Month: October 2020

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Biblical Studies Isaiah

Isaiah 13-24

Fall of Babylon, Nuremburg Chronicles (1493)

Background

This section of First Isaiah is commonly called the “oracles against the nations.” The prophet utters oracles concerning Babylon, Assyria, Phillistia, Moab, Damascus, Ethiopia (Cush), Egypt, Dumah, Arabia (“the desert plain”), Kedar, and Tyre. All of these are oracles of judgment. The markers on the map below show the cities and regions mentioned. They include the superpowers of the day — Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon — and other important city states and tribal regions, all of which surround Jerusalem.

Map Source: The Baker Atlas of Christian History

There are also, however, oracles against Israel and Judah in this section. So, while one theme of the oracles is that God will judge the nations that are not his own, judgment extends also to God’s own people.

It’s likely that each of these oracles were uttered and published by Isaiah and his associates at various times during his ministry in response to specific threats and circumstances. Scholars offer various theories about what these specific events might have involved, but for the most part there is little consensus.

The overall canonical shape of these oracles as they are knit together in the text of First Isaiah supports the theme of God’s governance over history. From the perspective of First Isaiah, each of these nations — including, at times, Israel and Judah — tried to assert their governing authority and autonomy against Yahweh. It’s important to recall that there is no concept of “separation of church and state” in the ancient near east. Each of these nations aligned themselves with various deities, and many of them asserted that their rulers were living gods. Their claims to authority, then, were direct claims against Yahweh.

The oracles mention several means of judgment, including war, famine, and economic collapse. These judgments are depicted as acts of Yahweh. Wars, famines, and economic crises, of course, were common threats in the ancient near east, just as they are today. First Isaiah depicts the “natural” and “supernatural” as a seamless whole and ascribes Divine purpose to history. But there are also immediately “supernatural” elements to some of the oracles. The stars and constellations, the sun and the moon, understood in the ancient near east as cosmic beings, participate directly in some of the judgments, and where there were once vibrant human communities, the animals and “goat-demons” dance. (13:10, 21-22.)

Although the oracles target specific nations and cities, the scope of Yahweh’s judgment is often depicted as universal: he will “make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken out of its place” (13:13); he will “lay waste to the earth and make it desolate” (24:1). At the same time — surprisingly — there are notes of apocalyptic hope even for the powers outside Judah. Egypt, Assyria, and Tyre are depicted as receiving restoration from Yahweh. (19:23-25; 23:17-18.) Chapter 19 concludes with an astonishing blessing from Yahweh: “Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage.” (19:25.)

While most of the oracles are delivered in poetic stanzas, there are also some prose passages. One of the most interesting is in chapter 20. Yahweh instructs Isaiah to wander around Jerusalem naked and barefoot as a sign to the Egyptians and Ethiopians that Assyria will control them. This kind of performative sign-oracle occurs frequently in the Hebrew Scriptures’ prophetic literature. We might imagine this kind of activity as a sort of protest performance art by the prophet in some public venue.

Focus: 14:12-20

This section appears in an oracle against Babylon. It is famous in Christian history because the title “Day Star” (helel), translated “Lucifer” in Latin, was taken to refer to Satan. The immediate reference is to the King of Babylon — possibly one of the Babylonian kings who ruled not long before Tiglath-Peleser III of Assyria conquered Babylon. The names helel and ben-sahar (Son of the Morning), however, also draw on Canaanite mythology. The text recognizes, then, that the King of Babylon claims some kind of divine lineage. The text doesn’t deny that the King of Babylon possesses some kind of divine or supernatural power. However, it declares that this power is no match for Yahweh.

Another interesting example of this kind of response to a temporal King’s claim to divinity occurs in Ezekiel 28. In the first part of Ezekiel 28, the prophet declares to the King of Tyre, “your heart is proud and you have said ‘I am a god. . . yet you are a mortal, and no god. . . .” (Ezekiel 28:2). Here, the prophet outright denies the King’s claim to divinity. In the same chapter, however, there is another oracle against the King of Tyre, in which Yahweh says

You were the signet of perfection,
full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.
You were in Eden, the garden of God;
every precious stone was your covering
. . . .
You were blameless in your ways
from the day that you were created,
until iniquity was found in you.
In the abundance of your trade
you were filled with violence, and you sinned;
so I cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God,
and the guardian cherub drove you out
from among the stones of fire.

Ezekiel 28:12-16

Notice how Ezekiel’s oracle against the King of Tyre depicts the King as a kind of semi-divine being, and also as Adam. Notice also that the oracle refers to the city and its King interchangeably. Similarly, the oracle against Babylon refers both the the city / nation and to the King, and is cast in cosmic terms.

Some questions on this section:

  • We have been suggesting that Isaiah is a form of “political theology.” How would you describe the political theology of First Isaiah? Is any of this relevant to our contemporary circumstances?
  • How does the cosmic dimension of good and evil — God and the “Morning Star” — inform your understanding of the world? How might it affect how you conduct your daily life?

Focus: 19:16-25

This section concludes an oracle against Egypt. In the context of the Hebrew Scriptures’ broader narrative, and also coming on the heels of the oracle of judgment, this section is astonishing. As Brueggemann notes, “[t]he remarkable fact of this rhetoric is that it replicates the ancient Exodus narrative.” (Brueggemann, First Isaiah, 162.) Egypt will be brought into “hard service,” cry out, and be rescued by God, just like Israel when enslaved by Egypt. In the conclusion to this section, as Brueggemann notes, “[t]he oracle takes three pet names by which Yahweh characterizes Israel — ‘my people,’ ‘the work of my hands,’ and ‘my heritage’ — and generously redeploys them across the Fertile Crescent.” (Brueggemann, First Isaiah, 153.)

Some questions on this section:

  • What does this section tell you about God’s grace? About God’s plan for history?
  • In the context of First Isaiah, is this section suggesting that Egypt is rewarded for becoming like Israel? If Israel is also judged, what does that say about God’s plan for history?

Focus: 24:1-13; 21-23

This is a harsh judgment oracle that seems to summarize all the previous judgments against the nations as a judgment of the whole earth. Notice that this catastrophe levels the poor and rich and affects the natural environment on which people depend for sustenance. The last part of this oracle is cosmic in scope: God judges both heavenly beings and kings, who once again are depicted as somehow connected, as well as the moon and the sun.

  • How and why do God’s judgments affect the natural environment? Can we say that our current environmental crisis is a judgment of God?
  • Is God’s judgment arbitrary? Is it constrained by anything outside God?

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Law and Policy Lectures

Comments on Book Launch

We had a wonderful book launch event for my book Law and Theology: Classic Questions and Contemporary Perspectives at the law school Monday. Here’s the text of my remarks.

