Essays on Ecclesiology (Critical Issues in the Dispensational Theology of the Grace Gospel Fellowship) 0898140935, 9780898140934

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ESSAYS ON ECCLESIOLOGY

ESSAYS ON ECCLESIOLOGY

Critical Issues in the Dispensational Theology of the Grace Gospel Fellowship

by Dale S. DeWitt, with contributions by Philip J. Long, Thomas Waltz, and Donald Sommer

Published jointly by Grace Publications and Grace Bible College Grand Rapids, Michigan 2013

Copyright © 2011 Dale S. DeWitt All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronically or mechanically, photo-copying, recording, or any other information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers and the chief author as named on the cover and in the copyright line above. Brief quotations may be made in papers and books. For permission to quote or information write Grace Publications 1011 Aldon Street SW, Grand Rapids MI, 49509, Grace Bible College Publications, 1011 Aldon Street SW, Grand Rapids MI 49509, or Dale S. DeWitt 1928 Sunny Springs Drive, Rapid City SD 57702 Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 by the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission, All rights reserved. NonRSV quotations not otherwise specified are the author’s translations. Book format and cover design by Dale S. DeWitt. Type set in New Times Roman. First Edition, 2013 ISBN Number 978-0-89814-093-4 Published jointly by Grace Publications and Grace Bible College Publications 1011 Aldon Street Grand Rapids MI 49509

About the cover: The twin spires of Grossmünster Huldrych Zwingli birthed the Swiss-German Reformation in Switzerland from his office at the Grossmünster, starting in 1520. Zwingli won a series of debates presided over by the magistrate in 1523 which ultimately led local civil authorities to support the severance of the church from Rome. The reforms initiated by Zwingli account for the plain interior of the church. The iconoclastic reformers removed the organ and religious statuary in 1524. These changes, accompanied by abandonment of Lent, replacement of the Mass, disavowal of celibacy, eating meat on fast days, replacement of the lectionary with a seven-year New Testament cycle, a ban on church music, and other significant reforms make this church one of the most important sites in the history of the reformation and the birthplace of the Swiss-German reformation

TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface

Part I: Biblical, Theological, Historical

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Essays

I ISRAEL AND THE CHURCH IN THE APOSTOLIC AGE D. DeWitt

II THE THEORY OF TWO NEW TESTAMENT GOSPELS D. DeWitt and D. Sommer III BAPTISM IN DISPENSATIONAL PERSPECTIVE: THE NEW TESTAMENT D. DeWitt

IV BAPTISM IN DISPENSATIONAL PERSPECTIVE: AFTER THE NEW TESTAMENT D. DeWitt



1 57

101 141

V CHARISMATA AND THE CHURCH D. DeWitt 185

VI PREMILLENNIALISM, THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND THE CHURCH D. DeWitt VII THE DEVELOPMENT OF MILLENARIAN THOUGHT SINCE THE REFORMATION D. DeWitt and P. Long

219

275

Part II: Biblical, Theological, Practical VIII THE LORD’S SUPPER: ITS JEWISH BACKGROUND AND MEANINGS T. Waltz and D. DeWitt IX THE CHURCH AS THE BODY OF CHRIST: PAUL’S CONCEPT OF THE

329

BODY AND SOME PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS D. DeWitt

357



415

X LEADERSHIP AND SPIRITUAL GIFTS D. DeWitt

XI CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE D. DeWitt

463

XII CHRISTIANITY AND GOVERNMENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY D. DeWitt

531

XIII THE CONVERGENT INTERESTS OF CHURCH AND STATE 573 D. DeWitt

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Preface

The following essays are on selected topics and issues related to the theology and practices of the Grace Gospel Fellowship. They are likely to be of interest to other related organizations as well—the Berean Bible Fellowship; Grace Ministries International; Things to Come Mission; Berean Bible Institute; St. Louis Theological Seminary, and other outreach ministries. I used Grace Gospel Fellowship in the sub-title since this is my own fellowship of choice. Its institution of higher education is Grace Bible College where I taught for 42 years and with which I am still in close touch in retirement. The College granted its imprint on my earlier book on dispensational theology; I appreciate its interest in continuing that arrangement. Several themes discussed here were of interest to Charles F. Baker, the founder of our College and its long-time Professor of Systematic Theology. I studied with Baker during my first two years after undergraduate college. From the beginning I saw in him a moderate, thoughtful manner of handling the topics of systematic theology—a style of thinking and teaching I admired and respected. Later we worked together for about twenty years. I learned from him and found his thoughtful moderation in matters of dispensational theology admirable and similar to like perspectives I had already developed when I enrolled at Grace Bible College in 1958 (then Milwaukee Bible College). I did not always agree with him on a few details of our theology, but we remained friends and colleagues, working together as theology professors in a cordial atmosphere. This series of studies was written in his memory. He would not agree with all that follows, but would, I think, be interested in the developments in these essays. These essays do not make up a single lineal argument. They should be read separately as they are on different subjects of concern to the theology and practice of the grace movement. Ten of the thirteen studies are follow-on essays to views of long standing in the grace movement. They entail development, context or restructuring of certain theological lines of thought we have taken as a denomination of dispensational convictions. These ten essays are on topics on which I thought more work would be useful, especially to theological students, pastors and teachers. The other three are on subjects about which I have developed special interests and concerns in connection with the thinking and practice of our Fellowship—Christianity and Culture; Separation of Church and State as an important context for dispensational theology in America; and a Convergent Interests view of church-state relations during the Dispensation of Grace. These topics go beyond Baker’s interests and the interests of the grace movement; but they seem to me important areas of thought for dispensationalist vii

millenarians emerging from the limitations of the Fundamentalist era of our origin. Their intent is a more normalized historic view of Christianity and culture than the separatist premillennialism of the founding era (1925-1950). Since my earlier book on dispensational theology appeared in 2003, a significant article by David Turner appeared in the pages of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (Dec 2010) on the subject, “Matthew among the Dispensationalists.” Turner cites both Charles Baker and my earlier work, Dispensational Theology in America during the Twentieth Century as part of the scholarly discussion of dispensational theology. While he does not always agree with our perspective, I am grateful to him for including our work in the discussion. Disagreements aside, however, treatments of Matthew’s Gospel remain central in the discussion as a kind of index to what people of dispensational theology convictions are thinking. Some essays in this group attempt to evaluate and restate certain dispensationalist perspectives on Matthew in light of recent gospels studies. Thanks are due to several friends and colleagues who have read portions or the whole of the collection: long-time friend and outstanding pastor-theologian, Henry Hudson, collaborators Philip J. Long, Professor of Biblical Studies at Grace Bible College, Donald Sommer, former Director of Prison Mission Association, and Tom Waltz, former student and active Christian elder theologian. To other former and current colleagues I owe much gratitude: Matthew Loverin, Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Grace Bible College; Daniel J. Denk, former Professor of Bible at Grace Bible College; Jack Van Aartsen, Professor of History at Grand Rapids Community College and sometime Professor of History at Grace Bible College; Scott Shaw, Professor of Sociology at Grace Bible College; Samuel Vinton, Jr., missionary to Congo, former President and Professor of Theology at Grace Bible College, and President of Grace Ministries, International; and Timothy Conklin, long time friend and sometime Dean of Grace Bible College. I thank them all for their comments and suggestions. A special word of thanks also belongs to Grace Bible College Librarian, Kathy Molenkamp for continuous special and timely assistance in locating materials for study and research; to President Kenneth Kemper for encouragement in publication; to Timothy McGarvey, editor of Grace Publications for his interest; to Henrietta Molenkamp for a very good proof-read; and to my wife Mina whose encouragement gave birth to the idea for this book and who rescued me from many nightmarish computer issues. Dale S. DeWitt Christmas, 2012

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Abbreviations ABD ANET AUSS BAGD BAR BASOR BDF BS CAD CD CT DSS EBC ed; Ed EDT ET ICC IDB IEJ JBL JETS JSNT L-S LXX M-M MSS NBD NIB NIDCC passim RJ TDNT TDOT TWOT VT WBC WTJ x

Anchor Bible Dictionary Ancient Near Eastern Texts, ed J. B. Pritchard Andrews University Seminary Studies Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich, Danker, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature Biblical Archaeology Review Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Blass, Debrunner, Funk, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, Second Edition Bibliotheca Sacra Chicago Assyrian Dictionary Covenant of Damascus of the Dead Sea Scrolls Christianity Today Dead Sea Scrolls Expositors Biblical Commentary edited by; Edition Evangelical Dictionary of Theology Expository Times International Critical Commentary Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible Israel Exploration Journal Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society Journal for the Study of the New Testament Liddell, Scott, Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon Septuagint Moulton and Milligan, Vocabulary of the Greek Testament Illustrated from the Papyri and Other Non-Literary Sources manuscripts New Bible Dictionary New Interpreters Bible New International Dictionary of the Christian Church Noted in various places in the work cited Reformed Journal Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed G. Kittel Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed J. Botterweck, et al Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, ed Harris, Archer and Waltke Vetus Testamentum Word Biblical Commentary Westminster Theological Journal number of times a word occurs ix

PART I BIBLICAL, THEOLOGICAL, HISTORICAL

ESSAY I ISRAEL AND THE CHURCH IN THE APOSTOLIC AGE Continuity and Discontinuity between Israel and Church in Light of Israel’s Contingent Kingdom by Dale S. DeWitt The purpose of this essay is to state and discuss the reasons for the view that the early chapters of Acts represent a contingent nearness of Israel’s final, promised messianic kingdom, and not the beginning of the church. Usually this contingent nearness is called an “offer” or sometimes a “re-offer” of the manifest messianic kingdom to Israel on condition of repentance.1 It is thought that so long as the contingency was open to Israel, the kingdom was a live possibility and the church of this dispensation was not yet forming; or put another way, the divine intent is Israel’s repentance and acceptance of Messiah, and not establishing and revealing the church. A corollary of this view is that the church of the present dispensation was a Pauline revelation not anticipated in the Old Testament or by Jesus, and is not found in Acts until the Pauline Gentile Mission begins. This thesis is well-known to virtually all evangelical scholars, to most evangelical pastors, and to at least some evangelical laymen. The view discussed here is an alternative to the common belief that the church of our era began at Pentecost (Acts 2), or that it began with Adam, with Jesus or with John the Baptist. Among these possibilities, the Acts 2 view seems to be the most widely embraced at present based almost entirely on the coming of the 1 I am not particularly fond of this terminology, though I have no principled objection to it. Often people of our persuasion characterize their view as “mid-Acts dispensationalism.” I care for this even less as it is not really accurate, since people who use it usually believe the Pauline church began before the middle (chapter 14) of Acts, and some, perhaps a majority, place its beginning even earlier, say, in Acts 9; a small number prefer Acts 11. All these variant views share the idea that the church began with Paul, and that when it did, an important turning point in Israel’s rejection of Messiah had been reached. These favored descriptions also seem to have a kind of quasi-sophisticated, but still more or less cultic ring. Another description of fairly thick cultic connotations is subsuming our view under the rubric, “the grace message,” which is an extraordinarily odd way to differentiate Paul and the church from Peter and the kingdom, despite its popularity as a short-hand for describing the theology of the group. Having registered these modest complaints, I have no alternative suggestions, at least none as yet. We may need to consider a basic set of nomenclature changes, less odd-sounding and more sensitive to the perceptions of other evangelicals.

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Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 2). The view discussed here is sometimes called “the mid-Acts” view. The reason for a new essay on the subject is to reformulate this view by treating the relevant Gospel and Acts texts thematically to make clear the contingency idea and, in the process, correlate the results with a broader range of relevant recent scholarship. On the latter point about recent scholarship—to borrow a public metaphor from the first decade of the twenty-first century—this study attempts to connect certain dots that remain isolated in commentaries, dictionary articles and biblical studies on the gospels and Acts. These studies sometimes have insightful remarks about biblical details on Israel, about contingent repentance texts, about Israel’s believing remnant, the priestly opposition and the crisis of Israel’s opportunity, about the nature of baptism in the Jerusalem remnant, and about the related issue of the newness of the church revelation in Paul. In this manner, the study attempts to restate an overview of Israel’s situation as reflected in both the gospels and Acts. Accordingly, this essay will undertake an examination of the matter in the light of certain events or trends in biblical scholarship which bear on the issue exegetically, and thus draw the implications into a synthesis. My method is largely exegetical and topical or thematic. These elements of Biblical Theology are combined with comments on important passages in the interest of highlighting important relevant details or correlating repetitions of information on what the apostles and the Acts narrator, Luke, were thinking. In addition to these considerations, there is a procedural issue. Does one begin with the information in the Pauline epistles, muster its import, and draw the appropriate conclusions about the nature of the Pauline church? Or does one begin with the mission of Jesus, compare its crucial statements with the outcome registered in Acts, and finally compare the gospels and Acts with the relevant material in Paul? These and other methodological issues will necessarily show themselves in various parts of the discussion. I only argue that the biblical data we have, fairly interpreted in light of what we know of Israel’s hopes at the time of Jesus and in the light of current scholarship, appear to support the interpretation offered. I have chosen to approach the study sequentially, using a kind of development-of-New-Testament-revelation format so that the New Testament’s movements and shifts in progressive revelation can be exhibited. I hope, of course, that I am dealing with reality and not making mountains of mole-hills. Much more could and perhaps needs to be said about methodology, but this much will suffice for some brief reflections on how to go about the essay. These comments suggest the format. We shall begin in the gospels with Jesus’ mission to Israel to see how far and on what conditions it projects Israel’s latter day renewal; we shall examine Acts for continuity with Jesus’ mission to Israel, and then how the church of the Pauline letters compares with the ministry of the Messiah and his apostles. What I perceive as an unfortunate trap in making “dispensational distinctions” is to argue that a different gospel was preached by Peter in his Acts sermons than that preached by Paul. Such a view is often linked by my predecessors (some of whom are noted below) to the view of Acts 1-8 discussed in this essay. Rather, I believe there was from the beginning one apostolic gospel, although it had some varied adaptations to Israel as preached by Peter, and other adaptations to Gentiles as preached by Paul. The distinction between different gospels appears to be artificially imposed on the New Testament passages where the apostles’ preaching (Gr kerygma or euaggelion) appears. It seems to me a case of 2

excessive dispensational distinction-making insufficiently supported by passages alleged to illustrate it. Another essay in this collection will show that the New Testament summaries of apostolic preaching contain essentially the same saving gospel both to Israel and the Gentiles.2 This singular gospel is the gospel preached under the new covenant inaugurated by Jesus’ death and resurrection. It began its saving path in the world with Peter’s sermon in Acts 2; it continued in Paul’s preaching; and it will be preached for personal salvation so long as the new covenant is in force. The view elaborated here was first taught in America by John C. O’Hair, pastor of North Shore Church in Chicago, 1923-1958. He expounded it in many pamphlets and booklets mostly during the second quarter of the twentieth century. O’Hair was followed in this exposition by popular and somewhat acerbic books and pamphlets by Cornelius R. Stam, especially in his well known Fundamentals of Dispensationalism (1951).3 It is also found in Stam’s larger four-volume work on Acts entitled Acts Dispensationally Considered. Neither of these men was trained in theology or biblical and exegetical studies; their efforts were highly populist in nature, and lacking in careful attention to exegetical detail. Both embraced all tenets of the historic evangelical theology of the first half of the twentieth century, save for their rejection of water baptism as without Pauline foundation. The view received a more careful and systematic treatment by Charles F. Baker in A Dispensational Theology (1971), Understanding the Book of Acts (1981) and several other works on the gospels and epistles. Baker was theologically trained; these works reflect his formal theological education.

Jesus’ and the Apostles’ Messianic Mission to Israel Israel in the Gospels

Jesus’ messianic mission begins with various expressions of its target—his own nation, Israel. Three of the gospels explicitly—Matthew, Luke and John, and Mark covertly— have explicit statements or passages on Jesus’ mission to Israel in their first few chapters, and sometimes later in their gospels. It is unnecessary to belabor the obvious geographical context of the land of Israel since all four gospels picture Jesus’ activity concentrated in the dominantly Jewish lands of Galilee and Judea. He appears in synagogues, interacts with Jewish Pharisees and scribes, uses the Jewish scriptures, and maintains connections with Jewish institutions and festivals. It would be banal to repeat the passages below that reflect Israel’s centrality in Jesus’ ministry if they were not so often overlooked or even

2

C. H. Dodd, The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1936), showed that the sermons of Acts contain a set of common elements that together make up the substance of “The Apostolic Preaching.” In this respect Dodd’s work seems permanently valid. These Acts texts should be compared to Paul’s own summaries of the gospel, most notably Rom 1:1-4; I Cor 1-2; 15:1-11; Gal 1-2; and 1 Thes 1-2. The claim that Paul’s references to “my gospel,” sometimes alleged to refer to his distinctive gospel as opposed to Peter’s, is effectively undermined by the one passage where he has any definition of what he means by “my gospel.” The passage is 2 Tim 2:8-13, where the resurrection and Davidic descent of Christ are mentioned; these are not distinctively or uniquely Pauline terms or thoughts, but belong to the apostolic tradition in general. 3 The book was later re-titled Things that Differ.

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forgotten as scholars pursue other interests to which these are subordinate or unimportant. So despite the pedantic appearance of this collection of texts, and the risk of belaboring the obvious, the passages gathered and commented below appear to establish Israel’s priority quite forcefully.

While Matthew’s picture of the early portion of Jesus’ ministry is somewhat more nuanced than Luke or John’s, it is full of Jewish nationalist interests. Jesus descended from Abraham and David (1:1); John the Baptist’s work occurred in the wilderness of Judea where people from Judea and Jerusalem came out to be baptized by him; the new people is a new kind of children of Abraham—not Gentiles, but a new Israel forming from within the old Israel (3:9 “these stones”). Jesus appears first in the “Land of Zebulon and the land of Naphtali,” even though it had been long dominated by Gentile rule (4:15, 25). In an early synagogue scene he says he has not found in Israel such faith as that of a Gentile centurion (8:10), a remark that shows his main work to be in and toward Israel, though not entirely bypassing Gentiles. A few chapters later, Jesus instructs his disciples to “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (10:5-6).” And in the same chapter he says they will “not have gone through all the towns of Israel, before the Son of Man comes (10:23).” According to Luke, Jesus will “reign over the house of Jacob for ever (1:33).” John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah, being filled with the Holy Spirit, states that in John the Baptist, “the God of Israel . . . has visited and redeemed his people (Israel, 1:68)”; this in a passage bristling with nationalist hopes (1:72-75, 77-79). Simeon thought Jesus “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to thy people Israel (2:32).” That Gentiles should be included was also an Old Testament hope; but mention of Gentiles does not negate the primacy of the mission to Israel. John’s first chapter has three notable affirmations of Jesus’ primary mission to Israel: John the Baptist says “. . . I came baptizing with water . . . that he might be revealed to Israel (1:31)”; Jesus says of Nathaniel, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile (1:47)”; and Nathaniel says of Jesus, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel (1:49)!” There is no good reason to think “Israel” in such texts refers to anything other than the national-ethnic entity. While the central and later chapters of the gospels do show some decline in explicit references to Israel, such references do not disappear. If one divides Matthew at the approximate middle of the book by chapter numbers, “Israel” occurs 7 times in chapters 1-14 (numerical half), and 5 times in the second half. Mark’s two uses of “Israel” occur only in his latter half; Luke’s occur in a 10 to 2 ratio in his two halves; and John’s in a 3 to 1 ratio between the first and second halves. For Matthew, Jesus persists in the idea that “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (15:24).” In 15:31, the crowd, responding to his miracles, “glorified the God of Israel,” a notice that restates the mission to Israel indirectly as its ethnic framework. Jesus also envisions the twelve as Israel’s future rulers: “. . . Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of man shall sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel (19:28).” All four gospels have references to Jesus as the “king of Israel” in their passion accounts. For the purpose of this survey, it matters little that the “king of Israel” titles are all from the lips of other people, including antagonists. “King of Israel” in three of the four passion stories bespeaks the sphere, if not the goal of Jesus’ mission (Matt 27:42; Mark 15:32; John 12:13); this is also the case with “. . . we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel (Luke 24:21).” 4

In contrast to Israel are the Gentiles; Matthew refers to them more than any other gospel (14 times). These uses of “Gentile/Gentiles” in Matthew are striking enough that many scholars think the Jewish Christian community(ies?) for whom Matthew was first written—probably in Upper Galilee or Syria—had begun to admit Gentile converts. Some have even reacted so strongly to the traditional early Jewish gospel view of Matthew as to suggest Matthew was written by a Gentile leader largely for Gentile Christians.4 Graham Stanton rightly thinks this view unconvincing, and opts for a Jewish bearing of the book in a Jewish-Christian community still standing within Judaism, but having already parted ways with the traditional synagogue, and containing some Gentiles—probably the most realistic of assessments.5 In reality, however, the references to Gentiles in Matthew are not very impressive if one is looking for solid evidence of more than a few Gentiles in Jesus ministry or within a Jewish Christian community in Matthew’s time (the late 70s or 80s).



Five of the fourteen references are to Gentiles or nations either having their own ethnic ways, fighting among themselves, or persecuting Jesus or his people. Three examples see the nations in some future relation to Jesus such as gathered before him for judgment, (25:32), the objects of a proclamation of Messiah’s judgment against them (12:18) or coming to hope in Jesus (12:21). Two are to the Gentiles as simply “out there,” either living their own lives and values (6:32), or outside the realm of Jesus and his disciples (10:5). One use is singular (a nation) and very probably refers to the disciples as the future New Israel receiving their reward for believing on Jesus (21:43, Gr. ethnos/nation, NIV “people”). The three remaining uses do speak of a future witness of the disciples to the nations (10:18; 24:14; 28:19). Of these three, the first two (10:18; 24:14) probably view their witness as occurring in judicial scenes where they have to give account of their activities to Gentile rulers in the context of great struggle or “tribulation.” Only 28:19 (though 24:14 might belong in this category) is clearly an order to the disciples to carry out a mission of the gospel to the nations after Jesus’ departure. Only a very few, and probably none, of these references to Gentiles in Matthew, are a clear reflection of Gentiles already included in a Jewish Christian community either within Matthew’s purview as he writes or in Jesus’ ministry earlier. There are a very few pictures of isolated individual Gentiles in relation to Jesus: for example, the Capernaum centurion noted for his faith (8:10), and the Phoenician woman who accedes to Israel’s priority also noted for her faith (15:24-28).

Israel’s Kingdom in Matthew 11-13 What Jesus manifested to Israel was himself, his teaching and his works—all as tokens of the presence of the kingdom promised by Israel’s God in the prophets. The manifest kingdom of God in turn previews its future consummation at the Second Coming—a taste of the “powers of the age to come” as Hebrews 6:5 has it. Virtually all scholarship is now agreed that texts of the presence or future of the kingdom account for most references to it in the gospels. The more literalist tradition in biblical interpretation has for several centuries seen in both the present and future kingdom in Jesus’ ministry, the same identical kingdom promised in the Old Testament. In the literalist tradition, 4 Graham N. Stanton, A Gospel For a New People: Studies in Matthew (Louisville KY: Westminster/ John Knox Press, 1993), p. 132-133. 5 Ibid., p. 124.

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that kingdom is understood as an earthly monarchy in which Messiah rules the world in peace from within a renewed Israel; Israel’s spiritual and national restoration sends divine blessings throughout the earth. Very few, however, try to argue that the whole kingdom in its consummated fullness was exhibited by Jesus. Rather, common agreement prevails that in his first advent Jesus gave the world a limited sample of its powers and character, and established its salvation6 in the world prior to its consummation at his Second Coming. One form of this view of the kingdom is found in a number of important church fathers in the early Christian centuries. Though it died after Augustine, it began to revive after the Reformation, with gradually increasing recognition that a redeemed Israel will be its operative. The revival of belief in a literal earthly kingdom was first expressed in the work of J. H. Alsted and Joseph Mede in the years after 1620; it then grew with ups and downs during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until issuing in widely popular millenarian belief during the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This stream has produced hundreds of studies of the kingdom in both testaments down to our own time. Most are popular, but some are of serious scholarly worth. Two from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries stand out as unusually thorough—one a large three-volume work by G. N. H. Peters in the later nineteenth century under the title The Theocratic Kingdom, first published in 1884, the other a twentieth century work by Alva J. McClain entitled The Greatness of the Kingdom, first published in 1959. Peters’ work is thoroughly millenarian and has some elements of what became dispensational premillennialism after 1900, while McClain’s work was consciously dispensationalist. These two studies, complemented by an appreciable number of more or less forceful millenarian works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,7 have already synthesized the biblical materials on the messianic/ mediatorial kingdom. Because these major works discuss the kingdom and its future so thoroughly, only a few of the more important related or sub-themes of this perspective need be discussed below. One of earlier twentieth century American dispensationalism’s favorite interpretive tenets on the presence of Jesus’ kingdom mission to Israel was the notion that in the earliest stage of Jesus’ mission as seen in Matthew 4-10, Jesus was offering the kingdom to Israel; this is the view of the Scofield Reference Bible. In the events and sayings of Matthew 1113, on this view, Jesus withdrew his offer of the kingdom to Israel, and began to speak of the kingdom in mystery form—most notably in the parables of chapter 13. The Matthew 13 parables were thought to symbolize the character, course and end of the intervening mystery-church era instead of continuing the offer of the kingdom to Israel as alleged for 6 G. E. Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament, Rev Ed (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 68-78; Crucial Questions about the Kingdom of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952), pp. 92-94. Ladd’s contention that the kingdom’s salvation was established at the first advent, though not the whole or consummated kingdom, has had a forceful effect on developments within dispensational theology, and far beyond as well. 7 Some of the more notable of these nineteenth and twentieth century studies in America are Joshua Spalding, Sentiments, Concerning the Coming and Kingdom of Christ (Salem MA: Thomas Cushing, 1796); George Duffield, Dissertations on the Prophecies Relative to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ (New York: Dayton and Newman, 1842; Nathaniel West, The Thousand Years in Both Testaments (New York: Fleming Revell, 1880); Feinberg, Charles L., Premillennialism and Amillennialism (Chicago: Moody Press, 1936). For an expanded bibliography of millenarian works in Britain and America since the Reformation, see Dale S. DeWitt and Philip J. Long, A Bibliography of British and American Premillennialism and Related Works and Resources (Grand Rapids: Grace Bible College, 2008).

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Matthew 4-10. However, this view is not really in evidence. Matthew rather keeps all the same themes going straight through his gospel: Jesus as Son of God/Lord; the kingdom’s righteousness as already available; ministry to outcasts or marginalized in Israel; the presence of the kingdom; fulfillment of prophecy; and most forceful of all—the dual theme of Israel’s gradual rejection and the consequent formation of a New Israel in Jesus and his disciples.8 On the contrary, the events of Matthew 11-13 do not represent a withdrawal of the kingdom from Israel or an alleged change in Jesus’ message or the details of his teaching; they do represent a step in Israel’s rejection of Messiah. The idea that a withdrawal of a supposed “offer” of the kingdom to Israel begins here, followed by a new message of Jesus on individual discipleship instead, and a coordinated revelation of a “mystery form” of the kingdom which will prevail throughout an interim church-age anticipated by Jesus—these ideas are simply not in evidence. They appear more as constructs imposed on Matthew’s text. The comprehensive theme of Jesus’ mission for a renewed Israel continues through the whole gospel as the process of his gradual rejection unfolds. The Scofield Reference Bible of 1909 appears to represent a concurrence of thinking among several major leaders of the Bible and Prophetic Conference movement of 1878 and the decades following the Niagara Conferences and Moody’s Northfield Conferences. These conferences occupied the last quarter of the nineteenth century and extended more or less into the first decades of the twentieth century. C. I. Scofield became an important leader of these meetings for the study of prophecy, and with his reference Bible, succeeded in popularizing American dispensationalist ideas.9 Thereby the view of Israel and the kingdom noted above was normalized as the dispensational view of Jesus and the kingdom. In Scofield’s notes to chapters 11-13 one finds the following descriptions. The textual head-note to 11:20 reads, “Jesus rejected, predicts judgment.” The footnote explains that the kingdom of heaven “has been morally (editor’s italics) rejected.” The next head-note (at 11:28) reads, “The new message of Jesus: not the kingdom, but personal discipleship.” A footnote explains that this is “The new message of Jesus. The rejected king now turns from the rejecting nation and offers, not the kingdom, but rest and service to such in Israel as are conscious of need. It is a pivotal point in the ministry of Jesus (all italics Scofield’s).” To two verses in chapter 12, Scofield adds more similar notes (12:3 on David; 12:18 on Gentiles): “Jesus, action is highly significant” and “This too is most significant. The rejected King of Israel will turn to the Gentiles; both “significant” statements emphasize the point of the notes. In 12:21 Jesus does speak of the Gentiles trusting in his name in the future. But Scofield’s comment on Gentiles is only because the reference happens to fit the imposed schema; it does not indicate the major shift asserted in the notes and their implications for chapters 11-13. In footnote 1 at 12:41, Scofield says, “Again the rejected King announces judgment.” The head-note to 12:46-50 describes the comment of Jesus about his true family as “The new relationships.” Footnote 2 on the first word of 12:46 reads, “Rejected by Israel, His kinsmen 8 Stanton, Gospel for a New People., pp. 10-12, prefers “new people” as in his title; considering the mission to Israel motif throughout the whole gospel, and the very good possibility that the reference of 21:43 to the kingdom to be given to another “nation” is yet another reference among many to the disciples, the term “New Israel” is retained here. 9 See now for this major source of twentieth-century dispensational theology, R. T. Magnum and M. S. Sweetnam, The Scofield Bible: Its History and Impact on the Evangelical Church (Colorado Springs CO: Paternoster, 2009).

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according to the flesh, our Lord intimates the formation of the new family of faith . . . .” Again, there is no question that a “new family of faith” is an appropriate description, but this new family is in formation through the whole gospel in a lineal fashion; it is not a new idea in chapters 11-13; rather the idea of “the new family” has earlier and later expressions in more like a straight line thematic development in the gospel. In chapter 13, footnote 1 at 13:3, Scofield says, “. . . the ‘mysteries of the kingdom of heaven,’ taken together describe the result of the presence of the Gospel in the world during the present age, that is, the time of seed-sowing which began with our Lord’s personal ministry, and ends with the ‘harvest’. Briefly, that result is the mingled tares and wheat, good fish and bad, in the sphere of Christian profession. It is Christendom.” In footnote 2 to 13:3, on “a sower went forth to sow,” Scofield says, “The figure marks a new beginning. To labor in God’s vineyard (Israel, Isa. 5:1-7) is one thing, to go forth sowing the seed of the word in a field which is the world is quite another (cf. Mt. 10:5).” Again, not all observations are erroneous or incorrect here; rather, the problem is that an artificial, radical change is attributed to these three chapters which they do not in themselves bear. Scofield has imposed a schema of several specific details to gain the appearance of a “significant” shift at this point in Jesus’ mission. There is no space or warrant here to examine every detail. The difficulty is attributing unique changes in direction to Jesus’ work and teaching, when the details alleged are simply outcrops of longitudinal themes worked over by Matthew throughout the gospel.10

Non-millenarian scholars with as varied interests and perspectives as E. P. Sanders, Scot McKnight, N. T. Wright and Richard Horsley write about Jesus’ mission as though it is a given that Jesus’ ministry goal was a renewed Israel.11 Neither the texts assembled above, nor these scholars’ studies in the gospels, diminish or ignore Jesus’ occasional encounters with Gentiles, or even their implications for some future time. Nor are Jesus’ brief journeys into Gentile territories to be ignored or downplayed. None of these notices, however, diminish his focused attention on Israel’s messianic renewal. Furthermore, there is general recognition that Israel’s renewal is possible because of ways in which the kingdom is already present in Jesus’ works, words and person, including and especially its salvation.12 And so, however further defined, the intended and available renewal of Israel was also a stage in the public appearance of the promised kingdom of peace. If there is no such major shift in Matthew 11-13, then the door is open to another option.13 Whatever manifestation of the messianic kingdom is present in Jesus’ ministry, 10 All citations are from The Scofield Reference Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1909), pp. 1011-1014; see also The New Scofield Reference Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp.1009-1017, where these views are substantially unchanged. This assessment is similar to that of D. Turner, “Matthew among the Dispensationalists,” JETS 53, 4 (December, 2010), pp. 697-716. 11 E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), pp. 110-119; Scot McKnight, A New Vision for Israel: The Teachings of Jesus in National Context (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999); R. A. Horsley, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Order (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), pp. 72-81. Horsley raises the basic concept of Jesus seeking a renewed Israel in several works on the gospels. 12 An especially important and corrective insight was gained in the works of premillennialist G. E. Ladd, Theology of the New Testament, as well as in several other of his earlier works in which this view was gradually developed and articulated. 13 For a similar criticism of Scofield and discontinuity dispensationalist interpretation of Matthew 11-13, see D. Turner, “Matthew Among the Dispensationalists,” 705-707; Turner, like this study, rejects the traditionally perceived major shift in these chapters consequent on an alleged decisive rejection of Jesus by Israel, withdrawal of a supposed “offer” of the kingdom found in Matthew 4-10, and a “mystery form” of

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that presentation in multiple facets and aspects should be viewed as persisting from the beginning to the end of his mission in a series of ongoing steps. It is true that some aspects of the kingdom’s revelation are found together in tightly packed clusters. Matthew 11-13 is one of these, even though there are several other such clusters, for example, in chapters 2122. It seems more realistic to recognize that Matthew’s themes are horizontally developed more or less evenly through the book, depending on any given theme in question. The Contingency of Israel’s Situation and the Manifest Kingdom of the Gospels In this portion of the essay, I argue as follows: a contingent feature exists in the ministry of Jesus in which the future consummation of the kingdom promised to national Israel is available on condition. This factor in the accounts of Jesus’ ministry is neglected in modern studies of the kingdom. Because of its neglect, an important aspect of the theology of the kingdom goes begging for recognition. No one questions seriously that in Jesus’ teaching, faith in him or reception of his person, teaching and works is the requisite for personal salvation; this point is secure in gospels study because it is of interest to the pan-salvationism of many evangelical studies of the gospels and Jesus’ message. The centrality of salvation in Scripture, controlled by creedal commitments to salvation, as the theme and detail of every part of Scripture, is deeply embedded in many reformation stream creeds and biblical studies. There is no question that repentance of individuals is part of their submission to Jesus’ offer of salvation. Not usually discussed in any detailed way are the implications of faith and repentance, not for individual salvation alone, but for the possibility of Israel’s national salvation: Jesus looks for a turning of the nation as a whole and especially its leaders to himself as Messiah. Their turning will make operational in the human realm the promised redemption of the nation as the Old Testament prophets repeatedly stated. In the current segment of the essay, this motif in the gospels will be reviewed in some detail, since it contributes notably to the discussion. Then I will gather some of the important gospel texts where the theme outcrops, and finally try to synthesize these into a comprehensive view of Israel’s potential national salvation at its crisis point— in Messiah’s presence and the availability of the kingdom. Between 1946 and 1950 a series of articles appeared in the Expository Times by Roderic Dunkerley, an Anglican clergyman. These articles were already cited in a footnote to pages 320-321 in my earlier book, Dispensational Theology in America during the Twentieth Century (2003). Dunkerley’s thesis in the articles was based on some suggestions of C. J. Cadoux in a work entitled The Historic Mission of Jesus. Cadoux’s work was among many other similar studies belonging to the “life of Jesus” movement in European scholarship. I wish here to revive the Cadoux-Dunkerley thinking as it is highly suggestive for understanding the themes under discussion and likewise crucial to any theology of the messianic kingdom in the New Testament. In the article of The Expository Times, volume 59 (1948):218-222, Dunkerley begins with this observation: the kingdom projecting an interim through the church era. Like this study, Turner believes Matthew keeps his major themes going through the book; note his collected texts illustrating the continuity of some of Matthew’s themes on p. 706.

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. . . I have argued in favor of the ‘moral eschatological’ view of the life of Jesus—that He

came in the purpose of God to inaugurate the Kingdom on earth in a way which did not take place because the Jews refused to make the moral response necessary for such a glorious epiphany.

Among various facts he thinks must be kept in mind to do justice to the subject, were the following: “While some predictions were definite and irrevocable, many were contingent on the people’s response or lack of response. The Scriptural statement of this principle is of course Jeremiah 18:7-10 . . . .” He then cites A. B. Davidson from an article in Hastings Dictionary of the Bible (4:125): “The prophecies were designed to influence the conduct of the people; they were moral teaching, of the nature of threats or promises, which might be revoked or fulfilled according to the demeanor of those to whom they were addressed.”14

Dunkerley’s articles address Albert Schweitzer’s famous claim that Jesus did hope to realize the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies of a glorious kingdom of Messiah on earth. Jesus believed he was its agent and that it would come very soon. He finally realized, however, that it was not coming by his agency and threw himself on the wheel of history, dying at the hands of Roman and Jewish leaders at Jerusalem. His hopes for the kingdom were dashed and he has to be reckoned as deluded (so Schweitzer). Dunkerley seeks another explanation: in Jesus’ ministry a contingency prevailed in which if Israel had repented, the kingdom would soon have come to consummation. Hence the series of articles seeks to assemble all passages and texts which have anything to do with his hopes for Israel, his call to Israel for repentance as a contingency to the promised kingdom and its rejection, the abuse Jesus encountered in proclaiming the kingdom, and his disappointment with his own nation.15 It is unnecessary to review all of Dunkerley’s details. Rather, I have isolated his most important direct and suggestive comments that reflect the contingency of faith and repentance as a condition of the full kingdom in history. Dunkerley arranged his text collection on the basis of various types. I choose to place them in a sequence from the beginning to the end of Jesus’ ministry, adding brief comments as seem appropriate, and organizing the texts by geographical sequence between Galilee and Judea.

14 R. Dunkerley, “Prophecy and the Gospels, The Expository Times 59 (ET, 1948):218-222; the other articles in the series are “The Life of Jesus: A New Approach, ET 57 (1946):264-268; “The Principle of Coherence in the Gospel Story,” ET 58 (1947):133-136, 161-164; “The Context of the Gospel Story, ET 59 (1948):4-7; “Prophecy and Prediction, ET 61 (1950):260-263. See also very recently, S. Toussaint, C. Dyer and J. Quine, “No, Not Yet: The Contingency of God’s Promised Kingdom,” Bibliotheca Sacra 164 (2007): 131-147. 15 More recently the Jewish nationalist apocalyptic tradition as the context for Jesus mission has been brought forward by G. B. Caird, Jesus and the Jewish Nation (London: Athlone Press, 1965) and in a very thorough-going study of Israel’s situation in Jesus” mission by N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), In numerous respects the views expressed here are similar to those of Wright.

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Galilee Mark 1:15. John the Baptist: “. . . the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” “At hand” means “near (NIV),” but not “here.” The thought is that it is now available, although most people of dispensationalist conviction prefer to speak of “offered,” a term that cannot be seriously objectionable, although “near” and “available” might be considered as a slight improvement. John’s hearers were Judean Jews, although Mark does not really care about this detail, while Matthew and Luke are more interested. The call links the realization of the kingdom with repentance, whether individual or national. Mark 6:5-6. “And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands upon a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief.” The event occurred in Jesus’ home synagogue at Nazareth, which may be seen as a sample of the whole Israel, although this is not an obvious or necessary reading. It is striking that Jesus seems to restrain his powers because they do not believe, i.e. the kingdom in Galilee is unrealized in/ to them, because inhibited by unbelief. Matthew 10:23. “. . . I say to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of man comes (cf similar texts in 16:28; 24:30, parallels in Mark 9:1; 13:26, 30).” The main implication of the text is the straightforward certainty and nearness of the coming messianic future. The texts reveal an optimistic expectation of the kingdom’s final fulfillment. Dunkerley thinks these texts help us understand how, when repentance is entered as a condition, the prophecies become realistic. This text is not, however, evidence of contingency as such; it is evidence of the kingdom’s projected nearness. Matthew 11:12-14. “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and men of violence take it by force. For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John; and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come.” Jesus certainly identifies himself with the kingdom’s presence. John marks the transition to it as the hoped-for Elijah; but for any further fulfillment, they must be “willing to accept” the reality of John the Baptist as an event preparatory to the kingdom’s finalization. Jesus makes this point to the Jewish crowd. Matthew 11:20ff. “Then he began to upbraid the cities where most of his mighty works had been done, because they did not repent.” Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum are singled out. They are regarded as social entities; individuals are not addressed. Because they did not believe, what could have been messianic blessing (“exhalted to the heavens [Capernaum]”) will instead be judgment. This too is an important text because of the possibilities present within the contingency of repentance. The argument is sustained. Judea and Jerusalem Luke 13:6-9. “And he told this parable: ‘A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. And he said to the vinedresser, ‘Lo, these three years I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down; why should it use up the ground?’ And he answered him, ‘Let it alone, sir, this year also, till I dig about it and put on manure. And if it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’” This parable is immediately preceded by another saying explicitly about Jerusalem: “I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.” The parable depicts repentance

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as a kind of probation period. Failure in it will bring destruction; the implication is that another possibility exists—the opposite of destruction. The larger context makes it probable that this possibility is the promised kingdom. A 3 + 1 scheme appears—Jesus’ ministry plus one more year of possibility. But so far, “The owner’s expectations are disappointed; hence the tree . . . must have been one that was already fit to bear fruit . . . .”16 This is quite precisely Dunkerley’s point: these texts think of two possibilities—repentance and fruition of the messianic goal, or collapse of repentance with the goal unrealized and Jerusalem cut down. Matthew 21:33-45. The Lord established his vineyard, and when the season of fruit came, he sent servants to get the fruit; the farmers rejected God’s servants three times over. Then they rejected the son as well. So “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it (vs 43).” The parable appears to view the kingdom of God as continuously possible in Israel’s (the vineyard pace Isaiah 5:1-7) history, a history that finally climaxes with the kingdom in the Son-heir (21:37-38). Clearly, it is the kingdom that is available; but rejection of Jesus means it is lost to the vintners. Again, two options are before Israel. Dunkerley’s point is visible here: the kingdom is given to others because it belongs to those of repentance and faith—Jesus’ disciples, at least so far. The wording also suggests that a new people of God is or will be in formation. This thought is consonant with Matthew 16:18ff where Jesus’ national assembly/church is to be built in the future; this text too refers to another people, a “new people” as Graham Stanton calls it.17 Is this new people a permanent substitute for Israel? The larger picture is not clearly visible here. Rather than a permanent substitution, however, it is more likely that the substitute people occupies an interim, since the longer view is that the old Israel will still be urged to repentance in the apostles’ preaching in Acts, and Paul sees a mass conversion of Israel in the even longer view of Romans 11. It appears that, although Matthew’s parable does not really envision a delay in the future kingdom’s establishment, there is to be a change due to Israel’s resistance to Jesus. The shift to a new people is not permanent, however, but temporary until the old Israel repents and finally comes to its salvation. This in turn is due to the fact that the divine promises are irrevocably linked to Israel by divine covenant and will finally meet fulfillment in its future repentance and salvation (as in Rom 11). There is further discussion on this situation in the text immediately below and in the discussion of the “church” later in the essay. Luke 19:11-33. “As they heard these things, he proceeded to tell a parable, because he was near to Jerusalem, and because they supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately . . . . ‘A nobleman went into a far country to receive kingly power and then return. Calling ten of his servants, he gave them ten pounds, and said to them, ‘Trade with these till I come.’ But his citizens hated him . . . . ‘We do not want this man to reign over us.’ When he returned, having received kingly power, he commanded these servants to whom he had given the money to be called to him, that he might know what they had gained by trading.” This piece is among the most telling of the passages on contingency. It knows of a kingdom to “appear,” i.e., on earth in the future, and so is parallel to Jesus thought in 16 I. H. Marshall, The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), p. 555. Just below he adds, “. . . unrepentant Israelites will be excluded from salvation.” This makes the text sound like its interest is in the salvation of individuals, whereas the context is clear that he is speaking about Jerusalem which Jesus is at the moment approaching . 17 Stanton, Gospel for a New People, p. 18. “Nation” is preferred here since it seems more consonant with Matthew’s notion of Israel and its rejection of Jesus and is closer to Matthew’s general use of Gr. ethnos.

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Matthew 10:23; 16:28. It does not dismiss the concept as wrong, but only the assumption of “immediately,” implying a delay. Like other passages of rejection above, it also knows of a rejection by the King’s target subjects (Israel; but in context specifically Jerusalem). The parable also knows of a group called his “servants,” who appear to be his real people and who receive rewards when he returns. Thus the two options of the contingency are implicit: reject or accept. It specifies that he will slay those enemies who rejected him (Israel and its leaders). Thus while the scene does not use the term repentance, the idea is present in the parable’s images and descriptions. Mark 11:17b-18. “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations?’ But you have made it a den of robbers.” And the chief priests and the scribes heard it and sought a way to destroy him . . . .” There were two possibilities before Jerusalem: a joyous prospect that the temple might become a house of prayer for all nations (brought in by the plan of God in the kingdom era as in Matthew 8:10b-12), or what they have done and persist in doing, in making the temple a den of robbers (its commercialism). It is not as though the opportunity for this contingency has forever passed or been finally revoked; it is still available but they take the opposite action of seeking to destroy him, and in rejecting him they reject the kingdom with him. Matthew 23:37-39. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! Behold, your house is forsaken and desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again, until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” Two possibilities are before Jerusalem: respond to God’s calls to come to him (repentance) or refuse (“you would not”). But there is a future coming of Messiah, and Israel will have repented by then to welcome him with blessing; but it is not repenting at the moment.

Forceful, categorical prophecies about Israel’s future kingdom of glory and peace are made by Jesus, as though it was his real expectation for God’s eschatological plan. One explanation for delay is that he was just wrong about either the fact of the kingdom’s glorious future, or about how he thought of it. Or, perhaps he rather meant it was through and through a spiritual kingdom only. In the wake of Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer’s recognition of Jewish apocalyptic thought in the gospels, it has become impossible to sidestep the kingdom’s earthly, world-wide character as described in the Old Testament and during the Second Temple era in the developments and variations in Jewish apocalyptic literature. Another explanation is more suitable: woven through the gospels is a condition or contingency which qualifies the seemingly unqualified nature of at least some of Jesus’ predictions of the kingdom’s future. As Roderic Dunkerley argued more than sixty years ago, the qualification is the repentance of Israel, stated with remarkable repetition in Jesus words, and in a number of cases in direct connection with the promised messianic kingdom. It may not always be put in overt, fixed formulas using the term repentance over and over, but it is present and sustained in Jesus’ teaching with considerable variety of expression. The constant factor is an expectation of Jesus that accompanying his predictions, two options were before Israel in the face of his messianic witness: if Israel repents and turns to him as Messiah in faith, the fullness of the kingdom will come; if not, the kingdom for the moment belongs to a new (repentant) people but is delayed for the rest of Israel; for the present unrepentant, it is lost.

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This assessment and its implications sound disturbingly non- or anti-“Calvinistic” and much as though the biblical theology of repentance is thoroughly “Arminian” or “open theism”-like in character; what has happened to the sovereign and fixed plan of God here? These implications do not necessarily follow despite the appearance. A few comments about divine attributes related to contingency issues in biblical prophecy will at least move the argument back toward a firm sense of a fixed plan of God for the world’s salvation, but will also include the appropriate conditional factor articulated in Jeremiah 18 in general terms. That God has a grand plan for the world’s redemption with some events fixed and others contingent is widely agreed; but contingency is often overlooked, even though Jeremiah 18:1-11 articulates it explicitly and other prophetic passages on repentance imply it. The Old Testament’s references to God’s occasional “repentance” over some of his acts (as with his regret at having created man), the presence of stated conditions on certain promises (as those to Abraham), and the straightforward statement of contingency by Jeremiah (18:5-10)—all this has to figure into how fixity functions in the realization of God’s plan in history. I offer a few considerations which may help with this dilemma. Crucial in judging the situation is God’s omniscience. This attribute, like all others, interacts with the whole of his being. Even if the discussion is limited to God’s knowledge of what he is doing and thinking, there is infinity in him as most orthodox Christian theology confesses, and which in turn conditions the nature of his works. Accordingly, he knows all his plans at once, knows them all perfectly at once, knows all the consequences of any and all of them, and knows perfectly what the agents or responders will do and all the consequences of their responses. He also must therefore know all the consequences of all the contingencies (as noted in the above example), all the possibilities of what he will do to bring the plan to fruition despite the disparate nature of negative reactions. In other words, if his knowledge is infinite it is sufficient to include all possibilities and all consequent remedies for human non-response. Thus, serious objection to real contingencies in a fixed plan is not obviously necessary. The biblical data straightforwardly contain plan and contingency, or, to crystallize the ingredients in the above scenes, we are dealing with something that might be called planned contingency. That is, the Calvinist emphasis on fixity in God’s plan is served; the Arminian stress on human response is served, real freedom in human responders is retained, and orthodox theology’s insistence on the infinity of God’s knowledge is likewise served. Thus there can be no significant objections to the presence of a serious and meaningful moral contingency in Jesus’ presentation of the kingdom to Israel, and that Jesus’ predictions of its future certainty were conditioned by that very contingency. Thus the promised final kingdom was conditionally imminent in his person, teaching and deeds: if Israel repents, the promised kingdom-redemption of the world moves directly forward from Jesus’ mission. Jesus’ Prophecy of the Church A further issue is now opened: what “church” did Jesus have in view when he said to Peter, “upon this rock (Peter) I will build my church?” More precisely put for our purpose, the question is whether or not the “church” Jesus prophesied is identical to the 14

“church” described in the Pauline epistles. This issue is at least ostensibly important since Paul is the apostle of the church, while Jesus is the exponent of the kingdom. But both do mention the other entity: Jesus mentions the “church,” and Paul mentions the “kingdom.” However, Jesus’ mentions of the “church” are only three in number in the whole gospel record, and all three are in Matthew. The most significant of the three is Matthew 16:18 since it prophesies a “church” for the future. The other two are in Matthew 18:17 where the “church” is differentiated from the Gentiles in the same verse, at least suggesting that the “church” (Gr ekklesia) is a Jewish one, whatever else it is. What then can be said about 16:18? Oscar Cullmann and George Ladd recognized that this ekklesia is more likely an enlarged Jewish remnant continuous with Jesus and his mission to Israel. Cullmann’s significant comment is: . . . the Greek word for church, ekklesia does not designate anything like a Christian creation, but belongs to the Jewish sphere . . . When he speaks of the people of God that he (Jesus) is founding he certainly thinks of the ‘remnant of Israel . . . the new feature which Jesus brought is that . . . this people of God, is reconstituted in view of the end.18 There are some more or less obvious reasons for this perspective. (1) There is no Gentile world mission associated with Jesus’ prophecy of the beginning of the church. (2) The language of Matthew’s verse says nothing about any “body of Christ.” (3) “Church” is one of a series of terms Jesus uses for his disciples in the Jewish context of his mission; others are “nation,” and “flock.” (4) The term ekklesia includes the notion of “national assembly,” as K. L. Schmidt has shown.19 In addition to these observations, Craig Keener recently commented on the same limited reference of Jesus’ term: “. . . a Jewish renewal movement might have employed the same language Jesus did. The Essenes (Dead Sea Scrolls community) described themselves as a qahal (assembly) . . . Jesus likewise depicts his community as the true, faithful remnant of Israel in continuity with the Old Testament covenant community.20 (5) A fifth observation on the meaning of “church” in Matthew 16:18 may be added. When the apostles began their mission in Acts, they limited themselves to preaching to Israel in Jerusalem. The community of faith in Jesus the Messiah created by their preaching was just such a Jewish “national assembly” under the leadership of Peter as predicted by Jesus. How long this “assembly” continued to hope for the coming kingdom is not clear; it may, in some form or degree, have been until the Fall of Jerusalem. Still another consideration is (6) that Jesus’ commission to the twelve to evangelize the nations (Matt 28:19) was not intended to by-pass or exclude Israel as the plural “nations” suggests, and 18 O. Cullmann, Peter: Disciple-Apostle-Martyr, trans F. Filson (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953), pp. 187-189. For similar remarks, see G. E. Ladd, Theology of the New Testament, pp. 107-108. 19 K. L. Schmidt,”ekklesia,” TDNT 3:350, 20 Craig Keener, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 428, where he cites H. Ridderbos, F. F. Bruce, and W. Klaasen.

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as Luke’s parallel, “beginning at Jerusalem (Luke 24:47),” shows; rather, the commission to evangelize included Israel, a point now agreed by several scholars.21 Following these linguistic, social and ethnic indicators, ekklesia in Matthew is not likely to refer to the coming church of the Gentile mission and the Pauline epistles. It is perfectly plausible, as the scholars cited above indicate, that its intention lies within the framework of a future messianic remnant as a new national assembly of Israel attached to himself as Messiah, as Old Testament prophecy had said. Israel, Kingdom and Related Motifs in Acts 1-8 Having noted the sustained themes of Israel, its kingdom, and its repentance as a stated or implied contingency for further fulfillment of the kingdom promises, a further examination of related themes and motifs in Acts can be made. This examination will determine whether these promise-fulfillment thoughts are continued in at least the early chapters of Acts, and whether Israel or the church is textually focused. Of course it is the case that later New Testament passages, say in the Pauline and Jewish-Christian epistles and Revelation, could furnish texts that would state clearly and unequivocally, or obviously imply, that the church began with the Spirit and the ministry of the apostles in Acts 2. That question, however, can wait. For now the question of Israel, its repentance, the kingdom, and other related motifs like the New Israel22 remnant assembly (“church”) may be pursued. Israel and Repentance in Acts 1-8 A concentrated use of “Israel,” “Israelites” or a related term like “men of Israel,” is visible in the first eight chapters of Acts (about 12x). In the remaining nearly three-fourths of the book combined, it weakens perceptibly in quantity (7x in the rest of the book). This is analogous to the way “Israel” appears in the early chapters of Luke (9x in chapters 1-4; 3x in the remainder of the gospel). It is easy to see that the national name is concentrated near the beginning of both Luke and Acts. This merely statistical reality suggests, but not more, that in a sense, Luke saw the early ministry of the apostles in Acts as a kind of restart of the messianic mission to Israel; if not, why is such a concentration of “Israel” paralleled in the two books; and yet, care should be taken to read enough but not too much out of such statistics. It is similar, if not slightly more intense, with another term for Israel—the word laos (people). Acts 1-7 uses it 24x, while the remaining three-fourths of the book uses it a total of 23x. And, dividing Acts into thirds, one may see an even more striking presence of the comparison: in chapters 1-7, 24x; chapters 8-19, 12x; in chapters 20-28, 11x. In Luke’s gospel, the matter is unbalanced in a different way with uses concentrated mostly 21 Robert Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on his Handbook for a Mixed Church, 2nd Ed (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 595, with some qualifications. 22 As L. Goppelt, Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Times, trans R. Guelich (London: A. & C. Black, 1970), p. 28: [Jesus’ disciples] considered . . . the New Israel.”

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in the final four chapters (chapters 1-6, 12x; chapters 7-12, 6x; chapters 13-18, 1x; and chapters 19-24, 19x!). An obvious point is that for Luke, laos is most relevant to the final scenes of Jesus’ life and death, suggesting a tragic and ironic outburst of national hostility and rejection in those events. This would seem to highlight Jesus’ words of forgiveness to the nation, and to open the door to the divine largesse focused in the early chapters of Acts. The one clear use for Gentile believers is Acts 15:14. Other notable terms for Israel or part of it are “Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem,” “Abraham (for the founder),” “sons of Abraham,” “children of Abraham” and “seed of Abraham.” In Acts, concentrated references to Abraham or his sons or seed characterize Acts 1-7 (7x), but appear only once after chapter 7 (13:26: “brothers, children of Abraham,” to a synagogue gathering). A like concentration of Abraham terms is not found generally in Luke, although there are five such uses in Luke 1-3, with even more occurrences in Luke 13-20 (9x). The distribution of laos is related to Luke’s use of “Israel” and other like terms. When viewed this way, Luke may be said to have a sustained interest in the idea of Jesus’ mission to Israel that surpasses even Matthew’s (“Abraham” 7x in Matthew, cf Luke’s 14x in the gospel only; “Israel” 12x in Matthew, cf. 12x in Luke’s gospel only; laos 14x in Matthew; cf Luke’s 37x in the gospel only!). Caution is in order to avoid unwarranted inferences, since the statistics are only suggestive. Care is needed in determining what is said and for what reasons in each individual context. We turn now to the specific occurrences of “Israel” and “Israelites,” and references to Abraham’s children or seed in Acts 1-7. These texts will show how concentrated the apostles’ attention is on the Israel they address directly at Jerusalem. Again, it seems best to exhibit these texts with a few comments to highlight details. Acts 1:6-8. “So when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’ He said to them, ‘It is not for you to know the times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth’.” “Kingdom to Israel” is a restatement of the monarchic nationalism of the Old Testament Davidic sort, but known also in some references in the apocalyptic literature of late Judaism and in its contemporary synagogue prayers.23 It is now frequently acknowledged that Jesus does not reject the question, but responds only to the time factor while adding an intervening event, thereby leaving the assumptions and hopes of the question to remain alive24. One is invited by this text to look for further manifestations of this “kingdom to Israel” in the ensuing chapters. Barrett acknowledges Jewish interest 23 Psalms of Solomon 17:23; The Eighteen Benedictions (Shemoneh Esreh), 14-15, where there is prayer for a hasty appearance of the Davidic Messiah, his throne, and salvation in Jerusalem. The whole set of prayers (19 in its finished form) is produced in translation by E. Schurer, A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ, trans S. Taylor and P. Christie (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1885) Div. 2, Vol 3:85-87, also available now in a modern, revised edition. 24 Cf. Oepke, TDNT 1:389: “The answer . . . though it forbids inquisitive investigation of the times and seasons, it does not repudiate the expectation as such . . . .” It was unnecessary for him to add that the answer also “deprives it [the question’ s assumptions] of political significance and refers it to the pneumatic sphere.” This evaluation is unclear, but it seems to suggest that no theocratic Old Testament vision of the earthly Davidic or Davidic-like monarchy should be considered; beside this, “pneumatic sphere” complicates the meaning further, unless he means that the kingdom will finally be an earthly work of the Spirit, which of course is not objectionable.

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in the question, following Klausner, but thinks Luke “uses the question to underline the non-nationalist character of the Christian movement.”25 He means by this the command to witness to the ends of the earth and the coming of the Spirit. Barrett thinks Luke understands God’s end-times plan to be universal rather than nationalist.26 This view involves a false opposition. Alternately, the piece means that the restoration of the kingdom to Israel will occur, but important intervening events will also occur before it does, i.e., the apostles’ witness and the coming of the Spirit, and continued reference to the kingdom and Israel’s national repentance. Thus, following Jesus’ instructions in Luke 24:27-29 to begin their work in Jerusalem, they will continue the mission to Israel as Acts shows they actually do. The universal perspective is here but the way to it is an Israel-first mission, as the apostles’ activities in Jerusalem show. Acts 1:16, 20-22. “Brethren, the scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand by the mouth of David . . . , ‘His office let another take.’ So one of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us . . . must become with us a witness to the resurrection.” The scene is about Judas’ replacement by Matthias as the twelfth apostle. No form of “Israel” occurs here; but Israel’s symbolic national number twelve does occur in connection with the twelve apostles. The text identifies two necessities, both using some form of Greek dei, “it is necessary.” The first necessity (1:16) is specifically the fulfillment of Psalm 69:25 and Psalm 109:8, texts understood to be prophecies about a replacement of Judas. (The problematic details of original meaning and usage need not be discussed since this is not the focus here.) The same necessity is referred to in 1:22. And yet there appears to be a larger “necessity,” i.e., that the number twelve be re-established after the departure of Judas, although this is not stated directly. Some commentators on Acts express in various ways a ‘necessity” in a larger sense, for example that the national leadership of a potentially redeemed Israel be reconstituted.27 The event thus belongs to Luke’s larger notion of “Israel first.” Acts 2:14. “Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem . . . .” The address is specifically to Peter’s local, immediate hearers; he explains the outpouring of the Spirit. Acts 2:22. “Men of Israel [Israelites], hear these words.” “Men of Israel” is the same crowd gathered over the noise in the house at the Holy Spirit’s coming. The multitude gathered outside is called by Peter/Luke, “. . . Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven (2:5),” “Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem (2:14),” and “both Jews and proselytes (2:10).” The NIV translates “proselytes” as “converts to Judaism,” which is correct. Proselytes were Gentiles who had become Jews, and thus had joined the national entity by passing through the requirements for full proselyte membership in Israel. From the time of Abraham, the nation had never been a pure biological-genetic entity. For example, Abraham circumcised 25 C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, 2 vols (London: T & T Clark, 1994), 1:76. He cites Klausner, Jesus, p. 402 on the Jewishness of the question. 26 Ibid. 27 J. B. Polhill, An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of the Holy Scripture: Acts (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1992), p. 93, remarks about the “necessity” of reconstituting the twelve in national terms: “Luke 22:28-30 speaks of the apostles’ unique role of sitting in the kingdom and judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Their number corresponds to the tribes of Israel, for in a real sense they represent the restored Israel, the people of God. The continuity with Israel necessitates the restoration of the full number of the twelve.” Though Polhill goes on to speak of the founding of the church as the messianic Israel, his recognition of a larger national “necessity” based on the historic Israel and its promises of the kingdom is significant.

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slaves he had purchased from “from a foreigner (Gen 17:27).” The presence of proselytes is not a valid objection to national Israel as his target audience. Proselytes were a regular part of the whole of Israel assembled in this scene at one of its traditional national festivals in Jerusalem. Acts 2:36. “Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.” The plea to “all Israel” enlarges beyond the Jews gathered in Jerusalem and Judea. The whole nation was not actually gathered here; but the crowd of Judeans with proselytes and diaspora Jews from all over the Mediterranean and near eastern world (2:5-11) is representative of the whole nation. There may be a Lukan interest in the larger-than-Judea scope in the situation. But no actual movement beyond “Israel” occurs; the apostles apparently believe a mission of the messianic gospel to Israel precedes any further movement of a universal nature. As Barrett notes, “only Israelites are being addressed.”28 Acts 3:12. “Men of Israel, why does this surprise you?” The surprise event is a healing at or in the temple. A new episode has begun and continues to the end of chapter 4—two whole chapters of a healing event and its aftermath. Peter still addresses only Israel at Jerusalem, but now in the temple. Acts 3:19. “Repent then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Christ, who has been appointed for you—even Jesus. He must remain in heaven until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets.” In this statement, the contingency of Israel’s repentance and the consequent resumption of prophesied events is starkly clear. On the future hope expressed here see below under “Hopes for Israel.” Acts 3:25-26. At the end of the speech to the “Men of Israel,” Peter says of them, “You are sons of the prophets and of the covenant which God gave to your fathers, saying to Abraham, ‘And in your posterity shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’ God having raised up his servant, sent him to you first to bless you in turning every one of you from your wickedness.” The words, “. . . in your posterity (Gr sperma, seed)” are usually understood by commentators as a reference to Jesus. But the nationalistic context and the use of “seed/ posterity” for national Israel elsewhere in the New Testament make a compelling case for a reference to the priority of Israel.29 In contrast, there is no compelling contextual reason for understanding “seed/posterity” as a reference to Jesus as Abraham’s seed; rather, the reference is to the people he is addressing, as the sequel in vs 26 also shows. A more frequent term for Jesus in these chapters is “servant,” although there are several unusual terms applied to him in addition to his usual titles of Jesus, Christ and Lord. The context also repeats the plea for Israel’s repentance (“turning”) and confirms the hoped-for repentance as prior to (“first”) the times of refreshing (“bless you”) and related future events usually tied in the New Testament to the Second Coming. Acts 4:10. “. . . be it known to you all, and to all the people of Israel . . .” This time the address is to a gathering of rulers, elders and scribes along with Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, John 28 Barrett, Acts, 1:151. 29 D. Bock, Acts (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), pp. 180-181, seems to see “seed” as Israel, not Jesus. Of “in your seed (posterity RSV),” he says, “Here the point is only that God’s promises were made to and for Israel first of all.” He does, however, avoid a direct statement to the effect that “seed/posterity” refers to Israel.

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and Alexander (not otherwise identified), and other members of the high priest’s family. The group is called “Rulers of the people and elders (vs 8).” The list of named auditors is enlarged to include by implication or extension “. . . all the people of Israel . . . .” The substance of the thought is that in Jesus the messianic salvation is available to the leaders and their nation—not to individuals alone but to Israel collectively. Acts 4:27. “. . . for truly in this city there were gathered together against thy holy servant Jesus . . . both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel . . . .” The allusion is to Israel’s part in Jesus’ death, but is not of further significance for our thesis. Acts 5:21. “Now the high priest came and those who were with him and called together the council and all the senate of Israel . . . .” “Israel” here is not of any further significance for the argument of this essay, except that with the whole context, it shows the apostles’ activity to continue in Jerusalem and within the jurisdiction of Jerusalem’s Jewish authorities.” Acts 5:30-32. “The God of our fathers raised Jesus whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.” The following details are of significance: (1) repentance is again mentioned; (2) it is specifically Israel’s repentance; and (3) forgiveness of sins is repeated from earlier repentance passages (2:38; 3:19, 26). There is no projection of potential or prophesied consequent future events as in 3:21ff. Acts 5:35. “Men of Israel, take care what you do to these men.” Gamaliel warns the “men of Israel” to be careful what they are doing to the apostles. The reference is of no special significance to the argument here, except that it shows the action is still in Jerusalem and on Jewish ground, and there is concern about a possible divine origin of the apostles’ preaching and works as an inner-Israel issue. Gamaliel thinks this may be a real movement of God; he also thinks of the possibility of a serious mistake by Israel’s leaders. Acts 7:23, 37, 42. These three uses of “Israel” are in Stephen’s speech and are all historical allusions to events of Israel’s Old Testament history.

Peter in these chapters speaks only, repeatedly and without exception to national Israel; Gentiles who appear here as proselytes (1:10) are part of Israel. There is no Gentile mission or even thought about one, notwithstanding the incidental suggestions of universality—a situation that comports with Luke’s “beginning at Jerusalem.” The temptation to read Gentile interest into “all who are far off (2:39)” is out of context.

The Samaritans and the Ethiopian Eunuch According to Acts 8:1-2, persecution against Christians in Jerusalem arose as a result of Stephen’s speech. As a result, Judean Jewish Christians fled Jerusalem to the north including Samaria. Luke, keeping to the Jerusalem-Israel national mission of the twelve apostles, reports that they remained in Jerusalem to continue their repentancemission at the center of Judaism. The story line continues with a mission to Samaria, not by the twelve, but by Philip, one of the seven deacons appointed by the Jerusalem church. 20

That is, when there is any expansion at all beyond Jerusalem, it is not the twelve who go, but a representative of the Jewish Hellenists, still based, however, in Jerusalem. Thus the mission priorities of the twelve—preaching Christ and repentance to Israel—are retained at least through the eighth chapter of Acts. The geographical schematic of Acts 1:8 (JudeaSamaria-ends of the earth) is unfolding, but in a way that was not specified in their original commission. Judea is receiving a more extended offering of the gospel than might have been guessed from their commission in Matthew. Nor does Samaria receive anything like a proportionate amount of space in the account. Whether this reflects the extent of actual mission preaching or Luke’s literary priorities is unclear.30 The target group now becomes the Samaritans (Acts 8), a sect of Judaism living in the territory adjoining Judea to the north, but not recognized as such by the Jerusalem authorities. The Samaritans are not Gentiles, nor are they “Jews” in the strict Judean sense, especially as they have their own temple and Pentateuch. But, as J. Jervell has shown, Luke has a special interest in the Samaritans. Jervell recognizes that while they are not strictly main-line Judean or Galilean Jews, they are a sect within Israel. Only Luke and John know of a Samaritan ministry of Jesus; but the Samaritan sect within Israel rejects Jesus just as does the rest of Israel. Luke views the Samaritans as another sub-group of Jews along with other sects or groups including Pharisees, Herodians, Sadducees and others.31 Hence this outreach beyond Jerusalem to Samaria is not an abandonment of the national Israel-renewal mission. Rather it is another phase of the same mission, now moving to other parts of Israel outside of the Jewish mainstream, and manned appropriately by a representative of a secondary group of men called “deacons,” among which were some with special evangelizing gifts. It may be that these “deacons” each had an “out-Jerusalem” but nevertheless within-Israel target group of Jews, although that idea is not attested in any explicit or detailed statement. A view of this sort, however, is at least consistent with the origins of the “deacon” group in Acts 6:1-6. It appears to be about the same with Philip’s subsequent mission to the single Ethiopian. This Ethiopian works in the royal service of Candace, queen of Ethiopia. He appears in Acts to be returning home, probably after attending Israel’s celebration of Pentecost; the indeterminate chronology of Acts 1-8 allows for this estimate. Philip, transported to the eunuch’s side by “the angel of the Lord,” finds the man reading Isaiah 53. The reader is left to guess that he was drawn to Isaiah by the preaching of the apostles who several times in the early chapters of Acts speak of Christ as the “servant,” with clear allusions to Jesus in fulfillment of the Isaiah’s Servant of the Lord (Isa 52:13-53:12). The story leaves the impression that the eunuch was actually a Jew or proselyte since he had made a long journey to Jerusalem to attend an event of the Jewish festival calendar at the Jewish capital—presumably the Pentecost of the preceding chapters. Though we cannot be sure he was a dispersed Jew, if not a proselyte, Zephaniah 3:10 does reflect already the presence of scattered Jews in Ethiopia. These circumstances create a plausibility in assuming his actual Jewishness. At any rate, we are not into an expansion of the gospel to the Gentiles here either, so far as the outlook of Acts is concerned. That expansion Luke delays until Acts 10, although the Lord’s words to Paul at his conversion are a preliminary

30 31

R. Zehnle, Peter’s Pentecost Discourse (Nashville: Abingdon, 1971), p. 99. J. Jervell, Luke and the People of God (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1972), pp. 113-132.

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announcement of it as the sequels show.32 A specific mission target group is identified for two of the seven deacons, but only two—which may be nothing more than a matter of Luke’s available space. Of the two known from Acts, Stephen evoked disputes from members of a “synagogue of the Freedmen” in Jerusalem; that synagogue contained Cyrenians, Alexandrians, Cilicians and Asians—all likely Jews or proselytes. Stephen’s efforts resulted in accusations leading to his murder. Philip went to the Samaritans and to the Ethiopian eunuch. So the suggested pattern seems present, but we have no other information about missions of the other five deacons, nor even whether there were other such Christian-messianic evangelistic thrusts toward out-Jerusalem sectarian Jewish groups during the Acts period. Thus the picture of Israel, including both its Jerusalem-Judean center, and some of its several subdivisions outside that orbit, is that it was the persistent target of the apostolic messianic mission during the first several chapters of Acts. To at least this Jerusalem national center and its leadership, the twelve, although represented only by Peter and John, proclaimed Jesus as the Servant-Messiah, repentance for forgiveness of sins as the contingent national act of renunciation of its sins, and the hopes upon repentance of its latter day glories—“the restoration of all things.”33 The Hellenist “deacons” move out to other Jewish groups. Clearly, Jesus’ mission to Israel continued in Acts with his twelve apostles and a few others including the Jerusalem “deacons.” Other Related Motifs in Acts 1-8 The apostles’ preaching of repentance to Israel in Jerusalem recounted in Acts 1-8 continues Jesus’ messianic work as a movement of national spiritual renewal—a prelude to the expected ensuing kingdom. The following elements are part of the same cloth—the preaching of repentance as a contingency of further fulfillment of Jesus’ kingdom prophecies: stated hopes, the coming of the Spirit, adherence to the temple, conversion of some priests and a few other national leaders, the communal sharing of goods, and a messianic Jewish ritual bath of symbolic cleansing of the growing new Israel; these elements all bespeak the potential imminence of the promised Israel-centered messianic kingdom. As this story unfolds in Acts 1-8, however, a growing resistance by Israel’s leadership is also featured. The resistance climaxes in the leadership’s stoning of Stephen in Acts 7. But this climactic rejection of his message is not the absolute end of Israel’s probation; it was, however, a major step toward the gradual collapse of the contingent availability of the kingdom at the moment when Israel’s potential for realization of its promises was at a maximum point.

32 One occasionally finds remarks in the commentaries on this hold-off of a Gentile mission in Acts., for example by J. Munck, Acts (Garden City NY: Doubleday), p. 78: “An Ethiopian on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem must supposedly be a god-fearing Gentile. But if so, why did they make so much of the god-fearing Gentile Cornelius in ch. x?”; cf. for a much less forceful statement, Barrett, Acts, 1:421: “. . . the story of Cornelius marks a definite advance on the story of the Ethiopian,” and note his discussion en loc. 33 Barrett, Acts., 1:203 notes this combination of ideas, including the dual “personal and corporate” blotting out of sin. He summarizes, “Forgiveness and future salvation of the people of God are thus dependent on repentance.”

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The Coming of the Spirit For our purposes here, the most significant observation is that the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 2) was an event of realized prophecy about Israel’s latter days along with Jesus’ messianic appearance and the foretaste of the promised kingdom. As such, it is yet another local case of Israel’s promised and manifest goal like other fulfillments at or following from the First Advent. The prophecy of the Spirit, which foretold what became the event of Pentecost, is found in Joel amid scenes of national repentance and warnings of judgment (Joel 1:1318; 2:12-17). In Joel’s time, that judgment was a foreign invasion, possibly Assyrian, but more likely Babylonian, symbolized by the book’s scenes of a devastating locust plague. Immediately preceding the promise of the Spirit (2:28-32, quoted in part in Acts 2), are promises of great political and agricultural blessings, all local or regional to Israel (“his land [2:18],” “his people [2:18],” “you . . . you . . . you [2:19],” “O land [2:20],” “O people of Zion [2:23],”you . . . you . . . you . . . you . . . you . . . you [2:23-26],” “my people [2:26],” and finally, “. . . you will know that I am in Israel [2:27]).” The prophecy itself reads (2:2832), And it shall come to pass afterward (or “in the latter days”), that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even upon the menservants and maidservants in those days, I will pour out my spirit. And I will give portents in the heavens and on earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the LORD comes. And it shall come to pass that all who call upon the name of the LORD shall be delivered; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape, as the LORD has said, and among the survivors shall be those whom the LORD calls.

The words “pour out my spirit on all flesh” suggest universality. Joel’s touch of universality is actually forthcoming in the sequel scenes in Acts. As the gospel moves beyond Jerusalem and Israel into the Gentile world, the Spirit accompanies it and permanently indwells both Jews and Gentiles who believe. And yet what one would expect from the local focus on Israel in Joel appears again in the passage itself in the words, “for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem . . . (2:32).” This back-and-forth of Israel and “all flesh” is just what we find in the Acts fulfillment. But as it turns out, the matter is sequenced: Israel primarily and first, then “whoever calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved.” Did Peter or Luke understand the event as a latter-day sign? There are some reasons think this is the case. (1) Twice in the immediate speech context, the diad or triad appears— wonders and signs (2:19 in the actual quote from Joel), or miracles, wonders and signs (2:22 after the quote). “Signs” is not in the Greek of Joel’s LXX (cited in 2:19). If “signs” was added by Luke, as seems the case,34 it suggests at least Luke believed the event was a sign.35 The group of three sign terms in 2:22 is clearly in Luke’s own words and refers to Jesus’ deeds (2:22). (2) Some details of Joel’s words about what would happen at the Spirit’s

34 35

It is so construed by the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament, p. 412. Zehnle, Peter’s Pentecost Discourse, p. 33.

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coming are already fulfilled in the tongues event. Other details like the noted celestial events appear to await further developments. These features imply that the Spirit event belongs to a group of latter day signs to Israel. In fact the association is so obvious that the sign nature of the Spirit event is all but directly stated. If it is a sign, it appears to signify several things: a miraculous new communication capability; further prophetic events of Joel including the onset of the prophetic Day of the Lord; and a new power of salvation in the world—at least this much, and perhaps more. (3) The event is a language miracle on any reckoning, initiated by the ascended Jesus in sending the Spirit. No one prayed for it, or at least there is no record of such a prayer. One implication is that in this initiative, a kind of re-start of the messianic era occurs; it began with a miraculous divine initiative in Jesus’ incarnation and now continues with a second major divinely initiated miracle also promised in the prophets—Joel in particular. After the completion of his messianic work, Jesus goes to heaven and, having received the promise from God in heaven, sends the Spirit to enlarge what he began. In this sense it is a new beginning, although at the same time a continuation. The newness lay in its demonstration of the power of prophetic speech (tongues)36 as a symbolic event to unite all dispersion Israel in communication capabilities. It also signals the potential for a universal expansion of such communication powers, should Israel receive Jesus. Ultimately, the Gentile world would afterward pour into the divine fold as the prophets, especially Second Isaiah, indicate. Clearly, the latter day inclusion of Gentiles upon Israel’s conversion was thought to necessitate some kind of massive communication miracle. And so there is ground to conclude that this was in fact a major eschatological 37 sign, first to Israel—in Jerusalem as promised—that the renewal mission to Israel was continuing, and that further eschatological events may be coming. It is not an argument against the thesis of this essay that apostles continue to do signs and wonders beyond Israel when the gospel later moves to the Gentile world. For the moment, however, the significance of this sign lay in its connection with the ongoing availability of the kingdom to Israel as an inducement to its repentance—the national contingency on the “times of restitution.” Eschatological Aspects of Peter’s Speech in Acts 3:19-26 Expressions of hope for a national realization of the kingdom promised to Israel and the world are not frequent in the first eight chapters of Acts. However, what is there is strikingly forthright, especially when considered as the expression of people now filled with the Spirit and fully aware of Jesus’ messiahship. The following discussion relates other national eschatology notes in Acts 1-8 to the central passage of 3:19-26. 36 Luke adds to the Joel quotation the words, “ and they shall prophesy,” indicating that, whatever terms Peter used to describe the Spirit event, Luke believed the event in some aspect contained the ability to prophesy—another aspect of the sign cluster in the event, though he does not say this directly. Luke may have thought the prophecy event occurred when Peter began to speak, since a notable verb of inspired prophetic speech is used at the very beginning of his message (Gr. apophtheggomai, “to utter (divinely) inspired speech.” Cf Zehnle,Peter’s Pentecostal Discourse, p. 37. 37 Ibid., pp. 29-31, notices the use of the term eschaton in the LXX of Joel and quoted by Luke in Acts 2:17 at the beginning of the citation.

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Certainly the twelve apostles thought of the Second Coming as another operative future event—the catalyst for still other prophesied events. The base-line eschatology in the early chapters is expressed first in Acts 1:11: “This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” The other direct allusion to the Second Coming is in Peter’s speech at Acts 3:20: “. . . and that he [God] may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus . . . .” There is also a possible allusion in the words of Stephen just before his death when he says, “. . . I see the heavens open and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God (7:56).” “Son of man” (the preferred reading) places the thought in an apocalyptic setting not unlike Daniel 7. Some think that “standing” sees the ascended Jesus ready to come back to earth in judgment. Barrett thinks it more general—“ready to perform eschatological functions,”38 which certainly cannot be wrong. Several commentators cited by Barrett (en loc) think the Son of man is standing to guide or welcome him to heaven. Kummel, however, supposes he is standing because he is about to come (back to earth).39 Sometimes, in Old Testament judgment scenes, judges stand for a verdict. The image encourages a Second Coming interpretation, but specifically to judge the rejecting Israel; this view is also encouraged by the hostility of Israel’s leaders in the context.40

Hope for the kingdom’s soon restoration to Israel is expressed in 1:6-7. However, the major text of Acts 1-8 for this idea is Acts 3:19-25 where its connection with the Second Coming is added (although this event is also nearby in 1:8ff). The discussion will focus mainly on this passage since it is the most detailed, and represents a very early account of Peter’s national renewal preaching in Jerusalem.41 One important term in the vocabulary of national restoration foretold by the prophets is the verb apokathistano (1:6) and its related noun apokatastasis (3:21). The verb is used in 1:6 in the apostles’ question about restoring the kingdom to Israel “at this time”; in connection with this text, it is important to recognize that Jesus does not reject the question, but comments only on the time factor—“at this time.” The noun is used in Peter’s speech following the public healing in the temple (3:21). There is hardly any disagreement in Acts studies that this word-group designates the fulfillment in Israel of part or the whole of what the prophets promised—the earthly kingdom of peace and/or Edenic tranquility. The LXX does not use the noun. Josephus does use it for the return of the Jews from exile, while Philo uses it for the redemption from Egypt in a mystical way like the “restoration of the soul” of which the exodus, for him, is a physical example.42 The meaning “establishment,” suggested by Oepke, is sometimes embraced more or less tentatively by some commentators; it is not out of the question. But since there is so little use of the word in Jewish eschatological contexts before and outside the New Testament, we are left to the context to piece details together. 38 Barrett, Acts, 1:384. 39 Ibid., p. 385 40 Cf. Isa 3:13 and H. Bultema, Commentary on Isaiah, trans by C. Lambregtse (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1981), p. 68. 41 Ibid., pp. 44-60. Unusual titles for God, and Jesus, as well as the presence here of a Moses-Jesus typology are thought by Zehnle to be evidences of a primitive source, unlike most of Luke’s speech scenes: he thinks most of the speeches were composed by Luke. This one is unusual. 42 Oepke, TDNT 1:391.

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This may be done in a few simple points, limiting ourselves to those texts where any like-sounding prophetic elements appear. (1) The verb receives a very specific sense in 1:6 for restoring the kingdom to Israel. This fairly requires that the matter belongs to Old Testament “restored (Davidic) monarchy” thoughts. (2) A very similar thought, but lacking any specific details of Acts 1:6, occurs when Elijah is said to “restore all things” as in Matthew 17:11 and Mark 9:12. (3) Immediately after “restoration of all things (Acts 3:21),” Peter adds that what he refers to are the “things” (events) of which all the prophets spoke (3:21b); this too puts the matter summarily into the prophetic picture of the future, which, while sometimes containing something like a restored creation or Eden, refers mostly to a restored (Davidic) monarchy in Israel.43 Even more significantly for our theme, 3:19 urges repentance and turning as a basis for blotting out “your sins.” From a beginning with repentance and blotting out of sins, other eschatological blessings follow—“times of refreshing,” Jesus’ return, and the restoration of all things of which the prophets spoke. Whether the purpose of repentance is represented with eis to (UBS, p. 74) or pros to (Vaticanus, Sinaiticus) there is little difference for the meaning, “in order that.”44 Repentance and removal of sins are requisite to further divinely determined eschatological goals: “times of refreshing” and the Return (“send Jesus Christ”). Although Barrett thinks the repentance-forgiveness clause and the times of refreshing-return clause do not furnish grammatical grounds (my italics) for distinguishing nearer and more remote purposes, he does say that “it seems clear on the grounds of sense and word order (my italics) that pros to (or eis to) “introduces the immediate personal consequence of repentance. and hopos an (“so that”) the wider cosmic-historical consequence.” 45 This seems correct. Thus, without pushing the grammatical distinction, the two groups of thoughts—the repentance group, then the refreshing group—represent nearer and more distant consequences of repentance; just how distant is impossible to discern. A further question is the relation of “times of refreshing” of 3:20, and “restoration of all things” of 3:21. The two central terms anapsukasis (“refreshing”) and apokatastasis (“restoration”) may be more or less synonymous. J. Polhill views the two terms as synonymous, after noting that anapsukasis appears in Ezra 11:46 to denote the earth’s “refreshment” or “healing” after the messianic woes (the N. T.’s “great tribulation.”).46 Oepke thinks the two expressions “stand in correspondence and mutually explain one another.”47 It is hard to decide whether Luke intended the repentance, the “times of refreshing,” the Return of Jesus and the “restoration of all things” to be (chronologically) 43 E. Haenchen, Acts of the Apostles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), p. 208, thinks the restoration is “the realization of all prophetic promises, which is at the same time a restoration of the order of creation.” 44 Barrett, Acts, 1:203, thinks there is “no difference in meaning.” 45 Ibid.. 46 J. Polhill, Acts (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1992), p. 134. 47 A. Oepke, “apokatastasis,” TDNT 1:393; see also A. Dihle and E. Schweizer, “anapsuksis,” TDNT 1:664-665. Anapsuksis’ oldest meaning was the idea of cooling by blowing on, later coming to mean “to refresh,” “relieve,” or “strengthen.” Dihle comments that it also referred to “the drying out and healing of an open wound which the surgeon has left exposed to the air when bandaging a broken limb; it also refers in another usage to “relief from the plague of frogs (Exod 8:11 LXX). In the next segment of the same article Schweizer adds that from a Jewish perspective, the “context makes sense only if the ‘times of refreshing’ are the definitive age of salvation. The expression is undoubtedly apocalyptic in origin . . . . The reference then is to the eschatological redemption which is promised to Israel if it repents.”

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sequential, or whether he simply intended to note four related events with no thought of sequence. If he meant a precisely marked sequence, he had Greek words with which to do this in the common eita . . .epeita language (“then . . . and then . . .”). Instead he merely coordinates the four respective thoughts more or less loosely with at least some overlap between “times of refreshing” and “restoration of all things.” On the other hand, he clearly regarded a national repentance as basic and first, while in relation to it, the “restoration of all things” appears to be the final stage and is correlated with the Return. It may be possible with these clues, to see the times of refreshing as the first-fruit of a national repentance— the prophetic national spiritual awakening that would restore Israel to Yahweh identical to the implanted “new covenant” of Jeremiah, the national cleansing of Ezekiel, and the national righteousness/salvation of Isaiah 40-66. This construction would be compatible with Oepke’s thought that “times of refreshing” is the subjective description of the end time situation, while “restoration of all things” is the objective description.48 In the midst or at a certain point in, or even at the climax of this refreshing, Jesus would return and the “times of restoration” of all things would continue to work its way toward full realization. This estimate of the language sees “refreshing” and “restoration” as describing two aspects of the same future era of national salvation and peace, elsewhere described in the prophets under the language of Messiah’s kingship and kingdom,49 or more generally as the national blessing of the “latter days.” On any reckoning, these summary terms for the Old Testament hope are punctuated in Acts 3:19-21 by Jesus’ return.

What is entirely clear is that a national repentance is necessary for the three ensuing future aspects of the prophetic promises to be fulfilled. These eschatological concepts then were probably thought of as a sequence: repentance—national refreshing—Second Coming—restortion. Repentance was the doorway to realization of Israel’s national eschatology. Repentance is the contingency of this discussion. In addition to the biblical basis for contingency in Acts, some passages in rabbinic and Second Temple Jewish literature express the same idea. Zehnle gathered several such texts to illustrate the currency of the idea around the time of the New Testament. Two examples of each—rabbinic and apocalyptic—will suffice.50 Sanhedrin 97b. (Discussing the liberation of Israel) If the Israelites repent, they will be redeemed; but if not they will not be redeemed. P Ta’an 1:1. If the Israelites would repent for one day, the son of David (Messiah) would come immediately” Assumption of Moses 7:30. “. . . that His name should be called upon until the day of repentance in the visitation wherewith the Lord will visit them in the consummation of the end of days (1:18). Testament of Dan 6:4. For he [the enemy] knows that on the day on which Israel shall repent, the kingdom of the enemy shall be brought to an end. 48 Oepke, TDNT 1:391; Barrett judges this distinction improbable because Luke uses a word for times (plural) with “refreshing” just as he uses a word for time (plural) with “restoration.” (Barrett, Acts 1:25). Thus Oepke’s subjective-objective distinction doubtful if he thinks of two aspects of one event. 49 So Haenchen, Acts., p. 208; Cf Rackham, Acts, pp. 53-54. 50 Zehnle, Peter’s Pentecost Discourse, pp. 72-73.

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Barrett evaluates Israel’s repentance and its contingent latter day consequences in a remarkable synthesis of the language and its implications: Forgiveness and the future salvation of the people of God are thus dependent on repentance. As Weiser points out, it is not so much that repentance will hasten the parousia; it is necessary if the time of salvation is to come at all. The connection of thought is not unfamiliar in Judaism . . . . Repentance has personal and corporate aspects and is called for in the present; the blotting out of sins similarly is both personal and corporate, and in its personal aspect belongs to the present; the coming of the Messiah means corporate redemption in the future. These observations are necessary for the correct understanding of 3:20, 21.51

Temple, Priesthood and Sanhedrin in Acts 1-8

Acts indicates that the twelve apostles remained in Jerusalem for some time after Jesus’ ascension (Acts (1:12; 8:1; 9:26-28). Philip first and a little later Peter and John go to Samaria at the request of the Jerusalem apostles, but they returned to Jerusalem when this mission ended; otherwise there is no other movement. Additionally, Barrett is correct that “It is part of Luke’s overall scheme to portray the first Christians as devout and observant Jews, maintaining Jewish practices and frequenting synagogue and temple till forced out of them.”52 Their adherence to Jerusalem includes the obvious Pentecost context of Peter’s first speech and that of the second speech of 3:12-26 as well. They adhere to the temple and its prayer times, and initiate Jewish converts into the believing Israel remnant with baptism by water following the model of John the Baptist. The most striking of these solidarities with Judaism was the apostles’ continuance in the temple area as witnessed through chapter 7. The temple (Gr ieron) is a regular description of Israel’s central sanctuary—13x in Acts 2-5 alone. Greek ieron (“temple”) occurs only 11x in all the rest of Acts, mostly for the Jerusalem sanctuary. This concentration is not of any special symbolic significance, except to the extent that it witnesses to the apostles’ national mission focus. The scenes of the apostles’ presence in the temple are all more or less natural uses of the term “temple” given the local context. The more interesting questions are why they stayed in Jerusalem and kept to the temple at all, and why they persisted in this practice as long as the events of chapter 7. At least two reasons may be suggested from prophetic and apocalyptic texts about messianic Jerusalem, and from recent discussion of the temple as a symbol of Jewish nationalism. First, in the post-exilic prophets (Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi) the city, the temple of the future and a renewed, purified priesthood are sustained subjects. A selection of only the most salient of these Jerusalem-temple prophetic texts is needed to secure the point that the latter day Jerusalem and its temple will be the scene of great blessing and some striking events, including the Lord’s sudden appearance in the temple to cleanse the priesthood. One may consider some initial fulfillment of these prophecies during the beginning of the second temple in the late sixth century B. C. But longer-term fulfillments

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51 52

Barrett, Acts, 1:203 Ibid., 1:177.

also occur in details of Jesus’ appearance at the temple. And—recognizing the telescopic nature of prophetic promises—fulfillments are also envisioned in the future purified temple of Jesus’ laments and symbolic actions during his speaking of the temple (Mark 11:11-26; Matt 21:12-22; 23:37-39). Jesus indeed warned about the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. But we may justly assume either (1) that it could have been averted by repentance, or (2) that the apostles were looking beyond a non-contingent destruction to fulfillment of Jesus’ promises after that destruction, which seems unlikely. Haggai 2:6-9. . . . in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land; and I will shake all nations, so that the treasures of all nations shall come in, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the LORD of hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine says the LORD of hosts. The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says the LORD of hosts; and in this place I will give prosperity. Zechariah 3:3-7. Now [the high priest] Joshua was standing before the angel with filthy garments. And the angel said to those who were standing before him, ‘remove the filthy garments from him.’ And to him he said, ‘Behold I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you in rich apparel . . . Let them put a clean turban on his head.’ So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him with garments . . . And the angel of the LORD enjoined Joshua, ‘ . . . If you will walk in my ways and keep my charges, then you shall rule my house and have charge of my courts, and I will give you the right of access among those who are standing here.’

Here the contingency is forthrightly stated in terms of a cleansed priesthood and rule of the temple’s courts; access to them is promised in this purity setting. There is local fulfillment; but any loss or shortfall of this symbolic purification will require renewal of the hope and promise, including renewal of the priesthood and temple implied in Jesus’ laments over their impurity. Malachi 3:1, 2b-3. “. . . and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts . . . For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fuller’s soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, till they present right offerings to the LORD.”

There is no need to look beyond a messianic return of the Lord to Jerusalem for a final fulfillment of such prophecies. In fact, many prophetic fulfillments of the first advent were striking enough that the apostles would have been right to think of a sudden actual return of Jesus to the temple and of the kinds of blessings promised in these and other such texts. Similar hopes for a cleansed or new temple and priesthood are found in various documents of the priestly Dead Sea Community (The Temple Scroll) and in some instances in Jewish wisdom and apocalyptic literature (Ben Sira; 1 Enoch) which need not be cited.53 Jesus and his apostles were not priests or Levites. But the apostles’ presence in the temple, as much as Jesus’ own presence there, can easily be seen as a prelude to priestly 53 The most significant passages are gathered by D. Mendels, The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp. 140-151. See also Wright, Jesus, pp. 369-442.

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renewal upon repentance as a latter-day messianic event. The notice of many priests becoming obedient to the faith in Acts 6:7 may serve precisely the interest in a renewed priesthood. Luke seems to see priests’ conversions or resistance as especially significant. Second, concerning the temple as a symbol of Jewish nationalism, D. Mendels has shown how central it was, along with land, kingship, and army, to Jewish nationalism and hopes for Israel’s national future, despite the variety of ways it was thought of in late Jewish literature. One central concept of the temple that emerged during the Maccabean Era was that it was to be a place of national purity.54 Another was that it be a place of prayer and supplication.55 Yet another was the importance of the priesthood as a complementary national symbol.56 These and other central concepts are illustrated in narratives of the Maccabean temple-cleansing activities and of the years of the Hasmonean dynasty that followed.57 The dominance of one or another of the four major symbols of Jewish nationalism waxed and waned. For example, the temple was the most dominant of the four major symbols during the Maccabean Era; with Herod, kingship gained ascendancy.58 Still, during the whole long period from the Return through the Second Jewish Revolt, says Mendels, “We can see a continuity of the service and other religio-spiritual functions in the temple . . . .”59 Jesus saw the apostles as the vanguard of a spiritually renewed Israel in possession of the promises of a renewed latter day nation living in its promised kingdom. Certainly this was a substantially spiritual conception, as Mendels too, with many other recent studies, correctly emphasizes.60 It is unnecessary, however, to impose with Mendels a false opposition between Jesus and the apostles’ essentially spiritual sense of their calling, and a more earthy social and political hope for a renewed Davidic kingdom. The messianic era begins with a spiritual and moral renewal in Jesus as the new/fulfillment David, and his disciples as the firstfruit of a spiritually renewed Israel. The apostles’ miracles belong to this renewed Acts context as much as they belonged to Jesus’ own work—functioning together as a foretaste of the “powers of the age to come (Heb 6:5).” The miracles are not only events of personal compassion; they are also signs of renewal and purification. To further empower this renewal movement in Israel, the Holy Spirit was given, after which the apostles preached and acted with transforming power. Their adherence to the temple was primarily for the purpose of prayer and preaching the message of messianic personal and national salvation. This cannot be anything but a comprehensive renewal movement for Israel, its capital Jerusalem and its temple, in hope that the whole nation would respond to their preaching with repentance and faith in Jesus as Messiah. From such a repentance the “times of refreshing” and “restitution of all things (AV)” spoken of by the prophets would follow (Acts 3:21). It is not different with the prominence of the temple priesthood and the established Jewish ruling groups in Acts 1-8. The priesthood controlled the temple and was the Ibid., p. 126. Ibid., p. 130. 56 Ibid., p. 133. 57 See the stories in I-II Maccabees and Josephus’ Wars of the Jew and Antiquities of the Jews for illustrations. 58 Ibid., p. 136. 59 Ibid., p. 137. 60 Ibid., pp. 228-230.

54 55

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dominant force in the Sanhedrin.61 In addition to Acts’ attention to the priestly guardians of the Jewish national temple-state, Acts 4-6 contains concentrated notes of the priests’ leadership partners. Luke details how they handled the apostles’ public preaching, and how they regarded it as a serious problem if not a frontal threat. These Lukan notes include priests (4:1, 6, 23; 5:17, 21, 24), Sadducees (4:1; 5:17), rulers (4:5; 5:22), elders (4:8, 23; 6:12), teachers (scribes, 4:5; 6:12), the temple guard (4:1, 8; 5:24, 26), the High Priests Annas and Caiaphas (4:6; 5:17, 21, 27; 7:1), Caiaphas’ family ( 4:6), chief priests (4:23; 5:24), the whole gathered Sanhedrin (consisting of representatives of most of the groups above, 4:15; 5:21, 27; 5:34, 41; 6:12, 15), and John and Alexander (4:6) who belonged to Caiaphas’ family. This is a remarkable array of Jewish officials dominated by priests; the Sanhedrin dominates chapters 4-8 in its scenes of contact with the local Jewish templestate government. The detailed list of 4:5-7 and the activities of 5:17-42 suggest that virtually the whole established governance formed an opposition block, and thus acted irresponsibly in the crisis of the messianic reality. As the apostles’ opponents, they take repeated action against their public preaching of Jesus as the Messiah/Christ. They again fear the crowds as they did during Jesus’ passion and teaching in the temple. They perceive the apostles as leaders of a messianic movement that is gaining ground with the people. Several thousand converts are noted including even “a great many of the priests (6:7).” Together they believed—no doubt from the history of radical movements in Judea—that Jesus’ messianic movement had potential to displace the priestly leadership if it should become a mass conversion. We do not know it to be the case, but if the Jewish priestly leadership knew of Jesus’ words to the Pharisees about taking the kingdom from them and transferring it to another nation (Matt 21:43), they had reason to squelch the movement. This scenario was forcefully clear in the apostles’ claim that they were only following the direction given them by the God of Israel (4:19-20; 5:29-32). This group of national priestly leaders and temple-keepers were seen by Luke as quickly becoming (and perhaps continuing as) the chief resistance and spokesmen for the larger national struggle of Israel in dealing with the apostles’ pleas for repentance and faith in Jesus. The Pharisees seem to have fallen into the background, except for Gamaliel (5:34). The ruling priestly elite’s rejection of Christ as the national Messiah resulted in the murder of Stephen after his speech in Acts 7—the longest speech in Acts.62 Luke clearly believed they thought and acted concertedly in the harassment scenes of Acts 4-6, thereby expressing a strong “no” to Jesus’ messiahship and the proffered possibilities for realization of the national kingdom promises. The extraordinarily hostile and violent rejection to Stephen’s speech appears to climax the Jewish leadership’s rejection of Jesus. The rejection of Stephen is thus a near closure on Israel’s possibilities at this crucial stage of its history. The tendency of Acts commentators to see the speech as highly significant both in content and quantity is justified. The reaction to it by Jewish leadership groups seems to be a

If N. T. Wright is correct about the centrality of the temple (and priesthood by inclusion) in Jesus’ death, there is futher encouragement to the above view by extension of their bearings into Acts. I do not claim support from Wright, however, beyond this observation. See Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, pp. 405-428. 62 Barrett, Acts, 1:334. Barrett infers that, “If there is any direct relation between length and importance, this is the most important speech in Acts.” 61

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plateau of rejection; the contingent possibilities for Israel are rejected along with Jesus the Messiah himself and his apostolic representatives, notwithstanding the quantity of peopleconverts. Stephen’s speech has several repeated themes. Bruce notes, for example, that the speech suggests God’s presence is not restricted to any one land or building (temple).63 However, it may be doubted that this is the speech’s major aim. Closer to its central point is Bruce’s thought that the speech is interested in “the Jewish people’s refusal to acknowledge Jesus as Messiah,” which was “all of a piece with their attitude to God’s messengers from the beginning of their national history.”64 That national history of resistance to the Lord and the advances in his plan occupies nearly half the speech. It is illustrated by Joseph’s brothers’ rejection of himself (7:9-10), and Moses’ rejection by Israel at another crucial point in its history (7:20-39).65 Thus the speech boldly accuses Israel of rejecting its Messiah in the same fashion as it rejected several pivotal Israelite leaders. Two other complementary themes occupy some segments of the speech. (1) Israel’s history was moved toward its destiny by a process of divine promises and fulfillments (7:4-8, 17), a motif that suggests the nation is in the same situation with its kingdom promises in Stephen’s time. (2) As in its handling of the old tabernacle, the nation is again in danger of misunderstanding its temple by insisting it is a fixed locus of God’s presence (7:41-50), thereby replaying the founding era’s idolatry of things “made with hands (7:41, 48),” and the errors of temple-chanters in Jeremiah’s time. These elements of the speech contain an anti-temple theme that becomes more pointed toward its end. However, the climax makes clear that the hearer’s rejection of Jesus the Messiah brings the nation into judgment.66 Thus, by mustering and reshaping these themes for that moment, Stephen’s speech climaxes Israel’s rejection of its Messiah and the contingency attached to its national restoration. In Luke’s attention to the priest-led rejection of Jesus and Stephen, there is a suggested criterion for determining how Israel’s national repentance can be realized—a somewhat vexed question in some thinking about Israel’s situation in these chapters. The prominence of the opposition scenes in Acts 4-7 suggests it is the conversion of the priesthood that is crucial to national repentance, rather than a renunciation of nationalism like that found in sectarian groups such as Essenes, Pharisees, Samaritans or Zealots. Suggestions of the same can be seen in the Qumran scrolls where the priesthood and its purity are central to national life and renewal. One also thinks of the massive concern at Qumran for the temple’s corruption and its renewal in the messianic future, especially as seen in the Temple Scroll. This suggestion would also explain why priestly opposition 63 Bruce, Acts, p. 130. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. On this point, see C. Baker, Understanding the Book of Acts (Grand Rapids: Grace Bible College Publications, 1981), pp. 41-42. Barrett, Acts 1:337, also suggests a recurring pattern in which God brings good out of evil. This suggestion is instructive in that it might support a hopeful note along with the promise theme: despite their rejection, God will move his plan forward. 66 See Haenchen, Acts, pp. 286-290 for discussion of issues in the theme(s) of Stephen’s speech. Haenchen concludes that what he thinks are Lukan additions to a “history sermon” point to Israel’s rejection of Jesus as its main interest: “You did not recognize the Savior sent by God (p. 288).” Cf also B. Witherington, Acts, pp. 59-77, and passim, for repeated characterizations of Stephen’s speech scoring Israel’s rejection of God’s messengers.

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to Jesus at his appearance in the temple was a central focus in the passion narrative. And it would imply that those scholars are on the right track who see in the gospels’ temple cleansing actions the crucial preparation for Jesus’ death as a point of no return. One may also think of the prominence of the temple and sacrificial system in the Mosaic Law, the attention to details of priestly ordination in Leviticus, and the climactic priestly history of Israel’s Old Testament era in the books of Chronicles. Perhaps, then, we have a clue in the temple scenes of Acts 1-8 as to how at least some early Christians thought about who was responsible for Israel’s massive failure at its historic messianic moment. Some dispensationalist expositors and teachers speak of an “offer” or “re-offer” of the kingdom to Israel in these chapters.67 The present essay has avoided this terminology thus far, partly to suggest some new ways to think of Acts 1-8, and partly to avoid fixated language habits in theological description. On balance, however, there does not really appear to be anything very objectionable to this “kingdom offer” terminology. It does justice to the contingency we have been discussing by suggesting an option to receive or reject the available fulfillment of kingdom promises, or more exactly the “offer” of repentance, even in the wake of the Jewish leadership’s complicity with the Romans in the crucifixion of Jesus. A description like “contingent kingdom” might be useful as a theological thesis, but “kingdom offer” will no doubt prevail. Accordingly there is no serious criticism of such language here. I am only interested in enlarging or suggesting a modest shift in the language used to describe this situation in Acts 1-8. It is sufficient to see it as the period of Israel’s contingent kingdom after the messianic salvation has been provided in Jesus’ death and resurrection. The One-Year Extended Probation of Luke 13:6-9 The image of the unfruitful fig tree is found several times in the gospels. In Matthew and Mark it appears as Jesus enters Jerusalem. The image appears in two parts in Matthew and Mark’s passion scenes. In the first part the fig tree is “cursed” for its barrenness before Jesus cleanses the temple; the second part occurs after Jesus cleanses the temple. In this temple-cleansing context the tree represents the polluted and fruitless temple. In Luke, on the other hand, it appears in a parable as Jesus proceeds toward Jerusalem, and perhaps is more generally a comment on the situation of Israel or Jerusalem or both in light of Jesus’ messianic presence. It seems likely that the image is used twice, in two different settings. The parable form of the image belongs to a segment of Luke’s gospel, the theme of which may be called “Getting Ready for the Kingdom (Luke 12-14).” In it are many allusions to the Second Coming and its associated judgments: Satan’s power over death and hell (`12:5); angels who conduct the judgment (12:8-9); and being cut down (13:7-8). On the positive side are the power, joys and possession of the future kingdom such as a universal banquet (12:28-30), resurrection of the righteous (14:14), and possession of the Baker, Understanding Acts, pp. 29-32; for “re-offer,” see A. J. McClain, The Greatness of the Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1959; Reprint, Moody Press, 1968), pp. 403-406. McClain’s “reoffer” description seems necessitated because he shares the classical dispensationalist idea of an offer of the kingdom by Jesus from the beginning of his public ministry until about Matthew 12 where the offer is thought to have been withdrawn. 67

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kingdom already by the disciples (12:32) and the out-class (14:21-24). In this connection the Pharisees and Jerusalem leaders are already in a crisis of resistance, unprepared for what is before them: the Pharisees plot secretly even though everything will become open (12:1-11); they are preoccupied with Sabbath fixations (13:14; 14:1-4); and they want to get rid of Jesus (13:31; 12:1-4). Jerusalem and the Pharisees resist repentance in blindness and ignorance of the messianic revelation before them (13:4, 34-35; cf. 19:41-44). In the midst of these scenes is the parable of the fruitless fig tree which grows in a vineyard. Its owner has been seeking fruit without success for three years, so he orders it cut down; but the vintager asks for one more year during which he will dig around it, fertilize it, and see if one more year will finally yield fruit. Since resistance to repentance68 by Jerusalem is the immediate foregoing issue (13:4-5), Jerusalem appears to be the fig tree, while the vineyard is Israel and the vintner is God himself.69 Most commentators are understandably cautious about taking the 3 years plus 1 year as chronological indicators of Jesus’ three years of ministry plus one more. Nolland observes, however, that the one added year sets a “limit on the time available for the required repentance.”70 In this he is closer to J. A. Bengel and several German commentators of the late nineteenth century who understood the three years as the length of Jesus ministry.71 This rather bold recognition by Nolland of the one added year is compelling, given that in Acts, Luke gives focused attention to the beginning of the apostles’ ministry in Jerusalem to the “men of Israel,” and especially the attitudes and actions of the Sanhedrin and priestly leadership. There is no good reason for rejecting this reading of the parable; those who do seem over-cautious. If this view of the parable is adopted, then Luke has already supplied a frame for the apostles’ post-ascension ministry to Israel-Jerusalem. The implication is that the probationcontingency noted both in the parable and in Acts 1-8’s call for repentance, is of limited duration (Nolland) and explains the distinctive elements discussed above in that portion of Acts. It is not possible to identify any precise one-year chronological note in Acts 1-8. But neither is there anything to prohibit recognition of a one-year period in this segment. Acts 1-8 is just such an added one-year probation/contingency in which the kingdom lies before Israel on condition of repentance.



68 E. Ellis, Luke (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1974), pp. 184-185. 69 Ibid. The identification of Israel with the vineyard is Ellis’ while the suggestions about Jerusalem and the vintage are the author’s. On this identification, J. Green, The Gospel of Luke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997) n. 126, p. 515, may also be noted. Green thinks that if Luke intends readers to hear Isaiah 57 as they read the parable, then Israel is the vineyard and the tree is Israel’s leadership. There is hesitation; but why not go the next small step, especially as Green thinks the parable is an effective call to repentance on any reckoning, which, of course, is the case. 70 Nolland, Luke (Dallas: Word, 1993), p. 185. 71 Noted by Godet, Luke, 5th Ed, trans M. D. Cusin (Edinburgh: T &T Clark,1952), 2:118. Bengel, Gnomon of the New Testament, 5 vols, trans A. Fausset (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1858), 2:118 (but sic with Godet’s pagination), is remarkably bold in seeing the three years for Jesus ministry and another year beyond.

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Practices of the New Israel Remnant Assembly in Jerusalem Baptism The practice of baptizing is attested three times in Acts 1-8—once for all Jews at Pentecost who accepted Jesus as Lord and Christ (2:38), a second time for the Samaritans and Simon (8:12-13), and a third time for the Ethiopian eunuch (8:34-40). Since it has been shown elsewhere in these essays that baptismal practice in the gospels and Acts is a Jewish ritual bath signifying entry into Israel’s latter-day believing remnant, there is no need to repeat the detailed support of that perspective here. Accordingly, this portion of the present essay will focus on the meaning of baptism in the context of the already manifest and future-available kingdom. This discussion will seek to explain two issues of meaning: (1) what Luke understood by Peter’s words, “repent and be baptized for remission of sins,” and (2) the larger background of the messianic adoption of a ritual washing practice already existing in Judaism. Peter’s words, “repent and be baptized for the remission of sins (2:38),” are difficult. As stated, the words appear to make baptism a requisite for salvation. Whether it is a required submission to baptism as an act of faith, or even a kind of baptismal regeneration, there is a perceived difficulty with this text in many Protestant exegetical and confessional traditions. The difficulty is especially acute for those following Anabaptist thinking because their practice of adult believers’ baptism is mostly symbolic of the cleansing of faith. Some thoroughgoing dispensationalists believe the text does require baptism for salvation, but in the sense of a required act of obedience in faith.72 They also believe it cannot apply to the church of the Pauline epistles (and today) because this requirement belongs to Israel, hence recognizing, they think, a substantial dispensational distinction, indeed a seriously crucial one, since personal salvation is at stake. The one hopeful way to gain insight on Luke’s meaning is to assemble all Luke-Acts’ texts that correlate faith, or repentance and faith, with salvation. A survey of this sort would determine whether any other texts among Luke’s pictures of salvation by faith interpose a required baptism as a response element in personal salvation, as is assumed for Acts 2:38 in context.

72 V. Schutz, Water Baptism: Its History, Importance and Cessation (Grand Rapids: Grace Publications, 1978), p. 13. C. Baker, A Dispensational Theology (Grand Rapids: Grace Bible College Publications, 1971), p. 408, thinks this text means “. . . [God] channeled His blessings through the instrumentality of ordinances, but not apart from faith.” R. Hill, The Big Difference Between the Two Gospels (Commerce City CO: Biblical Answers Ministry, 1999), pp. 51-66, argues that the necessity in Peter’s baptism in Acts 2:38 lies in the combination of priestly induction with washing texts in the Pentateuch, and prophetic texts on the future all-Israel priesthood in the new messianic age. He thinks the necessity lies in the symbolic ritual washing patterns by which the whole of Israel become priests. The assumption behind this reasoning appears to be that God established a fixed typological symbolism that could not be broken. While citing Pentateuchal and prophetic texts on Israel’s latter day cleansing and priesthood is relevant as such, Hill’s specific construction on how the Old Testament texts bear on baptism in John and Jesus’ ministries does not seem compelling for the New Israel of the Gospels or Acts, except for the prophetic passages he cites. But these cannot be taken alone. They need to be understood through the Jewish traditions which show how the latter-day Israel applied them, for example, in the ritual baths at Qumran. Mikveh baths seem less and less limited to priesthood as more and more of them turn up in diverse contexts from New Testament times.

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Luke correlates repentance, faith and salvation throughout Luke-Acts about 36 times. The passages may be classified into several types for a comprehensive view of how Luke represents faith and salvation. The result may be stated here preliminarily: in no other passage among 36 passages that combine baptism with repentance, faith or salvation, does Luke link baptism as a necessary ingredient in salvation; only in the wording of Acts 2:38 does this appear to be the case. Luke 3:3 is not verbally parallel to Acts 2:38. I will produce only an example or two of each type of context.

(1) One very small group of texts in Luke-Acts has “believe” with “be saved” adjoining, and nothing intervening: Luke 8:12; 8:50. (2) Another similar group of texts in Acts uses the verb “believe” with some other term for salvation or its benefits (eternal life or forgiveness of sins, for example), again with no intervening term of condition or requirement: Acts 10:43, for example, has, “everyone who believes on him receives forgiveness of sins, or “everyone who believes shall be justified (13:39).” (3) A third type, not very different from type (1), is found in several passages in Luke where “believe” or “faith” and “saved” are stated together, again with nothing intervening, as in “your faith has saved you (Luke 8:48; 18:42).” (4) A fourth type is a series of texts in Acts where faith and a blessing of salvation or healing other than forgiveness are correlated with nothing intervening: “faith in the name of Jesus has given this complete healing to him (3:16),” or “. . . he purified their hearts by faith (Acts 15:9).” (5) Finally, a large group of passages (22 in all) has repentance with the same immediate result of salvation or escape from future judgment, but with no intervening act of baptism: “The men of Nineveh would be able to stand up in judgment of this generation, for they repented (Luke 11:32),” “. . . baptism of repentance unto forgiveness of sins (3:3),” “. . . give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins (Acts 5:31).” Many more examples could be cited.

In a total of 36 cases of such similar constructions in Luke-Acts, there is no other case where (water) baptism is interposed as an added requirement for salvation, certainly not in Luke 3:3. Thus it is extremely unlikely that this is the meaning of the phrase in Acts 2:38. J. Polhill, in preparing his recent commentary on Acts, apparently undertook a similar exhaustive investigation of Luke’s faith/repentance and salvation terms, and came to the same conclusion. Thirty-six cases of such combinations is a substantial set of samples. In considering a fairly close parallel in Luke 3:3—“. . . John came] preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”—one could with some justice think Acts 2:38 is only a variant wording of the same thought. What then does this text mean? A workable and plausible solution can be gained by translating “for (Gr. eis)” differently, and by recognizing the nature of Jewish ritual washing at the time of the New Testament. Polhill suggests that eis (meaning for, toward, in, into, unto) has other meanings which would relieve Acts 2:38 of its ad hoc “baptism-required-for-salvation” impression. He suggests there are sufficient New Testament examples of eis meaning “on the ground of,” or “on the basis of.” Unfortunately, he does not give examples or lexical documentation. In fact, the Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker (BAGD) lexicon does give several other meanings that would be satisfactory for eis both in Luke 3:3 and Acts 2:38, like “with respect to,” “in the face of,” or “because of.”



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BAGD meaning 5: for reference to a person or thing with the meanings “for, with reference or respect to”; meaning group 6: “at, in the face of, because of”;73 meaning 9: eis is frequently used where en would be expected as in such phrases as “in Capernaum,” or “in the field, or “in the synagogues.” It is true that these expressions are mostly referring to locations or places; but BAGD also give an instrumental use of en for eis as in Luke 7:50; 8:48 and Acts 7:53.74 Several of these uses of eis would yield a satisfactory meaning and loosen the otherwise apparently tight connection between baptism and forgiveness in the text, at least as most English translations word it. For example, both Luke 3:3 and Acts 2:38 could be translated, “repent and be baptized because of forgiveness,” or “repent and be baptized in connection with forgiveness.” This somewhat looser connection of forgiveness with baptism leaves the precise connection of faith and baptism to be defined by larger contexts as appropriate. Clearly J. R. Mantey’s “because of forgiveness” is the more forceful of these possibilities; it comes close to Polhill’s “on the basis of”; perhaps Polhill was thinking of Mantey’s examples in his article on eis.75

These options are satisfactory for both Luke 3:3 and Acts 2:38. At any rate the former of these two texts already cautions against a strict necessitarian reading of the latter. Beside this, the larger messianic context of Second Temple Judaism and its views of the meaning of ritual washings is pertinent. These elements are found in documents contemporary with or proximate to the era of the New Testament. Judaism viewed ritual washings as symbolic only and without sacramental power or meaning. Priestly participants in the communal life of Qumran washed themselves as attested by ritual bath tanks at the site and related documents from the caves with passages on the meaning of their washings. Individual priests, who ministered in the Jerusalem temple in New Testament times, washed in the course of their service as shown by numerous ritual bath tanks recently excavated in and around priestly homes and adjacent to the southwestern walls of the temple. Since I have discussed the details of this perspective in another essay herein, it will be satisfactory to summarize that discussion with a few examples from Judaism and the Qumran texts. With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls after World War II, a new source for understanding priestly Judaism in the New Testament era became available. Fragments of a document labeled 4Q414 (meaning cave 4, Qumran, document no. 414) were published only recently (1992). Fragment 1, column 2 refers to the Qumran ritual baths and reads (as reconstructed): ( line 1) Your . . . for the Laws of Holine[ss . . .] (2) on the first [and] third and se[venth (days) . . .] (3) in the Tr[u]th of You[r] Covenant . . . (4) to be cleansed from the pollution of . . . (5) and after he enters the water . . . (6) he will answer and say, Blessed are Y[ou . . .] (7) for from the declaration of your mouth . . . (8) men of . . . .76

Another Qumran document known as the Manual of Discipline is more direct about the true cleansing; it says in 2:25-3:9, 232.

BAGD cite for this meaning, J. R. Mantey, JBL 70 (1951):45-48, 309-311. BAGD, p. 230. 75 J. R. Mantey JBL 70 (1951): 45-48, 309-311. 76 R. Eisenman and D. Wise, The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered (Rockport MA: Element, 1992), p. 73 74

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(About entrance into the community) . . . anyone who declines to enter [the covenant of Go] d in order to walk in the stubbornness of his heart shall not [enter the Com]munity of his truth . . . [he] shall not be counted with the upright . . . there are stains on his conversion . . . He will not become clean by the acts of atonement, nor shall he be purified by the cleansing waters, nor shall he be made holy by the seas or rivers, nor shall he be purified by all the cleansing waters . . . . And by the compliance of his soul with all the laws of God his flesh is cleansed by being sprinkled with cleansing waters and being made holy with the waters of repentance.77

In still another passage the Manual of Discipline 5:7-20 states, Everyone who is admitted to the formal organization of the community is to enter into a covenant of God in the presence of all fellow-volunteers in the cause and to commit himself by a binding oath to return with all his heart and soul to the commandments of the law of Moses . . . . No one is to go into water in order to attain the purity of holy men. For men cannot be purified except they repent their evil.

Similar thoughts about water rituals are expressed in The Zadokite Document 10:10-13 of which fragments of at least five copies were found in caves 4 and 6 at Qumran.78 Qumran ritual washings were not sacramental, but only symbols of a clean relationship with God as indicated by the wording “. . . by the compliance of his soul with all the laws of God” . . . ; [only] his flesh is cleansed by the water of ritual washing,” a thought that sounds strikingly reminiscent of Hebrews 9:10, 13 (“. . . cleansing of the flesh,” AV). Study of central concepts around the idea of ritual baptism for a law-observant remnant has resulted in recognition of close ties between remnant and washing (“baptism”) ideas in late Judaism. Authors of major dictionary articles on “remnant” are agreed that the remnant idea occurs in Qumran texts, in John the Baptist and in Jesus.79 These movements were focused on their latter day remnant status and driven by hopes for a new Israel in which fulfillment of its historic promises would occur. Passages like Matthew 3:9, 12 and Luke 3:17 use Qumran-like cleansing/purification imagery. The texts show that John knows an end-time remnant is forming in response to his message of the kingdom’s nearness. The combination of repentance, confession and baptism is simply another form of the Qumran baptism upon/with repentance. Furthermore, it is now a commonplace that John the Baptist had some connection with the Qumran community, since the likenesses are many and striking.80 In addition to such ritual washings, the newly excavated ritual baths (mikvaot) within feet of the western temple wall and in priestly homes excavated in the southeast 77 F. G. Martinez, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated: The Qumran Texts in English (Leiden: Brill, 1996), p. 5. 78 J. VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 55-57. 79 See, for example G. Hasel, “Remnant,” IDB 5:735-736, with a full collection of remnant terminology from the Damascus Document (CD), showing how the Qumran sectarians claimed Old Testament holy remnant language about the latter-day Israel for themselves exclusively. 80 An early study of comparisons was W. Brownlee, “John the Baptist in the New Light of the Ancient Scrolls,” in The Scrolls and the New Testament, Ed K. Stendahl (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), pp. 33-53; more recently O. Betz, “Was John an Essene?” in Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, Ed H. Shanks (New York: Random House, 1992) and J. Fitzmyer, The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian Origins (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 18-21, with appropriate cautions about certainty on the matter.

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sector of Herodian Jerusalem near the western temple wall attest to the widespread use of ritual washing for ceremonial purification in late Judaism.81 This combination of concepts and practices shows conclusively that John adopted this cleansing symbol for converts to his pre-messianic movement, while Jesus himself submitted to John’s baptism. When the twelve began their messianic remnant preaching to Israel in Acts 2, they simply continued the use of baptism as a symbolic initiatory ritual bath for converts to Jesus. Thereby the idea of a cleansed eschatological remnant functioning as the beginning of the New Israel of the latter days continued its path toward the hoped-for establishment of the promised kingdom. Peter and Philip’s baptizing in Acts 2 and Acts 8 are simply extensions of the formation of a New Israel remnant identified by a symbolic initiatory rite begun for the messianic movement by John the Baptist. There is no necessary connection between baptism and forgiveness of sins in this ritual of the first apostles. Grammatical alternatives make other explanations of the text grammatically plausible. Finally, when ritual washing was limited to specific priestly people or objects, the implication was always symbolic of real or potential national purity. R. Hill may be right that the roots of the meaning of ritual washing were in Old Testament ritual washings like that of the red heifer ritual of Numbers 19:9-21.82 But perhaps one should add the priestly washings of Leviticus 8, or even the washings for certain sores (Lev 13:34), cleansing from the impurity of mildew (Lev 14:47), or washings for human discharges (Lev 15). The individual significance of these varied washings was not projected directly to Jesus, the apostles or the latter day remnant’s submission to baptism in Acts 1-8. Those washings rather passed forward through the biblical prophets, where they were cast in new forms which expanded them to include the whole nation.83 Hill is also right that Exodus 19:5-6 promised that the whole of Israel would become a holy priesthood, a concept also passed along by the prophets with arrows directly into the promised New Israel. The following texts illustrate that prophetic picture. Isaiah 1:16-17a. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good. Isaiah 4:4. . . . when the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and cleansed the bloodstains of Jerusalem from its midst by a spirit of judgment and by a spirit of burning.

81 The basic work on the Jewish mikveh is by R. Reich, “Miqvaoth in Eretz-Israel in the Second Temple and the Mishna and Talmud Periods (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1990; in Hebrew). Unfortunately, this important work of Reich has not been translated or published in English. Since then many more mikvaoth have been discovered in Israel and studied in an extensive literature. A recent article on third and fourth century mikvaoth at Beth Shearim at the northwest end of the Plain of Jezreel is of interest for those who wish to pursue Jewish ritual baths beyond the New Testament era (D. Amit and Y. Adler, “Miqvaoth in the Necropolis of Beth Shearim, IEJ 60 [2010]:72-88). 82 Hill, The Big Difference, pp. 52-54; but it is not necessary to read from these ritual scenes, pentateuchal or prophetic, a legally strict symbolical or typological patterning necessity, and certainly not to a supposed “gospel of the circumcision” as a New Testament gospel separate from Paul’s “gospel of the uncircumcision.” 83 On inner-biblical interpretation in the Hebrew Bible, see M. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

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Isaiah 44:3-4. For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my Spirit upon your descendents, and my blessing on your offspring. They shall spring up like grass amid waters, like willows by flowing streams. Isaiah 61:6. . . . but you shall be called priests of the LORD, men shall speak of you as the ministers of our God. Jeremiah 4:14. O Jerusalem, wash your heart from wickedness, that you may be saved. How long will shall your evil thoughts lodge within you? Ezekiel 36:25. I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. Zechariah 13:1. On that day there shall be a fountain opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to cleanse them from sin and uncleanness.

In an atmosphere of national renewal like that of Qumran, of John the Baptist, and of Jesus, these images were directive. Both movements, no matter how they differed in their conception of where the true Israel might be found or how it was to be formed, were guided by the notion of an all-Israel purification—a notion no doubt reinforced by the national ideology of a kingdom of priests. Both movements or rather the two movements together, sought to coordinate the language, the symbol and the reality. Both recognized that washing was no substitute for spiritual-religious reality, but also that it was, with the reality, part of the prophetic promise.84 In fact, the Qumran priestly community at the Dead Sea used ritual washings in a similar way since it too thought of itself as a purified community of Israel. Qumran practice, in fact, increases the likelihood of the above explanations both by analogy and related tradition-streams. That is, John the Baptist and Jesus’ messianic community are like Qumran in the respects noted, and in fact they both belong to variants within a common stream of Jewish traditions. The Communal Practice of the New Israel Jerusalem Assembly In Acts 2:42-47; 4:32-37 and 6:1-6, Acts summarily reports on communal economic practices in the Jerusalem messianic assembly. Several details of 2:42-47 are notable elements of the New Israel’s fellowship (koinonia): continuance in apostolic teaching, breaking of bread (common meals), prayer, and miracles by the apostles; their most unique feature was a community of goods and distribution from the fund according to needs (2:45; 4:34), especially needs of widows (6:1)—another practice with possible parallels to the Qumran priestly Dead Sea community. Acts’ description is general enough to include at least monetary support and meals. The “community of goods” as it is often called was sustained by contributions from all (2:44-45), and especially by some who “from time to time (NIV) sold houses or lands and laid the proceeds at the apostles’ feet (4:35, NIV).” Although at least some of the Pauline churches (Ephesus, for example [1 Tim 5]) later had funds for support of widows, it appears that this communal arrangement did not continue 84 This material is cited from D. DeWitt, “Baptism in Dispensational Perspective: The New Testament (Essay III in this collection).”

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beyond the earliest days, even in Jerusalem; at least there is no further notice of the sale of houses and lands. The situation was, therefore, distinctive to the New Israel context of the early apostolic ministry as far as we can tell, and in fact this limitation to Israel helps explain its limited extent in space and time. Commentators generally see contributions to the fund as voluntary and not expected in the same sense as the Dead Sea Qumran community which required sale of properties and deposit of proceeds with the sect for full membership after a probationary period.85 Although some of our predecessors in the Grace Fellowship were reluctant to acknowledge the voluntary nature of Acts’ communalism, our early writers were not quite so forceful. C. R. Stam, for example, although not speaking of its voluntary nature, does say it was “spontaneous.”86 C. Baker does not mention the voluntary nature of the contributions either, but stresses nonetheless that what made communal life viable was possession of all persons by the Holy Spirit, and the consequent oneness of spirit in the assembly.87 While possession of all by the Spirit is no doubt a major factor (2:38-39), one adjacent text (4:31) representing those filled with the Spirit refers mainly to apostolic leaders. Thus Baker and others are clearly right in seeing the community of goods as inspired by the Spirit. The reasons for widespread perception of its voluntary nature are: (1) the development is nowhere said to a matter of force or requirement; (2) Ananias is not punished because of his non-conformity, but because he sold property and falsified his gift as being the whole amount of the sale, while keeping back part for himself; (3) Mary, presumably also a Jewish Christian and the mother of John Mark, kept her Jerusalem home apparently without judgment (Acts 12:12). The latter is the most telling of these factors.88 More important and interesting for the purpose of this essay are the larger motivations and historical contexts for the community of goods. Such communal thoughts and practices were already present in Judaism and the larger Greco-Roman world. (1) The Qumran community at the Dead Sea required sale of property and permanent deposit with the community at final entrance, but only after a trial period of two or years.89 Their practice should not be viewed in isolation from communal impulses throughout late Judaism, although those of the latter were usually not practiced in such forceful terms. (2) Judaism at large had a well-developed system of alms collection and distribution at least by the second Christian century—a system that was likely already developing during the first Christian century or earlier. Rabbinic writings preserved from that time, probably reflecting practices of the first century, document this system. Where there was a Jewish community, a collection of money or goods called the kuppah was made door to door weekly (Fridays) by two collectors, and distribution was made to the needy. Another collection of food, the tamkhut, was made daily for the known hungry to supply them for the coming day. These collections may have been managed by local synagogues and were probably in use already in the first half of the first (Christian) century by Jews. They are evidence of a 85 Bruce, Acts, pp. 47, 100-101; Barrett, Acts, 1:168: “Nothing is said in Acts about a law (his italics) requiring converts . . . to hand over their property; Rackham, Acts, p. 63; Polhill, Acts, p. 153. 86 C. Stam, Acts Dispensationally Considered, 4 vols (Chicago: Berean Bible Society, 1954), 1:169; later on p. 171 he speaks of baptism as “expected.” 87 Baker, Acts, pp. 25-26, 36. Bruce, Acts, p. 74, also notes with Baker that the arrangement could only be kept up so long as “their sense of spiritual unity was exceptionally active.” . 88 Polhill, Acts, p. 153. 89 Manual of Discipline, Col. 6:13-27.

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larger practice of organized collection and distribution in Jewish culture; they add another dimension to the specialized Qumran community practice. Jewish culture valued some form of voluntary re-distribution of resources to meet human needs.90 (3) The Greeks too had communal sects and advocates; the Pythagorian groups91 were communal and as Aristotle famously said, “the possessions of friends are common.” Did the Old Testament furnish any prophecies or prototypes of eschatological communalism? The apparent answer is—no, there is no prophecy of communal sharing in messianic passages. Still, Old Testament scholars sometimes refer to Israel’s economic ideals as communal, especially in the Pentateuch; and curiously, though perhaps significantly, the Qumran Manual of Discipline begins its code of regulations as though the whole code is based on Moses and the prophets.92 It includes the rules for sale of properties and deposit of gains with the community upon entrance. Old Israelite sites tend to suggest egalitarian practice. Despite these visible models in the historical context, recent commentators are more inclined to see the communal practice of the New Israel community in Jerusalem as motivated by Jesus teaching and example combined with the imminent messianic kingdom. Barrett, for example, thinks the combination of Jesus’ economic teaching and example along with Israel’s hope for the promised kingdom, were together formative for the Jerusalem communal practice. He says, “Christians may have known and obeyed commands of Jesus such as Mt: 6.19-

21, practicing a ‘communism out of love . . . . Their practice may have been the result of their eschatological beliefs . . . .”93 Jesus sayings about sharing are straightforward and forceful: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break in and steal . . . (Matt 6:19).” To the wealthy young man he said, “. . . You lack one thing; go, sell what you have, and give to the poor . . . .” In addition to these sayings, it seems from John 12:2-8 and 13:29 that Jesus and the apostles had a common fund from which they met their need of sustenance and gave alms to poor people. The contexts of these passages suggest that the fund was supplied by monetary gifts or sale of donated goods. We do not know that the apostles themselves sold property to start or sustain the fund; but this is not out of the question. Despite sale of properties, it is unlikely that donors ceased working. The Jerusalem communal practice appears to have been primarily an extension of Jesus’ and the apostles’ practice. Kingdom texts in the gospels link poverty in the present with a great reversal from poverty to wealth in the future kingdom. One story of Jesus underscores the linkage between sale and distribution of gains to the poor on one side, and its implications for the future kingdom on the other. After the rich young man departed with grief over the idea of selling his wealth (Mark 10:29-31), Jesus said to the disciples, “. . . Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, and who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, 90 Summarized from K. Lake, “The Communism of Acts,” in The Beginnings of Christianity: The Acts of the Apostles, 5 vols, ed by F. J. Foakes-Jackson and K. Lake (Reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1966), 5:148-149. 91 Cited by Polhill, Acts, p. 121-122; but this is more or less common knowledge. Aristotle’s famous saying is sometimes used in introductory classical Greek texts, for example, A. D. Chase and H. Phillips, Jr., A New Introduction to Greek (Cambridge: Harvard, 1961), p. 8. 92 Col 1:1-3. 93 Barrett, Acts, 1:168.

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houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. But many that are first will be last and the last first.” Here “age to come” is another term for the future kingdom, or at least includes it. Jesus also said, “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God (Luke 6:20 and parallels).” If disciples had some trouble knowing what to make of such teaching when Jesus originally said it, they seem to have taken it with full seriousness at and after Pentecost. The Law and the Jewish Remnant

Jesus did not envision an end of the law in his time or in the messianic future any more than did the prophets. On the other hand, nothing is said by way of generalities or principle in Acts 1-8 about retention of the law and its observance. What happened during the national contingency situation is that Jewish converts to Messiah simply continued to practice the law including its festivals, ceremonies and temple worship. That is, Jewish Christians in Judea continued to be Jews after they became Christians, because no incompatibility was considered. Acts 1-8 shows no consciousness of a cessation of the law. There is, finally, a clear statement by James about it as late as the events of Acts 21. To Paul, James said, speaking for the Jewish Christians at Jerusalem, “You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed; they are all zealous of the law (Acts 21:20).” Acts 15 (15:1-2, 5) already noted this reality among Pharisees who believed, but Galatians shows that Paul struggled with law-observant Jewish Christians over the freedom of his Gentile converts in Galatia. Acts 10’s account of Peter’s dramatic sheet vision about the inclusion of the Gentiles shows how normal was Peter’s continued practice of the law’s purity and separation principles, and equally how shocking to him was the revelation of the coming Gentile salvation mission. Consequently, one must include a kind of strict law-observance as yet another practice of the Jerusalem messianic remnant. But this is only another token of its experience and further hope of Israel’s “fullness.” After Jewish Christians fled to Pella in East Jordan during the Jewish war, a common characteristic among all—the main body called “Nazarenes” as well as Jewish-Christian sectarian groups like Elkesites and Ebionites—was their continued keeping of the law.94

The End of the Contingency Period

The most definitive text is Luke’s parable of the fig tree discussed above, assuming, of course, that it bears the meaning discussed, i.e., that the passage identifies one more year after the first three for the extended repentance-probation. Exact chronological information about lapsed time is not available from Acts 1-8. By the time of Paul’s first return to Jerusalem in Acts 9:26, about three years had lapsed from the time of his conversion, as he specifies in Galatians 1:18; this period, however, was not measured from Pentecost. Stephen’s speech appears to be a judgment on Israel’s unbelief, or at least that of the leaders. The speech does have a kind of decisive tone and gives the impression that something final or conclusive had developed in the resistance of the Sanhedrin. 1 Thessalonian 2:16

94 R. Pritz, Nazarene Jewish Christianity (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1988). This point is a major thesis of the book.

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suggests that Israel had by the time of writing fallen under the wrath of God, a viewpoint consistent with reading Stephen’s speech as a closure on Israel’s opportunity. But Romans 11:11 suggests that Israel had “stumbled” but not fallen; it is not clear whether this is a short-term “stumble” which would suggest a possible continued probation, or whether it is perhaps a longer-term projection with the ultimate conversion in view (Rom 11:12, 2527). It is probably not possible to identify a point in Acts where the contingency ends; the surviving epistles do not discuss the matter. It seems safe, therefore, to suggest that the probation ended in some major sense with Stephen’s speech, since the speech seems to think of a decisive rejection of both Messiah and the required messianic repentance by the local rulers of Israel. Hebrews 4:17, however, seems to extend the probation era to a full 40 years after the resurrection. We likely must think of a process rather than a pin-point absolute moment. Is Acts 1-8 the Beginning of the Church?

In his study of Peter’s Pentecost Discourse, R. Zehnle cites W. Furneaux in a 1912 work containing this assessment of Peter’s Jerusalem temple address in Acts 3: Peter still thinks of the Kingdom as a national kingdom, and the Second Advent as depending on the conversion of the Jews. He has as yet no conception of the union of Jew and Gentile in one church.95 This assessment certainly follows from what we have met in these early chapters of Acts. What else might be said in favor of this evaluation? If the church began when the Holy Spirit came and the apostles resumed Jesus’ messianic mission to Israel in Acts 2, one could reasonably expect to hear some hint of that reality in their earliest speeches. But there is no such explanation or anything remotely resembling it in Peter’s speeches. The coming of the Spirit at Pentecost would have been just the right event for Peter to explain that this was the beginning of the church. Instead Peter’s first speech cites the prophecy of Joel on the coming of the Spirit which mainly depicts tongues as a prophecy event, mentions the Day of the Lord, and states that whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. This in turn is followed by another Old Testament quotation on resurrection, an explanation of Jesus’ resurrection, an affirmation that the resurrection made Jesus both Lord and Christ, and finally a call to repentance and baptism. The speech does not explain anything about the formation of the church. The word “church” in the AV of Acts 2:47 is based on a corrupt text and is not used in modern translations; in fact “church” does not occur until Acts 5, where it also—along with terms for Israel noted above--refers to the Jerusalem “assembly” of Jewish believers seized with fear over Ananias’ death. “Church” in Acts 7:38 refers to ancient Israel gathered as a “congregation” in the wilderness. Two uses in chapter eight (8:1, 3) refer again to the Jerusalem remnant assembly. These uses of ekklesia reflect with only a touch, the church Jesus predicted in Matthew 16. Here it is just that kind of “national assembly” he foresaw. Rather than the beginning of the church of the Pauline mission and epistles, these chapters of Acts more closely approximate the apostles and deacons of chapter six aiming at what Paul later called the “fullness” of Israel (Rom 11:12). Certainly it was the Lord’s purpose

95 Zehnle, Peter’s Pentecost Discourse, p. 75; W. Furneaux, The Acts of the Apostles (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1912), p. 56

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to increase Israel and its potential by giving the Spirit, building a righteous remnant in Jerusalem including believing priests (Acts 6:7), stimulating a loving community of goods and unity, calling for repentance and “times of refreshing,” and looking for the return of Jesus and the restoration of all things spoken by the prophets. This hope rather begins to fade with increased persecution, the growing opposition of the Sanhedrin (Acts 4-7), and the stoning of Stephen. As the kingdom hope declines with the growing rejection of Jesus as Messiah, it is supplanted with Paul’s conversion, the Gentile mission, and the beginning of the egalitarian Jewish-Gentile church without Israel’s national conversion. But more forceful than these points is the way Paul characterizes the church and makes the on-the-ground Gentile mission the historical context for all he says about it. The most detailed of these thoughts appear in Ephesians and Colossians, but there are also details in other parallel passages. The main elements of these texts are focused on a change in the latter-day history of salvation: (1) the independent Gentile mission without the salvation of Israel; (2) the egalitarian Jew-Gentile church as a “new humanity” created by a new divine revelation within and based on the converts of the Gentile mission. The Gentile World Mission The one text where Jesus commissions the disciples in the sense of directing them to undertake a mission of the gospel to the nations, i.e., Matthew 28:19, was obviously not sufficiently clear to the disciples to move them out into that mission immediately and aggressively. This is due to the contextual perspective of the Israel-to-repent-first motif, and not to a mere “narrow nationalism” among the apostles as is sometimes claimed. There was always—from the promise of posterity and land to Abraham and on through the prophets—a plan to extend redemption to the whole (Gentile) world. But through the whole process, especially in Second Isaiah and into Jesus and the apostles’ ministry, this world-wide outlook is seen as a consequence or extension of a redeemed Israel. As we have seen, this prophetic plan is continued into the early chapters of Acts. Clearly, Matthew’s commission of the twelve to make disciples of all nations is set in a larger Israel-too-Israel-first context as Luke’s note in his commission text about “beginning at Jerusalem” also shows. The twelve cannot be faulted for narrow nationalism in not rushing to Gentile evangelism or an immediate inclusion of the Gentiles. Peter’s revulsion at eating the unclean animals of his vision in Acts 10 is indeed a reaction to including the Gentiles (the symbolism of the animals); however, its larger context is not merely a strike at his Israel-first mission, but a shift in the plan of God toward inclusion of the Gentiles without regard for Israel’s repentance. Its larger purpose is to open his mind to what God was beginning to do in the apostleship of Paul as the ensuing Acts stories, especially the Jerusalem meeting of Acts 15, will show. This story also shows that the twelve apostles as well as all converted Jews in Judea were still keeping to the law, probably on the basis of Old Testament normalization of the law in the messianic era (Isa 2:1-5):, and not just stubbornly clinging to their Jewish nationalism. In contrast, the commands to Paul prioritize the Gentile world mission of which his commissioning orders make him the chief mover and leader (Acts 9:15; 22:21ff; 26:12-18 on which see below). There is no longer any intermediate event of Israel’s preliminary 45

conversion; rather Paul’s mission mandates order a direct, aggressive channeling of the gospel to the nations. Even Paul’s preparatory years are part of this mission. It is also supported by Peter’s dramatic sheet vision and reception of Cornelius in Acts 10. Peter does not receive a commission at that time to undertake or join the Gentile mission; but he does undergo a shift in outlook that opens his mind to what Paul is commissioned to begin; this is the way Acts 9-12 structures the revelational development. These mandates to Paul (and a growing group of aides and co-workers) are restated in varied scenes in Acts beginning in ninth chapter. Acts 9:15. “But the Lord said to him [Ananias], ‘Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel’.” In the recount of his conversion in Acts 22:17-21, Paul adds another vision not found in Acts 9; this vision of Christ occurred in the temple upon his return to Jerusalem: “When I had returned to Jerusalem . . . I fell into a trance and saw him saying to me . . . ‘get quickly out of Jerusalem, because they will not accept your testimony about me’ . . . . And he said to me, ‘Depart; for I will send you far away to the Gentiles’.” Acts 26:15-17 again repeats the order: “. . . ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And the Lord said, ‘I am Jesus whom you are persecuting . . . for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve . . . delivering you from the people and from the Gentiles—to whom I send you’ . . . .” Several passages in the epistles echo these Acts texts. Galatians 1:15: “But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me through his grace was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with flesh and blood . . . .” Romans 11:13: “Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry.” Romans 15:15-16: “. . . because of the grace given me by God to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable . . . .” Ephesians 3:8: “To me . . . this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ . . . .” These combined texts show clearly that Paul thinks the planned Gentile mission (by God) dates in either concept or action to his conversion.

This does not mean Paul did not also go to the Jews. In fact, several scenes in Acts picture him beginning his mission work in Roman territories, provinces or cities at Jewish synagogues; othert texts speak of ministry to both Jews and Gentiles. However, the context of Jewish evangelism has changed in that synagogue preaching of the gospel and the rejections Paul takes from synagogue Jews become the occasions for Gentile evangelism as in Acts 13:46-48; 18:5-6; and 28:25-28; in this limited sense the Israel-first aspect continues as is also stated in Romans 1:16. Another change is that such rejections belong to a process in which Israel is “stumbling,” as he says (Rom 11:11), and has fallen under the wrath of God (1 Thess 2:16). The themes noted below add more factors to a new context for the extent and character of Paul’s continued work with his own nation. However, Paul’s mission is not an unqualified continuation and development of the early preaching of the twelve apostles to Israel. Instead, a world mission has developed under divine commission to Paul, which is independent of Israel’s conversion and stands on its own divine authority with no necessary attachment to Israel. In fact, in Galatians 2:7-9, Peter and Paul agree together on this same division of labor—Paul to the Gentiles; Peter and the eleven to the Jews. In other words, an uncoupling has occurred that alters the historical Israel-first pattern along with the contingency under study, even though Paul

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recognizes that in a limited sense the earlier plan continues. Some hints of an ongoing probation/contingency for Israel do seem to exist, as in the 40 years of Hebrews 4:17, but they are muted and occasional, and are no longer central or crucial, especially not for Paul. A shift or “transition” is developing. In his internationally well-known work on Paul and the Gentile Mission, Johannes Munck added a remarkable observation to the historical fact of the Pauline Gentile Mission: Paul interprets the Gentile Mission as a new, intervening step in salvation history.96 Munck sees the Gentile Mission as the divinely initiated prelude to Israel’s final salvation; that final salvation was no longer Israel’s hoped-for repentance, salvation and kingdom. This means there is a reversal in the earlier movement of Jesus and the twelve apostles. In their view and movement, extending, in our argument, through Acts 8, Israel’s salvation was the prelude to the Gentile world’s salvation; in Paul’s newly revealed Gentile Mission, this is dropped and the salvation of the Gentile “nations” has become the prelude to Israel’s repentance and renewal, notwithstanding Paul’s “first to the Jews” thought of Romans 1:16. This shift is a reversal of the Old Testament’s view of how the Gentiles will be blessed in connection with Israel. The basis of this observation is Paul’s thinking in Romans 11:12-14, 25. Here he sees his ministry to the Gentiles and their inclusion in God’s plan as an interval between Israel’s opportunity and its final salvation with their “transgression” as the occasion for the conversion of the Gentiles without the conversion of Israel. In 11:25 he speaks of a hardening in part of Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles occurs. Hence, Romans 11:1214 supports Munck’s point and that of this essay as well.

It can perhaps be put another way, though this is my formulation, not Munck’s: Israel’s salvation would have brought about the Second Coming and kingdom and the consequent salvation of the Gentiles; but the Gentiles’ repentance delays the Second Coming until the “fullness of the Gentiles” happens, i.e., until all the nations, not a specific number of Gentile persons (so Munck) receive the gospel. Then Israel’s salvation will occur together with the accompanying end time events. A revised schema of salvation history is thus introduced, different than that of the prophets, Jesus and the twelve apostles in the gospels and Acts. We may now pursue the question of how this happened. Israel’s Situation in the Time of Paul and The Egalitarian Church as a New Revelation

Paul remarks several times on what has happened to Israel; he appears to see in

96 J. Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind, trans Frank Clark (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1959), pp. 36-68. In this essay, Munck embraces Oscar Cullman’s idea that Paul himself is the “restrainer” and his gospel “that which restrains,” in 2 Thess 2, i.e., Paul and the Gentile Mission restrains the Antichrist’s emergence until the “fullness of the Gentiles” arrives. Whether or not this eschatological detail is necessary to understand what Romans 11 reveals about how Paul thinks of the intervening Gentile Mission and the newly conceived way to Israel’s salvation, may be an open question. The two concepts seem separable. Munck’s views of the uniqueness and independence of Paul’s mission are not cited in their wholeness as a close parallel to the arguments of this essay; there are, nonetheless similarities in some details, and these seem useful to cite.

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its rejection of Christ a virtual cause-effect or at least an occasion-connection between its unbelief and the rise of the Gentile world mission. We are not dealing with merely a Gentile Mission as a separate fact with no wider context or larger explanation in the Pauline movement. The independent, without-Israel Gentile Mission is rather framed by a larger divine revelation involving a shift in the history of salvation. The Gentile Mission is only part of the formation of what Paul calls the egalitarian “church” of Jews and Gentiles, even though it is the actual “on-the-ground” operative of the newly forming church. The Gentile Mission as a matter of history belongs to the formation of the newly revealed church; that is, the new Gentile Mission belongs to the new church. The manner in which Paul represents the newness of the church revelation in time, is matched by the newness of its components and character. These elements of newness point to a church formed only with the Gentile Mission of Paul and his team, but also inclusive of believing Jews. The “restoration of all things,” including the kingdom to Israel which occupies Acts 1-8, simply does not match this normative Pauline conception of the church, i.e., this church was not forming in Acts 1-8, but only when Jews and Gentiles began to be formed together into “one new man,” the body of Christ as defined in Ephesians 2-3 and Colossians 1. Three of sixty-one uses of “church” in Paul’s epistles refer to the pre-Pauline remnant assemblies of Judea and perhaps elsewhere (1 Cor 15:9; Gal 1:13; Phil 3:6). “Church” in 1 Corinthians 12:28 refers to gifts in the church; since some gifts were clearly present before the Gentile Mission and the beginning of Paul’s church revelation (at least apostles, prophets and teachers), the allusion would have to include these gifts within “church.” The other three refer to Paul persecuting the “church” before his conversion. The small proportion of such references should not be taken lightly or flippantly explained away merely because of their small number. Three plausible explanations might be suggested. (1) Use of “church” for the Jewish remnant assemblies of Acts 1-8 discussed above shows that “the church” of the Pauline epistles existed in some limited or preliminary sense before Paul’s church revelation. A few leaders within the Grace Gospel Fellowship in the early years regarded the “church” as having begun secretly at Pentecost. But if mere use of the term “church” is the criterion for the existence of the egalitarian body of Christ, then Stephen’s and the LXX’s use of “church” for Israel would indicate that the same church existed throughout most of the Old Testament as well, which seems very unlikely if not impossible, to judge by Paul’s definitions stressing its newness in Ephesians and Colossians. (2) The use of ekklesia in the LXX to translate Hebrew kahal (congregation) for Israel would seem natural as a term for the New Israel of John the Baptist and Jesus as well as the apostles’ messianic mission in Acts 1-8. Even though used very slightly in Acts for the New Israel remnant of Acts 1-8, ekklesia may well have been used in the leadership’s (apostles’) oral talk about their New Israel “community,” and thus would have become established in usage during that period without any connotations like Paul’s Jew-Gentile egalitarian “church” meanings. This usage would have stemmed from Jesus’ use of ekklesia, as extremely limited as it was. What happened, then, is that Paul simply adopted this terminology in referring to the Jewish remnant “church.” He did so, however, without qualifying or explaining it in respect of this earlier meaning; this explanation seems plausible. (3) By the time of 1 Corinthians, Paul could use ekklesia for all Christian assemblies everywhere, including those representing the “churches of the Gentiles (Rom 16:4)” and the “churches of God which are in Judea (Gal 1:22).” These flexible uses of ekklesia might suggest the meaning “community” 48

rather than “church.” As early as the time of Galatians (the earliest epistle) he can think of one single “body of Christ” made up of all Christian churches, Jewish and Gentile, or of mixed Jew and Gentile congregations. First Corinthians (among the earlier letters) is addressed “To the church of God which is at Corinth . . . called to be saints together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours . . . (1 Cor 1:2).” Thus by this time, Paul regarded all Christians as one single church, a concept conforming very closely to his definition of the Jew-Gentile body of Christ in the Ephesian and Colossian letters.97 Thus, when he speaks of the church he persecuted before his conversion, he may be simply projecting a by-then conventional terminology backward without intending to transfer his later definition of the newly revealed church back to the New Israel remnant. This is a viable explanation because those Jews who made up the New Israel messianic remnant had become, by the time he wrote his earlier epistles, the Jewish segment of the new egalitarian Jew-Gentile church. One might say, therefore, that the church of Jew-Gentile composition existed already in the Jewish remnant in nuce (in potentiality), but not necessarily de facto (in fact). Of these ways of explaining his use of “church” for the New Israel remnant, (2) seems workable, but improbable, and (3) seems the most workable. (1) seems very unlikely. The dispensationalist exegesis of Ephesians 2:11-3:13 and Colossians 1:24-27 is well known in the way it yields the idea that the church as body of Christ is a Pauline revelation not found earlier in the historical and scriptural record of progressing revelation. Readers may also refer to my discussion of these passages in detail in my earlier book Dispensational Theology in America during the Twentieth Century.98 Only the barest summary is needed here to complete the discussion. Briefly it is this: the egalitarian JewGentile church is a new revelation made known by God himself to Paul as leader of and in connection with the Gentile Mission; we do not find it outside his epistles except for a few allusions to the developing idea and first case of a Gentile mission with Peter (Acts 10). The chief reality and its articulation by Paul is that the church as body of Christ is a divine work in which a new form of the people of God is created that did not exist before its origin in the context of the actual, on-the-ground Gentile World Mission. Its newness lies in the egalitarian reconciliation of all social and ethnic groups and entities, including and especially Jewish and Gentile believers. This is something stunningly new from the standpoint of the histories of Israel and salvation, and the former estranged relation of Jews and Gentiles (Eph 2:11-13). This in-history action of God, along with its divinely revealed explanation in the epistles, forms a new movement in the history of salvation.99 It was unknown as long as Israel, its repentance and its salvation were the subjects and aim of the John-Jesus messianic movement—a process which, as has been shown, was the object of Jesus’ mission and that of the apostles up to about the eighth chapter of Acts. Hence there is no revelation of the church in Paul’s normative sense in that period. The revelation that founded the church did not begin until Paul’s call and the Gentile Mission—in concept or fact—when for the first time a fellowship of believing Jews and Gentiles truly existed 97 As also Baker, Dispensational Theology, pp. 513-515. 98 DeWitt, Dispensational Theology in America, pp. 173ff; 223-233. 99 The event-interpretation structure of biblical revelation is discussed in some details for Jesus and the gospels by K. Kantzer, “The Christ-Revelation as Act and Interpretation,” in Jesus of Nazareth: Savior and Lord, Ed C. F. H. Henry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966), pp. 241-264.

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without any necessary membership in Israel or keeping of its law. Summarily then the passages contain the following concepts. Several sharp contrasts with then-and-now language occur of which the chief subjects are Israel’s life and law/freedom from law, or not-revealed/now-revealed contrasts focused on the church. This church is “the body of Christ” consisting of redeemed Jews and Gentiles amalgamated and united in new congregations or, even if still in separate congregations with different practices, all composing the one “new man,” the newly revealed church. This new people of God is not Israel or under Israel’s law, some interpretations of Galatians 6:16 notwithstanding. The church-body was a mystery hid in God during the past ages of redemption, but was revealed to Paul who became its earthly apostolic operative along with other apostle-prophets as his partners in the World Mission. Some of those partners were otherwise drawn into it or made aware of it by added divine revelations as in Acts 13:1-2. The scriptural texts below are selected and so do not exhaust the possible passages illustrating these concepts. (1) Then-and-now language about Israel and the Gentiles, and/or other elements of the contrast, is characteristic of Ephesians 2:11-3:13; such terms are accompanied by more or less lengthy explanatory clauses. “. . . at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision . . . you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near . . . .”100 This thought is followed by mentions of a “dividing wall of hostility,” the law, and the end of that hostility. The church as a not then but now entity is found in 3:4-5: “. . . my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men of other generations as it has now been revealed to the apostles and prophets . . . .”101 The former of these two quotations is about actual shifts in salvation history, the latter about verbal revelation accompanying and explaining in-history revelatory events. Such contrasts do not describe events of Acts 1-8 or the redemptive plan in the Old Testament or gospels, despite the notes of Jesus’ contacts with Gentiles, o the presence of proselytes in Acts 2 or Samaritans and an Ethiopian (Jew?) in Acts 8. The only recourse is to suggest the church was being secretly formed in those chapters, which of course cannot be an argument because no data exists there on which to base it. (2) The then-now historical-explanatory revelation is about the formation of the church-body as a newly revealed “mystery.” Daniel’s mystery revelations are the Old Testament model for this concept framework, but not a model of the content. The content rather is the church-body of Jews and Gentiles in a new bond: Ephesians 1:22b-23: “[God] has made him head over all things for the church which is his body.” The equation of church and body here is obvious; 2:15-16: “. . . that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two [Jews and Gentiles], so making peace, and might reconcile us both [Jew and Gentile] to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end.” The church-body is called a “new man”; its work is egalitarian peace between Jews and Gentiles; it is described as a new creation” in its nature as a joint-body-church; 3:6: “. . . the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.” These descriptions and even the name—body of Christ—do not fit the events or sermonic explanations of events in Acts 1-8.

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100 101

My italics this sentence and below, point (3). All italics in the quotations of the indented paragraphs (1)-(4) are the author’s.

(3) Thoughts about the mystery formerly hid in God are limited here to 3:3-5, 9; still, the thoughts in these texts inter-lace with those of Ephesians 1:3-2:21. Ephesians 3:35, 9: “. . . how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ102 which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit;” 3:9: “. . . and to make all men see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things.” It is important to understand the “as” in “not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed (3:5b),” to be an absolute contrast with previous eras of biblical salvation history. The claim of an absolute contrast is partly based on the parallel in Colossians 1:26.103 It is also to be noted that in 3:9, “hid in God” is determinative against the view that the mystery was actually hidden in the Old Testament in a way similar to thinking about “mystery” in the priestly Qumran scrolls. The possible parallel of Paul’s use of “mystery” with its use at Qumran is discussed by J. D. G. Dunn.104 However, Paul’s “hid in God” does not correspond with Qumran’s notion of mysteries hid in Scripture or with the use of the Old Testament in Acts 1-8. In those events and Peter’s accompanying interpretive speeches, everything is based on prophetic concepts about Israel or the Gentiles, whether quoted or alluded. The Jewish latter day remnant assembly of Acts 1-8 does not match the description of a newly revealed church-body in this Ephesian passage and its Colossian parallel. Nothing in Acts 1-8 qualifies as a newly revealed secret hid in God himself during all past eras of salvation history. (4) Finally, Paul, by his dramatic conversion and prophetic-like call to the Gentile Mission, became the apostolic operative of that Mission and its related church: 3:1-3a: “. . . For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles—assuming that you have heard of the stewardship (“dispensation” AV) of God’s grace that was given to me for you . . . ”; 3:8-9: “To me , though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all men see what is the plan (“dispensation” AV) of the mystery hidden for ages in God . . . .” It is incorrect, however, to argue that Paul alone received the mystery revelation to which he alludes. He says it was revealed to other apostles and prophets, or more correctly “the apostle-prophets (Eph 3:5)”—a group of Gentile Mission associates to whom revelations came about the Mission (Acts 13:1-3). Peter is to be included in this group, since he too received a preparatory, revealed order to speak to the Roman centurion, Cornelius. Later the Jerusalem assembly generalizes from it about the inclusion of the Gentiles (11:18) as does Peter himself (15:7). But he does not receive a commission to join or lead the Gentile Mission; this is Paul and his team’s work as the division of labor between Paul and Peter in Galatians 2:9 shows. The vision rather functions to open Peter’s mind to the larger Mission entrusted to Paul and his mission colleagues. His associates, legates and support team are mostly new people in the Acts process; a few like Barnabas and Silas had earlier associations 102 For discussion and citation of parallels on why this is not an appositional genitive but a subjective genitive, cf. DeWitt, Dispensational Theology in America, pp. 233-234; parallels are cited in n. 32, p. 234. 103 For discussion of the exegetical details see DeWitt, ibid., pp. 176-177, 240-241. The meaning of hos (“as”) is a minute exegetical problem that can only be resolved by parallels and a careful examination of appropriate meanings from the lexicons. Nonetheless, it is of interest that the major critical commentaries on Ephesians in the last quarter century or more opt for the absolute meaning. Reference should be made to those of M. Barth, A. Lincoln, E. Best and H. Hoffner at Ephesians 2:11-3:13 and other parallels in Ephesians and Colossians. One may appropriately speak of a consensus on this point, or at the very least a strong majority of recent commentators. 104 J. D. G. Dunn, Romans 9-16, 2 vols (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1988) 2:678-679.

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with the Jerusalem Jewish remnant (Acts 15:32, 40). Acts 1:8 describes equally well the Israel-first preaching of Peter or the larger schema of Acts without mentioning the way in which it will be carried out or the time elements involved. Hence the Pauline conceptions and details about the church as body of Christ do not fit the events of Acts 1-8.

Baptism and Communalism in Paul and the Gentile Mission What is the status of the Jewish water baptism and economic communalism of Acts 1-8 in Paul? No record exists of an order for Paul to drop baptizing with water or to abandon communalism—two distinctive practices of the Jerusalem remnant assembly. And yet, “Paul could sit pretty loose” with baptism,” as C. K. Barrett said,105 referring to 1 Corinthians 1:17. But he does embrace a modified communal ideal in 2 Corinthians 8. At least this may be said on the basis of silence in the Pauline letters; but nowhere does Paul order the churches to baptize new converts, nor does he ever expect churches to practice communalism by selling land and homes in order to create or support a communal fund, although it seems obvious that people might do so if they wished; there is no record of it in the epistles if they did. In the epistles, Paul alludes to baptizing a very few converts at Corinth at the beginning; he also discusses his collection for poor Judean Jewish believers in 2 Corinthians 8-9 (cf Gal 2:9-10); he likewise discuses a widows’ fund at Ephesus in 1 Timothy 5. None of these passages, however, quite corresponds to either the mass baptisms of the Jerusalem messianic remnant or the specific details of the Acts 2-6 passages about its communal fund. There is no record of any mass baptism of Gentile converts by Paul, by one of his associates in the Gentile mission, or by an appointed local leader, either in Acts or the epistles.106 There are notices in Acts of baptisms of a few individuals or small groups including families, and one statement about “many of the Corinthians” who heard Paul being baptized; but there is no direct statement of who baptized them. Neither is there any explicit reference to Paul baptizing a Gentile convert identified as such in either Acts or the epistles. Luke’s baptism scenes involving Paul are in explicit Jewish/synagogue contexts; only the Philippian jailor is a marginal possibility to the contrary, while the nascent church there was Jewish. These scenes suggest that the Jewish remnant idea is still operating in some limited form, and that overlap in the Israel-remnant mission with Pauline evangelization of the Roman Empire did occur as one may assume it must have. The baptisms at Philippi (Acts 16), at Corinth (Acts18) and at Ephesus (Acts 19) are explicitly Jewish in context. The Philippian jailer (Acts 16) may have been a converted Gentile, but is not so identified; we do not know his ethnic or national origin, and he may have been Jewish or a proselyte. The Philippian church began with an outdoor Jewish proseuche/synagogue outside the city near the river (Acts 16); thus the ethnic context is Jewish. Otherwise, all C. K. Barrett, From First Adam to Last (London: A & C Black, 1962), p. 107. Acts 18:8’s “many of the Corinthians . . . were baptized,” could be viewed as a case to the contrary. But “many” is quite relative, and the comment is made with no further clarification, and in the context of the Corinthian synagogue and its ruler, Crispus. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:14 that Crispus was among the few he baptized. No agent of the “many” is indicated, but according to his statement in the context of 1 Corinthians 1:14, it was not likely to have been Paul himself. 105 106

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Paul’s uses of baptism language with Greek baptizo, baptisma, or louo are clearly or likely metaphorical. There is no explicit or certain evidence in Paul of a regular water baptizing practice, except for the three baptism references in 1 Corinthians 1 (Crispus, Gaius, and Stephanas’ households—two individuals and a family, possibly extended); but this hardly qualifies as “regular.” Beyond these three, he says he couldn’t remember any others he baptized. One wonders how such a remark can normalize water baptism for all time. All this is suggestive that in Paul, water baptism either was limited to a few Jewish converts or gradually dropped as both policy and practice for converted Gentiles—a development that would not surprise anyone who took seriously Paul’s disclaimer on baptizing in 1 Corinthians 1. What might explain this “sit loose” policy on baptizing at Corinth, and a modified form of communalism? We can only speculate, but perhaps with some good reasons. It is not likely to have been a divine order or divine command—“stop baptizing (Gentiile) converts,”—since there is no such command recorded in the epistles or Acts. Paul’s “. . . Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel . . .” in 1 Corinthians 1:17 is given this twist in some dispensationalist thinking. But this is neither what Paul says nor means, although it is a negative, and at least is a policy disclaimer on baptizing. A better possibility, but still far from certain, is that Paul reduced or stopped baptizing Gentile converts with water because the baptism of the Jewish remnant was rooted in Judaism and the John-Jesus messianism. Baptizing Gentile converts had no Old Testament authority in prophecies of Gentile inclusion. To cease baptizing them was only a small step within the framework of his general prohibition on Gentile Christians observing Jewish laws or ceremonies like circumcision and calendar (Gal 4:8-11; 6:14-15; Col 2:20-23). This logical step may have resulted from a real or potential threat by Jewish opponents of using his few baptisms of Gentile converts as a lever for forcing the whole law upon the Gentile Christians to make them full proselytes, i.e., full Jews. Jewish Christians appear to have done this very thing already with circumcision among Galatian Gentile Christians (Gal 5:2-3). Thus Paul could easily have discontinued baptism of Gentile converts as a barricade against any Jewish argument that Gentile converts should be joining Israel as proselytes.107 By this logic Jewish-Christian law-zealots would have implied that Paul’s Gentile converts at least conform to proselyte requirements; and by complying, they enter upon taking to themselves the whole law, as Jews expected of proselytes who had submitted to the five or six steps for inclusion in Israel. No property-sale communalism like that of Acts 2 and 4 appears in the epistles. Paul does embrace an equalitarian ideal explicitly, not once but twice in 2 Corinthians 8:14. One may say he avoids the practice because he was aware that the community of funds by sale of property and houses “didn’t work,” that the Jerusalem Christians soon became poor under it, or that socialism always creates mass poverty. But there is no proof that any of these were his actual reasons. One could claim that property sale for funding the On proselytes and baptism, see M. Pope, “Proselytes,” IDB 3:392; J. J. Collins, Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora (New York: Crossroads, 1986), pp. 214-215; S. McKnight, A Light Among the Nations (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), p. 84. The usual proselyte ceremonies included baptism, circumcision, a sacrifice in the temple during a pilgrimage to Israel and, in some rabbis, agreement to a Jewish marriage and to taking a Jewish name. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, p 309, thinks Galatians reflects a larger proselyting issue. 107

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community of goods was dropped by Paul because it would have put the church under law. But we have already seen that it was voluntary among the New Israel remnant, and that no reason exists to think the Jerusalem remnant practice was a matter of law, even though the Old Testament contains communal principles as a model. Paul thought generous giving by Christians was more compatible with the freedom of grace which he stressed; certainly this is the principle on which he asks the Corinthians to give to the poor Judean Christians (2 Cor 8:1ff). He may also have realized that the shift from Israel to the church necessitated adjustments to the realities of life in the Roman Empire. The church in the empire was already a politically powerless people separated by its faith and ethics from the Roman state,108 and was in no position to attempt power moves or to entertain unrealistic theocratic hopes. Nor is there any sign that Gentile offerings for poor Jewish Christians constituted anything like the Jewish temple tax. The Body-Church and the Mosaic Law Little need be said here about the church of the Pauline epistles and the Mosaic law. That the church is not under the law is agreed by virtually all parties to the discussion. Usually a distinction is made between the ceremonial and moral law to account for the New Testament and particularly Pauline use of the law for moral guidance. The ceremonial law is said to be done away, but the moral law is continued for the guidance offered from its civil and moral precepts, and its function as a moral instructor as well as the “schoolmaster” that leads us to Christ. Calvin’s famous “three uses” of the law correspond to this summary: (1) to restrain human rage (civil); (2) to lead us to Christ (the “schoolmaster” use); and (3) as teacher of believers’ moral and spiritual life (educative). The last of the three continues to be the most controversial; but it is easy to see that Paul does use the moral law for instructional purposes as in his citations of it for this purpose. All of Calvin’s three uses continue to be relevant to the whole people of God. In fact, Calvin probably formed the points as he did to make the law’s moral relevance clear, and as a way to specifically distinguish the permanent moral law from the obsolete ceremonial law. Since I have discussed this in detail in a chapter of my earlier book, Dispensational Theology in American During the Twentieth Century, it is unnecessary to say any more here. What matters is that the Jewish remnant Christians of Acts 1-8 continued to keep the whole law, including its ceremonial aspects, until losing the temple in 70 A. D. Otherwise, the Gentile churches of the Pauline mission and epistles are entirely freed from those parts of the law. Our thesis is sustained: the New Israel remnant of Acts 1-8 is not the church of the Pauline epistles. Another subject for which there is no space here is that amid the church-Israel differences, continuities exist between these two stages of the history of salvation. They include the Savior himself; the gospel preached, the new covenant and life; and “elders” and “deacons” as local ministry leaders—these at least. There is no solid textual evidence Despite its lack of political power in the Roman Empire, the church did possess persuasive power, especially when its value-of-life ethic emphasized the rescue of fetuses and infants, pregnant woman and their dignity, and the value of human life as in its pacifism and opposition to capital punishment. On this reality see the remarkable study by R. Stark, The Rise of Christianity (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1997). 108

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that the Jewish remnant assembly continued as a separate “church”; claims to this effect are mental constructs of modern dispensatioal interpreters. Rather, it appears that Paul considered all believers one body of Christ once the new stage of the people of God began.

Conclusion

The language of Paul in Ephesians 2-3 yields an understanding of the church as a newly revealed and divinely created social entity in the apostolic age, substantially different than Israel. In the Pauline letters the church is a new creation of God himself established as the egalitarian “body of Christ.” Believing Gentiles are not merely added to an already existing Jewish church so that Gentiles become full Jews. Rather, by creating a “new man” consisting of redeemed Jews and Gentiles, the church has become an entirely new social entity in the redemptive plan in history, whether in mixed congregations or ethnically separate assemblies. This revealed development effectively releases the dominantly Gentile church from Israel and Judaism, and allows it to be itself in the world without attachment to Israel—a truly universal people of God—no matter how much language was borrowed from Old Testament Israel to describe or characterize it. This Pauline-mediated movement of God’s plan and will is not in evidence in the ministry of Jesus or that of the apostles in Acts 1-8, even though it was always God’s purpose to finally include the Gentiles in the sweep of redemption. In the first stages of New Testament revelation, foretastes of the kingdom were exhibited to Israel and a contingency was present in the proclamation that makes repentance the condition of Israel’s national realization of its kingdom promises. The messianic salvation exhibited in the gospels is, despite these distinctions, continuous from Jesus to the apostles and into Paul. On the other hand all evidence and details in Acts 1-8 point to this Israel-kingdom combination as the focal point of the twelve apostles’ work in Jerusalem and Judea; in this context, Israel is the target people of the mission, not the Gentiles. In the Pauline Gentile mission and the epistles representing it, Gentiles rather receive the gospel without a repentant Israel as a prelude; indeed, they receive it because of an unbelieving Israel. In this unbelieving state, Israel is already under divine judgment (1 Thes 2:14-16; Romans 11:17, 19-20, “broken off,” and “stumbled, 11:11).” Rather than a substitute Israel, the church was instead formed of believing Jews and Gentiles equally, even though the churches of the period 65-135 A. D. and beyond thought of themselves as the “True Israel”109 Paul’s concept of the church in Ephesians shows how entirely new he thought it was, and precisely in the sense that the mutual hostilities of Jew-Gentile relations had become “reconciled” in a new people under the new revelation. The new people of God is not the old Israel any more than the church is brought under the law or any of Israel’s institutions or ceremonies prescribed in the law. The church of the epistles is not the Israel of history, of the gospels, or of the book of Acts. The church is a new people of God, even though it has continuities with Israel, especially in its reception of the prophesied and proffered salvation, and takes guidance from the values of its social, moral and ethical laws.

109 J. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 5 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 1:12-26.

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This conclusion means that the very few scattered uses of the term “church (ekklesia)” in the gospels (3x and only in Matthew) and Acts 1-8 do not refer to the church-body of the Pauline epistles any more than does Stephen’s use of “church” for Israel in the wilderness at the time of its national origin (Acts 7:38, “congregation,” RSV). This point was made correctly over and over by the founding leaders of the grace movement. Otherwise, if one takes guidance from following the mere occurrences of the term ekklesia in a mechanical fashion (with only one fixed meaning or social referent), he must say the church began when ekklesia or its Hebrew equivalent qahal first occurred in the Old Testament; there it is used frequently for the total “congregation,” “assembly,” or as some now prefer “community” of Israel. This procedure would lead to the farthest possible distance from Paul’s understanding of the church in Ephesians and Colossians. It is about the same when Paul refers to the “church” that preceded him at the beginning of the Christian movement. The mere occurrence of “church” here or there outside Paul is not proof of the existence of the church of the Pauline and later New Testament literature in such contexts. “Church” has to be understood within its own contexts as the plan of salvation progresses, and as each new stage of the people of God is formed.

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ESSAY II THE THEORY OF TWO NEW TESTAMENT GOSPELS The Common Apostolic Preaching by Donald Sommer and Dale S. DeWitt The Two Gospels Theory From its beginning the grace movement adopted the teaching that there were two apostolic gospels, one preached by Paul and called by him “the gospel of the uncircumcision” and “my gospel,”110 the other preached by Peter called “the gospel of the circumcision (Gal 2:7, AV).” Paul preached his gospel to Gentiles, offering them salvation without circumcision, the law or membership in Israel. In contrast, Peter preached his gospel to Jewish hearers; his gospel included water baptism for salvation (in some sense), accusations of guilt for rejecting and crucifying Jesus without atonement teaching, signgifts, the communalism of Acts 2 and 4, the promise of the messianic kingdom and approval of continued Jewish practices and ceremonies. We describe it this way because our theological literature leaves a question as to whether there was any message of salvation in Peter’s preaching in Acts, at least as the matter is explained by earlier teachers, particularly C. R. Stam. At the least one must say—if Peter preached salvation, the ground for it seems unrecognized or undefined. This is due in turn to a tendency to think the atoning meaning of the cross was, like the mystery of the church, also an entirely new and unique Pauline revelation. Sometimes the two gospels were thought enhanced in their separate distinctiveness by adding other contrasts: Peter’s gospel was a call to form a new earthly people (a new Israel), while Paul’s was a call to form a heavenly people. Or Peter’s gospel concerned the kingdom, while Paul’s concerned only the church. Or (again) Peter’s “gospel of the circumcision,” was a further preaching of the “gospel of the kingdom,” while Paul proclaimed only the “gospel of salvation” or as it was sometimes called in our literature, “the gospel of reconciliation (not a biblical phrase).” The latter term was identified further with “the gospel of the grace of God.” Other contrasts might be added as exhibiting further 110 For two variant views similar in viewpoint to this essay see T. Waltz, “Paul and the Twelve,” Truth Oct., 1985, pp. 4-5; D. DeWitt, “You Asked,” Truth, Dec. 1988, pp. 14-15.

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dispensational distinctions, including, for example, a sharp distinction between the gospel promised in the prophets on one hand and Paul’s gospel not promised by the prophets on the other; or Paul’s gospel was what he also calls the “mystery of the gospel” in contrast to the “gospel of the kingdom.”111 There is some reason to think that two of our earliest theological leaders, J. C. O’Hair and C. F. Baker, did not make the distinctions noted above quite so sharply as C. R. Stam and later R. Hill.112 For example, in The Unsearchable Riches of Christ, O’Hair several times comments on the common gospel preaching of Jesus, Paul and the apostles in a way that suggests a common core. In one place he says, “Paul in addition to a prophesied message, proclaimed unprophesied truth concerning the One New Man of Ephesians 2:15, the Perfect Man of Ephesians 4:13.”113 In a passage quoted by Baker, O’Hair says, “All of the apostles were preaching 1 Corinthians 15:1-4.”114 And in the same study, “Let us always keep in mind that while the Lord Jesus was on earth, God was carrying on a twofold program, in that Christ was offering salvation to individual Israelites and presenting the prophesied Kingdom to the Nation Israel.”115 These brief passages are not quoted to suggest that O’Hair did not, after all, make the distinction between the gospel of the circumcision and the gospel of the uncircumcision discussed above. He does make this distinction in the same study, but it is muted and not a major point. Rather he is more interested in how the “gospel of the circumcision” contrasts with Paul’s “my gospel,” which he thinks was another way to describe what Paul also calls “the gospel of the uncircumcision (Gal 2:7).” More important to O’Hair in this study was a difference within Paul’s terms and teaching between “the gospel,” which all the apostles were preaching, and the gospel he names with the biblical term, “the mystery of the gospel (Eph 6:19-20).”116 It seems obvious that he believed Christ and all the apostles did share the common gospel of salvation. It is puzzling that Baker quotes O’Hair in the passage from p. 97 of Unsearchable Riches of Christ cited above to support the two gospels theory. But it is in the very same quote that O’Hair also says, “all the apostles were preaching 1 Corinthians 15:1-4,” a remark uncommented by Baker, who either did not recognize the implications of O’Hair’s remark, or if he did, chose to let the matter stand unresolved. Another duality Baker left in place without further resolution was a pair of remarks about “the gospel of the uncircumcision” and “the gospel of the circumcision.” In one place he says the terms refer 111 C. R. Stam, The Fundamentals of Dispensationalism (Chicago: Berean Searchlight, 1961), pp. 191-217; C. Baker, A Dispensational Theology (Grand Rapids: Grace Bible College Publications, 1971), pp. 324-332, especially pp. 327-332. Baker cites J. C. O’Hair, The Unsearchable Riches of Christ (Chicago, 1941), p. 99 and G. Williams, The Students’ Commentary, 4th Ed (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1949), p. 876, as another case of these distinctions. 112 R. T. Hill, The Big Difference Between the Two Gospels The Covenant of Circumcision Its Gospel and Epistles Contrasted with The Mystery and Paul’s Gospel (Commerce City CO: Biblical Answers Ministry, 1999). 113 O’Hair, Unsearchable Riches of Christ, p. 64. Italics in the quote are the author’s. 114 Baker, Dispensational Theology, p. 328; O’Hair, Unsearchable Riches, p. 99; my italics. 115 O’Hair,Unsearchable Riches, p. 98; my italics. 116 The phrase “mystery of the gospel” (Eph 6:19-20) is dubious textually, and should not be used in this discussion; the reasons for textual doubt are discussed in D. DeWitt, Dispensational Theology in America, pp. 234-235, notes 33-34.

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“to the people to whom it [the gospel] was sent”;117 but three pages later he says of the same terminology that it refers to the fact that “. . . Paul had truth which the Twelve did not have.”118 It seems that both O’Hair and Baker leave unresolved tensions in these assessments, at least as judged by the logic of their discussion. It is to the credit of both that they left these remarks unresolved without trying to force a solution. It is also true that both O’Hair and Baker harmonize a truly available salvation in Jesus’ mission (and that of the twelve apostles) with the simultaneous presence of “the gospel of the kingdom” or “gospel of the circumcision.” On the other hand, Stam actually seems to reject this way of handling the matter. The difficulty in O’Hair and Baker’s thinking is that salvation just seems to be there without connection to any “gospel.” Both O’Hair and Baker think of this as two messages proclaimed at the same time, the relationship of which is not explained. The most probable explanation of this lack of resolution is that both were concerned about the unity of the early grace movement. In their concern they recognized that a number of the founding era leaders in the 1940s and 1950s had varied views on these and related issues, and were hesitant to generate unnecessary, destabilizing conflicts. On any reckoning, Baker was committed to the two gospels theory. But his treatment was far more cautious than Stam’s, and shows signs of grappling with exegetical issues and related inductive method procedures raised by this stance to a far greater degree than does Stam. The main application of his more exegetical and inductive method was gathering and commenting on the meaning all major terms of the New Testament containing “gospel of . . .” phrases. Still, his most detailed comments are on the terms of the supposed duality of “the gospel of the circumcision” and Paul’s “my gospel.” One may suppose that because Baker continued thinking in terms of two gospels, he did not see any problem with leaving his assessments of the biblical material with tensions. If he had followed the logic of his first point about the terms referring to the gospel’s target ethnic groups, and had more fully developed his probes into his other slight modifications of Stam’s two-gospels dualism, he might have moved toward seeing a single apostolic gospel as in the current essay.119 Some details of such a view are in place in Baker’s treatment; but they remained undeveloped. Finally, in another cautionary warning, Baker states, “the gospel of circumcision is not another way of being saved.”120 However, Stam did try to resolve the tension in a far more thoroughgoing way by rejecting outright any form of a common apostolic gospel, and drawing an absolute distinction between Petrine and Pauline preaching. The present 117 Baker, Dispensational Theology, p. 326. In returning to the “gospel of the circumcision,” on p. 330, Baker, after saying that this gospel “is involved in the Covenant of Circumcision made with Abraham,” continues with a discussion of the term in which he repeats several times that it was the people of Israel to whom the gospel of the circumcision was sent: “Christ plainly stated that the circumcision people must first receive their full blessings before the Gentiles could receive anything . . . .” This is still in his treatment of the gospel of the circumcision. 118 Ibid., p. 329. 119 One should carefully read Baker, Dispensational Theology, chapter 42, “The Various Gospel Messages of the Bible,” to see how he grapples with the issues of meaning in discussing the significance for different qualifiers on “the gospel.” At one point in his discussion, Baker actually says, “Since all God’s good news is wrapped up in the death of Christ, there is a sense in which there is but one gospel, but in saying this it is most important to at least make the distinctions which follow (p. 326).” This assessment illustrates the cautions and qualifications he makes on the historic two gospels duality of the founding days. 120 Baker, Dispensational Theology, p. 330.

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essay also seeks a resolution, but in the opposite way, i.e., that the distinction between two apostolic gospels be dropped as lacking exegetical support. Stam’s clearest detailed discussion of these issues is in his Fundamentals of Dispensationalism. For him, both the church and the gospel of salvation are unique Pauline revelation: both church and gospel are aspects of the mystery hidden from past ages in God until made known to Paul. There is no common preaching as O’Hair has it.121 First, Stam ties the “gospel of the kingdom” (proclaimed before the cross) with the “gospel of the circumcision.” These are gospels Jesus and the twelve apostles preached to Israel. They “go back” respectively to the kingdom promised to David and even earlier to the covenant of circumcision with Abraham (Gen 17). Both offer promises or blessings to national Israel. On one side is “the gospel of the uncircumcision” which “takes us back” to Abram before circumcision; on the other side is the “gospel of reconciliation”—a nonbiblical phrase Stam coins as a way to describe the salvation Paul preached in contrast to Peter who did not preach any salvation at all, but only accusations against a Christrejecting Israel. Reconciliation “takes us back” before David, before Abraham, and before Abram to Adam’s alienation from God. “Reconciliation” was preached only by Paul while Peter and his eleven fellow-apostles preached only the “gospel of the circumcision.” “Reconciliation” is identical with salvation in Paul’s preaching. Stam does not explain his repeated vague term “takes us back” for these inner-biblical connections. “Takes us back” appears to serve a kind of neat series of enveloped connections he sees, but there seems to be no real significance for the connections except to give them some larger inner-biblical bearing. Nor does Stam explain in what sense circumcision is “good news.” Connected by link-words with the “gospel of the uncircumcision” and “gospel of reconciliation” is the mystery. The link word is “reconcile” in Ephesians 2:16—a passage on the church of the mystery. Stam seeks to gain Pauline distinctiveness by the thought that “until we come to the writings of Paul we do not find one single word as to this great mystery or any of its associated mysteries (including the gospel itself, as in “mystery of the gospel”).” Hence the upshot of his linkage operations is that the gospel Paul preached is entirely different and other than Peter’s,122 and only Paul’s contains salvation. Peter only proclaims a condemnation of Israel for murdering its Messiah. In an earlier chapter entitled “The Two-Fold Aspect of the Mystery,” Stam builds another link-word construct, making the same distinction between the two different gospels preached respectively by Peter and Paul.123 In the earlier chapter he links “the “mystery 121 In a pamphlet on the same subject entitled Did Peter and Paul Preach Different Gospels? (reprinted probably after 1960 by Missionary Literature Distributors, but originally from about 1945, about four years after the publication of Unsearchable Riches), O’Hair seems to strengthen the distinction between Peter and Paul’s gospel, and in fact appears there to argue that both preached two gospels. Christ with Peter and the other eleven apostles preached the “gospel of the circumcision” and “the gospel of the kingdom” while Paul preached the gospel of salvation for sinners and the “mystery of the gospel” for saints. This is an odd kind of distinction-making, and seems unnecessarily complicated. O’Hair did not, however, renounce his view of the earlier essay that Paul’s gospel of salvation was foretold in the prophets. The question of a real salvation (and its basis) available during the ministry of Christ and the twelve after Pentecost seems murky in this pamphlet. Another pamphlet on this subject by Peter Wiering, Did Paul Preach a Prophesied Gospel? (c 1975), affirms a single apostolic gospel similarly to the current essay. 122 Stam, Fundamentals, pp. 191-217. I have summarized the key concepts. 123 Ibid., pp. 68-82.

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of the gospel (Eph 6:19),” which he takes to mean “the secret of, or key to the good news with “the gospel of the grace of God (Acts 20:24; all italics his),” and finally with “the preaching of the cross (1 Cor 1:18; his italics).” He comments about these phrases, “It is the proclamation of the over-abounding grace of God to man through the shed blood of Christ, and in the Pauline message everything centers in the cross.”124 He then links further with Pauline phrases like “by His blood,” “by the death of His Son,” and “by the blood of Christ (all italics his).” These phrases also link to the newly revealed mystery since “by the cross” occurs in a passage about the mystery (Eph 2:14-16). To reinforce these linkages, he heads the next section of the chapter, “THE SECRET OF THE GOSPEL NOT REVEALED BEFORE PAUL (his bold).” Under this heading, he explains away two major atonement passages before or outside of Paul, one in the Old Testament and one in the New Testament by various movements of logic and commentary. The two texts are Isaiah 52:13-53:12 and John 1:29. The discussion is introduced by the statement, “never were the merits of Christ’s death proclaimed as the ground of salvation until Paul (his italics).” Instead of preaching a saving atonement of Christ, Peter accused Israel of crucifying him. Yet another link is made with the Pauline phrase, “the mystery of his [God’s] will,” and the discussion concludes with yet another link: all these phrases are what Paul meant by “my gospel.” This treatment of phrases in Paul by (arbitrary) linkages yields the conclusion, “GOD’S SECRET PURPOSE NOT REVEALED UNTIL PAUL (all italics and bold type his).” It appears that this whole treatment and concept is a construct Stam has built by linking certain words and phrases in an entirely unique but arbitrary way. The construct has biblical base only in the sense that the words and phrases are biblical; but the contrived biblical concepts are not based on any exegesis of parallel passages, let alone any discussion of evidence that the passages are parallel; rather they seem arbitrarily linked by a set of pre-conceived ideas determined in turn by the logic of related dispensational distinctions. Instead of critiquing this thesis point by point, we will rather simply lay out the alternative view in some detail. Our view is that there is one substantial New Testament apostolic gospel, a view which Stam explicitly opposed. It appears to us that O’Hair and Baker were on the right track, O’Hair by recognizing a common preaching of all the apostles, Baker by toning down the harshness of Stam’s claims and by suggesting that “. . . of the uncircumcision” and “. . . of the circumcision” might actually denote the two people-types to whom the gospel was sent. We also think those translations which render Galatians 2:7 as “gospel to (or for) the uncircumcised” and “[gospel] to (or for) the circumcised” (or some slight variation) are correct, and that when the New Testament uses “the” with these terms the reference is not to conceptual content of what was preached, but to groups of people, i.e., Gentiles and Jews: “the circumcision” is law-keeping Israel; “the uncircumcision” refers to Gentiles. This is the way these circumcision terms with “the” are used in the New Testament, a factor Baker seems to have recognzed. Instead of beginning with a stark contrast, therefore, it seems more suitable to begin with the Old Testament roots of the gospel. With this context we’ll look at the atonement sayings in the gospels, then at actual relations between Paul and the earlier apostles, and then at the common elements in the apostles’ preaching. Along the way, we’ll also consider Luke’s intent in the respective Peter and Paul segments of Acts and how he reports the apostles’ speeches.

124

Ibid., p. 71-72.

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Atonement and Salvation before the Apostolic Preaching While a complete treatment would be of interest, we limit ourselves here to a brief sketch of the Old Testament prelude to Jesus’ sacrificial atonement for sins and the several related sayings of the gospel records from John the Baptist and Jesus. In a review article of Udo Schnelle’s Theology of the New Testament (2009), D. Carson expresses concern about Schnelle’s Marcion-like neglect of the Old Testament after the fashion, for example, of Harnack, Bultmann, Hirsch and others, as he thinks.125 He notes that most of the Christian tradition, including more recent New Testament theologies like those of Hahn, Wilkens, Stuhlmacher, Marshall, Schreiner, Thielman and Matera, rather seek to coordinate the Christ-centered theology of the New Testament with its Old Testament roots.126 Stam’s reductive-dismissive treatment of Isaiah’s Servant Song (Isa 52:13-53:12) as a major Old Testament root of New Testament atonement teaching, while not intentionally Marcionite, is Marcion-like in its attitude to Isaiah’s Servant Song as a major biblical source of New Testament atonement thought. Stam was not Marcionite in intent, nor was he trying to do away with the Old Testament. But his treatment of Isaiah 53 is close to rejective—a tendency in some of the grace movement’s thought toward the Old Testament, even though not fully articulated by anyone. Such attitudes try to diminish the significance of the Old Testament for the New Testament and for some aspects of Christian theology in order to emphasize the distinctiveness of Paul. Isaiah 53 in fact is a rich, detailed piece of Hebrew poetry on the atonement of the Lord’s Servant, including several aspects of his salvation work. Carson points out rather that “the NT authors understand the significance of Jesus Christ in categories substantially drawn from the OT, or at least in ongoing discussion with such categories.”127 The atonement of the Servant is part of this richness of the Old Testament which informs New Testament atonement teaching. It should be understood here that in our view Christ and his saving death were not—contrary to Stam’s overdispensationalized treatment of the subject—a newly revealed mystery. It is the body of Christ that Paul speaks of as a newly revealed mystery, not Christ, his atonement or salvation. The gospel writers, the twelve apostles and Paul all recognized and repeatedly referred to Old Testament texts which they say foretold Messiah’s suffering and salvation. Paul never alludes to the death of Christ as a mystery uniquely revealed to him alone. Rather, 1 Corinthians 15:3 states in a brief and sweeping way, that “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.” In light of a generalization like this it seems impossible to argue that Paul’s references to the Old Testament are merely to the fact that Messiah would be killed and rise again, and not to his substitutionary death for salvation; indeed, the Corinthians’ salvation is the main point of the context in which “Christ died for our sins” is stated. Of course, the gospels are clear that the apostles did not understand Christ’s references to his atoning death during his ministry before the resurrection. But that does not mean it was not revealed or that they never understood. Long before Paul’s general statement about Christ’s atoning death, the sacrificial 125 D. A. Carson, “Locating Udo Schnelle’s Theology of the New Testament, in the Contemporary Discussion (A Review Article),” JETS 53 (2010):133-134. 126 Ibid. 127 Ibid., p. 134.; note his similar references near the end of the brief article, p. 140.

