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Archive for the ‘Salvation’ Category

More on Campbell’s “Deliverance of God” (3)

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

At the end of the book, Douglas summarizes his view of Paul’s gospel as “the countervailing gospel [i.e., contra Justification Discourse] of sanctification, ethical efficacy, and ecclesial community” (p. 935); I think this is a fabulous summary of Paul. In the same context he claims that his argument

is meant to be an important moment in the advance to ecclesial and scholarly triumph of the participatory and apocalyptic gospel, which is also really to say, of the Trinitarian gospel—an ecumenical gospel that both Protestants and Catholics can presumably affirm (obviously in accord with both the Orthodox and most post-modern Protestant traditions), a gospel both old and new…. an authentic and orthodox Pauline gospel. (p. 934; cf. my similar comments in the Introduction to Inhabiting, p. 8, n. 22)

Douglas has indeed rendered a tremendous service both to Pauline scholarship and to the church. He rightly insists that the material content of Romans 5-8, transformation or sanctification or “ontological reconstitution” (e.g., p. 185), is not supplemental to the gospel or to justification but constitutive of them:

Paul’s account of sanctification is his gospel. His description of deliverance and cleansing “in Christ,” through the work of the Spirit, at the behest of the Father, the entire process being symbolized by baptism, is the good news. It requires no supplementation by other [e.g., “contractual”] systems. (p. 934; cf. pp. 187-88)

However, Douglas believes that his thesis about 1:18—3:20 as “alien discourse,” and only this thesis, elevates Romans 5-8 “to its rightful status” (p. 934), because his thesis, and only his thesis, makes it possible to “affirm coherently that ‘God justifies the ungodly,’” that is, that God unconditionally delivers those enslaved to Sin (p. 934). While I strongly affirm his overall interpretation of Paul’s gospel, I think Douglas’s reading of 1:18—3:20 is wrong, and that his reading of Paul’s gospel does not depend on his reading of 1:18—3:20.

More to come…

Posted in Biblical Scholars & Theologians, Paul, Salvation | 8 Comments »

Already Glorified? (part 2)

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Here’s my own position (at least as of today!):

If (1) Paul can say that “in hope we were saved,” when “save” (sozo) language is always, even there, future in orientation for him, and if (2) future salvation includes glorification, then he could quite plausibly mean in saying “those whom [God] justified [God] also glorified” that believers were glorified in hope, that is, they were and are partially and proleptically saved/glorified in the initial and daily reality of justification, that is, of dying with Christ and rising to new life in Christ. Of course that new life is always in the shape of the cross!

If this correct, then the term “theosis” to describe what Paul is describing is quite appropriate—a process of being formed into the likeness of the Son of God, though in this life the “glory” is partial, proleptic, and cruciform.

One possible problem with this interpretation is connecting it to the liberation of creation. Is there any sense of proleptic salvation for the creation in Romans 8? Or could there be, implicitly?

(This post is expanded from a comment I made on my previous post on this topic.)

Posted in Paul, Salvation, Theosis | 6 Comments »

Already Glorified? (Rom 8:30)

Monday, October 19th, 2009

In Romans 8:30 Paul asserts that those who were predestined, called, and justified were also glorified. What could it mean? Many (though not all—see, e.g., Cranfield and Jewett) commentators argue that it does not refer literally to a past (or ongoing) event or experience. They stand on a rather firm foundation of texts such as 5:2 (“our hope of sharing the glory of God”) and 8:17-18 (“…so that we may also be glorified with him… the glory about to be revealed to us”)—plus a healthy fear of any “theology of glory.” They offer several different interpretations of the aorist:

• the proleptic, futuristic, or prophetic aorist: a future action is so certain that it may be narrated in the past tense (many)
• the properly theological use of the aorist (my term): a future action is already complete from the timeless, eternal perspective of God (Keck)
• the a-historical use of the aorist (my-term): like “predestined,” “glorified” expresses a view of salvation events that occur outside of time as we know it, unlike “called” and “justified,” which refer to events within time (Dunn)
• the punctiliar/non-temporal aorist: an action is perceived and described with respect to its aspect (one-time or completed character), not its temporality

While each of these interpretations could make sense of the text in isolation, or in connection only with other texts that clearly refer to the believing community’s future experience of glory, I wonder if these explanations sufficiently recognize the present reality of glory that Paul describes in 2 Cor 3:18 or, more importantly, whether they connect “glory” to the totality of that theme in Romans. Here is the question: Has the glorification of humanity already begun? Can it be said, in some sense, to be a past/present reality as well as a future reality? If so, what does that mean, especially in Romans?

