Quadrilateral Thoughts

Book Review: Finishing the Starfish and Spider

2009-07-19T14:45:00.005-04:00

The reading list off to the right has stayed the same for embarrassingly long. I had a little time today and thought I would knock off one of them, The Starfish and the Spider.

So I've now read chapter 4: Standing on Five Legs (in decentralized organizations):
1) the role somewhat independent circles of groups play (Bibleheads, practioners, church leaders)
2) the role of catalysing personalities (me and Drury for the seminary)
3) the centrality of common ideology (real denominations have seminaries!)
4) connecting with pre-existing networks (IWU and the Wesleyan Church)
5) having champions who make it happen (President Smith and Russ Gunsalus for the seminary)

I've read chapter 5: The Hidden Power of the Catalyst

I've read chapter 6: Taking on Decentralization
Interesting stuff on Al-Qaeda in here, stuff I've been saying since I started this blog in 2004.
1) Changing Ideology
2) Centralize them (give their catalysts cows to compete over)
3) Decentralize yourself (if you can't beat them, join them)

I've read chapter 7: The Combo Special: The Hybrid Organization
Had an MA student do a final project on the Hybrid Church. Watch out!
1) Some centralized companies decentralize the customer experience (eBay is the model here)
2) Some centralized companies decentralize parts of the company (GE, for example)

I've read chapter 8: In Search of the Sweet Spot
That is, the right hybrid mix between centralization and decentralization. GM is the loser in this chapter, Toyota the winner. The sweet spot can shift rapidly, which is why those who were massively on top in the music industry 9 years ago are going out of business today. Apple brilliantly capitalized on the change with iTunes.

And I read chapter 9: The New World:

1. Diseconomies of scale--smaller can be better
2. The Network effect--overall value increases with each member added to the network
3. The Power of Chaos--which optimizes creativity. Increased, tidy organizational structures can be an organization's downfall (knowing looks to friends)
4. Knowledge is at the edge--The best understanding of the organization is often at its fringes
5. Everyone wants to contribute
6. Beware the hydra--cut off one head and two more come back in a decentralized setting (which is why I said the Bush administration with terrorism and Israel with Lebanon were like a couple fools stomping on an ant hill.
7. Catalysts rule
8. The values are the organization (ideology, common goals and values are what make a decentralized organization go)
9. Measure, monitor, and manage (that is, the circles)--but do it as a cheerleader
10. Flatten or be flattened.

Sometime this week you should see my next book purchase in this area (what's wrong with me... I haven't read a fifth of the books I bought just last month!):

Deneff on Temptation: A Wesleyan Reflection

2009-07-19T10:34:00.003-04:00

Steve Deneff preached a good sermon this morning on temptation. You can listen to it on iTunes in a day or two. Check back at the College Wesleyan website.

What made me think of posting was the fact that he really ignored the Wesleyan question of entire sanctification. If we're honest, few Wesleyan pastors preach this doctrine. Few people in the pew understand it. Forgive the imagery, but this morning sermon struck me as something like a by-pass around a blocked artery.

Deneff's sermon took off from Genesis 4 and the line that "sin crouches at the door." He made very healthy distinctions between evil and sin. He had a helpful section on avenues by which temptation come (personality, physical issues, environment). He had a practical "to this" start toward solutions (practice the virtue opposite the tempting vice).

He warned the entirely sanctified not to forget that still "sin crouches at the door." Crouches, not as in we "fall" into sin but that it is looking to get us.

How am I as a Wesleyan to map this sermon to our historical doctrines? Is this Keswick? Sin will always be a struggle, even though you can beat it through the Spirit. That's not historically Wesleyan. What about entire sanctification? Where the power of Sin over me is defeated over the whole?

For good or ill, those aren't the questions Christians are asking and I suspect if we were to dwell on them, we simply consign ourselves to irrelevance. I believe Deneff has hit the nail on the head this morning and has, intentionally or not, boiled down the Wesleyan tradition in this area to what people need to hear and will actually help them.

1. Sin crouches at the door of all our lives, no matter how long you have been a Christian. No one dare think they have arrived or ignore the constant possibility of having and yielding to temptation.

2. No one need be defeated by Sin or temptation, through the Spirit's power. Sin may crouch, but it never need catch.

3. Implicit, although it was not the focus this morning, is the possibility that God can "break the power of cancelled Sin." I personally think it is more problematic than helpful to debate the breaking of the power of Sin for the entirety of a person, since we are constantly changing all the time. In principle, I completely agree that a Christian should be able to say at any point of their life that, for their part, they are as surrendered to God as they know how to be and would obey Him whatever He might ask them to do.

But what matters today--and as humans we only ever have today--is that the power of Sin be broken in the area where Sin is crouching today. Wesleyans believe that God can shoot the lion crouching today to where that particular temptation ceases to crouch so threatenly tomorrow.

The blood will flow through this artery.

Explanatory Notes on Galatians: Posted!

2009-07-19T07:29:00.001-04:00

I've now completed explanatory notes for both 1 Thessalonians and Galatians, with outlines and all. As far as anyone seems to know, I'm the first blogger to blog a commentary through Galatians. At some point, I need to read through the whole thing at once and make sure it all fits together well. But just getting it in the above form was enough work for one day.

Next Sunday, deo volente, I start finishing up Philippians, in progress, with the end of chapter 3. Man, I hate loose ends, and my life is one big one, thousands of unfinished projects...

9. Critical Issues in Isaiah

2009-07-18T14:12:00.012-04:00

Previous posts in this series include:

2. The Old Testament Canon
3. Genres in the Pentateuch
4. Critical Issues in the Pentateuch
5. Critical Issues in the Historical Books
6. The Poetic Sub-Genre
7. Critical Issues in the Psalms
8. Critical Issues in Wisdom Literature
_________
As we mentioned earlier, the Hebrew Bible is divided into three parts: the Law, Prophets, and Writings. We can further divide the Prophets into two parts: the Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) and the Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve). Isaiah thus leads off the prophets proper.

Prophecy was not a phenomenon limited to ancient Israel. The Old Testament itself illustrates this point not only with reference to the prophets of Ba'al (e.g., 1 Kings 18:19) but also in the character of Balaam, who is not an Israelite and free lances for whatever god from which a person might want to hear (e.g., Num. 22:4-6). Texts discovered from throughout the Ancient Near East (ANE) reinforce this observation.

The primary function of a prophet would seem to be that of a messenger from the gods, with the message uttered in the form of a prophetic oracle. The intended audience of such oracles was not a generation centuries in the future but the message was for those who were the actual individuals standing in front of the prophet as the message was given. In that sense, the prophetic texts of the Old Testament are, at least in the first instance, compilations of speech uttered orally on previous occasions.

It is now recognized that the transition from oral prophecy to written record of prophecy need not have been long. For example, Isaiah 8:16 mentions Isaiah's testimony being bound up by his followers. Jeremiah 36:4 mentions Baruch as his "secretary." At the same time, nothing about inspiration requires that it had to be the prophet himself that wrote it down, let alone edited the prophecies of a lifetime into a collection of prophecies.

The nature of such collections is such that the writings of the prophets have probably to some extent been "de-contextualized" from their original settings in real life (their Sitz im Leben, situation in life) and "re-contextualized" because of being repackaged as a new literary whole. The same is of course true of the sayings of Jesus as well in the gospels. Such re-contextualization inevitably results in some change in meaning and connotation. The larger the prophetic book, the more relocation and thus the greater potential shift in meaning.

We witness an apparent transition from the early days of prophecy in Israel to the prophets of the later monarchy (rule by king). This transition follows the shift from a period when Israel was a loose collection of tribes with no real common leadership to the more centralized days when kings ruled. The prophets and "seers" of the earlier days (cf. 1 Sam. 9:9) were apparently very "charismatic" figures, for lack of a better word, who often acted in groups. Saul comes on a group of such prophets after he is anointed king. He finds them processing from sacrifice with musical instruments.

When Saul joins them, a spirit from God possesses him and he goes into a kind of prophetic frenzy (1 Sam. 10:10). In another part of 1 Samuel, Saul actually strips his clothes off when this happens, and he lies naked for a whole day and night (1 Sam. 19:24). Similarly, when David brings the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem, he dances and leaps largely uncovered (2 Sam. 6:14, 16, 20).

These sorts of texts remind us that the concept of the Satan was not yet around when they were written. What 2 Samuel 24:1 attributes to God, 1 Chronicles 21:1 attributes to Satan. It is difficult for us, from a New Testament perspective to think that it was God directly who sent an "evil spirit" on Saul and led him to throw a spear at David (1 Sam. 16:14)! And so from a Christian perspective, it is not completely clear to us which spiritual powers were really responsible for various spiritual activities attributed to God in the Historical Books.

By contrast, the prophets of the Latter Prophets date from the later monarchy on. At least in presentation, they seem much less frenzied than the earlier companies of prophets (Ezekiel is a noticeable exception at points). Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel may all have been priests. Their messages often have to do with social justice (concern for the poor, widows, orphans, etc.), although we do find engagement with geo-political events, concern for appropriate worship of Yahweh, and so forth.

Christian Interpretation
The New Testament quotes Isaiah and the Psalms more than any other books in the Old Testament. And as we have seen with the Psalms, the New Testament tends to take its words in a "fuller sense," a sensus plenior. To varying degrees, the New Testament was somewhat unconcerned to read Isaiah in context. Its paradigm for reading Scripture was not wired to look for original, contextual meaning but for how the words might be read spiritually in relation to Christ and the concerns of the early church.

We arguably find this hermeneutic at play in a number of well known instances. For example, when the Old Testament portion of the Revised Standard Version (RSV) first came out in 1952, a good deal of controversy rose over its translation of Isaiah 7:14: "Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." The issue of course is that this verse is a classic prophecy of the virgin conception in Matthew 1:23.

But the RSV was not denying the virgin birth. Indeed, it uses "virgin" in its translation of Matthew 1:23. The issue is that the Hebrew word 'alma in Isaiah 7 would not seem to demand a miraculous birth. Young women--in fact virgins--conceive all the time. They just conceive by way of sex rather than by miracle!

The original context of Isaiah 7 is the LORD giving a sign to King Ahaz in relation to two kings that were threatening him from the north. A young woman would give birth to a son as a sign to him, and before the child grew up, God would take the threat to the north away (7:16). Now if this prediction only applied to Jesus, then it was not a sign to Ahaz in any way. He died over 700 years before Jesus! Matthew reads Isaiah 7 with Spiritual eyes and sees a meaning no one, including Isaiah, had ever seen before Jesus.

We find this pattern of interpretation consistently throughout the New Testament. Prophecies that originally had to do with the immediate situations of the prophets are read figuratively, spiritually, in relation to the New Testament context. For this reason, the prediction-fulfillment argument for the truth of Christianity is dangerous and potentially counter-productive. It seems primarily through spiritual eyes that the Old Testament words are understood of Christ and New Testament events. So we potentially provide an opportunity for the skeptic when we argue that these verses "predict" Jesus.

One of the most important texts in Isaiah for us as Christians is Isaiah 53, a text that we relate to the sufferings of Jesus on our behalf. Interestingly, the New Testament does not actually engage this text as a witness to Christ's suffering very often. For example, Matthew 8:16-17 is the only text in the gospel that quotes it, and it uses it in relation to Jesus' healing ministry rather than his death. The main texts that read it in this way are 1 Peter 2:22-25 and Acts 8, where God uses this text to provide an opportunity for Philip to bring the gospel to an Ethiopian.

What is interesting about this text hermeneutically is that it poses some challenges to read in its literary context. The broader literary context equates the servant in question with Israel (e.g., 44:1, 21; 45:4; 49:3). But Isaiah 53 speaks about the servant suffering for "our" transgressions (53:5). If the "our" is Israel, then we have Israel suffering for Israel. In short, we can identify with the Ethiopian eunuch's question in Acts 8:34, "About whom is the prophet speaking?" Thus some Old Testament passages have elements that seem to have pushed later readers toward more than literal interpretations.

"Three Isaiahs"
The fact that New Testament authors were not wired to read the Old Testament in context immediately provides a warning for those who insist we must limit our understandings of Old Testament authorship to the names by which the New Testament references the Old Testament. When it comes to Isaiah, we have no good reason to suggest that the core material of the first half of the book does not incorporate prophesies that Isaiah himself uttered in the 700s BC. The points of debate come with the packaging of those prophecies together in the first half and with the authorship of the second half.

If you approach Isaiah inductively, letting its text generate your thoughts on matters like dating and authorship, you will immediately be struck with its second half. For example, Isaiah 36-39 is not prophetic material, but a historical narrative of events near the end of King Hezekiah's reign. This material is virtually word for word the same as material in 2 Kings 18-20. Like the Pentateuch, this material talks about Isaiah and things he does. Inductively, however, it does not read as if Isaiah is writing these chapters. In th light of what follows, it reads more like someone has excerpted Kings to provide a bridge between the time of Isaiah and a time two hundred years later.

Since the New Testament does not quote these chapters, the main reason someone would ascribe them to Isaiah is the current packaging of them in a book that begins in 1:1 to say, "The vision of Isaiah..." Proverbs also begins by saying its contents are "The proverbs of Solomon" but then goes on to include proverbs of the wise (24:23), of Agur (30:1), and of Lemuel (31:1). It is at least possible that the ancients did not think of such headings as having to extend to everything that followed.

However, the real controversy comes when we get to Isaiah 40-66. Once again, from an inductive perspective, Isaiah is mentioned nowhere in these pages. These chapters do not attribute their material to Isaiah. It is only the packaging of them in the same book as Isaiah 1:1 that starts us out with this expectation inductively.

But as we proceed inductively through the rest of these chapters, they do not seem to picture a setting in the time of Isaiah. The setting is that of Israel about to return from exile around the year 539BC. Isaiah prophesied in the late 700s. Nowhere is this setting clearer than in Isaiah 45:1, where the Persian king Cyrus is mentioned. Cyrus is the king who in 538BC allowed the Jews to return to Israel from Babylon. Isaiah 45 addresses him in the present and even past tense in 45:1.

