Michael Bird's Interview with N. T. Wright on "Paul and the Faithfulness of God"

The wait is nearly over. It has been twenty-two years since I first encountered N. T. Wright's groundbreaking work on Paul while researching for my Ph.D. dissertation on Paul's teaching on justification in the letter to the Galatians. A year later he launched his "Christian Origins and the Question of God" series with the formidable The New Testament and the People of God, a series whose scope would more than match the work of Rudolf Bultmann a couple of generations earlier. Subsequent volumes in the series (Jesus and the Victory of God [1996], The Resurrection of the Son of God [2003]) have not failed to meet expectations, manifesting both rigorous historical method and an orthodox (though certainly not always traditionalist) theological sensibility. All along, however, my anticipation has been focused on the proposed fourth volume in the series, his so-called "big book on Paul," a work on which he had been working ever since his 1980 Oxford D.Phil. thesis entitled "Romans and the People of God."

Well, the "big book" is nearly here. Jointly published by SPCK in the UK and Fortress Press here in the US, Paul and the Faithfulness of God will make its appearance in November, just in time for the annual conference of the Society of Biblical Literature. And a "big book" it certainly is. More than 1700 pages spread over two volumes, it appears destined to be the go-to volume on the Apostle's thought for years to come.

In anticipation of its release, Professor Wright was interviewed by Michael Bird, an informative video of which was published earlier today by Bird at his blog Euangelion. Those with a familiarity of Wright's work on Paul will not be surprised that the work situates the Apostle within the context of his place in Judaism, the Hellenistic culture, and the overarching Roman Empire. Nor will they be surprised that Wright explains Paul's thought as a reworking of the Jewish themes of monotheism, election, and eschatology through the grid of the Christian experience of Christ and the Spirit. One further rumor I had heard is also confirmed. Rather than structuring the Apostle's theology around various topoi derived from systematic theology or, as Jimmy Dunn famously did, using Romans as a template, Wright begins with the smallest letter of the Pauline corpus, the intensely personal Philemon, finding it to be a window through which to gaze at the massive edifice of the Apostle's thought.

To whet your appetite (if you don't have one already) watch Bird's video. This book promises to be a game changer. I can taste it already!

Are Evangelicalism and Rigorous Scholarship Mutually Exclusive (Part 2)?

A couple of weeks ago I raised the question, prompted by Peter Enns's recollections of the late James Barr, as to the compatibility of evangelicalism and the type of rigorous scholarship demanded in academia. Barr, of course, the erstwhile Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, was a pointed critic of evangelicalism, not least the academic pretensions it developed in the decades immediately after World War II. Indeed, his little book, Fundamentalism, originally published in 1977, was alternately infuriating and enlightening to me as I began my academic and decidedly evangelical theological education in the early '80s. For his part, Enns has also raised the question more than once, no doubt precipitated by his own experience of being forced out of his position at Westminster Seminary due to the controversy stirred up by his own little book, Incarnation and Inspiration.

The issue, at one level, is fairly straightforward: Are evangelical presuppositions about the nature of scripture compatible with the unfettered free inquiry that is foundational to academic research? To put it differently, do prior commitments to biblical "inerrancy" or to pre-critical confessions alter the conditions for "playing the game" by ruling out certain potential conclusions a priori? At another level, however, the question becomes a little more complex for the simple reason that not all "evangelicalisms" are created equal (see my earlier posts here and here). For Barr, as the title of his book indicates, "evangelicalism" is but another name for the dreaded "fundamentalism," or at least what today might be deemed the "neo-fundamentalism" of certain elements of the Evangelical Theological Society and the resurgent Southern Baptist Convention of Al Mohler. This indeed is the regnant perception of evangelicalism in the popular imagination, at least here in America, where such "evangelicals" are numerically plentiful and wield enormous ecclesial influence. I know this movement well, having grown up in it and taught for eight years at an institution that considers itself a "premier" college of its type within those circles.

But such "evangelicalism" is emphatically not the only type worthy of claiming the name. There is, for one, British evangelicalism, many of whose scholars such as F. F. Bruce, I. Howard Marshall, Donald Guthrie, and Dick France, were well respected in the international scholarly community. Indeed, Barr knew of such men, and respected them too, especially his fellow Scot Bruce, who remains the only person to have been elected President of both the Societies of Old Testament and New Testament Studies. Barr may have viewed Bruce as an exception that proved his rule, considering the latter's advocacy of three Isaiahs and a Maccabean date for the Book of Daniel. And so he relegated discussion of Bruce to a footnote. But Bruce was a classicist and historian, not a theologian—someone once told me they considered Bruce "neo-orthodox" rather than evangelical, but such doesn't ring true; Bruce and Barth (let alone Brunner) hardly breathe the same intellectual air, and the whiff of dialectic rarely if ever may be discerned in his writings—and he treated the biblical text as one might expect a historian and linguist to do: with utmost respect and critical acumen. While in seminary I was privileged to listen to a series of lectures he delivered on the letter to the Colossians and attend a dinner the New Testament department held in his honor. One student had the temerity to ask why he didn't hold to "inerrancy." His reply was classic: that simply wasn't an issue in his circles, be they ecclesial (and he was a member of a Plymouth Brethren assembly!) or academic [On a related note, I just read a prepublication release from Zondervan about a forthcoming book entitled Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy; one chapter is written by the Australian Michael Bird, arguing that inerrancy is not necessary for evangelicalism outside the USA.]. One need only read Bruce's great commentaries on Galatians, Acts, and Hebrews, however, to realize the man was an evangelical, with a respect for the text interpreted historically and a deep commitment to Christ. The same may be said for today's preeminent British New Testament scholar, N. T. Wright, despite the ignominy attached to his name by many, though certainly not all, American evangelicals. Needless to say, such a broader understanding of what constitutes a genuine evangelical is present in certain circles of America as well. 

