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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
We don’t offer animals on altars, but the Christian life is more sacrificial than the ancient Jews’, not less. For us, the world is a temple, our lives a continuous offering, our actions moments of a daily liturgy. Paul’s rapid-fire series of instructions in today’s New Testament reading (Romans 12) is not a random list of moralisms. It’s a description of the new covenant sacrificial system, Leviticus redux.
We don’t offer whole-burnt ascension offerings. We are whole-burnt offerings as we discover and use the Spirit’s gifts to benefit the body. Can you teach? Teach. Can you serve? Serve. Can you give? Give, and so offer your bodies as living sacrifice.
We don’t perform sin offerings; we abhor evil, and cling to good. We don’t offer incense; we rejoice in hope and pray. No more peace offerings; rather, we give to the saints and practice hospitality. No more blood and slaughter at church; instead, we bless when others curse, rejoice with the joyful, weep with those who mourning, and refrain from vengeance to leave room for the perfect vengeance of God.
These are the steps of our daily liturgical dance, which is the dance of discipleship. Pattern your time so you can perform this liturgy; nurture these habits in the power of the Spirit; and offer all of it as living sacrifice to God.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, January 1, 2012 at 7:40 am
In a 2009 article responding to Richard Hays’s pacifist reading of the New Testament (Studies in Christian Ethics), Nigel Biggar argues that Hays’s Anabaptist reading of Romans 13 is “incoherent.” Hays argues that while the use of force in punishment is ordained of God, “that is not the role of believers.”
Biggar responds: “If God has ordained the use of the sword to punish wrongdoers (and thereby defend innocents), then that is something that should be done. If needs to be done and it is right to do. Why should Christians be exempt from doing what is necessary and right?”
To the Anabaptist argument that the special calling of Christians is to embody the “alternative society so completely governed by God as to lack need of the sword.” If this were God’s intent, Biggar observes, one wonders how Romans 13 got into the NT in the first place. And then he adds,
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 1:11 pm
Romans 10:9-10: If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
A baptismal liturgy is an appropriate place for the creed, particularly for the Apostles’ Creed we’re currently using. The Apostles’ creed probably originated as a series of questions posed at the time of baptism to the candidate for baptism. “Do you believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth? Do you believe in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord, who was born of the Virgin Mary? Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?” Many churches today still use the Apostles’ Creed in this way in their baptismal rites.
The Apostles’ Creed elaborates Paul’s exhortation to confess the Lord Jesus. Paul emphasizes that we have to articulate this confession with our mouth to be saved. Having unexpressed faith in our heart does not save. It must come from the heart to the mouth as testimony and witness for Jesus. In the early church, those who confessed by affirming the content of the Apostles’ Creed were baptized into the community of salvation.
But what is this confession doing in an infant baptism?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, September 25, 2011 at 6:28 am
Romans 10:9-10 has a neat chiastic structure:
A. If you confess
B. With your mouth the Lord Jesus
C. And believe
D. in your heart that God raised Him
E. you will be saved
D’. For with the heart
C’. One believes unto righteousness
B’. And with the mouth
A’. Confession is made.
E’. unto salvation
A few comments on this.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, September 24, 2011 at 6:08 am
The church in Laodicea is wretched without knowing it (Revelation 3:17).
The only other use of the word “wretched” in the New Testament is in Romans 7, where Paul laments after describing his divided existence under the law, that he is a “wretched” man longing for release.
Wretchedness is an “Egyptian” condition, the condition before exodus, the condition of David crying for deliverance (Psalm 11:6 LXX; Engl. 12:5). Unlike Paul, the Laodiceans don’t even know they are wretched.
Paul’s wretchedness consists in his recognition of the difference between his heart and his conduct, a dichotomy that is brought by the sharp sword of the Torah. Torah leaves him wretched, longing for deliverance, as it should. But the Laodiceans are happy and think they need nothing. They are like the Pharisees who, though they have the law, are not cut down by it. Perhaps they are Pharisees.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 9:45 am
Paul is not ashamed of the gospel (Romans 1:16). We psychologize: Some might be embarrassed to preach a crucified Christ, but not Paul. He glories in the shame.
