Bruce Epperly, Process Theology & N.T. Wright's "Faithful God of Paul"

Signs of the New Creation: Responding to N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/livingaholyadventure/2013/11/signs-of-the-new-creation-responding-to-n-t-wrights-paul-and-the-faithfulness-of-god/

by Bruce Epperly

November 1, 2013

Comments

New Testament Scholar,
N.T. Wright

N. T. Wright’s magisterial text Paul and the Faithfulness of God is destined to become a classic in Pauline theological studies. As a pastor and theologian, like Wright, I join the study and the pulpit and the library and hospital room.  My preaching and pastoral care are grounded in theological reflection and my theology finds its inspiration in pastoral care, spiritual direction, and the weekly responsibilities of preaching God’s good news and leading a congregation on Cape Cod. I have always appreciated Paul’s approach to ministry – he proclaimed the universally applicable wisdom of God embodied in Jesus Christ with full awareness of the intimate needs of the communities with which he corresponded. The universal truths of faith become transformational only when they connect with the real challenges of congregations, communities, and persons.

Paul is a working pastor-theologian, and I can identify with that joyful-challenging vocation. His theology is holistic, practical, and connected with what’s going on in the faith of emerging Christian communities. He doesn’t speak to Christians in general; he speaks to the faithful church in Philippi, the ethnically troubled churches in Galatia, and the divided congregation in Corinth. Still, precisely because his theology is embodied and emerges from the concrete world of budgets and communication gaffes, it echoes through the ages, bringing challenge and good news to twenty-first century believers and seekers.

N. T. Wright sees the heart of Paul’s theology as involving his experience and expression of God’s new creation, brought about by God’s action in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. Although Christ as Messiah is profoundly Jewish – you cannot find any foundation for anti-Judaism in the authentic Pauline literature – he sees Jesus Christ as embodying and inviting us to live in God’s new age of Shalom. Accordingly, Pauline theology is profoundly concrete. He is a preacher-theologian: his thinking is ultimately practical. Paul believes that the theological is transformational. The message of the Gospel and God’s new creation, the heart of Paul’s message, is transformational and invites us to become transformed persons, living in transformed communities, and working toward a transformed world order. Many scholars of John’s Gospel note a similar holistic approach to John’s theology: John’s proclamation of eternal life is not just some future hope, the “pie in the sky when we die,” but a present experience that emerges the moment we enter into relationship with Jesus Christ, the word and wisdom of God.

Theology is homiletical and can be healing, for Paul. The theologian-preacher does not abandon history, but imagines, as Wright asserts, a better history and then works to bring it forth. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ brings about new creation in the here-and-now, and the spirit of Jewish monotheism, this new creation is cosmological, ethical, and soteriological – we are new people, experiencing a transformed universe, touched by the healing Christ, and living by the values of God’s realm “on earth as it is in heaven.” Our vision of God’s faithfulness throughout history and in all creation nurtures the confidence that transforms behavior and beliefs.

As the body of Christ, the church is always more than we can imagine. Paul’s letters to emerging congregations are invitations to live in God’s realm of Shalom right now. As a holistic theologian, Paul sees the body, mind, spirit relationship as both a metaphor and a reality for community life. Disease among the members – like cells run amuck – can destroy the community, and render it insentient to God’s vision. Every part matters, every member is inspired (in-breathed) and touched by the mind-spirit of Christ, which is not some supernatural add-on, but the animating and guiding principle of part and whole. Dynamic in nature, the lively, inspired body of Christ can become God’s embodied vision of Shalom – of new creation – in this very moment of time. Accordingly, when Paul encounters the tragic brokenness of Christ’s body, he experiences what Abraham Joshua Heschel describes as the “divine pathos,” the intimate joy and suffering God experiences in relationship to our world. What happens in Corinth, including the details of agape meals and worship services, matters to God because God is in the details: God is touched by church divisions, arguments among members, economic disparity, and ethnic prejudice.

God is truly in Christ reconciling the world, and we are intended to be companions in God’s ministry of reconciliation. We are intended to be a microcosm, a foretaste, of the world to come, participating in God’s new creation and becoming God’s temple making sacred the world. As  pastor-theologians, Paul and I share the hope for new creation in the congregations we serve; we also experience the dissonance between our concrete embodiment of God’s new creation and God’s vision of what we as pastors and our congregations can be in God’s ever-present, ever-future new creation. We expect far too little from God, and far too little from ourselves. We are the body of Christ and individually reflections of divine wisdom, yet we settle for so much less – petty prejudices, alienation over budget items, neglect of vulnerable members, and conforming to a social order that is ruled by consumerism, narcissism, and polarization. We are too often, Paul says in Romans, conformed to this world, when God calls us to transformation – first, of ourselves, but also of transformed communities without which personal transformation is almost impossible.

