Jesus, The Scandal of Particularity: Some Exegesis on 1 Corinthians 1:23

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Some exegesis on 1 Corinthians 1:23 (taken from my Master’s thesis: Christ Crucified, The Wisdom and Power of God: An Exegetical Analysis of I Corinthians 1:17–25 circa. 2003). Take the writing cum grano salis. I was yet a burgeoning writer, so you will notice certain grammatical infelicities throughout. Nonetheless, the exegesis is solid.

but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness,

 ἡμεῖς δὲ κηρύσσομεν Χριστὸν ἐσταυρωμένον, Ἰουδαίοις μὲν σκάνδαλον ἔθνεσιν δὲ μωρίαν,

The next phrase, Χριστὸν ἐσταυρωμένον, is important because it brings the discussion back to that which is the cause of the adversative, noted above. This phrase serves as the content of the proclamation of foolishness, back in vs. 21.137 The term ἐσταυρωμένον is a perfect passive participle, and it is functioning as an adjectival-substantive participle, meaning the one who was crucified. The perfect participle carries the force of, “. . . describing an event that, completed in the past . . .,” and “. . . has results existing in the present time.”138 Thus Christ crucified carries with it the notion that Christ’s crucifixion stands as a past reality with its effects coming into the present.139 Lenski succinctly summarizes this phraseology:

The perfect participle ἐσταυρωμένον states that, one crucified, Christ now stands before us continuously as such. The fact of his crucifixion has become something permanent and enduring from the very moment when that fact occurred. This crucified Christ is both the sum of the gospel and the center from which every part of the gospel radiates, and in which all of its parts meet.140

The proclamation of Christ crucified is what serves as a stumbling block to the Jews and as folly to the Greeks.

Conversely, the next phrase, Ἰουδαίοις μὲν σκάνδαλον, ἔθνεσιν δὲ μωρίαν, “to the Jews, on the one hand, a stumbling block, and to the Greeks, on the other hand, foolishness.”141 The dative μὲν . . . δὲ construction, like in vs. 18, is noting the designation of two classifications of people. And the construction is also highlighting, “. . . the contrast between the interests of the Jews and the Greeks.”142 Nevertheless, the contrasts do not imply a different result in their judgment of the cross; rather it serves to highlight the point made in vs. 22, that “all” (i.e. Jew or Greek) human-centered wisdom will consider the message of the cross as foolishness (cf. vs. 21). Paul now turns to discuss the question, “what is the meaning of that saying?” (i.e. the saying that was just discussed, “We preach Christ crucified”). Paul provides a two-pronged approach to developing what this means first for the Jew, and then the Greek.

Paul approaches the Jew first and points out that the proclamation of Christ crucified serves as a σκάνδαλον, “. . . that which gives offense or causes revulsion, that which arouses opposition, an object of anger or disapproval, which is revolting to those who have no faith.”143 In concert with this definition, Conzelmann notes, “. . . There is correspondence between σημεῖα/σκάνδαλον . . ..”144 The correspondence is related to the definition of how Jews seek for validation of a work of God, as noted in vs. 22, they ask for signs or miracles. The Jews were aroused to opposition because Christ was a contradiction to what they expected. They expected great signs, but instead Messiah was crucified. Therefore, as Fee notes,

To the Jew the message of a crucified Messiah was the ultimate scandal. Although in Roman times the Jews did not crucify, they did afterward hang those who had been stoned, especially blasphemers and idolaters. They saw hanging therefore as the fulfillment of Deut. 21:23, because anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse.145

From the Jewish perspective, which had imposed their criteria upon the dealings of God, Christ could not be the Messiah.

