Tag Archive - Michael Gorman

Who Is This “Our” of Whom You Speak?

March 2, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 11 Comments

Michael Gorman wants to help reshape our imaginations. As a people whose political world includes no little amount of civil religion in the forms of (among other things) prayers devoid of specificity, vague allusions to God, invocations of God’s blessing upon our military actions, and statements of trust in God upon our coinage, we have been trained to associate God and country.

Gorman thinks he has a powerful ally in his corner–the book of Revelation.

The conversion of the imagination he is after is a contemporary application of the imagery of Revelation, which invites its readers to recognize that behind the empire’s claims of divine right stands a powerful enemy, striving to assign to the kingdoms of the world the prerogatives of the Kingdom of God.

I leave you with one challenging note from the book, and encourage you to grab a copy and wrestle afresh with both the Biblical book and our calling as Christians within an American (or other, insert your country here) state:

    Christian references to “our troops,” in prayer or any other forms of discourse, are theologically inappropriate because “we” (the church, Christians) do not have troops. Such talk confuses our being Christian with being American (or British or whatever) and manifest a profound forgetfulness about two important aspects of the church stressed in Revelation: its international character as a worldwide assembly of people from every tribe and nation (Revelation 7) and its peaceful, nonviolent character as a community of the Lamb. (52 n.52).

Orienting to Views on Paul

January 21, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 2 Comments

If you're interested in a helpful, clear description of the field of Paul studies these days, especially with respect to justification, you can do no better than Andy Johnson's "Navigating Justification: Conversing with Paul.”

Andy is a professor of New Testament at Nazarene Theological Seminary and all around good guy.

Inhabiting the Cruciform God (Part 3: Theosis?)

February 1, 2010 in Book Reviews with 5 Comments

Since one of my readers/FB friends guilted me into taking responsibility for the fact that theosis is a huge them of Michael Gorman‘s Inhabiting the Cruciform God, I will deal with it in this final post on the book. I was intending to not deal with it because the other two issues (justification and non-violence) are more in my everyday world of wrestling with Paul. And it’s my blog. But, it’s Mike’s book, and the subtitle is “Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology,” after all, so here we go.

I’ll start with what I think is the strongest element of Gorman’s discussion of theosis. The emphasis on theosis (becoming like God) is derivative of Paul’s insistence that we are saved by participation in the death and resurrection of Christ. The Christian call to be “Christ-like” is the call to become conformed to the narrative that moves through the cross to the resurrection. So when Gorman speaks of “theoformity” or “theosis,” he is talking about a God who is made known in the death and resurrection of Jesus, not a vision of God detached from this world, whose identity is expressed in transhistorical categories. He is painting a picture of conformity to what I would call the story-bound God of the Bible.

Gorman argues that Paul understands theosis like this: “Theosis is transformative participation in the kenotic, cruciform character of God through Spirit-enabled cruciformity to the incarnate, crucified, and resurrected/glorified Christ” (7). I resonate deeply with the notions that God is known most fully in the Christ-event (kenotic = emptying, as in Christ’s self-emptying in Phil 2; cruciform = cross shaped), and that our lives are to be conformed to the image of the crucified Christ.

There’s one point at which I’m more cautious about theosis as Gorman describes it, and it has to do with the concern that Jesus as God is performing a function that in Paul is more often played by Jesus as quintessential human: second and last Adam. On pp. 6-7, Gorman lists a number of passages that are often associated with theosis, none of which in my estimation are speaking of becoming Christlike in the sense of Christ’s divinity, but Christlike in the sense of Jesus’ inauguration of a new humanity.

  • Romans 8:29 speaks of being conformed to the image of the son. This is the sonship that Jesus has as a result of his resurrection (Romans 1:4), the sonship that makes Jesus Davidic king / true Adam: his enthronement to the right hand of God.  Yes, to be truly human is to be God-like, renewed after the image of God in which we were created, but is this what is meant by “theosis”?
  • 1 Corinthians 15:42-49 is to the same effect: we’ve born the image of the earthly man, we’ll also bear the image of the heavenly. This is about Jesus as last Adam. Again, humans were created in God’s image, but this seems to be more about anthroposis than theosis.
  • 2 Corinthians 3:18 speaks of being transformed into the image of God from glory to glory. The idea of “new creation” is in view here as well: it’s God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness who has shone in our hearts…” the new image comes as part of new creation.
  • 2 Corinthians 5:17, 21: “If anyone is in Christ–new creation!” Again, being creation is about being truly human once again. To be truly human is to be in God’s image and therefore revelatory of God’s image. But is this what Gorman means by theosis?

Throughout, I felt that the idea of theosis leaned most heavily on Jesus being divine, whereas such passages as these gain their traction from the resurrected Jesus being the firstborn of a new/renewed humanity. I agree that Jesus reveals God, and that the cross is the revelation of God for Paul, but I’m not sure that Paul means it with all of the same ontological identification that Gorman seems to lean on. Put more simply: I found Gorman more ready to bring the church’s understanding of Jesus as fully divine to bear on his Pauline exegesis than I am, and I wonder if this hasn’t caused some of the “humanness” of Jesus to be downplayed or even replaced by the divinity? I like much of what he’s saying, but I’m cautious about going whole hog on this as a reading of Paul.