Still in our imperfection and waywardness, we can experience God’s transformation. We feel, as Paul did, “wretched” and pray that something will deliver us from the conflicts and weakness that beset us. We can’t do it on our own. Faithful communities, inspired and animated by a faithful God, are essential. But, more than that, it involves trusting a faithful God of new creation, whose love still encompasses Judaism, but now extends in space and time reconciling all history, and making this moment a holy moment. Only the faithful God can give us the energy of transformation that enables us to make a commitment to reconciling people, living God’s new creation. The new creation is here – or nowhere – transforming the past and luring us to live in God’s future now!

Theology is pastoral, homiletical, spiritual, and theological. God is found in worship, but also in potluck suppers, daily decision-making, and brick and mortar. It is all the prayer of God’s spirit groaning in creation and in us in “sighs too deep for words.

It is only right that the final page of Wright’s grand opus affirms, “Prayer and theology met in his personal history, as in the once-for-all history of the crucified and risen Messiah. Paul’s ‘aims’, his apostolic vocation, modeled the faithfulness of God. Concentrated and gathered. Prayer became theology, theology prayer. Something understood.”

Continue to Index -

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bruce Epperly - The Process Theologian's "Bonhoeffer"

Bonhoeffer’s Vision and Process Theology

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/livingaholyadventure/2013/11/bonhoeffers-vision-and-process-theology/

by Bruce Epperly

November 18, 2013

Comments

A Response to The Bonhoeffer Reader, edited by  Clifford J. Green and Michael P. DeJonge

Few theologians have responded as creatively and forthrightly to the postmodern challenge as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer recognized the pluralistic, multi-centered, experience-oriented world of our current religious landscape. He imagined an emerging Christianity, no longer at the center of culture, but at the margins, and making these same margins the ground of a frontier faith. Postmodernism presented a threat to the old-time religion and Christian supremacy, but it also presented an opportunity to a fluid, agile, and worldly faith.

In the midst of the maelstrom of war, Bonhoeffer saw the eclipse of Christendom and imagined a dynamic, counter-cultural Christian faith of the future. The Bonhoeffer Reader, edited by Clifford J. Green and Michael P. DeJonge not only captures the breadth and evolution of Bonhoeffer’s theology, but gives special care to his final expansive visions of a Christianity big enough to embrace a radically-changing world.  From his prison cell, Bonhoeffer saw more than most free-ranging people. He saw, in the words of Bishop John Shelby Spong, that Christianity must change or die. He did not see the future of Jesus’ mission in megachurches, dreams of Christian dominion, or Christian supremacy, but in living out the mission of the suffering servant Jesus of Nazareth and the God who celebrates and suffers with us.

Bonhoeffer never had the opportunity to fully articulate his vision of God, but his emerging vision touches the edges of process theology. His vision of God shapes the contours of an interactive, relational, and affirmative Christianity, comfortable with diversity and open to the insights of secularity. According to Bonhoeffer, God “needs” us to achieve the best in our ambiguous world. God is not a “timeless fate” but “waits for and responds to prayer and sincere actions” (769-770). This vision touches process theology’s insight that God evolves with the world: neither God nor the world are complete, but are open-ended. In the spirit of Jewish mysticism, God needs us to be God’s companions in tikkun ‘olam, “mending the world.” The healing of the world requires our participation; there is no preordained end of history, or end-time goal, or apocalypse, but rather an ongoing process which requires our positive action for God’s vision to be embodied.

God’s vision for us is not timeless but God acts in real time and not in “advance” (769), similar to process thought’s image of God’s vision of possibilities appropriate to each moment. We are given strength, insight, and the resources to achieve God’s aim that all things work out for good. This happens right where we are with all its limitations and opportunities.

The parent of process theology, Alfred North Whitehead describes God as “the fellow sufferer who understands.” Echoing this, Bonhoeffer asserts that humans are called to share in God’s sufferings” (804). Note well, “God’s sufferings.” Only a suffering God can save, a God with skin, who shares our condition and seeks to bring beauty from ugliness and justice from injustice. Jewish spiritual teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel speaks of the “divine pathos” as being the heart of prophetic religion: God experiences the details of our lives and is truly hurt by injustice; God suffers in the anguish of the vulnerable and dispossessed. God is not apathetic but passionate in God’s care for creation: God is not an Aristotelian “unmoved mover,” but as process philosopher Charles Hartshore claims, the “most moved mover.”

