A Thinking Reed

Category: Bible

  • God of Israel and Christian Theology: Wrap up

    Soulen is, in my view, largely persuasive in recasting of the scriptual meta-narrative as one of blessing and consummation, wherein sin and redemption plays a subordinate, though still important, role. Further, I think he’s right to avoid a certain kind of “Christocentric” reading of the Bible. If the churches are serious about overcoming supersessionism, then something like Soulen’s project seems to be necessary. He has demonstrated, to my satisfaction, that supersessionism isn’t simply an appendage that can easily be lopped off the main body of Christian tradition, but is more like a structural flaw in the foundation of the mainstream theological tradition. Of course, I’d already been largely convinced of that by Clark Williamson and Rosemary Radford Ruether. Soulen’s perspective also seems consistent with other recent trends in theology that have tried to emphasize God’s work as consummator of all creation and only secondarily God’s redemptive work. (I’m thinking of eco-theologies and some feminist theology.)

    Supersessionist readings of the Bible are deeply entrenched in the church, though, even among those who consciously reject supersessionism. It will take a good bit of detailed exegetical work, I think, to flesh this alternative narrative out and make it compelling. For instance, it requires a virtual paradigm shift in how churches have historically, and in many cases still do, read Paul on the relationship between Jews and Gentiles. (Although, if I’m not mistaken, some of themes of the “new perspective” on Paul seem like they might provide support to this kind of project.)

    More challengingly, perhaps, I wonder whether Soulen’s proposed reading of the canon is consistent with the church’s christological and trinitarian dogmas, at least as those have been classicly expressed. Does the canonical narrative as Soulen has presented it demand a “high” Christology in the way that the traditional sin-redemption schema seemed to? I gather that this may be addressed in his new book, but I think it presents a potentially thorny issue for any Christian theology that seeks to be “post-supersessionist.” In what sense is Jesus unique and uniquely indispensable to God’s economy of blessing? Can Christians affirm Jesus’ unique role in God’s plan of consummation-salvation without, implicitly at least, courting supersessionism and exclusivism?

    This brings me to another point. I wonder if the theme of mutual blessing-in-difference is portrayed too one-sidedly here? Although Soulen emphasizes that the blessing between Israel and the nations is mutual, his narrative assigns the Gentiles to a distinctly secondary role, religiously speaking. They seem to be little more than second-hand beneficiaries of God’s revelation to and covenant with Israel. But if God really creates for mutual blessing, might gentile religious wisdom not also contribute to the faith of Israel? In fact, historically we know that wisdom from Greek and other cultures was assimilated into biblical religion. This opens the possibility of a greater appreciation of broader religious pluralism. (I’m thinking along the lines proposed by Marjorie Suchocki.) An appreciation of pluralism need not entail a naively “universalist” standpoint but can be rooted in an affirmation of particularity.

    As far as church practice goes, it’s hard to imagine what a church that was open to Jews as Jews would look like in the 21st century. Even granting that most Jews will continue to decline the Christian invitation to join the church, how would church life be affected if we took seriously Soulen’s contention that Jews could (should?) continue to observe the tenets of Judaism as members of the church? There are “messianic” Jews who to do this, but this seems like something that would make most mainline churches deeply uncomfortable. And should churches require continued Torah-observance of prospective Jewish members or simply permit it? What would that look like? How might such a “mixed” congregation be reflected in worship? The concept of a truly mixed Gentile-Jewish congregation raises a host of interesting and potentially difficult issues, I think.

    All that notwithstanding, Soulen has written a fascinating and important book. Hopefully more Christians will start to grapple with these issues.

