• Evangelical Theology: An Introduction © 1963
• Eerdmans
• 206 pages

Here’s my first encounter with Karl Barth: I was asked to present a three minute profile of the man to my class in Bible College. I went to the library’s theological dictionary, thinking to find a one or two column profile I could regurgitate in class. It was then that I knew I was out of my league.

Since then I’ve always wanted to read him. He’s touted (for good reason) as one of if not the most influential theologian of the twentieth century. Still, every time I think about buying his Church Dogmatics, I get a nervous flutter in my stomach. 9,000 pages is a serious commitment. Enter: Evangelical Theology.

Near the end of his career, Karl Barth toured the United States and offered a series of seventeen lectures on what constitutes true Evangelical Theology. This book is the text of those lectures. It provided me with a good grasp of the way he thinks without having to wade through the details of theological battles fought in the mid-1900s.

Barth is everything I hoped he would be. His passion shines through on every page. His writing is full of pithy quotable sentences worth spending time thinking about. Most of all, he views theology as a high calling—an important science.

For years I’ve encouraged anyone entering theological study to read Hulmut Thielike’s A Little Exercise for Young Theologians. I now have two books to recommend.

—Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology, 166-7.

• The Theology of Paul the Apostle © 1998
• Eerdmans
• xxxvi+808 pages

James Dunn has spent over four decades with Paul on his mind. He’s produced commentaries on his letters and been one of the pioneers of the New Perspective on Paul. When you read The Theology of Paul the Apostle, his experience and knowledge of the topic comes through on every lucid page.

Theologies of Paul are difficult precisely because all of Paul’s letters were occasional. Even so, Romans was written at a time in his life where he was finishing up a major section of his missionary work and preparing to embark on another journey. This letter is the most systematic of his letters, so Dunn used it as a template to explore his thought. Galatians and Corinthians also make frequent appearances as his major concepts are fleshed out.

If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ll know that I have spent a lot of time digesting this book. I’ve benefited immensely by summarizing each of the 25 chapters. Here are some of the key areas I’ve benefited from while interacting with this book:

New Perspective. I always had a bit of a fuzzy understanding of what the whole New Perspective on Paul actually meant. Now that I’ve read one of the leaders in the New Perspective discuss Paul’s relationship with Judaism in detail, it’s starting to become clearer.

Salvation. I love how Dunn divides the topic of salvation up into two: the beginning and the process of salvation. Naming it “the process of salvation” instead of sanctification clarifies Paul’s understanding of “being saved.” It also makes more sense of the eschatological tension (more on that later). The other element that struck me was the sheer number of metaphors Paul used to describe salvation. Having been trained up with forensics on the brain, this chapter really expanded my thinking.

Anthropology. Hearing Paul’s use of sōma, sarx, nous, kardia, psyche, and pneuma described so precisely does a lot to combat the Trichotomist sandwich that has been a staple of the Western church.

Paul and Jesus. I had never really considered why Paul quoted Jesus’ life and teaching so rarely until I read Dun’s explanation. Dunn not only presented the problem clearly, he provided logical explanations. Dunn’s exploration of all the areas where Paul’s teaching echoes Jesus was also helpful.

Eschatological Tension. Aside from the New Perspective, the emphasis on the eschatological tension is the biggest important concept in this Theology. The fact that we’re living in the already/not yet has implications in every area of theology—implications that Dunn spells out in detail. This eschatological tension if a very useful framework for understanding many of Paul’s more confusing concepts.

I could go on. These were the five most important areas for my theological growth, but I’m sure it will speak to you in different ways. I couldn’t recommend a serious theology book more enthusiastically to any student, pastor, or thoughtful Christian.

—Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah 40-66, 140.

I have been curious about Christian pacifism since the aftermath of 9/11. “Just war theory” had always been my official view, although I had no real idea what that meant.

