The Ethical and Redemptive Aspects of the Kingdom of God

"My contention would be that kingdom goodness is done
by kingdom people who live under King Jesus." - Scot McKnight

While understanding Scot's purpose in saying this and wanting to sympathize with his purebred insistence upon the Kingdom concept that only Kingdom people living under King Jesus can do Kingdom goodness, my personal position would be more on the other side of this statement....

...That God's Spirit rests upon all mankind, and that anyone who does the will of God (or the will of the Father for those Christians amongst us) may commit true Kingdom goodness. It's not so much the vessel that pours out God's goodness and ethics, but the Spirit Himself, through his vessels, be they beggarly or redeemed.

Conversely, we all know examples of redeemed Christians who do not commit acts of Kingdom goodness (which is where I feel these arguments again fall down here, however much I would wish to side with these sentiments). These believers are ones who lapse, or fail in their faith, do not trust God's leading, and submit to the spirit of man, the flesh, the devil, and sin. (I will avoid for now any discussions of a believer's positional justification / sanctification in Christ as versus a believer's practical failings and sins in his faith that reflect more his own spirit than that of Christ's work on the Cross).

However, I do agree with Scot in his distinction between God's ethical Kingdom and God's Redeemed Kingdom... there is a difference of residents in this concept. God's ethical Kingdom is inhabited by all mankind, some who will do God's will and some who will not. Just as in God's redemptive Kingdom there will be some who will do God's will and some who will not. HOWEVER, the main distinction here is that those in God's Redeemed Kingdom are just that - residents redeemed in Jesus' atonement and resurrection who have acknowledged their sin and need of a Savior.

Why do I say this? Because it correlates with one of the major themes of the Bible, that of "God's Remnant." Throughout both Testaments it can be seen that those believers who follow God through faith and obedience are designated by God as His sons and daughters. And that those who do not follow God through faith and obedience are not His sons and daughters. And by-and-large that group of spiritually faithful are usually less in number than those found in society at large, and are therefore known as the remnant of God for that very reason.

In the OT those believers exhibiting Abraham's faith were of God (I should someday like to better explain the importance and meaning of the Abrahamic Covenant, for it is very important indeed!).... In the NT that Abrahamic faith is crystallized into God's Son Jesus so that Jesus' Jewish disciples (Matthew, Mark, Peter, James, John, etc... and later, Paul in place of the appointed apostle Stephen whom he had stoned to death by Jewish fiat) went throughout the ancient Jewish world proclaiming the very personage of Christ in the Jewish synagogues.

Why? So that Jewish believers everywhere may worship God through His sent Messiah/Savior Jesus who completed their Covenants and Exile. For it was in Jesus that (1) the Jewish Covenants - the Abrahamic, the Mosaic (known as the Old Covenant), and the Davidic - found their conclusion through Jesus' divine Personage and work of Redemption. And it was also through the personage of Jesus that (2) Israel's spiritual exile from God concluded into assemblies of believers known as the Church. So then, in Jewish terms, Jesus is the end of the Covenants and the end of Israel's exile from God. Which explains John the Baptist's earlier mission to the Jews before Jesus; then Jesus' mission to the Jews; and then the disciples missions to the Jews before they went to all the world to bring in (reap, harvest) non-Jewish societies of Samaritans and Gentiles as the adoptive children of God.

In review, the Kingdom of God is a blood-bought Kingdom of faithful believers known as the remnant of God who are to live according to God's new charter called the New Covenant; are Covenant purchased and inscribed in Jesus; and avow to all the ethics and goodness found in the Kingdom. But more than that - these very same believers proclaim the Covenant-Maker, Christ Himself, through their lives, their work and duties, their worship and fellowship, and in their very acts of love, mercy, and righteousness.

Why? As witness and testimony to Jesus who is God, and came to redeem mankind, who is Love, Mercy and Righteousness in-and-of Himself. His children do as their Father does. Not because we have to. But because we are. And must. And follow our newly redeemed natures over the fallen nature still inscribed within us. That disturbs and mars the Image of God in us; that corrupts the spirit of Christ present; that groans the Spirit of God who indwells his faithful. It is a life-long battle that God wants to win because God's nature knows no darkness. He is light and light has no communion with darkness. It is powerless before He who is Light and Love. And man's fallen nature, even when redeemed, struggles with perfection until death comes and God takes him home to eternal rest, peace, light and joy, to be with his Spirit eternally.

So then, these are the Kingdom residents the Bible speaks of... they are God's adopted children who testify of their Savior; who live as a true Kingdom community of redeemed sinners; and who exhibit and obey the ethics of that Kingdom community. This Kingdom community is now known as the Church universal until that era passes when, in the future, Jesus returns (in an event called the "Parousia" in theological terms) to rule directly. At which point the Church era becomes the Kingdom era. And as the Church era uplifted the OT era from a Jewish monarchy to a fellowship of believers in Jesus. So the Church will be uplifted itself from an era of persecution and oppression to an era of freedom and liberty when Christ comes back to rule. (We call this an "eschalation" that is not-so-much "circular" as it is a "stretched, upwardly spiraling, coil" of historic proportions accounting for the linear movement of time, and the forward movement of God's spirit upon his creation to redeem it from sin. It also where we get the word "eschatology" which speaks of the end-times, the times to come when Jesus returns).

