The revealed Word leading you to the hidden God

Luther says in a Table Talk:

"consideration must be given to the revealed God on the one hand and to knowledge of the unrevealed [hidden] will of God on the other. Of the latter nothing at all is known to us. We must confess that what is beyond our comprehension is nothing for us to bother about. [...God] says in effect: "Let me remain hidden. Otherwise you will fall into the abyss of hell, as it is written, 'He who inquires into the majesty of God shall be crushed by it.' [Prov26:27] In this place leave me untouched. Carnal wisdom shall here have its limit. Here I wish to remain unrevealed. I shall reveal your election in another way. From the unrevealed God I shall become the revealed God. I shall incarnate my Son and shall give you one who will enable you to see whether you are elected. do this: Give up your speculations which are apart from the Word of God, thoroughly root them out, and drive them to the devil in hell. ' This is my beloved Son. Hear ye him'.["...] Christ says, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." [John 14:9] Christ will lead you to the hidden God."

(pp.132-133, Luther: Letters of Spiritual Counsel, Translated and edited by Theodore G. Tappert).

Further reading on the hidden and revealed will of God can be found in Calvin's Institutes in book 1 chapters 17 and 18 (especially in the first few sections of each chapter)

Helpfully this is when Calvin is dealing with God's providence which includes him being in some way behind evil acts, whilst his will is clearly for good acts. Predestination to salvation really follows from this less contested teaching.

Elisha's miracles

Elisha performs astonishing miracles and one of the highlights is when he raises the Shunammite's Son (2 Kings 4). But he doesn't always find miracle-working straight forward. He sends his staff to be laid on the dead son but it does not work. He then has to go to house, shuts out the crowd from the room, and lays on the child, 'putting his mouth on his mouth, his eyes on his eyes, and his hands on his hands'; but that only makes the child warm. He then has a short break and repeats the process before the child wakes up coughing and spluttering. Later in the same chapter Elisha also feeds a hundred men with 'twenty loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain in his sack'.

In Mark 5 Jesus also is brought to someone's home to raise their child from the dead. He also shuts the door behind him and a couple of others but simply holds the child by her hand and speaks words to her and she immediately is risen and able to walk around. In the next chapter Mark records how Jesus feeds five thousand people with five loaves and two fish.

Killing and making alive

The Lord kills and brings to life;
  he brings down to Sheol and raises up. (1 Sam 2:6)

Some religions, and indeed some versions of Christianity, sound to me like God kills those that are out and does not kill those who are in. That is not the path of Jesus though, and it is not the Christian's path either.

Law and Gospel again

Sometimes I don't like the way law and Gospel can sometimes be used to chop the bible up into bits where some are law and some are Gospel. A nasty temptation when that is done is to ignore the law and only talk about those parts containing the Gospel (c.f. Hummel, Horace D. "Are Law and Gospel a Valid Hermeneutical Principle?" [online]Concordia Theological Quarterly 46 (1982) no. 2-3:181-207). I have commented before (here and here) that the same passage can in some ways be both law and Gospel. Wengert gives an example below:

the brokenness of election in Lutheranism - as foolish as it appears to human wisdom - already contains great comfort. We can thereby announce this electing promise to anyone and everyone ("God chooses you") and watch as that declaration acts as law and gospel in justifying the sinner. As law, God's choice destroys and puts an end to all our choices. As gospel, we can finally relax and let God's grace carry the day.

(p.190, A Formula for Parish Practice: Using the Formula of Concord in Congregations, by Timothy J. Wengert)

...BTW I'm not sure that I agree with all of the quote.

Melanchthon on the Qur'an

Did you know that in 1543 Martin Luther had a significant role in the publication of a Latin edition of the Qur'an? He wrote the preface and Philip Melanchthon wrote a 'warning to the Christian Reader'. Melanchthon had a number of points to raise, one of which was to 'compare types of teachings' between religions. This is what he found:

• Mohammed 'says nothing in favor of the forgiveness of sins'.
• 'He spews forth blasphemies upon the Son of God'.
• 'He does not teach what sin is'.
• 'nor does he demonstrate the causes of human misfortune'
• 'He is incapable of saying anything about true prayer in faith'.
• 'Finally, he completely rejects that teaching which belongs to the Gospel'.

