N.T. Wright, "Paul and the Faithfulness of God" (Vol 4) - The Unity of the Church

The Unity of the Church — NT Wright

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/10/17/the-unity-of-the-church-nt-wright/

 

by Scot McKnight

Oct 17, 2013

Comments 

NT Wright, in his Paul and the Faithfulness of God, makes a claim many need to hear today, both those who diminish the church for kingdom work and those who do “Pauline theology” exclusively through the lens of soteriology and make the church where the saved land on Sunday mornings. Not so for Wright: the church is where Paul’s worldview begins. At the core of Paul’s worldview was symbolic praxis and the first one is church.

No: we are simply asking the question: what were the main symbols, and symbols-in-action, of Paul’s newly envisaged and constructed world? And we are about to find, large as life, on the basis not of a theological a priori but simply by asking this question, scratching our heads, and looking around, that the primary answer is the ekklēsia: its unity, holiness and witness (385). 

The theme of the unity of the church is at the core of Paul’s worldview, his new social praxis, and Galatians 3:28 counters not only what is traditionally set alongside it from Judaism but also from the Greek world (I thank God I’m not…. all countered by Paul). That’s the unity for which he strives and the unity that drives so much of his mission. Wright then pores over 1 Corinthians through the theme of the unity of the church, and then over to RRomans 9-11 all in an effort to show how significant the church was to Paul. It was a family, a fictive kinship, marked by hospitality. Here is his summary, reformatted for easier reading on this blog:

First, the gospel message of Jesus the Messiah created a new world with new inhabitants, no longer defined by the specifics of Jewish law, but not seeking as a replacement any of the standard symbols of pagan identity. 

Second, this new community could sometimes be thought of as the new Temple, sometimes as a human body, in both cases not simply drawing on obvious and available metaphors but making powerful symbolic statements. 

Third, this new community was to learn to live as a family, with all that this would entail.

Fourth, we might suppose that this new community, being itself such a powerful symbol of a radically new worldview, might be regarded as a considerable threat to existing power structures. 

Fifth, this new symbol was rooted in a monotheism which, while having the recognizable shape of Jewish rather than pagan styles of monotheism, had come to fresh expression precisely through Jesus the Messiah. 

Sixth, this new community was formed and characterized at every point by its conformity to the Messiah himself, specifically in his crucifixion and resurrection. 

We might also then say a seventh thing. It will be noticed that in these six points, growing naturally out of the analysis of Paul’s symbolic praxis in the letters so far studied, we have just summarized Ephesians 2.11—3.21. Perhaps symbolic or even sociological analysis may yet achieve the revolution in scholarly assumptions that neither the ‘new perspective’ nor the revived ‘apocalyptic’ school, nor even the ‘political Paul’, have so far managed to do, though all might have tumbled to it at any point in recent discussion: Ephesians, long sidelined in western protestant Pauline discussions, turns out to articulate rather precisely the very points which have emerged, on the basis of the ‘main’ letters, from a detailed worldview-study of Paul’s central symbol (402).

Wright then turns to “Messiah” in symbolic praxis to observe that all the symbols find their re-expression in Jesus, in whom everything is revised to fit into a Messiah who was crucified and resurrected, leading to a people marked by cross and resurrection. Jesus is now The Lord. Wright turns this into the gospel (and he gets to using the word “gospel” as a verb — I like that!):

Put all this together, and what do we have, as the central, shaping marker of the new worldview, taking the place and bearing the weight that the Jewish symbols had borne within the worldview of Saul of Tarsus? We have precisely the gospel, the euangelion, the ‘good news’, rooted in the ‘good news’ spoken of in the Great Prophet, confronting the ‘good news’ carved in stone around Caesar’s empire. We have the symbol by which Paul declared that he was himself defined, the anchor of his own vocational mindset: Paul, an apostle, set apart for the good news of God; I am not ashamed of the good news, because it is God’s power for salvation to all who believe; the Messiah did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel; woe to me if I do not announce the good news; I do it all for the sake of the good news; let me remind you of the gospel which I announced to you, which you received, in which you stand firm, through which you are saved; the gospel of the glory of the Messiah, who is the image of God; your confession of faith in the Messiah’s gospel has brought you into proper order; let me remind you that the gospel which was gospelled by me was not something I received from other people; I did it so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you; my calling is to gospel to the gentiles the unsearchable riches of the Messiah; what has been happening to me has been for the advancement of the gospel; let your public life be worthy of the gospel of the Messiah; don’t move away from the hope of the gospel; our gospel was not in word only, but in power, in the holy spirit, and in full conviction; I wanted to keep Onesi- mus with me, to serve me on your behalf in the bonds of the gospel. The gospel, the gospel, the gospel. It defined Paul. It defined his work. It defined his communities. It was the shorthand summary of the theology which, in turn, was the foundation for the central pillar for the new worldview. It carried God’s power. That was just as well: the worldview, and those who lived by it, were going to need it (410-411).

