Marginal Christianity

The Prison Letters of Paul:                                                                                                                                Equipping God’s Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement (SCRM) From the fall of Adam and Eve on God determined to win his wayward human creatures and creation careening toward chaos on their account bac...

I will interrupt the series on Attention today with this piece I hope might prove timely. In it I draw on two works: Michael Gorman’s Reading Paul and Andrew Roots, Faith Formation in a Secular Age. Saul the Culture Warrior The two main reasons Saul wanted to eliminate the church were (1) its preaching of a crucified, cursed Messiah and                                                                                 (2) its embrace of Gentiles in a way that polluted Israel. (13) His zeal in this matter found a precedent in Phineas who according to Numbers 25, was so zealous that he killed an Israelite man and his Midianite consort to purify the people from the immorality and idolatry brought into the community by non-Israelites. Phinehas was rewarded with divine approval a...

For those with ears to hear! Saul (aka Paul) was a culture warrior before he met the risen Christ on the Damacus Rd. He believed it his religious duty to persecute those Jews who were doing it wrong (those pesky Jews who believed in Jesus). Michael Gorman tells us how and how the Christian Paul was transformed. “He was most likely attempting to secure his justification before God through imitating, at least to some degree, the violent priestly hero Phinehas, who purified Israel and stayed God’s wrath by killing an Israelite and his Midianite consort (Num. 25: 6-13). According to Psalm 106:31 (LXX 105:31), Phinehas was justified by his violent zeal: his act was “reckoned to him as righteousness” (elogisthē autō eis dikaiosynēn); the Greek phrase is exactly the same as the parallel text in Genesis 15:6 and in Romans 4:3, 5, 9, 22-24. When Paul was justified, reconciled to God, his oppressive, violent public behavior changed dramatically, and so did his spirituality, his relatio...

May 24, 2017 by Michael F. Bird 0 Comments A central tenet in New Testament proclamation is that Jesus Christ has won a victory for his people, the famous  Christus Victor theme of the atonement, where sin, death, and the devil have been defeated. You find this view beautifully enunciated by Paul in Col 2:13-14: 13  When you were dead because of the things you had done wrong and because your body wasn’t circumcised, God made you alive with Christ and forgave all the things you had done wrong. 14  He destroyed the record of the debt we owed, with its requirements that worked against us. He canceled it by nailing it to the cross. However, I’ve been wondering of late, how does this express itself in practice? What does it mean to live a victorious Christian life? Does it mean having sin conquered, success in your ministries, a fruitful spiritual life, healthy relationships, onward and upward all the time? What is it? What does victory look like when worked ou...

Lent: Call to an Altared/Altered Life Romans 12:1-2 12  1-2  So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.   (The Message) Second Sunday in Lent Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Lent is about re-Altaring and re-Altering our lives. Worship (Altaring) and our response (altering) go hand-in-hand. -Hands and feet will follow our he...

Ch 4: The Covenant of Vocation            The Heaven and Hell scheme the reformers brought forward from the late Medieval church congeals into a “gospel” that Wright claims is: -Platonized: accepts the material (earth) – spiritual (heaven) dualism and favors the latter over the former. -Moralized: believes the “sin” and its punishment/forgiveness is the basic human problem. -Paganized: the solution is seen as an angry deity who has to be pacified by human sacrifice.         The biblical gospel, on the contrary, is about heaven and earth reunited in the new creation which will host God and humanity in living fellowship through the ages. The problem is not morality but idolatry. And the solution is a loving God who goes to the uttermost to reclaim and restore his lost creatures and creation.         While some versions of reformed theology teach tha...