I really need to get round to reading the Qur'an at some stage, but I suspect if I did I would come up with a different list. Nevertheless I think Melanchthon's list is better than one that I would write. I probably would never have thought of observing the lack of an explanation for 'causes of human misfortune' (how important is that for living life?) or teaching on 'true prayer in faith' (what a blessing that is!).

(Quotes from "Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, and the Publication of the Qur'an" by J Paul Rajashekar and Timothy J. Wengert, in Lutheran Quarterly Vol 26 (2002) pp. 221-228)

The other restoration of Peter

"go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you." (Mark 16:7)

"now Peter is singled out and included in the group who are commanded to follow to Galilee: it is not yet too late for them to become disciples once more. The message is thus not simply a command, but an assurance that the death and resurrection of Jesus bring forgiveness and the opportunity to begin again" (p.66, Not Ashamed of the Gospel: New Testament Interpretations of the Death of Christ by Morna D. Hooker)

Justification: one metaphor among many?

I've often been one of those people trotting out that phrase of the moment in criticism of some exegesis that it is 'importing law court language' into passages where it doesn't belong. Behind that oft heard criticism of exegesis of individual passages and peoples theology in general is the assumption that the law court (justification, righteous, acquittal etc) is just one metaphor among many for describing our relationship with God. I have had that challenged recently in reading Oswald Bayer. He argues in short that the law court is just a heightened and formalised version of something that is all encompassing:

We cannot reject the question that others put to us: Why have you done this? What were you talking about? Might you not have done something else? In the other's view of us, and also in our own view we always find ourselves to be the ones who are already being questioned and who have to answer [...] We are forced to justify ourselves, and as we do so, we usually want to be right. Before the court of law, what constitutes our whole life is disclosed with particular clarity. The world of the court is not a special world of its own, but just a particular instance - a very striking one - of what is being done always and everywhere.

(p.1, Living by Faith: Justification and Sanctification (Lutheran Quarterly Books) by Oswald Bayer, translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley)

Distractions

I was challenged as a regular cinemagoer by Ray Ortland's recent post about entertainment. Although I am not sure I agree totally. He has followed this up today with an interesting quote from Francis Schaeffer.

"People today are afraid to be alone. This fear is a dominant mark of our society. Many now ceaselessly sit in the cinema or read novels about other people's lives or watch dramas. Why? Simply to avoid having to face their own existence. . . .

No one seems to want (and no one can find) a place of quiet -- because, when you are quiet, you have to face reality. But many in the present generation dare not do this because on their own basis reality leads them to meaninglessness; so they fill their lives with entertainment, even if it is only noise. . . .

The Christian is supposed to be very opposite: There is a place for proper entertainment, but we are not to be caught up in ceaseless motion which prevents us from ever being quiet. Rather we are to put everything second so we can be alive to the voice of God and allow it to speak to us and confront us."

(Francis Schaeffer, "Walking through the mud," in No Little People, pages 86-87; HT Ray Ortland)

The only thing I'm unsure of in that comment is that it is only something that has started happening 'today'. Carl Trueman relates how Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) wondered about the same issue.

He can understand, he says, why poor people might enjoy the odd dance to distract them from the miserable drudge of their daily lives, but why should a king, glorious, powerful, surrounded by proofs of his own greatness need trivial entertainment? The answer is that, left to himself with nothing to distract him, he will think about himself and the reality of the death that awaits him.

(cited in The Wages Of Spin: Critical Writings on Historical and Contemporary Evangelicalism, p. 177)

Passing judgment

Reflections on Romans 2

Romans 1:18-32 seems characterised by the words ‘they’, ‘their’ and ‘them’. ‘They are without excuse’, ‘they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images, ‘God gave them up’, ‘they were filled with every kind of wickedness’. God’s wrath seems to be ‘against those people over there’, but Paul is just setting us up for chapter 2.

Roman 2:1 begins with a big ‘therefore you’! Catching us while we are in the process of joining God in his judgment on ‘them’ he swings round the spotlight on us. We do ‘the very same things’ as them, so if we can judge them then we must judge ourselves the same.

