Theo Geek

My Book is Published

2011-03-08T16:00:00.005+13:00

The book that a friend and I have been working on part time for the last six years (!) is finally published.

Moral Transformation: The Original Christian Paradigm of Salvation

During the Reformation, the Reformers deliberately altered Christian teaching in an attempt to bring it more in line with what they believed the bible taught. After the Reformation a certain set of beliefs became fairly common across much of Protestant thinking. This theology taught that humans were hell-bound due to sin but that Jesus came to save us by dying on the cross and taking the punishment we deserved. The idea goes that by believing in him and his saving work his punishment becomes effective for us and we can go to heaven instead. This paradigm of salvation, known as penal substitutionary atonement, is often alleged to be "what the Bible teaches". However, there are many reasons to think that penal substitution is not in fact what the Bible teaches - see my book for the details.

So if the Reformers got it wrong, what theology is actually taught by the Bible? Well, basically the theology that was taught by Christians before the Reformers came on the scene and which the Reformers rejected. In Protestant terminology this theology teaches that salvation is about "sanctification" (moral transformation) rather than "justification". It says that what God cares about, and judges people on is their 'hearts' - their inner moral character. God wants to lead people to be more loving, and he does this through the teachings and example of Jesus and the Holy Spirit at work in people. My book works through the details of the original Christian beliefs and looks at how we can be sure that this is really what the Bible teaches.

Review: Deliverance of God - Review Introduction

2009-09-17T15:00:00.001+12:00

Douglas Campbell's 1000-page tome, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul is finally available. It argues that the traditional Protestant/Lutheran reading of Paul is fundamentally all wrong. Rather, a completely and utterly different paradigm of salvation is in fact taught by Paul.

I will be reviewing, discussing, and engaging with this book on this blog over the coming weeks. I may quite possibly also engage with the views of other bloggers who discuss it (such as Andy Goodliff and Sean the Baptist).

I was looking forward to the book having read Campbell's earlier work The Quest for Paul's Gospel and finding myself in essential agreement with him. Campbell and I both agree about the basic paradigm of salvation over against traditional Protestant thinking. Since my own views are roughly a mix of those of Sanders, Dunn, Campbell and Stowers, I am anticipating an overall agreement with Campbell's basic ideas throughout the book, with various disagreements on particulars.

One thing that really annoys me about Campbell's writing style that I want to get out of the way right now and so never have to repeat in this series is that he over-complicates things. As a child I was once told that anyone could make simple ideas sound complex and hard to understand, but the sign of an intelligent person was making complex ideas simple. As a result, I have worked throughout my life on the skill of explaining complex things simply, and like to think I am pretty good at it. I've come to see there are many many advantages in keeping things simple and avoiding jargon, and that so often people who use complex jargon make things hard for themselves. Campbell on the other hand, seems to love using the longest and most complex words possible. A good example is what we use to describe our paradigm of salvation:

Most scholars' jargon-label for our position: "Apocalyptic"
My label: "Moral transformation"
Campbell's label: "Pneumatologically participatory martyrological eschatology" [!]

Okay, so that example comes from Campbell's previous work, and in the current work he has relabeled his position to "the alternative paradigm". However his basic writing style hasn't changed and he seems to love discussing "epistemological, anthropological, christological and eschatological implications of soteriological paradigms"... ~sigh~

Campbell on Romans and pistis christou

2009-01-09T10:22:00.002+13:00

I just came across the most wonderful article on the interpretation of pistis christou in Romans:

Douglas A. Campbell, “The Faithfulness of Jesus Christ in Romans and Galatians (with special reference to Romans 1:17 & 3:22).” SBL, 2007. (online here)

Campbell espouses my own views almost as if he were reading my mind. (Perhaps because we're both kiwis?) Our overall interpretations of Paul as well as most of the details seem almost identical. I suspect that once we both make key exegetical decisions identically the details tend to resolve themselves identically too.

Although I suspect there are some differences of opinion on other issues. I can't remember offhand what Campbell's interpretation of the phrase 'righteousness of God' was, but I got the impression when reading the above article that his view might be different to my one.

I enjoyed Campbell's book The Quest for Paul's Gospel: A Suggested Strategy and am really looking forward to his forthcoming book The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul.

I think I shall add a reference to my own (hopefully) forthcoming book on early Christian salvation theology, saying to look no further than Campbell for my views on pistis christou.

How St Paul got his beliefs

2008-08-27T17:46:00.003+12:00

Something I've found greatly helps me understand different scholars interpretation of Paul's theology are 'Just So' stories... one to three small paragraphs of a hypothetical and plausible story, outlining how and why Paul came to hold the various beliefs he does.

Such a story should explain why Paul's theology has the characteristic emphases it does. I find that such stories have great explanatory power. They point to what things were important to him and why, they point to reasons for inconsistencies, and they can be used to deduce what the scholar thinks Paul's view are on other issues. Overall, they make the depiction of Paul seem more plausible and real, and hence more convincing.

If a scholar makes no effort to provide such a story, I often try to puzzle one out myself that would account for Paul having the beliefs the scholar alleges. In cases where I am unable unable to construct a hypothetical story that could have resulted in Paul thinking the things the scholar alleges him to have thought... I tend to be very unconvinced of the arguments.

So what are your 'just so' stories? How did the apostle Paul get his beliefs?

Modern bible translations: half good

2008-08-19T10:14:00.003+12:00

Mainstream modern bible translations do two things very well.

1) Textual Criticism - getting the original letters right
There is widespread concern about working out the letters of the original texts as accurately as possible. A large amount of scholarly effort has been put into performing exhaustive analyses of surviving manuscripts. Published critical editions tend to be reliable and comprehensive. Biblical prefaces will usually discuss what critical editions were used and whether the translation team contained any experts in the field who used their own judgments. Most importantly, it is extremely common for translations to have footnotes that alert the reader to textual variants.

Of course, the lack of surviving manuscripts from the first couple of centuries places an inherent limit on the accuracy scholars can achieve. Equally it might be argued that scholars have made various mistakes or that the early Christians corrupted the texts. However, overall, there is a lot of concern about getting this right, a lot of effort put into it, and the reader is alerted about these issues.

2) Readable English - getting the English editing right
There is widespread concern about producing the most readable English translations possible. A large amount of effort gets put into improving the readability of the English versions. Biblical prefaces will usually discuss the ways in which they have aimed to improve readability. The diverse range of English translations offer readers a full spectrum of formal to colloquial language.

Of course, all translations have some verses that are hard to read or where the grammar is bad. The pros and cons of literal versus paraphrase translations can be endlessly debated. But, overall, a lot of effort gets put into making translations easier to read, and the variety of different English translations cater to all tastes.

Coming soon: Modern bible translations: half bad

The meaning of 'faith'

2008-08-13T16:30:00.004+12:00

People seem to have very different ideas about what 'faith' means. Everyone seems to think their view is obvious.

I enjoy reading discussions about the relationship between faith and works in salvation. Yet such discussions seem to suffer when no effort is made to define 'faith'. I am amazed at how often even scholars omit discussion of the meaning of 'faith' when talking about the relationship between faith and works.

For example, I've just been reading a discussion of Origen's thought on the relationship between faith and works in justification. I would have thought that such an analysis should ask what meaning Origen gives to these key terms. Apparently not.

Surely to understand how faith and works might relate, it is crucial to understand what they themselves are? Maybe not. I suppose that for most popular definitions of 'faith', the concept of 'faith' is entirely separate from the concept of 'works'. Such defintions only become relevant if you take a view like mine that the actual definition and meaning of the word 'faith' (pistis) means something that overlaps with the concept of 'works' (eg means 'the faithful doing of God's will' or somesuch). In that case, in asking how faith and works relate, you are asking a very subtle question of the distinction between faithfully doing God's will and doing the good works that God wills. It is suddenly essential to know exactly how 'faith' and 'works' are being defined so that the subtle distinctions can be understood.

But if 'faith' and 'works' are completely separate - eg. 'believing things' and 'doing stuff' - then you don't need to enquire so closely into their definitions in order to talk about their relationship to each other.

What do you label it?

2008-08-01T14:23:00.002+12:00

When studying the history of doctrine it is traditional to label different periods during which doctrine was relatively stable and refer to the period as a whole by name.

So, for example, people talk of "pre-Nicene" Christianity, or "the scholastic period", or "the Greek Fathers", or "medieval doctrine" etc.

A question I've struggled with over the last few years of writing is what do you call the standard evangelical post-reformation protestant doctrine of the modern period?

I'm thinking in particular of the set of salvation doctrines which seem to be standard during this period which see the gospel as being about original sin, grace, penal substitution, and salvation by faith.

Various names I've used at times, none of which I'm entirely happy with include:
"Evangelical doctrine", "the modern gospel", "Reformation theology", "protestant thought", "confessional protestantism", "the post-Reformation period", "modern thought", "typical protestant doctrine"... etc

Since many Roman Catholics would agree with a lot of these views I would be happier if the name for the modern doctrinal period was broad enough to include many Catholics as well.

It really needs to be something short and sweet which I can use over and over again, and clear enough that I don't have to give an explanation before using it.

Stowers and Romans 1:18-32

2008-07-22T20:52:00.004+12:00

Stanley Stowers' A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews and Gentiles is an insightful introduction to the ancient concept of "Speech in Character", if a bit dry at times. He explains well the presence of the phenomenon in Romans 7.

However I take issue with his treatment of Rom 1:18-32. His view is very similar to mine, in that he sees Paul critiquing the hypocritical person who is busy condemning others in the passage. However, he is unwilling to view the passage as an instance of speech in character primarily because:

"[A view like the one of it being a speech-in-character] assumes as a patently explicit and obvious Jewish doctrine that God punishes gentiles severely but mercifully overlooks Jewish evil... I find no Jewish texts explicitly saying that God will ignore Jewish sin because of the covenant." (pg 29)

Well, I find a Jewish text explicitly saying that very thing: Wisdom of Solomon. ie The text from which Paul is quoting in Romans 1:18-32 (Stowers agrees Paul is referencing Wisdom pg 87). In fact, Paul quotes two entire chapters of Wisdom of Solomon (and as a result, has to paraphrase), in what is surely the longest quotation in the bible, and in doing so implicitly sets Wisdom of Solomon up as a potentially major player within the rhetoric of Romans. Well here is what Wisdom has to say on the issue of God punishing Jews and Gentiles. Immediately after the tirade about Gentile evil and their sins and the coming punishment of God upon the gentiles in chapters 13-14 that Paul quotes in Romans 1, we read:

“But you our [the Jews] God, are kind and true, patient, and ruling all things in mercy. For even if we [the Jews] sin we are yours, knowing your power; but we will not sin, because we know that you acknowledge us as yours. For to know you is complete righteousness, and to know your power is the root of immortality.” (15:1-3)

The writer then gets carried away once again for another chapter's worth at the evil and stupidity of gentiles and the punishments they will receive from God. Then we get another contrast with the goodness of Jews and the way God treats them positively:

"Instead of this punishment [which the Gentiles received] you showed kindness to your people". (16:2)

Then the writer gives us a long list of contrasts of how God punished gentiles and blessed Jews for the rest of the book. Here is an example:

"For they [Gentiles] were killed by the bites of locusts and flies, and no healing was found for them, because they deserved to be punished by such things. But your children [Jews] were not conquered even by the fangs of venomous serpents, for your mercy came to their help and healed them. (16:9-10)"

The Gentiles are repeatedly labeled "the ungodly" throughout. We are told "they justly suffered because of their wicked acts" (19:13). We are told that the wrath of God against Jews is stopped simply by virtue of "the oaths and covenants given to our ancestors" (18.22). The writer concludes the book with the statement:

"For in everything, O Lord, you have exalted and glorified your people, and you have not neglected to help them at all times and in all places. (19:22)"

Wisdom of Solomon seems to contain exactly and precisely the view that Stowers says is necessary to make sense of the idea that Rom 1:18-32 is speech-in-character! Furthermore, I believe that seeing this viewpoint as representing that of Paul's opponents explains the flow of Romans through to chapter four where Paul comments in passing that in his view God justifies the "ungodly" (ie the gentiles).

Romans 1:18-32 and Wisdom of Solomon

2008-07-22T14:47:00.003+12:00

The incredibly strong similarities between Romans 1:18-32 and Wisdom of Solomon 13-14 have long been noted by scholars. Paul appears to be deliberately quoting (paraphrasing) a Jewish piece of anti-gentile propaganda.

Isn't that a strange thing for Paul to do? Yes. We would expect Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, not to agree with such anti-Gentile and pro-Jewish sentiments.

Indeed, immediately after the quote, Paul launches into a critique of people who hold the quoted view.

Romans 1:18-32 seems to be an instance of an ancient literary device called "speech-in-character" (prosopopoeia). Or, more simply put, is what we would call a "dialog" or "debate", with Paul deliberately presenting an opposition viewpoint and responding. It is now well-established that in Romans 7 Paul uses a lengthy speech-in-character without warning his readers. Equally, in many part of Romans that take a question and answer format, Paul is obviously engaging in a pseudo-dialog with opposing viewpoints.

Seeing Wisdom of Solomon as representing Paul's ongoing debate opponent through the rest of Romans 2-4 is particularly helpful. Wisdom 15-19 takes the view that God has chosen the Jews, protects them from sin, and that as a result Jews do not sin like the Gentiles do. It is exactly such a viewpoint that Paul is arguing against in Romans 2-4 - he asserts that there is equality before God and that the Jews do not enjoy special sinlessness.

A important point is that Paul has no need to prove that every human individual sins (hence the oft-observed fact that his argument fails to prove this is irrelevant). Rather, he wants to prove that some Jews in history have been particularly sinful on occasion and that therefore the Jews as a people are not protected from sin simply by virtue of being Jews as Wisdom of Solomon claims.

The long and the short of this is that Romans 1:18-32 is not Paul speaking (just like much of Romans 7), and that Paul in fact disagrees with the speaker on many issues, and the speaker becomes Paul's debate partner for that section of Romans.

The invention of Imputed Righteousness

2008-07-21T08:37:00.003+12:00

McGrath explains that the criteria used throughout the Reformation period to distinguish Protestant from Catholic was the question of whether justification was forensic (ie used a legal, court-based, paradigm). (pg 215) McGrath argues that the concept was fundamentally new within the Christian theological tradition, as was the Protestant separation of sanctification and justification.

"Luther... introduced a decisive break with the western theological tradition as a whole by insisting that, through their justification, humans are intrinsically sinful yet extrinsically righteous." (pg 213, cf 217) "The significance of the Protestant distinction between iustifcatio and regeneratio is that a fundamental intellectual discontinuity has been introduced into the western theological tradition through the recognition of a difference, where none had previously been acknowledged to exist." ... "The Protestant understanding of the nature of justification thus represents a theological novum".

Interestingly, McGrath explains that the Protestants at the time vehemently denied that their doctrine was new and unprecedented. Melanchthon claimed he was returning to Augustine's teachings on justification. McGrath explains that in reality these Protestant claims were entirely without basis and that the Catholics were Augustinian and Melanchthon was departing from Augustine. (pg 216)

Steinbart on the history of doctrine

2008-07-18T13:50:00.001+12:00

In McGrath's book on justification he mentioned a person who caught my interest:

Gotthelf Samuel Steinbart (1738-1809) was one of the first writers of what we would call modern biblical scholarship. He extensively studied of the history of Christian doctrines, and concluded that originally Christianity had been a religion focused on moral teachings. However, over the course of time Christian doctrine had been distorted by the introduction of random views, most importantly including:

1. Augustine's invention of Original Sin
2. Augustine's invention of Predestination
3. Anselm's invention of Satisfaction
4. The Protestant invention of Imputed Righteousness

Steinbart called for a rejection of such innovations and a return to historic orthodox Christianity as it used to be prior to the invention of such doctrines.

I found it quite amazing that I, myself, have on this blog long made exactly the same arguments based on my own study of doctrinal history... arguments that Steinbart made almost 250 years ago. It is somewhat depressing that historians of doctrine have been agreeing with Steinbart's conclusions for the last 250 years, and yet nothing has changed.

Thoughts on doctrinal development

2008-07-16T12:00:00.000+12:00

I like studying doctrinal history, and understanding how, when, and why, different Christian doctrines and ideas have changed over time. As a result I have formed some opinions about the validity of various doctrines based on their origins and history.

I am occasionally bemused when someone expresses the view that it's not legitimate to draw opinions on a doctrine from a study of its origins and history, and that "doctrinal development" is perfectly allowable.

I tend to side with the following view:

"the Gospel is never different from what it was before. Hence, if at any time someone says that the faith includes something which yesterday was not said to be of the faith, it is always heterodoxy, which is any doctrine different from orthodoxy. There is no difficulty about recognising false doctrine: there is no argument about it: it is recognised at once, whenever it appears, merely because it is new." (Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Premiere Instruction pastorale 27)

Thoughts?

McGrath's History of Justification

2008-07-15T14:46:00.003+12:00

I recently read Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (Third Edition) by Alister McGrath.

Overall, it's not a book I'd recommend. The book runs to 400 pages and deals in detail with the thinking of medieval and reformation scholars on grace, the justice of God, and the process of justification. The two major things I got out of it were that:

1) Everyone prior to the Reformation saw "justification" as involving actually being made righteous. The Protestant ideas of forensic justification and distinguishing justification from regeneration and sanctification were fundamentally new and unprecedented in church theology.

2) The pre-Augustinian fathers didn't have much interest in the word "justification" and talked about salvation using other ideas. In the last 300 years the Roman Catholic church has largely stopped using the word also, and in the last 50 years most Protestant churches have largely stopped using it too.

There, I just condensed a 400 page book to two small paragraphs...

Roger Pearse and Cyril of Alexandria

2008-07-07T11:01:00.003+12:00

Roger Pearse of Tertullian.org and the Thoughts on Antiquity blog has done a lot of great work over the years in making English translations of the early church fathers available online. Thanks Roger! It's great to have such works more freely available.

For some reason though, recently he has been focusing on the works of Cyril of Alexandria. Cyril was one of the least positive influences in Christian history, so I have mixed feelings about this. Roger comments "It is hard for anglophone readers to like Cyril." Among his many other endearing traits, Cyril was the first to permanently split the Christian church. Roger writes:

At the Council of Ephesus in 433, Cyril obtained the condemnation of his rival Archbishop Nestorius of Constantinople for heresy. The vote was taken before the eastern bishops who supported Nestorius could arrive. When they did arrive they excommunicated Cyril. Both sides then appealed to the imperial government, then run by the eunuch Chrysaphius, who wisely deposed them both. After a campaign of letter writing and bribery, Cyril was allowed to return and the decisions of the synod endorsed. The Nestorian schism had begun, and has still not been resolved to this day.

After the synod, Cyril’s reputation was tarnished. Isidore of Pelusium wrote to him that, while he agreed with Cyril theologically, a lot of people thought that the Alexandrian Archbishop had behaved like a jerk. (From here)

The above is an example of one of the "great" ecumenical church councils in action. I love their careful consideration of the evidence and Christian willingness to carefully discuss things prayerfully in brotherly love. The way they handled things gives me such confidence that their decisions were correct. Thanks to this God-guided council we were saved from the errors of Nestorianism and Pelagianism by the inspired St Cyril. (As I said, Church history is somewhat depressing)

Elsewhere Roger quotes Cyril as saying:

indeed we often purchase men’s friendship with large sums of gold, and if those of high rank are reconciled to us, we feel great joy in offering them presents even beyond what we can afford, because of the honour which accrues to us from them.

But then later Roger expresses surprise when reading the letters of Cyril and finds him bribing people:

I was astonished to find, as ‘letter’ 96, a list of ‘presents’ to be given to various court personages in Constantinople. The FoC editor simply describes these as bribes, and, since they indicate that the purpose of the gifts is to purchase favour or disarm opponents, so they must indeed be!

The parable of wheat and poisonous weeds

2008-07-04T09:10:00.002+12:00

I am still intrigued at an interpretation of the parable of the wheat and chaff I read a while ago.

In the parable, a weed is spotted by the servants growing among the wheat. Apparently this particular weed was poisonous and was well-known to the farmers in Israel at the time who knew that it was essential to remove it as fast as possible to stop it contaminating and destroying the entire wheat crop.

In the parable, the landowner orders the servants not to remove the weeds in case they accidentally remove a bit of wheat too. Here the landowner exemplifies two attributes: greed, and ignorance of sensible farming practices.

Israel at the time of Jesus had a serious economic problem of mortgagee sales, where farming families lost their ancestral land to rich and greedy landowners (and then would often be the servants on that land). So, imagine the parable ended here, and consider what Jesus' hearers would think. They would see him as describing such a landowner who has gained control of some land and that as a result of greed and ignorance has given a stupid command that results in his entire crop becoming contaminated by poisonous weeds.

If the story ended there, Jesus' listeners (presumably farmers) would have laughed at the stupidity of such landowners and the genre of the parable would be essentially a political parody as Jesus reinforced the stupidity of what was happening within Israel.

Of course, in the gospels as we have them, the story doesn't end there and gets interpreted as being about God and final judgment. A lot of scholars believe that the gospels misinterpret several of Jesus' parables in this manner, reinterpreting them to be about God
when originally they were political/economic parodies. Given that such a massive proportion of Jesus' ministry (80% or so?) is about economics anyway, offhand it would seem unsurprising if these parables were too.

Does 'All' Mean 'All'?

2008-06-26T13:24:00.003+12:00

It's always amusing to see people arguing over whether "all" really means "all" in a particular biblical passage.

There's a nice demonstration here that in numerous and uncontroversial instances, the bible uses "all" to mean "lots" not "all".

I have long agreed with the New Perspective view that when Paul says "all" are sinners, he does not mean "all". Rather he means "some Jews and some Gentiles" (ie "various people of every nationality"). There are many good arguments for such a view, but one I had never seen, has been suggested by a reader of Chris' blog...

Paul writes "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" and immediately follows with "they are now justified by his grace as a gift" (Rom 3:23-24). So if "all" means "all" have sinned, then "they" are also "all" justified. So taking the (reasonable) assumption that Paul isn't teaching universal salvation, "all" in this passage doesn't mean "all".

What makes something 'another religion'?

2008-06-22T10:00:00.002+12:00

I've been pondering lately the question of what makes something a different religion. For example, it is generally accepted that Judaism is a different religion to Christianity. Yet both share much of the same history, worship the same God, share many of the same scriptures etc. Likewise Islam is considered a different religion to both Judaism and Christianity despite a lot of overlap too.

On the other hand, there was a group called the Gnostics in the second century. They believed the creation of the world was an error made by a demigod and that Jesus had been sent by a higher god to help rescue some of the pure spiritual souls that had become trapped in matter. Through secret knowledge of the nature of the cosmos, these souls could escape the realm of matter after death. The Gnostics generally rejected the Old Testament, and had their own New Testament books and gospels. Now I would want to say Gnosticism is a different religion to Christianity. It isn't just a "heresy", but it's another religion entirely. Yet generally it is described by historians of doctrine as simply a heresy. I can't quite fathom that.

Really, the question I have been pondering over the last couple of months, is whether Calvinism can really be called Christianity or whether it must be counted as a separate religion. When I pull my nose out of a book about New Testament or pre-Nicene Christianity and wander out onto the internet, I see statements by Calvinists that simply have nothing in common with early Christianity whatsoever. Of course, the same argument could potentially be made whenever Christian doctrine varies, and thus could be used against all heresies throughout history and all Christians today. However, some differences are obviously more profound than others and Calvinism increasingly strikes me as being so antithetical to early Christianity that it is hard to consider it anything other than a different religion.

If we consider the core doctrines of the early Christian faith:

Monotheism
Christ as Teacher of Righteousness
Final Judgment by Works
Free Will

Catholicism and non-Calvinistic Protestantism vary between endorsing two to four of these doctrines. Yet Calvinism agrees only with the first and is deliberately and implacably opposed to the other three (ie 2. Penal substitutionary atonement, 3. Judgment by faith and grace alone, 4. TULIP). Like the Gnostics, the Calvinist system of salvation bears no relationship whatsoever to the early Christian view. It also adds in a wide variety of additional doctrines (though is no worse than Roman Catholicism in this regard I suppose). Anyway, over the last couple of months as I have reflected on this, I have become convinced that Calvinism cannot be meaningfully classed as Christianity and represents such a complete departure from NT and pre-Nicene Christianity that it should be classified as a separate religion (at least from the point of view of doctrine - the issue of classifying religions is obviously more complex and has to take into account rituals, customs and practices etc as well).

Why did it go so wrong?

2008-06-16T11:49:00.003+12:00

In my last post I noted that church doctrine started going very wrong after the merge with the Roman Empire. In this post I'm going to list a few reasons why I think that was.

Reading about the various events, I get the impression that there was no one single problem, but rather a huge variety of problems that were caused by the imperial period. Here is a list, in no particular order, of some of the factors that seem to have contributed to the issues:

1. Direct interference by Emperors in the legislation of church doctrine. At times the Emperors made arbitrary decisions about which theological side to support.

2. Positions of church leadership became positions of great wealth and power which were then sought after by the wrong people for the wrong motives. Some of the church leadership were in multi-million dollar positions and were some of the most powerful people in the Empire. Such positions were doubtless sought-after by atheists with political ambition who pretended to be Christians.

3. Irregularities in the elections of church leaders. The elections of church leaders to prominent church positions of power were plagued with scandals and imperial interference.

4. The notion of Orthodoxy within the Empire. The globalisation of the church brought with it a globalisation of doctrine. Previously, if a Christian in one part of the world invented a new doctrine, the change tended to be geographically confined. However, in an effort to promote Orthodoxy and stamp out heresy, the Councils and Emperors promulgated their decrees throughout the Empire, thus providing a mechanism to deliver doctrinal change to the entire church simultaneously.

5. The use of force against those deemed heretics. The state became the enforcer of orthodoxy - those deemed heretics were taken away by state soldiers and tended to die either a quick or slow death when exiled to uninhabitable locations or to work in the salt mines.

6. Extremely poor judicial processes for reviewing complaints of heresy. Often those accused of heresy were condemned without being allowed to present their case. Mere things like evidence or fair trials didn't stand in the way of councils ruling on topics. Most councils were not careful inquiries into truth but shams.

7. General civil unrest and nominal Christianity. Riots were commons. The killing of churchmen at the hands of a 'Christian' mob who disagreed over theology was not uncommon. Those in positions of power within the church often instigated such riots for political reasons.

8. Language differences. The Eastern Empire spoke Greek, the Western spoke Latin. This at times led to communication difficulties. It also caused Latin bible translations to be incorrect at times.

9. Attempts at Sola Scriptura. Christian doctrinal tradition for the most part governed people's beliefs. But increasingly there were those who preferred to come up with their own doctrines based on their own exegesis of scripture, which were generally wrong as a result of using mistranslated passages or just poor exegesis. People then claimed the authority of scripture for such views.

10. Lack of peer-review among influential theologians. It seemed common for particular theologians to gain a reputation in a certain geographical area and become the great theological champion of that area. Their theological utterances would subsequently be somewhat mindlessly parroted by Christians in that area without being peer reviewed by other prominent theologians across the Empire. Essentially, the major theologians tended to do their theology somewhat in isolation with little collaboration.

11. Popularity as a measure of success. To a large extent, theological doctrines were measured by popularity - theological controversies tended to get resolved by vote. Particularly, if a theologian became sufficiently popular and respected within their geographical area, they could then begin to teach almost any heresy and their popularity would see them through. Anyone who challenged them could be silenced or ignored.

Church history is somewhat depressing.

2008-06-15T21:46:00.005+12:00

I've been reading a lot of books on the history of doctrine lately. Or, more precisely, the sections of them that deal with soteriological doctrines from the Apostolic Fathers to Augustine. I've finished going through the three shelves of them at the university library, so I'll have to find another library I suppose.

What I am finding depressing is the post-Nicene period when Christianity was the state religion. The amount of corruption, church-politics, and imperial interference in the church and its doctrine at that time is simply dumbfounding. The reasons for which decisions were made varied from bad to worse. In fact I would simply go so far as to make the blanket statement that all decisions and decrees made within the church during the imperial period are not worthy of being used for toilet paper. The whole thing was one great moronic political circus.

One historian I was reading today aptly commented: "the thinkers church historians write about are neither as logical, as truthful or as edifying in their morals as the devout usually expect." (Linonel Wickham pg 211 in The Making of Orthodoxy 1989 Ed. Rowan Williams) Another comments "There is no doubt that we would be repelled in the twentieth century should church leaders, professing to follow and practice the truths of Christ, were to use such methods [as were used by Cyril of Alexandria]" (Gordon Harper pg 88 in The Heritage of Christian Thought 1979)

Time after time it was the side that is willing to go the furthest, play politics, manipulate others, bribe the right people, who won. It was virtually never about careful reasoning or informed discussion, but about power and politics. Time and again the arbitrary decrees of the Emperors were the turning point, and whichever side could control the Emperors' decisions won the game.

It is disappointing to me to read of those who called themselves Christians acting like they did. But it is far worse to realize that their decisions which they made affected Christian doctrine and have affected many Christians to this day - although protestants have since escaped from a lot of that legacy.

In case anyone is curious, the people who I am particular pissed off at are:

Cyril of Alexandria, uber-super-unmatched-bastard
Augustine, arch-heretic and doctrinal-innovator extraordinaire
Bishops of Rome, dumbasses with super-delusions of grandeur
Athanasius, all-round bastard
Church Councils, morons with power
Emperors, interfering morons with supreme power

People who come out smelling of roses (perhaps somewhat tarnished by the manure they were living amongst):

St Pelagius, defender of orthodoxy
St Nestorius, suppressor of the cult of Mary

On a slightly different note, something that surprises me somewhat when I consider it, is that informed scholarly opinion is so unanimous on these issues (eg Augustine being a heretical innovator and Pelagius defending previous orthodoxy against Augustine's innovations) and yet this has so completely not filtered through to people in the church. The books sit there in the library, and yet walking into a church and telling people you agree with Pelagius is likely to have those that have heard of Pelagianism upset at your 'heresy' instead of happy at your orthodoxy. It seems that scholars of the history of doctrine can write books that sit on the shelves all they like and that the beliefs of people in the church will simply carry on the way they did before. It's a funny world.

Defining 'the Gospel' and 'Evangelical'

2008-05-22T13:40:00.003+12:00

I have been pondering recently how different people define "the gospel" and "Evangelical" differently.

For a lot of people, "the gospel" is a short message of the kind given in gospel presentations. It covers sin, holiness, Jesus, atonement, salvation etc. It is essentially a bit of systematic theology rooted in a particular interpretation of Paul's writings which calls the hearer to some sort of response.

In particular it has been striking just how strong a contrast there is between this Pauline gospel and the "good news of the kingdom of God" that Jesus is depicted preaching in the gospels. A lot of Christians seem to assume that when Jesus preached the gospel he was in fact preaching what they think of as the gospel, without bothering to pay any attention to how the bible depicts Jesus' ministry.

Evangelical is one of those words where everybody seems to have a different definition. It also seems to be one of those words that comes with a built-in value judgment - it's implicitly a good thing to be "evangelical" as it has connotations of committed to God, and believing the gospel. I was browsing this Evangelical Manifesto and was quite surprised to find that throughout the document numerous different (and in my view, mutually exclusive) definitions of Evangelical were given.

One of the definitions suggested that Evangelicals were true to and preached that gospel that Jesus preached. I found that comment surprising, since in my observation, Evangelicals tend to far prefer a Pauline form of the gospel to Jesus' form of it.

Another interesting suggested definition is that Evangelical is the name for any and all Christians in history who are simple stock-standard committed lay Christians. What came as somewhat of a shock to me (as someone who has done of lot of research into the history of the development of doctrine) is that they followed this statement up with a short doctrinal list of allegedly what these average Christians throughout history have always believed... opps. They appear to have taken a list of what Evangelicals today hold to be their defining doctrinal views and arbitrarily assumed that throughout history average Christians also held those beliefs...

Who knows their bible best?

2008-05-06T10:04:00.003+12:00

Thanks Doug for the link to this article. Apparently the Vatican commissioned an independent and extensive worldwide survey in an attempt to gain insight into people's knowledge of the bible.

They found that the class of readers who knew their bibles best were the discerning readers who took the bible as authoritative but felt it was important to apply critical thinking and interpretation skills. Fundamentalists did not score nearly as well.