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types of the Old Testament had established an atonement system that informs not only the New Testament picture of Christ’s death, but also already the later Old Testament itself as in the details of Isaiah 53. In other words, the New Testament is not the first time Israel’s sacrifices were used to picture aspects of the saving atonement of Christ. The sacrifices of the law already flowed into the Suffering Servant song of the Isaiah passage: “. . . and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all (53:6)”; “he was led like a lamb to the slaughter (53:7)”; “. . . the Lord makes his life a guilt offering (53:10)”; “he will bear their iniquities (53:11)”; “For he bore the sin of many (53:12; all citations from NIV).” These thoughts draw on sacrifices like the guilt offering and the Day of Atonement. A resultant salvation is also pictured in varied details of Isaiah’s Servant Song. In fact, even the Song’s introductory lines (52:7-12) speak of “salvation” twice (52:7, 10), and parallel salvation with “good news” (LXX euaggelizomenos/proclaim good news/proclaim the gospel [52:7 twice]); the passage is one important source of the New Testament’s “preach the gospel”. The text thinks mainly of Israel as the beneficiary of the Servant’s suffering; but 52:10 also speaks of salvation as revealed to the whole world: “The Lord will lay bare his holy arm in the sight of all nations, and all the ends of the earth will see the salvation of our God (NIV, my italics).” Isaiah 52:15 expands this world-encompassing revelation of salvation: “. . . so will he sprinkle many nations, and kings will shut their mouths because of him (NIV, my italics).” The thoughts of the passage also picture the salvation gained by the Servant through his suffering, not merely his death or even merely the idea of substitution, but the actual application of salvation to “many.” The texts read (NIV): Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows (53:4). But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed (53:5). . . . and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all (53:6). . . . for the transgression of my people was he stricken . . . (53:8). . . . the Lord makes his life a guilt offering (53:10). . . . by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities (53:11). For he bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors (53:12).

Several aspects of salvation found in the New Testament are foretold here: bearing our sorrows and sins; atonement for our guilt before God; justification; and mediation—all major aspects of salvation. The scene does make reference repeatedly to Israel of which the poet thinks first and foremost; but the introduction, as noted above, also encompasses the nations in the work of the Servant about to be celebrated. To argue that Israel is the sole focus of the passage simply ignores not only the introductory lines (52:7-12); it overlooks the (universal) sinfulness of sin that is the target of the Servant’s work. For these reasons, 63

it is necessary to understand Isaiah as depicting a salvation-producing vicarious atonement of the Servant and a world-wide scope in its saving application. The remaining chapters of Isaiah expand the flow of salvation from the atoning Servant by repeatedly mentioning the future outpouring of God’s righteousness and salvation (56:1; 59:16-17), a covenant related to the coming messianic salvation (54:10; 55:3; 59:21), the messianic peace and joy (61:1-7), the coming redemption (63:4), and many other expressions of the same salvation. These passages, with those of the coming messianic atonement, inform the New Testament teaching about salvation from the beginning, and are spread out between Jesus himself, the apostles, and particularly Paul. We do not mean by these observations that the salvation of the Gentiles without national Israel’s redemption is the meaning of the texts, or that the mystery of the church revealed through Paul was after all prophesied in the Old Testament. Isaiah’s Servant Song and its preface rather belong to the Old Testament prophetic pattern of Israel’s salvation and its extension to the Gentile world through a redeemed and renewed Israel. The mystery of the Pauline epistles is not merely that the Gentiles are now to be saved as the Old Testament foretold. Rather, the way in which they now come to God through Christ is different than in the Old Testament picture. That is, their salvation is without Israel’s prior spiritual renewal, and is accompanied by a wholly new and hitherto unrevealed form of the people of God—the body church in its world wide witness. Finally we note about the Old Testament that the whole New Testament including Paul repeatedly uses Isaiah 52:7-53:12 to expound the meaning of the atonement-death of Christ as a saving sacrifice for sins. Any complete index to the allusions and quotations of this Isaiah passage in the New Testament will illustrate its profound and pervasive effect on the thinking of the New Testament about the death of Christ.128 Aland and others identify no less than 41 such allusions and quotations including seven in Paul alone. Actual phrases of the passage are run into the gospel narratives of the passion. In doing this the gospel writers make Isaiah’s text part of the passion narrative—a striking case of what is now often called “inner-biblical interpretation” or biblical “inter-textuality.” Appropriate caution in assessing the allusions is certainly called for; but it is hard to gainsay the Old Testament revelational significance of such prophetic texts. Beside, there are now ample resources to study these citations in detail.129 In the gospels, references to Jesus’ atonement are limited to a few texts that say more than that he would die and rise again, or that Jesus himself predicted his own death and resurrection.130 An extremely important passage relating to this subject is John 1:29 128 See for example, K. Aland, et al, The Greek New Testament, 4th ed (Stuttgart: The United Bible Societies, 1994), p. 897. 129 C. H. Dodd, According to the Scriptures (New York: Scribner’s, 1953); W. C. Kaiser, The Uses of the Old Testament in the New (Chicago: Moody Press, 1985); G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson, Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007). These are only some of the major sources. By suggesting these titles it is only intended to furnish resources for careful study; not all interpretations of the data found in them are endorsed merely by citing. 130 This modest number of texts on the atonement in the passion is sometimes remarked by gospels studies, as for example by G. Smeaton in a classic work on the atonement, The Doctrine of the Atonement as Taught by Christ Himself (Reprint, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1953), p. 3: “ . . . the number of these sayings, it is true, is smaller than we would wish, but the amount of information they convey is not measured by their number, but by their variety, by their fullness, and by their range of meaning. They are not to be measured by their fullness, but by their range of meaning. They are not to be numbered but weighed.”

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where John the Baptist exclaims that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. L. Morris remarks that

John is referring to the death of Jesus and to that death as a means of taking away sin. Most students agree that he is thinking of that death in sacrificial terms . . . the term is vague of set purpose, so that the allusion is not to be tied down to any one sacrifice, be it Passover, or sin offering or any other. It is a way of bringing before the mind the sacrificial system as a whole. What all the ancient sacrifices dimly foreshadowed, that Christ effectively accomplished.131

Morris’ comment is to the same effect as the note above, i.e., that the sacrificial system is to be viewed as a whole, informing already the prophetic picture of the Suffering Servant’s atoning death (Isa 52:13-53:12) as well as the New Testament’s own atonement teaching. Although John probably did not understand the full significance of his own statement, he does indicate that prior to the time of the revelation of the body-church, Christ’s death was seen as a vicarious redemptive sacrifice. He gave final meaning to the sacrificial system which had from its inception looked forward to such an atoning death. Two further texts in John similarly link Christ’s death with eternal life: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone that believes in him may have eternal life (Jn 3:14-15)”; “But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself (12:32).” The latter of these texts certainly links the first along with it to the cross as Jesus’ “lifting up,” and the end is the availability of eternal life finally achieved by his death and resurrection. There is a saving efficacy in his death that goes far beyond simple prophecies of rejection and murder. The synoptic gospels also have atonement-salvation texts. Matthew 20:28 and Mark 10:45 (in parallel) are clear allusions to Christ’s death as “a ransom for many.” This language pictures the “many” as captives or slaves and Jesus’ death as a payment for their release from sin’s captivity.132 Jesus spoke of the voluntary surrender of his life as an act which produced saving effects on the condition of those for whom he would die. Perhaps the most significant texts on the atoning force of Jesus’ death are his references to his own blood as that of the new covenant in the setting of his final Passover (Matt 26:2728; Mark 14:24). The Paschal setting of the event gives his comments a larger symbolic significance than if they were made in some other setting: the event represents the Passover lamb sacrificed for the salvation/deliverance of Israel from Egyptian slavery at the exodus. Salvation terms like yasha (save, Ex 14:30), natzal (snatch, rescue, at least 10x in Ex 1-18) and gaal (redeem, Ex 6:6; 15:13) are already used in the Old Testament story to describe Israel’s deliverance from Egypt. In Luke 22:19, Jesus identifies the bread as symbolic of his body which would be given up for the benefit of the disciples: “This is my body given for you . . . .” Mark and Matthew quote Jesus as saying his blood would be “poured out for many,” and Matthew adds that the poured blood is “for the forgiveness of sins.” These atonement thoughts are forthright and clear revelations not only of the fact of his death, but of its provision for salvation. That the disciples did not understand such statements is not a valid reason to believe they did not contain revelation; the problem was in their blindness,

131 132

L. Morris, The Cross in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), p. 174. Smeaton, Atonement, p. 92.

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not the availability of the revelation. The revelatory nature of the sayings is reinforced when in Luke 24:25-26, Christ opened the scriptures to them about his suffering and entry into glory. This notice summarily takes in the whole foregoing revelation of sacrificial atonement, including, finally, his own sacrifice. A short time later they said their hearts burned within them (24:32) when he opened the scriptures to them, which implies they now finally understood his whole teaching about his death and its meaning.133 It is, therefore, very difficult—we think impossible—to reconcile this whole body of Old Testament and pre-apostolic-preaching thought about messianic atonement with a statement like Stam’s in Fundamentals of Dispensationalism, p. 74, where he says in his own italics, “never were the merits of Christ’s death proclaimed as the ground of salvation until Paul.” It seems disingenuous to argue that in Isaiah 53, “there is substitution, to be sure,” but only in the limited sense that “substitution in itself is not good news,” and that Isaiah only means that Messiah would “be taking the blame for Israel’s sins.”134 This reduction and explaining away of the full atonement teaching of the passage in effect makes biblical teaching the victim of a system-logic that rides roughshod over clear scriptural affirmations in order to serve its own pre-conceived ideas. We suggest this thinking and exegesis be dropped by the grace movement as without biblical foundation. From the Old Testament and gospels we turn to Paul and his relations with the other apostles in personal contacts and preaching according to the record in Acts. Paul’s Early Relations and Connections with the Apostles Paul had living relationships with earlier disciples immediately after his conversion and upon returning to Jerusalem. Beside Acts’ generalizations about these relationships and contacts (9:19b, 26-28), several individuals are specifically mentioned (Ananias, Barnabas). Strong presumption is thereby created that he learned, now at last with an open mind, about the contents of the apostolic preaching (Acts 2:42; 5:42; 8:5). Conversely, it is unlikely in the extreme that he and the disciples with whom he stayed and talked after his conversion should have avoided all conversation about Jesus of Nazareth and their witness to his person, deeds, words, death and resurrection, and their proclamation of Christ as Messiah in Jerusalem. Nor can we imagine that Paul cautioned them not to speak to him of what they were preaching, because he had a different gospel to preach. Thus when Paul says he received the gospel only by revelation of Christ (Gal 1:11-17), this is not to be understood as excluding oral information about Jesus or the preaching of the apostles, or even things he may have learned about Jesus by personal observation—even though we know nothing about any such close-up observing. Rather he means the two modes of receiving inclusively—revelation and information. Certainly he did not receive the gospel internally-personally merely from human instructors. It is unlikely in the extreme, though, that he did not know basic facts about Jesus and the way he was being proclaimed by Peter 133 Similarly, but cautiously, I. H. Marshall, Commentary on Luke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), pp. 898-899; H. Alford, Greek Testament, 5 vols (London: Rivington’s, 1856), 1:605, thinks “burning” refers to a kind of self-reproach for their early lack of understanding, which seems realistic. But this remark too assumes they have experienced an awakening to his Messiahship and its prophesied atonement-making. 134 Stam, Fundamentals, p. 76.

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and the other apostles as savior and provider of forgiveness of sins (Acts 5:31). In fact, Paul acknowledges that he did have knowledge of Christ in the flesh, even though he does not know him in (merely) this way any longer (2 Cor 5:16).135 He had also become active in persecuting Christians before his conversion; it would be incredible that he was in total ignorance of everything for which he was attacking Christians before his conversion. In his own defense before Agrippa II (Acts 26:9-11), he said, I myself was convinced that I ought to do many things in opposing the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And I did so in Jerusalem; I not only shut up many of the saints in prison, by authority from the chief priests, but when they were put to death I cast my vote against them. And I punished them often in all the synagogues and tried to make them blaspheme; and in raging fury against them, I persecuted them even to foreign cities.

That he acted knowledgeably from hearing Peter’s public speeches in the temple in Acts 2-6 is very likely. In those temple speeches he would have heard testimony to Jesus, his acts, words, and person. He and other rabbinic students were meeting in The Royal Porch, the spacious colonnade inside the south wall of the temple court, while the apostles were preaching in Solomon’s Porch along the east wall, and the Sanhedrin was meeting in its room in the western wall. I (DeWitt) walked these spaces on the temple platform myself in 2007,136 and it is obvious that only a few paces would have moved one from the Royal Porch to Solomon’s Porch, or to the area of the Sanhedrin chambers in order to hear what was being said. The Sanhedrin Chamber was near the Royal Porch in the western wall. There Paul might have heard Stephen’s speech directly. Acts 7:58 says the witnesses to the speech laid their clothes at the feet of Saul (later Paul), i.e., gave him authority to act on their behalf in trying to halt the new Christian movement. Acts 8:1 goes on to say that Saul was present giving his approval to Stephen’s death. If he was not in the Sanhedrin Chamber, he was nearby, perhaps close enough to hear, or at least to have taken an oral summary from Stephen’s hearers. In listening to Peter and Stephen’s speeches in the temple courts, what did Paul hear that aroused his hatred? That hatred could not have come from nowhere; nor could it have come from mere hearsay without knowing facts about Jesus or the apostles’ preaching as a basis for judicial action against them. He certainly would have heard them accusing Israel of putting their own Messiah to death; but there was more to hear than this. He would have heard them say that Jesus was crucified and resurrected, and in those events Jesus and his Father were acting for Israel and the world’s salvation: “. . . it shall be that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved (Acts 2:21),” and, “. . . there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved (4:12).” Peter had also argued in his Pentecost speech that by the resurrection Jesus was “made . . . both Lord and Messiah (2:36).” Paul would have heard them say that Jesus was 135 A. Plummer, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Second Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1915), p. 177. 136 Prof. Philip J. Long of Grace Bible College was able, through a chain of contacts, to secure permission for our 2007 tour in Israel to enter the temple mount and walk its length and breadth, a privilege most tourists are not able to secure.

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God’s “servant (3:13, 26; 4:27, 30)”—an allusion to Isaiah 52:7-53:12 and other servant songs in Isaiah 40-53 including 42:1-9, which, with Isaiah 52:7-53:12, is cited in the New Testament.137 Paul also would have heard that forgiveness of sins was available through Jesus (2:38; 3:19; 5:31). Even more basically, Jesus had said that his blood of the new covenant was to be poured out for the forgiveness of the sins of many (Matt 26:28). And earlier he had said that he would give his life a ransom for many (Mark 10:45). These sayings of Jesus must have been passed on in the oral gospel tradition from the beginning along with the basic outline of Jesus mission found in Peter’s speeches in Acts (chapters 2, 3, 4, 5 and 10). The only way around this implication is to argue that the apostles invented these sayings and inserted them in the gospels later. But this would involve a contrived deception and would also be contrary to the promised divine guidance on the preservation of the traditions under the truth-producing work of the Holy Spirit (John 14:16-17, 26; 16:13-15). These admittedly limited pictures of meaning in Jesus death show that when the apostles began to preach in Jerusalem there was already more in the proclamation of Jesus’ death and resurrection than merely an accusation of murdering him, and also more involved in their witness than the limited preaching summaries of Acts present. Stam is right in one important respect, however: the fuller exposition of Jesus atoning death was given by Paul in his epistles. But these scenes of contact in Acts also discourage the claim that Jesus’ death for sins was entirely a Pauline revelation. They also disallow the view that there was no definitive salvation preached until Paul. Finally, the New Testament’s view is that there is only one new covenant gospel since Pentecost, which will be preached as long as the new covenant is in operation— during the time of Israel’s contingent kingdom hope, the time of the church, the future great tribulation, and the messianic kingdom. This is a major thesis of the Hebrews letter; Paul’s references to the new covenant in 2 Corinthians 3 and 1 Corinthians 11 contain the same elements as Hebrews view of the new covenant. That covenant and its gospel differ from the gospel of the old covenant era—Israel’s deliverance from Egypt at the exodus. As the dispensation of law developed historically, the revelation of a future personal Davidic Messiah also developed within it, particularly after the Davidic covenant (2 Sam 7). In Isaiah 52:7-53:12 especially, the Davidic servant motif dramatically prophesies a suffering Messiah complete with basic salvation provisions, including an introduction which calls this “good news (52:7, Heb basar, LXX euaggelizomai).” Current efforts to find two new covenants in the New Testament have and will continue to fail, since the evidence for two such New Testament covenants is simply not there.138 Hence, the whole Old Testament body of promises associated with the new or messianic era covenant spoken of repeatedly in Isaiah and Jeremiah—that whole body of promises comes to actual or potential fulfillment in the era of the second covenant, the new covenant of the New Testament. 137 A portion of Isaiah 53 is cited by the Ethiopian eunuch to Philip (8:32-33), showing he was aware that this passage was applied to Christ in the Jerusalem preaching of the apostles. Cf. O. Betz, “Jesus Gospel of the Kingdom,” in The Gospel and the Gospels, ed P. Stuhlmacher (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), pp. 53-74. Betz stresses the thorough influence of Isaiah 52:13-53:12 through the gospel materials. 138 Charles Ryrie tried to make an argument for two new covenants in his 1953 work, The Basis of the Premillennial Faith (New York: Loizeaux, 1953); but this advocacy has met with virtually universal rejection. More recently Jerry Shugart has tried to revive this view in a series of email studies (2009).

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The implications of Paul’s contacts and presence in Jerusalem during the period of early apostolic preaching become more forceful in supporting a single continuous apostolic gospel in the light of two specific texts in the Pauline epistles:

1 Corinthians 15:11. Referring to his rehearsal of the gospel he preached to the Corinthians, he says, “Whether, then, it was I or they [the other apostles],so we preach, and so you believed (my italics).” Galatians 1:23. The Syrian and Cilician Christians had heard a report about him, which he represents as “The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he o n c e tried to destroy (my italics).”

These two texts are explicit that the same faith proclaimed before Paul by the twelve was now also proclaimed by him and the twelve together. We may now test the argument by filling out these generalizations, gathering together under several summary headings the details of the apostolic preaching. The Common Apostolic Preaching The apostles’ preaching is briefly recorded in the speeches of Acts, both Peter and Paul’s, and occasionally others’; it is also found in summaries or capsules in several Pauline passages (1 Cor 15:1-11; Rom 1:2-4, 17; 3:21ff). In other passages, Paul made multiple clustered references to the gospel as in 1 Thessalonians 1-2, 1 Corinthians 1-2 and Galatians 1-2; these texts reflect back on his past gospel preaching. There are also brief shorthand phrases like “the gospel of Christ,” “Christ crucified,” and “the cross.” These summaries and fragments could be and sometimes were expanded with detail to make a connected passion or resurrection account. Such expanded accounts would be supplemented with sayings or teaching, conflict accounts and miracle stories; finally these stories became written “gospels.” In fact this is precisely what happened: the oral gospel finally became the written gospels.139 Hence, we find in the New Testament both highly compressed accounts and longer, fuller accounts of the gospel facts from Jesus’ life. There are also summaries such as Peter’s to Cornelius in Acts 10 or Paul’s expanded account of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances in 1 Corinthians 15:4-8, with unique elements that did not get into our written gospels. The following is an outline of the common elements of the apostles’ preaching of the gospel. 1. The gospel was promised in the Scriptures. In his references to the gospel, Paul several times says it was foretold, promised, or witnessed to in the Old Testament. (1 Cor 15:1-11; Rom 1:1-4; 3:21). These references undermine the claim that nothing of the gospel was known or revealed in the Old Testament. Because the messianic kingdom was also foretold in the Old Testament, the summaries imply that the “gospel of the kingdom” was part of the process of fulfillment, and that the “gospel of the kingdom” as a matter 139 One of the more suggestive accounts of how this process happened is by Donald Guthrie, Introduction to the New Testament (Downer’s Grove IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1970), pp. 220-236.

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of fulfillment must relate to other fulfillments of the prophecies in a unified body of related texts on the promised gospel. These biblical realities also suggest how much of an oversimplification the two-gospels theory is. Peter also speaks of Christ fulfilling the prophecies in his suffering and resurrection (Acts 2:22-35; 3:18; 4:10-11; 1 Pet 1:10-12). The availability of the kingdom in Jesus’ person and mission was also a fulfillment of prophecy. How did the “gospel of the kingdom (Matt 4:23; 9:35; 24:14)” become the also-promised gospel of Christ and salvation? The answer is that the gospel foretold in the prophecies became a historical development within Jesus’ ministry of the kingdom; that is, the prophecies were unfolded in the biblical manner of progressive revelation at their fulfillment. At the beginning of Jesus’ mission, the “gospel of the kingdom” did not include all that later came to be called “the gospel of Christ,” since Christ had not yet died or risen. At first, it could only include an announcement of the nearness or presence of the promised kingdom. But as his ministry developed, Jesus gradually made known the larger meaning of his Messiahship that focused on his death and resurrection. In this way, the salvation concepts of the gift of righteousness, Satan’s judgment, eternal life, forgiveness, new covenant, and ransom were more and more linked to the cross and resurrection, and thus gradually attached to the gospel. In this manner and with progressing revelation, the “gospel of the kingdom” became the later “gospel of Christ.”140 Hence, “gospel of the kingdom”wais replaced by terms of more fullness appropriate to the progressively revealed meaning of Jesus’ Messiahship, especially his atoning death and resurrection. Nor was the gospel of the kingdom a single, static message of a coming kingdom, although it was such a single idea at the beginning; but we must say—only at the beginning, in order to allow for progressive revelation in Jesus’ ministry.141 Whenever Jesus spoke or taught, healed or exorcised, and slowly unveiled his own person, more of its meaning appeared. A clear leap forward toward what became the “gospel of Christ” or “gospel of salvation” emerged when Jesus began speaking directly of his passion and resurrection. This turning point in his mission occurred immediately after Peter’s confession of him as Messiah (Mark 8:27-31 = Matt 16:13-21). Passion announcements were repeated several times thereafter (Mark 9:31-32 = Matt 16:20-21; Mark 10:32-34 = Matt 20:17-19). Sometimes the passion sayings are attached to his status as Son of God (Mark 9:7-13 = Matt 17:5-13). In other cases they are attached to Jesus as Son of Man, and sometimes they are laced with atonement-meaning statements. This is the case in Mark 10:45 (= Matt 20:28): “. . . the Son of Man [came] to give his life as a ransom for many,” or Mark 14:24 (=Matt 16:28): “This is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many.” Or, they may also be tied to prophecy-fulfillment comments as in Mark 14:21 (in the context of betrayal and new covenant sayings), and 14:49 in the context of his arrest. It will not do to pass over these details of progressive revelation, to explain them away, or minimize their significance. In fact, they are strategically placed in Mark, showing that they were central 140 A. Harnack, The Constitution and Law of the Church in the First Two Centuries (1910), p .327: “. . . at a very early time period the gospel of the Kingdom was transformed into the gospel of Christ (cited by P. Stuhlmacher, “The Pauline Gospel,” in The Gospel and the Gospels, p. 140). 141 Neither O’Hair, Stam nor Baker tried to fill in defining details of the gospel of the kingdom. They were content to affirm that it is “the good news that Christ will establish His kingdom of righteousness and peace in the world.” Cf. Baker, Dispensational Theology, p. 331. Baker goes on to affirm, following Matt 24:14, that it will be preached again in during the great tribulation (p. 331). He does not discuss any revelational development of the gospel of the kingdom; why this is so is not obvious. Cf. Dispensational Theology, pp 36-37.

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to Jesus’ mission and its meaning. In this way the gospel of the kingdom was gradually filled with meaning—meaning that became the saving gospel of Christ in the apostles’ preaching. That fullness of meaning was gained by scenes of his passion and resurrection, prophecy-fulfillment concepts, identification of his relationship with God, and thoughts of a sacrificial atonement for sins, especially oriented to Isaiah 52:7-53:12.142 Fulfilled prophecy is a theme from the beginning of the story, and is especially stressed by Matthew with his repeated “in order that it may be fulfilled.” It is important to see the centrality of his atoning death in the light of Isaiah’s suffering servant text as part of the fulfillment process.

2. Jesus is the Messiah (Christ). Those who make an absolute contrast between Peter and Paul’s gospels, or in moments of dispensational extremism make radical distinctions, say that Paul never preached Jesus as Messiah. But both Peter and Paul did in fact proclaim that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah. Acts 5:42: teaching and preaching Jesus as the Christ, i.e., that Jesus is Messiah (Heb mashach, anoint = Gr chrio, anoint); Acts 8:5: Philip proclaimed to him the Christ; Acts 9:20: Paul preached Jesus in the synagogue; Acts 17:3b: Jesus is Messiah (Christ). In addition to Christ, the name Lord is also prominent (Peter: Acts 2:36; 9:5; 10:36), a title especially notable in Paul as a confessional utterance (Rom 10:9-10; l Cor 12:3; Phil 2:10). Christ and Lord are the two basic common apostolic title-confession names; they form the ground-concepts of common apostolic Christology. However, as it progressed, Jewish Christianity tended to prefer titles for Jesus which differed from Paul and his mission team and Gentile Christianity generally.143 In a general way, but with no hard-fast distinction visible, “Messiah” tends to be a more Jewish term because of the Old Testament’s usage, while “Lord” is a more Gentile term to challenge the Hellenistic-Roman imperial use of Lord for kings under the notion of divine kingship.

3. Jesus did messianic deeds, suffered an atoning death, and rose again from death. These facts are summarily repeated in most of the speeches of Acts and are reflected in both Peter and Paul’s epistles. In the Acts speeches, an outline of the saving events emerges beginning with John the Baptist, then Jesus’ baptism, the ministry in Galilee, his miracles, and in Judea his suffering and resurrection. The emphasis is on the conclusion of his mission in Jerusalem with death, resurrection and appearances after the resurrection. Not every speech repeats all these elements; but they show the formation of a redemptivehistorical story line, especially climaxing in the crucifixion and resurrection. That Paul mentions Jesus’ messianic miracles and teaching so little may be due to a desire to avoid leaving the impression that he was witness to Jesus’ Galilean ministry (which he probably was not). The Jerusalem events are more pronounced in Paul, perhaps similarly because he was a witness to those events. (a) Both Peter and Paul briefly identify the messianic events and deeds beginning with John the Baptist (Acts 2:22-23; 10:37-42; 13:23-35; Rom 1:2-4; l Cor 2:7-8). The secondary Pauline book of Hebrews does cite the events/deeds of Jesus’ life more often: 142 Betz,”Jesus’ Gospel of the Kingdom.” 143 See R. Longenecker, The Christology of Earliest Jewish Christianity. Studies in Biblical Theology, Second Series, No. 17 (London: SCM, 1970).

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Hebrews 2:5-18: humanity, defeat of Satan, temptation, perfection; 4:14-5:10: sinlessness, prayers, suffering, obedience, ascension; 7:14 descent from Judah; 7:26: purity, ascension; 13:12-13: death outside the wall of Jerusalem.144 (b) Christ’s suffering is more frequently mentioned in various ways (Acts 2:36; 5:30-31; 10:39; 13:26-29; 17:3; 26:22-23). Sometimes the suffering is reduced to the shortest possible summary: 1 Corinthians 1:23: “. . . we preach Christ crucified”; 2:2: “Jesus Christ and him crucified”; or 1:17: “the cross of Christ”—all shorthands for the preaching of the gospel. 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 summarily combines cross and resurrection as do Acts 17:3 and 26:23. (c) Christ’s resurrection is always part of the proclamation (Peter: Acts 2:22-36 in a lengthy exposition, but more summarily in 3:13-16; 4:10-12; 5:30; Paul: 13:30-38; 17:31-32; 24:13-15; 26:22-23). Luke intentionally parallels Peter and Paul in 2:30-36 and 13:30-37; cf. 2:14-36; 10:34-43; 1 Cor 15:11). Clearly, resurrection can be merely mentioned or expanded. Of the three—deeds, suffering and resurrection—resurrection is expanded most often by both Peter and Paul, whereas Christ’s sufferings and their atoning meaning are really the subject of only three Pauline passages—Romans 3:21-26; 2 Corinthians 5:19-21; Galatians 3:10-13—and even these are quite brief. The earliest use of the verb “preach the gospel” for this whole is for Peter’s “preaching Jesus as the Christ” (euaggelizomai) in Acts 5:42. The verb is then used further in 8:4, 12, 25, 35, 40, and notably in Acts 10:36 (Peter); 11:20; 13:32; 14:7, 15, 21; 15:35; 16:10; 17:18 (Paul).145 The message is also called “the word” or “the message” in 10:36a, 37 and 13:26b (expanded there to “word of salvation”); the passages make Peter and Paul’s preaching parallel. In l Corinthians 2, the gospel is the subject through 2:5; but the mystery (of the church) is the subject of 2:6-16 where Paul speaks of new revelation which, in typical Jewish-scribal, apocalyptic-teacher fashion, he cautiously withholds from them in their immaturity (cf. 2:6ff, 3:1ff)—a practice not normal with either gospel or ethical instruction which followed for new believers.

4. Jesus’ deeds, death, and resurrection fulfill Old Testament prophecies of Messiah’s person and salvation work. This theme begins with the earliest accounts of Jesus’ birth and ministry and continues through the gospels and into Acts and into the Pauline and other epistles. The apostles are conscious that they live in the latter days prophesied in the Old Testament. Paul says, “Now these things happened to them as a warning, but they were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come (my italics; 1 Cor 10:11).” The theme is a normal part of the apostles’ preaching and was shared by all. They believed they lived at the beginning of the age of fulfillment of which the first advent was the initial manifestation.

Fulfillment statements occur in Acts 2:25-35 (resurrection); 3:18; 10:43; 13:33; 17:3-4; 26:22-23; l Corinthians 15:3-4; Romans 1:2-4; 3:21. There is especially heavy reliance on Psalm 16 (resurrection) and Isaiah 52:7-53:12. Isaiah 52-53 is filled with salvation/atonement themes cited or alluded to in the apostolic preaching: 52:7: good news, salvation; 52:8: joy; 52:9: comfort, redemption; 52:10: revelation (bared arm), salvation; 52:11: separation, sanctification; 52:12: wisdom, exaltation; 53:1: revelation. The chapter’s salvation-filled motifs are mingled with Israel’s rejection of the Servant. Other salvation/ 144 B. F. Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews: The Greek Text with Notes and Essays (London: The Macmillan Company, 1889), p. 463, compiled a list of all such references in the epistle. I am not aware that such a list has been compiled and discussed for the Pauline epistles; such a study would be helpful. 145 For statistics and a sketch of the meaning and history of “gospel” and “preach the gospel,” see Stuhlmacher, Gospel and Gospels, pp. 149-151.

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atonement motifs occur: 53:4: took up our infirmities, carried our sorrows; 53:5: pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, paid the penalty for our peace, healed our wounds; 53:6: bore the iniquity of us all; 53:8: for the transgression of God’s people he was stricken; 53:10: his life/suffering was a guilt offering; 53:11: after suffering he will see light of life (Dead Sea Isaiah; not the Massoretic Hebrew text; NIV has “light of life,” a possible reference to resurrection), will justify many, bear their iniquities; 53:12: bore the sin of many, made intercession for transgressors. It is clear that provision of righteousness by sacrificial atoning death is Isaiah’s focus. This Old Testament prophecy cannot be reduced to substitution (in order to enhance the Pauline atonement phraseology), but has many details of what that substitutionary death entailed; those details come out in Paul’s uses of Isaiah’s phrases and thoughts.146

5. Christ’s death and resurrection make salvation available, not a new revelation to Paul. The most frequent brief expression is forgiveness of sins; but otherterms parallel in meaning and explanation occur as well. Thus for Peter: Acts 2:38: forgiveness of sins; 4:12: salvation in no other; 5:31: a Savior who will give Israel forgiveness of sins; 10:43: everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins. And for Paul: Acts 13:26: this message of salvation has been sent; 13:38: through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed; 26:18: that they (the Gentiles) may receive forgiveness of sins. The references to Christ as God’s servant in Acts 3:13, 26; 4:27, 30 allude to Isaiah 52-53’s salvation concepts for Jews who had already heard the portion expounded as messianic in the (synagogue) targums (Aramaic biblical expositions).147 Paul’s most important atonement comments on the available salvation are not in Acts but in Romans 3:21-26 and 2 Corinthians 5:19; Romans 4:1-8 where forgiveness is explained as God crediting (the) righteousness (of Christ) revealed in the gospel [3:21-26]) to us. Otherwise Paul expounds the available salvation as righteousness and life, reconciliation and peace, ransom and redemption, adoption and sonship, and new covenant and the Spirit—some of which occur in the gospels as already available through the presence of Christ, even before the atonement. Four major Pauline passages (Eph 1:3-14; Rom 5:1-11; 5:12-21; 6:1-14) contain lists of blessings of the prophesied salvation (cf. Rom 15:27). Paul’s expansions are recognized by everyone as the most specific and 146 Stam, Fundamentals, pp. 75-76; by various maneuvers Stam explains away the details of Isaiah 53 and dulls its atonement phraseology, reducing it to substitution idea in order to make way for Paul’s alleged new revelation of Christ’s saving death. Cf. L. Morris, The Apostolic Preaching for full evaluative discussion of all New Testament terms for atonement and salvation. Paul’s use of justification language should have been a warning from the start not to make his atonement teaching a wholly new revelation, since he makes Abraham’s justification before God his model and undergirds the meaning of justification with a quotation from Psalm 32:1-2. If justification by faith is a description of salvation, and Paul’s basic exposition is drawn from Old Testament texts on the subject, it seems inexplicable that a claim should have been made that salvation was not preached at all until Paul, unless dispensationalist interests were made over into blinders to these biblical realities. 147 W. Zimmerli and J. Jeremias, The Servant of God. Studies in Biblical Theology, No. 20, Rev Ed (London: SCM Press, 1965), pp. 78, 80, 86 (plus notes), 87 (plus notes); cf. M. Hengel, “The Effective History of Isaiah 53 in the Pre-Christian Period, in The Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 in Jewish and Christian Sources, trans. D. P. Bailey, ed B. Janowski and P. Stuhlmacher (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), pp. 75-146. Jeremias, “pais” TDNT 5:696, notes Messiah’s suffering is found in rabbinic documents and Justin Martyr’s Jewish dialogue partner, Trypho. Otherwise, Jewish messianic readings of Isa 52:13-53:12 did exist but focused almost entirely on the glory and power of Messiah (Jeremias, “pais,” 693-694).

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detailed, especially as tied with Genesis 15 and Habakkuk’s phrases about justification by faith.

6. Repentance, conversion, and faith are necessary to receive Christ’s salvation. From the preaching of John the Baptist on all three elements belonged to the salvation message. Conversion or turning is especially pronounced in Luke-Acts. Repentance (metanoia): Peter: Acts 2:38; 3:19; 11:17-18; Paul: 17:30; 20:21; 26:20. Repentance is a change of mind about sin and autonomy before God. It is sometimes claimed by advocates of two apostolic gospels that Peter preached repentance but Paul preached faith. Acts 20:21 and 26:20 undermine this claim. But there is perhaps to be recognized a difference in emphasis, possibly because Peter recognized that Israel was already in an established (covenantal) relationship with God. On the other side, Paul’s emphasis in the epistles is on faith rather than repentance as an aspect of initial belief; in fact there is only one reference to repentance as a response to God, and that is in reference to the Jews (Rom 2:4). 1 Thessalonians 1:8-10 has the ideas of repentance and turning, but does not use the term repentance, or, for that matter, faith either, although the triad of faith, hope and love is in the near context. Conversion or turning (epistrepho): Peter: Acts 3:19; 11:21; Paul: 9:35; 14:15; 15:19; 26:18, 20. There is no notable difference between Peter and Paul’s speeches on this element in Acts except a quantitative one; the terms for turn or turning are apparently more Lukan than either Pauline or Petrine (11x in Acts, but only 2x in Paul and 1x in 1 Peter). Faith (pistis, pisteuo): Peter: Acts 2:44; 3:16; 4:4; 10:43; Paul: 13:39; 14:27; 20:2l. Because faith is Paul’s primary term for entering relationship with God through Christ, there is an appearance that, as is sometimes claimed and discussed above, Peter preaches repentance to Israel, but Paul preaches faith to Gentiles. Luke uses the verb pisteuo (believe) about 11x in the Peter-Israel scenes of Acts (1-12), and about 26x in the Pauline scenes (9-28)—a distribution that is about proportionate to the amount of space devoted to each apostle in Acts. There is little here to encourage a sharp distinction between the two apostles at least as seen by Luke. It can at least be said that Luke did not think of it this way. The best illustration of repentance, turning, and faith is l Thessalonians 1:9b10. Conversion is turning from sin; faith is receiving the divinely proffered salvation. Romans 10 is the most important and detailed exposition of faith and related dynamics of interaction with the word working in the world.

There are, however, differences in the expression of faith in Peter and Paul. In this respect Stam is correct to point out differences, even though they are not quite along the lines of his absolute distinction between the two apostles and two gospels. (a). Peter includes submission to water baptism as an expression of faith: Acts

2:38, cf. Philip Acts 8:38. Baptism even here, however, is not the essential ingredient, since Luke mentions repentance and faith very frequently without baptism as responses to either Jesus or the gospel, but never baptism in isolation without repentance and/or faith (cf. even Acts 22:16). This is a clear indication of how Luke understood Peter. “Baptism of repentance for remission of sins” (Mark 1:4; Luke 3:3; cf. Matt 3:11) should be understood as baptism because of, or on the basis of, or with respect to repentance-for-remission-ofsins, so that the meaning reflects Luke’s pattern that repentance and faith are the operatives of forgiveness. Paul occasionally baptizes in Acts, but l Corinthians 1:14-17 makes clear

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that he did not regularly baptize all converts.148 Peter orders or urges baptism. Nowhere in Acts or epistles does Paul order or urge baptism. (b). In Paul there is rather indication of a confessional response which verbally owns the Lordship of Christ as the moment of conversion or surrender (Rom 10:9-10; l Cor 12:3; Phil 2:11). This response has a particularly Gentile-Christian interest: (1) It fits the special Pauline concentration of deity/lordship titles versus Jewish Christianity’s trend toward prophetic or angelomorphic titles; (2) it reflects Paul’s insistence that Gentile Christians break decisively with the paganism of their background both ideologically (renunciation of other deities/lords, idols) and morally (deliverance from passion: sexual deviancy, hostility, hatred, despair); (3) it reflects the determination of the Gentile mission that becoming a Christian meant renouncing Rome and its emperor as gods and their deification of the political realm, and the embracing another king—Jesus Christ—with future/eschatological meaning. The epistles contain no order by which converts from among the Gentiles are normally ordered or expected to be baptized. Such an expectation or order might be assumed, but there is no epistolary evidence to support it. Other than in 1 Corinthians 1:13-17, the bapt- word group occurs only in metaphorical uses in Paul to denote union of believers with each other and with Christ achieved at faith by a work of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 12:13). Paul uses the Greek louo (wash) only once (1 Co 6:11) and loutron twice (washing; Eph 5:26; Titus 3:5); these uses are probably metaphorical.

7. The experienced reality in the ministries of both Peter and Paul was the Holy Spirit coming to indwell the believer. All believers receive the Spirit already in Acts 2:38 with which one may compare Paul’s “you were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit (Eph 1:13).” The Peter scenes in Acts regularly feature the coming or reception of the Holy Spirit (2:1-12; 8:17; 10:44-47; 11:11-16). In these scenes it is a new, permanent presence of the Spirit in the believers of Israel’s remnant along with special gifts of the Spirit. Romans 8, Galatians 5, and l Corinthians 12-14 show that Paul understood the Spirit as the power of the new life as well. The presence of charismatic ministry gifts among bodies of Christian believers—Jews or Gentiles—is a special issue since the presence of miraculous gifts of the Spirit at Jerusalem does not appear to have included all possible miracles for the whole gathered crowd. Rather, the gathered disciples’ chief Spirit-gift was speaking in actual local dialects of the Roman Empire (Acts 2:4-12). It was interpreted by Peter as a special case of prophecy (2:17-21). Thereafter for the most part, groups of miraculous gifts were mostly done by the apostles according to Acts, two passages in Paul (Rom 15:18-19; 2 Cor 12:12) and one passage in Hebrews (2:3-4). Miracles were not limited to Israel or Jewish contexts, however. Their appearance at Corinth is an anomaly, since they are not clearly attested at other Pauline churches, except for prophecy at Thessalonica (1 Thes 5:20). Multiple miracles were thus mainly for the support of the gift of apostle to validate their personal preaching authority in the special period of Christianity’s establishment. This seems to be the perspective of Acts, the Pauline epistles and Hebrews 2:1-4. Otherwise, the more dominant work of the Holy Spirit was accompanying apostolic preaching to bring about conversion to Christ in sufficient numbers of persons to establish the first churches 148 E. Ferguson, Baptism in the First Five Centuries (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), sees baptism as conferring or at least resulting in salvation from its beginning in the New Testament through the early centuries in one continuous line of meaning, i.e., baptismal regeneration.

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along the north shore of the Mediterranean from Jerusalem all the way to Spain.149 This is substantially the reformed view of apostolic age miracles; this is the view of both Paul and Luke. Miracles/sign-gifts were also aimed at Israel as a testimony to the presence of its God in Jesus and the apostolic ministry (1 Cor 1:22). Peter and Paul’s Speeches in Acts The speeches of Acts are intended to show, not how different Peter and Paul were, but quite the opposite, i.e., their likenesses with a few details of variation. We shall note most of those similarities in this discussion, without suggesting there are no differences between the two apostles at all; rather, that the differences are also of some significance for their respective spheres of mission, Peter to Israel and Paul to the Gentiles. Large quantities of space in Acts are given to speeches of Peter and Paul after the fashion of Greek and Roman historians before the time of Christ (Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Sallust and Cicero).150 A discussion of the speeches of Peter and Paul is relevant to the subject since Stam’s treatment of the alleged separate and different gospels of the two apostles relies on a sharp contrast between the preaching of each respectively. For Peter, Stam’s construction depends mostly on the speech of Peter in Acts 2. Stam structured his treatment of the alleged differences between the two apostles preaching by comparing Peter’s references to Jesus’ death in his speeches in Acts and Paul’s teaching in his epistles. In the same chapter of his Fundamentals of Dispensationalism discussed at the beginning of this essay, Stam leans heavily on three thoughts: an exclusive focus by Peter on Israel as beneficiary of Jesus’ suffering rooted in Isaiah 53; statements of the gospels that the disciples did not understand his teaching about his own death as though this blindness was still in some respect normal even after Pentecost; and statements of Peter in his sermon of Acts 2 in which he blames Israel for crucifying Jesus, i.e., he had no knowledge of any saving good news (by which he presumably means atonement) in Jesus’ death. Stam says: . . . Isaiah speaks as a Hebrew prophet concerning his own people, ‘For the transgression of MY PEOPLE was He stricken (italics, bold and caps his).” So, first of all, the prophet speaks here of Messiah’s death only as it related to the nation Israel (his italics). Even after the crucifixion, the apostles did not immediately see the death of Christ as the secret of the gospel. Peter . . . referred to the crucifixion, but did not offer it for salvation. He blamed his hearers for the death of Christ and demanded repentance and water baptism for the remission of their sins (Acts 2:36, 38). Whereas Peter at Pentecost had accused his hearers of crucifying Christ and had demanded repentance and baptism for the remission of sins (Acts 2:23, 36, 38), Paul

149 This subject is discussed further in the essay below on charismata in this collection. 150 H. Cadbury, The Making of Luke-Acts ( New York: Macmillan, 1927); D. W. Palmer, “Acts and the Ancient Historical Monograph,” in B. W. Winter (ed), The Book of Acts in Its First Century Setting, 5 vols. Volume I The Book of Acts in Its Ancient Literary Setting, ed B. W. Winter and A. D. Clark (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1993).

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proclaimed the crucifixion of Christ as good news (I Cor 1:18). With Peter at Pentecost it was a matter of shame; Paul gloried in it (Gal 6:14).151

The thought that Peter only blamed and accused Israel of crucifying Christ relies mostly on thoughts in Peter’s speech of Acts 2, treated so as to isolate the charges from its larger context and from other speeches in Acts—a procedure that discourages readers from even raising the question of contextual comparison with other speeches in the book. For his contrasts with Paul, Stam relies on a collection of atonement and salvation passages in Paul’s epistles. This way of trying to establish the distinction between Peter’s ignorance of any atoning meaning in Jesus’ death, and Paul’s recognition of its atoning work for salvation, is flawed in its method: for Peter he relies on his Acts 2 speech; but, shifting gears, he seeks Paul’s view from the epistles. Instead, a fair view of atonement and salvation expressions on the part of each apostle respectively, in order not to misread the material in Acts or attribute too little or to much to it, should have compared Peter’s speeches in Acts with Paul’s speeches in Acts. The significance of this flaw is that when one makes this comparison, atonement statements in Paul’s speeches in Acts are even more lacking than they are in the speeches of Peter. The point here, accordingly, is that a comparison of the longer and shorter speeches of Peter and Paul along with the capsule (more or less quoted) statements of their preaching and summaries of teaching will show that Luke’s intent in Acts is to illustrate the likenesses of the two apostles’ preaching, not their differences. Some differences have already been noted in the discussion above; but these are not sufficient to warrant the conclusion that two quite different gospels were proclaimed by the two leaders, and may be explained in another way. Readers will have to study the speeches for themselves since they cannot all be reproduced here. What can be done here is to summarize the similarities between Luke’s accounts of the apostles’ preaching. To do this we will first review certain similar vocabularies about Jesus’ person or works spread throughout the Acts speeches, noting especially certain concepts and motifs which are repeated thematically in the first speeches of both Peter and Paul (Peter, Acts 2; Paul, Acts 13) as well as segments of the speeches devoted to certain common topics along with conclusions near the end of the two speeches. Some overlaps with the outline of the common apostolic preaching above will necessarily appear. To begin the survey, it is simply not true that no salvation, removal of sins or atonement statements are made by Peter in his Acts speeches; nor is it true that there is no mention of his preaching of Christ as “good news.” (1) The term “preach good news” begins to occur in Acts 5:42 (euaggelizomi/preaching); thereafter in the early or Jerusalem apostles and deacons preaching alone (Acts 1-10) it occurs a total of six more times for a total of seven times in the Peter-Jerusalem portion (Acts 1-8). In the Pauline sections the total number of occurrences of “preach good news” (euaggelizomai) is eight—only one more than in the earlier sections, even though twenty chapters cover the rest of Acts. There is no significant difference as far as Luke’s representation is concerned. In the speeches of Paul and Peter alone, each uses the verb once—Peter in Acts 10:36, and Paul in Acts 13:32; all other uses are Luke’s to summarize the apostles’ respective preaching and missions.

151

Stam, Fundamentals of Dispensationalism, pp. 75-79.

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(2) The combined ideas of Jesus’ atoning sacrifice for sins, a newly available salvation, forgiveness of sins, and the term Savior, all point to Peter’s awareness of a new saving power flowing from the death and resurrection of Jesus. Four allusions to the messianic Servant of the Lord and his atoning work in Isaiah 53 are made by Peter in his Acts speeches (3:13, 26 [longer speech]; 4:27, 30 [short prayer]). Awareness of this Isaiah text by the Ethiopian eunuch and the Jerusalem deacon, Philip is visible in Acts 8:32-33. After Isaiah 53:7-8 is cited by the eunuch, Philip explains its application to Jesus (8:35) as “good news (NIV).” This meaning cannot have been learned from Paul since he had not yet become a Christian. Thus it is not speculation to suggest Peter’s awareness of what his term “servant” (AV erroneously “child”) refers to in the earlier allusions of Acts 3-4 cited above. Peter refers to forgiveness of sins (2:38) and proclaims repentance so that “your sins may be wiped out (3:19). Paul too proclaims forgiveness of sins in speeches (13:38; 26:18). Otherwise atonement statements or terms are very limited in Paul’s speeches. (3) Peter also says “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved (4:12 NIV)”; and he repeats in 5:31 that God exalted Jesus to be a “Prince and Savior that he might give repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel . . . (NIV). No fully developed atonement doctrine is stated here, but these texts taken together are allusions to a newly available salvation coming from the atoning work of Jesus’ death and resurrection; they do not sound like Stam’s denials of any good news of salvation in the ministry of the Jerusalem apostles and deacons including Peter. In Paul’s Acts speeches, “forgiveness of sins” (or a like phrase) occurs twice (13:38; 26:18) which compares to Peter’s twice (2:38; 5:31; but cf also Peter’s “sins . . . wiped out,” 3:19). Peter uses “Savior” for Jesus once (5:31); Paul also uses “Savior” once (13:23), while Peter uses “salvation” once (4:12) for the new redemption, and Paul too uses it only once (13:26), even though Luke uses it three more times in Pauline scenes outside of speeches. The near balance of “preach good news” in Petrine and Pauline segments of Acts has already been noted. On an ironic note, Paul does not use “servant” for Jesus’ death at all in allusion to Isaiah 53 in Acts compared to Peter’s four uses of this name; Paul does use a “servant of the Lord” text of Isaiah 49:6 for himself, but not to refer to the suffering Servant of Isaiah 53. The pointers in these uses of salvation and atonement terminology are to a fairly even, but not exactly identical distribution of such terms between the Jewish and Gentile apostles. In fact Peter and the Eunuch’s use (with Philip) of Isaiah 53 language suggests more atonement and good news/salvation emphasis in Peter’s speeches than Paul’s, even though one should not push this too hard. (4) Another way to look at the Peter-Paul relation in Acts is to compare their respective use of names, titles, epithets and affirmations about Jesus in their speeches. If Peter and Paul had used a clear pattern of different titles for Jesus, it would strengthen the idea of two separate gospels for the two apostles respectively. If not, it would discourage that view; the latter is in evidence. The focus of the speeches is on Jesus of Nazareth This term occurs 7x in Acts of which 5x are in speeches of apostles (Peter: 2:22; 3:6; 4:10; 10:38; Paul: 26:9). Otherwise both Peter and Paul can speak of “Jesus” with no other title or epithet (1:16; 2:32, 36; 5:30; 13:33; 17:3; 28:23); mostly “Jesus” is combined with another name, usually Lord, Christ, or Son of God; these combined names seem quite evenly distributed in Acts, both in speeches and narratives. Other titles are Savior (5:31; 13:23), Founder (3:15), Holy/Righteous One (Peter: 3:14; Paul: 22:14), Prince (5:31). 78

Peter’s two titles, Founder of Life (3:14) and Prince (5:31) do have political overtones, a feature which could be viewed as a way of expressing hope for the messianic kingdom. Overall, the titles in Acts’ speeches do not occur in two distinctive sets of terms, but tend toward a fairly even distribution between the two apostles with a few exceptions. (5) The content of Peter and Paul’s speeches shows identical repeated motifs which occupy a verse or more. (a) Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies about the coming Redeemer/Messiah’s death and resurrection (Peter: Acts 2:30-32; 3:17-18; 10: 43; Paul: 13:27-29, 32-33; 17:2-3; 24:14-15; 26:22-23). While atonement teaching in Acts speeches is rather limited whether in Peter or Paul, there are in fact more allusions to it by Peter than by Paul, most notably in references to the Servant of Isaiah 52:13-53:12. When only one of these events (Jesus’ death or resurrection) is mentioned or explained in detail, it is resurrection (2:23-35; 13:30-38; 17:30-31; 24:15). In the first speech of both apostles (Peter, Acts 2; Paul, Acts 13), Jesus’ resurrection occupies a large block of speech text: Acts 2—12 verses; Acts 13—8 verses. In both speeches the Old Testament resurrection texts are some combination of Psalms 16 and 110 or Psalm 2; the latter two are enthronement psalms and are used and reused in the New Testament. (b) Through Jesus and his saving works salvation is available by repentance and faith/believing: Peter: 2:38; 3:19-20; 4:12; 5:31; 10:43; Paul: 13:38-39; 16:31; 17:30; 20:21; 26:17-18, 20, 27-28). Peter’s speeches use repentance in Israel contexts, which is probably related to Israel as God’s covenant people for whom repentance and return to God would be an appropriate emphasis. But this is not a sharp distinction either since Paul can speak of “repent/repentance” for the Gentiles as well as for Jews (Acts 20:21: Jews and Greeks; 26:20: Gentiles; 17:30: all men everywhere), while Peter uses “believe” rather than “repent” in Acts 3:16 and 10:43. This distribution of repentance and belief/faith language among both apostles’ speeches should caution against attempting sharp distinctions between the preaching of the two apostles, but some difference in emphasis and setting is visible. Language for faith/believing (pisteuo) is limited in Acts 1-12 (13x), but increases appreciably in Acts 13-28 (25x). Most of these uses are Luke’s in narrative rather than in speeches. This language occurs in two of Peter’s speeches (chapters 3, 10), while faith language occurs in Paul’s speeches about twelve times. Thus, repentance receives somewhat more attention in Peter’s speeches, while believe/trust is more characteristic of Paul. On any reckoning, there is no sharp— certainly not thorough-going or categorical—distinction between the preaching of faith or repentance in Peter as against Paul. The same themes belong to the speeches of both in different quantities of terms and manners of speaking. These realities do not point to two separate gospels, but at the most to different emphases or settings. Stam argues—to stress the difference between Peter (in Acts) and Paul (in the epistles)—that Peter only accuses Israel of guilt in the death of Jesus: “. . . and you (Israel), with the help of wicked men, put him to death . . . (2:23)”; “. . . you disowned . . . and killed the author of life (3:15)”; “Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified . . . (4:10)”; cf 5:30; 7:52; 10:39). Paul’s speeches in Acts do the same, but perhaps with less harshness: “For those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers, because they did not recognize Jesus . . . could charge him with nothing deserving death, yet they asked Pilate to have him killed . . . And . . . fulfilled all that was written of him . . . (13:27-29, RSV)”; “Christ had to suffer . . . (17:3)”; “I too was convinced that I ought to do all that was possible to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth (26:9; all citations except 13:27-29 NIV).” The point of this review is 79

simply that no such contrast between Peter and Paul’s preaching of the gospel is visible in Acts. If one follows the logic, only slightly extended, it would be possible to argue on the same ground as Stam does that Paul preached one gospel in Acts and a completely different gospel in the epistles, which of course is absurd. The pointers discussed here are toward one single, unified apostolic preaching as the speeches show. In fact, it seems clear that Luke intended to show that Peter and Paul’s preaching was the same with respect to the saving message of the suffering and resurrected Christ who fulfilled the prophecies. Further Intended Harmonies between Peter and Paul’s Speeches in Acts Transition to the Gentile Mission The larger context for preaching a contingent Second Coming and messianic kingdom is the limitation of the mission of the twelve apostles to Israel. “Israel” occurs about 14x in Acts 1-10 with no reference to Gentiles except proselytes and Roman opposers, and mostly in words or speeches of Peter or Stephen. This exclusive attention to Israel drops off sharply after Acts 10 when the quantity of references to Israel (speeches and narrative) also diminishes. Peter’s emphasis on Israel’s messianic era repentance, sometimes spoken of dismissively by interested evangelicals as “narrow nationalism” was rather a follow-on of Jesus’ own mission to his nation, and was a divinely determined priority in light of the covenants and promises (3:25-26) about which Peter speaks under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. An important unifying theme in Acts is the opening of Peter’s mind to the developing Gentile mission, but without drawing him actively into that mission except for the one individual, Cornelius. Peter’s vision of the great sheet containing all kinds of earth creatures about which he is told, “kill and eat (Acts 10:13-14),” concerns himself as a first witness to a Roman Gentile, Cornelius. The animals symbolize the Gentiles. To the Lord’s order to eat of the animals in the vision, he retorts, “. . . I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean (Acts 10:13-14).” The Lord in turn answers, “What God has cleansed, you must not call common (10:15),” a command repeated three times. A few verses later Peter explains the vision to Cornelius: “God has shown me that I should not call any man common or unclean (10:28).” It will not do to dismiss these words as proof of “narrow nationalism” to explain why the twelve kept to Israel. It is true that this event and its spoken articulation does reveal a limiting attitude toward Gentiles, an attitude that accompanied Peter and the eleven’s Israel-first mission. The real significance of the event, however, is that in Luke’s perspective, it opens Peter’s mind not only to Cornelius as a Gentile, but also, and more importantly, to the gradually unfolding Pauline Gentile mission developing in the larger context. Peter was not told to join that mission, but to recognize and accept it—to receive what God is about to begin doing with Paul and the commissioned world mission. He never expresses any doubt or regret at the Israel-first mission of his early preaching; rather he reflects openness to the divinely commanded shift to the Gentiles. One searches in vain for any renunciation or regret, let alone a confession of misunderstanding, over the prior mission to Israel. 80

The following statements appear in Peter’s ensuing words in Acts. These statements have the intended purpose of exhibiting Peter’s acceptance of the Gentiles’ salvation and correspondingly of the unfolding Gentile world mission. They thus service the coordination, not the division, of the two apostolic missions (Jews, Gentiles).

10:34-35 (speaking to Cornelius). “. . . God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” 10:36, 42 (continuing the speech to Cornelius). “You (the group gathered around Cornelius) know the word which he sent to Israel . . . And he commanded us to preach to the people (Gr laos, normally and repeatedly for Israel in Luke-Acts with only one exception).”

11:12, 15, 17-18 (in a speech to the other apostles explaining the Cornelius event). “And the Spirit told me to go with them, making no distinction . . . the Holy Spirit fell on them just as on us at the beginning . . . If then God gave the same gift to them as he gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could withstand God . . . . When they heard this they were silenced. And they glorified God, saying, ‘Then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance unto life.’”

These statements together are to the effect that the Jewish Jerusalem apostles recognized the new Gentile mission movement already announced to Paul as its chief instrument at his conversion (Acts 9:15; cf 22:15, 21; 26:17-18). In his final recorded words in the speeches of Acts (Acts 15:7b-9), Peter says, carrying the theme forward to its conclusion: Brethren, you know that in the early days God made choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe. And God who knows the heart bore witness to them, giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us; and he made no distinction between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith.

This collection of speech texts indicates that with the divinely purposed Israelfirst program, Peter and his Jerusalem colleagues carried certain habits and inhibitions about Gentiles which needed to be overcome. The point is that as the Gentile mission was beginning to be articulated and put into operation, a series of revelation-events occurred with the aim of opening their minds to what was happening or about to happen with Paul and his team(s). But this did not require renouncing their Israel-first mission or assuming that they were now being called to drop the Jewish mission and join the Pauline Gentile mission. In fact, at the famine meeting of Galatians 2:1-10 (=Acts 11), Peter and Paul agreed on a continued division of labor with Peter and original apostles going to the Jews, and Paul and his team to the Gentiles. Acts knows of no change in this division-of-labor arrangement, although at a later time at least some of the original apostles may have moved on to Gentile ministries as Eusebius thought in his fourth-century history. Acts coordinates Peter and Paul’s respective missions by Peter’s acceptance statements discussed above and the agreement of Galatians 2 on division of labor. So far from thinking of two separate gospels, Luke sought to harmonize the two apostles’ views on the Gentile mission by repeating Peter’s testimonies to his recognition of that mission. One may say that this is Peter coming Paul’s way, and it would be true in a sense; but it is more like both apostles moving with the plan of God.

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Peter, Paul, and the Jewish Law A final thematic element in Acts seeking to show unity between Peter and Paul is certain statements in both apostles’ speeches about the end of the law for Gentile converts. These statements are confined to Acts 10-15 and are less in number than those cited above. 10:43. (Peter, in the wake of the Cornelius vision and witness). “To him all the prophets bear witness that every one who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” This speech-statement refers to the salvation of the Gentile Cornelius. In it, the law is noticeably absent—a situation which follows Peter’s earlier statement (cited above) that “. . . God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him (10:34b-35).” 13:38-39. (Paul, in a speech to Jews and Gentiles in the synagogue at Antioch of Pisidia). “Let it be known to you therefore, brethren, that through this man [Christ] forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you, and by him every one that believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses.” This is a principled statement of the salvation of Christ not being available through the Mosaic law. Acts 15:7b-11. (Peter, to the Jerusalem apostolic council in Paul and the twelve’s presence). “. . . God made choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe. And God who knows the heart bore witness to them, giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us; and he made no distinction between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith. Now therefore why do you make trial of God by putting a yoke upon the neck of the disciples [Gentile converts] which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we shall be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.” There is simply no hint of Peter pursuing a completely separate gospel here. Luke seeks rather to show the apostolic harmony, even over Gentile freedom from the law as advocated by Paul. Peter has caught up with the movement of God. This does not mean, however, that he ceased supporting Jewish Christians who persisted in keeping the law, a kind of dual “one-foot-in-each-world stance that did create strife between himself and Paul on at least one (earlier?) occasion (Gal 2:11-16).

For the purpose of this study, the important conclusion is that Luke intended to show that the same basic gospel of salvation was proclaimed by the narrated apostles from the beginning of their work in Acts. He was entirely conscious that Peter’s mission was to Israel in hope of the near Second Coming and kingdom. He also features a collection of Peter’s sayings that recognize the developing Pauline Gentile mission as well as another group of sayings in which he adopts an accepting posture toward Paul’s policy of freedom from the law for Gentile converts. But he does not interpret this as a second and entirely different gospel from Peter’s. In short, Luke’s intent is to show apostolic unity on the gospel and conditions of its reception throughout, even though he registers differences in emphasis and practice between the Petrine Jewish messianic assemblies and the Pauline Gentile churches. There are no two apostolic gospels, only one unified gospel of salvation through Christ, albeit with adaptations to different ethnic groups, their religious cultures 82

and their hopes. We now turn our attention to distinctive elements in the two apostles both in and beyond the speeches, lest our readers think we have blotted out all distinctions. Distinctive Aspects of Paul’s Preaching Several distinctive Pauline preaching (kerygma) themes are visible which gravitate around his apostleship to the Gentiles; in the nature of the case, they differentiate Paul from Peter. These include his independent reception of the gospel (Gal 1), preference for certain frequently repeated titles of Christ (Lord, Christ/Messiah), inclusion of a commitment to monotheism in his preaching to Gentiles (Acts 14, 17), insistence on Gentile converts’ freedom from the Jewish law in its ritual, calendar and social aspects, an extensive program of moral and ethical instruction for Gentile converts (didache), freeing of the plan of eschatological (end-time) events from Jewish nationalism including proselyte rituals (circumcision sacrifice and a ritual bath), and a radically new context for the inclusion of the Gentiles, i.e., the egalitarian church as body of Christ rather than a converted and spiritually renewed Israel; the last of these elements is attributed by Paul to a special revelation he calls “the mystery.”152 These are the elements that went into Paul’s adaptation of the gospel to the Gentiles; they do not make up a different gospel but the same gospel adapted to Gentile hearers and/or converts in connection with the revelation and formation of the church of this dispensation. They make up at least some aspects of what he meant by “the gospel of/for the uncircumcision.” Or, one may think of these elements as necessarily added to the core common gospel in order to give the message of the Gentile mission special features of universality that could not be the case with Peter’s preaching to the Jewish nation and his converts continued practice of Judaism. Finally, the big picture includes the decline and abandonment of the Jewish remnant’s sign of water baptism. This is an appreciable list of distinctives. We may detail each with a few comments on meaning and function as follows. 1. Paul received the gospel independently of the Jerusalem apostles by direct revelation of Christ from heaven (Gal 1). This releases the preaching of Paul from the Jewish apostles as human mediators of the Jesus traditions, even though Paul knows basic information about Jesus from those sources (chiefly the Jerusalem apostles).

There is no evidence in the epistles that Paul’s independent reception of the gospel implies a different gospel than theirs—not even in Galatians 2; his witness does refer to a different way of receiving the gospel. Nor does it mean that he did not learn anything from whatever oral apostolic preaching he heard. In fact, he says elsewhere that he received the gospel he preached by oral tradition (paralambano, l Cor 15:1-3; 11:23 where this language refers to an identifiable saying of Jesus about the new covenant). To have “received from the Lord (l Cor 11:23; Gal 1:12)” includes both apostolic oral tradition and direct revelation—the latter having brought the Christ of the gospel directly into his life. Still, no other apostle says of his message that he received it by revelation from the ascended Christ. He must mean, therefore, that while he knew what was being said and done by 152 This subject was discussed in detail in DeWitt, Dispensational Theology in America During the Twentieth Century, pp. 197-220

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Jesus and the apostles, he never received it, but instead violently raged against it; rather Christ revealed it to him in a personal revelation before the gates of Damascus,153 after which he again probably received more oral traditions of Jesus—a consequence of his postconversion contacts with the other disciples and Jerusalem apostles.154 The “other gospel” he condemns in Galatians (1:6) was not that of the twelve or Peter, but of the Pharisees who accepted Jesus as Messiah, but insisted that all Gentile converts be circumcised and keep the law of Moses, i.e., become proselytes and joined to Israel (Acts 15:1, 5), which implied living under the law. The twelve apostles in Jerusalem distanced themselves from the Pharisees’ views at the Jerusalem meeting (Acts 15:24), though not from the practice of Judaism and the law by Jewish believers.

2. The Pauline theology and mission tended to avoid those Christological titles more favored by Jewish Christians, and instead used only a few Christological titles, chiefly Lord and Christ, as the two bedrock essentials of Jesus person in death and resurrection.

Lord and Christ tend to dominate the Pauline epistles. But Jewish Christians drifted toward titles of national symbolic meaning: the Mosaic prophet, Shepherd, Rejected Stone; titles of beginning/founding: The Beginning, Firstborn, Founder, Alpha/Omega, First/Last; Descending/Ascending; titles of Davidic kingship: The Righteous One, The Chosen, King, Son of God, Servant; titles of renewed cultus: High Priest, Melchizedek, Lamb; angelomorphic titles: Michael, Glorious Angel, Venerable Angel, Holy Angel, Angel of the Lord.155 These titles do not occur substantially in Acts, although some do. They multiply in Jewish Christian literature in and beyond the New Testament; many are absent or infrequent in Paul. The tendency is rather toward titles of universal import, and away from titles of Jewish particularism. This is most true of the name Lord; it is less the case with Christ/Messiah. One way to explain the title Lord is to would be that for Gentiles it exalted Jesus above all Gentile deities including the deified Roman emperor, a value with distinct political overtones. This would also be true for terms like ekklesia (“church,” “national assembly”) and euaggelion (“gospel,” “good news”).156 On the other hand, the title Christ was retained and standardized for Paul’s Jewish hearers from their traditional prophetic messianic hope, and used with Gentile listeners (with some risk of Gentile reaction to Jewish language) to convey the tradition’s most basic salvation emphasis— Jesus’ atoning death and resurrection. The manner in which “Lord” came to predominate among Gentile or mixed congregations is suggested by its appearance alone in texts like 1 Corinthians 12:1-3, Romans 10:8-10 and Philippians 2:11—all with near backgrounds in Roman paginism.

153 This phrase is borrowed from Stuhlmacher, Gospel and Gospels, pp. 149-172, passim. 154 Cf. 1 Corinthians 7 where he refers to sayings of Jesus about marriage and distinguishes them from his own instruction (7:8-16). Also see Romans 12:9-21 which contains Sermon on the Mount sayings; and the Lord’s Supper tradition (1 Cor 11:23-26), which, by using the words “from the Lord” shows similarity of citation language with 7:8-16), indicating that he is using words from Jesus. 155 R. Longenecker, Christology of the Earliest Jewish Christianity. Studies in Biblical Theology, New Series, No. 17 (London: SCM Press, 1970), pp. 25-229 156 H. D. Georgi, Theocracy in Paul’s Praxis and Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991). Georgi argues that these and other terms reveal a theocratic bearing of Paul’s thinking. This theocratic thinking had political overtones, and consequently an implied anti-Roman empire stance.

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3. Paul’s preaching emphasized monotheism. The necessity for this element in Paul’s preaching to Gentiles was to wed their acceptance of Christ with a process of depaganization which was never thought of as automatic. In Acts the speeches of Paul to Gentile audiences feature this factor. It also comes up in 1 Corinthians 8, is part of the confession of Ephesians 4:4-6, and appears in a review of the Thessalonians’ conversion in 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10.157 The relevance of this theme lies in its contribution to the universality of the Gentile mission and its connection to the idea of a universal egalitarian church of fall nations under a single sovereign, loving God.

The speeches at both Lystra and Athens (Acts 14, 17) show how Paul sought a monotheistic base of belief as a starting point for presenting the gospel. Romans 1:20-23, l Corinthians 8, and Ephesians 4:4-6 indicate the centrality of aniconic (beyond images) monotheism, its inclusion in early Christian confessions, or the way Paul sought special monotheistic corrections in actual or potential converts.

4. Also distinctively Pauline is his emphasis on freedom from the Jewish law. Freedom from the law further separates Gentile Christians and the church from attachments to Judaism, contributes to the universality of Paul’s body of Christ theme, and services real-life applications oneness of one God over all nations.

Although there is no specific statement to this effect in the epistles, Paul seems to be following a pattern of Jewish omissions that will convince his converts not to become Jewish proselytes. Galatians suggests that the goal of the “Judaizers,” is to increase Israel by capturing Paul’s Gentile converts for Israel and subjecting them to the law in order to make them real and complete Jews. They seem to have understood his mission as a proselyte mission, but incomplete on his part due to what they thought were compromises.158 This is probably why Paul “sits loose” with baptism as well. It was one of the initiatory rituals for proselyte entry into Judaism. One may puzzle over why Paul never speaks of the cessation of the law for Gentiles as a new “mystery” revelation. Galatians is the epistle where one would have expected such a connection, but it is not there. In Ephesians 2:14-16 he does include the end of the law in the larger context of an explanation of the church as a new (recent) creation by God, formed from believing Jews and Gentiles. So he may have thought of the end of the law as part of the creation of the church which was a newly revealed mystery; but he does not say this independently of his discussion of the church.159

5. To protect against anti-law accusations by Jewish opponents or tendencies of his Gentile converts to continue in aspects of their former paganism, Paul developed extensive moral-ethical instruction for Gentile converts. This body of teaching is concentrated in

157 R. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, 2 vols, trans K. Grobel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, 1955), 1:65-92. 158 S. McKnight, Light Among the Gentiles: Jewish Missionary Activity in the Second Temple Period (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991). McKnight discusses what is known about proselyting baptismal practices in Judaism during the period covered by the New Testament. 159 S. Westerholm, Israel’s Law and the Church’s Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994). Westerholm’s study is among the best of the later twentieth-century assessments of all issues in and around issues of the law for the church. Cf. also F. Thielmann, Paul and the Law: A Contextual Approach (Downer’s Grove IL: Inter-Varsity, 1994) for a more recent study rather widely cited.

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portions of Romans 12-15; Ephesians 4-6; Colossians 3-4; 1 Thessalonians 4-5; and 2 Thessalonians 3, often called in the scholarly literature Paul’s didache (moral teaching). These sections contain details of contrast to recipients’ pagan backgrounds and movement toward a universal kind of morality and ethics rooted in the basic quality of egalitarian love—an idea foreign to Greek and Roman ethics until the time of Seneca, and tied to monotheism (one God, one church, one ethic).

This didache (moral “teaching”) material was first common Jewish/apostolic and used orally, probably in some relation to the apostolic decree of Acts 15; but it soon found its way into epistles as need arose (as Eph 4-6; Col 3-4; Rom 12-13; l Thes 4-5; 1 Peter 2-3). Paul adapted the material to Gentile Christians and added to it an anti-paganism cast which shows how hard and in what detail Paul worked to de-paganize his Gentile converts. Such moral/ethical instruction, however, was at bottom Jewish, since it was based on the widespread Jewish two-ways moral tradition (love and hate, forexample) found in Jewish-Christian books like (the Christianversion of) Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Didache, and Barnabas. The apostolic didache material is also found in other forms in James, and Hebrews, but without much if any of the de-paganizing cast it has in Paul.

6. The parousia, and apocalyptic thought about the end-times generally, has been freed by Paul from Jewish messianic nationalism, and appears rather in the form of personal bodily immortality in the future kingdom of God for all Christian believers, both Jew and Gentile, by resurrection. The first two speeches of Peter in Acts are very conscious of the messianic kingdom available to Israel and stress its national repentance as the contingent condition discussed in Essay I.

Two expressions of the contingent near parousia and kingdom for Israel occur in Peter’s speeches in Acts. (1) Peter explains the Pentecostal tongues-speaking as a sign of Israel’s prophesied end times (2:17-21). He assumes that Joel’s prophecy of the latter-day works of the Spirit does not need explanation when it concludes that tongues, visions, dreams and prophecy will be followed by further celestial signs (2:19-20a)—all of them to occur “before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord (2:20 NIV).” (2) Similarly in the speech of 3:12-26, he projects the coming restoration (cf 1:6) for which Israel’s national repentance is a necessary moral prelude and the event which will bring about what all the prophets promised (3:19-21, 24 with 3:25-26). These texts assume and speak of the primacy of Israel’s repentance which is also found in 5:31, even though without any eschatology specifically mentioned. Thereafter this motif gives way to the threat of judgment on Israel for its unbelief (Stephen’s speech, 7:2-53) and the gradual shift toward the gospel to the Gentiles and formation of the church in Paul’s mission; Israel’s national repentance urged by Jesus and the apostles gradually fades from the picture with its increasingly more resolute resistance to the gospel. Paul’s emphasis is not a non-Jewish view of immortality and the coming kingdom; but it does tend away from the Jewish nationalist connections of Peter’s first two speeches. An Israel connection seems to return in Revelation where Israel’s salvation is again an ingredient. The Old Testament hope thought mainly of the latter day salvation and resurrection of Israel; but in Paul this connection with national Israel is no longer visible. Especially interesting in this respect are l Corinthians 15 and l Thessalonians 4-5 where Paul says he has received a special new dimension of the parousia by direct revelation, a

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resurrection of all believers, known off and on since the time of Joseph Mede in the early seventeenth century as a “rapture.”160

Although these differences are real, the preaching of the two apostles shares the common idea of Jesus’ parousia as the future focal point for completion of the biblical salvation plan; both apostles stress the already and future resurrection repeatedly. 7. Even the justification of the Gentiles by faith, although represented as the subject of God’s foreknowledge, and belonging to the prophesied gospel, receives a new context, i.e., the salvation of the Gentiles outside of Israel by personal conversion to Christ. The contextual change includes the larger formation of the body-church as a wholly new creation—the church as egalitarian body of Christ formed from believers of all nations. According to Paul’s descriptions of the church, it included from its beginning those Jews who previously believed in Jesus as Messiah and Lord. This is the case, even though Paul’s mission was primarily to the Gentiles. The church begins with the first conversion of Gentiles resulting from independent Gentile mission activity.

Paul uses the verb proeuaggelizomai in Galatians 3:8 to represent the promise that in Abraham all nations of the earth would be blessed. But the text does not take into account the new mystery/church framework for this situation; only Gentile salvation as such is seen in the context of freedom from the law. Thus the salvation of the Gentiles promised in the prophets in the context of Israel’s future salvation has come through a new channel not before known.

8. The decline of water baptism is not clear and striking in the Pauline sections of Acts. But the absence in Paul’s epistles and Acts of any command to individual believers or newly formed churches to baptize converts is significant; also significant is the lack of reference to baptizing converts in his reviews of preaching the gospel at the beginning in Galatians 1-2, 1 Corinthians 1-2 and 1 Thessalonians 1-2, is significant. Of course, the exception in 1 Corinthians 1:14-17, seems at first to contradict this general pattern. But one is clearly met here with a forceful disclaimer on any more than a very few baptisms and a general negative conclusion: “For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel.” Such remarks show that Paul did not continue working under Jesus’ commission; nor did he continue the same requirement of baptism at the conclusion of sermons as did Peter according to his speeches in Acts. Hence a notable shift is visible in which water baptism if left to Jewish converts as the latter day messianic remnant. Further discussion of baptizing issues can be found in Essays III-IV below.

160 J. Mede, The Works of Joseph Mede 4:775-777, Epistle 22. Mede is the first to use this term, even though skepticism still prevails about its use until J. N. Darby. This attribution of the term and concept to Darby is part of the general perception that most dispensationalist beliefs can be traced to Darby. The bibliographic essay below (Essay VI) on researches into the history of millennialisms shows how varied millenarian eschatological ideas were during its history after Alstead and Mede (c 1640). Having had the unusual opportunity to check Mede’s text personally, it seems to me far more likely that Darby borrowed the rapture terminology from him than that he (Darby) first invented it, as is often, nearly always, claimed. Darby may have used the term in a new way, but Mede did in fact relate it to a pre-wrath escape of the true people of God.

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Varied Formulations Using the Term Gospel

We now turn to the varied and enlarged expressions of “the gospel” especially in Paul where they are more frequent than elsewhere in the New Testament.161 Anticipating the implications and conclusion to be drawn at the end, we may say that all terms are variations on aspects of the one central proclamation of Christ. Or one may say that each is a dimension or aspect of the singular apostolic preaching of the gospel. I will explain what these meant, and suggest why—in apostolic thinking and expression—such varied formulations were useful or needed. Enlargements, modifications and clarifications of the term gospel by adding descriptors with “of”—like “gospel of God, gospel of Christ, or gospel of the kingdom— appear to have arisen from a single original use of the noun “gospel (euaggelion) or the related verb “proclaim good news (euaggelizomai).” In other words, the qualifying or defining phrases seem to assume that the unmodified terms “the gospel” or “preach the gospel” were already current in the earliest Christian vocabulary. We may safely assume that somewhere in the earliest years of the Christian movement, someone thoughtfully described its earliest events and powers as an outburst of “good news.” It does not seem too much to suggest that Jesus himself first used the term to describe what he was about. It occurs near the beginning with his quotation of Isaiah 61:1-2 as a self-description: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news (euaggelizesthai) to the poor . . . (Luke 4:16-19; cf Matt 11:5).” This striking quotation of Isaiah 61:1-2 in his home synagogue at Nazareth is the first use by Jesus or a disciple as an umbrella term for his mission. Other uses early in the gospel records, in narratives composed by the gospel writers, point to Jesus’ use of the term at Nazareth; but they all seem to be anticipations of this first use by Jesus himself. All such uses of the terms form a kind of continuous line (Luke 1:19; 2:10; 3:18) that points to Jesus himself. The Gospel of the Kingdom Jesus identified himself with the prophet of Isaiah 61 (“me”)—a basic reality which is certain from this text; he also identified himself with the servant of Isaiah 42:1-4 in Matthew 12:18-21.162 Thus, Jesus sees the servant-prophet texts of Isaiah 40-66 as merging for fulfillment in himself. Isaiah 52:7 uses euaggelizomai in a participial form as an introduction to the ensuing poem on the suffering and glory of the righteous servant (52:1353:12). The opening lines of the introduction (52:7-12) begin, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings, who publishes peace, who brings good tidings of good, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns’ (italics mine).” The two phrases translated “brings tidings” and “brings good tidings” respectively 161 In fact, “gospel” and “the gospel (the noun)” occur in the gospels a total of only 12 times, 4 in Matthew, the remaining 8 in Mark, with no occurrences in either Luke or John. Oddly, the verb euaggelizomai occurs only once in Matthew and 10 times in Luke, but not at all in Mark or John. This seems to be the strangest of patterns; in fact it is a no-pattern situation. 162 Similarly to O. Betz, “Jesus’ Gospel of the Kingdom,” in The Gospel and the Gospels ed P. Stuhlmacher, pp. 59-60.

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use the verb euaggelizomai (proclaim good news) in the Septuagint—the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible first translated about the third century B.C. Here, “proclaim good news” is associated immediately with peace, salvation, and the kingdom (reign) of God. These three uses of euaggelizomai in Isaiah 52:7 and 61:1-2 are the most likely root of the term “gospel” in the New Testament, including “gospel of the kingdom.” Perhaps the suggestion may be ventured that from these three uses of the verb for “proclaim good news,” Jesus used the noun form in several instances. He may have used the Hebrew or Aramaic root basar—the Hebrew word translated with euaggelizomai in the Greek Old Testament (LXX). Some scholars have continued to believe at least since Adolf Deissmann’s Light from the Ancient East (1910) that euaggelizomai (“proclaim good news”) was adapted in the New Testament from proclamations of births or deeds of Hellenistic gods and kings; and indeed it was so used by them.163 Since Jesus’ birth was that of a God-king and his kingdom, it seems likely that a merger of both the prophetic and Hellenistic senses of the word-group occurred, although the greater force lies with its Old Testament origins.164 Mark, the earliest of the gospels, does not use the verb, but does use the noun seven times. Of Mark’s seven uses, five are with a definite article—“the gospel” with no further qualifier like “of the . . . .” All five occur only in Jesus’ words (1:15; 8:35; 10:29; 13:10; 14:9). Mark 16:15 is not included in our discussion because this ending of Mark was not original. That leaves only two other uses: 1:1 in the title of the gospel—a case of Mark’s, not Jesus’ usage—and 1:14 to summarize Jesus’ kingdom preaching, where it is also Mark’s, not Jesus’ word (hence later); both have qualifiers: 1:1 “the gospel of Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God (my italics)”; 1:14: “preaching (kerusson, a synonym of euaggelizomai) the gospel of God (my italics both references).” This pattern easily yields the impression that Mark lets Jesus’ absolute uses stand without adding modifiers He only feels free to use modifiers in his own narrative portions, and very sparingly. Matthew uses the verb euaggelizomai only once (11:5, Jesus’ words), and the noun four times of which three are in “gospel of the kingdom”; one of the three is in a saying of Jesus (24:14), while two are in Matthew’s narrative; the other use is in a saying of Jesus without any modifier (26:13). Since Matthew was written after Paul had already used many modifying phrases (see below), and about a decade after Mark which Matthew used heavily, it would be understandable that from Mark 1:14 (“the kingdom of God is at hand”), the phrase “of the kingdom” might have been added to “gospel” twice by Matthew in narratives. It would also be understandable that he added it to one saying of Jesus for clarification, i.e., to assure his readers that in 24:14 Jesus was talking about the same gospel (of the kingdom) that he was proclaiming in the earlier stories. So the fact that in both Matthew and Mark the modified forms are all in narrative, except Matthew 24:14, seems to point to modifiers being added later either by the apostolic uses of the oral gospel tradition or the gospel writers themselves (which seems more likely). Perhaps this modest use of 163 A. Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, trans L. R. M. Strachan (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1910), pp. 370-372. Deissmann included recently discovered texts with euaggelion used for proclaiming the birth of a god as the beginning of tidings of joy, and another proclaiming the accession of Emperor Gaius Julius Verus Maximus Augustus. Deity and king proclamations are strikingly similar to what Jesus was about from the beginning of his mission. 164 Recent scholarly discussion was summarized by Stuhlmacher, The Gospel and the Gospels, in both his text and the notes, pp. 149-152.

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modifiers was from Paul’s influence, since his modifiers were sufficient in number and variety to invite more such modifiers by other apostolic writers. Luke uses the verb ten times. The uses are distributed about evenly through the gospel. The most frequent associated idea is the kingdom of God, but a few other related details appear which need not be discussed. Luke has no uses of the noun. We can conclude that Jesus first used the term in Luke 4:18 as a verbal (infinitive of euaggelizomai) from Isaiah 61:1-2. From this verbal he began to use the noun, first without a definite article, then with a definite article (“the gospel”) to describe his person, words and deeds, and in association with the presence of the kingdom and its peace and salvation after the model of Isaiah 60:1-2 and 52:7. From the article-noun combination (‘the gospel” unmodified), two gospel writers added very minor qualifiers, mostly “of the kingdom (Matthew),” but also “of Jesus Christ, Son of God (Mark 1:1) and “of God (Mark 1:14).” Those modifications in the gospels are very modest. They may have been influenced by the freedom with which Paul added modifiers—a development that is possible because the gospels came after the Pauline epistles. It seems likely that the first modifying phrases were used by Paul. If so, he did this with a high degree of rhetorical freedom, but always to clarify some aspect or dimension of the basic gospel content. Euaggelion (Gospel) with Article and No Following Modifiers in Paul Paul uses euaggelion (gospel) in the same way Jesus does in Mark, with the noun modified only by the preceding definite article (the gospel). He does this with no modifier following the noun about 28x among about 56 total uses in his epistles. The most obvious implication of these simple uses of euaggelion with article is that he expects readers and/ or opponents to know what he refers to—the story of Jesus and his atoning death and resurrection. Despite lack of following modifiers in 28 uses (“gospel of . . .” additions), he does at times add other details in varied expressions. (1) The most frequent are places where he uses the verb (euaggelizomai) with the noun and article (to euaggelion) meaning literally “gospel the gospel,” or more meaningfully, “proclaim the gospel (6 of the 28x or a little more than one-fourth of this noun’s uses with the article).” (2) In a second group of expressions, Paul uses common terms for blessings or benefits of the gospel: partakers of the promise through the gospel (Eph 3:6); fellowship of the gospel (Phil 1:5); the faith of the gospel (Phil 1:27); heeding the gospel (Rom 10:16); the hope of the gospel (Col 1:23); life and immortality through the gospel (2 Tim 1:10). (3) Another type articulates the power or strength of the gospel: its truth (3x, Gal 2:5, 14, Col 1:5); churches birthed through it (1 Cor 4:15) or its advance in the world (Phil 1:12). (4) Still another and larger group refers to Paul or his helpers’ powers, authority, conflicts and struggles in their work for the gospel: enemies of the gospel (Rom 11:28 of Israel); suffering evil for the gospel (2 Tim 1:11-12); chained for (“bonds in”) the gospel (imprisonment, Phile 13); his right in the gospel (1 Cor 9:18); defending the gospel (Phil 1:7, 16); another gospel (2 Cor 11:4; Gal 1:6, referring to Jewish opponents (but not the other apostles); and qualities of his companions in the gospel, like Titus (2 Cor 8:18; cf Phil 4:3). Ephesians 6:19, “the mystery of the gospel,” is not included because our earliest manuscripts very probably did 90

not have the expression in this line.165 Each of these expressions precedes “the gospel.” They are not modifiers or definers, but aspects of the ministry of the gospel in the world. Nothing particularly unusual or interesting occurs in this variety of expressions; they seem to be what one would expect of a person whose life was governed by this value; multiple aspects of its ministry are frequently alluded to. Nor is there anything here especially relevant to our issue in this essay, except perhaps commonality with both Jesus and the twelve’s similar expressions. In this sense “the gospel” has commonality with the activity of Jesus and that of the twelve apostles. The most important detail here is the frequent use of the definite article “the” with the noun. The definite article appears to refer to something the readers already know and identify. Still it is true that use in the epistles points to what Paul himself or one of his associates preached to them originally. Modifying Expressions of the Gospel in Paul This heading refers to uses of “the gospel” followed by “of” plus some defining or qualifying phrase. The importance of this portion of the essay lies in what these variant

defining words, phrases, modifiers or characterizations of the gospel might contribute to our central issue of the oneness or difference between Peter and Paul’s messages. Again, to state the conclusion at the beginning for clarity, none of these expressions turn out to denote a different conceptual, factual or operational content of what was preached. They rather define other aspects of the gospel simply because the gospel itself has many aspects, just as the above survey shows many aspects of its ministry in the world. In fact, some of these expressions may do the same. There is no rule or “technology” here, just varied expressions of aspects of the gospel’s elements. 1. The Gospel of God. The modifier “of God” is a source construction, or it possibly denotes God’s ownership (gen. of possession), or is a subjective genitive meaning the gospel that God gave or that comes from him or as an expression of his saving sovereignty. Nothing in any use of this expression helps us with the exact meaning of fine details. The expression “gospel of God” is used once in the gospels in parallel to the

message of the kingdom (Mark 1:14) and is linked with Israel’s called-for repentance in the presence of it. Paul uses it 6x (Rom 1:1; 15:16; 1 Thes 2:2, 8, 9; 1 Tim 1:11). Not only do Mark and Paul use it, but Peter does as well (1 Peter 4:17). The concentration of uses in 1 Thessalonians 2 is striking but probably only an anomaly among the uses; he seems to repeat it only because after the first use it lies in his thinking process, and he has other mentions of the gospel yet to make in the context. All are about the gospel when he was with the Thessalonians the first time. There is one striking exception to the lack of further definition for this simple term, i.e., 1 Timothy 1:11: “. . . the gospel of the glory of the blessed God . . . .” The expression is simply a kind of doxology in praise of the God who sent the gospel into the world; its language and grammar favor understanding the thought as the glory of God reflected in the striking results of the gospel working in the world: 165 This manuscript issue for the verse and the expression “mystery of the gospel” is discussed in detail in DeWitt, Dispensational Theology in America, pp. 234-235.

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God himself did it, it came from him, and it is glorious; for all this he should be praised (“blessed God”).

The obvious point for the issue raised in this essay is that the use of “gospel of God in Mark, Paul and 1 Peter shows that it cannot be made into or be part of some overt or even subtle distinction between Jesus or the twelve’s kingdom preaching versus Paul’s preaching. Common use of the expression suggests at least a point of common ground. 2. The gospel of Christ (Rom 1:17; 1 Cor 15:1-4, both texts in idea and summary only). The term refers to the good news of Christ’s saving person and work. The texts cite his death for sins and resurrection for communication of righteousness and life. There are about eleven (11) such expressions in the epistles. An exhibit of them will make clear their similarities and variations; the sometimes awkward wording of the texts is due to exact word for word translation.

Rom 1:9 Rom 15:19 1 Cor 9:12 2 Cor 2:12 2 Cor 4:4 2 Cor 9:13 2 Cor 10:14 Gal 1:7 Phil 1:27 1 Thes 3:2 2 Thes 1:8

of the his son of the Christ of the Christ of the Christ of the glory of the Christ of the Christ of the Christ of the Christ of the Christ in the Christ of our Lord Jesus Christ

These are brief formulations with only a few occasional variations about which little need be said. No one would want to make multiplied gospels of each expression unless thinking under a mechanical concept of word denotations in which even a slightly different expression must denote another reality out there somewhere (extreme Platonic realism, i.e., a “real” connection between words and objects, assuming different words refer to different objects, with no room for synonyms).

A point of comparison can be made that has a bearing on the subject of this essay. Mark 1:1 uses “gospel of Jesus Christ [Son of God].” This looks like the same formula as in the list above, but with other variations in detail. It is hard to escape the impression that a conventional terminology is reflected in Paul’s terms and has been adopted by his sometime companion Mark, but now as a title for his Gospel, defined by two titles of Christ as central interests of the gospel. If so, it is an indication that “gospel of Christ” or a slight variant of the phrase was a name for the whole narrative of Jesus’ public ministry, but conceived of mainly as an elongated passion-resurrection narrative and stories (pericopae) illustrating the two titles. 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 is evidence that just as Peter at times (speeches of Acts 2, 4, 5, 10), Paul too could recite details of the historical narrative of Jesus, even if abbreviated in those details of the story that occur before the beginning of the crucifixion narrative or after it of post-resurrection appearances. That is, in varied contexts,

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more detail on Jesus’ deeds, passion, resurrection and post-resurrection appearances could be recited when an occasion demanded such details as in 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 or much more elongated versions as the Mark’s gospel. Note varied details in Peter’s message to Cornelius (Acts 10:34-43).

3. The gospel which I preach among the Gentiles (Gal 2:2). The expression seems to refer to the common gospel with Paul’s added elements of Gentile freedom from the law; it may also connote his independence from Jerusalem, abandonment of the nationalist Jewish call to repentance (Acts 3:19-26), and the rise of another, greater priority: the rise of a Judaism-free church. Paul’s preaching of the gospel to the Gentiles did have variations in adaptation to the Gentiles as outlined above. In this sense, the two-gospels theory we are discussing has an element of truth; but this does not make it another entirely different gospel from Peter’s. We examine what appear to be related expressions in the next few points. 4. Gospel of the uncircumcision . . . [gospel of] the circumcision (Gal 2:7 AV). The brackets indicate that the words are not in the Greek text, but are normally supplied in translation, since all agree this is Paul’s meaning. Several considerations suggest that these expressions mean “gospel for the . . . ,” referring to the two respective ethnic target groups defined in a parallel construction in the immediately following context (Gal 2:9).

(a) Grammatically, “of the uncircumcision . . . circumcision” are objective genitives denoting the persons who receive the activity in or implied in the preceding verbalized noun “gospel.” In Greek, many nouns of action or implied action take genitives for the object following them; this includes even some nouns that appear to denote static objects that in fact are not static any more than “gospel” is a static entity. This is due to the fact that nouns can denote actual or implied associated activity, and thus take genitives for their objects, as odd as this may sound to people not familiar with the Greek noun system.166 It could have been intended even as a genitive possession—the gospel belonging to the uncircumcision or now in possession of the uncircumcision. (b) In the following lines, Paul parallels “circumcision” with Jews, and “uncircumcision” with Gentiles (vss 8-9)—a clear indication he is think of people groups. In several other places in the New Testament, including Paul, “circumcision” with “the” before it denotes the Jews, including Jewish Christians who insisted on the circumcision of the Gentile mission’s converts (Eph 2:11-12; Phil 3:3; Col 4:11; Titus 1:10; Acts 11:2; cf 15:1, 5). Elsewhere in the epistles “the circumcision” usually means Jews, “the uncircumcision” Gentiles, particularly when the context is speaking of ethnic groups. Despite the appearance of denoting a different gospel, “gospel of the uncircumcision” seems to be another term for the common gospel, but with all or at least some of those special Pauline emphases noted above included in its concept-range, especially freedom from the law in the context of Galatians. (c) Logically, it is difficult to see how after emphasizing so strongly that there is only one gospel—and that by pronouncing an anathema on any other gospel—he could then be referring to two 166 F. Blass, A. Debrunner and R. Funk, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 90 under Objective Genitive; cf. H. E. Dana and J. R. Mantey, A Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927), pp. 78-79. This reading is adopted by a number of modern translations, not because they oppose or reject a certain dispensational pre-set, but because of the grammatical and contextual elements of meaning noted above. See also the RSV.

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separate gospels in the next chapter.167 The gospel on which he pronounces an anathema is not that of Peter and the twelve, but that of Christian Pharisee evangelists who want to add full law-keeping for Gentile Christians in the interest of adding them to national Israel as proselytes. Not only Paul but the twelve apostles also distanced themselves from the Pharisee Christians’ demand for Gentile circumcision (Acts 15). If the “gospel of the circumcision” was another gospel, Paul is pronouncing curses on his fellow apostles in a context where his point is that they were in agreement on the gospel, but decided to divide their labors among the two ethnic types summarily called “the circumcision” and “the Gentiles (Gal 2:9).” (d) The other detail of importance is Paul’s statement about the Judean chuches who say he now preaches (1:23) the faith he once destroyed.

5. My gospel (gospel of me/gospel preached by me). This expression occurs in Romans 2:16; 16:25; and 2 Timothy 2:8. It is especially appealed to as evidence of a distinctive Pauline gospel that is different from that of Peter.168 At bottom, the modifier “my” denotes Paul as the personal human mediator/proclaimer of the gospel. But there are more issues of detail to discuss due to what has been made of it in the interests of positing two different gospels. Thoughtfully, Baker appeals to the context of Roman 16:25, where the term occurs in conjunction with the mystery kept silent from other ages and generations.

“Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed . . . (Rom 16:25).” To make connection of “my gospel” with the “mystery” concept in Paul, Baker observes that “and” between “my gospel” and “the preaching of Jesus Christ according to the revelation of the mystery . . .” may be translated “even.” Wisely, however, he does not push for this view. Otherwise, “and (kai)” seems to have its normal continuative meaning “and,” which is very regularly used to advance the thought with an additional reference or concept beyond the previous element of the sentence or clause. The meaning, “even,” or “that is to say,’ has the support of J. D. G. Dunn.169 There is in fact no certainty in this suggested meaning; therefore “and” should probably be left in place. If so, it distinguishes Paul’s gospel from the preaching of the mystery as two subjects of his missionary message: gospel and mystery. Two other particles in Greek were options for correlating the two expressions, ge meaning “even, indeed” and de meaning “also, indeed, even”; both are more correlative than kai, although the latter can occasionally be correlative as well.

Rather than basing everything on the nuances of kai here, it is better to seek understanding of the meaning by noting what is said about it in the other two uses (Rom 2:16; 2 Tim 2:8). This procedure steps around the logical twist that one suspects might be involved in making a distinctive gospel (meaning wholly separate) out of “my gospel.” That twist goes something like this: if Paul uses an expression like “my gospel” and the stress lies with my, the only reason he might make such an emphasis is because he wanted to stress his own distinctive preaching content; and—given other texts where he stresses his own distinctive revelation of the body of Christ—the obvious explanation would be that 167 I’m indebted to Dr. Sam Vinton Jr. for this logical observation which certainly has force (personal written communication, July 12, 2009). 168 O’Hair, Unsearchable Riches, p. 98; Baker, Dispensational Theology, pp. 327-328; cf Stam, Fundamentals, pp. 68-82; 191-216. 169 J. D. G. Dunn, Romans 9-16 (Dallas TX: Word, 1988), 2:914.

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the gospel too was distinctive to him. “My gospel” like other concepts in Scripture has its own distinctive referent, and the “my” indicates it is something that is Paul’s alone—so it might be said. This point is made because of how obvious it is that in the other two places where Paul speaks of “my gospel,” there is no definitive indication of anything distinctive. The scant details of what he means rather show that he is speaking of related ideas that are part of the common apostolic preaching, not elements of a previously unknown but now newly revealed mystery gospel. The following details are to be noted. Romans 2:14-16. “[The Gentiles] show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.” This is an important passage on the future judgment of the whole Gentile world. But this judgment is not distinctive to Paul, and there is no warrant in the context for trying to argue for a distinctive Pauline judgment just because “my gospel” is its standard. A future judgment of the world is common biblical doctrine. It is derived from Old Testament world-judgment texts like Isaiah 24 or Zephaniah 1:14-18. The only possible distinctive detail is the detail about the Gentile world in its sins, and that is not really distinctive as just noted. Beyond this it seems impossible to draw some contextual argument for support of a completely distinctive gospel in the expression. There is certainly no hint that this judgment is part of a newly revealed mystery previously hidden in God for long ages past, at least not if one relies (properly) on detailed mystery language to gain some certitude of especially unique concepts. 2 Timothy 2:8. “Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, descended from David, as preached in my gospel, the gospel for which I am suffering and wearing fetters like a criminal.” This passage has the most conceptual content among the three uses. And when it occurs, it is specifically about Jesus as the Son of David and the resurrection—two main themes of Peter’s Pentecost speech (Acts 2) and of Paul’s Pisidian Antioch synagogue speech (Acts 13). How this can be seen as a separate gospel of Paul is not in sight at all. It says nothing about “my gospel” being a newly revealed mystery hidden in God from earlier ages but now made known; there is simply no basis here for such a view. It can be concluded safely, at least from what one sees in the passages, that the and in the expression, “my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ according to the revelation of the mystery (Rom 16:25)” can be left as it is in most versions. This reading is also supported with the observation that when Paul speaks of a mystery now newly revealed, but kept hid in God from previous ages and generations, he is rather talking not about the gospel but about the church of Jew-Gentile equality, even though this is not specified in the Romans 16 context (as it is in other such contexts). Otherwise, what is distinctively new Pauline revelation is specified in the related mystery passage in Ephesians 3:1-13 and Colossians 1:24-27.

It is not different when Paul shifts from “my gospel” to “our gospel (2 Cor 4:3; 1 Thes 1:5; 2 Thes 2:14).” The few places where this change occurs show no variant either. The “our” is either rhetorical—a momentary rhetorical change of expression—or, he intends to include his mission team, probably Timothy and Silas earlier (1 Thes 1:5; 2 Thes 2:14), and Timothy (2 Cor 1:1) and Titus later (2:13; 7:14). It is the same again with three other expressions for his preaching: “. . . the gospel which is preached (euaggelizomai) by me (Gal 1:11)”; “. . . the gospel which I preach (kerusso [herald], Gal 2:2)”; and “the gospel 95

I preached (euaggelizomai) to you (1 Cor 15:1).” Although it is sometimes claimed that the Galatian expressions refer to a completely different gospel than that of the twelve, the context shows that when Paul discussed his gospel with the Jerusalem apostles, there was no disagreement, let alone sharp difference. Two contextual considerations nonetheless show some differences in mode of reception and policy for ethnic target-group types, but not in preaching content: (1) Paul received the gospel directly from Christ by revelation; (2) there was an agreed division of labor—the twelve would keep to their mission to Israel, while Paul (and Barnabas) would go to the Gentiles, allowing them freedom from the Mosaic law (Gal 2:1-10). If one wishes to say this shows a distinctive preaching, it cannot be objectionable as such; but one should specify exactly what “distinctive” means, and connect with the clearly visible special elements of Paul’s preaching to Gentiles outlined above. These Galatian references to the gospel should also be viewed in the larger context of Paul’s statements about receiving and delivering what he received (paralambano receive by oral tradition) as in the 1 Corinthians texts quoted earlier. And these in turn should be understood in light of the same verb for receiving information by oral transmission (paralambano) used earlier for Jesus’ words instituting the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor 11:23) and for the common gospel itself (15:11). The Supper language is found in the common material of the written gospels. The text of 1 Corinthians 15:1 concludes in 15:11 with the words, “Whether then it was I or they [the twelve], so we preach and so you believed.” This comment cannot be arbitrarily limited to the resurrection, but is about the gospel including crucifixion, resurrection and Old Testament testimonies as the context shows. 6. Gospel of the grace of God. This expression occurs only in Acts 20:24. Since it describes his commission to the Gentile world, it is probably a short-hand for all Pauline passages where “grace” refers to his special commission and God’s favor toward undeserving Gentiles. In 1903, J. A. Robinson gathered all such passages in a special note in his commentary on Ephesians.170 He drew together no less than about twenty (20) such passages in the Pauline epistles. It is very unlikely that either Paul or Luke intended it to be the one outstanding expression to denote a special Pauline gospel unknown to other apostles. It does, nonetheless, appear to be a summary term for Paul’s special emphasis on God’s grace-to-the-Gentiles. A difficulty in claiming it is a gospel-in-itself is that it lacks any contextual explanation in Acts 20:24 and does not occur elsewhere. 7. The Gospel of your salvation. The expression occurs only in Ephesians 1:13. Its reference appears to be the list of salvation blessings in the preceding verses—perhaps a portion of an early hymn of praise for salvation, or Paul’s own composition. 8. The Gospel of peace. This too occurs only once and in Ephesians as well (6:15). It too denotes a benefit or blessing of the gospel in personal life, especially the new peaceful relation of believers with God and with each other in contrast to their former ethnic hostilities—a special emphasis of Ephesians crystallized in 2:11-22.

170 J. A. Robinson, The Epistle to the Ephesians (London: James Clark, 1904), pp. 225-226, identified twenty Pauline passages in which “grace” is used in connection with the mission of Paul to the Gentile world.

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These expressions can be summed up and accounted for as modifiers or qualifiers of various aspects of the gospel as it is proclaimed in the Gentile world by Paul and his colleagues, sometimes with special touches related to distinctive emphases of Paul. Gospel of God thinks of its source and perhaps its power; gospel of Christ denotes its divine mediator; gospel which I preach among the Gentiles characterizes its target people, and probably refers summarily to several special features in Paul’s preaching to the Gentiles outlined earlier; “gospel of the uncircumcision” denotes a target people and may also include distinctive adaptive elements as noted above; “[gospel] of the circumcision” also denotes a target people, but in this case the Jews and some special features adapted to their national law and history. “My gospel” refers to its secondary (to God) human carrier-source, and may also include some special Pauline emphases; gospel of the grace of God thinks of a combination of God as its source and especially his grace in sending the gospel to the unworthy Gentile world; gospel of your salvation and gospel of peace both refer to the benefits or blessings it conveys to those who receive it. There is no satisfactory reason why these expressions should be thought to denote a whole series of separate proclamations; not even one or two of them function in this way. Rather they are best interpreted as various aspects of the common saving gospel with, in some cases, a distinctive Pauline ingredient required by a policy of detachment from Israel and its law in the interests of universality. Conclusion It seems clear that the various expressions surrounding the term “the gospel” can be better explained as modifications and ethnic or other adaptations of one basic New Testament gospel proclamation, than by positing a theory of two completely unrelated gospels. That proclamation begins with the incarnation of Jesus in the world and his subsequent messianic mission to Israel. In his mission he uses “the gospel” without qualifiers, except once; that one exception can be seen as an editorial clarification to indicate that when Jesus used the expression “gospel of the kingdom” in Matthew 24, Matthew wanted it understood that Jesus meant the same thing he (Matthew) meant when he used it in narratives near the beginning of his book. Jesus was the first to use “proclaim the good news (euaggelizomai)” for his own messianic mission to Israel, and strikingly he did so at the opening of his public ministry (Luke 4:18). “Gospel of the kingdom,” used by Matthew to describe Jesus’ message, denoted the good news that the kingdom was near and available in his person, words, and works. But the term did not retain this singular meaning unqualified or permanently. Rather, as Jesus’ mission expanded, “gospel of the kingdom” gradually was filled with added content: Jesus’ miracles, righteousness, crucifixion, atonement, and finally resurrection and ascension, and above all his emphasis on the salvation of the kingdom gained by receiving him as Messiah or Son of God. These progressively revealed developments in his mission filled out the meaning of “gospel of the kingdom.” But that means, as has been said, the gospel of the kingdom was transformed into the gospel of Christ. And, it might be added, the messianic kingdom, as originally announced, finally faded from the meaning of “the gospel” as new meanings drawn from crucifixion, resurrection and salvation became normalized in the apostles’ preaching. To put it another way, progressive revelation enlarged 97

and finally changed the sense of “the gospel of the kingdom”; in consequence, “gospel of the kingdom” was dropped in the remainder of the apostolic books, except for Matthew, as the gospel of the kingdom became the gospel of Christ or gospel of salvation. In Paul, “the gospel” continued to be used without modifiers for the basic proclamation of the manifest Messiah and his work in about a fourth of his uses of “gospel.” The striking new development in Paul was the use of a variety of modifiers and defining terms as in “gospel of salvation,” “gospel of God,” “gospel of the uncircumcision and “[gospel] of the circumcision.” The latter two became the basis of a sharp distinction between Peter’s gospel and Paul’s gospel in the early theology of the grace movement. But early leaders O’Hair and Baker noted commonalities between the preaching of the apostles even though they retained the distinction. Those commonalities were not explored further for their implications, but left as first defined. This study suggests that had O’Hair and Baker pursued these implications more fully, they might have finally concluded that the idea of two separate apostolic gospels did not really have a substantial exegetical base. One can see this tendency toward a more careful exegetical-inductive treatment in Baker’s Dispensational Theology wherein he made some modest concessions toward a single apostolic gospel, though he did not develop these concessions any further, and in the end retained the early two gospels view. An outline of the common apostolic preaching may be sketched from the common elements in the preaching of both apostles as seen in the speeches of Acts, whether the long speeches, the very short speeches, or those of medium length. A further consideration is that Luke seeks to show the likenesses between the apostles preaching by offering parallel speeches of the two main apostles—a point dramatically visible in the first speech of each of the two (Acts 2, 13). He also shows in the central transitional chapters (10-15) how Peter was being prepared by God for Paul’s mission and preaching, and how they reached harmonious views on the cessation of the Mosaic law for Gentile converts, and perhaps even on principle for Jewish Christians as well. This application, however, had to wait until the writing of Hebrews. There is no question, however, that in fact Jewish Christians continued to keep the law after salvation (Acts 21:20). One seems forced to conclude from the many details, that there is after all, one basic apostolic gospel, and that all apparent differences perceived in the varied Acts speeches and gospel terms can be explained satisfactorily if allowance is made for progressive revelation, for special factors in Peter and Paul’s dual ethnic missions, and for a flexible use of qualifying expressions to denote aspects of the gospel or special factors in its preaching. The special factors are adaptations to Jewish national interests in Peter’s mission, while Paul’s preaching to the Gentiles adapted special features in the interests of a trans-national, universal gospel in the Gentile world. The final point is that Paul did indeed receive a new revelation, but it was a revelation of the church, a mystery hid in God from previous ages and generations, not a revelation of a new and different gospel unknown previously. On the other hand, the gospel existed before the mystery revelation was made to him. The gospel of salvation was promised and witnessed in the Old Testament; its salvation—the salvation of the kingdom—was offered already in Jesus’ mission to Israel. The one gospel is rather the saving proclamation of Jesus’ messiahship and salvation under the new covenant, available before the cross by his incarnation as God and after it by his completed atonement and resurrection. Hence 98

the gospel was not a special revelation of a new mystery; rather it was foretold in the Old Testament history and prophets. Jesus’ messianic mission filled out its meaning and that meaning continues to thrust its way into the world with saving power as it is proclaimed today.

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ESSAY III BAPTISM IN DISPENSATIONAL PERSPECTIVE: THE NEW TESTAMENT Paul’s Transformation of Water Baptism by Dale S. DeWitt



This essay seeks to show that the ideas of dispensational theology taken together raise questions about whether water baptism is supportable from the appropriate portion of Scripture, i.e., the Pauline Church Epistles. Normalizing the Pauline epistles in this manner is an implication of Paul’s claims to the church as a new and special revelation entailing the creation by God of the church of this dispensation (see Essay I), a point on which virtually all dispensationalists agree. One may go farther: Paul’s disclaimer on baptizing is sufficiently general to be normalized as a prospective principle (1 Cor 1:16-17) when understood in larger perspective. For example, one can cite the complete absence of any command or order in Paul to make baptizing with water a normative ordinance of the church, and his transformation of several details of Jewish ritual into their spiritual equivalents, thereby relativizing all such old covenant and late Jewish ceremonial as well as historic or modern baptismal practices. This perspective in turn yields the suggestion that the ordinance should not be practiced because it lacks appropriate (Pauline) authorization, or because it is inappropriate to the church (but was appropriate to the first manifestation of the kingdom to Israel), or is unnecessary to the evangelical churches’ proclamation of the gospel in our time. In the next essay it will be noted that others in the Reformation stream have moved sacramental thinking in a more spiritual direction, and some in that stream have also taken the decision to drop water baptism: Quakers in the seventeenth century, the Salvation Army in the nineteenth century, and certain independent African denominations in the twentieth century.171 171 The logic of dispensational thought, Quakerism, and the Salvationists is not the same. But inevitably, any pragmatism (no need for baptism because . . .) will have to be supplemented with biblical support, which takes the form of appeals to at least an old covenant-new covenant logic. Cf. D. Rightmire, The Sacraments and the Salvation Army (Metuchen NJ: Scarecrow, 1990) for the Salvationists, and R. Barclay, Apology for the True Divinity, ed D. Freiday (privately published) for the Quakers. The ecumenical movement has also taken notice of certain African churches which have dropped water baptism; see K. Brown, “Forms of

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This conclusion lands with startling force against a situation in which the church has for centuries normalized the practice, even though with a confusing variety of both forms and meanings. Most treatments are after the fact: with the practice of water baptism firmly established in history and tradition, the tradition romanticized and legitimated by a vast body of spiritual experience, and the experience spread throughout the whole historic church, the possibilities for this critique seem precluded from the start. Of course such a conclusion can be tested by specific individual uses of the terms for baptism in the Pauline literature. Indeed, these uses could rescue the point from this logic of exclusion with a simple demonstration: Paul uses the terms “baptize” and “baptism” so plainly for a watery ritual of initiation that all questioning is straightaway demolished. But this point too runs into difficulty, since it cannot really be demonstrated that the terms refer to any form of water, and in at least one case baptism is a clear metaphor for the engaging and enveloping work of the Spirit (1 Cor 12:12-13). Nonetheless, Paul’s use of the terms should be carefully investigated and set in the context of his larger transformation of Jewish ritual into its spiritual equivalents as in the New Testament elsewhere, and in the Apostolic Fathers with rituals like fasting.172 If a negative result is reached, there is still the question of why Paul embarked on such a course (he does not claim it as a special revelation), whether or not the disclaimer on baptizing in 1 Corinthians 1 is really a principled one, and how it is possible that the church continued a practice which Paul intended to be discontinued or dropped with other Jewish ceremonies. These are not easy questions to answer. Indeed they may overwhelm the logic of non-baptism even without any help from Paul’s use of the terms. Examination of these questions is the reason for this and the following essay. To repeat and set the matter in focus, the base line for reconsidering the practice of water baptism in the church is the observation that Paul’s epistles nowhere command or order the ritual as a normal induction or incorporation rite. This silence alone may very well release the church from obligation to practice water baptism as a matter of scriptural faith and order.173 However, other parts of the New Testament with New Israel or Jewish remnant readerships do have water baptism scenes. The orientation of this essay is to the church as a Pauline revelation, from which it is inferred that the church originated with the Pauline Gentile world mission, without any rise of a new national Israel, i.e., independently of the renewed historic national entity. Summarily, we may say that coherence is gained by coordinating certain realities: the absence of a Pauline baptismal order; the fact that baptismal language undergoes the same transformation from shadow to substance as other Jewish rituals; the fact that the negatives in Paul’s disclaimer on baptizing in 1 Corinthians 1 correspond to these changes; and the fact that Acts’ Pauline baptizing scenes explain exceptions in Paul’s practice when considered against the background of John the Baptist and the Jewish origin of Christianity. Baptism in the AICs, ”Practical Anthropology 19 (1972): 169-182, and Pobee and Ositelu II, eds, African Initiatives in Christianity—The Growth, Gifts, and Diversities of Indigenous African Churches: A Challenge to the Ecumenical Movement (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1998); I’m indebted to Prof. Matt Loverin for these references and for a doctoral paper on African non-baptizing churches. 172 See for example, The Shepherd of Hermas, Vision 5, on the subject of fasting. 173 Ramm, Protestant Biblical Interpretation. 3rd ed (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1970), p. 178, states the basis of faith and order in protestant thought: “what is not a matter of revelation cannot be made a matter of creed or faith.” But this principle must be qualified by progressive revelation (pp. 111-114).

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We shall examine seriatim this pattern of coherent realities. We may then turn to other issues raised by this stance: the context and meaning of water baptism elsewhere in the New Testament and the problem of baptism’s conflicting meanings throughout the history of the church. The Pauline Perspective Transformation of Jewish Ritual

Paul’s sweeping release of the church from Mosaic ritual observances, including priestly washings, is clear in certain well-known passages in Romans, Galatians, and Colossians; it is also clear in the deutero-Pauline Hebrews. Romans 14:5-6; cf. 14:15-21. One man esteems one day as better than another, while another man esteems all days alike. Let every one be fully convinced in his own mind. He who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord. He also who eats, eats in honor of the Lord, since he gives thanks to God. Galatians 4:9-10. . . . but now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits, whose slaves you want to be once more? You observe days, and months, and seasons, and years! Colossians 2:14-17. . . . having canceled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands . . . Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are only a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ. Hebrews 9:9-10. According to this arrangement (the Old Covenant and its cultus), gifts and sacrifices are offered which cannot perfect the conscience of the worshiper, but deal only with food and drink and various ablutions, regulations for the body imposed until the time of reformation.

It is only an extension of this kind of pronouncement when Paul says believers are the true circumcision (Phil 3:3), and “he is not a real Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical (Rom 2:28).” He says Christ is our Passover (1 Cor 5:7); the church is the true temple of God as is the body of the individual Christian (1 Cor 6:19); the Christian’s presentation of himself to God is the living sacrifice God asks (Rom 12:1-2); and Jesus’ blood was shed at the final atoning mercy seat (Rom 3:25). Hebrews enlarges this thinking, especially as its thought forms are those of the Old Covenant priestly/sacrificial system. It is only another small step to recognize in Paul’s baptism language the same transformation. The baptizing work of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 12:13)174 by which believers are “immersed” in Christ and cleansed from their sins is a specific case 174 J. D. G. Dunn, Baptism in the Holy Spirit (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970), p. 129, insists that baptism in this text has no reference to water. Dunn argues that the verb is metaphorical when applied to the work of the Spirit, whereas the noun “baptism” is literal in Paul’s usage. But he is not able to prove this, and the distinction remains questionable since Jesus uses both noun and verb metaphorically for his own death baptism (Mark 10:38).

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of Jewish ritual replaced by its real, final saving equivalent.175 This language signifies incorporation into Christ and union with Him. The image communicates enveloping, or full covering with water—“immersed” as a metaphor of inclusion and union. Unwarranted claims are sometimes made for the meaning of details in 1 Corinthians

12:13. (1) The text refers to Pentecost (“by one Spirit”). But this is very unlikely even though articulated with an aorist indicative in a context about the charismatic works of the Spirit. The past tenses of the chapter’s verbs refer to the Corinthians’ conversion, not Pentecost, even though the subject is the Holy Spirit. If there is any allusion to earlier events or language, it is limited to the term en pneumati which is applied to the Corinthian experience of the Spirit. Perhaps this term became summary apostolic language for all forms and manifestations of the Spirit’s work.176 (2) The text contains the same ideas as Acts 1:5 (“before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit”). The linkage is chiefly a superficial grammatical parallel using en pneumati. But the concepts, persons, and actions are sufficiently different to make any direct allusion extremely doubtful. Paul has probably borrowed en pneumati from early Christian rhetoric about the Spirit and applied it to a new configuration of concepts related to his doctrine of the church as body of Christ. (3) The event of baptizing is positional and unexperienced. But this would fly in the face of other New Testament redemptive terms, all of which refer to experiential or existential aspects of the life or being of believers, although until the resurrection these are not fully experienced.177 (4) Instead of these explanations, Paul’s meaning is rather that the believer’s new life pervades his being as he is now in Christ, i.e., in union with Christ’s extended resurrection body, the church;178 this new placing-into is the work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit’s work here is creating community and personal union; it is certainly not an isolated, individualized seizure of individuals by the Spirit.

Paul’s transformation of baptism is also visible in his reference to “one baptism” in Ephesians 4:5, where there is no contextual clue to immersion in water. Instead, contextual indicators point to the spiritual “immersion” referred in 1 Corinthians 12:13, i.e., union of Christ and church.

175 This is the thesis of Dunn, Baptism in the Holy Spirit. Dunn seems acquiescing in retaining water baptism even as he marginalizes it in passage after passage. For him baptism in the Spirit has sequentially replaced water baptism as was promised already by John the Baptist. Dunn really believes such a replacement occurred, and the two baptisms—water and Spirit—are sequenced in a then-and-now relation. He only maintains water baptism as secondary—a term he also uses repeatedly. But his retention of water baptism has no force; it is just there in a couple places in Paul, and those by allusion rather than command. Dunn has effectively demolished water baptism as sacramentalists understand it, and Spirit baptism as a second work of grace as Pentecostals understand it. Water baptism in any form is left hanging by the slenderest of threads. 176 Cf. R. Saucy, The Case for Progressive Dispensationalism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan. 1993), pp. 180-183; Saucy thinks the identity of the phrase with the other six occurrences in the New Testament argues for identity of meaning. This conclusion is not required, however, and the new formulation here is equally well explained by suggesting use of the phrase in new patterns of thoughts with their own meaning. 177 Cf. C. Ryrie, Dispensationalism Today (Chicago: Moody Press, 1965), pp. 136-137, 203-204; The Holy Spirit (Chicago: Moody Press, 1965), p. 77. 178 J. A. T. Robinson, The Body. Studies in Biblical Theology, No. 5 (London: SCM Press, 1952), pp. 49-83.

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(1) The seven ones—one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God—to which believers were called (vs 3) are together a single “unity of the Spirit,” which means brought to confessional and personal reality by the Spirit (subjective genitive). (2) The other six “ones” are themselves all spiritual/theological realities with no ritual element. (3) The larger context of the portion knows only spiritual dynamics taking shape, not in rituals but in gifts such as apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers and evangelists (vss 7-11). Reference to water baptism is out of place and not relevant in context. A quantitative argument is sometimes used to conclude for the impossibility of anything but the baptizing work of the Spirit here: water baptism and Spirit baptism make two baptisms, while Paul establishes one. Some early Quakers embraced this logic;179 however, it tends to make events, processes, or even words into entities and then quantify them, thus placing a mathematical cast on biblical concepts. Still one should not dismiss the matter too hastily. The other “ones” are so called just because Paul intends to exclude all others. One Lord means Christians own no other lord at all; it does not mean that other lords do not exist, or that one may not use the term of a lesser, human lord—a slave owner, for example. But Paul really does not mean this; he rather means there is only one Lordship, i.e., ruler of all things and savior. In a really quantitative sense, Christians cannot acknowledge any other at all. Similarly with faith and hope: one faith means to exclude all other religious or theological belief systems as Christian; one hope means all other claims to man’s personal or social future and immortality are disowned by believers. It is similar with baptism. One baptism excludes others, including the material washing ceremony in deference to the eschatological, real work of the Spirit.180

The same transformation of baptism is seen in three other related uses of baptizo/ baptismos/baptisma in Paul’s letters: Romans 6:1-4. Baptized into Christ is incorporation into and union with Christ; here, however, the context necessitates another dimension of the image—cleansing from sin/ break with sin/sin shall no more have dominion. The context contains thoughts of freedom from sin and new life parallel to the implications of 1 Corinthians 12:13. Romans 8 makes release from sin the Spirit’s work with no mention of baptism. Colossians 2:12. Baptism includes thoughts similar to those of Romans 6:1-4: burial and resurrection with Christ. Galatians 3:27. The same transformational/incorporative thoughts appear here (those baptized have “put on Christ”), with body of Christ thought parallel to or enlarging on 1 Corinthians 12:13. In Christ there is no slave or free, male or female, Jew or Greek, but all are one. 179 Cf. H. Barbour and A. O. Roberts, Early Quaker Writings, 1650-1700 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973), pp. 330-341, citing Robert Barclay’s Catechism and Confession of Faith, 4th Ed, 1701. 180 Andrew Lincoln surprisingly maintains water baptism here by simply stating the matter without discussion; see A. Lincoln, Ephesians (Dallas TX: Word Books, 1990), p. 240. The assumption that “baptism” is ”obviously the Christian initiatory rite of water baptism and not Spirit baptism” is also taken by E. Best, Ephesians (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), p. 369, after which he goes on to discuss other interpretive issues including some implications of “one” before “baptism.” His note about Spirit baptism is dismissive without further discussion or engagement. Most commentators on Ephesians, especially those in the historic Reformed Protestant traditions give little attention to a possible reference to Spirit baptism in the text, despite the contextual indicators.

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In these texts the nuances of union with Christ are pronounced and parallel with 1 Corinthians 12:13. Each text suggests what 1 Corinthians 12:13 makes explicit, that union with Christ is a work of the Holy Spirit. This work of the Spirit binds the believer into union with Christ in his death and resurrection, thus breaking the dominion of sin. No ritual/water element appears; rather, the realities referred to are incorporation, union, and cleansing.181 Reference to water here would require the conclusion that Paul teaches either baptismal regeneration or at least some form of concurrency (Spirit and water together) which requires physical washing as part of or even to effect the whole.182 There is some probability that, in speaking of Christians’ baptism into Christ’s death, he is making direct use of language from the oral gospel tradition. Jesus had used baptism language for his own death (Luke 12:50; Mark 10:35-39).183 In so doing he had said his disciples would also be baptized in such a way, i.e., into death—almost certainly meaning martyrdom. Reference to martyrdom is never far away from the implications of “dying with Christ,” and Paul does speak of it as an implication of union with him in texts like 2 Corinthians 4:7-12: “. . .always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you.” Although Dunn favors metaphorical use with the verb, he says of “through baptism (the noun)” in the next phrase, “the ritual act is almost certainly in view,” but notes “though baptisma also appears as a metaphor in Mark 10:38-39.”184 This strengthens, not weakens, the probable dependence of Paul on the Gospel tradition of Jesus’ death baptism. The unlikelihood of the noun baptisma changing its referent here is increased by the definite article before it for the anaphoric sense—the baptism just referred to in the verb. In addition to bapt-words, Paul uses lou-words three times, perhaps as a synonym for baptism language. Louo means bathe, wash, of course with the connotation of cleansing; loutron means bath house, place of bathing, or what happens there—washing.185 In 1 Corinthians 6:11, apolouo (washed) in aorist indicative refers to the past event of their salvation: “And such were some of you. But you were washed (apolouo, aor. ind.), you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.” Apolouo occurs here in a list of salvation terms which elsewhere denote “the spiritual transformation made possible through Christ and effected by the Spirit . . . ‘regeneration, sanctification, and justification’ . . . the work of the Spirit in the believer’s life, not the result of baptism,” as G. Fee notes.186 The spiritual character of salvation and the role of both Christ and Spirit together, point to gains of faith, not of (water) baptism. 181 Cf. D. Lake, “Baptism,” NIDCC, p. 99. 182 This view is similar to the thesis of Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973). 183 J. D. G. Dunn, Romans 1-8. 2 vols (Dallas TX: Word Publishing, 1988), 1:311: “. . . a metaphorical usage is well established in the Christian tradition (at least Mark 10:38 pars.) as well as in wider usage and still more in wider secular usage.” Dunn does not directly advocate abandoning water baptism, but leans toward a metaphorical usage here. 184 Dunn, ibid., p. 313. 185 A. Oepke, “louo, apolouo, loutron,” TDNT 4:303. Contrary to Oepke, G. Fee thinks “this verb is not used elsewhere in the New Testament to denote baptism (First Epistle to the Corinthians [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987], p. 246).” 186 Fee, First Corinthians, p. 248.

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Thus louo here is equivalent to cleansing (katharizo), and it belongs to the sphere of actual release from the dirt of sin. It seems hardly questionable that this use is analogous to Hellenistic uses for baths required to approach deity or in ritual preparation for other important personal or social occasions such as marriage. Hence the immediate follow-on is the word “sanctified” to explain the effect. This metaphorical sense also holds for Titus 3:5-6 where both Christ and Spirit are similarly identified as operatives and the metaphor is enriched with language of renewal by the Spirit, regeneration and pouring. The latter two terms are found elsewhere of the work of the Spirit. In the third case (Eph 5:26) a cleansing action of Christ likewise produces moral change toward love in another transformational context. Here loutron is complemented by its normal agent water, and by “the word (hrama)” which may be a reference to the word of Christ or God. Romans and Hebrews use the term this way (Rom 10:17; Heb 6:5; both as Eph 5:26 without article, cf. Rom 10:89); however, the best evidence comes from “word of God” (hrama theou) in Ephesians 6:17 in a list of the Christian’s spiritual weapons. These patterns point to a metaphorical use of lou- words by Paul, drawn almost certainly from real bathing/cleansing images, but metaphorical nonetheless. Whence such a radical reorientation of baptism language? Two types of background

contexts show enlarged usage of baptizo and related terms: Hellenistic metaphorical uses and figurative adaptations within early Christianity itself. Data from these two sources confirm the suspicion that Paul’s language shift from ritual to spiritual is only apparently radical; because subsequent Christian history has made the word a technical ritual term such a different meaning seems surprising. But against such developing uses in Paul’s linguistic context, it is not surprising, especially considering that metaphorical uses of the word-group were found already in the earliest parts of the John-Jesus traditions. Papyri produce examples of immersion (baptizo) applied to a ship sinking in water or mud, and for drowning or perishing in water; baptize is used for sinking into sleep or intoxication, and sometimes in the sense of becoming “immersed” in troubles, desires, sickness, magic, or astrology. Philo used the verb in connection with lusts and desires of the body which “baptized” the soul, i.e., engulfed or flooded it. Josephus uses baptize for “baptized a city” meaning to bring it to the brink of destruction.187 Early Christian rhetoric adopted this flexible use of baptizo. John the Baptist said “I baptize you with water for repentance . . . he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire,” thus suggesting at the outset Paul’s engulfing and enveloping thoughts. Jesus spoke of his death as baptism (Luke 12:50). Paul too uses baptizo for Israel’s union with Moses in the cloud and the sea (1 Cor 10:2). Even the LXX in Isaiah 21:4 contributes a detail to this usage: “my heart is deceived; lawlessness engulfs (baptizei) me; my soul stands (ephistemi) before fear.” Dunn has observed this metaphor-making of the bapt-group more realistically than anyone in modern New Testament studies.188

Paul’s usage of the bapt- group thus stands in an established figurative meaning tradition, both outside and within early Christian usage. The appearance of radical meaning change is therefore illusory. Paul’s thought of Christians engulfed or immersed in Christ by the Holy Spirit is continuous with both general and early Christian rhetoric. 187 For examples, cf. Moulton and Milligan, Vocabulary of the Greek Testament (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1949), p. 102; Oepke, “baptizo,” TDNT 1:530. 188 Dunn, Baptism in the Spirit, passim; Romans 1:311-314.

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Paul’s Disclaimer on Baptism

1 Corinthians 1:13-17 makes a disclaimer on a general baptizing policy: Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? I am thankful that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius; lest any one should say that you were baptized in my name. (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.) For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

The language of this remarkable text needs to be examined carefully so that its yield is neither too little nor too much. Generally C. K. Barrett’s comment is appropriate from an ecclesiastical perspective: “On the practical level, it is clear . . . that baptism was an institution to which Paul could sit pretty loose. It is hard to make 1 Corinthians 1:17 mean less than this.”189 How is this looseness of which Barrett speaks to be construed? Paul says, “I did not baptize . . . for . . . Christ sent me not to baptize . . . .” The particularized statement about Corinth enlarges into a general one. From the initial statement (“I did not”) alone one might argue for a mere exception to normal baptizing activity; but the generalized negative pushes local non-baptizing toward a general negative, even if he does not state that he stopped baptizing absolutely, and certainly not that he was ordered to remove baptism. It is often said that Paul only mentions the matter in order to deal with divisions at Corinth.190 There is no question about divisions as the touch point of the text and context as he writes; but in dealing with divisions he speaks of his original nonbaptizing policy at Corinth at a time when the current divisions had not yet developed, thus making statements reflecting his policy before the divisions arose. Rather than speaking only of matters relating to divisions, he speaks on at least three levels of meaning. (1) Some statements in 1:13-17 represent historical events of his first ministry of the gospel at Corinth. These events of his founding work at Corinth are generally represented with a past tense-mood (aorist indicative) to indicate historical reference: “Was Paul crucified for you (vs 13)?” “. . . were you baptized in the name of Paul (vs 13)?” “I did baptize also the household of Stephanus (vs 15).” (2) Some statements in the text are implications of these historical events which people at Corinth could and did draw on to support party interests. These appear with a perfect tense verb to indicate present implications or with subjunctive mood for possibilities of drawing such implications: “Is Christ divided (more exactly, “Has Christ become divided?” vs 13)?” “. . . lest any one should say that you were baptized in my name (vs 16).” (3) The historical points are supplemented by statements of the current situation or policy, and represented with present tense verbs: “. . . there is quarreling among you . . . (vs 11),” “. . . each one of you says, ‘I belong to Paul’ (vs 12),” “Is Christ divided . . . (vs 13)?” “. . . not to baptize but to preach the gospel (vs 17) . . . .” The latter generalization appears last in the section. It is climactic and the broadest

189 C. K. Barrett, From First Adam to Last (London: A & C Black, 1962), p. 107; cf. Fee, First Corinthians, pp. 61-66; little attention is paid to this Pauline “looseness.” 190 So substantially Fee, ibid.

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explanatory statement of principle.191 In fact, the only statement of principle in the whole text about baptizing at Corinth or in general is this final negative one. This seems remote from any way of seeking to normalize water baptizing. Any assessment of the permanent meaning of this passage for the church must face the fact that most of its crucial representations related to baptism are about events of his original mission at Corinth before the present problem of divisions ever arose. Likewise, any assessment which seeks to suppress these pre-division policy and practice statements in lieu of a one-dimensional analysis focused only on the present divisions, is simply abandoning historical exegesis. But it is just these statements of pre-division policy and practice which make Barrett’s characterization poignant. To focus the question as forcefully as possible, why is it that both his original baptizing policy and practice were negative toward baptism, even though he cites a few exceptions? It is clear that as he writes, the several negatives do address the division problem; but why does Paul state his principle of preaching in general with the principled negative toward baptism, even though he can cite two or three exceptions in practice at Corinth? It appears when set in this perspective that the ground fact is: for reasons not clear in context, he did not generally baptize converts during his original mission at Corinth. There are implications. The historical negatives on baptism here show Paul did not function under Jesus’ commission to disciple and baptize converts. The twelve certainly did understand their responsibility this way, and Acts shows them carrying out the order. The historical negatives here also fail to indicate Paul did not baptize because he had another policy on baptizing converts—to leave their baptism to others.192 This possibility is left vague in Acts and is never addressed in the epistles. It is flatly contradicted by this text in 1 Corinthians which, with all its negatives, still indicates Paul did on occasion baptize individuals. Acts’ scenes of Paul baptizing indicate the same thing: when baptism was occasionally done, he apparently did it or supervised it; he did not assign it to others as though distancing himself from it any more than the other apostles.193 He does not even say he preached first as a priority and then regularly baptized converts as though keeping to Jesus’ priorities in his commission to the original apostles. The text rather represents non-baptizing as the practice (with exceptions), and supports with a policy statement which is positive on preaching the gospel but negative about baptizing. Thus practice and policy together are coherent: neither policy nor practice was originally baptistic. Corinthian baptisms have to be explained some other way. Furthermore, if his disclaimer is not genuine, i.e., really general in nature, then Paul has to be viewed as trying to solve a problem duplicitously, i.e., by citing a body of ground facts, both of policy and practice, which are untrue as stated or in implication. But this is exactly what he denies in his correspondence again and again in both Corinthian letters. Rather, his ground facts of both policy and practice represent a general policy of non191 The aorist indicative must certainly be constative: “not sent to baptize” was his situation from the beginning and continued to be; the constative aorist views his ministry as a whole. 192 H. A. W. Meyer, Critical and Exegetical Handbook to the Epistles to the Corinthians, trans. D. Bannernan (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1884), p. 26. 193 Meyer, ibid., p. 27, finds fault with Ruchert for suggesting that the problem is not lessened by reference to others. Perhaps, however, the Corinthians were only naming the most prominent leaders of the mission; yet Apollos seems to have been invoked by one party, though he was not among the most prominent leaders and apparently not a founder.

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baptizing, and this stance forms the basis for denying that baptizing at Corinth originally had any relation to special party interests in this church. For this reason the disclaimer on both baptizing policy and practice is the item of fundamental importance for the Corinthian divisions problem, not merely what Paul can say to quell division issues at the time of writing several months or even years later, as is sometimes claimed. He could not take the tack he does here without a principled diminishing or disclaimer on baptizing as such; and this is exactly the step he takes with both statements: “I baptized none of you except . . . ,” and “Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel.” A practice (or non-practice) is undergirded with a policy; thus coherence is gained with his theological transformations of Jewish ritual. Do Acts’ baptism scenes comport with this view? Luke’s Pauline Baptism Scenes Luke sets Paul in four baptism scenes within Acts 16-19 (16:15; 16:33; 18:8; 19:35), aside, that is, from the scenes where Paul was baptized after his conversion, or where his conversion is alluded to later, 9:18; 22:16. Although Luke never directly represents Paul as baptizing, his presence as the evangelist of the scenes implies that he did conduct the ceremony. Chapter eighteen’s reference to Crispus as the subject of baptism illustrates Paul’s reference to him in 1 Corinthians 1 as one of the several people he baptized there (1 Cor 1:14, 16 with Gaius, and Stephanas’ house). Aside from the superficial impression that Luke might be seeking to distance Paul from baptizing events by failing to represent him as directly performing the event, and indeed representing all of these scenes with passive verbs without agent indicated, there is a consideration which mitigates any normalizing ecclesiastical force in these scenes. All four of these scenes are in the short compass of Acts 16-19, which represent Luke’s special attention to European evangelization (16:6-19:21).194 The section’s interests, however, do spill over into chapters twenty and twenty-one, and perhaps the section itself should be regarded as extending that far. The section also contains a pronounced interest in Paul’s loyalty to Israel, its law, and its institutions, even while working in a chiefly European setting.195 The following expressions of Jewish ritual practice appear in a thickly compacted sequence: he keeps Sabbath; he circumcises Timothy (because of the presence of Jews); he takes a vow of purification which requires an animal offering (21:17-20); he baptizes; he plans his itinerary around the Jewish feast calendar; he seeks a Jewish open air proseuche (place of worship) in apparent absence of a synagogue (Philippi); he preaches monotheism at Athens; he works at his Jewish trade (tentmaking; 18:3); and he attends synagogue. Luke’s notice that Paul circumcised Timothy, “because of the Jews that were in those places, for they all knew that his father was a Greek (16:3),” is a transparency to the meaning of his theme in this section. Luke is clearly showing that Paul was thinking of what he would have to face at Jerusalem from his fellow Jewish Christian nationalists 194 G. Barker, W. Lane, and R. Michaels, The New Testament Speaks (New York: Harper and Row, l969), pp. 294-302; the authors correctly posit discrete geographical interests in Luke’s division of material into six panels. They identify the panel containing chapters 16-19 as European; this identification could be enlarged to include through chapter 20 or into chapter 21. Luke was clearly aware that Paul either baptized or was present at baptisms in Europe; no such scenes are recorded for Acts’ Asian panel (Acts 13:1-16:5). 195 Jervell, Luke and the People of God (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1972), pp. 153-207.

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under the sway of priestly and Pharisaic interests. Indeed, he may well have known that he was headed for repudiation not only by the mass of Jewish Christians, but perhaps even by the original apostles themselves.196 Thus, in chapters 16-19 (21?) Luke pursues Paul’s loyalty to Judaism and especially to the religious if not equally political nationalistic commitments of Judean Christians. Luke knew Paul was going to Jerusalem, so he took pains to symbolize his Jewish loyalty by narrating a series of loyalist rituals (16-19), if not his loyalty to their apostolic leaders as well. Thereby Luke reproduced in narrative what had already been Paul’s own effort in fact. Presumably, Paul’s loyalty to his Jewish origins had relevance to some otherwise unexplained aspect of Theophilos’ concerns—perhaps continuing Jewish agitation over Paul’s role in disrupting Jewish synagogues. Luke indicates that each of the specific baptism scenes does in fact occur against a Jewish backdrop. The first scene, at Philippi, is set in the context of a Sabbath proseuche (place of prayer/worship). This situation is Jewish as commentators note.197 In the second scene the Jewish context is less clear. Paul has returned to the Jewish proseuche at the river (vs 16). The events that follow lead to the earthquake, the opening of the jail, and the conversion and baptism of the jailer. Since the scene is set within the Jewish proseuche, however, we may safely assume that Jewish sensitivities and interests were considered. In the second scene, at Corinth, the context is explicitly the synagogue (18:8). In the third scene, at Ephesus, the event is also Jewish since followers of John the Baptist are the subjects. Considering Luke’s intent to picture Paul as a loyal practicing Jew among Jews, the suggestion presents itself that the reason Paul baptized in these scenes was at least in part the same as the reason he circumcised Timothy.

Acts 16:2-3. “[Timothy] was well spoken of by the brethren at Lystra and Iconium. Paul wanted Timothy to accompany him; and he took him and circumcised him because of the Jews that were in those places . . . .” This is the same Paul who wrote a scathing rejection of circumcision for Gentile believers in Galatians, a book distinguishing what is appropriate for Jewish Christians from what is not appropriate for Gentile believers. In another case, Paul decided on a vow requiring a sacrifice in the Jerusalem temple; this is the same Paul who wrote Romans 6:14: “. . . you are not under law but under grace.” We do not know how far knowledge of the Jewish practices of the Jerusalem New Israel assembly traveled by the time of the Corinthian, Philippian and Ephesian ministries—the sites of Pauline baptism scenes noted above. But it seems very unlikely that Jewish converts were entirely unaware of the New Israel’s baptism practice, their communalism (Acts 2, 4), their adherence to the temple, their Jewish food (Acts 10:12-14) and calendar adherence, and generally their loyalty to the Jewish law and traditional law-keeping practices. In Acts 21:20 James reminded Paul: “You see, brother, how many thousands of Jews believe, and all of them are zealous of the law.” Beside this, Jewish ritual bath practices were

196 S. G. F. Brandon, Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church, 2nd Ed (London: S. P. C. K.., 1957), pp. 126-153. Brandon has an unusually realistic assessment of the deteriorating relationship between Paul and the Judean Christians, including the suggestion that once Paul was distanced from them and jailed at Caesarea for two years, the Pharisee party at least pursued the judaization of Gentile converts full force. This scenario is very likely to have occurred, but it cannot be demonstrated. 197 Cf. Munck, Acts (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1967), p. 161. Haenchen, Acts (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), p. 495; Foakes-Jackson and Lake, Acts of the Apostles, 5 vols, London: Macmillen, 1932) 4:191; Bruce, The Book of the Acts, revised ed (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), pp. 310-311, but with reserve.

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well known around the Mediterranean if only through the widely spread communities of Essenes and other priestly Jews living in the dispersion. Jewish mikvahs (ritual baths) found in both Judea and Galilee dating to the first Christian century attest to the widespread character of Jewish ritual bathing; in fact Jewish law required a ritual bath for full proselyte status among Gentiles who wanted to become Jews, as well as circumcision, a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for temple sacrifice, a promise not to marry outside Judaism, and often the adoption of a Jewish name. From these realities, we may infer that Paul baptized Jewish converts to keep continuity with both their Judaism and with the practices of the Jewish Christian core community at Jerusalem, all together oriented to the New Israel character of Jewish Christian messianic life. So long as the contingent redemption of all Israel through its repentance and acceptance of their Messiah was a possibility—and it appears to have been a possibility throughout Acts—the Jewish practices of Jewish Christians were normal and normative. Indeed, Paul’s own loyalty to his Jewish nation as Luke pictures it in nearly a dozen scenes in Acts 16-21 shows how normal this adherence was for Jewish Christians. With Paul’s Gentile converts it was quite another matter: complete freedom from Jewish practices and law-keeping as Galatians and other texts in the epistles show. For further discussion of Jewish-Christian issues in and around Paul’s mission, see below.

Acts says (18:8) that not only the Jewish synagogue leader Crispus was baptized, but also a number of other believers apparently proximate to the synagogue. Paul’s disclaimer does not sound like this. But one is not likely to err in keeping closely to Paul’s own representation of the situation, although I do not suggest that Luke has falsified the account. Paul’s personal account rather represents his own perspective and that perspective is normative for determining his apostolic policies and practices, and that is the line along which the argument of this essay proceeds. Thus the four baptizing scenes in Acts are no counter to the otherwise consistent picture obtained from the epistles; they are rather entirely harmonious with it, when one adapts his estimate of the situation to that of the actual and potential New Israel of the earliest apostolic ministry. A final detail fills out the pattern of coherence between Paul’s disclaimer and the Acts accounts. In Acts 15 the apostles agree on what is expected of Gentile converts, and not of converts only, but also of Paul and his mission team as the evangelists and founders of Gentile churches. No order or expectation of baptism is mentioned; only the four agreed-to abstentions. If baptism with water had been the one ritual of Jewish or even of the John the Baptist tradition expected of the Gentile mission, one would have thought it would have at least come up for discussion; but it does not. The impression is left that Paul is free to release his converts from this Jewish proselyte ordinance as well. Paul’s disclaimer on baptism harmonizes with all relevant factors. John the Baptist, Jesus’ Disciples, and Jewish Christianity We turn now to examine the meaning of John’s baptism with its background, implications and sequels in the New Testament. Our thesis is that baptism in the nonPauline New Testament milieu was the distinctive, new rite of purification and initiation to symbolize formation of and incorporation into the New Israel—the promised eschatological remnant. This perspective accounts for all non-Pauline baptism texts, except for Hebrews which stands in a special situation. It suggests the explanation that when Paul distanced 112

himself from water baptism for Gentile converts, it was apparently in the conviction that Israel’s eschatological repentance was still possible along side the Gentile mission, as already noted above. That repentance was the doorway to its prophesied renewal and rise as the mediator-nation. The church, which had begun to be formed because of Israel’s unbelief, would best be served by release from this symbol of Jewish eschatological nationalism. Where he did baptize, it was in deference to real or potential Jewish New Israel eschatology interests. It is even possible that he recognized as early as 50-55 A.D. that eschatological nationalism was entangled with Jewish political nationalism moving toward confrontation with Rome, and wished the church to be detached as far as possible from this situation.198 Before seeking to establish the more crucial elements of this perspective, however, it will be well to briefly describe some major resources for understanding Jewish and Jewish Christian thinking as the new faith developed during the apostolic age. Representing the Judaism of the New Testament era is a vast apocalyptic literature with vision upon vision of a terrible future tribulation period, a mighty divine visitation, and the final establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. Israel’s final national victory over its enemies and mediation of God’s will to the nations is the driving force of this hope.199 Jewish synagogue prayers dating almost certainly from the first century, known as The Eighteen Benedictions, The Kaddish, and The Alenu, also pulsate with eschatological nationalist hopes of the coming kingdom and Israel’s final triumph. Of more recent discovery is the sectarian community at Qumran with its famous scrolls and dwellings—a community of priestly-nomistic bearings settled near the northwest shore of the Dead Sea during the two centuries covering the late second temple period and ending with the third quarter of the first Christian century. Its literature reveals nationalist hopes and visions, and the priestly purity it sought to practice in preparation for the end, including ritual baths. The New Testament itself is an important source for our knowledge of Jewish, especially Jewish Christian nationalist hopes. Jesus and the twelve apostles focused their ministry on Israel throughout the Testament, while Paul went to the Gentiles. This division of labor was agreed to as early as Acts 11 (described in Galatians 2:1-10), and is also attested in Paul’s speech to the synagogue congregation at Antioch in Pisidia (Acts 13:30). According to Acts, many Jerusalem priests and Pharisees believed the gospel, and they insisted that all converts, both Jew and Gentile, submit to circumcision and the whole Mosaic law (Acts 6:7; 11:2; 21:20-26). Some speeches of both Peter and Paul mention and embrace Jewish eschatological nationalism (3:12-26; 26:6-8), recognizing that Messiah’s resurrection is the crystallizing, operational event for Israel’s national hopes. Another appreciable group of New Testament texts show Paul was pursued by Pharisaic or priestly (or both) Jewish Christian nationalists who believed he had no authority for his Gentile mission (1 Thes 2:14-16) or for their release from the law (Acts 15:1-2, 5). They sought to 198 Brandon, Fall of Jerusalem, discusses the stake of Judean Christians in the anti-Roman revolution that led to the fall of Jerusalem and the temple in the war of 67-72 A.D. 199 Now exhibited in a new complete edition in English translation by J. H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983-1985); some of this literature like the Sibylline Oracles, Bks I-IV, exhibits a sequence of world empires leading to the end and refers to ritual bath cleansing as preparation for avoiding the judgment leading to the establishment of God’s rule. Cf Sibylline Oracles 1:340; 4:165, and note e2, vol 1:388. Sibylline Oracles 4 is almost certainly Jewish in origin and pictures whole-body river baptisms as preparatory for forgiveness and safety in the coming judgment and participation in the resurrection of the righteous (4:165).

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obstruct his mission, undermine his authority, and undo his freedom-from-the-law policy by enticing his converts into circumcision and law-keeping. Certainly there were variations within Jewish Christian belief. But in general, Jewish Christians and the original apostles continue their commitment to eschatological nationalism and the fullness of the Mosaic institutions in preparation for realization of these hopes. Finally, Jewish Christianity produced a body of its own literature, some of which reached New Testament canonical inclusion (James, The Petrine Epistles, The Johannine Epistles, Hebrews, Jude, Revelation),200 while most did not. Several sectrarian books are known including the Gospel of the Hebrews and the Clementine Recognitions. Another group includes those nationalistic Jewish apocalypses mentioned above which have received Christian additions (Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs; Sibylline Oracles, Bks I-II, VIII; 4 Ezra). Still another group among the apostolic fathers was less nationalistic and more fully used by Christians generally (The Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas). The more suppressed, sectarian, and nationalistic of these writings tended to several distinctive emphases: (1) Jerusalem as the mother church; (2) the original twelve apostles as the only true apostles; (3) anti-Pauline and anti-Gentile mission; (4) adherence to the Mosaic Law;201 and (5) preference of certain non-Pauline titles of Christ including some which were angelomorphic (Michael: Angel of the Lord), prophetic (the Prophet), foundationalistic (Firstborn: Founder), or messianic (Servant, Son of David; King of Israel).202 It appears safe to assume that Jewish Christianity kept to distinctive views and practices on three major themes: its eschatological nationalism, its Christology, and its Mosaism, and that in all three elements lay nuances and details related to its continued adherence to that baptism begun by John and continued by Jesus and the disciples. We return now to more specific details of this development. Baptism at Qumran With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls shortly after the end of World War II, the realization gradually dawned that John’s baptism can be better understood against the backdrop of the Qumran community and its remarkable literary and collecting activity— the scrolls hidden in the caves near Khirbet Qumran.203 I shall assume what is a widely though not universally accepted commonplace in recent Christian origins studies, that some relation existed between John and Qumran,204 even though we may not be able to specify all details of difference at the point when John went his own way. The published and translated scroll library now contains whole manuscripts of some and many fragments 200 R. Longenecker, The Christology of Earliest Jewish Christianity, Studies in Biblical Theology, Second Series, No. 17 (Naperville IL: Allenson, 1970), p. 18. 201 G. Luedemann, Opposition to Paul in Jewish Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989). 202 So Brandon, Fall of Jerusalem, pp. 78-87; Longenecker, Christology of Early Jewish Christianity. 203 For an integrative treatment of scrolls, community and caves, see H. Stegemann, The Library of Qumran (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). 204 W. Brownlee, “John the Baptist in the New Light of the Ancient Scrolls,” in The Scrolls and the New Testament, Ed K. Stendahl (New York: Harper and Row, l957), pp. 33-53; Brownlee coordinates many parallel details between John the Baptist and Qumran; the case for overlap seems compelling.

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of scores of literary works in addition to all or portions of most Old Testament books. Among these extra-biblical works, two documents published early on—The Manual of Discipline and The Zadokite Document—contain baptismal passages, including, among the very recently published materials, fragments of a Baptismal Liturgy/Hymn. Together with several baptismal tanks interlinked with the water supply and drainage system excavated at Qumran, these baptismal passages provide a realistic perspective from which to understand the context of John’s baptism. We begin then, where henceforth all studies of baptism in the New Testament must begin—with Qumran.205 The following are deteriorated fragments of the Baptismal Hymn. Frag. 2 col. I. 1 [ . . . he will reply] and will say: Blessed are 2 [ . . . ] the pure ones of the epoch of 3 your light [ . . . ] to atone for us 4 according to your will [ . . . ] the pure ones in your presence 5 . . . [ . . . ] in every word 6 [ . . . ] to purify before 7 [ . . . ] you have made us Frag. 2 col. II. 1 and you will purify him . . . for your ho[ly] laws [ . . .] 2 for the first, and third and the six[th . . .] 3 in the truth of your covenant [ . . . ] 4 to purify from impurity of [ . . . ] 5 And afterwards he will enter the water [ . . . ] 6 And he will reply and say: Blessed are you [ . . . ] 7 because what issues from your mouth [ . . . ] 8 men Frag. 7 col. II. 1 his cloth[es] and in the water [ . . . ] 2 [ . . . ] he will bless [ . . . ] 3 Israel which [ . . . ] 4 before from all [ . . . ] 5 you have forsaken [ . . . ] Frag. 10. 1 the soul [ . . . ] 2 he is [ . . . ] 3 for you as a pu[re] people [ . . . ] 4 And I, too, . . . [ . . . ] 5 today, when [ . . . ] 6 in the periods of purification [ . . . ] 7 of the community. Blank [ . . . ] 8 During the purifications of Israel not [ . . . ] 9 And it will happen on the day of [ . . . ] 10 a woman, and she will give thanks [ . . . ] 11 [ . . . ] . . . [ . . . ] Frag. 12. 1 for you have made the [ . . . ] 2 your [w]ill, to purify in your presence [ . . . ] 3 and he established for him a glorious regulation [ . . . ] 4 to be in purity [ . . . ] 5 and he will wash in water, and he will be [pure . . . ] 6 And afterwards he will come out of the [water . . . ] 7 purifying his people with the water which washes [ . . . ] 8 [And he will be] the second in his position, and he will re[ply and will say: Blessed are you . . . ] 9 [ . . . ] your purification in the glory of [ . . . ] 10 [ . . . ] . . . ]

Granting the fragmentariness of the material, much may be learned from its phraseology. (1) The Hymn is concerned with purification; forms of the terms pure and clean occur in several lines. To these may be added other related terms such as atone, holiness and law. (2) The goal is a purified Israel living within God’s covenant. Terms like Israel, covenant, community, people, you and your, we and us (referring to Israel) occur several times. (3) That ritual washing is involved is shown by the clear references to water. (4) The way these terms combine also attests to the idea of national purification: “atone for us,” “purify from impurity,” “purifications of Israel,” and “purifying his people with the water which washes.” The term “enter the water” (Frag. 2 col. II) represents the larger 205 Frag. refers to fragment numbers; col. refers to column numbers; Arabic numbers refer to lines. The translations are from F. G. Martinez, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated: The Qumran Texts in English. 2nd Ed (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992).

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purified Israel referred to in Frag. 12. Their baptismal purity appears to be ceremonial and symbolic. To gain a sense of realism, we may call this a baptism of national purification, not yet functional for the whole nation, but represented in proxy by the Qumran priests. It is well-known that the Qumran leaders thought of their community as a purified eschatological Israel—the remnant forming a true Israel in advance of the impending eschatological war.206 Gaster’s topical concordance of terms used by the community for itself and other Jews shows their “true Israel” thinking about themselves.207 They call themselves “the Congregation,” “the Elect,” “those in the lot of God,” “Sons of Light,” and “Sons of Truth.” Officials are called by terms like “Prince of the Congregation” and “Overseer of all the Camps.” In their priestly uniqueness, they refer to themselves with terms like “the sons of Zadok” or “the priest anointed for war.” Their organization was based on Israel in the wilderness: three priests head the community; “twelve perfect men” are its leaders; priests and levites are present; they have judges, inspectors, expositors, instructors, and overseers. In short, the community makes up—by its own lights at least— the real, fulfillment era, latter day Israel, and baptism symbolizes its pure status. More insight is gained form baptismal passages in The Manual of Discipline and The Zadokite Document. These passages make quite clear that the Qumran ritual washing is only symbolic of purity and has no real purifying power in its own right. It is worthwhile to reproduce the relevant material. Manual of Discipline 3:4-12. Anyone who refuses to enter the (ideal) society of God and persists in walking in the stubbornness of his heart shall not be admitted to this community of God’s truth . . . (he) cannot be reckoned with the upright . . . and ‘there are stains on his repentance’ . . . . He cannot be cleansed by mere ceremonies of atonement, nor cleansed by any waters of ablution, nor sanctified by immersion in lakes or rivers, nor purified by any bath . . . Only by the submission of his soul to all the ordinances of God can his flesh be made clean. Only thus can it really be sprinkled with waters of ablution. . . . and then indeed will he be admitted to the covenant of the community forever. Manual of Discipline 5:7-20. Everyone who is admitted to the formal organization of the community is to enter into a covenant of God in the presence of all fellow-volunteers in the cause and to commit himself by a binding oath to return with all his heart and soul to the commandments of the law of Moses . . . . No one is to go into water in order to attain the purity of holy men. For men cannot be purified except they repent their evil. Zadokite Document 10:10-13. Now concerning purification by water. No one is to bathe in dirty water or in water which is too scant to fill a pail (?). No man is to purify himself with water drawn in a vessel or in a rock-pool where there is insufficient to fill a pail (?). If an unclean person comes in contact with such water, he merely renders it unclean; and the same is true of water drawn in a vessel. 208



Here we learn more about Qumran baptism(s). (1) Baptism or ritual washing to

206 G. Hasel, “Remnant,” IDB 5:735-736, with a full collection of the remnant terminology, especially from the Damascus Document (CD), showing how the Qumran sectarians claimed Old Testament language about Israel exclusively for themselves; F. Cross, “The Historical Context of the Scrolls,” in Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, Ed H. Shanks (New York: Random House, 1992), pp. 24, 26. 207 T. H. Gaster, The Dead Sea Scriptures (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1976), pp. 548-567. 208 Translation from Gaster, The Dead Sea Scriptures, pp. 47-48.

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symbolize purification was among the first acts of entering the community, perhaps the first. (2) Ablutions are non-sacramental. All references emphasize that this bath cannot change the heart or ensure right status with either God or the community; only repentance can purify. (3) If “pail” is the correct translation, it implies that pouring or effusion was sufficient if more water was unavailable. The normal procedure, however, seems to have been entire immersion; at least some tanks at Qumran served this end.209 Ritual washings were thus an external symbol of prior purity of heart. Although the term “Israel” does not appear here as it does in the 4Q414 fragments above, the assumption is that upon entering the community, the entrant joins the purified end-time Israel in advance of the impending final war and messianic age. The Old Testament Background In discussing the possibility (which he rejects) that John the Baptist adopted Jewish proselyte baptism, G. R. Beasley-Murray observes correctly that John recognized in the newer use of washings among Jewish groups like Essenes (viz. Qumran) a means whereby the Old Testament predictions of cleansing in the last day, prior to the great Messianic purgation, should be fulfilled.210 In general and by common agreement of many scholars, this is the right way to gain perspective on the baptism of John. The line of thought showing here begins in the Old Testament with Israel washing its clothes to consecrate itself for God’s appearance at Sinai (Ex 19:14)—a national cleansing-before-revelation. Subsequently, priests were washed (Ex 29:4; Lev 8:6), Levites were washed (Numbers 8:7), and entrails of sacrifices were washed (Lev 1:9). Washing occurred after bodily discharges (Lev 15) and in connection with mildew contamination (Lev 13:47-58). Even when washing with water was limited to specific priestly people or objects, the implication was always national purity. Israel’s prophetic leadership never let the nation forget that Yahweh’s design was always that Israel become a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Ex 19:6).” The prophets use priestly resources in sketching their picture of Israel’s messianic future. Again it is worthwhile to assemble the relevant texts, all from clearly eschatological sections of the prophets: Isaiah 1:16. Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight! Stop doing wrong, learn to do right! Isaiah 4:4. The Lord will wash away the filth of the women of Zion; he will cleanse the bloodstains from Jerusalem by a spirit of judgment and a spirit of fire. Isaiah 44:3-4. For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I 209 Y. Hirschfeld, Qumran in Context (Peabody MA: Hendrickson, 2004), pp. 79-82, discusses and illustrates the pools and ritual baths (mikvaoth) at Qumran. There is controversy in Qumran studies as to which pools were for water storage and which were ritual baths. 210 G. R. Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973), p. 43. Beasley-Murray has thoroughly reviewed the relevant recent literature on the subject of baptism; this discussion generally follows his, although with major differences at certain key points. He wrote, however, before many long-withheld Dead Sea Scroll fragments became available around 1990.

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will pour out my Spirit on your offspring, and my blessing on your descendants. They will spring up like grass in a meadow, like poplar trees by flowing streams. Jeremiah 4:14. O Jerusalem, wash the evil from your heart and be saved. How long will you harbor wicked thoughts? Ezekiel 36:25. I will sprinkle clean water on you and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. Zechariah 13:1. On that day a fountain will be opened to the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and impurity.211

In an atmosphere of national renewal like that of Qumran and of John the Baptist and Jesus, these images were directive. Both movements, no matter how they differed in their conception of where the true Israel might be found or how it was to be formed, were guided by the notion of an all-Israel purification—a notion no doubt reinforced by the national ideology of a kingdom of priests. Both movements, or rather the two movements together, sought to coordinate the language, the symbol and the reality. Both recognized that symbol was no substitute for reality, but also that it was, with the reality, part of the prophetic promise. National Renewal and Remnant Ideas in John the Baptist and Jesus The Bible dictionary articles on “remnant” are agreed that the remnant idea occurs in John the Baptist and Jesus.212 Formation of a remnant responding to the kingdom proclamation of John and Jesus occurs, not in circles of rigid particularism like that of the Qumran sect, but as an open invitation to all Israel to repent in the kingdom’s presence.213 The mission of both John and Jesus was focused on eschatological nationalism.214 Luke’s origins narrative pulsates with national hope: John will “turn many of the sons of Israel . . . to the Lord their God (Luke 1:16)”; his work will be “to make ready for the Lord a people prepared (1:17, NIV)”; of Jesus, Gabriel said

211 Texts are assembled here from NIV, and discussed as background in ibid. pp. 40-43 in connection with the issue of proselyte baptism as context for John’s baptism. 212 Hasel, “Remnant”; F. F. Bruce, “Israel of God,” NBD, pp. 588-589; Bruce is clearest and most specific in identifying the remnant concepts in the gospel narratives of John the Baptist; L. V. Meyer, “Remnant,” ABD 4:671; also the widely cited review article by B. Meyer, “Jesus and the Remnant of Israel,” JBL 84 (1965):123-130. See also G. Ladd, Theology of the New Testament, Rev Ed (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), pp. 106-107. 213 B. Meyer, “Jesus and the Remnant,” p. 128 214 D. Mendels, The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism (New York: Doubleday, 1992). Mendels does not include baptism in his delineation of symbols of Jewish nationalism since he is chiefly tracking the symbols of political nationalism: temple, kingship, army, and land. Eschatological nationalism as I use it here denotes hope of Israel’s end-time restoration through divine intervention. Its form is spiritual repentance from waywardness and evil in accordance with the prophetic preaching, and related apocalyptic events not primarily of human revolutionary origin.

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He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end (1:32-33).

Mary’s Magnificat is no isolated personal blessing. The larger meaning of her pregnancy is that “He has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his posterity for ever (1:54-55).” John’s father Zechariah, filled with the Holy Spirit, voices a remarkable song of national latter day hope: Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people, and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all who hate us; to perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant, the oath which he swore to our father Abraham, to grant us that we, being delivered from our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all the days of our life (1:68-75) . . .

Simeon too was “looking for the consolation of Israel (2:25),” and saw the end of his life converging with the messianic age: . . . for mine eyes have seen thy salvation which thou hast prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to thy people Israel (2:30-32).

Anna the prophetess also spoke of Christ to all “who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem (2:38).”215 Within this spiritual and universalistic nationalism, however, is a clear remnant theme. John the Baptist insists that descent from Abraham is valueless in itself,216 and that God can generate new sons of Abraham even from Judea’s rocky wilderness (Matt 3:9).217 He prophesied that Christ would clear his threshing floor (diakatharizo, cleanse), gathering 215 Jerusalem in such a text is an inclusive symbol of Israel as a whole; in contexts with this sense Jerusalem and Israel are more or less interchangeable (cf. also e.g., Luke 13:34-35; Matt 23:37-39. This same coordination occurs in the early chapters of Acts where the apostles apparently confine their mission for more than a year to Jerusalem as instructed (Luke 24:47), and continue to expound the messianic salvation to Israel (Acts 1:6; 2:14, 36; 3:12, 17-26; 5:31; 7:2, 51-53; 8:1). 216 Bruce, “Remnant.” 217 L. V. Meyer, “Remnant”; O. Betz, “Was John the Baptist an Essene?” in Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, p. 211, thinks John’s reference to “stones” refers to the Qumran community’s self-understanding as the true temple, i.e., the true stones of God.

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his wheat into the granary and burning up the chaff (Matt 3:12; Luke 3:17).218 Use of such Qumran-like purification imagery indicates that John knows a remnant is forming in response to his own and Messiah’s proclamation of the kingdom. While both the presence and nature of the remnant idea in Jesus’ teaching are debated, B. Meyer has compellingly shown that recognition of the motif in Jesus’ relations with his disciples is unavoidable.219 All studies of the issue recognize that Jesus’ term “little flock (Luke 12:32)” for his disciples is remnant language. Although the word “remnant” is absent in the gospels, the idea is expressed in several terms drawn from Old Testament remnant language: sheep, the few, the chosen, the poor, the little ones—all such terms showing the presence of remnant thinking.220 Jesus speaks of the wide gate to destruction which many find, while only a “few” find the narrow gate to life (Matt 7:13-14). Remnant ideas also show in the parables of Matthew 13: seed is sown everywhere (“universalism”), but weeds and rocks choke most of it, and weeds and wheat grow together until the judgment sorts them out. Perhaps the most impressive testimony to the remnant as the New Israel is a series of parables in Matthew 21:28-22:14. In the center parable among three (21:33-46), Jesus promises to transfer the kingdom’s benefits to the “other (allois, 21:41) . . . nation (ethnei [singular], 21:43)” which “does” its fruit. The preceding parable of the two sons identifies the “others” as those who responded to John and himself (21:32). The larger section of Matthew 19-22 makes perfectly clear just who this remnant is: among its people are the unmarried (19:1-12), the children (19:13-15), eleventh-hour believers (20:1-16), servantmartyrs (20:20-28), the blind (20:29-34), the lame (21:14), prostitutes and tax-collectors (21:32), and those gathered from the “exits of the roads (22:9, not “thoroughfares” as RSV)”—the outcasts, the misfits, and the marginalized, at least by the Pharisees’ ways of measuring. Such are the new people of God, Messiah’s disciples, the new “nation.” Why does this remnant receive John and later the disciples’ washing? John’s baptism was a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins (Luke 3:3).” Matthew (3:2) represents John as preaching “repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” and notes that those submitting to his baptism came “confessing their sins.” This combination of concepts is an extended Qumran baptism-with-repentance. New elements have been added with growth of the messianic movement beginning with John: the promised messianic kingdom has actually entered Israel’s history of salvation to call for repentance and faith. From a later perspective on John, Jesus says John came “to you (Israel) in the way of righteousness” to which the appropriate responses were repentance and faith (Matt 21:32).221 When Jesus himself was baptized by John, he said, “it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness (Matt 3:15).” While there is much discussion about this language, it seems clear enough that John the Baptist represented the revelation of messianic righteousness promised as salvation most notably in Isaiah 40-66. The ground-blessing of the new righteousness is forgiveness of sins upon repentance; but this righteousness is God’s righteousness—his gift to be received in faith. Since the gift is God’s righteousness, it represents real cleansing and 218 Hasel, “Remnant.” 219 B. Meyer, “Jesus and the Remnant.” 220 Hasel, “Remnant,” has the best collection of the terminology; cf. also the list of remnant images gathered by B. Meyer, “Jesus and the Remnant,” p. 129-130. 221 Betz, “Was John the Baptist an Essene?” p. 213; Betz stresses the sequence: repent, confess, then be baptized which is certainly true to the Qumran sense of order. Despite initial appearance, Acts 2:38 does not contradict this sequence.

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purification just as was already conceived in the Qumran Baptismal Hymn. John’s baptism was the sign of personal entry into eschatological righteousness, and the formation thereby of a New Israel from the Old. The baptism of Jesus marks the transition from the work of the Forerunner to the actual Bearer of God’s righteousness. These themes of eschatological nationalism are epitomized in three texts of the Baptist scenes in John 1: 1:31. . . . for this I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel. 1:47. Jesus saw Nathaniel coming to him and said of him, ‘Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile.’ 1:49. Nathanael answered him, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! Israel.’

You are the king of

With these developments, the provisions for a New Israel had advanced quite beyond those of Qumran. The framework for baptism changed with the advancing history of redemption. John and Jesus represent the initial appearance of the messianic kingdom. The righteousness/salvation promised in Isaiah 40-66 is available for forming the promised eschatological Israel. A crisis of repentance is upon Israel in light of the gift of a once-forall forgiveness of sins.222 Despite the fully universalistic implications of these advances in the history of salvation (the Lukan origins stories even note the Gentiles), John and Jesus do not move beyond formation of a New Israel. The context is limited to eschatological Jewish nationalism which has the promised renewal of Israel as its goal after the fashion of Old Testament promises. It is clear that the gospels and the early chapters of Acts envision the priority of a renewed Israel practicing the fullness of its national law and distinctive ritual as a “kingdom of priests.” Just as cleansing with water-initiated priestly consecration in the Old Testament and at Qumran, so the dawning day of priestly nationhood was furnished with a washing of purification. In Romans 9-11, which is contemporary with Acts 20, Paul actually uses the term “remnant (leimma)” for the repentant portion of ethnic Israel.223 The same remnant ideas found in the gospels appear in Romans in new forms: 2:28-29. For he is not a real Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. He is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart, spiritual and not literal. 9:6-7. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his descendants . . . .

These texts, in an epistle reflective of the Jewish dilemma over the appearance of Messiah, show that remnant ideas, at least in biblical language, are relevant only to national Israel, since Paul does not use this terminology for the church. Even more important from a historical perspective is the fact that a living remnant still survives in both reality and 222 Betz, ibid. 223 “Remnant” is used by Paul only of believing Israel; it is not applied to the church. It is among a group of terms which, despite some other Israel language applied to the church (flock, elect), are reserved discretely for Israel, perhaps because so fraught with spiritual/nationalist overtones: remnant, vineyard, Israel (threshing floor?).

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conception as late as Acts 20 (the time of the letter to the Romans). Thus all concepts and practices of a potentially or actually renewed Israel continue at least this far into the apostolic age. That one should find the earlier elements of eschatological nationalism persisting through the history of Acts, even in parallel or contact with the Gentile Mission should not be any surprise: history does not keep things as separate as does human thinking. Admittedly, it is difficult for us to envision this kind of situation. But Romans indicates that Paul continued to hope and work for the conversion of Israel in the short term, while believing on any reckoning that its conversion would eventually occur in the longer term. Jesus’ commission to make disciples of all nations includes baptism. Matthew and Luke’s baptism narratives at the beginning of the story are much more detailed than Mark’s. Both note changes in thinking and behavior along with forgiveness and repentance. Mark’s long ending (16:9-20) was not part of the original Mark and should not be included in any discussion of commissions, baptism, or demonstrative charismatic gifts. John has no “great commission.” Matthew begins the commission with “when you go.” It is possible that in Aramaic, Jesus intended a command—“go.” But as written in Greek, it is a circumstantial participle before a command—“when you go, make disciples.” The participle is most likely temporal, and so leaves the timing undefined—“when you go.” “The nations” no doubt included Israel with the Gentiles, as many commentators believe, and as the subsequent history and self-understanding of the twelve apostles in Acts shows.224 The world mission as conceived here permits an Israel-first sequence, though this is not specified. Yet Israel-first is what the twelve apostles understood and how they conducted their mission in Acts. If these simple grammatical indicators and the larger history of apostolic work may be allowed to guide our understanding, then it appears the world mission command, including baptism, envisions inclusion of Gentiles/nations within the (as yet only potential) growth of the New Israel. Jesus’ included some Gentiles within the initial New Israel of his ministry, just as some were always included in the Old Israel. Their token or symbolic inclusion is the guide to this expectation. In addition, Jesus’ mission and apocalyptic sayings in Matthew 10:16-23 and 24:14 together indicate mission activity among Gentiles in some form, even while concentrating their work on Israel (cf. 10:17, 23). This perspective is sustained by the original twelve apostles throughout the expansion of Christianity in Acts, at least as far as Luke’s purview is concerned. The baptism commission thus belongs to the continuing formation of the New Israel in the anticipated work of the apostles. The commission projects the inclusion of Gentiles in that development. Baptism in the commission is that of John and Jesus—the symbol of inclusion and incorporation in the New, purified Israel. The New Israel grew in meaning, however, by the atonement and resurrection of Messiah, and was about to be further enlarged by the coming of the Spirit. Baptism in Acts Luke’s account of apostolic history bears marks of a certain reserve about the early Christian practice of baptism. Of the 20 uses of the bapt- word group, only John the Baptist and Philip are actually said to have performed baptism as represented by an active or passive voice form of baptize (1:5; 11:16; 19:4). No original apostle is directly 224 R. Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on His Handbook for a Mixed Church under Persecution nd 2 ed (Grand Rapidsd: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 596.

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represented as performing baptisms, not even Peter, although he is certainly close by. The only exception is Philip with the Ethiopian eunuch, and this baptism is at the eunuch’s initiation, not Philip’s (8:36). Furthermore, sixteen of the twenty references to baptism use the verb baptizo in passive, and without note of the agent—a pattern which appears to represent caution on Luke’s part over presenting apostles as baptizers. Another indication of Luke’s reserve is that despite 20 appearances of the bapt- word group, its uses are clustered in five baptismal scenes while isolated baptismal scenes with one use of the verb or noun range as follows: there are two isolated references to Paul’s baptism (9:18; 22:16); three references to John the Baptist (1:5; 11:16; 19:4); one isolated reference to disciples of John the Baptist having been baptized (19:3); two references to the baptism of the Holy Spirit (1:5; 11:16); and three isolated Pauline baptizing scenes (16:15, 33; 18:8), two of which are at Philippi, and one at Corinth; a fourth is with John the Baptist’s disciples at Ephesus. Compared to such Lukan priorities as faith (pisteuo, 33x) or the Spirit (pneuma, 60x), this usage pattern is on the light side. In all scenes Luke notes a Jewish presence or Jewish context. On the other side, important advances of the gospel into the Roman world occur without notice of any baptisms at all: first missionary tour into Asia, chs 13-14; and important Gentile evangelization sites like Thessalonica (cf. 1 Thess 1-2), Athens (17:1634), and Ephesus (19:8-41).225 Most striking is the fact that Luke detaches the work of the Spirit from baptism, even in scenes where they appear together. There is no fixed order: the Spirit may descend after (longer or shorter term) or before baptism, or without any regard to baptism. The reason may be that Luke took literally the Baptist prophecy that the time would come when water baptism would be displaced by that of the Spirit; Luke in fact cites this shift in two programmatic-like pronouncements by Jesus and Peter respectively (1:5 by Jesus; 11:16 by Peter): John indeed baptized with water; but you shall be baptized in the Holy Spirit.226 This articulation comes close to marginalizing water baptism. Indeed, this picture should give pause to any normalization of water baptism based on Acts. Fee and Stuart’s cautions about using Acts as a guide to normalizing any church practice are appropriate here as well.227 The question now arises of whether the same eschatological nationalism as governed John the Baptist’s purified remnant activity plays any part in the continuation of baptism in Acts. The tendency of Acts to see the coming of the Spirit, as overshadowing, if not supplanting water baptism, recalls Qumran cessation thought as characterized by O. Betz: According to the Gospels, John the Baptist announced the coming of a “Stronger One” who would baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire (Mark 1:7-8). The Qumran community had a similar expectation: they anticipated that their ritual washings would be superseded with a purification by the Holy Spirit at the end of time. God himself will pour 225 This statement is exclusive of the disciples of John the Baptist of 19:1-7; it refers to Paul’s newconverts from synagogue or open-air preaching over a three-year period. 226 Dunn, Baptism in the Holy Spirit, makes this point his basic thesis: the work of the Spirit in initiation-conversion is the real and only initiatory work of the Holy Spirit. The work of the Holy Spirit is what makes people Christians: there is no second work as in Pentecostalism, nor an intrinsic work as in sacramentalism. Dunn explains continuation of water baptism, which he sometimes plays down very strongly, as the normative expression of the initiation-conversion work of the Spirit. He does not explain how this fits. 227 G. Fee and D. Stuart, How to Study the Bible for All Its Worth. 2nd ed (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1993), pp. 94-112.

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his Spirit like water from heaven and remove the spirit of perversion from the hearts of his chosen people. Then they would receive the “knowledge of the Most High and all the glory of Adam” (Manual of Discipline 4:20-22).228

There is evidence that the eschatological nationalism and remnant formation of the gospels continues in Acts. We limit ourselves to those texts which occur before the beginning of Paul’s mission work, highlighting with italics significant thematic concepts. Act 1:6. Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? Acts 2:38-40. Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit . . . . For the promise is to you and to your children and to all that are far off,229 every one whom the Lord our God calls to him . . . . Save yourselves from this crooked generation. Acts 3:17-23. And now, brethren (Jerusalem Jews) . . . Repent . . . and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord . . . . Moses said, ‘the Lord God will raise up for you a prophet . . . You shall listen to him in whatever he tells you. And it shall be that every soul that does not listen to that prophet shall be destroyed from the people.’ Acts 5:30-31. (Peter) The God of our fathers raised Jesus whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses of these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him. Acts 7:51. You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. Acts 10:36-43. (Peter to Cornelius the Gentile centurion) You know the word which he sent to Israel, preaching good news of peace by Jesus Christ . . . He (Jesus) commanded us (disciples) to preach to the people230 . . . To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name . . . the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word . . . Can anyone forbid water for baptizing these people . . . ?

No text here states all the New Israel remnant ideas in a single formulation. But the major elements of spiritual eschatological nationalism appear in the texts: the mission to Israel; separation of believing from the unbelieving Israel; repentance as the way of receiving salvation; judgment and destruction of rebellious Israel; forgiveness of sins as the initial blessing of the messianic era; baptism of believers; future restoration of the nation and its kingdom through the enlargement of the remnant; advance to Jesus as the fulfillment of John the Baptist’s work (“ in his name”); and notes of the presence, gifts and works of the Spirit. In the Pauline baptismal scenes in Acts 16-19, the baptisms are normally qualified by a Jewish presence or context as already noted, and the scenes equally form part of 228 Betz, “Was John the Baptist an Essene?,” pp. 209-210. 229 Commentators differ on whether “far off” refers to the Gentiles waiting for the soon-to-come Christian world mission, or to the dispersion of Israel. The latter is more realistic both to the source in Isaiah (57:19) and Peter’s mission-to-Israel commitments (Gal 2:1-10); cf. Munck, Acts, pp. 20-21. 230 Here too the reference of “people (Gr laos)” is to Israel, cf. Munck, Acts, p. 94.

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Luke’s interest in showing Paul to be thoroughly loyal to his Jewish national commitments when Jews are present. Chapters 16-19 show clearly that he circumcises, takes Jewish ritual vows, plans his movements by the Jewish festival calendar, attends Jewish festivals, worships in the temple, and offers sacrifices—commitments shared by thousands of both Diaspora and Judean Jews including Jewish Christians;231 he is present at two baptizing scenes, observing, if not supporting the New Israel initiation symbol, and even on occasion himself conducting if not actually performing the baptism of Jewish converts to the faith. Is there evidence that Paul was simply carrying out the Jewish remnant’s expectations in the framework of eschatological nationalism—the hoped-for salvation, restoration, and messianic kingdom of Israel, including the baptism introduced by John and its implications? Several considerations point to an affirmative. First, Luke placed the manifold Jewishness of Paul’s activities in Acts 16-19 as prelude to Paul’s final visit to Jerusalem and the defense speeches aimed at countering antiIsrael and anti-law charges against himself. In this picture, Luke is no doubt replicating in the narrative what Paul also purposed: an accumulated body of actions showing his loyalty to Israel, especially the New Israel led by priests, scribes, and Pharisees newly converted to faith in Christ.232 Luke exhibits continuity in Paul’s intense Jewishness by presenting his self-defense against Jewish disloyalty and subversion charges in the defense speeches of Acts 21-26.233 His baptism (9:18; 22:16) also shows his participation in the remnant’s initiation rite at his conversion; “. . . be baptized and wash away your sins” is probably symbolic in a similar way to like such formulae in the Dead Sea Scrolls washing texts where symbol and reality simply merge in description, but not in a baptismal regeneration sense. A larger pattern of clear New Testament baptismal regeneration texts would be needed to take it in the latter sense. Secondly, a group of texts from Acts 21-26 shows a rigorous commitment to the Jewish-Christian nationalist remnant and its Jewish interests to which Paul does not withdraw or object: Acts 21:20ff. (James to Paul upon arrival at Jerusalem) ‘You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed; they are all zealous for the law, and they have been told about you that you teach all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or observe the customs . . . take these men and purify yourself . . . Thus all will know . . . that you yourself live in observance of the law’ . . . Paul took the men and purified himself with them.

231 Nothing shows the commitments of even diaspora Jews to Jewish nationalism any more fully than the Jewish Sibylline Oracles; cf. J. Collins in Charlesworth, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 1:317372. Oracles I-V, XI, XIII-XIV are Jewish; Oracles VI-X are Christian; only Oracles I-V are quite certainly pre-Christian or at least contemporary with the first Christian century, and even these have some Christian interpolations 232 Paul reviews his adaptability to both Gentiles and Israel in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23, probably under stress from Corinthian critics. 233 Jervell, Luke and the People of God, pp. 153-177; Jervell sees clearly the Jewish practice and self-defense motifs of these latter chapters of Acts. He is wrong, however, in arguing that the restored Israel has already been accomplished in the mass conversions in the early chapters of Acts so that the Gentile mission simply fulfills the Old Testament order, Israel first and then the Gentiles. Luke does not regard Israel as converted simply because he mentions the large number of Jews who believed.

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Acts 23:6-9. Paul . . . cried out in the council, ‘Brethren, I am a Pharisee, the son of Pharisees; with respect to the hope and the resurrection of the dead, I am on trial’ . . . some of the scribes of the Pharisees’ party stood up and contended, ‘We find nothing wrong in this man.’ Acts 24:14ff. (before Felix) ‘. . . But this I admit to you, that according to the Way, which they call a sect, I worship the God of our fathers, believing everything laid down by the law or written in the prophets, having a hope in God which these themselves accept, that there will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust . . . . Now after some years I came to bring to my nation alms and offerings.’ Acts 26:5-8. (Paul to Agrippa) ‘ . . . according to the strictest party of our religion I have lived as a Pharisee. And now I stand here on trial for hope in the promise made by God to our fathers, to which our twelve tribes hope to attain, as they earnestly worship night and day. And for this hope I am accused by Jews, O king! Why is it thought incredible by any of you that God raises the dead?’

These notices in Acts involve Jewish-nationalist loyalty interests. Climaxing the Jewish-Christian remnant motifs of chapters 16-19, Luke depicts Paul as thoroughly committed in both attitude and action to the nationalist religious concerns of the New Israel remnant. Romans 9-11 and Acts on the whole together show that Paul embraces Israel’s national eschatology, as it has now become focused on resurrection. One should not take Paul/Luke in these texts to mean that everything has now been reduced to Jesus’ resurrection; rather that Jesus’ resurrection is the signal event in the forward movement of the Jewish hope and has itself become one of several firstfruits of that hope. Thus the baptismal scenes of Acts 16-19 belong to this work-up of events exhibiting loyalty to Israel—especially to the already redeemed nationalist remnant and its baptismal initiation rite begun with John the Baptist. Did Paul baptize some Gentiles in these scenes at Corinth and Philippi? No text says so. Lydia was probably a Gentile, but like Cornelius “a worshipper of God,”—a Jewish proselyte or half-proselyte—as Luke points out (Acts 16:14). The Philippian jailor could have been a Gentile, but Luke specifies no ethnic origin. At Corinth, the synagogue is the scene of evangelization. Presumably Titius Justus, “a worshipper of God (i.e., a half- or full proselyte, 18:7),” along with “Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue (18:8; 1 Cor 1:14),” were among the baptizands noted in 18:8. Luke specifies no Gentile, only Jews or proselytes with Roman names. He does note, immediately after Crispus’ conversion, that “many of the Corinthians hearing Paul believed and were baptized.” The tight connection of the “many Corinthians” with Titius Justus and Crispus—both Jewish—suggests that most if not all of these converts were Jews or proselytes. It may be argued that there were pagan Gentiles also among the believers; but Luke persistently identifies the Jewishness of these scenes and fails to specify any baptizand as Gentile. Luke can be seen as (1) avoiding reference to Paul baptizing Gentiles, or (2) recognizing that John the Baptist or Jesus’ activity included individual believing Gentiles in Israel’s remnant. In fact, Jesus’ several isolated contacts with Gentiles suggest they were included in the New Israel, as they had been in the Old. Still, no case of Paul baptizing a Gentile is specified in Acts or Epistles. Rather Luke notes Paul’s baptizands were already proselytes or semi-proselytes, were Jewish in background, or were baptized in a Jewish context. The jailor cannot rightly 126

be claimed as Jew, proselyte, or Gentile, since Acts is mute on his ethnic origin. Appeal to the jailor as a baptized Gentile convert is evidentially nil. Paul never commands or urges a Gentile convert to be baptized. The Significance of Acts’ Baptism Scenes: An Interaction with G. R. Beasley-Murray Finally, we may summarize some of the more salient data of the baptismal scenes in Acts, following somewhat J. R. Beasley-Murray’s assessment of the texts.234 First, Acts’baptism scenes represent continuity with the cleansing/purification symbolism of the Qumran-Baptist movement (Acts 2:38; 9:18; 22:16): “Repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins (2:38)”; “Rise and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on his name (22:16).” These texts are misread when thought to affirm baptismal regeneration or an absolute requirement for salvation; they rather merely but firmly merge symbol and reality without qualification in a way similar to some Qumran texts. Rather, Luke’s constant representation in more than thirty places in Luke-Acts is that salvation/forgiveness is received by repentance and faith; never, in all these places where “salvation” or “forgiveness of sins” is gained, does he place on it a ritual mediation.235 All evidence suggests that the close relation of forgiveness and baptism is simply a normal Jewish merger of symbol and reality for purification and incorporation into the New Israel remnant—a way of linking the two together without ascribing sacramental power to the material element. Baptism, though separated, still appears several times with close proximity to reception of the Holy Spirit, sometimes accompanied by the laying on of hands. 2:38. Baptism and receiving the Spirit are two results of repentance, but without indicating lapsed time between the two events. 8:13-17. Baptism and the Spirit are closely related, but with only a short lapse of time between them and a separate act of laying-on hands. 9:17-18. The text notes laying-on of hands, then (apparently) the Spirit, then baptism, with little time lapse between the three events. 10:44-47. The Spirit is mentioned first; baptism follows. 19:1-7. Baptism occurs first, then the Spirit appears; laying-on hands by Paul seems to be somewhat separated from both; finally John;s disciples are rebaptized.

From John the Baptist and Jesus onward, the Holy Spirit is the effective purifier, and baptism or washing a symbol of this reality. On the other hand these cases show—we 234 J. R. Beasley-Murray, Bapism in the New Testament; Beasley-Murray’s work is of great importance since he reviewed most of the important work on the subject during the last two centuries, and restudies all relevant materials carefully. The work is also important in that he represents an English Baptist viewpoint which is in most other respects Reformed in outlook and spirit, as well as in scholarship. 235 J. B. Polhill, The New American Commentary: Acts (Nashville: Broadman, 1992) correctly: “Perhaps more significant, however, is that the usual connection of the forgiveness of sins in Luke-Acts is with repentance and not with baptism at all. In fact, in no other passage of Acts is baptism presented as bringing about the forgiveness of sins. If not linked with repentance, forgiveness is connected with faith.”

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note again—a certain detachment of the coming of the Spirit from the washing symbol. The coming of the Spirit is not inseparably linked to baptism—a distancing carried out consistently in Acts, even though a loose connection is retained. Both variations occur: the coming of the Spirit sometimes occurs apart from baptism; and sometimes the narrative shows no accompanying Spirit at baptism as for example at Philippi and Corinth. This full picture tells us about aspects of Luke’s theological story. Another feature of Luke’s baptism scenes is the frequent note of baptism in or into the name of Jesus. Beasley-Murray believes this entailed an utterance of Jesus name, perhaps confessionally as in “Jesus is Lord (1 Cor 12:3; Rom 10:9-10).”236 Acts 22:16 seems to be evidence of this in Paul’s speech at the army barracks in Jerusalem: “Arise and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on his name (my italics).” Such a confession shows that Christ is the sole operative of the messianic salvation; the baptizand is joining the community who owned his sovereignty: Jesus is the saving head of the New Israel. Being baptized “into his name” means acknowledging all he is, has done, and will do as the messianic redeemer. “In his name” therefore is a forceful acknowledgement of Jesus’ messianic saviorship. Paul’s encounter with the twelve “disciples” of John the Baptist at Ephesus embodies our thesis. That they are described as “disciples” shows they were some sort of believers.237 Still, their discipleship was defective enough to have needed much advancement. And so they are baptized after which Paul lays hands on them, and the Holy Spirit comes upon them. That they were messianic Jews already is clear since they had a form of adherence to John’s baptism. One suspects their relation to John’s movement was so distant and their understanding so distorted and limited, that they had not even heard of his promise of the Holy Spirit, his message of repentance, or his preaching of the kingdom, of Christ to whom he pointed, or of judgment for resistive Israel. If Paul’s participation in the eschatological nationalism of the New Israel remnant—all Jewish symbols in full function including baptism since John—was a reality, and Acts 16-19 does indicate it, then with messianic, eschatological nationalist Jews, his actions seem entirely appropriate. Their baptism completes their entry into the New Israel. It is possible that proselyte baptism, along with circumcision, sacrifice, and perhaps agreement to Jewish marriage and a Jewish name238 (the maximum proselyte requirements), entered the picture as well. We cannot be sure of this, however, since proselyte baptism, unlike circumcision for proselytes (which is documented for the Judaism of the apostolic age), is not well attested for the period.239 Certainly by the late second century proselyte baptism was more regularly practiced in Judaism. S. McKnight has recently reviewed the 236 Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament, pp. 100-101. Implications for any sacramentarian view of baptism are discussed in Essay IV 237 Dunn, Baptism in the Holy Spirit, pp. 83-89, expresses justifiable doubt that their having received “the baptism of John” proves they were real disciples of the Baptist. This is the only place where Gr mathetes (disciple) is used without a definite article in Acts, indicating reserve on Luke’s part of the extent of their belief; indeed, they had not even heard of the Spirit. How they related to John the Baptist is unclear. 238 M. Pope, “Proselyte,” IDB 4:931; J. J. Collins, Jewish Identify in the Hellenistic Diaspora (New York: Crossroads, 1986), pp. 214-215; S. McKnight, A Light Among the Nations (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), p. 84. 239 Pope, ibid., p. 930, seems sure of its practice in the first century: “. . . there is general agreement among scholars that it was a part of the reception of proselytes from the beginning.” There is doubt, however, because explicit evidence is lacking.

