Philosophical Orthodoxy

Why the Reformed Tend to be Nestorian and the Lutherans Monophysite: The Degeneration of Christological Language in Incarnation-Talk

2012-01-30T12:54:00.000-08:00

Something I wrote up for an online class:

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COMPOSITION VERSUS HYPOSTATIC UNION IN THE INCARNATION

The goal of this paper is to explore what Evangelicals should think about the Incarnation and argue that we should think about it in terms of a hypostatic union. My main thesis is that much confusion and argumentation over the Incarnation could be avoided by a proper understanding of the Incarnation as hypostatic union rather than some other form of union. This is extremely important since a proper understanding of the Incarnation as hypostatic union preserves the orthodox Christian viewpoint that the person of Christ is identical with the Divine Person of the Eternal Word of God and that this Divine Person has become human. Otherwise, various difficulties occur, which push one either in the direction of Monophysitism or Nestorianism.

In the course of my paper, I will first examine the views of Eutyches and Nestorius who each have an understanding of the Incarnation as a composition of Christ out of the two natures. I will then show how a common way of speaking about Christ’s two natures encourages this viewpoint and that this tendency, when coupled with different assumptions, has led to Monophysite tendencies among Lutherans and similar-minded thinkers and Nestorian tendencies among Reformed thinkers. A common way of stating the communicatio idiomatum is involved in these tendencies. Following this, I will show how the ancient, traditional Christian notion of the Incarnation as hypostatic union avoids these negative tendencies, affirming unity and yet maintaining the integrity of each nature.

I. The Problem: Incarnation as Composition

I.1. The Early Heresies: Nestorius and Eutyches

In much discussion throughout Christian history, both the divine and human natures of Christ have had a tendency to be spoken of as if they were subjects of attribution in their own right and the unity of Christ has similarly thus often been spoken of as if it was a matter of combining of the two natures to form one person out of this combination. This tendency, of course, derives from the early church and such a tendency was taken to its logical conclusion in the theologies of Eutyches and Nestorius, where the person of Christ was seen as a result of a combining of divine and human natures, understood as distinct entities and subjects of attribution. On such a view, Christ is said to be divine because he is partly produced out of divinity and he is said to be human because he is partly produced out of humanity.

The difficulty of attaining a unified person out of this combination was resolved by mingling the natures in some way. Nestorius does this not by an actual mingling of the two themselves but, following Theodore of Mopsuestia, by a mingling of their respective appearances, that of God and that of man, so as to produce the appearance of a single person, Christ. Because of this, human predicates could be applied to the divinity and divine to the humanity, but this was only in appearances, a matter of words only. Strictly speaking, the divine only applied to the divinity and the human to the humanity, but because of the single appearance of Christ, they could both be applied to Christ.[1] So one could say, for instance, “Christ died on the cross” or “The man died on the cross” in virtue of Christ being partly compounded out of the human, but not “God died on the cross”, even though one could also say “Christ is God” in virtue of being partly compounded out of the divinity. The subjects of the divine properties and human properties, respectively, however, remain the divine nature on the one hand and the human nature on the other.

Eutyches, on the other hand, took the same starting point – Christ as the result of the combination of the two natures – but when he gained unity for Christ through the exchange of properties, it was not merely a matter of words as with Nestorius. Instead, this was a real exchange of properties for Eutyches, resulting in a kind of Monophysitism as the distinction between the two natures was blurred or lost. If this was understood as the Word actually changing by taking on human attributes, it would result in a loss of divinity. If, on the other hand, it was understood as the humanity being overtaken by divinity, it would result in a kind of Docetism and a loss of full humanity.[2]

Considering Christ a result of the compounding of the two natures, then, requires finding a tight unity between the natures, the tightest on this picture being a blending of the two, anything less failing to account for the unity of the person in Christ. If one takes this blending as merely notional, we have Nestorius’s view. On the other hand, if one takes this blending as a real, metaphysical blending then we have Eutyches’s view, some form of Monophysitism which renders Christ either not fully human or not fully divine, with either both natures being destroyed or one taking backseat to the other. A more Docetist version would uphold the divinity at the expense of the humanity, whereas a Kenotic view would uphold the humanity at the expense of the divinity. In either case, Christ ends up a third thing in addition to the two natures, composed out of the two.

I.2. Modern Turns: Reformed and Lutheran

In modern times, people still often speak as if the two natures were themselves the subjects of the divine or human attributes, giving at least the appearance or tendency because of this way of speaking, even if it is not meant literally, of a notion of Incarnation as a compounding of the two natures to form a single person out of them. This tendency, unchecked, gives rise to precisely the Nestorian and Monophysite troubles enunciated above: Christ is seen as unified in virtue of an exchange of properties between the natures and the key division between those holding to this is whether to opt for a mere verbal exchange or a real one.[3]

In the Reformed tradition, one sees the tendency towards composition-talk resulting in a distinctly Nestorian tendency as Reformed thinkers tend, in contrast to Lutherans, to speak of an exchange of attributes between the two natures as a merely verbal one. John Calvin, for instance, could speak of some things as attributed to one nature, some to the other, and some to the composite whole, as if Christ was this third, composite thing just as a man is an additional thing dependent on and composed out of body and soul. Being combined into one thing, the attributes of one nature could be spoken of as if they belonged to the other, even though in reality they did not.[4]

On the Lutheran side, there is the opposite Monophysite tendency either in a Docetist or Kenotic direction. There is here a tendency to speak of a real exchange of attributes between the two natures rather than a merely verbal one. Diverse writers, for instance, have accused Martin Luther himself of believing that the person of Christ is the result of the union of the two natures – the unity of the person results from the unity of the natures rather than vice versa.[5] Lutheran Jan Siggins, for instance, both holds that Luther’s early work treated the two natures as sometimes too distinct[6] and also speaks as if for Luther the union of the two natures results from the fact that we can attribute the properties of one nature to the other and that this is so since “we can understand how Christ’s human properties can be predicated of God, or divine properties of man […] because the human nature shares in the glory of all the properties which otherwise pertain to God, ‘to worship this man is to worship God’”.[7] That is, worshipping the man Jesus is worshipping God since God’s properties have been bestowed upon the man. Or at least that is what Siggins’ language suggests, whether that is what he intended or not. It certainly seems that we have two subjects: the human nature, “Jesus,” and the divine, “God”, and that by an interchange of properties they form a single unit.

Because of this Incarnation-as-composition tendency, we also have the tendency to speak of the communicatio idiomatum – the fact that we can say things like “God the Son suffered and died” and “The man Jesus created the world” – as an exchange of properties between the two natures since these themselves are viewed as the subjects of these respective kinds of properties. Hence “God the Son suffered and died” could mean that the divine nature, understood as the subject of the properties, suffered and died, and “The man Jesus created the world” could mean that the human nature, again understood as subject, created the world. “God” then is understood as referring to the divine nature, being the subject of divine properties, “Jesus” as referring to the human nature, being the subject of human properties, and the union of the two “Christ”, resulting from some kind of exchange of these properties between the two. Hence, the frequent claims that followers of Calvin make the communicatio merely verbal and the uncomfortableness of some Reformed thinkers to say that things like “God died” go beyond something merely verbal.[8] From this we get claims such as that of G. C. Berkouwer, that “the man Jesus Christ has his existence immediately and exclusively in the existence of the eternal Son of God”,[9] appearing thereby to give separate referents to “the man Jesus Christ” and “the eternal Son of God”. Hence also the felt need of many Lutheran thinkers to combine or mix the properties in some way to come out with a single person as result, so as to be able to truly say things like “Jesus created the world.”

While the Reformed tendency is clearly Nestorian, then, the Lutheran tendency is towards either a Docetic or a Kenotic Christ.[10] By tending to speak of the Incarnation as if it was by a compounding of the natures, there is the obvious danger of getting a third thing, neither God nor man but a mixture or compound of the two. If one tries make sure the person so compounded is fully God, the humanity must thereby suffer – we have a Docetic Christ, the divinity pushing out the human. On the other hand, if one tries to make sure the person is fully human, the divinity must somehow suffer or be put in check – we have a Kenotic Christ, the humanity pushing out the divinity.[11] Moderate Kenoticist Millard Erickson, for instance, considers it obvious that in order for Christ to be fully human, he must give up “the privilege” of exercising his divine attributes.[12] Tellingly, he speaks of the attributes of one nature being added to the other, the divine attributes being restricted to their exercise through the humanity.[13]

The respective Nestorian and Monophysite tendencies of the Reformed and Lutheran camps, then, seems to arise largely as a result of the tendency to see and speak as if the two natures, as subjects of attribution, are compounded together in the Incarnation so as to form a single Christ. One need only look back to the church’s history, however, to see that the view of the Incarnation taken by the Church Fathers as it was developed in the great Christological controversies provides a very different take on things, one which avoids these tendencies and indeed was meant to combat them.

II. The Solution: Incarnation as Hypostatic Union

Evangelicals should avoid the heretical-seeming tendencies of both the Reformed and Lutheran camps. To do this requires abandoning seeing or speaking of the natures as subjects of attribution or of Christ as being a compound out of these. Otherwise, the natures invariably come to be seen as opposing one another and something must be done resolve that tension – either by making the union more a verbal one or by restricting or modifying one of the natures. The traditional, orthodox view, however, defended and developed in the Ecumenical Councils, treats the Incarnation not as a compounding of one person out of two other entities but rather as hypostatic union. That is, the unity of Jesus in the Incarnation is not founded on any special relations between two independent subjects but rather in the single hypostasis or person of the Divine Word who assumed a human mode of being (i.e., became human).

This is Incarnation as a coming to be a man, not a metamorphosis into one, a single person possessing two natures by first being divine and then being human as well. The two natures are not the subjects of the divine or human attributions but the Word Himself is that subject, who has both divine and human characteristics. Rather than the unity of the person resting in the unity of the natures, the opposite is the case, one person possessing both natures as hypostatic or personal modes of being, one subject of attribution existing as both human and divine.

The Divine Word in the Incarnation did not change in regard to his atemporal divinity but rather from eternity assumed temporal humanity to himself as an additional way of existing.[14] Rather than requiring some restriction or alteration of one nature or the other, this version of the Incarnation is both real, not merely verbal, and yet without conflict between the natures as the Word has two modes of existence and there is no need to try to smash or assimilate them together in order to get a relation of unity between them, since the unity comes via the one Person who exists in both manners. In fact, it is precisely because the Word in his divine nature remains unchanging and omnipotent, unrestricted and unchanged in his divine attributes, that God here is able to become man – that is, to take on a new mode of existence.[15] And this can happen without any restriction or alteration of either of the two natures since it is not they who are the subject or grounds of unity but rather the Divine Person of the Word Himself.

Hence, strictly speaking, the communicatio idiomatum which allows us to say “God the Son suffered and died” and “The man Jesus created the world” is, contrary to how it is often formulated, not a matter of one nature trading attributes with the other – the natures are not the subjects of attribution, nor are they referred to by “God” or “Jesus”.[16] The only referent and only subject of attribution here is the Divine Second Person of the Trinity. Hence, since this person created the world in his divine nature and suffered and died in his human nature and is the referent of both “God the Son” and “the man Jesus”, both “God the Son suffered and died” and “The man Jesus created the world” are literally true and not merely verbally so and this is the case even without the two natures exchanging properties since it is one person who is in possession of both the divine and the human properties and hence who is both God and man.

The communicatio idiomatum, then, is not about an exchange of properties between natures but rather the possession of both sorts of properties – having both natures and being the subject of their respective attributions – by a single hypostasis existing in both ways. Much confusion can be cleared up by this point alone – some attributes are indeed only human and hence are only had by the Word in virtue of having a human nature (that is, in virtue of being human), but it is still the Divine Word who possesses them (and all that without the divine nature changing or being restricted in any way).[17]

III. Conclusion

Against Stanley Grenz, then, the ancient notion of Incarnation as hypostatic union in no way involves a mythological god transforming into a human, any implicit Docetism, or a conception of the Word apart from Jesus.[18] On the contrary, it is precisely the hypostatic union which guarantees the falsity of these pictures by guaranteeing the integrity of the two natures and the singleness of the person who is both fully human and fully divine[19] – it is Jesus the man who is eternal God who takes upon himself a temporal, human life without any change in his divinity. Grenz’s criticisms, instead, find a target only in the ancient misunderstanding of the Incarnation as composition.

In sum, then, there is a common mistaken way of speaking to the effect the natures are the subjects of divine or human attributions and this leads to a mistaken view of Incarnation as composition and hence to a view of the communicatio as sharing of properties between natures, which in turn leads to grave difficulties with Nestorianism or Monophysitism and all the problems attending these. To avoid this, we should speak only of Jesus Christ as the single subject of these attributions, the Divine Person who took on humanity. We should not speak of “God the Son” or “Jesus” any differently, since these are not two natures, but one and the same person existing both fully divinely and fully humanly. Doing this will hopefully then resolve some of the difficulties between Reformed and Lutheran thinkers as we think more clearly about the Incarnation.

[1] J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, Fifth Edition (New York: Continuum, 1977), 315-316; Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?: The Word’s Becoming in Incarnation (Still River, Massachusetts: St. Bede’s Publications, 1985), 43-44.

[2] This, at least, was how the consequences of Eutyches’s views were seen – his own thoughts are widely thought now to be rather more muddled and inconsistent. See J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 331-335; Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 61-62. In keeping with common usage, however, I will continue to attribute these views to Eutyches in the interests of brevity.

[3] Cf. Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 105-106.

[4] See, for instance, John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. J. Allen (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Education, 1936), 527-529.

[5] E.g., Yves M.-J. Congar, Dialogue Between Christians: Catholic Contributions to Ecumenism, trans. P. Loretz (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1966), 394; Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 104-105.

[6] Jan D. Kingston Siggins, Martin Luther’s Doctrine of Christ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 219.

[7] Jan Siggins, Martin Luther’s Doctrine of Christ, 231-232.

[8] For this distinctly Nestorian phenomenon in Calvin, see John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 529.

[9] G. C. Berkouwer, The Person of Christ, trans. J. Vriend (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1954), 309.

[10] It is no accident that some Reformed thinkers have also ended up with a Kenotic Christology, since the underlying Christological tendency in thinking of the Incarnation as a union by composition is the same.

[11] Cf. Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 106. For a criticism of strong versions of Kenoticism, see Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994), 307.

[12] Millard Erickson, The Word Became Flesh: A Contemporary Incarnational Christology (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1991), 549-550.

[13] Millard Erickson, The Word Became Flesh, 555.

[14] See, for instance, Donald Bloesch, Jesus Christ: Savior and Lord (Downer’s Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 54; Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 104; and the discussion of Cyril of Alexandria in Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 54-55.

[15] Weinandy quotes Karl Rahner to this effect in Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 174.

[16] Veli-Matti Kärkäinen, Christology: A Global Introduction: An Ecumenical, International, and Contextual Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 77-81 assumes precisely this confused manner of speaking of Incarnation and the communicatio in his exposition of Christological history and the Lutheran-Reformed debates. Unsurprisingly, there is no mention of the hypostatic union.

[17] Cf. John McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy: Its History, Theology, and Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 202; Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 98. Note that the truth of the Lutheran view of the acquisition by the human nature of the divine attributes occurs in the belief of the Church Fathers that Christ’s human nature was divinized in its union with the Divine Person. That is, Christ was the original subject of theosis, a process we too can undergo without any injury to our human nature, this process being understood as a perfection or completion of human nature rather than its transformation into something else (which Lutherans have a hard time avoiding). Theosis was seen, after all, as a participation in God’s energies or operations, which indwell us, not as a taking on of God’s essence. See J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 321-322; John McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria, 133-134; Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology: A Concise Exposition, trans. and ed. S. Rose (Platina, California: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1994), 184.

[18] Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God, 309.

[19] On the issue of a divine being leaving heaven to become human, see Thomas Weinandy, Does God Change?, 86.

Pneumatological Trends

2012-01-21T11:26:00.000-08:00

One of the key trends in recent theologies of the Holy Spirit seems to be a movement away from confining our concern for the Spirit only to the spheres of personal salvation, understood as a purely “spiritual” matter, or mediation through institutionalized church hierarchies. There seems to be a greatly increased acknowledgement of the holistic nature of the human person and hence of the Holy Spirit’s work not only in personal spiritual matters for a person but also in physical, economic, ecological, and communal matters as well.

Thinkers such as Pannenberg, Moltmann, and ecological thinkers, for instance, rightly stress the Spirit’s role in creation and in sustaining and creating life, thus giving the Spirit a more biblical, more universal role than has often been done in Evangelical theologies where care for creation both by the church and by God have been shamefully set aside, probably partly due to an overreaction to perceived theologically and politically liberal excesses and the wish to avoid guilt by association.

There is also the important theme of the Spirit’s involvement in sustaining and empowering community and justice and liberation, such as can be found in various pieces in the writings of Zizioulas, Welker, African theologians, and ecological and feminist thinkers. Again, this is an important emphasis that was long neglected by Evangelicalism but which I think, with the mainstreaming of a lot of Evangelical concerns for justice and racial reconciliation, can quickly be reinfused into the Evangelical heritage – it only requires us to take those concerns just mentioned and relate them more directly to the Holy Spirit.

Hate religion, love Jesus?