Other areas of praxis, each discussed at varying lengths, include prayer (and mysticism) and Scripture and baptism and eucharist. On baptism:

So, to sum up: baptism in the worldview of Paul’s communities, and within his own mindset, emerges not from pagan mystery religions but from the deep roots of Jewish covenantal story and covenantal symbolism. It is differentiated from the latter precisely because of the crucifixion and resurrection of Israel’s Messiah and the effect that that has had in generating the Mes- siah’s people as a worldwide family. The passage in Colossians appears to form something of a mid-point between Galatians and Romans. In Galatians, the emphasis is on the renewed multi-ethnic family; in Romans (as in 1 Corinthians 10; for that matter), it is on the fact that the family leaves behind the realm of sin; in Colossians, there is a bit of both, and in 1 Corinthians 1 and 12 a reaffirmation of unity when faced by a different kind of threat. But the point for our present purposes is that baptism is clearly a key ritual (in the sense noted above) which serves to mark out this people inthis way as part of this single and united family, grounded in the messianic monotheism we have already described (427).

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Don Thorsen, Calvin vs Wesley - "Just What Kind of Sovereignty Does Grace and Freedom Bring?"

Where Calvin Went Wrong

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/10/16/where-calvin-went-wrong/

 

by Scot McKnight

additions by R.E. Slater

Oct 16, 2013

Comments

 

At the core of Calvinism is God’s sovereignty, but just what sovereignty means is the essence of Calvin’s core: [for Calvin] sovereignty means determinism in which God elects, God awakens, God shows grace, God predestines, God regenerates, God preserves and God glorifies. John Wesley, on the other hand, can be said to teach each of those, but where he thinks Calvin went wrong is that Calvin’s view of sovereignty so overwhelmed his theology that he ends up denying the capacity of humans to choose to believe. [In this discussion] we are looking at Don Thorsen’s fair-minded comparison of John Calvin and John Wesley, in his book Calvin vs. Wesley: Bringing Life in Line with Practice.

 

Do you think "meticulous sovereignty" denies human’s capacity to choose (for and against) something? Does it deny, in that sense, “free will”? Do you think Christ died for all?

 

In [Thorson's] study [comparing Calvin's and Wesley's] vews of salvation, he begins with [the Reformed theologican's personal] conversion experiences — comparing Wesley’s famous Aldersgate experience and Calvin’s cryptic comments in the introduction to his commentary on the Psalms, which differs slightly from other [expressions] of his experience. What perhaps ought to be observed is that folks like Calvin and Wesley [simply] say “Here’s when I got saved.” (That, perhaps, is worth our pondering more than it is often pondered.)

 

Both believed in a penal substitutionary theory of the atonement: Christ died to take upon himself our punishment. The big issue between them is that Calvin’s theory of the atonement was “limited” while Wesley’s was “universal” (or “general”). Though he does not always say so in explicit terms, Calvin sees [Christ's] effectual atonement only for the elect, so it is fair to say Christ died (only) for the elect while for Wesley Christ died for all. Once again, here comes [the tension between] free grace or free will — God did the work but he grants to humans the opportunity to choose and they therefore become accountable to God.

 

Yes, accusations in both directions: Wesleyans think Calvinists end up denying [human] faith in "justification-by-faith" or "free grace’s gift to choose" - while Calvinists sometimes accuse Wesleyans of ultimately being universalists [(all are saved regardless of any expression of human faith in Christ)]. (Actually, only a Calvinist can be a universalist because to believe all will be saved means no one can choose not to be saved, which is a form of determinism.)

 

In the ordo salutis, the order of salvation, Calvin’s emphasis was the grace of God accomplishing each while Wesley’s was the necessity of Christian [obedience and Spirit-led conviction] to pursue sanctification, holiness, and love. Calvin emphasized two themes in salvation: union with Christ (the ground of it all), and justification (which is a juridical re-framing of salvation).  Wesley’s themes are not dissimilar but Wesley differs over faith as a condition of salvation. For Calvin faith is the result of grace; for Wesley grace is the source but faith is the condition (67). For Calvin faith shows effectual grace; for Wesley it shows prevenient grace.

 

On assurance, Thorsen’s sketch wobbles a bit for me: at first I thought he saw Calvin affirming the certainty of assurance but Calvin’s theology of election and sovereignty (by the end of his sketch) seemed to minimize assurance a bit, which is not how Wesley taught it: for him one could be assured of one’s salvation. The witness of the Spirit is where Wesley focused [as versus the assurance of one's act of faith - res].

 

 

 

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Index to past articles on Calvinism v. Wesleyanism

 

 

 

 

 

My Father's Final Passage and Continuing Voyage

A Family Trip to Mackinac Island where we love to bike
its wandering routes and paths

A short note to my readers:

My father's great struggle with Parkinson's ended early last night and with his passing I will suspend any blogging activity for a very short while through this week and perhaps the next. My apologies to you, the reader, while I complete the transition from hospice's helpfulness and any necessary family obligations that will be arising. And thank you too for your understanding and patience. My father was a South Korean war vet in the early 1950's, a public school bus driver of 22 years, a volunteer fireman, full time policeman, and public civil servant for 40 years, a dairy farmer, faithful husband, and grandest of all fathers, dads, and friends. He will be dearly missed even as his blessed life has been completed into the awaiting hands of our loving Father God. In his passing I have found a great sense of relief and God's holy peace. Especially knowing that dad's trial of suffering has finally ended its aftermath of wasting disease and heartborne tragedy.

