Archive for Theology

D. A. Carson on ‘Jesus, the Son of God’

By | Published 05/15/2012

As I post I’m making dinner and listening to a lecture given by D. A. Carson at Westminster Seminary back in March. It’s titled “A Christological Title Often Overlooked, Sometimes Misconstrued, and Currently Disputed: Jesus, the Son of God.” You can download the mp3 and have a listen.

Unfortunately, Dr. Carson begins his talk by saying he won’t be discussing this christological title in connection with Bible translation as he just came from doing so. One always stands to benefit, however, from Carson’s careful exegesis and that’s what you’ll find in this lecture (I hope–still listening!).

HT: Credo blog

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Witherington on Familial Language in the NT

By | Published 04/30/2012

Ben Witherington III offers some clear and concise thoughts on familial and gender language in the NT in a recent article in the Biblical Archaeological Review Magazine. While the article cited is not extended or detailed enough to offer a convincing argument in favor of his thoughts, it is nonetheless interesting to read what Dr. Ben Witherington of Asbury Seminary has to say on these things. An excerpt or three:

God is not male, God in the divine essence does not have a gendered identity, and yet God is the Father of Jesus and by extension the Father of all his adopted children as well. How so?

Witherington answers his own question:

…the relationship between Jesus and the Father is one of direct kinship. Jesus and the Father are one…

This doesn’t mean that the Son was literally begotten by the Father, only that they had a unique, distinctive, even exclusive family relationship to one another. The language of Father and Son implies intimacy, deep kinship, sharing of a nature (in this case a divine nature) and the like. It is relational language, not gender language.
So what?
Thus the attempt to treat the “Father” language used of God as either a bad manifestation of a male-dominated patriarchal culture or a clue to the actual masculinity of God is wrong on both counts. It also ignores an important fact. The reason Jesus did not call God “Mother” is not just because God is never prayed to or directly addressed that way in the Bible, but also because Jesus had an actual human mother.

And a note on language:

When we see male or female nouns or pronouns, we assume they must imply or entail gender. This is false.

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The Son of God

By | Published 02/16/2012

We read in Romans 1:4 that Jesus is “declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead.” With the able help of N. T. Wright I want to explore the worlds of meaning of the phrase “Son of God” and then conclude this post with implications for missiology.

What does it mean to be “Son of God”?

N.T. Wright concludes his masterful tome The Resurrection of the Son of God with a section entitled “The Meanings of the Son of God” where he outlines the “world of meaning which was generated for the early Christians by the resurrection of Jesus.”1

I find it helpful to remember the three subtitles, or worlds of meaning, under which Wright works as (1) messiah, (2) master, (3) and Emmanuel.

1. Messiahship

“To claim the risen Jesus as ‘son of god’ in the sense of ‘Messiah’ was the most deeply Jewish thing the Christians could do, and hence the most deeply suspect in the eyes of those Jews who did not share their convictions.”2

“The first level of a ‘son of god’ understanding of Jesus’ resurrection can therefore be summarized as follows. Jesus is Israel’s Messiah. In him, the creator’s covenant plan, to deal with the sin and death that has so radically infected his world, has reached its long-awaited and decisive fulfilment.”3

2. World Lordship (or Master)

“We must not confuse derivation with confrontation. The roots of the title as it appears in the New Testament are the firmly Jewish ones noted in the previous sub-section. But there can be no question that the title would have been heard by many in the greco-roman world, from very early on, as a challenge to Caesar.”4

“Jesus [as] ‘son of god’ within this wider circle of meaning constituted a refusal to retreat, a determination to stop Christian discipleship turning into a private cult, a sect, a mystery religion. It launched a claim on the world… It grew from an essentially positive view of the world, of creation. It refused to relinquish the world to the principalities and powers, but claimed even them for allegiance to the Messiah who was now the lord, the kyrios.”5

“This, then, is the second level of meaning. The resurrection constitutes Jesus as the world’s true sovereign, the ‘son of god’ who claims absolute allegiance from everyone and everything within creation. He is the start of the creator’s new world: its pilot project, indeed its pilot.” 6

3. The Question of God (or Emmanuel)

“…early Christians [had] the breathtaking belief that Jesus was ‘son of god’, the unique ‘Son’ of this God as opposed to any other. They meant by this not simply that he was Israel’s Messiah, though that remained foundational; nor simply that he was the reality of which Caesar and all other such tyrants were the parodies, though that remained a vital implication. They meant it in the sense that he was the personal embodiment and revelation of the one true god.”7

“The third sense of ‘son of God’, then, does not leave the first two behind, but integrates them within a larger picture of who the one true God, Israel’s God, actually is.”8

Implications for Missiology

Wright’s threefold definition of Jesus as “Son of God” highlights the missiological consideration that within each culture that encounters the gospel announcement of Jesus as the Son of God there will without fail be aspects of that culture that run counter to at least one level of meaning of Jesus as “Son of God.” As a result, each culture must change in some way: my culture as much as your culture as much as that culture over there in a distant land. The gospel challenges inherited culture wherever it is found.