We therefore cannot simply say that someone who dates this portion of Isaiah to the 500s does not believe in prophecy. These words would not have made much sense at all during the time of Isaiah or the intervening century until 586BC when Babylon destroyed Jerusalem. For example, Isaiah 61:4 speaks of God rebuilding ancient ruins and destroyed cities. The literary context both before and afterwards indicates that it is Jerusalem that is in view, a city that was not destroyed for 150 years after Isaiah and could not have been considered ancient ruins for some time after that.

Once again, the primary reason the authorship of these chapters in Isaiah is an issue is the way the New Testament quotes them. It is the fact that Jesus and the New Testament cite this material as material from Isaiah (e.g., Matt. 12:17). Unlike the Psalms, however, no New Testament author makes an argument on the basis of Isaiah's authorship. It is rather a matter of how the New Testament and Jesus reference the material in these later chapters. Each believer will have to decide whether the New Testament quotes such material within the categories of its day or whether God wants us to take from these references a timeless statement of authorship.

It is thus conventional since the commentary of Bernhard Duhm in 1892 to speak of Isaiah 49-55 as "deutero" or second Isaiah and Isaiah 56-66 as "trito" or third Isaiah. Material from the first part ("proto" Isaiah) thus was thought to go back to Isaiah. Isaiah 40-55 was thought to date from the time right before Cyrus allowed Israel to return from captivity and Isaiah 56-66 was thought to date from the period immediately following return in the late 500s BC. The idea is not that there were three different people named Isaiah. At most, some have suggested that a group of Jews preserved and extended the Isaianic tradition in the late sixth century.

As with Wellhausen's theory of the Pentateuch, the specifics have not gone unquestioned in the intervening days. And with the rise of literary approaches to the Bible in the 70s and 80s such as the narrative criticism we mentioned earlier, the study of Isaiah has focused more attention on the literary unity of the sixty-six books rather than the partitioning up of the book into parts. Common themes such as God as the "Holy One" appear throughout. Regardless of what one thinks about the historical origins of Isaiah's content, therefore, it is possible to read it literarily and theologically as a unity.

Wiki-Space--how 'bout it NASA?

2009-07-17T19:43:00.004-04:00

I was listening to NPR Science Friday today. It's been 40 years since we first went to the moon and over 35 since we've been back. That to me is an atrocity.

Anyway, it's the same old conundrum. When our nation is in such massive debt, when there are children who have no medical care, how can we spend billions and billions of dollars over the next 10 years designing new space craft?

Some at NASA have an innovative idea. Take parts from the existing space shuttles and put together one new craft at massively less cost and time. The problem? Then you have one craft that can go to the moon... and do precious little to advance our exploration of space elsewhere.

Then my mind went to Nupedia. Ever heard of it? No? It was scrapped before it hardly got started. It was old school encylopedia. Commission some experts to write some articles for a new online encyclopedia. Why didn't it make it? Wikipedia did thousands and thousands of times more in a year or two by letting us all make it.

Now someone like me shouldn't be allowed to post on Wiki-Space. You should have to have a graduate degree in some relevant discipline. But what if NASA and the space agencies of the world opened up a Wiki for development? This group of the geekiest of the geeks works on engine stuff. That group works on shield stuff. This one on navigation. That one on life support. Certainly some stuff wouldn't be public and there would be NASA people putting it into final form.

But the genius of decentralization is the ticket. This sort of people does this kind of stuff as a hobby. Imagine having 200 geniuses give thousands of hours of research for free! You've heard of Open Source software? It's Open Source engineering!

Friday Paul: Born at a Time and Place 2

2009-07-17T09:56:00.006-04:00

And now, a draft of part 2 of chapter 1 of Life Reflections on Paul's Life and Letters. By the way, I'm detoxing from my email addiction these next 24 hours. IWU is upgrading its systems so all I have is my backdoor gmail no one even knows exists. I'm curled up in the fetal position, shaking, and sweating profusely.
_________
We are all born in a particular place at a particular time. We have no choice in the matter. In some parts of the world, particularly the West, we like to think we are free to be anything we want to be or do anything we want to do. But at least the situation of our birth is not of this sort. Our most formative years are a kind of slavery to the contexts into which we are born. We are slaves to the forces at work on us, the genes we inherit from our parents and the influences of our environment.

We cannot help whether we are born into poverty or wealth. We cannot help it if we are surrounded by peace or war. We cannot help if we are raised in a Christian or Muslim family. Our most fundamental desires seem to be something we inherit from one place or another, long before anyone begins to reflect on whether we should have them or might have different ones.

As we grow up, we become freer to do the things we want, but most of us probably continue largely as slaves to our desires. We come to think of ourselves as free, but we mostly live out the desires and whims set in cement in our formative years. Education can help. We can learn about other ways of seeing things. Life can hold up a mirror to ourselves and show us how others see us. When we truly see the other options, then we are freer to be or do something different from the enslavement of our childhood... or we can now more freely choose to be what we already are.

But most humans seem content to live on in ignorance of the forces at work on them. We assume that the way we have grown up thinking is the only way to think. We have a built in tendency to think that those who think or act differently are either ignorant or evil. To the extent that we are not self-reflective in this way, we behave different from the other animals around us, pushed around by the world around them.

Christians disagree over the extent to which God empowers us to choose Him or not. Some believe God orchestrates everything in our lives, so that we have no real choice whether to choose or not to choose Him. I come from a tradition that cannot reconcile this view of God with the fundamental affirmation that He is love. We believe that God, at some point of everyone’s life, gives them a chance to move in His direction. And the more we take that opportunity, the more power He gives us to keep moving toward Him.

Paul was also born in a particular time and place. On the one hand, he was privileged to be born a Jew, which meant he was born with the Scriptures. In one sense, he started out on his journey to God farther along than those who were not born within Israel. Assuming that Christianity is true, those of us who are born in a Christian context today are born even farther along on that journey than Paul started out.

But Christians believe it is ultimately a journey I must take, regardless of where I am born. If I am born into a devout Christian home, perhaps even baptized as a child, then I start out potentially far along in the way. But my parents and church cannot ultimately go on the journey for me. I must take the journey. I must move beyond the givens of my birth and become "free" in my choice of God.

What of those who have never heard? What of those who were born into a different set of religious beliefs? It is hard to see a person born in the most fundamentalist of Muslim circles coming to believe on Christ, given his or her environment! Miracles, signs, and wonders have always helped to convince, but how many of these does the average individual in the world see even in a lifetime?

Christian tradition has often had a sense that God will judge people "according to the light they have." The Quakers used to speak of an "inner light" within everyone. Many Christians believe that those who have never heard will be judged by how they responded to the light God gave them, not by whether they confessed faith in a name they never heard. Still others take the thought experiment further and suggest there may be "anonymous Christians" who have faith in God and are saved through Jesus even though with their conscious minds they reject him. If you had been told that Jesus was a certain way all your life, how difficult it would be to accept him in wrapping paper you had been raised to despise!

In the end, God is the one who decides eternal destinies. In one sense, it is foolish for any of us to think we know the answer to these questions. The righteous Judge will act justly. That we know for certain. We had best leave the rest to Him.

John Wesley had a lovely concept we refer to today as "prevenient grace," the grace of God that comes to us before we even can come to Him. It can bring us to God in the most beautiful way if we allow it. Although it is God's business, I like to think that no matter who you are, no matter what the circumstances of your origins--your gender, geography, and geneaology--God will be there, drawing you to Himself. It is not where we start that is important but where we end up.

The biblical worlds remind us that our identity is more than just a matter of me, what I want and what I like. At the same time, some of the basic principles of Christianity require us to move well beyond the "group mentality" of the ancient world. The gospel has made it clear that "in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free; there is no male and female" (Gal. 3:28).

A person is not more valuable to God simply because they are a man or a Jew. Everyone is equally loved by God. One of the great insights of the modern world--one we are in danger of losing--is that you simply cannot assume a person is a certain way because they are a woman or a certain color or from a certain place. It is beyond dispute that all men are not better leaders or more insightful or even stronger than all women. If the gospel really required us to believe such things, it would be false.

The principles of the gospel thus require us to let each individual, regardless of their gender, race or social status, tell us who they are, what they believe, and how they will act. Christianity is no excuse for bad thinking or unloving behavior. It is absurd even to have to remind ourselves of such things. And yet some Christians do use the Bible as an excuse to turn their brains off or to treat certain groups of people hatefully. Here we remember the words of Jesus to such people in Matthew 7:23, "I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!" (TNIV).

4.1 Apostles, Overseers, and Deacons

2009-07-16T07:10:00.007-04:00

The New Testament does not articulate a clear leadership structure for a local assembly of believers. That is not to say that such churches did not have a fairly common structure. We may catch glimpses of one from time to time, like when Paul greets "overseers and deacons" at Philippi (Phil. 1:1). Paul calls himself and Barnabas "apostles" (e.g., 1 Cor. 9:1-6). 1 Peter refers to "elders" (1 Pet. 5:1), and 1 Timothy has a list of qualifications for an overseer or a deacon (1 Tim. 3:1-13).

But we are left to sort out exactly what these roles were and whether they were relatively uniform throughout early Christianity. Or did the leadership structures of local assemblies and Christian synagogues actually vary somewhat from place to place. It seems impossible to answer such questions definitively, although we can make educated guesses. When all is said and done, we must ultimately recognize that even if we knew for sure how leadership took place, we would still only have descriptions, not prescriptions for how churches should structure their leadership today.

Perhaps the easiest place to begin is with the category of apostle, a person "sent" on a mission. We find the word used in more than one way in Acts and Paul's writings. On the one hand are "the Twelve." The book of Acts in particular considered the twelve apostles in a special category of apostle, one for which Paul himself would not have qualified. In Acts 1, the earliest believers replace Judas with Matthias so that the number of twelve remains intact (1:12-16).

The qualifications for this role were that a person had been with Jesus from the time of his baptism up until the time of the resurrection (1:21-22). Acts implies that more than one person might have fit into this category, but it is Matthias who is chosen. Some have speculated that the early church made a bad decision here, that Paul should have been Judas' replacement. [1] But Paul would not have qualified as Judas' replacement given the criteria. He apparently had no encounters with Jesus during his earthly life. [2]

At the same time, both Paul and Acts also use a broader definition of a "sent one," an apostle. Acts 14:14 calls Paul and Barnabas apostles in this more general sense. And when Paul is defending his rights as an apostle, his criteria seem to be 1) that one has seen the risen Lord and 2) that the risen Lord has commissioned you as a special representative of it (cf. 1 Cor. 9:1). It is in this sense that he considers himself and Barnabas to be apostles (e.g., 1 Cor. 9:5-6). And it is perhaps in this sense that he considers the husband-wife pair of Andronicus and Junia to be apostles (Rom. 16:7).

There are some Pentecostal traditions today that use the word "apostle" of some of its leaders, many of which use the word Apostolic in their name. On the one hand, it is hard to find fault with the idea that certain individuals believe themselves to be called and sent by God in some special sense. At the same time, the burden of proof is on anyone who would suggest that we have apostles today of the same sort Paul or Barnabas were. Could the risen Christ appear to someone today in the manner he appeared to Paul? Certainly.

But it is not clear that any of those who call themselves apostles today would claim to have seen the risen Christ in the same way as Paul saw him. Similarly, Paul seemed to have considered himself the last of the apostles (1 Cor. 15:8-9). With some three years separating himself from the resurrection appearances he narrates, he considers himself to have been a "miscarriage" and uses the word "lastly." By implication, he does not believe any new apostles have come on the scene in the over twenty intervening years. You can see how extremely "untimely born" would be someone claiming that suddenly, two thousand years later at the beginning of the twentieth century, a whole slough of new apostles have suddenly started to flow again!

A second category of importance in the early church seems to be that of elder. In the Methodist tradition, ministers have historically been called "ordained elders." Presbyterian and Congregationalist traditions also have a category they call "teaching" elders that understands the word in this way (cf. 1 Tim. 5:17). No doubt this use of the word relates to 1 Peter 5:1, where Peter calls himself a "fellow elder" with the elders that are leaders in the churches to which he writes.

However, the Presbyterian sense of a group of "ruling elders" in a local church probably comes closer to what the New Testament usually meant when it referred to elders. Indeed, the word "Presbyterian" is a reflection of the Greek word for elder, presbyteros. We know that members of the Jewish ruling council were considered elders (e.g., Acts 6:12; 24:1). We can imagine that synagogues throughout the Diaspora were also structured in this way. Acts refers to the leaders of the Jerusalem church beyond James and the apostles, "elders" (e.g., 15:6). So it is no surprise to hear Acts tell us that Paul and Barnabas appointed "elders" in every town (14:23).

The word elder of course refers to an older person (e.g., 1 Tim. 5:1), and so it seems overwhelmingly likely that any elders in the early church were older. We can imagine that such elders tended to be male, but we have no evidence that a woman could not be an elder in a church. The matter of Paul's churches in particular is a question. If they had elders, it is hard to imagine that a Priscilla (e.g., Rom. 16:3; Acts 18:26) or a Phoebe (Rom. 16:1) would not have been on such a body at the appropriate age.

It is, however, at least a matter of debate whether Paul's churches were structured in this way. Our personal inclination is to consider overseers (e.g., Phil. 1:1) as synonymous with elders and thus conclude that Paul's churches probably did have elders as leaders. But it is significant to notice that Paul himself does not use the word "elder" in any of his unquestioned writings. The word appears only in 1 Timothy 5, and 1 Timothy differs enough from the thinking and categories of Paul's earlier writings that most consider it pseudonymous, written to convey Paul's authority to a context several decades after his death. [3]

As is often pointed out, the operations of Paul's churches, at least the one at Corinth, seem to have proceeded in much more of a "charismatic" than "presbyterian" way. Indeed, the worship at Corinth was so "spirit" oriented and open in its participation that it had apparently disintegrated into chaos. Everyone had a hymn or a prophecy or a lesson or spoke in an unknown tongue/language or had an interpretation of someone's unknown language. Paul tries to steer them out of this chaos. Tongues must have interpretations. Two or at the most three with prophecy and tongues-speaking, and one at a time.