A few years ago the documentary, God of War, Prince of Peace was produced. (You can grab it for free on TheMovieBlog.com.) In it, Tony Campolo’s story about his inability to drop bombs while asking, “what would Jesus do” really struck me. Lately I’ve been reading Hauerwas, a pacifist theologian. (I didn’t know they made pacifists in Texas!) It turns out Hauerwas was a student of J. H. Yoder, a Mennonite theologian and popular thinker in the 20th century pacifist tradition

I’ll be honest: I want to be a pacifist. I can’t believe Jesus wants us to kill other people created in his image. Still, when I think of the rise of Hitler and the abuse of innocent people, I wonder whether Christian love doesn’t compel us to act violently against oppression. I’ve decided to study The Politics of Jesus and really consider what Yoder had to say on the topic. I’m using the second edition (1994), which is an update of the 1972 classic. Each chapter (12 total) will have its own post as I try my best to respond to Yoder’s logic and, with the help of the Spirit, form my own perspective on Christianity and war. I welcome any constructive—surely I can’t be the only Christian wrestling with this topic!

An now, on to “the simple rebound of a Christian pacifist commitment as it responds to the ways in which mainstream Christian theology has set aside the pacifist implications of the New Testament message” (x).

. . .

Chapter 1: The Possibility of a Messianic Ethic

Summary

1972: We need to bridge the gap between New Testament studies and social ethics. Ethics is currently primarily concerned with power and revolution—but was Jesus? Modern social ethics views Jesus’ ethical teaching as irrelevant due to many reasons (only for a short “interim”, only for a small village, etc.). Therefore, they look for a concept to bridge the gap between Jesus’ teaching and today (love, faith, freedom, etc.). By trying to translate the ethical teaching of Jesus in this way, we end up accepting the current order of things as normative.

We then look to Paul who, in putting a priority on grace, reduced the need for works/ethics. In addition to this, Paul’s acceptance of society’s institutions like slavery and the Roman government make it seem like Jesus had nothing to say.

Despite the modern view sketched above, there is a genuine Christian social ethic. The rest of this book will use Luke’s gospel to discover it.

1994: Since the first edition was written, scholarship has swung to almost unanimously agree that Jesus was a political person. There are even more reasons to ignore his ethical teaching as normative (historical-critical skepticism, move from narrative and prophetic to divine wisdom). In the end, people still try to appeal to something other than the particularities of Jesus’ teaching for “Christian” ethics. Nature, reason, creation, and reality are the four classical approaches. While these four items appear to have logical priority, they in fact push the authority of Jesus aside.

Thoughts

When Yoder wrote the first edition the Jesus movement was exploding. Scores of hippies decided to follow the socially radical Jesus that the church had hidden from them. Yoder’s book validates the hippie view. Jesus is socially radical—very political. Yoder acknowledged scholarly acceptance of Jesus as a political figure in the 1994 material. We take this for granted now.

Scholarship and church life can be two very different things, though. We’re taught as pastors in Canada to be careful not to mix politics into our churches. Our charitable organization status reminds us to disseminate religion, not to give opinions on who to vote for. I agree that we shouldn’t tell our congregations who to vote for (mostly because I’m never 100% sure I made the right decision when leaving the ballot booth). Still, we need to get the politics of Jesus across.

Jesus’ words to the people around him need to inform the political decisions we make today. Thankfully, organizations like the Sojourners and The Simple Way are making it easier for pastors to make the connections.

. . .

I suppose our theological worldview has a lot to say about our view of politics. As many influential Christians have been emphasizing lately (N. T. Wright, Scot McKnight, Brian MacLaren), we pray that God’s will will be done on earth as it is in heaven. As long as our goal is merely to escape this wicked world to enjoy heavenly bliss, then there’s no motivation to consider Jesus’ politics, let alone our own world’s.

