Embracing Wholeness - More Gospel Thoughts

Darin left a great comment on the new blog.

He said, "From your writings I would say that Jesus has made you whole; whether or not you want to embrace that truth or not is another discussion."

Come by the new site and help me get my head around this idea. Thanks!

in HIS love,
nick

JD Will Be So Proud of Me!

I've finally given in. The Clown Prince of Blog laid down the law, and I have submitted to his royal mandate.

JUST KIDDING! But I've made the switch. Check out the new and (hopefully) improved Fumbling Towards Eternity here.

Monday Night Gospel Thoughts

I know... I know... I promised the next installment of my review of The Living Word of God. At the moment, I'm struggling with my voice as a writer because I want to write a review that is useful and profitable for my brothers and sisters, but without pretending that I know more than I do. Like Doc Holliday said, "My hypocrisy only goes so far." The next installment IS coming, but not tonight.

Tonight, I want to talk about the gospel.

I think about the gospel a LOT. My world is shadowed and haunted by the gospel.

I read a LOT. Just this week, I read Pagan Christianity, I finished Seeking a Lasting City, I'm chewing on chapters from Kingdom Come and Celebrating the Wrath of God. Just today, I read several essays from Jay Guin's explosively dynamic blog, NT Wright's Easter sermon, and Phil Sanders' latest article.

Through it all, soaking all of that writing, is the gospel. How big is the gospel? How broad? How deep? Do I know enough to be saved? Am I faithful enough? Repentant enough? Or am I one of Paul's hearers who is "always learning, but never coming to a knowledge of the truth?"

One night recently, we were discussing 2 Pet 1. The teacher asked, "What does it mean that we've been given all things that pertain to life and godliness?"

Someone else said, "It means that this is it -- there will not be another word from God besides what we have."
Our teacher said, "Yes, that's true."
I raised my hand and said, "Unless this is the last letter written in the New Testament, that cannot be what Peter meant to say." I continued, after a long pause, to say that what I believe Peter means is that the coming of Christ brought to us from God everything necessary for life and godliness. Peter's not talking about verbal revelation, he is talking about the completeness of God's salvation in Christ.

Since then, a lot of thoughts have burbled down the brook in my brain, but I've been haunted by the gospel implications of this question. I think the first respondent was deeply right, but that understanding was parsed out through some twisted means. Here's what I mean:

We often place the full content of the New Testament, Matthew 1:1-Revelation 22:21, in a box labeled THE FAITH on one side and/or THE GOSPEL on the other side. This causes us tremendous difficulty, which is irrelevant if the labelling in question is valid. No difficulty is so great that we should accept as true something we think is false.

I wrote Saturday night in my teaching notes for Sunday AM (I worry sometimes about the soundness of letting ME teach, but that's a whole other blog) the following idea:

1) The Hebrew Scriptures testify univocally to the nearness (or the expectation of nearness) of God and his active work in providing for his people. The LORD reigns!

2) In the Gospels, Jesus says, "My Father is working... and I also am working."

3) Acts is the story of the Holy Spirit working to spread the kingdom throughout the Greco-Roman world and beyond.

4) In Revelation, Father and Son and Spirit work in indescribably perfect harmony to accomplish the divine purpose.

5) In the Epistles, the Holy Spirit works with the author to interpret who Jesus is and what he did in his life, his death, and his resurrection, and to apply that identity and accomplishment to particular situations.

Nothing NEW came after Jesus! The Epistles, even, aren't new. They are the practical application, to broken situations, of the revelation of God in Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospel IS Jesus, the King come into his Kingdom.

So you see, I agree that no new revelation is coming (at least not before the parousia appearance of Jesus). But that doesn't mean that I agree that:

1) "THE GOSPEL" or "THE FAITH" = the whole content of the NT
2) The "New Testament" (27 ancient and inspired Christian texts) = the New Covenant (especially as spoken of by the Preacher of Hebrews)
3) One's salvation is dependent upon how much information about the "Christian System" or "the Primitive Order of Things" one comprehends before placing one's trust in, rendering one's allegiance to the God of Israel.

But I am haunted by the fact that a fair number of intelligent, studious, honorable and devoted Christians believe I am eternally damned for not agreeing with these and other points of doctrine.

What if they are right?