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available materials and suggests that (1) the rites of Judaism and Christianity owe their origin to a common Jewish milieu, (2) in which washings become increasingly important for converts, and (3) Judaism’s rite of proselyte baptism may very well have received a decisive impetus from John the Baptist, Jesus, and the earliest Christians. He says: “The origins of Jewish proselyte baptism, then, may have been in the entrance requirements of Jewish Christianity.”240 If proselyte baptism in Judaism was developing at the time of early Christianity, as seems to be the case, then it may have been necessary for Paul to avoid baptizing for this related reason—to be sure he did not confuse world Christianity with Jewish nationalistic eschatological hopes, and to be equally clear that the Gentile Mission was no Jewish proselyte movement. Both reasons—the former far more obvious than the latter—would have been ample ground for Paul to decline baptism of Gentile converts. McKnight further argues that in Galatians, Paul was dealing with Pharisee religious zealots who were working at making total converts out of Paul’s Christians, i.e., proselytization that went all the way toward taking on the whole yoke of the law and perhaps joining their sect.241 This kind of Pharisee pressure, attested in Acts 15:1, 5 and Galatians, would have normally included baptism as one of the normal proselyte rites of entry into Israel discussed by McKnight and others. And while circumcision is the more frequently attested rite of proselyte entrance into Israel and is attested as such in Jewish literature, the Greek philosopher Epictetus rather mentions baptism: Whenever we see [A Greek, a Syrian or an Egyptian who acts Jewish but is not a Jew] we say, ‘he is only acting the part’. But when he adopts the attitude of mind of the man who as been baptized, and has made his choice, then he both is a Jew in fact and also is called one. 242

It is certainly possible, perhaps even likely, that for Jewish Christian Pharisees, John’s baptism simply merged with their prior interests as a force for proselyte baptism of Gentile converts during Christianity’s first full century. Paul’s concern about circumcision only reflects the top priority on Jewish identity as it had developed during the preceding centuries. R. Gundry observes about the dynamics of this situation, Even the Judaizing party objected only to failure to require that converts from among the Gentiles be treated as proselytes who came to Judaism, i.e., be accepted into the church on condition of circumcision and observance of the Mosaic law, including its other ceremonial features.243

240 McKnight, A Light Among the Nations, p. 85. 241 Ibid., pp. 104ff, cited to this effect by I. Levinskaya, The Book of Acts in its First Century Setting. Vol 5: Diaspora Setting (Carlisle: The Paternoster Press, 1996), p. 37. Levinskaya, in a thorough review of all evidence, concludes that it does not support a general, aggressive Jewish proselyting activity; but this does not mean the Pharisees did not do so as their activity in Matthew 23:15 and Acts 15:1, 5 shows. 242 Cited by Levinskaya, ibid., p. 119, along with the literataure on circumcicion or baptism as the final step into Judaism/Israel in note 5. That Epictetus confused Judaism and Christianity seems unlikely. 243 Gundry, Matthew, p. 596.

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Presumably, Gundry would include proselyte baptism in the list of ceremonial features. On any reckoning, though, this is a realistic assessment of the situation because it recognizes an existing dynamic Paul faced with Gentile converts and Jewish pressures. Realisticallly, circumcision was only the beginning of Judaization. There may be a question about whether the Judaizing party even recognized the church; its people may rather have been thinking of a New Israel “assembly” instead of “the church” in Paul’s developing sense. Beasley-Murray recognizes in John’s baptism all that is argued above about baptism: it was a washing of cleansing and incorporation into the New Israel and its JewishChristian eschatological nationalism. In explaining John’s movement beyond the Qumran covenanters, he says: Everything in John’s practice and preaching was more radical than that of the Covenanters: the eschatological expectation was more immediate; the call to repentance was more urgent; it was expressed in a once-for-all baptism; the message of warning and offer of the Kingdom hope was addressed to the whole nation and not to a privileged few.244

Again he notes: The baptism of John thus had two focal points: it inaugurated the new life of the converted, so assuring the baptized of forgiveness and cleansing from sin; it anticipated the messianic baptism with Spirit and fire, so giving assurance of a place in the Messiah’s kingdom.245

And he cites with approval W. F. Flemington’s point that “for Jesus His baptism expressed and effected His oneness with the new Israel . . . .”246 In Beasley-Murray’s mind, there is no question about what I have called the “eschatological nationalism” of John the Baptist’s mission. Does Acts think of a change from John’s to Christian (water) baptism? In a subsequent discussion of “The Nature of Early Christian Baptism” in his baptism study, Beasley-Murray takes issue with R. Bultmann. Bultmann thought the rite during the early Christian period247 must have been essentially similar in import to the baptism of John and that it was a bath of purification for the coming Reign of God.248 Beasley-Murray goes on to ask: Is it likely, however, that a community constituted by the conviction that its Master had been “installed Son of God in power by the resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:4), and exulting in its present possession of the Spirit of the age to come, should consider itself to be in the same position as the people about the Forerunner?249

The supposed difficulty here is related to Beasley-Murray’s general overview that John’s baptism was not yet Christian baptism. For him, Christian baptism does not begin until 244 McKnight, Light Among the Nations, p. 40. 245 Ibid., p. 39. 246 Ibid., p. 63, citing W. F. Flemington, The New Testament Doctrine of Baptism (London: 1948), pp. 27ff, 121. 247 Emphasis is author’s, not either Beasley-Murray or Bultmann’s. 248 Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament, p. 99. 249 Ibid.

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Pentecost, because only then was the messianic first advent work completed and the Spirit given—the two irreducible elements that make baptism Christian. But is has been shown above that a continuity is visible from John’s through Acts’ baptisms. Beasley-Murray has let himself be caught here in a false opposition: Christian baptism must be something different from John’s baptism of national eschatological renewal, and so there must have been a shift in its meaning. He elaborated this distinction throughout the study, but in one place it receives a particularly crisp expression: (citing F. Büchsel) . . . baptism in Acts (is) repentance and faith coming to expression in an act that anticipates the turning and renewal of the whole course of life; by it the purely inward experience steps into the open and so comes to completion; consequently the act was the occasion for the bestowal of the Spirit. Not that the Spirit was bound to a rite; the connection was due to the turn of the ages that took place in the resurrection of Jesus, whereby baptism unto the Kingdom became baptism unto the Christ.

For Beasley-Murray this “became” is necessitated by the point that in retaining baptism, the church will have to distinguish Christian baptism from John’s—which was in fact a symbolic washing of the Jewish remnant in its repentance before the Kingdom; and—John’s baptism lacked resurrection and the Spirit as its substantial Christian meaning content. Baptism into the name of Christ in Acts, however, is not a change from John’s to Christian baptism, but a lineal development of meaning within the manifest messianic kingdom from John to Christ to the Spirit in the New Israel remnant. But why should this be thought of as a change from John’s to Christian baptism? Indeed, this is a construct that assumes the conclusion, i.e., that it is Christian baptism versus John’s baptism that is ordained. Rather, what has happened is that the kingdom of God has shown itself to Israel, and its meaning slowly filled out as the mission of John, Jesus, and the apostles developed: first there was only a bare announcement of the kingdom with appropriate repentance; then Jesus’ baptism, messianic signs, and teaching; then his atoning death; then the resurrection; then the gift of the Holy Spirit and an offer of the kingdom to Israel; and finally the building and decline of the New Israel remnant in Acts as Israel rejected its Messiah and came under God’s judgment. All this is one line of ever-enlarging development in the formation of the New Israel. If not, why were not the apostles re-baptized with “Christian Baptism”? Steadily, the Old Israel said “no” to Jesus the Messiah simultaneously with these developments. The New Israel remnant took shape, then expanded, then leveled out, and finally withdrew to become the all-but-lost-from-view “Jewish Christianity” or “Nazarenes” of the late first and early second centuries. The change came with the Pauline Gentile mission and the release of his Gentile converts from the Jewish remnant’s nationalism and law-keeping. Within the New Israel remnant, Jewish Christians, in a singular continuity from John the Baptist on, made up the New Israel of the end times, not by dropping the old Mosaic national ceremonial and social law, but renewing it as messianic Jews. But with Jesus’ example and teaching, Jewish Christians had no reason to change. With faith in their Messiah, they had reason only to live the fullest distinctive national life possible in looking for the consummation of the promised national destiny—the messianic kingdom. From this Jewish-Christian nationalism the dominantly Gentile church had to be released in order to become the agent of a truly universal gospel. Added to this practical point is 131

the larger Pauline framework in which the church of a new egalitarian Jew-Gentile relation began both to be revealed and to be established in the history of salvation, and of which Ephesians 3 and Colossians 1 are the main Pauline expressions. The point of this essay then is exactly this—that baptism was included among the Jewish-Christian remnant’s ordinances dropped by Paul in the interest of an Israel-free universal church of Jew-Gentile union spoken of by him as the revelation of a mystery formerly hid in God (Eph 3:1-13). Washings in Hebrews Hebrews has its own point of view. It seems best to understand the book as an expression of a form of Jewish Christianity aligned with Stephen and his views as expressed in Acts 7,250 although other views are viable, including especially a priestly authorship and/ or readership with affinities to Qumran. A Stephen-group or Qumran connection would represent Hebrews as another variation of Jewish nationalism in which ritual elements are sharply curtailed or even eliminated, but perhaps not until other developments within Jewish Christianity in the first century. Hebrews views “baptisms (pl baptismoi)” as belonging to the earlier history of the readers under their pre-Christian Judaism (6:1-3). He identifies it as plural—various baptisms (baptismoi, 6:2; various washings, 9:10) from which he urges them to go on to more mature matters. Commentators are not agreed on whether or not 6:1-3 represents Christian initiation or merely the reader’s Jewish background. It is doubtful that their “enlightenment (6:6; 10:32)” refers to baptism;251 to affirm it seems to read second century baptismal enlightenment into the New Testament without clear warrant. Hebrews rather views baptism(s) as belonging to the old covenant (9:10) and therefore to what is passing away. The book may therefore be viewed as belonging to the general Stephen-Paul outlook on ritual and the new covenant. The writer and readers were within the Pauline law-passed-away viewpoint, and what passed away included ritual baptisms in the law. Thus, by the time of Hebrews (c 65 A. D.) there was indeed a call to Jewish Christians to drop the practice of the Mosaic law and its ritual ordinances. Hebrews’ call certainly shows signs of Pauline influence. Indeed, he now applies Paul’s freedom-from-law principle even to Jewish Christian readers; but he does so relative to their dangerous situation, i.e., because the law was becoming a shield for hiding themselves from Roman persecution. We do not know if this development represents yet another strand within Jewish Christianity, or whether it is only a purely pragmatic suspension of Jewish law-keeping in the light of the situation. We shall probably have to leave it there.

250 W. Manson, The Epistle to the Hebrews (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1962); Manson carefully developed his thesis that Hebrews represents the same line of anti-temple, anti-cultus thought as Stephen’s speech of Acts 7; This view of Hebrews seems to satisfy most of the requirements to the book’s bearings. But a Qumran-priestly context for the book cannot be easily ignored. 251 Contra Beasley-Murray, Baptism, pp. 244ff and many Reformed and sacramentarian commentators. On the contrary, although Beasley-Murray says it cannot be doubted that the writer has baptism in mind, it is simply the case that it can be doubted on the ground that association of baptism with being “enlightened” is nowhere else explicitly made in the New Testament, and doing so involves reading this association back into the New Testament form the time of Justin Martyr and others who do make baptism “enlightenment.”

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The plural baptismoi (in its appropriate grammatical variations (dative in 9:10; genitive in 6:2) certainly covers variable or repeated ritual washings as at Qumran and among priests in Jerusalem, and does not refer only to initiatory washing as with John the Baptist. The plurals, underscored in 9:10 by the modifier diaphoros/different (also plural to agree with baptismois), seem sweeping and inclusive of all and every kind of Jewish washing (cf Mk 7:1-3). The generalized statement thus cannot refer to John the Baptist exclusively. Nor can Hebrews mean the readers should drop Jewish washings in favor of the (true) Christian (water) baptism, for the simple reason that he does not specify “Christian (water) baptism” as now normative, unless the “enlightenment” of 6:6 and 10:32 and the “pure water” of 10:22 are “Christian baptism.” To read Hebrews’ “enlightenment” as baptism can only be achieved by reading this language backward from the second century into the middle of the first century or apostolic era. And the “pure water” of 10:22b as with its parallel in 10:22a (the sprinkled heart) is likely to be metaphorical. That is, there is simply nothing in Hebrews to suggest that Jewish baptism(s) have been replaced by a new (Christian, water) baptism. If the above references are to their (water) baptism as Jewish Christians, it falls within the same circle of New Israel thoughts and practices as noted in the gospels and Acts, and as discussed below for 1 Peter. Hebrews does not dismiss “ceremonial washings (NIV)” alone as a type of Christian thought about the old covenant or Judaism. In 9:10 he adds to baptisms/washings Jewish food and drink laws. In 6:1-3 he assembles a similar list of Jewish beliefs and practices in which he also speaks of messianic doctrines, baptisms, repentance from dead works (a sure clue to the list’s Jewishness), laying on of hands, resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment. The manner of his list of 6:1-3 suggests he is thinking of a larger circle of pre-Christian Jewish messianic ideas, not their Christian sense gained by new covenant fulfillments. In constructing two such lists he joins Paul who also offered such lists for example in Galatians (4:10), where he faults the readers for observing days, months, seasons and years, and—repeatedly in the same book—circumcision. The tendency to frame a few specifics with one or more generalizations about what is past and obsolete also appears in Galatians (4:9). Similarly, Paul draws up a slightly longer list in Colossians 2:16: food, drinks, festivals, new moon celebrations, Sabbaths. Here again, he generalizes from the specifics: “These are a shadow of things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ (2:7, NIV). Quarrels over foods, days and drinks come up for rather detailed discussion in Romans 14 as well. A little later than Hebrews, Mark adds an explanatory note on Jewish ritual practices and washings with comments (Mark 7:3-4). An implication is that Hebrews engages in an extension of Paul’s release of Gentile converts from all such practices by applying the principle of obsolescence to Jews as well, albeit for a perceptibly practical reason, i.e., their tendency to hide behind Judaism for protection from persecution. The tendency to hide from persecution was natural and workable for Jewish Christians since Judaism was a legal religion in the Roman Empire due to its antiquity. This situational application of Paul’s practice may have been no more than a local and temporary expedient for Roman Jewish Christians. But one should also consider the possibility that a certain point has been reached in Israel’s crisis of unbelief (say, in the 60s) wherein the Pauline view of Gentile freedom from law now has to be applied to Jewish Christians on principle as well, since Israel’s contingency era has drawn or is drawing to a close.

On any reckoning, for Hebrews, baptismoi are obsolete—a point which Paul did not make in any direct statement, but which can be seen in his disclaimer on baptizing at Corinth and his transformation of Jewish institutions and rituals into their spiritual and theological 133

fulfillment-era equivalents. No New Testament book does this via the inauguration of the new covenant in the thoroughgoing path taken by the Hebrews epistle. There is no clear evidence that Hebrews substitutes “Christian baptism” for Jewish baptism(s) First Peter 1 Peter belongs to the Jewish-Christian epistle group.252 It is addressed to the Diaspora—Jews dispersed around the Mediterranean and beyond (1:1-2); the readers are spoken of in language directly borrowed from several descriptions of Israel in the Old Testament. They seem to be distinguished from the Gentiles around them (4:3-5) even though the latter reference is widely taken to mean they were now Christians in contrast to their former Gentile life. The mixed Jewish and Gentile allusions describing the recipients, while inducing most scholars to think of a pagan Gentile background, are not in fact unlikely descriptions of a once partly paganized Jewish Diaspora. Also to be considered is the fact that the agreed division of labor between Peter and Paul—Peter to the Jews, Paul to the Gentiles (Gal 2:9-10)—was not rescinded or modified according to any New Testament text, even though some later church fathers thought the apostles later scattered far and wide along with other Jews and Jewish Christians in the awful war years of the 70s and after. It seems best, therefore, to view the epistle as written to Petrine Jewish Christians formerly somewhat paganized in their dispersion surroundings. Since Peter refers to their (water) baptism in 3:21, it is vital to our discussion to determine the ethnic nature of his congregations. The language of Jewish dispersion for the readers is forceful—so forceful that

even the recent commentators who argue that it is all metaphorical of Gentile converts do not dispute the Jewishness of the book’s recipient descriptions. J. R. Michaels, for example, remarks, “The phrase ‘exiles of the dispersion’ in 1:1 builds on the notion of the Jews as a people scattered in the world ever since the Babylonian captivity of 586 B. C . . . . The clear impression is that the readers of the epistle are Jewish Christians. . . . The impression is reinforced in 1 Pet 2:11, where the readers are called ‘aliens and strangers’ in the cities and provinces where they live, and in 1:17, where they are told to ‘spend your allotted time . . . in reverent fear’ in their places of exile. . . . . No NT letter is so consistently addressed, directly or indirectly, to “Israel,” that is (on the face of it) to Jews. . . . The author’s reference point is not so much Israel before it had a land as Israel dispossessed of her land. . . . The same perspective governs the way in which those outside the community are described. They are ‘Gentiles,’ apparently in contrast to the Christian readers of the epistle who think of themselves as ‘Jews.’ “Yet in the face of all this evidence, there is a near consensus that 1 Peter was in fact directed to a predominantly Gentile Christian audience.” The contrary evidence is that they are said to have lived formerly in “ignorance,” and that their former lives were “empty.” Also, that “They are ‘believers in God’ not by virtue of their ancestral religion but only through Jesus Christ, who was raised from the dead ‘so that your faith and hope might be in God,’ implying that previously it was not. . . . Later in the epistle we are told 252 Longenecker, Christology of Earliest Jewish Christianity, p. 18; he does not seek to support an exclusively Jewish readership, however.

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plainly: ‘There was time enough in the past to have done what the Gentiles wanted, so you went along with them in acts of immorality and lust, drunken orgies, feasts, revelries, and lawless acts of idolatry.’”253 Michaels, using pronouns of the translation that identify the readers as Gentiles, concludes that “such words are scarcely intelligible in relation to a Jewish Christian audience.” And so he thinks the book was written to a dominantly Gentile readership.

The Jewish language for the letter’s target group is gathered below and commented; it fully justifies Michaels’ and others’ estimate of its Jewish Christian force—in spite of which recent commentators decide on a Gentile target group. As we shall see, their reasons are not wholly unjustified, but are inadequate or at least certainly questionable in each specific case.

(1) They are called in 1:1 “exiles . . .” (RSV, NRSV, ESV; NIV and AV: “strangers”; ASV: “sojourners”). Greek parepidamos means “one who is (temporarily) resident in a place as an alien; the verb parepidameo means “stay in a place as an alien, and the noun form parepidamia refers to the temporary stay of a foreigner.254 This terminology describes resident aliens. (2) Follows the technical term for dispersion (of the Jews from their homeland): diaspora/dispersion. Hence the phrase denotes “dispersed resident aliens.” These quasitechnical terms for dispersed and resettled resident aliens may be taken literally if all other factors are favorable. A literal-historical reading would view them as Jewish emigrants and refugees from Palestine who have become Christians more or less recently. They are under Peter’s apostolic supervision according to the ethnic division of labor agreed to by Peter and Paul in Galatians 2:7-9. Their community may be been receiving Jewish Christians fleeing from the anti-Roman political upheaval that developed in Palestine c 5070 A. D. which eventuated in the fall of Jerusalem and scattering of both Jews and Jewish Christians. (3) parepidamos appears again in 2:11 with paroikos added. Greek paroikos also refers to a foreigner living abroad but with the more permanent sense of “resident alien” with “no civil rights” and . . . living under the common protection.”255 (4) In addition, Peter says of them, “. . . you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people . . . (2:9).” Two of these terms originally referred to Israel at the time of its adoption by God at the exodus from Egypt (Exod 19:6); the others are drawn summarily from various Old Testament texts like Deuteronomy 7:6; 10:15; Isaiah 43:20-21 (LXX) with echoes in Matthew 22:14; Mark 13:20, 22, 27 and Luke 18:7.256 It is claimed, however, that this discrete Israel-language is rather used here in a

spiritual or metaphorical fulfillment sense of Gentile Christians in an astonishing early case—if true—of the second century church-as-the-true-Israel thinking. (This development will be discussed in the next essay.) The basis for this claim is the group of texts gathered by Michaels in the quotation above. But the claim of original Gentile readers made by Michaels is not entirely clear in the Greek Bible; to a significant degree, careful attention

J. R. Michaels, 1Peter (Dallas: Word, 1990), pp. xlv-xlvi. W. Grundmann, “damos,” et al., TDNT 2:64-65. 255 K. L. Schmidt, “paroikos,” et al, TDNT 5:842. 256 E. G. Selwyn, The First Epistle of St. Peter (London: Macmillan & Co, 1958), p. 165. 253 254

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to textual and exegetical details diminishes the force of his argument. In each case there are contrary indications to what is claimed in support of Gentile recipients. (1) “The passions of your former ignorance (1:14)” sounds like it refers to Gentiles. But “ignorance” (agnoia) is used for unbelieving Jews by Paul in Romans 10:3 (cf Heb 5:2), and more importantly, “lust (epithumia)” is used by Jesus (Mark 4:19; Jn 8:44) as a human or demonic power to which Jews too are subject. (2) Nor does the phrase “. . . empty way of life . . . from your fathers (1:18),” on its face, sound very appropriate to Jews. But the operative term, “empty/mataios” is used of the idols of Israel’s worship in the Old Testament; and James 1:26 uses mataios for anything but the true religion including Judaism, while Paul uses mataios for any reasoning against Christ and the gospel. And certainly the Israel of New Testament times engaged in such empty thinking and arguments against its Messiah. These uses show that Peter’s description of his readers as mataios is not incompatible with the failures of Judaism, especially to receive and believe in Jesus as Messiah and his proffered kingdom. Neither is the characterization unlike the way Stephen spoke of Israelite-Jewish history in his speech of Acts 7:51-53. Hebrews also uses similar language for the inadequacies of the old covenant (9:9, 24; 10:1, 3, 11) as does Paul in 2 Corinthians 3. (3) 1 Peter 4:1-4 is especially important. The rendering of the NIV substantially reflects Michael’s views. The crucial terms are underscored and then commented below. “Therefore, since Christ suffered in his body, arm yourselves also with the same attitude, because he who has suffered in his body is done with sin. As a result, he does not live the rest of his earthly life for evil human desires, but rather for the will of God. For you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do—living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry. They think it strange that you do not plunge with them into the same flood of dissipation, and they heap abuse on you.”257 (a) done with sin (4:1). This is the central idea of the whole piece; the remaining thoughts expand on it and thus mention the Gentiles who continue their sins. But Peter does not say this in a way that specifically links the readers with the Gentiles, despite the unwarranted “you” in “For you (on which see below).” (b) rest . . . time (4:2). The terms translate the same Greek word, chronos/(duration/ quantity of) time. The pared uses of chronos in consecutive phrases indicate that “time” is the main idea connecting the two verses. This connection is formally made with “for,” (gar explanatory), i.e., verse 2 shifts the time thought of vs 1 from the short time remaining for one to do the will of God between conversion to Christ and death to the long time during which the “lust” of the Gentiles has been running its course in history, and persists to the present. This means that both uses of “desires . . . lust (epithumia)” in vss 1-2 refer to the common problem of human passions shared between the readers and the “Gentiles.” The linkage thus might suggest that those who have ceased from sin are precisely the Gentile Christian recipients of the letter. But this link is not explicit, and epithumia is also used for Jewish passions in the New Testament as already noted.258 257 Italics here and throughout points (a), (b), (c) and (d) are the author’s. 258 That the pre-Christian life of Jews was also afflicted with deviant passions is shown by the fact that at least one of the exact same terms in the list of Gentile passion-driven acts in 1 Peter 4 (aselgeia/sensuality/debauchery, 1Peter 4:3) is also used in an argument of Jesus with Jews about what makes human beings, including them, unclean (Mark 7:22). The list of passion-driven works in Jesus’ teaching (Mark 7:21-22) contains no statement that this is the way Gentiles act while Jews lack such behaviors or passions; it is rather a common human problem. In addition, the several terms for Gentile passions in 1 Peter 4:3 have synonyms or equivalent terms in Jesus list of passionate offences that also make Jews unclean.

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(c) The insertion of “you (3a)” in English translations is thus misleading and without critical textual warrant since “you” is not in the critical Greek text.259 Therefore the assumed direct connection of the statement of 4:3 with the assumed Gentile readers does not exist in the text’s language—at least not in the pronoun “you.” In actual wording the Greek text reads (translated), “For the time passed was sufficient to accomplish the will of the Gentiles/nations . . . .” The statement is chiefly focused on the history of Gentile iniquity in relation to the history of redemption (chronos) and thus belongs to biblical notions of salvation history. It does not state or necessarily imply that the readers are Gentiles, but rather that the time (chronos) of the nations’ passions and desires (including those of Israel) has sufficiently run its course and that redeemed people have no more life among them. That he includes the readers in cessation from sin is clear; he does not, however, directly identify them as Gentiles, but as participating in the past history of the nations’ passions. We have already seen that Israel too is said by both Jesus and Paul to have had its own struggle with passion-driven deviancies; hence there is no textual proof that the readers are Gentiles. What the language of these verses indicates is that the (Jewish-Christian) recipients of the letter shared the same pre-Christian deviant passions as the Gentiles. (d) pagans/Gentiles/nations (4:3a). “Gentiles” might be correctly translated “nations,” and could thus include Israel. But the fact that they practiced idolatry (4:3b) favors “Gentiles” rather than “nations.” And yet Israel too was idolatrous in its history, even though after the exile it shed that part of its national religious life, while some dispersion Jews were again drawn into it by their later pagan surroundings. Why does Peter bring the comparison with the Gentiles into the text, if the readers were not Gentiles? The likely reason is that they have not ceased from the long history of working their passionate will in the world, and even more to the point, in doing so have become the persecutors of Christians, including Jewish Christians who have ceased from sin (gained redemption). Read in this way, 4:3-4 distinguish the readers from the Gentiles who surround them. Considering these exegetical observations, the people of 4:1-4 could theoretically be either Jews or Gentiles, while the force of the Jewish descriptions points to their Jewish origins since the evidence for their Gentile origins is indecisive. (4) 1 Peter 2:10 applies language from Hosea 1:9 and 2:23 to the readers: “Once you were no people but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy but now you have received mercy.” Hosea uses this description of Israel for a particular tragic stage of its history when it was rejected by God and sent into exile. If the recipients were Gentiles, this description, lifted from its Israelite use by Hosea, would not be inappropriate. On the other hand, Israel had again distanced itself from God, not as the first time with its idolatry, but in its rejective response to Messiah and his kingdom. The story of this rejection already in the gospels has many scenes of judgment pronounced on the nation for its actual and future potential unbelief—all of course with a contingency as in Jeremiah’s messages as well. This description has more poignancy when one understands that diaspora Jews were in many cases more or less paganized in adaptation to their surroundings as is often observed about Jews living in Gentile lands. Accordingly, this passage is equally applicable to the judgment situation in which Israel had placed itself both in dispersion with varied degrees of adaptation to the surrounding paganism, and again in a highly rejective way at Christ’s first advent. The language is therefore no clear pointer to Gentile readership. 259 “You” (dative humin) does occur in the (early) uncorrected text of Codex Sinaiticus and a few other MSS. But it is absent in p72, Sinaiticus’ third corrector, Codex Vaticanus, and manuscript representatives of several regional textual traditions. This situation fails to merit consideration in the United Bible Societies Greek Testament. “You” is an intrusive reading clearly motivated by a scribe’s desire to clarify.

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These exegetical considerations undermine the decisiveness of the contrary texts favoring a Gentile readership as most of recent study has it. The alleged evidence for Gentile recipients does not really contradict the impression of a Jewish-Christian readership gained from the Jewish-like language used for the readers to which Michaels correctly calls attention. So there is no substantial reason why the Jewish-like allusions should not be taken literally for Israel. Therefore, 1 Peter can be rightly taken to address a group of Jewish Christian dispersion congregations scattered throughout the northern Roman Asia Minor provinces. This Jewish Christian destination of 1 Peter puts the readers in the realm of the New Israel Jewish remnant discussed earlier in this essay. Peter’s reference to their baptism (3:20-21) places them in the context of the New Israel’s baptism with its initiatory water symbol mentioned in 3:21. As Jewish (-Christian) readers, they appear to have been in the same difficulty as Hebrews’ recipients, i.e., were threatened with persecution, almost certainly (as in Hebrews’ context) Nero’s, but farther to the east (in Asia Minor rather than Rome itself). Unlike Hebrews, Peter does not urge them to move on from their Jewish roots, since there is no sign that like Hebrews’ readers they were hiding behind Judaism for protection. Hence 1 Peter has no sweeping admonitions to abandon Jewish rituals— whichever ones they continued to practice. The letter’s reference to baptism is somewhat obscure. Spirit baptism seems out of the question since their (water) baptism is noted by allusion to Noah and the waters of the flood. Their baptism is called a “pledge” of a good conscience to God. On any reckoning, baptism “saves,” but, as the text specifies, in the sense of being a pledge of conscience to God. This is not baptismal regeneration, but a clear statement of late Jewish non-sacramental thinking about ritual washings, as noted several times above, especially in the Qumran sect’s views of its own ritual washings. The strong New Israel language of 2:9, combined with a reference to baptism, bespeaks the same New Israel eschatological nationalism as elsewhere in the New Testament. Peter’s emphasis on the future glory adds to this understanding, giving the context a further Jewish-Christian nationalist eschatology flavor. “Pledge” for Greek eperotama seems more satisfactory then any other meanings of the word such as “question” or “request,” which seem remote for this text. “Pledge” as a meaning for eperotama is attested in the papyri which encourages its adoption here (see NIV).260 Selwyn adopts “pledge” and thinks it may refer to a baptismal pledge that already had arisen in the apostolic age, in which questions were being asked of the baptizand from whom satisfactory answers were expected as they came to be in considerable detail in the second century.261 This is a plausible explanation with its kind of legal overtone which might be considered suitable to the Jewish-New Israel context since this form of early Christianity continued to practice Jewish law. Several interpreters discussed by Selwyn note the legal or juridical, perhaps contractual tone of the term.262 But there seems to be no clear development toward the second century’s regenerative, enlightenment and exorcising views of baptism as yet. The thought would then be that Peter’s Jewish readers had received Christ as their Passover sacrifice and in their baptism had taken a kind of oath or pledge of loyalty to him upon confession of him as Lord and Christ. This combination of confession,

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BAGD, p. 285, see under eperotama 2. Selwyn, I Peter, pp. 205-206. 262 Ibid. 260 261



faith and pledge was a matter of conscience, i.e., consciousness of and seriousness moral commitment to God, and so is called a “pledge of a good consceience” toward him. The sense, then, in which their baptism “saves” is not in its supposed regenerative power, but in the sense that it stands as a symbol of a good conscience before God. Conscience has in fact become good through their actual spiritual regeneration and deliverance from sin by faith in Christ’s sacrifice—the main redemptive theme of the book along with the “born anew” of 1:3.

Conclusion That type of Protestant theology which seeks to do the fullest justice to the meaning of biblical Israel by fully recognizing its priority in both the Old and New Testaments, may comfortably take the position that baptism in the New Testament also belonged to the renewal of that nation. If this is so, an explanation is at hand for why Paul is so slight on the matter with companion Luke close behind. The evidence is that “baptism/baptize” has been transformed by Paul into its ultimate spiritual meaning by using baptismal language metaphorically for the initiating and incorporating work of the Holy Spirit without any ritual accompaniment. Lacking appropriate biblical authorization or order, water baptism may be dropped by the non-New Israel church without fanfare or further ado as lacking appropriate biblical authorization. It is unnecessary for Quakers, Salvationists, or dispensationalists who take such a position, to engage in polemic or hostility toward the practice or its adherents. They are justified in merely dropping it, further reducing the “sacraments” just as Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli reduced them radically—though not radically enough on this view—at the time of the Reformation. The Reformation stream already set in motion a de-sacramentalizing thought process of which this conclusion is only the end point. Important subsequent segments of Protestant ecclesiology, especially its evangelical elements, then ascribed only symbolic status to the former Catholic sacraments. The view represented here steps into this stream on the subject of baptism, and follows to a negative conclusion the Pauline transformation of baptismal language along with the implications of the Reformation’s handling of sacraments; so one arrives at the ultimate result of the Protestant past on the subject of baptism, by returning yet again with the reformers to biblical roots. If a new biblical perspective has really been gained herein on baptism, then it is equally important to gain or retain biblical perspective on the Eucharist. But here, unlike the case of water baptism, we have an explicit Pauline command to practice the Lord’s Supper until Christ comes. The order is straightforward and unequivocal, with not a hint of cessation, withdrawal, or “sit loose.” So this perspective does not advocate a negative logic of ceremonial or symbol absolutely as in Quakerism, but only a reconsideration of water baptism and its usefulness to the identity of the church. If one strips away this rite, an even greater load is to be born in securing the true identity of the church—the responsibility to identify the church with its life in Christ, and all that is spiritually, morally, ethically, and socially potent about its living spiritual union with him. The ultimate sacrament is the incarnate Christ and his continued incarnation in the lives of his redeemed people. They are the sacrament of sacraments—the earthly, material bearers of the resurrected Christ to the world. 139

The perspective argued here offers a way to finally deal with the confusing welter of forms, meanings and the false assurances of salvation of epidemic proportion in traditional churches in our time. Dropping this ceremony will make clear once for all that no initiating ritual offers hope of salvation and life. Saving union with Christ is by faith, while his Spirit alone makes sacramental Christians—created substance transformed into living extensions of Christ’s resurrection body.

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ESSAY IV BAPTISM IN DISPENSATIONAL PERSPECTIVE: AFTER THE NEW TESTAMENT Why the Churches Continued to Baptize And Why they Adopted Baptismal Regeneration by Dale S. DeWitt



On the baptismal font at Grossmünster Church in Zürich, Switzerland, is the inscription, “I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit . . . .” The inscription dates from 1598 (almost 70 years after Zwingli’s death), but it suggests something of the theological interests of the Zürich reformer who began his work at Grossmünster on the first Sunday of January, 1519. The inscription also evokes the theme of this more historical chapter on water baptism—its continuation in the early church after the New Testament, and the new meanings it took on after the apostles, then the sixteenthcentury reformers’ reduction of the sacraments and its implications, and some samples of recent discussion of baptism in theological literature. The agonizing question of water baptism in the church persists by the sheer force of its near-universal acceptance but also its conflicting meanings among various Christian bodies and their claims. But another question persists from the preceding essay: if Paul intended the church to discontinue water baptism, why did it continue to baptize, completely missing the point, perpetrating a misleading practice and abandoning an otherwise thorough new covenant rejection of Jewish ritual? Or—to put the matter in another light—why did baptism survive so sturdily when other Jewish-New Testament practices like fasting, footwashing, anointing with oil, wearing skins, eating locusts and wild honey, and laying-on hands, did not survive—or where they did, why so erratically? We shall pursue the question of continuation here by first sketching the nature of Jewish-Christian relations from 65 to 135 A. D., then tracing developments in early Christian baptism thought during and beyond this crucial era, then reassessing relevant dynamics of the era, and finally discussing the Reformation and implications of its trajectories for our subject.

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Jews and Christians from 65 to 135 A.D. Some insights can be gained on Jewish-Christian influence by understanding the context of the churches’ existence between the beginnings of the second Jewish war of independence (60-72 A. D.), and the end of the fourth/last Jewish revolt (130-135 A. D.).263 The following does not pretend to be a complete survey of Jewish influence during the period. Rather it sketches only the real or potential impact of Jewish Christianity on the churches of the Pauline mission during his ministry and after his death with respect to baptism, assuming, that is, the argument of the preceding essay.264 The period from about A. D. 60 or 65 to A. D. 135 was an era of adaptation to Judaism and the synagogue265 in which, chiefly for reasons of location, circumstance266 and argument,267 Christians thought of themselves as the true Israel or the true fulfillment Israel—the Israel prophesied in the Hebrew Scriptures to receive the first advent messianic gifts of righteousness and the Spirit. This program of equating the church with fulfillment Israel was achieved in a variety of ways, but especially by the manner in which the church betook the Old Testament and Jewish traditions and habits to itself. Sometimes it did so with general arguments of continuity; sometimes it cast upon the Jews the noxious insult of suggesting that the old Israel never was really the people of God at all since it always evaded the law and persisted in forfeiting its promised rights to the divine blessings.268 In another sense, this was a more or less natural development, given the messiahship of Jesus of Nazareth, Israel’s persistent rejection of Jesus as Messiah, the development of a substitute people which did receive him and his promised spiritual gifts, the scattering of Jewish Christians after the fall of Jerusalem, and the probable absorption of many of them into already existing Gentile or mixed congregations (John at Ephesus; Philip at Hierapolis for examples of which we have at least some knowledge). The church thereby took influence from Jewish Christianity as it had developed from the earliest apostolic mission to Israel. In doing so, it tended to adopt important elements of the language, thinking and practices of Jewish Christians—not entirely or absolutely, but to whatever extent it could do 263 This terminology refers to four Jewish wars; the first was the Maccabean Revolt of 165 B.C.ff which was more or less successful; the second the war against the Romans in which Jerusalem was destroyed (70 A.D.); the third the Diaspora uprising of 116-117 in Egypt, Syria, and Parthia; the fourth the Bar Kokhba rebellion of 130-135. The second, third and fourth of these revolts were unsuccessful in pursuit of Jewish independence. Cf. L. Goppelt, Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Times, trans R. Guelich (London: A & C Black, 1970), pp. 117-118. 264 Goppelt, ibid., gives a broad-sweep picture of the whole scene. His interest is mainly in the developmento of Gnosticism. The current discussion is more narrowly focused. 265 bid., pp. 108-151; W. H. C. Frend, The Early Church (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), pp. 35-48. 266 E. Meyers, “Early Judaism and Christianity in the Light of Archaeology,” Biblical Archaeologist 51 (1988):69-79. Meyers has discovered evidence for a large population influx of Jews and Jewish Christians into Galilee in the aftermath of Jerusalem’s destruction in 70 A.D. This suggests that the whole Levantine region saw a situation for 50 or more years in which Jews and Christians lived in close quarters. The motivations of Jewish evangelism (which continued during this period) naturally made this Christianity more or less Jewish in character and belief. This is the more significant since many Christians took their historical senses seriously and received their lights from Christianity’s earliest forms. Jewish Christianity was that earliest form. 267 J. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition. 5 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971) 1:1225. 268 Ibid. This argument anticipated that of Islam.

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so without completely abandoning Paul’s principled release of the church from the Mosaic law and Jewish identity rituals.269 Some Jewish Christians refused to recognize Paul’s mission to the Gentiles and their release from the law. Indeed, many Jewish Christians refused to heed Hebrews’ warnings that believing Jews too should (by c 65 A. D.) let go of the old covenant rituals and legislation en toto. After the fourth Jewish war of 130-135 A. D., Christianity took a decisive turn toward Hellenism as the church turned away from Jewish connections toward a more universalizing adaptation of positive Greek and Roman theological, conceptual, ethical and social anticipations of Christianity.270 But for the decisive, formative period of 65-135 A. D., thinking about “The Christian Synagogue”271 was the chief influence on its growing thought and practice as the Old Catholic Church began to emerge. This situation means that no sooner did Christianity begin to appear, slowly experience its distinctiveness and begin to separate from unbelieving Judaism, than it also re-Judaized itself as the True Israel. Historical study is slowly bringing this scene into clearer relief; the reasons for it, however, are complex and still somewhat obscure. Some dynamics will be suggested in the discussion below. There were other conflicting forces. Pressures were exerted on many Jewish Christians who continued in the fellowship of their old synagogues to depart and form their own assemblies, which many no doubt did. But this does not mean they abandoned Jewish practices, thought or spiritual-eschatological nationalist hopes. Such Jewish Christians must have been full of conflicts and tensions with their determination that Jesus alone was their teacher, and yet retaining the feeling that their loyalty to the Mosaic law could not be compromised. The Gospels of Matthew and John are one important index to these tensions in their scenes of Pharisee conflict with Jesus and expulsion of his people from their synagogues.272 Aspects of this struggle are well known. For one thing, persistently non-believing, strongly nationalistic Jews would have resented Christians, especially Jewish Christians, for renouncing the Jewish rebellion against Rome, which they finally did en masse. For another, the reorganized Judaism at Jamnia on the Mediterranean coast after Jerusalem’s fall made Pharisee-scribal theology and attitudes the only acceptable Judaism, which in turn proceeded to insert curses on the minim (heretics) in synagogue prayers; these curses were at least partly, perhaps mainly, aimed at Jewish Christians.273 For yet another, the second leader of the reconstructed Jamnia Judaism, Gamaliel II, sought to make clear to Rome that “Israel” was a name only appropriately used for historic Israel and Judaism, and not for anyone else, i.e., Christians;274 Gamaliel thought this point so important that he journeyed to Rome to make the case to the imperial leadership. In particular, once baptism was established by universalizing the rite from its Jewish Christian origins, no reconsideration 269 Cf. Goppelt’s discussion this phenomenon and its affect on adoption of the Old Testament and Jewish traditions in Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Times, p. 120. 270 W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), p. 164, and passim. 271 Ibid., pp. 99-160. 272 J. L. Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, rev ed (Nashville: Abingdon, 1979). 273 For a thorough discussion of the relation of the Gospel of Matthew to this situation up to 1993, see G. Stanton, A Gospel for a New People of God: Studies in Matthew (Louisville KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), pp. 113-168. 274 Frend, The Rise of Christianity, p. 148; cf Goppelt, Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Times, p. 118.

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of its propriety was possible because of the meaning which Jewish-Christians began to pour into it. Baptism in Jewish Christianity In the First and Second Centuries What became the Old Catholic doctrine of baptismal regeneration originated in the late first century. The sources of that doctrine were in the Jewish Christianity of Syria, Palestine and Egypt toward the close of the apostolic era. The Old Catholic view itself is really two views of baptism. Along both northern and southern Mediterranean coasts the normative view was illuminism, i.e., baptism is a miraculous regenerative enlightenment: the baptizand comes up out of the water illuminated by Christ and delivered of his ignorance. Along the eastern and more westerly Mediterranean coasts, the normative view is exorcism: the baptizand comes from the water exorcised of demons and delivered of his enslavement to the devil. But these themes also came from somewhere. In fact, they are themes extended into the second century universalizing movement of Christianity from the theology of Jewish Christianity chiefly in Syria. In that context both views were developments from reflection on miraculous elements of Jesus’ baptism in the Gospel traditions. It became assumed that whenever the apostles mention baptism or practice it, these meanings of Jewish Christianity are carried in the rite. The basic fact is the Christianity and influence of a mass of Jewish converts to Christianity scattered through the crescent formed by the east Mediterranean shores. If one begins at Alexandria, the curve runs east and north to Judea, then through Galilee and Syria, and then northwest into eastern Asia Minor. Using Jerusalem as a convenient reference point, the southwesterly movement of Christianity across Sinai or by sea to Egypt is poorly documented.275 Its more northerly and westerly movement is better documented in Acts. Acts follows the expansion of Christianity to the north and west, noting how Jewish Christians scattered northward after the Stephen persecution, first to Samaria, then as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch into Syria and Cilicia (8:1; 11:19). 1 Peter may be evidence that some Jewish Christians were dispersed into the Black Sea provinces,276 where they joined already existing but very small Jewish Christian groups. Other Jewish Christians began migrating to Egypt and thence westward along the southern Mediterranean shore

275

Goppelt, Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Times, p. 134.

276 If 1 Peter could be understood as a truly Jewish Christian book—Eusebius’ view—rather than a truly Gentile Christian book describing them as Jews, as modern scholarship has it almost unanimously (cf. most recently J. R. Michaels, 1 Peter [Waco, TX: Word, 1988], pp. xlv-lv), then this epistle would be evidence of continued movement of migrating Jewish Christians all the way to the provinces along the south shore of the Black Sea. This possibility is enhanced by recognizing the effects of the growing rebellion in Palestine between 50 and 67 A.D., and the pressures of resettlement to the north. Michaels says of 1 Peter’s readers that “although not Jewish . . . they could be addressed as Jews because of their allegiance to the God of the Jews (p.lii).” This assessment could certainly be questioned.

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and southward toward Ethiopia and beyond. More Jewish Christians migrated toward these same areas during the development of tensions leading to the Jewish revolt during the period c 50-68 A. D., and during the war itself and its aftermath. In his study of The Theology of Jewish Christianity, J. Danielou277 has described the beliefs and practices of such early Jewish Christian communities and their descendents during the later first and early second century. Jewish Christians in the East Mediterranean crescent produced a remarkable literature containing their thought and reflecting their practices. In Egypt (Alexandria probably) a Jewish-Christian group produced the Sibylline Oracles, Books V-VII,278 and the Epistle of Barnabas,279 a book included in the old collection of Apostolic Fathers. The surviving Syrian Jewish Christian books include The Ascension of Isaiah, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (the Christian edition), II Enoch, The Odes of Solomon,280 and The Prayer of Joseph.281 The great Jewish Christian crescent also produced the early full-scale apocryphal gospels, The Gospel of Peter, The Gospel of James, The Gospel of the Nazarenes, The Gospel of the Hebrews, The Gospel of the Egyptians, and The Gospel of Thomas.282 Most were tinged with various sectarian, especially Gnostic, beliefs. From these books Danielou reconstructed what is now one of the basic descriptions of the theology of Jewish Christianity. We shall limit ourselves to his collected material on baptism—Christ’s and Christians’—although Jewish Christians had distinctive beliefs on many points of the Judeo-Christian doctrinal agenda. In Jewish Christianity, Jesus’ baptism is the prototype for Christian baptism. It is assumed that the Jesus’ baptism traditions contain sufficient meaning on which to construct the meaning of Christian baptism. Later apostolic use of baptism is assumed to adhere in thought and development to alleged meanings of the tradition. Texts are almost entirely quoted as they are without exegesis or critical assessment of meaning. Two themes on the meaning of Jesus’ baptism are persistent in the theology of Jewish Christians. (1) Jesus’ descent into the Jordan river took him into the realm of the demons. The Testament of Asher 7:3 says that when the Most High would come to visit men, he would break the head of the dragon by means of water. This theme comes to expression in Cyril of Jerusalem’s fourth century Catechetical Lectures given to prepare candidates for baptism. In the Catechetical Lectures, the elaborate baptismal preparation and ceremony of eastern Christians is an exorcism event—deliverance from demons in a replay of Jesus’ baptism. Cyril says, “Since . . . it was necessary to break the heads of the dragon in pieces, He went down and bound the strong one in the waters.”283 That this is an addition to the Gospel records does not appear to him as a problem; hence the meaning tradition is taken for 277 The recommendation of Frend, The Rise of Christianity, p. 151, is followed here and with his cautions. I adopt Danielous’s topical description despite G. Luedemann’s methodological objections to his procedure. Cf. Luedemann, Opposition to Paul in Jewish Christianity, pp. 25-27; Danielou’s description is not faulted by Luedemann per se. 278 Danielou, Theology of Jewish Christianity, p. 181; one may reference the introductions to these books in Charlesworth, Pseudepigrapha. 279 J. B. Lightfoot, J. R. Harmer, and M. W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations of their Writings (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992), p. 272. 280 Danielou, Theology of Jewish Christianity, passim. 281 Ibid., pp. 16-17. 282 Ibid., pp. 19-20; Frend, Rise of Christianity, p. 121. 283 Catechetical Lectures, III. 11.

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granted. The thinking exemplified in Cyril led to baptism as an exorcism of demons. (2) Upon emerging out of the Jordan’s waters, the voice declaring Christ to be God’s Son was immediately followed by a great light according to the Gospel of the Ebionites.284 This is also an addition to the story as our canonical Gospels have it. Still, biblical or not, Jewish Christians generally understood Jesus’ emergence from the Jordan as accompanied by light, sometimes thought of as fire, but on any reckoning embodying light linked with an open heaven.285 This second notion is the one which became standard in The Epistle of Barnabas, in Clement of Alexandria’s Paidogogos, in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, and finally in Tertullian’s tractate On Baptism near the end of the second century. In this theology, baptism is not a conquest and deliverance from demons, but an enlightenment which regenerates in the water. Danielou does not discuss Hippolytus’ Apostolic Tradition. But since this work is of extreme importance to this discussion, even though, or rather because it represents Jewish Christian views penetrating the Roman church as the second century advanced, we shall discuss its baptismal theology in some detail below. Baptismal theology in the early church belongs to one of these two Jewish Christian conceptions—a miraculous regenerating enlightenment in the water, or a miraculous defeat of and deliverance from demons in the water, both stemming from a Jewish Christian reading of details in Jesus’ baptism. Sometimes the two concepts merge into each other or are embraced together. We do not know the specific local origins of these formulations beyond the probability of Syria; but it is clear that earlier Jewish use of water as a symbol has been replaced by the influence of miracle-thinking in the earliest post-apostolic Christianity. The influence of miracles in stories of Jesus’ baptism was strong enough to naturally integrate into the Christian initiation ceremony, thereby overwhelming the simpler Jewish external symbol usage of Qumran and John the Baptist. Danielou also documents other didactic and ceremonial details of early Jewish Christian baptism. It included catechetical instruction in the Two Ways ethics (often the differences between love and hate) with special emphasis on the Christian’s responsibility of loving God and neighbor, and practicing the Golden Rule;286 a fast or periods of fasting; anointing with oil; doning a white robe or tunic; a coronation; and some post-baptismal sphragis or sealing ceremony of which details are not clear. The white garment/coronation feature may derive from details of the Feast of Tabernacles;287 the sphragis/sealing perhaps derives from the Jewish Christian analogy of baptism and circumcision as initiation into the community. Among the books making up The Apostolic Fathers, three of the earliest are from the south and east Mediterranean Jewish Christian crescent. Two show evidences of the same two themes of Jewish Christianity’s views of baptism. The Didache most likely arose in Syria, perhaps as early as 70 A. D.288 Its baptismal concepts are almost entirely procedural rather than theological. Already in place are the period of catechetical instruction in the new life, a period of fasting, and then baptism in the name of Father, Son, and Spirit. Immersion in running water is recommended, but failing this provision, water poured on the head will

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Danielou, Theology of Jewish Christianity, pp. 230-231. Ibid. 286 Ibid., p. 316. 287 Ibid., p. 328. 288 Lightfoot, Harmer and Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, pp. 247-248. 284 285

suffice (Didache 7)—a provision strikingly reminiscent of Qumran baptismal provisions cited above, so much so in fact that one might entertain an author of Qumran origins converted to Christianity.289 There is no exorcism or illumination thought here. But it would be unwise to draw the conclusion that the document is all against the miracle baptism theology of exorcism and illumination, for the simple reason that it is a procedural manual throughout with little interest in theology. (It discusses in order: moral instruction, baptism, the eucharist, reception of itinerant apostles and prophets, and an order for bishops and deacons.) The Epistle of Barnabas may be placed between the fall of Jerusalem (70 A.D.) and Hadrian’s rebuilding of Jerusalem about 135 A.D. The book almost certainly originated in Alexandria.290 Its baptismal doctrine occupies chapter 11. Barnabas gains theological substructure for supporting miraculous regenerative baptism by merging Old Testament water texts: living waters of Psalm 1; the fountain of life of Jeremiah 2:12-13; the hidden, unseen treasures promised in Isaiah 45:3; and the never-failing water of Isaiah 33:16. Together these merged living water and divine power texts yield the miracle of baptismal regeneration and illumination:

. . . while we descend into the water laden with sins and dirt, we rise up bearing fruit in our heart and with fear and hope in Jesus in our spirits.

While he does not use the term “enlightenment” or “illumination” as such, references to it are likely in phrases like “bearing fruit in our heart” and “fear and hope in Jesus in our spirits.” Barnabas already manifests Tertullian’s practice of ransacking the Old Testament for every kind of water reference in any way related to the water miracle doctrine of illumination, no matter how remote or dubious. The cross too is found in proximity with water in texts like Psalm 1 and Ezekiel 47:1-12(?):

Notice how he pointed out the water and the cross together. For this is what he means: blessed are those who, having set their hope on the cross, descended into the water, because he speaks of the reward ‘in its season’; at that time, he means, I will repay. But for now what does he say? ‘The leaves will not wither.’ By this he means that every word that comes forth from your mouth in faith and love will bring conversion and hope to many. And again in a different prophet he says: ‘And the land of Jacob was praised more than any land.’ This means he is glorifying the vessel of his spirit. Then what does he say? ‘And there was a river flowing on the right hand, and beautiful trees were rising from it, and whoever eats from them will live forever.’

Thus by interfacing several more or less thought-linked Old Testament prophetic texts with no exegesis, but rather guided by water-miracle assumptions, he reaches miraculous life through water. Readers will have to realize that a sense of the miraculous is pervasive in this period of church development. This sense of things yields a love of mystery, and allegorical readings are normal—by divine miracle, Scripture is bulging with mystical meaning. Not until later, in Theodore of Mopsuestia and John Chrysostom is there a movement (return?)

289 There is discussion of Qumran (usually thought Essene) converts to Jewish Christianity; cf. Danielou, Theology of Jewish Christianity, passim. 290 Lightfoot-Harmer and Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, p. 272.

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to literal understanding of Scripture, but it was not really normalized until the Reformation, and then especially in Calvin’s commentaries and hermeneutical format.291 Ignatius, reflecting with the Odes of Solomon the Syrian Jewish Christian theology,292 speaks for the notion of a watery confrontation with the powers of evil at Christ’s baptism. This is certainly the connection of his strange allusion to Jesus cleansing the water at his baptism (Ignatius To the Ephesians 18:2):

For our God, Jesus the Christ, was conceived by Mary according to God’s plan, both from the seed of David and of the Holy Spirit. He was born and was baptized in order that by his suffering he might cleanse the water.

The most obvious explanation of this passage is, as Danielou says:

. . . that Christ by descending into the water destroyed the demonic forces that dwelt in it, thus purifying them by his Passion, that is to say, by his death, which is a descent into the world of death.293

Likewise the connection with the cross appears here as in Barnabas to achieve the theological point that “Christ’s baptism prefigures the cross.”294 And one is tempted too, to see in Ignatius to Polycarp 62 another such allusion when he states that Polycarp should let his “baptism serve as a shield”—at the least an allusion to combat. Be that as it may, the important point to note is the victory over demons which Syrian Jewish Christianity linked with Christ’s and implicitly with each Christian’s baptism, despite the fact that this theology of baptism nowhere appears in the New Testament. The remaining references to baptism in The Apostolic Fathers are of theological significance only for the developing Old Catholic ecclesiology: baptism must be by the bishop (Ignatius To the Smyrneans, 8:2); by baptism one enters the safety of the church (The Shepherd of Hermas, Vision 3:7:3); Jesus was baptized by John (Ignatius to the Smyrneans 1:1); or there may be a moral dimension as in 2 Clement’s plea that the readers keep their baptism clean to prepare for entering the kingdom (6:9). Illuminism in Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria Since these Fathers produced the primary baptism treatises of the first four centuries, it will be instructive to give attention to the details of their baptism theology. Here one finds the same miraculous baptismal views: illumination or exorcism—both by miraculous intervention in baptism. In his tract On Baptism Tertullian seeks to demolish the arguments of a Cainite Gnostic teacher who wished to do away with baptism entirely. The tract is divided into two parts, the first on the theology of baptism, the second on what Tertullian calls “certain minor questions.” A review of the baptism theology of Part I will satisfy our purpose. 291 See T. H. L. Parker, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries (London: SCM Press, 1971, pp. 2668. 292 Goppelt, Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Times, p. 133, suggests that the Odes of Solomon might have been the hymnal of Ignatius’ Syrian/Antioch congregations. 293 Danielou, The Theology of Jewish Christianity, p. 226. 294 Ibid.

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Tertullian wastes no time entering the illuminism of Jewish Christian theology. In the very first lines he states: Happy is our sacrament of water, in that by washing away the sins of our early blindness, we are set free and admitted into eternal life.295

The watery transformation has the divine qualities of simplicity and power; it is a matter of divine wonder (ch 2). Water was established at creation as a material element of divine dignity by its immense age and its instrumental functions in producing the rest of creation: “. . . waters were in some way the regulating powers by which the disposition of the world thence forward was constituted by God (ch 3).” He is quite aware that this line of thought makes him seem to “have collected rather the praises of water than the reasons of baptism.” Still the primacy of water at creation shows that God has “made the material substance . . . obey him also in His own peculiar sacraments (ch 3).” Just as the Spirit hovered over the waters at creation so it hovers over the waters of baptism, which thus catch “the quality” of the hovering Spirit. This does not mean that the water is made holy; rather, because both waters (of creation and baptism) are holy by divine determination, the already holy created water catches the powers of the spiritual or celestial holy, i.e., the natural already being holy is raised to a higher level by the Spirit.296 Thus: All waters, therefore, in virtue of the pristine privilege of their origin, do, after invocation of God, attain the sacramental power of sanctification; for the Spirit immediately supervenes from the heavens, and rests over the waters, sanctifying them from Himself; and being thus sanctified, they imbibe at the same time the power of sanctifying (ch 4).

Tertullian thinks both paganism and Judaism have instructive analogies: pagan religion used washing ceremonies which their votaries presumed really regenerated and remitted penalties of their perjuries.297 Judaism had its angel at the pool of Bethesda which stirred the waters to heal the first person dipped (John 5:7). But these are mere natural anticipations of miraculous Christian baptism which fulfills the longings of both paganism and Judaism. . . . things carnal are always antecedent as figurative of things spiritual. And thus, when the grace of God advanced to higher degrees among men, an accession of efficacy was granted to the waters and to the angel (ch 5).

Enlightenment or what he called the removal of “our early blindness” is not the sole motif of Tertullian’s baptismal theology. Around and enfolded it are larger concepts of divine or eternal life, cleansing, forgiveness, sanctification, peace, and freedom from the devil, all of which appear at crucial defining points through the nine chapters of Part I. It is significant, however, that the removal of blindness stands at the head of the discussion. Toward the end of Part I, Tertullian explains the other elements of baptism. These elements 295 The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed A. Roberts and J. Donaldson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 3:669. 296 One of the sources of Catholicism’s view of the relation of nature and grace; cf. E. Troeltsch, Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 2 vols, trans O. Wyon (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 1:262-269. 297 See. A. D. Nock, Early Gentile Christianity (London: Longmans, Green, 1928), pp. 59-63, for a larger summary of the pagan-Christian analogies.

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also appear to be continuous with earlier Jewish Christianity including its miraculous illuminism. (1) Having arisen from the water, the baptizand is anointed with oil. Tertullian derives this part of the ceremony from Aaron’s priestly anointing. The unction runs carnally, but profits spiritually just as baptism. (2) The anointing is followed by imposition of hands. This too is supported by the Old Testament case of Jacob who blessed his grandsons by laying hands on them. (3) At this point in the ritual, the Holy Spirit comes on the baptizand like the descent of a dove;298 he is prepared for this moment by the watery cleansing and oily anointing. These ingredients are sought chiefly, though not exclusively, from Old Testament analogies and archetypes, not from exegetical treatment of apostolic texts. Thus Tertullian continues to show the effects of thinking about the church in terms of the Christian synagogue and the true Israel: the bishop is the chief priest (ch 17); either Passover or Pentecost is the best baptismal occasion; he recommends prayers, fasts and all night vigils in preparation for baptism (ch 20). He does not discuss a preparatory catechetical period; but it seems assumed in his recommendation that baptism of children be delayed until a period of maturing and learning can occur, and his biblical examples likewise suggest a period of biblical and worldly awareness undeveloped in “the innocent period of life (ch 18).” Thus it is clear that the older Jewish Christian practices and conceptions of baptism are found in Tertullian where they have become normative. Barnabas’ earlier theology became elaborated in more detail and embellished with Levitical details and the procedural details of The Didache continued and enriched with Old Testament counterparts in the fashion of Barnabas. The church is thinking of itself as the “True Israel,” fully saturated with the Holy Spirit. Tertullian’s contemporary, Clement of Alexandria, also expounds baptism as enlightenment; but, typically, he integrates more closely the concepts of illumination, removal of sin and new knowledge gained by the Christian. Christ’s baptism forcefully models that of the individual Christian: Well, I assert, simultaneously with his baptism by John, He becomes perfect? Manifestly, He did not then learn anything more from him? Certainly not. But He is perfected by the washing—of baptism—alone, and is sanctified by the descent of the Spirit? Such is the case. The same also takes place in our case, whose examplar Christ became. Being baptized, we are illuminated; illuminated, we become sons; being made sons, we are made perfect; being made perfect, we are made immortal . . . . This work is variously called grace, illumination perfection, and washing: washing, by which we cleanse away our sins; grace, by which the penalties accruing to transgressions are remitted; and illumination, by which that Holy light of salvation is beheld, that is, by which we see God clearly.299

This set of integrated ideas comes up again and again in Clement’s continuing discussion of Christian instruction. For example: . . . thus also we who are baptized, having wiped off the sins which obscure the light of the Divine Spirit, have the eye of the spirit free, unimpeded, and full of light, by which alone we contemplate the Divine, the Holy Spirit flowing down to us from above.300 298 It is not clear whether there was an actual dove released. Tertullian’s persistent correlation of carnal and spiritual would suggest that this might have been the case; but his text does not say so. 299 The Instructor, Bk 1.6. 300 Ibid.

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Or again: So that in illumination what we receive is knowledge, and the end of knowledge is rest— the last thing conceived as the object of aspiration. As, then, inexperience comes to an end by experience, and perplexity by finding a clear outlet, so by illumination must darkness disappear. The darkness is ignorance, through which we fall into sins, purblind as to the truth. Knowledge, then, is the illumination we receive, which makes ignorance disappear, and endows us with clear vision . . . . We are washed from all our sins, and are no longer entangled in evil. This is the one grace of illumination, that our characters are not the same as before our washing. And since knowledge springs up with illumination, shedding its beams around the mind, the moment we hear, we who are untaught become disciples.

Just a few years earlier, Justin Martyr had explained baptism in the same terms, with virtually the same close connection of ideas as those of Clement: And for this rite we have learned from the apostles this reason. Since at our birth we were born without our own knowledge or choice, by our parents coming together, and were brought up in bad habits and wicked training; in order that we may not remain the children of necessity and ignorance, but may become the children of choice and knowledge, and may obtain in the water the remission of sins formerly committed, there is pronounced over him who chooses to be born again, and has repented of his sins, the name of God the Father and Lord of the universe; he who leads to the laver the person that is to be washed calling him by this name alone . . . . And this washing is called illumination because they who learn these things are illuminated in their understandings.301

It is clear, then, that this baptismal tradition is firmly established in the church by the beginning of the third century. Baptism is illumination; the Holy Spirit enlightens as a miraculous work like the light that dawned at Christ’s baptism; and in this sacrament the intellectual (“noetic”) blinders of sin are removed to grant the Christian new knowledge of God. There is a hint of interest in likening Christian baptism to pagan water rituals, but they are viewed as preliminary and inferior; Christian baptism is their fulfillment. Exorcism in Hippolytus of Rome and Cyril of Jerusalem Baptism as exorcism of Satan and demons has its fullest statement in this father. For Hippolytus we are fortunate to have recovered the document known as The Apostolic Tradition,302 and to have firmed up its connection with Hippolytus of Rome (c. 170-236 A.D.), the pupil of Irenaeus. The Apostolic Tradition is a church order manual reflecting church practice about the turn of the century at Rome (c. 200 A.D.). It includes forms for ordination of bishops, presbyters, and deacons; standards for new catechumens including professions or trades forbidden to Christians (sculptors, painters, charioteers, gladiators, 301 Justin Martyr, The First Apology, ch. 61. 302 G. Dix and H. Chadwick, The Treatise on The Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus of Rome, Second Rev Ed, with Additional Corrections (London: The Alban Press, 1992). The recovery of a portion of Hippolytus’ statue near his tomb in Rome containing a list of his writings, the proof by Dollinger in 1856 that the Refutation of All Heresies was not Origen’s but Hippolytus’, and the recognition that the ancient work known as The Apostolic Tradition is also his—these together are an example of the gradual archaeological and literary recovery of more and more of the ancient church (P. Toon, “Hippolytus,” NIDCC).

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magicians); baptismal liturgy; and instructions for the Eucharist, times of prayer, and the sign of the cross. Catechumens began conversion, after having abandoned unsavory professions, trades, and practices, with a period of three years instruction. Upon final inspection of their lives at the end of the three-year instruction period, catechumens approached baptism. From the day the final decision was made to accept them, they were exorcised daily (19:3) by laying-on of hands; the bishop himself conducted a special exorcism as baptism day approached—to “be certain that he is purified (19:3).” On Thursday of baptism week a preliminary washing was done. (A menstruous woman had to wait for another baptism day.) On Friday and Saturday the expectant baptizands fasted, and on Saturday assembled for prayer with the bishop. Each was again exorcised and the bishop breathed in their faces, and sealed their foreheads, ears, and noses. They then arose from their knees to spend the whole of Saturday night in vigil, hearing Scripture read to them, and receiving further instruction (20:7-9). On Sunday morning at cock-crow, the water was consecrated. Two vessels of anointing oil were prepared—Oil of Thanksgiving and Oil of Exorcism. One of two Presbyters grasped the baptizand and bid him renounce Satan: “I renounce thee, Satan, and all thy service and all thy works.” Then he anointed him with the Oil of Exorcism and pronounced the words, “Let all evil spirits depart far from thee.” The baptizand then faced east and confessed his consent to the will of God. The first Presbyter gave him to the second Presbyter at the water after which he again confessed belief; the baptizing Presbyter was then joined by a Deacon and together they descended into the water and arose three times. Between the three descents (tri-immersion) the baptizand uttered the words of the Apostles’ Creed twice. After arising the final time he was anointed with the Oil of Thanksgiving by a(nother?) Presbyter who had been holding it, and he joined the assembly (21:20). Then the Bishop laid hands on the whole group of baptizands (how this is done is not specified), prayed for them, again anointed them with oil, put a seal on their forehead, and gave them the kiss of peace. Prayer was offered with the whole congregation and after another kiss of peace (232:6) the service continued with the Eucharist (ch 23). This is Hippolytus of Rome and the ritual was no doubt practiced there in this fashion during and after his time. But Rome is the western, not the eastern Mediterranean, and I have suggested that this exorcist form of baptism is eastern. One can only say, following Danielou, that by this time Jewish Christianity had penetrated the West, that it probably coalesced with Diaspora Jewish Christianity to a significant degree, that it produced Jewish Christian congregations and influences on Gentile congregations, and finally that it caused ethnic factors to transcend geographical particulars thus making geography more or less irrelevant. Gregory Dix makes clear that this baptismal liturgy, while already in use at Rome before Hippolytus’ time, was of Jewish-Christian origin throughout: the seal, the oblation, the prayers, the water, the blessing, and other details: [Hippolytus’] whole initiation rite is recognizably derived from the initiation of Jewish proselytes.303 . . . This primitive rite is Jewish through and through, Jewish in form and feeling, saturated in Paschal conceptions, transcended and Christianized, but recognizably Jewish all the same.304

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303 304

Dix, The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, p. xl Ibid., p. xli.

Indeed, he states that . . . it appears from other writers that the Jewish origin of much in second-century Church Order had been practically lost sight of by the time the Apostolic Tradition came to be written. Hippolytus himself had nothing but contempt for ‘the People’ and their dumb observances. Nor are these Judaic elements obviously developed from Old Testament Scripture . . . They must be legacies from the period when most Christian leaders were still Jews by birth, and upbringing and habit of mind, who unquestioningly carried over into their new faith all which did not seem directly superseded in the Church Order and practice of piety of the old Israel of God. This period was virtually ended by about A. D. 100 . . . even the strongly Gentile Christianity of the Great Church did steadily retain an incurably Judaic side to its soul . . . Hippolytus reveals clearly for the first time how firmly the Jewish liturgical basis persisted in the Catholic cultus after a century and a half of Gentile Christianity. 305

In the Catechetical Lectures of Cyril of Jerusalem (310-386 A.D.), most of this exorcist view of baptism and its ritual procedures are also in view. There were variations as was also the case at Antioch in Chrysostom’s time; but the same basic meaning of baptism as exorcism of the devil can be seen in these extant patristic examples through the early centuries. Cyril achieves something of a synthesis of illuminist and exorcist values, even though his lectures reflect dominant exorcist concerns. Jewish Christianity and the Pauline Churches If we try now to take a larger view of what happened as the apostolic age wore on, as the last of the apostles died in the 90s, and as the church moved into its second century development, we may be better able to understand the larger context for baptism developments. Several questions will be useful in structuring the discussion: (1) What was the extent of Jewish Christian influence in the Pauline churches, especially after Paul’s temporary or permanent departure, or even death? (2) What happened to Jewish Christianity and its remarkable literature identified above? (3) How did the view of Tertullian and Irenaeus, that there was only one single faith believed by all from the very beginning, emerge in light of the diversity which existed within Jewish Christianity? (4) Were there any gaps either large or small, between Paul’s teaching and that of the fathers of the late first and early second century—gaps that opened space for Judaizing activity? (1) Evidence of the influence of Jewish Christianity on the Pauline churches is fairly widespread. Paul’s epistles already exhibit a troubling and often aggressive Jewish or Jewish-Christian presence in or near most of the Pauline-founded or Pauline-taught churches. Jewish influence is visible in Galatia (where it was most aggressive, with Gentile circumcision as its focal point), and at Thessalonica (Actss 17:1-4; 1 Thes 2:14-16), Corinth (2 Cor 11:21b-23), Philippi (3:2-4), Colosse (2:16-19), Ephesus (1 Tim 1:3-7), and Rome (Rom 14). These texts refer to Jewish attempts to influence Gentile or mixed Jew-Gentile churches. Whether or how Jewish Christians may have included or influenced baptismal practice and/or theology is not in evidence; only their presence and some agenda items are noted. Proselyting interests are somewhere in the midst of these situations since their aims

305

Ibid., pp. xlii-xliii.

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are clearly to make Jews out of Pauline Gentile converts (Acts 15:1, 6), with baptism a major feature of proselyte entry requirements. Most of these cases occurred during Paul’s absence. Writing about the middle of the second Christian century, Justin Martyr, in his dialogue with the Jew Trypho, refers to Jews or Jewish Christians who try to persuade other Christians to adopt Jewish Sabbath-keeping, circumcision, calendar regulations and washings after touching anything prohibited by Moses or after sexual intercourse. What this has to do with a one-time initiatory Christian baptismal practice is not clear; but the allusion is certainly of interest to the thesis of this essay.306 Jews zealous for making full proselytes could not possibly have ignored their own value on proselyte baptism. A survey of the regional churches and major Pauline cities will provide a somewhat fuller picture of Jewish influences in Paul’s absence. This survey moves from east to west through the northern Mediterranean area. In Syria the churches were strongly Jewish in composition or influence or both. Paul’s mission activity was originally based at Antioch where Jewish Christian groups were strong if not dominant. These groups produced at least some of the influential JewishChristian literature and its baptismal doctrines discussed above, while other Jewish Christians apparently drifted toward Gnosticism.307 A strong or dominant Jewish Christianity would certainly be sympathetic to continued Pharisee efforts at Judaizing Gentile congregations as in Galatia earlier. Similarly, the growth of a single ruling bishop per church-region probably developed first at Antioch; the monarchial bishopric was already in place there when its former bishop Ignatius wrote to the churches of Asia shortly after the turn of the century (c 110-117 A. D.). Johannes Weiss thought developments in the Syrian and nearby Cilician churches were heavily influenced by the Jerusalem church.308 More recently G. Luedemann is repeatedly affirmative about the Jerusalem origins of the flow of antiPaulinism309 It seems likely but not certain that the idea of the single ruling bishop along with illuminism and exorcism baptizing doctrine came from this same influence—JewishChristian, especially Pharisaic or priestly elements in the “mother church” at Jerusalem. The single-head leadership of James I and James II at Jerusalem would have been a forceful model. Ignatius, during his journey from Syrian Antioch to martyrdom in Rome, wrote epistles to the Asian churches after the turn of the century, perhaps in the period 112-117 A. D. In his letters Ignatius warns about resisting continued Jewish teaching. Concern about Jewish influence is expressed in his letters to the Magnesians (8, 10) and to the Philadelphians (6). Ignatius’ warnings discourage the churches from adopting Jewish practices,310 and thus testify to the reality of the problem. More specifically, Ignatius alludes to teachers who 306 Justin Martyr, Dialogue With Trypho, 46:2, 4. The passage is cited by C. Setzer, Jewish Responses to Early Christians (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), p. 136, who understands it as a case of Jewish attempts at persuading Christians to take up Jewish rituals. 307 Goppelt, Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Times, pp. 132-133. 308 J. Weiss, Earliest Christianity: A History of the Period A. D. 30-150, 2 vols, trans F. C. Grant (New York: Harper and Row, 1959) 2:740-742. His description is, “After [Paul’s] departure [from Antioch] this province was to lie completely in the sphere of influence of Jerusalem (p. 740).” 309 G. Luedemann, Opposition to Paul inh Jewish Christianity, passim, and especially pp. 212-213 in conclusion. This seems quite widely agreed. 310 Setzer, Jewish Responses, p. 110.

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deny the reality of Jesus’ flesh and humanity—a view called “docetism” from Greek dokeo meaning “seem,” and affirming that Jesus only “seemed” to have a human nature. This view of Jesus along with other elements of developing Gnosticism is believed to have had Jewish roots.311 Thus Jewish influence on the Pauline churches continued well into the second Christian century. Somewhere in this Syrian-Asian church context—perhaps most likely in Syria and the churches in and around Antioch—Jewish Christian theologies of baptism took shape in the exorcism and illuminism of the later apostolic and post-apostolic eras as documented and discussed by Danielou. Parallel development of similar ideas may also have occurred in Egyptian Christianity through cross-fertilization of thought in the East Mediterranean Jewish-Christian crescent. In western Asia, Jewish-Christian teachers had already been present in mixed Pauline congregations or were waiting in the wings of newly planted Gentile churches in urban centers to move in when Paul left. In this way they took advantage of his itinerant method of evangelism and church planting. Paul’s itinerant practices sometimes left dangerous gaps in teaching authority since he sometimes appointed elders only during later visits. Elsewhere in Asia Minor, the church at Colossae was threatened by Judaizers (2:16-19) pushing for Sabbath observance, festivals and food laws, while the seven churches of Revelation 2-3 also had Jewish influences in their midst. At Ephesus on the western Asia coast, Paul appointed elders as successors, probably during his three years there (Acts 20); he did not appoint successor apostles.312 Timothy, a kind of apostolic legate, continued teaching at Ephesus; but we do not know anything of his teaching strength or of what happened after his demise or departure. We do not know either about the date of his departure. Nor do we know the extent of the Ephesian elders’ capabilities or effectiveness. Paul warned the Ephesian elders about disruptive teachers after his departure (Acts 20), and urged Timothy to deal with Jewish-based deviations (1 Tim 1:3-7; 4:1-8). The pastoral epistles also warn about “deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons (1 Tim 4:1)” and the “pretensions of liars (1 Tim 4:2)”; immediate allusion to food restrictions is evidence for Jewish influences. This is also the case with the reference of 2 Timothy 3:8 to Jannes and Jambres who opposed Moses—a reference out of Jewish legend. Near the end of the century, Onesimus, whose identity is unknown, became bishop at Ephesus; but we know little about him or his work. On any reckoning, the departure of Paul and his personal apostolic teaching authority at Ephesus left an opening for Jewish influences already visible in his own time. In Achaia (chiefly Corinth), we know that the church continued to have divisions because Clement of Rome wrote to them about 95 A.D. to help heal an actual split. Because the churches at Corinth began in connection with the Jewish synagogue (Acts 18:4-8), and at an early stage of development experienced pressures from itinerant Jewish teachers competing with Paul (2 Cor 11), it is clear that this element was once of concern here. In his epistle to Corinth, Clement tries to help Corinth with its schism, but there is no evidence that the on-going division referred to in Clement’s epistle was caused by Jewish 311 R Grant, Gnosticism and Early Christianity, rev ed (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). 312 O. Cullmann, Peter: Disciple—Apostle—Martyr, trans F. Filson (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953), pp. 219-223; H. Koester, “Ephesos in Early Christian Literature,” in Ephesos: Metropolis of Asia, ed H. Koester (Valley Forge PA: Trinity Press International, 1995), p. 134, on Luke knowing only of elder appointments; there was no single bishop as yet.

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forces; however, one may suspect with some justice that this could well have been the case. In northern Greece, the church at Thessalonica may also have suffered pressure from Jews, although Paul’s comment concerns mainly Judean Jews (2:14-16). J. Weiss suggests that for both Achaia (Corinth) and Macedonia (Thessalonica chiefly) there was probably a century-long lack of capable leaders.313 If this is so, Jewish-Christian teachers may have tried to step in, especially since this church too had Jewish synagogue origins as well as Jewish and semi-proselyte members (“God-fearing Greeks,” Acts 17:1-4). At Rome with its large Jewish quarter and a dozen or more synagogues, the church lacked Pauline foundations, having originated almost certainly from Jewish Christian preaching—the same Jewish Christianity from which the questions addressed in Romans came. Paul’s letter to this church (Romans) is thick with Jewish objections to his law-free policy for Gentile churches and concerns about his view of Israel’s situation; these factors point to a persistent Jewish element in the Roman church. A strong Jewish element is also indicated from the divisive Jewish food and calendar scruples mentioned in Romans 14. For the post-apostolic period, we have 1 Clement which originated at Rome, and The Shepherd of Hermas from about a half-century after Paul’s letter to the Romans. Both 1 Clement and the The Shepherd of Hermas have heavily legalistic-behavioral expositions of Christian responsibility, which suggests that by the turn of the century the Roman church was guided by a moralism born mostly if not entirely of its Jewish roots.314 I Clement’s Jewish-like moralism gradually evolved into Tertullian’s notion that Christianity is a New Law, although this thinking was also natural to the thought of a Roman lawyer. Hermas is a Jewish-like apocalyptic book. Thus the probabilities are toward forceful Jewish and Jewish-Christian influence in Roman Christianity. The churches of the Pauline mission were, therefore, vulnerable to pressures from their environment among which one of the strongest was Judaism.315 Many churches originated in or were near local synagogues, and many Jewish Christians departing from synagogues entered Gentile churches. In addition, the literature of Jewish Christianity discussed above was far more plentiful than any produced by Paul’s followers or leaders of Gentile Christianity after his departure. And not least, the New Testament already provided much evidence for Judaizing itinerants regionally preying on Paul’s churches. (2) What happened to Jewish Christians? Three major movements are visible with actual or potential significance for the reality of Jewish influence on Pauline churches. (a) In addition to their determination to oppose Paul and insist on Gentile converts keeping the whole Mosaic law, Jewish Christians at a rather early time created and used a different gospel—The Gospel of the Hebrews. This gospel has not survived, and what we know of it is from a few extracts found in several church fathers down to the fourth century; Jerome says he translated it into Greek and Latin. The work probably existed in several different 313 Weiss, Earliest Christianity, 2:828. Since Weiss, some comprehensive treatments of the postapostolic church have followed his regional-descriptive method, cf. Goppelt, Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Times, pp. 123-135 and W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity, pp. 142-151. 314 Goppelt, Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Times, pp. 126-127. 315 “Jewish” here includes Gnosticism. Cf. R. Grant,Gnosticism and Early Christianity, who recognizes that Gnosticism developed mostly from within Judaism via disappointed apocalyptic hopes. In another study he again expresses the view that Gnosticism had Jewish-Christian roots (After the New Testament [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967], p. 202).

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revisions and was sometimes called The Gospel of the Nazarenes, although not everywhere and by all Jewish Christians throughout their whole existence. Jewish-Christian users identified its origins with Matthew or an early form of Matthew, probably in Aramaic, that later became our (translated) Greek Gospel of Matthew. Archaeological discovery of a copy of this gospel would be very important to the study of early Jewish Christianity. Jewish Christian sects existed at least until Jerome’s time, although they were slowly dying out.316 Jerome suggests that at least some of them continued to use The Gospel of the Hebrews down to his own time. Jewish Christians, of whatever sectarian commitments, could not and would not have tried to confine this Jewish gospel to their own sects or synagogues; certainly it circulated in the eastern Mediterranean region and may have been used as a tool of influence on some more westerly Pauline congregations. This suggestion does not, however, claim it as an influence on Gentile church baptisms since we do not know if it contained any such teaching. Perhaps it would be justified to assume its use by Judaizers after about 50 A. D. We do not know either how this book relates to the JewishChristian literature’s views of baptism discussed above. However these possibilities may be, The Gospel of the Hebrews would have been influential after Paul’s death in the middle sixties. (b) Jewish Christians were gradually expelled from their synagogues under a scheme of curses pronounced against them and added to the standard synagogue prayers including the well-known Eighteen Benedictions. This drove them to form their own Christian synagogues or join already existing Gentile or mixed Jew-Gentile churches; in at least some cases they would have joined congregations of Paul’s founding. In changes like these some Jewish Christians would have been among those referred to in Paul and Ignatius’ letters, especially if they were converted Pharisees or their supporters and sympathizers, and thus continuous with the Christian Pharisees of Acts 15:1, 6. Jewish Christians who were passionate about advocating Gentile Christian subjection to the Mosaic Law or Gentile subjection to proselyte induction rituals, would have continued to pressure law-free Pauline Gentile congregations toward circumcision, baptism and other proselyte requirements. The process of synagogue expulsion is already reflected during the 90s of the first century in the Gospel of John (12:42; 16:2), and is also attested in Jewish records of the apostolic and post-apostolic era exhibited and discussed by R. Pritz.317 Jewish Christians expelled from their synagogues are another possible source or channel for the origin and spread of illuminism and exorcism baptism theology reflected in Jewish-Christian literature. (c) Jewish-Christian sects developed in reaction to or in trying to cope with Christianity and its mission activity, especially in the case of Paul and his mission to the Gentiles. Pritz also shows in his recent monograph that by all lights—especially in Jerome and Epiphanius’ references to the Jewish-Christian sects—“Nazarene” was the name for Jewish Christians sympathetic to the reality of Gentile churches, who adhered to a form of Christology closest to Christian orthodoxy, and who persisted in practicing the whole Mosaic law—all they could, that is, without the temple. The Jewish-Christian sect known as Ebionites was an offshoot from centrist Nazarene Jewish Christianity, and the JewishChristian Elkesaite sect is still too obscure to place in the stream, although both Ebonites and Elkesites may have joined or tried to join (or rejoin) the Nazarenes at one time.

316 317

Ibid., p. 99. R. A. Pritz, Nazarene Jewish Christianty (Leiden: Brill, 1988).

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Some sectarian Jewish Christians were so hotly anti-Paul that they even spoke of him as a false proselyte, a false prophet, and the “apostle of Satan.” Anti-Paul Jewish Christians adhered strongly to James (or to a lesser extent, Peter). They not only opposed Paul’s view of the law, but argued that he went to the Gentiles prematurely.318 Most of the documentation for these observations comes from Jewish literature after the New Testament or late in the apostolic age; some documentation is available from second century allusions. This situation certainly illustrates continuity with the same kind of anti-Paul passion that characterized Pharisee efforts to counter the freedom of Gentile Christians as reported in Acts 15:1, 6. On any reckoning it appears that the Nazarenes were the main body of Jewish Christians from the earliest time, and were the chief targets of synagogue curses on heretics (chiefly Christian Jews) after 70 A.D; another of their offenses against former fellow Jews could well have been their refusal to mourn the destruction of Jerusalem;319 refusal to mourn Jerusalem might have been one among a number of points on which at least some Jewish Christians sided with Gentile Christians. There is no certainty as yet about whether the Jewish Christian literature identified by Danielou was associated with the Nazarenes or another of the Jewish Christian sects. It may be that all three Jewish Christian groups—and perhaps several others as well—shared in the production and circulation of this literature. The Jewish activity under discussion was concentrated in, but not limited to the East Mediterranean region. The determination of Jewish Christians to keep the law and to criticize Paul in details of his message and practice continued to undermine Paul, to reintroduce at least some Jewish practices, and to seek Gentile Christian baptisms. Their activity probably took the form of seeking to make full proselytes of Paul’s converts, including the standard proselyte baptism. It is not known exactly how long this activity continued; but it may have diminished or ended with the conclusion of the final Jewish revolt in 135 A. D. The later Jewish-Christian books known as The Kerygmata Petrou and The Pseudo-Clementine Literature may have represented one form of its final efforts.320 (3) Diversity among early Christians as in the multiplication of Jewish-Christian sects was obscured for centuries by Tertullian and Irenaeus’ emphasis on the one united faith of all Christians everywhere. Their struggle with Gnostics and other heretics, including Jewish Christian sects, produced a sharp black and white difference, and a correspondingly repressive view of variant Christian beliefs. Jewish Christianity suffered heresy consignment from these fathers, except possibly in some sense for the more centrist Nazarenes. No doubt the fathers’ view was deeply influenced by both the common apostolic creed to which they appealed, and the need to sharply distinguish real Christians from heretics. The more or less hostile attitudes of at least some orthodox Gentile Christians to Jews and Jewish Christians

318 G. Luedemann, Opposition to Paul in Jewish Christianity. Luedemann discusses these and other characteristics of anti-Pauline Jewish Christianity in detail. 319 Pritz, Nazarene Jewish Christianity, p. 99-107, has an impressive collection of data on this this phenomenon. Pritz’ conclusions seem quite compatible with the argument of this segment of the essay, but not in every detail. 320 This is my point; but see Goppelt, Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Times, p.122 for related comments.

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no doubt contributed to elbowing the latter from consideration in patristic literature.321 It is possible to blind oneself to them and their influence by concentrating exclusively on the one-faith emphasis of these early Fathers. However this may be, Judaism and Jewish Christianity were increasingly influential in moving the church to adopt moralism, priesthood, and a watery initiation ceremony with all its elaborate ritual and extra-biblical theology. Intrusive into baptism was a miraculous element, entering where it had not entered before in the work and teaching of the apostles, thereby creating early on the doctrine of baptismal regeneration—as either or both illumination or exorcism. By it all the baptized, including gradually more infants, were assured of salvation. While earlier fathers before Augustine seem to have preferred adult baptism, an early openness also developed to child and infant baptism. Tertullian prefers not to do it, but Gregory Nazianzen permits it in the face of danger and loss of life, while Cyprian encourages it; all three saw it as the rite of regenerative salvation. (4) There were no doubt variably shorter or longer gaps that followed partly from Paul’s itinerant form of evangelism and church planting, and partly from the relative shortage of apostolically trained teaching elders; some of these gaps have been noted above. In some cases, Paul did not immediately appoint elders at first (South Galatia certainly; Thessalonica and Corinth probably). This early Pauline lag on elder appointments created some short-term gaps in apostolic authority for supporting Gentile freedom from the Mosaic law and related proselyting rituals. A larger gap in teaching authority may have opened at Corinth and Thessalonica while at Colosse as in Galatia, Jewish law teachers appear to have leaped into the church’s life not long after Paul’s evangelist-legates founded their first house churches. In retrospect, it would have been far better for the church to recognize the originally limited, ethnic eschatological meaning of baptism in the New Testament—as the symbol of initiation into the New Israel believing remnant—than to have continued to update it with new meanings and escalating attendant symbolisms to the spiritual and eternal danger of millions of professing Christians. The graveness of the danger was not only in the use of ritual as such, but in the fact that this symbol became an initiation into faith and eternal life. This sets the use of the rite in a far riskier context than the Lord’s Supper, which is normally a celebration of people already Christians by whatever reckoning. There are dangers with the Supper too; but they are not the extreme dangers attached to baptism as the entrance ritual and gateway to eternal safety. In these two essays, I have argued that the retention of water baptism rituals in the church was an unwarranted deviation—not just in retaining the rite itself, but more importantly in the fact that the rite cannot exist without its meaning, indeed that it was and still is materially supported in the life of the churches only by its meaning, and that both meaning and fact have been imposed without Pauline authority. The church of the late first and early second century cannot guide us in the matter, since its views are already deviant, or at least a step away from Pauline teaching. The early churches after Paul did not recognize the deviations developing from Jewish influence in a more or less complex historical situation.

321

Ibid., pp. 133-134.

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The Crucial Decades: 65-135 A. D.: Some Further Factors The era from the second (67 A. D.) to the last and final Jewish revolt (135 A. D.) is the crucial era of “The Christian Synagogue.” Why did the church come through this period with baptism so important and firmly established as regenerative? This question cannot be anwered in detail or with certain finality. But certain dynamics in the history of the era do provide general clues as to what happened. Actual or potential analogies to the continued use or adoption of this Jewish rite existed in the New Testament era: fasting, alms-giving, foot-washing, anointing, laying-on of hands—all with some place in church life—but not, like baptism, fully miracalized into sacraments; still, these Jewish practices have always had a more or less uncertain place in the life of the church. It is also curious that of the various ritual/ceremonial elements found occasionally in the New Testament, John’s baptism persisted, while his diet of locusts and honey did not, nor did his clothing of animal skins or desert existence, except in some aspects of the hermitism of the third and fourth centuries. Catholicism gradually retained or restored several of these practices; but the reforming movements of the thirteenth century and following, up to the present Protestantism, sidelined or diminished most of them while re-establishing the evangelical salvation of the apostolic preaching. If one looks for biblical authority, it seems clear that while Paul mentions several such Jewish practices, he does not normalize them any more than he does baptism. So it is important to ask about baptism in particular: where does Paul ever seek to normalize anything by not mentioning it, marginalizing it, or stressing in both practice and policy how little he did it, how he couldn’t remember who he did it to or with, and that Christ did not send him to do it. Yet normalizing is what he is thought to do with baptism in 1 Corinthians 1, even though elsewhere using “baptize” and “baptism” with clear metaphorical senses, thoroughly drenching the concept with spiritual-theological meaning, and attributing the work of baptizing believers to the Holy Spirit instead of to a Jewish water ritual. Whence was this Jewish rite of eschatological nationalism transformed into a normalized water illumination and exorcism rebirth? We cannot answer this historical question with certainty as yet, but a few dynamics of the situation can be identified to help understand the process of re-Judaization in which it occurred, and somehow in Jewish-Chrisitan thought gained regenerative strength. One should keep in mind that Danielou’s research found this development in Jewish Christianity—that force in the early church which contained elements that opposed Paul and the free Gentile church. First, we return to the reality described by both W. H. C. Frend and J. Pelikan— the latter perhaps with the greatest force and clarity: the church assimilated itself to the Jewish synagogue, or perhaps more correctly, adapted Jewish synagogue life and practice to itself. In this manner, the Judaization described in the preceding pages was not a oneway street; Christian churches met Judaizing pressures with their own internal motivations toward assimilating themselves to the always near-by Judaism. Did this happen out of compassion for the fallen and scattered Israel? Did it happen out of accommodation in a final desperate attempt to evangelize Israel and convince it that Jesus was its Messiah? Did it happen from the shear drawing force of Judaism’s personal and social ethics system, or from the admirable power of its monotheism? Or did it happen in the quest for safety from persecution by seeking a kind of affiliation with an historic, legally recognized religion 160

in the face of early and growing Roman persecution or other forms of pagan resistance? Reading through Pelikan’s collection of patristic church-as-True-Israel texts, one can see how the logic at bottom was simply that of promise and fulfillment: Jesus was the fulfillment of the promises; his disciples were co-heirs of the promises; and the church is the enlarged Christ and joint-heir of everything originally meant for Israel. Sometimes this logic stretched to the hostile, insulting suggestion that the old Israel never really was the people of God at all, since it always evaded or broke the law.322 Thus the logic was that the church is the only true Israel and the inheritor of the whole Old Testament including and especially Israel’s life, blessings and institutions, and—whatever Jewish rituals might have been useful. When Israel lost nearly everything in 70 A. D., the church looted it, so to say, by seizing everything it could use, adding insult to Israel’s injury (lost war and ruined Jerusalem) by making itself the True Israel. In its nightmare of loss and change, Judaism also had to do something about the growing number of Christian believers in its synagogues. Its answer was to expel them, add new curses on them to synagogue prayers, help Roman authorities and intellectuals know who were Christians and what they really believed, and participate in their repression.323 This process increased potential for vengeful attitudes and stimulated Christian determination to seize Israel’s spiritual and institutional inheritance. In this situation, Jewish Christians were landed in massive conflicts because of their belief that Jesus was their special teacher and because they were determined to keep the Mosaic law—all possible, that is, without the temple. It is also likely that Nero’s persecutions and the renewal of persecution fears under Domitian and Trajan motivated the church to think of and present itself as another sect of Judaism—the only true Judaism—and thereby to gain safety from Roman threats. Ironically, the Christian claim to Jewish identify no doubt stimulated forceful Jewish pressures (as discussed above) to increase the church’s Judaization. This scene is full of bizarre, conflicting motivations. If it sounds contradictory, this is because it was contradictory. Still, this dual force—Christians wanting to appear or actually be more Jewish and Jews passionately determined to make Christians complete Jews—is what developed as the first century passed into the second. The Hebrews epistle with its social dynamics is an early witness to an early stage of this process. By 95 A.D. Christian capture of Jewish self-identity (the elect, sons of Abraham, the church as the true and only congregation [ekklesia] of God), and perhaps some practices like developing eldership or borrowed synagogue worship and biblical exposition patterns, had become increasingly aggravating to traditional (non-Christian) Jews. As a result, the leader of reorganized, Pharisac Judaism, Gamaliel II, decided to visit Rome to inform the emperor (Domitian) that only traditional ethnic Jews, whose national religious identity and practice of the law had been kept intact by the founding of the law school at Jamnia after 322 Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 1:12-25. This is like the argument of Islam by which it considers itself to have become the permanent replacement of Israel, which, by breach of its law, showed itself no people of God at all, forfeited its right to continuous existence, and lost any possible possession of or right to its land and temple forever. 323 Goppelt, Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Times, pp. 119-120. C. Setzer, Jewish Responses to Early Christians (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), pp. 110-146, assembles and discusses Jewish-Christian tensions in the first half of the second century; significant resources are The Martyrdom of Polycarp, The Gospel of Peter, The Epistle to Diognetus, and Justin Martyr’s First Apology and Dialogue with Trypho. Setzer (pp. 175-176) expresses some skepticism about Jews colluding with Romans against Christians.

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the fall of Jerusalem, could properly be called or regarded as “Israel.”324 This development bode ill for Christians but did not diminish their insistence on being the True Israel despite the dangers. Gamaliel’s visit was apparently successful; after this event Christians tended to go their own way, although separation did not happen suddenly. Apparently it was only after the ill-fated messianic revolt of 131-135 A.D. that the separation was complete. By then, Christian adoption of the True Israel idea was stabilized, and the path was fixed for its gradual outworking in institutional forms; thus in time the bishopric evolved into priesthood; the Lord’s Supper became a sacrifice; Constantine’s empire became the hopedfor messianic kingdom; and Charlemagne’s empire became the restored Davidic-Solomonic monarchy. Whatever potential existed for a principled separation of Israel and church in the Pauline mission and epistles was largely obscured by the power of these events and the vortex of derived attitudes and practices. Thus Jewish national identity language, Jewish post-war fragmentation, Jewish safe-haven, Jewish Pharisaic-rabbinic attitudes, Jewish theology, and Jewish history all deeply affected Christianity as it developed, in a strange and contradictory process of adoption and adaptation on one hand, and mutual repulsions on the other. Secondly, 65-100 A. D. is the period of the origin of the Gospels. The process of producing and publishing gospels was both occasioned by and contributed to interest in the original acts and words of Jesus. This growing interest inevitably overshadowed Paul, his gospel and law-free churches. Matthew’s was the Gospel of Jewish Christians who fled to Syria after the destruction of Jerusalem; it was this gospel that preserved in a a highly organized form the sayings of Jesus. In Syria, a group of Jewish Christians, whether in lower Syria closer to Caesarea Philippi/Banias or in upper Syria closer to or at Antioch, and probably under Matthew’s leadership, produced this gospel for their own use or for use in evangelizing and instructing other Jewish Christians about the implications of their faith in Jesus the Messiah. With its large blocks of rabbinic-like teaching of Jesus, and Matthew’s way of organizing Jesus’ mission, this gospel gained currency as a teaching and worship tool among Jewish Christians. From there the Gospel of Matthew increasingly became the favorite of the whole church along the east and north shores of the Mediterranean and beyond. Matthew’s concentrated picture of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount was sometimes mistaken for the Christian doctrine of salvation as a higher morality, even though this was not the Sermon’s meaning in its own context. The Sermon, interpreted as Messiah’s Law, was by the time of The Didache in the 90s considered useful as a preparation for baptism among both Jewish and Gentile Christians because of its instruction in the moral responsibilities of their new faith. Thus emerged Ignatius’ notion that the canon is the gospel events themselves—Jesus’ life and words—and to this canon all else is subordinate.325 In this atmosphere, Paul was sure to be merely reckoned among the apostles and assumed to have taught the same as Jesus and in the manner of his Jewish context. And so a maximum opportunity was created for Jewish Christianity and 324 Frend, The Rise of Christianity, p. 148. 325 B.F.Wescott, A General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament (London: Macmillan, 1875), pp. 52-54, finally quoting Ignatius’ letter to the church at Philadelphia: “my inviolable words are His Cross and Death and Resurrections, and the Faith through Him.” Paul was not useful because the earliest heretics denied his apostleship and the epistles are quoted mostly anonymously in so far as they support the gospels and the creed; this is what mattered.

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its Gospel of Matthew to be the guiding light of the entire church. This gospel ends with an order by Jesus not only to baptize, but to perpetuate his entire teaching, including all his sayings about his fulfillment, continuation and normalization of the Mosaic law. Matthew gave Jewish Chrisitans further impetus for their commitment to keeping the whole law, even while receiving Jesus as their Messiah and Teacher.326 Third and finally—and to conclude this essay’s subject—the ascendancy and power of Matthew’s Gospel in later apostolic and post-apostolic times would appear to make its baptism command (28:19) the standard for this rite without further discussion since it seems straightforward and simple. It is viewed in this way down to our own time. But despite the apostles’ apparent obedience to the baptism order of Matthew 28:19 in Acts, certain enigmas appear in the apostolic and post-apostolic church. The puzzling question is whether and how Acts understood apostolic baptism in relation to Jesus’ command to continue it. W. H. Flemington has pondered this and related issues as deeply as anyone. He asks searching questions about how to account for seemingly discrepant facts. (1) Elsewhere in the New Testament era Matthew 28:19 is never appealed to or cited, or followed in its triune baptismal formula (in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit) until triune immersion appears in The Didache in the 90s of the first century. He also asks why 21 of Eusebius’ 25 references to Matthew 28:19 seem to quote a form of the text that lacked the baptism reference, and why a similar situation exists for Justin Martyr and Hermas’ allusions to this text.327 In other words, what happened to Matthew 28:19’s baptism clause in Acts and in certain church fathers? (2) John seems to have foretold water baptism’s replacement by Spirit baptism; one notes the succession of water by Jesus and the Spirit in several texts of the synoptic gospels, The Gospel of John, chapters 2-5, and the book of Acts. Beside these issues discussed by Flemington, two more questions can be raised. (3) Why does Peter not mention baptism in citing Jesus’ postresurrection commands on the occasion of Cornelius’ baptism (Acts 10:40-43)?328 And why does he not mention the baptism command in Acts 11:16 where he explains Cornelius’ faith and baptism to the other apostles? In both cases he appeals to John the Baptist and Jesus as forerunners. Citing the baptism command in these contexts would have been natural and relevant. In other words, Peter does not seem aware of a command to baptize in Jesus’ post-resurrection orders to the apostles. (4) Why do the other three gospels (Mark, Luke and John) not refer to the baptism command among Jesus’ last words? (Mark’s long ending [16:9-20] was not originally part his text.) These questions seem to point toward Flemington’s view that Jesus’ final commission lacked reference to baptism—and more specifically, that early oral traditions or texts of Matthew did not contain the baptism clause 326 This does not mean that Paul, in his apostleship to the Gentiles, could not, would not, or did not extract and adapt Jesus’ ethical and moral teaching as the major root of his own instruction of the churches. In fact he did do so as the ethical sections of his epistles show, especially Romans 12:9-21. It does mean that Jewish Christians continued the Mosaic law framework for Jesus’ teaching, only with the exception that they received him as Messiah and Savior. This is the position of the Jewish-Christian Pharisees of Acts 15:1, 5. Their views continued in most or at least many of the Jewish-Christian sectarians discussed herein, but in varied degrees of intensity and tolerance. 327 W. H. Flemington, The New Testament Doctrine of Baptism (London: S. P. C. K.), pp. 105-129. 328 Flemington, ibid., pp. 115-116 does discuss the baptism allusions in Acts 10-11, but in another, albeit related, connection.

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now found in Matthew 28.329 Thus Flemington concludes that no saying of Jesus was the authority for early Christian baptizing. Asking what then was the basis for apostolic baptismal practice, he finds the answer in Jesus’ own baptism. Here, he thinks, was a powerful prophetic symbol and example which alone explains continuation of baptism in the absence of any specific order of Jesus to baptize other than the problematic Matthew 28:19.330 If Matthew 28:19’s baptismal clause was not originally part of Matthew’s Gospel, it would explain why references to the command or its details are nowhere to be seen in the other gospels or Acts, and why it is missing in citations of several church fathers. One wonders where Matthew 28:19 was in the apostolic church, especially its triune baptismal formula. Nevertheless, Matthew 28:19’s baptismal clause was almost certainly part of the early oral and written traditions that eventuated in Matthew’s original text. This seems necessitated by two factors. (a) There is no textual (manuscript) evidence that the baptism clause was ever missing from the gospel at least in its written forms; Nestle and the editors of the UBS Greek Testament do not cite any manuscripts in which the baptism clause is missing. (b) Robert Gundry in his careful, classic redaction-critical study of Matthew notes that virtually the whole vocabulary of 28:19 is found elsewhere in Matthew, including key terms in the baptism clause.331 This means there is continuity in the baptism tradition from John’s baptism through Acts 19. The references to Father, Son and Spirit in 28:19 mean that revelation has progressed to include three divine persons in the instructions to the apostles on their mission; inclusion of the three arises from Jesus teaching about God, the Spirit and especially himself as Lord, and the active role of all three divine persons in his ministry. In this sense Beasley-Murray’s thought about a shift from John’s baptism to “Christian baptism” has an element of truth. Still, the baptisms of Acts are the same baptism as John’s—the ritual of initiation into the New Israel in light of the presence and possibility of the consummated kingdom. John’s baptism has rather taken on a new sense resulting from the teaching of Jesus, his miracles, his atoning death and resurrection, and his affirmations about his own deity as well as the special messianic works of the Holy Spirit. Matthew 28:19 remains another allusion to the baptism of repentance for the New Israel in preparation for the contingent kingdom, but with new elements of progressing revelation included. It is also the case that Jesus’ baptism, not his baptism command, became the main ground of soon-to-develop regenerative baptism as expansions of the tradition about its miraculous voice-from-heaven. This limited but real miraculous feature was sufficient to encourage further miracle-expansions by Jewish Christians. The miracle element was increasingly undergirded with Old Testament water-life texts for support in certain fathers of the second Christian century. Matthew’s command as a follow-on of Jesus’ baptism is relevant for the question of why the churches continued baptism, or, more exactly, why they accepted miracalized baptism into their church practice. The command of Matthew 28:19 undergirds the early Christian interest in Jesus’ baptism. When added to the miracle element in Jesus’ baptism, not only did the command influence the practice of baptism 329 Ibid., pp. 106-109. 330 Ibid., pp. 115-129. 331 R. Gundry, Matthew: Commentary on His Handbook for a Mixed Church under Persecution. 2nd ed (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 595-596.

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by Jewish Christians; it must have been viewed as supporting the miraculous aspect of Jesus’ baptism as well. The only place where the simple Jewish symbolic meaning of ritual washing survived in the major patristic literature after the New Testament was The Didache. And even then one cannot be sure that the miracalizing elaboration of Jesus’ baptism had not already taken place among the Didache’s original readers. The Didache itself does not reflect the developing illuminism and exorcism baptism of its Syrian context; its procedural interests fall far short of the elaborate illuminism and exorcism thinking of the fathers. Matthew’s baptism command, therefore, as the conclusion to a JewishChristian gospel332 of ascendant influence, belongs to the Jewish-Christian influence on the whole church including the Pauline congregations. Baptismal Pluralism in America To press the case for the relevance of this survey, we skip over the long history of medieval Catholicism, and move to the Reformation and its later implications where the next significant movements occur. This approach will help put the problems of continued use of water baptism within realistic perspective. To do this we shall have to briefly describe the struggles of major Protestant traditions, and then note the publically obscure but important elements of the non-sacramental traditions of two major Protestant groups. From this perspective, the issue of how the pluralistic baptizing impasse developed will become clearer. The pertinent Reformation theme is the question about how the church corrupted its doctrine and practice, and lost not only its most precious salvation proclamation (justification by faith alone), but took on an ecclesiastical organization and ritual machinery that spoiled its nature and function as the church. The point of importance is that the sixteenth century Reformation did not go far enough—a point with which no serious Protestant evangelicalism can disagree in principle, since it owns the Puritan principle that a reformed church is always reforming. America was the scene of a massive, near-simultaneous transplant of plural religious traditions from Europe and Britain in the seventeenth century.333 A shift thus occurred from the one-state-church policies of Europe and Britain to what would become with the Constitution an ethos of freedom, individualism, plurality of religions, and revivalism in America. The new situation required tolerance of diverse traditions, and even encouraged their separate development. The majority of colonial churches nonetheless agreed on baptizing infants as an initiation into Christian faith and life, no matter how much they struggled with the meaning or implications of the rite.334 At first, only the Baptists differed with this massive majority in insisting on believers’ baptism. However, Baptists remained a small and often troubling minority until after 1800, just as they had been in Europe and Britain earlier. 332 Ibid., p. 596, where he remarks that on any reckoning, the apostles mission to Israel continues. 333 W. Hudson, Religion in America. 4th ed (New York: Macmillan, 1987). 334 One example is the famous Half-Way Covenant in colonial New England, a controversy that arose from baptized but later unconverted children of believing church members. See for example, Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).

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The variations within this American religious scene are well known, and may be summarized briefly. Catholics have understood infant baptism as regenerative: God works in his own created water to miraculously regenerate the infant who could then work at justification by good works throughout his life. Luther retained the first aspect of this view, but modified it to include baptizand faith. He saw clearly that the New Testament exhibited the baptism of believers. To soothe his radicalism, however slightly, Luther and the Lutherans continued infant baptism by inserting the element of active baptizand faith they saw in the New Testament. They suggested that God injected faith in the infant at baptism, or that infant faith existed within parental faith.335 Reformed, Congregational, and Presbyterian baptismal traditions interpreted infant baptism as a “sign and seal” of the new covenant of grace just as infants were circumcised under the promises of the old covenant. For them, baptism symbolized the faith to which the infant would eventually come upon reaching the age of discretion. These diverse traditions continued to grow with the growth of the American nation; they exist today in large numbers together with various offshoots and developments: Methodists from the Anglican tradition; Pentecostals from Methodism (but practicing believer baptism); Restorationists from Presbyterianism (also practicing believer baptism); Free and covenant churches from within Scandinavian Lutheranism (usually practicing believer baptism). The Anabaptist movement is also well represented in America in various Mennonite and Brethren denominations, and most notably in the many Baptist groups. The shifting sands of baptismal definition have also drawn Reformed bodies into a struggle over the status of infant baptism—a struggle which produced a significant literary war since Karl Barth’s 1947 book, Die Kirchliche Lehre von der Taufe (The Teaching of the Church Regarding Baptism). He called on the Reformed churches to face the reality that at bottom, only a dogged clinging to the Constantinian state church ideal—the Corpus Christianum—made them unable to give up the unbiblical practice of infant baptism. Barth says in this regard, “When the church breaks with infant baptism, People’s Church, in the sense of a state church or a mass church, is finished.”336 That is, the infant baptism system makes all Europeans and Britons church members, few of whom are real Christians by their own faith. Barth thought the matter boiled down to the question of maintaining a Christian majority in Europe and England. But, he asked, “Where does Holy Writ say that Christians may not be in a minority? Perhaps even in a very small minority?”337 This “pebble” in the theological pond (P. K. Jewett’s metaphor) generated strident reactions by Lutherans like Oscar Cullmann and Joachim Jeremias who tried to defend the biblical basis of infant baptism. A French Reformed conservative, Pierre Marcel, wrote about The Biblical Doctrine of Infant Baptism (1953), arguing that in the sacraments we have nothing but what the Jews had in theirs, i.e., Jesus Christ and his spiritual riches. For Marcel, the efficacy of the sacraments today is identical with that of the Old Testament: the Passover has become the Supper; circumcision has become baptism.338

335 P. Jewett, Infant Baptism and the Covenant of Grace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), pp. 160185, reviews the varieties of practice and speculation in the main-stream Reformation traditions. 336 Cited with his own translation by Jewett, Infant Baptism and the Covenant of Grace, p. 111. 337 Ibid., p. 112. 338 Cited by ibid., p. 95.

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In America, Barth’s rethinking received an evangelical advocate in Paul King Jewett’s Infant Baptism and the Covenant of Grace (1978). Jewett embraces the Reformed covenant of grace, but thinks nothing in this concept requires the church to baptized infants, even though the practice is historic.339 He rather calls for a modified covenant of grace in which real progressive revelation is honored, and pleads that people drop the habit of reading the Old Testament as if it were the New Testament and the New as if it were the Old. He also advocates that Reformed people break their habit of reading New Testament references to children and the children of believers as though such texts implied or assumed infant baptism.340 What emerges from Jewett is a kind of Reformed Baptist stance. The debate after Barth encouraged Baptist scholars like J. R. Beasley-Murray (Baptism in the New Testament, 1962). He reaches a concurrency view—baptism and regeneration are two concurrent operations—faith mingled with the baptismal moment through the work of the Spirit.341 Beasley-Murray seems closer to sacramentarianism than most Baptists, but in principle is still Baptist since baptism is by immersion and at least concurrent with active faith; only persons of discretion are proper baptismal subjects. It is of interest that both Jewett and Beasley-Murray were published in America by a traditionally Reformed publisher. However, church bodies stemming from Reformation roots seem mostly unmoved by such bold initiatives as Barth’s or Jewett’s. Instead, they continue to baptize infants with little care about the missing biblical support. The prospects are slim for such a stout tradition admitting that four hundred years of “detesting the error of the Anabaptists” was itself an error; but the question about infant baptism is raised again and again. In the midst of this massive Protestant religious scene in America, Baptists have become predominant through aggressive growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.342 Their insistence on believers’ baptism requires that faith be already present and testified. Baptism is only an outward testimony of prior faith entirely apart from baptism. Baptist non-sacramentarianism was already vigorous in the Reformation era.343 The large Baptist development in America is significant for several reasons: (1) it generates the phenomenon of “baptistification”344—the feeling that Baptists by force of numbers, populist revivalism 339 Reformed covenant thought almost certainly originated in its operative form with Zwingli and Bullinger at Zurich, whence it entered the Reformed stream and gained force via Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. On this development see S. Gillies, “Zwingli and the Origin of the Reformed Covenant,” Scottish Journal of Theology 54 (2001):21-50. 340 Ibid, pp. 89-137. 341 “Baptism is the occasion when the Spirit works creatively in the believer (Baptism in the New Testament, p. 211).” 342 S. Ahlstrom, American Religious History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 441444, 719-725. 343 J. Warns, Baptism, trans G. H. Lang (London: Paternoster , 1957), traces Baptists and their views to the Reformation era, despite claims that Baptists did not arise until after the beginning of the Anabaptist Reformation. 344 M. Marty, “Baptistification Takes Over,” CT 27, Sept. 2, 1982, pp. 32-36. “Baptistification” means, “make Baptist”, in the sense of encouraging individuals or groups to take on a Baptist style (his italics) of Christian life. It does not mean getting people to join Baptist churches, or even to have themselves immersed as believers. Marty refers chiefly to Baptistic conversionism and the promise of new life in a new supportive religious community—the phenomenon of traditions-crossing—and the flood of movement from old “Catholic” styles of Christianity into more Baptistic ones. My meaning is as noted above and partly Marty’s; regardless, the term is a useful description of a phenomenon to be regretted

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and separatism somehow represent superior religious power, popularity, and rightness, and are therefore the standard-bearers for Christendom; (2) new American denominations often veer toward baptistic practice and theology (Restoration movement; Pentecostals; Bible and Independent Church movements; Scandinavian Free and Covenant Churches); (3) Baptists represent the farthest possible departure from the inherited sacramentalism of Catholic tradition, and the thinnest possible meaning of the rite—the now normalized “testimony” theory of Baptist professional and popular theology.345 Only one step remains possible beyond this gradual thinning of meaning: should the rite be practiced at all? Baptist defense will tend to fall back on authority—Jesus was baptized and commanded it—or to lean on a promising isolated text to define the whole meaning, as for example Matthew 28:19 or 1 Peter 3:21. But this fall-back will have to resist exegetical scrutiny of contexts and meaning, because such an examination of biblical details tends to drain the force from a simple authoritarian appeal: the baptism texts have their own New Israel context for both the origin and meaning of the rite. Into this vortex of post-Reformation rethinking came the Quakers and Salvation Army—Quakers in the seventeenth century, the Army in the nineteenth. Quakers renounced the sacraments all, and said real baptism was the Holy Spirit as the inner light which illumined everyone. All ritual and formality was seen as conflicting with the simplicity of a heart fully in touch with God. For Quakers, Christianity had no room for superficial ordinances including regular sermons, professional ministry, ordered services and— sacraments.346 The Salvation Army on the other hand, rejected the ordinances for entirely pragmatic reasons: baptism and Lord’s Supper simply do not work where the conversion and sanctification of souls is at stake. Early Army evangelistic activity was in London’s slums, where church ordinances were seen as a hindrance to evangelism and to the Army’s doctrine of perfectionism—the elimination of all sin from one’s life. Early Salvation Army leaders simply substituted other means of grace—preaching, prayer, and the class meeting—for the older sacraments.347 Two significantly powerful movements thus took one or more themes of the Reformation reduction of sacraments, and carried the logic of Protestant sacramental thinning to its conclusion. Dispensational theology is in a unique position with respect to baptism. It has historically identified Paul as the Apostle and Teacher of the Gentiles, as the articulator, if not the operative-founder of the church, and as the revelator of the end of the law and its rituals. Thus it has the logic for drawing the obvious implication of the Pauline silence on baptism as an ordinance, thereby discontinuing this often misleading and always problematic practice. Dispensational theology also lives on the line of gradual Protestant thinning of baptism’s meaning: evangelical reduction of the quantity of sacraments and their meaning, and progress toward a more evangelical and biblical non-sacramentalism in Puritan and Pietist hands—more and more toward testified conversion, and more and more away from 345 M. Erickson, Christian Theology, 3 vols (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985) 3:1097-1101. 346 H. Barbour and A. O. Roberts, eds., Early Quaker Writings: 1650-1700 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973), pp. 47-148; the collection shows the remarkable degree of early Quaker radicalism. 347 R. D. Rightmire, Sacraments and the Salvation Army (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1990); Rightmire’s work is a comprehensive study of the historical development of Salvationist rejection of ordinances. The main dynamic of sacrament rejection was evangelistic pragmatism and its implications in an inner city mission context where Anglican formalism was the enemy of dynamic conversion.

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belief that sacraments conveyed salvation or a regenerational ability to believe. This dual position furnishes dispensational theology with inherited resources for making its biblical and historical logic converge on the obvious implication—dropping water baptism in any form once for all. However, the vast majority of dispensationalists do not follow this line of thought. Conclusion Retention of baptism in the post-Pauline churches can be explained by the influence of Jewish Christianity on the Gentile-dominated churches of the Pauline world-mission. This is not just a matter of Jewish influence; the force was Jewish-Christian, not Judaism alone. The miracalized meanings of regenerating baptismal illumination and exorcism emerged first in Jewish Christian congregations within the eastern Mediterranean crescent. If Paul intended water baptism to cease with other Jewish ritual practices, Jewish Christian congregations and their leadership retained it with other inherited Jewish practices; they prevailed over the Gentile churches to do so as well. The dynamics of this development included social proximity of Jewish and Gentile Christians in most church regions, entry of Jewish Christians into Gentile congregations after expulsion from synagogues, and possibly assimilation of Gentile Christians to Judaism for protection from persecution. On their side, Gentile Christian congregations had motivations toward assimilation to Judaism through their insistent capture of Jewish identity symbols. A major influence was the large quantity of Jewish-Christian books of the late first and second century—many more than were produced by Gentile Christian leaders after Paul’s departure. These books contained the enlightenment and exorcism views of baptism that eventually came to dominate the whole church. The Didache, one of the earliest of many Jewish-Christian books after the apostles,348 does not have this regenerative doctrine since it is primarily an early Christian handbook on church order; but it could have had the baptism-miracle development in its background—a matter yet to be determined, if possible. Furthermore, as the second century opened, Christians more and more took on the idea that they were the True Israel. This thinking sometimes included the idea that the Old Israel had never been the True Israel at all, that it had now forfeited its promises by rejecting its Messiah, and that the church was inheriting virtually the whole of the Old Israel’s institutions and life—at least all that could be reconciled with the Pauline “no” to the law. These views of baptism became the doctrine of the Old and Medieval Catholic Church. The Reformation recovered the essential New Testament saving gospel by restoring its central proclamation of justification by faith alone. In doing so the Reformation reduced the seven Catholic sacraments to two—baptism and the Lord’s Supper—but resisted any temptation to go farther because the two remaining sacraments appeared to have New Testament authority. The reformers and their succedssors might have explored at least the possibility of dropping infant baptism and substituting adult believers’ baptism. But the Anabaptist Reformation—which did shift to believers’ baptism—probably killed any such thoughts in the major reformers since they rather loathed Anabaptist radicalism. The problems of European state churches 348 See, for example, R. M. Grant, Ed., The Apostolic Fathers: A New Translation and Commentary, 6 vols (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1964ff), vol 3: Barnabas and the Didache, by R. A. Kraft, pp. 65-66. There is wide agreement on the Jewishness of The Didache.

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finally lead to a call for dropping infant baptism. This line of thought was led by Karl Barth in Switzerland and then Paul King Jewett in America. But such calls for reform appear for the most part to have merely bounced off old traditions. On any reckoning, the conflicting views of meaning and practice within the churches continue with only faint traces of modification. Sometimes new denominations are formed by reformers when the custodians of tradition cannot be moved to change. The baptismal font in Zwingli’s Grossmunster Church at Zurich did not set in motion the development or movements discussed here, nor was any such movement of thought its intention. But the wording itself nonetheless symbolically represents the very shift to the baptizing work of the Spirit in the church under consideration in these two essays. It also suggests that Quakers and Salvationists have been on the right track in dropping water baptism; but they didn’t travel far enough exegetically or logically. They could have gone on to examine the Jewish remnant connection of New Testament water baptism, and they could have noted the larger connections of Paul’s transformed use of baptism language to denote the Spirit’s work of union with Christ. The logic of the Reformation treatment of the sacraments might also have led the Protestant churches to question not only infant baptism, but the validity of water baptism in principle. If the Reformation had followed its own logic more fully, the Pauline proclamation of salvation by faith alone might never have been left encumbered with a confusing and problematic water ritual. It is to be hoped that the uneasiness in most Protestant bodies over baptism, whatever its form and meaning, will eventuate in a whole new look at the matter. Such a new look could well include recognition of its original New Israel connection and accompanying kingdom contingency, the remarkable Pauline silence on baptism, and the potential of a dispensational framework within which to finally resolve this church-wide issue.

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Appendix A A Short History of Baptism Studies in the Grace Movement John C. O’Hair The grace movement’s non-practice of water baptism has produced several studies of the subject in exposition and defense of its views. Because this is only a very brief sketch, and because of its limited scope—to briefly note the contribution of each of several better known writers and studies—it will not be possible to give a full description of each contribution. The following were selected for this sketch because they are major contributions to the discussion as judged by length of time in print, extent of influence, quality of scholarship or uniqueness of perspective, even though some are only pamphlets. Use of these criteria is at bottom, however, the more or less subjective judgment of the author; readers should understand this qualification. The grace movement, with its non-water view of baptism, began with J. C. O’Hair in the early years of the twentieth century. It now seems possible to determine rather closely some details of O’Hair’s written expressions of his views on water baptism in the earliest period of his active ministry. A suggestion about the earliest expression will appear in the course of the discussion. Lack of certainty is due to the fact that no chronology of O’Hair’s works exists and only a few of his numerous books and pamphlets are dated. It is clear, though, that he was first put on the track toward his developed baptismal views after a conversation with a Pentecostal minister during a series of Indianapolis evangelisticteaching meetings at which he spoke in 1920.349 O’Hair’s new baptism view sprang from a situation in which the meetings’ leader, James Nipper, asked O’Hair to speak on tongues and other signs. Clues in O’Hair’s accounts suggest that Nipper may have been concerned about whether the holiness movement’s own theology was pointing it toward the new and rapidly developing Pentecostalism, and more locally that Pentecostals were disturbing the Indianapolis meetings. O’Hair developed a message—perhaps more than one—on why tongues, signs and wonders are not in God’s program for the church. The message, he says, was entitled “Three Reasons Why Tongues Ceased When Paul Reached Rome.”350 Soon after this message was given, the Pentecostal preacher mentioned above told him he thought his argument against the sign-gifts also 349 O’Hair reports on the Indianapolis meeting in his pamphlet, “The Accuser of the Brethren and the Brethren,” p. 2. The pamphlet is formally undated, but comes from 1945 or shortly thereafter since he includes in it a letter dated to that year. He mentions the same meeting as a significant event in his theological life in a private tape recording made in Milwaukee by Charles Baker in 1955 in which he narrates his life story. The typed transcript numbers 19 total pages. The information here is drawn from both of these accounts. Hereafter I shall refer to the typescript of this oral account as “Transcript.” The citation here is from Transcript, p. 11. “Holiness” here refers to certain American Wesleyan or Wesleyan-like bodies including, by O’Hair’s account, The Christian and Missionary Alliance, Pentecostals and Nazarenes (p. 11). Allowance should be made in using these parallel accounts for memory lapses and possible later additions to the story reflecting O’Hair’s later thinking or modes of expression. 350 Transcript, p. 11.

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applied to water baptism. O’Hair replied that he was mistaken in this comment (O’Hair was still committed to water baptism at the time.); but instead of dropping the matter, he went to his hotel room and studied far into the night in the wake of the man’s question.351 He finally concluded that the man was probably right. Since he relates this event as especially important to his own teaching of dispensational theology (as indeed it was), it seems appropriate to think of it as resulting in what we might call O’Hair’s “Indianapolis insight.” From it he seems to have continued with a thorough study of baptism in the Bible which confirmed his new perspective—based on his existing assumptions about the difference between Israel and the church: “I came to the conclusion that water baptism stands or falls with tongues, signs and visions.”352 Although we do not know for certain the title of his earliest pamphlet on the subject, it is possible that it is the one entitled “Seven Questions on Water Baptism and the Second Coming of Christ.” In another booklet entitled “Have Ye Received the Holy Spirit since Ye Believed” he refers to the “Seven Questions . . .” pamphlet in a list of 20 “little booklets” he has written. At the end of “Have Ye Received . . .” is a letter “to a dear Christian Friend” dated January 1, 1929; on the back of the letter page he speaks of the “Seven Questions . . .” booklet among the 20 booklets in print at the time (there are actually about 26 titles listed here). This means that “Seven Questions . . .” already existed by about 1929, and since it is the only booklet listed up to that time as a study on baptism, it could be his earliest on the subject. A second conversation occurred during the same Indianapolis meetings some time after the message on signs and miracles. It was related to two publishing events of unequal magnitude in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and flowed into this Indianapolis situation and its implications. The first was the appearance of The Scofield Reference Bible (1909, 1917) with its strong emphasis in certain notes on differences between Israel and the church, and its notable premillennialism. Of lesser magnitude, but of decisive importance for the discussion at hand, was a very recent pamphlet by Central American missionary A. E. Bishop, entitled Tongues, Signs and Visions, Not God’s Order for Today (1920). Bishop, who had no previous connection with O’Hair, but was related to Scofield’s Central American Mission, argued that tongues, signs and visions belonged to God’s dealings with Israel, but not to the church. O’Hair relates that a short time after his tongues and signs message at Indianapolis, another man gave him a copy of the Bishop pamphlet with the remark, “. . . here’s a book that teaches almost what you teach.”353 As a consequence, O’Hair’s writings of the 1920s and 1930s (and after) refer frequently to Bishop’s pamphlet with approval, while Scofield’s Reference Bible was steadily growing in public popularity in the larger context of the premillenarian renewal movement. Thus in general, such distinctions were not entirely original with O’Hair in the 1920s. Rather the series of Bible and prophetic conferences which began in America in 351 Ibid. 352 Ibid., p. 3. In this pamphlet, he expresses the same idea with an enlarged list of associated realities in the New Testament: “. . . After I searched and studied the Scriptures diligently, and saw that in every chapter of the Bible where water baptism is mentioned, there is a Jewish feast or holy day, a miracle, a signgift, or healing or tongues (p. 3).” This could justly be viewed as something of an overstatement. It might be more exactly said that water baptism is always associated with the rise of the messianic New Israel in the ministries of John the Baptist, Jesus and the twelve apostles, and in their message of the present and available Kingdom of God. 353 Ibid.

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1878 had already been differentiating in various ways between Israel and the church as their published speeches show, and as came to fruition in the Scofield Reference Bible. In these conferences, the millenarian renewal movement was partly following the older premillenarian movement which began after 1620 with J. H. Alsted and Joseph Mede, and partly its more recent developments in J. N. Darby’s unique form of premillennialism along with what became Scofield’s expositions of 1909 and after. Several leaders of this more recent stage of the millenarian movement, still alive and active during O’Hair’s early ministry years, also made quite sharp pronouncements in their writings on the difference between Paul’s mission, and that of the original twelve apostles. O’Hair has to be understood in this context for any kind of fair evaluation of his teaching on baptism and other related topics. O’Hair traveled extensively in the northeast quadrant of the country before his pastorate at North Shore Congregational Church (Chicago) began in 1923. He cultivated many warm friendships with leading premillenarians including, for example, evangelical leaders like Louis Talbot (Talbot Theological Seminary), Harry Hager of Bethany Reformed Church, Chicago354 and Harry Bultema of Muskegon, Michigan, to cite only a few. We can also identify two more O’Hair pamphlets of the 1920s which gather Scriptural material on differences between Israel and the church, and between the twelve apostles and Paul; these two pamphlets are related to the Indianapolis insight on water baptism and its theological substructure. We know of the early circulation of these O’Hair pamphlets from Cornelius Stam, an emerging leader of the early grace movement after 1930. About 1926, by Stam’s account,355 a friend of the Stam family, who worked in New York (and/or Philadelphia) as an investment consultant and associate of Donald Grey Barnhouse’s ministry at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, spoke to Stam’s father, Peter Stam, Sr, about the “one body” and “one baptism.” Peter Stam, a Dutch immigrant recently converted to Christ, had become superintendent of a rescue mission in Patterson, New Jersey. Later (Stam does not say how much later), the same gentleman gave his father copies of the two O’Hair pamphlets, Jesus Christ the Minister of the Circumcision, and The Twelve Apostles and Paul. Both pamphlets extend the distinctions of the Bishop pamphlet mentioned above. Stam’s account does not indicate any title of O’Hair on baptism already in existence in 1926; he only mentions these two pamphlets. Jesus Christ the Minister of the Circumcision makes the point that God had a special purpose for national Israel and that Christ never did anything but participate in and confirm that purpose. To make this point he collects Old and New Testament texts on the title’s theme, and on Paul’s differences from God’s purpose for Israel, by interspersing texts on Paul’s unique calling and Gentile mission. In the second pamphlet, The Twelve Apostles and Paul, O’Hair further extends this contrast into the book of Acts by collecting Acts’ Israel texts, and further Pauline statements about Israel and his independent Gentile mission under the call of God. In 1931, O’Hair wrote—and then published in a booklet for public distribution—a letter to Albertus Pieters, a theological leader and probably by this time theology professor in the Reformed Church in America seminary at Holland, Michigan (Western Theological Seminary). In its booklet form, the letter was entitled An Epistle to Mr. Albertus Pieters Concerning the How and Why of Water Baptism. The letter shows that by this time O’Hair was discussing with other Evangelical-Fundamentalist leaders his view that water baptism

354 355

For a discussion of the history of this long millenarian renewal movement, see Essay VII below. C. R. Stam, The Controversy (Chicago: Berean Bible Society, 1956), pp. 21-22.

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had ceased with the mission of Paul and the establishment of the church. This letter is among the few of O’Hair’s many published writings with any indication of date. I mentioned above O’Hair’s relation with the Reformed Church pastor, Harry Hager. The Pieters letter mentions some details of O’Hair’s relationship with Hager including comments to the effect that O’Hair had held or was about to conduct a series of meetings in Bethany Reformed Church of Roseland, Chicago, where Hagar was in the early years of his long pastorate there; apparently O’Hair took this invitation and did speak at Bethany Church, the author’s childhood home church. The O’Hair-Hager connection is an example of the way in which O’Hair’s outgoing, jovial spirit was an important ingredient in his notability as a popular evangelist and Bible teacher, and frequently, in his early years, across denominational lines. Such relations existed among many premillennialist pastors and teachers throughout the northeast quadrant of the United States, and to some extent beyond including Colorado and California. In Bible Study for Bereans, a periodical O’Hair launched in September 1935, and in The Unsearchable Riches of Christ (1941), a series of 70 sermons and Bible studies, he included comments, messages and studies of varied sorts on baptism themes, but only in modest quantity. In some of these treatments O’Hair included shorter or longer lists of practices distinctive to Israel’s life and culture in which Old and New Testament baptisms and washings were included, still following the signs-were-for-Israel thought of the Bishop pamphlet (which he sometimes referred to as the “Scofield-Moody-Bishop pamphlet” (or the like) because Scofield wrote an endorsement in the “Introduction,” and Moody Bible Institute published it). In these lists of Jewish practices, O’Hair usually included or even emphasized baptism as having full part with signs and wonders in the twelve apostles’ mission to Israel—a continuing reflection of the Indianapolis insight. In this respect, and in one sense, the most interesting and important of the studies in Unsearchable Riches is the first “message” in the book, entitled “The Dispensational Answer to Undispensational Religious Practices.” On the very first page he lists no less than 30 Israelite and Jewish practices from both the Old and New Testaments which were being selectively kept or attempted by about twenty various comtemporary Christian groups or denominations known to him. This way of discussing the baptism issue illustrates one of the ways in which O’Hair engaged the many Protestant denominations around him on the issue of baptism. The thirtieth item in the list of Jewish practices in this study is “30—Believers should be baptized with water for the remission of sins.” Sometimes he discusses the traditional Reformed belief that baptism is a New Testament substitute for circumcision (Message 12, p. 58). Hence the “Indianapolis insight” continued to develop into a larger biblicaltheological perspective: baptism ceased for the church of this dispensation when all other rituals and distinctive features (including the law, food rules, calendar observances, and signs and wonders) of the New Israel’s national life ceased, i.e., in the era of the available messianic kingdom—the era of Jesus and the twelve apostles’ mission to Israel. In evaluation, two points might be made, one on O’Hair’s argumentation and one on the state of the research into O’Hair’s booklets and pamphlets that produced the foregoing sketch of the origin of the grace movement’s distinctive baptism view and its earliest expressions. (1) It may be both possible and advisable to restructure some details of the way the 174

grace movement thinks of the cessation of water baptism and O’Hair’s linkage of it to Israel and its New Testament signs and miracles. One problem is that the argument’s most telling linkage of water baptism with Israel’s miracles occurs in Mark 16:9-21, a passage that does not belong to Mark’s gospel originally. O’Hair—and the grace movement in general down to the present time—did not recognize the text-critical problems of this passage. Another problem with O’Hair’s argumentation is the way in which he overstates in absolute terms the linkage of water baptism with Jewish feasts or holy day celebrations. For example, this linkage does not appear clearly in the baptism of the Philippian jailer (Acts 16:2533) although the Corinthian baptisms of Acts 18:8 are related to the Jewish synagogue at Corinth and its leadership. It is not the case, however, that these difficulties destroy the general force of the Israel-Jewish connection of New Testament baptism scenes. It is only that the form of the argument could be restructured to avoid these discrepancies in detail. Essays III and IV herein illustrate at least some ways the argument can be reshaped without loss of force. (2) The question of where the views of the grace movement came from is a question about the history of ideas; it is called formally by theologians “historical theology” and thus takes its place among the world’s Christian bodies who also have their own historical theologies—their accounts of the origins and development of their theological distinctives. In our case, J. C. O’Hair’s thought-development, in the larger framework of his evangelism and pastoral ministries and the larger premillenarian renewal, is difficult to trace, as the above sketch suggests. The earliest details of his views and his growth in understanding the biblical implications of the Indianapolis insight are historically complex: the details involve many inter-related factors. In his booklets and pamphlets he sometimes alludes to events and contacts. Very few booklets or pamphlets are formally dated and their location in time within his ministry is a major problem in seeking his thought-history. The material discussed above is the firstfruit of what has already become a research project. For the foreseeable future, I plan to continue an attempt at a rough chronology—perhaps first by classifying the few books and many booklets and pamphlets by decades—from 1917 through 1958. Once a by-decade classification is gained with reasonable certainty, further work will be possible on the development of O’Hair’s thought. Bultema Library at Grace Bible College possesses several collections of O’Hair’s booklets and pamphlets, the most complete of which appears to be that of Paul Franzen who donated his collection to Bultema Library. Franzen grouped the pamphlets by size, bound them roughly in size-groups with black tape and numbered the collection by bound groups into 37 volumes. For the time being, reference by Franzen’s volumes is the only way we can hope to make a citation system—until that is, the pamphlets can be reclassified by chronological groupings. After a first attempt at surveying the materials while looking mainly for baptism pamphlets, I’m convinced that a chronological classification is a viable project even though chronological and event information in O’Hair’s pamphlets is relatively scarce.

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Subsequent Discussions of Baptism Cornelius Stam reports in the same chapter of The Controversy noted above that by 1932 or 1933 he was in his own first pastorate at Preakness, New Jersey. There he found it useful to write and publish a pamphlet for his congregation on baptism entitled Water Baptism: Is It Included in God’s Program for This Age? This pamphlet is only sixteen pages in length and is now in its 9th printing (2012). Its arguments are familiar from O’Hair’s early pamphlets: water baptism is only related to John the Baptist, Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom to Israel, and the continuing mission of the original twelve apostles to Israel; John’s baptism continued this connection as long as it was practiced. On the other hand, Paul is silent in his epistles about water baptism except for his one statement about baptizing only three Corinthian believers, and he never commands the church to practice it. Baptism and related terms in Paul’s epistles refer to a non-water baptism of the Holy Spirit, whereby believers are united with Christ and his church, are made complete in him, and are united and identified with him (Stam’s descriptions). Thus water baptism is baptism into the New Israel (my term) and its manifest kingdom; Spirit baptism into the body of Christ belongs to the church. A second pamphlet, still in print (8th printing, 2012), was first published about 1943 with the title Why Was Christ Baptized? Here Stam makes the point that Jesus’ explanation to John the Baptist of why he should be baptized—“. . . it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness (KJV, Matt 3:15)”—refers to Jesus being numbered with Israel’s transgressors and bearing the blame and disgrace for its sins. Jesus’ baptism by John is contrasted with his baptism into death (Luke 12:50), which is called by Stam “A Greater Baptism,” while he calls the baptism of Romans 6:1-4 “The Greatest Baptism”—referring to believers’ baptism into Jesus’ death (cf 1 Cor 12:12-13 and parallel Pauline passages). Finally, a larger booklet by Stam appeared in 1981 entitled Baptism and the Bible. The first chapter is something of a follow-on to Water Baptism: Is It Included . . . , but expands its basic distinction between the kingdom and the church on baptism by following water baptism from John the Baptist through Acts 19 in some detail. He shows how it does not change its significance in connection with Israel’s repentance and forgiveness of sins as long as it was practiced in Acts. In other words there is no change from John’s Jewish baptism to “Christian baptism.” The change that does occur is that Paul ceases to practice any water baptism after Acts 19 as seen in Acts 20-28 and his later epistles. The second chapter assembles and examines the arguments of those fellowships who baptize infants, especially Roman Catholicism, and Reformed and Lutheran traditions. Chapter three examines arguments of immersionists and seeks to show that few if any biblical references to water baptism are to immersion. This denial of immersion in New Testament baptism texts became thematic in these treatments of the subject, and continued to be espoused by all later treatments discussed below. The final chapter expands on the beauties and power of the idea and reality of one baptism by the Holy Spirit found in the Pauline epistles. During the 1950s Charles Baker issued Real Baptism as a Bible class, Sunday School class, or individual’s study guide. This too was a booklet of modest size, but more detailed and systematic than any of the above. Its genius was that Baker examined and classified every use of the baptism word group in the New Testament. He found about a dozen different “baptisms” including a surprising number of metaphorical uses of the 176

terminology having nothing to do with water except by use of baptism imagery applied to other New Testament realities (“baptized with the Holy Spirit,” or, “baptized with fire,” for example). The study was objective and thoroughly biblical with little theological warfare, clearly reflecting Baker’s systematic theology training, knowledge of biblical languages, and methodology in establishing theological points from complete induction of biblical texts. This study adroitly set in place the reality that the baptism terminology of the New Testament was of considerably varied application and frequently non-literal, i.e., non-water. Thus, Baker showed that one cannot make any assumptions about the presence of water in many New Testament “baptism” texts, with the added implication that every text has to be dealt with free from water assumptions unless water is clearly mentioned, alluded to or entailed in specific contexts, especially in the Pauline epistles. From this outline of the varied uses of “baptism” in the New Testament, the list of different New Testament “baptisms” made its way into a summary list of twelve biblical baptisms in his later Dispensational Theology (pp. 544-545), and then reappeared again in Henry Hudson’s work of 1987 and Edward Wishart’s study of 2007. Real Baptism was the first systematized treatment of the subject in the grace movement; it became foundational for non-water baptism theology despite its limited scope and modest size. Baker’s skillful way of classifying and identifying variations in biblical usage of baptism terms forces readers to see the whole New Testament picture and thus to recognize differences. In 1952, Harry Bultema published The Bible and Baptism at Muskegon, Michigan, but only at first in a mimeographed form for local distribution. Bultema and O’Hair had been personal friends and theological colleagues since about 1930. Bultema died later in 1952; but in 1955 the Bultema Memorial Publication Society of Muskegon published a hardback edition. This was the first full (167 pp.) scholarly treatment of the subject within the grace movement. Bultema too dealt with every use of the baptism word group in both testaments. He is also the first among writers discussed here to consider the washing practices in the Jewish Talmud wherein “baptisms” are self-performed unlike the water baptisms of the New Testament. Bultema was mainly interested in the use of biblical baptism language to describe the (non-water) union of believers with Christ and his body through the baptizing work of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 12:12-13). Like O’Hair, Stam and Baker, he found the “Real Baptism” in Paul’s (non-water) baptism language and unionwith-Christ texts. At the outset (Introduction, p. 9) he identifies his readers’ understanding of believers’ union with Christ as his main purpose. Bultema follows O’Hair’s emphasis on water baptism’s connection with Israel’s sign-gifts and other Jewish practices. He tends to characterize Israel’s institutions and washing practices as legalistic because they are prescribed in the Mosaic law. He also draws a very sharp contrast between John’s water baptism and Christ’s Spirit baptism, noting that Jesus is never said to baptize anyone in the gospel records. Booklet discussion of the subject resumed in a short study by Vernon Schutz entitled Water Baptism: Its History, Importance and Cessation (1978). Schutz briefly reviewed major denominational variants on baptismal practice and meaning. He noticed confusing variations even within treatments of the subject by such Protestant denominations as Reformed and Baptist bodies. Schutz takes note of the non-baptizing views of both the Quaker tradition and the Salvation Army as parallels to the grace movement’s views. The study stresses biblical progressive revelation as the only way to rightly understand variant 177

developments on baptism and other subjects in Scripture, including developments within the New Testament itself. Schutz recognizes the role that accommodation to the Jews plays in Acts’ Pauline baptizing scenes; in one brief and striking section he gathers texts in which Paul himself speaks of his adaptation to the Jews (p. 23), a point also explicitly made by Luke in his record of Paul’s circumcision of Timothy (Acts 16:3). The reason Paul baptized at all was for the same reason he circumcised Timothy, i.e., in deference to Jews. This adaptive factor in Paul, however, is only one aspect of a larger and principled Pauline theology of Spirit baptism. Schutz also mentions the possible bearing of Jewish proselyte practice on Paul’s lack of baptism instruction for his Gentile congregations (p. 23)—a point of potentially significant importance needing further research. He cites Jewish literature of the inter-testamental era as bearing on the the discussion, and concludes that water baptism passed away along with other Israel-related miracles in yet another reflex of O’Hair’s Indianapolis insight, although expressed in a more moderate way. This booklet is also significant in sighting some of the more recent critical literature on the subject. In Baptism in the Bible (1987), Henry Hudson again reviewed the whole of the biblical material on washings. This is a very thoughtful, tolerant and open-minded volume; it considers seriously major variant interpretations of biblical texts on the subject. The volume’s special interest and plea is for tolerance of all viewpoints as a framework for discussion, and for the Bible as the only valid determinant for a truly biblical view of baptism; this principle requires careful realistic exegesis and recognition of the actual sense of primary texts without theological pre-set schemes or creedal guidance. Hudson follows the above studies in pressing for recognition that the baptism terms do not always mean immersion. In fact he suggests they never actually refer to immersion, but only to sprinkling or pouring. While paying attention to baptismal practice at Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls site), he does not discuss the large number of Jewish mikvaoth (ritual bath tanks356) very recently recovered in archaeological excavations at Qumran, multiple Jerusalem locations and elsewhere. Many of the recovered mikvaoth date to the late Second Temple period—the New Testament era. This new knowledge of Jewish washing practices should be included in any further baptism studies produced by the grace movement with discussion of Jewish modes of baptism. Otherwise Hudson’s study is a superb volume, greatly enriched by prolific citation of the most significant works from the history of the baptism discussion in recent centuries. The volume is notable for its open-minded fairness and irenic spirit. Future editions or reprints should include indices. A very recent study of baptism in Scripture is by Edward Wishart, entitled How Many Baptisms are there in the Bible? This work of 150 pages is a series of sermons identifying twelve baptisms in Scripture. In a sense it is an expanded treatment of Baker’s Real Baptism, although much of the expansion is extensive quotations of closely or remotely related portions of the Bible for each of the twelve different baptisms he isolates. Wishart concludes there are more “baptisms” (i.e., uses of the term “baptism”) of a non-watery 356 Three distinctive features of mikvaoth are (1) steps for descending into the tank, (2) sufficient depth to easily cover the whole body, and (3) close conformity to talmudic measurements required for a valid mikvah; most are about the same dimensions, although standardized measurements may not have been finally established until after the fall of Jerusalem and the establishment of the rabbinic school at Jamnia. Not all water tanks at Qumran are mikvaoth; one may observe them in most photographs of details at Qumran. They are also visible in excavations near the southwest corner of the temple mount in Jerusalem, in the priestly homes to the west of the western wall, and around Caiphas’ house farther to the southeast.

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nature in Scripture than water events (7 against 5 water texts), a statistical generalization which sustains Baker’s similar emphasis; the point is significant since Wishart was not aware of the contents of Baker’s booklet. A distinctive gain in this study is the sustained emphasis throughout on holiness, sanctification, cleansing or purification (Wishart uses all these terms more or less inter-changeably.) as the goal of all water and non-water baptisms in Scripture. Wishart means this in the sense of real holiness equipment for the people of God. He does not limit cleansing to realization of a “positional” or “standing” holiness as though it is another way to think of justification, but stresses the purpose of all baptizing activity as symbolic of actual in-life holiness and progressive cleansing. Another distinctive contribution of this study is Wishart’s attention to type-anti-type relations between Old and New Testament baptisms. The study seems to have abandoned the sustained grace movement use of the signs and wonders link with water baptism in the New Testament; in this respect the study may contribute to reshaping the way the movement explains its baptism views. It would be helpful to readers if the work could be rewritten in orthodox prose paragraph style to facilitate reading and progressive flow of the argument. The study could also eliminate the dispensationalist habit of a labored preliminary statemenet on literal hermeneutics. The holiness-sanctification theme is entirely sufficient to sustain the argument in its own right. Despite these qualifications, this study is valid, useful and insightful.

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Appendix B O’Hair’s Pamphlet, “Seven Questions Concerning ‘Water Baptism’” This pamphlet is probably one of O’Hair’s earliest, if not the earliest of his pamphlets on baptism; if so, it is at the same time the grace movement’s earliest writing on the subject of baptism, and in another sense the theological root of what is distinctive to the grace movement. Perhaps another early pamphlet, Buried with Him by Baptism, is earlier, but it is certainly not as aggressive as Seven Questions . . . . This pamphlet certainly dates before about 1929 since he listed it in another pamphlet as one of 26 already in print in by that time. I suggest it comes from c 1925-1928 since it shows some development of thought from O’Hair’s basic insight of 1920 at the Indianapolis meeting where he was first challenged by a Pentecostal minister on whether his arguments against signs and wonders did not also apply to water baptism. It may also reflect experience in debate and discussion of baptism with Baptists and possibly Reformed ministers. O’Hair’s challenge questions are in italics below; his answers are briefly summarized in 12 point type; my comments are indented in 10 point type.

Question 1: Does “Baptizo” mean immerse? The only modes of baptism in the Old Testament are sprinkling, pouring (“effusion”) or anointing (smearing). No Old Testament ritual washings involved immersion. Neither does the New Testament anywhere support or teach immersion. O’Hair sides with Reformed, Lutheran and Catholic sprinkling or effusion in how he reads texts with baptize and other words in the group. This view on mode became normal for grace movement works on baptism; it continues so to the present, despite evidence of widespread appearance in archaeological sites of Jewish ritual tanks with steps before and during the apostolic age, including at least two outside the southwest wall of the temple platform in Jerusalem. The larger purpose of the pamphlet was to engage immersionists, chiefly Campbellites (now Christian Church, Disciples, and Churches of Christ) and Baptists. Question 1 begins this engagement with immersionists. It is reminiscent of K. Barth’s 1943 and P. K. Jewett’s 1978 attacks on Reformed and Lutheran infant baptism. O’Hair goes farther and engages immersionist thought and claims about water baptism’s normalcy in the church, in part for reasons similar to those of Barth and Jewett—salvation is at stake and many churches are full of baptized non-believers.

Question 2: Does John’s Baptism belong to the body of Christ? John’s baptism was within the framework of the Old Testament, Jesus’ manifestation to Israel, the Mosaic law, and Israel’s “near” kingdom in the New Testament; it was also within the scope of Ezekiel’s (36:24, 25, 28) prophecy of Israel’s latter day washing. There is no record that the apostles ever received New Testament baptism. The apostles were baptized long before the Holy Spirit came. While there is no record of their baptism, they did baptize others (John 4:2), so they themselves must have been baptized. By “New Testament baptism” he seems to mean a post-resurrection and post-Pentecost baptism that included the reception of the Holy Spirit; or is he using a term picked up from immersionists? This is another aspect of the pamphlet’s engagement of immersionists since Baptists (he points out), for example, openly expect candidates for baptism to show evidence of the Spirit in their lives opposite to the cases of the Peter or Philip in Acts 2, 8. No one today can be baptized

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with John’s baptism since its context, meaning and order (baptism, then the Spirit) are unique to John and Israel’s situation. John’s baptism, whether done by him or the apostles, is the only New Testament baptism; it was within the framework of the Old Testament, the law, the manifestation of the Messiah to Israel, the presence of the kingdom, and Israel’s repentance-before-the-kingdom. This point has been pursued by most grace movement studies of baptism.

Question 3: Which water-baptism belongs to the present day believer; that demanded by Peter on the day of Pentecost or that granted to Cornelius, the Gentile? Peter’s message to Israel (Acts 2:38) follows the sequence: repent—be baptized for forgiveness of sins—receive the Holy Spirit. Peter’s message to Cornelius (Acts 10:43-47) follows the sequence: believing—receiving the Spirit—being baptized; the latter pattern/ sequence is the only one possible for the church according to Paul. In Samaria (Acts 8:1217), Philip follows Peter’s order (Acts 2:38). With the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:35-38), the sequence is again similar to Acts 2:38, but lacks reference to the Spirit. The question is answered—Peter’s order with the Gentile Cornelius (faith, then Spirit, then baptism) is the correct one for the church’s proclamation. He concludes with the observation that “Many do study the subject of water baptism in light of the change from Pentecost to Cornelius. But why stop there? “[One should] develop the truth in the light of the change from Cornelius to the end of the New Testament.” Baptism, however, seems to disappear in Acts after chapter 19 and in the later Pauline epistles. Three comments on O’Hair’s thought seem appropriate. (1) He assumes Acts 2:38 is read correctly by Campbellites (Christian Church, Disciples, and Churches of Christ), Mormons and Catholics, in claiming baptism is necessary for forgiveness of sins; I have shown above that this is more than questionable. (2) His central concern is the personal salvation of individuals in baptizing churches. He sees in the Cornelius order of faith—Spirit—baptism, the clear pattern of the Pauline epistles that believers receive the Spirit upon believing—whatever else they do subsequently. His interest in the order of salvation events in Acts comes from concern about baptizing churches following Peter’s Pentecost order rather than the Cornelius’ order. But here too, he chiefly means to engage Baptists who disclaim any instrumentality of water baptism in salvation, but cannot give a satisfactory explanation of Acts 2:38 to denominations who in one way or another make baptism necessary to salvation; nor can Baptists in particular explain why the signs and wonders linked with baptism and faith in Mark 16:16-18 do not accompany faith and baptism among themselves. In this sense, while he is concerned about salvation in baptism-required-for-salvation groups, the argument here too seems chiefly concerned about Baptist belief and practice. (3) The argument here is basically over progressive revelation as the final quotation above shows: there is development and change from Pentecost to Cornelius, but also from Cornelius to Paul whose epistles show a break with water baptism as the baptizing work of the Spirit becomes normal for the church. It seems likely that this pamphlet is an enlargement of his Indianapolis insight along the lines of the progressive revelation of “baptism” in the New Testament. He does not abandon the linkage of baptism with signs and miracles (Mark 16:9-20), but rather moves to the reality of progressing revelation in the New Testament, specifically here on baptism. Question 5 returns to this point, but probably does not represent the original form of the earlier argument of 1920; it may be a recast of it, but until a specific original form of that sermon is located—if it ever is—we cannot be sure. Generally, this pamphlet seems to entail internal developments in O’Hair’s argument against water baptism, possibly arising from discussion and debate on the subject.

Question 4: How about baptismal regeneration? Denominations that “do not go beyond the second chapter of Acts teach baptismal regeneration (p. 7).” They also cite John 3:5—born of water and Spirit. But to read the John text this way ignores figurative 181

uses of “water” in John, like 4:14 where water is apparently a symbol of natural life (well water) and an explicit metaphor of eternal life, and like 7:38, where water is said to be the Spirit; he also cites Revelation 22:17 where “water of life” stands for salvation and eternal life. He concludes with an appeal to 1 Corinthians 1:14ff: could baptismal regeneration be valid when Paul says he thanks God he baptized none of them; one would think Paul would have baptized as many as possible. O’Hair does not explain what water refers to in John 3:5; he is content to suggest that it is metaphorical. He could have gone farther by invoking the several water-to-Christ or water-to-Spirit passages in 2:1-4:42. “Water” occurs nineteen times in John 1-4 alone; but in chs 5-21 only four more times. This betrays a clear water(s) of Judaism to Christ and Spirit transition. It remains a problem what the “water” of “water and Spirit” in John 3:5 refers to. It may be the water of Judaism generally, the water of birth, or the water of John’s baptism, or perhaps others. John 2:1-4:42 may be a moveon-from-John-the-Baptist-to-Christ-and-the-Spirit tract once used to move disciples of John the Baptist on to Christ and the Spirit. Despite the unresolved explanation of “water and Spirit,” clear metaphorical uses of “water” in John are rightly thought to complicate and ultimately spoil biblical arguments for baptismal regeneration. Water is mostly symbolic, as O’Hair argued in his examples. Any appeal to water in John’s Gospel to support baptismal regeneration is misguided.

Question 5: How about water baptism and the great commission? Water baptizing is found in Matthew and Mark’s commissions. In Mark 16:15-18, Mark’s parallel to Matthew includes faith, and with baptism, miracles and sign gifts, which with baptism make a whole. The point here is again to engage Baptists, Campbellites, Mormons and other immersionists with the problems he sees in the arguments supporting their practices. He engages a New York City Baptist minister (whom he greatly respects and admires) who claimed (apparently in O’Hair’s hearing in a prayer meeting) that faith and baptism are inseparably joined in Mark 16:16. Subsequently, a Pentecostal minister came to New York advocating signs and wonders from the same Mark passage. The New York Baptist denounced him for this after earlier dogmatically arguing that faith and baptism were inseparably joined in the same passage. Why then, if faith and baptism are inseparable here, are both faith and baptism not also inseparable from the text’s miracles and sign gifts? He concludes that Peter and the eleven practiced faith and baptism-for-forgiveness of sins in their ministry to Israel along with miracles; Paul said he thanked God he baptized no Corinthians beside the few mentioned (1 Cor 1:14-17). Finally, sign-gifts diminish and disappear in the later epistles. If this pamphlet preserves any of O’Hair’s original starting-point thoughts (the immediate consequences of his Indianapolis encounter over baptism in 1920) about the end of baptism in Paul, this is very probably the question where they appear, although with the influence of some later developments added. This argument is the origin of what for the early period of the grace movement’s thinking about water baptism, even if it gave way to other developed forms of articulating the matter including in O’Hair’s own thought . Why it appears as the fifth rather than the first question here is neither clear nor important, although it is curious. One may then see the other questions making up this pamphlet as further developments of his original thinking., but not likely in chronological order. One might guess that the pamphlet is logically structured from debates with other denominations’ leaders over baptism, especially Baptists and Campbellites. Such debates are illustrated in the pamphlet-letter to Albertus Pieters referred to above and in other pamphlets as well.

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Question 6: Have all who have been baptized with water by immersion put on Christ? “Any sensible person,” O’Hair says, knows that not all who are water baptized have thereby “put on Christ (Gal 3:27).” He thinks Colossians 2:11-13 is parallel to Galatians 3:27, but Colossians adds thoughts about circumcision “without hands” and then straight-on about baptism into Christ’s resurrection in which whoever is baptized becomes risen with Christ by faith in the operation of God. Circumcision without hands is parallel to the baptismal raising from the dead in Colossians 2:11-13, which cannot be water baptism. Neither circumcision nor baptism here is literal-physical; both are about the baptizing work of the Spirit, since it is clearly observable that thousands of baptized persons are not really in Christ by faith. By “sensible person” he seems to mean—any observant person looking for evidence of a claim to genuinely being in Christ by water baptism, whether the claim is expressed by the persons own personal theology, or his church or denomination. The point is important because it is a way of pressing the issue of salvation and true conversion by sustaining his engagement with immersionists (Campbellites and Baptists), and paedo-baptists (Catholics and Lutherans) who claim baptismal regeneration as biblical. That this question and answer are placed here refocuses on the priority of real personal redemption, and is thus again parallel to Jewett’s case against paedo-baptism, which, had Jewett’s work been available (which it was not), O’Hair might have seen as a step toward his own views.

Question 7. How about the expression, “buried with Him by baptism (Rom 6:4)?” “Therefore we are buried with Him by baptism into death . . . .” This statement is introduced in Romans by “therefore,” referring to the immediately preceding statement, “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” Thus, if baptism here is water baptism, then baptism actually effects a moral change of life in which the subject is transformed from sinfulness to an actual new life in Christ. The remainder of the Romans context underscores this same point. Further, Peter (assuming he submitted to John’s baptism) could not have understood his baptism as burial with Christ since Christ had not yet died, been buried or raised. To illustrate the opposite, he asks, “. . . is it not a fact that everyone who has been born of the Spirit, whether that one has received water baptism by pouring, sprinkling or immersion, has been raised up with Christ? This point climaxes his concern over real personal salvation. It was a wise follow-on of the preceding question. O’Hair the evangelist is speaking here to the whole Christian world about the seriousness of thinking one is “in Christ” by faith when he is not because he has been misled into thinking that, by whatever version of necessary baptism, he is really in Christ because of receiving the ritual. Interestingly, it was a version of this same logic that led Samuel Vinton, Sr. to stop baptizing converts in Congo in the 1930s before he ever knew there was a grace movement. Vinton feared that former—but not fully converted in thought and emotions—animist Africans might attribute magic powers to baptism; of this problem, Vinton probably had specific evidence among his own early converts.

Reflecting back over this pamphlet, I note several themes, connections and possible implications in this piece of historical theology more than eighty years after the pamphlet’s publication. The argumentation here is reminiscent of Barth’s attack on infant baptism in Christendom, and similarly like P. K. Jewett’s follow-on in pleading with Reformed denominations (chiefly Dutch or German Reformed and Presbyterians) to drop infant 183

baptism (to be replaced by immersion upon testified conversion) as misleading to millions of souls who may have thought, or actually do think, they are eternally safe by baptism when in fact they are not. In this pamphlet, not paedobaptists, but immersionists of every stripe are engaged by O’Hair on equally serious grounds to those of Jewett: salvation and eternal safety are at stake. If this pamphlet is O’Hair’s earliest on baptism, he has moved beyond the Indianapolis insight on the connection of water baptism with sign gifts as a mode of argumentation, and enlarged the discussion to a broader audience and agenda by setting out key immersion issues in the form of a series of questions; the pamphlet thus shows expansion in his thought about baptism. He also accompanies the discussion with persistent reference to various kinds of immersionists, especially Baptists, and Campbellites in all three of their branches. A major added theme is that there is really no explicit scriptural evidence for “baptism” as immersion. Even in the New Testament, there is no text specifically referring to immersion. Question #5 appears to be the closest we may ever get to the earliest written statement of the form O’Hair gave to his Indianapolis insight, even though it appears in fifth position among the seven questions of the pamphlet. This question and its answer—the longest answer among the seven—is the fountainhead of the grace movement’s existence and distinctive theology of baptism and the church.

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ESSAY V CHARISMATA IN THE CHURCH Signs and Wonders for the Body of Christ? by Dale S. DeWitt By all lights, the Protestant-led charismatic movement of the twentieth century is one of the most popular and potent if not controversial Christian forces in our world. It has risen from modest beginnings to become a world-wide force, and for sheer visibility outranks most other evangelical groups with immense impact on all continents. It is, however, frequently controversial, not merely because of its public aggressiveness, but because of the judgments it sometimes makes about other Christians, the dubious ethical and moral behavior of some leading representatives, the slick fund-raising and pulpit style of other notable leaders, and the murky meaning of some of its religious practices such as healing, prophecy, tongues, and laughing. At the same time, much of its witness to the gospel is potent, its worship styles and growth strategies are models of effectiveness, and the supportive fellowship of its churches is often deeply enriching and healing. A certain reluctance and sadness prevails, therefore, in saying “no” to its charismatic claims—a certain discomfort in putting rational and exegetical considerations to such fiercely passionate experience. But—Spirit-led reason, criticism of difficulties, and exegetical examination will no doubt prevail, and this process might as well go forward. Thus the goal of this chapter is to identify the reasons why this movement, despite its massive popularity and power, lacks the support of coherent experience and exegetical detail.357 357 A few index works from the massive literature can be cited—those which have been the most popular and significant: S. M. Burgess and G. B. McGee, Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988); DuPlessis, The Spirit Bade Me Go (Plainfield NJ: Logos, 1970); W. Grudem, The Gift of Prophecy in the New Testament and Today (Westchester IL: Crossway, 1988); M. Hamilton The Charismatic Movement (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975); E. D. O’Connor, Perspectives on Charismatic Renewal (London: Notre Dame, 1975); J. Ruthven, On the Cessation of the Charismata: The Protestant Polemic on Postbiblical Miracles (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993); J. Sherrill, They Speak with Other Tongues (New York: Guideposts, 1964); V. Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971); J. R. Williams, “The Charismatic Movement,” Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. W. Elwell (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1984); J. Deere, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1993).

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Beliefs of the Charismatic Movement: Essential Ideas Despite the varied denominational and sub-group expressions of the charismata (gifts), there is a core of agreed ideas, although even these have tonal and perspectival variations among different groups. (1) Acts and 1 Corinthians furnish patterns of the Holy Spirit’s activity which are normative for the life of the church through all its long existence (Acts 2:4-21; 10:44-48; 1 Cor 1:7).358 (2) The filling of the Spirit (Eph 5:18), or baptism of the Spirit, is a sudden experience of sovereign grace which usually comes on a person sometime after salvation (cf Acts 19:2); speaking in tongues is its normative sign. (3) Speaking in tongues sometimes involves real human languages spoken by people with no prior knowledge; this event is proof of the divine origin and real supernatural nature of the experience (Acts 2:4-12). Most tongues-speaking, however, is linguistically unrecognizable while such no-language is said to be “the tongues of . . . angels (1 Cor 13:1).” (4) Speaking in tongues produces the deepest and strongest feelings, attitudes and actions of love for others—love stronger and deeper than any form of normal human love. In this way tongues opens the fullness of Christian experience and the complete self. Tonguesspeaking, however, is not such a fullness when accompanied by shaking, falling, shouting, and barking as in nineteenth century camp meetings;359 in the 1990s the gifts of prophecy and laughing gained public view.360 (5) Tongues have accompaniments like praising God (Acts 10:46), witness (1Cor 14:22), prayer (1 Cor 14:13; Rom 8:26), interpretation of tongues (1 Cor 14:26-27), healing (1 Cor 12:9), prophecy (1 Cor 12:10; 14:1) and exorcisms (Mark 16:17); such accompaniments are found in different combinations in various people. (6) Preparations for Holy Spirit baptism and tongues are essential to charismatic spirituality. Acts 2 is the model: conversion, obedience including separation from sin, tarrying, faith sufficient and added to obedience, and (sometimes) laying-on of hands.361 Conditions for the baptism of the Spirit are part of charismatic doctrine, just as lists of preparations were common in Puritan treatments of conversion, although details are different.362

358 Ruthven, Cessation of the Charismata, pp. 112-131; cf. Logan, Charismatic Movement, p. 34. 359 DuPlessis, The Spirit Bade Me Go, p. 93; S. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale, 1972), pp. 430-435. 360 M. G. Maudlin, “Seers in the Heartland,” CT, Jan 14, 1991, pp. 18-22; J. A. Beverley, “Toronto’s Mixed Blessing,” CT, Sept 11, 1995, pp. 22-27. 361 Bruner, Theology of the Holy Spirit, pp. 87-117. 362 Ibid., pp. 87-117; cf R. Lovelace, The American Pietism of Cotton Mather (Washington, D.C.: The Christian College Consortium, 1979), pp. 76-86, for discussion of Puritan preparationism.

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Variations in the Charismatic Movement363 Charismatics differ among themselves. Pentecostalism in America arose from the Methodist holiness movement which sought complete personal sanctification in a second divine work of grace after justification (salvation). Three major controversies arose in the early years (late nineteenth, early twentieth century): some groups rejected tongues (Nazarenes, Wesleyan Methodists); others within Methodism rejected total sanctification as a second work of grace (Methodist Episcopal Church); still others rejected the Jesusonly Unitarianism of some early Pentecostals (Assemblies of God, 1914).364 Charismatics also differ on such issues as the correct number of crucial Spirit-moments in the Christian life or which gifts are being restored in the life of the church: are there two crucial moments (conversion, baptism in the Spirit/tongues)? Are there three (conversion, water baptism, Spirit baptism)? are there six (conversion, the Spirit, dynamite baptism, lyddite baptism, oxidite baptism, and one other needed to perfect the Christian)?365 Most American Pentecostals hesitate on restoration of the gift of apostle. But the Anglo-German New Apostolic Church—the early nineteenth century forerunner of American charismatic restoration—recognized early on that a restored apostolic age must include not only healing, tongues and prophets, but apostles as well; and so it gradually created a “complete” church including not only apostles, but a chief apostle, priests and “angels” as well. Peter Wagner recently thought the second apostolic age began about the year 2000.366 In a larger perspective, probing discussion of the meaning of charismatic renewal was inevitable. An older, persistent view is that charismatic gifts renew the fullness of the apostolic church—the concept behind the use of “Apostolic” for the New Apostolic Church in Germany as well as for several Holiness-Pentecostal denominations in America. David DuPlessis revised and enlarged charismatic restorationism, thinking of charismatic renewal as God’s provision for a more spiritual ecumenism.367 Still another construction is charismatic renewal as sign either that the church has finally entered on the age of the Spirit (recalling the 13th century Joachite movement), or as a readying for the near return of Christ—the latter rain before the parousia.368 In some cases, these interpretations are combined or correlated, while some charismatics may entertain all these explanations together. There are varied views of the use and meanings of tongues: are they for private use only? Are they properly used only in public? Is an interpreter required? What is the relation of human languages and angelic languages? A special problem of continuing relevance to Anglican and Catholic charismatics is how the spontaneity of tongues fits traditional worship liturgy. Most charismatic Catholics and Anglicans have found creative ways to 363 J. R. Williams, “Charismatic Movement,” EDT, ed W. Elwell (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1984), pp. 205-1208, discusses many important variables in the movement. 364 Synan, Holiness-Pentecostal Movement, p. 163. 365 Ibid, p 66; this extreme construction seems to have been peculiar to B. H. Irwin’s Fire Baptized Church which was strong in Iowa around 1900, but failed to capture any appreciable segment of this movement, due apparently to its extremism. No serious Pentecostals of today accept such a bizarre use of “chemical jargon” as Synan calls it; but there is still debate over two or three movements of special grace. 366 P. Wagner, Dominion! How Kingdom Action Can Changea the World (Grand Rapids: Chosen Books, 2008). 367 DuPlessis, The Spirit Bade Me Go, pp. 29-34. 368 Synan, Holiness-Pentecostal Movement, p. 146.

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do this, and it turns out not to be an insurmountable problem, even though modification of liturgical patterns may be troubling for liturgical worshippers for whom quiet aesthetic elements in worship are central and spiritually renewing. A question also arises about whether charismatic life is emotional, or simply non- or supra-rational. Some argue that speaking in tongues is emotional and should be; others argue that rational/non-rational is an irrelevant either-or: speaking in tongues is neither, but an altogether different dimension of reality, although it may produce emotion. Nodal Points in the History of The Charismatic-Pentecostal Movement A brief history will help put these agreements and variations into an American historical perspective with greater clarity. We are best informed by Vinson Synan’s The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States; neglecting the Scottish and English prehistory, and details of the American prehistory omitted by Synan skews the history. About 1820, a movement arose in Scotland and England in which prophecy, tongues, and healing were central. Its modern spiritual descendents, the leaders of the German Neuapostolischen Kirche (The New Apostolic Church) maintain that prophecy arose spontaneously among humble Scottish working families.369 But the unusually impressive personality of Edward Irving was almost certainly at work in these developments, although at this time Irving did not personally claim any of these powers.370 From this Scottish beginning grew an ever enlarging restoration of apostolic era gifts including not only prophecies, tongues, and healings, but apostles, priests, chief apostles and “angels” as well. The movement in Scotland and England evolved into the Catholic Apostolic Church. It included leaders like the earlier Henry Drummond, founder of the chair of political economy at Oxford, and leader of a prophecy study group at his home in Surrey,371 William Caird, and an Anglican named Cardale who became the first apostle, followed closely by the apostleship of Drummond. Edward Irving was born and educated in Scotland. After teaching school in Scotland for several years he moved to a London parish ministry. Irving’s London congregation quickly became the largest in the movement, and his influence was a major guide to its growth, even though he was gradually marginalized by the “apostles” and other emerging leaders. From England the movement spread to Germany where, unlike its English source, it continued to grow well into the twentieth century. A crisis occurred when the original “apostles” died, causing separation of the German Church from its English roots. The Euro-German New Apostolic Church continued to ordain new apostles, while the English mother churches hesitated. In post-Civil War America, the ministry of A. B. Simpson was developing. Simpson was born and educated in Canada. He served three Presbyterian churches in Canada and the U.S. before launching an independent ministry in New York City. He became the founder 369 C. Rockenfelder (ed), History of the New Apostolic Church (Frankfurt am Main: F. Bischoff, 1970), pp. 11-16. 370 D. Bundy, “Edward Irving,” Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, pp. 470-471. 371 J. W. Meiklejohn, “Henry Drummond,” NIDCC, pp. 313-314.

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of the Christian and Missionary Alliance and a leading American promoter of foreign missions in the later nineteenth century. He was also active in the prophetic study and premillennialism movement. Simpson went through three decisive spiritual experiences in which he successively met Christ as Savior—his initial salvation, then as Sanctifier (in a crisis experience in his second pastorate at Louisville, Kentucky) and finally as Healer whereupon he accepted healing as a permanent ministry in the church. His view of Christ as Healer was informed by the healing of his bad heart, and the recovery of his daughter from diphtheria.372 His commitment to miraculous healing took shape in his Berachah Healing Home in Manhattan. Simpson does not seem to have been directly influenced by the New Apostolic Church in England and Germany. Realism suggests, however, that the movement for restoring lost gifts was in the air of Euro-American revivalism at the time, and it is reasonable to believe Simpson at least heard about new apostolic gifts during his several trips to The United Kingdom. Simpson’s natural caution, however, led him to careful judgments about such matters—a reserve visible in his hesitation about tonguesspeaking, which nonetheless did develop in a segment of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Within the revivals and national evangelicalism of nineteenth-century America, evangelical Methodism was gradually transforming Wesley’s idea of a second work of grace which produced perfect love, into the perfectionist idea of total sanctification. This movement reached a decisive stage when the National Holiness Association was organized in 1876 to promote total sanctification. The holiness movement developed in camp meetings with orgies of rolling, shrieking, jerking, and sometimes tongues and healing.373 In 1894 the Methodist Episcopal Church formally decided that the National Holiness Association had strayed from Methodism, thus isolating and fragmenting the fruit of Methodist revivalism. Set free from its parent body, the holiness movement was open to its own innovations. An early example, but by no means the center of this ongoing holiness development, was B. H. Irwin’s Fire Baptized Holiness Church (1895), an outgrowth of the earlier Iowa Holiness Association. In the southeastern states a related development was the organization of the Church of God, Cleveland, Tennessee, by A. J. Tomlinson (1903). These two regional holiness churches were complemented by other local or regional holiness organizations during the turn-of-the-century era. New organizations were concentrated in an arc from the Atlantic coast through the southern states to Arkansas and northward into Nebraska and Iowa. In 1900 Charles Parham emerged as the catalyst of a new Pentecostalism. Parham was a former Methodist minister in the Iowa Holiness Association and was active in B. H. Irwin’s Fire Baptized Holiness Church in Iowa. In the late 1890’s, Parham visited Alexander Dowie’s charisma-renewal church in Zion, Illinois, A. B. Simpson’s holiness 372 A. E. Thompson, A. B. Simpson: His Life and Work, Rev Ed (Harrisburg, PA: Christian Publications, 1960); D. J. Evearitt, Body and Soul: Evangelism and the Social Concern of A. B. Simpson (Camp Hill, PA: Christian Publications, 1994). 373 Synan, Holiness-Pentecostal Movement, p. 25, citing E. M. Coulter, College Life in the Old South (1928), and G. Griffis, “Camp Meetings in Ante-Bellum North Carolina,” The North Carolina Historical Review (Jan), 1933, which contains a description of tongues-speaking in early North Carolina camp meetings. Synan is only able to say, however, that “Throughout the nineteenth century speaking in unknown tongues occurred occasionally in the revivals and camp meetings that dotted the countryside.”

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and healing ministry in New York, and Frank Sandifer’s “Holy Ghost and Us” church at “Shiloh,” near Durham, Maine.374 By 1900 he had begun a Bible institute in Topeka, Kansas. During the fall of 1900 Parham led his students through a study of New Testament miracles and challenged them to determine from Acts what might be the sign of baptism in the Holy Spirit. In a watch-night service on December 31, 1900, Parham’s student Agnes Ozman reportedly experienced a strange tongues-speaking power of the Spirit in which she could communicate only by writing Chinese characters for three days; the event was reported by the Kansas press. Parham, helped by this public press exposure and convinced that tongues-speaking was evidence of baptism with the Holy Spirit, moved to Houston, Texas to begin another Bible institute for promoting holiness. Many students were now speaking in tongues, and events again drew attention from the press, this time the Houston Chronicle. At Houston, W. J. Seymour studied Parham’s three decisive moments in the Christian life: conversion, total sanctification and tongues. Seymour himself did not speak in tongues at Houston, but soon moved to Los Angeles, where on April 9, 1906 he fell into a trance and did speak in tongues. Curiosity seekers became crowds which kept coming and growing nightly. Needing more space, Seymour found and occupied an abandoned Methodist church on Azusa Street. There the revival continued for three years, drawing thousands of visitors from all over America and Europe. This event is recognized universally as the beginning of the modern charismatic-pentecostal movement in America. In reality it was only the flowering of a long, complex development, with a prehistory in Europe and America, and a continuing history led thereafter by men who visited the Azusa Street revival. Notable among the latter were William Durham of Chicago (North Avenue Mission), leader of early Midwest Pentecostals, G. B. Cashwell, who introduced tongues into the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), and C. H. Mason, founder of the now huge Church of God in Christ (Memphis, Tennessee). For numbers, impact and visibility, the most important institutional expression of Pentecostalism is the Assemblies of God, organized in 1914 at Hot Springs, Arkansas. This meeting was called by two southern Pentecostal leaders, A. N. Bell and M. M. Pinson, but was attended by many other influential leaders including Durham (who rejected perfectionism, but not tongues and healing) and leaders estranged from A. B. Simpson over tonguesspeaking. At this gathering the assembled representatives rejected the Jesus-only sector of the movement, thus assuring their trinitarianism. They rejected one-time or second-workof-grace total sanctification, thereby assuring commitment to progressive sanctification. They decided on congregational government assuring a break with Methodism, and adopted believer immersion as their form of baptism, assuring linkage with the already burgeoning Baptist movement; and they embraced tongues as the only second work of grace and the initial evidence of baptism in the Holy Spirit, thus assuring its normalization as their form of Pentecostalism. The literature of these movements is thick with stories of spiritual experience, but thin on biblical exegesis. To question its validity seems coldly audacious; but charismatics and Pentecostals cannot be allowed to hide behind the shelter of incorrigible speech— speech about experience so subjective and personal as to be safe from scrutiny or criticism.

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Synan, Holiness-Pentecostal Movement, p. 101.

They may present themselves as a restored church and a righteous remnant, but all such attitudes ought to be subject to the same searchlights to which all other Christian doctrine and experience are subjected. To this inquiry we now turn. Some Problems of Validity The problems of validity with the charismatic movement are legion: there are questions of reality, consistency, wholism and universality; there are problems of faith, clarity and confusing explanations; there are problems with the psychological and social bearings of the movement; and there are theology and exegesis problems. Reality, Consistency, Holism, Universality The biblical configuration of sign-gifts usually includes some form of nature miracle and resurrection—events of special divine action which supplement events of the natural world. For example, Luke 4-8 has two cycles of miracles, intending to recapitulate a Mosaic group and/or the Elijah-Elisha cycles, and climaxing in resurrection or restoration of dead persons to life. The New Testament normalizes this power as part of the Messianicapostolic sign-gift combination. The charismatic movement is not able to duplicate either this element or other nature miracles in the biblical pattern; if it is biblical as it claims, and has restored a normal apostolic expectation, why nature miracles and resurrection are without presence in its life is inexplicable. A basic reason why non-charismatic Christians suspect fraud is that the alleged miraculous gifts, let alone nature and resuscitation miracles, are not part of the normal, universal and ever-present gifts of the church; they have more often been sectarian, temporary, and limited to small segments of the church—a reason for thinking they will wane again. The Montanist movement of the second century testifies to the disappearance of the sign-gifts since it thought itself called to restore them for a final time before the appearance of the kingdom. A third problem with divine reality is the biblical warning that miraculous phenomena may be lying wonders (Deut 13:1-3; 2 Thes 2:9). Deuteronomy 13:1ff makes knowledge of the Mosaic law and adherence to Moses’ teaching the basic norm for guidance from such miracles. Deuteronomy 18 recognizes that sorcery was real and expects Israel to abhor it. This biblical idea offers just ground for doubt, although it does not require dismissal of all such miracles and mysteries as satanic. Psychic or socio-psychological sources may be involved. Biblically, one would have to possess the gift of prophecy by which spirits are discerned to know with certainty. But this gift too is problematic in its reality and is easily confused with excitement, deviancy, socio-psychological powers, or merely bigoted opinions and self-expressionism. Finally, glossolalia (tongues-speaking) and healing are not limited to Christianity; these gifts were practiced in the cults of the Greek states.375 375 P. Feine, “Speaking with Tongues,” The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge 11:37-38; healing is a major activity of medicine men and witch doctors in pagan tribalism, and glossolalia exists for example in Zaire among Muslims where it is used in curses and spells (Steven Vinton, oral communication).

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The problem of clarity is implicit in the above discussion. But there are other problems of clarity. What is the meaning of any given tongues-speech? Are tongues heard in charismatic services or meetings to be evaluated by whether recognizable foreign languages are heard as in Acts 2 where they were nothing but real languges? Is speaking in no-language satisfactory everywhere and always? Again, the permanent validity of public healings is often a problem. Unexplained remissions of disease occur in Christians and non-Christians alike; and special healings occur with or without public or private use of the gift of healing, sometimes in answer to simple prayers of Christian family and friends. Nor is possession of the gift of healing anything like clear. Fraudulent claims and melodramatic pretenses to miraculous healing abound. Euphoria and enthusiasm— and even believing one has been healed—are no substitute for reality. Ethical issues are raised by the cruelty of failure to deliver what healers promise whether privately or as a matter of public demonstration. Some famous healers may well turn out to be morally and ethically fraudulent or dubious stagers of big dreams. There is also the perpetual problem of exorcism. Exorcism implies the coordinated gifts of prophecy or discerning spirits. And to pronounce any person demon-possessed is extremely destructive even though exorcism has always been included in Catholic priestly vows.376 One exorcism anecdote of which I am aware produced quite different accounts of what happened by on-site observers. Lack of clarity is so serious a problem—of both events themselves, and their explanation(s)— that it is difficult to get to bottom-line reality. Another serious problem is the extravagant claims charismatics make about their faith, and their sometimes glib or judgmental talk in explaining others’ lack of charismatic faith. In more extreme groups like the New Apostolic Church, the whole church since the second century is condemned as apostate while the new movement is seen as the only true apostolic church.377 It is clear, however, that many of the godliest and most exemplary Christians of the ages have not experienced these gifts with any regularity or at all. The clearest canonical example is Paul himself. He did make faith in Christ the normative experience of salvation and new life; but he himself was not personally healed of a lifelong disease, and at various times he notes companions who were ill and of whom he reports no healing (Epaphroditus [Phil 2]; Trophimus [2 Tim4]). Nor does he report or suggest a general or even momentary lapse of faith to account for these sicknesses, either in his own faith or that of his associates. On the other hand, people with very slender evidence of faith, or even with no faith in Christ at all, sometimes experience glossolalia and other miracles, as shown for example by the presence of miracles in paganism or underdeveloped nations and tribal groups. Indeed, the Corinthian church where sign gifts are attested was the weakest in Christian maturity, stability and unity of all Paul’s churches. Paul rather chided the Corinthians for deviance, immaturity and carnality in attitude and behavior. This church appears to have been a mixture of faith mingled with instability or pagan baggage, but weak and undeveloped in any case. However, Paul did not say the Corinthians’ glossolalia was pagan; he rather said their gifts were signs of immaturity. In those cases where he alludes to some signs or charismata present when founding a church, he is thinking of his apostolic gifts and the way miracles attended his initial preaching, not of the normal persistence of such charismata as a sign of their strong faith. The sign of

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376 377

J. P. Toner, “Exorcism, Exorcist,” The Catholic Encyclopaedia 5:709-12. Rockenfelder, History of the New Apostolic Church, passim.

their faith was new moral, ethical and spiritual life embodied in faith, hope, and love (1 Cor 13-14; Gal 3-6; 1 Thes 1, 4-5). The few possible notices of charismata accompanying his first preaching of the gospel at Thessalonica or Galatia (Gal 3:5; 1 Thes 1:5) are even more obscure than the notes of unhealed disease in himself and associates. Explanations Several explanations of the charismatic movement, and especially tongues, complicate its assessment. The standard charismatic explanation is that its gifts are the work of the Holy Spirit. But if this is so, why does it not occur in believers everywhere and always? The relevant analogy is regeneration378 which is ubiquitous among real Christians, and which everywhere and always produces the spiritual, moral and ethical effects signified, although not yet perfectly or completely. Paul rather values personal moral transformation by regeneration as the one valid criterion for the presence of the gospel and salvation; he never urges any church to seek miracle-gifts as tokens of its regeneration or maturity. Although he accommodated the Corinthian passion for such charismata, he seeks to diminish their value and presence in favor of non-sign gifts, chiefly faith, hope and love (1 Cor 13-14). A second explanation is that all such miraculous phenomena are satanic. This explanation is extremely popular among many non- and anti-charismatic evangelicals. It is as problematic as the first explanation with its bigotry, hostility, theological problems, and glib dualism of God and Satan. A third explanation should be considered—that charismatic experience is a phenomenon of social psychology, and easily transportable to mission fields of nations with receptive psycho-social dynamics. It was inevitable that the moderate spiritual individualism of the Reformation stream should promote increasingly more radical individualism, therapy and self-expression.379 American democratic-therapeutic perfectionism, for example, creates strong passions to overcome personal, social or religious frustration in a more satisfying inward experience of power and euphoria. Such a quest is to be expected in Christian circles where transcendent reality is stressed. Since this explanation seems plausible as an alternative to the limits of the Holy Spirit and Satan explanations, it deserves more extended comment. For one thing, in a close examination of several hundred charismatics over a tenyear period (c.1962-1972), J. P. Kildahl concluded that tongues-speaking was a learned experience.380 For another, the subjective, psychic gift of tongues has been the most frequent and regular of the alleged gifts, far surpassing in visibility and popularity other more potentially evidential ones like nature miracles and resusitations. But instead of more demonstrative miracles or the gift of apostle, there followed in time the easier, more subjective gifts—tongues or even laughter—supplying, so to say, yet more fulfillments 378 A. Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology, trans J. H. DeVries (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954 Reprint). 379 R. Bellah, Habits of the Heart (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985), pp. 32-35; 48-50 and passim. 380 J. P. Kildahl, “Psychological Observations,” in The Charismatic Movement, ed. M. P. Hamilton, pp. 124-142.

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of the soul, but not more public deeds of genuine power as in the apostolic age. The movement thereby loses rather than gaining biblical ground. More importantly, in its American manifestation, tongues grew up in an era of disappointed hopes over the inability of the church to deliver America’s supposed divine destiny—the establishment of the kingdom of God. One passion of nineteenth century revivalism was to keep the Second Great Awakening alive and moving toward the millennium. When this hope faded along with the gradual decline of the large Protestant majority after the Civil War, the holiness movement sought personal subjective reality instead of historical reality. Charismata had occurred in an earlier era in Britain in a similar time of frustration and fear (1800-1850). It can hardly be accidental that the earliest American Pentecostal experiences occurred in areas with high concentrations of people demoralized or disillusioned with economic abuse and already cultivated in emotional religion and healing techniques.381 The regional relevance of these depressed situations and their socio-psychological dynamics have been noted by others.382 The western tongues outbreak occurred in the central plains where farm life was highly tenuous, and where frustrated farmers staged massive protests during the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. The Pentecostal development in southern Appalachia, notably east Tennessee, also occurred in an area of economic depression and abuse.383 And one should not discount a Reconstruction Era atmosphere of Federal punishment, humiliation and military occupation,384 sometimes among people who had not owned slaves and in some cases were not sympathetic to the cause of the South. Finally, what is needed to keep this hunger for subjective experience alive is simply more of the same—a continued sense of frustration, lack of meaning in education, institutions and history, and a feeling of disenfranchisement with alternatives couched in terms and tones of self, experience, community, acceptance, joy and emotional fulfillment. A complementary reality is the fact that some humans or groups of humans are simply more psychically prone than others. For them, the non-rational, the personal, and the language capacities of the psyche are a source of meaning and satisfaction. In addition to such a focused, psychic individualism and its counterpart in acceptance into a psychic community, Kildahl also observed certain similar or related social-psychological patterns. People who seek tongues (and accompaniments) are people who have been in a state of distress and suffering, and have a strong sense of dependency. Such people find comradery in a tongues group both because of their acceptance into it and because of the faith they can place without qualification in a leader. They have a capability for hypnosis and are most happy in a situation where they may submit themselves wholly to the will of another whom they trust, just as people were “hypnotized” by Hitler’s speeches, 381 C. Albanese, America: Religions and Religion, Second Edition (Belmont, CA: Wordsworth Publishing Co, 1992), p. 344. 382 bid., pp. 324-348. 383 Ibid., p. 345; for the impact of the Civil War on the region of southeast Pentecostalism’s origin, see also R. T. McKenzie, “Oh, Ours is a Deplorable Condition: The Impact of the Civil War in Upper East Tennessee, in The Civil War in Appalachia, ed K. W. Noe and S. H. Wilson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975), pp. 199-226. 384 For discussion of post-Civil War problems of recovery from humiliation and occupation, see G. M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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reported euphoria at the time, and then wondered after the war what had happened to them. Kildahl found that the feeling of euphoria was not so much the tongues experience as the well-being of relationship with leader and group. This psycho-social scramble showed again when taped tongues speeches were taken to three different people who claimed the gift of interpretation, and all three reported different subjects in the speech.385 Kildahl found little evidence of real living languages; rather, most such claims were picked up through third-hand reports. F. D. Goodman produced a similar social-psychological study of a tongues-speaking congregation in Mexico City and in a related Mayan-speaking congregation in the Yucatan; her results were similar to Kildahl’s: the beliefs of the groups about what happens in tongues experience are not confirmed by close examination, and their values do in fact lie elsewhere in the social psychology of the situation.386 Theological Problems The concerns discussed here are serious but not desperate. Up to the present, Pentecostals have generally proclaimed the biblical saving gospel and remained orthodox in doctrine. But there are signs of confusion. There is a danger of the gospel being obscured by the quest for tongues, prophecy, laughing, excitement, or idolatry of leaders, let alone by the attention and energy needed to seek healing and other miracles. No matter how much charismatics emphasize tongues and accompaniments, they cannot gainsay the fact that the chief activity of the apostles in Acts is preaching and teaching, while the emphasis of authentic Christianity from Jesus through the apostles is on faith, hope and love with their many implications in many New Testament passages. Paul teaches the Corinthians in the midst of their excitement with tongues, that faith, hope and love are a better way (1 Cor 13:1, 13). The stable, quiet endurance of these three gifts tends to be obscured by the public sensationalism of tongues, prophecy and other alleged signs. A second closely related problem is the arbitrary use of Acts. The charismatic movement tends to place Acts over the epistles for guidance on the normal life of the church. But Acts is not a didactic book, and except where Luke clearly intends a theme to become normative, Acts cannot be used as an instructional pattern for regular church life.387 The charismatic outlook on Acts is a reversal of a baseline principle of Reformation hermeneutics which insists that didactic sections like epistles interpret historical sections like Acts.388 Acts is highly selective although its drift is clear enough. If anything, it points to Pauline authority as a guide and seeks to show how Israel failed through unbelief, how the gospel passed to the Gentiles, how the Holy Spirit led the apostles, how the gospel 385 Kildahl, Charismatic Movement, p. 136. 386 Eleven of Goodman’s major conclusions are cited by P. F. Esler, The First Christians in Their Social World (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 40-43. 387 Cf. Fee and Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth: A Guide to Understanding the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982), pp. 87-112. 388 Carnell, The Case for Orthodox Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1959), p. 59: “. . . if the church teaches anything that offends the system of Romans and Galatians, it is cultic.” But this is only one way to state the matter; the force of most of the relevant chapter of Carnell’s book is to the same effect.