That’s true enough, but Paul’s emphasis lies elsewhere, according to Neil Elliott (The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the Shadow of Empire (Paul in Critical Context) (Paul in Critical Contexts)
In Scripture, shame is associated with defeat. Confident of God’s triumph, in the public history of Israel and the nations, Paul knows that he will not be ashamed. Like the Christ he serves, he will be vindicated.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 4:23 am
Perriman offers a careful assessment of the “faith of Jesus” question. He notes the differences between the verb pisteuo and the noun pistis, notes as well the differences between Habakkuk’s use of the word and the use of the verb in Genesis 15, and concludes: “The verb pisteuo is unambiguous: it denotes the act of believing or having faith in something or someone. . . . The noun, however, can mean i) ‘belief/faith in’ something or someone, or ii) ‘faithfulness,’ in the sense, for example, of Jesus’s obedience to the point of death . . . or of the saints’ steadfastness in the face of persecution.” The verbal sense aligns with Abraham; the second noun sense is the focus of Habakkuk 2:4. More specifically, the verb highlights belief in God’s promise to give a future to His people; the noun in its second sense highlights the believer’s radical trust in God in the face of catastrophic destruction.
Hence, “the pistis of the believer is both the ‘faithfulness’ of Habakkuk 2:4 and the ‘belief’ of Genesis 15:6.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 3:28 pm
Perriman’s subtitle is “Reading Romans Before and After Western Christendom.” The before and after are important. If Paul’s gospel in Romans is an announcement about God’s wrath against the oikoumene and the vindication of those who trust Jesus, then it is fulfilled in the overturning of Roman order. Perriman bites the bullet and suggests that Paul’s gospel is fulfilled in Christendom. In a passing comment on Daniel 7, he writes, “I wonder whether it is really too fanciful to suggest that the apocalyptically conceived hope, reconfigured by Jesus’s identification of himself and his followers with the figure like a son of man who comes on the clouds of heaven, found fulfillment in the victory of Christ over the gods, represented historically – and therefore, of course, ambiguously – by Constantine’s adoption of Christianity as the religion of the empire.”
More fully later:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Andrew Perriman’s The Future of the People of God: Reading Romans Before and After Western Christendom
This tight historical framework requires a rethinking of virtually everything in Romans. For instance: ”Paul’s ‘gospel’ in Romans . . . is the announcement to the oikoumene that the God of Israel is about to vindicate himself in the eyes of the world by judging the dominant culture of Greco-Roman paganism through the one to whom he has given the nations as an inheritance. This is not a final judgment. . . . Because the behavior of the Jew . . . is not better than the behavior of the pagan, he will find himself – much to his shame – subject to the same condemnation.”
When Paul warns that circumcision will not save the Jew in the day of judgment, his focus is not on the role of good works in the final judgment (which Perriman believes in) but on Jerusalem’s day of wrath. At that time, circumcision will not be a protective device: “It will not halt the Roman armies; it will not prevent the destruction and slaughter; it will not forestall the pillaging of Israel’s wealth and the very public humiliation of captive Jews led in procession through the streets of Rome. Nor will it safeguard the Jews of the diaspora.” This because the Jews failed in their calling within the oikoumene:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 3:06 pm
A student, Leta Sundet, wrote a quite brilliant paper on Romans 7. The entire paper is posted below.
“I do not understand my own actions,” Paul says helplessly. “I do the things I hate. Oh wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
Christians have struggled for a long time over how to interpret Romans 7:13-25. Who is Paul speaking for? Is he remembering his pre-conversion plight? Or is he describing himself in the present: a Christian being sanctified too slowly for his taste? Is he expressing his own frustration? Or is he speaking representatively?
In a lecture this term Dr. Leithart argued that Paul is here speaking for old covenant Israel, describing the tension and frustration Israel felt living under the Law. Before Christ came God’s people were in a sense “subjected to futility”: they wanted to obey God, but they couldn’t stop sinning.
This argument was compelling to me, but my one “beef” with it was this: then wouldn’t the OT saints have expressed a similar frustration to Paul’s? Wouldn’t people like Adam and Moses and David and Solomon have raged against their inability to obey God? I kept slamming up against the fact that there seems to be very little of this kind of fretting over sin in the Old Testament.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, May 13, 2011 at 8:45 am
When Jesus died as a sin offering, God “condemned sin in the flesh” (Romans 8:3), with the result that the righteous requirement of the law can be fulfilled in us (v. 4). James Dunn paraphrases: In the cross, God “passed effective judgment on sin.” In Christ’s death, sin is brought before the Judge, and declared guilty.
That way of putting it suggests that “sin” is distinguishable from sinners. And that idea is rooted deeply in Paul’s argument in Romans. From chapter 3, he has personified “sin” as a power that, along with death, enslaves and plagues humanity. In the immediate context of 8:3, Paul has been talking about the bondage of his flesh to sin (7:14) and the fact that nothing good is in his flesh (7:18). He ends chapter 7 by describing his schizoid state: serving the law of God with the mind, but serving the law of sin with the flesh (v. 25).