For cultures of Abrahamic background, Jesus as Son of God challenges established notions of who or what ultimately reveals God and in whom God’s promises come to a head. For cultures that deny sin, the Son of God as Messiah in his great act of redemption signals the reality of sin and God’s own offering of a remedy. For cultures that exalt autonomy of any sort, the lordship of Jesus as Son of God redraws the Creator-creation distinction. Jesus Christ is Lord. For cultures in which God is a stranger or for cultures that blur the Creator-creation distinction, the personal embodiment of the Son of God reveals God for who he actually is.

Thus, we see that no person and no culture is free from the all-encompassing person of Jesus as Son of God. Change as a result of encountering the gospel is not imperialism, it’s what it means for Jesus to be Son of God.

  1. N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God) (Augsburg Fortress Publishers. Kindle Edition), 734. ↩
  2. Ibid, 727 ↩
  3. Ibid, 728 ↩
  4. Ibid, 729 ↩
  5. Ibid, 729 ↩
  6. Ibid, 731 ↩
  7. Ibid, 731 ↩
  8. Ibid, 735 ↩
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How is Biblical Conquest Different from Jihad?

By | Published 08/17/2011

In his review of Miroslav Volf’s Allah: A Christian Response in the most recent issue of the journal Themelios, Imad Shehadeh (Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary, Amman, Jordan) perceives “a serious misunderstanding of God’s OT command to obliterate entire nations. It is very different than the qur’anic Jihad.”

How then is Biblical conquest different from jihad? Shehadeh notes five ways:

The biblical conquest is marked by the following:

  1. It is limited to one time, not all times.
  2. It is limited to one land, not all lands. It judges sin to fulfill prophecy, not to adhere to a religion.
  3. It shows God’s holiness, not his power. Its goal is to bless the whole earth, not subdue it. It is God fighting for his people, not the people fighting for God.
  4. It is according to God’s trustworthy nature, not according to a capricious nature.
  5. It prefigures God finally absorbing the deserved judgment and wrath on all nations in Christ’s death on the cross. Judgment deserved became judgment absorbed.
Are there other ways in which Biblical conquest differs from jihad?
Read the rest of Shehadeh’s review and also check out the rest of Themelios 36.2 for articles and book reviews.
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The Sacraments and Eschatology

By | Published 02/18/2011

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t always been able to think eschatologically. We’re led to believe that eschatology (the “end times”) has nothing to do with the present and it’s all a muddled debate about millennia and rapture and Apache helicopters. Tosh!

[D]on’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. (Romans 6:3-5)

Studying Matthew 14:13-21 (God feeds a lot of people1) and reading Romans 6 very slowly and repeatedly yesterday led me to think about the eschatological dimension of the sacraments2 more so than I had done before. The eschatology of the Lord’s Supper has always been, for me at least, readily apparent, but I just hadn’t really thought of baptism in this way before.

But the goal of baptism is eschatological: that we be united with Christ in his resurrection, not just his death. Read Romans 6:3-5 again, if you need to.

Concerning the eschatological dimension of the Lord’s Supper, it’s interesting to note verbal parallels in Matthew between the account of the feeding of the 5,000 and the Last Supper discourse (e.g., blessing and breaking bread). Also there’s an interesting book by one Geoffrey Wainwright which I would love to check out. It’s called Eucharist and Eschatology. Publisher’s description:

Pulling together themes from 20th-century theology, this text discusses how, from scripture, tradition and practice, the Lord’s Supper is shown to epitomize the Christian vision of the final ends for the individual, the Church, human society and the entire cosmos. At the same time however, at the beginning of the 21st century, just as in the past, people are posing major questions about existence. The debate is contained within.

Intriguing. Is it not true that “whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26)?

You know, now that I think about it, the phrase “eschatological dimension” seems a bit…

Oh well!

  1. Titling this section The Feeding of the 5,000 gives away climax of the story too easily when Matthew puts off to the last minute to tell us that “The number of those who ate was about five thousand men, besides women and children” (Mat 14:21). ↩
  2. I know some in Baptist circles aren’t comfortable referring to baptism and the Lord’s Supper as “sacraments.” I would ask, why not? ↩
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Translating “Son of God”

By | Published 02/11/2011

Commentary

Reports

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Putting the Gospels Back Together: How We’ve All Misread Our Central Story

By | Published 02/08/2011

There’s a guy named Sam Marsh who’s about to be your new best friend. Why? Well, he’s posted a download link for a recent lecture by Tom Wright that will absolutely be worth your time; I promise. Go over to Sam’s blog and download “Putting the Gospels Back Together: How We’ve All Misread Our Central Story” (MP3). Wright brings together some ideas that I’ve been pondering lately and would call “your gospel is too small.” Anyways, don’t fear the name N. T. Wright or the lecture’s jabbing title (“We’ve All Misread”). Just give it a listen.