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reached Rome, and how the Romans offered no opposition of any legal or administrative substance at the beginning. A third theological difficulty lies in the shifting of priorities. After nearly a century of attempts to explain and undergird tongues, prophecy suddenly came to the fore about 1985. Already in 1979, Richard Lovelace, in The Dynamics of Spiritual Life, suggested that while he was not very impressed with tongues or their significance, prophecy may well be the charism to be reckoned with, as its claims are far more serious.389 But charismatics struggle indecisively with the literal meaning of the gift of prophecy in Scripture since this gift produced in prophets and apostles direct divine revelations of both present and future; it also produced Scripture as Word of God. Where prophecy is claimed, it now tends to be understood as a gift of insight and exhortation. This claim gives a thinned meaning to the biblical idea of prophecy. The only way through this thinned meaning is to identify two different uses of prophecy in the New Testament—revelations and exhortation.390 But this distinction skips over the fact that there is a Pauline word for exhortation, paraklasis, which appears as a charism alongside prophecy, for example in Romans 12:8. Only a few charismatics are willing to engage in prophecy as a normative divine revelation.391 Despite these difficulties, a shift from tongues to prophecy in the revelatory sense has occurred in some circles. If the shift to prophecy is not audacious enough, others have taken up the gift of laughter.392 This ebb and flow of “gifts” does not bespeak the stability and vitality of the Holy Spirit’s permanent works in all belivers; but it does show the whims of the human spirit. One can also think of the spirit of the American entertainment industry with excitement and sensation as mainstays. These kinds of joys quickly pass. The analysis offered here suggests confusion of the human spirit with God’s Spirit in the context of western individualistic selfism and psychic longings for fulfillment. The three popular subjective manifestations—tongues, prophecy as insight, and laughter—are expressions of the human spirit struggling for “lift” in a context of prolonged meaning loss, alienation, disillusionment and desperate longing for internal fulfillment; or perhaps the movement is driven in part by American passion for excitement or the social status of show business as with some television charismatics. In American evangelicalism it was natural that this psychic search should attach itself to biblical tongues-speaking as described in Acts 2, since American evangelicals are a people of the Book, especially the New Testament, and the spirit of American evangelicalism is the spirit of restoration—the renewal of everything apostolic. Pentecost looked like a promise of biblical guidance, 389 Lovelace’s interest in prophecy is also visible in his American Pietism of Cotton Mather (Washington D. C.: Christian College Consortium, 1979), pp. 184-185, where he notes Mather’s interests in special prophetic experiences of the Holy Spirit, and in his article adjoining the report of “Prophets in the Heartland,” CT, Jan 4, 1991. 390 Grudem, The Gift of Prophecy in the New Testament and Today, renews this view, but with a firmer attention to the direct memory-renewing work of the Holy Spirit in specific congregational contexts: prophecy in this sense is a direct inspirational work of the Spirit in specific situations, and makes use of truths already known from Scripture. 391 Ibid., pp. 245-250; Grudem assembles an impressive collection of warnings from charismatic sources against prophecy as continuing divine revelation of new truths, especially prediction of specific events in individuals’ lives or events of world history, as well as directives to individuals to act in prescribed ways in their lives. 392 Beverley, J. A., “Toronto’s Mixed Blessing,” pp. 22-27.

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even if Acts plainly stated that the tongues of Pentecost were real dialects of the Roman empire, and the apostolic miracles were signs to Israel of the presence of its last days and Messiah’s presence—a combination of events essentially unrepeatable. Biblical Theology Issues In this section, the arguments advanced by dispensational and Reformed theology for cessation of sign gifts at the end of the apostolic age will be explained and examined. Three basic biblical arguments are advanced by cessationists. (1) Signs belong historically to Israel; the principled dispensational distinction between Israel and the church makes it a matter of logical extension to argue—once this distinction has been made—that signs are the way of God with Israel, while no principled evidence exists for its universal extension during the era of the church.393 (2) The sign gifts were extended in God’s purpose to support the apostolic gift of teaching authority, and power for establishing the gospel in the world—including in some cases the apostles’ authority among Gentiles; but even in these scenes, the chief intent is support of apostolic teaching authority in principle, not establishing an independent witness to Gentiles or a gift of permanent universality. This is the classic Reformed view of cessation.394 (3) Sign gifts were continued and expanded as internal supports in an unusually immature and unstable church like Corinth. 1 Corinthians 13, however, predicts the cessation of representative sign gifts—prophecy, tongues, and (divine) knowledge. This consideration must apply by analogy to the other sign gifts, since Paul’s isolation of these three is owing to special Corinthian interests driven by their Christian immaturity. There appears to be considerable agreement that tongues, prophecy and knowledge in this text are representative of sign gifts as a whole (examples of the whole). That this passage teaches sign gift cessation “when that which is perfect is come” is agreed by all interpreters of whatever stripe. But interpreters are far from agreed on the time horizon and condition referred to in the words, “when that which is perfect is come.” Signs and Israel In 1 Corinthians 1:22-23 Paul states, “For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.” The letter argues with Corinthian (Greek) Christians who demand that the gospel show itself as a kind of wisdom characteristic of their own thinking and history. The Jews also have a characteristic way of thinking about their God and his history with them: they ask for signs. Paul accommodates his Greek readers by presenting Christ as (God’s) wisdom; he also accommodates his own nation by identifying Christ as the “power” (dunamis, miracle 393 G. Sheppard, “Pentecostals and the Hermeneutics of Dispensationalism,” Pneuma 6 (1954), discusses the inner-Pentecostal tensions created by recognizing the apostles’ ministry to Israel in Acts 1-8 on one hand, and normalizing the Pentecostal experience of tongues and other miracles from the same portion. 394 Stated in its classical form by B. B. Warfield, Miracles: Real and Counterfeit (New York, 1918); this position is now assailed with vigor by Ruthven, Cessation of the Charismata, by J. Deere, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1993), and by W. Grudem, The Gift of Prophecy.

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[1:24]) of God—a way of referring to incarnation, resurrection, and other messianic miracles in summary. The two ways—wisdom and signs—represent God’s preparatory work with the two respective peoples, Gentiles and Jews. Paul’s comment that “the Jews demand a sign” is not to be taken as a negative or a condemnation, but as a realistic recognition of God’s historic way with Israel via special revelation in parallel to wisdom as God’s historic way with the Greeks via general revelation. Although Jesus, for reasons of situation, resisted doing miracles upon family or Pharisaic demand (John 2:1-12), he did in fact do miracles before both at his own initiative. Signs were the historic way of God with Israel, beginning with Moses (Ex 4:1-2; 6:30-7:3; Jud 6:17; Isa 7:10-16), and then dramatically with Elijah and Elisha, although not limited to them.395 Prophecies of the messianic age included renewed miracles (Isa 35; Joel 2:28-32; Zech 8:12-13; 14:1-8). Jesus embraced this mode of revelation to Israel, and invited John the Baptist and his disciples to look at his miracles as signs of the kingdom’s presence in himself (Luke 11:19-20; Matt 11:2-6; 12:28). In the speeches of Acts 2-3, Peter interprets the miracles of the moment as signs to Israel of the nearness of the end of the age and of the messianic kingdom (1:14-20; 3:16ff): in the face of messianic miracles, Israel must repent and the restoration will follow (3:17-26). Some cessationists who embrace this “signs for Israel” consideration396 appeal to a text in 1 Corinthians 14:21 (citing Isa 28:11-12) for closure of their argument: In the law it is written, ‘by men of strange tongues and by the lips of foreigners will I speak to this people, and even then they will not listen to me, says the Lord.’

Paul’s own comment on the passage is Thus, tongues are a sign not for believers but for unbelievers, while prophecy is not for unbelievers but for believers.

It is hard to see how Paul’s interpretation of this text supports the signs-for-Israel argument. Isaiah’s reference is to Assyrians (the “strange tongues” of the quote) invading Judah (“this people” of the quote) and demanding surrender. What Paul interprets from this is that tongues are for unbelievers, i.e., in his Isaiah text, unbelieving Israel. He does not say “. . . so then tongues are for Israel . . . ,” but “. . . so then tongues are for unbelievers” without distingishing unbelieving Israel from any other unbelievers. The argument seems to be overdrawn and falters with a simple reading of the text and its contextual intent. The argument from signs as a historic way of God with Israel will have to rest content with a set of brief historical observations as above and thus relinquish hope of finding a firm closure text in 1 Corinthians 14:21. 395 Deere, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit, pp. 49-52 makes this point correctly, but overdraws it somewhat by suggesting that the occasional miracles of the Old Testament fail to support identification of special periods of concentrated miracles; the argument is a tendentious one, cast in the face of a thoughtless student’s claim that miracles only occurred in special clusters in the biblical history of redemption. Still, that they were at times clustered is the case. 396 J. Napier, Charismatic Challenge: Four Key Questions (Franklin TN: Providence House Publishers, 1995), pp. 50-51.

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Despite, then, the misappeal to 1 Corinthians 14:21, Paul’s observation in 1 Corinthians 1:22 that Jews require a sign, points to a reality in the history of redemption: sign gifts are the historic way of God with Israel. While not stating the matter absolutely, Paul positively correlates signs with Israel just as he correlates wisdom with Greeks. 1 Corinthians 1:22 establishes the connection of signs with Israel as a matter of historic principle; God’s way with Greeks—and other Gentiles—is wisdom. Both cases involve a kind of divine accommodation to conditioned expectations. Signs and the Gift of Apostle The second point is better attested in New Testament thought, even though aggressively rejected by J. Deere and J. Ruthven.397 The classical Reformed rejection of sign gifts for the church beyond the apostolic age identifies them as limited in time because they functioned as supports for the gift of apostle—the gift of teaching with full divine authority (exousia); the sign-gifts ceased when the gift of apostle ceased.398 Deere argues that the miracles rather support the apostles’ message, not their gift or teaching authority. Since signs supported the message (the gospel), they remain as long as the message remains, i.e., permanently.399 However, he rejects the idea that any divine necessity requires signs to always accompany the gospel, and holds that the gospel rather makes its powerful way in the world even without miraculous supports. Still, it is sometimes God’s purpose to use them. He claims from a review of New Testament “signs and wonders” passages that no evidence exists for the idea that the charismata include the gift of apostle as the churches’ primary teachers. This claim releases New Testament signs from any temporary use in the first century. Deere does not believe the gift of apostle is in the church currently, because he does not see anyone with the spiritual calling, commissioning, or spiritual level of biblical apostles in today’s church; and certainly apostles as “Scripture writers” are not in the church today. He argues that “apostle” is not called a gift in either 1 Corinthians 12:28 or Ephesians 4:11. He distinguishes between the “requirements” of an apostle (distinctive calling and commissioning) and “characteristics” of an apostle (suffering, insight into divine mysteries, signs and wonders, integrity, authority over demons, and church discipline). He reduces the divine-authority teaching function of apostles to near zero: Scripture-writing should not be listed as either a requirement or characteristic of apostles because “not all apostles wrote Scripture.”400 Still, he wants to allow that God may at any time renew the gift of apostle in the church; when he does, it will be as in the New Testament, a gift of unusual calling 397 J. Deere, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit. The book is an account of Deere’s move from dispensational theology to charismatic faith; it is extremely well written for thoughtful laymen, persuasive and passionate; perhaps it is the most formidable challenge yet to cessationists because it addresses them directly from the perspective of a former cessationist who was led by experiences into the charismatic movement. J. Ruthven’s, The Cessation of the Charismata is also an aggressive argument against cessationism, but not as personal as Deere’s. 398 The normative statement is B. Warfield, Counterfeit Miracles (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1953, reprinted as Miracles: Yesterday and today, True and False). 399 Deere, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit, pp. 99-110. 400 Ibid., p. 247.

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and commissioning together with unusual suffering, insight into divine mysteries, signs and wonders, integrity, authority over demons, and discipline—this combination, but not a renewed teaching authority, since this is not the meaning of “apostle” in any significant sense. These points seem evasive. Clearly, in order to avoid the problems of affirming that all charismata are permanently in the church, and the implications of this notion, he has to deny the historic biblical and church understanding of “apostle”.401 The biblical and historic sense is rather that apostles in the church means teachers with direct and full teaching authority from Christ, including direct revelation and inspiration which issued in both oral and written expressions (1 Thes 2:15). He also has to overlook the facts that (1) “apostle” is actually called a “gift” along with prophecy (which he values as still in the church) and pastor-teacher in Ephesians 4:11 (only under the term domata, a synonym for charisma); (2) the list of 1 Corinthians 12:28 includes “apostle” as part of a discussion which explicitly uses charismata as its subject (12:4, 28, 29), and (3) Paul finally repeats the whole list of gifts including apostles and prophets (12:29-30). Deere’s treatment is tendentious and artificial since it jostles the biblical/historic concept of apostle, explains away instead of getting to grips with the term “gift” for apostles in two Pauline texts, and manipulates both terms away from their biblical sense. Cessationists, he rightly notes, invoke two texts as proofs of signs-to-support-apostolic-authority: 2 Corinthians 12:12 and Hebrews 2:3-4. These two texts read respectively: The signs of a true apostle were performed among you in all patience, with signs and wonders and mighty works. . . . how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard him, while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his own will.

Deere argues that 2 Corinthians 12:12 should be translated, “The signs of an apostle were performed among you in all endurance with signs and wonders and miracles.” This translation understands miracles not as the way by which apostleship was authenticated, but as accompaniments to another way his apostleship was attested, i.e., by his life and ministry. For this suggestion he cites R. Martin402 and others who make similar suggestions about the multiple bases for authentication of Paul’s ministry.403 The net effect is to remove miracles from the sphere of Paul’s thought about the authentication of his apostolic authority. Indeed, Martin stresses that Paul invoked many other tests even in 2 Corinthians, and he is hesitant in chapters 10-13 to depend on visionary experiences or other supernatural elements as proofs, which despite the misgiving, he does narrate in his own defence. But 401 N.Geldenhuys, Supreme Authority (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1953); see also Cullmann, Peter: Disciple-Apostle-Martyr, trans F. Filson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953). 402 Deere, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit, pp. 104-105; R. Martin, 2 Corinthians (Waco: Word Books, 1986), pp. 434-436. 403 Deere, ibid. There is no question that Paul multiplies signs of authentication, especially his suffering of hardships, and his function as a servant of the new covenant.

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does this indicate he excludes miracles, or that these are secondary either in function or purpose? The answer is no for the following reasons. Deere’s chief argument is that “with signs and wonders and mighty works” is an accompaniment concept. But (1) why did not Paul then write “with” when a way to say this in Greek existed and was used regularly in associational-accompaniment constructions, i.e., Greek sun with the dative meaning “with.” (2) The dative provides an agent for the passive voice of the verb “performed”; this is the classical-koine instrumental dative meaning “by” or “by means of”—a more regular and natural construction with the passive when the agency is an event or object rather than a person (which more often takes hupo with genitive for the personal agent). (3) No difficulty exists with the two uses of the term “sign” since most modern exegetes are agreed that it means “marks” or “indicators” in the first of the two uses here. So Paul means “the indications (marks, signs) of an apostle were wrought with persistence by signs (miracles) and wonders and acts of power.” This is the natural meaning of the grammar and terms. Nor does this text support Deere’s claim that miracles only support the message. Paul says miracles are “marks of the apostles.” This text, however, is not an isolated piece of evidence. Paul and others make the same appeal elsewhere, in a few cases more directly, and in others where miracles support a combination of elements—saving message, apostolic authority and human need-meeting miracle combined. Deere is simply wrong in trying to isolate the message alone as the only thing supported by apostolic signs. In fact the texts cover several divine intentions holistically, and the decisive connection is with the authority of the apostles. Acts 2:22. “. . . Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested404 to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs which God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know.” The term “attested” denotes demonstration of truth or reality.405 The three words for miracles appear here in the same dative case following the perfect passive participle—the passive in parallel to Paul’s passive in 2 Corinthians 12:12. The datives are instrumental—a point made all the clearer by a verb of demonstration as a function of miracles in “attesting” Jesus’ own messianic personhood. Acts 2:43. “And fear came upon every soul; and many wonders and signs were done through the apostles.” There is no note of their authority enhanced by the miracles; nor is the message even mentioned. It is the apostles who do wonders and signs, not just any, let along all, believers. Acts 4:16-30. The Jewish authorities discuss what to do with “these men” since a notable sign has been done by them (4:16). They prohibit them from further speaking. But they were soon released and returned to preaching with boldness and invoking the Lord’s blessing with signs and wonders (vs 30). No distinction is visible between message and gift; they work together, the message supported by their charism authority.. Acts 5:12-13. “Now many signs and wonders were done among the people by the hands of the apostles . . . the people held them in high honor.” Reference is to the apostles, not their message, which is nonetheless not very far away.

404 405

Italics mine throughout. BAGD, p. 89.

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Acts 6:8. “And Stephen, full of grace and power, did great wonders and signs among the people.” The fullness of grace and power in Stephen is the focus; however, the thought soon turns to his opponents’ inability to “withstand the Spirit and power with which he spoke.” It is the combination of personal power in the man, and the consequent force of his speech that is noted. But it is not the gospel per se he speaks; rather he gives history of Israel that emphasizes Israel’s tendency to resist the movements of God. Still, his speech does receive the attention. Acts 8:6. “And the multitudes with one accord gave heed to what was said by Philip, when they heard him and saw the signs which he did.” There is no argument to be made against either message or messenger; the miracles attested Philip and his message together. One could object that Philip was not an apostle.406 But some combination of charisms obviously spilled over to other gifted leaders in the apostolic church, although they are clustered, if not limited, in the leaders who worked with Israel (cf Agabus, Acts 11:27; 21:10-11). Acts 8:13. “Even Simon himself believed, and after being baptized he continued with Philip. And seeing signs and great miracles performed, he was amazed.” The focus here is on Philip and his personal gifts rather than on his message. There is no indication here of separating the message from the apostolic person; rather Philip’s gifts draw Simon’s interest, and the support of any teaching or message falls somewhat into the background, even though it is implied. Acts 14:3. The text stresses the support of the message and apostolic leaders’ gifts of preaching and teaching: “. . . the Lord, who bore witness to the word of his grace, granting signs and wonders to be done by their hands.” Apostolic gifts and message are included. Acts 15:12. “. . . Barnabas and Paul . . . related what signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles.” The text is interested in the use of miracles to support apostolic mission work among Gentiles. The message is not mentioned, but it may be assumed; the central focus is the effectiveness of the first effort to evangelize Gentiles (cf Rom 15:19 for more of the same), and support from miracles received by the apostles.

Summary signs and wonders texts in Acts connect with the apostles or immediate co-laborers who in some measure share the powers of the apostolic gifts; the texts also relate their powers of miracle to apostolic preaching and teaching. But this is exactly the point of the Reformed argument: miracles correlate with apostolic authority to preach and teach. Clearly Luke thought this, since his summary notes of “signs and wonders” relate no other persons who do such miracles than these apostolic people, even though prophecy and some other gifts occasionally appear in associated people. Signs do not support the message apart from the gift and powers of apostles. Nor does the book of Acts suggest that apostles and leaders sought to establish signs, miracles and wonders as normal in all and throughout all congregations. 406 Deere, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit, pp. 106-107. But he is arguing with a particular form of apostolic authority support which links it with writing books of the New Testament. Apostolic associates like Philip, Mark, Luke and Jude for example were not apostles but wrote New Testament books, and so he thinks the argument fails over such people. But the New Testament is quite clear that the gifts of evangelism, teaching, preaching, and prophecy were powerfully spread to leaders beyond the twelve and Paul, even to the point that some are called apostles (Barnabas, Apollos, Timothy). This fluid situation makes it impossible to argue for fine distinctions.

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In Hebrews 2:3-4, it was not necessary for the author to mention either “the Lord” or “those who heard him”; but he does. With both the message of salvation is linked. There is no split between apostles and message; miracles attest the combination. But they do not attest the message in the abstract; they attest it in the hands of gifted disciple-apostles who bore witness to the message of salvation. As in Acts, signs are associated with the original leaders and their proclamation. Deere has clearly made his answer to Warfield and the Reformed argument depend, in one important respect, on an artificial distinction between apostolic authority and message. The texts do not attest a miraculous support of the message separated from the apostles; they point everywhere to the combination of apostles and message. The Cessation Passage

In 1 Corinthians 13:8-10 Paul wrote, Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love.

Any fair reading of this text in its first century context gains the impression that Paul is actually suggesting some gifts which the Corinthians value and practice will really fade away, i.e., will soon fade from them; if not, what, realistically, is the point of saying it to them? This initial impression, gained from nothing but the simplicity of historical realism, does indeed commend itself. First, the letter is local correspondence to the local conditions at Corinth; this context does not suddenly change when he speaks of sign-gift cessation. The letter concerns changes Paul is trying to effect in their congregational life. Among these changes are a more orderly worship, reduction of interest in tongues—if not preoccupation with them— in favor of the more edifying gift of prophecy, and a greater valuing of those gifts which will remain even beyond prophecy (which he says will also cease)—faith, hope, and love. That faith, hope and love will remain in contrast to knowledge, tongues, and prophecy which will not, shows Paul is not thinking of a far or even near eschatological event like Christ’s second coming, but of the continuing earthly life of the church in the world, since the latter gifts and the quest for gifts generally pertain only to its earthly sojourn.407 Secondly, in the context of 1 Corinthians 13:8-10, conditions for the cessation of tongues, prophecy, and knowledge are specified. Four terms are used to describe this anticipated situation: (1) when “that which is perfect” comes; (2) when “manhood” comes; (3) when a condition called “face to face” occurs; and (4) when a condition identified as “I shall know as I am known” occurs. All four descriptions are the opposite of what he

407

This is the case despite Deere’s argument.

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calls “childhood” or “infancy,” a condition he attributes to the Corinthians. The four terms describe a more advanced earthly state of maturity (“mature,” “manhood”), communication (“face to face”) and awareness (“know as I am known”). Biblical usage of these words shows that none goes beyond the earthly condition of the church, not even “face to face” as stated (contrary to certain hymns). All four terms represent earthly adulthood in its fullness (cf Eph 4:8-16). Thirdly, the notion that miraculous gifts may be expected until Christ’s return, as advocated universally by charismatics of every stripe including charismatic premillennialists (for some time the majority view of the future among Pentecostals), reads too much into “that which is perfect” as a personal reference to the Second Coming of Christ or the end times (eschaton) generally. The neuter adjective and article could refer to the eschaton; but a personal reference to Christ is unlikely virtually impossible, especially considering the fact that when using a Greek adjective as a noun, gender was optional. In other words, when using an adjective as a noun, Paul could choose a neuter form which he does here. In addition, the idea that “the perfect” refers to Christ’s second coming ignores the stark Old Testament fact, reaffirmed in the New Testament (Heb 6:4-6), that the future messianic kingdom will be a time of the flourish of miracles, not their cessation. No version of premillennialism (most evangelical charismatics are premillennial) can be true to itself in advocating cessation of miracles as a feature of the future messianic kingdom. Jesus’ miracles as foretaste of the kingdom show this clearly. Of course, charismatics like Peter Wagner who identify kingdom with church are on more solid ground,408 although they cannot make this argument logically persuasive to any serious millenarian. Fourthly, the ways in which apostles thought about the churches’ earthly maturing problems are, in fact, quite well defined in the New Testament. To address the maturity issue, neither Paul nor any other apostle advocates more sign gifts among Christians in general, and certainly not more tongues-speaking. Not even 1 Corinthians 14:39b is such a text; rather it simply accommodates the Corinthians’ experience of the Spirit as it was happening in the first century. The same is true for “do not despise prophesying” in 1 Thessalonians 5:20. The apostles’ nurturing and maturing interests focus not on miracleseeking but on (1) doctrinal stabilization; (2) social release from pagan religious practices (idolatrous rituals and morality, 1 Cor 10); (3) disciplined organization of the church as a this-world community (elders, deacons); (4) spiritual, moral and ethical growth (chastity, work, sharing, love, faith, peace), and (5) growth toward stable unity. Corinth lacked seriously in all five. No Corinthian text interprets their charismata as signs of maturity, whether in doctrine, de-paganization, organization, morality, or unity. It is necessary now, to discuss the exegetical details of 1 Corinthians 13:8-10 which support this summary. To do so, it will be relevant to refer to the three (noted) scholarly treatments of this passage, along with one of their outstanding exegetical supporters. They assume: (1) “that which is perfect (Gr to teleion)” is an eschatological term which refers by common agreement to the Second Coming of Christ/the eschaton/the age to come, so that in their view the sign-gifts continue until the parousia; (2) The language about seeing “. . . face to face,” and “I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood” can only costals.

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P. Wagner’s Dominion! is a major popular statement of “kingdom now” thinking among Pente-

refer to heaven or to the age to come after the parousia. We shall examine contextually these assumptions below. Childhood and Adulthood. In the phrase, “that which is perfect (to teleion),”409 is to teleion an eschatological term? Grudem, Ruthven and Deere do not examine the Pauline use of the term teleion, despite its importance to their view.410 The term does not refer in any Pauline usage to the parousia. Ruthven assumes that by citing the related term telos (“end”) in 1 Corinthians 1:8, he has gained the required linkage with the eschaton and parousia.411 But Paul writes teleion not telos in 1 Corinthians 13:10. In Paul, teleion means “full, mature” in contrast to napios, “infant”, “immature” (Since napios implies possible teleion, its uses are part of the following summary.). Greek telos rather means “completion, end, purpose,” and has a quite different usage pattern than teleion.412 In all uses of the napios-teleion contrast, Paul refers to an attainable condition of the churches to be reached by apostolic instruction (Col 1:28) in preparation for, but not at, or by parousia or eschaton. Including the uses in 1 Corinthians, teleion is: (1) a condition he wishes the Corinthains were in (1 Cor 3:1-2, napios without teleion formally written); (2) a condition he assumes they could be in if not blocked by carnality (1 Cor 3:1-2); (3) a condition the lack of which requires him to withhold teaching from them (1 Cor 3:1-2); (4) a condition he exhorts them to attain now (1 Cor 14:20), which (5) some believers of his time—probably including himself (as Phil 3:15a implies)—have already attained, and (6) a condition which he expects the church at large to have gained through apostolic work before the parousia, i.e. without the powers of Christ to be manifested uniquely at that event, but with the powers of Christ already at work in the church (Eph 4:13; Col 4:12). More precisely, (7) it is the opposite of childishness and immaturity (napios)—a contrast sustained in each of its three occurrences in 1 Corinthians (2:6; 13:10; 14:20) where (14:20) he can substitute the synonym paidion (child), or supplement with the verb napiazo (be immature, be infantile). In one case only (Col 1:28) does Paul allude to the parousia in connection with teleion, and in that one case (8) he refers directly and explicitly in the next verse (Col 1:29) to the fact that teleion is to be achieved by the vigor of apostolic teaching efforts, so that believers may be in this condition already when they are presented to Christ. “Perfect” does not 409 Several cessationist books and articles outline possible views and attempt to evaluate the arguments, as well as cite the relevant literature: R. Gaffin, Perspectives on Pentecost (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979); F. D. Farnell, “Is the Gift of Prophecy for Today?” BS 149 (1992):117-303, 387-410; 150 (1993): 6288, 171-202, argues that prophecy ceased at the end of the apostolic age; M. J. Houghton, “A Reexamination of 1 Corinthians 13:8-10,” BS 153 (1996): 344-356, argues for cessation with the end of the New Testament era of revelation. 410 Grudem, Gift of Prophecy, pp. 230-243, instead of dealing with the usage of teleios, puts the weight on the terms “in part” and “when”. Ruthven, Cessation of the Charismata, pp. 140-142, also fails to come to grips with this crux word by equating it in passing but erroneously with telos. Supposing it is sufficient to note the contrast of teleion with “in part,” he cites church fathers of the second century who were embroiled in Montanist claims. Montanists thought their gifts marked the conclusion of prophecy, against which the fathers affirm its continuation until the Second Coming. Ruthven invokes Fee’s thought that katargeo is an eschatological term, and appeals to the contextual “know as we are known” and “face to face” as certainly supporting a reference in teleios to the parousia. Deere, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit, pp. 140-141, only reviews opinions about “perfection” here. 411 Ruthven, Cessation of the Charismata, p. 140. 412 BAGD, pp. 816-820.

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refer to the parousia, but to a mature condition of believers before the parousia and toward which he writes and labors to bring the Corinthian church as he writes. The childhood-adulthood motif is sustained throughout the whole of vss 9-12, in an integrated sequence of images.413 The fragmented, partial knowledge of childhood (napios) is represented by several terms in the text. “In part (ek merous)” refers to a part of something as distinct from its related larger whole: a political party, a party to a lawsuit or contract, or a division of an army; it is common in government contexts where it refers to sharing the burdens of office. In Philo and the LXX it refers to a fraction, a district, or a share of inheritance.414 Paul’s use has the meanings “somewhat, to some degree in some measure (2 Cor 2:5; Rom 15:15, 24),” “in this respect/case (2 Cor 9:3),” “in an orderly way,” meaning one at a time, “each in turn (1 Cor 14:27).” He sometimes uses merous with “I write (grapho)” meaning “I write in part” to put limits on the scope of a letter or its subject; sometimes it refers to part of a whole as in “Israel is blind in part” or “part of Israel is blind (Rom 11:25),” or to a local part of the body of Christ (1 Cor 12:27). All this evidence shows how ek meros refers in 1 Corinthians 13:9, 12 to the partial and limited knowledge of children or infants. The counterpoint of “prophesy in part (vs 9, merous)” and “know in part (vs 9),” twice stated, is not better prophecy or better knowledge, but its disappearance or cessation. In vs 12, full knowledge is the other end of “in part” as an extension of Paul’s series of infancyadulthood characterizations. “Now we see . . . then (vs 12).” When arti (now) occurs with blepo (see) the meaning is like that of John 9:19: “now he sees.” When one wants to say “from now on” then he writes apo arti plus an appropriate verb.415 The phrase apo arti (“from now on”) is used with lego (I say, as in John 13:19), with ginosko (I know as in John 14:7), with apothnesko (I die as in Rev 14:3), or with a future tense verb like horai (“from now on you shall see” as in Matt 26:64). These linguistic considerations discourage the sense “from now on we see . . .” as though Paul means from now until the parousia. He could have written this by using apo before arti plus the verb to indicate continuance of the specified charismata until the parousia; but he does not. This means he continues the now-then time factors of the infant-adult contrast through this thought. “We see . . .” Paul makes a rhetorical shift to the first person plural of the present tense in order to merge his own with the viewpoint of the Corinthians. It appears that he shifts now to prophecy; but he may be thinking of prophecy and tongues together in a fashion similar to tongues as a form of prophecy as in the thought of Acts 2. He means by “we”—you and I together: we (may) both prophesy. Certainly prophecy and tongues are about to occupy his thought in the ensuing exposition (ch 14), just as they were his chief focus in 13:1-2 to introduce the discussion of cessation and permanence. “Darkly (en ainigmati).” “Among both Greeks and Jews the essence of prophetic utterance is speaking with riddles in the sense of saying things which require clarification.”416

413 A. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), pp.10651067 speaks repeatedly of the childhood-maturity them in vs 11, but does not see it continuing in vs 12 as does the current study. Rather he thinks 13:12 returns to the future and thus to eschatology. Such an abrupt change in range of reference at 13:12 disrupts the force of the teleion-now interest of the text. 414 Summary from J. Schneider, “meros,” TDNT 4:594-598. 415 BAGD, p. 109. 416 R. Kittel, “ainigma,” TDNT 1:178.

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The reason Paul uses “enigmas” or riddles here is to express limitation within his larger metaphor field of childhood to maturity. Infants/tongues-speakers/prophets speak riddles, talk that needs to get clearer and will be clearer as maturity develops. After all, prophecy, though better than tongues, is itself among those gifts which mark immaturity and will pass away. There is a possible allusion to lesser prophets who see in enigmas (ainigmaton, pl) according to Numbers 12:8. Paul is thinking differently than Numbers 12:8, however, when he deals with now-then contrasts. Kittel notes: “en ainigmati blepein (to see darkly) is always used of the obscure seeing, hearing and speaking of lesser prophets, among whom Moses was not included.”417 Thus even prophecy has its gradations in clarity. “In a glass (esoptrou) . . .” The Greek word denotes a mirror of glass or brass. One of the three papyri samples of this word produced by Moulton and Milligan refers to a silver children’s mirror,418 —a usage which belongs to Paul’s larger immaturity-adulthood imagery.

Face to Face. The assumption that the language of seeing face to face and knowing as one is known refers to heaven or the age to come is ill-founded. Instead, these Pauline statements of verse twelve are simply extensions of the metaphor of childishness and adulthood found in verse eleven; in other words, the whole of verses 11-12 refer to the contrast of childhood and adulthood. Continuation of the metaphor through verse twelve is indicated by (1) the introduction of verse twelve with the explanatory continuative “for (gar).” And (2) continuation of the metaphor with the first person either singular or plural to indicate that he wishes to be understood as speaking generally for the church (cf. “our” in vs 9, “we” in verse 12, both interchanged with “I”). To say one will see face to face is to say children reach head-level communication with adults when they grow up. If Paul is conscious of Numbers 12:8, he avoids the MT/LXX “mouth to mouth” for Moses, and substitutes “face to face,” thereby steering away from any suggestion that they raise their prophesying to the level of Moses. Thus, avoiding a reference to Moses’ more perfect form of prophecy (mouth to mouth), Paul generalizes toward his own metaphor field of now-then growth from childhood to adulthood. The usage of “face to face” for direct communication between adult peers is normal rhetoric as shown by 2 and 3 John’s use of “face to face” in precisely this sense: “I hope to see you soon, and we will talk together face to face (3 Jn 14; cf 2 Jn 12).”

Know as we are known (vs 12b). To say one will know as he is known is to say he will achieve maturity as an adult that is not reached in childhood.

He is thinking of how adults know in direct peer communication in contrast to children who are known by adults, but do not yet have adult knowledge. Since “see” is not actually in the text at verse 12b, a better supply verb would be “speak” to merge the allusion to prophecy with the childhood metaphor and with the knowing language of 13:12c. The assumption that Paul is speaking eschatologically destroys his extensions of the metaphor and obstructs perception of his focus on the local conditions at Corinth which in turn represent a special case of the infant church at large. 417 418

Ibid., p. 180. Moulton and Milligan Vocabulary of the New Testament, p. 256.

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This reading of the language is simple, contextual and straight-forward. There is no indication of reference to Christ’s second coming, the eschaton, or the age to come. Cessation. The twice-used verb for “cease” (katargeo) in 13:8 is not evidence for an eschatological reference, as G. Fee claims.419 He thinks it is an eschatological term “used elsewhere in the letter to refer to the ‘passing away’ of what belongs merely to the present age.” But this reading misleads since most of Paul’s twenty-five uses are for things already being annulled by Christ’s present power over the age of Adam. The powers already being annulled with specified stoppage or decline include law in various senses (Rom 7:2, 6; 2 Cor 3:7, 11, 13, 14; Eph 2:15), human wisdom and its sophist peddlers (1 Cor 1:28), death (2 Tim 1:10), sin (Rom 6:6), and opposers (1 Cor 2:6). Paul even uses it of being “nullified” from Christ (Gal 5:4) by taking on the law which in turn “nullifies” the “scandal of the cross (Gal 5:11).” At times Paul speaks of what cannot, in God’s plan, be nullified: God’s loyalty to himself (Rom 3:3) or his promises (Gal 3:17; Rom 4:14), or the principle of law (Rom 3:31). Future eschatological uses are clear only in 1 Corinthians 15:24, 26 where Christ’s future reign will nullify opposing principalities and powers along with death, and in 2 Thessalonians 2:8 where Christ will nullify or bring to an end anti-Christ’s powers. Otherwise the remaining three uses in 1 Corinthians are to powers and forces already being nullified: revelation is nullifying the “things which are” (1:28); the rulers of this age are being nullified by the revelation of the mystery (2:6); and God will nullify both the belly and its meats—probably a reference to death (6:13). This review cites all Paul’s uses except for the four in 1 Corinthians 13. By speaking of katargeo as an “eschatological” term, Fee has suggested that its use here is for the future parousia or some related, clearly identifiable future event. But the usage pattern shows that if the term applies to eschatology at all, it is almost entirely to eschatology already in realization by the first advent. Most of Paul’s twenty-five uses refer to nullifications already achieved, in process, or possible in the present as Paul wrote: only three are for specific future eschatological events, and none of the three is general; the three future uses apply to works consequent upon the parousia within the framework of the basileia/kingdom.

Teleion as an attainable goal of the early church—of which Corinth was the most problematic case—was sought through apostolic instruction aiming at the five goals noted above. The sign gifts belonged to the infant church’s immaturity, and were expected to depart with the growth process pursued along the lines indicated. The surviving gifts of faith, hope and love clearly belong to the earthly life of the church. The triad does not pertain to heaven or the age to come; rather these three gifts summarize the spiritual dynamics of a maturing or mature church, and were everywhere assumed to be attainable as Christians assimilated and practiced apostolic teaching. The eschatological interpretation of 1 Corinthians 13:8-12 simply has no specific semantic or contextual support and should be abandoned, despite its popularity even among evangelical scholars otherwise opposing permanent charismata. All three lines of thought—signs as Israel’s historic gift, sign gifts to support apostolic powers and message, and sign gifts as local manifestations of an immature infant 419 Fee, First Epistle to the Corinthians, p. 643. I respectfully demur on Fee’s interpretation, though I regard him as one of the twentieth century’s truly great New Testament scholars.

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church—converge at the first-century/second-century horizon. This horizon is the end of apostolic age miracle-gifts: Israel falls and turns hostile; the gift of apostle ceases and is replaced only by that of bishops/elders whom the apostles appoint;420 the church attains maturity and stability along the five main lines of apostolic thought. The five criteria of maturity clearly visible in Paul’s letters can be summarized as stability of doctrine, serious de-paganization, organizational structure, moral-ethical maturity, and unity—all as continuous works of the Spirit through the apostolic ministry, if not in person, then through the books they left to the church. If these categories of maturing are valid, it does not mean the twists and nuances they took on in the process were ideal and completely free from error. But as such, they represent a rough sketch of the maturation envisioned in the epistles. Some dispensationalists believe they have a conclusive argument for end-of-firstcentury cessation of sign-gifts by identifying “that which is perfect” with the completed biblical canon: the Bible is “that which is (truly) perfect” as the “perfect” word of God. We do not need to deny that this may be an implication in detail of the envisioned maturity process. But the difficulty is that this interpretation of “perfect” rests on both an erroneous linguistic judgment about the meaning of teleion (wrongly understood as “perfect” in an absolute sense as though of physical objects or an inspired Bible) in Paul’s usage, and a dubious inference from this meaning about a reference to Scripture. The summary of the uses of teleion above shows no references to a completed canonical Scripture; it does show that in Paul’s use, the word denotes something human and personal, not the quality of non-personal objects. If this view—that “perfect” refers to completed Scripture—is to be maintained, it will have to find a more substantial exegetical pattern to overcome the repeated use of the word for contrasts between infancy or childhood and adulthood, especially in 1 Corinthians 13:8ff, but in several other contexts as well. Signs, Wonders, Miracles and Charisms in Paul Assuming the generally normative nature of the Pauline books for the church of the Gentile era, we undertake, finally, a close examination of the four words for miracle in Paul, including charisma. Certainly these terms should produce a clear affirmation of on-going miracle expectation in Paul—if, that is, he had such thoughts about miracles, and sought to establish them for the duration of the life of the church. The miracles triad—miracles, signs and wonders (dunameis, semeia and terata)—occurs in Paul in this order two times (Rom 15:19; 2 Thes 2:9). Paul does not use the shorter form—signs and wonders (cf Heb 2:4; Acts passim in either order). As noted above, Acts too uses this tri- or diad discretely for miracles as apostolic support. The concept is also found in Hebrews 2:4; (bearing witness sunepimarturountos) as well as the two Pauline passages discussed above (Rom 15:19; 2 Cor 12:12). Using the plural of one term tended to evoke another in plural when the forces of divine manifestation were thought of summarily. This tendency suggests an apostolic rhetorical habit. We shall canvass the first three terms in reverse order, and then examine charisma. Three instances of “wonders” (terata) in plural occur to summarize multiple miracles

420

O. Cullmann, Peter: Disciple-Apostle-Martyr, pp. 215-238.

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(Rom 15:19; 2 Cor 12:12; 2 Thes 2:9); the term refers only to apostolic miracles or satanic miracles. It is about the same with “signs” (semeia), but Paul’s uses increase to seven. Three times he uses it in plural with a plural of the other terms (Rom 15:19; 2 Cor 12:12; 2 Thes 2:9), and like terata, of both apostolic and satanic miracles, there is no reference to Christ’s miracles—likely a conicidence. A fourth plural use is for the Jews seeking signs (1 Cor 1:22) like the Greeks seek wisdom. The remaining three uses are singular referring respectively to circumcision as a sign to Abraham and his seed (Rom 4:11), to Paul’s own “signature” (2 Thes 3:17), and to tongues as a”sign” for unbelievers who happen into the Corinthian church. The latter reference is to the spiritual life of the church and to the Corinthian church in particular with its immature experience of charismata. With “miracles” (dunameis) Paul’s uses increase to forty-eight, thus furnishing more material with considerably larger theological significance, or at least more windows to his thought. Like semeia, dunamies is used for miracles which support the gift of apostle and the gospel together (Rom 15:19; 2 Cor 12:12; Eph 3:7 [“power”]), notably in apostolic world mission texts about the expanding church. And, like semeia, dunameis is used of miraculous gifts in the Corinthian church—four times in 1 Corinthians 12-14. Paul also uses dunameis twice of the powers of civil government to be subdued by Christ at his coming (1 Cor 15:24; cf Eph 1:21). Law too is a “power” in the world—an accomplice of sin and death overwhelming humanity with grinding defeat and alienation from God (1 Cor 15:56; 2 Cor 1:8). Dunameis, used for both external and internal spiritual forces, even negative and debilitating ones, adumbrates Paul’s turn of dunamis in a spiritual direction. Indeed, thirty-five of forty-eight uses turn dunamis away from public, demonstrative miracles, and toward the personal, morally renovating spiritual powers of the gospel—its converting force. The dunamis of God himself (Rom 1:16, 20) is manifest in Christ who is also the dunamis of God (1 Cor 1:18) in resurrection (Phil 3:10). From Christ, saving dunamis enters the world as the power of God to salvation to everyone who believes (Rom 1:1617; 1 Cor 2:4-5; 1 Thes 1:5), turning men from blinding idolatry and passion to God (1 Thes 1:5) through the gift of righteousness (Rom 1:16-17). With Christ and the gift of righteousness comes the Holy Spirit whose dunamis in the Christian stimulates hope, grace and peace—the believer’s inner impulses toward uplift (hope, Rom 15:13) and peacemaking relationships (peace, Rom 15:13; love, Eph 3:16-20). In this internal renewal the dunamis of Christ’s resurrection is beginning to be known already (Phil 3:10): the new life is already resurrection life-in-waiting for its climax. With this compelling force, believers know Christ’s dunamis of endurance and longsuffering in the normal struggles of life. Some struggles are intensified by conflict with the low life of the world around them, and some come from the world’s overt pressures against them (2 Thes 1:11; 2 Tim 1:7). Thus Paul can use dunamis for the church’s discipline of its own members’ moral life (1 Cor 4:19-20; 6:14) since its dunamis is the saving moral force of the kingdom already present in advance of its fullness, even in the church (Rom 14:17). Apostles report the personal strengthening of dunamis in passages of discouraging moments: “we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power is God’s and not ours (2 Cor 4:7: cf 6:7; 12:9).” In these allusions, Paul thinks of personal courage with its ethical supports (knowledge, purity, humility, truth, forbearance, kindness) which under the duress of life and death struggle, are always in danger of failure. That he remains alive, and in the 210

spiritual life and moral power of Christ’s will, is God’s dunamis at work in him. What is truly remarkable here is the clear tendency away from reference to external miracles; instead, we see the internalization of the power of God in the life-changing gospel of Christ, the spiritual force of this transformation in the struggles of human life, and the force of ethical change in the treatment of opponents and persecutors. Despite this dominant transformational-moral use of dunamis, however, Paul does use the word four times for charisma powers—all four of the Corinthian church (1 Cor 12:10, 28, 29; 14:11). In the first case (12:10), “workings of miracles” (energamata ton dunameon—both words plural) is found in a list between gifts of healings (charismata iamaton, both terms plural) and prophecy (singular). While there can be no doubt about reference to something superhuman or supernatural, the plurals cover multiple events thought of summarily.421 In the second and third uses (12:28-29), “miracles” (dunameis) is probably personified to mean “miracle workers” since it is fourth in two lists of leadership gifts: apostles, prophets, teachers, then dunameis—miracle workers or possibly “miracle events” or “miracle activities,” and thus “miracles.” The fourth use in 1 Corinthians 12-14 (14:11) refers to the “power of the voice” (dunamin tas phonas—both words singular). In fact, however, he is only speaking of the many sounds (voices) in the world; if one does not know the “power of the sound,” i.e., of any voice/sound, he is to the speaker as a barbarian, and the sound-maker himself is a barbarian to his hearer. This thought in turn is an expression of the non-rational, non-communicable in tongues, a point which Paul makes in the interest of reducing tongues and encouraging prophecy at Corinth. Thus, by “power of voice,” Paul appears to mean something like “meaning of the language (RSV).” This use of dunamis, therefore, does not denote miracles. Focusing on the three uses of chapter twelve for gifts in the church, it is, in all candor, hard to spot precisely what plural powers (dunameis) Paul has in mind, since the referent is ambiguous. When Paul writes “workings of dunameis” (12:10 only) he may refer to the effects of such dunameis as Fee suggests.422 The other two uses are in two final lists of gifts at the end of the chapter (12:28-29): apostles, prophets, teachers, miracles (12:28); and apostles, prophets, teachers, miracles (12:29). What does Paul mean by “miracles”? Frankly, we are against a wall of uncertainty. Perhaps it may at least be said that Christians regularly experience special events of God’s dunamis in their lives. From these they do ministry works which are forcefully constructive (“edifying”); and they equally regularly report or demonstrate such matters to congregations. But these occur among all modern Christians as well, charismatic and non-charismatic alike. Some Christians certainly speak 421 One may note the commentators. But they are not sure how to distinguish dunamis, especially in plural, from healing or prophecy (which the context does). Fee (First Corinthians, p. 594, thinks of “a broad range of supernatural events”; he is unwilling to be any more specific. Another tendency is to identify dunamis, singular or plural, with exorcisms (Weiss; Hering; cf A. Robertson and A. Plummer, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1911), p. 266, but also “such chastisements as were inflicted on Elymas the sorcerer or on Hymenaeus and Philetus.” Robertson refers to inflicting blindness and (perhaps) excommunication (?), or deliverance by pronouncement or expulsion into Satan’s domain (1 Cor 5:4-5, 13). Fee is certainly dealing with textual reality by hesitating to be more specific. He notes the plural here and in 1 Corinthians 12:28, but he does not clarify further. 422 Fee, First Corinthians, p. 87; Fee comments on the term “workings” (energamata) before dunameon.

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more frequently and perceptively than others of such special events. Paul may even have public demonstrative signs in mind as charismatics claim; but charismatics or commentators notwithstanding, we simply do not know what Paul means here by dunameis. For all we know, he is not thinking of anything other than special events of ethical empowerment in the sense of his majority uses of dunamis, or of regular ministry powers in the church. There is simply not enough here (1 Corinthians 12) of sufficient clarity and specificity to say more. Dunamis even in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 does not deliver modern charismatics’ promise. There is one more promising dunamis text: Galatians 3:5: “Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles (dunameis) among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?” Perhaps with Burton and others we must see in the plural dunameis with present participle a reference to Galatian miracles.423 The grammar of the text links the “he who supplies the Spirit” with “works miracles.” “Supplies the Spirit” plays out in “works miracles”.424 However, since Paul does develop an explanation of the powers of the Spirit in Galatians (5:22-23) in precisely the same direction as he develops dunamis in his large majority of uses, i.e., for the newly internalized spiritual, moral and ethical powers of Christ and the gospel, we may safely question whether dunamis here refers to anything but the new life of the church in its plurality of qualities, powers and persons. If, that is, we follow a synchronic exegetical procedure, Galatians itself—the synchronic source—furnishes only more material on the internalized spiritual and moral gifts of the saving Christ, but nothing of on-going demonstrative signs. We cannot conclude without attention to Paul’s use of the other term for miracles, i.e., charisma; it occurs sixteen times. In plural, charismata is the name for special ministering powers of the Spirit in individuals within the gathered church. In 1 Corinthians 12 (vss 4, 9, 28, 30) there are four uses of charismata for miraculous powers. Three of the four (vss 9, 28, 30) identify healings as the case in point (also plural); the plural may be for repeated instances or for healings of different sorts—physical, emotional, or social. Two uses in the letters to Timothy (1Tim 4:14; 2 Tim 1:6) also denote Timothy’s singular ministry gift, a gift which came to him with prophecies and laying-on of elders’ hands (1 Tim 4:14) including Paul’s (2 Tim 1:6). The best clue to the gift itself is Paul’s reference to “evangelist” (2 Tim 4:5; cf Eph 4:11); but Timothy also does regular pastoral preaching and teaching (1 Tim 4:13; 2 Tim 4:2). Perhaps we must think of a joint gift with dual functions of pastor-evangelist analogous to pastor-teacher (Eph 4:11). In-body ministry gifts are also detailed under plural charismata in Romans 12:6-8: prophecy, serving, teaching, encouraging, giving, leadership and mercy. The cases of Timothy and Romans 12:6-8 show Paul’s tendency to fill out the meaning of charisma with more socially normalized, permanent church ministries when the Corinthian situation is not in view or does not require accommodation. It is impossible to mistake this Pauline bent. Otherwise charisma 423 E. D. Burton, A Critical and Exegetical Commentatry on the Epistle to the Galatians (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1921), pp. 151-152. 424 Ibid. “. . . the latter (the moral fruit of the Spirit of chapter five) though not included in dunameis is not necessarily excluded from the thought expressed by epichoregon umin to pneuma (“he who supplies to you the Spirit”). One may say the dunameis is entailed more or less loosely in the notion of supplying the Spirit. Longenecker, Galatians (Dallas: Word, 1990), p. 105, also thinks the two participles refer to “related activities affecting the same person”; F. Bruce, Galatians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), p. 75: the two present participles “probably imply that this divine activity continues.”

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shows the same tendency as dunamis to internalized spiritual, moral and ethical powers. Charisms of the gospel are denoted in Romans 5:15-16; 6:23: righteousness and eternal life, and the irrevocable vocation of Israel (11:29). As with dunamis, other powers of spiritual life flow with salvation: the charisma of faith in both Paul and readers (Rom 1:11-12); the charismata of hope and life (2 Cor 1:11) in the midst of death threats; and the spiritually powerful qualities of faith, strength, love and moderation (1 Tim 1:7, charisma as followon of 1:6). This is also the import of 1 Corinthians 13:13 where faith, hope, and love are recommended to the Corinthians as the “greater gifts” of 12:31. Even here the “greatest” single gift is love, not tongues or even prophecy. The marital choices of Christians are also a “gift of God (charisma, 1 Cor 7:7).” So again in the case of charisma, Paul bends the meaning of his power words toward the internal gifts of the Spirit. Scattered uses of charisma refer to qualities parallel to the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23, or he thinks of more socially normalized—less signgifted—ministry powers of the church as in Romans 12:6-8. Thus, whether measured by dunamis or charisma, the pattern is the same. Specific “miraculous” charisms are limited to the Corinthian church which is no model (the persistence of prophecy outside Corinth is an exception), while the major terms for spiritual powers are rather turned to the new, spiritually imparted moral and social ministry powers of Christians. Paul’s direction is away from, not toward sign-gifts; the latter have apostolic support functions quite consistently in Paul’s thought, or they are peculiar to the Corinthian church—at least as far as the evidence of usage can take us. Prophecy is the one exception, however it is understood; but it is also subject to cessation along with tongues as 1 Corinthians 13:8 shows. Prophecy in the Early Church Recent studies of prophecy in the New Testament recognize a distinction between apostolic prophecy and church prophecy however these may be defined in detail. The former denotes the gifts of apostle and prophet mingling together in one person, or a group with these gifts, and correlates with itinerant mission activity. Persons with these gifts spoke words of divine revelation with divinely commissioned authority.425 Church prophecy refers to prophets without the added gift of apostle, and whose gifts functioned chiefly in a settled congregation with regular meetings; they, too, spoke words of divine revelation, but in support of or coordination with the authoritative teaching of apostle-prophets. Some prophets in the early church did move around (Agabus [Acts 11:28]; Silas and Judas [Acts 15:32]);426 but most such prophets worked within congregations. The prophets of interest here are those who ministered in a local church setting. Prophecy is the biblical gift of divine revelation. However, virtually all parties to the discussion about continuous sign gifts in the church wish to avoid both claim and appearance of adding new divine revelation to the biblical canon in today’s church. Very few if any evangelical charismatics would want to affirm the gift of apostle in the church today. But the gift of prophecy is affirmed, even if sharply limited or redefined. Wayne 425 D. DeWitt, “Paul’s Concept of Prophecy,” unpublished Master’s Thesis, Wheaton College, 1961. 426 Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), p. 212.

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Grudem, for example, advocates the permanent presence of prophecy in the church. He defines church prophecy as a non-authoritative gift, often coming with errors and mistakes in the prophet’s articulation; it is only revelation as “something God brings to mind” in a Christian setting. To support this concept biblically, he seeks New Testament texts on prophets and prophecy which might suggest the non-authoritative character of church prophecy. But can prophecy be thus rescued from cessation? Outside 1 Corinthians 12-14, prophecy in church life appears without other miraculous charismata in four Pauline texts, although it may be questioned whether these allusions are all to prophecy in congregational meetings. However that may be, these four texts establish a more widespread presence of prophecy in local churches. In Romans 12:6, prophecy is first in a list of church gifts with the qualifier, “. . . [let prophecy be] in proportion (analogia) to our faith.” But the objective meaning is more probably to be preferred—prophecy is to be measured by its likeness to the received faith. As favored by several commentators, the translation above reflects a subjective qualifier—according to the proportion of (the prophet’s) faith, or in the sense of reliance on God appropriate to the actual working of the prophetic Spirit.427 The other meaning of analogia is “similarity,” “likeness.” Coupled with the article before faith (“the faith”), the thought seems more like a warning against distortions by false prophets. Paul requires that their prophecies fit the faith—the body of teaching delivered by apostles as preaching (kerygma) and teaching (didache). This view is the more attractive428 considering that Romans was written not long after 1 Corinthians where Paul insisted that prophetic sayings are subject to examination by other prophets (1 Cor 14:32) and to his own teaching (14:3740). These texts on church prophecy are uniform in their concern for distinguishing false from true prophets and their prophecies.

Prophecy also appears in isolation in 1 Thessalonians 5:20—a straightforward command not to despise or suppress prophecies in their gatherings. This may be due to the positive function of prophecies of the sort, for example, that led Paul to Timothy and his gifts (1 Tim 1:18; 4:14). If the latter two Timothy texts refer to church prophecy, they complete the group of relevant texts. These four passages demonstrate that prophecy was more wide-spread in Pauline churches than the other sign-charisms of 1 Corinthians; but the quantity of material is slender on any reckoning. Still, it is clear that prophecy was once part of the life of at least three churches (Rome, Thessalonica and Ephesus). What did church prophets actually prophesy? The subject matter of extra-apostolic church prophecies cannot be fully identified, although several examples are preserved in the New Testament. They tend to show a kind of supplementary or supportive subject matter to the teaching or activity of apostles. At least 427 As Dunn, Romans, 2:728. 428 As Kasemann, Commentary on Romans, trans G. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), pp. 341-342, with characteristic insight and against the majority of critical commentators: “already possible abuses have arisen. Prophecy is obviously the most vulnerable, probably less through apocalyptic fantasy than through enthusiasm, which can disrupt order with its preaching of freedom as well as favoring ascetic tendencies . . . . [despite no fixed rule of doctrine] . . . liturgical . . . and catechetical instruction about conduct were present . . . the prophet is subject to testing in this light . . . the appropriateness of his message has to be demonstrated.”

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five kinds of subjects may serve as examples. (1) Non-apostolic prophets gave predictions of future, publicly verifiable historical events: Agabus predicts a famine during Claudius’ reign (Acts 11:28) and the dangers Paul faced in Jerusalem (Acts 21:10-11); they may also have delivered visions of the messianic future. (2) They issued warnings of danger: an unnamed group of disciples (Acts 21:4) and Agabus (Acts 21:11-12) warned Paul of dangers facing him in Jerusalem—similarly in a supportive, publicly testable prediction.429 (3) They identified gifted ministers: Paul was led to Timothy by multiple prophecies (plural; 1 Tim 1:18); this too would be testable by experience for its truth value. (4) They possessed special knowledge, for example, of evil lurking in certain human hearts with a revelation of its secrets; this is the case with the prophecies Paul discusses in the Corinthian assembly (1 Cor 14:24-25; cf Peter in Acts 5:3-5, 8-10). (5) Church prophets may utter Christological confessions—titles or pronouncements about Jesus. One case in point is a false prophecy that pronounced a curse on Jesus (1 Cor 12:3) which no one can utter by the Holy Spirit. On the contrary, only by the Spirit can one utter a true acknowledgement that Jesus is Lord. These examples show a pattern in which prophecies support apostolic activity and teaching by testable sequel events or apostolic instruction. The last text cited above raises the acute question of the true or false status of church prophecies, and by analogy, how advocates of church prophecies today think such utterances are to be judged. In defending the continuation or revival of church prophecy in the twentieth century church, Grudem argued that Pauline church prophecy texts show not so much a judgment of each prophecy as true or false, as a congregational discernment of true and false elements in each prophetic utterance.430 He believes this is the way modern church prophecies should be evaluated as well. He says: . . . we can conclude that 1 Corinthians 14:29 indicates that the whole congregation would listen and evaluate what was said by the prophet, forming opinions about it, and some would perhaps discuss it publicly. Each prophecy might have both true and false elements in it, and those would be sifted and evaluated for what they were.431

He further finds 1 Corinthians 14:30 to refer to non-divine or even erroneous prophecy—“If a revelation is made to another sitting by, let the first be silent.” The text, he thinks, describes an interrupted prophecy; and if such a prophecy really spoke God’s authoritative words, Paul would not try to silence it with these instructions. For Grudem, such prophets must have been “speaking merely human words to report something God had brought to mind.”432 He concludes that such prophecies were “intentionally neglected” 429 W. Grudem, The Gift of Prophecy, pp. 93-95, identifies this as a case of non-authoritative prophecy which Paul could disobey; he defends the continuing presence of such non-authoritative prophecy in the church. He can do this by interpreting the me epibaino—that Paul not go to Jerusalem—as an erroneous order. But this infinitive with me does not need to be taken so strictly. F. Bruce, The Book of Acts, Rev Ed (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), p. 398, for example, notes rather that they “warned him” and explains: “It should not be concluded that his determination to go on was disobedience to the guidance of the Spirit of God; it was under the constraint of that Spirit that he was bound for Jerusalem with such determination (19:21; 20:22).” 430 Grudem, The Gift of Prophecy, pp. 72-78 431 Ibid., p. 78 432 Ibid., p. 80

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because they were not God’s word or of divine authority. He does not consider that Paul’s direction may simply be that when another prophet received a revelation while the first prophet spoke, the speaking prophet should finish his prophecy and then stop so the prophet with a new revelation could speak. Nor does he note Paul’s final statement of principle that the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets (1 Cor 14:32)433—almost certainly a statement of principle for control of false prophecy. D. Farnell has thoroughly discussed Grudem’s developed theses. He finds them distorting the combined realities that (1) prophecy by function, power and biblical definition is always revelatory in both origin and articulation, and (2) the assumption of Paul in controlling Corinthian prophecy is simply the trueness or falseness of each prophet and his prophecies, i.e., the issue with church prophecy is the detection of false prophecy.434 Other criticisms of Grudem would be (3) his over-subtle exegetical maneuvers and (4) the difficulties of thinking the Corinthians would reduce confusion by debates about true and false elements in any specific prophecy. Could they really hope to reduce confusion by ongoing discussion of what was or was not useful, was or was not edifying, was “less good” or “more good,” or was found profitable by “carefully sorting and evaluating . . . and determining which (prophecies) are right and which are not.”435 To suppose or argue that the Spirit in church life was the source of what might, in congregational evaluation, turn out to be a string of misguided and erroneous prophecies, or prophecies fraught with some detailed errors, seems to sink congregational prophecy in confusion and abandon a biblical sense of what a “prophet” was about. It is, however, exactly the continuous revelational meaning of prophecy which characterizes its unity within the New Testament and the New Testament’s unity with the Old, and was the basis for the second century church’s gradual realization that true prophecy had ceased. That is, the church slowly realized it had to count as false prophecy everything but apostolic (true) prophecy since there was no other way to deal with the progressive, persistent deviancy of false prophecy. When Paul says prophecy will cease, he means that direct divine revelation will cease as the larger context of 1 Corinthians 13:1-12 shows, and as the Montanist attempt to revive prophecy in the second century also shows. The case for belief that congregational prophecies are really of the Holy Spirit but have incurred error in passing through their human recipients has not been made by Grudem. In the Bible, erroneous elements in prophecy mark it as false prophecy. The idea 433 Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity, p. 220, notes that while this interpretation has been questioned recently (including by Grudem), “it nevertheless remains thoroughly defensible.” This narrower concept, however, Aune thinks, should be enlarged to at least include the necessity for prophets in the assembly to “evaluate” prophecies for their “agreement with what Paul himself had previously taught (2 Thess 2:1-3; Gal 1:8-9), or with the generally accepted beliefs and customs of the Christian community (1 Cor 12: 1-3; p. 222).” 434 D. Farnell, “Is the Gift of Prophecy for Today?” BS 149 (1992):277-303, 387-410; 150 (1993): 62-88, 171-202. These studies find good reasons why there are not two gifts of prophecy in the New Testament, one revelatory and the other human, with very full citation of virtually all relevant literature. In an interesting parallel to Farnell, I found in my 1961 master’s thesis, “Paul’s Concept of Prophecy” (Wheaton College, IL), the same normative revelatory concept that Farnell argues; however, I did not at that time try to resolve the intricate web of problems raised by church prophecy at Corinth, though I recognized the problems. It ultimately took the rise of the non-revelational prophecy movement to jar this issue loose for widerranging discussion. 435 Grudem, The Gift of Prophecy, p. 76.

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that mixed true-false prophecy has a normal place in the life of the church seems more of a construct to defend special interests of charismatic experience than a viable exposition of the nature of biblical prophecy. This discussion will surely continue; and well it should since prophecy in the alleged lesser sense will continue to be sought in at least some charismatic circles. We conclude only that the case for two kinds of prophecy as defined by Grudem is not demonstrated, and the greater likelihood lies with only one genuine sense of prophecy—revelation in both thought and speech. And—it is precisely prophecy as authoritative divine revelation that will cease according to Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:8: “. . . as for prophecies, they will pass away.” Conclusion The nineteenth century Anglo-German New Apostolic Church sought without limit or qualification to renew the gifts of the early church including apostles and prophets in a full New Testament sense. Despite determined effort and godly sincerity, they failed to restore the divine-revelatory gifts of apostle-prophet that would have added to the church a body of new apostolic revelation of exactly the same authority as the New Testament; nor were they able to produce resuscitations or other nature miracles as both testaments require. Twentieth century American Pentecostalism also seems misguided on this point. It does not seem willing to face the difficulties of its own history, its own internal issues of consistency and wholeness, or its superficial handling of biblical support material. And it seems unwilling to confront biblical texts which undermine its views or support alternatives. It does appear to feel secure in its numbers, great public visibility, and popularity, and in its justifiable evangelistic and witnessing zeal. Numbers, visibility and popularity, however, are poor substitutes for serious engagement with the problems it has created with its own internal lack of coherence and its superficial biblical appeals. The Pauline use of terms for miracles drifts away from denoting sign gifts and toward internalized spiritual, moral and ethical powers arising from salvation. Paul’s pattern gives little encouragement to the claims of modern charismatics. His tendency is rather toward gifts of personal spiritual renewal or more socially potent ministry gifts, which are nevertheless gifts of the Holy Spirit for the church. Usage patterns of the four terms for sign gifts drift away from, not toward normalized miraculous gifts in the church. Of the possible miraculous gifts, only prophecy seems to persist outside the Corinthian situation, and its functions were limited and qualified by apostolic authority. We conclude there is no basis in Paul for a permanent and universal presence of all New Testament sign gifts in the era of the world church before the parousia. Such claims are more likely to come from complex and varied phenomena of social psychology. He rather tells the Corinthian church that prophecy will cease, not at the Second Coming, but when they become mature Christians—a distinctively local aspect of sign-gifts. In larger perspective, prophecy, tongues and other sign-gifts rather belonged to Israel’s kingdom in its initial manifestation and immediate availability through national repentance, and also served to support apostolic preaching and teaching authority in planting the gospel and the church in its crucial and dangerous start-up phase. 217

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ESSAY VI PREMILLENNIALISM, THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND THE INTERIM CHURCH Coming Kingdom and Present Church in the History of Redemption by Dale S. DeWitt Why This Subject is Important for Christians Christians are people of the future and of hope. The many biblical texts of Christ’s future victory over the powers of sin and evil, and the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit in the heart of every Christian stimulate our interest in the Lord’s future for us. To suppress this testimony by ignoring or explaining it away is to suppress a ministry of the Spirit. John 14:17, 25; 16:13-15 teach us that the Spirit’s witnesses in us to our future. This teaching work of the Spirit is as permanent in the church as the other works of the Spirit in John 14 and 16: counseling, guiding, illuminating. Hope belongs to the Christian’s life. Paul also states it in his famous triad—faith, hope and love. Augustine, Luther and others have stressed the triad as three internal spiritual powers which make Christians what they are. Several specific texts relate hope to the Second Coming and resurrection (Rom 8:18-25; Gal 5:5; 1 Thes 5:8; Rom 5:2 with Col 1:27; and Titus 2:13). Such texts mingle thoughts of hope with faith, patience and endurance. Life-in-waiting for Christ’s return is spiritually, morally, and ethically energized by anticipation. Paul explains this in at least three ways: (1) The Spirit’s works in us anticipate resurrection toward which they drive (Rom 8:9-11; 8:23-25; 1 Pet 4:7-11). (2) The future kingdom has already inserted its spiritual powers into the era of the church (Rom 14:17); in a sense the Spirit awakens our thoughts and emotions toward the future, while at the same time what we know of the powers and glories of the coming kingdom draw us toward its grandeur from the other end. (3) Our present and future accountability to Christ forms the always challenging “ought” of Christian life and service while we wait (Luke 19:11-27; Rom 14:10-12; 2 Cor 5:10; 1 Cor 3:11-15). In a larger sense, Christians cannot ignore Christ’s coming and kingdom because these events make up the end of the Bible’s salvation history into which we are drawn when receiving Christ and his word. Salvation history is the Bible’s sequence of ages or eras called “dispensations” in which salvation is 219

gradually revealed and operated with ever-greater reach—greater peace, greater perfection, greater righteousness and justice, all in increasing extent and depth. There are four such dispensations: promise (Adam to Moses); law (Moses to Paul); grace (Paul to Christ’s kingdom); and the kingdom (Christ’s Second Coming through eternity). The kingdom of Christ is the climax and goal of God’s plan for man in history. Augustine, though amillennialist, understood some of the most important aspects of the New Testament sense of a sequence of ages under God’s sovereignty. Thinking with the majority of the fathers of the first four centuries, he recognized that salvation history and history itself were sequenced in eras, were progressive in the sense of advancing with parallel divine providences and lineal rather than merely cyclical. These dynamics drive us to thought, prayer and watchfulness about our determined future. No people on earth has its future mapped out as does the people of God. Nor does any other than a millenarian view fully depend on the plan of a sovereign God to intervene directly in history for his people’s extended earthly future. The grand march of salvation history will happen because God in his sovereign grace will enact it. Christ’s coming to consummate God’s plan is held in the timing of God himself. For the present we have sufficient guidance from Scripture to know already, in outline at least, the events of our future on earth. Thus we live in faith that God will act, we manage our struggles in hope of his kingdom, and we love Christ’s appearing to complete his work. When Raymond Reich compiled a sketch of the history of the Grace Gospel Fellowship in 1974—only thirty years after the founding—he recognized from experience and theological reflection that our theology had a tap root in premillennialism. This perception was still sufficiently strong at that time to name one major part of his booklet “Our Premillennial Heritage.” In identifying our heritage this way, he recognized the larger framework of our founders’ dispensational theology as premillennialism.436 In discussing this tradition, Reich also recognized its currency among the fathers of the first four centuries and its renewal in the nineteenth century. He also noted some leaders of the new premillennialism in America during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: J. H. Brookes, J. M. Gray, W. Pettingill, A. T. Pierson and C. I. Scofield, to name only a few of the most important. From these American leaders of the new premillennialism, its dispensational form emerged in the twentieth century—the matrix of our early grace movement. That movement produced only one full-length scholarly work on premillennialism from participants in the founding of the Grace Gospel Fellowship, i.e., Harry Bultema’s

436 R. Reich, “Our Grace Heritage,” Truth 25 (July, 1974), p. 4. What Reich did not fully realize was that the nineteenth and twentieth century renewal of premillennialism had a development period reaching back into the Reformation and post-Reformation eras, beginning with the works of John Henry Alsted in Gernany and Joseph Mede in England. From these sources grew an appreciable body of literature with varying millenary views that itself grew toward the larger millenarian renewal of the latter two centuries. For this history see D. DeWitt and P. Long, A Bibliography of British and American Premillennialism and Related Works, from 1550 to 1960; also C. Gribben, Evangelical Millennialism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500-2000 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011). Gribben’s is the first actual history of millenary developments since the reformation; it is much too brief, however, to be the complete history of the renewing premillennialism needed for full understanding of this theology.

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Maranatha (1917).437 Bultema soon produced several commentaries on Old Testament prophetic books, the most detailed of which was his work on Isaiah (1919); Bultema’s Maranatha, originally in Dutch, finally became available in English in 1985. No further scholarly work on premillennialism was undertaken thereafter in our history. Perhaps a major reason for this lack was the fact that the larger American movement had produced several other such works even before Bultema and a few more notable volumes on the subject after Maranatha. Among the most important of the earlier millenarian works were G. N. H. Peters, The Theocratic Kingdom (1884) and J. H. Brookes, The Second Coming of Our Lord (1885). Following a lull in writing full monographs on the subject, Charles L. Feinberg produced Premillennialism or Amillennialism in 1936. These titles were probably enough, along with many popular short, tract-like books and booklets, to sustain and satisfy the new millenarian stream for the time being. The next scholarly synthesis had to wait until 1959 when A. J. McClain published The Greatness of the Kingdom. McClain, however did not produce a defense of premillennialism as such, but sought a coherent detailed description of the future kingdom posited by millenarians. No further major scholarly work on premillennialism has appeared since McClain, and there the matter stood in 2010. Nor, after a century of renewed millenarianism among American evangelicals, has a comprehensive bibliography of premillennial and related works since the reformation been attempted. Nor is any comprehensive history of the view is in sight of which the writer has knowledge. Such a bibliography is presently in draft form by the writer and his colleague, Philip J. Long. Otherwise an important historical study with extensive bibliography was produced by Crawford Gribben in 2011 under the title, Evangelical Millenialism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500-2000. In the meantime we may proceed with a sketch of two important representative millenarians of the second half of the twentieth century. Two Important Twentieth-Century Millenarians Not long after the nineteenth century became the twentieth, Harry Bultema published his book Maranatha. In it he adopted most of the standard concepts of premillennialism as they had developed since the time of J. H. Alsted about 1620, and down to Bultema’s time. What was unusual but not unique was his detailed exposition of the biblical texts about the two resurrections. Once Maranatha was finally translated into English in 1985 from Bultema’s original Dutch edition of 1917, the book was noted by at least one fellow millenarian reviewer as one of the more remarkable discussions of the significance of the First Resurrection and how it differed from the Second Resurrection.438 Bultema’s discussion of the First Resurrection occupies six brief chapters in about fifty pages or about onesixth of his exposition of the central millenarian concepts. Another striking feature of the book is the last section occupying another roughly sixty-five pages in which he, like other millenarians, traces the history of millenarian theology. This would not be unusual except that he devotes the last twenty-five pages to nineteenth century Dutch millenarians before 437 H. Bultema, Maranatha: A Study of Unfulfilled Prophecy, trans C. Lambregtse (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 1985. 438 J. Walvoord, review of Maranatha in BS 144 (no. 573):111.

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him—a rather stunning array of thinkers in the Netherlands—stunning because American evangelicals perceive Dutch theology as uniformlyt Reformed and non-millenarian. In this respect, Bultema does a service to the history of millenarian exposition by enriching the resources for its history, and that from an ethnic branch of European-immigrant Reformed theology otherwise thought lacking in or uniformly opposing premillennialism. A few Dutch thinkers’ names and titles mentioned by Bultema are included in D. DeWitt and P. Long’s larger bibliography of millenarianism since the Reformation. We would like to have included more.439 That having been said in tribute, the important point is Bultema’s insights into the centrality and details of the differences between the First and Second Resurrection. A millenarian of considerable stature during the second half of the twentieth century was Presbyterian J. O. Buswell.440 Buswell’s is an equally careful treatment of the first resurrection and millennium. He too invests considerable labor on the sequence of resurrections, especially as found in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28. Both Bultema and Buswell correlate the First Resurrection with the ensuing millennial kingdom by critically working out the exegesis of key texts and the logic of their implications. It seems wise to follow their thoughtful guidance in making any further investment in exegesis of the crucial New Testament texts on resurrections. We shall summarize the relevant materials from the Old Testament in due course after examining those from the New. A millenarian conclusion seems required from a realistic assessment of the texts on both the resurrections and the kingdom. The discussion below follows Bultema with some reworking of the order and a few variant details of exegesis. My admiration of and debt to Bultema and Buswell is not simply because they were explicit millenarians. Rather it lies in their careful attention to detail and their interest in re-formulation of the exegetical support for our mutual view. My hope is that the following discussion will add some exegetical detail to their consideration of the biblical data. First Resurrection, Parousia and Kingdom in the New Testament Two groups to be resurrected in the future are found in the New Testament, but more is said about those who participate in one than about the participants in the other. The emphasis is upon the just (righteous) as the only participants in the First Resurrection. Other 439 Unfortunately, Bultema did not give full bibliographic information about the many Dutch millenarians he names; in fact in some cases he listed only names with sketchy titles or no titles at all. This deficiency makes it very difficult to proceed with bibliographic information on Dutch millenarians, since Bultema was one of only a very few outlets of information in America and the English speaking world at large on Dutch expositors of the two resurrections and millennium. His discussion of Dutch millenarians is far more prolific than his treatment of German, French or British expositors. It is not at all clear that this is due to a real difference in quantity between the Netherlands and the rest of Europe and Britain, or just because Bultema was more interested in millenarian thought in his own homeland. There is certainly room to suspect that the former is the actual reason, but any conclusion will have to wait for research in European millenarianism to catch up with knowledge of Dutch writers and especially with the recent massive studies of British millenarianism. 440 O. J. Buswell, A Systematic Theology of the Christian Religion (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1962), Pt 4, Chs 3-4).

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texts place the resurrection of the just in a sequence of events to follow the resurrection of the righteous. Texts on the Resurrection of the Just New Testament texts outside Revelation 20:4-6 distinguish two groups to be resurrected—the just (righteous) and the unjust (unrighteous). The resurrection of the two groups is not separated in time in these texts. The texts are quoted below and commented as seems appropriate.

John 5:28-29. (Jesus) Do not marvel at this; for the hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come forth, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.

Acts 24:15. (Paul) . . . there will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust.

These thoughts follow a similar distinction in Daniel 12:2. (Michael to Daniel) Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

Further, and also without any time indicators, several texts in the New Testament isolate the resurrection of the just/righteous without mention of the resurrection of the unjust.



Luke 14:13-14. (Jesus) “But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just. John 6:39-54. (Jesus) “For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him should have eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day (v 40) . . . No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day (v 44) . . . he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day (v 54).” Each of these cases belongs to the theme of thepassage—eternal life and resurrection—and participation in both by relationship with Jesus. These are not cases of general resurrection either, but examples of the “resurrection of the just,” who are identified as attached to Jesus with resulting eternal life. Romans 8:11. (Paul) “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit which dwells in you.” This is not a general resurrection either; nor does it speak of the resurrection of the unjust/unbelieving. Attachment to Jesus gains resurrection, but resurrection is also possible because believers possess the Spirit of God. This too is only “the resurrection of the just.” Philippians 3:11. (Paul) “. . . that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” Since Paul is a believer, the resurrection he refers to must be the resurrection of the just.441

441 So J. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians (London: Macmillen & Company, 1913), p. 151. As Lightfoot says, this meaning is required by the context.

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That he seems to express some doubt about attaining it needs explanation. The unusual expression eksanastasis (out-resurrection) instead of anastasis (resurrection) may be best explained as emphasizing removal from (among) the earth’s corpses. His doubt is really only apparent. He means “since in some manner I should attain to the resurrection of the dead.” The ei (since) suggests certainty that he will; the pos (somehow) is where the doubt lies—“in some manner,” by which he probably means he is unsure of whether it will be in death or while still living.442 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17. (Paul) “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.” The reference to “in Christ” and the outcome—“we shall always be with the Lord,”—shows that this too is the resurrection of the just.

Details throughout these texts refer to or imply only the resurrection of the just/ righteous rather than a general resurrection of all humanity. They do not refer to the resurrection of the unjust/unrighteous. Neither do they contain further clues to a sequence in which this resurrection clearly comes before the resurrection of the unjust; nor do they have clues to a messianic kingdom of Christ on earth to follow the resurrection of the just, let alone a period of 1,000 years occupying the space between the resurrection of each group. Texts which Sequence the Resurrection of the Just in Detail Three major texts place the resurrection of the righteous/the just/the people of God in a sequence with other end-time (eschatological) events. Romans 8:18-25. This resurrection passage in the midst of an exposition of the works of the Spirit in believers has scenes of a future “glory” (8:17, 18, 21). It speaks of a new kind of existence beyond the struggles of the present earthly life, but still within “creation.” There is no reference to heaven here; the thought is earthy, anchored to creation and moving only within that sphere. Furthermore, reference is made to resurrection near the end of the thought (but not using that exact term), and the passage sees the glorification of the “sons of God” as the opening to a new world promised as an inheritance to believers (cf Rom 4:13-17). Thus the resurrection of the righteous occurs before and as the doorway to a new world (not heaven). The passage reads, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subject to futility, not of 442 I do not follow Bultema, Maranatha, pp. 125-126 here. His discussion is unnecessarily involved. He is correct, however, in insisting that this reference to resurrection cannot be to a general resurrection alleged by Augustinians and almost all Reformed exegetes. On the point of uncertainty, see G. Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p. 336

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its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” The persons of the text are called “us” and “we” throughout. They are distinguished from “creation” generally, but very clearly in the last two verses of the preceding segment (8:16-17). “Us” and “we” are also interchanged with “sons of God,” “children of God” and “heirs” (see 8:16-17, 19, 21, 23). The glory is depicted as a future divinely wrought apocalyptic-like event. In fact both the noun and verb of the apocalyp- word group are used of it in 8:18-19 (“revealed”). Verse 18 speaks of “. . . the glory that is to be revealed to us” and 8:19 of a revealing of the sons of God. Verse 18 uses “glory” as a follow-on to “glorified with him” in a future sense (8:17). Verse 21 adds, “creation itself will obtain . . . the glorious liberty of the children of God.” Both creation and the redeemed within it are thus included. This translation is adequate, but “glorious” in the Greek text actually reads more exactly “liberty of the glory (some form of doxa throughout the verses cited) of the children of God.” What is this “glory” and how will it become visible? It is said to come upon or to God’s people (8:19 eis humas), and to be a revelation of them (8:19). We are probably to think of a stunning, visible display of powers and qualities coming both upon them and out of them in resurrection bodies as the context suggests. Further, since it is said to be a more or less sudden attainment of freedom (“freedom of the glory/glorious freedom of the children of God,” 8:22), we may think of a visible appearance of powers and qualities now kept invisible in the natural bodies of creation (8:19, 21-22)—fully present but mostly latent now, barely present in creation as a whole (as traces of God’s image), but ready to burst forth into spectacular public view in our resurrection bodies. This event is thus the future glorification of the sons of God by arousing in them or conferring upon them (or both) a new level of freedom at the redemption of their bodies in resurrection. Perhaps we should think, for example, of justice, freedom and love—powers of struggle among the race, elevated already to new consciousness and somewhat to action in Christians now, but awaiting their full bloom and implementation in resurrection. The passage does not leave us guessing about the identity of the event. It is our future “adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies (8:23).” Virtually all commentators recognize this statement as the future resurrection of believers in Christ, identified as such in 8:16-17 just prior to 8:18-25.443 Thus while “resurrection” is not explicitly used, it can justly be inferred from the suffering-then-glory pattern of 8:17-18 along with an analogy like Luke 24:26: “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” In this statement Christ’s “glory” is his resurrection. Commentators also correctly cite 1 Corinthians 15:43 of the body (Gr. soma here [vs 44] as in Rom 8:23): “It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory.” 443 From the nineteenth century Alford, Godet and an English translation of Bengal were used; from the early twentieth century Sanday and Headlam, and C. Gore, and from the later twentieth century, John Murray and J. D. G. Dunn.. Barrett does not say one way or another, while Kasemann alone denies a reference to resurrection with this strange evaluation: “The idea of . . . the resurrection of the flesh is non-Pauline (E. Kasemann, Romans, trans G. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980).” He suggests, alternatively, that “Redemption takes place ultimately when the earthly body is put off, but it also involves the conferring of a new corporality (p. 237).”

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The problem from which believers are delivered is the same as that of creation generally. All creation, he says, is in “eager longing (apokaradokia)” for the revelation of God’s sons; it waits to “welcome (apodexomai)” them. Further terms in 8:19-22 tell us that this “eager longing” is out of a dismal condition: vanity (things fall apart, fail of expectations and hopes, vs 20); slavery to dissolution (or corruption, phthora, vs 21, where reference is to decay and death, and sinfulness, so that both slavery and decay bespeak the situation); and groaning and painful laboring—all images of human groaning and sighing, and a woman in labor pains. These images describe vanity and frustration, i.e., that hopes and ideals are persistently dashed and spoiled, and life is full of collapsed expectations in which the whole earth is constantly disappointed. It seems excessively narrow to limit this groaning of creation in pain to the vegetable and geological world, or to the animal world, even though by a certain arbitrary logic, restriction to these parts of creation is sometimes suggested. Commentators say it can’t be believers; it can’t be the human world in general because . . . , etc.444 That creation includes humanity seems required by the descriptive terms above, and especially by the fact that believers, too, sigh and groan (“even we,” “even we ourselves within ourselves [vs 23];” “groan” is stenazo, meaning “groan,” “sigh,” “complain”) despite their possession of the Spirit. He does not seem to mean that believers are in an entirely different class of persons wholly outside creation; rather, that even though we have what will become the antidote—and already somewhat is!—even we, like the rest of creation, are not yet relieved of slavery to corruption and decay, and mourning and labor.

Hence, Paul looks for a glorious freeing from frustrating creation life in a future resurrection of believers, a future point marking a shift from the present world to its relief, when the glory dawns at the resurrection of believers. That is to say, for the purpose of this study, the resurrection is that of believers followed by a new condition for creation—the next stage of the new world. But he does not say the whole world is resurrected as yet. The emphasis is on believers, the “we also” and “even we ourselves who have the first fruit of the Spirit,” who also groan while looking for “the redemption of our body (8:23).” How did creation get into this state of groaning frustration? Paul answers this briefly in 8:20: “for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it . . . .” Opinions of the personal reference in “him who subjected it” include Adam, God and Satan. Some commentators cite Genesis 3:17 which is appropriate. However, while God himself pronounced a judgment according to Genesis 3:17— “cursed is the ground because of you”—it appears that Adam is the effective cause; Genesis 3:16 is probably in view. The allusion may also include Isaiah 24:1-6, perhaps viewed by Paul as a prophetic text complementing the Genesis source.445 Romans 8:18-25 is not a full premillenarian text as it says nothing about an earthly reign of saints after the parousia, though it could imply such a reign.446 But it does envision a resurrection of believers as the doorway to a new world where the struggle of creation is 444 F. Godet, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, trans A. Cusin (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1883), pp. 313-314, falls into this logic of categories, as does J. Murray, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959), 1:303-304. Kasemann, op. cit., p. 233, seems correct in appealing to 8:22: all creation without differentiation. 445 Using a second Old Testament text to supplement or complement a first or primary scriptural text was a common practice in synagogue exposition in the late Second Temple Era; see E. Ellis, Prophecy and Hermeneutic (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1978), pp. 154-162. 446 See Kasemann, Romans, p. 233. And yet it contains analogous concepts to parts of this biblical reality.

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relieved. Generally we may say it is like other texts which view the Second Coming and/ or resurrection of believers as the opening to a full messianic era. This connection of the piece is encouraged by 8:17: being children of God, we are heirs, heirs of God and fellowheirs of Christ; and after suffering with him now we shall be glorified with him. The glory motif is continued in 8:18-25 as we have seen. The inheritance thought of 8:17 fits with Paul’s series of “inherit the kingdom” texts as well as with Jesus’ similar saying on the righteous inheriting the earth. 1 Corinthians 15:22-28. The passage is crucial for determining further elements in any Pauline or other New Testament sequence of resurrections and who is included in them. It is also more significant than Romans 8:18-25 because it adds pictures of the kingdom of Christ between what appear to be two resurrections, or at least the kingdom of Christ after the first resurectionnon-millenarians criticisms or doubts notwithstanding. 1 Corinthians 15:22-24. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power.

The subject of this passage and its context is resurrection. Paul is thinking of multiple resurrection events: Christ first, then those who are his at his coming (parousia)—this much at least. In addition, two uses of “then” announce a series: Christ . . . then (epeita) . . . then (eita) . . . . Thus resurrections beyond Christ’s occur by group—each in his own group (tagma order, group, division). Christ seems to be thought of as the first group (tagma); but being an individual person, to all appearances he is not a group; instead he is called the “first fruit.” While translating “then comes the end (telos)” for the last event does not sound like a group either, some commentators think the sequence compels a second group resurrection under the two terms tagma (group, division, troop, unit) and telos (end, final one), i.e., a final group resurrection. This construction yields two resurrected groups. Since the New Testament nowhere abandons the two-group resurrection—that of the just and that of the unjust—it appears Paul is thinking of these two groups of resurrected persons as sequels to Christ’s resurrection with an interval between the two. The two groups would then be (1) those who are his at his parousia and (2) the rest of humanity at the “end,” or more precisely the final group, i.e., the unjust of the first two texts above and Daniel 12:12. Thus, to telos (“the end”) would require that “resurrection group” be supplied to clarify the sense-flow. This is also the schema of Revelation 20:4-6 and 11-15 in sequence. This way of reading the verse is disputed, so the contrary views shall have to be discussed, and more detailed reasons cited for adopting the view above—the usual millenarian view—in exegetical detail. Substantially, the contrary views are the following. (1) Among those commentators who deny two resurrected groups and embrace one general resurrection of both groups more or less simultaneously, telos (end) is understood to mean “the end,” not “the final (resurrection).” There is some lexical basis for this insistence, but it does not appear decisive. (2) Among those commentators who do think a sequence of group resurrections is meant, there are variations on how to understand Paul’s meaning of “the end.” In its 227

ensuing lines (15:25-28), the passage repeatedly pictures the kingdom of Christ as filling the time before finalization of the redemptive plan. This is the case whether one thinks the kingdom fills the space between the resurrection of Christ and “the end,” or only the space between the parousia and “the end,” i.e., between the second and third group-resurrection events (both of which these commentators accept). There are, we believe, good reasons for placing the beginning of “the kingdom” after the parousia, and not after Christ’s personal resurrection which would seem to equate it with the church; how one makes the case will appear as the discussion progresses. The alternative exegesis (one general resurrection) was perhaps argued most forcefully in the twentieth century by Geerhardus Vos in The Pauline Eschatology (1930). His discussion articulates a twentieth-century Reformed, non-millennial view. If this take on Vos is overstated, then it is still true that his is at least one of the important recent Reformed discussions. We shall interact with him as a major representative of the alternative view. Some of the two-group resurrection interactions will be registered in comments on Vos’ construction; their views of how to interpret “the end” will be considered in a further development below. Vos’ basic issue is that when Paul writes “in Christ shall all be made alive,” he cannot mean “all” absolutely, even though “all” in Adam is absolutely “all.” That is, he thinks that “Wherever ‘in Christ,’ occurs in Paul it is always meant in the full sense of a soteric in-being in Christ,”447 as he puts it. This statement of Vos is one of those biblical linguistic arguments in which using “always” to secure a biblical language argument is misleading. Because of the point, Vos thinks Paul cannot be referring to a resurrection of the whole race—those both inside and outside of Christ—the resurrection of both the just and the unjust. But the dangerous “always” opens a door to complications. If Vos had said “usually” he would have been on solid ground, but at the same time would have spoiled his argument by admitting exceptions. There are, however, exceptions. In at least two passages, “in Christ” means something like “in connection with Christ,’ or even “by means of Christ.”448 Philippians 2:10 and Ephesians 1:9-10 illustrate variations on “in Christ.” Philippians 2:10-11 contains a universal perspective. Paul uses a modified en Christo formula for the universal confession of his lordship: “. . . at the name of Jesus (more exactly ‘in [relation to/connection with] the name of Jesus’) every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” This is either universal salvation (which is usually rightly denied by orthodox exegetes), or, as John Murray correctly argued in an important article, it entails a forced confession by the opposition.449 In either case the confession occurs “in connection with” Christ, i.e., with his 447 G. Vos, The Pauline Eschatology (Princeton: Princeton University, 1930; Reprint: Phillipsburg NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1994), p. 238. 448 For this meaning see R. C. H. Lenski, The Intepretation of St. Paul’s Epistles to the Galatians, to the Ephesians and to the Philippians (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1961), pp. 435-36. 449 J. Murray, “The Reconciliation,” WTJ 29 (1966):1-23. Murray noted that the connection of Ephesians 3:10’s statement about the church’s witness to the principalities and powers is one form of the subjection of all things to Christ. These powers, he thought, are among the “all things” of which Christ has become head. This does not mean they receive the reconciliation in the same way believers do; nonetheless, they too are brought under the power of the gospel through the universality of the church’s witness, even if their confession of Christ must finally be coerced out of stubborn resistance. The latter point is crucial to the texts under discussion.

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sovereignty, not “in saving union” with Christ, since the confession is necessarily compelled from opposing unbelievers;450 this way of understanding the thought is parallel to subjecting his enemies in 1 Corinthians 15:24-27. An even closer parallel is Ephesians 1:9-10: “. . . according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth (ESV).” In the Greek Bible Paul adds at the end a redundant “in him” to emphasize this universal headship of all things as “in Christ.” But it is clear from Philippians 2:10-ll and 1 Corinthians 15:24-28 that part of what happens “in (connection with) Christ” is not redemptive; rather one aspect of Christ’s headship of all is coerced subjection of enemies to his authority—a compelled submission as (again) in 1 Corinthians 15:24-27a.

One can see from these examples that too rigid a technical salvation meaning for all uses of en Christo and related, parallel or modified constructions should make one wary of a generalization like Vos’. “In Christ” may be understood more flexibly as “in relation to” or “in connection with.” Hence, the wording “just as in connection with Adam all die” and “so in connection with Christ shall all be made alive”—or even “by means of”—seems a suitable understanding of Paul’s sense. This is all the more encouraged by the fact that “in Adam all” and “in Christ all” was written in parallel to a simple agency construction to begin with (vs 21): “. . . by (dia) a man came death . . . by (dia) a man . . . also . . . resurrection . . . .” This shows that Paul was already thinking agency when he wrote “in Christ” immediately afterward. Hence the meaning is that Christ is the agent in connection with whom the whole race is raised from the dead, even though resurrection of the whole occurs in two groups—the just and the unjust—as in the texts discussed above (Dan 12:2, John 5:28-29 and Acts 24:15).451 Understood in light of these related texts, the second inferred tagma-as-unit refers to the second resurrection (that of the unjust), so named because the first resurrection group, the just, was already called “those who belong to Christ (15:23).” Later, in Revelation 20:6, the resurrection of the first group is actually called “the first resurrection” to distinguish it from the implied second resurrection—that of the unjust or unbelieving. This view of a second inclusive reference to the whole human race expressed as “in Christ shall all be made alive,” is far from unjustified, unless, of course, one is wary of inferring “universal reconciliation” from this interpretation. Such an inference, however, is not called for, and the inclusion of a reference to the resurrection of the unjust/unsaved is entirely suitable when one realizes that Paul is painting in broad strokes a picture of the resurrection of the whole of humanity—the point the Corinthian church denied: “in Adam . . . in Christ.” One cannot be too concerned with the implications of this exegesis of the Adam-Christ parallel as a matter of historical theology, since one form or another of it was that of Chrysostom in the fourth century, Calvin in the sixteenth century, and H. A. W. Meyer in

450 Two more examples can be seen in Eph 1:10-12. 451 Conzelmann, A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, trans J. Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), pp. 268-269, cautions against loading too heavy a Jewish set of Adam conceptions into the text: “. . . this notion of ‘corporate solidarity’ does not suffice to explain the Adam-Christ typology,” a notion related to Vos’ treatment of “in Christ” here. Nor does Gordon Fee seem interested in “corporate solidarity and representative headship” notions for this text, even though it is clear that such ideas may be present in the Adam-Christ thought of Romans 5:12-21.

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the nineteenth century.452 Thus, Vos’ argument is unnecessarily restrictive and far from decisive, considering the varied linguistic representations and texts on Christ’s connection with the judgment of the wicked, and even when some form of “in Christ” is used. Vos seeks to counter the two-resurrection view of tagma (“order” RSV; “turn” NIV; “order” ESV) by raising further issues. (1) It is impossible, he says, to exclude Christ from the range covered by ekastos (each [in his own tagma order]), and that, in this connection, “each (ekastos)” includes “Christ the firstfruits.” He makes this point because some people who believe the passage includes two resurrections think ekastos does not include Christ because it refers to groups—“each in his own group/unit.” (2) He adopts a speculative argument to the effect that Paul only uses “first fruits” because he wants to counter a supposed Corinthian argument that the resurrection of believers should take place immediately after their death, just as Christ’s did. To meet this suspected Corinthian argument, Paul, Vos thinks, used “first fruits” (aparche) to picture Christ as the source of the entire process, and therefore his resurrection had to occur without delay, while the resurrection of others will be postponed until the Second Coming. Vos appears to mean by this claim that the metaphor “first fruits” suggests a delay of the rest of the harvest, i.e., for those who are Christ’s, until the parousia. (3) He thinks Paul does not seem to attach any military meaning to tagma; rather Paul means no more than “order, sequence of events.”453 To the enumerated points above it may be remarked as follows. On (1), it does seem quite clear that ekastos (each) includes Christ; but in context, ekastos would also have to include Christ as a tagma in himself. If tagma does in fact retain its usual military meaning of troop, group or unit here, then it seems at first out of place to include Christ within it, since Christ is not a group—as Vos says, “Christ cannot form a tagma by Himself.”454 Most commentators, however, seem to think tagma does have the military meaning here— “group, troop, division, unit” or the like—and does by inclusion refer to Christ as well as the following resurrections. How, then, might tagma be understood as referring to Christ? Paul apparently thought that as a tagma, Christ was the first representative and first real case of resurrection, or, as Vos suggests (without agreeing), that as tagma Christ possessed in himself the multiple powers of a tagma (military unit), and in God’s time would extend those powers to the other “units” similarly to how a “firstfruit” extends itself (so to say) by representing and including the whole harvest. Thus a kind of corporate “realistic representation” thought may be included in the language.455 Or, more suitably to the immediate context, just as Adam was the whole race itself (so to say) and the original representative of the whole, so Christ in himself and his powers was the the first sample

452 Godet, Commentary on the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, 2 vols, trans A. Cusin (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1957), 2;354. 453 Vos, ibid., p. 242-243. 454 Ibid., p. 242. 455 Despite some recent cautions, P. R. Shedd’s positive treatment of the notions of “corporate solidarity” and “realistic representation” seems sound in describing how Adam—old race, and Christ—new race are thought of in Scripture. See his Man in Community (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), especially pp. 93125.

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of the whole of resurrection (hence aparche, firstfruit).456 One recent study interested in event-sequence here thus notes that tagma (unit, group) and aparche (firstftuit) are not really mutually exclusive.457 In this way, ekastos, aparche, tagma, and christos are to be viewed as coordinated descriptors of the first appearance of resurrection in Christ as the the first part representing the whole (hence, again, aparche firstfruit). On (2), it is unnecessary to resort to a speculative reconstruction of some supposed detail Paul is countering against the Corinthians when there is good reason from the language and concepts of the context for his quick shift to “first fruit.” Vos simply states the alleged Corinthian immediateresurrection theory without any evidence from 1 Corinthians or any citation of support from scholarship. That “first fruit” suggested a delay is probably the case, but this suggestion is overly subtle as a special point against some supposed Corinthian belief or argument about resurrection immediately at death, especially when Paul says nothing about it. On (3), the term tagma also explicitly designates a group in the phrase, “those (plural for group) who belong to Christ.” So the evidence of the context favors a group reference in plural to unit resurrection against Vos’ reduced “sequence of occurrence” meaning (“. . . the only point of comparison is that of order”). Rather, sequence is also included in a larger, more filled-out sense, i.e., Paul does think in terms of one unit at a time in a sequence of three “units,” i.e., Christ first, then at least one (and probably two) future group resurrection(s), all of which are cut from one cloth—resurrection as the divine plan for humanity as a whole contained in principle or inclusively in Christ the “firstfruit.” Finally, on (3), Vos discusses the two-resurrection view’s understanding of “the end” (to telos). He stresses its “absolute” meaning, i.e., it denotes the absolute end of the divine works of salvation—the absolute “goal to which the entire process of redemption has been moving,” or, “the close of the great eschatological finale . . . .” About this way to read it, one may note that telos does indicate something final and concluding. Vos cannot include in “the end” a final resurrection, however, since he appears to think resurrection has to be specified to read “the end (to telos)” as a second group resurrection event. In answer to this one-resurrection view we remark as follows. The events of “the end” in the immediate context include: (a) turning over the kingdom to God; (b) victory over all other governments of the world, especially Christ’s “enemies” who are “destroyed” (15:24-26 with terms like “enemies” and “destroy” ; and (c) the final victory over death (15:23-26). That is, “the end” includes the subjection (v 27) of Christ’s enemies—all of them; they are the persons and powers making up “the end.” But since “the end” includes a final victory over death as well (15:25-26), there is yet a further suggestion of a final resurrection answering to what is elsewhere in the New Testament (as above) called the resurrection of the unjust. And since all those “destroyed” or “nullified” are enemies, those resurrected in the final victory over death must be opponents, i.e., the “unjust”; hence a

456 In the nineteenth century, Alford seems to favor Christ as a tagma in himself (Greek Testament 2:577; in the twentieth century, Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians, p. 270, n. 64 seems to favor this view on the basis of a quasi-parallel in 1 Clement 41:1, while Thiselton, 1 Corinthians, p. 1229, does not, and Fee, 1 Corinthians, p. 753, n. 38, agreeing that tagma is to be understood as a military term, seems to by-pass the text’s apparent application of tagma applied to Christ personally. 457 E. Hiebert, “Evidence from 1 Corinthians 15,” in The Coming Millennial Kingdom, ed D. K. Campbell and J. L. Townsend (Grand Rapids, Kregel, 1997), p. 229.

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second group resurrection is necessarily included in “the end.” With this observation, the positive considerations in support of two-resurrections in 15:23-24a can be detailed to gain the sense for telos as ”the last/final resurrection group.” There is full agreement that the subject of the passage is resurrection. Many commentators stress correctly that Paul is chiefly concerned to affirm the resurrection of the just as against the Corinthian denial of resurrection; but this main interest does not mean he cannot mention the resurrection of the unjust, even if vaguely at first (“the end”), and then in more detail shortly (the enemies of 15:24-28). The two heads—Adam and Christ—are operatives respectively of all death (Adam) and all resurrection (Christ). Notwithstanding the dispute over the sense in which Christ raises all, the inclusive language that all men will be raised through or in connection with him seems required. Furthermore, it is widely recognized that “order” or “group” (tagma) is after all a military term denoting a unit in an army—“division” “regiment,” “unit.” Viewed narrowly, Christ is not a military unit; but Paul clarifies the uniqueness of Christ’s own singular resurrection by shifting the description to “first fruit” for Christ from “group (tagma)” for the succeeding resurrections, but not necessarily denying outright that Christ is a tagma in his own right as noted above. “Firstfruit” is singular and views the small first sample of animal or harvest unitarily, hence the singular for Christ, even though it is often translated as though plural (“firstfruits.”). After Christ as firstfruit, Paul resumes with the group military metaphor in a more literal way (tagma) after the first adverb of sequence (epeita): then, after that, at his coming, those who belong to Christ. The second adverb of sequence (eita) and its clause follow: “then (eita) comes the end (telos).” Since he is explaining the resurrection of all by Christ, “the end” (to telos) must refer to the resurrection of the unjust or unbelieving, which is then coordinated with other related events: subjection of all principalities and powers, victory over all his enemies including death, and delivery of the kingdom to the Father. That he speaks of death as among the enemies conquered thus implies a further resurrection—that of the “enemies” or “unjust” and “death.” What is the connection of “the end” (telos) with “unit” (tagma), i.e., the final group? Since telos is general and has several meanings,458 varied attempts have been made to clarify it, especially by supplying words that try to make Paul’s meaning clear. (a) Early in the history of Protestant interpretation, J. A. Bengel, following Theodoret in the early Christian centuries, and later H. A. W. Meyer among major critical commentators, thought to supply “resurrection” to make “the end” mean “the final resurrection.”459 (b) Alford, though not favorable to supplying “resurrection,” does think eita just before to telos denotes “then,” “next in succession,” even, he says, “introducing the third group (tagma).”460 This seems tantamount to supplying, not necessarily “resurrection,” but a repeated tagma which would yield telos tagma (“final/last unit/group”) from the context. The linguistic difficulty is that this gives telos an adjectival function, of which the lexicons lack examples. But on almost any reading other than Vos’ “the [absolute] end,” it is a virtual necessity to supply some noun that would require an adjectival sense for telos. Thus adding “group” to give the sense seems necessary and suitable to the context as already noted. (c) In a rather bold move, H. Lietzmann proposed supplying three forms of the Greek word meaning “make alive 458 Anyone may sample this remarkable variety of meanings and nuances in all of Greek literature in Liddell and Scott’s Lexicon, s.v. telos. 459 Cited by Alford, Greek Testament, 2:578; but he is not favorable to “last resurrection.” 460 Ibid. Alford thinks, later followed by Godet, that to telos may retain its general (his italics) sense, “when all shall be accomplished, the bringing in and fullness of the Kingdom by the subjugation of the last enemy, the whole course of the mediatorial work of Christ . . . .”

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(zoopoieo),” so as to make the text read, “Christ the first fruit [was made alive], then those who are his at the parousia [will be made alive], then the end [ones shall be made alive].461 This frankly seems a bit overbold. But ironically, while there is no serious possibility of actually reading the phrases this way straight on, the suggestion is actually quite close to Paul’s meaning since he is clearly discussing resurrections in series: Christ first . . . then . . . then. (d) More importantly, telos (end) has many meanings as one can see from the lexicons. BAGD show this well enough. Liddell-Scott-Jones (LSJ) include a number of variant meanings in which the authors (of LSJ) are compelled to add a descriptive word to to telos to make clear what “end” is referred to in various uses. TDNT has a few cases of this handling of to telos as well.462 Some of Delling’s (TDNT) examples from the New Testament are to telos in James 5:11 meaning the “final end”; Hebrews 6:8 requiring “final fate”; and Romans 6:21 needing, “final destiny.” Liddell-Scott-Jones give these examples among others: “end (of life),” “end (of a word),” “end (of a sentence),” “chief good.” These examples supply a term in translation inferred from contexts; all are translations of telos supplemented by a qualifier from the context. These examples of to telos make clear how I Corinthians 15:24 is a guide to its meaning in this location: “final resurrection” or more exactly “final group,” is the sense from context, meaning “final [resurrection] group.”

1 Corinthians 15:22-28 goes on to scenes of events between the parousia and the telos with thoughts relating the kingdom to the resurrections. How is the kingdom thought of in this text? It is not explicitly clear in the passage whether the kingdom extends from Christ’s resurrection through the first resurrection to “the end,” or if it fills only the time between the first and second resurrections. However, the context does seem implicitly clear in providing clues in its conquest thoughts (15:24-27)463 that point to Christ’s conquering work between the two group (tagma) resurrections—between his coming and the final resurrection associated with the completion of the kingdom and its delivery to the father. Christ achieves two conquests in which enemies are overcome before he delivers the completed kingdom to the father: defeat of all rule, authority, and power (15:24-25), and defeat of the last enemy, death (25-26). Since these conquests appear to be at least partly over earthly, human opposition governments (rule, authority and power), they are not likely to be simply spiritual conquests of the hearts of sinful human beings. And, since Paul assumes the church will normally live under governments of the world (Rom 13:1-8) and gives no orders to Christians to organize armies to subjugate them as governments, it appears that these conquests are not expected to occur between Christ’s first fruit resurrection and the first group resurrection, but between the first resurrection and “the end,” i.e., the final resurrection. Thus, although certain proof is not available, 15:24-28 appears to mean that basileia fills the space between ha parousia and to telos, not the space between Christ’s own resurrection and “the end.” The clues are (a) there is no kingdom thought until Paul reaches parousia in his thought-chain, and (b) the two “when” or “whenever” clauses in 461 H. Lietzmann, An die Korinther, rev ed. by W. Kummel (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1949), cited by H. Conzelmann, First Corinthians, p. 271, n. 73. 462 G. Delling, “telos,” etc., TDNT 8:55. 463 In addition to Culver’s article cited in note 426 above, three further recent articles have advanced the two-resurrections-with-kingdom-between discussion on the passage: W. Wallis, “The Use of Psalms 8 and 110 in 1 Corinthians 15:25-27 and in Hebrews 1 and 2,” JETS 15 (Winter, 1972):20-28; ibid, “The Problem of an Intermediate Kingdom in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28; E. Hiebert, “Evidence from 1 Corinthians 15 (n. 416 above).

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parallel appear to be the climax or end-point in the conquest. Hence, the kingdom fills the space between the two unit/group resurrections. Thus the Second Coming and the related resurrection of “those who are his” occur prior to the kingdom, i.e., are “premillennial.”

There is no kingdom thought until Paul reaches the term parousia. When he does reach parousia, he immediately begins using the basileia vocabulary to explain how the plan of God gets to its end; the explanation is—by the conquests of the kingdom after the parousia. If he had intended the thought that basileia fills the space between the “first fruit” resurrection of Christ and the parousia, he certainly could have inserted basileia events at that point in the text right after aparche and before parousia. He also could have made a more direct equation of the ha parousia and to telos. Instead, he draws the resurrection sequence out further by the epeita . . . eita sequence. Or, to put it differently and in a formula,basileia presupposes parousia, and culminates in to telos. The two “when/whenever” (hotan, vs 24) clauses represent a completion of the kingdom’s conquering activities explained in the following verse. The aorist subjunctive is used only because the thought required a grammatical form to express an undefined lapse in time. The kingdom is said to be prepared for its delivery to God at the time of the end (telos), suggesting that even though aorist tense verbs are appropriately used for a climactic event, the reign of Christ is the supposition for delivering the kingdom to God. This shows that the reign (basilein) was thought to precede to telos; it also shows that “kingdom” is to be a conquering process (basilein, present tense, vs 25a) leading to its delivery to God at its end as the explanatory clause of 15:25 indicates. The second appearance of “when/whenever” (hotan) also uses an aorist subjunctive for a completed event at an indefinite time. But this hotan clause rather refers to events during the reign—the conquest of all rule, authority and power. Although the climactic verb to designate the triumphant conclusion (katargeo/put down, nullify) is aorist, it obviously envisions a conquest process or sequence of events involved in “destroying (katargeo) every rule and every authority and power.” The kind of activity specified by the verb and its direct objects shows, as Hiebert says, that “the destruction of Christ’s enemies is prior to the event of the first hotan clause, when the delivery of the kingdom occurs at the telos. In other words, delivery of the kingdom to God follows the subjugation when the work of the reign is completed.464 It is tempting, with Conzelmann, to simply identify “every rule (archan), and every authority (exsousn) and power (dunamin) as demons or satanic powers.465 This identification is given incentive if one opts for only one general resurrection. Seen this way, the activity of subduing the powers is spiritual and easily seen as being completed by the church during the present age. Surprisingly, Conzelmann does not really mention the other option, i.e., that the governing-power terms can and more likely do designate or at least include actual entities of human government (as 1 Cor 2:6, 8; Rom 13:1-8; 1Tim 2:2; Titus 3:1).466

464 Hiebert, “Evidence from 1 Corinthians 15,” p. 230. 465 Conzelmann, First Corinthians, 271-272; Conzelmann agrees with most of the Reformed and Lutheran tradition, including Godet, First Corinthians, 2:360. Godet speaks of the terms for the powers as “almost technical.” But this is surely an overstatement. 466 So correctly Hiebert, “Evidence from 1 Corinthians 15,” p. 231; B. Witherington, Conflict and Community in Corinth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 304-305, thinks correctly that Paul is countering a royal eschatology here, and that the rulers and authorities are human rulers. This is partly due to the current tendency of many interpreters to see Paul’s theology as theocratic-like in suggesting that Christianity is a counter-culture to the Roman imperial cult and empire.

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The terms used for human powers of earth are, it is true, is sometimes used elsewhere for demonic rule of the cosmos; hence this larger sense cannot be excluded in principle. But the terms also refer to earthly human powers in the texts just cited. Hiebert too notes that earthly rulers cannot be excluded. That Paul can move from satanic to human powers with the same terms indicates wholeness in his thought, and suggests that the satanic and the human are related. Some texts seem to include a mixture of both satanic and human elements (Col 1:16; 2:15). 1 Corinthians 15:24 seems clearly to be a text of warfare and conquest on earth, even if the earthly government powers are driven by demons or satan of which there is here no indication, although various scenes in Revelation see satanic influence on humans. The text is about battles with earthly human forces (governments) as their resurrection at “the end” and the conquest of death indicate; hence the remarks above about the church lacking any commission to such actual warfare against human governments. On the contrary, the church is ordered to obey them. This picture is reason to see the kingdom Paul has in mind as ensuing upon the parousia rather than in the activity of the current church between the first two resurrections (Christ’s and that of his own) and as the conquest of earthly opposing goverments. Verse 25 follows with its “necessary” rule of Christ. The necessity lies in the divine subjecting of all things to the Messiah of which Psalms 8 and 110 are the promise and therefore the “necessity.” Finally, the verb “reign” (basileuein) in present tense suggesting continuous rule, reinforces the conquest scene of vs 24 and depicts it as a process of conquest over earth’s governing powers. We need not look in detail at the technicalities of Paul’s use of subjection psalms in vss 27-28. The use of “all” (panta) six times in 15:27-28 parallels its two singular adjectival uses in vss 24 and 25. These uses are broad. Paul’s repeated term “all” vouches for inclusion of every kind of ruler in the conquest scene of vs 24 notwithstanding the probable reference to human rulers as the main focus.

Reformulated, then, we may say that in the passage, the kingdom is correlated with two other major future realities, the coming and the consequent subjection. In the passge there is no subjection without the kingdom, and there is no kingdom without the coming. Thereby, the passge agrees with the remainder of the New Testament that the Second Coming precedes the Kingdom, and thus is “premillennial.” Revelation 20. When the overall sequential movement of events in Revelation 19-

20 is coordinated with the texts discussed above, the picture is substantially the same as in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28.467 In 19:11ff Christ comes from heaven to earth (the parousia). Conquest and confinement of the devil follows (20:1-3); then comes the millennial passage in which the Christ’s people reign with him a thousand years in resurrected bodies. After the thousand years the devil is released, leads a final war against Christ and his people, and is defeated and deposed (20:7-10). Then unbelieving humanity is raised for judgment

467 In offering the following account of both the idea of a general sequence and the apparent specific sequence of events in Revelation 19-20, I am quite aware that it by-passes R. F. White’s recent version of the amillennial “recapitulation” view of the relation of 19:11-21 to 20:7-10, i.e., that the latter portion is the same event as the former, which it repeats (“recapitulates”). For reasons outlined in the Appendix to this essay, his arguments for recapitulation do not seem to me compelling. On G. Beale’s recapitulation arguments on Revelation 19:11-21 and 20:7-10, see also the discussion in the Appendix.

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and sent to its place in the “second death.”468 It is granted that there is recapitulation and extension, obscurity and symbolism, and breaks and gaps between and within the scenes that make up this sequence;469 but in the main it is hard to avoid the gradual progression of events as sketched, especially if one notes where resurrection occurs or does not occur in the series. For the purpose of this essay, only certain crucial exegetical details need to be commented.470

There is virtually no disagreement that the climax of Revelation’s repeated projections forward toward the coming and reign of Messiah reach a climax in 19:11-21. The earthly reign of Christ is mentioned within the Coming scene at 19:15, and while the verse describes it more harshly than other such scenes or texts of his reign, his rule is the intended prospect. The first acts of his Coming seem to be regional or local judgments against opposing kings, commanders, mighty men, their horses, and their servants both great and small. So the scene does not preclude earth-wide survivors since even “the nations” survive this event (20:3). The war is only, but massively, between Christ and his armies and the armies of “the beast” and those nations, armies and support people (“servants”) who have joined the fight. It is thus an earthly scene, as also shows in the descent of an assisting angel (20:1) whose function is to open the “bottomless pit” to receive the devil to be bound there for a thousand years (20:2-3); the perspective is from the earth’s surface. Another part of the earthly scene is the appearance of the “nations (20:3)” who continue to live in some earthly normalcy for the next thousand years. There might be some hesitation about the earthiness of the scene were it not for the fact that Revelation 5:10 too says explicitly that the reign of the redeemed is their rule on earth. This in turn comports with the crucial passage on resurrections at 20:4-6: the saints reign with Christ a thousand years. The details of crucial significance for resurrection(s) are the following. (1) The post-parousia scene opens with people (“they”) seated on thrones to whom judgment (krima) is given.471 Who are the “they/them” of these lines? It cannot be the enemies of 468 This sketch is based on the events in their sequence and uniqueness in Revelation 19-20, and not on the (however related) sequence of visions (“And I saw” repeatedly). There is some relation between the sequence of visions and the sequence of events, but the relation is not a one-to-one connection, or, if it is, it is yet to be established and should not be taken for granted. The sequence-vision issue is partly discussed by D. Matthewson, “A Re-examination of the Millennium in Rev 20-1-6: Consummation and Recapitulation,” JETS 44 (2001):237-251. 469 Ibid. “Recapitulation” is the recent favored term for the repetitions of Revelation 19-20 in relation to discussion of parousia, resurrections, millennium, and other related events. Matthewson cites the literature of the recent discussion on these two chapters. 470 An important debate has been slowly making its way forward since 1989 on the issue of the extent of “recapitulation” in the scenes of Revelation 19-20, and in turn, the recapitulation in those chapters of Ezekiel 38-39’s eschatological war scene. The discussion originated with an article by R. Fowler White, “Reexamining the Evidence for Recapitulation in Rev 20:1-10,” WTJ 51 (1989):319-344. This article was only the beginning of the discussion, however. In the Appendix at the end of this essay, the literature of the discussion is reviewed with comments. 471 Greek krima denotes judicial decisions, and so quite often the outcome is a “condemnation.” It has the added connotation of “decision, decree, sentence” which is a judge’s function. It is also a major function of kings and rulers, and sometimes is a general term for ruling as in the Old Testament book of Judges. In Revelation 20:4 it is associated with “thrones” as a function of those who sit on them, so the ruling element in the word is obvious. The same is true for the judgment of those raised after the thousand years. Cf. F. Buchsel, “krima,” TDNT 3:942.

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the preceding context who would be so rewarded. A contextual connection is gained if “they” refers back to the armies who accompany Christ from heaven to earth for the great battle (19:14). However, they do not fight, are not dressed, and do not function as warriors, which suggests they are the saints who are promised the kingdom and who reign over the earth in 5:10. They may be martyrs as many commentators prefer, but they are accounted for in 20:4. 1 Corinthians 6:2 and Revelation 2:26-27 are also clear that the saints will rule the world.472 If so, they are not yet in their resurrection bodies in chapter 19, but perhaps in some otherwise identifiable form, perhaps an intermediate, temporary heavenly body (2 Cor 5:1-5). (2) A second group then appears, preceded by “and” (kai for a distinguishable next entity or event); they are the martyrs of the “great tribulation.” (3) All these, perceptibly the people of Christ, are then said to “come to life.” That this is not a spiritual awakening but a bodily resurrection is shown by the fact that those raised had been slain as martyrs in the preceding tribulation (20:4); this does not preclude inclusion of the saints of the first clause of 20:4. They all rise from death to reign with Christ since they are all his own. For our purpose, it is sufficient to note the sequence: parousia—resurrection—reign, just as in the more likely sequence and meaning of 1 Corinthians 15:22-28. (4) A second “came to life” occurs, which is limited to the “rest of the dead.” This too is to be a resurrection as is shown by the fact that those “raised” too had been actually, physically dead. The latter event occurs after the thousand year reign of Christ and his people. Indications in 20:11-15 suggest that these are the unbelieving/unjust dead at their final judgment (20:14-15). These portions of Revelation 20 thus yield two resurrections, the first of the redeemed who reign with Christ for a thousand years, the second of those who go to their final death called “the second death” in Revelation 20:14. In this fashion, the scene yields a sequence of events analogous to that of I Corinthians 15:23-24. If the summary above is a fair representation of sequential progressions from event

to event in the Revelation 19-20, it seems clear that the Coming precedes and issues in the reign of Christ with his whole people on earth. It is also clear that there are two resurrections here, one before the millennial kingdom and one after it. It is equally clear from the analogy of the first “came to life” to the second “came to life,” that the unbelieving dead do not reign with him, and that they rather are judged in the second resurrection and its “second death.” The fact that Revelation 20:5 calls the resurrection of Christ’s people “the first resurrection” implies that there is a second resurrection while the rest of chapter 20 unfolds that event as the resurrection of the unbelieving/unjust. Further Sequencing Texts A final series of texts clearly places the Second Coming of Christ (parousia) in a sequence with the kingdom of God or kingdom Heaven following. This sequencing is significant because the three above and those below relate the parousia to the resurrection of the righteous and correlate the sequence with the kingdom to follow. Having found in Romans 8:18-25, 1 Corinthians 15:22-28 and Revelation 20:4-6 cross-interpreting texts containing the basic event-sequence of the messianic future, further 472 G. Ladd, A Commentary on the Revelation of John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), pp. 263264, adopts this two-group view, although may other commentators limit the description to martyrs only.

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clarity may be gained by noting another group of passages which include both Christ’s coming and kingdom but without mention of resurrection. These texts do not deliver less than those already discussed in terms of clarity; but neither do they deliver as detailed a picture as 1 Corinthians 15 and Revelation 19-20. They quite simply delineate parousia and ensuing kingdom in that order; this is the basic sequence on which millenarian belief rests in its most elementary form. Instead of quoting the passages directly, it seems satisfactory to characterize them and add a few brief comments (italics mine). Matthew 25:31-34. “When he comes in his glory, he will sit on his throne and the nations will be gathered before him.” This text is, like those above, an earthly scene, not a heavenly one. The King comes, sits on his earthly throne, the kingdom as the reward of the righteous is before him, and the nations are under his earthly rule as a result of his return to earth. Luke 19:11-2. King and kingdom are together in relation to the delayed future: when the king returns, it will be with the kingdom. Having returned with his kingdom, he rewards his servants with responsibilities of co-rule, as in Revelation 5:10; 20:4-6. Luke 21:25-32. The parable gives another picture of the parousia; in this sequel, the kingdom comes just as in the preceding scene the Son of Man comes. The “near” of both vss 28 and 31 shows the relation of the two realities—Christ and kingdom together. Matthew 19:28. Here the kingdom is called “the renewal of all things,” which is coordinated with Christ ascending his throne and ruling over the future Israel. 2 Timothy 4:1. Christ’s appearing and kingdom are spoken of together, and can reasonably be seen as forming a sequence, although no particles or adverbs of sequence are used. However, if Paul had intended that the kingdom be understood as prior to the coming as in postmillennialism, he could as well have written “Christ’s kingdom and coming.” The passage does not have independent conceptual value for the sequence—coming then kingdom. But it does suitably fit the sequence in the other texts.

From these exegetical considerations and the scenes of the texts cited, it is reasonable to conclude that the parousia of Christ, with its accompanying resurrection of the saints, launches the main future basileia stage of the divine plan. On any reckoning, this reading of the resurrection passage in 1 Corinthinians 15:22-28 seems more realistic than the traditional Augustinian readings by major Reformation stream exegetes—chiefly Reformed and Lutheran. This perspective gains further encouragement from the way the parousia, resurrections and kingdom are structured in Revelation 19-20. It cannot be a merely arbitrary and uncritical merging of scattered biblical texts that we are discussing, therefore, but a simple exercise in correlating analogous texts and their event-sequences to let them complement each other for meaning and sense.473 It seems unnecessary to discuss the point any further, because the matter has been reviewed literally hundreds of times by hundreds of scholars and students of prophecy. Our review suggests

473 So, for example, C. C. Rowland, NIB, 12:703: “The closest parallel in the New Testament to Rev 19:11-21 is the short eschatological account in 1 Corinthians,” for which he goes on to cite 1 Corinthians 15:20-24.

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there are credible exegetical reasons for the eschatology that understands the future as consisting of a resurrection of the just at the parousia, then a Great Tribulation, then the reign of Christ and his saints on earth, and finally a second resurrection consequent on the final defeat of the devil and other earthly-human enemies of Christ. The Larger Picture of The Kingdom in Scripture

We now turn from exegetical details of the several crucial New Testament kingdommillennium passages to studies of a more general nature on the kingdom in both the Old Testament and the New. We first look summarily at the Old Testament’s description of the coming kingdom of God, and then examine its appearance in the mission of Jesus and the epistles of Paul. So far this essay has assumed that the kingdom under consideration and finally enacted in the later scenes of Revelation is the yet-future kingdom long promised to the people of God, including a finally redeemed and restored Israel. Thus the next step in this discussion is to determine some ways in which it is thought of in the Old Testament promises. Descriptions of its remarkable features—all rooted in its nature as God’s kingdom—have been written by millenarians. Some of these more scholarly and detailed works have achieved notably coherent descriptions of the future kingdom, despite certain limitations which are rightly subject to criticism. Others are more simple and general, and lack critical assessments. Most of the latter are popular in purpose. Both types of works should be read. The more scholarly are appropriate after beginning with the more basic popular introductory studies.474 Assessing the kingdom’s presence in the gospels will require some modest exegetical comments, but for the most part this discussion will attempt to sustain the thesis that the kingdom of the New Testament is the same as that promised in the Old Testament. But there is one major proviso, i.e., recognition that in Jesus’ mission the kingdom was really manifested in a preliminary form including one of its major provisions, i.e., its salvation, which was actually established and made operational. Otherwise, its political, social, geographical and other characteristics remain to be fulfilled after the Second Coming.

The Kingdom in Old Testament Prophecy The following discussion is limited to Old Testament prophecy. To take this tack does not mean there was no preceding development let alone that it is proper to ignore it 474 As an introduction for basic concepts, one may still profit from L. S. Chafer, The Kingdom in History and Prophecy (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1915). Despite limitations, this is still a suitable primer. At a more advanced level, see A. J. McClain’s, The Greatness of the Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, c 1959; Reprint: Chicago: Moody Press, 1968). McClain’s is still the best modern synthesis of all biblical materials on the future kingdom, and perhaps the fullest twentieth century description of the future kingdom in all its manifold dimensions. The most detailed treatment of the kingdom ever written was by G. N. H. Peters, The Theocratic Kingdom, 3 vols. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1884; Reprint, Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1952 with a new Introduction by Wilbur Smith; 2nd Reprint Edition, Kregel, 1968, with another new Introduction by John Stoll who added new information about Peters’ life and scholarly work). Each volume of Peters is 800 or more pages.

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in a complete study. There was in fact a long development in Israel’s patriarchal promises and the early history of the nation. The only justification for concentrating on the prophetic description of the messianic and eternal kingdom of God is that its prophetic description is the most developed one in the two testaments. No millenarian of the twentieth century has written on the kingdom with more attention to detail than Alva McClain in his Greatness of the Kingdom (1959), although G. N. H. Peters’ massive three-volume work, The Theocratic Kingdom (1884), was even more detailed. McClain sifted hundreds of futuristic Old Testament texts for details about the kingdom, and organized them with care in a comprehensive description of what he chose to call “the mediatorial kingdom.” He was also sensitive to certain motifs of evangelical scholarship, steering a thoughtful millenarian course between amillennialist and postmillennialist positions. He could do this with intellectual energy and passion, of course, because he believed the detailed futurism of the Old Testament prophets was realistic even when it pictured utopian-like (future) conditions. He also believed the God of promise and miracle could and would do wonders in bringing the future kingdom to historical reality. He noted that the earthly kingdom was continuous with the history of human political and social life. He thought the visibly supernatural dimensions of the kingdom found in prophetic texts either enhanced, elevated or moved beyond the limitations of a fallen humanity and an earth filled with effects of the fall. This study is a notable synthesis and deserves continued use by millenarians looking for a sober treatment of their biblical roots and a millenarian philosophy of history. It is not possible, given the limited scope of this essay to review McClain’s complete picture of the kingdom in the prophets. But a sketch of his chapters—only two of six on the kingdom in the prophets—will fill out at least part of the meaning of the “whole promised kingdom” in Old Testament prophecy. McClain’s chapters on “The Government of the Kingdom” and “The Blessings of the Kingdom” fulfill the need for a coherent and biblically based description of the sort demanded by the kingdom-between-two-resurrections discussed above. He gathers Old Testament prophetic texts which state or imply conditions of a new and uprighted world. On “The Government of the Kingdom,” McClain argues that it is thought of as an earthly monarchy not dissimilar to other monarchies of the ancient world, but with changes toward fulfillment of human longings for qualities, powers and ideals that continually slip their way out of human grasp under the limitations of sin and finiteness. The form of the kingdom in prophecy is a mediatorial monarchy with all functions of government centered in the person of the king—mediatorial because it bears (mediates) divine blessings to the world; monarchy because it is an earthly kingdom.475 The “nature” of its government will be moral: truth, holiness, righteousness and justice—qualities to be supported by special power. For example, the nations will become Messiah’s inheritance; he will be given a rod of iron with which to rule them; but it will be tempered with mercy and tenderness.476 In organization, the king will be at the head; under him will be princes and the saints. The surviving and converted Israel is at the next level; it will be granted a “world supremacy” in which the nations will be so awed that they will come to Israel with gifts and wealth, and will worship Israel’s God. Israel’s world supremacy, however,

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475 476

McClain, Greatness of the Kingdom, pp. 206-208. Ibid, pp. 208-209

is not an end in itself as though some unrestricted nationalistic power; rather the purpose of its power will be the welfare of the nations. At the “lowest level” will be the Gentile nations whose gifts and cultures, insofar as beneficial, will be consecrated to the Lord. Even former enemies of Israel will find favor in the messianic kingdom. McClain knows this description of ranks of subordination as he describes it may sound humiliating or condescending, but he notes that in another sense the New Testament at a later time levels chiefs and servants in texts with egalitarian tendencies like Matthew 20:27.477 In extent, the kingdom is universal; in duration it is eternal. He discusses the New Testament’s temporary thousand-year kingdom and how it interfaces with the repeated promises of an eternal kingdom, thereby seeking to resolve the issue already—as far as he thinks it can be resolved from the Old Testament—by noting passages that place temporal limits on Messiah’s kingdom.478

In describing “The Blessings of the Kingdom” McClain emphasizes that the messianic kingdom will see striking changes in the earth’s present life that will make it the beginning of the new world—the new heavens and new earth.

McClain thinks (1) the whole kingdom in all aspects will be spiritually based, i.e. a personal spiritual salvation in fullness and grace centered in the royal Man (Christ); this priority saves McClain and other millenarians from frequent but unwarranted charges that the millenarian kingdom is merely a kingdom of flesh or even of sensual delights. Salvation will fill the earth with great joy and spread in its effects and implications to social and physical life.479 (2) The effects of the kingdom’s salvation will be ethical, with readjustment of moral values, an objective standard (a teacher-king on the throne), accurate estimates of moral worth, the triumph of truth, retribution for wrong, and a visible relation between character and well-being.480 (3) It will have sweeping social effects: warfare abolished, complete social justice, cessation of social wasting (ruined cities, slums, for example), enhanced worth of persons, enhanced marriage, and dignity and respect to the aged.481 (4) There will be a new body politic with central international authority (new legal order), a world capital (Jerusalem), resolution of abusive treatment of Israel, righting of political wrongs, and resolution of language barriers.482 (5) The kingdom and its population will know remarkable physical effects like beneficial climate changes, fertility of deserts and waste land, increased fertility and productiveness, peace in the animal world, disappearance of disease and deformity, and freedom from daily hazards.483 (6) The kingdom will see new forms of worship and spiritual life: a priest-king on the world’s throne, Israel as religious leader of nations, Jerusalem the religious center of the world, a secure, safe and stable worship environment in which disruption and rebellion, and even dissent will be rapidly ended, and a future temple built as the center of world worship.484 477 Ibid, pp. 209-213. 478 Ibid, pp. 213-216. 479 Ibid, pp. 219-221. 480 Ibid, pp. 221-224. 481 bid, pp. 224-228. He might have added the terrible waste of talent of the poor and uneducated. 482 Ibid, pp. 228-234. 483 Ibid, pp. 234-241. 484 Ibid, pp. 241-254. This segment pictures some features of the kingdom that are controversial and may be overdrawn. McClain thinks freedom of religion will no longer be a value, and that animal sacrifices will be restored with a memorial function—two highly problematic perspectives which might need another look. He gets these from some notably harsh or materialistic texts in the prophets.

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This detailed description is faithful to the texts he cites for them, including the harsh treatment he thinks will come to rebels and opponents, and especially hostile nations. He reminds us that, given that nations will exist in their natural, sinful state and even though Satan is bound, one should expect opposition to such a messianic government, since the nations will still be in their natural and sinful state. Aside from possible dissent from some details he proposes, this is on the whole a fair and comprehensive identification of kingdom blessings that can serve for further discussion, critique and analysis. Granting room for discussion of some controversial details in light of New Testament emphasis on God’s mercy or the end of sacrifice (Hebrews), McClain covers the ground rather thoroughly.

Some Limitations of McClain’s Work Choosing this commendatory assessment of McClain’s work is not meant to ignore some of the book’s limitations both for the time when it was written, and more importantly for its continued value at the beginning of the twenty-first century. After all, it has now been in print continuously for over fifty years, and bears the marks of its 1959 publication. Some of these limits lie in McClain’s research style and sectarian perspectives. Others involve lack of awareness of developments in dispensational premillennialism in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, most of which McClain could not have foreseen. (1) McClain does very minimal exegesis of texts, only occasionally mentioning a Hebrew or Greek word. His method is to quote scriptural texts with little discussion of

the meaning of Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek terms. Hence, there is more work to be done with texts for a complete treatment based on recent ancient Near Eastern language study. Extensive treatment of exegetical issues would have required a discussion far beyond McClain’s purpose and scope. (2) The work makes heavy use of nineteenth century commentaries and other tools (Lange, Alford, Godet, H. A. W. Meyer, Barnes, and Thayer [Lexicon]). McClain’s work was done in a dark period of very limited Fundamentalist scholarship, a factor that explains his reliance on scholarly nineteenth century orthodox commentators. The point of this observation is that McClain’s work needs to be used in consultation with more recent commentaries and biblical studies resources coming from the renewal of evangelical scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. (3) In discussing more controversial aspects of his subject, McClain sometimes vests his argument in authorities of like or similar viewpoint to his own; or, he rests his case on apriori considerations in which he nonetheless thoughtfully relies on likelihoods or probabilities. A notable case is his discussion of the interpretive relation of the New Testament to the Old Testament prophecies.485 (4) Occasionally he adopts (acknowledged) problematic views in his prophets section based on a too-strict literalism of the prophecies with only passing regard for New Testament modifications. This is the case with his discussion of animal sacrifices in the (alleged) millennial temple as against the teaching of Hebrews. (5) His discussion of the interpretive relation of the New Testament to the Old argues only that Scripture is clear, and that problems of correlating the Old and



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485

Ibid., pp. 250ff.

New are largely due to human ignorance or blindness. This discussion assumes Scripture’s simple literality and clarity—an assumption that overlooks the complexity of inner-biblical interpretation (New Testament use of the Old Testament). But McClain could not have known what the years after 1959 would produce in study of New Testament quotation details (now called “inter-textuality” or “inner-biblical exegesis”), including practices of Jewish hermeneutics and New Testament use of synagogue hermeneutics adopted and/or adapted in the New Testament. (6) McClain could not have known the direction of coming studies of the kingdom’s presence in Jesus’ ministry, such as those of G. E. Ladd, whose most significant work was to show that the kingdom’s salvation is present in advance of its future Second Advent consummation and fullness. McClain seems to have kept to his view that if the whole mediatorial kingdom is present in the New Testament, then either all references to it must be directly or proleptically future (anticipative in one way or another), since it did not come in its wholeness during Jesus’ ministry or the apostolic age. This older dispensationalist view has been and continues to be modified.

The fact that McClain could not have known of the developments mentioned in (5) and (6) above means that if the work continues to be used, millenarians have catch-up to do in reshaping their view of the kingdom in the New Testament. For example, Ladd’s compelling studies left traditional millenarians with a dilemma. Those who admired McClain could either reject Ladd’s synthesis outright, or attempt a new, revised form of millenarianism along Ladd’s lines while still retaining the essentials of the millenarian heritage, while risking loss of popular, cherished earlier formulations. This latter way, of course, assumes that Ladd’s kingdom studies are sufficiently compelling that a new millenarian synthesis is the best option, a view that McClain could not have imagined, but that more recent scholarly millenarians have in fact undertaken. The risk lies in the fact that many church people of millenarian belief were nurtured on the populist studies of the earlier and mid-twentieth century, and might find some changes and adjustments hard to grasp or embrace—a form of populist versus scholarly perceptions.486 Hence, the commendation of McClain offered here must be somewhat qualified. The work remains the best piece of serious synthesis on the biblical concept of the kingdom among twentieth-century millenarians. But millenarians have much work to do. They have been engaging at least some issues over the last 50 years, and have gained ground toward new statements of their millenarianism. Some of this study is in detailed journal articles, and some is in monographs. McClain will no doubt be supplanted by a new work on the kingdom that takes as seriously as did he its basic and detailed meanings. One very recent work of importance is that edited by C. Blomberg and S. Chung, A Case for Historic Premillennialism; but it falls short of McClain’s synthesis since its goal is more narrowly focused. Until such a supplanting of McClain occurs, however, The Greatness of the Kingdom will stand as modern millenarianism’s finest guide to the meaning of God’s kingdom to occur between the two resurrections, even though it reflects some limitations of its time. Further reprints of Peters’ Theocratic Kingdom will not resolve the issues

486 An extraordinary study of the nineteenth-century populist movements in American Christianity is Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); cf also the personal comments about change in D. Turner, ”Matthew among the Dispensationalists,” JETS 53, 4 (December, 2010):697.

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on which recent millenarians need to do more work—a remark which is not intended to suggest Peters should go out of reprint. Rather, both Peters earlier and McClain later are classics and deserve careful study. The Kingdom in Jesus’ Mission Of course, the question arises again and again—is the kingdom of which Jesus spoke the same kingdom foretold in the Old Testament with its many physical, social, political, economic and spiritual dimensions? As might be expected, there are several ways the kingdom has been understood in New Testament scholarship. One way to explain the kingdom in Jesus’ mission is to view it as a case of Jewish apocalyptic hopes. This view is informed by a large body of Jewish apocalyptic books written in the wake of the successful Maccabean Revolt against the Greek occupation after 167 B. C. The presence of late Jewish apocalyptic thinking in Jesus’ mission was first argued effectively by Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer; they used it to explain Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom of God: Jesus was proclaiming a literal, earthly, messianic kingdom of glory and peace that was about to dawn, and he was its agent. To Weiss and Schweitzer he was deluded about this expectation and his role in it, and finally perished from the radical nature of his teaching about the doom of the temple and priesthood. In this view the kingdom of Jesus was that of the prophets, but still wholly future. This view recognizes that at least some of Jesus’ terminology about the future is drawn from Jewish apocalyptic hopes in his own age, and has the merit of recognizing a literal earthly kingdom in Jesus’ sayings. However, it misses the establishment of the kingdom’s personal salvation in Jesus’ mission, and pays too much attention to ethics as merely preparatory for the coming kingdom. A second possibility for explaining Jesus’ kingdom teaching is the AugustinianReformation main-stream view (chiefly Reformed, Lutheran and Brethren bodies and their scholars). In this view the kingdom is a spiritual kingdom regardless of recognizable apocalyptic elements. Reformed resistance to literalism, except for the Second Coming, resurrection and judgment, excludes recognition of a literal kingdom, and focuses so hard and so thoroughly on personal salvation, and kingdom spirituality and ethics that no future consummated kingdom on earth is relevant; or, if any such kingdom is visible (which is hard to deny), it is shifted to heaven for its final realization; after all, it is called “the kingdom of heaven.” This view is also largely that of the modern evangelical discipleship movement: the kingdom is manifest in the discipleship of Jesus’ serious followers. There is some truth in this view: Jesus did teach great spiritual truths about God, himself, faith, obedience, ethics and mission, as well other aspects of personal spirituality and discipleship. Ultimately, however, the view is unsatisfactory since it reduces Jesus and his person, deeds and teaching to a kingdom of spiritual disciples here and now, and pays little attention to its future consummation, except in very general terms. A third view is that the kingdom was Jesus’ term for the social ideal of his ethical teaching: the kingdom is what the world will become when it puts his ethical and moral teaching into practice. The founder of this view was the nineteenth century German theologian Albrecht Ritschl; it became the Social Gospel of American theological 244

modernism, and persists in more liberal main-line denominational churches. In this view, an ethics-now perspective prevails, in fact ethics-now is the manifestation of the kingdom, while the apocalyptic elements of the gospels’ futurism are seen as the disposable husks of regional Jewish apocalyptic hopes clinging to the ethical kernel, and thus should be dropped. Following the guidance of Ritschl and Adolf Harnack, liberals argue that Christianity’s distinctive kingdom was its ideas of the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the infinite worth of the individual, and love for all men equally. Its main American spokesmen were Shailer Mathews and Walter Rauschenbusch, the two most prominent scholarly promoters of the American Social Gospel. There is some truth in this view as well; but it reduces Christianity’s kingdom to simple ethical principles while letting the supernatural framework fall to the ground. It has little use for the divinely miraculous, and virtually no place at all for any future kingdom except insofar as the realization of the four kingdom principles can be called “the kingdom of God.” A fourth view reads the kingdom of God in the gospels as the whole physical, social-political, spiritual-redemptive kingdom of Old Testament prophecy—a literal kingdom of God on earth. There are at least three major varieties of this view. (a) One is that of the earlier “classical dispensationalism” of the first half of the twentieth century. In this view, Jesus’ ministry offered the kingdom to Israel in his early ministry—up to the events of Matthew 11-13. By Matthew 12, Israel had rejected him as Messiah and the offer was withdrawn. Then Jesus began to reveal an interim mystery form of the kingdom (which shortly became the church period), and to teach that the kingdom would be delayed. McClain represents this view, but he is not alone; it is taught in the Scofield Reference Bible, and is the view of many twentieth-century dispensationalist teachers and writers. In this thinking the kingdom is almost entirely future in the gospels, even in texts where it sounds like it is somehow present in Jesus and his mission. (b) In a mostly rejective re-thinking of this view, George Ladd argued that the kingdom was partially present in Jesus’ mission, i.e., the salvation of the kingdom was available in advance of its complete establishment at his Second Coming. In this sense, the salvation of the kingdom was not only revealed and made operative at Jesus first advent, but is still working in the preaching of the gospel in the world. This view in turn is favored and argued in the remainder of this essay, and constitutes an important revision of dispensational premillennialism. It is regrettable that McClain’s work was published before any dispensationalists began recognizing the value and truth of Ladd’s synthesis. (c) In another re-thinking of the “classical” dispensationalist view, the kingdom continued to be exhibited by Jesus, but was not actually offered to Israel until his first advent atonement and resurrection were completed. The offer of the kingdom was first made, not in Matthew 4-10, but in the early preaching of the apostles in Acts. This view is that of Charles Baker. However, in Greatness of the Kingdom, McClain developed his own version of this view by suggesting that the kingdom was “re-offered” to Israel in the apostles’ preaching in the first several chapters of Acts. The best articulation of this view is Baker’s; but it is also the view of his American denomination, the Grace Gospel Fellowship, its world-wide churches, and its extension and mission agencies. This essay

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and others in the collection seek to combine Ladd’s important insights on the salvation of the kingdom with the view of the Grace Gospel Fellowship. It is illustrated mostly in this essay and in Essay I above.487 Multi-Dimensional Kingdom in the Prophets and Gospels McClain knew that to gain a coherent description of the kingdom, he had to synthesize Jesus’ sayings of the gospels on the subject as he had done with the prophets. He thus proceeded from prophets to gospels, seeking to find whether or not the same details of the kingdom he isolated in the prophets appeared in Jesus’ teaching as well. He believed, with all orthodox Protestants, that on the analogy of Scripture (like biblical passages, concepts and phrases explain each other), there must be continuity of meaning from the Old Testament to the New. This holds not only for salvation, but for most other matters of the revealed content as well, including the kingdom of God. Thus he sought to find in the fine details of Jesus’ teaching the same multi-dimensional kingdom he had described in the prophets. The result was an astonishing amount of direct and inferred detail in the gospels on all major aspects of the kingdom found in the prophets, although the quantity of texts was less, partly at least because the material in the gospels is less in quantity than in the prophets and psalms. To this picture of the kingdom in Jesus’ mission McClain devoted four chapters, including one of sixty-three pages in length. He titled this chapter “Christ’s Ministry in Preparation for the Interregnum,” by which he meant the interval between Christ’s two advents. In finding the whole messianic kingdom of the Old Testament referred to in Jesus’ teaching, albeit in modest allusions and echos, McClain steered himself into a problem: if the whole kingdom was present in Jesus’ teaching, it didn’t happen—at least little or none of it happened. This led him to read the kingdom allusions of Jesus as either directly future or proleptically future, i.e, as anticipating future fulfillment of the kingdom, no matter how much many kingdom sayings sounded like the kingdom was already present in Jesus’ mission. This preoccupation with the kingdom as future, however explained in detail, is a major weakness of McClain’s work. Ladd’s revised premillennialism on this point was visible to McClain only in a sketchy form from Ladd’s earliest books on the kingdom; Ladd published these early studies about the time of McClain’s Greatness of the Kingdom.488 It 487 An important study from within the Grace Gospel Fellowship on the kingdom in the gospels is by Henry Hudson, What Did Jesus Preach? A Biblical, Theological, and Practical Study of the Kingdom of God (1994). 488 Ladd’s first book in the series was Crucial Questions about the Kingdom of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952); it originated in a series of lectures at Western Conservative Baptist Seminary, Portland OR, and raised the exegetical and theological issues of the saving nature of the kingdom in Jesus’ mission. There followed The Blessed Hope: A Biblical Study of The Second Advent and The Rapture (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1956), wherein Ladd sought to combat the pre-tribulation rapture of the church, and to establish the idea that the first resurrection referred to only one event at the end of the Great Tribulation. The last of this preliminary series of kingdom studies (as it turned out) was The Gospel of the Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959). Here Ladd proposed the idea that the gospel of the kingdom always included salvation from the beginning of Jesus’ ministry; the gospel of the kingdom remains the gospel of salvation preached by the church, even though “gospel of the kingdom” does not occur outside the gospels in any further New Testament formulations.

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is important to recognize that Ladd’s reconstruction of traditional millenarian doctrine is only a modification of its view of the kingdom in Jesus’ mission, not a principled rejection of a future messianic kingdom as such. That is, Ladd did not reject the basic millenarian outline of future events, but rather remained a traditional millenarian; he did reject the pretribulation rapture. Nonetheless, his revision involves notable revisions in the earlier dispensationalist understanding of Jesus’ mission to Israel. Present and Future Kingdom The kingdom shows its historical presence in the person and mission of Jesus. This means it was actually brought into visible-audible history in Jesus person, miracles, and teaching as seen in a number of “present kingdom” texts in the gospels. However, the gospels also contain an appreciable group of texts which just as clearly and certainly project the fullness of the kingdom into the future, and associate that future consummation with Jesus’ Second Coming. The chief texts that exhibit the presence of the kingdom in Jesus’ person and mission are the following. A few comments are added to help with understanding their concepts. First we note a group of passages which announce that the kingdom has (already) come near. John the Baptist announces its nearness, and Jesus repeats its nearness several more times. No text explains how the kingdom moves from being “near” to actually being “here.” The announcements are sometimes accompanied by a plea for repentance. The call for repentance is a demand for decision in the face of its nearness. The implication is that a decision to repent brings one into relation with it, although this is not stated in so many words either. Likewise, failure to repent would keep one at a distance from it. Matthew 3:2. (John the Baptist) “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand (eggizo near). Matthew 4:17. (Jesus) “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Matthew 4:23. (Jesus) “And he went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, saying, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Matthew 10:7. (Jesus to the disciples) “And preach as you go, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” Along with a call to repentance, the disciples will work miraculous signs of the kingdom. In 11:2-6 Jesus links the signs to himself in answer to John the Baptist’s question about his messiahship. Follows in 11:12 the saying reproduced below dating the advance of the kingdom since the mission of John the Baptist.

Another group of passages sees the kingdom already present as its powers and blessings coming upon people though Jesus’ messianic works. In the first instance, its presence is dated—from the time of John the Baptist. Other aspects follow.

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Matthew 11:12. (Jesus) “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and men of violence take it by force (RSV; cf NRSV, ESV).” Another version reads, “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing, and forceful men lay hold of it (NIV).”489 The difference does not have to be resolved here. The important matter for this discussion is that the kingdom was already present in the world from the time of John the Baptist (cf Luke 16:16). Present tense verbs prevail as Jesus speaks of the action of the kingdom or violent reactions against it—however interpreted; either way, the saying assumes the kingdom is present already and implies that he is its operative. Matthew 12:28. (Jesus) “But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.” The phrase “. . . has come upon you” indicates it is already in operation in exorcising demon-possessed persons; he is its agent or operative (“I”). Here too, the implication is that the kingdom in such events is more than “near”; rather, with deliverance from demons, it becomes actual—“here.” Matthew 21:31. “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the harlots go into the kingdom before you. For John came in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the harlots believed him; and when you saw it, you did not afterward repent and believe him.” The verbs are in present tense: publicans and harlots are entering the kingdom now, and have been in it already for some time. They enter by recognizing the gift of God’s righteousness (Matt 6:33) made available in Jesus, and by repentance and faith in receiving it. Matthew 23:13. (Jesus) “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go in.” The kingdom is available. But scribes and Pharisees around Jesus prevent others from entering and refuse to enter themselves. The verbs are in present tense for action concurrent with the saying.

The force of these texts is not satisfied by saying that all they mean is that the kingdom is somewhere in the near future if people repent. They rather picture entry at the moment, and picture its “now” so forcefully that nothing else can be meant but the kingdom’s actual presence and availability at the moment. Entry by faith in the available righteousness is described and the kingdom is present by Jesus’ action toward persons in distress. A third set of passages in Matthew is a group of parables. Their stories are about Jesus himself, or his words, or some aspect of his interactions toward persons on behalf of God. The actions bring benefits or blessings, or remove the kingdom from their grasp as a judgment for resistance. The first of these is the group of parables in chapter 13 where the kingdom is compared to the produce of land or sea. The parables are not about the future apart from the present ministry of Jesus, as though they are through and through prophecies about what will happen in the future when the kingdom comes in fullness. Rather they are about the word or message of the kingdom, and consequences arising from its action in his messianic mission—his person, works, and words. In some parables he projects what 489 R. Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on His Handbook for a Mixed Church under Persecution. nd 2 Ed (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 209, seems to favor the RSV and NRSV. G. Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament, Rev Ed (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), pp. 69-70, favors the NIV rendering, observing that this is the way Luke understood the saying.

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his words will bring about in the future. Even when he speaks this way, it is not about a distant future but more like varied responses to Jesus’ word at work among hearers as he acts and speaks. Several of the later parables picture other aspects of what is happening in his mission, most having to do with Israel’s negative reactions; other nuances appear as well. It is unnecessary to be exhaustive with the parables in Matthew. Rather it is sufficient to illustrate from several examples. In Matthew 13:10-17, Jesus explains to the disciples that the parables are given to them. They are not general descriptions of the future kingdom, but for the disciples’ knowledge of how the kingdom is working in his mission at the time, i.e., the describe the kingdom’s action, not the kingdom as an entity. He says, “to you, not to them (NIV),” and “. . . blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear . . . prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see but did not see, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it (NIV).” He also warns that the parables will provoke blindness in Israel, and hence will divide responders from rejectors. The parables of chapter 13 are about how Jesus’ message (the word) is working in Israel. That they represent mysteries of the kingdom does not mean he is opening the new mystery era of the church in the wake of Israel’s rejection.490 Rather, as Ladd correctly saw, they are mysteries because they picture kingdom realities hidden from Israel through its history, but now newly revealed as he acts and speaks. In this sense, “mystery” is used in a way similar to Daniel 2 and to Ephesians and Colossians, i.e, for knowledge of divinely planned events or realities previously hidden in God but now revealed in Jesus’ mission or in symbols (or both) of the mission like parables or miracles, just as other mysteries were revealed for the first time through Paul. The parables thus stress the proclamation of the word and the halting receptions of it (Soils, 13:18-23), but nonetheless its final massive productivity. The parable of Wheat and Tares teaches that believers and unbelievers will mingle until the judgment, which McClain takes to mean during the “present age” to its end. The Mustard Seed and The Yeast are parables about the very small beginning compared to the great end of the kingdom-word working in the world. The parables of The Hidden Treasure and The Pearls are about the value of the kingdom; and the parable of The Dragnet is again about the mixture of believing and unbelieving until the end of the age, i.e., until the kingdom’s final establishment. This perspective does point beyond Jesus’ ministry. But there is no indication of its length, and in fact the future outlook should be interpreted through other gospel passages about both the shortness of the time and the contingency of Israel’s repentance. Even though they contain images implying a longer perspective on judgment, the parables are mainly about the kingdom’s powers operating already in Jesus’ mission.491

490 Dispensationalist millenarians tend to futurism on these parables, as A. McClain, Greatness of the Kingdom, pp. 324-325, where his futurism emerges in his statement that in the parables, “the most important [among the mysteries of the kingdom in Mathew 13] has to do with the mystery of the interregnum (his italics) which is to follow the arrival of the King and continue until His second coming (p. 325); cf. C. Baker, Understanding the Gospels: A Different Approach (Grand Rapids: Grace Publications, 1978), pp. 106ff. Baker nonetheless thinks that new knowledge about the kingdom is part of their intent; this perspective is clearly a gain. McClain finds the key to the parables in the Wheat and the Tares which does have a future perspective. But McClain’s point is that the whole group of parables is about the “interregnum,” an assessment which follows the basics of the Scofield Reference Bible’s view—a view which finally makes the “interregnum” equal to the “church age.” 491 For a larger and more detailed statement of this view see G. E. Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament, pp. 89-102. Some of Ladd’s details might be somewhat different than the brief sketch above, but in the main, these two ways of understanding the parables of the kingdom are the same. Ladd, in turn, while

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The other group of parables with stunning images of what is actually happening in Jesus’ mission is that of Matthew 21:28-22:13: The Two Sons; The Tenants; and The Wedding Banquet. These three parables have a common theme: the presence of God’s Son in Israel, his rejection by the Jewish leadership, and the consequences of that rejection. Vivid descriptions are given of the kingdom happening before the disciples and even the Pharisees’ eyes. Future consequences appear as results of Jesus’ rejection as it is happening at the time of the parables; but the focus is on the presence of the kingdom at the moment. This brief illustrative review offers good reasons to recognize that in Matthew the

kingdom of Old Testament promise is actually present in Jesus’ mission in preliminary aspects, or as Hebrews 6:5 calls it—a foretaste of the powers of the age to come. But it is not yet present in its fullness as described in the prophets. That future fullness is also the subject of many prophecies and parable details. The discussion above is not intended to wash out those futuristic concepts in the gospels, but only to deal realistically with the fact that the kingdom is already partially present in Jesus’ mission in its saving power. In fact, when compared with the quantity of clear and certain statements about its presence in Jesus’ work, statements about the kingdom’s future fullness are even greater in number. As discussed above, four clear and indisputable statements of the kingdom’s real presence were produced from Matthew. But the number of texts alluding to the future of the kingdom might be set at ten or more, depending on details and purview of each text; these proportions are present in Mark and Luke’s versions as well. Futuristic elements actually dominate the remaining New Testament mentions of the kingdom of God with the exception of some uses in Acts. And yet, McClain is right to the extent that there is often some futuristic nuance suggested. Those future notices are more than statements of principle; they also include events and scenes of its final establishment. This is why the texts studied above from 1 Corinthians 15 and Revelation 20 are so important: they are more detailed expansions of this very reality, even though Paul knows that some aspects of the kingdom of God established at Jesus’ first advent are also already extended in the church era, and thus that the life of the body-church is already a partial realization of some kingdom blessings (Rom 14:17). Details of these aspects of the kingdom in the epistles will be discussed in the final segment of this essay. In the meantime the issue has become—what saving aspects of the kingdom were actually present in Jesus’ mission? Two prominent kingdom-linked themes related to this discussion are the presence of its salvation and the initial formation of the New Israel in the apostles and other recipients of Jesus’ messianic person and works. The Presence of the Kingdom’s Salvation in the Gospels

Since G. Ladd has already synthesized the gospel materials on the presence of salvation in Jesus’ ministry, we need only summarize and cite some illustrative details under four headings: the forgiveness of sins, faith, righteousness and justification, and far from embracing C. H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom (New York: Scribner’s, 1935), has adopted some aspects of Dodd’s “realized eschatology,” while the same is true of most treatments of the later twentieth century. It is also true that Dodd’s attempt to reduce all futurism in the New Testament to an already realized status has not gained much ground; the passages’ futurism is too forceful.

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eternal life. Jesus speaks as though these elements of salvation are already available in the presence of the king and kingdom; he does not merely mention them as future hopes for the time when the kingdom will come in its fullness. Some other details might be mentioned, but these four are basic and illustrative. Forgiveness of Sins. Forgiveness of sins is present from the beginning of John and Jesus’ mission where it is linked to the kingdom of God. Forgiveness of sins appears in John the Baptist’s message (Mark 1:4-5) accompanied by confession and repentance. In Matthew, John announces the kingdom’s nearness. In Luke, John’s family hears that Mary will bear Jesus whose kingdom will never end; in this same first chapter of Luke, a forgiveness promise occurs (Luke 1:77). While found in several gospels, forgiveness texts are more frequent in Luke, especially in the earlier chapters. For example, Luke 7:47-50 supplements the story of the paralytic’s forgiveness (Luke 5:17-26) with Jesus’ forgiveness of a sinful woman: “And he said to her, ‘Your sins are forgiven (7:48).” When Jesus says her sins are forgiven because she loved much (7:47), it is not a matter of good works earning salvation; rather, her love for Jesus is part of a series of movements toward him which manifest her faith. Finally, he says to her, “your faith has saved you (7:50).” And as Ladd shows, forgiveness in the messianic age was foretold in the prophets (Isa 33:24; Mic 7:18-20; Jer 31:34; cf Zech 13:1).492 Conjunction of the promised kingdom with promised forgiveness is not a coincidence. In such scenes, Messiah’s forgiveness of sins is no longer a promise for the future, but a realized hope awaiting only its actual finalizing sacrifice of Jesus’ death.

Faith. Jesus also speaks of faith/belief (pistis, pisteuo) in a notable series of text where faith and salvation converge in combination with other salvation-related motifs. (All italics mine.)

The nearness of the kingdom appears as a heading over the events of Jesus’ mission in Mark (1:15). Mark follows his “repent and believe (pisteuo) the gospel” of 1:14b with two sozo/ save miracles (5:34; 10:52) in which Jesus says “your faith has saved you.” As with the paralytic man of Mark 2, spiritual and physical “salvation” are joined, which is likely the case in other sozo miracles as well, even though not stated directly. Luke repeats Mark’s sozo scenes and adds to them (Luke 7:50 as above; 8:48; 17:19; 18:42). In John, the verb for “believe (pisteuo)” occurs more than ninety times. Faith in John’s Gospel is belief in and acceptance of Jesus as God’s Son, otherwise referred to as receiving him (1:12). Its benefit is eternal life already available by the incarnation and Jesus’ divine messianic powers; it does not have to wait until finalized in his death and resurrection because it is fully available in Jesus’ divine person, works and teaching. John links faith and eternal life in the story of Nicodemus (3:3-14). A group of texts in Mark 9-10 uses synonyms of faith to illustrate a personal believing relationship with Jesus that gains the kingdom, both now and in the future. For example “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me (italics added).” Shortly after this Jesus speaks of “. . . these little ones who believe in me . . . (9:37-42).” This emphasis on receiving Christ and the kingdom continues in Mark 10:15: “. . . whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” In the sequel of Mark 10:17-31,

492

Ladd, Theology of the New Testament, p. 76.

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the rich young man is told that eternal life lies in following Jesus (a concept related to faith, 10:21); Jesus immediately equates eternal life with entering the kingdom of God and the age to come (10:23-25, 29-30). Hence, faith is the human mode by which the salvation or powers of the present kingdom are humanly gained—the kingdom in this sense becomes “here,” a clear step beyond “near,” so to say.

Righteousness/Justification. Righteousness and justification thoughts are found in various scenes in the Gospel of Luke as well as the other gospels, but not quite so prominently.



Luke uses faith and righteousness words (or related/synonymous terms) a combined total of about 54 times in his Gospel.493 Righteousness and justification are varied translations of different forms of the dik- word group; the terms have meanings like right, upright, righteous,straight, just, justified and justice, depending on context, and usually thought of in relation to law in some aspect. For example, in the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax-Collector, the Pharisee boasts about his own righteous deeds (works). But the hated tax-collector prays, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” Of him Jesus concludes, “. . . this man went down to his house justified (18:11-14).” This is justification by faith without works on the basis of the grace and kindness (mercy) of God. In Matthew’s parable of the two sons (21:28-32), what brought tax collectors and harlots into the kingdom was repenting and believing John the Baptist who “came to you in the path of righteousness.” Jesus’ words about his submission to John’s baptism tell us the same thing as Matthew 21:32: “thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness (Matt 3:15).” Matthew 6:33 makes clear that the available righteousness spoken of in Matthew 21:32 is God’s own: “. . . seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness . . . .” This is the righteousness repeatedly promised in Isaiah 40-66 where in text after text Isaiah speaks about God’s righteousness to be revealed in coming messianic days. In Isaiah, righteousness is repeatedly paralleled with wording about salvation—the coming salvation is a revelation of the righteousness of God; this righteousness of salvation is available in the presence of the kingdom.

Eternal Life. According to the teaching of the gospels, eternal life is also available within the framework of the available kingdom. G. Ladd nicely highlighted the prominence of righteousness and eternal life in his 1966 lectues at North Park Seminary, Chicago, published under the title, The Pattern of New Testament Truth.494

Eternal life too, as with forgiveness, faith, and righteousness, was available even before the atoning provision and resurrection of Christ. In Mark 9:43, 45, 47, Jesus interchanges “enter life . . . enter life . . .” and “enter the kingdom of God.” In 10:15 Jesus says, “I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it,” and in Mark 10:21, “. . . Then come, follow me” is the entrance to eternal life. In the immediate context, life is interchangeable with “enter the kingdom of God (10:23, 25).” By the end of the story, the kingdom in turn becomes “the age to come (10:30),” which again in turn is coordinated with “eternal life (10:30),” and the 493 D. DeWitt, “Righteousness by Faith and Related Themes in the Gospel of Luke,” unpublished paper, Andrews University, 1981, p. 9. 494 G. Ladd, The Pattern of New Testament Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968), pp. 64-107. In linking righteousness and justicification with Paul, however, the presence of righteousness in the gospels was slightly more obscured than perhaps it should have been, especially in the cases of Matthew and Luke.

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whole series is said to be “because of me and the gospel (10:29).” It is sufficient to merely mention the endless merging of faith and eternal life in the Gospel of John (believe pisteuo, 94 x in John; life zoe or zoa aionion/ eternal life, 39x in John). Even in John’s Gospel with its few uses of “kingdom of God,” one of the two is the present available kingdom of God to be entered by faith (3:2ff) in Jesus himself. No more than in the other gospels is this the “overall reign of God,” but rather the mediatorial kingdom of the Old Testament prophets promised to Israel and the world, focused at the beginning on its salvation.

These examples are only a small portion of the many kinds and specific cases of salvation motifs associated with the available kingdom of God in the gospels. The salvation of the kingdom is available in advance of its consummation. For these basic concepts I am indebted to George Ladd who gathered the evidence masterfully. This does not mean that everything in his chapter on the salvation of the kingdom is to be accepted without critical review or caution. But in the main, Ladd’s collection of salvation texts and their coordination with the kingdom of God is compelling: the kingdom’s salvation is already available in Jesus’ mission—not only in advance of the future fullness of the kingdom, but even in advance and anticipation of the cross and resurrection. Kingdom and New Israel in the Gospel of Matthew

Since the available kingdom and the New Israel are most closely coordinated in the Gospel of Matthew, we shall limit our illustrative study of this theme to that Gospel. The “New Israel” in Matthew is not a Matthean term as such, but a helpful theological term to describe a new people of Israel created by Jesus from the remnants of the old Israel through exactly those elements discussed just above. This work in the gospels is happening before his, the disciples’ and his auditors’ eyes. The New Israel is not the church being formed by Jesus, nor the church about to succeed Israel in the near future, nor even a wholly different nation about to replace the old Israel. Rather, the New Israel is formed from the old Israel, but is still the historic national Israel—a portion of the nation—but that portion with a new messianic heart and redemption by acceptance of Jesus as Messiah and/or reception of his blessings. This New Israel is the Israel that will inherit the kingdom along with Old Testament believers according to the national promises of the Old Testament, and over which the apostles will reign (Matt 19:28). That it includes some Gentiles even at its beginning, and will include many Gentile nations later, is an idea found in the Old Testament prophecies as well as in the gospels but only in scattered examples. This theme was not examined or discussed in full detail by Ladd, so the texts and language that evidence the beginning of the latter day Israel will be gathered here. The idea of the New Israel is recognized in modern scholarly treatments of Matthew and explained in various ways and with various nuances.495 Because of limited space and the limited illustrative purpose of this discussion, only the narrative portions of Matthew 1-22 will be cited for New Israel concepts.

495 G. Stanton, A Gospel for a New People: Studies in Matthew; Ladd, Theology of the New Testament, passim, and pp. 31-217. R. S. Ascough, “Matthew and Community Formation” in The Gospel of Matthew in Current Study, ed D. Aune (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 96-126, does not speak of a “New Israel,” but does discuss the dynamics of new community formation as an interest of Matthew; this is a somewhat broader way of thinking of New Israel interests in this Gospel.

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The idea is prominent in Matthew, but is also found in bits and pieces in the other gospels. Its most direct statement in Matthew is in the parable of the farmers (21:43), which may have been intended as climactic. There, toward the end of the parable, and speaking of the chief priests and Pharisees, Jesus says, “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it.” The context does not indicate explicitly what nation is in view. Many commentators think Jesus refers to the Gentiles; but if so, the plural was available to express plurality. It is sometimes thought that ethnos/nation means “people,” but this seems unlikely too. In Matthew’s larger context the apparent meaning is that a New Israel has begun to form from the powers of Jesus’ mission: its people are the disciples and the many kinds of outcasts and needy who are responding to him. Ladd, though not discussing the New Israel idea in detail, thinks Jesus means the shift of the kingdom is occurring “right now.” But like many others, he also thinks of the larger inclusion of Gentiles based on the pictures of Gentile contact elsewhere in Matthew, as meager as those scenes are. He says, “. . . and if, as we have argued above, Jesus regarded his disciples as the remnant of the true Israel because they have accepted God’s offer of the Kingdom, the ‘others’ must be the circle of Jesus’ disciples. Matthew only makes this more explicit by adding the words, ‘the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it (Mt. 21:43).’”496 Citing Ladd is not meant to invoke his authority for everything advocated in this discussion of the New Israel idea in Matthew. But he rightly recognizes an on-sight reference to the disciples here. This identification of the new “nation” will guide the discussion to follow.

The New Israel theme in Matthew begins in chapters 1-2. Matthew’s Jesus fulfills the Old Israel—both its history and its prophecies—by recurrence and extension. Matthew does this by personal links: Abraham; Joseph; David; Moses; the prophets. And he enlarges by focusing on details of Jesus’ messianic experiences and actions. The motifs add up to Jesus as the onset of a New Israel, the awaited “King of the Jews (2:2, 6),” who relives Israel’s formative history and fulfills its prophecies. The genealogy is Davidic and includes some Gentiles as did the Old Israel from Abraham on. The nationalist character of the list sought to evoke the readers’ identity with their national past; the point, however, was that, even genealogically, Jesus was the goal of Israel’s history.497 A dream motif appears in 1:20; it recycles Old Testament Joseph (Gen 37ff) and continues in 1:24; 2:12, 13, 22. Joseph and Mary’s sexual restraint also evokes Old Testament Joseph. “Joseph” steers the beginnings of the New Israel through dangerous waters as did his Old Testament counterpart. A New Exodus/New Moses motif—very thick in 2:7-20—is added to the New David and New Joseph motifs along with kingship (2:2). The magoi recall Egypt’s magicians at Israel’s national birth in Egypt; they speak of a star as does Balaam in Numbers 23:7; 24:17-19. Herod is the story’s Pharaoh, the oppressor-killer (Ex 1:16; 2:15). “Joseph” takes the family to Egypt (Matt 2:13), and Jesus as Israel/son is called out of Egypt (2:15; Hos 11:1) to return to the “land of Israel (2:20, 21)”—another Old Israel nationalistic detail.



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496 497

Ladd, Theology of the New Testament, p. 199. C. Keener, A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 77.

Matthew pursues the formation of the New Israel in chapters 3-4. There is progression: fulfilling “all righteousness” is tested in temptation; the first elements of the New Israel are formed—the first disciples and the first healings. The righteousness of the kingdom is at hand. A New Israel appears when John proclaims, “out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham, i.e., the New Israel is God’s work, not merely man’s reproductive function. The ax is “already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire (3:9-10).” The messianic decision time has arrived and a separation is at hand. Repentance is demanded in light of the kingdom’s nearness.



John preaches, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” establishing a contingency on the Old Israel’s salvation. Many prophetic texts urge repentance, not least Joel 2:12ff. John sees the New Israel remnant sorted out by repentance from those who reject; repentance is pursued in a sequence of metaphors (3:7-12) about two kinds of results: fruit of repentance or coming wrath; new stones or a chopped-down tree; Spirit or fire; wheat or chaff; and “cleansing his (Jesus’) dirty/messy threshing floor.” Jesus is baptized to “fulfill all righteousness,” which, in Matthew’s prophecy-fulfillment schema probably means full realization of the promised righteousness (Isa 16:5; 45:8; 51:4-8; 45:22-25; 46:13; 53:11; 56:1b; 59:14-20).498 John’s call to repentance and washing is its inception (cf. Qumran’s ritual washings; 21:32). God’s voice after the baptism announces Jesus as God’s Son. For Matthew, the voice from heaven belongs to the unfolding “path of righteousness”. Matthew goes straight to Jesus’ temptation which tests the reality of his sonship to God and advances the meaning of “fulfill all righteousness.” The salvationrighteousness of the kingdom is present in advance of the world-rule of the kingdom, even if so far only in Messiah’s person. Jesus settles in Capernaum, the territory of Zebulon and Naphtali—Isaiah’s place of messianic light (Isa 9:1-2). Here Jesus makes his first disciples, the vanguard of the new nation.

In chapters 8-9, the New Israel motifs of chapters 1-7 are continued. Ten miracles by the sea recall the ten wonders done “by the sea” in Egypt; the ten wonders also illustrate Jesus’ inclusion of outcasts devalued by the Pharisees—perhaps another parallel to Exodus’ remark about the “rabble” that joined Israel at the time of the exodus (Exod 12:38). The outcasts who form the New Israel—the “other nation” of Matthew 21:42-43— keep appearing in Matthew (3:9, 12; 8:10-12; 9:16-17; 21:31-32, 22:8-10). “Israel” frames this miracle series (8:10; 9:33) and suggests its significance. Matthew takes explicit note of the new people by contrasting the Pharisees’ attitudes (9:10-11, 34). The New Israel includes a leper (unclean), a Gentile centurion and his servant (unclean), Peter’s mother-inlaw (a woman), two demonized but exorcised men of Gadara, a paralytic, a ruler’s daughter raised from death, a bleeding woman (unclean), and two blind men along with a dumb man (demonized). In 9:36 (as 4:23-25), Matthew calls them the “harassed and helpless.” Two other out-of-the-ways become followers: a lone Scribe; and Matthew the publican.

Chapters 11-12 work on two related themes. (1) With Jesus and his people, the kingdom advances forcefully.499 John’s question about Jesus’ identity mounts the thesis.

498 499

D. Hagner, Matthew 1-13 (Dallas: Word Books, 1993), pp. 456-57. Ladd, Theology of the New Testament, p. 71-72.

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Jesus’ answer is simple: tell him what you see (11:4-5). (2) Powerful people treat the kingdom violently (11:12b). For Matthew, Jesus refers to the Jewish leaders in their growing rejection led by scribes and Pharisees, and finally at Jerusalem by the priesthood. Jesus expands his thought from individuals to “this generation (11:16; 12:39, 45b).” These sayings are evidence that synagogue leaders/scribes in Galilee have led some people to resist Jesus, even though he has individual followers; Jesus divides the nation.

The kingdom advances. Jesus cites his miracles (11:2-5; cf Isa 26:12-21; 29:1819; 35:5-6; 61:1-3) and challenges the crowd: what did you think you were getting with John (11:7-10)? What they received was the last of the prophets and more—Messiah’s forerunner; now the long-promised kingdom is at their doorstep though they do not recognize it (11:11-15). The kingdom creates its people by revelation (11:25-30) as they enter relationship with Jesus (25-27). The outcasts of 9:36 are now referred to as the struggling and burdened (kopiao, phortizo; 11:28). They are urged to come to him because his yoke is easy and his burden is light—not like the heavy burdens imposed on them by scribes and Pharisees. Other remnant descriptions are “little children” (11:25), “the innocent” (12:7), and brothers, sisters and mothers (12:50). Still another of the “struggling and burdened” is the man with the withered hand (12:9-14). Jesus touches “bruised reeds” and “smoldering wicks (12:20)”—metaphors from Isaiah 42:1-3 (12:20) for people whose lives are threatened with disease, weakness, or exclusion. Jesus is “leading justice to victory (12:20b)”—an allusion to the distributive justice of his compassionate acts. The remnant and division of Israel are again articulated (12:33-37). The judgment text in 12:33ff advances John the Baptist’s judgment and remnant sayings. Matthew reshapes Mark’s discipleship context to a people-of-the-kingdom context. The New Israel grows with its realization of the kingdom, but only as a beginning. The advancing kingdom is treated violently. Israel does not respond (11:13-17). It is like children and their deadbeat listeners: the kingdom sings and plays messianic songs, but there is no response. The cities Jesus visited neither repent (11:20-24) nor understand his works of mercy (12:20-24). The Pharisees think he is empowered by Beelzebub (12:2224). This too divides “your people (12:27)” from Jesus’ people. The division of Israel appears again in 12:30. Blaspheming rejecters are bad trees bearing bad fruit (12:33-37). Jesus says his generation needs to repent; without repentance they stand condemned by two foreign powers, Nineveh, and Sheba (Ethiopia?), since Nineveh repented at Jonah’s preaching and the Queen of Sheba came “from the ends of the earth” to listen. Matthew closes the segment with a final word from Jesus about who is demonized: his binding of the devil has not been met with a real replacement by repentant hearts.500 Therefore they are prime subjects for the devil’s return; and when he does return, it will be seven times worse. Thus for Jesus, it is not he who evidences Israel’s demonization in the latter days (4Q390), but Israel’s leaders. With this horrifying charge, the scene ends, except for a final affirmation that Jesus has his own people, the remnant, who are doing God’s will (12:4650).

New Israel interests are pursued in chapters 15-17. “Israel” (15:24, 31) sustains the theme. The identity of Jesus and his New Israel is Matthew’s guiding interest. Matthew 500 Hagner, Matthew 1-13, p. 357; W. D. Davies and D. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, 3 vols (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988) 2:360.

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shortens Mark slightly in order to insert distinctive material on Israel (15:23-24, 31) and the Pharisees (15:3-6; 12-14; 16:2-4; 11-12), thus persisting in his Pharisee-rejection interests.

Faith is the divide between the two Israels (13:58; 14:31; 15:28)—even the faith of an isolated Gentile. The true Israel confesses Jesus as Lord and Son of God (14:28-32; 15:22-27; 16:13-17). The new nation will become a national assembly (ekklesia,16:18) which Peter with the other disciples will rule with divine judicial powers (16:18-20). This text gains nuance from 19:28: the coming rule of the twelve over the tribes of Israel in the “restoration.” Peter will be the (human) founder of Israel’s messianic assembly (Acts 2ff). Rescue, sustenance and healing are the experience of the New Israel. Pharisees, scribes and Sadducees are no guide to Jesus’ identity and no leaders of the messianic nation. Instead, they “nullify the word of God (Jesus’ teaching and works) for the sake of . . . tradition (15:6-9),” have not been planted by God, and will be pulled up by the roots (15:13). They are blind guides (15:14) who cannot read the “signs of the times (16:3).” Matthew 19-20 adds striking new features to the developing New Israel theme. More outcasts are added to Jesus’ followers: eunuchs (the unmarried), children, last hour believers, prostitutes and tax collectors. While they enter the kingdom, the opposition of the Jerusalem leaders (scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, priests) grows more strident. A major new ideas are the transfer of kingdom inheritance promises to the New Israel, and the losses to be suffered by the Old Israel in its unbelief.

Matthew 19-20 features the saying, “. . . the last will be first, and the first last (19:30; 20:16).” Of whom is Jesus thinking? The context tells us. The marriage piece adds comments on eunuchs who are welcome in the kingdom of God (19:10-12).501 Children are also welcome (19:13-15), but a rich man falters while the disciples not only belong (19:1630), but will become the new nation’s rulers—one of the clearest future national kingdom sayings in the gospels (19:28). The parable of the vineyard owner features the inclusion of eleventh-hour hires (the disciples and all Jesus’ people) in a retrospect covering Israel’s whole history—its patriarchs and prophets all. The whole believing remnant through its history, including Jesus’ people, receives the same reward, despite the protests of the current workers (Pharisees, and, shortly—priests). In the parable, the vineyard manager (epitropos) is almost certainly Jesus himself. The parables following in chapters 21-22 also have historical restrospects on Israel in relation to the messianic dawn in Jesus. These motifs are unmistakably New Israel interests.

Similarly, in chapters 21-22, in the wake of Jerusalem’s growing opposition, a series of parables again explores the divide between the Old and New Israel. It would be a mistake to say the theme runs out in chapter 22, since aspects of it continue, especially in chapter 23 with its scathing condemnations of the Pharisees. But what continues merges into the passion story. Chapters 21-22 are for all practical purposes a climax of the theme.

501 Keener, Matthew, pp. 471-472, has grasped the eunuch passage correctly: “Jewish society did not allow eunuchs into the covenant, based on Deuteronomy 23:1 . . . Jewish society regarded marriage and childbearing as solemn responsibility.” This is yet another “outsider,” or in the language of this two-chapter piece, a “last” who “shall be first”; Isaiah 56:3-4 had foretold the inclusion of eunuchs in the messianic future.

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In the temple, Jesus receives the blind, the lame and the children while the Pharisees question and carp. This leads to a series of three parables about the divided Israel: The Vineyard Worker; the Vineyard Householder (21:28-45); and the King’s Banquet. The parables share common ideas: (1) a sovereign owner/feast-giver (God); (2) retrospects on Israel’s history; and (3) transfer of the kingdom to receptive out-of-the-ways—people Jesus has been gathering as the New Nation because they receive the kingdom, especially the disciples. All three parables reject unbelieving Israel and substitute Jesus’ people as the nation bearing the kingdom’s fruit (21:31-32; 21:42-43; 22:8-10). In 22:7 the sequence of events suggests that the city is not the Jerusalem burned and destroyed in 70 A. D.,502 but the old Jerusalem destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B. C. Here too the unbelieving Israel is rejected and the kingdom is shifted to the New Israel of Jesus’ mission.

We may summarize Matthew’s concept of The New Israel and its reception of the kingdom. The most persistent appearance of this theme is in the gradual divide between the Old and New Israel in the face of the kingdom’s appearance. The New Israel is the growing people of Messiah. The Old Israel goes on its unbelieving path to judgment. Many passages state Jesus’ and the New Israel’s values, behavior and life, like the Sermon on the Mount and the other discourses. In the parables of chapters 21-22, the clearest form of the New Israel theme appears. The disciples with Jesus and other kingdom people form the core of the new “nation.”503 The disciples are especially instructed in the “mysteries of the kingdom (Matt 13)”—new, previously unknown details about the kingdom’s nature and working. A complementing motif in Matthew is the permanence of the law (5:1720; 23:2-4), which is expanded by Messiah’s law (Isa 42:4; Matthew 28:20—“whatever I command you”). The New Israel is largely thought of as outcasts rejected by the agents of the temple-state—the marginalized, unclean, demonized and ostracized—made new and drawn to Jesus as his people. In responding to Jesus or benefiting from his miracle-powers, they make up the new nation along with the disciples who represent them, and will become their leaders. In Matthew, faith and salvation belong to these themes. The variety of such people and the language used to describe them is remarkable. There is a ray of hope for the custodians of the Old Israel. The persistent theme of repentance represents a contingency for the Old Israel that makes reception of the Messiah and his salvation along with the growth of the new people of God a continuing possibility. In short, the available kingdom

502 So D. Carson and B. Reicke, “Matthew,” in EBC, 8:457. 503 A. Saldarini, “Reading Matthew without Anti-Semitism, in The Gospel of Matthew in Current Study, ed D. Aune (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 170-173, is certainly right to object to “New Israel” when it has the late first century-second century meaning: the church of Gentile Christians replaces Israel in this parable. But he seems to skip the immediate reference to the disciples and outcast followers, and instead thinks it is Matthew’s community at the time of writing. That Matthew’s community is Jewish Christian and a continuation of the New Israel of Jesus’ ministry is likely, but skipping Jesus’ immediate reference seems strange. On any reckoning, the reference to the “nation” that will receive the kingdom is not the Gentile church; rather it is to a New Israel arising within the Old Israel—mostly Jewish at least for the prospective future. Saldarini is concerned about the influence of the church or Gentile interpretation of “nation” on AntiSemitism, which is by all means a serious matter. It is unnecessary, however, to deny a New Israel theology in principle on Matthew’s part in order to avoid an offensive or troubling “replacement theology.”

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creates a crisis for the Old Israel; only its repentance and faith in Jesus and his kingdom can relieve it.504 The Kingdom in the Pauline Epistles

Despite the tendency of many dispensationalist millenarians to argue that the kingdom in the Pauline epistles is either the “overall kingdom of God” meaning the rule of God over the universe and world, or exclusively the future messianic kingdom of a renewed, repentant Israel, the realized/present kingdom in Jesus’ mission has left its mark on Paul’s eschatology as well: it has also left its mark on Acts. In the end, it will be necessary to conclude from the three themes examined below, that the church too is a preliminary stage of the messianic kingdom, i.e., the salvation-first stage. This is the case even though the church is also an entirely new revelation in history occasioned by Israel’s rejection of Messiah. This dual nature of the church seems contrary to some forms of dispensational theology, but nonetheless appears to be a reality in Paul’s thought.

The Shift in the Ages

With the whole New Testament, Paul recognized that in Christ a shift had occurred in the earthly history of the divine plan. Perhaps we may say that the center of the plan of salvation in history has been reached. A suitable starting point is Galatians 4:4.505

But when the fullness of the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

While the biblical words “fullness” and “time” are always hard to define precisely, several features of the context point to the meaning “full amount” since the word for time (chronos) refers to a measurable quantity of time. The sense is—when the full amount of time reached its maximum quantity—numbered years for example— God sent his Son. In the preceding metaphor, an infant’s time of adoption into sonship determined by his father is marked by terms of extent of time: “as long as (4:1),” “while we were minors (4:3),” “you are no longer under . . . (4:7),” and “date set by the father (4:2).” The last phrase uses the term prothesia meaning “set beforehand,” picturing God assigning a specific stretch of time to the preparatory period before Christ. Furthermore, the contextual paragraph characterizes the old era as a time of waiting. It was a time of childhood and slavery (4:1) and living under “elemental spirits,” a term covering the Mosaic law and Israel’s history, and the world’s dominion by sin, death, flesh, law, and demonic spirits. Galatians 4:1-7 also has a set of terms for the new time of Christ’s appearance and salvation: adulthood, adoption (4: 1, 3, 6), the spirit (4:6), receiving the inheritance, and freedom

504 National repentance as an implicit contingency in Israel’s history is the subject of the first essay in this collection and should be read for a continuation of the story in Acts. 505 So H. Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of his Theology, trans J. R. DeWit (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), p. 44.

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from the old elemental powers. Most of these terms specify identifiable stages or phases of life.

This outline of two eras is spoken of in other ways: Adam and Christ (Rom 5:12-21); the Old Adam and the New Adam (Christ; 1 Cor 15:44-49); the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. Adam’s age was the age of sin, flesh, disobedience and death; Christ’s age is the age of righteousness, Spirit, obedience and life (Rom 5:1-12). In 2 Corinthians 3 Paul characterizes the age of the law as an administration of death, condemnation, and a veil that shut God off from view. One of his summary terms for the age of Christ that beautifully describes its joy and power, and the overwhelming mercy of God is “grace.” This description affirms that the evil world deserved only God’s wrath, but that in his great love he decided to continue the history of salvation and act toward the evil world in mercy and kindness (John 1:17: law then grace).

In this manner, a broad two-part outline of the history of man and salvation is marked out. Paul and the whole New Testament (note its name!) together see that the messianic (Christ) age has arrived. But although this is true, the messianic kingdom has not come in its fullness as promised by both the Old Testament and Jesus. Instead, as noted in the preceding discussion, only aspects of the kingdom have arrived—Messiah himself in his divine person, word and works, the salvation of the kingdom, and even the beginning of the prophesied New Israel, but not the full and final kingdom or the wholly renewed Israel. Instead, beginning with Paul, the church has intervened as a newly added part of the messianic age (Christ), but before the kingdom of peace arrives at the parousia. With Christ, the mid-point of the whole redemptive plan in history has been reached,506 the New Covenant inaugurated, the Spirit already given, and the promised messianic salvation set in operation through Christ. Paul similarly speaks of “this age . . . and the age to come (Eph 1:21).” The same division of salvation time into two ages is found in Jesus’ teaching in the gospels (Mark 10:30; Matt 19:28-30; Luke 18:29-30). It is also found in Jewish apocalyptic books from the New Testament era, but without the New Testament’s sense of the beginning of fulfillment. As will be seen there is coordination of thought about the “ages” with the basic two-part outline noted above. The coordination yields an overlap arrangement that coordinates church and kingdom in a way not typical of dispensational theology, but still a way that can be integrated with dispensational theology if care is taken to consider all details and their implications. The two-age division of time noted above does not correspond exactly to the twopart concepts gathered above. Rather, the “present age” continues beyond the cross and resurrection, and was still current when Paul wrote Galatians. This is apparent when Paul speaks in Galatians 1:4 of “the present evil age.” The added adjective “evil” links “the present age” to Adam’s age; but unlike the Adam-Christ contrast, the expression thinks of it as continuing into the Christ age. That the present age is still evil is also shown by reference 506 This is the basic thesis of the extraordinary study of Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time, trans F. Filson (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964).

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to “the god of this age (satan; 2 Cor 4:4),” who blinds people to Christ and the gospel. However, it also seems clear that “the present evil age actually does coordinate with the age of Adam, since Paul recognizes that Adam’s influence also lives on despite Christ’s coming and work; men continue to be delivered from Adam by Christ. Thus the age of evil under Adam and the age of redemption under Christ overlap. The clearest statement of overlap is in the secondary Pauline book of Hebrews, where in 6:5 the writer speaks of the powers of Christ and the Spirit as “the powers of the age to come,” which is a way of saying that even though the age to come is strictly future, its powers have been felt and seen in the events of Christ’s first advent and the works of the Spirit as “foretastes.” The term “the age to come” refers to the whole future work of Christ in the coming messianic kingdom and the eternal kingdom beyond it, regardless of its more limited meanings in Jewish apocalyptic literature of the second temple era. Paul can also speak of ages in plural. Of the past ages he says in 1 Corinthians 1 10:ll, that New Testament times are the ends of the ages, meaning the events of the past up to the center (Christ) are multiple in number and have brought an end to foregoing ages: “. . . for our instruction upon whom the ends (plural tela) of the ages have come.” Likewise he again uses the plural for the future in Ephesians 2:7: “. . . that in the ages (pl) to come . . . .” The plurality of past and future “ages” can be coordinated with his term “dispensation,” since he names other eras in the past history of salvation by generalized terms: promise (Adam to Moses) and law (Moses to New Covenant). He also names grace as the current “dispensation/administration” equivalent in extent with the church era (to the parousia), and finally the kingdom as a future era beyond the present. Grace and kingdom appear to be two dispensations of the Christ age or new covenant half of the history whereas promise and law were the two dispensations of the pre-Christ age. Thus Paul thinks of the old age consisting of two dispensations covering the old covenant, and of two dispensations covering the new covenant era. By using such terms he seems to think of pairs or two-part eras amounting to two major time divisions under each of the two “ages.”507

The future kingdom of Christ, therefore, is coordinated with biblical thought about the ages, and this concept is found in both Christ and Paul. Such a common outline is shared by several apostolic leaders, just as Christ and the salvation of the kingdom are common ground between them. Within this shared framework, Paul distinctively adds the idea of four dispensations, a concept found only in his epistles. Paul further coordinates the “age/ages” framework with the revelation of the mystery of the church which was granted to him in connection with the era of the Gentile world mission and the egalitarian church, otherwise called “the dispensation of grace.” It may be rightly said, therefore, that the revelation of the mystery of the church (Eph 3; Col 1) was inserted by divine revelation into the era of the prophesied New Covenant or the early messianic age as an

507 Cf. C. Baker, Dispensational Relationships (Milwaukee: Grace Line Bible Lessons, n. d.), pp.12-15 for comments on “the ages.” W. Kaiser, Toward a Theology of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978) discusses themes and terms that unify Genesis 1-11 with Genesis 1-12, noting especially the language for God’s speech, e. g., terms like spoke, made an oath, blessed, multiply, the nations, etc. Cf. his pp. 43-44, 71-83.

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unprophesied but divinely planned alternative508 form of the interval or delay between the first and second advents. The occasion—but not the “cause”—for this divine action was the failure of Israel to respond to the Messiah in faith; the “cause” can only be God’s plan. Israel’s “stumbling” over God’s messianic favor, and its inability, therefore, to grow the New Israel remnant into a sufficient kind (leadership) and quantity of Jewish believers to lead directly to the messianic kingdom, occasioned the dramatic shift to the Pauline Gentile mission seen in Acts and the Pauline epistles. The new mystery revelation accompanied this mission movement as the establishment of the egalitarian church; and it prolonged the interval of Israel’s unbelief and scattering. Or, to put it a bit differently, the insertion of the mystery into this promised-kingdom framework along with the Christ-revelation, was occasioned by the failure of Israel’s contingent repentance; that repentance was necessary for the establishment of the kingdom during the period covered by Acts, and especially chapters 1-8. This arrangement, therefore, may be rightly thought of as a contingency involving alternative plans. With this framework in mind, the kingdom in Paul can be considered. The Kingdom in Paul



The coming kingdom of God with Christ as its ruling King has already been discussed as

it appears in 1 Corinthians 15:22-28. The terms “kingdom” or “kingdom of God” actually appear about 14 total times in the epistles. Most uses of the term have some kind of future nuance, even in cases where already realized elements of the kingdom may be in view— something of the main themes above, i.e., the available kingdom, its salvation, the New Israel remnant, and the New Testament’s pattern of the overlapping ages. Anticipating the conclusion, we may say that the epistles appear to view the mystery-church revelation as an added preliminary stage of the messianic kingdom, but limited to the salvation-ethics dimension. This conclusion will be troubling to many dispensational premillennialists, some more so, some less, depending on the degree of their willingness to coordinate continuities between the dispensations, and to perhaps shift some thought habits and terminology used for more than a generation to identify and verbalize key dispensational ideas. The final segment of this essay—on Ephesians 1:21-23—will add support to this general assessment of kingdom thought of the Pauline epistles. All fourteen uses of “kingdom” by Paul refer to the mediatorial/messianic kingdom, although in varied ways. None is used for the “overall” reign of God over his creation and history in general. It is not always easy to determine whether “kingdom of God” refers to the present or future. The term “kingdom of God” embraces a future goal of the salvation plan. If so, those aspects already present, like the pattern developed in Jesus’ salvation teaching, are the “already” realizations of some kingdom powers drawn from prophetic knowledge of the end-time goal and already at work in the world but without the fullness of the final kingdom. That fullness is reserved until the Second Coming and beyond—the 508 Baker, the founding era theologian of the grace movement, saw clearly that both covenants and ages in Scripture had to be coordinated with the dispensations. He discussed this thoughtfully first in his booklet Dispensational Relationships, and again in his later work A Dispensational Theology. My coordination of the ideas in the above discussion is not identical with his, but they are similar. My treatment, as must be clear by now, is much influenced by G. E. Ladd, who coordinated the ages and the kingdom more precisely than did Baker. Nonetheless Baker’s treatment of the issues discussed here was an important step in the biblical rooting of our form of dispensational theology.

