For me, the question of “inerrancy” versus not, or the question of how “historical” the Gospels are, or the question of whether or not we should harmonize different passages pushes in this direction: When we push for inerrancy, harmonizations, and historicity, we show that we have a fundamentally different desire for what these texts might give us than the biblical writers themselves had when they composed them.
If the purpose of the Gospels was to give us the historically identifiable account of the anointing of Jesus, then Luke would not have changed the location, host, time frame, and body part on which Jesus was anointed. If the purpose of a Gospel is to give a full, historical account, then Matthew would not go around introducing second things such as a second Gerasene demoniac or second donkey that Jesus simultaneously rode into Jerusalem with the other.
The point is that at various points both Matthew and Luke have decided to tell versions of the story that are in ways major or minor different from the story of Mark–and that in trying to smash them all back together into a coherent unity we show that our own desire for the text is antithetical to the impulse that gave us the texts we actually have.
What the Gospel writers have separated, let no man put together.
And this begins to form my response . . . about where my view ever moves from the messy details to the “high” acknowledgment that this is God’s word for the church, not just a human doing. My response to that is that it is precisely these humans doings that are God’s word to the church. God’s word to the church is Matthew’s post-Torah Jewish Christianity, and Mark’s apocalyptic and surprising messiah, and Luke’s seamless-salvation-history-Davidic-King, and even John’s pre-existent heavenly but now incarnate Son of God.
Honoring them as the word of God means receiving them not only as they are actually given to us, but trusting that God gave us the kind of books he wanted us to have in order to find the salvation that God has on offer in Christ. In other words, it’s precisely by not turning these into history books that I honor them as the word that God has given to guide us into the life that is only found in Jesus the Son.
He continues in a subsequent post:
I would like to put the shoe on the other foot. Why must God be accountable to our modern, rationalistic demands about how the Bible must fit together in order to be trustworthy? Why must the Bible be devoid of human labor, research, and even historical creativity, in order to be worthy of God’s voice to speak through it?
What I am saying is that we trust that the Bible we have is the Bible God wanted us to have, and that we investigate this Bible to learn how it is, in fact, that God has chosen to speak to us. I trust that this Bible we actually have is the Bible God wanted us to have. To respond to this by saying, “If this is what the Bible is then we shouldn’t listen to it” is to say that God must fit certain criteria, established by us, independent of the actual contents of the Bible [!] in order to be worthy of our ear.
It will never do to say that God must speak in x manner in order to be worthy of our ear. It will only do to say, This is actually how God has spoken, therefore if we would hear God’s voice we must accept this mode of divine speech. All this is to say that, as pious as it sounds to demand that “Bible as word of God” dictate our posture toward the text, I will not allow that confession to tell me that the Bible must be something that the data demands be recognized as something else.
But secondly, the reason why it is important that pastors and theologians adopt this stance and not attempt to force the Bible into a preconceived mold is that it is disastrous for the faith of those who then go on to get an education in religious and/or biblical studies.
A professor friend of mine used to say, “A liberal is a fundamentalist who got an education.” What he meant by that is linked to what I said in my first point. Both fundamentalism and liberalism look at the world, and at the Bible, and make the same demands. This includes the demand for historical accuracy, the ability to be harmonized, and all the rest.
Once a thusly educated fundamentalist leaves the friendly confines and starts wrestling with the data in some other venue (such as an undergraduate or seminary New Testament Intro course), they discover that by those standards the Bible simply doesn’t measure up.
The problem is not that I’m saying that “the Bible doesn’t measure up to the historical standard,” the problem comes in when we affirm that in order to be truly apprehended as the word of God the Bible must live up to this preconceived historical standard. It’s that demand, made to my right and my left, that will cause people’s faith in the God of the Bible to be shaken when they wrestle with the tensions, not the reality of the data itself.
Allowing the data of the Bible to set our expectations about the kind of history we find there is essential–both for duly honoring the God who gave us this particular Bible and for speaking of scripture in such a way that followers of Jesus can maintain their faith even when they discover that the Bible does not live up to one set of preconceived expectations.
There has been some good conversation on Jesus Creed recently about scripture. Here is a post I contributed, including some additional material I put into the comments.
Our recent conversation about inerrancy generated lots of discussion. Although the conversation about this question often becomes heated and difficult, there is one positive note: everyone on this blog is concerned about truth, the authority of the Word of God, the welfare of the Church, and the quality of the Church’s proclamation of the Gospel. In that spirit, I’d like to offer a perspective that seems helpful to me: “dynamic infallibilism.” I came across this term in a wonderful essay by Bruce McCormack in a volume titled “Evangelicals and Scripture: Tradition, Authority, and Hermeneutics” – a volume I highly recommend, if nothing else for the excellent and well-balanced introduction by the editors.
In order to introduce my thoughts, let me start with a question: is William Shakespeare’s play Henry V inerrant? Shakespeare’s Henry V includes the famous “Crispin’s Day” speech, one of my favorite blood-stirring dramatic passages (played in the clip above by Kenneth Branaugh):
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother
It also includes glorious nuggets such as these: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more / Or close the wall up with our English dead!” and “Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’”
The play is one of Shakespeare’s “Histories,” a number of which dramatize the life of “Prince Hal.” Henry V, of course, was a historical person, who really did defeat the French at Agincourt on Crispin’s Day in 1415. But did the real Henry V actually give the famous Shakespearian speeches? No — at least not in the words attributed to him by Shakespeare. And there are a number of historical problems with the plot as a whole.
Is Shakespeare’s play, then, “in error?” At least concerning the great speeches, I think we would agree that Shakespeare properly employed genre conventions. The play Henry V is designed as an entertaining drama rooted in historical events, not as a detailed “scientific” account of what happened. One could suggest, therefore, that Shakespeare’s play is not “errant,” despite its questionable facticity and embellishments at many points.
Many conservative evangelicals make the same sort of move with Biblical texts such as the histories in the Hebrew Scriptures. For example, the overlapping histories of Kings and Chronicles cannot be “harmonized” in detail, but this is not necessarily a problem because they reflect a particular type or genre of history that is properly told from a particular perspective for religious and polemical purposes.
This sort of genre criticism can be very helpful. At some point, however, genre criticism seems like a wax nose. As the Shakespeare illustration suggests, almost any text can be called “inerrant” if we allow that the author’s genre permits imprecision or literary license. The only exceptions might be the genres of scientific and technical academic literature and factual news reporting, which are among the very few literary genres in which no imprecision or license are supposed to be tolerated.