In the meantime, there are many sections within this website that await exploration. It has been built purposely as a reference site from the many hands-and-hearts of God's servants: each topic lending help and support to the next in an intra-connected web of thought and expression. Hopefully my writing has improved since its first inception from the several years ago when I started under the name skinhead (though I cringe when reading some of my earliest articles). I began writing of my great personal transformation under a massive Spirit-led conviction to leave the once hallowed halls of contemporary evangelicalism in which I grew up, having held a great love and respect for its traditions and passions, preaching and ministries. I then explored for several years the more hopeful lands of emergent Christianity's broader expressions of God's love and grace, and to this end I believe I have successfully navigated the breakwaters of this turbulent expanse. And having written of that experience am now transitioning yet again to the broader planes of a fuller, more postmodern and post-evangelic, perspective of doctrine and worship, mission and ministry, amid a Jesus-centered proclaim and an approach of a multi-vocal bible redux. Overall my burden is to re-connect God's Word with our lives, and to leave the next generation of exegetes with a simpler, more refined idea of doctrinal truths, missional witness, and a generous Christianity.

To the several recent topical series that remain unfinished know that I will not leave them undone but intend to shortly continue their exploration as I have time and strength to research and write. These areas can be found under the following topics of "Science and Religion," "Calvin v. Wesley," and "NT Wright's Vol 4" series. Each discussion will naturally lead to past areas of theological thought which has already been expressed within the pages of Relevancy22 should the reader wish to refer within its backlogs (as I hope you would).

And with that, thank you again for your patience and prayers. I leave you with the great peace that can only be found in Jesus' wonderful name and the holy convocations of His wonderful calling.

R.E. Slater

October 16, 2013

In an earlier life of love and family

The Wasting Disease of Parkinson's,

August 2012

Grandfather and Nephew,

South Korean Vets Reunite, August 2013

  

Empty Spaces

N.T. Wright, "Paul and the Faithfulness of God" (Vol 4) - What Place Israel and the Church?

NT Wright and the Supersessionism Question: What did Paul do?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/10/15/nt-wright-and-the-supersessionism-question-what-did-paul-do/

 

by Scot McKnight

Oct 15, 2013

Comments 

One of the distinguishing discussions today in Pauline studies is whether or not Paul was a “supersessionist,” and the issue is Paul thought the church “replaced” Israel in such a way that now God no longer worked with Israel but with the church. To get ahold of this one means knowing how the whole Bible is to be read when we see that word “fulfillment.” At the ground level it has to do with how Torah observant “messianic Christians” are to be and how “Jewish” Christianity ought to be… it goes back and forth. N.T. Wright, in his magisterial Paul and the Faithfulness of God, as he opens the second part of the book by examining Paul’s worldview as it takes on and adapts and adjusts the worldviews of Judaism, paganism and empire, goes square at that issue without using the terms so many in the supersessionism debate use. He differs with those, like Bockmuehl and Nanos, who see the messianists carrying on their Judaism, or Paul continuing to be kosher as he had been as a Pharisee, but because this has all become a worldview issue and not simply a theology issue, the framework changes with Wright — he seems to be talking about the same issues but now from a new angle. He’s asking What did Paul do with Judaism when he saw the resurrected Jesus?

 

In brief, I see in Wright a kind of Christian fulfillment theory that some will see as replacement theology and others as supersessionism and yet others (like Wright himself) will see as nothing of the sort. It is the Jewish Paul being completely Jewish under the Messiahship of Jesus. When Jesus is Messiah, nothing and everything chances at the same time: he’s just as Jewish, perhaps more so, and yet different than what contemporaries, like Pharisees, saw as Jewish. His terms: everything gets reworked (monotheism, election, eschatology), everything gets revised, everything is taken on in new categories but it’s the same old covenant in a messianic worldview.

 

I once had a lengthy conversation with a Jewish scholar who told me I could not be Christian without being a supersessionist; sometimes one gets the impression the only way not to be supersessionist is to be a radical pluralist. Here are words NT Wright uses to describe how Paul revised the worldview of Judaism.

 

Like Temple:

The replacement of Temple with Jesus and, secondarily and derivatively, with his people remains one of Paul’s central worldview-revisions, unnoticed in an earlier generation that chose to forget the significance of the Temple within Paul’s ancestral symbolic universe. He developed it further: the Messiah’s people, and the tasks they perform ‘in the Messiah’, are described in terms which reflect the people at the centre of Jerusalem and the Temple and the tasks they performed there. They were priests, offering sacrifices, indeed offering themselves as sacrifices, or, in Paul’s case, bringing the gentiles themselves as a quasi-sacrificial offering, with a kind of heavy irony, to Jerusalem. And Jerusalem itself, the focus of the longed-for centripetal pilgrimage of the nations, has been replaced by Jerusalem as the centrifugal originating point of the world mission. The redeemer does not now come to Zion but from Zion, going out into all the world to ‘gather the nations’, not by their coming to the central symbol of ancient Judaism, but by their becoming the central symbol, as we shall see, of the transformed world- view” (358).