    Previous posts:

    Redemption for the sake of blessing

    Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

    Supersessionism and the flight from history

    Blessing and difference

    The story so far

    Jesus and the gospel of God’s coming reign

    “There is neither Jew nor Greek…”

  • “There is neither Jew nor Greek…”

    Soulen’s interpretation of the gospel within the entire canonical framework allows him to characterize the life of Christian discipleship as cruciform–without negating the OT’s very this-worldly promises of blessing. “Jesus…frees his disciples to live in such a way that the blessing of others knows no bounds” (p. 167). This is consistent with the divine economy of blessing-in-difference, but in a world afflicted by sin, this lifestyle will inevitably invite suffering.

    Following Bonhoeffer, Soulen argues that the Christian doesn’t court suffering for its own sake. Rather, suffering is endured for the sake of the economy of mutual blessing. “The cross does not supersede the economy of mutual blessing; it establishes the outermost point of God’s fidelity to it on behalf of the estranged other” (p. 168). This is a healthy corrective to the sometimes morbid fixation on suffering as somehow meritorious in itself that characterizes some strains of Christian spirituality. God wants to deliver God’s creation from suffering, sickness, hatred, estrangement, and death. Moreover, Soulen says, the cross is not about “the denial or destruction of Israel’s national privilege” but is the means by which “God preserves the economy of mutual blessing through suffering love, to which Jew and Greek alike are called to be conformed” (p. 168).

    Following this, Soulen turns to the nature of the Christian community. The church is “the table fellowship of Jews and Gentiles that prays in Jesus’ name for the coming of the God of Israel’s reign” (p. 169). Soulen goes on to argue that the fellowship of the church “confirms rather than annuls the difference and mutual dependence of Israel and the nations” (p. 168). Rather than seeing itself as a “spiritual” fellowship that transcends “carnal” differences such as that between Jew and Gentile, the church should be “a table fellowship of those who are–and remain–different” (p. 168). He maintains that the distinction between Jew and Gentile is not erased, but realized in a new way, in the church. “What the church rejects is not the difference of Jew and Gentile, male and female, but rather the idea that these differences essentially entail curse, opposition, and antithesis” (p. 170). The church is the “social embodiment of the doctrine of justification”–the reconciliation between peoples. He notes that this view of the church is underwritten by the decision at the so-called Council of Jerusalem recorded in the Book of Acts. It was decided that gentile Christians were not bound to observe Torah, but that Jewish followers of Jesus would continue to observe it. “Hence obedience to Jesus is possible from either of two vantage points” (pp. 170-171).

    Further, the church must be mindful of its status as a provisional fellowship that anticipates God’s reign–it is not that reign itself. This is exhibited in part by the empirical fact that the church is overwhelmingly Gentile and that most Jews have declined the invitation to become part of the church’s fellowship. The church must simultaneously remember that it is a fellowship open to Jews and Gentile but also that gentile Christians do not have a mission to convert non-Christian Jews. This is a fine line to walk, but the church shouldn’t seek simplistic solutions as it lives in between the times.

    Finally, Soulen argues that Christians have no warrant for thinking that Jews will convert en masse to Christianity in some sort of end-times scenario, as is sometimes imagined. Citing Paul’s discussion of Israel’s destiny in Romans, he says that only a “trans-ecclesiological” free action of God will determine the final status of each person. The fate of the Jews is not mediated by the Church, but is rooted in God’s irrevocable promises.

    Summarizing, Soulen writes

    The unity of the Christian canon is not best unlocked by insisting that everything in the Bible points toward Jesus Christ. Such a construal of the canon’s unity systematically disregards Bonhoeffer’s admonition not to speak that last word before the last but one. What results practically is a Christian theology that is triumphalist in its posture toward Jews and latently gnostic in its grasp of God’s purposes for the earth and its history. More helpful for discerning the unity of the canon is the recognition that the Scriptures [OT] and the Apostolic Witness [NT] are both centrally concerned with the God of Israel and the God of Israel’s coming reign of shalom. (p. 175)

    I’ll save my own thoughts and questions for a subsequent post.