But God's rule is perfect. Which rule the Church attempts to live under and exhibit. Thus the Church is an "upside-down" Kingdom. Whose Kingdom characteristics or elements are not self-laudatory qualities. They seek the best from others, give fully of themselves to the "redemption" of other men and women found both in the body of Christ or outside the body of Christ. Jesus follower's (or born-again believers) are to be selfless in their service of God's love to all mankind. Love is what God is. And love is what God's children are, and are to be, however imperfectly we share God's love.  And then, in the Kingdom era to come, this service will be perfected, as it were, into all the realms of man's societies, man's rulings, man's communities. Love will flow throughout the world and with it, Truth and Justice.

Meanwhile, God's Spirit rests upon all men's hearts and kingdoms everywhere, including the very nature of man himself through God's Image and Pervasive Presence. And because of these truths we will witness the ethics and goodness of God's Rule (or Kingdom) even within the world of men, despite the interruptions of man's fallenness, sin and devil. Thus, that portion of society not submitted to God's work of redemption through His Son Jesus, though residing as God's creation (and who may be pervasively known as God's "children" through God's very act of creation itself) are not known by God as His redeemed remnant (or, redeemed "children"). The importance is more than colloquial, it's very meaning carries eternity in it. And by import, our eternity starts now, in this life. Today. Within linear time and space. Within our personal histories to one another as to God Himself (which has been Rob Bell's main argument in the book, Love Wins).

And so it can be said, the Kingdom of God has come to men and women, even though it has always been present through God's creational acts from Genesis forward, and in His very-present Sovereign activity working within our fallen, self-willed, sinful worlds. Including the sinful "will" or "bent" of the creative order itself (see link here). Further, the Kingdom of God comes especially through Jesus who is the fulfillment of the Abrahamic Covenant in His person as Suzzerainty-King; who is the fulfillment of the Mosaic (Old) Covenant's High Laws and Standards as both Priest and Lamb; and, who is the fulfillment of the Davidic Covenant as man's Lord and King.

It is in Jesus that a NEW Covenant is made with mankind, and more specifically, with the remnant of God who follow Jesus by faith. It is a New Covenant established in Jesus' bodily death and resurrection which fulfills all previously existing Covenants of God with His people. In essence, it is enlivened (as it always as been enlivened) through God's faithful remnant to all men or women everywhere (whether believing or not) who enact its charters of goodness and mercy, regardless of Covenantal (or Testamental) era. For God's rulership has always been present whether man has submitted to it or not. It is in the goodness of God - in His Love for His creation - that He continues to "redeem" our worlds of sin back to its once pristine order of holiness and fellowship with Himself. Which is what I think Scot McKnight is getting to in his earlier statement and can now be more fully appreciated in its ramifications.

For God's Kingdom is "here, but not fully." A heavenly Kingdom that lives in tension with the corporate kingdoms of men as well as in tension with the personal kingdoms of men's hearts. It calls all men everywhere to seek Jesus and become one with the rest of their spiritual brotherhood of blood-bought believers through faith in Christ. This is the call of God by His Spirit to convert and follow, to obey and believe, to count the cost and know it as nothing short of marvelous, majestic, sublime. And this then is what is meant by God's REDEEMED Kingdom as versus God's ETHICAL Kingdom. It has all the heart and none of the constrictions of God's blessed Being and fellowship. We are part of Him now. And part of God's Worlds already here and growing in fulfillment to His will. 

Thanks Scot for bringing this important distinction back before us!

- RE Slater

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Steve Jobs’ Legacy: Kingdom Work?

http://www.patheos.com/community/jesuscreed/2011/11/03/steve-jobs-legacy-kingdom-work/#more-21972

by Scot McKnight

November 3, 2011

The word “kingdom” is perhaps the flabbiest term being used by Christians today. In fact, many who like “kingdom” would rather they not be called “Christians.” This good word of Jesus’, which he inherited from his scriptures and from his Jewish world, has come to mean two wildly different things today: for some it means little more than personal redemption, that is, it means submitting personally to God as your king and Lord. Let’s call this the redemptive kingdom. For yet others it means the ethics connected with the kingdom, that is, it means wherever there is peace, justice, goodness, freedom, liberation … you name it … there is kingdom. Let’s call this the justice kingdom.

Before I raise my hand and speak from the floor in a way that many simply don’t like, I want to make two things clear: Yes, the kingdom needs to be connected to the redemptive powers at work in this world, and this can be found at times in Jesus’ teachings when he says things like

“if it is by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matthew 12:28).

And Yes there is an ethical dimension to this term, besides ideas like righteousness and zealous commitment and joy (as in Matthew 13), but also flat-out ethical categories like justice, as in Romans 14:17 - but which has much less support in the language of the Bible:

“For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” So, Yes, it is reasonable to see a redemptive kingdom and a justice kingdom.

My beef today is that too many today have abstracted the ethical ideals from Jesus’ kingdom vision, all but cut Jesus out of the picture, and then called anything that is just, peace, good and loving the “kingdom.” The result is this equation: kingdom means goodness, goodness means kingdom. Regardless of who does it.

My contention would be that kingdom goodness is done by kingdom people who live under King Jesus. I applaud goodness at large. This is not a question of either/or but whether or not all goodness is kingdom goodness. Some say Yes, I say No.

_______________________________________________

Please refer to my earlier observations at the beginning of this article.

- RE Slater

_______________________________________________

Here’s a really good example and I use this post on a blog because the author sent it to me and because it’s a great example of what we are talking about. I’m not picking on this piece and don’t want this conversation to be about this piece or about what this author says about Steve Jobs. I only want to show how goodness or usefulness and progress in society is sometimes called “kingdom.” In fact, Steve Jobs denied Christianity and was a Buddhist. This guy says Steve Jobs’ contribution to our society was kingdom.