The real issue is whether or not rigorous scholarship can coexist with the more stridently conservative type of evangelicalism that undoubtedly exists in America and, to a lesser degree, elsewhere.  For example, last week I came across a blog post written by a man called Clint Archer at The Cripplegate entitled "How to Spot a Liberal Seminary." One of the defining marks of a so-called "liberal" seminary was its propagation of the view, dominant in New Testament scholarship since the 19th century, that Mark was the earliest of the canonical Gospels to have been written. This view is deemed "liberal" because it is supposedly based on an "evolutionary" view of the Gospels: Matthew, being more complex than Mark, must therefore be later and secondary. But, in Archer's view, such "liberalism" fails to take into consideration "external" evidence (Papias, I'm guessing) for Matthew's priority, not to mention its author's having been an eyewitness of the events. In any case, all of this is irrelevant, for the verbal similarities between the two Gospels are, according to Archer, to be attributed to their each being inspired by the same Holy Spirit. Failing to account for that is simply evidence of an insufficient commitment to biblical inspiration.

Now, as one who took a doctoral seminar in the Synoptic Gospels, read Streeter, Farmer, Tuckett, and countless others, and dutifully colored his Nestle-Aland Synopsis to compare verbal similarities and differences between Matthew, Mark, and Luke, I can say that the one critical position on which I would stake my reputation as a New Testament scholar is that of Markan priority. The so-called Synoptic Problem is exceedingly complex, but a literary relationship at some stage is well nigh demanded by the evidence, and once redactional issues are taken into consideration, Markan priority becomes, in my view, all but certain. The basis for Archer's view is instructive: tradition (!) and an a priori understanding of the entails of biblical inspiration: why posit "plagiarism," so the "argument" goes, when similarities can be attributed to "inspiration" or "divine revelation," which obviate the necessity for such "liberal," "naturalistic" explanations as literary dependence (despite Luke's claim [Luke 1:1-4] to have consulted many such written and oral sources!). Simply put, it is the naive assumption of what "inspiration" and "inerrancy" must entail, rather than measured literary or historical argument, that determines the conclusion at which Archer arrives. Let me be clear: it is not Archer's conclusion per se—indeed, there are some who argue for a purely oral approach to the Gospel traditions, and even more who posit Matthean priority—but the means by which he arrives at it, that renders his approach incompatible with rigorous scholarship. And Archer's approach is hardly unique. It is duplicated by countless preachers and writers on that and many other issues as well, not least those of cosmogony and human origins based on the creation accounts of Genesis 1-2. Whenever someone claims that the earth must have been created in six literal days thousands, not billions, of years ago, and claims that any "compromise" on the issues of the age of the earth and/or biological evolution is disallowed by a commitment to biblical inerrancy, that person is speaking as an ideologue rather than a scholar. He or she may be right or wrong (I have my suspicions), but the fact remains that historical and hermeneutical work has been short-circuited by theological presuppositions which simply cannot be assumed without further ado. The fact that such a person operates with presuppositions, of course, is not the problem. We all do. Such cannot be helped, and the desire to operate without them is both naive and misguided. Nevertheless, presuppositions—in particular, secondary assumptions about what kind of book the Bible must be and a modernistic view of what inerrancy must look like—simply cannot be made to screen out unwanted and inconvenient evidence willy-nilly. We are, of course, told to love God with our minds as well as our hearts.

Most evangelicals, however, are not so naive and unsophisticated as the previous example might suggest. This is particularly true of so-called "confessional evangelicals" who trace their roots to the great Protestant confessions of the 16th and 17th centuries, whose tradition of learning runs quite deep. Nevertheless, commitment to such pre-critical confessions brings with it challenges, not to mention temptations, of its own. Back in my seminary days I was struck by the words of Charles Cranfield with reference to John Murray's NICNT commentary on Romans: "Since the beginning of 1960 we have had Murray's two-volume commentary, which is admirable in its learning and carefulness, and often sound in its judgments, but somehow leaves the impression, at least in the mind of one student, that the author did not offer very serious resistance to the temptation, which of course is common to us all, to conduct inquiries with one's mind already made up that the answer to emerge shall be the one which suits one's own preconceptions" (A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans [2 vols.: ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1973-79] 1:44). Murray, of course, was a Highland Scot Free Presbyterian who served for decades as Professor of Systematic Theology at Westminster Seminary, and who, as one might expect, gave whole-hearted allegiance to the 1646 Westminster Confession. Hence a traditionalist spiritual descendant of John Knox would find little with which to quibble with Murray's exposition (though, as a good Scot, Mr. Murray did have a mind of his own and occasionally would come to surprising conclusions; indeed, a friend of mine once told me the story of an Orthodox Presbyterian elder who warned a ministerial candidate to be "careful" with Murray because he was too much of a "biblicist;" ironies always abound in conservative Protestantism). His commentary indeed is, in my view, the best ever to come from the pen of a Presbyterian. Yet Cranfield was right. At times the only explanation I can give for his interpretative decisions and theological deductions is their amenability to his antecedent theological commitments.

Therein lies the problem with strict confessionalism. The adherent confesses that his or her preferred document contains the system of doctrine taught in the Bible. Not only does this tend to promote a view of the Bible as a repository of "timeless" propositional truths, it tends to blind the confessor to the historical "situatedness" of the confession itself and thus illegitimately promote the confession as a filter through which to read the biblical text itself. The confession, in this scenario, provides not merely the answer as to what to believe, but also the environment that determines what questions to ask from the text. 

