Malcolm’s Eleven

Who could be the most crucial and effective member of a group of high-class, sophisticated, cocktail-sipping, calling-card-leaving criminals?  The person who pulls the team together?  Nope… The computer hacker/software expert?  No again… The little guy who goofs around and almost ruins things, but then comes good at the end?  Heck no… The bimbo who mesmerises the guards?  Nuh-uh…  The intelligence-challenged steroid-filled strong man with a single-syllable vocabulary?  Way off…  The eccentric but brilliant scientist with a test tube in one hand and a stool sample in the other?  Come on – be serious!!…  Okay I can see I’m going to have to give you a clue: I’ve made him out of playdough, and he’s pictured above.

That’s right – the most powerful contribution could come from the theologian (an evil theologian, admittedly).  Because the theologian is able to share this insight: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be.”  And so the theologian is able to set the strategy for the group: Capture people’s hearts, and they’ll line up to give you their treasures… no safe-cracker required.

Hmmm…  if only this sort of thing  were pure fiction…

Batter my heart

Having encountered some great poetry by George Herbert here I was reminded of my favourite Christian poem, by John Donne.  I used to have this poem stuck up next to my desk, so I could share its prayer: Unless you imprison me, I will never be free…

Batter my heart, three-person’d God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

John Donne, Holy Sonnets XIV

Gorman on Justification

I’ve just got Michael Gorman’s new book ‘Reading Paul’.  I really appreciated some of his insights in previous books (particularly his emphasis on cruciformity) so I’ve been looking forward to it.  Generally it seems to be a useful book.  I don’t intend to do a book review here, but simply give some thoughts on his section about justification.

He attempts to give a fresh understanding of what Paul means by justification.  He notes that historically, many Protestants have understood justification as God’s means of imputing righteousness to the believer’s account; and many Catholics have understood justification as God’s means of imparting righteousness to the believer’s life.  He goes on to note that the New Perspective on Paul has often challenged both views, by suggesting that justification is not about humans receiving salvation, but rather about humans receiving acknowledgement that they are members of the covenant community, on the basis of their faith.

Gorman feels a tension here between conceptions of justification as individual reception and conceptions of justification as corporate participation.  He seeks to offer a fresh understanding of justification that incorporates both perspectives:

Justification is the establishment of right covenantal relations – fidelity to God and love for neighbor – by means of God’s grace in Christ’s death and our co-crucifixion with him.  Justification therefore means co-resurrection with Christ to new life within the people of God now and the certain hope of acquittal, and thus resurrection to eternal life, on the day of judgment.  (pp116-117)

To summarize: justification and participation are two sides of the same coin, the coin of relationship to God in Christ by the Spirit, because faith for Paul is above all sharing in the faithfulness of Jesus that culminated on the cross.  The experience of justification-participation is intensely personal but not private or individual; we are justified, we are baptized, and we participate in Christ in the context of a community and in relation to a wider world.  (p130)

Gorman suggests that justification IS reconciliation, which is transformative: Justification means sharing the faith of Christ by dying and rising with him to participate in his renewed covenant community.

However, I find myself unconvinced.  To me it seems that Gorman is squeezing a number of related concepts into the theme “justification”, in a way that doesn’t really work.  I sympathise with the desire to emphasise the theme of sharing in Christ’s death and resurrection; and I sympathise with the desire to emphasise the need for transformation, particularly in corporate terms.  But I don’t think that Paul equates those things with “justification”.  Rather, Paul seems to employ “justification” terminology as one way of describing the salvific benefit of union with Christ in his death and resurrection. 

In other words, union (or ‘bond’) with Christ by faith is central to Paul’s soteriology: By faith, the church is bound to Christ and enjoys the benefits of his own death and resurrection.  Justification is a ‘judicial’ soteriological image that depends on this bond with Christ.  Reconciliation is a ‘relational’ soteriological image that likewise depends on this bond with Christ.  And this saving bond with Christ results in Paul expressing his ethics in terms of responsive participation with Christ in his death (thus personal and corporate self-restraint), his resurrection (thus personal and corporate renewal), and his hiddenness as he awaits cosmic recognition (thus personal and corporate endurance).

Or to put it more simply, the church is saved by union with Christ, for conformity to Christ.  “Justification” is one way of elaborating the former; “Corporate transformation” is one way of elaborating the latter.

Spectacled Theologian Hall of Fame

The first person who can correctly name all of these people in the ‘Spectacled Theologian Hall of Fame’ will win a kit-kat: That is, if ever I encounter you in person (which is more likely for some than others, admittedly), I will personally buy you a kit-kat… or if you are a vegan, I’ll buy you some parsley.  The offer is valid for ten (10) years after the winner has been announced.

 

Luke hints at Jesus’ divinity?

From time to time I’ve wondered why Luke points out that those who were travelling with Saul on the road to Damascus didn’t see the same thing that Saul saw: Why diminish the credibility of the story by mentioning this?  He says:

[The men] heard the sound/voice (akouontes men tes phones) but saw nothing (medena de theorountes). (Acts 9:7)

It’s not even made clear that what the people heard (voice/sound) was as articulate as what Saul heard.  So Luke has Saul travelling along, encountering something that only he perceives as Jesus.  But it struck me that, besides playing on the motif of seeing/blindness, perhaps Luke is alluding to an encounter that was etched into Israel’s memory:

Then the LORD spoke to you out of the fire.  You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice (phonen – LXX).  (Deuteronomy 4:12)

Of course, in that context, the point is that Israel has not seen the form of God, and so shouldn’t attempt to make idols in his image.  But perhaps Luke is hinting at this tradition of God being heard but not seen, apart from those to whom he specifically reveals himself.

free books

I came across a blog just now that is giving away a few hundred dollars worth of book vouchers through a theology bookstore.  You simply need to type in your email address… in theory there will be no spam-emails sent to your address… anyway, I’m in the draw, and if you’d like to be in it too, here is a link.