It’s amazing beyond words to have my book celebrated like this by our community. I’m very grateful to the Dean’s office for hosting this event. I’m so glad Professors Carmella and Uelman could present. I’m humbled and flattered and challenged by their remarks. I’ve known Amy for a number of years, I think since I first helped host a law and theology conference here at Seton Hall about a decade ago. I admire her thoughtful, deeply theologically and pastorally informed perspective on the law and the lawyer’s vocation. If I speak too much about Angela’s part in this I will get inappropriately emotional. Angela was my law and religion teacher when I was a law student – dare I say it – 30 years ago. That she is now a faculty colleague is hard enough to imagine. That she is helping present my book to you is more than anything I could have dreamed up 30 years ago. One thing I can definitely say is that I’m glad everything was done only on paper in my student days, not stored on computers, so that whatever I might have submitted in Professor Carmella’s seminar has, hopefully, long since moldered away.

When I had the opportunity to transition from full time law practice to academia, I knew that I somehow needed to bring my faith commitments, and my passion for theology, into deeper conversation with my life as a law teacher and scholar. To that end I pursued formal theological training – in a deliberate if sometimes piecemeal way, over the years. My specialty areas as a legal academic concern law and technology, cybersecurity, and intellectual property. I’ve been able to work on some projects involving intellectual property and religious thought, and my doctoral dissertation on theology, coming out as a book probably sometime next year, involves law, neuroscience and theology. I love that very wonky kind of stuff.


But this book, though it has its wonky moments, is really a passion project – a cri de coeur. My original title for the book was “Law and the Mission of God.” This reflects my interest in a movement called “missional theology,” rooted ultimately in the work of the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth, that ties to shape theological conversation around the missio Dei: the grand story of God’s redeeming and reconciling work in the world. The publishers thought that title was too narrow, and maybe they were right.

In the broadest sense, though, this book isn’t meant to be about the details of the law, whether natural law or positive law. It’s meant to be a call to the Church – to all persons called by God to participate in God’s great work of restoration. This is a call to hear, and embody, what the Apostle Paul called the euangellion – the Gospel – the good news. Christians claim that the news we have heard, and to which we bear witness – that in Christ, God is reconciling the world to Himself – is really, truly, unreservedly, good news.
If law – both natural law and positive law – plays some part in the missio Dei, in the good news, we should be able to tell a story about how law helps enable human flourishing and human liberation.

As Professor Carmella noted, I discuss both natural law and positive law in the book. Of course, in the modern legal academy, it takes some effort to talk about natural law at all, much less a kind of natural law that can’t exist apart from some tradition-specific discussion of creation, God, and transcendence. But in my view, that kind of tradition-specific discussion is exactly what’s needed, and I won’t shy away from it. Natural law is basic to human flourishing because “natural law” is simply one term for creation’s participation in the goodness of God. When we try to explain concepts like “goodness” without ideas about God and creation, and when we try to talk about “law” without a transcendent “goodness,” I think we end up talking nonsense that dissolves the human person away without any moral remainder –more on that next year in my next book on law and neuroscience! This is why the first part of the book is a tradition-specific survey of scripture, of important thinkers in the Christian tradition, and of the messy course of Church history. I hope in particular that my treatment of the Bible as narrative, and my focus on some less well known figures beyond the usual suspects of Aquinas, Augustine, Calvin, and Luther, brings something to the table.

As Professor Carmella also noted, however, my focus isn’t primarily on natural law. My focus is on positive law – the law humans make. My goal here was to draw out a theme that I think has been lost in our contemporary polarization: contingency. Natural law, flowing from the goodness of God’s being, is broad and unchanging. Positive law confronts specific human circumstances in specific moments of time. Natural law is the way things truly are, the way things ought to be, the way things one day will be – enveloped in God’s loving embrace. Positive law deals with the raw facts on the ground, now, when things are not yet as they should be. Positive law, then, is limited – it can’t do everything, indeed, sometimes it can’t do very much at all. Positive law is, and must be, connected with natural law, with moral truth – another sentiment, sadly, that is dangerous to express in the legal academy given the dominance of legal positivism. But positive law cannot, and should not, try to encode in detail all principles of morality. I think my view probably leans towards Lon Fuller’s approach to procedural morality, but with a nod towards the goals of liberation theology. Positive law should mostly be about institutions, processes, and ground rules that embody basic principles of peaceable community, human dignity, and fairness – with specific provisions that prefer the poor and oppressed.

In the praxis section of the book on contemporary issues, I hope, the theme of liberation comes into closer focus. The missio Dei is a mission of liberation: liberation from what the Christian scriptures and tradition call the powers of sin and death, and from what the Hebrew scriptures and tradition call slavery and oppression.

This is where my heart aches. I noticed early on in my academic career that almost every “law and religion” conference featuring Christians titled strongly towards the neo-Conservative, Federalist Society, originalist end of the spectrum. Now, this is an interesting set of perspectives, which should be part of any balanced discussion of the kinds of difficult, sensitive questions I try to address in this book. The scholars I know in the academy who promote these views do so out of the concern for procedural justice that I mentioned a moment ago. But how has this become the widespread default – not only among elite legal scholars and judges, but among people in the pews? Where are the Christian moderate or progressive legal scholars and judges, who want to discuss how Constitutional norms and legal rules could provide greater equity for the poor and oppressed? Where is the focus on the stuff that the Hebrew prophets railed about? My goodness – where is Jesus, the crucified preacher of the Sermon on the Mount? Why do some people, both among the elites and in the pews, seem so willing to sacrifice common decency and civility to pack the courts with originalists?

I think there are a number of reasons, which I discuss in the book. Let me briefly mention three in these remarks. This is where, forgive me, my remarks might cause some trouble, but I hope it’s “good trouble” as the late Rep. John Lewis put it.

Number one is a much deeper and darker history of racism. As religion scholar Robert Jones convincingly demonstrates in his recent book “White Too Long,” the history of Christianity in America is inextricably bound up with the American original sin of race. The origins of crabbed and limited Constitutional interpretation, an emphasis on state’s rights Federalism, and culture war alarmism, aren’t in contemporary disputes about school prayer, abortion, or LGBTQ rights. They’re in racism – specifically in claim by white Christians, from the antebellum period, through reconstruction and the civil rights movement, to today, that white Christian society is under attack by “the other.” It’s a gross and despicable legacy, one that many other Christians, worked to oppose, including, of course: Christians from minority communities who challenged the white Church as well as white Christian abolitionists and civil rights activists. Please hear me clearly: I am not, not suggesting that everyone today, much less any of my friends in the legal academy, who argues in favor of neo-Conservatism or originalism is a racist. We shouldn’t commit the genetic fallacy. On the other hand, dark evils – in the New Testament language, demonic powers – have a way of surfacing over and over again if we don’t expose them to the light. I think we are seeing those powers at work in our present racial divisions. This legacy should provoke a humbling conversation.

Number two is the tragedy of the evangelical and Catholic Christian culture wars against LGBTQ people. The current posture that this is all about religious freedom and preserving some degree of cultural pluralism – I’m sorry, this is going to cause trouble also – I believe is a farce. Again, don’t get me wrong: I believe ardently in religious freedom as well as in cultural pluralism. The hermeneutical and pastoral question of how Christian communities should love and care for LGBTQ people does not admit only one answer. Church communities that are doing their best to hold together a traditional Christian view of marriage and sexuality while learning how to love LGBTQ people should be legally protected and I support their honest efforts.