In no issue have such problems come to the fore in recent decades than in the massive kerfuffle in evangelical and confessional circles over the doctrine of justification precipitated by the so-called New Perspective on Paul. The great Protestant confessions, as one might expect, consolidated the legacy of such Reformers as Martin Luther (Augsburg) and John Calvin (Westminster), both of whom read Galatians and Romans through the lens provided by their struggles against semi-Pelagian medieval Roman Catholicism. New Testament scholars associated with the NPP, however, prompted by the revolution in scholarly understanding of Second Temple Judaism caused by Ed Sanders's massive Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), began to understand St. Paul's conflict with the Jews and certain Jewish Christians of his day differently,viz., less as a struggle against legalistic "works righteousness" than against a "cultural imperialism" that insisted that membership in God's people was confined to those who attached themselves to the physical seed of Abraham and lived accordingly. Such a way of posing the issues is somewhat problematic, but the fact remains that supporters of various permutations of the NPP, from Jimmy Dunn to N. T. Wright to John Barclay to Richard Hays to Bruce Longenecker, all argue that the classic Protestant position was a legitimate application or contextualization of the apostle's teaching to the struggles of their time. Never mind. In certain confessionalist circles (and, as I know from experience, certain supposedly nonconfessionalist ones), favorability to the NPP is a career threatening offense. Classic here is the PCA's Report of the Ad Interim Study Committee on Federal Vision, New Perspective, and Auburn Avenue Theology. A newcomer to the debates would, upon reading this report compiled by reputable theologians, churchmen, and church historians, be excused if he or she wondered how in the world any "Reformed" Christian could be tempted to agree with such "dangerous" fellows. On the other hand, any trained academician specializing in Pauline studies would be hard pressed to recognize the real views of such men as Wright in the report's condemnation of his supposed views. The only explanation I can offer for this is the blinding capacity of the confession the committee members held to be the "system of doctrine" taught in the Bible. Not only did the Westminster Confession control what they believe to be absolutely true, it also colored how they understood the writings of contemporary scholars as well.

Now this does not mean that confessions are to be despised or ignored. It doesn't even mean that "confessionalism" per se is a bad idea. Yet it does call into question the way many Christians hold to their confessions. These confessions (even the Westminster) were documents of their times, colored by the conflicts their authors were fighting at the time of their drafting. They are, in a very real sense, tradition. Despite reflexive Protestant disdain for such, that is not a bad thing. All of us stand in a tradition or traditions. But, like all traditions, they must be subjest to the basic Protestant principle of sola scriptura, according to which Scripture, properly and historically interpreted, must be allowed to have the final word. A confessionalism which holds its traditions respectfully, but lightly, is far to be preferred to the type which acts as if its preferred confession, in effect, shares the inerrancy only legitimately posited (in whatever way) of Scripture itself.

Are evangelicalism and rigorous biblical scholarship mutually exclusive? The answer I would give is "Not necessarily." Some forms of evangelicalism—naive, uncritical fundamentalism and an overly strict confessionalism—are not amenable to such scholarship, at least as "scholarship," with its implications of free inquiry, is commonly understood in the academy. Strict confessionalism may be characterized by vast learning (especially in the areas of church history and systematic theology), but, as Pete Enns suggests, all too often treats biblical studies as a branch of theological apologetics.

Nevertheless, genuine evangelicalism, as I have argued, does not necessarily proceed on the assumption that the correct "answers" have already been given and that "inerrancy" or even "inspiration" dictate how we must understand what the Bible has to say. Indeed, as Christians we can only interpret the Bible we have been given, not the one we wish we had. And that means interpreting it literarily and historically, without illegitimately delimiting how it "must," a priori, be interpreted. If the Bible is indeed, as I—an evangelical, after all— believe it to be, then such rigorous literary and historical work is only to be welcomed and pursued relentlessly and fearlessly. And the work of such men as John Walton, Bruce Waltke, Fred Bruce, Darrell Bock, Scot McKnight, Doug Moo, Craig Keener, Ben Witherington, and Tom Wright has shown empirically that such labors are not in vain.

What about more overt "critical" scholarship? To that question I will devote my next, and last, post on this issue.

The March on Washington Fifty Years Later

March on Washington, 28 August 1963
(Image in Public Domain, courtesy of the National Archives)

Today marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most significant events of 20th century America, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where upwards of 300,000 people, more than three-quarters of whom were African Americans, gathered for what must, in retrospect, be judged to be the signature event of the Civil Rights Movement. Today this event is known primarily as the occasion when Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, the thrilling rhetoric and moral power of which still resonates to this day (for the text of his speech and my ruminations on it, see my post here).

The event is justly famous. But what has been its lasting impact? What lasting change, if any, did it actually effect? I ask these questions in the realization that some progress has been made. After all, when my dad and mom moved from North Jersey to Dallas in 1950 to attend seminary, the Texas city still had "colored-only" water fountains and rest rooms. Northern cities like the beloved Philadelphia of my youth were de facto segregated due to mass white flight out of the inner city industrial neighborhoods to newly-developed areas of the city's Great Northeast and the lily-white, wealthy suburbs. The triple whammy of white flight, post-World War II deindustrialization, and redlining conspired to make life miserable and devoid of hope for the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who just decades before had migrated to the city from the Jim Crow South to work in the thousands of factories in what was then the "Workshop of America." Even the media—dismissed as hopelessly "liberal" by the right-wing masses—could hardly mask their contempt for Dr. King's cause, as may be seen in the August 25, 1963 edition of Meet the Press, recorded just three days before the famous march.