Reviewing The Living Word of God Chapter I

Reviewing The Living Word of God

by Dr. Ben Witherington III

Chapter I - Seeking the Word of God

"Fancy writes, 'Mary had a little lamb'; inspired imagination writes, 'The Lord is my shepherd.'" - Eugene Peterson

Mankind hungers for a word from God. We appreciate how hard it is to truly observe life and reality and to share those observations truly, so voracious readers and passionate communicators enjoy ruminating on the writing of others. What we don't need is invention.

What Dr. Witherington gives us is interesting and challenging observations about the Word we have from God. After clearing off the table and giving us some hints about the menu in the Preface, he now begins to set the table by dealing with a most interesting aspect of God's Word - the relationship between oral texts and written texts -- in the first section, Holy God and Holy Words.

The written word has ruled Western culture since shortly after it became affordable to print. I believe an interesting discussion could be had about whether we are shifting into a visual/aural culture again (with the popularity of YouTube and podcasts and the gentle decline of established media). Still, by comparison to biblical cultures, the written word still rules ours.

This is important to examine because the New Testament presents us with the phenomenon of oral texts - written words that were meant to be read. Dr. Witherington may perhaps be best known in theological circles for positing and defending this point of view - that most of the documents we call the New Testament are crafted according to the oral rhetorical schemes of first-century Greco-Roman culture and that we will understand them best only when we understand how they are put together. This, I've learned, is called the Socio-Rhetorical school of thought. It is not mentioned so much as understood in this chapter as the author discusses sacred texts in an oral culture. He points to the stories in the Hebrew Scriptures about the ark of the covenant (esp. 1 Sam 4-6 and 2 Sam 6) as important biblical examples of the reverence with which sacred texts were treated. He says:

"My point in this discussion is simple: ancients did not think words, and especially divine words, were mere ciphers or sounds. The ancients believed words partook of the character and quality of the one who spoke them, especially when talking about God's words, and not surprisingly oral culture puts a premium on the oral word. The living voice was generally preferred, except when it came to holy words spoken to unholy people. Then there might well be a preference for a mediated conveying of God's word, a reading or proclaiming of his word by a spokesperson... When the living Word was proclaimed by a living voice, whether God directly or through God's messenger or emissary, things were likely to happen. Imagine what would be the conclusion if it was thought that God's special anointed one, the Messiah, was doing the proclaiming of God's word as well? Would they not have expected the words of the Messiah to be clearly from God, having especial power and efficacy as well?"

Dr. Witherington points to Mark 12:36 as an important passage where that Messiah himself expresses a particular understanding of inspiration. "...Jesus is not just referring to an inspiration of persons, like David himself, but an inspiration that results in an inspired text which Jesus could quote as still having divine authority -- a Holy Scripture, not merely sacred speech or oral tradition."

The next section, The Viva Voce -- The Message about Jesus as the Spoken Word of God and Jesus as the Word made Flesh, analyzes four major passages to help us understand this relationship. They are 1 Thess 2:13; 1 Cor 4:36-37; Hebrews 4:12-13; and 1 Peter 1:23. Throughout the section he points also to references in Acts (4:31; 6:7; 12:24) of how the word of God grows, and causes and creates life and community. Having started the foundation by explaining how ancients understood holy communication, he now builds onto that with the understanding that the message about Jesus was clearly understood to be the Word of God. I believe Dr. Witherington is also hinting towards the upcoming dialogue with Peter Enns' "incarnational" understanding of the Bible.

He follows with The Word made Scripture, where he offers an exegesis of what everyone must have known was coming in an argument about inspiration in the NT - 2 Tim 3:16-17 and 2 Peter 1:20-21. I will not reproduce that exegesis here, but will offer some highlights.

1) "One could also read the verse to mean, 'every inspired Scripture is useful...,' but against this view is the more natural approach of taking the two qualifying adjectives as relating to the noun in the same way as in 1 Timothy 4:4." This pokes a credible hole in one of my understandings.
2) "We are not given an explanation of how inspiration works. This text [2 Tim 3:16-17] by itself does not explicate a theory of inspiration or its nature. Does the Spirit lift the mind of the writer to see, understand, and write, or is it a amtter of mechanical dictation? These questions are not answered here. Rather, whatever the process, the product is God's word, telling God's truth."
3) "Neither Paul nor the author of Hebrews views the OT as an example of what God once said, relegating the revelation and speaking to the past. No, God's word still has the life and power and truth of God in it, and it still speaks in and to the present."
4) "The author [of 2 Peter] thinks there is a meaning in the prophecy iteself that makes a claim on the listener, and it is not for the listener to determine the meaning of the text but rather to discover it. Indeed he even means it wasn't up to the prophet to interpret or add his own interpretation to it. He was constrained by the source of the information to speak another's words and meaning -- namely God's."

