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

-----

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

Showing posts with label Pauline Theology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pauline Theology. Show all posts

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Paul and the "New Perspective of the Bible"


http://www.preachingpeace.org/

From the pen of my friend Michael Hardin - 

The New Perspective on Paul (see the Index of Relevancy22 for more articles on this subject) has for almost four decades (since the publication of E.P. Sanders 1977 'Paul and Palestinian Judaism' [and even before that in Krister Stendahls' 1963 essay on 'Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West') been deconstructing the older reading of Romans as focused on personal salvation and now understands the Pauline meta-narrative to be that of the justification of the Gentiles inclusion into the covenant people of God. In other words, Romans is not about "my" personal salvation by faith" as much as it is about the bringing together of enemies (Jews and Gentiles) together in faith or by faith. The old paradigm has been completely debunked.


Almost all recent scholarship on Paul has moved in this direction (except for the hard core Lutherans). This is one of the most significant moves in reading the Bible since the Reformation. Sadly, pietistic Evangelicalism and spiritualist Charismatic Christianity still live in the illusion that the old "I,me, my" reading of Romans is still proper to Paul when it is not. The massive deconstruction of this position in the first 470 pages of Douglas Campbell's The Deliverance of God completely mitigates the narcissitic reading so familiar to 99% of the Christian population. This is not to mention all of the incredible work by Pauline scholars such as Tom Wright, Jimmy Dunn and others.

Appeals to the Fourth Gospel and arguments therein that Christians are called to have an intimate relationship with God, (as though that was the primary overarching meta-narrative of the Fourth Gospel) have for a long time been critiqued with the recognition placed by the writer and redactor of this text on the community of faith. Furthermore, as I have shown, the structure of I John is one oriented, not to a personal relationship with God but to social ethics.

Jesus' call to discipleship is never to the crowd but always to the individual. This is true. However, that call to discipleship in the Synoptics never has to do with a personal relationship to him in some 'spiritual' or 'pietistic' sense but is a call to live out in one's life the same ethic he lived out in his life.

My point: one skews the Bible if one reads the meta-narrative of the Bible so that the goal of the Bible is to create a personal mystical relationship with the divine. That component, to be sure, is not absent from scripture, but it is not its emphasis. People who read the bible this way are out of step with the Bible itself which is always focused globally, historically and cosmically. The notion of a 'personal relationship' with Jesus (or God) is a fiction of the post-Reformation era, a step-child of the Enlightenment fantasy of the 'individual.' Humans are not individuals, we are inter-dividual (to use a term coined by Rene Girard). This is why ethics plays such a prominent role in the New Testament. Notice I said ethics, not morality, not law. Ethics has to do with our human relationships, especially our relationships with the enemy 'other.'

Over the past two years I have seen more misunderstanding of the Bible from certain circles than I could have ever imagined. The swamp of a 'personal relationship' with Jesus has turned into a tar pit from which persons do not seem to be able to escape. Why? Because they have turned their own personal experience into a subtle form of self-justification. Their experience has become a 'Law' internalized, psycholgized and spiritualized. Thus they cannot see beyond themselves and so it is that they identify their salvation with their experience. This is just another form of natural theology, so roundly critiqued by Karl Barth. Those who fail to see this are doomed to dwell in their own subjectivity which they project onto the highest category they know (God).

There is a world of difference between discipleship and the modern 'personal relationship' with Jesus. The former teaches persons to follow Jesus, the latter seduces the person into just following themselves (or the group/cult leader). And so it is in these circles we have the never go ending merry go round of self-justification, whether it be by orientation to an external law or orientation to an internal law. Either way it is self-justification. And as such, this type of Christian focus has nothing to do with the gospel of the Lord Jesus and his work on behalf of all humanity.

Please remember that in the parable of the sheep and the goats, it was the goats who 'had they seen Jesus in the 'other'' (that is, had they recognized that the 'other' was Jesus with whom presumably these goats had a 'personal relationship' [sic]), they would have aided them. It was the sheep who 'did not see Jesus in the other' (who did what they did because it was the right thing to do not out of some alleged 'overflow of a personal relationship' with Jesus) who are commended.

Michael Hardin
April 12, 2015

ps - What I'm Not Saying: "I am NOT saying that one cannot have a personal experience of the transcendent; I am simply saying we should neither make personal experience the meta-narrative of the Bible nor should we confuse our subjective experience with 'Reality.' "


Michael Hardin, the "Dude of Theology"



http://www.preachingpeace.org/


For more on the "New Perspective of Paul" go to the Articles Index
of Relevancy22 under this topic to the immediate right.

Or start here and follow the topic index at the bottom of both 
this current post and any related post on NPP - 




Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Confronting the End of Meaning: Crucifixion and the Critique of Signs and Wonders


Francisco de Zurbaran , Agnus Dei , 1636 - 40 , San Diego Museum of Art , California , USA


3 Reasons the Human Jesus is Important
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2015/03/3-reasons-human-jesus-is-important/

by Peter Enns
March 31, 2015

Guest Blogger Jared Byas

This week Christians celebrate the crazy idea that God became human.

While affirming this in theory, my evangelical upbringing was very uncomfortable with the idea of  a Human Jesus. We had to admit Jesus was human but that didn’t mean we had to like it.

After all, the God Jesus is where the magic happens. Human Jesus sometimes muddles the important stuff, takes our eyes off the ball about heaven and whatnot. But here, I submit 3 reasons why Human Jesus is important to remember:


1. God gets that we are a mess.

Jesus experienced the love of his mother and the betrayal of his best friends. He felt the beautiful sensuality of getting his feet wiped with the hair of a young woman and the tortuous pain of getting his feet nailed to a cross.

In seminary it was through seeing Jesus as unapologetically human that I was able to see that God doesn’t want me to become superhuman but wants me to be a loved person.

Christianity isn’t an instruction manual for how to be perfect like God but a story about how God became like us. And that’s a crucial difference.