But the voices driving the culture war against LGBTQ people are voices, to put it simply, voices of fear and hate. Remember, when faced with equally divisive cultural and moral issues in the first century church, in a Roman world far more diverse, dangerous, and hostile than ours, Paul didn’t tell the Romans Christians to seize control of the reins of political power. Instead, he said,

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep. . . . If your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink. . . . Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (Romans 12:14-21).

Within our own Christian communities, we can continue to debate and disagree about what the great political theologian Oliver O’Donovan rightly called a delicate hermeneutical issue that requires, first of all, a posture of listening: how to relate the ancient horizons of our scriptures and tradition to our horizon, the world in front of the text, with an understanding of sexual orientation and with possible ways of life for LGBTQ people that didn’t exist two or three thousand years ago. I’m not going to try to answer that question today, and I’m just one legal scholar-slash-theologian, not qualified in any event to answer it definitively. The one thing I can say for certain is that the answers Jesus solicits from us don’t involve fear or hate.

Number three is the role of conspiracy theories. The bizarre “Q” conspiracy has gotten lots of press lately. I’m not the least bit surprised that this kind of craziness is penetrating actual politics to the point where people espousing these views are actually getting elected to Congress. Conspiracy thinking has been part of conservative evangelical movements since the turn of the 20th century, and there have been outbursts of chiliastic conspiracy movements throughout Church history. One I discuss in the book, if you don’t know the story, is the Munster Rebellion by radical Anabaptists in 1534-1535. The violence in that episode, by the rebels as well as by the Protestant and Catholic authorities, is where all such things end.

In the U.S., conservative evangelical conspiracy thinking rapidly gained momentum in the cold war years. It funded a thirty-million dollar “Creation Museum” in Kentucky dedicated to the proposition that mainstream science is a well-orchestrated conspiracy to deny God. It has underwritten countless best-selling books about how the Pope, the latest leader of the Soviet Union, the Chinese, the Muslims, Hilary Clinton, George Soros, a propitious sequence of “blood moons,” or all of the above, are ushering in the end of days. Yes, you heard me say “the Pope.” The cooperation between some evangelicals and Catholics on issues like abortion and gay marriage is relatively recent and still paper thin at the popular level.

We might make light of this, but it is enormously, powerfully influential at the grass roots level. The elites, like most of us in this virtual room, who discuss law and religion at a professional level may only have heard of such things second or third hand. Whether we are taking a more “progressive” or a more “conservative” position, we should take more care about our rhetoric. Christians do believe that history has a goal and that God is bringing about and will bring about a different world, a peaceable Kingdom, through Christ. Christians do believe that positive law matters, that positive law can protect, empower, and liberate, and that positive law can destroy, debilitate, and weaken – and that all of this, across ages and cultures and nations, somehow is part of what God is doing in the world now and what God will do in the world in the future – and that some Christians are called to work as lawyers, judges, lawmakers, public officials, and so-on. But sound Christian theology and practice refuses identify any given moment with that last “day of the LORD.” As teachers and lawyers who care about such things, let’s make absolutely clear that our moment in history, and our place in it, is limited, brief, and in the end not of singular importance.

In my personal devotional reading of the Bible I often return to the wisdom texts of the Psalms, Job and Ecclesiastes. They remind me that my life is just a breath in God’s time – to put it bluntly, that I’m not very consequential. But I also study the prophetic texts like Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Micah, and I also read, with fear and trembling, the words of Jesus, the one Christians identify as Prophet, Priest, and King. Those words remind me that what I do related to God’s Kingdom of peace and justice now reverberates into God’s future world to come. I am inconsequential, a fading breath; I am an agent within a Divine project of creation and reconciliation that endures forever. This is the both-and of the lawyer who wants to think like a theologian.

Categories
Biblical Studies Isaiah

Isaiah 7-12

The Peaceable Kingdom - Edward Hicks 1830-32

Background

These chapters continue the oracles of First Isaiah. Most scholars agree that these oracles date to Isaiah ben Amoz, though they probably were edited and arranged at later dates. In chapter 7, we are in the reign of King Ahaz of Judah, who is pictured in the Bible as a bad King. The Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Aram allied to attack Jerusalem in Judah. Aram, the home of the Aramaeans, was located in present day Syria, on the northern border of Israel:

By Oldtidens_Israel, Wikimedia Commons

Biblical Scholar Walter Bruggemann describes these chapters as the challenge of fear versus faith. The heart of the people of Judah, Isaiah 7:2 says, “shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind.” In verse 2, Ahaz is referred to by the title “the House of David.” This suggests that the threat concerned the future of the entire Davidic dynasty, and therefore implied whether God would really keep his covenant with the nation.

Yahweh instructs Isaiah to bring his son Shear-jashub to confront Ahaz and to challenge Ahaz to be brave. Shear-jashub means “a remnant shall return,” so the son’s name invokes judgment as well as hope. Isaiah’s charge from Yahweh summarizes the key message of these oracles: “If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all” (7:9).

Yahweh invites Ahaz to ask for a sign about how the threat from the north will affect Judah. Ahaz refuses (7:11-12). Although Ahaz’s refusal to ask for a sign is stated in pious terms, it seems he is in fact afraid to hear what God might have to say. Isaiah then offers a number of signs and statements of judgment, but with a final note of hope.

Focus: 7:14-17

The first sign Isaiah gives Ahaz is famous because of how it has been taken up in Christian thought: “Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.”

This sign is mentioned in the infancy narrative of Jesus in Matthew 1:

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means ‘God with us). (Matt. 1 22)

It is also alluded to in Luke 1:

How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?” The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. (Luke 1:34-35).

The Christian tradition thus has taken the sign to Ahaz as a sign about Jesus as messiah. Further, the Christian tradition has emphasized the virgin birth as a miracle with theological significance. For Christians in the Catholic tradition, the virgin birth is tied closely to an explanation of how Jesus could have been born without the taint of original sin. For both Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Christians, the virgin birth is connected with Mary’s purity and with practices of Marian devotion. Here’s where this text is used in Handel’s Messiah:

The Hebrew word ‘alma means a young woman of marriageable age, but is not a specific word for a “virgin.” The Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures in common use when the Gospels were written uses the word “virgin.” In the modern period, some scholars have questioned whether the notion of the virgin birth therefore rests on a mistake.

As Bruggemann notes, in its original context Isaiah’s sign is not about a virgin birth. It is, rather, about the innocent young woman, the child’s name (God With Us) and the propitious time of the birth, as a sign of reassurance that Yahweh will not allow Israel and Syria to prevail if Ahaz relies on Yahweh. However, as Bruggemann also notes, this doesn’t make the subsequent Christian tradition “wrong.” The scriptures are pregnant (pun intended) with meaning, and the New Testament frequently draws out Christological implications from the Hebrew Scriptures that likely were not on the horizon of the original writers and editors.

Some questions on this section:

  • Walter Bruggemann notes that “[f]aith (‘stand firm in faith’) is not a matter of intellectual content or cognitive belief. It is rather a matter of quite practical reliance upon the assurance of God in a context of risk where one’s own resources are not adequate.” (Bruggemmann, Isaiah Vol. 1, 67.) We all are having to do this during the time of COVID. What does this mean for you?
  • Do you see any reassuring signs of “God With Us” today?
  • How might this example of how the Christian tradition took up the sign of the young woman and the child inform your reading of scripture?

