Parker Palmer quote on Soul Care

Posted on May 4, 2009 by PaulVK

A disciple asks the Rabbi, “What does Torah tell us to ‘place these words upon your hearts’?  What does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?”  The Rabbi answers, “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts.  So we place them on top of our hearts.  And there they stay until, one day the heart breaks and the words fall in.”
(from “The Politics of the Brokenhearted,” by Parker Palmer)

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Distinguishing Facebook and Twitter

Posted on May 4, 2009 by PaulVK

Facebook is a good vehicle for reconstructing your own historical network. As we go through time we develop a historical network through family, friends, geography and institutions. Facebook nicely allows you to reconstruct that network and participate with people you’ve lost contact with. Twitter, especially combined with the search capacities helps you to develop a network around common interests with people for whom there is no short historical route with which to connect. If you tweet enough on a subject and someone is trolling for things in the stream for things you’re tweeting it’s easy to follow and to then continue to construct your network. That network will of course grow as people begin to find each other and read their tweets.

The networking economy of Twitter is more fluid and pragmatic. There is a social cost to “de-friending” someone on Facebook because you likely have a historical connection this this person and that network. Twitter “followers” are much more about the signal to noise ratio of a person’s tweets. This means that you’re always refining, adjusting and likely improving your personal network for what you are trying to get out of it. Even the naming “followers” rather than “friends” makes it easier to stop following with less risk of stigma or embarrassment. The relationship likely hasn’t been “historified” in the way Facebook relationships are through pictures and other cultural artifacts.

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Possible Important Futures for Twitter

Posted on May 4, 2009 by PaulVK

Last week’s TWIT (This Week in Tech) had Jason Calacanis as a guest. He made two comments about Twitter that I thought were significant:

1. Twitter will likely continue to grow world-wide because it is hand-set friendly. In much of the 2/3rds world the cell phone is their PC. They are cheap, available, and universal. Cell phones leap frogged over land lines, and texting has leap frogged over e-mail. In countries where many of the poor use pre-pay cell phone service texting is used often instead of voice calls. Twitter easily fits into this world more easily than most other social networking sites. Social networking has only begun to grow in the developing world but early indications are that it will explode.

2. E-mail addresses have become “the name” for many, but with multiple accounts and spam this is declining. It could be that if twitter continues to grow at this pace then twitter user IDs will become “the name” for people, how they are identified. Twitter is already displacing e-mail for many because of its economical way of getting on the handset, and because the user is the gate keeper being more spam resistant than e-mail. Phone numbers change or get lost. Twitter IDs will increasingly be (he thinks, and he may be right) the communications surest tool of contact between friends.

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A response to the Biologos.org site

Posted on May 4, 2009 by PaulVK

I wrote this for CiC on a thread about Francis Collins and his new project http://biologos.org.

Francis Collins addresses the Veritas Forum recorded on YouTube.

I had found that site after an interesting Time Magazine article on Collins: http://digg.com/u12KMK

I took a look at the biologos site and was frankly disappointed.

Many of the approaches to the questions reveal an approach to Scripture reading that is rather scientistic. It’s hard to fault Collins and the group of evangelical scientists I assume he’s gathered around himself to look at these issues because neither they, nor perhaps their pastors, have approached language in any other way.

The Belgic confession talks about the “two books” but the approach to reading the two books matters because the manner in which the scientist finds helpful reading the one may not prove so helpful reading the other which really comes to us in a sense from other worlds with vastly different approaches to language, art, communication and worldviews than our own. All of this is to say, perhaps, that pastors, Biblical scholars, theologians, historians can’t comfortably delegate this project to believing scientists as perhaps we would like to because of the mine fields in many of the religious communities that may sustain our employment.

A couple more points.

I think it is important to recognize that this website is intended to be in the service of apologetics. Apologetics is a helpful project but seldom able to really carry all the weight that those who pursue it usually hope it well. Sometimes the best they can offer is a community with which to share questions to struggle over. Religious commitment tends to be a matter of the heart which is prior to the head most often.

The second point is that this will likely always be an ongoing project. Just like the poor, we will always have these kinds of projects with us. The church has always had them and I see no reason for that to end. I have lots of questions of these sorts in my mind. One of the things that I think the OT wisdom literature teaches is that part of the package of “The fear of the LORD” is gaining a sense of comfort with not having to know a lot of things. The book of Job is a brutal course in this. Job is never informed as to the wager in the heavenly court that devastated his life. The book doesn’t justify it, it just leaves it there. Something deep inside of us then joins Job throughout the book in his protest. “Would that God were available to me so that I could face him in court and demand an accounting of everything I’ve suffered!!!” When the shocking thing happens of God actually showing up, Job puts his hand over his mouth. That’s a pretty good word picture of “The fear of the LORD”.

