Second (see below), I've been thinking lots lately about the significance of confessing Jesus as "fully God, fully man." For a long time I haven't given much weight to such theological affirmations (scary, I know), because I could not see how they mattered or were essential to the Scriptural gospel. I wrote them off as fourth century Greekified aberrations from (or at least unnecessary formulations of) New Testament truth. But thanks to some suggestions from I don't remember where, I came to see that confessing this means that Jesus becomes determinative for our portrait of true divinity and our paradigm of true humanity.

That is, believing that Jesus was fully God means that any picture of "God" that isn't congruent with Jesus is not (faithfully) describing the One True God. (In my estimation, this would include the Calvinist God, as well as the God who can't allow sinful people into his presence, or who must punish people even though he doesn't want to.)

Moreover, believing that Jesus was fully human means that his whole life is a model of what it means to be truly and faithfully human. We should therefore pattern our entire lives after his life - including the so-called public or political parts - which I of course think means renouncing the use of violence even in defense of justice (among many other things).

In addition to confirming the convictions that were already developing in me, Carter highlighted a totally new thought for me in this regard. It is often said that Nicene Christology (i.e. Christ as fully God and fully man) is more Greek than Hebrew in that it separates thinking about Jesus from the actual Christ of history. That may in some ways have been the case, but Carter argues the opposite: by affirming that it was in the form of a fully human life that God embodied Godself, we can never separate our thinking of God from the specific life of this Jew from Nazareth. (This is important because otherwise Jesus becomes part of some "god" totally disconnected from us and our real lives.) Taken this way, Nicene Christology, at least in theory though often not in practice, totally affirms and protects the humanness and thus the Jewishness of our Messiah-Savior-Lord.

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I recently read an incredibly important book (!) for understanding how the church has gotten to where we are today, as well as what choices faces us as we approach tomorrow: Craig Carter's Rethinking Christ and Culture. The whole book is a re-analysis of what H. Richard Niebuhr called "the enduring problem" - how Christ (and/or) the chrch relates to culture. Regardless of whether you've ever heard of him, Niebuhr has shaped the way all of us think - at least those of us who are Christian and American and have lived any time from 1950 to today. In 1951 he wrote a book called Christ and Culture, which was an instant classic and has been read as a textbook in colleges and seminaries ever since. In this book Niebuhr laid out five options for how Christ has been and can be related to culture by his followers: Christ of culture, Christ against culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ transforming culture. Among other things, this work popularized the idea that pacifist Christians can only remain pacifist at teh expense of responsible engagement with society.

Carter's book is a thorough critique of Niebuhr's work; Carter's main gripe is that Niebuhr fails to account for the underlying assumption between all five types: Carter calls "Christendom," which basically refers to a world where the church functions as the religious arm of the state as part of a unified system in which both are seen as partners in God's efforts to run the world. I'm oversimplifying horribly, and I'll try to offer a better analysis after the other books I promised to blog through, but for now I just want to mention a fe specific things. Oh, let me say one more general thing about the book first: Carter locates the dividing line between faithful and unfaithful Christian approaches to culture precisely at the church's willingness (or nonwillingness) to engage in state-sponsored violence of any kind. Very interesting.

In this and the next few posts I'll discuss a few specific points Carter made that line up exactly with thoughts I've been having lately. It was actually eerie at one point, when Carter made the very same claim I tried to articulate in the last post: "Like Jesus, we are called to live lives that make no sense if there is no such thing as the resurrection of the dead" (208). I know, crazy! :) Let me say again that I think this is absolutely crucial to following Jesus faithfully. How we talk about God (theology), how we aim to be good and do right (ethics), how we lead churches, how we pray, how we get and stay married (or don't get married at all), how we raise children (whether ours or someone else's) and everything else in our lives must be founded upon, line up with, and draw its resources from the central reality of resurrection. Stating it bluntly, to the extent that our lives and choices fail to require resurrection in order to make sense, they should not be described as "Christian."

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I just finished reading Eat This Book by Eugene Peterson, and I thought I'd share a few thoughts. (This isn't meant to be a comprehensive review at all.) I read the book for three reasons: (1) I wanted to read something about lectio divina and I'd had this book for a while (with a section on LD); (2) I found out it was required reading for incoming students at Duke Divinity School this year, which intrigued me; (3) an OCC prof told me he's using it for the class "Principles of Interpretation," which is my favorite class in all my schooling. So I read it. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed. It's not that it wasn't good; in fact in some ways it was very good, and I am quite glad that it is being used in these different settings (Duke and Ozark). But I guess it wasn't "what I was looking for" or something. I will offer just a few thoughts and reflections:

Strengths
1. Peterson emphasized the necessity of a person's character in the process of rightly reading Scripture. He emphasized the necessity of humility and other virtues, not only as something to be desired by persons who read Scripture, but more as a necessary ingredient in the interpretive task. People who aren't shaped in the image of Christ simply cannot read Scripture rightly, because to be read rightly it must be read in the spirit in which it was written. This does not mean blindly adhering to what one initially thinks the text is saying, but it does mean a readiness to obey, and a readiness to recognize when our prior interpretations are off-key and need tweaking or replacing.

2. He didn't separate devotional reading from intellectual reading. I hate it when people act like the two are not twin sides of a single coin, because (in my humble but bold opinion) neither is anything without the other. I have had teachers who speak as if there is a time to read the Bible devotionally and a time to read it informationally, and never the twain shall meet. I have also had teachers who denied this dichotomy but ended up flattening one of the two sides into the other. Peterson at least tries to keep the two connected. This he does (in part) thorugh discussing lectio divina, which is an ancient Christian way of reading and practicing the Scriptures.

3. He speaks with seasoned wisdom about the task of translating Scripture (or anything involving the use of language). He tells the story of how he came to write The Message, which is interesting in its own right, and he defends his use of everyday language by pointing out the commonness of the Hebrew and especially Greek used by the authors of our Bibles. He pokes all sorts of holes in literalism, which is good for evangelicals to hear. Not only does he dismantle the King James Version (which, sadly, is still adhered to passionately in some circles, though those circles are dwindling), but he also deflates some of the strong language being used against the NIV, TNIV, and other translations that use "current" language.

Shortcomings( Read more )