The iPistol

This is great, but it really irks me that this just comes in one color? What's was Glock-Nokia thinking?

And I would have also liked to have seen something like what the iPhone offers - when you turn the gun sideways to shoot it gangster-style, the sights would move to the side. But because it doesn't I'm going to have to spend more money on a new set of Birdman HoMeBoy sights. Sigh.

The War

Lately I've been reading accounts of the battles in Iraq. If you don't know anything about this war except what you hear on the TV news, you don't know squat. I've read quite a bit of WWII history and I've been surprised at the similarities. I should have known that war is war. Bracket the new technology and you have the same thing - dedicated, tough young men fighting together to kill our enemies.

And make no mistake about it, our men are fighting and killing our enemies in Iraq. Even if it wasn't true that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and even if he had no direct connection with Al-Qaeda and what they did to us on 9-11, nevertheless, since we've been in Iraq we have been routing out and killing scads of terrorist there, mostly Al-Qaeda. The reports from the battle of Fallujah (Nov. 2004) confirmed terrorists from 18 different countries were killed in that city. Even Chechen rebels were there, dressed in their own uniforms, and using their own distinctive tactics against our marines!

Before you make a critical comment about this post or the war first go read Patrick O'Donnell's Were Were One. After that, feel free to say whatever you want.

Alien Attack Imminent! Take Cover!

Hollywood star Tom Cruise is planning to build a bunker at his Colorado home to protect his family in the event of an intergalactic alien attack, according to new reports.

Indignant Jesus

The story of Jesus rebuking his disciples for hindering people from bringing their babies to him has often been used by Presbyterians in their argument for infant baptism.

And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them. But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them (Mark 10:13-16).

On some level, of course, it works as proof for infant baptism simply because of the way Jesus treats these little children (paidea) and because of the fact that he concludes with a saying about entrance into his kingdom.

It is important to remember that there's a huge transition underway at this time. The old people of God are going to be transformed into something new in union with Christ. The kingdom promised in the Hebrew Scriptures is at hand. And in the end when Jesus concludes with the saying, "Amen, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like child shall not enter it," he is speaking to Israel and warning them about receiving his ministry.

Every member of the Jewish community was being challenged to humbly receive Jesus and his kingdom. Everyone had to enter Jesus' new kingdom as a child. Therefore, it is appropriate to use this passage for baptism. All baptism is infant baptism. Every one who enters the kingdom does so as a baby. Adult baptism is not the ideal so that we have to find a way to make an exception for infants. Infant baptism is the norm and we need to be careful not to think that adult baptisms are somehow different.

A closer examination, however, leads me in another interesting direction. These children being brought to Jesus were already part of the people of God. They had gone through the entrance rituals and been accepted in the community. To put it in terms appropriate to the post-Pentecost situation, these children were already baptized. They were not being brought to Jesus in order to enter the community of the people of God. They were already members of it.

The problem was that the disciples were treating these little children as if they were not an important part of the community. Their parents were being rebuked by the disciples for bothering Jesus with requests that he "touch" their children. Apparently for the disciples, Jesus kingdom had to do with weightier matters than touching and blessing little children.

Applying this to today, I ask: where is the locus of Christ's presence in the community of the people of God? If someone today wants to "come to" Jesus, where do they go? If a parent wants to bring their little one to Jesus, where will they find him? Well, we confess that Jesus' special presence is at the Lord's Table, eating and drinking with him. Participating in the Lord's Supper is the closest we get to him, or better, he gets to us, until the Second Coming.

And the Table is for the entire body of Christ. The "one loaf" represents the one body of Christ: "Because there is one loaf, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of one loaf" (1 Cor. 10:17). According to Paul just a few chapters from this, everyone who is baptized is baptized into the one body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:12-13). Moreover, the weaker members of the body are to be respected and served because they are to have "greater honor" in the body. We all know these admonitions in 1 Cor. 12. But have we applied them to the weakest, seemingly insignificant members of Christ's body—the baptized little children of the church? Well, no, traditionally we have not.

Like the disciples we rebuke parents who want to bring their children to eat with Jesus at his Table. We hinder them from coming. These children have to wait. They don't know enough. They are not mature enough. They haven't memorized their catechism yet. They cannot recite the difference between the Reformed, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic positions on the real presence. Give then some crayons and let them color while the bread and wine are being passed. If they reach out and act as if they are part of the family of God and entitled to participate at the family Table and "sense" their inclusion, then swat their little hands so they don't do it again.

When Jesus says, "Let the little children come to me," he's not only talking about baptism. He also wants to them to "come to him" regularly. He wants to feed all his children at his Table and have them grow up knowing that they belong to his kingdom. They are not second class, half-way members of his covenant family. The tactile, sensory "touch" of Jesus (Mark. 10:16) is experienced at the Table. Without it, children will never have the full experience and assurance that ought to accompany the confession "Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so." The Bible does tell them it is so, but baptism and the Lord's Table confirm and seal Gods love for them in ways that words alone cannot.