Process theologian, Bernard Loomer described two kinds of power – unilateral and relational. (1) Unilateral power, characteristic of the Christendom that had died in the modern world, described God as determining and knowing everything in advance: the all-powerful God established the powers of the universe, and determined success and failure and life and death. Images of God’s omnipotence inspired and undergirded the unilateral and often oppressive actions of religious institutions and nation states. After all, if we are the chosen servants of an all-determining God, we alone are equipped to shape history, especially as it relates to government, church, and non-Christians and foreigners.

In contrast, (2) a relational God works with the world, creating along with the evolving history of humanity and the non-human world, being subject to our actions as well as shaping our actions. When Bonhoeffer invokes the “powerlessness” of God, he is also speaking of God with us, not as omnipotent, but as the One who suffers with us, who experiences our pain, but also invites us to invest ourselves in the worldliness of a secular world.

Writing in the shadow of the culture Christianity of World War II Germany, Bonhoeffer asserts that you will not find God’s vision in those who identify God and country, and advocate national supremacy. Nor, according to Bonhoeffer’s theological vision, will we find God’s vision in the machinations of congressional leaders who demean the poor and underinsured by shutting down government. Who traumatize the children of undocumented immigrants by advocating the deportation of their parents. Or, who see Christ as dominating the political sphere, guiding them to shut down government or default on loans to avoid expanding health care to the vulnerable. While such persons may call themselves Christians, they will truly experience God’s costly grace only when they let go of the power to exclude and welcome the power to embrace the least, the last, and the lost.

Liberals also may live by what Bonhoeffer calls cheap grace, especially as they privilege the middle class and forget the traumas of the dispossessed in order to seek a better day for all. The vulnerable are never expendable, even for a good political cause or for a greater good. God feels the pain caused by conservatives for whom the greatest good is lower taxes, smaller government, and the right to bear arms; and liberals whose liberalism obscures the needs of the least of these to obscure political goals. The truly great society must include everyone and start with the least of these, whose faces reveal the suffering face of Christ.

Much more could be said and of course Green and DeJonge’s Bonhoeffer Reader gives a complete picture of Bonhoeffer’s evolving theology. Nevertheless, the insights of the later Bonhoeffer parallel those of process theology in their respective affirmations of: 

1) a God who evolves along with the world,

2) a God whose power is limited by the world,

3) a God who is touched by our pain,

4) a God who needs our best efforts to secure God’s vision on earth, and

5) a humanity whose vocation is to become God’s companions in transforming the world so that God’s vision on earth as well as heaven be realized.

N.T. Wright, "The Big Picture" (select videos)

What is the Gospel? NT Wright

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICHovRHJAYY



N.T. Wright, The Big Picture



112013 - NT Wright from Matthew Hickman on Vimeo.

On Nov 20, 2013, NT Wright, the author of numerous books, including Surprised by Hope, Simply
Christian, and How God Became King, spoke at Mars Hill on the Big Story of the Bible. Missed his
lecture? Watch it online now.



NT Wright on Paul, Hell, Satan, Creation, Adam, Eve & more



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueegnOTz7qY



NT Wright and Larry Crabb Conversation - Christianity and Culture



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TETGLqxdtJY

Continue to Index -

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Index - Christian Poetry

Index to Christian Poetry

Poems by R.E. Slater

OneRepublic - Come Home (prodigal son)

Kindred Fellowships

Rebirth (poem)

The Glory of the Lord (psalm)

Abiding Presence (poem)

Star Light, Star Bright (poem)

Expressing Love (poem)

A Prayer (poem)

The Power of Our Words (poem)

Jars of Clay (poem)


Poetry Website Link

The Poetry of R.E. Slater


Advent Poems

24 Advent Poems for Christmas

R.E. Slater - Butterfly Wings of Promise


Easter Poems

R.E. Slater - Butterfly Wings of Promise

Geroge Herbert, "Easter Wings" (poem)

R.E. Slater - Ruptured Soils


Inspirational Poems

R.E. Slater - Best Coin Ever Spent...

The Wonders of God's Creation - Kuroshio Sea and Poem

Verses on Humanity and Goodwill, Compassion and Forgiveness


Select Poems and Poetry

Of Dads and Daughters, of Parenting and Love: "Wakefulness in a Night of Fireworks"

Love Poems by Shannon Eason

An Evening Prayer, by Sir Thomas Browne

Poetry Magazine's Editor Christian Wiman Discusses Faith

The Calf Path, by Sam Walter Foss (poem)

Padraig O Tuama - "Go in Pieces" (poem)

Of Calvin, Barth and Poetry


Poems of Awakening

I Dreamed a Great Revival Came

Langston Hughes - I Dream a World

What If... ?