The life of discipleship presupposes that “fear”. It is primarily about trust which is believing in the character of their Beloved rather than requiring the Beloved to offer a complete accounting (if that would be possible) as a pre-condition for the relationship. pvk

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Twitter Updates for 2009-05-04

Posted on May 4, 2009 by PaulVK

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Twitter Updates for 2009-05-02

Posted on May 2, 2009 by PaulVK

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NT Wright on Justification in Galatians 2

Posted on May 1, 2009 by PaulVK

I thought this was a superbly clear passage on delimiting the definition of justification in Paul in Galatians 2. Very helpful. Again from NT Wright’s Justification pages 116, 117.

BOQ

So something has happened to Peter—something so profound that he now has a new identity, which affects key behavior patterns and taboos about that very central human activity, sitting down to a meal. And it is on that “something,” that change of identity, that transfer from one family to another, and the new position which membership in the new family creates, that Paul now concentrates, broadening what he has said to Peter (and hence, in the context of the letter, what he has said about Peter) to a more general statement (Galatians 2:15-16) about all those who, though born Jewish, have become Christians.

“We are Jews by nature,” he writes, “and not ‘Gentile sinners’ (Galatians 2:15). That last phrase is a technical term: “lesser breeds,” as it were, “outside the law.” It represents, as do the boasts cataloged in Romans 2:17-20, what Paul knew to be a standard Jewish attitude, rooted of course in the Scriptures themselves. He is talking about ethnic identity, and about the practices that go with that. And he is about to show that in the gospel this ethnic identity is dismantled, so that a new identity may be constructed, in which the things that separated Jew from Gentile (as in Ephesians 2:14-16, on which see below) no longer matter. This, and only this, is the context in which we can read the famous and dense verse 2:16 with some hope of success.
Despite the fact that “we are Jews by nature [i.e., by birth], not ‘Gentile sinners,” “we nevertheless know,” he says, “that a person is not justified by works of the law.” Here it is: the first statement of the Christian doctrine of justification by faith. Or rather, the first statement of its negative pole, that one cannot be justified by works of “the law”—which, by the way, for Paul, always means “the Jewish Law, the Torah.”

Now: another thought experiment. Let us suppose we only had a fragment of this letter, consisting of 2:11-16a, and stopping right here, “not justified by works of the law.” What would we conclude about the meaning of “justified”? We might well know, from extraneous verbal evidence, that “justified” was a lawcourt term meaning “given the status of being ‘in the right.'” But Paul is not in a lawcourt, he is at a dinner table. The context of his talking about “not being justified by works of the law” is that he is confronted with the question of ethnic taboos about eating together across ethnic boundaries. The force of his statement is clear: “Yes, you are Jewish; but as a Christian Jew you ought not to be separating on ethnic lines.” Reading Paul strictly in his own context—as John Piper rightly insists we must always ultimately do—we are forced to conclude, at least in a preliminary way, that “to be justified” here does not mean “to be granted free forgiveness of your sins,” “to come into a right relation with God” or some other near- synonym of “to be reckoned ‘in the right’ before God,” but rather, and very specifically, “to be reckoned by God to be a true member of his family, and hence with the right to share table fellowship.” This does not clinch the argument for my reading of the whole doctrine. But the first signs are that, for Paul, “justification,” whatever else it included, always had in mind God’s declaration of membership, and that this always referred specifically to the coming together of Jews and Gentiles in faithful membership of the Christian family.

EOQ

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NT Wright Delimits Pauline Terms for Jesus/Christ

Posted on May 1, 2009 by PaulVK

I find there is great confusion among people regarding the terms used on the NT and what exactly they refer to. I’m sure many others have given a nice, compact summary of these terms but this is the first one I’ve run across. It should serve as a handy guide in helping people understand what Paul is talking about when he uses one term as opposed to another. This is from Justification pages 104, 105

BOQ

First, as to terms.

1. Paul uses the word Jesus to refer to Jesus himself, Jesus of Nazareth, the human being who lived in the Middle East, announced God’s sovereign and saving rule, died on a cross, and rose again three days later.

2. When he uses the word Christ he denotes, of course, the same human being, but connotes the Jewish notion of “Messiah.”

3. When he uses the phrase Son ofGod, he means both that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of David whom God had promised would be his (God’s) own Son (2 Samuel 7:14 and elsewhere), and that the human being Jesus is to be identified as the one who was, all along, at one with “the Father,” and has now been sent from him (Romans 8:3; Galatians 4:4).