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A Christological Reading of the Parable of the Hidden Treasure and the Pearl (Matthew 13:44-46)

By | Published 01/15/2011

The parables of the hidden treasure and the pearl found in Matthew 13:44-46 are assumed to be so easily understood that arguments in favor of a particular interpretation are rarely given. Jeff Gibbs in his commentary on Matthew in the Concordia series, however, challenges the “traditional discipleship reading” of these parables and argues persuasively for a Christological reading.

44 “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.45 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. 46 When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it. (NIV 2010)

While the traditional discipleship reading quickly equates the object of high value for which one sells everything (the hidden treasure and the pearl) with the kingdom of heaven for which a disciple must give up everything in order to enter, Gibbs’ Christological reading equates things differently: the object of high value is the disciples not the kingdom of heaven and the central figure is Jesus not the disciples. The message of these parables is then similar to the Christology famously hymned in the Philippians 2:6-7 kenosis passage so that “what Jesus is accomplishing in restoring God’s reign in Israel and the world is compared to the action of a man who, because he had found an object of great value, extravagantly sold all that he possessed in order to purchase that valued object and to make it his own. Jesus himself is the man.”1

In support of his Christological interpretation, Gibbs offers the following arguments:

  1. The kingdom of heaven (or the reign of heaven) is about what God is accomplishing in Christ. He’s the central figure.
  2. “Whenever a reign parable has a lone human figure acting in the symbolic narrative, that figure always represents (more generally) God or (specifically) Jesus, and when there are multiple characters…[the] central figure always represents God/Jesus.”2
  3. The refrain common to both parables highlights selling all or “whatever he had.”
  4. Nobody is able to give up anything in exchange for his life (cf. Matthew 16:26)
  5. Jesus alone is able to give something in exchange (cf. Matthew 20:28)
  6. The Old Testament theme of God’s people as segula, his treasure.
  7. The discipleship reading does not fit well with the previous parables in Matthew 13.

Gibbs concludes by providing the practical import of this Christological interpretation for Jesus’ disciples: “Though we disciples may often feel buried under the challenges and dangers presented by our own sinful flesh, by the hostile world around us, and by the great enemy and father of lies, there need be no doubt that we belong to Jesus. We have been acquired. Christ has purchased us at the price of everything that he had. In the breathtaking reckoning of grace, we are as a treasure to him. Secure in that confidence, we can continue to follow him.”3

  1. Jeffrey A. Gibbs, Matthew 11:2-20:24, Concordia Commentary (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 2010), 720. ↩
  2. Gibbs, Matthew, 716. ↩
  3. Gibbs, Matthew, 721. ↩
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

By | Published 07/07/2010

This is one of those films that I end up watching because of its popularity and then after watching, I’m unsure how to proceed having seen it. Do you talk about a Not Rated film with Christian friends and unavoidably stir up their interest in a movie the content of which you want to distance yourself from?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is graphic to be sure. (When I mentioned the title to my wife, she asked if it was a porno! No, it’s not.) The basic story is that of a journalist who in the months before he has to fulfill a prison sentence is hired by a ritzy tycoon to track down his long disappeared neice. The journalist gets help from a mentally-troubled goth computer hacker who plays host to an enormous dragon tattoo on her back, which you wouldn’t see except for a sex scene. Overall, the film even at 2:26 is an absolute thriller of a mystery that will easily end up being the shortest longest film you’ve seen, if you decide to see it.

I read this week that the most important philosophical question to ask when watching a movie, according to the author of a new book called Meaning at the Movies, is

What is the overall view of the nature of man presented by the film as seen by a reasonably perceptive viewer? This can largely be determined by considering plot, characterization, and the tone or mood of the film.

Reasonably perceptive, eh? Well, it doesn’t take much to gather that the view of man in this movie is total depravity. You could even take total depravity in the oft misunderstood sense of “as evil as can be” and still be on target. But this is the view of men in the film. Women are almost exclusively portrayed as the helpless victims of horendous abuses while the girl with the dragon tattoo is the defiant female taking charge. In fact, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is only the name of the novel/film in English. The original Swedish title is Man som hatar kvinnor (“Men Who Hate Women”). The film indeed highlights misogyny at its worst.

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Doctrinal Frameworks

By | Published 07/01/2010

Far from regulating biblical interpretation arbitrarily, doctrinal frameworks challenge new generations to recognize their own cultural assumptions and to revise them in light of how the church has understood Scripture as a whole.

Daniel J. Treier in Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture (p. 77)

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