In the same vein, Paul turns to ἔθνεσιν146, the Greeks from vs. 22. Although this time He explicitly refers to them as Gentiles. The term ἔθνος, from which the plural ἔθνεσιν is derived, carries with it the definition of: “. . . heathen, pagans, Gentiles.”147 Paul by way of parallel, with vs. 22, notes the Greeks as pure pagans.148 Paul continues and states that these Gentiles consider the proclamation of Christ crucified, as μωρία. This notion of μωρία is commented on by BAGD, they state, “Conversely, to all those who are lost 1:18 and esp. to the Gentiles vs. 23, the Christian preaching of a Savior who died a slave’s death on the cross was μ. It has pleased God to save the believers διὰ τ. μωρίας τοῦ κηρύγματος vs. 21.”149 The Gentiles could not receive the slave’s death on a cross as meeting their expectations of wisdom, therefore this message is pure foolishness to them.150

BAGD highlights the usage of this word, μωρία, from vss. 18, 21, and 23. Two of the three usages denote it as the Gentiles considering God’s wisdom as folly. But one of the usages they note, in vs. 21, relates the foolishness of the proclamation with God’s wisdom. And it is through such a reception of God’s wisdom, that a person is considered, one of those called. Therefore, Paul adversatively turns the discussion to those who receive the wisdom and power of God.

 

141 Translation provided by the author of this paper.

142 Kistemaker, I Corinthians, 61.

143 Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 760.

144 Conzelmann, A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, 47.

145 Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, 75-76.

146 There is a variant reading on this term, and it is followed by the Textus Receptus. The Textus Receptus is following later manuscripts. The desire in following this variant reading was to make Paul’s terminology consistent. Metzger notes this variant reading in Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Germany: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart 1994), 480.

147 Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 217.

148 Conzelmann, A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, 47.

149 Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 533.

150 Consult Kistemaker, 1 Corinthians, 59. He provides good summative coverage on the Gentiles perspective of the death of someone on the cross.

Christian Doctrine Slavishly Bound to a Theology of the Word

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Christians don’t just get to make up doctrine and beliefs as they go. As Protestants, deeply committed to a theology of the Word, doctrine must be grounded in Holy Scripture and its reality in Jesus Christ. Good theology understands this. Its theological reasoning processes are attendant to the inner reality of Scripture, which in fact is an analogate of the incarnation itself. That is, a genuine biblical exegesis does its reasoning by closely following the depth contours and teleology of the text of Holy Scripture itself. Anything beyond this, beyond the Word of God, is to adulterate and produce no-doctrines that only can lead people to destruction.

Is Jesus Just a Demiurge in the Decretal System of Calvinism?

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Jesus in the decretal system that funds Calvinism becomes the organon (Ὄργανον) or instrument of salvation, which is the fatal flaw of the decretal system in a God-world relation. Jesus meets the condition set by the absolute decree (decretum absolutum) for the elect, thus becoming the means by which humanity is reconciled to God. The problem with this scheme is it rips asunder the work of God from the person of God, thus subordinating Jesus to something like a demiurge or go-between or in fact, payment, meeting the conditions of the covenant of works as God’s act of grace for the elect.

Translation: the Son become flesh in Jesus merely becomes an instrument of the Father to procure salvation for the elect. I.e., Jesus’ divinity in this scheme is not required for salvation to obtain. The penalty paid is what is required, and Jesus meets that condition. This is what a purely forensic or juridical understanding of the atonement produces.

On The Digital Christian Polemicists

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In light of the internet, I thought the following from Jarslov Pelikan, on the matter of ‘polemics’ would be apropos to highlight. He writes:

There were still versions of the “domino theory,” which cautioned that indifference or the leas concession on any point of doctrine could lead to a toleration of the most extreme excesses, but such an admonition that “fundamental truth cannot be ignored except at the cost of salvation” was often accompanied by the acknowledgement that this did not apply to “secondary elements of fundamental doctrine,” nor to the nonfundamental doctrines. Jonathan Edwards could speak of “zeal” expressed in “vigorous opposition” as “the fervor of this flame [of love],” but he cautioned that it was directed “against things, and not persons,” a distinction that was not always easy to observe amid such “zeal.” A theologian with “a contentious nature” could easily abuse doctrinal polemics for self-aggrandizement. Even those who urged the necessity of polemics added that the pulpit was no place for scholastic controversies about obscure theological points. It was, a professor of theology declared in his inaugural lecture of 1696, “the task of the theologian not only to confirm true doctrine, but to refute errors that are opposed to the truth, above all if they are dangerous and pernicious”; but he went on to urge that in polemics the theologian must strive to do justice to the opposing position, not to caricature it, because “nothing should be imputed to someone that he does not acknowledge in deed or in word.”[1]