    Previous posts:

    Redemption for the sake of blessing

    Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

    Supersessionism and the flight from history

    Blessing and difference

    The story so far

    Jesus and the gospel of God’s coming reign

  • Jesus and the gospel of God’s coming reign

    I’ve been sick for the past week or so, which hasn’t left much extra energy for blogging. But I want to get back to (and hopefully wrap up!) my series on R. Kendall Soulen’s The God of Israel and Christian Theology.

    Previously, we’ve seen that Soulen tries to re-cast the biblical narrative as one of blessing-within-difference. In creation and in the covenant with Israel, God’s will for creation is a differentiation of existence which leads to mutual blessing precisely through that difference.

    So how does the gospel about Jesus fit in to all this? Soulen notes that the gospel is meant to be news–good news–but news about what? His answer: it tells us something about God’s coming reign. “News about God’s coming reign is good or bad depending on the outcome of God’s work as the Consummator of creation (p. 157).” The fact of evil suggests that this outcome is not assured–that God’s intentions for creation could be severely hampered, or even undone altogether. Will the outcome be one of blessing or one of curse? Or perhaps blessing for some and curse for others?

    The good news then is God’s “present answer to the eschatological question of whether God’s work as Consummator will prove ultimately victorious on behalf of all creation over the powers that destroy (p. 158).” Faith in the gospel of Jesus is ultimately faith in “the ultimate victory of blessing over curse,” a faith that is manifested in “cruciform discipleship” (p. 158).

    In his life and ministry, Jesus bears witness to a certain understanding of what God’s coming reign will look like. He “trusted God’s reign to consummate the economy of mutual blessing that God had initiated long ago through God’s promises to Abraham and Sarah” (p. 160) but also that this consummation would include the nations. Secondly, he trusted that God’s reign would consummate creation “in a manner that reclaimed, redeemed, and restored the lost” (p. 161). In short, God’s reign will be marked by reconciliation for mutual blessing, not a zero-sum victory of one group over another. Jesus’ displays a trust in the ultimate victory of mutual blessing, even in the face of the forces of “curse, violence, and enmity” (p. 162). Hence his commands to bless and pray for one’s enemies, which give a cruciform shape to the life of discipleship.

    In following this path ultimately to the cross, Jesus “became wholly identified with the lost whose cause he advocated,” but in the resurrection, God “vindicates the economy of mutual blessing over against all the destructive powers of sin, curse, separation, and death” (p. 164). This throws a new light on the cross, which we can now see as his point of “utmost solidarity with the lost” for the sake of “the whole house of Israel and for the whole earthly economy of difference and mutual dependence” (p. 164). The resurrection appearances are marked by reconciliation, feasting, and sending, and the risen Christ becomes a source of “power among the living until the day of the Lord’s return (p. 165).”

    So, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God has provided a “victorious guarantee” of God’s “end-time fidelity to the work of consummation.”

    The gospel proclaims Jesus as victorious because through the resurrection God vindicates Jesus’ trust in the triumph of blessing over curse, life over death, communion over isolation. At the same time, the gospel proclaims Jesus as guarantee because while everything about Jesus pertains to God’s eschatological reign, Jesus himself is not that reign in its fullness. (p. 165)

    Jesus, then, is a foretaste, a prolepsis, of God’s coming reign. He is the down payment or promissory note that shows that the end will indeed be one of blessing, not curse. He is the sign that God’s program of universal blessing through the calling of Israel will be a reality:

    If Jesus is the proleptic enactment of God’s eschatological fidelity to the work of consummation, then Jesus is by this very fact the carnal embodiment of God’s end-time fidelity toward Israel and toward Israel’s future as the place of unsurpassable blessing for Israel, for the nations, and for all creation. By its very nature, then, Jesus’ resurrection from the dead anticipates a future event whose character as victorious fidelity can no longer be in doubt. That event is God’s intervention on behalf of all Israel in keeping with God’s promises, such that God’s final act of covenant faithfulness toward Israel redounds not only to the blessing of Israel but also to the blessing of the nations and all of creation. (p. 166)

    In the next post I’ll look at some of the implications Soulen draws from this for the life of discipleship and the shape of the church.