2012-01-15T16:19:00.000-08:00

Notes on Stanley Grenz's Christology

2012-01-14T12:21:00.000-08:00

I'm now reading Stanley Grenz's Theology for the Community of God for an online class. Here are some thoughts about his Christology so far:

Grenz’s Christology is based on the idea of Jesus as both revelation of God and revelation of true humanity. The strength of Grenz’s view is how he derives such ideas from Scripture and then uses them both to demonstrate Jesus’ divinity and humanity, and to show how Jesus’ humanity reveals to us how we are to live loving each other as a community. Unfortunately, there is not much more to his view and very little in the way of explanation, despite claims otherwise. The key problem is that Grenz continually confuses demonstration of Christological truths with explanation of them. Over and over, when he goes to explain something all he does instead is offer evidence for it, which is not in any way the same thing. In particular, he uses a “from below” method, focusing on Jesus’ earthly life, to demonstrate Christological truths but then confuses this with having explained them.

The key problem is found in his attempt to explain how Christ is both God and human (303-305). He says, looking at Christ’s human life, that Christ reveals both God and true humanity. The most full representation or revelation of a thing, of course, is something which is identical to it. Hence, it follows that Christ is both God and true human. But this does not explain how he is both God and true human. Being fully God or fully human is what makes it the case that he reveals God or true humanity, not vice versa. So that Jesus is both God and man follows from his revealing God and humanity but it is the former that explains the latter. Hence revealing both cannot explain being both since the dependence is the other way around. Grenz has confused demonstration (that Christ is God and man) with explanation (how Christ is God and man).

His attempted explanation of the Incarnation, for instance, does little more than simply say again that the man Jesus reveals God and true humanity and hence Jesus is both divine and human, another instance of confusing demonstration with explanation. If Jesus is God, though, then he is eternal and the question remains how then to explain an eternal God becoming human, something which a view of the Incarnation ought to do. Grenz (308-311), however, simply sidesteps the issue by offering misgivings of standard views (which really affect popular expositions of such views or ways people have taken them rather than the views themselves) but without offering any actual alternative.

Grenz’s problems lead to a problematic take on pre-existence, where Grenz claims that Jesus “belongs to” God’s eternity but does not really explain this and instead changes the subject – he shifts from ascribing the revelation of God to Jesus to ascribing it to his 30-something-year-long earthly life. He then speaks as if this series of events was eternal, which it literally speaking is not. He then proceeds to use pre-existence as a metaphor for the significance of Jesus’ life in history, which is a distinct issue, even if literal pre-existence is what makes this significance possible. Grenz, ultimately, seems to tie Jesus so closely to his earthly life that he does not seem to address in any satisfactory way a divine life logically prior to it and existing in eternity. This seems to be due mostly to his confusion between a “from below” method of demonstration with an actual explanation, which may require taking the results of that method and going further to explain them. Unfortunately, he does not do this, either in his take on pre-existence or in the other Christological issues I already discussed.

Bibliography 2nd Half 2011

2012-01-07T08:15:00.000-08:00

A bibliography similar to the last one. This one covers July-December 2011. Again, it's not necessarily complete and contains only whole books, not articles or primarily reference works. I'm also trying to only include books that are new - i.e., not on the previous list. Starred books are ones I consider particularly outstanding, interesting, or otherwise likable.

Bell, Richard H. Provoked to Jealousy: The Origin and Purpose of the Jealousy Motif in Romans 9-11. Tübingen: Mohr, 1994.
Bell, Richard H. The Irrevocable Call of God: An Inquiry into Paul’s Theology of Israel. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005
Betz, Hans Dieter, Galatians
Bruce, F.F. The Epistle to the Galatians
Cranfield, C. E. B. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Volume I: Commentary on Romans I-XIII. New York: T&T Clark, 1979
Cranfield, C. E. B. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Volume II: Commentary on Romans IX-XVI and Essays. New York: T&T Clark, 1979
Carson, O'Brien, Seifrid (eds.) Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume 2: The Paradoxes of Paul
Carter, Jeffrey, Understanding Religious Sacrifice: A Reader
*Davis, Leo Donald. The First Seven Ecumenical Councils: Their History and Theology
Das, A. Andrew. Paul and the Jews. Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 2003
Donaldson, Terence L. Paul and the Gentiles: Remapping the Apostle’s Convictional World. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997
Donnelly, Doris (ed.) Mary, Woman of Nazareth: Biblical and Theological Perspectives
*Dunn, James D. G. Romans, 2 vols.
Dunn, James D. G. The Epistle to the Galatians
*Dunn, James D. G. The Theology of Paul's Letter to the Galatians
Dunn, James D. G. (ed.) Paul and the Mosaic Law
*Fee, Gordon. Galatians
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. New York: Doubleday, 1993
Gadenz, Pablo. Called from the Jews and from the Gentiles: Pauline Ecclesiology in Romans 9-11. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009
Grillmeier, Aloys, S.J. Christ in Christian Tradition, Volume One: From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451),1975.
Hay, D. M. and E. E. Johnson (eds.) Pauline Theology, Volume III: Romans. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995
*Hays, Richard. The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11. 2nd edition.
*Hays, Richard. Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989
Hays, Richard "Galatians" in New Interpreter's Bible Vol. XI
Hubner, Hans. Law in Paul's Thought
Jewett, Robert. Romans: A Commentary. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007
Käsemann, Ernst. Commentary on Romans. Translated and edited by G. W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1980
*Kelly, J.N.D. Early Christian Doctrines. 5th edition.
Lambrecht, Jan. Pauline Studies: Collected Essays by Jan Lambrecht. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1994
Longenecker, Richard. Galatians
Martyn, J. Louis Galatians
*Matera, Frank J. Galatians
Matera, Frank J. Romans. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010
McCabe, Herbert, O.P. God Still Matters
*Moo, Douglas. The Epistle to the Romans. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1996
Perriman, Andrew. The Future of the People of God
*Plato, The Republic
Sanders, E. P. Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1983
Schillebeeckx, E. Mary, Mother of Redemption
Scott, James M. (editor). Exile: Old Testament, Jewish, and Christian Conceptions. Leiden: Brill, 1997
Smulders, P. The Fathers on Christology: The Development of Christological Dogma from the Bible
Stendahl, Krister. Final Account
Thielman, Frank. From Plight to Solution: A Jewish Framework for Understanding Paul’s View of the Law in Galatians and Romans. Leiden: Brill, 1989
*Weinandy, Thomas, OFM Cap. Does God Change?: The Word's Becoming in the Incarnation
Westerholm, Stephen, Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The "Lutheran" Paul and His Critics
Williams, Sam K., Galatians
*Witherington, III, Ben. Paul’s Narrative Thought World: The Tapestry of Tragedy and Triumph. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1994
*Witherington, III, Ben. Grace in Galatia: A Commentary on Paul's Letter to the Galatians
*Wright, N. T. The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991
*Wright, N. T., The New Testament and the People of God. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992
*Wright, N. T.,“Romans.” In The New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume X, 393-770, edited by L. E. Keck, et al. Nashville: Abingdon, 2002
*Wright, N. T., Paul for Everyone: Romans: Part 1: Chapters 1-8.
*Wright, N. T., Paul for Everyone: Romans: Part 2: Chapters 9-16.
*Wright, N. T., Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians.

Some Soteriological Notes

2011-12-31T11:21:00.000-08:00

This paper consists of some personal reflections on some of the Soteriological material presented in class. My initial reaction to most of the material was how far removed talk of Christ’s atoning work on the cross was from the actual biblical source material and its Jewish-Christian context. While Anselm, for instance, retains the notion of substitution one finds in the New Testament (unfortunately ὑπέρ in these contexts is often translated “for” or “for the sake of” when the sense “in place of” is in fact syntactically more probable), he sets it in a very different frame of reference than the salvation-historical framework one finds in the New Testament, where Jesus’ atonement is linked with Torah and Israel’s plight under its curse (particularly in Galatians and Romans). Paul, for instance, seems to see Israel’s transgression of the Torah and subsequent condemnation by it as playing some important, non-accidental role in producing salvation (see especially Galatians 3, Romans 5, 9-11).

None of this, however, makes it into the considerations of the mostly ahistorical, abstract accounts of Christ’s work that we have studied. That is not to say that there is not much valuable in these accounts and that a more biblically-oriented account would not be understood at least partly in these terms when elaborated philosophically, but it does mean that these accounts necessarily leave out some of the key data that must be taken into account when constructing a view of the atonement. On the other accounts, Jesus might as well have come and died as a Greek, an Arab, or a Bantu – his Jewishness and Jewish context does not seem to play any part in the makeup of his saving work.

While Aquinas keeps much of Anselm’s view, it looks like Aquinas (at least according to our reading from Caesario (81)) eventually held that Christ’s satisfaction on the cross was not ultimately necessary for God to justly save us. It was simply more convenient in obtaining (mostly subjective) goods which more naturally flow from Christ’s satisfaction on the cross than from elsewhere. Of course, since it is the omnipotent God we are speaking of, it is not clear what it would mean to speak of him doing something more easily or conveniently in one way than another. It seems to me, however, that this makes it difficult to see the point of the atonement. If God could just as well accomplish our salvation in some other way, Christ’s crucifixion seems to represent pointless, unnecessary pain and suffering. Sure, it gets us redemption and all sorts of goods, but it was not really necessary for all of that. It certainly seems that we need some kind of stricter, less contingent connection between Christ’s work and our salvation.

Herbert McCabe (in his 2002 book God Still Matters) takes the problems with Anselm and Aquinas recounted above, however, and makes them even worse. This is something that bothered me quite a bit when I read him. He at least tries to put in some historical context but his grasp of that context is questionable and gets both Second Temple Judaism and its relation to Jesus and the New Testament wrong, importing much later (and ironically often more Protestant) Christian criticisms of Jews as unloving and legalistic (and Christ as the ancient equivalent of the stereotypical 1960s hippie – pro-love and anti-law or anti-authority) back into the first century, thus divorcing Jesus from his Jewish context in a way not justified by the New Testament or Second Temple evidence.

In any case, the nod to apparent historical context essentially functions in the McCabe work as a mere foil to press yet another basically ahistorical understanding of Christ’s work. It becomes all about an abstract principle of love and the preaching of that love, and the kingdom of God becomes more or less just the realization of that love on earth. Indeed, only the humanity of Christ seems to be important in McCabe’s chapter, as it is Christ’s full humanity and the perfect love wherefrom that does all the work here – the divinity seems to be well-hidden indeed.

What is worse, however, is that, while at least Aquinas had some kind of goal for the crucifixion, even if it could have been accomplished differently, McCabe does not even seem to retain this much. Questions such as “Why did Jesus opt for crucifixion?” are basically replaced with “Why would humans crucify someone like him?” The second question would certainly be an interesting one, but it completely changes the subject so that we are no longer even speaking of Christ’s saving work or its goals anymore but rather fallen human psychology. McCabe’s answer, that this is what fallen people do to people who truly love and preach the same, does not really address or even acknowledge the need for Jesus to die, or why he would go to Jerusalem in order to die in accordance with God’s will, both of which are forcefully presented in the New Testament, especially in the Gospels (but which several of our readings would appear at first glance to want to avoid). McCabe, in other words, substitutes essentially ahistorical principles of armchair human psychology for the divine objectives of the cross – a pale substitution indeed.

McCabe completely ignores the perspective in the Gospels whereby Jesus in fact purposely provokes the hostile reaction of the leaders leading to death, going to Jerusalem in order to die precisely as the climax of his ministry and not, as McCabe would have it, the failure of it. It is precisely the culmination of his mission, not its failure (or even a failure then used victoriously by God). McCabe’s chapter, in effect, seems to make Jesus’ crucifixion just an accidental effect of telling people to love each other, without any real point, purpose, or objective effect. It is difficult to see in McCabe’s crucifixion any real, objective redemption rather than just an accident of history. It instead becomes a mere pastoral illustration of what happens when people talk “too much” about love.

What many of these accounts lack, then, would need to be remedied in a more serviceable account of the atonement of Christ on the cross. What we need is an account that is based firmly in the biblical data and actually takes it all into account, taking the event of the crucifixion in its historical context and its biblical place within the salvation-historical narrative of Scripture rather than simply trying to abstract from it a mere instance of some acontextual timeless principle. From these beginnings, it can then engage philosophically and systematically with the biblical theology and concepts and understand what is contained therein in new ways. At this point, however, it would be best I think to draw a tighter connection between Christ’s death and its results, making the crucifixion once again an actual need of ours met by God in Christ according to the divine plan for our salvation.

Aquinas and Christmas

2011-12-23T11:17:00.000-08:00

Like the great councils of Nicea, Constantinople I, Ephesus, Chalcedon, and Constantinople III, Aquinas addressed, in his own theory of the Incarnation, many of the Christological concerns that had been prevalent during the patristic period. Indeed, one way to see what he is doing is to try to do justice in a philosophical framework to the insights of these great councils, seeing Christ as having both a human nature and a divine nature and these as united in the one person of the divine Word, each with its own characteristic activity and operations. In my previous paper, I showed how the councils just mentioned addressed these concerns; in the present paper my concern will be to show first of all how Aquinas addresses these. As his own views entail that in some sense Christ is not a human person, I will also show how Aquinas can maintain this in light of Christ’s full humanity. Similarly, in regards to Christ’s full divinity and full humanity, I will describe how it is that Aquinas thinks Christ’s human will can be the principle of its own self-determining action but always as an instrument of and in cooperation with his divine will.

In the Incarnation, what is most essential perhaps is that God becomes man. However, to do justice to the divine transcendence requires explaining this in a way that does not impinge on the transcendence and immutability of God. The distinction between the two natures in Christ provides the beginning of a way to do justice to this. Since God qua God – that is, as existing in and through the divine nature – cannot change, then it must be something else that undergoes a change, since obviously some change does occur with the advent of the Incarnation. So it must be the Creation itself which undergoes change, not the Creator. After all, one can say that the divine Word does change in the sense that at one time certain predicates (such as being a man) cannot be applied to the Word but then later one is indeed able to apply such predicates. But that is compatible with there being no actual change in the Word himself as existing in his divine nature since the change which results in a change in which predicates can be appropriately applied may be in something outside of that divine nature.

This change, which is not in the Word in his divinity but in creation, involves the creation by God of a human nature in personal dependence on the Word as the Word’s own. A bit of creation, in this way, has been taken into the divine life, conjoined to God. It is not a pre-existing human nature but a created nature created precisely as a way of being for the divine Word, itself dependent upon the Word and lacking its own separate individual existence distinct from and apart from the Word since it is itself a mode of the Word’s own existing.

For Aquinas, this change in creation and subsequent relation of dependence of the humanity of the Word on the person of the Word involves the coming into being of new mixed relations rather than relations in which each term is really related to the other. Instead, the human nature is really related to the Word as one of its two modes of existence. The relation is real in it as it comes into existence united to the Word. This involves a real effect in the humanity without a change or any kind of effect in the Word in his divine existence, guaranteeing thus both the possibility of full humanity and full divinity since the two natures thus remain unmixed yet united in the one person of the Word, the human nature subject to change and really related to the divine but the divine nature still immutable and only in ideal relation to the human nature, the relation being in the human nature alone. Because God thus remains immutable in becoming human, we can truly say that it is God in Christ who has become a mutable man, not some other entity which in becoming a human would be subject to change and hence devoid of the divine transcendence proper to God. This works precisely because it is one and the same divine Word who, in addition to his divine nature, has conjoined to him a human nature in addition, thus permitting the communication of idioms when speaking of Christ.

Christ has a full human nature, however, composed of a fully human soul united to a fully human body. The problem is having this body/soul compound and full humanity in Christ yet not have it constitute its own person in addition to the divine person of the Word. A Boethian conception of personhood would let any concrete nature capable of consciousness and freedom to be a person, in which case there would be a human person in addition to divine person of the Word. Aquinas, however, requires of personhood or being a hypostasis that it be complete and existing independently of other things. In this sense, there is only one person in Christ for Aquinas, the divine person of the Word.

A union of joined body and soul, however, would in normal circumstances result in the existence of a human person. In Christ there is no such person but only a human nature since the human nature of Christ does not exist apart from all other hypostases but instead exists only in dependence on the person or hypostasis of the Word. Otherwise, the human nature would have its own human person, existing apart from the Word. The divine person, then, takes the place of the human person, preventing the human nature of Christ from being the mode of existence of a separate human person. If we understand a human person as a human nature existing hypostatically in itself, then on Aquinas’s view, there is no human person of Christ, only a divine person existing compositely in both divine and human natures.

For Aquinas, a person or hypostasis is not equivalent to the modern notion of a personality or a stream of consciousness but an individual existent. Personhood is a matter of who, not of what. The hypostasis of someone specifies who it is, its nature specifies what it is, giving the way in which that who exists. Being fully human, however, is a matter of what one is – one’s nature – not who one is – one’s hypostasis. Whether or not the person who has the human nature is divine or human does not impact the full humanity of that person, since being a divine person in no way effects what that person is. Insofar as they have a full, working human nature, that person is thereby fully human. The absence of a human person does not, in Christ, involve an absence of anything in his humanity but rather is the result of its addition to the divine person. Christ, then, is fully human and in that sense, subsisting in a human nature, can be said to be a human person. But Christ’s personhood does not arise from the human nature on its own, existing apart from everything else, and in that sense Christ is not a human person, but in such a way that his full humanity remains intact.