God is kind to us now, but we cannot presume that will last when ‘God’s righteous judgment is revealed’. We cannot rely on past kindness because circumcision can become uncircumcision (2:25). God’s past kindness was not faithless but was meant to be lived out going forward in repentance (v.4). Not only was the past to be lived out going forward, but also the external was to be lived out internally in our heart (v.28). God's judgment is thorough and impartial. We cannot stand before the judgment of a God who judges the ‘secret thoughts of all’ and sees impenitent hearts.

Suddenly we who felt so complacent in judging others are fearful of the coming ‘righteous judgment of God’ which ‘will be revealed’. But then we remember that ‘the righteousness of God’ has already been revealed (1:17; 3:21-26). By faith we saw it at the cross where Jesus Christ was crucified. There our pride was put to death, and our ability to lord it over others in judgment. But three days later Jesus Christ was raised and was justified, and if we saw our death in his we also see our justification in his.

Universal justification - a definition

Phil Walker has just commented on an earlier post saying that one place that he would really not want to go with Lutheranism is 'universal justification'. As someone who is quite new to Lutheranism I was pleased for someone to give me a name for something that I had already detected as lying behind much of the discussion of baptism I have been reading. Phil probably should not get too concerned just yet, but a brief bit of internet surfing has brought up this helpful definition which I post here so I can refer to it later when I have time to properly think about it.

By "objective" or "universal" justification one means that God has declared the whole world to be righteous for Christ's sake and that righteousness has thus been procured for all people. It is objective because this was God's unilateral act prior to and in no way dependent upon man's response to it, and universal because all human beings are embraced by this verdict. God has acquired the forgiveness of sins for all people by declaring that the world for Christ's sake has been forgiven. The acquiring of forgiveness is the pronouncement of forgiveness. (Rom. 3:24; 4:25; 5:19; 2 Cor. 5:19-21; Ap IV, 40-41; SA II, i, 1-3; FC Ep V, 5; FC SD XI, 15)

(Theses on Justification, Part I, A Report of the Commission on Theology and Church Relations of the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod, May 1983)

Sounds like universal salvation, but it's not. Put that in your theological pipe and smoke it.

I suspect selfish posting like this is what means I will never get very high in Technorati rankings, so it is a good thing I reconciled myself a long time ago to using this blog as a electronic notebook which other people can read if they wish.

The Threat of Grace

Tim Keller recalls recalls how he once met a women who found the promise of free grace 'scary'. When he asked her why she replied:

If I was saved by my good works, then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would be like a taxpayer with "rights" - I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if I am a sinner saved by sheer grace - then there's nothing he cannot ask of me.

(The Reason for God, p.183)

On not being able to return the favour

Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

I have recently been thinking about all the good gifts I receive from people I know, in particular my church and my family. This has been prompted by a recent splurge of gifts due to various sudden needs. I have found that grace is a difficult thing to accept as humans. If someone gives me something I feel compelled to return the favour. I find it really, really hard to accept gifts that are not part of a reciprocal relationship. I think we all do because we don't want to dependant people. That's part of why people commit suicide rather that 'be a burden', why British people are obsessed with rounds of drinks, and why we feel compelled to buy a birthday card for someone if they bought us one last year.

I see grace most often in my parents. Most of us have received a crazy amount from our parents who have given up so much for us. I find it almost crippling in my relationship with them to realise this. To realise I will never be out of their debt. I can never return the favour.

Kids often try and ignore the reality of their parent’s grace by claiming that it is a parent’s 'job' to do something, or that it is part of the circle of life because we will do the same to our children (and so on). These are pathetic attempts to avoid the reality of our debt. As adults we are more sophisticated. We accept that we have received much but draw a line over it at 18 (or whatever) and pretend that it never happened as we begin to live as equals giving in a strictly reciprocal way.

It is obvious to me that how we think and act towards our parents is usually mirrored in our relationship with our heavenly Father.

The weight of condemnation is weighing on me at the moment, but I don’t have to be burdened… the trouble is I perversely prefer to shift the burden around with me than accept that I need help.

Lord have mercy
Christ have mercy
Lord have mercy

Random facts about Calvin and Calvinism

I found them interesting. But then perhaps I ought to get our more.

