Marginal Christianity

http://timgombis.com/2014/05/29/more-on-the-plight-from-wright/ By timgombis In Paul and the Faithfulness of God , N. T. Wright has a wonderful section dealing with the multifaceted “plight” in Paul’s theological outlook. For Paul, far more has gone wrong than simply humanity being sinful and in need of being set right with God. The problem of evil is multi-dimensional, including personal and cosmic aspects. This, of course, makes salvation multi-dimensional for Paul. The larger section of which the below is an excerpt is well worth reading, not least because it demonstrates the emptiness of the claim that Wright and others who read Paul from a “new perspective” don’t take sin seriously. The ideas of personal sin and salvation, and the role of Israel’s Torah in relation to those questions, remain important, indeed obviously vital, in Paul. But instead of approaching them through the framework of mediaeval and Reformational theories, we must relocate them within the m...

As C. S. Lewis pointed out about words, when we read old books we go to the dictionaries to look up the hard words, the ones we don’t know at all. The apparently easy words, the ones we use every day, pass by us without our realizing the very different meaning they may have carried five centuries ago. So it is with texts in general. If we do not make the effort to check out the underlying worldview, we will all too easily assume that the writer shared, on this or that point, a worldview (including an implicit narrative) we ourselves know well. The writer must really have been talking ‘about’ what we assume he was talking about, and we ignore the hints within the text of a different worldview, a different underlying narrative. Paul ‘must really’ have been talking about ‘how I can find a gracious God’, and the turns and twists of his argument must then be explained as his use of this pre-Pauline tradition, that hellenistic topos , these themes his opponents introduced into the argume...

https://www.facebook.com/lawyatt/posts/634330573287226?notif_t=share_wall_create February 6, 2014 by Lawrence Garcia No comments yet Categories: The Atonement Jesus-on-the-cross-1[1]Now, I am either a self-loathing Calvinist who loves N.T. Wright’s brand of NPP or I am a self-loathing Wrightian who adores T.F. Torrance’s scientific-theological approach to Scripture or both; either way, I have no way of offering a satisfactory account with how to bridge their approaches to Scripture accept to say that it must be dynamically dialogical. On the one hand, we must make some sense of the history, culture, and context of these texts; while on the other hand, they must be read in light of God’s personal self-revelation in the person and work of Christ. And though their works are markedly different in method, occasionally, their work overlaps, and the varying angles by which they approach Scripture shed light upon each other’s conclusions. One in particular, is their understanding of evi...

 Nov 5, 2013 @ 0:02 By Scot McKnight Leave a Comment NT Wright, in his  Paul and the Faithfulness of God , examines Paul’s theology as a mutation or reframing of classic Jewish monotheism themes (alongside election and eschatology), including who God is. This has led for centuries to the question If Jesus is God or if he is not God. The framing of that question, though, is often backward or sideward and often enough not — in fact, Wright would say rarely — from the ground level of 1st Century Jewish Christians. If Paul must have been aware that he was reaffirming the classic Jewish monotheism of his day, he must equally have been aware of the fact that he had redrawn this monotheism quite dramatically around Jesus himself. This bold claim will be made good in what follows (644). NTWright develops his christology in discussion with many proposals, including Moule, Dunn, Hurtado, but especially Richard Bauckham: Bauckham’s proposal is simple and striking...

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/10/15/nt-wright-and-the-supersessionism-question-what-did-paul-do/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PatheosJesusCreed+%28Blog+-+Jesus+Creed%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher Oct 15, 2013 @ 0:13 By Scot McKnight Leave a Comment One of the distinguishing discussions today in Pauline studies is whether or not Paul was a “supersessionist,” and the issue is Paul thought the church “replaced” Israel in such a way that now God no longer worked with Israel but with the church. To get ahold of this one means knowing how the whole Bible is to be read when we see that word “fulfillment.” At the ground level it has to do with how Torah observant “messianic Christians” are to be and how “Jewish” Christianity ought to be… it goes back and forth. N.T. Wright, in his magisterial Paul and the Faithfulness of God , as he opens the second part of the book by examining Paul’s worldview as it takes on and a...