Maya Angelou. Poet, Activist, Storyteller


Essays and Articles on Creativity

The Messy Minds (Personalities) of Creative People


Poetry Essays & Historical Poems

G&N - Poetry for Scientists?

The Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, and the Struggle for Human Rights
(re: Archibald MacLeish)


Poetry to Nature, Ecology, Environment

Notes to Water Based Green Infrastructure: Sustainability and Practices
(Wendell Berry)

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

There is no happiness like mine.

I have been eating poetry.

Eating Poetry, by Mark Strand

You Might be a Radical Theologian If...

Religion, Politics, and the Earth: The New Materialism (Radical Theologies)

by Clayton Crockett  (Author) , Jeffrey W. Robbins  (Author)

http://homebrewedchristianity.com/2013/11/19/you-might-be-a-radical-theologian-if/

by Bo Sanders

November 19, 2013

Comments

Many of you asked for it – now you get it!  We are excited to announce the release of the paperback edition of The New Materialism.

Cornel West, author of Race Matters, Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice, Union Theological Seminary, had this to say about the book:

‘I love the sense of urgency from Crockett and Robbins. By invoking the earth as subject, they have named our emergency situation today. This book is a true manifesto. It is comprehensive and encyclopedic. And as a renewal of radical theology as an insurrectionary political theology, it just might be a new species of liberation theology. Don’t miss this book!’

In celebration of this release, we wanted to have some fun. So here is what the co-authors, Clayton Crockett and Jeffery Robbins came up with.

 

You Might be a Radical Theologian If

• The idea of the death of God fills you with excitement rather than dismay.

• You are suspicious of priestly authority - whether in its ecclesiastical or academic forms.

• In college your favorite philosopher was Nietzsche, and your favorite aphorism was: ‘be careful when you stare into the abyss, because the abyss is also staring back at you.’

• You disagree with traditional theology’s obsession over individual salvation — and more pointedly, with the theological rendering of death as the prerequisite for life.

• You cried when Thomas J. J. Altizer died. Wait! – he’s not dead? How is that possible that God is dead and Altizer is still alive!?

• You conceive of theology as a creative endeavor - that is, not as a reduplication of an already given, inherited, or predetermined faith, but for its possibility of generating new concepts and different formulations of extremity.

• You have ever tried to deconstruct a sermon by _______ (insert popular evangelical preacher here).

• You have a tattoo of the cover art of Erring - Robert Morris’s labyrinth - somewhere on your body.

• It actually makes sense to think of theology as a ‘discourse formation.’

• You refuse the category of the sacred, or at the very least take more delight in locating the sacred within the profane rather than distinguishing the former from the latter. It is in this sense that radical theology is a secular theology by grounding the sacred/profane distinction in the shared saeculum.

• The first person who comes to mind when you see the initials ‘JC’ is John Caputo, as opposed to - well, you know.

• You also acknowledge radical theology’s own limitations and blindspots - most specifically, radical theology has heretofore remained almost exclusively an academic theology lacking in both a politics and an ecclesiology, its voice of protest has all too often not risen beyond that of white, male frustration, and instead of seeking out common cause with the poor and the oppressed it has all too often remained aloof and self-obsessed.

Please feel free to add your own in the comment section below.

You can find the original pair of podcasts here [part 1]  and [part 2] 

You can also go back the original blog tour and get up to speed while your paperback ships.

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

Religion, Politics, and the Earth: The New Materialism (Radical Theologies)

Paperback

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1137374217/?tag=homebrechrist-20+politics+and+the+earth

by Clayton Crockett (Author) and Jeffrey W. Robbins (Author)

This book takes its leave with the realization that Western-driven culture is quickly reaching the limits of global capitalism, and that this reality manifests itself not only economically and politically, but that it is at once a cultural, aesthetic, political, religious, ecological, and philosophical problem.  While Western capitalism is based upon the assumption of indefinite growth, we have run up against real, physical constraints to growth, and humanity must face the real, physical ramifications of the short-sighted and ultimately counter-productive choices made on behalf of the capitalist machine.  While there is widespread angst and numerous scenarios of apocalyptic crisis and collapse, there is little or no comprehension of the problem and a coherent picture of reality is left wanting.  Drawing primarily from the discourses of contemporary continental philosophy, cultural theory, and radical theology, the new materialism is being offered up as a redress to this problem by its effort to make sense of the world as an integrated whole.

The book emphasizes three aspects of the current crisis: the ecological crisis, which is often viewed primarily in terms of global warming; the energy crisis, which involves peak oil and the limits of the ability to extract and exploit the cheap energy of fossil fuels; and finally the financial crisis, which involves the de-leveraging and destruction of massive amounts of money and credit. Each of these problems is inter-related, because money is dependent upon energy, and energy is a product of natural physical resources that are finite and diminishing.