In his words:

There are hundreds of millions of people who can trace a tangible improvement in their livesdirectly to the labor of this man. In reflecting on that, without adequate mental categories for it, erroneous conclusions abound. Whether one concludes that Steve Jobs was a demigod, or that his life’s work to revolutionize the way people can interact with information was a petty and trivial waste of time, there seems to be a lot of confusion. I decided to write this essay because I think that the reflexive eulogizing of those hundreds of millions of people has roots in something more profound than delusional worship of the creator of the smartphone. 

Why did Steve Jobs’s life work strike such a personal chord with so many people? I’d like to suggest that the answer has to do with the kingdom of God….

At the risk of over-simplification, the kingdom of God is the realm where God’s will is done—where things work the way God wants. It requires some vivid imagining for people stuck in a bitterly broken world to conceive of such a kingdom. But if you let your mind roam, you might be able to sketch some outlines. Start with the obvious: no more meaningless suffering, no more inexplicable pain. No more sickness, no more death, perhaps not even any decay. Purpose and meaning are woven into the fabric of all experience. Work is productive. Love is the prevailing character of all interaction. Everything works the way it’s supposed to, for everyone. And at the heart of it all, there is perfect goodness—a person of inexplicable beauty and wisdom and perfection, sustaining the economic, social, physical and spiritual dynamics of all that takes place. In other words, words can’t do it justice, but it’s good.

But what does Steve Jobs’s life have to do with this kingdom? One of the things that Jesus taught was that the kingdom of God was “at hand.” Again, this probably means a lot of things, among them that people are called to participate in bringing the kingdom of God with us, “on earth as it is in heaven.” To labor with the goal of making things work the way God wants. Whether by taking a stand for social justice, or by fighting oppression and poverty, or by opposing all things that set themselves up against the way of God. By unlocking the spiritual and psychological chains that stunt people, or by pointing people to the path of freedom and maturity, or by working for the restoration of the natural world. By pleading with God to set things right in individual instances, and once and for all. The way I see it, Steve Jobs did this type of work.

For the immensity of his impact on modern life, he participated in the work of the kingdom in a small, but noteworthy, manner. He recognized the importance, and profound good, of having access to information – for solving problems, for connecting with other people, for experiencing music, for creating. You might say he recognized that, in the kingdom of God, the barriers to information and communication would be dissolved. And he realized the poignancy of creating truly beautiful tools for people to use for these purposes. Jobs was, to borrow a phrase from philosopher Dallas Willard, “free and powerful in the creation and governance of what is good.”On Tuesday night people publicly recognized, at the rate of 10,000 per second, that this was the story of Steve Jobs’s life.

Get out your Bible and find the references to kingdom and you will discover that it refers to a society in which God’s will is done, with Jesus as the King, where the Story of Israel finds its completion in the Story of Jesus and where that same Story of Jesus shapes everyone. Kingdom refers to that Davidic hope for the earthly world where God sets up his rule in the Messiah and where people live under that Messiah as God’s redeemed and liberated and healed and loving and peaceful and just people.

Yes, feeding the poor is good and it is God’s will for this world, whoever does it. But “kingdom” refers to that special society that does good under Jesus, that society that is buried in his death and raised in his resurrection and lives that Story out in our world today. It makes no sense to me to take this word of Jesus that he used to refer to what God was doing in and through him at that crucial new juncture in time and history and use it for something else.

At this point I want simply to mention that when the early Christians did “good” in society, they didn’t call it kingdom work but “doing good” or “benefaction” and 1 Peter has a few examples of this, including 1 Peter 2:13-15:

Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority: whether to the emperor, as the supreme authority, or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right. For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people. [Italics refer to those words of benevolence in the public realm.]

 

You are Beautiful

(You are) Beautiful by Mercy Me

God Is Love (1 John 4.7-21)

⁷Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸ Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. ¹⁰In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. ¹¹Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹² No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

¹³ By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. ¹⁴And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. ¹⁵ Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. ¹⁶So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. ¹⁷By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. ¹⁸There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. ¹⁹ We love because he first loved us. ²⁰ If anyone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot^[a] love God whom he has not seen. ²¹And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.

Song Lyrics

Days will come when you don't have the strength
When all you hear is you're not worth anything
Wondering if you ever could be loved
And if they truly saw your heart
They'd see too much

You're beautiful, You're beautiful
You are made for so much more than all of this
You're beautiful, You're beautiful
You are treasured, you are sacred, you are His
You're beautiful

and Praying that you have the heart to fight
Cuz you are more than what is hurting you tonight
For all the lies you've held inside so long
and they are nothing in the shadow of the cross

You're beautiful, You're beautiful
You are made for so much more than all of this
You're beautiful, You're beautiful
You are treasured, you are sacred, you are His
You're beautiful

Before you ever took a breath
Long before the world began
Of all the wonders He possessed
There was one more precious
Of all the earth and skies above
You're the one He madly loves
Enough to die

You're beautiful, You're beautiful
In His eyes

You're beautiful
You were meant for so much more than all of this
You're beautiful
You are treasured, you are sacred, you are His
You're beautiful, You're beautiful
You were meant for so much more than all of this
You're beautiful, You're beautiful
You are treasured
You are sacred
You are His

"Spoken For" by Mercy Me

 

 

MercyMe - I Can Only Imagine

 

MercyMe - I Can Only Imagine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9La_4svq8JI

- or -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9La_4svq8JI&feature=list_related&playnext=1&list=AVGxdCwVVULXfaz7YN23Ut84Fo3L70i3Rf

 

 

 

Official Band Site -

http://mercyme.org/#!/ss:facebook

 

 

 

Mercy Me in Concert (GRR, MI)

November 2011

(click to enlarge)

Wikipedia Info

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MercyMe

MercyMe is an American Christian rock band founded in Greenville, Texas. The band consists of vocalist Bart Millard, keyboardist James Bryson, percussionist Robby Shaffer, bassist Nathan Cochran and guitarists Michael Scheuchzer and Barry Graul.

