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The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)
Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)
The Four: A Survey of the Gospels
Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
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
Enns again: He admits that Paul, given the culturally assumed and conditioned conceptual framework he inherited from Judahism, believed that Adam was a primordial man whose disobedience was the cause of sin. Enns doesn’t believe that Adam is a historical first man, and acknowledges that he is leaving Paul behind: “my suggestion here leaves behind the truly historical Adam of Paul’s thinking.” He argues, accurately I think, that anyone who wants to “bring evolutionary and Christianity together” will have to leave Paul behind in some fashion. Still, Pete says, we don’t lose those features of “Paul’s theology” that are “core elements of the gospel” – the universality of death and sin and the event of Christ’s death and resurrection.
In addition to the standard objections to this line of thinking, I have two questions: What does Pete think Paul’s theology (or biblical theology as a whole) is if it is not an interpretation of history? And, having left Paul behind, how does he account for the contingency of sin and death – which, it seems, is a necessary presumption if we are going to talk about Christ’s victory over death and sin?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 5:21 pm
What keeps us from doing as we ought?
Peer pressure, sloth, fear, honor, desire to be liked, our own wants, wealth, selfishness.
Paul’s word for this is “flesh.” “Flesh” is not a bad person living inside me. “Flesh” names a social and political order, also, inevitably, an accompanying order of soul.
But Jesus killed flesh on the cross.
Jesus died to liberate us from this perverse and perverting order that keeps us from living not for ourselves but for Him.
And He rises to form a new order.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, October 30, 2011 at 5:16 am
Wise words from NT Wright, in his contribution to Horsley’s Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation
The money quote: “Paul . . . was not opposed to Caesar’s empire primarily because it was an empire, with all the unpleasant things we have learned to associate with that word, but because it was Caesar’s, and because Caesar was claiming divine status and honors which belonged only to the one God.”
To confirm the point by way of contrast: Do we find the same enthusiasm among scholars for Paul’s opposition to sodomy?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 11:45 am
Until the Reformation, virtually all translations of the New Testament translated the Pauline phrase pistis Christou as “the faith of Christ,” that is, the father exercised by Christ (a “subjective” genitive), rather than “faith in Christ” (an “objective” genitive). The Vulgate, for instance, straightforwardly rendered it as fide Christi. From the Reformation until the late twentieth century, Protestant interpreters hardly noticed that a subjective reading was possible. That all changed with the publication of Richard Hays’s seminal The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11 (The Biblical Resource Series)
What is at stake in this discussion? According to Hays, a lot.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 4:17 am
Commenting on John 1:12-13, Calvin says “Some think that an indirect reference is here made to the preposterous confidence of the Jews, and I willingly adopt that opinion. They had continually in their mouth the nobleness of their lineage, as if, because they were descended from a holy stock, they were naturally holy. And justly might they have gloried in their descent from Abraham, if they had been lawful sons, and not bastards; but the glowing of faith ascribes nothing whatever to carnal generation, but acknowledges its obligation to the grace of God alone for all that is good. John, therefore, says, that those among the formerly unclean Gentiles who believe in Christ are not born the sons of God from the womb, but are renewed by God, that they may begin to be his sons. The reason why he uses the word blood in the plural number appears to have been, that he might express more fully a long succession of lineage; for this was a part of the boasting among the Jews, that they could trace their descent, by an uninterrupted line, upwards to the patriarchs.”
Note that Calvin not only endorses this reasoning, but also that others were saying the same thing at the time.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 9:12 am
In a post last week, I suggested that there is at least a tension, perhaps an internal contradiction, in Wright’s view that justification is both a declaration that creates a legal status and a declaration regarding a preexisting fact; it both creates the status “in the right” as a speech-act, and declares the fact that the person who believes has already entered the people of God.
I hinted cryptically that my idea of justification as a “deliverdict” might help resolve the tension. How? In a couple of ways.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, April 26, 2011 at 5:34 am
When Paul talks about justification by faith, he normally contrasts it with justification by works. But elsewhere in Paul, “by faith” is contrasted with “by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul is speaking of two different “walks,” but can the same contrast apply to justification? Does it make sense to say that we are justified by faith rather than by sight?