Thankfully such overt discrimination and prejudice are legally disallowed and societally frowned upon in today's America. Just ask Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Riley Cooper, who was caught on videotape using the "n-word" at a Kenny Chesney concert in Camden, New Jersey on 31 July. While fined for his vile utterance, at least he kept his job, which is more than can be said about former Eagles defensive end Hugh Douglas, who was fired from his position at ESPN when, a mere fortnight later, he used the same expression at an Orlando nightclub. Use of racially-offensive epithets is clearly, and rightly, unacceptable in America today.

Yet the problem persists. Joblessness, poverty, and incarceration still plague the black community. Moreover, large numbers of America's majority whites still haven't got with the program. While explicitly racist speech is strongly condemned in the public square, the anonymity provided by the internet encourages cowardly racists to spew their ignorant vitriol in the comments to numerous articles on philly.com, which I read every day to remind myself, if such were needed, of inveterate human sinfulness. And, sad to say, Riley Cooper is unique only in the sense that he was caught in using hateful speech. Indeed, only a month earlier a man named Darren Walp of Ridley Park, PA was arrested after shouting racial epithets and waving a Confederate battle flag after scaling the fence of an adjacent apartment complex during a Toby Keith concert in Camden. [Is it mere coincidence that both these incidents occurred in the context of a country music concert? One wonders. And the mere sight of a displayed Confederate flag, particularly in the north, always gets my dander up.] 

One must conclude that Dr. King's dream, fueled in part by the glorious vision of the Hebrew prophets, remains only partially fulfilled. And that is to be expected. Dr. King, after all, used the glorious words of Isaiah 40 ("Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all people will see it together.") to describe his dream and the famous exhortation of Amos ("we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.") to give specific content to it. As I have often emphasized, the New Testament consistently presents what has been described as "inaugurated eschatology." Yes, the Christ event brought with it an initial fulfillment of the covenant promises of the Old Testament. But their complete realization, and the ultimate transformation of both humanity and creation itself awaits the consummation of the kingdom subsequent to Jesus' triumphant return. In the meantime, humanity remains fatally flawed by virtue of the sin which resides in each of us [Indeed, as I often say, "total depravity" is the only empirically demonstrable "Calvinistic" doctrine.] In the meantime, it is incumbent on us who name the name of Christ to work to embody and promote (with love!) the priorities and perspectives of the kingdom until he comes, in the sure hope that at that time justice will run down like waters and all peoples will join together in praise of the one who loved them and gave himself for them.

I leave you with two videos: first, Dr. King's stirring speech itself (which really must be watched and heard to experience its power), and second, the performances by one of my musical heroes, Bob Dylan, at the march.

Are Evangelicalism and Rigorous Scholarship Mutually Exclusive (Part 1)?

Over the past couple of weeks I have been trying to catch up on some blog reading while working an inconvenient shift disadvantageous to writing or sustained thinking. This weekend I ran across a post written in July by Pete Enns entitled "James Barr on Evangelical Biblical Scholarship." Barr, of course, was a famous Old Testament scholar and linguist from Scotland, whose first major work, The Semantics of Biblical Language, published in 1961, has influenced generations of biblical scholars with its devastating expose of the manifold linguistic fallacies that served as the stock-in-trade for many a minister or Bible teacher. In his later academic career he served as the replacement Doctor-father of my own friend and teacher, Buist Fanning, at Oxford after the untimely demise of G. B. Caird. Barr also was no friend of fundamentalism ... or of an evangelicalism which, despite its smoothing of fundamentalism's hard edges, he nevertheless saw as a kindlier, more learned variant of the same thing.

I first came across the second edition of Barr's famous Fundamentalism (1981) in the early years of my own graduate theological education at a very conservative American seminary. At the time I was taken aback by what I considered the stridency of his views. Over the years, however, I have come to see insight in many of his accusations—evangelical "gains" in scholarly quality balanced by an intensification of (neo-) fundamentalist obscurantism, the prevalence of academic witch hunts in evangelical schools, undue influence of pseudo-intellectual gurus, an undifferentiated emphasis on the role of presuppositions, an unseemly predilection for playing power games—despite his penchant for what I view as uncharitable over-generalization in those very accusations.

For his part, Enns's post contributes to a prominent thread in his Patheos blog, one with obvious ties to his own experience of banishment from a very conservative and confessional seminary. Representative of these is his post from 3 January of this year, entitled "Can Evangelical Colleges and Seminaries Be Truly Academic Institutions?" There Enns asks a trenchant question: "Can an institution claim to be fundamentally academic while at the same time centered on defending certain positions that are largely, if not wholly, out of sync with generations of academic discourse outside of evangelical boundaries? (emphasis his)" Later he asks another question whose applicability to many an "evangelical" institution with which I have been associated is transparently a propos: "At what point, if ever, would it show more integrity for a school to say the following: “Our center of gravity is not academic integrity or engagement but the defense of our theology by either mining the academic discourse of biblical scholarship where useful or condemning it where harmful. We do not see ourselves as primarily an academic body but an ecclesial one.” Should such institutions publicly acknowledge that they are centers of theological apologetics and therefore not places of academic training? (emphasis his).

The problems, as I see them, are basically two, and are interrelated. First, how can an evangelical scholar or institution committed to biblical "inerrancy" and/or an ecclesial confession claim to operate within an environment committed to free inquiry (i.e., the fundamental environmental condition of academic investigation)? Do not such prior commitments make any supposed "academic" or "scholarly" investigations suspect in that they greatly delimit the potential results of the given inquiries? How is one to suppose the conclusions of such scholars are not motivated more by prior religious commitments than they are to the preponderance of the relevant evidence?

