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From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
R. Michael Allen’s The Christ’s Faith: A Dogmatic Account (T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology)
Allen, who teaches at Wheaton, argues that “the Christ’s faith coheres with and is, in fact, a necessary implication of orthodox Christology and the soteriology of the magisterial Reformation.” Somewhat more fully, “the faithful one exercises that very faith ‘for us and for our salvation’ precisely because this Jesus came to redeem and perfect humanity. ’Without faith it is impossible to please God,’ . . . yet the Christ came to bring redemption to those who are unable to please God because incapable of sustaining perfect faith. Thus, the flawless life of the incarnate Son is itself constitutive of Christian salvation. That is, the fulfillment of the human vocation before God – ‘pleasing God’ – is a necessary, though not sufficient, aspect of the work of Christ. Though various dogmatic traditions have affirmed this in different ways, the present book highlights the centrality of the Christ’s faith in sustaining the broader claim that Jesus’ human life matters. . . . a theology of the humanity of Christ must attend to the nature and role of his faith.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 3:28 pm
Wow.
That’s my initial reaction to a quick perusal of the opening chapters of Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul
What’s wrong with “Justification theory”? A lot, Campbell thinks.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, August 14, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Jacob Taubes (The Political Theology of Paul (Cultural Memory in the Present)
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, May 9, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Christians typically object to deterministic social theories. Humans are not, we insist, slaves to birth, culture, nurture, social status, political affiliation. We are free.
That may be the wrong answer. The right answer may be: Yes, outside of Christ, human beings are slaves to all those things and more. These are the “powers” and the “elementary principles” that hold people in bondage, the powers from which Jesus releases us by His cross and resurrection. Perhaps what we count as evidence of human freedom from these determinations is simply the afterglow of two millennia of evangelization.
Perhaps the typical Christian response to determinism is a variant of Pelagius, and what we need to a sociological Augustinianism.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, April 4, 2009 at 5:41 am
Several times in his stimulating Contours of Pauline Theology, Tom Holland claims that Paul’s references to displayed blood must refer to sacrifice becuase “there is only one sacrifice in the entire Old Testament that was given public display. It was the Paschal victim whose blood was daubed on the lintel and doorposts of the homes it protected.”
Paul may well be referring to Passover, but Holland is mistaken. Every sacrifice, in fact, included a display of blood, and many of them displayed blood on the bronze altar in the courtyard. Passover is always in the background, but it was from the only sacrifice that displayed the blood for all to see.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Paul’s teaching concerning the relation of the Spirit to law is often understood this way: The law sets out God’s demands for His people; we can’t keep those demands; the Spirit enables us to conform to the law.
That’s one way of putting it. It is the way that Jeremiah and Ezekiel put it – new hearts enable Israel to obey the Torah.
But that is not Paul’s characteristic way of putting it. More often, Paul says that we “keep in step” with the Spirit, rather than relying on the Spirit to “keep in step” with Torah.
Of course, by keeping up with the Spirit, we do fulfill what the law required all along (Romans 8:1-4). But the law is not the standard the Spirit enables us to reach. Rather, the Spirit (who is, of course, the Spirit of the Christ, the living Torah) has Himself become the standard.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 2:58 am
Contrary to some trends of modern NT scholarship, Paul and John inhabit the very same world of thought, ask the same questions, address the same problems. One hint of this: John 8 focuses attention, at turgid length, on the question of Jewish origin and identity. The Jews claim to be of God their Father, and therefore sons, the true Israel (cf. Exodus 4:23). Jesus says they are of their father the devil, and they are not the true Israel. The whole question is, Who is Abraham’s seed?
Which is, as NT Wright has shown, precisely Paul’s question.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 9, 2009 at 7:56 am
Yoder (Body Politics) suggests that “flesh” in the New Testament can refer to “ethnicity.” Citing 2 Corinthians 5, he writes that “Paul is defending the missionary policies, for which he was being criticized, according to wich on principle he makes Jews and Gentiles pray and eat together. What the NEB calls ‘worldly standards’ would more precisely be rendered as ‘ethnically.’ The phrase kata sarka in verse 16, literally ‘according to the flesh,’ means ‘ethnically.’”
Yoder is certainly correct for some passages (Philippians 3, eg), and perhaps he’s right for many passages. Should we read “the Spirit desires against the flesh, and the flesh against the Spirit” not as a war between Spirit and “sinful nature” (or, not only) but rather as a war between the Pentecostal Spirit who joins all nations in Christ and the spirit of ethnicity and national pride?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, March 3, 2009 at 9:27 am
We instinctively distinguish nature and nurture, genes and training, and the Greeks did too with their distinction of physis and nomos. Paul’s use, though, doesn’t fit easily into this binary.
Paul at times uses physis in a sense close to our own, describing what is given to a thing by its biology. Romans 1:26 is arguably an example.