Certainly, we cannot claim that any part of scripture is a type of literature akin to scientific and technical academic literature or simple news reporting. No capable inerrantist scholar would make any such claim. But if the flexibility of genre conventions means that Shakespeare’s plays could be “inerrant” in the same sense as scripture, does the concept of “inerrancy” retain any useful content?
This comparison suggests to me that we need a “higher” view of scripture than inerrancy as typically formulated. We need to be clear that scripture is like no other text in all of literature, because scripture is the only literary text through which God reveals Himself to us in a way that is finally authoritative for the Church. God does not speak to us through Shakespearian plays, at least not in the sense that He speaks through scripture.
How, then, is scripture different? The difference, I think, comes through the dynamic action of the Holy Spirit speaking in and through the text of scripture as the Spirit’s instrument for the instruction of the Church. Without the Spirit, the Bible is only a human book. It may contain “inspiring” bits akin to Shakespeare’s Crispin’s Day speech in Henry V, and it may provide remarkable historical, religious and moral insights, but could not be considered truly theopneustos, breathed-out by God. As Karl Barth put it:
We can even hear Holy Scripture and simply hear words, human words, which we either understand or do not understand but along with which there is for us no corresponding event. But if so, then neither in proclamation nor Holy Scripture has it been the Word of God that we have heard. (Church Dogmatics 5.3).
Scripture does not “err” because it is uniquely used by the Holy Spirit to reveal to us who God is, what God is done, and how we are to live in response to God’s glory and grace. Scripture unfailingly – infallibly – directs us to faith in Jesus Christ and to living conformity with the image of Christ. However, this is a dynamic event that occurs only as we listen prayerfully to what the Spirit is saying in and through scripture. It is a theological mistake, I believe, to try to locate the “inerrancy” or “infallibility” of scripture in the organic quality of the words on the page. Rather, scripture is unerring and unfailing in its application to the believer and to the Church through the instrumentality of the Spirit.
This does not mean – as some interpreters (or perhaps mis-interpreters) of Barth suggest – that the organic nature of scripture is irrelevant. No – we carefully study the organic qualities of scripture, including its genres, cultural settings, languages, historical construction, and so on, because all of this is essential and preparatory to sitting under the teaching and revelation of scripture. God has chosen to communicate in the creaturely medium of scripture, and therefore God has limited His freedom in this regard and has tied Himself to the organic qualities of this particular set of texts. If we think we hear the Spirit saying something that is dramatically different than an organic reading of the text would suggest, we are most likely not listening to what God is saying.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that it is a mistake to tie the text’s infallible function as the rule of faith and practice completely to its organic qualities. This is the mistake – in my judgment – made by B.B. Warfield in his notion of “concursus,” a mistake grafted into the conservative evangelical view of organic inerrancy. Scripture is not “inerrant” like a Shakespearian history could be “inerrant,” merely as a function of its genre conventions. Rather, scripture is unerring, never failing, and always true, as and because it is the Spirit’s instrument and as and because we hear and obey the Spirit speaking through it.
What does this concept of “dynamic infallibility” mean for the hotly disputed historical-critical questions that arise in most discussions of the doctrine of inspiration? It does not “solve” the problem of scripture’s historical content. The organic content matters. But it does mean that we should not expect the organic content to take on a super-human quality in its own right. If we investigate the Biblical texts as human documents and find them to be thoroughly human, that is not a problem – it is expected, and even helpful. We are in trouble, however, when the Bible remains for us only human, when we do not allow the Spirit to wield it as an instrument that cleanses, clarifies, challenges and comforts. The Holy Spirit is our infallible tutor, and the instrument of the Spirit’s teaching is the Holy Scriptures, such that the Bible’s character as unique, unfailing and true derives from the ongoing action of the Spirit.
There’s an important nuance here for me: the Bible is not infallible in an ontological sense as it sits on the shelf, as though we could open it to any random page and select from it some scattered propositions, all of which would correspond to everyday empirical observations in any and all fields of human rational inquiry. That is the view of scholasticism.
Rather, the Bible is infallible as it is employed by the Spirit in the economy of God’s salvation to teach us. “Word” and “Spirit” cannot be separated in God’s action of “revelation,” and the proper “location” of scripture is Church proclamation. This nuance on the one hand rebuffs the kind of rationalism inherent in “scientific” exegesis — which rules any Divine agency in connection with the text out of court — and on the other hand rebuffs the kind of rationalism inherent in very conservative evangelical approaches ala the Chicago Statement. (For a great example of the rationalism of “scientific” exegesis, check out this article in the current edition of Biblical Archeology Review, in which any belief in divine agency with respect to the Biblical text is branded as fundamentally irrational.)
I should note that the view I’m trying to explore here isn’t that scripture only becomes God-breathed as it is read. It’s more subtle than that, and has to do with what McCormack calls the “ontology” of scripture. Probably better to let McCormack speak for himself here (pp. 62-64 of the essay):
For Warfield . . . once the last of the writings found in the New Testament canon was finished . . . revelation was complete. As complete, it was — from that point on — the secure ‘possession’ of men. . . . For Barth, by contrast, what completes the circle of revelation is the creation of the human subject who hears and receives the word of God in faith and obedience, which means that the work of the Spirit in revelation is not complete once the Scriptures have been written. To use the traditional language, illumination is just as decisive a moment in the process of revelation as inspiration.
McCormack further explains how Barth’s prioritizing of Christology facilitates an ontology of scripture that incorporates both its human and divine elements:
As the Word of God in the sign of this prophetic-apostolic word of man, Holy Scripture is like the unity of God and man in Jesus Christ. It is nether divine only nor human only. Nor is it a mixture of the two nor a tertium quid between them. But in its own way and degree, it is very God and very man, that is, a witness of revelation which itself belongs to revelation. Now, to be sure, the “union” of the divine and the human in Scripture (of God’s Word and human word) does not result in the divinization of the human element any more than it does in the case of Christ’s humanity.
McCormack notes — and I agree — that there is not a huge gulf between the view he is proposing and the conservative evangelical view. However, he goes on to distinguish the “essentialism” inherent in Warfield’s view from the “actualism” underlying Barth’s, and suggests that Barth’s insight about prioritizing Christology in the doctrine of revelation was correct — and that seems right to me as well.
Folks who lean more towards Warfield on this point usually express a concern about the Bible as a fixed standard of reference. It is a fair concern and indeed was one of the basic theological issues implicated in the Reformation. Without the Church’s Magesterium, the Reformation emphasized the primacy of scripture (sola scriptura). All of us who are not Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, it seems to me, need to have some similar kind of understanding.