    Previous posts:

    Redemption for the sake of blessing

    Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

    Supersessionism and the flight from history

    Blessing and difference

    The story so far

  • The story so far…

    In the eighth and final chapter of The God of Israel and Christian Theology, R. Kendall Soulen provides a helpful summary of the argument thus far, which I’m going to quote at length:

    The gospel is the story of the God of Israel’s victory in Jesus over powers that destroy. Just so, God’s victory in Jesus is the center but not the totality of Christian faith. Faith in the gospel presupposes the God of Israel’s antecedent purpose for creation, a purpose threatened by destructive powers but vindicated by God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

    Christians have almost universally assented to the truth of the previous paragraph. But, as we saw in Part One, they have commonly accounted for its truth by means of a construal of the Bible’s narrative unity that–paradoxically enough–renders God’s identity as the God of Israel and the center of the Hebrew Scriptures almost wholly indecisive for grasping God’s antecedent purpose for human creation. As an alternative to the standard construal, I have sketched in the previous chapters one way in which God’s identity as the God of Israel becomes decisive for grasping God’s antecedent purpose for creation. I have argued that God’s work as the Consummator of creation promises life and the fullness of life to creation and to the human family in and through earthly economies of difference and mutual dependence. In the context of God’s six-days’ blessing, God’s economy is embodied in the distinction and mutual relation of the natural world and the human family, of female and male, of parent and child, of one generation and the next. In the context of God’s crowning Sabbath blessing, God’s economy is irrevocably embodied in the carnal election of the Jewish people and in the consequent distinction between Jew and Gentile, between Israel and the nations. Furthermore, I have argued that God’s work as Consummator is oriented from the outset toward God’s eschatological shalom, where God intends to fulfill the economies of difference and reciprocity…in unsurpassable fashion to the mutual blessing of all in a reign of wholeness, righteousness, and peace. (pp. 156-7)

    In the next post I’ll look at how Soulen thinks the story of Jesus fits into this.

    Previous posts:

    Redemption for the sake of blessing

    Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

    Supersessionism and the flight from history

    Blessing and difference

  • Redemption for the sake of blessing

    If the great theme of the Bible is one of blessing, it can’t be denied that sin, or curse, and redemption is an important sub-theme. The God who is Consummator is also Redeemer and Deliverer. So how should this theme fit into the canonical narrative that Soulen is proposing as an alternative to the traditional one?

    Soulen notes that

    the primeval history (Gen 1-11) knows nothing of a single catastrophic fall that introduces a major turning point into the biblical story. On the contrary…the central theme of the primeval history and of Genesis as a whole is the continuity, resilience, and growth of God’s work as the Consummator of creation. Nevertheless, the creation sagas are nothing if not utterly unsentimental about the seriousness of human sin and dreadful weight of the divine curse. The creation sagas trace the human family’s readiness to receive God’s blessing through a series of social pairs: male and female (Gen 2-3), brother and brother (Gen 4), comrade and comrade (Gen 11). In each case, the result is distressingly negative. (p. 142)

    Seen in this light, Soulen understands sin to be the refusal to receive God’s blessing as mediated through the other. This can refer to the divine Other, as in Adam and Eve’s failure to trust God as the source of their fullness, or it can refer to the human other, as in Cain’s refusal to accept blessing through his brother Abel. Instead of receiving God’s blessing “through economies of difference and mutual dependence” (p. 143), we try to secure our own blessing on our own terms. “Sin assaults the link that joins blessing and otherness. Sin seeks blessing apart from its source in the divine Other and apart from life with the human other” (p. 144).

    When humanity rejects the divinely ordained economy of mutual dependence, it invites the divine curse. In the story of the Exodus we learn of Egypt’s rejection of the mutually beneficial relationship it had established with the family of Jacob, turning instead to exploitation. In turn, God’s curse falls upon the Egyptians and God delivers the people that would become Israel. But lest this seem to be just national egoism on Israel’s part, the Scriptures speak just as if not more often of God’s judgment on Israel. “Like the nations, Israel is prone to forget that God’s covenant is the only trustworthy source of benediction for Israel and for creation” (p. 146).