Focus: 9:2-6

Our next focus section provides another example of a sign relating to a child that has been taken up into the Christian tradition. Part of this passage is mentioned in Matthew 4:12-17:

When Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, he withdrew to Galilee. Leaving Nazareth, he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali— to fulfill what was said through the prophet Isaiah:

“Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali,
the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles—
the people living in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of the shadow of death
a light has dawned.”
From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

Again, this is a very free use of Isaiah by the author of Matthew, but the original context doesn’t necessarily render the Christian usage “wrong.” Jesus is depicted in the New Testament as a rightful heir to David’s throne. (See Matthew 1.)

Here is where 9:2 appears in Handel’s

https://youtu.be/gquOhNC80Fg

And here is 9:6:

In its original context, this text seems to refer to God’s promise to keep his covenant regarding the Davidic Kingdom. If Ahaz cannot remain steadfast and faithful, God will provide another King in David’s line.

Some questions on this section:

  • How do the various titles ascribed to the child resonate with you? Do any of them reflect your experience of Jesus?
  • Can Christians use this text in a way that is not supercessionist — that is, in a way that understands it first as a text of Jewish hope?

Focus: 10:1-6, 20-26

This section repeats some themes we saw in Week 1. One of the basic sins of Judah’s rulers was oppression of the poor; this sin will be judged; and Yahweh will preserve a remnant in Israel.

Focus: 11:1-9

This section is another promise about the Davidic line that Christian thought has understood Christologically. The reference to the “spirit of the LORD” has also been understood in the Christian tradition to refer to the Holy Spirit. Again, the Christian reading goes beyond the original historical context, but can be seen as a creative use of the text in light of the experience of Jesus.

This section also includes the famous eschatological image of the wolf living with the lamb (the lion actually lies with the calf), a vision of a restored creation that also reverberates throughout the New Testament, particularly in the letters of Paul and in the book of Revelation.

Some questions on this section:

  • What do you think is the significance of the image of a shoot growing out of a stump? Do you see new shoots growing out of dead stumps anywhere today?
  • How do you understand some of the images of the eschatological kingdom in this text? How might those images inform your hope?
Categories
Biblical Studies Isaiah

Isaiah 1-6

Setting

Scholars call Isaiah 1-39 “First Isaiah.” There is general agreement that the oracles in these chapters originally derive from Isaiah Ben Amoz and/or people associated with him. Some scholars argue that the underlying materials in First Isaiah were heavily edited in later centuries.

Verse 1 tells us that the text presents “the vision” (chazon) of Isaiah concerning Judah and Jerusalem during the time of Kings Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. By this time the Jewish nation had been divided into the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah. The Kingdom of Judah encompassed the holy city of Jerusalem, which contained the First Temple originally built by King Solomon. This graphic shows the Kings of Israel and Judah:

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kings_of_Israel_and_Judah

It’s difficult to know precisely when some of these different Kings ruled. There is extra-Biblical (archeological and textual) evidence, however, to support the existence of many of these Kings, and we do know the dates of some key events mentioned in the narratives. During the period encompassed by this part of Isaiah, Israel and Judah came under increasing pressure from the Kingdom of Assyria.

The Biblical text tells us Uzziah reigned for 52 years. Judah became powerful and prosperous under Uzziah, but the Bible depicts him as deeply flawed. Uzziah’s son, Jotham, took the throne when Uzziah was struck with leprosy for offering incense in the Temple — an act seen as an usurpation of Uzziah’s authority. Only the Priests, who had been consecrated to God, were supposed to perform this function. Jotham, the Bible says, reigned for 16 years until he was deposed by a group that supported his son, Ahaz. Jotham is generally depicted as a good King in the Bible, but not a perfect one, particularly because Jotham failed to preserve the overall morality and piety of the people. Ahaz is depicted in the Bible as an evil King who gave in to the Assyrians, both politically and religiously. Upon his death after 16 years in power, Ahaz was succeeded by his son Hezekiah, who reigned for 29 years according to the Bible. Hezekiah, the Bible says, was a highly righteous King, who rolled back the syncretism introduced by Ahaz — although, again, not a perfect one.

During Hezekiah’s reign, the Northern Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by King Sargon of Assyria. After Sargon died his son, Sennacherib, became King of Assyria and attacked Judah. Sennacherib’s army laid siege to Jerusalem, but, according to the Bible, God miraculously destroyed the Assyrian army and the siege was turned away. There is an Assyrian inscription which admits that Hezekiah did not submit to Sennacherib but which claims Hezekiah later paid him tribute money.

Here’s a picture of the “Sennacharib Prism,” which contains the Assyrian inscription:

Source: David Castor, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6586412

Here’s a translation of the cuneiform on the Sennacherib Prism that mentions Hezekiah:

Here’s a portion of the wall built by Hezekiah to withstand the Assyrian siege:

Source: By Lior Golgher – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1830495

And here is part of the Siloam Tunnel, dug by Hezekiah to provide water to Jerusalem during the siege:

Source: By DANIEL WONG from Newark, CA, USA – Hezekiah’s Tunnel, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5701779

The oracles in First Isaiah, then, cover a huge amount of territory — a period of about 64 years, from the end of Uzziah’s reign until the start of Hezekiah’s — during a tumultuous time in the life of Israel and Judah. It’s important to remember that the oracles in First Isaiah relate to specific events or issues in Judean society during this stretch of time. We are not entirely sure how these oracles were recorded and collected for publication, either in their original form or in the final canonical form of the book of Isaiah. We might imagine Isaiah sitting at his desk feverishly writing on a scroll with a quill pen, but that is not the likely scenario. It’s more likely that there were scribes attached to Isaiah and his school or movement, who perhaps published some of Isaiah’s sayings at critical times and then arranged and edited them into collections.

As we mentioned in our Introduction and Overview, Prophets played a unique role in ancient Israel during the time of the Kings. There was no concept of “separation of religion and state” in ancient Israel or otherwise in the ancient near east. However, in ancient Israel and Judah, the King and the Priests played different official functions under the Law. Prophets, in contrast, did not have an official civic function under the Law. Nevertheless, important Prophets, including Isaiah, could influence civic and religious policy. At the same time, Prophets, again including Isaiah, could criticize both Kings and Priests for failures to fulfill their roles, in particular in leading the nation to follow God’s Law and enact justice. Prophets were consulted for insight from Yahweh about momentous decisions, but their role usually was more about forthtelling — explaining why things are the way they are — than foretelling the future.

General Themes

Chapters 1-6 of First Isaiah establish what will become a familiar pattern of alternating oracles of judgment and oracles of hope. Notice that the oracles of judgment focus on the decline of the nation and of its cities — its cultural, economic, and religious centers, including in particular Jerusalem. As 1:7 puts it, “Your country lies desolate, your cities are burned with fire. . . .” The judgment oracles often sound xenophobic to our modern ears: 1:7 further says that, “in your very presence aliens devour your land; it is desolate, as overthrown by foreigners.” One of the central themes of the Law was that Israel should remain distinct from foreign idolatrous nations.