Is Paul, then, condoning slavery as an acceptable societal institution? Of course not! But raising the question does give the opportunity to look at a basic principle of biblical interpretation. Briefly stated, this principle is that the cultural context which the gospel encounters is descriptive not prescriptive. The gospel makes a home for itself in all cultures but is captive to none. What we have in the New Testament are descriptions of how it made a home for itself in the various cultures it encountered in the Greco-Roman world of the first century. Our task is not to replicate the way the gospel took shape then and there but to carefully observe the intention and direction the gospel reshaped those relationships and discern how it can reshape ours in the same direction and with the same intention in the changed and changing situations we find ourselves in. Far, then, from accepting or condoning slavery, Paul objects vigorously to the way it forms relationships betwee...

by Peter J. Leithart 9 . 25 . 15   According to many contemporary scholars, the apostle Paul didn’t object to “Judaizers” because they taught that salvation is achieved by works. He objected because Judaizers tried to reverse history by imposing the requirements of the old Mosaic covenant on Gentile Christians. Circumcision, dietary laws, and other Jewish practices functioned as “boundary markers,” and Paul insisted that such badges of Jewishness were now relativized to a common identity in Christ. Judaizing disrupted the Church in which there is no “Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.” Some traditional Protestants regard this new reading of Paul with suspicion, partly because it seems to rob Paul’s letters of their timeless relevance. Luther’s Paul always has something to say, because self-salvation is a perennial temptation. But if Paul is addressing a problem specific to the first century, what does he have to say to us now? Can we preach a Paul who is ce...

June 11, 2015 by Michael F. Bird 1 Comment At the moment the state of Pauline scholarship could be divided into four basic camps: (1) Traditional Protestant . Paul was preacher of grace that stands in contrasts to the legalism/nomism of second temple Judaism. In some versions, this is accompanied with an implied or even explicit supersessionist view of the church as replacing Israel. (2) The New Perspective on Paul . The problem with Judaism was not legalism, but ethnocentrism. Paul was arguing that Jews need to accept that God has acted in Christ to bring Jews and Gentiles into the new saving event ahead of an eschatological consummation. (3) The Apocalyptic/Barthian Paul . Paul proclaimed God’s invasive and cosmic act of salvation to rectify and renew the whole creation rendering the old order with its religion as obsolete. (4) The Radical Perspective on Paul . Paul was Jewish and Torah-observant. He tried to bring Gentile communities into closer fellow...

Of course the obvious and most general answer is divine grace in Christ through the power of the Spirit. Let's take that as a given. But more specifically, what does Paul consistently point to as a necessary, or at least inevitable, shaping agent God uses in our lives? Here are the verbs he uses throughout his letters when when talking about this thing: rejoice in, complete, have courage in, imitate others in, not be ashamed of, share, endure. Paul clearly expects this to be active in his churches lives, expects it himself, even makes it a condition of our glorification with Christ! The answer, I believe, is found in 2 Cor.4:7: “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.” “Slight momentary affliction,” which as we will see is pretty heavy duty suffering, is what work in us an immeasurable “eternal weight of glory.” And whatever exactly the latter is, I gather it's what we want as Christians. Paul seems to make...

  0 Sidenotes What do you think? How “trendy” was St. Paul? An analysis of his life and letters shows us a very culturally-aware and culturally-engaged apostle who was well-traveled, conversant in the idioms and ideas of various cultures, able to interact with popular poetry and philosophy, and eager to use symbolism from sports, war, and theater. + And yet, and this is perhaps the most important thing to know about Paul as apostle at large, he was remarkably un -trendy in his perspective on honor and power. You see, in Paul’s world, the hottest commodity was honor or reputation. It wasn’t dying with the most toys that mattered – it was dying with the highest number of honors recognized by the most number of people, popularity through status and virtue. Sometimes a concern with honor can be a very good thing, like a business “priding itself” on fine craftsmanship or excellent, trustworthy service. However, good “pride” can all-too-easily turn into greed an...

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...

http://timgombis.com/2014/04/28/paul-the-pastoral-theologian/ By  timgombis I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about Paul as a pastoral theologian (or, as a theologically-oriented pastor). I was struck by, and had to re-read a few times, this wonderful closing passage to Part 2 of N. T. Wright’s  Paul and the Faithfulness of God : So when people say, as they often do, that Paul ‘was not a systematic theologian’, meaning that ‘Paul didn’t write a medieval  Summa Theologica  or a book that corresponds to Calvin’s  Institutes ,’ we will want to say: Fair enough. So far as we know, he didn’t. But the statement is often taken to mean that Paul was therefore just a jumbled, rambling sort of thinker, who would grab odd ideas out of the assortment of junk in his mental cupboard and throw them roughly in the direction of the problems presented to him by his beloved and frustrating  ekklsiai . And that is simply nonsense. The more time we spend in the ...