What do people think about this?

Posted in Paul, Salvation, Theosis | 3 Comments »

Abraham our Prototype of Participation in Romans 4

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Some thoughts…

1. The traditional scholarly and reigning interpretation of the role of Abraham in Romans 4 is that of exemplum of justification by faith. This sort of interpretation is often quite thin, focusing merely on the claim that Abraham’s faith—not, as most Jews would have said, his obedience or faithfulness, or as others might think, his works/works of the law (whether deeds or identity markers)—was reckoned to him as righteousness. This approach assumes that faith basically means a non-doing trust (e.g., in the promise), without exploring in any depth the meaning of either faith or righteousness in the chapter, much less in Romans or Paul more broadly. The strength of this view is its apparent basis in the very Scriptural texts, especially Gen 15:6, that Paul cites. But this view over-privileges the accounting metaphor (“reckoned”) and sometimes neglects much of the second half of Romans 4, in which the language shifts from the accounting metaphor to language of death and resurrection. In other cases this sort of interpretation is much thicker, stressing at least the rather full picture of faith that emerges from this chapter: its relation to hope and its theocoentric focus on God’s ability to bring life out of death.

2. Dissatisfaction with certain aspects of these two versions of the reigning interpretation has led some scholars to look for another dimension of Abraham’s role in Romans. They would argue that Abraham’s faithfulness is in fact the focus of Romans 4, and that the chapter serves as a means of connecting the faithfulness of Abraham to the faithfulness of Christ displayed on the cross. It is this kind of faith—that is, faithfulness—that is exemplary in Abraham and that is Paul’s desideratum for the communities in Rome. Other interpreters may focus less on the nature of Abraham’s faith and more on its universal role in Romans 4, that is, to serve Paul’s thematic argument that both Jews and Gentiles who have Abraham-like faith are part of the new covenant community in Christ.

3. As tempting and promising as the “faithfulness” solution may be for those of us who prefer the “faith of Christ” interpretation of pistis christou, or as self-evidently correct as the focus on universality may be, I think we also need to look at another dimension of Romans 4 that has been neglected. I want to propose that Paul wants us to see the actual content of Abraham’s faith and the experience of that faith as a prototype of death and resurrection with Christ. If this is correct, then Abraham serves as an exemplum of Paul’s unique participatory understanding of justification by faith as co-crucifixion and co-resurrection with Christ.

4. The basic argument here is very simple: Abraham’s faith was not merely an attitude of trust versus a doing of deeds or faithfulness or confidence in possession of a “boundary marker” (circumcision); nor was it merely a general theological belief in, or even a trusting posture toward, God as the one who can raise the dead or bring life out of death. Rather, because Abraham himself was functionally dead—along with his wife’s womb—his faith was that God could bring life out of his death, could transform his dead-ness into life. In other words, his faith was completely self-involving and participatory. That he was justified by faith means that he trusted the promise of life-out-of-death given to him, and that he was justified by faith means not merely that he was fictitiously considered just or righteous, but that he was granted the gracious gift of new life out of death, which was concretely fulfilled in the birth of a descendant—a very Jewish notion of life. In retrospect, from Paul’s own position of having died and been resurrected in Christ, Abraham’s experience is prospectively analogous to what Paul says about all baptized believers in Romans 6: their justification by faith means a participatory experience of resurrection out of death.

5. All of this helps us understand, in part, why the resurrection is absolutely essential to justification (Rom 4:25).

Any thoughts about this?

Posted in Justification, Resurrection, Salvation, Scripture | 21 Comments »

God’s Mission: Righting or Writing the World?