So while Paul's church probably did have appointed leaders, the Spirit element seems to have dominated, at least at Corinth. "Do not put out the fire of the Spirit," he tells the Thessalonians, "and do not despise prophecy" (1 Thess. 5:19-20). This tension between the Spirit and structure seems to have been one of the structural conflicts of the first century. We likely see it reflected in the words of Matthew 7:21-23. Here are pictured exorcists and prophets who do not make it into Jesus' kingdom. 3 John seems to reflect a conflict between a travelling evangelist (Demetrius) is rejected by a powerful local leader (Diotrephes). And 1 Timothy 3's attention to structure may very well be a response to such travelling teachers (cf. 2 Tim. 3:5-9).

Paul thus pays little attention to church structure in his commonly agreed writings. Only as his writings look to the period after his death does church leadership become an issue. This in itself is a significant observation. While Paul was alive, he was the final authority as an apostle and father to his churches. He probably did leave leadership behind, but a more pneumatic, spiritual kind of environment seems to have more been the normal mode of operation. Paul does not use established leadership as the solution to church conflict.

Acts, on the other hand, does. Acts presents a very orderly and structured church with a fairly clear chain of command. The subjugated Paul of Acts is not the free wheeling apostle of his own writings. Where we are headed with these observations is, once again, that there is no absolute church structure that the New Testament prescribes. We can read between the lines to find a description, and even this description implies some diversity of focus. The New Testament thus provides models from which we may choose. But it does not tell us how to structure our churches today in terms of specifics.

We have two more categories of early church leadership to consider, which we must then map to those we have already mentioned. The first is that of overseer (episkopos). The word has sometimes been translated as "bishop," but this translation is greatly misleading in our current context. A bishop today is a person of authority over many local church leaders, usually centered in a metropolitan area. The New Testament does not use the word episkopos in this way. A modern day bishop comes closer to an apostle in the early church than to an overseer or elder.

In the two words presbyteros (elder) and episkopos (overseer) we see the two principal ways of structuring church leadership today. "Presbyterian" churches tend to be governed by a local group of elders, while "episcopal" churches tend to have a hierarchy of leaders that govern many local congregations, perhaps even up to the level of "archbishops" who govern bishops. Over time, of course, these structures have multiplied in diversity. In actually, Congregational churches are even more "presbyterian" than the Presbyterians, for local Presbyterian churches are actually under an authority that goes above the level of the local church. "Congregational" churches, on the other hand, are self-governing on the local level, as are most Baptist churches.

The idea of an "episcopacy" that governs local churches within a hierarchy of regional leaders is the structure of the centuries. As early as AD110, the church father Ignatius was telling the church leaders of local congregations within a city to obey their bishop/overseer, who by that time governed an entire city of leaders. The shift back to a more congregational structure among some groups thus did not come into play until well into the Protestant Reformation.

Both groups can claim biblical precedents for their structures. The congregational/presbyterian format seems to reflect the structure of most local assemblies in the early church (although not the charismatic character of many in the earliest church). Meanwhile, the episcopal structure reflects the role that apostles played in the early church and the structure that God allowed to dominate the Church for 1500 years (although often not in the give and take of the earliest church).

When Paul addresses the leaders of the church at Philippi, he includes its "overseers" and "deacons." It does not seem likely that the church at Philippi, where Paul spent far less time than at Corinth, would be larger than the single church at Corinth. It would therefore seem likely that by "overseers," Paul is referring to the elders of the church at Philippi rather than to single individuals who governed individual churches.

At the same time, if the early church borrowed the model of elders from the synagogue, it is quite possible that it also borrowed the idea of a synagogue ruler. Here we are thinking of a person who took the leadership of a synagogue for a year or so and then perhaps passed it on to someone else at a later time. Just because early churches had councils of elders would not in any way preclude a single individual from serving as leader of the group. Indeed, it is hard to imagine such leaders not emerging, whether they had any official title or not. Once again, we do not find any particular structure among churches today eliminated. We only feel chastized if we have been dogmatic about our structure.

The role of deacon seems difficult to spell out. The seven appointees of Acts 6 are often considered the precedent for deacons as individuals who perform less spiritual functions within the church, like making sure widows get fed. But Acts 6 does not call these seven individuals deacons. The two we know the most about, Stephen and Philip, become preachers. Acts 21:8 calls Philip an "evangelist," and Acts 8 certainly shows him going around proclaiming the good news and facilitating the Holy Spirit's engagement with Judea and Samaria.

One possibility that immediately comes to mind is that deacons tended to be church leaders who were not old enough to be elders. For example, it is interesting that 1 Timothy, which tells Timothy not to despise his youth (4:12) also refers to Timothy as a "deacon," even if the word is not usually translated this way in 4:6. It is this word that is used of Phoebe in Romans 16:1. In any case, the frequent translation of "servant," in Phoebe's case joined to a word that has the sense of patron (Rom. 16:2), may suggest someone who supports the church in a somewhat concrete way.

In Paul's somewhat charismatic church world, he mentions many other roles a person might have in a church. 1 Corinthians 12:28 mentions apostles, prophets, teachers, and then blurs off into things like people who perform miracles or heal or administrate or speak in tongues. This is not an absolute list, as some to make up "spiritual gift tests" treat them. The first three have the most status, but then he mentions not offices in the church but a sampling of some gifts people in the churches of his day had.

So in Romans 12:6-8 he mentions prophecy, service, teaching, exhortation, contributing, leading, and being merciful. Ephesians 4:11 mentions apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. What we have hear are important functions that need to take place in the church more than anything like an absolute list of how to package them. Those that expend great amounts of energy trying to line themselves up to these sorts of lists worry about lists Paul at least partially was creating on the spot in relation to his audiences and whose functions no doubt overlapped.

Evangelists were perhaps, like Philip, individuals who proclaimed the good news, but who had not seen the risen Jesus personallty. Travelling teachers would become a problem as the first century progressed. These were perhaps individuals who, like the Greek sophists, would set up shop in a place, relying on the patronage of some wealthy individual. A recurrent theme in books like 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, 2 Peter, and Jude is false teaching, so it is no wonder Christianity soon developed a system of authority to control right teaching.

The role of prophets was apparently very significant in the early church. When Ephesians adds prophets to the foundation of the church (2:20), it is almost certainly referring to Christian prophets rather than the prophets of the Old Testament. 1 Corinthians 14 shows the important role they played in the worship at Corinth. Such individuals brought revelation to the assembly, which may often have urged the church on, and perhaps sometimes predicted things that were about to happen.

The vast majority of the functions of these "leadership roles" in the early church remain important for Christians today. However, there is no biblical mandate for us today to structure our leadership in the same way they did. Even in our descriptions of varying strands of the New Testament church, there is some variety. And even then, we do not find exact prescriptions for how to structure church leadership today.

[1] Indeed, some have used this instance as an argument against gambling, "casting lots." :-)

[2] Although some have argued that 2 Cor. 5:** implies that Paul had at least seen him while he was on earth. Paul's statement, however, does not necessarily imply that much.

[3] And while our personal inclination is to think Acts 14:23 is an accurate historical reflection of Paul's practice, to be circumspect we must acknowledge that Acts is not simply a documentary of what happened but is as much a position piece in relation to the church of its day, which we would see written probably in the 80s.

Response to Ben Witherington on IWU's Seminary

2009-07-14T10:27:00.003-04:00

Ben Witherington of Asbury Seminary has given his first impressions of our new seminary curriculum (although he does not name us) in a piece he wrote a week ago called M.Div. Lite! --Less Filling--Tastes Great!!

His concerns deserve a good hearing. My response is twofold: 1) there is much, much more Bible, theology, and church history in our degree than at first seems apparent, and 2) the rest is a difference in philosophy--traditional seminaries tend to be idealistic in a way that undermines the needs of most seminary students. "We do less and give more. They do more and give less."

See my clarifications on the seminary blog: Where's the Beef?

Blogs Update

2009-07-13T08:05:00.000-04:00

New post today on the seminary blog.

Second chapter of novel posting begins today.

With any luck, I'll post 4.1 Apostles, Overseers, and Deacons, of Generous Ecclesiology later today here. And 9. Critical Issues in Isaiah should show up probably some time tomorrow.

Explanatory Notes: Galatians 6:11-18

2009-07-12T13:02:00.008-04:00

And now, the rest! I hope to get it edited and put on my archive site alongside 1 Thessalonians, which is already there, within the week. Then it's on to finish Philippians and Hebrews. I'm currently thinking not to do the General Epistles this Fall as I just won't have the time to finish them. Why aim at something I know I will not be able to do? So I'm thinking after finishing Hebrews, of starting under no time pressure, a leisurely stroll through Romans for the traditional academic year on Sundays.
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6:11 Look with what large letters I have written to you with my hand.
Paul alluded earlier in Galatians to troubles he had with his eyes (4:15), possibly a thorn in the flesh he had for some time (cf. 2 Cor. 12:7-8). Perhaps the large letters of Paul's verse related in some way to his eye problems. Others have suggested he wanted to emphasize the points that follow.

It is possible that Paul wrote this entire letter by hand. After all, he does not mention any others in his heading, as he does in some cases. On the other hand, 2 Thessalonians 3:17 implies that Paul sometimes picked up the stylus and wrote a line or two at the end of a letter as a kind of authenticating signature. So it is possible that a secretary has written most of the letter and that Paul only picks up the writing tool here. This conclusion would seem to be the one most have reached.

6:12 As many of those who want to make a good showing in the flesh, these people are trying to compel you to be circumcised, [but they] only [do it] so that they might not be persecuted because of the cross of the Christ.
Paul now impugns the motives of the missionaries trying to get the Galatians to be circumcised. He gives two critiques of them. The first is that they are proud of the wrong thing. They will gain "honor" from their peers if they convince Gentiles to go all the way and fully convert to Judaism.

The second is that they are taking the path of least resistance with their Jewish peers, perhaps both "conservative" Jewish believers in Jesus as Messiah and non-believing Jews such as Paul used to be. The "cross of Christ" is thus a shorthand for more than simply faith in the effectiveness of the cross. It implies an understanding of the cross that saw it solely sufficient to reconcile believers, whether Jew or Gentile, to God.

6:13 For not even those who are being circumcised themselves are keeping Law, but they want you to be circumcised so that they might boast in your flesh.
From our vantage point two thousand years later, this verse is ambiguous. Perhaps the traditional interpretation is to hear Paul indicting Jews for being hypocrites. They want these Gentiles to keep the Jewish Law when in fact they themselves do not keep the Law perfectly. They are sinners too.

The present tense, "those who are being circumcised," perhaps points in a different direction, namely, to some Gentiles who have already gone through with circumcision in a process of conversion to Judaism. Could it be that even the "ones troubling them" (5:12) were Gentile proselytes to Judaism? At the same time, Paul does say that Peter "lives like a Gentile and not like a Jew" (2:14).

The omission of the article on "Law" is interesting. Another possibility is that we are to read this statement in terms similar to Romans 2:21-24. Paul would target Jews for their hypocrisy, but not for their lack of perfection in Law keeping. Romans 3:31 also does not have the article on "Law" and seems to refer to the "righteous requirement" of the Law (cf. 8:4), which Paul later summarizes as the love of one's neighbor (13:8-10).

6:14 But for me, may it not be to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.
Such detractors want to boast in the wrong thing, Paul indicates. They want to boast about something physical, something that was a matter of flesh. Paul suggests that what is rather appropriate to boast in is the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Again, Paul surely means to include in this shorthand all the benefits and effects that he sees being accomplished by way of the cross.

Paul seems to say that, through the cross, he is dead to the "world," meaning presumably the sinful world of flesh and its sense of honor and shame. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:20-23 that God has made foolish the wisdom of the world. By contrast, he preaches Christ crucified, which is foolishness to the Gentile and a stumblingblock to the Jews. Again, in our dating, Paul has just written these things prior to Galatians.

6:15 For neither circumcision is something, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.
Paul here anticipates the better known statement of his on new creation in 2 Corinthians 5:17. The criterion for what matters is not whether one is circumcised or not, which is apparently what has become the focus of justification before God in Galatia. What matters is "new creation," which Paul believes only comes by incorporation into the Messiah. Such an individual has been crucified with Christ (Gal. 2:20) and has thus died to the world and to sin (6:10).

6:16 And as many as walk by this rule, peace on them and mercy and on the Israel of God.
This is the rule of walking, of living, then, for the believer. It is not the rule of works of Law, with particular attention to those elements in the Law that distinguished Jew from Gentile, like circumcision. The rule is new creation, that the old things, the old life under the power of Sin, has passed. Instead there is life to God and walking in newness of life, fulfilling the righteous requirement of the Law by loving one's neighbor as yourself.

The mention of the "Israel of God" seems to subtly redefine Israel, anticipating things Paul will say in Romans 9. In Romans 9:6 Paul indicates that not all of those in ethnic Israel are truly in Israel. It is hard for us to read such words without taking a "supercessionist" message from them, namely, that Christianity has replaced Judaism.

But such a reading would be anachronistic. When Paul unfolds such comments further, particularly in Romans 11, we find that he still defines ethnic Israel as the "natural" branches in distinction from Gentiles who have been grafted into the tree of (ethnic) Israel (e.g., 11:21). So while Paul does in effect redefine Israel as those who are in Christ, he is not thereby thinking that the Church has taken the place of ethnic Israel.

