Exegesis and Theology

The Blog of Brian Collins

Review of Gonzalez, Story of Christianity, Volume 2

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s-l1000-1Gonzalez, Justo L. The Story of Christianity: The Reformation to the Present Day. Revised edition. New York: HarperOne, 2010.

The coverage of the Reformation in this volume is good, but many other areas suffer from serious defects. For instances, the coverage of Protestant Orthodoxy still follows the older neo-orthodox historiography and fails to reckon with the scholarship of Richard Muller and others. The coverage of fundamentalism does not take into account the work of George Marsden. With regard to recent church history, evangelical history is given minimal attention while a great deal of attention is given to the ecumenism and liberation theology. I found the coverage of Vatican II and the World Council of Churches helpful, but as the book moves toward the end Gonzalez’s own theological predilections become clearer in ways not entirely fitting for a broad-scale historical survey of church history.

The Sermon on the Mount in James

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Porter, Virgil V. “The Sermon on the Mount in the Book of James, Part 1,” BibSac 162, no. 647 (July-Sept. 2005): 344-60.

This article contains a helpful chart of all the verbal parallels between the Sermon on the Mount and the Book of James. It also highlights shared topics: law, wealth and poverty, speech, prayer, trials, temptation, perfection, wisdom and folly, judgment, righteousness, people (this list is drawn from the article’s section headings). Part 2, which I did not read, covers parallels organized by the categories of systematic theology.

Peter Gurry on Changes in Textual Criticism

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Gurry, Peter J. “How Your Greek NT Is Changing: A Simple Introduction to the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM),” JETS 59, no. 4 (2016): 675-89.

This is a readable article on a new method in textual criticism, perhaps most notable for being employed in the General Epistles in the NA and UBS texts. Helpfully, he includes an index to discussions of variant readings in the General Epistles where CBGM played a role in the editor’s decisions.

I came across this article via an audio interview with Gurry that discusses the article. Gurry also posts at https://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/.

Sermon on the Mount through the Centuries

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Greenman, Jeffrey P., Timothy Larsen, and Stephen R. Spencer, eds. The Sermon on the Mount through the Centuries: From the Early Church to John Paul II. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2007.

This is a survey of the views of Chrysostom, Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, Dante, Chaucer, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Surgeon, Yoder, Woytla, Boff, and Stott. Many chapters were well written. But the ethos was ecumenical, and the Spurgeon chapter was written entirely out of sympathy with Spurgeon.

Review of Four Articles by Dale Allison

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s-l300Allison, Dale C., Jr., “Reading Matthew through the Church Fathers.” In Studies in Matthew: Interpretation Past and Present. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005.

Allison argues that attending to the Church Fathers is a good way of becoming attuned to the kind of allusions that the Gospel writers may have been making to the OT texts. Though not all the allusions the Father’s saw may be valid, they raise possibilities for our consideration. Allison gives several examples including comparing Moses, the meekest man  with the Beatitude: “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.”

Allison, Dale C., Jr., “Seeing God (Matt. 5:8).” In Studies in Matthew: Interpretation Past and Present. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005.

Allison surveys several historical options for what it means to see God. That part of the essay was helpful. Oddly, he concludes that the meaning most likely original to Matthew is unorthodox (that God is embodied and will be seen) even though he cites Psalms in support of another option which is orthodox. Helpful data; unhelpful conclusions.

9780801048753_lAllison, Dale C., Jr. “Excursus 1: The Kingdom of God and the World to Come.” In Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010.

This forty-page excursus is a detailed survey of Jesus’s kingdom sayings in the Synoptics. Allison first lists the 58 kingdom sayings by corpus (e.g., “From Mark,” “Common to Matthew and Luke,” etc.). He then investigates these sayings, drawing on Old Testament and related extrabiblical literature along two line: what is the “nature of the kingdom” and how does it relate to “the world to come.” He argues against the idea that βασιλεία means reign rather than realm. While not discounting reign as part of the semantic domain, Allison makes a strong case that realm is also a signfiicant part of the semantic domain. Recently, I’ve found Micahel Goheen, Jonathan Pennington, and Patrick Schreiner arguing similarly. With regard to the world to come, Allison sees a strong orientation to the world to come. In his own words, “My judgment, then, is that ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ is, in the Synoptics, a realm as well as a reign; it is a place and a time yet to come in which God will reign supreme,” though he follows this by saying, “I wish to reaffirm emphatically that מלכות and βασιλεία often do . . . refer to kingly authority or royal reign” (201).