All this shows, then, that on Aquinas’s views it is truly God who is redeeming us as a man, but in such a way that the divine Word retains his divine transcendence and yet also possesses full humanity and unites both divinity and humanity in a single person. To show, however, that Jesus’ humanity is truly a mediator in our salvation and not simply an instrument of God (and hence is a full humanity and able to save human beings through his life, death, and resurrection), Aquinas must elaborate a dyothelite position which allows for truly human acting and willing. Otherwise, the divine will and activity crowd out the human and it becomes the divine nature alone which is active, the human nature being merely a passive participant and not a truly human source of human willing and human activity. It is the human suffering and willing of the divine Word in a genuinely human fashion that is redemptive, after all.

In Aquinas’s view, it seems that there is first of all a coordination of the divine will and human will in Christ rooted precisely in the fact that it is one person who possesses both wills, both principles of genuinely divine and human activity. The human will of Christ receives its principle of activity and is moved towards the intentions of God by the divine will. In this way, the human will of Christ acts as an instrument of the divine will in bringing about the divine ends. It is not a mere instrument, however, as the actions of the human nature of Christ are mediated by his human will, which is free and self-determining. It is, hence, a conjoined will as the will of the very divine person using it as an instrument, but also an instrument of the rational order with its own principle of action moved via that principle by another principle of action, the divine. It is hence not passive in this interaction but actively pursues and chooses for itself the intentions and goals of the divine will.

The human will of Christ, hence, is moved by the divine will to freely act and is graced by God in its hypostatic union with the person of the Word with the grace necessary to do so. This grace perfects in some way the human nature of Christ, as human nature is always perfected through the infusion of divine grace, which thereby makes Christ’s will free to always follow the good. In this sense of freedom, freedom to do the good, the hypostatic union and corresponding instrumentality of the human will of Christ in fact guarantee the freedom of that will rather than take away from it. The divine will, then, moves the human will of Christ towards freely pursuing the good and the divine ends, but through the self-determining and active principles of the human nature, not directly and without that mediation. As a conjoined will being used by a divine will, the influence of that divine will is one from the inside (internal to that person), as it were, not an external or coercive one. This may very well require, as perhaps Aquinas, White and Crowley seem to think (see, for instance, White 415, 421), a progressive human knowledge in Christ of who he is and of God’s will in given situations, graced upon him as part of the cooperation of his human nature with his divine, thus helping to secure a psychological unity for Christ as a single, integrated person of unmixed humanity and divinity. As already said, this grace perfects Christ’s humanity rather than detracts from it. By always being aware of the good and will of God, Christ, because of his graced human nature and will, always acts in accordance with the good and divine will, the human and divine wills thus being coordinated and yet their own principles of genuinely free activity in the person of Christ.

The person of the divine Word, then, acts as a single person precisely through this coordinated cooperation of his two natures and two wills. The Word is fully God, transcendent and unchanging even in the Incarnation. The Word is fully human, possessed of a union of body and soul with a functioning human life and active, self-determining will. It is one divine person who exists in and acts through each of these natures; there is not a distinct human person in Christ. Hence, it is in Christ truly God who redeems and truly through his own humanity and its activities and will that he does so. Aquinas appears, then, to have further elaborated and defended the very balancing of the various Christological concerns that was so vigorously defended by the great councils of the church.

Patristic Christology

2011-12-16T11:11:00.000-08:00

I have finally finished all my commitments for this semester at the GTU! I'm currently applying both for philosophy employment (please pray for that) and for New Testament PhD programs at the same time and will see where Providence takes us. In the meantime, I'll make a couple of posts from the papers (mostly summarizing my own synthesis of course materials) I wrote for my Historical Development of Christology class. Here's the first one:

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Arius, Apollinaris, and Nestorius represented respectively for the early church three different foils for the development of Christological doctrine. In response to the Christological imbalances in the views of these thinkers and others after them, the successive ecumenical councils of the early church progressively centered in on a truly balanced Christology, taking into account Christ’s full humanity, full divinity, and unity, while at the same time maintaining the transcendence of God within the mystery of the Incarnation. In this essay I will consider each of the three heterodox thinkers listed above and show how Nicea, Constantinople I, Ephesus, Chalcedon, and Constantinople III all redressed in their particular ways the doctrinal mistakes of those three.

Arius was the first early heretical thinker to provoke his own ecumenical council devoted to adjudicating his views. It is arguable that one of the key determining factors in Arius’s Christology was his concern to protect the transcendence of the divine as he understood it – to keep the divine immutable and well-removed from the earthly realm of becoming and corruption. Arius’s God is, in effect, not so different from modern Deist versions of the deity, if not even more aloof from his creation, if that is possible.

The Logos serves in Arius’s thinking, as in Origenist theology of the period, as the intermediary in creation between God and the world, keeping the two firmly apart. But since the Logos is thus involved in creation, the Logos cannot be transcendent in the same way God is. With the rejection of a Platonic view of levels within God and a focus on divine transcendence as essential to divinity, this apparently lower being, the Logos, cannot have a share in that divinity. As such, the Logos must be created by God Himself, all else coming from the Logos directly rather than God in his unsullied distance from Creation.

Apart from cosmological considerations, Arius’s understanding of transcendence also pushes him towards a rejection of the Son’s divinity because of his view of the Incarnation and the nature of the unity of the Incarnate Son. Arius takes onboard the Logos-sarx framework then fashionable in Alexandria, according to which Jesus Christ had a human body but instead of a rational soul in the way other humans do, he had the supreme Logos as his rational, animating principle (I will return to this framework below in discussing Apollinaris). As such, since Christ underwent suffering and change, the Logos as his vital principle also underwent these. But since the divine nature is immutable and impassible, not to mention transcendent, the Logos cannot possess the divine nature as its own.

Arius, then, certainly protects divine transcendence as well as the unity of Christ – the Logos is not an additional entity but rather takes the role of the soul in the man Christ, thus combining Logos and human body in one incarnate being. The Platonically-influenced thought was that if something is the rational, animating principle of a human body then that basically makes it a human soul. However, the Logos was very different from a human soul, hence the worry with Logos-sarx Christology that Christ’s full humanity had been compromised. Christ becomes a kind of super-creature with a human body but something very different from the human mind or soul possessed by the rest of the human race. While preserving the need for Christ to actually suffer and die, thus entering into human reality, that very human reality is compromised by replacing the soul with the Logos. Christ, rather than being a human being, becomes in this view of the Incarnation a new kind of entity, compounded of human bodily parts and the super-creature who mediates between God and man. And if Christ, as many argued, needed to be fully human in order to fully save humans – possessing every bit of human nature in order to redeem every bit of it – then this Christ is not able to redeem us as whole human beings, bodies and souls. Jettisoning divinity for Christ, Arius thus also ran afoul of the objection that his Christ, lacking divinity, could not save, since only God can save.

The Council of Nicea, called to address Arius’s views, succeeded in theologically resolving at least some of Arius’s imbalanced theology. Without addressing issues relating to the divine transcendence or Christ’s humanity or unity, Nicea did affirm the full divinity of Christ, declaring him same in substance or being (ὁμοούσιος) with the Father. The Origenist notion of levels of divinity in the Godhead via emanation from the ultimate, transcendent, unitary God was abandoned. This safeguarded both Christ’s full possession of the divine nature shared with the Father as well as his ability to save in virtue of this fact.

Since Nicea did not address the other issues involved in Arius’s view, however, it is not surprising to see Apollinaris accept Nicea and the full divinity of Christ (or at least attempt to do so) and yet fall into other problems related to Arius’s view, all stemming from Apollinaris’s acceptance of the same Logos-sarx framework as Arius. Like Arius, Apollinaris views Christ as a composite of the Logos and a human body, the former again replacing the human soul in Christ. But once the Logos is recognized as fully divine, the combination with the Logos-sarx view, while rendering Christ a true unity, in fact causes problems in almost every other area.

Since the Logos, on Apollinaris’s view, joins with a human body, it seems to form a new, composite entity, Christ (similar to the way it does in Arius’s view) – a tertium quid neither fully human nor fully divine but something else. Just as in Arius’s view, a human body with the Logos instead of a human soul is not fully human. Christ apparently also cannot be fully divine for the additional reason that since it would seem that the Logos, as the replacement for the human soul, would have to serve as the seat of Christ’s suffering and other experiences. But that would make the Logos passable. The Logos in such a case could not have the full divine nature, lacking divine transcendence and its impassibility. Being neither fully God nor fully man, Christ would then neither save as God nor be able to redeem whole human persons since he would lack whole human personhood himself. While it could be claimed that the Logos retains its impassibility, this would require a mere appearance of suffering and human experience and hence a retreat to a docetic Christ, a denial of the true reality of the man Jesus and his real suffering, human life and free obedience for our salvation as he is swallowed up in the transcendent divine.

The First Council of Constantinople condemned Apollinaris and affirmed the true, full humanity of Christ. Rather than a mere human body, his humanity was a full one, involving a combination of both body and soul, complete humanity for the salvation of human beings. It thus also safeguarded against a violation of divine transcendence as well as the danger of docetism since the Logos was not directly compounded with a human body (and hence helped save the reality of the man Jesus).

Without the Logos-sarx framework, however, the problem of accounting for the unity of Christ returned. If we start with the divine Logos on one hand – God – and this complete human being on the other – the man Jesus – then how do we account for their unity in Christ? The unity of Christ thus provides the central problem affecting Nestorius’s Christology. Nestorius accepted both a full human nature and a full divine nature in Christ, but seems to have had problems putting them together in such a way as to form a convincing unity, so averse he was to the danger of forming a tertium quid out of the two as Apollinaris or Arius did. Nestorius’s notion of a nature was that of an concrete individual entity and hence he thought of the incarnation as the coming together of two concrete individuals, which results in one new prosopon or phenomenal reality of unity. On Nestorius’s view, then, there is not a single subject who is the Logos and hence has divine properties and who is also the man Jesus and hence has human properties – existing both as God and as man. Hence, there can be on his view no communication of idioms – no applying of predicates of divinity to the man Jesus and no applying of predicates of humanity to the divine Logos, as would have followed were the subject identical. Mary, on this view, cannot be rightly said to be the Mother of God – the Theotokos (Θεοτόκος) or God-Bearer.

Nestorius, in trying to maintain full divinity and divine transcendence on the one hand, and full humanity on the other, thus trips over the issue of the unity of Christ, which in turns raises the issue of whether Christ on Nestorius’s view would be able to save, given that only God can save, since it would seem that one would not then be allowed to say that God lived, suffered, died, and was raised for our salvation. Human mediatorship in salvation is secured, but the role of the divine, being pushed out of the created world as in Arius’s view, seems to be damaged.

The Council of Ephesus responded to Nestorius by rejecting his views as providing insufficient unity for Christ. It is one and the same Logos who is at once God and man, to whom both divine and human attributes accrue and hence Mary is indeed Theotokos. As Cyril noted, divinity and humanity are united in the one hypostasis or person of the divine Logos, hence the communication of idioms is completely appropriate (it is, in fact, just an application of the logical rule Leibniz’s Law, also known as the Indiscernibility of Identicals) – we can say both that God truly suffered on the cross and that the man Jesus is creator of the world, Second Person of the Trinity, since these are really one person, God the Son. Unity is hence found in the person of the Logos, not in some special extra relationship added as an outside extra to Christ’s divinity and humanity. Hence the unity of Christ and the divine role in salvation were secured for the time being by the council.

Ephesus, however, did not solve the question that Nestorius’s view seems to have addressed fairly well; that is, how to maintain divine transcendence and full divinity in the face of full humanity, taking both the divinity and humanity seriously as demanded by Nicea and Constantinople I. The idea of dividing humanity and divinity into two distinct, unmixed natures seems to do this, allowing for full humanity without being distorted or altered in nature by mixing with divinity and for full divinity without being distorted or altered in nature by mixing with humanity. Hence, in divinity Christ can remain transcendent and divine, whereas in humanity he can be a full, though sinless, human.

The Council of Chalcedon takes on this important usage of the notion of two natures, but without adding in Nestorius’s interpretation of the notion. That is, Constantinople does not interpret the notion of a nature in terms of a concrete individual entity. The natures are not independent things added together to form Christ but, instead, the human and divine natures are distinct sets of characteristic properties or ways of being, united in the person of Christ as the one subject of these properties who thus exists in two fully distinct ways – the divine way and a particular human way. Without changing in the divine nature, the single person of Christ took on a new mode of existence in the Incarnation, which is a change in the created order rather than in Christ qua God. Chalcedon thus takes on the important insights of the two-nature view held by people like Nestorius but without the distortions caused by too-concrete a notion of what a divine or human nature might be. Chalcedon thus successfully integrates the insights of Nicea – that Christ is fully God – and of Constantinople I – that Christ is fully human – with that of Ephesus – that Christ forms a unity in the person of the divine Logos.

The Third Council of Constantinople clarified and further developed the Chalcedonian trajectory of Christology by addressing Christ’s full humanity not merely in the sense of the possession of an abstract, though concretely realized, nature but also in terms of a fully human way of life and activity, a human use of human freedom to form a truly human life, giving truly human obedience to the Father unto death. Without a distinctly human will and human activity, which were rejected by the monothelites, there is an inherent danger of a kind of implicit Apollinarism or even docetism, where the human life of Christ is consumed by rather than perfected by the divine life he also possesses. There is a danger then in the two directions of either failing to respect divine transcendence by, in effect, replacing much of the functionality of the human soul with that of the divine Logos, or, on the other hand, failing to respect the true reality of the man Jesus. In either case, a truly human life has been compromised and, if as in the West, it is thought that such a life and human obedience are important for our salvation, then such a view will certainly not do. If Christ is to save us by humanly taking on as free, human action, a human obedience unto death on the cross, this would seem to require that he actually act and will in his human nature and that he both have a human will and source of activity and that these not simply sit there inert, as good as absent from him.

The Third Council of Constantinople addresses this concern by investing in Christ a fully human reality – Christ, in addition to his divine will, has and uses a human will, a human principle of activity. Christ, in other words, acts in both of his natures, not simply the divine one. The real human existence, activity, and freedom of the man Jesus are thus at last properly ascribed to the one Logos who is at once also in possession of a divine existence, activity, and freedom, unified together in that one divine person who acts and exists in each nature.

In conjunction with the councils before it, then, Constantinople III guarantees that Christ is truly one of us – the perfect human being and representative of us as human beings before the Father and to us of what we as Christians can and must become in Christ. At the same time, however, Christ is guaranteed as where we are able in this life to directly meet God – not mediated through creation but the divine Son himself who, in virtue of his consubstantiality with the Father, reveals to us the Father as well. In Christ, we encounter God himself in the only way we are currently able to do so – the infinite taking on the finite in order to be revealed to the finite.

The orthodox view developed in the councils examined in this paper, then, does something that the heterodox thinkers do not – that is, present a picture of Christ which balances all the important considerations and truths we get from theology and Scripture. While the heterodox views latch onto and appear to do extremely well with certain considerations, they do so at the cost of others, failing to take into account other important considerations or truths and thus ending up with a lopsided theology as a result or even a Christ who perhaps cannot even save.

More on Ephesians 5 and Principles of Interpretation and Application of Scripture

2011-11-05T10:16:00.000-07:00

It's commonplace for Christians to take the Bible as speaking directly to them - to individualize and personalize whatever is written and read it as addressed particularly to me in my current context (however wide or narrow I may take that). In this, Christians have a lot in common with the early Rabbis (and later ones, I believe) and certainly with certain strands in Paul and the rest of the New Testament. How we read in this way and how we take into account the fact that the human authors of the Bible did not, generally, have me in particular as their direct addressee, will differ, however. In what way we take the Bible to be addressed to me in particular is very important and has ramifications for the theological and ethical interpretation of the Bible. In my opinion, the Bible is addressed to me in particular in that the Holy Spirit uses the Bible to speak to me - words that were not originally addressed to me and perhaps with a different meaning are reused by the divine activity within me to address me in my particular situation. This, I think, retains both the freedom of God to speak to my current situation in Scripture while also retaining the integrity of the Scripture's original meaning. A lot of people, however, do maintain this sort of distinction in practice and treat Scripture as if in its original meaning it was speaking directly to me personally.

Another problem is to confuse description and prescription. Pastors must often appeal to this distinction when our favorite Bible saint obviously acts not-so-saintly, but otherwise the distinction unfortunately tends to get ignored. That the early church is described in Acts as doing things a certain way (or not doing it, as the case may be), for instance, does not tell us necessarily whether that is how we are to do things - i.e., description is not prescription. Telling us that something is happening a certain way (or will happen or did happen) is not the same as telling us that things should be thus and so or that we should do such and such.

The Ephesians 5 passage on wives and husbands, which I discussed in my last post, is a nice case to look at in regards to both the above problems. This passage, as hinted at in the other post, is a flashpoint in the gender wars going on in Evangelicalism today. On one side are the Egalitarians, who uphold things like women's ordination and functional equality in the home (anti-patriarchal, in other words). On the other are the Complementarians, who (at least for some of them) are against women's ordination and uphold things like patriarchal household structure as a Scriptural norm to be followed.