2. God is willing to join the mess.

God doesn’t mind “looking bad” for the sake of those God loves.

If you want to be in relationship with broken humans, you run the risk of looking broken yourself. God doesn’t seem to care. Why do we?

The streak I see in Human Jesus is the holy being so involved in the lives of the unholy that people are uncomfortable with how, from the outside, it’s hard to tell the difference. I see a God who, for the sake of love would risk reputation, trading in “omnipotent” for “glutton” and “drunk.”


3. Because of #1 & #2, I expect a very human-looking Bible.

If the same God that came to earth as an unimpressive carpenter from an underperforming people group also provided us a book, I would expect it to look very human. Would it run the risk of looking ordinary, unrefined, and altogether human?

Yes. Point taken. The Bible looks a lot like Jesus.


* * * * * * * * * * *


Confronting the End of Meaning:
Crucifixion and the Critique of Signs and Wonders
http://peterrollins.net/2015/03/confronting-the-end-of-meaning-crucifixion-and-the-critique-of-signs-and-wonders/

by Peter Rollins
March 03, 2015

Last night Tony Jones had a launch for his latest book Did God Kill Jesus. The book itself is an excellent and very readable overview of the various ways that the church has understood the meaning and significance of the Crucifixion. Partly motivated by Trip Fuller’s statement, “God has to be at least as nice as Jesus,” he goes further than simply describing the basic approaches and endeavours to find a way of understanding the Crucifixion that prevents it [from] being mired in a theology that justifies violence, anti-Semitism, exclusion, and political oppression.

In the book Jones views the incarnation as signifying a fundamental shift in the way God relates to human beings (shifting God from a place of sympathy regarding humans to empathy). The infinite lives into the finite and tastes the existential predicament of human subjectivity. Including condemnation by the law, oppression and a sense of alienation (Crucifixion).

The main problem I have with this approach is that Tony continues to see the Crucifixion as a meaningful event. It is an event that must be integrated into a certain apologetic system. An approach that generates so many of the problems that Tony brings up in the book… how to make an event that seems to defy everything we think of the Absolute, fit with it.


Below I have taken an excerpt from The Divine Magician that outlines a critique of this idea. It begins by referencing a previous argument concerning “freedom from the sacred-object” and closes before I go on to draw the consequences of the position I outline. Both of which are important to the position. But I hope it at least introduces the idea that Crucifixion might operate as a rupture in meaning.


This freedom from the sacred-object also spells freedom from the need to find an overarching meaning to life. Indeed, the apostle Paul directly attacks the idea of Christianity offering a system of meaning in his attacks on what he called “signs” and “wisdom.” Signs and wisdom represent two ways in which we seek meaning. Through either apologetic argument or the occurrence of unusual or unexplainable events, we want to find ways to justify our beliefs.

To the Jew a "Stumbling Block"

While the affirmation of signs and wisdom to justify a particular religious position is part-and-parcel of religious discourse, Paul sets his sights firmly against them when critiquing the Jewish community of his day for seeking the former and the Greeks for wanting the latter,

Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom,but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

What’s fascinating here is the way Paul sets up the Crucifixion as the very opposite of a sign or wisdom. From the perspective of both, the Crucifixion can strike one as nothing but empty nonsense. Why? Because this method of execution symbolized a divine curse. More than this, the idea of an innocent man, let alone God, being murdered in such horrific terms strikes against the idea of justice, reason, or goodness.

It is a meaningless, absurd, and offensive event, something theologian Paul Hessert picks up in his book Christ and the End of Meaning,

Anyone executed by hanging was seen in Jewish tradition as cursed by God. The sign of such a death was taken as divine corroboration of the administration of human justice. In other words, God was seen as acting in this sign-event to give the victim “what was coming to him.”

As that which runs against the very idea of a sign, Hessert argues that what we’re confronted with is a type of profound offense to reason:

The affront is not merely the case of the ignominious, brutal death of Jesus . . . [it is] to the whole religious outlook that searches for signs. . . . Preaching “Christ crucified” is not merely saying that bad things happen to good people but that God’s approach to us belies our expectations.

In other words, the event of the Crucifixion is actually the very contradiction of our expectations. This contradiction is much more than the liberal concept that the cross represents the idea of a good person being killed because he stood up against injustice. It is rather a direct confrontation of all that we think religion and God is about—it is that which breaks apart “our sense of reality.”

To Greek Stoicism "foolishness"

In the scripture passage quoted previously, Paul connects the desire for wisdom with the Greeks and their development of classical philosophy (the “love of wisdom”). The Greeks were not so much interested in signs, but rather with the eternal realm of ideas. They sought an underlying rational structure that would make sense of the passing, decaying nature of the world and render it all meaningful.

The preeminent teachers of wisdom at the time of Jesus were the Stoics. Stoicism was the ancient Hellenistic philosophy that emphasized an emotionally balanced life based upon a will that was in accord to nature, a strong moral temperament, and a deeply rational outlook.

These teachers would often compete with Christian preachers for an audience and argued that behind the chaos of our lived experience there was a harmonious center, an order that could, in principle, provide a meaning for everything. The Stoics saw the brokenness and decay of the world as a type of illusion or temporary condition. While they had a strong moral theory, there was a broad acceptance of the status quo. In this way, Stoicism was able to become the philosophical outlook of the cultural elite in the Roman Empire without actually threatening some of the more barbaric and inequitable practices of the day.

The Stoics would have had little problem in accepting the liberal reading of Christ’s crucifixion as an example of one who faced injustice and suffering with [a kind of Stoic] peace and resoluteness. Indeed this Jesus would have fitted very neatly into their worldview.

For Paul, however, there was something much more profound and offensive taking place in the idea of “Christ crucified.” Indeed, Paul was reading the Crucifixion against this stoic vision of Jesus. For Paul, the Crucifixion was that which defied reduction to a sign or system of meaning. As Hessert notes,

“Christ crucified” makes no sense. Instead of linking God to the enveloping rationality that absorbs or even overrides the passing contradictions of goodness, it focuses attention on the contradiction itself. That is, “Christ crucified” is no key to the meaning of life and human events. It is a problem to meaning, a problem requiring explanation.