My own assessment is that Allison convincingly demonstrates that realm is a significant part of the kingdom of God theme. I do think, however, that he under-emphasized the present aspect of the kingdom.

Allison, Dale C., Jr. “More Than an Aphorist: The Discourses of Jesus.” In Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010.

In this essay Allison argues that the core of the Sermon on the Plain is a preserved discourse of Jesus (rather than a collection of Jesus sayings collected by the evangelist) that drew heavily on Leviticus 19. In the course of the essay Allison also highlights quotations from or allusions to the Sermon on the Plain in a variety of New Testament and early Christian writings. The documentation of these quotations and allusions along with the notation of parallels with Leviticus 19 is valuable. The rest of the essay was, given my disagreement with Allison’s critical presuppositions, a futile, if learned, exercise.

Warfield on Shorter Catechism One: To Glorify God and Enjoy Him Forever

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WARFIELD-Benjamin-B.-IpsenWarfield, Benjamin B. “The First Question of the Westminster ‘Shorter Catechism.'” In The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield. Volume 6. 1932; Reprinted, Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003.

The first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism is perhaps the most famous of all catechism questions: “Q. What is the chief end of man. A. The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.” This is an excellent article tracing the origins of this question through earlier catechisms and theologies. It also contains a helpful discussion about the “enjoy” part of the answer.

For instance:

 For justice is not done that conception if we say merely that man’s chief end is to glorify God. That certainly: and certainly that first. But according to the Reformed conception man exists not merely that God may be glorified in him, but that he may delight in this glorious God. It does justice to the subjective as well as to the objective side of the case. The Reformed conception is not fully or fairly stated if it be so stated that it may seem to be satisfied with conceiving man merely as the object on which God manifests His glory—possibly even the passive object in and through which the Divine glory is secured. It conceives man also as the subject in which the gloriousness of God is perceived and delighted in. No man is truly Reformed in his thought, then, unless he conceives of man not merely as destined to be the instrument of the Divine glory, but also as destined to reflect the glory of God in his own consciousness, to exult in God: nay, unless he himself delights in God as the all-glorious One.

Read the great Reformed divines. The note of their work is exultation in God. How Calvin, for example, gloried and delighted in God! Every page rings with this note, the note of personal joy in the Almighty, known to be, not the all-wise merely, but the all-loving too. Take, for example, such a passage as the exposition of what true and undefiled religion is, which closes the second chapter of the First Book of the Institutes. [pp. 396-97]

Jane Austen, Jacobs on the Book of Common Prayer, and Robinson’s Gilead

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s-l1000Jacobs, Alan. The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography. Lives of Great Religious Books. Princeton University Press, 2015.

In keeping with this series, Jacobs traces the origins, reception, and effect of the Book of Common Prayer. As always with Jacobs, excellently written, informative, thought-provoking.

Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park.

I would rank this, alongside Sense and Sensibility as one of my favorite Austen novels. An insightful meditation on the distinction between true manners and acted manners, the role of the clergy in society, etc. There is also food for thought here about the parent-child relationship.

Leithart, Peter J. Miniatures and Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2004.51VstTdcQkL._SY445_QL70_

This is an enjoyable exegesis of Austen’s novels. Repeatedly Leithart showed what I thought to be helpful insights. As to the subtitle, I think Leithart demonstrated Austen to have been a committed Anglican who grew in sympathy to evangelical Christians and who adroitly addressed moral issues in her novels. The book does suffer, however, from a lack of footnotes. Leithart will quote other critics by name. The bibliography provides the works, but no page numbers are supplied.

91k3cIBsWSLRobinson, Marilynne. Gilead.

Though Robinson is often praised as a Calvinist author who seeks to recover Calvin and religion for a modern audience, she often does this by pulling her punches. She doesn’t want to come across as stuffy, so the main character at times winks at ungodliness. She has a discussion of predestination between two characters, but the main character can’t bring himself to actually embrace Calvin’s view. She shies away from affirming eternal punishment. The ethos of the book is not that of the Reformation but of the Protestant Mainline.

Anderson and Young on the Identity of Darius the Mede

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Anderson, Steven D. and Rodger C. Young, “The Remembrance of Daniel’s Darius the Mede in Berossus and Harpocration,” Bibliotheca Sacra 173 (July-Sept. 2016): 315-23.