Second, are the "presuppositions" of evangelical and non-evangelical scholars both to be granted equal legitimacy? In other words, are the "unorthodox" conclusions of many non-evangelicals due simply to the problematic assumptions they bring to the inquiry a priori? Are all presuppositions to be granted equal respect, or must the scholar provide at least some methodological ground for those he or she brings to the table? This is an issue brought forward by another thoughtful post published earlier this month by Joseph Kelly entitled "Is Evangelical Scholarship Academically Rigorous?" To Kelly, evangelical scholars too often play the presupposition trump card when they should rather have applied more methodological rigor to their investigations. No doubt he is right on that score.

All who know me—indeed, all who simply read the "about me" on my blog—know that I am committed both to a theological and a critical interpretative approach to Scripture. Yet I am acutely and existentially aware of the difficulties associated with this dual task, not least for professional scholars whose scholarly views lead to conflict and ultimate severance of relationship with the conservative institutions who employed them. My answer to the question I posed in this post's title is a qualified "yes." But, as I hope to show, the matter is not a simple one. Presuppositions, personal temperaments, and professional ambitions all play a role in the matter and muddy the waters considerably. No one—not conservatives or "evangelicals," not "liberals" or "progressives"—are immune from these factors and pressures, and thus none can really claim the moral high ground on the subject.

What do you think about this? Can evangelicals legitimately claim to do rigorous academic scholarship?

James D. G. Dunn on the New Testament and Infant Baptism

Over the past few months The Gospel Coalition has published a few posts on the subject of "Why I Changed My Mind about Infant Baptism." Two such posts have been written by prominent PCA pastors Sean Michael Lucas (First Presbyterian Church, Hattiesburg, Mississippi) and Liam Goligher (Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia), both of whom were nurtured in the faith in credo-baptist circles in America and Scotland, respectively.

Not surprisingly, what ultimately precipitated their change of mind was a discovery of the doctrines of grace, which led to a reconsideration of other elements of classic Reformed theology. Goligher indeed found the ultimate basis of paedo-baptism in the so-called covenant of grace, the organizing principle of the classic Reformed theology of his native Scotland and the Presbyterian churches emanating from it [On a side note, he contrasts this with the classic dispensationalism in which he was reared, but—as is all too common with Reformed writers—he badly misrepresents what that system believes about salvation through the ages. Considering that Charles Ryrie's Dispensationalism Today[i] was published in 1965, such misrepresentation really is inexcusable. And I write this as one who, though raised in that classic dispensationalism, no longer hold to its distinctives.] Interestingly, both Lucas and Goligher were led to reconsider their previous views about baptism after being influenced strongly by the system of Reformed theology to which they had been attracted by their graduate studies in theology, not as a result of biblical exegesis per se.

As a soteriological Calvinist reared in classic dispensationalism, I understand the pull Reformed theology exerts acutely. Baptists, at least here in America, are all too often characterized by "easy believism," anti-intellectualism, and a stifling legalism that measures piety at least partly by the avoidance of trivial external "worldly" behaviors. Even worse, so-called "Bible Churches," "Community Churches," and—worse still—megachurches which adhere to credo-baptism have all too often substituted historic Christian worship for the mess of pottage provided by "contemporary" entertainment-based services. Reformed theology harks back behind the contemporary Zeitgeist or fundamentalism's 19th-century ethos to the 16th and 17th centuries, ultimately finding its origins in the thought of perhaps the most learned and intelligent thinker God has given his church, the great Calvin himself. When one adds to this the fact that a growing number of Reformed theologians are vociferously protesting the use of the "Reformed" label by credo-baptist Calvinists like John Piper and the "Young, Restless, and Reformed" crowd, one understands immediately the tendency of many young Calvinists to take the metaphorical plunge into the advocacy of paedo-baptism.

Nevertheless ... I am a New Testament student by training. I am very wary of, and hence not beholden to, theological systems, no matter how venerable or apparently intellectually rigorous (Indeed, I find it hard to imagine how anyone could make the outrageous claim that any pre-critical confession, no matter how well-thought out, could possibly contain “the system of doctrine taught in scripture” and thereby command complete assent). What matters to me, as it should to any Christian, is what the Bible, in this case the New Testament, teaches on a given subject. To put it differently, what is needed is a reaffirmation of the classic Protestant principle of sola scriptura—the notion that Scripture, properly and historically interpreted, must be allowed to trump tradition. And it is here, in my measured opinion, that the case for infant baptism falters badly. Indeed, there are no clear examples of prescribed or practiced paedo-baptism in the New Testament. Texts like 1 Corinthians 7:14 are simply too insubstantial and ambiguous to bear the weight preachers like Lucas and Goligher place on them. Indeed, the fact that St. Paul here writes that the unbelieving spouse is rendered “sanctified” (hēgiastai) by his or her union with a believer renders it highly unlikely that he intends an oblique reference to baptism when he describes the offspring of such unions as “holy” (hagia). Moreover, the use of Acts 2:39 as warrant for infant baptism (“The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call”) simply boggles the mind. Are all who are “far off” likewise to be baptized on the off chance that they will be recipients of the effectual call? At best the biblical arguments proffered by supporters of the “covenant” baptism of children suggest infant baptism as a possible, though unstated, implication of the texts in question. But that possibility diminishes significantly when one considers what the New Testament actually says explicitly concerning the significance of Christian baptism in such texts as Romans 6.[ii] Simply put, it is transparent that other factors are involved in the switch to a paedo-baptist position than the exegesis of holy Scripture.[iii]

