Daniel Kirk’s New Book: Unlocking Romans

This is a re-post, of sorts…

Daniel Kirk’s new book, Unlocking Romans: Resurrection and the Justification of God, is now available.

Many of the contributors of this blog, and certainly some of its readers, know Daniel Kirk. Daniel is a MDiv graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary (2000). He subsequently completed a PhD in New Testament from Duke University’s Department of Religion, studying under Richard Hays, E.P. Sanders, and Joel Marcus, among others. He wrote a fascinating dissertation on Resurrection in Romans, how Paul re-understood and re-told the significance of Israel in the light of Christ. His advisor was none other than Richard Hays, whose writings certainly molded my thought on Paul and the communal significance of Paul for the church more than anyone else’s writings. Daniel started his job as a professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary this Fall.

During and since his time at Duke Daniel has written a fair amount concerning Paul and the significance of recent scholarship on Paul for the contemporary church. He penned a helpful response to Doug Kelly (Professor of Systematic Theology at RTS-Charlotte) on the New Perspective and Reformed Theology for the PCA’s online news site. He also published a two-part article in the Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology (24 [2006]: 36-64, 133-54) arguing for a passive-obedience-only position both as Scriptural and within the bounds of the Westminster Standards. A shorter version of these articles is available online, as are google-documents versions of the original articles (1 & 2), which require some cleaning-up. Many of you have read, and probably frequent, Daniel’s blog. There, when he has time, he has continued to post refreshing communally and missionally-oriented reflections on Christ, the Bible, hermeneutics, and contemporary scholarship. His reputation as a cutting-edge but church-oriented scholar apparently grew enough that he was asked to present a paper on the New Perspective on Paul at last year’s meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. Daniel has written and published other reviews, essays, and articles in more academically oriented contexts as well.

 

Do “Texts” Control Their Own Interpretation?

I greatly enjoy studying how we understand things—whether texts, another person in conversation, etc. I thought I would share some thoughts about such understanding-theory (hermeneutics, if you will), specifically focused on texts and meaning. Does a text control its own interpretation?

 

Reflections on Faith

Over the past year, as I have been posting, lurking, and chiming in here at Conn-versation, and reading and occasionally commenting on Art Boulet’s personal blog, I have continually found myself brought back to the question of what Christian faith really is.

 

The Bible has a good bit to say on the subject, but it’s really a New Testament concept. The OT explicitly addresses faithfulness, but it’s usually in the context of a quality of Yahweh and the desired quality of his people. The aspect of belief and trust that we typically mean when we talk about faith makes its first appearance in the gospels. Jesus observes faith in the people he encounters, and tends to evaluate it on a quantitative scale: little or great. He seems to be addressing their specific willingness to trust in him personally to accomplish in-real-time salvific acts, manifest most often in healing and life-restoration miracles, which then serve as object lessons pointing to his greater purpose. For the most part, it’s not until the epistles that we get a fuller-blown explication of faith as belief and trust in the person and work of Christ for salvation and eternal life.

 

In light of this, what does it then mean when we talk about hanging on to faith or losing faith as we ask questions of the Bible? It has occurred to me that conservative reformed Christians have worked hard to ensure that faith is so underpinned by certainties that – well – it doesn’t require all that much faith. To be one of the people of Yahweh requires faith in Jesus, which requires faith in the Bible, which believers can trust completely because the church has doctrinally declared to be inerrant, wholly trustworthy, and perfect down to its very words. Start asking too many untidy questions of the Conn-versation sort, and the whole system, it would seem, is at risk of collapsing, bringing the faith of the faithful along with it.

 

This is where I’ve had difficulty. Does my faith in the Jesus of the gospels really hinge on Genesis 5 being literally true, as opposed to an Israelite retooling and repurposing of the Sumerian kings list?  On insisting as true that Samson was a historic figure and his deeds were accomplished as recorded or that David wrote the Psalms bearing his name?  On intentionally burying my understanding of the very different looks of Jeremiah in the MT and the LXX in favor of one Jeremiah only?  If these things are equivocal, must it follow that Jesus is equivocal?