    As we saw with blessing, redemption is ultimately oriented to the advent of God’s eschatological shalom. Both persecution by the nations and Israel’s own sin “threat[en] God’s intentions to bring Israel to final consummation” (p. 147). The Scriptures are ambivalent about whether this means simply judgment of the nations and vindication for Israel, or whether it means a restoration and final fulfillment of the economy of mutual blessing God always intended. This is a question Soulen returns to when considering the meaning of Jesus in the next chapter.

    For the time being, the key point is that redemption or deliverance is for the sake of consummation. In the Pentateuch, the story of deliverance is framed by stories of God’s blessing (in Genesis and Deuteronomy). There are hints in the Exodus story itself that Israel will be blessed in the company of the nations (Moses delivered by Pharaoh’s daughter and raised in Pharaoh’s house, Moses’ marriage into a gentile household, and the “mixed crowd” that escapes Egypt with the Hebrews). The institution of the Jubilee is another instance of redemption (forgiveness of debts) for the sake of blessing (a restored relationship with land and community), and the Scriptures’ eschatological hope is not just for deliverance from evil, but for the positive blessings of life and wholeness.

    [L]iberation from the powers that destroy is a matter of utmost urgency precisely because these powers threaten to cut off the human family from the arena in which God’s blessings are bestowed. The antithesis of sin and redemption is misunderstood if it is torn from its context in God’s work as Consummator and from the economies of mutual blessing that God establishes and sustains. (p. 52)

    It should be clear at this point that from this perspective redemption does not mean erasing the distinction between Jew and Gentile, as the church has maintained for most of its history. Rather it means forging a new community in which Jew and Gentile exist in a relationship of mutual blessing without ceasing to be Jew and Gentile.

    Previous posts:

    Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    Supersessionism and the “deep grammar” of Christian theology

    Supersessionism and the flight from history

    Blessing and difference

  • Reading the Bible after supersessionism

    I’ve started reading R. Kendall Soulen’s The God of Israel and Christian Theology, which is an attempt to rethink the foundational narrative of Christianity within a “post-supersessionist” context. Christian theology has traditionally held that the church replaces Israel in God’s covenant. However, the realization, post-Holocaust, of how Christian theology has contributed to anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jews has led many Christian churches to renounce any supersessionist claims. While this is an important step, Soulen argues that simply renouncing supersessionism isn’t enough–we need to attend to the “deep grammar” in the traditional Christian story that makes supersessionism not only possible, but virtually inevitable.

    Soulen introduces the concept of a “canonical narrative” or “canonical construal” of scripture–the overarching story of how the diverse collection of texts that constitute the Bible “hangs together.” In particular, this narrative construal allows us to see how the Old and New Testaments (or, as Soulen sometimes refers to them, the Scriptures and the Apostolic Witness) constitute one canon. This provides a prism for reading the texts as a story about God’s relation to the world.

    In Soulen’s view, the traditional Christian narrative construal is one of “creation-for-consummation, fall, redemption in Christ, and final consummation” (p. 16). God creates humanity with intention of ultimately consummating human existence with eternal life. Tragically, because of the fall into sin, this project of consummation is derailed, and God must resort to “plan B.” This, of course, is the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity in Jesus Christ and his life, death, and resurrection. This redemptive act restores humanity and allows God’s plans for consummation to proceed.

    The problem with the standard view, from a post-supersessionist perspective, is that it views the role of Israel as temporary and inessential to God’s greater purposes. Or as Soulen puts it “it makes God’s identity as the God of Israel largely indecisive for shaping theological conclusions about God’s enduring purposes for creation” (p. 16). It allows God’s acts of salvation to be seen as individualistic and ahistorical–as dealing with the “universal” problem of sin rather than as part of the story of God binding Godself to one particular people. This is why the church has typically erased any religiously significant distinction between Jew and Gentile.