The bottom line: Jesus is indignant.

Animals are so nice

The Son of God - Part III

Continued from Part II

The Classical Interpretation of Romans 1:4

Why does Paul ascribe to Jesus the title “Son of God” in Romans 1:4? Is he simply borrowing a designation from contemporary Hellenistic or pagan religious culture in order to impress upon his readers a reverence for Jesus that they would be able to readily appreciate? Influential 20th century commentators have argued for this. The suggestion has been made that Paul (and other New Testament authors) utilized the Hellenistic notion of “divine men” as the “sons” of gods as one way to bridge the conceptual gap between the Greek culture and the Hebraic understanding of the Messiah.

Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos, trans. J. E. Steely (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1970 [German, 1913]), pp. 91-98 and 206-10; G. P. Wetter, “Der Sohn Gottes,” eine Untersuchung über den Charakter und die Tendenz des Johannes-Evangeliums (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1916); W. Grundmann, Die Gotteskindschaft in der Geschichte Jesu und ihre religionsgeschichtlichen Voraussetzzungen (Weimar: Verlag Deutsche Christen, 1938); Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, 1955), pp. 149-59; and H. J. Schoeps, Paul: The Theology of the Apostle in the Light of Jewish Religious History (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1959), pp. 149-59.

Recently, however, this theory has been rejected for many good reasons, not the least of which being, on the one hand, the absence of genuine Greco-Roman pagan parallels that would account for Paul’s view of Jesus as God’s Son or render it more intelligible to his contemporary audience, and, on the other hand, the abundance of Old Testament precedent that gives a much more satisfying explanation for the New Testament authors’ ascription of this title to Jesus.

Martin Hengel, The Son of God: The Origins of Christology and the History of Jewish Hellenistic Religion (rev. ed; Philadelphia/London: Fortress Press/SCM, 1977 [German, 1975]); J. Bieneck, Sohn Gottes als Christusbezeichnung der Synoptiker (Zurich: Zwingli, 1951); Oscar Cullmann, Christology of the New Testament, trans. S. C. Guthrie and C. M. Hall (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1959), pp. 271ff.

The impetus for employing the language of divine sonship need not have come from pagan traditions of divinized heroes. As we shall see, Paul’s use of sonship derives from common Old Testament language and images as well as from both the history of Jesus’ own verbal interaction with the Father as recorded in the Gospels (Mark 1:11; Matt. 11:27; Luke 6:22, etc.) and the confessions made by disciples, demons, and others (e.g., Matt. 4:3, 6; 8:29; 16:16; 26:63-64; 27:43, 54; Mark 15:39; Jn. 1:34, 49; 3:18; 10:36; 11:4, 27; Luke 1:35), some of which Paul had either already read or the substance of which had been passed down to him by apostolic tradition (Acts 9:20; 1 Cor. 15:1ff.).

Many New Testament scholars have even regarded Paul’s language here in Rom. 1:2-4 as evidence of an early, pre-pauline ecclesiastical confession. If this is the case—and its far from being established—it simply underscores the primitive character of Paul’s confession of Jesus sonship and witnesses to the common confessional tradition of the original apostles and the earliest Christian communities that were founded by them. See Oscar Cullmann, The Earliest Christian Confessions, trans. J. K. S. Reid (London: Lutterworth Press, 1949), p. 55; V. H. Neufeld, The Earliest Christian Confessions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963), p. 50; and Rudolf Bultmann, The Theology of the New Testament, vol. 1 (London: SCM Press, 1952), p. 49.

If Paul does not borrow extra-biblical conceptions in order to ascribe sonship to Jesus, then what does he mean by the phrase “Son of God”? Does he desire thereby to denominate Jesus’ ontological union with God the Father’s divine essence as the eternal Son? This has been a common, indeed, maybe the traditional interpretation of this passage among orthodox commentators since the early church controversies over Arianism and Adoptionism. On this interpretation Romans 1:4 refers to the historical manifestation or declaration that Jesus was truly the eternal Son of God, and the participle that begins the clause in v. 4 is taken to mean “declare” or “show.” What was true ontologically remained hidden during Jesus’ earthly ministry, suffering, and death, but was made clear and manifest when Jesus rose from the dead (as Luther explains: “Before the resurrection this was not revealed and manifested but hidden in the flesh of Christ” [Luther, Lectures on Romans, p. 148]).