 

Faith requires an element of trust in the absence of concrete proof. It is, as the writer of Hebrews puts it, “the conviction of things not seen.” Given that, to what extent does the church’s admittedly well-intended insistence on the perfection of Scripture as a bedrock of faith begin to work at cross-purposes with trusting in things not seen? It strikes me as requiring a greater measure of faith to go with the kind of Bible we’ve actually got than the kind of Bible we may have at one time thought we had, or the kind that arch-conservatives continue to insist we must have. Is there room for the Holy Spirit to infuse the believer’s soul with the truth of the gospel resulting in faith even when Genesis 1-11 is understood to be literature rather than history?

 

I think it’s time for some reflections on exactly what we as Christian believers mean when we say we have faith. Is the Bible we have, the one that God in some mysterious way caused to be written, assembled, translated, and passed down by generation after generation of Christians, robust enough to withstand detailed secular and academic scrutiny and still contribute to the creation and growth of faithful believers in the person and work of Jesus to salvation? If it’s not, what are we really saying? Is it, as the conservatives would argue, that God is less than fully God? Or, is it, as I have begun to think, that our faith is less than the faith that Jesus himself commended?  Or, is it something else?  What do you think?

 

Considering Ancient Contexts: Ancient Near Eastern Views of “Creation”

Reading Jon Levenson’s Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence several years ago radically impacted the way I read much of the Hebrew Bible. Parts of the Bible came alive in new and exciting ways, especially as I saw things charged with a new significance. Parts of the Hebrew Bible and topics within it became connected for me in new enrichingly deep ways. Challenging new ways for viewing God’s ultimate work in Christ opened up for me.

 

What did Levenson’s work do for me years back? Among other things, he introduced me to some of the dynamics and functions of ancient Near Eastern mythic-cosmic views of reality and how thought about temples, kings, creation, and “salvation,” all function interconnectedly in such views of reality…

 

“Covenant” in the Garden: Some of the Earliest Explicit References–How Does Studying the Ways Ancient People Approached God and Our Bible Help Us Now?

The Covenant of Works (COW) functions in the deep structures of much classic Reformed Theology. Though different articulations with varying nuances exist, essentially the doctrine is that God made a covenant with Adam whereby he promised ultimate life to him (and to his seed, those he represented) should he keep the covenant for the duration of some “probationary” period. Usually a concept of “merit” in some form functions here: Adam would thus merit eternal life by keeping the covenant; often understand as, among other things, keeping the moral law—another Reformed category. Sadly, Adam failed. But, Christ came as the second Adam and kept the covenant (moral law? Law?) perfectly. Thus Christ perfectly fulfilled the demands of the COW (his “Active Obedience” in much Reformed thought), meriting eternal life for himself and thus for those he represents. It is important to note that the doctrine of the COW for many Reformed folk involves not simply the notion of an arrangement (even covenant) between God and Adam, but understanding it terms of certain concepts of merit, the works-principle, (often) Reformed understandings of the Law, etc.

 

One of the (numerous!) nagging issues for many about the COW is that nowhere in Genesis 1-3 is the word covenant used for God’s relationship with Adam. Nor is it used anywhere else in the (Protestant) Bible, though some passages are disputed. I should note this is but one of many concerns among some who question the notion of the COW.

 

For the sake of interest and another reason I will discuss below, I thought I would post two of the earliest passages from the ancient Mediterranean that seem to use the word “covenant” with respect to God and Adam/man in the beginning. The winners are…

 

Jephtah’s Vow and Sacrifice of his Daughter: Pseudo-Philo’s Take

Many who read this blog are familiar with Judges 11 and its narrative of Jephthah, his vow, and his sacrifice of his daughter. For many this stands as one of the more disturbing narratives in the Bible. Phyllis Trible discusses it in her well known book, Texts of Terror.