The temptation for the theologian, the Christian to fall off into the pit of “polemicistry,” is always as near as the sarx (‘flesh’). Our frames remain but dust, but God’s mercy is ever present to buoy us upon his holy breath beyond such vitrolituous downfalls. The human heart homo incurvatus in se has always already been bent upon self-congratulation and elevation. But the cross of Christ contradicts such antics. Thus, the Christian life, existence, is one marked by living in the midst of this battle between the flesh and the Spirit; even, ironically, when the Christian is attempting to present and discuss theology about our blessed Lord.

The internet only amplifies the putrefied heart to the grandiose heights of self-exaltation and muse. It siren calls, even the Christian in step with the Spirit, to toot one’s own horn behind the surliness of the digital confessional; as in a mockery of the holy habitation of the communio sanctorum. May Christ have mercy upon us, the rascally lot we are.

[1] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine: Christian Doctrine and Modern Culture (since 1700) (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 57.

Constructively Correcting Calvin’s Doctrine of Assurance: Resourcing Barth and TFT

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From the conclusion on my personal chapter for my co-edited/authored book, Evangelical Calvinism: Dogmatics&Devotion: Volume 2. My chapter is entitled: “Assurance is of the Essence of Saving Faith” Calvin, Barth, Torrance, and the “Faith of Christ”. In it I offer a charitable corrective of John Calvin’s doctrine of assurance of salvation (or lack thereof), by resourcing the theologies of Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance, respectively.

What we have come to see is that assurance of salvation, dogmatically understood, is fully grounded in Jesus Christ. From Calvin, to Barth, to Torrance, union with Christ and the vicarious humanity of Christ provides the foundation for how to understand assurance of salvation and how it should be framed; that the faith of Christ for us is the only real saving faith, as such elect people can only participate from that faith for them. It is this reality, as we have seen, that allows the seeker (of assurance) to realize that indeed assurance is of the essence of faith; precisely because faith is a reality that comes from God in Christ and not individual human beings. We also came to see, particularly in Barth and Torrance, that election and reprobation should be understood to be fully concentrated in the vicarious humanity of Christ. Again, what this does is to evacuate the question of whether or not Jesus died for me, and instead allows all of humanity to keep their eyes fully on Jesus because Jesus, in this frame, died for all of humanity. As a result, any space that could allow for anxiety has been erased, and Jesus is understood to be the one that stands in the gap between God and all of humanity in his vicarious humanity. We have come to see that from this vantage point assurance is the essence of saving faith because to think salvation is to fully think Jesus and not ourselves. Assurance for the Evangelical Calvinist, then, is of the essence of saving faith because it is not an individual’s faith that saves them, but instead it is the vicarious faith of Jesus Christ. We look to Christ, then, and no one else, not even ourselves; particularly when we think things salvation. Jesus Christ is assurance.

 

The unBondage of the Will: Liberum Arbitrium

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Latin theological word for the day: LIBERUM ARBITRIUM=‘Freewill.’