1. 'Archbishop William Whitgift whose distaste for Puritanism was legendary, remained a staunch Cavinist in his views on predestination, as the Lambeth Articles of 1595 amply demonstrate' (p.4).
2. 'Calvin regarded Zwingli as a second-rate theologian and ridiculed the esteem in which he was held at Zurich. though Calvin read and cited Zwingli's important treatise, the Commentary on True and False Religion, he confessed that he was put off by Zwingli's reliance on philosophy, he excessive use of paradox, and his confusion of the universal concerns of the gospel with the parochial interests of the Swiss' (p.173)
3. Calvin signed the Augsburg Confession while at the Regensburg Colloquy in 1541 (p. 172).
4. Relying 'only upon the index of the Corpus Reformatorum as a guide to Calvin's knowledge of the Fathers, one would conclude that Calvin referred in his commentaries on the new Testament to Chrysostom 105 times, to Augustine 101, to Jerome 38, to Ambrose 23, and to Ambrosiaster not at all' (p. 135).
5. 'Calvin does not use the Fathers in the way a medieval commentator used his ancient authorities. The Father's are not cited by Calvin in his exegesis of Romans 8 because he agrees with them and needs their authority their authority to strengthen his argument [...] in every case, explicit and anonymous, in which Calvin has referred to Patristic exegesis, he has quarreled with it. One ought not to make too much of this quarrel. After all, as we have already seen, there is a wide range of issues on which Calvin is in complete agreement with the Fathers. [...] Calvin, after all, is writing a commentary on Paul, not on Origen or chrysostom or Augustine or Ambrosiaster. Calvin keeps his pages as uncluttered as possible because it is Paul himself and not the commentators he wants to interpret' (p. 136)

All page references are to Calvin in Context by David Steinmetz.

The Dark Knight and Wall-E

Reviews of The Dark Knight to make you think:

• Peter Dray: are we 'able to keep to our own moral frameworks, particularly when placed under intense pressure'? and is vigilantism a moral response to evil?
• Chris Oldfield: action is absurd but everything, chance is fairness. The joker resembles Nietzsche's madman, who has seen the consequences of the death of God.
• Mark Kermode: one moral set piece too many, one character too many.

I'm still waiting for the similarly thoughtful reviews of Wall-E, so I'll try my hand at the film reviewing lark myself.... SPOILERS ALERT.. I'll assume readers have seen the film (because you should).

I love Pixar films and this one is exceptional. In contrast to The Dark Knight it was beautiful in it's simplicity, although it had plenty of ideas of it's own. Bizarrely it had both a very positive and very negative view of humanity. In the future humanity is lazy to the point that they never stand up and communicate with each other only through screens. They drift (literally) through life not creating but only consuming passively what the all dominant faceless corporation tells them to. However, everyone is very polite to each other and the robots, and once forced to question the direction of their lives they come up with the 'right answer' immediately, setting their faces to renewing the world they had abandoned as a garbage heap.

The morality behind the film is not hard to discern and some reviewers have found it to grate a little. Clearly, we should all care for the environment and our bodies. Who is going to disagree with that! However, most reviewers have stopped there and so had problems linking the first half of the film on Earth with the second in space. But to me the two halves are essential to the film as a whole. To have missed out the second half (as Mark Kermode would have liked) would have led to missing out the central theme of the film.

Wall-E after 700 years on earth has exceeded his programming and discovered what is most important. He values other things (as art), other people (or at least cockroaches) and he values himself (repairing himself while all his brothers died). He is really living, but longing to share his life with another. With Eve he finds the love that he has been longing for and doggedly pursues her because of this. This brings Wall-E and Eve together on the human ship where they show the humans how to be truly human. The humans enthusiastically embrace this new (or old) kind of life that they have forgotten and the charming titles at the end show them repeating the creative achievements of the last 2000 years.

By the end of Wall-E the relationships between humans and creation have been healed and humanity is (unconsciously) imaging our creative and caring God again. It is a beautiful, fantastical film. But it is fantastical. Wall-E depicts humans as having drifted out of the way they were made to live, but having now learnt their lesson.