It seems the study also found high biblical knowledge to not correlate with particular denominations (in other words Catholics are level with Evangelical Protestants, in general!) nor with political voting tendencies. Apparently, also, most people wanted a fair level of assistance in interpreting and understanding the bible, preferring not to do it alone.

The Resurrection of Jesus

2008-05-05T15:08:00.002+12:00

In the last week I have been studying passages in the NT (minus the gospels) that deal with the theological significance of Jesus' death and resurrection.

One of the first things that became obvious is that there are significantly more passages that deal with Christ's resurrection than his death. A number of passages also assert that the resurrection is absolutely central to Christianity and without it Christianity is nothing (there are no corresponding statements made about the death of Christ). In short it is safe to say that the New Testament Christians saw the resurrection as more important than the death of Christ. Interesting how times have changed...

The resurrection seems to be so important to the Christians because it proves that death is not the end - that there will be an afterlife, that there will be postmortem judgment and restitution, and in the act of resurrecting Christ God affirms Christ's teachings and publicly indicates the type of behavior God chooses to reward. As a result, the resurrection inspires Christians to live self-controlled lives, imitate Christ, and suffer martyrdom gladly.

Silly quote of the day

2008-05-05T09:41:00.003+12:00

From here (italics in original):

The Christian gospel is in serious danger of being melted down into a call merely to do good works here and now in the social and political realms. ...a “gospel” that majors on good deeds and social work to the detriment of the atoning, saving work of Christ is no “gospel” at all. As I’ve put it elsewhere, it winds up making Christianity just another boring moralism that’s no different from any other religion in the world....

I think you’re right to define and emphasize justification by faith alone in Christ alone as the heart of the Christian gospel. That is without doubt or equivocation the fountainhead of everything else, and you don’t get to the rest of the “good news” unless you start there. In other words, to tell someone that it’s not really important to focus on the atonement, but rather that you can be a Christian just by being a “follower of Jesus” and by “living like Jesus” is not Christianity. To be a Christian is to believe in Jesus, repenting of sins and trusting for salvation in his atoning, reconciling, justifying, substitutionary death on the cross.

Okay, so I didn't manage to read through to the end of that before I cracked up laughing.

A message "to do good works here and now in the social and political realms" strikes me as an extremely accurate description of the content of Jesus' public ministry as depicted in the gospels. The gospels present Jesus' ministry as a campaign over social issues, period. The social gospel is certainly well-founded in the biblical accounts of Jesus' ministry. So, according to the above writer, the Christian gospel is apparently "in serious danger" of being reduced to, well, the gospels. Dang, we surely can't allow that, can we? Apparently not, because as our above writer continues, that is "no gospel at all". Excuse me while I go and cut the four gospels out of my bible. One wonders why Christ bothered preaching "no gospel at all" in the course of his three year ministry.

Next, the writer makes the accusation of moralism. 'Moralism' is the most common term historians of doctrine use to describe Christianity in the pre-Nicene period, namely because early Christianity was extremely moralistic. So as I was reading the above I mentally substituted: "it winds up making Christianity just another ~~boring~~ (?!) moralism that’s no different from ~~any other religion in the world~~ early Christianity." Of course, according to the above writer's definition, pre-Nicene Christianity is not Christianity, so maybe the writer wouldn't be concerned by this.

Sadly, for some reason a popular apologetic tactic at the moment among some groups is to assert the totally arbitrary idea that "human religions" are about man trying to get merit before God whereas "true religion" is about man trusting in God for salvation, and it is usually further arbitrarily asserted without evidence that Christianity is the only religion in world history that fits the category of "true religion". Somehow I doubt the author's implicit claim that all non-Christian religions in world-history are "boring" rests on any evidence or any actual experience of other religions! I also note that if all non-Christian religions are moralistic then it means that the vast majority of humans in world-history felt that moralistic religions are a good type of religion, and suggests that non-moralistic forms of Christianity would generally be considered bad, thus calling the arbitrary value judgment that such religions are good into serious doubt.

As for the claim that "justification by faith alone in Christ alone [is] the heart of the Christian gospel", well it seems then that the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century therefore marks the beginning of Christianity. Can we therefore consign the first 15 centuries of Christians, martyr and theologians to the dustbin?

For me, the most amusing quote in the above is: '[the idea] that you can be a Christian just by being a “follower of Jesus” and by “living like Jesus” is not Christianity.' Excuse me while I go cut the rest of my New Testament out of my bible...

Augustine

2008-04-30T09:28:00.002+12:00

I have recently been reading about Augustine (354-430AD). He wrote:
- Just over 100 Books
- Over 250 Letters
- Over 350 Sermons

Western Latin theology of Augustine's time didn't have a particularly large number of influential theologians in the way that the Greek East at that time did. As a result, Augustine completely dominated the theological landscape of the period in the Western church and his writings were massively influential (the Greek East never read Augustine as they spoke a different language and no translations were made). Apparently virtually all theology in the Medieval period was done with reference to the writings of Augustine. Because he writings were so widely used, copies of 95% of them survive today.

What is most fascinating to me, as someone interested in the development of Christian doctrine, is how substantially Augustine's own ideas changed throughout his life. Scholars of Augustine talk about the theological views of the "early Augustine" as compared to the "later Augustine". It's the same person, but during the course of 30 years of writing on theology, studying the bible, and debating with others, Augustine's views slowly and substantially changed.

The theology of his earliest writings reflects the theology that he had been taught by other Christians. It matches the standard Christian doctrines of the pre-Augustinian period in virtually all respects. Most of the theology he held to thirty years later though was quite novel, having been drawn out from the bible and fleshed out by Augustine himself in the course of the various doctrinal arguments he got into. One of Augustine's works written at the very end of his life is titled "Retractions", and in that work Augustine surveys his previous books one by one and comments about how and in what ways he has since changed his mind and in what areas he would now disagree with his previous work.

In the Medieval period through to the Reformation within Western Christianity, virtually all sides claimed Augustine as advocating their position and attempted to prove it by quoting from his works. Since Augustine's works were inconsistent, in many cases two opposing sides could both find ample support for their positions from Augustine's works.

The amazing thing is, from the point of view of the history of doctrine, that Augustine managed to virtually single-handedly introduce so many novel ideas into Christian thought and make those ideas normative and shunt out much of what had before him been see as standard Christianity. Some examples:

* Probably most famous was Augustine's creation of the doctrine of predestination. Prior to Augustine all Christian writers vigorously defended the free will of man as one of the central points of Christian doctrine and predestination was opposed as pagan. The later Augustine advocated double-predestination, and Christians ever since have debated over how to balance God's sovereignty with free will.

* A related issue was Original Sin and the state of fallen man. Pre-Augustinian Christianity had taught that men were not guilty of Adam's sin and that after the fall they retained the image of God and the ability to do good. The later Augustine came to view humanity as a 'mass of sin', teaching a view later called Total Depravity, saying fallen humans were unable to do true good of their own accord. He also taught that people were born guilty before God due to their participation in Adam's sin.

* The early Augustine, like the Christians before him, held a moral exemplar view of the atonement. The later Augustine denied that moral exemplar was sufficient and insisted on the addition of Christus Victor and Satisfaction/Penal Substitution (in a rather bizarre embryonic form).

* The whole concept of "grace" as we are familiar with it today was fundamentally pioneered by Augustine. Previous Christians had typically seen grace as God's actions in the external world which influenced us by normal means. Augustine developed the concept of God's grace being internal - working inside of our heads to create psychological changes.

Augustine's efforts contributed many other ideas to Western Christianity. Ideas such as Purgatory, the importance and power of Baptism for salvation, the precise shape of the Western view of the Trinity (which differs to the Eastern view slightly). Augustine's views of justification were massively influential for subsequent Western Christianity. The strategy of double-justification which Augustine developed for systematizing the place of faith and works in salvation (whereby the believer is saved by their faith at the moment of conversion and then produces works throughout their Christian life which justify them at the final judgment) became standard in Roman Catholicism, and provided a starting point to be developed by the Protestant Reformers.

Scholars, of course, have fun in trying to outline and speculate about why it was that Augustine's views changed etc. It seems generally agreed by all that Augustine's idea of everyone being present in Adam at the time of his sin and thus everyone being guilty of it stemmed from a mistranslation of Romans 5:12 in the Latin bible he used. But is it coincidence that before converting to Christianity, Augustine was a Manichean who believed that "the nature of man can be corrupt to the point that his will is powerless to obey God's commands" (Chadwick, "The Early Church"), only to thirty years later start introducing that doctrine into Christianity?

Adherance to Doctrinal Statements

2008-04-03T08:45:00.002+13:00

Westminster Theological Seminary's recent suspension of Peter Enns for his book on understanding the nature of scripture that board perceived as violating the Westminster Confession intrigues me.

It intrigues me because I just can't fathom the sanity of adhering to a creedal statement written in 1642. In 1642 they barely understood Koine Greek, biblical scholarship was only in its infancy, they had next to no understanding of the customs, practices and thinking of ancient world, and they had very few of the writings of the early church Fathers that we now have. For almost every conceivable reason there is evidence to think that people trying to interpret the bible in 1642 could have made serious errors. Indeed, the majority of scholars today would say they did.

In that century, Isaac Newton published one of the greatest works in the history of science. Yet today his work is a historical curiosity, marking the beginning of serious scientific study. In a like manner the Reformation and confessions of faith resulting out of it mark the beginning of serious biblical scholarship. No sane person today would reprimand a quantum physicist for failure to adhere to Newton's theories. Likewise, the thought that someone might reprimand a biblical scholar for failure to adhere to a seventeenth century interpretation of the bible seems like a joke.

It frustrates me that colleges actually exist who adhere to such doctrinal statements and see it as their duty to churn out students who believe such things. Such indoctrination results in a massive amount of bias, propaganda and apologetics contaminating scholarship. Modern interpretations and theories end up judged on their conformance with seventeenth century doctrinal statements! I have learned to steer clear of such biased 'scholarship'. Before reading any book I now attempt to ascertain whether it is written by a person who has been indoctrinated with seventeenth century confessional standards, because their bias so often completely undermines their scholarship and destroys any objective value in their work, as they always twist the evidence in such a way that it just so happens to end up proving the conclusions that they started with. In practice this seems to mean avoiding completely reading 'scholarship' produced by anyone in the Reformed or Presbyterian traditions, and careful filtering of Anglican, Catholic and Lutheran writings.

I think the fact that I myself abandoned the doctrinal teachings of my childhood church as a result of serious biblical study has resulted in me having very little tolerance of people who fail to do likewise and who simply push the party line and doctrinal statements of whatever group happens to have indoctrinated them.

Jesus' Death in Luke-Acts

2008-03-20T09:27:00.003+13:00

Browsing the internet I came across this fascinating article by Richard Anderson on the view of Jesus' atonement in Luke-Acts. It's well worth reading in full, but for the lazy here's a short summary of some of what I felt were the important points:

1. Luke contains no statements that give any sort of 'theological' interpretation to the cross. Nor does Acts contain such statements except where it's quoting the speeches of Paul. (In Luke's gospel the sole interpretation of Jesus' death is that he was a martyr)

2. Luke-Acts heavily emphasizes the Jewish concept of repentance and forgiveness to an extent not found in the remainder of the New Testament. The Jews believed that a person who truly repented would be forgiven by God. The importance of repentance occurs regularly throughout Luke-Acts, and a primary function of Jesus' ministry is "to call sinners to repentance".

3. Luke omits all negative statements toward Sacrifices, Temple, and Dietary Laws from the preaching of Jesus. In Acts all such statements are placed in the mouths of certain followers of Jesus subsequent to Jesus' death. Luke's version of Jesus is acceptable to a person who is a Law-following Judean, and Anderson sees them as the intended audience.

4. Overall Luke-Acts is very careful in distinguishing between the theology of the writer and the theology of Paul in terms of what is said about Jesus' death, Sacrifices, the Temple, and Dietary Laws. (This would seem to raise the question, not dealt with by Anderson, of what Luke's own view of Paul's theology is, and how Luke is trying to portray Paul... it had never crossed my mind that Luke (or his audience) might not like Paul or Paul's theology!)

Paul on the Law

2008-03-19T09:58:00.003+13:00

It frustrates me when scholars select a poorly chosen category or question and try to force an answer out of an ancient text. They typically then proceed to argue endlessly over various answers that they try to give.

I think Paul's views on the law is an example of one such offender. ("Was Judaism a religion of grace?" is another) In this case, I think the situation is very simple but that scholars have got confused by asking the wrong questions and trying to give answers. Often these issues can be resolved simply by starting with the obvious and seeing what light obvious things can shed on the situation under discussion.

These two statements, I think, may be said to be obvious and universally agreed upon: (1) Paul has certain expectations regarding the moral conduct of Christians. He exhorts his readers to aspire to and achieve moral behavior, and he rebukes his converts when he feels they are falling short of such behavior. (2) Paul is against Gentiles having to follow the rituals of the Mosaic Law.

Those form two poles of Paul's thought. In his rhetoric and arguments he sometimes talks about one, sometimes the other, sometimes both at once. In the course of these arguments he uses the word 'law' in different ways. On the one hand, because Gentiles do not need to follow the rituals of the Mosaic Law, the Law is for them abolished, finished, ended, gone, and irrelevant etc. On the other hand, because these gentile Christians live morally they can be said to meet the moral requirements of the law, obey the commandments, fulfill the law, obey the law of Christ etc.

In other words, the two basic elements of Paul's thought outlined above naturally give rise to him making statements about the law in the course of his arguments that taken literally are inconsistent because he is using the word law in different senses in different arguments. Paul's thinking on this issue is perfectly consistent, but his terminology varies depending of which of his thoughts he is expressing.

A NPP exegesis of Romans 4:4-5

2008-03-14T22:26:00.001+13:00

A central part of the New Perspective on Paul has been the recognition that when Paul speaks of the "works of the Law" he does not mean moral good works, but rather the following of Jewish customs such as circumcision, dietary rules, sabbath keeping and so forth, which Paul calls "works of the Law". Paul's belief was that a person did not need to adopt Jewish customs to be acceptable to God, but rather that God accepted both Jews and Gentiles who were faithful to him, who were living morally in accordance with his will. This distinction is needed, for example, to explain Paul's arguments in Galatians where Paul spends four chapters attacking the value works of the law and then turns around and spends the last two chapters affirming the saving value of works of morality.

Paul, sadly, does not meet 21st century standards of using perfectly clear and unambiguous terms in 100% consistent ways. So it requires some level of attention on the part of the reader to determine from the context of his argument when he is talking about morality and when he is talking about Jewish customs, as the words "works" and "law" sometimes occur in the context of each. Romans is certainly no exception to this, as Paul in Romans 2 affirms that God will judge people "according to their works" (of morality) and that it is the "doers of the law who are justified" (ie the moral law) but by 3:28 is asserting that "works of the law" (Jewish customs) are not the criterion of God's judgment. In the second half of chapter 3 and the first half of chapter 4, Paul engages in a somewhat convoluted argument against this idea of Jewishness as achieving righteousness before God.

In 3:9-26 Paul has argued that there is no distinction between followers of Jewish customs and followers of Greek customs before God: Anyone who is faithfully obedient to God's moral commands is acceptable. Paul asks about what happens to "boasting" (3:27). If the Jews are they elect of God then they can claim to have been honoured above the Gentiles, but if God honours anyone who is faithful then the Jews don't have any privileged status to boast about (3:27-28). Paul clarifies that this would be analogous to God being "the God of the Jews only" and argues that God is not the God of the Jews only and will justify both those who follow Jewish customs and those who follow Greek ones (3:29-30).

Paul then turns to Abraham in chapter 4 and argues that when Abraham was called righteous by God it was at a time when Abraham was not a follower of Jewish customs and his righteousness was due to his faithfulness. Paul observes that if Abraham had been chosen arbitrarily by God because of Jewishness then he could have claimed to have been honoured above Gentiles by God (4:2), but he could not have claimed honour in God's sight because God would have been arbitrarily gifting him honour. (Paul's comment about Abraham not being able to claim honour from God would make no sense if he was talking about moral good works) Paul reiterates that Abraham's righteousness came from his "faithfulness" (4:3). Then follows 4:4-5, to which I will return shortly.

Paul says David teaches that people can be righteous apart from Jewish customs, arguing that God's forgiveness and acceptance is available to both those who are circumcised and those who are not (4:6-9a). Paul argues that Abraham did not follow Jewish customs when God first called him righteous (4:9b-11a). God calling him righteous was because of his faithfulness not his Jewishness. He argues that like Abraham, those who now have faithfulness but do not follow Jewish customs are righteous (4:11b-17). Paul argues that God's promise to Abraham that his descendants would inherit the world would not be true if Abraham's descendants were limited to those who followed Jewish customs. Rather Abraham's true descendants are peoples of all nations who share the faithfulness that he exemplified.

Paul in the course of this argument has created a distinction between two groups of ideas. In one group are "Jewish Customs", "Law", and "works". In the other group are "faithfulness" and "justification". The average Jew of Paul's time would have argued these two groups of ideas are identical, saying that a person's faithfulness to God is demonstrated by their performance of God's commands - and that faithfulness to God and following the Jewish customs laid out by the law are therefore interchangeable. Paul however, is trying to make these two groups of ideas stand in a contrast throughout his argument. As a rhetorical ploy, in 4:4 he employs an analogy from everyday life in the ancient world that contrasts these two groups of ideas.

In 4:4 he gives this analogy which draws on two contrasting economic systems that ran side-by-side in Paul's day relating to work and payment. One was an informal system in which favours were exchanged as gifts and faithfulness was key. The other was a formal legal system in which work was performed contractually and a legal obligation for repayment existed. It is these systems which provide the separation Paul is looking for between his two categories. This contrasts faithfulness, favour, non-law, and non-work against law, and work. This provides the contrast that Paul is looking for between his two groups of ideas. Thus in 4:4 he references briefly the everyday-reality of these dual systems, which his Roman readers understood well (but which can seem strange to us today).

In 4:5 Paul draws this contrast into his argument, restating again his thesis that the person who does not follow Jewish customs but who is faithful to God is righteous. In this sentence, Paul speaks of God as being the God who justifies the "ungodly". This seems to be a somewhat derogatory Jewish term to refer to those who did not follow Jewish customs. Paul elsewhere speaks of "Gentile sinners" in the same vein. For Paul, God is a God who will call righteous these 'ungodly' Gentiles that do not keep the Jewish customs because they are faithful to God and keep God's moral law. He is the God of the Gentiles and not just the God of the Jews.

Romans 4:4-5 in my view, is thus a small part of Paul's wider argument advocating that what matters to God is a person's moral behavior and not their cultural customs. It is a brief reference to the everyday practices of the Roman world, and this reference is lost on many today. By failing to perceive this reference, and by misconstruing Paul's use of the word "works" in this argument, and by taking the passage out of the context of Paul's wider argument, the passage has often been interpreted incorrectly by pre-new perspective protestant scholars. The (mis)interpretation of this passage has all too often been used to proof-text against Roman Catholic, and new perspective interpretations of Paul's writings (as they do with Phil 3:9 also).

Judging historical theology

2008-03-13T17:56:00.000+13:00

For some reason it cracks me up when modern scholars pass judgment on ancient theologians for failing to have "correct" or "biblical" doctrine. (In other words, failing to agree with that scholar's own denomination's theology, especially their interpretation of Paul's writings) I think part of why I find it hilarious is because I so often agree with the ancient theologians' interpretation of the bible and think the modern scholars are wrong (as, for example, the NPP has demonstrated).

The apostolic fathers is the title given to a dozen or so Christian writings in the period 90-150AD. Here is an example of one biased commentator's negative views of them:

"...occasionally these fathers of the generation after the apostles gave the gospel their own unique interpretations that began to turn it way from the great themes of grace and faith so strongly emphasized by Paul and the other apostles and more toward the gospel as a "new law" of God-pleasing conduct and behavior. Justo Gonzalez takes nothing from the apostolic fathers' importance or value when he rightly notes that "not only in their understanding of baptism, but also in their total theological outlook, one senses a distance between the Christianity of the New Testament - especially that of Paul - and that of the apostolic fathers. References to Paul and the other apostles are frequent; but in spite of this the new faith becomes more and more a new law, and the doctrine of God's gracious justification becomes a doctrine of grace that helps us act justly." Of course this shift was subtle and not absolute. It was a barely but definitely perceptible turn in these second-century Christian writings toward legalism, or what may be better termed "Christian moralism.""

From The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition & Reform by Roger E. Olson, pg 40-41

One particularly amusing commenter is Seeberg in his Textbook of the History of Dogma:

"It may be said, indeed, that Clement [of Rome] has not grasped the saving efficacy of the death of Christ in its full biblical significance" (pg 57)

[In the Apostolic Fathers] ""Righteousness" is always merely an active, actual righteousness." [and not the imputed righteousness of Protestant theology] (78)
..."the Pauline idea of justification was lost sight of, and a moralistic element readily became interwoven with them." (79)

"Thus we note the second great defect in the doctrinal conceptions of this period. As the work of Christ is not understood as having directly in view the forgiveness of sins, so there is naturally a failure to obtain this forgiveness as an essential object of faith. Good works are considered necessary in order to become sure of the forgiveness of sins. It is perfectly proper to speak of the "moralism" of such views. Faith is more and more robbed of its significance. Love assumes the leading place in the soul, but, having by the depreciation of faith lost the inner impulsive power, it turns to the fulfillment of the commandments and the performing of good works. Thus was lost, however, the attitude of soul which distinguished primitive Christianity, the sense of receiving everything form God by his gift. Instead of this man's own works now occupy the foreground. This moralistic modification of the primitive Christian position was, indeed, brought about by means of the popular Greek-Roman ideal of human freedom. It Hellenized, but at the same time it proved a doorway through which Judaic legalism forced its way into the church." (80)

He doesn't seem quite to know what or who to blame it on, so he spreads the blame far and wide:

"A lack of comprehensive understanding and profound apprehension of the gospel itself is here undeniable. And this defect certainly reaches far back into the apostolic age. The legality which here appears is not of the Jewish sect, but it, nevertheless, without awakening suspicion, prepared the way for the intrusion of Judaic influences. The moralism is that of the heathen world, particularly in that age, and has its origin in the state of the natural man as such. The misconceptions of the gospel may be traced directly to the fact that the Gentile Christians did not understand the Old Testament ideas presupposed in the apostolic proclamation of the gospel. But moralism always serves the interests of legalism. Making much of man's own works, the age accepted the legalistic works of the later Jewish piety." (115)

When he gets to the Apologists he is no happier:

"It may be said of the majority of these writers that they had no clearer conceptions of the gospel than had the Apostolic Fathers... In defining the work of Christ, it is first of all emphasized that he became a teacher of the [human] race, as he had already shown himself before his incarnation. The content of his teaching is found in the ideas of the One God; the new law, requiring a virtuous life; and immortality, more strictly speaking, the resurrection, bringing with it rewards and punishments... Man has the ability to keep these commandments, since God created him free. Although man, by disobeying the commandments of God, fell and became subject to death, he is nevertheless still free to decide fore God through faith and repentance" (115)

"The Apologists... make it evident that the general conception of Christianity in that day labored under the same defects and limitations as in the generation immediately preceding them (the work of Christ; moralism)." (118)

He is also upset they don't hold the Protestant interpretation of 'grace':

"Grace is no more than the revelation of doctrine and of the law." (116)

Comments on Daley's article

2008-03-12T07:34:00.003+13:00

One of the articles in the recent work The Redemption: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Christ as Redeemer is Brian Daley's article "He Himself is Our Peace' (Eph. 2:14): Early Christian views of Redemption in Christ'.

Rather than survey early Christian views about redemption comprehensively, Daley begins by asking what it is about the atonement that requires Jesus be fully divine. In asking and answering this question he seems to assume that the correct view of Christ's work would require Jesus be fully divine. I don't think that such an assumption is warrented. The New Testament writers do not seem to see a "need" for Jesus to be God in order for the salvation of man to be accomplished, and references to Jesus as God are few and far between.

In the pre-Nicene writers three distinct answers are given to the question of why Jesus was divine. (1) Justin Martyr's answer was that an important part of Jesus' teachings was to teach men the truth about the divine nature, and Justin therefore sees Jesus as being the "Word" of God, a Greek philosophical term to refer to a divine entity that conveyed knowledge of God to humanity. In other words, only God can truly teach accurately about the divine nature. (2) Lactantius' answer was that Jesus' teaching of moral virtue would only be perfect in all respects if Jesus was God. (3) Athanasius' answer was that Jesus had to be divine in order that by means of his human incarnation humanity and divinity could be metaphysically joined.

In the Christological councils of the fourth to sixth century it was the third view that was most influential, advocated by a vocal Alexandrian party. According to their soteriology, Jesus had to be fully divine and they succeed in legislating this idea. Daley's line of questioning hence strikes me as going backwards when he starts from the premise that Jesus is fully divine and tries to work to a conclusion about soteriology, when in fact it historically worked the other way around.

Daley then proceeds to outline major ways the Fathers speak of Christ's saving action. He lists and explains four views: The second and third of the three ideas I list here, and also Ransom and Christus Victor. That is a fairly comprehensive survey save that it is missing the most common view in the Fathers - Jesus as a teacher of moral virtue (see here and point 1 here and here and examples of that theology here and here).

Daley uses this survey to conclude that for the Fathers, generally speaking, salvation is not something Jesus "achieved or earned for the human race by acting on our behalf... Rather they all presuppose that salvation... is first of all something Jesus brought about in his own person". That idea appears to be Daley's thesis for which he wants to argue - that salvation is about who Christ is rather what what Christ did.

I would argue that this concept Daley proposes has only a very small amount of truth to it, and that by and large it is simply wrong. In the Fathers' generally it is not Jesus' divinity in and of itself which saves humanity. Rather the fact that Jesus is a divine being is seen as enabling and empowering him to do things that normal humans would not be able to do. Due to being divine, Jesus is able to perform actions to save humanity. For example, because of his divinity he can fight and defeat the devil, or is able to rise from the dead, or is able to teach humanity about the true nature of God, or is able to teach and exemplify perfect virtue. These saving actions that Jesus is seen as performing, he is capable of performing, empowered to perform, or can perform perfectly, due to being divine. But in these cases, humanity would not be helped if Jesus became incarnate and then did nothing.

Further I would argue that none of these ideas require Jesus to be divine: An arch-angel could potentially teach moral behavior, reveal the nature of God, be resurrected from the dead by God, offer his soul to Satan in exchange for humanity, or battle and conquer demons. A divine Christ might indeed accomplish these things better or more effectively, but divinity is not required in order to accomplish them.

The only view of Christ's work in the Fathers which absolutely demands and requires Jesus' divinity as absolutely essential to the very fundamentals of the theory itself is the Alexandrian view of Jesus uniting humanity and God metaphysically in the incarnation. In this view it is, just as Daley says, the very fact that Jesus is God and man which causes redemption. In this view, Jesus doesn't need to do anything or take any action in order to redeem humanity, but simply be who he is. Taken to its logical extreme, in this view Jesus could have lived a perfectly normal life with no one ever in history ever knowing that he had been God and his life would still have redeemed humanity because of who Jesus was. This explains why historically it was the Alexandrian party who held the divine-human-joining theory who were so adamantly against Arianism (which taught Jesus was a super-angel who was 'like' God rather than being one-in-essence with God himself). The Alexandrians' view required Jesus be one-in-essence with God as otherwise in his incarnation in which he united himself with human nature he would not be metaphysically uniting human nature with the divine.

So I see three fundamental flaws in Daley's approach:
1. He starts out by begging the question, asking why Christ "needed" to be fully divine. This presupposes that Christ did in fact "need" to be divine and that this was not simply an arbitrary decision on God's part as, for example, the Parable of the Tenants ("They didn't listen to my servants but maybe they will listen to my son?") might suggest.
2. In his survey of patristic views of the atonement, he omits the most commonly held one - that of Jesus as a teacher of moral virtue.
3. His attempt to draw the conclusion that the Fathers' saw Jesus as having saved humanity simply by virtue of being divine and not because of anything Jesus did or achieved is not supported even by the evidence that he presents. Daley's conclusion applies only to the Alexandrian theory about uniting divine and human natures, and while this theory was very popular in the East from the beginning of the fourth century onward, it was hardly the main patristic idea of the atonement.

The Theology of the Apologists

2008-03-05T07:54:00.000+13:00

The "Apologists" is the name given to the group of about 12 Christian writers in the second century AD who wrote public works to pagan audiences defending and explaining Christianity. Here's a selection of some of my notes on what a few Patristics scholars have to say about the writings of the Apologists.

Harnack, History of Dogma writes:

1.3.3.2 The moralistic view, in which eternal life is the wages and reward of a perfect moral life wrought out essentially by one’s own power, took the place of first importance at a very early period.

2.4.3 The essential content of revealed philosophy is viewed by the Apologists ... as comprised in three doctrines. First, there is one spiritual and inexpressibly exalted God, who is Lord and Father of the world. Secondly, he requires a holy life. Thirdly, he will at last sit in judgment, and will reward the good with immortality and punish the wicked with death. The teaching concerning God, virtue, and eternal reward is traced to the prophets and Christ; but the bringing about of a virtuous life (of righteousness) has been necessarily left by God to men themselves; for God has created man free, and virtue can only be acquired by man’s own efforts. The prophets and Christ are therefore a source of righteousness in so far as they are teachers. But as God, that is, the divine Word (which we need not here discuss) has spoken in them, Christianity is to be defined as the Knowledge of God, mediated by the Deity himself, and as a virtuous walk in the longing after eternal and perfect life with God, as well as in the sure hope of this imperishable reward. By knowing what is true and doing what is good man becomes righteous and a partaker of the highest bliss.

2.4.3.2 To the gift of imperishability God, however, attached the condition of man’s preserving... the knowledge of God and maintaining a holy walk in imitation of the divine perfection. This demand is as natural as it is just; moreover, nobody can fulfil it in man’s stead, for an essential feature of virtue is its being free, independent action. Man must therefore determine himself to virtue by the knowledge that he is only in this way obedient to the Father of the world and able to reckon on the gift of immortality.

...moral goodness consists in letting oneself be influenced in no way by the sensuous, but in living solely, after the Spirit, and imitating the perfection and purity of God. Moral badness is giving way to any affection resulting from the natural basis of man. The moral law of nature of which the Apologists speak, and which they find reproduced in the clearest and most beautiful way in the sayings of Jesus, calls upon man to raise himself above his nature and to enter into a corresponding union with his fellow-man which is something higher than natural connections.

2.4.3.3 [In the Apologists' view:] Christ has also made special provision for the spread of the truth and is himself an unequalled exemplification of a virtuous life, the principles of which have now become known in the whole world through the spread of his precepts. These statements exhaust the arguments in most of the Apologies; and they accordingly seem neither to have contemplated a redemption by Christ in the stricter sense of the word, nor to have assumed the unique nature of the appearance of the Logos in Jesus. Christ accomplished salvation as a divine teacher, that is to say, his teaching brings about the [change] and [return] of the human race, its restoration to its original destination.

2.4.I [According to the Apologists] the redemption merely enables us to redeem ourselves

Here's a few other scholars on the subject:

"[The Apologists] are unanimous that man is endowed with free-will." (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrine, 166)

"Undoubtedly the principal purpose of the incarnation… strikes him [Justin Martyr] as having been didactic. Having forgotten the truth and having been inveigled into ignorance and positive error by the demons, men desperately need the restoration of the light they have lost. As ‘the new law giver’ or again, ‘the eternal, final law, the faithful covenant which replaces all laws and commandments’, Christ imparts this saving knowledge. It was to bestow such illumination, in particular the realization of the oneness of God and the belief in the moral law, and to restore men by it, that the Logos in fact became man." (Kelly, 168-169)

"We have already noted the popularity of redemption as enlightenment among the Apostolic Fathers. It reappears in the Apologists..." (Kelly, 169)

"[In the Apologists] his chief vocation as Savior was to teach men the truth about monotheism and the moral life." (Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition 100-600AD, 153)

"The Apostolic Fathers. We can hardly overstress the importance in their writings of the idea of Christ the Teacher. Indeed it appears to be their principle contribution to the doctrine of Redemption... The Apologists take up the same theme." (Turner, The Patristic Doctrine of Redemption, 43-44)

"It is clear, then, that... we are on firm ground in treating the concept of Christ the Example, Teacher, and Illuminator as the starting-point in our study of the patristic doctrine of Redemption..." (Turner, 46)

'Grace', a mistranslated word and misunderstood concept

2008-02-29T08:03:00.000+13:00

The word charis, often translated 'grace' is quite heavily used in the New Testament. For many Christians and denominations, particular understandings of 'grace' shape their understanding of Christianity. Even though it means different things to different Christians, 'grace' (charis) is commonly heavily used and an important theological and emotional term. It is therefore, in my view, immensely important to accurately understand the meaning of the Greek word charis as it was understood by the original writers and readers of the New Testament. A multitude of sins, eisegesis, and bad theology, can be built on a misunderstanding of this word.