The band formed in 1994 and released six independent albums prior to signing with INO Records in 2001. The group first gained mainstream recognition with the crossover single, “I Can Only Imagine” which elevated their debut album, Almost There, to double platinum certification. Since then, the group has released six additional studio albums (four of which have been certified gold) and a greatest hits album, 10. The group has also had 13 consecutive top 5 singles on the Billboard Christian Songs chart, with 7 of them reaching no. 1. MercyMe has won 8 Dove Awards and has had numerous Grammy Award nominations.

Mercy Me in Concert (GRR, MI)

November 2011

(click to enlarge)



 

Which Do You Chose - Justice, Justification or Jesus?

Do We Have the Gospel Wrong?

Scot is on the money here in all three categories. We have (i) the right-wing evangelical conservatives in the Justice camp, (ii) the Reformed traditionalists (or revivalists) in the Justification camp, and (iii) the Love Wins / Emergent groups in the Jesus camp. Each have a condensed version of the Gospel of Jesus - group (i) has a politically charged social gospel with an empire theology at its heart; group (ii) has a soterian gospel that preaches the sinfulness of man and the cross as its penal substitutionary remedy; and, group (iii) has a pure Jesus gospel that sees God at work through Adam, Abraham, Israel and the Church as the completing story and remedy for man's need.

Yes, "Love Wins," but love wins through Jesus' love, and this is what the "Love Wins" group has been saying all along. If you preach Jesus as the gospel you will get both justice and justification (theological camps 1 and 2). But if you preach either the justice gospel, or the justification gospel, you may only get some Jesus, but not all of Jesus, in those gospel versions.

Consequently, preaching the Jesus of Paul's gospel includes both the perspectives of justice and justification. And this third-and-last "J-Gospel" is the theologically correct gospel to place your money on as Scot will go on to explain below.*

R.E. Slater
November 3, 2011

*For additional links on this subject matter please refer to: Do We Have the Gospel Wrong?; The New Perspective of Paul; and generally, to the sidebar "Pauline Theology").

**********

The Three “J’s” in the Gospel Debate

http://www.patheos.com/community/jesuscreed/2011/11/02/the-three-js-in-the-gospel-debate/#more-21889

by Scot McKnight

November 2, 2011

Some people are a bit baffled when they hear there is a gospel debate today. Others, and this is no surprise to the readers of this blog, know that many debates actually end up discovering that at the bottom of this debate is the gospel, or how we understand the gospel. Some mainline organizations break into a rash when interviewing a candidate for ministry and discover that he or she has a traditional Reformed understanding of the gospel, while some in that more traditional Reformed movement today do the same when they hear a candidate contend for a more new perspective view of the gospel. And some in the revivalist tradition cannot comprehend how in the world anyone doesn’t think the gospel is anything but that simple four or five point gospel. Yet others, and I’ll avoid giving names here, seem to think the gospel itself can be reduced to three words: God loves you.

The gospel is at the heart today of every major theological debate, and it spills over into one ecclesiastical debate after another.

In all of this lots of folks get thoroughly confused. Take, for instance, the new perspective and the gospel. Some people think this is a fun debate but at stake for many of us is not just a curious piece of history — what was 1st Century Judaism really like? — but instead we see the gospel at stake. To be sure, if you find yourself in the middle of all of this the debate can become bewildering.

So I want to contend this morning that there are three ways of framing the gospel today. What I want to emphasize is that how we frame the gospel determines everything, and I mean everything. I contend there are three J’s that can put the whole debate today on the table in the simplest of framing categories.

First, some people frame the gospel through the category of justice. The point of the gospel is this: Jesus came to establish a kingdom marked by justice, and of course justice is the big term that includes other important ideas like peace and love and salvation. In fact, for many in the justice camp the word “salvation” is robust enough to be called “justice” or “justice” is robust enough to be called “salvation.” For these folks, Luke 4:18-19 is about as gospel as you can get, and Jesus’ death and his resurrection are all connected to this vision of justice. This means gospel work is justice work; it also means any gospel work that doesn’t entail justice is not gospel work.

Some in this camp, of course, are so justice and so “social justice” that it seems like nothing more than political activism or the worst caricature of the social gospel. But a charitable reading of justice gospelers reveals that they do believe Jesus’ death forgives sins (I find few in this camp care much for substitutionary atonement but they are not denying atonement in the death of Jesus; to be sure, some are little more than Abelard or even Girard).

Justice gospelers today tend toward political activism, the summons for more Christians to see compassion for the poor and better laws and peace in the world, and toward a kingdom language. One of the more recent developments for justice gospelers is the category of empire, and they see a conscious and consistent anti-empire agenda at work in Jesus and in the apostles. They like this expression: “Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not.”

I’m not persuaded empire is as important to gospel as many do today, though anyone who claims Jesus is Lord knows that Caesar is not. The issue for me is how conscious is this. (And I’m co-editing a book with IVP, due out next Fall, that will put this anti-empire theory to the test. We’ve got some really, really good essays in this volume.)

