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.

[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!

Footnotes

• http://trevinwax.com/2011/02/10/islam-and-contextualization-a-conversation-with-collin-hansen-j-d-greear/
• http://www.edstetzer.com/2011/02/the-son-of-god-and-ministry-to.html
• http://www.jrdkirk.com/2011/02/08/translating-son-of-god/
• http://www.missionfrontiers.org/blog/post/bible-translations-for-muslim-readers

Reports

• http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/02/09/translating-%E2%80%9Cson-of-god%E2%80%9D-for-muslims/
• http://www.edstetzer.com/2011/02/scripture-translation-and-mini.html
• http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2011/02/09/translating-son-of-god-for-muslims/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+between2worlds+%28Between+Two+Worlds%29

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

Footnotes

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.

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)

Our species-specificity operates on a number of different levels, so also God’s specificity. Thus, it is best to think of the imago Dei not as something that reflects a singular aspect of the divine off a singular aspect of the human but as a prism refracting the various ways human beings, beginning with their gendered diversity, are capable of conveying the manifold character of God in the world.¹

photo credit: chris-dcx

Footnotes

The Bible, to be sure, could take up the fundamental notion of the universe as existing for the sake of worship, but at the same time it had to purify it. This idea is to be found there, as has already been said, in the context of the sabbath. The Bible declares that creation has its structure in the sabbath ordinace. But the sabbath is in its turn the summing up of Torah, the law of Israel. This means that worship has a moral aspect to it. God’s whole moral order has been taken up into it; only thus is it truly worship. To this must be added the fact that Torah, the law, is an expression of Israel’s history with God. It is an expression of the covenant, and the covenant is in turn an expression of God’s love, of his “yes” to the human being that he created, so that he could both love and receive love.¹

Footnotes

“…Hebrews’ protological language in relation to Christ is largely metonymic; that is, Hebrews associates Christ with the creation of the world because the telos of the world is fulfilled in Christ’s establishment of God’s rule on earth as it is in heaven.”¹

Interesting to reason from a figure of speech: Christ associated with end-goal of world (telos) therefore also with its beginning.

(Sorry for the wordy, pretentious title.)

photo credit: loswl

Footnotes