Amongst Classics scholars there is no debate as to what this word means. Surviving documents from the ancient world contain hundreds of passages that give us great clarity about their understanding of charis and the role this word and its concepts played in their society. Charis was the key-word in what scholars call "the reciprocity system". This system operated according to time-delay exchanges where goods were given and then at a later time goods of relatively equal value were returned to the giver. These goods could be tangible (money, material goods) or intangible (public acclaim, authority). An obligation existed to repay favors owed, they were not 'free' in the sense we would understand it - it is just like when a bank gives you a loan the money is not 'free'. (It is due to this reciprocal nature of the transactions that scholars label it the Reciprocity System.) Essentially the system was an informal system of economics. The word charis itself is best translated with the English "favor" in the sense of talking about favors given and favors repaid. Greek makes no linguistic distinction between the first favor given and the second favor to repay it, calling each a charis. Greek also uses charis to refer to a positive attitude toward someone - we would speak in English of this as "regarding them favorably" or "having their favor".

Of course, a century or more ago, such information simply wasn't available. People interpreting charis in the Bible had to use what information they had and try to make some sense of it. Reformation Christianity is famous for seeing charis as being "free grace" and being the opposite of human effort. These concepts have heavily influenced many Christians' understandings of 'grace' today, but have nothing to do with the actual meaning of charis in Greek. The translation 'grace' is not a good one, it is not 'free', and it isn't the opposite of human effort.

These historical misinterpretations of 'grace' have led to correspondingly incorrect interpretations of passages that use charis. Romans 4, for example, contrasts the Reciprocity System to a Contractual system (a rather subtle contrast) which has historically been exegeted as the difference between human effort and reliance on 'grace'. Similarly Ephesians 2:8, due to the ambiguity in Greek about givers and receivers of favors clarifies that God is the giver of the favor and we the receiver, and yet this has historically been exegeted as speaking about lack of human effort.

Unfortunately, nothing endures and propagates quite like bad theology. At certain points in history, theologians have constructed theologies based on certain incorrect understandings of 'grace' and these theologies remain influential today and taught as biblical even when scholarship regarding the meaning of these words has long moved on. Mistaken ideas about charis continue to influence many Christians who are convinced that 'grace' means salvation is in no way by human effort.

A proper Bible translation

2008-02-28T08:00:00.000+13:00

Dave Warnock introduced me to very recent NT translation by a scholar of Classics who is an expert in ancient Greek Lexigraphy. A Lexigrapher is a person who studies of the meanings of words and writes dictionaries. In my opinion, that is exactly the sort of person who should be writing Bible translations! The translation is (somewhat strangely) titled The Source by Ann Nyland. There is an interesting interview with her here from which I will quote the most interesting parts:

In the late 1880s and again in the mid 1970s, large amounts of papyri and inscriptions were discovered. These impacted our knowledge of word meaning in the New Testament dramatically. Why? Well, the papyri and inscriptions were written at the time of the New Testament. They were non-literary sources, that is, they touched upon all aspects of life - everyday private letters from ordinary people, contracts of marriage and divorce, tax papers, official decrees, birth and death notices, tombstones, and business documents.

Why is this important? Prior to these discoveries, people who made up New Testament dictionaries didn’t have a clue what many of the words meant, as I said. But now, these rare words appeared commonly in different contexts, and everyday contexts too. We would use formal language in a letter to a politician, but we use everyday language in letters to friends. It is this everyday language that appears in the New Testament, and up popped hundreds of examples of these words. Large numbers of previously uncommon words found in the New Testament now appeared commonly in everyday documents as well as on inscriptions. Many mysteries of word meaning were thus solved.

15 volumes of new papyri were published in 1976. This meant that the meanings of a large number of words previously unattested were discovered. In the last 20 yrs, 4,000 inscriptions have been found at Ephesus alone. These discoveries have been largely overlooked by Bible translators. The problem is that laypersons and a significant number of Bible translators alike are unaware of all this as it is tucked away in technical journals. Available Bible dictionaries do not have this scholarship to any useful degree. BDAG has a little of it, but not much at all. In other words, Bible translators rely on dictionaries. The dictionaries are wrong, for many words.

Nearly every recent New Testament dictionary is based on this outdated work while older ones are based on work prior even to that of Moulton and Milligan.

the resources for translation have not been available to the Bible translator. Translators need decent dictionaries, and the current New Testament lexicon project (going on in my town, although work has stalled) won’t be in print for many, many years. As a lexicographer, I had to do my own dictionary work.

every New Testament translation of today, apart from The Source, follows the traditional translations of the earlier versions, which were published centuries before the evidence from the papyri and inscriptions revealed to us the actual meanings of numerous New Testament words!

The disregard of this evidence for word meaning has had a terrible impact on Bible translation. Many words suffer, but technical terms and idioms suffer particularly. For example, the term mistranslated “husband of one wife” is actually “faithful to their partner” and has been found on the tombstones of women. It is also clear that many modern translators have followed the KJV, whether directly or through the lexicons (dictionaries).

The translations of most New Testament versions are based on a lack of understanding of Greek word meaning. Available translations do not sufficiently regard the abundant evidence from the papyri and inscriptions and thus in many cases present a far from accurate translation of the New Testament ... because the tools are not available to the translator – the tools being published lexicons

In many cases, the trouble is that religion based on mistranslation has laid down certain things in the Christian community on the whole and tradition is a very powerful thing.

The Source is different because: The meanings of many words in other available Bibles are, quite bluntly, wrong. These meanings were discovered only recently but have been published only in technical academic journals related to the classics discipline in secular universities. The lexicon to replace Moulton and Milligan will not be published in fascicles [=multiple pieces over time], and is years away from publication. The Source is the only translation to date to take account of these word meanings. My field of research is lexicography.

“Believe in (someone)” is an appalling mistranslation and I would happily mark a student wrong for such a translation.

That's an interesting explanation which explains why I'm so often upset at the poorness of Bible lexicons and translations which seem to ignore evidence. I intend to buy a copy of her translation - which comes in a normal form or as a study bible with extensive notes on Greek word meanings. Apparently her study bible has been vetoed by some Christian groups because she performs the 'unbiblical' acts of explaining why Greek words traditionally translated "homosexual" in our bibles do not in fact mean that and why gender neutral terms are the correct English rendering of Greek words.

Of course, even with the best lexigraphy there's still plenty of translation decisions that have to be made that can be right, wrong or just matters of taste. So I'm not under any illusions that this translation will be 100% right for me, but it should at least be a breath of fresh air.

Homosexuals shall not inherit the kingdom of God?

2008-02-27T12:40:00.002+13:00

1 Corinthians 6:9-10 gives a list of those who shall not inherit the kingdom of God. There are two different Greek words in this sentence sometimes translated "homosexual", but there are translation difficulties with both these words.

Various ancient Greek writers discuss homosexual behavior quite a bit, and so we have a good knowledge of what the culture of the time thought about homosexuality and what words they used to describe it. The words Paul uses are not the normal words used to speak of homosexuality.

The first of Paul's two difficult words is "malakos" which literally means "soft" and is a fairly common Greek word that depending on context can mean virtually anything: (1) "soft" grassy meadows, (2) "gentle" or "mild", (3) "cowardly", "lacking self-control", (4) low pitched music, (5) poor logic or reasoning (6) "weak", "sickly". The context of Paul's list is moral vices and so meanings from definition 3 above are appropriate ones and thus "lack of self control" seems best. Some people appear to have decided that the word can mean 'soft' in a sexual sense and thus mean 'effeminate' or 'passive homosexual partner', which I suppose is possible. There seems no reason to think the context here merits such a translation though.

The second of Paul's difficult words is "arsenokoites" (literally "man-bed") which has the opposite problem - this word does not occur enough times in surviving documents for us to tell clearly what it means. The evidence provided by these occurrences is confusing. It appears in some listings of economic sins. Elsewhere it is said to be something mainly done by men with men but which can even be done to a woman. A meaning that explains a lot of the evidence (but not all) is "anal rape" or "having sex with someone in order to prove dominance over them" (bear in mind that in the ancient world this was a somewhat common practice for heterosexuals to engage in). In short, Greek usage provides no reason at all to think that the word means "homosexual". No study I have ever seen has concluded that the word meant "homosexual" in Greek.

However Christians who have studied Greek are rather infamous for never reading or paying attention to any Greek documents outside of the Bible. So often their policy is: Using the Bible alone, what does this word mean? I would like to stress that such methodology, in general, is incredibly bad. The bible was written in Koine ('common') Greek and it uses normal words from the common Greek of the time. It was NOT written in some heavenly language that came into being for the sake of writing the bible and then immediately disappeared (as a few scholars once wildly speculated!). Its original readers when reading it would have understood the meanings of the words it uses because they already knew what the words meant from their knowledge of Greek, just as we who read it in English understand it because we already know how to speak English.

At any rate, people have searched the bible from top to bottom to see what arsenokoites (man + bed) means in the 'bible' language and discovered a passage that uses 'man' and 'bed' in the same sentence in the bowels of Leviticus. Therefore it must be a reference to that, right? (Because, of course, Paul would invent a word his Corinthian readers didn't know and expect them to search the bible from top to bottom to find the sentence that most closely matched it... not!) The sentence in Leviticus is generally believed to be condemning homosexuality and therefore "arsenokoites" in Paul's writings is translated "homosexuality".

In short, I see no reason to think either malakos or arsenokoites in 1 Cor 6:9 have anything to do with homosexuality whatsoever. Such translations are simply a result of poor scholarship.

PS. It has been brought to my attention that a lot of the evidence regarding ancient usage of 'arsenokoites' was only discovered in the last 30 years, and that therefore the scholars who in the past concluded it meant homosexuality based on the above-critiqued argument were engaging in reasonable speculation based on the lack-of-evidence they had at the time.

Justin Martyr, Defender of Christianity

2008-02-26T17:57:00.002+13:00

Justin Martyr (b. 100AD, d. 165AD) was born in Palestine, and was a philosopher who converted to Christianity. In the second century a number of Christian writers wrote public defenses of Christianity to try to stop persecution, and Justin's works are the longest and most comprehensive of these to survive. According to church legend he was martyred in Rome. Justin's works are generally very clear and easy to read. They set out Christianity simply and clearly for a non-Christian audience. If anyone is interested in studying early Christian writings, I suggest they start with Justin's First Apology and Second Apology.

Justin presents Christianity as consisting primarily of four main doctrines:
1. Monotheism
2. Jesus, the Teacher of virtue, the Word of God
3. Free Will
4. Eternal final judgment by works

Here are some quotes from Justin's Apologies:

And we have been taught, and are convinced, and do believe, that He accepts those only who imitate the excellences which reside in Him, temperance, and justice, and philanthropy, and as many virtues as are peculiar to a God who is called by no proper name. And we have been taught that He in the beginning did of His goodness, for man's sake, create all things out of unformed matter; and if men by their works show themselves worthy of this His design, they are deemed worthy, and so we have received—of reigning in company with Him, being delivered from corruption and suffering. For as in the beginning He created us when we were not, so do we consider that, in like manner, those who choose what is pleasing to Him are, on account of their choice, deemed worthy of incorruption and of fellowship with Him. (1 Apol 10)

We hold this view, that it is alike impossible for the wicked, the covetous, the conspirator, and for the virtuous, to escape the notice of God, and that each man goes to everlasting punishment or salvation according to the value of his actions. For if all men knew this, no one would choose wickedness even for a little, knowing that he goes to the everlasting punishment of fire; but would by all means restrain himself, and adorn himself with virtue, that he might obtain the good gifts of God, and escape the punishments. ...That all these things should come to pass, I say, our Teacher foretold, He who is both Son and Apostle of God the Father of all and the Ruler, Jesus Christ (1 Apol 12)

[Those] only are deified who have lived near to God in holiness and virtue; and we believe that those who live wickedly and do not repent are punished in everlasting fire. (1 Apol 21)

We say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven (1 Apol 22)

For among us the prince of the wicked spirits is called the serpent, and Satan, and the devil, as you can learn by looking into our writings. And that he would be sent into the fire with his host, and the men who follow him, and would be punished for an endless duration, Christ foretold. For the reason why God has delayed to do this, is His regard for the human race. For He foreknows that some are to be saved by repentance, some even that are perhaps not yet born. In the beginning He made the human race with the power of thought and of choosing the truth and doing right, so that all men are without excuse before God; for they have been born rational and contemplative. And if any one disbelieves that God cares for these things, he will thereby either insinuate that God does not exist, or he will assert that though He exists He delights in vice, or exists like a stone, and that neither virtue nor vice are anything, but only in the opinion of men these things are reckoned good or evil. And this is the greatest profanity and wickedness. (1 Apol 28)

We have learned from the prophets, and we hold it to be true, that punishments, and chastisements, and good rewards, are rendered according to the merit of each man's actions. Since if it be not so, but all things happen by fate, neither is anything at all in our own power. For if it be fated that this man, e.g., be good, and this other evil, neither is the former meritorious nor the latter to be blamed. And again, unless the human race have the power of avoiding evil and choosing good by free choice, they are not accountable for their actions, of whatever kind they be... But this we assert is inevitable fate, that they who choose the good have worthy rewards, and they who choose the opposite have their merited awards. For not like other things, as trees and quadrupeds, which cannot act by choice, did God make man: for neither would he be worthy of reward or praise did he not of himself choose the good, but were created for this end; nor, if he were evil, would he be worthy of punishment, not being evil of himself, but being able to be nothing else than what he was made. (1 Apol 43)

So that what we say about future events being foretold, we do not say it as if they came about by a fatal necessity; but God foreknowing all that shall be done by all men, and it being His decree that the future actions of men shall all be recompensed according to their several value, He foretells by the Spirit of prophecy that He will bestow meet rewards according to the merit of the actions done, always urging the human race to effort and recollection, showing that He cares and provides for men. (1 Apol 44)

Those who lived virtuously are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them (1 Apol 46)

He shall raise the bodies of all men who have lived, and shall clothe those of the worthy with immortality, and shall send those of the wicked, endued with eternal sensibility, into everlasting fire with the wicked devils. (1 Apol 52)

The unjust and intemperate shall be punished in eternal fire, but the virtuous and those who lived like Christ shall dwell with God in a state that is free from suffering (2 Apol 1)

The teaching of Christ [says] that there shall be punishment in eternal fire inflicted upon those who do not live temperately and conformably to virtue. (2 Apol 2)

But neither do we affirm that it is by fate that men do what they do, or suffer what they suffer, but that each man by free choice acts rightly or sins;...since God in the beginning made the race of angels and men with free-will, they will justly suffer in eternal fire the punishment of whatever sins they have committed. And this is the nature of all that is made, to be capable of vice and virtue. For neither would any of them be praiseworthy unless there were power to turn to both [virtue and vice]. (2 Apol 7)

The Theology of Lactantius

2008-02-25T17:25:00.001+13:00

Lucius Caelius Firmianus Lactantius (b. 240AD, d. 320AD) was born in North Africa and became a renowned teacher of philosophy and taught in many cities around the Roman Empire. He converted to Christianity and subsequently authored the first Latin Christian Systematic Theology, titled Divine Institutions. Of all the pre-Nicene writers he is one of the easiest to read due to his clarity of writing style and comprehensiveness. There are none of the normal problems with concepts left undefined or cryptic indecipherable references - he spells out his views simply, clearly, and at great length.

The theology he presents can be summed up very simply:

Monotheism, One Creator God.
Jesus, Teacher of Virtue, both Human and Divine,
The importance of humans living virtuously
Eternal judgment by works

Here are a few one-liners:

The spirit must earn immortality by works of righteousness (D.I. 4.25)
No other religion is true except that which consists of virtue and justice. (D.I. 6.25)
He has given us this present life, that we may either lose that true and eternal life by our vices, or win it by virtue. (D.I. 7.5)
Immortality, then, is not the consequence of nature, but the reward and recompense of virtue. (D.I. 7.5)
Whoever by his virtue has trampled upon the corruptions of the earth, the supreme and truthful arbiter will raise him to life and to perpetual light. (D.I. 7.27)

For those interested, here are some longer extracts:

I will first show for what reason Christ came to the earth, that the foundation and the system of divine religion may be manifest. When the Jews often resisted wholesome precepts, and departed from the divine law, going astray to the impious worship of false gods, then God filled just and chosen men with the Holy Spirit, appointing them as prophets in the midst of the people, by whom He might rebuke with threatening words the sins of the ungrateful people, and nevertheless exhort them to repent of their wickedness; for unless they did this, and, laying aside their vanities, return to their God, it would come to pass that He would change His covenant, that is, bestow the inheritance of eternal life upon foreign nations, and collect to Himself a more faithful people out of those who were aliens by birth. But they, when rebuked by the prophets, not only rejected their words; but being offended because they were upbraided for their sins, they slew the prophets themselves with studied tortures: all which things are sealed up and preserved in the sacred writings. ... On account of these impieties of theirs He cast them off for ever; and so He ceased to send to them prophets. But He commanded His own Son, the first-begotten, the maker of all things, His own counsellor, to descend from heaven, that He might transfer the sacred religion of God to the Gentiles, that is, to those who were ignorant of God, and might teach them righteousness, which the perfidious people had cast aside. And He had long before threatened that He would do this... Therefore (as I had begun to say), when God had determined to send to men a teacher of righteousness, He commanded Him to be born again a second time in the flesh, and to be made in the likeness of man himself, to whom he was about to be a guide, and companion, and teacher. But since God is kind and merciful to His people, He sent Him to those very persons whom He hated, that He might not close the way of salvation against them for ever, but might give them a free opportunity of following God, that they might both gain the reward of life if they should follow Him (which many of them do, and have done), and that they might incur the penalty of death by their fault if they should reject their King. He ordered Him therefore to be born again among them, and of their seed, lest, if He should be born of another nation, they might be able to allege a just excuse from the law for their rejection of Him; and at the same time, that there might be no nation at all under heaven to which the hope of immortality should be denied. (D.I. 4.10-11)

He had to be clothed with flesh on the earth, that having assumed the form of a man and the condition of mortality, He might teach men righteousness; ... [many people now] adore His name, confess His majesty, follow His teaching, and imitate His goodness (D.I. 4.12)

Therefore the Most High God, and Parent of all, when He had purposed to transfer His religion, sent from heaven a teacher of righteousness, that in Him or through Him He might give a new law to new worshippers; not as He had before done, by the instrumentality of man. (D.I. 4.13)

For God, when He saw that wickedness and the worship of false gods had so prevailed throughout the world, that His name had now also been taken away from the memory of men (since even the Jews, who alone had been entrusted with the secret of God, had deserted the living God, and, ensnared by the deceits of demons, had gone astray, and turned aside to the worship of images, and when rebuked by the prophets did not choose to return to God), He sent His Son as an ambassador to men, that He might turn them from their impious and vain worship to the knowledge and worship of the true God; and also that He might turn their minds from foolishness to wisdom, and from wickedness to deeds of righteousness. (D.I. 4.14)

For nothing among earthly things can be venerable and worthy of heaven; but it is virtue alone, and justice alone, which can be judged a true, and heavenly, and perpetual good, because it is neither given to any one, nor taken away. And since Christ came upon earth, supplied with virtue and righteousness, yea rather, since He Himself is virtue, and Himself righteousness, He descended that He might teach it and mould the character of man. (D.I. 4.16)

If any one gives to men precepts for living, and moulds the characters of others, I ask whether he is bound himself to practice the things which he enjoins, or is not bound. If he shall not do so, his precepts are annulled. For if the things which are enjoined are good, if they place the life of men in the best condition, the instructor ought not to separate himself from the number and assemblage of men among whom he acts; and he ought himself to live in the same manner in which he teaches that men ought to live, lest, by living in another way, he himself should disparage his own precepts, and make his instruction of less value, if in reality he should relax the obligations of that which he endeavours to establish by his words. For every one, when he hears another giving precepts, is unwilling that the necessity of obeying should be imposed upon him, as though the right of liberty were taken from him. Therefore he answers his teacher in this manner: I am not able to do the things which you command, for they are impossible. For you forbid me to be angry, you forbid me to covet, you forbid me to be excited by desire, you forbid me to fear pain or death; but this is so contrary to nature, that all animals are subject to these affections. Or if you are so entirely of opinion that it is possible to resist nature, do you yourself practice the things which you enjoin, that I may know that they are possible? But since you yourself do not practice them, what arrogance is it, to wish to impose upon a free man laws which you yourself do not obey! You who teach, first learn; and before you correct the character of others, correct your own. Who could deny the justice of this answer? Nay! a teacher of this kind will fall into contempt, and will in his turn be mocked, because he also will appear to mock others. What, therefore, will that instructor do, if these things shall be objected to him? how will he deprive the self-willed of an excuse, unless he teach them by deeds before their eyes that he teaches things which are possible? Whence it comes to pass, that no one obeys the precepts of the philosophers. For men prefer examples rather than words, because it is easy to speak, but difficult to accomplish. Would to heaven that there were as many who acted well as there are who speak well! But they who give precepts, without carrying them out into action, are distrusted; and if they shall be men, will be despised as inconsistent: if it shall be God, He will be met with the excuse of the frailty of man's nature. It remains that words should be confirmed by deeds, which the philosophers are unable to do. Therefore, since the instructors themselves are overcome by the affections which they say that it is our duty to overcome, they are able to train no one to virtue, which they falsely proclaim; and for this cause they imagine that no perfect wise man has as yet existed, that is, in whom the greatest virtue and perfect justice were in harmony with the greatest learning and knowledge. And this indeed was true. For no one since the creation of the world has been such, except Christ, who both delivered wisdom by His word, and confirmed His teaching by presenting virtue to the eyes of men. (D.I. 4.23)

[Christ needed a mortal, fleshly, body because] if He should come to men as God, not to mention that mortal eyes cannot look upon and endure the glory of His majesty in His own person, assuredly God will not be able to teach virtue; for, inasmuch as He is without a body, He will not practice the things which He will teach, and through this His teaching will not be perfect. Otherwise, if it is the greatest virtue patiently to endure pain for the sake of righteousness and duty, if it is virtue not to fear death itself when threatened, and when inflicted to undergo it with fortitude; it follows that the perfect teacher ought both to teach these things by precept, and to confirm them by practice. For he who gives precepts for the life, ought to remove every method of excuse, that he may impose upon men the necessity of obedience, not by any constraint, but by a sense of shame, and yet may leave them liberty, that a reward may be appointed for those who obey, because it was in their power not to obey if they so wished; and a punishment for those who do not obey, because it was in their power to obey if they so wished. How then can excuse be removed, unless the teacher should practice what he teaches, and as it were go before and hold out his hand to one who is about to follow? But how can one practice what he teaches, unless he is like him whom he teaches? For if he be subject to no passion, a man may thus answer him who is the teacher: It is my wish not to sin, but I am overpowered; for I am clothed with frail and weak flesh: it is this which covets, which is angry, which fears pain and death. And thus I am led on against my will; and I sin, not because it is my wish, but because I am compelled. I myself perceive that I sin; but the necessity imposed by my frailty, which I am unable to resist, impels me. What will that teacher of righteousness say in reply to these things? How will he refute and convict a man who shall allege the frailty of the flesh as an excuse for his faults, unless he himself also shall be clothed with flesh, so that he may show that even the flesh is capable of virtue? For obstinacy cannot be refuted except by example. For the things which you teach cannot have any weight unless you shall be the first to practice them; because the nature of men is inclined to faults, and wishes to sin not only with indulgence, but also with a reasonable plea. It is befitting that a master and teacher of virtue should most closely resemble man, that by overpowering sin he may teach man that sin may be overpowered by him. But if he is immortal, he can by no means propose an example to man. For there will stand forth some one persevering in his opinion, and will say: You indeed do not sin, because you are free from this body; you do not covet, because nothing is needed by an immortal; but I have need of many things for the support of this life. You do not fear death, because it can have no power against you. You despise pain, because you can suffer no violence. But I, a mortal, fear both, because they bring upon me the severest tortures, which the weakness of the flesh cannot endure. A teacher of virtue therefore ought to have taken away this excuse from men, that no one may ascribe it to necessity that he sins, rather than to his own fault. Therefore, that a teacher may be perfect, no objection ought to be brought forward by him who is to be taught, so that if he should happen to say, You enjoin impossibilities; the teacher may answer, See, I myself do them. But I am clothed with flesh, and it is the property of flesh to sin. I too bear the same flesh, and yet sin does not bear rule in me. It is difficult for me to despise riches, because otherwise I am unable to live in this body. See, I too have a body, and yet I contend against every desire. I am not able to bear pain or death for righteousness, because I am frail. See, pain and death have power over me also; and I overcome those very things which you fear, that I may make you victorious over pain and death. I go before you through those things which you allege that it is impossible to endure: if you are not able to follow me giving directions, follow me going before you. In this way all excuse is taken away, and you must confess that man is unjust through his own fault, since he does not follow a teacher of virtue, who is at the same time a guide. You see, therefore, how much more perfect is a teacher who is mortal, because he is able to be a guide to one who is mortal, than one who is immortal, for he is unable to teach patient endurance who is not subject to passions. Nor, however, does this extend so far that I prefer man to God; but to show that man cannot be a perfect teacher unless he is also God, that he may by his heavenly authority impose upon men the necessity of obedience; nor God, unless he is clothed with a mortal body, that by carrying out his precepts to their completion in actions, he may bind others by the necessity of obedience. It plainly therefore appears, that he who is a guide of life and teacher of righteousness must have a body, and that his teaching cannot otherwise be full and perfect, unless it has a root and foundation, and remains firm and fixed among men; and that he himself must undergo weakness of flesh and body, and display in himself the virtue of which he is a teacher, that he may teach it at the same time both by words and deeds. Also, he must be subject to death and all sufferings, since the duties of virtue are occupied with the enduring of suffering, and the undergoing death; all which, as I have said, a perfect teacher ought to endure, that he may teach the possibility of their being endured.(D.I. 4.24)

Let men therefore learn and understand why the Most High God, when He sent His ambassador and messenger to instruct mortals with the precepts of His righteousness, willed that He should be clothed with mortal flesh, and be afflicted with torture, and be sentenced to death. For since there was no righteousness on earth, He sent a teacher, as it were a living law, to found a new name and temple, that by His words and example He might spread throughout the earth a true and holy worship. ... if He had been God only (as we have before said), He would not have been able to afford to man examples of goodness; if He had been man only, He would not have been able to compel men to righteousness, unless there had been added an authority and virtue greater than that of man. (D.I. 4.25)

But with reference to the cross, it has great force and meaning, which I will now endeavour to show. For God (as I have before explained), when He had determined to set man free, sent as His ambassador to the earth a teacher of virtue, who might both by salutary precepts train men to innocence, and by works and deeds before their eyes might open the way of righteousness, by walking in which, and following his teacher, man might attain to eternal life. He therefore assumed a body, and was clothed in a garment of flesh, that He might hold out to man, for whose instruction He had come, examples of virtue and incitements to its practice. But when He had afforded an example of righteousness in all the duties of life, in order that He might teach man also the patient endurance of pain and contempt of death, by which virtue is rendered perfect and complete, He came into the hands of an impious nation, when, by the knowledge of the future which He had, He might have avoided them, and by the same power by which He did wonderful works He might have repelled them. Therefore He endured tortures, and stripes, and thorns. At last He did not refuse even to undergo death, that under His guidance man might triumph over death, subdued and bound in chains with all its terrors. But the reason why the Most High Father chose that kind of death in preference to others, with which He should permit Him to be visited, is this. For some one may perchance say: Why, if He was God, and chose to die, did He not at least suffer by some honourable kind of death? why was it by the cross especially? why by an infamous kind of punishment, which may appear unworthy even of a man if he is free, although guilty? First of all, because He, who had come in humility that He might bring assistance to the humble and men of low degree, and might hold out to all the hope of safety, was to suffer by that kind of punishment by which the humble and low usually suffer, that there might be no one at all who might not be able to imitate Him. (D.I. 4.26)

There are two ways, O Emperor Constantine, by which human life must proceed—the one which leads to heaven, the other which sinks to hell; and these ways poets have introduced in their poems, and philosophers in their disputations. And indeed philosophers have represented the one as belonging to virtues, the other to vices ...the two ways belong to heaven and hell, because immortality is promised to the righteous, and everlasting punishment is threatened to the unrighteous. ... he who follows truth and righteousness, having received the reward of immortality, will enjoy perpetual light; but he who, enticed by that evil guide, shall prefer vices to virtues, falsehood to truth, must be borne to the setting of the sun, and to darkness. (D.I. 6.3)

The first step of virtue is to abstain from evil works; the second, to abstain also from evil words; the third, to abstain even from the thoughts of evil things. He who ascends the first step is sufficiently just; he who ascends the second is now of perfect virtue, since he offends neither in deeds nor in conversation; he who ascends the third appears truly to have attained the likeness of God. (D.I. 6.13)

Atonement doctrine in the pre-Nicene Fathers

2008-02-22T17:45:00.001+13:00

By far the strongest view of Jesus' saving work within the early Fathers is one that sees his primary work as being that of a teacher, who imparts to humanity information about how to live in a way that God considers righteous. His teachings and example are considered to be able to lead humans to live righteous lives in correct worship of God and correct behavior. The church movement is seen as continuing and disseminating these teachings, and thus the founding of the church is considered an important part of Jesus' actions.

This concept of Jesus as a teacher of righteousness is universally a primary soteriological concept in the pre-Nicene Fathers. In the large majority of them, it is the only one. Protestant scholars have historically had a tendency to label the Christianity of this period, somewhat derogatorily, as "Moralism" due to the emphasis placed on moral effort in salvation. (Judgment by Works + Free Will + Christ as Teacher = "Moralism") This "Moralism" is the theology of the Apostolic Fathers and the Apologists which constitutes the orthodoxy of the second century AD (see here).

Some of the later pre-Nicene Fathers developed other ideas of Jesus' saving work in addition to holding the one described above. As I outlined in my previous post Greek philosophical concepts about union with and contemplation of the divine began to influence Christian thought. In the last quarter of the second century the thinking of Irenaeus of Lyons and Clement of Alexandria was heavily shaped by these ideas. In their writings the notion of Christ as a teacher and example of moral righteousness remains of first importance, but alongside it and of equal importance is the attainment of the human soul's unity with God through mingling with the divine. This conception occurs to a much lesser extent in a many of the subsequent pre-Nicene writers (eg Origen, Hippolytus, and Methodius) but climaxes again at the close of the pre-Nicene period in the writings of Athanasius and was extremely influential thereafter and the main driving force in the Christological councils of the fourth to sixth centuries.

Another view of Jesus' work that makes its first appearance in this period is the concept of "Ransom from Satan" / "Christus Victor" which appears in the work of Origen in the early third century AD. This idea sees sinners as falling under the power and influence of Satan and needing to be freed from Satan through payment or force. Origen in his biblical commentaries often depicts a major part of Jesus' work as being a payment to Satan to free us from his grasp (although the concept of Jesus as a teacher of moral virtue receives more emphasis). This view of rescue from Satan does not seem to have caught on during the pre-Nicene period, but its popularity seems to have blossomed during the fourth century - being popularized by Gregory of Nyssa and by a resurgence of interest in the writings of Origen.

At the close of the pre-Nicene period in the early years of the fourth century AD, two contrasting Christian writers best depict the difference between the past and the future. Lactantius wrote a systematic theology of Christianity in which the "Moralism" typical of the pre-Nicene period is in fullest flower, and which represents the close of an era in the sense that it is really the last major work in which the concept of Christ-as-Teacher stands alone. Meanwhile Athanasius was authoring a work in which took further than ever before the concept of a union with God through the God-man Jesus, and which also suggested the idea that Jesus suffered punishment from God on our behalf... both ideas were signs of things to come.

