How Matthew wanted to be read and proclaimed

"How can Matthew, originally functioning as a catalyst for character formation, serve this end in our time? In order to allow Matthew to function in line with its original aim, it must be read and proclaimed not as a "striver's manual" but as a "verbal icon".

"Reading and proclaiming a gospel text rightly are not acts of moralism in which the text is assumed to be law and the purpose of reading to specify what we ought to do, utilizing guild and shame to motivate the desired behavior. When this type of use of Matthew occurs, the typical sermon is essentialy "here is how bad we are because we have not done what we ought to have done". The typical accompanying prayer is essentially "forgive us for being so bad and for not being willing to do better". The typical emotion of the preacher is impatience with, and sometimes anger at, the delinquent parishioners. Underlying this approach is the assumption that if humans know what to do, they can do it. Hence failure to do so is due to conscious perversity on our part. This is no way to read or proclaim a gospel text.

"A reading and proclamation of Matthew that fits with the Gospel's original concern to enable the transformation of the character of its auditors is one that treats it as a verbal icon through which one sees into the divine realm and God's will. The purpose of such reading and proclamation is to become centered on Jesus so as to see into another world, assuming that, over time, one becomes like that which he/she contemplates. The typical sermon, then, presents Jesus in his sayings and deeds as the embodiment of the divine presence, through whom one sees into God's heart and will for us. The sermon becomes an encomium (=bragging on Jesus). The typical accompanying prayer for such a reading is, "praise you Jesus for who you are and thank you for what you have done". The typical emotion of the preacher is awe and adoration. Underlying this approach is the assumption that humans cannot do what they know to be right unless they are enabled to do so. Hence, the vision of "the good", patterned in the story of Jesus, is presented so that it can function as a catalyst for a change of our perceptions, dispositions, and intentions. When Matthew is so read and so proclaimed as a catalyst for character formation today, it is once again functioning as its first auditors would have experienced it."

Charles H. Talbert, "Matthew and Character Formation", Expository Times, 121:2 (Nov 2009) pp. 58-59.

Martin Luther on the True Nature of the Church

But we are speaking of the external word, preached orally by people like you and me, for this is what Christ left behind as an external sign, by which his church, or his Christian people in the world, should be recognized.... Now, anywhere you hear or see such a word preached, believed, confessed, and acted upon, do not doubt that the true ecclesia sancta catholica, a "holy Christian people" must be there, even though there are very few of them.

Martin Luther, On the Councils and the Church (1539)

The Exciting New World of the New Testament

A book from the ancient East, and lit up by the light of the dawn, a book breathing the fragrance of the Galilean spring, and anon swept by the shipwrecking north-east tempest from the Mediterranean, a book of peasants, fishermen, artisans, travellers by land and sea, fighters and martyrs, a book in cosmopolitan Greek with marks of Semitic origin, a book of the Imperial age, written at Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Rome, a book of pictures, miracles, and visions, book of the village and the town, book of the people and the peoples, the New Testament, if regard be had to the inward side of things, is the great book, chief and singular, of human souls.

Because of its psychic depth and breadth this book of the East is a book for both East and West, a book for humanity: a book ancient but eternal.

And because of the figure that emerges from the book -- the Redeemer, accompanied by the multitude of the redeemed, blessing and consoling, exhorting and renewing, revealing Himself anew to every generation of the weary and heavy-laden, and growing from century to century more great -- the New Testament is the Book of Life.

Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East (1908), p. 392.

Gregory of Nyssa on the Imago Dei

If, then, man came into being for these reasons, viz., to participate in the divine goodness, he had to be fashioned in such a way as to fit him to share in this goodness. For ... something akin to the divine had to be mingled with human nature. In this way its desire [for divine goodness] would correspond to something native to it. Even the natures of irrational creatures, whose lot is to live in water or air, are fashioned to correspond with their mode of life. In each case the particular way their bodies are formed makes the air or the water appropriate and congenial to them. In the same way man, who was created to enjoy God's goodness, had to have some element in his nature akin to what he was to share. Hence he was endowed with life, reason, wisdom, and all the good things of God, so that by each of them his desires might be directed to what was natural to him. And since immortality is one of the good attributes of the divine nature, it was essential that the constitution of our nature should not be deprived of this. It had to have an immortal element, so that it might, by this inherent faculty, recognize the transcendent and have the desire for God's immortality.

The account of creation sums all this up in a single expression when it says that man was created "in the image of God."

Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Oration (4th C AD), p. 276 in Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. E. R. Hardy. Phildelphia: Westminster, 1954.

Why did God leave difficulties on the surface of scripture?

If [the Bible] is, as we devoutly believe, the very source and measure of our religious faith, it seems impossible to insist too earnestly on the supreme importance of patience, candour and truthfulness in investigating every problem which it involves. The first steps towards the solution of a difficulty are the recognition of its existence and the determination of its extent. And, unless all past experience is worthless, the difficulties of the Bible are the most fruitful guides to its divine depths. It was said long since that 'God was pleased to leave the difficulties upon the surface of scripture, that men might be forced to look below the surface.'

Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901, Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, Bishop of Durham), The Bible in the Church (1864), p. x.

C S Lewis on Three Enemies which War Raises Up against the Scholar

The first enemy is excitement--the tendency to think and feel about the war when we had intended to think about our work. The best defence is a recognition that in this, as in everything else, the war has not really raised up a new enemy but only aggravated an old one. There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come. There are, of course, moments when the pressure of the excitement is so great that only superhuman self-control could resist it. They come both in war and peace. We must do the best we can.

The second enemy is frustration--the feeling that we shall not have time to finish. If I say to you that no one has time to finish, that the longest human life leaves a man, in any branch of learning, a beginner, I shall seem to you to be saying something quite academic and theoretical. You would be surprised if you knew how soon one begins to feel the shortness of the tether: of how many things, even in middle life, we have to say "No time for that", "Too late now", and "Not for me." But Nature herself forbids you to share that experience. A more Christian attitude, which can be attained at any age, is that of leaving futurity in God's hands. We may as well, for God will certainly retain it whether we leave it to Him or not. Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment "as to the Lord". It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.

The third enemy is fear. War threatens us with death and pain. No man--and specially no Christian who remembers Gethsemane--need try to attain a stoic indifference about these things: but we can guard against the illusions of the imagination. We think of the streets of Warsaw and contrast the deaths there suffered with an abstraction called Life. But there is no question of death or life for any of us; only a question of this death or of that--of a machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty years later. What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent: 100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. It puts several deaths earlier: but I hardly suppose that that is what we fear. Certainly when the moment comes, it will make little difference how many years we have behind us. Does it increase our chances of a painful death? I doubt it. As far as I can find out, what we call natural death is usually preceded by suffering: and a battlefield is one of the very few places where one has a reasonable prospect fo dying with no pain at all. Does it decrease our chances of dying at peace with God? I cannot believe it. If active service does not persuade a man to prepare for death, what conceivable concatenation of circumstances would? Yet war does do something to death. It forces us to remember it. The only reason why the cancer at sixty or the paralysis at seventy-five do not bother us is that we forget them. War makes death real to us: and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right. All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centred in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration. In ordinary times only a wise man can realize it. Now the stupidest of us knows. We see unmistakably the sort of universe in which we have all along been living, and must come to terms with it. If we had foolish un-Christian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon. But if we thought that for some souls, and at some times, the life of learning, humbly offered to God, was, in its own small way, one of the appointed approaches to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty which we hope to enjoy hereafter, we can think so still.

C. S. Lewis, "Learning in War-Time", a sermon preached in Oxford, Autumn 1939, pp. 52-54 in Transposition and other Addresses, London: Bles, 1949.

On Being Purchased through Christ's Cross

"Is sin, man’s refusal to be reconciled with eternal, absolute Goodness, really an organ essential to life? Is it not much more like a spreading cancer? Can we say that God is robbing man of anything by restoring his health? Furthermore, if a man has become locked in a syndrome of refusal, if he refuses to keep faith with God, can he free himself from his own obstinacy? He may think he can, but in reality he becomes a slave of his ‘No’ because there is only true freedom when we are in contact with the Good, in the atmosphere of love -- that is, of God. This is something that has to be shown, from within, to the person who has turned away. What is taken away from sinful man through the surrender of the Son of God is nothing other than his alienation from the Good; what is given to him is nothing other than inner access to the Good, that is, true freedom. He is liberated both toward himself and toward God.