According to this reading of Rom. 1:4, the resurrection did not make or even provide the occasion for him to become the Son of God; rather, it powerfully declared to the world what he was already—God’s eternal son. The pressure of polemic theology has so influenced the interpretation of Rom. 1:4 that even the phrase “spirit of holiness” has some times been interpreted as a striking way of referring to Jesus’ divine nature in contradistinction to “according to the flesh” which designates his human nature. The antithetically parallel kata-clauses, therefore, describe a contrast or distinction between Jesus’ human and divine natures. Robert Reymond suggests “that the entire clause can be paraphrased as follows: “who was powerfully marked out the Son of God in accordance with His divine nature by His resurrection from the dead’” (Robert L. Reymond, Jesus, Divine Messiah: The New Testament Witness [Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1990], p. 207).

What I have outlined above we might call the "classical" interpretation of Romans 1:4. In my next post we'll begin to examine the merits of this interpretation.

Hunting Update

Nothing this time. Between my hunting partner and me (on different stands), however, we saw about 15 deer. I actually walked up on one yesterday afternoon. I was about 10 yards away as she was partially hidden in a field of sunflowers. I drew my bow, held it for about a minute, but then she moved and I saw that she was just a yearling. It couldn't have been a yearling buck, too. I don't know. I let bambi bound away.

From my stand that night, I had two clear shots on a couple of doe—about 30 yards away. But I wasn't in the mood for doe this year. And these girls were not very large. I'm looking for an 8-point buck or higher this year. I'm not really thrilled about deer meat anyway. I want the head and rack!

I did see a larger buck when it was close to dark. But I couldn't see it well enough to know how large the rack was, and it never presented me with a clear shot. Bummer. Well, at least it wasn't boring with no activity whatsoever.

My hunting partner arrowed his first deer and I helped him gut and clean it. So it was an enjoyable outing.

Bow Hunting

It's time for my first bow hunt of the year. I'll head out in the afternoon after church, sit in a stand for a couple of hours before sunset, spend the night, and try again in the morning. I haven't arrowed a deer yet, so maybe this is the year. We'll see.

Looks like it will be hot. I just hope the mosquitoes lock onto some other source of warmth.

The Son of God - A Highlight

Continued from Part II

In my previous post I noted that the technical theological term “Son of God” has been built up from passages that do not necessarily use the phrase itself. This deserves a footnote because of problems associated with reading the Bible in the light of our systematic theological or confessional vocabulary.

For most Christians, as I said before, the phrase "the Son of God" functions as short hand, an abbreviation, if you will, of a theological composite of teachings centering on questions concerning the divine nature of the Son in relation to God the Father. There is nothing wrong with this. But it does complicate the exegete’s work and naïve readers are often prone to making such a basic category mistake when they come across familiar theological terms in the Bible.

This mistake is similar to what is described by James W. Voelz, What Does This Mean: Principles of Biblical Interpretation in the Post-Modern World, 2nd edition (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1997), pp. 124-125. "It is important to note that the several different meanings conveyed by the same word, indeed, several different meanings and not part of one "giant" super-meaning."

James Barr refers to this problem as “illegitimate identity transfer” in his Semantics of Biblical Language (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 217-218).

Vern Poythress warns against this kind of category mistake with his second maxim of symphonic theology: “No term in the Bible is equal to a technical term of systematic theology.” He explains that “if we want to develop technical terms in theology, such as ‘Trinity’ or ‘saving faith,’ we cannot make those terms perfectly match individual Hebrew or Greek vocabulary items. The reason is that we cannot make a word with a precise meaning exactly match a word with a broad, flexible meaning, or one with several shades of meaning in different contexts. If we really succeeded in making some English word “exactly match” a Hebrew or Greek word, the word in English would be just as vague and flexible as the one in Greek or Hebrew; it would not have any of the advantages of technical precision or fixity of meaning. The more precise we make the technical term, the greater the distance it must have from an exact match to any one word of Hebrew or Greek” (Symphonic Theology: The Validity of Multiple Perspectives in Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1987), p. 75).

In other words, reading our systematic theological meaning into every occurrence of the phrase "son of God" or "God's Son" in the Bible will most likely cause us to misunderstand the passage.

The Bible & Tradition

Why should there be such hostility against my comment that we seem to “have lost the ability to critique and correct our tradition when the Bible calls for it.” The Scriptures do indeed call for us to guard against our tradition taking the place of God’s Word. I learned that in Sunday school. Jesus teaches this in his interaction with the Pharisees (Matt. 15).

Is our precious Reformed tradition above criticism? I believe it is part of our tradition to be suspicious of tradition, and maybe more importantly, to never rely on our tradition to adjudicate theological and ecclesiastical controversies. But that’s all we seem to want to do these days.

We don’t read this in WCF 1.8: “The Reformed tradition being immediately inspired by God, and, by his singular care and providence, kept pure since the Reformation, is therefore authentic; so as, in all controversies of religion, the church is finally to appeal unto it.”

Nor do we find this in WCF 1.9: “The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the the Reformed tradition: and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold, but one), only the Reformed tradition can provide the answer.”

And this is not what WCF 1.10 says: “The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Reformed tradition.”

Follow the debate over at De Regno Christi, if you want (or if you can).