The Vision and Contemplation of God

2008-02-21T12:50:00.001+13:00

According to ancient Greek philosophy, the highest good, the greatest state of true happiness, was when the innermost part of the human soul contemplated and was illuminated by the divine. The ultimate goal of human existence was for the soul/spirit to conform itself to the divine archetype by having a constant vision of the divine before it, and through its focused gaze on the nature of the divine the soul would gain immortality and the divine likeness. This concept of a mystic, direct and intimate union of the soul with God through contemplation or ecstasy was hugely influential within Greek philosophy and was expounded by Plato, Aristotle, Middle-Platonism and Neo-Platonism. As a result it exercised a profound influence on Greek-Christian thought, especially on Christians who had philosophical training.

In the second century AD, Christian Apologists when speaking of how Christ taught Monotheism and God's moral laws, draw on the language of philosophy to speak of how Christ was the "logos" (a word from Greek philosophy that described the mediator of divine illumination) who has brought this "knowledge of God". Toward the end of the second century this gets taken to an extreme by Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria who draw fully on the Greek philosophical conception of union with God. For Clement the highest possible good is "divine contemplation and illumination", and Christ's illuminating teachings are the instruction through which an initiate can attain to the true vision of the divine nature and live a contemplative life. Clement sees a great difference between the average Christian who merely does what God wants and the super-Christian who fully apprehends the reality of the divine through contemplation. For Irenaeus "union and communion between God and man" is the highest goal and the divine incarnation in the person of Jesus that opened the way to unite the human soul with the divine. These ideas also play a prominant role in the fourth to sixth centuries AD, heavily influencing theologians such as Athanasius, Augustine, the Cappadocians, Maximus etc.

In Christian theology there are essentially three variant forms of this idea which are significantly different to each other and worth dealing with separately:

1. Jesus is conceived of a teacher and revealer of truth about God. He teaches monotheism, God's commandments, morality etc. By following the teachings and example of Jesus a person can live a morally virtuous life. God will reward such people with immortality. Language from Greek philosophy is used to describe these concepts.

2. The mystic vision of the divine light, and conformity of the soul to the likeness of the divine is the highest goal and state of the soul. To set ones gaze upon the divine results in moral behavior and godliness being manifested in one's life, and brings immortality to the soul by virtue of its direct mystical participation within the immortal divine nature. Jesus taught information about God and mystical truths about the divine nature. Through the incarnation, the nature of God is revealed and by contemplation of the person of Jesus as the incarnate God we can contemplate the divine nature.

3. Human souls due to their separation from the divine essence and light have lost their similitude to the divine and become subject to corruption. Human souls will eventually pass into non-existence due to this ever-increasing decay unless reunited with the divine. In the incarnation God mystically joined the divine essence and the created order, making them one in the God-human Jesus. By that act all humanity was reconnected to the divine and the decay into non-existence of the human soul averted.

Those three ways of thinking in order represent an increasing influence of Greek philosophical concepts on Christianity. In the first, philosophical terms are used to describe Christian doctrine without any of the philosophical concepts being present. In the second, many concepts from Greek philosophy are taken for granted and Christianity is seen as the best means to attaining the goal of the philosopher. In the third, concepts from Greek philosophy map out the 'problem' that faces humanity and are used to dictate the understanding of its solution in Christ. All three concepts are present strongly in Athanasius' influential work On the Incarnation of the Word (~318AD) and continued to play a strong role through the centuries. (eg In the fourteenth century it was suggested that the use of meditation, repetition and breathing by monks to attain an inner vision and experience of the ineffable uncreated divine light in the union of their consciousness with the divine energies was a waste of time, but church councils ruled on it as a worthwhile activity.)

The Inhospitality of Sodom

2008-02-20T12:20:00.000+13:00

In the ancient world an action valued extremely highly was what we might call "hospitality".

The intertestamental work "Testament of Abraham" depicts hospitality as being Abraham's primary virtue which makes him great in the eyes of God. In Judges 19-20 there is a story of an Israelite who instead of hospitality receives attempted rape and murder at the hands of fellow Israelites which leads to a major battle. The importance placed on hospitality in the ancient world is well-document by scholars studying its social environment. Hospitality and inhospitality were actions seen to be of major importance, to an extent that Christians often do not understand today.

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah contrasts the great hospitality of Abraham and Lot with the inhospitality of the men of Sodom: Abraham and then Lot welcome the strangers that come to them, whereas the men of Sodom attempt to rape them. The story cites God's reason for destroying Sodom as being that they are "exceedingly sinful" and subsequent Jewish tradition and interpretation attributed a huge variety of sins to them (economic crimes, general nastiness, pride, violence). But one sin that Jewish and early Christian interpretation saw as being primary was the sin of inhospitality depicted so clearly in the story. In the Gospels on two different occasions Jesus and his apostles speak of the primary sin of Sodom and Gomorrah as being inhospitality:

If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town. (Mat 5:14-15 / Luke 10:11-12)

On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; but they did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, "Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" (Luke 9:52-54)

The Christian writer of 1 Clement, ~100AD, picks up on the theme of hospitality:

"On account of his faith and hospitality, a son was given to Abraham in his old age... On account of his hospitality and godliness, Lot was saved out of Sodom" (1 Clement, ch 10-11)

Yet, somehow, for Christians today "Sodom and Gomorrah" seem to have become synonymous with homosexuality. There seems to be a widely assumed view that the reason God destroyed these cities was because they were full of homosexuals. I have no idea as to how or why this viewpoint arose - it is not justified by the text of the story, and has no support in ancient Jewish and Christian interpretation of the story. Yet we have the word "sodomy" (originating it seems, sometime in the middle or dark ages) that focuses on the homosexuality of the men of Sodom (I suspect the 'logic' of this link may also have originated in the dark ages!)

There is actually no particular reason to think the men of Sodom were homosexuals as we would define them. The story in Judges 19-20 is similar in that men of the city attempt to rape a male visitor, yet when that visitor gives them his woman instead they rape and kill her and leave him alone. These men are apparently not wanting sex with men so much as being aggressive, and scholars tend to analyze their behavior through the idea of that they were seeking to prove their dominance over the visitor (dominance being quite an important concept in the ancient world). By overpowering him and treating him as a woman they would dishonor him, but they also achieve the same by taking his woman for themselves. In the Sodom story a similar thing occurs, when they demand to rape the visitors Lot offers to them his daughters instead. Lot's offer would be silly if Lot knew these men to be homosexual - why not offer a male relative instead? Clearly as in the Judges case there is an understanding that it is not that these people are attracted to men but are rather acting aggressively for other reasons. In the case of Sodom the counter-offer is refused (the women being offered do not belong to the strangers and therefore raping them would dishonor Lot not the visitors. Lot's offer is an example of his hospitality - he is willing to suffer dishonor himself rather than see his visitors dishonored). The actions of the people of Sodom are consistent with seeking dominance over the strangers (aka "overwhelming pride" - Josephus Ant 1:194) not with being homosexual.

The widespread modern view that Sodom was destroyed because of its homosexuality seems to me entirely unfounded. The evidence does not indicate the people of Sodom were homosexual. Their major crime in the story is depicted as inhospitality and this is how the story was understood by early Jewish and Christian interpreters including Jesus.

Jesus died in order to ...make the church

2008-02-18T11:59:00.002+13:00

Mike Bird has a recent post in which he suggests that a primary goal of Jesus' death was the creation of the Church as a movement.

I believe that thesis to be fundamentally correct.

Mike in his post mentions only a couple of reasons for his holding this view (and they're not very good ones IMO). However there are numerous reasons for holding this view. I recommend Paul on the Cross: Reconstructing the Apostle's Story of Redemption by David A. Brondos, 2006, for a really good analysis of Paul's soteriology which argues that Paul's view was primarily that Christ's life and death were focused on creating the Church movement.

In such a view, the church is a movement founded by Christ which has the role of spreading his teachings to transform people's lives and the world. That role is seen as so important that one of Christ's purposes, perhaps his only purpose, was to create the church movement. In such a reading, Christ's death is no longer a supernatural event which atones for the sins of the world, but rather a historical event in which Jesus dies as a martyr for the sake of the movement he is trying to found - a movement that he hopes will change the world. History shows that the church movement has affected the lives of billions of people.

The view that Christ gave his life and was resurrected for the purpose of founding the church is attested in post-biblical literature as early as the writings of Ignatius (~110AD), and Jesus is depicted as a martyr in the Martyrdom of Polycarp (~150AD). Such a view, as Brondos demonstrates in the book referenced above, has a great deal of explanatory power when it comes to the writings of Paul. Paul says things like "in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church." (Col 1:24)

Also important in my view is that such a view ties the story and theology of the gospels to the story and theology of the NT epistles. If someone heard the gospel accounts they would never guess that Jesus had died a Penal Substitutionary death for the sins of the world unless someone explicitly explained this to them - which makes me wonder where the NT church could have got the idea of Penal Substitution from if they believed it (which I don't think they did). But a person reading the gospels would say that Jesus had died for his cause to found his movement - scholars who focus on the gospels seem to be in widespread agreement that the gospels depict Jesus death as a martyrdom. Recent research has also demonstrated that the "Christ died for us" phrases that Paul loves using have their background in the milieu of Greek martyrdoms - Christ's martyrdom was done in order to found the church and through it help us. This view thus ties Paul's theology into the gospels - they have the same message: Jesus teaches, dies and is resurrected with the purpose of founding the church movement which now has a mission to go out and change the world doing "greater works" than Jesus (John 14:12).

Pre-Nicene Salvation By Effort

2008-02-13T12:06:00.000+13:00

A key component of pre-Nicene Christian theology was a strong emphasis on human effort required to live virtuous lives and be saved. Christianity worldwide in the second and third centuries was a religion that put the strongest possible emphasis on the freedom of the will and the need to make an effort to live righteous lives in order to pass God's final eternal judgment that would be according to works. I find it fascinating how Christianity has changed over the centuries and how many modern Christians are precisely against the very doctrines that were originally considered the foundations stones of Christianity.

The following two ancient quotes capture the typical view nicely:

"Man was not created perfect, but created suitable for acquiring virtue... For God desires us to be saved by our own efforts." -Clement of Alexandria, ~200AD, Stromata 6.12.96

"I do not know if these commandments can be kept by man, because they are exceeding hard." [The Angel became extremely angry] and said to me, "If you lay it down as certain that they can be kept, then you will easily keep them, and they will not be hard. But if you come to imagine that they cannot be kept by man, then you will not keep them. Now I say to you, If you do not keep them, but neglect them, you will not be saved, nor your children, nor your house, since you have already determined for yourself that these commandments cannot be kept by man." -Shepherd of Hermas, ~150AD, Commandment 12.3-4

Morality without God

2008-02-08T17:29:00.000+13:00

Some Christians I speak to are convinced that morality cannot exist without God. Or, alternatively are convinced that the existence of morality proves the existence of God. They think that the alternative to belief in God is moral nihilism. I get the impression that they think a country full of atheists would instantly disintegrate into anarchy as everyone would go out and murder, riot, steal and so forth... So here's a few little exercises to show why all of the above ideas are completely misguided.

Imagine you are a person who does not believe in God. If you were such a person, would you think that murder is an act that harms people? Of course you would. Would you be happy about the idea of someone murdering you or one of your family or a friend? Of course not. Since you care about yourself and various other people in your life, you have a desire that no harm comes to them because you value their well-being.

So you'd want to prevent people killing them. Indeed, you'd want to stop people from causing any sort of serious harm to those you care about. If you were such a person, would you prefer to live in a society that permitted murder and where hundreds of people were murdered every day, or one where murder was illegal and a relatively rare thing? Obviously, you'd prefer to live in a society where murder was rare because you don't want those you care for to be harmed.

In other words you would view murder as a bad thing because it causes harm to those whose well-being you value, and you would want your society to prohibit and condemn murder by making it illegal and discourage it. The same applies for any other behavior you would consider harmful to those you value. Conversely any behaviors you deem beneficial to those you value, you would want your society to encourage and applaud.

Each atheist in society would be like you - being against behaviors that cause harm to people and being supportive of behaviors that are beneficial to people, because they in turn have those whose well-being they care about. All these people would want to see their society use its laws and customs to discourage, condemn and prohibit conduct that harms others and to encourage, praise and allow conduct that helps others. This atheist society would label many things "right" and allow them and label many other things "wrong" and disallow them. They would have a system of morality and do so without believing in God.

Jesus and the apostles on homosexuality

2008-02-07T10:09:00.000+13:00

I was asked: do you really believe that Jesus and the apostles considered homosexual activity to be acceptable?

The gospels do not depict Jesus making any explicit statements on this topic. Nor is there much reason to think that his part of the world was familiar with concepts of sexual orientation or committed homosexual relationships as we would know them today. So to answer this question we have to speculate about Jesus’ reaction might have been to concepts he didn’t know about… so let the rampant speculation begin…

Jews in general at the time were against homosexual practices as they knew and understood them. Therefore we might think that Jesus, being a Jew, would have also held such a view. Alternatively we could consider that Jesus' ministry was focused on supporting, helping, and endorsing the oppressed minorities that the Jewish culture of his time was against. That in turn might lend us to speculate that Jesus would have opposed the Jewish view on this issue and supported homosexuals. I think however that if we apply the principles Jesus' stood for to the modern issues of homosexuality there is only one answer: By the principles Jesus taught, stood for and depicted in his ministry, the challenges he mounted against traditional Jewish moral and social viewpoints, lead me to believe that were he to speak on today’s issues he would uphold the rights of homosexuals. (Liberation theology has, I think, in general correctly grounded itself in Jesus' biblical ministry.)

Would the apostles have considered homosexuality acceptable? Well that is a very interesting question. The apostles struggled for years with understanding the implications of Jesus' ministry and values when applied to circumstances Jesus hadn't explicitly dealt with - most notably its application to the question of circumcision of Gentiles. I see us today as being like the apostles and having to struggle with the question of how Jesus' teachings play out in a new area that was not addressed by him. It took them years and more than one argument to reach a consensus (if indeed they ever did?) about circumcision of Gentiles, so we're in good company. I can only speculate that most/all of the apostles were, by default, against homosexuality because the Jews were (and time and again the Jewish apostles show they default to Jewish values unless some situation causes them to think deeply about how the teachings and values of Jesus might change these). Like them, we are being faced with an issue today in a way that has caused us to reflect deeply on it to a degree never done before when we took our assumed tradition for granted.

Paul is the only apostle to mention homosexuality in his writings and only does so once IMO (ie 1 Cor 6:9, I believe for exegetical reasons that Romans 1:26-27 is part of a speech by Paul's opponents). Paul is somewhat infamous in scholarship for the tensions that lie within his own ethical framework. He argues that Christians are bound by the spirit of the law not its letter, and that the entire law is summarized in the love of ones neighbour as themselves. This suggests a virtue-ethic moral framework where a good action is defined as one characterized by benevolence. (Which IMO as a moral philosopher is a really powerful and logical framework, and I myself would endorse it) Yet at other times, Paul defaults back to a Jewish rule-based ethic that is founded on a list of "do"s and "don't"s based on the Jewish Law. For example Paul gets upset when his Corinthian converts with whom he lived for years had so imbibed his spirit-of-the-law ethic and "freedom from the law" claims that their actions which logically flowed from these shocked his Jewish sensibilities. Many scholars have commented on the uneasy tension that thus exists within Paul's own ethics as his framework of "freedom" and "spirit-of-the-law based on love" battle the list of "do"s and "don't"s that have been ingrained into him from his life as a Jew. His love-framework leads him to make great statements of equality in line with Jesus' teachings, like "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." Yet the ramifications of this truly revolutionary egalitarian statement are not carried out fully in Paul's program. His biases creep back in - eg he doesn't allow woman to talk in churches, they should have long hair etc where he capitulates to cultural views rather than allow his ethical theory full reign. The fact that he buys into societies gender-roles battles with the egalitarianism that he'd learned from Christ. One major ethical conflict that shaped Paul’s life and ministry was the fact that as a Jew he had bought into Jewish racial/cultural roles of "Jew vs Greek" and this battled with the egalitarian principle that he saw in Christ's teachings. Paul's egalitarian won out on the race/culture issue and he made that his life focus, but it seems that he never fully let Jesus' egalitarian teachings flower with regard to the gender roles, or slavery issues.

Gender roles were of huge importance in the society of their day - a hundred or a thousand times more so than anything we in the West today can perhaps understand. Rejection of homosexuality in their culture was founded on an emphasis on gender roles. For example, Philo (a first century Jew) argues that homosexual acts lead one partner to act like a woman which is so bad that it deserves the death penalty (because in his eyes manliness is the ultimate virtue), and that the other partner is equally deserving of death for causing the other man to act like a woman. The speech Paul quotes in Romans 1 also ties homosexuality to gender roles. Modern societies with firm gender roles (eg Arab ones) are also firm in rejecting homosexual acts on the grounds that it causes a man to act like a woman. However in our Western society which has let biblical egalitarianism shape our view of gender roles, where we truly put into practice Paul's statement of "there is no longer male and female" we find that homosexuality seems to most people to be acceptable. For if no distinction is to be made between men and women in the social roles they are permitted to take, then it follows there should be no social rules about when genders take part in sexual acts.

Hence, I would argue that though Paul rejected homosexual activity it was due to him failing to fully work through on the subject of gender roles the egalitarian teachings of Christ that he preached. The moral advances he achieved and advocated in the area of Jew-Gentile relations were never accompanied by a corresponding thorough-going challenge to his society's view of gender-roles or slavery, and this is depicted by many of his writings. In today's society we have put into practice the principles that he preached on the subject of gender roles and slavery, and have come to see that it thus supersedes what he said about woman having long hair, covering their heads, not speaking in Church, and having slaves obey their masters. Time and again on these issues we have determined that the clear ethical spirit of the New Testament needs to be worked out fully in practice in a way that the New Testament Christians themselves were not able to do, and that the ethical spirit of the biblical witness needs to trump the letter of the law when the views they express consistent with their culture are not justified in light of the underlying principles of Christian ethics they are espousing. The next logical step in our egalitarian abolition of gender roles is an acceptance of homosexuality.

I see there as being two basic biblical ethical principles advocated in the New Testament: (1) A love ethic, (2) Egalitarianism. (The second one is really a subset of the first, and so the first is essentially the overarching biblical principle) The love ethic expounded first by Jesus and subsequently by his apostles is that an action has a morally good intent if and only if it is done out of love, and morally good consequences if and only if it is beneficial to those who are affected by it. In other words, morality is solely about benevolence, and the good or harm that our actions bring to others. This principle is used ruthlessly by Jesus and the apostles against Jewish rituals and practices that the Jews saw as commanded by God. Early Christianity was insistent that such rituals had no moral value because they were not motivated by benevolence/love toward others. Today’s Western society due to its historically Christian origins has learned well the lesson of this love ethic and as a result it pervades public thinking and laws in a way that it has ironically actually failed to pervade the thinking of conservative Christians (who usually endorse a divine-command ethic). Since the general view is that homosexuality is neither malevolent nor brings harm to others, it is generally deemed a morally permissible act under a love ethic. Furthermore those who are anti-homosexual and/or want to forbid homosexuals expressing and living the love they feel for others are acting in a way that is contrary to such an ethic (hence why I would deem such opposition unchristian).

Anglicans, schisms and homosexuality

2008-02-05T09:36:00.000+13:00

I was having a read of this article about the latest Anglican shall-we-split-over-homosexuality antics, by NT Wright. I was a little surprised to see him misquote Acts 27:30-31 in the first line (he says "soldiers" when it should be "sailors"). But the article makes for sad reading in general. It seems the schismatics are at it again: In the Anglican church there seems to be a core group who would like nothing better to split their church. It seems to me (as an outside observer) that several of them are out for their own gain and have been quite pleased with the power and influence that stirring up conflict has already brought them, and they can see even more power on the horizon if they manage to split off a faction of the Anglican church and gain full control of it.

What some of this group is doing with the power they already have is deeply disturbing too. Peter Akinola, one of the leaders of the faction, in 2006 responded to Muslim violence against Christians in his country by announcing in his capacity as a Christian leader of Nigeria that "May we at this stage remind our Muslim brothers that they do not have the monopoly of violence in this nation." Eighty Muslims were killed by 'Christians' in a subsequent backlash. I can only wonder why he has not been stripped of his rank and excommunicated from the church for this... He clearly knows nothing of biblical teachings of love, and so his attempts to "correct" others on issues of biblical morality are laughable.

What I do not understand in this debate is the schismatic faction's strength of feeling on this issue. The number of times homosexuality is mentioned in the bible can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Another issue that occurs in the bible about as often - remarriage after divorce being adultery - was recently deemed acceptable by a general Anglican council without remotely the same degree of hue and cry. Apparently it is okay for people to live in committed adulterous relationships and for these to be sanctioned by the church, but it is apparently a matter of church-splitting importance if people live in committed homosexual relationships. I see a double-standard there. This group seems upset over the issue of homosexuality to an extent that is neither justified by the biblical texts nor logically consistent with their strength of feeling on other issues.

Honestly, I can only conclude that they are homophobic, lacking rational motivation for the degree of opposition on the issue but rather seriously affected by their emotions about it. Peter Akinola again comes to mind, as he has led a major movement in Nigeria against homosexuality and attempted to criminalize it. Perhaps someone might think that given the African Aids crisis he was acting out of concern for people and trying to prevent the spread of Aids, yet the statistics show that it is actually amorous heterosexual relationships that are the problem. The issue of homosexuality just seems to be one that gets people emotional in a way that other questions of divorce-and-remarriage don't. Even among non-Christians, I've observed people get far more vocal and have much stronger feelings about homosexuality than about many other issues. Something about it causes people to feel strongly (pro or con) in a way that other seemingly similar issues don't, and to be honest I'm not sure why this is.

As with all issues this one is often clouded by emotion. A lot of people make up their minds before studying the issue carefully and looking at the evidence. I find a lot of those Christians I talk to who feel strongly (pro or con) about the issue have only the tiniest acquaintance with what the bible says on the subject, virtually no grasp of relevant moral philosophical concepts, and little to no skill or training in careful exegesis of biblical passages. It is my experience and observation that, generally speaking, the majority of the most vocal and firm Christian advocates against homosexuality come from a demographic consisting of under-informed laymen. By contrast, the anecdotal evidence that has come to my attention shows that of those who have been through seminaries (and are thus, hopefully, somewhat more intelligent, more expert in exegeting the bible, and better at understanding moral philosophy than the average pew-sitter) the majority think homosexuality is okay. In my own city it seems to be the case that a few parishes contain a small group of people influential within the congregation who have decided to take a stand against homosexuality and they have told the remainder of their congregation that homosexuality is unbiblical and the rest of their congregation has unquestioningly accepted what they have been taught.

I'm a theologian-philosopher who has studied the biblical, exegetical, philosophical and theological issues carefully for years and concluded that homosexuality is definitely okay. (In fact I would go so far as to say that attempting to suppress or condemn homosexuality could be reasonably classed as un-Christian.) Yet time after time in discussion with lay Christians who are convinced the Christian and biblical position is to be against homosexuality (because their Pastor told them so, and pointed to a verse in the bible) I find that they simply know nothing of the issues that need to be considered before coming to any sort of conclusion. Time and again, they have simply believed others who sounded plausible and feel strongly about an issue they know virtually nothing about and are totally unqualified to have an opinion on.

Being "fair" to Pelagius

2008-01-11T11:45:00.000+13:00

This article caught my eye, in which the writer says:

In all fairness to Pelagius, one does not get the sense that he set out to intentionally subvert the true meaning of Grace within the New Testament.

Even when the writer is trying to be "fair" to Pelagius, the best he can do is say that Pelagius didn't really mean to teach terrible heresy. Whereas the writers' view of Augustine is:

St. Augustine, one of the most stalwart and adept defenders of the Faith in the history of the Church.

Such views seem typical of what is often written at the level of popular theology. The controversy is judged against the context of modern orthodoxy, and Augustine is made the hero and defender of orthodoxy and Pelagius the villain. The agenda of such presentations is to endorse and promote orthodox modern views on the subjects of sin and salvation, and Pelagius is judged for failing to hold modern doctrine.

In my opinion such views are ridiculous. Historical controversies ought to be seen in the context of history not modern theology. The facts of history are that Augustine was a massive doctrinal innovator in virtually every area of doctrine and Pelagius held what was roughly orthodox doctrine at that time. Augustine managed to use his political influence to get Pelagius condemned and this had a massively influence on subsequent Western Christianity. The top Lutheran doctrinal historian of the 20th century has called it "an injustice that made history" (Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, 313). Augustine's use of a serious Latin mistranslation to support his views is also infamous among scholars of historical doctrine. From a historical point of view it is clear that Pelagius was right and Augustine wrong.

However most theological articles aren't interested in mere facts of history, but only in labeling and condemning people based on whether other people agree with the author's own beliefs. For modern protestants and catholics, Augustine's doctrines agree better with their own than Pelagius', so the facts of history and Pelagius be damned. The thought that their own modern views have been inherited from Augustine's unjust victory over orthodoxy fifteen centuries ago does not seem to enter their mind...

Jewish => Judeanish?

2007-12-23T09:37:00.000+13:00

The view that "Jew" is a mistranslation seems to be popular amongst scholars at moment. Apparently the word should be "Judean". Now that's fine with me, so I'm changing my writing to stop using "Jew" terminology and I'm replacing it with "Judean" instead.

The problem comes though when I hit "Jewish". What is the new form of that word?
Judeanish?
Judish?
Judite?

Apparently Richard Horsley uses "Judhite". But is a person seeing that word really going to have a clue what it means, especially if I write for a popular audience rather than a scholarly one?

Jesus' Parables: Two Interpretations

2007-12-21T14:14:00.000+13:00

Many of Jesus' parable stories involve a powerful person. Each of these parables has essentially two possible interpretations, depending on who the hearer identifies the powerful person as:
1) God.
2) Unjust humans.
Each interpretation leads to quite a different meaning to the parable.

A common theme I've noticed in recent scholarship on the parables is to argue that modern Christians and/or the gospel writers often interpret parables as having meaning (1), when in fact Jesus more likely intended the parable to have meaning (2).

The parable most often cited an a clear example of this is the Parable of the Talents. In the traditional Christian reading, the lord is God who gives to his servants differing levels of abilities and lets them make what they will of them. God then judges everyone at the end of time and rewards them based on what use they made of the gifts given to them, and he also destroys anyone who didn't acknowledge him as their king.

However recent scholarship seems to almost unanimously be of the view that in fact the ruler in the parable is meant to depict an unjust rich human ruler, who expects his servants to exploit others in order to make him more money because he is greedy, and who crushes those who rightly protest against him. Reading 1 thus sees the parable's theme as "make good use of the gifts God has given you", while reading 2 sees it as a critique of greedy and unjust human rulers and a warning about what happens to those who directly challenge such people.

Interestingly, it turns out that in the parables that depict a main lord, master, ruler or farmer figure as focus of the parable, can be read either with reading 1 or 2 and a plausible meaning extracted from them. The question this raises then, is which is the correct or intended meaning? (or are both equally plausible and true?)

A lot of scholars whose interest lies in studying Jesus' ministry against its socio-historical context seem extremely confident that the original meaning is almost always reading 2 and that the gospels err quite often in the explanations they provide for the parables (since they usually favour reading 1).

I'm not quite sure what to think on this. I find a lot of the reading 2 constructions quite interesting and socio-historically seem very plausible, but I am hesitant to out-and-out affirm that the gospels are absolutely wrong in their provided interpretations of certain parables.

James' Dunn's NPP essay online

2007-12-20T09:41:00.000+13:00

James Dunn's famous 1983 essay The New Perspective on Paul is now available online.

It's a very worthwhile read. (Though it requires knowledge of covenantal nomism to make sense)

A Cup that's not of God's wrath

2007-12-18T11:01:00.002+13:00

But Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" (Mark 10:38)

It appears to be becoming a popular argument in Evangelical circles that the presence of the word "cup" here implies or proves Penal Substitution.

Now you might well ask how any sane person could possibly reason their way from the word "cup" to the doctrine of Penal Substitution. Well, apparently the "logic" goes that in several passages in the Old Testament prophets they speak of "the cup of God's wrath", and therefore Jesus' use of the word "cup" refers to God's wrath, and therefore he is expecting to take God's wrath upon himself as a Penal Substitute.

Such ridiculously tenuous logic seems like a bad joke. It reminds me of Liam Goligher's equally stellar claim in The Jesus Gospel that a reference to the herb hyssop in one of the psalms proves Penal Substitution. Yet this "logic" is used by people including NT Wright (The Challenge of Jesus, 87; Matthew for Everyone, 60-61), Thomas Schreiner (The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views, 91) and the writers of Pierced For Our Transgressions (68-70). More than one of these cites Bolt's The Cross from a Distance (69-71) as source of this idea.

Apart from the wholly unconvincing and ridiculously tenuous logic, there are two main problems with such a claim. The first problem is that the Bible uses the word "cup" as a metaphor for a fate, which can be either a positive or negative fate. A few examples of a positive fate include:

The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot. (Psa 16:5)
you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. (Psa 23:5)
I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord (Psa 116:13)

Similarly a couple of examples of a negative fate include:

On the wicked he will rain coals of fire and sulfur; a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup. (Psa 11:6)
A cup of horror and desolation is the cup of your sister Samaria (Ezek 23:33)

People God is wrathful towards do, unsurprisingly, experience a negative fate, and cup language is sometimes used to describe this fate. However the use of the cup metaphor itself is not limited to God's wrath and hence the word "cup" does not mean "suffering God's wrath".

The second, and most important problem with the claim, is the verse that follows Mark 10:38:

The disciples replied, "We are able." Then Jesus said to them, "The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; (Mark 10:39)

Here Jesus explicitly says they will drink the same cup as himself. If the "cup" he is drinking from means "Penal Substitution", then the disciples must also be participating in Penal Substitution. Yet this bizarre conclusion shows that the exegesis being proposed for verse 38 is ridiculous.

The craziest thing of all is that the writers of Pierced For Our Transgressions are aware of verse 39 and hence know the exegesis of verse 38 they are proposing is ludicrous. Yet they comment in a footnote: "Jesus' point [in vs 39] is that their sufferings will be patterned on his, not that they will be identical in every respect. Neither James nor John will die under God's wrath in place of others." So it seems that when they feel like it, "cup" means "Penal Substitution", and a verse later, when it's no longer convenient with their theology the same cup suddenly stops being Penal Substitution. I just can't fathom the stupidity...

Not a Christian?

2007-12-14T09:20:00.000+13:00

Because someone recommended them to me, I listened yesterday to a few Theology Unplugged podcasts. (I didn't think they were that great and won't be listening to any more of them. I found them too biased towards Reformed theology) A few things they said made me laugh somewhat though, here's one:

A series of two podcasts was about the definition of 'Christian', and what a person needs to believe before it is accurate to apply the label of 'Christian' to them, as compared to those who call themselves a 'Christian' for no good reason. I was intrigued to hear one of speakers give a fairly succinct summary of my view of the New Testament's theology: That Jesus lived a life that pleased God, and therefore if we imitate Jesus' life we too will similarly be able to be called please God and be called righteous. (See, for example, Paul on the Cross: Reconstructing the Apostle's Story of Redemption by David Brondos for a detailed scholarly analysis of why this is Paul's soteriological view) Anyway, they all agreed that such a view is by definition not 'Christian', and apparently anyone who holds such a view and gives themselves the label Christian is simply kidding themselves. So, sorry, St Paul... it's decided: You don't qualify as a "Christian".

By the same token these guys decided that most Catholics could not be called Christians since they don't hold to Salvation by Faith Alone. Apparently you need to actually believe in salvation by faith alone to be saved, rather than merely have faith. (Because I personally would argue, that if you believe in salvation by faith alone, therefore anyone who has both faith and works [as the Catholics think you should] must by definition be saved because they have faith.)

Another of the podcasts touched on atonement doctrine. They were agreeing that penal substitution was new in the 11th century and that the Ransom from Satan view had been taught prior to that. But despite this, they were decided that the Ransom from Satan view was definitely heretical, and seemed to think it that holding it rather than penal substitution could have adverse effects on the salvation of the believer. (I often seem to get the impression from those of Reformed persuasions, rightly or wrongly, that very few people prior to the Reformation are going to heaven.)

But then, what would I know, since apparently I am by definition not a Christian. Oh well, at least I'm in good company, along with most Catholics, most people who thought they were 'Christians' prior to the 11th century, St Paul, and apparently the Calvinist scholar Michael Bird.