He also briefly touches upon the passages in Hebrews where the preacher quotes the Hebrew Scriptures in the present tense. "What Scripture says, God says, and the God is is said to be speaking these OT texts is Father, Son, or Spirit.... the author enunciates a hermeneutic of progressive revelation from the very beginning of the book.... some sort of symbiotic relationship is envisioned between the word written, the word proclaimed, and the Word Incarnate."

Dr Witherington's conclusion thus far is that the idea called "the living word of God" in the New Testament includes an oral message about Jesus, an Incarnate person, and finally a text, specifically (so far) the text of the Hebrew Scriptures. "Some NT writers even reached the point of being able to talk about Jesus being the Word of God incarnate, come in the flesh, such that when Jesus spoke on earth, he not only spoke for God, he spoke as God and indeed spoke about himself." We've talked about Jesus as the climax of revelation, but how do ordinary words BECOME God's Word?

Stay tuned next Friday for Dr. Witherington's offer of an answer!

CAN YOU HANDLE THE TRUTH? - A Series on the Living Word of God

Reviewing The Living Word of God – Rethinking the Theology of the Bible
by Ben Witherington III

Since Dr. Ben and I both live in the Bluegrass and have probably rubbed shoulders at one of the Lexington movie theaters, I read his books differently than I do someone whom I only know by name. Recently, he has been working on a series of books on the Protestant sacraments. Those books are:




With this review series, I’m not going to pretend that some of this material isn’t over my head. I’m still learning on the fly the language of grad school-trained theologians, and I often feel like I’ve gotten to the party several hours late and totally missed many conversations. That’s why I’d like this to be a discussion series. Today, I’m going to give a lightning-quick overview of the book and talk about the preface. Tomorrow, I’ll dig into chapter one, and try and cover a chapter a week here.

This series first caught my eye because it was beginning to parallel the work of John Mark Hicks in our own tradition. JM wrote Come to the Table and Down in the River to Pray, striving to share our history and revision our understanding and practice of Baptism and Communion. Then JM and Bobby went one direction and Ben went this way. Anyway… Dr. Ben breaks down into 9 chapters, an afterword, and a neat-looking Bible FAQ:

I. SEEKING THE WORD OF GOD
II. INSPIRATION WITHOUT AN EXPIRATION DATE
III. THE END OF ENNS: THE DANGER OF AN ANALOGY
IV. TRUTH TELLING AS AN ART FORM
V. CAN THESE THINGS BE TRUE?
VI. DID THE CANON AND ITS TRANSLATORS MISFIRE?
VII. HOW TO PICK A TRANSLATION WITHOUT LOSING YOUR RELIGION
VIII. RIGHTLY DIVIDING THE WORD OF TRUTH
IX. THE ART OF READING SCRIPTURE IN A POSTMODERN WORLD
X. AFTERWORD: THE SACRIFICE OF THE INTELLECT?
XI. APPENDIX: BIBLE Q&A

In the preface, Ben shares some options for broad understanding of the “Word of God”, and then offers some strong affirmations that stake out some territory for the upcoming discussions. He quotes Barbara Brown Taylor for the options:

1. Divine Creation (or as I like to put it, “Holy Dictation” as depicted in Rembrandt’s Matthew);
2. Divine Inspiration (Revelation from God that reflects human style, thought patterns, interests, etc.)
3. “Shakespeare at his best” (Pinnacle of Human Endeavor, but lacking revelation – the best of the “word ABOUT God” schools of thought)
4. Literary Classic
5. Human Machination, written to deceive and enslave (“opiate of the masses”)

Divine Inspiration, says Dr. Witherington, is the view most often held by the church through the ages, and “does the most justice to both the divine and human dimensions of Scripture.”

Quotes to ponder:

“Wouldn’t it be better to say that the text of the New Testament as originally given is what inspiration actually looks like? Wouldn’t it be better to assess the nature of the New Testament’s truth claims after delving in depth into a close study of the meaning of various relevant texts, asking how they work and what sorts of information they are trying to convey?” I like this, because I’ve been frustrated for a long time with the use of deductive reasoning to decipher Scripture. It just makes better sense to me to examine Scripture first and then come to some conclusions, rather than coming to a conclusion and then expecting Scripture to clearly verify or deny that conclusion.