I see much to love in the message of Wall-E. However, I know that our drifting into sin is not entirely unintentional, and our turning from it is not as easy. I also know that as long as our primary relationship to our Father is broken we cannot fix our relationships with each other or creation.

We can't rely on robots to save humanity and then show us the way to live. We need a more powerful saviour, a better example to follow and new heart to enable us to do it. We also need to experience that greater love, and greater relationship that we were made for; and until we do we will be like Wall-E watching old VHS videos but longing for the reality.

Stop me if you have heard this before

Indidividualism is the problem, community is the solution.

Jonathan Leeman (in Modern Reformation, HT Dave Bish) has heard it before. Like most writers today he is no fan of individualism and loves community, however he sees a deeper problem, which requires a solution that reaches right down to the root. For him...

the problem is we hate authority, and the solution is repentance.

A very good article. Well worth reading.

More random notes on Law and Gospel

Note to self: I need to do a review post of John Frame's article "Law and Gospel". I think that would help crystallise many of the helpful things I have learnt from Lutheran theology over the last year. It would also be very topical in the mist of a lot of confusion in the Reformed world (or blogosphere at least) that Lutherans may say has been a part of Reformed theology since the beginning.

I think I would start by clearing the air by copying Don Carson's point in his article "The Vindication of Imputation: On Fields of Discourse and Semantic Fields" (in the brilliant Justification: What's at stake in the current debates ed. Mark Husbands & Daniel J. Treier).

I then may point out that characterisation of the traditional dichotomy between law and gospel of law = old covenant, gospel = new covenant, is a caricature (c.f. quote from Timothy Wengert posted previously).

Then I should think about why it is important after all.... I might find this bit hard work to write.

Finally I might think about why Reformed Theology often seems to struggle with conflicting urges in the debate.... this will be where I fall flat on my face because it here it will actually become clear what I may have hidden up till then: my ignorance of historical theology.

Law first, Gospel second

One of the most challenging things to think about in John Frame's article is that it is more biblical to preach the gospel first and then the law, in contrast to what "one commonly hears that it is important, not only to preach both law and gospel, but also to preach the law first and the gospel second". I can see his point here, and yet he doesn't deal with what for Luther seems to be the biggest argument for that ordering: as Christ died and then was raised, so we are baptised into the water of death and are raised to life and repent of sin and are absolved by the confessor.

My top 3 books for seekers

Inspired by this.

What would you suggest? Do you think my limited reading/sin has made me make some bad choices? This is a genuine request for recommendations (but you will have to work hard to persuade me of Mere Christianity/Basic Christianity if you were thinking of those).

• A Journey Worth Taking by Charles Drew
• Real Life Jesus: meaning, freedom, purpose by Mike Cain
• The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Tim Keller

I fear that all of these are a bit to nice. Maybe that's because I'm a bit to horrible... I don't know, there is nothing wrong with being nice after all. But you really can feel a difference between those three and John Piper's Seeing and savouring Jesus Christ. I don't think that it is meant to be so much of a 'seeker book' but nevertheless the Jesus presented by Piper is a whole lot more full blooded that the other three... and yet they remain my top 3 books for seekers... go figure.

I think I'm going to read Vintage Jesus: Timeless Answers to Timely Questions by Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears next.

Does anyone else have this nasty dilemma when reading such books, to decide between books which spell out the challenge and the promise of the gospel without neglecting the challenge or putting up unnecessary obstacles (in the form of controversial secondary doctrines) to the gospel?

I still think though that the best thing to do is take someone to a gospel (e.g. with Christianity Explored) or through the bible (e.g. with The World We All Want). Saves all the angst as well, and you can avoid having to add in caveats about how you would phrase things differently!

Problems with comments

Sorry to all of you who commented in the last few weeks and I didn't respond. Usually Blogger emails me to let me know if someone has commented. It hasn't recently. I don't know why.

Online Mark Seifrid resources

[I'll try and keep this updated as I find more, but please let me know if you know of anything I don't].