Pistis Christou: An Adjectival Genitive

2007-12-10T15:06:00.000+13:00

The Pistis Christou debate has almost exclusively focused on debating whether it is a subjective or objective genitive. Now obviously there are more types of genitive than this, but virtually zero articles on the subject seem to devote any thought to these other possibilities.

It has long been my view that Pistis Christou is an adjectival genitive. That is to say that the genitive Christou is acting as an adjective, and thus essentially means "Christ-like".

Pistis Christou = Christ-like faithfulness

An example in English is "He's got the courage of a lion and the strength of Samson." Here the genitives function as adjectives qualifying the main nouns and mean 'lion-like' courage and 'Samson-like' strength.

A simple table categorizing the objective, subjective and adjectival interpretations of Pistis Christou is helpful:

Genitive type	Who has faithfulness	Object of faithfulness
Objective	Humans	Christ
Subjective	Christ	God
Adjectival	Humans	God

From this table we can see that the adjectival genitive shares common features with both the subjective and objective genitives. It makes humans the ones having faith like the objective genitive and God the target of their faith like the subjective genitive.

Since the adjectival genitive is essentially a hybrid in this way it can incorporate and explain evidence for both the subjective and objective genitive viewpoints. For example, in the discussion An Evening Conversation on Jesus and Paul between James Dunn and NT Wright, Dunn says he believes that the evidence points to humans having the faith and Wright says he believes the the evidence points to God being the object of the faith, and therefore they each take their evidence as proof respectively of objective and subjective views. From the table we see that both observations agree with the adjectival view.

More importantly, what I consider to be the single strongest piece of evidence in the entire pistis Christou debate fits only with the adjectival view, and does not fit with either the subjective or objective views (and thus is generally ignored). This is the parallel between Romans 3:26 and 4:16:

Rom 4:16 tw ek pistews Abraam

Rom 3:26 tov ek pistews Christou

This almost exact parallel in structure and wording occurs only half a chapter after Paul's heavy use of pistis Christou. All major bible versions unanimously translate 4:16 as "those who share the faith of Abraham", because the context of 4:16 is quite restrictive in clearly determining the meaning - it demands an adjectival interpretation and permits neither the subjective nor objective reading. The verbal identity of the parallel implies that Rom 3:26 should be read as "those who share the faith of Christ", ie as an adjectival genitive.

Another similar parallel is comes from Paul's talk about us having the mind of Christ (ie Christ-like minds). In Phil 2:5f he encourages the Christians to "have the same mind in you that was in Jesus Christ". And in 1 Cor 2:16 he says that we have Christ-like minds:

1 Cor 2:16 noun Christou exomen - "we have the mind of Christ"

This is an example of Paul using Christou to qualify a noun, and Christou being an adjectival genitive. In this way pistis Christou exomen would mean that we have Christ-like faith.

Summary
I believe that the adjectival reading of pistis Christou is superior to either the objective or subjective readings. Obviously I have only covered a small proportion of the arguments regarding pistis Christou in this post, but it is my experience that the adjectival genitive deals consistently well with the evidence and is able to account for data that each of the other theories count in their favor. As we have seen the adjectival reading also accounts for key data that neither the subjective nor objective readings can explain. Key parallels with Paul's use elsewhere demonstrate the adjectival genitive to be Paul's likely meaning.

Finally I have two questions. What is the best translation for the adjectival genitive: Is it better to talk of "Christ-like faithfulness" or a person who "shares the faithfulness of Christ" or who "has a level of faithfulness like that which Christ himself had"? Secondly, is 'adjectival genitive' the best and clearest name for the type of genitive I am trying to advocate it as being? (I'm far from an expert on naming genitive types!)

The New Perspective is not so new

2007-12-07T14:46:00.000+13:00

In Martin Luther's commentary on Galatians he accuses most of the church before him of holding New Perspective views:

Here again I warn that Paul is not speaking about the Ceremonial Law, as the sophists continually imagine. Origen and Jerome were the originators of this error. They were extremely dangerous teachers on this point; all the scholastics followed them, and in our day Erasmus approves and confirms their error. (1535 Commentary on Galatians, 2:21)

In his commentary, Luther pays a great deal of attention to dealing with this interpretation, and seems to see it as the traditional view. I am surprised that so little attention has been paid in the New Perspective on Paul debate to the presence of NPP views among the early church fathers. I have not seen any comprehensive analysis given by any scholar on the topic.

I have haphazardly over the course of time (and with the assistance of others) collected a list of relevant and semi-relevant references myself. Here's my far-from-comprehensive list:

Held 'New' Perspective on Paul:
Irenaeus, Against Heresy Book 4, Ch 13-16
Ambrosiater, Commentary on Romans
Pelagius, Commentary on Romans
(Less clear:)
Justin Martyr, Dialogue Ch 10-11
Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 6:6
Ignatius, Magnesians 8
Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 4:33

Held 'Old' Perspective on Paul:
Origen, Commentary on Romans
Jerome, Epistle 133, 8
John Chrysostom (He can seem quite pro-NPP sometimes though: eg Homilies on Galatians, ch 1)

Interestingly, from this list we can see that Luther's claim that Origen and Jerome taught this is incorrect. It seems that Luther simply disliked them so he pinned this 'error' on them.

Circumcision is self-righteousness?

2007-12-05T15:46:00.000+13:00

James McGrath has a good post on the New Perspective, in which he makes the highly worthwhile observation:

Paul keeps coming back to one particular work of the Law: circumcision. But few seem to notice that this is probably the least appropriate ‘work of the Law’ for him to choose to represent or symbolize self-justification and self-righteousness.

I have commented in the past on a similar thing with regard to Philippians 3:

When we look at the description of Judaism he gives we find that half of what he says has nothing whatsoever to do with human effort or striving to attain righteousness, but rather is about his Jewish birth

It's just so clear, time and again that what Paul is talking about is being Judean and following Judean customs, not attempts to gain favor with God through moral self-righteousness.

James McGrath goes on to note that in exegeting Galatians, the old perspective starts turning to custard when it gets to the last couple of chapters. There Paul, after writing his virulent attacks against works of the law, turns round and says "I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do [evil] things will not inherit the kingdom of God." (5:21), "so let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap [eternal life], if we do not give up." (6:9) After spending five chapters denying, attacking and lambasting works-righteousness (according to the old perspective), Paul suddenly turns round and not only endorses it, but buys the t-shirt as well.

Nor is this behavior confined to Galatians. In my post on Philippians 3 I noted:

Then when we look at the description of his Christian life that follows we find the entire passage is about striving to achieve righteousness and 'win' the race, and exerting all possible effort. So far from a Judaism of "effort" being contrasted with a Christian "lack of effort and reliance on grace". [Paul, in fact] discusses a Judaism that relies as much on grace as it does on effort and a Christianity that relies totally on effort.

Either Paul is schizophrenic or the old perspective is wrong, it's as simple as that.

Faith and Works in the ECFs

2007-12-05T09:39:00.000+13:00

One popular way of reconciling justification by faith with judgment by works is to appeal to Augustine's double-justification scheme, whereby at conversion we are justified by faith then live subsequent spirit-empowered lives of holiness and are at the final judgment judged on our deeds.

My own interest lies in the pre-Nicene Fathers' theology, rather than Augustine's (which is very different on most issues). Offhand, I cannot think of any evidence in any of the pre-Nicene writers to suggest they held to Augustine's double-justification scheme. So how do the pre-Nicene writers reconcile faith and works? Unfortunately that's not a question that's very easy to answer.

Universally in pre-Nicene writers, a strong belief in a final and eternal judgment by works is attested to. It is stated multiple times in most surviving documents and never denied. It is listed time and again as one of the major and basic tenets of Christianity.

Mention of justification by faith however is quite erratic. It is generally not mentioned very often. The Shepherd of Hermas, the longest document of the Apostolic Fathers, is all about judgment by works and just doesn't mention faith. Justin Martyr time and again repeats there will be a final judgment according to our good or bad deeds, and then just occasionally uses the word "faith" where one has come to expect him to say "works". First Clement emphasizes the importance of good works and how a doctrine of final judgment by works is to be taught to Christian children.

The majority of writers of this period follow Justin Martyr's style: Most of the time a final judgment by works is heavily emphasized, but on random occasion this will be swapped with justification by faith without warning, as if there was no substantial difference between the two. This leads me to believe that by and large the ECFs saw them as in some way virtually equivalent or synonymous (the alternative thesis being that they just had no clue about how to reconcile faith and works so swapped arbitrarily between them in a cognitively dissonant way).

The theory that seems to me to make most sense out of what they say, is to see faithfulness as the underlying heart attitude which works flow from and that God judges our heart not our actions per se. Thus they can talk about the doing of good deeds, having the right heart, being a good person, and being faithful to God interchangeably as ways of speaking about the heart and character of a person which is what God judges.

Another line of evidence to follow is that there is to some degree a clear demarcation between those who only talk about works, and those who use "faith" regularly. Now if you are willing to hypothetically consider an opposition between Paul and James within the New Testament on the subject of faith vs works, you could potentially construe the second century writers as following one or the other of these traditions and thus see a serious rift dividing the Christian theology of the second century into two camps. (The division within the second century documents is even more severe than what is found within the NT.) But there is no documentary evidence that Christians in the second century ever got into any arguments with each other on faith vs works issues, no suggestion that any such lines were drawn within orthodoxy. Furthermore, the group of writers who do use 'faith' terminology also use works terminology regularly. But if we want to deny any massive rift within orthodoxy, we have to really conclude that the theology of the authors that didn't use the word faith is substantially identical to the theology of the authors that do. Therefore, we'd want to conclude: Whatever the authors using the word faith meant by it, their ideas and theology could be expressed in language that talked about works without substantial loss of meaning. In other words, we'd conclude that faith and works have some sort of pretty compatible and substantially similar meaning.

So, when I read scholarly word studies about how pistis ("faith") was actually used in ancient times and find them concluding that it generally meant things like loyal obedience and faithfulness, I'm inclined to think "case closed, problem solved: 'faith' when you translate it right means something pretty synonymous with works, and that's why the pre-Nicene Fathers are generally happy to swap between them or use one or the other."

Carson reviews VanLandingham's work

2007-12-04T12:03:00.000+13:00

Today I was looking through the Review of Biblical Literature list and saw there was a review of Chris VanLandingham's Judgment and Justification in Early Judaism and the Apostle Paul. I confess I got a bit excited upon seeing it.

In my view this is one of the best biblical studies books written in recent years, and I would put it along side EP Sanders' Paul and Palestinian Judaism in terms of thoroughness and quality of scholarship and importance. (Note that I have both minor and major disagreements with both these books, and bear in mind that VanLandingham is writing against Sanders)

I have been highly dissappointed by the reactions that VanLandingham's work has received from bloggers so far. Reactions have included "Oh my God, he denies Penal Substitution! Heretic! Can you believe someone would do that?", and someone who's only skimmed the book accusing VanLandingham of not saying the very things he does say. As a result I have been rolling my eyes a lot recently. So I was looking forward to reading a more sane review, by a respectable scholar writing for RBL...

...then I saw the reviewer was DA Carson. My eyes rolled. A frustrated sigh may well have escaped my lips. Whoops. It's a bit like inviting the Leader of the Opposition to publicly comment on the Government's latest policies... 'Biased' would be too mild a word for it. So, somewhat curious about just how bad it would get and doing my best ironic smile, I read the review.

In the first half, Carson summarizes VanLandingham's work, mostly by quoting the man himself and does a good job of it. Then he begins the second half by recounting a story about how some PHD students decide their thesis in advance and then study the data and force it to agree, and some study the data and then draw conclusions. While reading this I thought "well, VanLandingham talks about how long it took for a thesis topic to come together at the start of his book, so he's clearly more in the second group, so I wonder where Carson's going with this?" Carson however asserts that VanLandingham is one of those people who has formed his opinions in advance and tried to force-fit the data to the thesis, and the work was biased from the outset and the results worthless. I cracked up laughing. Carson is calling VanLandingham biased?! Carson is accusing someone else of forcing evidence to fit a thesis, and of biased scholarship? That's the blackest pot in town calling the kettle black if ever I saw it.

The remainder of the review is, somewhat amusingly, Carson comparing VanLandingham's findings against Carson's own conservative-Protestant anti-New Perspective beliefs, and systematically judging them based on how well they agree with Carson's beloved preconceived doctrine. Carson is happy to agree that Jews believed in the importance of works and that Jews at the time of the New Testament were advocates of works-righteousness (because of course Carson wants to believe those nasty Jewish taught works-righteousness which he wants to see Paul as attacking). Carson is not at all prepared to agree that this Jewish view is a reasonable interpretation of what the Old Testament says though (since Carson wants to see the Old Testament as agreeing with his own theology) so he refuses to accept VanLandingham's case that the Jews had understood their own scriptures in a reasonable manner.

Carson then gets hung up on the fact that VanLandingham implies in passing that he holds to Libertarian Free Will (Carson being a compatibilist). I rolled my eyes at Carson here, since this is an irrelevant tangent. VanLandingham's interpretation of Justification, which is really pretty similar to the Roman Catholic one and fairly well-evidenced, Carson dismisses in one sentence as "not sophisticated" (which made me frown in puzzlement). Apparently VanLandingham commits the cardinal sin of mentioning Paul's view of election without exegeting Carson's favorite verse (do I care? Hmm, no.). And then Carson writes something that made my mouth fall open and my eyes widen:

He does not see that in its context Rom 4:5 presupposes that Paul understands God’s “justification” of Abraham to be the justification of the wicked;

What the...? I'm sorry, but one of my fields of expertise is Romans 1-4 and let me just respond again to Carson's comment here: What?!? Romans 4 is about how Abraham was uncircumcised when he was justified, so the context of 4:5 is the justification of the uncircumcised not the morally wicked. Unless Carson wants to argue that Paul saw Abraham as a morally wicked person? (I can't think that even Carson would want to argue for that one) Apparently VanLandingham's findings don't fit well with Carson's idea of "grace" either (who would have thought it?) so he rejects this (mere evidence cannot of course hope to compete with Carson's faith).

Finally Carson makes some observations that are actually useful. He notes that the topic of reconciling justification by faith and judgment by works is an interesting and important one (hear, hear!), and he praises VanLandingham for his subject (though not, I note, for the obviously massive effort VanLandingham has put into this huge study). He observes that some of the details of the way VanLandingham has chosen to reconcile faith and works "approaches the bizarre" (I totally agree) and highlights the most obvious problem with VanLandingham's reconstruction accurately. But then just when the going was getting good he finishes by admitting that he didn't understand part of VanLandingham's view (a part which VanLandingham had clearly spelled out, so I'm left wondering whether Carson actually read the book properly).

The Three Ways

2007-12-03T16:19:00.001+13:00

In all the many and various theological works I have read, attempts to reconcile the ideas of "justification by faith" and "judgment by works" have always boiled down to three basic options:

1) Get rid of one.
2) Hold that both are true, but are different events and criteria. (ie "faith" and "works" are different criteria, and one is judged at conversion and the other after death.)
3) Hold that both are true and the same thing. (ie the phrases "justification by faith" and "[positive] judgment by works" are synonymous because "faith" and "works" are synonyms as are "justification" and "positive judgment by God".)

Conservative Protestantism has historically opted for 1, saying that any judgment by works is about rewards but not eternal destinies, or saying that passages about a final eternal judgment by deeds are hypothetical and no one can actually live up to God's standard.

Many recent scholars have opted for option 2, arguing that justification by faith is an event that happens at conversion and that a judgment by works happens at the final eternal judgment. Thus people come to faith and are justified in the present, and will be judged by their works in the afterlife. The difficulty comes in making sense of this proposed double-justification scheme. The simplest way to do it is to say that to those who come to faith, God gives them the spirit and union with Christ which sanctifies them and empowers them to live a life pleasing to God which results in them passing the final judgment according to deeds. Virtually all modern Protestant scholars I have seen write on this subject, would opt for some variation of this view (eg NT Wright, EP Sanders, Garlington, VanLandingham, Yinger, Stanley, Bird, Rainbow) and it seems to have been Augustine's view and is also pretty much the modern Roman Catholic view.

The third option has been written off without due consideration, and I believe it is the correct one. I think the cause of its undue dismissal is that protestant tradition has attempted to define faith fundamentally over and against works, as meaning "belief and not doing". Yet all the recent linguistic studies of pistis have concluded that it means faithfulness, steadfast loyalty, and perseverance. Is it possible to be "faithful" to God without "doing" God's will? Hardly. But as soon as we say that faithfulness to God absolutely necessitates the doing of God's will, and employ the NPP observation that the "works of Law" being contrasted to "faithfulness" by Paul are "Judean customs" rather than "the doing of God's will", then the dichotomy between faithfulness and works melts away and Paul's theology turns into: "we are judged by God on our faithful obedience to God's will rather than the following the customs of Judea". Justification by faith and judgment by works collapse into a unity, all the difficult questions are answered, and the resultant theology is simple, coherent, and somewhat self-evident. While option 2 is based on Augustine's theology, I think option 3 coheres much better with the pre-Nicene Fathers.

Why are Calvinists / Reformed so divisive?

2007-12-02T16:49:00.000+13:00

Scot McKnight has published a letter from a pastor asking for help with a small and vocal group of Calvinists in his church who are being divisive over theology and not prepared to live and let live. Over 200 reader comments have confirmed that a massive number of people have had the same experiences. Scot's response thread is similar, as is Denny Burk's thread.

My own experiences and observations over the years have been clear and unambiguous - people of Calvinist / Reformed persuasions are vastly, vastly, more prone to: vocal condemnations of what they perceive as inaccurate theology, extremely harsh criticism, uncompromising insistence on adherence to their doctrine, exclusion and rejection of those failing to adhere, extreme arrogance and condescension, ungraciousness, disinterest in learning about the views of others, unwillingness to tolerate others in love or compromise, relentlessness in zeal, venomous, promoting their own views as Truth and fighting against and eradicating others.

It appears to me that this has been a growing worldwide problem for some years now. One poster describes it aptly as "a war-time mentality", which I think really is insightful, and numerous posters blame John Piper for promoting such a mentality. I doubt it's Piper alone, but it does seem to be the case that modern Calvinist apologists are prone to preaching the need to "fight" for the gospel truth and "defend" it against those who would "attack" and undermine and deny "the central truths of the faith".

What interests me is the question of why they are acting this way. Is it something in their theology which naturally leads to this sort of behavior? Perhaps. I can think of a number of possible reasons offhand:
(1) Emphasis on the importance of humans doing nothing in salvation is going to lead to less Christ-likeness in the lives of believers.
(2) Emphasis on justification by faith alone has a tendency to be interpreted as justification by belief alone, which gets interpreted as "justified by correct beliefs", and hence extreme importance is placed on correct belief.
(3) Because the emphasis is on faith alone, their Christianity is only doctrine. So often among other Christians, Christianity is about how you live and doctrine is ignored. Whereas the emphasis on faith alone cuts off the rest of Christianity and hence doctrine must be contended for because it is the center and only part of the faith in a way that it is not for other Christians.
(4) Belief in predestination is likely to lead to less evangelism, and more focus on the saved - eg teaching them correct doctrine.
(5) Their belief in the lack on any innate value in humanity is more likely to result in disdain and a lack of love toward fellow humans.
(6) The doctrine of predestination is one that a large number of people find morally and emotionally repugnant on the grounds that it is unkind and unloving. People that accept such a doctrine are thus more likely to have greater acceptance of behaviors that other Christians consider unkind and unloving.
(7) The doctrine of predestination provides an example of God arbitrarily excluding and condemning people, when imitated among humans this leads to exclusive and divisive behavior.

One poster suggests that it is "as much about a culture as it is about a theological position" and that it is the culture of harsh criticism and exclusiveness within these groups that breeds its own. I can think of a few cultural, rather than theological reasons why this might be the case:
(A) Perhaps the origin of the doctrine during the period of turmoil and persecution in the Reformation has left this sub-culture with a war mentality? I'm inclined to doubt it could have lasted that long without other more important factors.
(B) The level of propaganda / indoctrination of members among Reformed churches seems to vastly outweigh anything among other denominations. Members are trained far more heavily in their tradition than what other Christian traditions do. The subsequent zealousness with which the members defend their faith is probably greatly a result of how well they understand their own tradition and how much they see it as their own.
(C) Similarly the culture in these churches seems to place a lot of emphasis on "preaching the gospel" to believers on an extremely regular basis. Most other denominations have no interest in preaching the gospel to believers. Thus "the truth of the gospel" becomes more important to these churches because they hear it often.
(D) Up until 30 years ago the vast majority of conservative biblical scholarship supported Calvinism, but in the last 30 years conservative biblical scholarship has vastly improved for a variety of reasons and as a result has systematically undermined, demolished and disproved the exegesis on which Calvinist ideas were based. Calvinist apologists have responded by attempting to fight scholarly biblical exegesis which has had a trickle down effect and infected their followers to "fight" for their gospel.
(E) It's a recent fad, it will pass like all fads do. Perhaps certain recent writers have contributed by writing works in an inflammatory fashion.
(F) The introduction of the internet has affected Calvinism in a way it hasn't affected other Christian denominations so much (probably because Calvinism focuses more on ideas rather than practice, which are thus more easily discussed).

So those are a range of possible factors that I can come up with. I'm left wondering if I've thought of the right factors, and if so, which of the factors I've thought of are the most important ones. My best guess at what I see as the most likely explanation is: Calvinism has lost massive ground in biblical studies in 30 years with the majority of conservative biblical scholars now agreeing that fundamental doctrines of creedal Calvinism were built on biblical misinterpretation, which has led popular Calvinist Apologists and Scholars to launch a defensive attack to "fight" for their gospel and so they see themselves as being on a war-footing which as a mindset has filtered down to their followers, and done so much more than it once would have as a result of the internet, and the situation has been worsened by a number of theological and cultural factors which cause Calvinists to be more than usually prone to this sort of behavior.

Paul vs Empire?

2007-12-01T23:09:00.000+13:00

A recording of the SBL discussion-debate is available on the topic of whether Paul's letters were intentionally and deeply anti-Rome: here (scroll to the bottom of that post).
John Barclay takes the negative, Tom Wright the positive, and then Robert Jewett comments on both (and he is ultra-positive).

Though two focii of my studies have been Paul's theology and the socio-cultural background to the NT, a rather odd omission is that I virtually haven't looked at all at the topic of Paul and Empire. So I found the debate extremely interesting to listen to. I would tend to side with Barclay at this stage, but no doubt my view will nuance itself with study and time. I already had Horsley's Paul and Empire sitting in my waiting-to-be-read pile beside my bed (along with 12 other theology books sadly... why are there not more hours in the day?), so hopefully I will feel more informed after reading that.

I'm reading Milgrom's Leviticus at the moment, and have just finished Beckwith and Selman's Sacrifice in the Bible, so there may be some posts on sacrifices in the near future.

Books on Judgment by Works

2007-11-22T09:59:00.000+13:00

The subject of a final judgment by works (and its relationship to the topic of justification by faith) tends to be a severely under-discussed subject in Christianity. So I have been pleased to see and read a few recent works on the subject:

Kent L. Yinger, Paul, Judaism, and Judgment according to Deeds, 1999

Alan Stanley, Did Jesus Teach Salvation by Works?: The Role of Works in Salvation in the Synoptic Gospels, 2006

Chris VanLandingham, Judgment & Justification In Early Judaism And The Apostle Paul, 2006

Michael Bird, The Saving Righteousness of God Studies on Paul, Justification and the New Perspective, 2007

(If anyone has recommendations of any other works dealing with this topic, please do let me know!)

Each of these works approaches the topic from a different angle, and so provides various insights.

Yinger is interested in seeing how Paul and Judaism compare in their treatments of judgment according to deeds. He analyzes a variety of Jewish and Pauline passages and concludes there is no difference between Paul and Judaism on this issue - both teach a final judgment in accordance with deeds. Yinger strongly emphasizes throughout his work that such a judgment should not be understood as a simple counting up of good works and bad (as many Protestants seem to interpret it as), bur rather a holistic judgment that takes into account one's entire life, deeds and attitude, and takes into account repentance and forgiveness and mercy. Yinger is a strong advocate of the New Perspective on Paul and attempts to explore how Covenantal Nomism can be used to reconcile an affirmation of final judgment by works with the idea of justification by faith. He appeared to be firmly convinced it could, but I couldn't fully follow his explanation. He continually asserts that there is no conflict between the idea of justification by faith and judgment by works, yet I wasn't sure I understood why he thought this. My rating: 4/5, a good balance between simple and comprehensive with a tad of unclarity in his systematic theology.

Stanley is interested in the teachings of Jesus in the synoptic gospels which at face value appear to teach a final judgment by works, and he is interested in exploring the conflict with his Evangelical heritage. He analyzes these passages, very often coming to conclusions in his exegesis that he admits are unusual, and concludes that a final judgment according to works is indeed taught by Jesus. In order to reconcile this with with notions of faith and grace, he draws up a systematic theology in which believers gain faith through grace, and then with the power of the spirit and Christ are sanctified in order to pass a final judgment according to deeds. He seemed keen to affirm that only Christians can thus pass the final judgment, and non-Christians lacking grace, faith, Jesus and the spirit couldn't gain a positive judgment simply out of their own efforts and works-righteousness. On occasion this concern looked in danger of driving the exegesis. My rating: 3/5, some interesting thoughts, book could have used a good editor.

VanLandingham dismisses Yinger's analysis of the Jewish texts as insufficiently thorough, and embarks on his own extremely extensive analysis of Jewish texts (strongly reminiscent of Paul and Palestinian Judaism) which after a while demands judicious skim-reading. He concludes that Judaism does indeed teach a final judgment according to works. VanLandingham's foil for his project is E.P. Sanders, and VanLandingham takes Sanders to task for attempting to turn Judaism into a religion of grace rather than works. I found VanLandingham's interpretation of Sanders theses in PPJ quite different to my own impression of Sanders from my reading of PPJ, so I was a bit unsure here. VanLandingham makes clear he likes the notion of a final judgment by works (since it shows God is just, good and non-abitrary), and he is upset that the New Perspective has bought into the 'grace is good, works are bad' concept promulgated by the Reformation. He notes that the idea of a final judgment by works doesn't at all exclude things like repentance and forgiveness from being taken into account. The second part of the book turns to Paul's theology. After analyzing texts from Paul, he concludes that Paul teachings a final judgment according to works just like Judaism. He rejects the notion that this is a judgment of what the holy spirit or Christ has achieved in the believer and asserts that it is a judgment of the individual and what the individual has done. VanLandingham is concerned about how this can be reconciled with justification by faith. He (naively) accepts that faith means belief, but thinks that 'justification' has been misunderstood, and that justification by faith is simply that a person is forgiven their past (but not future) misdeeds when they become a Christian and given a (temporarily) clean slate. Thus justification by faith is roughly equivalent to the Jewish concept of repentance and forgiveness, and is not related to final judgment (which is by works). My rating: 5/5, yes it's a tome and hard-reading, but that's because it's got more quality content than you could shake a stick at.

Bird is a 'card-carrying Calvinist' who is interested in the New Perspective on Paul and would like to take a middle position between it and the Reformed tradition in order to get the best of both worlds. Unlike the previous works mentioned, Bird spends only a chapter on the theme of final judgment by works, and his interest lies in reconciling it with salvation by faith alone. He thinks the view that Christians receive the Spirit's assistance in doing good works and therefore being able to attain a positive judgment is a view that has much to commend it, and yet one which ultimately leaves no room for Christ. He therefore emphasizes Christ as the originator of good works and sees our union with Christ as the means by which Christ's works are done by us. My rating: 1 / 5, he doesn't really make arguments or give evidence so much as simply state his own view on various issues.

The difficulty of interpreting the bible

2007-11-19T22:04:00.000+13:00

When a person is writing a theological or philosophical work, they express their ideas using a variety of words, phrases, analogies and concepts. In a work of any significant length, ideas will be repeated more than once but expressed in different terms and ways. Each individual expression of the idea will have some relation to the idea under discussion, attempting to express or explain some truth or some part of the concept. It may be a particularly good and helpful explanation (as far as the reader is concerned) or it may do more harm than good to that particular reader's attempt to understand the concept.

We could use a Normal Distribution to graphically depict these attempts at expressing and conveying a thought. The center of the distribution depicts the truth itself that is being attempted to be conveyed, and the datapoints are the various repeated attempts at stating and conveying that truth. Thus, many are pretty close to spot on. Most expressions and attempted explanations are somewhat close. But there are always a few outliers, which correspond to ways of expressing the idea that are not so close to the idea itself.

This has some serious implications for practical attempts to understand a difficult piece of writing:
1. The overall gist of the content is a much better guide to accurately comprehending the author's intent than taking a small part of the work in isolation.
2. Once you have got the correct interpretation there will still be outliers. Tiny and disparate pieces of the work will exist where you do not understand what the author was trying to say, or which might seem to contradict other ideas.
3. The outliers will fit better with a theory of explanation specifically designed to explain the outliers than with a correct understanding of author intent.

To illustrate point 3 with a more detailed example: In the graph above the thesis that the author was proposing is represented by zero. Imagine you read that work and accurately conclude that the author is attempting to communicate that concept. Someone else interprets the work and mistakenly concludes the author is trying to communicate a thesis that would be represented on the graph as -3. In defense of their claim, they cite a number of passages from the author's work in support of their thesis, quoting passages that on the graph would fall in the -2 to -4 range. The graph shows how every one of these passages would agree more with the -3 interpretation than the zero interpretation. What this illustrates is that when comparing one interpretation of a work to another, the presence of some passages that agree more with the faulty interpretation than the correct one is to be expected. All suggested interpretations of a work will almost certainly be able to cite some textual support (otherwise they probably would not have been suggested), but that does not thereby indicate their accuracy.

The situation is greatly complicated by the possibility of a multi-part theory being proposed to explain the same data. If someone said "I think the author's theory is -2, 0, 2", then the entire data set would more closely cohere to their theory than it would to the zero theory, and yet they would still in fact be wrong. Occam's razor then, is quite useful in this sort of circumstance. The difficulty however, lies in accepting that once you have the correct understanding there will still be outliers and resisting the temptation to construct ad hoc theories to deal with outliers.

Some truly weird illogic

2007-11-15T16:21:00.002+13:00

Recently, in an otherwise fairly sensible book, I encountered a piece of absurd illogic.

In the gospels, Jesus tells the rich young ruler that to have eternal life he needs to keep God's commandments. Subsequently Jesus suggests that the man give all his money to the poor and as a result the ruler "goes away sad" because he was very rich.

Now have always thought, and still think, that it's obvious that the rich young ruler didn't want to give away his money because he liked having a lot of money.

In Did Jesus Teach Salvation by Works? the author Alan Stanley uses truly weird logic to come to a very different conclusion. He observes that some Jews of the time believed wealth to be a sign of God's blessing (which is true). But during this course of his argument, this mysteriously morphs into the extremely bizarre idea that if a person gives that wealth away then he loses eternal salvation! Thus, Stanley concludes that the rich man was relying on his wealth to save him, and thus was made sad by Jesus' suggestion he share it with the poor, because it threatened his eternal salvation. Stanley's final exegesis of this story is then that Jesus called the man to stop relying on his wealth to save him and instead rely on Jesus!

What the average Christian should believe

2007-11-14T14:56:00.000+13:00

At times I have been skeptical of the Reformation idea that everyone should read their bible, because the bible is difficult to understand, and is arguably something that should be left to competant experts - and even they will make serious errors at times. In most fields, eg quantum physics, medicene, engineering etc we do just "believe the experts" and don't try and do it ourselves. But in most fields the experts have an extremely high level of agreement on major issues, whereas in biblical interpretation the experts almost always have severe disagreements, and experts can be found who support almost any given view about what the bible says.

So how does the man-in-the-street know which experts to believe? Generally people just believe their own tradition - they believe what their pastor tells them. A person born to parents who go to a Catholic church comes to accept the expert opinions of their own group's teachings and a person born Reformed likewise. This is, of course, hardly a practice that leads people to actually believe what is true - it is no better than tossing a coin. The chances that the denomination you were born into is correct, rather than any of the other 99 denominations all claiming to believe biblical truth is only one in a hundred.