Overall I am utterly convinced as I can be that Jesus intended to create a just society, and I’ve written about this in most of my books: but I am just as convinced that the gospel is not justice per se. Justice is the inevitable result and implication of the gospel but not the same as the gospel.

Second, some people frame the gospel through the category of justification. This is the traditional Reformation category, and Luther famously said that the church stands or falls with justification by faith. (Ahem, Jesus spoke to this and he said it stood or fell with the confession of Peter, namely, that Jesus was Messiah/King. [But] I digress.) For justification gospelers, the gospel is soterian and that soteriology, or doctrine of salvation, can all be summed up in and through the term justification. The essence is that we are sinners and guilty before God and God must deal in a legal courtroom kind of way with our status. The good news is that God forgives us through Jesus and we can become justified, or declared in the right, through the death and resurrection of Christ. (Justification gospelers don’t emphasize resurrection enough, sometimes revealing almost no interest. Most emphasize a penal substitution theory of atonement and see divine satisfaction as the primary act of God at work in making justification possible. Many are also double imputation folks. Not all, as others emphasize union with Christ.)

Justification gospelers preach a soterian gospel, and I’ve said enough about this on this blog and in my book (linked below). They tend to be at odds with justice gospelers, just as justice gospelers are at odds with justification gospelers. Tim Keller is on record saying justification leads to justice, but I don’t think the logic is necessary and it is too obvious to me that far too many justification gospelers inherently react to the justice gospelers because they don’t think justification leads inevitably to justice. More of that some other time. [Thus, though they say it they don't believe it. - re slater]

The issue I’m talking about is how to frame the gospel. The justice gospelers frame the gospel through systemic injustice that needs to be undone and justice established; the justification gospelers frame the gospel through the systematic theology of creation, fall, sinfulness, God’s just judgment of humans as sinners, and the remedy of justice in the cross (and resurrection) of Christ where God is both just and justifier.

But I want to contend once again that justification, like justice, is the implication or result of the gospel and not the gospel itself. The proof is in the absence of justification language (especially as the “driver”) in 1 Corinthians 15, the almost total absence of justification in the gospel sermons in Acts, and the same almost total absence of the category/term of justification in the Gospels (which are the gospel). Again, we are talking here about how to frame the gospel.

The gospel, I contend, is not properly framed as injustice becoming justice (though clearly this happens) or as the unjust becoming just/justified (though clearly this happens too). And the debate between these two folks proves an inability to convince one leads to the other compellingly. There’s a better way. Instead…

Third, some people frame the gospel through the category of Jesus. As I argue in The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited, fundamental category for the gospel in Jesus and the apostles is the Story of Jesus. Just look at 1 Corinthians 15, just look at the gospeling sermons in Acts, and then just take a good look at why the first four books are called THE GOSPEL according to (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John).

What drove them was the Story of Jesus as the completing/fulfilling Story of God’s work in this world, beginning with Adam and then taken up into Abraham.

There are three J’s in the gospel debate. The right J is Jesus.

If you preach Jesus as the gospel you will get both justification and justice.

If you preach justification you may get Jesus (but I see only some of Jesus and not the whole of Jesus) and you may get some justice (I’m skeptical on this one).

 If you preach justice you may get some justification (but I’m skeptical on enough justice gospelers ever getting to justification) and you get Jesus, but again only some of Jesus (often only his teachings, his life, and his life as an example).

If you preach the Jesus of Paul’s gospel (1 Cor 15) or the apostolic sermons in Acts or the gospel of the Gospels, you get all of Jesus and all of Jesus creates both justice and justification.

As for me and my house, we take the third J.

Comments

Comment by Russ — November 3, 2011 @ 6:47 am

Hi Scot. I made a second reading of your article this morning and came to the conclusion that the third-and-last J-Gospel speaks to the “Love Wins / Emergent Church groups” that are unmentioned in your opening paragraph.

Not that other Christian church groups don’t fit into this, but for me (at least my version of the Love Wins/Emergent groups) places this group squarely into the center of the New Perspective of Paul understanding of the Gospel.

And this is the version that I wish to support and to push onto any "Emergent / Love Wins" groups floundering around for direction in their theology. As does the Rob Bell version of the gospel that I am acquainted with. Rob is all about “Jesus” 24 x 7, and goes on to show how Jesus relates to every other thing in societal structures.

I firmly believe the Emergent Church Movement can help revive the Gospel to our pluralistic, postmodern world, and can appeal to all groups, both evangelical and non-evangelical, to denominations and to sub-sectarian groups, to Judaism, Muslimism, Hinduism, and so on. And it can do so in re-righting the understanding of how God loves us through his son Jesus. And as you have said, "Jesus is the center and nothing else," including one of God’s attributes known as divine love. But the “Love Wins” crowd knows and understands this most central of all truths (again, at least in my first-hand experience of this through Rob Bell’s ministry).

And lest I stand wrong in these statements than please correct those gaps and oversights. The Emergent Church movement needs direction (and not backwards) and I believe to the degree it is given that direction, to that degree Christianity can again become relevant to the world rather than hung-up in its factions and “isms.”

Thank you.

Why Inerrancy Doesn't Matter

Dr. Olson relates in this article the difference between the use of the word "inerrancy" v. "infallibility" in strict definitions of the terms. Overall, he concludes, inerrancy is a manufactured word by latter day evangelicals (1980s forward) intent on "removing biblical inconsistencies" found on the pages of Scripture. Olson contends that the word "infallible" is good enough and not in need of any further help through additional definitions and added nuances.

