Justice at Amazon.
This is a fantastic book. It has changed several of the buying habits around the house of Kirk, as well as raising our consciousness about the effects of our consumerism. So go get a copy.
Please note that you can download Kindle readers for your PC, Mac, iPhone, etc. even if you don’t have a Kindle. So go get a copy of this book and jump on in.
There was an important one-page article in Christianity Today about a woman who has started a ministry to women who struggle with porn addiction.
The ministry’s website is Dirty Girl Ministries.
We all know that pornography is a huge problem among men. It may come as a surprise to many that it’s not just a guy thing. Also, I hope it’s encouraging to women that there are other women who are struggling with the issue and that this resource is available to you.
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.
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]
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?
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…
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.
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.
Recently, I’ve been following from afar Ben Roethlisberger’s most recent run-in with the law. This is the second time in the past year or so that he has been accused of sexual misconduct–in other words, of forcing someone into sexual contact against her will.
Now, I know that according to the principles of law, we are supposed to withhold judgment until a person is proven guilty. But, in case you hadn’t noticed, that’s not how things work in the good ol’ U.S. of A.
When someone is accused of something that we pretend to find reprehensible, there is an uprising. We feign righteous indignation at the drop of a hat!
When people found out about Michael Vick and his dog fighting ring, we were morally outraged, talked about how he should be suspended for life from the NFL, and should rot in prison until past his athletic prime. No killing dogs! This is America!
But a quick survey of what people are saying about Big Ben on the interwebs indicates these deep seated concerns: (1) in the face of a looming 2-4 game suspension, is Roethlisberger a bad pick-up for your fantasy football team? (2) aren’t you starting to question his decision-making?
Why is there no outrage that this guy is allegedly repeating a pattern of using his physical power and bodyguards (literal and figurative) to force women into sexual contact?
I wish I could say that the answer is that there’s not been enough evidence, or that there are no criminal charges filed. But we never wait for the verdict! We get mad when we hear mere allegations of, for example, dog fighting.
No, we’re not angry because as a collective society we simply don’t care.
The lack of outrage indicates, IMHO, a culpable absence of concern for the exploitation of women as sex objects, exploitation that takes many forms through whatever power a man might have at his command.