6:17 The rest: let no one cause troubles for me, for I carry the marks of Jesus on my body.
Here presumably begins the rather brief conclusion of the letter. Paul basically says, "Bug off! I've suffered enough for Christ from non-believers and so certainly don't need trouble from believers like you all, churches I myself founded, nonetheless!" Of course if we are correct in dating Galatians not long after 1 Corinthians, he writes this letter on the heals of opposition at Corinth as well. We could understand if he was getting more and more exasperated, perhaps culminating in the harsh letter he sent to Corinth (cf. 2 Cor. 7:8).

Paul catalogs some of the sufferings he faced in 2 Corinthians 11:23-27 in the course of conducting his mission. Noticeable there are the three times he was beaten with rods and the five times he received a synagogue beating of 39 lashes. He has suffered for the gospel. What marks do his detractors have to show for their faith?

6:18 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ [be] with your spirit, brothers. Amen.
The wish of Christ's grace on his audiences is characteristic of Paul's postscripts. Noticeably missing are the usual greetings from others and to others Paul normally includes. Some have suggested this omission, like the absence of a thanksgiving section, is a reflection of Paul's dissatisfaction with the Galatians at this point.

And thus Paul ends this grand defense of the entrance of the Gentiles into God's people, as well as the confirmation that Jews are truly in God's people, on the basis of human faith in the effectiveness of Jesus' faithfulness on the cross. Because of such faith, God recognizes a person as righteous, He "justifies" them.

8. Critical Issues in the Wisdom Literature

2009-07-11T17:54:00.004-04:00

Previous posts have included:

2. The Old Testament Canon
3. Genres in the Pentateuch
4. Critical Issues in the Pentateuch
5. Critical Issues in the Historical Books
6. The Poetic Sub-Genre
7. Critical Issues in the Psalms
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Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes are sometimes considered wisdom literature. We can finish out a look at the so called Poetic Books of the Old Testament if we make a few brief comments at them and throw in Song of Solomon for good measure.

Job
The book of Job comes second in the Writings after Psalms, even though it appears just before Psalms in the Christian Bible. The book in its current form has the overall shape of a story, so it can and has been analyzed as one. It is also susceptible to speculation about stages it might have gone through in arriving at its current form (source criticism). In particular, the material on Elihu arrives somewhat unexpectedly after the prolonged dialog between Job and his three initial comforters. Similarly, the bulk of Job is in poetic form, while its opening and closing are narrative.

However, Job's relevance to all times and places comes chiefly in what is usually perceived to be its central topic, namely, the problem of why bad things happen sometimes to good people. Perhaps more than any other story in the Bible, Job illustrates the importance of taking point of view into consideration. The "evaluative" point of view in Job is clearly that of God at the end of the story. At that point, even Job repents of misunderstanding a good deal of what was really going on (42:6). In the earlier parts of the story, however, Job's view is clearly superior to that of his "comforters." One must be careful in appropriating the earlier chapters, because Job's comforters are often wrong, and Job is sometimes wrong.

In terms of the Christian canon, some of the message of Job seems sub-Christian. Therefore, even its evaluative point of view needs to be weighed against more fully developed Christian faith. For example, God in effect tells Job to "shut up" with his questions at the end of the book because he could not possibly understand (38:2-3). Other parts of the Old Testament and the New Testament, on the other hand, legitimate asking God questions about things that seem unjust (e.g., Hab. 1:2-17).

Much of Job, like Psalms and Ecclesiastes, seems to reject the idea of a personal, conscious continuation of existence after death (e.g., Job 14:14; Ps. 30:9; Eccl. 9:5). On the other hand, some do argue that Job 19:25-26 affirms resurrection. Since Christians believe in an afterlife, we would see ourselves further along in the flow of revelation if Job in fact does not affirm one.

Finally, Job embodies the entrance of "the Satan," the Adversary, into Jewish thought. It is not clear, however, that Satan is yet understood as a stark opponent of God or a "fallen angel" at this point in the flow of revelation. He seems rather more like an employee of God who reports back on the loyalty of the earth. His job is to test people, to see if they will stay faithful when they face trouble and hardship, and he seems to do his job with God's explicit permission.

The matter of the Satan raises issues of the dating of Job in its current form. In the past, some have suggested it might be the earliest book in the Old Testament, since the earthly story itself is neither located in Israel nor does it have any clear interaction with Israel as a nation. We can raise a number of questions about this line of thought, although it is certainly possible that the story of Job was very old.

First, there seems to be a tendency when it comes to Scripture to confuse the subject matter of the text with the dating of the text. I would argue that a fundamental reason for this is because Scriptures are seen as God speaking directly to us. This dynamic often leads to a suspension of the normal patterns of reading. Conclusions that would normally be obvious are completely missed.

The characters of the story subtly become speakers to us and, over time, traditions have a tendency to confuse the characters of a text with its authors. We may see this dynamic in relation to the Pentateuch, where a clear character in the story, Moses, somehow over time comes to be thought of as the author of the story. The subject matter of Job thus has no necessary implication for when it was written, since anyone today could write a story about Job too (e.g., Archibald MacLeish).

A second question has to do with the matter of genre. There is, again, a hermeneutical tendency when it comes to Scripture to assume that a story like Job or Jonah is about historical individuals. On the one hand, we have no reason to have a bias against such stories being historical. But it is often an unexamined assumption that such stories must be historical.

For example, nothing in the book of Job itself would tell us that it could not be read as inspired fiction. The book does not tell us its genre. We do have the fact that James 5:11 seems to think of Job as a historical figure, which for many is definitive in itself. So we once again come to the issue of whether the New Testament discusses the Old Testament in the categories of its day or in absolute categories.

This is an important consideration that shows up in a number of hot issues in the rest of the Bible. No one would accuse an author like Charles Dickens of being a liar because he made up characters like Tiny Tim or Madame Defarge. We know that he was writing novels. Unfortunately, however, when it comes to the biblical texts, we do not have the authors handy to ask them what genre they were writing in.

So while the story of Job certainly could be about things that happened in history, we have no evidence from Job itself to say that the author was not inspired to write truths about the problem of evil by way of fictional characters or by modifying a familiar story. Clearly the vast majority of Christians throughout the centuries have taken Job to be a historical figure. Each believer will have to work out what they believe is possible.

As far as dating, it seems significant that the concept of the Satan does not appear elsewhere in the Old Testament except in 1 Chronicles 21:1 and Zechariah 3:1-2, both of which are post-exilic. Although Christians would later understand the serpent in the Garden of Eden to be Satan, it is significant to notice that Genesis itself mentions nothing about a Satan. Further, we have no evidence of any Jewish writing considering the serpent to be Satan prior to The Life of Adam and Eve in the first century before Christ. The New Testament then follows suit (e.g., 2 Cor. 11:3).

It is thus quite possible to see the concept of the Satan as one that entered the flow of revelation while Israel was in captivity. If so, then Job in its current form would date from the period after the exile, regardless of how old the story itself was. The fact that the Writings were the last to join the Jewish canon is sometimes taken to indicate that they tend in general to date later than the books of the Law and the Prophets.

Proverbs
The proverbs of Proverbs, like most of Job and all of Psalms, are poetry. They thus follow the patterns of synonymous, antithetical, and synthetic parallelism.

As someone once said about proverbs, they are sometimes true. The point is that proverbs are neither promises nor absolute predictions. They are rather observations about life that ring true enough of the time that people pass them on with knowing looks and tell-tale winks.

The example of Proverbs 26:4-5 is often given to illustrate. Verse 4 says, "Do not answer a fool according to his folly." Then verse 5 says, "Answer a fool according to his folly." Obviously, both statements cannot be true for all situations if the words are being used in the same sense. They are worded to sound like opposite statements. Proverbs thus are not absolute philosophical assertions. They are broad statements that are generally rather than always true.

By their very nature, proverbs tend to be passed down anonymously. Who knows, for example, who first said, "A bird in hand is worth two in the bush"? Certain personalities collect and perpetuate proverbs, but they are not necessarily the ones who coined them. It is thus no surprise to find that the proverbs of 22:17-24:34 overlap extensively with a collection of Egyptian proverbs called the Instruction of Amen-em-ope, which dates from before 1000BC. Some collections of proverbs in Proverbs explicitly identify individuals other than Solomon as their sources (e.g., 30:1 and 31:1).

The first verse of Proverbs identifies king Solomon as the source of the book. Since parts of the book attribute proverbs to other individuals, such a heading apparently was not absolute. Traditionally, the bulk of Proverbs has been thought written down by Solomon. But since 1:1 refers to the proverbs as Solomon's, we might think of a later collector actually putting the sayings together. We then get into the same question we have seen elsewhere of whether ways of referencing material are central to the truthfulness of the material.

Ecclesiastes
Ecclesiastes is a fascinating, even if possibly depressing book at times. Like Proverbs, its heading points to Solomon as the author of the bulk of its material. And like Proverbs, many have questioned whether that is a matter of tradition or history. At the same time, the question of authorship seems a little different with Ecclesiastes than with Proverbs or the other Old Testament writings we have seen so far. The Pentateuch does not claim Moses as its author, nor do any of the individual psalms claim David as their author. Proverbs implies that much if not most of its material was passed on by Solomon but does not claim that Solomon was the actual editor of the proverbs.

But Ecclesiastes both frames its material in 1:1 and 12:9-14 as Solomon's. 1:12 has Solomon himself, the "Teacher," as the voice of the vast majority of the book. Ecclesiastes thus purports to be the very words of Solomon. We thus must either 1) take this attribution literally, 2) consider it a literary device, where someone is writing from the perspective they believe Solomon would take, or 3) consider the heading of 1:1 a mistaken understanding of who the "Teacher" was.

The similarity of some of Ecclesiastes to Epicurean thought at some points has led some to date it to the 200s BC, after Israel came under Greek rule to the north in Syria. But nothing in Ecclesiastes needs such a hypothesis to explain it. There are two Persian loan words that lead some scholars to date the book in its current form to the post-exilic period. Once again, different Christians will have different senses of what options are appropriate to consider.

One of the most noticeable features of Ecclesiastes is its seeming denial of any afterlife. It is thus has comments similar to those we have seen in Job and Psalms. But Ecclesiastes has some of the starkest language in this regard. "A living dog is better than a dead lion. The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing. They have no more reward, and even their memory is lost... never again will they have any part in everything that happens under the sun" (Eccl. 9:4-6).

Thankfully, the New Testament and later Jewish understanding have moved beyond this apparently sub-Christian view. The framer of Ecclesiastes, either the Teacher himself or an editor who added the beginning and ending, has a bottom line reaction to the words of the Teacher. "Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the all of humanity" (12:13). Certainly this bottom line remains fully appropriate as one way of summarizing Christian ethics for our time on earth.

Song of Solomon
This lovely piece of poetry was typically allegorized throughout Christian history as a parable of the relationship between Christ and the Church. Most now would recognize it as patent love poetry, whatever further theological meaning we might find in it as Christians. It also is attributed to Solomon in the first verse. And like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, some take this as tradition rather than history, pointing in particular to apparent Persian and Greek loan words that would not have existed in Solomon's day. Some believers will find it essential to defend Solomonic authorship, while others will find this quest tangential to this book read as Christian Scripture.

Harry Potter and Language Games

2009-07-11T11:58:00.002-04:00

For whatever reason, my family follows Harry Potter closely. My two step-daughters are almost the age of the actors and actresses and so have grown up with them. When my youngest children are bored at a restaurant waiting for food, they often play "famous people" with the characters from Harry Potter a regular feature. My wife has already bought us all tickets for the 11:59pm showing Tuesday night and has been rereading the books and having Potter marathons in the evenings at home.

And I have to begrudgingly acknowledge that Rowling is quite brilliant. The narrative world she has created is phenomenally clever at point after point. I come at these movies with a little different lens since I consider myself a philosopher of language and not too shabby a narrative critic.

Last night we watched The Prisoner of Azkaban (the best, I think) and I turned off The Goblet of Fire just before the last challenge. There's a brilliant line from a philosophy of language standpoint in Goblet. Harry and Ron aren't speaking to each other, so at one point they have Hermione brokering a conversation.

Finally, exasperated, she exclaims, "I am not an owl!"

I love that line. In any normal conversation in the real world (read "language game"), it is completely meaningless. What do you mean? You're not wise? You don't stay up at night chasing rodents?

Rowling has successfully created an alternative universe, a narrative world. In the language games of that world, owls carry messages back and forth between people.

As I once said similarly of Jack Handy, frustrated at my own mediocrity, "She's a master!" Bill Patrick, are you out there?

Happy Birthday Calvin!

2009-07-10T19:16:00.002-04:00

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday, Dear Johnnie,
Happy birthday to you.

I'm a little late in the day, but three cheers for Calvin! He was one smart cookie.

1 Born at a Time and Place 1

2009-07-10T07:23:00.013-04:00

I was delighted to receive a warm reception at Wesleyan Publishing House (WPH) not only possibly to write one book with life reflections on Paul, but to write two, as well as perhaps some Bible study material. I've designated Friday as my writing day on this project, and they were happy for me to do it publicly here on the blog. That means you can help steer things like tone and focus. What line of approach most interests you and would be most helpful/interesting to those in your congregation who like Bible study?

Another idea was to triangulate between WPH, our new seminary at IWU, and perhaps a church like College Wesleyan. The idea here is that at a time when some churches would ordinarily be having a Wednesday night or Sunday night service, perhaps even Sunday School, to crank up Adobe Connect so that churches could log on for a live Q & A with me over a week of the Bible study material.

Or I could even lead such an online hour of Bible study each week with PowerPoints, a talking head, and a chat feature. The church could put the webcast up on a screen at the front of the church and designate a person to type in chat questions. If someone wanted, we could give a certificate for finishing the Bible study, etc.

So here's a start. I'm thinking of dividing each chapter into two parts, the first of which has more to do with Paul and the second of which has more to do with life refections on Paul. Love to know what you think.