Some thirty years ago I read an early work by the current doyen of British New Testament scholars, the moderately evangelical James D. G. Dunn, entitled Unity and Diversity in the New Testament.[iv] Professor Dunn was raised as a Scots Presbyterian, and today is a member of the Methodist Church of Great Britain. So he has no credo-baptist axe to grind on the matter of infant baptism. Thus what he wrote on the subject all those years ago has remained imprinted on my mind as a cautionary word against adopting a position for the wrong reasons without sufficient scriptural warrant:

A few brief comments are perhaps called for on the subject of infant baptism. It is one of the standing ironies of the diversity of Christian theology and practice that the chief means of accomplishing regeneration for so many centuries has had so little foothold in the NT, and has not clearly been encompassed even within the wide-ranging diversity of first-century Christian practice. For it has to be recognized that infant baptism can find no real support in the theology of baptism which any NT writer can be shown to espouse. And the more we recognize that a primary function of baptism throughout the first decades of Christianity was to serve as a means of expressing the initiate’s faith and commitment, the less justified in terms of Christian beginnings would the practice of infant baptism appear to be. The strongest support from within the NT period would probably come from the Corinthians …, but that is not a precedent many would want to argue from.

A more circuitous justification can be attempted with greater promise through the concept of family solidarity—that the child of a believing parent by virtue of that fact stands within the circle of (the parent’s) faith (1 Cor. 7.14). And no one would want to deny that Jesus blessed infants during his ministry (Mark 10.13-16). The real question is whether Christian baptism is the appropriate expression of this status within the family of faith, or whether baptism is the means whereby the children of today are brought to Jesus and blessed by him. The household baptisms of Acts 16.15, 33, 18.8 and 1 Cor. 1.16 might provide sufficient (NT) precedent; but the case is hardly proved, since it is far from certain that the households included small children: Acts 16.15—was Lydia married? 16.34—all rejoiced in the middle of the night; 18.8—all believed; 1 Cor. 16.15—all served. The supporting argument from circumcision’s being administered to Israelite (male) infants as part of the covenant people of Yahweh depends on how one assesses the relation between the old Israel and the new: as we have seen, the new covenant equivalent of old covenant circumcision is the circumcision of the heart, the gift of the Spirit, not baptism; and membership of the new covenant is through faith in Jesus Christ, not by natural descent (see particularly Gal. 3). The weakness of the family solidarity argument then is that it explains the child’s status within the circle of faith, without necessarily justifying the further step that he/she ought therefore to be baptized—for certainly that status is not dependent on baptism, nor is the blessing of Christ. Consequently if baptism is to retain its regular significance within the NT, as the expression of the baptisand’s faith, it should probably be reserved for that time when it can serve to express the child’s own commitment, a practice which can be followed without detracting in any way from the status of the child of a believing parent within the circle of faith. In short, for all the diversity of faith and practice in first-century Christianity it remains doubtful whether it stretches so far as to include infant baptism.[v]

Professor Dunn, I believe, is right. To put it simply, the case for infant baptism in Reformed theology rests almost entirely on a theological understanding of the relationship between the old and new covenants in which their salvation-historical discontinuity is downplayed in the interest of subsuming both under the rubric of an overarching, hypothetical “covenant of grace.” Rightly understood, however, the Old and New Covenants are not structured identically. The Old Covenant was a national covenant into which boys and girls were born, with circumcision functioning as the badge of covenant identity for male children of Abraham. No one is born into membership of the New Covenant, however. Membership there, as Luke records Peter as proclaiming, is reserved to those whom God calls (Acts 2:39) and who accordingly respond in repentance, faith, and baptism (Acts 2:38). Baptism in the New Testament is not only the concrete expression of the faith that saves; it is the means provided by God to picture the union of the believer with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection (Rom 6)—the very union by virtue of which the believer is “justified” (Gal 2:17), constituted a member of God’s eschatological covenant people who will be acquitted at the great assize on the last day. As such baptism can be viewed as the means by which God concretely declares the justified status of the baptisand that the Spirit effected when, through the word of the gospel, he created in the believer that faith through which he or she became united with Christ. Baptism, in other words, is not a mere badge, even a theologically pregnant one, like circumcision was. But, as Dunn rightly points out, circumcision of the foreskin has as its New Covenant counterpart the circumcision of the heart (Deut 30:6; Rom 2:26-27), not baptism. Baptism, on the other hand, proclaims what has already happened to the believer who submits to it. Therein lies the inherent contradiction in evangelical practice of paedo-baptism.

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[i] Charles Caldwell Ryrie, Dispensationalism Today (Chicago: Moody, 1965).

[ii] Despite the valiant-yet-unsuccessful effort by John Murray, Christian Baptism (Philadelphia: P&R, 1974), to argue that the significance of infant baptism must be the same as that for adult believers/converts.

[iii] One such matter is the acknowledged practice of infant baptism dating back at least to the second century. See, for example, Irenaeus, Against Heresies II.22.4; Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 21.3-5; Origen, Commentary on Romans 5:9. Origen indeed claims the tradition of baptizing infants went back to the apostles. On the practice of paedo-baptism in the early church, see the back and forth between the Lutheran New Testament scholars Joachim Jeremias, Infant Baptism in the First Four Centuries (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004 [1960]) (for) and Kurt Aland, Did the Early Church Baptize Infants? (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004 [1963]) (against).