Ch. 2: The Kingdom Coming >

First, the predictable. There are 3 Hebrew (including my go-to, TWOT) and 6 Greek lexicons (including Friberg and Thayer) built in to BW9. To look up a Hebrew or Greek word, just right-click on it and choose “Lookup Lemma in Lexicon Browser”. It’s that easy. (Of course, if the word is a Hebrew compound word, BW9 lets you select which lemma you want to search for.) You can quickly switch between lexicons in the lexicon browser by using the drop-down list at the top.

Many times while studying I pass over a common word to save time. If you don’t want the depth of the Lexicon Browser, you can hover over the word and see the lexicon entry immediately in the analysis tab. Seriously, you can look up every word of a verse in seconds using this method. I’ve found this to be a great way to give your teaching creativity a boost.

Now for a word study help that’s a bit more unusual: searching semantic domains. Say you want to do a word study on “truth” in the Gospel of John. You can quickly set the limits to search only the Gospel of John, then enter the Louw-Nida domain code dialogue box. Enter alētheia and you’re presented with a semantic range of words that include truth as well as words like amēn. In an flash you can search for all the words within that semantic range so you don’t miss out on any important data.

Let’s move a little further from the common. Cross version search mode allows you to search beyond the Bible. Once this mode is selected, your search will cover all the other resources included in BW9 like the works of Josephus and the Early Church Fathers. This is one handy feature! Last week at prayer meeting we were studying Daniel where the author mentioned the heavenly watcher that visited Nebuchadnezzar. One quick search and I can find all the references to these watchers in the book of 1 Enoch. Brilliant.

Finally, there are a multitude of ways to check out graphs of the statistical frequency of the word being searched. Are you curious which chapter of the Bible has the most references to the word agapē? No problem—it’s Psalm 136. (Look it up and you’ll quickly see why.)

In sum, BibleWorks 9 makes word studies simple. And, when they’re easy to do, you’re more apt to dig deeper.

< Part 2: Searching

Part 4 >

• All Is Grace: A Ragamuffin Memoir © 2011
• David C. Cook
• 240 pages

At the end of Kubric’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Commander David Bowman left the ship to explore a massive black monolith stationed between Jupiter and Io. This monolith represented mystery and higher intelligence in the universe. As he stared full into the mystery, he gave his final transmission:

My God, it’s full of stars!

In All Is Grace, a timeworn Brennan Manning, who has spent his entire life staring full in the face of the ultimate mystery of the universe, gave his final transmission:

My God, He’s full of grace!

Memoirs of Christians are important because they chronicle how God reaches people. We have scripture to read how God reached Israel and the early church. We have memoir to help discern his actions today.

Manning was very flawed man. He was a priest who got married. He was a drunk for most of his life. (Indeed, he resembles biblical heroes more than he does modern ‘saints’.) A couple things make Manning more unique than your average run-of-the-mill sinner:

1. He recognized his sin and confessed it freely (even founding a “Notorious Sinners” club).
2. He developed an eye to see the superabundant grace of God throughout his life.

God’s grace is more powerful than Manning’s sin or our own. That’s his message and it’s well worth reading.

—Frederick Buechner, “The Great Dance” in Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, 240.

• The End of Eternity © 1955
• Fawcett Crest (1971)
• 192 pages

Reading 50 year old science fiction is an entertaining experience. Not only do you have to envision the future with the author, you have to view it through a dated lens.

Asimov’s The End of Eternity is a great example of classic science fiction. You get an archetypal mystery/love story mix set in a world of time-travel.

Asimov’s science-fiction creativity is superb. How, for example, did he think up a time-travel system energized by the power of our sun in the distant future as it goes nova? The paradoxes that are always explored in time-travel books are well worked into the mystery.

Unfortunately, the character development is as bad as the science-fiction is good. These people feel like little more than artificial devices invented to carry the plot forward—which, of course, they are.

If you’re feeling nostalgic, this book provides a few interesting hours of escape.

—Martin Luther, Luther’s Works: Sermons on the Gospel of St. John Chapters 1-4, 334.