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millennial messianic kingdom, and the eternal kingdom. I begin accordingly, with those uses of “kingdom of God” which seem clearly future. One group of texts thinks of the kingdom as simply coming in the future. In these texts it is associated, directly or indirectly, with the Second Coming or has other future indicators. 2 Timothy 4:1. “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom . . . .” Here the Second Coming is referred to with one of its main terms, epiphaneia (appearing). The reference to judging the living and dead sets the kingdom in the context of future resurrection(s). 2 Timothy 4:18. “The Lord will rescue me from every evil and save me for his heavenly kingdom.” “For” is a translation of eis (for, unto, toward, into). The adjective “heavenly” clearly points to the future beyond the present era. It does not refer, however, to heaven in a local sense, but modifies “kingdom” in its visible earthly character and hence is roughly equivalent to “kingdom of God’ since heaven is God’s dwelling-place; it denotes the kingdom in its source or heavenly character, but nonetheless on earth. The phrase is as close as Paul comes to Jesus’ term “kingdom of heaven” which is not heaven either, but heaven-come-down-to-earth in Jesus, God’s son. The normal biblical pattern is that “heavenly” and other such adjectives more normally refer to heaven (God or his powers) coming down to earth to do its work.509 It remains true, though, that “heaven” in other contexts does refer to heaven-up-there, the abode of God and the interim dwelling of God’s people between death and resurrection. Still, “kingdom” is an earthly monarchy as in the prophetic descriptions. 1 Thessalonians 2:12. “. . . to lead a life worthy of God, who calls you to his kingdom and glory.” “Calls” is present tense and means “is calling,” and is followed again by eis (unto, toward, into); he does not say “called” as though already, say, to salvation, but to inheritance in the messianic kingdom as in Jesus saying about the meek inheriting the earth (Matt 5:5). “Glory” is unmistakably the end time glory frequently associated with the latter days and kingdom.510 1 Corinthians 15:24. “Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power.” The kingdom is future here on any reckoning. The text thinks of its conclusion—the time of its completion. But when it begins is a debated point, as was noted above. This discussion prefers its inception at the parousia as in the discussion of 1 Corinthians 15 above. 2 Thessalonians 1:5. “. . . that you may be made worthy of the kingdom of God for which you are suffering . . . .” It is hard to decide on a future reference here. The pattern of “through tribulation to the kingdom,” as it is sometimes called, is present here. The strong judgment and parousia elements in the immediate context point to the kingdom as future.

509 Similarly, C. Schoonhoven, The Wrath of Heaven (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966). 510 So. G. Milligan, St. Paul’s Epistles to the Thessalonians: The Greek Text with Introduction and Notes (London: Macmillan and Co., 1908), p. 27, for an early twentieth century commentator; and C. Wanamaker, The Epistles to the Thessalonians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), p. 108, for the later twentieth century. Like Milligan, Wanamaker thinks “glory” is decisive.

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A second group of five Pauline uses thinks of the kingdom as the inheritance of the

righteous with mostly future tense verbs, although other variations of expression occur as well. Whether noun or verb of the same root, the sense is the same—inheritance, inherit. While the righteous inherit the kingdom, the wicked cannot gain it in its fullest sense because they are not heirs of God or Christ. Still, as in the Old Testament, the “nations” will be present in their natural state on earth (Rev 20:3). 1 Corinthians 6:9-10. “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.” The future tense is used both times for “inherit.” This must be the future kingdom, since by the time it is established, the unrighteous are simply excluded, which is not yet true at the time Paul writes; they are still very much present, and some are even in the Corinthian church.511 Galatians 5:21. (again with a catalog of vices) “. . . those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.” Ephesians 5:5. “Be sure of this, that no immoral or impure man, or one who is covetous (an idolator), has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.” The tense of “has” is present, not future. But the notion of inheritance and the exclusion of the vice-ridden is parallel to 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and Galatians 5:21.512 1 Corinthians 15:50. “I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.” The certainty of a future thought here lies in the fact that he is thinking of resurrection: no one can “inherit” the kingdom of God in a purely natural body.513 A narrowed sense of “inherit” seems required here, i.e., the thought is limited to Christ and his own people. This situation will create a major divide in the messianic kingdom and implies that the kingdom’s people are the believing resurrected; others will be present in unbelief and natural bodies, but not as “heirs.” Perhaps it is necessary to think of large scale subdivisions within the world-wide kingdom.

These future texts about the kingdom of God give perspective from which to view those not so clearly future. The next group shows the present aspect of the kingdom. Powers and qualities are drawn from knowledge of the future kingdom and are viewed as already working in the present church. 511 See G. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), p. 242, for comments on the future perspective of the text; also Conzelmann, A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, trans J. Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), p. 106: “The original apocalyptic sense of ‘kingdom of God’ is maintained.” That the unrighteous cannot inherit the kingdom was a Jewish notion. 512 For recognition of the future element here see A. Lincoln, Ephesians (Dallas: Word Books, 1990), p. 325, but with an appropriate caution about Paul’s present concerns; likewise E. Best, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Ephesians (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), p. 483, but also with recognition that the present is Paul’s concern (p. 482). 513 On the text see Conzelmann, First Corinthians, p. 289: “. . . flesh and blood . . . ,” speaks not of the resurrection of the dead, but of the transformation of the living at the parousia.” This is a hair-splitting false opposition: the transformation of dead and living saints at the parousia is a resurrection as 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17 shows.

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Romans 14:17. “For the kingdom of God does not mean food and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” Throughout the prophets, the future reign of God is a time of righteousness, peace and joy. The Holy Spirit in the church belongs to the prophecies of the coming kingdom as well. Paul extracts these qualities from what is known of the future kingdom and notes them as values already present for the people of God in the church era. This is the same pattern as in Jesus remarks about the powers of the kingdom present in his ministry. Paul’s list of four qualities is extremely brief and lacking any narrative or comments to illustrate how he thinks of their actual working.514 1 Corinthians 4:20. “For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power.” Again a quality of the kingdom of God is abstracted from its whole as in Romans 14:17, and assumed to be already operative in the body-church. Colossians 1:13. “He has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” The thought is about the past and present as the phrase “has delivered (metastasen, aorist indicative)” shows. And yet, there is probably a proleptic or future-already-present-in-part thought here. McClain reads this text as proleptic and he may not be wrong.515 However, the effective action of the kingdom is the already present forgiveness of sins for believers just as in John the Baptist and Jesus. “Kingdom of Christ” is almost certainly not intended to be something entirely different than “kingdom of God,” as Ephesians 5:5’s “kingdom of Christ and God” shows.516

These present applications of kingdom qualities are slight. One has to be somewhat surprised that Paul does not do it in this fashion (using the term “kingdom”) more frequently. Perhaps the stark contrast between his slight references to the kingdom compared to Jesus’ uses is an indication of a shift in emphasis for the interim of the church era to avoid confusion of the church with the kingdom. This is my observation, but Dunn also suggests the related possibility that Paul is careful about “kingdom” for another possible reason—to avoid the appearance of the church as a kingdom competing politically with Rome.517 We may conclude that Paul does indeed refer to the future kingdom of God in its consummation, but without a description except for 1 Corinthians 15:24-26; but the piece is more like a sequence of events specifying how the kingdom functions and ends, and what its achievements will have been by the time of its conclusion. Otherwise we have

514 For a similar assessment of this verse see J. Dunn, Romans, 2 vols (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1991), 2:822-823. By “similar” is meant that future and present aspects also appear in Dunn’s discussion. 515 McClain, Greatness of the Kingdom, p. 435: “. . . we have been transferred judicially (his italics) into the Kingdom of our Lord even before its establishment.” This text is reminiscent of the exorcisms of the gospels which also embody the presence of the kingdom before its full consummation. So here may be add to power, its righteousness, its joy, the Spirit, its peace, its forgiveness of sins, and our release from the power of the devil, not by an exorcist or the gift of exorcism, but by a relationship to Christ; our salvation in Christ is our exorcism. 516 F. F. Bruce, “Colossians,” in Commentary on Ephesians and Colossians by E. K. Simpson and F. F. Bruce (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957), pp. 189-190, recognizes a future reference, but correctly emphasizes that it is an “already present” aspect of the kingdom: “By . . . a real experience and not a legal fiction they have received here and now the glory that is yet to be revealed.” 517 Ibid.

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only references to it; they divide between its future appearance at the Second Coming and something like “kingdom powers already in the world” before its future consummation. As in the gospels, powers and blessings of the kingdom and its salvation are already present in the lives of believers and their church. In this way, continuity is established between Jesus’ mission to Israel and the era of the church, but also between the church and the future consummation of the kingdom. Both continuities and discontinuities exist in shifts between the dispensations. Thus despite the mere fourteen references, the Pauline and Revelation pattern of parousia-then-kingdom is sustained and supported. Ephesians 1:22-23

Finally, there is the kingdom-like “subjection of all things” of Ephesians 1:22-23. The verses use Psalm 8:6 (LXX) as does the related passage of 1 Corinthians 15:27 where the Psalm allusion links with the future messianic kingdom. Ephesians lacks 1 Corinthian’s linkage with terms like “reign” and “kingdom,” although the absence of such terms may not be significant since in both Psalm 8 and Psalm 110 kingship and subjection are correlated. If subjection of all things by Christ is a kingdom concept in 1 Corinthians, it must also be a kingdom concept by analogy in some sense or aspect in Ephesians 1:22-23. However, not only does Ephesians lack the verb “reign” or the noun “kingdom”; it also omits to speak of any ruling or conquering the world as a political function of the church. That is, there are no indications of how the subjection functions as it does in the Old Testament descriptions of the kingdom and its operations; the text and its New Testament adaptations only specify the conquest of enemies in a general way. If “rule and authority, power and dominion” in 1:21 refer to earthly rulers, then all that is said is that Christ is exalted above them. Even the more explicit conquest language of the parallel in Colossians 2:14 refers only to Christ’s triumph over the law powers “by the cross,” with no reference or implication for extension of the victory into political conquest by the church. Nor does any kingdom-like conquest of the world or its governments appear in Ephesians 1:22-23: “head over all things” does not specify in what sense the subjection operates in the wider world now—not, at least, in any recognizable Old Testament sense. In addition, the one governing term “head” is restricted to headship over the church, not the world: “. . . gave him as head of all things to the church.” A similar thought reappears in Ephesians 4:9-11 where it refers to the church’s empowerment with gifts of ministry; but specific conquest of (human) world powers is not one of them as it is with the completed kingdom of Christ in 1 Corinthians 15:24-28. Even “Put all things under his feet (Psa 8:6),” which sounds gloriously triumphant and conquering, has no definition to tell the reader that it refers to anything like the church’s conquest of world governments. On the other hand, there is one hint of function in the very last phrase of 1:23: “. . . him who fills all in all.” In fact, this phrase seems to mean that Christ is working through his church to fill everything everywhere with himself. This is probably a thought about world mission and evangelism through the church’s growth and use of its gifts as in 4:11-16. Hence, in this sense the church is a stage or phase of the kingdom of God in its proclamation of the kingdom’s salvation everywhere in the world.

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“Head over all things” after “put all things in subjection” suggests exhaltation and power, but no concrete function is stated. Or is it just a glorious position over all things that still awaits specific, concrete action and thus the reason for Paul’s phrase, “in this age and the age to come”? The use of subjection language from Psalm 8 implies conquest, but no conquering activity is specified as it is in 1 Corinthians 15—certainly no conquest of hostile governments or rulers beyond the triumph of the atonement and resurrection (cf Col 2:14-15). With the same subjection language from the same Psalm (8) in 1 Corinthians 15:27 there is a political function specified: “destroying every rule and every authority and every power,” and “. . . he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.” These meaningful functional descriptions do not appear in Ephesians for the church; they do appear in 1 Corinthians 15 for the future kingdom. The passage limits Christ’s relation to exaltation over principalities and powers, and does not go beyond this achievement either here or in Colossians 2:14-15, at least not in overt political conquest terms. Still, subjection language is kingship language. In . . . “head over all things for the church,” the sub-phrase “for/to the church” might be a normal dative of indirect object to complement the direct object “head.” Both Eadie in the nineteenth century and Lincoln in the late twentieth century understand it this way, but explain it later in terms of “for the benefit of.”518 Eadie suggests something like securing or protecting the church (dative of advantage, meaning “for the benefit of” which seems workable and does yield an intelligible function in the thought “to the church” or “for the church.” The phrase, “. . . fills all in all” is difficult. While E. Roels, whose work on Ephesians focused on its world mission thought, cannot find any world-mission thinking in Ephesians 1:21-23, this kind of language does seem to suggest it.519 The church as the “fullness” of Christ, i.e., having gained Christ’s spiritual and resurrection powers and gifts (as in 4:10-11), becomes the agent of “the fullness of him who fills all things.520 This language does, after all, seem to suggest a function in his exaltation, at least for the church, i.e., that he is now filling the world (peplaroumenou, direct middle, perhaps) with himself through the stabilizing and growth of the church as in 4:14-16. Contrary to any view that would not see mission thinking here, the thought seems to be that Christ’s action in his exalted state at God’s right hand is chiefly, at least for the church era, the extension of himself into everything everywhere, i.e., the evangelization of the world. Filling the earth with himself is thus preliminary to his return and reign. That is, his current work of subjecting is to fill the world with knowledge of himself through the operation of his powers and gifts in the church before he returns to establish his larger rule of the world in justice and righteousness. Thus, it appears that Roels, who sees world mission in Ephesians as a whole, might have seen it in 1:22-23 as well.

518 J. Eadie, Commnentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1883; Reprint Edition by Zondervan, Grand Rapids MI, n.d.), p. 107; Lincoln, Ephesians, p. 67: “for the benefit of believers . . . .” 519 Lincoln, Ephesians, p. 78: “. . . the writer . . . does not choose to emphasize the Church’s active missionary efforts,” citing E. Roels, God’s Mission: The Epistle to the Ephesians in Mission Perspective (Franeker: T. Wever, 1962), pp. 231-232. Lincoln makes these comments upon E. Schweizer’s (Neotestamentica, pp. 314-316, 327-329) thought that there is in fact mission expansion thought in Ephesians 1:22-23. 520 The adjective pasin in this interpretation is a local dative plural meaning “in all places” rather than the more usual “in every way” or “all in all.” It is probably neuter to the parallel panta (all things), not “all in all,” as in most versions, which is hopelessly vague.

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Together with other realized elements of the kingdom in Paul’s epistles, Ephesians 1:22-23 thinks of the church as a specially revealed preliminary stage of the messianic kingdom of God. But the passage, along with its parallels in 1:10 and 4:11ff, fails to specify any meaningful political functions of the kingdom for the church. Rather these texts together envision only a world-mission-of-the-gospel as the subjection function of Christ for the church era. Through the church’s preaching of the gospel, growth and gifts, God’s purpose is that the gospel be preached throughout the world preliminary to Jesus’ Second Coming and kingdom. Nevertheless, this restriction does not preclude, but rather strongly implies that the body-church of this dispensation of grace is actually a stage of the messianic kingdom, even though in a remarkably limited way. How to account for this is best explained by recognizing that the church is an entirely new revelation of the people of God, not known in the Old Testament or gospels, but divinely inserted as an extra into the already existing framework of the messianic age—the age which begins the prophesied reign of God. Conclusion We may conclude with several points. (1) The New Testament quite uniformly pictures the future messianic political-social kingdom to commence with the Second Coming.521 (2) Two passages, one in Paul and one in Revelation, also picture an earthly kingdom of Christ as occurring between two group resurrections with the earthly reign of Christ and his saints between. (3) When we try to fill in the meaning of these kingdom references and scenes with Old Testament descriptions of the messianic kingdom, a coherent picture of a world-wide kingdom of Israel’s Messiah appears with many details of his reign. (4) There is no change in the elements of the prophesied kingdom throughout the New Testament; it is the same kingdom that is referred to everywhere. (5) However, there is a modification over when the several aspects of the kingdom actually enter upon their historical operation: Jesus inaugurates the kingdom’s salvation at his first advent; but he forcefully predicts the delay of the kingdom’s full universal ethnic, social, and political qualities until his return. (6) Paul reflects this same “already-but-not-yet” division of the kingdom’s several dimensions. This means the church as body of Christ—the church of the newly revealed mystery and the integrated Gentile world mission without Israel or its spiritual renewal—also became a preliminary stage of the messianic kingdom. That is, the church as a uniquely revealed new people of God fills the interim between the first and second advents, after, that is, Israel failed to meet the condition of its repentance leading to its prophesied mediatorial role in the world’s salvation and moral reordering. Instead, the church now fills that function, but only in a limited, preliminary way and without any commission to rule the nations politically. This latter function is reserved for the Second Advent and the ensuing messianic kingdom in its fullness. In this sense, the church is not the kingdom, as dispensational theology rightly maintains. A recent work arguing for “historic premillennialism” against “dispensational premillennialism” by members of a conference at Denver Seminary,entitled The Case for Historic Premillennialism, is, consistently affirmative of premillennialism. Its concern is with the Left Behind literature and its pretribulation rapture. The book’s strongest argument against pretribulationism is absence in the early church fathers. Otherwise the essays make many worthwhile points. 521

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Appendix The Pre-consummation and Recapitulation Debate over Revelation 19-20 since 1989: A Summary and Assessment A vigorous exegetical debate developed beginning about 1987 over what used to be

universally called premillennialism or amillennialism. The discussion directly affects the interpretation of the parousia scene of Revelation 19:11-21 and how that scene coordinates with the millennium and judgments of Revelation 20:1-14. I said it used to be thought of as a debate over premillennialism or amillennialism because this terminology has been shifted by the non-millenarian side of the discussion. Some recent representatives of the older amillennialist exegesis of Revelation 19-20 now wish to call their view “The Preconsummation Parousia.” We will not know about other substantial modifications until the public print discussion resumes—if it ever does—although the issues raised by both sides seem to merit its continuation, especially since the outcome relates to the Christian view of the end of history. The purpose of this appendix is to give an account of the debate, review its literature briefly, and make an assessment of what both sides have achieved. “Preconsummation Parousia” is perhaps an improvement over older ways to describe the relation of the Second Coming and the future kingdom in the sense that the older amillennialist exegesis now describes its view with a term that at least posits the Second Coming before the consummation. This is not new, of course, but the terminology is new. Virtually all views will agree with it as such, but will go their own ways with the details. Just as a renewed millenarianism was developing in Protestantism since the time of J. H. Alsted (c 1620) raised sharp disagreement, so the growth of dispensational premillennialism raised the discussion to a new level of shrillness during the twentieth century. The attempt to redirect the discussion began in 1987 with the publication of V. Poythress’ Understanding Dispensationalists (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987). The book was the first to advocate the terminology shift noted above by re-labeling the amillennial view of Revelation 19-20 “pre-consummationist,” i.e., that the Second Coming occurs before the consummation. Presumably it was thought useful for amillennialism to propose a partial concession to premillennialism to the effect that at least the two views could agree that the parousia is to be the initial event of a cluster of final events. The events for the amillennialist view would be the parousia followed by one general resurrection and the one general judgment. The new terminology, however, does not indicate a change in how the end-time events are thought of, except that a sequential factor is explicitly admitted in that Christ’s parousia is the operative event for the sequel events. Otherwise, premillennialism’s more detailed sequential concepts of the several events making up the end-times remain in place as does the older amillennial insistence on one basic event of resurrection and judgment for all of humanity. Poythress did not carry the discussion any farther. The next step was an article in the Westminster Theological Journal 51 (1989): 319-344, by R. Fowler White. White’s essay begins by noting the standard amillennial recapitulationist view of 20:7-10 in which 19:11-21 and 20:7-10 are harmonized into twin accounts of the same judgment event with no sequence of parousia-induced events through 269

the two pieces. Nor is there any sequencing in the binding of Satan and millennium scene of 20:1-6. White finds B. Warfield’s 1929 discussion in Biblical Doctrines on “The Millennium and the Apocalypse” to be the last account of this view of any significance. White thinks studies of amillennial or postmillennial recapitulation teaching after Warfield have done nothing to advance the discussion, but merely repeated older arguments. He cites studies by J. Adams, B. Chilton, W. Hendricksen and A. Hoekema, and complains about the same with premillennial sequence-of-events treatments of Revelation 19-20, mentioning J. Walvoord and G. Ladd. White thinks of his Westminster Journal article as new ground on which he will re-examine the old arguments for recapitulationism, and develop a stronger case in its defense against premillenarians. However, he ends his opening statement of goals and procedure on a modest note: “I hope to have injected some new life into the discussion of how Revelation 20:1-10 relates to Rev 19:11-21.”522 In this sense the article at least attempts to cut a new path through the interpretive thicket. In 1997 a new collection of essays defending premillennialism appeared under the title The Coming Millennial Kingdom, edited by D. Campbell and J. Townsend. It contains an essay by Harold Hoehner of Dallas Theological Seminary on “Evidence from Revelation 20.” Hoehner reviews the details of visionary events in Revelation 19-20 in order to undermine White’s (and other amillennialist’s) theory that 19:11-21 is recapitulated in 20:1-10 (or more exactly 20:7-10). Hoehner thinks expansion and differentiation of events making up the visionary content of Revelation 19-20 should still be viewed as clear because of details White by-passes while concentrating instead on similarities and repetitions in the passages. Hoehner’s emphasis on variation in the envisioned events reveals a weakness in White’s treatment. These varia lead Hoehner to the conclusion that White’s article was not a decisive case for recapitulation. White followed Hoehner with a rebuttal in an article entitled “Making Sense of Rev 20:1-10? Harold Hoehner versus Recapitulation,” in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 37 (1992): 539-551. Here White focuses on the use of the Gog and Magog prophecy of Ezekiel 38-39 in Revelation 19-20, on the end of God’s wrath in Revelation 15:1 which White thinks is repeated in Revelation 19-20, and on whether the accounts of cosmic destruction refer to the same event in the scenes of 6:12-17; 16:17-21; 19:11-21; and 20:9-11. White mostly reviews his previous arguments on these issues and comments on Hoehner’s alleged failures in answering him decisively. White continued the debate in a new article in the Journal of the Evangelical Society 42 (1999): 53-66, under the title, “On the Hermeneutics and Interpretation of Rev 20:1-3: A Pre-consummationist Perspective.” But the debate seems to have stalled from the premillennial side after Hoehner’s rebuttal in The Coming Millennial Kingdom noted above. In this new piece, White likens the defeat of the devil in Revelation 19:19-21 and 20:1-3 to an ancient Near Eastern thought pattern in which the dragon of evil and chaos is defeated by God who, after the victory, rebuilds both the world (the pattern at creation) and Israel—the first time after the defeat of Egypt, the second time after the defeat of Babylon by the Persians. The victory-rebuilding pattern shows again in Revelation 19-20: after the defeat(s) of the devil, God rebuilds his kingdom as he did earlier with both creation and Israel. There is only one defeat of Satan in Revelation (amillennialism’s historic view), not two (premillennialism’s view—first his binding, then his destruction). The two passages, 522 R. F. White, “Reexamining the Evidence for Recapitulation in Rev 20:1-10,” Westminster Theological Journal 51 (1989): 319-344, p. 320.

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but primarily 20:1-3, depict the same single defeat of the devil and refer to only one event (20:1-3 recapitulates 19:19 [or 17-21]). But the main point of the article with respect to the debate is to ask what defeat-of-the-devil is in view. However, Fowler never says anything of this until the last few lines of the conclusion. And then the answer is: the devil is defeated in “those first-coming events in relation to the draconic Satan.” In a footnote he adds, “It is enough to associate the vision of Rev 20:1-3 within the complex of events associated with Christ’s death/exhaltation.” This means the argument is only a new way of stating the older and persistent amillennial view that the devil’s defeat/binding occurred at the First Advent; it will not occur in the future before the millennium. This piece is certainly a worthwhile comparison of ancient Near Eastern myth patterns of victory over the dragon and subsequent rebuilding. But in the end White collapses the high hopes expressed in his first (Westminster Theological Journal) article for forging a new path in the stalemated discussion of the millennium. He finally returns to the same view of the devil’s binding that has always been expressed by amillennialists against premillennialists.523 The debate seems to have faltered, even from the amillennialist side, at least until traditional premillennialists develop some new perspectives on Revelation 19-20 beyond Hoehner, whose contribution is certainly not insignificant. An article by David Mathewson, also in The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (44 [2001]: 237-251), does seek to move the discussion forward. Mathewson agrees with White and Beale’s view that Revelation 20:1-10 recapitulates 19:11-21. Using the same repeated-scenes technique as White, he notices that a number of passages in Revelation not discussed by White form a chain-theme through the book on the subject of the promised future rule of the saints with Christ in the kingdom. Revelation begins this theme in 1:6 and repeats it in 2:26-27; 3:21; 5:10; 11:18; and 20:4-6. This sounds premillenarian. Fowler had not dealt with these texts, but like the judgment scenes, they too require finalization and fulfillment. Mathewson finds their fulfillment in Revelation 19:11-21 and 20:4-6, reading them traditionally as a real future parousia and kingdom. However, he reads the 1,000 years of 20:4-6 as a symbolic number, and argues that its meaning is an idea—the vindication and reign of the saints with no temporal intent or actuality. How then can one speak of a “millennium” in 20:4-6 while reading the two judgments of the devil in 19:17-21 and 20:1-2, 7-10 (on either side of the millennium) as the same event? Because, he thinks, the judgments and the reign of the saints occur in a cluster without sequence differences. Here the discussion rests without resolution, at least in the pages of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society and The Westminster Theological Journal. The recapitulationist argument for the identity of judgment events in Revelation 19:11-21 and 20:1-3, 7-10 (with the millennium between) appeared in White’s first article to be looking for a new level of discussion. But there are some problems even in White’s smooth articulation and careful attention to his key texts in Revelation. The recapitulationist argument is isolative and reductionist at least in Fowler’s articulation. He limits himself to several thematically similar texts and reduces them to one event only. His treatment of Ezekiel 38-39 disallows multiple uses for different end-time events. For him, the parousia and a later climactic victory over the devil rather assumes that one prophecy 523 G. Beale, The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) repeats most of Fowler White’s points made in his original 1989 article, though Beale does not appear to be especially desirous of forging some new ground as a participant in the debate under discussion.

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(Ezekiel 38-39) can have only one fulfillment event. Elsewhere, however, the New Testament separates “already but not yet” fulfillment from future fulfillments with various Old Testament prophecies including the kingdom. This can be seen in its use of Psalm 8 (kingdom/subjection theme) for multiple aspects of fulfillment under Christ’s dominion, including both First and Second Advent events. Similarly other New Testament uses of the Old Testament split singular Old Testament resurrection promises into First and Second Advent fulfillments. White’s narrowness in limiting one prophecy to one event also shows in his unwillingness to consider Revelation’s use of thought patterns like retrospect and extension along with recapitulations of identical or similar scenes. In method of argument, White assumes the opposing view bears the whole burden of proof—a point on which he insists repeatedly, whereas the burden of proof actually lies with anyone who makes an assertion or offers a thesis opposing another thesis, that is, whoever makes an argument bears a burden of proof. Hoehner, representing a traditional premillenarian view, pays more attention to details of historical reference in Revelation 19:11-20:10. He assumes that the more details one isolates, the more the case grows for both varied events and a sequence for those events. To some extent, however, Hoehner tends to let proposed historical referents dominate consideration of symbols and vision elements, although he does acknowledge these factors. Hoehner’s handling of details like the use of Ezekiel 38-39 in both 19:1121 and 20:7-10 is detail-burdened. He seeks to differentiate Ezekiel 38-39 by noting six detailed differences between Ezekiel and Revelation, and concludes that the prophecy and the details of the Revelation passages show that the events described are not the same. In larger perspective, the issues of Revelation’s apparent use of Ezekiel in the two passages are not resolved satisfactorily. Overall, White and Beale’s treatment of the passages is more sophisticated than Hoehner’s, but also operates on too narrow a set of themes and with the assumption that one prophetic text may have only one fulfillment event. Accordingly, White and Beale seek to reduce the events of Revelation 19-20 to one single event, and pay little attention to differentiating details. Mathewson’s treatment correctly uses a thematic and recapitulated event/vision method and with it shows that the scenes of the promised reign of Christ and the saints from earlier in Revelation require a finalized fulfillment and climax. That climax is the 1,000-year reign of Christ and the saints in Revelation 20:4-6, a scene that repeats the halfdozen earlier scenes of the saints ruling with Christ, and thereby climaxes them. In other words, the final millennial kingdom scene is a necessary scene to finalize Revelation’s repeated promises of the saints’ future reign with Christ, thus climaxing the series. However, when Mathewson asks about the nature of the millennial kingdom, he reduces it to a concept—the saints and Christ’s victory and the vindication of both. The millennium is not a real kingdom but a symbol for an abstraction with no tangible historical referent— an affirmation of victory and no more. This seems like an entirely inappropriate way for Revelation to climax a salvation history full of detailed, specific promises of an earthly messianic kingdom. Matthewson needed to show, but does not show, the manner in which the specific accumulated promises end in a grand, real, and detail-specific event of rule over the earth by Christ and his people. Even if he had only said the thousand years is a symbol of a long time, it would have opened space for historical realization of the kingdom promises. Instead, he finally joins the inevitable tendency of all non-millennial treatments 272

of Revelation to let the long string of Scriptural promises collapse at the end with no actual earthly era of kingship over the nations. Otherwise, how does God and man’s kingship of the earth have meaning when at the end everything shifts to heaven or ends in abstractions? Fullness of tangible, concrete meaning simply disappears, especially if one thinks with Scripture generally of a philosophy of history with an earthly conclusion. In the end, then, this “debate” tends to the amillennial reduction of biblical kingdom prophecies either to heaven or to unspecified abstractions. It does not move the discussion to a new level, except in recognizing certain aspects of Revelation’s communication methods. The kingdom in Revelation needs a new study that follows the recapitulated scenes of the book to a serious earthly climax, makes space for a final series of earthly events of divine sovereignty, does justice to the book’s use of retrospect and extension of details, recognizes its use of historical-referent details in symbol and vision, and allows the book the leeway to split singular Old Testament prophecies into multiple fulfillments which adapt to actual redemptive-history events.

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ESSAY VII THE DEVELOPMENT OF MILLENARIAN THOUGHT SINCE THE REFORMATION An Essay on the Growth of Renewed Premillennialism by Dale S. DeWitt and Philip J. Long On Development of a Millenarian Bibliography At present, there is no longer a question about whether a renewed premillennialism grew out of certain intellectual forces of the Reformation Era. It did; and the exposition of it has been growing richly in an ever expanding literature from about 1600 to the present. The statements and restatements show signs of gradual development with many twists and turns. This kind of eschatology was never stagnant. For the most part, each time someone of intellectual acumen undertook a restatement, fresh nuances emerged. The essay below does not claim to be a full history, but only a preliminary sketch of the path along which the renewed premillennialism made its way to the twenty-first century. Its point is that all recent forms of this view have sprung from predecessors in the long stream and belong equally to the basic type. The essay below grew out of a bibliography project on premillennial works since the Reformation. In the 1990s we began to think about the many expressions of premillennialism and other kinds of eschatology, and their many generalizations about the history of millenarian ideas. It occurred to us somewhere along this path that there ought to be an objective history of premillennialism since the Reformation, if not from the beginning. However, such a history cannot be written until a thorough bibliography of all millenarian work since the Reformation has been gathered. Since the time of Joshua Brooks’ work, A Dictionary of Writers on the Prophecies with the Titles and Occasional Description of their Works; Also an Appendix Containing Lists of Commentators, Annotators, etc., on the Holy Scriptures (4th Ed,1835), premillenarians have occasionally sought to compile bibliographic histories of their view. But their bibliographies are usually repetitious and sketchy rehearsals of the fact that the Christian world does have plenty of millenarian authors. They offer scanty notes on what was said per work, and move on to their next entry. What is lacking is a full history of the idea in its development from the Post-Reformation 275

renewal era down to the present, and with thorough attention to the historical contexts of such works. Carl Sanders III’s Premillennial Faith of J. H. Brookes (2001) is a model of the kind of historical theology study of which we are thinking. However, the sketch offered here is not such a history, but one sort of essay that might be preliminary to it—an effort to at least identify some of the lines along which such a history could be written and the recent research studies on which it must be based. In 1998, Professor Phillip Long and I—at the time both professors at Grace Bible College, Grand Rapids, Michigan—began discussing the idea of a bibliography of millenarian works in America, with appropriate attention to British and European forerunners. We first sought to expand the bibliographies furnished by the late Ernest Sandeen in his work, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism 1830-1930 (1970). We quickly multiplied the quantity of titles of his already substantial lists of such works. We then decided to divide our work into the British prelude (Long) and the American development (DeWitt)—divided this way because these were our respective interests. We worked steadily at this project for the next few years. By the time of DeWitt’s retirement in 2003, we had developed a large collection of British and American titles far exceeding Sandeen’s original titles in quantity. About the same time, Long began his doctoral studies and was not able to actively continue work on our project. I (DeWitt) took over his materials, added them to my own, and continued to develop the bibliography and the resultant sketch essay on the history of research. The bibliography itself now numbers about 1500 titles covering the period of roughly 1620 to 1960. In 2009 we finally obtained a copy of Brooks’ Dictionary. Brooks yielded about 160 more titles of British works on the subject (but not all millenarian) than what had been accumulated up to that time. E. Bickersteth’s bibliography was already in an early form by the time Brooks issued his fourth edition in 1835. Brooks accumulated well over 2000 titles, most of them commentaries on prophetic books (we did not include millenarian commentaries), but many topical works on millennial themes (our focus) as well, virtually all European and British (very few American titles). Brooks acknowledged the contribution of Bickerstech and W. Pym to his effort (Preface, p. 1). Hence we have been able to include many titles of topical works on the millennium, but still not all. The works of Brooks and Bickersteth are basic to any historical bibliography of premillennialism The essay that follows is not that bibliography, but is extracted from the beginning of our larger work—the actual bibliography of British and American millennialism. This essay appears as an introductory chapter at the beginning of the bibliography which we hope to publish separately. It seeks to represent what research on millenary studies has been done thus far, and what has been discovered about the movement of this eschatology along its historical path. What follows is a preliminary sketch of this history of research on millenary literature and exposition, and an equally preliminary sketch of millenary thinking since the Reformtion. It is hoped that others will build on this preliminary work. To call this a “preliminary work” seems to ignore important predecessors in the search for millenarian history. We are certainly indebted to Ernest Sundeen for his ground-breaking work on British and American millenarianism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our bibliography owes much to him and we consider our effort something of an expansion of his efforts. But perhaps any student of the history of millennialism owes the greatest debt to 276

Leroy Froom for his massive four-volume work, The Prophetic Faith of our Fathers—each volume about 800-1000 pages. We have consulted him constantly for post-Reformation works and information. However, Froom’s anti-Catholicism, we think, constricted his selection of material for comment on many prophetic writers he reviews. Our bibliography and this essay tries to cover the ground more broadly, even if in a more sketchy way then his effort. This is the sense in which it seems suitable to speak of this as a work “preliminary” to a conceivably larger history—perhaps when filled out, even another multvolume millennialist history free from Froom’s limited evaluations. We are also aware of the significant work of Crawford Gribben at Trinity College, Dublin. Gribben and his associates have produced significant detailed studies of millenarian thought in the UK, especially in Ireland. Gribben has produced the brief history, Evangelical Millennialism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500-2000 (2011). His effort is a notable synthesis of this history with many developed parallels to what follows herein and in our bibliography. We would have preferred to see a fuller account of the history of post-Reformation millennialisms. At bottom, the following is an essay on the history of research more than a sketch history of millenarianism’s history since 1600; but the latter is necessarily part of the picture. Since this is basically a bibliographic essay with discussion of an appreciable number of titles, it was decided to simply refer to titles in the textual flow, rather than footnote them. Beginnings of the Millenarian Renewal: The Reformation and Post-Reformation Eras to J. H. Alsted It appears that no premillenarian work was produced during the Reformation and PostReformation eras until that of J. H. Alsted in the 1620s (R. Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, p 210), although his colleague Johannes Piscator, is sometimes seen as a forerunner, perhaps with good reason; one occasionally sees allusions to Piscator in the literature in this respect. However, certain developments in Reformation and Post-Reformation theology created the dynamics for development of earthly eschatologies, including premillennialism and postmillennialism. The reformers appear to have avoided eschatology, perhaps for very good, even necessary reasons—necessary at least to their situation and goals. But they did not—and could not even if they had wished—prevent the development of earthly eschatology in their successors. They did, however—Calvin especially—set a context by their exposition of salvation in the framework of the covenant idea. In the Institutes, the covenant idea was explained by Calvin as an inner biblical development with an old and new form, the differences of which had to be explained, though in such a way as to keep the two in essential unity. Nonetheless, the idea of sequenced covenants within the progressing historical revelation of the one single divine covenant of grace appears to be there en nuce. Thus it seemed advisable to begin with the covenant in recent research, and then follow the main lines of development toward the millennium as a further dispensation beyond the church era with the Second Coming or literal First Resurrection or some other Christ-wrought event as the divide. 1. A. McGrath, Iustitia Dei (1986), vol. 2 passim, incidentally cites several references to covenants or the covenant idea in pre-reformation Catholic theology. In their study of the 277

covenant idea in Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor at Grossmunster Church in Zurich after the latter’s death in 1531, McCoy and Baker (Fountainhead of Federalism: Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenant Tradition [1991]) discuss this late medieval notion as well as the related contractual idea with which the Swiss confederation of cantons was formed in 1291. These covenant ideas formed part of the medieval background to the Reformation era development of the idea. Pre-Reformation covenant ideas are present in the thought of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They emphasized the sovereign action and power of God over human knowledge and reason: God is known as he sovereignly and freely acts, a perspective similar to that of Peter Damiani in the eleventh century (Norman Cantor, Medieval History, pp. 278-281; G. Leff, Medieval Thought, pp. 96-97). For these medieval thinkers, God is also sovereign over his own covenant (S. Ozment, Reformation in the Cities, p. 3). Biblical covenant thinking structures the Godman relationship within a rational legal framework functioning as a kind of container for the biblically revealed salvation. These studies show how Catholic theology in the preReformation era had a ready biblical reference point in this concept. Such thoughts in the Reformation predecessors stimulated the Reformation itself to a new synthesis of God and his covenant activity in the overall structure and details of the biblical history of redemption. Far more important than the pre-Reformation covenant idea for eschatology-inhistory, however, are the works of two thinkers of the twelfth century on the historyeschatology axis, one of lesser the other of greater influence. The first is Otto of Freising (1111[?]-1158 ). Otto was an uncle of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa; he became bishop of Freising in Bavaria in 1137 or 1138 (“Otto of Freising,” The Catholic Encyclopaedia, 8:358-359). The work he authored of significance to the history of eschatology was Chronicon seu rerum ab initio mundi ad sua usque tempora 1157 libri VIII—a history of the world from creation to the Second Coming which mixed history and prophecy into a single whole. Firth summarizes: “. . . Otto and many others before and after him argued for the continuation of the Roman Church until the end of time. During the second stage (of this history) the function of the prophecies was to warn Christians of the trials to come, and to promise them the final translation of the Church to a heavenly state following the judgment (The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530-1645, p. 3).” Firth recognizes Otto’s contribution to developments leading to Joachim of Fiore, the second important thinker (c.1135-1204). In his seminal work, Liber Concordia Novi et Veteris Testamenti which is the basis of his other works including an exposition of the Apocalypse (Reeves, Joachim, pp. 2, 198), Joachim divided all history into three phases, each a status/ stage/arrangement, the first the age of the Father (Old Testament era), the second the age of the Son (New Testament to his own time), the third the coming status of the Spirit which he considered to be imminent. His view of a coming golden age of the Spirit, with renovation of the earth and spiritual life, was, as Reeves remarks, “concealed dynamite”; it soon bred one apocalyptic movement after another, identifying this or that preacher or teacher as the onset of the millennial Spirit age—the last in the earth’s history. Unlike Otto, Joachim’s influence was massive and perpetual through the Reformation era and beyond. Reeves sketches the history of Spirit age identities. The millenarian anarchy movements set off by Spirit-age activists through the end of the middle ages is studied by Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium. One of the more energetic Joachists of the sixteenth century was Giacopo Brocardo. 278

Brocardo’s work on the Apocalypse appeared in English in 1582. Bauckham says he “was a tireless exponent of the three Status and Middle Advent doctrines (Tudor Apocalypse, p. 218).” He believed the Status of the Spirit had begun with Luther’s preaching. He subdivided the Status of the Spirit into 7 sub-ages. The sixth age was to extend from the Massacre of St. Bartholomew (1572) to the final overthrow of the papacy. Then the seventh age, “the sabbath of the Spirit in the full sense,” would be inaugurated by a Protestant general council in Venice; that sabbath would constitute the millennium of Revelation 21 (sic?; Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, pp 218-219). The English translation of Brocardo’s commentary on Revelation included a dedicatory to the Earl of Leicester by the translator, James Sanford. Sanford himself published in 1576 his Houres of Recreation in which he registers the observation that “some . . . say, moreover, that his (Christ’s) Gospel shall have free and peaceable passage over all the world, and that lastly when he hath been glorified universally, he wil (sic) come personally with glory to raise the dead to life (cited by Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, p, 220).” Hence Bauckham generalizes that postmillennialism could lean on Joachim and the reformation era’s optimism—a period when the progress of the gospel seemed to be enjoying miraculous success (Tudor Apocalypse, p. 211). In these developments the covenant idea en nuce comported with new notions of the history of salvation in a series of ages. 2. The covenant idea in medieval Catholic thought or political practice was not the primary origin of the theological notion of later covenant theology, so prominent in encouraging the idea of the sameness of salvation throughout the history of the plan, and discouraging therefore to millennialism and the idea of a future dispensation beyond the current church era because it had no serious idea of real progress in revelation. Scott Gillies has recently shown that the Reformation and Post-Reformation covenant theology originated in Zwingli’s lectures during the first year of the Prophezei at Zurich (1525) when he lectured on Genesis. Prior to 1525 Zwingli habitually made sharp, more or less disparaging distinctions between the Old Testament and the New in medieval fashion, even while retaining infant baptism against the growing Anabaptist movement and its leaders at Zurich. These lectures of 1525 were then published in Zwingli’s Genesis Commentary of 1527. Here he rather emphasizes the unity of the two testaments from his study of the Abraham stories. Abraham’s infant circumcision is, in the unified single covenant, the Old Testament’s counterpart to the New Testament’s infant baptism (Scott Gillies, “Zwingli and the Origin of the Reformed Covenant, 1524-27,” Scottish Journal of Theology 54 [2001]: 21-50). This view of baptism became permanent in the Reformed churches. The transition into new forms of covenant thinking was solidified at Zurich by Zwingli’s successor, H. Bullinger in his De Testamento sen foedere Dei unico et aeterno of 1534—the first Reformation era work devoted to the single covenant idea. Here Bullinger argues: (a) there is one basic covenant; (b) the covenant describes the relation of God to the world and affirms God’s faithfulness to the relation; (c) the covenant is also a model of human relations, and thereby the federalist/covenant idea also came to include social compacts in Reformation stream fellowships like, for example, the Scottish Covenant and the Mayflower Compact, and in thousands of local church covenants. The covenant idea in Bullinger also provided context for the later development of a history of the covenant relation in which the main segments of the biblical history came to be called “stages” or 279

“dispensations,” i.e., a history of enactments or events as segments of a unified biblical covenant history (McCoy and Baker, Fountainhed of Federalism, pp. 14, 24). But such concepts could not easily overcome emphasis on the unity of the covenant throughout its saving history. This unity/uniformity theme would wait some time for other motifs to modify it. In the meantime the covenant idea served as an inner-biblical stabilizing concept for an equally stable plan of salvation revealed in the covenant throughout the Bible. 3. Calvin probably read both Zwingli and Bullinger. But as were they, Martin Bucer of Strasbourg was deeply influential on the persistent Augustinian, non-millennial eschatology. The first edition of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion appeared in 1536, with continuous new editions and enlargements until his death in 1564. In Book II, Chapter 10, Calvin refers repeatedly to a single covenant with many summary formulations—“the spiritual covenant was common also to the Fathers . . . ,” “the covenant which God always made with his servants . . . ,” “. . . clear evidence of a spiritual covenant . . . ,” “the covenant of his mercy . . . ,” and similar such phrases. He does distinguish the older from the newer covenant, but the difference is not one of content or substance, only of clarity and fullness of explanation. Thus there is some liklihood he had read Zwingli and Bullinger early on, and adopted their concept of a unified salvation covenant. Bucer embraced similar covenant ideas. Distillation of his thinking about kingdom and church finally appeared in a substantial work on The Kingdom of Christ drafted after his arrival in England at the invitation of Thomas Cranmer. Bucer served a short professorship at Cambridge before his death in 1551. His Kingdom of Christ, written during this brief period, has a few allusions to the future of Christ’s kingdom, but Bucer normally equates the kingdom and the church throughout; for him, the church is the kingdom of Christ and thus he remains Augustinian-like and non-millenary. The book calls for royal supervision of the “Kingdom of Christ” with a civil-law-like organizational structure more or less parallel to, but coordinated with the monarchies of Europe. Beyond this Bucer has little interest in any future kingdom; the future of the Kingdom of Christ is the anticipated future of the Church. Thus neither Calvin, Zwingli nor Bucer have much interest in the details of eschatology, let alone what was developing in the “apocalyptic tradition” of the second level reformers, while the equation of kingdom with church under a covenantal regime prevails. With Luther, Calvin did embrace one significant detail of the “apocalyptic” view of the papal Antichrist when he came to write and preach on 2 Thessalonians 2, and Bullinger himself dared to venture into The Revelation with a series of sermons. However, these are relatively insignificant expressions of near-term eschatology, let alone a far-term churchly or messianic kingdom. Thus any renewing premillennialism had to struggle against the notion of a covenantally uniform salvation through both testaments, even though the covenant salvation moves forward in “stages” or “economies” or “dispensations of the covenant.” 4. In a concurrent and potentially contrary development toward the end of the Reformation Era, the Geneva Bible with extensive marginal notes appeared in the city of its name in 1560. This English translation was the work of and for the benefit of English expatriates living in Geneva—Henrican and Marian exiles. The version became the standard English Bible of the Puritans; it is shown in the Puritan huts of the restored 280

Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts, and was the standard Puritan Bible throughout the British commonwealth. This Bible contains a note at Romans 11:25 to the effect that the whole nation of the “Jewes,” though not each one individually, will in the future turn to the Lord and be joined to the church”—a modest beginning of what was to gradually become “Judeo-centrist” millennialism. While the term “dispensation” is not used, and the notion of converted Jews entering the church in the latter days is not that of twentieth century dispensational premillennialism, the idea of a future conversion of Israel is forcefully stated. This point of prophetic belief thus began spreading through the English Reformation stream. From there it became more widespread in the seventeenth century and beyond as Richard Cogley shows. This marginal note encouraged Puritan belief in a future restoration of Israel in the context of faith and acceptance of its Messiah. The significance of this marginal note is discussed by Peter Toon in his essay, “The Latter Day Glory” (in Puritans, The Millennium and the Future of Israel: Puritan Eschatology 16001660, ed by P. Toon, p. 24) for its role in the development of Puritan millennialism. Toon also notes that while Calvin interpreted “Israel” in Romans 11 as referring to the church of Jews and Gentiles, his successor at Geneva, Theodore de Beza, favored the Geneva Bible’s more literal Jewish national spiritual renewal interpretation. 5. In a related or at least parallel development, the Reformation Era also produced a spate of prefaces to and/or commentaries on The Apocalypse. Calvin and Luther’s (not to say Zwingli and Bucer’s) caution on Revelation was not shared by all their followers and successors, either in respect to writing on the Apoclypse or on apocalyptic thinking arising from it. These commentaries are the subject of Irena Backus’ work, Reformation Reading of the Apocalypse: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg (Oxford University Press, 2000). Backus has documented about a dozen such prefaces or commentaries. Listing them will help the fact gain force: Martin Luther (prefaces only, Wittenberg, 1522, 1530); Francois Lambert (commentary, Marburg, 1528); Frans Titelmans (1530); Desiderius Erasmus (annotations, 1516, 1522); Sebastian Meyer (commentary, Berne, 1534? 1541-1545?); Antoine du Pinet (commentary, Lyons, 5 eds, 1539-1557); Theodore de Beza (annotations, Geneva, after 1550); Leo Jud (paraphrase, Zurich, 1542); Theodore Bibliander (commentary, Zurich, 1545); Heinrich Bullinger (sermons, Zurich, 1557); Augustin Marlorat (commentary, Paris 1561 or 1562); Francois de Jon (commentary, Heidelberg, 1591); David Pareus (commentary, 1618); Nicholas Colladon (commentary, Lusanne or Morges, 1581); David Chytraeus (commentary, Rostock, 1563); Nicholas Selnecker (commentary, Jena or Leipzig, 1567). None of these commentaries is millennialist or millenarian; virtually all are energetically anti-papal and identify the Antichrist with the papacy generically, or at times with a particular pope or group of popes; all use the Apocalypse to promote the Reformation and a Christ-centered salvation. Several of the more original and creative of the Revelation commentaries (Colladon, Jud, Bibliander, Bullinger), however, offer ways in which they think the internal schematics of the Apocalypse point to eras of redemptive or world history, sometimes several, sometimes specifically seven. Some think the eras covered by the book begin with creation and extend to the Final Judgment. Some think only of the eras of the church since Christ’s time. Leo Jud, for example, thought Revelation predicted the whole era of the church in several stages from Jesus to the Final Judgment; Bibliander thought similarly, but more generally, 281

that the seven seals were seven stages in the whole history of the world from Creation to the Last Judgment. Heinrich Bullinger also thought similarly, but with differences from his Zurich colleagues. In one of two interpretive schemes, Bullinger thought the “historical” division of the book was: Apocalypse 1:1-8: the prologue; Apocalypse 1:9-Ch. 4: the reign of Christ and his influence on the church; Apocalypse 4-12: Christ’s warning of all the evils to befall the church; Apocalypse 12-15: the struggle of the church against the tyranny of Rome (dragon, and old and new beasts); and Apocalypse 15-22: the torments of Antichrist and his people (Backus, p. 105). Some believed the Reformation was the time just before the Final Judgment, and others that the Final Judgment is far into the future—nowhere near their own time. What is significant here is the idea that the book schematizes the whole or some part of a history of redemption subdivided into multiple eras in some fashion. These assessments illustrate the gradual formation of a historicist perspective on the book. From such perceptions, it was a small step for any kind of literal millenary notion to achieve a clarification of the final era—the millennium in (some) relation to the life of the church, regardless of the temporal locus of the Second Coming in relation to it. This step, it must be stressed, was taken by none of these commentators; they were too focused on what they thought was The Apocalypse’s history of Christianity—or of the papacy, or of Islam, or of the world—to move to a general let alone specific eschatology, and a future millennium. What awaited was for scholarly readers of these works (the extent of which reading we are not yet clear on) to raise exegetical questions about chapter 20 as they continued assessing the book’s structure and textual dynamics. Such Reformation era views only awaited new minds to gain other interpretations including some form of a future thousand-year reign of Christ with his saints. The magisterial reformers avoided The Apocalypse and so were not guides, although Colladon believed from private conversations with Calvin that he was about to preach or write on it at the time of his death. As the dates show, this attention to The Apocalypse extends over most of the sixteenth century and slightly beyond, notably into the era of J. H. Alsted’s scholarly career. With these perceptions of historical sequence punctuated by decisive events, the stage was set for further thought about eras, judgments and dispensations—something like “Puritan Millennialism.” 6. Study of the Apocalypse generated an apocalyptic teaching tradition within the Reformation stream in England from about 1530 to about 1645 among the less well-known leaders of the Reformation working beyond its main centers. This apocalyptic tradition is studied by K. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530-1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), and by Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth Century Apocalypticism, Millenarianism and the English Reformation from John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman (1978). Other studies have appeared by Christianson and Hill. Firth’s methodology included selecting major representatives of the tradition by counting either quantity of later citations, uses and acknowledgements of a work, or quantity of printings, editions and translations. This quantitative element in her method produces some assurance that while certain authors may be unfamiliar to main stream popular Reformation studies, their sub-floor influence was vast and pervasive so long as the tradition flourished even with little development in millenary works. This way of opening the matter could, however, be a bit misleading since the dynamics of the 282

movement contributed significantly to the rise after 1625 of two major millennialisms, post- and premillennialism, or three if one counts the renewed anarchic millennialism of the British Commonwealth’s Fifth Monarchy movement, which certainly came and went more quickly than the other two. At the end of her first chapter, Firth summarizes the pre- and early-Reformation developments of the apocalyptic tradition: “By 1540 the apocalyptic tradition on the continent had evolved two of what were to be its three main constituents.” (1) History in virtually all such works is periodized into three major stages; specifically, there is a tendency to periodize history based on revelation, and with the meaning that history was under the divine plan: “Prophecy was praised for its guidance in the writing of universal history and chronology (p. 30).” (2) This movement showed growing appreciation for Daniel’s “comprehension of worldly as well as spiritual changes, and for its warning that the fall of the Empire would hasten the end of the world, and this through the (periodized, i.e., future) rise of Antichrist as some combination of Pope and Turk (p. 30).” How did these trends come about? Before the Reformation there were significant periodizing studies, some of which were influential such as Otto of Freising’s (one of N. Cantor’s five major leaders of Medieval thought, see Cantor, Medieval History, pp. 349374) transformation of Augustine’s City of God as a transcendent City, into a history of Church and Empire as earthly cities of God and man, and Joachim of Fiore’s periodization of history into three eras— Israel, Christ and the Apostles (the church), and the coming age/Status of the Holy Spirit. Of the two, Joachim’s was the more consistently literalistic (p. 4). Firth also notes the importance of Daniel, Revelation, and the much later nonbiblical “Prophecy of Elias.” Martin Luther—no millennialist of any sort—first resisted dealing with the Apocalypse. But between his Preface of 1522 and the revised Preface of 1530, he learned of some significant recent prophecies, one of which was contained in a letter of Myrconius (1529). Myrconius had discovered fragments of a fourteenth century work of a Johann Hilten which not only identified the threatening Turks with biblical Gog and foretold an invasion of Germany, but also prophesied that about 1516 a man would arise to reform the Church and overthrow the Papacy (Firth, p. 11, my italics).” In a letter of November 1529, Luther wrote a friend describing the Turks as Gog and the Pope as Magog; he also identified the Turk with the little horn of Daniel 7. With his interest thus piqued in Daniel and Revelation’s Antichrist as a period- specific historical reality (my italics), Luther stressed in his 1530 Preface the dignity of prophecy and even its necessity to the church (Firth, p. 11). This combination—prophecy-fulfilled-in-history, i.e., in periodspecific events—was a new departure for Luther. Thereby, significant interest arose in both periodization of history and in the specific identity in his world of an in-history Antichrist. Complementing these developments were two chronologies of history as revelation, one by Sebastian Frank which viewed history as manifest logos, and another by John Carion which distinguished sacred from profane history (human politics); both “came together in a single chronological sequence through the gift of prophecy to the Church (Firth, p. 15).” Prophecy as an ingredient allows the church to know the general course of political events, thus “bridging the gap between the spiritual vision and the temporal progress of events (Firth, p 16).” Firth notes that “Carion’s Chronicle went farther than Luther in making the connection between this anti-Christian kingdom of the Turks and Antichrist (Firth, p. 18), speaking of the Turk as the greatest part of Antichrist (Firth, p. 18).” Thus 283

the third major ingredient in this apocalyptic tradition (3) gradually became a “historical rendering of the seven seals, trumpets and vials (Firth, p. 120),” and the corresponding futurism of Antichrist’s rise, as more and more chronological calculations of the time of the end developed. If Firth had had Backus’ work at hand, she might have included the accumulating commentaries on Revelation as another major ingredient in formation of the apocalyptic tradition, although she certainly was aware of and makes reference to several of them. Opposed to this whole prophecy-fulfillment-in-history-now thinking was a persistent no-development-in-salvation-history view represented by Erasmus, William Tyndale, probably Martin Bucer (at least in emphasis), and in a limited sense Calvin. They viewed history as a chain of examples of eternal principles with more or less repetitive manifestations of fixed principles, and Scripture as a record in allegories of these eternal truths. Tyndale, who certainly used “Antichrist” of the Pope, nonetheless did not expect any climax of world history; nor was he interested in prophetic chronology. Rather, Antichrist was manifest continuously throughout history. Erasmus too rather stressed history as the ongoing display of heroes with fixed values or deviations there-from (Firth, p. 25). Erasmus and Tyndale together were the “entrenched resistance . . . to the apocalyptic tradition (Firth, p. 26).” This resistance weakened, however, with the translation of Luther into English, notably (Firth, p. 27) Luther’s De Antichristo. But the weakening was gradual, and yet it was also definite: apocalyptic gradually gained force in England in a way in which it did not on the larger continent.. Once these three ingredients were established, the apocalyptic tradition rapidly developed its implications through mostly English writers, many of whom were Henrican or Marian exiles living on the continent. John Bale sought to match a sequence of events in history to the sequences of symbols in Revelation. Matthias Flacius Illyricus sought in The Magdeburg Centuries a whole new Protestant concept of Christian history while his friend and counterpart John Foxe, of Book of Martyrs fame, outlined the history of persecution of the true church by the papal Antichrist in his Acts and Monuments (1st ed 1563). Foxe was influential in establishing a pattern of thinking in thousand-year periods of church history. John Napier was among the earliest to attempt a calculation of the end of the world based on numbers of Daniel and Revelation; he was also among the first to use Peter Ramus’ system of logic to numerically conjecture the future, although Andreas Osiander had also engaged in such conjectures. Napier in fact moved one step closer to the seventeenth century millenarian development: his dating called for the Second Coming in 1688 and a golden age of perfection thereupon; he did not identify this with the millennium for certain technical reasons, however. Hugh Broughton, with many friends among Jewish leaders and scholars, then included the conversion of the Jews (Firth, p. 156) after the fashion of the Geneva Bible’s note to the same effect. Thus there gradually developed and strengthened the notion of a prophesied future Golden Age. 7. Easily as influential as Alsted and Mede slightly later was Thomas Brightman’s exposition (P. Toon, “The Latter Day Glory,” in Puritans, The Millennium and the Future of Israel, pp. 23-41). His eschatology in substance was an early form of postmillennialism as Toon and Tuveson observe. Brightman’s A Revelation of the Revelation was published in Latin at Frankfort in 1609 and at Heidelberg in 1612. “An English translation was printed 284

at Amsterdam in 1615 (Toon, p. 27, n. 5), and his commentaries on Daniel and Canticles appeared under one cover in Latin at Basle in 1614 and Leyden in 1616, with an English version appearing in 1635 (Toon, “Latter-day Glory,” p. 27, n 5).” Brightman believed the letters to the seven churches of Revelation 2-3 represented seven periods of church history from Christ to his own time—the historicist view of Revelation’s prophecies, at least in part. Ephesus symbolized the church from the apostles to Constantine; Smyrna stood for Constantine to Gratian, and so forth. Sardis represented the Lutheran churches’deadening effect on the power of the Reformation by their doctrine of consubstantiation. Philadelphia stood for the Calvinist Reformation—the true one—and Laodicea for the “luke-warm” Church of England. The seals of Revelation 4-7, he thought, expired by the time of Constantine, and three of the vials of chapters 16 and beyond had been poured out by 1600. The remaining vials included the destruction of the Catholic Church and the Turks, and the conversion of the Jews. Added to this process and beyond it, Brightman believed, were not one but two millenia spoken of in Revelation 20. Both millennial periods were to be introduced by spiritual resurrections—the two resurrections of Revelation 20:1-6—with the first running from Constantine to about 1300 when Satan was “loosed for a little time” in the Turkish invasion of Europe, the second running 1000 years from about 1300 to 2300, when “the battle with Gog and Magog will occur (20:8) and the Jewish nation will be surrounded by the Turks in its ancient homeland (Toon, “Latter-day Glory,” p. 30).” The Lord will miraculously intervene on Israel’s behalf, destroy its enemies and cause its full restoration to the land as well as its full conversion to Messiah (Toon, “Latter-day Glory,” p. 30). This renewal of Israel is the second (spiritual) resurrection. All will confess Christ, and at the end of this second millennium about 2300, Christ will return and the literal resurrection and last judgment will occur. Modified versions of this scheme continued to draw expositors like Henry Finch, William Gouge, John Cotton in England and America, John Owen, the authors of the Congregational Savoy Declaration of 1658, J. A. Bengel and Scotsman James Durham; all embraced some form of this basic scheme, including the more distant future completion of Brightman’s second thousand-year period. Thus Toon calls this an early form of postmillennialism—Christ to return after the latter-day reign of all the saints on earth for a long period based on spiritual First and Second Resurrections. Brightman’s contribution to renewed millenarianism, especially his two millennia of eschatological history (300-1300; 1300-2300) and the future, simply followed on what Bale, Foxe and Napier had already established in the apocalyptic tradition—thinking in thousands—which shortly make the step to premillennialism a modest one. 8. Running through or parallel with these developments is something that appears to be an early expression of a millenarian “philosophy of history,” with both a pessimistic and then more optimistic outlook. The pessimistic side is represented by apocalyptic thinkers who identified Antichrist with the papacy. They found, in the “sorrows of St. Cyprian” and in regressive beliefs about the dissipation of the natural world (novas, earthquakes, storms, volcanoes), grounds for a dominantly gloomy view of the flow of history—everything becoming “worse and worse.” In his Millennium and Utopia, Ernest Tuveson traces the dissolution of the universe through several thinkers such as Thomas Rogers’ translation of Shelton a Geveren’s Of the Ende of this Worlde, and the Seconde Commying of Christ, 285

Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, and even King James I’s A Fruitfull Meditation, containing a Plaine and Easie Exposition, or Laying Open of the VII, VIII, IX and X Verses of the 20. Chapter of the Revelation, in Forme and Maner of a Sermon, and his Paraphrase upon the Revelation of the Apostle John. On the more optimistic side, observes Tuveson, there are traces of hope and “cheerfulness” even in these expositions of historical gloom. Those traces of hope took a gradual turn toward optimism across the turn of the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries. When this turn occurs, it is visible, for example, in Pierre du Moulin who began to take some clues about a hopeful future from science, then in Jean Bodin’s Methodus, ad Facilem Historiarum Cognitionem (1566). Bodin thought the four monarchies of Daniel had little or nothing to do with declension in history; rather the classical world’s cyclic view of history was correct: “men have evolved from simple, imperfect states, to ones of greater complexity, refinement, and order (Tuveson, Millennium, p. 57).” This work of Bodin went through six French editions. Then came Roys LeRoy, another cyclist, Godfrey Goodman, George Hakewill (a traditional millenarian), Joseph Mede (also premillenarian), Henry More (likewise premillenarian) and Henry Archer (the same)—all synthesizing science developments with millenarian beliefs, and all with increasingly optimistic views of the direction of nature and history toward the millennial utopia. A major step beyond this was Robert Boyle who stressed the scientific reading of nature as God’s other book and the knowledge gained from it as increasingly elevating humanity. Boyle spoke at times in rhapsodic poetry of the future utopian era. And then came Thomas Burnet; with Burnet we are all the way down to 1674 when he issued The Excellency of Theology, a book calling men back to Scripture from too much preoccupation with science; but Burnet nonetheless believed in progress—the progress of exegesis from new awareness of philology, and progress from exegesis to theology, as well as in other aspects of development. This tension between pessimism and optimism on the gross course of history later came to be divided between postmillennialism (optimistic) and premillennialism (pessimistic); it is the chief interest of Tuveson’s two works, Millennium and Utopia (1949) and Redeemer Nation (1968). But this sharp division over the up or down of history and the corresponding function of the Second Coming (for pessimists, to fix it; for optimists, to complete it) characteristic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may not be valid for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in relation to premillennialism, since some premillenarians have had sensitive social consciences and not all to a man have been pessimistic. However this may be, these two ingredients in millenary thought are important ones in the stream. John Henry Alsted and Joseph Mede 9. In the meantime a decisive step toward millenarian renewal was taken by John Henry Alsted, a Calvinist Professor at Herborn in northwest Germany, where his major millenarian work, the Diatribe de mille annis Apocalypticis (1627), was written. Our knowledge of Alsted was significantly advanced by the 1963 doctoral dissertation of Robert G. Clouse, The Influence of John Henry Alsted on English Millenarian Thought in the Seventeenth Century. In addition to the Diatribe, Clouse discusses two earlier works 286

of Alsted which show his growth toward the millenarian work of 1627, i.e., his Methodus Sacrosanctae Theologiae (1614) in which he discusses the importance of the Apocalypse to the church, and his Theologia Prophetica of 1622 which shows expansion of interest in prophecy (Clouse, Alsted, pp. 153-169). The Diatribe de mille annis Apocalypticis was translated into English by William Burton in 1643 under the title The Beloved City, whence it came to the attention of Joseph Mede at Cambridge. Alsted’s treatment of the millennium and related concepts is not, however, the “premillennialism” of 1750 to the present. For the later millenarian view, Christ’s personal, visible return and permanent dwelling on earth to initiate and operate the promised messianic kingdom is the “what” of “premillennialism” from today’s vantage point. This is not quite Alsted’s view. Rather what is “premillennial” is the literal First Resurrection of Revelation 20:5—that of the martyrs, but perhaps also all other believers represented by the martyrs. They are literally raised from the dead to reign with Christ on earth for a thousand years. But even “reign with Christ on earth” does not mean Christ himself actually returns bodily and permanently to earth. For Alsted, Christ rather remains in heaven or somewhere in the upper realms throughout the thousand years. Thus, although Clouse repeatedly refers to Alsted’s “premillennialism,” the term still does not refer to the Second Coming of Christ to live and rule on earth as in the later development. The latter sense of the Second Coming still has to be integrated into the First Resurrection as literal. In reality, even this “premillennialism” might be correlated with a “postmillennial” Second Coming of Christ, all the while maintaining a “premillennial” First Resurrection in the sense of a spiritual awakening or even a literal resurrection. Such a view is in fact found in the American millennialism of the famous nineteenth century Old Testament scholar Moses Stuart, for example. This version of the tradition did not die either and is perhaps still a millenarian option (On this note see Clouse, “The Rebirth of Millenarianism,” in Puritan Eschatology, ed P. Toon, pp. 42-65.). 10. Concurrently with growing Calvinist-Puritan expositions of the covenant as the biblical framework of salvation, attention to The Apocalypse continued without letup. Gradually through Johann Piscator, Alsted, Brightman and John Cotton, varied forms of millenary thought emerged. Despite Cotton’s millenary futurism, he offered spiritual interpretations of both resurrections of Revelation 20 pace Alsted. As noted above, the most important thinker to posit a literal First Resurrection and associate it with the reign of Christ with the saints for the thousand years was J. H. Alsted in Germany. But he was quickly joined by Joseph Mede at Cambridge in England. The fountainhead of gradually reviving premillennialism in England and America was Mede’s Clavis Apocalyptica (1627), translated from Mede’s Latin by Richard More, published by order of a committee of the House of Commons (C. Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution, p. 304), and printed under the name The Key of the Revelation (1642) with a preface by William Twisse, Mede’s inquisitive convert to his views and Prolocutor (presiding officer) of the famous Westminster Assembly. The work was widely read, and by some accounts its popularity amounted to a kind of best seller status. Among several essays written by Mede after Clavis, but before his Apocalypse commentary, was one on Revelation 20. This essay explained his First Resurrection premillennialism, and eventuated in Mede’s questionanswering correspondence with Twisse who not only became a convert to Mede’s views, but a fervent promoter, after an initially stiff opposition. In 1632 Mede published In Sancti 287

Joannis Apocalypsin Commentarius. In 1641 The Apostacy of the Latter Times appeared, again with a preface by Twisse (with several later reprints). In 1642 A Paraphrase and Exposition of the Prophesie of Saint Peter (on 2 Peter 3) was published. And in 1643 his Daniel’s Weekes appeared. Clouse establishes Alsted’s influence on Mede (John Henry Alsted, pp. 208ff) by noting his quotations and citations of Alsted. Mede’s writings were collected in 1648 and published in an enlarged edition edited by John Worthington with several ensuing reprints through 1677. So influential was Mede in Anglican thought that “nearly three-quarters of Presbyterian and Independent writings published between 1640 and 1653 expressed millenarian expectations,” and Robert Baillie reported in 1645 that “most of the chief divines in London ‘are express chiliasts (citations from C. Hill, The English Bible, p. 304).’” A new edition of Mede’s Works appeared in 1833. Reformation stream Anglicanism was becoming millenarian—for a brief time. Five features of Mede’s millenarianism are especially notable for future developments. (1) Mede coordinates the numbers of Revelation 11-13 (1260 days; time, times and a half time; 42 months) to show that they all refer to the same thing. (2) He is historicist, not futurist, in his interpretation of Revelation. Most modern students of millenarian literature and history believe his popular promotion of the year-day equation in prophetic numbers established it as a fixed point for interpreting prophecy until the time of S. R. Maitland in the nineteenth century. (3) The First Resurrection of Revelation 20 is literal, not spiritual, and precedes the millennium. (4) Christ executes the First Resurrection but does not remain on earth to physically reign with the saints during the millennium (as Alsted). (5) The resurrection of 1 Thessalonians 4 (which he correlates with that of Revelation 20), he calls a “rapture,” possibly for the first time. This “rapture” terminology occurs several times over through the four points of Mede’s answer to Twisse’s tenth question in Epistle 22. In the fourth point of Mede’s answer he explains that the purpose for the “rapture” is that “[the saints] may be preserved from the conflagration of the earth and the works thereof, 2 Peter 3:10 (Epistle 22, in Mede’s Works 4:775-777).” Mede, differently from modern “pretribulation” rapturists, separates by a thousand years (the millennium) the resurrection of the “dead in Christ (only the martyrs),” which he calls the “First Resurrection” from “we which are alive and remain (living believers),” which he calls the “last Resurrection.” In this way he makes the “rapture” refer to a resurrection of living believers at the end of the millennium, followed by the conglagration of 2 Peter 3:10. This way of identifying and correlating events is, of course, capable of other arrangements. The point of interest is the term “rapture” for (part of) the resurrection of 1 Thessalonians 4, with a main reason for it to rescue living saints from the “conflagration” after the fashion of Noah’s rescue. Later millenarians would shift the timing of the “rapture” to an event before another conflagration, i.e., the Great Tribulation, thus detaching it from the “conflagration” of 2 Peter 3:10. After Mede, there slowly grew the attachment of Christ’s Second Coming and his permanent earthly ruling presence, to the First Resurrection; but this was not Mede’s own view. Certainly by the time of Thomas Newton’s Discourses on the Prophecies (Vol. 1, 1759), this attachment of a literal First Resurrection of all believers—both dead and living— to the parousia-resurrection passages in 1 Thessalonians 4 and 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 was becoming more current, even though this version of premillennialism was still historicist and anti-papal following the lines and emphases of the Reformation Era commentators 288

on the Apocalypse. Clouse’s study of Alsted also shows how other prominent English divines were persuaded by Mede’s arguments for a future earthly reign of resurrected saints (martyrs) after the Second Coming and First Resurrection (for Mede only the martyrs), even in the midst of sharp criticisms by Englishmen like Thomas Hayne and Robert Baillie (Clouse, pp. 191ff). The apocalyptic-millenarian tradition continued with help from widespread respect for Brightman in several works distributed among William Twisse, Nathaniel Ho(l)mes (The Revelation Revealed, 1653), and Cambridge Platonist Henry More in no fewer than four works on eschatology (Clouse, pp 245-261). These men were more or less prominent English clergymen and graduates of Oxford or Cambridge. A slightly lesser but more prolific light was William Sherman who (according to Clouse, p. 261, n. 52) produced “a number of works on millenarian themes and often quoted Mede approvingly.” Another lesser but still important thinker influenced by Mede was Henry (John) Archer. His work, The Personall Reigne of Christ upon Earth (1642) went through many editions (B. S. Capp, “Extreme Millenarianism” in Toon [ed] Puritans, the Millennium and the Future of Israel, p. 66). Archer thought, like most of the apocalyptic tradition, that Revelation’s 1260 days were years. The judgment of Antichrist and the beginning of the millennium could be calculated by adding 1260 days of Revelation 11-13 (interpreted as years) to the year in which papal authority began—for him 406—yielding a beginning date for the millennium of 1666. He thought the conversion of the Jews would occur just before this, say, in the 1650s. The Second Coming of Christ to earth would be visible; he would actually raise dead saints and initiate the millennium at his visible, bodily coming. But Archer too, like his predecessors, thought Christ would then withdraw again into heaven, leaving his apostles and saints in charge of the millennial kingdom for the thousand years (Capp, p. 67). Thus this British millenarian stream reaches the border of a more fully developed premillenarian eschatology with multiple events as the transition to the millennium, including not just the fall of the papacy and Turks, the conversion of the Jews, and the bodily First Resurrection of the saints to reign with Christ, but also a visible return of Christ to earth to establish the millennium even though Christ does not stay here for the thousand years. Of even greater significance was Isaac Newton’s embrace of Mede’s millenarianism (Observations upon the Prophecies). Mede was also cited with some regularity by eighteenth century American millenarians. Hence the apocalyptic-millenarian tradition did not die out, but on the contrary gained new traction under Mede’s influence, and only abated for a brief time because of the extremes of the British Fifth Monarchy movement; rather it survived through the Fifth Monarchy and then grew more rapidly after recovering from a lull brought about by that infamous kingdom-now affair. 11. Although not very prominent in the terminology of the Euro-British apocalyptic tradition, the concept of “economies,” or “dispensations”—as terms for periods of salvation history within the covenant—received further treatment in the work of Matthias Martini, a professor at Bremen, in 1610. Martini thought the covenant of grace, so central and ubiquitous in Calvinism, was historically arranged in economies or dispensations—one before the law, one under the law, and another under Christ. His brilliant pupil at Bremen, Johannes Cocceius, published in 1648 his Doctrine of the Covenant and Testaments of God which returned to the (medieval) notion of a slight disparagement of the Old Testament 289

as incomplete and limited, and the covenant administered in a series of dispensations of increasing fullness. He adopted Martini’s three dispensations of the covenant, perhaps to be seen as a semi-conscious embrace of the popular Joachite three-era redemptive plan, althouth C. Gribben (Evangelical Millennialism, p 49) says he embraced Brightman’s double millennium. The several “economies” of the covenant are gradual developments of salvation, nothing else. This way of thinking dominated the next two centuries, with dispensations or economies sometimes multiplied or expanded to four or seven or more. This is the era of the grand flourish of “covenant theology.” The best brief but thorough bibliographic discussion of the literature of covenant theology is the article on the subject by William Adams Brown in Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. Documentation of dispensations as expressions of the covenant during the Protestant Era is the merit of A. Ehlert’s Bibliographic History of Dispensationalism (1965). However, calling this stream of covenant thinkers a “History of Dispensationalism,” has been rightly criticized as a kind of theological piracy—certainly an anachronism—since none were dispensationalist in the twentieth century sense. Still, Ehlert did perform a service of documentation important to later dispensationalism. Jonathan Edwards History of Redemption published shortly after his death in 1758 is perhaps the high point of covenant theology’s combination of a single redemptive covenant arranged in successive dispensations and climaxing in the church’s future millennium (postmillennialism; cf. C. C. Goen, “Jonathan Edwards, A Departure in Eschatology,” Church History 28 [1959]: 25-40). Several important students of the relation of covenant theology to dispensational thought in the twentieth century, for example Norman Kraus and D. H. Kromminga, recognized the important role of Cocceius in the development of these related biblical concepts in modern times. Having noted this about Cocceius, however, it must be said that caution is appropriate since we still do not have a thorough study of his thought, even though bits and pieces of his work are frequently paraphrased or cited. 12. The more optimistic and developmental view of history represented by Thomas Burnet in the discussion above took on strength in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. The thinker in which this ray of historical hope began to take more forceful shape among apocalyptic interests was George Hakewill in his Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World (1627). By now the uncertainties about the Reformation’s success in its first century—especially with the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the Netherlands’ victory over Philip II of Spain, and even though in the midst of the Thirty Years War—had passed, with the Reformation becoming a tradition and gaining a stronger sense of security. Hakewill was among the first to look back on the Reformation as a further step of the providential movement of God in history in an upward direction toward a future goal developing along a linear path. He also saw nature not as declining, but as creative and developing under new recognitions of natural law (Tuveson, p. 73), and the arts of civilization advancing again as they did in the Greeks, then the Romans, then the Persians. Hakewill thought history indeed moved in cycles; but the gross movement of the cycles was at least slightly upward or progressive—“circular progress,” as he called it (Tuveson, p. 74). Still, the most important step in the developing resources for golden age thought came from Joseph Mede’s millenarianism as noted above. After Mede, important 290

developments toward a progressive philosophy of history occurred even more pointedly in the combination of scientist Robert Boyle as well as in the theologian Thomas Burnet. Boyle was impressed by parallels in knowledge between science and theology. He spoke of “theological discoveries” (Tuveson, p. 114) and “better reflections on . . . [the] matchless book.” He believed that after the earth’s frame is shattered, it will be “renewed to a better state.” He also thought the meaning of parts of Scripture had remained veiled, and “the intention of the Deity was that the real meanings . . . should only gradually be brought to light, as men’s knowledge advanced on all fronts (Tuveson, p. 116). So Boyle saw exegetical and theological knowledge in a parallel development to that of science; such thinking is material for theological development. Burnet’s progressive millenarianism is recognized by Tuveson, and found chiefly in three major works: The Excellency of Theology (1674); Theory of the Earth (1684-1690); and Archaeologiae Philosophicae; or, the Ancient Doctrine concerning the Originals of Things. His progressive theory of history included a fiery conflagration as part of the boundary between the current age and the millennium. A literal First Resurrection also belongs to this boundary, and this makes him a millenarian in Alsted and Mede’s sense. He liked the image of a divine clock-maker for God’s creation of the universe, and argued that a self-running universe reflects a better clock-maker than one needing constant tinkering to keep it running according to plan. With Burnet, whom Tuveson thinks was the most singularly pivotal figure in the seventeenth century shift from a pessimistic view of history to an optimistic one, it is nature itself and our delightful knowledge of it combined that will gradually produce the utopia-millennium of Christian and world hopes. He thought contemplation of nature, with its design, beauty, wisdom and goodness, would “raise great and noble passions.” The coming millennium will be a flourish of rationality, cosmic movement toward the good, and contemplation—all contributing to and correlated with moral progress, and with more and more development in worldly secondary causes. Another step, though still in the basic nature and knowledge axis of Boyle and Burnet, is the thought of John Edwards (1637-1716), a leader of the Restoration era Calvinists in England. In his Natural and Mechanick Philosophy, and Compleat History or Survey of all the Dispensations and Methods of Religion, from the Beginning of the World to the Consummation of all Things; as Represented in the Old and New Testament (1699), Edwards thinks of a series of progressing stages in (redemptive and human) history. These several stages he calls “dispensations” and “oeconomies,” each advancing from inferior to more perfect and sublime. Such “divers Administrations shall take Place in their Order, and . . . one shall not anticipate the other . . . God dispenseth not all his Favors together, not all at once: but the manifestations of his Will grow greater and greater successively.” Edwards’ version, unlike Henry More and Thomas Burnet’s, was postmillennial. He could only think of a literal resurrection at the end of the millennium. For him, “Christ’s Kingdom . . . shall be set up and maintain’d by the Kings and Rulers of the earth (cited by Tuveson, p. 137),” surging forward in a great westward advance of culture and religion (Tuveson, p. 139). Still another millenary contributer to the progressivist discussion was Thomas Sherlock (1678-1761), Bishop of London. His Use and Intent of Prophecy, in the Several Ages of the World (1725) went through six editions over a thirty-year period (Tuveson, p. 140). In it he argued for a gradual remission of the curse on men at the Fall (Tuveson, p. 140), and states that “If you allow the Account, it carries on the Series of God’s Dispensations 291

towards Mankind, in a natural Gradation . . . (Tuveson, pp. 140-141).” He conceives of progressing revelation organized into distinctive periods adapted to the growing powers of mankind (Tuveson, p. 141). Edwards and Sherlock steer clear of any conflagration as transition to the millennium, while Burnet embraces a premillennial conflagration and literal First Resurrection. Nonetheless, Burnet can be characterized by Tuveson thus: “. . . in Burnet the Augustinian emphasis on the saving experience of the individual (his italics) is submerged in the concept of the whole of mankind being led, step by step, slowly but surely, back to its original Eden (Tuveson, p. 155).” Burnet’s sense of development also made explicit the idea that the human race had grown intellectually and spiritually. So much is this the case that parts of the Bible have been superseded and have grown unnecessary. Not yet does man have, however much advancement has occurred, that happiness he will have in the future kingdom of Christ: “The present constitution of Nature will not bear that happiness, that is promis’d in the Millennium, or is not consistent with it. The diseases of our Bodies, the disorders of our Passions, the incommodiousness of external Nature; Indigency, Servility, and the unpeaceableness of the World; These are things inconsistent with the happiness that is promis’d in the kingdom of Christ (cited by Tuveson, p. l80 from Burnet, Theory of the Earth, IV, 8).” What Burnet sees in the big picture as “progress” is, however, not merely technological or inventive progress, but “advance in men’s understanding of the universe, of the relation of God to humanity (Tuveson, p. 180).” In Burnet such understanding is by natural reason and inquiry more than through revelation alone. Man gains much by the moral instinct and unfolding faculties of the mind. From Burnet on, thought about history is more and more focused on gradualism and process, how intellect arises, and even how religion emerges. Thereafter new focus is set on civil society and how to create the conditions of moral growth and virtue—away from brutality and toward right and moral knowledge. Tuveson reads these developments as the fading of apocalyptic hope, similarly to the manner in which Firth and others seem to think things fade at the end of the periods they chronicle. This history, though still literally millenarian in Burnet, is moving toward the great secular dream chronicled in Carl Becker’s Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers. But as noted elsewhere in this discussion, a more biblical millenary hope is not about to die. By 1700 it was certainly falling from its seventeenth century (British) throne. What happened is more like a swollen stream entering a small culvert—the older accumulation of millenary thought up against a great clog in the flow with some getting through to the other side (1750) and several new works joining them like a tiny spring or two entering the stream just below the clog. One of these springs is Daniel Whitby (1703); another is Isaac Newton. Then comes Thomas Newton (1750s) and the millenarian stream begins to widen again. It also reaches a kind of delta in which the secularizing “heavenly city” thinkers do indeed lose the older biblical millenary bearings. But the millenary stream moves on, narrows about 1700, and then enlarges once more, coming gradually to its own divide again between premillenarians and postmillenarians, and then into varied subsets of both. It seems clear that not only did such views circulate in Daniel Whitby’s world— before him, after him and all around him—but they are also the basis through him of both American postmillennial enthusiasm, and Latin American Catholic postmillennialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see J. McManners [ed], The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity, pp. 425-426). It also seems clear that J. N. Darby had read such 292

works along with a likely reading of Hugo Grotius while studying law at Dublin, and that from them with his own Calvinism to help, he seized on the idea of the dispensations. What he did with this notion, however, was return it to the earlier pessimism as an estimate of the downward course of history. Darby knows about the dispensations at the very beginning of his theological literary efforts in the 1820s. These and others reviewed here are in all probability among the writers he read in both law and theology. I say this because there is no doubt that Darby helped move millenarianism onto the ground it occupies in the twentieth century among dispensationalists. But it should be stressed again that he is no prime mover of millenarian thought. That is a much larger stream which exists with or without him, and would no doubt have eventuated in some form of dispensations thought regardless of his more eccentric contributions. 13. The restoration of the Jews to their God and land found early on in the Reformation apocalyptic stream received a remarkable life-sustaining thrust from the history of Jewish policy in Britain. This ingredient in the millenarian stew, though not necessarily millenarian per se, gained new currency by a growing advocacy for readmission of Jews to England, and restoration of their synagogues and community life in Britain in the 1650s. The new Jewish perspective and its millenarian significance is the subject of yet another of Peter Toon’s essays in Puritans, The Millennium and the Future of Israel (“The Question of Jewish Immigration,” pp. 115-125). On July 18, 1290, King Edward I expelled the Jews from England. Early in the Puritan movement the future of the Jews in the plan of God and in England became a growing advocacy. Having connected with this development, the Dutch Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel undertook in 1655 a journey to England to discuss readmission of Jews with Oliver Cromwell. This event had preparations in England. As early as 1614, Baptist Leonard Busher published a tract asking for readmissison of Jews to England. This tract was reprinted at least once (1646). In 1615 another Baptist, John Murton, wrote in defense of a change of policy toward Jews; this too was reprinted—at least three times. And in 1644, Roger Williams argued in The Bloudy Tenet of Persecution that Jews could be good citizens, their consciences respected, and their presence and religion tolerated throughout Britain and its colonies. There were others of like thinking over the sixty years from 1600-1660. Gradually the political and social implications of these views took form, partly out of realization that Jewish economic wisdom might just be useful in England at the time, or as Toon puts it, “. . . not only were some Jews very successful merchants but other of their number were international financiers and bankers. And England needed the money (p. 121),” not least for its project of getting atop the international, all-powerful Dutch trading network by any and every which means. Surprisingly, Menasseh ben Israel himself underwent something of a conversion to “eschatological speculation” (Toon, p. 118), i.e., Israel’s restoration to God and land, and other related details of the developing Reformation stream apocalyptic tradition. A larger monographic development of these themes appeared in Menasseh’s work, The Hope of Israel, translated into English by Moses Wall, first in 1650, and shortly in a second edition (1651) which included an appendix by Wall entitled, “Considerations upon the point of the Conversion of the Jews.” Menasseh’s volume was quickly reprinted again, and according to Toon (p. 120), widely read by both theologians and politicians. In an appendix, Wall gave eight reasons why English Christians should be concerned with the conversion of 293

the Jews to Christ. Most of the now familiar reasons are given: God’s promises to them; conversion will bring the kingdom to pass; they are God’s holy tree; the covenant with Abraham has not been cancelled; Gentiles will profit by Israel’s conversion. Several of these arguments are drawn from Romans 11; but Menasseh’s original Hope of Israel also included the curious argument that Britain, by excluding the Jews, was obstructing the fulfillment of prophecy preliminary to Israel’s conversion and restoration to its Middle East land. Until Britain readmitted them, the prophecy that they must be dispersed “among all peoples from one end of the earth even unto the other end was in force (Deut 28:64; Toon, p. 118).” It was now Oliver Cromwell’s hour, and he did his best to facilitate Menasseh’s request, but the commercial opposition to them prevailed and the conference called to act on the matter ended with a negative. Still Cromwell did what he could to gain entrance for small groups of Jews. Their full legal return to England had to wait until 1858, and then it was a relatively short span of time until the Balfour Declaration made it British policy to support the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But the idea of Israel’s future conversion and return nonetheless received a new currency and stimulus which millenarians could not but embrace with interest, especially the many “Judeo-centrists” (Copley’s term) among them. Cromwell himself said in Parliament on July 4, 1653, “. . . Psalm Sixty-eighth . . . prophesies that He [God] will bring His people again from the depths of the sea, as once he led Israel through the Red Sea. And it may be, as some think, God will bring the Jews home to their station from the isles of the sea (cited by Toon, p. 121).” Thus, though with demurs even among eschatologists, a steady line of Jewish restoration thought moved forward from the time of the Geneva Bible about 1560, mostly concentrated in England, and sometimes with strange and even bizarre twists. The whole episode is something of a replay of European Jewish influence on developing prophecy thought as it occurred earlier in the Hebraist Hugh Broughton and his European Jewish friends—Jewish interests thrusting their way into Christian eschatology. 14. As noted already, the Alsted-Mede axis influenced some important members of the Westminster Assembly (1640s). The most notable millenarian in the body was William Twisse of whose eschatology we shall probably never have any full account since he wrote little more on the subject than his prefaces to two of Mede’s works. Others were Thomas Goodwin and Samuel Rutherford. Twisse and Goodwin are sometimes cited by American premillenarians after 1700 along with Mede, G. S. Faber and Thomas Newton (see below). We have at least two accounts of Goodwin’s millenarian exposition. One by A. R. Dallison appeared in The Gospel Magazine for July, 1969. A briefer account was supplied by Robert Clouse in his essay, “The Rebirth of Millenarianism,” in Toon (ed), Puritan Eschatology, pp. 62-65. Goodwin preached on the Apocalypse in Holland in 1639 and published these lectures in Exposition of the Revelation. His sermons on Ephesians contain significant comments on Ephesians 1:21-22. There is a Goodwin sermon entitled “A Glimpse of Syons Glory,” also preached in Holland in 1641, and sometimes questioned as his. He also gave a sermon in the House of Commons on February 25, 1646 entitled, “The Great Interest of States and Kingdoms (Clouse in Toon, p. 62).” By Clouse’s account, Goodwin’s millenarianism was based on a literal reading of prophecy—by now common ground in both Protestant soteriology and eschatology—as in texts like Zechariah 12:10, Matthew 26:29 and Revelation 20:4-6. Goodwin thought biblical eschatology texts about the earth 294

and world as the scene of end-time events should not be referred to heaven, but belonged to the Bible’s First Adam-Second Adam thinking. Thus in Ephesians 1:21-22, the reference to “age to come” is not to heaven, but to the age of the Second Adam (Christ) identified in Revelation 20 as the millennial reign of Christ or kingdom of Christ. Goodwin in fact states (cited by Clouse in Toon, p. 63) that “He (God) hath appointed a special world on purpose for him, between this world and the end of the day of judgment . . . wherein our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ shall reign (cited by Clouse in Toon, p. 63).” He also states that “As Adam had a world made for him, so shall Jesus Christ, the second Adam . . . have a world made for him (cited by Clouse in Toon, p. 63; both quotes are from Dallison’s sketch of Goodwin’s eschatology).” Goodwin, however, in Dallison and Clouse’s assessments, did not mean any more than Alsted or Mede, i.e., that Christ would physically come to earth in order to reign here during the millennium. Nonetheless, the First Resurrection is literal, and effected by God in Christ since 1 Corinthians 15:24-25 assigns the kingdom to Christ and thinks of him delivering it up to the Father at its triumphant conclusion. He can also state straightaway that the coming kingdom/millennium is that in which Christ shall reign. That he will do so by a permanent, personal, visible presence, as in nineteenth and twentieth century millenarian thought, does not loom as a point of controversy or issue for any in the Alsted-Mede tradition. The millennial kingdom is Christ’s reign established at its beginning by the First Resurrection of Revelation 20:4-6 and operated by him and his reigning powers, whether personally on earth or from heaven. Nonetheless, as noted above, most seventeenth and eighteenth century millenarians thought of a literal Second Coming to effect these events, even if they believed Christ would return again to heaven. This seventeenth century millenarian thought contained important details moving along the line of development which sometime in the late seventeenth or eighteenth century began to gradually to think of the millennium as a permanent personal presence of Christ on earth. The difficulty here, of course, is the question of how Jesus could maintain his intercessory ministry for the saints at the right hand of God, on which the New Testament invests considerable reflection in a quite literal way, and simultaneously carry out all governmental functions in operating his worldwide kingdom on earth. In whatever way this question was later to be resolved, or left unresolved, at a time slightly before 1800 millenarians began thinking of Christ as literally raising saints and/or martyrs, and personally reigning with them on earth in the millennial era. 15. Brightman’s second-millenium-in-progress fed the popularity of the Fifth Monarchy anarchists and parliamentary millenarians from 1648 to 1685. At the same time a more postmillennial-like view was out and about, and in considerable popularity for a full century and more before Daniel Whitby gave it popular currency. He expounded it in more detail and had the honor of his name attached to it without much recognition of his antecedents. Whitby’s Postmillennialism came to be understood as involving only a single millennium, not Brightman and Bengel’s double millennium. Whitby’s views fed revolutionary England through preaching in Parliament by its great Puritan advocate John Owen and many others. Toon sketches contextual influences which had encouraged Brightman’s entourage: revival of Hebrew Bible and Jewish studies including prophecy; the centrality of the Bible and its literal interpretation; and the corollary of reading “Israel” to mean the national Jewish entity and not the church. Confidence was increasing that Christ’s 295

victory over the enemies of the church would occur in a historically sequenced manner on earth, and that his victory on earth was the subject of the sequences in the Apocalypse. Brightman’s eschatology made it possible to relate the Apocalypse to the situation faced by biblical prophecy students in seventeenth century England. Since the second and last of the two millenia alleged by Brightman was thought to be in progress and some of its historical dynamics are found in Revelation, the application to politics is patent, though fraught with problems of specificity and detail. But whatever the problems, millennialist zeal was rife throughout English aristocracy all the way to Parliament until that zeal collapsed by overextension and extremism after the revolutionary period it encouraged—with finality by about 1690. Thereafter it lost aristocratic popularity, although did not cease to exist. Firth concluded that with millennialism and developing criticism of its details, the apocalyptic tradition began to fade in the middle years of the seventeenth century, dying so to say at its own hands. But subsequent studies, and even some prior to Firth, make this conclusion dubious, since ongoing attention to millenary and apocalyptic ideas rather shows gradual revision, consolidation, re-arrangement, and development of some more biblically based values in this vortex. These ideas in fact became the extended and developed Puritan millenarian eschatology in England and America, although not without a self-interested attachment to the notion that England and/or America had become the divinely chosen nation—the New Israel (see Conrad Cherry, God’s New Israel for the American application). The surveys of millenary and apocalyptic literature observe that the movement entered upon a decline period after the violent and disruptive seventeenth century in England, and that it survived through the period of 1690 to 1750. It certainly did not die; rather it went through a series of modifications, adjustments and mutations (see below) even while taking extensive losses among English aristocracy. B. S. Capp is a later twentieth century scholar of the English Fifth Monarchists. He thinks Henry (John) Archer is midway between Alsted-Mede, and the Fifth Monarchy movement and even fed it, but without ever taking on their view that the Kingdom of Christ may be brought about by earthly action of the saints now. Archer remained a divine (vs saintly) sovereignty millenarian. The Fifth Monarchy movement was nonetheless an implication of Brightman’s postmillennialism, something of a throw-back to Muntzer and early Anabaptist radicalism during the Reformation, as well as being an anticipation of American postmillennialism’s hot pursuit of the Kingdom of God all the way down to about 1925. The Fifth Monarchy spokesmen described the coming millennium of their effort more fully than had any up to their own time, even though their description is a mix of biblical and human social ideas during the period of 1648 through 1685. The details from Capp may be read in his essay in Toon. 16. In 1988 Millennialism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, 1650-1800 appeared—a collection of essays originally delivered as a series of lectures at the Clark Library in England in 1975. The lecturers discussed the vast influence in English literature and politics of the eschatological ideas of the Reformation and Post-reformation era. Christopher Hill, for example, explored the conversion of the Jews which by 1600 had become a mainstay of the Protestant apocalyptic tradition along with the widely accepted date of 1656 for the fall of the Antichrist papacy and Turks. But by 1650 the influence of Mede and Alsted had become even more pervasive than Katharine Firth thought: it was 296

“everywhere.” Hill’s essay is an astonishing collection and review of this seventeenth century literature. In quantity and scope it probes far beyond what other studies had perceived. Decline of millenarianism after the restoration of the monarchy accounts for its relatively thin representation from 1700 to 1750, certainly in Britain, and probably in America as well. “Decline” is a satisfactory description of what happened to millennialism in Britain; but what happened to it is more like splintering, fragmenting, or groping about for some satisfying version of eschatology, a kind of shaking out and uncertainty after the collapse of the date-setting era of 1600-1660 and beyond. Theological leaders were casting about for the right date for the millennium or Second Coming, and trying to cope with the disappointment of a failed millennium-now overthrow of the British monarchy from 1648 to 1660. What took its place in public discourse and British aristocratic interests was a turn toward classical Greek and Roman political thought. This situation is the subject of essayist Steven Zwicker in this volume. While the general decline of millenary interest is understandable in the political climate of the Restoration and Glorious Revolution, its greatest losses were in that very sector of British society where it had thrived—most notably among the British aristocracy, and in government, military and other elitist circles. So essayist Margaret Jacob puts it; and she is consistent with others in the volume—most notably Zwicker’s discussion of this shift from millenary biblical appeals to an awakened interest in the political thought of the Greek and Roman classics. Thus in early eighteenthcentury England, millenary beliefs and apocalyptic predictions had mostly disappeared from upper-class culture. The masses, however, still clung to beliefs in abrupt pauses or final conflagrations which their prophets assured them would alter the human condition and destroy the wicked and oppressive. As English high culture came to presume an infinitude of earthly time, i.e., a future history without a near millennium, the new scientific thought, particularly as it was applied mechanically to material needs, simultaneously encouraged the belief that human progress was possible, or even inevitable and unending (p. 127). Millennialism and Messianism gathers evidence for the survival of millenary thought in various forms through the first half of the eighteenth century. Isaac Newton, whose mechanics theories are a primary reference of Margaret Jacob’s discussion of “scientific thought,” was a premillenarian (pace Clouse), and he was influential in this as in his scientific work. William Whiston, famous translator of Josephus’ works, was also an influential eschatologist. Bishop George Berkeley, too, most famous as a philosopher of human knowing, was very probably some kind of millenarian as well. Still, the few millenarian works of the era continued to come mostly from theologians and clergymen, happy enough perhaps to have the support of these respected scientific and philosophical luminaries. 17. There was more to this decline of millenary beliefs from about 1690 to 1750 in England. Not only did Englishmen turn from biblical prophecy to the Graeco-Roman classics and away from millennialism for their politics. They also turned to science, inspired by the striking work of Isaac Newton, and beginning about 1715, to Freemasonry. Freemasonry was founded about that time to strengthen morality and education without any special connection to the church, let alone popular millennialism, although many clergymen became masons and often delivered sermons in lodge meetings. The irony of Isaac Newton’s 297

influence, including his theology and millenarian beliefs, is the subject of Arthur Quinn’s essay in the collection noted above, “On Reading Newton Apocalyptically.” It appears that the survival of millenary thinking through this period was partly due to two very prominent Britons—Newton himself and Henry Moore. Newton did not publish extensively on eschatology. But Clouse notes Newton’s more or less obscure work, Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733), discussed by recent Newton biographer Richard Westfall, and also known from an edition of 1922 as Daniel and the Apocalypse. A small extract from this work was published in London by Charles Thynne in 1916 in a series entitled Prophecy Investigation Society: Aids to Prophetic Study, No. 8: Sir Isaac Newton on the Prophetic Symbols. Newton continued the historicism of his time on Daniel and Revelation and as virtually all other Protestants, thought the Catholic Church and papacy to be continuous with the Roman Empire supposed to be the fourth kingdom in Daniel 7. Quinn notes Newton’s hesitation to publish anything including his scientific works, the Principia and the Opticks. And yet his millenarian and other theological views, including his Arianism, appear to have been well known everywhere. Quinn also refers to yet unpublished manuscripts of Newton on theological subjects apparently including eschatology since more recent biographers have studied them and refer to them. Henry More was a friend of Newton. Toward the end of his life More grew less and less interested in the philosophy of science, and more and more interested in biblical prophecy and millenarianism. He was partly motivated to this interest by what he considered the diluting studies of Francisco Ribera from the Catholic side, and the prominent Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius on the Protestant side. Both writers, he thought, turned public attention away from the papacy as Antichrist, either by preterizing the Apocalypse (Grotius), or futurizing it as a prophecy of the victory of Roman Catholicism in the plan of God (Ribera; see Clouse, Alsted, p. 248, n. 40). More follows Mede on Revelation. He periodizes the seven churches: Ephesus represents the beginning to Nero; Thyatira represents 1242 to the Reformation; and Sardis represents the Reformation to the Consummatio. Philadelphia is the church in the millennium. During the millennium Satan will be bound and the kings of the earth will issue edicts ordering restraints on paganism, Muslims and Catholics. The martyrs will rule with Christ in heaven, while the successors of the martyrs will reign on earth. (summary from Clouse, Alsted, pp. 259-260). More believed in a literal resurrection at the beginning of the millennium which made the reign of the saints possible, even though he did not think Christ would be permanently and personally present on earth like Alsted and Mede. Still, the reign of the saints is made possible by the powerful works of Christ at his coming to earth, especially the First Resurrection. Thus More is seen by Clouse to be “premillenarian” which means a real premillennial personal Second Coming to execute the events which begin the kingdom, but not necessarily a permanent personal presence of Christ on earth for the whole thousand years. Nonetheless, each of Mede’s closest followers in his turn—Twisse, Holmes, Sherwin, Newton and More—also speak explicitly, according to Clouse’s account, of Christ’s Second Coming or appearance on earth to accomplish the events of judgment, resurrection and the ensuing millennial kingdom. So far, this may be seen as the persistent normal premillennialism from Alstead on. 18. Several lesser-known but important Second Advent millenarians published prophecy works during this thin period (1690-1750); one was Robert Fleming. His stature 298

is suggested by the inclusion of an extract from his writings in a collection of “conjectures” on the French Revolution published in London under the title Prophetic Conjectures on the French Revolution and other Recent and Shortly Expected Events. The volume extracts adumbrations and predictions of the French Revolution from John Knox, Thomas Goodwin, James Ussher, Henry More, Pierre Jurieu (the French eschatologist) and John Gill—a notable company. Fleming died in 1716, well into the period of millenarian decline. In his younger years he lived in Holland where he studied at Utrecht and Leyden, taught in Rotterdam, and later was offered but declined the principalship of the University of Glasgow (Froom, 2:642). While lecturing at Salters’ Hall in Scotland in 1701, he published a speech on The Rise and Fall of the Papacy. By this time, some millenarians, similarly to Brightman, were projecting the beginning of the millennium as far forward as 2000, Fleming among them. Fleming identified the papacy as the Antichrist who would be destroyed only by the Second Coming of Christ, when “the world enters upon that glorious sabbatical millenary, when the saints shall reign on the earth, in a peaceable manner for a thousand years more (italics Fleming’s or Froom’s—not clear in Froom, 2:646).” At the end of the thousand years an apostasy will occur, and Christ will come to judge it. This judgment might take another thousand years (Froom, 2:646), a thought reminiscent of Brightman’s double millennium. Yet another millenarian who spoke during the decline of 1690-1750 was Charles Daubuz. Born in France, Daubuz fled France during the Huguenot persecution and settled finally in Yorkshire; he was educated at Christ Church, Oxford and Queens College, Cambridge (Froom 2:655). Daubuz is of some importance since he is cited occasionally by American millenarians after 1750. In 1720 he published A Perpetual Commentary on the Revelation of St. John in which he argues that both resurrections in Revelation 20 are resurrections of the body—by now a gradually emerging base line of premillennialism. Froom is not clear on when the Second Coming occurs according to Daubuz. But as we have seen, the tradition does not need Christ’s permanent presence on earth after the First Resurrection to qualify as premillenarian—not yet, at least. So Fleming and Daubuz join Newton and More to keep the waning millenarian tradition alive in a period characterized by reactions favoring classicism, science and freemasonry, and by weariness with seventeenth century millennialist wars. Two more thinkers of this decline era, though of differing weight in their status and influence, contributed to the development of Second Coming millennialism. Both represent English Baptist elements in the discussion. In 1734 Sayer Rudd (d. 1757) published An Essay toward a New Explication of the Doctrines of the Resurrection, Millennium, and Judgment. This essay was among the first to engage Whitby’s postmillennialism with the premillennial alternative. Rudd argued that Satan had not yet been bound, and the millennium not yet commenced. Rather, he thought, the thousand years would begin only with the destruction of Turk and Pope, and the Second Coming of Christ (Froom, 2:682).” Rudd, however, does not appear to have been widely influential. Far more significant is John Gill’s (d. 1771) exposition of the prophets and Revelation, both published after 1750 (1758 and 1776 respectively). For Gill, “The millennium will be bounded by the two literal, corporeal resurrections, and the eternal kingdom is to be on earth, not in heaven (Froom, 2:683).” Gill became famous for his expositions and thus better known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when he was sometimes reprinted, though he does not seem to be a special favorite of American millenarians. 299

In America, the premillenarian views of Increase and Cotton Mather were widely held and perhaps even prevailed until Jonathan Edwards, thereby extending earlier forms of millenary thought within the Cotton and Mather families—John Cotton in England and America, and Increase Mather and son Cotton Mather in Boston. Increase and son Cotton Mather’s premillennialism was soon to be overshadowed by the towering influence of Jonathan Edwards’ massive literary output expounding the Great Awakening and its future implications in his postmillennialism. The Mathers’ millenarianism has been discussed by Robert Middlekauff in his widely cited work, The Mathers (1970) and by John Erwin in The Millennialism of Cotton Mather: An Historical and Theological Analysis (1990). John Cotton, first in England, then in America, was a kind of postmillennialist, somewhat in the Brightman tradition. He believed the First Resurrection of Revelation 20 was a spiritual resurrection, as in his booklet, The Churches Resurrection, or the Opening of the Fift and sixt verses of the 20th Chapter of the Revelation (1642). John Cotton had emirgrated and was teaching in Boston by this time, but the work was published in London by R. O. & G. D. for Henry Overton. Increase Mather published The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation about the same time, and son Cotton Mather advanced this influential New England millenarian movement in both the quantity of expositions and extent of its influence in America (see bibliography entries). These developments achieved a precisely defined form of premillennialism with the millenium established by Christ’s descent and earthly reign as a further dispensation beyond the church. As yet, however, and even until after 1800, the central chapters of Revelation continued to be interpreted as a prophecy of the history of the church in its gradual triumph over Roman Catholicism, the papacy and the Turks. What remained, though still some time off, was abandonment of this historicist view of Revelation 6-19 in favor of a futurist reading of these chapters. 19. The year 1703 marks a significant point in Protestant millenary development. In that year Daniel Whitby (1638-1726) published his Paraphrase and Commentary on the New Testament in 2 volumes. Here, toward the end of the second volume, he included an essay of twenty-six pages in length with a “hypothesis” on the millennium and Second Coming. In it he argued that the world will be converted to the gospel, the Jews restored to the Holy Land, and the papacy and Muslims defeated by the preaching of the gospel. At the close of the millennium, Christ would return to conduct the Last Judgment (R. Clouse, “Daniel Whitby,” in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology). Actually, despite calling it a “new” theory, Whitby’s articulation was more like the first systematically developed statement of a view of the millennium established by Brightman’s influence in British thought from about 1600 on. In various expressions, an appreciable body of millenarians simply continued thinking of the millennium as the final victory of the elect after the defeat of the Turkish and Papal Antichrists, and the conversion of the Jews to Christ. After these preliminary events, the church’s millennium would follow; at its end Christ would reappear and finalize history. Premillenarians rather placed the personal return of Christ before the millennium; this difference became an increasingly sharp divide between the two main types of millenary thought, i.e., post- and premillennialism. But the differences had not yet become major in the history of the apocalyptic tradition. It is not clear whether Whitby’s explanation of the millennium gained a large immediate following in the United Kingdom or even on the continent. But when Jonathan 300

Edwards—without direct critical-exegetical argument—adopted it in America during the First Great Awakening of 1740-1750, postmillennialism became as normal in America as any of Edwards’ other assessments of the Awakening. His pupil and “improver,” Samuel Hopkins, then published The Millennium at Newport RI in 1793 in which the view was restated and argued. By this time the American consciousness had already developed a strong millennializing sense of its own history stemming in part from an American victory over the French at Breton Island near the mouth of the St. Lawrence river (N. Hatch, “The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Series, XXXI [1974]: 407-430). The American Revolution and Civil War were both thought of as further important steps toward the American Millennium—a tradition studied and documented in remarkable detail in a large body of literature found in our accompanying bibliography of secondary millenary studies. In 1846, postmillennialism gained a prestigious and detailed scholarly defense— against a steadily growing premillennialist literature—in the work of David Brown, Christ’s Second Coming: Will it be Pre-millennial? (Edinburgh, 1847). Brown was a Scottish Presbyterian who taught at the Presbyterian college in Edinburgh. This book meticulously examined every theological and exegetical issue in the growing postmillennial-premillennial Second Coming debate. Already in 1845, Patrick Fairbairn had lent his support against premillennialism in The Typology of Scripture, and subsequently Samuel Walgrave as well in his 1855 work, New Testament Millenarianism, which, Sandeen notes (Roots of Fundamentalism, p. 298), “attracted much attention among millenarians.” Perhaps the combined force of Whitby, Fairbairn, Brown and Walgrave in Britain, and the prestige of Edwards and Hopkins in America, made it unnecessary for American postmillennialists to work very hard in their own defense beyond these widely read studies and their great popularity. Postmillennialist literary output did not rise to the level of the premillenarians in quantity. Sandeen’s bibliography of American opponents of premillennialism numbers only about a dozen items, about half of which are articles, although it would be a mistake to assume his list is exhaustive. Still, several observers in both the earlier and later parts of the twentieth century speak of postmillennialism’s more modest quantity of expositions (L. S. Chafer earlier; J. Moorhead more recently). Further critical examination of the biblical data supporting postmillennialism was apparently not needed amid the currency of this Scottish-American examination of the issues. The fullest study of postmillennialism’s literary history in America is that of James Moorhead (“The Erosion of Postmillennialism . . .” and World Without End). Ernest Tuveson had already shown how certain forms of millennialism adopted progressivistdevelopmental views of history to support optimism about the church’s worldly victory. Moorhead shows how postmillennialism could not in the long run bear the burden of an allegedly improving history moving toward utopia; nor could it bear the odium of endless revision of what fulfilled what in recent history. For Moorhead, postmillennialism collapsed of its own weight between the Civil War and about 1925. He discusses in detail how this view had nonetheless gained an immense following in America by linking American destiny with postmillennialism as a progressivist Christian eschatology. While these studies are of great importance for charting the history of this view, we venture to offer a few comments on its American ethos. 301

Postmillennialism was perhaps sufficiently popular in the nineteenth century that preaching and pamphleteering were enough to defend and normalize it. To appreciate the power of Edwards’ advocacy of postmillennialism, one might take note of how his followers and even his detractors viewed him, whether on small points or large. Alan Heimart, Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (1968), thus speaks of “. . . the intellectual dominion of Jonathan Edwards (p. 6).” Separatists and other Baptists called him “the greatest pillar in this part of Zion’s Building.” Baptist leader Isaac Backus thought of him as a speaker of “pure truth,” and warmly referred to “our Edwards.” Ministers referred to him as the “late divine, whose praise is in all the churches,” and Gilbert Tennent as the “ascending Elijah.” In the same vein, J. C. Calhoun, aware of his own persuasive abilities, thought of Edwards’ “almost superhuman wisdom.” C. C. Goen, in a frequently cited article shows how a simple revision in the received millennial scheme made his views so workable: the millennium was not to be introduced by the horrors of judgment, but rather in a smooth transition brought about by the joy and human benefits of revivals. In other words, postmillennialism was becoming a happy, pleasant and successdriven missionary millennialism as against an Anti-Christ military anarchy movement. Said Heimert, “Edwards could not fail to sweep like a flood over America in eschatology as in everything else (comments collected by Heimart, pp. 6-7).” To Edwards popularity— beside Samuel Hopkins’ 1793 on The Millennium—was added that of David Brown in which for beyond 500 pages he tried to exegetically undergird the details of postmillennialism and demolish every premillenarian objection point by point. Did postmillennialism need more? And yet it is recognized today as a view which could not deliver on its endlessly revised promises of Christian triumph over history and human wickedness (J. Moorhead. “The Erosion of Postmillennialism in American Religious Thought, 1865-1925,” Church History 53 [1984]: 61-77). Decades after his death, however, Edwards gained a new and popular promoter of his American postmillennialism in revivalist Charles Finney. Finney’s revival in Rochester, New York in 1830-1831 created a massive national outburst of postmillennial enthusiasm, at least in the northeastern states—as a kind of futuristic high point of the Second Great Awakening. It is not that postmillennialism was the point of enthusiasm as such, rather its force was the possibility of soon establishing the millennium in America as in the hymn America the Beautiful. Indeed, the power to make it happen lay in the stunning changes which Finney’s revival brought about in city after city in the northeast. In Rochester New York, people returned to prayer, masses were converted to Christ, and moral reform followed including temperance, Sabbath-keeping, evangelism and missions. This revival and its children throughout the northeastern states was a moral renovation in America, and its possibilities for cleaning up drunkenness and carousing everywhere, just as in Rochester, were without limit. Thus to Finney should be attributed in large part, the moral crusade which made postmillennialism so emotionally popular. Finney himself in turn had a notable helper at Rochester in Theodore Weld whose temperance preaching virtually dried out the town in a few weeks. This is the same Theodore Weld who soon joined the abolition movement as another aspect of the revivalist moral crusade, later radicalized Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, and became a lecturer on the abolition circuit together with the corps of anti-slavery lecturers around William Lloyd Garrison. The Rochester revival has been studied in detail by Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and 302

Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). Another study of note is David Weddle’s Law as Gospel: Revival and Reform in the Theology of Charles G. Finney (London: Scarecrow Press, 1985). In this manner, though with many more evangelists and reformers than identified in this brief paragraph, Whitby’s influence, aided by Edwards, Hopkins and Finney, moved America into a vast embrace of the idea that the gospel itself, together with the consequent moral reforms of the kind exhibited at Rochester, could transform the world into the promised millennium without any Second Coming. Perhaps it was Finney’s powerful advocacy of this idea that as much as anything aroused the premillenarians in the middle years of the nineteenth century. Thomas Newton and American Premillennialism 20. Isaac Newton died in 1713. But another Newton—Bishop Thomas Newton of Bristol (England)—represents the renewal of prophecy-fulfilled-in-history studies, with an apparent cautious embrace of a literal First Resurrection to begin the millennium. Thus the survival of millennialism through its period of very thin popularity is something of a tale of two Newtons, Sir Isaac and Bishop Thomas. In prophecy-fufilled-in-history theology, and Catholicism-as-Roman-Antichrist views of Revelation, none surpasses Thomas Newton in popularity after 1760, not only in Britain, but in America, and all the way to the Civil War Era and beyond. His momentous contribution will be described in some detail below. If it is appropriate to outline this history of the major movers and shakers, then to Daniel Whitby’s work must be added that of Thomas Newton about a half-century years later. The decline of millenarian belief set the stage for these two stunning publishing events in eschatology—Whitby’s commentary on the New Testament, and the publication beginning in 1754 of the first of Thomas Newton’s three volumes of Dissertations on the Prophecies which have remarkably been Fulfilled, and at this Time are Fulfilling in the World. However, it is all too easy to overstate the importance of this situation. The millenary literature which stimulated British hopes did not suddenly disappear from the shelves of libraries and booksellers. Its cumulative impact, even in British universities and the Anglican Church, let alone in Puritan circles, should not be thought to have suddenly disappeared. It is important to understand what Rousseau terms the “underbelly” of British aristocracy—that stream of subterranean ideas not always in aristocratic public approval, but still moving around on the underside of its life. With the work of Whitby and Thomas Newton, forms of a more workable millenary theology again enter the public stream, and spread out in a broad delta of influence in both Britain and America. These two thinkers set the stage for what became a battle of millennialisms (pre- and post-) in England and America. The postmillennialism in the Whitby-Edwards-Finney stream was not by intent politically violent, although it was capable of becoming that as it did in the American Revolution (Heimert) and Civil War. Thomas Newton’s treatment continues a premillennialism with purely divine causation of the literal First Resurrection, although Newton continued with great vigor the Reformation view of the Catholic Church and papacy as the Rome of Daniel and Revelation, and expounded the whole of Christian history as a steady stream of preliminarily fulfilled prophecies during the church era from all parts of the Bible in good historicist fashion. Together with Mede, Thomas Newton became one of the most cited 303

students of prophecy and fulfillment among American historicist premillenarians from about 1750 to the American Civil War. Newton perhaps represents the climax of historicist anti-papal prophecy studies. American premillenarians were most conscious of Thomas Newton’s prophetic studies in the period from 1760 to 1870. Sometimes he is mentioned with Joseph Mede, but sometimes alone in hermeneutical comments. Among the many editions and reprints of Newton, the new American edition of 1813, reproduced in the original three volumes (Philadelphia: James Martin), and the 1850 revised edition, produced in one volume by editor W. S. Dobson (London and Philadelphia) are notable. The first American edition had appeared in the 1790s, but the work had probably been read in America from its first publication. Newton is persistently cited as a kind of groundwork to which readers are repeatedly referred, as for example by American premillenarians David Austin (1792), Joshua Spalding (1796) and Elhanan Winchester (l800). Newton does not offer his study as a continuation of the work of Mede or anyone else, although he cites Mede occasionally. Rather he notes Francis Bacon’s call for a history of prophecy in Book II of his Advancement of Learning (1605), and relates a personal conversation with a skeptical British military officer, Marshal Wade, who explained the prophecies as originating and fulfilled ex eventu, that is, narrated so as to appear to have been fulfilled, but actually composed in both promise and fulfillment after the alleged prophecyfulfillment event. Wade told Newton in a personal conversation, as the latter relates in his Introduction, that if he could be shown some Scriptural cases clearly to the contrary, he would have to rethink his objections to the presence of divine revelation in Scripture. In response, Newton developed a series of sermons on the fulfillment of prophecies. This series in turn became the basis for the book-length, multi-volume treatment of Dissertations for a larger audience beginning with the publication of volume one, as he explains. Newton distilled and consolidated the Protestant prophetic study tradition of the years 1530 to 1650. This is not to say his defense of its central ideas (periodization of prophecies fulfilled in history, especially the papacy as Antichrist) is uniformly compelling. But the work shows that the Reformation prophetic-apocalyptic tradition did not in fact die as is sometimes suggested, but rather continued in one millenary form or another with considerable energy, including premillenarian studies running in parallel with the promotions of postmillennialism. The work is driven from the beginning—although one does not really sense it until the Daniel passages—by his convictions that (1) Daniel’s fourth kingdom is Rome, (2) Rome in the Apocalypse continues Daniel’s Rome but with vast expansion, and (3) the continuing form of the Daniel-Revelation Roman empire is Catholicism and the papacy. Newton’s treatment of the prophecies begins in Genesis. He cannot deal with every biblical prophecy, so he selects the most broad and sweeping prophecies such as those about Shem, Ham and Japheth in Genesis 9, or those with more details like Daniel 7-8. Newton’s method is the same as the earlier Protestant apocalyptic tradition—prophecy-fulfilled-in history, including the history of the church. He knows the writings of ancient historians and geographers, and several eighteenth century Middle East travelers. He draws on all of them in massive detail, sometimes to show that they all attest to this or that point of history prophesied in major biblical prophetic texts. His favorites are all the best historians and observers of events honored as the greatest since their own time. He spares no space to cite all he can marshal in support of the biblical language he sees 304

fulfilled. Sometimes his historicism is so determined that he wants to deny any futurism at all as, for example, in the prophecies of Jesus about Jerusalem and subsequent events after its fall as referring only to the events of the Jewish war of 67-72. Not Jerusalem but Rome, in its whole history from the founding to the Roman Catholic Church and Holy Roman Empire down to his own time, is the distant projecting subject of biblical prophecy, with Protestant Christianity under divine powers predestined to be the victor. To construct his argument Newton makes use of several different types of prophecy with several modes of historical fulfillment. (1) The simplest form of prophecy-fulfillment occurs in his handling of the prophecy of Balaam, that Israel will “not be reckoned among the nations.” This statement is satisfied by all perceptions of Israel’s uniqueness. (2) A type of prophecy needing special exegetical attention is represented by the famous “Shiloh” text of Genesis 49:10. For guidance he consults the Vulgate, Syriac, Samaritan Pentetuch, and Targums and Talmud. He finds they all think the text refers to Messiah; so there is general agreement, even though LeClerc demurs. (3) One gains help with the meaning of some prophecies by analogies with other prophecies on the same topic; the testaments of Jacob (Gen 49) and Moses (Deut 33), which prophesy the destinies of the twelve tribes seriatim, are examples, as are multiple prophecies for Esau-Edom. (4) Some prophecies have much more stretch in the history of their fulfillment than others; examples are those of Christ or events of the church age. This stretching out of both the prophecies and their fulfillments, in multiple details and historical events, is characteristic of Daniel and Revelation. (5) Some prophecies require a very precise knowledge of world history for which he cites a combination, for example, of Roman historians and modern travelers. (6) More complicated are prophecies with a double sense which he calls “literal and mystical” or “two events” or “two-fold completion.” David, for example, was both an historical king and a type of Jesus the Messiah. (7) In some cases a very minute search is required to discern the exact reference of the biblical language. This is the case with Balaam’s reference to the Kittim in Numbers 22:23-25. This term is the occasion for an exhaustive collection of Kittim texts to identify its location. Newton finally decides Kittim denotes the people and cities of the Mediterranean Islands and coasts including Greece and Rome. This identification allows fulfillment in Greece and Rome’s advances against Mesopotamian regional powers. More importantly, to account for the favor in which he was held by historicist millenarians, are the ways in which he seeks to establish fulfillment. (1) He uses classical historians and other resources of antiquity profusely. His favorites are Strabo, Alexander Polyhistor, Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, and Dio Cassius; he also uses Menander of Ephesus on the prophesied fate of Tyre, and cites Prideaux’s use of “The Phoenician Annals.” (2) Following the principle of what might be called “amplitude,” he cites Isaiah 1:7-9 (“Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire; your fields are being stripped by foreigners right before you, laid waste as when overthrown by strangers. The Daughter of Zion is left like a shelter in a vineyard, like a hut in a field of melons, like a city under siege. Unless the Lord Almighty had left us some survivors, we would have become like Sodom, we would have been like Gomorrah (NIV).”). Newton makes Isaiah’s words reach first to Ahaz and Hezekiah, then to the Babylonians, then to the Romans and beyond. On this stretching and extension, his comment is, “. . . and has not the state of Judea now for many ages been exactly answerable to this description?” In support he cites Voltaire’s history of the Crusades, Aristeas and Josephus, Strabo, Hecataeus as cited by Josephus, Tacitus, and 305

the travelers Maundrell and Shaw who comment on the barrenness of the land of Israel— all with summaries or direct quotations occupying more than five full pages in the 1813 edition of Volume I. (3) Sometimes a sweeping historical review is required, as for example to illustrate fulfillment of the Ishmael prophecy—“And he will be a wild man . . . in the wilderness,” and “. . . [he] shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.” To achieve the desired forceful sense of fulfillment, Newton reviews Egyptian, Persian, Greek and Roman relations with Arabs to show that none subdued them to any extent. To this he adds material on desert life in the Middle East from Amianus Marcellinus and Harris’ Voyages. On the biblical statement that Ishmael “became an archer,” he cites Virgil’s Georgics, Book II, line 448, to illustrate how the wood of the yew tree “is bent into Iturean bows.” (4) Sometimes the more recent history of Jews in Christian Europe satisfies the wording requirements of a prophetic text. For example, Deuteronomy 28:36, 64 speak of Israel worshipping other gods of wood and stone. Newton gains the desired sense of historical realism by citing Jewish presence in Catholic convents and occupation of church offices under non-Jewish names, for which he also coordinates material from at least four recent sources. (5) One final dimension of Newton’s historicism may be noted. Sometimes he invokes prophetic wording in precise detail to achieve attestable historical coordination. He does so in Nahum’s prophecy of 1:10 that Nineveh will fall while its people are drunk, or of 2:6 that Nineveh’s palace will be dissolved by a flooded Tigris River. On both statements he cites Diodorus Siculus again for a historian’s supposedly independent account in order to confirm these biblical statements. But although Diodorus does furnish detail to supplement a gap in Herodotus account of the fall of Nineveh and the Assyrians’ drunkeness, and although he also furnishes parallel information on the flooded Tigris rolling over the city, Newton backs off slightly, and finally, perhaps to be on the cautious side, settles for a more general validation: “But Nahum is cited upon this occasion principally to show, that he foretold the total and entire destruction of this city.” Newton is satisfied therewith since he recognizes that Diodorus has some fanciful and erroneous details in his account, and is sometimes in conflict with both Herodotus and Amianus Marcellinus over the details of Assyrian history. Thus Newton avoids damaging his argument by too much dependence on sources with critical difficulties on precise literal detail. Newton also backs off elsewhere when the precise details of the history-in-fulfillment he seeks cannot be attested with certainty from his historical sources. This feature creates the impression that he critically sifts the value of sources, and hence gains a cautionary projection of credibility in the argument. Welleducated nineteenth century millenarians perhaps appreciated this critical dimension of Newton, since it shows a certain careful attitude in handling sources—a caution not always visible in expositions of biblical prophecy or millenarian formulations. Thomas Newton only infrequently refers to his hermeneutical operations as “literalism.” Rather, he identifies literalism with something more wooden and mechanical, or straining for an assumed precision in detail without due regard for rhetorical turns of expression or historically descriptive language capable of flexible or adaptive fulfillment. He rather prefers terms like “fulfilled” or “completed” which express degrees of variety and complexity in the biblical language itself and in the possibilities of historical fulfillment. Nonetheless, his American millenarian readers and interpreters certainly saw him as expounding prophecy with a visual-verifiable method—a sort of biblical linguistic and historical realism which in turn undergirds their own more or less “literalist” 306

millenarianism—at least in the manner in which they interpret the prophecies and look for both present and future fulfillments. And so Newton hermeneutically and Mede theologically became major guides along with many other lesser expositors (several of considerable status in England) toward their millenarian expositions of eschatology. Newton clearly began something of a prophetic realist movement which simply grew in its interpretive consciousness until it became the literalism of twentieth century premillennialism. 21. During the eighteenth century, a resurgent premillennialism continued to develop in North America, almost entirely along lines layed down by Alsted and Mede in the seventeenth century, and of course with many aberrations and eccentricities along the way. While premillennialists more or less dominated the landscape following the Mathers, the view does seem to have somewhat leveled out in popularity after 1750 in America. The slow-downl is owing to the rapidly rising postmillennialism of Whitby, popularized during and after the Great Awakening by the prestigeous support of Jonathan Edwards and his pupils, especially Samuel Hopkins at Newport, Rhode Island, as noted above (see Whitby). The sudden popular currency of postmillennialism aroused the premillennialists at the same time. Thus aroused and determined, they began a renewed literary campaign of propaganda which despite the popularity of the Whitby-Edwardsian exposition, began what gradually became a decided new life for premillennialism in America. The bibliographic research of the current project into the extent and kinds of premillenarian works produced in America after 1750 shows an inclining gradiant in quantity of works through the last part of the nineteenth century and continuing in the twentieth century. That multiplication of millenarian works did not produce instant popularity, however, but gradually became fodder for the later nineteenth and early twentieth century war with postmillennialism. Among the most forceful, clear and sober of these works is that of Joshua Spalding, pastor of the Tabernacle Church at Salem, Massachusetts between about 1785 and 1800. In 1796 Spalding published Sentiments, Concerning the Coming and Kingdom of Christ (Salem: Thomas Cushing). Froom, Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, 3: 230) calls Spalding “The Daystar of Returning Premillennialism.” This work is unmatched among all those published between 1750 and 1850 for brevity, clarity and charm. Its argumentation is crisp and clean. It focuses on the bedrock basics of the view, and achieves a sober avoidance of eccentric detail including the ever present temptation to set dates for the Second Coming. Spalding is quite aware of his most important antecedents and cites them throughout; most are discussed in the survey above. At the same time, there is not much new here, only the cleanest and most pointed of basic formulations. Reformation and post-Reformation historicism continues (prophecy fulfilled in ongoing visible events of church and surrounding history. But as history stretches out, the schemes of earlier centuries have to be modified to match events in the history with symbols and numbers in the Apocalypse. If there is an explanation for the quantity of premillenarian works compared to the lesser quantity of postmillennial works (about 5 to 1 according to E. Sandeen’s quantities; see The Roots of Fundamentalism, pp, 299-301), it might be attributed not only to reaction to Edwardsian postmillennialism, but also to a kind of outrage among premillenarians that they should be overcome by a less scriptural view (as they clearly saw it) against which they turned aggressively productive out of protest motivations. Perhaps Spalding’s 307

most important early nineteenth century counterpart was George Duffield’s Dissertations on the Prophecies Relative to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ (New York: Dayton and Newman, 1842)—another study characterized by sober and cautious exegetical methodology. Duffield was probably the most influential premillenarian in the era from the Miller (1840s) to the Civil War. If such a status becomes Duffield, David Nevins Lord runs a close second for this same period. These classics of nineteenth-century premillennialism were to be outdone just after 1880 by the massive three volume work of G. N. H. Peters, The Theocratic Kingdom. 22. Mede and Thomas Newton alone cannot be the sole stimulus to resumption of the renewal of premillenarian literature after 1750. At least six other forces fed this renewal in the last period of the American British colonies. (1) As we have seen, surviving millenarian works through the decline period continued to circulate in England and America, though it has not been determined to what degree they were actually studied. (2) As noted above, a reaction to Whitby and Edwards was beginning by the 1750s. By then Edwards’ works were in print in America, and Whitby’s Interpretation and Paraphrase of the New Testament was being read on both sides of the Atlantic. (3) A sequence of earthquakes between 1720 and 1760 produced several new works on eschatology through the 1750s in America. We can probably identify at least four works devoted in part to earthquake eschatology; earthquakes were acts of God and probably served to return eschatologists to thinking about divine sovereignty in prophecy and history. (4) Increasing irritation of the colonies with their British administration tended to generate apocalyptic thought about what is now called “civil millennialism (Hatch).” Most colonial eschatology was postmillennial in this period. It appears that postmillennialism prevailed popularly through sermons; but in quantity of publications postmillennialism was bested by premillennialists; after all, could Edwards really be improved by anyone except Samuel Hopkins, Edwards’ great “improver.” On any reckoning, postmillennialism’s American civil connection was bound to inspire an irritated minority reaction. (5) A significant force in the millenarian renewal movement after 1750 was French power, French meddling in North America (French and Indian War) and ultimately the French Revolution. Sandeen begins his history of the British phase of the renewal with the events of the Revolution in France: “THE FRENCH REVOLUTION was directly responsible for the revival of prophetic concern. To live through the decade of the 1790s was an experience in apocalypticism for many of the British (Sandeen, Roots, p. 5).” Sandeen might have added “many of the Americans.” British eschatologists saw the banishment of the pope in 1798 as the prophecied fall of Antichrist at last, not unlike Americans who saw the defeat of the French fortress at Louisbourg on Breton Island at the entrance to the gulf of the St. Lawrence in 1745 and again in 1758 as a similar defeat of papal (French) power. Sandeen traces the millenarian treatment of the French Revolution through George Stanley Faber (Dissertations on the Prophecies, That Have Been Fulfilled, Are Now Fulfilling, or Will Hereafter Be Fulfilled, Relative to the Great Period of 1260 Years [London, 1804]; Eight Dissertations . . . on Prophetical Passages [London, 1845]; Remarks on the Effusion of the Fifth Apocalyptic Vial [London, 1815]), William Cuninghame (A Dissertation on the Seals and Trumpets of the Apocalypse [London, 1813]) and James Hatley Frere (Combined View of the Prophecies of Daniel, Esdras, and S. John Showing That All Prophetic Writings Are Formed upon One Plan . . . with Critical Remarks upon . 308

. . Mr. Faber and Mr. Cuninghame [London, 1815]). These apocalyptists identify specific events of the Revolution with specific prophecies of Daniel and Revelation, and debate with each other about the details. (6) A surge of millenarian interest lay in the adoption of premillennial views by the Separatists of the First Great Awakening who embraced millenarianism largely under the theological guidance of Ebenezer Frothingham and Isaac Backus. Since we now have a study of the social dynamics of separatism in the work of C. C. Goen (Revivalists and Separatists, 1962), we are in a better position to understand the dynamics and extent of the separatist branch of the First Awakening. (7) An equally important theme of this era was continuing interest in the conversion of the Jews. A major British leader of this strain of thought was Lewis Way in Britain, who was interested in the condition of European Jews. Sandeen, noting Way’s “intriguing eccentricities,” nonetheless discusses his vast influence, especially through Way’s discovery of the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews (LSPCJ, founded 1809). During the early 1820s Way published a series of articles in the LSPCJ paper, The Jewish Expositor, under the pseudonym “Basilicus.” This development might have been a mere dark-corner quirk, had not Way been a forceful premillenarian. Also, his articles and tracts caught fire among other more prominent leaders of the millenarian movement such as Henry Drummond of Surrey who by 1827 was remarking about how Way’s articles were turning the leaders of the prophetic movement toward study of the millennium. Lewis Way thus also became the ignition not only of renewed interest in conversion of the Jews, but of continuing the tie of Jewish renewal with premillennialism (Sandeen, Roots, p. 12). Then came Edward Irving, who mixed tongues-speaking with the premillenarian renewal movement and the beginning of British prophetic conferences at Henry Drummond’s Surrey estate about 1826. Here British aristocrats met periodically for informal prophecy studies in a pattern of day by day study, dialogue, critique, and synthesis. Their group study format was later immitated by the American Niagara Conferences when dispensational premillennialism began emerging after 1875. (8) Overlapping the Surrey Conferences was a considerable growth in popular prophetic-millenarian magazine publications such as Morning Watch (London, 1839-1833), Christian Herald (Dublin, 1830-1835) and The Investigator (London, 18311836). The most serious and important of these British papers came a little later—Horatius Bonar’s Quarterly Journal of Prophecy. Societies for the popular study of prophecy also developed in the United Kingdom after 1825: The Society for the Investigation of Prophecy and The Prophecy Investigation Society founded in 1842 (Sandeen, p. 24). Many British clergymen became millenarians once again, but by now Second Coming millenarianism was becoming the norm; this form posed no anarchic threats to monarchy or any other government, since it vested everything in the sovereignty of God, not the sovereignty of millennial enthusiasts. 23. The period 1790-1840 in Britain has been closely studied by W. H. Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in England from the 1790s to the 1840s. Oliver covers much the same ground as Sandeen; but he registers some new directions. He too notes the ways in which the French Revolution stimulated prophetic searching and linkage of biblical texts with events. The alarm in Britain over the French Revolution created a shift in identification of Antichrist, away from the long-standing Protestant preoccupation with papacy and Turk, and toward identification of Antichrist 309

with the French Revolution and its concurrent liberalism, anti-Christianity and “atheism.” A consequence of this development was a loosening of the grip on Protestantism of the idea of the papal Antichrist; indeed, the reaction to the likes of Priestley, Jurieu, Bicheno and Faber’s interest in a French Antichrist was a horrified perception of abandonment of the Reformation! None of them would say there was no Antichrist in the papacy. Rather it was becoming clear, they thought, that papacy was perhaps not the only Antichrist, not even the chief Antichrist. The Antichrist spirit was certainly believed to have been at work in the papacy for centuries; but these prophetic writers thought the papal antichristian spirit only a kind of long preview of the actual and final one. An effect of this focus was a kind of new millenarian British nationalism—England to be the locus of the millennium’s establishment as the favored nation, if, that is, it could manage the requisite repentance and godliness. This situation may have generated a feeling of urgency that stimulated the rise of British evangelicalism and some of its new premillennialists. Although not discussed by Oliver (but detailed by Froom), an important twist in the loosening of Protestant focus on the papal Antichrist was the formation in 1819 of The Continental Society for the Diffusion of Religious Knowledge. The Society was organized by a Geneva pastor, M. Mejanel, with the help of British millenarians Robert Haldane, Lewis Way, the elder Henry Drummond, Thomas Baring and others. The purpose of the Society was to proclaim the coming judgment of God on all apostacy--both Catholic and Protestant. The Society held its meetings in London, but its concern was with Europe and its theological drift from the standards of the Reformation. At its annual meetings, officers gave speeches on their concerns about the issue. The Society circulated annual reports to its membership on its proceedings. According to Froom’s summary (3:439-449), these meetings often heard speeches about the apostasy in Europe’s theology and churches, along with calls for theologically orthodox pastors and church leaders to “come out of her (Babylon), my people” and separate themselves from the apostasy. The touch point for this development was Robert Haldane’s alarm while living in Geneva over the Socinian and Arian drift of the Geneva Consistory which had expelled a small group of orthodox pastors. Hence developed a further shift from the earlier exclusive Protestant occupation with a papal Anti-Christ, not only to the French Revolution as Antichrist, but to most of Europe and its churches as equally complicit in the Roman apostasy. The notion of Antichrist as an apostate Protestant church thus began to take shape. It would become a major ingredient in the developing American millenarian renewal, at least for the period of about 1920 to 1960. It continued but with much less force in British millenarians who seem to have backed away from apostate church thinking over time. The Society met annually for about 20 years. Its personnel became the leaders of Drummond’s Surrey prophetic conferences (c 1827-1830). Oliver notes that a new rash of premillenarians arose during the 1820s—some extreme and crude. In the era of the 1820s, he thought, millenarians began turning toward the practical uses of their doctrine, as with James Haldane Stewart’s A Practical View of the Redeemer’s Advent in a Series of Discourses. Soon, however, “practical” took a small step into “earthly” in the hands of Edward Irving and Henry Drummond. Both men were associates at Surrey and then in the New Catholic Apostolic Church. They argued not only for an earthly hierarchal kingly millennium, but for a new political, social and economic order to replace the present corrupt order of church and state. Oliver documents 310

the gradual growth from Irving and Drummond of several secularizing views of the millennium in the hands of John Ward, Robert Owen, James Smith and finally the Mormon missionaries—all this through the 1830s and 1840s. John Ward appointed himself the messiah. He agitated for a new Zion of absolute liberty, and proclaimed the new age to have begun with himself. Robert Owen was a forceful anti-Christian who believed the millenium had begun in 1817 when he organized a communal labor union. Owen strikingly cast his descriptions of the new world, now beginning, in biblical language emptied of any theological content. James Smith announced the commencement of the millennium with the formation of the Consolidated Labor Union while the Mormon missionaries in England induced thousand of Britons to emigrate to America to their millennium arrival site. Oliver shows how millenarian ideas were captured by these labor thinkers who pressed them into the service of a new social world of their own. Thus Britain underwent a second outburst of millennium-now thinking only 150 years after the first one collapsed in the later 1600s, only this time Christian millenarianism was seized and converted into a radical British social gospel little more than a half century before postmillennialism moved in a similar direction in America. Oliver pays scant attention to more orthodox and/or exegetical-theological millenarians of the period 1820-1840. Instead he is interested in the ways in which millenary thought took on serious social-secularizing twists and turns in this period. He too, as do others studying limited periods, speaks of a certain decline in millenarianism through this radical period. The statistics of quantity during these two decades show a certain thinness. But the collection of British titles in the bibliography also shows a some increase just after 1840—nearly four times the quantity of titles in the two decades spanning 1820-1840. Perhaps orthodox/exegetical millenarians as Oliver calls them were spurred to mount their high horse after the period of deviant millenary thinking. The Origins of Futurism 24. Concurrently with Thomas Newton’s growing influence, another movement in millenarian thought was beginning its development toward ultimate (American) triumph over both historicist premillennialism and postmillennialism—the dramatic rise of futurism in the interpretation of Revelation. Millenarian futurism’s origin and growth have not been well understood, but this shortfall has been partly compensated by an (2003) unpublished paper by Phillip J. Long on “The Origins of Futurism.” Long’s work is among a small handful of efforts to gather the relevant material in some detail. He traces the development in more detail than any other; this sketch will follow Professor Long’s paper. The paper in turn is partly dependent on the research of Bryan W. Ball reported in his work A Great Expectation: Eschatological Thought in English Protestantism to 1660 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975). Futurism is the view that most or all of Revelation 4-22 (with relevant Daniel material), instead of being symbolic prophecies of events and conflicts in the history of the Christian church and its world, is rather to be viewed as unfulfilled in the church or EuroAmerican history, but yet to be fulfilled in a more or less literal manner in the future period of Anti-Christ. The yet-to-be-fulfilled activity of Anti-Christ includes his harassment of 311

Christians and his judgment by the returning Christ at the Second Coming. An implication of futurism is that the historical papacy and Roman Catholic Church are not the only— not even the chief—Antichrist. Not all futurists have been millenarians, especially at the beginning of the futurist movement which emerged first among Catholic eschatologists and then spread among Protestants as well. Long traces Catholic futurism to the writings of Francisco Ribera and Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621) of Tridentine fame. Bellarmine’s Disputationes de Controversiis Christianae Fidei Adversus Huius Temporis Haereticos (1581-1593; Eng trans., Polemic Lectures Concerning the Disputed Points of the Christian Belief Against the Heretics of this Time) attacked the Protestant identification of papacy as Anti-Christ and the year-day theory of prophetic numbers. Protestant allegations of a papal Anti-Christ also aroused other Catholic futurists, including Blasius Viegas (1554-1599), Cornelius a Lapide (15671613) and Thomas Malvenda (1566-1628). For Protestants, the most important of the Catholic futurists was Manuel Lacunza, a Chilean Jesuit. His work, La venida del Mesias en glori y magestad: Observaciones de Juan Josafat Ben-Ezra, hebero-christiano: dirigidas as sacerdote cristofilo (Cadiz, Spain, 1812), was of futurist premillenarian bearings. Although first appearing in Spain, the work was translated into English by Edward Irving and published in London under the title, The Coming of Messiah in Glory and Majesty (1827). Lacunza was read by the British prophetic studies movement and also enjoyed some currency among American millenarians like Harry Bultema at a later time (19151925). The earlier Catholic futurists were obscured by the popular historicism of Joseph Mede and later by the vigorous anti-Catholic historicism of Thomas Newton (as above), whom some futurists of the nineteenth century, like John Henry Newman, identified as the most potent of historicists. Among Protestants, futurism appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century through the books and pamphlets of S. R. Maitland. Maitland attended St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he studied law. In 1815 he went to Trinity College, Dublin, where his anti-historicism and new-found futurism opposed the year-day theory of popular millenary Protestantism. In 1826 he published An Enquiry into the Grounds on Which the Prophetic Period of Daniel and St. John, Has Been Supposed to Consist of 1260 Years. This was followed by another similar study, A Second Enquiry into the Grounds on Which the Prophetic Period of Daniel and St. John, Has Been Supposed to Consist of 1260 Years: Containing an Examination of the Arguments of Mede—remarks on a Passage in the Dialogues on Prophecy—on Various Reviews of the First Enquiry—and on the Common Interpretation of the Seven Heads of the Beast (1829). The result of these studies was a paper war with William Cunninghame and William Digby in Horatius Bonar’s journal The Morning Star (later The Quarterly Journal of Prophecy, 1849-1878), and in the periodical The Christian Review published in Dublin. Despite this theological debate, Maitland was not especially friendly toward evangelicals or millenarians (he was neither) who thought him too cordial to Catholicism. Still, Oliver notes that while no millenarian, Maitland nonetheless had firm beliefs about the reality of future events. Maitland influenced other Trinity College professors and/or lecturers toward futurism. Among them was James Henthorn Todd (1805-1869), editor of The Christian Examiner after 1825 (while a tutor at Trinity College) and a futurist on prophecy and the coming emergence of Anti-Christ, but not necessarily a millenarian. Another was William 312

de Burgh (1800-1866), the Donnellan Lecturer at Trinity in 1853 and 1862. Todd’s work, Six Discourses on the Prophecies Relating to Antichrist in the Apocalypse of St. John: Preached before the University of Dublin at the Donnellan Lecture (1846), reflected his own 1839 statement that he was a “follower of Maitland.” Burgh’s literary output was more prolific than Todd’s. Already by 1821 he had issued A Discourse On the Coming Day of God in Connexion With the First Resurrection. In 1829 he produced Antichrist, and in 1832 The Apocalypse Unfulfilled as well as Lectures on the Second Advent. As the titles suggest, Burgh was a futurist premillenarian—among the first. Maitland was not entirely alone when he first began questioning and attacking historicism. He gained a close friend, supporter and promoter during the 1830s in the person of Alexander McCaul. McCaul entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 18l4, receiving the B.A. in 1819, the M.A. in 1831, and a D. D. in 1837. By 1821 McCaul had become interested in Jewish evangelism and the future conversion of the Jews. In 1821 he went to Poland where he studied German and Hebrew. Upon returning to Britain, he became Curate at Huntley. He also met Maitland during this period. In 1823 he returned to Poland where he worked in a mission to the Jews until 1830 (DNB); he was an evangelical and far more friendly to their interests than Maitland. He produced several works including at least four on prophetic themes whose titles reveal something of his prophetic and futurist convictions. In 1837 he published at London The Conversion and Restoration of the Jews: Two Sermons, Preached Before the University of Dublin (London: B. Wertheim). The title reflects his interest in the Jews and their conversion. This work had been preceded by a published sermon on The Equality of Jew and Gentile in the New Testament Dispensation: a Sermon Preached at the Parish Church of St. Clement Danes, Strand, on Thursday Evening May 2, 1833, Before the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews (reference is to the fourth edition published in London by the Society in 1838). The title is interesting both for its attention to the situation of Jews and Gentiles in the present age, and for its use of the term “dispensation” in connection with the notion of Jew-Gentile equality in the church. In 1838 McCaul lectured on and published The Eternal Sonship of the Messiah: a Sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church of Saint Paul on the Feast of the Annunciation and in the Chapel of Trinity College, Dublin, on Sunday Morning, April 28, 1838. The Trinity College connection is to be noted in the first and last of these titles. It seems clear that futurism in prophetic thinking had an encouraging context at Trinity College, Dublin, where several futurists worked or visited. Another of the Dublin futurists was Joseph Tyso. Summarily, the elements of Maitland’s futurist alternative to historicism on the central Revelation chapters are: (1) denial of the year-day theory on preference for a literal reading of the 3½ year (1260 days) period in Revelation; (2) the Anti-Christ is a not a system, but a person who will come in the future; (3) separation of the 70th week of Daniel 9 from the first 69 weeks; (4) a literal restoration of Israel; and (5) Revelation 4-22 as referring mostly or even wholly to future events. Historicism was not seriously threatened by Maitland’s efforts for another three quarters of a century, even among premillenarians; but historicism did take on pressure from the combination of new millenarian developments and the gradual demise of post-millennialism in America. The Trinity College connection of futurist-millenarian ideas forms the context for John Nelson Darby’s futurist millennialism, although Darby too had to be convinced to 313

change from historicism to futurism on Daniel and Revelation, since he does not seem to have been a futurist in his earliest writings. However that may be, Trinity was a meeting place for futurists, and it is most likely through Darby’s Trinity connections that American leaders of the Niagara Conferences and international prophetic conferences like James H. Brookes and C. I. Scofield received and successfully popularized futurist millennialism in America. However, caution is in order on this point, since three recent studies have shown that Darby’s influence in these American circles was not unilateral, direct or unmixed. The first of these studies was by L. Crutchfield, The Origins of Dispensationalism (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1992); Crutchfield shows sufficient differences between Darby and Scofield to dispel any idea that Scofield simply took over Darby’s ideas directly with little or no modification. Then in 1996, D. J. MacCleod showed that in the one significant place where Scofield actually names a theological tutor, it is not Darby, but Walter Scott, a millenarian expositor of Revelation (“Walter Scott, a Link in Dispensationalism between Darby and Scofield?” BS 154 [1996]: 155-178). Finally, in a very important study of James H. Brookes, Carl Sanders III showed that Brookes—although almost certainly the St. Louis pastor friend referred to by Darby, and the personal tutor of C. I. Scofield after his conversion—was rather significantly influenced toward dispensational premillennialism by ideas already circulating in Brookes’ own American Presbyterian circles (The Premillennial Faith of James Brookes: Reexamining the Roots of American Dispensationalism [Lanham MD: The University Press of America, 2001]). These studies make clear how tenuous are the sometimes facile, direct connections of Darby and Scofield. Still, Trinity College, Dublin, was a meeting place of prophetic historicists and futurists, and it was after all, Darby’s institution as well, where he studied in the very years of futurism’s early development. Coordinating these persons and ideas in detail, however, is a task remaining to historians of the millenarian renewal. 25. In 1826 the first of what were to become at least a century and a half of millenarian prophetic conferences occurred at the estate of Member of Parliament Henry Drummond at Surrey, England. The conference met for a week annually for several years. It was followed by another annual series of Second Advent conferences beginning in Lent 1848 at Bloomsbury, England. A third annual series emphasizing eschatology began in 1878 at Mildmay Park near London. None continued indefinitely, although the Bloomsbury Lent Lectures ran for about ten years. All were prophetic conferences and all were strongly if not exclusively millenarian in outlook, including a strong passion to spread premillennial teaching. Several British denominations were represented, although Anglicans were in the majority at each. What made these meetings more than esoteric looks into prophecy by small clergy groups was their publications. Each of the conferences issued published papers and studies given at the conferences as a way to promote millenarian thinking (Froom, Prophetic Faith 3:349-354, 455-460). The Albury Park conferences seem to have been the brain-child of Lewis Way and the elder Henry Drummond. The first conference of 1826 included 20 prophecy students (mostly clergy) who answered the call. By the time the conferences ended in 1829 or 1830 more than forty different persons had been involved. They met in Drummond’s large library. The chief publication of these early conferences was a three-volume work entitled Dialogues on Prophecy (London, 1827-29). The Bloomsbury Lenten Conferences began in 314

1848. Each year’s Lenten meeting saw a publication of its studies and speeches until about ten volumes accumulated. The leaders drew up a set of “Rules” which limited the size of the gathering to fifty. Froom does not register the publications of Bloomsbury; he only notes that the meetings were an activity of the Society for the Investigation of Prophecy (Froom 3:499-500). The Mildmay Conferences in which eschatology was especially prominent were held in 1878, 1879 and 1886, although Mildmay conferences on holiness had begun in 1856. These conferences are not reported by Froom, but Sandeen has compensated this omission (Sandeen, Roots, 145-147). By the time of Mildmay (1878), William R. Freemantle, a Bloomsbury speaker, had become head of the Prophetic Investigation Society (Sandeen, Roots, 146). Other participants were Horatius Bonar, Edward Auriol and Joseph Denham Smith, a Hebraist to whom the group sometimes looked for guidance on language matters from the Hebrew Bible. Fifty-six millenarians attended the Mildmay Conferences (Sandeen, Roots, p. 146) among whom was William P. Mackay, pastor of Prospect Street Presbyterian Church, Hull. Mackay is important because he spoke at the 1878 first American Bible and Prophetic Conference in New York. These three conferences set patterns for the American Bible and Prophetic Conference which began during the Mildmay period and continued well beyond it. Three publications contain Mildmay speeches: Our God Shall Come (London, 1878); The Sure Word of Prophecy (London, 1879); and Things That Shall Come to Pass (London, 1886). For a discussion of the Mildmay Park conferences on holiness, see Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 159-164. 26. About 1830 Edward Bickersteth published A Practical Guide to the Prophecies, with Reference to their Interpretation and Fulfillment, and to Personal Edification (London). He included therein an extensive bibliography of prophetic studies which had accumulated up to that time. The sixth London edition was also published in America by Orrin Rogers at Philadelphia in 1841. The work probably went through something like eight editions before Bickersteth died in 1850. The bibliography as we found it constituted Appendix III of the sixth London edition, although it may have appeared in earlier editions. It contained almost 450 entries (we counted roughly 443), divided topically into general works on prophecy, the Messiah, the Second Coming of Christ, the Jews, Antichrist, Popery, the Millennium and the First Resurrection, the Kingdom of God, and Commentaries on important biblical books—“such as give fuller attention to, or are more useful in the interpretation of the Prophetical Scriptures (p. 275).” The entries assembled for each category are arranged in chronological order beginning with the Fathers, then skipping almost entirely the medieval period and resuming with the Reformation up to the time of publication; Bickersteth’s entries, even in the later editions come to only about one-fourth of Joshua Brooks’ in 1835. All views of prophecy and eschatology are represented (not premillennialism alone), although perhaps not evenly—which may partly account for the difference in quantity. Several Reformation era apocalyptists of Firth and Backus’ studies appear in Bickersteth; even Jewish works on prophecy are included. Without distinguishing the several topical categories, the quantities of such works published between 1700 and 1750 alone were counted to sample what might have come from this widely recognized thin period of millenarian interest as discussed above. The quantity turns out to be about 70-75 such works across all topical categories and eschatological views. Commentaries on Revelation were then counted separately by half-centuries from the Reformation Era to the time of 315

Bickersteth’s publication, beginning for the purpose of counting at the year 1550. The results for Revelation are as follows: 1550-1599 -- 6 (which is surely too low judged by Irena Backus’ study of treatments of the Apocalypse during the Reformation Era) 1600-1649 – 12 1650-1699 – 16 1700-1749 – 11 1750-1799 – 12 1800-1849 – 33 The period of decline in millenarian interest from 1700 to 1749 is reflected, though barely, in the 11 commentaries on Revelation published in that period. If one counts the three half-centuries before 1700 the aggregate is 34; if the three half-centuries after 1700, the aggregate is 56. Whatever else this pattern represents, it illustrates the growing interest in eschatology over the Protestant centuries, and is likely to reflect both the survival of millenarian interests and debate through the period 1700-1749. It also suggests the growing interest in some form of millenary thought (aside from opponents represented) to the time of Bickersteth’s death (1850). Several of the British writers of this period are those that might be expected, but there are many more obscure writers here as well. For example we hear of the well-known Henry More and William Whiston. On the millennium, Daniel Whitby appears. And among Apocalypse commentators Isaac Newton and Whiston are noted. But many names are obscure, although many were known to us from the critical and scholarly studies of millennarianism and apocalyptic traditions already noted. The suggestion is that millenarian interest declined in a certain social sector of Commonwealth society (the aristocracy, as already noted), but not as noticeably in other segments. With leadership of the stature of Isaac Newton and Henry Moreover, impetus was given to others, and they appear to have produced considerably. Bickersteth apparently stood above the conflict over millenary interests and missions characteristic of and studied closely by Oliver in Prophets and Millennialists. Bickersteth’s work was to be followed by the first bibliographic essay on the history and literature of premillennialism by Daniel Taylor, The Voice of the Church on the Coming and Kingdom of the Redeemer; or a History of the Doctrine of the Reign of Christ on Earth (1856). Both Bickersteth and Taylor were preceded by Joshua Brooks Dictionary of Writers on the Prophecies (1835), in which he lists bibliographically about 2,100 titles including commentaries. 27. By 1800 there was some loosening of attitude toward of the unitary biblical covenant idea as a more or less fixed legal arrangement within which salvation was expounded, and a gradual elevation of dispensations as a related primary idea, though the notion of a single covenant of grace/salvation was never abandoned by the vast majority of the reformed theological tradition including its millenarians. One can see this loosening of a strict single covenant of salvation in the work of Elhanan Winchester, for example (A Course of Lectures on the Prophecies, 2 vols, 1792), where the covenants of the Old Testament with Noah, Abraham and Moses are not a single covenant, but separate transactions with varied contents. Nor is there a covenant with Adam at all, i.e., no original 316

covenant of works, nor a subsequent single redemptive covenant of grace. Winchester gave these lectures in England where they were published, even though he was American. By this time another habit had developed among the fragmented Puritan millenarian remnant (pre- or post-) of referring to the future millennial kingdom as a future “dispensation” with little or no reference to any future covenant. G. Duffield (1842—a little later) for example, begins his five-hundred page premillenarian treatment of the Second Coming with the statement that the question before him is whether another (earthly) “dispensation” follows the current one, i.e., the kingdom of biblical revelation. Duffield was not alone in putting the matter this way. Despite this gradually developing use of “dispensation” and its elevation to primacy, covenant theology, with its one redemptive covenant throughout Scripture, did not pass from the scene. The continued use of the covenant concept, however, was more and more confined to Augustinian-like treatments of biblical salvation history, while millenarians slowly advanced the transition to normalizing “dispensations” as the overarch of the biblical plan of redemption in history. From what has been seen in the preceding sketch, this attention to dispensations was not new; but the form it was beginning to take, by substituting it for the one covenant-in-several-dispensations idea is a new development—not an innovation, but a kind of gradual shift in concept. Later, the evolving idea of dispensations will again pay serious attention to the biblical covenants, but will think of them differently than did the classical covenant theology. One of the more forceful abandonments of a single covenant of grace/redemption occurred in the work of John Nelson Darby (1800-1882). Darby disseminated an emphasis on the dispensations throughout Britain, Europe (especially southern France and Switzerland where he spent much of the first few decades of his career) and North America (both Canada and the United States where he spent the later decades of his career). In 1836 he published the pamphlet, “The Apostasy of the Successive Dispensations.” In it he argues that (1) the biblical stewards (Adam, Abraham, e.g.) of the earlier biblical dispensations apostatized almost immediately upon the revelation of each new dispensation, and (2) there is no single covenant over the dispensations; rather the dispensations are eras of divine governance of the world. In putting it this way, which he does frequently both in this pamphlet and in other tracts and booklets, a wedge is driven between the dispensations as the eras of salvation history, and the dispensations as eras of the one covenant of grace. The idea of immediate apostasy gave to the dispensations a negative, pessimistic cast, a notion which set the stage for the next step in the development of renewed premillennialism—its early dispensational form. When apostasy and “divine government” are joined, it becomes possible for the dispensations to be seen as culminating in a series of judgments, one per each dispensation. Studies of the intermediaries between Darby and the development of later dispensational premillennialism (by Crutchfied, MacCleod) are cautious about Darby’s direct influence on early American thinking about dispensations, although opponents tend to ignore these finer details of the influence-flow. The negative cast to which Darby subjected the growing notion of dispensations clearly came into the dispensational millenarian scheme in the form of the seven-dispensation outline with its popularly conceived scheme of revelationtest-failure-judgment. 28. While the futurism of Maitland, McCaul and Darby was struggling to gain a foothold, a new wave of historicism asserted itself in the work of George Stanley Faber 317

(1773-1854). Faber was Vicar at Stockton-upon-Tees. As with Thomas Newton, there is discussion about whether Faber was a millenarian. George Duffield did not consider Faber a millenarian; but Sandeen (Roots, p. 8), J. C. F. Harrison (The Second Coming: Popular Millennialism, 1780-1850, p. 8) who links him with Timothy Dwight and Edward Irving, and W. H. Oliver (Prophets and Millennialists, p. 55) think Faber was in the tradition of Mede, More, Isaac Newton and Thomas Newton, and a millenarian. Froom too thought Faber was millenarian from the latter’s treatment of Revelation 20. Faber was the author of nearly 30 works on theology, many of which were on prophetic themes. He was clearly historicist as Froom’s summary of salient points clearly shows (3:338-346). Faber is often cited by American millenarians during the nineteenth century—frequently with Mede and Thomas Newton. His historicism is reflected in his major eschatological works: Two Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford, Feb. 10, 1799: An Attempt to Explain, by Recent Events, Five of the Seven Vials Mentioned in the Revelation, and an Inquiry into the Scriptural Signification of the Word Bara (Oxford,1799); and A Dissertation on the Prophecies That Have Been Fulfilled, Are Now Being Fulfilled, or Will Hereafter Be Fulfilled Relative to the Great Period of 1260 Years, the Papal and Mohammedan Apostasies, The Tyrannical Reign of Antichrist, or the Infidel of Power, and the Restoration of the Jews, to Which is Added an Appendix (Boston, 1808 from the 2nd London Edition). Several other works ensued on related subjects through 1853. It is notable that at least three of his eschatological studies were published in America, while most appeared first in London. His most noted study was The Sacred Calendar of Prophecy (London, 1828); it appeared in a 2nd edition under the title, The Sacred Calendar of Prophecy, Or a Dissertation on the Prophecies Which Treat of the Grand Period of Seven Times: and Especially of its Second Moiety or the Latter Three Times and a Half (London, 1844). Faber’s titles illustrate his historicism, but his major contribution to this version of millenarianism is his updating of fulfillment events by reference to the French Revolution and its aftermath, including the role of Napoleon III in the scheme of fulfillments. Faber is not yet the end of the long history of millenarian historicism. In 1844 E. B. Elliot’s Horae Apocalypticae (4 vols) was published. As Sandeen notes (Roots, p.82), Elliot “attempted to destroy the futurist position.” Even with this goal, he was still a staunch premillenarian as his treatment of Revelation 20 shows. Later in the century historicist premillennialism received another boost in the hands of H. Gratten Guinness. By the middle of the twentieth century historicism had almost died; but J. Barton Payne kept to it in his works on prophecy, The Imminent Appearing of Christ (1962), and his later Enclyclopaedia of Biblical Prophecy (c. 1970). It is hard to find an historicist millenarian study after Payne, who was largely ignored, especially after G. E. Ladd pronounced negatively on Payne’s effort. 29. During the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the BrightmanWhitby-Edwardsian postmillennialism slowly lost ground and at last nearly died after World War I. As the nineteenth century progressed, postmillennialism’s passion for the complete Christianizing of America and the world gradually evolved into a social crusade until it became the American social gospel—a logical development of Thomas Burnet’s vision of a kind of empirical millennium enriched and advanced over the present era by scientific gains, but now necessarily including the new social sciences as well. The decline 318

of postmillennialism was the subject of an important chapter in H. R. Niebuhr’s Kingdom of God in America (1937) and more recently of an article and later monograph by J. H. Moorhead cited above. The article was entitled, “The Erosion of Postmillennialism in American Religious Thought, 1865-1925 (Church History 53 [1984]: 61-77), where he argues that postmillennialism became a compromise between supernatural historicist eschatology and an evolutionary view of time, in which history itself simply outstripped postmillennialism’s prophecy-fulfilled-in history claims, or as Moorhead says, “events had stubbornly refused to follow its scenario (p. 77).” Moorhead’s later monograph, World Without End: Mainstream American Protestant Visions of the Last Things, 1880-1925 (1999), thus concludes, “. . . as ideas of building a kingdom ‘as wide as the earth itself’ waxed and waned, another eschatology (premillennialism of several sorts) proved more durable.” But—postmillennialism did not die never to be heard from again. From 1930 on, L. Boettner continued to promote postmillennialism nearly single-handedly, climaxing the effort in his 1957 work, The Millennium. Boettner’s defense of postmillannialism went through at least seven printings (7th printing, 1972) until 16,000 copies had been distributed. Since 1980, postmillennialism has continued in a modest revieal, mostly in the hands of American Reconstructionists. 30. Against the popular force of postmillennialism and with ample millenarian literature to draw on, William Miller, from 1830 through 1844 launched a date-setting crusade for the Second Coming which has become the most famous in American premillennialism. The literature of and on Miller’s movement is vast, especially since his chief successor—Ellen G. White and Seventh Day Adventism—has preserved collections of Miller materials at Loma Linda University in California and Andrews University at Berrien Springs, Michigan. The Miller movement has been more recently studied by scholars like Francis Nichol, Ronald Numbers and Michael Barkun in critical monographs and collections of essays. The American International Prophetic Conferences and the Rise of Dispensational Premillennialism 31. Around 1875, three centuries of Protestant apocalyptic focus on ages, eras, periods and dispensations in the history of salvation began to shape the long renewal of premillennialism in more new directions; thus there gradually emerged what is now called “dispensational premillennialism.” This movement has been studied, commented and evaluated, but with mixed results in the way its history is understood. In 1958 Norman Kraus’ Dispensationalism in America appeared. Kraus was followed by Timothy Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875-1982 (1979), with an enlarged edition appearing in 1983. D. DeWitt, Dispensational Theology in America during the Twentieth Century: Theological Development and Cultural Context (2003) has comments throughout on details of development during the twentieth century. Some doctoral dissertations have also studied the rise of dispensational premillennialism after 1925. Finally Timothy Weber’s The Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend (2004) painstakingly describes dispensational premillennialism’s 319

century-long ideological (and sometimes monetary) investment first in the idea, than in fact of modern restored political Israel—the major social application of its view of Israel’s future. Weber virtually ignores all other aspects of dispensational theology. Finally, Michael Williams has contributed a brief historical study in This World is not My Home: The Origins and Development of Dispensationalism (2003). Despite these studies, however, no thorough history of dispensational premillennialism has been undertaken, especially one that takes the thick pre-Darby developments fully into account and pays objective attention to all its internal concepts in their complex interlock. American (and several earlier British) prophetic conferences of c. 1875-1925 represent the approximate time when renewed premillennialism shifted from its exposition by leadership pastor-theologians in mainline denominations, to larger, cross-denominational millenarian fellowships and meetings, and finally to twentieth century institutions— theological seminaries, Bible conferences, Bible institutes and colleges, Christian liberal arts colleges and universities, and even several denominations. In other words, what were earlier smaller groups of individual millenarians gradually became groups and institutions of premillenarian belief. The renewed premillennialism also developed theologically, first by taking on a dispensational form, then by the dispensational form taking on a life of its own as “dispensationalism” or “dispensational theology.” Finally, dispensational theology entered its own period of internal revisions while remaining premillenarian. The earliest manifestation of a stable cross-denominational prophetic-millenarian fellowship in America was in the informal meetings of several more or less Darbyite millenarians during and after the Civil War era; these meetings were led first by James Inglis, editor of the periodical Waymarks in the Wilderness, and George Needham, an associate of D. L. Moody. Inglis died in 1870, and by 1875 the group consisted of at least Needham, Nathaniel West, J. H. Brookes, W. J. Erdman and Henry Parsons. They adopted the name Believers’ Meeting for Bible Study. This group met first under this name in 1876 at Swampscott MA, then in 1877 at Watkins Glen NY, in 1878-1880 at Clifton Springs NY, in 1881 at Old Orchard ME, and in 1882 on Mackinac Island. From 1883 to 1897 they met near Niagara Falls NY whence the gathering came to be called the Niagara Conference. During these meetings, increasing attention was paid to “dispensational truth” including the concept of dispensations (of which the future millennial Kingdom is the last), and the rapture of the church before the Great Tribulation. Participants spent much time in “Bible readings,” a practice of Darby by which Scriptural passages on a single theme were read in sequence with minimum observation of exegetical details and other commentary; this method may have originated in the British Surrey Conferences or other British conferences where Plymouth Brethren were influential. The main focus, however, was still on the literal, visible, personal Second Coming of Christ before and in order to establish and rule his kingdom on earth. Attendance at Belivers’ Meeting and Niagara Conferences grew over the years of its greatest vitality, although the group was relatively small compared to the public (American) international Bible and Prophetic Conferences. Parallel to the Believers’ Meeting/Niagara Conference, a series of international Prophetic Conferences emerged, held periodically (not annually, but roughly every several years) at different locations: at Trinity Episcopal Church, New York, 1878; Farwell Hall, Chicago, 1886; Allegheny PA, 1895, Clarendon Street Baptist Church, Boston, 1914, and Baltimore, 1918. The group that planned the first conference consisted of J. H. Brookes, 320

S. H. Tyng; W. R. Nicholson, W. G. Moorehead, A. J. Gordon, Maurice Baldwin, H. M. Parsons and Rufus Clark. Another 130 ministers, professors, teachers and evangelists united in “indorsing (sic) the calling of the conference,” with their names listed in the published speeches edited by Nathaniel West (Premillennial Essays [1879]). As the names show, several leaders were organizers of both the Believers’ Meetings and the Prophetic Conferences; the connections of these meetings grew stronger over the years. The international conferences drew larger crowds and gained more public interest, since speeches were published daily in local newspapers, at least at the beginning. At the same time, dispensational influence, though gradually increasing, was less than in the Believers’-Niagara meetings. Some subjects of the 1878 conference messages were: “Christ’s Coming: Personal and Visible (Tyng);” “Christ’s Coming: Is It Premillennial? (Kellogg);” “The Kingdom and the Church (Lummis);” “The Present Age and Development of Antichrist (Parsons);” “The Gathering of Israel (Nicholson);” and “The Return of Christ and Foreign Missions (Clark).” These topics were repeated in various forms in all succeeding conferences; they exhibit the conferences’ focus on prophetic and millenarian themes. J. H. Brookes appeared above as one of a small leadership group of early American dispensational millenarians. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century he was not very well understood. Sometimes he appears in the literature as a shadowy figure in the later nineteenth century. Carl Sanders III has now contributed an important study of Brookes’ background, activities and influence in his work The Premillennial Faith of James Brookes: Reexamining the Roots of American Dispensationalism (2001). Sanders argues that “the prevailing view of Brookes’s significance to American dispensationalism has been governed by the untenable suggestion that Darby was the dominant influence on Brookes’s premillennialism (p. 138).” Rather than a dittograph of Darby, Sanders found that Brookes owed more to American and Old Presbyterian motifs and thinkers already at work in southeastern Presbyterianism, like James Henley Thornwell and his emphasis on the spiritual church (p. 38). An earlier study of early dispensational millenarians by Larry Crutchfield, The Origins of Dispensationalism: The Darby Factor (1992), also sought to show that the influence of Darby on Scofield was exaggerated, and that one might be on more solid historical ground by looking to a figure actually named by Scofield like the Britiish millenarian Walter Scott. By the late 1890s the Niagara and prophetic conferences had seen two new but related developments: Moody’s Northfield (MA) Conferences, and growing internal strife in the Niagara Conferences over the pretribulation rapture. Moody himself was an important proponent of premillennialism, but not really a scholar-teacher; he was primarily an evangelist and promoter of missions. By the time of Moody’s death (1899), the dispensational element in the meetings had grown stronger, and an opposition group developed challenging the pretribulation rapture as a dispensationalist invention and no historic doctrine of the church. The leaders of this challenge were Nathaniel West, Robert Cameron, W. J. Erdman, James Stifler, William G. Moorehead and Henry Frost. This strife brought an end to the Niagara Conference in 1901. In the meantime, the dispensationalist group had gained an impressive new leader in C. I. Scofield. Gathered around him were several other strong dispensationalists. In 1909 Scofield published his Reference Bible with both dispensational and non-dispensational premillenarians as associate editors. This reference work, with its extensive marginal notes, was the chief but not only tool 321

by which the dispensational form of premillennialism spread from 1910 to c.1960. The hallmarks of the dispensational side were: the plan of redemption in sharply disginguished dispensations; the pretribulation rapture; the prophesied kingdom actually offered to Israel during Jesus’ earthly ministry; and a principled distinction between the church as a heavenly people and Israel as an earthly people. The last feature sometimes involves not mixing or even correlating the two peoples of God—virtually no continuity at all. Dispensational premillennialism received perhaps its most thoughtful scholarly exposition in the work of Charles Feinberg, Premillennialism and Amillennialism (1936), and in A. J. McClain’s study, The Greatness of the Kingdom (1959). In the meantime Lewis Sperry Chafer was founding Dallas Theological Seminary and published his massive eightvolume work, Systematic Theology (1947ff) which sharpened many distinctions between Israel, the church and the millennial kingdom; the work was of considerable influence. M. Williams, perhaps correctly, thought it ranked with the Scofield Reference Bible as a power in spreading the ideas of dispensational premillennialism. A more thoroughgoing form of this theology is represented in C. F. Baker’s A Dispensational Theology (1971) and D. DeWitt’s Dispensational Theology in American during the Twentieth Century (2003) and Essays on Ecclesiology (2013). From the Cameron-West protest against pretribulation rapture teaching in the Niagara Conference grew another scholarly literature expounding the postribulation rapture view (the rapture occurs at the end of, not before the tribulation, though still before the millennium). This view was adopted, along with a premillennialism more or less emptied of dispensational elements, by George Eldon Ladd who became Professor of New Testament at the new Fuller Theological Seminary in California upon its founding in 1947. Ladd rallied the sometimes better educated or more scholarly non-dispensational and covenant millenarians under his immense influence. His works continue to this day to weaken the earlier popularity of dispensationalism, or at least to influence its revision. The most notable development within dispensational premillennialism is the gradual isolation of the dispensational ideas into a life of their own, and then into “dispensational theology”—a distinct type of Protestant premillenarian thought. As such it has undergone its own development during our century, first with the work of Charles Ryrie in Dispensationalism Today (1965), then in the view called “progressive dispensationalism” of which Dallas Theological Seminary’s Darrell Bock and Craig Blaising (Progressive Dispensationalism [1993]), and Talbot School of Theology’s Robert Saucy (The Case for Progressive Dispensationalism [1993]) are the leaders. Their concern is to compensate for an internal tendency to make distinctions into disjunctions between the dispensations, especially between Law, Grace and Kingdom. Progressive dispensationalists rather believe a corrective is needed to show connections and continuities between the dispensations without destroying the essential concepts of the latter. Other dispensationalists are threatened by this apparent reversal in distinction-making. Some far more insidious problems seem to be the diluting effect of neglecting premillenarian preaching, careless attitudes among evangelicals about millennial thought, the destructive effects of a century-long quarrel over the time of the rapture, and gnostic-like tendencies in the earlier—Scofield and Chafer— dispensationalist view of creation, culture, and the life of the earthly church. Such factors eat at the fabric of millenarian theology and weaken it by neglect, default, pettiness and distortion. 322

32. Cyrus Ingerson Scofield represents the systematizing of the seven dispensations of Darby and other forebears into their standard dispensationalist form, sometimes called “classical dispensationalism.” In the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909 and 1917, Scofield popularized his own concept of dispensations. A dispensation is established with a new revelation of God’s saving plan (SRB—“condition, life, salvation,” p. 6), with each dispensation progressing through a test, failure and a final judgment. Thus Scofield preserves and more precisely defines Darby’s ideas. Scofield does not ignore the covenants of Scripture, but gives them full treatment as individual enactments. They are, however, severed from the dispensations, running in a kind of parallel set of revelations to the dispensations. Dispensationalist Charles Baker, A Dispensational Theology (1971, p. 87), strikes a balance when he tries to correlate the covenants and dispensations more closely: “in some cases, covenants give the content to dispensations.” In fact, in Baker’s treatment, the Abrahamic, Noachic and Mosaic covenants and dispensations coordinate in this manner. More recently, revisionist dispensationalist thinkers (Ryrie, Saucy, Bock, Johnson,) have preferred to abandon the negative scheme of Darby and Scofield without making a sensation of their revisions. They think the New Testament does not understand a dispensation in the Darby-Scofield test-failure-judgment sense, and they redefine a dispensation as simply a discernable era in the progressive revelation of salvation. They persist, however, in viewing covenants under the dispensations rather than dispensations under a single covenant of grace as in historic reformed covenant theology. This inversion of covenants and dispensations serves their premillennialism more satisfactorily, since it allows sharper distinctions between the eras of salvation history. This development was a natural one, given the gradual gain in currency of the term “dispensation” along with something of a decline in the centrality of the single covenant idea. 33. Within the evangelical millenarian tradition of the twentieth century, major modifications are represented in the works, first of Philip Mauro and then of George Eldon Ladd. Philip Mauro was a prominent New York attorney and lay theologian converted to evangelical Christianity under the New York ministry of A. B. Simpson in 1903. At first and for some time, Mauro adopted most of Simpson’s theology including the latter’s premillennialism. His first monograph appeared in 1909, after which he continued to write books on the Christian life and eschatology at least through 1929. Easily ten of his books are on millenarian eschatology, but gradually Mauro’s work too a more reactionary form with growing opposition to the developing dispensationalism of the 1870-1925 era. The first important change was his recognition that the kingdom of God in the teaching of Jesus is not only a future kingdom, but a manifestation in Jesus of the salvation of the kingdom promised throughout the Old Testament; or to put it somewhat differently, the kingdom of the gospels and Jesus’ teaching is God’s kingdom of personal salvation—the saving reign of God as Ladd later crystalized it. Apparently Mauro continued for a while to believe in a future millennium, but by the time of his last few books, he had become so reactionary that he virtually dissolved all future reference of the kingdom idea, and came close to if not actually equating kingdom, salvation and church as a coordinated, contemporaneous whole. Ladd finally perceived him as amillennialist; but it also seems clear that Ladd read and learned from Mauro. In one of his earlier works on the kingdom and millennialism, Crucial Questions about the Kingdom of God (1952), Ladd refers to Mauro, lists some 323

of his major writings in a note, and speaks of him in a review of the literature opposing dispensational premillennialism as the “first” to be mentioned among varied contributions to the reactionary movement against dispensationalism. Ladd’s brief discussion of Mauro places him under the rubric of “The Amillennial Interpretation” of the kingdom, and for this there is perhaps a case to be made, especially from Mauro’s later eschatological writings. Otherwise, Ladd’s general view of the kingdom in Jesus’ teaching is similar to Mauro’s— the kingdom of Jesus’ teaching is primarily the saving kingdom or reign of God promised in the prophetic scriptures; but Ladd never relinquished or diminished what he thought to be the biblical view of the future millennium as the consummation of the kingdom, the powers of which he saw as already working in the church. In other words he remained a committed premillenarian, but not of the dispensationalist type which he also consistently opposed, mostly in its pretribulation rapture beliefs. Ladd continued to develop this concept in his several subsequent works on the kingdom. This modification entails a view of the kingdom in the New Testament with more continuity between kingdom and church than was generally the case among American millenarians from 1870 to 1950. Even scholarly dispensational millenarians of the last quarter of the twentieth century have been persuaded by Ladd to modify their view of the kingdom in his direction, though not entirely. This is probably the most important development in American premillennialism of the twentieth century after dispensational theology’s emergence. 34. In one of the strangest twists in the twentieth century shift from historicism to futurism, the new futurists almost from the beginning took on a nearly obsessive preoccupation with the prophetic identification of Antichrist and twentieth century events in the Middle East. Of course, they did not revert to historicism on Revelation 4-22 except for Barton Payne. But they did retain a fragment of it by interpreting the churches of Revelation 2-3 in historicist fashion. Instead of returning to the older historicism, they focused on one possible Antichrist figure after another. This preoccupation with the identity of the Anti-Christ is the subject of a study in American eschatology by Robert Fuller, Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession (1995; his spelling of Antichrist). Fuller traces naming the Anti-Christ through seventy-some attempts in American history. One should not be surprised at this way of thinking, since we know the Reformers already engaged in identifying the papacy with Antichrist. Still, the American centuries—especially the twentieth—saw a remarkable sequence of such identifications by a now dominant evangelical premillennialism skewed toward a freshly revived view of history-getting-worse. While such a perception of the world as brimming with emergent Anti-Christs one after the other is visible in the historicist postmillennial era as well, the stream of alleged Antichrist figures in twentieth century futurist premillennialism is stunning—so stunning that one might say with justice that this element far overshadows the more sober and serious theological and biblical exposition of the millenarian faith, and nearly drowns the basic ideas of biblical millenarianism in Antichrist and last-days speculation. That this is so betrays a serious inconsistency in dispensational premillennialism because of its belief that the subject of Revelation’s central chapters is the Great Tribulation, not the history of the church. Its votaries avoid this inconsistency by justifying modern events as prophetic fulfillments through a kind of antipative lens—modern events look like the beginning of 324

what could be the Great Tribulation. It also inhibits serious millenarians from developing a millenarian philosophy of history in a broader and much more detailed and nuanced sense. Identifying Anti-Christ could also be viewed as scandalous if one considers the evangelical presses happy profit-taking from the sale of multi-millions of copies of such works (Hal Lindsey’s l7 million, for example, of Late Great Planet Earth) and the enervating Left Behind novels. But the most telling criticisms of this thinking is how often it has been completely, irredeemably wrong about alleged Anti-Christs and related, alleged prelude events, but keeps stumbling along its path anyway. The list of Anti-Christs is profuse even if limited to the later twentieth century: Yasser Arafat, Willy Brandt, Mu’ammar Gadhafi, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Anwar Sadat and more. Organizations and movements are also identified as AntiChrist: Christian Socialism, Communism, the Federal/World Council of Churches and the ecumenical movement generally, democratic values, labor unions, free masonry (lodges), Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, science, the League of Nations and the United Nations. Even technological and scientific developments are said to be Anti-Christ’s work: bar codes, environmentalism, computers, fiber optics, microchips and television. Systems of linkage are needed to connect such modern world features with biblical prophecies, especially because no such explicitness exists in the biblical prophetic material as it stands. But Antichrist hunting thrives not on proof, but on suggestion, imagination and fear, if not on entertainment, and certainly on book sales. It is under-girded with popular receptivity based on disgust with the modern world, or fear and suspicion of evil in an atmosphere of conspiracy theories. Fuller has done evangelical millenarians a service by collecting the major identities of Antichrist if for no other reason than that his mass of such identifications might just help more serious exegetes and theologians committed to premillennialism to distinguish their views from this populist, fear-mongering, sensationalistic propaganda. Such apocalyptic speculation is not the center of serious biblical millenarianism (which leaves the transition to the millennium of Christian hope in God’s own hands), although passionate, fear-laden Anti-Christ obsession easily draws lay millenarians to itself. These twentieth century speculations are included here because they are part of twentieth century millenarian thinking. But such speculations are no necessary part of biblical millennialist thought. They are rather laden with great danger to biblical millenarianism, since the history of this thinking requires jumping from one arbitrary identification of Antichrist to another as the events of history unfold. Apocalyptic Anti-Christ speculation is in fact the same trap as postmillennialism fell into in trying to link biblical prophecies to the flow of history: it collapsed for this reason as Moorhead has shown of its history, and as the Fifth Monarchy in England illustrated in the seventeenth century. In their quest to identify the Anti-Christ, millenarians abandon and betray the literal interpretation of Scripture they once professed to be their modus operandi. Francis Gumerlock, in a needed work under the title The Day and the Hour (2000), has gathered a history of hundreds of failed attempts to date the Second Coming and Anti-Christ’s emergence. These kinds of studies raise disturbing questions about why there is any ground to listen seriously to any such prophetic speculation. Another side of this prophetic identification mentality is the populist promotion of the modern state of Israel and persistent attempts to call the balls and strikes of related end-time events. The history of this prophecy-in-fulfillment thinking, and its 325

public popularity and political implications, is the subject of Timothy Weber’s study, On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals became Israel’s Best Friend (2004). Weber chronicles in detail the attempts of a century of American dispensationalism to link events, especially in Europe and the Middle East, to biblical prophecies. He covers these popular public pronouncements on this and that event through the entire twentieth century from the publication of W. E. Blackstone’s Jesus is Coming in 1889 to the present. For the first sixty or so years (1900-1960) dispensationalist millenarians were content to watch events such as World War I, the activity of the League of Nations, the rise of Russian Communism, World War II and the growth of a united Europe, and write about how events were possibly fulfilling or about to fulfill biblical prophecies. After 1948, millenarians gradually became more political and activistic, especially in their promotion of the state of Israel. Weber’s work is the first full history of this popular prophecy movement in its twentieth century form. It is the story of that part of dispenstional thought which needed to be told, even though prophecy and pro-Israelism has a much longer history, as this essay has shown. Its current pro-Israelism is only one facet of that type of theology, and one on which no sober dispensationalist would stake his commitment to its central ideas.

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PART II BIBLICAL, THEOLOGICAL, PRACTICAL

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ESSAY VIII THE LORD’S SUPPER: Its Jewish Background and Meanings for the Church by Tom Waltz and Dale. S. DeWitt The Grace Gospel Fellowship practices the Lord’s Supper regularly, although its frequency is a matter of freedom for each congregation, both in American congregations and in mission works abroad. Its basis for doing so is that the Supper is explicitly ordered for the church in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. This essay seeks to demonstrate its Jewish origins, and argues that the Supper is not to be dismissed simply on that ground, even though Paul makes the point in several epistles that Jewish ordinances in principle are not to be carried over into the life of the body of Christ. In making this point, the Fellowship’s leaders have always observed that water baptism is not ordered for the bodychurch—a point in which it differs from the Lord’s Supper Of the great variety of subjects discussed by the Christian church, perhaps none is typically approached with such great emotion and therefore with such clouded objectivity as the sacraments. J. Jeremias laments this situation specifically with reference to studies on the Lord’s Supper. In the Preface to his Eucharistic Words of Jesus, he states, Studies of the Lord’s Supper not infrequently leave the reader with the uneasy feeling that the author has unconsciously read into the text what he would like to find. Must we not all learn better to listen to the text alone . . . ? No doubt it will also confront us with unexpected and bewildering questions which, however, will eventually deepen our understanding, if we do not attempt to evade them. Exegesis is, after all, a matter of obedience.524

This study is an examination of the Lord’s Supper from the “Median Dispensational View” as C. F. Baker called it (popularly the “mid-Acts” beginning of the church). It has been undertaken to seek, in the spirit of the above quotation, the relevance of the Supper for Christians of grace movement theological convictions. It is necessary because even among 524 J. Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), p. 8. Jeremias’ study is one of two or three recent premier studies that examine the critical issues thoroughly. But having said this, it is only fair to note that much material in this volume is useful to all millenarians.

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those who adhere strictly to the literal interpretation of Scripture, there appears to be little objective exegetical study of the subject within our movement. The first section of this treatment is concerned with assertions by Median Dispensationalists about the origins of the Lord’s Supper. It is commonly claimed that the continued observation of the Eucharist is legitimate for the church because it is one of the special revelations given to the apostle Paul. These revelations given by Christ to Paul from heaven provide God’s will for the church.525 The relevance of the Supper for the church is also supported by the claim that the Lord’s Supper is distinct from the Jewish Passover and thus not connected in any way to the Mosaic covenant. These two claims are considered in order. The Lord’s Supper and Oral Tradition in 1 Corinthians 11 On the first claim, Charles Baker states that Paul says, “part of the special revelation given to him for the Body of Christ was the observance of the Lord’s Supper (I Corinthians 11:23).”526 Arthur T. Sims, also basing his conclusions upon 1 Corinthians 11:23, writes, “The Lord’s Supper was given by direct revelation to the Apostle Paul with the members of Christ’s body in view.”527 Cornelius Stam reaches the same conclusion based upon the same passage.528 In 1 Corinthians 11:23, Paul does speak of his reception and delivery of the Lord’s Supper. He says, “For I received from the Lord (parlambano apo tou kuriou) what I also delivered (paredoka) to you . . . .” Does this statement indicate that this communication was by direct revelation? Little weight can be attached to the use of the more general apo (“from”) rather than para which might have suggested independent conveyance to Paul. Apo neither excludes nor suggests direct revelation.529 A more important element in the wording is “I received” and “I delivered.” As Conzelmann notes of these verbs citing numerous examples, paralambanein and paradidomi are technical terms in both the Greek and the Jewish world by which Paul classifies himself as a link in a chain of (oral) tradition: “He does not say or mean that he received this teaching in a vision or by a special revelation. He was acquainted with it through the mediation of men.”530 Oscar There is some import in noting that the defining characteristic of the new aspects of God’s purpose for the church, called elsewhere the “secret” or the “mystery,” is not that these new aspects were given by direct revelation. Rather it is that they were formerly unknown or unrevealed, being kept from human time and history, and hidden in God (Eph 3:3-6, 9; Col 1:26) until Paul and the Gentile mission. Such divine secrets had to be revealed because they were not available by more ordinary means. However the opposite is not necessarily true, namely that everything communicated by direct revelation was formerly unknowable through more normal means. Such an understanding of the distinctive Pauline teaching concerning the church might even be seen by extreme “right division” as disqualifying the Lord’s Supper from its appearance in Paul since the Lord’s Supper is rooted in and communicated through a previously known historical event that occurred before Paul’s conversion during Christ’s mission to Israel. 526 C. Baker, A Dispensational Theology (Grand Rapids: Grace Bible College, 1971), p. 103. 527 A. T. Sims, Distinctions that Matter (Grand Rapids: Grace Publications, 1978), p. 60. C. R. Stam, Things that Differ (Chicago: Berean Bible Society, 1951), p. 275. G. G. Findlay, “First Corinthians,” Expositor’s Greek Testament, 5 vols, ed W. R. Nicoll (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans) 2:880. 530 H. Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), pp. 195-196. 525

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Cullmann, in supporting this view, adds weight to the argument by noting Paul’s use of kai in 1 Corinthians 11:23; 15:1 and 14:3. The kai in these passages reveals the fact that Paul saw himself as a receiver of tradition, which he then (“also”) passed on to the Corinthians who received it in the same manner (11:23, “I have received . . . that which I also (kai) delivered”; Similarly, in 15:3, he says, “I delivered . . . that which I also (kai) received.” As Cullmann notes, “E. B. Allo has rightly pointed out that in 1 Corinthians 11:23 this kai must refer to the manner of transmission: ‘I received the tradition in the same way as I [also] handed it on to you—by mediation’.”531 Cullmann cites twelve verses in which Paul uses paralambanein and/or paradidomi in this technical sense (1 Cor 11:2, 23; 15:3; 1 Thes 2:13; 2 Thes 2:15; 3:6; Rom 6:17; Gal 1:9, 12; Phil 4:9; Col 2:6, 8).532 These conclusions are supported by the Bauer lexicon which classifies this occurrence of both words in 1 Corinthians 11 as referring to the transmission of oral or written tradition.533 Along these same lines, Jeremias works with Paul’s use of this word pair in 1 Corinthians 15:1-11. The apostle here reminds the Corinthians that the kerygma (what was preached) which he “received” and “delivered (15:3)” to them was an established tradition which found its roots in the Old Testament Scriptures (15:3, 4) and was received and proclaimed by both himself and the twelve (15:11).534 Jeremias concludes of 1 Corinthians 11:23, “There should never have been any doubt that ‘to receive” (paralambanein and “to deliver” (paradidomi) represents the rabbinical technical terms min qivval and le maser (receive from . . . deliver to), so that the chain of tradition goes back unbroken to Jesus himself.”535 What is evident from this discussion is that Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:23 was not using the language of direct revelation (as he did in Galatians 1:12). Rather, he refers to an established tradition of the words and actions of Jesus Christ on the night he was betrayed. It is probable, as Cullmann seems to suggest,536 that the sense in which this tradition was “from the Lord” is similar to the sense in which people today receive the special revelation of Scripture from the Lord. Paul’s use of paralambano in 1 Thessalonians 2:13 supports this understanding. Here Paul praises God because the Thessalonians received (paralabontes­) his message “not as the word of men, but, as it is in truth, the word of God.” It is clear that though men mediate the material delivered, it is still seen as from God since he is its ultimate and provident origin. Any exegesis which concludes that Paul is here speaking of a special direct revelation of “secret” truth about the body of Christ is pushing the text beyond what it actually states, considering the use of oral tradition terms in its conveyance. 531 O. Cullmann, The Early Church, ed A. J. B. Higgins (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1956), p. 64. 532 Ibid., p. 63; of these only Galatians 1:12 might be questionable.  However, when he says, “not from man,” he is not referring to information containing the content of the gospel, but to the fact that it did not reach him—into his heart, his mind, and his life—merely by human instruction.  He affirms this internalized application of both his apostleship and receiving of the gospel in Galatians 1:1 and 1:12.  Hence, “not from man” is not really contradictory to the idea of receiving and conveying information about the gospel by oral tradition; he means he did not personally receive his apostleship and salvation from merely human sources alone. 533 BAGD, pp. 620, 625. 534 Jeremias, Eucharistic Words. pp. 101-103. Paul’s grounding of the truth of the resurrection in history through eye witness testimony might lend additional weight to the notion that he is here referring to oral and written communications. 535 Ibid., p. f101. 536 Cullmann, Early Church, p. 62.