Focus Sections

Our first “focus” section, 1:18-26, includes a famous text: “Come now, let us reason [argue it out] together.” Notice God’s appeal to the people to enter into discussion or argumentation with God. God judges the nation’s unfaithfulness, but continually remains available for renewal if the nation wishes to return to Him. This section also establishes God’s primary complaints against His people: “Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the orphan, and the widow’s case does not come before them.”

Some questions on this section:

  • Do you ever hear God’s invitation to reason / argue things out?
  • What do the images of scarlet / crimson sins and snow / white wool suggest for you?

Our second “focus” section, 2:1-4, illustrates the kind of eschatological hope continually held out in Isaiah in between the oracles of judgment. It also contains a famous line about “beating swords into plowshares.” Because it is an eschatological vision, we should be careful about interpreting these images too literally. A tradition did develop among some Jewish interpreters, however, that imagined a literal future highway running from surrounding nations into Jerusalem and to God’s Temple. Notice that there is an apparent contrast here from the seeming xenophobia of the previous oracles of judgment: the nations are welcomed into Jerusalem. This vision reverberates into the New Testament — compare Revelation 21:24-27, in which the nations are welcomed into the New Jerusalem.

Some questions on this section:

  • How do you understand the hope offered in this section? Can a hope like this still sustain us today?

Our third focus section, 3:16 to 4:1, is part of a judgment oracle. It can sound sexist to modern ears. The theme, however, is about how the elites of Judean society had adopted Assyrian fashions, aspirations, and manners. They had become arrogant and secure in their wealth, disregarding the threat Assyria posed to the basic identity and existence of God’s people. Notice that God appears as a prosecutor arguing his case as well as the Judge (3:13-14).

Some questions on this section:

  • How would you compare God’s invitation to argument in 1:18 with his argument in this oracle?
  • What do you see as the core evils identified in this oracle? What might be an analogous warning for us today?

Our final focus section, 6:1-13, presents an awesome vision of Isaiah before the Heavenly Throne. Compare this vision with John the Seer’s vision in Revelation 4. This section also includes the famous scene in which a seraph purifies Isaiah for prophetic speech with a hot coal.

  • What does Isaiah’s vision tell us about God? What might it say about our practices of prayer and worship?
  • Have you ever experienced God’s purification as a preparation for some ministry or other part of your life?
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Uncategorized

Isaiah: Introduction and Overview

The Peaceable Kingdom - Edward Hicks 1830-32

Overview and Themes

The book of Isaiah has had enormous influence on Christian thought and piety. Based on the materials in the Gospels, Jesus’ self-identity seems to have been shaped deeply by Isaiah. The Gospels, the letters of Paul, and the New Testament’s apocalyptic literature are saturated with direct references and allusions to Isaiah. The Church Fathers and Doctors likewise frequently drew on Isaiah as they struggled to illuminate how the God we worship is one God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, while at the same time establishing their claim that Jesus Christ is God incarnate. Our study of Isaiah therefore offers us an opportunity to delve more deeply into the mystery of God’s redemption of the world through Christ — a beautiful opportunity, particularly as we move through the Autumn season towards Advent.

That opportunity, however, also comes with a challenge. As discussed below, some of the Christological resonances drawn out of Isaiah in the New Testament and in the history of Christian thought seem to go beyond the meaning of the original text, both in historical context and in its original Hebrew language. Our study of Isaiah therefore also offers us an opportunity to reflect on the nature of the Hebrew Scriptures as Christian scripture. How can we as Christians approach this text that was and is first central to Jewish thought and piety? What does the New Testament’s use of the Hebrew Scriptures, including notably Isaiah, tell us about Biblical interpretation?

Our reflection on Christian interpretations of Isaiah also will bring us back to the historical meaning of the collection of texts that make up the canonical book. We’ll see that before — or, perhaps better stated, connected with — the Christian Christological reading are deep, hopeful themes about God’s providence, justice, love, and ultimate restoration of a broken and chaotic world.

Historical Background and Canonical Context

Before we consider the date and authorship of Isaiah itself, it’s helpful to put the book into context within the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures. The narrative arc of the Hebrew Scriptures begins with the “protohistory” of Genesis 1-11 — creation, Noah’s Flood, the Tower of Babel, and the scattering of the nations. The remainder of the Pentateuch — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy — concern the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob), the enslavement of the Jews in Egypt, the exodus from Egypt, and the giving of the law through Moses.

The period of the protohistory is impossible to date. Genesis 1-11 includes literary, poetic, and mythic elements drawn from surrounding ancient near eastern cultures, meaning that the protohistory, in a very real sense, falls “outside” ordinary time. The period of the Patriarchs, the Exodus, and the Conquest is similarly impossible to date precisely and likely includes literary ornaments and embellishments — although a historical basis for the founding of the people of Israel by these key figures, a rescue from slavery in Egypt, and a movement into Canaan always was and still remains central to Jewish identity.

The “historical” books in the Hebrew Scriptures — Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemia, and Esther — cover:

  • The Jewish conquest of the land of Canaan and entry into the promised land;
  • A period when the people of Israel were led by “Judges” (charismatic military / political leaders);
  • The beginning of the monarchy under King Saul;
  • The glorious, though tumultuous, period of King David;
  • The reign of David’s son, King Solomon;
  • The tragic division of the nation into the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah;
  • Various good and bad (mostly bad) Kings in Israel and Judah;
  • The subjugation of the Northern Kingdom by Assyria and the Assyrian attack on Jerusalem and the Southern Kingdom;
  • The destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon and the start of the Babylonian Exile.

The historical books relate more closely to information from archeology and other extra-Biblical historical sources, particularly as they move closer to the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests. This doesn’t mean the Biblical historical books are straightforwardly historical in a modern sense. The historical books sometimes don’t agree with each other, much less correlating in any clear way with extra-Biblical archeological or textual sources. There are intense, intractable disagreements among scholars in the field of Biblical Archeology about whether the Bible’s historical books are broadly historically reliable (“maximalists”) or mostly made up as a kind of later propaganda (“minimalists”).

In addition to the Pentateuch and the historical books, the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures includes the wisdom books and theprophetic books. Jewish readers divide the books somewhat differently than this. The Torah (“teaching” or “law”) is most immediately the Pentateuch; the Nevi’im (“prophets”) include the prophetic books and some of the historical books; and the Ketuvim (“writings”) include the wisdom books along with Chronicles, Ruth, Esther, Daniel, and Ezra-Nehemiah. Thus, Isaiah is part of the Nevi’im. The prophetic books, including the book of Isaiah, are mostly about why God allowed this destruction by the Assyrians and Babylonians and whether or how God will keep the covenant He made with Abraham and David and restore the nation.

Canonical Context, Dating, and Authorship of Isaiah

In the modern period, the nature of the text of the canonical book of Isaiah, and its role in Christian thought, has come under significant scrutiny. Even during the Medieval period, scholars suggested that the canonical text almost certainly was written and ended in multiple stages. Modern textual and critical scholarship shows that the canonical text of Isaiah may have taken shape in three or four stages over about two hundred years.