Ephesians 5, I maintain, is actually a difficult passage to use for either side, despite its current wide use. As argued previously, it first of all does not contain a single command for wives to submit - it merely says that they are or will do so (in other words, it describes but does not prescribe submission). But what about the whole "the husband is head of the wife" thing? Well, there's a big debate here over the meaning of "head" in Greek (kephale), which some Egalitarians argue always or almost always lacks any connotation of hierarchy (unlike the word for "head" in Latin, Hebrew, or English, all of which have exactly that connotation). Let's set that debate aside, however, and simply assume for the moment that the Greek word has the same meaning as the English one and here indicates a position of leadership or power over the household. What then?

Well, notice that the language here is actually on its surface at least descriptive, not prescriptive. Paul says, "the husband is the head of the wife as Christ of the church," but does not say "the husband should be the head of the wife as Christ of the church." That does not mean Paul did not think the latter or did not mean for us to believe it, just that he did not go out and write it, which makes it more difficult to argue that this is some kind of norm for the Christian family just from this passage. What Paul says, however, is also consistent with the thinking that, though the husband is head of the wife, that is not how things should be and that such an arrangement should be avoided where possible (ceterus paribus, of course).

Note also that we ought to avoid the problem noted in the first paragraph of this post. Paul uses the present tense to describe male headship. But, of course, Paul wrote in the first century, not the twenty-first! Which means, Paul is not even necessarily describing the current state of things but rather the way things were in the first century (and perhaps in an even smaller context than that even - he probably did not have in mind Native American societies, for instance, in his description - though, on the other hand, he may indeed have intended his description universally - unfortunately the text is not specific enough to tell for sure). In first century Asia Minor, his intended addressee, the male was indeed the head of the household. Both Jewish and Gentile cultures here were thoroughly patriarchal, after all. It is a mistake, then, to see a translation like "The husband is head of the wife" and automatically assume that Paul is saying this about our current time. Maybe he meant it as an eternal truth, but maybe not - the text does not obviously specify the former, in any case. At the very least, Paul is making an observation about the state of affairs in their cultures, but it's not easy to go beyond that. Even if, then, Paul did in fact mean male headship to be prescriptive rather than merely descriptive, that would not tell us directly whether or not it is prescriptive for us today (rather than being so only for those cultures to which Paul was directly speaking).

Take some of the other passages in the same series: Paul commands children to obey parents and slaves their masters. In the first instance, we think this is still a good arrangement and prescriptive generally across the board. In the second, nowadays, we tend to think that it addresses situations where slavery is socially accepted but is compatible with thinking slavery to be wrong. Similarly, the wife passage may be taken either in the same way as the children passage or in the same way as the slave passage - is female submission to male headship an eternal arrangement or just a way to deal with an unjust situation which is systemic in a particular culture (in this case, patriarchal dominance)?

Ephesians 5 Contains No Command for Wives to Submit - Or, Why Things are Often More Interesting in the Original Greek

2011-10-07T22:45:00.000-07:00

With all of my Greek studies, I've gotten to the point where I don't really like translations all that much any more (although it has increased my appreciation of the KJV somewhat, ironically). While I still primarily use the NIV for personal reading, for instance, I would never use it for more in-depth study. It's translations of Romans and Galatians, for instance, are particularly horrid and completely distort the sense of the Greek, reading into it things that either are not there or even completely changing the meaning in an unwarranted fashion. More literal translations tend to be better but not necessarily - the NASB's version of Song of Songs, for instance, misreads crucial sections of the Hebrew so that the Wisdom sub-genre of the Song is nearly lost, resulting in a very inferior version.
In any case, looking at the (in)famous "wives and husbands" passage in Ephesians 5, a favorite at weddings (well, more conservative ones at least), one finds something somewhat different from what winds up in most English translations. Most treat verse 21 as a command for everyone to submit to one another and then move on in 22 to a command for wives to submit to husbands, and then a rule to the effect that this is how things ought to be in verse 24. The thing is, in the Greek none of these commands, "should"s or "ought"s show up in the Greek. Sure, "submit" words show up, but none are in the Imperative mood - which is what is used in Greek to make commands (there are no modal or "ought" words either).
What is found instead is a full complex sentence in verse 18, ending with a command to be filled with the Spirit. What follows in 19-21 are a string of phrases built around a series of participles (think "-ing" words like "singing" or "submitting"). The ESV has a fairly decent literal translation of 19-21:

¹⁹addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, ²⁰ giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, ²¹ submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Verse 21, then, contains a participle, not an imperative. All these phrases are attached to a clause with an imperative, yes ("be filled with the Spirit" in verse 18), but the participles here are probably best seen as describing the results of what is said in that clause rather than, say, what it consists in. 19-21, then, are telling us what happens as a result of the Ephesians being filled with the Spirit. They are not commanded to submit to each other in 21, then, but the submission is portrayed as a natural byproduct of being Spirit-filled.
Now we turn to verse 22, which normally gets stated in English as "Wives, submit to your husbands, as to the Lord". In Greek, however, what it literally says is "Wives to your husbands as to the Lord". It is common in Greek to leave out a word from a sentence or phrase if it has already been used in the previous one and this is what is happening here - this apparently verb-less expression is actually picking up its verbal element from the previous verse. And the verbal element from the previous verse, while a form of the verb for "submit", is not in the imperative form. So it's not a command. Instead, it is a participle - one that was explaining the result of being filled with the Spirit. So this is saying how things are or will be, not how they ought to be let alone commanding them to be that way.
In verse 24 we have something similar - another verse usually translated as a command in English (e.g., "Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands"). But in fact, the Greek has literally "but as the church submits to Christ so also wives to husbands in everything". The second half of that sentence "so also wives to husbands in everything" lacks a verbal element but again picks it up from the previous bit. But the previous verbal element, though again a form of "submit", is not in the Imperative. It is not a command, but a statement of what is in fact happening - the church is submitting to Christ. So again, we have a case of explaining what is going on rather than a command that wives are required to follow.
All in all, then, the Greek syntax seems to bar this passage from being used straightforwardly for any view of women's roles in life. There are, of course, other passages in the Bible that could be used by either side in that debate, but I don't think a very good case could be made for whatever side you take based on this particular one.

Thoughts from Ephesians 3:1-13

2011-08-21T00:08:00.000-07:00

A sampling of some thoughts written down for a session of our Young Marrieds group we happened to lead at the end of June:

*In bringing the Gentiles into the Church through Christ, there were obvious differences in how people lived and followed Christ. These differences could at times cause problems. So far, Paul has told us that the use of the Law to divide God’s people has been abolished (2:14-16) and now Gentiles have been accepted into the promises and privileges of Israel as equals. It’s not that Gentiles have replaced Israel or that all Israel has been rejected (see also Romans 9-11) but Jews as Jews and Gentiles as Gentiles are accepted in Christ as parts of the one people of God made up of many peoples (see Isaiah 19:23-25) on the basis of grace through faith (2:4-9). In history, however, as Gentiles became the majority, this was forgotten and Jews were expected to become Gentiles and leave their Jewishness behind them – theologians even thought that performing the Jewish aspects of the Law would condemn you to hell! The church, historically, then, has not dealt well with differences.

*In the 2nd century, Marcion saw a sharp dichotomy between an Old Testament creator god, Yahweh, who was full of wrath, judgment, and law and a New Testament rescuing god, the Father, who was full of love, mercy, and grace. The Old Testament was to be rejected as a product of the inferior god of the Jews who Jesus came to rescue us from. Despite being condemned, these views continue to be circulated in the church – people see the Law as bad, a way of getting salvation by works in contrast to the New Testament way of grace, the Old Testament religion as legalistic and primitive and to be replaced by good, rational, Gentile Christianity.

*Verses 10-11: God’s eternal purpose is to save a remnant through faith of all humankind, Jew and Gentile united together. This uniting and undoing of the division of sin and evil in the church will display to the “powers and principalities” that Jesus is now Lord, not them – their time is up and God’s bringing all things together (1:10) has begun in Christ in, through, and for the church.

Exegetical Notes on the Synoptic Beelzebul Controversy

2011-08-08T12:01:00.000-07:00

Notes from various drafts of a couple papers written in the Fall, much of this culled from an earlier, over-long draft of a paper on the consistency of Jesus' argument in the relevant passages (many scholars see the passage as inconsistent).

***

In Mark, the controversy comes after Jesus has had some initial successes healing, performing exorcisms, and participating in controversies over the Law and Jewish customs, as well as whether he had personal authority to forgive sins. He then chooses the Twelve from among his disciples and our pericope begins from there. Mark 3:20-22 introduce the controversy, including the two related charges that Jesus is mad and that he is perhaps under demonic power in some way. 3:21, in addition, also serves as an introduction to a separate pericope involving his family which gets continued in 3:31 -35 immediately following Jesus’ response to the charge that he is in league with the demonic, thus creating a typical Marcan “sandwich”.

In 3:20, Jesus is once again at home, the last time having been in Mark 2:1-12, where previously there was also a crowd, charges of blasphemy, and mention of forgiveness of sin.[1] In 3:21, it seems that Jesus’ family, having heard about all the commotion he had been causing, comes to restrain him lest he bring shame on himself and the family, saying he must have lost his senses.[2] Since madness was often associated with demon possession, this verse prepares for the escalated, more serious charge of the next, where Jesus is accused of using demonic power in his exorcisms.[3] The Greek for “he has lost his senses” (or “he is beside himself”), ejxevsth, is a prefixed form of the verb i{sthmi, “stand,” which is used later in the pericope with regard to Satan and his kingdom, insinuating that for Mark it is not Jesus’ mind that is on shaky ground but Satan’s kingdom.[4]

In 3:22, some Scribes have come down from Jerusalem and now speak to Jesus, their ill-intent marked by their coming down and it being from Jerusalem, descent often having negative connotations in the Bible and Jerusalem in Mark as well.[5] They accuse him of “having” Beelzebul and further charge that it is by “the prince of demons” that Jesus casts out demons.[6]

***

Whether the scribes are saying that Jesus is possessed by Beelzebul or more specifically has him as his familiar,[7] the charge is further specified that Jesus is using this Beelzebul, who the scribes identify as the prince of demons, to power his exorcisms. It is not any old demon whose power Jesus is using, but the chief of them all – an implicit recognition of the great power and authority with which Jesus had been performing his miracles and exorcisms. Either Jesus’ power came from God – which the scribes would not admit – or it came from the chief of all demons.[8] The scribes choose the latter option, accusing Jesus, in effect, of being a kind of sorcerer or magician who has a spirit granting him power, a status which they likely saw as proscribed by Torah (e.g., Leviticus 19:31, 20:27) – in effect, marking Jesus out as a deviant perhaps in an attempt to stem his popularity and shame him[9] (as well as, maybe, to give a rationale for their own opposition). This emphasized by their choosing the name of a foreign god instead of something like “Satan” to refer to Jesus’ supposed spirit. Jesus had been, in their eyes, deviant with respect to the law and blasphemous before God and hence they now associate him with those outside the covenant people, as an outsider trying to lead Israel astray.[10]

***

Out of the KJV, NASB, NIV, and NRSV, the biggest difference between them (concerning this pericope) comes in verse 21 dealing with who exactly is coming to take hold of Jesus. Here, the NIV and NRSV are the only two that agree by rendering the relevant Greek as “his family”. The KJV and NASB, by contrast, have “his friends” and “his own people” respectively. The Greek here is simply “oiJ par’ aujtouæ”, which seems at first glance to mean literally something like “those from him”. In addition, the NRSV, despite its agreement with the NIV on how to translate the phrase, disagrees with all the other translations (NIV included) in that it seems to deny any identity between those who have come to take Jesus and those who are charging him with madness (it uses the generic “people” to describe the latter group). The other translations explicitly identify the two groups. In the Greek, the clause is simply “e[legon ga;r o{ti ejxevsth”. It clearly has someone asserting the contents of the o{ti clause (which falls inside the larger clause), but the subject is not explicitly found within the larger clause as a separate expression. The Greek e[legon indicates, though, that that it is a plurality of persons doing the speaking here.

The charge against Jesus in the same verse, meanwhile, is missing entirely from both Matthew and Luke. A form of the word used in the charge – ejxivsthmi – appears, however, in Matthew’s version of the beginning of the pericope in Matthew 12:23. Matthew perhaps retains and reuses this word taken from the rather different beginning of the pericope in Mark. Matthew’s earlier version of the exorcism story which both he and Luke use to introduce the pericope, after all, does not contain this word. Luke’s version does not contain it either but uses a form of qaumavzw just like Matthew’s earlier version. Hence, Matthew’s use of the participle form of ejxivsthmi, ejxivstanto, is probably editorial rather than original to the shared exorcism story in Q and may plausibly come from Mark’s use (of the aorist form, ejxevsth) of the same verb.

According to the BDAG (pgs. 756-757), phrases like oiJ par’ aujtouæ are used to indicate either someone’s envoys or else those intimately connected with someone, such as their family. In Reisenfeld’s article under parav in the TDNT, meanwhile, he states that this sort of construction could mean in secular Greek “those who belong to someone as well as those sent by him” and at times was used to refer to someone’s soldiers, servants, officials, heirs, friends, neighbors, or relatives. In the Septuagint, meanwhile, it seems mostly to be used for those around someone, particularly in I Maccabees. In the New Testament, it is also used in Mark 5:26 with a neuter plural article and indicates possession. With regard to Mark 3:21 in particular, Reisenfeld notes that the phrase on its own could refer to Jesus’ relatives or even to the disciples. And, in accordance with what most critical commentators seem to think,[11] he takes it that in the Marcan context in which the phrase appears, oiJ par’ aujtouæ are to be identified with the group of 3:32, which is Jesus’ family. This is especially probable given Mark’s widespread use of narrative sandwiches, 3:21 providing the introduction to and anticipation of the events in 3:31-35 involving Jesus’ family and his speech on who his true family is. The KJV is thus the odd man out here, with the NIV and NRSV agreeing and the NASB giving a very literal, neutral rendering of the phrase.

The next question is what the charge about Jesus in 3:21 is exactly and who is making it. As stated already, the word used, ejxevsth, is an aorist form of ejxivsthmi. According to the BDAG (pg. 350), in every usage of this word the idea is one of being involved “in a state or condition of consternation.” In its intransitive usage, which seems to be what is operative here, it has acquired a sense of being out of one’s normal state of mind, which could be either, on the one hand, in the sense of losing one’s mind or having lost one’s senses, or, on the other, in the sense of being amazed or astonished. The former sense seems to be what is mind in Mark 3:21 whereas in Matthew’s version of the pericope, it is used in Matthew 12:23 more in the latter sense. The TDNT article by Albrecht Oepke (pgs.459-460), similarly, notes that the intransitive use means literally “to remove oneself” and was used of the loss of capacities, figuratively in terms of loss of one’s mind or else being “terrified out of one’s wits”. In the Septuagint, it is used more in the latter sense, conveying strong emotions of “terror, anxiety, or astonishment, with a strong sense of the numinous.” In Mark 3:21, however, it seems to be used more in the former sense of losing one’s mind.

So the charge is that Jesus has lost his senses or gone mad, but the question still remains as to whether it is his family (oiJ par’ aujtouæ) who is making the charge or some others who are doing it. Despite the NRSV’s interpretation (this is the RSV’s as well) that it was generic “people” who were saying Jesus was mad, it seems more plausible to see the ones coming to seize Jesus (oiJ par’ aujtouæ) as providing the appropriate grammatical antecedent for e[legon and hence taking subject place in that sentence. Most critical scholars appear to agree.[12]

Mark 3:21, then, seems to claim that Jesus’ family said he had lost his senses and that they thus went to seize him. This reading appears to be supported by most of the best manuscripts. The few alternate readings found in other manuscripts most people seem to agree are a result of scribes correctly understanding the verse and, finding it offensive, altering it to make it less so. These manuscripts alter the verse so that it is the scribes and others who make the accusation, with the phrase “oiJ par’ aujtouæ” no longer making an appearance. Thus we have at least two manuscripts whose version of the verse reads the following in place of “ajkouvsanteV oiJ par’ aujtouæ”:

ajkouvsanteV peri; aujtouæ oiJ grammateiæV kai; oiJ loipoi;

A number of others contain the very similar alternative reading:

o{te h[kousan peri; aujtouæ oiJ grammateiæV kai; oiJ loipoi;

Such variants would, if they were in fact correct, give us a reading of 3:21 on which the scribes and some others, having heard things about Jesus, come to seize him, saying that Jesus is out of his mind.