It would seem so. Justification by sight would be something like this: God makes it publicly evident that some individual stands in the right before Him. That public justification will occur at the last day, and so the future justification is a justification “by sight” – just as we will see face to face in the eschaton.
For now, though, our standing with God is not public and obvious. When Jesus stood before Pilate, it was not obvious that He stood righteous before the Father. When Jesus hung on a Roman cross, it was not evident that He was in the right with the Creator. So too, when we share in His sufferings, there is no indisputable proof that we have been declared right in God’s court. The world might be excused for thinking the opposite, that, if there is a God, He cannot be the Father and Savior of a people so beleaguered. And we ourselves are tempted to doubt our right standing.
Justification by faith means knowing that God favors us, counts us as righteous covenant partners, even when all the empirical symptoms indicate the opposite.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, April 26, 2011 at 5:08 am
Famously and controversially, Wright argues that justification involves two dimensions, which he says were, for Paul, the same thing: the declaration that someone is in the right and forgiven, and the declaration that a person is a member of the covenant community.
This formulation helpfully highlights the corporate dimension of justification, obvious in Galatians 2 and implicit, as Wright has argued, elsewhere when Paul brings justification and Jew/Gentile union into intimate contact.
But Wright also embeds some confusing ambiguities in this formulation.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 5:09 am
Vanhoozer’s lecture and now article on Wright emphasizes the central importance of union with Christ in understanding justification. He suggests the term “incorporated righteousness” as a way of getting at Calvin’s focus on union with Christ and the double grace that flows from that union. Justification is thus an effective speech act of incorporation: “To declare someone righteous is to declare that person incorporated into Christ’s righteousness: ‘I now pronounce in man in Christ.’”
Vanhoozer’s point is well taken: Up with union with Christ! What surprises, though, is that Vanhoozer thinks this is somehow a corrective to Wright, an insight that Wright has failed to reckon with. I have always understood incorporation into the Messiah to be close to the heart of Wright’s explanation of Paul’s doctrine of justification, and an interview from late 2009 (before the Wheaton conference where Vanhoozer delivered his paper, and while Wright was formulating his response to John Piper) confirms this.
Wright said: “in line with many Reformed readers of scripture, including Calvin, I understand Paul’s doctrine of justification to be of those who are ‘in Christ’, whereas Piper and others don’t make that a central element in justification itself. Conversely, for Piper the center of justification is the ‘imputation’ of ‘the righteousness of Christ’, seen in terms of ‘righteousness’ as a kind of moral achievement earned by Jesus and then reckoned to those who believe. I believe that this is an attempt to say something close to what Paul actually says in Romans 6, namely that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is ‘reckoned’ to those who are ‘in him’. Putting it the way Piper (and one part of the Reformation tradition) puts it is a pointer to something which is truly there in Paul, but one which gives off misleading signals as well.”
This also indicates that Wright acknowledges that Paul teaches a form of imputation, God’s reckoning of something accomplished by Christ to sinners by virtue of their union with Christ.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 4:26 am
One of Michael Horton’s criticisms of NT Wright has to do with the way he construes the relation of Adam’s sin and Israel’s calling. Wright emphasizes that God’s call to Abraham is the beginning of His response to the sin of Babel, ultimately the sin of Adam. Israel is God’s instruments for redeeming the world. Horton replies, “It is not . . . that the whole world is in Israel, but that even Israel is ‘in Adam.’”
But this criticism misses a major theme of Wright’s work. He emphasizes again and again that the great crisis of the world is precisely this, that Israel ends up being another Adamic people. The reason why the grace of Yahweh is not flowing to the Gentiles is that Israel herself is under a curse; instead of spreading the knowledge of God over the earth,. Israel has caused the Lord’s name to be blasphemed among the nations. In missing this point, Horton misses most of Wright’s argument about the specific place that the cross has in Israel’s history: Jesus comes to bear Israel’s curse and to be the true, faithful Israel, so that the blessing of Abraham can flow out to the Gentiles.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 4:03 am
Not many theologians make me laugh out loud. Kevin Vanhoozer is one who does, regularly.