Although the historical and prophetic books of the Hebrew Scriptures raise many questions about their relationship to history as understood through modern archeology and textual analysis, there is no doubt about the fact of the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions of Israel and Judah or about the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians and the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. There is also little doubt that Isaiah ben Amoz was an important figure during this time. Tantalizingly, archeologist Eliat Mazar recently uncovered a bulla (clay seal) that might be the ancient equivalent of Isaiah’s personal signature, although, as is usually the case with Biblical archeology, Mazar’s interpretation is contested.

The role of the “prophet” in ancient Israel and Judah is interesting and complex. It appears that from early times there were prophets or seers attached to popular shrines, not only dedicated to the God of the Israelites, Yahweh, but also to Canaanite or other gods or to a syncretistic mix of Yahwism and Canaanite religions./1/ In fact, much of the Bible’s prophetic literature sharply criticizes this kind of syncretism, depicting fidelity to Yahweh alone as the key to the nation’s success. It also appears that there were prophets related to the Priestly class that became connected with the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem first constructed under King Solomon.

There also seem to have been independent prophets who were popular teachers or spokesmen outside the Priestly class and who had some kind of authority, recognition, or at least fearful respect, among the political leadership. These prophets often were highly critical of the political class, but at the same time, the Kings often consulted them about weighty matters such as the prospects for a military campaign. Isaiah ben Amoz seems to have been one of these important prophets who lived at the time of the Assyrian invasion of Judah.

Scholars today generally do not attribute the entire text of the canonical book to Isaiah ben Amoz. Contemporary scholars speak of chapters 1-39 as “First Isaiah,” which was probably originally written during the lifetime of the prophet Isaiah ben Amoz, when the Assyrians invaded Israel and Judah in 742-701 BCE; chapters 56-66 as “Second Isaiah,” written by an anonymous prophet who lived during the Babylonian Exile; and chapters 56-66 as “Third Isaiah,” a collection of sayings from various prophets who lived during early Persian-period restoration of Jerusalem in the 6th century BCE. This is based on both textual criticism (study of the language and grammatical forms of the text) and historical criticism (careful attention to historical references that inform the text). Scholars debate the exact periodization and attribution of the different parts of the text, but mainstream scholars generally agree that it was edited and updated at various times over a period of about 200 years to address contemporary circumstances.

Christian Interpretation of Isaiah

From the First Century CE — that is, from the time of Jesus — through today, Christians have claimed that the book of Isaiah points to Jesus as the savior of Israel and of the world. Some Christian readers have argued that the original purpose of specific texts in Isaiah and elsewhere in the Old Testament was to make specific prophecies about Jesus. In this view, the original authors of these texts knew they were foretelling an individual Messiah who would suffer and die for our sins.

These varied circumstances addressed in the canonical text of Isaiah, however, were different from, although in some ways related to, the Second Temple setting of Jesus’ life and ministry. The original writers and editors of texts such as Isaiah likely were not usually themselves intending to make the specific claims later attributed to these texts by Christian readers.

A related problem is that the New Testament authors often allude to or quote from a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures that was commonly used by Greek-speaking Jews in the first century, the Septuagint (or LXX). The New Testament literature was produced in Koine Greek, the common everyday language in the Hellenistic Roman world (with occasional snatches of Aramaic)./2/ In some places the Greek translation of the LXX does not accurately reflect the meaning of the Hebrew of the original text, sometimes with significant theological ramifications.

The Christian claim that Isaiah points to, and sometimes directly prophesies about, Jesus as the Messiah, therefore raises numerous exegetical, hermeneutical, and theological problems. One fruitful response to these problems is to set aside the Christological biases of the New Testament and later Christian interpretation and simply to encounter a text like Isaiah on its own terms for what it tells Jewish and Christian (and Islamic) readers about God. Here is a video from Old Testament scholar Chris Hays of Fuller Seminary highlighting some of those themes: (1) Yahweh alone is Lord; (2) God is in control and will bring His salvation to pass; (3) the central importance of social justice.

There is also a long Christian tradition of suggesting an allegorical or figural interpretation of texts such as Isaiah that is teased out in the New Testament and in later Christian thought. This tradition goes all the way back to the early Church Fathers, and indeed, arguably, to the New Testament writers. It remains important today among Christian scholars associated with the “theological interpretation” movement.

For example, in his book Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness, New Testament scholar and former Duke Divinity School Dean Richard Hays says

[T]he Gospel writers summon us to a conversion of the imagination. . . . [W]e will learn to read Scripture rightly only if our minds and imaginations are opened by seeing the scriptural text — and therefore the world — through the Evangelists’ eyes. In order to explore that hermeneutical possibility, we must give close consideration to the revisionary figural ways the four Gospel writers actually read Israel’s Scripture.

Hays, Reading Backwards, 4.

Hays draws out three general interpretive themes based on his figural reading:

(1) The OT [Old Testament] teaches us to take seriously God’s word of judgment: those who oppress the alien, the widow, and the orphan and shed innocent blood will come under God’s fearful judgment, whether in Jermiah’s Judah in the seventh century B.C.E., in Jerusalem in Jesus’ lifetime, or in our own time. . . .

(2) The OT teaches us that all our prayer and action should be ordered toward Isaiah’s vision of a restored and healed new creation; that is to say, the salvation proclaimed in the Gospels is neither merely individual nor otherworldly. . . .

(3) How will such a redemptive ending take place? The OT hints mysteriously that God’s beloved Son will suffer rejection . . . but that he will also ‘become the head of the corner’ as an exalted king . . . . The Christological treasure [in the OT] is subtly wrapped, but [the New Testament] starts to unwind it. . . .

Hays, Reading Backwards, 13.

As we work through our study of Isaiah we’ll try to keep in mind both of these interpretive strategies — the text within its various original contexts and the text read figurally from the perspective of our experience of Christ — and the ways in which these strategies can be connected. In the end we’ll see that Isaiah’s vision is finally one of justice and hope for the restoration of all of creation, a promise of justice and hope that we as Christians see fulfilled in Christ.

Notes:

/1/ The original Hebrew text had no vowels. The name is thus represented in the Hebrew text as יהוה (YHWH). Yahweh or Yehovah are therefore extrapolations of what the name might have sounded like, though today scholars think Yahweh was the likely pronunciation. Many Jews consider the name too holy to pronounce aloud and substitute other words such as Adonai (my Lord) or HaShem (The Name).

/2/ Aramaic was the common Hebrew-related tongue in First Century Palestine. Aramaic was almost certainly the language spoken by Jesus and his immediate disciples. Some scholars suggest that some of the sayings of Jesus in what became the canonical Gospels were first written in Aramaic and subsequently translated into Koine Greek.

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1 Corinthians Biblical Studies

1 Corinthians 15 and 16: The Resurrection of the Body; Concluding Pastoral Concerns

If Chapter 13, the “love chapter,” is one of the greatest texts in the New Testament, Chapter 15, the “resurrection chapter,” is one of the most theologically weighty.