It disturbs me when I see denominations teaching their adherants that "We are right, everyone else is wrong. Our experts are the best. Only our doctrines are biblical truth." I see people who belong to those denominations being indoctrinated into believing the Truth of their pastors teachings. These people then are taught to go out and teach the Truth to others and convert them into the fold of True Christianity (ie that denomination). In reality, these people haven't engaged in any careful unbiased analysis of biblical doctrine, and are just parrots who have been taught to repeat the phrases their masters have given them. If their doctrine is true, then it only due to luck. I find this idea, which I will here coin "denominational-discipleship" quite scarey. Through indoctrination it promotes proud and arrogant certainty and exclusivism that is not at all backed by any corresponding accuracy, evidence, or reason. I'm sure we can all think of people we have met who have been adversely affected by this process, and it is not a good thing.

But what this means is that picking experts at random (since what denomination you happen to be born into is random) and treating them as gospel is not a good idea. There is no reason why one randomly picked expert should be better than another. Some average Christians might listen to a few experts and go with the one that "sounded best" (according to some arbitrary measure of 'best'). But of course, as we all know, academic ability and rigour does not necessary correlate with rhetorical ability or debating skill. Good speakers aren't always good scholars and vice versa.

I believe it comes down to this: Where the experts disagree and tread lightly, only fools run in and claim they have the certain answers. It is the responsibility of the man in the street to not go claiming they themselves have the true and correct answers on a subject where the experts widely disagree. If someone has no time or ability for proper study, then it is irresponsible to put their own conclusions ahead of expert opinions, nor is it responsible to choose one set of experts over another without reason. If a person is not prepared and able to make the effort to carefully explore the expert opinions being offered, the evidence for them, and the research behind them, then that person is not entitled to have a firm or expert opinion.

Thus the simple answer is that that average Christian ought to accept the opinions of all the experts taken as a whole in their diversity. On subjects the experts disagree, then the person should be tolerant of a diversity of opinions. On subjects where the experts broadly agree, then the average Christian ought to accept the opinion of the experts. The average Christian then needs to be open-minded and tolerant of the wide variety of opinions that are held within Christianity. The man in the street should neither pick certain experts at random and take their word as gospel, nor should they take their own interpretation of the bible as gospel. Rather, they should just get a basic idea of the variety and types of different opinions that the experts have, accept all of them as possibly true, and then go no further. Sadly, few resources are available to easily facilitate this task.

Must Everything Change?

2007-11-12T12:30:00.000+13:00

In a previous post I outlined a very different view of Jesus that I had discovered that the gospels depicted from the one that I had received as an Evangelical.

It is not just me that has come to this conclusion, as numerous scholars seem to have converged on the same view in the last decade or so. Scholars who take the gospels seriously seem to be increasingly coming to this same set of conclusions about how the gospels themselves depict Jesus. Our expanded understanding of the social background of Israel at that time seems to have demonstrated that the Jesus depicted in the gospels was the leader of a movement that aimed at social reform, "a prophet of social change", and that this is entirely plausible in the context as a historical reality (there being numerous such movements at the time in Judea).

However I wonder at the radical difference between this Jesus of the gospels and the Jesus of creedal faith. The idea that Jesus was primarily a social reformer, who focused heavily on the economic suffering of the lower classes and who had borderline Communist ideals, who calls us as followers to go out and transform the world is not something that the average conservative evangelical in the pew wants to hear. It is radically different in almost every respect to the creedal picture of the Jesus as incarnate God who takes the sins of the world onto himself and in whose act of atonement we need to place our reliance and trust.

In centuries past, the social gospel of the liberals clashed with the creeds of the evangelicals. Back then the bible-rejecting extreme-liberal demythologizing scholarship rejected the evangelical Jesus and the gospels out of hand and constructed an unevidenced Jesus out of its own imagination. Whereas now it is those precisely those seeking to take the gospels seriously, and who perform careful research about the times and people of ancient Galilee that are finding this different view of Jesus. The issues are similar to what they were one hundred years ago, but the foundations are quite different. This time it is the scholars that are taking the evangelicals to task for not being biblical rather than vice versa.

The Emergent Church movement seems to be the popular spearhead of these changes within evangelicalism. Its leaders are well-versed in the latest biblical scholarship and have attempted to popularize it in their books. Brian McLaren and Steve Chalke, for example, have written books entitled The Secret Message of Jesus: Uncovering the Truth that Could Change Everything and The Lost Message of Jesus respectively and attempted to popularize this new view of Jesus as political and economic reformer and explore what it means for the church. Chalke's book caused a storm of controversy because of two sentences that mentioned the atonement, but nothing much resulted from his presentation of Jesus as a social-reformer. Perhaps this demonstrates that the problem with the new Jesus is not so much that anyone objects to him, but rather that our atonement theories can't handle him. Indeed, the more I study the life of Jesus, the more that objective atonement theories strike me as simply irrelevant.

Brian McLaren has just released another book entitled Everything Must Change, in which he works through this new understanding of Jesus and considers how and in what ways the church needs to change its doctrine and practices to be faithful to Jesus' mission. As the title might suggest, he thinks everything must change. This is, unsurprisingly, not proving popular with Protestant traditionalists who are convinced they believe biblical truth and thus that nothing ought to change. A somewhat amusing review says that McLaren's work should "shock and disgust any Christian", and:

"It seems increasingly clear that the new kind of Christian McLaren seeks is no kind of Christian at all. The church on the other side of his reinvention is a church devoid of the glorious gospel of Christ’s atoning death. It is a church utterly stripped of its power because it is a church stripped of the gospel message. McLaren’s new gospel is a social gospel, a liberal gospel and, in fact, no gospel at all."

For a more positive discussion of Brian's book, check out Scot McKnight's series of posts.

How does the average Christian know what to believe?

2007-11-11T14:25:00.000+13:00

One of my favorite bloggers Dan has a post critical of John Piper and fundamentalist biblical interpretation.

Piper's advice: Ignore the experts and their research, and just read the bible and believe whatever you think it says.

Dan's response: Following carefully the expert opinions is of great importance in understanding the bible. In no other field would we dismiss expert advice: 'If one were to take [Piper's] advice with other experts, like one's doctor for example, the results could well be tragic.'

Commenter asks: What then is the average Christian to do, who has neither the time nor ability to follow carefully the expert opinions?

Another commenter responds: 'If it were any other subject, the only proper response would be "tough cookies." If you don't have the time or the ability or can't make the effort, then you'll be left out in the cold. Knowledge isn't egalitarian.'

So what is the correct answer? How should the average Christian with neither much time nor ability know what to believe?

Christ-likeness is a helpful term

2007-11-01T11:22:00.000+13:00

I was reading this post and I was struck by the comment:

It is only Christ-likeness - and not works of the law - that will ensure that they survive the suffering and destruction that will mark the transition from the present evil age to the age that has now (from our perspective) come.

I think that's a great way of expressing Paul's thought. I think I need to use the term Christ-likeness more. It is a particularly good term at capturing what I have long argued Paul's theology is all about, but it is not a term I have used much.

Making sense of 'justified by faith'

2007-10-19T09:31:00.000+13:00

In the last couple of months various things have challenged me as to whether the particular nuances of my thoughts about 'justification by faith' are correct.

So I thought I'd sit down and start from what I'm sure of beyond doubt and work toward what I'm totally unsure of.
1. Every single description of the final eternal judgment of God in the undisputed Paulines is a judgment whose criteria is whether a person is good or evil. (This is in line with standard Jewish and early Christian beliefs)
2. The word Dikaiosune itself in Greek means primarily morality or virtue and is essentially moral rather than forensic.
3. Paul firmly believes in the moral transformation of the Christian. He believes that God provides the Spirit which works in Christians to transform them.
4. Paul's theology about what happens to Christians after conversion is therefore fairly straightforward. They receive the spirit, are sanctified, gain real moral righteousness, and achieve a positive final judgment as a result. (It is his theology of conversion, 'justified by faith' etc, that is the tricky part.)

5. The verb form Dikaioo seems to usually mean "to consider/declare/deem righteous", rather than to "make righteous" and so could be said to be forensic.
6. The word Pistis can mean a variety of things, but the ones most relevant to the NT are 'belief' in an idea, 'faithfulness' to a person, and 'perseverance'.
7. Pistis is most commonly used by Paul without an explicit object. When it has one it is most commonly God, and secondarily the controversial pistis christou passages.
8. According to Paul it is definitely good for Christians themselves to have 'faith'. (even the pistis-chrisou-is-subjective crowd thinks it's not just Christ who has faith)
9. Chronologically in a Christian's life we see the flow:
Hear the gospel -> faith -> sanctification -> final judgment
10. Paul suggests that the Galatians received the Spirit after hearing the message and coming to faith.
11. Perhaps the simplest theoretical framework to construct from all of this then is that people come to God in faith and he provides them with the Spirit which empowers their sanctification and leads to a positive final judgment.

The trouble is that while all this doesn't pin down the meaning of the phrase 'justified by faith'. Is it something that happens at the moment of conversion? Or does it mean "we are eventually justified, at the final judgment, as a result of processes that occur that begin with our faith and end with our justification"? That is really quite key to pinning down justification - is it a conversion event, an ongoing process, or an event at the final judgment? I have typically taken the second view, but now I wonder.

As far as 'faith' goes, I have tended to understand it as meaning 'faithfulness to Jesus' and interpret this as meaning means we faithfully follow Jesus' teachings and thus become righteous (ie justified through faithfulness). In support of this view is that sanctification and justification are linguistically synonymous in meaning, and we read in Acts that Christ told Paul to teach that Gentiles are "sanctified by faith in me" (implying that justified and sanctified can be swapped in that phrase). However equating 'faithful' to Jesus to mean 'the faithful following of Jesus' teachings' I have found to be a bit of a stretch. It's possible, but when talking to people about it, I've increasingly found that other people are not very happy to accept it as a natural reading.

Random thoughts...
I think it is not often enough thought about where Paul gets the very idea of 'faith' from. Why on earth does he (apparently arbitrarily) think 'faith' (whatever it is) is so important? From his vision of the risen Jesus? From the Abraham passage? A clear answer to that question would help in understanding what Paul thinks 'faith' means.

'Justified by faith' is not a particularly common phrase in the NT, residing mainly in just two of Paul's epistles. Unless we want to posit a massive split within early Christianity, we need to believe that whatever Paul was on about with his 'justified by faith' terminology was (if it was at all important) held by other NT writers and second century Christians who do not use such terms - and thus that the doctrine is translatable in to phrases and concepts that speak of neither justification nor faith.

Does 'justified' connect with forgiveness of sins? Or repentance? Why does Paul so rarely speak of the concept of 'repentance and forgiveness' so common in Judaism and elsewhere in the NT? Is justification by faith synonymous with that, or something different?

Justifying the ungodly

2007-10-18T14:37:00.000+13:00

God, according to Romans 4:5, "justifies the ungodly". There are, as always, many ways this phrase could be read depending on how the key words are interpreted.

The most common Protestant reading would be to take justifies in a legal sense and ungodly in a moral sense, resulting in a reading that God "declares righteous the immoral". Catholics however would generally read both words in a moral sense, resulting in a reading where God "makes the immoral righteous".

New Perspective scholars however seem to almost universally agree that the phrases "Gentile sinners" and "ungodly Gentiles" are proverbial phrases within Judaism of this time. Therefore the term "sinner" or "ungodly" can and does often simply mean "Gentile" or "person who doesn't follow the Mosaic Law", rather than indicating an immoral or wicked person. It has an ethnic/legal meaning rather than moral meaning.

Thus the NPP reading is that God "declares righteous those who do not follow the Mosaic Law". This seems to me to be the best reading and agree with the context in which Paul talks about how Abraham was declared righteous by God before he was circumcised.

Problems with the Gift/Satisfaction theory

2007-10-16T23:03:00.000+13:00

The Gift / Satisfaction theory of the atonement that I explained here, is an interesting theory of atonement. It fits well with the culture of the time. We know Jews at this time understood some deaths in this manner (the Maccabean Martyrs), and the language they use about these deaths is very very similar to the language used about Jesus in the New Testament. It also explains the use of generic phrases such as "Christ died for our sins". Three highly competent scholars I am aware of think it is taught by Paul.

Yet I have two issues with it that I just can't get my head around. They just don't make any sense to me, and I just can't understand how they could ever make sense. Both come back to the close link between Jesus and God.

1. Giving a gift to yourself makes no sense. It just doesn't. Sure the concept of splashing out as a reward for your hard work makes sense. But no one expends a great deal of effort simply to gift themselves that effort. If Jesus is in any way God's agent, the idea that he gifted his faithful life to God strikes me as plain nonsensical. It would be fine if he was human and not 'working for' God. But I just can't make sense of the idea of God trying to give a gift to himself. It seems to me that an extremely exceptionally 'low' view of Jesus' divinity is required to make any sense at all of this idea.

2. Why the need for God to give himself 'satisfaction' or a gift? If God wants to be kind, he doesn't need to give himself a gift imploring himself to be kind. To make this work, some reason has to be concocted about God not being able to do what he wants to do until he has given himself a gift to make him want to do it more. Alternatively we could say that God wants to not be wrathful and yet is obligated to be, and so has Jesus achieve satisfaction in order to get out of his obligation that he does not desire to fulfill. That was the line Anselm took. But that idea just doesn't make sense in our culture at all. And I think Anselm was scraping the barrel with this one and that it didn't make much sense in his own culture or the biblical authors' culture either.

So, in short, the gift theory is all very well and has potential. Yet it seems to demand either a fairly extreme disconnection between God and Jesus, or an implausible account of the necessities that God works under. So I can't really get my head around it as a model despite the benefits I can see in it.

So readers! What am I missing? This one has me stumped.

The Jesus of the Gospels

2007-10-15T16:00:00.000+13:00

When I performed the exercise of reading carefully through all four gospels in at attempt to see how the gospels themselves were trying to present Jesus and his mission, trying not to impose my preconceived evangelical framework on them, and trying to make full use of the large number of scholarly books about the social-cultural background of the time that I'd read, I was quite surprised at the results. First of all, what wasn't there: The gospels spend very little time on questions of Jesus' divinity or the meaning of his death. The Evangelical "gospel" of a divine Jesus in whom we need to place faith in his atoning death in order to be saved is not the focus of the biblical gospels, nor is this depicted as the content of Jesus' preaching.

The Jesus of the gospels is presented as taking up the lead of the Kingdom of God movement, already in motion under John the Baptist. Jesus is perceived by people as a Prophet (he is called a prophet far more in the gospels than anything else). He gets into repeated arguments with people over three issues: Torah (Israelite law and customs), Temple, and Wealth. In all these areas his concern for the poor, needy, sick, and outcasts shows through. The major focus of all these is, time and again, economics! (I was very surprised) The focus is especially the plight of suffering poor compared to the wealth of the rich. His criticisms of the Temple and Torah seem to always be focused on economics and how these institutions are causing poverty and benefiting the rich. The morality discussed in the gospels is most often interpersonal economics related morality.

Jesus' criticism of Torah constantly focuses on how the Pharisees' careful following of Torah is resulting in suffering for the poor and needy. Jesus emphasizes the Torah themes of caring for the poor and marginalized, echoing many of the Prophets in Israel's tradition. His criticism of the temple returns time and again to money, as he sees it as an instrument of oppression toward the poor from whom money is extorted by it. He predicts therefore that God in an act of judgment upon it will destroy the Temple. The "Kingdom of God" idea seems to be based on the concept of a Utopia. The kingdom of God is the conceptual perfect ideal in which everything in the kingdom is as God wishes it to be. In English we might say "A Better Tomorrow" or "God's Ideal for the World".

Much space in the gospels is dedicated to focusing on Jesus building up his movement. He recruits followers and organizes them and sets them about recruiting more. Exhortation to his followers to persevere takes up an amazing amount of space in the gospels (a whopping 30% or so!). Time after time, Jesus warns his followers of hardships and persecutions they may face, of the sacrifices they will have to make, and encourages and exhorts them to persevere with the promise that God will reward them for their actions both in the present life and after death. He warns that they, like himself, may be killed for the cause. I found the theme of secrecy in the gospels particularly intriguing. First Jesus tries to hide his movement from the authorities, telling those he encounters to tell no one about it, though he tells his followers that eventually it will come out in the open. Throughout the course of the gospels his movement grows and his attempts to keep it secret increasingly fail. Finally when he is told the authorities have learned all about him and his movement he begins to confront them publicly.

The Jesus of the gospels is thus primarily presented as a social reformer. He is a social activist, a popular Prophet in the tradition of Israel's history of Prophetic reformers who challenge and are killed by the authorities, a leader of a grass-roots lower-classes movement that challenges the authorities and upper classes in an effort to achieve greater egalitarianism. Call it what you will, but by far the closest parallels are people such as Martin Luther King Jr, Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, or Robin Hood - people who led movements against the authorities in attempted reform on a variety of social issues, and who enjoyed the popular support of the masses. This concept of Jesus was really quite different to anything I had thought or dreamed of finding in the gospels.

The other thing I found surprising was the huge extent to which Jesus is clearly depicted as a martyr for his cause in the gospels. As his movement increasing becomes known to the authorities and he enters into conflicts with them, he warns his followers of the persecutions and death they may face. He reminds them that God will reward them either now or in the afterlife for doing his will. As he realizes that if he continues his movement he will be killed for it, he makes the painful decision to continue nonetheless. He is finally captured by the authorities who execute him. But his followers then see him resurrected by God, demonstrating that everything Jesus had stood for was true, and they are inspired to carry on the movement.

Now there are certainly further questions that can be asked and issues that border on the periphery in the gospels, where the answers are left vague or unclear: Is Jesus' movement nonviolent? In what sense (if any) does he consider himself a Messiah, or would he prefer to avoid the role of Messiah thrust on him by others? Would he have been for, against, or indifferent to the armed insurrections against Roman rule that engulfed Israel about once a generation? To what extent does he believe in the "communist" type ultra-egalitarian ideals he advocates as general principles universally applicable, as opposed to seeing them as a practical solution to a particular situation at that time and place?

The Satisfaction Model of Atonement

2007-10-12T11:07:00.000+13:00

The Satisfaction model is often dismissed by many as being a poor-man's precursor to Penal Substitution. Yet the logic by which it works is quite different to Penal Substitution, and these two models are best not grouped together nor confused. The differences between Satisfaction and Penal Substitution are simple but profound. The Satisfaction model instead ought to be grouped under the broader category of a "Gift" theory of the atonement.

The Satisfaction model is based on principles and ideas that were definitely current in Biblical times. Such understandings could plausibly have been used by the early Christians to understand the atonement. This method of understanding Christ's work definitely was employed by various Christians from the fourth century AD onwards. I am as-yet-undecided about whether the earliest Christians did make use of this model of understanding Christ's death, but I am quite open to the possibility that they in theory could have. The evidence, so far as I have considered it, does not lean clearly in favor one way or the other regarding their use or disuse of the concepts involved in Satisfaction.

Satisfaction is a concept which is generally present in honour-shame societies. When one person or group offends publicly in some manner against another person or group, the offended party is obligated by the rules governing social interaction to respond vengefully ("wrath") in proportion to the offense, otherwise their reputation is damaged. Wrath did not necessarily imply any anger and was an obligatory public action rather than an emotion per se. People could be reluctant to be wrathful, or refrain from wrath if they chose even if they were extremely emotionally angry. It was possible to prevent, or mitigate such obligatory vengeance by the payment of a gift equivalent in value of the offense to the offended party. To understand this in modern day terms, it can be imagined that all offenses are equivalent to stealing a certain amount of money (honour) from the offended person, and thus the situation can be righted either by the person taking vengeful actions to steal that same amount back off you, or someone paying that person the required amount of money.

The gift that was given to remove offenses is called a "satisfaction" payment, because it "satisfies" the offended party, and resolves the situation peacefully. This was a standard practice in ancient society which took place regularly among humans and was believed to also take place between mankind and the gods. By far the commonest forms of sacrifices in the ancient world were thus understood to be gifts to the gods - either "satisfaction" payments to atone for transgressions and thus make atonement for offenses, or gifts that pushed your 'account' into the positives causing the gods to respond with blessings. The same social norms that demanded wrath when slighted demanded that positive favors and gifts be repaid in kind. (I will come back to this positive "gift" variation of satisfaction later, so keep it in mind) With such payments it is the monetary value of the gift that is most important, but the publicity of the payment is generally important too.

The difference between Penal Substitution and Satisfaction is quite well illustrated in the case of sacrifices. A sacrifice which worked by Penal Substitution (which, to the best of my knowledge, there is not a single instance of in any culture) would be thought to supernaturally take onto itself the sins of the offender, and then in its death suffer the punishment deserved for those sins in place of the offender. Whereas a sacrifice that worked by Satisfaction would be a gift of something of value to the god or his earthly representatives in order to appease him. The gift itself could be grain or coin or meat or slaves or land, and if it was meat then the animal would be ritually killed and die a death no more supernatural than any other death (many ancient societies were inclined to see mystical power in all life-forces and thus the need for careful rituals to channel that life properly in death). The ancient world was a relatively coinless society, and meat was rare and very valuable and so was generally used for important sacrifices.

When Anselm popularized the Satisfaction model, he drew heavily on the parallels with his Feudal society and how satisfaction payments worked in it. His society was, in its honour-shame system, very similar to the society of biblical times and thus his model stands as a plausible way people in biblical times could have understood Jesus' atonement. The Maccabean Martyrs are a prime example of the Jews of Jesus' time understanding deaths in precisely this manner. This group of Jews were martyred for their zealous adherence to God's law and were seen as achieving satisfaction for the sins of the nation. Their own faithfulness to God and their endurance of suffering for the sake of doing his will was seen as "satisfying" the wrath of God that had been brought on by disobedient Israel. Equally present in the accounts of them is the 'gift' notion of their faithfulness to God earning a positive balance of divine favor toward them and thus divine obligation to respond to their prayers for Israel. (Satisfaction and gift notions go hand in hand in these accounts, and are essentially the same thing) The Jewish book of 4 Maccabees speaks of these martyrs "propitiating God" and becoming a "ransom" for the sin of the nation, since they provide in their faithful devotion to God a pleasing gift which satisfies him thus appeasing his wrath and paying for Israel to be ransomed. Thus the ideas of faithful martyrdoms "satisfying" God's wrath were definitely present in the Jewish culture of the time of Jesus. But whether any Christians in the New Testament or the next couple of centuries actually utilize these ideas is something I am currently quite uncertain about. It is not their primary understanding of the work of Christ, but it may (or may not) have a fair amount of significance for them. They do not clearly state that they saw Jesus in this manner, but some of their language could potentially be so interpreted.

Differences between the Penal Substitution and Satisfaction models in terms of what happened to Christ on the cross are fairly straight-forward. The Penal Substitutionary model claims that on the cross a supernatural event took place in which the sins and guilt of humans were transferred to Christ and there he suffered God's punishment on our behalf. In the Satisfaction model Christ's death is not supernatural and there is no transfer of sins. Rather his faithfulness to God's will to the point of death is regarded positively by God and as either making satisfaction for human transgression or as achieving a positive balance of divine favor which is then exercised toward Jesus and his followers (more of a "gift" model than what has been historically called "Satisfaction"). In neither version of the satisfaction model does God metaphysically need Jesus to die, but rather Jesus' death epitomizes his faithfulness to God and thus obliges a favorable divine response (according to the social norms of the day it would be extremely dishonorable for God to fail to respond favorably to such a display of faithfulness).

The Satisfaction model is quite interesting insofar as people who loathe the Penal Substitutionary model can happily embrace the Satisfaction model despite the great surface similarity of the models. Steve Chalke would be the most prominent example of this, as he thinks Penal Substitution is "cosmic child abuse" (since in it Jesus suffers the wrath of God) but seems to be quite happy with accepting the satisfaction model and saying Jesus propitiates the wrath of God etc. (This seems to have confused a lot of people who are scratching their heads about how he can reject Penal Substitution so vehemently and yet sign doctrinal statements intended by their authors to endorse Penal Substitution but which are sufficiently vague as to allow for Satisfaction instead) The two models explain a very similar data set but do so using very different mechanisms. The Satisfaction model avoids several of the problems that penal substitution seems to present - eg it doesn't involve the moral transfer of guilt, nor God punishing Jesus. The "gift" version of the Satisfaction theory is even more powerful in the sense that it can explain a very similar data set, but admits many more nuances than even straight "Satisfaction" does and avoids many of the pitfalls that the Satisfaction theory itself falls into. For example, David Brondos in his great little book Paul on the Cross (which I highly recommend as an insightful study of Paul's doctrine of atonement, even though I think he misses some of the most central ideas), totally rejects the literal Satisfaction model and yet advocates the "gift" model (among others) without apparently realizing the existence of any link between this and the Satisfaction model. (ie that the Satisfaction model is just a specialized version of the more general "gift" model)

It is my contention that the Satisfaction/Gift model do not get the air-time they deserve in popular Protestantism. The Satisfaction model is either imagined to be substantially identical to Penal Substitution, or dismissed out of hand as a feudalistic version of it. Yet this seems to me unwarranted. The mechanics of Satisfaction/Gift substantially differ to Penal Substitution, and it has greater explanatory power, far fewer ethical and logical problems, and a hugely better claim to be biblical. I think if many people were more knowledgeable about the Satisfaction/Gift model that they would realize that they "evidence" they see as being in the the Bible supporting Penal Substitution actually supports the Satisfacton/Gift model. Whether such evidence is in reality really there at all is something that I am totally and utterly unconvinced about one way or the other at this stage...

Evolution of Doctrine: Simultaneously righteous and sinner

2007-10-10T15:50:00.000+13:00

An important conceptual change in theological doctrine was Luther's idea of "Simultaneously righteous and sinner" (Simul Iustus et Peccator).

In early Christianity, human righteousness is conceived of as being on a single continuum, with extreme wickedness at one end and godly righteousness at the other end. It is thus a grey-scale which measures morality:
Sinner <------------------------------------> Righteous
The basic idea is that a given human can only occupy one location on this scale at a particular time. Over time they can become better or worse - moral improvement, or moral decline. God is seen as approving of righteousness and disapproving of wickedness. The solution to avoiding God's anger is thus to move across the scale and become a better person, ie to repent of one's wicked ways and change them. This continuum is taken for granted by Christians throughout the first millennia: To become righteous is to cease being a sinner, and vice versa. There is never the thought of a "righteousness" that doesn't entail actually being moral and ceasing from sin.

Luther however took an axe to this continuum and cut it into two. In his system there are two such continua: One measuring human morality as it actually is, and one measuring God's (judicial) view of humans. On one continuum we can be sitting at "world's worst sinner" and on the other at "perfectly righteous" - our true moral state, and our moral state before God, are in Luther's system two totally different things.

The practical outworking of this is that there is no great need for humans to be actually righteous or live righteously, and thus Luther writes "boldly sin... No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day." This is a strikingly different attitude toward sinning compared to that evident in the first millennia writings (see the Desert Fathers for example).

The essential conceptual development at work here is the breaking of the old single-continuum into two, so that you can now be both sinner and saint at the same time, where in previous Christianity being one excluded being the other. In a sense it was Luther's projection of this new model back onto Paul's writings that shaped his entire theology. Paul was reread in light of this double-continua and what now came out of his writings was no longer talk of actual moral righteousness, but rather a way to be righteous before God despite actually being a sinner. Paul's gospel, in Luther's model, is then about how human beings can be righteous before God and sinners in actuality at the same time due to what Christ has achieved. Actual moral change is no longer a prerequisite to salvation, because the continuum that governs salvation and status in the eyes of God is now an independent continuum to that which measures our actual morality.

How to find or not find the historical Jesus

2007-10-09T15:34:00.000+13:00

My general evangelical background influenced me without me realizing it on the subject of the life of Jesus. My understanding of the life of Jesus came to be something like as follows:

He preached that he was God-incarnate, and called people to believe in him that they might be saved. He did miracles to prove this. He died on the cross taking the sins of the world onto himself and thereby accomplishing atonement.

I remember once seeing a discussion about the historical Jesus and the fact that certain scholars thought there was good evidence to prove that various events in Jesus' life (things like baptism by John, controversy with Pharisees, preaching of parables, trial before Pilate) were really historical and not made up by the later Church. My attitude at the time was "what on earth does any of that matter? Those are of zero relevance to salvation."

I felt that all that mattered was Jesus' atoning death on the cross, and the rest of his life was irrelevant, but it had presumably been spent preaching the evangelical gospel. That was the view I had been implicitly taught to hold. The gospel stories were simply interesting stories that made for some nice sermons sometimes but which had no important meaning. It was simply a record of the life of someone who'd lived 2000 years ago and what he'd done from day to day was of no importance compared to his atoning death. The mere words of Jesus written in the gospels were as nothing compared to the reality of salvation available today for those who put their trust in his substitutionary death.

When I began to seriously wonder about the correctness of Penal Substitution, I was left with the question of "so if Jesus wasn't trying to achieve that, then was was he trying to achieve?" With that question in mind I read through all four gospels taking careful notes in an attempt to see how the gospel's presented Jesus' mission and achievements. ie what did the gospel writers see Jesus as having been trying to accomplish and accomplishing? I was extremely surprised by the results of doing this. The gospels were quite clear and unanimous in their presentation of what Jesus and his mission. I could hardly believe I'd never noticed before what the gospels clearly spelled out.

I have since realized that very few people indeed are actually interested in the picture of Jesus painted by the gospel writers. Conservative Christians already have a picture of Jesus in their minds, the Jesus of faith that they believe in. They already know who and what Jesus was and what his mission was, and so they aren't interested in what the gospels say. The gospels are not allowed to differ from the creeds and statements of faith that these Christians already subscribe to. Liberal Christians who want to get away from the Jesus of Faith and back to the Historical Jesus have classically tended to dismiss with a wave of the hand (without even considering it) any picture of Jesus painted by the gospel writers as being the Jesus of Faith and not of history. They put the gospels metaphorically through a shredder and then carefully examine each isolated sentence according to complex criteria for authenticity. After deciding about three sentences authentically go back to the historical Jesus, they use their imaginations to fill in the vast blanks and construct a "historical Jesus" out of whole cloth.

In my view a much better approach in getting at the real Jesus is to take the gospels as whole narratives, looking at the general picture of Jesus that they present and evaluating the plausibility of that picture as an authentic picture of the historical Jesus. It seems that the more we learn about the social context and background of the times in which Jesus lived, the more the picture of Jesus drawn in the gospels seems an entirely plausible historical reality. I have been pleasantly surprised to see so many others arrive at the same conclusions as me on this. All the recent studies of the gospels and Jesus that rely heavily on social-context research all seem to be coming to the same conclusions about Jesus' life and ministry, and also about how we need to study the gospels holistically. I was reading Horsley's great little book Jesus and Empire the other day and laughed at his pithy phrase "we must take our gospels whole" which he used to summarize the concept of holistic gospel analysis I have just mentioned.

Ancient Rhetoric and NT Documents

2007-10-08T11:43:00.000+13:00

Ben Witherington on his blog lately has been emphasizing the worthwhileness of understanding ancient rhetorical techniques to aid in our understanding of the New Testament documents. He posts an interesting lecture he gave on the subject.

I have myself found that, in general, understanding better the social and cultural background of the New Testament has helped immeasurably in my understanding of it. That said, I recently read Witherington's allegedly "Social-Rhetorical Commentary on Romans" which failed almost completely to make any worthwhile use of insights about rhetorical techniques and structure (he talked plenty about rhetoric, but it was of no actual assistance in understanding the text), so that tempers my enthusiasm for understanding rhetoric somewhat. I confess, however, to being almost totally ignorant of the structures and forms of ancient rhetoric. So I intend to attempt to remedy this by studying the subject.

I am a bit unsure where to begin my study of ancient rhetoric. I would have thought they'd be a book designed for Classics students titled "An introduction to the standard forms of ancient rhetoric" or "Types of Greek rhetoric and their structures" or something similar. But searching of Google and Amazon has yet to reveal such a book to me. So if anyone knows of one, please sing out. Lacking helpful secondary sources I'm thinking I might start by reading Aristotle and Quintilian on rhetoric.

Evolution of Doctrine: Original Sin

2007-10-06T23:10:00.000+13:00

In the history of Christian theology there have been a number of major theological changes made in Western Christian theology over the course of time, often due to the use of inaccurate Latin bible translations.