Mark Seifrid is Mildred and Ernest Hogan Professor of New Testament Interpretation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Articles

• "The Narrative of Scripture and Justification by Faith: A Still Fresher Reading of Paul" 2006 Symposium on Exegetical Theology, Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana (17 January 2006) published as "The Narrative of Scripture and Justification by Faith: A Fresh Response to N.T. Wright" in Concordia Theological Quarterly (Vol 72:1, January 2008)
• "The Gospel as the Revelation of Mystery: The Witness of the Scriptures to Christ in Romans" in SBJT 11/3 (Fall 2007)
• "Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth: An Introduction to the Distinction between Law and Gospel" in SBJT 10/2 (Summer 2006)
• "Justified by Faith and Judged by Works: A Biblical Paradox and Its Significance" (SBJT Winter 2001) - a revised version of his faculty address
• "The Waiting Church and Its Duty: James 5:13-18" (SBJT Fall 2000)
• "The 'New Perspective on Paul' and Its Problems" (Themelios, Issue 25-2, Feb 2000)
• "Faith, Hope, and Love: Paul’s Message to the Church at Thessalonica" (SBJT Fall 1999)
• "Salvation, BF&M Article 4 Summary" from An Exposition from the Faculty of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary on The Baptist Faith and Message 2000
• "'The gift of salvation': Its failure to address the crux of justification" (JETS, December 1999)
• "Natural Revelation and the Purpose of the Law in Romans" (TynBul, 49.1, May 1998) [pdf] [doc]
• "Blind Alleys in the Controversy Over the Paul of History" (TynBul, 45.1, May 1994) [pdf] [doc]

Audio

• Discussion with Albert Mohler, Tom Schreiner, Brian Vickers and Denny Burk: N.T. Wright and the Doctrine of Justification, video and MP3 (3 September 2009)
• Discussion with Tom Schreiner, Brian Vickers and Denny Burk: "Assessing the Piper-Wright Debate on Justification", MP3, (15 April 2009)
• Sermon: "The Radically Realistic Gospel: Romans 7:7-25", MP3, (1 June 2008)
• Sermon: "The Parable of the Talents", MP3, (1 July 2007)
• SBTS Faculty Address: "Justification by Faith", MP3, (16 February 2000)

Reviews by Seifrid

• The Galatians Debate: Contemporary Issues in Rhetorical and Historical Interpretation by Mark Nanos (Trinity Journal, Fall 2004)
• Leben aus den Verheissungen: Traditionsgeschichtliche und biblisch-theologische Untersuchungen zur Rede von Gottes Verheissungen im Frühjudentum und beim Apostel Paulus, by Gerhard Sass (RBL, 2000)
• Paul, Judaism, and Judgment According to Deeds by Kent L. Yinger (RBL, 22 June 2000)
• Neglected Endings: The Significance of the Pauline Letter Closings By Jeffrey A. D. Weima (JETS September 1998)

Reviews of Seifrid

• Review of Christ Our Righteousness: Paul's Theology of Justification by Simon J. Gathercole (Beginning With Moses / Themelios Vol. 26 No. 2)
• Review of Christ Our Righteousness: Paul's Theology of Justification by Kim Riddlebarger (Modern Reformation, March/April 2002 Vol: 11 Num: 2)

Leithart and I on Law and Gospel

To quote Leithart in full:

A strict distinction between law and gospel is offered as a prophylactic against works-righteousness. If it is admitted that law is gospel in any sense, all is lost.

But this view assumes the very same view of law that it contests. A proponent of works righteousness sees the law as demands that need to be kept, and the end of the law is simply its keeping. The proponent of law/gospel segregation has the same view of law.

Both detach law from its purpose, which, as Knight argues, is eschatological. Law exists to correct, instruct, lead to maturity. And to that extent, law is always intended as, and in practice often is, good news.

However is this to misunderstand what is properly meant by Law/Gospel. Charles Arand and Robert Kolb in their conversations on the Book of Concord note that even "Christ died for your sins" can be "Law" rather than Gospel if you hear it as condemning you for the magnitude of your sins rather than lifting you from despair (they said it in a really menacing and accusative way to emphasise the point).