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The Lord’s Supper and the Passover Turning to the second claim that the Lord’s Supper is distinct from the Passover, two supporting arguments are common. First, it is thought, in the words of C. R. Stam, that “Luke 22:20 clearly states that our Lord took the communion cup ‘after supper’ and that this was clearly also true of the common bread, with which it is connected by the word ‘likewise’ . . . .”537 Luke’s account is thus thought to teach that the institution of the Lord’s Supper took place after the completion of the Passover meal and is therefore disconnected from it. Sims538 and Baker539 concur with Stam in using the same argument. In this view, severing the Supper from the Passover, and denying that this Lord’s Supper is the same Supper discussed in the Pauline epistles, opens a way to understand the Lord’s Supper of the church’s practice to be a wholly and distinct Pauline revelation. But this view runs into the difficulty that Paul does not explicitly claim the Supper to be a part of the mystery revelation of the church. Secondly, it is thought that a difference between what was actually eaten involves a distinction. J. C. O’Hair argues from this perspective when he inquires, “. . . what has bread, with the fruit of the vine, to do with roast lamb, bitter herbs, and unleavened bread?”540 Though Stam admits, “they may have drunk wine in connection with the Passover,” nevertheless “the Passover itself consisted of roast lamb, unleavened bread and bitter herbs, not bread and wine.”541 Examination of the elements of the Passover meal in Higgin’s study shows this claim to be erroneous, if not dictated by prior dispensationalist conceptions based on the notion that everything in the epistles is distinctive Pauline revelation—a disposition much more forceful in C. R. Stam’s thought than in that of C. F. Baker generally. On the basis of these two arguments, it is concluded that the Lord’s Supper and Passover are two unrelated “feasts,” each deriving its significance apart from the other.542 To respond to this proposed discontinuity, we begin by reviewing a harmony of the first century A. D. Passover meal with the New Testament records of the Last Supper. The harmony below by A. J. B. Higgins is a notable twentieth century study.543

537 C. R. Stam, The Lord’s Supper and the Bible (Chicago: Berean Bible Society, 1981), p. 83 538 Sims, Distinctions That Matter., p. 61 539 Baker, Dispensational Theology, p. 537. 540 J. C. O’Hair, The Unsearchable Riches of Christ (Reprint, Grand Rapids: Grace Publications), p. 230. 541 Stam, Lord’s Supper. 542 Jeremias, Eucharistic Words, pp. 62-84 discusses eleven objections to understanding the last Supper as a Passover meal, based mostly on gospel harmony issues. I. H Marshall, Last Supper and Lord’s Supper, pp. 58-75 argues for the unity of the gospel accounts. 543 A. J. B. Higgins, The Lord’s Supper in the New Testament (London: S. C. M. Press, 1952), pp. 45-47.

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Passover

Last Supper Luke 22:15. And he said to them, I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; (16) for I say to you that I shall not eat it until it is fulfilled in the Kingdom of God.

1. Hors d’oerve. The head of the household over the first cup pronounces the blessing for the day and a blessing for the wine, which is then drunk by him and the others present. The first blessing is the kiddush, the second would have been in the traditional form, “Blessed art thou who createst the fruit of the vine.” Then are eaten green herbs, bitter herbs, and haroseth, a sauce consisting of fruits, spices, and vinegar into which the bitter herbs are dipped. 2. Haggadah. When the food (unleavened bread, the roast lamb, wine, bitter herbs, etc.) for the meal proper is brought in, the son in a household asks his father why this night differs from other nights in several respects, particularly in that all the bread is unleavened. The reply is that the Passover lamb is eaten “because God passed over the houses of our fathers in Egypt’ (Ex. 12:26f); unleavened bread ‘because our fathers were redeemed from Egypt’ (cf. Ex. 12:39); bitter herbs ‘because the Egyptians embittered the lives of our fathers in Egypt” (cf. Ex. 1:14). Everyone must regard himself as if he had come out of Egypt (cf. Ex. 13:8).

Luke 22:17. And he took a cup and gave thanks and said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves; (18) for I say to you that henceforth I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the Kingdom of God comes (=Mark 14:25. Verily I say unto you, that I shall not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the Kingdom of God).

Jesus’ description of himself as the true Passover.

3. The singing of the first part of the Hallel (according to the school of Shammai, Ps. 113; according to the school of Hillel, Pss. 113 and 114).

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4. The drinking of a second cup of wine. 5. The president takes un- leavened bread, blesses God in the words, “Blessed art thou who bringest forth bread from the earth,” and breaks it in pieces which he hands to the guests.

Mark 14:22 . . . He took bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave to them, and said, Take; this is my body. (I Cor. 11:24; Luke 22:19. Do this in remembrance of me.)

6. The meal proper.

7. At the conclusion the president offers a prayer of thanksgiving for the meal over a third cup, “the cup of blessing” (cf. I Cor. 10:16).

Mark 14:23. And he took a cup (Likewise also the cup after supper, 1 Cor 11:25; Luke 22.20), and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and all drank of it. (24) And he said to them, This is my blook which is poured out for many.

8. The singing of the second part of the Hallel.

Mark 14:26. And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

As can be seen in the schematic above, Luke’s (as well as Paul’s) statement that Christ took the cup after the meal (meta to deipnasai) fits well with the presentation of the third cup by the presiding person at the conclusion of the meal proper (“after dinner”). It does not follow that Christ also took up the bread after the meal suggesting separation from it, as Stam suggests. The breaking of the bread took place as part of the meal sequence, not at its conclusion and separate from it. This understanding also allows harmony with Matthew 26:26 and Mark 14:22. These two gospels by a general statement (“as they were eating”) link Christ’s distribution of the bread and cup with the Passover meal. As Higgins notes, although the breaking of bread precedes the meal proper, there is eating (“hors d’oeuvre”) before the breaking of bread which “consists of green herbs, bitter herbs, and fruit sauce . . . . Thus the Jewish Mishnah says: ‘When food is brought before him he eats it seasoned with lettuce, until he is come to the breaking of bread.’”544 Thus even in a technical sense, Mark and Matthew can speak of Christ’s actions as taking place “as they were eating.” Clearly, Luke’s account is far from disjoining Christ’s words over the bread and cup from the Passover. Luke, in fact, sets the saying over the cup exactly where one would expect to find it within the Passover liturgy of Christ’s day—after the meal. Stam, Baker, and Sims seem not to have taken into account the sequence of detail in the Passover

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544

Higgins, Lord’s Supper, p. 20.

in Jesus’ time. Doing so eliminates the alleged disjunction; “after” has been mistaken for a separation rather than as simply a statement of the normal Passover sequence. With respect to the second claim—that the bread and the cup are not to be identified with the Passover which centered on different foods—the following observations seem pertinent. (1) Although the meal of lamb, unleavened bread and bitter herbs is specified for the original meal in Egypt (Exod 12:8) and for subsequent Passover meals (Num 9:11, 12), the keeping of the Passover feast in later Judaism did not consist in partaking of these three elements alone. Included in this festival is a seven-day period of eating unleavened bread only (Exod 12:14-20), the selection and slaying of a lamb (Exod 12:21), and the explanation of the feast’s significance to the children (Exod 12:26, 27). Neither is it specified that all the commanded actions of the first Passover were to be exactly repeated, i.e., the application of the blood, standing throughout the meal, and remaining in one’s house until morning . . . . The feast is not a re-enactment of every detail of Israel’s last meal in Egypt. Rather, it is a memorial to remind Israel of their deliverance by the hand of God. (2) The keeping of the Passover was not a form established in Exodus never to be revised or enlarged. Although the central elements and their meaning remained the same, the feast was adapted to the contemporary situation of the nation. A shift occurs already in the Pentateuch itself from the head of the family slaying and eating the lamb at his own house (Exod 12:21-24) to slaying and eating the lamb in the temple or its vicinity (Deut 16:1-7). Again, the importance is not in the specific elements or details, but in the remembrance of what God had done. (3) This observation of the Passover’s significance being found not in exact reenactment but in remembrance is supported by the actions of Christ: he kept the Passover not strictly as it is portrayed in Exodus, but as it was practiced by the conscientious Jew of his day; he ate the Passover in Jerusalem (Matt 26:18); he remained in the Jerusalem area which included the Mount of Olives (Mark 14:26, 32) rather than returning to Bethany as had been his habit (Mark 11:11, 19);545 he reclined at the table rather than standing (Mark 14:8; Luke 22:14);546 the meal was concluded with the singing of a hymn (Mark 14:26; Matt 26:30), the second half of the Passover Hallel;547 and finally, he drank wine as was considered the duty of every participant. Jeremias cites Pesachim 10:1 which states that at least four cups are to be taken, “even if it is from the pauper’s dish, i.e., from charity.”548 This is no trivial observation in light of Christ’s rejection of the Jewish traditions which subordinated the Scriptures to the will of man (Mark 7:1-13; Matt 15:1-9). Therefore, it cannot be concluded that the bread and cup are not part of the Passover merely because the cup is not specifically mentioned in Exodus 12. Jesus and his disciples kept the Passover in the established manner typically accepted in their day, which 545 Jeremias, Eucharistic Words, p. 55. 546 Ibid., p. 48. 547 Ibid., p 55. 548 Ibid., p. 52. The final evidence Jeremias cites in support of the Last Supper as a Passover meal is the act of Jesus in assigning figurative significance to the bread and wine. He writes, “Jesus announces his impending passion at the Last Supper by speaking words of interpretation over the bread and the wine. What led him to this altogether extraordinary manner of announcing his passion? I can see only one answer to the question: interpretation of the special elements of the meal is a fixed part of the passover ritual (pp. 55-56).” He goes on to cite examples—from Jewish and rabbinic literature leading up to and contemporary with the time of Jesus—which assign figurative significance to the bread and the four cups of wine in the Passover meal (pp. 56-61). Thus even in his central act of establishing significance for the bread and wine, Jesus is reflecting an established practice within the Passover meal.

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included breaking unleavened bread and sharing wine as can be seen in the above harmony from Higgins. Other allusions and fragments of the Passover feast seem alluded in 1 Corinthians. As was usual throughout the New Testament period and beyond,549 the Corinthians met together for common meals which were more than a token reception of bread and wine (1 Cor 11:21, 22). It seems that this dinner (11:21; deipnon, commonly used for a “cultic meal” in the religious speech of Hellenism)”550 is taken from the pattern of Christ’s last Passover meal with the twelve. Paul confronts their impurity by citing the Passover feast in 1 Corinthians 5:6-8. He enjoins the Corinthians to “purge out” the old leaven of sin and “keep the feast” as “unleavened” because “Christ, our Passover is sacrificed for us.” F. F. Bruce believed the use of this imagery was likely due to Paul’s writing around the time of the Passover.551 This may be true; but it seems more likely that Paul would have been thinking of at least some of his readers’ understanding along with his own sentiment. Higgins’ also views Paul as dealing with a concept “quite familiar to the Christians of Corinth.”552 He thinks “the phrase ‘Christ our Passover’ has been sacrificed,” is an allusion to the Eucharist.”553 In view of this context, it seems likely that the Corinthians connected not only the symbolic taking of the bread and the cup with the Lord’s Supper, but also with their common meal which may have consisted of portions of the Passover. This can be seen in the fact that Paul chides them for treating this dinner, and not only the two elements, as if it were ordinary (1 Cor 11:20-22; cf 11:20, “the Lord’s deipnon”; Exod 12:11, “the LORD’S Passover”). This perspective is further suggested by the fact that “many” of the Corinthians were experiencing God’s judgment because they were taking part in the Lord’s Supper “unworthily (1 Cor 11:27-30). The somewhat strange occurrence of God’s chastening being directly related to the manner in which one approached the meal becomes understandable in light of the Passover origin of the Lord’s Supper. Moses commanded that anyone who defiled himself with leaven during the feast was to be put to death (Exod 12:15, 19). Further, it is apparent that one who defiled the tabernacle by personal uncleanness was in danger of being physically judged by God (Lev 15:31). In Hezekiah’s time there is an example of such judgment from God due to the impurity of many Israelites at Passover (2 Chron 30:17-20). 2 Chronicles 30:20 makes reference to God’s healing of the people after Hezekiah made intercession. Though there is much controversy as to whether this healing was physical or spiritual,554 the position taken here with Harvey-Jellie555 and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown556 is that the uncleanness of the people was not spiritual since their hearts were pure in seeking God (2 Chron 30:19); rather, the defilement was over ritual 549 I. H. Marshall, The Last Supper and the Lord’s Supper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), p. 111. 550 J. Behm, “deipnon,” TDNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), 2:34, 35. 551 F. F. Bruce, First and Second Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), p. 57. 552 Higgins, Lord’s Supper, p. 65. 553 Ibid. 554 E. L. Curtis, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Books of Chronicles (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1910), p. 475. 555 W. R. Harvey-Jellie, The New Century Bible, Chronicles (New York: Henry Frowde), p. 299. 556 Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, Commentary on the Whole Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, n. d), p. 331.

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purification. It follows that the punishment and its relief were also likely physical.557 These passages may help explain the Corinthian situation. This New Testament group came to the dinner defiled by the leaven of sin and reaped the appropriate punishment of God. From this record, it is clear that not only the gospel writers but also the early church as represented by the church at Corinth understood the institution of the Lord’s Supper as closely related to—apparently an expansion of aspects of—the Jewish Passover. In this connection, it is worth noting that “one group in the Early Church . . . did practice a yearly repetition of the Last Supper at Passover time: The Jewish Christians.”558 This illustrates the correlation of the Passover and Supper in its original Jewish context after Jesus’ departure. Were Jewish Christians at Corinth dominant enough to have influenced Passover practice there? They probably were since the church had its origins with the Jews of Corinth in their synagogue (Acts 18). The next consideration is of the nature of this relationship between the Passover and Lord’s Supper. Higgins seems correct that “the Last Supper was a pattern of future celebrations of the Passover for the followers of Jesus.”559 In this ”revised” celebration the basic focus has shifted from remembering Israel’s deliverance from Egypt (the salvation which initiated the Old Covenant) to the remembrance of Messiah’s death (the salvation which initiated the New Covenant). That there would be such a shift of focus is seen already in the writings of Jeremiah. In speaking of Israel’s re-gathering under Messiah, he states, Therefore behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when it will no longer be said, ‘As the Lord lives, who brought up the sons of Israel out of the land of Egypt,’ but, ‘As the Lord lives, who brought up the sons of Israel from the land of the north and from all the countries where He had banished them,’ For I will restore them to their own land which I gave to their fathers (Jer 16:14-15).

And again, when dealing with the establishment of the New Covenant, he writes, Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,” declares the Lord. “But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the Lord, “I will put My law within them, and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people (Jer 31:31-33).

The Passover not only remembered the past deliverance from Egypt, but also prefigured the coming sacrifice of Messiah. This eschatological outlook is referred to by Paul (“Christ, our Passover, is sacrificed for us,” 1 Cor 5:7) and also by Peter in speaking of the source of 557 R. Dillard makes the following observation which may speak against this conclusion: “Though no physical illness is suggested in the passage, the Chronicler goes out of his way to introduce the term heal (30:20), a direct allusion to 2 Chron 7:14.” See R. B. Dillard, 2 Chronicles (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1987), p. 245. Whether there was a physical expression of judgment evident in those who came to the feast with impurity may not be certain. In any case, it was recognized that they were worthy of death and were given relief through God’s response to Hezekiah’s prayer for mercy in light of the purity of their hearts. The Corinthians seemed to have lacked such preparation of the heart in their practice, and reaped the consequences. 558 Jeremias, Eucharistic Words, p. 66. 559 Higgins, Lord’s Supper, p. 53.

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redemption: “with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot,” 1 Pet 1:19.560 The same outlook was also present in first century Judaism. Higgins notes one such reference: “it was said by Joshua ben Hananiah (c A. D. 90) that Passover night was the night on which the Jews had been redeemed in the past, and on which they will be redeemed in the future.”561 Jeremias summarizes: The Jewish Passover celebration at the time of Jesus is both retrospect and prospect. At this festival the people of God remember the merciful immunity granted to the houses marked with the blood of the paschal lamb and the deliverance from the Egyptian servitude. But that is only one aspect. At the same time the Passover is a looking forward to the coming deliverance of which the deliverance from Egypt is the prototype. ‘This typology is a concept which most comprehensively determined already in early times, as no other did, the form that the doctrine of final salvation took (Billerbeck).’ The Messiah comes in the Passover night.562

Therefore, with the coming of Messiah, the meaning of the Passover had been transcended. The Passover was to be a perpetual feast (Exod 12:14). Thus it is that Jesus, using, as Jeremias notes, a fixed part of the Passover ritual, assigns a new meaning to two elements of the meal, even in the midst of celebrating it in its Jewish form. It no longer looks back on salvation via the Passover lamb. Rather, it becomes a remembrance of fulfillment through Christ’s sacrifice. It no longer anticipates the coming of Messiah to suffer for the sins of the world (John 1:29, 36; 1 Pet 1:10, 11; Isa 53), but celebrates atonement for sins already completed, and looks forward to Christ’s return to reign (Mk 14:25; Matt 26:29; Luke 22:15-18; 1 Cor 11:26). Higgins notes of the Last Supper: Jesus tells the disciples that on this occasion and henceforth before eating the Passover they are to remember that the original meaning of the feast has been transcended. He is the fulfillment of the Passover victim; the customary unleavened bread now stands as the symbol of His body, the wine of ‘the cup of blessing’ as a symbol of his blood.563

Elsewhere Higgins also says, Because of the special words of explanation uniquely attached by Jesus to the bread and wine, these elements of the meal replaced the lamb as the central feature . . . .564

This being the case, what is the relationship of the body of Christ to the Lord’s Supper? The typical argument of medial dispensationalists has been to support its practice in this dispensation by insisting upon its absolute distinctiveness from the Passover and upon its status as a part of the revelation of formerly unrevealed truth given to Paul alone. Since neither of these arguments has proved valid, one is left with a dilemma. Either the Lord’s Supper is a Jewish feast without relevance to the church, or the Lord’s Supper is a celebration of salvation given for both Israel and the church, even though the Corinthian

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A. M. Stibbs, The First Epistle General of Peter (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959), pp. 205, 206. Higgins, Lord’s Supper, p. 47 562 Jeremias, Eucharistic Words, pp. 205, 206 563 Higgins, Lord’s Supper, p. 52. 564 Ibid., p. 23. 560 561

church may have practiced it along with some aspects of the old Passover or even of pagan temple meals. We now turn to a further consideration of this question. The Lord’s Supper in the Church A preliminary factor in this discussion must be the relationship between Israel and the church. Dispensational theology has always, at least in principle but in detail unevenly, recognized both continuities and distinctions in the unfolding plan of God. It is important to recognize the presence of both elements when considering the Israel-church relation. Dispensational theology has rightly stressed the distinctiveness of the church as a secret in that it was unknown to the Old Testament prophets (Eph 3:1-11; Col 1:24-27; Rom 16:2526), and the corresponding break in law-observance, focused repeatedly in Paul on Jewish ritual and ritual law which he rejects for the church; this is a correct understanding, and yet it must be balanced with other statements of Paul which indicate continuity between the church and the former dispensations. This balance can be seen in certain details of Paul’s teaching and practice. For example: the law’s moral instruction is used by Paul for the church (Rom 13:8-10); Paul uses Jesus sayings (1 Cor 7:10-12; Acts 20:35); and elder governance of churches is a clear take over of Jewish elder functions in leadership and synagogue; the transition is visible in references to elders in Acts. More subtle theological extensions of Israel or its self-concepts are also visible in the following features of Paul’s thought. In Galatians 3, Paul discusses the manner in which the church has inherited the promises given to Abraham. He views Christ as Abraham’s promised (3:16). He then sees all those who are joined to Christ by faith as Abraham’s seed (3:26-29). In this way the blessing of Abraham is passed on to the Gentiles (3:14). He goes farther in saying that God’s promise to Abraham that all nations would be blessed in him (Gen 12:3) finds fulfillment (3:8; note a similar statement in Rom 4:16-17) in the salvation brought to the Gentiles by his world mission. Because of Paul’s understanding of the Gentiles inheriting Israel’s spiritual blessings (Rom 15:27), he is free to speak of the Gentiles being grafted into the root from which Israel was broken off (Rom 11:16-24)—a reference to Abraham. In this manner, the promises to Abraham reach a partial fulfillment, even though in a different context than originally expected—rather by extension into the dispensation of grace even though the latter is an entirely new revelation. The connecting groups of concepts are justification by faith coming to the nations (Gentiles) through Abraham’s seed, Christ. This reality bespeaks continuity and fulfillment of Gentile blessing promises, but does not compromise their final fulfillment upon the Second Coming and Israel’s promised salvation and consequent material benefits promised in the prophets. It is important to realize with Burton in his comments on Galatians 3:16 that Paul is not giving these Old Testament passages their original meaning.565 Yet, it is clearly Paul’s understanding that the church is “spiritual Israel” in the very limited sense that its members become sons of Abraham and partakers of the promised salvation through faith 565 E. D. Burton, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Galatians (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1921), p. 182.

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in Abraham’s seed, Christ. Because of this, Paul, while laboring to bring Gentiles to this salvation, could refer to himself and his co-workers as “ministers of the New Covenant (2 Cor 3:6).” But as Daniel Fuller points out, this does not mean these Old Testament prophecies find their total or even intended fulfillment in the church as covenant theology generally claims. Rather, the intended final fulfillment awaits the messianic kingdom.566 Neither does this kind of fulfillment compromise the “mystery” character of the church. Although Gentile salvation is clearly prophesied through Israel, the manner in which the church now enjoys that salvation was certainly unknown. In the Old Testament, Gentile salvation is normally seen as a result of Israel’s restoration and blessing, not of its resistance and judgment. Returning now to the question of the Lord’s Supper, we attempt to apply this theological balance. Admitting that the Supper springs from Jewish soil, does not of necessity mean that it has no place in the church’s practice. Since we recognize with Paul that continuities exist between the dispensation of law centering upon Israel and the dispensation of grace for the church, it can be seen from the foregoing that the Lord’s Supper reflects continuity with the Passover. Continuity becomes firm when it is recalled that the Lord’s Supper commemorates the New Covenant salvation—the sacrifice of Christ. Since the New Covenant salvation too is an aspect of continuity, it is understandable that the Lord’s Supper is an aspect of continuity as well. To reach a definite affirmative to this question, we have only to ponder several other attitudes and thoughts of Paul. (1) Paul does not include the Lord’s Supper or its forerunner (Passover) in his discussion of ordinances abolished in Christ (Col 2:14-17). The practices made obsolete in this and other passages are those which were shadows of the coming substance, Christ, and hence were made obsolete.567 As noted above, the Lord’s Supper does not fall into this category, since its meaning reaches beyond the Old Covenant shadows by the force of Jesus’ teaching about his atoning death and Paul’s affirmations of the same. (2) In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul seeks to correct abuse of the Lord’s Supper by separating the bread and cup of the Supper from the common meal, which as noted above may have included other elements of the Passover under influence from the strong Jewish element in the Corinthian church.568 He urges the Corinthians to satisfy their hunger at home rather than despising the church’s poor and bringing shame to those who were too poor to feast (11:21-22, 34). In so doing, Paul removed the two elements of the Supper from their Passover setting and established their unique practice for the church. As Higgins notes, “In seeking to correct these abuses by counseling the hungry to eat at home first, Paul took the initial step in the separation of the specifically Eucharistic celebration from the meal of which it formed part . . . .”569 It is also important that in addressing the Corinthian abuse, Paul gives no indication that the Lord’s Supper was to be temporary as he did when dealing with the certain gifts in 1 Corinthians 13:8-13. 566 D. P. Fuller, Gospel and Law: Contrast or Continuum? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), p. 162. 567 T. K. Abbott, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistles to the Ephesians and to the Colossians (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1897), p. 264. 568 As Higgins, Lord’s Supper, p. 54, notes, the dinner likely became weekly as a result of the resurrection. 569 Ibid., p. 63.

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(3) Paul establishes a new meaning for the Lord’s Supper which refers directly to the body of Christ: Is not the cup of blessing which we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ? Is not the bread which we break a sharing in the body of Christ? Since there is one bread, we who are many are one body; for we all partake of the one bread. (1 Cor 10:16, 17)

According to Conzelmann, “this link between the Lord’s Supper and the concept of the church is the new element which he introduces into the understanding of the sacrament.”570 The bread which represents Christ is one. All who receive that bread and thus what it represents are bound together into one spiritual people. Long ago, F. Godet pointed out that “The bond which unites them to Jesus as their common head, unites them also to one another as members of the same body.”571 This use of the bread of the Lord’s Supper to represent the unity of the body appears again in 1 Corinthians 11:29: “For he who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgment to himself, if he does not judge (in sense of recognize572) the body rightly.” It seems best to understand “body” here as a reference to the church, as does Bruce, rather than to Christ himself, because of the context.573 Paul’s obvious concern in this section is with the divisions evident in eating the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor 11:18-22, 33, 34). It would seem strange indeed if Paul were to attach such significance to a practice which he considered abnormal and temporary for the church which is the body of Christ. This correlation of the Supper with the body of Christ is a distinctive Pauline connection in which he joins earlier revelation to new revelation in something like the way Conzelmann puts it. (4) Paul places more emphasis on the command to practice the Lord’s Supper than any other New Testament writer.574 He refers to the Lord’s imperative, “This do in remembrance of me,” in connection with both bread and cup (1 Cor 11:24, 25; Luke 22:19). Neither Mark nor Matthew refers to this command of repetition. Luke records it only in connection with the bread (Luke 22:19). This statement in Luke is in a disputed passage which is given a “C” rating in the United Bible Societies Greek New Testament. And yet, as Marshall concludes, the available textual evidence would favor it as being original.575 The question naturally arises, why would Matthew and Mark neglect such an important aspect as the injunction to repeat the Supper? Plummer believes that such a command was unknown to Mark and Matthew but given as special revelation to Paul and thus Luke.576 This seems unlikely especially when it is noticed that Paul and Luke both attribute these words to Jesus on “the night in which he was betrayed (1 Cor 11:23; Luke 22:19).” These are important words with which Matthew, who was present, would surely have been familiar. A better explanation comes from the Passover background of the gospel accounts. Jesus 570 Conzelmann, First Corinthians, p. 172. 571 F. Godet, Commentary on First Corinthians, 2 vols (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1957), 2:512513. 572 BAGD, p. 184. 573 Bruce, First and Second Corinthians, p. 115. 574 D. Guthrie, New Testament Theology (Downers Grove IL: Inter-Varsity, 1981), pp. 719-720. 575 I. Howard Marshall, Commentary on Luke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), pp. 799-801. 576 A. Plummer, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to St. Luke (Edinburgh: T & T Clark), p. 50.

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was giving new meaning to an already established memorial. The repetition of the new symbols would be understood, just as with the Passover’s perpetural observance. Godet recognizes this likelihood: Jesus meant to preserve the Passover, but by renewing its meaning. Matthew and Mark preserved of the words of institution only that which referred to the new meaning given to the ceremony. As to the command of Jesus, it had not been preserved in the liturgical formula, because it was implied in the very act of celebrating the rite.577

Thus Paul (likely influencing Luke) makes explicit what was implicit in the gospel accounts. This was necessary, as we have seen, because Paul seeks to separate the Lord’s Supper from its Passover setting, but in a different way than suggested by several grace movement teachers. Again, it would seem strange that Paul, more than any other biblical writer, should stress the command to repeat the Lord’s Supper if he intended that its practice should be discontinued. His concern in this passage seems to be that the Corinthians recognize and respect the authority which commanded their sharing of the bread and the cup (1 Cor 11:20, 23-32). He does not suggest that they cease the practice. Rather, he emphasizes that their present habit was actually not the Lord’s Supper (11:20). They must recognize that it was the Lord who commanded them, “this do in remembrance of me (vss. 24, 25),” and adjust their behavior accordingly. The Practice and Meaning of the Lord’s Supper According to the logic that justifies the practice of the Lord’s Supper by severing it from the Jewish Passover and arguing it is a wholly unique Pauline revelation, the Supper is a kind of Pauline add-on with no connection to anything—just a detached Pauline revelation to be practiced because Paul commands it. This approach thins its meaning since no Passover nuances can attach to it; only Pauline meanings (thanksgiving, proclamation, unity, remembrance, et al, on which see below) can adhere to its practice. On the other hand, the view that the church of this dispensation did not begin until Acts 28 or later entirely rejects the Lord’s Supper. This view believes the Lord’s Supper did belong to the Jewish Passover and is only found in those earlier epistles of Paul written before the body of Christ of the Prison Epistles existed. The earlier epistles belong, in this view, to the period of Paul’s mission to Israel. 1 Corinthians is among the earlier “Jewish” epistles (on this view), and since it contains instruction about the Lord’s Supper, the Supper is limited to the Jewish “church” or “kingdom church” in both practice and meaning. Either way, however, it is clear that the actual practice of the Lord’s Supper is inseparably tied to its meaning. Meaning in the first view is unrelated to its history; in the second view meaning is retained only for Jewish Christians, while Paul’s larger meanings for the symbol cannot have any permanent value for believers today. Of these two views, the latter, rejecting the Supper for the body-church, is far more problematic, especially as it argues from a dispensational split among the epistles of Paul. Accordingly, it is appropriate to at least state why the Grace Gospel Fellowship practices the Lord’s Supper, and then discuss the elements of 577 F. Godet, A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke, trans A Cusin, 2 vols, 5th ed, (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1952), 2:291.

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its meaning in the light of the foregoing discussion, i.e., that it is a continuation of aspects of the Jewish Passover with new meanings appropriate to the details of Jesus’ fulfillment of the Jewish celebration of Israel’s redemption from Egypt—the Old Testament’s chief preview, with its slain Passover lamb, of Jesus’ death for our sins. The Lord’s Supper and the Unity of Paul’s Epistles There can be no doubt that one central insight of dispensational theology—that the church’s faith and practice be rooted in the appropriate portions of Scripture—is a valid one. This means that (1) the Mosaic law as expressed throughout the Old Testament Pentateuch is not the church’s normative guide for its faith and life; (2) neither is the kingdom foretold in the historical books and in more detail in the prophets the normative guide for the faith and life of the church; (3) nor is the mission of Christ to Israel such a normative guide, although many aspects of Christ’s teaching belong more generally to the unfolding New Covenant and therefore have permanent value for the faith and life of the church under the New Covenant. Our view is that the Pauline revelation, theology and practical instruction are the normative guide for the church, although even with this principle, some caution is necessary for culturally-linked teaching such as the issue of veils for women and a practice called by Paul “baptism for the dead.” Still, with this reservation in view, we affirm that Paul’s epistles are normative for the church. Implicit in this principle is recognition of the dispensational unity of the epistles. Since a dispensational division of Paul’s epistles was already a threat at the time of the Grace Gospel Fellowship’s origin in 1944, the founders steered through this problem by affirming the unity of the Pauline epistles. They simply stated that the body-church began with Paul before he wrote his first epistle. This position assured that the epistles would not be sundered—one group belonging to the kingdom, the other to the church. It also made possible a principled adoption of the Lord’s Supper, even though from the beginning it was argued that the Supper was a special Pauline revelation along with the gospel and the church—a view from which other related essays in this book dissent in part. A detailed argument for the identity of the body of Christ in the early epistles with the body-church of the Prison Epistles is not within the scope of this essay. But we may note that the dating of the Prison Epistles at the last chapter of Acts or even later is a central assumption of all views discussed in this section of the essay; so long as this view prevails, it is theoretically possible to speak of Paul’s pre-Acts 28 mission as Jewish while his post-Acts 28 mission is Gentile in character. However, the grace movement continues to ignore—actually remains almost entirely unaware of—substantial arguments for earlier dating of the Prison Epistles and even of the Pastoral Epistles than Acts 28 or after. Some scholars think the case for a preActs 28 origin of the Prison Epistles during Paul’s two-year confinement at Caesarea (Acts 24:27) is decisive. Others think the Prison Epistles originated even earlier—during his three-year stay at Ephesus (Acts 20:31; cf 19:8, 10); and one prominent scholar argues that the Pastoral Epistles were also written during travels around the Aegean Sea that occurred within the three years at Ephesus—the period covered by Acts 18:22-19:41, known as the “third missionary journey.” Needless to say, such an earlier dating of the crucial Prison 343

Epistles puts these epistles in close chronological proximity to the “earlier” epistles. Actually, nothing prohibits the implied period of intensive epistle-writing within these limits, except, of course, tenaciously held traditions, teaching and preaching habits, or the inconvenience of change. But whether there is any interest in such an earlier dating of the Prison Epistles or not, the basis for practicing the Lord’s Supper lies in the unity of all the Pauline epistles,578 recognized by the Grace Fellowship from its beginning. The Meanings of the Lord’s Supper The thesis of this part of the essay is that the Supper has multiple meanings—a reality only gradually emerging in thought and practice by evangelical Protestants. A major reason for caution is the emphasis evangelicals have historically placed on affirming the non-sacramental and thus non-saving value of the Supper. Evangelicals rather tend to stress its memorial nature (“in remembrance of me”); they mean it is only a memorial. With this emphasis they strongly, sometimes fiercely, distinguish their view from the Catholic, Lutheran, and in some cases even from the Reformed or Calvinist view. Preoccupation with the Supper as a mere memorial has built-in blinders to the varied meanings found in the gospel and epistolary passages. This is not to claim that Jesus or Paul outline a set of multiple meanings in a one-two-three enumerated fashion. Rather, both Jesus and Paul expand the meaning of certain Passover concepts as they speak of the Supper. Jesus himself gave new meanings to the bread and cup as he anticipated his own fulfillment of the Passover. Paul expanded meanings by dealing with at least three problems in the Corinthian church: the impurity of one or more persons in their assembly (1 Cor 5); divisions caused in practice of the Supper by social class conflicts (1 Cor 11:17-22); and continued attendance of some Corinthian believers at pagan sacrificial meals and temple dinners (1 Cor 10:14-22). More could be said about these expansions in a technical study of inner-biblical and Jewish-to-Christian interpretation; but these aspects or contexts in Jesus and Paul’s missions are sufficient to illustrate how meaning shifts and enhancements occurred—new situations needing new corrections to counteract pagan or Jewish twists as at Corinth, for example. Accordingly, the following sketch is not intended as final or exhaustive, and certainly not beyond further discussion. Added insights will emerge by interaction with the following aspects and by further study of the texts and their contexts. To sort out or comment on all the history-of-traditions issues that arise if one asks about the original form of the Supper sayings and their respective meanings, and how they passed into the epistles, is also beyond the scope of this essay. Jeremias’ Eucharistic Words of Jesus is a recent basic study addressing those issues rather fully. He thinks the oldest forms we can detect were two: the Mark-Matthew version, and the Luke-Paul version. However that may be, the treatment below seeks only the sense of the several biblical meaning texts, even though there is insight to be gained from a study of the likely oral path of the Supper traditions from Jesus to their appearance in the epistles and gospels. Jewish Passover traditions from New Testament times, as far as known, will be noted appropriately, based on the conclusiveness of the argument above for the origin of the 578 For a discussion of the reasons for earlier dating of the Prison and Pastoral Epistles, see Appendices A and B to Essay X below.

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Supper in those traditions. Jeremias’ is also strongly affirmative about the literal future coming and kingdom in Jewish prayers and sayings traditionally uttered in Passover celebrations. Whether or not he intends thereby to embrace any millenarian construction on the coming and kingdom, he certainly recognizes these elements of biblical futurism, and thereby intentionally or unintentionally offers encouragements to millenarian exegesis and exposition of parousia and basileia texts. (1) Remembrance of the Lord’s Death. Jesus’ death for sins is attached to the Supper in the earliest Passover sayings to his disciples; he already calls it a remembrance (Gr anamnesis) in Luke. Anamnesis (remembrance) does not mean “memorial” as though it were a gravestone or mere static token of the event, or a lifeless object. Rather the word suggests active remembering, an experience central to the meaning of the Passover in Judaism and based in the Old Testament (Exod 12:14, 24-25). The verbal element in the noun means “reminder.” This active nuance was strong enough that some religious uses in the New Testament’s Greek environment included dramatic enactments, as Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker’s note about how the goddess Basileia was “remembered” shows. For example, when Basileia’s votaries remembered her after her disappearance, they not only offered sacrifices to her, but “beat kettle drums and cymbals, as Basileia herself did, and they put on a presentation of her experiences.”579 The New Testament does not directly encourage dramatic re-enactments of the Supper. On the other hand, some symbolic action around the bread and cup or even with the bread and cup (such as breaking the loaf or pouring the wine/juice) might be suitable as a way to activate minds to the symbol.580 Jesus broke the bread before the disciples (Matt, Luke; not Mark) as if to say, “this is my (broken, Gr klao) body.” While Paul has only “this is my body which is for you (without ‘broken’),” it is probably correct to assume he includes the imagery of the broken body. Accordingly the breaking of the bread before a congregation might be an appropriate dramatization of this aspect of meaning. Similarly, but with a different grammatical arrangement, the words, “this cup . . . is my blood which is poured out for you,” should be understood to include both the wine/juice itself and its pouring; it may also be appropriate to conduct some pouring gesture in the sight of congregations, since the tradition in the gospels retained a verb (ekkhunomenon) for this part of the meal; Paul does not use this verb, although Luke’s version does.

579 BAGD, p. 59. Jeremias, Eucharistic Words, pp. 237-255, opposes this traditional understanding and thinks Jesus and Paul both mean by “my remembrance” God’s remembrance of Jesus’ messiahship and kingdom, i.e., the bringing of it into the world. Conzelmann, First Corinthians, pp. 198-199, dismisses this explanation as impossible and a breach of the obvious meaning. Thiselton, First Corinthians, pp. 880-881, also expresses doubt. We should not be dismissive, however. Jeremias may have found something in the Jewish versus Greek thought habits about remembrance: God’s remembrance and our remembrance are not mutually exclusive. 580 So V. Taylor, The Gospel According to Mark (London: Macmillan & Co, 1959), p. 544: touto (this) “clearly refers to the broken bread.” This seems correct even though the neuter touto is formally required by the neuter soma (body). The saying includes both the action and the material—the loaf and its breaking by Jesus. With the cup, the neuter to potarion also formally required the neuter touto; but the note of pouring is added even though it did not have to be. These elements in the Passover-Supper indicate that Jesus is thinking of his death as a sacrifice. It seems strange that Jeremias, Eucharistic Words, p. 221, should oppose this way of understanding Jesus’ words.

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Far more central, however, are the narrative details of Jesus’ death. This is the traditional and dominant way Christians have re-lived the event, and in their re-living and remembering, the gospel is proclaimed. Meaning is gained with selections from the gospels that specify varied details, or from aspects of the story in small vignettes, one at a time. The Unleavened Bread-Passover connection invites use of Scripture texts from these Old Testament and Jewish feasts as well, since they are the context of the First Supper. Jesus adjusts the symbolism to himself as fulfillment: he is the bread of the feast of Unleavened Bread; his blood is the blood of the Passover lamb. In using the gospels, care should be taken to keep the story-scenes varied so the event does not fall into stagnant repetition. Paul supplements the tradition with his remark (not in Jesus’ words of institution)

that as often as we eat the bread and drink the cup, we proclaim (katangello) the Lord’s death (1 Cor 11:26). Katangello is one of several terms used in Hellenistic Greek for proclaiming religious festivals; it parallels euaggelizomai for proclaiming honors upon the Roman emperor. Since katangello normally refers to some oral activity, proclaiming the Lord’s death in the Supper almost certainly refers to narrative details spoken during its course, and not primarily to actions with the symbols.581 One might infer that most remembering symbolisms need verbal comment or explanation.

(2) The New Covenant. The proclamation Paul speaks of includes the inauguration of the new covenant in the Passover-Supper sayings. All three synoptic gospels contain the thought that the cup “is” the new covenant in (connection with) his blood which is poured out.582 In Mark and Matthew, Jesus speaks of “poured out for many”; Luke personalizes it to “. . . for you (disciples).” But Matthew, apparently wishing to clarify what Mark meant by “for you,” adds, “ . . . “poured out for forgiveness of sins”—an addition that embodies not only a clarification of “for you,” but incorporates the basic blessing proclaimed in the New Testament from the beginning of Jesus’ messianic mission (Mark 1:4; 2:5).

Some dispensationalists have argued for two new covenants, one for Israel referred to in Jeremiah 31, Isaiah 40-66 (passim), and Jesus’ institution of the Lord’s Supper, and another in Paul and Hebrews.583 However, Paul does not make such a distinction between two new covenants in any passage. Rather he thinks of the same internal-spiritual work of the new covenant in Jeremiah 31 when he mentions the new covenant in 2 Corinthians 3; Hebrews does the same (10:16-18). He also brings the new covenant of Jesus’ words of institution into the church (1 Cor 11:25). More importantly, the new covenant of Jeremiah 31 specifies forgiveness of sins as the primary blessing of a personalized and internalized new covenant written in human hearts (Jer 31:34), just as does Hebrews. The attempt to posit two new covenants is not viable. It is based not on exegesis but on a dispensationalist 581 J. Schniewind, “katangello,” TDNT 1:72 582 A tendency can be detected among some conservative treatments to see covenant elements in several and perhaps all parts of the Passover and Lord’s Supper texts, for example A. Millard, “Covenant and Communion in First Corinthians,” in Apostolic History and the Gospel, ed W. Gasque and R. Martin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), pp. 242-248; more recently, A. Thiselton is sympathetic to covenant as the basic Supper meaning framework (First Corinthians, pp. 756-760). 583 C. Ryrie,The Basis of the Premillennial Faith (New York: Loizeaux, 1953), pp. 105-125. More recently within dispensationalist circles, Jerry Shugart in a series of personal emails during the summer of 2009 adopts the same view.

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pre-set concept that too harshly separates Israel and church for the sake of its system’s logic.

(3) Coming and Kingdom. The proclamation carried in the Supper is intended to continue “until he comes.” Both festivals—Passover and Unleavened Bread—included elements in their Jewish celebration about the coming messianic age.584 In the Christian adaptation of the feast, this element is already found in all three synoptic gospels and survives in a short form in 1 Corinthians 11:26: “until he comes.” This meaning element in the Supper derives from the common synoptic sayings about the coming kingdom of God which surround the words of institution. In Mark and Matthew the coming kingdom sayings appear after the bread and cup (Mark 14:23-25; Matt 26:27-29), while Luke records related future kingdom sayings spoken before the bread and cup (Luke 22:15-20). Paul does not repeat the future kingdom sayings; but in the synoptic tradition the kingdom sayings around the words of institution assume the kingdom comes when Jesus returns. The sayings are pointed and refer to the expected coming of the kingdom: “I tell you I shall not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom (Matt 26:29);” “. . . I shall not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God (Mark 14:25);” “. . . I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes (Luke 22:18).” And shortly after, while he and the disciples were still together, he added, “ . . . as my Father appointed a kingdom for me, so do I appoint for you that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel (Luke 22:29-30).” In each of the sayings or their sequel, he places himself with them in the coming kingdom, thereby establishing continuity between his Supper with disciples and its continuation in the coming kingdom. Hence the shorthand, “. . . until he comes,” as a proclamation by the body-church, implies with the larger form of the original sayings that the whole people of God celebrates the Supper and similarly will likewise partake of it when Jesus also eats and drinks it “new” (Matt, Mark only) in the coming kingdom. This motif belongs to the messianic banquet theme in Scripture investigated by Philip Long in his doctoral dissertation of 2012.

(4) Thanksgiving/Eucharist. To celebrate Jesus’ sacrifice for our salvation, the related idea of thanksgiving is more than appropriate. The synoptic accounts of the Passover and Supper use both eulogeo (to bless God; Matt, Mark) and eucharisteo (be thankful; Luke). In fact, the Passover, from which the Supper emerged as discussed above, included repeated blessings spoken toward the Lord. Jeremias identifies several such blessings from Jewish sources: Blessed art thou, O Lord, our God, king of the universe, who feedest the whole world with goodness, with grace and with mercy.

We thank thee, O Lord, our God, that thou hast caused us to inherit a goodly and pleasant land.



584

Jeremias, Eucharistic Words, p. 59.

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Have mercy, O Lord, our God, on Israel, thy people, and on Jerusalem, thy city, and upon Zion, the dwelling place of thy glory, and upon thy altar and upon thy temple. Blessed art thou O Lord, thou who buildest Jerusalem.585

Paul, again with Luke, retains the eucharist terminology (1 Cor 11:24). It is implicit in this language that, as with the endless Jewish prayers of thanksgiving, the element of joy is prominent, even though Paul does not use any regular term for joy in the Supper passages. The recent common use of the term celebration cannot be objectionable, although care should be taken not to let frivolous or party-like types of modern celebration enter the Supper service. On any reckoning some expressions of joy should be encouraged with its practice. Jeremias’ treatment of the meaning of the Supper is thoroughly oriented to the coming messianic kingdom and its joys. Even this “blessing” (The Hallel of the Passover) he reads—with texts from Jewish sources close to the New Testament era—as filled with thoughts and emotions of the earthly redemption of Jerusalem in the coming messianic kingdom. This cannot be wrong in light of the evidence; but the focus seems to be on Jesus as the operative of the future consummation through his provision of salvation in death and resurrection. In this manner the primary focus is on the establishment of salvation, but with a view also to its completed application at the Second Coming. (5) Participation in Christ’s Body and Blood. Usually, the related Greek terms are translated and thought of as “fellowship” or “communion.” Most evangelical bodies stress that the two elements of the Supper have no sacramental communication value in themselves, and cannot be made to have such value by consecration or by a blessing pronounced over them. Evangelicals also generally regard the term “sacrament” as unwise or misleading lest members of the body be led back into any sacramental associations of a spiritually unhealthy or unrealistic character. This aversion to Catholic, Lutheran or even Reformed use of the term “sacrament” seems justified. On the other hand, the more one stresses the mere symbolization or mere memorial meaning of the Supper, the more a perfunctory or even flippant attitude may be encouraged. On the other side, the more a real divine action in the elements is stressed, as in Catholic transubstantiation, with either or both elements, the greater the tendency toward what we might call automatic-ism will prevail with the “sacrament” itself thought of as achieving the saving relation. A few remarks on some details may take us in the right direction, although the meaning of “is” and “a participation” in verse 16 are in need of clarity. Generally, the observation of Godet a century ago seems correct with respect to the verb “is” (esti) in the sayings, “this [bread] is my body . . . this cup is the new covenant in my blood.” The position of the verb “is” cannot be emphatic and therefore does not carry any special meaning load as in Catholic or Lutheran views. Godet remarks:

585 Jeremias, Eucharistic Words, p. 110, identifies his sources, both primary and secondary. He is cautious and claims no more than probability for the wording. But it is clear that such prayers, including thanksgivings to God were widely used in late Judaism’s festivals and synagogue worship as the Eighteen Benedictions testify.

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In the principal proposition, the notion of being (esti) is certainly not the essential idea in Paul’s view as if he wished to insist and to say: ‘is really.’ In this sense the word esti would have required to be placed first both times, before the predicate koinonia, the communion. The emphasis is on the predicate: the communion.”586 It seems unlikely, therefore, that any of the several uses of the verb “to be” in the koinonia sayings is intended to be a primary emphasis. “Is” does, however, at least affirm a real connection between believers and Christ’s body and blood.

In support of Godet’s observations, the following grammatical and stylistic remarks may be added, about both the position of “is” in the Greek sentences as non-emphatic, and about the meaning of koinonia as “partnership with,” not “fellowship” or “communion,” both of which are misleading. (a) In Jesus’ sayings like “this is my body” and “this is my blood,” the “is” occupies a normal (non-emphatic) position (Mark 14:22, 24; Matt 26:26, 28; Luke omits “is” for the cup). When Paul quotes, “This is my body . . . (11:24),” it is also in normal position; but when he quotes, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood,” it is slightly nudged toward the end of the (Greek, not English) sentence, apparently to give prominence to “cup” and “covenant (11:25)” near the beginning. In 10:16a, when he says, “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation (koinonia) in the blood of Christ?” it is in near normal position, but nudged just slightly toward the end to give “participation (koinonia)” the priority. In “The bread which we break is it not a participation (koinonia) in the body of Christ (10:16b)?” the “is” takes the very last position in the sentence! Normally, this thrusting to the end of the sentence might indicate emphasis. However, in this short Supper passage, there are six (6) uses of this verb pushed toward or to the end of their sentences or clauses. In each case one can see a thrusting forward in the sentence of the prominent concept Paul wishes to emphasize. It seems most plausible to take the view that in this series of placements, whether normal or very abnormal (pushing to the end of the sentence or clause), the intent is not to emphasize “is” and “are” (etc), but to stress the subject and predicate terms which bear the load of meaning by leaving them in forward positions. (b) The exact sort of “participation” (koinonia) is not clear on its face. That “partake (metecho)” is a related concept of some meaning overlap with koinonia is obvious from a simple lexical study. It is used in 10:17, 21 of the actual eating-drinking of the Supper’s elements, not with either Christ’s body or blood as a genitive of the object, i.e., not eatingdrinking Christ’s body-blood. It is true that “we are all partakers (metecho) of the one loaf (10:17)” is stated. With metecho (partake), however, “partake” in both uses (10:17, 21) seems to refer simply to eating the Supper elements as such (with either bread [vs 17] or “table [vs 21],” in a clear metonymy of the table for the bread). Koinonia, however, used for “participation in” Christ’s body and blood, is at least a somewhat different concept, or at least the meaning range of koinonia is different. The linguistic pattern with koinonia is participating in or associating with in a joint enterprise. It does not involve “partaking of” something but participating in something already established or existing—a partnership with it by participating in its provisions, powers, purposes and activities—and thus keeps more to the social-associational side of the possible meaning range. Thus koinonia in the New Testament, as with its counterpart khavar in the Hebrew Bible, does not refer primarily to the communication of some benefit, power or quality in 586 F. Godet, First Corinthians, 2:78; although some technical issues of word placement and emphasis might be raised about this assessment, the comment seems substantially correct, especially considering the nearly regular pushing-ahead of forms of eimi (is) within the section considered as a unit by itself.

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a mystical fashion as with God or Christ projecting a real saving something into or onto a worshipping person. It does denote participation in or association with an established order of provisions or arrangements. In the Old Testament the Hebrew equivalent khavar means to ally oneself or join forces with. In Hebrew, a khavereth is a companion, and a khevrah is a company.587 In sharp contrast, Greek pagan religious festival usage referred to an “inward reception of mysterious divine power (mana) in eating and drinking,” i.e., in a feast to or with a deity—an active communion, i.e., communication, between and gods and men. In Greek poetry (as Homer), this is because the gods actually take part in the festivals, and eating and drinking are in this sense a communication between god and man.588 Neither the Old Testament nor the New embrace this Greek concept as the use of Hebrew khavar shows. Even if we speak of a living “union” between Christ and the Christian believer, we are talking about a partnership, comradeship or participation of the believer in the God’s salvation enterprise through the person and work of his son, Jesus. Paul’s meaning is more like the social use of koinonia, not like its cultic or religious use. In Greek social usage the word denotes a common share in something, as with a business partner or associate. It can be used for the common life of equal citizens, and in Plato’s sense of his ideal community of goods and even wives (which Christians rejected from the beginning).

Even though Paul is dealing with divine persons (God and Christ), there is no good reason to see in the communion statements of 1 Corinthians 10:16 any more than our koinonia with the body and blood of Christ as a partnership with Christ’s atoning work symbolized by the elements. Hauck shows that most if not all of Paul’s uses, even for relationship with God or Christ or the Spirit, basically depict this partnership-associational notion.589 This is koinonia’s meaning domain as influenced by Greek and social usage of its Hebrew verbal counterpart khavar; but this is not its Greek religious festival meaning.590 There is justice in A. Thiselton’s remarks about “fellowship” being a misleading translation of koinonia: it is too much associated with horizontal communication—fellowship between human persons.591 Sometimes one reads or hears of “identification” as a suitable sense of the connection; but this is probably the weakest possible way to describe the sense of koinonia and should probably be dropped. (6) The Unity of the Body. The Corinthian church was divided by factions. The factions seem to have been deep and driven by class conflicts as the passage about dining separately before the Lord’s Supper indicates (1 Cor 11:17-22). Some scholars, with good reason, attribute most aspects of the Corinthian’s factions to a “group of relatively well-to587 W. Holladay, A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Leiden: Brill, 1971), pp. 94-95. 588 F. Hauck, “koinon,” TDNT 3:799. 589 Ibid., pp. 804-807. 590 Hauck, ibid., p. 804-806, thinks the participation idea is also expressed with ten or more verbs to which Paul attaches sun- (with) as a prefix. But he also thinks the meaning range of such constructions is to be distinguished from Paul’s very common expression “in Christ” which coordinates with “body of Christ.” These are fine distinctions, but probably on the right track. In some cases “sharing” seems closer to Paul’s thought, mostly in those passages where he is thinking of the Gentile churches’ gift to the Judean Jewish Christians.. Even in an expression like “fellowship of the Spirit” the sense is probably the same— “partnership with the Spirit (Phil 2:1).” Philippians 3:10 should read “partnership with his sufferings.” 591 Thiselton, First Corinthians, p. 761.

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do Gentile male converts,”592 although this church was strongloy Jewish in origins. This context for the Lord’s Supper instruction of 1 Corinthians 10-11 is an easily recognized parallel to culturally or economically or generationally conflicted churches in our own world. Therefore Paul’s comments about the unity of the body in 1 Corinthians 10:17 remain relevant for the world church in our time. Paul’s words are: “Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of one loaf (NIV).” It was noted above that “body of Christ” in 10:16 is a reference to Christ’s physical earthly body. But in 10:17 Paul shifts the reference of body to mean the church.593 The language of the verse is fairly clear and does not need much comment. Paul thinks of a loaf of bread as a symbol for the unity of the church-body, and adds, “we the many” are the one loaf. He is not thinking of its brokenness; that is another aspect of the multiple meanings of the image—a reality that literalist Bible readers and interpreters often fail to recognize.594 The point of the image in 10:17, then, is simply the unity of the church in its wholeness.

Thiselton is interested in whether we think of artos as “one bread” or “one loaf.” He wonders if the two occurrences of artos in 10:17 should be “one bread . . . one loaf,” or if we should keep to “one loaf” for both uses. The former, he thinks, breaks the symmetry of the chiasm A-B-B’-A’ (loaf—many-body—loaf), while translating both as “loaf” verges on the banal, and compromises the possible variety of symbolic variation in the image of a loaf of bread.595 But since the emphasis is on “one,” represented by a loaf, perhaps the alleged banality can be overlooked in order to retain the picture of oneness-wholeness, especially considering that the body of Christ in its oneness is the point. Besides, “bread” is not a very suggestive image as it seems the reference is primarily to the wholeness and oneness of the loaf, and this seems to be Paul’s interest, as the oneness of the whole body of Christ is his interest. Thus the comments above point to “loaf” as noted for both uses of artos in 10:17.

The use of “body,” for the church in its unity seems to refer to Christ’s body; but if so, reference is to his (extended-spiritual) resurrection body as argued by Robinson and discussed in another essay in this book. If this is so, “body” has undergone a striking expansion—from Christ’s pre-resurrection body to his resurrection body to his larger resurrection body, the church. Thiselton looks with serious concern on the idea that the “body” of Christ in this and other uses carries Robinson’s notion (along with L. Thornton and A. Schweitzer) that the body of Christ is Christ’s resurrection body—a view that moves, in his view, “too 592 B. Witherington, Conflict & Community in Corinth (Carlisle UK: Paternoster Press, 1995), p. 313. 593 For the view that both are references to the body of Christ, see Fee, First Corinthians, p. 469. . Thiselton, First Corinthians, p. 766, reads Fee this way and takes issue with him; but Fee’s emphasis on the matter is not very strong, or very explicit. Perhaps both Thiselton and the comment here are somewhat overdrawn. Yet Fee does seem to take this view. Thiselton, ibid., p. 769, recognizes the shift in meaning for “body”. 594 Thiselton, ibid., p 769, bases his recognition of a quick shift of meaning on P. Ricoeur’s “split reference” assessment of much human language. There is wide agreement that multiple meaning of images is as common in biblical as in all language, sometimes called the “multivalence” of images. 595 Thiselton, First Corinthians, p. 770.

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readily toward a virtually unqualified . . . identification between the eucharistic community of the fallible church and the body of the raised Christ.”596 But this objection—which does bespeak a danger—is met if the matter is qualified. One obvious way to qualify it is to recognize the range of Paul’s use of resurrection language. The best example is the verb zoopoieo, meaning “make alive.” It is used several times for Christ’s resurrection, and more often for our future resurrection. But the verb is also applied in two places to God himself “making alive” believers, which has brought about their salvation here and now (Eph 2:5; Col 2:13), with no possibility of a future anticipative sense—our future resurrection. That is, it is used for the divine life granted believers that makes them alive to God now from their former deadness in trespasses and sins—in their being, that is, and not merely in their status. There is no implication about believers’ perfection now. The work is spiritual and internal and represents the beginning of what will become their “infallibility” (Thiselton’s term) in future bodily resurrection, or their “revealing” as in Romans 8:19; but there is no hint in usage that this ultimately “infallible” condition has already been entered by the church, certainly not by means of the Supper. In Romans 8:5-17 a sharp difference between flesh and spirit is seen in which being in the Spirit means a deliverance from the flesh, but not in the sense of a present “infallible” state as Thiselton fears. That this view has affinities with the Catholic view of the church and its views of the Lord’s Supper is not denied; but it can exist without any of the Catholic theological superstructure built on it. This is because resurrection is already working in believers and is not mediated by sacraments and/or hierarchy, but solely by Christ and the Holy Spirit through the believer’s faith. Thus the Lord’s Supper celebrates not only the unity of the body, but the fact that its unity is that of living already in Christ’s resurrection.

It seems essential that here, too, some creativity by worship leaders be sought in projecting images of unity with the material loaf of the Supper and inclusive of the several nuances noted above. This celebration of unity with the loaf as its symbol might seem to conflict with the brokenness of the loaf when the verb for “broken” is taken to be an image of Christ’s broken body. But this seemingly logical conflict is accounted for, again, by the multiple features of the image (the “multivalence of images”) as noted above. Pastors and worship leaders might consider using two loaves occasionally, one left whole for visualizing the unity of the body, the other broken for visualizing the brokenness of Christ’s body. Other visual effects might be creatively imagined. At any rate, care should be taken not to disturb the symbolism by temptations to mere novelty.

(7) Community and Individual Purity. 1 Corinthians 5:7-8 has an apparent allusion to the Lord’s Supper.597 It is joined in this text with allusions to the related feast of Unleavened Bread which in ancient Israel and late Judaism occurred in the week after Passover as a memorial of the deliverance from Egypt. In New Testament times they formed one single festival. The immediate occasion for Paul using Unleavened Bread language is the Corinthians’ failure to deal with a horrifically impure element in the church, an incestuous man, about whom, he seems to assume, the whole congregation knows. Congregational purity in public moral matters thus belongs to the symbolism of Passover and Unleavened Bread.

Ibid., p. 768. Higgins, Lord’ Supper; Fee, First Corinthians, p. 218, but with some hesitation, although he cites other commentators who take this view as well. 596

597

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Unleavened Bread is cited in its Old Testament significance mainly as a community celebration, not an individual one, even though the removal of leaven was from individual or perhaps extended family houses. And yet it was also a national feast since it was celebrated throughout the whole nation: “. . . For seven days no yeast is to be found in your houses,” but also, “whoever eats anything with yeast in it must be cut off from the community of Israel (Exod 12:19).” The shift from individual/clan houses to the whole community of Israel shows how the local house represents the whole of Israel. For Paul, following the obvious community element in the Old Testament text, a “house” is understood as representing all Israel and as a symbol of the church fellowship. Hence he has adopted the larger social sphere of reference in the Exodus account of Unleavened Bread, and has let the Old Testament’s references to Israelite houses become a generalized symbolism or image of the church; it is a fitting adaptation since the Corinthian “church” was actually a group of house churches. This is another case of Paul creating meaning from the situation needing correction.

Paul’s emphasis is on the purity drawn from the symbolism with the required removal of the unleavened bread from each “house,” which he applies to the Corinthian issue of an incestuous man. In order to keep the feast honorably, they must “purge out the old leaven,” i.e., remove the incestuous man from table fellowship (5:11b, 12b). He shortly enlarges the incest problem into a list of other corrupt people-types who apparently should also be kept out of the feast: prostitutes (male or female?), greedy, swindlers, idolaters, revilers, and drunkards (5:11-13). The reference to keeping the feast (5:8) appears to be to the combined Unleavened Bread-Passover, which would be natural from their union in the Old Testament and Judaism.598 But he is thinking of the Christian/fulfillment version of the feasts, i.e., the Lord’s Supper. His admonitions appear to reverse the Old Testament order in which the Passover was followed by Unleavened Bread, since they are of the “become what you already are” type, i.e., they have already become unleavened in their salvation by receiving “Christ our Passover (5:7).599 Now he wants the purity of removed yeast to precede their celebration of Passover-Lord’s Supper, because they have already become a pure body of believers through the Passover sacrifice of Christ. Accordingly, the first symbolism of the Passover lies in its connection, but in reversed order, to Unleavened Bread in fulfillment, i.e., the purity of the congregation ought to precede celebration of the Christian Passover. But he is not insisting that every individual be perfected from every possible sin; rather, he is thinking of publicly known sin like that of the incestuous man and those in the list of 5:11. At the end of 5:8 he mentions sincerity and truth, which summarize the basic values of the authentic Christian person.600 These values also contribute to his admonition that a base-line purity must exist among Christians in relation to participation in the PassoverLord’s Supper.

The framework of the whole congregation as pure/impure thus reappears as the purity of the individual in another (specific) Lord’s Supper text, 1 Corinthians 11:27-28.601 598 Luke 22:7: “Then came the day of Unleavened Bread, on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed.” J. Jeremias, “pascha,” TDNT 5:900, cites this passage. 599 Fee, First Corinthians, p. 217. 600 Ibid. 601 Jeremias, “pascha,” TDNT, p. 901

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Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself.

But again, as noted above about Unleavened Bread, there is also a community element here since the individual is made responsible for the purity of the body: he is in danger of “not discerning the body”—probably a cautionary self-examination. Paul seems to assume that the individual believer may be harboring serious secret sins, which, if they become known—as is almost inevitable—will be as corrupting to the whole church as is the case with the publicly known sins of 5:11-13. From 5:13 it seems clear that the list of publicly known social sins is an extension from the issue of the corrupt man who is again mentioned at the end of 5:13. Hence, the Lord’s Supper is a symbol of the already existing purity of the body of real believers and their church. In consequence he asks them to deal with any impurity that has crept in while at the same time warning about other types of corrupt persons, and asking participants in the Supper to undertake self-examinations in the interest of congregational purity. Hence also, the reference to “Christ our Passover” and “the feast” in 5:7-8 are likely references to the combined Lord’s Supper,Unleavened Bread and Passover; the separation of the Lord’s Supper from its Jewish connections was not yet complete, due almost certainly to the strong Jewish element in the Corinthian church. The moral ordering of both the congregation and its individuals is a basic meaning of the Lord’s Supper in the modern as well as the ancient church. Appropriate action toward totally unfit persons by the current churches (represented in their elders) seems to be a reasonable application, although most churches will find it difficult to be as firm as Paul, especially in a highly permissive America and Europe. Even though offenders profess faith in Christ, as was no doubt true of the incestuous man at Corinth, it is essential to the symbolism of the Supper and its Jewish background, that firm but kindly action be taken. Thus the Supper includes the purity of the congregation. (8) Deliverance from Demons. The Lord’s Supper symbolized the Corinthian churches’ new attachment to Christ and their consequent freedom from demons (1 Cor 10:14-22)—a new relationship with the true God and Christ. Their partnership with Christ put them beyond their old partnership with the demons of their former paganism. The idea does not seem to be primarily separation; but separation at least was required from their former gods and the idols representing them. Certainly deliverance from demons and coherent communion with the Savior and his own “altar” are central. Nor does this clear demarcation between Christ and demons seem motivated by hate, but lies in the principle of non-interference and non-encroachment by pagan deities into their new solidarity with Christ and its whole set of values and powers. Deliverance from demons, i.e., former gods, was not a second work of grace added to their salvation; rather, salvation through Christ from demon powers was their exorcism. Therefore, they cannot have it both ways: the two powers are in conflict. Paul’s discussion of the Supper is partly concerned about the remnants of Roman paganism persisting at Corinth, probably for the most part in “well-to-do” families who

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might have retained vested social or other interests in the established Graeco-Roman cults, and their temple dining facilities of which we have knowledge from archaeological excavations at Corinth. Paul thinks they cannot be loyalists to both pagan altars and Christ. To make this point Paul extends the koinonia theme into a discussion of conflicting solidarities or partnerships (koinonia) with Christ or with demons. One can see in this use of “demons” a development of some aspects of the early Christian identification of pagan gods with demons, i.e., as this identification affects the practice of the Lord’s Supper. Paul does not deny that such powers exist; but he does deny that their images/idols are anything. Nor is the meat of sacrificed animals anything but meat. One can see in this treatment an awareness of conflict between demons and Jesus in the orally circulating gospel stories. The gospel exorcism stories are models of Jesus’ spiritual war on satanic powers which destroy human beings. These stories probably influenced Paul’s determination that they keep to their new partnership with Christ. Their salvation was deliverance from demons and a permanent exorcism that exchanged demon possession for Spirit possession. This thinking is not a call to a general separation from the world. Paul himself distinguishes the world of Graeco-Roman culture from pagan deities/demon spirits which use that culture. Guidance by the Holy Spirit and apostolic teaching steered the early church along a fine line of distinctions between human culture and its manifold inventions on one hand, and demon spirits and their idol-symbols which seized human life and its thinking on the other hand. 1 Corinthians has examples of this distinction. This demons passage itself makes a more or less subtle distinction between idols and their statuary from which they ought to separate themselves on the one hand, and meals eaten in their temples or with friends who dine there on the other hand. In an earlier passage in 1 Corinthians (5:9-11) he is clear that by non-association with sexually immoral people, he does not mean the people of the world, but those who are actually immoral and still call themselves Christians. Hence 1 Corinthians makes rather careful distinctions about where the separation must be made. In a later passage (2 Cor 6:14-18) he seems more general about separation, but the touchpoint is still explicitly demons and idols. For his Christian congregations it must be either Christ or Belial.

Accordingly, for us too, the Supper should be regarded as a full commitment to Christ with appropriate separations from the idols of our world. Such modern idols may be hard to identify, and judgments about them may be somewhat personal and arbitrary. Thoughtful comments by worship leaders on possible idols in Christian’s lives seem to be in place in a Supper setting, along with strong encouragements to partnership with Christ. But application of this idea to details is slippery for serious Christians since the (literal) forms of idolatry Paul is thinking of do not actually exist in the western world any longer. Idolatry in the larger sense of man turning away from God and worshipping himself or the objects of cultural creativity, in fact it is the basic sin among all sins.602 This issue is one of many in the long and complex discussion of the relation of Christianity and culture. We shall turn to this subject in another essay below.



602

D. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), pp. 47-49.

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Conclusion The earlier views of the Grace Movement—that we practice the Lord’s Supper because it is a special Pauline revelation—were skewed toward an extreme view of Paul’s mystery revelation; no Pauline passage on the Lord’s Supper identifies it as a newly revealed mystery. The earlier view, based on the idea that the whole of the Pauline teaching is “mystery,” was made to mean that we who worship in the body-church, practice the Lord’s Supper only because it had nothing to do with the Jewish Passover. In fact, Paul does not claim the Lord’s Supper to be a special mystery first made known through him. The larger pattern of Supper and Passover details shows that it was a continuation of parts of the Passover now filled with new meanings for the church while at the same time dropping older Israelite-Jewish ritual details and meanings attached to the exodus from Egypt. Although the form of the argument for separation from Jewish rituals took in the early thinking of the grace movement seems unworkable, 1 Corinthians nevertheless seems to show a gradual detachment of the Supper from remaining Jewish elements of the feasts of Passover and Unleavened Bread; Paul’s way of gaining separation of the Supper from its earlier Jewish connections may be regarded as another case of dispensational change in releasing the church from Jewish ritual. Within this framework, Paul’s language for the Supper includes several terms and aspects that indicate multiple meanings and nuances, some of which are derived from the Passover and/or Unleavened Bread; other meanings are evoked by deviations from the new Christ-relationship by old pagan practices clinging to some Corinthian Christians. The Supper is a symbol and thus may carry multiple meanings because multiple meanings are a common feature of symbols and image-fields. Such image-fields are usually recognized and described with terms like “multivalence” (Riesenfeld) or “split reference” (Ricoeur) of images and symbols. The viewpoint represented here suggests that the practice of the Supper be enriched for believers through thoughtful and creative means of conveying the several meanings found in the Pauline passages. These aspects of meaning do not all have to be present in every celebration of the Supper. In fact, they could be used thematically one at a time so that any given celebration of the Supper makes use of one of the several meaning theme. This can be and sometimes is done in our Grace Fellowship churches with repeated images, Scriptures, visuals, gestures, etc. for the one meaning chosen for that Sunday. Or, multiple meanings may be used in any one service—which probably happens at times whether planned or not. On any reckoning, recognition of multiple meanings is basic to a spiritually and theologically rich practice of the Lord’s Supper. Care should be taken to avoid entertainment or novelty in the use of multiple symbols or images. 356



ESSAY IX CHURCH LEADERSHIP AND SPIRITUAL GIFTS Apostles, Prophets, Pastors, Elders, Teachers and Deacons As Gifts to the Body of Christ by Dale S. DeWitt This essay seeks to show that ministry gifts at the base line are not permanent offices or a permanent office principle or structure established by Jesus or the apostles, but gifts of the Spirit to the church; all ministry gifts are cut from this same cloth, including the gift of elder. The gifts are to be sought, discovered, encouraged and allowed to work in a local church through the experience of the gifted, and recognzed by a body of Christians. The reason for thinking of leadership gifts this way is that according to the Pauline leadership passages, leadership functions603 are among gifts already deposited in the church by the Spirit before any ministries actually occur in practice; they are latent but present until awakened by the life and activity of a congregtion. When awakened they appear as the functions of pastor, teacher, elder, deacon or evangelist, each of which is already there covertly and waiting to be awakened in the life of God’s people. Other gifts appear most notably in 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12. Issues and Perspectives The reason for this discussion is the historic and still widely held view that a sharp distinction is to be made between offices of permanent establishment in the church (chiefly elder and deacon) and charisms which were not intended to be permanently established (like apostle, prophet or tongues-speaking). An especially forceful statement and form of this idea is that of the prominent nineteenth century Presbyterian ecclesiologist James 603 For “functions” distinguished from “offices,” see H. Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), p. 298: “. . . for Paul there are indeed as yet no ‘offices, but functions.’ It is striking how devoid of any hints of offices the epistles of Paul really are. If there are any hints of “offices” they do not come until the later epistles. See also F. J. A. Hort’s classic, The Christian Ecclesia (London: Macmillan, 1897), pp. 153-170.

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Bannerman in The Church of Christ: A Treatise on the Nature, Powers, Ordinances, Discipline and Government of the Christian Church (1869). For example, on p. 230 of volume II, he says: In dealing with the question of the form of polity of the New Testament Church, we must take special care not to confound the different charismata, or gifts, enumerated in the Epistle to the Corinthians with the distinct offices enumerated in the Epistle to the Ephesians, or to assume that because the same individual exercised different endowments or powers for the edification of the Church, he therefore is to be held as invested with different offices, ordinary or extraordinary, in the Christian society It is with the offices, and not with the gifts of the apostolic Church, that we have at present to do—the former, or the offices, marking out the form of constitution of the ecclesiastical society; the latter, or the gifts, only marking out the endowments conferred on the persons belonging to it.

It is just this distinction that seems dubious for the simple reason that what Bannerman and countless other Reformation-stream ecclesiologists and writers of doctrine manuals see as confounding of offices and gifts is precisely what appear as one holistic set of divinely bestowed gifts found in the very lists Bannerman cites to support the distinction.604 The lists make no such distinction, although there is certainly another, more biblical distinction to be made. Another form of the distinction is found in an article by Harold Hoehner in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society for December, 2006. Hoehner argues for not one but two sharp and thorough-going distinctions, one between offices (elders and deacons) and gifts (all the others in Paul’s gift lists), the other between pastor-teachers and elders. His interest in the second distinction is that he thinks the Pauline material allows for women to be pastor-teachers but not elders. This way of fixing ministry identities and boundaries seems more problematic than ever due to the artificial way the distinctions are imposed on New Testament teaching.605 The distinction between offices and gifts is more or less conventional among traditional Calvinist bodies like the Reformed and Presbyterian churches. It is also found in various American church groups of twentieth century origin including the Grace Gospel Fellowship. The founders of our Fellowship were moderate Calvinists on the whole, and several were of Reformed or Presbyterian backgrounds. The Fellowship’s recognized founding theologian for its first half-century was Charles Baker. Baker preferred Reformed theologians, and students at Milwaukee Bible College/Grace Bible College read mostly Calvinist systematic theologies with encouragement from Baker as their teacher. One reason for this interest in Calvinist thinkers was the basically Calvinistic character of dispensational theology modified by a high level of consciousness over the differences between the covenant theology of Calvinism and (Calvinistic) dispensational theology. When Baker published his own systematic theology in 1971, he too followed the conventional ecclesiology pattern of distinguishing offices from gifts; but he did not make any special point of the office-gifts distinction as did Bannerman earlier or Hoehner later. Baker also acknowledged the work of the Holy Spirit in placing elders in the church, but 604 J. Bannerman, The Church of Christ: A Treatise on the Nature, Powers, Ordinances, Discipline and Government of the Church (1869; Reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1960). 605 H. Hoehner, “Can aWoman Be a Pastor-Teacher?” JETS 50 (2007):761-771.

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still without any forceful distinctions of the Bannerman or Hoehner sort. He rather quotes with approval the Scofield Reference Bible’s statement about the Holy Spirit setting elders in the church.606 The present essay continues Baker’s moderate way of handling elder and deacon matters, but rather more forcefully picks up Baker’s approval of Scofield’s thought about the Holy Spirit setting elders in the church (my italics). However, Baker simply speaks conventionally about the “office” of elder and deacon, puts no special stress on Scofield’s words about the Holy Spirit setting elders in the church, and does not try to make any principled distinction in the manner of Bannerman or Hoehner. This essay rather seeks a full and detailed discussion of leadership gifts as charisms of the Spirit which has not been undertaken heretofore in the grace movement. That such gifts may become offices to be filled as they develop in actual church life seems almost inevitable. The long history of ministry, the practical needs of stabilizing churches and extension ministries, and the admiration by congregations of outstanding elders among themselves, suggest that eldership as a fixed office is something close to socially pre-determined, even if not biblically grounded. No one wants to let a viable form of ministry die just because no locally gifted person immediately arises from a congregation to continue it. Some studies on the development of leadership functions in the early churches have claimed that leadership rapidly evolved from charismatic powers in the earliest churches to standardized offices leading to the monarchial bishop of the second century. This view sees the Pastoral Epistles as a step toward the monarchial bishop, viewing them as post-Pauline and originating toward or after the turn of the first to the second Christian century. Two other options on the Pastorals are: (1) continue to view them as Pauline (the traditional view) but without connection to Paul’s known movements in Acts; (2) find a place for them within the known movements and stationary periods of Paul’s mission activities before Acts 28. The later is the view embraced in Appendix B of Essay X below. The view of this essay is that the major leadership gifts, especially that of elder arose during Paul’s mission journeys to which the Pastoral Epistles are in fact witness and about which they give much insight. Rather than establishing perpetual offices, the persistent Pauline teaching is that the Spirit has given and activates a range of gifts in the church, and that leadership gifts emerge among them, i.e., the ministry gifts are charisms (charismata) created by the Spirit, and the gifts include leadership functions. Even if thought of as permanent offices to be filled, they would necessarily have to be filled by works of the Holy Spirit to be genuine ministry gifts in the Pauline sense. Nothing less than this will satisfy the biblical concept, and nothing less will produce continuous, spiritually dynamic leadership. Of course, more or less paltry imitations are possible. Since the scope of this essay is limited to leadership gifts, I shall assume that the list of gifts in Ephesians 4:11 is such a leadership list, and thus make that list central in the discussion, but not exclusively so since deacons will also be considered. Four other lists of gifts, while not limited to leadership, include these gifts in various configurations, but also place apostles, prophets and pastors (using varied terms) or teachers near the beginning, 606 C. Baker, A Dispensational Theology (Grand Rapids: Grace Bible College Publications, 1971, p. 524. The note Baker quotes with approval from the Scofield Reference Bible, p. 1283, reads, “Elders are made or ‘set’ in the churches by the Holy Spirit (Acts 20:28), but stress is laid on their appointment (Acts 14:23; Titus 1:5; Scofield’s italics).”

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though not uniformly. One list includes deacons, and only one includes evangelists. One includes something called “administration” and the same list includes “miracles.” Another reason for this limited scope is that when Paul did discuss leadership issues in detail— emphasizing qualifications rather than functions—he only addressed qualifications for elders and deacons, thus isolating these gifts as of major importance for leadership; this valuing scheme is also found in the statement of 1 Corinthians 12:28: “God has appointed first of all apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then . . . (NIV).” Otherwise, the gifts found in the major lists appear to be spread out beyond leadership to whole congregations. Also included in the scope of the essay are two other issues for comment: gender in leadership gifts, and which gifts are permanent; i.e., which remain and which ceased; the latter issue has already been discussed in detail in Essay V above. Finally, to gain perspective on the flow of leadership powers and gifts in the Pauline churches, the gift-giving of Jesus and the Spirit will be included in the discussion in order to set the Pauline material in a larger New Testament context. Jesus and the Gift of Apostle The word apostolos is mostly a sea-trade and military term in Greek usage. It denotes a freighter or transport ship, a band of colonists or an admiral. It also refers to a bill or invoice for a shipment of corn, and at times means something like a passport.607 As a military term it denoted an army or military expedition.608 In these military and commercial uses, the word lacks any uniformly strong sense of personal authority. In the religious or philosophical realm apostolos comes closer to the New Testament. Some religious philosophers thought themselves “sent” by Zeus. Other philosophers think of being sent (apostellein) to conduct an investigation, and sometimes to proclaim a deity’s decree. The philosopher thinks himself “sent” by his god as a doctor of the soul—a kataskopos— an inspector or scout. But these usages also mostly lack the thought of an authoritative appointment609 as in the case of the New Testament apostles. On the other hand, in the Old Testament and Judaism, shalakh (send) is used regularly of messengers sent to Israel by God, and shaluach (a sent one [passive]) in Judaism takes on the sense of an authorized representative sent from higher authority with full power to act on behalf of the sending official or even God himself, as with pre-Christian Jewish missionaries. Some rabbis said Moses, Elijah, Elisha and Ezekiel were shelukhim—sent by God to Israel. It remains a fact, however, that there is almost no use of apostolos as a noun in the Greek Old Testament (LXX).610 Rather, the Hebrew Bible mostly uses the verb shalakh (send; LXX apostello). The closest it comes to the New Testament is the rabbinic connotation of shaluakh noted above. The apostles were first appointed to their gift by the initiative of Christ himself. A search for whatever human factors or qualities in the disciple-apostles may have been involved is not a viable inquiry because the gospels are only modestly interested in the

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R Rengstorf, “apostolos,” TDNT 1:407-408. Ibid. 609 Ibid., pp. 411-412. 610 Ibid., pp. 414-420 607 608

human factors. What little interest there may be is in the laboring and social bearings of their backgrounds. The apostles were not first apostles, however, but disciples.611 Every action in bringing them into relationship to himself is initiated by Jesus; they are entirely receiver-responders at the beginning. The same is true of their first mission task: Jesus himself determined their mission, spoke of its kingdom-near context, commissioned them, and bestowed upon them powers to fulfill their commission. These activities of Jesus with the disciple-apostles are the fountainhead from which all other gift-endowments flow in the later apostolic documents. The usage statistics for “disciple” and “apostle” in the gospels tell the story of this development from the beginning. The noun “disciple (mathatas)” occurs about 150x in the synoptic gospels and about 75x in John; but the noun “apostle (apostolos)” occurs only 9x in the synoptics and 1x in John. The synoptics have the verb (apostello) about 65x, John about 15x. But the statistics of the verb are not as significant as those of the noun because the verb is used for a much wider variety of “sendings” than just that of the apostles, including and especially of Jesus having been sent from the Father and empowered with his own unique gifts. Two striking dynamics govern use of the noun: “apostle” represents a later name for the apostles read back into the gospels: it never occurs in Jesus’ speech for the twelve, except in John 13:16. On the other hand, it is remarkable that it is read back so sparingly, and that “disciple” persisted so thoroughly in the gospel traditions. Jesus did not first appoint a group he called “apostles,” but rather persuasively, and with stunning personal magnetism, invites (proskaleo, Mk 3:13; but deute, “come,” in 1:17) the “disciples” to join him in his mission. Still, the synoptic gospels all use “apostles” in their lists; the use of the word probably anticipates their soon going-out. The earliest relationship was that of disciples. They joined and followed him because of his “authority (exousia)” as Mark repeatedly calls it in the first two chapters of his gospel (repeated thematically through 1:17, 22, 27; 2:10, 28). The swiftness of their response to his call is stunning, especially in Mark. At the time of his seaside call to follow him, he said he would make them “fishers of men.” This is the central point of the call story at least for Mark: he will make something of them they were not before. The attraction of the disciples to Jesus quickly became more than a normal or especially close social relationship. Details of its development occur in Mark reach a new stage in 3:13-19. There Mark says: (1) they will henceforth be with him; (2) he will send them out (apostello, Mk 3:14) to proclaim (karusso, “herald,” Mark 3:14) [the kingdom]; (3) they are given personal possession (exein) of authority (exousia) over demons.612 Matthew is equally direct: “he gave them exousia.” This is more than personal relationship and more than training; it is personal power and authority to function in the same ways he did in the service of the available messianic kingdom. All three synoptic gospels attach some form of the sending word-group to this part of the story. Mark uses the verb apostello; all use these terms very sparingly. The climactic exousia is a personal authority charisma capable of extension. It would be enlarged in their mission to Israel after Pentecost and later in their relation to churches of their oversight. However extended, this beginning is the root from which the apostolic tree grew in spiritual force and effectiveness.



611 612

Ibid., p. 424. Ibid., 425.

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In the next step, he actually sent them out on a mission. In preparation he repeated the original functions and powers first seen in Mark 3:13-18. According to Luke, he also expanded the number of “apostles” to 72 and endowed this larger group with similar powers. We do not know what happened to this larger group of apostles. They may have followed him to Jerusalem; they could have become part of the people Paul later calls “all the apostles,” a body distinguished from the twelve and Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:5-7. This larger group of “apostles” was perhaps included among those who met in the Jerusalem house at Pentecost (Acts 2), since the group was of Galilean origin (Acts 2:7). Because Paul, Barnabas, Timothy and Silas are also called apostles by Luke or Paul, “apostle” seems to have been an inclusive term for all those from Jesus’ ministry and even later, who actually witnessed his saw him, his miracles and teaching, and whom he “sent out” with special powers (exousiai) derived from his original conferral or its later extensions.613 Mark 6:6-13 contains the basic sending-out story of the twelve, and 6:30ff records their return. The passage repeats several details of 3:13-19, including their endowment with “authority (exousia)” over unclean spirits and human diseases. Exousia is paralleled in all three synoptics. Matthew and Mark use exousia alone in the early passages, while Luke adds to exousia the term “power (dunamis, Luke 9:1).” Matthew seems to think of the disciple-apostles’ first mission as miracle-demonstrations to witness the kingdom and facilitate a search for sympathizers and stray or scattered followers, or at least interested or open-minded Jews (Matt 10). All three synoptic gospels use apostello for their initial mission. A notable feature of this first apostello story, though not yet a strong emphasis, is Mark and Luke’s interest in preaching. Near the end of the story, Mark notes that they preached (using karusso, herald) and called for repentance. Luke says near the beginning (9:2), “he sent them to preach the kingdom of God and to heal.” At his end of the story, Luke shifts the term for preaching to “proclaim good news (euaggelizomai).” These notes in the relationship and sending-out stories are not strong, repeated emphases, but they tend toward interest in preaching and proclaiming. Finally, they themselves say when they return (Mark 6:30) that they both acted and taught (didasko).614 This function thus becomes another expression of their exousia—one that will figure in an important later development. Nor do the sending-out stories diminish exorcisms and healings. But the added notes of preaching mark a slight development toward the later, fuller use of their exousia for their major activity of preaching and teaching with full divine authority. With the 72 disciples, apostello is again used for their mission (Luke 10:1), and the same powers of exorcism and healing are given them. Whether received or rejected, they are to witness that the kingdom of God has come near (10:9, 11) just as Jesus had said of the twelve. In his version of the sending-out story, Matthew knows only of the twelve but still has verbal parallels to Luke’s story of the 72. Matthew also uses a term for proclaiming (karusso), parallels Luke’s “kingdom has come near,” and expands the powers of the “apostles” to include raising the dead and cleansing lepers. In this passage Matthew also uses apostello (10:5) and exousia (10:1), and understands that proclamation of the kingdom is their task (10:7-8). Matthew affirms the authority Jesus gave them at the outset (10:1) as though this is the origin of other powers and activities. 613 J. B. Lightfoot, The Epistle of St. Paul to the Galatians (London: Macmillan, 1865) early noted this larger use of “apostle” in Acts and Paul; the larger meaning is opposed by J. N. Geldenhuys, Supreme Authority (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1953), who does not recognize it. 614 Rengstorf, ibid., p. 429.

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In this way Jesus begins to transform disciples into apostles and partners in mission. He empowers them with authority to act on behalf of his kingdom and its powers, instructs them to exorcize, heal and resuscitate the dead as signs of their power, and commissions them to proclaim the kingdom’s nearness. Their call to be with him along with the powers he grants them, together represent the beginnings of their “charisma”; none of this was their doing, but all of it his gifts and powers conferred upon them by himself. This set of dynamics does not develop much further in the twelve or the 72 until after Jesus’ resurrection and the twelve’s commission to bear witness to him under his own exousia (Matt 28:18).615 He does issue some rebukes for abuse of their exousia over presuming to speak for him about who can use his name in exorcisms (Mark 9:39)616 or who can expect honored places in the kingdom (10:35-38). But these are only delimiting, negative lessons—what their exousia does not mean. Regardless of his rebukes, their commission to go out, to represent and proclaim, is the beginning of a mission meaning for apostolos. This meaning is not yet developed beyond the immediate goals of their first brief mission, and even less if the mission’s goals included, in addition to proclaiming, such limited objectives as awakening interest, looking for sympathizers and receptive Jews, or searching for people who actually believe already— which appears to be the case, at least in part. On any reckoning, the connotation, “mission” is present, if only in a seed form at this early stage. It thus becomes, with the several other elements, part of the New Testament gift of apostolos. An implication of this combination of concepts is the inherent sense that “apostle” also suggests “evangelist,” which is later listed as a gift of the Spirit (Eph 4:11) but distinguished from that of apostle. Although not using the term “apostle,” the story recognizes that Jesus assigned administrative and judicial authority to at least Peter (Matt only, at 16:19). But in Matthew 19:28 Jesus expands administrative powers to all twelve apostles in the saying about their future governance of Israel. For this essay, we do not need to resolve the question of the exact meaning of binding and loosing in 16:19. It is sufficient to note that administrative or judicial power is granted to the twelve in these two texts viewed together. That the term “apostle” or some other term of the word-group is not used in either passage does not seem consequential. What is significant in both texts is that administrative authority is conferred on the same group elsewhere called “apostles.” Bestowal of “the keys of the kingdom of heaven” and the power to “bind and loose” is at the very least the authority to rule a future social realm within Jesus’ authority—a realm called by him “the restoration,” which would include the whole latter day Israel and its kingdom. There existed, therefore, from the beginning of Jesus’ public mission, a group of disciple-apostles, at first only four in number, then expanded to twelve, and before long to over seventy. This group was given gifts of power and authority by him. Through their gifts and powers they conducted ministry and became leaders in Jesus’ messianic movement. In Acts they continued Jesus’ mission to Israel. Their authority was not their own, but was granted them as a gift by Jesus himself; nonetheless the gift engulfed their personalities and social relationships. This situation was fully in place and functioning 615 So R. Meye, Jesus and the Twelve (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968), p. 68: “. . . the mission of the Twelve in Mark . . . does [not] find any extension beyond the few passages in chapter 6.” Meye says this only of Mark, but it is also true of Matthew and Luke; it seems less true of John. 616 Meye, ibid., p. 180.

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when Paul was later summoned to become an apostle. In this fashion the primal gift of apostle developed and with it other gifts of the Spirit.

The Apostles in Acts

In Acts, Luke increases the use of apostolos strikingly (6x in Luke [24 chapters]; 28x in only the first 16 chapters of Acts; but in chapter 16, usage stops abruptly. Increased usage begins at the outset, consistent with Luke’s belief that the apostolate of twelve had to be re-formed following Judas’ departure; this interest occupies much of chapter one. It might be supposed that filling Judas’ place assumes apostolos is becoming an office to be filled; but one should be wary of this conclusion, since the appointment is primarily intended to fill out the number twelve rather than to create a permanent office. What is showing here is completion of the full apostolate of twelve to represent the new Israel, not merely filling a vacancy in a supposed apostolic office, for there is no office, only a charism corresponding to the number of Israel’s tribes. In other words, we are dealing here with a special case from which no general inference should be made about offices. The apostolic function is continuous with its beginnings in Jesus’ mission and expands as the apostles’ mission to Israel expands. That filling Judas’ place is an act of God is shown by the combination of prayer, prophetic fulfillment, and selection by lot, thus extending the idea of the divine initiative. Without saying it in so many words, everything is now determined by the apostles’ gifts, the resurrection, the coming of the Spirit and the preaching of repentance to Israel. God in Christ and the Holy Spirit working in concert have created two new facts—resurrection and the presence of the Spirit. These two new ingredients feed forcefully into the already existing apostolic exousia. After the outpouring of the Spirit and the language miracle of Acts 2:1-13, “Peter, standing with the eleven,” explained the Spirit event as a fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy of the Spirit. He then adds, “This Jesus God raised up, and of that we are all witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he (my italics) has poured out this which you see and hear (2:32-33).” Only slightly later Luke summarizes: “And with great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all (4:33).617 Thus their proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection with the added presence of the Spirit adds new powers to their exousia. From this new combination of events and powers, the apostles continue their mission to Israel with increased power to act and speak.

Important major developments are reported. (1) The number twelve shows that the New Israel apostolate is re-established (Acts 1:26) on Jesus’ original foundation. (2) The apostles renew their earlier preaching and guide the “men of Israel” toward salvation (2:22). Both karusso and euaggelizomai describe their preaching, but euaggelizomai is used twice 617 Bannerman, The Church, 2:217-2l9, noted that this eyewitness situation of the original apostles and Paul was a distinctive aspect of the apostolate and one reason why it could not be continued beyond them, i.e., it was an “extraordinary” function of their apostleship, and “formed no part of the ordinary equipment of the Church of Christ, or the ordinary staff of the office-bearers by which its affairs were to be administered.” Thus this feature of their apostleship contributed to making it both extraordinary and temporary.

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as often [15x] as karusso [8x], with didasko (teach) in about equal frequency [16x] to euaggelizomai. These numbers should not be over-interpreted. But they do indicate a shift in emphasis to “preaching the gospel” and “teaching.” (3) Their preaching is renewed with great force and effect; Luke reports large numbers of converts (2:41: three thousand; 4:4: “. . . the number of men grew to five thousand; 5:14: “more and more . . . added to their number”; 6:1: “number of disciples increasing”; 6:7: “The number of disciples . . . increased rapidly”). Such generalized notes continue through the book (all citations from NIV). (4) They continue to do “signs and wonders,” although these are treated summarily compared to detailed accounts of preaching. (5) They become administrators, using their exousia, for example, to oversee monetary gifts to the messianic assembly (4:34-35; 5:2-3), to approve the development of deacons for managing distribution of the funds to widows (6:1-6), and to judge deviancy in the messianic remnant (5:1-11). These are the initial exercises of their governing power in the context of the continued formation of a New Israel.

A striking development is the appearance of apostles in consultation with the Jerusalem New Israel assembly’s “elders (presbuteroi)”—a connection noted several time in Acts 15-16. When the Pauline apostolic party encounters opposition for not making full Jews out of its Gentile converts by circumcising them as an entre to keeping the whole Mosaic law, the mission group from Antioch (Syria) is sent to Jerusalem to consult with “the apostles and elders.” This formula is used no less than six (6) times in chapters 15-16, indicating special interest in yet another new conjunction of leadership activities. What is the point of this formulaic terminology? No direct explanation is given, but the following can be noted.

(1) The formula is “the apostles and the elders (my italics),” thinking of two distinct groups, not one group composed of two elements. This grammatical form suggests Luke wishes to distinguish the two groups from non-believing Jewish elders, and to make this distinction clear by putting “the apostles” first to indicate Christian leaders of the Jerusalem national remnant assembly. Of seventeen (17) times “elders” appears in Acts for leaders, the first four (in chapters 4-6) and the last three (in chapters 23-25) are clearly for Jewish national leaders, not Christian elders. This is shown by referring to those groups associated with elders, like “scribes” or “high/chief priests,” mostly in plural and only once in singular. (2) Another intention is to represent two Christian leadership groups working in concert to resolve the “circumcision problem” over Gentile converts. Together the apostles and elders represent the highest authority to which Paul and Barnabas can appeal; beyond them there is no higher council to decide on a distinctively Christian issue. (3) While it would be too much to infer that from the two terms alone Luke wants to put apostles and elders on the same level of authority—although this appears to be the case, especially by apostolic consent—the combination does at least present a coordinated relation between the groups. This is further suggested in several other passages of Acts which speak only of Christian elders, i.e., elders of Christian churches as opposed to Jewish elders of Israel. Elder leadership is borrowed from Jewish synagogue practice and adapted to the Christian assemblies. However, the use of “apostles” elsewhere in Acts shows that apostolic authority, power and prerogatives are decidedly of a higher order than those of local elders since apostles appoint elders (14:23), and apostles direct, warn, and invest elders with local oversight and ministry responsibilities (Acts 20:17-38). On the other hand, in one case the Jewish-Christian elders in Jerusalem gather to hear Paul the apostle report the results of his

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Gentile mission activity and are expected to decide on its legitimacy. This notice keeps the relation balanced, correlated, and mutually accountable or at least referential. In any case the special powers (exousai) of apostles, or as we may now safely say, their “charisma” becomes fully operational. These few Acts passages raise the question of how elders were chosen or gained this function in early churches, and what guided apostles in recognizing such gifted presbyters. What seems likely is that the elder function was rooted in Jewish synagogue governance or courts. This does not solve anything, though, of the question of elders as needful charisma-based functionaries or elders as reflecting a more humanly conceived and permanent “office.” For that issue we shall have to depend on the fuller information of the Pauline epistles. On any reckoning, there is no change in the apostles’ gift-powers. Their exousia for multiple functions continues and expands further. Elder emergence and elder consultation, even by apostles, is growing into the idea of a normal church order.

The basic dynamics of apostolic exousia do not change with Paul. In fact, we get a fresh and more detailed picture of their operation due to the relatively large quantity of material left to us in Acts and the epistles. The many autobiographical details of Paul’s personal apostleship reveal the manner in which the gift was received and used. Even with the striking continuities visible in his accounts of his apostleship, some principled differences exist with the twelve and their mission up to the point of Paul’s conversion in Acts. To these continuities and distinctive aspects we now turn.

Paul’s Apostleship R. Meye has adequately summarized the aspects of continuous apostolic elements from the original apostles to Paul: a direct call or appointment by Christ; a conferral of authority (exousia); the extension of their authority to do mighty works or signs; authority to oversee the people of God; the authority to preach and teach the “good news” including a sense of mission; the expectation of suffering in their task; and a statement of servant life.618 The discussion will be limited to the first few and most important of these aspects of apostleship for the purpose of this essay. The most persistent expressions by Paul of his call occur in the first few lines of several epistles: “Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead . . . (Gal 1:1).” This statement is a full and specific account of his apostolic gift which he links with Jesus’ resurrection. He follows this divine-power account with “. . . the gospel which was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ (1:11b-12).” This adds to the previously noted emphasis on the priority of preaching God’s good news and the reality that the mission originated in the Lord himself. There are shorter statements like “Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus (1 Cor 1:1; 2 Cor 1:1; Eph 1:1; Col 1:1)”; or “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope (1 Tim 1:1)”; or with another form of the note on resurrection: “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God according to the promise of the life which is in Christ Jesus (2 Tim 1:1).”

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618

Meye, Jesus and the Twelve, pp. 183-184.

But longer statements also recur: “Paul a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, to further the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth which accords with godliness, in hope of eternal life which God, who never lies, promised ages ago and at the proper time manifested in his word through the preaching with which I have been entrusted by command of God our Savior (Titus 1:1-3).” Most of the regular elements noted already and summarized above from Meye are found in these identity greetings. What is not here of the other elements introduced in Jesus’ relation with the twelve is found elsewhere in scattered statements, sometimes in the contexts of struggle or controversy as in the Corinthian letters: “Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? (1 Cor 9:1)”; “The signs of a true apostle were performed among you in all patience, with signs and wonders and mighty works (2 Cor 12:12).” And there are several statements of his authority (exousia) in various aspects (1 Cor 9:4, 5, 6, 12) including teaching, pastoral and administrative functions (2 Cor 10:8; 13:10). In the last text (2 Cor 13:10) he includes the authority of his letters to them as well as his authority in managing the conflict between them. These texts illustrate the main elements of apostleship in continuity with those of the twelve and the seventy-two.

But there are distinctive elements as well in Paul, in both emphasis and newness. Three of the most important are: use of charisma for the gifts of the Spirit to all Christians; a strong sense of new revelation;619 and extension of exousia into written forms of preaching and teaching.620 These aspects are important enough for further comment. There are others as well such as use of the “mystery” terminology,621 and the related mission to the Gentiles.622 But since these last two have been discussed in other essays in this collection as well as in my Dispensational Theology in America during the Twentieth Century, they will not be further discussed here. Hence the added comments are limited to elements in the first three distinctive features just noted which enhance or extend the basic argument of this essay. (1) Use of Charisma for Apostle and Other Gifts. The point was made above that after the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, the gifts and powers bestowed on the discipleapostles were made more fully operational by the Holy Spirit as personal powers of ministry and mission. This development eventuated in application of the Greek word charisma to the gift of apostle. Paul is the first to use charisma for ministry-leadership gifts. When he does, it is not only for apostles, but prophets and a remarkable number of other ministry gifts within the life of the church. While it is probably impossible to determine in detail why Paul chose this term with its extremely rare usage in Greek, he probably did so in thinking of the gifts as unmerited, undeserved and un-initiated by human beings, but given 619 G. E. Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament, Rev Ed (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), pp. 421-432. This emphasis on apostleship and revelation in Paul is somewhat distinctive to Ladd; but it is very important that he has recognizedd and discussed this ingredient. It is found in the basic terminology in and around the word-group apokalupsis, apokalupto. It is not limited to this terminology, but is found with other vocabularies related to apocalyptic thought as well. 620 An important but excessively conservative study in some respects is that of J. N. Geldenhuys, Supreme Authority: The Authority of the Lord, His apostles and the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1953). 621 See on this subject, D. DeWitt, Dispensational Theology in America during the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids: Grace Bible College Publications), pp. 221-247. 622 Ibid. See also Essay I above.

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and operated by God himself. In 1 Corinthians 12:28, charisma is applied from the earlier part of the context (12:4ff) to apostles: “And in the church God has appointed first of all apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles . . . .”

Charisma is an adaptation of charis (grace, gift), a term with a history in the Hebrew Bible (khan) and Septuagint. It is rare, but not unknown in Greek, which makes its frequency in Paul the more striking. A -ma suffix usually indicates result,623 but in some cases there may be a passive touch in the word as well. This combination suggests Paul is thinking of specific gift and power functions as the Spirit’s work. The passive touch would underscore the already inherent idea of believers as receivers of personal ministry powers from Christ and the Spirit. The first appearance of charisma is in 1 Corinthians (7x); then 2 Corinthians (1x) and Romans (6x). When Paul says “first apostles, second prophets, third teachers,” there is an apparent ranking. Is it in authority? Is it in importance? One may even suspect a chronological element—first, second and third in order of appearance or emergence—were not the thought so arbitrary. On any reckoning, Paul’s use of charisma is yet another testimony to the gift of apostle and other gifts originating in God himself, and given first by Christ and then by the Spirit as powers to the church.

(2) Divine Revelation in Paul and Apostolic Colleagues. G. Ladd recognized the apostolic reference of “we” and “us” in 1 Corinthians 2:6-16.624 Paul’s wisdom-Spirit thought combined with revelatory language and the “mystery” vocabulary contains details and specifics of new revelation. The most telling detail in this passage, however, is its language that what the apostles teach is in words (logois) both taught to them (didaktois . . . logois) and words taught by them (laloumen, speak) as words of the Spirit (2:13). This claim implies Paul’s awareness of his and his Gentile mission helpers’ authority to teach—an authority given by Jesus and the Spirit. Earlier he had placed both his oral and written teaching on the same level of authority (2 Thess 2:15); in the Corinthian letter he states forcefully that “. . . what I am writing to you is a command of the Lord (1 Cor 14:37).” The idea of Spirit-guided teaching is another step in particularizing apostolic authority (exousia) to include both oral and written apostolic communications as in Paul’s own letters. Hence the charisma of apostles expands from the original preaching-teaching authority granted them by Jesus to their written teaching.625

623 BDF, p. 59. 624 Ladd, Theology of the New Testament, pp. 421-423. It is unfortunate that Ladd did not recognize clearly a change of subject between 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 and 2:6-16. His discussion, otherwise helpful in recognizing the relation of the Spirit and his revealing work, is hampered by assuming that Paul continues to discuss the gospel in the context of apostolic revelatory experience. Rather, the new subject is the special wisdom of the Gentile apostles for the instruction and maturing of Gentile Christian congregations, called here and elsewhere “the mystery.” H. Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians, p. 57, does clearly recognize the distinctive character of the Spirit-wisdom motif here, and distinguishes it from the preceding passage about the gospel, including the fact that “we” refers to the preachers. 625 No one in recent decades of evangelical scholarship has laid out all the material of the New Testament on this subject as thoroughly as N. Geldenhuys, Supreme Authority. The value of this work abides despite its repetitiveness and severe conservativism about the original twelve as the only “apostles” to whom all the apostolic exousia statements of the New Testament (with their nuances) apply.

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Two textual indicators point to apostles as the “we” and “us” of 1 Corinthians 2:6-

16. (a) The apostles receive revelations in mysteries through the Spirit. They also speak those revelations to receptive believers (laloumen) whose maturity the revelations both assume and advance. A Christian who receives the teachers’ instruction in wisdom is “the spiritual man (2:15).” While he calls the Corinthians “brothers (3:1),” he distinguishes between “infants” and “mature” believers, and adds that the Corinthian church in general is not among the mature (3:1-2). For this reason he cannot share the wisdom revealed in mysteries with them until they gain a (more) mature state (3:1-2). These thoughts distinguish teachers from those who are taught. In the meantime, he does instruct them in the issues about which they correspond in writing (5:9; 7:1). (b) When he does mention teachers in 1 Corinthians, they are himself, Apollos and Peter (3:4-5). Paul and Apollos (Acts 18:1; 19:1) became partners in the Gentile world mission, and both preached and taught in Corinth and Ephesus (Acts 18:1; 19:1). Whatever may be true of the original apostles receiving added revelations through the Spirit (as did Peter also in relation to the Gentile mission [Acts 10]), Paul certainly reports that he did—in this passage, and in 2 Corinthians 12, as well as in other passages, but with only brief details. Ephesians 2:113:13 is the fullest and most detailed passage on the theology of the Gentile mission and church as new revelation.626 Elsewhere, outside 1 Corinthians, he restricts those who have received revelations of mysteries or the mystery of the church to “apostles and prophets,” a pattern of thought found in Ephesians 3:5, which includes the specific detail—“by the Spirit.” The persistent appearance of verbs like “revealed” and “made known” with verbs or nouns of prophecy shows that the revelatory element found in 1 Corinthians 2:6-16 is more closely associated with the gift of prophet than with that of apostle. Thus, to be more exact, it must be said that apostle is the gift of divine authority to act and preach and teach, while the gift of prophecy is the gift of receiving new revelation from God through the Spirit. This factor will be discussed more fully below under prophecy.

(3) Paul as Writer of Divine Revelation. Paul became the first of the apostles to write anything of a public nature, i.e., letters to be publically read in churches. While it was not distinctive to him to do so (other apostles soon wrote letters as well), he began the development of the medium which grew among Christian leaders and climaxed in the era of Jerome and Augustine.627 Paul certainly viewed his letters as possessing the same authority as his oral preaching and teaching, as 2 Thessalonians 2:15 states: “hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter.” This same authority appears in 1 Corinthians 14:37: “If any one thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that what I am writing to you is a command of the Lord”—a striking case of putting his own authority on the same level as that of the Old Testament This

626 Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 229-233, and the studies he cites are too concerned to steer away from any elitist meaning in Paul’s discussion of the “infants” and “mature” in the Pauline churches. They are correct that in principle there is no elitism of the mature or “initiated” as in the Greek mystery religions. But there is nonetheless a Pauline notion of gradations of maturity available to all and for which the apostles labor in teaching. Rather, Paul thinks of the whole church as in this more or less immature condition (Eph 4:13-16) and states that local leaders and apostles labor to move it toward maturity (Eph 4:9-12). Clearly, some churches are more mature than others, and equally clearly, some like Corinth are immature. 627 W. Stowers, Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986), pp. 45-46.

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extension of his combined gifts of apostle and prophet may be traceable to an analogy growing forcefully in the apostolic mind between the old and new covenants: the old began to be written by Moses from its beginnings (sometimes spoken of as the “inscripturated” covenant); awareness of that fact and of the new covenant’s inauguration must have been a powerful stimulus to write letters, gospels and other kinds of books (Acts, Apocalypse) as an appropriate form of administering and teaching the covenant. Two examples can be used from Paul’s epistles to illustrate, each of a rather different sort.

Why Paul wrote a letter to the Roman churches is not hard to determine; why it took the shape it did is another matter. Clearly he is dealing with serious Jewish questions about whether his preaching of salvation without the law is a form of antinomianism (Rom 1-8), and whether his “no” to the law is also a “no” to Israel (Rom 9-11). It is puzzling that the letter is as long as it is in explanation of these issues. A very plausible recent proposal is that Romans is a special purpose Greco-Roman letter-type identified by M. Stirewalt as a “Greek letter-essay.”628 The distinctive feature of such essays was their philosophical nature, and while formally written to an identifiable main party or group over a specific issue, essay-letters also had a third party in view to whom the letter would be passed. In this case, the likely third party was the Roman emperor, Nero, perhaps his court philosopher Seneca, or his Jewish wife Poppaea Sabina, and perhaps even the leaders of the several Roman Jewish synagogues. The Roman court’s attention had almost certainly by now been drawn to Christian preaching, especially Paul’s activities in Roman administrative centers (Thessalonica, Corinth, Ephesus). It is also possible that a state paper or document was in preparation for public circulaton against Christianity and Paul based on Jewish irritations over his teaching about the law and Israel as well as the threat of the faith to Roman state religion. If this is so, Paul’s apostolic authority and its written expression passes through the immediate issues of the Roman congregations into the much larger Roman imperial world and its dilemmas over Judaism. The second example is the connection of Paul’s apostolic writing with the newly revealed mystery of the church—a new and beyond-Israel form of the people of God. In Ephesians 3:1-13, Paul makes specific remarks on writing about the mystery of the church (3:3). This reference is not to another letter, but to the contents of Ephesians 1:13:5—the foregoing parts of the letter. Ephesians 3:3-4 contains a concentrated set of vocabulary terms for the mystery and its revelation to him and other apostle-prophets “by the Spirit”—the same sort of vocabulary as 1 Corinthians 2:6-16 uses for the reception and communication of revelation. It is true that Paul’s letters are not all or solely about the mystery. Very much of Paul’s letters is about the gospel, its benefits, its reception, and especially its moral, spiritual and ethical implications in the lives of believers. But it is also true that two of four major texts on the newly revealed mystery (Rom 16:25-27; 1 Cor 2:6-16; Eph 2:11-3:13; Col 1:24-27) speak about it being visible in his own “prophetic writings” (Rom 16:26; cf Eph 3:3-5: “to the apostle-prophets). M. Stirewalt, “The Greek Letter-Essay,” in The Romans Debate, ed K. Donfried (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1977), pp. 175-206. This is the original edition; more essays were added in subsequent editions; readers who care to pursue the details should note the relevant pages in more recent editions. The proposal is Stirewalt’s; the remarks about Nero, Seneca and Poppaea Sabina are mine. There is speculation here, but it is constructive and suggestive speculation that might shed light on Paul’s prophetic letter-writing and its larger significance. 628

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Thus “apostle” was a gift given by Christ to a limited number of chosen persons. Its meaning was enhanced by a special set of powers and authority which became closely focused on the teaching of revelation they received through prophecy. This combination is the reference of the early Chrisitian era to “apostle-prophets” in Ephesians. And so we are led to the charisma of prophecy.

The Gift of Prophecy in the Early Apostolic Era

Unlike “apostle,” prophecy has a long pre-Christian history in Greece and Israel with a relatively stable, semi-technical meaning. In both realms the gift of prophecy persisted with the dominant meaning that prophecy is revelation from the gods and refers to the unveiling of the thoughts and will of a deity about human behavior, affairs and destiny. Usually such revelations were about the future both near and distant, but they also usually included action to be taken in light of the future, and in Israel always contained moral expectations or wisdom about the behavior of the receiver in anticipation of the plan of God for the national future.629 In Greek usage another, less frequent sense was noted by Meyer, in which prophatas virtually loses its revelatory connection and refers to a spoken deploring of wrong behavior, or a forceful application of existing knowledge to certain kinds of situations needing guidance or correction, or simply an urging of important choices on responsible people. Among philosophers “prophet” was sometimes used for a person leading an inquiry arising from a problem in interpreting texts or sayings; it may also refer to a “spokesman” for a pupil’s philosophy teacher. “Prophet” can also be used for teachers of true ethical values or even for a specialist in knowledge, for example of botany.630 It is only fair to state, however, that these latter usages are much a minority compared to the quantity and types of uses for divine revelation. But at least they present another option for what Paul might mean by “prophets” and “prophecy” in a passage like 1 Corinthians 12-14 where church prophets are discussed.631 In the New Testament, and in a way unlike apostolos, prophecy appears at the very beginning of the gospel story (especially Luke 1-4), then in John the Baptist, then in Jesus and again in the outbreak of tongues with the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, in several other places in Acts, and finally in a few scattered texts in the epistles.632 Also unlike Jesus and the apostolate, prophecy happens again and again. Jesus makes no provision for its use and there is no obvious development or extension from a beginning point as is the case with apostolos. At the most he merges aspects of prophecy with apostles’ powers as in John 14:25-26 and 16:13-15 without using prophecy terms as such. The sustained presence of prophecy in the Greek world and in Israel is the backdrop of Paul’s concept of prophecy in the churches; but there seems to be no clear development within the New Testament itself 629 Cf. the very detailed material by R. Meyer, “prophatas,” TDNT 6:783-828. 630 Ibid., pp. 793-794. 631 The weakened Greek usage for speaking about anything important, in contrast to the revelation of a deity’s mind and will, is appealed to by W. Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), pp. 1250-1261, as a guide to Paul’s sense of prophecy in 1 Corinthians 14. It seems very unlikely, however, that this more or less de-theologized meaning for Paul’s use of the prophecy word-group can be sustained. 632 Peter clearly interprets tongues as an outbreak of prophecy in Acts 2.

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as in the case of apostolos. Generally then, it may be said that if apostleship is the gift of divine authority to act, preach and teach given by Jesus’ gift of exousia, prophecy is the gift of divine revelation by which the present and future, and related human behaviors are directed. Apostleship interlaces preaching, teaching and acting authority, while prophecy provides the content of New Testament revelation about God’s intentions for the present and future. These two powers interlace throughout the New Testament with no very sharp distinctions between them. They operate in a kind of steady confluence of “sending” and “prophesying” concepts and events. That is, being sent on a mission with revealed messages is often what happens to prophets in the Old Testament; in a similar way they correlate in the New Testament in the apostle-prophet texts of Ephesians which are associated in this epistle with world mission interests and thoughts. Prophecy in Acts In Ephesians 4:11 apostle and prophet are the first two gifts in the list. Prophecy also appears in second place in Paul’s two gift lists in 1 Corinthians 12:28-29. The modest materials on prophecy are due to its intermittent appearance in Acts and in the epistles. But what we do have points to no different dynamics than with the gift of apostle: the power of prophecy, as with the exousia of an apostle, comes from God; the emphasis is strongly on apokalupsis by the Holy Spirit. The revelatory basis of New Testament prophecy633 appears in certain passages in Acts where the power of the Holy Spirit is often cited with it. The content of prophecies noted in Acts is varied: speaking in tongues as prophecy (Acts 2); inspired speeches of apostles using the verbs apophtheggomai (give an inspired speech) or prophateuo (prophesy); divinely gripping prophetic events narrated as likenesses to Old Testament prophetic events (Paul’s conversion); prophetic visionary experiences; specific predictions of future events; speeches of church prophets (Antioch); and notes of individual and/or itinerant prophets with or without clear church attachments (Agabus). Most if not all such prophetic events are related as being of divine origin; there is no possibility or suggestion of some supposed prophetic office being filled: prophecy is dynamic charisma, not more and not less. Prophecies are works of God himself or of his Spirit inducing charismatic, inspired speech or symbolic events (tongues in Acts 2; Paul’s conversion). The events and verbal descriptions of prophecies show that they are divine revelatory happenings, except where a bare note of someone being a prophet says too little to be sure of any other contextual details. The following account deals with the more obvious manifestations.634

(1) The tongues-speaking of Acts 2 was a spontaneous sovereign act of God in which the Holy Spirit caused most or all of the 120 gathered in the upper room of a Jerusalem house to speak in actual foreign languages—Galileans speaking in languages they did not know and heard by gathered diaspora Jews as their own languages—languages spoken by 633 G. Friedrich, “prophatas,” TDNT 6:853: “All prophecy rests on revelation.” 634 For more details and careful sifting of all relevant information in light of Greco-Roman and Jewish prophetic experience, see D. Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983).

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Jews and proselytes in their own countries. They had gathered in Jerusalem for Pentecost from the many Roman provinces where they lived as diaspora. The addition of “and they shall prophesy” to the Joel quotation (2:18b) shows that the author of Acts thought this was a prophetic event, a view also suggested by Acts 19:6 in its close association of prophecy and tongues.635 The virtual equation of tongues with prophecy appears to mean that the whole or nearly the whole of the 120 prophesied, thus making this prophecy a group event. When Peter says that Jesus through the Holy Spirit “has poured out this which you see and hear (Acts 2:33),” he is combining pouring language elsewhere used of the Spirit with the notion of revelation: “poured out what you see and hear (my italics).” It is in fact a language revelation to both speakers and hearers—a revelatory act of God. (2) Spirit-inspired speeches are represented by the verb apophtheggomai in three texts in Acts. The verb means “speak out,” “declare boldly” when used for the speech of a wise man; it is also used for the oracle-giver, diviner, prophet, or exorcist for some form of inspired speech.636 It is used of the tongues-speaking of the 120 in Acts 2:4, to introduce Peter’s speech explaining the tongues event in 2:14, and by Paul of his own speech to Agrippa II (Acts 26:25). These speeches, introduced by apophtheggomai are prophetic explanations of divine acts of power; they do not foretell the future; they rather explain or interpret acts of God. Still, they are revelatory and represent messages from God himself through divinely inspired speech. (3) Acts also contains several prophetic-like events but with no use of any term for prophecy. The two most noted are Philip’s transport reminiscent of Elijah’s similar transport (1 Kings 18:12; Acts 8:39), and Paul’s call and conversion (Acts 9:1-8) which is widely viewed as akin to those of Isaiah 6, Jeremiah 1 and Ezekiel 1-3. The inaugural visions of these three Old Testament prophets are alluded to or echoed in Paul’s recount of his conversion in Galatians 1.637 Other events in Acts which can be viewed as propheticlike in character are Peter’s escape from prison (Acts 12), Paul’s vision of the Macedonian (Acts 16, on which see further below), and some aspects of the shipwreck scene of Acts 27. Furthermore, in Paul’s recount of his conversion in Acts 26:19, he calls the event an optasia (vision), a term referring to what a deity permits or causes a human to see, either of his own divine world, or something else usually hidden from man.638 (4) Prophetic experiences are also reported using the term horama, another term for vision. One of the more dramatic examples is the two-part vision of the Roman centurion, Cornelius, and Peter which in form is like the two-part vision and interpretation of Daniel 2. The two parts of the Acts 10 vision complement each other and are twice called a horama (vision, 10:3, 19); Cornelius receives part I, and Peter receives part II, just as in Daniel 2 Nebuchadnezzar receives part I and Daniel part II. Its purpose is to bring the two men together to conclude a salvation event. In his half of the event, an angel gave Cornelius instructions about what to do; the instructions accompany the symbolic sheet and animals in the vision. The event has a short time frame—two days. In another case, Acts 16:9-10 uses horama to describe a vision in which Paul’s mission party was directed to go elsewhere than where they had planned. In yet another use in Acts (18:9), horama refers to assurance Paul received that he would not be harmed in a dangerous situation at Corinth. In two other Acts scenes, Paul is told directly by the Lord that despite the immediate circumstances he will testify to Christ at Rome as well as in Jerusalem (Acts 23:11). In yet another vision he is assured—when facing shipwreck in a violent storm—that he will finally stand before

Ibid., p. 191. BAGD, p. 102 637 Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianityy, p. 202. 638 BAGD, p. 576. 635 636

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Caesar (Acts 27:23-25), i.e., will survive the shipwreck. These are assurance and guidance prophecies; but they contain predictive details as well, both local and short term ones. (5) Another prophetic term used by Luke for Paul is ekstasis (trance) into which he once fell in the Jerusalem temple (Acts 22:17); the trance also recounts his conversion. He was ordered to get out of Jerusalem quickly because his testimony to Christ would not be received. This is yet another prediction, and it too contains an order for what to do next in light of a pending problem. In 2 Corinthians 12:1-10 Paul describes visions and revelations which he calls optasias (visions) and apokalupseos (revelations), just as he represents his conversion vision as an apocalupsis in Galatians 1:12. All this visionary and revelatory language is simply that of charisma and prophetic revelation; it has no connection with an office. The contents of these visions, as far as we know them in any detail, are focused on short-term practical matters of assurance, guidance, instructions, warnings, and predictions of near term events, all reminiscent of similar Old Testament prophetic revelations. (6) Specific predictions of future events in Acts include the prophecy of Agabus of Jerusalem. He appears twice in Acts with predictive prophecies or warnings for Paul. He first appears in Antioch of Syria where he predicts a Judean famine (Acts 11:27-28) to which the Christians at Antioch respond with a gift sent with Paul and Barnabas (11:29). In a second appearance at Caesarea on the coast (Acts 21:10), he issues a warning to Paul: taking Paul’s waist belt, he binds his own hands and feet, and states that this is what will happen at Jerusalem to the belt’s owner. This spontaneous outburst in a symbolic action is a very local prophecy about a near event. It is neither an eschatological nor a moral exhortation. Paul did not heed it; but the prophecy did work out as given: Paul was bound at Jerusalem and fell into Gentile hands as Agabus prophesied. Agabus’ prophecy about Paul in Jerusalem was so short term that he did not see in it the larger consequence—the way by which Paul would get to Rome; but Rome had already been in Paul’s plan for at least a year and probably longer. (7) Acts 13:1 contains a rare note of a group of church prophets: “Now in the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen, a member of the court of Herod the tetrarch, and Saul [Paul].” The meaning of this description is that the people named had the gifts of prophecy and teaching spread among them. To this group the Holy Spirit spoke an order to set apart Barnabas and Saul “for the work to which I have called them (13:2).” This too is clearly a prophetic revelation; it is not eschatological either, but only an order to begin their first Gentile mission. The prophecy is similar to those of Agabus noted above in that both have short term perspectives. This one contains a commissioning-like order unlike those of Agabus. Thus, whether from an isolated prophet or from a group of church prophets, the prophetic messages are local, varied, short term in scope, and highly practical about near future events. Luke has a striking sense of the frequency and purpose of such local prophecies which in turn seem similar to congregational church prophecies in Corinth discussed below. Prophetic revelations are a form of direct divine guidance. (8) There are a few notes of individual prophets with little or no information on details of specific revelations. Two are mentioned in Acts 15:32: Judas and Silas; the latter was attached to Paul and the Gentile mission. Luke again associates certain individual prophets with Paul in the scene about the church at Antioch in Syria (Acts 13:1). In another scene the evangelist Philip is said to have had four daughters who prophesied (Acts 21:9). All we know is that they were living at the time of the notice in Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast.

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Luke was clearly interested in prophecy, and gives sustained attention to prophetic events. The prophetic events noted have a pattern: when prophecies occur they almost exclusively contain instructions from the Lord through the Holy Spirit for immediate actions in light of a near future event. The prophecies are revelatory and show the author of Acts’ belief that prophecies regularly gave guidance to apostolic people with short-term predictions and instructions. Some are explanations of divinely caused events (Cornelius and Paul’s conversion). None are prophecies of longer-range eschatological events, related, say, to the Great Tribulation or the Second Coming or the Messianic Kingdom. Nor are any of these prophetic revelations simply forceful moral or ethical exhortations already known and brought again to mind by the Spirit.639 Instead, all are revelatory statements about what is happening or will soon occur in the apostles’ mission activity; they are accompanied by guidance for action in the meantime. There is nothing here of the nature of an “office” of prophet. As in the Old Testament, prophecy is a gift of the Spirit under his divine sovereignty and power. At Christianity’s beginning, prophecy returned. New Testament Prophecy in the Epistles The most pronounced element is the association of prophecy with revelation. Prophecy is the revelatory gift. Its purpose is to enable gifted people to receive and convey communications from the Lord through the Holy Spirit. This basic idea continues the central element of prophecy from both the Greco-Roman world and the history of Israel. Possession of the gift includes visions, dreams, trances, and directly inspired speech. All such forms of prophecy convey information from God to man about current or near-term events, longer-term events anticipated in history (especially events of the apostolic age), and end time events associated with the Second Coming of Christ. Envisioned events related to the Second Coming may refer to prelude details (Anti-Christ; Great Tribulation), the event itself (Second Coming in either stage—rapture or return to earth), or consequent events (kingdom; judgment; new heavens and new earth). One striking type of passage depicts revelations conveyed through the combined gifts of apostle and prophet. Another type of passage discusses church prophets, i.e., situations in which more than one person with the gift of prophecy was active in a church meeting. The Thessalonian and Corinthian churches probably had one or more prophetic persons or groups of prophets. It also appears that revelations coming through persons with the combined gifts of apostle and prophet are not testable for their truth or validity, while the utterances of local individual or group church prophets had to be tested. At least two passages reflect this situation.640

639 This is how Grudem thinks about congregational prophecies at Corinth (Systematic Theology, 1250-1261). Still, it is not out of the question that moral or ethical matters or details of personal guidance in individual church members’ lives might be the subject of local congregational prophecies. On this, note also the discussion below on prophecy at Corinth. 640 D. Aune, Prophecy, pp. 195-211, has a thorough discussion which carefully considers all the relevant data from the epistles. Not every detail of Aune’s discussion is adopted here; but the discussion is probably the most important among recent considerations of New Testament prophecy, especially as reflected in the Pauline epistles.

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Summarily, then, Paul’s epistles reflect two main types of prophecy—apostolicprophetic revelation and church-prophetic revelation. Reception of oracles appears to be thought of in different ways: the first is absolute and normative for the churches, and not subject to local church testing. Paul does seem to have voluntarily submitted the Gentile mission revelation to the elders at Jerusalem (Acts 15). We should be cautious about assuming a “test” in this move, since Paul’s submission may have been thought of as consultative to obtain agreement on details of the mission from Jerusalem leaders, and not as a test of truth; this at least was the outcome. The other type of prophecy is relative in its value, subject to congregational testing, might be judged false prophecy lacking wisdom, or might just be misleading or vague. In any case true prophecy is revelatory of God’s will and activity and manifests the prophetic function through the Spirit. The gift does not create an office, but remains a charisma—a divinely granted and powered spiritual gift, not the establishment of an office to be continually filled.

The association of prophecy with revelation lies in its repeated connection with verbs of revelation (apokalupto, reveal; gnorizo, make known). The verbs often have God as the subject-source of new knowledge and sometimes include the Holy Spirit as agent. A rather regular term for what is revealed is “mystery” or “mysteries.” While Paul’s usage of these terms does show some relation to their Greek usage, the more pertinent source is Daniel 2 with its “mystery” and “mysteries” for symbols of historical events, nations or personages with explanation of their meaning. Jesus also employed “mystery” in this sense where the symbols are parables and what is explained is the present and available kingdom of God; hence, “to you is given (didotai) the mystery of the kingdom of God.” In Paul’s case the newly revealed “mystery” refers to the fact of Gentile salvation without Israel which calls for an explanation; hence the “mystery . . . now revealed” description of the mission in Ephesians 3:3-9. The explanation is that the Gentile mission creates the church of believing Jews and Gentiles. In each of these mystery-revelation texts—Old or New Testament—the revealed mystery is about actual visionary symbols and related historical events which need explanation. The most crucial passage is 1 Corinthians 13:2: “And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge . . . but have not love I am nothing.” The substantial language of prophecy here is “prophetic . . . understand . . . mysteries . . . knowledge.” In Ephesians 3:3, 5 the language is “. . . the mystery was made known to me by revelation,” with the remarkable addition, “as I have written briefly . . . .” Again, “mystery . . . made known . . . revelation . . .” are the substantial concepts, while “written” is an expansion showing that such revelations did at times take apostolic written form. In Ephesians 3:4-5 Paul repeats most of the language of 3:3: “When you read this you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit . . . .” The same combination of revelation and prophecy terms occurs: “read (written) . . . insight . . . mystery . . . (not) made known (in other generations) . . . now revealed . . . to apostles . . . prophets . . . Spirit.” In rewording the description he includes more ingredients in the cluster of revelatory terms. Especially noteworthy is the reference to apostles and prophets, or more exactly “apostle-prophets,” a way to put the matter that combines apostles and prophets into a unitary pair of charisms—apostles and prophets viewed as a unity. With apostle-prophets as the secondary (human) agent-receptors, the historic connection of prophets with divine revelation is made specific, whether one thinks of the Greek form of the connection or its Israelite form. Ephesians 1:9-10 and Colossians

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1:25-27 again repeat the prophetic language as does Romans 16:25-27, each with some variations. In Romans 16:26, the notable addition of “. . . through prophetic scriptures . . .” recalls in another form the reference to writing in Ephesians 3:3-5.641 Prophecy and revelation language in 1 Corinthians 2:6-16 is the basis for the discussion above about the identity of “we” and “us” in the earlier lines of the passage. Its combination of revelation-related terms sets the passage within the same framework of apostolic-prophetic power to receive revelation from God, and to teach what is received. Especially notable is the sequence of substance words—“We . . . secret . . . hidden wisdom . . . of God (v 7) . . . revealed . . . Spirit (v 10) . . . understand (v 12) . . . we impart . . . in words . . . taught by the Spirit (v 13).” Here the terminology is mostly the same as the above texts, and the apostolic teaching is again mentioned as the humanly-conveyed and Spirit-guided outcome. Paul uses some revelation terms again in 1 Corinthians 14:6: “. . . how shall I benefit you unless I bring you some revelation or knowledge or prophecy or teaching?” He certainly means these words in the same revelatory sense as in the other passages where they cluster. None of this language refers to the common experience of all Christians; the terms rather refer to the apostle-prophets’ revelations and teaching in words of the Spirit, while recipients of their teaching enter his thought only at 1 Corinthians 2:1415.642 This is a clear and forceful set of revelatory concepts associated several times with prophecy. Sometimes apostles are paired with prophets. Mysteries are mentioned, verbs of revelation are used and the Spirit is spoken of as the divine agent. Paul also speaks of gifted apostolic-prophetic leaders teaching (1 Cor 2:6-13) or writing (Eph 3:3) what is revealed. This activity is not of human origin. The verbs of revelation are often passive. When not passive, the assumed source of the revelatory event is God. This set of concepts shows how fully prophecy is a divinely operated charisma, not an established office.

Local groups of church prophets are a subset of New Testament prophecy and varied prophetic types.643 It is important to establish here that local church prophets were also viewed by Paul, along with apostle-prophets, as charismatically driven. We know them from one major passage (1 Corinthians 14) and several other scattered references (1 Thes 5:19-22; Rom 12:6; 1 Tim 4:14). But there is no doubt that revelation was also their experience just as prophecy is attached to apostles and their exousia. It also appears that church or congregational prophets, unlike apostle-prophets, are subject to each others’ evaluations. For congregational prophets, testing principles are articulated by various 641 The assumption that Paul is referring to his own writings is discussed positively by F. Godet, A Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, trans C. Cusin (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1881), pp. 416417. Most recent commentators have been hesitant, though for insufficient reasons, to see a reference to Paul’s own letter(s) in Romans 16:26. The chief reasons for Godet’s and the view expressed above are (1) that Paul’s subject is New Testament revelation in the passage, and (2) the reference to prophetic Scriptures has no definite article—a grammatical omission that generalizes the reference away from a specific allusion to the Old Testament. 642 E. Ellis, Prophecy and Hermeneutic in Early Christianity (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1978), pp. 24-30, reads the passage this way in the later twentieth century as Godet, 1 Corinthians, did in the nineteenth. Ellis thinks apostles, prophets and teachers were pneumatics and all spoke inspired speech. He may have overextended this argument by including inspired teachers since the complex of revelation-related terms (as above) is actually associated with apostles and prophets. The inclusion of teachers under this set of terms does not seem in evidence. 643 These issues are thoroughly discussed and weighed by D. Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity, pp. 189-231.

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passages; but the tests are not entirely clear. The implication of a testing procedure is that there were either false prophets to be identified or at least some prophecies were judged to be false. W. Grudem argues that tests were aimed at detecting only erroneous details in otherwise

true prophecies; but this interpretation does not seem clearly in evidence. If tongues-speaking throughout Acts is viewed via tongues at Jerusalem (Acts 2:1-21), then group tongues-speaking in Acts 10:44-45 may qualify as prophecy,644 even though tongues are not always call “prophecy” as in Acts 2:17-21. We are on more solid ground in 1 Corinthians 14 where tongues and prophecy are sharply distinguished in a congregational setting. That there were prophets in Corinthian worship gatherings is clear from 1 Corinthians 14:29: “Let two or three prophets speak and let the others weigh what is said.” When he adds two verses later, “For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be encouraged (14:31) . . . ,” he is probably not speaking to everyone in the gathering, but only to small groups of prophets.645 Of these he says, “If a revelation (my italics) is made to another sitting by, let the first be silent (14:30).” This too shows that group prophets in church meetings received revelation. Thus the basic idea of prophecy in Scripture—its revelatory function—is again indicated. Earlier in the chapter, Paul had also said that the value of the gift of prophecy over tongues was partly that prophets could look into the secrets of human hearts and call people to account for what is disclosed (14:24-25). Supernatural revelatory activity is spread throughout these prophecy notices. When such prophecies are reduced to merely forceful speech at the human level, or to spontaneous recall of something already known to the mind and then spoken,646 or to some sense of illumination or insight—although illumination occurred in such prophecies—they are diluted of their normal revelatory meaning. In each notice the assumption is divine revelatory action which usually contains some form of verbalized knowledge—information, expectations or directives about immediate matters of life, or near or far events. Spontaneous recall can be a work of the Spirit (John 14:26), but it is not firmly linked to prophecy. Prophetic claims in church prophecies are subject to evaluation by other prophets or perhaps a whole congregation, and certainly by apostles. Prophecies by local groups of church prophets are Paul’s subject in 1 Corinthians 14. 1 Thessalonians 5:19-22 and Romans 12:6 have isolated comments about tests. The church prophets of these passages belong to a different context than the apostle-prophets of Acts and Ephesians. Church prophets lacked connection with apostles and their special exousia. They may speak words contrary to other groups of prophets. Thus the use of a testing standard reflects conflict within congregational prophecies.647 Probably not all differences between prophets or prophetic groups within a congregation called for testing, since testing assumes that substantial difference has been perceived. Identifying false prophets is likely the chief reason for testing. When Paul speaks of testing for either good or evil in prophecies (1 Thes 5:19-22), he seems to have falsehood or truth in mind, expressed simply as good or evil. This is the case in remarks about false prophecy in 1 John 4:1-3—a prescription that recalls Jesus’ warnings about false prophets (Matt 24:24).648 644 So Aune, ibid., p. 199. 645 Ibid., p. 201. 646 As Grudem, Systematic Theology, pp. 1052, l056. 647 Aune, Prophecy, p. 217. But he thinks testing arose only in situations of “strong conflict.” One may also say this kind of situation was more problematic and acute with the absence of any apostle from the scene. 648 Grudem’s allegation, Systematic Theology, p. 1053, that evaluation of prophecy was to determine

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Testing the truth of prophetic claims to revelation in church prophecies is stated in varied ways. 1 Corinthians 14:29, 32: “Let two or three prophets speak, and let others weigh what is said . . . the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets.” In 1 Thessalonians 5:19-22 the order to test prophets without (at least initially) suppressing them reads: Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophesying, but test everything; hold fast to what is good, abstain from every form of evil.649 The portion advocates testing and sets criteria of good and evil for judging specific congregational prophecies. The last line suggests that some prophets in fact advocated evil in some form, probably falsehood(s). The situation might have been parallel to Jezebel’s advocacy of sexual freedom in the church at Thyatira (Rev 2:20-24), which involved sexual falsehood in advocacy or practice under the guise of prophecy. The context of the Thessalonian passage is also concerned about sexual morality as suggested by the space occupied by the subject in the context (4:1-8). In Romans 12:6 his words are: “. . . if [one’s gift is] prophecy, in proportion to our faith.” The term “proportion,” followed by many modern versions, is misleading in trying to personalize the thought to individuals’ own faith. “Analogy” or “likeness” is a better translation than “proportion,” since it is closer to the text’s term “the faith. It also recognizes a reference to an objective standard—the basic Christian confession of the gospel and related truths (“the faith”). Perhaps he is thinking of Old Testament prophets and New Testament apostle-prohets as the basic standard of truth. In other words, the phrase means “in agreement with the faith as taught by Christ and the apostle-prophets and so understood by all,”650 not in the sense of the rigid doctrinal fixity of later times, but adhering to the apostolic traditions received as in 2 Thessalonians 2:15. The matter is stated more directly in 1 John 4:1-3 where identification of false prophets is explicitly mentioned and their spirits are the spirit of falsehood. In 1 Corinthians 14:29 Paul’s term for testing prophetic utterances is diakrino (judge, differentiate, make a decision, make a distinction 651); in 1 Thessalonians 5:21 it is dokimazo (examine, test652; NIV: “weigh carefully”). and filter out errors from truth is hard to document. He thinks Agabus’ prophecy of Acts 21:10-11 contains error, and it is this kind of error in details that testing of prophecies determined. D. Bock, Acts (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), p. 638, takes the contrary view, explaining that the Jewish involvement in Paul’s “binding” by the Romans is causative—the Jews did it in the sense that they made it happen. I owe this reference to J. Greenbury, “1 Corinthians 14:34-35: Evaluation of Prophecy Revisited,” JETS 51 (2008):721-731. 649 This arrangement by D. Aune, Prophecy, p. 219, has the merit of showing how the whole of vss 19-20 relate to prophecy and its testing. 650 So Godet, Romans, pp. 430-431, contra W. Sanday and A. C. Headlam¸ A Critical and Exegetical Commentry on the Epistle to the Romans (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1895), pp. 356-357. E. Kasemann, Commentary on Romans, trans G. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), pp. 341-342, sides with the objective standard in terms of the need for prophets to keep to the received traditions. This seems correct and does allow for some flexibility. J. Dunn represents the subjective side, Romans 9-16 (Dallas: Word, 1988), pp. 727-728, reading the definite article as a personal pronoun to mean his faith. 651 BAGD, p. 185. 652 Ibid., p. 202. There are some secondary terms like “be subject to (14:32),” and perhaps others that need not be cited or discussed further.

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What sorts of things did groups of church prophets utter? If the individual prophets of Acts and the “good” and “evil” judgments expected of congregations in 1 Thessalonians 5:19-21 are any guide, most of the church prophets sayings were about immediate practical matters. However, at least two texts suggest that erroneous “doctrinal” prophecies also occurred. 1 Corinthians 12:3: “. . . no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says, ‘Jesus be cursed,’ and no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.” “Jesus be accursed” may be a prophetic utterance essentially undermining the most basic of Christian confessions and therefore a blatant case of false prophecy. Even more direct and clear is a false prophecy confronted by Paul in 2 Thessalonians 2:1-2: “. . . we beg you brethren, not to be quickly shaken in mind or excited either by spirit or by word, or by letter purporting to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.” The text reveals some aspects of false prophecy, although we do not know for certain that the claim comes from a church prophet. The content of the false prophetic claim is eschatological while that of 1 Corinthians 12:3 it is doctrinal. A false identification of a fulfillment event and its timing is in view. Paul recognizes that this false prophecy might have been circulating in a letter, perhaps even pretending to have been his. This one case alone should make all Christians wary of attempts to identify modern events as fulfillments of canonical prophecy. Enough has become visible in this discussion to show that true prophecy in the New Testament era—even church prophecy—was revelatory in nature. If there is a trend toward establishing an office of prophet anywhere in the middle apostolic age, there is no sign of it in the major texts discussed here. Prophecy was a charism of the Holy Spirit governed by gifting acts of God. That the two primal gifts of apostle and prophet were divinely initiated and driven in the apostolic age is clear from the discussion so far. That they were divinely determined and operated is not an indication they were destined by the Lord to be permanent. In the case of apostle, it is generally agreed that the gift was intentionally temporary as suggested by the fact that apostles made no provisions to confirm or recognize successor apostles. In the case of prophets, Paul simply says prophecy will cease (1 Corinthians 13:8-12), including in that statement the related gift of tongues and the gift of revealed knowledge (as in 13:2). There is no further need to discuss cessation of these gifts, especially prophecy. Cessation of prophecy in particular has been discussed in detail in another essay in this collection (see Essay V). Accordingly we move on to other local leadership functions to determine whether or not they too are charismatic, and if so, what relation they have to the abiding issue of the near-inevitability of emerging permanent offices.



Other Ministry Gifts in the Church Evangelists

The gift of evangelist appears only in the gift-list in Ephesians 4:11, where it is placed after apostles and prophets; this is the main reason for a discussion of evangelist here. Its placement in Ephesians 4:11 suggests a relatively high importance; but the suggestion is not met with an equal attention to the gift elsewhere in the New Testament, as measured by frequency of usage or scenes of evangelists at work—independently, that is, 380

of apostles. The term occurs only two other times in the New Testament, once for Philip the evangelist (Acts 21:8) and once for Timothy (2 Tim 4:5). Despite low frequency of use, these few texts show that this gift was recognized beyond its presence in the apostles. More evangelists were probably active than the New Testament speaks of under the term, since the apostles were evangelists from the beginning and the term here is plural along with the other gifts.653 The appearance of “evangelists” apart from apostles suggests that the gift was moving beyond its original attachment to apostles. In Ephesians 4:7-11 charisma is not used for the gifts listed; but this is not a material difference since the basic concepts of gift-giving and several specific gifts are present here as in other gift-list texts that do use charisma. Instead, domata (gifts) appears (4:8) as the gift term for the text’s five gifts: apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastor-teachers. This list shows that “evangelist” was no more an office than elder, but a charisma function among early Christians. Philip appears to have been itinerant; Timothy worked in a more or less settled situation at Ephesus. The euaggelistas is apparently named for the work of preaching the gospel (euaggelion), and probably pictures the winning of converts to Christ. Despite its limited use, euaggelistas is to be viewed in the modern church as a gift of importance all out of proportion to its infrequent New Testament use; it appears to have emerged from its original association with apostles. Recognition and encouragement of this gift is vital to the cutting edge of growth and gain for the church in every age. There is no sustained connection between prophets and evangelists in the New Testament. The two gifts join only here and in the family of Philip—an evangelist whose daughters prophesied (Acts 21:8-9); thus the connection with prophecy in Philip’s family may be coincidental, i.e., not a case of a pattern of combined gifts. There is a connection in actual function and activity between apostles and evangelists, and this may be the reason why evangelists do not receive more attention in the New Testament, i.e., the gift belonged at first to the apostles as public preachers of the gospel, and at the beginning only fell for the time being to a few others. Pastors, Teachers, Elders, Deacons We come now to the point of this long preliminary discussion—to determine the nature and origin of the two primary New Testament local church leadership functions of elder and deacon, known to be such from the way in which they are isolated with detailed quality criteria in the Pastoral Epistles. Are these also “charisms” or are they established perpetual offices?

The thesis is the same as above: elders and deacons arise from the same empowerment of Christ and the Spirit as the gifts of apostle and prophet. Paul’s lists of Spirit-gifts show them all flowing in the same charisma stream. Locating a starting point for the pastorteacher-elder-deacon gifts that does not improperly skew the conclusion is a major problem which the following discussion does not presume to decisively overcome, except that the procedure seeks the whole available information by a search for all leader terms, especially elders.



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G. Friedrich, “euaggelistes,” TDNT 2:736-737.

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Leadership terms appear in a variety of ways. (1) Acts favors the use of presbuteros— 17x including several times for Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, but mostly for Christian church elders, Jewish or Gentile. Luke’s use of “elders” for Christian leaders may reflect gradual standardization of this terminology by the 80s, the probable decade of Acts’ publication. This development was not yet reached by Paul as shown by his extremely limited use of the term. He does not use it at all in the earliest epistles (Galatians, 1-2 Thessalonians) even though by the time of Galatians he had appointed elders in the south Galatian churches (Acts 14:23), and only three times for church leaders elsewhere—all in the Pastoral Epistles.654 The scene of Acts 20 shows one group of leaders for which three leadership terms are used in the same speech: elders, overseers (“bishops”) and pastors. These remarks call attention to another issue, i.e., the probability of some kind of gradual usage development for “elder.” (2) Paul avoids “elder,” preferring instead a variety of leadership terms other than elder—at least fifteen in all for church leaders under functional terms, and perhaps as many as twenty. The terms are scattered through the epistles. They sometimes appear in pairs or triplets. In such texts they may be in parallel or synonymous relation to each other; a second or third term may define the preceding one; some are repeated from one epistle to another; or they may occur in random fashion. (3) Still other Pauline passages contain lists of ministry gifts for the whole church, but include obvious leadership gifts. There are five such passages spread through 1 Corinthians, Romans and Ephesians; all allude to leadership gifts with some overlap and coordination of leader-terms with the passages and terms of points (1) and (2) above. The use of certain leadership terms in the charisma-list passages supports the larger point of this essay since these charismalists contain the broadest view of both the charisma idea and several specific leader terms. For the gifts in these passages see Appendix C. Finding the Terms for Elder In seeking a Pauline picture of who are elders and what they do, we are met with a methodology issue: how to find the defining passages? It seems simple: find the “elder” texts and adopt what they say. However, more terms than “elder” appear; hence a larger view necessarily emerges for reasons that will become apparent. Elders are referred to by well over a dozen terms, perhaps by as many as fifteen or perhaps up to twenty beside the term “elder” itself; several occur in Paul’s lists of gifts, showing that eldering is a gift of the Spirit. To the three texts using “elder” in Paul (1 Tim 5:17, 19; Titus 1:5) may be add ten (10) “elder” texts in the central chapters of Acts (11:30; 14:23; 15:2, 4, 6, 22, 23; 16:4; 20:17; 21:18), although these are Luke’s, not Paul’s. The remaining seven (7) in Acts 654 The sense of “later” for the Pastoral Epistles is not that of the traditional dating of the Pastorals, i.e., between (1 Timothy, Titus) and during (2 Timothy) the last of two alleged Roman imprisonments, very late and beyond the scope of Acts 28. See Essay X, Appendix B for a reconstruction. What is meant by “later” is before Romans, but after the Thessalonian letters, Galatians and 1 Corinthians, and during a probable journey all the way to Crete and then north along the west shore of Greece as far north as Dalmatia and Illyricum—the area of today’s northwestern Balkan States. A journey in this period is well known, but not in the way proposed here; my proposal sees it as launched from and ending at Ephesus during Paul’s third mission tour, and far more extensive than a quick trip from Ephesus to Corinth and back. Strictly speaking, 2 Corinthians belongs in the later group of letters as well.

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refer to elders of Israel, not the church. Further questions arise: why should the search be limited to the study of “elder” alone? Why is presbuteros (elder) so scarce in the Pauline epistles? And why are there no elder function lists like the elder qualification lists of the Pastoral Epistles? In Paul’s Acts 20 speech, presbuteros/elder, episcopos/overseer/bishop and poiman/pastor/shepherd overlap in that all three terms are applied to the same people (Acts 20:17, 28 [2]). In another text, two of the terms apply to the same people (Titus 1:5, 7, elder and overseer/bishop only). These passages are rightly taken to indicate that no varied offices are denoted since all three terms refer to the same people without distinction or qualification. Judged by their meanings, the three terms of Acts 20 encourage another kind of distinction than the Catholic-Anglican-Methodist one (with variations) between elders and bishops: the basic term is “elder,” while the other two terms describe elder functions,655 i.e., “overseer” and “pastor/shepherd.” By this reckoning we have not one, but three terms for church elders in the two passages using the three and two terms for the same persons respectively. If these two passages suggest elder functions, then the question arises about other possible functional terms that also denote elders and further functions or aspects of their work. Expansion of the search for elder terms is encouraged by another passage (1 Tim 5:17) where presbuteros/elder is defined functionally by three more terms beyond “elder”: prohistemi/rule, take care of; kopiao/labor “in word” (NIV “preaching”); and didaskalia/ teaching. Thus the accumulated list of terms now numbers six (6)—presbuteros plus five functional terms expressed in noun participles or common verbal nouns. But if there are more leadership terms not directly linked to “elder” by the contextual presence of “elder” itself as above, but overlapping with the other terms gathered above, or otherwise appearing in clear references to leadership people in congregations, then there may be more such terms. In fact, as many as another six (6) functional terms and possibly even more appear. 1 Thessalonians 5:12 has three terms: kopiao/labor; prohistemi/ lead; care for; and noutheteo/admonish/warn. “Labor” and “lead” are the same as in 1Timothy 5:17, where they are definitions of “elder/presbuteros; but “admonish (noutheteo)” is new. In 1 Timothy 4:5 paraklasis/urging/comforting/exhorting is a ministry function of Timothy and seems akin in thought to noutheteo. Hebrews 13:7, 17 add hageomai/govern, which is new, followed (13:7) by “who spoke the word” as in 1 Timothy 5:17 after kopiao/labor “in the word,” and agrupneo/watchers (over you), which is new; the terms denote leaders since the congregation(s?) are urged to submit to them. We now have a total of ten (10) elder terms (not counting repeated words) found in interlocking and overlapping or even synonymous relationships, including with “elder” itself. Beside the above terms, eight (8) more functional terms also overlap, interchange, or are joined with the previously identified ten (10): kubernasis may be synonymous with prohistemi; it means piloting (a ship), managing, guiding or steering, although it could more suitably relate to other terms (1 Cor 12:28); sunergeo/work together (1 Cor 16:15), which is attracted by the already mentioned kopiao to make a word-trio with diakoneo/minister for others who minister/diakoneo (1 Cor 16:15-16) at Corinth along with Stephanus. (The diakon- word-group is usually associated with “deacon,” but also has the broader general The distinction between titles or offices and functions was already noted by F. J. A. Hort in his classic work, The Christian Ecclesia (London: Macmillan and Co, 1897), pp. 157-161. 655

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meaning of “ministry” as shown by Paul’s use of it several times for his mission.) The term apodidomi/dispense, give out, followed by “the word” (Heb13:17) overlaps in concept with pastor-teacher; epimeleomai/care for, is a further definition of prohistemi rule/care for in 1 Timothy 3:4 (2x), which in turn is a further functional definition of “overseer” (1 Tim 3:1). Overlap and extension (further definition) are well-illustrated in 1 Timothy 3:1-4 as in 5:17 (cf. 1 Cor 16:16; Heb 13:7, 17; 1 Thes 5:12). Sophos (wise man) and diakrino (act as a judge,1 Cor 6:4) are also probable elder terms or functions; but lacking overlap connections with any other elder terms in the passage, they could be disputed. Finally, there is another term for teaching (katacheo, Gal 6:6; 1 Cor 14:19, meaning teach, instruct). The new terms here beside those identified above total eight (8), bringing the gross number to eighteen (18) Why Paul multiples elder-function terms while using “elder” itself so sparingly—at least in the earlier epistles—is an open question. He offers no list of elder functions like the lists of qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. The eighteen (18) functional terms describe what elders do or the manner of their work, and thus together are the equivalent of such a function-list when viewed together. The remarkable variety of terms for elder-leadership in Pauline churches shows that elder activity had several functional descriptions even when synonyms are recognized. On any reckoning, the terms clearly fall into overlapped groupings since the meanings of several, when synonyms are considered, are among the aggregate of terms. A summary of elder functions will be offered below, but more needs to be said about elders than just further study of the functional terms alone: the meaning of qualification terms, service-term limits or suspension, appointment, support, and gender issues need more study, discussion and implementation. But before summarizing the basic elder functions, some details of the gift lists warrant discussion.656 The Language of Charisma-List Passages

To achieve the clearest and fullest Pauline perspective on leadership as charisma, it seems useful to discuss the introductory language of the Spirit or Christ’s gift-giving in passages where teachers, leaders, pastors and deacons appear. At the base line the same charisma language appears for teachers, leaders, pastors and deacons as is used for apostles and prophets and many other gifts. This is true despite the fact that the texts on these functions might be understood to show the establishment of an office—more, that is, than do those texts that list the primal gifts of apostle and prophet. This possible tendency toward office may also seem encouraged by the parallel fact that far more is said about the moral qualifications for these functions than is the case with the gifts of apostles and prophets. But do these appearances really support office versus charisma? Paul uses a more or less fixed vocabulary in his charisma-gift introductions— regularly repeated words and phrases detailing the larger charisma framework. In such

This essay’s recognition of functional elder terms coordinaes well with the treatment of elder functions by A. Strauch, Biblical Eldership: An Urgent Call to Restore Biblical Church Leadership (Colorado Springs: Lewis and Roth, 1995). Strauch’s study is a valuable expansion on details of this essay. It is unfortunate, however, that Strauch slips into office-thinking due to insufficient attention to the larger charisma over-structure for the elder terms. 656

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passages the power and principle of the gift-lists is grace (charis) in the sense of unmerited, beneficial power. For the resulting personal and public appearance of the gifts Paul uses “gift (charisma)”; for their source and conferral he uses “given” (didomi) and assumes the “divine passive” (God, Christ or Spirit as agent) with the persistent passive voice (“given”) of the verb for giving (usually a participle of didomi/give; sometimes the agency of the Holy Spirit (pneuma) in imparting and operating the gifts is stated. The net effect is to attribute the rise of ministry gifts to the work of God or Christ or the Holy Spirit. In these passages Paul is thinking not of establishing offices of ministry, but of the Spirit at work in the church-body inducing functional gifts for meeting congregational needs. No awakening mechanisms are given; rather, people apparently come forward to meet needs, and are recognized for their gifts as they begin to grow in practicing them. The matter is left to the Spirit in the actual life of the church-body, i.e., the Spirit induces leadership and other gifts as the body meets and needs become known and serviced; apparently this is the only “how” of recognition. Under this set of concepts the lists of specific leadership gifts include apostles, prophets, evangelists, elders/pastors/overseers, teachers and deacons. Other gifts following in various lists show much variety. The only differentiation in the passages is the firstsecond-third of 1 Corinthians 12:28. In fact, Paul goes on to say the “greatest gifts” are none of these, but rather faith, hope and love, and that these gifts are to be especially sought (1 Cor 14:1). This statement alone implies that one of the “mechanisms” of giftrealization is “seeking” gifts once they are known to exist by appearing in the service of congregational needs. By this reckoning, the substantial egalitarianism of the body of Christ is maintained and the appropriate humility of leaders and people is encouraged as all submit to and benefit from the gifts working in the whole. Five passages contain appropriate combinations of descriptive terms in gift lists: (in likely chronological order) 1 Corinthians 12:4-11; 12:28; 12:29; Ephesians 4:11; Romans 12:6-8.657 1 Timothy 4:14 is not a charisma-list, but uses the same formulaic terminology of divine gift-bestowal for one unnamed gift.

The basic concept is grace (charis, charisma)—a quality of God’s interactions with man in redemption. It often means “unmerited favor” when Paul is thinking about salvation without human works, and with human unworthiness in mind. In these contexts it is a “legal” or “judicial” concept describing forgiveness of sins without works by God the Judge. In other passages grace is a power notion—the unmerited power of God graciously entering human life to effect salvation and empower toward good. This is the sense in a passage like 1 Corinthians 15:10: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it 657 Ephesians and 1 Timothy are placed in this order assuming the view that the Prison Epistles and Pastoral Epistles in reality belong to the three-year Ephesian period of Acts 19-20, and therefore coordinate in time with 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians and Romans, although it is not possible to be more precise with exact chronological order among this group of third missionary tour epistles. There is nothing consequential riding on this placement for the discussion of this portion of the essay, since I am not seeking to make any points of theological substance about “progressive revelation” or some other such argument based on this sequence of epistles. In other words, no part of this essay’s thesis rests on it; some forms of Grace Fellowship argumentation on other theological issues is involved. See the discussion in Essay X, Appendix A for the Prison Epistles, and Appendix B for the Pastoral Epistles.

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was not I, but the grace of God which is with me.”658 The power sense is also that of the passages listed above, where charis or charisma occur to denote ministry gifts (Eph 4:7, 11; Rom 12:6-8). But when Paul lists the specific gifts, he usually prefers charisma (1 Cor 12:4, 9, 28, 30, 31; Rom 12:6; 1 Tim 4:14). In one case doma (gift) is substituted for charis/charisma (Eph 4:7), partly because it occurs in the Old Testament quotation used to undergird gift distribution by the risen Christ (Eph 4:7-8). The verb is either in the active or passive voice often followed by the object in dative or accusative: to each one (1 Cor 12:7-8; Eph 4:7, 11; 1 Tim 4:14; Rom 12:6). Mentions of the Holy Spirit as agent are profuse in 1 Corinthians 12 (vss 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 11). Christ is the giver in Ephesians 4:7-11, and the human mediation of eldership is noted in 1 Timothy 4:14 showing that mediation may include human persons along with the Spirit or Christ himself. Bestowal of gifts in the church is a manifold work of the sovereign Holy Spirit and has little to do with human initiative, management or offices, although both desire and human mediation are part of the process. A complete list of the gifts from all five texts is included in Appendix C of Essay X. Coordinating the Major Elder Terms Considering that synonyms and overlaps occur among functional terms for elders, it seems appropriate to distinguish between major and minor elder terms. While it may appear arbitrary to

do so, it also seems necessary as a way to bring order into the discussion thereby avoiding the novel idea that twenty functional terms can be converted mechanically into twenty elder functions. Accordingly, the goal of this portion of the essay is to discover the functional priorities for elders in the New Testament situation so that the emphasis of the apostolic thinking on leadership functions becomes clear and convertible into a useful set of elder responsibilities and activities. An implication of this consideration is that varied ways of ordering the terms and concepts might be attempted, considering their overlaps. That discussion should go on and ought to result in greater clarity and usefulness. But since I know of no other such attempt to grasp the functions of elders by a complete assemblage of the many terms, it seems permissible to proceed in this manner in the interests of a thorough understanding of the New Testament Christian elder.659 An example of what at least seems to be a difference between major and minor terms would be the relative difference in specificity between, say, prohistemi (lead) or prohistamai (care for), and kopiao (work hard). It seems easy to see a difference in specificity between caring for the needs of church members on one hand, and working hard (kopiao) which is vague; kopiao seems rather more a term for the manner of carrying out other clear elder functions. With these thoughts in mind we may proceed to the substance of the discussion. Protestant church order and organization manuals repeatedly make the point that elder, pastor and overseer/bishop are used interchangeably of the same persons or groups of church leaders, often as an alternative to the Catholic and Anglican elevation of bishops as a separate office from elder, for which there is no clear New Testament authority. There is also common agreement that this point issues from the use of all three terms by Paul for the 658 BAGD, p. 878, under meaning 4: “exceptional effects produced by divine grace . . . powers and capabilities . . . hardly to be differentiated from dunamis (power).” 659 Although Strauch alludes to and discusses most of the functional terms, he does not assemble them as I am attempting to do here; cf. Biblical Eldership, pp. 161-180, for his fullest treatment of the terms.

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same group of leaders addressed in Acts 20, and in the interchangeable use of the terms for elders and overseers in Titus 1:5-7. The three gift-functions are not divisible or separable, but are themselves terms for one group of leaders who are generically called “elders”; of these three primary terms, one is the generic name (elder) and the other two are basic but not the only functions. In reality, then, when any of these terms or other synonyms and related language occurs in lists of charisms, there is reason to believe they too belong to the gift-powers spread through the church by the Holy Spirit, and are not merely appointed, perpetual offices. This is due to the way the terms are interchanged and varied in the texts viewed as a whole; the discussion following will show how this is the case. Five (5) primary, repeated terms can be identified for major church leaders and functionaries at the local or regional church level; other terms noted above complement, expand or extend, or (potentially) add new meanings. The most widely used660 is elder/ presbuteros (thought not by Paul) along with its related word-group including presbuterion (a group, council or body of elders with local oversight responsibilities), presbutes (old man, ambassador), presbutis (old woman), and presbeuo (be or work as an ambassador or envoy).661 This remark, however, can only be made because of the quantity of uses in Acts. While age is not a specified criterion for eldership, the qualifications lists do suggest an appreciable range and quantity of experience in several aspects of life. A closely related term is teacher (didaskalos), occurring 7x in Acts, and 9x in the epistles; not all uses in Acts’ refer to church teachers. The word-group for teacher includes didaskalia/teaching occurring only in the Pastoral Epistles, but not in Acts, and didasko/teach, used for church teachers in Acts and epistles apart from Jesus or apostles, occurs about 11x.662 Another set of terms, less used than the presbuteros group,663 is the word-group for overseer including episcopos (overseer, guardian, superintendent, “bishop”), episcopeo (take care of, oversee, care for), and episcopa (divine visitation, position of overseer).664 A notably overlooked term, prohistemi/lead/govern and its relative prohistamai/care for,665 is used parallel to and as a substitute for elder or leader, and as a functional description for elders.666 The root occurs only as a noun or participle or infinitive, appearing 6x in elder connections in Paul’s letters—more frequently than “elder” in Paul, though not in Acts. Its senses include 660 Presbuteros alone occurs c 21x in Acts and epistles for Christian church elders. That it is the most widely used can only be said because of its high frequency in Acts which was written after Paul’s death, not because Paul himself uses it frequently. 661 This basic lexical information is from BAGD, pp 699-700. The Greek, and the Jewish use of this terminology for the leader of Israel in the first and second temple periods, is gathered by G. Bornkamm, “presbus,” TDNT 6:651-682. 662 BAGD, p. 191 663 Episcopos occurs alone c 5x only in Acts and epistles. By including episkopeo and episcope, 5 more total uses are added, amounting to 10x for the word group. 664 BAGD, pp. 298-299; the entry sometimes uses the term “office” for the meaning comment. The term is not used herein to avoid confusion. The use of “office” is not substantial to the meanings indentified. See also H. Beyer, episkeptomai,” TDNT 2:599-621. 665 So Louw and Nida, A Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 2 vols (New York: American Bible Society, 1988), 1:459, 465, suggest that the actual verbal form is (at least in some cases) prohistamai/take care of, care for. Cf. L-S, pp. 1482-1483, where they find this care-giving meaning under prohistami without appeal to prohistamai, howbeit with a passive rather than active sense. 666 BAGD, p. 707. B. Reiche, “prohistami,” TDNT 6:700-703, also reports these and several other meanings; he too thinks the most important and relevant meanings are those expressing care or caring.

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preside, lead, conduct, direct, govern, protect, care for, the last meaning being carried more fully by prohistamai. In the Septuagint the related masculine noun is entirely a term of political governing and denotes an official or governor. It’s close association with elders in the New Testament merits careful attention, especially because it occurs as a participle in the gift list of Romans 12:8, although near the end of the list. A fifth major term is pastor/poimen (shepherd, sheep-herder) with its related verb (poimaino, herd, tend a flock, shepherd). The term is nearly short-suited in Acts and epistles compared to its wide and standard use in the apostolic fathers and throughout Christian history: the noun occurs only 2x, while the verb occurs 4x in Acts as an activity of church leaders. As noted above, the largest scope would be to consider all leadership gift terms from the several types of passages identified previously. However, since the argument here is that elder leadership functions are charisms of the Holy Spirit and not all terms have equal value for defining functions, it seems satisfactory to begin with the use of these terms in charisma lists and then expand the discussion to other leadership terms which are clearly or seem likely to be related. The minor terms will be discussed further below. Primary Elder Terms Inside and Outside the Gift Lists Terms for leaders occur in the gift lists with bewildering variations in order of appearance and consistency, and even in their presence or absence from the lists. Several terms recur in gift-lists, but others do not. This should not deter a study like this from attempting a synthesis, even though unevenness in use of the terms requires cautious conclusions. On the whole, it appears that the noted variation in terminology bespeaks a broad mixture of basic and other functional terms for elders in the early churches. This variety and interchangeability makes it impossible to limit one’s thinking about elder leadership to one word group like presbuteros. The interface of terms outlined above and discussed in some detail below is like the relation of interlocking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle: one needs all the pieces to see the whole picture. For example, persons Luke usually calls “elders,” are referred to by Paul with several terms. It might seem unwarranted to say that “elder” is the cover word for four or more other leader terms; but interlacing and overlapping of the terms does point in that direction. In some cases, it may have been only a matter of time before certain functional leaders, called at first by terms like “laborers among you,” “those who lead you,” or “those who instruct you (all in 1 Thes 5:12),” came to be called “elders.” One can see this happening with a term like “those who lead you (prohistami),” since in 1 Timothy 5:17 it is interchanged as a functional synonym with elders/presbuteroi. So the terms need to be surveyed, even though with something short of absolute exhaustiveness and precise sifting of every possible detail, to see how these variations actually describe the work of elders. The following are the major leader terms and synonyms in relation to the charisma gift lists. Elder. Presbuteros is not found in the charisma/gift lists, but in 1 Timothy 5:17 it is notably important because the gift is divided into its ruling/caring function (prohistemi) and its teaching/instructing function (didaskalia). While “elder” does not itself occur in a gift list, its functional synonym prohistami does (Rom 12:8). Presbuteros is also significant in Titus 1:5 where it is interchanged with episcopos (1:5, 7) in a striking equation. Presbuteros 388

is the basic leader-term and episcopos one of the ways to describe its activity. Peter (1 Pet 5:1) uses presbuteros in plural, but includes a reference to himself as a “fellow-elder.” Here too, “elder” is followed by another functional term for elder, i.e., “shepherd/pastor,” expressed as a verb (poimaino). But in the next verse, Peter follows again with a second use of the episcop- group, this time the verb (episcopeo). This suggests in parallel to Titus 1:5-7 that presbuteros was gradually becoming the base term with the other parallel nouns and verbals as functional descriptions for aspects of their work. These interchanges and functionalisms illustrate the flexibility of the terms. James’ use of “elders” in 5:14 is mainly about certain elder practices, using presbuteros in plural as often elsewhere. The group term presbuterion (group of elders) is used in 1 Timothy 4:14 of a group who laid their hands on Timothy at his ordination. The more frequent use of plural presbuteros in Acts shows how normally elders are viewed as a body in which final authority rests. It would have been unusual for Greeks or Jews to think of an individual, isolated elder with final authority, since elders usually appear in groups. Paul’s reserve in using presbuteros is all the more striking since Acts uses it with regularity (17x covering Jewish and Christian elders). Its infrequency in Paul could be a peculiarity of the local conditions Paul addresses as at Corinth where only very limited leadership terms appear (16:16: diakonia, sunergeo and kopiao), and at Thessalonica where leadership terms are also limited (1 Thes 5:12: kopiontas, laborers; proistamenous, leaders/ elders; nouthetountas, admonishers, instructors); in none of the Corinthian or Thessalonian letters is presbuteros used. Does this mean Paul wished to steer clear in certain situations of any use of presbuteros out of caution—perhaps about too much likeness of Gentile churches to Jewish synagogues, at least in the early period? Or did he avoid presbuteros simply out of preference for more functional terms like prohistemi or poiman? Or, again, was he merely being cautious about heavily weighted honorific connotations, especially in a place like Corinth where there was already a division over social status of members? However these questions may be answered, three functional elder terms noted above are found in gift lists, making it clear that this leadership charisma was thought of as a work of the Holy Spirit. The three terms are pastor (poiman), teacher (didaskalos) and leader (prohistemi).

Having noted that the texts consider prophecy as the revelatory gift, there is nonetheless overlap between prophecy and teaching just as between apostle and prophet. While it would be satisfying to be able to note a clean discreteness between each leadership gift, such a clean distinction is doubtful. Just as E. Ellis has shown how prophecy and teaching overlap, so the overlap of eldership and teaching will emerge in the ensuing discussion.667 Generally, then, the New Testament use of leader-terms and gifts disturbs any attempt to argue for categorical distinctions between each of the leadership functions by terms alone. Teacher. “Teacher” is more frequent in Paul’s gift lists than “pastor,” occurring in the two lists of 1 Corinthians 12:28, 29 respectively, and in Ephesians 4:11. This frequency may reflect the urgency of grounding congregations in essential apostolic doctrinal and moral teaching; or it may involve actual early threats to doctrinal soundness which is viewed with great urgency in the Pastoral Epistles as an elder concern. In all three passages

667

Ellis, Prophecy and Hermeneutic in Early Christianity, pp. 129-144.

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it occurs after prophets (1 Cor 12:28: apostles, prophets, teachers; 1 Cor 12:29: apostles, prophets, teachers; Eph 4:11 apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers). In Romans 12:7 “teaching” is listed third after prophecy and deaconing—again in a charisma giftlist. It is unlikely that “teacher” is precisely equivalent to “pastor,” but there is certainly a substantial overlap and coordination as Ephesians 4:11 shows (“pastor-teachers”). The linkage of teaching with elders is clear in 1 Timothy 5:17 (“elders . . . who labor in preaching and teaching . . .”) and Ephesians 4:11 (“pastor-teachers”). In Greek traditions, “teacher” is equal to “schoolmaster,” or “choirmaster.” For Greeks, teacher/teaching was an entirely intellectual and rational function of school or choir instructors in which “teacher” refers to one who instructs in specific technical skills like reading, fighting or music, and usually for pay. In contrast, Jewish teachers of Paul’s time were rather Scripture instructors and expounders of its meaning as well as of the derived wisdom and knowledge of the ways of God with man.668 In the New Testament, “teacher” seems to be used mainly for those leaders who expounded Old Testament Scriptures, coordinated the Old Testament with apostolic oral traditions about Jesus (which eventually became the gospels and epistles), and explained the apostolic-prophetic teaching in the churches. Jesus is called teacher in the Jewish sense; instances in Paul reflect the same Jewish usage. The Jewish sense is visible in the Pastoral Epistles, where “teaching (didaskalia)” is thought of as “sound doctrine.” Teachers are church leaders gifted by the Spirit who explain the doctrine of Christianity and moral life of believers. A touch of the Greek idea may be seen in Paul’s use of the term since teacher and teaching seem to refer to a rational explanation of Scripture and the apostolic traditions. While “teaching” is a charisma, there are few signs that their words were revealed teaching in the sense that prophecy is direct revelation; still, this is the case when the gifts of apostle or prophet combine with teacher as, for example in Acts 13:1-3 where a specific (prophetic) revelation by the Holy Spirit is noted. References to didaskalia/teaching in the Pastoral Epistles (14x; but only 4x elsewhere in Paul) suggest exposition of Scripture and apostolic oral tradition; 2 Timothy 3:16: “Scripture is inspired by God and profitable . . .”; Romans 15:4: whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction (didaskalia); 1 Timothy 6:3 (cf 2 Thes 2:15): moral teaching of Paul and Jesus (cf 1 Tim 1:10); 1 Timothy 4:3-6: Paul’s teaching about eating with thanksgiving; 1 Timothy 1:10: moral instruction with a list of evils to be avoided. Teaching sometimes takes the form of exhorting and encouraging (1 Tim 4:13; 1 Tim 6:2; Titus 1:9). These texts suggest the work of teachers was explaining Scriptural or apostolic material, especially moral and doctrinal teaching. The Pastoral Epistles’ warnings about false doctrine/teaching point to the same. The two uses of katacheo in Paul (Gal 6:6; 1 Cor 14:19) do not appear to add any further insight to that available from the didask- group, although the verb’s meanings tip to the rational side: “report, give information, instruct”669; katacheo became the regular term for instruction of converts in the second century and beyond. Even though the work of teachers and teaching elders was substantially a reasoned exposition of doctrine and morals or ethics from Scriptural and apostolic oral traditions, it was nonetheless a special divine charisma in local churches or groups of churches. Katecho in Galatians 6:6 may suggest very limited elder functions about the time of Acts 14;



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668 669

K. Rengstorf, “didasko,” etc, TDNT 2:148-157. BAGD, p. 423.

only teaching is referred to in Galatians. Katacheo in 1 Corinthians 14:19 examplifies the rational character of its activity: five words with the mind (vous) are better than many words with a “tongue.”

Episcopos. Episcopos (overseer) instead of presbuteros (elder) is paired with deacons in Philippians 1:1 with no clues on function except its common meaning of “overseer.” In 1 Timothy 3:1, however, “overseer” is the object of human seeking/desiring (orego, aspire to, strive from desire, stretch oneself).670 Paul’s expression in 1 Timothy 3:1 is capable of the inference that episcopos might be an office to be sought after all. On the other hand, it does not have to be seen this way, but merely as visibly existing in some gifted people and therefore admired, honored and desired by others. Despite this possibility, nothing here requires an inference about a permanent office separate from, emerging from, and higher than elder. In the only other instance of episcopos in the epistles (Titus 1:7), the term is used alone except for the list of moral and spiritual qualifications that follows. The qualifications are substantially the same as in 1 Timothy 3:1-7, which illustrates another case of overlap. Conzelmann’s suggestion, that the singular of episcopos might be a hint toward multiple elders under the leadership of a single bishop, seems overdrawn and too much guided by later church tradition. Actually, Paul uses the plural episcopoi in Philippians 1:1 as does Luke in Acts 20:28 (Paul’s speech). No patterned or intended distinction between plurals and singulars seems visible, unless one wishes to infer it from the two singulars for “overseer” in 1 Timothy 3:2 and Titus1:7; such an inference seems very uncertain, however, especially considering the likelihood that Paul is using the singular generically as a rhetorical substitute for the plural. Oversight of a congregation demands that a leader keep his eye open to the whole congregation and its life. Leader. The case of prohistami is more complicated. (1) The surest place to start is 1 Timothy 5:17-18 where prohistami occurs as an adjectival participle modifying presbuteos—a “ruling” elder. The modifier seems to refer to one function of an elder—to rule, direct, govern, care for671—or perhaps a special class of elders who work the rulingcaring aspect of eldership; it is also modified by kalos—those who do it well, suggesting that some do it poorly or ineffectively. The sequel in 5:19-20 follows the implication that some bad elders had arisen and were objects of accusation by congregation members; only with two or three witnesses may such accusations be considered. (2) Other elders “labor in . . . teaching (5:17b).” Thus two elder functions appear. Since prohistami describes one function of elders, it would seem correct to recognize prohistami as an elder term when used alone (Rom 12:8), just as it would be to recognize “teacher/teaching” and “overseer” as an elder function. (3) 1 Thessalonians 5:12, “those who govern (prohistami),” also uses a participle form of the verb, now as a noun substituting for presbuteros, but still thinking of a body of elders who govern the congregation(s). Here too, it is puzzling that Paul does not use presbuteros straightforwardly. One wonders if he was avoiding it for one of the special reasons suggested above. (4) Three uses of prohistami in 1 Timothy 3 refer to both overseers (episcopos) and deacons in a functional sense. But the function of overseers here is leading (caring for, leading, governing) their own homes, else they cannot

670 671

BAGD, pp. 579-580. G. Knight, Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), p. 231.

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“care for (epimelasetai, care for) the church of God (3:4b)”—an obvious elder-function term. Prohistemi is defined by substituting a specific care-giving synomym in “care for,”672 which is not the case when used in 5:12 for deacons, thus differentiating the two gifts. In using a synonym for prohistami, the direction is toward “caring for,” not the stronger “rule” or “govern.” It is tempting to think that “caring for” is the more dominant meaning of prohistami elsewhere as well—an implication that would nudge the meaning toward the helpful, redeeming-in-love aspect of leadership and away from the power/ruling sense.673 (5) From these uses, it is a small step to Romans 12:8 where prohistami (participle) occurs in a charisma list along with prophecy, deaconing, teaching, encouraging, giving and mercying. It falls next to last in this list—before “showing mercy.” Despite the speculation above about the meaning of the order of gifts in 1 Corinthians 12:28, 29, the placement of prohistami near the end of the list is probably no more significant than placing prophecy far down a gift list in 1 Corinthians 12:10 (with five gifts ahead of it), and then second in 12:28, 29 and Ephesians 4:11. However this may be, it is certainly a term for eldering in Romans 12:6. The Romans gift list is no exception to Paul’s unexplained avoidance of presbuteros in Thessalonians, Galatians and Corinthians. Hence, eldering, whether described with its basic term (elder) or with a functional substitute, is a Spirit charisma arising out of the giving of God, and not from any notion of a predetermined perpetual office. Pastors. “Pastor” is fourth in the order of gifts in Ephesians 4:11, but does not appear in the three lists of 1 Corinthians 12 or that of Romans 12. Apparently Corinth as yet had no elder-pastors, and the leadership for the moment was limited to people called prophets and deacons (the latter with unclear sense). A functional deacon ministry appears to have been done by the “house of Stephanus (16:15)”; but the text may be speaking in a very general way rather than of deaconing in a more limited monetary or sustenance-distribution sense. There was some leadership “ministry” at Corinth, but there is not enough here to tell us much about it. With the appearance of “pastor” in the gift-list of Ephesians 4:11, there is solid ground for our thesis: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors (poiman) and teachers are gifts, not offices. The terms pastor and teacher are joined by “and” with a definite article only before “pastors,” but not repeated before “teachers,” indicating that Paul thought of them as a unified function, even if not exactly identical.

Less Frequent Functional Leadership Terms Several terms with elder-like functions appear in more or less isolated texts. These terms depict leader functions even if “elder” is not directly mentioned; some, but not all of the same terms are used in the gift lists while others are associated with elders in the Jewish cultural context; within the range of Jewish connotations is the connection of elders with judging and wisdom.674 This enlarged sketch of connotations and social associations 672 BAGD, p. 296. 673 This is also the direction of B. Reiche’s study of prohistami in his TDNT (6:700-703) article where he notes that governing and caring are to be coordinated rather than opposed. This would yield the sense, “caring governance.” 674 G. Bornkamm, “presbuteros,” etc, pp. 657-661, esp. p. 660.

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opens a window to recognizing the use of such terms as wise man and judge for elder functions. The most striking passage is 1 Corinthians 6:3-5—striking because it deals with a particular case in the Corinthian church and because Paul pleadingly asks whether there is not even one man—let alone several—sufficiently wise among them to judge the situation; he expects the church to be its own judiciary rather than taking the case to a civil court where it does not belong. Wisdom to judge was certainly within the realm of elder functions in Judaism in Paul’s time;675 he expects the Corinthians to find a man of wisdom and justice among them to deal with the case. There is no mention of an elder in the text, but the functions are urged. In a way, this should not be surprising since Paul may not have as yet appointed elders in this church, perhaps for one of the reasons suggested above. The implication is that elder-judges should arise within the local congregations through the work of the Spirit, with or without apostolic appointment. Among other terms for congregational leadership, the most frequent is “labor” as in “those who labor among you (kopiontes [present participle of kopioo]).” Its close association with presbuteros (1 Tim 5:17) and prohistami (1 Thes 5:12), and its repetition to denote a group of leaders distinguished from congregations—in one case by a named individual (Stephanus in 1 Cor 16:15-16)—indicates its importance, despite lack of functional clarity. The verb means “work hard, toil, strive, struggle,” and sometimes “become weary, tired.” Paul knows that leadership of congregations is arduous and wearisome when done to fulfill the multiple functions of elders. Beyond this rather generalized meaning, however, it is not a particularly telling term for leadership if judged by whether it furnishes a clear functional picture.

The earliest use of kopioo is in 1 Thessalonians 5:12 where it is followed by a form of prohistami (lead, care for), the elder term of Romans 12:8 and 1Timothy 5:17 discussed above. The two terms are joined by “and (kai)” without a repeated definite article, suggesting that prohistami is a further, perhaps clearer description of kopioo. In Romans 16:6, 12 kopioo occurs 3x referring to the labors of four women (Mary, Tryphaena, Tryphosa and Persis) in the Roman churches. In 1 Corinthians 16:16 kopioo and sunergeo (work together) refer to Stephanas, the “firstfruit” of Asia to whom the Corinthian church owes subjection along with other workers and “laborers” among them. This kind of thought suggests elder-leadership even though “elder” is not used. Finally, the appearance of kopiao in 1 Timothy 5:17 meaning “those who labor” as elders (both presbuteroi and proestotes [perfect participle of prohistami] used with it) of the Ephesian churches shows its importance. This elder-function use in direct overlap with two other elder terms is suggestive for the elder-connection of kopioo. Elders and leaders labor in the word and in teaching (1 Thes 5:12). What form of “the word” he has in mind is not clear, but we may rightly think of the Old Testament, and the apostolic preaching and teaching traditions. The meanings of kopiao suggest something of a vocation and its labors, but no reference to compensation is visible. Still, this concept of elder work refers to its cost in time and energy.

There are other terms. Closely related to kopioo is the term sunergos and the related verb, sunergeo. These words also denote work, but connote work as purposeful; they suggest

675

Ibid.

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productivity and human gain for both agent and beneficiary. Still another term with “the word” as direct object is apodosontes—those who “give out” or “give account” of the word (Heb 13:17). Since this term includes teaching “the word,” it also appears to refer to elders, even though “elder” does not occur in Hebrews 13:17 either. 1 Timothy 5:17 recognizes this as another term of elder teaching activity. Also denoting the ruling and governing side of elder activity is hageomai meaning “govern,” “manage,” or “rule” as in its use for Roman provincial governors. The verb hageomai (govern, rule) is used twice in Hebrews (13:7, 17) and overlaps with the ruling sense of prohistami (rule, take care of, care for). On the caring side are three more terms which move the practice of eldering toward the loving, helping and supporting work of elders; they are close in sense to episkopos. The three, each used once for leaders, are noutheteo (1 Thes 5:12 [with prohistami]: admonish, warn, instruct), agrupneo (Heb 13:17: keep watch, guard, take care of/for) and epimeleomai (1 Tim 3:4: take care of). Another term related to this group is paraklasis (comfort, exhortation, urging, encouragement, admonishing); it occurs in the gift list at Roman 12:8 with its verb; cf 1 Tim 4:13; 6:2). These three elder-caring terms describe a mollifying and comforting side of elder ministry. This language too seems to describe elder-ministry, even if one cannot strictly prove the terms are interchangeable with other elder terms. Some older European treatments of church “offices” and leadership make the “power” of the church the primary description of its nature as does the classical Presbyterian ecclesiologist, James Bannerman.676 Bannerman’s title itself conveys how firmly he thinks of the church as a power structure—a kind of government within civil government, to which he also devotes much space in the first of his two volumes on the church. The present essay on leadership and charisma points rather to a charisma-driven leadership of the church in which its ministry balances Spirit-guided elder rule with Spirit- guided elder care, each with its own array of synonyms. The New Testament picture seems closest to the Presbyterian style of eldership, but it is not strong on Bannerman’s power connotations. In this kind of church administration, a body of elders emerging within local churches ministers in each local church. Their larger activities include meetings with regional elders to discuss theological and practical issues affecting any larger fellowship of churches, on which see Essay X below. Principles and Issues of Elder Ministry

The New Testament terminology for the five gifts of Ephesians 4:11 refers to church leadership functions during the apostolic age in broad outline. Terms for leaders with various gifts and functions are included in the New Testament’s vocabulary and its varied pictures of how church leadership functions. Further questions remain, however, on details. Some can be answered more or less fully; others elude definitive answers, and 676 Bannerman, The Church, passim. The full title of the two-volume work includes the “Powers, Ordinances, Discipline and Government of the Christian Church.” He repeatedly speaks of its divinely ordained power and its nature as a “visible kingdom,” in which Christ “is personally present,” as its Ruler and Originator, and the giver of its ordinances, laws and authority (pp. 208-209); this kind of description is repeated often and in many sections of the work.