That Mark 3:21 does in fact implicate Jesus’ family as the ones charging him with loss of sanity may also be the way Matthew and Luke understood Mark, which perhaps explains at least part of the reason why they omitted this verse or any version of it in their own accounts of the pericope on Jesus’ true family. That Mark 3:21 does in fact claim that it was Jesus’ family who came to seize him and that it was they who claimed he was out of his mind, then, seems the most plausible view based on the evidence so far, thus making the NIV’s translation of 3:21 (though not necessarily of the rest of the pericope) perhaps the best of those examined and basically in agreement with most Marcan scholars.[13]

***

The beginning of the controversy in Mark thus already signals an ironic reversal of relations of inside and outside. In the passage just before, twelve disciples – a group which were otherwise outsiders with regard to Jesus and perhaps marginal at best in the eyes of the religious elite, are made the core insiders. And now here, those who should be the insiders par excellence, Jesus’ family and the religious elite, are strangely found outside, the Marcan sandwich concerning Jesus’ family, in effect, showing who the true insiders are in contrast to, say, the scribes here who are themselves accusing Jesus of being the outsider.[14]

Aside from a few variations, the sense of the beginning of the controversy in both Matthew and Luke are essentially the same as that given above for Mark with the important exception that instead of beginning with Jesus’ family thinking him out of his mind (the mention of which might have seemed somewhat scandalous to Matthew and Luke)[15], Matthew and Luke both begin with a short exorcism story designed to provoke the reaction of the opponents. Matthew’s exorcism story in fact appears earlier, with slight differences, in Matthew 9:32-34, where a demon-possessed man who was mute is brought to Jesus and becomes able to speak after Jesus casts out the demon, a story immediately preceded by another short miracle resulting in two blind men, who had been calling out “Have mercy on us, Son of David!”, recovering their sight. Matthew then contrasts the reaction of the crowds, who marvel at Jesus’ mighty works and emphasize their unique character, to that of the Pharisees, Matthew’s preferred targets for criticism (which perhaps explains why Matthew, in accordance with his practice elsewhere, has the Pharisees making the accusation rather than the scribes in Mark or some among the crowds in Luke)[16], who accuse Jesus of using the power of the prince of demons.

Matthew reuses the story from 9:32-34, with some modifications, to introduce the Beelzebul controversy in Matthew 12. This time, the demoniac is blind as well as mute. In part, this is likely a result of Matthew combining the characteristics of the two exorcisms in 9:27-34,[17] a link which is perhaps further confirmed by the change in the crowd’s reaction to include the phrase “Son of David” (Greek: uiJo;V Dauivd), which is the same phrase used by the blind men, and by the use of a form of the Greek verb qerapeuvw, “heal”, applied to the demoniac in 12:22 instead of a form of ejkbavllw, “cast out”, applied to the demon as in 9:33 (this also, perhaps, links back to 12:15).[18] The dual affliction may also be related to Isaianic passages connecting the healing of the blind with that of the deaf and mute.[19]

The appellation “Son of David” may, particularly in light of Matthew’s linking of Jesus and divine wisdom, allude to Solomon, who in Jewish settings had become regarded as the exorcist and miracle worker (and magician) par excellence and to whom the phrase “Son of David” was generally applied both within the Old Testament and without. Matthew may then be using the phrase both with this allusion and, more importantly for Matthew’s larger purposes, to emphasize Jesus as Messiah.[20] The use of this title may also prepare for the Sign of Jonah sayings immediately following the Beelzebul controversy in Matthew, the former ending with mention of people coming to hear Solomon’s wisdom and Jesus’ claim of being greater than Solomon – if the Pharisees who, unlike the blind and mute man, can physically see, are spiritually blind to the signs of the kingdom in Jesus’ words and mighty deeds, no other sign is left to them but the culmination of Jesus’ kingdom ministry, his death and resurrection.

Unlike Matthew or Mark, Luke does not specify Jesus’ opponents and instead leaves them faceless among the crowds.[21] Like Mark, however, Luke creates his own narrative sandwich with the story by inserting in 11:16 a call for a sign from heaven to validate Jesus’ ministry and teaching, which prepares for the Sign of Jonah sayings in response to this call in 11:29-32, immediately following the close of Jesus’ speech in response to the charges of being in league with the demonic. These others who ask for a sign are, in effect, taking on the role of Satan from the temptation narrative earlier in Luke (thus also linking them with the desert generation in the Pentateuch – see the next section), putting Jesus (and, by extension, God) to the test just as Satan did, the previous “sign from heaven” having been the successful triumph in 10:17-18 of the Seventy-Two over demons, which Jesus applauds by speaking of seeing Satan falling from heaven. By contrast with the disciples, those asking for signs are blind to the kingdom’s signs (11:33-36, thus connecting with 10:21-24), asking for signs (11:16) instead of the Holy Spirit (11:13) and putting Jesus to the test (11:16) instead of asking for deliverance from testing (11:14).[22]

***

In Matthew 12:27 and Luke 11:19, immediately following the Parables of the Divided House and the Kingdom, we have Jesus question his opponents concerning by whom certain people associated with them are casting out demons. The majority opinion, which seems to me more plausible than anything else, is that Jesus is here issuing a charge of inconsistency against his opponents – they do not charge certain others with being in league with Satan, yet Jesus, whose exorcisms and miracle working are even more unmistakably unlike magical practices than the more ambiguous exorcisms performed by Jewish exorcists, is the one accused of sorcery.[23] There is in fact no evidence in Jesus’ exorcisms that cast a negative shadow on them in comparison with other Jews whose exorcisms do not seem to be in question. Hence, without further evidence and given that these others are not in question, the opponents ought not to be putting Jesus’ exorcisms into question and attributing them to Satan.[24] If Jesus is casting out by Satan, then so must these others, a charge those others would likely not accept and perhaps condemn.[25] But this raises the question: If not by Satan, then by whom?

The alternative to casting out demons by Satan seems to be that Jesus does so by power from God. And if this is true, Jesus’ message is vindicated – the kingdom of God really has come in the person of Jesus. This is what we find in the Finger/Spirit of God saying in Matthew 12:28/Luke 11:20.[26] Jesus’ exorcisms are unique in that they point to the presence of the kingdom and this is due to Jesus’ unique relationship to the kingdom.[27] In Luke, the use of the phrase “finger of God” points to the Exodus narrative, particularly God’s saving his people from Pharaoh through sending the plagues on Egypt (e.g., Exodus 8:19, Deuteronomy 9:10) – as God rescued his people from the oppressor and gave them the Law on Sinai, so now Jesus as the new Moses inaugurates the coming of the kingdom, an eschatological exodus, a restoration of creation through God’s creation power, rescuing his people from the ultimate oppressor, Satan himself.[28] Like Pharaoh, and Israel in the desert, though, Jesus’ opponents, particularly those asking for a sign, have hardened their hearts against God’s salvific actions.[29]

***

In Luke’s version of the parable, an armed strong man guards his abode and is then defeated and disarmed by an even stronger attacker, who then divides his goods. Thus, instead of a robbery as in Matthew and Mark, we have pictured here an armed battle. Martin Emmrich suggests that Luke’s version more clearly than its parallels echoes the exodus pattern behind Isaiah 49:24-26 (and 59:16-18), with God’s people rescued from a tyrant who oppresses them by the even more powerful divine warrior.[30] Jesus seems clearly to be the stronger man who attacks Satan’s kingdom and overcomes him, linking to both Luke 3:16 and 4:1-13.[31]

This attack has similar results for Satan as in the parallels in Matthew and Mark, as he is disarmed and his goods taken. What happens with the goods, though, is slightly different. Whereas in the parallels, the goods seemed to be people and the idea seemed to be that they are released from Satan’s power, here the idea seems to be that in disarming Satan, Jesus brings blessings of some kind to people.[32] Despite the difference between accounts, the outcome seems to be similar – in casting out demons, Jesus (and perhaps his followers) are disarming Satan, thus bringing blessings to the formerly possessed and, in general via the power of the kingdom of God, to the world.

***

Mark’s passage, as described previously, emphasizes the ironic reversal of who is inside and who is out. Based on things such as Jesus’ perceived looseness with the Law and his claiming authority to forgive sins, he was opposed, accused of blasphemy, and finally, here, charged with madness by his own family and then with consorting with Beelzebul in an honor challenge by his opponents. These two groups, who should be in on what God is doing, are not. Jesus, exercising his authority, calls his challengers and bests them in the honor game, thus parrying their attempt to label him a deviant and outsider and instead deflecting aspects of the charge back onto them.[33] First, Jesus notes how if Satan casts out Satan, his kingdom would fall (here we can pick one of our three interpretations), using several analogies to back it up. And since Satan would not willingly give up his kingdom and so it would not fall from internal division, Jesus himself has assaulted Satan and is releasing people from his power.

Jesus, then, is the ultimate insider and, given the final saying on the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit in Mark 3:28-29,[34] his opponents’ attempts to cast Jesus as an outsider render them in danger of being complete outsiders in regards to God’s kingdom forever. In his response to them, then, Jesus turns the tables on his opponents and warns them not to blaspheme. By the Spirit Jesus works, saving people from their bondage to Satan, the “strong man”, and initiates the saving power of God, bringing them into a new, undivided household with Jesus at its head. To arrogantly say it is Satan instead of the Spirit behind all these works is to slander the Spirit and mistake it and its power for good and salvation for the power of darkness and its power for evil and bondage. To reject the Spirit is to miss forgiveness and salvation since it is precisely the Spirit which brings forgiveness and escape from evil’s bondage.[35]

In Matthew, we see Jesus, the Messiah and the one greater than Solomon in wisdom and power displaying the power of the kingdom of God in the healing of a deaf and blind man. The Pharisees, Jesus’ chief opponents in Matthew, reject other interpretations of Jesus’ identity, and treat him as in league with Beelzebul – they are blind to the true signs of the kingdom. Jesus, as in Mark, responds by talking about how Satan would fall if that was true. And the Pharisees are, in any case, guilty of hypocrisy in accusing Jesus of being in cahoots with Satan. Instead, Jesus is performing his actions by the Spirit and hence, because of who Jesus is, the kingdom of God really has arrived. Jesus is rescuing those oppressed by Satan, healing and casting out demons.

Matthew then shows us the consequences of this all-out battle with Satan, issuing a call to those who would listen. The kingdom of Satan is being invaded by the kingdom of God and there is no neutrality here, one is either on Jesus’ side or, like the Pharisees, one is an opponent or persecutor or otherwise on the wrong side – one either gathers with Jesus or one scatters (Matthew 12:30).[36] There is then a warning in some ways similar to that of Mark against blaspheming the Holy Spirit.[37] As the exact meaning of the versions of this saying in Matthew and Luke are controversial,[38] the only thing I think we can confidently say at this point without really delving into the topic is that it is a warning here based on the previous saying about scattering. There is no neutrality here between Jesus and Satan and the Pharisees are in danger of casting themselves on the wrong side forever. And the very fact that the Pharisees have uttered such dangerous blasphemy condemns them as evil. Jesus, in words very similar to those from the Sermon on the Mount, speaks of how evil words come from an evil internal character and how these words can thus prove as evidence both now and on the day of judgment.[39]

Luke is superficially overall very similar to Matthew but with more of an exodus theme than is present in Matthew. Here, Jesus is the bringer of the new creation, the eschatological exodus, the one who passes the test in contrast to those who test him. He is the divine warrior who is the one stronger than Satan and has violently attacked and disarmed him in order to distribute the eschatological blessings of the coming of the kingdom to those who side with him.[40] In the next chunk of text, Luke describes the spirit who is cast out, wanders in the desert, and returns with seven more demons. The spirit here undergoes a kind of anti-exodus as a kind of anti-Israel – it goes into the desert and returns to its home stronger than before. This creates a contrast between the nature of demons versus Jesus as the true Israel. Only Jesus can free Israel of the tyranny of Satan. Previous attempts at reform and cleaning house have only been temporary – the demonic powers have always struck back, thus also reemphasizing their unity and undivided power. Jesus is clearly not possessed and only his kingdom will succeed in rescuing Israel from the kingdom of Satan.[41]

[1] Donahue, J. R. and D.J. Harrington, The Gospel of Mark (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2002), 128.

[2] Some manuscripts have the scribes doing and saying these things, but this is almost certainly an effort to soften the otherwise seemingly harsh view of Jesus’ family portrayed here. Some English translations, likely effected by some of the same sentiments, have likewise interpreted the Greek here to refer to people other than Jesus’ family but scholars seem to agree that the Greek most likely refers to Jesus’ family, especially considering Mark 3:21’s status as one half of the Marcan sandwich which continues in 3:31 with Jesus’ family. Likewise, despite the RSV’S and NRSV’s interpretations that it was generic “people” who were saying Jesus was mad, it seems more plausible to see the ones coming to seize Jesus as providing the appropriate grammatical antecedent and hence taking subject place in that sentence. And since such charges would not likely be made up by the early church, there is a high probability that these verses accurately reflect a tension in Jesus’ family during his earthly ministry. See Ayers, James, “Mark 3:20-35,” Interpretation 51 (1997): 174; Best, Ernest, “Mark 3:20, 21, 31-35,” New Testament Studies 22 (1976): 309-314; Donahue, J. R. and D.J. Harrington, The Gospel of Mark (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2002), 129; Marcus, Joel, Mark 1-8 (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 270; May, David M., “Mark 3:20-35 from the Perspective of Shame/Honor,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 17 (1987): 85; Meier, John P., A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Volume One: The Roots of the Problem and the Person (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 370-371; Yarbro Collins, Adela, Mark: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2007), 225.

[3] Cf. Best, “Mark,” 309; France, R. T., The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002), 169.

[4] Marcus, Mark, 271.

[5] Marcus, Mark, 271.

[6] The sorts of charges brought out in the Beelzebul controversy in the Synoptic Gospel are likely historical given the also likely historicity of Jesus’ exorcism and healing ministries (both charges of possession and ministries of Jesus also being attested to by the Gospel of John). See Donahue and Harrington, Mark, 130; Emmrich, Martin, “The Lucan Account of the Beelzebul Controversy,” Westminster Theological Journal 62 (2000): 269; France, Mark, 170; Harrington, D. J., The Gospel of Matthew (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1991), 134; Meier, Marginal Jew I, 96; Wright, N. T., Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 187, 195.

[7] Yarbro Collins, Mark, 229.

[8] On the unity of the demonic world under a single demonic ruler (particularly, who took control, through his minions, of humans and the world) in Second Temple literature, see Alexander, Philips, “The Demonology of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, Vol. 2, ed. P. W. Flint and J. C. Vanderkam (Leiden: Brill, 1999) , 331-353; Russell, D. S., The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic: 200 B.C. – A.D. 100 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1964), 254-257.

[9] May, “Shame/Honor,” 85. Here, May takes the scribes in Mark to be issuing a public honor challenge in contrast to the opponents in the parallel passages in Matthew and Luke where the charges do not seem to be made publicly. Cf. Guijarro, “Politics,” 124.

[10] Caragounis, Chrys C., “Kingdom of God, Son of Man, and Jesus’ Self-Understanding,” Tyndale Bulletin 40 (1989): 224; Humphries, Michael, “The Kingdom of God in the Q Version of the Beelzebul Controversy: Q 11:14-26,” Forum 9 (1993): 128-130; Marcus, Mark, 281; Wright, Jesus, 452-453; Yarbro Collins, Mark, 228. Lloyd Gaston also argues that in Matthew, the meaning of “Beelzebul” has links with Jesus’ claims to superiority vis-à-vis the Temple earlier in the Gospel, making the Pharisees’ charge in part an act of throwing such claims in his face. See Gaston, “Beelzebul,” 254.

[11] See footnote 3 for some references.

[12] See the following footnote.

[13] See, for instance, James Ayers, “Mark 3:20-35,” Interpretation 51 (1997): 174; Ernest Best, “Mark 3:20, 21, 31-35,” New Testament Studies 22 (1976): 309-314; Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2007), 225; J. R. Donahue and D.J. Harrington, The Gospel of Mark (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2002), 129; R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002); Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8 (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 270; David M. May, “Mark 3:20-35 from the Perspective of Shame/Honor,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 17 (1987): 85.

[14] Cf. Busch, Austin, “Questioning and Conviction: Double-voiced Discourse in Mark 3:22–30,” Journal of Biblical Literature 125 (2006): 480-482.

[15] Cf. Boring, “Unforgivable Sin,” 260; Davies and Allison, Matthew, 332; Gundry, Robert H., Matthew: A Commentary on His Handbook for a Mixed Church under Persecution, Second Edition (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1982), 230.

[16] Boring, “Unforgivable Sin,” 261. Cf. Davies and Allison, Matthew, 335. Note, though, that Matthew does directly echo Mark’s beginning, reusing ejxivstanto from Mark 3:21 to apply to the crowds’ wonderment at Jesus instead of ejqauvmasan as in Luke 11:14 and Matthew 9:33. See Gundry, Matthew, 231.

[17] Gundry, Matthew, 231; Nolland, John, The Gospel of Matthew: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 498.

[18] Gundry, Matthew, 231.

[19] Collins, Raymond F., “Jesus’ Ministry to the Deaf and Dumb,” Melita Theologica 35 (1984): 17. Collins cites examples such as Isaiah 29:18 and 35:5. Note that all of these considerations so far explaining why Matthew has included blindness in the narrative renders Luz’s unsupported commented that, since Matthew used the story already he added to it so that no one would notice, rather lame. See Luz, Matthew, 199.

[20] Fisher, Loren R., “Can this be the Son of David?” in Jesus and the Historian: Written in Honor of Ernest Cadman Calwell, ed. F. T. Trotter (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968), 85-89; Harrington, Matthew, 186. Contra Gundry, Mark, 231.

[21] See Marshall, Luke, 472 for evidence that it may have been Luke that deleted reference to the Pharisees in Q rather than Matthew that added his reference.

[22] Emmrich, “The Lucan Account,” 274; Johnson, Luke Timothy, The Gospel of Luke (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1991), 181-183; Marshall, Luke, 473.