The Gospel

Paul first reminds the Corinthians of the “good news” — the euangelion, the gospel — he proclaimed to them and that they received. Paul says the gospel he passes on is the same one he received. Notice that “the gospel,” verses 3-7, is the story of Christ’s death “for our sins” and of his resurrection, all “according to the scriptures.” “The gospel” is not a theory of the atonement — of how exactly Christ’s death is “for” our sins. Nor is “the gospel” a theory of the mechanics of conversion. Of course, “the gospel” invites contemplation of theories of atonement, and even more, the gospel invites our grateful response of faith. But “the gospel” itself is simply the story of Christ according to the scriptures.

When Paul uses the phrase “according to the scriptures” here he is not referring to the New Testament, which had not yet been compiled, and certainly not to his own letters, which he probably did not think of as “scripture.” He was referring to the Hebrew Scriptures. For Paul, then, the story of Christ was already contained in the Hebrew Scriptures. But the Hebrew Scriptures, read within their own original frame of reference, do not clearly predict the “Christ” Paul describes, at least not when read before Christ Jesus’ advent. Jesus himself, and the church that bore witness to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, saw the narratives and prophetic and wisdom texts of the Hebrew Scriptures with fresh eyes in light of their experience. Jesus Christ is the interpretive principle. Jesus Christ is the gospel.

What Paul received, and what he passes on, is a witness to the event of Jesus Christ. Paul says he “proclaimed” (euēngelisamēn) the gospel (euangelion) and the “word” (logō) (15:1), that the story of Christ’s resurrection is “proclaimed” (kēryssetai) and is a form of “proclamation” (kērygma) (15:12, 14), and that Paul and the other Apostles’ “testify” or bear witness (martureó) (15:15) to the resurrection. This constellation of terms, all collected in one place, demonstrates that the gospel Paul passes along is a well-known, foundational narrative that runs from the first Apostles through Paul to the Corinthians — and to us (15:11).

The Resurrection

Despite the central narrative of Christ’s death and resurrection, it seems some in the Corinthian congregation did not believe in the resurrection of the dead. (15:12.) Perhaps some of these Corinthians were Jewish Christians who believed in a general resurrection of the dead at the end of history, as did the Pharisees and other Second Temple Jewish groups, but questioned why the Christ, the Messiah, would rise first.

It seems, though, that the people Paul addresses here do not think the dead can rise at all. Perhaps, then, some of these Corinthians were gentile skeptics about the possibility of a bodily resurrection, like those Paul encountered in Athens (see Acts 17:32). The Greek philosopher Plato believed in the immortality of the soul (or at least, of parts of the soul), and thought the soul was subsequently reborn in different bodies. Aristotle believed in the soul but it is not clear that he though the soul was immortal. Greek skeptics did not believe in the immortality of the soul at all. None of the Greek philosophers or their Roman heirs believed in the resurrection of the body.

Paul states that Christ is raised from the dead, “the first fruits (aparché) of those who have died.” And the resurrection of Christ is central to the gospel, because “death” (thanatos) is the consequence of sin. (15:21-22). The gospel is good news because it changes the reality of death.

In verses 21-22, Paul draws a parallel between Christ and Adam. Adam, a human being, introduced sin and death; Christ, a human being, introduced resurrection. Adam was the firstfruits of death; Christ is the firstfruits of resurrection. We should not press this metaphor into a theology of “original sin,” which is not really present here or elsewhere in Paul, and we certainly shouldn’t take this is a some kind of modern “scientific” statement about human origins. The point is that humanity, at its root, from its deepest origins as humanity, embraces sin and death. Having been given the gift of our created being, we choose to de-create ourselves. But Christ, the true Adam, re-creates us, through the power of his resurrection, which defeats death.

Notice that “death” here is personified as one of the powers. The resurrection of Christ is an apocalyptic event that inaugurates the end of present age, which culminates when Christ subjugates all of God’s enemies — and “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” (15:26.) At the end of history, everything, including the Son Paul says, will be subject to God the Father, “so that God may be all in all.” (As we have discussed before, there are Trinitarian themes in Paul’s thought but he did not have a worked-out theology of the Trinity. This statement about Christ being subject to the Father by later standards would be considered subordinationist.)

In verses 25 and 27 Paul alludes to some of the “scriptures” he mentioned earlier. In verse 25, the reference is to Psalm 10, which says:

The Lord says to my lord:
“Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”
The Lord will extend your mighty scepter from Zion, saying,
“Rule in the midst of your enemies!”
Your troops will be willing
on your day of battle.
Arrayed in holy splendor,
your young men will come to you
like dew from the morning’s womb.
The Lord has sworn
and will not change his mind:
“You are a priest forever,
in the order of Melchizedek.”
The Lord is at your right hand;
he will crush kings on the day of his wrath.
He will judge the nations, heaping up the dead
and crushing the rulers of the whole earth.
He will drink from a brook along the way,
and so he will lift his head high.

The reference in Psalm 10 to Melchizedek brings forward an obscure figure from Genesis 14, the King of Salem, who blessed Abram (Abraham) after the battle of the Kings and thereby performed a priestly function — although he was not an heir of Abraham and there was as yet no nation of Israel and no Jewish Priesthood.

Melchizedek features in some of the eschatological texts of the Second Temple period. Jesus is compared to Melchizedek in Hebrews 7, also using quotations from Psalm 25. It seems, then, that in the Second Temple period, the notion of Melchizedek, or a Melchizedek-like figure, appearing or reappearing as a priestly figure who recalls the nation to purity, was a known motif, and that this motif was connected to Jesus in early Christianity.

In verse 27 the reference is to Psalm 8, which says:

Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
in the heavens.
Through the praise of children and infants
you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You made him ruler over the works of your hands;
you put everything under his feet:
all flocks and herds,
and the animals of the wild,
the birds in the sky,
and the fish in the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.
Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Notice that this Psalm echoes Genesis 1 and 2, in which humans are given charge over caring for creation. There is an echo of a connection here between Adam and Melchizedek, both as mystical figures who perform kingly and priestly functions — one at the beginning of creation and one at the beginning of the Hebrew people. For Paul, then, the resurrection of Christ is the fulfillment of the purposes of humanity and of the mission of Israel, culminating in the restoration of creation itself.

Starting in verse 35, Paul begins to respond to an objection from the skeptics: if the dead are raised, what kind of body do they possess? No one would want to be raised in a rotten corpse. Even more, although ancient people did not understand chemistry or microbiology the way we do, they knew that over time bodies decompose and are consumed by other creatures. If a person’s body is thrown into a river and consumed by fish, does the person become a fish in the resurrection? (A version of this very question was, in fact, answered in the Medieval period by Thomas Aquinas — so it remained a live question!)

Paul says the question is foolish because the present body is like a seed that becomes something greater. In verse 44, Paul says “it is sown a physical [natural] (sōma psychikon) body, it is raised a spiritual (sōma pneumatikon) body.” This leads some interpreters to suggest that Paul does not believe in a material, bodily resurrection, but rather moves the concept of the resurrection entirely to the spiritual realm. But there are several reasons why this is not what Paul is doing.