But, the Magesterial Reformers also were clear about the need for “illumination” by the Spirit in order to fully understand what the text is teaching. So, at least for the Magesterial Reformers, “sola scriptura” was never divorced from the ongoing action of the Spirit in illuminating the reader as to the text’s meaning. For them, scripture was fixed, but the human understanding of the text was not fixed, because understanding came not through human reason but through the illumination of the Spirit.
I think it’s difficult for us to put ourselves back into the Magesterial Reformer’s shoes to imagine why they had to make these moves. Their break from the Roman Church was monumental — far more traumatic than, say, some theologian today losing a job at a fundamentalist school because his doctrine of scripture smells fishy to them. The religious power, wealth and authority of the Roman Church from the time of Augustine to the time of the Reformers was truly universal in the West (though of course the Papacy had endured various crises mostly relating to relations with secular rulers). They had to explain why the institution was heir to the line of Bishops going back to Peter, that was extolled by all the great Patristic minds including Augustine, that produced the ecumenical councils, was no longer authoritative.
Their views, which we protestants today take for granted, were shockingly radical: the Bible, read by ordinary people aided by the Holy Spirit, was the final word. But if that was so, how could they explain centuries of the Roman Church getting it wrong and reading the Bible incorrectly? They had to argue that in more recent times, the Papacy and the Church had become corrupt, to the extent that the Spirit was now leading the invisible Church — a new concept — in a radically different direction. They could not neatly separate Word and Spirit because otherwise they’d be left to contend with the Roman Church’s magesterial interpretation of the Word.
By the 19th Century, Warfield and others like him were dealing with a different problem: the discoveries of science and the rise of higher criticism in protestantism. One could argue, in fact, that Warfield’s view reflects a later scholasticism that downplayed (but even then, didn’t eliminate) the Magesterial Reformer’s emphasis on the Spirit.
In this regard, we have to bring in the notion of the “perpiscuity” of scripture. For scripture to function as a final authority without a Church Magesterium, scripture must be clear or “perpiscuous.” The Magesterial Reformers held that scripture was sufficiently clear that anyone could learn by reading it the basics of salvation. This did not mean, however, that all parts of scripture were equally clear or easy to understand — indeed, many parts of scripture remained opaque without lots of study and the Spirit’s illumination.
The later scholastic Reformed divines, and the 19th Century Princetonians, including Warfield, agreed with this notion of perpiscuity, but arguably they expanded it somewhat by tying it to the prevalent “common sense realist” epistemology of their day. They assumed that the meaning of scripture would be evident to anyone with common sense once the necessary background information was understood. This assumption also carried with it a certain view of language and authorship that presumed essentially a one-to-one correpsondence between the “meaning” of a text and the “author’s” “intentions.” And this in turn reflected an assumption about the “authorship” of the various Biblical texts — that for the most part we can identify an individual human “author” of the various parts of the Bible (e.g., Moses as author of the Pentatuech). In effect, they tried to combat the higher critics on their own turf, using the tools of common sense realism.
It’s debateable whether the Princetonian Divines’ views were fully consistent with the Magesterial Reformers. From my reading of Luther, at least, I don’t think so. Luther was, in my view, quite pre-modern in his understanding of divine action and language. Calvin perhaps was more essentialist, but when you start reading the Institutes for the first time (at least for me) Calvin’s emphasis on the role of the Spirit is substantial.
None of this is to suggest that Barth’s “actualism” simply recovers the ground of the Magesterial Reformers. Barth is taking a different tack than Warfield in response to 19th and 20th century liberal protestantism, and is also working from a different, European intellectual milieu. As I’ve begun reading Barth, however, I’ve been struck by his continual references to Luther and by the extent to which Luther and Barth’s thought are consonant.
All of this backround is to say that, yes, the stability of revelation is an important concern. Yet, at the same time, the ongoing work of the Spirit in relation to scripture has always been an important Reformational theme. (Actually it’s always been an important theme in Catholic and Eastern theology as well….)
So why would the nuanced view of Barth that McCormack offers and that I’m exploring here matter? I think it matters if you are trying to deal with the scholarship about the Bible’s human construction and sources with integrity.
Take as just one example the debates about the “days” of creation. If you are a Warfieldian and not a YEC, eventually you’ll have to argue that “the author” of Genesis 1 “intended to communicate” a non-literal message about the “days.” That’s a tough row to hoe, not the least because we have no certain idea about the origins and authorship even of the canonical form of the text (though there are good, but debated, reasons to believe it was redacted by a “Priestly” community later in Israel’s history). (If you want to assert that Moses is basically the sole author of the Pentateuch, then you really have to reject essentially all contemporary scholarship about those texts and retreat into an intellectual bunker, which in my mind is not an option).
If you’re more of a Barthian, you’ll probably be more comfortable acknowledging that there is no single identifiable “author” of the Gen. 1 narrative, and that the many people and communities responsible for the construction and transmission of the story — in its earlier oral forms and then eventually, probably much later, in its final redacted canonical form — may have had very different ideas about the meaning of the “days.” We understand this text as “non-literal” not necessarily because we know for sure what some “original author” intended, but because the Spirit has been working in the Church to supply more information about the text, its relation to other ANE creation stories, and about the natural world, and is leading the Church to develop an understanding of what God reveals about Himself through this text.
You could look at this under the rubric of “illumination,” but it seems to me this requires the kinds of untenable assumptions about authorship that I mentioned above. But either way, the organic text remains central and the Spirit’s action is essential. McCormack’s approach seems to me much more honest, and more true, than Warfield’s.
In my Reading the New Testament Missionally class at Biblical Seminary, our final project was to write a paper on this topic: “Explain the mission of God in the Bible as you understand it on the basis of the New Testament. Who or what is sent by whom, as a result of what causes, and to achieve what ends? What are the main implications of this divine missional story for your life and for the life of the Christian church in the early 21st century?”
Here is Part II of my effort.
My statement of mission is this:The mission of God is to be God for the world God created.God is “God for the world God created” by the desire of the Father, the sending and suffering of the Son, and the ministry of the Spirit.The mission of the Church is to incarnate God’s life in the world in anticipation of the age to come, when God will be all in all.