Like Torah and food laws:

In the light of this, and of Paul’s own insistence that he took what he calls the ‘strong’ position, I find myself in agreement with those who have maintained that Paul did not himself continue to keep the kosher laws, and did not propose to, or require of, other ‘Jewish Christians’ that they should, either (359). 

Paul’s revising of the Jewish symbol of Torah in terms of food and table- fellowship, then, was clear, if necessarily complex. First, all those who belong to the Messiah, and are defined by Messiah-faithfulness and baptism, belong at the same table: this, as we shall see, is a constitutive part of his most central new positive symbol. Second, Messiah-followers are free to eat whatever they wish, with that freedom curtailed only (but strongly) when someone else’s ‘weak’ conscience is endangered. Third, Messiah-followers are free to eat ordinary meals with anyone they like, but not with someone who professes to be one of the family but whose behaviour indicates otherwise. Fourth (an extra but important point), Messiah-followers are not free to go into a pagan temple and eat there. To do so would be to stage a contest with the lord himself. All this is not just ‘ethics’. It is a matter of a freshly crafted symbolic universe (361).

Similar, and just as interesting, observations are made about circumcision and sabbath and prayer and land and zeal/the Battle (with the satan, et al) and Scripture itself. Supersessionism? No, I don’t think. Fulfillment? Certainly. Revision? That’s the key term here. Faith in Messiah turns the old inside out and makes the old new without abolishing it.

 

He turns then to briefer escapades into worldview and paganism and then worldview and empire, on the latter he opens with this reminder, something in need of saying because so many think anti-empire means anarchism too: “The answer to corrupt authorities is not anarchy” (381). But he returns to the implication of a confession by way of a denial:

Jesus is ‘son of God’; he is ‘lord of the world’; he is ‘saviour’; the worldwide revelation of his rule is ‘good news’, because through it ‘justice’ and ‘peace’ are brought to birth at last. He is the one who ‘rises to rule the nations’. The announcement of all this is the key source, for Paul, of ‘power’, and in Ephesians, which is either Paul’s greatest summary of his own teach- ing or the work of a careful and close colleague and imitator, he speaks eloquently about the power of the one God at work in the Messiah, a power which has raised him above all rule, authority, power and dominion, and above every name that is named, both in the present age and in the age to come. Anyone who had seen the Eagle at work, and had heard its names and claims, would know what was being said. We must advance this case more fully later on (383).

On countering the breathtaking power of the story at work in empire and Rome …

Paul does not mention this story explicitly, any more than he speaks of the imperial claim made by coins, statues and other obvious imagery. Yet we should not ignore the subversive nature of the retold Jewish story which undergirds so much of his writing. If this – the story of Adam, Abraham and Israel, climaxing in the Messiah! – is the grand narrative of the creator’s design for his world, then the grand narrative of Virgil, Horace and Livy, and the visual symbolism which went with those writings, cannot be true, or the ultimate truth. That is the dilemma which Paul posed to his readers. The extent to which they will have ‘heard’ that subversive note is a question to which we must return (383).

Put together then we are back to the anti-empire theme:

When Paul said, ‘Jesus is lord,’ a good many of his hearers must have known at once that this meant, ‘So Caesar isn’t.’ And that was the ‘good news’, the euangelion which Paul announced around the world. Was that a subversion of the symbolic world of the empire? How could it not be? How would that work out? (384)

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Star War's Sense of Mission in the Bible: "May the Force Be With You"

 

The Star Wars Reboot and the Bible

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2012/08/15/jeff-cook-could-believing-in-god-harm-your-soul/

 

by Jeff Cook

Oct 14, 2013

Comments

 

Nerd out with me, and watch the video posted below. I resonated with these observations and found that all four apply well to why we love the Bible and how we should read it.

 

Rule #1: The setting is the frontier.

 

Star Wars doesn’t happen in the city. It doesn’t happen in parliament, or in the library. It happens out here away from civilization amidst smugglers and bounty hunters. Star Wars is a western and it’s set in the frontier.

 

So too, the Bible is written in times of hardship–not at a seminary, monastery or a common church building.

 

Most of the Bible was edited and composed by those in distress after the symbol of their faith–the Temple–had been torn apart (either in 587 BC for the Old Testament or 70 AD for the New). The writers picture both the desolation as well as a whole new world arriving. The setting is the frontier and there is deep anticipation of God’s future.

 

Rule # 2: The future is old.

 

Star Wars beauty isn’t clean. It isn’t new. It’s dirty, gritty, a second hand world. The beauty of the frontier.

 

So too, We discover new and progressive truths in the ancient when we read the scriptures. The soul-moving beauties presented by God are often wrapped in disease, politics and blood. In order to love the Bible, I must get my mind covered in muck and my heart aware of God’s voice in the alleyways and truck stops.

 

The Bible is not clean! it is graphic literature that uses foul imagery to display the grand and abiding grace of God.