Kolb and Arand don't make the connection but I wonder if the same cannot be true for commandments. Commandments can be good news if they bring life rather than condemnation. I think of the beatitudes which Matthew characterises as Gospel (Matt 4:23) although most people teach them as commandments - do this and you will receive this (be merciful and you will receive mercy etc). However, if read in context they seem to be saying: “rejoice because you who are X are going to be saved”. It does not say be X, but assumes that they already are. Equally though it could be preached as an impossible standard we cannot reach in seeking justification by our works.

So the same words can have the different meanings for different people. God knew this so the Law of Moses was intended to be both life and death to people, just as the Gospel is (2 Corinthians 2:16). This may make interpretation of the different statements in the bible a whole lot easier (although it may be cheating).

Why all Christians need to think about Biblical Theology

How can we read the scriptures like Jesus on the road to Emmaus, Peter at Pentecost, and Paul in Romans, when the word Jesus is so small in a Wordle of the bible (from the ESV blog; what is a Wordle?)?

A start may be made by realising that Jesus is in one way or another also 'Lord', 'God', the Word ('said'), 'Israel', the 'people', and 'king'.

I wish I had time to right this post

Why Tom Wright's theology is distinctively Reformed, even though it is different from most Reformed theologies out there today.

I would talk about their similarities on:

• The importance of union with Christ
• Justification/baptism as declaring a reality that is already present
• Redemption as involving the whole of creation
• Biblical theology
• The importance of covenant
• The emphasis on the goodness of the law
• The doctrine of Sola Scriptura
• ...and more?

I probably haven't read enough to make it coherent and persuasive... still that never has stopped me posting before. :)

A quick search of the internet would give me some quotes to use as illustrations though, e.g.

"I grew up in a Lutheran evangelicalism which left me with a strong antithesis between law and grace. I found this all profoundly unsatisfying until I met Calvin and Calvinism. I began to think, "Whew…the law is a good thing. It is holy and just and good. It is right and it has been fulfilled, not abrogated, in Christ." All of that is right. So, if you are faced with a choice between Luther and Calvin, you simply have to choose Calvin... What I then found, and believe me I tried very hard to do this, was that I couldn’t make the Calvinist reading of Galatians actually work." (An Interview with NT Wright by Travis Tamerius)

"From (at least) Calvin onwards, reaching something of a climax in the Romans commentary of Charles Cranfield, exegetes in the Reformed tradition found in Paul a view of the Jewish law which was far more positive than Lutheran exegesis had assumed. I am not sure that this tradition ever did full justice to second Temple Judaism, but at least it did not start from the assumption that the law itself was basically a bad thing ripe for abolition. (Notice how this works out in exegesis of the notorious crux at Rom. 10: 4: is Christ the abolition, end, completion, goal, or fulfilment of the law? Or what?) After all, in [72] Reformed Theology the Torah was given in the first place within a historical scheme, not to enable the Israelites to keep it and so earn their membership in God’s people, but to enable them, as a people already redeemed through the Exodus, to demonstrate and work out the implications of their membership and vocation. The (at least partial) convergence of Sanders’s reading of Judaism with a Reformed view of the law makes it all the more ironic that the anti-NP movement is today centred not least in Reformed circles such as the Presbyterian Church of America and Westminster Theological Seminary" (Redemption from the New Perspective? Towards a Multi-Layered Pauline Theology of the Cross)

Wright: Would you agree with the following analysis of how all this happened? The mainstream of New Testament studies from the Reformation until very recently – certainly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – was being led by German Lutherans who had a very definite law-gospel antithesis. Had it instead been led by people in the Reformed as opposed to the Lutheran tradition, the new perspective would never have been necessary. If you take the theology of someone like Ridderbos or Charles Cranfield, you find exactly the same idea in principle, which is that the law was never given as a ladder of good works up which people ought to climb to save themselves; if anyone ever thought that, that was an abuse of the law, because grace and particularly the covenant precedes obedience.

I find this very ironic, because if you were to go on to Google and were to type in “Tom Wright” +”justification by faith,” you would turn up many American web sites from the Presbyterian Church of America and various other strongly Reformed centers like Westminster Seminary which are extremely rude about the two people sitting on this platform tonight for having sold Paul down the river and given up the genuine Reformed doctrine of justification by faith. This is really quite bizarre, because I think that what we have both done in taking forward Sanders’ proposal theologically – Sanders is really not a theologian, he’s more of an historian – I see what we’re doing as actually much more on a Reformed map than a Lutheran map, precisely because of the emphasis on the covenant and grace as basic, and on the Law from the start as being the way of life for the redeemed people. This corresponds to Luther’s tertiary use of it, if you like, but it’s much easier to do it in a Reformed or Calvinist framework. Would you be happy with that?