Condemning the sin that resides in Paul’s flesh is precisely what needs to happen if Paul is going to fulfill the law that he longs to fulfill. And that’s what happens on the cross: In Jesus the sin offering, who came in the likeness of sinful flesh, sin is condemned in the flesh, put to death and killed, so that those who walk in the Spirit can fulfill the law’s demands.
The cross takes as given Paul’s divided state; on the cross, the sin is judged; what’s left is Paul’s “I” that serves the law of God. By the Spirit, the old nature is crucified with Christ, so that the body of sin might be destroyed (6:6).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 21, 2011 at 2:11 pm
Romans 3:25 says that God set Jesus forth as a hilasterion to “demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forebearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed.” That translation conformed to the “God is just in condemning us all” viewpoint, but the Greek is trickier.
Woodenly, it says, “to declare His righteousness on account of the passing-over of before-happened sins.” That still might mean “God had passed over sin, and therefore people thought Him unconcerned with sin; He finally has shown that He’s serious about sin by putting forth Jesus as an expiating sacrifice.”
Perhaps, but it might also be taken to mean something else: first, that the passing-over was itself righteous, that God demonstrated His righteousness in forbearing in the face of sin; and, second, that the fact that His forbearance was righteous all along is shown when Jesus is set forth as a hilsterion. Either way, we cannot know God’s righteousness without the cross. But the two interpretations of the passage give us quite distinct interpretations of what God was up to in the Old Testament: Was His forbearance unrighteous or righteous? Was it an act of mercy that had to be “corrected” by the cross, or an act of justice whose justice is only evident after the cross?
The second interpretation offers a way of thinking about the “problem of evil”: The problem of evil is a problem of God’s forbearance. Is it just for God to “pass over” sin? Doesn’t look like it; but then, somehow, the cross demonstrates that this passing-over was righteous all along.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 21, 2011 at 2:02 pm
Rowan Williams and others have attempted to blunt the force of Paul’s condemnation of homosexual relations in Romans 1 by working backward through the passage. It becomes clear at the end of the passage that the disorder that Paul condemns is a failure to pursue the love and righteousness that God has exhibited in Jesus. For Paul, same-sex relations show disordered desires, and in his historical context he was quite right: Homosexual relations were relations of dominance and abuse. But what he doesn’t think is the possibility of same-sex relations that do exhibit the fruits of the gospel and the Spirit.
If that logic applies to same-sex relations in the passage, why not to other evils that Paul lists? Perhaps Paul was only condemning disordered, unloving gossip and slander; he just hadn’t imagined the Christian sort. In the first century, the only disobedience to parents on offer was the unChristian kind, but perhaps now we are able to think the possibility of righteous, loving disregard of parents. Good greed and good envy – Paul was too much a man of his culture, and couldn’t yet imagine the insight of a Gordon Gecko, who envisions an entire world-order founded on greed.
And why not idolatry? Paul condemned idolatry just because he didn’t know of the tolerant, nice sort of idolatry that we moderns practice.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, March 18, 2011 at 12:02 pm
Romans 2:5 warns the wicked that by their stubbornness and impenitence, they are treasuring up wrath for the day of wrath and apocalypse of God’s judgment.
That “apocalypse” is important. An apocalypse is an advent, but more importantly an unveiling. It discloses what has been the case. Judgment day is not so much (or not only) God’s making-right of everything, but the disclosure of His making-right.
The Judge of the earth does right, always and everywhere and in everything. He does right. But that right-doing is hidden until teh day of wrath and unveiling.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, January 28, 2011 at 2:56 pm
Paul quotes, alludes to, or echoes Isaiah 40-66 over twenty times in the letter to the Romans. Many of the major moves of the letter are linked with references to Isaiah, argues J. Edward Walters.
The thesis that God reveals His righteousness to the Jew first and also to the Greek is similar to the LXX of Isaiah 51:4-8. He quotes directly from Isaiah 52:5 when he charges Jews with doing the very things they condemn in others, and quotes from Isaiah 59:7-8 in chapter 3 to show that all are under the power of sin. In announcing the single sacrifice of Jesus, he alludes to the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53. ”WHo can bring a charge against God’s elect?” is answered with Isaiah 50:8, “It is God who justifies,” and the hardening and mercy of Romans 9 makes use of Isaiah 49:10.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, August 21, 2010 at 5:51 am
Where does Paul get the notion that Abraham is “heir of the world”? Mark Forman argues in a 2009 JSNT article that it arises from Paul’s seeing the story of Abraham through the lends of Isaiah 54. Applying Richard Hays’s criteria for identifying echoes, Forman concludes that “there is good evidence that Paul is intentionally echoing this passage from Isa. 54 in Romans 4: the passage explicitly occurs in Galatians; there is a degree of verbal and conceptual correspondence between the two passages, and the use of the passage in this way is plausible in the context of the first-century Graeco-Roman world.”