This from his much-discussed justification lecture at Wheaton, just published in Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright
“We’re all acquainted with the Reformation theologian’s Paul. He looks like Luther, only shorter.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, April 18, 2011 at 4:05 pm
Bruno Blumenfeld makes the intriguing comments that “Paul lived in a world in which ethics was the only field of intellectual speculation left to the philosopher.” The polis was dead. But, Blumenfeld continues, “Paul transcends morals and makes his way into the political.”
The gospel resurrected the polis, the rebirth of politics.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, March 22, 2011 at 5:49 am
NPP types often claim that the Reformers projected their own issues back into their interpretations of Paul. No doubt that happened, but (influenced by Augustine’s treatment of Pauline theology) they were more careful to note that Paul’s central concern was with Jew/Gentile questions than they are often credited.
The Bern Synod of 1532, for instance, has four full chapters on the differences between the preaching of the gospel in a Jewish context and a Gentile context. The section ends up defending the notion that Christian preachers should “adopt the mode of preaching which the apostle employed among the Gentiles” since they are preaching to Gentiles, and this means “exposing sin by reference to Christ rather than by the law.” (Interesting that they reject a law/gospel scheme!)
But several chapters of the confession are a historically sensitive summary of the apostolic mission to Jews and Gentiles. They even recognize that Paul’s image of the law as “pedagogue” is a redemptive-historical analogy: ”the believing Gentile does not need a legal schooolmaster, for he has already attained the freedom of sonship.”
I am drawing from James Dennison’s wonderful collection, Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation: 1523-1552
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 5:38 am
Paul uses the verb “eagerly await” a number of times. What is he waiting for? He awaits the Savior from heaven (Philippians 3:20), the apocalypse of the Lord Jesus (1 Corinthians 1:7), the revelation of the sons of God (Romans 8:19), the adoption of sons and redemption of the body (8:23). The author of Hebrews says that we eagerly await Jesus to appear a second time (9:28). When Jesus comes, at the apocalypse of Jesus, secret sins will be revealed, and the hidden righteous-judgment (dikaiokrisia) will be revealed (Romans 2:5).
But then in Galatians 5:5 Paul says that we eagerly await the hope of righteousness by faith (dikaiosune ek pisteos).
This is the hope of Christians: That Jesus the Savior would come, that our adoption would be revealed in the redemption of the body, that Jesus would unveil Himself. It is also a hope for justification by faith, which is to say a hope for God’s righteous judgment by the Faithful One, Jesus.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, January 24, 2011 at 6:46 am
During the ETS discussion, Wright made a point of emphasizing that justification in Paul is one narrow slice of his theology and not the whole. Wright has been protesting for years against the expansion of “justification” to include everything that Paul says about salvation.
At one level, he’s got a point. We should try to capture the precise contours of Paul’s usage and meaning. Justification is, as Wright continuously emphasizes (following the Reformed tradition!) that justification is the forensic dimension of salvation, not the whole of salvation.
On the other hand: This narrow sense of justification holds only if we are still reading Paul in individualistic terms, and if we are still thinking of justification in an ordo salutis sense. Consider these links:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 2:59 pm
At ETS last week, the Toms – Schreiner and Wright – debated Paul and justification, along with Frank Thielman. The discussion was illuminating on many points, but on one central point it frustratingly kept missing the point.
Schreiner accused Wright of a false dichotomy between soteriological and ecclesiological emphases in Paul, arguing for a both-and instead of an either-or. Amen! But Schreiner himself pretty much kept the dichotomy intact, simply tilting the balance over in favor of soteriology rather than ecclesiology.
The debate ended up a fruitless debate over “emphasis” and “priority,” and was really a debate about individual v. corporate emphases in Paul. Schreiner, as a Baptist, naturally wants to put the individual front and center; Wright, as an Anglican, has a more churchly reading of Paul.
Two responses: Why are we using systematic theological terms like soteriology and ecclesiology to expound Paul in the first place? Did he think in those terms? And, more importantly, the only way to really break through the dichotomy that Schreiner rightly rejects is to raise questions about the category of “individual.” If persons are relational, then there simply is no non-corporate salvation, nor non-soteriological corporate life in Christ.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 2:48 pm
Against Badiou and Zizek, who want to use Paul to defend a generic “universalism” that can become homogenization, John Caputo (St. Paul among the Philosophers (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion)
He goes on to suggest that “it is not that all differences or distinctions are abolished, but that one difference or distinction in particular, the Jewish difference, is transformed and in being transformed proves to be transcendent, or better self-transcendent, in Christ Jesus, in whom it is able to break out of the particularity of the first form it took in the law and to trump and assimilate other differences, both its own early Jewish form and the Greek difference.”