---

Shoah
noun

1. (in secular Judaism) a Hebrew word for holocaust (sense 2) See alsoChurban (sense 2)
Word Origin literally: destruction

---

Holocaust
[hol-uh-kawst, hoh-luh-]

noun

1. a great or complete devastation or destruction, especially by fire.
2. a sacrifice completely consumed by fire; burnt offering.
3. the systematic mass slaughter of European Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II
4. any mass slaughter or reckless destruction of life.

---

Hessert notes that the Shoah operates in a similar way within Jewish thought. For the Shoah is that horrific, unspeakable event that ruptures and renders offensive any attempt to make it into a divine sign or element of wider rationality. This is why the term Shoah is often preferred over Holocaust. For the latter is derived from the Greek holókauston, a term that has connections with the notion of religious sacrifice and thus religious significance. In contrast, the Shoah simply means destruction and thus lacks any justificatory undertones.

The attempt to provide a cosmic meaning for the Shoah is not simply misplaced, it is a profound offense. The event stands as an affront to all such strategies. In terms of the European intellectual tradition, the First World War can be seen to act in a similar way. One of the features of this horrific event is found in the way that the war disrupted all our attempts to tie it into some deeper meaning or significance.

It is precisely this connection with meaning, religious or otherwise, that the Crucifixion of Christ cuts against.

Once we grasp this idea of Christ representing a break with [Jewish] signs and [Greek] wisdom, we can begin to perceive how the actual existing church has fundamentally betrayed the scandal of the Crucifixion, effectively making it into a type of Stoic doctrine that doesn’t challenge our world, but confirms it.

In contrast, for Paul, “Christ crucified” is that event that defies all attempts at being reduced to some system of meaning.

It is a type of antisign that fractures religious signs.

An antiwisdom that confounds human wisdom.

A nuclear event that blows apart all of our apologetic enclosures.





Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Homebrewed Christianity Online Class - Paul: Rupture, Revelation, Revolution




Announcement

It's been a busy morning. Join with me for another High Gravity course (the fourth in 2 years) to be held on Monday's from March 2 to April 13, 2015. Our hosts will be the Homebrewed crowd as they wax eloquent on the Apostle of Apostles, our own dear Apostle Paul, servant of the King.

For you theological nerds out there this will be a classic throwdown and fun!

R.E. Slater
February 10, 2015



The class is titled, "Paul: Rupture, Revelation, Revolution." In this High Gravity course Peter Rollins and Tripp Fuller will tackle Paul by engaging 4 different philosophers along with contemporary Biblical scholarship and theological interpretations all packed into 12 hours of soul-boggling content.

Each session will focus on the thinker of the week with downloadable readings. In order to cover all the material we are going to have four 90 minute sessions covering an individual philosopher and two "teach-ins" over 2-1/2 hours - the first on the Bible and the second on Theology.

To open the March 2 course theologian Daniel Kirk of Fuller Seminary will be the first speaker to discuss Paul. Then, over the following weeks, philosophers will be discussed such as Heidegger, Badiou, and Zizek , amongst others.

There will be a moderate cost for these classes.

Join us!



 





Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Peter Enns - Paul's Letter from Rome to the Christian Churches


This 4th century New Testament papyrus contains the first seven verses of Paul's Letter to the Romans.
Beneath the scripture a different author has scribbled in random 
phrases. It has been suggested that this

papyrus may have been a writing exercise. 
New research has identified the owner of this document - a

man named Aurelius Leonides - who was a flax merchant from Eqypt. (article link here)

a long lost letter back to Paul from the Jewish Christians at Rome (that I totally made up)
uphttp://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2014/04/a-long-lost-letter-back-to-paul-from-the-jewish-christians-at-rome-that-i-totally-made-up/

by Peter Enns
April 21, 2014
Comments

If I could go back in time, I’d love to be a fly on the wall to hear how the Jewish believers in the church at Rome heard Paul’s words in his letter to them. (Actually, if I really could go back in time I’d first make a pit stop along the way so I could win the Power Ball Jackpot, but I digress.)

Here we have Paul writing a letter to a church he had neither founded nor even visited and that had a significant Jewish population. And he says things like the following:

  • Gentiles (a.k.a. Greeks) may be sinners, but Jews are no better off in God’s eyes, since they are the ones who have God’s gift of Torah but don’t do what it says.
  • Jews and Gentiles are in the same boat as far as God is concerned because both are enslaved to the power of sin, both equally fall short of God’s glory, and both equally need Jesus, not Torah, to defeat that power.
  • This decentering of Torah to allow Gentiles to become equal partners with Jews in Israel’s story, though appearing to be an unexpected move, has actually been God’s plan all along, beginning with Abraham.
  • Neither circumcision nor maintaining food laws, both of which are commandments to Israel, remain necessary for God’s people–either Jews or Gentiles–in view of Christ’s death and resurrection.
  • Those whose conscience tells them that they need to maintain food laws may continue to do so, but rather than being praised as obeying Scripture, these believers are “weak” in their faith as opposed to those who are “strong,” i.e., those who understand that no foods are unclean.
  • Neither the weak nor the strong are to judge each other, for love and unity among the people of God take priority over whether Israel’s ancient practices continue to be maintained.

- Paul the Apostle

---

[In response,] I hope one day we find a long lost letter written back to Paul by these Jewish believers. It might go something like this:


Dear Paul,

We read your letter with great interest, and it sparked no little amount of commotion among your fellow Jews.

Have you lost your mind?

We believe in Jesus as you do, and like you we are still scratching our heads a bit about why our Messiah came in humility and weakness, even dying a criminal’s death, and then was raised. You’ve actually helped us quite a bit on those things, especially early on in your letter, and we much appreciate it.