Rather than despair or the cynicism that passes for realpolitik, the authors will suggest that this crisis provides an opening for a new kind of orientation to thinking and acting, a new way of being in and of the earth. This opening is an opening onto a new materialism that is neither a crude consumerist materialism nor a reductive atomic materialism, but a materialism that takes seriously the material and physical world in which we live. This materialism counters idealism in its practical and philosophical forms, which constructs an ideal world that we wish to inhabit and then mistakes that world for the real one. Furthermore, in contrast to classical materialism which rejects religion as a form of false consciousness, this new materialism recognizes religion as an effective means of political mobilization and as a genuine source of piety, and thus does not oppose religion per se; instead, it opposes fanaticism and fundamentalism, including the fairy-tale expectations that a God (or gods) will rescue us from our predicament and punish the evil-doers while rewarding the righteous.


 

Index - Readings in N.T. Wright

Index to Readings in N.T. Wright

How to Read Torah in Light of Paul's NT Reading

N.T. Wright, "The Big Picture" (select videos)

N.T. Wright Series (Vol 4) - The New Perspective of Paaul (many articles)

N.T. Wright, "Paul and the Faithfulness of God" (Vol 4) - Introduction to NPP

An Interview with N.T. Wright: The New Ecology, the God of the OT v. NT, Open Theism, Sexuality, Biblical Interpretation, and More

N.T. Wright: "Love Is the Name of the Game"

N.T. Wright asks: Have we gotten heaven all wrong?

N.T. Wright, Scripture & the Authority of God - "How to Read Scripture"

N.T. Wright, Scripture & the Authority of God - "Enlightenment, Postmodernism, and Misreading Scripture"

How Should We Read the Bible? Through Creeds or through the Scriptures?

The Failure of Christianity is a Modern Myth

N.T.Wright - "What Sabbath was, What it is now; and What it isn't any longer"

Reacting to the Virgin Birth of Mary and the Virgin Conception of Jesus

Book Review: "How God Became King," by N.T. Wright

N.T. Wright - How God Became King

How God Became King: Putting Creed and Canon Back Together Again

Review - N.T. Wright, "The Kingdom New Testament"

NT Wright - Introduction to Paul's New Perspective, Part 1 of 2

N.T. Wright - The Authority of the Bible

NT Wright on "Scripture and God's Authority"

N.T. Wright, "Paul and the Faithfulness of God" (Vol 4) - Re-Envisaging Israel's Election in Jesus

Not “Christ” but “Messiah”: NT Wright on Translating Christos
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/11/26/not-christ-but-messiah-nt-wright-on-translating-christos/

by Scot McKnight
November 26, 2013
Comments

“The purpose for which the covenant God had called Israel had been accomplished, Paul believed, through Jesus. The entire ‘theology of election’ we have examined in the preceding pages is not set aside. It is brought into fresh focus, rethought, reimagined and reworked around Jesus himself, and particularly around his death, resurrection and enthronement. Christology, in the several senses that word must bear, is the first major lens through which Paul envisages the ancient doctrine of Israel’s election” (815-816).

 

One of the more interesting features of NT scholarship is a widespread (radical) minimization of “Christ” meaning “Messiah.” Instead of a direct royal perception, this term is understood by many scholars to mean a second/last/family name, that is Jesus Christ is little more than Jesus’ name. NT Wright’s work won’t get off the ground until this is critiqued.

 

I want to [also] add that this interpretive approach owes some (not all) of its origin in (i)  the de-Judaization of Christianity and to the idea (ii) that making Jesus a Jewish Messiah makes Jesus less universally relevant. (The same happened to the word “kingdom” in NT and theological scholarship.)

 

NT Wright’s response:

 

1. Paul’s use of royal passages from the Psalms and Isaiah — and here he points to Romans 1:3-4, where there are clear and loud echoes to 2 Samuel 7 and Psalm 2. Inheritance theme in Romans, then Romans 15:1-13 and 1 Cor 15:20-28 (Psalm 110 and 8:6)… Ephesians 1:20-23.

 

2. Wisdom theme, a royal house theme (David and Solomon).

 

3. Narrative role in Pauline letters, like Galatians, where Jesus’ narrative role is that of Israel’s Messiah: e.g., “seed.” Romans 9:6–10:13.

 

Then there’s another element, often overlooked, now brought out by Novenson: “For a start, there is the linguistic evidence, set out recently by Matthew Novenson, that Christos is in fact neither a proper name (with denotation but no necessary connotation) nor a ‘title’ as such (with connotation but flexible denotation, as when ‘the King of Spain’ goes on meaning the same thing when one king dies and another succeeds him). It is, rather, an honorific, which shares some features of a ‘title’ but works differently” (824).