    What’s needed, Soulen argues, is a new narrative construal that sees the election of Israel of lasting significance. For such a construal to be faithful to the Christian gospel it must maintain the core evangelical conviction that the God of Israel has acted in Jesus Christ for all, to use Soulen’s summary. But it must do so without treating the election of Israel as a temporary detour in salvation history.

  • Is “Christocentrism” the proper alternative to “biblicism”?

    I’m against “biblicism” if by that we mean treating each and every passage of the Bible as equally inspired and authoritative. However, I’m not sure a “Christocentric” reading is a viable alternative if it means this:

    The Bible is about Jesus Christ, and the only way to read the Bible is read it from beginning to end to be about Jesus, and to read each passage as about Jesus Christ and to be unlocked only through the gospel about Jesus Christ.

    Two thoughts here. First, on a plain reading, every passage in the Bible just isn’t about Jesus, and trying to read it as if they were will probably result in bad readings. Second, such an approach seems to me to risk shortchanging the integrity of the Old Testament witness, ultimately re-inscribing a form of supersessionism.

    Now, perhaps there’s a way of re-stating this that avoids these problems. Jesus is, so Christians believe, the incarnate Word or Wisdom of God. So in that sense, it may be true to say that the Bible as a whole is about Christ–because the Bible is ultimately about God. Although, even this has to be qualified because I don’t think we can say that each and every passage in the Bible reflects the Wisdom of God. Some passages attribute qualities or actions to God that are unworthy of God as we have come to know him through the biblical witness.

    I would say that our Bible reading should be Christocentric in this sense: we believe that Jesus is the clearest expression of the nature and character of God. That means that this revelation should be the controlling image for how we read the Bible. When we come across a passage that seems to conflict with the divine nature as it has been disclosed in Jesus, we have to ask whether it is really a revelation of God, or a human projection. This is hardly a straightforward task, but some kind of “canon within a canon” does seem necessary if we’re going to avoid “flat” theories of biblical authority and inspiration (which I don’t think anyone consistently sticks to in practice anyway).

    This might seem like splitting hairs, but the difference is that this kind of “Christocentric” view would allow the biblical witness to speak in all its plurality, without trying to harmonize seemingly inconsistent passages by asserting that they’re “really” about Jesus. And yet Jesus remains the controlling image or icon of God for Christians–even while we recognize that the same Wisdom that was incarnate in Jesus was present to ancient Israel (and continues to be present in other traditions, including contemporary Judaism).

  • Making all things new

    During my vacation I finished Craig Hill’s In God’s Time and wanted to offer some concluding thoughts on it. (See previous posts here and here.)

    Hill, wisely in my view, declines to meet the popular “end times” view of conservative dispensationalism on its own turf by countering one proof-text with another. He recognizes that different views of eschatology arise from fundamentally different approaches to the Bible. He names these the “deductive” and “inductive” approaches.

    A deductive approach takes it as axiomatic that the Bible is the perfect, inerrant word of God and therefore it provides an internally consistent and true map of the end times. Thus books that may at first blush seem inconsistent (e.g., the gospels, Paul’s letters, and Revelation) are “harmonized,” often in what seem to outsiders as outlandishly complicated or implausible ways. Nothing is allowed to count as counter-evidence to the Bible’s perfect, factual accuracy and consistency.

    By contrast, an inductive approach takes the Bible to be a collection of witnesses to God’s self-revelation, but ones that offer complementary–and not always consistent–perspectives on that revelation. The inductive approach begins with the particularity of the varied biblical witnesses and tries to arrive at some general truths. For this view, Jesus Christ always stands “behind” scripture as the ultimate norm, albeit one that we only have access to through the biblical witnesses.

