Route 66 Through The Year: Colossians 3:18-4:18

Spring Harvest’s ‘Route 66 Through the Year’ is designed to take readers on a tour through each of the 66 books of the Bible over the course of a year, with each day’s reading featuring a short passage and comment written by a variety of Spring Harvest speakers.

I have contributed notes for this week on Colossians, looking today at 3:18-4:18.

Read: Colossians 3:18-4:18

Regardless of where we might stand on the interpretation of the so-called ‘household code’ in 3:18-4:1, the passage portrays a Christianity that is whole-life, relationships that are two-way, and a motivation that is Christ-centred.

Paul’s ‘whatever you do’ in 3:17 already makes it clear, but the section that follows reinforces the fact that Christ’s rule extends to the whole of our existence. The gospel is worked out in our mundane, daily life, wherever we are – in the domestic sphere and in the public sphere, at home and at work.

In addition, the passage reminds us that relationships are reciprocal, that duties belong to both parties. Wives and husbands, children and parents, slaves and masters are equal in being treated as members of the Christian community and in being called to treat others as responsible human beings to whom they are related in some way.

Finally, every aspect of our life and relationships – whether of family or work – is redefined in relation to Christ. And this fits with what we have seen throughout Paul’s letter. Faced with the challenges of following Jesus in an indifferent or hostile society, Colossians orients us around the word of the gospel and the majesty of Christ, showing who Jesus is, what he has done, and how that works out in the everyday lives and relationships of ordinary men and women.

Interpretation 66, 4 (October 2011) on Climate Change

The latest issue of Interpretation is devoted to climate change – ‘Creation Groaning’ – with the following main articles:

Theodore Hiebert

Reclaiming the World: Biblical Resources for the Ecological Crisis

The Bible believes this world is our home, the primary place we live and practice our faith. It provides us ways of reinventing our role in the world and gives us reasons for human faithfulness to it even when the crisis we have created for the world looks impossibly desperate.

Rosemary Radford Ruether

Ecology and Theology: Ecojustice at the Center of the Church’s Mission

This essay examines two major biblical and theological traditions for ecological commitment: the covenantal tradition, biblical and modern, and the sacramental tradition, biblical and modern. It also asks how we need to reclaim these traditions in the practice of the churches today.

Larry Rasmussen

New Wineskins
This essay explores the conversion of various Christianities to an “Earth-honoring” faith with a moral universe different from the one presently at home in most heads, hearts, and practices. Such reborn faith and morality would be new cloth, new wineskins.

William Schlesinger

Climate Change
Atmospheric physicists show us that rising concentrations of certain greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere should raise the temperature of the planet at rates, times, and places that are consistent with recent observations of ongoing climate change – that is, global warming. It will take great leadership to guide us to a sustainable future before we experience huge destructive impacts on the environment of our only planetary home.

Route 66 Through The Year: Colossians 3:1-17

Spring Harvest’s ‘Route 66 Through the Year’ is designed to take readers on a tour through each of the 66 books of the Bible over the course of a year, with each day’s reading featuring a short passage and comment written by a variety of Spring Harvest speakers.

I have contributed notes for this week on Colossians, looking today at 3:1-17.

Read: Colossians 3:1-17

The previous chapter might sound as if Paul is giving us the freedom to do whatever we like. As it happens, however, there is a new kind of life that comes from being raised with Christ. Seated with Christ at the right hand of God, the Colossian Christians are also called to live out their lives in the here and now, their identity in Christ touching every area of their daily existence.

What goes with this is a set of defining characteristics. We ‘put off’ certain qualities that damage relationships – anger, rage, malice, slander, filthy language, lying – and we clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness and love. But these aren’t just practical tips; they flow from the pattern set by Christ himself – where his forgiveness provides the motive for our forgiveness of others (3:13), his peace rules our lives (3:15), his word dwells in us (3:16), as we do everything in his name (3:17).

So, this is not a set of commandments so much as a reflection on the character of Christian life and relationships – taking our cue from Jesus, with what he has done for us, and asking what sort of people we should be as a result.

Lord, help us be people who live out the virtues at the heart of our faith and follow the person at the heart of our faith.

The Spectator on Harold Bloom on the King James Bible

The Spectator carries a brief review by Matthew Richardson of Harold Bloom’s The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

Under the title ‘A quirky dish’, Richardson notes that Bloom’s book ‘excels in showing the ways the Bible has influenced later literature’, but ‘is too often marred by the author’s idiosyncrasies’.

Q&A with Tim Keller on the Meaning of Marriage

I’m looking forward to reading Tim Keller’s soon-to-be-released book, The Meaning of Marriage (published by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK). Meanwhile, Christianity Today carries a brief interview with him on the subject here.

Asked about what type of book it is and how it differs from others on the topic, he notes that it began as a series of sermons, and that ‘when you preach, the sermon usually goes from the theological to the more polemical and into the practical’.

‘On a practical level, the church doesn’t do a great job of giving people a vision for what God wants marriage to be. I actually think that’s a way that my book is somewhat different in that it’s almost as much for a non-married person as for a married person. I actually think, in the end, what is very practical for both singles and married people is they need to get a breathtaking vision for what marriage should be. I don’t know if the strictly theological, strictly polemical, and strictly practical books do that.’