Biblically, only God genuinely has liberum arbitrium. But He is a gifting God. Never in abstraction from Himself, but only concretely within Himself, and thus for us in Jesus Christ. As such humanity comes to have liberum arbitrium only because God has freely elected that we come to actually have it, to be for Him rather than against Him, in and through participation with the only humanity that is truly for God; Christ’s vicarious humanity for us. So, the path for human agency, human freedom for God, is only blazed first, by Christ’s humanity for us; indeed, as He is the firstborn from the dead. It is by the Holy Spirit that human beings are awakened to the fact that this is already the objective and subjective reality for them, as Christ has already accomplished that for them, whereby by a node of corresponding faith with Christ’s for us, that the human being can say Yes and Amen for God, just as Christ is God’s Yes and Amen for us, in both the No (to sin) and Yes (for God) that Christ freely chose to be for ALL of humanity, as His humanity is ALL of humanity as humanity’s free turn to God and away from the incurved hearts they have lived in bondage to since conception.

The Self-Generative Godhead

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Do the Son and the Spirit merely subsist in the being of God (typically thought of as the Father, because he ostensibly is understood to be the “ingenerate” One)? Or instead, do the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit “subsist” in each other, in a subject-IN-being relation? Which then presupposes that the being (ousia) of God just is, always already and has been, and continues to be, the one in the three, the three in the one, as the eternal personal coinherence that just is constitutive of the Monarxia (Godhead). If so then, God just is Self-generative; which eternally presupposes upon the entirety of the triune relation as a generative movement without prioritization of one hypostasis (Father) next to another. Whilst also being able to refer to the Father as the first person, the Son as the second, the Holy Spirit as the third without also collapsing that type of linear thinking into a numerical hierarchy wherein mathematics as physics, rather than the triune filiation, becomes the determinative mode by which God is thought. The idea of causation or aitea is absent in such a scheme, insofar that the pleroma of God’s being is already and primordially understood, in se, as Self-generative within the subject-in-being relations. So, the Godhead itself is thought of as eternally generative rather than causative, per se, and or delimited to a singular source (as if a monad).

And then this down the line has serious impact upon how we conceive of a God-world relation (nostra theologia).

*Inspired by an internalization of Thomas F. Torrance’s thinking over the years.

God is God Theology

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When reality starts with God as the given, as the Self-given one for the world in Christ—indeed as the purpose for the world’s existence—rather than starting from the given, as if the creaturely just is, then everything is flipped on its head. Questions of human freedom, agency, morality, sin, evil, life, death—everything—is from that point on conditioned by God first rather than us first. We at His behest, and He not at ours (i.e., He doesn’t answer to us). Because He is a relational Father-Son-by the Holy Spirit Got, there is ineffable amount of space to dialogue with and know Him, as He has deigned it so.

The sooner folks accept that He is God and that we are not, the sooner an order is given in regard to the character of our questions and His answers. And this because He is the One who sets the questions to be answered, not us.

This is what true dogmatic theology does: it only attempts to speak, after it recognizes Deus dixit (that ‘God has spoken’ in Christ). Outwith this order there really is no order in theological development, or the great questions of life. All that someone can do outside of this God is God order is speculate in discursive forms, hoping to make contact with the source of all reality.

God’s Geschichte as Human Historie and Salvation in Christ

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Karl Barth’s doctrine of human agency and salvation in general, as John Webster underscores, is largely in response to Rudolf Bultmann’s existentialist from below anthropology vis-à-vis soteriology. Barth became concerned with Bultmann’s et al. turn to the subject in Christian salvation, insofar that the humanity in need of salvation, in Bultmann’s frame, had its own independent resource to turn to Christ outwith Christ first and unilaterally turning to and for them. Barth spied in Bultmann a type of monistic humanity wherein humanity simpliciter could actualize ‘their salvation’ almost in a symmetrical way to God’s own agency for the world in Christ. And of course, this type of Herculean action, for Barth, not to mention the clear teaching of Holy Scripture, represented the heights of human idolatry. Webster writes on Barth in extenso:

As often in Church Dogmatics IV, Barth’s hidden dialogue partner is Bultmann. Already in the Foreword to IV/1, Barth remarked that ‘throughout I have found myself in an intensive, although for the most part quiet, debate with Rudolf Bultmann’, and Barth’s critical distance from Bultmann here, as earlier, revolves around the question of how and on what grounds the reality of God impinges upon our existence. The distance between the two dates back at least as far as Bultmann’s critical remarks on Barth’s Christliche Dogmatik for working with ‘uncritically adopted concepts of an older ontology’. By 1930, Barth had come to see the rift between the two as once concerning the entire grounds of Christian faith and theology: writing of Bultmann, Gogarten and Brunner, he says:

From my standpoint all of you, though your concern differs from mine in different ways, represent a large-scale return to the fleshpots of Egypt. I mean that if I am not deceived, all of you – in a new way different from that of the nineteenth century – are trying to understand faith as a human possibility, or, if you will, as grounded in a human possibility, and therefore you are once again surrendering theology to philosophy.

Where Bultmann read Barth as a return to a post-Reformation scholasticism, Barth came to read Bultmann as espousing a relatively independent sphere of human existence and its capabilities with which faith and theology must be coordinated, thus compromising the absolute originality and gratuity of the basis of faith. By the time Barth came to deliver his famous response in the early 1950s, Rudolf Bultmann – An Attempt to Understand Him, he presented his quarrel with Bultmann in terms of a widely divergent understanding of the place of the pro nobis aspect of the Christ event. For Bultmann (in the tradition of Schleiermacher, Melanchthon, and the young Luther), the pro nobis is accorded such central importance that soteriology swallows up Christology, and the exposition of the gospel becomes caught within ‘the anthropological triangle of law, sin and grace’. What Barth fails to find in Bultmann is a sense that the Christ-event ‘possessed an intrinsic significance of its own, and that only because it has that primary significance has it a derived significance here and now’. And, in response to Bultmann’s reply to Rudolph Bultmann, Barth writes thus:

I have become increasingly a Zinzendorfian to the extent that in the New Testament only the one central figure as such has begun to occupy me – or each and everything else only in the light and under the sign of this central figure. As I see it, one can and should read all theology in some sense backwards from it: down to anthropology, ethics, and then methodology . . . [I]n this light it has become for me a very positive business . . . One cannot discuss the fact that ‘Jesus lives’, as we are both convinced. But one can, as a theologian, either refrain or not refrain from thinking to and from this ‘objective’ reality. I myself cannot refrain from doing so.

The issue here, as throughout Dogmatics IV, is not simply one of the importance assigned to the subjective realm in talking of the work of Christ: on that, both are in some measure agreed (Barth more than is commonly realised). The issue is much more one of the grounds upon which the subjective realm is affirmed. By securing that realm by reference to the ‘prophetic’ character of Christ’s work (rather than by reference to the dynamics of human existence or faith), Barth is denying that there are two realities, the reality of Christ on the one hand and, on the other hand, the quasi-independent reality of human existence in terms of which Christ’s reality has to be made meaningful. Any such affirmation, Barth has come to propose, is in the end a form of unbelief, a covert disqualification of the absoluteness of Jesus Christ as the God-man who embraces both sides of the covenant relation. Over against Bultmann, Barth presses the point that what matters is not that – in apologetic fashion – Jesus’ history be made meaningful in our history (as if there were any real human history ex Christum), but the opposite: what matters is our being drawn into his sphere, which is in truth the sphere in which alone we may properly be said to exist:

Whatever it may or may not mean for us subjectively; whatever may be its reflection in our consciousness, the fact that reconciliation is also revelation and Jesus Christ lives and works as Prophet means that objectively we can no longer be remote from Him in a private sphere, but that we are drawn into His sphere, into what takes place in Him.