Moreover, believers are better able to maintain an "authoritative" bible when using the word "infallible" as pertaining to the revelation of God to man and all things related to man's sin and salvation. But to insist that the bible does not have inconsistencies within its records and then place the word inerrancy into this definition will do harm to the authority of the bible. It is better to admit that there are inconsistencies found within the bible while knowing that those discovered errors of history, science, etc, do no harm to the authority of Scriptures pertaining to God and salvation.

Thus, this is the complaint and false help (or misdirection) of the word inerrancy. In other articles on this blog we have discussed how the bible is authoritative. Please refer to the "Bible - Authority & Interpretation" sidebar. Additionally let me reference one of the first articles I had placed within that section by NT Wright, The Authority of the Bible.

We take the bible seriously here, all the more so because it is an authoritative and infallible revelatory revelation regarding its teaching on God and salvation. What is not needed are additional qualifications to God's word by dogmatically-bound, well-meaning, believers (of whatever sort and stripe they are). The temptation to over-define (via an hyper-conservatist theology) God's words are as dangerous as to under-define (liberalism) God's words to us. As theologians and students of the Word, let us hear and speak the Word of God aright, in all of its authority and spiritual empowerment, given to us by Almighty God.

R.E. Slater
November 2011

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Why Inerrancy Doesn't Matter
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2010/08/why-inerrancy-doesnt-matter/

by Roger Olson

posted August 19, 2010

I know I promised more about postconservative evangelicalism today. Even though it may not seem directly related to a delineation of that, this post does help explicate how most postconservatives think about the inspiration and authority of the Bible.

First, a strong affirmation. As evangelicals, we postconservatives DO believe the Bible is our (and should be every Christian’s) norming norm for life and belief. Tradition is our normed norm–a secondary guide or compass that is not infallible. Scripture, we all agree, is infallible in all that it teaches regarding God and salvation.

Second, however, for most of us the word “inerrancy” has become too problematic uncritically to embrace and use. To the untrained and untutored ear “inerrant” always and necessarily implies absolute flawless perfection even with regard to numbers and chronologies and quotations from sources, etc. But even the strictest scholarly adherents of inerrancy kill that definition with the death of a thousand qualifications. Some who insist that you must be evangelical to be faithful to Scripture’s authority say inerrancy is consistent with biblical authors’ use of errant sources. In other words, they say, the Bible is nevertheless inerrant if it contains an error so long as the author used an errant source inerrantly!?!

How many people in the pews know about these qualifications held by many, if not all, scholarly conservative evangelicals? When I teach these qualifications to my students (as I have done over almost 30 years) the reaction is almost uniformly the same: “That’s not what ‘inerrancy’ means!” I have them read the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy and most of them laugh at the twists and turns it makes in order to qualify inerrancy to make it fit with the undeniable phenomena of Scripture.

The biggest qualification [by inerrantists] is that only the original autographs were inerrant. Think about this. The claim made by most conservative evangelicals (and, of course fundamentalists) is that biblical authority stands or falls with inerrancy. If the Bible contains any real errors it cannot be trusted. Then they admit every Bible that exists probably contains errors. Only the original manuscripts on which the inspired authors wrote can be considered perfectly inerrant.

Again, for almost 30 years I’ve presented this to my students and allowed them to react. The reaction is almost always the same: Huh? Then no Bible we have is inerrant and therefore no Bible we have is authoritative. Right. You can’t make authority depend on inerrancy and then say no existing Bible is inerrant without calling every Bible’s authority into question. It’s a hole in inerrantists’ logic so huge even a sophomore can drive a truck through it.

My experience teaching theology has been that more students give up belief in the Bible’s authority because they were taught that it depended on [the concept of] absolute inerrancy (even in matters of cosmology and history) than because they are taught [that the bible] isn’t inerrant. In other words, they discover for themselves the problems with inerrancy once they face the problems. Wouldn’t it be better to be totally honest with young people about the Bible so that they do not face a crisis of faith when they finally have to face up to its factual flaws (that even inerrantists admit but rarely tell people in the pews)?

What’s ironic is that many strong inerrantists who insist belief in the Bible’s inerrancy is necessary for authentic evangelical faith define inerrancy in highly questionable ways. In other words, “inerrancy” has become a shibboleth. So long as you affirm the word you can go on to define it however you want to and you’re still “in.”

Here’s an example.  A leading inerrantist wrote his own definition of inerrancy for a college where he applied to teach. I taught at that same college later and his statement about inerrancy fell into my hands. His definition was “perfection with respect to purpose.” He admitted that many statements of Scripture, taken at face value, are wrong, but so long as they do not touch on matters of the Bible’s main purpose which is to identify God for us and lead us into salvation, these do not matter. This scholar has emerged as a leading defender of biblical inerrancy and has spoken out very publicly about it (without explaining his own definition). I confirmed at least twice over the years that he still believes in his definition of inerrancy.

I sent his two page definition and description of “inerrancy” to Carl F. H. Henry and asked him for an analysis and evaluation of the statement (without naming its author). All I told Henry was that this person wrote the statement for the college as an applicant for a teaching position. I didn’t mention that it was years earlier. My purpose was an experiment about how the word “inerrancy” functions in evangelical circles.