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still others are controversial and remain unresolved. The following sketch outlines most of what we can know. Having indicated that the New Testament pattern of leadership gifts and functions seems to point to a form of church order close to Presbyterianism, I shall interact somewhat in what follows with the nineteenth century Presbyterian ecclesiologist James Bannerman; these interactions will suggest some ways in which he seems to be on the right track biblically and other ways in which his power-heavy emphasis can be modified for the better. The sketch below may seem idealistic and impractical if one attempts to enforce every detail in a local or larger church setting, and especially if one tries to insist that all elders must have all the functional gifts. Often the best we can do is approximate the ideal; but we should certainly pray and work for it. Temporary and Permanent Gifts. The viewpoint here is that the gifts of apostle and prophet, though sometimes coupled together without adding “evangelist” or an elder term or function, were extraordinary gifts and intended to be temporary. They were in operation for about the first century. The reasons for their limitation to the first century were several, all relating to Israel’s crisis situation and the critical period of the church’s origin. Apostles provided original eyewitness testimony to Jesus’ ministry, resurrection and postresurrection appearances; their work included evangelism and the beginnings of the church. Fledgling churches needed apostles’s extraordinary powers of miracle, preaching, teaching and stabilization to move beyond infancy to a workable level of maturity and stability. High level concern for the well-being, spiritual growth and stability of fledgling churches can be seen in most of the New Testament epistles. Another aspect of the apostles’ special power was their testimony to Israel in adaptation and accommodation to its education by the Lord in signs and wonders throughout its history. The gift of prophecy on the other hand existed to convey new revelation in the apostolic period and, contributed to an eventual written or “inscripturated” form of apostolic-prophetic teaching analogous to the written Old Testament, i.e., the New Testament. Prophets were also the avenue of direct divine guidance amid the threats and struggles of a new beginning. Bannerman thought the right distinction was between temporary gifts like those listed in 1 Corinthians 12, and permanent offices like elder and deacon. This form of the distinction seems unworkable since several terms for what he thought to be permanent offices are also in the gift lists of 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12 and Ephesians 4. For more on this distinction between the permanent and passing in Spirit gifts, readers can refer to Essay V in this collection. What emerges, in general agreement with Bannerman and the Calvinist ecclesiological tradition, is that the permanent leadership gift is that of elder and its various forms and functions. The primacy of elder ministry is encouraged further by the reality that apostles did not appoint successor apostles, but elders—another factor in the temporary intent of the apostle-prophet; it appears that elders did seek gifted successorelders. The same is true of prophets: they did not appoint successor prophets—or at least there is no evidence of it—but seem to have allowed their gift to pass to gifted teachers, especially for the expounding of written prophetic (Old Testament) or apostolic (New Testament) traditions. Finally, Paul, using prophecy, tongues and (prophetic) knowledge as cases in point, says realistically that when the church matures, these gifts will cease (1 Cor 13). Elder Functions and Activities. Elder functions and activities can be summarized in a brief outline guided by the varied biblical terms. The puzzling question of why we have 395

lists of qualifications for elders, but no lists of functions is answered, at least potentially, by the functional terms discussed above: the varied terms for elder quite simply describe their functions. (1) Evangelism. Since Timothy’s functional gifts included preaching and teaching (apparently), and administration and governance (several forms of the gift of elder), and since he also possessed the gift of evangelism (2 Tim 4:5), it is probably safe to assume that some elders will have the gift of evangelism. To judge by its modest appearance in the New Testament, it may be a relatively rare gift. (2) Teaching and Exhorting. Elders expounded and explained the prophetic and apostolic traditions. “Building” or “edifying” was a goal of this activity; it included working for numerical and qualitative growth of congregations. Teaching content included doctrine, the new spiritual life, and morals and ethics—the entire pattern of apostolic thought, supported all possible from Old Testament texts. It is unrealistic to insist that all elders be teachers as is sometimes argued from “apt to teach” (1 Tim 3:2; 2 Tim 2:24), since the meaning of the term is more exactly “well-taught (on which see below and Appendix A).” A special aspect of teaching is watchfulness for error and correction of mis-guided theological ideas.677 (3) Governing. Some elders in the New Testament era were governing, ruling or supervising elders; they probably dealt with issues of organization and management. The Ephesian elders were charged by Paul with governing the theological life of congregations (Acts 20); they also probably interacted with expositions of biblical traditions by other teaching elders. Moral discipline could be thought of under this function or under judging.678 (4) Judging. Closely related to governing, this function appears in the Corinthian dispute (1 Cor 6). Paul expected one “wise man,” or perhaps several, to emerge at Corinth who would be able to adjudicate the congregations’ dispute which they had decided to take to a civil court; the mention of a local civil court itself implies the judicial elder function. On any reckoning, this text establishes the principle of churches as judiciaries and courts for resolving disputes or (quasi-) openly immoral actions (the incestuous man). The Corinthian case again illustrates one or several with the gift-function. (5) Caring/succoring. One group of functional elder terms is about the watchfulness of elders over congregational pains and afflictions and other kinds of suffering or disfunction; the most specific term for this aspect is metameleomai (care for, 1 Tim 3:5) where it is parallel to prohistami in the same verse and likened to care for ones family (house oikos). This side of eldering softens the more forceful side of governing, judging or ruling by concentrating on where the individuals or families or social groups in a congregation are hurting, hungry, sick, poor or untaught; personal counseling, professional or personal, seems to belong to this function in the modern world. (6) Ordaining. 1 Timothy 4:14 refers to elders “ordaining” Timothy. In other scenes of appointment or recognition in Acts, a group of elder-apostles administer this function. Hence the principle is—elders ordain more elders. Considering these activities as a whole, functions like ordaining or being welltaught are whole-group activities. However, all functions need not be present in every

Strauch, Biblical Eldership, stresses this repeatedly, perhaps too strongly. 678 An important study of church discipline is the recent doctoral dissertation of R. Renberg, “Courageous Leadership: A Model of Church Discipline for Grace Churches in America,” Ph. D. diss., Trinity Theological Seminary, Newberg IN, 2005, pp. 49-80. Renberg sees judging and governing as major functions of elders in the early churches. 677

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elder per congregation as the division of labor in 1 Timothy 5:17 and the one-or-morejudges of 1 Corinthians 6:4-5 show. Some functions may be rare and limited to one or two elders. No severe demands are visible to suggest that all be able to do all functions equally or equally well; perhaps the basics for all would be desire and being well-taught along with at least one other more specific gift-function. An implication of several functions is the need for some basic kind of education or training once the gift is known (well-taught). Another implication of several functions is that learning by practicing one function or more in the life of a congregation is intrinsic in the presence of the gifts. Some gift-functions may be communicable or exemplary to others, and may inspire or stimulate the awakening of that gift-function in other fellow-elders. Encouragement in varied gift-ministries among the group seems within the spirit of the elder group. Watchfulness for abuse or misuse of a gift-function, or even moral lapse, is certainly implied in 1 Timothy 5:17ff. Attention to doctrinal deviation also seems implied and is explicit in various texts of the Pastoral Epistles and in Paul’s elder-speech of Acts 20. Paul thought deviations could arise even among the Ephesian elders (Acts 20). In all, awareness and sensitivity to others’ gifts among the elders seems suggested by functional variations working under the principles of love, forbearance and deference. Qualifications. At least four kinds of qualifications can be drawn from the New Testament. (1) Eldering ought to be a matter of serious desire (1 Tim 3:1). In this text the human side is visible. Eldering as gift of the Spirit and human desire for the task (NIV) are not incompatible; that is, desire should be viewed as itself induced by the Spirit if united with the other specified functions and qualifications. (2) Some form or forms of the above elder functions, spread over a period of time, should be visible in a potential candidate, i.e., someone desiring to be an elder should show abilities in at least one elder function; this is suggested by Paul’s caution about novices. It is only realistic to recognize that some elders will be more gifted in one or two or more functions, others in most of the functions, and some will have different bearings on the same function(s) as others with their gift. The assumption that individual elders may have different functional gifts seems supported by 1 Timothy 5:17 and by the plea for at least a single judge at Corinth (1 Cor 6:5). (3) Rather stringent moral and social qualifications appear in the lists of 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1: above reproach, monogamous, moderate, self-controlled, respected, hospitable, gentle, peaceful, free from greed, and a well-ordered family life; Titus 1:9 adds the ability to correct opposers of sound doctrine.679 (4) A qualification somewhat difficult to pin down is “apt to teach (1 Tim 3:2).” The phrase is sometimes taken to mean “able to teach,” meaning able to publicly teach. But it seems too much—in light of the division of labors in 1 Timothy 5:17—to expect that every elder function should have such an added, uniform qualification, while the spread of elder functions discourages such a rule.680 Rather, a case can be made from the form of the word for teach (didaktikon) that it means “taught,” i.e., knowledgeable of the Old Testament and apostolic traditions, and able to articulate Strauch, Biblical Eldership, discusses the terms of the qualification lists in considerable detail; he is moderate on controversial details of monogamy, elders’ children, and use of alchol. 680 R. Tucker, “Our Understanding of Elder Traits,” Truth, Summer 2011, pp. 8-13, discusses elder qualifications in the Timothy and Titus texts; with Strauch he recognizes the difficulties of a rigid legalistic reading of qualifications texts. This brief article also advances discussion of eldership in the grace movement. 679

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the basic ideas of the faith along with its morals and ethics. This would be a workable knowledge standard for all elders, since all the functions assume this basic requirement for effective service in church leadership.681 Recognition and Appointment. As with human desire for the gift and its functions, so with recognition and appointment; these are human factors in the emergence of elders, but not incompatible with the work of the Holy Spirit in bestowing gifts. In a thoughtful treatment of the question of appointment, C. MacDonald argues that the apostolic way is a kind of unilateral appointment rather than by election in the fashion of the democratic West. Within the Grace Fellowship this discussion is appropriate and needful since Charles Baker left certain aspects of church order without detailed treatment. MacDonald’s treatment is a needed expansion of the church government discussion within our movement just as R. Renberg’s dissertation is a needed expansion of any denominational thought about church discipline. MacDonald’s emphasis is on a more or less unilateral appointment of elders. He notes that Paul ordained elders in the churches of his first mission tour (Acts 14:23) and instructs Titus to establish (“ordain”?) elders in every city on the Mediterranean island of Crete (Titus 1:5).682 The biblical scenes are somewhat scanty in details. The Titus text does sound unilateral. But in the appointment scene in Acts 14:23, the Greek word for “appointed” means “elect by raising hands (cheirotoneo).”683 MacDonald thinks that despite the suggestion of the term, the main import is appointment by the two apostles; this seems correct. And yet the Greek participle cheirotonasantes is adverbial and probably denotes the means or manner of the main verb, “they committed them to the Lord.” It is correct to say they were not elected by the congregation(s) at hand as in the modern democratic world; but it seems unnecessary to dismiss the implications of the term. MacDonald acknowledges, however, that congregational approval may be appropriate; it is correct to say that whatever happened here, there was probably an approving action by Christians raising hands. The phrase may be translated, “and having made appointments by a show of hands . . . .” The scene suggests that MacDonald’s point seems to need some qualification—some kind of group approval or concurrence. This aside, however, appointment seems to have been the means of establishing elders. Acts 16:2 is also clear evidence that Timothy’s appointment by Paul to (elder?) mission service was in consultation with or approval of a group of “brothers.” And the analogy of the choice of deacon candidates by “the body of disciples,” with confirmation and final appointment by 681 The detailed reasons for this reading of the text are discussed in Appendix A at the end of this essay. 682 C. MacDonald, “Church Government,” Truth, April 1993, pp. 4-5; June, 1993, pp. 4-5. 683 BAGD, p. 881, with a brief discussion in which they note among other things, “. . . the presbyters in Lycaonia and Pisidia were not chosen by the congregations,” but by Paul and Barnabas. But the use of this verb does suggest at least an approval by local Christians. Calvin, Acts of the Apostles, 2 vols, trans J. Fraser (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) 2:19, was probably first among Reformation era commentators to note this verb and its significance. Since the Greek verb was used in Paul’s era for election of officials (see C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, 1-14 [London: T & T Clark, 1994], p. 687, for Greek sources), it is probably right to see at least an approval action by regional or local Christians. Barrett does seem to support MacDonald’s emphasis, however. Calvin probably saw the significance of the participle as a kind of “democratic” counter-concept to the authority of bishops—a movement already underway in Catholicism in the late Middle Ages as a counter-poise among bishops to the papal absolutism of the high Middle Ages. Calvin was interested in taking this principle a step farther to limit bishops or elders under the authority of congregations.

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the apostles, is also significant (Acts 6:5-6). The indications are that while appointments were by apostle-elders, there is a pattern of larger concurrence as well, including recognized spiritual and moral qualities (Acts 6:3, 6). Ordination of Elders. MacDonald rightly insists on this point as well. The primary text is 1 Timothy 4:14: “Do not neglect the gift that you have, which was given you by prophetic utterance when the elders laid their hands upon you (my italics).” By almost any measure, laying-on of hands was an act of recognition and approval, if not of empowerment for ministry by the Ephesian elders—the same body as Paul addressed in Acts 20. Other scenes of the onset of approved ministry by apostle-elders have the same reference to laying on of hands as in the cases of Paul with Timothy (2 Tim 1:6) and the deacons of Acts 6:1-6. Ceremonial activity also accompanied Paul and Barnabas’ establishment of the elders in Acts 14:23 (prayer and fasting). Paul cautions Timothy (1 Tim 5:22) about not laying hands on anyone hastily—a caution consistent with the functions and qualifications for elders, thus suggesting a time of trial or experience for new elders before ordination. Several elements in these passages—and the texts on appointment above—suggest caution in recognizing new elders. Laying-on of hands was a Jewish practice and may have been borrowed and adapted to Christian elder appointments. Each scene represents some form of approval, concurrence, or recognition, and some form of ceremonial or real empowerment, even if only a prayer for blessing. Term Length and Continuation. There is no indication of limitation on the length of elder service. Apparently, once appointed it was assumed elders would serve for life. However, in 1 Timothy 5:17-20, the possibility of bad elders appears. The passage begins with “Let elders who rule well . . . ,” implying that elders who ruled badly were already known. The remark is followed in 5:19 with a reference to charges brought against elders about unspecified bad behavior. For this, Paul prescribes a procedure for which he invokes the Old Testament judicial principle requiring multiple witnesses in judging an accusation. This too assumes that the elders must sometimes act as a judiciary, as 1 Corinthians 6 provides, although in this case among themselves. These comments by Paul are not theoretical or hypothetical, as 1 Timothy 5:20 shows: “As for those (elders in the context) who persist in sin, rebuke them in the presence of all, so that the rest may stand in fear.” The goal appears to be restoration; he does not say—“remove them,” although persistence in the wrong could lead to removal or suspension. Timothy is apparently thought of as the chief elder at Ephesus, perhaps by practice of his multiple gifts of teacher and evangelist. Presumably then, some form of sin or malpractice raises a question about continuation; but permanent expulsion from ministry is not explicitly mentioned. The restoration-uponrepentance of 2 Corinthians 7:8-13 for misbehaving Christians would appear to be valid within elder bodies as well. If there are moral conditions on appointment, there also appears from this text to be a condition on continuation. Number. Elders usually appear in groups in Acts and epistles; there are few references to individual elders. Use of presbuteros (singular) in 1 Timothy 5:1 is simply for an older man as the list of social groups with age notes in the context shows. In 5:19 presbuteros is singular, but the reference is to elders generically as a class—anyone who is part of the elder group. Other singular references, for example in the epistles of John (2 Jn 1; 3 Jn 1), are to the writer as a presbuteros. In Acts all uses of presbuteros for Christian leaders are plural (c 10x), as are the other few references in the epistles. 1 Timothy 4:14’s 399

presbuterion refers to a body of leaders who act together. James 5:14 probably refers to a plurality of elders in one church as suggested by their ministry of visiting and prayer with a sick person; a body of regional elders is rather unlikely for this in-home social context. A plurality of elders per congregation, though contested by traditional Baptists, is likely in Acts’ description of “elders (plural) per church (kat’ ekklesian, singular).”684 Although multiple elders per congregation is the meaning here, larger bodies of elders appear for a city or region (Ephesus, Acts 20:17-18; “elders in every town [Titus 1:5]” seems to support the idea of multiple elders per city or region (see Essay X below). As for elders appointed by Titus on the island of Crete, there may have been only one church per town at the time of the letter. However these points are seen, Paul thinks of it in the same way he thinks of the elders of Ephesus in Acts 20: elders per city or region, which in the case of Ephesus likely involved several congregations by the time of the meeting of Acts 20. Hence, the New Testament epistles and Acts know only of bodies of elders per congregations or per cities or regions. When individual elders are mentioned, they are individuals within a ministryleadership group. There is no indication of a single elder per congregation as standard. The information we have is to the contrary; it is about the same with singlular references to “overseers.” Support. Financial support for both ruling-caring and preaching-teaching elders is indicated in 1 Timothy 5:17ff. Paul’s Old Testament text (Deut 25:4) about feeding oxen as they tread grain is the same one he uses in 1 Corinthians 9:3-12 in advocating financial support for itinerant apostles. Both elder types are to be compensated for their work, assuming they carried out their ministry “well (1 Tim 5:17).” Galatians 6:6 advocates support for teachers of the word as does 1 Timothy 5:17: elders are “. . . worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching.” Monetary compensation of itinerant apostles and settled elders is one of two uses of early church offerings. The other use is the support of worthy widows (1 Tim 5:3-16) and others in financial stress (Gal 2:10; Acts 11:29-30; 1 Cor 16:1-3; 2 Cor 8-9; Rom 15:25-29). Perhaps, by “especially” for preaching-teaching elders, he only means they should be given particularly careful attention since they would have had to devote special weekly time to study and preparation. All elders probably met regularly for their own education and discussion of issues needing decisions; it is possible that main teaching elders also needed special preparation for these meetings since it hardly seems possible that their education in apostolic theology, the Old Testament, and moral-ethical issues of the pagan world would have stopped after their appointment. Paul’s speech to the elders at Ephesus is suggestive of continued elder education, although he does not specify it. We have no such scenes apart from Paul in Acts 20. But the brief mention of well-taught elders in 1 Timothy 3:2 and the admonition of 2 Timothy 2:2 to entrust [what he had heard from Paul] “to faithful men who will be able to teach others also,” is suggestive of continuing labor in theological and practical instruction, including new elders.

684 So Barrett, Acts 1-14, p. 688; R. Rackham, Acts of the Apostles (London: Methuen, 1901), pp. 236-237; J. Munck, Acts of the Apostles (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1967); J. B. Lightfoot, St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians (London: Macmillan & Co., 1913), p. 193.

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Deacons If elder is not an office but a gift, the same is true of deacons since “deacon” is listed as a charisma in the gift-list of Romans 12:7. This gift also appears as a leadership gift along with elders/overseers in two conspicuous places in the Pauline epistles. In the first case, Paul’s letter to the Philippians is addressed not only to the whole church, but in particular to the “overseers and deacons (NIV).” In a second and more detailed instance, Paul proposes standards for deacons immediately following similar standards for overseers (1 Tim 3:813). He does not provide lists of qualifications for other gifts listed in 1 Corinthians 12, Ephesians 4, or Romans 12, or anywhere else. Unlike the terminology for elders and its parallel functional terms discussed above, “deacon” has only one basic functional term—the diakonos/diokonia/diokoneo group itself. In Greek, the verb diakoneo referred to serving meals. It did have some broader uses like “serve” in government. For menial serving, Greeks had low regard; service acquired higher value only when rendered to the state.685 Judaism, however, found nothing unworthy in serving;686 it had a long history of the goodness of serving which gave the idea a positive sense. An even broader meaning of the word-group for serving included the gods, God or other persons. Jesus several times speaks of the disciples serving each other or him. And in a significant number of instances, serving in Paul is the service of the gospel in the sense of ministering or preaching it; in such texts the gospel itself and the people who carry it are probably in view. Still, the dominant material use in the New Testament of both diakoneo and diakonia is for either food service (including management and preparation) or collecting and distributing funds for the poor. The gospels’ dominant use is for food service (c 14x of 20 uses), whereas in Paul the main application is for the collection, management and transport to Jerusalem of the fund raised among Gentile churches for poor Judean Christians. Beyer seems correct in arguing that the idea of a group of people responsible for alms of nourishment or money does not have its ultimate origin in Acts 6:2, but in the Jewish synagogue where elders had a group of subordinate workers who assisted them, even though the latter were not called “deacons” in Greek, but huperetai meaning assistants, or aides. Still, the two-group arrangement of leadership and service persons is the basic model.687 This being so, the appointment of deacons (diakonoi) to manage and serve money or meals to needy persons was only an adaptation of Jewish synagogue practice by early Christian churches. As with elders, the deaconate grew into a regular and widespread function—regular enough already in Paul’s time to lay down a set of principles to insure the Christian character quality of deacons. Despite the simplicity of deacon terminology and lack of conceptual or functional synonyms, there are some terms in the gift-lists which may overlap with “deacon.” In the list of spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12:27-28—the list with the most varied and unusual gifts—two gifts seem close to that of deacon: helping others, and (possibly) administration. Romans 12:7-8 also mentions two gifts closely related to deaconing which is listed separately: “if contributing to the needs of others, let him give generously”; and “if it is

H. Beyer, “diakoneo,” TDNT 2:82. Ibid., p. 83 687 Ibid. 685 686

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showing mercy, let him do it cheerfully.” These gifts should probably be interpreted of givers of funds or other resources, not of their managers or distributors. On the other hand, two explanations might be suggested for these parallels; although not directly related in any text to the activity of deacons, they overlap in thought. (1) At the time of the founding of churches, very little organized division of labor existed; Galatians shows none, nor do the Thessalonian or Corinthian letters. “Deaconing,” as distributing to the needy, helping, and showing mercy to others, was not as yet organized by varied functions among deacons, and so appears in these separate forms in the gift lists. Or (2), the deacon functions were made different ministries by an assumption that deacons worked only with church funds or food distribution gathered by regular donations, while others worked by the guidance of the Spirit on an individual basis, giving or helping or making arrangements (“administration”) in a variety of ways of their own choosing or the promptings of the Spirit. There is not enough information to make a determination, and both explanations may be more or less relevant. On numbers of deacons per congregation there is less information than for elders. They also appear to be plural by church. There is no scene of inter-city or inter-regional deacon meetings as is the case with elders. So it appears that a plurality of both elders and deacons served the needs of each church. It is possible that some churches had a single functioning deacon in the narrower sense, although it seems unlikely. Phoebe of Cenchrea (Rom 16:1-2) was a deacon (NIV “servant,” Gr diakonos), but she may have been one among several; she is not called “the deacon.” At Corinth, in the only hint of any ministry at all in those congregations, Stephanus and his house are said by Paul to have “devoted themselves to the service (diakoneo, 16:15) of the saints.” Stephanus and his family were among Paul’s first converts at Corinth (or, more broadly, as he says, in Achaia); he may have been among the wealthy, and may have even used some of his own funds in helping the poor in the Corinthian churches. We do know that Stephanus and his people did some form of local deaconing, since the text uses this term explicitly. It is also possible that Paul used “deaconing” for Stephanus in the more general sense of preaching, teaching, shepherding, caring for—taking up, that is, major elder functions in the absence of appointed elders in the churches up to the time of 1 Corinthians. On qualifications, Paul thinks of a rather stringent set of qualities similar to those for elders. Deacons must be respected, sincere, sober, honest, have good consciences with the truths of the faith (i.e., integrity in doctrine), be monogamous, and conduct an orderly family life; they should be tested before serving (1 Tim 3:8-13). We are probably wrong to think that finding people qualified by these standards and keeping the standards in place was easier in the earliest churches than for us. The evidence for unworthy elders at Ephesus in 1 Timothy 5:17ff shows that from very near the beginning, quality in church leaders was a problem. Gender in Elders and Deacons On any reckoning, the issue is difficult, both from a practical and cultural standpoint, and from a biblical standpoint as well. The right place to begin is in the lists of ministry gifts. A complete treatment of this subject, including a substantial recent literature, is beyond 402

the scope of this essay; but a summary of some crucial aspects of the discussion seems appropriate. On this topic, many readers will probably disagree or wish I had not brought the subject up; but I shall put forth an alternative to the popular traditonal view for further discussion, not to generate controversy, but as a common issue among most contemporary churches and denominations. In some essays I presume to speak for the Grace Fellowship, i.e., those in which its doctrines are defended. In some like Essay II, and the two on elders as well as the remainder of the book, I intend to speak to my own denomination from my own viewpoint. In the following segment, I speak only for myself, intending only to offer a limited personal viewpoint. (1) The Pauline gift-lists do not distinguish any gender division as to which gender gets which gifts. Accordingly, the following information appears respecting women and leadership gifts: apostle is a gift and Roman 16:7 speaks of a couple who were “apostles.”688 Women prophets are noted by Paul in 1 Corinthians 11, and since prophecy is a speech and teaching gift, this form of ministry gift for women is affirmed; it entails speaking in Christian gatherings (1 Cor 10-11). One should also note Philip’s daughters’ gift of prophecy (Acts 21:9). As to the gifts of elder and deacon, both an elder term (prostatis, a noun form related to prohistami, an elder term) and “deacon” are used for Phoebe of Cenchrea (Rom 16:1-2; see Appendix B below); but information about her is very limited. When the named women associated with Paul as co-workers (Rom 16; Phil 4; Col 4) and church leaders are considered, the picture is somewhat enlarged. Thus at least a few cases appear in Acts and Paul in which women have the same gifts as men; we just know much less about them than about men in these positions, but the few details we do have indicate at least a beginning of the egalitarian principle of Galatians 3:28 at work in leadership gifts. If this is only a small beginning, it is nonetheless a beginning, no less than Paul’s egalitarian tendency on slavery. In another sense it is not a beginning at all, since gifted women appear in several leadership scenes in the Old Testament: Miriam whose hymn celebrating Israel’s victory at the Red Sea made canonical inclusion (Exod 15); Deborah, without whose guidance the male military leader of Israel, Barak, would not act (Jud 4-5); Hannah, Samuel’s mother, whose hymn from the social “bottom” also made the canon (1 Sam 1-2); Samson’s mother, whose prophecies preceded Samson’s birth (Jud 13) was included; and Huldah, whose prophetic advice Josiah sought (2 Ki 22:14ff), also reached the canon. These observations are not in support of some crusade for women as elders just for the sake of a rise of women, but because the biblical pattern is that when women have the same gifts as men, they function among the people of God in the same ways as men. Since this principle is sustained in Scripture, it might encourage 688 Since Paul says they are kinsmen, meaning at the least fellow Jews if not relatives and to have been “in Christ before me,” it is not beyond possibility that they were among the original 72 apostles of Luke 10:1-16 and hence also included in “all the apostles” of 1 Corinthians 15:7, especially as the twelve and “all the apostles” are distinguished from each other. If so, they would have qualified as apostles by Paul’s stricter definition of 1 Corinthians 9:1; however, certainty is not possible on these details. Junias is likely a feminine name and was so read by the church fathers. “Among the apostles” meaning “in the eyes of the apostles” is not regarded as the likely meaning of the defining phrase. Recent commentators favor a reference to at least one woman as an apostle here. Cf. C. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on The Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols (London: T & T Clark, 1979), 2:788-789; E. Kasemann, Commentary on Romans, trans G. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), p. 414; J. Dunn, Romans 9-16 (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1991), pp. 894-895.

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seeking a more occasional or local intentional explanation for the Pauline passages that appear to the contrary. (2) The egalitarian tendency visible in the above New Testament cases, let alone the examples from the Old Testament, is extended in Jesus’ relations with women. The gospels are also straightforward about women as prophets in the birth stories, about Jesus positive and respectful treatment of women, and about their special role as first witnesses to the resurrection. This special interest is found in both Luke and John whose authorial viewpoints reflect the developing role of women in the later apostolic age—the time of these books’ composition. As with Miriam, Hannah, and Deborah, Elizabeth and Mary, both receive prophecies that enter the biblical record (Luke 1:26-56), and Anna the Jewish prophetess speaks of the near redemption (Luke 2:36-38). Jesus’ relations with women were healing and kindly, even with women of questionable life-style or morality: his mother at the Cana wedding (Jn 2:1-11); the sinful woman (Luke 7:36-50); the Samaritan woman who had had five husbands (Jn 4: 1-26); and Mary for anointing him against Judas’ scorn (John 12:1-7). He has respectful conversations with Martha and Mary over the theology of resurrection as applied to their brother (John 11:1-44). The climax of these gospel stories about Jesus and women is their role as the first witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection (Mark 16:18; Matt 28:1-10; Luke 24:1-12; John 20:1-18). Interest in gifted women in the earliest days continues in Acts. Women were with the apostles and others in the house in Jerusalem (Acts 1:12-14) and apparently spoke in tongues along with the apostles and other Galileans (2:1-12, 17); a notable egalitarian statement about women in the group was based on the prophecy of Joel [2:17]). Luke cares about Dorcas (Acts 9:32-43), Lydia, Paul’s first convert at Philippi (16:11-15), and about the couple Priscilla and Aquila, who are both represented as the teachers of Apollos (18:26). (3) Leadership women are mentioned by Paul throughout Romans 16:1-16. Beside Priscilla and Aquilla, and Andronicus and Junia, he notes Tryphena and Tryphosa, women who “worked hard in the Lord (16:12),” Persis who also “worked hard in the Lord (16:13),” and the sister of Nereus (16:15). In Philippians 4:2-3 he mentions two women who “labored side by side” with him in the gospel (NIV). Most of these allusions to women workers sound like more than fixing his meals or washing and mending his clothes, unless one wishes to force them into these subordinate/traditional roles. The examples gathered here seem to fill out what otherwise might be dismissed as pure idealism in Galatians 3:28 with its forceful statement that in Christ there is no male or female, just as there is no slave or free man, Barbarian or Sythian, or Jew or Greek. This movement of women into ministries and honor looks like an extension of Jesus’ relation with women in his ministry and of the prophetic gifts in women at the beginning of Luke’s gospel. There is no question that some women ministered to women (Titus 2:3-5) in teaching; but this passage should not be made an absolute rule, as though what is said is all that is said about “women’s ministry,” considering the other positive indications of gifted women speaking or otherwise working in congregations. (4) Most of the above realities about Jesus and women and the interest of the gospels and Acts in them, as well as Paul’s allusions to women ministry partners, are not subjects of debate. Difficulties are far more serious in trying to discern the meaning and significance of the three passages of Paul which seem to place restrictions on women in public ministry—two in 1 Corinthians (11, 14), and one in 1 Timothy (2). For a long time, 404

these texts have been taken as more or less flat orders about prohibiting women to speak or teach in Christian worship or instructional gatherings when men are present. It should have been evident all along that women prophesying in the Corinthian churches created a problem for this take on the texts. Rather, it is apparent that each of the three texts has its own social-theological context to which the instructions are addressed.689 These chapters seem to contain roots of restriction. The arguments to the contrary are a combination of textual and contextual factors that go largely unrecognized along with deeply embedded negative social and theological traditions on feminine restriction, often deepened by male fears or negative, condescending humor about women. This is not the place for detailed exegetical discussion of all such issues which would make this essay much too long; but at least the basic outlines of the social occasions for these texts and their implications for the meaning of the apparent restriction of women can be suggested. Each of the three passages has textually identifiable local issues forming the context for Paul’s coments on women. (1) With 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, the visible problem is women removing veils in Christian fellowships. The probable cultural issue is intended gender confusion by some women combining veil removal and head-shaving; intended gender confusion was a kind of chic game Romans played. For women to appear as males or remove tokens of suppression in public was one kind of protest against suppression-generated emotions like resentment and hostility.690 Women who engaged in such practices sometimes claimed superiority to men. This is why Paul appeals to the order of creation for men and women, i.e., that man was created first. But the passage does not try to argue that women should not speak in mixed Christian meetings, since the issue is how they should behave when praying or prophesying in Roman culture. While offering cultural commentary on what happens with culturally-derived sensitivities when women remove veils or shave heads (the details of which are, of course debated), Paul also speaks in an egalitarian spirit of the mutual interdependence of male and female “in the Lord (11:11-12)”—one of a number of equalitarian remarks in the epistles, among which several are in 1 Corinthians. Since his main point is to diminish or eliminate sexual identity gestures that culturally express

689 One of the first women to offer varied and compelling insights into the social situation of women in the New Testament world, based on her knowledge of classical and early Christian literature texts on women, was Catherine Kroeger, sometimes with her husband Richard Kroeger. Their studies first began to appear in the Reformed Journal in the late 1970s under titles like “Sexual Identity in Corinth,” (RJ Dec, 1978) and “Ancient Heresies and a Strange Greek Verb” (RJ Mar, 1979). Catherine Kroeger later revised some of her earlier positions, but expanded her important treatments of contexts as a guide to the limited local conditions to which the apparent restrictive instructions were addressed, for example in I Suffer Not a Woman (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992). Many others have made contributions to this discussion, including important articles in the pages of JETS, with much interaction mostly along the lines of the egalitarian and patriarchal “models” of male-female relations. For an example, see the recent article by Russell D. Moore, “After Patriarchy, What? Why Egalitarians Are Winning the Gender Debate,” JETS 49 (Sept. 2006):569-576), who cites some of the literature. This article also—unfortunately—explores the logic of positions instead of struggling with the exegetical issues. It should be noted that the literature is prolific and these citations are only samples. Moore argues the curious thesis that the egalitarians are winning because the “patriarchists” have not yet made a very good case. 690 K. and R. Kroeger, “Sexual Identity at Corinth: Paul Faces a Crisis,” RJ December, 1978, pp. 11-14.

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feminine superiority or equality, the passage cannot be used to restrict women from any aspect of elder ministry, since it does not intend to address this issue in principle. (2) In 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, the issue is over women disrupting the order of Corinthian services by speaking out loudly (laleo for upraised voice [21x in ch 14, note 14:35], not lego for calm, rational discourse), apparently in the evaluation of prophetic revelatory claims (14:29-33). Their motivation is not at all clear in the passage; but may have been the same as in 11:2—spontaneous assertions or demands of feminine equality or even superiority in evaluating prophecies, or more likely in context, questions about the details or implications of a particular church prophecy. For this Paul urges that they raise their questions to husbands at home—itself a token of Christianity’s new value on women and an early appearance of Tatian’s later boast (c 150) that Christianity bests paganism because both its women and men are philosophers. Hence this text is easily read as a practical temporary measure to relieve the disorder. Since Paul specifies in his prefatory remark that “God is not a God of disorder, but of peace (11:33a),” it seems clear that disorder is the issue of the passage. The silence he enjoins (11:34) has only to do with the peace and order of the meeting, not whether women may be gifted with prophecy, or pray or teach. Therefore if the expectation of order and peace is met the church problem addressed in the passage is satisfied. There is no principled restriction on women speaking or prophesying (and praying), but only on women disrupting the meeting with questions. This is the context of 14:35b. (3) In 1 Timothy 2:9-15 Paul does seem to bar women from teaching in a principled way. But this is not a flat edict either, i.e., it too has social context. The activity of women at Ephesus was part of a sexual heresy, i.e., women behaving as prostitutes in one or more of the Ephesian Christian assemblies as “Jezebel” at Thyatira (Rev 2:20-23). Allusions in the passage to women dressing for sexual stimulus also point to this situation. Furthermore, the prohibition on teaching is followed immediately by a verb meaning “authority (authentein),” although it is not the usual New Testament word for authority (exousia). The verb authentein rather means “possess violently, murder,” “have sexual relations with,” and “create, generate.” The sequel (2:15) speaks of bearing children, i.e., children would inevitably be born to a woman and man in a sexual relationship originating in church, even though Paul does see a spiritual way out of the mess: “if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.” This too evidences where the moral heresy lies. The appropriate translation of “teach” therefore, is “publicly advocate”: “I do not allow a woman to advocate (usually “teach”) or have [generative] sexual relations with a man” i.e., such relations originating in a church setting. Paul’s language about the order of Adam and Eve’s creation reflects female advocacy of superiority in creation, being and power over men as at Corinth (1 Cor 11:2-16 as above); at Ephesus too women were playing Roman sexual games. So again, for similar reasons, Paul invokes the biblical order of male-female creation in order to straighten the distortion. This cannot, therefore be a denial of the gifts of teaching, eldering, or prophecy to women; it is rather a prohibition on women abusing their new Christian liberty and equality (Gal 3:28) by publicly advocating, teaching, or inducing sexual-generative relations with local congregational males as inferiors.691 691 Much of this summary is interpretive detail gleaned from C. Kroeger’s research and articles cited above. I have not seen, as yet at least, any very good answers to her contextual and lexical studies. I have combined her earlier study of the verb “have authority over (authentein)” with her later advocacy of “create,

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Conclusions Having examined the origins of the several leadership gifts and the varied terms used for them—rich and varied for elders—it is clear that all are initiated by Christ or the Holy Spirit. Church leadership functions are charismata (plural of charisma)—personal gifts and powers of ministry. None is merely a perpetual office to be established and filled by human appointment or election; none is merely to be sought by human motivations or arrangements alone. In action and outcome, all are in service of the message, of the people of God, and of God himself, and most occur in the gathered Christian community. Originally, Jesus established one leader gift—apostle. He granted the apostles— first 12 only, then 72 later, of whom the New Testament knows little more—power/ exousia to proclaim the kingdom’s availability, do miracles as witness to its presence, and preach and teach about himself and the kingdom. Apostleship also appears to have included the gift of evangelism, but that gift was not limited to them, and perhaps gradually separated from them as a separate gift. Evangelism was mostly practiced in an itinerant, public mode rather than as a settled local ministry. The gift of apostle continued until the end of the apostolic age when its special purposes were fufilled. Before Jesus’ birth and after his ascension, the Holy Spirit renewed the gift of prophecy. Prophecy was the gift for reception of new revelation—to explain divine acts, give immediate guidance, instruct in ethics and moral life, forcefully relate cautions and warnings, and assure and instruct on the near and distant future. Prophecy also continued to the end of the apostolic era. Some early Christian prophets were itinerant, but more were local and congregational. Local prophecy was more local-congregational than apostleship. In some instances prophecy remained in congregational life after apostles left. The primacy of the gifts of apostle and prophet, perhaps with a chronological implication, but probably more likely stressing their importance for the authority and revelatory aspects of the new movement, is shown by the way in which in three important gift-lists apostles and prophets are named first and second respectively. Hence, although Jesus began the flow of new covenant ministry gifts with apostleship, the Spirit after Pentecost enlarged the number and kinds of gifts both in the New Israel Jerusalem assembly and among Paul’s Gentile churches. To apostles and prophets the leadership gifts of elder and deacon were added. These gifts were local or regional in origin and practice. Unlike “apostle” and “prophet” which were largely technical terms for specific gifted persons and functions, terms for elder rapidly multiplied to nearly twenty functional descriptions, although “elder” gradually became widely used and normalized as in Acts and after the New Testament—probably by about 80 A. D. Although two passages refer to Paul or one of his legates (Titus) appointing elders in fledgling congregations, their appointing activity was not unilaterally human, but based on recognition of gifts already operating within local persons and their congregations. Recognition rather than office-filling seems necessitated by the forceful and persistent Pauline picture of all leadership and other gifts as congregational works of the Spirit and with or without an apostolic presence. The roughly twenty terms for congregational leadership are all functional terms for elders, except for “elder” itself. At least three terms for elders are clearly used for the same people in two New Testament generate” for the meaning of the verb, because these meanings appear to be subsets of a basic meaning field related to physical generation of life as the immediate reference to child-bearing shows.

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passages; this use of leader terms suggests that other terms for governing, teaching, and care-giving elders (spread across these major functions in meanings) are simply indications of varied elder functions. What appears true for elders arising from within congregations is also true for deacons. Deaconing too is among the gifts of ministry mentioned in a gift list. The puzzling question of why elders are not mentioned in the earlier epistles of Paul does not seem answerable; several possible explanations were suggested. It is at least a plausible suggestion, however, that during his Ephesus-Aegean period (Acts 18-20), Paul began organizing and stabilizing the growing number of churches in that region, and accordingly included lists of elder/overseer and deacon qualifications. In this connection a more active approach to establishing elderships might be seen as beginning during his three-year Ephesian period rather than later in the apostolic age. A possible re-dating of the Pastoral Epistles to an earlier-than-usual period of Paul’s ministry might help with understanding this process; a suggestion for such a re-dating of the Pastoral Epistles is made in Appendix B of Essay X below. A similar suggestion for the Prison Epistles is outlined in Appendix A of Essay X in another but related interest. The twenty or more functional terms used by Paul for leaders (elders) seem best understood as descriptions of the kind and manner of functional congregational leadership activities Paul recognized and promoted. The varied terms can be seen as covering several kinds of elder ministry. One group of terms with civil governing analogies in Greek usage emphasizes their role in governing and managing or administrating congregations; in one such text the language is “elders who rule.” A smaller group of texts refers to care-giving activities which serve to balance the more ruling or power functions of the governing terms by denoting the loving, caring side of elder ministry. Otherwise, “elder” overlaps with preaching, teaching and evangelism. Judging and ordaining are further elder functions. The Pauline epistles also deal with or reflect such elder issues as qualifications, recognition and appointment, ordination, plurality per church, and a moral contingency on tenure. There are also hints of women in elder functions, but the quantity of examples is limited, and the case for women elders is not forceful, while the examples are at least suggestive of a new order for women. The passages which seem to prohibit women in elder roles have other, contextual, explanations, and are not flat, principled or mandated restrictions as such on women. What then of the tendency in practice to make the ministry gifts of elder, teacher and deacon into permanent offices? In a sense one could see this tendency already in the examples of Paul appointing elders in south central Asia Minor churches, and in his order to Titus to appoint elders in the new churches of Crete. And also in a sense, this tendency will always be present and even practiced in most churches as it is in fact and with a long history. But the Spirit is the giver of these gifts, even when they become humanly established offices. This means that even if elder, teacher, pastor, deacon, etc., are established as permanent offices to be filled in church constitutions, the persons appointed to fill them ought to evidence the consciousness and actual working of the Spirit in actualizing the gift before formal appointment. Or, to say it differently, offices and Spirit-gifts of their functions are not absolutely incompatible. This essay only argues that at bottom, gifts of ministry leadership are works of the Spirit and should be recognized as such by serious Christians and their congregations. 408

Appendix A “Able to Teach” (1 Timothy 3:2 NIV) The Greek word on which this translation is based has good possibilities (is in fact widely used) for a firm definition of a major elder qualification. It is worthwhile to be clear on its exact meaning. The Greek word is didaktikon. It is one of those adjectives formed from a verb root (didasko), of which there are many in the New Testament and Hellenistic Greek. It has analogies for gaining a fairly precise picture. The basic data are as follows. l. The t is an adjective element usually filled out with a declinable ending as with all adjectives in Greek. The ending written fully is -tos or -atos. This adjective form is passive to express something done to a person or object by an agent. Similar forms occur: agapatos loved or beloved from agapao love; gennatos begotten from gennao beget; and didaktos taught from didasko teach. Each of these examples is followed by a genitive for the action agent. Hence, “beloved of (by) God,” “begotten/born of (by) women (Matt 11:11; Luke7:28),” and “taught of (by) God (John 6:45).” To these examples of -t forms we may add eklektos elect of (by) God (Matt 24:31).”692 This is solid evidence for the passive sense “taught” rather than the active “teach.” 2. The second element in the adjective is the -ikon; -akon and -ikon endings are added to express the idea of possession or belonging. Hence sarkikos belonging to flesh; pneumatikos belonging to spirit; kuriakos belonging to the Lord. In Revelation 2:27 we have skeua keramika potter’s vessels and in 1:10 hamera kuriaka Lord’s Day. These examples are equally clear. The term means “belonging to, part of, of the nature of . . .”693 Since the context has a series of singulars; they can be read as describing the qualities of one such episcopos bishop/elder, or read generically: an (the) episcopos. The term didaktikon takes its place in the singular series, thinking probably of a person among the (well) taught. Thus the meaning is “belonging to the taught/instructed” or “among the taught.” The active sense of actually teaching or having the active gift of teaching is not Paul’s meaning. Rather, he means an elder should be among the taught, those in the church who are well instructed, knowing the essentials of the gospel and Christian practice. Some of these well-taught will be among the teachers of an assembly—the “teaching elders” of 1 Timothy 5:17. Some judgments about meaning push too hard in one direction, while others go too far in another.694

692 Examples from BDF, p. 98. 693 Examples from BDF, p. 62. 694 Rengstorf, TDNT 2:165 is to the left with “able to learn,” while Knight, Pastoral Epistles (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1902), is too traditional with “skillful in teaching.” Paul means “taught,” “knowledgeable.”

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Appendix B Prostatis in Koine Greek and its Meaning in Romans 16:2

l. Septuagint

a. The feminine form of Romans 16:2 does not occur. b. Masculine occurs in 8 instances (NIV renderings; AV in Apocrypha): l Chron 27:31 “officials in charge of . . .” l Chron 29:6 “officials in charge of” the king’s work 2 Chron 8:10 “they were also King Solomon’s chief officials” 2 Chron 24:11 “all the officials . . .” 2 Chron 24:11 “officer of the chief priest” 1 Esdras 2:12 “Sanabassar governor of Judea” Sirach 45:24 “chief of the sanctuary” 2 Maccab 3:4 “Simon . . . governor of the temple” 2. Papyri Selections (Moulton and Milligan, Vocabulary)

a. Feminine does not occur. b. Masculine 1. “Apollonius . . . to Tryphon . . .manager/director of the loans . . . greeting” (a letter; my translation) 2. “Dionysius, the chief man of Nemerae” (M-M’s trans) 3. “. . . the god of Saint Philoxenus our patron” (M-M’s trans.; 4th century Christian papyrus) 4. “. . . the officer . . . and the temple magistrate and the scribe—each must show . . .” (my trans.; text is about a leader of pagan associations acc to M-M) 3. Classical Greek (Liddell and Scott, Lexicon, pp. 1526-1527; summary of meanings; mostly masculine, a few feminine examples)

a. Masculine: one who stands before; front rank man



d. Feminine. The few examples yield no different translations acc to L-S

b. Leader, chief (of a democracy); ruler (e.g., of the Spartans); author; administrator; president or presiding officer (as of a gymnasium or council) c. One who stands before and protects; guardian, champion; patron (e.g., who takes care of the interests of foreigners) 1. A suppliant to a deity who stands and entreats 2. Prostate gland (medical use)

4. B. Reicke in TDNT 6:700-703 (summary of his meanings for verb prohistemi only with comment on noun in Romans 16:2)

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a. Preside; lead; conduct; direct; govern b. Standing before someone in protection; protect, with senses of assist, join with c. Care for, arrange, handle, execute; Reicke emphasizes that this care-giving element is to be understood as coordinated with the ruling, governing sense in the Pauline elder texts; pastoral care is in view. d. “How significant the idea of care is in NT prohistemi may be seen from the fact that prostatis is the word for `protectress’ or `patroness’ in R 16:2.” There is little or no substantial difference in meaning for the noun than for the verb; the function is an elder/pastoral one on any reckoning, and this is the normative Pauline meaning except possibly in the two cases in Titus where church offices/leadership functions are not in view. Even here, however, prohistemi may well mean something like “govern yourself with good works.” 5. Some comments: a. A prostatas (masc) or prostatis (fem) is clearly a leader/dispenser of guidance, organization, management, and group care, whose work is caring for the subject or object of that activity—the person, group, institution, etc. b. That Phoebe is said to be a prostatis “of many and of me myself” can only mean that she was such a church leader, and that in her office/function, many including Paul, were the beneficiaries of her “standing before.” c. The meanings of the noun are similar to those of the verb. The verb or its participle are terms for (usually male) an elder function. d. The weak translation “helper” is misleading, especially if it is understood to connote underling, aide, subordinate, servant. Even if one insists on “helper,” the sense is one who helps from above, from a leadership or governance posture. Even of his co-workers, Paul does not use subordinate terms but rather calls them “fellow servants” and the like. e. The combination of meanings/connotations, and a specific person including a woman in Romans 16:2, opens the door to recognition of women in leadership/eldering functions in the church. Still this is only a isolated case.

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Appendix C Lists of Charisms/Gifts695 Eph 4:7 Apostles Prophets

Rom 12:6-8 Prophecy Deaconing

1 Cor 12: 8-10

1 Cor 12:28 Apostles Prophets

[Prophecy]

1 Cor 12:29, 30 Apostles Prophets

Evangelists Pastors Teachers Teaching Teachers Teachers Encouraging Giving Leading [Administration] Mercying Wisdom Knowledge Faith Healing [Healing] [Healing] Miracles Miracles Miracles Prophecy Discernment Tongues [Tongues] [Tongues] Interpretation [Interpret.]

Interpret.

Healing Healing Helping Administration Tongues Tongues

Notes 1. Apostles: people with a direct commission from Christ to preach and teach as his representatives. 2. Wisdom: persons with “how to” or foresight awareness. 3. Knowledge: prophetic awareness and thought about God and human behavior. 4. Prophets: people who receive direct revelation from God on doctrine, short term guidance, and the future. 695 Gifts in brackets occur in other locations in the lists. They are put in brackets to suggest their relation to the order of other lists.

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5. Teachers: persons with special ability to explain, provoke thought or instruct from existing material. These five are a cluster of instruction-communication gifts. 6. Miracles: works of power like those done by Jesus and the apostles including nature miracles and resusitations. 7. Healing: the power to restore sick persons to normalcy; includes exorcism. 8. Helping (antilampsis), mercying: rescuing others from desperate and hopeless circumstances. 9. Administration (kubernesis): piloting, steering, guiding (as a ship). This cluster is for restoring or insuring orderly personal and group life. 10. Tongues: speaking other languages. At Corinth it is doubtful that actual living languages were used as in Acts 2. 11. Interpretation: giving the meaning of a tongues-speaker. Tongues are last because most problematic. This cluster contains instruction on tongues.

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ESSAY X THE CHURCH AS THE BODY OF CHRIST The Organism and Its Local, Regional and International Leadership by Dale S. DeWitt Having exposed the New Testament’s sustained theme of ministry gifts originating from Jesus himself or the Holy Spirit in the developing church, we turn to Paul’s concept of the church and how its elders functioned in leadership in and beyond the local assemblies. The points I wish to make in this essay are that the Grace Gospel Fellowship has correctly conceived the rich and universal character of the body of Christ, but has never fully grasped, stressed appropriately, or put in place the biblical concepts of its chief leadership function (eldership) in its total intensive (personal ministries) and extensive (governing activity) functions. The pastoring and teaching aspects of eldership have received fuller attention out of ongoing pastoral necessity. Pastors in our Fellowship carry out appropriately and fully the several ministry functions; but a fully developed eldership concept and practice has fallen behind in implementation . The focus here is on the body and its largest governance by elders both at the congregational level and in larger gatherings. In order to exhibit some elements of its leadership ideas that seem to me to have (inadvertently) prohibited a clear vision of New Testament eldership, it seemed useful to sketch some relevant aspects of the history of our thinking about the body and its organization, hence the discussion of the first few pages. The analysis and views expressed here are my own; I do not claim to speak for the Fellowship of which I am glad to be a member. The History of Leadership Thought in the Grace Fellowship When the Grace Gospel Fellowship was organized in 1944 it was largely a premillenarian fellowship of pastors. Their premillennialism was dispensational in nature and of a specific type that believed the church was an exclusively Pauline revelation 415

not found in other parts of the Bible. Their stand included recognition that the baptism terminology of the Pauline epistles, other than that of 1 Corinthians 1, referred not to water baptism but to the baptizing work of the Holy Spirit which incorporated believers into the body of Christ—the church; they found no baptizing order in the church epistles. They came to the fellowship they created from diverse denominational backgrounds from which they brought some older ideas or to which they were reacting. Their theological leader, John C. O’Hair, came from a Catholic background, and was converted to Christ in Louisiana, immersion baptized, and ordained to ministry by Presbyterians in Texas. Much of his early ministry was in cross-denominational rescue missions and evangelistic meetings. In 1923 he became pastor of North Shore Congregational Church in Chicago. Some early leaders had roots in various Baptist denominations; others were of Presbyterian and Reformed backgrounds. Several items of faith and practice mattered deeply to the group: the Bible as the Word of God, premillennialism and its dispensational implications, and a determination not to organize as a denomination. They understood denominations as church bodies with property-holding powers in a central organization or office with control over local congregations. Their main idea of the church was its nature as the body of Christ. They held that no denomination was the true church; rather, the true church was the universal body of Christ, and all true believers in Christ were members of the church by the baptizing work of the Holy Spirit, regardless of denominational affiliation. Within this set of values, a strong anti-denominational spirit characterized the founders. I learned about the Fellowship’s anti-denominational spirit soon after my first interests in their doctrine, but I did not personally see this attitude as necessary since I had no anti-denomintional baggage from my Dutch Reformed background. Stressing that the organization they created was only a fellowship and not a denomination, they named it accordingly the Grace Gospel Fellowship. In short the emphasis was non-denominational and on the “true” church, the universal body of Christ. These values meant the founders had to forge a more or less new kind of national organization that was not like the historic denominations they had left. At first the Fellowship was simply an association of pastors similar in values and organization to the earliest missionary organization formed in 1939 as Worldwide Grace Testimony. Originally, membership was open to laymen as well as pastors, but pastors alone had voting rights on doctrinal, organizational policy and business matters.696 National meetings were held, but were largely Bible conferences on the model of the national, inter-denominational premillennial Bible and Prophetic Conferences of 1878 and the following decades, as well as other similar cross-denominational gatherings, likewise often premillennial and sometimes world mission in focus. Such interdenominational fellowships encouraged our founders thinking about the universal body of Christ as the true church. National Grace Gospel Fellowship meetings never functioned as church synods since elder gatherings were assumed to be appropriate only for local churches. It is not clear why the two biblical models of elder gatherings for urban or regional, or even larger areas (Acts 15, 20), were never considered or the implications developed. This inattention to biblical (Pauline) leadership-organizational practice was probably due to their strong congregationalism (each local church independent and self-governing); it was also augmented by the Fellowship’s

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R. Reich, “Our Grace Heritage,” Truth 25, No. 2 (July, 1974), p. 14.

small size, considerable distances between churches, and strong preoccupation with distinctive doctrines; resistance prevailed toward anything that looked or felt like larger denominational control over local congregations. Hence the notable cases where Paul refers issues to a larger than local body of elders (the Jerusalem council of Acts 15; the Ephesus elders meeting of Acts 20) went begging for attention, or, if they were recognized, were not thought relevant or important. This inattention by committed Paulinists seems out of character with Paul’s actual practice. Between 1944 and 1970, discussions were periodically held by the Fellowship’s leaders about more effective organization, since several independent ministries sharing the same doctrinal views had arisen under the umbrella of the Grace Fellowship. Each organization had its own purpose; the organizations participated in the pastors meetings and conferences through their respective heads. During this period, C. R. Stam wrote and sometimes addressed conventions on organization issues, proposing that the various organizations be thought of as “arms” of a “movement.” This concept sought to give maximum liberty to all organizations, while serving their commitment to theological unity. Desire for more effective organization and representation in the interests of unity prevailed, and in 1970-1971 the Fellowship undertook what Raymond Reich called “a rather sweeping reorganization of [its] administration.”697 The new organizational structure included a National Cabinet as the chief decision-making body, an Executive President, a National Congress with representative voting by delegates from churches and organizations at the annual National Convention, and a ten-region national organization, each with a Regional Council of church and organization representatives. But still there was no thought given, even by national meetings, to the Pauline practice and concept of ministering elders working in council on oversight, education, leadership development, resolution of referred church struggles and conflicts, and elder caring activity—or other kinds of issues with which help from outside the local church might have been desired or useful. Elder activity was left to and almost entirely confined to independent local congregations. By 1996 the annual National Congress had been abandoned. The National Cabinet was renamed the National Council, Regional Councils were retained, and the National Convention was continued along with an Executive President. Throughout this process of revision and refining, representation by churches on the Regional Councils and National Council was gained for churches and organization by constitutional provision. The National Council consists of one pastor and one “layman” elected or appointed by each Regional Council. Affiliated organizations have two representatives per organization on the National Council. Regional Councils consist of the pastors of each regional congregation (church) and “lay representatives” determined in quantity by church size—roughly one per hundred members. Business and other issues may still be voted on at the National Convention when referred to the Convention by the National Council.698



Ibid. This sketch of organizational history is based on mnutes of Grace Gospel Fellowship National Cabinet and National Council meetings kindly furnished by T. Hanson, President of the Grace Gospel Fellowship. 697 698

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Clearly, there is much here of good order. However, because of its unusually strong anti-denominational spirit, churches and other ministries of the Fellowship have had to live with a makeshift and more or less weak organizational structure compared to older Protestant denominations. On the other hand, the more recent reorganization documents appear to strengthen the regions, even though that strengthening is not with elders or an enriched concept of elder ministry, but only with more “lay” persons. The bane or blessing of this arrangement left all entities—churches and specialized organizations—in a state of freedom from any coercive central power, and accountable only to their own boards. The whole hung together as an informal voluntary association based on theological unity expressed in the doctrinal statement, and on voluntary participation in larger gatherings including occasional decision-making events at the National Convention. In this respect the Fellowship has baptistic traits. This situation may change with nothing more than time, experience, recognition of Pauline practice with elders, or teaching on the larger functions of elder bodies. It must be said, though, that despite this relatively weak structure, the organization closely approximates the values held by the majority, even though it leaves one puzzled—after a study of elders in the New Testament—as to why there should be such a tacit neglect of elder leadership in and beyond local congregations. Local boards are usually composed of at least some ministering elders. Pastors are generally thought of as individual teaching elders and/or ruling elders, and in this capacity are board members; but other elder functions are not generally spread among elder boards or beyond local board membership. On the whole, pastors are expected to do most or all the elder functions. Other gifts of elder ministry as suggested by the Pauline elder terms are only weakly or haphazardly functional. Elder education and training programs are only local if they exist at all. Beyond local board functions there is no normalized extension of local-congregational elder bodies to urban, regional or even larger—say national, for example—elder bodies similar to the Pauline practice in Acts. This is the case even though there are plenty of issues to discuss among and within churches, and among ministering elder bodies; doing so assumes only that churches might benefit from discussion by elders ministering the full range of elder functions and from referral of church issues and problems to a larger viewpoint gained from other experienced elders engaged in the full range of elder ministries as outlined above and discussed herein and in detail by Strauch in Biblical Eldership. Why eldership in its full biblical sense continues to mostly evade us (beyond pastors as “teaching elders”) seems explainable only by certain assumptions about local church autonomy and independence i.e., no central organization should be influential on congregatons except for the doctrinal agenda. Elders continue to function mostly as “board” members.” In concept they do not exist in the national organization’s constitution. “Lay” terminology is used for members of local governing bodies other than pastors thereby perpetuating a long-standing traditional clergy-laity distinction. There is no structure by which local elders may function at larger levels of organization or problem-solving unless a local elder body suggests it to another such body. Problem situations in local congregations which might benefit from discussion and suggestions of a larger body of experienced regional elders are seldom if ever referred. In short, elders do not form larger urban or regional bodies for fellowship, education or help with resolution of referred problems, despite the fact that Paul did make use of larger elder gatherings. 418

At the national level the annual Convention remains largely a Bible conference and transacts only a minimum of business when the National Council chooses to refer matters to it. No appeal process exists in the sense of a larger judicial function of elders for referral of questions, opinions, issues or disputes. Rather the Grace Gospel Fellowship President may be called on to mediate a dispute, and he does function in such situations as an elder in a quasi-judicial role, even though he works mostly alone; he may at times ask local or regional elders or pastors to serve as advisors in mediation situations. Larger elder functions and ministry remain almost entirely local and are mostly limited to pastors. Elders work as such only at local levels. There is little or no regular regional elder activity. The membership of regional councils is not an elder gathering. Accordingly, the purpose of this and the preceding essay is recovery of the main lines of concepts involved in the organism and organization of the church, with special attention to biblical concepts of eldering as the chief leadership gift of the churches. The foregoing essay gathered the biblical materials on Paul’s terms for elders and their local functions. In this essay the biblical concepts that articulate the universal body of Christ will first be gathered in the context of some primary historic views of the church. Then the expression of the body in the house church will be discussed, and finally how Paul thought of the body-leadership functioning through representative elders in their judicial function and in larger elder gatherings. I will seek to show that Paul relied for decisions or concurrence or oversight on representative elders in council. This essay does not mean to suggest that others have not given thought to such matters. I only assume that a fresh assessment of the biblical concepts and materials may be of some help in any ongoing process of reshaping eldership in the life of our congregations, and how larger patterns of elder function happened in Paul’s practice both in and beyond the local assembly. The Church as Body of Christ In Paul’s thought, the church is and manifests the projection of Christ’s resurrection, i.e., his resurrection body in the world;699 it is Christ’s extension of himself into the world via the church. This concept is most prominent in certain portions of Ephesians and Colossians, especially the former, but is found elsewhere in the epistles as well, notably in the two Corinthian letters. Of course, in making human beings not merely individual representatives, but an actual corporate extension of himself, and arranging them into groups of believers, there was and is a risk of abuse or distortion due to their individual and collective sins and shortcomings—one of many divine risks with man. This is one reason why Paul’s epistles are filled with corrective moral and ethical teaching, and why, in the providence of God, certain churches’ shortcomings and corrective letters written to 699 J. A. T. Robinson, The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology, Studies in Biblical Theology, No 5 (London: SCM Press, 1952), pp 49-83. The church as Christ’s extended resurrection body is a debated concept in Pauline studies; but it seems to me the only currently available, workable way to understand the meaning of a whole group of passages in the epistles on the subject. Conversely, it seems glib and dismissive to simply say it’s only a metaphor. Robinson’s study should be read since he assembles all the crucial passages which contain or reflect this concept.

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them are made public. Nonetheless, the extravagant language of the church used by Paul without reservation or hedging speaks of the church as Christ’s presence in the world. It is his ever-growing resurrection “body” in several respects and functions. The Body 1. The church is the fullness of Christ. Paul means this in the sense that the body receives corporately certain gifts, powers and attributes, not yet in perfect development, in fact mostly hidden, but at least in some beginning stage of actual operation (Eph 1:23; 4:1011). This is not an individual but a corporate concept. The qualities and powers of Christ are distributed throughout the whole body, not identically in every individual member but in the whole in many manifestations and degrees, and in visible diversity (1 Cor 12). Some passages also contain the sense that the church completes Christ or is the larger Christ (Col 1:24; 2 Cor 4:10-12). In these passages, Paul speaks of himself. He does not mean that to “carry around in our body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” is his in some solitary way; he is more probably thinking of the whole church and himself as a corporate representative, although he does seem to bear some aspects of Christ’s real presence in his own unique or especially intense ways. A more direct corporate sense is gained in 1 Corinthians 12:12: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” The thought achieves a forceful organic sense: the body of Christ is Christ. Paul does not mean the body is like a social group or institution, although it is both in appropriate senses; he does mean the body of Christ (the church) is Christ’s body, i.e., his resurrection body. To say this means something close to the idea of a spiritual body described in some details in 1 Corinthians 15:44: “it is raised a spiritual body,” even though Paul’s reference is to our (final) resurrection body. Indeed, a text like Ephesians 2:4-6 speaks of us already being in resurrection with Christ: “But God . . . raised us up with him.” Hence, we seem to be dealing with a larger-than-us reality, not in an other-worldly sense, but in a this-world, divine transformative sense—God coming here, being in us, changing us and uniting with his redeemed people as well as uniting us with himself and with Christ. 2. The church is the tangible, visible and real manifestation of Christ’s work of filling up everything everywhere with himself (Eph 1:23b). This language appears to mean that Christ’s purpose is to fill the whole world with himself and his redeeming works.700 The emphasis here is on continuous action in which Christ himself is engaged; he is doing it himself in the church. In this process it is Christ’s ongoing purpose to inject himself into every city, village, hamlet, byway, island and continent, to establish a people as a living testimony to himself. Hans Kung says, “Christ is entirely present in every congregation . . . every congregation is in the fullest sense God’s Ecclesia, Christ’s body.”701 It is impossible to explain this without recognition that it is in his resurrection body that this is the case. This also appears to be a world mission concept, the embodiment of a plan by which the church spreads itself and the gospel into the entire world through local congregations and 700 Ibid., pp. 68-69. Robinson takes the filling language of Ephesians 1:23 in a slightly different sense, but this does not affect the larger concept of the verse in its expression of the body’s nature. 701 H. Kung, The Church (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), p. 306.

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their extension missions, whether they participate in the mission through prayer, financial support or sending people out as ambassadors of his body. People who cannot accept this language as anything but metaphors, or others who are content with speaking of the church’s “identification” with Christ, miss the intended ever-enlarging Christ element in Paul’s thought. “Identification” is too vague. 3. The “mechanism” for this actual extension of Christ is the life of the local church as it is built, unified, and enlarged by the presence of gifts of ministry and mission. The function of gifts is the subject of Ephesians 4:10-16. Here the gifts of the conquering Christ are distributed like the spoils of a conquering king are given to friends and officers. But in this case the gifts are those of apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher. These are leadership gifts, of course. But other passages containing lists of gifts are longer and more democratic or egalitarian in their distribution (1 Cor 12; Rom 12:3-8)—far beyond leadership gifts, in fact to the whole church. The end goal of the gifts in the church is that “From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work (Eph 4:16).” Hence there emerges at the end of Paul’s Ephesian discussion in Ephesians 4 the notion of the ever growing church, which in turn is another expression of the thought of the fullness of Christ filling everything everywhere. The greatest of the gifts are not the “sign” or demonstrative gifts associated with apostles in Acts, but the more quiet, but spiritually potent gifts of faith, hope and love (1 Cor 13). Other gifts of ministry for the well-being and “advantage” of others (1 Corinthians 12:7, where “advantage” is sometimes translated “the common good,” as in the RSV) are certainly normalized as well (Rom 12:3-8). 4. Several related realities are also found in various epistle texts. (a) Sometimes Paul calls attention to elements of the common life in the body of Christ. These elements are found in lists of common-life gifts of redemption shared by the whole body: sonship to God through Christ, sometimes also called “adoption” (Eph 1:5; Gal 3:26-28); redemption (Eph 1:7); forgiveness of sins (1:7); cleansing (Gal 3:27); new clothing (3:27); and the Holy Spirit as the guarantee of a promised future inheritance (Eph 1:13-14). (b) Nor is the individual lost on the grandeur of the corporate whole: Christ is the churches’ many “members (1 Cor 12).” Christ’s body is many diverse individuals just as the human body has many diverse but united parts, or, as Paul says, “we who are many are one bread, one body (1 Cor 10:17). (c) Since the church is one universal people, each local church is a representation of the universal whole. This shows in the way he describes the Corinthian church as “the church of God, the one which is in Corinth” (1 Cor 1:2), or as R. P. Shedd says, “the local church is . . . the whole church locally embodied,”702 even if it exists concretely in several urban house churches in one city or region. (d) An implied social concept of importance is the forceful egalitarianism of the Body of Christ (Gal 3:28; Col 3:11; Eph 2:11-22; in most detail 1 Cor. 12:12-26)). Sometimes—in the history of Protestant thought—this sense is strong enough to suggest that even the education of pastors violates the simple equalitarian nature of the church, with the added suggestion that non-educated pastors should be the norm. (e) In biblical (Pauline) egalitarian thinking, even the gender distinctions of Graeco-Roman and Jewish societies are leveled (Gal 3:28). In this way age-factored social institutions and processes are also affected by the mutuality of common life in the body: “Submit yourselves 702 R. P. Shedd, Man in Community (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), p. 135, following F. J. A. Hort’s earlier study, The Christian Ecclesia (London, 1908).

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to one another (Eph 5:21),” an order followed by mutual submission perspectives for wives and husbands, parents and children, and slaves and masters. (f) Paul does not overtly order the end of slavery; rather the mutuality of body life would be destined to so modify the slave-master relation that finally the institution will be undermined, as though from the inside out instead of by external order or imposition.703 (g) Paul even idealizes economic equality in a passage about a Corinthian gift to the poverty-stricken Jewish Christians in Judea: “I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of equality (my italics) your abundance at the present time should supply their want, so that there may be equality (2 Cor 8:13-14).” This collection is also the subject of passages in Romans 15 and 1 Corinthians 15 as well as 2 Corinthians. (h) The egalitarian tendency in Paul’s thought means that all such gifts inevitably tend, when viewed with humility, to equal value including the equal value of their personal possessors. This perspective is the subject of a detailed meditation in 1 Corinthians 12:22-26, which reads in part: On the contrary, the parts of the body which seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those parts of the body which we think less honorable we invest with greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so adjusted the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior part, that there may be no discord in the body . . . .

Paul’s thought does not mean no social distinctions are visible, or that Christians should pretend they do not exist; he means rather that in the gathered church where gifts of ministry are present, such social distinctions do not count for anything of consequence. All are equally honored because all belong to the community of the Spirit, and all gifts, powers and their manifestations are visible for the profit of all, even in all their diversity and variation (1 Cor 12:4-7). Paul’s emphasis on equal value and diversity is the subject of 1 Corinthians 12:21-26 where he speaks to social distinctions in the Corinthian church perpetrated by the upper-class members who inflict outsider status and inferiority on lowerclass members (1 Cor 11:17-22; 12:14-16). The aristocratic types at Corinth may also be those who so greatly treasure speaking in tongues. Hence, 1 Corinthians contains several manifestations of Paul’s egalitarianism, including that of gifts of the Spirit. What might there have been in Christ’s resurrection body that brought forth, along with special powers and gifts, these equalitarian notions? Being apparently wthout an explicit textual answer to this question, it might be suggested that it was apostolic reflections on the gospel stories about the special features of Jesus’ resurrection body exhibited in the stories. Paul’s own thoughts about the resurrection must be modeled by these stories. That is, summarily or in concept, Jesus’ resurrection body was no longer a body of humiliation (Phil 2:6-8), but rather—now in visibly perfect harmony (“oneness”) with his divine nature, or as Paul speaks of it, perhaps based on the same reflections, as a body imperishable, glorious, powerful, spiritual, life-giving and heavenly (1 Cor 15:42-49). It seems to me this is the only possible explanation of this resurrection-body egalitarianism—everything 703 By the third century, and perhaps earlier, church funds were being used, among other social ministries, to pay for emancipation of Christian slaves. On this and other social policies of the second and third century church, see H. Chadwick, “The Early Christian Community,’ in The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity, ed J. McManners (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 38.

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in perfect equalized harmony. One might also look to similar equalitarian thoughts in 1 Corinthians 12:14-26, especially 12:25. The Cultural Context of “Body” Of the many possible notions of “body” in Paul’s time on which he might have drawn, the one most germane to his teaching about the church was Greek and Roman era thinking about the head-body relation. Plato was among the first to use “body (soma)” in connection with head-body thought. In his later writings he stresses that the soul moves the body and is seated in man’s head; the head holds the whole body upright and draws a person upward from earth to heaven.704 Paul rather develops the head-body relation of Christ and church with a different image—marriage. (Eph 5:22-33). In this case, the relation of husband and wife is a model of Christ and church, a likeness that features a bond of love, thought of as personal union. Love means a saving relationship of the head to the body, self-giving of one’s life for the other (5:23-25), a purifying power (5:26-27), and nourishing and cherishing of the body by the head (5:29). While there is still debate about authority elements in the “head” image, the language of the passage rather favors the head as source of support and nourishment, i.e., the image is about the source of life, not about authority.705 The most pictorial feature of the passage, however, is the thought from Genesis 2:24, “the two shall be one flesh” –a thought about personal union. Genesis 2:24 also speaks of the husband leaving father and mother and joining his wife to form something called “one flesh”; this change operationalizes the union in that the couple lives together. Paul intends that the likeness of marriage and body be mutually illustrative of both equally. This image of personal union between Christ and church entails the unity of the head and body (Eph 5:32, “one flesh”). The unity of the head and body, and the unity of the body with itself, is extensively drawn out in 1 Corinthians 12:12-31, an emphasis required by the diversity of Christ’s gifts to the church. On this point the Stoic parallels are striking. Like other schools of thought, the Stoic philosophers were interested in the issues of evil, suffering, oppression and cosmic gloom—the endlessly puzzling problems of the human struggle to overcome uncanny adversity. Whereas Plato tried to solve these problems by construing the whole of reality as dualities (heaven-earth; mind-matter; ignorance-knowledge), the Stoics sought a universe rationally structured from within. For them, all matter was unified including soul and body, and in its whole, creative Reason (logos) was everywhere. Since soul and body are both material, and since two bodies cannot be at the same place at the same time there is a (logical) problem. Stoicism’s founder, Zeno, solved this problem with his doctrine of mixture: one body may fully permeate another, although admittedly, Paul’s image of marriage falls short of this thought in a significant degree. Zeno’s favorite illustration was a piece of red hot iron fully permeated by fire. The relation of body and soul is not the relation of a vessel and its contents, but the relation of two inter-penetrating forms of matter—like iron and fire. In this way the whole is soul, but the whole is also body. This 704 E. Schweizer, “soma,” TDNT 7:1028-1029. 705 Among evangelicals, see for example, G. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), pp. 501-505.

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view of a body (soma) as something in itself but permeated by something else, opened the way for other Stoics to speak of a body of divisions—thus a crew, an army, a people, a senate, a choir and a crowd are all parts (mera) of larger wholes. The Athenian citizens’ assembly (ekklesia, Paul’s other term for church) was also thought of as a single body made up of many separate bodies.706 A single body consists of many bodies in which life, instruction and thought come to each individual. The cosmos itself is a soma, and full of such inter-penetrations. In this way the idea of a unified totality is forged; it is called a soma and usually has parts (mera). Later Stoicism also called the cosmos the “body of God,” with the supreme god as its head. For them the cosmos is really God with each person a member of the cosmic body. Seneca, Nero’s state philosopher, applies this concept to the emperor and the empire: the state is the body of the emperor who is its soul or head.707 This somewhat varied thinking about body had already developed and was readyto-hand in Paul’s Graeco-Roman thought world. Totality, unity, interpenetration of bodies, and parts or divisions of bodies were its main themes when used to represent a cosmos of different sorts of matter and beings. In the Hellenistic world the application of head-body thought was usually turned to an argument for necessary social stratification. In Ephesians and Colossians the unity of the body of Christ is chiefly seen in the fact that its distinctive character is its composition of Jews and Gentiles, but also in the inter-penetrating Christ and his gifts through the whole. These two features call for a comprehensive name like “body” with its connotations of wholeness, interpenetration, unity, connectedness, parts and wholes, and variation. (1) One manifestation of the body’s wholeness it that there is no Jew or Gentile here, no slave or free person, and there is no Barbarian or Scythian—two population types threatening the Roman Empire respectively on its north and east. All who are in Christ are one. The social conflicts between the named groups represented centuries of accumulated hostilities, intolerance and bitterness. Paul was obviously impressed as he saw warring social and ethnic groups newly united in worship of Christ with joy and peace. Here it becomes clear why “body” is so carefully applied by Paul to the church created by the Gentile mission. For him, the body exists to be a fellowship of reconciliation (Eph 2:1122), and in his perspective, the Gentile world mission was was effecting ethnic and racial reconciliation. Interpenetration of all by the resurrected Christ at work through his Spirit is the source of tangible social reconciliation and egalitarian oneness. (2) The other manifestation of the unity of the church is the mutually “edifying” operation of Christ’s gifts interpenetrating the whole spiritually and socially reconciled church. Each member is a part of the body and contributes distinctive gifts of the Spirit to the whole. Gender differences do not count here any more than national or ethnic ones. Diversity in distribution of gifts is an expression of God’s wisdom as the combined texts on gifts show (1 Cor 12-14; Eph 4:8-12; Rom 12:3-8). Every “member,” being an aspect of the whole, is a recipient of one or more differing gifts for the benefit and unity of the whole. In these ministry gifts, Christ is showing himself in his resurrection body through the gifts of his (death and resurrection) conquest to the church (Eph 4:7-11).



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706 707

Schweizer, “soma,” TDNT 7:1034-1035. Summary from ibid., 7:1036, 1038.

In Paul’s usage, the “body of Christ” is the church, not the cosmos or its parts as in Stoicism. Stoicism may have supplied some language and images, but Paul re-applies and reshapes them to a new people in the world—the church. “Body” denotes the fellowship-in-union of redeemed persons, those ‘in Christ,” not the natural world (cosmos) or merely some natural social parts of the world. It is this body of which Christ is the head (Eph 1:22; 2:16). There is yet another dimension to Paul’s language for these realities. Without using the words “church” or “body,” Paul speaks about the new people of God as a new man or new humanity, and a new race in Romans 5:12-21. Its primary characteristics are righteousness, life, spirit and grace—all coming from Christ. In contrast is the old race of Adam; its characteristics are sin, death, flesh and law. Adam was “head” of the old race; Christ is “head” of the new race. For this dimension of the new humanity, the Jewish concept of the race’s unity in Adam’s sin is Paul’s most likely resource, rather than Stoicism. In late Judaism, Adam is thought of as the head with the race is his body.708 In Exodus Rabba, all souls were created in the six days of creation and lodged in the Garden of Eden.709 More important than this is the fact that the Jewish-Christian work, IV Ezra, a book originating in Jewish apocalyptic circles, but with Christian additions, pictures the whole human race as infested with Adam’s sin: “Oh, Adam, what hast thou done. For the fall was not thine alone but ours who are thy descendents (IV Ezra 3:7).” Adam’s race is a body (a unity), but because it is, it can carry the infection of sin throughout itself, interpenetrating every part of the whole. The entire race is thus implicated as a “body.” These parallels are suggestive of Paul’s concept “in Christ.” It is in fact a concept of two totalities. In Paul’s thought, “in Christ” and the “body of Christ” are a new totality, of which the whole is the main focus of these descriptions. Just as Adam’s sin interpenetrated the whole of his race, so Christ’s resurrection body, righteousness and gifts interpenetrate the whole of his race. Just as Adam’s whole death-body casts itself into his race, so Christ’s whole resurrection-body casts itself into each individual of his race. An important implication of Paul’s body thought is the idea of its growth. This aspect of the “body” image is developed in detail in Ephesians 4:7-16. Here the unity and diversity of the body are emphasized in terms of growth and maturity. The text speaks of its “perfecting (vs 12),” its “building up (vs 12),” its “attaining (vs 13),” its “full-grown man” character (vs 13), its “stature of the fullness (vs 13),” its “growing up into him (vs 15),” and its “increase (vs 16a).” One has to wonder if this can be based on anything but Paul’s observation of growing local churches or the growing whole likened to the human body in its physical, emotional and social development. Just as the human body and personality grows into maturity, so it is normal for the whole of the body of Christ to grow into maturity, the goal of which is “the stature of the fullness of Christ”—the totality of the head’s perfections inter-penetrating his resurrection body as the church. The possibility of continuous growth beyond elementary forms of faith seems to be his argument about the Corinthian church’s experience with tongues and prophecy (1 Corinthians 13). For this he uses the images of infancy and adulthood; the latter is characterized by the term mature/ maturity (teleion) which he thinks is possible for Corinth through apostolic instruction and 708 Exodus Rabba, 40:3. 709 W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (London: SPCK, 1962), pp. 53-55; R. P. Shedd, Man in Community, pp. 73ff.

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a quest for greater spiritual gifts than tongues and prophecy, and this before the parousia. Several other passages beyond 1 Corinthians 13 use this infancy-adulthood-maturity concept for growth as well. Is the Church a ‘Metaphysical’ Entity? The preceding discussion suggests that the total body of Christ has real existence as a whole entity even though it is only partly visible (in individual believers and in local congregations). We may refer to this as a kind of “metaphysical” reality; some might prefer to call this kind of existence “mystical,” i.e., real but mysteriously greater than its visible manifestation. Harry Bultema, the grace movement’s earliest pastor-scholar, sometimes spoke of the “mystical” body of Christ in this sense. If so, passages in which Paul speaks of the church as a “mytery” do not refer to it in this sense (except apparently Ephesians 5:22-33); they more usually think of the “mystery of the church” in the sense of a newly revealed, formerly hidden-in-God reality. Perhaps both senses of “mystery” appear in Paul. For the moment the question is—is it really plausible to think of the total church as “metaphysical?” If J. A. T. Robinson is correct that corporate body language in the Pauline epistles refers to Christ’s extended resurrection body, there is at once the implication of an actual total entity, partly visible and partly hidden as in Christ’s own resurrection body. Not only Robinson’s concept, but some passages with “body of Christ,” like those cited above, sound like they refer to an entity which has real existence—an existence that is simultaneously visible in a local sense, and on a larger scale invisible, both local and universal. These passages often seem to interpreters to have a universal reference that goes beyond a group of “visible saints” in any locality or region. Some ecclesiologists have thus spoken about an “invisible church” as well as a “universal church,” both descriptions thought to refer to its metaphysical existence. A more cautious view of the “body” texts views “body” not as a real entity, but only a metaphor. Dispensationalist R. Saucy notes that the Catholic view sees in the body a real entity having universal existence.710 For most of his Protestant readers this situation sets the matter in a negative light, since he understands the Catholic doctrine of the church to rest “upon the literal interpretation which identifies the church as the body of Christ with Christ Himself”711 much in the manner of the above sketch. Saucy’s note observes that the Catholic doctrine of an authoritative church is part of this thinking. For Saucy it is important that a literal sense be avoided in favor of reading “the body” as a metaphor.712 However, it should be observed that Catholicism’s way of thinking of an authoritarian church as “body of Christ” also needs other Catholic dogmas to support it, i.e., apostolic succession, a special divine presence in bishops, and the seven sacraments administered by bishops and priests. But despite the way these elements are combined in Catholic theology, it is possible for the holistic-Christ view of the church to stand alone, based not on extra-biblical dogmas, but simply on the nature of salvation by faith alone and the formation of the church by Christ

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710 711

R. Saucy, The Church in God’s Program (Chicago: Moody Press, 1972), pp. 24ff. Ibid., p. 25, n.11. Ibid.

and the Spirit—created, that is, by acts of God. Saucy rather seems to think the Catholic view of universality and the identity of Christ with the church has to be rejected because it has these other Catholic connections, which seems questionable; Catholic views of the trinity are also surrounded by the same non-biblical thought structures. The idea of the church as Christ’s extended resurrection (spiritual) body does take the historic Protestant view of the union of Christ and the church a slight step farther than traditional Protestant thought; but in another sense, it is another way to describe the historic Protestant view of the visible-invisible church. Some representatives of the Presbyterian stream of thought about the nature of the church’s union with Christ (classical Presbyterian ecclesiology) seem to be content with stressing a union of the two but with only the slenderest of definitions. For example James Bannerman, the author of one of the great Scottish Free Church (Presbyterian) studies of the church, repeatedly uses language like “the elect, who are vitally united to Christ the Head.”713 Members of the church are “savingly united to Him as their Head,” and in a “union of the most intimate kind . . . .”714 Robinson seems to clarify Bannerman’s vague language when he speaks of the body as Christ’s resurrection body. Still, this extension concept is a theological one in nature, i.e., the church is his new, spiritual body as it actually exists and keeps extending into the world to produce a universal spiritual body of believers. In this activity, he begins to make them what they will become fully at their future final resurrection in a more physical sense. An analogy—if not a real case of the same reality— is Jesus ability to pass through locked doors, a point made in the post-resurrection scenes of John 20-21: Jesus’ resurrection body appears to have qualities larger than his physical appearance. In his resurrection body this was possible; this extent of our resurrection is not yet possible. How could the body of Christ have some such “metaphysical” status? I have already discussed this briefly above, but some further thoughts seem appropriate here. The issue is related to the doctrine of philosophical realism. Historically there are two major views of universal, general, or abstract terms, one Plato’s and one Aristotle’s. Plato thought verbs, nouns and adjectives, and sentences of affirmation containing them, had real referents in the heavenly world (general terms refer to real entities in the heavenly world), even when used of concrete earthly realities. The concrete earthly realities they refer to are only “shadows” of another mode of existence which the same entities possess in the ideal (heavenly, upper) world. Aristotle rather thought that real, ideal-world unseen realities were co-present with their visible counterparts in a way somewhat like the Stoic idea of interpenetrating bodies. In other words, the ideas or universals represented in visible realities were present in and with their concrete manifestation. Since Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle has been the major ancient world philosopher thought to provide philosophical concepts as a framework for theology. Hence, Catholicism, following Aristotelian-Thomistic views of metaphysics, easily sees “body of Christ” as a local particular entity; but the universal entity with which it is co-joined, is also present in the visible particulars denoted by the “the body” or “the church.” Aristotle’s notion of universals and particulars resembles the manner in which Paul represents Christ’s body, and seems to be a workable way to view biblical terms appearing to have more than only specific local, visible referents. “Body of Christ” is one

713 714

J. Bannerman, The Church of Christ (Edinburgh, 1869), 1:29. Ibid., pp. 30, 19.

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such biblical term; the term “kingdom of God” could be another. Each biblical designation, however, must be evaluated for its own internal biblical thought value in this respect; the idea does not apply to all biblical categories without further ado. The Lord’s Supper does not appear to be another case in point; even the “is” texts (this bread is my flesh” and kindred concepts, Jn 6:50-59) are not so explained in other Supper passages. To say it another way, the Lord’s Supper does not seem to have metaphysical status. Is there any other Pauline language about the church that might be understood to refer to a more-than-visible body of Christ? There does appear to be such language about the church in at least two expressions. (1) Paul’s reference to the Jerusalem above that is our mother (Gal 4:21-31) seems to be such a Pauline phrase: “But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother” suggests that a true church is already in heaven in some sense and that the current visible church is an expression of the heavenly Jerusalem; that church is also “free” in an ideal sense. The implication might be that the heavenly church is represented in the earthly, visible church, and may be thought of as co-present with it, or, in a more Platonic sense, as also existing in heaven. A parallel in Hebrews comes closer (Heb 12:22-24), but even then does not embrace the co-present idea explicitly, although it may do so implicitly: But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to a judge who is God of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel.

In fact, Hebrews’ heavenly-earthly schema on the whole seems rife with larger-than-visible reality: Jesus and his sacrifice operate in two worlds as it were: the visible earthly world and the invisible heavenly world. Talk about having “come to” this heavenly God and his heavenly people suggests a larger people of God than the one now visible on earth, so that in a sense the two exist co-presently if the total universe is the largest possible reference point. The church must therefore be a single entity that has real metaphysical existence. (2) Paul also uses the term “mystery” in its other sense of “mysterious,” inexplicable,” or “hidden.” This is the case when he says in Ephesians 5:31-32, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one (citing Gen 2:24). This is a great mystery, and I take it to mean Christ and the church.” This text uses “mystery” with different meanings and nuances than when he speaks of something formerly hidden but now openly revealed. The subject is the union of Christ and the church, which represents a form of the co-presence of the resurrected Christ with his church. In this case, then, the term “mystery” is used in Paul’s less-frequent sense of “mysterious,” i.e., some reality that remains hidden and unexplained, similarly to the way he speaks of the “mystery of evil” in 2 Thessalonians 2:7. Even if his allusion to marriage and the sexual union of man and wife is understood as his main point, he nonetheless means the church and Christ (with the whole congregation of believers) exist together in a simultaneously visible and hidden whole. Of the whole only some is visible, but much is hidden, just as marital sex and love powers are largely hidden, but always present and real—co-present, so to say, within the total persons of married life in their visibility, 428

physicality and (hidden) emotions. It does appear, then, that Paul uses “mystery” in both senses—the previously hidden but now revealed, and that which is hidden-but-real. Thus we may understand the sense in which Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 12:12: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ (my italics).” It is stunning to have “Christ” used to mean the church or “body of Christ,” but this is quite clearly what he means. Thus, whether “body” is used, or Paul speaks of Christ himself, a reality exists, and is present in the church which is more than the visible saints in any given congregation or group of congregations. If one should say—“well, this is the Holy Spirit in the church”—the comment would certainly be correct; and yet Paul can also say, “The Lord (Christ) is the Spirit (2 Cor 3:17, 18).” The larger reality, therefore, is not just a mystical (hidden) body of believers, but the larger Christ who is co-present both with the visible earthly church and with the heavenly church—all making up one more-than-visible church—a “mysterious,” “hidden” whole, but out-in-the-open in visible congregations. Robinson’s thought about “Christ’s extended resurrection body” seems to be an apt description. A second issue which would be mostly of interest to people of “median” dispensationalist views is whether “in Christ” also describes the Jewish remnant looking for the kingdom. This remnant too was under the salvation of Christ and the new covenant. In other words, does the Adam-Christ, two-races thought only encompass the body church as a separate entity? Or does it also include all persons redeemed under the new covenant, beginning with Christ and the cross and forever onward through the church and then the millennial kingdom? A yes to the second question would mean that an overlapping of Paul’s descriptions of redeemed persons occurs in the epistles. Without entering into a full discussion of all related issues, it seems most plausible that the answer is—yes, the believers of Israel’s remnant came under the redemptive provisions of the new covenant, and then became included in the body of Christ when it began. Charles Baker argued for this view in his Dispensational Theology, and his thinking seems sufficiently biblical and inductive to be conclusive.715 The obvious suggestion of this assessment is that the church was simply included as a new form of the people of God in the new covenant era, just as the redeemed Israel of the future will be included and incorporated into the new covenant in the future. An possible implication of this view, following the analogy of the foregoing examples, is that the church will be incorporated into the messianic kingdom when Christ comes to establish it. The reality of a universal believers’ church as discussed above raises the issue of how it can be identified in the world when much of its reality is invisible in daily life. The issue became acute with the rise of pre-Reformation reforming movements like those of 715 C. Baker, A Dispensational Theology (Grand Rapids: Grace Bible College, 1971), pp. 510-515, concludes that Paul’s larger outlook knows no separate Jewish and Gentile churches, but only one unified church throughout the world (1 Cor 1:2; 10:32). In these texts there is only one single church in the world. If the Body of Christ was begun early in Paul’s mission, Jewish believers must have been incorporated into it to satisfy these broad-view texts. To deny Jewish remnant believers inclusion in the body-church seems to deny all Paul’s statements about its Jew-Gentile inclusiveness as well as these Corinthian references to a single church throughout the world. The advantage of this view is that it honors the biblical value on the progressive accumulative unity of the people of God. For example, when the dispensation of law began with Moses, surely all Israelites before Moses were incorporated into it, rather than being left to be another people of God of the foregoing dispensation of promise.

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the Waldensians, Wycliffe and Hus, all of whom virtually or actually denied that Rome was a true church. The church as understood here cannot be identified with any particular denomination or movement, with church buildings, and certainly not with any particular nation not even with “Christendom” in general. What then is the minimum, or even maximum, set of realities with which the body-church can be identified as a question of history or world reality? The discussion will be limited to the Reformation and beyond, since the Reformation is the demarcation point for the modern proliferation of church groups and denominations, and was also the point of departure for the issue of locating or identifying the true church. Thus Robinson’s description of the church as the extended resurrection body of Christ seems to embody a valid insight into the Pauline sense of the new people of God. The Issue of an Historical True Church Once the primal Reformers—Luther at Wittenberg, Zwingli at Zurich, Calvin at Geneva and Bucer at Strasbourg—embarked on a wide-ranging program of reform, they had to tackle the issue of how to identify the true church. This issue became all the more desperate once they said or suggested that (1) the Roman Church was an apostate church and no true church at all, except that within it were remnants of the true church, and (2) the Roman Church developed from a depleted understanding of New Testament salvation—a loss which began at an early time, certainly with Constantine; some second generation reforming groups said—at the end of the apostolic age. With a few other variant details, P. D. L. Avis puts it this way: The very existence of the reform movement and of the evangelical Churches which had broken with Rome hung upon their ability to answer the question, ‘Which Church is the true Church?’ in a satisfactory and convincing way that would both justify their separation from the historic Western Church centered on Rome and safeguard the validity of their sacraments as means of grace and pledges of salvation. Reformation ecclesiology returns obsessively to the problem of distinguishing between the false Church and the true;716

The reformers answered by invoking the notion of notae ecclesiae—the true church has visible “marks” (notae) by which it can be identified. To speak of “marks” is a cautious way of putting the matter since it implicitly acknowledges that even the true church is not absolutely clearly identifiable. The marks were specified as “the word of God rightly preached (the gospel) and believed, and the sacraments rightly administered.” This notion was first articulated by Luther and adopted by Calvin and the other Reformers. Calvin tended to think of the first “mark” as “true doctrine,” but more often expressed it as the preaching of the word supplemented by the presence of a ministry, stressing preaching, and in his earlier writings, the visible presence of discipline.717 Bucer at times suggested that discipline (especially excommunication of deviants) be more firmly one of the “marks,” a 716 P. D. L. Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981), p. 1. The treatment here follows the outline of Reformation ecclesiology offered by Avis. The first few chapters should be read for a broad understanding of ecclesiological options. 717 Ibid., p. 30

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view that was not only shared by the Anabaptist branch of the Reformation, but made the most important of the “marks.”718 The major Reformers named above all held to the idea that even a true church would inevitably be a mixture of wheat and tares; they appealed to 1 Corinthians and Galatians to show that deviations of various sorts—relational, moral and theological—did not cancel the status of any such New Testament church as “true.” The radical reformers (Anabaptists) held that any impure or erroneous mixture in the church disqualified it as “true,” necessarily apostate, and requiring to be cleaned out, expelled or disregarded as a church. They renounced all connection with everything worldly, including religious matters like contact with Catholics; and, they said, Christians must completely separate from all worldly structures of every kind, including government. They thought the major Reformers simply stopped half way to a true Reformation by normalizing the mixed church of real and false believers as a true church.719 How did this situation translate into the settlement of American churches in the colonial period? And—what kind of “church” came here from Europe? The European reformers of the sixteenth century had only two basic (visible) options. They are related to the two noted in the preceding paragraph (word and sacrament). Since they believed that the true church was at least partly visible, the chief way they thought of its visibility was to relate it to the political states of their surroundings, and opt thus for state churches. That is, churches existing under political regimes should recognize one religious body as the church in that government’s jurisdiction—an updated version of the church-state relation first established by Constantine and the Christian bishops in the fourth century. All persons of the civil state were to be baptized as infants, thus making them simultaneously members of the church and the civil state. The Anabaptists took issue with this view, and opted for no civil connections at all, thereby drawing a sharp separation between church and state—a view Luther embraced in theory, but could not fulfill in practice. What in Europe and Britain were state churches, were simply transplanted to America at the time of the founding—in concept at least.720 In this situation churches were “established” as the church of this or that colony based on the European government each colony represented, and in coordination with the religious commitments of the colony’s European connection or that of the proprietor in the case of proprietary colonies like Maryland and Pennsylvania. As immigration continued, however, this situation became more and more complicated. Intolerance within colonial establishments continued apace with two notable exceptions— the colonies just mentioned: partially in Maryland, a proprietary colony under the governance of Lord Baltimore, a Roman Catholic, and more fully in Pennsylvania, another proprietary colony under the Quaker William Penn. Both decided more or less strictly and with varied applications over time on policies of tolerance for all religions within their colonies. Later, the constitutional separation of church and state was another, much larger step toward collapse of the state church of western Christendom—the idea that the western 718 Avis notes this feature, ibid., pp. 551-61; cf. William R. Estep, The Anabaptist Story, 3rd Ed (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), pp. 247-253. 719 Avis, Church., pp. 13-77. 720 W. S. Hudson and J. Corrigan, Religion in America. 5th Ed (Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1992), pp. 28-59. Later editions of this widely used text seem to have abandoned this “Transplanted Churches” terminology; they did not abandon the concept, however, which seems useful for historical description of what actually happened.

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nations are Christian by total population baptism under a Christian ruler.721 New church bodies and denominations originating in America had to follow thereafter some form of the Anabaptist model since in principle church-state separation was enacted into civil law in the Constitution’s First Amendment. This arrangement created the possibility for resolving one aspect of the “true church” issue, i.e., it eliminated one of the main sources of a confusingly mixed church—mixed, that is, by all members of a civil entity being Christians by (infant) baptism, even when many parents and children were not true believers. But it did not eliminate the problem totally, since even within intentionally believers’ churches, non-believers can be present. Thus was created the mixed “wheat and tares” of Jesus’ parable (Matt 13:24-30). The reality and problem of a mixed church persists despite the clarifying nature of church-state separation.722 Among post-colonial American churches there seems to have been agreement as to the fact of only one real church. Therefore, instead of a general church war, so to say, between many types of churches, the notion of varied church bodies as “denominations” arose, i.e., there was in fact one true church, but different and varied particular churches “denominated” by different names, beliefs and practices, and hence “denominations.”723 Their names denoted their particular characteristics based on the theological or organizational preferences of each. Of course, some denominations arising in American life did dare to claim they were the only true church and all the rest were apostate. But the larger notion of denominations combined with the idea of one true church led easily to the recognition of one true church made up of all true believers, regardless of denominational affiliation. With diverse multiplication of groups and denominations, it became even more crucial to return to some form of the Reformation era idea of notae ecclesiae—the marks of a true church. And in varied ways, that is what happened. A simple solution, and very far from the reformers’ views, is many American Christians’ common-denominator thinking: all professing, visible Christians are actual Christians and are obviously diverse from each other in basic beliefs, so we all ought to just try to get along. This feeling about diversity began to gain an early form of its current popularity during the liberal and social gospel era, even though it did not yet come to the form of the first sentence of this paragraph until the later decades of the twentieth century.724 Liberal Christianity in America assigned much less importance to matters of doctrine and belief than did the Protestant tradition up to about the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The leaders of the theologically liberal social gospel movement tried to identify 721 C. Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture: A Post-Christendom Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), pp. 14ff. Carter argues that “Christendom” has collapsed and that the idea was a mistake to begin with. Clearly, the American church-state separation idea was a major step in that collapse. Whether this means H. R. Niebuhr’s five ways of relating Christ and culture collapse with it, as Carter argues, is another matter, and unlikely to be the case. 722 C. Hodge insists, with most Reformed and Lutheran ecclesiologists, on defending the mixed church as a normal inevitability. One is hesitant to normalize this for ongoing congregational life, but perhaps his defense is of an inevitable situation. Hodge was trying to deal with reality. Cf Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 3:548-549, for his discussion. 723 W. S. Hudson and J. Corrigan, Religion in America. 6th Ed (Upper Saddle River NJ: PrenticeHall, 1992), pp. 100-101. The notion of denominations noted above arose from within a group of Dissenting Brethren of the Westminster Assembly (c 1648); it too came to America from Europe, specifically England. 724 Diversity is stressed and featured in the later editions of the widely used Hudson text of the previous footnote.

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a central body of concepts that all Christians shared and which suggested in turn how the true church might be identified. This attempt took several forms. In Germany—and gladly adopted by American liberals by the turn of the nineteenth century—Adolph Harnack reduced the basics of Christian belief to four ideas in a famous book entitled What is Christianity?725 Harnack’s four basics were: Christians are people who confess the universal fatherhood of God, the universal brotherhood of man, the infinite value of the human person, and the primacy of love—a huge departure from, say, the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. If liberals chose, they could simply substitute these principles for orthodox Christian doctrine and make belief in such principles the test of a true church; many either explicitly or implicitly did so. Of course, one would then have to undertake another huge project—the re-definition of all the main affirmations of historic Christian doctrine, especially as it emerged in the Reformation and Post-Reformation eras; and this is what they did. Thereby, orthodox Christianity became a heresy or at least deviant. Following Harnack and other liberal European thinkers, the leading American theologian of the Social Gospel movement, the University of Chicago’s Shailer Mathews, made further attempts at a reductionist assessment of what Christianity really was and what Christians really (should) believe. Mathews used the method of finding the kernels of Christian belief within the New Testament’s husks (its culturized and dated Jewish and Graeco-Roman thought forms). With this method he first suggested that “the essentials of the gospel . . .” are: (1) the personality, teaching and resurrection of Jesus; (2) a rational faith in God as Father; (3) a certainty of divine forgiveness; (4) an experience of eternal life; and (5) assurance of a complete life beyond and because of death.726 In 1912 he revised this outline, identifying the essentials of Christianity as belief that (1) the God of love is the God of Law, meaning the universe is both physical and spiritual; (2) the God of love is revealed in Jesus; (3) man can be forgiven through repentance and personal union with God; (4) faith makes possible such a union and is evoked by the historical Jesus; (5) there is a certain blessed immortality of the individual; and (6) there is a coming new social order in which man will be dominated by brother-love.727 Obviously Mathews thought hard about what is distinctively Christian—and therefore what the church exists for and how it is to be identified. Like all adherents of the social gospel his answer is love, i.e., in man’s understanding, perfect harmony with the will of God and equalitarian brother-love for all humanity exhibited by example in the historical Jesus. I recite these thoughts of Harnack and Mathews as examples of a new way to identify the church’s faith similar to the way Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and Bucer identified the visible church (by reduction). But the Reformers would not have considered this list of beliefs anything close to a statement of the whole faith; they rather followed the old creeds. 725 A. Harnack, What is Christianity? trans T. B. Saunders (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957). The book was first published in Germany in or shortly after 1900 when Harnack wrote the author’s preface. It was a highly influential contribution to the growing social Christianity movement in German theology, and easily jumped the Atlantic to America where the Social Gospel movement was already in its beginnings. 726 S. Mathews, The Messianic Hope in the New Testament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1905); this early work distinguishes the passing (apocalyptic, e.g.) from the permanent (love, e.g.) in Jesus’ teaching. This work was formative for Mathews’ methodology. 727 Most of this outline appears in Mathews’ work, The Gospel and Modern Man (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1910).

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Nineteenth and twentieth-century Protestant liberals were reverting to the second century tendency to think of Christianity and the church as a new moral proclamation in which the faith was simply morally superior to Greek and Roman paganism. However, this kind of reduction of the New Testament proclamation simply will not do as it is not the biblical gospel of the saving God-man, Jesus Christ. What then are the basic elements that make the body of Christ, the church, a recognizable entity in the world? Identifying the Church We may begin with the basics of Reformation thinking: (1) the church exists where the gospel is truly (biblically) proclaimed and where the symbols of the saving gospel are rightly administered, i.e., the Lord’s Supper and baptism (as they thought). The Reformation era tendency in the early Calvin and in Bucer, and then fiercely in the Anabaptist leaders, to add (3) the power of disciplinary action to this minimum outline, may have been locally viable in its early Calvin and Bucer forms.728 But when the Anabaptists made discipline mean the right and power of a church to ban any and every impure or erroneous (imperfect) element, the more central Reformation traditions drew a line. They argued that the presence of erroneous and impure elements in the churches of Galatia and Corinth did not stop the apostles from recognizing them as churches, although in cases of extreme immorality, at least a temporary or provisional expulsion was expected (as in 1 Cor 5, for example).729 The basic Reformation formula in all its simplicity—the presence of the word (the gospel) rightly preached and sacraments rightly administered—is more or less on the right track. None of the main reformers cared to place a more stringent list of doctrinal details in a list of the notae (marks), even though in their confessions they spelled out many details of their doctrine. This means that however much they disagreed with each other over details, they were not willing to make these differences in detail into marks of a true church. We are wise to do the same, and this is consistent with the original vision of the founders of the grace movement. The Reformers’ principle, that there is a true church where the word is rightly preached and the “sacraments” (as they continued to call them) rightly ministered, was certainly an appropriate proposal given their basic convictions and the crisis nature of the Reformation. Of course, the words “true” and “rightly” are central in importance, and “sacraments” needs careful definition. Here the discussion of the visible and invisible church returns for a moment, but in a different sense. Visible and invisible thinking did not substantially exist before the Reformation,730 though there were some anticipations of it. Dorner thought Zwingli at Zurich (between c 1520 and 1530) was the first to use this language (ecclesia visibilis et invisibilis). The distinction in these terms impressed itself on both Luther and Calvin who also used it. The sense is similar to “true and false,” but is a richer concept in that it depends on a strong affirmation that the invisible church is that of true faith in Christ and the individual possession of salvation, the real presence of the Spirit in the redeemed, and 728 Avis, The Church, pp. 51-61. 729 Ibid., p. 41. 730 So I. A. Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine, 4 vols, trans A. Cave and J. Banks (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1882) 4:347-350.

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their bond in the body of Christ and its ministry gifts. The distinction also recognizes that in a true church there may be unbelievers. In this way the true church is really invisible because real faith is not visible in itself, the Spirit is not visible, the spiritual bond of believers is not fully visible, and the universal body is not fully visible either. Indeed, there will always be pretenders who in every outward respect have the appearance of faith but in reality lack it.731 As Dorner says, The evangelical Confessions teach: He is not a member of the Church in the proper sense, who stands in the outward communion of Church usages and ceremonies, or in the same politeia (under the same Church government), but only he who has faith; for the Church is principaliter a communion of faith, and the Holy Spirit, the assembly of the saints scattered over the entire circle of the earth.732

In this light we must insist on asking: where is there any evidence in the New Testament epistles or Acts, that there is no “mark” of a true church unless the Lord’s Supper or baptism is rightly practiced? Rather, it seems the case that a true body-church was formed whenever multiple persons (more than one) received Christ and the gospel (the word in the narrower sense) in any locality and entered into a voluntary fellowship based on common faith. There a church existed, even before baptism or the Supper. From the standpoint of Acts and the earliest epistles of Paul, what made the church visible was not at first sacraments added to the gospel, but the gospel as publicly proclaimed, received and fellowshipped, or, more as Calvin would have thought of it, the word received in faith and salvation; exactly there was a true and visible church. This is the view of Paul’s earliest letters— Galatians, Thessalonians (2) and Corinthians (2). They speak only of the gospel or the word received in faith as the identity of the churches.733 Hence we must say—where the gospel/the word is truly preached and believed, and a group of believers gathered, there is a true church, partly visible and partly invisible. This emphasis became characteristic of the evangelical movement in the post-Reformation era, especially in its Pietist and Puritan developments, and in their successor, world evangelicalism.

It seems fair to assume that apostolic traditions about the Lord’s Supper were delivered by Paul to a church as soon as it was formed. This seems the case in 1 Corinthians where they had within a brief time begun celebrating the Supper (1 Cor 11:23-26). And yet neither of the two Corinthian letters counts the Supper as foundational or anything like the Reformers’ notion of a true “mark.” This is all the more true at Corinth where, as suggested above, Jewish-Christian influence seems to have encouraged continuation of the whole feast of Unleavened Bread and Passover for a time. The Supper appears as one among several belief-practices of the Corinthian Christians. The more obvious and explicit “mark” of 731 Ibid., p. 356. 732 Ibid., p. 350. 733 Dorner, System of Doctrine, 4:355, cites an apparent Lutheran divine, Emser, who in turn is cited by Walch, an eighteenth century Lutheran, to the following effect: “Of a truth the Gospel is the only surest and noblest sign of the Church, far surer than Baptism or the Bread (Emser).” Despite lack of clarity on the source in Dorner’s citation, the opinion is of value as a parallel to the point above, coming as it does from within the Lutheran theological tradition. I assume the Walch is Johann Georg Walch in one of his two German works noted by James E. Bradley and Richard Muller, Church History: An Introduction to Research, Reference Works, and Methods (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p. 56, n. 16.

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the Pauline assemblies as churches is the reception of the word and their consciousness of being a new people in consequence of their faith in the gospel of Christ as 1 Corinthians 1-2, Galatians 1-2 and 1 Thessalonians 1-2 clearly show. The Corinthians’ faith is said to have included the confession that “Jesus is Lord ((1 Cor 12:3; Rom 10:9-10).734 For Thessalonica Paul repeatedly mentions their reception of the gospel in 1 Thessalonians 1-2, as is also true of the repeated references to the gospel in Galatians 1-2. In these chapters the distinctive mark of their faith, and all the more of their existence as a church, is their turn from idols to serve the true God. Other more spiritual and inward dynamics of this effect are mentioned in 1 Thessalonians 1:4-8. At Galatia, the break with paganism is also noted, but not in any detail (4:8). At Corinth it is the same: the tangible, visible token of their existence as a church is the break with their former paganism in consequence of transforming faith reduced to the confession “Jesus is Lord.” Thus, other “marks” seem to have supplemented the basic “mark” as churches were taught or discovered and began to practice their new life, the Lord’s Supper among them. In the case of Jewish believers, the defining “mark” appears to have been a parallel confession that “Jesus is Christ (Messiah).” One assumes that as with the confession “Jesus is Lord,” “Jesus is Christ” was also public and thus a visible mark of a group of Jewish believers who uttered it. Scenes of Jewish conversion in Acts do suggest that baptism in the name of Jesus was a major immediate visible “mark” of their confession of Jesus as Messiah.

In all then, the most immediate visible “mark” of a “church” was—where the gospel and word were preached and received in a confession of Jesus’ Lordship, and a fellowship of such believers formed—there was a true church. When one turns to the issue of visibility in a concrete, hands-on sense, what did Pauline churches really look like? Did a building identify them, especially one with a distinctive church architecture? Was it a sign with a church name on it? Was it a public symbol? The only reference point in the epistles is the house church, which will be discussed later.

True Church—Truest Church? Notwithstanding the minimum understanding discussed above of where a true church is visible, i.e., where the gospel is proclaimed and believers are gathered, we may consider whether there might be a truest church—a church with all major basic provisions fully functioning. By this I mean a church which functions with the fullest elements of a people of God in the dispensation of grace, as seen in the teaching of the Pauline epistles and reflected to some degree in the churches of the book of Acts. We may thus consider elements visible in the epistles and Acts that might be called the “truest” form of the church or the church in its “fullness.” However, if such a concept of a gradually developing fullness is a correct estimate of what actually happened and in reality continues to happen, we must 734

The public nature of early Christian confessions is suggested, though not proved as such, by Paul’s notice of the use of the “mouth” in speaking the confession as in Romans 10:9-10. These fragmentary notes of confession are also said there to have been the manifestation of faith. This practice of identity by early Christians should be viewed in the context of the larger use of confessions as “marks” of faith, and hence of the real presence of a true church as noted by the very important study of V. Neufeld, The Earliest Christian Confessions (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1963). Since its appearance, this study has been cited frequently by commentators as a kind of standard on this subject, but insufficiently appreciated in studies of the church.

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recognize also that such a filling out of a church is nothing more than the awakening of gifts and powers of the Holy Spirit which were latent in the church-body from its first acceptance of the gospel. The following is only a sketch outline with a few comments on urgent priorities and American cultural drags on the vitality of churches.735 1. First place in such an inventory of added “marks” (to continue using the reformers’ term)” after a community of the gospel, faith, and confession is formed, must be the Lord’s Supper and worship including the faithful teaching of the Word, and prayer. The ministry of the Word has top priority in numerous texts and should not be

subordinated to the extreme pragmatic temperament, therapeutic values, juvenilization,736 and entertainment wants of modern Christians. Monologue preaching could be at least partially replaced by dialogue, interactive teaching methods, and use of other engagement techniques. Other worship elements are mentioned in a few places in Paul’s epistles. The worship and prayer life of the body is not the subject of many passages, but it is clear that when Paul asks a church for prayer, he is thinking of prayers during their gatherings. Mention is made of singing as well (Eph 5:19-20; Col 3:15-17), but such references are very limited. The Supper is certainly a remembrance of the Lord’s body and blood, but in nature not more than that; and yet it does have several added meanings which need to be understood by congregations. For example, 1 Corinthians 11:20-22 insists that it be orderly and unified. It is a fellowship, communion or participation in Christ (10:16-17), but the sense of this concept (physical, spiritual or social) is not further specified. It is certainly a symbolic proclamation of Christ until he comes (11:26). It requires a selfjudgment (11:27-29), and implies a renunciation of other masters (10:21-22).

The tendency to mechanical or perfunctory practice of the Lord’s Supper is a potential or actual problem in virtually all denominations of Protestantism and in Catholicism as well. The frequency of the Supper is not specifically ordered in the New Testament, so there is liberty on the matter. Contrary to much established practice in which one major meaning of the Lord’s Supper is held by a church or denomination and mechanically repeated, or a habitual disclaimer on what it does not mean is regularly repeated, the manifold meanings and nuances can be made to enrich its service.737

2. The presence of a local Spirit-given and Spirit-led ministry which encompasses the whole local assembly is taught by Paul; especially important are the leader-gifts such as pastor/overseer/elder which belong to any church seeking the fullness of its ministry. I stress this because of Paul’s special attention to the leadership gifts including passages on their functions and qualification; they are far more fully discussed than the other gifts of 1 Corinthians 12:1-26 and Romans 12:6-8.

See E. Wishart, “Designing a Paradigm of Church Health for Pauline Churches,” D. Min diss, Ashland Theological Seminary, Ashland OH, 2000, for a study on church health with coverage of the literature and recent thought on the general subject. 736 T. R. Bergler, “When Are We Going to Grow Up? The Juvenilization of American Christianity,” CT 56, 8 (June, 2012), pp. 18-24. 737 For further discussion of various nuances as subjects of communion meditations by pastor-elders, see Essay VIII in this collection. 735

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If the Prison and Pastoral Epistles (including Ephesians) belong to the EphesianAegean period of Paul’s mission activity (Acts 19-20),738 or even to the Caesarean imprisonment period (Acts 23:23-26:32), then the last list of spiritual gifts Paul wrote is that of Romans 12:6-8. This gift list is notable for its lack of reference to tongues and miracles or gifts of discerning spirits and interpretation of tongues, and equally notable for its inclusion of elders (leadership, prohistami, cf. 1 Tim 5:17, where prohistami defines an elder function) and deacons (diakoneo). Prophecy is mentioned; but along with tongues, this gift was expected to pass away. Elder functions are covered by about twenty functional terms for elders in the epistles. When Paul wrote to Timothy and Titus toward the end of his Ephesian period travels around the Aegean, he clearly thought it important to specify moral and social qualifications for elders and deacons (1 Tim 3; Titus 1). While the signgifts of the Corinthian lists (1 Cor 12-14 passim) have passed away (13:8-12), many gifts of the Corinthian lists along with those of Romans 12:6-8 are still in the church.739 Churches or denominations of various stripes have a tendency to make eldership an office to be established and continually filled by elected persons. While a modicum of Spirit charisma may remain, there is little consideration of gifts awakened by the Spirit through experience, practice or recognition. The weakest presence of ministry functions within elder or elder-deacon groups is that of eldership’s caring-helping dimension.740 The practice of leaving most elder functions to pastors is not biblical; it is partly the consequence of pastor-as-employee thinking along the lines of a business model. Elder training, once gift patterns become visible to leaders and congregations from volunteer experience, can be developed.

3. The presence of moral discipline in the churches, along with an orderly process for adjudication of conflicts, grievances and moral lapses, is essential to a serious and realistic view of church life and vitality. American churches are notoriously weak in this aspect of their corporate life; they need to take firm but kindly and restorative action upon repentance in dealing with such issues.741

1 Corinthians 5 orders such moral discipline, at least in the most offensive cases, and the following chapter (6) specifies that the local church must function as a judiciary in cases of serious conflicts or breach of morality. 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians stress or state the priority of some process of moral and ethical de-paganization of Christian bodies.

The weakness of moral discipline in western world churches probably stems from the influence of developments in western cultures on the churches. One factor in hesitations on discipline is a reaction to the harshness of church discipline in European, and especially British and American church history. Nathaniel Hawthorne memorialized this problem in The Scarlet Letter. The famous Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts in the 1690s is 738 On reasons for this placement of these letters see the Appendices A and B to this essay. 739 See Appendix C to Essay IX for a chart of all the gifts spread through these passages. Also see Essay IX’s discussion of elder functions and qualifications. 740 See Essay IX for further discussion of elders’ caring function. 741 The repentant man of 2 Corinthians 7 likely refers to the immoral man of 1 Corinthians 5; regardless, the bruised relations between either the Corinthian church or Paul (or both) and the man of 2 Corinthians 2 and 7, have been corrected by repentance. This passage is the locus classicus of this kind of restorative churchly action toward serious misbehavior.

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another famous case in point. Another is the American tendency to regard all discipline as potentially or actually psychologically harmful to persons, and few would care to take any action that might hurt another person at all, or to endanger the churches’ reputation as a loving community, especially in a therapeutic atmosphere in which hurt people often relate their treatment to others in almost totally personal viewpoint terms. If there is discipline, the Pauline instruction allows for and even encourages repentance and kindly restoration as a normal process. 4. The practice of a new community life with visible communal giving and receiving also belongs to a church practicing fullness of its churchly life. This too is extraordinarily difficult in an American culture dominated by selfism and avarice driven by individualistic capitalism, personal enterprise, and the Puritan work ethic. American churches are unconsciously driven by business models and often highly judgmental attitudes of business and enterprising members toward their congregational poor and laboring members. While there is no prohibition on gain and wealth, there is a greater responsibility on the part of those with more to share among the economically weaker, especially their working poor (1 Tim 6). The ideal is that believers live in real economic community of work and egalitarian sharing (2 Cor 8:13-15). Paul recognizes there will be wealthy members of churches (1 Tim 6:1-10, 17-19), a situation he does not begrudge or try to undo. But he also emphasizes the principle that those with greater means have greater responsibilities to those whose lot is far less. This thinking is based on the communal ideals of the Old Testament which are brought forward into the New Testament. The two major uses of church monies from gifts are (a) support of ministers who devote their full time to the word (Gal 6:6), and (b) support of the needy within the church, and to whatever extent possible those outside as well (Gal 2:9-10; 6:10; 1 Cor 9:3-14).742

5. A church living in the fullness of its churchly life needs to know visible manifestations of good works produced by the body gathered in fellowship and worship to its own and to those outside (Gal 6:10).

Galatians 6:10 is large-spirited in its thinking about the use of church funds, even while prioritizing the meeting of needs within congregations. “Doing good” is not limited to monetary matters, but certainly includes all forms of kindness, mercy, rescuing and helping—all gifts that cannot be confined arbitrarily to the assembly of believers. “Good,” when used of interactions with others, normally refers in the New Testament to the increase of others’ well-being; it is often used in a monetary sense. Romans 15:1-3 is also to be 742 That Galatians 6:6 belongs here may be questioned. Sharing good things with one’s teacher in a local assembly is the language of economic support; see E. D. Burton, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1921), p. 335. The ensuing language about reaping and sowing (6:7-8) also has economic reference as it does in 1 Corinthians 9 and especially in 2 Corinthians 9:7-12, on which see also J. B. Lightfoot, The Epistle of St. Paul to the Galatians (Reprint, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, n.d.), pp. 218-219. These texts abound in egalitarian sharing in an economic sense. Paul also thinks generosity is actually more than equalitarian sharing; it will cause an abundance, and such a flourish also becomes mutual, as the passages together indicate. This is not about a principled legal or forced socialism, but a voluntary mutual helpfulness that carries divine rewards.

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noted, where the context mentions enemies, and as well Romans 12:9-21, where those who need the love of Christians are not differentiated from other believers or unbelievers.

6. Churches need to practice egalitarian reconciliation over alienated ethnic, social and gender issues (Ephesians 5-6). The flow of sin-laden and conflict-ridden social history is the subject of Ephesians 2:11-22, which uses Jew and Gentile as the case in point at the moment. In Galatians 3:28 and Colossians 3:11 Paul speaks of social pairs struggling for equality and new relationships of love and service with each other. His general statements are to the effect that in Christ there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian or Scythian, slave or free, male or female. These pairs are remarkably comprehensive for Paul’s world, reaching to the most damaging or threatening of all such social realities. These representative examples of conflict illustrate similar conflict types in our own world and churches; application of Paul’s values are intended to be without limit, assuming Christians with prejudice or harmful attitude habits can be persuaded or convicted to follow the implications of the lists. James too in several passages of chapters 2-5 discusses the persistent harmful practice of social divisions in his Palestinian congregations. He is hard on their unwillingness to modify or give up such divisions. The egalitarian reconciliation teaching of the New Testament is not limited to Paul, but is certainly most forceful in him, while James specifies details and attitudes of economic and social divisions within his own apparently Jewish congregations. Stubborn prejudices among white American Christians toward Native Americans, Hispanics, and African Americans need constant attention; and sometimes these minority groups need encouragement in overcoming their hurts, or anger toward Euro-Americans.

As all American Christians are aware, there is always a residue of ethnic consciousness in the American mix of cultures and national origins. Ethnic jokes are a sign of these variations, and while people persist in laughing at them, there is beneath the laughter a latent malaise if not at times hostility, or at least unkindness. Racial reconciliation of AfroAmericans with Euro-Americans still lags even after a century and a half of freedom from race slavery; and Native-American integration into other American congregations makes poor headway as well. The unusually heavy immigration of Hispanics into America after 1980 is yet another challenge to American churches to make ethnic reconciliation work.

7. Visible commitment to the world mission of the gospel, as a preliminary first step in Christ’s conquest, also belongs in the true church (Eph 1:22-23).743 Churches need outflow of several or many sorts to be true to their calling and to enhance their vitality. If Paul’s pattern of mission is followed, priority goes to urban centers as Acts illustrates, for the simple reason that this is where the greatest quantity of both people and sin are concentrated. Smaller towns too are included in the mission pictures of Acts. Still, Paul concentrates on the major Roman cities like Syrian Antioch, Ephesus, Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, and finally Rome, and then moving out in several directions from these urban centers (Acts 19:1, 8-10; 1 Thes 1:9-10; 2 Cor 10:15-16; Rom 15:23743 G. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), passim, frequently discuses these conflicts reflected in various topics of 1 Corinthians.

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24)—all seaports, administrative centers and main Roman road-and-branch sites. This concept necessarily includes the immediate environs of any specific local church, as 1 Thessalonians’ references to provincial Macedonia show (1:8; 4:10). Identity of gifted evangelists is essential along with their encouragement and support.

Not all churches can be expected to have made these dynamic “marks” of a true church immediately or totally operational from the moment of their inception. Acts and Titus show that Paul gradually introduced elders into already existing congregations. Development of radiating outreach from urban centers was also gradual, though planned; it was apparently spontaneous at Thessalonica (1 Thes 1:8), apostolically developed at Ephesus (Acts 19:10), and envisioned but not yet happening at Corinth (2 Cor.10:15-16). Other such elements of fullness only show up in the epistles in bits and pieces, which also suggests their gradual development. On any reckoning it is clear that these values were addressed by Paul as what churches do and by which they can be identified as churches in their fullness. House Churches: Their Relations and Leadership

In Paul, the primary visible expression of the local body-church in its settings and relations is the house church. An example of a larger expression of one kind of body relation is the case of the offering gathered by Paul from the Gentile churches for the poor Jewish Christians at Jerusalem. Another expression of the body is the elder-gathering scenes of Acts as cases of how representative leaders from local churches function as elders in larger-than-local gatherings. These scenes of concrete body life are the most obvious of such expressions in the earliest Pauline congregations; but they are not the only ones. Because of their clear presence in the epistles the discussion will use these as examples. What then did the earliest Christian churches actually look like? Local Body Relations

The earliest social form of the body is the house church. House churches are explicitly alluded to in Romans 16:5; 1 Corinthians 16:19; Colossians 4:15; Philemon 2, and probably Acts 20:20. This is an appreciable group of house-church appearances in the epistles; they show that the social expression of the body is present in several geographical areas of Paul’s church-planting mission activity. An early study among those with renewed interest in New Testament house churches points out that this arrangement for body-gatherings is even the source of family language in the Pauline epistles.744 If this

is so it suggests that churches meeting in houses fostered a closeness of relations among Christians in the Roman Empire that transcended other kinds of available associations in the empire; nothing less than a new kind of family is suggested.

744

Robert Banks, Paul’s Idea of Community (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980).

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A description like that of Romans 16:5 (about Priscilla and Aquila) of “the church that meets at (kata) their house,” is perfectly clear. Priscilla and Aquila were apparently a Roman business family (Acts 18:1-3) who appear to have had a “house” in Rome, perhaps another at Corinth (Rom 16:5) and yet another at Ephesus (1 Cor 16:8, 19). In a recent study by R. H. Finger, at least three more house churches are suggested from a combination of Romans 16:11, 14 and 15, where house churches are inferred from family/household language.745 The language of the house church and its leadership is very similar in 1 Corinthians 16:19 where Paul speaks of “. . . Aquila and Priscilla together with the church at their house (Ephesus).” With what we know about the number of notable or wealthier Christians at Corinth, it is probably not too much to suppose several house churches there as well as at Rome and Ephesus.746 Colossae probably represents a smaller-scale situation (smaller inland town) with perhaps only two house churches, one belonging to Philemon, the owner of the slave Onesimus (Phile 2), and another meeting in the house of Nympha (Col 4:15); these texts suggest multiple house churches per city. Philemon 2 speaks of “the church in your house in the same language as Romans 16:5 and 1 Corinthians 16:19—“the at-your-house-church.” Paul’s reference in Acts 20:20 to teaching the church/elders “house to house” refers to making the rounds of house churches at Ephesus; the passage reads kat oikous, almost certainly meaning “per houses,” that is, “ per house church (20:20).”747 This is a rather telling reference to multiple house churches at Ephesus—a likely reality stemming from Paul’s three years there. At Corinth, despite the remark of 1 Corinthians 1:26, that few among them were wise, influential or of noble birth, G. Thiessen identified no less than seventeen Corinthian Christians actually named by Paul, of whom at least several were influential.748 This is the most named persons of any church except Rome with twenty-five (Rom 16). If there were several house churches among the twenty-five leader-host-hostess persons at Rome (Rom16), then Corinth was probably not far behind this in the number of house churches. At least one house church is specifically attested at Corinth—that of Gaius (Rom 16:23). But to think his was the only one at Corinth seems impossible since among the seventeen named people were very likely a number of other prominent persons including Stephanus (1 Cor 16:15) and Erastus (Rom 16:23). The published house plans derived from excavations at both Corinth and Ephesus give us some idea of the space available in the homes of wealthier Christians.749 745 R. H. Finger, Paul and the Roman House Churches (Scottsdale PA: Herald Press, 1993), pp. 3143. 746 G. Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity: Essays on Corinth, ed and trans J. H. Schutz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), pp. 69-119. Theissen identifies no less than seventeen persons who were people of note and likely belonged to the upper-class of the Corinthian churches, 1:26 notwithstanding; this text may suggest the large size of this church. Several passages in 1 Corinthians reflect conflicts between social levels. 747 So C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, 2 vols (London: T & T Clark, 1994), 2:968. 748 Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity, pp. 91-96. 749 J. M. O’Connor, “The Corinth That Paul Saw,” The Biblical Archaeologist 47 (1984): 145-160; the house plan exhibited in the article shows a central atrium of about 6 x 7 meters with a centered impluvium. The dining room (triclinium) is adjacent with entry through an open doorway; it measures c 5 x 10 meters. If either of these spaces were anything like other houses where Christians met, they might perhaps hold comfortably 40 (+ or -) persons. If the adjoining dining room was used, the space would have been proportionally more. A photo of the atrium of a house at Ephesus (reconstructed) recently excavated appears in Huseyin Cimrin, The Metropolis of the Antique Age Ephesus (Selcuk/ISMIR: Muhsin Demirel, 2000), pp. 22-24, also with an impluvium at the center under an open space for light. This sample may be somewhat larger than the atrium of the Corinth house.

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Such people would have had homes with an atrium (partially open central courtyard) and dining rooms sufficient to host 20-40 persons or more at a gathering. So we must probably reckon a total number of Christians of at least 100-150 at Corinth spread among several hose churches by the time Romans was written from there; they were spread perhaps among five houses, and these numbers may be on the low side. A private home with a much larger atrium or courtyard like that of the Vetti family at Pompeii, could have held perhaps double the modest numbers suggested for Rome, Corinth and Ephesus or Colossae. Of the homes recently excavated at Ephesus, several had atria that could have accommodated perhaps 40-60 persons in the atrium alone. The atrium of the private home excavated in the Anaploga neighborhood at Corinth could probably have accommodated up to 40 persons, and the dining room another 15-25. The atrium of the Roman patrician houses at Ephesus and Corinth was a square, not a circle. Still, one can imagine 30-60 persons seated on benches or on the floor around a square or even within it (both were open) with the speaker in one corner, in the center, or even on one side. Everyone could see everyone else more or less face-on just as families and persons (bodies) see each other face-on in normal normal family life. This arrangement would facilitate dialogue (Gr dialogeomai, several times in Acts’ communication scenes) and interaction as most modern church floor and seating plans do not. It may not be too much to see in the church’s fourth century adoption of the boxy Roman basilica an arrangement serviceable to the authoritarian pulpit speech of Roman bishops—a leadership and seating style still with us in our row-style churches with a monolog pulpit raised at the front for a “talk-at” effect.

The purpose for discussing these details of the house church is not to argue for a return to house churches (which have their own pros and cons). Rather it is for the purpose of giving some idea of the limited size, physical closeness, and interactive possibilities that characterized the body-as-family idea in the Pauline churches. Most churches since the Reformation (and long before), with their straight or curved row seating and raised pulpit have perpetuated the box-like architectural pattern of the rectangular floor plan characteristic of the Roman basilica-church of the fourth century and after. The basilica pattern discourages the physical closeness and interactive communication possibilities of the body/family house churches. The modern round church and broad-church patterns (as opposed to the narrow rectangular basilica pattern) make a pass at an exception to this tradition; but even here the monologue pulpit arrangement is the norm, interaction is virtually non-existent in the meeting, and persons cannot look at or address each other in any interactive way without disruption. The rectangular basilica church is ideal for hiding and anonymity, and serves the monolog sermon of the western world.

A Symbolic Action Reflecting Paul’s Regard for the Whole: The Offering for the Judean Jewish Christians Paul’s language and thoughts about the whole body of Christ have more than ideological expression as in a book like Ephesians (2:11-3:13). One tangible expression of his body thinking is the collection of funds from Gentile churches of his founding for poor Jewish Christians in Judea. No text explicitly links the collection with his body of Christ thinking or language in 1 Corinthians or Ephesians-Colossians, unless his mention in Ephesians 1:15 of the readers’ love for all the saints is such a reference.750 To see the

750

This possible reference assumes that Paul’s Prison Epistles belong not to Acts 28 or later, but to

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same collection here that appears in Romans 15 and 2 Corinthians 8-9 would depend on an earlier than usual dating of Ephesians—a point argued in Appendix A to this essay below, but still viewed with doubts. Despite the lack of a specific text linking the collection to any body of Christ text in 1 Corinthians or Ephesians-Colossians (or elsewhere), some statements Paul makes about it do show interest in the unity of Jew-Gentile groups. The most telling of these is Romans 15:25-27: At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem with aid for the saints. For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem; they were pleased to do it, and indeed they are in debt to them, for if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought to be of service to them in material blessings.

This notice of the meaning of the collection reflects another form of egalitarian body thinking that characterizes the Jew-Gentile passages in Ephesians, Galatians, 1 Corinthians, and Colossians: Jews and Gentiles in the body are one. There is no hint here or anywhere else that they continued as separate churches, one Jewish and “earthly,” the other Gentile and “heavenly.” Paul clearly believed the body was made up of all believing Jews and Gentiles undifferentiated, rather than divided into two unrelated churches with two different hopes, let alone two different gospels. It seems obvious that this collection was a tangible expression of body life between precisely the two major ethnic components of its composition (Eph 2:11-22). It is striking that he speaks in the most general terms of the parties involved—simply believing Jews and Gentiles. The third mission journey collection appears in all three certainly datable epistles of that “journey”: (in chronological order) 1 Corinthians; 2 Corinthians; and Romans. He first alludes to the actual collection in 1 Corinthians 16 in anticipation of his arrival there to receive it. He then discusses it in detail in 2 Corinthians 8-9 where he refers to its “equality” (2 Cor 8:13-14) in another body-like thought, and to its ability to make the whole enterprise flourish for the benefit of all (2 Cor 9:10-15). Finally, the collection appears again in Romans in 15:25-27 with its mutual benefit thought.

Thus the collection exhibits Paul’s universality and reconciliation thoughts about Jews and Gentiles in a book like Ephesians, and thus stands as a token of mutual body life between the two ethnic types formerly in a hostile and alienated condition toward each other (Eph 2:11-13). The relations he thinks of are corporate group relations, not isolated interpersonal ones. For the moment we shall be content with this and the following expression of the body’s life as illustrations of how the church functioned in its earliest years from the an imprisonment, or more than one imprisonment suffered during the third “missionary journey,” or to his return to Jerusalem at the end of that journey. In my view the Prison Epistles belong either to an imprisonment during a period of travel within the three years at Ephesus, or to the Caesarean imprisonment of Acts 23:23ff which followed closely on his arrival and delivery of the collection to Jerusalem. For the basic arguments see Appendix A at the end of this essay. For discussion of the same general placement of the Pastoral Epistles, see Appendix B to this essay.

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standpoint of the situation of its earliest tangible gatherings. Between Paul’s theologicalsocial conceptions of the body discussed above and the leadership realities discussed below lies the inner-congregational dynamics of elder charisma, functions and leadership; how this internal working of Spirit-driven ministry works was discussed in the precding essay. The point of the following consideration of elder-leadership is to sketch the life of the body in its largest inter-church activity—how elders ought to deal with internal disputes, how at times they worked together in larger than single-congregation gatherings, and how the body is led and governed at it largest point. Elders as Body Leaders and Representatives At least three kinds of local or larger-than-local body-church scenes are available for guidance in which a leadership person or persons potentially or actually appear; from these scenes insight can be gained into responsible management of church life, order, needs and conflicts. How do elders qualify or derive authority to act on behalf of local, urban, or regional churches? In discussing this question, it is essential to recognize that eldering is not a preset office to be filled by a unilateral appointment of a higher authority—a practice into which churches easily slip, especially when guided by political or business models rather than Scriptural models. In the biblical models, elders (and deacons) embody gifts working in a local setting; they are appointed because they have exhibited such gifts in actual congregational life. Having gifts, they owe their functions to the Holy Spirit working in them and in their congregations; they thus represent whole churches since their gifts derive from the activity of the Holy Spirit in each gathered assembly which recognizes and identifies them. Or to say it differently, they are in community with the gift-recognition processes of local churches to which they belong, and are thereby in union with them. In this manner they are representatives of the churches in the most body-whole sense. Their particular body-function may on occasion happen to take them away from their congregations for limited purposes and for a brief time to deal with elder matters coming from a group of congregations. But because of their union with their own church-body entities they are assumed to act in their church-body interests, and then return to them with results. Hence they cannot have acted independently in their own personal interests. It seems assumed that they rather represented their local assemblies when gathered together in a city or region. The Larger Urban-Regional Church As its Own Judiciary

In the first example, a conflict arose that involved one or the several Corinthian house

churches. (Paul addresses his guidance to the whole church at Corinth.) The church or some in it proposed that they take the conflict to a local civil court for resolution (1 Cor 6), perhaps to Gallio’s bema—his public, open-air justice-seat—the same court where a judicial proceeding occurred over a charge of disorder against Paul (Acts 18). A discussion of the situation would not be appropriate in this context if 1 Corinthians was not addressed to the 445

whole church, i.e., the several house churches of the city (1 Cor 1:1-2). In speaking to them about it, Paul assumes the whole church to be responsible, not to resolve it themselves as the body-whole, but to seek and appoint wise men (at least one) who are able to adjudicate the issue in a way similar to the Corinthian civil court. This responsibility of the whole Corinthian church—to appoint (or at least recognize) from within it a judiciary, even if only one wise person—is thought of as an action of the whole body since the order is addressed to the whole church, i.e., several house churches viewed in 1 Corinthians 1:1-2 as one urban or regional church. The order makes the means of resolution a body-whole action, not to function as a court, but to appoint a court within itself; thereby the judges are implied to be representative of the whole by congregational appointment (6:4-6). Paul’s instructions entail the principle of referral (even if only to a single wise, capable person) since the body-whole seems unable to deal with the situation itself. So far from removing the action from the authority of the local body-whole, this kind of procedural principle rather puts the responsibility squarely on the congregation and expects it to resolve the issue through appointed representative(s) or operative(s), thought of as judges. Thus, in the action Paul urges, the church, the action, and the proposed judge are a unity. There is no elder mentioned anywhere in 1 Corinthians; but the appointed “wise men” would have been just that if elders had been established.751 Paul expects the Corinthian house churches to establish their own judiciary—at bottom, an apparent elder function. Paul does not quote the main Old Testament judicial referral passage of Deuteronomy—the passage which established such a process for Israel (Deut 17:8-13): If cases come before your courts that are too difficult for you to judge—whether bloodshed, lawsuits or assaults—take them to the place the LORD your God will choose. Go to the priests, who are Levites, and to the judge who is in office at that time. Inquire of them and they will give you the verdict.

But although he does not cite this or any other such Old Testament passage, the two judicial referral scenes (Deut 17; 1 Cor 10) have similarities in their procedural concepts, i.e., he is probably following an Old Testament judicial pattern of referral, without actually quoting a passage, a kind of Old Testament “echo” discussed by P. Long in his doctoral dissertation of 2013. Nor is this anything out of the ordinary for Paul in dealing with the Corinthians’ problems, since he does cite Old Testament principles for establishing other matters of good order. A notable case is his use of the Old Testament for the principle of a minister’s right to compensation from a congregation (1 Cor 9). Biblically we have only the example from Deuteronomy and the analogy of elder-judges in the Old Testament to guide us; but there may be examples of judge-elders in Judaism as well—a point already noticed in the previous essay. Hence we may conclude that judicial referral is a proper procedure for resolution of a conflict or problem that a single congregation can not, will not, or simply does not resolve by itself. On the smallest scale, the church should appoint elder-judges for adjudication of conflicts referred to them. The scene establishes the principle of church judiciaries—(elder) judges appointed by the churches themselves. The exact nature of 751 This question is further discussed in Essay IX above in the section on elder functions where it will be seen that judicial wisdom is one among several elder functions. See also R. Renberg, Courageous Leadership, pp.

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judicial authority and scope is apparently left to wise discretion. This is not a reversion to “legalism,” but a realistic, guided adoption of a basic principle of criminal or conflict resolution from analogies in the civil sphere. This principle will become important as we proceed further into larger meetings of elder representatives of the body-whole in other respects. An Urban-Regional Meeting of Elders In Acts 20:17-38 a meeting of Paul with the Ephesian elders (20:17) is reported; the account is mainly an admonitory speech to them by Paul. Again, several features of this situation can be commented with focus on its significance and exemplary character. The content and implications of the speech show that it is not just a friendly, sentimental farewell, but deals with serious issues they will face as church leaders. (1) The “church” of Ephesus is uni-plural. In the speech account the description is “the elders (plural) of the church (singular, 20:17, 28). The elders (plural) present belong to the church (singular), not churches (plural). The singular term suggests one Ephesian church despite virtual certainty of several house churches at Ephesus. Plurality of house churches is suggested (not proved) by the combined references to “elders of the church” (singular, 20:17) with mention of teaching them “house by house” (NIV; Gr kat’ oikous, vs 20, “by houses”). His reference seems to be to multiple house churches within the city or region where he taught these same elders during his three year stay; this is not a reference to “door to door” evangelism at Ephesus, but “houses” where Paul taught the elders. This combination of terms is reason to think of at least a single, broadly unified urban church composed of multiple congregations—one church, several congregations. This way of representing the gathered elders suggests they formed something like a “presbytery,” to use the equivalent term from Presbyterian church government, i.e., the gathered elders of several urban or regional congregations whom he taught in their specific congregations, but who are now gathered together as a body to hear him.752 (2) The elders of the passage are a representative body. The textual details of the passage suggest they do not merely represent themselves individually, and do not even represent only their own congregations, but are one with “the church,” of Ephesus, whether it is whole-urban or regional. In such a representation the community itself and the community spirit of early Christian churches is noticeable, and the unity and solidarity of the “body of Christ” is retained rather than atomized or broken up into nothing more than the whole as the sum of its individualized parts. This way of speaking of groups— congregations or elder bodies—sees elders or congregations or regional expressions of the body of Christ as unities or solidarities, and explains why such an urban or regional 752 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3.14.2, thinks the elders summoned by Paul came not only from Ephesus, but also from other neighboring cities, i.e., that “Ephesus” is the inclusive name for the region. Developing ideas about regional bishops could be an interest of Irenaeus in this comment, but it is interesting that it comes from many centuries before any Reformation stream Presbyterian system of government existed. R. B. Rackham, The Acts of the Apostles (London: Methuen, 1901), p. 382, happens to agree with Irenaeus’ comment. But he does not draw any implications about elders per church and/or per city, let alone per region, from the details of the text. There is no substantial teaching in the New Testament to the effect that from a body of elders, a single regional bishop will or should arise.

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elder gathering is simply a representative expression of the whole, however broad the geographical framework may be. The later development of the regional ruling bishop, while not provided for in any New Testament text, was an outgrowth of this urban-regional way of thinking of the church-churches, but not a biblically necessary one. (3) The speech suggests that as a body of elders, they have authority and responsibility to shepherd (“pastor,” vs 28, using poiman, shepherd), to oversee (“bishop,” vs 28, using episkopos, overseer/bishop), and to elder (vs 17, using presbuteros, elder) the church as a body-whole.753 If the neighborhood house churches each have their own government, which is likely (Acts 14:23: “elders per [house] church),” it also appears from the speech that the churches were shepherded by their elders as a group. What the interface between each congregation’s governance and a regional elder body might be is not part of the speech, but some balance of shared or distributed administrative, teaching and caring responsibilities was essential (1 Tim 5:17). Church properties cannot be involved in their authority—at least not as yet—since the house churches were owned by private persons at this stage of church history. Rather they appear more like a council under the guidance of an apostle (for the moment), but with responsibility and authority to act with and for the churches once he departs. They seem already to have oversight functions in matters of doctrine and practice (20:27-31). If, however, Paul expected local churches or clusters of urban or regional churches to appoint their own judiciaries, we can at least think that this group of elders may have already met to resolve at least some issues at Ephesus, even though no such description of them exists here. (4) Paul assumes this body of urban-regional elders will have to make decisions as a group about doctrinal issues that will disturb the church and even the elders themselves. The issues will include actual disruptions after he departs: “I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from your own selves will arise men speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them (Acts 20:30).” While avoiding legal or judicial language for their future responsibilities and authority, this charge to them nonetheless assumes they will be required to make judgments about difficult situations as a body; it also assumes that they and the flock (the whole church) are one single community together. This scene, therefore, necessitates that the body of elders must function as a church judiciary in the same way that Paul expectd the Corinthian church to appoint wise men or even a single wise man to act as judge so that churches function as their own courts in resolution of issues. Of course, there was no church procedure to guide them or to which they were responsible, but only the apostolic doctrine and conduct principles found in Jesus and the apostles’ teaching. Taking guidance from the scene, Presbyterian elder bodies have undertaken to function in such a way since the time of John Knox and the Reformation in Scotland. Governance of churches and churches as their own courts became the principle of order in Presbyterianism—a set of ideas derived from these passages under consideration, and from other eldering texts in the Pauline epistles. American churches of dispensationalist belief with strong convictions about local congregational autonomy and government have not paid serious attention to these scenes and their implications because they do not fit well with strict congregationalism within the 753 There is no argument among Protestant theologians and ecclesiologists on the fact that these elders are also called in the same speech “bishops (overseers)” and “shepherds (pastors).” This is a base-line reality in attempting to shape modern church leadership functions to biblical-apostolic practice.

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culture of American individualism. One only hears of Paul’s final speech to the Ephesian elders, and perhaps about its significance for the three leadership functions—elder, overseer, and shepherd—all used for the same persons. The scene is seldom if ever assessed for its “Presbyterian” sense of elders as a unified urban or regional body required to make decisions on behalf of the whole church which they represent by its appointment, and with which they are in solidarity. Such a larger decision-making and supervisory body needs to receive serious attention by today’s churches. There is little if anything here that defines larger details of elders’ decision-making or authority. Their activity might be advisory, recommendational or binding, some combination of these, or something else. These scenes mostly picture elders’ representational, judicial and decision-making functions; they leave undefined the nature of their authority. There is, however, one case where an elder body’s decision is viewed as binding on the churches— the decree of the Jerusalem council of Acts 15. The elder scenes generally seem to leave room for various forms of authority expression that might be desired, needed or required; or, they might be more closely defined by assembling all elder terms in the epistles.

The Jerusalem Meeting: A Council of Elders Representing the Whole

There is a third example of representative elder action. According to Acts 15, Paul and Barnabas “were appointed along with some other believers (Acts 15:2b),” to refer the question of circumcising Gentile converts to the “apostles and elders” at Jerusalem for an opinion or final decision. With American individualist eyes, it is easy to pass over the subtle notes of more extensive church community and representation in this scene. The story has larger reference points than just Paul and Barnabas (for example the Jerusalem apostles; already developed Christian eldership at Jerusalem; and the appointing church at Antioch). Again we may draw some observations and implications from the scene. (1) It is usually said more or less casually that Paul and Barnabas went to Jerusalem to consult with others over the circumcision of uncircumcised Gentile believers, as though they themselves initiated the move. But the text of Acts notes that Paul and Barnabas were rather appointed to this consultation, presumably by “the brothers” whom the Judaizing Pharisees had tried to persuade toward circumcision and law-keeping in the Antioch church. The determination to send Paul and Barnabas makes their journey to Jerusalem a church action seeking resolution via appointed representatives—a situation not exactly the same as that of the wise judges Paul wants the Corinthians to seek from among themselves, but still somewhat parallel to it in that both involve representation and referral: the decisive action did or was expected to originate with congregations—apparently groups of them already at Antioch in Syria. The substantial difference is the number of persons involved. Paul and Barnabas simply became the Antioch church’s representatives by appointment for this special mission, no doubt for the obvious reason that they were chief discussants in the local dispute on the Gentile freedom side. Acts also notes that along with Paul and Barnabas, a larger group was appointed to accompany them, referred to as “some other believers.” This re-enforces the fact that the church community took action, not only in appointing them, but also by adding other persons to the party.754

754

So Rackham, Acts of the Apostles, p. 244: “So the church (my italics) at Antioch sent up an em-

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(2) This might be a larger than urban-regional gathering, but not a council of the whole church formally called or invited to send representatives to Jerusalem. The action was locally or regionally initiated by the church at Antioch, not coerced from the top down on any assumptions about the authority of the Jerusalem to take such action. It is rather a free and voluntary consultation, but still assuming the appropriateness of such a consultation, and seeking a larger reference point for the policy of allowing Gentile converts freedom from circumcision and other Jewish practices. It is, however, international in a sense or at least regional in scope, and seeking agreement on a policy of Gentile freedom from Jewish law—a major departure from Judaism. (3) The event establishes the normalcy of a larger church-elders consultation, in this case to establish a unified policy about Gentile circumcision; in the end the conference issued a decree that had authority for all Gentile churches. It is assumed in the meeting that several speakers (Paul, Barnabas, Peter, James) will be heard, that an agreement should result (which succeeded), and that the agreed result should set a policy norm for all the concerned churches. In fact, the council issued a letter declaring Gentile freedom from circumcision to be the policy decision of the gathered apostles and elders (15:19-29) including those of the Jewish church and mission at Jerusalem. Luke further notes that Paul and Barnabas delivered the letter to the Gentile churches expecting them and Jewish agitators to comply with the clarification: As they [Paul and (now) Silas] traveled from town to town [through Asia], they delivered the decisions reached by the apostles and elders in Jerusalem for the people to obey. So the churches were strengthened in the faith, and they increased in numbers daily.

It seems clear that this action has authority in part because it was undertaken by appointed representatives of the whole and in the interests of the whole. Clearly, this is a form of what many churches of the Reformation stream would today call “synodical” action—an action of appointed, gathered elders (and apostles in this case) representing the need of the Gentile churches for resolution of a dispute and eventuating in a letter representing the action of the gathering. This kind of conciliar action is hard for independent, congregationally governed churches to accept. In America with its several thousand denominations and fiercely independent congregationalism, the nearly normal reaction to such a process is for individual churches to simply withdraw from a fellowship if they think it necessary or desirable. Happily, the Grace Gospel Fellowship does have a procedure for at least doctrinal statement change or clarification that refers such suggested changes to the gathered national body. But practical matters of dispute and conflict are largely confined to local churches for resolution, and when they cannot resolve local disputes, the tendency is to divide. Referral of local issues to a larger body is not practiced, perhaps not even thought of. It would seem, if we take guidance from these larger elder gatherings in Acts, that some process of adjudication of conflict by a larger-than-congregational, and even larger-than-regional elder body ought to be considered by the Fellowship for both doctrinal and practical disputes. The passages bassy to the church at Jerusalem; likewise more recently C. K. Barrett, 2:700: “. . . it is best to render, ‘They (the Christians at Antioch) appointed Paul and Barnabas (author’s italics) and certain others to go up.’”

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together appear to suggest that in such cases, a representative-referral principle should be used. Three biblical scenes show elder-groups larger than the single local church meeting for instruction, warning, resolution or opinion on a doctrinal or other conflicted issue. It seems to have been assumed that an agreement of the larger representative elder body would be authoritative by consent of the church or churches seeking resolution. The nature of the larger gathering’s authority would have depended on the kind of authority granted the meeting by the appointing groups; the Jerusalem “apostles and elders” apparently did not assume their own authority. They functioned in a policy-decision role by request. Conclusion The Grace Gospel Fellowship began with the belief that the body of Christ consisted of all true believers in Christ irrespective of denominational connections. It embodied in its thinking, doctrinal statement, organization and life the idea that no denomination is the true church, and that the true universal church of all believers in Christ is a work of the Holy Spirit. They believed all congregations of true Christians are constituted such by their free faith in Christ and should govern themselves in their own congregations. This concept of the body of Christ embodied a rich biblical sense of the church, nurtured by the unique Pauline idea of the body of Christ in many details. Issues of governance and leadership of the church, however, have not been well developed, perhaps intentinally. Questions of local governance and procedure or conflict resolution have mostly been left to local churches. Most of the congregations of the fellowship adopted some older form of elder governance inherited from varied church traditions and recognition of the presence of elders in Pauline texts. For the most part governing bodies in local assemblies were and still are called “boards” and occasionally “elder boards” or “boards of elders.” Sometimes deacons are also included on church boards—a management function also inherited from past traditions. The term “board” seems to reflect a business model rather than a biblical elders’ model. Despite the presence of elders on local boards, the Fellowship lacks any full theology of eldership, except as local pastors seek to be biblical in their leadership philosophies and concern for elder qualifications. This inattention to a developed theology of elder leadership is strange considering the strong Pauline commitment of the fellowship. Why it should own so strong a Pauline view of the church as body of Christ, while letting slide an equally strong attention to Pauline leadership functions, is puzzling. To the extent that congregations in our Fellowship do have elders and/or boards on which elders serve as leaders, our corporate life adopts at least a degree of Pauline thought on elders and their work. But there is more to the Pauline view on provision and practice of elder leadership than local congregational practice. Two passages in Acts report Paul working with larger

elder bodies representing local segments of the body of Christ; these are definitely largerthan-local elder gatherings. In such texts, elders bear responsibilities for the shepherding of local, regional and larger area congregations through their functions of teaching, care, referral, consultation and decision-making. Such elder gatherings are seen in Acts as elderbodies representing smaller church bodies as they meet in council. The Pauline materials on the body of Christ show us a church of confessed believers 451

joined together in an organism of universal character with real metaphysical existence; this is the partly visible and partly invisible true church as an extension of Christ’s resurrection body, and governed by elders functioning both locally and in larger gatherings per city or per region. Elder leadership operates normally at the level of local congregations. This reality is an expression of congregational government; but local government does not prohibit, and in fact the scenes of Acts involving elder gatherings rather encourage, larger elder gatherings at urban-regional and trans-regional levels for general oversight and resolution of difficulties and conflicts. The normal pattern appears to be that such adjudications beyond local congregations originate with the initiative of those congregations seeking resolution of issues; the texts contain the principle of locally initiated referral after the pattern of Old Testament judicial referral scenes. This set of principles is closest to the historic Presbyterian form of church government. It is worth noting in this respect that historians of dispensational theology in England and America have sometimes recognized (correctly) that the dispensational theology movement emerged from Calvinist roots. In fact the majority of leaders and attendees at the millenarian Bible and Prophecy Conferences in North America beginning in 1878 were Calvinist Presbyterians. But the emergence of dispensational theology in several American expressions lost sight of this rootage, and sometimes adopted fiercely Arminian, anti-Calvinist theological positions, thereby also losing sight of virtually all aspects of their theology’s Calvinist roots, including useful biblical elements of Calvinist ecclesiology, and especially the governance of churches by elder bodies. Aside from the narrower connotation of Calvinism (meaning a harsh doctrine of personal election to salvation and equal predestination to damnation), dispensational theology’s leaders are quite aware of their own Calvinist-like emphasis on the sovereignty of God’s plan for a gradually unfolding redemption. Most, however, do not recognize the affinity of this emphasis with historic Calvinism. And yet this is their heritage, and it includes within it an elder-centered ecclesiology rooted in Calvinism, especially welldeveloped in its Presbyterian form. This sense of God’s sovereign plan of redemption, and its development in the dispensations as the framework of the history of salvation, is the emphasis of dispensational theology. Accordingly, our Fellowship might do well to reconsider another aspect of God’s sovereignty in the historic Presbyterian-Reformed attention to the role of elders at every level of the churches’ life, including their function as judiciaries for resolving issues and disputes within the body-church.

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Appendix A The Date and Origin of the Prison Epistles There are two main alternative options to the traditional location for the Prison Epistles (Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon; all at Rome during [not after] Acts 28). Both involve connections with Paul’s third mission tour of the northeastern Mediterranean or its near aftermath. The options to the traditional Roman imprisonment at the end of Acts are: (1) the letters originated at Ephesus during Paul’s three-year stay there (Acts 19:8-10; 20:31), where he probably endured one or more brief imprisonments; (2) they originated during the two-year imprisonment at Caesarea (Acts 23:33-24:27). The Ephesian suggestion was first proposed with detailed argumentation in the Englishspeaking world by G. Duncan, St. Paul’s Ephesian Ministry (1930). Since 1930 Duncan’s arguments have been given serious consideration by virtually every critical commentary on these letters and in introductions to the New Testament. The case for Caesarea is wellstated in English by B. Reiche, “Caesarea, Rome and the Captivity Epistles,” in Apostolic History and the Gospel, ed W. Gasque and R. Martin (1970). Arguments pro and con are thoroughly sifted by D. Guthrie, Introduction to the New Testament, 3 vols, (Downers Grove IL: Inter-Varsity, 1961, 1962, 1963; 1 vol edition, 1970). Since discussion is offered in these works and in most recent New Testament introductions, there is no need to repeat all considerations here. I will merely mention with modest detail what seem to me the most crucial factors. 1. An Ephesian imprisonment during the three years of Acts 19-20 is not explicitly mentioned in Acts or attested in the epistles. However, when Paul wrote 2 Corinthians, just after leaving Ephesus, he mentioned multiple imprisonments he had endured (2 Cor 11:23), and a near-death situation in Ephesus/Asia (2 Cor 1:8-11) including something he referred to as “fought with wild beasts at Ephesus (1 Cor 15:32).” A small stone building called “St. Paul”s Prison” is also shown to travelers at Ephesus; this building may preserve memory of an ancient reality. 2. The objection that Paul would not have written an epistle to the Ephesians from Ephesus (1:1) is met by these considerations: (a) “to the Ephesians” is not in our earliest manuscripts; (b) Ephesians is a very impersonal letter; it does not mention anyone he wished to greet there, which seems unlikely for a church where he spent three years;755 accordingly (c), Ephesians is now viewed as a general or circular letter to several Asian churches founded during his three-year stay at Ephesus. Hence the letter has no personal references at all except for Tychicus, its carrier. No doubt a copy reached Ephesus and the prominence of that church, having quickly become the bishopric for western Asia, caused its name to be soon attached, perhaps in the sense that “Ephesus” became inclusive of its provincial Asian daughter churches which owed their existence to the legate missions to the interior from Ephesus during Paul’s stay (Acts 19:10): “. . . all the Jews and Greeks who lived in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord (NIV),” i.e., during Paul’s 755 This point has force because those epistles written to churches where he does know people include greetings to them, for example, Romans (16), Colossians and 1 Corinthians

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several years at Ephesus. This city was the later-life residence of the apostle John and in the second century became the bishop’s seat for the province of Asia. 3. One of the most telling arguments is the proximity issue. Rome, the traditional point of origin for all four Prison Epistles, is far distant, whether by land or sea, from Philippi, and even farther from Ephesus or Colossae (Philemon lived in Colossae)—about 1000 miles overland from Rome to Philippi, 1300 to Ephesus, and another 100 beyond that for a total of 1400 to Colossae, and only slightly less by sea. The problem concerns the carriers of the prison letters and their travel time which is the most complicated for Philippians since several journeys back and forth are required for the movements of persons and information exchanges of that letter. The advantage of the prison letters’ Ephesian origin is that Ephesuss lies in the midst of the recipient cities—Philippi 300 miles north by land or sea from Ephesus, and Colossae only a little over 100 miles east. Any map of the northeastern Mediterranean will show these distance factors when read with care. Similar considerations against Rome hold against Caesarea at about 1000 miles from Philippi. In this connection, the movements of companions like Timothy, Epaphras and Tychicus seem much more understandable with Ephesus at the center of carriers’ movements than either Rome or Caesarea at more extreme distances in both directions respectively. 4. Anyone who wants to say these arguments are not proof is correct. The other side of this objection is that the traditional time and place of origin (Rome during Acts 28) has no proof either. The traditional view has only the strength of tradition and habit, but no more concrete geographical probability than Ephesus or Caesarea, indeed less probability considering the distances noted above. 5. All eleven (11) named companions or co-workers associated with Paul in the Prison Epistles are the Greek and Asian (Aegean region and period) companions of the third missionary tour, as far as we can identify them and their movements. Several can also be seen in the Corinthian letters and Romans from the same period. But for travel companions to Rome, Paul’s journey by ship in Acts 27 included only Luke (“we”) and Aristarchus (Acts 27:1-2). That exactly the same companions of the third missionary tour should have followed Paul to Rome independently is unlikely. In fact, we have a long list of Roman friends and acquaintances in Romans 16, and not one of them appears in the Prison Epistles. Priscilla and Aquila (Rom 16:3) are not exceptions to this pattern of companions, since the couple is not mentioned in the prison letters either. 6. The references to “Caesar’s household (Phil 4:22)” and “the Praetorium (Phil 1:13; 4:22)” are not certain references to Rome since both terms are used for imperial people and buildings all over the Roman Empire. There was a Praetorium at Ephesus and Caesarea, and “household of Caesar” was used for high administration officials residing in major imperial administrative like Ephesus, Corinth and Caesarea. This enumeration of major considerations could be discussed in more detail. The conclusion is that the best option between Rome, Ephesus and Caesarea seems to be Ephesus. This means that dispensational timing arguments of various sorts based on the Acts 28 origin of these letters are shaky at best and invalid at worst. For discussion of same Ephesian-Aegean connection of the Pastoral Epistles, see Appendix B.

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Appendix B The Date and Setting of the Pastoral Epistles Re-dating the Pastoral Epistles to Paul’s third mission tour and his three-year long base at Ephesus is possible as well. A few points made in the essay above allude to a preference herein for other than traditional settings of these letters. Popular thinking in the Grace Fellowship about the Pastorals places them after Acts 28—a view based on a supposed travel period after release from the two-year confinement in Rome, and projected by Paul to include a journey to Spain and back. The same view is suggested by certain church fathers, but without much basis. To do this one has to add a post-Spain return, not just to Rome, but like the Prison Epistles, to the Aegean region where all the topographical references of the Pastoral Epistles center, except for “Rome” in 2 Timothy 1:17 (discussed below). As an alternative it will be satisfactory to list the considerations for placing them in an actual secondary mission-travel period during the three years at Ephesus (Acts 19:810; 20:31). Even though we do not know the exact extent or route of this journey, it is certain that Paul traveled some distance around or across the Aegean from Ephesus and then returned there. The only consequence of interest to this essay is that a third mission tour context for the Pastorals allows for an earlier development of standardization for elder-leadership terminology, establishment and qualifications than the later dating of these letters.756 This development of elder-deacon qualifications may have been part of a general purpose of the supposed journey during the three-year Ephesian period (beginning and ending at Ephesus) for the purpose of further evangelization, as well as stabilization and organization of the churches of the Greek region (including the Aegean, Crete and the Asian and Greek west coasts. Problems with the Traditional View Paul’s only reference to a journey to Spain is in Rom 15:28, where it is planned, not accomplished. In early Christian books after the New Testament, the earliest reference to a journey of Paul to Spain is in Clement’s Epistle to the Corinthians (1 Clement), chapter 5, where Clement says: By reason of jealousy and strife Paul by his example pointed out the prize of patient endurance. After that he had been seven times in bonds, had been driven into exile, and had been stoned, had preached in the East and the West, he won the noble renown which was the reward of his faith, having taught righteousness unto the whole world and having reached the farthest bounds to the West.757 756 This is not the first attempt to place these letters earlier than the traditional placement. Recognition of an earlier period placement can be found in L. Johnson, J. Gunther, B. Reiche, and J. Robinson, Redating the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), pp. 66ff. None of these reconstructs the event in the same way as here. These efforts are important for the probe they conduct, not merely because they do it as herein. 757 J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1956), p. 15.

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Following a version of this tradition, Eusebius in his Church History, Bk 2, Ch 22 (4th century), says: . . . after [Paul] had made his defense it is said that the apostle was sent again upon the ministry of preaching and that upon coming to the same city [Rome] a second time he suffered martyrdom. In this imprisonment he wrote his second epistle to Timothy, in which he mentions his first defense and his impending death.758

Clement and Eusebius are the only two well-known authors who support a supposed journey to Spain and return to Rome; Paul does not say he made this trip, he only projects its possibility. The Muratorian Canon in the latter part of the second century also contains the tradition that Paul went to Spain. There is no good reason to doubt this journey as a basic fact of Paul’s later life, except that it is stated in very general terms with almost no details given, even by Eusebius who might have included more detail if any of importance had been known to him. There is justifiable doubt, however, about whether the movements of Paul alluded to in the Pastoral Epistles have any connection with the journey to Spain. Second Timothy is included in this part of Paul’s life by Eusebius, as noted above. Since the three Pastoral Epistles seem homogeneous in subject matter and style, they are grouped together. They also seem to picture Paul as older, represent development in the stabilization of church leadership functions, and assume a time when Christian doctrine had become unstable and needed solidity. These factors seemed to some fathers to suggest a later time than Paul’s activities in Acts. On the other hand, the patristic sources state that Paul returned to Rome, not to the Aegean travel locations reflected in these letters. In addition, the reference to Illyricum in Romans 15:19 shows Paul reached northwest Greece earlier than the time of the Romans letter. The mention of Illyricum in Romans coordinates with travel references to Dalamatia (2 Tim 4:10) and Nicopolis (Titus 3:12), all three being locales along the western and northwestern coast of Greece. Romans 15:19 proves Paul had been in these remote regions of northern Greece before he wrote Romans. This opens the door to an alternative. The thesis of this appendix, then, is that the Pastoral Epistles can better be placed in the three-year Ephesian period of Acts 19-20. During that period, according to this proposal and the travel sites in the Pastorals, Paul journeyed at least across the Aegean, but more likely around the Aegean including Corinth and up to Dalmatia (to account for the assumed second visit alluded in 2 Corinthians 13:1); but was the circle even wider? The circle included a visit to Crete (Titus) and the northwest coast of Greece along the east shore of the Adriatic Sea (the Greek west coast), and finally a return via Macedonia to Ephesus; there he remained a few months, and then left Ephesus (again) for Corinth (the third [anticipated] visit of 2 Corinthians 13:1) via Macedonia. During this journey he wrote the Pastoral Letters to Timothy (who remained at Ephesus) and Titus (on Crete) as part of the effort to fully organize both his older and newer congregations. He works at this by specifying the establishment of elders and deacons as the basic church leadership gifts, and by spelling out qualifications for these two main leadership functions. How can



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The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 8 vols, ed P. Schaff (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952) 1:124.

this view become coherent with all the information of Acts, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and the Pastorals? Paul’s Situation and Movements That Paul is an old man and about to die is not the viewpoint of 2 Timothy any more than of 2 Corinthians 1; “Paul the Aged” is found in Philemon, not 2 Timothy (Phile 9), and might even be a touch of self-deprecating humor. Beside this, he still regards Timothy as young. In 1 Timothy 4:12 he urges Timothy to let no one despise his youth and in 2 Timothy 2:22 urges him to flee youthful lusts. Paul’s memory of Timothy’s conversion and entry into ministry does not seem to put these events in a remote past (cf 1 Tim 1:18; 4:14; 6:12). In these letters he looks back on a period of stay at Ephesus and has recently gone from Ephesus into Macedonia (1 Tim 1:3). Memories of Ephesus are still fresh: he hopes to return to Ephesus and Timothy soon (1 Tim 3:14); he refers to Alexander the coppersmith (2 Tim 4:14f) as though Alexander’s opposition to him was in the near past and still a problem (2 Tim 4:15); the house of Onesiphorus, an Ephesian Christian who was not ashamed of Paul’s chains, ministered to Paul at Ephesus (2 Tim 1:16-17). The last text raises the question of an imprisonment at Ephesus which is likely on other grounds; where he searched for and found Paul elsewhere cannot be determined. “Rome” (Greek hrome) could very well be the common noun hrome meaning “strength, courage,” often physical, sometimes psychological, and usually in the face of obstacles or difficulties (as here). If so, this is not a reference to the city of Rome, but to Onesiphorus’ courage in visiting Paul in his imprisonment situation (chains): “because (causal participle of ginomai) he was courageous/confident/determined.”759 Paul also refers to Priscilla and Aquila as people for Timothy to greet; they too were living at Ephesus at the time (2 Tim 4:19). The travel locations of Titus and 2 Timothy are spread around the Aegean and eastern Adriatic regions. There are no intervening events since leaving Ephesus except details of these Aegean and Adriatic travels. There is no reference to his last visit to Jerusalem, to the sea journey to Rome, to the shipwreck, or to the Roman confinement upon arrival there, except for the possible reference to Rome in 2 Timothy 1:17, which can be read differently (as above). Paul does mention death threats, imprisonments (plural) and shipwrecks (plural) in 2 Corinthians 11:23, 25. But these occurred before 2 Corinthians and thus before he returned to Jerusalem for the last time, just after he left Ephesus for good. Therefore the imprisonments and shipwrecks of 2 Corinthians cannot refer to those connected with the journey to Rome; rather they must have occurred during other east Mediterranean mission travels, on trips between one or another of his bases like Ephesus or Corinth, or on side trips of which Acts does not speak, but to which the Pastorals allude. Even the first mission tour cities still stand out in his mind: Antioch, Iconium, Lystra (2 Tim 3:11) as though they are not very far in the past. The companions, assistants, couriers, and friends mentioned in the letters to Timothy and Titus are not Romans (Christians who live in Rome), and certainly not Spaniards.

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The Greek construction is actually en with dative: he was “in courage,” i.e., courageous or took courage.

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They are in fact the Aegean-Ephesian period companions and friends, most of whom are also found in the Prison Epistles or other more firmly datable letters (Romans; Corinthian letters): Timothy, Titus, Demas, Mark, Tychicus, Priscilla, Aquila (not in the Prison Epistles), Erastus, Trophimus, Apollos, and Luke. There are a few otherwise unknown such companions and friends: Crescens, Eubulus, Pudens, Linus, Claudia, and Zenas the lawyer. These names are mostly Latin but cannot be clues to his whereabouts since the Greek, Aegean and Asian cities were full of Roman business people, administrators, lawyers, bureaucrats and soldiers. The presence of some Latin names is not a contrary factor for the thesis under study here. The most persuasive facts vouching for an extensive Aegean-Greek region trip during the Ephesian period are Paul’s reference to having reached Illyricum by the time he wrote Romans 15:19, and his allusions to near death events, imprisonments and shipwrecks in 2 Corinthians 11:23, 25. The travel allusions of the Pastoral Epistles must also include the Adriatic Sea between Italy and Greece. The reference to Illyricum shows that he did in fact travel at some length before (from Corinth, Acts 18?) or during the Ephesian-AegeanAdriatic period (Acts 19). Acts has no account of this travel, so we are left to piece it together from allusions in such epistles as furnish data. The atlases’ map detail is inadequate and misleading. In 2 Timothy 4:10 he refers to Titus going to Dalmatia. Dalmatia and Illyricum are both in far northwestern Greece, farther to the northwest even than the northern border of Macedonia and part of the region near or in what we now know as Bosnia. Illyricum is the name of the Roman province; Dalmatia is an old regional name for the same region. Some maps, even those limited to Paul’s mission journeys, do not show his movement into this region and sometimes do not even show the region at all.760 Furthermore, many atlases fail to show any trip to Crete as part of his mission travels. Another issue is that the Pastoral Epistles are widely regarded by some critical scholars as non-Pauline and very late in origin. The result of these gaps is to give up the effort to piece together Paul’s travels reflected in the Pastoral Epistles and to fall back on a post-Acts 28 theoretical placement—the traditional view—or even to assign these letters to a false author from long after Paul’s death; in any event, the geography of the Pastorals is short-changed. But the references to the dangers harsh realities of mission travel in 2 Corinthians 6:3-10; 11:23-28, to Illyricum in Romans 15:19, and to Dalmatia in 2 Timothy 4:10, are suggestive even though neglected. And what is true of Illyricum and Dalmatia is also true of travel to Crete, even though he makes no allusion to it in a datable letter like Romans. A further clue lies in 2 Corinthians 13:1, where Paul mentions that the projected visit to Corinth will be his third visit to them. The trip that included Illyricum is unlikely to have occurred at any time period prior to the three years at Ephesus due to time limitations, even of the year and a half at Corinth. So these allusions must raise the question of when the second visit to Corinth occurred—again, a visit not mentioned in Acts. Just as with Illyricum in 760 For example, the widely used Macmillan Bible Atlas ed Aharoni and Avi-Yonah (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1968), has no reference in the map index to Illyricum, and Dalmatia only appears on a map of second century churches, i.e., does not appear on the basic reference maps for Paul’s movements. Nor was this omission remedied in the Revised Edition of 1977. Other atlases, e.g., The HarperCollins Atlas of the Bible, and the older Westminster Historical Atlas of the Bible do show these regions on their maps of Paul’s journeys, but do not have lines showing his journeys into them.

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Romans 15:19, this alluded-to second visit had to have occurred before 2 Corinthians was written shortly after he left Ephesus for the final time—near the end of the Ephesus-Aegean period—but after his first visit to Corinth in Acts 18. Still another little piece of information is his reference to wintering in Nicopolis (Titus 3:12)—also a town on the west coast of Greece ner the mouth of the Corinthian gulf on the Adriatric Sea; this, too, fits with the itinerary of a trip up the west coast of Greece to Illyricum (Titus 3:12). These bits and pieces of information fairly necessitate a travel period during the three years at Ephesus¸ including Corinth but not limited to it, and up the Greek west coast to Nicopolis and on to Illyricum-Dalmatia. A Proposal Advocating this view necessitates at least suggesting a route that would include Crete, even though the epistle to Titus is the only witness to it. There are some difficulties in such a proposal. (1) The data of Paul’s movements in the Pastorals are more or less conflicting on any reckoning and cannot be conclusively harmonized by plotting the movements of a single trip in a clear journey-site sequence. (2) It is possible that the allusions to his movements refer to more than one short trip from Ephesus to places like Crete (Titus 1:5) or Corinth (2 Tim 4:20) or Miletus (2 Tim 4:20), and return to Ephesus between them—instead, that is, of one long, continuous, circular trip that included these sites. A satisfactory first step is to comment on the site-references, situations and movements that have to be satisfied, if one assumes a single continuous journey from Ephesus in a kind of circle. 1. The tour has to include sites north of Ephesus since there is a reference to Troas (2 Tim 4:13) and another to Macedonia (1 Tim 1:3), both of which are north of Ephesus. It also has to include sites south of Ephesus—Miletus and Crete. 2. In southern Greece, the tour has to include Corinth (2 Tim 4:20), and in westcentral Greece must include Nicopolis on the Adriatic coast almost due west of Corinth about 100 miles (Titus 3:12), since Paul expresses hope of wintering at this Adriatic city (Titus 3:12). The way Paul speaks of Erastus remaining at Corinth suggests that this citygovernment official (Rom 16:23) might have been a hoped-for travel companion, or might have actually been a travel-companion for part of the trip. 3. The tour has to include Illyricum-Dalmatia, areas north of the northwestern Macedonian border as already noted (Rom 15:19; 2 Tim 4:10). Titus might have gone to Dalmatia (2.4:10) after a period of establishing elders in churches on the island of Crete. This sequence seems more likely in order to allow time for establishing elders in Cretan churches, depending on how many churches he was dealing with. 4. The tour had to include a stop at Miletus (2 Tim 4:20) where Trophimus fell sick and had to be “left” for a time. The reference to Miletus involves a southerly direction of travel from Ephesus; this is a major but not insurmountable difficulty. 5. The tour also requires a city or town where Paul would have been in prison and endured a trial, probably before a Roman tribunal (2 Tim 4:16). He has endured some threat from “the lion’s mouth (2 Tim 4:17),” but seems to expect release (2 Tim 4:18). This does not require a Roman imprisonment, since he also had a serious near-death escape 459

at Ephesus, perhaps early in his three-year period there (2 Cor 1:8-11), and had endured multiple imprisonments before the writing of 2 Corinthians (11:23), even though they are not mentioned in Acts (which only mentions Philippi [before 2 Corinthians]) and the [later than 2 Corinthians] Caesarean confinement). Wherever the imprisonment of 2 Timothy 1:16 and 4:17-18 occurred, it was the context for the writing of that book. 6. The visit to Crete had to include Titus whom he left to establish elders in the churches of the island founded during evangelistic preaching there. Titus too belongs to the earlier period of mission. 7. Two of the three Pastoral Epistles refer to a wintering site (2 Tim 4:21; Titus 3:12); the latter reference specifies Nicopolis. If the median (second) trip to Corinth was the only travel of the Ephesian period, wintering should not have been necessary since either Corinth or Ephesus were never unreachable. It seems unlikely that two successive winters occurred during this journey. We must probably think of one winter only. During that winter, Paul was in prison, but for how long is unknown. Accordingly, the following sequence is suggested, but only suggested, since other proposals may always be considered once one decides on the basic proposition of a journey during the Ephesus-Aegean period. A schematic including more than one journey during this period is also possible; but this seems to me unlikely. Use of a map of the Aegean region is necessary for following the site and movement sequence. 1. The trip began at Ephesus from which Paul went about sixty miles south to Miletus, perhaps overland. Among his travel companions was Trophimus who became sick at Miletus and was left there. The reason for this out-of-the-way stop near the beginning was a young church, probably founded near the beginning of the Ephesian period. Paul probably had several travel companions beside Trophimus, including Luke, Titus (for the first leg), Tychicus and several others. 2. At Miletus, Paul caught a ship sailing toward northern Aegean ports. He stopped at Troas, having back-tracked about 60 miles by sea (sailing past Ephesus) instead of walking or riding; there he had a friend named Carpus with whom, for reasons not mentioned, he left both a cloak and some manuscripts. Was he thinking that he would not need the cloak during the summer? But why leave manuscripts? 3. From Troas he sailed or traveled overland to Macedonia (1 Tim 1:3, which shows that Macedonia was his first provincial objective), perhaps stopping for visits with Christians at Philippi, Thessalonica and Berea. He may have written 1 Timothy from Macedonia, since no more travel sites are mentioned in the letter, and he seems not to have not gotten farther than this province at the time of the letter. He seems to have thought about returning to Ephesus soon (1 Tim 3:14), but he also thought about a possible delay (1 Tim 3:15); was it bad news from Corinth that induced him to go on to southern Greece? 4. From Macedonia he went south to Corinth. This is the second visit to Corinth as suggested by the otherwise obscure third-visit reference in 2 Corinthians 13:1. Erastus left the party by remaining at Corinth; Paul may have valued him as a travel companion because Erastus would have been useful in Roman conflict situations given his government job at Corinth. 5. Paul and his team then boarded a ship at Cenchrea and sailed south across the open north Mediterranean to Crete, a sea journey of about 200 miles. There he conducted an 460

evangelization tour, gained converts to Christ, and formed churches. The mission activity on Crete takes up a fair part of the summer, perhaps extending into late summer. 6. He and Titus decide that the latter will stay on Crete for a while to establish elders in the newly formed churches (Titus). Paul and his party board a ship sailing north from Crete along the western coast of Greece (the Adriatic Sea). By now fall is approaching and sea travel is becoming more dangerous, so he decides to winter at Nicopolis on the western (Adriatic) shore of Greece (Titus 3:12). Paul may have written the letter to Titus at Nicapolis soon after arrival, sending it on a ship headed south to Crete. He soon fell into trouble at Nicopolis, was arrested, and imprisoned. He may have written 2 Timothy at this time—a suggestion that would satisfy the two references to wintering (Titus 3:14; 2 Tim 4:21). Titus soon left Crete and met Paul here whence Paul apparently sent him on ahead to Dalmatia (2 Tim 4:10). In a later development at Nicopolis, Paul was abandoned by some traveling friends (2 Tim 3:1-9; 4:9-10). He must have been released during the late winter or very early spring. 7. Early in the spring sailing season, Paul caught the earliest ship sailing north along the Greek west coast and Dalmatia (provincial name, Illyricum, Rom 15:19), and went ashore, perhaps at Salona, into the region to preach and plant churches. After this mission activity he headed southeast to begin his overland route back toward Ephesus, moving along the east-west Roman road from Epidamnos to Thessalonica or possibly Philippi, since he has Christian friends in both cities. 8. From Philippi, Paul proceeded toward the home base at Ephesus, either by ship, sailing south along the east coast of the Aegean Sea, or by traveling overland to Ephesus via the north-south coastal road. As it turned out the tour took over a year. This sketch accounts for all the movements of the Pastoral Epistles on the alternative theory of their origin during Paul’s Ephesus-Aegean period. Its drawback is that the movements are conjectured, even though the sites and some segments of his movement are not. A difficulty—which does not seem serious to me— is the large topographical swings from south to north. All we know is that some trip was made during the period that had to have included Corinth, and that it very probably included Dalmatia-Illyricum and Crete. The first year of Paul’s Ephesian work was probably spent in an aggressive evangelization effort in Ephesus and the province of Asia (Acts 19:10). The trip would have occupied roughly the second or middle year of the Ephesian-Aegean period plus a few more weeks or months.

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ESSAY XI CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE Millenarian Cultural Negativism and the Biblical Cultural Mandate by Dale S. DeWitt Some Points of Orientation The Problem and Its Recent History At the beginning of the sixth chapter of his very recent Evangelical Millennialism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500-2000, Crawford Gribben cites Darrell Hart in this description of the 1970s: “By the beginning of that decade, and ‘almost by sheer tenacity,’ the theologians and churchmen who had attempted an alternative movement to the Fundamentalism that had pulled conservative Protestants from the cultural mainstream had succeeded in fashioning a ‘new religious identity, and evangelical was its designation.’” What is the context of the allusion to “the Fundamentalism that had pulled conservative Protestants from the cultural mainstream . . . ?”761 It refers to the history of a shift well known to observers of American Christianity in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It involves attitudes of American Christians toward culture in general and toward government and social problems as well—millenarian Fundamentalists, charismatic groups, several holiness denominations and some descendents of older and Anabaptist groups. Reference to these attitudes requires a sketch of this history and some of its themes. On the other hand, this essay seeks to explain why evangelicals and especially their millenarian sector are not bound by the critical separatist stance on culture and human endeavor inherited from the Fundamentalist stage of their history. Although other fellowships than millenarian bodies participated in the cultural revolt, this essay will mostly speak of Fundamentalist millenarians since they are its main interest; this concern reflects my own church fellowship in this changing stream. It grew from desire to see it change and broaden without sacrificing its doctrine and insights into Scripture, and its commitment to the serious Christian life. 761 C. Gribben, Evangelicalism Millennialism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500-2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 110, citing D. Hart, Deconstructing Evangelicalism, p. 24.

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The term “not bound” above suggests that Fundamentalist-millenarian traditions are or once were—as a whole, though not to a person—visibly negative about many aspects of culture. Certainly they are so perceived by historians and theologians, and many people who grew up in Fundamentalist churches are quite aware of their anti-culture perspectives. The negative cultural attitudes of this tradition, both actual and perceived, will be discussed shortly in more detail. “Culture” as used here refers to the whole human output—ideas and their expression, forms of sociality, and material inventions and their technology, ancient and modern. For the moment, it is sufficient to state that the main reason for making a biblical case for a positive bearing of Christianity on culture is that evangelical millenarians’ foundation document (the Bible) is itself interested in culture— its goods for our benefit and its evils to be overcome. That motif in Scripture does not appear to involve a special vested interest only in negating it; nor is its interest solely in some special features of culture that require to be brought under the umbrella of the Bible’s larger redemptive theme solely to serve that larger interest. Sometimes biblical culture notes rather sound more like an interest in the thing itself—in human cultural capacity expressed in the creations, inventions, institutions and vocations of human talent and life. Some biblical scenes assume that inevitably the people of God too are part of culture because they belong to creation, humanity, history, and society both ancient and modern. We can be more specific. Sometimes our Bible even suggests—sometimes making a special point of it—that God’s people just take cultural achievements into their scheme of things as a matter of course, appropriate them for their own ends, touch, use or transform them in the process, and turn them back to the world in a new form; or, biblical writers note adaptation of cultural details in the life of the people of God who then use them for their own purposes, sometimes under specific divine direction. In still other cases the Bible merely observes such events without making any special point of them, but in matterof-fact thoughts and scenes depicts ways in which a people of God are really human but also live in their humanity and its cultural creations as the Lord’s people, and with his permission or even his approval. Proverbs with its attention to all of life is rich in such cultural allusions—income, commerce and work, for example. Biblical writers sometimes even include poetry or stories about those aspects of human activity that surround and engage the people of God—farming or mining, for example. In still other scenes, evil grips culture, and God’s people are expected to overcome or renounce its evils, just as when culture is good they may partake and even create more or transform what is already there. A Brief History of Christ and Culture Thought The reality of Christianity within culture has a long history. It begins in the Old Testament, continues in the New Testament stories of Jesus and Paul, gains force in Clement of Alexandria (d c 220), is expanded by Augustine, is narrowly focused by Thomas Aquinas (Christianity and Aristotle merge) and reaches a new synthesis in the Protestant Reformers, especially with Calvin and Calvinism. In the twentieth century the subject again reached a high point in the widely read and much appreciated work of H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (1951). Niebuhr had some notable near forebears and partners, although they did not discuss the subject under this heading, but under titles like Lectures on Calvinism 464

(Abraham Kuyper, 1899) and Christianity and Civilization (Emil Brunner, 1949). These studies of the relation of Christianity to human values, creativity and history are certainly of general interest to all Christians. But somehow, the renewed premillennialism of the seventeenth through the twentieth century, especially in its dispensational form, gradually fell into disinterest or hostility to culture. It simply came to ignore culture, and became at least for a period (c 1925-1960) belligerent toward cultural matters while narrowing itself down to ideas like the near Second Coming, winning souls before the momentary Advent, and the Bible as the only book that needed to read. In this frame of mind it demeaned, belittled, and even rejected higher education, the arts and sciences and most other sophisticated forms of human endeavor and achievement, without, however, much consistency in actual practice. At the lowest level of this anti-cultural trough in the period 1930-1950, only a few older evangelical Christian liberal arts colleges kept alive any interest in the subject. Once Niebuhr was published in 1951, for better or worse (he now has several harsh critics), a gradual renewal of interest in both subject and practice began. Even a few millenarian Christians began to wonder about their separatism; but many millenarians found and are still finding it hard to change. And yet, more and more evangelicals, including millenarians, have by 2010 become consumers of culture, like all the rest of the developed world, thus giving culture a kind of new-found nod. Something happened to the earlier hostilities. The tensions in this flow of thought and practice are the larger context of this essay. The renewing premillennialism of the nineteenth century, having escaped the earlier British Fifth Monarchy movement of the seventeenth century, began turning toward worldly separatism in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and grew more strident in its negativism until it became hostile and despondent almost to a man after 1925.762 The nurse of this development was the revivalistic millenarianism of the era, which took on a harsh view of cultural goods, many of which it lumped thoughtlessly with cultural bads. For example, in his widely read and translated (into at least 25 languages) volume Jesus is Coming (1st Edition, 1882), W. E. Blackstone refers several times to separation from the world with few qualifications or clarifications on exactly what he meant. The Second Coming, he says, “gives us a view of the world, as a wrecked vessel,” for which he quotes Matthew 7:13: “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat (AV).”763 This image, possibly drawn from Moody’s famous salvation as “life-boat” image, became a normalized negative way for Fundamentalists to think about the world in general. There is biblical precedent in the Johannine books for this use of “world.” But that “world” always has this negative meaning in the larger New Testament is not realistic. Sometimes “earth” is used instead of “world”—a way to speak of the world without all the bad connotations of “world.” But Paul also has several references to the “world” which are more positive; they will be noted toward the end of the essay. This unfortunate negativism is a strange contrast to Blackstone’s own compassionate crusade at the political level for the restoration 762 On the effect of the 1925 Scopes Trial on millenarian evangelicals, see G. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism: 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 184-188. 763 W. E. Blackstone, Jesus is Coming (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1898), p 18. More such generalized uses of “world” occur on pp. 116, 142, 144, 145-146, 147-148, and 178.

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of world Jews to Palestine, a crusade that was largely effective and an important part of the prelude to modern Israel.764 One reason for this tension in Blackstone is that Fundamentalist hostility to culture had not yet reached its fullest force in 1882; but it was growing. One should not be too harsh, however. Historical context did exist in the American and western world for the growth of cultural negativism: the horrors and consuming nature of the American Civil War;765 the mass of unskilled freed slaves; the greed and machinations of northern prosperity; T. Roosevelt’s attempts to control business trusts, growing biblical criticism and theological modernism; the secularizing social gospel and Darwinism; the World War I nightmare; the Bolshevik Revolution in Eastern Europe; the rollicking twenties and thirties with their big city gangsters; mass migration to urban centers from the farm; massive growth of worker exploitation in mining, food processing and manufacturing; growth and violence of labor unions; growth in gambling, burlesque, show business and movies, and in liquor sales and consumption; and massive immigration from southern and eastern Europe. All this turned revivalistic millenarian evangelicals into separating Fundamentalists. Their struggle with the world was rendered more strident by the shift from postmillennialism’s historical optimism to premillennialism’s historical pessimism. The latter’s Second Coming-before-the-millennium beliefs narrowed the possibilities for human gain and improvement to a few simple values: evangelism before the returning Jesus would finally straighten the social order—this combination and the negative worldly implications of details. The latter, they thought, could only become “worse and worse” until The Advent. It was easy to see culture itself as worthless, so riddled with evil that only total separation was thinkable. Their disgust with the world weakened their view of creation of which history and culture are subsets; the world of culture and invention all but vanished from their minds, although some spoke appreciatively of life growing a bit easier. The irony of this situation is that leadership in evangelical churches mostly came from business people; hence total separation was not really possible. In addition, the Bible didn’t condemn wealth in principle, and many businessmen knew the value of higher education. So a permanent crack persisted in the Fundamentalist debunking of culture. That crack was to grow after 1960. George Marsden, having gathered documentation of the Fundamentalist anti-world/ anti-culture style, showed how the separatist emphasis articulated by Blackstone and others gathered steam through the early decades of the twentieth century.766 Certainly separatism with the connotation of culture as evil is perceived by historians of the movement like Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994) and Ronald Sider, The Scandal of Evangelical Politics (2008). The problem uncovered by students of this movement is that biblical negatives about some aspects of the world were converted by anti-culture Christians into a generalized attitude toward culture as a whole, and particularly toward government,767 while forgetting about man in God’s image, or simply ignoring common grace and cultural gifts to the human race by creation. Biblical cultural realities went 764 J. Moorhead, “The Father of Zionism: William E. Blackstone? JETS 53 (2010): 787-800. 765 J. McPherson, The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 1-2. 766 G. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 24-138. 767 J. Budziszewski, Evangelicals in the Public Square (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006).

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largely unrecognized under a canopy of biblical interpretation guided by the notion of “Christ in all of Scripture,” and similar rubrics. This view, while not witout some truth, nonetheless created blinders toward the biblical cultural mandate. “Impossible to Maintain” This study undertakes a selection of biblical cultural details, reflections and remarks that illustrate Israel or the church’s view and practice of culture and its relation to biblical faith. In 1912, the scholarly orthodox evangelical, J. Greshem Machen of Princeton Seminary, speaking at the opening of the Princeton school year, chose to discuss “Culture and Christianity.” There he expressed his finding that hostile Fundamentalist attitudes toward culture were in some respects better than Protestant Liberalism, but still “illogical, unbiblical, and impossible to maintain.”768 Perhaps with clues from Machen, but also from other resources like H. R. Niebuhr, Richard Halvorson spoke at a Wheaton College event in the 1960s of “the cultural mandate” in Scripture. This may not have been the first use of the term, but Halvorson in using this suggestive language, was speaking for groups of evangelicals who cared about the Christianity-culture relation, and about its neglect during the Fundamentalist era. “Impossible to maintain,” Machen said. This is precisely what happened as the twentieth century advanced, even though some hard-core culture-skeptics held on tenaciously to what by 1960 had become a thought habit. Still, American Fundamentalism was beginning to crawl out of its cocoon, and by the 1970s had re-entered the cultural world. Now calling themselves “evangelicals,” or “neo-evangelicals,” most were returning to some broader form of higher education than Fundamentalism’s Bible institutes, and normalizing their individual lives in their own private cultural worlds of work, art and the professions with good consciences. Publicly, however, the new cultural engagement was moving only along certain limited lines: anti-evolution, anti-abortion, pro-school prayer, anti-gay rights, and other protective positions, but with no real general cultural engagement beyond these limited defensive interests. Their return to culture had little biblical or theological base; they just did it, mostly because they were weary of practicing and defending their inherited separatism, which seemed increasingly excessive, extremist and unnecessary. In the meantime, more and more evangelical students were being exposed to H. R. Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture. From Niebuhr they learned that several options through Christian history were available for thinking about the Christ-culture connection. Most dispensational millenarians seem to have passively accepted evangelicalism’s new cultural awareness by normalizing their worldly life as a kind of obvious necessity for continuing to live in the world without seeing the Second Coming, even amid wave after wave of nearadvent enthusiasms. Machen’s thought in 1912, that cultural separatism was impossible to maintain, proved prophetic. Despite several recent highly critical assessments of Niebuhr,769 768 Marsden, Fundamentalism and Anerican Culture, p.137. 769 C. Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006); D. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). G. Marsden, in a series of lectures at Austin Presbyterian Seminary (Texas) and John Howard Yoder in a brief paper apparently widely distributed according to J. Gustafson in his Preface to the fiftieth anniversary re-publication (2001) are critical of Niebuhr.

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only a few serious evangelical monographs on the subject exist, although happily, the journal Christianity Today has persistently addressed many cultural issues throughout more than a half-century of publication beginning in 1955. Evangelicals, including dispensational millenarians, were left with few resources to steer their thinking about a more positive but not very thoughtful relation to culture. And while positive discussion of a new way forward seems locked in academia, at least there was discussion. At the moment, Andy Crouch’s Culture-Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (2008) seems the most promising wayshower; but alas, it is a book for the educated, not for work-a-day laymen. In a sense those of us who care to write about the subject are preaching to the proverbial choir, but with hopes that others might hear through the walls. Two exceptional works of Niebuhr’s earlier twentieth-century forerunners— Abraham Kuyper and Emil Brunner, both Europeans—were mentioned above. Since the new evangelical interest in culture began in the 1960s and gained force between 1980 and 2010, several new works have appeared with their own analyses and proposals. A significant beginning in summarizing the long history of Christianity’s transformative cultural force in the world is Alvin Schmidt’s Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001). Schmidt’s work is a history; it should be enlarged into a multi-volume work with more selections, analysis and evaluation. A more detailed work on a specific aspect of culture (government) is O. and J. O’Donovan’s From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999)—a huge tome of 830 pages on one limited subject illustrating Christian thought about government from the second to the mid-seventeenth century; a second and/ or third volume should be prepared to bring the subject down to the present. Also in 1999 D.. B. Hegeman’s Plowing in Hope: Toward a Biblical Theology of Culture (Moscow ID: Canon Press, 1999) appeared, a much simpler and very brief work, but still valuable. Hegeman comes closer to the interest of this essay by offering theses about God, church and culture from various scriptural scenes and texts. Less directly biblical for the most part are two works of 2008 and 2010 respectively which have very great potential for lifting the Christianity and Culture discussion to higher ground. Crouch’s 2008 work, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling is a boldly realistic treatment of how we function in culture as Christians. It includes a sketch of culture in Scripture, then a final segment on “calling” that traces some theological dynamics of Christian culture-making for which the book is a summons. James Davison Hunter has just issued To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Hunter’s burden is to suggest that the overly idealistic ambition of evangelicals to “change the world” is not a viable enterprise (also noted by Crouch). Steering a middle path between the evangelical activist left and right, he suggests a more modest Christianity and culture strategy which he calls “faithful presence.” One major ideal of such a faithful presence of Christians in the institutions and works of culture would include pursuits like awakening each others’ good talents and projects, identifying with each other, and directing our lives toward each other’s flourishing—each of us within our own sphere of cultural activity and influence. Crouch and Hunter’s works are dynamic studies of Christianity and culture and hold promise for a new engagement of Christians in culture. Both offer new ways of thinking about Christian cultural engagement; both recognize the validity of such movement even when undertaken on modest scales. 468

Culture and the Relationship Our subject in this essay, however, is more directly focused on biblical theology —toward Hegeman’s assessment of biblical culture-thinking. The current essay seeks a more detailed treatment of some sample scenes, values and texts in both testaments. One goal of the essay is to determine whether the several biblical samples discussed point to only one of Niebuhr’s types of the Christianity and Culture relation, or whether varied biblical scenes and perspectives encourage a multi-type approach depending on the context; or, again, whether some new types need to be added to Niebuhr’s five major types; or, yet again, whether Niebuhr’s five types are outmoded, need modification, are too discrete, or need a more radical repair as some critics suggest. But before we embark on our scriptural study, a few comments are needed on what is meant by “culture”, and in what Niebuhr’s famous five types consist. For the limited purpose of this essay, culture may be understood the as the total human experience and its output—ideas, social organization, material culture and the manifold inventiveness and creativity they embody, and perhaps even the usefulness and and specific uses of the human output.770 Culture is what we make of the world,771 referring to everything man thinks and creates regardless of its employment for good or evil. Culture includes ideas, social thought, mathematics, rhetoric, government, family, law, work, literature, music, language, social mores, art, architecture, economics, education, science and its applications, sport, weaponry and more; it also includes human behavior, interests, motivations, attitudes, thought, and the social institutions humans devise by which to organize and protect themselves. Some culture is popular, simple, functional (gold, wooden lead pencils) and often sensuous (“popular culture”); some is complex, learned, artful and aesthetic (“fine art”). Culture is problematic; if it were not, no disagreement would exist about many basic ideas and products of human achievement and what humans make of and do with them for good or ill. Its problematic nature is due to human ignorance, finiteness and sinfulness, which have varying effects on what people think, do and invent, and the fact that not all effects are equally distributed, equally forceful, equally understood or equally consequential. By Christianity is meant the whole of our faith in its biblical origins, theological and social expressions, and current employment and appropriation. Christianity also means the biblical revelation about culture as well as the historical and cultural expressions of biblical faith and culture throughout global Christian history. In a narrower sense, Christianity means evangelical (Reformation) Christianity chiefly, but also its Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Monastic, Gnostic and Protestant modernist (liberal), or cultic/sectarian forms as well—all of which have contributed substantially to Christian thought and expression. Also included is the basic perspective that the activity of God consists of both creation and redemption, not one or the other, and that the biblical record of creation includes something that may rightly be called “the cultural mandate”—a biblical theme steadily correlated and 770 H. R. Niehuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 195l), p. 32. The simplified statement here is more fully nuanced by Niebuhr, but the idea is similar. 771 A. Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (Downer’s Grove IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1908), p. 23, citing K. Myers among various works referred to by Crouch in a note on p. 273; the exact reference is unclear.