[By the way and completely unrelated, five days of my novel in progress are now posted :-)]

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1 Born at a Time and Place
It is hard to understand a person fully and what makes them tick if you do not know anything about their past. It would be nice to be able to take Paul out for coffee to ask him a few things, to fill in a few blanks. But thankfully, he has left us with three key passages where he gives us some personal information about himself: Philippians 3:4-6; 2 Corinthians 11:21-12:10; and Galatians 1:13-2:14.

We learn that Paul was a Jew. One significant difference between the way Paul likely understood himself and the way we understand ourselves has to do with how much of our identity we draw from the groups to which we belong. Westerners usually lean toward the "individualistic" side of the spectrum. That is to say, we identify ourselves far more in terms of how we are different from other people rather than in terms of those we are like. It was not so in Paul's world. In his world, your identity was primarily a function of the groups you were in rather than how you as an individual defined yourself.

As one scholar has put it, identity in the ancient Mediterranean world was primarily a function of three things: gender, geneaology, and geography. [1] Are you male or female (gender)? Where are you from and what is your ethnicity (geography)? What is your family like, its place in society and social status (genealogy)? We rightly question these sorts of stereotypes and pigeonholes today. They are the stuff of prejudice, and you could argue that our attempts to abandon them are a working out of gospel principles into the fabric of our society, although we have not completely arrived.

So if Western cultures tend--sometimes too much--toward the individualist, ancient and third world cultures have tended toward the "collectivist." Identity tends to be "group-embedded" rather than self-identified. For example, it is not surprising that marriages are often pre-arranged in group cultures, sometimes even before the children are born. When identity is primarily a function of "external" features like gender, family, and race, you know the compatibility of two people at birth. Two comparable families of the same race can pair up their children as long as they have a male and a female.

Today, we have such highly developed individual tastes and desires that we want to date to see if we are compatible. Will this other person make me happy? Will they really irritate me because they do not squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom of the tube or because they roll their toilet paper from the bottom. Most ancients spent their energies just trying to survive. They did not have the luxury and opportunity to worry about such trivial things. We often do not need each other to survive.

So Paul was a Jew. This was a significant statement of identity in his world. For an outsider, it meant he was wierd at the very least. "Why don't you eat pork," a Roman emperor once responded to a Jew who had waited months to see him about matters of life and death. [2] Jews were the ones who cut off the foreskins of their male children. What was up with that?! And they did no work from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday, the day they called the "Sabbath." What was that all about?

For Paul growing up, though, it meant he was a part of God's chosen people. He was a member of the nation God had chosen out of all the nations of the earth to walk with and bless, if Israel would only keep His commandments (e.g., Deut. 32:8-9; 7:6-11). Paul was part of the nation to whom God had entrusted the "oracles of God," the Scriptures (Rom. 3:2). It was to Israel that God had given all the promises that had begun to take place in Christ (Rom. 9:4).

Since the early 100s, Christians have often had a skewed perspective on the Jews. We likely deserve some blame in various persecutions of Jews that have taken place over the centuries. Some of Martin Luther's comments on Jews in his later writings were atrocious, and it is not too surprising that the Holocaust took place in his Germany with significant support from many in the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches of his country at the time. [3]

Of course it would be equally wrong--indeed the same sin--to paint all the Germans of the day as anti-semitic. Germans like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rudolf Bultmann did not support Hitler. Bonhoeffer famously lost his life within months of the liberation of his prison for his opposition to Hitler. We will address some of the misconceptions of Judaism that persist to this day in the next chapter.

Paul calls himself a "Hebrew of Hebrews" (Phil. 3:5; cf. 2 Cor. 11:22), although interestingly he was not born in Jerusalem to some well established family of important Jews. He was born in Tarsus, in Asia Minor, according to Acts (e.g., 22:3). [4] To say he was a “Hebrew of the Hebrews” means that Aramaic was a first language for him and that his family was oriented around Aramaic-speaking Jerusalem. Yet all his letters are in Greek, and fluent Greek at that. He quotes as much from the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, as he does the original Hebrew.

In short, he has all the makings of a “wannabe,” someone whom others might easily put down as one of those "Diaspora" Jews scattered around the world. Someone might stereotype him as a Hellenistic Jew who spoke Greek instead of the Aramaic of the motherland. "No!" he might have protested in the days before he believed. "I am an Aramaic speaker like anyone in Jerusalem. In fact, I know Hebrew and read the Bible in the original language like the Pharisee and purist I am."

Whether this background accounts for some of Paul’s drive, we do not know. Did he spend a good deal of his early life trying to prove himself to those who looked down on him or dismissed him because of where he was born? If so, he would not be the first or the last to do so. Some of us spend our whole lives trying to prove ourselves to some phantom of our childhood that has long since passed.

Perhaps one casualty of this syndrome is Paul’s failure to mention anywhere in his writings that he was a Roman citizen, an honor very few in his world enjoyed. Was he a little ashamed of it? Was not Rome the political power that held sway over Jerusalem and the land of Israel? Would not the restoration of the land of Israel mean that the messiah would overcome the hold of Rome?

Even in Acts, Paul does not bring up his citizenship until Philippi, after he has suffered a beating and has spent a night in jail (16:37). Perhaps he finally sees that he can use his citizenship to his advantage in the spreading of the gospel. At the very least, he could use it to get out of a few beatings!

If Paul was a Roman citizen from birth, as Acts 22:28 indicates, it says some important things about him. It suggests that his family had some status. Paul did not pay for his citizenship or get granted citizenship by someone important. His family already had this status before he was born. Perhaps his grandfather made tents for Julius Caesar when he was traipsing around the Mediterranean chasing Pompey. Or perhaps he made tents for Pompey. In any case, some important Roman seems to have rewarded one of Paul's ancestors with the great honor of Roman citizenship.

It is thus possible that when Paul was back in Tarsus, he was much more like the owner of a tent-making or leatherworking business rather than a menial laborer himself. At one point in his letters, he seems to think of working with his hands as a kind of sacrifice for the sake of the gospel (1 Cor. 4:12). He had the kinds of means to be able to travel and leave his hometown behind. At some point he moves to Jerusalem, perhaps to live with his sister (Acts 23:16), and he studies with the Pharisees of his day.

And so he enters a quite different world than the one he was surrounded by as a child. If he had at least the beginnings of a Hellenistic "gymnasium" education, he now becomes a Pharisee. He no longer learns Homer and how to separate Greek syllables. Now he extends his knowledge of the Law, the Torah, and the traditions of the elders. We will think more about what it meant to be a Pharisee in the next chapter.

[1] As we move through Paul's life and letters, I will be suggesting the fifty or so books on Paul that a person might read to master Paul. Here let me mention the first: Bruce Malina and Jerome Neyrey's Portraits of Paul: An Archaeology of Ancient Personality (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996).

[2] Philo of Alexandria had come to the emperor Caligula in the aftermath of a persecution against the Jews in AD38. The story is found in Philo's treatise, Embassy to Gaius.

[3] Especially Luthers, On the Jews and Their Lies.

[4] We only learn that Paul is from Tarsus in Acts, but we have no reason to question this claim. Some have questioned whether Acts was overstating things to call Paul a Roman citizen. The question of whether Jews were citizens was one of the things Philo brought as an issue to the emperor Caligula (see note 2).

Guide to American Christianity :-)

2009-07-09T15:23:00.004-04:00

Baptists - American Christians

Pentecostals - Baptists who speak in tongues

Methodists - Insecure Baptists

Anabaptists - Baptists who don't fight back

Presbyterians - Baptists who read

Reformed - Elect Baptists

Lutherans - Baptists who baptize infants

Episcopalians - Baptists who completely disagree with everything Baptist

Catholics - European Christians who came to America

Orthodox - European Christians who didn't come to America

7. Critical Issues in the Psalms

2009-07-07T07:07:00.023-04:00

Previous posts have included:

2. The Old Testament Canon
3. Genres in the Pentateuch
4. Critical Issues in the Pentateuch
5. Critical Issues in the Historical Books
6. The Poetic Sub-Genre
_________
We have chosen to move through the Old Testament by way of its Christian rather than Jewish groupings. What are often called the "Poetic Books" of the Christian Old Testament are actually in the Writings of the Jewish Bible. They are not the only books in the Writings, but most of them lead off this division. Here we are speaking of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon.

Types of Psalm
We have already encountered Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932) for his form critical work in Genesis. His second claim to fame was his work in the Psalms. In particular, Gunkel suggested about five main types of psalm: 1) the hymn, 2) the community lament, 3) the individual lament, 4) the individual song of thanksgiving, and 5) the royal psalm, which Gunkel believed were about pre-exilic Israelite kings. In this list we can see once again his pre-occupation with the forms a psalm might take.

Gunkel further divided these categories into subcategories. For example, among royal psalms, he distinguished a) coronation hymns (Ps. 2, 110), b) a hymn for a royal wedding (Ps. 45), and c) hymn on the anniversary of a dynasty (Ps. 132). This type is of some interest to Christians since the New Testament generally read them in relation to Christ. Some have therefore called them "messianic" psalms.

Christian Interpretation
The distinction between thinking of a psalm as a "royal" psalm and thinking of it as a "messianic" psalm is very instructive. The earliest Christians engaged the books of Psalms and Isaiah more than any other parts of the Old Testament. But, as we will also see when we get to the Prophets, they did not always pay much attention to the original contexts of the texts through which they heard God's voice. This is again the distinction between a particular theological interpretation the early Christians read in the Psalms and the meaning one would infer when reading the Psalms inductively.

Thus Psalm 45 reads inductively as a wedding psalm for a king. Psalm 45:1 indicates the psalm is about a king. Verse 7 speaks of the anointing of the king at a particular time in the presence of the king's contemporaries. Verses 13-14 tell how the princess to be wed is in her chamber in lovely garments. Her virgin companions follow her as she enters the palace (45:14). Finally, verse 16 looks forward to the king having sons. Yet Hebrews 1:8-9 apply two verses in this psalm to Christ as exalted, eternal cosmic king.

From an inductive standpoint, nothing about the psalm suggests anything other than that this is a wedding psalm for a human king--that is, nothing except perhaps verse 6 that Hebrews quotes. In that verse, the king is addressed as "God": "your throne, O God, is forever and ever." Still, in the light of the Ancient Near East, it is scarcely surprising for a king to be considered divine in some representative or derivative sense. Indeed, God himself tells Moses in Exodus 7:1 that He has made him like god to Pharaoh.

This hermeneutic, this pattern of reading the Old Testament, turns out to be a fairly consistent New Testament practice. That is to say, the New Testament does not seem to read Old Testament texts by way of an inductive method that is concerned to read these texts in their original literary and historical contexts. They find different meanings in the texts than they originally had. We might say they read these texts in light of a "fuller sense" (sensus plenior) those words might take on when read Christianly. To be sure, some have gone to great lengths to argue that the original contexts of these texts were important to the New Testament authors. The individual student of the Bible will have to make up his or her own mind.

What is clear is that the earliest Christians saw Christ in these psalms. Indeed, in several cases, the early Christians read the "I" of a psalm as if Christ were speaking (e.g., Ps. 40:6-8 in Heb. 10:5-7). They might thus hear Psalm 22, a lament psalm, as the voice of Christ, perhaps following Jesus' own cue on the cross. Matthew and Mark remember Jesus quoting verse 1 on the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" But this meaning for the psalm is a different meaning than its original meaning as an individual lament. Indeed, at some time the psalm was considered a "psalm of David."

Authorship and Date
With the Psalms, we face similar authorship issues to those we face in relation to the Pentateuch and Isaiah. The New Testament and Jesus material in the gospels refer to several psalms as if David were author. In more than one instance, Davidic authorship of a certain psalm is key to the point Jesus or the New Testament author was making. As such, these instances raise starkly the question of what truthfulness might mean in the "intra-biblical" use of other biblical texts. The New Testament language of David sometimes goes beyond a merely conventional way of referring to the Psalms.

Perhaps the issue is best presented by looking at how Jesus uses Psalm 110:1 in argument, one of Gunkel's royal psalms. In Mark 12:35-37 and its parallels, Jesus poses a question by way of this text: "The LORD said to my Lord, 'Sit at my right hand.'" Jesus assumes in his question that David is the writer, and David is saying that the "LORD," Yahweh, is saying something to the Messiah, the "Lord." If David calls the Messiah, "Lord," Jesus asks, then how is the Messiah David's son?

From a contextual, historical, and inductive standpoint, however, we would not naturally read Psalm 110 in this way. The very concept of a coming king most obviously would have arisen in the absence of a human king, in longing for God to raise up a king to restore the fortunes of Israel and restore a Davidic king to its throne. We see the concept develop most in the century or so immediately before Jesus. Historically, it is difficult to think of David having any concept of this sort of "anointed one" at all, which is what messiah means. After all, David was the anointed one of that sort at that time!

From an inductive standpoint, the most obvious reading of Psalm 110:1 is that of an anonymous psalmist speaking of Yahweh addressing the human king of Israel or Judah. The "LORD," Yahweh, enthrones the "Lord," the earthly, human king. God promises to empower the king to have victory over the nation's enemies.

Again, it would not be surprising in itself to find Jesus reading this Old Testament text in a different way from what it originally meant. We find over and over that the New Testament interpreted the Old in this way. But in this particular instance, the very point of Jesus' question seems to ride on David being the speaker in Psalm 110. Is it enough that Jesus' point (or the New Testament point) be true, even if it comes by way of a format and line of argument that is based on assumptions we do not have? Was Jesus teasing his opponents, following through assumptions of theirs he knew weren't true? The individual believer will have to work out what they believe is acceptable.

Most would accept that the psalm headings should be treated separately from the psalm texts themselves. That is to say, a heading mentioning "Asaph" represents later tradition and was not a title put on the psalm at the time it was written. The Hebrew usually says "to Asaph," which is a little ambiguous in itself. Perhaps we are to take the heading to mean something like "attributed" to Asaph.