I’m finding that amazon has been doing pretty well out of me over the last few months… nothing is more exciting than getting into the office and finding a little package on my desk.  Right now I am waiting on two books: One by Gorman which I still haven’t read (I really really liked his other two books – I highly recommend him), and the other is John Chrysostom’s homilies on 1 Corinthians.  His stuff on 1 Corinthians seems to me to be incredibly insightful.  He has now ascended to being my favourite Eastern Patristic… apart from his whole anti-Jewish thing…  So anyway if you’re doing substantial work on 1 Corinthians, he is certainly one person worth reading.  You can get it all free online if you don’t feel like paying for the print version – just do a google search.

a tale of two men

Just now I was sitting down in a grassed area reading my book, when something happened that forced me to put down my Hegel (actually any excuse will do) and leave – it wasn’t a bad thing that happened; it was a good thing, but it totally distracted me: A man came and sat down and started eating sandwiches.  I used to eat sandwiches that my mum made for me in primary school – but I still recall one occasion – aged about 8 – when I was too embarrassed to bring my sandwiches with me to the playing area, and threw them in the bin… and then besides being hungry, I felt absolutely dreadful – like I’d let my mum down and could do nothing to fix the fact.  Maybe that was in the background when I was watching this man eating sandwiches, and maybe that’s why I was so distracted – he just looked so utterly happy, sitting in a grassy field, enjoying the sunny outdoors, and enjoying what looked like delicious sandwiches that had perhaps been made for him.  For some reason my mind instantly saw in this man the church – happily enjoying the bread of life… looking at him, it was hard to imagine time better spent.

 

Then my mind went to one other memory I have – well actually it’s not a memory; it’s a recurring daydream – the saddest thought I ever have: it’s just an old man, in an utterly quiet, impeccably clean cottage, carefully washing up his cup and saucer.  I don’t know anything about him – no one knows his name… he just stands at the sink with his wrinkled, expressionless face fixed on the empty cup in his hands.  I don’t know why, but this image is just chilling to me – so quiet, so empty, so stupidly pointless.  For the first time, as I was thinking about this man today, I saw in him the world – busily accomplishing something, but tinged with a certain… I don’t know what.

 

Then I wondered what would happen if these two men were to meet…  Was that a flicker of embarrassment I saw in the sandwich-man’s eyes?  “Don’t worry mate,” I whispered… “I know of a certain bin….”

Awards

I don’t have much time at the moment, giving that I’m frantically working on a paper that I want to complete by Monday… so I’ll just hand out some brief awards.  The category here is “search terms people have made that have landed them on my blog”…. and now for the awards…

Most noble internet research:

“ritual cleansing bath roman”

Most interesting internet research:

“theologians’ views on sexual immorality in the church”

Search that would have resulted in the greatest disappointment upon arriving at my blog:

“anthony thiselton death”  [Hey, I'm glad to have disappointed 'em!]

Search that has most tried to butter me up:

“matthew son of thiselton”

And finally (drumroll, please)….. stupidest web search that has landed on my site:

“zen hippie welshman makes quality coffee”

All these people have won themselves free coffees, claimable at the University of Nottingham any time.

the lion is the lamb

Although I didn’t care for the rhetoric of the post, I was saddened to read here about the Christian pastor who loves “authoritative” Jesus but has no time for “vulnerable” Jesus: He has said in a magazine interview…

“Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a pride fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity. “

He cannot worship a guy he can beat up…  I guess the Roman guards thought the same thing.

“Then the governor’s soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him.  They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head.  They put a staff in his right hand as a scepter.  Then they knelt in front of him and mocked him.  ‘Hail, king of the Jews!’ they said.  They spat on him, and took the staff and struckhim on the head again and again.  After they had mocked him, they took off the robe and put his own clothes on him.  Then they led him away to crucify him.”  Matthew 27:27-31, TNIV

Paul’s Ethics

One of the main areas I’m working on at the moment is Pauline ethics: For many months now I’ve been wrestling with the question: How does Paul think Christians should live – and on what basis does he think this?  So I’ve been going through Paul’s letters, reading up on OT ethics, Greco-Roman ethics, early Jewish ethics, Jesus’ ethics, apocryphal ethics… I’ve been reading books on New Testament ethics (Furnish, Horrell, Hays, Burridge, Rosner, Countryman…), and trying to be as attentive as possible to Paul’s thought.

I haven’t yet finished my current paper (I’m up to 50 pages) but I hope to give it to my supervisor in a week.  One thing that has intrigued me is that Paul often seems to use very similar imagery to deal with very similar issues, in a very similar order.  Here is a little snippet from the paper that I’m currently working on:

It would seem that for Paul, fundamental ethical godlessness or idolatry may be encapsulated both with the attitude of bold self-assertion (in terms of greed or passionate desire) and with the bodily practice of impurity/sexual immorality.  Thus the movement that can be described judicially by Paul as being from boastful works to divine justification; and which can be described relationally by Paul as being from heart-hardened enmity to reconciliation, can also be described ethically by Paul as being from passionate covetous impurity to surrendered loving incorporation.

 

The church comes to the Christ of the bodily resurrection, and, being bound to him by faith, crucifies sexual immorality, impurity and greed.  The members of the personal body are offered to God as risen instruments of righteousness, and each individual finds themself to be a member of Christ’s own body, in which mutual love reigns.