Radical Belonging

I contributed today’s ‘Word for the Week’, a weekly email service provided by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully.

Romans 12:4-8

By the oversight of the Holy Spirit, while Romans was written for us, it wasn’t written to us. As Peter Oakes invites us to imagine in Reading Romans in Pompeii: Paul’s Letter at Ground Level, it was written to Holconius the craftworker and the Christians who gathered in his workshop every Sunday. How would it have been heard by them?

Almost certainly, as residents of the Greco-Roman world of the first century, they would be familiar with the use of ‘body’ as a metaphor for harmony and cooperation. Except that where the analogy was used to call the commoners to work for the good of the senators or the state, here those who are gifted work for the good of the whole body – and all are gifted.

A body where ‘each member belongs to all the others’, where a householder and a slave are equally interdependent, would undermine the status system of first-century Rome. Centuries later, whenever we’re tempted to feel superior to fellow members in the body of Christ, it still does. How could it be otherwise when the different gifts flow from God’s grace to each of us and are given for the good of the whole body?

The similarities and differences with other lists of gifts in Paul’s letters suggests it’s not intended to be a complete catalogue. Of the ones mentioned here, several of them have to do with the practical assistance of those in need. While some would be exercised during the time of meeting, others would be more applicable outside that context. All of them are concerned with our responsibility to one another, and are to be exercised with diligence and passion. None of them require calling to a special office.

The overall picture is of a community marked by the inspired disclosure of God’s word, a wellbeing that comes from service, teaching that builds people up, encouragement which helps fellow believers live out their obedience to Jesus, sharing generously with those in need, which is led diligently and well, characterised by a cheerful mercy that imitates God himself.

Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?

It would be all too easy to bemoan how we fail to live up to that picture rather than ask instead how we might contribute to it, how we too might belong to the body of Christ.

Reformed Faith and Practice 1, 1 (2016)

Reformed Faith and Practice is a newish online journal, published by the Reformed Theological Seminary. According to the website, it ‘will publish three times a year, and each issue will contain several sections: articles and book reviews, a few discoveries from our Reformed past, and occasional tastes of campus community life’.

The entire first issue, whose contents are below, is available to download as a pdf here.

Introducing Reformed Faith & Practice

Michael Allen

Divine Fullness: A Dogmatic Sketch 

Richard B. Gaffin Jr.

The Life-Giving Spirit

Sean Michael Lucas

Owning our Past: The Spirituality of the Church in History, Failure, and Hope

Gregory R. Lanier

“It Was Made to Appear Like That to Them:” Islam’s Denial of the Crucifixion

Timothy J. Keller

Redeemer City Ministry as a Model of Ministry Preparation for the City

Roger Nicole

From the Archives: The Five Points of Calvinism

Conversation: Q & A with J. Todd Billings

Book Reviews

How to Think of Yourself

I contributed today’s ‘Word for the Week’, a weekly email service provided by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.

Romans 12:3

How would Holconius the cabinet-maker hear this? What would Sabina the stoneworker make of it? Or Iris the barmaid, or Primus the slave, or any of the others who belonged to the small Christian community in Rome?

Those are the questions Peter Oakes encourages us to consider in his fascinating book, Reading Romans in Pompeii: Paul’s Letter at Ground Level. From a guided tour through the remains of houses in Pompeii and a reconstruction of their possible occupants, making due allowance for differences in Rome, he invites us to imagine the social makeup of a house church in Rome. There are about thirty people: several householders with their spouses, children, and slaves; some, including slaves, from other households where they are the only Christian, and a few homeless people. When they meet, they squeeze into the largest room they have access to – a workshop rented by the wealthiest person among their number.

Just in case they were in any doubt, Paul’s message is for all of them: ‘I say to every one of you’, he writes. In God’s design, each of them has the amazing privilege of living out the renewed mind in how they think about themselves: ‘do not think of yourself more highly than you ought’.

We can so easily dismiss a call to humility as a truism. Doesn’t everyone believe it to be a good thing? But that simply wasn’t the case in first-century Rome. As Peter Oakes points out, in a society which was fiercely competitive for honour and status, Paul makes it clear that ‘there is no basis for seeing oneself as superior when the only measure is faith, a gift from God’.

Away from first-century Rome, there is something here for those of us whose egos are just about held in check by a sense of decorum (because it would reflect badly on me) rather than any exercise of spiritual discipline. There is something here, too, for those of us who are self-deprecating in the hope that someone else will feel obliged to praise us. Where is my source of self-worth? In what others think of me? In my latest achievements? In the need for constant acclaim?

For us, as for Holconius and Sabina, we are no more than what we are before the cross of Jesus. The measure for how we think of ourselves flows out of the gospel, and it’s the same fixed standard for all of us.

Mark Meynell on a Wilderness of Mirrors

I wrote the following mini review for EG, the quarterly magazine produced by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. Mark is a friend, but that has in no way biased my reading of his superb book!

Mark Meynell, A Wilderness of Mirrors: Trusting Again in a Cynical World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015).

One of the significant currents swirling around society today is the breakdown of trust – in politicians, businesses, authorities and institutions, including the church. Hand in hand with that goes cynicism and a sense of betrayal. How are we to live in such a world?