The psalms do not clearly come from a single period of Israel's history. For example, Psalm 137 clearly was written during the years of Israel's captivity in Babylon (586-539BC). While some scholars do date psalms like Psalm 110 to the time of the Maccabeans in the second century BC, it is reasonable to date the royal psalms to the pre-exilic period, since that is when Israel and Judah had kings. Certainly the Psalms will have taken on their current form at some point in the post-exilic period, when they perhaps became the "hymn book" of the second temple.

Insights into History and Culture
Psalms study in the early twentieth century saw numerous attempts to relate the psalms to various moments in the worship and temple life of pre-exilic Israel. Perhaps the most prominent name here is that of Sigmund Mowinkel (1884-1965). He famously argued that the royal psalms Gunkel called "coronation" or enthronement psalms had featured at a yearly new year "Festival of Yahweh," where Yahweh as ritually re-enthroned as king of the cosmos (cf. Judg. 21:19).

Much of his proposal was clearly speculative. But he does provide a nice segway into the fact that the Psalms do seem at various points to interact with elements of Canaanite myth. One of the best known works on this subject, focusing primarily on Genesis however, is Frank Moore Cross' (1921-present) Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic.

The most likely interaction of the Psalms with contemporary myth is in Psalm 74 and 89. The first reminds us of the Babylonian creation story the Enuma Elish, where the God Marduk destroys the sea monsters of chaos in creation. So in Psalm 74:13-14, God breaks the heads of sea monsters, including "Leviathan." In Ugaritic literature, a related language of Israel's context, Lothan is one of the primordial chaos monsters as well. "Leviathan" and "Lothan" are the same basic word in these languages, sharing the same fundamental letters. They are thus quite possibly two versions of the same figure from contemporary stories.

Psalm 89 similarly speaks of Yahweh crushing "Rahab," also a figure of chaotic waters as perhaps in Genesis 1:2. We do not in any way have to assume that the respective psalmists took all these images literally. They read very well as poetic pictures of Yahweh's power. It is noteworthy, however, that the psalmist had no qualms about using such imagery from contemporary myth.

Psalm 82, as Psalm 89, pictures the other gods of the other nations as part of a divine council in which Yahweh is the supreme deity, an image not unlike the picture we might get of a Zeus presiding over the gods of Olympus (82:1, 6; 89:6-7). However literally the psalmist understood such pictures, we remember again that Israel at least in the pre-exilic period seems to have been henotheistic rather than monotheistic in the proper sense. They seem to have believed that other gods like Dagon and Ba'al existed. They just did not believe they came anywhere close to the power of El Elyon, the "Most High God," nor were they properly to be worshipped.

3.4 Multiple Services and Sites

2009-07-06T20:12:00.006-04:00

As I often do, I send off a proposal and then let my mind wander. But I'm very close to finishing another chapter of my proposed book Generous Ecclesiology. Chapter 3 is titled, "How and Where We Meet" and I have written three posts in the chapter here on previous Mondays:

3.1 Houses and Synagogues
3.2 Cathedrals and Homes
3.3 Saturdays and Sundays

So here's the final installment to this chapter.
_________
We have argued in this chapter that the early church generally met on Sundays to celebrate Jesus' resurrection and that Christian Jews probably continued to worship on the Saturday Sabbath. Most assemblies probably met in houses, but we have no basis to say that all of them did. The long and short of it is that the New Testament does not lay down hard and fast rules for any of these things. Far from telling us where and when we have to meet, the New Testament does not even suggest that the early churches had hard and fast practices themselves.

One take away from all this discussion is that we can welcome the great creativity that churches today are showing in how and when they meet. Certainly nothing stops us from having the now tried and true meetings in church buildings on a Sunday morning. There is something to say for having a default. When the apostle Paul went to a new city, he could count on finding a synagogue gathering of some sort on Saturday. Similarly, there is something to be said for being able to find a worship service on Sunday morning when you are visiting a city you have never visited before!

But starting new services at new sites or even church "plants" are usually a sign of a growing, flourishing community of faith. Indeed, in some instances, the "core" congregation has so dwindled and is so anemic that grafting in a new branch in a second service or site may be the only way for that church to survive. That dying church whose neighborhood now looks completely different than the few still coming might do well to allow those in the community to start an afternoon, evening, or other day of the week service in your church building. That older congregation watching its grandchildren go elsewhere might do well to have a second service with a music and worship style they themselves cannot stand.

One thing that the house church movement has recognized so well--and that even mega-churches like Willow Creek have even come to realize--is that Christians do not usually grow if their only real "Christ time" is in a large group of people one hour on a Sunday morning. Even beyond "personal devotions," Christians need to be engaging other believers in small enough groups for accountability and the synergy of the Holy Spirit to take place. You cannot be a lone Christian for long under most normal circumstances before you wither away.

Such small groupings of Christians can take place in all kinds of different ways. The Sunday School and Wednesday night "prayer meeting" were unique American ways to create this important discipleship dynamic. Today we have cell groups meeting in homes, Starbucks, or wherever the group in question feels most comfortable.

John Wesley, the father of Methodism, had smaller accountability groups where the members allowed others to ask them the most intimate of questions. Are any sins ruling over you, either in your outward living or in your inward thinking? There was no "cheap grace" or sloppy excuses for someone who really had no interest or intention of allowing God's Spirit to help them grow. There was an optimism that God could and would give them the strength to defeat temptation in their lives when it might come.

It is hard to imagine any truly healthy Christian not longing for this sort of growth. And it is hard to imagine this sort of growth taking place if a person is not willing to submit to the loving accountability of the body of Christ. Willow Creek found out that this sort of growth will not likely take place in a large "seeker sensitive" service where the sermon and worship is primarily aimed at inviting those outside the church in. Discipleship and maturation are normally the stuff of smaller groups of believers. Here we remember that the entire church of Corinth, to which Paul addresses 1 and 2 Corinthians, probably consisted of less than 50 people who could fit in a single home.

Starting worship groups in other places and times allows the church to be in the community even before the community comes to the church. We resist the trend of some today who seem to think that the "church" need never be in the church, so to speak, whether the church be in its own building or in a home. The church is not the world, and from the New Testament till today Christians have always made a distinction between one who believes and one who does not yet believe. While God will decide the eternal fate of us all, there is a distinction between "not yet in the church" and "in the church," and the church is "in the world but not of the world." To think otherwise is to depart from what Christians have believed for two thousand years. We'll see what staying power the new trend in thinking has!

At the same time, certain cultural trends in America afford us some great possibilities today. In a pre-modern, traditional context, we might have assumed that there was only one right way to worship--our way or the way our tradition had always done it. "We've always done it this way." In the modernist era, we became ecumenical. We wanted a worship service that appealed to everyone. And in the process, we watered down that same single service to where it was blase and appealed to no one.

In a post-modern context, for lack of a better word, we can have multiple services with multiple styles. No longer is there any reason for a younger preacher to alienate an older congregation by making them abandon the hymns they so much enjoy. One group likes clapping and saying "Amen." Another likes to speak in tongues and have spontaneous prophecy. Another likes to say the liturgy Christians have spoken for most of these last two thousand years. Another likes to run the aisles shouting during a testimony time.

There is no basis for any of these groups de-Christianizing or de-spiritualizing each other any more than there was when the church of Corinth so long ago played the "I'm more spiritual than you are game." In a post-modern context, we not only can have different churches with different styles, all of whom serve our Lord with their whole heart. But in our context we are free to have different worship styles going on in the same congregation.

My own church, College Wesleyan Church in Marion, Indiana, has two services and up to six or seven venues every week. The first service has a main congregation that leans toward the older generation. They sing hymns and have typical American evangelical worship as it was in the sixties and seventies. At the same time, there is an ancient-future service in the chapel where we say the Apostle's Creed, the Lord's Prayer, take communion, and have open prayer surrounding the very same sermon, which is piped in on video feed at the appropriate time.

The second service is more contemporary, with songs the older crowd have never heard before. The songs go on a lot longer than most of the older people like--the music is as much or more the focus than the sermon. And they stand the whole time they are singing!

During the first and second services, there is a 30-40 something age service where they sit at round tables, drink coffee, sing guitar music, and have discussion questions around their tables before the same sermon is also brought to them on video feed. There is an evening service at 7:47pm for college students. There are services for teenagers where testimonies are given. Certainly most churches do not have enough resources to do this much, but most churches could do more than they are currently doing to let the good news of Christ take on whatever form speaks most to those they are starting with and those in their community who might hear God's voice through them.

So diversity of worship is far from a bad thing. Hopefully we will only move further and further away from the days where each group insisted that their way was the only right way at the only right place and time. And hopefully we can move beyond the "unity in diversity" view that melts down everything to vanilla, where we try to find the common denominator between everyone coming and only worship in that way at that place and time. We are now in a world of "identity within diversity," where we have our worship at our time and place in our way--we know who we are. But we worship alongside others who worship in other ways at other times and places.

And we think as highly of them as we think of ourselves. We know that we are serving the same Lord!

Two New Schenck Blogs

2009-07-06T08:00:00.002-04:00

Yes, I know, I have way too many blogs on my dashboard. Most of them are ones I created for classes I was teaching. Blogger has a new feature where you can export a blog, so at some point I'll go through and save those old class things and delete the old blogs.

Anyway, two new blogs:

1. Wesleyan Seminary Blog
I probably won't continue to call it that after the name of the new seminary is officially announced, but it works for now. I'll be posting weekly seminary development updates there, deo volente, on Monday mornings. Mine will likely be of an academic nature as there may eventually be a more macro seminary blog.

The first post is up on the blog.

2. Novel Blog: Fragmented Chaos
I have started I don't know how many novels. It has to be about 30. I'm a fair story teller, especially with children... probably not as good a novel writer.

Anyway, I had this idea of posting a page of a novel a day on a blog, but no more than a chapter at a time. Then I thought I would have a link for those who were willing to donate a few pennies to read more than was posted ("fragments to date"). So I monetized the above blog.

I have about 50 pages of material already (so I wouldn't have to do much new on it for about two months), based on a novel I started a while back called H2 O2. Anyway, the first chapter is already uploaded and scheduled to post one page a day for the next 6 days. Assuming the system is working, you can donate 99 cents to get the whole week's chapter through PayPal right now. If anyone is foolhearty enough to do it, I'd love to know if it works.

:-)

6. The Poetic Sub-Genre (Critical Issues Series)

2009-07-05T12:05:00.007-04:00

Darrell Pursiful has suggested these posts be cataloged (Thanks for the plug! I hope to get them published as a short guide too). So here are the posts in the series so far:

2. The Old Testament Canon
3. Genres in the Pentateuch
4. Critical Issues in the Pentateuch
5. Critical Issues in the Historical Books

As an illustration of my frustration with myself, I dug up a copy of Ronald Clements' 1976 book A Century of Old Testament Study to help me with some OT issues. I think it was one of a few books I took to Sierra Leone, West Africa, when I was there for a couple months in the winter of 97 (not a great time to be in the country, if you remember what happened there in the spring). Typical of me, I noticed this afternoon that I have underlined things throughout the book.

I remember none of it.
_________
Strangely, it was apparently not until the time of Robert Lowth (1710-87) that anyone seems to have pointed out the secret to understanding Hebrew poetry. You will notice, for example, that the King James Version of 1611 and even the current revision of 1769 do not have the Psalms or relevant passages of the Prophets in poetic form, as most modern translations do. While stereotypical poetry in recent centuries rhymes sounds, and while classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry followed a certain meter, ancient Hebrew poetry "rhymed" thought.

The secret to Hebrew poetry is thus parallelism, "say it; say it again" or "say it; say the opposite." Although various scholars have proposed refinements on the various categories of parallelism, the simplest categorization admits of three basic types.

Synonymous parallelism is of the type, "say it; say it again."

"Create in me a clean heart, O God,
And renew a right spirit within me.

"Cast me not away from your presence,
And do not take your Holy Spirit from me" (Ps. 51:10-11).

In the lines above, you can see that the second line in each stanza "rhymes" or parallels the thought of the first in a roughly synonymous way. Recognizing the generally synonymous nature of parallel lines can be a great help in interpretation.

Antithetical parallelism is of the type, "say it; say the opposite."

"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge;
Fools despise wisdom and instruction" (Prov. 1:7).

In this case, the second line says roughly the opposite of the first. We can thus possibly infer that a "fool" here is not a stupid or ignorant person but a person whose attitude toward God is wrong.

Synthetic parallelism was the category into which Lowth lumped other instances of Hebrew poetry that neither were roughly synonymous or antithetical. In many such instances the next line or lines extend the thought.

"Know that the LORD,
He is God!
It is He who has made us,
And we are His.
We are His people,
And the sheep of His pasture" (Ps. 100:3).

Notice how each line seems to extend or in some cases complete the thought of the line before.

Various subcategories of the above are often mentioned (e.g., step parallelism, introverted parallelism, etc.). Such categorizations are far more meaningful to us as catgorizers than helpful in interpretation. They are categorizations of form that describe the artfulness of the text but do not contribute much to our understanding of meaning. The general breakdown into three general headings seems sufficient for us to know how to interpret Hebrew poetry.

Explanatory Notes: Galatians 6:6-10

2009-07-05T07:40:00.004-04:00

6:6 Let the person being taught the word share in all good things with the one teaching [it].
The connection between this command and the preceding statements to bear each other's burdens and carry one's own load is not completely obvious. Paul presumably is not thinking of the Jewish missionary here. And he does not mention himself coming to them or receiving support from them anywhere else in the letter. Some have suggested he wishes to balance out the instruction to carry your own load--that does not let you off the hook to support those who minister to you.

Since the command is directed at the person being taught, the thrust of this statement would seem to urge the person taught to support those who teach them. We are reminded of 1 Corinthians 9:11-12, where Paul indicates that the "ox" should not be muzzled while treading the grain. Paul interprets the statement allegorically to mean that those who sow spiritual things among them have a right to material support from them.