4. When he uses the word Lord, he means
a. that Jesus, precisely as the Messiah, is now exalted over all things;
b. that Jesus has attained the position of sovereignty over creation marked out for human beings from the beginning, as in Genesis 1 and Psalm 8;
c. that Jesus is therefore the reality of which all earthly emperors are mere parodies;
d. and, strikingly, that he is to be understood in the role regularly marked out, in the Greek Old Testament, as kyrios, which renders the reverent Hebrew adonai, which stands of course for YHWH (e.g., 1 Corinthians 8:6; Romans 10:13).

This complex but utterly coherent usage, in which Paul is completely consistent throughout his writings, forms the platform for what is to come.

Second, the meaning of Messiahship. Paul uses Christos, designating Jesus as the Messiah, in the conscious belief that the Messiah is the one in whom two things in particular happen.

1. “The Messiah” is the one who draws Israel’s long history to its appointed goal (Romans 9:5; 10:4). The single-plan-through-Israel-for-the-world was designed (so Paul believed, with many precedents in the Old Testament and second-temple Judaism) to culminate in the Messiah, who would fight the victorious battle against the ultimate enemy, build the new temple, and inaugurate a worldwide rule of justice, peace and prosperity. Paul, of course, saw all of these as being redefined, granted that the Messiah was Jesus (of all people!); but none of them is lost.

2. “The Messiah” is therefore the one—this is clearest in Paul, but there are significant antecedents—in ‘whom God’s people are summed up, so that what is true of him is true of them. To belong to the people over whom David, or David’s son, was ruling was spoken of in the Old Testament as being “in David” or “in the son of Jesse” (2 Samuel 20:1; 1 Kings 12:16). Paul can therefore speak of Christians as “entering into the Messiah” through baptism and faith, as being “in him” as a result. He is the “seed of Abraham,” not simply as a single person but because he “contains,” as the goal of God’s Israel-plan, the whole people of God in himself. The same point can be made by saying that Christians “belong to the Messiah”: “If you are Messiah’s, you are Abraham’s family, heirs according to promise” (Galatians 3:29). This is the key that unlocks some of the most apparently stubborn and tricky bits of Paul, not least in Galatians 2-4.

Third, the accomplishment of the Messiah. Going back to (1) in the previous paragraph, the task of the Messiah, bringing to its appointed goal the single-plan-through-Israel-for-the-world, was to offer to God the “obedience” which Israel should have offered but did not. It is striking that, in Romans 5:19, one of the most climactic ways in which Paul speaks of the accomplishment of Jesus the Messiah is in terms of his “obedience.” This is picked up, famously, in Philippians 2:8: he was “obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.” But if Romans 5:19 thus looks back to the obedient death of Jesus, as Paul has referred to it in Romans 3:24-26, 4:25 and 5:6-11, he looks forward to exactly the same point with a closely correlated motif in Romans 3.

EOQ

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NT Wright quotes McGrath on Justification

Posted on May 1, 2009 by PaulVK

This is a really helpful section where Wright in Justification quotes from Alister McGrath in Institia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification from 1500 to the Present Day (Cambridge University Press 1986)

BOQ

I begin with some remarks of Alister McGrath, whose remarkable two-volume history of the doctrine is required reading for anyone who wants seriously to engage with it.’ Having proposed that the heart of the Christian faith is found in “the saving action of God toward mankind in Jesus Christ,” stressing that this larger saving activity, rather than a specific doctrine of justification, is the center of it all, he proceeds with some enormously important observations:

“The concept of justification and the doctrine of justification must be carefully distinguished. The concept of justification is one of many employed within the Old and New Testaments, particularly the Pauline corpus,to describe God’s saving action toward his people. It cannot lay claim to exhaust, nor adequately characterise in itself, the richness of the biblical understanding of salvation in Christ.”-2

This is already highly significant. McGrath is creating hermeneutical space in which one might say: there are many equally biblical ways of talking about how God saves people through Jesus Christ, and justification is but one of them. This (for instance) enables us at once to note that the four Gospels, where the term “justification” is scarce, are not for that reason to be treated as merely ancillary to, or perhaps preparatory for, the message of Paul—as has sometimes happened, at least de facto, in the Western church. But there is more:

“The doctrine of justification has come to develop a meaning quite independent of its biblical origins, and concerns the means by which man’s relationship to God is established. The church has chosen to subsume its discussion of the reconciliation of man to God under the aegis of justification, thereby giving the concept an emphasis quite absent from the New Testament. The “doctrine of justification” has come to bear a meaning within dogmatic theology which is quite independent of its Pauline origins.”3