'Bought at a great price.' The first Christians were well aware of this when they put these two little words, 'pro nobis,' at the heart of the Creed. It was 'for us' that the Son came down from heaven, 'for us' that he was crucified, died and was buried. And this means not only 'for our benefit' but also 'in our place,' taking over what was our due. If this is watered down, the fundamental tenet of the New Testament disappears and it looks as if God is always reconciled, sin is always forgiven and overcome, irrespective of Christ's self-surrender; then the Cross becomes merely a particularly eloquent symbol of God's unchanging kindness, only a symbol, indicating something but not effecting anything. ... By sleight of hand the modern world has caused death to vanish from its everyday awareness: let us make sure that we Christians do not, by equal stealth, remove the tremendous drama of the Cross from our Christianity. "

Hans Urs von Balthasar, You Crown the Year with Your Goodness: Radio Sermons, trans. G. Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), pp. 78-79.

Translation presupposes a stable, "literal" meaning

Although translation participates in the fluidity of all interpretation and can never provide an exact equivalence, it remains possible to distinguish a translation from a mistranslation -- where, for example, the translator of a New Testament text has failed to understand that the semantic range of a Greek term is quite different from that of its normal vernacular equivalent. Translation can at best provide inexact equivalence, which is why it can never be an adequate substitute for study of the texts in their original languages. And yet, although inexact and imperfect, it is still an equivalence that it offers, rather than an entirely new text. The translation presupposes and confirms the basic stability and meaningfulness of the original text; that is, it presupposes and confirms that the text has a basically stable and meaningful "literal sense."

Francis Watson, "Toward a Literal Reading of the Gospels," pp 210-211 in The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (R. Bauckham, ed., Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998).

The Theological Riddle of History

The antithesis between [the gospel] and modern idealism arises, not because Jesus and primitive Christianity were less human than humanitarianism, but because they were infinitely more so. The primitive Christians found the revelation of God in an historical figure so desparately human that there emerged within the early Church a faith in men and women so deeply rooted as to make modern humanitarianism seem doctrinaire and trivial. The New Testament does not present a complex chaos of conceptions about God and man from which one or another may be picked out and proclaimed as ultimate and true because it satisfies the highest idealism of this or of all ages; it presents a concrete and definite solution of the problems of life and death, of right and wrong, of happiness and misery in a form which consistutes a challenge to all thought and to all ethical idealism. The New Testament presents the solution in a unique event, in a particular history of human flesh and blood. The New Testament is therefore neither a collection of thoughtful essays nor an attempt to construct a system of ethics. It bears witness to a unique history, and it discovers the truth in the history.

Sir Edwyn Hoskyns and Noel Davey, The Riddle of the New Testament (1931), pp. 180-181

On the Future of New Testament Studies

"Our journey began by suggesting a diagnosis of a discipline that is now widely felt to lack agreed criteria not just for appropriate methods and results, but in many cases about even the very subject to be studied. What future can there be for scholarly New Testament studies amid the ruins of so many "assured results" of the past? Two initiatives in particular, I suggested, may hold promise for a reenergized, common conversation about the New Testament: first, to investigate the implied readership and the implied readings that arise from its engagement with the text; and, second, to harness the New Testament's plural and diverse effects as a resource for renewed reflection on its interpretation. I have argued, in other words, that the question of the implied readers is linked, both exegetically and historically, to that of implied readings. More specifically, both of these questions are illuminated by the study of how the apostolic voices were in fact remembered, heard, and heeded in the early postapostolic period--and vice versa."

Markus Bockmuehl, Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study

(Baker, 2006) pp. 229-230

The Character and Purpose of a Theological School

We begin that effort by defining the theological school as intellectual center of the Church's life. Though anti-intellectualism within the Church and anti-ecclesiasticism among intelligentsia outside it will object to the close correlation of intellect and Church, their ill-founded objections need not detain us. We content ourselves at this stage with the reflections that to love God with the whole understanding has ever been accepted by the great Church, if not by every sect, as part of its duty and privilege; and that there is no exercise of the intellect which is not an expression of love. If love is not directed toward God and neighbor it is directed toward something else, perhaps even toward the intellect itself in the universal tendency toward narcissism.

H. Richard Niebuhr, The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry (1956), p. 107

A Hermeneutics of Trust

"To read Scripture rightly we must trust the God who speaks through Scripture. As Schüssler Fiorenza rightly insists, this God is not a God of violence, not an abuser, not a deceiver. This God so passionately desires our safety and wholeness that he has given his own Son to die for us...

"What, then, of the hermeneutics of suspicion? Is all questioning to be excluded, all critical reading banished? Me genoito. Asking necessary and difficult questions is not to be equated with apistia. When we read Scripture through a hermeneutic of trust in God, we discover that we should indeed be suspicious: suspicious first of all of ourselves, because our own minds have been corrupted and shaped by the present evil age (Gal 1:4). Our minds must be transformed by grace, and that happens nowhere more powerfully than through reading Scripture receptively and trustingly with the aid of the Holy Spirit.