Henry wrote back a two page, handwritten letter blasting the statement as totally inadequate. He said “This person means well but needs help [understanding inerrancy].” The thrust of his response was that the college should not hire this person. And yet, the person who wrote the statement is widely considered an influential conservative evangelical who has publicly criticized others for allegedly not truly believing in biblical inerrancy.

Not too long ago I had a debate with another leading conservative evangelical inerrantist. This one was an officer of the Evangelical Theological Society which requires affirmation of inerrancy for membership. I have never joined because I don’t think inerrancy is the right word for what we evangelicals believe–including those who hold to the term. This person is also an officer of a leading evangelical seminary. After much communication back and forth we realized that we differ hardly at all about the Bible. Given his qualifications of inerrancy and my high view of Scripture (supernatural inspiration and highest authority for life and faith) our accounts of the Bible were nearly identical. So I asked him if I could join the ETS without affirming the word “inerrancy.” He said no. To me that proves it is just a shibboleth.

The theologian I referred to earlier who defines inerrancy as “perfection with respect to purpose” and whose expanded definition was deemed totally “inadequate” by Carl F. H. Henry still is and has been for many years an influential member of the ETS!

I have to conclude that within evangelical circles “inerrancy” has developed into a mere shibboleth because a person (such as I) can affirm everything many leading inerrantists believe about the Bible and yet be rejected and even criticized. I fear they have elevated a word into an idol.

So how would I describe my own and many inerrantists’ view of Scripture’s accuracy? I think “infallible” does a better job than “inerrant” so long as I can explain what it means. “Infallible,” to me, means the Bible never fails in its main purpose which is to identify God for us, to communicate his love and his will to us, and to lead us into salvation and a right relationship with our Creator, Savior and Lord.

I like theologian Emil Brunner’s illustration. (I don’t necessarily agree with everything he wrote about the Bible.) In his little book, Our Faith, Brunner wrote about the old RCA Victrola advertisement that showed a dog listening to the megaphone of a record player. Under the picture the caption read “His master’s voice.” We recognize our master’s voice in Scripture in spite of its inevitable flaws, just as the dog in the illustration recognized his master’s voice in spite of the inevitable flaws on the record.

I think it is time we evangelicals matured enough to get over our obsession with a word and care more about our common belief in the Bible’s authority in all matters pertaining to faith and practice. We used to be able to do this. After all, the statement of faith of the National Association of Evangelicals has never included inerrancy. And leading evangelicals of the past who were universally considered authentically evangelical denied inerrancy. (For example Scottish evangelical theologian James Orr who wrote chapters for The Fundamentals and was a good friend of B. B. Warfield!)

When I deny inerrancy I am not necessarily denying anything many inerrantists believe. It may be, and I think is the case, that I am only denying that the word “inerrancy” is the most helpful or accurate term for what they and I believe in common.

The Infallibility and Multi-Vocality of Scripture

Part of reading and understanding the Bible is the acknowledgement to the fact that the Bible is inconsistent within itself - not unified, as it were - as we have been led to believe by well-meaning pastors and theologians. We find numerous mistakes, inaccurate witness, historic revisions, and irreconcilable passages within its pages. But rather than framing this truth in terms of a "fallible" Bible (a common knee-jerk reaction by scholars, the media, and wise-cracking friends) I would rather like to understand this as giving to us an "infinitely wider" Bible. One coloured by the perceptions of multiple authors, their real-life experiences, their accumulated knowledge gathered through training, perception, and life in general. One pitted with the veracity of time and tradition through the many ages of paganism, Judaism and the Church itself. A testimony which I understand to be the multiple voices (or, multi-vocality) of Scriptures.

As such, we now have in our possession a Bible that is replete with the Word of God through an infinite number of sources, viewpoints, and historic arguments both studied and pedestrian. Ranging from wise-fools to corrupt Kings, humble shepherds to hoary sagas, imperfect leaders to willful prophets, faithless priests to wicked scribes. From exasperated housewives to diligent fishermen, hardy camel drivers to orphaned girls lost and alone; from uncertain guards to irreligious jailers, doubting tax gathers to besotted wine-bibbers. From believing crooks to repentant murderers, incorrigible thieves to clear-sighted virgins, from endearing boys and girls to children of faith.

Within the testimony of Scriptures comes to us an infinite parade of beggars, clowns, fools, and ignoble. As well as the honorable, studious, faithful, and spiritual. We see the depressed, the destitute, the harmed and the hurting. We see the determined, the persevering, the blessed and the rewarded. We see repentants and the sinful; the disbelieving and the believing; the confessing and the wicked. The testimony of the Bible shouts to one-and-all its testimony to our fallibleness, making known to us that we are in good company with the residents of its historic pages down through time immemorial.

So then, the misnomer of ascribing the Bible's pages and integrity as "fallible" should be corrected and understood as "faithful and accurate" in its revelatory depiction of man's fallenness and his need for redemption, for guidance, for humility and graciousness. The Bible ascribes to us its "earthy testimony of a heavenly God's revelation to fallen men and women." A testimony as large-and-wide as God is wise-and-deep. A testimony both plain and mysterious. A testimony that can lend doubt, on the one hand, to our "too-well constructed versions" of who we think God is, what He is doing, who we are, and where all this is going. As well as lend certitude (as versus certainty), on the other hand, to those very same questions when constructed correctly, using a broader hermeneutic, a more balanced theology, a wiser understanding of what exactly the Scriptures actually are as redemptive revelation. In this regard we then have an "infallible" Bible in perfect testimony to the Divine.