[23] Caragounis, “Kingdom of God,” 229; Davies and Allison, Matthew, 337; Fitzmyer, Luke, 918; Harrington, Matthew, 183; Luz, Matthew, 203. See, though, Shirock, Robert, “Whose Exorcists are They? The Referents of oiÓ uiÓoi; uÓmwæn at Matthew 12:27/Luke 11:19,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 46 (1992): 41-51, for an alternative (and, it seems to me, less plausible) interpretation according to which these exorcists are the disciples rather than Pharisees or some other Jews outside Jesus’ circle.

[24] Note that this important move on Jesus’ part in no way implies or requires the acceptance of the other exorcists and their exorcisms and Jesus’ part. At least some commentators notice this. See, for instance, Gundry, Matthew, 235. Hence, we need not follow, for instance, Humphries, “Q Version,” 132-134.

[25] Marshall, Luke, 471, 474-475, gets this right but still seems at times to think that on this interpretation Jesus must be accepting the exorcists and their exorcisms.

[26] Whether or not this Q saying originally spoke of casting out demons by the “finger of God” or the “Spirit of God” need not concern us, particularly given the amounts of evidence on both sides and the difficulty of adjudicating it. See Davies and Allison, Matthew, 340; Emmrich, “Lucan Account,” 271-273; Fitzmyer, Luke, 918; Harrington, Matthew, 183; Luz, Matthew, 200; Marshall, Luke, 475-476; Menzies, Robert P., The Development of Early Christian Pneumatology (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991), 186; Rodd, C. S., “Spirit or Finger,” Expository Times 72 (1960-1961): 157-158; Wall, Robert W., “The Finger of God: Deuteronomy 9:10 and Luke 11:20,” New Testament Studies 93 (1987): 144-150. Whether or not the saying, in whatever form it originally took, is regarded as an authentic word of Jesus, it certainly fits the context well and probably went together with the charges of demon possession in the tradition (at least within Q’s version of it), which might give us at least some reason (even if it is not seen as decisive) to think this might originally belong with the DS sayings or even go back to Jesus (though its absence from Mark certainly makes these claims less supported than they otherwise might have been).

[27] Caragounis, “Kingdom of God,” 230-231; Davies and Allison, Matthew, 339. There may also be a sense of here of Jesus’ companions having won a victory for God’s kingdom over Satan as Jesus’ kingdom subordinates by attacking Satan via casting out his subordinates. See Johnson, Luke, 183.

[28] Fitzmyer, Luke, 922; Klingbeil, Gerald A., “The Finger of God in the Old Testament,” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 112 (2000): 415; Marshall, Luke, 475; Williams, David, “Why the Finger?” Expository Times 115 (2003): 48. Against the alternative understanding of Wall, “Finger of God,” 144-150, see Emmrich, “Lucan Account,” 272n32.

[29] Emmrich, “Lucan Account,” 272, 275; Perkins, Larry, “Why the ‘Finger of God’ in Luke 11:20?” Expository Times 115 (2004): 261-262.

[30] Emmrich, “Lucan Account,” 273; Marshall, Luke, 478.

[31] Fitzmyer, Luke, 919.

[32] Marshall, Luke 477-478.

[33] Guijarro, “Politics,” 125; May, “Shame/Honor,” 86.

[34] On the authenticity of this saying and its belonging (or not) to its context within the Beelzebul controversy, see Boring, M. Eugene, “How May We Identify Oracles of Christian Prophets in the Synoptic Tradition? Mark 3:28-29 as a Test Case,” Journal of Biblical Literature 91 (1972): 501-521; Boring, “Unforgivable Sin,” 276-277; Emmrich, “Lucan Account,” 270.

[35] Cf. Ayers, “Mark 3:20-35,” 182; Donahue and Harrington, Mark, 131-136; France, Mark, 177; Marcus, Mark, 284; Williams, James G., “A Note on the ‘Unforgiveable Sin’ Logion,” New Testament Studies 12 (1965): 75-77; Wright, Jesus, 453-454.

[36] Davies and Allison, Matthew, 343; Gundry, Matthew, 236; Luz, Matthew, 205-206. Cf. Fitzmyer, Luke, 919; Marshall, Luke, 478. For alternative approaches to this saying, see Humphries, “Q Version,” 137; Kilgallen,, “Return,” 59n29.

[37] On the relationship between the Q and Mark sayings, how Matthew has combined the sayings, and trying to figure out the possible Aramaic prehistory of these and the relationships between them, see Boring, “Unforgivable Sin,” 258-279; Caragounis, “Kingdom of God,” 6-7; Davies and Allison, Matthew, 345-346; Gundry, Matthew, 237-239; Luz, Matthew, 201; Marcus, Mark, 275; Schippers, R., “The Son of Man in Matt. xii. 32 = Lk. xii. 10, Compared with Mk. iii. 28,” Studia Evangelica IV, Part I: The New Testament Scriptures, ed. F. L. Cross (Berlin: Akademic Verlag, 1968), 231-235; Yarbro Collins, Mark, 234.

[38] See Caragounis, “Kingdom of God,” 11, 227;Harrington, Matthew, 184; Maddox, Robert J., “The Function of the Son of Man according to the Synoptic Gospels,” New Testament Studies 15 (1968-1969): 59; Schippers, “Son of Man,” 235.

[39] Davies and Allison, Matthew, 349-351; Gundry, Matthew, 240.

[40] Cf. Robbins, Vernon K., “Beelzebul Controversy in Mark and Luke: Rhetorical and Social Analysis,” Forum 7 (1991): 276.

[41] Humphries, “Kingdom of God,” 139; Kilgallen, “Return,” 56; Marshall, Luke, 471; Wall, “Finger of God,” 148; Wright, Jesus, 456.

Ephesians 1:1-14

2011-07-31T13:17:00.000-07:00

Something I wrote on the beginning of Ephesians for our Young Marrieds group at Cornerstone, obviously drawing a lot on N. T. Wright:

Ephesians 1 is the introduction to the letter, which contains both the standard sections of greetings (1:1-2) and thanksgiving (1:3-23 – though some scholars think this section goes all the way through chapter 3). Like many of Paul’s letters, the introductory material also tells us about the theme of the rest of the letter, with 1:3-14 a thanksgiving to God for all that he has done for the church and 1:15-23 a prayer that the church may know all of this. Chapters 2-3 will elaborate further and the rest of the book will apply this information to how the church should conduct itself in light of all that God has done.

1:3-14, like much of Paul’s writings, draws on, highlights, and presupposes Paul’s basic story of God’s dealings with humanity culminating in Christ. If we want to understand this section fully, we need to know something of that story. The story begins with a good creation which is subjected to corruption, death, chaos, disorder, and evil as a result of the first man, Adam, the representative of humanity, and his sin against God. Adam experiences, then, what Jews would have seen as a kind of exile much like what they experienced when they were cast out of the Promised Land as a result of their own disobedience to God. This exile – the Fall – resulted in estrangement between God and humanity and animosity and estrangement within humanity as well. Sin, death, and curse have entered the world in and through humanity.

God’s rescue operation to set everything right again was to start a new humanity (the Hebrew and Greek words for “person” or “man” – ’adam and anthropos – can refer either to an individual or to humanity as a whole, as in 2:15) not subject to corruption, sin, and death and free of the curse and to set them in a new creation which is also free of these things, where all things are united under God and his rule. Instead of starting over, though, the new humanity and new creation were to be formed by rescuing the old humanity and old creation. The beginnings of this new Adam, this new humanity, were seen in the exodus and God’s redemption of Israel from their own exile in Egypt, bringing them into their inheritance as children of God. They were God’s chosen people, the beginning of God’s new humanity and new creation, tasked to be a light to the other nations so that they too could become part of the new Adam instead of remain in the old, and the Law was given as the covenant charter establishing the relationship like the commandment given to Adam long ago.

But like Adam, Israel failed and suffered curse and exile and looked forward to a restoration/ new creation/ new exodus/ full return from exile and all its effects, which would mean nothing less than the restoration of all creation and a new age, God’s kingdom, of God’s will reigning over and in all things. “Forgiveness of sins” for Israel would mean, then, restoration for both the nation and the world – and this comes through the blood of a sacrifice, Jesus acting much like the Passover lamb of the exodus (1:7, 14).

Jesus comes as the climax to this story. Jesus, as Israel’s perfect king, is the representative of his people before God. He takes on Israel’s task as its representative king and fulfills the Law and undergoes the spiritual exile, punishment, and curse due to all in order to again redeem his people from bondage, but this time to sin and death (and Satan and all the spiritual powers and oppressors), like Israel from Egypt, and, like Israel, bring them into their true inheritance, God’s kingdom in a restored world (again, 1:7, 14).

Jesus, as representative, is the true Israel, the new Adam, God’s chosen, so that whoever joins him and his people thereby becomes part of that chosen people – Christ was chosen and predestined and hence, since he represents his people and what is true of him as representative is true of them too, they also take part in that chosenness (they are God’s chosen people, his Israel) and in that glorious destiny as part of God’s new humanity (see 2:15) – the advanced guard of God’s making all things new and uniting it all under himself in Christ (thus removing the animosity of the divisions between such things as Jews and Gentiles, as in 2:11-22; 3:6) – see 1:4-5, 9-14. We were chosen or predestined “in him” or “in Christ”, a phrase which indicates that what is being said of someone is said of them in virtue of their belonging to Christ’s people as one of his followers – that is, as a member of his church.

That new creation and that kingdom of God, in Christ, has come with all its blessings – though now only in principle and in part and not yet in its fullness. Hence, Paul speaks of the church as having these blessings “in the heavenly realms” (1:3 – see also 2:6-7) – “heaven” talk often in Paul and the New Testament being used to indicate the present realities of God’s final reign over all creation, where earth and heaven are finally joined forever. Paul wants the church to see itself in terms of this story and its place within it as the new humanity made of Jew and Gentile under Christ as its representative, redeemer, and king.

Sealed Until the End: The Messianic Secret as Apocalyptic Motif

2011-07-26T08:04:00.000-07:00

A paper I wrote for a New Testament class this last semester at the GTU. Unfortunately, I had a maximum of 10 pages to write this in, so I had to leave out a lot of interesting parallels between Mark and Daniel and did not have a lot of space to explain the things I did talk about. But here it is:

In Mark there appears to be a motif or set of motifs involving secrecy – secrecy, for instance, concerning miracles, concerning an aspect (or aspects) of Jesus’ message, and concerning his identity. Such a motif of secrecy in Mark, particularly as it concerns Jesus’ identity, has been dubbed the Messianic Secret. Properly speaking, there are a number of secrecy motifs in Mark, not all of them really concerning Jesus’ identity. But, as Jack Kingsbury puts it, these “may be motifs that can be distinguished from the messianic secret, but it is obvious that they can also enhance and further it.”[1] In other words, the other secrecy motifs may be read as reinforcing the motif concerning the secret of Jesus’ identity and hence examining the latter will likely involve examining at least some aspects of the former as well.

While there are many different ways to go about trying to explain the secrecy motif, the goal of this paper is not to sort through these or to evaluate which does a better job and where. Instead, the goal is to show that we can read the Messianic Secret in Mark as a kind of apocalyptic motif, particularly inspired by the book of Daniel – in particular, one that invites its readers into believing reception of the secrets unveiled to them in the book and a status as a follower of Jesus. This is not meant to forestall other understandings of the Secret nor is it meant to exhaustively explain it in every one of its details – it is simply meant to give us one more interpretive angle by which we can understand the secrecy motif in a better, fuller fashion.

The plan for the rest of this paper, then, is first to take some steps towards establishing echoes and correspondences both between Mark 4:1-20 and Daniel (especially chapter 2) and Mark 13 and Daniel. I then turn to some of the passages in which the Messianic Secret proper might be said to actually pop up and offer a preliminary reading of these within the context of my treatment of Mark 4 and 13. Finally, I will sum up how we can look at the Messianic Secret as a kind of apocalyptic motif based on such a reading.

Let us turn first to Mark 4:1-20 and Daniel 2 and the respective secrets or mysteries displayed therein.[2] Each of these two passages presents us with a riddle, a message hidden in imagistic clothing, in Mark in the form of a parable and in Daniel in the form of a dream. Each, then, gives us a wisdom-riddle which presents us with, as it says in the Greek text of both passages, a musthvrion – that is, a secret or mystery (Daniel 2:27 and Mark 4:11).[3] Indeed, later on in the Greek (12:8), Daniel, when inquiring into the meanings of his own visions, asks about parabolaiv or parables.[4] In Mark 4, there is likewise a mystery and it is given in parables.

The mystery, then, in both Daniel and Mark is indeed given, either in the form of dream or of parable, but it still requires explanation – the revelation is there, but it does not automatically generate understanding. Neither the disciples nor Nebuchadnezzar, though already given their respective mysteries, are able on their own to apprehend them. Such understanding must come from some special revelation or explanation. This failure to understand in both books emphasizes the mysteriousness of what is being given and questions may be required to get at the true meaning of what is being communicated. This becomes more apparent later on in Daniel where Daniel, like Nebuchadnezzar’s earlier seeking after the meaning of his dream, needs to ask questions in order to unpack the mysterious revelations he has been given (Daniel 8:27; 12:8).[5] In fact, as Joel Marcus has pointed out, in apocalyptic environments, inquisitiveness was seen as a good and adds that in Mark “it is a sign of serious spiritual impairment when [the disciples] become afraid to ask [questions] (9:32).”[6] The disciples’ questions, then, are not necessarily being cast in a purely negative light but may in fact play a positive function here as in Daniel and other apocalyptic works.

But what is this mystery? In both Mark 4 and Daniel 2, the mystery has something to do with God’s divine actions in history or God’s kingdom (basileiva in both Mark 4 and Daniel 2). In the early chapters of Daniel, for instance, we see God as sovereign even in the midst of the pagan, ungodly rule of foreign powers. In Daniel 2:44-45, God’s eschatological kingdom arrives not with the help of human hands but as an act of God’s perpetual sovereignty, thus emphasizing the theme in Daniel of the faithful suffering patiently through tribulation, awaiting God and God’s actions to bring in the kingdom and their salvation rather than attempting to force it on their own.[7] In Mark, we see that God’s kingdom has already come but not yet in its fullness and is to be followed not by way of military action but through taking up one’s cross and following Jesus – it does not yet overtake all other kingdoms but rather has come in their midst as an act of God in the person of Jesus, proceeding by the preaching of God’s word and not by the sword – despite what many Jews of his time may have wanted.[8]

As these mysteries concerning God’s kingdom are given veiled in imagery, someone else must help others to understand them. In Daniel, it is God who gives the mystery (e.g., Daniel 2:28) and Daniel who explains to the inquiring Nebuchadnezzar the content of the mystery already given. And in Mark, it is Jesus who both gives and explains the mystery to his inquiring disciples. Jesus (see, for instance, the many passages in which he teaches or is called teacher or rabbi[9]) and Daniel (see, for instance, Daniel 1:17) are both presented as wisdom figures, where wisdom is understood here as insight from God. With Daniel and Jesus we variously have such insight granted or communicated to others, thus being or making others wise in virtue of the possession of such revelatory insight.[10]

In Daniel, what is revealed in particular through Daniel is what must happen according to God’s plan for history leading up to his kingdom. In the Greek version of 2:28-29, the phrase for “it must happen” is dei: genevsqai, which does not occur in Mark 4 but does occur later in the apocalyptic discourse of Mark 13 in verse 7.[11] Such a deterministic air, however, so common in apocalyptic literature, also appears in Mark 4, particularly in verses 11 and 12, where the purpose of giving the mystery of the kingdom in parable form is, in effect, to illuminate “those inside” but to harden the already unbelieving hearts of “those outside”.[12] In the context of Mark 3, it may very well be that the insiders are those who “do God’s will” (3:35) and outsiders those who directly oppose Jesus’ ministry, such as the religious authorities (3:22 – cf. 3:28-29).[13] While the crowds are invited in, these religious authorities have shut themselves out and are confirmed in their opposition by Jesus’ own preaching. In a pattern reminiscent of Pharaoh before Moses or the Israelites before Isaiah (in the Isaiah 6 passage quoted in Mark), their own hardness of heart and stubborn unbelief, their resistance against God and his prophet, results in a punitive further hardening. As Joel Marcus puts it, “in a way their condemnation to blindness and obduracy in 4:12 is just a ratification of a process already in motion.”[14]

The hardening of Jesus’ opponents, however, according to many scholars has the specific goal of guaranteeing Jesus’ death by provoking such opponents into escalating their opposition. His crucifixion is not a failure of his ministry, but a crucial part of its success.[15] Speaking of much of the secrecy in Mark in general (cf. Mark 4:21-25), Marcus writes, “Jesus […] must hide his lamp under a bushel […] in order that he may be opposed and, ultimately, killed – in order that he may ‘give his life as a ransom for many’ (10:45).”[16] The crucifixion is therefore part of God’s predetermined plan, enacted partly through the God-ordained means of Jesus’ own preaching of the mystery of the kingdom in parable form. As Mark progresses towards the crucifixion, the apocalyptic overtones echoed in the modal verb deiv start to pile up, the majority coming in the apocalyptic discourse of chapter 13 (outside that chapter, one finds it in key eschatological or predictive contexts, for instance, in 8:31; 9:11; 14:31),[17] all leading up to the Passion, thus fulfilling Scripture and God’s plan.