 

Some find Judg 11.29-40, and the narrative’s lack of explicit condemnation, so revolting that they argue Jephthah devotes his daughter to perpetual virginity (or something else besides sacrifice). While I do not agree with such a reading (cleaning-up?) of Judg 11.29-40, I understand the drive to find some way to “deal with” such a disturbing text.

 

As already mentioned, one of the more disturbing aspects of the narrative for many is its (and God’s within the narrative) silence in terms of any explicit evaluative comment on Jephthah’s vow and sacrifice and its relation to the victory the Lord works. Such is typical of how Hebrew-Bible narrative often works. Understanding the function of this story in the flow of Judges, Judges’ presentation/characterization of Jephthah, etc., depends upon the subtle art of reading Hebrew-Bible narrative. But, I digress…

 

For now, I want to quote from a 1^st century CE Jewish understanding: Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities (Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum), an extensive “re-telling” of Genesis through the death of Saul. What does everyone think?

 

The Humanity of Scripture: From where does this Quote Come?

In this context, I shall argue that if it was necessary for evangelicals in response to liberal theology to emphasize the divine speaking, it is time to redress the balance by saying more about the human authors of Scripture. I shall further demonstrate that, far from weakening an evangelical doctrine of Scripture, this move actually strengthens it.

 

And the winner is…

 

What has Galatians to do with Jubilees?

Studying Paul in his ancient Mediterranean horizon and the reception and handling of Paul in early Christianity are two of my primary areas of historical research. In view of this—and the Conn-verations blog’s focus on issues of hermeneutics and context(s)—every now and then I will try to post on Paul in Christian Origins.

 

During a short reading break I decided to type out something that has been swirling around my head since I recently read through Jubilees (a 2^nd century BCE Jewish writing) again. The following passage stuck out to me in connection with something Paul does in Galatians 3.1-4.7.

 

Just to be clear at the outset, I do not think that Paul is necessarily writing with Jubilees in mind or that what Paul is doing is predicated upon some unique development within Jubilees. Rather, I prefer to view the following passage from Jubilees as a possible window in on certain ways things might have been understood by some(many?) Early Jews—thus, something that might have been “in the air” in Paul’s context.

 

But after this they [Israel] will return to me in all uprightness and with all of their heart and soul. And I shall cut off the foreskin of their heart and the foreskin of the heart of their descendents. And I shall create for them a Holy Spirit, and I shall purify them so that they will not turn away from following me from that day and forever. And their souls will cleave to me and to all my commandments. And they will do my commandments. And I shall be a father to them, and they will be sons to me. And they will all be called “sons of the living God.” And every angel and spirit will know and acknowledge that they are my sons and I am their father in uprightness and righteousness. And I shall love them. (Jubilees 1.22b-25)

 

On “Kingdom Come: The Public Meaning of the Gospels” by N.T. Wright

An article by N.T. Wright, entitled “Kingdom Come: The Public Meaning of the Gospels,” appeared in Christian Century on June 17, 2008.

Regarding common approaches to the gospel, Wright notes how approaches to the Gospels (in the West, in recent history) have tended to give exclusive attention toward either Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom (and, so, social gospel readings) or Jesus’ death and resurrection (and, so, individual salvation-of-souls readings). I appreciated his “third way,” so to speak, of looking at the Gospels. He avoids a private/public dichotomizing of these Scriptures. And he goes on to ask how the church should live out its kingdom calling–its “biblical commitment to ‘doing God in public’” (33).

I thought this was a worthwhile read for someone who does little reading these days. And I was glad to see it appear in Christian Century. I’ll be interested to hear what others have to say.

 

John Frame’s Review of Peter Enns’ “Inspiration and Incarnation”

John Frame has posted a gentle-negative review of Pete Enns’ Inspiration and Incarnation on his website. Perhaps sometime soon I or someone else on the Conn-Blog can do a more detailed post on it.

 

I commend this review to everyone.