The earliest of these changes chronologically was the doctrine of Original Sin. The Christian church in the second century AD had nothing remotely resembling the doctrine of original sin as we know it today. The universal view attested is that children are born innocent and that people are guilty only of their own sins. In some writers the concept that Adam's sin damaged the likeness of God within humanity somewhat, and this is viewed as a kind of corruption of the natural order which is inherited - and this is generally taken to explain why humans die. But this is not taken to imply any inevitability to human sinfulness or any damage to free will. There is a dominating belief that through human effort and the assistance of the Holy Spirit and Christ's example, humans can live godly lives that are upright and pleasing to God.

In the late second century, in North Africa, the writer Tertullian protested against the introduction of the practice of infant baptism there. He argued that baptism was supposed to be for the forgiveness of sins, but since infants had no sin the introduction of its use for them was wrong. The widespread thought however seemed to be that there might be some mysterious gracious blessing from God conveyed through baptism, and thus infant baptism quickly became a fairly universal custom.

In third and fourth century North African Latin Christianity, there is a clear trend present towards taking a darker view of the human condition. In the course of these centuries the theologians in this area began to take the view that humanity had been very seriously damaged by the fall, that humanity was bad, that the human will is not capable of becoming good, and that all humans are born guilty of Adam's sin. It appears that a couple of generations after Tertullian, people had started using his same logic backwards: "We baptise infants, baptism is for forgiveness of sin, therefore infants must have sin." Such doctrinal changes were geographically fairly confined. Greek Christian writings from during and after this period reflect an unchanged stance on the subject - eg John Chrysostom (d. 407), states explicitly that infants have no sin and that forgiveness of sin is not the motive for infant baptism.

Nor, it seems, had these innovations reached too far to the west. When a monk from England named Pelagius journeyed to Rome he was shocked by the theology he encountered there. He felt that the teachings of the North African bishop Augustine effectively denied the possibility of good moral conduct and human moral reform which Pelagius (in line with typical Christianity of earlier centuries) saw as the foundations of Christianity. Augustine had gone further than his North African predecessors and actually advocated Predestination, a doctrine that had always previously been strongly opposed by Christians. This led to an extended controversy between Pelagius and Augustine. Scholars are generally agreed that Pelagius' viewpoints by and large were typical of previous Christian orthodoxy (especially the Greek-speaking church at the time, who couldn't read Augustine's writings) and Augustine's were radically new. Nonetheless Augustine managed to use his influence to get Pelagius condemned as a heretic: "it was an injustice that made history" writes the renowned Lutheran patristics scholar Jaroslav Pelikan in his The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (pg 313).

One passage that Augustine drew heavily on in his arguments with Pelagius was Romans 5:12, which in the Latin translation (he couldn't read Greek) said that everyone had sinned "in" Adam. Augustine used this to argue that all humanity was present "in" Adam when he sinned, and thus all are born guilty of sin. His Latin translation was extremely faulty here however, and it actually reads in the Greek that everyone dies "because" they sin or that everyone dies "because of which" they sin.

Thus the doctrine of Original Sin became standard within Latin Christianity. The Greek Christians however (who were at that time a large majority of Christendom), never read Augustine's writings and continued to hold their traditional doctrines. To this day the Eastern Orthodox Christians continue to totally reject the Latin innovations of the doctrine of Original Sin. Unsurprisingly when we turn from history to the Bible, there isn't much in the bible that could lend itself in support to the Latin doctrine of Original Sin. Nor did the Jewish Rabbis teach such a doctrine, and Judaism today rejects any such doctrine.

And that's how the standard Protestant doctrine of Original Sin resulted from the introduction of infant baptism, a bad Latin translation, a conflict where influence beat orthodoxy, and a couple of centuries of doctrinal change.

Attitudes toward second century theology

2007-10-04T13:35:00.000+13:00

Sometimes when I read scholarship on early Christianity I am struck by the scholar's superior and disdaining attitude toward these writings. Reading between the lines, I get the impression they are thinking something like:

Gee, these guys' theology sucks. They've just got no idea. They don't get original sin. They don't understand grace. Their understanding of the atonement is woefully inadequate. Their understanding of Paul's theology is non-existent. They've just got no concept of the proper Christianity, the good Reformation doctrine that I hold. Really, they can hardly even be called Christians.

Whereas my attitude has always been that the second century church's theology is of great importance in understanding what the first Christians believed. I take the phrase "modern protestant Christian theology looks nothing like second century theology" to mean "modern protestant Christian theology is badly wrong and has radically departed from authentic Christianity." When I read a scholar who writes "Christians of this period had a woefully inadequate understanding of original sin", I mentally translate this to "Modern Christianity needs to reexamine its doctrine of original sin, because there is a serious mismatch with early Christianity." In my view, it is early Christianity that is normative and to which modern Christianity needs to conform and not vice versa.

Now I'm not for a second saying there was no theological development from the time of Jesus until Origen. Of course there was some development - that's one of my fields of interest. But anyone who thinks there was a world-wide 100% u-turn within Christianity with no dissenting voices within a hundred year period is surely dreaming. So if modern theology is substantially different to second century theology on large numbers of major issues, then it surely demands a serious reexamination of our doctrines. We don't necessarily have to end up agreeing 100% with second century theology - we might identify and avoid some of their mistakes as we study the development of doctrine during this early period... however the fact that their theology differs to ours really ought to ring alarm bells and lead to into a serious reexamination of our supposedly 'biblical' theology. Yet so many scholars seem to take a "no way my interpretation of the bible can possibly be wrong, it's just second century theology that sucks" attitude.

What I find interesting to do, is for each of the differences in theology, to trace the development of doctrine from the second century until today and see where and why changes occurred. It has been this process of study more than anything else that made me lose faith in modern protestant theology. I found what is taught today is simply a result of two millennia of theological development where theological changes happened over the course of time for poor reasons. In basically every aspect where modern and second century Christianity disagree, modern Christianity's reasons for its view are poor and unjustified.

The 2nd century system of salvation

2007-10-03T10:36:00.000+13:00

There were three doctrines that I would call fundamental to second and third century Christianity's system of salvation:
1. A works-based final judgment
2. Christ as a teacher of goodness and righteousness
3. Free will

In this period the Christian belief in free will is regularly vigorously defended by writers. It is contrasted to the Greco-Roman concept of Fate (predestination), and also to the gnostic idea of Natures (unchangeable inner natures). The strength of these endorsements of the freedom of the will seem to largely derive from the universal belief that humans would be judged by God in according to their character and deeds. Several writers comment that the fact of God's judgment of us implies that it is within our own power to meet that judgment else we cannot be held accountable. (This is known in moral philosophy as as the "ought implies can" argument, generally attributed to Kant).

This also is clearly defined in the teaching of the Church, that every rational soul is possessed of free-will and volition; that it has a struggle to maintain with the devil and his angels, and opposing influences, because they strive to burden it with sins; but if we live rightly and wisely, we should endeavour to shake ourselves free of a burden of that kind. From which it follows, also, that we understand ourselves not to be subject to necessity, so as to be compelled by all means, even against our will, to do either good or evil. For if we are our own masters, some influences perhaps may impel us to sin, and others help us to salvation; we are not forced, however, by any necessity either to act rightly or wrongly, which those persons think is the case who say that the courses and movements of the stars are the cause of human actions, not only of those which take place beyond the influence of the freedom of the will, but also of those which are placed within our own power. (Origen 230AD, First Principles, Preface 5)

The concept of Christ as a teacher of goodness, monotheism, morality, and righteous living who brings man to the knowledge of virtue and the knowledge of God is easily the strongest view of Christ's atoning work in this period. This conception of Christ as a teacher is universally present and in virtually every writer is the dominant model. Even in the theology of Irenaeus (fairly unique in this period for his Recapitulation (theosis) model of the atonement), the conception of Christ as Teacher is very much present in his writings and is co-dominant with Recapitulation. Emphasis is made at various points by the writers of this period on how Christ is the greatest teacher - the validity of other moral teachers is not diminished by this in their opinion, since all true moral teachers are considered inspired by the spirit that was in Christ. Clement of Alexandria in his work The Teacher (Paedagogus) attempts to demonstrate Christ's superiority to all other moral teachers through showing how he utilized every single form and type of rhetoric and moral exhortation known to Greek Rhetoricians. Origen expresses it with a nice image:

Suppose some one ignorant and uneducated to become conscious of his defects, either through the admonition of his teacher, or simply of himself, and then to put himself in the hands of a man whom he thinks capable of leading him into education and virtue; when he thus surrenders himself, his instructor promises to take away the lack of education and to give him an education; not, however, as though the educating and the escape from the want of it in no way depend on the pupil having offered himself for treatment: he only promises to benefit his pupil because he desires to improve. Thus the Divine Word promises to take away the wickedness, which it calls the stony heart, of those who come to it, not if they are unwilling, but if they submit themselves to the Physician of the sick (Origen 230AD, First Principles, Book 3, Chapter 1.15)

The concept of a final judgment by works is universally presupposed during this period. It is stated as Christian doctrine by the Apologists in their presentation of Christianity to outsiders. It appears explicitly or implicitly in almost every work of this period. The fact of and belief in a final judgment according to deeds is consistently utilized for moral exhortation and to defend the doctrine of a bodily resurrection. Several Christian works from this period argue against the idea of a spirit-only resurrection on the grounds that if only the spirit rather than the body as well were rewarded or punished at the final judgment then that would be unjust since the body participated in the deeds during this life it ought to be punished or rewarded too.

the apostolic teaching is that the soul, having a substance and life of its own, shall, after its departure from the world, be rewarded according to its deserts, being destined to obtain either an inheritance of eternal life and blessedness, if its actions shall have procured this for it, or to be delivered up to eternal fire and punishments, if the guilt of its crimes shall have brought it down to this. (Origen 230AD, First Principles, Preface 5)

In short this trio of doctrines are interconnected and seem to be the universally present in virtually all the writers of this period. (Offhand I can't think of any they aren't in, and certainly no orthodox writer in this period actively denies any of them) Together they form what I would call the "system of salvation" or "atonement theology" of the Christians of this period.

The 2nd century model: Christ as Teacher

2007-10-01T11:28:00.000+13:00

In the second and third century AD, by far the most dominant model of the atonement was Christ as a teacher of righteousness. Jesus through his life and teachings demonstrated, exemplified and taught a 'new law' of righteousness. We, by following his teachings and example can become righteous before God.

“At times, in all these writers [the Apostolic Fathers], the saving efficacy of Christ’s work is made to consist mainly – sometimes wholly – in His teaching.” (Hastings Rashdall, The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology, pg 198)
“When we analyse their [the Apostolic Fathers'] utterances, we find that their chief emphasis is on what Christ has imparted to us – new knowledge, fresh life, immortality, etc” (J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines [revised edition], pg 163)
“We have already noted the popularity of the conception of redemption as enlightenment among the Apostolic Fathers. It reappears in the Apologists…” (Kelly, 169)
“[In the Apologists] his chief vocation as Savior was to teach men the truth about monotheism and the moral life.” (Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition 100-600AD, 153)
“Undoubtedly the principal purpose of the incarnation… strikes him [Justin Martyr] as having been didactic. Having forgotten the truth and having been inveigled into ignorance and positive error by the demons, men desperately need the restoration of the light they have lost. As ‘the new law giver’ or again, ‘the eternal, final law, the faithful covenant which replaces all laws and commandments’ , Christ imparts this saving knowledge. It was to bestow such illumination, in particular the realization of the oneness of God and the belief in the moral law, and to restore men by it, that the Logos in fact became man .” (Kelly, 168-169)
“there is a distinct tendency in Tertullian to reduce Christ’s achievement to ‘the proclamation of a new law and a new promise of the kingdom of heaven’, and to represent Him as ‘the illuminator and instructor of mankind’.” (Kelly, 177)
“[Clement of Alexandria's] most frequent and characteristic thought is that Christ is the teacher Who endows men with true knowledge, leading them to a love exempt from desires and a righteousness who prime fruit is contemplation.” (Kelly 183)
“Clement is equally fond of speaking of Christ as the Teacher and the Saviour. And the two words mean for him much the same thing, for it is mainly by His teaching and His influence that Christ saves.” (Rashdall, 225)
“[For Origen, Christ] is ‘the pattern of the perfect life’, the exemplar of true virtue into Whose likeness Christians are transformed, thereby being enabled to participate in the divine nature.” (Kelly, 184)
“[Hippolytus'] most characteristic thought, however, is one derived from the Apologists, viz. that the redemption chiefly consists in the knowledge of God mediated by the Word through nature and history, the law and the prophets, and finally the Gospel: ‘appearing in the world as the truth, He taught the truth.’” (Kelly, 178)
Thus, in summary:
“it is clear that meditation on the life and teachings of Jesus was a major preoccupation of the piety and doctrine of the Church [of the second century].... Christ as example and Christ as teacher were constant and closely related doctrinal themes.... [A common teaching was] salvation through the obedience to the teachings of Christ and through imitation of his example.... the work of Christ was represented as that of the exemplar and teacher who brought the true revelation of God’s will for man.” (Pelikan, 142-152)

PS. If anyone can recommend any good books on second and third century atonement theology I'd be interested to hear.

My mistake in studying second century atonement doctrine

2007-09-28T13:37:00.000+12:00

When I first became seriously interested in studying atonement doctrine, one of the places to which I directed study was the theology of the early post-biblical Church. I read through the surviving orthodox second century writings in an attempt to identify their view of atonement. Since people argue so much about how best to interpret the New Testament authors themselves, I felt that the second century writings could provide another vector of attack in determining what the first Christians believed.

So I read through the Christian literature of the second century, taking careful note of references to the Work of Christ, what Christ achieved, and any implications of how his death worked. I tried to be as open-minded as possible, trying to determine whether and to what extent they held Penal Substitution, Ransom, Christus Victor, or Recapitulation. From their words I attempted to try to understand what their logic of salvation was, what they saw Christ as having achieved and done. Thus I attempted to reconstruct clearly their system of atonement in a model that had clear logical steps.

This task largely failed.

About all I managed to gather from that exercise was that Irenaeus seemed to teach Recapitulation (along with much else that was incomprehensible) and that the rest of the writers defied models and reconstructions. Looking back on it, I see that this was one time in which evangelical views I had heard had biased me without my really realizing it. I had been asking the wrong questions, seeking an answer to the question of how Christ's death had worked. There were two problems there that caused this first effort to fail. My focus had been largely on the death of Christ, a focus not really shared by the second century Christians.

More importantly, my focus had been on how Christ's atonement had worked. I had been carefully looking for what are known as "objective" theories of atonement. (An objective theory is one that envisages a supernatural event of atonement happening at Christ's end, eg taking the sins of the world on himself, defeating the devil etc). In doing so I had read straight past all the "subjective" theories of the atonement without seeing them in the text (A subjective theory is where the thing of importance is Christ's influence on us: eg us being inspired to love God when we see Christ's love for us). An Objective theory atonement is something Christ "achieves" or "secures" or "works" or "finishes" instead of us. Our response then consists largely of trusting in his work. Whereas in Subjective theories Christ "inspires" or "influences" or "empowers" for the sake of us whose lives are changed as a result of hearing the message of Christ and acting on it. Thus to generalize, Objective models are completed cosmic transactions of atonement which can be laid out in as logical progressions as a series of true propositions about what happened, whereas Subjective models tend to be more subtle and "relational" - depending on human psychology and specific historical circumstances.

Of the major atonement models generally talked about today there is only really one subjective one - "Moral Exemplar" (Christus Victor can also be interpreted subjectively though). At the time I first looked at the writings of the second century I did not really seriously regard it as a model of atonement, since (1) the presentations I had heard of it sounded very stupid and definitely unbiblical (ie they boiled down to "Christ committed suicide to show his love for us, this inspires people to love him back"), and (2) it is not an objective model of atonement.

So my attempts to find an objective model of the atonement, especially one pertaining to Jesus' death, in the Christian writings of the second century ended in failure. There wasn't one. At the time, of course, I was rather confused because of this. Where was their doctrine of the atonement hiding? It took me more than a year to realize my mistake. Later, when I went looking for a subjective model of atonement, I found answers...

The best arguments on Hilasterion

2007-09-27T13:37:00.000+12:00

A couple of months ago I wrote this post taking a skeptical view of the meaning of the word Hilasterion in Romans 3:25. I suggested that given the total indecision within the last few hundred years of scholarship on the subject that no one can really be sure what the word means. (See also this post by Doug on the meaning of Rom 3:25)

However, I have since that time been reflecting on the subject and looking at the various arguments proposed by scholars. It seems to me to be the case that if you sort through all the scholarly arguments and keep the good ones and discard the bad ones, then all the good arguments point toward one particular reading.

Some linguistic points
Dan Bailey in his recent PHD on the subject points out that scholars have clouded the matter by trying to find the meaning of the Hilas- word group rather than focusing on the word Hilasterion itself. He found that all extra-Biblical occurances of Hilasterion prior to 200AD mean "propitiatory gift or offering", or as one ancient writer puts it: "gifts capable of soothing". These are gifts given to an enemy or an offended person or god in an effort to make peace with them or appease them. Perhaps the most natural English description of this would be "reconciliation gift" or "peace offering". The word does not seem to be sacrificial, for "hilasterion never denotes an animal victim in any known source." The LXX uses hilasterion as the name for part of an altar (ie the Mercy Seat on the ark in the Pentateuch or to the "ledges" on an altar in Ezekiel). These are the only two meanings of hilasterion prior to 200AD.

The Parallel between Romans 3:24-25 and 4 Macc 17:21-22
By far the strongest parallel passage with Romans 3:25 is a passage in the book of 4 Maccabees. It reads:
"they having become, as it were, a ransom for the sin of our nation. And through the blood of those devout ones and the hilasterion of their death, divine Providence preserved Israel that previously had been mistreated." (4 Macc 17:21b-22)

The similarities include:

Numerous key word matches: Hilasterion, blood, ransom, sin, divine
Both speak of the hilasterion as the death of a person. (unique in surviving ancient literature)
Maccabees was written within a century of Romans, and also by a Hellenistic Jew.

The meaning of Hilasterion in 4 Macc 17:22
It is relatively straight-forward to determine the meaning of hilasterion in 4 Maccabees.

The theology of the context. The author makes it clear that God is punishing Israel because they have offended him. Then this group of Israelites have been faithful to God and his Law to the point of torture and death. Their faithful matyrdoms appease God, and oblige him to repay their faithfulness with kindness to Israel. This fits perfectly with the "appeasement gift" meaning of hilasterion.
Grammatically the verse just doesn't make sense if it is read as "mercy seat". To talk of the "mercy seat of their death" is nonsense. It can only be read as "gift of appeasement".
4 Maccabees is extremely Hellenistic in its language and philosophy. Thus the standard Hellenistic meaning of hilasterion is the most likely intended meaning. The chances of it favoring the LXX meaning of the word over the standard Greek meaning are slim-to-none.

Thus it seems clear that in 4 Macc 17:22 the meaning of hilasterion is "appeasing gift".

The meaning of Hilasterion in Rom 3:25
A number of arguments are relevant, I think in the following order of importance, for why hilasterion in Rom 3:25 must mean appeasing gift.

The parallel with 4 Macc 17:22 is so strong that the meaning of hilasterion is almost certainly identical in both passages.
The idea of Christ as a "gift of appeasement" makes great sense in Paul's theology. Paul elsewhere speaks of Christ making peace, undoing enmity, reconciling us and God.
The statement that Christ was a "mercy seat" makes no real sense. How can Christ be part of an altar? Perhaps it could metaphorically mean that Christ is the locus of the presence of God among men, or perhaps that he is the Holy of Holies, or perhaps that he is the New Temple, or perhaps that he is the place where atonement takes place. But none of this is obvious from calling him a "mercy seat", and if any of this was what was meant, more clarification would be necessary.
Most of recent scholarship believes that Paul's intended audience for Romans was primarily Gentiles. Therefore it makes sense for hilasterion to have its standard Greek meaning rather than any unusual Jewish one.
Stowers in Rereading Romans, claims the Temple of Paul's time had no hilasterion in it. This strikes me as likely wrong, but if true then it implies that the average Jew of Paul's time would have been more likely to use the normal Greek meaning of hilasterion than the no-longer-applicable ancient Jewish one.

Thus the evidence for seeing hilasterion in Romans 3:25 as meaning "appeasing gift" seems fairly compelling.

Who is receiving the Hilasterion?
If this is a gift of reconciliation who is giving it and who is receiving it? Is it a gift from God to humanity, or from God to himself on behalf of humanity? Here the arguments are mixed:

If we simply take Paul's words at face value in Romans 3:25 then Jesus would seem to be a gift to humanity from God.
This is consistent with the rest of Paul's theology, because he always speaks of us being reconciled to God, and us putting away our enmity against God, and never vice versa. So if makes sense in Paul's theology to see Jesus as the messenger and minister of reconciliation sent to us from God, who is given to us and killed by us in the course of saying "be reconciled to God". (1 Cor 5:19-20)
However the strong parallel with 4 Maccabees would suggest otherwise. In 4 Maccabees the martyrs are giving their lives faithfully to God and thereby appeasing him.
The idea of Jesus giving his life faithfully to God in order to appease God's anger against humanity has historically been fairly popular in Christian theology - it is Anselm's "Satisfaction" model.

My view would be that ultimately we have to let Paul speak for himself. The meaning of his words must be determined by what he actually says in the passage and elsewhere, and not determined by parallels with other literature or Christian atonement models from a millennium later. The most natural reading of the passage, and of Paul's words elsewhere lends it to being read as a reconciliation offering from God to man.

Lack of books on the atonement views of the second-third century church

2007-09-26T17:38:00.000+12:00

One of my main areas of interest is the doctrines of atonement and salvation in the early post-biblical church. For this reason I have a tendency to add to my Amazon wish list any book I come across that is about the theology of the early church.

Today I was reading through my wishlist, trying to work out what to buy and what not to buy. There were over a dozen of these books about the early church in my list, and with the help of Amazon's "search inside" feature and reader reviews I was able to get a pretty good idea of the contents of the vast majority of them. What I consistently found is this:

They talked about the writers of the period. They talked about these writer's doctrines of God, their doctines of scripture vs tradition, their doctrines of the sacraments... these books contained virtually nothing on the subjects of Salvation, Atonement, the Work of Christ, Final Judgment etc.

ARRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!! Why? Why? Why?

I would have thought that the basic idea of how a person is saved, and gains a positive final judgment is the one thing worth talking about. It's surely the one thing that matters above all else. Surely if you're going to outline someone's theology the first thing you'd explain is their conception of salvation, what it is, and how it's achieved... not their beliefs about tradition or their thoughts about the deity of Christ. Yet all these works seem to have taken the view that such things simply don't matter and omitted them entirely.

Am I the only one that thinks the atonement and eternal salvation are important? Of all the people who study the early Church writers am I the only one that cares what they thought about how humans can get to heaven and what Jesus achieved?

Molinism, and the Grounding Objection

2007-09-21T21:29:00.000+12:00

The question of how to reconcile God’s foreknowledge and human free will has plagued theologians for centuries. A view called Molinism presents itself as a logical explanation of how the two can be reconciled.

The major objection to Molinism is known as the “grounding objection”, and in my opinion it disproves Molinism completely. The grounding objection is the observation that the idea of (libertarian) free will means that people’s decisions can’t be known with certainty before they’re made, but Molinism claims God foreknows them.

Put a little more formally, it looks like this:
A. God foreknows the things he foreknows because they are true. He doesn’t just guess. There is an actual causal connection between something being true and God gaining foreknowledge of it. ie his foreknowledge is causally dependent on the truth of the thing he foreknows. (from definition of Exhaustive Definite Foreknowledge)
B. The truth of X depends on the person’s decision to do X. ie the person’s decision causes the action. (from definition of Libertarian Free Will)
Conclusion 1. Hence God’s foreknowledge is causally dependent on the person’s decision. (from A & B)
D. The person’s decision is indeterministic. (from definition of Libertarian Free Will)
E. The outcome of an indeterministic event cannot be calculated or predicted in advance even if everything is known about the situation and causes of the event. (from definition of Indeterminism)
Conclusion 2. The person’s decision cannot be calculated or predicted in prior to the person making it. (from D & E)
Conclusion 3. God cannot have foreknowledge of the decision prior to the person making it. (from conclusions 1 & 2)

This shows that is logically impossible for God to have definite foreknowledge of libertarian free will decisions. It is very rare in philosophy to get such a clear argument, so this is one of my favorites.

This means that either:
1. God’s foreknowledge is limited to some degree (ie the Open View); or
2. That free will is compatibilist not libertarian.

Of course a person can endorse both 1 and 2 if they wanted. However if Christian rejects Open Theism then, per the grounding objection, they logically ought to endorse 2. But endorsing Compatibilism and rejecting Open Theism seems to inevitably end up affirming double-predestination. So it seems to me that Christians really have a choice between Open Theism and double-predestination.

Indoctrination, Creeds, and 'Scholarship'

2007-09-20T12:20:00.000+12:00

I was brought up in a Baptist church that believed in "the bible" only. No one in my presence ever taught any theology, or any statements of faith. There was no interpretation of the bible, no "this is what the bible says". Rather I was simply encouraged to read the bible as much as possible, and I did. In this way I managed to reach an age of about 17 being extremely knowledgeable of the literal content of the bible, but being totally and completely ignorant of the various interpretations of the bible and of theology in general.

My first exposure to real theology was in visiting an Anglican church where the Athanasian Creed was read. I remember reading the line "in this Trinity... none is greater or less than another" and thinking "Um, that's pretty unbiblical: 'the Father is greater than I' (John 14:28)." Of course since that time I have made a fairly serious study of theology and biblical exegesis. But the fact that I was taught the bible and not any theology or creeds as a child continues to profoundly shape my viewpoint.

I have found that not everyone is like me. Many Christians grow up being taught a certain point of view as correct. They get presented with "the truth" about what the bible "really" says and means. They get taught a particular theology. They get given creeds and told that they contain precious truths needing to be defended. From the age of four their parents teach them certain interpretations of the bible as truth. They grow up in churches that endorse the same theological view. Then they go to seminaries who teach them how true and how biblical their creeds and confessions are. Then they become 'biblical scholars' and I get to read their writings.

That process scares me and disturbs me. I grew up as a Christian with no theology I would identify as my own, so I have no theological attachments, no particular preconceptions I am afraid to challenge. At the age of about 19 I simply one day thought "hmm, I should probably do some study of what those various denominations believe and find out who is right." My search has been one of neutral and disinterested curiosity to search out the truth. I did not care in the slightest if the Catholics rather than the Protestants turned out to be right, nor would I lose a moments sleep if I found out that the doctrine of the Trinity was rubbish, and if it turned out that 99% of Christians in history were totally mistaken I would shrug and move on... I was simply curious and had no particular attachments to any doctrines or teachings at all - I wanted to know what I ought to believe precisely because I didn't believe anything at all. Yet unlike me, most Christians have undergone 20-50 years of rigorous indoctrination. I can hardly conceive what that's like. It is also somewhat frustrating, because this part of their background so heavily biases their work in favor of the creeds they have been taught that they do not approach the issues from even a remotely neutral angle.

But what can I do about this? If I read a book by a scholar, and in it they do some study and then conclude that the bible precisely agrees with their own denomination's doctrines, what can I meaningfully get out of that? I can try and separate the bad arguments from the good ones, and I would like to think I'm pretty good at that. But bias can heavily affect the presentation of the evidence itself, which makes drawing any conclusions impossible. I have got to the point of taking the view that systematically biased scholarship is not worth the paper it is written on. I have to wonder though, in what sense can these people be meaningfully be called 'scholars' or said to engage in 'scholarship'. The correct term for a defender of a preset position is an 'apologist'. I'm sure they think of themselves as scholars, and think that their work is really a serious and unbiased study of what the bible really says... and it just happens by pure chance that they always end up concluding the traditions they have been taught are correct.

I have learned from experience to be extremely wary of other people's theological baggage and indoctrination, creeds, or confessions that they bring with them to the study of the bible and theology. Easily the worst offenders at systematic indoctrination and apologetics is the Reformed denomination, and it has reached the point where if I know a person is Reformed I will simply not read their works. But Presbyterians, Southern Baptists, Lutherans and Anglicans can be almost as bad at times, and with all writers it is necessary to keep a look out for indoctrinated bias.

This problem makes biblical studies a lot more difficult than other fields I have studied (ie philosophy, classics, maths, computing). All fields have their crackpots (and philosophy more so than many), but only in biblical studies are there hundreds of people churned out of seminaries per year dedicated to proving the truth of the traditions passed on to them, who will masquerade as scholars and write books defending their preconceived positions that supposedly impartially examine the evidence. It's depressing... how can the field of study advance when there are institutions dedicated to freezing it in stasis due to a perceived attainment of perfect doctrine?

Irenaeus' works

2007-09-19T10:43:00.000+12:00

When I first became interested in studying second century Christian theology, one of the first works I read were those of Irenaeus.
Big mistake.
Irenaeus' writings are probably the most difficult Christian writings in the entire patristic period to read. At the best of times he borders on incoherency. He uses some very unclear terminology. He makes prolific use of vivid imagery and totally fails to distinguish between the literal and metaphorical. Irenaeus has some very strange ideas that are not evidenced in other Christian sources from this period. He sees a strong connection between himself and the apostles, yet he gets extremely basic facts about the life of Jesus wildly wrong. Most patristics scholars have taken the same unflattering view on Irenaeus as myself. It was particularly popular to slander Irenaeus in the first 20 years of the 20th century, and though more people seem to like him now, I'm not convinced that this is for any good reason.

My frank advice therefore to anyone interested in studying second century Christianity is to avoid Irenaeus. Start instead with Justin Martyr's Apologies, and the Apostolic Fathers. Then read absolutely everything else from the second century, except Irenaeus. Then move to Origen and Clement of Alexandria in the early third century, and only then, and only if you really really must, go back and read Irenaeus.

I mention this because two blogs I read are starting a series of posts about one of Irenaeus' works. See here and here. I will read with great interest what they have to say about Irenaeus' theology. Because despite having a passing-fair knowledge of early Christian theology and having read Irenaeus' works a few times, I fully confess that I don't understand Irenaeus. From their posts so far it looks like John Behr's translation of Irenaeus' Apostolic Preaching is by far the best translation to read (I have not read it myself).

The Power or Guilt of Sin?

2007-09-12T19:32:00.000+12:00

I am reading The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views at the moment, and generally enjoying the food-for-thought it offers.

Something that surprised me in Greg Boyd's section on Christus Victor, was the degree to which the New Testament speaks of sinfulness as being a kind of "power" which rules over humanity and which we thus need freeing from. Thomas Schreiner, who defends Penal Substitution in the book, took issue with this of course and asserted that it is the personal moral "guilt" of sin that is the issue, and thus God's wrath which we need freeing from. Yet he provides little evidence of this beyond his assertion. (pg 51, 68)

Now the New Testament never once mentions the word "guilt" in relation to the atonement, so Schreiner's inability to support his claims is hardly surprising. But it is interesting to realize that the New Testament talks about sinfulness as if it were a power that dominates humanity and holds it in its thrall. Correspondingly, humanity needs rescuing from its domination.

I find it interesting to reflect on the biblical authors' way of viewing sinfulness. Taken too far in that direction and it could seemingly erase moral responsibility, leaving humans totally helpless and trapped by the domination of sinfulness from which we can do nothing at all to be free. Indeed Paul lays this picture on thick in Romans 5-8 and presents a person saying "woe is me, I am trapped by sinfulness ruling over me despite what I want" and then presents Christ as the answer to free the person from the power of sinfulness. I think this depiction is balanced however by language in the other direction elsewhere - given the NT is choc-full of moral exhortation it definitely implies ability on our part to join the fight. I think Boyd has it right when he highlights the war language that depicts a battle, and sees the fight of us and Christ against the power of sinfulness and evil in human lives as an extremely strong focus in the New Testament.

It is interesting how our modern Western worry about guilt before God are just so different to these ideas. Instead of asking "who will save me from the power of sinfulness", we ask "who will save me from God?" Instead of seeing sinfulness as a dominating power we pretend the bible is talking about guilt whenever it mentions sinfulness. People are convinced that guilt is the problem, and hey, the bible might never say it, but they're sure that it's the real problem nonetheless. However much I might disagree with Stendahl, I think he was absolutely on the money in suggesting that we have learned to read the bible in a way that sees talk of "guilt" where there is none.

Romans: Is that you speaking Paul?