By putting both the parable and its explanation in the book, however, Mark seems to be inviting his reader to either become or continue being wise like Daniel or those who are in Jesus’ circle by their reception of this divine revelation – and thus being wise, being also an insider with regard to Jesus and not an outsider. Readers may be encouraged, then, to see themselves as ones who have been given the secret of kingdom of God by Jesus since it has been written out for them in this very book. There may also be a hint of such a strategy also in Mark 13, to which we now turn.

As already hinted at, chapter 13 concentrates the apocalyptic vibe of Mark into a single discourse.[18] More instances of deiv seem to show up here than in any other chapter (13:7, 10, 14). The idea of an apocalyptic timetable as expressed in this chapter appears also in Daniel 12:7, 11, 12, minus the exact calculations and in favor of a more general sense of indefinite timing (Mark 13:32-37). Indeed, the notion of a shortening of the days as in 13:20, a truncation of the timetable, appears not only in Mark but also in other more paradigmatic apocalyptic works (1 Enoch 80:2; 83:1; Baruch 20:2).[19]

This shortened timetable is necessitated by the unparalleled suffering summarized in the prediction of 13:19, which seems to allude to the similar prediction of unparalleled suffering in Daniel 12:1.[20] And, as in Daniel 12:1, God shows mercy on his chosen ones – as already mentioned, the time in Mark 13:20 is cut short for their sake. Just as passages such as chapter 12 of Daniel can be read as a call to perseverance in the midst of refining suffering,[21] so also Mark 13 (and, indeed, Mark as a whole with its call for Christians to follow the way of the Cross). As John Goldingay states in relation to the suffering spoken of in Daniel, “It forces people to make up their mind which side they are on.”[22] So also Mark 13 can be seen as a call to choose sides and to choose the right one – to stay on the inside with Jesus and his followers.

For Mark’s readers, who many have suggested were undergoing some amount of persecution or suffering, this may have been an important call. Mark, in 13:14, connects more directly with them – making sure they know that this is written to them, perhaps calling attention to some particular aspect of what he is saying[23] – with the words “let the reader understand”. Although this is immediately connected with Jesus’ allusion to the abomination (bdeluvgma) of Daniel 9:27, 11:31, and 12:11, we can also, considering similar calls in Daniel, read it as applying also more generally to the discourse as a whole. Calls to understand a given passage occur, for instance, in Daniel 9:23 and 9:25,[24] calls which are directed at Daniel but which could also be seen as directed at the reader (perhaps uncoincidentally, this is also the very same passage where the abomination first shows up in Daniel).

Here in Mark 13, as in Mark 4, there may be an idea that the reader, by believing reception of what is given, will achieve understanding and stand as one of God’s chosen ones. This idea may also be present in Daniel 9 and indeed in the book as a whole, with its theme of the unveiling of various mysteries and future events, particularly for the sake of the readers who come later to the book – its messages were sealed for the future, hidden from others (Daniel 8:26-27; 12:4, 9-10), but now revealed at the proper time to the wise, those who believingly appropriate the book and its message and who are promised a glorious future. [25] As John Collins puts it, “Because the book is sealed, true understanding is hidden” – it is only available to the wise.[26] If we read Mark 13 against this background, we can look at it as having more to do with the secrecy motifs than it may have seemed at first – hidden things about the future spoken by Jesus have been put into this book and given to the readers so that they might read and understand and stand firm as part of God’s chosen. It is not so different, then, on such a reading, from the use of the secrecy motif as it occurred back in Mark 4. Let us now see how these apocalyptic themes which we have seen in Mark 4 and 13 can help us understand the Messianic Secret.

The secret of Jesus’ identity in Mark, Kingsbury has shown, is associated more often with the title “Son of God” than any other title in the book (1:11; 1:24-25, 34; 3:11-12; 5:7; 9:2-9; 12:1, 6; 14:11-64).[27] Mark slowly unfolds the secret of Jesus’ divine sonship throughout the second half of his gospel, marching through such partial understandings as 11:1-11 and 12:35-37, culminating in the insightful statement of 15:39 when Jesus dies on the cross. As Kingsbury puts it, in 8:27-16:8 “Mark guides the reader through a progressive unveiling of Jesus’ identity: the reader witnesses, respectively, Peter confess Jesus to be the Messiah, Bartimaeus appeal to him as the Son of David, and, finally, the centurion penetrate what for Mark is the essential secret of Jesus’ person, his divine sonship.”[28]

How are we to understand this progressive unveiling of the secret of Jesus’ identity and its relative hiddenness in Mark 1:1-8:26? From the general apocalyptic context of the book and its relation to the unveiling of secrets, particularly as we have seen in Mark 4 and 13, perhaps we can see this unveiling of Jesus’ identity as at least partially falling within this matrix of ideas. In this eschatological moment of the nearing of the kingdom (1:15), there is an initial divinely given message of divine sonship (1:11). In the following passages, it seems only the demons know of Jesus’ true identity as God’s Son, thus emphasizing that the truth of this is not discernible without supernatural aid. Such contests with the demonic or with oppressive spiritual forces occur also in Daniel 10:13, 20 and in other apocalyptic literature elsewhere as well, thus also emphasizing Jesus’ eschatological kingdom power.

It may very well be that part of what is going on when Jesus silences the demons is that the demons are trying to gain control over Jesus by stating who he really is but Jesus shows his greater power as their exorcist by silencing them.[29] But we can also see this in an apocalyptic light – it is not yet the right time in the divine time table for the unveiling of this secret. Yet, of course, Mark’s readers, by the very recounting of such stories are being let in on the secret as part of the continual invitation to read and understand and join in as insiders with regards to Jesus and his kingdom. In 8:30, after Peter is the first of the disciples to finally confess Jesus as the messiah, Jesus warns the disciples not to tell anyone, which emphasizes the lack of understanding of the disciples as to the exact kind of messiah he would be (and the nature of the kingdom as it was breaking in at this time in his person) – a suffering and dying one (3:31-33) whose followers need to be willing to take on suffering and death as well (3:34-38).

The warning thus emphasizes the secrecy or hiddenness of Jesus’ messiahship, both from the disciples and the rest of the world. From here on out, Mark unveils to his readers what kind of messiah this is, the suffering, Danielic, apocalyptic Son of Man (see Daniel 7) who is the Son of God.[30] The disciples do not fully understand all of this until after Easter – though they hear God’s reaffirmation of Jesus’ divine sonship in 9:7 (directly echoing the earlier 1:11), thus giving them the secret of Jesus’ identity, they do not understand it and are, as in the case of Daniel and his visions of the future and heavenly glory, not to reveal any of what happened at the transfiguration until after Jesus rises from the dead (9:9). Predictions of Jesus’ death continue from here on out as Jesus approaches his passion to come at Jerusalem.[31] As Ulrich Luz puts it, Jesus’ coming “suffering remains incomprehensible to the disciples until the cross. Only there, in the light of Jesus’ death, is full understanding and genuine confession of Jesus’ divine sonship possible, as Mark shows by way of example through the gentile centurion’s confession at the cross.”[32]

The Messianic Secret, read against the apocalyptic background of Daniel, particularly as instantiated in Mark 4 and 13, can thus be read as an apocalyptic motif used by Mark as a literary device, reinforced and in combination with some of the other secrecy motifs woven into the book of Mark. There is a divine time table and the correct time for the unveiling of secrets, here Jesus’ identity, is not to be rushed – and, in fact, the veiling and the timing of partial or full unveilment may very well be part of what pushes the plan along. Correct timing pushes the opposition forward and controls the perceptions of Jesus’ identity for their proper times.[33] The secrets themselves and their understanding, though, are for those inside – Jesus’ followers – alone, but such understanding comes in part through believing reception of the very words and secrets recorded in this book and finally unveiled now at the proper time for the readers. In Jesus’ death and resurrection, the end times for which the book has been written have proleptically arrived, thus ending Mark’s book on a note looking forward to resurrection, and the triumph of God and God’s kingdom over history, much as the book of Daniel itself ends. Like in Daniel, Mark’s readers are invited to take a part in this.[34]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Collins, Adela Yarbro. “The Influence of Daniel on the New Testament.” In J. J. Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel, 90-112. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.

Collins, John J. Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.

Donahue, J. R. and D. J. Harrington. The Gospel of Mark. Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2002.

Evans, Craig A. “The Function of Isaiah 6:9-10 in Mark and John.” Novum Testamentum 24 (1982): 124-138.

Goldingay, John E. Daniel. Dallas: Word, 1989.

Gundry, Robert H. Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1993.

Kingsbury, Jack D. The Christology of Mark’s Gospel. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983.

Luz, Ulrich. “The Secrecy Motif and the Marcan Christology.” In The Messianic Secret, edited by C. Tuckett, 75-96. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983.

Marcus, Joel. Mark 1-8. New York: Doubleday, 2000.

Moule, Charles F. D. “On Defining the Messianic Secret in Mark.” In Jesus und Paulus: Festschrift für Werner Georg Kümmel zum 70. Geburtstag, edited by E. E. Ellis and E. Gräßer, 239-252. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1975.

Telford, W. R. The Theology of the Gospel of Mark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Tuckett, Christopher. “Introduction: The Problem of the Messianic Secret.” In The Messianic Secret, edited by C. Tuckett, 1-28. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983.

[1] Jack D. Kingsbury, The Christology of Mark’s Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 11. Cf. Christopher Tuckett, “Introduction: The Problem of the Messianic Secret,” in The Messianic Secret, ed. C. Tuckett (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 1-28.

[2] There is another possible correspondence in Mark 4 with Daniel – the mighty tree in the parable of Mark 4:32 with its birds and branches may be an echo of the tree in the dream of Daniel 4 which similarly hosts animals. See John J. Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 107.

[3] Adela Yarbro Collins, “The Influence of Daniel on the New Testament,” in J. J. Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel, 105-106. In drawing correspondences between Daniel and Mark, I will elsewhere also be making reference to the Greek text of Daniel.

[4] Collins, Daniel, 400.

[5] Collins, Daniel, 400; Robert H. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1993), 197; Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8 (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 298.

[6] Marcus, Mark, 302. From the Dead Sea Scrolls, Marcus cites, for comparison, 1QH 4:23-24; 1Q5 5:11-12.

[7] Cf. Collins, Daniel, 51; John E. Goldingay, Daniel (Dallas: Word, 1989), 330.

[8] J. R. Donahue and D. J. Harrington, The Gospel of Mark (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2002), 146; Gundry, Mark, 206-207; Kingsbury, Christology, 73; Marcus, Mark, 303.

[9] For a sample list, see W. R. Telford, The Theology of the Gospel of Mark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 33-34.

[10] Collins, Daniel, 49-50, 105-106; Donahue and Harrington, Mark, 145; Goldingay, Daniel, 57.

[11] Collins, Daniel, 105-106; Donahue and Harrington, Mark, 145.

[12] Donahue and Harrington, Mark, 145; Gundry, Mark, 195-198; Marcus, Mark, 303. Donahue and Harrington, in particular, cite for comparison 1 Enoch 83:7; 91:5; 1QM 1:9-10; 1QpHab 7:13.

[13] Donahue and Harrington, Mark, 146; Gundry, Mark, 195, 203-207.

[14] Marcus, Mark, 306.

[15] Craig A. Evans, “The Function of Isaiah 6:9-10 in Mark and John,” Novum Testamentum 24 (1982): 138; Gundry, Mark, 195; Marcus, Mark, 526.

[16] Marcus, Mark, 526.

[17] Donahue and Harrington, Mark, 261.

[18] For additional parallels between this chapter of Mark and the book of Daniel or other apocalyptic literature beyond what I pursue here, see, for example, Donahue and Harrington, Mark, 371; Gundry, Mark, 747.

[19] Donahue and Harrington, Mark, 373.

[20] Collins, “Influence”, 110. A snippet of the parallel language – Mark 13:19: “aiJ hJmevrai ejkeivnai qli:yiV oi{a ouj gevgonen toiauvth ajp j”; Daniel 12:1: “ejkeivnh hJ hJmevra qlivyewV oi{a oujk ejgenhvqh ajf j”.

[21] Goldingay, Daniel, 319.

[22] Goldingay, Daniel, 319.

[23] Gundry argues that it is calling attention to Mark’s use of the masculine rather than the neuter in reference to the abomination of 13:14. But, as I will interpret it, it may additionally (or instead) also be a general call for the reader to pay attention. See Gundry, Mark, 743.

[24] Cf. Gundry, Mark, 743.

[25] Cf. Collins, Daniel, 341-342, 400; Goldingay, Daniel, 218, 309.

[26] Collins, Daniel, 400.

[27] Kingsbury, Christology, 12, 19, 150, 164. Cf. Charles F. D. Moule, “On Defining the Messianic Secret in Mark,” in Jesus und Paulus: Festschrift für Werner Georg Kümmel zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. E. E. Ellis and E. Gräßer (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1975), 242-243.

[28] Kingsbury, Christology, 20.

[29] Gundry, Mark, 88; Ulrich Luz, “The Secrecy Motif and the Marcan Christology,” in The Messianic Secret, ed. C. Tuckett (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 82; Marcus, Mark, 187, 201.

[30] “Son of Man” being an apocalyptic title developed further in other apocalyptic literature but originating in Daniel 7. Unfortunately, there is not enough room in the current paper for a full discussion of this contribution of Daniel to Mark’s apocalyptic atmosphere. For its use in Mark and Daniel, see Collins, Daniel, 80-84; Collins, “Influence,” 90; Kingsbury, Christology, 169-170; Moule, “Defining,” 250; Telford, Theology, 36.

[31] Cf. Collins, “Influence,” 98; Donahue and Harrington, Mark, 28-29, 261; Gundry, Mark, 462; Luz, “Secrecy,” 83-86; Tuckett, “Introduction,” 28.

[32] Luz, “Secrecy,” 85.

[33] Cf. Moule, “Defining,” 248-249.

[34] Cf. Collins, Daniel, 401; Goldingay, Daniel, 318.

Warren on the Purpose-Driven Life: A Short Historical Write-Up

2011-07-20T07:51:00.000-07:00

The following ended up sounding more negative than I intended, since I really did like the book and thought it served FBC well years ago when the church went through it:

Rick Warren is undoubtedly one of the United States’ most influential pastors and one of the public faces of mainstream Evangelicalism. He and his church have had a huge impact on congregations across the country – and now across the world – through their ministries, in particular through the book The Purpose Driven Life and the small group curriculum/church extravaganza that it is designed to be paired with. The main goal of the book is to engage people in the task of living out God’s purposes for them on this earth in place of some other purpose or purposes that might be pursued instead. It aims to inculcate a sense of direction and of purpose that can be lived into and used to order the various priorities, desires, and goals one might have in day-to-day living that vie for volitional control within one’s mind or will. An orderly, energized, focused life is the ideal goal to be imperfectly pursued in a process of spiritual self-formation.

There are, of course, criticisms one could make of the book. It definitely is not meant to address every person in every circumstance where they might be at and does not show any awareness how particular uses of language may alienate some female readers, as it has in fact done in at least some instances. Nor does it do a perfect job with its use of (often very paraphrastic translations of) Scripture, though at least some of that can be chalked up to audience and format, which does not allow an in depth exegesis of particular verses in their contexts and a subsequent exposition based on this. At least from a critical view, of course, some of the uses of the Scriptures do not really support or say what he is using them to support or say. In Warren’s defense, however, it is hard to find a pastor who does not fall into this from time to time, particularly when speaking on such a popular level. There are certainly pastors who are also very good exegetes, but they are a minority and I do not think we should expect pastors to all be so (though that would be very nice indeed), since not all are given such gifts or talents. It does do a good job of portraying the sort of unsophisticated use of the Scriptures that we can work to improve and show by both example and explicit teaching how to go beyond.

As a kind of how-to manual for self-formation, of course, people are likely to criticize it for not being something else they would rather have. Such books, for instance, always have the danger of being too self-focused, a danger that Warren admirably does in fact try to ameliorate with his constant call to focus on God and others and to live as a member of a community of faith, though this is admittedly at times lost in a focus on one’s own self-interests (the rewards one can get, for instance, from God for being faithful). This, of course, is just a symptom of American Christians’ often not-so-successful struggle to get out of the bonds of individualism and self-focus that are practically bred into Americans and into their perceptions of religion and the Christian life. We want to know how something will benefit us and how it relates to us and focus on ourselves as the center and focus of our own spirituality or religious path. Religion is a consumer affair, like everything else in our culture.

This brings me to one of my biggest pet peeves about this book and about American (and much other) Christianity as well, which is the focus in parts on “going to heaven” when we die as if that was the great hope for Christians. Rather than the cosmic vision of the bodily resurrection of God’s people and the concomitant restoration of all of creation, the earth and the physical universe included, such as one finds in places like Romans 8 and in pieces all throughout the New Testament, we are given a limp, bland, self-centered picture of getting to go as a single solitary individual to a disembodied heaven away from the earth when I die. Christian eschatology has nearly dropped out of the picture, replaced with a kind of Platonist placebo. Such views, however, are common in the individualistic churches we find here in the West. “Going to heaven”, where this is understood as personal, individualistic persistence as a disembodied spirit in an immaterial realm separated from the physical universe, is seen as the great hope and goal of the Christian faith. This has usurped the classical and biblical view of our great hope as being the renewal of all things, including the resurrection of our own bodies, the hallowing of the physical, and heaven descended to earth. The cosmic, physical, redemptive gospel has become a personal, immaterial, escapist fantasy. This almost Gnostic flight from the historically and physically-oriented view of our destiny is something we ought to continue to work to correct in our churches.