EOQ

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NT Wright's "Justification" on Piper and God's Glory

Posted on May 1, 2009 by PaulVK

In his book Justification NT Wright responds to John Piper’s critique of Wright’s earlier work on Paul. The book has a wealth of useful and careful theological definition. These quotes from the book from 64, 65, 66, 67

BOQ

Then and subsequently he [Piper] has expounded a view of the righteousness of God which, he claims, goes deeper than covenant faithfulness, deeper also than the lawcourt implications. God’s righteousness, he claims, is God’s concern for God’s own glory…

First, there is a huge mass of scholarly literature on the meaning of God’s righteousness, and Piper simply ignores it. I am not aware of any other scholar, old perspective, new perspective, Catholic, Reformed, Evangelical, anyone, who thinks that tsedaqah elohim in Hebrew or dikaiosyne theou in Greek actually means “God’s concern for God’s own glory.” Rather, the widespread view is that tsedaqah/dikaiosyne in general (i.e., the Hebrew meaning, still reflected in biblical Greek as opposed to classical Greek where dikaiosyne means “justice”) refer to “conformity with a norm,” and when this is further contextualized as God’s “righteousness” the strong probability is that this refers to God’s fidelity to the norms he himself has set up, in other words, the covenant. Thus J. I. Packer: “The reason why these texts (Isaiah and the Psalms) call God’s vindication of his oppressed people his ‘righteousness’ is that it is an act of faithfulness to his covenant promise to them.”15 Of course, when God acts in faithfulness to his own promises, this results in his name, his honor and his reputation being magnified or glorified. Nobody would deny that. But nowhere is it clear that “God’s righteousness” actually denotes that glorification. Piper’s attempt to show that there must be a “righteousness” behind God’s “covenant faithfulness” is simply unconvincing. It begins to look as though Piper has simply not understood what covenant faithfulness means, and its enormous significance throughout Scripture. As many representatives of both old and new perspectives have said, following Ernst Kasemann who, though in some ways a classic Lutheran and therefore naturally an old perspective person, was too good an exegete not to notice many of the phenomena which then turned into the new perspective, God’s dikaiosyne is, not least, his faithfulness to, and his powerful commitment to rescue, creation itself. it always has in view God’s utter commitment to put things right. But, as we shall see presently, in Scripture, in second-temple Jewish literature, and in Paul himself, not least in Paul’s reading of Scripture, God’s way of putting the world right is precisely through his covenant with Israel. This is the theme that will emerge clearly in the exegesis in due course. God’s single plan to put the world to rights is his plan to do so through Israel…

Second, it is not at all clear how Piper’s idiosyncratic definition of “God’s righteousness” works out within the scheme of imputation that lies at the heart of his own reading. If “God’s righteousness” is “God’s concern for God’s own glory,” what does it mean to suggest that this is imputed to the believer? It could only mean “the believer’s concern for God’s own glory.” But concern for someone else’s glory is not the same as concern for one’s own. Here we meet, not for the last time, the confusion that arises inevitably when we try to think of the judge transferring, by imputation or any other way, his own attributes to the defendant. And, in any case, though it is true that Paul does see Abraham, for instance, as giving “glory to God” (Romans 4:20), there is nothing to say that this is what was meant by his having “righteousness” imputed to him. Indeed, Paul says in Romans 4:22 that this “giving glory to God,” along with faith, and trust in God’s promise, and full conviction of God’s power, was the reason why God “reckoned [it] to him as righteousness.” The two can then hardly be the same thing, though since Piper does not discuss Romans 4:20-22 in this book I cannot be sure.

In any case, Paul’s repeated quotation of Genesis 15 throughout Romans 4 indicates strongly what is going on. That chapter was where God established his covenant with Abraham. To be sure, this was for God’s own glory. But Abraham’s righteousness is his right standing within that covenant, and God’s righteousness is his unswerving commitment to be faithful to that covenant—including the promise (Romans 4:13) that Abraham would inherit the world. Here we have it: God’s single plan, through Abraham and his family, to bless the whole world. That is what I have meant by the word covenant when I have used it as shorthand in writing about Paul. My justification for using it is not that every time the idea is present Paul uses the word diatheke, the normal Greek for berith, “covenant,” because obviously he doesn’t. My justification is that this massive, many-sided and multiply explanatory narrative is rooted, by Paul himself, in classic covenantal passages such as Genesis 15, Deuteronomy 27-30 and Daniel 9.

EOQ

I like what Wright is doing here. The definitions of clear, and in fact traditional, and his view nicely keeps the overall Biblical covenantal narrative tight. The book obviously has way more stuff, but this will give you a taste.

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