 

Rule 3: The Force is mysterious.

 

We don’t always need an explanation. The greatest power of the Force is it’s sense of magic. That comes from the unknown.

 

Christians–especially those who do work like I do–consistently fall victim to this trap (and yes “it’s a trap”).

 

The Author of reality doesn’t explain everything in neat little package (thankfully). One of the primary attributes of the real God is that He so often hides, speaking through donkeys and storms and flaming bushes in seemingly random, brief encounters. The God of the Bible allows tension and longing and hopes finally realized. This is true not only in the text but in the lives of the faithful today.

 

As such, we lose the real God when we make God’s work and priorities systematic and obvious–the result of mere deduction. The real God is like the wind, said Jesus, blowing where he wishes–sometimes cooling our brows, sometimes igniting small sparks into a wildfire.

 

If we make following Jesus about Jedi “midi-chlorian levels” we lose huge and no one will care.

 

Rule 4: Star Wars isn’t cute.

 

Walk into the wrong bar, lose your arm. Don’t pay your debts, end up in carbonite. The frontier is a dangerous place. It’s never cute or silly. It’s not child proofed. It’s freakin’ Star Wars – and Han always shoots first.

 

What world do you think we live in?!?

 

The common portrait of life on earth in the Bible is a spiritual war zone, overrun with villains, troubles and a soul-infecting disease unleashed on humanity that will crush everything we care for if God does not act.

 

Jesus’ charge–perhaps the words he said more than any others– was “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” In other words, we live in enemy occupied territory, a revolution is underway, and we are invited to flip the world right side up again through an ancient and decisive force: we are to embrace this force at every turn; we are to lean in to it because this force never fails.

 

Resurrecting, cruciform love is the power of the living God–the force that binds the galaxy together. Christ’s love has been unleashed into our world, and in the end everything will be transformed by its power and scope.

 

The Bible isn’t cute. Its a subversive manifesto in the midst of a dangerous world inviting us to throw off every chain of the present regime for the easy yoke offered by the world’s true heir.

 

 

Jeff Cook pastors Atlas Church in Greeley Colorado. He teaches philosophy at UNC and is the author of Everything New: One Philosopher’s Search for a God Worth Believing In. @jeffvcook

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Does God Move and Act in the Universe? - "Eight Positions of Divine Sovereignty"

Options in Divine Action

http://thomasjayoord.com/index.php/blog/archives/options_in_divine_action/#.Ula2i9KsiSo

by Thomas Oord

Dec 13, 2010

A recurring interest of mine is pondering how God acts. It's an immensely complex subject. I've come to think eight main options present themselves to Christians wanting a general framework for considering divine action.

Below is a chart of the eight general options. Some options are more attractive to me than others are. Those nearer the middle of the chart are most attractive.

Less Attractive Options

The options on the far left of the chart presuppose a very controlling God. The universe is virtually a puppet, because God controls everything or almost everything. This view of divine sovereignty, in my opinion, allows little or no room for genuine creaturely freedom or agency. These options fit some Calvinist theologies.

The options at the far right have problems as well. Although I think some degree of mystery should always be present when pondering how God acts, absolute mystery negates the entire enterprise of believing in God. I can't affirm wholescale negative theology.

Deism is not a viable option for me. My own personal experience, the Bible, and from reports of people throughout history testify to the ongoing activity of God after the creation of our universe. Thoroughgoing deism allows no room to account well for the spiritual experiences of my life and the lives of most people who have every lived.

More Attractive Options

Among the four remaining options, I see strengths and weaknesses.

Traditional freewill theism fits most of what John Wesley says about God's action. So I'm partial to that option. God generally gives freedom and only occasionally "interrupts" or "intervenes" the freedom God gives.

Natural and/or Supernatural Action fits most of what I read in the writings of important theologians like Thomas Aquinas. His version of divine primary and secondary causation has been influential, although I don't think it answers some of the most important questions pertaining to theodicy.

What I've called the Steady State Divine Influence option has the advantage of an active God whose causal activity is uniform. This option fits well with theologies that emphasize God working in and with the laws of nature. But it has a more difficult time accounting for miracles. And most versions say God is voluntarily self-limited and the gifts of freedom and/or agency God gives are entirely voluntary on God’s part.

The option I currently like most is Essential Kenosis Freewill Theism. It says God necessarily gives freedom and/or agency to others. But the forms of God’s causal influence vary. And the effectiveness of God's activity depends in part on creaturely responses. It seems to fit best both with the idea that God creates and works with natural laws and the idea that God can act dramatically – miraculously – without squashing creaturely freedom and agency entirely.

I like to think Essential Kenosis Freewill Theism option takes Wesley's theology of prevenient grace, puts it on turbo charge, and then offers a consistent basis for affirming God's love. This is the option I develop in the last chapter of my new book, The Nature of Love: A Theology (Chalice Press) and in Defining Love: A Philosophical, Scientific, and Theological Engagement (Brazos Press).

We Live by Faith

At the end of the day, of course, there will always be a speculative element to thinking about how God acts in the world. We live by faith, after all. None of our minds can comprehend the Universal Mind.