II.The Fall; or, The Great Turning
In the five or six-act structure of recent narrative theology, the second act is the pathetic crisis of the Fall.[1]As the curtain rises on this second Act, God has created the world as “good,” and has installed human beings, the man and the woman, as his vice-regents over creation, in the “garden” of Eden.[2]The man and the woman appear to have everything they need for fellowship with each other and with God.[3]The man and the woman, however, rebel against God’s command and eat of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”[4]They are cast out of the garden, the ground and humanity are cursed, and the way back into the garden is barred by angelic beings “and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.”[5]
The prefatory hymn of John 1 does not refer directly to this “Fall” event, but simply assumes the current state of “darkness.”[6]Paul, however, connects Adam’s sin to the “death” of all humanity and to the “groaning” of all creation.[7]For Paul, Adam, the sinner, is the prototypical “first” humanity, while Christ, the perfect redeemer, is the prototypical “second” humanity.
The Fall is the lynchpin of classical Augustinian theology.For much of Christian history, it was assumed that this was a “literal” event in human history – that the first two human beings, Adam and Eve, lived in a paradisiacal state from which they “fell.”[8]If the Western Patristic or Scholastic Catholic divines or Reformers were to speak in terms of the “mission of God,” they would have construed it as a mission to restore the paradise lost by Adam’s sin.[9]
By the nineteenth century, however, it had already begun to become evident that the Biblical story of the “Fall” cannot be simply and literally historical.Today, it has become clear beyond any reasonable doubt that the created world, including human beings, developed through an evolutionary process that involved billions of years of struggle and death.[10]Narrative theology, for all its merits, simply sidesteps this problem.What can we make of the dramatic hinge of the “Fall” in a post-scientific age?How should the information we are able to glean about the created world influence the story we tell?
This is an enormous question, which cannot be resolved within the scope of this paper, and probably cannot be definitively resolved at all.[11]I’d like to suggest, however, that the “Fall” cannot be understood as somehow temporarily thwarting God’s original purposes for creation.Rather, the “Fall” represents a misdirection of human will and desire that God had already taken account of when He created the universe, the consequences of which God Himself entered into through the cross.
God evidently designed a dynamic process of physical death and decay into the fabric of the created order as a means of producing life.There is no possibility of the creation we enjoy today without an unimaginably deep history of evolutionary change.And there is no evolutionary change – no possibility of “life” as we know it – without entropy and death. The physical constraints human beings face, therefore, are not the proximate result of “Adam’s” sin, but rather are a necessary function of the created world.In this sense, the creation itself, before humanity comes onto the scene, already bore a “cruciform” shape.[12]
But humans are more than physical beings.[13]Apparently we are the only creatures on the earth who possess the “spiritual” capacity to relate to God, to each other, and to the created world itself, in a manner somehow analogous to the relationality of God.[14]We alone are created in God’s image.[15]The primordial human rebellion against God – the “Fall” – represents our existential experience of the brokenness of this relationality as well as an ontological fissure that somehow transcends the empirically observable universe.We know that in some sense we are unique, that in some sense we are “free,” that in some sense we are made for union with God, each other, and the world.We sense that our lives should reflect the mutuality, coinherence and perichoretic fellowship of God’s Triune life, from which we were born.Yet we each experience the pain and loneliness of desires that are turned in on ourselves and away from God, others and the world.To be left to ourselves, alone, is the heart of what it means to be “fallen.”[16]
If the term “Fall” were not so entrenched, I might prefer a narrative header such as “The Great Turning.”In fact, I think this is consistent with some Eastern Patristic and contemporary Eastern Orthodox thought about sin and the Fall.In On the Incarnation, for example, Ireneaus envisioned pre-Fall Adam as inherently mortal, and Athanasius pictured Adam and the entire pre-lapsarian creation as an infant that needed to grow and develop.[17]Contemporary Orthodox theology likewise understands original sin less as an Augustinian inherited depravity and more as a continuing misdirection of the will.[18]
God created human beings with a capacity to orient their relational capacities towards God, the each other, and the creation.Humans were made to participate in the life of God.But we turned and turn, primordially and individually, in a different direction, inwards, into our selves, and away from God.The “mission” of God is to draw us back towards Himself, back into His life, and thereby to “complete” – in some sense with us and through us as well as in us and upon us – the work and mandate of creation.[19]God accomplishes this mission through His own suffering in the crucifixion of the incarnate Son, in His recreation of all things, begun with the Resurrection of the incarnate Son, and in his final victory over evil and injustice, revealed fully at the Son’s return.[20]In this way, the “mission” of God is a mission “for the world” – the second major phrase in my definition.
[1]See Craig G. Bartholomew and Michael Goheen, The Drama of Scripture (Baker Academic 2004), at p. 27.
[9] The Eastern tradition does not, in contrast, tend to speak in such terms.See James R. Payton, Light from the Christian East:An Introduction to the Orthodox Tradition (IVP Academic 2007).In many ways, the Eastern tradition’s notion that humanity has become misdirected and must be directed back towards union with God (“theosis”) informs the re-reading of the Western tradition that I am to some extent attempting in this paper.
[10] For a general discussion of the scientific evidence, see Darrell Falk, Coming to Peace With Science:Bridging the World Between Faith and Biology (InterVarsity Press 2004); Francis Collins, The Language of God:A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press 2007).
[11] For a discussion of some of the issues, see R.J. Berry and T.A. Noble, Darwin, Creation and the Fall:Theological Challenges (InterVarsity Press 2009).
[12]See George L. Murphy, The Cosmos in Light of the Cross (Continuum 2003).
[13] For a discussion of theological anthropology and the problem of the “mind” or the “soul,” see David W. Opderbeck, A Critically Realist Theology of Law, Neurobiology and the Soul, Social Science Research Network Working Paper, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1594907.
[14] Many animals possess significant capacities for empathy and relationality, but there seems to be something unique about human beings in this regard.See Wentzel Van Huyssteen, Alone in the World?:Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology (Eerdmans 2006).
[16] I am obviously drawing here on the Barthian and “neo-orthodox” tradition concerning the human condition and the “fall.”See, e.g., Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man:A Christian Interpretation (Westminster John Knox 1996).At this point in my thinking about this question, however, I would depart from neo-orthodoxy by suggesting that the “Fall” must have been a “real” primordial event.My sense of hermeneutical consistency and the integrity of my broadly Reformed theological outlook seem to require a “historical” fall with ontological consequences of some sort.But perhaps the “flaming sword flashing back and forth” that guards the “garden” represents an epistemological as well as an existential barrier against recovering the history “behind” the Gen. 1-4 narratives.For a preliminary effort to sketch out a “realist” view of the fall that is also scientifically literate, see my essay A Historical Adam? on the BioLogos website, available at http://biologos.org/blog/a-historical-adam/.