Dunn: That’s entirely so. I rediscovered, as it were, my Reformed heritage in all this because I was brought up Presbyterian. I was a strong Calvinist in my youth, and one of the impressive things about Calvin is that he sees the continuity of the covenants. The covenant of grace is the dominant category running through the Old and New Testaments.

Wright: Grand narrative, you mean.

Dunn: Well, a motif, shall we say. And likewise, a very important point: Calvin’s work is systematic – Luther was never systematic like that. Calvin is able to integrate better what is typically called now a “participationist” soteriology (“in Christ”) and the forensic emphasis. One of the sad things about this rebuke coming from many in the States is that they want to operate entirely in forensic categories. They haven’t really integrated the en Christo, the “in Christ” motif, which is so fundamental to Paul. The term “in Christ” occurs far more frequently in Paul than justification language.

Wright: Yes.

(An Evening Conversation on Jesus and Paul with James D.G. Dunn and N.T. Wright)

Newbigin on telling stories

I have done a good deal of street preaching in my life and I have often stood in a street to preach the gospel where the name of Jesus is quite unknown. It is no use mentioning the name of Jesus because no one knows what that means, but I have to use the word God. Of course I must find one of the many Tamil words for God and there are many words. And when I use one of these words, I know that in my hearers' minds they will be thinking of perhaps Shiva or Vishnu or Murugan or Subramanya or Ganesha or Hanuman. they will certainly not be thinking of the one whom I think of when I say the word God, the one I have learned to know through Jesus Christ. So what difference has my preaching made? So far, none at all. It will only make a difference when I begin to tell stories about what this God has done. Then you begin to see that God is different from what we thought, because you come to know who a person really is only be understanding that person's life, knowing how she behaves, how she responds in different situations, by interacting with her.

(p.117 "...and Culture" in Signs Amid the Rubble: The Purposes of God in Human History by Lesslie Newbigin)

Very true, and one reason why I am loving being part of sharing the Gospel through the gospel of Mark using Christianity Explored.

The only unhelpful thing about it is that by focusing on stories about God's actions, we can distance ourselves more easily than if we focus on what God has said. Although it is less fashionable, it is actually more personal to focus on the latter. Both are true though.

Did Luther believe justification by faith was a legal fiction?

Paul Helm doesn't like a similarity in Richard Baxter and Tom Wright's theology of justification. He says that both believe "Justification is not a change of status, but of persons.". This may or may not be true, but consider Kolb and Arand on Martin Luther's theology of Justification:

Those who see this form of forensic justification as merely a legal fiction do not share Luther’s understanding of the power of the Word of God. The reformer knew that from the beginning of the world, God determined reality by speaking. Therefore, he was certain that God’s word of forgiveness created a new reality in the life of the sinner.

(I heard something similar in audio from them, but this is from their book, HT Shephard's Scrapbook)

So for Luther the key thing is not whether justification is a declaration or regeneration. It is both. The question is which comes first in priority.

There is a book out there by Lowell Green that argues that Melancthon "helped Luther discover the Gospel", by which he means forensic justification (or so I understand). In the Apology to the Augsburg Confession Melancthon states that:

by faith alone we obtain the remission of sins for Christ's sake, and that by faith alone we are justified, i.e., of unrighteous men made righteous, or regenerated.

Some connections could be drawn here with speech-act theory. Unsurprisingly though Anthony Thiselton got there first. He has an article called 'Justification by grace as legal fiction? : "language-games and 'seeing as' : a fresh approach to justification by faith in Paul and James"' (in Thiselton on Hermeneutics). I'll have to see if I can get hold of it.

How I cut 7 words out of the Lord's prayer

Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those who sin against us.
Lead us not into temptation
but deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the power,
and the glory are yours
now and for ever.
Amen.

I don't know how I have been so blind before.