But some divine action options make better sense of what we find in Scripture, in our own experience, and contemporary science. And some do a better job of consistently affirming God's love.

* * * * * * * * * *

An Observation

Of note is that both ends move away from the idea of Open Theism while the middle positions are various versions of Open Theism from weak to strong to weak. Tom Oord's selection of EKFT will fit best with Wesleyan-Arminian theology, which would also fit best with this website's position of divine sovereignty (one which is always open), human free will (open), and relational theism (the freeing nature and action of the love of God).

R.E. Slater

October 12, 2013

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The Certainty of Completion Against Despair

Certainty Against Despair

by R.E. Slater

In life there is death;

and in death there is life;

It is here in this wilderness

where both life and death find,

Completeness from the other

despite the jagged shards within.

In our agony lies a greater finality,

a greater promise bound in the

Time worn promises of a

healing yet to occur,

Bound in the promise of God

Beyond death's reach.

Even as sorrow and tragedy

unbind wounded hearts,

So forgiveness in grief's silence

rebind broken souls waiting,

Eternally waiting for completeness

a'washed tears of grief.

Silence is the wisdom 

which comes from living,

Hope is the deep balm

which comes from knowing,

These, the severe gifts of the mortal

allowed the human breast.

And yet, there is another gift,

the promise of God to all who wait,

A promise that life and death

find meaning in His fellowship,

'Til the world ends and He comes

in the silences of grief's mortality.

- R. E. Slater

3.19,2019

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

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We all bear a past even as we envision a future. One pointing forward to the present present while the other points backwards to the same. Each present present is made from all past presents even as each present present forms the basis for a future made from all past presents. For some, our pasts remain with us for a lifetime. For others the present doesn't stay with us long enough. Even as for others the future doesn't come soon enough, and when it does, doesn't last long enough, or satisfy fully enough. Mostly, we feel abandoned... of ourselves that disappear too quickly into the fogs of what once was, and could have been, to then as quickly slip clear of its own present time. A time we would but wish to hold onto a bit longer leaving a feeling of brokenness lingering in our bones. A brokenness that isn't quite complete, quite healed, quite ended. A brokenness needing more time to savor, to sit within quietly, beholding its sublimity. A sublimity requiring an ending, requiring a healing, or a fullness, and most always requiring melodic notes of completion in soothing choruses of comfort and embrace.

And it is in this sense that death doesn't come just once, but repeatedly through our present presents. Ending things before they are ended. Removing things that were wonderful to know and experience. Feel, and touch. Turning us forwards away from our steady backwards stare. Pushing us away from loved ones, glad times, and things we might hold onto for too long for their dearness of life to us. But in another sense, death holds the keys of life within its grasp. For wherever death is - so is life. Each defining the other with purpose and meaning. Otherwise there would be no present to move into. Nor a future to think about. There could be no other orientation than that of a black blackness, or nothingness, or lifeless silence. In each, both in death and in life, can be found the habitation of the other. Each defining the other with meaning and prose like two halves of the same coin without which there could be no coin:

⁵⁵ “Where, O death, is your victory?
     Where, O death, is your sting?”^[i]

⁵⁶ The sting of death is sin,

    and the power of sin is the law.

⁵⁷ But thanks be to God! He gives to us

   the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

⁵⁰[For] I declare to you, brothers and sisters,

that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,

nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

⁵¹ Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep,

but we will all be changed -

⁵² in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye,

at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound,

the dead will be raised imperishable,

and we will be changed.

⁵³ For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable,

and the mortal with immortality.

⁵⁴ When the perishable has been clothed

with the imperishable,

and the mortal with immortality,

then the saying that is written will come true:

“Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

- 1 Cor 15.50-57

In but a few short sentences and observations the Apostle Paul sums up the Christian hope. That life's completion and fullness is forever fulfilled in the Christ of the Cross where mortality is clothed with immortality, and the perishable with imperishability. It is Christianity's bold proclaim that God's divine presence will forever inhabit creation's seeming voids of presence with purposeful meaning. Its horridness and evil. Threading each broken life into the holy garments of re-creation where each suffering life may find its final completion and rest. Allowing no earthly work to be forgotten. No tearful prayer unheard. No rent passion unfulfilled. No relationship a final finality. Knowing that all who are broken may come through Jesus for immortal healing and life everlasting. And not simply in the next life but, if possible, to begin even now in this very life of our present present in which we live. Possessing lives filled with death with lives filled with eternal hope, love, mercy, forgiveness, kindness, and compassion. Bourne by the Spirit of God, and the Spirit of Christ, whose Spirit pervades and overcomes life's many deaths with life's intended sense of meaning and divine purpose.