    Hill also offers to ways of thinking about how the Bible functions in the life of the believing community. We can think of the Bible as something we must conform to, or we can think of it as something that models the life of faith for us, providing “archetypes of Christian thinking and living” (p. 27).

    Recognizing this fundamental division, and taking his stand with an inductive, modeling approach to the Bible, Hill is free to look at the eschatological and apocalyptic texts in the Bible (as well as extra-canonical sources) in all their bewildering diversity. For instance, he points out that the extra-canonical Jewish text I Enoch shares many specific themes with Revelation, and may even have influenced it. In fact, one significant outcome of Hill’s survey is to show how close Jewish and early Christian thinking about the end was. The common assumption that Jesus presented a way of being the Messiah that broke starkly with Jewish messianic expectations overlooks the rich diversity of 1st-century Jewish apocalyptic thought.

    Hill also offers close readings of Daniel and Revelation itself, as well as a survey of Paul’s thought on eschatology, and a succinct, but convincing, rebuttal to historical Jesus scholars (e.g., the Jesus Seminar) who seek to “de-eschatologize” Jesus.

    The upshot is that these visions of God’s ultimate victory are both rooted in a specific historical context (a hostile Roman Empire in the case of Revelation) and also convey profound theological truths that have application beyond that context. Hill thus seeks to avoid the extremes of viewing the text as only of historical interest or as something that is speaking exclusively about some future time (usually the interpreter’s own).

    This plurality of images can play itself in a variety of ways within Christian thought; Hill notes particularly the tension between future and realized eschatologies in the New Testament, and the theologies, forms of church, and social ethics that tend to go with them. He sees this division working itself out within Paul’s thinking–which oscillates between a theology of the cross that sees Christian life as one of patient suffering while holding to a future expectation of fulfillment and a theology of glory (my term, not Hill’s) that is more optimistic about the possibilities for transformed human life here and now.

    Hill concludes that the Bible “provides us with numerous models of hopeful expectation,” which should caution us “against holding too-certain ideas about what lies ahead” (p. 197).

    At its core, eschatology is about the character of God. If God can be trusted, then the future can be trusted with God. (p. 197)

    While we should sit loose to the details of what God’s ultimate victory will look like, our vocation is clear: it’s “insofar as possible, to bring the eschatological future into the present” (p. 197). This is the polar opposite of the attitude (in)famously displayed by Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the interior James Watt, who said that there was no point in protecting the environment or conserving nature since Jesus was coming back soon anyway. On the contrary, says Hill: it’s precisely the eschatological message and mission of Jesus that provide the urgency to the call to discipleship. Because God is “making all things new,” we are called to live into that new future.

  • Friday Links

    –Marvin on the Presbyterian Church’s decision to allow congregations to call non-celibate gay and lesbian pastors.

    –Libraries are part of the social safety net.

    –“I hated vegans too, but now I am one.”

    –On anti-Semites and philo-Semites.

    –Mark Bittman asks, “Why bother with meat?”

    –Jesus and eco-theology.

    –Jeremy discusses Herbert McCabe and Gerhard Forde on the Atonement.

    –Your commute is killing you.

    –Rowan Williams’ Ascension Day sermon: “The friends of Jesus are called … to offer themselves as signs of God in the world.”

    –Grist’s “great places” series continues with two posts on the industrial food system and its alternatives.

    –Keith Ward on his recent book More than Matter?

    –Russell Arben Fox on the Left in America.

    –The Cheers challenge. My wife and I have already been rewatching the entire series. We’re on season 6 now, which replaces Shelley Long’s Diane with Kirstie Alley’s Rebecca. It’s one of my all-time favorite shows, although the earlier seasons are probably the best ones.

    –Ozzy’s first two solo albums, which are generally considered classics, have gotten the deluxe reissue treatment. Here’s a review.