But Paul, you’re Jewish. You’re one of us. Do you really think that the God of our fathers would simply reverse course and expect us to figure out that Jesus the Galilean brought an end to our ancient traditions–especially given how (according to the stories we heard) Jesus himself never said any of what you’re saying here?

We’ve never met though your reputation precedes you. We believe that you are an apostle, but do you really think we should just take your word for it that all that we’ve known is now, at best, an add-on and at worst a hindrance to true faith in the God of our fathers?

And we appreciate how fervently and creatively you cite scripture to support your point, but don’t you think you took your creative readings of scripture a bit too far? Was obedience to Torah really never central to the Lord’s overall plan? We’ve read our scripture cover to cover many times and we can’t find where God even hints at that idea.

Your reading of the story of our father Abraham to marginalize Torah-keeping is way over the top, and your handling of the Psalms and the Prophets to show how the Lord has always “elected” Gentiles is…well…you might as well say that there is really no advantage at all to being a Jew–like we’re one big mistake.

You try to get out of that implication a couple of times in your letter. You sense the dilemma, but frankly you don’t do a very good job of talking your way out of it.

And then toward the end of your letter, when you talk about clean and unclean foods (which seems to be the real point of your letter), you call “weak” those who have the courage and faithfulness amid our pagan culture to maintain God’s holy laws, given by him to Moses on Mt. Sinai, and you call others “strong” for not doing so.

So, what’s up with that?

Paul, we cannot stress this enough: you can’t just pick and choose what parts of scripture you think are worth holding on to.

After all, if everyone did that, there’d be chaos. And where does it end, Paul? Once you start denying one part of scripture, there is no logical reason not to deny anything else. And then what happens to the authority of scripture?

You can’t do this sort of thing with God’s word and you can’t claim that God is telling you to deny what God had told us from ancient days up to know.

We respect you as our brother, Paul, but when you finally pay us a visit, which we do hope will happen in the not-too-distant future, we would like to sit down with you and hear from you more clearly your reasoning process in all of this–exactly how Jesus’s death and resurrection, which we firmly believe, leads you to draw the conclusion that God is turning his back on the very traditions he commanded.

So, those are our main concerns. If in the meantime you decide to write back, could you please work on writing shorter sentences, and maybe not breaking off in mid-sentence to follow another train of thought? That would help us a lot.

We would also appreciate it you used certain key words a bit more consistently–like faith, righteousness, and law. We see some ambiguity here and it’s already caused us no end of debate.

Most sincerely,

Your brothers and sisters in the faith,

fellow children of our father Abraham, according to the flesh


- Your brothers and sisters in Christ


Monday, November 4, 2013

Book Review: Peter Oakes, "Reading Romans in Pompeii"

Pompeii, Italy
 
Who “attended” those earliest churches?
 
Amazon.com link here


 

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Confusing Judaism's Covenantal Nomism with Evangelic Terms

Challenging the New Perspective on Paul
 
by Scot McKnight
edited by R.E. Slater
Sep 26, 2013


E.P. Sanders, and then following him J.D.G. Dunn and N.T. Wright, challenged the traditional Christian consensus of how to “read” Judaism at the time of Paul (and Jesus) in 1977 with his well-known and must-read Paul and Palestinian Judaism. The consensus was that Judaism was a works-righteousness religion in which Jews, not on the basis of their covenant-based election by God but on the basis of merit and works, sought to earn favor with God. While there was nuance, and dissenting voices like G.F. Moore, this was the ruling paradigm. So, when Paul said “not by works of the law” most people thought they knew exactly what Paul meant: human pride, self-justification, and weighing one’s merits in a scale so the tip favored the human’s accumulation of merits.



Amazon Book Links
 

Sanders proved that Judaism was far more complex than this and that its “pattern of religion” was in fact a covenant based summons by God to obey the Torah. So Sanders said Judaism’s pattern of religion was not merit seeking but instead “covenantal nomism” (covenant-based call to do the Law [nomos]). This required a re-evaluation of what Paul was opposing and what “works of the law” meant and whether or not the opponents of Paul were seeking to establish themselves by earning favor with God.
 
Sanders won the day; the vast majority of NT scholars believe today that Judaism was not a merit-seeking system and, in fact, if one is not careful one ends up either in anti-Semitism or its softer version anti-Judaism or in some kind of Marcionite denial of the truth of the Old Testament. [This paragraph deserves extensive commentary but this is not the place.]
 
But Sanders and the so-called “New Perspective on Paul” were challenged by some, most notably Reformed or Calvinistic thinkers and exegetes. I am persuaded that the “problems” for the NPP are far more problems for Calvinists and Lutherans and much less so for Arminians, who have never had as much of a problem with the issue of obedience and works, and in some ways for Anabaptists, who valued obedience and discipleship as central to what faith means. (Frustratingly to many of us, many critics repeat talking points and have not read the Jewish evidence at all.) The most recent challenge, a nuanced one, comes from Preston Sprinkle, Paul and Judaism Revisited: A Study of Divine and Human Agency in Salvation (2013). It’s a good book though whether or not his proposals will satisfy deserves more than can be said here, and whether or not his sketch of Paul would fit Jesus is yet another one worthy of discussion. [Preston and I have corresponded about this review and his comments made this post better.]
 
Preston’s big ideas:
 
The Old Testament, when it comes to “divine and human agency” (how much are humans involved in salvation? how are they involved?) and “continuity vs. discontinuity” (how different is Paul from Judaism?), reveals two major strands of thinking. Preston calls these the “Deuteronomic” and the “Prophetic.” By these he means that one must repent before one gets restoration or salvation and the other that it all comes from the grace and intervention of God (so that repentance is not the precipitating factor).
 
He then examines these themes, examining what the Dead Sea Scrolls teach and comparing that with what the apostle Paul teaches: the curse of the law, the eschatological spirit, anthropological pessimism, justification, and judgment according to works. Each of these concludes with admirable nuance for each side of the comparison — Qumran and Paul.
 