 

Thus: “The Messiah", then, " 'ho Christos," is for Paul not simply an individual, Jesus of Nazareth, who happens to have acquired a second proper name through the flattening out of the royal title that other early Christians were eager still to affirm. The royal meaning of Christos does not disappear in Paul’s writings. It is present, central and foundational. Though sometimes the word seems to function more or less as a proper name (any word, repeated often enough, can appear to have its surface indentations worn smooth), its connotations are never far beneath the surface and often show clearly through” (824).

 

Wright’s big point, of course, is that in Jesus we find an “incorporative Messiah,” that is, in Jesus we find someone in whom the identity and vocation of all Israel has been assumed. When one looks at Jesus one sees all Israel, the whole of Israel’s Story, and the plan of God incarnated in one person. Here is how Wright puts it:

Paul, I propose, exploited the notion of ‘Messiahship’ in such a way as to say two things in particular.

First, the vocation and destiny of ancient Israel, the people of Abraham, had been brought to its fulfilment in the Messiah, particularly in his death and resurrection.

Second, those who believed the gospel, whether Jew or Greek, were likewise to be seen as incorporated into him and thus defined by him, specifically again by his death and resurrection. 

The full range of Paul’s ‘incorporative’ language can be thoroughly and satisfactorily explained on this hypothesis: that he regarded the people of God and the Messiah of God as so bound up together that what was true of the one was true of the other. And this becomes in turn the vital key to understanding the close and intimate link between ‘incorporation’ and ‘justification’, between ‘participatory’ and ‘forensic’ accounts of Paul’s soteriology – not to mention the themes of salvation history, ‘apocalyptic’ and transformation (826).

This incorporative language, Wright is arguing, is not typical Judaism but more of a revising by Paul’s own belief in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Thus, “Israel” would be raised up in the general resurrection; it happened though only to Jesus (Tom skips Matt 27 but it might have helped a tad); therefore the general resurrection did happen but our resurrection is “in” Jesus. This is the kind of thinking that went on in Paul’s head. Israel’s king was representative and incorporative. He has backed off seeing some of this, as he once did, in other OT and Jewish texts, but he maintains it is taught by Paul — in Romans 3:1-26; Galatians 2:15-4:11; Phlippians 3:2-11.

 

Also the “in” and “with” Christ passages abound, and they are incorporative.

Continue to Index -

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

 

 

 

 

 

The Glories of God's Creation...

An Itch to Scratch the Earth from Mac Jermstad on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/80242031

An Itch to Scratch the Earth

from Mac Jermstad 12 hours ago NOT YET RATED

Philosopher, Alan Watts, states that we come out of this world, like a flower budding from a tree. Upon sprouting, the desire to examine our surroundings and stake claim of our experiences grow. Shot on a Bolex 16mm film camera and a Go Pro, we attempt to see our surroundings with a different perspective.

This visual voyage takes you on a journey from Michigan to Colorado to California, utilizing the lens as means to touch, see and be apart of the world.

Filmed//Edited by Mac Jermstad
Stills by Zach Snellenberger
Opening Graphic by Logan Sabo
Words by William Hedgepeth
Sound Bite: Alan Watts

Written permission by Tessa Murray of Still Corners for permission to use "The Trip" in the video
Please support Still Corners by buying their music.

Special Thanks: Imperial Motion

N.T. Wright, "Paul and the Faithfulness of God" (Vol 4) - The People of God: Israel, Church, Kingdom

Introduction

Here we have the age-old problem of whether the church replaces Israel in God's plan, or whether Israel will be resurrected again to replace the church later on. Let the reader be forewarned that I'm probably not on the same wavelength as Wright is on the idea of supercessionism. Wright's concern is to read Paul in light of Jesus' fulfillment of Messianic Scripture as heralded in the promises of God's return in the OT to His people Israel. However, along comes Christianity to re-interpret all the blessings of the Israel for itself in a wide variety of soteriological and eschatalogical and schemas. In effect, if I understand Wright correctly, God has done His job to Israel and has passed the torch along to the church through the hands of Jesus, the Immanuel of Israel, and Savior of man.

Which brings me to a loggerhead.... When I first began writing this website my immediate concern was to describe a post-modern, post-evangelic Chrisitanity - popularly known as "Emergent Christianity" (1990s-2010) whose term has been shredded so much as to cause me to re-apply its usage more recently as "post-modern, post-evangelic Christianity" instead of "emergent." In effect, my generation of evangelics had so lost their way within biblical theology that it motivated me to reassess the pros, and cons, of evangelicalism gone awry. And this I have done even as I have neglected a steady diet of biblical exegesis for the writing of contemporary theology in an effort to wrest back into the hands of the church the vision of the bible apart from its many misstatements and misrepresentations made by eager pulpiteers and a politicizing Christian media.