This is the Christian hope. A hope that is present in our present present filling us with the knowledge that our pasts our neither meaningless, nor forgotten, but bound up in the presence of the God of life and breath. The God of immortality and purpose. Who holds each life dear though we may hold it too cheaply, and thereby abandon ourselves to despair, to hatred or jealousy, to unforgotten pains, thus allowing death to live within lives (made up of present moments) meant for life. It is this Jesus who brings life to those who are dead. Who wish to live lives filled with fullness and meaning. Bravely facing all future deaths with the promise of ever-present life overcoming each and every death and pain, sorrow and woe, separation, harm, and hurt. Nay, we are not abandoned. We cannot be. Not by a God of life who would overcome all evils with His love and wisdom. It is such a one to whom we would look to, to find life's meaning, and death's demise: "O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting? But thanks be to God who has given to us the victory through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ."

R.E. Slater

October 10, 2013

A Second Sight
by R.E. Slater

Burnt Norton, No. 1 of "Four Quartets"

by T.S. Eliot

N.T. Wright, "Paul and the Faithfulness of God" (Vol 4) - Rome and Its Empire

Rome as Empire and Emperor Worship

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/10/10/rome-as-empire-and-emperor-worship/

by Scot McKnight

Oct 10, 2013

Comments 

I have been reading theological books for forty plus years. In that time only one truly great piece of writing stands out as a book deserving reading for the poetry of its prose, and that was Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus, a book with a story so good and a conclusion so wrong. Yet, no book stands next to it when it comes to prose. Until N.T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God, a book zippered up with eloquence and tightened by potent observations. Read it for the prose.

 

I should perhaps note that when Tom was the good bishop he had many other responsibilities; now freed to be a professor we might long for the day when his big books were only 700 pages or so!

 

In this chp we get to the heart of the new contribution that PFG will make; here is a full display of the imperial cult as a/the context for understanding Paul’s claim that Jesus is Lord. That Tom knows this claim will be given considerable pushback explains the detail and vigorous prose and evidence-based conclusions. There can be no doubt the emperor, from Augustus on, was worshiped or prayed to (and for); the issue will be how much this figured into Paul’s theological claims about Jesus as Lord.

 

So what is, or better yet, was religion in Paul’s world?

When Paul arrived in Ephesus, Philippi or anywhere else with his message about the one God and his crucified and risen son, he was not offering an alternative way of being ‘religious’ in the sense of a private hobby, something to do in a few hours at the weekend. He was offering a heart transplant for an entire community and its culture. If ‘the centrality of Artemis was part of what it meant to be an Ephesian,’43 it is not surprising that Paul’s ministry there caused a riot (255). 

By the same token, even the small beginnings of a ‘thick description’ of greco-roman culture such as we have made here indicate that when Paul arrived in a town and began to speak about the one true God, and about this God raising from the dead a man called Jesus who was now to be invoked, worshipped and hailed as kyrios, there was a whole network of assumptions, vested interests, long-cherished traditions, hopes and fears both personal and civic, which would be aroused. When the antagonists in Philippi declare that Paul and Silas are Jews, throwing the city into an uproar by ‘teaching customs which it’s illegal for us Romans to accept or practise’,122 and when the crowd in Thessalonica yell out that Paul and Silas have been ‘turning the world upside down’ by ‘acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus’,123 we can understand, in view of the evidence so far surveyed in this chapter, that these, though carrying an inescapably political dimension, were fundamentally to do with a strong, deep-rooted culture, and within that culture with something we may as well call ‘religion’. ‘Religion’ may not be ultimately the best category for describing or analyzing what Paul was doing, or what he thought he was doing. But it is certainly a key and basic element in what his contemporaries will have seen him doing and heard him saying. And with ‘religion’, in all of these complex senses, we are dealing with what today we might call ‘the fabric of society’, the things which held people together and gave shape and meaning to their personal and corporate life (273-274).

But a pressing issue in today’s scholarship is Caesar or, to ramp him up one notch, Empire.

The Roman empire was the great new Fact of the world which included the Palestine of Jesus’ boyhood and the Cilicia of Saul’s. It proclaimed itself as a bright new world: new roads with new soldiers to march along them, new taxes and new coins to pay them with, new administrations and law- courts, local officials falling over themselves to erect splendid, presti- gious new temples to the divine royal house. New crosses by the roadside, displaying the bird-pecked remains of rebels. Whole cities were redesigned to give honour to the emperor and his family, portrayed, often enough, in the guise of the ancient pagan divinities. Perhaps, after all, the gods had come down in human form. Rome took the eagle as its symbol; popular legend and iconography suggested a direct link to Jupiter, the highest god of all (279).

Now to Empire:

It was not by military force alone that Augustus consolidated his power, or that his successors maintained it. It has been shown in great detail that from the beginning the empire used every available means in art, architecture, literature and culture in general – everything from tiny coins to the rebuild- ing of entire city centres – to communicate to the Roman people near and far the message that Augustus’s rise to power was the great new moment for which Rome, and indeed the whole world, had been waiting. This is what I mean, in this broad sense and in the present context, by ‘rhetoric’ (294).

Wright provides extensive discussion of the empire narrative, the narrative that says history is coming to a golden moment in the Empire’s Caesars, at work in the Roman world among the Roman historians — from Horace and Ovid and Livy but especially Virgil, about whom Wright makes an important observation, one with which I agree:

There is every reason to suppose that an intelligent boy growing up in Tarsus, or for that matter in Jerusalem, would know at least its [Virgil's Aeneid's] main themes, if not its finer details (307). [And now to the conclusion:] “But his grand narrative stands to the grand narrative of Israel’s scriptures, together with their putative final chapter, at worst as a kind of parody, at best as another altar to an unknown god” (311).

