Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

A Reformed View of the New Perspective (of Paul)

(A) Reformed View of the New Perspective
April 18, 2012

Comments

The clash was inevitable, but the clash has too often taken place under terms and categories that unfairly describe the other side. The traditionally Reformed have a stake in framing Paul’s gospel as justification by faith, and behind that they traditionally understand the problem to be humans who strive to establish themselves before God. A good proponent of this view, always framed in pastorally sensitive ways, is Tim Keller. But the New Perspective says "No" to this way of framing Paul’s gospel.

Why do you think the Reformed view of justification clashes so much with the new perspective on Paul, especially its view(s) of justification? What’s the essence of the clash?

First, that view assumes a view of Judaism that has clearly been undermined: Judaism was not full of self-righteous people seeking to establish themselves on the basis of the Law before God. Instead, one good way of describing Judaism is what E.P. Sanders called “covenantal nomism.” Covenant - and that means grace and election - have the first word and the Law (the nomism bit) is not how to become a Jew but how to maintain ones Jewishness, or sustain one’s relationship to the God of Israel. In effect, this knocks the former problem out from under one traditional view and sends people back to the NT and Judaism to see “what the problem was.”

In steps Alan J. Spence, in his book Justification: A Guide for the Perplexed, to say the New Perspective (1) gets it all wrong and (2) is designed to create a gospel shaped apart from what I’m calling Spence’s “justification worldview,” a worldview in which God is judge, humans are sinners, and Christ establishes as relationally right with God.

Spence got off for me on the wrong foot in five ways:

First, he misspelled E.P. Sanders’ name wrong every time, spelling it “Saunders.” He also called him “E.T.” Saunders, and this makes me wonder if he has even read Sanders. One should avoid speculating on such things, so I won’t. (Maybe I already have.)

Second, he kept seeing Sanders in terms of comparative religion and, well, yes, Sanders does talk about comparing the pattern of religion, but to say he’s into comparative religion pulls Sanders from the historian to the modern religions expert. Just not so.

Third, he failed to sketch that the fundamental insight of Sanders and of the whole New Perspective is a fresh re-examination of Judaism and that means, inevitably, what Paul was saying in the context of a sharper profile of Judaism. I see absolutely no interest in Spence in this historical question.

Fourth, Spence shows no awareness of the nuances of variation among New Perspective scholars — from Sanders to Wright to Dunn to Hays and others. For Spence, this is all about Tom Wright’s denial of his justification worldview, and this chp is dramatically different in tone from his chps on Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin and is more like — but stronger — than the chps on Schleiermacher and Barth. He blames the latter two for deconstructing a justification worldview, and thinks Wright is floating on that deconstruction.

Fifth, he says he will root his sketch of Tom’s view of justification in his What Saint Paul Really Said, in spite of the 2009 book called Justification, which ought to have been the place to base one’s observations, but I’ll forgive him for not living up to what he said: it’s just as much based on the 2009 book as the earlier one, though I don’t think he sees the nuances of the latter vs. the former.

Spence sketches Wright’s narrative, which is the narrative of Israel’s Story coming to fulfillment in Jesus, the true Israelite; he argues Wright’s view of justification is not about salvation but about ecclesiology (this is an overstatement); he doesn’t think there’s enough about forensics, in spite of Tom’s clear statements to the contrary though Wright doesn’t have Spence’s justification worldview; and he thinks Wright doesn’t have enough on faith as instrumental in salvation. Well, here’s a good summary of Spence’s criticisms:
I suggest the controlling motif of Wright’s soteriology is ‘the reinstatement of good governance through the kingship of Jesus’ or, in the evocative jargon of the comparative study of religions, ‘messianic nomism’. [Who uses this expression?] If one removed from his exposition of justification the few passing references to relational concepts such as grace, mercy, pardon and reconciliation [did he read Justification?], the structure would stand intact. None of these concepts serve as load-bearing terms. They are, however, integral features of Paul’s soteriology.
One could at this point stop for a long day discussing how Wright expounds grace and these other terms, and to ask if the proper approach is “The Western Tradition’s” view vs. recent NT scholarship’s view, and how one determines such things — surely by exegesis and history not by appealing to Augustine and Luther and Calvin – but I find this summary critique both hitting on the sensitive areas but grossly misrepresenting Wright’s stuff. But I’m sketching Spence, who says Tom’s use of those terms was only done in deference to others, the way Spence himself crossed himself in a Catholic school as a boy though he was Reformed.

In essence, Spence thinks the best Story of the Old Testament must be only the personal salvation story because the governance Story of Wright, by which he means Jesus as King as the true Israelite through whom God will put the world to rights …. and, well, we’ve got an exaggeration: Tom Wright believes in personal salvation; he thinks the NT teaches that; but personally is caught up in the larger Story. What Spence has is a theory of justification that no one in the Old Testament taught (unless one thinks Gen 15:6 is Abraham’s personal salvation), for which there would have been no back story in the New Testament and which is then assumed to be the true gospel of the apostle Paul.

The New Perspective’s view of justification deserves some good strong pushback; there have been some early overstatements and many take backs, including some by Dunn and Wright. I wonder if Spence might spend some time reading Jimmy Dunn’s big pumpkin book, his book on Paul’s theology, and read the chp on justification, and then ask if he has really sketched the New Perspective’s view of justification. He hasn’t.

This Guide for the Perplexed will make some folks happy; it leaves me perplexed.



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