These authors argue that there is extrabiblical evidence for a king Darius prior to Darius I found in Berossus and Harpocration. This Darius fits in time period and position the Darius the Mede mentioned in Daniel. The most interesting evidence comes from Berossus, who wrote: “Cyrus at first treated him [Nabonidus] kindly, and, giving a residence to him in Carmania, sent him out of Babylonia. (But) Darius the king took away some of his province for himself.” This would place Cyrus and Darius as contemporaneous rulers. The authors say in a footnote they are inclined to identify this Darius with the Cyaxares II found in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, though this is not argued for in this article.

I have been inclined to see Darius the Mede and Cyrus the Persian as two names for the same person, but I find the argument of this article intriguing.

Miroslav Volf on Human Flourishing

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Volf, Miroslav. “Human Flourishing.” In Renewing the Evangelical Mission, ed. Richard Lints. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013.

In this essay Miroslav Volf provides a brief and broad historical survey of views of human flourishing accompanied with evaluation and a proposal. Volf’s survey begins with Augustine, for whom human flourishing was found in love for God and neighbor. With the Enlightenment God dropped away, but love for neighbor remained a part of the conception of human flourishing. “The central pillar of its vision of the good life was a universal beneficence transcending all boundaries of tribe or nation and extending to all human beings” (16). In late 20th century, however, human flourishing came to be understood simply in terms of “experiential satisfaction.” Volf concludes: “ours is a culture of managed pursuit of pleasure, not a culture of sustained endeavor to lead the good life” (15).

The problem, Volf explains, with making pleasure or “experiential satisfaction” at the heart of human flourishing is that humans are never satisfied. Even when they achieve what they want, there is more to want. “Our striving can therefore find proper rest only when we find joy in something infinite” (19).

Another problem with equating human flourishing and pleasure is the disconnect between creation and human flourshing that emerges. Volf observes, “Satisfaction is a form of experience, and experiences are generally deemed to be matters of individual preference. Everyone is the best judge of their own experience of satisfaction” (25). He argues that in contrast to this approach most religions and philosophies have argued that human flourishing is tied to the nature of reality. Though Volf does not provides exegetical argumentation for this being the correct position, I would argue that the exegetical foundation is present in Proverbs 8’s teaching that God built wisdom/law into the structure of creation and in Psalm 1’s teaching that wisdom is to live in accordance with this law with flourishing as the result.

In enunciating what this fit between reality and flourishing is, Volf returns to Augustine and summarizes his position in four points: “First, he believed that God is not an impersonal Reason dispersed throughout the world, but a ‘person’ who loves and can be loved in return. Second, to be human is to love; we can choose what to love but not whether to love. Third, we live well when we love both God and neighbor, aligning ourselves with the God who loves. Fourth, we will flourish and be truly happy when we discover joy in loving the infinite God and our neighbors in God” (27-28). Again, though Volf does not bring it out, there is a connection with Psalm 1. It is in meditating on (and then living out) the law of God (which can be summarized in loving God and others) that humans flourish.

The Role of Man in the Kingdom of God

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I find Eugene Merrill’s statement that the kingdom of God refers to “the sovereignty of God over all His creation, mediated through man, His vice-regent and image” important in its inclusion of “mediated through man.”

Scholars have long wrestled with the fact that God has never lost his sovereignty over the earth while the kingdom of God was something not present that drew near in Christ. For instance, Craig Blomberg explains this tension by proposing, “It was not that [God] was not previously king, but his sovereignty is now being demonstrated in a new, clearer, and more powerful fashion.”[1] Thomas Schreiner presents a bit sharper explanation: “[Jesus] was not referring to God’s sovereign reign over all of history, for God has always ruled over all that occurs. The coming of the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed designated something new, a time when God’s enemies would be demonstrably defeated and the righteous would be visibly blessed.”[2]

Blomberg and Schreiner are not wrong in what they say. But I don’t think their explanations go far enough. For instance, Jesus reigns now, but because he reigns “in the midst of his enemies” (Psalm 110:2) and does not yet “execute judgment among the nations” in “the day of his wrath” (Psalm 110:5-6), it does not seem that at present “God’s enemies [are] demonstrably defeated” or that “the righteous [are] visibly blessed.” We’re still in the time of “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:10).

I think greater clarity comes when the fact that the kingdom theme has its roots in Genesis 1:26-28 is combined with the fact that the kingdom draws near with the Son’s incarnation. The kingdom is about God’s reign over the earth mediated through man. The marvelous thing about God’s plan is that the ultimate human ruler over the earth, Jesus, is both God and man in the same Person.

[1] Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey, 2nd ed. (Nashville: B&H, 2009), 271, n. 1.

[2] Thomas R. Schreiner, New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 53-54.