“I take it as a fundamental axiom that I should not bring my theology to the text… Rather my theology should be drawn from the biblical text, even my theology of Scripture, after the hard work of interpretation and reflection on meanings has taken place. And hard work it is because we have to fight off many modern misconceptions of what an ancient text must say or do if it is to be seen as veracious.”

“Veracity must always be judged on the basis of what a person is intending to say and trying to convey. Modern notions about chronological or verbal precision equaling inerrancy are not helpful if the inspired author was intending to give us the gist of something in a way that was user friendly for his audience... if the author wants to convey something in a general way, he should not be faulted for imprecision.” I often hear NT Wright comment on how critics of public teachers seem to demand that the teacher say absolutely everything they believe about everything every time they open their mouths, or otherwise the critics assume that the teacher is denying some essential tenet of New Testament Christianity.

“[The student] assumes that the truth of [biblical] issues should be apparent to laypersons simply by examining the surface of these texts, even in translation. This assumption is false. Every translation is already an interpretation, so the intermediary role of scholarship cannot be escaped… The essence of the salvation message of the New Testament can, of course, be understood without such sophistication, but the Bible speaks to a plethora of subjects and often speaks at a depth and in ways that moderns would naturally find puzzling or confusing.” This quote made me feel vindicated, because I get SO FRUSTRATED when someone tells me just how simple the Bible really is if people would just sit down and read it. I want to lay Exodus 24 and John 1 before them side-by-side and ask, “How simple is THAT?”

“I assume these texts were clear to the human authors who wrote them, and probably clear to many in the audience as well. But to them to be clear for us, we must imaginatively enter into their worlds, their forms of discourse, their ways of conveying important truths. It is not enough to roughly translate their words into our common parlance and then just assume we should be able to understand what they say and mean.” This is where the churches of Christ have a deadly weakness, but ought to have a real opportunity for strength as well. Generally speaking, we’ve been taught that history is irrelevant. Like the people to whom Peter wrote in 2 Pet 3:4, our brethren imagine that people have been living and talking and doing things in exactly the same way since forever. The fact is that ancient cultures REALLY ARE ancient. They spoke differently. They wrote differently. They had different questions and problems and answers and fears. This is our deadly danger: we incredibly underestimate the difference between biblical cultures and our world. Our great potential, though: We are RESTORATION PEOPLE. We have spent so much time imagining ourselves in 1st century settings that we really should have an advantage over those who have never considered the setting of the church. We should be good at imagining ourselves in that world. I pray that we get better at it.

“We should start [our theology of the Bible] with and stick closely to the Bible itself, assuming that as was the case with Jacob, if we wrestle with the divine long enough, we will obtain a blessing, even if we walk with a limp for a while thereafter.”

TOMORROW: SEEKING THE WORD OF GOD – WHAT DOES THE NT SAY ABOUT INSPIRATION?

Beauty - Pointing the Way Home

The greatest sledding slope EVER!

And Spring is gonna out-do THIS?

Jerusalem Ridge clad in all her wintry glory!

My own back yard! SWEET!

Longing

As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?

My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long,

"Where is your God?"

These things I remember, as I pour out my soul:

how I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God

with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival.

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.

My soul is cast down within me;

therefore I remember you from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.

Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls;

all your breakers and your waves have gone over me.

By day the LORD commands his steadfast love,

and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.
(Psalm 42:1-8 ESV)

"I'm at a point in my life where I realize there has to be something more."

This sentence, a DREAM for an evangelist, probably sounds really strange coming from a believer in Jesus. But it is true! I've enver been greedy or ambitious for power, although my little dissatisfactions with what I have and my frustration with the status quo might bely such blanket statements. Suffice it to say that it isn't because of oversatiation or disenchantment, this desire for MORE.

I LOVE God!
I LOVE Jesus!
I LOVE God's Spirit! (That one makes me feel funny to say... maybe we'll explore that later)

No matter how badly I fail, how I disgust myself with sin, I keep coming back to that three-fold confession. Not as an excuse, not to justify myself, but as this haunting inescapable fact that pulls and gnaws and never lets me alone.

I know there must be more than this pitiful and banal cycle of complacency, sin, and mortification. I want that more, to do more, to be more. But like a teenager with an expensive car I didn't buy myself, God knows that more will destroy his unprepared and undisciplined child. So I turn to Scripture, to let God train me in godliness. First... to go deeper into this longing... this Augustinian restlessness:

"O God, You have made us only for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee."

What do you long for?