[19] This description of the “mission” of God also obviously resonates with Eastern Orthodox theology, particularly with the notion of theosis.See supra Note 25.
[20] I am drawing here from Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God:The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Fortress Press 1993).Bryan Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat also draw heavily on the suffering of God in relation to the mission of God and the praxis of the Church in Colossians Remixed:Subverting the Empire (IVP Academic 2004).The possibility of Divine passibility and suffering, of course, is a controversial one in contemporary theology, as it seems to run afoul of orthodoxy with respect to Divine impassibility and simplicity.See, e.g., Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, at pp. 155-168.At this point in my own reflection and study, I confess that I am not yet fully able to navigate these difficult waters.I do agree with Hart that “[a] God who can become, who can acquire determinations, who has his future as potential and realizes his future through ‘dramatic self-transcendence,’ is not God but a god, a mere supreme being; and regarding the gods, Christianity has always quite properly been identified as atheism.”Ibid., at p. 166.I also like Hart’s manner of turning Divine impassibility into something of awe and beauty:“God’s impassibility is the utter fullness of an infinite dynamism, the absolutely complete and replete generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit from the Father, the infinite ‘drama’ of God’s joyous act of self-outpouring — which is his being as God.”Ibid. at p. 167.For this reason, I say that God’s “mission” is to “be” God, and not to “become” God.
In my Reading the New Testament Missionally class at Biblical Seminary, our final project was to write a paper on this topic: “Explain the mission of God in the Bible as you understand it on the basis of the New Testament. Who or what is sent by whom, as a result of what causes, and to achieve what ends? What are the main implications of this divine missional story for your life and for the life of the Christian church in the early 21st century?”
Here is Part I of my effort.
My statement of mission is this:The mission of God is to be God for the world God created.God is “God for the world God created” by the desire of the Father, the sending and suffering of the Son, and the ministry of the Spirit.The mission of the Church is to incarnate God’s life in the world in anticipation of the age to come, when God will be all in all.
I.God, Creation, and “Mission”
When we speak of God having a “mission,” our capacity for analogical speech stretches to the breaking point.[1]“Mission” is a term with military connotations, which implies a discrete task assigned by a superior authority (a “principal”) to be carried out by an agent on the principal’s behalf.The agent typically is trained and equipped by the principal for the particular mission assigned.The principal typically is itself subject to some higher authority, which sets the parameters for the sort of mission the principal may assign to the agent.
A U.S. Marine, for example, might be assigned a mission to provide covering fire for members of his squad.The Marine squad together might be engaged in a mission to locate and destroy a hideout used by terrorist insurgents in Afganistan.The squad’s mission, ideally, will be tied to the overall U.S. mission in Afganistan, which in turn, ideally, will be situated within the national mission to secure the citizenry against terrorism and to spread democracy abroad.The “mission” of the U.S. as a nation derives from the contingent historical circumstances that led to the founding and development of the nation and the creation of its Constitution and other legal and cultural norms.
We cannot ultimately speak the same way about God because there are no contingent circumstances that led to God’s being.God simply is (and, in theological terms, is simply).[2]God’s “mission,” then, must in some sense equate with God’s a priori “being.”Thus, the first part of my statement of the mission Dei is the verb “to be.”God’s “mission” flows from His being.In Trinitarian terms, the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity.[3]
This aspect of the mission of God is expressed beautifully in the first chapter of John’s Gospel:“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.He was with God in the beginning.”[4]What is this “beginning?”It is not the “beginning” of the life of God.The Word “was” in the beginning the preexistent agent of creation.Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.In him was life, and that life was the light of men.”[5]
God’s creative activity, then, did involve agency.The Logos was “with” God and all things were made “through” the Logos.The Logos, therefore, acted on God’s behalf, as God’s agent.Thus, my statement of the mission Dei refers to the “world God created.”God’s “mission” involves creation.
Yet there was no imperative for the Divine Logos to create.No lack or crisis prompted God to call the universe into being, and no part of the universe came into being except by the action of the Logos.And in contrast to our usual use of the term “mission,” the “mission” of creation given to the Son by the Father is not greater than the agent.A soldier might be required to sacrifice himself to advance his mission, because the mission is greater than any individual soldier.Christ, in contrast, “is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”[6] The universe is contingent on God’s creative and sustaining action exercised by the Son, but God is not contingent on the universe.[7]There is reciprocity between God and the agency of the Logos in the dynamic of creation:all things were created not only “by [the Logos]” but also “for him.”[8]
God’s “mission” of creation, then, is not something delegated from one ontologically independent entity to another.The relationship of the Father and the Son is one of mutuality and coinherence.[9]The analogy of “mission” with respect to creation and God’s Triune life ultimately breaks over the fact of coinherence.In this sense, creation is not God’s “mission.” Creation is the extension of the Divine life through the agency of the Logos (“in him was life“) into that which is other than God.[10]As David Bently Hart puts it, “God’s gracious action in creation belongs from the first to that delight, pleasure and regard that the Trinity enjoys from eternity, as an outward and unnecessary expression of that love; and thus creation must be received before all else as gift and as beauty.”[11]
This theme is developed by Jurgen Moltmann in his creative and challenging book God in Creation.Moltmann draws from Luther’s theology of the cross, which for Moltmann “expresses the conviction that the creation and sustaining of the world are not simply works of the almighty God, but that in them God gives himself and communicates himself, and is thus himself present in his works.”[12]God’s act of creation is also a kenotic act of self-limitation, because “out of his infinite possibilities [for creation] God realizes this particular one, and renounces all others.”[13]Moreover, because creation flows from God’s perichoretic life, creation “proceeds from God’s love, and this love respects the own, personal existence of all things, and the freedom of the human beings who have been created.”[14]
Creation, then, was never a static, Platonic abstraction of “perfection.”Creation was from the beginning an “open system” with potentiality for development towards an eschatological future.[15] Eschatology is understood from the perspective of the original creation and what has gone wrong, but at the same time creation must be understood from the perspective of the eschatological future and ongoing participation of creation in the life of God.[16]
[1] Because God is wholly “other,” all theology works only by analogy.See, e.g., Stanley J. Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Broadman & Holman 1994), at p. 11 (“[t]heological systems do not provide a replica, a ‘scale model’ of reality.Their propositions are not univocal.Hence, no one system can claim to be an exact verbal reproduction of the nature of God or of the human person and the world in relation to God.Rather, the theologian seeks to invoke an understanding of reality by setting forth through an analogous model realities which may be mysterious, even ineffable.”).