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

A few months back I gave a major public lecture on Paul called “Justification and Justice: Paul, the Mission of the Church, and the Salvation of the World.” In the lecture I picked up on NT Wright’s theme of God’s “putting the world to rights.” Deciding to avoid the British idiom, I said (perhaps several times) that according to Paul God is “righting” the world, as in righting a capsized ship or setting right that which is out of alignment.

A journalist heard my talk of God’s “righting the world” as God’s “writing the world”—and was apparently quite taken by the idea. (OK, I confess: Yes, I am a closet process theologian. Just kidding. ) In fact, it turned her on to Paul once again, and she wrote about that at length.

This little episode raises all kinds of interesting questions about hermeneutics, etc., but most importantly it raises the question, “Did the journalist have an unintentional brilliant insight into Paul and into God?” Is that what the missio Dei is in some sense? Writing the world? What might that mean?

Posted in Justification, Missional hermeneutic, Paul, Salvation | 4 Comments »

The Nonviolent Missio Dei

Friday, June 26th, 2009

A number of people, not least John Howard Yoder and Richard Hays, have made the case that the NT does not give support to Christian participation in violence but, rather, leads us to practice nonviolence. Glen Stassen and others argue rightly that hearing the NT as a call to nonviolence alone is insufficient, and that we must also practice just peacemaking.

I am not disputing either of these claims and would in fact support them. Without going back and looking at each of their writings in detail, I would also add that each also says, implicitly or explicitly, that the mission or story of God is in fact a mission/story of nonviolent action centered in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. If we think, then, of participating in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—that is, of participating in the story and mission of God—as the goal of human existence and the meaning of salvation, then nonviolence is not a matter to discuss or debate as one of so many possible topics in Christian ethics. Rather, it is at the very heart of what it means to be Christian, to be saved, to be a disciple.

Over at Getting Free, T has a brief but excellent post about this very topic: “The Cross and the Plot-line of our Time.” He says:

If this is a Story that we’re in, then the plot of how good beats evil in this world must be central to it. From what I can tell from the New Testament, generous love for people who are (currently) agents of evil (even to the point of giving one’s blood or money in love) is the central strategy of God in this plot line.

If T is right, and I think he is “spot on,” then the way Tom Wright and others tell the story of God in five acts (creation through recreation/redemption) needs to be more carefully articulated with an emphasis on God’s nonviolent, nonretaliatiory enemy love that is the central act of the story.

I wonder if Rev. Pagano and friends (see previous post) have thought about this? What’s the story of God they believe in and tell week in and week out?

T (and I) welcome responses there or here.

Posted in Christian practices, Cross, Missional hermeneutic, Nonviolence, Peacemaking, Salvation | 14 Comments »

Revelation as the Key to a Missional Hermeneutic

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

I ended my lectures on Revelation at Duke this past term, in both my own class on the book and in Susan Eastman’s NT Intro, where I was a guest lecturer, with the following paragraph:

Revelation concludes the canon; it completes God’s story. It is the last book of the Christian Bible. Perhaps it would not be too bold to suggest that if the church of Jesus Christ is to be faithful to its vocation in the 21st century, the book of Revelation—especially its vision of the slaughtered, victorious, and coming Lamb—needs to become more central to our worship, our spirituality, our practices. Perhaps, in a profound way, the last book of the Bible needs to become the church’s first book.

What would it mean if Revelation were taken as the first book of Christian mission, as the key to a missional hermeneutic? As a working proposal, I think this makes a lot of sense. After all, as I suggest above, the book of Revelation is the telos of the Christian Bible, and it contains the telos of the divine story. In that sense, it is analogous in a way to Christ himself, who is the telos of the Law, according to Paul (Rom 10:4). In both cases, we should take telos to mean “end” in the sense of both conclusion and, more importantly, goal.

If Revelation reveals the goal of the divine, biblical narrative and thus the goal of human existence (salvation), then what we see at the end of the end–that is, in Rev 21:1-22:5 (and related texts)–gives us both a picture of the telos and the contours of Christian mission: bearing witness in the present to the future, the telos.

Revelation 7, one of my favorite NT texts, briefly depicts the

“great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. 10They cried out in a loud voice, saying, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!’ ”

This perpetual multicultural liturgy embodies the universal salvation brought in Christ: the reconciliation (one loud voice) of the peoples of the earth to one another and to their creator and redeemer.