Barth’s protest, then, is that by according to such significance to the existential conditions for the gospel’s realisation, Bultmann fails to see the objective history of Jesus as ‘history in the supreme sense, history in which we have a share whether we realise it and like it or not, history in which our own history takes place’. In sum: on the basis of his doctrine of hypostatic union, Barth stresses that the existential realm is ‘a minor and conclusion’ deduced from ‘a given major’.[1]

In nuce, as Webster develops, Barth wants to ensure that it is God’s initiation, God’s unilateral act of love as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit whereby a salvific history has the potency to obtain. And for Barth, and dare I say, the Bible, it is this history, God’s own elected and Self-given history for us where the occasion for human agency before God comes to be made actualized and event[ual] reality. It is by his entrance and assumptio carnis into our humanity, which first was always already his humanity, whereby the covenant relations between God and humanity have a concrete ground; indeed, a nexus wherein the human has re-creational freedom to move and breathe and have its being in and before, and most significantly, from God’s being for humanity in his graciously elected humanity in the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ.

[1] John Webster, Barth’s ethics of reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 91–93.

Evangelical Theology as Bricolage

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Do evangelicals have a theology, like a confessional-dogmatic theology? No. As an evangelical myself, growing up the deepest theologies I was ever exposed to was something like Walter Martin’s Kingdom of the Cults, or on the fringes, I would hear the name, Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop (as an evangelical who was an intellectual) thrown around (and maybe, Charles Ryrie). None of this is to suggest that my experience is the delimiting factor in regards to whether or not evangelicals had or have a dogmatic theology present. But it is to recognize that even if attempts were indeed being made, they were not prominent ones. Later in life (like in my early 20s) I was exposed to Millard Erickson and Wayne Grudem; not to mention Bruce and Demarest and Stanley Grenz. But none of these theologies have ever risen to the levels of the Post Reformed orthodox theologians, or the Lutherans scholastics of the 16th and 17th centuries. And of course, in such a vacuum, because of the lacuna of dogmatic theologies for contemporary evangelicals and Reformed types, they are called back to said 16th and 17th century theologians, respectively (which we see now in the retrieval movement). And I think I am also part of this generation of evangelicals who happens to be a deep thinker, and was on the lookout for something deeper and substantive; something catholic, which has a liminal rootage with the church continuous.

What’s more, my turn hasn’t been to the 16th and 17th centuries, per se, but, clearly to the early 20th century as that is primarily resident in the theologies of Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance. Even so, my “turn” happened by becoming attuned to the patristics, the medieval theologians, along with Martin Luther, John Calvin, and even the Post Reformed orthodox; primarily, the Puritans and Pietists. I quickly recognized that whilst there are great riches strewn throughout the history of the church’s doctrinal development, that much of it did not correlate directly with an evangelical ethos. That is, while there has been a lacuna of evangelical dogmatics in the 20th and 21st centuries, even still, evangelicals have functioned with an unspoken set of theological themes that have served regulative for their worship services, Sunday morning sermons, Bible studies, so on and so forth. Evangelicals, by and large, believe that Jesus died and rose again for everyone; that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God; that the Gospel is genuinely offered to everyone (not just sufficiently, but efficaciously too); that God is love; that Jesus is God in flesh, both fully God and fully human; that God is triune as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; that salvation is by faith alone; and more.

And yet, does Post Reformed orthodoxy map onto those themes in ethos? No, I would say not; even if there is some doctrinal overlap here and there. And so where can the evangelical turn? Many think they are more Arminian or Wesleyan than Calvinist, and then vice versa. As if these types of binaries are the only ones available, or most proximate to what they think they believe as evangelicals. And so often, the evangelical will attempt to cobble together some type of theological identity by taking themes from this perceived “side” or that, and then claim to be an Arminian, Wesleyan, Provisionist (as that has been more popularly developing), Free Grace, Calvinist, Anabaptist, evangelical Lutheran etc. But, in my view, this type of pastiche does not represent a coherent dogmatic theological offering that is genuinely evangelical in ethos, in spirit. I think Barth and TF Torrance, in their own ways, map onto a real evangelical dogmatic theology in ways that evangelicals have been in search for, for a long time (if they have been searching, anyway).

I understand that this post is highly generalized. But it is in gist.