[2] For a discussion of the “simplicity” of God, and some problems with that notion in Augustinian theology, see Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1:The Triune God (Oxford Univ. Press 1997), at pp. 111-114.Jensen seeks to ground divine “simplicity” in mutuality rather than in indistinguishability.Id. at 113.
[3] For a discussion of this formulation, referred to as “Rahner’s Rule,” see Stanley J. Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God:The Trinity in Contemporary Theology (Fortress Press 2004), at pp. 55-71.
[9]See, e.g., Jenson, supra Note 2; see also Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, supra Note 4, at p. 155 (stating that “[t]he Christian understanding of beauty emerges not only naturally, but necessarily, from the Christian understanding of God as a perichoresis of love, a dynamic coinherence of the three divine persons, whose life is eternally one of shared regard, delight, fellowship, feasting, and joy.”).
[15]Ibid., “Creation as an Open System,” at pp. 34-40.This view of creation resonates with some early Patristic sources, particularly Athanasius and Ireneaus.See Athanasius, The Incarnation of the Word of God (online version available at http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/athanasius/incarnation/incarnation.c.htm); Gustav Wingren, Man and Incarnation:A Study of the Biblical Theology of Irenaeus (Wipf & Stock 2004).
[16]Ibid., at p. 34.Moltmann extends his understanding of creation and kenosis to God’s self-limitation of His own attributes, including His omnipotence and omniscience.According to Moltmann, “God doesn’t know everything in advance because he doesn’t will to know everything in advance.He waits for the response of those he has created, and lets their future come.”Ibid. at 64.At this point I will part ways with Moltmann.God can “limit” His omnipotence in the sense that He does not always do everything He is capable of doing.For example, God could destroy the world in judgment in this instant, yet He refrains, because He “is patient with [us], not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”(2 Peter 3:9.)But it seems to me that God cannot limit His omniscience without ceasing to be God.If an omniscient being voluntarily ceases to know all things, then that being no longer possesses the attribute of omniscience.Some open theists address this a different way, by arguing that the future is simply unknowable, because the “future” does not yet exist.See, e.g., The Open Theism Information Site, http://www.opentheism.info/ (stating that “God could have known every event of the future had God decided to create a fully determined universe. However, in our view God decided to create beings with indeterministic freedom which implies that God chose to create a universe in which the future is not entirely knowable, even for God. For many open theists the ‘future’ is not a present reality-it does not exist-and God knows reality as it is.”).This view ultimately is unappealing to me for several reasons, in particular that an “eschatological” view of creation (which I find greatly resonant), it seems to me, requires a proleptically realized future that is in some sense already an ontological reality.Therefore, if pressed, I would opt for some version of supralapsarianism in order to “reconcile” God’s sovereignty with the “openness” of creation to God’s eschatological future.
IV.The Mission of Paul:The Ingrafting of the Gentiles and the Time Between the Times
Many scholars have discussed the apparent tensions between Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God and Paul’s relative lack of attention to that theme.As noted in our lectures, however, Paul’s letters can hardly be understood as a “later” institutional accretion over Jesus’ simpler message of the Kingdom, since the Jesus traditions collected in the synoptic Gospels likely were not written in their canonical form until after Paul’s letters were composed and circulated.[1]Moreover, Paul’s letters themselves sometimes refer to proto-creedal affirmations that relate to the Jesus traditions.[2]It is better to understand the Pauline corpus as an extension of Jesus’ teaching about the “Kingdom of God” as well as the start of a wisdom tradition about how to live in the “time between the times” when the Kingdom is inaugurated but not yet consummated.
Paul’s theology extends Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of God to the Gentiles.As noted in Section III.A. of this paper, Jesus himself prefigured the notion that the hope of “restoration” would extend beyond the nation of Israel.Paul makes this theme explicit and explores the theological and praxiological implications of this move in detail.
This is perhaps most majestically expressed in Romans 1-11, particularly in the (in my view) widely misunderstood chapters 9-11.High scholastic Calvinism, and the degenerative forms of neo-Calvinism often represented in populist Evangelicalism, tend to view Romans 9-11 primarily as statements of exclusion.In this view, these chapters are about the particularity of election and double predestination.
But the direction of Paul’s argument in Romans 9-11 is in fact about inclusion.Paul is offering here a defense of his teaching that the blessings of the Kingdom are available to the Gentiles in Christ.Romans 9-11 could be viewed as a theological exposition of Jesus’ parables and teaching in Matthew 21-24, particularly the parables of the laborers in the vineyard and the wedding feast.That God has surprisingly extended the Kingdom to the Gentiles should provoke no complaint from Israel, for God is free to show mercy and compassion to whomever God chooses.[3]
Although Paul does not often use the term “Kingdom of God,” his narrative of an alternative “empire” under Christ echoes Jewish critiques of Babylon and Rome.[4]Rather than the Hebraic concept of “Kingdom,” Paul prefers the Greco-Roman notion of “Lordship.”This may reflect Paul’s missional posture as the “Apostle to the Gentiles.”A pressing concern for Paul’s Gentile readers would have been the notion that Jesus, not Caesar, is kyrios, and that God’s Kingdom is not the Roman Empire.Indeed, this notion is the crux of Paul’s argument in Romans 10:faith in the resurrection and Lordship of Christ, rather than cultural identity, are the hallmarks of inclusion in the Kingdom.[5]
Paul’s praxiology also is central to his mission.One of Paul’s central pastoral concerns was to manage tensions between Jewish and Gentile Christians, particularly regarding adherence to Torah.This is reflected in Paul’s participation in the Jerusalem Council, narrated in Acts 15, in the Pastoral instructions in Paul’s letters (for example, Romans 14-15), and in the detailed discussion of law and grace in Galatians.