[iv] James D. G. Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament: An Inquiry into the Character of Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977).

[v] Unity and Diversity, 160-61. See also Dunn’s The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1998) 457-59.

Reza Aslan's "Zealot": Some Belated Reflections on a Book about Jesus

Nothing is bound to garner notoriety for an author more than producing a well-written, seemingly "novel" (read "unorthodox") "historical" study of the life of Jesus of Nazareth for mass consumption. Think the late Robert Funk's infamous Jesus Seminar, whose democratic voting process led to 1996's The Five Gospels, with its portayal of Jesus as a peasant Cynic poetaster adept at spinning aphorisms about the lilies of the field. Think too of Dan Brown, whose incredible historical hypotheses about Jesus formed the substrata of his 2003 murder-mystery page-turner The DaVinci Code, the popularity of which led to serious responses by such prominent evangelical scholars as Darrell Bock and Ben Witherington, who really had better things to do with their time.

The latest writer to "earn" his Warholian five minutes of fame is Reza Aslan, Associate Professor of Creative Writing (!) at UC-Riverside, whose new book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, is ensconced at the top of The New York Times' Best Sellers List. The reason has less to do with the merits of his work (more on that presently) than popular response to an already-infamous interview on Fox News by host Lauren Green conducted on 26 July. The interview was a disaster for both Green and Fox. The former—where does Fox come up with such gray cell-challenged hosts, anyway?—made the fundamental error of repeatedly (!) expressing incredulity that Aslan, as a Muslim, would even desire to write a book about Jesus, more than implying that he had some ulterior motive to tackle a subject about which he could have no objectivity. Green's ineptitude simply furthered the (valid) perception that Fox's institutional Islamophobia renders the network unable to comment meaningfully on related matters. Response was immediate (see the swift take of Andrew Kaczynski at BuzzFeed here) and almost unanimous in its sympathy for, and support of, Aslan.

For his part, Aslan played a feisty defender of both his honor and his credentials for writing his book. He repeatedly declared himself to be an "expert" and "scholar of religions" with "four degrees, including one in the New Testament and also a Ph.D. in the subject." Well, not so fast, as many, including Joe Carter, quickly countered. Aslan, it seems, pulled one over on most of the media who, not surprisingly, were unacquainted with the academic discipline in question—my discipline, as it happens. As it turns out, Aslan doesn't have a terminal degree in any of the relevant fields related to the study of the historical Jesus: Ancient History, New Testament, Ancient Judaism, or Classics. Neither has he written any peer-reviewed works in any of those fields, nor even taught any of these subjects at the undergraduate or graduate levels. His Ph.D. is in the sociology of religion, his dissertation, as Barnard College Religion Professor Elizabeth Castelli informs us, a mere 140-page work on contemporary Muslim activism. That is not to say, of course, that Aslan could not possibly write intelligently on the matter (indeed, his bibliography shows him to be fairly well-read in the field of the Quest of the Historical Jesus, though, as Anthony Le Donne has rightly remarked, much of it is of older literature, with unfortunate lacunae in many areas). It is to say, however, that Aslan has deliberately overstated his qualifications to write as a self-styled "expert" on the matter. It would have been better if he had admitted that he wrote as a non-specialist. After all, books like that are written all the time, not least by ministers and others who, like Aslan, are fluent in Koine Greek but have no legitimate claim to be scholars in the field.

More importantly, however, is the fact that Aslan's thesis, to wit, that Jesus was a "zealot" who was crucified because he wanted to overthrow the Romans violently (and thus, of course, that all the Gospels' talk about "loving one's enemies" was a later fabrication by his followers, who were further divided when St. Paul "introduced" the idea of Jesus' divinity and the like), has an absolutely zero percent chance of being true. This is something about which every reputable New Testament scholar who has responded is in agreement, both evangelical (Gary Manning, Jr., Anthony Le Donne, Craig A. Evans, and especially the scathing article by John Dickson) and non-evangelical (Elizabeth Castelli, Simon J. Joseph) alike. Indeed, Aslan's problems lie, not only with his central thesis, but with scores of over-generalizations and blatant historical errors to boot (see especially the exposes by Le Donne, Castelli, and Dickson on these), which no "expert" in Jesus studies would write in such numbers.

Aslan's thesis is also hardly a new or "novel" one, and so needs no substantial feat of ingenuity to refute. Indeed, for anyone who has read widely in historical Jesus studies, Aslan's thesis will recall that of Hermann Samuel Reimarus, the posthumous publications of whose Wolfenbüttel Fragments by G. E. Lessing in 1774-78 is generally regarded as the first installment of the original Quest for the Historical Jesus. More recently, S. G. F. Brandon of the University of Manchester tried to resurrect a variation/refinement of Reimarus's thesis in his 1967 work, Jesus and the Zealots. Reimarus, after all, exerted more influence in method than he did by virtue of his conclusions, which ultimately failed to satisfy almost all scholars. Not surprisingly, Brandon failed to persuade many, and his thesis was delivered a knock-out blow by a substantial article published by Ernst Bammel in 1984 ("The Revolution Theory from Reimarus to Brandon," in E. Bammel and C. F. D. Moule [eds.], Jesus and the Politics of His Day [Cambridge: CUP, 1984] 11-68). Since that day, Jesus scholarship has moved on, with the so-called "Third Quest of the Historical Jesus" dominating the discussion (apart from the more "radical" stream represented by such men as Funk, Dom Crossan, and Burton Mack). Like Aslan, scholars associated with the "Third Quest" (both Jewish and Christian, "conservative" and "liberal") insist Jesus must be understood against his Jewish background and seek, above all, to explain both the historical reasons for Jesus' crucifixion and the rise of the early church. Aslan provides a possible, though, contrary to his assertion, not a necessary or even probable, explanation for why Jesus was crucified. Where he really fails, however, is in explaining how the early church developed as it demonstrably did. Particularly egregious is his understanding of Paul and the delineation of his putative differences from the Palestinian Christians who followed Jesus before him. At best one can say that Aslan's thesis is an inelegant one.