At that time I did not feel it was important to write of the "Relationship between the Testaments," which was the name of my graduate thesis project, and an idea I once had to author. However, the very idea of supercessionism's many misrepresentations tells me that I should perhaps reconsider this task again. Broadly, it takes Wright's observations and applies them forward to the eschaton to come. That is, it speaks of God's election in terms of promise, covenant, community, and fulfillment in Jesus.

Below are my several thoughts on this subject but when re-reading its bullet points I must admit that it pales to the real subject I have in mind - to the major themes of the bible as they move forward in Jesus.... Even so, have I made a hasty sketch to further confound the matter without further apology or explanation at this stage of writing:

  1. Jesus came for Israel. He came to be their Messiah. He came to fulfill Scripture to Israel.

  2. Jesus came to redeem His people and raise them up as a new people to His name. We know this as the (Jewish) early church as it spread outwards to the world under the Apostles.

  3. The church does not replace Israel nor does Israel usurp the church at some later date.

  4. As the old covenant has passed away, so has Israel. Even as the church will be folded into the massing Kingdom of God under God's New Covenant as it converges and spreads.

  5. To be a part of Israel's election in the OT Gentiles had to proselytize under the Old Covenant.

  6. But with the New Covenant comes a new people of God. One composed of Jews AND Gentiles.

  7. In the New Covenant each people group comes on equal footing without proselytization.

      Hence, there is no need to be a Jewish Christian either now or later. But a Messianic

      Christian knowing Jesus as one's Messiah. All is uplifted.

  8. The Gospel of Christ is trans-denominational, trans-cultural, trans-national. It melds and unites all men and women in Jesus' name.

  9. God has always had a remnant, an elect. We know them as the "people of God."

 10. God's community changes with covenant. With a covenant change comes a people (and era) change.

11. This does not mean that Jesus doesn't fulfill Israel's hope... He simply expands them inclusively.

12. Someday the church will be replaced not by a new Israel but by God's Expanded Kingdom.

13. In the Kingdom of God will God's people rejoice and all find Shalom.

R.E. Slater

November 25, 2013

* * * * * * * * * *

Revised People of God and Supersessionism

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/11/21/revised-people-of-god-and-supersessionism/

by Scot McKnight
November 21, 2013

At the heart of any theology of the Bible is the people of God, which means Israel and it is a source of astonishment that some write “biblical” theologies and have almost nothing on Israel — other than as background. At the same time, at the core of a Christian reading of the Bible as the Story of God in this world, is the church. In NT Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God, this theme of church, along with the classic understanding of salvation, are tied together under the theme of “election.” All of this from a singular angle: The People of God, Freshly Reworked. We are talking here then as the church as the elect people of God — but what does election mean? And how does this get applied to the church after it was applied to Israel?

 

I use the term ‘election’, rather, to highlight the choice, by the One God, of Abraham’s family, the people historically known as ‘Israel’ and, in Paul’s day, in their smaller post-exilic form, as hoi Ioudaioi, ‘the Jews’ or ‘the Judeans’. The word ‘election’, as applied to Israel, usually carries a further connotation: not simply the divine choice of this people, but more specifically the divine choice of this people for a particular purpose (775).

 

Election, then, embraces some big themes and NT Wright mentions briefly each — justification, anthropology, being in Christ, salvation history, apocalyptic, transformation (deification), and covenant. Wright himself prefers covenant, thereby assuming election and covenant are to be brought together.

 

He knows the issues abound, including supersessionism, about which he has these strong comments to say:

We have to contend with what one can only call a revived anti-Christian polemic in which anything, absolutely anything, that is said by way of a ‘fulfilment’ of Abrahamic promises in and through Jesus of Nazareth is said to constitute, or contribute to, that wicked thing called ‘supersessionism’, the merest mention of which sends shivers through the narrow and brittle spine of postmodern moralism. How can we say what has to be said, by way of proper historical exegesis, in such a climate? (784)

The storied nature of covenant comes to the fore in NT Wright’s work: Adam and Abraham and Land and Exodus are all tied into a resumptive and redemptive framework, but the overall impact is that Abraham is the one through whom God chooses to work out the divine plan. In this section in PFG we get an important discussion of texts that connect Adam to Abraham. (I have myself for a number of years called Abraham [as] the “first second Adam.”) From Genesis Rabbah 14.6: “Why is Abraham called a great man? Because he was worthy of being created before the first man. But the Holy One, blessed be he, thought, ‘Perhaps something may go wrong, and there will be no one to repair matters. Lo, to begin with I shall create the first Adam, so that if something should go wrong with him, Abraham will be able to come and remedy matters in his stead’” (from Wright, 794). In other words,