He says some nice things about ‘freedom’, that the contemporary view of freedom is negative – freedom from obligation – whereas the biblical view is freedom of – ‘freedom of joy, the freedom of realizing what I was designed to be’.

‘If you don't bind yourself to practice the piano for eight hours a day for ten years, you'll never know the freedom of being able to sit down and express yourself through playing beautiful music.’

And there are some brief comments on what I suspect will be the most chewed-over element of the book by its readers – egalitarian or complementarian?

‘On the one hand, we [Keller and his wife, Kathy] say there is such a thing as male headship. It is irreducible in the home and in the church. But then, the details of what it looks like are almost completely un-spelled out. There are hints, but they are not laid out. We think it’s a principle for all times, all places, and all cultures, so if you had any list of specifics, it would make the principle less applicable. Complementarians admit the principle, but they always add a list of specifics that they treat as universal. Egalitarians won’t admit the principle. So, you might say we’re complementarians who endorse the principle that the husband and wife say “yes, the husband is the head,” but then we expect couples to come up with what that’s going to look like in their own marriage. Just don’t punt on the principle.’

Route 66 Through The Year: Colossians 1:24-2:23

Spring Harvest’s ‘Route 66 Through the Year’ is designed to take readers on a tour through each of the 66 books of the Bible over the course of a year, with each day’s reading featuring a short passage and comment written by a variety of Spring Harvest speakers.

I have contributed notes for this week on Colossians, looking today at 1:24-2:23.

Read: Colossians 1:24-2:23

It becomes apparent that Paul is trying to persuade the church not to be led astray by ‘fine-sounding arguments’ (2:4). Whatever the precise nature of the problem he is countering, Paul names it as a ‘hollow and deceptive philosophy’ (2:8) which moves them away from depending on Christ.

At the heart of his appeal, then, is to stick with Jesus – to start with him and continue with him (2:6-7).

So, the warning not to get distracted by ‘deceptive philosophy’ in 2:8 is coupled with a reminder in 2:9-15 of who Jesus is and what he has done – that Jesus embodies God’s fulness in himself, that we have the benefits of being joined to him, which includes being made alive, having all our sins forgiven, our record of debt cancelled by Christ’s work on the cross through which he also triumphed over powers and authorities.

Paul’s pastoral combination of warning with reminders about what we have in Jesus continues in the rest of the passage, as we are encouraged to trust Christ rather than irrelevant practices (2:16-17), empty promises (2:18-19), and false purity (2:20-23).

Lord, we want to serve you, but please give us the confidence of knowing that our faith is based on what Jesus has already done on our behalf, not on what we can do for him.

Mark Noll on the King James Bible

Mark Noll, ‘Long Live the King: The 400th Anniversary of the KJV’, Books & Culture (28 October 2011).

Mark Noll notes that the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible ‘has produced a magnificent harvest of exhibitions, conferences, and scholarship’. In comparison with the 300th anniversary celebrations in 1911, he points out, ‘most commemorations have resulted from local initiatives under local sponsorship’.

The substance of his piece reflects on six books and one video published around the 400th anniversary. Leaving aside the literary influence of the KJB, the accuracy or otherwise of its translation, and the nature of its influence on English vocabulary, he explores the books under review via four questions.

(1) What were the circumstances in which the KJB was created, and what implications should be drawn from understanding those circumstances?

In a word, politics.

(2) What is the relationship of the KJB to its predecessor translations, and how did this one new translation win out so decisively over all its competitors?

In a sense, again, politics! Readers recognised its dependence on previous versions, and the good work of those who had prepared a revised version. ‘Yet it was not this recognition as such that won the day. It was rather that those who controlled the monopoly for publishing Bibles in England stopped producing the Bishops’ Bible, supported the regime’s effort to keep the Catholic Douay-Rheims translation as far away as possible, and maneuvered to freeze out publication of the Geneva Bible.’

(3) What kind of translation is the KJB, and why should we care?

In two words, ‘essentially literal’.

Among other interesting points here, Noll refers to Myles Smith’s prefatory ‘note to the reader’, claiming that ‘the very meanest translation of the Bible in English... containeth the word of God, yea, is the word of God’.

Noll himself comments:

‘Even as Smith was taking pains to explain why the Bible he had worked on was a good translation, he contended that “the word of God” was what any even half-way adequate translation communicated. For Smith, “the word of God” was of utmost importance since, as he wrote in another part of the prefatory note: “But now what piety without truth? What truth, what saving truth, without the word of God? What word of God whereof we may be sure, without the Scripture?”’

He also says a few things about the relationship between the KJB as a literary masterpiece and the KJB as the word of God:

‘What, in particular, should be said about those readers who esteem the literary qualities of the KJB but pay no heed to its spiritual message? T.S. Eliot’s dictum in response was unequivocal: “Those who talk of the Bible as a ‘monument of English prose’ are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.”’

(4) The most complicated questions, both historically and theologically, arise from combining the circumstances of the KJB’s origins (question 1), its cultural dominance from the early 17th century until the recent past (question 2), and the interplay of spiritual purpose and literary excellence in its history (question 3). These questions ask what studying the history of the KJB reveals about the relationship between divine revelation and its human reception, about words on a page and the message of salvation, about the use of secondary means and the life-giving work of the Holy Spirit.