His fundamental conclusion is that pockets (sectarian elements) of Judaism are Deuteronomic, or mostly so, while the apostle Paul is Prophetic, with some nuances all over the place. In essence, then, he comes out suggesting that the New Perspective overcooked “continuity” between Paul and Judaism and undercooked the discontinuity and that while Judaism has a stronger emphasis on human agency Paul had a stronger emphasis on divine agency in salvation.
 
A few questions:
 
1 - An Artificial Division.
 
I wonder if Deuteronomic vs. Prophetic doesn’t deny the coherency of these two themes in the authors of the Old Testament and therefore the coherency of grace and election and covenant and the simultaneous demand of repentance and obedience for salvation. In other words, at times some suggest Judaism’s emphasis is Deuteronomic without the Prophetic. I doubt any Jewish text is entirely Deuteronomic and I doubt any Prophetic text is not also Deuteronomic. One text he saw as almost entirely Prophetic has some core statements about covenant that are relentlessly Deuteronomic, and Preston Sprinkle is aware of such texts and offers reasonable explanations. Notice  Jeremiah 7:23; 11:4; where covenant election and grace are set up in conditionality, and the point must be seen: we are dealing here with covenant status dependent upon or shaped by or conditioned by obedience:
Jer 7:23 But this command I gave them, “Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; and walk only in the way that I command you, so that it may be well with you.” 
Jer 11:4 which I commanded your ancestors when I brought them out of the land of Egypt, from the iron-smelter, saying, Listen to my voice, and do all that I command you. So shall you be my people, and I will be your God…
At work here in theological hermeneutics is what is sometimes called the “failure” of the Mosaic covenant and the completion (words are important here and I chose a neutral one) of that covenant with the New Covenant. This entire approach is shaped by Augustinian, Lutheran and Calvinist hermeneutics. Part of the NPP is that those categories do not emerge sufficiently from a 1st Century Jewish framework. I will emphasize that Preston knows these texts and seeks to resolve them within his Deuteronomic and Prophetic approach.
 
2 - The Many Faces of Salvation. The bigger issue for me is that this term “salvation” is slippery. Frankly, the OT texts are not about personal salvation but about Israel; so too Judaism mostly. But the NT stuff is more or less taken to be personal and individual. What happens, then, to “restoration” or “salvation” when it is more corporate focused?
 
At work, as well, is that soteriology is shaped by discussing in the OT how covenant people are restored (top of p. 34). I wonder if that how most in the Protestant tradition understand “salvation” in the NT — in fact, I’m confident they see it as “entry” into the covenant. Hence, for me there is a lingering question: Are we comparing the same senses of salvation?
 
3 - Evangelic Terms Do Not Equate with Biblical Terms. I do wonder how much rhetoric and choice of terms shapes how much “works-based” stuff we see in Judaism, and now that Gary Anderson has virtually proven that “debt” and “merit” were the new commercial metaphor at work in Judaism for “sin” and “obedience” (see his book Sin: A History), I have to ask if we have not overdone the works element in Judaism while ignoring the covenant and grace themes. To his credit, Preston works hard to nuance works and grace and divine and human agency with variety in each text. But for me the positing of the Deuteronomic over against the Prophetic is shaped by that very issue — how much is human agency involved?
 
4 - The Use of Law within the NT. But this simply misses how we have learned to read our own faith. Read the Gospel of Matthew (e.g., Matthew 6:1, 2, 5, 16) and watch this word “reward” on the part of Jesus. Is Jesus Deuteronomic? (Preston doesn’t answer this but I don’t know how one could read Jesus and not see his term Deuterononomic instead of Prophetic.) And doesn’t Paul say our final state is on the basis of works in his judgment by works texts, like 2 Cor 5? So, are we minimizing the Deuteronomic in our faith and maximizing it in Judaism? All in the attempt to prove we are better and right?
 
This is a big one: Let us assume my suspicion is right, namely, that Jesus fits the Deuteronomic paradigm. What does that say about Paul? That he departed? That we need to re-visit Paul? (This is what the NPP does, after all.) Or does it suggest the Deuteronomic and the Prophetic fit more closely into a single coherency? Anyway, the two approaches to OT themes sure makes me wonder what Preston does with Jesus.
 
5 - The NPP Remains a Tour de Force. OK, there’s something at work here in Paul especially about grace that shapes the whole system of thought. And there is discontinuity here. But in my judgment the New Perspective offered an important and enduring correction from which we cannot move back. Sprinkle’s effort here is a good one with plenty of sensitive nuance, but this is not the final word.


 

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Evolution and The Problem of Sin and Death: A Look at Evolutionary Theodicy

  

How Could God Create Through Evolution?
Part 1
 
 by Bethany Sollereder
editing by R.E.Slater
July 22, 2010

Bethany Sollereder has a Master's Degree in Christian Studies from Regent College in Vancouver, Canada. Her focus was on science and religion, and her thesis was entitled "Evolutionary Theodicy: Toward an Evangelical Perspective." She has been accepted into PhD studies at the University of Exeter and hopes to start in 2011. Bethany's first degree was in intercultural studies. Bethany's other great love is 19th century British history, so when she is not reading about science and religion, she can usually be found reading Victorian literature.
 
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“How could a good God create through a process that involves so much pain and death?” For many people, accepting evolution is less a scientific question than a theological one. After all, seeing evolution as God’s method of creation requires affirming that death, pain, and natural disasters are part of God’s creative toolbox instead of a result of the Fall. In this three-part blog series, I will first look at how theologians and scientists have seen the world in contrary ways, and then reflect theologically on how a world created through evolutionary means can be good.
 
Is Death Necessary?
 
First, let’s see how theologians have thought about our world. Theologians––academic and popular, contemporary and ancient––have almost universally affirmed the connection between sin and physical death. Drawing from passages such as Genesis 3 and Romans 5 & 8, they have argued that death came through sin. In regard to the natural world, this means invoking a Cosmic Fall scenario in which not only human death came through the Fall, but earthquakes, tornadoes, pain, predation, and disease as well.
 