Addressing these issues, Mark Meynell serves up a well-researched, well-written book, with much to delight pundits of politics, history, philosophy, and popular culture. Here Thomas Hardy rubs shoulders with Monty Python, U2 with John Le Carré. But it’s deeply sensitive as well as informative. And ultimately hopeful too, because of what Mark believes about the way God works in the world, because of the self-giving love of Jesus in serving the powerless, and because of the community that gathers around him and his word.

A Wilderness of Mirrors calls us to rediscover the radical implications of the gospel for a disillusioned world, a world more than ever in need of Christ’s trustworthy goodness.

Journal for the Evangelical Study of the Old Testament 5, 1 (2016)

The latest issue of the Journal for the Evangelical Study of the Old Testament is now available online. The main articles (listed below with their abstracts) are available from here, with a pdf of the entire issue available here. As always, it’s worth checking out its book reviews as much as anything else.

Scott M. Callaham

Must Biblical and Systematic Theology Remain  Apart? Reflection on Paul van Imschoot

Biblical and systematic theology stand in tension as fields of study that are constructively related in theory but strictly segregated in practice. In the first place, the nature of biblical theology seems to mandate that the concerns of systematic theology exert no conscious influence upon the work of biblical theologians. Furthermore, as a rule, biblical theologies – especially those firmly grounded in the OT – only tangentially influence the work of systematicians. Thus endures a stubborn, seemingly intractable impasse in academic theology. Those who nonetheless seek a voice for biblical theology in the broader world of Christian theological reflection have an unlikely ally in Paul van Imschoot, a nearly forgotten pre-Vatican II Catholic biblical theologian. Van Imschoot’s productive labors transgress received assumptions on the relationship between biblical and systematic theology and beckon present theologians to return to the grounding of Scripture for the formation of doctrine.

Gregory Cook

Power, Mercy, and Vengeance: The Thirteen Attributes in Nahum

Nahum scholars typically interpret the reference to YHWH’s Thirteen Attributes of Mercy in Nah 1:3a as a re-reading meant to minimize YHWH’s mercy and emphasize his wrath. This article shows that the quote originates from Num 14:17–18 while maintaining an allusion to Exod 34:6–7. In this light, Nah 1:3a does not explain YHWH’s wrath against Assyria; rather, it explains how YHWH could pardon Judah’s apostasy and deliver his people 

Sunny Wang

The Visual and Auditory Presentation of God on Mount Sinai

In the OT there are two accounts of theophany recorded in Exod 19–20 and Deut 4–5. Some scholars thus argue that Deut 4 is constructed in such a way as to show that hearing is superior to sight. This paper argues that the senses of sight and hearing are used together to attain knowledge of God and that this interrelation between seeing and hearing is intended. The account of theophany on Mount Sinai is used as an example to show that seeing and hearing are often mingled to complement each other. The presence of God is experienced through hearing the voice of God and seeing God speaking out of fire, cloud, and smoke on the mountain. There is no sign to prove that one sense is superior to the other in the account of theophany. They are both means by which to experience God.

Book Reviews

The Bible Project

Since I last posted on the Bible Project, many more video overviews of Bible books have been added, including on Zechariah, Haggai, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, Ezekiel (in two parts), Lamentations, Esther, Jeremiah, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Nahum, Micah, Joel, Obadiah, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah (in two parts), Jonah, Kings, Samuel (in two parts), and Judges.

Check out all the videos from here (click on ‘Videos’ or scroll down to the ‘Videos/Study Guides/Posters’ section) or see them all via YouTube here.

An Amazing Possibility

I contributed today’s ‘Word for the Week’, a weekly email service provided by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Romans 12:1-2

It’s a gloomy picture, and it doesn’t make for pleasant reading, but Paul won’t have it any other way. Back in the early part of his letter to the Christians in Rome, Paul writes about bodies being degraded, minds being darkened, and men and women suppressing the will of God. All this, he makes clear, amounts to a refusal on the part of humanity to glorify and serve God, to worship God acceptably.

But what we have here at the start of Romans 12 is a reversal of that story. With the gospel comes the remaking of human beings – bodies and minds and wills – into God’s new people. And when God puts us back together, he does so in order that we might worship him, might give him his proper due.

The prophet Jeremiah looked forward to the day when God would make a new covenant with his people by putting his laws into their minds and writing them on their hearts, when all would know him (Jeremiah 31:31-34). Ezekiel too spoke of God putting his Spirit in his restored people and moving them to follow his decrees and keep his laws (Ezekiel 36:27). Paul’s language here echoes these promises and invites us to see that what the prophets looked forward to has now come to pass in the creation of a new people – Jew and Gentile – in Christ.

As we might expect, there is continuity as well as discontinuity with what went before. Christian life and worship is no longer focused on the sacrifices in the temple, and no longer determined by the law. There is still sacrifice, and there remains a desire to know and do the will of God; but these now come through the ongoing sacrifice of our whole selves, through the constant renewal of our minds, and through the alignment of our wills with God’s will – ‘his good, pleasing and perfect will’.

The vision offered here for working out the will of God is not following a list of dos and don’ts, but of God’s people – individually and together – walking in God’s ways.

As John Stott wrote, ‘if God has a purpose for the lives of his people, and if his purpose is discoverable, then nothing could be more important than for us to discern and do it’.

The apostle Paul holds out that amazing possibility.