How how does a quotation from Isaiah 54 fit into Romans 4, which is often understood as a passage about Abraham’s personal faith? Forman shows that the promises of seed and land go together in Genesis, and argues that Paul has not spiritualized away the concern with territory. He thinks Paul applies this promise specifically to the Christians at Rome, consisting mainly of the poor and marginalized, and concludes: “it seems likely that in Rom. 4.19-21 Paul deliberately alludes to Isa. 54.1-3, a passage originally used to provide hope in the midst of exile. The artists, poets and sculptors of first-century Rome were covering their ‘canvas’ with colours they perceived would or should be (or already were) the colours ofthe future. Paul appropriates Isa. 54.1-3 and the interpretive tradition associated with it in order to remind his audience that, although they are currently in the midst of a world fraught with inequality and injustice, and dwelling in the shadows of an empire which claims otherwise, it is the people of God, consisting now of believing Jews and Gentiles, who have been promised the inheritance ofthe earth.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, August 21, 2010 at 5:37 am
In a 1962 article, one Leslie Allen connections Paul’s discussion of the work of the Last Adam in Romans 5 with the work of the Servant of Isaiah: ”In Paul’s great formulation of the origin and effect of sin and its redemptive counteraction in Christ (Romans v. 12 ff.) it has been recognized that the concepts of the Son of Man and of the Servant have been united. O. Cullmann has written of v. 19: ‘Verse 19 shows clearly that the apostle had in mind the Servant of Isaiah: …by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous.’ This is a reference to Isaiah liii. 11: My Servant shall make many to be accounted righteous.’ A. M. Hunter agrees: ‘The latter half of the verse [v. 19] surely echoes Isaiah liii. 11.’ It is noticeable that Cullmann omits beda‘t? [by his knowledge] in his quotation from Isaiah liii.11. But is not that too echoed in Romans v. 19, in the words dia tes upakoes tou enos (‘by the obedience of the one’)?”
This has intriguing implications in various directions. First, it indicates that the Servant of Isaiah is, among other things, an Adamic figure. Second, it shows how Paul’s theology of atonement and justification is rooted in Isaiah’s Servant prophecies. Third, Paul’s interpretation of the phrase “by his knowledge” as “by obedience” is arresting. Fourth, the reference to “knowledge” in Isaiah 53 becomes more explicable: Because the Servant is an Adam, his work is about undoing the sin of Adam at the tree of knowledge. Justifying many by his knowledge/obedience might be taken to mean “justifying many by obeying with regard to knowledge,” by a right use of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, August 21, 2010 at 5:17 am
How is circumcision a seal of the righteousness of faith (Romans 4:11). Augustine (Contra Faustum) says this:
Circumcision was performed on the eighth day.
The eighth day is the day of Jesus’ resurrection.
Jesus resurrection is for our justification (Romans 4:25).
Hence, “because this resurrection, which justifies us when we believe it, was symbolized by that circumcision on the eighth day, the apostle therefore says of Abraham, to whom it was first entrusted, ‘And he received the sign of circumcision as a sign of the righteousness of faith.’”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, June 8, 2010 at 7:13 am
INTRODUCTION
No family exists in isolation from the rest of the world. Our children have friends, many go to school; eventually they will leave home for good. We should train them so that when they leave, they are led out by the Spirit.
THE TEXT
“There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. . . .” (Romans 8:1-17).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, May 24, 2010 at 5:10 am
Romans 7 is about the law, and the effects that the law has on someone (Paul) who is living in the flesh. When the law comes, it divided Paul into two, like a sacrifice, killing him and leaving him desperate for new life, which he found in Christ and His Spirit (8:1-4).
If Paul is talking about the effect of Torah on people living in the flesh, how is it that so many Christians find that Romans 7 describes their experience? How do we explain Luther’s anguish?
Is it perhaps that the church has, more often than we realize or care to admit, has been Galatian? Is it perhaps because we – Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant all – have regularly brought ourselves back under the elementary principles of the cosmos?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, May 11, 2009 at 4:44 am
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