Probably the most likely alternative, then, is that Paul is telling the Galatians in general to support their own leaders, possibly in contrast to the Jewish visitor who has been toubling them over issues like circumcision and such. But we cannot know for sure.

6:7-8 Do not be deceived. God is not made a fool. For whatever a person sows, this the person will also reap. Because the one who sows to his own flesh will harvest corruption from the flesh. But the one who sows to the Spirit will harvest eternal life from the Spirit.
The common mention of "sowing" in the context of a church supporting its minister again reminds us of 1 Corinthians 9, which we would argue was written not too long previous to Galatians. It also argues that these verses follow in some way on 6:6.

The contrast between flesh and Spirit shows up again here. Once again, Paul reminds the Galatians that the person who gratifies the desires of his or her flesh is not on a trajectory for eternal life. It is those who sow seed of the Spirit who will eventually harvest eternal life. Those who gratify their fleshly desires, those who bite and devour each other, those who are selfish and do not care for others around them, those who do not carry their weight, these are headed for the same decay that their bodies are. There are consequences to the way a person chooses to behave.

6:9 But as we do the good, let us not get tired, for in its own time, we will harvest, if we do not give up.
It can be tiring sowing seed and discouraging in that you do not see the results of your labors until some time later. Doing the good is an investment that does not always pay off immediately. Indeed, it may not pay off in our earthly lifetimes. The harvest is something to have faith in, to hope for, to believe will come eventually after a life of doing good.

6:10 Therefore, then, as we have opportunity, let us bring about the good for all, and especially toward those in the household of faith.
Interestingly, Paul gives priority of good doing to those in the household of faith. Note that he does not say to ignore the world outside or let believers off the hook in relation to those in the world. He simply highlights the priority of doing good in relation to those in the household of faith, meaning all believers.

We are reminded of the dictum in James 4:17 that if a person knows to do the good and does not do it, such inaction is sin. So also Paul indicates that believers must take advantage of the occasion to do good for others, both believer and non-believer alike. We can perhaps read between the lines in Galatians the temptation for some believers to exclude doing good for certain other believers, as is surely the temptation in every age.

Happy Independence Day!

2009-07-04T13:43:00.004-04:00

May this day of remembering the great privileges of living in the United States, as well as what good things it has contributed to the world, be grand for all who chance across this post!

Are we perfect? Certainly not. Are we more righteous than all other nations? A horrible question even to ask! But everyone has a family, and I love mine, warts and all. Cheers to the good parts, therapy to those we can rehabilitate, and prison for those who refuse to follow the social contract :-)

I am deeply grateful and privileged to be an American.

By the way, happened across an irritating piece on Christian radio on the way to the store today. The guest was giving a lovely piece of special pleading for Benjamin Franklin as a righteous man. Don't get me wrong. I am fond of Franklin and admire him in very many ways.

But I would never spin him as this godly, almost a Christian man, who might have believed on Jesus if only someone had shared the gospel with him before he reached his 80s. The guest's reading of this Letter to Ezra Stiles was a glorious exhibition of civil religious spin.

I stand corrected on the certainty, but it was at least strongly rumored in his day that Franklin was a womanizer, particularly in France with various women, while his wife stayed behind in America. His suspicions of Jesus' divinity were not some unthought through off the cuff answer. He was a child of his age and not close to a Christian in any historic sense and certainly not in any evangelical sense.

There was much of good to this man... but don't try to spin him as a Christian.

5. Critical Issues in the Historical Books

2009-07-03T20:18:00.007-04:00

We mentioned in the second section on the Old Testament Canon that the books we currently call the "Historical Books" actually incorporate books from two quite different sections of the Jewish Bible. The books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings are the "Former Prophets" of the Hebrew Bible. Meanwhile, Ruth, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther were part of the Writings, the third part of the Jewish Bible. Ruth and Esther in particular were two of five scrolls in the Writings collectively known as the Megilloth.

Composition
Since the days of Martin Noth (1902-68), it has been conventional to call the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings the deuteronomistic history. Prior to this time, individuals like Wellhausen and others had noticed how smoothly Deuteronomy flowed into Joshua and so had spoken of the "Hexateuch," including Joshua as part of the same final product as the Pentateuch, drawing on the same J and E sources. Indeed, some scholars believed the original epics of Israel went all the way from parts of Genesis to parts of Kings.

Noth's suggestion went rather the other way, namely, that Genesis through Numbers formed a kind of Tetrateuch and then that Deuteronomy was a quite different document that served as a kind of a preface to the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. He believed that the same person who wrote the opening chapters of Deuteronomy was the final editor of the deuteronomistic history.

As with other source debates, the conversation has continued in the years since, with some suggesting that the deuteronomistic history went through at least two major revisions, beyond the use of previous sources such as a collection of David material and so forth. Theorizing about such things has not faced much resistance because these books do not have a traditional author that the New Testament mentions. In general, the New Testament does not engage these writings as much as they do Genesis, the Psalms, and Isaiah.

Theology
The "deuteronomistic history" is so called in part because it interprets history according to a certain theology, namely, the theology of Deuteronomy. Some of the key features of this deuteronomistic theology are 1) a sense that as long as Israel keeps God's commandments, God will bless them in their land, 2) that if Israel does not appropriately serve Yahweh, they will be cursed and become enslaved to foreign powers, and 3) that part of obeying Yahweh's commands involved offering sacrifices to Him only in the place He would put His name, namely, Jerusalem and its temple. This same theology is also associated with the book of Jeremiah.

We thus find throughout these books that Israel only loses in battle if someone has disobeyed God's commandments in some way. Similarly, none of the kings of the north can by definition be good kings, because none of them offer sacrifices to Yahweh in Jerusalem. We also find operative the idea that the sins of the fathers can be visited on the children. This is particularly noticeable when Josiah, the most righteous king of all (from a deuteronomistic standpoint), is unable to offset the sins of his long dead father Manasseh, whose unrighteousness sends Judah into exile (and not the sins of the actual generation that suffers).

This theological perspective seems to be sub-Christian, as the New Testament and indeed other parts of the Old Testament itself (like Job) teach that a righteous person can suffer. Indeed, it seems difficult to account for Jesus' suffering purely on the basis of deuteronomistic theology. Herein is an argument that the books of the Old Testament are in a flow of revelation, and the books of the Jewish Bible are not yet Christian Scripture until they are read through Christian eyes and in the light of further revelation.

History
There persists to this day a collection of scholars, many of them ironically Jewish, whom we might call biblical minimalists. Such individuals might deny that there ever actually was a king named David or Solomon. On the other hand, recent archaeological discoveries would seem to put the existence of David on secure evidentiary ground.

Nevertheless, we are sorely lacking in archaeological evidence to confirm the historicity of much of the Historical Books. As it is often said, however, "absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence." For example, when John Garstang (1876-1956) excavated Jericho, the science of archaeology was still in its infancy. His team blew through thousands of years of dirt without carefully cataloging it and discarding most of it in a pile that stands to this day.

When he arrived at an impressive structure, he assumed it was the ruins of Jericho from Joshua's invasion. Even to this day you occasionally hear someone hail Jericho as one of the great confirmations of the historicity of the Bible. However, the subsequent archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon (1906-78) determined that the structure dated to about 3000BC. The layer from the time when Joshua would have lived is thus lost to Garstang's rubble.

Again, you will find differing senses among Christians of how important the precise historicity of such individuals and events are, ranging from those for whom it is essential for all the historical of details of the Historical Books to be accurate, to those who think the theological import of the stories is what is important. Each believer must wrestle with such questions in the context of their relationship with God.

Chronicles
The ending of Chronicles makes it clear that it was written in the post-exilic period. Chronicles covers the same territory as 2 Samuel and Kings, so it is fairly easy to see the theological emphases of its author at work. For example, Chronicles clearly has a much greater interest in the Levitical priesthood and in priestly matters by far than Kings did. It seems to reflect a time when the temple had become the center of Israel's political life, while the kings were more likely the center in the memory of Kings.

Other theological shifts are evident as well. For example, 2 Samuel 24:1 says that God incited David to number the people of Israel and Judah. But in 1 Chronicles 21:1, it is the Satan who does so. Like Job, Chronicles has developed a sense of the Satan as a servant of God who goes around testing the loyalty of people to God. Chronicles thus gives us a moment a little further along in the flow of revelation than Samuel, at least on the subject of the Satan.

Ezra-Nehemiah
Ezra-Nehemiah is a single book in the Hebrew Bible, and the storyline picks up where Chronicles left off. Some have suggested that Ezra returned after Nehemiah, but the majority opinion is that the returns took place in the current order of the two books: Ezra first, then Nehemiah a little over ten years later.

Esther
The book of Esther poses some interesting issues in relation to the canon. For example, it is one of only two books of which no trace at all was found among the Qumran documents. It seems reasonable to assume that it was not a part of the Essene canon.

Indeed, it poses some interesting theological issues. It is the only book of the Old Testament that does not use the word "God." And Esther's apparent sexual cooperation with a pagan, Gentile king as one of many candidates, clearly created issues for later Jews. It is no surprise that the Greek translation of Esther includes a number of additions and revisions that soften these issues. It is this version of Esther that is considered Scripture by the Orthodox, and these expansions are in the Roman Catholic Bible as well.

Death of Martin Hengel

2009-07-03T14:26:00.004-04:00

I was sad to see on Jim West's blog that Martin Hengel has died. What a wonderful and enjoyable man he was! He was a model of a person with warm hearted faith who nevertheless didn't play games with the evidence. What is it about the European evangelical community that is free of the quasi-fundamentalist politics of the ETS scene?

Aside from his always painstaking and ever thorough scholarship, I think most of his work, first, on Judaism and Hellenism. It was his work more than any other that put to death the absolute distinction people used to make between Hebrew and Greek thought. Good grief, Palestine had been hellenized for over 300 years before Jesus was even born.

Then there was his work on John, The Johannine Question. While this book has not commanded as much attention as Raymond Brown's, it made consummate sense to me when I first read it. It's on my top five list of books on John you need to read.

Hengel would not have known me, but I have delightful memories of four brief intersections with his person. One was while I was a teaching fellow at Asbury and we went to see him in Louisville (that was before Albert Mohler destroyed Louisville Southern Baptist Seminary, a place I wouldn't recommend now to my pet rat, if I had one). My good friend Bill Patrick still teases me that I answered "Yes" when Hengel asked me if I was German. As it turns out, I was born in America (and in the meantime, I now know that my great grandfather was from Holland).

A second is a delightful memory of sitting on the steps of the Stiftskirche in Tübingen during a semester of research there. (The kebabs in Tübingen are sehr ausgezeichnet, and there was a lovely little hole in the wall that sold them right next to the church) As I sat there thinking mediocre thoughts, Martin Hengel wandered across the cobbled stones in front, looking absent mindedly at something or another. Cool, I thought to myself. What a privileged life I lead.

A third was during a symposium at Durham where I was privileged to sit on the sidelines while the big dogs gave papers that would be eventually published as Paul and the Mosaic Law, a must read, indeed a good starting place on the topic of Paul and the Jewish Law. I remember Hengel coming up to a table where I was sitting at supper and interrupting a conversation with Dunn, I believe and a few other notables. Gushing forth with the topic obsessing him, he blurted out something about Luke breaking up the Sermon on the Mount--"I can't imagine that he would be able to break up such a masterpiece" or something like that. I believe he was working at that time on The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Hengel would always say that he got a late start on the study of the Bible, since it had been his second career. He had started out as a businessman. So he would say he had to work doubly hard to make up for lost time. Of course he did more of scholarly worth in his first five years than I'll do my entire life.

His wife went along with him on most of his ventures and even participated in discussions every once and a while. She clearly engaged his every thought and was a true partner. My greatest sympathies to her, as she has no doubt lost a more than best friend. She was with him the last time I was in a room where he was, at a conference in Chicago. My wife Angie and I drove up to the University of Chicago to hear him and others speak. She was sad to hear of his death.

I've almost given up on engaging in that world. My life has taken a different direction. But I mourn with the scholarly world today.

4. Critical Issues in the Pentateuch

2009-07-02T14:58:00.012-04:00

Some of the earliest firestorms in biblical studies centered on the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. The reason they created such controversy was not only because they called the historicity of these books into question but also because they came at a time when some of the most fundamental ways of looking at Christian faith were being challenged from every side. All in all, there are four basic responses we might make to these issues.

The first and the last were those taken respectively by fundamentalists and modernists in the early twentieth century. Modernists largely reformulated what Christian faith they had around being a good person and denied the supernatural element of the Pentateuch and the Bible in general. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, focused--one might even say reformulated their Christian faith around defending the historicity of the biblical texts tooth and nail.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, two additional gradations present themselves. The one might accept the general historicity of the Pentateuchal accounts, while not being overly concerned with variations that might result from the use of sources or in the variations of oral tradition. Another largely ignores the historical issues altogether, finding the Scriptural import of the text in the theological meaning and significance Christians have ascribed to the texts.

Source criticism
Source criticism is that branch of biblical studies that asks what written sources might have been used by various books of the Bible. It has been applied in particular to the Pentateuch in the Old Testament and the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke in the New Testament. In theory, God clearly could inspire a person to edit sources just as easily as to inspire a completely new writing. Nevertheless, the idea of sources behind various biblical writings initially encountered strong resistance, particularly in relation to the Pentateuch.

We can suggest several reasons why source criticism of the Pentateuch has encountered such strong resistance. Perhaps the most obvious is that source criticism has generally tended to diminish to one degree or another the historicity of the Pentateuchal narratives. In itself, the idea of sources would not need to imply that the final form of the text was not fully historical. But the way the discussion of the Pentateuch proceeded in the 1800s led in this direction, especially the form it took in the theory of Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918).