2007-09-08T22:56:00.000+12:00

Recent scholars on Romans has identified several instances of Speech-In-Character, where the a character other than Paul is speaking. I agree with Witherington's assessment that this is because Paul was writing to a church over which he had no direct authority, and therefore needed to be a bit indirect in his arguments.

It is fairly universally accepted that Romans 7 contains a lengthy monologue by a character who is not Paul who speaks of their struggles with sin and the law. It has also long been noted that Paul often asks rhetorical questions in Romans. Scholars seem to widely agree now that these are mostly not rhetorical questions, but rather indicate a dialogue between two characters.

To give an idea of how endemic this is in Romans:
Romans 1:18-2:16 is sometimes regarded as a dialogue between a gentile moral preacher and Paul. Much of Romans 2:17-4:25 is generally accepted to be a dialogue between Paul and a Jewish teacher of the Law. Romans 7 contains a long monologue by a non-Paul character. Most ancient commentators thought most of Romans 9 was a Jew who was not Paul speaking.

In some places in Romans there is some substantial level of difficulty involved in identifying who the characters are and which one is asking the questions and which one is giving the answers. eg Stowers argues that in Rom 3:1-8 Paul is the one asking questions and the teacher is giving answers. Campbell thinks most of 1:18-2:16 is a Jewish preacher speaking. I think the strength of the parallels between 1:18-32 and the Jewish work Wisdom of Solomon mean that it's the Jewish teacher there, but contrary to Campbell I think the voice changes to Paul in 2:1.

To the original intended audience it would have been clear what was going on because Phoebe whom Paul sent with the letter would have read and presented it in such a way as to make it clear (changing voice, expression, body movements) as she read / presented / acted out the letter. Whereas we do not have that luxury.

Of course this creates substantial difficulties for us in trying to understand the letter. It certainly makes difficulties if we try to "get theology" out of the letter by grabbing a sentence and setting it up as Truth, since it might be in the mouth of one of Paul's opponents.

Romans 7 and the "I"

2007-09-07T09:27:00.000+12:00

Romans 7 is remarkable for being a passage on which biblical scholars had an almost unanimous change of view in a relatively short time.

Romans 7 contains a lengthy and passionate explanation about a person's struggles with Sin, Flesh, Spirit and Law. One of the more famous lines reads "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do." This passage has often spoken powerfully to people as the see their own life struggles reflected in it.

From the time of the Reformation until 50 years ago, biblical scholarship was deeply divided over one question regarding Romans 7: Is Paul in this passage speaking of his pre-conversion life as a Pharisee or his post-conversion life as a Christian? In other words, should we expect such struggles with sin to exemplify the Christian life, or ought the Christian life be characterized by freedom from sin? The fact that the passage was about Paul was universally accepted - after all, it uses the word "I" constantly, and how could Paul write with such emotion if he was not writing about himself?

Yet now there is pretty much unanimity amongst scholars that the passage is not about Paul. Paul is definitely not the "I" speaking in the passage. Paul is using a standard ancient Greek rhetorical device of speech-in-character and it is that character who is talking. The previous question about whether the struggle with sin describes the Christian or pre-Christian life seems to have also been definitively answered: The character is speaking of their pre-Christian life and their struggles with sin, and looking for Christ to free them from the power of sin and save them from that struggle. It is notable that all the early Greek Christian commentaries on Romans held both these views.

The new question that has scholars engaged is the question of: Who is the character? The main candidates seem to be:

Adam himself and his experiences with the command to not eat the fruit.
A gentile who decided to start following the Jewish Law.
Humanity/Israel personified. ie the passage is the story of salvation history from Adam to Christ like in Rom 5, with humanity/Israel itself as the speaker.

Scholars are divided on these three and no one has yet to produce a compelling argument for one over the others. I have no idea myself which of these three is most likely (I haven't studied the passage too carefully).

On few issues in scholarship is there much level of agreement, so it is quite surprising that there is so much agreement on the subject of Paul not being the "I" in Romans 7 and that there has been a universal change of tune within so short a time-frame. But it also raises a rather important question: If the one passage where we were sure was Paul speaking is in fact not Paul at all, then what about all the other passages where we thought Paul was speaking? More on that later...

Sanctification vs Justification

2007-09-03T09:59:00.000+12:00

It's been traditional since the Reformation to draw a distinction between Justification and Sanctification. This is one of issues where I just can't fathom what the Reformers were thinking, since there seems no good reason for doing this. The two words mean substantially the same thing, and Paul uses them synonymously.

So it was with a sigh that today I read this post endorsing the traditional Protestant separation of justification and sanctification, written by someone who studies Paul's writings and thus ought to know better.

One of the other things that kind of makes me go "huh?" is that if someone demanded of me that I draw a distinction between Sanctification and Justification, then I would split the terms up the opposite way round. That is, the idea that the word "sanctification" in the Bible means what Protestants call justification and that "justification" means what Protestants call sanctification, is a more plausible hypothesis than the opposite. Given the evidence, it's silly to try to split the terms up, but if I had to that's how I'd split them... so I really don't get what the Reformers were thinking when they split them the way they did. Everyone in the church prior to the Reformation had held that they were synonymous and indicative of moral transformation, so why did the Reformers see fit to tamper, and tamper in such a bizarre and unevidenced manner at that? One of the mysteries of life, I suppose...

Legalistic, or grace?

2007-08-31T15:17:00.000+12:00

Talk about whether something is "legalistic" always annoys me because it is such an unhelpful word.

"Legalism" is not a clear category at all, and everyone who uses it seems to mean something different, so it's no longer a meaningful word. It's an emotionally loaded term though, so it does have a meaning of a certain kind - it effectively acts as indicating a negative value judgment. ie "it's legalistic" says more about the fact that the speaker places a negative value judgment on the referent than it does about actually describing the referent.

The opposite of "legalism" seems to be "grace", which is a word that is just as bad. I have heard people use the world "grace" to mean at least a dozen different things. It also indicates a positive value judgment.

Thus when I encounter a sentence like "Is it true that Judaism was a religion of grace, not legalistic works righteousness?" my eyes roll.

Things I look for...

2007-08-27T15:31:00.000+12:00

I have been thinking about what qualities make a theological book or article "worthwhile" in my opinion. Since I read a lot of different articles and books focused on the same topics, what I look for focuses around whether I can get something out of the work I am reading that was not contained in the other works. Thus, a book or article can be brilliant, but if I don't learn something from it, it is not going to be worthwhile reading in my view. This could of course mean that the single overall best book on the topic for a person to read if they were only going to read one book on that topic, might not be "worthwhile" according to my criteria. I think there are four primary qualities I look for, at least one of which needs to be present:

1. Original scholarship
The author proposes new ideas, novel approaches, a radical thesis... something that makes me stop and think "wow, hadn't thought of that" or "hmm, that's an interesting idea".

2. Breadth of citations
Some writers interact a lot with the rest of scholarly literature. If a book makes reference to the ideas of a hundred other different authors then there's bound to be something to be learned from it.

3. Insightful analyzes
When dealing with a controversial issue, sometimes writers can beautifully lay out the various viewpoints that different people hold on the topic, and explain wonderfully the pros and cons of the different viewpoints. This is often a great help to clear thinking, even though no conclusion may be reached and no original research is done.

4. Strong arguments
This is where the writer provides an abnormally high level of good-logic and evidence-analysis in their arguments. Rather than survey the various views and then sit on the fence, the writer provides the strongest possible argument for their views.

I was thinking about these things because I am currently reading Ben Witherington's Paul's Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary and trying to work out why I think it is so bad. I think I've convinced myself that the reason I hate it is because it fails abysmally on all four of the above criteria.

A brief history of Christian atonement thought

2007-08-23T10:25:00.000+12:00

100-313AD
Christ is primarily seen as a teacher of virtue and monotheism. By hearing and following Christ's teachings and example, Christian converts are able to turn from their old sinful ways and live righteously before God. Some also add teaching of Recapitulation, or Christus Victor/Ransom-from-Satan (CV/RS). No original sin. Final judgement by works. Free Will.

250-500AD, Original Sin in the West
The doctrine of Original Sin develops in North Africa. Pelagius, Augustine, Cassian, between them result in Western Christianity adopting a significantly more pessimistic view of man than Eastern Christianity. Augustine invents the idea of Predestination, but it is not very influential.

350+, A not-so Eternal Hell in the West
In discussion of whether hell is eternal, or whether God might eventually bring hell to an end, it is suggested that perhaps hell is not eternal for Christians who are sent to hell (for their evil works). Western Christianity adopts the idea that for evil Christians hell is not eternal. This leads to it becoming "Purgatory". Thus, Christians unworthy to go to heaven go to purgatory temporarily, prior to heaven.

313-1000AD Atonement Models
In Eastern Christianity the atonement model of Christ-as-teacher merges with the model of Recapitulation to produce "Theosis", which is about both sanctification and ontological transformation (ie humanity becomes 'divine' by becoming godly and virtuous, and also by spiritually 'participating' in God). CV/RS and Theosis both universally taught in East. The East then goes largely into doctrinal stasis.

In Western Christianity the atonement models in use are Christ as teacher of righteousness, CV/RS, and an emerging new idea that conceived of Christ's work as targeted at God and as a gift to him. CV/RS is universally dominant over this period, with Christ as teacher being taken for granted, and Christ-as-gift cropping up occasionally.

1100+AD New and Old Models in the West
In Western Christianity, Anselm challenged CV/RS and drew up a formal version of the Christ-as-gift theory to replace it, which became known as "Satisfaction". The offense given to God by human disobedience was made up for by Christ's faithful obedience to God. Peter Abelard objected vigorously to Anselm's ideas, but rather than defend CV/RS against Anselm's challenge he attempted to reinvigorate the Christ-as-Teacher model, which became known as "Moral Exemplar". Western Christianity from this point on generally dropped CV/RS and became split between Satisfaction and Moral Exemplar

1400-1700 Satisfaction gets a face lift
Anselm's satisfaction model was based on the idea of God as a Feudal Lord and acting according to social norms in accepting Christ's faithfulness as repayment for our disobedience. As society passed out of feudalism his ideas were recast using a paradigm of a Law-Court: "Penal Substitution" (PS). This added to Satisfaction the idea of Christ suffering our punishment. A modified form of PS that was popular for a while was the "Governmental View" which attempts to drop some of the conceptual difficulties inherent in the original.

1500+ Reformation Theology in the West
The Reformers adopted wholehearted the Penal Substitution theology of their day. Original Sin was strengthened by them back to Augustine's levels. Augustine's predestination ideas were reintroduced. Salvation was by "faith alone" and all works were moved into the category of "sanctification" which was made tangential to the main salvation process. "Justification" was redefined, no longer being about inner moral transformation, and now considered to mean a righteous status declared by God that was contrary to our real state of sinfulness.

1700-2000 To the Present Day
The Eastern Orthodox continued to hold their Theosis and CV/RS views. They still endorsed free will, rejected original sin, and held to final judgment by works.

Conservative Protestants and Roman Catholics continued to endorse and defend their party lines. Liberal Protestants held the Moral Exemplar view and free will and rejected original sin. Within conservative protestantism the Arminians and Calvinists debated their differences on free will, while the Catholics and Protestants debated their differences on the nature of justification and faith/works, and the conservatives and liberals debated over Penal Substitution and Moral Exemplar.

On interpreting metaphors and genres

2007-08-22T08:55:00.000+12:00

Scholar Ben Witherington has a nice post that covers a few common mistakes I often see people make when interpreting the bible.

One thing that surprises me time and again is how bad people are at understanding the concept of, and interpreting, metaphorical language. Now I'm sure most people have done poetry at school, and that if you shoved a line of poetry under their noses and said "identify the similes and metaphors" they could do a reasonable job. And if you asked them to "explain the poet's meaning here" they could probably give a reasonable explanation about what the meaning behind the metaphorical language was and what the poet was saying.

Yet this knowledge seems to fly out the nearest window when it comes to the Bible. Put a line from the bible in front of someone and say "identify the metaphorical language" and you'll be met with blank stares. If you suggest that there's metaphorical language present then your words will be understood as meaning that you are denying the literal meaning of the text (ie refusing to believe the bible) and that this is because you don't believe in the supernatural and that you justify this by 'spiritualising' the text (eg they think you're talking about making the resurrection of Jesus a 'metaphor' for the 'new life' that people feel like they receive when they hear his marvelous teachings). The concept of trying to correctly identify instances of metaphorical language in an attempt to understand authorial intent just doesn't seem able to be fathomed by a surprisingly large number of people, no matter how much effort is put into explaining it.

I think this ties into another problem Witherington isolates - genre identification. Too many people treat the entire bible as if in genre it was a Systematic Theology textbook. ie any and all sentences are intended with dry literalism to state theological facts and the target audience is any theologically-interested reader. Systematic Theological language tends to be always literal and never metaphorical, hence (I suspect) the difficulty some people have with the very concept of metaphors in the bible. This problem also results in a failure to pay attention to the genre of the biblical passage being interpreted. One of the most glaring genre errors I see regularly is people interpreting passages as meaning that "no one can ever do good, so don't bother trying" in sections where the genre is Moral Exhortation.

A gospel of doing nothing?

2007-08-20T15:34:00.000+12:00

When I first began theological studies from a conservative Protestant background, I quickly found a universally accepted truth was that salvation was "by faith alone", it was "by grace" and that it was our duty to "rest" on "Christ's finished work". It was considered important to realize that we could "add nothing" to "Christ's atoning work". It was important that we didn't try to "save ourselves" by "human effort". It was extremely important not to add the least bit of "works" to salvation, otherwise you'd be like those (heretical) Roman Catholics and teach (evil) "Works Based Salvation".

Paul's writings about "by grace through faith not works" were considered "irrefutable proof" of this view. Anyone who said anything different was being "unbiblical" and "straying" from the Bible's teachings. Salvation by "human effort" was how "human religions" worked, and all humans who are "in the flesh" inherently by their psychology wanted to try to save themselves, whereas the fact that Christianity relied on God alone for salvation separated it from other religions and caused it to be "nonsense" and "foolishness" to the "natural man". I found that in some quarters there was even worry that our very belief in and acceptance of Christ's finished work for us might be considered something we do, as a work based on human effort that saves us. Thus, some thought that we ought to think of even our faith in Christ's finished atoning work as something given graciously to us by God.

However, now that I've learned a bit more than I once knew about both Pauline theology and the Church Fathers, it is with amusement that I look back on such ideas and claims.

Advances in biblical scholarship in the last thirty years have well and truly refuted the "irrefutable evidence" of Paul's grace, faith and works language... ironically it turned out that grace didn't mean grace, faith didn't mean faith, and works didn't mean works. The New Perspective on Paul has thus cast Paul's writings in quite a different light to the ideas above. Far from being the apostle who rejects the value of human effort, it in fact turns out that not once in any of his writings does Paul reject or deny the value or saving value of human effort to avail before God, and in fact he regularly affirms it.

Studying the early Church Fathers has been no less interesting. I find it reasonable to assume (contrary to some Protestants) that Christianity didn't suddenly disappear out of the world the moment that the New Testament was completed, and that post-NT Christian writings accurately depict the major doctrines of early Christianity. There's a quote by Clement of Alexandria (~200AD) that succinctly summarizes what appears to have been universal early Christian doctrine: "God desires us to be saved by our own efforts." (Stromata 6.12.96) As is attested in the numerous writings we have from the second century church, Christianity worldwide was a religion of "works based salvation".

It was with great amusement then, and also a little frustration and sadness that I recently read this article which made all the claims I had originally been taught as a conservative protestant about how the true gospel is about us trying to cease from human effort and rely on God's salvation. In the article he writes "We do not need a better set of how to's, or a better teacher, or a better therapist." which brought to my mind all the early Christian writings which boasted about Christianity providing precisely these three things. It is really quite amazing, when I reflect on it, that Christianity has come in such a full circle that this writer, in the belief that he is proclaiming the true Christian gospel can be attacking the very essence of original Christianity.

Dikaio-, not so forensic

2007-08-10T17:30:00.000+12:00

The Dikaio- words [dikaiosune (righteousness), dikaios (righteous), dikaioo (justify, set/do/make/become right), dikaiosis (justification, process of setting/making/becoming righteous), dikaioma (righteous acts)] are fairly important in biblical exegesis and theology.

Sometimes people talk about how the Dikaio- word group can be used in a "forensic" sense (ie legal, law-court language). Certainly this word group was sometimes used in law courts in the ancient world. There's nothing wrong with observing that. But, I was reminded with a shock recently while browsing the internet that some people actually think that the Greek word group itself has to do with law-courts and takes its meaning from a law-court setting and paradigm. In other words, they think that wherever we see a sentence containing a word from this group we ought to start thinking about a law-court setting. As these people read the bible wherever they see a Dikaio- word a law-court pops up in their minds.

The main trouble with this notion of the Dikaio- group as an "intrinsically forensic" word is that it is just utter crap. The vast majority of the uses of the word in both classical literature and the bible have nothing to do with law-courts. The Dikaio- word group is about morality. So it comes in useful sometimes in law-court discussions because law-courts generally try to discriminate the those who have done right from those who have done wrong and then do something about it.

In English, for example, we can talk about "guilty" and "innocent" people. Law courts use these moral terms precisely because they are interested in investigating the pre-existing moral status of individuals and subsequently announcing their findings. People do not become guilty of their crimes just because the court announces them guilty - rather they were already guilty or innocent prior to being tried and it is the court's job to search out and ascertain the truth. It is utter nonsense to talk of a judge making a person morally innocent by declaring them innocent. If the court gives the wrong verdict, the we would say "the judge got it wrong". In other words, the moral meaning of these English words is the primary one and the law-court usage is secondary and contingent on that moral meaning.

It is the same in Greek. "Dikaiosune" refers to morality / righteousness / virtue / goodness, and the "dikaios" are the good/virtuous/moral/righteous people, and so forth for the rest of the Dikaio- group. While such language can be useful in legal discussions, it is getting the cart before the horse to think that such language makes it a legal discussion. Use of such language makes it a discussion of morality and ethics. Moral language can be used in a judicial context of course, but the use of morality-related language doesn't make the context a judicial one. I shudder to think the sort of havoc screwing up the meaning of such a basic, central, and simple word makes to their exegesis and theology. But sadly, the linguistic nonsense of Dikaio- as intrinsically forensic terminology seems to propagate itself precisely because people like the theology it results it - ie the claim seems to be made for theological reasons rather than due to actual evidence for the view.

Pointless historical speculation: As far as I can tell, know or guess, the idea that Dikaio- is intrinsically forensic is a hangover from when the Latin Vulgate crossbreed with the origins of the modern judicial system half a millennia ago. The coincidence that the then-millennium-old Vulgate's Latin terminology happened to match with the then-current Latin judicial terminology was at the time projected back onto the underlying Greek.

Abstract atonement theory vs actual history

2007-07-31T18:33:00.000+12:00

The fundamental question sitting in the background throughout Brondos' book is "how does Paul's view of atonement compare to the historical facts of Jesus' life and death?"

Jesus was a person, who lived at a particular time in history and did various things during his life. He gathered disciples, taught, healed, got into conflicts over the Law, the Temple and money. He got plotted against and killed by the authorities. Then God raised him from the dead. That's the story recorded in the gospels. That's the story his followers passed on to each other, its a story of Jesus' life and death and resurrection that purports to a historical account of something that really happened.

Now, if we heard this story as told to us by an early follower of Jesus, or read the gospels that recorded this story, the very first thing we would not say upon hearing the facts of the story is "so Satan's power over humanity is now broken" or "So thorough becoming human Jesus united humanity with God" or "so in dying Jesus took upon himself the sins of the world?". None of these ideas flow naturally out of the story. If you'd just heard the story of Jesus' life you wouldn't, from that story, deduce these ideas.

A view that was quite popular among scholars about a hundred years ago was the viewpoint that most of Jesus' immediate followers simply repeated the bare facts about his life, teachings, death and resurrection. It was believed they taught the historical story about Jesus, and then Paul came along and he wasn't interested in the historical Jesus as a real-person at all. To Paul (according to these scholars) Jesus was the Cosmic Redeemer, and Paul invented an abstract system of atonement in which Jesus' death is an event of cosmic atonement which is dissimilar from any other human deaths in history and which changes the very nature of reality itself. This was thought to have made Pauline Christianity far more attractive to the gentiles who were into religions that said this sort of thing. So it was thought Paul had invented these ideas basically out of whole cloth as he religiousifed
Christianity and brought it to the gentiles. In this way a huge chasm exists between the real Jesus of history which most of Jesus' immediate followers understood Jesus as and the non-historical cosmic Jesus of faith that Paul holds to.

Brondos is concerned about views such as this, where the views ascribed to Paul are either explicitly or implicitly divorced from the facts of Jesus' life and death. ie. where the "theory of atonement" is not obvious upon hearing a simple account of Jesus' ministry, where it involves hidden cosmic transactions that one has to be told about separately. Brondos sees numerous problems with this. He doesn't buy the idea that Paul is disinterested in the historical Jesus, and points to recent scholarship that has found numerous references to the life and teachings of Jesus throughout Paul's letters. He points out that in Romans, Paul is writing to a church he has never been to and yet uses Paul's normal atonement language with the assumption its recipients would understand it fine, indicating that Paul expected people who had heard the simple historical story about the life of Jesus would understand his atonement language and understand him to be saying essentially the same thing as what they already believed.

Brondos argues that a hypothesis that sees Paul's language situated in essentially the same narrative as the gospels actually does make sense of what Paul says. If one takes the view that Paul sees the atonement not as a single event of cosmic redemption accomplished once for all in a single act, but as an ongoing story, then one finds that this coheres very well with things Paul says. In a lengthy analysis of Paul's atonement language, Brondos concludes that Paul's story is the same story as the four gospels. Paul is not meaning to affirm a mysterious cosmic atoning event of a non-historical Christ, but rather to affirm the gospel stories of a historical Jesus whose life, death and resurrection form a unique part in the continuing global story of God's redemption.

The same cup

2007-07-26T14:28:00.000+12:00

One of the arguments made in Pierced for our transgressions that caused me to roll my eyes in despair a bit more than usual was the claim the use of the word "cup" in the gospels in reference to Jesus' death proves Penal Substitution. Their alleged logic behind this is that the Old Testament uses the word cup in the content of God punishing people and being wrathful. They quote a few passages and apparently this therefore proves by the use of the same word in the gospels that God is being depicted as wrathful toward Jesus. (God is actually never described in the Bible as wrathful toward Jesus, hence why the authors of PFOT need to go to such extreme lengths to find proof for their idea) Thus, Jesus' bears the cup of God's wrath poured out on him as a substitute for sinful humanity etc. Anyway, at the time of reading I just dismissed it as yet another one of their E-grade arguments and mentally bucketed it with Goligher's stellar argument that mention of the herb hyssop proves penal substitution.

But in Brondos' Paul on the Cross he has an extended discussion of how in the bible believers are said to suffer the same sufferings that Christ himself suffered, dying "with" Christ etc. His aim is thus to demonstrate that Christ's sufferings weren't thought of as unique among humanity's but rather that Christ suffered in the course of trying to achieve certain things and subsequently his followers suffered for those same goals. Among other passages, he mentions this:

But Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" They replied, "We are able." Then Jesus said to them, "The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; (Mk 10:38-39)

That cracked me up. If you use the PFOT logic of "cup" meaning PS, then this says the disciples are also penal substitutes for the sins of humanity! They drink from the same "cup" of God's wrath as Jesus in their death, and are "baptized" like Jesus in God's wrath. ~snigger~

I was impressed though at Brondos' demonstration of just how strong the theme of us dying like Christ for the same things as Christ is in the New Testament. Not only the (in)famous passage "in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions" (Col 1:24) but heaps of others as well speak of believers suffering like Christ for the same causes as Christ in order to attempt to achieve and further the goals Christ was trying to achieve.

The methodology of exegeting atonement doctrine

2007-07-25T20:29:00.000+12:00

I have found that when it comes to atonement, a lot of people have been taught ideas about how it works. If anything causes them to doubt what they have been told, they then go to the bible and say "Is there biblical support for what I have been taught?"

That question is a trick question. Because looking through the bible, if you look long enough, you will find passages that agree close-enough to whatever you have been taught. It is simply a matter of statistics. If you check enough passages they will eventually find some that can be interpreted in agreement with you theory. People are especially psychologically gifted at ignoring passages that disagree with their ideas and focus only one ones that agree. I find that once people have found 'proof' in the bible of the theology they have been taught they will hold it up to doubters and say "look, can't you see? It's so obvious!" It's always obvious, once you've done a careful selection of precisely the verses that most agree with your view, interpreted them in the way that seems best to you, and shunted all the evidence to one side.

I think a major turning point in my own psychology when I came to study the theories of atonement was when I put them all mentally on a level playing field. Instead of saying to myself "can I prove that this particular one is biblical?", I instead said "Well person A thinks that one is biblical and can 'prove' it with biblical verses, and person B thinks that different one is biblical and can 'prove' it with different verses, and person C thinks a different one again is biblical and can prove it with different verses. So how can I know who is right?" I was exposed to different people who were convinced that different and mutually exclusive views of the atonement were biblical and they could all prove it from the bible.

It was that which really made me do a mental gear change. Christians at different times and places in history had been absolutely convinced that certain models of the atonement were the biblical model, but had believed in differing models. Funnily enough, these different Christians seemed always convinced that the model they had been taught was the true biblical. For me I realized that if I really wanted to understand what the Bible writers themselves thought about the atonement I needed a major methodological change. It was clearly not enough to just take what I'd been taught, ask myself if I could find some bible verses that seemed to agree, and then be convinced I held biblical truth. Getting to the truth was clearly much more complicated and messy. Even if multiple atonement models were true or partially true, clearly when different Christians thought different models were the main central model, they could not all be right. In fact, at least all but one of the groups had to be wrong.

Trying to analyze and answer the question of which model of the atonement is really the central biblical one has taken me years. It is a complex matter of studying a whole lot of different subject areas, comparing multiple competing theories against a vast amount of data, and paying as much attention to evidence that disagrees with a viewpoint as is paid to evidence that supports a viewpoint. After years of study during which time I've become fairly knowledgeable on the historical Jesus, Pauline theology, the Early Church Fathers, and the NT writings and systematic theology in general in the process of trying to understand the atonement, and I've come to various conclusions on the subject of atonement doctrine.

But the internet is great for people saying to me in forums "do you believe X?" and I say "Well, actually I don't think that's biblical", and they say "But verses X, Y, & Z say so! Can't you see? It's obvious! You must be blind if you can't see it! You're denying the bible!" The problem I often have is that there's no simple way to explain to people why I hold the views I do. There's no way to compress years of study and analysis, of books and debate into a few sentences or paragraphs. The reasons why I think my view is best are horrendously complicated, depending on complex analyzes of all the evidence and cross-comparisons of different theories and ideas which build on other ideas and scholarship that the person I'm talking to often has never has encountered.

I think this makes me truly appreciate works where the author demonstrates they have engaged in this process themselves. Where they are not just saying "can I prove/disprove what I've been taught", but rather have long grappled with all the different atonement ideas and really understand the situation. I think this is what made me so contemptuous of Pierced For Our Transgressions as the authors demonstrated ignorance on all the important issues and had set out to prove what they had been taught in response to some else denying the truth of what they had been taught. (Similarly for Goligher's The Jesus Gospel) Whereas Brondos in Paul on the Cross gained my full respect by demonstrating that he understands how complex the situation is, that he is fully conversant with all the theories of atonement and sees how different Christians have been convinced different ones and biblical, and is interested in trying to get beyond this to learn something worthwhile about what the NT writers thought however complex this might be to accomplish, and he has good knowledge of the relevant scholarship.

Hebrews' allegory of Christ as Priest

2007-07-24T10:17:00.000+12:00

The writer of Hebrews presents an allegory that sees Christ achieving what the sacrificial system would have ideally liked to do but couldn't. The new covenant, as a result of Christ, has not only accomplished everything the old covenant did, but surpassed it in every way. I think such an allegory is not really the best place to be looking to learn how the new covenant actually works. But reservations aside, since I have been asked what I think the writer of Hebrews thinks about the atonement...

The first atonement motif in Hebrews is in chapter 2 and talks about him defeating the devil and freeing us from the fear of death, though this motif does not seem to reoccur. So I'm going to put it to one side.

The most common atonement motif is of Christ as an intercessor who submits prayers and supplications to God like an old testament priest. It is in this context that it is said Christ as priest submits to God "gifts and sacrifices" (5:1, 8:3, 9:9) along with his supplications. The idea of sacrifices as gifts to God in order to please him and thus have him view the petitions and prayers favorably was extremely common in the ancient world. The pleasant smell of incense and the giving of gifts other than animals were understood to function in much the same way, thus aiding the petitions of the worshipers.

In this sense in trying to "work out" the allegory, we could say that the writer sees Christ's life of obedience to God and his faithfulness to death doing God's will forms a pleasing gift to God, a sacrificial offering of himself and his life to the will of God ("I have come to do your will" 10:7-9), thus pleasing God and strengthening his petitions.

A second and different function of sacrifices is discussed later in Hebrews - that of purification. In the ancient world the life-force of of pure animals was considered to be able to purify that which it touched by virtue of its own purity. Thus comments are made about how things are washed clean and purified through blood, as if blood was a detergent. The Mosaic law contains long descriptions of how and where to spread the blood to achieve purification. Furthermore the eating of the holy meat of the sacrifice was also believed to bring purification.

Christ gets paralleled to this notion of sacrificial purification. He has achieved some sort of purification that is better and bigger than what the sacrifices could achieve. But how it works is somehow different - we neither are literally washed in Christ's blood nor eat his flesh (well there's the Eucharist, but it's not mentioned). The mechanics of how he achieved this purification are not specified unambiguously or clearly. It is therefore possible to link any atonement mechanism into this.

The mention of a defeat of Satan right near the start of Hebrews would suggest that Christus Victor or Ransom from Satan might provide the correct mechanism for understanding the author's thought here. On the other hand, what is occurring here is sacrificial supersession - ie the sacrificial system is being superseded and replaced by something else. Since cultural studies have indicated that sacrificial systems seem to be always superseded in cultures by morality and ethics this would seem to suggest an Ethical or Moralistic mechanism of atonement is most likely in mind. Throughout the rest of the new testament there is clear evidence of moral living as superseding sacrifices. The most famous being of course Rom 12:1 "present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship", but there are heaps of others.

It would be passing strange if the author of Hebrews saw CV or Ransom as providing the mechanism of supersession when the rest of the NT Christians thought moral transformation to living a moral life in obedience to the teachings of Christ and the imitation of his life was what brought about purification and hence superceded the sacrificial system. These ideas seem to make sense of Hebrews when applied to it. The author of Hebrews also seems to have a tendency to draw moral conclusions from sacrificial sentences, implying the same idea of morality as achieving purification and thus having done away with the need for sacrifices.

Without the shedding of blood

2007-07-23T13:28:00.000+12:00

I am often surprised when people fail to distinguish properly between descriptive and normative statements, or between contingency and necessity. For those unfamiliar with philosophical terminology:

Descriptive statement - a statement that simply describes how things are. It doesn't make any value judgments about whether things ought to be that way, it just observes the facts.
Normative statement - a statement about how things ought to be. Rather than describing the facts of any given instance, it makes claims about what is ideal, correct, normal, or best.
Contingent - something is contingently true if it happens to be true but didn't have to be true. ie if things could have happened differently, if something could have been done another way, then the fact that things happened in the way they did is called contingent.
Necessity - this is where something that is true could never have been different.

The verse I observe people regularly making mistakes about is:

Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. (Hebrews 9:22)

Many people read or quote this verse and assume that it is speaking of something normative or necessary. The assumed idea is that either "without the shedding of blood there can't be forgiveness of sins", or that the law is basically correct in its ideas about purification through blood. They implicitly assume the phrase is not a descriptive one describing a contingent truth.

Yet the phrase seems to me to be obviously descriptive. The writer is observing that "under the law" things are purified with blood and sins aren't forgiven apart from blood sacrifice. In this sentence he makes no value judgment about this fact, he simply makes an observational statement. Elsewhere he does make value judgments and those value judgments are negative, not positive! (Heb 10:4, "it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.") Far from describing a necessary truth or a normative method of sin-removal in Heb 9:22, the writer is making a descriptive comment about how the law does things that elsewhere he makes clear he disapproves of. In his view, the law's method is neither the only method nor the best method - neither necessary nor normative.