Consider this quotation from John Calvin: “For it appears that all the evils of the present life, which experience proves to be innumerable, have proceeded from the same fountain. The inclemency of the air, frost, thunders, unseasonable rains, drought, hail, and whatever is disorderly in the world, are the fruits of sin. Nor is there any other primary cause of diseases.”1 Pretty clear, right? God did not want these “evils” to be part of the world, and the only reason they exist is because of human sin.
 
What’s more, theologians see the redemption by Christ on the cross as the denunciation of these natural evils. For example, T. F. Torrance writes “The Cross of Christ tells us unmistakably that all physical evil, not only pain, suffering, disease, corruption, death, and of course cruelty and venom in animals as well as human behaviour, but also ‘natural’ calamities, devastations and monstrosities are an outrage against the love of God and a contradiction of good order in his creation.”2
 
Scientists, on the other hand, have looked at these same natural phenomena, and have come to the conclusion that realities like pain, earthquakes, and death are in fact necessary to good and flourishing lives. How do they do this? Let’s look at two examples: earthquakes and pain.
 
Is Death Good?
 
When discussing plate tectonics3, the media tends to focus on the negative effects of our planet’s mobile plates. We hear about volcanic activity that shuts down European flight zones, tsunamis that devastate whole populations, and of course earthquakes, which have caused major devastations and cost many people their lives in Haiti, China, and Chile. How can earthquakes be good? What else does the plate cycle do?
 
First, plate tectonics, through the rotation of the mantle below, contributes to the magnetic field which surrounds our planet, keeping the atmosphere in and warding off deadly cosmic rays from the sun, which would destroy life if they reached the planet. Second, plate tectonic movement involves the solid plates being forced down into the liquid mantle and melting in some places, while in other places the plates separate and allow hot magma to rise and solidify. This recycling uses up heat produced by the interior radiation of the earth. This process is so effective that it uses up almost 90% of the heat produced by the Earth. In comparison, on Venus, the lack of plate tectonics means that the same heat produced by the core does not get recycled, and the pressure and heat build up so high that the distinction between mantle and crust gets lost––the whole planet goes molten. The rest of the time, surface temperatures average around 500 degrees Celsius. There are many other advantages to plate tectonics, including stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide, maintaining temperatures for liquid surface water, renewing nutrients in the soil, and keeping a distinction between ocean and continent. Life, and certainly human life in this world, simply does not have a chance without plate tectonics. I do not want to understate the great human and animal cost associated with earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis, but without plate tectonics, there would be no life at all. I would affirm that this world’s plate tectonics are part of God’s very good creation.
 
What about pain? If any of us were given the choice to live without pain, most of us would say an enthusiastic “yes please!” Until, that is, we saw what a life without pain really looks like. In our mind’s eye we would imagine striding untouched though hardship and peril, like a real-life Superman, able to conquer all the aches and pains that keep us from reaching our full potential. In reality, a painless life is a horror show. In reality, painlessness looks like leprosy.
 
Leprosy, also known as Hansen’s Disease, is a bacterial infection that invades the body’s pain nerves and ultimately destroys them, leaving the person with an inability to feel pain. That is, in fact, almost all that leprosy does. The subsequent damage that we associate with leprosy––fingers falling off, open wounds, and missing limbs––does not actually come from the bacteria themselves, but from the resulting painlessness. Patients burn themselves and do not pull back; they walk on broken limbs and do not notice. In the book The Gift of Pain, Paul Brand describes how in one African clinic, rats were coming in the night and feeding on patients fingers, and because they felt no pain, they slept on.4 Pain is a good thing, our ever-present protector, developed through an evolutionary process to help us live good lives. Now, this is not to say that pain never goes wild. It does, and with realities like chronic pain or torture, pain can become an enemy. But that does not undermine the fact that our ability to feel pain is a great gift; it just means that sometimes that gift becomes twisted in its expression. The solution is not to wish for a world with no pain, but for a world where pain is appropriately experienced.
 
Now let me insert one caveat here: in no way do I want to say that just because pain is “natural” that we have no responsibility to help relieve it. That is not what I am arguing. I would say that pain serves important purposes, which are needed for a good life. At the same time, we should look to the example of Jesus, who walked into pain-filled situations and brought healing, regardless of the cause of the suffering. It is our recognition of suffering in the other5 and our responsibility of stewardship to one another that must motivate our medical ethics.
 
Why Didn't God Create Heaven in the First Place?
 
There is a lot more that we could talk about here. We could speak of predation, which encourages biodiversity and drives evolutionary innovation. We could explore how physical death is a good and necessary part of a world that has limited resources, keeping organisms from becoming cancerous (cancer cells never die on their own and are thus “immortal”). These are important, but they roughly follow the same type of argumentation as above. In my next post, I will look at the values of a world developed through an evolutionary process, or, as it is sometimes asked, “Why didn’t God simply create heaven in the first place?”


NOTES

1. John Calvin, Commentaries upon the First Book of Moses called Genesis (1554) in Calvin’s Bible Commentaries: Genesis, Part I, trans. J. King (Forgotten Books, 1847, 2007), 113.

2. T. F. Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981), 117.

3. For more about plate tectonics, check out Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, (New York: Copernicus, 2004).

4. Paul Brand & Philip Yancey, The Gift of Pain: Why we hurt & what we can do about it (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1993), 127.

5. Suffering, and not necessarily pain. Pain is the brain’s reception of the stimulation of pain nerves. Suffering is a psychological state, and can be caused by many things. Pain can be absent in those who suffer, as is the case with
leprosy. We should be careful not to collapse these two distinct concepts into one and the same thing.