"Reading receptively and trustingly does not mean accepting everything in the text at face value, as Paul's own critical shifting of the Torah demonstrates. Cases may arise in which we must acknowledge internal tensions within Scripture that require us to choose guidance from one biblical witness and to reject another. Because the witness of Scripture itself is neither simple nor univocal, the hermeneutics of trust is necessarily a matter of faithful struggle to hear and discern....

"At the same time, we should be suspicious of the institutions that govern and shape interpretation. That means not only ecclesiastical institutions but also academic institutions. If our critical readings lead us away from trusting the grace of God in Jesus Christ, then something is amiss, and we would do well to interrogate the methods and presuppositions that taught us to distance ourselves arrogantly or fearfully from the text ...

"The real work of interpretation is to hear the text. We must consider how to read and teach Scripture in a way that opens up its message, a way that both models and fosters trust in God. So much of the ideological critique that currently dominates the academy fails to achieve these ends. Scripture is critiqued but never interpreted. The critic exposes but never exposits. Thus the word itself recedes into the background, and we are left talking only about the politics of interpretation, having lost the capacity to perform interpretations."

Richard Hays, Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel's Scripture (Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 197-198.

Paul's theology in Romans

" Above all, what is noteworthy about Paul's theology in Romans is the way the pivotal significance of Jesus' death and resurrection emphasizes the character of God. The theology of Romans is theocentric because it is christomorphic. That is, the understanding of God, which Paul inherited from the Pharisaic Judaism he had once advocated assiduously (Gal 1:14), was reshaped in light of his conviction that God had resurrected the crucified Jesus. For the theology of Romans (as for Paul's theology as a whole), what matters is not what Jesus of Nazareth had done and said in his Galilean ministry, but what God had done in resurrecting him, and thus far only him. If God has done that, then what does that disclose about God that was not known before, and how is this new disclosure related to what is known through scripture, which emphasizes God's commitment to Israel? Such are the questions that propel Paul's theological thinking in this letter. "

Leander Keck, Romans (Abingdon, 2005) p. 37

Paul assumes the worldview of the Psalms

We may well find curious the way the psalmists can abstract, out of all the ambiguities of lived experience, this unambiguous portrayal of the glories of the created order. The psalmists knew famine, disease, violence, and death. And yet, in some of the psalms at least, no trace of evil of any kind is part of the picture. ... To dismiss such texts as naive would only show our own naiveté. Rather, they are an affirmation that ultimately, fundamentally, creation is good, and the Creator deserving of universal praise; that the reality of evil is not ultimate, but secondary and parasitic, a disorder brought about by inappropriate responses to the goodness of the fundamental order.

Stephen Westerholm, A Preface to the Study of Paul (Eerdmans, 1997), p. 15

On the assumptions of form criticism

"Our own conviction is that if scholars are genuinely open to the possibility that the Gospel portrait of Jesus is possible, an assessment of all available evidence in this light will lead them to the conclusion that the historical veracity of this portrait is not only possible but most plausible. To state it differently, we believe that once the “plausibility” criterion is no longer used as an a priori naturalistic filter imposed upon the data, and once we allow the techniques and standards of historical reporting/precision of the orally oriented ancient world to guide our reflection, the evidence itself offers good reasons to conclude that the a posteriori burden of proof is justly shifted to those who wish to argue that the Synoptic portrait(s) of Jesus is not substantially reliable."

Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory A Boyd, Jesus Legend, The: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Baker Academic, 2007), p. 440

Reevaluating Jesus' Ethical Teaching

"As the biographical genre of the gospels means that we should take Jesus' deeds and example into account as much as his words, so the epistolary genre of Paul's letters directs us to set his ethical teaching within the contingent context of his early Christian communities. As Jesus' pastoral acceptance of 'sinners' means that his extremely demanding teaching cannot be applied in an exclusive manner, so too Paul's ethical teaching must always be balanced by his appeal to the imitation of Christ -- and this entails accepting others as we have been accepted."

Richard Burridge, Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics (Eerdmans, 2007), p. 154.

Is Christianity True? Democracy and Tradition

The following lines from G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy do a fine job of exposing the inadequacy of one of the still very common objections to Christianity, namely, that it is old.

"In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves -- the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy; and in this I have always believed.

"But there is one thing that I have never from my youth up been able to understand. I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. ...

"If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea."

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908) ch 4