The lesson to be gained from this is that popular audiences should be careful whom they read on matters as potentially important as the identity, message, and work of Jesus of Nazareth. Credentials matter, and the lack of such credentials is often painfully evident to those with the specialized training to notice it. For those who are interested and really want to see how genuine historical research into Jesus is done, I suggest two works: from a more conservative perspective, N. T. Wright (The University of St. Andrews), Jesus and the Victory of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 2; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996); from a less conservative standpoint, Dale C. Allison, Jr. (Princeton Theological Seminary), Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010). Neither is for the faint of heart or dull of mind, but the difference between such works and that of Aslan is immediately obvious.

James D. G. Dunn on the So-Called "New" and "Old" Perspectives on Paul

(image@theparsonspatch.com)

Over at Euangelion Michael Bird has drawn attention to a helpful article by venerable New Testament scholar Jimmy Dunn in the latest issue of Early Christianity (4:2 [2013] 157-82). Entitled "A New Perspective on the New Perspective on Paul," the article interacts largely with German scholarship which, by and large, has either ignored or rejected the so-called "New Perspective" (henceforth NPP) precipitated by Ed Sanders's ground-breaking 1977 tome, Paul and Palestinian Judaism. The German response to the NPP is hardly surprising, given that the foil for Sanders et al.'s rethinking of St. Paul's teaching on justification is Martin Luther's classic and influential articulation of the doctrine as a polemic against prideful works-righteousness. More recently, one thinks as well of the related debate half a century ago between Krister Stendahl, a forerunner of the NPP, and the august Lutheran scholar Ernst Kӓsemann on the related topic of the presence of salvation-history in Paul's thought. It is not surprising that the NPP has been no more congenial to the thought of German Lutherans than it has been to confessional Reformed types in the USA and UK.

Professor Dunn is uniquely qualified to write on this subject, having popularized the title "The New Perspective on Paul" in his famous 1982 Manson Memorial Lecture of that name at the John Rylands Library in Manchester. In the three decades since then he has continued to contribute to the discussion with major commentaries on Romans and Galatians, a magisterial Theology of Paul, and numerous smaller studies in journals and Festschriften. Most recently, he contributed to the very helpful 2011 book, Justification: Five Views, which all theology students not up to speed on the issue should read as soon as possible. Over the years, Dunn has almost imperceptively shifted his articulation of the issues to the point where, though he once may have drawn too sharp a distinction between the perspectives, he now writes with a balance that refuses to place a wedge where one is not necessary. Bird draws our attention to the following, entirely a propos comments from his most recent article:

[T]he ‘new perspective’ should not be defined or regarded as an alternative to the ‘old perspective’. The ‘new perspective’ does not pretend or think or want to replace all elements of the ‘old perspective’. It does not regard the ‘new perspective’ as hostile or antithetical to the ‘old perspective’. It asks simply whether the ways in which the doctrine of justification have traditionally been expounded have taken full enough account of Paul’s theology at this point. It is not necessary to call into question what have traditionally been taken to be the the central emphases of Paul’s doctrine.

The social dimension of the doctrine of justification was as integral to its initial formulation as any other. It was not a corollary which Paul drew from his primary emphasis at a later date; as an apostle he was never anything other than apostle to the Gentiles. This emphasis was at the heart of his gospel, why he felt so committed to it and why he defended it so resolutely. A doctrine of justification by faith which does not give prominence to Paul’s concern to bring Jew and Gentile together is not true to Paul’s doctrine.

To repeat, ‘works of the law’ is a more general phrase, which refers to the principle of keeping the law in all its requirements. But when the phrase comes in the context of Paul’s mission to Gentiles, and particularly of Jewish believers trying to compel Gentile believers to live like Jews, then its most obvious reference is particularly to the law in its role as a wall diving Jew from Gentile, the boundary markers which define who is ‘inside’ and who is ‘outside’, that is, inside the law/covenant and outside the law/covenant people.

I would maintain that these statements are completely correct. Indeed, they are substantially the same points I had made back in 1995 in my Ph.D. dissertation dealing with Paul's teaching on justification in Galatians. Alas, however, such has been a hard sell in very conservative American Protestant Christianity, especially in so-called "confessional" circles beholden to 16th and 17th century doctrinal formulations reflecting the debates of that time with semi-Pelagian Roman Catholicism. Indeed, being "favorable" to the NPP in any of its various permutations—even when, like Dunn, one affirms the compatibility of the NPP with the main features of the "old" perspective—can be career suicide, as any number of scholars can attest, to the enduring shame of the institutions in question. In the long run, however, there is no going back. Dunn, in his most recent writings, demonstrates that the NPP has raised historical and theological issues in Paul's letters that cannot be avoided in favor of perpetuating anachronistic paradigms. Luther and Calvin may have been justified—I would argue they certainly were justified—in applying what Paul wrote to the Galatian and Roman churches to the important soteriological conflicts in which they were engaged. But to see the faces of medieval Roman Catholics in Paul's Jewish Christian opponents at Galatia, and even in first century Jews, is unjustified, and to do so causes the interpreter to privilege anachronism at the expense of the very historical exegesis which is his or her proper concern.