The individualism of the book, particularly as it has infected its eschatology, is the main think I would correct in this book as I find it most irksome. The book as a whole, however, has much to say to many people, whether or not it falls short in all the ways listed here – what book does not fall short in many ways or fail to do everything one might want it to do? It offers hope and direction for a more real and deep relationship with God, realizing one’s divine purpose in life, and fleeing from self-serving goals and externally- or self-imposed purposes in favor of the purposes of our life that have been ordained by God, who is the center and anchor of all things.

Portraits of a King

2011-07-14T01:34:00.000-07:00

Since my previous post was of an old Berkeley-days paper, I thought I'd share another one, which reuses some of the material from the previous one:

In reading and comparing the narrative of Samuel-Kings in the Deuteronomistic History and that of Chronicles one is struck by the differences in the story which are presented to us – both sometimes in the material recounted and in the way the material is put before the reader. One especially interesting point of comparison is the figure of David in these two histories. Each presents David in a different light, for differing reasons, and presents some slightly different material not included in the other. In this paper I hope to make a beginning in the process of answering the questions how Samuel-Kings and Chronicles respectively view David, discussing how the material the Chronicler chooses to omit or add shows his view of David as it differs from Samuel-Kings. We will first look at the accounts of David’s rise to the throne and then his court history and the succession of Solomon to his throne.

Let us look first at the books of Samuel. The first king of Israel is Saul, who by any light should have made a great king – he was chosen by God through the prophet Samuel and by birth seems especially fit to be king. His father is a prominent man and though Benjamin is one of the smallest tribes, it is centrally located and thus in an ideal position to provide leadership to the land. Saul even looks the part of a king (see I Samuel 9-10). All of this only serves to show how much Saul falls short of being the ideal king by protecting the people and obeying Yahweh.

Despite apparently every advantage, Saul is flawed and fails as king. He disobeys in religious areas such as the time when he sacrifices an animal from impatience while waiting for Samuel. When Samuel arrives, the prophet declares that Saul’s kingdom will end and that God will choose some other king (see I Samuel 10:8, 13:7-14). Saul also fails to kill Agag the enemy king and all the livestock which were to be destroyed (I Samuel 15) and so is rejected by Yahweh. To make matters worse, Saul even consults a witch (I Samuel 28), at which time the apparition of Samuel declares David king and Saul’s dynasty soon to be destroyed by the Philistines (note, not by David, as some might have thought, which is further emphasized later). He even slaughters God’s priests, while David receives one with the ephod and all (I Samuel 22).

Here we begin to have hints of apologetic – a justification of David’s rise to the throne – Saul was a bad king and so Yahweh, who chooses the king, picked someone else. Indeed, David is anointed by Samuel at the command of God – David is the right person for the job of king (I Samuel 16). David is, after all, a man after God’s own heart and is promised a never-ending dynasty (I Samuel 7). This particular piece functions well as a polemic against the detractors of the Davidic dynasty, emphasizing that they are the rulers chosen by God himself.

In comparison to Saul’s situation, David is extremely disadvantaged. His family does not seem to be as well off and he is in fact the youngest of eight sons – and it is generally the oldest that is normally the one who ascends to greatness (or who becomes a king). Indeed, David does not seem at first be the one to whom the kingship over Israel should go to – he is not even one of Saul’s sons. Thus we have this defense of David’s rise and kingship.

Saul also fails as king in being leader of his people, doing such things as imposing unnecessary hardships on his own fighting men (I Samuel 14:24-45). Later, he becomes afflicted by fits of madness due to an evil spirit and even more than once tries to kill his own heir, his son Jonathan (I Samuel 14, 20:32-33). To emphasize Saul’s failure, the Spirit of Yahweh departs from him. So David comes into Saul’s court and serves him well, providing him with a necessary service – his playing of the harp is of such a virtue as to calm Saul as he is afflicted with the evil spirit. His harp playing, having such almost supernatural abilities, helps display David’s quality as a hero (I Samuel 16:14-23).

Saul wrongs David in various ways, trying to get David to be killed in battle, and ends up driving David into hiding. He owes David a daughter in marriage (apparently this is what was promised to the man who defeated Goliath in I Samuel 17) but does not give her to him. Again David is promised Saul’s oldest daughter Merab, but she is given to someone else when the time comes for her to be married. Saul’s youngest daughter Michal, meanwhile, loves David and so Saul finally gives this daughter to David in marriage - and after he does give David one of his daughters, he takes her and gives her to another man (for all this, see I Samuel 18, 25:44).

Saul is concerned for the security of his line and his own well being against the threat he perceives in David. David, meanwhile, does in fact only further the security of Saul and his line to the very end and takes care of them – David is portrayed as but a faithful servant. Even when Saul becomes his enemy, David goes so far as to rebuke his men for even suggesting that they kill Saul – he will not raise a hand against Saul, despite many opportunities to do so (see I Samuel 24:1-15, 26:1-12). He even fights against Saul’s foreign enemies while hiding in the land of the Philistines (I Samuel 23:1-6, 27:8-9).

In his service and in his military success as a warrior-hero, David gains great renown and the love of the people. The Bible emphasizes that he had great success in all that he did, since Yahweh, his divine benefactor (something important for an ancient hero to have, which of course also marks him as a hero – and the proper king), was with him. Even Saul’s family turns in favor of David and loves him intensely – including even the crown prince and, of course, Saul’s daughter, the princess Michal. This success scares Saul, since it emphasizes his own inadequacy and the fact that Yahweh is no longer with him (see especially I Samuel 18). David is the good leader, but Saul is not.

Thus Saul, in his jealousy, sees David as a danger to his kingship and dynasty, declaring his suspicions in an outburst against his son Jonathan (I Samuel 20:30-31). There he proclaims that if David is not killed, he will inherit the kingdom of Israel instead of Jonathan himself. So David is forced into the fringes of society as an outcast and man on the run. But in this David gains a large following, even though forced into an appearance of evil by staying with Israel’s enemies, the Philistines, and leading what looks like a band of outlaws (I Samuel 22:1-2, I Samuel 27). Thus David’s qualifications as a leader come out, especially fit for the heroic warrior-king he is meant to become. But again it is from this apparent evil that David rises into his position, as only he is fit to do.

David has taken on the identity of royalty through his identification with Jonathan – who in turn, as heir, is identified with Saul. This is done when Jonathan makes a covenant with David and gives him his robe, tunic, sword, bow, and belt (I Samuel 20). It is probable that the robes were Jonathan’s royal robes – such a transfer evoking a certain legal symbolism in which there is a transfer of Jonathan’s position as crown prince to David (McCarter, I Samuel, p.305).

All this leads David into the threat of death from his opponent Saul. At first, in a fit of madness, Saul tries to pin him to the wall. Then he tries to get David killed by sending him off on missions against the Philistines, even offering a daughter of his in marriage as an incentive to lure David on to what Saul probably thought was certain death (I Samuel 18). But as the hero, David as usual succeeds in what he does and achieves great victories. Merely by being a hero, David is under the wrath of Saul – leading Israel in battle under God’s favor, as Saul, being the king, should have been doing. Finally Saul actively pursues David and tries to kill him continuously but David, as a hero, is always able to escape.

Through all of this, we see the hero David moving closer and closer to his opponent’s role. Being forced into the fringe he displays his transcendent qualities by using this to come into power “through the back door” as it were. Thus there are one or more transformations involved and an intimate identification of the hero with the one that he is to replace – by identification with Jonathan, entering into Saul’s family by marriage to Michal, and so on. David is thus the true king despite appearances, the one who will succeed where Saul failed. The narrative is meant to show this and that David was faithful to Saul all along.

Other things explained are that David did not kill Nabal but that God did (I Samuel 25), Nabal being evil anyway, and that David did not fight Israel nor did he engage in the battle in which Saul was killed (I Samuel 29). David therefore was not responsible for Saul’s death in any way – Saul in fact killed himself (I Samuel 31). In fact, David executes the man who claims to have slain Saul and weeps both for the king and his son (II Samuel 1). David is so spotless that the fortuitous deaths of Ish-bosheth son of Saul, his rival for the kingship in the north, and his commander Abner are not perpetrated by David but are in fact expressly against his will (II Samuel 3.4). He even takes care of the remaining son of Jonathan (II Samuel 9), and the later killing of Saul’s other descendants is not really David’s fault at all (II Samuel 29:1-14).

A large part of the Samuel narrative thus serves an apologetic function, legitimizing David’s rise and explaining what might otherwise look bad. David is a hero – a warrior, musician, and leader – who transcends normal limitations, taking on Saul’s position by divine choice and succeeding so far where Saul failed.

Chronicles, in the meantime, leaves out most of the story of David’s rise. It first relates Saul’s death in battle, leaving out all other narratives concerning Saul, and declares that Yahweh handed the kingdom over to David because of Saul’s wickedness (I Chronicles 10). David is portrayed as immediately becoming king (though remnants of the memory of his reign in Hebron are retained in particular places like I Chronicles 29:27). I Chronicles 11:1-3 is parallel to I Samuel 5:1-5 yet excludes mention of his reign in Hebron – an example of the Chronicler’s exclusion of all materials which might cast any shadow on David or suggest that there was a struggle or uncertainty in David’s rise. II Samuel 5:1 has “all the tribes of Israel came to David,” reflecting the reality of separate tribal or sociopolitical entities coming together to recognize David. Meanwhile, I Chronicles 11:1 has “all Israel gathered together to David,” stressing the unity of the people as a whole in making this unanimous decision to elevate David. Emphasis is on David as the one who unites all Israel as a people.

The tragic years in David’s life begins with II Samuel 11-12, where David commits adultery and murder (though this tempered by his repentance). I Chronicles 20:1-3 covers the same period, only it excludes II Samuel 11:2 through 12:25 as well as material in the rest of 12 which might make David look bad. I Chronicles includes therefore only the attack of Rabbah and not the story of Bathsheba for which the story of that battle provides a frame. It basically relates II Samuel 11:1 and then moves straight to the material in II Samuel 12:26-31. I Chronicles relates basically only one story that might reflect badly on David, leaving out all others in order to portray David as an ideal figure. This negative story is found in I Chronicles 21, but it is emphasized that Satan incited David, David repented, and that through this the site of the temple was purchased. It is this connection with the temple that seems to provide the reason for the story’s inclusion.

Samuel-Kings, on the other hand, provide quite a bit of material that might reflect negatively on David – or at least on his family – besides the Bathsheba story. David’s sins of murder and rape are continued in his family when the eldest son Amnon rapes his sister and then is killed by the next in line for the throne, his brother Absalom (II Samuel 13). Absalom later tries to usurp his father’s throne (II Samuel 15-18), but is killed by Joab. This seems to indirectly produce another rebellion, which is quickly crushed (II Samuel 19-20). Murder and rape thus beget murder and rape and rebellion against David, who is perhaps portrayed as not always being a very good father and that it is failure in this among other things that leads to his family troubles.

Adonijah is apparently next in line for the throne and intends to succeed his father, supported by much of the court, including Joab and perhaps all of David’s other sons (see I Kings 1). The succession is clearly disputed, as there is a contingent that is in favor of Solomon’s kingship. David meanwhile is presented as impotent, possibly in more ways than one, and is perhaps senile as well – a shadow of his former self. He is old and probably close to death. Through the influence of Bathsheba and Nathan, David declares Solomon king and Adonijah’s bid for kingship is abruptly ended.

For some, these narratives mentioned from Bathsheba onwards suggest that they were originally written against David but were reworked to allow a positive reading and apologetic use (Van Seters actually believes that they formed an antimonarchic narrative which used the Deuteronomistic history rather than the other way around – see Van Seters, pp.287-290). P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., however, believes that they served as a court apologetic (see McCarter, II Samuel, pp.13-16). The tension and ambiguity in the text derives from its nature as apologetic – the author could not deny publicly known faults of David or things that went on and so had to make a version of the stories to explain them as best as possible. The way to deal with it would not be to exclude it or to make overly obvious distortions and so this is why the narratives appear as they do.

The narratives provide a warning for future leaders and shows why Solomon rather than a more “rightful” son was made king – Solomon was the divine choice and the others proved their inadequacy. Amnon raped his sister, so was murdered. Absalom was a murderer and rebelled against his father and so died. Adonijah is presented like Absalom in I Kings 1-2 (see McCarter, II Samuel, pp.9-13) – he is handsome like Absalom (compare II Samuel 14:25 and I Kings 1:6), has similar chariots and horses and runners (compare II Samuel 15:1 and I Kings 1:5), declared himself king (compare II Samuel 15:10 and I Kings 1), and tries to symbolically assert authority through taking David’s women (Absalom with David’s wives in II Samuel 16:22, and Adonijah with Abishag in I Kings 2). The Absalom narrative thus functions, among other things, to put Adonijah in a bad light as the same as Absalom and thus unworthy to be king, Solomon being the right choice. If this is a valid reading, it shows that this is thus another defense of the continued Davidic dynasty.

In Chronicles, by contrast, we see no hint of a deteriorated David. He is still presented spotless, without a troubled family or kingdom. David is the creative and energetic agent of Solomon’s ascent to the throne – no mention is made of Nathan or Bathsheba. David appears fully in control of both himself and his surroundings. No disputation over the succession occurs – Solomon’s acclaim is unanimous and unchallenged, even by David’s sons – in stark contrast to the same events in I Kings (I Chronicles 29:22-24). All Israel is again brought together in unity by David, who passes on leadership to Solomon, thus transitioning the Israelites into their next stage of life in the land.

David is presented in Chronicles as the one who planned and prepared the temple (I Chronicles 22, 28, 29:1-9). He also was the one who prepared for the temple cult (I Chronicles 23-26). David is thus Chronicles’ Moses – founder of nation and cult, to be revered and looked back to. Such places as I Chronicles 22:13 and 28:19-21 are direct echoes of Deuteronomy 31 and Joshua 1, where Joshua is commissioned by Moses to continue God’s work in leading the people into the enjoyment of the land (see also Brettler, pp.35-38). So here Solomon is commissioned by David to continue God’s work in prospering the nation, continuing what David started by building the temple and developing the nation and cult. David thus lays the foundation for a people and it is up to future generations like that of the Chronicler to complete the task by maintaining temple worship, uniting the people of God, and so on. In the same way Moses began the people and it is up to later generations to uphold the law and maintain the cult and so on. Moses laid out the plans for the tabernacle, David for the temple.

The Chronicler seems to want his readers to look to David as to Moses and be encouraged to help continue the work – worshipping at the temple in Jerusalem as the center of a restored people. David is thus used by the Chronicler for his political and theological purpose – he is an icon, an ideal person to be looked to. Jacob M. Meyers reports, “The Chronicler sees Jerusalem as the authentic place of worship, the returnees as the legitimate successors of the people of Judah and the cult personnel, and the community established by them as the true Israel” (Myers, p.xxxvi). The Chronicler’s picture of David thus serves as a vehicle for hope of a national unity in a restored community of all Israel, focused around the second temple and the new community that already exists there. As such, the Chronicler is open to and eager for the inclusion of the north in this community by their allegiance to the temple and its standards and practices (as evidenced in his concern for the north in his genealogies and in his treatment of Hezekiah’s Passover, which included northerners, in II Chronicles 30).

Chronicles might then be the Chronicler’s history for and to create such a community – the community has begun in the current group at Jerusalem but will be made into the community it was meant to be by the influence of Chronicles. According to Norman Gottwald, the community at Jerusalem in this time had no political power to enforce religiocultural views outside its borders except by persuasion, its persuasive power resting on ideological and pragmatic grounds (Gottwald, p.239). Without political power to create conformity, this must come by other means – and Chronicles is the Chronicler’s way of achieving this. Thus Chronicles is not so much interested in David as a real person with problems and enemies and personal complexities but as more of an idea to look to. He is dealt with more for the theological role the Chronicler could give him than as a real person.

Samuel-Kings deals with David in all his complexity as a national and historical figure – all his ambiguities, faults, and dark days. David is presented as flawed, despite his greatness. Yet he is a hero, God’s chosen king, a man after God’s own heart despite deep flaws. He is a warrior and a leader who deteriorates sadly with age yet is never seen by the author as fully and finally rejected by Yahweh as Saul had been – David is God’s king for Israel, and thus his dynasty, despite its detractors, is ordained by God.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brettler, Marc Zvi, The Creation of History in Ancient Israel, Routledge; New York: 1995.

Gottwald, Norman, The Politics of Ancient Israel, Westminster John Knox Press; Louisville, Kentucky: 2001.

McCarter, Jr., P. Kyle, I Samuel, Doubleday and Company, Inc.; Garden City, New York: 1986.

McCarter, Jr., P. Kyle, II Samuel, Doubleday and Company, Inc.; Garden City, New York: 1984.

Myers, Jacob M., I Chronicles, Doubleday and Company, Inc.; Garden City, New York: 1965.

Van Seters, John, In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History, Eisenbrauns; Winona Lake, Indiana: 1997.