“The question of how this link played out – whether, as we said before, the Abrahamic purpose was designed to rescue the whole of the human race, or rather to rescue Abraham’s family from the rest of the human race – receives a variety of answers, but the underlying point remains: the promises to Abraham were understood in relation to the problems caused by Adam. Their intention was to get the human project back on track after the disasters of the fall, the flood and the idolatrous Tower. The covenant that YHWH made with Abraham was the way of sealing this intent, binding this God to his promise and Abraham’s family to this God, assuring Abraham of the ‘seed’ that would inherit the promises, the promises which were focused on the Land as the new Eden, promises which would be fulfilled by the Exodus from Egypt as the great act of redemption (794-795).

Covenant and righteousness go together: the former is the means of the latter. So NTW examines the meaning of “righteousness” yet one more time, and here is my four point summary:

1. The word refers in the history of Israel first to right behavior in a relation to God and God’s will.
2. It is connected to the law court, where the judge is to be righteous and the person in front of the judge may be declared right. (Sometimes the defendant is righteous anyway.)
3. YHWH will vindicate/justify Israel because YHWH is righteous. God’s act of righteousness then is an act of salvation (Psalms, Isaiah 40–55). That is, God is faithful to his covenant with Israel in justifying/saving.
4. YHWH’s righteousness then is also cosmic, setting the whole world right.

God’s righteousness, God’s restorative justice and God’s covenant faithfulness are all pulled into one whole in this term “righteousness.”

Israel, then, is God’s servant in this world. The covenant elects Israel to be the redemptive agent for God of the world. Which raises the issue of supersessionism all over again, and Wright sees three kinds:

Hard: God rejected Israel in Christ.

Sweeping: post-Barthian, apocalyptic newness beyond anything earlier. It’s all new. He sees it in J.L. Martyn’s commentary on Galatians.

Jewish: Qumran. The rest of Judaism is compromised.

This latter kind emphasizes fulfillment and is not, he argues, genuinely supersessionist. He asks, Was John Baptist a supersessionist? Jesus? Paul? NT Wright sees his view of Paul to be this kind of Jewish supersessionism. He takes it all on with this:

My proposal has of course been (in chapter 6 of the present work and elsewhere) that Paul’s revision of the Jewish view of Election was more or less of the same type as what we find in Qumran. Call it ‘Jewish supersessionism’ if you like, but recognize the oxymoronic nature of such a phrase. The scandal of Paul’s gospel, after all, was that the events in which he claimed that Israel’s God had been true to what he promised centred on a crucified Messiah. That is the real problem with any and all use of the ‘supersession’ language: either Jesus was and is Israel’s Messiah, or he was not and is not. That question in turn is of course directly linked to the question of the resurrection: either Jesus rose from the dead or he did not. Trying to use postmodern moralism, with its usual weapon of linguistic smearing, as a way to force Christians today to stop saying that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah is bad enough, though that is not our current problem. Trying to use that moralism as a way of forcing first-century historians to deny that Paul thought Jesus was the Messiah, and that the divine promises to Israel had been fulfilled in him, simply will not do (810).

So election is all about God choosing Israel for a purpose:

1. Within the framework of the covenant outlined so far, in which Israel was called to be the people through whom the one God would rescue the world, Israel was called to be the Shema people, confessing the One God and loving him with heart, mind and life itself.

2. Israel was called to be the people shaped by the creator God’s ‘wis dom’. Again, we looked at this earlier. For many in Paul’s day, this ‘wisdom’ was contained, more or less, in Torah.

3. Israel was called to be the people in whom, therefore, the life held out by Torah would become a reality – both in the sense of the ‘life’ of glad, loving obedience and the ‘life’ promised to Torah-keepers (much as the ‘tree of life’ remained, tantalizingly, in Eden).

4. Israel was the people in whose midst the living God had deigned to dwell, first in the pillar of cloud and fire, then in the wilderness tabernacle, and finally in the Temple in Jerusalem.

5. Israel was to be the people who inherited YHWH’s sovereign rule over the world. The promised land was a sign of this, but already by the first century many Jews had glimpsed the possibility, already implicit within the Adam–Abraham nexus, that the land was simply an advance signpost to YHWH’s claim over the whole of creation.

6. Israel was to be (according to the Pentateuchal origins and the second- temple writings already noted) the people who would discover YHWH’s faithfulness to the covenant through the pattern of slavery and Exodus, of exile and restoration.

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