Elsewhere, though, he includes characteristics that are given by birth but not by biology. That is, physis expands to include what we think of as “religion” and “culture.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, February 3, 2009 at 8:03 am
From Neill and Wright again, summarizing the assumptions behind William Hietmuller’s early twentieth-century work on Paul’s views on sacraments. Hietmuller placed Paul within the history of religions, and arrived at conclusions that have guided many Pauline scholars ever since.
As summarized by Neill and Wright, there are four principles at work: a) There is radical difference between preaching of Jesus and the theology of Paul; b) Paul is self-contradictory, and unaware of it; c) The source of the contradiction is the intrusion of alien Hellenistic elements into his thought: destroyed faith as simple trust; d) This is the beginning of “Catholicism,” reliance on outward and visible, an institutionalization of Christianity that is at war with the true spiritual gospel of Protestantism.
The last is crucial: Critical scholarship sees itself as a continuation of the Reformation. Critical scholarship is a Pietist/Anabaptist movement that attempts to purge “foreign” and “catholic” residue from Christianity and re-tells the story of early Christianity accordingly.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 8:04 am
Schweitzer didn’t think so, but he did think that Paul prepared the ground for Hellenization. According to the summary found in Stephen Neill and N. T. Wright’s history of New Testament interpretation, Schweitzer identified the primary historical problem of Paul studies, namely to explain the transition from Jesus to Paul and from Paul to later Greek theology:
“The great and still undischarged task which confronts those engaged in historical study of primitive Christianity is to explain how the teaching of Jesus developed into the early Greek theology, in the form in which it appears in the works of Ignatius, Justin, Tertullian, and Irenaeus. How could the doctrinal system of Paul arise on the basis of the life and work of Jesus and the beliefs of the primitive community, and how did the early Greek theology arise out of Paulinism?”
Schweitzer’s own explanation focused on Pauline eschatology.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 7:49 am
Lawrence Wellborn gave a fascinating paper on Alain Badiou’s treatment of Paul. I’m not sure I can summarize everything in his rich and wide-ranging paper, but I’ll try to get some of the main themes in the enumerated points below.
1) He began with a summary of what Badiou means by a “truth event.” This is a “rupture” or “tear” in the social fabric that restructures the coordinates of desire, and is part of the progression of human beings from social animals to human subjects. The event creates a disorganization that might become itself the grounds for a new organization. (Wellborn didn’t say this, but I’m suspicious about this progression from “social animal” to “human subject.” Is that an evolutionary scheme? Is Badiou absolutizing the specific history of the Western self?)
Continue reading…
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, November 24, 2008 at 12:02 pm
As Watson goes on, he notes Dunn’s early and fundamental attacks on Sanders’s reading of Paul. Dunn argues that Sanders treats Paul as an un-Jewish theologian, rejecting not only covenant nomism but the whole apparatus of covenantal, biblical theology that the Jews built from. Dunn insists that Paul opposes covenant nomism (in Watson’s words) “on the basis of an expanded, inclusive, but still recognizably Jewish covenantal theology.” Wright has made similar criticisms of Sanders, adding that Sanders’s view is vitiated by his avoidance of eschatology.
Watson concludes laconically: “it is ironic, then, that Sanders and Dunn are both commonly seen as representatives of a single ‘New Perspective on Paul.’ The reality is that a repudiation of Sanders’s reading of Paul is integral to the New Perspective as Dunn conceived it.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, December 25, 2007 at 7:19 am
In the introduction to his book, Watson summarizes the thesis of his unpublished doctoral thesis, on which the published book is based. His initiating observation is that “in virtually every passage where the Reformation tradition has found an attack on ‘earning salvation,’ there is a reference to the exclusiveness of the Jewish theology of the covenant as contrasted with the universality of Paul’s proclamation.” Paul’s attack does not, as Sanders claimed, arise from Christology per se, but from a “universalizing view of the law itself, peculiar to Paul and derived from his gospel.”
For the Jews, the law has a positive role, marking the Jews out as a special people, “exempt . . . from that solidarity in guilt before God.” Paul argued, on the contrary, that the law has universal, not particular application, and that this universal application is fundamentally negative: It “reveals to be the true position of all men, Jews and Gentiles alike.” Promise too is not particular, as the Jews would have it, but universal. This led Watson to conclude that “justification has a clear social dimension, in that it is directed against a construal of the law that serves only to exclude.”
Watson, interestingly, lists a large number of scholars who noted this social dimension prior to Sanders and Dunn: Bauer, Markus Barth, Dahl, W. D. Davies, George Howard, Ulrich Mauer, Paul Minear, Halvor Moxnes, as well as Krister Stendahl and NT Wright. He notes that the diversity of this group makes “their common emphasis on the universality/exclusiveness polarity all the more striking.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, December 25, 2007 at 7:11 am
In his recently revised Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles, Francis Watson offers a pithy summary of the agenda of the New Perspective. Sanders, he says, extended the critique that G. F. Moore mounted in 1921 against German Lutheran scholarship on Judaism; Moore basically argued that German scholarship was systematizing and apologetic rather than genuinely historical, and Watson suggests that Sanders’s work extended the Moore critique to the Strack-Billerbeck rabbinic collection and the scholarship that came from it.