First, Paul is responding to some of the Corinthians who are skeptical of the resurrection of the body because of their Greek dualism. The skeptics might accept the immortality of the soul, but not the resurrection of the body. If Paul’s response is that the resurrection is spiritual and not bodily, he would be agreeing with the skeptics.

Second, the phrase sōma psychikon translated from the NRSV above as “physical body,” does not really contrast a “physical” body to a “non-physical” one. Paul quotes Genesis 2:7 in verse 45, because Adam is the example of the “physical” or “natural” body. In that text, in the Greek translation (the LXX) quoted by Paul, Adam became a psychēn zōsan — a “living being.” In the Hebrew the word is nephesh, sometimes translated “soul,” but meaning the vital center of life, personhood, passion, desire, and appetite. So Paul is not contrasting the “physical” with the “spiritual.” In both cases — the present sōma psychikon and the future sōma pneumatikon — Paul is referring to a kind of sōma, a body.

Third, Paul’s metaphor of the seed that produces wheat assumes a continuity between the present state and the future state. A wheat germ is not precisely the same thing as a mature wheat stalk, but there is a numerical continuity between the germ and the stalk: this germ, planted in the soil, produced this stalk. Of course, this is only a metaphor, so we shouldn’t press it too far, and Paul didn’t know anything about how a wheat germ becomes a wheat stalk at the molecular or genetic level. But the metaphor does tie into Paul’s overall discussion of how our present bodies relate to our bodies in the resurrection.

At the same time, Paul does say that our bodies in the resurrection will differ significantly from our present bodies. In Paul’s mind, the resurrection is not a zombie-fest of reanimated corpses. He does not attempt to explain how our resurrection bodies will differ, nor does he offer any details about their material constitution. It is something that will happen by God’s power “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.” (15:52.)

The result, Paul says, is that Death no longer holds final power over us. In verses 54 and 55, Paul quotes a line from Isaiah 25 and another from Hosea 13. Isaiah 25:6-8 reads as follows:

On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.
On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
from all the earth.

Is. 25:6-8

And Hosea 13:14 says:

I will deliver this people from the power of the grave;
I will redeem them from death.
Where, O death, are your plagues?
Where, O grave, is your destruction?

By quoting these texts Paul again connects Christ’s resurrection to the eschatological hope of the prophetic literature in the Hebrew scriptures — a hope for a restored nation and a renewed creation.

Excursus on Universalism

What precisely is the scope of Paul’s eschatological vision of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15? The mainstream of Christian eschatology envisions a dual outcome: some, maybe only a few, go to Heaven, and some, maybe many, go to Hell. There are important scriptural reasons for this view, including a number of sayings of Jesus in the Gospels and the vision of judgment at the conclusion of the book of Revelation. But there have always been voices in the Christian tradition who imagined an outcome in which every person is eventually saved, a view called apokatastasis. Some, such as the great Third Century theologian Origen of Alexandria, were later censured by the institutional Church at least in part for these views, while others, such as the Church Father Gregory of Nyssa, were always held in high esteem.

Today, both in academic theology (evidenced, for example, in the work of Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart (That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (Yale Univ. Press 2019)) and in popular writing (evidenced by Rob Bell’s Love Wins (HarperOne 2012)), there is a renewed interest, and often fierce argument, over the possibility of apokatastasis. Two verses in 1 Corinthians 15 are important to that debate. These are verse 22: “for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ”; and verse 28, which states that, in the end, God will be “all in all.”

There is no ambiguity about the words Paul uses in these verses: “all,” panta, literally means “all.” Here and elsewhere in Paul’s writings, there is a universal logic and universal language in his eschatological statements. At the same time, however, Paul repeatedly warns that not everyone will inherit the kingdom of God. (E.g., 1 Cor. 6:9-10.) And even in 1 Corinthians 15, there is a hint that some of the unrighteous dead need some help, in the cryptic reference to baptisms for the dead (15:29).

In his interesting and challenging book Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Eerdmans 2020), Duke Divinity School Professor Douglas Campbell suggests that, like many Second Temple period Jews, Paul probably believed in a resurrection only of the righteous. At the “Day of the Lord,” the last day, the righteous dead would be raised and the righteous living would be transformed. The unrighteous dead would be left dead, and the unrighteous living would be annihilated. Some Second Temple apocalyptic literature included a dual resurrection and a judgment of annihilation or exclusion (“Hell”) for the unrighteous living and dead, but Paul seems uninterested in that concept. There is no suggestion in Paul’s writing of an eternal dual outcome: what is left after the end is only God and God’s people.

At the same time, Campbell notes, the universalistic logic of of texts like 1 Corinthians 15 seems to stand in tension with Paul’s apparent assumption that only the righteous will be raised or transformed in the last day. The parallel between people “in Adam” and “in Christ” seems particularly powerful here. There can be no sense, in Paul’s logic, in which any human being is not naturally “in Adam,” and it appears likewise that there should be no sense in which any of humanity is not ultimately “in Christ.”

In my view, we press texts like 1 Corinthians 15 too far if we suggest they are dogmatic statements about apokatastasis. Paul is not writing systematic theology. When his focus is on Christ and the meaning of Christ’s death and resurrection, his language is universal. When his focus is on the realities of human sin, his language warns of exclusion.

We do best to take the full Biblical narrative, in all its diversity, together. Sin is judged. We are warned of the possibility of exclusion from God’s kingdom — even by Jesus himself. These warnings for us must remain live. They must spur us to repentance and faith, and to prophetic and faithful witness in a world that seems to oppose God’s peaceable reign. And yet, while we see only through a glass darkly, we know Jesus himself is the interpretive principle. The logic and goal of creation is the resurrection of Jesus. Death is not the last word; death is destroyed. Love bears, believes, endures, and hopes all things. In the end, love remains, and God is all in all. Even God’s judgment, whatever it will be, is a judgment born of love.

Some Questions on this Section

  • What do you understand as some of the implications of “the gospel” Paul describes at the start of this chapter?
  • What does it mean to you that Jesus’ resurrection defeats “death” as a power or enemy?
  • What is your eschatological vision — your hope for the future?

Concluding Remarks

In chapter 16, Paul offers some concluding personal remarks to the Corinthians. He returns to the theme of the collection he is taking for the church in Jerusalem. He promises a future visit, identifies Timothy as his emissary, and offers gratitude for a visit from Stephanas, Fortunatus and Achaicus, Greek converts who apparently were working among the various congregations in Greece. (Based on their names, Fortunatus and Achaicus — “Lucky” and “From Achaias” — were probably present or former slaves of Stephanas.) He also makes a kind of off-handed (passive aggressive?) reference to Apollos.

At the very end of the letter Paul appends his own hand-written greeting. Paul would have dictated the body of the letter to an amanuensis, a kind of professional scribe. This personal greeting in Paul’s own hand was akin to a personal note someone today might add to a typed official letter. We see in that short note the same parts of Paul’s personality we saw throughout the letter: a word of exclusion (anathema) on anyone who does not love the Lord, a common early Christian exclamation in Aramaic– maran atha — and a concluding word of grace and love.

Final Question:

  • What thoughts, impressions, or feelings does our study of 1 Corinthians leave you with?