That’s well said. I have more trouble with Caputo’s further claim that “Christ fulfills a Jewish promise, not a Greek one,” a claim based on the notion that events can only be recognized as events within a context and “the Christ-event is an event only in the context of the Jewish promise.” As central as Jewish particularity is, it doesn’t seem correct to say that “The crucifixion and resurrection of Christ is not an event for the Greeks.” The gospel is to the Jew and the to Greek, and it seems that Paul argues for some form of Gentile preparation for the coming of the gospel of the Jewish Jesus.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, October 19, 2010 at 8:35 am
According to Paul, all human beings lived under the “elementary principles” (stoicheia) until the coming of the Son and Spirit. As he elaborates on this theme in Galatians 4 and Colossians 2, he identifies several features of stoicheic life:
1. Stoicheic life is the life of a son in his minority, the life of a son who is treated as no better than a slave.
2. Stoicheic life involves submission to beings that are not god.
3. Stoicheic life involves “taste not, touch not” restrictions, as well as adherence to the heavenly lights to mark signs and seasons.
4. #1 implies that stoicheic life is temporary. When the son reaches majority (in the Son), he is no longer under guardians and managers.
How does this description of stoicheic life compare to the life of Adam in Eden? Did the prefall covenant with Adam take a stoicheic form? I think so. But then, what difference does the fall make? Here is my provisional formulation of things:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 27, 2010 at 1:05 pm
In his recent Paul and Scripture: Studying the New Testament Use of the Old Testament
Paul “uses a well-known exegetical device (known as gezerah sewa) whereby a word in one text is explained by its occurrence in another text. Psalm 32.2 is such a verse, using the key verb ‘reckon,’” just like Genesis 15:6. ”On the surface, the two verses have little in common. Genesis 15:6 is about Abraham’s acceptance of God’s promise to provide him with descendants; Psalm 32:2 is David’s lament over his sin. But David is talking about ‘blessing,’ and the whole Abrahamic narrative is about God’s promise of blessing. The reference to ‘blessing’ and the shared word ‘reckon’ suggests to Paul that the two verses are referring to the same thing. Thus he can deduce that ‘David speaks of the blessedness of those to whom God reckons righteousness apart from works (Roman 4.6). In other words, having righteousness reckoned to oneself (Abraham) is equivalent to having one’s sins forgiven (David).”
The details of Moyise’s interpretation are not central to my concern at the moment. Rather, I am intrigued by the way Paul comes to his conclusion. A verbal link between two passages provides the cornerstone for one of Paul’s central claims about justification.
Nor is this the only example in the NT.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, August 13, 2010 at 11:40 am
What is Galatians about? Augustine says that the question at stake was how to induct Gentiles into the people of God. Paul circumcised Timothy, since “these rites and traditions [of Judaism] were not harmful to people born and raised in that way,” but for those who came from outside “those who were bound by no such requirement but came as it were from the opposite wall, that is, from those without circumcision, to that cornerstone, which is Christ, were forced into no such rites.”
The Galatian crisis erupted when “certain wicked people persuaded [gentiles] that they could not be saved without these words of the law,” that is, without circumcision and other rites and traditions of Judaism. Paul insisted that they should not be “burdened by any such observances,” knowing that “adults fears such unheard-of practice, especially circumcision, and those who were not born so as to be initiated into such sacraments would have been deterred from the faith if they were made converts according to the earlier rite, as if those mysteries sill promised that Christ was coming.” When the apostles decided that “gentiles should not be forced into such works of the law, certain Christians from the circumcision were displeased.” They could not recognize that if the rites continued to be imposed on Gentiles, then “people would suppose either that they were not instituted as promises of Christ or that they were still promising Christ.”
New Perspective on Paul? Hardly.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 4:25 am
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