Finally, Paul offered practical instructions for Christian living prior to the consummation of the Kingdom at Christ’s return.Although Paul, along with other first-century Christians, probably believed that Christ would return during his own generation, he laid the ethical foundations for wise living in the time between times — which as we know has now extended over two millennia.This can be seen, for example, in Paul’s teaching about sexual immorality, lawsuits, marriage, the sacrament of the Eucharist, and spiritual gifts.[6]
V.The Mission of the Early Church:Faithful Expectancy
From Luke-Acts, we see the mission of the early Church as a missionary endeavor.The Church is established and sent into the world to proclaim the Gospel, accompanied by the signs and wonders of the Spirit that indicate the Kingdom of God is breaking into the present age.[7]
From the Pauline corpus, we see the mission of the early Church as an exercise of patient fellowship.The “body of Christ” (1. Cor. 12) is to incarnate Christ in the local culture, anticipating the immanent resurrection, at which time those in Christ will become like him, all enemies of God’s shalom, including the enemy of “death,” will be vanquished, and “God [will] be all in all.”(1 Cor. 15).Paul’s vision for the community of the Church is that it would embody God’s Kingdom on earth:
So, as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience; bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone; just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you.Beyond all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity.Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body; and be thankful.[8]
In the Church, then, God’s purposes for the creation are being realized, even as the creation itself “waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God” and “groans and suffers the pains of childbirth,” and even as we continue to “groan within ourselves” as we wait for the completion of God’s redemption at the resurrection.[9]
The New Testament’s apocalyptic literature takes on similar themes, but from a somewhat different angle.In the Petrine (or pseudo-Petrine)[10] epistles and particularly in Revelation, the mission of Jesus is pictured from the perspective of consummation.Here the Lamb of God is also the Rider on the White Horse, the cosmic Christ who rides out “conquering and to conquer.”[11]
This literature is saturated in the imagery of Second Temple apocalyptic, but the vision of the “age to come” is more holistic.There is no “temple” because God Himself is present in the heavenly city, all of the “kings of the earth . . . bring their glory” through the city gates, and the “tree of life,” not seen since Genesis 3, now offers its leaves “for the healing of the nations.”[12]
The primary mission of the Church from this vantage point is to bear witness and to persevere, despite opposition and persecution.John offers this beatitude at the close of his apocalyptic vision:“[b]lessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter by the gates into the city.”[13] We are reminded that the Church’s incarnational mission does not encompass winning the final victory through the exercise of temporal power.Instead, the Church patiently lives out its calling as it eagerly awaits the one who is “coming quickly,” the “Lord Jesus.”[14]
[1] I find this point interesting and possibly helpful, but I confess that I’m not conversant enough with current scholarship on the synoptic tradition to evaluate fully whether the “date of authorship” of the synoptic Gospels vis-à-vis Paul’s letters is significant.James R. Edwards’ book The Hebrew Gospel & the Development of the Synoptic Tradition (Eerdmans 2009), for example, suggests that the synoptic Gospels draw significantly from an earlier “Hebrew Gospel,” which presumably would predate the Pauline epistles.Edwards’ hypothesis responds to and critiques the notion of the “Q” source underlying the synoptic tradition.If something like the “Q” thesis is correct, that also would imply a textual Jesus tradition that predates Paul.In any event, various verbal Jesus traditions, including Jesus’ extensive “Kingdom of God” sayings, must predate the canonical Pauline and pseudo-Pauline epistolary literature, such that, in one way or another, the Pauline tradition is “later” than the Jesus traditions.
[4] For a discussion of this theme, see the chapter “Gospel and Empire” in Wright, supra Note 9.Paul does, of course, occasionally use the Jewish concept of the “Kingdom of God.”See, e.g., 1 Cor. 15:50; Gal. 5:21.
[12] Rev. 21:-16 – 22:2.For an excellent discussion of how this eschatological vision relates to the “cultural mandate,” see Andy Crouch, Culture Making:Recovering Our Creative Calling (InterVarsity 2008) and Richard Mouw, When the Kings Come Marching In:Isaiah and the New Jerusalem (Eerdmans 2002).For a discussion of the physical, this-worldly nature of the new heavens and new earth, see N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope:Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne 2008).
[14] Rev. 22:20.Would that our evangelical churches in North America could rekindle this vision and turn from our political, economic and cultural idolatries!
III.The Mission of Jesus:Restoration and Prolepsis
A.Jesus in Narratival Perspective
If the story of creation from the Divine perspective is one of Trinitarian love, the story of creation from the human perspective is one of rebellion and death.Some narratival approaches to the Bible suggest that the diversity of the scriptural canon frames an overarching, unifying narrative of creation, fall, complication, cross, and consummation.[1]This is a helpful approach, which enables us to understand that Jesus’ mission during his first advent represented a sort of climax in the drama of redemption.
This narratival structure views the drama of redemption from the human perspective:how do we find ourselves in the current broken mess of the world, and how can this mess be fixed?Jesus is the answer to these questions, which burn through the pages of the Hebrew Bible.After humanity’s fall into sin, God takes the initiative to “clothe” the man and the woman.[2]He continues to pursue and preserve humanity in the covenant with Noah, and He calls a particular people to experience and spread His righteous fellowship in the covenants with Abraham and David.
By the close of the Hebrew Bible, however, God’s chosen people, His putative agents of redemption, have rebelled against God and have suffered the judgment of defeat and exile at the hands of Assyria and Babylon.The holy city of Jerusalem and its Temple, the place of God’s presence, have been destroyed.When the exiles are permitted to return to Jerusalem, the hope of Israel’s prophets turns towards a deliverer, a Messiah, who will restore the nation and the Temple.
During the “intertestamental” period, the hope of restoration becomes ever more pregnant as the remnant of Israel experiences Greek and Roman rule.The Roman puppet ruler Herod rebuilds a magnificent Temple in Jerusalem, but for many zealous Jews, this represents an abominable counterfeit of God’s holy purposes.Some of these Jews, including the Maccabees, attempt military rebellion, only to be crushed by Rome.Others, particularly the Pharisees, attempt to practice holiness within the daily context of Roman oppression, while yet others, such as the Essenes, withdraw into chiliastic communes; and still others, particularly the Sadducees, attempt to reach some accommodation to Hellenistic culture.Jesus steps into this milieu of “restoration eschatology” and both fulfills and upsets this hope.In this sense, we can say that the mission of Jesus is to inaugurate the Kingdom of God by restoring God’s reign over humanity through a people called to be God’s own holy people.N.T. Wright and others have helpfully situated Jesus’ frequent teaching about the “Kingdom of God” within this framework of the Second Temple Jewish hope of restoration.[3]Jesus, however, reframes Second Temple restoration eschatology by suggesting that the hope of redemption will extend beyond the Jewish people and that the power of redemption lies in his own person rather than in a revitalized Temple.
These themes are particularly poignant in the events and teachings of Matthew 20-24.In the parables of the laborers in the vineyard and the marriage feast, Jesus suggests that the Kingdom of God relates to a person’s disposition towards God and results from God’s broad and generous grace, rather than deriving primarily from a national identity.In Matthew 21, Jesus is hailed as a Messiah, consistent with restorationist expectations, but his action of “cleansing” the Temple is an unexpected symbol of the Kingdom’s extension to the “outer courts” of the Gentiles.In Matthew 24, Jesus somewhat obliquely predicts the destruction of Jerusalem, which eventually occurred in A.D. 70 under the Roman Emperor Titus.