 
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This image shows "slices" of the Universe at different times throughout its history (present day, and at 4 and 11 billion years ago). Each slice goes further back in time, showing how galaxies of each type appear. The shape is that of the Hubble tuning fork diagram, which describes and separates galaxies according to their morphology into spiral (S), elliptical (E), and lenticular (S0) galaxies. On the left of this diagram are the ellipticals, with lenticulars in the middle, and the spirals branching out on the right side. The spirals on the bottom branch have bars cutting through their centres. The present-day Universe shows big, fully formed and intricate galaxy shapes. As we go further back in time, they become smaller and less mature, as these galaxies are still in the process of forming. This image is illustrative: The Hubble images of nearby and distant galaxies used were selected based on their appearance; their individual distances are only approximate. 

 
 
How Could God Create Through Evolution?
Part 2
 
by Bethany Sollereder
editing by R.E.Slater
July 26, 2010

Last week we looked at how our very good evolutionary world necessarily includes unpleasant realities like earthquakes and pain. This week, we are going to look at why God might have created a world through evolutionary processes. What is the advantage of a world where pain and death are necessities? What is gained by an evolutionary process that would not be present in an unchanging, static, ‘perfect’ world? Why did God not simply create heaven in the first place? These are questions of huge theological significance and are not going to be satisfactorily answered here. I do, however, hope to offer some starting points for discussion.
 
I began to look at these questions by researching Irenaeus’s theology of creation. Irenaeus of Lyons was a second-century Church Father, and one of the Church’s greatest theologians. One of the most intriguing parts about his theology is that he understood the creation as being made in immaturity. Most of us imagine the world of Genesis 1-2, or the original creation, as a perfect world, where everything is already completed, and where Adam and Eve were meant to live out their lives in a perfect existence. Apart from multiplying and filling the earth, there is not a lot of room for growth, either physically or spiritually, for humans or for creation because everything has already “arrived.”
 
Room for Growth and Development
 
In a radical re-imagining of this story, Irenaeus pictures Adam and Eve in the garden as children––not perfect, but on a journey toward maturity and perfection. This is because perfection is not something you can give to an infant; it must be grown into. Irenaeus argues, “For as it certainly is in the power of a mother to give strong food to her infant, [but she does not do so], as the child is not yet able to receive more substantial nourishment; so also it was possible for God Himself to have made man perfect from the first, but man could not receive this [perfection] being as yet an infant.”1 So, God does not force something on to humanity that it is not ready for. Perfection was not something that could be implanted; it had to be journeyed toward. And so Irenaeus gives us our first value of an evolving world: room for the growth and development of [creation and] humans.
 
Creation Has To Go Somewhere
 
Now, let’s extend this argument to the wider cosmos. Just as humanity is not created in static perfection, the world around is not fully completed either. Colin Gunton, reflecting on Irenaeus, writes, “Creation is a project... It has somewhere to go.”2 There is value in saying that creation has the freedom to grow, that it is an ongoing project. A world with freedom must have choice, and this is present in a world with a long evolutionary history. The cosmos, like humanity, is created very good, but it is not created in its final state. This giving of freedom (and perhaps even limited autonomy) to the creation is, I would argue, more consistent with the nature of divine love than a creation where everything is determined. God gives true freedom to humanity, leading to moral choice, and true freedom to creation, leading to evolutionary development. This is God’s act of love, and this is why God did not just make heaven in the first place.3 Freedom and growth are valuable, and God delights in them.
 
Creation Was Meant for the Renewal of Life
 
A third value given through evolution is the ability to move toward a goal. And that begs the question: “Where is evolution going?” I would argue that evolution was moving toward developing a community of beings which carries God’s image and amongst which God would be made incarnate. The Incarnation was not a contingency plan brought in when humanity sinned, but rather was one of the original purposes of creation. This concept is one of the great contributions of Irenaeus––creation was always headed for the Incarnation! Also, this creation was always part of the journey toward new life. God’s promise of a new creation is not a contingency plan either!4 The new (or, rather, renewed) creation, as described at the end of Revelation, was always part of the plan. I don’t think that any theodicy can say “this world is good” without also pointing forward to the time when there will be no pain, no death, and no tears, under some new and unimaginable reconstruction of the universe. Keep in mind that we do tend to imagine the new future as static in some ways. Many of the values that are achieved here (such as having children or freedom of moral choice) are not imagined to exist there in the same way. In no way does saying “this is a good world” undermine the Christian hope in the world to come. Actually, recognition that this life was always meant to be renewed can help our Christian walk. The spiritual growth coming from this world is seen most easily, perhaps, with the example of death.
 
Why Death?
 
In the present world, physical death is the most poignant reminder of our mortality. While we grasp at immortality through various means, we find it is always beyond our reach. The suffocating horror and fear that accompanies many of our encounters with death reminds us finally that we are not God [but we bear the image of this Creator God]. Yet it is in those moments of deepest agony that our need for the hope of resurrection is the strongest.
 
What do we do with death? In light of the new creation, death is a transition from this life to the new life. It is a leap of faith that God always intended, and one which God himself did not avoid. In the lives of saints and martyrs, we see a taste of what physical death was intended to be (I am speaking here of physical death without sin; our present experience of death is horridly marred by sin and the reality of spiritual death). We see how many of the martyrs approached death with peace, acceptance, and even joy––to lay down their lives and be called into the presence of God. I believe that this was the original intention of death. Death was to be a transition, a final giving up of oneself into the enfolding arms of God. Our bodies go to decompose and support new life, while our trust is placed in the promise of the resurrected life.
 
I want to be careful here. This does not mean that we should not grieve death. Even Jesus, when he was at the tomb of Lazarus, wept openly, even though he knew that he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead. There can be a strange disconnect, where if we Christians say something is good or natural, we sometimes feel we should then be able to avoid a real emotional response to the situation, or that faith means not being broken by certain situations. This is not what I am advocating. Encountering death should make us weep, because the loss we experience is real. Christian hope makes us more human, not less––we should feel more deeply, not less.
 
But we should also feel differently. We grieve, knowing that there is hope and life and renewal ahead. We know that physical death does not have the last word, because of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. We hear Paul’s triumphal cry “Where, O death is your victory? Where, O death is your sting?…The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”5 Our path is not to avoid pain and death, but to walk through them, following our Lord and Savior in life, in death, and in resurrection life.
 