Watson summarizes Sanders: “The crucial concept of ‘covenant nomism’ was set in polemical opposition to the familiar pejorative terminology – ‘legalism,’ ‘externalism,’ ‘formalism,’ ‘earning salvation,’ ‘works-righteousness,’ ‘acquiring merit,’ and so forth – whose overwhelmingly negative connotations eliminate from the outset all possibility of sympathetic understanding. It is easy to forget hw freely and unquestioningly such terminology was used prior to Sanders, especially in the field of Pauline studies. After Sanders, the whole conceptual apparatus underlying the terminology would have to be dismantled. And that mean rethinking all the polemical Pauline antitheses: faith and works, grace and law, Spirit and letter, life and death, blessing and curse, promise and flesh.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, December 25, 2007 at 7:03 am
Richard Hays has pointed to Job allusions in various writings of Paul. One of these occurs in 2 Timothy 1:12: “I also suffer these things, but I am not ashamed; for I know whom I have believed and I am convinced that He is able to guard what I have entrusted to Him until that day.”
Hays points out that the form “I know that” in several of Paul’s letters alludes back to Job 19:25 among other passages. Though the form is not the same here, Paul’s confidence that he knows the one who redeems and “guards” is a more distant echo of Job. This eminently fits the context, where Paul is talking about the suffering he endures for the sake of the gospel. Like Job, he suffers in hope, knowing that the Redeemer will intervene to save. And this helps to establish what Paul means by saying that he will not be ashamed. Shame is the result of defeat. Paul is confident that he, like Job, will be finally vindicated “in that day.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, October 5, 2007 at 6:11 pm
N. T. Wright’s views on Paul and justification will be misconstrued if they are examined outside the context of his views on Israel’s history and Jesus’ role in that history. That is, Wright’s work is of a piece – his historical Jesus studies are essential to a proper understanding of his historical Paul studies.
How does this work? Wright says that God called Israel into covenant as an answer to the problem of human sin. Abraham is the antidote to Adam, and through Abraham God intends to bring blessings to the nations by gathering a single worldwide family in Abraham’s seed. Israel, however, proved as sinful as the nations; the problem is “the hidden Adam in the Jew,” which is particularly evident in Israel’s “meta-sin” of boasting in her special place in God’s purposes.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 at 11:44 am
To understand EP Sanders’s “revolution” in Pauline studies, it’s helpful to look at Bultmann’s understanding of Paul, against which Sanders and others are explicitly and implicitly reacting. (I’m following the superb summary in Stephen Westerholm’s Perspectives Old and New on Paul.)
Bultmann’s starting point is anthropological. As a creature, man is dependent on God for everything, and only when man acknowledges this dependence is he “authentic” and “at one with himself.” Since always involves turning from God to the creation as the basis for security, to procure life, to gain satisfaction in one’s accomplishments. The “desire to gain recognition for one’s achievement” (Westerholm’s phrase) is universal and “the root of all other evils” (Bultmann).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 at 11:42 am
The volume edited by McCormack includes a final chapter by NT Wright. Like a good Calvinist, Wright summarizes his views on Paul and justification under five points.
He begins where he says Paul begins, with the gospel. For Paul, Wright argues, the gospel is not a message of individual salvation, not a how-to about how to be saved. The gospel implies these things, but that’s not the content of the gospel. Instead, it’s “the proclamation that the crucified Jesus of Nazareth ahs been raised from the dead and thereby demonstrated to be both Israel’s Messiah and the world’s true Lord.” In contrast to the Roman imperial ideology, Paul’s confrontational message is that “Jesus, not Caesar, is Lord, and at his name, not that of the emperor, every knee shall bow.” When Paul preaches this gospel, he is confident that the Spirit is at work in and through the message to awaken people to faith. The message is “a royal summons to submission, to obedience, to allegiance; and the form that this submission and obedient allegiance takes is faith.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, April 10, 2007 at 12:04 pm
What happens to Paul’s doctrine of justification if “faith” in the phrase “justified by faith” is a name for Jesus, as it appears to be in Gal 3:23, 25, on analogy with the use of PISTOS as a name in Rev 19:11? Or, perhaps, if “faith” is shorthand for “faith of Jesus,” understood in Hays’s sense as “faithfulness of Jesus”?
This wouldn’t undermine the Protestant insistence that faith is the proper human response to God, a point that can be established on the basis of all the passages that talk about our “believing into” Christ (Rom 4; Gal 2:16).
But this thesis would give a different coloration to the opposition of “works of the law” v. “faith”:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, April 20, 2006 at 2:37 pm
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