A second reason is the fact that the New Testament, including Jesus in the gospels, seems to think of Moses as the author of the Pentateuch (e.g., Luke 24:44). Most of these instances are referential rather than substantial, meaning that they might simply be taken as ways of referring to material in the Pentateuch in the categories of Jesus' day. However, Pentateuchal source criticism--especially as Wellhausen developed it--has tended to go further to suggest that the bulk of the material about Moses is not historical either, especially the sacrificial material.

Wellhausen is usually the target of attacks on the documentary hypothesis, the idea that certain documents have been spliced together to form the five current books of the Pentateuch. But the idea in various forms had been around for well over a century before he published his version of the idea in 1878. For example, W. M. L. de Wette (1780-1849) had earlier suggested that the "book of the Law" found in 2 Kings 22:8 was a portion of Deuteronomy rather than the entire Pentateuch.

Whether one agrees with this suggestion or not, it is easy enough to see why de Wette suggested it. The phrase "book of the Law" does not appear anywhere in Exodus, Leviticus, or Numbers. In Exodus, we find only the expression "book of the covenant" used once, and it seems to refer only to the legislation from Exodus 21-23 (cf. Exod. 24:7), presumably given while Israel is still at Mt. Sinai in the desert.

At the same time, if one takes a statement like Deuteronomy 31:26 as a literal presentation of history, then Moses is speaking about putting the "book of the Law" in the ark of the covenant, and this is forty years later in time. But if he is saying this about a book, then the part of Deuteronomy telling about him saying it could not be part of the book he is talking about. de Wette took this statement as a presentation of history and so concluded the book of the Law was a portion of Deuteronomy.

It is primarily the book of Joshua (e.g., 1:8) and 2 Kings where this phrase "book of the Law" is used. And Joshua 1 follows closely on the heals of Deuteronomy 34. Following an inductive method, it is at least understandable why de Wette saw 2 Kings 22:8 primarily referring to a portion of Deuteronomy. Only Deuteronomy mentions such a book in relation to some of its own content. So before Wellhausen, de Wette had argued that there was a source behind the Pentateuch that consisted of a portion of the book of Deuteronomy.

Another idea that preceded Wellhausen was that there are distinct sources behind the Pentateuchal narratives based on the name for God used in particular passages. For example, God tells Moses in Exodus 6:3 that He did not reveal himself to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob by his name Yahweh. Instead, He revealed himself as El Shaddai. When we turn back to the patriarchal narratives, the stories of the fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we interestingly find some stories that refer to God as Yahweh and other stories that refer to God as Elohim, the more generic word for God in Hebrew.

Again, regardless of what one concludes, it is easy enough to see why some scholars of the Old Testament came to the conclusion that there was a Yahweh source and at least one Elohim source that Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers had edited into one storyline. The idea is that in the Elohim version, God is not called Yahweh until Exodus 6. In the Yahweh version, on the other hand, God is called Yahweh from the very beginning. Only occasionally do we find a passage where both names are used in the same pericope or section.

As an example of this line of thinking, Genesis 15 and 16 refer consistently throughout the two chapters to God as Yahweh. The LORD (the way God's proper name is usually translated into English) promises Abram will have numerous descendants. Sarai follows common Ancient Near Eastern practice and suggests Abram have a child by Hagar, which he does. Then when we get to Genesis 17:1, God now calls himself El Shaddai. Once again, God promises Abraham that he will have numerous descendants. Sarah laughs at the thought of having a child at the age of 99, and so forth.

Genesis 15-17 flows fine as a single narrative, but we can see from it what some scholars prior to Wellhausen were thinking. They considered Genesis 15 and 16 largely to come from an epic of Israel's story that used the word Yahweh consistently for God. They called this source "J" because these thinkers were mostly German, and Yahweh is spelled Jahweh in German (although pronounced similarly to the English). Meanwhile, they saw Genesis 17 as part of a different epic that had God call himself "El Shaddai," or "God Almighty" to Abraham, only to reveal himself later to Moses as Yahweh. They called this source "E" for Elohim.

[chart breaking out supposed J and E sources in the Flood story]

From the above discussion, it is clear that Wellhausen's work was really much more of a synthesis and systematic presentation of ideas that had already been around prior to him. He followed others in proposing that the Pentateuch was the result of four basic sources edited together. Two were epics of Israel's history, one of which used Elohim for God up till the point of Moses (E2) and the other of which used Yahweh throughout (J). D was then some form of the book of Deuteronomy.

Finally, Wellhausen suggested that another source that used "Elohim" for God represented the work of a later editor who contributed most of the priestly material in Leviticus and so forth. The scholars that followed Wellhausen called this source "P" for priestly, although Wellhausen himself did not. It was probably this suggestion, more than any other, that fueled opposition to Wellhausen.

Although he did not originate the idea that this so called P source was a later priestly editor, Wellhausen argued for the notion more than any had before him. Earlier scholars had accepted the idea of another Elohim source of this sort, but they had argued it was early. By arguing it was one of the latest sources, Wellhausen basically implied that none of the sacrificial legislation of Leviticus actually went back to Moses.

Again, whether we agree with this theory or not, we can see why Wellhausen drew this conclusion. So much of the sacrificial element of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy seems completely absent from Judges, Samuel, and Kings. Wellhausen's first writing was on Samuel, so he particularly noticed its absence. So he concluded that sacrificial legislation did not exist at the time. The other possibility is of course to see this teaching as largely ignored by Israel until the time of Josiah.

The letters JEDP have long since become synonymous with Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis. Of course those who believe there to have been sources of this sort have not simply reproduced Wellhausen's ideas these last hundred thirty years. The idea of an "E" epic has often been questioned, and the "holiness codes" of Leviticus are not usually considered part of some P document in later scholarship. So while the idea of sources continues, current theories look significantly different from Wellhausen's famed suggestion.

As we mentioned at the beginning of this section, Christians react differently to these suggestions. Some will deny the idea of sources altogether, arguing that any editing done was either done by Moses or was done using Mosaic sources. Others will insist that, whatever sources might stand behind the Pentateuch, its essential historicity is intact. Still others, as we mentioned, find questions of historicity tangential to the essential meaning of the Pentateuch as Christian Scripture.

Form Criticism
In the early twentieth century, a number of Old and New Testament scholars at least recognized that before the stories about Abraham and Moses were written down, they would have been passed along as oral tradition. Although this was a great insight, it was not profitably pursued at the time. It has only been in the last couple decades that the idea has begun to pay off.

In the early twentieth century, an inordinate amount of attention was given to various forms that oral tradition allegedly took. The study of such forms was called form criticism, as if the ancients only used certain "templates" when they told stories of various kinds. It was a similar kind of thinking that led Adolph Jülicher (1857-1938) to suggest that Jesus could only have told parables that had one point, because that was--he argued--the form of a parable. Parables with more than one point could thus not truly go back to Jesus, at least not in the form they appeared in the gospels.

Nevertheless, the suggestion that we might find in the Pentateuch or synoptic gospels different versions of the same original story is not ridiculous. Whether in the end we agree or not, it is curious that we find three versions of a very similar storyline in Genesis involving a patriarch, his wife, and a king. So we find Abraham telling Sarah to pretend she is his sister to Pharaoh (Gen. 12:10-20 in a text that uses Yahweh). We find Abraham telling Sarah to pretend she is his sister to Abimelech (Gen. 20:1-17 in a text that uses Elohim, and Sarah is at least 90 years old). And we find Isaac telling Rebekah to pretend she is his sister to Abimelech (Gen. 26:6-11).

Form critics like Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932) suggested that these were all versions of the same oral tradition. He suggested that the earliest form of the story was that of the lesser known individuals Isaac and Rebekah in relation to Abimelech. But then the story gravitated to the better known Abraham and Sarah and then from Abimelech to the better known Pharaoh.

The way one reacts to ideas of this sort will depend on how important one considers exact historicity for God to speak authoritatively and truthfully through the biblical text. For some, it is essential to consider each of these three versions distinct historical events. For others, it will matter little whether they are three versions of the same oral tradition or not. Each Christian will have to work out their own sense of what the limits of inspiration are.

Seminary Vision (7-2-09): Leading Edge

2009-07-02T07:39:00.006-04:00

The final of the IWU Seminary videos is "leading edge." I've been providing further commentary along with the videos. Here are the links to the commentary, and each video on YouTube is further linked there:

Missional
Communal
Integrated
Spiritually Enriching
Personalized
Economical

The final video is on the Leading Edge aspect to our degree.

1. As I thought about what is leading edge about our seminary, really, all of the items on the above list fall into that category. A couple of them are now fairly common, although they weren't 10 years ago. For example, the fact that you don't have to move somewhere for three years--or even for one--is a new innovation that has saved the very existence of seminaries. You can do 2/3 of the degree online and the other third by coming to campus for 1 week intensives. Thanks to Asbury for pioneering much of this.

2. Asbury gives good training to its online profs. By the same token, Indiana Wesleyan has really perfected adult education both online and at satellite sites. We use the cohort model, where you take a sequence of courses in a particular order with the same group of fellow students. The model of course creation is usually three stage: 1) course content is generated by content experts, 2) the content is put into instructional form by pedagogical experts, which then is 3) taught by good facilitators.

This process in itself is a leading edge process. Most schools focus on getting content experts with name recognition. This makes a school look good, and it does privilege a group of students who are on the same wavelength with that professor.

But in practice, world renown content experts are rarely spectacular teachers. The majority of students thus do not benefit as much from having a world class professor as they would from a less brilliant scholar who is a more brilliant teacher. This is an interesting irony and self-defeating aspect of most educational institutions. That which is most valued--spectacular names--more often than not undermines the very reason for most educational institutions' existence: to teach.

A unique curricular process has evolved in the design of our seminary at IWU. Yes, our online courses with syllabus, grading process, and specific assignments are preset in a template in Blackboard, regardless of the particular professor. This is potentially discouraging to the maverick prof but is student oriented. It ensures the best pedagogy with the best content.

The content is generated collaboratively, not by a single content expert but by a half dozen brilliant minds. The pedagogy has also been generated collaboratively, by a group of people including several with significant online teaching. We have changed the standard format of Blackboard. I didn't use to like Blackboard, but I realized the reason was more than anything the way they generally package and promote its format. A small tweak--making each of the left hand buttons correspond to one week's assignments and discussion forums--and all is good. I'm left dumbfounded at who these Blackboard people that they have promoted such a counterintuitive format all these years in so many different institutions!

I have concluded that, really, big name scholars are best reserved most of the time for one week intensive formats. For the long haul, you want a good facilitator. Good education is not the transmission of information. The lecture in itself is the most inefficient form of teaching. Learning that is most retained and appropriate is learner generated, and thus the best teacher is one who designs a learning experience that leads a student to generate his or her own understanding. And it will hit multiple learning styles.

The teaching of individual courses will also include a collaborative element, where the course is led by a practitioner, but you receive some feedback from Bible and theology/church history professors, and other professors will feel free to drop in and comment too. We are thus trying to set up a true learning community, rather than a bunch of lone ranger superheroes like you get at other seminaries.

The seminary at IWU has also convinced IWU to add the Blackboard Community add on, making it possible for students across various cohorts to interact with one another. Asbury had this with its Cafe that so irked its board of trustees during the presidential crisis a few years back. But it was a great thing to create across the seminary cohesiveness and camaraderie. We will implement something like this as well, including alumni of IWU's MA program so they can keep in touch.

3. You can see from the process of course creation that integration has been a primary concern. It has been a challenge, but we have managed to meet in the middle on course design. There have been differences. One person wants a book that is just too long and too much for one element of a course. Some of the debates we've had as course designers have made their way into discussions for the course.

Is the missional movement wrong when it opposes thinking about attracting people to your church? Does your church community have to include the community immediately surrounding it or can your church be located in an area with which it has little interaction? We've debated and disagreed and finally made these discussions things for students themselves to make up their minds up in the course.

We've mentioned already how we bring Bible, theology, and church history to bear on topics. I'm excited for a couple weeks in the missional course where students will look at social justice in the prophets one week and study Rauschenbush and the early twentieth century social gospel in the next.

And as we've said, it is the leading edge of seminary education for training to be done in ministry, on the job. Students in our MDIV have to get in a church if they are not. We will be refining and retrofitting our MA degrees for those not in local church ministry. We haven't abandoned you in the parachurch or you lay leaders or you ministers wanting to beef up a particular skill set. But the MDIV is on the job training, "take your church to seminary."

4. The attention to spiritual formation is not unique to our program, but it is unusual. Tht we require it across the curriculm is fairly unique. And the robust way in which we address it is fairly unique. We look at the process of real change rather than the less productive--go and pray approach. And when you look at some other programs in spiritual formation, they usually myopically focus on the personal dimension, when in fact the corporate dimension must be present for the personal dimension to flourish. This is a blind spot of Western individualism that shows up even in the most noted spiritual formation programs in the US.

5. Finally, we have designed a program that is both faith-full and mature in its understanding. We are in the Wesleyan tradition, which means we are most interested in life change more than adding a set of mental widgets or skills. We are interested in you being able to do ministry more than in you knowing things. To be sure, knowing things is good and important, but we are getting the priorities of seminary education straight.

We are hermeneutically mature, especially for evangelicals. Most evangelical seminaries play a game here--if I learn Greek, diagram the sentences of the Bible, study a little historical background, then I will somehow mysteriously and almost automatically know God's will for today. We're seeing this paradigm unravelling before our very eyes. God has as often as not used the words of the Bible in ways other than their original sense and intent. This fact in itself undermines a curricular program at most seminaries that dedicates as much as a third of the curriculum to the pursuit of the original meanings of individual biblical books.

And of course, very little attention is spent in this typical curriculum to teaching what to do with that original meaning once you think you have it. How do I get from that time to this time. For that matter, how do I get from my class in Romans to my class in pastoral care and counseling, let alone to my class in preaching?

I have mentioned elsewhere that this is a great time for the Wesleyan tradition because of currents in the intellectual flow today. And as such, this is a great time to be starting a Wesleyan seminary!