Is Death the Enemy of God?
 
Speaking of Paul, I feel that I should acknowledge the big white elephant in the room. Someone will ask, “Doesn’t Paul say that death came through the Fall? How do you deal with the biblical texts where death is called the enemy of God?” This will be the topic of next week’s entry.


NOTES

1. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts & James Donaldson (Grand Rapids, MI: 1975), IV. xxxviii. 1.
 
2. Colin Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 56.
 
3. Here, I mean “heaven” in the sense of the new heavens and the new earth of the eschatological future, not the current dwelling place of God.
 
4. Read, for example, N. T. Wright’s book Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008).
 
5. 1 Corinthians 15:55-56.
 
 
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Death's Renewal
 

How Could God Create Through Evolution?

Part 3
 
by Bethany Sollereder
editing by R.E.Slater
July 31, 2010
 
Over the past week, I have been trying to show that the world we inhabit is in fact a very good world. It is marred by human sin, but the operations of the natural world express the values of freedom and growth, just as God intended them. Today, we come to what is likely to be the most contentious of my entries. How do we deal with the biblical language about death? We started this series with quotations from John Calvin and T. F. Torrance in which they asserted that the unpleasant realities of this world (predation, natural disasters, and so on) were not part of God’s original creation but were the results of human sin. This theology is usually taken from the curse language of Genesis, and Paul’s explanation of death in Romans 5, 8, and 1 Corinthians 15. There are, however, several more things going on here than meets the eye. The two major issues that need to be dealt with are the varying biblical perspectives on death and the influence of cultural accommodation in the text.
 
Correcting Our Presuppositions
 
Starting with the first of these, we must acknowledge that the Bible treats the issue of death in several different ways, and that it recognizes several different types of death. First we must draw a distinction between physical death and spiritual death. This is particularly evident in Paul’s writing to the Romans. In Chapter 7, speaking of the effects of sin, Paul writes, “For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death” (Romans 7:11). Now obviously, a man put to death physically could not have later written those words! An even more telling passage is 1 Corinthians 15:31 where the apostle writes, “I die every day—I mean that, brothers.”
 
It is interesting to note that in both places where Paul explicitly states that death came through Adam, he speaks of his own death as a past reality. This is not conclusive of Paul’s use of the word “death” but it is suggestive that we should be careful of assuming a simple one-level meaning. Certainly we see other places where Paul is clearly indicating physical death, such as 1 Corinthians 15:35-42, as he speaks of the physical resurrection of the body after (what is clearly) physical death.
 
This leaves us with the question: Which kind of death is Paul referring to when he states that death came through Adam? Unfortunately, this is not always clear. In Romans 5, Paul seems to be speaking of spiritual death, as he speaks of effects of death in contrast to eternal life and later (in v.18) uses “condemnation” as a substitute for death.1 However, considering Paul’s reliance on Genesis 3 where the curse language clearly indicates physical death through the phrase “dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19) it is likely better to adopt what Douglas Moo [(the Editor of the NIV Bible)] calls a “physico-spiritual” death which keeps both the physical and spiritual aspects in mind.2 These two are closely entwined in Paul’s mind, and the enmeshing of the two will become important later. The same multi-layered concept of death is true of 1 Corinthians 15:20-22, where Paul speaks of death and then future physical resurrection.
 
Science's View of Death
 
How does this view of death interact with modern science? It is clear that death was present in the world long before human sin, indeed, death has been present as long as life [itself]. It is also clear that death is necessary in order to renew resources and allow for evolutionary development. Paul, however, would not have known this. He would not have recognized the importance of death in ecosystems, nor would he have understood the horror of the limited types of “immortality” that we see in the natural world, such as cancer. Paul was an ancient thinker. Just as Pete Enns wrote about Paul’s views on Adam not necessarily determining our scientific and historical understanding, I would propose that Paul’s views on death need not keep us from accepting the insights of modern science.
 
This is where the issues of biblical interpretation get interesting. Most of us take for granted that if we read the Bible, we need someone who can translate from the original languages of Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic before we have a hope of understanding what is being said. What is less acknowledged is that worldviews and cultural assumptions must also be translated. Ancient perspectives, whether in science or history, must be moved into forms that make sense to a contemporary audience and to the questions a modern mind is asking.
 
Remember I said earlier that Paul entwines together spiritual and physical death? Both in the ancient world are seen as evil, as opposed to the will of God and against the flourishing of His creatures. Part of translating Paul into our culture means distinguishing between these two types of death, and acknowledging the necessity of physical death, while maintaining the sin-death connection in relation to spiritual death. Death did come through sin, but spiritual death, not physical death.
 
Creation's Need for Christ
 
This in no way undermines Paul’s main argument in Romans. Paul is explaining our need for Christ to redeem us from our sin, and our need for life that swallows up death.
 
This remains true in two ways. First, Christ redeems us from our spiritual death, from the separation from God which sin instills. Second, Christ assures us of the future life of physical resurrection.
 
While Christ deals with our sin problem completely, believers still die. If sin were the cause of physical death, we would expect Christians to live forever. But this is not the case. Our hope, as it ever was, lies in the resurrection, which is a direct consequence of Jesus’ work. Physical death will one day be defeated, but this comes from walking through the valley of the shadow of death, not around it. Where Paul attributes a conditional immortality to the figure of Adam, and sees eternal life as a past historical reality, we must instead root the cessation of death in the eschatological future.
 
While this brief 3-part treatment is in no way complete, I hope it will open up discussion and allow for new ways of seeing the truth, goodness, and beauty in the creation we inhabit.


NOTES

1. Or, as “The style is thoroughly mythological. Hence Paul is definitely not speaking of personal guilt or naturally necessary death but of the forces of sin and death which have invaded the world.” Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, trans. by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), 147
 
2. Douglas Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, MIL Eerdmans), 320.