  • Keith Ward on the sacrifice of Jesus

    In his book What the Bible Really Teaches, Keith Ward spends a chapter on “the sacrifice of Jesus.” He wants to contest the popular view that Jesus had to die as a kind of blood sacrifice to appease or deflect God’s wrath–a view, Ward argues, that’s at odds with the biblical view of what sacrifice is.

    According to Ward, sacrifices in the Old Testament are not inherently efficacious. That is, there’s nothing inherent in shedding animal blood or sending a goat into the wilderness that compels God to act or be disposed toward us in a particular way. To think this is to confuse religion with magic, and to adhere to a view of sacrifice that the Bible condemns as idolatry.

    Instead, says Ward, the sacrificial rituals of the OT are divinely established means for renewing fellowship and communion between God and human beings. They “work” because–and only because–they are appointed by God for this purpose. The value of these sacrifices consists in our symbolic identification with what is sacrificed as a form of whole-hearted self-offering to God. The forms these take are, in a sense, irrelevant. Hence the prophets’ condemnation of punctilious observation of the ritual law when it is not animated by the spirit of justice and compassion.

    These include sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving, as well as atonement for sin–and the latter are mainly concerned with unintentional infractions of the ritual law. There is no suggestion, Ward argues, of an atonement-sacrifice that can cancel out intentional sin. “Biblical sacrifices for sin do not pay the punishment due to sin, nor do they remove such a punishment” (p. 122).

    If this is true, then how should we think about Jesus’ sacrifice? In line with the biblical view of sacrifice, Ward says, Jesus’ sacrifice should be understood as his total self-offering to God, a self-offering that is the divinely appointed means for uniting humanity to the divine life:

    What Jesus offers [in his sacrifice] is not an animal-substitute, but himself. He expresses the heart of true sacrifice, the total offering of a life to God. This does not in itself entail that Jesus should die. But Jesus was prepared to face death as the price of his obedience to the divine will in a world that had turned from God. The death of the cross is the final, most complete expression of Jesus’ self-offering to God. It is not that the shedding of blood was necessary before humans could be united to God. That would be to revert to a magical transaction view of sacrifice. It is rather that his whole life, and his loyalty to his vocation even to death, was a full offering of humanity to God, so that God could unite humanity to the divine completely in him. (p. 124)

    But Jesus was more than a martyr, and his life was more than a perfect act of self-offering to God. His obedience “has a double significance”:

    It exposes the hostility of the “world” (the world which rejects God) to God. And it expresses the sharing by God of the suffering of that estranged world. Because the world rejects God, it rejects Jesus, the incarnation of God. The cross represents what the world does to God. Jesus, in freely accepting obedience to God’s will, becomes the expression of God’s suffering, accepted at the hands of disobedient humanity. Jesus’ obedience draws upon himself the disobedience of estranged humanity. In this sense, God does require that Jesus dies–but only because God knows that a complete obedience, in a disobedient world, will inevitably lead to rejection and death. (pp. 124-5)

    Ward continues,

    the death of Jesus is not the placation of an angry God. It is the opposite. It is the expression of the unrestricted love of God. It is the full expression of human obedience to the divine calling, and at the same time of the divine humility that shares the human condition. (p. 125)

    In the death of Jesus, God bears the hostility of disobedient humanity, but in the resurrection God demonstrates that such hostility doesn’t have the final word. Jesus’ life of self-offering is a “perfect prayer” to which God responds with the resurrection and outpouring of the Spirit. This is the means, ordained by God, for restoring relationship between God and an estranged humanity.

    I’m very sympathetic to this overall view, but I might make one slight qualification. Sometimes, maybe because of his desire to distinguish biblical sacrifice from “magical” notions, Ward almost seems to imply that it’s completely arbitrary what means God chooses to restore the human-divine relationship. In part, this is a salutary reminder that the Incarnation is rooted in God’s love and freedom; it’s not something that compels God to be merciful. But surely most Christians (including Professor Ward) would want to say that there’s something especially fitting about this restoration occurring by means of a human life that enacts, in history, the eternal love of God and the perfect human response to that love.