And there’s one point at which I disagree. In the last chapter, Gorman states almost against his will that theosis is the center of Paul’s theology. I say “against his will” because he isn’t entirely happy with the idea of a “center” (171). Though I agree that, as Gorman defines it, theosis might rightly be trumpeted as the center of Paul’s soteriology, this is not the same as to say that it is the center of Paul’s theology in general. I think this is an important distinction. Though such narrative participation is certainly at the heart of what it means to be joined to Christ, it is that Christ event itself rather than a model of how we participate in it, that is the center of Paul’s theology.

The Christ event itself, not our participation in it, determines how Paul reads  scripture, how he identifies the one true and living God, how God will act not only in the lives of Christians but even in the life of Israel–in addition to what our lives should look like. I don’t think participation is “big enough” to cover all that Paul says, but the surprising event itself not only covers how Paul understands the participatory and transformative nature of the event but also the broader contours of the story within which we who are jointed to it live and move and have our being.

So in general, I like where Gorman is going and think that his focus on theosis has drawn a number of important dynamics of Paul’s narrative soteriology to light. But I’m not quite ready to jump on the theosis train yet. Of course, Mike has plenty of time to teach me why I’m wrong…

(Dislaimer: I received a gratis copy of Inhabiting the Cruciform God from the good folks at Eerdmans publishing company)

Inhabiting the Curicform God (Part 1: Justification)

January 29, 2010 in Book Reviews with 11 Comments

If you don’t know who Michael Gorman is, you better find out in a hurry.

I use his Apostle of the Crucified Lord in my Acts- Revelation course because (a) students devour it; and (b) once they have, they speak of Paul differently, they read Paul differently, their understanding of the gospel is articulated in terms of the narrative of the cross.

I use his Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross in my Cross in the New Testament course because (a) I want my students to understand that biblical “ethics” is about living into a story, not about lists of right and wrong; and (b) because I want to subvert the idea that when we study the cross in the New Testament the most important thing is “theories about the atonement.” No, discipleship and “spirituality” are the more prominent interpretations of Jesus’ death on the cross.

If you want a quicker in to Gorman’s reading of Paul, you can check out his Reading Paul for a great orientation.

But in this and one subsequent post I want to say a few words about Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology (for my gratis copy of which I pass on my thanks to the goodly folks at Eerdmans). Today I mostly want to talk about justification, next time we’ll deal with nonviolence.

Gorman begins with a reading of the Christ-hymn in Philippians 2, which he calls Paul’s “master story.” “Although/because Christ existed in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God something to be exploited for gain, but emptied himself…” Although [x] not [y] but rather [z]. That’s Paul’s narrative.

The surprise of this story is that Christ reveals what it means both to be truly God and what it means to be truly human by not exploiting the power and position he had, but by self-emptying (=kenosis). For Paul as an apostle, his own life story must manifest the same: although he’s an apostle, he doesn’t exploit his position for gain, but labors and gives himself for the salvation of the churches (see 1 Thess 1, 2 Cor throughout).

We come now to chapter 2, whose subtitle begins, “justification by co-crucifixion.”

Gorman argues for a vision of participation in Christ in which justification happens by co-crucifixion. This means, among other things, that we must never imagine that there is a rift between justification and transformation (= sanctification) or between justification and justice. For my part, I would suggest that Gorman is here part of a growing chorus of voices that is helping get Paul scholarship back to one of the most important aspects of Reformed theology, one that had been set aside by several generations of Paul scholarship (perhaps culminating with E. P. Sanders): justification is a facet, and function, of Paul’s union with Christ soteriology.

For Gorman’s proposal concerning justification, two elements are indispensable: (1) the faithfulness of Jesus, expressed in going to the cross, is the reason that the cross effects our justification; and (2) this faithfulness is covenant faithfulness–fulfilling a covenant that demands both love of God and love of neighbor.

In short, what this means is that being united to the story of the self-giving son, Christians find themselves reconciled to both God and other people–and living into the narrative of God- and neighbor-love as the Spirit who joins them to Christ works out his cruciform image in them as individuals and as communities.

The means by which justification is accomplished (Christ’s faithful death) demonstrates the mode by which it comes to us (our own faithful response to God) and the manner in which we are called to live in the present (59).

In working out this theology, Gorman stresses that it is by grace: it is not self-generated; it is corporate: we are not saved on our own, but in Christ and as part of a body; it is an introduction into a new life that includes participation now in Jesus’ resurrection (69-70).

How does transformation happen in the Christian life? “Paradoxically, this death experience called faith results in life, both present and future” (80).

Two crucial take-home points for Pauline soteriology emerge from this chapter: (1) justification and union with Christ are not two separate theological models, but one model in which the former is a component part of the latter; and therefore (2) justification can never come without personal and corporate transformation into the image of the crucified and risen messiah.

Next up: co-crucifixion and non-violence.