Lastly, we must add to the revelatory vocality of the Bible the very revelatory voice of God himself in the wisdom, depth, and infinity of his divine personage and the Triune fellowship of Father, Spirit, Son. Whose voice rumbles through its earthy pages with the divine life and breath of our Savior-Redeemer who is the Creator-God and everlasting I AM. Who makes those who are dead, alive through His Spirit. Who empowers sinful men and women with a spiritual renewal to re-embrace life with the thunderous voices of the resurrected. Whose people rumble forth on the storms of His embrace on the troubling sounds of crucifixion - to death, to sin, flesh, and world - to dead men everywhere listening. Who hear in the storms of heavenly redemption the further sounds of lives reaped-and-harvested from emptiness, vanity, ego and pride. It is the sound of Love spoken down through the ages in grace and mercy. A sound more troubling to our soul than any other sound can ever be heard. For it is the voice of God heard in the revelation of Scriptures. A voice valiant and courageous, willing to seek, to find, to embrace all who hear his voice, seek and submit. It is the voice of everlasting Love.

R.E. Slater

November 2, 2011

I think “infallible” does a better job than “inerrant” so long as I can explain what it means. “Infallible,” to me, means the Bible never fails in its main purpose which is to identify God for us, to communicate his love and his will to us, and to lead us into salvation and a right relationship with our Creator, Savior and Lord. - Dr. Roger Olson, Why inerrancy doesn't matter

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On Not Harmonizing (the Gospels)

http://www.jrdkirk.com/2011/10/31/on-not-harmonizing/

J.R.Daniel Kirk

October 31, 2011

I’ve just wrapped up teaching the Synoptic Gospels part of my Gospels and Acts course. Going through the individual books, looking over proposed solutions to the Synoptic Problem, and seeing how the seemingly harmonious stories portray Jesus’ ministry in quite different lights, we are left with a few conclusion that are surprising to many of us. Here are a couple:

• The Gospel writers have different ideas about how Jesus’ death works, which means they have different ideas about how God brings salvation through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

• The Gospels we have used sources, including, probably, Mark as a source for Matthew and Luke, and yet they felt free to change this source for various reasons, including: style, making a somewhat different point, causing the story to more clearly echo an OT antecedent, eliminating theological claims that they did not want to make, or including new theological claims that are somewhat at odds with the theological claims of the original story.

This means that there is not only a plurality of voices in the NT, there is an irreducible theological diversity.

But more importantly, this theological diversity is no accident of history but, on the human level, has been intentionally introduced into the texts we have in front of us. Luke intentionally modifies Mark (and Matthew?) to increase the continuity between the OT narrative and the work of Jesus, and to eliminate the idea of Jesus’ death procuring salvation for people as such.

Two questions came up that I think are important for us to keep working through, especially as evangelicals for whom such conclusions seem to push against our prior conception of what it means to call the Bible the word of God.

First, what does this mean for “scripture interpreting scripture”? This rule became quite popular at the time of the Reformation, or at least, if you Google “scripture interprets scripture” the people who are the most fierce advocates for the view are likely to be appealing to the Reformation traditions in their defense.

But what do we do when Luke says, “Blessed are the poor,” and Matthew says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”? Is Matthew clear here where Luke is ambiguous, thereby telling us what Jesus really meant? Or are we to hear in Luke’s version his special concern for the socially marginalized?

What are we to do when Mark says that you don’t put new wine in old wineskins, but Luke feels compelled to add, “No one wants new wine, old is better!”? Do we let Mark’s apparent meaning stand, where Jesus is the new wine that cannot be contained by the older Jewish practices? Or do we allow the “more clear” Lucan conclusion to change our reading?

http://www.biblegateway.com/quicksearch/?quicksearch=new+wine&qs_version=ESV

Matthew 9:17
Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved."
Mark 2:22
And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins—and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins."
Luke 5:37-38
³⁷And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. ³⁸But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. ³⁹And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, 'The old is good/better.'"

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Biblical_Studies/New_Testament_Commentaries/The_Gospel_of_Mark/Chapter_8

[There can be two responses:] (1) [Do we] allow the scripture one author wrote help interpret that author’s other passages; [or] (2) allow the NT’s example of rereading the OT in light of Christ to train us to reread the OT as a witness to the saving life, death, resurrection, and reign of Jesus.

Question 1 -

If we insist on giving the one meaning made clear by the other texts, we start to force the Bible into our preconception of what kind of Bible would be good for us, what kind of Bible would qualify as “word of God,” and in so doing we spurn the actual Bible that God did give us, and that God thought was adequate for conveying God’s word.

Question 2 - What do we do with this stuff as pastors?

My answer here: it is your pastoral responsibility to help people recognize the Bible we actually have, rather than the Bible of our imaginations, is the word of God.

If you don’t give your people a category for this kind of diverse Bible being the word of God, then you will create a false sense of connection between a supposedly uniform, univocal Bible and the Christian faith as such. So what happens when they go off to college and take a Bible class at State University? What happens when they get bored one Saturday and map out (or try, anyway) the last week of Jesus’ life in each of the four Gospels?

Uh oh.

That’s when they discover that the Bible isn’t what you led them to believe. And if that imagined Bible is necessary for believing what God has to say about Jesus and the Christian faith in general, then the latter are apt to crumble as well.

Make no mistake, there are tremendous pastoral issues at stake in affirming correctly what the Bible is. But one of the worst mistakes we can make, especially in a day and age where media will tell people the truth if we don’t, is to affirm a vision of a single-voiced scripture that fails to correspond to the text we have actually been given.