Wright ventures into the Empire as religion, or the imperial cult, with a swirling set of paragraphs loaded up with nuances and claims that in spite of all this variety there remains something we can call the “imperial cult.”

1. There was a long tradition in the East of a divine monarchy.
2. There was a long tradition as well of worshiping the goddess Roma, Dea Roma.
3. Hercules was long associated with someone transcendent, with the divine. Flanking him are intellectual and civic heroes seen as gods.
4. There is the decline of traditional religion and the decision by Augustus to restore the ancient religion/cult, revealing the connection between the new leader and the old gods.
5. Homes and some more localized settings had their own shrines and religious settings(Lares and Penates). By the use of one word — augusti — these got connected to Augustus himself, leading religious customs to be more connected to the emperor.
6. Traditional deities were absorbed and renamed in new cultures, as when the Greek gods got new Latin/Roman names and became Roman gods. Kings got connected to these gods as well.  Augustus was portrayed as Jupiter or Zeus.
7. And Rome’s power was absorbed when local elites, chosen to represent Rome, were unafraid in expressing gratitude to Rome for their gifts and protection.

Now we get to the “divinity of Augustus,” something ambiguously worded but seemingly clear in implication: the man was divine. From a decree in Asia we learn these things:  

Augustus has bestowed great benefits, including ‘salvation’; Asia has held a competition to see who can propose the best way of honouring him, which has been won by the proconsul who suggested this reordering of the calendar. Augustus’s rule has proved a new beginning for the world, and for individuals. He has been raised, as it were, to cosmogonic stature; the Roman imperial system has been equated with the cosmic structures of the world. The events surrounding Augustus’s coming to power are therefore ‘good news’, euangelia, a word virtually always in the plural in such contexts, though, interestingly, always in the singular in the New Testament. This ‘good news’ is not merely a nice piece of information to cheer you up on a bad day, but the public, dramatic announcement that something has happened through which the world has changed for ever and much for the better (327).

Wright catalogs the evidence around the Roman Empire. Everywhere cities had altars and centers for Augustus; space was shaped to focus on the emperor. Here is how Wright puts it together for a good reminder:

There was indeed, then, no single thing we can call ‘the emperor cult’ at any time during the reign of Augustus. However, from the hints in Horace and Virgil to the enthusiastic temple-building in Asia and Palestine, to the soldiers’ drinking-cups in Switzerland, Augustus was the name that was found, literally, on everybody’s lips. The cults worked their way into domes- tic and workshop shrines, and onto signet rings, oil lamps and numerous other small artefacts. Libations were offered to the emperor at every feast whether public or private, a ruling from as early as 30 BC in the enthusiastic aftermath of Actium. However varied the cultic phenomena, however piecemeal the development, however ambiguous some of the phraseology, people were doing with Augustus what they had long done with the ancient pantheon: building temples to his honour, invoking him in prayer, offering sacrifice to him (334). 

The cults, in all their variety, and for all their blending of Augustus with other divinities and especially with Roma herself, came down to a focus on Augustus himself as the lynch-pin to the whole symbolic universe. Thus all the lines, east and west and in Rome itself, pointed to one conclusion, which was confirmed shortly after the great man finally died on 19 August in AD 14. Numerius Atticus, a senator, declared on oath that he had seen Augustus ascending, like Romulus, into heaven. Livia, Augustus’s widow, paid him a million sesterces for his trouble. Augustus thus received in death what he had refused to receive in his life. Suddenly, therefore, what was formerly forbidden now became urgent. A shrine for Augustus was at last built in Rome itself, priests were appointed, with Livia herself as priestess and a new college of priests, the sodales Augustales, consisting of leading senators. A golden image of the late emperor was placed in the temple of Mars, the architectural focus of Augustus’s civic building programme. Other rites and ceremonies were voted. Whereas with Julius Caesar it had taken some time for deification to occur, with Augustus it happened very quickly. This was the final, public, dotting of the ‘i’s and crossing of the ‘t’s in the message that the world had been able to read for some time (335).

Augustus then had climbed to top of Olympus; Tiberius, his successor, was immediately “son of god,” or son of the divine Augustus. Tiberius was moody; Gaius Caligula an egomaniac. Claudius kept pace. Nero was unstable but he too was given similar honors.

 

This is the makings of empire ideology and counter-ideology on the part of the apostle Paul. Was Paul, then, using language to counter the imperial cult in its various forms and ideas?

 

You may know that Joe Modica and I were co-editors of a book called Jesus is Lord, Caesar is Not, a book that examined claims made by scholars about anti-empire ideology at work in the NT authors. Our collection of authors routinely argued the evidence was overcooked. Not one of the authors under examination put together as much evidence as is put together here by Tom Wright, meaning we are in need of yet one more evaluation.

 

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Index to the "New(er) Perspective(s) of Paul"