In Rev 21:1-22:5 we find additional images of this salvation: the presence of God the absence of suffering and evil; the lush urban garden with beautiful walls and streets, and trees that have perpetual fruit and leaves for the healing of the nations.

What does it mean to bear witness, in advance, now, to this telos, this salvation? That is, it seems to me, the first, burning missional question that we must face. The answer will by necessity be both “vertical” and “horizontal.” That is, it will involve human-to-God and human-to-human relationships. And it will, I suggest, mean witnessing to the physicality and the beauty of the new creation, which has already begun (2 Cor 5).

Posted in Missional hermeneutic, Revelation, Salvation | 12 Comments »

Douglas Campbell on Justification

Friday, June 19th, 2009

Duke professor Douglas Campbell’s much-anticipated new book on Paul’s soteriology, and justification in particular, will soon be out. The title is The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul. This HUGE volume (almost 1400 pages!) will be a controversial book, to put it mildly. In substance, Campbell’s overall reading of Paul is very similar to mine, especially as articulated in Inhabiting the Cruciform God, though we do not agree on some major issues and arrive at our conclusions differently and separately.

Here is my blurb for his new book:

Douglas Campbell’s continuation of the quest for Paul’s gospel is a bold exercise in deconstruction and reconstruction. One may disagree with parts of his analysis, or take a somewhat different route to the same destination, but there is no doubt in my mind about his overall thesis: for Paul, justification is liberative, participatory, transformative, Trinitarian, and communal. This is a truly theological and ecumenical work with which all serious students of Paul must now come to terms.

The price is phenomenally low ($60) for the length, and Amazon’s discount is currently 37%.

Campbell uses the word “theosis” at least twice in this book. He also has an argument for nonviolence grounded in Paul. Both of these are of course near and dear to my heart.

Returning to a missional hermeneutic next week.

Posted in Justification, Nonviolence, Paul, Salvation, Theosis | 4 Comments »

Some Fundamental Features of Salvation in the NT (1)

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

Advent is the season of preparation for our salvation. With that in mind, I begin today a short series on salvation in the New Testament. The first two posts will be seven theses that serve as prolegomena to a series of propositions on the actual substance of salvation in the New Testament. These theses will be more full developed in my forthcoming article on salvation in volume 5 of the New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible.

   1. Salvation in the NT is thoroughly Christocentric. The NT knows of salvation only in and through Jesus Christ. The Johannine statement “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6) is not an exceptional and narrow perspective within the NT. Rather, it encapsulates the entire NT’s view of salvation.
   2. Because NT salvation is Christocentric, it is constituted by the narrative of Christ from incarnation and ministry to death and resurrection to parousia. Each part of this narrative has a function in salvation, and different NT texts focus on different parts of the story. But the NT’s most distinctive internal dynamic of salvation is that of death and resurrection, both Christ’s and ours.
   3. At the same time, salvation in the NT is thoroughly theocentric. For the NT writers it is the God of Israel, the one true God, who saves in and through Jesus Christ.
   4. NT soteriology is therefore biblical, meaning that the NT writers see salvation in Jesus Christ as a continuation of God’s activity in and for Israel as recounted in the Scriptures as a whole and especially as promised in the prophets. Throughout the NT, salvation is depicted both explicitly and implicitly as new creation, new humanity, new exodus, new covenant, and the like. This newness suggests both continuity and discontinuity with God’s past dealings with Israel.
   5. NT soteriology is, therefore, a narrative soteriology. Not only is it constituted by the story of Christ, but the story of Christ is part of a larger narrative from creation to Israel to Christ to church to new creation.

(Theses six and seven will follow.)

Posted in Salvation, Theological interpretation | No Comments »

Cross Talk ~ crux probat omnia

Archive for the ‘Salvation’ Category

More on Campbell’s “Deliverance of God” (3)

Already Glorified? (part 2)

Already Glorified? (Rom 8:30)

Abraham our Prototype of Participation in Romans 4

God’s Mission: Righting or Writing the World?

The Nonviolent Missio Dei

Revelation as the Key to a Missional Hermeneutic

Douglas Campbell on Justification

Some Fundamental Features of Salvation in the NT (1)

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