The synoptic Gospels each in their own way conclude with the theme that will be picked up in Paul’s epistles:not the restoration of the Temple, but the death and resurrection of Jesus, represent the inauguration of the hoped-for “age to come.”
B.An Excursus on Proleptic Eschatology and the Drama of Scripture
In my view, the five or six-act narratival structure of the Bible, with the death and resurrection of Jesus as a climactic point in the story, is helpful, but ultimately insufficient.From the divine perspective, the story of redemption proceeds proleptically.For God, the story in a sense startsat the end and is told backwards.The “sixth” act of the drama, that of consummation, was God’s purpose from “before the foundation of the world.”[4]The “new heavens and new earth” and “new Jerusalem” of Revelation 21 are not things God improvised in order to fix a mistake.The heavenly city is rather the telos of which Eden, the Tabernacle, the Temple, and the Church are beginnings.[5]If we fail to emphasize the “divine,” proleptic side of the Biblical narrative, I fear that we lose something important about the Trinitarian shape of the missio Dei.
[1]See N.T. Wright, Paul in Fresh Perspective (Fortress Press 2005) and The New Testament and the People of God (SPCK 1992); Craig G. Bartholomew and Michael W. Goheen, The Drama of Scripture:Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story (Baker Academic 2004).
[5] For more on the notion of proleptic eschatology, see, e.g., Jugen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (Fortress Press ed. 1993); Stanley Grenz and John Franke, Beyond Foundationalism:Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Westminster John Knox 2001).Some of the early Eastern Patristic sources, particularly Irenaeus, also offer helpful teleological correctives to the Western theology in this regard.See Gustav Wingren, Man and Incarnation:A Study in the Biblical Theology of Ireneaus (Wipf & Stock 2004).
Here is some material from a paper I had to write in my Reading the New Testament Missionally class. The subject of the paper is “How do you understand the mission of Jesus in his historical context and the relationship of Jesus’ mission to the mission of Paul and the early church?”
I.Introduction
The mission of Jesus, Paul, and the early church are about the same thing:God’s eschatological redemption of the world.Each of these actors play different, but complementary, roles in God’s mission.
II.Background:the Mission of God
Before we consider the specific mission of Jesus, Paul, and the early church, we must first briefly explore the missio Dei in which these actors participate.
Often we think of God’s mission in the world as one of rescue or repair.In this view, the original good creation was God’s “Plan A,” and human sin required a “Plan B,” the sending of Christ to save a few from judgment.This view of God’s plan for creation is profoundly mistaken.Jesus said that God loved him “before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24), and texts such as Ephesians 1:4 tell us that God “chose us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world. . . .”God’s redemptive mission in Christ and in the Church, then, was “Plan A.”Redemption was God’s plan from eternity past.
The story of God’s mission is ultimately the story of the eternal life of the Triune God.[1]As David Bosh notes, “[m]ission [is] understood as being derived from the very nature of God.It [is] thus put in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity, not of ecclesiology or soteriology.”[2]Creation results from the abundance and generosity of the perichoretic fellowship of Father, Son and Spirit.
The God who created knew beforehand that the creation would experience human sin and suffering, and that His act of creation therefore would also entail an act of sending and redemption.We cannot know for certain why God chose to create in light of this knowledge.Perhaps St. Augustine was right — perhaps this is the best of all possible worlds, and it is better for God to have created, with the result of some ultimate good, than not to have created at all.[3]Or perhaps Augustine’s classical theodicy should be tempered with the fact that God Himself enters into the suffering of creation through the cross.[4]
The problem of evil and the theodicy of creation remain mysteries.[5]A Trinitarian theology of creation and mission, however, provides a helpful glimpse into these often overwhelming existential questions.The immanent Trinity — the inner-Trinitarian relations of the Divine Persons — is also the economic Trinity — the actions of the Divine Persons with respect to creation and redemption.[6]God’s mission in creation is the extension of the shalom of the perichoretic Trinitarian dance to all of creation.
[1] In fact, if we were to follow the “Plan B” logic through the entire Biblical narrative, we would presently be in something like “Plan I,” which would encompass creation, fall, flood, Babel, Israel under Moses, Israel under the judges, Israel under the kings, and Israel in exile.It would seem that God continually engages in failed experiments, which would leave little hope for the success of the “Church Age” or even for the return of Christ.
[2] David Bosh, Transforming Mission:Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Orbis 1991).
[3]See, e.g., Augustine’s exploration of this theme in The City of God.
[4]See Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God:the Cross of Christ as the Foundation of Criticism and Christian Theology (Fortress Press 1993).
[5] For an excellent exploration of the problem of evil, see Nigel Goring Wright, A Theology of the Dark Side (InterVarsity 2003).Nigel Wright leans towards Karl Barth’s understanding of “evil” as “nothingness,” which seems fruitful to me.
[6] For a discussion of this formulation, referred to as “Rahner’s Rule” after Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, see Stanley Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God (Fortress Press 2004).
This is an excellent video from N.T. Wright. I think he’s right that faithful readings of the text must try to disentangle the text from our prior cultural and political assumptions and battles.
In my Missional Theology class at BTS, we’ve been discussing the nature and task of “theology.” One aspect of the discussion is the role of scripture in theology. Some folks think of theology as a house, with scripture as its foundation. This is an interesting analogy, particularly when we consider the creativity of the architect and the need to remodel the house at times when the landscape or neighborhood changes.
But, I wonder if the “foundationalist” metaphor for scripture is a good one. If scripture always has to be received and interpreted, and if we require the Holy Spirit to “illuminate” scripture for scripture to function as God intends in the Church, does the analogy of scripture to the unchanging foundation of a house stretch things too far? I wonder if the Apostle Paul’s frequent use of the analogy of a “body” in relation to the Church provides some different resources for thinking about the relationship of scripture to theology?
I wonder if scripture is more like the physical structures of the brain. Those structures regulate how we are capable of perceiving and thinking about the world. They are adapted to give us useful data — though not perfectly complete God’s-eye data — of the world we live in so that we can function effectively as human beings. Perhaps scripture is more like this than like the foundation of a building. Scripture regulates how an organism, the body of Christ, perceives and thinks about God and about how to live in the world God created.