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often meshed with the larger biblical redemptive mandate which speaks to it, even if not found in exactly those terms. It is also assumed that the biblical concept of creation is that it is continuous—a notion based on the wide-ranging use of “create” and “creation” in the Old Testament,772 especially Isaiah 40-66. The subject, however, is Christ and culture—their relation. In his Christ and Culture, Richard Niebuhr distinguished several ways he found in the history of our faith, in which the relation was construed—a typology of possibilities: Christ against Culture (separatism/Tertullian); the Christ of Culture (Protestant Modernism); Christ above Culture (Catholicism); Christ and Culture in Paradox (dualism/Luther); and Christ the Transformer of Culture (Calvinism). “Paradox” refers to the view that culture and Christianity run along their own distinctive tracks and do not meet until acts of God in his righteousness confront man in his unrighteousness.773 In response to an encounter with God, one is legally up-righted before God (“justified”), but only limited ethical implications arise for persons who receive God’s righteousness, and few significant social ethics changes emerge. After the encounter—what evangelicals speak of as “salvation”—culture and the gospel go on in their separate tracks. The latter of the several views (“Christ the Transformer”) has always existed in Calvinism, and emerged for a while as the normative working model among other thinkers who see culture’s potential and limitations and who also think of the immense potential for change in the human situation present in Christianity and its social ethic.774 Since the turn of the second to the third millennium, however, several harsh critics of Niebuhr’s five types have emerged, only to grope about for some alternative or enlarged approach to the subject.775 Niebuhr himself certainly encouraged the popularity of the transformationist idea in calling it “Christ the Transformer of Culture.” But the other types should not thereby be dismissed. More recently, A. Crouch suggested his own fivemode analysis: Christianity may variously condemn, critique, copy, consume or—as he advocates and hopes—create culture.776 Although in offering this bold proposal, Crouch could have sought earlier models, for example, in early Christianity-culture thinkers, in Charlemagne, in medieval Catholicism’s cultural achievements, or in the Protestant wing of the Enlightenment as it developed in the hands of musicians (Handel and Bach), poets (Milton, Bunyan and Herbert, for example), painters (Rembrandt van Rijn), architects 772 W. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament. 2 vols, trans J. A. Baker (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1961) 2:154. 773 Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, p. 150. 774 The only comprehensive attempt to outline the whole history of Christianity’s constructive transforming power in history is by Alvin J. Schmidt, Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001). The Christian world awaits a full multi-volume treatment of this subject, which should be illustrated from primary source documents in the manner, for example, of O. and J. O’Donovan’s From Irenaeus to Grotius. 775 Two of the most prominent are Carter’s, Rethinking Christ and Culture (see note above) and D. A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008); both titles are thinly disguised allusions to Niebuhr with whom both are mostly disaffected. In 1999, G. Marsden was invited to lecture at Austin Presbyterian Seminary upon the fiftieth anniversary of Niebuhr’s famous lecturers of 1949. Marsden suggested in his first lecture that Niebuhr’s usefulness may have run its course, and that “Its categories are wrong and misleading.” Marsden’s critical remarks are reviewed and discussed by J. Gustafson in his “Introduction” to the fiftieth anniversary reprint of Niebuhr (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001); Gustafson defends Niebuhr with an appreciation of his work. 776 Crouch, Culture Making, pp. 84-99.

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(Christopher Wren),777 and legal and political thinkers (Grotius and Rutherford), he did not. Crouch’s culture-creating call to Christians does not seem to have occurred to Niebuhr, at least not in a form visibly similar to Crouch’s. On the other hand, the biblical material does show a variety of relations including even a few cases of the “Christ of Culture” model—enough to encourage an open mind on all of Niebuhr’s five possibilities; the same is true for Crouch’s five types of the relation. Some samples of this biblical variety will be discussed along the way. The basic ingredients in the forces making up the Christianity and culture connection are problematic. Human creativity is a marvel, but it also struggles with limited knowledge, although there is wide agreement that education is a basic antidote to narrow stupidity and ignorance, and a major resource for creative thinking; this solution to the culture problem was Plato’s and is generally the more secular solution to the problems of culture. Not so widely recognized, however, is a more serious moral limitation—the presence of what Christians call sin in culture. In its uncanny way sin spoils or dissipates the constructive cultural products of creativity in varying ways and degrees: invent a bright new solution to a specific problem and another abuse or limitation rears its ugly head. Recognition of human finiteness and sinfulness does not mean Christians are above this struggle because they recognize it and even claim some form of deliverance from it. Indeed, they too are swamped in culture—both its blessings and joys and its limits and evils—since they remain only partially delivered from sin and ignorance, and like all human beings, are constantly the victims of unintended consequences even of actions well conceived, well articulated and well carried out at first.778 Still, Christianity does contain certain powers of change-forthe-better, as its history illustrates: belief in a single, loving God (overcoming god-conflicts as in world mythologies), faith in Christ (transforming personal life); love and its related virtues (ameliorating society); a foundation document with many slices of life for guidance (multi-factored insights); ethics of both personal and social values (extension of personal ethics into society), and behavior centering in justice; and an eschatology which tells us where we personally and human history are going (hope). But Christianity’s potential for cultural renovation has an “if only,” i.e., if only it can muster its own resources and apply them appropriately and humbly. If it can, as it has sometimes in the past . . .779 Finally, four concepts may be mentioned on the relation of Christ and culture—four ideas to which seem to inhere in the culture discussion, from which it works, and to which it seems to return again and again. (1) The first is the notion of a biblical cultural mandate which thematically persists in Scripture from beginning to end, and is repeatedly embodied in many biblical details. The cultural mandate is initially stated as a provision (the image of God in man) and commission, in Genesis 1:26-28—to fill and subdue the earth—as part of human oneness 777 J. McManners, “Enlightenment: Secular and Christian,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity, ed J. McManners (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 267-300. 778 J. D. Hunter, To Change the World, p. 47 and passim. 779 H. O. J. Brown, The Reconstruction of the Republic (Milford MI: Mott Media, 1981), sought to call Americans to moral reconstruction led by the church. At this writing, the Tea Party movement does not seem to be a current moral reconstruction movement. It rather seems driven by business favoritism, a parasite view of labor, continuing the Reagan tax rebellion, and budget-balancing. It is hard to see how this program is a case of moral renewal, except in its promotion of work as against welfare dependency.

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with creation. The mandate continues to appear in various forms in other biblical texts, but in a larger sense appears on every page of Scripture, if only in its use of then current regional languages (Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek). It is not to be seen as a balanced biblical theme concurrent with the redemptive mandate which dominates the biblical material, since the redemption mandate is the major, overarching theme of the Bible. But the two mandates repeatedly correlate in various ways to be noted in the discussion. (2) The second idea is that common interests exist between the people of God and the cultural life of humanity. By this I mean the people of God (Israel or church) live in the world of human affairs, participate consciously and unconsciously in its culture and culture-making, take from culture for their own interests, and feed ideas and artifacts back into culture in new forms as they live in the world. This taking and giving involves constant interaction between Israel/church and culture/creativity—interactions that entail events like relation-making, value-judging, change initiative, artifact use and hope affirmation, and perhaps many other such combinations waiting to be named and discussed. (3) A third idea is that the relation of redemption and culture may, with Niebuhr, be thought of as chiefly or perhaps ultimately transformational change. Much such change is in small increments, but occasionally very large changes occur in a virtually national sense; this would be to say that Niebuhr was substantially on the right track in speaking of Christ transforming culture in so general a way. Transformation-of-culture means that a people of God in the world of human creativity changes culture toward the kind of world God purposes and away from culture’s inevitable habit of keeping God and his purposes at a distance in the flow of cultural life. Transformation occurs in both covert and overt ways in the hands of Christians, in micro-changes and macro-changes, and in every degree of advance and decline. The process requires wisdom beyond ourselves—God’s wisdom. A long future perspective seems required by the fact that the Bible promises an ultimate new creation of all things; in the meantime we must think of local tokens, foretastes and adumbrations of the final goal. (4) One way to conceptualize and operate the relation of Christianity and culture is what James Davison Hunter (2010) calls the faithful presence of Christians everywhere and in everything. By this he means a way to peacefully infiltrate our own local piece of the cultural world which would be different in the culture of civic life, for example, than the confrontational and coercive tactics of the American evangelical right (James Dobson, for example), different from the relevance-and-adaptation tactics of the evangelical left (Jim Wallis, for example), and also different from the separatist and pacifist strategies of Neo-Anabaptists (John Howard Yoder, for example). Hunter thinks of his alternative as yet another mode of cultural transformation beyond the right, the left, or the pacifists, and as free from all assumptions and patterns of the historic but coercive Constantinian policy—a policy or mode by which Christians practice dominion and force by almost any means, including legislation and even military might. Having embraced both Niebuhr (with Crouch’s five-types) and the idea-description it birthed, especially Niebuhr’s preferred Christ the Transformer of Culture model, it is appropriate to explain in what sense this type is adopted as against his critics. Generally, this treatment sympathizes with his critics’ point that by categorizing people and views he sets up sharp distinctions that encourage would-be or actual analysists and activists to follow 472

unrealistic divisions between the types. That is, the five types often mingle with each other in biblical culture scenes, and in the types’ actual historical representatives themselves. What Niebuhr offers, by his own intent, seems to be more like ideal descriptions of merely representative types and their nuances, not rigid categories and pigeon-holes in which to put biblical or historical thinkers. One has to suspect that Craig Carter’s basic criticism that Niebuhr assumed the Constantinian idea of a western world Christendom—that the western world is already Christian, but in need of straightening to keep its political-social forms of Christendom alive and working—may be wide of the mark. Carter can only do this by imputing such an assumption to Niebuhr; but it is not entirely clear that this was any real intention in his work, or even an unconscious motivation. Carter may have confused Niebuhr’s intentions with those of his more enthusiastic followers. As for the criticism that Niebuhr failed (for his critics) to clearly state his method or deal with gender issues or with war, the latter issues were simply not in his scope because his is not a general treatment of Christian social ethics. Niebuhr’s lack of a methodological chapter is now compensated by James Gustafson’s publication of Niebuhr’s own outline of his typological method and its limitations. This outline is the Preface to the fiftieth anniversary re-issue of the work—an outline which, one may suppose, should have been published with the book originally, as it might have forestalled at least some misunderstanding. Accordingly, I adopt Niebuhr’s five-types as a guide, but not an exhaustive one, to what kinds of relations happen in encounters between God’s people and culture(s), while trying to avoid pigeonhole thinking in describing such encounters. Some critics who might chance to read this essay may think I nonetheless slip into noxious categorizing—one of the very things they wish to caution against. If so, they can at least know I have thought about it. The Cultural Mandate: The Old Testament Genesis 1-11 It is assumed here that a biblical appeal should be sufficient for Christians generally, including those of millenarian theological commitments since they too respect Scripture as their final theological authority. The starting point for the biblical perspective on culture and its divine mandate is Genesis 1—the whole chapter as creation context, but especially 1:26-28 as one of its most unique and important specifics with historic unfolding in human history:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth (ESV)

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The much discussed “image of God” in man might have been treated with less speculation over the centuries if the preceding context had been followed: the meaning of the image of God can be determined by what sorts of things God does in the first twenty-five verses of the Genesis 1. Or, put differently, what is said about God in the preceding context of Genesis 1 informs us of what the image includes.780 The substantial acts of God which feed into the idea of his image in man are his thought, speech and naming; his creating, inventing and blessing; his giving, valuing and organizing; and his power, glory and kingship—these at the very least. Aspects of God’s activity found in the verbals of the preceding material and what can be inferred from them make up what it is of God that informs the meaning of “image.” Of course there are subtleties of poetic detail in Genesis one, but for the present purpose the several noted kinds of divine acts can be seen in the creation poem prior to the appearance of the image. Moreover, the image of God in Adam (man) is complemented by mandates to be served in his activity on earth: Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on earth. And God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food (ESV).’

While the exact shape and extent of Adam’s dominion of the earth is not specified beyond the kinds of life God had already created (Genesis continues to use its own poetic-linguistic resources), it seems clear that the kingship mandated to Adam would have to be expanded and detailed in specific culture-making activities. God shared his kingship with Adam in this mandate,781 and while it is so far limited to aspects of creation already included in the poetry, Adam’s (that is, man’s [Heb adam, man]) activities under the mandate continue to develop and to expand the function of the image and mandate. Adam is first viewed as a gatherer; but soon he also begins working the ground (cultivation, implying domestication of plants, 2:6, 15) along with naming the animals as acts of language and expression (2:19); marriage is commissioned (2:21-24), and fig leaves are used for covering (3:7). The Fall spoils the purity, beauty and serenity of these scenes (ch 3), as Adam and Eve convert their garden culture and relationship with God into self-interested consumption; the Fall also adds troubling complications to all such expressions of the creative image. Still, the cultural mandate is not withdrawn even though it becomes complicated and troubled. Genesis rather pursues it by adding more and more of exactly those kinds of creative human works that characterize God’s creative work in Genesis 1.782 God is a maker; man is also a maker. As soon as the tragic story of Adam and Eve’s failed probation ends, the segment’s interest continues with further notes of the farmer and the shepherd (Cain, Abel), the 780 Similarly Crouch, Culture Making, pp. 20-22. Crouch does not make a methodology-conscious statement as above, but his way of determining the sense of the image of God in man is similar to that of this discussion. 781 E. Sauer, The King of the Earth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962) develops this theme as the title suggests. Sauer was a European dispensational millenarian with a different way of thinking about man and culture than the American-rooted Fundamentalist movement. 782 See most recently D. B. Hegeman, Plowing in Hope: Toward a Biblical Theology of Culture (Moscow ID: Canon Press).

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building of the first city (4:17), the development of nomadic tent-dwelling (4:20), musical instruments (4:22) and bronze smelting (4:21)—all this inventiveness and culture-making horribly complicated and twisted by flight from God, murder, and blood-vengeance (Gen 4). Genesis 1-11’s theme is a remarkable exploration of the twin motifs—the spread of man and culture, and the spread of sin and disorder.783 Nowhere is the cultural mandate of Genesis 1 revoked; and yet it becomes troubled and enervated, its products are misused, and compensations are introduced such as control of over-wrought blood revenge by the law of equal retribution (Gen 9:3-7). Moreover, as Genesis 1-11 unfolds, the image is directly invoked as the basis for still other human activities or values such as procreation (5:1-2) and human dignity (9:6). But God’s creating and organizing are also reflected in other remarkable notes of culture: Genesis 10’s details of social organization and migration, of languages, of lands and nations (10:5, 8-12, 20, 32), of cities with their builders and names (10:8-23), and of the art of hunting. In the chapter, none of this is subject to any kind of judgment by the author; in fact, in a distinctive cultural note, Nimrod is called a “mighty hunter before the LORD (10:9), as though to reaffirm the cultural mandate in a way that makes human achievement and skill approved activity in its own right. The events of Genesis 10 appear to be natural growth in human expansion, development and movement, extending and expanding the cultural mandate of Genesis 1. If not, why so much interest in these creative developments which seem precisely the unfolding of what God intended man to be and do as man, forming thereby an expanding process of creativity in the growth of culture and history. Even the story of the Tower of Babel is interested in Mesopotamian-Sumerian culture with its picture of settlement, brick-making, mortar, the city, the tower and language. But this local picture of confusion and dispersion too is spoiled by arrogance, and thereby its offense to God is judged in dispersal. Genesis 1-11 has a steadily unfolding picture of the origins of human creativity, skill, invention, organization, and sociality—all attributed to the gift of the image of God in Adam-man, and repeatedly illustrated by his culture-works in fulfillment of the cultural mandate: God made us to be “culturative” creatures, that is, culture creators.784

Cultural Scenes and Realities in Exodus and Deuteronomy Were the following brief but striking cultural note about Moses the only such statement about him, it would be enough to indicate Luke’s cultural interest:

Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action (Acts 7:22).

783 D. J. Clines, The Theme of the Pentateuch (Sheffield, England: Sheffield University, 1978), pp. 64-73. 784 Hegeman’s term, Plowing in Hope, passim. For a more recent and more sophisticated development of the same idea, see Crouch, Culture-Making.

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But this cultural note, regardless of what might have been its source, is not an oddity in Scripture. Other cultural notes or details appear in several Pentateuch texts. We may identify at least the following samples. The Tabernacle Craftsmen. Two Exodus passages in parallel (31:1-11; 35:30-36:2) mention certain tabernacle craftsmen whose gifts are specifically attributed to the Lord. One reads: And Moses said to the people of Israel, ‘See, the LORD has called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah; and he has filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability, with intelligence, with knowledge, and with all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold and silver and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, for work in every skilled craft. And he has inspired him to teach, both him and Oholiab the son of Ahisamach of the tribe of Dan. He has filled them with ability to do every sort of work done by a craftsman or by a designer or by an embroiderer in blue and purple and scarlet stuff and fine twined linen, or by a weaver—by any sort of workman or skilled designer. Bezalel and Oholiab and every able man in whom the LORD has put ability and intelligence to know how to do any work in the construction of the sanctuary shall work in accordance with all that the LORD has commanded.’ And Moses called Bezalel and Oholiab and every able man in whose mind the LORD had put ability, every one whose heart stirred him up to come to do the work.

Several observations about this text will help in understanding its meaning for the topic. (1) The description of gifts is extravagant and clustered—a concentrated collection of terms for crafts and craftsmen with a tone of honor and glory and pride. (2) It seems unlikely that the narrative thinks its gifted people suddenly received all their abilities in a moment, thus limiting them to the tabernacle’s construction and furnishings. As F. Delitzsch said long ago, “. . . for the performance of every kind of work . . . . This does not preclude either natural capacity or acquired skill, but rather presupposed them; for in ver. 6 it is expressly stated in relation to his assistants, that God had put wisdom into all that were wise-hearted.”785 Major English translations recognize that the gifts were already present by rendering the Hebrew verbs “has called,” “has filled,” or “has inspired (my italics, cf KJV, RSV, NIV, NRSV),” and then explicitly state that they brought these already-developed gifts to the building and furnishing of the tent. (3) That the workers were filled with the Spirit of God is not an indication of special temporary endowment with craft skills since the Old Testament knows of other creation works of the Spirit (Gen 1:2). (4) Exodus 36:2 speaks of “every able man in whose mind the LORD has put ability” thus broadening the picture of skilled workers beyond merely Bezelel and Oholiab, and suggesting prior development of talents. Thus, as Delitzsch recognized, the gifts of craftsmanship were already given—one may say, by a creation work of the Spirit—and then adapted and applied to the tabernacle. Use of Israelites in Egyptian building projects before the exodus suggests a context for development of craft talents.

785 C. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament: Vol II: The Pentateuch, trans J. Martin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), p. 217.

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Cultural Details in Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy emphasizes Israel’s land, culture details and (potential) wealth. The book contains frequent scenes of human activity to be raised to new levels of flourish and benefit by relationship with God. It mentions domestic cultivation of land (8:7) implying know-how in use of tools, iron-mining, copper-mining, silver- and gold-smelting (8:9), and architecture and building (8:12) which can be illustrated by the varied patterns of domestic four-room pillared houses (recovered in Iron Age I-IIa excavations), domestic animal husbandry (8:13), accumulation of national wealth (15:16) along with lending policies, the rise of kingship, a court system, judges with greater or lesser abilities (ch 17) and road building (19:3). Certainly Deuteronomy expects Israel to separate itself from Canaanite idolatry, spiritism, intermarriage, marriage alliances and foods (cf Deut 7). But the Old Testament does not equate culture in general with specific prohibited Canaanite practices, even though this equation is often suggested in separatist thinking. No text prohibits Israel from making or using Canaanite pottery or farm tools, for example. The prohibition of images would ban finishing pottery with Canaanite deity images or symbols, for example, but would not ban pottery-making using other foreign art forms as such—line designs like zig-zags or concentric circles, for example.786 To extend this ban to culture in general, even Canaanite culture in general, moves beyond the biblical framework. Other Striking Cultural Scenes in the Old Testament Job’s Poem on Mining (Job 28). Job’s poem on mining and wisdom is a subtle exploration of human ingenuity as adventurous, inventive and daring. The poem is full of awe and wonder at the work of the miner and smelter. While the poem does not say in a direct, prosaic way that the miner’s wisdom is a gift of God, the comparison suggests it by the analogy of the miner’s ingenuity (vs 7) and daring as an expression of God’s knowledge and understanding. This likeness, while another expression of the image of God, does not mean man’s wisdom is identical with God’s, but only that both “know” in their respective realms. God’s wisdom, for Job, is infinitely beyond mans’ as the poetry of chapters 38-41 vigorously affirms. This finally means that the miner’s knowledge is meager even though it leads him to daring explorations and exploits which animals do not know (28:7-8). Some selections will give the sense of the passage. Surely there is a mine for silver and a place for gold which they refine. Iron is taken out of the earth, and copper is smelted from the ore. Men put an end to darkness, and search out to the farthest bound the ore in gloom and deep darkness. They open shafts in a valley away from where men live; They are forgotten by travelers, they hang afar from men, they swing to and fro. Man puts his hand to the flinty rock and overturns mountains by the roots. He cuts channels in the rocks, and his eye sees every precious thing. 786 The earliest Iron Age I pottery (earliest Israelite) is in fact virtually without decoration—extremely plain; Israel does not appear to have used imported pottery during its earliest settlement years.

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He binds up the streams so that they do not trickle, and the thing that is hid he brings forth to light. But where will wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? . . .

The next segment of the poem makes the point that wisdom is with God. But this does not mean that man doesn’t have wisdom at all. What he can’t do is penetrate things known only by God. By this thesis he affirms what the whole Bible recognizes, that what wisdom man has—as here for a cultural work—originates with God, though not limited to him. Rather he operates the human world so that what man learns is nothing short of the wisdom of God, even though it is manifest in cultural life as in the case of mining and very limited compared to God’s. What he does learn about mining is actually a ray of God’s wisdom. This point becomes more explicit in Isaiah’s poem on the farmer. Isaiah’s Poem on the Farmer (Isa 28:23-29). Isaiah knows that in his own time Israel refuses to learn the ways of God. To illustrate Israel’s foolishness in not learning from God’s revealed law, he offers the poem of the farmer who does learn from God’s creation and the practice of agriculture.

Listen and hear my voice; pay attention and hear what I say. When a farmer plows for planting, does he plow continuously? Does he keep on breaking up and harrowing the soil? When he has leveled the surface, does he not sow caraway and scatter cumin? Does he not plant wheat in its place, barley in its plot, and spelt in its field? His God instructs him and teaches him the right way. Caraway is not threshed with a sledge, nor is a cartwheel rolled over cumin; Caraway is beaten out with a rod, and cumin with a stick. Grain must be ground to make bread; so one does not go on threshing it forever. Though he drives the wheels of his threshing cart over it, his horses do not grind it. All this also comes from the LORD Almighty, Wonderful in counsel and magnificent in wisdom (NIV).

Although the thought is about the Israelite farmer, Isaiah’s poem applies to farmers in general who learn the practices of agriculture by the natural processes of experience or example. But this cultural knowledge is twice said in the poem to be God’s instruction (28:26, 29). God’s image in man has a particular application to Israel’s resistance to God’s wisdom as the immediate context thinks; the universality of agricultural knowledge is obvious: cultural learning and practice is learning the wisdom taught by God. In the poem’s affirmation lies the point of our consideration of culture: culture is a creation work of God and men learn it by doing. To deny that this has no universal application because it is said of the Israelite farmer would be disingenuous since it is stated in general terms and makes no point about such a limited application. At its base the point is a cultural one: culture is a joint work of God and man, whether in Israel or elsewhere; it is not only 478

Israelite and divine, but intrinsically human as well, since other farmers too learn such matters. Isaiah and the Pagan Craftsman (Isa 54:16-17). If there is any doubt remaining about culture as a subset and expression of creation, Isaiah 54:16-17 dispels it.

Behold I have created the smith, who blows the fire of coals, and produces a weapon for its purpose. I have also created the ravager to destroy; no weapon that is fashioned against you shall prosper, and you shall confute every tongue that rises against you in judgment.

The work of the smith is not merely the work of man as though to separate the sacred, divine world from the “secular” world. This cultural detail is cast in the language of creation which is assumed to be continuous and a subset of history, i.e., culture history belongs to human history. An historical event is assumed in the text with the rest of Isaiah 40-66—the rise of the Persian empire and its military conquests of Babylon’s former territories and peoples. Israel on the other hand is promised protection as the actual growth of Persian rule over the Middle East region shows and as the book of Esther illustrates. The important point for our purpose is that this detail of culture—the smith and his production of a weapon—is a work of divine creation. Although the Hebrew perfect is used, the scene does not seem to refer to the “original” creation in Genesis 1-2; the reference is rather to a culture-work only recently created, to judge by the realism of Isaiah’s historical allusions to the Persian Empire (Isaiah 40-55). For this ongoing-contemporary sense of “create,” see Psalm 104:30 and context, as well as several uses of “create/Creator/creation in Isaiah 40-66. The Cultural Mandate: The New Testament The New Testament like the Old is full of scenes and interactions of earliest Christianity with the surrounding cultures of the era, whether Jewish, Greco-Roman or pagan. Most of these scenes show one or more aspects of the relationship—a reality which will be discussed with some examples later. For the moment, it is enough to observe a few cases where culture-works of God and man are directly affirmed or assumed to have their origin in the world’s historical-cultural operations. The greater number of cultural scenes in the Old Testament is due to its larger quantity of material over a much longer time, and thus deals with a much larger slice of life than does the New. Direct statements are also fewer in the New because it is so fully focused on the wondrous powers of Christ and the gospel and its spread over the northeastern portion of the Mediterranean world; it is also preoccupied with the rise of the international church and the departure of national Israel from center stage. Still, the New Testament does have some important passages on the subject.

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General Statements

Aside from isolated and incidental (to main points in context) cultural texts (Rom 1:25; Rev 10:6) and slightly fuller allusions to the creation of natural elements of the universe (Mark 13:19; 1 Cor 11:9; 2 Cor 4:6), a few longer, richer statements than those about cosmic entities or marriage can be found, even though general in nature:

Ephesians 3:9. “God who created all things”



Colossians 1:16. “. . . in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible . . . all things were created through him and for him.” Creation statements here are passive without an agent (“were created . . . were created”), but as elsewhere and more or less often in the New Testament, the passive assumes God is the agent—the “divine passive” as it is sometimes called by commentators. The statement is sweeping and inclusive and must include human culture-making as well as physical entities, similarly to the divinely created craftsman-smith of Isaiah 54:16.



Revelation 4:11. “Worthy are thou, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for thou didst create all things and by thy will they existed and were created.” This statement too is general, sweeping and inclusive. One could assume it refers, with those of Ephesians and Colossians, only to physical or spiritual cosmic forces. But this reading would be unnecessarily and arbitrarily restricted while at least a few other New Testament thoughts fill out details that include elements of culture.

Government and its Cultural Good With Romans 13:1-7, one enters the world of Roman social-political culture. Not only is government a specific cultural provision, but several of its cultural expressions are also included in the thoughts. The idea of power is dominant and is itself an expression of culture since it induces the fears of subjects.

Romans 13:1-2, 4, 6-7. “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment . . . for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer . . . For the same reason you also pay taxes for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay all of them their dues, taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due.” Without any creation language, Paul says government is a work of God in the world, a work carried out by the usual biblical bearers of culture—human beings in their sociality and community. Several aspects of governmental culture-making are also noted as details of the general provision: justice (vs 2 “judgment,” vs 4 “wrath”) on evil-doers in particular; good (vs 4a) in the larger biblical sense of increase in well-being; taxation (vss 6-7) since revenue is essential to basic government provisions; and the sword (vs 4)

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as a symbol of power and war. These are very public cultural elements, and hence qualify as culture in a broad public, and in this case international sense of the Roman Empire’s government.787

Vocations, Work and Calling In 1 Corinthians 7:17-24 Paul adds to his marriage and separation discussion of vss 1-16 two more pairs of social groups for which he uses the same principle of social stability with no-change-because-of-salvation: circumcision or non-circumcision (i.e., Jew or Gentiles), and slavery or free. His principle is that the newness of salvation does not call for abandoning the social “vocation” of one’s pre-Christian life: marriage should stay intact; a slave or free existence should remain as is; and one’s Jewish or Gentile ethnocultural position should not be changed either (Gentiles should not become Jews). Paul’s points are, as commentators agree: (1) salvation does not disrupt or require that normal social positions be changed due to salvation; (2) nonetheless, if an unbelieving marriage partner demands freedom, he may go, even though the priority is a permanent marriage; (3) Jews and Gentiles will not change identities; and (4) slaves and free men should remain as they are, even though, in this latter case as with marriage, the slave is also free to accept an offer of release if the opportunity is presented, just as with marriage the unbelieving partner is free to leave. As P. Sampley puts it:

Paul appears to walk a fine line . . . ; he inclines toward urging all people to stay put, to continue to live in the same context as when they received their call [to salvation in Christ], but he recognizes that some change may be important or necessary . . . some may have a chance to gain freedom from slavery.788

For the purpose of this essay, the most important point is unfortunately hidden in Sampley’s (correct) summary; but this is also true in several older and other more recent commentaries. They prefer to call marriage, uncircumcision and slavery or freedom “positions,”789 or “situations”790 not “callings” as Paul does. Other commentators pay only scant attention to the significant fact that these earthly “positions” are said to be “callings” like the other “calling” in the passage to salvation. Perhaps inadvertently and in the interest of centering salvation as the main spiritual work in believers, the fact that both the earthly “positions” or “situations” of new believers before their salvation in Christ and the summons to salvation are alternately spoken of as “calling.” When Paul uses this vocabulary of earthly social “positions,” as well as the “calling” to salvation, the implication is that human, socio-cultural “callings” are likewise from God, since the divine agent of the callings is assumed; this thought shows awareness of the Old Testament’s 787 Crouch, Culture Making, pp. 40-43. 788 J. P. Sampley, “The First Letter to the Corinthians: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” The New Interpreters Bible, ed L. Keck et al. 12 vols (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002), 10:833. 789 F. Godet, Commentary on the First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians, trans A. Cusin. 2 vols,(Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1886), 2:354, 355, 357 and passim. 790 G. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), pp. 314, 322 and passim through the discussion.

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similar notion of crafts and work as divine gifts. A further implication is that just as the blacksmith of Isaiah 54:16, the farmer, the miner, the craftsmen of the tabernacle, and the married and unmarried, are “called” to their “vocation,” so the slave is “called” to slavery, or the free person is “called” to his/her form of human cultural activity (1 Cor 7:17). Still another implication is that when Paul says of work-vocations, “. . . each one should retain the place in life where the Lord assigned him, and to which God has called him. (1 Cor 7:17, NIV),” he means that as in the Old Testament cultural scenes, all human beings are gifted with some earthly vocation as a joint culture-making work of God and his human creatures. Why it should be difficult to see in the passage this obvious use of “calling (Gr klasis/klareo)” as a providential work for all men in the sphere of creation is indeed strange. Oddly enough, Godet favors this view for 7:17, but not in the repetitions of the idea in 7:20, 24. In short, klasis and kaleo are used here for “summons,” or even in the weaker sense of “invite,” meaning a kind of pulling or drawing into a social situation or work vocation by personal or social powers or forces not further identified but certainly implied. This is the case whether by compulsions of one’s social location assumed to be a providential work of God for one’s own or others’ benefit, or in the narrower sense of the practice and skills of that social location, i.e., the work and skills of one’s life and livelihood as gifts of God. In any case Paul’s usage conforms closely to the sense that klasis usually has, of a call from a deity. The most notable exceptions in Hellenistic Greek are the sense of a legal summons to a court of law for some legal function, or a paymaster’s “call” to workers to receive their pay.791 Otherwise klasis in Greek usage is a call from deity to engage his interests in some fashion. For Paul, this usage applies to culture skills and work, and he appears to think it is general or universal among humans.

Only a few parallels exist in the Greco-Roman world’s language for this socialvocational use of klasis, even though callings are usually seen as coming from deity.792 But the negative view expressed in TDNT of Epictetus and the Stoics’ talk about their “calling” as philosophers as mere “formal” parallels to this passage, does not seem justified. The Stoics phrase about their philosophers’ task is “[the] calling with which God has called [us],” a very close parallel to Paul’s wording. Oepke is cited in note 5 of TDNT 3:493, in a work not clearly identified (the documentation seems confusing), as describing the Stoic philosopher’s calling as “set [in] a difficult and critical task in which he must bear witness to the truth and power of his principles.” This is not an exact parallel; but it is similar to Paul’s thought in that when the Stoic philosopher speaks of his work and craft he speaks of it as a “calling” of a god. Is it an accident that this lonely example comes from Stoicism? Paul’s letters contain echoes of Stoic thought about life and ethics; the parallels are so forceful that some scholars think Paul took instruction from Stoic teachers somewhere in his background—possibly in Tarsus before he moved to Jerusalem, or in a period of study in Damascus or environs after his conversion, or even during the elongated period of return to Tarsus after his conversion.

791 BAGD, p. 399. 792 A perusal of L-S and M-M will confirm this. Cf. also the remarks of K. L. Schmidt, “kaleo,” etc. TDNT 3:493, disparaging the “Lutheran” view of 1 Cor 7:20. It is not quite true that there are absolutely no parallels, however as noted bove. See also BAGD, p. 436, at klasis, mng. 2.

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Thus Luther’s sometimes maligned or ignored sense of 1 Corinthians 7:17, 20, 24—the use of “calling” for all morally or culturally productive vocations as callings of God—does in fact appear in the passage. That is, Luther’s view that all human vocations are “callings,” just as much as preaching, priesthood, monastic life and other church vocations, correctly derives from the sense of this passage. Luther had it right here, despite his reactionary disgust with monks: the passage spreads “callings” to other aspects of life beyond religious and spiritual “calls” and vocations. It should be clear now that work vocations are “callings” from God, are reflections of God’s image in man, and belong to the human activity of creation under God’s providence. C. F. H. Henry correctly infers the dignity of work from such a sense of calling to work vocations, and he supplements this dignifying notion with a renewed appeal to God’s image and kingship shared with man, and with the example of Jesus as a carpenter.793 Such concepts encourage Christians, who must live their lives in the world’s cultures, to relate their work skills to man-in-God’simage. Slowly but persistently, the image of God placed in man at creation, and the corresponding mandate to work out his kingship of the earth, also given at creation, emerge in the advancing scenes of human culture-making in the Old and New Testaments. Shepherding, farming, music and instruments, cities, hunting, language, migrations, farming and blacksmithing are all subjects of shorter or longer scenes in the Old Testament story of the image. Government and social organization also appear in the New Testament along with marriage (continued from the Old Testament). Even the life of slavery is the subject of culture-from-the-Lord passages in the New Testament. Evangelical Christians ought to recognize this notable biblical theme and develop new studies of its reality as a Scriptural concept and how it works in all Christians’ lives. One must conclude that there is something here akin to what might be expected from the “cultural mandate” of Genesis 1:26-28: kingship of the earth—a human power mandated by God through his image in humanity to create culture, that is, to design, invent, organize, produce, work at, and live in a world-of-activity-and-goods that makes humanity sparkle, bloom and effervesce with goods of use and beauty; and the joy of divine callings to such vocations which lends them personal dignity. Clearly, once created, they can and often are put to wicked and harmful uses; but the powers and energies of creativity, socialization and service are certainly displayed in these biblical scenes and texts. The question now confronts us: how do biblical texts and scenes of culture display the relation between a truly redeemed people and the culture around them? What actually happens in biblical models of the relation of a people of God and culture? Some Scenes and Modes of Interaction in the Old Testament The intent of this segment of the essay is to examine and summarize some scenes in which several different kinds of interactions of Israelites with their cultural surroundings occur, and to see what patterns of interaction are visible. It will be well to keep in mind the several types of “Christ and culture” modes of interaction to see if there are cases that fit one

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C. F. H. Henry, Aspects of Christian Social Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957), pp. 35-53.

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or more of Niebuhr or Crouch’s type-concepts and if there are any clues in the aggregate of examples that might encourage one of the five as the more dominant biblical pattern. This is admittedly a somewhat risky enterprise since our study will not be exhaustive, and admittedly the cases were chosen to illustrate various modes of interaction. Still, some guidance can be gained from these cases in point. There are five significant scenes of Israelites working in other ancient Near Eastern monarchies or their courts: Joseph, Moses, Jonah, Daniel and Esther. If a principled separatism is the biblical norm, how did these significant Old Testament Israelites enter the record as heroes, especially when all are honored for their achievement in foreign, pagan contexts? I will comment more extensively on the Joseph scenes than the other four because it seems to have more “Christ and culture” possibilities and can function as a kind of index to other such stories. Joseph in the Court of Pharoah

Joseph is the first extended story about an Israelite in a nearby national court. The story values Joseph’s upward movement to a high level in Egyptian government through a series of divine providences with the honors and gains he achieves. In the narrator’s eyes Joseph’s rise comes from his gifts of wisdom and prophecy which enable him to transcend the knowledge of anyone in Egypt, even Pharoah and his magicians. These gifts preserve the patriarchal family whole through years of famine. Egypt is not yet viewed so much as an evil slave power as a limited people, lacking enough or the kind of wisdom it needs to know how to preserve itself in a seven-year famine. Joseph’s significance therefore is that he knows the details of a national survival plan for Egypt through his gift of wisdom. Before the crucial situation unfolds, Joseph is in a kind of “Christ above Culture” situation. With prophetic wisdom Joseph is able to change the threatening famine situation. The story gives the impression of Joseph carrying out acts of civil grace from God— grace which transformed death into life, even through the famine. In his rise to power and creation of a grain storage and distribution plan for the famine, he also goes through a moral qualification by which he resists the seductions of Potiphar’s wife. His prophetic wisdom for Egypt’s good is enhanced by love for his abusive brothers. The story does not feature any special love for Egypt, though one may think of a general love of humanity that is like his love for his brothers; his gift to Egypt is his prophetic wisdom and the ingenuity of his arrangements for grain storage and distribution in the famine. It seems fair to see in this story a transformation of (Egyptian) culture from a death trap to a living, surviving nation, a transformation made possible because Joseph’s gift of (divine) wisdom was greater then Egypt’s wisdom gifts. That is, the relation of Joseph to Egyptian culture is both “above” and transformational. This is not a case of Niebuhr’s “Christ against Culture,” nor a case of “The Christ of Culture”: Egyptian culture cannot help itself out of famine, except in the limited sense that Egypt had the capacity to plant and harvest grain, and to move it to granaries as distribution points. Joseph’s transformative acts come from God, not from Egypt. But it is also something of a “Christ and Culture in Paradox” scene in that Joseph’s gift of just/righteous wisdom unexpectedly intersects Egyptian wisdom in a different-than-normal and unpredictable way. When the 484

famine is over Egypt goes on its own way while Joseph and his family go their way. But before and during the famine, Joseph’s wisdom is transformational. In the manner of his transformative achievement he also fits J. D. Hunter’s “faithful presence” mode in that he is simply present in a kind of natural way—no public crusade, no politicking, no fanfare— just quietly articulated directives from his prophetic wisdom. By it Egypt successfully navigates through potential disaster. This transformation, however, is limited in time. Can anything really be called “transformed” when after a complete but temporary rescue, it reverts to its original condition and goes on its way with no permanent change? The only hint of anything permanent is the possibility that subsequent Pharoahs continued to build grain-storage cities in order to insure the food supply in famines. This policy seems suggested by Exodus 1:11’s reference to the storage cities of Pithom and Rameses; beyond this there is little or no permanent effect of Joseph’s grain policy. Indeed, some time after the event, Egypt becomes an ugly slave state. With Joseph in Egypt, little of permanent change is achieved, at least not as far as the record is concerned; it certainly was not a dreamy, sweeping “change the world” event. Life was preserved, but nothing permanently better is achieved except a possible Egyptian policy of grain storage; otherwise Egyptian life returned to a normalcy that remained through its national history. In fact, by the opening of Exodus, Egypt was about to become a slave camp for Israel and other Semites—something terribly evil compared to Joseph’s time.794 No new world is achieved, but only a temporary survival through an especially bad famine. For this reason one may wonder whether the “Christ and Culture in Paradox” type identified by Niebuhr is not after all a more appropriate description of Joseph’s achievement. Although this description seems to fit the in-and-out of Joseph’s achievement, it does not seem to be a fully suitable way to think of Joseph’s creative action for Egyptian life and culture. Niebuhr’s critics are at least right to this extent, that his categories are not mutually exclusive when one looks at this biblical case in point. A multi-factored combination of the Israel and culture relation thus seems visible. The Joseph story may read as a combination of the paradox model and the transformative 794 The possibility for a Semite’s rise to governmental power in Egypt is usually sought in the Egyptian Hyksos Period (c 1720-1550 B. C.). The “Hyksos” were Semitic Palestinian/Canaanite/Syrian people who filtered into Egypt as “shepherds” from the east, grew in numbers, and finally overthrew native Egyptian phaorahs to become rulers of Egypt. After their overthrow by the native Egyptian Ah-mose, many of their leaders fled back to Palestine, but perhaps thousands of Semites continued to live in the delta region of Egypt, and were reduced to slavery by Ah-mose and his successors. These general patterns of Egyptian history correspond roughly to the flow of patriarchal history in Genesis and to the first part of Exodus; but it is impossible as yet to be much more specific about “the pharoah of the oppression” or other details of connection between biblical accounts and Egyptian records. It is possible to gather a modest collection of Egyptian documents that speak of or actually picture enslaved Semites working on Egyptian building projects in the delta where Israel lived, but the details are very fragmentary and it seems impossible to piece together any sort of history from the tidbits we have. The illustrations cover the period of c 1550 to possibly as late as 1200 B. C. One may compare the illustrations in ANET, 3rd Ed, pp. 223, 229-233; D. J. Wiseman, Illustrations from Biblical Archaeology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958), pp. 34, 44-45; cf also the discussion of R. DeVaux, The Early History of Israel, trans D. Smith (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press), pp. 75-81; J. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Some of the issues appear in H. Shanks, “Egypt’s Chief Archaeologist Defends His Rights (and Wrongs),” BAR 37:3 (2011), pp. 35-45. Even Hoffmeier’s thorough coverage of the archaeology produces only sketchy possibilities, which nonetheless are not to be discounted.

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model working together, even if limited in its temporal outcome. And—since what happened required Joseph’s divine wisdom—he represents God’s revelation above culture as well. But if a permanent “better” does not prevail, how is “transformed” an appropriate description? Perhaps a distinction between micro-transformations and macrotransformations is realistic. A micro-transformation would be one that really effects change for better in a culture, but within a small scope and for a limited time. Longer-term effects might be micro-consequences that do not even enter the story and whose reflexes last for varied quantities of time and limited space in limited ways. A macro-transformation would be one that can be made visibly permanent, for example, by becoming embodied in national law or written wisdom like the events of the exodus from Egypt produced, or even in the spirit of a people over a long period. On any reckoning, the Joseph story is about a representative of the people of God living in a world government, working for its good and providing for its survival. There is not a word of condemnation or judgment on Joseph or his project; he is rather a story-teller’s hero, guided by God’s moral laws and insight from God’s revelations. As in the paradox model, two worlds intersect, the higher inducing real change, even though only for a moment. As in the “Christ above culture” model, Joseph has the requisite wisdom even before he acts, and as in the transformation model, he changes Egypt, even if only temporarily. On any reckoning, Joseph in Egpt reveals varied kinds of “Christianity and culture” relations. Several of Niebuhr’s “types” are visible in the scenes or can justifiably be so understood. The relation is mulitiplex and passes through several aspects of Joseph’s bearing on Egypt’s problem. This model ought to make any full assessment of the relation many-faceted; one does not have to choose one of Niebuhr’s categories and reject the rest. Other Israelites in Foreign Nations or Courts Moses’ effort was even more limited than Joseph’s. He tried by divine direction to change Egypt’s culture-bound ambitions (huge building programs using slave labor with probable racial overtones) for the benefit of Israel; but Pharoah would not hear of a release, not even a change in policy toward slave labor. The economic policy of Pharoah was so culturally self-engulfing that no change was possible, like slavery in America. So the situation turned to judgment—first on Egypt’s primary life resource (the Nile) and its animal and insect gods, and then on Pharoah’s army amid Israel’s escape. This is a example of Christ against Culture (Niebuhr) or Christ condemning Culture (Crouch), at least for one aspect of Egyptian culture. The main effect was that a new culture came into being—Israel’s monotheistic nationhood—by escaping its former slave life and emerging into a new people by direct divine action. This too is transformative, but in a separating way not unlike the American Revolution, many of whose churchly and civic advocates effusively used Israel’s escape from slavery as a model: both Israel and the American nation gained permanent nationhood by separation, and with new laws and new institutions. These separating escapes were dramatically transformative on national levels. Jonah shows a pattern with some similarities to that of Joseph. He enters Assyrian Nineveh on a repentance mission. He preaches in the city’s open air and Assyria repents. 486

What it repents of is not specified, but one can guess it is repentance over one or more cases of its infamous brutality in warfare; perhaps it was over a homeland version of its violent foreign behavior like growing domestic violence in its capital (3:8?); perhaps it was over capture of nations in its path of conquest and the policy of dispersal and resettlement. The text never tells us about the larger scene. Nor does it specify exactly what the permanent effects were. All we know is that Jonah’s warning of repent-or-perish had its effect (3:110). This too involves a superior wisdom that is paradoxical and transformative, and as Joseph’s, short-lived and with an “against” element as well. Still, there is at least a temporary change that perhaps forestalled judgment, even if only to postpone it to another day (Nahum). This too is a micro-transformation initially, but as with Moses in Egypt, it had a long term effect in the rise of Israel’s prophetic repentance teaching expanded prophetically into a condition for the coming messianic age and the fulfillment of all the messianic-redemptive promises. Daniel enters the highest level of Babylon’s government as a captive, exiled Israelite. There he is willingly immersed in the literature of Babylon (1:17), while at the same time abstaining from its royal foods (1:8-16) and idols (3:1-18)—a determined but very limited abstention. His growth in prophetic wisdom (like Joseph’s, and in Babylonian culture with no judgment or condemnation, like Joseph), drew the king’s attention. When Nebuchadnezzar could gain no interpretation of his vision from his own wise men (like Pharoah), Daniel like Joseph delivered it out of his prophetic wisdom. There is no immediate effect on Babylonian culture; there is an immediate effect on Nebuchadnezzar personally; but ironically, the interpretation actually extends to his downfall as the Persians’ shortly assumed control of the region. But there is a longer effect as well, entirely outside Babylonian culture and within Israel’s culture: ultimately from the sequence of empires in the vision (s) will come an evil world ruler who will in turn be taken down by a God-figure, Israel’s messianic Son of Man (ch 7) who reigns with his saints’ on earth. Thus there is no cultural transformation of the immediate situation (Babylon), except for Nebuchadnezzar’s demise; but as with Israel escaping Egypt, a long term effect enters the stream of history— the renewal of the world in the kingdom of the saints. The end product is an earth-wide cultural reflex that, if we follow prophetic teaching, will ultimately mean a new heavens and new earth. As with Israel, the immediate no-transformation is finally overshadowed first by a modest one, then by extension into a world-wide one, macroscopic in extent, at least as envisioned in Daniel 7. Hence the theology of transformation in Daniel’s case has almost no short-, but rather larger mid- and longer-range reflexes, and on the much larger stage of world history. The “above culture” factor is here too, and the paradox type as well; but these types are somewhat muted: Nebuchadnezzar is not changed for the better, but for the worse. The historical pattern is Babylon’s national judgment before Israel’s national glory as Isaiah 40-66 has it. Esther lived in the culture of Persia; but she was no transformer of Persian culture as a whole; she has no revealed superior wisdom, but only a passionate but thoughtful Israelite nationalism. In the short term, she effects only, but significantly, a rescue of Israel from extinction by Persian decree—a strange anti-Semitic twist of history wrought by the manipulations of a single hater of Jews, Haman. The strange twist is that Cyrus’ decree released Israel from its former Babylonian exile to return to its land, rebuild its city and temple, and resume its national life. All this Haman either did not know, or out of his 487

furious, genocidal hatred, plotted to overwhelm. Additionally, the events of the book may be seen as having a mid-range effect in that at least some segment of Israel as a nation is preserved amid an inhuman threat. A longer-term micro-transformation appears in the story of how the Jewish feast of Purim arose to celebrate Esther’s victory of Jewish survival. But if one thinks of a transformation of Persian culture as a whole, the story reaches no such proportions. Rather, a mean-spirited fluke in Persian lower-level management changes, and ripple effects emerge in the emergence of Israel’s Feast of Purim and national survival. The micro-transformations of the book do have similarities to those of the other four. But unlike the others there is no visible, direct divine initiative or revelation; the change is entirely managed by the Jewess Esther’s relationship with King Xerxes, but nonetheless in the interest of Israel and its God and his plan. There is a Christ (Esther) against Culture feature here, and a modest culture-making event (Purim), but no more, except the longer term well-being of Israel. In a longer term sense, these modest culture transformations may be viewed as models of Israel’s ultimate redemption and the macro-transformation of the whole world through it. Kinds of Transformation in the Court Stories All five are stories are of micro-transformations, some short-term, some near-term, and others with longer-term results. All are of modest proportions when one considers the variant cultures represented. All elements, say, of Crouch’s five forms of the relationship (condemnation, critique, copying, consuming, and creating) are represented in varied ways and quantities; most of Niebuhr’s five are also more or less visible. But the transformation model seems dominant (or at least seems most suitable) providing one can accept distinctions between micro-transformations and macro-transformations, and varied degrees of extending reflexes. Perhaps patterns of culture-change emerge in the examples which can be further studied and supplemented with other Old Testament scenes, types and variations. Finally, both modes of culture-relation suggested by the two most recent constructive studies of Christianity and culture are illustrated in these biblical texts: Hunter’s “faithful presence” and Crouch’s “culture making” as modes of culture engagement are relevant to our lives as we work and serve Christ while still in the world of culture. And yet the dark reality amidst prevailing cultures after these transformative events is that Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and Persia continued virtually unchanged on their paths of civil, sinful distance from God, furthering their destructive behaviors until they themselves were destroyed by the next conqueror or dynasty. In some ways, these situations look more like the dualism/paradox views that Niebuhr describes—the sinful, limited and self-interested world running its own course with only a spurt of divine transformative action here and there crashing into their life for a moment as though from nowhere, and then disappearing again only to reappear elsewhere. The scenes above are paradoxical (except Esther)—God encountering people and nations. Two realities—culture and God himself—intersect now and again against all reason and expectation. Culture trudges on along its path aided by tradition, reason, nationalism and self-satisfaction, while the divine encounter happens, does a micro-work through revelation, prophecy and miracle, and then moves on to another appearance. Transformation does occur, but in the larger context of 488

paradox. Niebuhr’s account of these two types—paradox and transformation—is relevant. Both types happen in encounters, while at the same time Niebuhr’s other perceived ways of relating Christianity and culture happen as well, some modestly, others more strongly. “Christ and culture” do involve a complex matrix that ultimately defies neat classifications. It all happens strangely—to human perception at least. The interactions contain mysteries of the person, plan and activity of God. Even penetrating the finite and visible enigma of human creativity is difficult, perhaps impossible. Neither will submit to omniscienceseeking analysis because neither man nor God is containable; God is full of mystery and man stubbornly remains an enigma. The modesty of Hunters “faithful presence” is inviting when one considers the limitations that seem to prevail in biblical scenes of the Christ and culture relation. Nevertheless, there are more glimpses of varied relations of Christ and culture to discover. The discussion above leads to another dimension of the issue at hand: if a people of God lives and belongs legitimately in culture by divine decree (Gen 1:26-28), and engages in, creates and expands cultural artifacts, how does it intake, change, discriminate, and output the cultural details it engages, both its own and those that surround it? The question is akin to Crouch’s recognition that culture is partly what we partake of and partly what we make of it. We turn now to some biblical examples of Israel partaking of the surrounding culture and what happens in the process. Biblical Intakes from Adjacent Cultures The Old Testament The continuity of several aspects of culture from the ancient Near East with and in the biblical revelation of God is a very large subject with increasingly new data available from growing archaeological discovery. The archaeological material includes large assemblages of architecture, smaller artifacts, literature and historical documents on clay tablets and potsherds. To discuss all the elements of the continuity would be far beyond the scope of this essay; some aspects of the continuity will have to suffice for illustration. Cultural elements of ancient Near Eastern life in which Israel participated can be found in its institutions, literature, history, and theology and ethics in varied degrees: (1) creation and flood; (2) patriarchy and epic; (3) kingship and temple; (4) art and architecture; (5) history and power; (6) sacrifice and offering; (7) law and covenant; (8) proverbs and wisdom; (9) language and poetry; and (10) prophecy and oracle. If these broad areas show continuity with ancient Near Eastern practice, ideas and forms, archaeology also shows increasingly likely and sometimes entirely clear cultural identity elements in which Israel differs from its surroundings. Cultural elements that appear distinctive were combined with inherited elements from the beginning of its settlement and beyond. These common elements are worth noting because they reveal a people emerging from the ancient East Mediterranean world with its own identity markers even while living in continuity with its surroundings. Since detailed treatment of each of the cultural elements above is beyond the scope of this essay, only an example or two of each will be used to give some specific ideas of 489

Israel’s ties to its cultural environment. That these kinds of cultural elements actually existed and were consciously and intentionally borrowed by biblical Israel in its life and literature is not the point here; no biblical writer is likely to have said, “I think we’ll use this detail but not this one”; the point is rather that Israel was simply part of the common culture of the region, even though very much of its thought and experience were also unique. Some readers may be surprised at the extent of the parallels, since it is widely believed—due to ignorance of the region’s culture and history—that modern Bible readers have a guarantee prior to reading a single word that it is absolutely unique in every detail. The Bible is indeed a unique book or set of books, but that uniqueness does not lie in its isolation from its surroundings; rather, as Crouch insists about culture, the crucial issue lies in what the biblical revelation of God and its central salvation history actually does with these common features when they are adopted into Israel’s life and literature. Discussion of this issue will, however, be detained until a very modest picture of what we’re dealing with becomes clearer. In what then does the claim made above about cultural motifs taken up by the Old Testament actually consist? We can at least illustrate with a modicum of detail. Creation and Flood. In Sumerian mythology (the earliest settlers of the Mesopotamian basic, c 3000-2000 B. C.), creation and flood constitute the two first major events of earth’s history; between creation and the flood, kingship was lowered from heaven; after the flood kingship was again lowered to earth and restarted. After creation a list of kings follows and the same occurs again after the flood.795 Hence the biblical literary pattern of creation—genealogy—flood—genealogy is substantially the Sumerian structure of earliest human history in how it is narrated, even though the lists in its version are kings while in Genesis the lists are genealogies (or appear to be; or are they early dynasties?). The Genesis creation story also contains similar motifs to those of Sumerian creation myths—for example, man made from clay and breath.796 Patriarchy and Epic. A major theme of the epic story of Abraham is Sarah’s tormenting childlessness and how the promise of a great offspring will emerge. To this issue the Legend of King Keret, recovered on clay tablets among the finds at Ugarit on the Syrian coast, is also devoted; the theme is the childless patriarch-king struggling for assurance of offspring and for escape from son-less dishonor.797 But patriarchal-kingly childlessness is only one detail of scores of parallels and likenesses between ancient East Mediterranean literary culture(s) and the Old Testament. This literature comes from Egypt, early Greece (The Iliad), Ugarit, Sumer, Assyria and other ancient East Mediterranean

795 T. Jacobsen, The Sumerian King List, Assyriological Studies, No. 11 (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 1939). Readers should consult the more critical commentaries on Genesis for discussion in detail, especially those commentators who seek the meaning of the Old Testament within its ancient Near Eastern context. 796 S. N. Kramer, Sumerian Mythology (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), pp. 20-72. The writer once made a list of fourteen parallel concepts between Sumerian origins poetry and Genesis 1-3. 797 ANET, pp. 142-149.

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entities. Cyrus Gordon once collected a catalogue of more than 180 parallels with Old Testament story motifs running through many parts of the epic literature of the region, including Israel’s.798 Kingship and Temple. Israel’s historic near-by neighbors (Egypt, Hatti [Hittites]), Sumer, Asssyria and the two Babylonian empires) had a repertoire of concepts linking kingship with God and temple: kings as sons of a god and shepherds; rule by covenant/ treaty; law-giving; justice; conquests; royal cities; and temples of brilliant precious stones and stunning colors to honor the gods and their houses (temples). J. J. Niehaus has done the painstaking work of gathering and quoting the texts recovered by archaeologists that illustrate parallel uses of such Old Testament cultural elements.799 But his recent work is only one of many such collections of ancient Near Eastern materials. James Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament included a corps of translators who did the hard linguistic work of translating and preparing such texts for publication. The University of Chicago’s Assyrian Dictionary, a multi-volume dictionary that makes translation of ancient Near Eastern languages possible, is another such achievement. Art and Architecture. Israel’s first cultural-artifactual identity markers in its land, beginning about 1200 B. C., are simple and bland in the extreme—notably its first architecture, housing and pottery. W. Dever insists against other archaeologists that Israel simply adopted Canaanite pottery forms already in use—collared-rim storage jars and triangle-rimmed cooking pots, for example—at the Late Bronze level at Tel Gezer.800 In another development, once Solomon determined to build the temple, he employed Phoenician (Canaanite) artisans, against which the text makes no negative judgment. The temple’s architectural plan corresponds roughly—and in one case almost exactly—to the floor plans of at least 30 Canaanite-Syrian temples unearthed by archaeologists in the region (East Mediterranean shore and inland).801 Like them, its structure consisted of an outer court, a middle holy place, and the inner holy of holies. The temple recently discovered at Ain Dara in Syria is virtually identical in floor plan to Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem.802

798

C. Gordon, Homer and Bible (Ventnor NJ: Ventnor Publishers, 1967). Cf. J. J. Niehaus, Ancient

Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2008), passim.

799 Niehaus, Ancient Near Eastern Themes, pp. 34-115. This effort is one of the more stunning collections of such parallels in the history of modern scholarship; but Niehaus did have predecessors in the persons of William Irwin, Henri Frankfort,Thorkild Jacobsen and others. Niehaus has included much material not very accessible elsewhere. 800 W. Dever, “How to Tell a Canaanite from an Israelite,” in The Rise of Ancient Israel, ed H. Shanks (Washington D. C.: The Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992), pp. 79-80. Caution is needed on this point, however, since the archaeological stratum from which the alleged (Canaanite) prototypes come could turn out to have been an Israelite settlement level, although this is unlikely. 801 W. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know & When Did They Know It? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), pp 147-148. 802 V. Hurowitz, “Solomon’s Temple in Context,” BAR 37.2 (2011):46-57; Jon Monson, “The Ain Dara Temple and the Jerusalem Temple,” in G. Beckman and T. J. Lewis, Text, Artifact, and Image: Revealing Ancient Israelite Religion (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2006), pp. 273-299.

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History and Power. The heroic age epic of Israel’s origins uses many scores of cultural and story motifs found throughout ancient East Mediterranean literature.803 In its story of Jephthah (Judg. 10-12), for example, Judges incorporates such ancient Near Eastern historical motifs as a treaty lawsuit, a diplomatic speech, and a vow-for-power story.804 In a case of the latter story type, Jephthah vowed to sacrifice whatever came out of his house first to greet him at his return home after defeating the Ammonites, if, that is, the Lord would give him the victory (Jud 11). The Lord granted victory, and upon reaching home, his daughter appeared; so he offered her as a sacrifice. This strange story is a biblical counterpart of another ancient Near Eastern history motif found in similar East Mediterranean epic literature.805 The motif is repeated in Kings’ record of the war of Jehoshaphat and Moab (2 Ki 3:27). Sacrifice and Offering. Several offerings prescribed for Israel were the same as those found in ancient Near Eastern texts such as Canaanite offerings to their own deities. For example, analogies to burnt, fellowship, and drink offerings are found in the Ugaritic Baal myths; regional hero legends speak of using animals and other materials similar to those of the Hebrew Bible.806 Sacrifice also concludes covenants/treaties as with Abraham in Genesis 15 and with the covenant at the giving of the law (Exodus 24). Among the Hittites, in a covenant ritual noted by Niehaus, a goat is slaughtered and its blood smeared on a drinking vessel. In a Hittite covenant rite, an animal is sacrificed to the gods and consumed in a communion meal. D. McCarthy cites an example of a treaty concluded with the sacrifice of a puppy.807 Law and Covenant. At least 75 archaeologically recovered treaty texts are now known from cultures surrounding Israel. Three basic types are usually cited: grant treaties, parity treaties and vassal treaties; all three types occur in the Old Testament. A vassal treaty, for example, between Mursilis of Hatti and Pharoah Seti I, conforms to the usual pattern (formulary) of the several sections. The formulary consists of a preamble stating time, place and principals; a history of the relationship; a statement about the future relationship of the principals; a section of commandments sometimes using ” “thou shalt . . . thou shalt not” language and including case laws, for example, about extradition of fugitives; a curse and blessing segment; invocations of gods or nature [sun, moon] as witnesses; and document clauses requiring deposit of the text in a temple and cursing anyone who tampers with it.808 M. Kline has shown that Deuteronomy’s overall literary structure as a

803 C. Gordon, Homer and Bible. 804 D. DeWitt, “The Jephthah Traditions: A Rhetorical and Literary Study in the Deuteronomistic History,” Ph. D. dissertation, Andrews University, 1986, pp. 91-93, 145-147, 151-196, 212-214. 805 Parallels are gathered by T. H. Gaster, Myth, Legend and Custom in the Old Testament, 2 vols (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 1:430-432. 806 T. H. Gaster, ”Sacrifices,” IDB 4:148-156. 807 Examples cited by Niehaus, op. cit., p. 61. D. McCarthy, Treaty and Covenant: A Study in Form in the Ancient Oriental Documents and the Old Testament. (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1963), p. 91. 808 Ibid.; K. Baltzer, The Covenant Formulary, trans D. Green (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971); G. Mendenhall, “Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East,” The Biblical Archaeologist 17 (1954).

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document conforms to this formulary in detail.809 The famous Hammurabi Law code from Mesopotamia has many parallels with the Mosaic Law. A comparison of debt slavery laws is given below. Life and Wisdom. Many tribes and nations of the world have traditional proverb collections including those of the ancient Near East. A striking example is the Egyptian Wisdom of Amenemopet, which is closely related to the sayings of Proverbs 22:17-24:2.810 Whether Egypt borrowed from biblical Proverbs, or vice versa, is a question not yet answerable since dating of both Amenemopet and the finished Proverbs is problematic. The example shows that exchanges of wisdom occurred between monarchial courts in the region. Fables like Jotham’s dialogue of the fig and the olive trees (Jud 9:7-16) are paralleled in Akkadian fables like the Dispute between the Date Palm and the Tamarisk.811 Parallels in subject matter and theme also occur between biblical Job and the Sumerian Man and His God, and between certain Egyptian Love Songs and the Song of Solomon.812 Language and Poetry. Israel borrowed its alphabet from the newly invented alphabetic script of the East Mediterranean. A recent proposal suggests that the Ugaritic and Hebrew alphabets were invented by Canaanite turquoise miners working in the Egyptian mines at Serabit el-Khadem in southwestern Sinai between 1500 and 1200 B. C.;813 the matter remains under discussion. An early form of the new alphabet appears on an ostracon (broken potsherd) from Izbet Sarta814 and a related alphabet on another potsherd from the time of David uncovered at Khirbet Qeiyafa overlooking the Elah Valley in 2008.815 The Izbet Sartah fragment is evidence that the Israelites borrowed this new script from near-by regional Semites (Canaanites?) at an early time. The Canaanite documents from Ugarit on the Syrian coast use the same forms of parallelism known in Hebrew poetry, along with 809 M. Kline, Treaty of the Great King (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963. See also M. Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Winona Lake IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992). 810 ANET, pp. 421-425 has a translation of the text. 811 Ibid., pp. 410-411. 812 Ibid., pp. 589, 467-469. 813 O. Goldwasser, “How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs,” BAR 36, No. 2 (March-April, 2010), pp. 36-50. One should note the striking make-overs of Egyptian hieroglyphs into alphabet letters on p. 45, and their development into paleo-Hebrew. Goldwasser’s suggestions have been criticized, however.

814 M. Kochavi and A. Kempinski, “An Israelite Village from the Days of the Judges,” BAR 4, No. 3 (September/October, 1978), pp. 23-30. The ostracon is very early, but the authors’ date of c. 1200 B. C. may be a little too early. The twelfth century B. C. is a workable framework. J. Naveh, “Some Considerations on the Ostracon from Izbet Sartah,” IEJ 28, 1-2 (1978): 31-35. Naveh thinks it is not Hebrew but “Proto-Canaanite,” even though this is only an estimate. The original article in BAR (Kochavi and Kempinski) thought “Hebrew” was a satisfactory estimate of its language, op. cit., p. 24. The ostracon’s fifth line contains a Hebrew/Canaanite alphabet; the first articles thought no intelligible text could be identified in the first four lines. But in 1990 W. Shea identified the first four lines as a summary account of the capture of the ark by the Philistines (“The Izbet Sartah Ostracon,” AUSS 28, 1 [1990]: 62). If Shea is right the ostracon is the earliest extra-biblical account of an Old Testament event. Izbet Sartah is the likely site of biblical Ebenezer near where this event occurred.

1-54.

815

H. Shanks, “Prize Find: Oldest Hebrew Inscription,” BAR 36, No. 2 (March-April, 2010), pp.

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other features like standard word-pairs, chiastic line construction, and line composition using two or three short thoughts in parallel (“bicola” and “tricola”). Prophecy and Oracle. Beginning with the work of L. Kohler and A. Malamat, parallels between ancient Near Eastern prophetic language for reception and messaging of prophecies and similar Old Testament texts have been identified. The parallels include the language of oracles, prophetic “ecstasy” and inspiration, prophets commissioned as messengers, cleansing of the prophets mouth, dreams and visions, salvation oracles (in the sense of deliverance by a god in war), covenant lawsuits, and morality rather than sacrifice as ground for providential safety.816 These parallels were noticed in the Mari Tablets (several thousand clay tablets dating to the 1700s B. C. and recovered in the excavation of Mari on the Upper Euphrates River). Malamat first began to publish articles on prophetic language parallels in the 1950s and continued to do so through the 1960s.817 The New Testament The New Testament is more limited in clear cultural intakes than the Old, due mostly to its more limited historical scope (a century) and smaller “slices of life.” But at the least we can identify well-known parallels in these kinds of contexts: (1) Jesus and Judaism; (2) tradition and record; (3) communication and letter-writing; (4) ethics and philosophy; and (5) apocalyptic and millennialism. Jesus and Judaism. Jesus was a master of wisdom teachers’ use of the aphorism— pithy, compact sayings that pack potent truth into few words: “the last shall be first and the first last”; or “blessed are the poor in spirit . . . .” His aphorisms took the form of proverbs, questions and pungent metaphors. Jesus also followed the rabbis in his use of parables.818 If local synagogue teachers and village scribes taught apocalyptic concepts about the future to their Jewish attendees, so did Jesus. For example, he speaks several times of “this age” and/or “the age to come”—apocalyptic language identical to that of the Jewish apocalyptic literature of his era.819 These elements of Jesus’ teaching and style have roots in the Old Testament, but were developed in new directions by the Second Temple Judaism of Jesus’ time. 816 M. Weinfeld, “Ancient Near Eastern Patterns in Prophetic Literature,” VT 27 (1977): 178-195, lays the material out in illustrative detail from the Old Testament and various ancient Near Eastern sources noted above. 817 A. Malamat, “Prophecy in the Mari Documents,” in Eretz Israel 4 (1956): 74-84. Several more articles followed in 1958, 1966 and 1980 with more details. Since then others have advanced these comparative studies. Several of the more important articles were reprinted in The Place Is Too Small for Us: Israelite Prophets in Recent Scholarship, ed R. P. Gordon (Winona Lake IN: Eisenbrauns, 1995). Space and scope prohibit a full bibliography here. 818 H. McArthur and R. Johnston, They Also Taught in Parables: Rabbinic Parables from the First Centuries of the Christian Era (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990). 819 A useful list of Jesus’ teaching methods is given by R. Stein, The Method and Message of Jesus’ Teachings (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1978), pp. 1-59.

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Tradition and Record. During rabbinic times, which had begun by the early New Testament era, Jewish rabbis generated techniques for memorization of oral legal traditions. B. Gerhardsson gathered a large body of material from rabbinic sources to illustrate their techniques for memorizing teachers’ sayings, which in turn stabilized oral interpretive traditions as a step toward written forms. These techniques, Gerhardsson argued, explain how Jesus’ sayings could be accurately preserved in an oral culture on their path to written gospels, supplemented in his case with the Holy Spirit’s work of recall (John 14:26). Rabbis required students to memorize their words exactly as given, and to recite oral traditions precisely. They taught mnemonic techniques like catch-words and captions to jog memory of details and stimulate use of sayings-chains. The gospels evidence similar features of traditions on their way to becoming written gospels. Communication and Letter-Writing. Biblical letter-writers used ready-to-hand forms of Greco-Roman letter-writing. Roman letter formats developed in part from Aristotle’s rhetoric studies. Roman rhetoricians recommended that for deliberative letters, writers follow a format consisting of an Exordium (Greeting/Salutation), then a Narratio (history of writer-readers relationship), then a Probatio (proofs of readers’ needs to change), then a Peroratio (closing summary and other general remarks).820 1 Thessalonians uses this formulary, perhaps at least in part because the church was in the Roman administrative center of Macedonia. If 1 Thessalonians was one of Paul’s earliest epistles, he might, partly for this reason, have kept to a strict adherence to Roman letter fashion; later letters modified the form due to different purposes per letter. In Romans, a form of style called by M. Stirewalt, Jr., “the letter-essay,” explains its lengthy content as a kind of position paper that anticipated a readership including but beyond the original addressee (Roman churches)—like Roman senators, the emperor, or leaders of the dozen Jewish synagogues in Rome.821 Ethics and Philosophy. New Testament ethics combine elements of Jesus’ teaching with Jewish and Greek categories as Paul’s virtue-lists show. Jesus’ sayings appear in Romans 12:9-21; but Paul also parallels Stoic philosophers. M. S. Enslin examined Paul’s Stoic parallels. He found many similarities, but usually added a “. . . but yet,”822 noting that Paul’s contexts and perspectives differed from those of the Stoics (the biblical God and his revelation; Christ and his people’s unity; the motivation of Christian ethics as love for God and people). This use of Greek intellectual culture is conjunctive: the Christian revelation joins, so to say, the already existing Stoic virtues as the way of good and right, but reshapes and re-contextualizes them to Jesus’ person, teaching and acts. Paul also appreciates Greek thought sufficiently to cite truths from one of their own (Epimenedes) on the Cretans (Titus 1:12) and from Aratus’ Phaenomena (with a parallel half-line from Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus) on God himself.823 Details are debated; but Paul does use Greek philosophical culture enough to get classics’ readers attention. 820 C. Wanamaker, The Epistles to the Thessalonians (Carlisle UK: Paternoster, 1990), makes one of the most detailed uses so far of this format in his study of the Thessalonian letters. 821 M. Stirewalt, “The Greek Letter-Essay,” in The Romans Debate, ed K. Donfried (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1977), pp. 175-206. 822 M. S. Enslin, The Ethics of Paul (Nashville: Abingdon, 1957). 823 C. K. Barrett, The Acts of the Apostles. 2 vols (London: T & T Clark, 1998), 2:848

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Apocalyptic and Millennialism. The New Testament shares the language, sequences and imaging of some end-time events with Second Temple Judaism’s apocalyptic literature—books like 2 Baruch, 4 Ezra and Ethiopic Enoch, and certain of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Apocalyptic knows of two ages—the present evil age and the age to come (roughly the present age and messianic era and beyond). The end times begin with a horror period (the Great Tribulation/Great Apostasy of Israel [in the DSS]) followed by the promised kingdom. Somewhere in the future—different in different apocalypses—Messiah appears with salvation for Israel and the world. 1 Enoch thinks of a temporary 400-year Messianic Kingdom similar to Revelation’s 1000 year temporary Messianic Kingdom. The New Testament rather sees Messiah’s Kingdom as available in Jesus’ mission and in the early apostolic preaching to Israel, but rejected by Israel and delayed in the plan of God by the intervening church age. Jewish apocalyptic culture of the three pre-Christian centuries was adopted by Jesus and the apostles and then re-arranged and re-aligned to make Jesus its sole operative. Evaluating Israel’s Relation to Surrounding Cultures Israel’s Cultural Intake These limited illustrations of Israel’s cultural intake from its surroundings raise the question of the larger biblical handling of ancient Near Eastern cultural elements. It needs to be stressed again that the above survey is very limited in detail, and illustrations could be multiplied. Nonetheless there is enough here on which to draw some observations about our subject. First, the examples are mostly what might be called “framework aspects”—the form of things: the plan of contemporary (Late Bronze Age) temples is not more than a floor plan, although there are also similarities of structure and furnishings; the outline of origins history (creation-list-flood-list) is a broad, general framework, the details of which differ between Sumer and Israel.824 The Near Eastern treaty/covenant formulary is mostly represented in the biblical appropriation of form elements; Paul’s Roman epistle formulary is only a form of certain types of letters—and so forth. Secondly, on the other hand, details of the value- and concept-content of such cultural elements are also included in their biblical versions: sacrifices as gifts to deity; laws very close to Hammurabi’s code; kings’ social responsibilities to widows, orphans and other dependents; proverbial moral and ethical values; Stoic moral and ethical virtues— all these actually get into biblical texts in varying degrees. Still, having duly noted these examples, formalities seem to dominate the kinds of things taken into Scripture. However, this factor should not blind one to increasing discoveries of parallel or borrowed cultural elements of substance from the living context of Israel and early church. Biblical adoption of Canaanite and Accadian vocabulaties on law, war, society, prophecy, and other areas, are clear evidence of thought elements spread throughout the ancient Near East including Israel. It is possible that like the Sumerian king lists after creation and flood, the biblical “genealogies” may actually be kingly dynasties. This view has actually been advocated based on the parallel. 824

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Thirdly, in a more important and major part of biblical thought, the biblical writers persistently reject the mythologies, multiple deities and immoral cultic practices (including divination) of such cultural elements. They do this by several distinctive innerbiblical emphases and themes. (a) By insisting on a vigorous Yahweh monotheism, they substantially block entrance of polytheistic thoughts into the biblical flow. (b) By centering a history of redemption stemming from Abraham, salvation is made the central biblical story line, while more and more elements of its salvation theme progressively unfold. (c) Israel has its own inner culture—its own version of virtually everything it picks up from its environment and fills with its own mostly distinctive twists. That uniqueness consists in the events that gradually build the history of salvation: Abraham’s covenant revelation and promises; the exodus from Egypt; the covenant, its law and its egalitarian justice rooted in the rejection of personal landed property ownership or race slavery; the life of personal trust and spirituality in the Psalms; and the contemporary moral message and prophetic projections of the prophets—all these and their many details are the biblical central themes that choose and drive Scriptural content.825 (d) The New Testament continues this story with fulfillments of prophecy in Jesus’ person, teaching and saving acts—the whole of his mission as the (sample) appearance of an available kingdom. After Jesus’ resurrection the story continues with the apostles preaching of the gospel, the Pauline revelation of the church, and the dominating theology of the church, its leadership functions and its moral life, against the degradations and brutalities of Roman society.826 (e) The Bible’s story line is culturally rich, not only in narrating and detailing Israelite culture within the story line, but in the breadth of related subjects and cultural details it covers as the central salvation theme works its way out: marriage, family, society, economics, history, literature, work and vocation, justice (criminal, civil and social), freedom, life and death, human relations and more, and focusing precisely those many areas which suffer the most from sin’s influence and human limitations. (f) Old Testament monotheism and salvation steadily transform what elements are taken in from the environment, and press them into the service of a divine revelation that creates its own culture—first Israel’s distinctive culture, then in the New Testament that of the church. While the Scriptural salvation history acts as a sort of drag-line, scooping up details of the surrounding cultures as it develops by revelation, it also reshapes the accumulating cultural details and sends them back into the world filled with its own teaching and values. The above examples of Israelites in world courts making micro-transformations in their callings, but yet functioning in a way closer to Niebuhr’s paradoxical relation of Christ and culture, show that the larger biblical picture of what happens to culture in the biblical literature is both substantially paradoxical and transformative as it goes—if one chooses to use Niebuhr’s types.827 (g) 825 A kind of plateau was reached for Old Testament studies in G. E. Wright’s study The Old Testament Against Its Environment, Studies in Biblical Theology, No. 2 (London: SCM Press, 1950). This study made a serious effort to state what was unique in the Old Testament in the wake of more than a century of studies that stressed the Old Testament as part of its environment. Although not the same kind of study, G. Hasel’s Old Testament Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972) surveys developments in Old Testament theology, especially the issue of where its center is to be located. 826 What G. E. Wright did for the Old Testament, Floyd V. Filson did for the New in The New Testament Against Its Environment, Studies in Biblical Theology, No. 3 (London: SCM Press, 1950). 827 Crouch’s Culture Making is a bold, if somewhat impressionistic and anecdotal account of the culture-creating forces displayed in the biblical revelation. Crouch is probably the boldest and most provocative assessment of the biblical cultural mandate and its contemporary implications yet. But J. D. Hunter’s,

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Finally, we may remark the limits of culture. The Bible persists in offering examples of the way in which humanity twists, corrupts, abuses, converts or bends cultural achievements into corrupting, sinful departures from the God who created culture and commissioned man to perpetuate his creativity. This theme is equally relentless from Genesis to Revelation where, like all such biblical themes, it climaxes; but the biblical awareness of culture’s limits is misconstrued and misappropriated when this negative element is converted into a total view of culture. The more appropriate view is that culture, like man, is fallen, but also capable of creating human good while at the same time included in redemption under the sovereign grace of God. Crouch and Hunter are equally forthright about this matter, even as they explore the patterns of world and Christian engagement with the creation work of God. Israel’s Culture at its Emergence In a sense, this segment might be called “Israel creating its own culture.” As yet it cannot be determined exactly what or to what degree Israel took from its surroundings what actually appears in archaeological excavations in Israel. On any reckoning certain cultural distinctives begin to appear in archaeological levels dating from about the time of Israel’s entry into Canaan. Summarizing these finds will give some sense of Israel’s own early cultural artifacts. One of the great debates today among archaeologists and historians about Israel’s early history in its land is the question of what kind of artifactual ethnic identity markers Israel left in the ground when it first settled in Canaan around 1200 B. C.—at the turn of the Late Bronze Age to the Iron I Age. It is clear that about 1200 B. C. (+ or -) a very large influx of new people with a (mostly) new culture settled into the central highlands of Canaan (not the coastal plain or most of the great valleys). Recent large scale surveys of the central highlands by Israeli archaeologists have turned up over 450828 or more new settlements in this limited area dating to 1200-1000 B. C. The sites appear in a large area mostly unsettled by the earlier Canaanite population, who rather lived in the land’s lower deep valleys and fertile plains during the Late Bronze Age (1500-1200).829 In a very recent popular article (2009), Avraham Faust outlined the common cultural identity markers of the new settlers that continue to appear in each new excavation of Iron I sites. (Actually only a small number of the total newly identified sites have been excavated, but with remarkably similar artifact assemblages.) The new population’s culture consisted of the following elements: large, “collaredTo Change the World is also a very important work, although more systematic and less impressionistic and anecdotal than Crouch. 828 R. D. Miller, Chieftains of the Highland Clans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 127-136. 829 See for example, A. Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000-586 B.C.E. (New York: Doubleday, 1990, pp. 295-367; also very significant is L. Stager, “The Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel,” BASOR 260 (1985): 1-35; Stager’s widely cited article is still the standard, although it needs to be updated from new discoveries and the continued development of the debate and discussion up to the present. See also W. Dever, The Lives of Ordinary People in Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012.

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rim” jars; “triangle-rim” cooking pots; distinctive Iron I bowls; plain, distinctive 4-room houses and their earliest prototypes, usually with a row of stone pillars dividing two long parallel rooms from a third adjacent room of the same dimensions, and with a 4th room on one end perpendicular to the other three. The rooms set off by several stone pillars supporting the second story are often paved with flagstones for animal urine absorption, and sometimes contain remnants of mangers (animal feeding troughs). These houses are sometimes found adjoining each other in a circle, with their outer walls forming an enclosure; other examples have appeared as isolated farm houses, sometimes in drainage floodplains. These patterns also appear in the Galilean hills and on the East Jordan Plateau about the same time (about 1200 B. C.),830 although in neither of the latter two cases with the density they show in the central West Jordan highlands. The Iron I settlers did not decorate or import the pottery common in the Canaanite Late Bronze Age—at least not until after their first 200 years there (c 1000 B. C.). Nor did they eat pork (no pig bones in the new sites unlike the Late Bronze Age Canaanites and the settling Philistines who did leave pig bones) or build fortification walls, temples, large patrician houses and small palaces, or other public buildings. They did not bury their dead in caves or hand-hewn family burial chambers like the few Canaanites before them in the highlands and the many Canaanites in the valleys. In addition, the Iron Age I settler culture discussed by Faust apparently advanced the terracing of hillsides for cultivating grape vines, olive trees, and perhaps cereal grains and other fruits and vegetables; terracing conserved water and nutrients in hillside soils. A very small group of ostraca (inscribed potsherds) from the Iron I period also suggests that they soon adopted the new Canaanite alphabet, and perhaps some of them or their children were learning to write with early Canaanite-Hebrew characters as the Izbet Sartah abecedary (alphabet) suggests. These observations come from artifacts excavated at Iron I sites or from typical Canaanite artifacts missing in lower levels of the same sites. It also appears that most such sites were abandoned about 1050-1000 B. C. when the monarchy developed. At that time the original settlers’ descendents apparently moved into fewer but larger fortified or walled cities where they continued to build 4 room houses similar to those found in the earlier unfortified settlements, but often without the pillared room divider or flagstones. The flow of undecorated or modestly decorated pottery and architectural evidence along with the absence of pig bones in excavations continues into early Iron Age II (1000-800 B. C.). Considering these archaeological facts, an impressive case emerges that the new settlers of the Iron Age I were in all likelihood the early Israelites—the people referred to by Pharoah Merneptah (c1234-c1222 B. C.) in his victory stele as “Israel,” and already living in Canaan at the time of the victory stele.831 Beyond this name identification, there is no archaeologically-based self-designation during the earliest settlement period—at least not yet. The Izbet Sartah ostracon’s first four lines are very probably someone’s on-sight record of the Philistines capture of the ark (I Sam 7) as William Shea has shown.832 Still, 830 A. F. Rainey, “Whence Came the Israelites and Their Language?” IEJ 57 (2007): 41-64. 831 ANET, pp. 376-378. The stele was found in Merneptah’s mortuary temple at Thebes by Flinders Petrie, In the inscription, “Israel” occurs in a list of subdued regions and cities including Hatti (Hittites), Canaan, Ashkelon and Gezer. Its grammatical determinative indicates a people group rather than a location as with the other localities in the list. The reference to Israel is not disputed. 832 Shea, “The Isbet Sarta Ostracon.”

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the name “Israel” does not appear on the ostracon, even though—if Shea’s identification of its Hebrew letters and meaning are correct—in a sense early “Israel” is all over it. The Iron I settler culture of Canaan raises the question of how its cultural adaptations and exclusions occurred. The Hebrew Bible’s records of Israel’s early life and deliverance from Egypt, its adoption of the law at Sinai, its trek through the Sinai and Negev Deserts, and its entrance into the West Jordan highlands from the East Jordan plateau—these stories show many elements consistent with the artifact remains of the Iron I settlement sites. The records even picture a portable tent shrine (not Israel’s); the law orders abstinence from pork and orders certain abstinentions from Canaanite gods, idols and intermarriages. The latter could have been extended to abstinence from Canaanite art including pottery decorations as well as rejection of imported pottery, even though such extensions are not ordered. No biblical text ordered Israel to use or make undecorated “collared-rim” storage jars, “triangle-rim” cooking pots or four-room houses, let alone circular arrangements of such houses; nor was there any command to abandon earliest unwalled agricultural settlement sites in favor of fortified towns and cities at the beginning of the monarchy about 10501000 B. C. It appears rather that Philistine expansion inland after c 1190 B. C. induced development of fortified towns, including new fortresses along the Israel-Philistine border of which Khirbet Qeiyafa overlooking the Elah Valley is now (since 2008) the clearest example.833 The sites’ many 4-room house plans could have been carried over from life in Egypt,834 or might have been imitations of tent life in the desert (as has been suggested). We simply do not know where the plain, undecorated pottery designs came from. The pork ban is like that of the early Israelite biblical traditions. The more important principle for the purpose of this essay is the implied social (not mainly economic) egalitarianism of the sites: no palatial-patrician homes, temples or public buildings; just the ubiquitous 4-room stone and pillared houses in which all the tribes lived. Faust is quite emphatic, however, that it is misleading to talk about an actual economic egalitarianism of poverty (all equally poor); instead he stresses that what passes among scholars for poverty is better called a chosen culture of egalitarian simplicity. Nor should it be thought that no social group variations existed among the settlers.835 In fact, the whole Mosaic law reflects such an egalitarianism of simplicity as Faust calls it, taking further clues from inferred egalitarian burial practices of the highland settlements (simple inhumations in open spaces or fields), as well as other clues furnished by the discoveries summarized above.

J. Garfinkel and S. Ganor, Khirbet Qeiyafa Vol. I (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2009). 834 M. Bietak, “Israelites Found in Egypt,” BAR 29.5 (2003):40-49, 82-83. Identifying the 4-room house found in Egypt is very problematic; there is no certainty that this identification is correct. On the other hand the architectural pattern’s similarity to the Iron Age I’s 4-room houses in Canaan is striking. 835 Faust, “Mortuary Practices, Society and Ideology: The Lack of Iron Age I Burials in the Highlands in Context,” IEJ 54, 2 (2004): 174-190. One might hesitate on this claim of early Israelite “egalitarianism” were it not so persistent an inferred description by archaeologists in trying to explain the data from the earth with which they are confronted; Faust produces a list of eleven such scholars over the period of 1932-2004, many of whom were gifted interpreters of the archaeological (and biblical) record. Still, Robert D. Miller II, Chieftains of the Highlands of Canaan (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005) cites evidence from the early Israelite sites of larger chieftain-like four-room houses in some larger settlement sites, as well as small amounts of imported pottery; these features argue for some sort of social variation. 833

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The same sort of egalitarian ideal—not a social fact—is reflected in the case laws of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. There is no class structure here as there was for example in Egypt, or in the Old Babylonian Code of Hammurabi where different penalties are assigned to different social levels for the same crimes. In Israel’s legal traditions, variations in economic well-being are sometimes assumed, as in the laws covering debtservitude (Exod 21:1-11; cf Deut 15:12-18), compensations for losses (Exod 22), or laws protecting the poor, aliens or otherwise disadvantaged (e.g., Exod 23:1-9). Some of these laws take new turns in Deuteronomy, where, for example the egalitarian tendency in some social situations even reaches the level of attitudes and motivation (Deuteronomy 15:7-11), or in Deuteronomy’s extraordinary limitations on wealth and power of sure-to-come kings (Deut 17:14-20). It is hard to imagine the cultural coherence of the egalitarianism inferred from the archaeological remains with that of the biblical documents of Israel’s early life without supposing a combined common experience for the whole settling nation coupled with a religious ideology. In fact, this outcome seems explainable from Israel’s slave days in Egypt—the commonly lived slavery-escape stories of Exodus and the following all-Israel covenant and law attributed to Sinai in the ancient documents (common law). Another element of commonality is Israel’s whole national descent from Abraham, and the common promises to the whole nation of a large posterity and a land (Canaan) on which the whole nation will live together. The idea of the common whole is also seen in Joshua where land is distributed by lot to eleven tribes: no one purchased a piece of property and no tribe had preferential selection or treatment in land allotments. Naturally, not all portions allotted were of equal agricultural value in their natural state; some were no doubt rockier, more mountainous, of poorer soil, or more subject to climate extremes. Any serious biblical geography will tell this story. Compensations for these differences in soils were devised, such as terracing mountain slopes for water conservation, and planting or adaptation of crops to varied elevations and annual temperature and moisture conditions. The same kind of adaptation to great land and climate variables in Israel can be seen in modern Israeli agriculture. But some real commonalities of the sort noted above must have driven this new culture of Iron I Palestine; it is hard to imagine a set of historical realities more suitable for it than the historical experiences of the earliest Israel framed by the covenant idea and the specific law codes attributed to the Lord and his Sinai revelation. In his article of 2009 in the Biblical Archaeology Review, Faust promises a follow-on piece to cover the “religious” elements in Israel’s early archaeological record. He clearly states at the end that there were such religious factors in the Iron I settler period, but he leaves the matter there with only a promise of another article. At least one can speculate that he will probe some of the factors mentioned above when the religion article appears. At its settlement, Israel was an agricultural people. Much is known about Israelite agriculture since Oded Borowski gathered up a large body of information gleaned from excavations and the Hebrew Bible on Israel’s farming techniques, land use, water resources, and varieties of produce.836 So far, there seems to be no indication that Israel rejected the whole of Canaanite agriculture practice out of hand, since crops and cultivation would have to have had continuity from Canaanites to Israel. This would be the case if only on the

836

O. Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel (Winona Lake IN: Eisenbraun’s, 1987).

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basis of already domesticated Mediterranean crops and their ecological contexts. So Israel probably adopted most of Canaanite agriculture, cultivating olives, grapes, legumes (peas and beans), cereal grains and other fruits such as dates and figs mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. Early Israel also continued stock breeding of cattle, sheep, goats, oxen, and later pigeons for fertilizer as the bell caves at Marisa show. On the other hand the law regulated certain aspects of planting and harvesting such as prohibiting crop mixtures (Lev 19:19) or limiting consumption of the fruit from newly planted fruit trees for the first three years in a newly settled area (Lev 19:23). These and other such laws may have been anti-Canaanite regulations as well. The archaeological record shows a people creating its own material culture and apparently embracing a culture of ideological simplicity as well—at least at the beginning of its Canaan settlement. This archaeological record is substantially coherent with the biblical material.

Creation, Transformation and Participation within the Culture of the Ancient Near East

When God began to make the Semitic people called “Israel” into a nation at the exodus from Egypt, what sort of event or series of events was it? That it was a divine rescue of Semitic slaves from Egyptian slavery is obvious. But the “more” in this story is that an Israelite national culture began to be created; Israel’s formation as a nation is a culture-making story. Furthermore, a theocratic constitution was established which drew on, adapted, transformed and expanded a body of ancient Near Easter law; at its beginning, Israel became a legal entity in its own right by infiltrating certain received laws with notes of its national origin, i.e., the deliverance from Egypt and related interests. In yet another cultural step, as its monarchy developed Israel went on to participate in the ancient Near Eastern wisdom tradition by adopting its forms while generating a whole analogous body of courtly wisdom works remarkably like those of its monarchial neighbors, but furthering its own egalitarian ideology and other values. Space and scope constraints limit examples—one each from historic national origins, case law, and wisdom. The examples are parts of larger bodies of Old Testament literature and thought. An Example from History: The Exodus. In addition to creating a living relationship with Yahweh-God and the tools and resources for continuous individual and family worship, fellowship and (covenant) union with him, the Old Testament’s great redemption event of the exodus also created a permanent nation in an on-going covenant/treaty relation and a distinctive monotheistic-theocratic culture. This perspective does not mean to reduce biblical revelation to culture; rather the subject is the biblical cultural mandate which rides along the rails of biblical revelation together with the central, dominant spiritual mandate. The project here is simply to note the culture-forming elements of the founding salvation event. If this is truly a “culture-forming event,” it has potential for moving beyond Niebuhr’s five categories and perhaps subsuming whatever elements of Niebuhr’s five types can be found under a sixth term: Christ the Creator of Culture. Of course, we only mean by such 502

language the fact that the Spirit of Christ as Creator is at work in Israel’s history. Still, the event is so new and so different from anything before it in biblical records, and perhaps in the world, and so radical to what Israel was when it happened, that “culture-creating” seems entirely appropriate, especially when we look at the details of the event itself and its immediate outcomes, let alone its far distant implications. Crouch sees the culture-creating force of Christian practice in the first three Christian centuries as similar to Israel’s, only under the new dispensation (my term) and in the Roman Empire. And yet this later counterpart to Israel’s origin under the New Covenant seems more like a transformation than like a creation-event. Perhaps these Niebuhrian terms merge or overlap in any attempt to describe the early Christian centuries. Crouch cites Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity as exhibiting something like “a cultural revolution” and “a far-reaching wave of cultural creativity that shaped the Roman Empire,”837 let alone its force in forming Christian Medieval and Byzantine cultures. Revelation Producing Culture. The rescue from slavery is a record of a divinely generated Israelite culture, full of the new while also sweeping into itself the Israelite patriarchal traditions. God had promised Abraham a land and a nation. To these promises he added an order to circumcise males of Abraham’s own house and certain slaves Abraham had purchased from other nations (Gen 17:23, 27). These promises produced a culture of future land acquisition and bonding, and a high value on story-lining the crisis situations encountered in generating offspring (Jacob). Revelation also generated the accumulated experience of Joseph living in Egypt, his family’s removal to that land, and their subsequent slavery; the whole story is full of cultural detail and development. Throughout this history guided by God’s providence and continuous acts of direction, the ideological and elementary institutions were perpetuated and steadily reinforced, although there were serious lapses in Israel’s cooperation with the divine plan. Slavery and Exodus Memorials. The national protest led by Moses against Pharoah’s slave policy, and Israel’s subsequent escape through a miraculously opened Reed Sea, contains an impact-cluster of highly original memorials to the escape. By ordering certain symbolic remembrances of the exodus events as perpetual reminders of its details, other aspects of Israel’s new culture of celebration were created by God. The earliest memorials were the dedication of animal and human firstborn to God (Exod 13:11-16: “in days to come . . . ,” a sign on your hand . . . that the Lord brought us out of Egypt . . . .”), and the feasts of unleavened bread and Passover (12:14-28: “you are to commemorate . . . ,” “. . . a lasting ordinance . . .”). Memorials of the Sinai. Exodus continues its attention to culture-making events with its story of Israel in the Sinai Desert: Moses, Miriam and Israel made music of Pharoah’s defeat (15:1-21); Moses ordered that some manna be stored in a jar as a memorial of God’s provision of food “for the generations to come (16:32)”; wood thrown into the miraculous water at Marah was made into a law and decree with a related promise (15:2226); victory over the Amalekites was remembered in a written record (17:14); and the law 837

Crouch, Culture Making, p. 156. 503

covenant at Sinai became “the Book of the Covenant (24:6).” Exodus contains several more such references showing a remarkable permanentizing and perpetuating of the events of Israel’s origin; from these repeated references to the exodus in Israel’s festivals flow covenant renewals, psalms that sing of Yahweh’s mighty acts, and prophets who recall the events and make them over into “types” or example of what is still future (Isaiah 40-66). These culture-making ordinances and activities of God created an intentional God-centered Israelite culture of festival and book, covenant and law, worship and remembrance. In this way, a set of memorials generated continuous reminders of the Lord’s works as part of Israel’s national meaning. Egypt had turned itself into a slave state for delta area Semites, exploiting Israel and thousands of other Nubians, Canaanites and desert bedouin as they entered Egypt during droughts and famines over a five hundred year period. While there is no record of the exodus in Egyptian documents (as yet), there are many references to and some depictions of enslaved Semites in the northern Egyptian delta region from the eighteenth through the thirteenth centuries B. C. After a long attempt at negotiated settlement (Exodus 1-12), the Lord created a radical escape of a Niebuhrian paradoxical kind that transformed Israel into a new nation and a new culture—a truly revolutionary event that became, as its history developed, a pointer toward a divinely renewed world. This is not a “change the world” event, but it began a trajectory that would eventuate in such a total world change through the eventual appearance of Jesus the Messiah and—at his Second Coming—a world-wide kingdom of righteousness and peace. Israel’s God is both a salvation-maker and with it a culture-maker as well. In Niebuhr’s typology, the exodus of Israel from Egypt certainly also has striking “Christ against Culture” aspects. Israel protested, sought redress, then tried to negotiate a departure, and finally went through a violent escape. Separation is part of this scene. On the other hand, the event is anything but a “Christ of Culture” affair. There was nothing of Christ or his spirit in Egypt except the incidental articles of Egyptian silver, gold and clothing taken with them by the Israelites (Exod 12:35-36)—a scene called by Augustine “the despoiling of the Egyptians.” Augustine saw in Israel’s taking of Egypt’s silver and gold a model of Christian use of the world’s goods for their own purposes when appropriately “transformed.” Still, this expropriation of Egyptian valuables is no case of the Christ of Culture, except in the limited sense that Christ was the partner of God in creation. A sense of “Christ above Culture” also seems clear in the story: God is here, working in Israel and in the negotiations which sought to lift Egypt toward him; but it all collapsed under the load of Egypt’s stubborn resistance. Nor does the exodus exhibit a transformation of Egyptian culture unless one wishes to see this in the plagues; but this is not the sort of thing Niebuhr saw in this type of the relationship. A transformation happened, but it is Israel’s—from slavery to freedom. None of Niebuhr’s types fits this event very well; only remote bits and pieces are at all visible. “Christ the Transformer of Culture” becomes “Christ the Creator of Culture” in Israel’s origin. This is a truly culture-creating biblical event—the origin of Israel and the earliest stages of its history. But it is of God, not of man. Israel, and in a sense the world, gains the benefit.

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An Example from Ancient Near Eastern Law: Debt Slavery As noted above, the Old Testament illustrates intake from ancient Near Eastern culture on many points, one of which is law. One sort of Israel’s intake is its adoption of topics and agendas of law codes known in the ancient Near East from before 2000 B. C. forward until Moses’ time (c 1400 or 1300 B. C) and after. The codes come mostly from the peoples of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and the Hittites of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). They include: The Laws of Ur-Nammu (c 2050 B. C.); The Laws of Eshnunna (20th century B. C.); The Lipit-Ishtar Law Code (early 20th century B. C.); The Code of Hammurabi (c 1700 B. C. [the modern history textbook example]); The Middle Assyrian Laws (14th-12th centuries B. C.); and The Hittite Laws (15th century B .C.), all predating Moses.838 In 2010 two fragments of a lawcode tablet (Hazor 18) were discovered at Hazor in Israel, containing case laws about compensation for personal injury of a slave. This discovery shows that the northeastern Mesopotamian legal tradition had made its way west and south to Hazor where a local version of the tradition appeared in a city that later came into Israelite possession (Josh 11).839 Like many other aspects of ancient Near Eastern culture, the flow was often from the north and east to the west and south, following the same migration trail as that of Abraham. The Code of Hammurabi in particular has many very close parallels to the Mosaic laws, for example on subjects like false witnesses, court procedure, custody cases, debt slavery, adultery, kidnap, murder, loss and compensation, incest, assault and others. An example is the laws of debt servitude. Hammurabi 117: If a debt renders a citizen/seignior distressed, and he sells for money his wife, his son, or daughter, or if anyone is sold for service in lieu of debt, they shall work for three years in the house of the purchaser. In the fourth year they shall attain their freedom.

Hammurabi 118: If a serf or bondmaid has been sold, and should the merchant proceed to re-sell, and either is sold for money, they cannot be reclaimed. Hammurabi 119: If a debt renders a citizen distressed, and he sells for money his bondmaid who has born him children, the master of the bondmaid may repay the sum and redeem his bondmaid.840

The corresponding laws of debt slavery in the Old Testament are found in Exodus 21:2-11 with some later parallels in Deuteronomy 15:1, 12-18.

838 I. Mendelsohn, “Slavery in the Old Testament,” IDB 4:383; cf the list of codes in J. B. Pritchard, ANET, p. vii, and pp. 159-198 for translations. 839 W. Horowitz, T. Oshima and F. Vukosavovic, “Hazor 18: Fragments of a Cuneiform Law Collection from Hazor,” IEJ 62 (2012): 158-176. 840 ANET, 170-171.

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Exodus 21:2-11. When you buy a Hebrew [debt]841 slave, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing. If he comes in single, he shall go out single; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s and he shall go out alone. But if the slave plainly says, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free, then his master shall bring him to God, and he shall bring him to the door or the doorpost; and his master shall bore his ear through with an awl; and he shall serve him for life. When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. If she does not please her master, who has designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed; he shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has dealt faithlessly with her. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter. If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights. And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out for nothing, without payment of money.842

Assessment of the differences between Hammurabi and the Mosaic Covenant Laws need only occupy us for comparative reasons rather than technical detail. Students of ancient Near Eastern laws generalize along at least two major lines: Old Testament law is more focused on persons while Hammurabi’s interest is in property,843 and Old Testament counterparts to Hammurabi show a tendency toward humanization of law.844 We may note some examples. (1) In Hammurabi, the main focus is on owners and their rights and limitations; in the Covenant Code, attention is chiefly on the slave and his limitations, rights and possibilities; this suggests that Israel’s former Egyptian slavery is the point of reference, although this is not stated. (2) In the Covenant Code (Exod 20-24) more attention goes to the debt slave’s time in servitude as fixed by Israel’s seven-unit calendar (21:2), the right to maintain family ties (with some limitation) including wife and children (21:3), desire to remain with the purchasing master (21:5-6), treatment and right of redemption for female slaves (21:8), protection from sale to foreigners (21:8), daughter rights if the buyermaster selects her as a wife for his son (21:9), rights to food, clothing, unspecified marital rights if the master should marry a second wife (21: 10), and obligation on a master of free manumission for failure to fulfill support rights. To such details, Hammurabi pays little or no attention. The Covenant Code rather expands the rights of debt slaves and the limits of a buyer-owner over such slaves. Deuteronomy 15:12-15, 18 further expands a masters’ responsibility to furnish the debt slave liberally with provision upon his seventh-year release (15:13-14). In Deuteronomy, the master has no right to a hardship feeling or claim at the time of a slave’s release, because the six years (over the three of Hammurabi) of service have been for him 841 This is the author’s bracket. The reason for this bracketed insertion is the widely recognized reality that the regulations are speaking of debt-servitude. The sources of slave-exchanges in the ancient Near East are captivity in war, traffic in foreign slaves, sale of minors, self-sale, and insolvency. This paragraph does not deal with captured slaves, foreign slaves, or self-sales. Sale of minors is in the passage, so debtinsolvency remains, and is in fact attested in the Old Testament (2 Kings 4:1-7; Neh 5:4-5). Thus by elimination of known possibilities from Mendelsohn’s broad survey of regional law, it is clear that debt servitude is the background, and this is the case with the three laws of Hammurabi as well. 842 I have altered the paragraphing of the RSV to correspond with the NIV. 843 W. Harrelson, “Law in the Old Testament,” IDB 3:180. 844 Mendelsohn, “Slavery in the Old Testament,” pp. 387-388, passim.

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worth twice the value of a hired hand. This reminder suggests that the six-year service, while looking harsher than Hammurabi’s three-year service, provides an extra benefit to the master, thus contributing to his relative economic vitality, which as a consequence carries more moral or humanitarian responsibility to servants’ well-being. Thus in Deuteronomy’s revision and expansion, the movement goes even farther in extension of the humanitarian principle in consideration of the slave’s welfare. Slavery and Values in the Old Testament This assessment exhibits the same egalitarian tendency (not actuality) noted above as implied in the archaeological record and as characteristic of the Pentateuch’s legislation generally. Israel’s adoption of the agenda of legal subjects and provisions, therefore, shows a significant transformative force upon earlier regional legal traditions. In terms of scale,845 this transformation is national. In becoming public law in Israel (not different in this respect from Hammurabi), it also becomes permanently influential as well. The permanence of such provisions, however, is really only potential because their effectiveness in humanizing slave conditions depends on actual practice. These features of Old Testament law had potential to move Israel toward the biblically idealized kindly and peaceful theocratic kingdom of Old Testament promise—“move . . . toward,” but not yet there. Slavery is still in place, even though it is debt slavery and far from the Americas’ African race-chattel slavery of the fifteenth through the nineteenth century. If we wish to apply one or more of Niebuhr’s categories here, we are certainly dealing with “Christ the Transformer of Culture.” The paradox in the relationship is in the background, since the drift of ancient Near Eastern laws is a natural process, not a radical encounter, except for the divine intervention at the exodus, and perhaps a set of values formed in the divine reaction to Israel’s involuntary Egptian labor slavery. The divine encounter does not occur and end as with Joseph, but rather involves an adaptive process of expanding and humanizing law. A more or less permanent transformation of debt slave law is not yet an actual historical reality, but is at least ideologically and potentially present. The permanent potential of Israel’s slave laws is especially poignant when one considers their long-range effects on the history of slavery in the last five centuries of the Euro-American situation (despite Southern slave-owners supposedly forceful biblical arguments); Europe and America moved toward slavery’s elimination. We must not be too idealistic, however, since Israel had its problems with actually practicing the law; we see very little actual movement in its historical literature and Second Temple history. Still, “transformation of culture” seems a suitable description, even if only as an ideal or a tendency awaiting fruition.

845 “Scale” of culture change is discussed with important insights by Crouch, Culture Making, pp. 195-198, in the context of Christian “change the world” thinking—a widely popular notion of which he and Hunter (op. cit.) are appropriately critical. Permanent culture change cannot be achieved by Christians or anyone else without some permanent embodiment in law on at least a national if not international scale.

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An Example from Ancient Near Eastern Wisdom: Proverbs and Amenemopet Included for this discussion of Near Eastern wisdom are Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Canticles and Psalms. Some students of biblical wisdom are hesitant to include Psalms; but two recent evangelical treatments of biblical wisdom do include them.846 A case can be made that Psalms is a different genre than the wisdom books since the Psalm literature is actually hymnody, with only modest wisdom interests. Psalms is focused on personal and national relationship with God. Psalms are found among other nations’ wisdom books, however. More to the point, the other four wisdom books are more humanistic in the sense that they explore problems of human life with an aggressive rationality (Job, Ecclesiastes), offer basic values for good and right from human experience (Proverbs), or celebrate sexual attraction and love (Canticles). Proverbs was chosen for illustration because of its close ties to ancient Near Eastern wisdom culture, and because of its unusually large agenda of cultural issues. This literature seeks to instruct readers in what they need to know for success in life, assuming an orderly world. This “secular” element does not mean wisdom abandons any theological over-structure; but other ethnic wisdom works do not do so either. Proverbs is not more God-centered, for example than Egyptian wisdom; rather its God-centered view is that there is only one God, and that the one God is Yahweh—a reality which cannot be true for any of the surrounding nations, except for the Egyptian “monotheist revolution” of Pharoah Akhenaton in the thirteenth century B. C., a “revolution” of short duration. Israel’s monotheism implies the possibility of a universal scope in morals, ethics and wisdom—a body of divine wisdom for everyone everywhere under one God. To gain a fuller appreciation of Israel’s participation in ancient wisdom and psalm traditions, a larger account of titles seems useful, although an exhaustive list of known wisdom works is beyond the scope of this essay. Several more titles of each of the five Old Testament wisdom types may be noted. For Job we have from BabylonThe Poem on the Righteous Sufferer (suspected desertion by a deity), The Babylonian Theodicy (dialogue exploration with a friend on suffering),847 and the very early Sumerian work, A Man and His God; also related to Job’s dialogue is the Egyptian Dispute Over Suicide (dialogue of a man with his soul about death). Proverbial works from Egypt include The Instruction for King Merikare and The Instruction of Amenemopet; from Mesopotamia comes The Instructions of Shuruppak and two proverb collections called Counsels of Wisdom. Psalms and Hymns from Egypt include A Hymn to Amon-Re, The Hymn to Aton and A Penitential Hymn to a Goddess, while Sumerian psalmists wrote the Hymn to Enlil the All-Beneficent, the Hymn to Ninurta as a God of Wrath, and A Hymn to the Moon-God; a Hittite psalmist produced the Prayer of Kantuzilis for Relief from his Sufferings. Several more works are known from each of these ethnic sources. Pessimistic works reminiscent of Ecclesiastes

846 Similarly to D. J. Estes, Handbook on thee Wisdom Books and Psalms (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005). C. H. Bullock, An Introduction to the Old Testament Poetic Books (Chicago: Moody Press, 1979, 1988) also includes Psalms in his treatment. 847 Bullock, ibid., pp. 45-46.

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are The Dialogue of Pessimism from Babylon,848 and the very negative Satire on the Trades by an Egyptian scribal trainee.849 Finally, The Song of Solomon is akin to a large body of Sumerian love songs and poems including such titles as Dumuzi and Innana: Love in the Gipar; Dumuzi and Inanna: Courting, Marriage, and Honeymoon; Dumuzi and Inanna; The Ecstacy of Love; Inanna and the King: Blessing on the Wedding Night; and Lettuce is my Hair (a love song for Shu-Sin).850 On this subject too, there are several more. The least to be said is that this is substantial evidence that Israel participated in the flow of wisdom thought in the East Mediterranean-Mesopotamian region. Nor is it too much to speak of a general East Mediterranean literary and intellectual culture for which Cyrus Gordon argued through much of his career as an orientalist.851 It may be questionable whether one may assume any more than this about details. In the proverbial material below a few samples of differences between Israel’s wisdom and its surrounding wisdom culture will be noted. It might be necessary on this subject to see yet another new dimension of the Christ and culture relationship, something that might be called “Christ Participating in Culture”—perhaps another nuance of Niebuhr’s “The Christ of Culture.” A sample comparison of sayings from Proverbs with the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemopet is promising for this exploration of how the cultural mandate of Genesis and its biblical echoes correlate with the biblical spiritual mandate. The sample compares Proverbs and Amenemopet on moving boundary markers. Both Proverbs and Amenemopet forbid tampering with boundary markers. This earthy subject exhibits conjunctions and differences between their respective proverb collections. A potential pitfall here as above is that examples are anecdotal and could be misleading; but in an essay of limited scope, it is impossible to cover the whole ground or consider all possibilities. Amenemopet gathers his material in a single chapter of thought about boundary securities. It occupies the sixth of the thirty chapters. Do not carry off the landmark at the boundaries of the arable land, Nor disturb the position of the measuring cord; Be not greedy after a cubit of land, Nor encroach upon the boundaries of a widow. . . . Guard against encroaching upon the boundaries of the fields, Lest a terror carry thee off. One satisfies god with the will of the Lord, Who determines the boundaries of the arable land. . . . Plow the fields, that thou mayest find thy needs, That thou mayest receive bread of thy own threshing floor. Better is the measure that the god gives thee Than five thousand (taken) illegally. They do not spend a day in the granary or the barn; They make no provisions for the beer-jar. The completion of a moment is their lifetime in the storehouse; 848 Cited from Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature, pp. 139-149 by Bullock, ibid., p. 48; also ANET, pp. 600-601. 849 ANET, 432-434. 850 Titles are from ANET, p. xvi. 851 C. Gordon, Homer and Bible; see also his World of the Old Testament (London: Phoenix House, 1960) and other works.

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At daybreak they are sunk (from sight). Better is poverty in the hand of the god Than riches in a storehouse; Better is bread, when the heart is happy, Than riches with sorrow.852

Proverbs is also interested in the fixity of boundary markers, but unlike Amenemopet, which concentrates its thoughts in a poem on the subject and under-girds the prohibition with more related proverbial sayings, Proverbs has only three boundary marker sayings (using the common Hebrew word for boundaries, gevul).

15:25: The Lord tears down the house of the proud, but maintains the widow’s boundaries. 22:28: Remove not the ancient landmark which your fathers have set. 23:10-11: Do not remove an ancient landmark or enter the fields of the fatherless; For their Redeemer is strong; He will plead their cause against you.

The differences in form and arrangement are obvious. Amenemopet creates a poem of proverbs on boundary markers and follows the theme through his “chapter.” The reason for the quantity difference may be due to lack of formalized law in Egypt (no codes have been found), or some other unknown value system factors. Proverbs rather scatters his boundary sayings in three places. Amenemopet themetizes his main boundary-marker saying with support sayings most of which could stand on their own without losing their value. In contrast, Proverbs thematizes less and in different ways. In Proverbs, what at first seem to be scattered, unrelated sayings, for example, in 22:26-29 where one of his boundary sayings occurs, is actually a theme-group on economic interests of several kinds, even though it does not at first sight appear so.853 Still, Proverbs has nothing like the integration Amenemopet achieves by organizing his material into topic-chapters. In their moral theology, the two books think of different gods. Amenemopet’s references to deity are limited to “the god” or “god” even though other parts of the book refer to specific gods, for example Aton, the sun god (Chapter Seven) and Thoth, the god of just weights and measures.854 Proverbs is monotheistic throughout, and argues that a living relationship with the one God, Yahweh, is the absolute ground of wisdom and its operation in the moral demands of life. More significant are the similarities. (1) Both books view boundary markers as under the supervision of a deity who will act to maintain them in the economic interests of widows or orphans dependent on the yield of enclosed or marked fields. (2) Both suppose the deity will recompense offenders of boundary rules—since he is the supervisor of the 852 ANET, p. 422. 853 R. Van Leeuwen, “Proverbs,” NIB, passim, makes progress in understanding how Proverbs strings seemingly unrelated sayings together in larger themes or by use of catch-words or link-words sometimes seen or suggested in the Hebrew Bible, but mostly obscured in translation. 854 ANET, p. 423, n. 27.

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moral order—by distributing punishments or working out court proceedings. Amenemopet may, while Proverbs clearly does, make boundary security part of a larger network of ideas related to national land tenure. Proverbs honors family attachment to ancestral lands distributed to Israel’s clans in Joshua’s time along with the more general land-family tie that characterized ancient Israel. Beyond these specific differences and similarities, however, lies a general likeness in cultural norms and wisdom concepts. What can be easily seen in this isolated example also occurs throughout both biblical and other ethnic proverbial thought: Israel and the nations are just not all that different in their agendas of behavioral values in matters of daily (family and agricultural) life. Proverbs’ priorities comport with Amenemopet’s in many other aspects of life such as control of the tongue, the wisdom of quietness, the deceitfulness of greed, care of the poor, the wrong of stealing, the foolishness of acting on hot-tempered advice, the evil of falsehood, the criminality of rigged weights and measures, the wrong of creating confusion in court, and many other details of common interest in ancient regional cultures. One sees here a common set of moral interests at work. There is no point in making excessively subtle distinctions between Scripture and its surroundings where they are not clear or obvious; numerous social justice values were shared in the region. Old Testament wisdom thinking is simply part of the whole regional sense of right and wrong along with resulting issues of social justice. Hebrew wisdom neither detracts from that regional stream of thought, nor greatly improves on it (except for its monotheism), nor transforms it to any substantial degree. It is simply part of its thought world to which it makes its own contribution. Apparently we have here something very close to Niebuhr’s “The Christ of Culture.” Israel partakes, contributes to, and advances the same social justice wisdom as was cultivated in the region’s higher thought culture. Israel also orients its own thinking to the oneness of God, but not very differently, in making him the anchor of social and personal morality. This situation might rather be called “Christ Participating in Culture.” But this feature of biblical wisdom cannot be made the framework for the whole; it is only one dimension of the much larger scriptural range of culture scenes. Even here there is also a transformative aspect of the relationship despite much overlap, since Proverbs’ monotheism eliminates other territorial or national deities in competitive relationships. The World and Culture in the New Testament Jesus and Jewish Culture Without seeking to destroy Jewish institutions, Jesus engages in a variety of relations with them ranging through something like adopting, adapting or radicalizing them, depending on the cases in point. That is, in a kind of paradoxical way in which his intrinsic authority, dynamic personality and personal magnetism, working through his relationship with God, his acts of deliverance and the force of his teaching, change but do not destroy Israel and its culture; he may have worked under the thought of Isaiah 42:4, 6 with their allusions to the Servant-Messiah’s (own) law and covenant. Richard Niebuhr was certainly correct to see John’s Gospel as thoroughly transformational in how 511

it presents Jesus and his works and teaching;855 but that he does not pay closer attention to the same phenomenon in the synoptic gospels and Paul is puzzling. In Jesus’ mission to renew Israel, he does prohibited works on the Sabbath (Mark 2:23-28) under the explanation that he is Lord of the Sabbath. He cleanses the temple of its non-biblical commercialism (Matt 21:12-17), similarly astonishes his home-town synagogue with his wisdom, teaches a new (messianic) law to his disciples with assurances that he does not mean to destroy the old law (Matt 5-7), does many transformative miracles not as displays of power but as acts of love to the sick, the hungry and the excluded, and in preaching the present availability of the promised kingdom, begins—as Matthew sees it—to form a New Israel of his Jewish outcast followers. Perhaps the most radical, but not in a violent sense, is his proclamation that the promised kingdom of the prophets is actually present in himself, and in his teaching and works; he continues this radicalism in linking its future consummation with his own Second Coming. What happened was not a violent overthrow of the Old Israel, but the formation of a New Israel mostly from among the out-of-the-ways who became his people by repentance and faith in him as Messiah. The sparks that fly come not from organizing an armed nationalist uprising in Zealot fashion, or forming a monastic movement separate from central Judaism like the Qumran sect of the Dead Sea region, or developing a new lawenforcement group like the Pharisees. Jesus rather seeks repentance, faith, and attachment to himself, and thus the conversion of the whole nation and his kingdom. But the whole pattern seems paradoxical in Niebuhr’s sense: God confronting Israel anew and with transforming force (creation of a New Israel on earth from the Old), by repentance and faith in a God-like, or more exactly, an actual God-man. What could be incautiously seen as “Christ against (Israel’s) Culture” or “The Christ of Culture (merely a new kind of Jew emerging from the old Judaism),” is more realistically some combination like “Christ above (more exactly ‘over’) Culture, Christ and Culture in Paradox, and finally “Christ the Transformer of (Jewish) Culture—all three mixing and mingling. But he can also be seen as Christ the Creator of (a new) Culture, i.e., that of repentance, faith in himself as Messiah, and a new life in the world governed by the ethics of loving intent as seen in the Sermon on the Mount rather than an ethics of nationalism or power. On the same reckoning, Jesus only faintly resembles something like “Christ Participating in Culture,” a description that might take clues from his attendance at synagogue, for example. “Christ Consuming Culture” is no interest of the gospels either, as they are almost entirely focused elsewhere than on some consumer enjoyment of his own culture of which there is virtually nothing in their purview. The culture-related patterns in Jesus’ ministry, however they are described, are the root for much, but not all, of Paul’s elaboration on certain cultural interests of the early Christian churches of his founding. For this we must pay attention to important details in his epistles.



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Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, pp. 190-206.

Pauline Perspectives: The General Values Among several possible reasons why Paul is especially important is that his epistles contain something more akin to a theology of culture, and that from an apostle who came from and worked in the cultures of Greece, Rome and Judaism. By this I do not mean that Paul’s epistles are nothing but an intentional culture theology. Rather I mean they contain thoughts about God, Christ, the gospel, and ethics, and on how these elements of the New Testament message work in the context of culture inside but mostly outside of Israel and within the reality of the church in the Gentile world. Paul sometimes has explicit statements on the world to which the gospel came (mostly negative, but some positive, as I shall show), or how the gospel and its salvation affect life in the world for both individuals and society. By-passing general statements for the moment, we note for example, the notion of earthly vocational callings discussed above, Paul’s outline of how the gospelin-life affects marriage (1 Cor 7), husband and wife interactions (Eph 5:21-33; Col 3:1819), parent and child relations (Eph 6:1-4) and slave-master attitudes and relations (6:5-9). Elsewhere (1 Cor) he speaks of human and divine wisdom, social variations in the church including actual class conflicts, and more abstract or general human/cultural goal-values like freedom, wisdom, righteousness, equality and wealth. He also addresses that greatest of all human enigmas—government. Evangelical Christians read such statements as “practical Christianity” or something of the sort; they are certainly that. But these are cultural categories as well, discussed earlier by Greek philosophers with at least some overlaps in meaning with their biblical counterparts. With Greece we are comfortable calling these “Greek culture,” meaning Greek culture includes moral and social philosophy as in Aristotle’s Politics, for example. If a quadrilateral like the four Greek cardinal virtues—courage, justice, moderation and wisdom—qualifies as a summary of Greek ethical-cultural values, then similar such lists in the New Testament can easily be seen to have the same bearing, i.e., the New Testament is creating a Christian moral and social culture. So if goal-values like righteousness, freedom, wisdom, equality or justice appear in the New Testament, it seems obvious that Paul is pushing for certain cultural values on which our faith and the Greek philosophers are at least somewhat agreed. Hence he urges such values not in the sense of “mere” cultural values but in the sense that these values belong to the larger human quest for wellbeing as aspects of moral culture—aspects of human thought output about what is good for humanity and values which Christianity is now also advancing under the transforming power of the gospel. Niebuhr sees Paul as the biblical model of “Christ and Culture in Paradox.” By this he means the world is exceedingly sinful in its horizontal-lineal life; into it God enters vertically to convert and change, and to bring persons into a justified standing. However, Niebuhr does not see that Paul’s view of culture is transformational since he perceives Paul as socially conservative and failing to change anything very radically beyond individual persons. Slavery is the index case; Paul leaves it in place with a few changes in attitude, but without the least suggestion that it be destroyed. Niebuhr takes this as an almost invariable trait of the paradoxical view—an encounter with God that justifies the individual by getting him into Christ, but with no transformative social radicalism; paradox thinkers

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let the worldgo on as it is, and in fact are usually zealous for the socio-cultural status quo.856 Paradox believers tend to be conservative on social matters. For them the world is what it is, and can hardly be changed for the better. If the world is at all workable for Christians where they are, it ought to be kept in place lest things fall apart and change renders life worse than it already is. This sort of thinking lies behind Paul’s social conservatism according to Niebuhr, even though with Paul this is chiefly the result of his apocalyptic thinking—the Lord is near: don’t change anything (1 Cor 7). But it is hard to see that Paul is not also a transformationist. He seems to think Christ enters life to change and empower, to clarify and refine what people can already see they need, and to encourage, motivate and empower the doing of it. Not that there is no paradoxical thought here; there is. And there are shades of other types too including at least some participation in culture, a bit of “against culture” and quite a bit of “culture making (Crouch).” How does this work in Paul? It can perhaps be summarized under three headings: salvation as personal transformation; already and future social transformations, both abstract and concrete; and the eventual transformation of the world. These perspectives do not exclude elements of other modes of the Christ-Culture relation, but those modes, to the extent they can be identified, appear to belong to Paul’s transformational thinking. This would mean that Niebuhr’s preference for Christ the Transformer of Culture would be rather biblically anchored, not only in John, but in Paul and elsewhere as well, if, that is, we are able to accept certain limitations of our situation in the world as finite and sinful. Salvation as Personal Transformation. The biblical picture of man as culturemaker—persistently creative, but also persistently beaten back by his finite and sinful limitations—is part of the enigma that is man as the target of salvation and restoration to God. The group of texts to follow indicate that simultaneously with justification (our new legal standing of forgiven-righteous before God) is another simultaneous benefit of salvation—the remaking of redeemed persons in their actual existence. As will be seen later, redemption does in fact have socially transforming outcomes in culture, even though if one is looking for social radicalism, it is not really visible as Niebuhr has rightly observed. Romans 4:17. “. . . the God who gives life to the dead (as also Eph 2:5-10).” Both passages view salvation as the creation of divine life in us, and with a future reference as well (cf 2 Pet 1:4 and context, including reference to our future). “Make alive” (Gr zoopoiein) is used at least seven times for our re-creation. It refers to the implantation of God’s life in us, or more exactly, Christ’s resurrection life. Romans 5:17. Paul contrasts death in Adam with life in Christ. Read “in life” not of human life but with the meaning “in connection with Christ’s [resurrection] life.” The future is again hinted at in “shall reign.”

856 Cf Carter, Rethinking Christ anhd Culture, pp 49, for a characterization of the paradox view in Luther. And yet, while such characterizations are generally valid, Luther did comment and even take stands on specific cultural issues of his time; Karl Barth too (who is hard to place in this schema, although in some sense a paradox theologian), drew significant social ethics implications from various biblical scenes including a refinement of traditional just war theory.

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Romans 12:2. Here a verb meaning “transformed in nature (metamorphoo)” is actually used; it is also related in the context to making of a new mind (vs 2). The same word is used of Christ’s transfiguration. 1 Corinthians 15:42. Our perishable, dishonored, weak, natural, earthly body will be changed into an imperishable, honored, powerful, spiritual, heavenly body. This is our coming resurrection, and it is this body that will be changed; in it we reign with Christ in his kingdom. The future again is in view in vss 20-29, 50-55. 2 Corinthians 3:17-18. Paul uses “transformed” (metamorphoo): “. . . we are being transformed into his likeness with ever increasing glory.” This way to describe Christians’ new being thinks of their transformation as a process—from one stage to the next stage. 2 Corinthians 5:17. Anyone in Christ is a new creation; the old and new seem to be the old person and the new person; it is safe to assume Adam to Christ here as in Rom 5. The language describes our change in large-sweep terms—old creation, new creation as in Isaiah 66; the believer belongs to and is a foretaste or kind of vanguard of the new creation. Ephesians 4:24. Paul uses the term “created” for our new life. Cf. Colossians 3:5-11. His reference is to our “new man” who is “created” in true righteousness and holiness. The context includes our minds explicitly, but our minds are an aspect of a new humanity as in Romans 5:12-21. Titus 3:5-6. “. . . he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but by his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior.” Here, in a rare instance, Paul uses John (3:3-8) and Peter’s (1 Peter 1:3) “new birth” description of the remade human being.

Thus the new world is not built on a re-made, re-created race as the new people of God, not on a completely new physical creation as yet, but on a remade old humanity created by the transformation of the old Adam into the new Adam by salvation (Christ). Man the culture creature and culture maker is changed by the new birth into a foretaste or beginning of the coming new world—what in its next stage will be Christ’s messianic and then eternal kingdom. The idea suggests there will be human culture in the present sense in the messianic and eternal kingdom, but it will be raised to an entirely new level. This is true, it must be added, if there is continuity between the current stage of redemption and its future expansion in the earthly sphere which necessarily means in the flow of human culture. The main point here is that a remade humanity is the root of all efforts at Christian culture-making. Such transformation thought about individuals of faith also extends to their corporate community—the church which is also thought of as a new creation (Eph 2-3). Cultural-Social Transformation: Abstract Terms. This segment is about certain abstract terms in Paul that name end-point social outcomes of the new humanity’s life in the world during the era of the church or dispensation of grace. These values are expressed as cultural goals-in-themselves that need no further stage beyond themselves, that is, they 515

are not instrumental goals or steps to other cultural or spiritual goods for the new humanity or the new world. Neither are they only realizable in God’s own abode (heaven) or as steps to life in God’s heavenly world. They are rather ends-in-themselves in God’s plan for our new life here and later on earth, and therefore necessarily human and earthly while at the same time God-like and final. Perhaps some theologians might like to speak of them as teleological (end-point; final purpose) values which when satisfied leave nothing more to be gained since they have become structured into the divine scheme of things and belong to his plan for redeeming the race. If such goals of our new being are ends and not instruments of something else, they can still be thought of as reflexing their force back as it were into concrete, already present social realities. But their main function is as conditions of the new world beyond which there is no more to be gained as human benefits of redemption, but only details to be filled out in human relationships and outputs (culture). Readers should remember that this discussion is only about in-culture goods, not our responsibility to know and please God in and beyond this life (which these qualities in community and individual life do), but of what he plans for us to gain for the world in its cultural life while we live here and in our total future. On the other hand, the glory of God is never irrelevant or beyond his purpose. Justice, good, freedom, equality and peace are the identifiable values of the sort under discussion. Justice. Justice is that kind of human behavior that grants to everyone his due, considering all that belongs to what “ought” to be. It takes the form of criminal justice in breaches of codified law; it is civil when compensating wrongful losses or resolving conflicts; it is distributive when society’s needs require to be met; it is procedural when a court system requires fairness to all parties. Justice is the name of righteousness when the actions of persons are measured by God’s law; it is already a universal cultural concept since it assumes the presence, role, and rule of law in the world. The Old Testament pairs justice with righteousness, even though they are entirely different Hebrew words. In the New Testament the dikai- (right-) root covers both, but is dominantly thought of as the communication of God’s uprightness to us upon faith in Christ, whether in legal status with God or in behaviors consequent on it; when those behaviors reach the treatment of other people, righteousness becomes justice or injustice. Since “justice” is the sense in classical and Hellenistic Greek, and the New Testament covers both the Hebrew and Greek concept with the single root dikai-, “justice” will be its meaning when applied to human interrelations, especially to those governed by law, and especially to believers governed by the law of Christ (Gal 6:2). Good. In Ephesians 2:9-10 Paul sees that the Lord planned that salvation should issue in good works. Galatians 6:10 shows that our “good” is to be toward the church first, as well as to all including everyone around us, Christian or not. The church is also his reference in Eph 4:29 where “good (NIV)” is “for building.” At least three Pauline texts seek movement of believers’ “good” into the larger world: 1 Thessalonians 5:15; Romans 12:17-18; and Romans 15:2 (probably). There is a danger of substituting social justice for personal salvation—a mistake of the social gospel movement. The biblical use of “good” in the context of improved human life usually means increasing the well-bring of others in one’s social world; it is not limited to increased well-being of Christians only, as the texts 516

cited above show, although that is thought of in Galatians 6:10 as a priority. The New Testament embraced this transformational goal with persistence from Jesus on. Freedom. In three texts, Paul reflects the thought that a free humanity is an immediate and long-range goal of the plan of God for the human race. In Galatians 5:1, 13, freedom is a goal-in-itself, spiritually realized already in salvation. It is easy to infer that freedom “in Christ” is a final end of the purpose of salvation; but as stated it conveys the impression of a general goal of God for man, hence with larger implications for the race than only for the redeemed who gain it at its personal source—the human heart. The third text, Romans 8:21, goes farther and makes freedom a goal for all creation which believers (as in Gal) have already gained, but which will be enlarged in the resurrection world when the whole of creation is released from its current frustrating bondage. Extending the logic of such references, with the help of biblical analogies, Christians have tended to support just freedom movements, perceiving demeaning human conditions of life as a form of servitude or slavery hurtful to humanity as in Israel’s bondage in Egypt. Freedom is something for humanity and its creativity and joy. God himself is free; he means the gospel as something for man’s freedom, and this implies that freedom is a general value in itself, beyond which is the glory of God, but no further earthly benefits. Equality. Paul’s use of “equality (isotas)” stems from his thoughts about the body of Christ, and members’ new status and relations within it (Gal 3:28; Col 3:11; Eph 2:14-17; 3:6). The same word is applied to the new relation of slaves and masters in Colossians 4:1: masters owe slaves justice (dikaion) and equality (isotata, with parexomai, “grant” someone something). It appears again in the mutuality of subjections in Ephesians 5:21 which introduce the ensuing social instructions. A striking use of isotas is that of 2 Corinthians 8:13-14 where he sees the Gentile offering for poor Jews in Judea as an expression of the new equality between Jews and Gentiles. Equality is a human social goal of Christian attitudes and relations, and can be extended, like freedom, good and justice, into larger social applications. Paul’s use moves into a kind of veiled communalism, not a forced political communism or state socialism, but a process of communal interest in the well-being of all Christians and all men in general. Peace. The finality of peace appears in Paul’s opening greetings and closing prayers for his letter recipients: grace, mercy and peace (Rom 1:7); grace and peace (1 Cor 1:3, Eph 1:2, etc.). Peace us usually climactic—near the end of a series as above, or clustered with other blessings near the end of a letter (Eph 6:23; 1 Thes 5:23; 2 Thes 3:16), although in closing prayers it is sometimes outflanked by grace. “Peace” is the meaning of Hebrew shalom, an end-point state of earthly human affairs in which all powers, values and goods are working in harmony and producing personal and community flourish in all aspects of life. How much it represents something beyond which is no further cultural, personal or community benefit, is shown in how frequently we close worship services with a prayer or blessing of peace. It is also the goal of prophetic scenes of the coming kingdom of God, often termed “the kingdom of peace,” in passages describing in idyllic terms a final harmony between all parts of nature (Isaiah 11:6-9), human to human, and all with God.

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If it seems odd that love is not included among the cultural goods above, it is due to the fact that love is mostly an instrumental cultural-moral goal, not primarily a final or abstract one. It is surely the greatest of all such instrumental cultural-moral goods as 1 Corinthians 13:13 specifically says (cf also Col 3:14; 1 Tim 1:5). But one is hard-put to find any Pauline or other New Testament text where it is a final cultural goal, seeming mostly to be outstripped by peace or equality or justice or good. It could be a final goal in 2 Corinthians 13:11: “And the God of love and peace will be with you (NIV).” But it seems more likely that “love and peace” represent the great instrument and its goal in a mere twoword sequence. Ephesians 6:23 may be another case of love as final; but there too it will probably be best understood in light of its dominantly moral-ethical instrumental power as in most other Pauline uses. The same is true in Colossians 3:14: “And over all these virtues put love . . . .” The command is immediately followed by “. . . which binds them all together in perfect unity,” thus making it the instrument of community as the clustered use of “binds,” “all together” and “perfect unity” show. The noted unity concepts are simply another way to express the more comprehensive value—“peace.” In the Pastoral Epistles too, love may be more than instrumental in several instances. For example, in 1 Timothy 1:5: “The goal of this commandment is love”; this text is an extraordinarily clear statement that love is a finality among other instrumentalities (the contextual commandment specifically); but this does not argue one way or another about its value as a final abstract goal as is the case with, for example, good or peace (but cf 1 Tim 2:15; 6:11; 2 Tim 1:13; 2:22; 3:10; Titus 2:10). In 1 Timothy 4:12 and Titus 2:2 it is almost certainly instrumental.857 Paul’s generalized or abstract terms show how he thought in broad cultural categories about human well-being, especially as the terms occur in varied social contexts and applications. He encourages Christian actions which embody such humanly transforming forces within Christian persons and their communities, and their extension into transformative actions toward both toward Christians and the world around them (Gal 6:10; 1 Thes 5:15b). The beginnings of a Christian moral-cultural ethos are expressed in these terms—concepts at which early Christians up to the beginning of the fourth century worked very hard in exemplary ways as Crouch notes. In this respect Crouch follows Rodney Stark’s sketch of Christianity’s transforming spiritual, social and cultural power during that period of intermittent persecutions, c 60-313 A. D.858 By now it will be clear that this essay has at length seemed to slip out of culture and into social ethics. The suspicion would be correct, of course, at least for the moment at which the discussion of abstract final goals ended just above. Biblical ethics has become a very sophisticated discipline as one can readily see from a recent work on New Testament ethics by Richard B. Hays, for example. It is sufficient here to say that while this discussion sounds like a step into ethics, it still belongs to the culture discussion. In order to explore Paul’s thought about the culture goals of the human race, it seemed necessary to explore his language of ultimate goals for man in the world of culture, swamped in finiteness and sin 857 This perspective on love is similar to, but not the same as that of Richard B. Hayes, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). Hayes too believes that love is not the central ethical category of the New Testament, but he does not see it as instrumental either as argued here. He thinks love is part of the context in which community, cross, and new creation can be realized in human life. 858 Crouch, Culture Making, 156-159, citing R. Stark, The Rise of Christianity.

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as he is. It seems clear that the five social-cultural abstract goals just discussed do overlap ethics, but also that it was necessary to have this discussion to explore what language Paul uses to identify the final goals of the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:26-28 with respect to human benefit—the benefits which give human life its endless quests for purpose within the confines of human evil and finiteness. It was inevitable, too, since nothing is more cultural than human values and behavior; ethics belongs to culture. Cultural-Social Transformations: Specific Cases. In the discussion above, a list of several socio-cultural values indicated their use as Christian concepts in the Pauline epistles. Since space and scope are limited, a few specific illustrations will have to suffice. As a sample, I have selected the combined themes of work, slavery, income and uses of economic resources as aspects of economic culture that will reveal some cases of New Testament transformative thinking. Nowhere is the reality of Christians continuing to live with both feet in the world of culture more obvious than in Paul’s thoughts about earthly callings, work, and monetary income and its use. This aspect of human existence is addressed throughout the Bible with combined perspectives from the transforming force of personal relation with God, from the forces of his creation, and today from that relation of communities called churches. Most of us spend at least one-third of our lives in the struggle for bread—far more than we spend in church, with family, in leisure and other forms of thought and socialization. Paul’s conversion in a sense did, but in another sense did not, change this mode of work since he continued to support himself by it to engage his primary calling. Neither in the case of Priscilla and Aquilla, also tent-makers like Paul—and still other examples of Romans brought to salvation like Cornelius the centurion (Acts 10) and Sergius Paulus, Proconsul of the island of Cyprus (Acts 13)—is a change of earthly vocations upon salvation noted; all these converts continued their previous work after salvation—tent-making, military service, and government. There is no rush here to a distinctively Christian or church vocation; rather these converts continue in their culture works as Christians. On the larger subject of economics, several types of texts are of definitive importance. Each text contributes to the details of culturally transformative powers in Christian churches and their communities. All are micro-transformative, none macro. But they have abiding universal implications for Christians’ view of and participation in the world order. Work. Several Pauline texts place value on work as a Christian duty. In Ephesians 4:28 work is thought of as doing something useful, and for sharing income with people in need. Paul views the gospel as changing men from thieves into workers, and in fact orders them to effect such a change. Two passages in the Thessalonian letters urge work against what appears to be idleness (laziness is not specified); the texts picture withdrawal from work by some Thessalonian Christians. These believers may have stopped working, as many commentators still think from the common world-wide phenomenon of work-stops to wait for the new world to begin;859 it is not hard to find kingdom-soon/Second Coming thoughts 859 R. Jewett, The Thessalonian Correspondence: Pauline Rhetoric and Millenarian Piety (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), pp. 159-178, citing a large number of world millennialisms studies. Jewett gives this view new currency, but in a world context.

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in the Thessalonian letters. Or, this stop-work issue may have resulted from a craftsman revolt or some other conflict as seems hinted in a few details of the passage. At any rate, a direct attack on idleness is leveled in 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15. Our American Puritan forebears thought such passages excluded pleasure which they linked with idleness. With this perspective they built work into the American psyche; Americans now think they can have both work and pleasure. No sooner did Puritanism begin to disintegrate in America than Adam Smith burst on the scene with his promotion of free capitalism; Smith gained a major nineteenth-century American advocate in Francis Wayland’s Political Economy. A second Thessalonian passage contains thoughts about the meaning of work— beyond the bare fact of it; but other biblical texts on work add important details. Unlike American work-to-consume or work-to-play thinking, the passages are guided by thoughts about philadelphia—brotherly love, which is another way to speak about meeting needs (chreia, Eph 4:28). The Greek term philadelphia is the subject heading of the work passage in 1 Thessalonians 4:9-12 (4:9). The main element in the word philadelphia, the root phil-, sets the thought about love in the realm of affection and friendship (4:9) and recalls Aristotle’s thought, “Friends hold possessions in common.” The thought of brotherly love leads quickly in 4:10 to substituting agape for philadelphia to pursue the idea of others’ increased well-being, a move by Paul that nudges the meaning of philadelphia toward focus on others good by personal generosity or self-sacrifice. In the example of 4:10 he commends the Thessalonian church(es) for engaging the needs of other Macedonian Christians, perhaps in providing housing and meals for Christians and other travelers as some think; he also suggests they can do even more (4:10b). He also urges that they pursue peace (hasucheo, be peaceful, quiet), act responsibly in their own interests (prassein ta idia), and work with their own hands, thus adding thoughts of self-support or self-sufficiency. This text finally balances its communalism (peace and equality) with work for responsible care of personal and family needs—the same combination as in the widow-care, self-care thought of 1 Timothy 5:1-16. This is not a call to sell all and live communally. But it does reflect the same economic ideals as the “equality” texts of 2 Corinthians 8 and the selfsustenance thoughts of 1Timothy 5:8. Paul orders work; thereby he expects Christians to be culture-contributors as participants in both personal and community culture; with this activity they pursue their “callings.” This is what in fact happened as the faith grew in the succeeding centuries; Christians converted homes and basilicas into churches with donations and bequests, and transformed Roman social degradation into human redemption.860 The work passage in 2 Thessalonians 3:6-14 adds more thoughts about work and its church-community context; Paul’s comments are concentrated in 3:11-12. He forcefully says if one does not work he does not eat (3:11), which is similar to 1 Thessalonians 4:11

860 See R. Stark, The Rise of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996), for the history, and J. McManners, Illustrated History of Christianity, pp. 37-41, for upgrades in human life under the ministry of pastors and bishops. These socio-cultural transformations regressed between the time of Constantine and the Theodosians until the time of Charlemagne when they were revived in varied forms; gains in the quality of human life were often counter-balanced by the harshness of the growing body of oppressive laws requiring Christianizing or Christian behavior of pagans and Jews. With Constantine, Christianity somewhat lost the freedom of self-initiated transforming works by both individuals and the church, and became a comfortable religion of the Roman wealthy and church hierarchy.

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and 1 Timothy 5:8. This aphorism is another expression of responsible self- or (elsewhere) family sustenance. The term for peace/calm in 1 Thessalonians 4:12 re-appears in 2 Thessalonians 3:12 in the phrase “laboring with quietness (hasuchia, 3:12, NIV, “settle down”), which values community stability and peace, and may address a conflict element in the no-work issue. The work philosophy of the Thessalonian letters is an encouragement to work on the individual level. The letters are also interested in the flow of economic outcomes in the culture of individual lives, their responsibilities to selves and families, and sharing with the needs of the Christian community and surrounding world. The egalitarian sense is here, but it works by loving individual initiative, not community or legislated force. Paul is working at transformations of Christians here, and only secondarily the world (by implication) in small individually-initiated steps, with implications beyond. Slavery. 1 Corinthians 7:17, 20, 24 speak of slavery and all other vocations as “callings,” as we have seen. How individuals in the Roman world were matched to available vocations is not discussed in detail; the reference to slavery as calling is incidental, and many work occupations were fixed by social structure. For most of the Roman Empire’s population, slavery was culturally pre-determined by social circumstances already set and beyond individuals’ control.861 The 1 Corinthians texts teach that the Lord provides vocations for all human beings; and he provides personal abilities to work in them. How they connect is not stated by Paul. Paul’s allowance that slavery stay in place is a major reason why Niebuhr thinks Paul is a dualist and thinks in paradox: the world is left alone with the gospel encountering it with only minimal if any social effects. On the other hand, while Ephesians 6:5-9 counts slavery as service to God, along with all other vocations, it is at least much humanized by responsible mutual relations, even if not abolished outright. In the parallel to Ephesians 6:5-9 in Colossians 3:22-4:1, Paul injects both justice (dikaion) and equality (isotata) into masters’ treatment of slaves—two of the end-point values noted above; these values show how a specific cultural practice can be moved toward the abstract final values. In the epistle to Philemon, Paul’s instructions on his treatment of his escaped slave, Onesimus, are all on the side of love, kindness and respect for his person. The case in point shows far more than simply leaving slavery in place. In fact the persons of both slave and master are transformed. The more powerful of the two parties is diminished in potential harshness by instruction toward justice and equality. In another example of slave-master relations, Philemon, in taking Onesimus back, is now possessed of “love . . . to all the saints (vs 5).” Paul applies this thought (vs 16) to Onesimus as “no longer a slave, but now a loved brother.” This means “. . . if you consider me your partner, receive him as you would receive me (vs 17).” Thus without overtly abolishing slavery, Paul’s injection of equality, justice and love into the relationship modifies the ethics of slavery toward its undoing in principle. Hence, Christianity is transformative but also paradoxic (to again use Niebuhr’s terms); slavery is left in place as a social practice, but its social dynamics are ethically radicalized: slavery is implicitly 861 A large literature exists on social conditions in the Roman empire. See R. MacMullen, Roman Social Relations, 50 B.C. to A.D. 284, p. 92, who estimates that possibly a quarter of the population of the Empire was in slavery, although many slaves worked as domestic servants (alluded to in Gal 3:23-4:7). Some scholars put the percentage as high as nearly half the population (MacMullen, p. 184, n.. 7).

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undermined by the Christian end-values. All that remained to say was—release the slaves and pay them for their labor, just as James argues against exploitative farmers; wages for laborers had Old Testament support (Deut 24:14-15). This move could well be regarded as the climax point of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the release-and-pay scene near the end of the book. On the slaves’ side, they too are re-culturized with new motivations—no longer to work merely as eye-slaves (under watch of masters) and man-pleasers but as servants of Christ (Eph 6: 6a). This way of serving is from the soul (vs 6b), is ethically thoughtful (eunoias, affection, benevolence862), belongs to the realm of good (vs 8a), and is therefore compensated by the Lord (6:8) of the moral order. These thoughts about slaves do not include releasing them from slavery in the physical sense; but they do seek to increase the humanity of the slave-master relation. More than this, Paul’s thoughts may be intended to reduce the tendency to escape or to organize or join a slave revolt, hence steering away from potential violence. Thus the culture of Roman slavery is ameliorated toward its demise since both slave and master are changed by the gospel; the whole is a cultural revolution in the making, but clearly limited to micro-transformations at the smallest, most centered level—personal relations. Finally, 1 Corinthians 7’s passage on slavery and freedom as “callings” actually opens the possibilities for manumission, to which Paul says—if freedom is offered, take the opportunity. This is more than an apostolic movement “toward” eliminating slavery; it is a case of actually ending it for an individual slave. Under the values expressed in the letter to Philemon, this may have begun to happen. At least by the third century, the church was paying manumission fees for release of Christian slaves; thereby it was following an implication of Paul’s transformative remarks about the Roman slave-master culture,863 as well as his principle that if freedom becomes possible, take it. Sadly, however, some Christians and even their leaders apparently paid little attention to these biblical texts or their implications.864 Wealth. No principled biblical condemnation of wealth as such can be found in the Bible when all relevant texts are included. Abraham’s wealth is honored if not glorified (Gen 12:16). In a vision of the latter day redeemed Israel, the nations are seen as bringing their wealth to Jerusalem (Isa 60). The New Testament has sufficient warnings, however, to give Christians pause over such wealth-affirmations. Jesus taught that one cannot serve God and mammon (Gr. mamon, an Aramaic word meaning something like “gain, storing up,” Matt 6:24865). Matthew’s one reference to mammon is increased to three in Luke who is more interested in economic matters than Matthew. Jesus also warns about how wealth’s grip on persons’ thinking keeps them from God at times, perhaps most of the time, since wealth distorts thought about one’s need for God (Mark 10:17-23). This kind of warning 862 BAGD, p. 323, under meaning 1; meaning 2, preferred by BAGD, is also possible but would not very well serve the sense of moral transformation : “zeal, enthusiasm.” 863 H. Chadwick, “The Early Christian Community,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity, ed J. McManners (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 38. 864 J. A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press/Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 9. 865 A. H. McNeile, The Gospel According toMatthew (London: Macmillan & Co., 1915), p. 86.

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about the power of wealth is echoed in 1 Timothy 6:6-10, 17-19. Here Paul argues for contentment with what one has, since we brought nothing into the world and cannot take any of it with us when we leave. People hungry for riches fall pray to temptations and traps that plunge them into ruin. The quest for money is the root of many evils; its allure pulls people away from faith and by it they pierce themselves with grief. In the latter passage (6:17-19) he warns the wealthy directly against arrogance and misplaced hope in riches. Rather he wants Timothy to encourage the wealthy at Ephesus to “do good,” and be rich rather in good deeds, in generosity, and in willingness to share. Responsible use of wealth “stores up treasure” to be realized in the age to come, when wealthy boasting about any present “good life” will give way to “life that is truly life.” With such thoughts the Bible endorses monetary gain with heavy qualifications. In fact, the last thoughts above forcefully suggest that the greater one’s wealth, the more responsibilities one bears to others. Wealth is one of the great creations of human culture making, and one of the greatest potential powers-to-good. But one can see here again the force of Paul’s egalitarian tendency coupled with a sense of (distributive) justice. Redistribution of wealth is expected but voluntary. There is no reason to think Paul aims at humanly enforced distribution: responsibility lies with the wealthy. This perspective was and still is one of the culture-remaking powers within Christianity, regardless of how difficult it is to do in the midst of life’s insecurities. Especially in a capitalist society dominated by endless encouragements and pressures toward greed and where good has nearly been reduced to gain, this is the case. Still, a culture re-making economic force has been felt throughout the whole history of our faith. A striking example of this already occurs in the first century in James 4:13-15 where he scores the wealthy farmers among his Jewish-Christian readers for withholding pay from their laborers. James too exhibits the same leveling-egalitarian motif as in the other culture-transforming thought of the New Testament. Distributions. The Ephesians text cited above (4:28) makes a point of work for resources with which to help others, even while passing over any thought of immediate family need (which is addressed elsewhere); while “others” could include family, it does not seem to do so here. This use of income is mentioned in 1 Timothy 5:2-16, where several economic responsibilities are mentioned: the individual family head is responsible for his own nuclear and extended families (5:8b). Care of relatives in general is mentioned at 5:8a, and parents and grandparents are specified in 5:4. This use of family funds derived from work also shows a tendency toward the communal principle without assuming or suggesting forced mechanical distribution. The sale of goods and properties of Acts 1-6 to support a communal fund does not seem to have been continued in the churches of Ephesus, and actually does not appear anywhere in the epistles, while the ideal of equality is still embraced in economic thoughts like those above, and in a funds-project like Paul’s collection among Gentile churches for poor Judean Christians. The same Timothy passage advocates support of worthy widows for which several criteria are mentioned. It seems clear that the churches of Ephesus under Timothy’s leadership kept a list of needy widows (5:9, 16), and that discussion occurred about who rightfully belonged on the list. Paul’s concern that only those widows who are worthy and truly needy should receive church support reflects a policy of discriminating care with church funds. That such funds were probably none too plentiful at the time shows in his 523

policy that the unworthy should not be recipients. This issue brings the matter of widows’ support into the realm of justice in a negative sense. In addition to widows, Galatians 2:9-10 mentions Paul’s concern for support of the poor Jewish Christians in Judea—a commitment he continued to pursue in his later collection from the Gentile churches. In Romans 15:27, he says of this collection, “For if the Gentiles have shared in the Jews’ spiritual blessings, they owe it to the Jews to share with them their material blessings.” In addition to the collection as a symbol of Jew-Gentile equality in the church, the thought of Romans 15:27 expresses the egalitarian principle in another way, by featuring its reciprocal sense when he speaks of spiritual-material two-way sharing. Otherwise, Paul mentions the financial support of elders in 1 Timothy 5:17; teachers are specified as in Galatians 6:6 and 1 Corinthians 9. Thus, support of the needs and compensation of teachers are the major uses of monetary resources in the church epistles. The transformative cultural element is modestly visible in these economic thoughts of Paul; aspects of it are there, but change is not dramatic. There is little here that was not already practiced in Judaism’s teaching and practice of almsgiving. Perhaps Paul considered these matters the least that fledgling churches could do to practice economic justice, equality and peace. However this may be, these specific expressions certainly exhibit forms of distributive justice. These are some major specifics of how the apostolic thinking addressed cultural transformations in economic life. If carried out, they will be many-faceted and complex, and moving toward a culture of equality, good and peace within the church and beyond. These values belong to the culture of a Christian social order in its very infant beginnings, existing so far only in concept and modest applications, and only within the church, and yet capable of vast expansion. It is all the opposite of insatiable greed, narcissism and consumerism, none of which receives a speck of encouragement. Paul and the World With John, Paul shared a strongly negative view of the world as corrupt, sinful and lost, and under the judgment of God (Rom 1:20) as the sphere into which sin entered with Adam (Rom 5:12-13). Its behavior makes it guilty before God (Rom 3:19), and in its wisdom it does not know God or his works (1 Cor 1:20, 21) because of its ignorance, foolishness and rebellion (1 Cor 1:21, 27; 2:12; 3:19). Therefore, it is passing away (1 Cor 7:31) and full of sorrow and grief (2 Cor 7:10). Still, with this dominant emphasis, there are positive texts that pertain to culture. Despite the force of these repeated and dominantly negative evaluations of the human societies that create culture, and the manner in which evil dominates the whole cultural scene, the following texts invite a careful distinction between the world as the sphere of human culture (as it was intended at creation) and the world of culture as dominated by sin and finiteness. The world as the scene of cultural goods is destined to outlast the evil corruptions of the present. The following positive texts are favorable to the world as the scene of cultural goods. 1. The world was created by God (Rom 1:20). Paul’s thought is not gnostic; he does not attribute the cosmos and its human abilities to an alien creator God (Gnosticism). His view of creation is that of Genesis 1 and other Old Testament creation texts. It is not hard to spot Fundamentalism’s tendency (without actually becoming Gnostic) toward Gnostic-like 524

views of the world. Texts like this one that speak positively about creation and include the cultural mandate to rule the earth helped deliver Fundamentalism from Gnosticism. That theology’s most vicious idea was its view of matter as evil and created by a foreign, lesser God than Yahweh. And yet for Paul, the world has fallen for a while under the sway of sin. Sin corrupts the human race, not matter, not even human flesh as such, but flesh under the power of sin and awaiting its full release at resurrection. Creation remains “good” as Genesis affirms. 2. The world is the object of the love of God and the reconciling work of Christ (2 Cor 5:19). Even Israel’s “fall” is the “wealth of the world,” i.e., its enrichment and flourish in the plan of God (Rom 11:12) because the gospel now goes to the Gentiles. Paul thinks of the world’s rescue from the corruption of sin—a reality already begun through the gospel, but not to be completed until resurrection and kingdom. The somewhat off-hand and thoughtless remark often heard from strict separatists, that the world is worthless, does not really follow the whole New Testament view of the world, since in its disgust with the world’s sins and evils, it loses sight of the world’s rescue, i.e., the sphere of humanity and its creative powers to be redeemed by Christ. 3. That God plans for his people to be heirs of the world, minus its sin, is clear in Romans 4:13 where he sums up the Old Testament promises to Abraham with the words, “that he should be heir of the world.” The way this is explained in the context shows that we who are of faith are children of Abraham and thus heirs with him of this promise to inherit the world (4:13-17), a phrase recalling Jesus beatitudes. He means that we share this inheritance with Israel already by faith, even though it has not yet fully come to us. Full receipt of a sin-free world comes with the future messianic and eternal kingdom. The reference is to a world transformed by Christ, not another world like the heaven of evangelical dreams, but this world fixed by salvation and release from sin to engage the divine cultural mandate anew. 4. Thus the most striking thought among these positive Pauline texts about the world is that it is already ours (1 Cor 3:21-22 and context) along with the apostles, life, death, things present (the whole of salvation and culture) and things to come (the events of the Lord’s future centered in the coming kingdom of Christ). The commentators (for example, Godet, Plummer, Barrett and Fee) recognize that when Paul speaks of the apostles he means they are examples of 3:21b—“all things are yours”—in the sense of gifts to us. But on the world, death and life, the commentators usually shift from the gift idea to the sense of conquest, i.e., of death and the world. The perceived shift is arbitrary: choosing either gift or victory may be a false opposition; Paul’s point is that everything he names is their possession, not in the dominion-conquering sense, but in the sense that everything listed is a gift, even if everything he lists is also within the subject of victory. Thus the world is God’s gift to the church already just as it will be more fully in the messianic future (Rom 4:13), and just as it was to Israel. This must refer to the whole of human culture—thought, creativity, invention, work productivity and social organization—as now the possession of Christians, precisely because the release of the whole from sin has already begun in Christ and his people.

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Some Larger Perspectives This heading is partly a name for “conclusions.” By it I mean not only to summarize and conclude, but to set the import of the preceding in several somewhat larger perspectives. First, there are plenty of diverse scenes and texts in Scripture to illustrate that a multi-faceted participation of the people of God in culture is featured, and that they themselves are— in this way or that—culture-involved by possession of God’s image. The biblical cultural realities discussed above encourage the people of God to actually engage all aspects of the types Niebuhr isolated, with the mode depending on details of the cultural case in point, or the group of culture-types as appropriate to any given culturescene. Biblical scenes and texts also suggest that Niebuhr and Crouch’s type-categories are useful if culture-conscious Christians care to identify scriptural aspects of the relationship. In this limited survey, some scenes and texts also suggest that Niebuhr and Crouch’s ten combined types, with two added types for which we found evidence above, i.e., “Christ Participating in Culture,” and “Christ the Maker of Culture,” show that the people of God have several models with which to work; my modest suggestion of two additional models implies that several or many more not isolated by the samples might be found with further searches. Beyond these aspects, however, is the more basic biblical reality that there is something in Scripture that qualifies as “the cultural mandate,” and that it runs parallel with “the redemption mandate” since Adam’s fall. The cases examined also suggest that while Niebuhr’s types—and some to be added to his typology—are more or less visible in the samples, there is justification for regarding Christ the Transformer of Culture as the most persistent, or perhaps we may say, most overarching form of the relationship, even if not the only form. Secondly, the examples gathered in the discussion above raise the issue of microand macro-transformations. Crouch discusses this notion under the term “scales of culture.”866 While not many examples of very small transformations like person to person were discussed above, the modest scale and limited duration of Joseph’s Egyptian famine management did present itself as a small-scale national transformation (one nation, for a moment). A smaller scale case is the Israelite craftsmen who transformed colorful fabrics into the curtains for the tabernacle. This is not a moral transformation as such; and yet the tabernacle is a new image of God’s holiness, which contributed to Israel’s growing conception of God’s royal grandeur. It also had a lasting effect since the tabernacle remained as Israel’s worship center until the temple was built. An even smaller scale transformation appeared in Paul’s instructions to individual slaves and masters, a case where person to person change is visible. While there is no way to grasp what divine revelation might have gone into Israel’s creation/manufacture and use of plain pottery (collared-rim storage jars, for example), or its four-room pillared house, such cases appear to inject some reflex of Israel’s unique cultural simplicity (Faust’s “egalitarian simplicity”) into its culture-making on a national scale. In the New Testament, Paul’s collection of money from Gentile churches was a church-at-a-time gathering of resources for Judea’s poor; on a larger group to group scale, the collection embodied important notions of unity between Jewish

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Crouch, Culture Making, pp. 44-47.

and Gentile Christians idealized with end-goal abstract values like equality and peace. Most cases examined were and are capable of almost unlimited expansion as occurred both during the first three centuries in the case of church funds for slave manumission, and in later cases like Charlemagne’s social and education programs. All such cases entail divine revelation making culture by multiple, expanding transformations from small to larger scales. Smaller scale examples illustrate the foolish and misleading idealism of talk about “changing your world” and equally the foolishness of absolute separatist talk. Both Crouch and Hunter cut this dreamy world-changing rhetoric down to more realistic levels, while advocating wherever-you-are transformations by both individual and group effort. And yet, some remarkable large scale culture renovations can be found in Christian history such as the combined force of David Livingstone’s African prayers about eliminating slavery, John Newton’s withdrawal from slave trading, and William Wilberforce’s push for legislation to end the British slave trade; these three individuals’ combined prayers and actions converged in the American anti-slavery movement to finally end slavery, at least in Britain and the Americas.867 Nonetheless, white American slave culture thinking in both north and south found ways to keep African Americans down for another 150 years and more. Thirdly, a consequence of this discussion is to raise the question of why Christians and their churches find it so difficult to effect even small let alone larger changes in a culture like their own. Why is transformative work so halting? There are many and complicated reasons which can be noted without turning them into excuses. One reason is that American Christians, especially millenarian evangelicals awaiting the Second Coming became deeply culture-unconscious—an embodied in the previous generation’s Fundamentalism, while at the same time partaking with most Americans in an almost mindless consumption of culture.868 A related reason is that Western Christians are weighed down with narcissistic self-interest, especially in an individualistic, competitive culture like ours, and therefore with an extraordinarily weak civil community conscience, which nonetheless some evangelical leaders like Ronald Sider and Jim Wallis have fortunately begun to alleviate. A stark reality is that culture itself is endlessly bent and twisted away from even small cultural gains influenced by faith, as for example the extraordinary works of compassion by Christians in our inner cities and the ways in which their heroic impacts are so incessantly dragged down again and again by urban conditions of depravation, family dissolution, violence and poverty, drugs and guns; its discouraging work. Another factor is that a cultural transformation movement on a grand scale would have to be able to spell out in detail exactly how one goes about the transformation of vastly different elements among all the millions of cultural products and social details of human life. In other words, culture is complex, and it becomes almost impossible to make large-scale programmatic plans that have wide compass; this is the reason Lincoln was so determined to get the Thirteenth Amendment passed—to embody the defeat of slave power in law. Still, this event and other great achievements do happen like the breaking of demeaning segregation 867 It is remarkable how often the three authors (Noll, Hatch and Marsden) of The Search for Christian America return to the example of American slavery to illustrate social ethics issues as an expression of Christian and government interest in human well-being. 868 A trait remarked repeatedly by the very recent evangelical writers of the last decade on Christianity and culture; cf Hunter, Change the World, passim and Crouch, Culture Making, passim.

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by M. L. King and his movement, or the earlier American Revolution and its subsequent breathtaking constitution and ratification events. Fourthly, the biblical perspectives surveyed above show in several instances what may be called the convergent interests of Christianity and culture; this suggested concept could become a general theory of the relationship of the cultural and redemptive mandates. A theory of convergent interests would identify the categories of common interests between Christians, their churches, and their communities. This idea might also spell out in some detail a program for actions that would include the full range of elements in the relationship (Niebuhr plus . . . ); similarly, it might propose plans and strategies for micro- and macroinputs of Christianity’s culture-making force. At times I have engaged in making lists of such common interests between world and church just to see what this scenario might look like. In my list-making, I included what might amount to the whole range of human interests and occupations. I mean by this the arts and sciences, technology, the professions, social institutions, personal and national monetary policies, work and wealth, the environment, learning, human sustenance, commerce and exchange, and abstract subjects like thought, beauty, creativity, utility and function, order and structure, and realism and pretence. Clearly most of this is already in school, college and graduate curricula. But even in Christian colleges, and especially in those that propose “integration” of Christianity and subject matters, the notion of convergent interests might be useful. In Essay XIII, a “convergent interests” perspective on Christianity and government will be discussed; it will explain what such a set of values might look like in some detail. A commented list of common interests will emerge, the elements of which, incidentally, are not likely to surprise anyone since they have been thought of in other respects for a long time, notably by both east Mediterranean biblical and north Mediterranean classical thinkers. Fifthly, in view of the viability of this biblical theme for the earthly life and guidance of Christians, the possibility is suggested that Christian ethics ought to include something we might call cultural ethics in college and seminary or graduate school curricula. Traditionally, ethics has included personal and social ethics.869 From time to time new, specialized ethical issues have forced their way into theological curricula, like bioethics for example. This study suggests there are multiple scenes and concepts in Scripture to establish a larger set of type-scenes—by all means enough to make cultural ethics a viable part of the Theological Ethics curriculum, even though more work may be needed to distinguish cultural from social ethics. The ground-clue for this proposal is the growing sense, especially encouraged by Crouch and Hunter, that materials are available in Christian thought for perspectives on human creativity, but also that a modest estimate of possibilities for micro-transformations is also appropriate. Another way to think of the matter would be to make culture ethics a sub-set of social ethics, at least in certain respects. This would not be a large curriculum step, given the current popularity of “Christian worldview theology,” with which cultural ethics is akin, though not identical. The two fields of thought may be fairly easy to correlate since all such studies care about how Christians understand the moral order of the world and have at least vague notions of what they can do about or contribute to it. At this point, 869 This way to distinguish two main parts of ethics is seen in C. F. H. Henry, Aspects of Christian Social Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964) and in his earlier Christian Personal Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957). These two sub-disciplines within ethics may seem somewhat old-fashioned by now, but they still basically overarch most of what is discussed in ethics studies.

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however, no clear line exists by which to distinguish social from cultural ethics, especially given the overlap noted above under Paul’s abstract end-goal categories (justice, freedom, etc). A weakness of the two most recent calls for more insightful and dedicated culture transformation (Crouch and Hunter) is their lack of specific programmatic suggestions; this remark is not really a criticism since such programmed projects appear to have been beyond their scope: they basically leave the matter to individual or small group initiatives. How, for example would a Christian change-maker tell a civil engineer to do his math; the hard fact is, he wouldn’t and couldn’t. But he or she might encourage him to an acute awareness of how many people’s lives depend on the accuracy of his calculations. Crouch gives many examples of small scale cultural transformations, but virtually no direction on how to raise them to a larger scale. Furthermore, when a significant cultural transformation has been achieved on a small scale with universal implications and potential, ways would have to be found to make it permanent—by law, charter, or policy, for example—or by a forceful leadership personality training a group of followers, like happened with Jesus and his disciples. An American example would be the numerous abolitionist lecturers who gravitated around William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionist slave-story-tellers like Theodore Weld and Harriet Beecher Stowe, inspired in turn by Jesus, the Declaration of Independence, and gathered stories of slavery’s horrors.870 Still, in the aftermath, the great idealism of the movement plunged Americans into a 150-year plus drag on AfricanAmerican cultural development and serious, real equality, because the movement forgot to check its own attitudes toward African Americans. Nor can the law of multiplied, unintended consequences be controlled, which it would have to be in millions of cultural transformation cases over hundreds of years at a time. So it is no wonder that thinkers like Crouch and Hunter search rather for ways Christians can do micro-transformations, and emphasize that all and any transformation-of-culture changes are ultimately beyond our hands and fully in God’s provident hand. Still our models inspire us to get back to work again and again. Finally, to return to the point of departure, our biblical survey of samples of the cultural mandate tells us there really is no biblical ground for the millenarian flight from culture that typified evangelicals during the first half of the twentieth century, and in no small measure down to the opening of the twenty-first. Rather, it appears that the more recent Christianity and culture thinkers have recovered an important and whole-life biblical theme. It is also apparent that the re-discovery of this theme in Scripture carries with it recognition that culture is a subset of creation, along with history, nature, and world, and that this whole is under the direction of God’s providence. It is ironic that the sweeping separatist thought of the earlier twentieth century was not really so sweeping in actual practice. Fundamentalists, especially in the American northeast quadrant, stayed in the business and buying world, wore the world’s fashions, consumed the world’s goods and H. Mayer, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). Some worthwhile insights of how some local abolitionists worked are available in S. C. Henry’s Unvanquished Puritan: A Portrait of Lyman Beecher (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973), pp. 177182, 191-194; Henry’s account of Weld’s abolition activities at Lyman Beecher’s Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati is poignant. 870

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services, took in its music and art, benefited from what benevolent legislation could gain for the country (Social Security), and grew healthier through the practice of medicine and its astonishing research developments. In some ways, the millenarian withdrawal from the world was more pulpit stock than actual reality. But pulpits created an ethos that embraced withdrawal, even if it could not be fully implemented and sustained in real Christian lives, as Gresham Machen realized. Millenarian culture-skeptics and separatists did abstain from gambling, smoking, drinking, cinema and dancing, and even concert halls. Some refused to enjoy professional athletic contests and auto racing, and many stayed away from cardplaying and horse racing. Some of these abstentions proved healthy as history has shown; but the larger general withdrawal from culture proved to be an overdrawn zeal that was “impossible to sustain,” as Machen rightly observed. If there is a biblical cultural mandate that rides along the scriptural path with the biblical redemptive mandate, then the cultural mandate deserves place in a millenarian philosophy of history. One major difficulty is that the more recent millenarianism of the American twentieth century was decisively toned by what it assumed was a certain, confident reading of Paul’s “worse and worse” latter days/later times texts in 1 Timothy 4 and 2 Timothy 3. But those texts make clear that by the “latter days” Paul means his own times, i.e., the beginnings of the prophesied messianic age, especially its beginnings in which Paul lived under the new covenant, even before the arrival of the messianic kingdom, and into which the church was inserted by special revelation. He can even cite examples in the churches of his own founding but soon to be under Timothy’s care. He also thought those corruptions were temporary: “. . . they will not get very far,” he said, because . . . their folly will be clear to everyone (2 Tim 3, NIV).” In fact, so far from providing a general philosophy of history, these texts belong to the growing gnostic problem which the churches gradually overcame until the movement died its own death. Reading these texts as a comprehensive general philosophy of history can only be done by ignoring God’s providence—another part of biblical creation theology lost in the perceptions of Fundamentalism, and retained only with lip service in Fundamentalist schools’ traditional systematic theology or Christian doctrine courses. Otherwise, divested of inhibiting interpretations of Scripture and history, premillennialists are encouraged to participate in the cultural life of God’s creation, and—if they have the courage and vision—to work at its gradual transformation, whether at home, at work, or at play. That is, they are invited to rejoin their churchly forebears in practicing the culture-creative mandate, and indeed to join them in being culture-makers on microtransformational scales or—if God’s good providence grants it—on macro-transformational scales everywhere in the world. This plea is the obvious implication of our survey of the biblical cultural mandate.

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ESSAY XII CHRISTIANITY AND GOVERNMENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY Millenarianism and American Politics by Dale S. DeWitt This is an essay on one aspect of social ethics for dispensational millenarians. Its intent throughout is only to discuss the struggle for positive attitudes toward and normal constructive participation in the human-biblical values attributable to government, and the interests at which governments and churches together can aim. This aim is especially important because the evangelical millenarianism of our heritage—the Fundamentalist movement of 1925-1950—was not at all positive about either culture in general or government in particular This scene has changed: by the later decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century, Fundamentalist millenarians not only ceased to call themselves Fundamentalists or premillenialists, but have turned about face on government, driven by their dismay with American culture, alleged creeping “socialism,” taxes and debt. Many are now hotly engaged in activist causes aimed at restoring America to what they think is its character as a Christian nation. The current situation and its earlier history call for a reassessment of the relation of church and state from a millenarian perspective. The Dearth of American Evangelical Political Thought In his Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994), evangelical historian Mark Noll observed the thinness of constructive evangelical thought on the subjects of government and science during the twentieth century. He attributes this situation to the trenching of Fundamentalism from 1925 to 1990, aided most by dispensationalism and its worldly separatism. The same cultural separatism discussed in the previous essay applies to government, since government is one of the great products of culture. Some ministers condemned church members who sought government offices. However, one may question whether dispensational theology is altogether the cause of evangelical trenching since its lack of creative thought about government and politics seems to have existed among revivalistic 531

evangelicals almost from the beginning of the American republic. It seems hard to find improvements. What could be added to founding era political documents like the Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that would not dilute their force and power?871 Instead of focusing on science and politics, evangelicals took rather to revivalism, and devoted their energies to writing and speaking about the possibilities for the church bringing the promised millennium to America (Postmillennialism). These preoccupations existed prior to any twentieth century Fundamentalism, and characterized the churches through the first half of the nineteenth century. The transition to what became premillennial Fundamentalism is D. L. Moody,872 not quite single-handedly, but nearly so. Still, that Moody’s revivalist fundamentalism before and after 1900 (d 1899) contributed to the twentieth century phase of Noll’s noted dearth, is likely beyond dispute. Moody no doubt contributed significantly to the wedding of millennialist revivalism with American business and economics. A history of evangelical economic thinking from the Revolution to the Civil War would be worth looking into, if, that is, there really is anything very significanat to look at beyond Francis Wayland’s Elements of Political Economy (1837). Since about 1960, however, evangelicalism has been emerging from its political trench. Creative works on church and political thought, for example, have come from scholars like John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (1972), Richard Mouw, Political Evangelism (1973), Robert Culver, Toward a Biblical View of Civil Government (1974), Harold O. J. Brown, The Reconstruction of the Republic (1978), Mark Noll, George Marsden and Nathan Hatch, The Search for Christian America (1989), M. Cromartie (ed), Caesar’s Coin Revisited, J. Budziszewski (et al), Evangelicals in the Public Square (2006) and more recently, Ronald Sider, The Scandal of Evangelical Politics (2008).873 The examples noted, however, are mostly from professors and academics, and their works have unfortunately not circulated very far down into the rank and file of evangelical pastors or people in the pews. The dearth of which Noll speaks was also partly compensated by the gradual emergence of conservative political activist movements like the Moral Majority under the leadership of Jerry Falwell and Cal Thomas, then the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, the Home Schooling and then the emergence after 2008 of the Tea Party movement. The political engagement of these organizations and movements, however, is generally more activistic than thoughtful, since it focuses on the volatile issues mentioned above. There is little creative political thinking or thought about social responsibility of church and government. Why this weakened evangelical social conscience has developed

871 For the process leading to the Constitution, see G. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969). 872 J. Findlay, Dwight L. Moody American Evangelist 1837-1899 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 227-301. Findlay’s chapters on “”The Theology of a Popular Preacher” and “Gauging the Fever of Spiritual Enthusiasm” are extraordinarily helpful in illuminating the total pattern of Moody’s theology, and the spiritual and social outcomes of his revival work. Findlay’s work is thoroughly researched, and shows the development of virtually all the elements and dynamics that transitioned nineteenth century “democratic evangelicalism” (Sydney Ahlstrom’s phrase) into twentieth century separatist Fundamentalism. 873 M. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 211-239. Noll does not mention Culver’s work as a contribution to the discussion.

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is puzzling; it may be due to very weak reading and selective study of the Bible,874 or special interest studies of Scripture like fulfilled prophecy or biblical views of private wealth and enterprise; these and other pre-occupations promote skewed reading of the Bible, if the latter occurs at all. Still, any Christian with even a touch of social conscience should question his or her participation in a movement like the Tea Party whose leaders view the working poor and struggling as parasites in the fashion of atheist Ayn Rand’s philosophy of the individual economic superman. Still, by the 2000 elections, evangelicals had become a major element in the most trenchantly conservative segment of the Republican Party. They continued their political activism even more forcefully in the mid-term election of 2010. Many evangelicals believe that America is a kind of New Israel Theocracy and thus that America is a Christian nation—a belief brought forward from colonial times.875 A related impulse is the thought that the U. S. Constitution is a sort of American Scripture—a divine revelation to be set along side the Bible with a similar sort of divine authority. They also tend to believe that all change is decline, especially if it moves toward greater equalitarian distribution of the benefits of the republic. Most would prefer to return to the era of the (Christian) immigrant founders (a term that usually lacks definition in popular evangelical political discourse; does it refer to the Colonial Era? or does it refer to the Revolutionary-Constitutional Era?). These concepts are usually joined to a strict constructionist view of how the constitution should be read, i.e., what it originally meant aside from the long history of its interpretation and application. Most crusading political evangelicals are unaware that the opposite—a “broad constructionist” interpretation—rests on open-ended clauses in the Constitution itself such as its grant to Congress of the power to do whatever is “necessary and proper” to fulfill its duties to the nation.876 In the meantime, evangelicalism, especially in America’s northeastern quadrant had been steadily defining itself by coupling strong evangelism efforts with the interests of the American business community. During the first half of the nineteenth century Francis Wayland whose work Political Economy (1837) was well-circulated across America (two editions sold 53,000 copies) and translated into several foreign languages. Wayland became the American prophet of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations877—the manifesto of free democratic capitalism, free enterprise, free trade and free wealth accumulation. Wayland probably embodied what most of the new American republic was thinking all along about economics. After 1850, D. L. Moody, the Boston and Chicago shoe salesman turned international evangelist, strongly allied himself out of his own impulses and partly for fund-raising purposes with the Chicago business community, thus furthering the alliance

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A. B. Franzen, “A Left-Leaning Text,” CT 55, 10 (Oct, 2011): 32-33. Franzen reports a poll by LifeWay Research on what serious Bible reading does to Christians’ social conscience. Among other observations, he notes that “. . . people think they know what’s in it before they open it up. But once they start reading it on their own, they are bound to be surprised . . . .” 875 C. Cherry, God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American History, revised and updated ed (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Cherry gathers documents illustrating the origins and persistence of this idea to about 1990. 876 J. K. Martin et al, America and Its People, 2nd Ed, 2 vols (New York: HarperCollins, 1993) 1: 218-219. 877 W. S. Hudson and J. Corrigan, Religion in America, 6th Ed (Upper Saddle River NJ: PrenticeHall, 1999).

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of evangelicalism with business and free enterprise.878 For their part, the social gospel ministers and professors, with some businessmen of conscience in their constituencies, more and more sided with social justice issues and concern for a fairer distribution of American wealth; gradually this movement drifted away from the evangelism-millennialism and business alliance fostered by Moody. As the nineteenth century turned toward the twentieth, the evangelical-millennialismbusiness alliance was more and more solidified by continuing evangelical glorifications of business and wealth like Russell Conwell’s Acres of Diamonds, and the ongoing revivalism of J. Wilbur Chapman, Billy Sunday, Hyman Appleman and Billy Graham. This alliance and its relative disinterest in politics in favor of the business-enterprise-wealth-individualism movement continues to this day and can be seen in the persistent evangelical embrace of all manner of American conservative movements and ideas. This combination yielded no incentives for political thought except for a national tax rebellion, since what the already existing republic was about was individual initiative and accumulation of wealth; why tamper with what creates wealth? Hence the new Fundamentalist-Evangelical political activism of the period 1960-2010 carries on its work with little creative thought about government as Noll noticed; it cares mostly about free economics, personal liberty, traditional morality, “no new taxes” and national debt resolution. The new fundamentalist crusades of the later twentieth century could thus concentrate entirely on disturbing moral issues—Christian morality in public life, the family, marriage and divorce, abortion and gay issues along with perceived threats to unrestricted wealth accumulation the national debt. In 1999, something of a firestorm erupted over a sudden shift in Christian right political activism when a book by Edward Dobson and Cal Thomas appeared (Blinded by Might), joined by Paul Weyrich. The book abruptly called for a halt to the evangelical effort to capture political and legal power in America in order to turn it back to Christianity. In a feature article later in 1999, Christianity Today covered this development with a panel of six contributors in which Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and James Dobson joined the discussion to express their chagrin at the three authors’ new attitudes. Donald Eberly, a former aide to Ronald Reagan also joined the group; Eberly argues that since a cultural crisis exists in America, and culture is upstream from law, legislation and politics, culture is where Christian efforts at transformation of government should be concentrated. All participants in the discussion expressed belief that Christians should participate at all appropriate levels of government—local, individual (service and voting) and even congregational. By the latter they meant sermons on the moral aspects of political issues, but not explicit partisan recommendations. This pair of publishing events appears limited to a shift in strategy, not an abandonment of their new politicals. The development seems to have been part of a general shift from highly visible public rallies and political campaigning to more local grass-root forms of penetration, as could be seen in the growing Tea Party movement in advance of the 2010 election. But a more modest “transformation of American culture” does not seem to be what is happening; rather evangelical initiative now seems more likely to be cell-groups

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J. Findlay, Dwight L. Moody, pp. 43-91, develops the story of Moody’s growth into this businessevangelical alliance in careful detail; he is appropriately sympathetic and open to Moody’s personal development as an independent evangelist and does not try to picture him as a mere lackey of businessmen.

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and other grass-roots efforts with the same political goals. Will the Tea Party development really get what its (largely) Christian composition wants? Only time will tell. Meanwhile, we have also seen a quieter but slowly growing new body of thought about Christianity and culture, which in tone and goals is actually more like what the authors of Blinded by Might called for. However, the new Christianity and culture movement is not a new political strategy at all; indeed, it disdains the goals of the Christianity and government politics of the more aggressive and public evangelical right. The preceding essay on “Christianity and Culture” discusses this branch of evangelical thought. A Larger Perspective on Dispensational Millenarianism And Political Thinking The subtitle of this essay may seem like a lapse into unreality, since historically, the developing dispensational theology of the earlier twentieth century discouraged involvement and more or less withdrew from government and politics, just as it withdrew and separated from culture generally; this, at least, is what was preached in many pulpits, and adopted by many Christians. This cultural reaction was shared by certain holiness and Pentecostal groups, by Adventist groups and by some Brethren and Mennonite bodies. The subtitle of the essay is intended to be provocative. It suggests a new path for all evangelicals including millenarians in the political dimension of culture as well as in the wider cultural whole. As with culture, engagement of dispensational millenarians in thought and action over government and its issues is endemic in American life; there is no escape from government. But in fact evangelicalism and its dispensationalist contingent really do not withdraw entirely: they vote; they engage in citizen actions now and again; they voice opinions. They enjoy well-kept roads, highways and bridges, a pure water supply and waste disposal, laws to restrain harmful behavior like reckless and drunk driving or texting while driving, education, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, retired military welfare, and a thousand other benefits forgotten or lost in the shadows of negative or non-thinking about government and its politicians. A few have run for political office; and everyone has political views of national election issues every two years, one way or the other. Reformed covenant theology, total-Lordship-of-Christ-now thought and discipleship emphases, frequently articulate their thinking about Christianity and government in terms of kingdom life. They mostly explain their views in terms of biblical kingdom language, since this language certainly has kingdom-of-God-in-history connections. Dispensational millenarians not only shy away from kingdom language for the church or government; they would not and could not articulate their thinking in kingdom terms because they believe the biblical kingdom of God is not the church or some combination of church and state, but the future messianic kingdom of Christ.879 This is the case even if one thinks certain aspects of the kingdom introduced at the First Advent remain in operation during the church era—blessings like God’s available righteousness and salvation. This situation

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Dispensational millenarians should appreciate the view of a historian like George Marsden, “Return to Christian America: A Political Agenda,” in M. Noll, N. Hatch and G. Marsden in The Search for Christian America (Colorado Springs: Helmers and Howard,1989), pp. 46, 124, where he expresses skepticism about equating any government with the final or full kingdom of God.

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is partly why dispensationalist millenarians appear to have no biblically-rooted (or one may say evangelically-rooted or Christianity-rooted) philosophy of government; for them biblical kingdom concepts are not pertinent to government during the church age, even though they believe these provisions will be present in the coming messianic kingdom. On the other side, Christians who invoke the kingdom idea as a basis for active participation in government are caught in a potentially—if not actually at times— more tense dilemma: applying kingdom theology tends to dominion theology, and such ideas push hard toward force or coercion. Kingdom ideology might be skewed to social justice only without temptations to power and coercion or take-over motivations. But if one has to drain the political power ideas out of biblically-rooted kingdom thought to apply it to American or other world political endeavors, what happens to this rich and full kingdom thinking of the prophets, especially if one thinks the church is the kingdom? Regardless of these tensions and variations, most American Christians participate in the political system—to the extent that they do—with catch-as-catch-can politics or with special interest motivations. As each election and its agenda of issues come along, they rather tend to follow family traditions, social ties (including work-site cultures), personal experience and self-interest, or the political culture of their local churches and communities. Sometimes overtly, but mostly covertly, political issues are embraced in pulpits or in church political cultures fostered by conversations before, after and between church gatherings. Christians do talk to each other about taxes, national debt, trade union issues or economic stress. The Anabaptist Reformation called for separation of Christians from all worldly and public life, a view that, whether consciously or not, carried itself forward into the American church-state separation thinking of Jefferson and other American revolutionaryconstitutional founders, not, of course at the personal church affiliation level, but certainly at the concept level. Jefferson was no Anabaptist, but he evolved views on church-state separation from observing the differences between the church-state colonies like his own Virginia and quasi-free church colonies like Maryland880 and mostly-free Pennsylvania from its beginning. Significantly, and far more importantly, twentieth century dispensational millenarians theoretically own a church-kingdom distinction that could favor a political philosophy worked out free from confusion of kingdom and church, and equally free from the Constantinian church-state power tradition.881 American Christians theoretically follow the church-state separation principle in keeping politics and civil government out of their churches and church life—for the most part. On the other side, they too seem to want government to do their bidding on national issues, especially moral ones. Once these desires become legal advocacies or legislative action in any manner or degree, Christians seem oblivious to the spectacle of coercing non-Christian countrymen to behave and appear as Christians, even though they are not, thus tampering with non-Christians’ consciences. This is a scene in which—as strange as it is—nationally zealous Christians, thinking their American fellows ought to be Christians because they live in a Christian nation (as they think), believe it is perfectly acceptable to coerce (or try to coerce) Christian appearances on Americans who are not Christians. Nationalist Christians are thus willing and even zealous to push non-Christians

880

My term; cf S. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 331-335 for Maryland’s checkered and somewhat chaotic colonial history. 881 See R. Noll, N. Hatch and G. Marsden, The Search for Christian America.

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into hypocrisy to satisfy their own Christian passions for the mere appearances of faith with its social and moral implications; sadly, they do so with little sense of the enormity of this habit of thinking and acting. But trying to bind non-Christian or other-faith consciences— for example, with laws on Sabbath-keeping, a church membership qualification on voting, or laws against usury—is precisely what the American religious freedom and tolerance stream determined to prohibit by separating church and state. Despite the realities of the political situation faced by the evangelical-fundamentalistmillenarian sector, however, this essay is not a call to the people of the Grace Fellowship and its sister organizations, or to evangelicals generally, to engage in an independent change of course of their own special liking. It is a call to participate more fully and thoughtfully in the growing new developments in evangelical political thinking and a call to invest less energy in one-issue-at-a-time, negative political activism. To do this, it would be useful to abandon the idea of Christendom—that the European-American world is actually Christian, that its direction is a “falling away,” and that Christian political action should aim at restoration. This perspective as it is, is one meaning of “revival in our time,” “only Christ can save America” and other such politically-tinged slogans. The advocacy here is a modest one that calls for reading of and interaction with the more thoughtful evangelical works that are beginning to appear again after a lull of more than 80 years since 1925 or even earlier. I’m suggesting we think and write from our own free church perspective—free in the sense that the churches here, including ours, are free from government control and even, in ours and among other groups, from denominational control as local congregations, and from any effort to engage thought about government based on a kingdom model. There seems to be a more biblically realistic and workable way to re-engage. The perspective here includes the idea that the church as body of Christ and governments as national political entities are each sui generis—that is, each exists in its own realm with its own operative principles and with its own powers and functions. On the other hand, and despite these differences between church and state, the two are not to be unrelated to each other since each has a body of interests in parallel which may be coordinated by some notion of convergent interests. What this essay advocates is an end to withdrawal from culture in general and government in particular, and a participative stance that is more than issue-activism or envisioned power quests by churches or Christian groups. The discussion here is a call to participate along with some basic concepts such as those above and what is to follow in Essay XIII below. But this will require interconnection, equal status and treatment of all values we may identify as both final goals (freedom, for example) and the means to them (love and truth, for example). The viewpoint of this essay, embracing a legal and constitutional church-state separation framework (a-typical among current evangelicals), does not mean to suggest we should engage thought about government without a biblical perspective. In fact, the engagement must be a combination of the humanitarian tradition inherited chiefly from the Greeks and Romans, and the Christian tradition rooted in Scripture and Christian thought, with help from two-value thinkers like evangelical John Witherspoon during the revolutionary and ratification eras. In fact, the basic resources are multiple: the GrecoRoman democratic-republican political works read by Europeans and our American founding

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leaders,882 the writings of sixteenth to eighteenth century European thinkers whose ideas fed into American independence thinking, and the writings of founders like evangelicals John Jay and John Witherspoon as well as non-evangelicals like Franklin, Jefferson and Madison. Biblical perspectives on government—read and interpreted in an appropriate progressive revelation fashion so that the Old Testament’s monarchial perspective is limited properly to those values and concepts brought forward into the New Testament— are essential to Christian political thought short of trying to create a Bible commonwealth or Christian theocracy. Consideration of government in both testaments and in the whole Christian tradition, has never, on the whole, tried to limit itself to either a philosophicalonly or biblical-only body of government thought—never, that is until the strange turns of evangelical thinking in the American twenty-first century. It remains part of the tension in this situation to find ways to work in a cooperative manner at the project—ways that do justice to both the western and world political traditions, and the perspectives of biblical and Christian thought about civil values. With this in mind, we turn first to a summary of biblical and Christian thinking thinking about government, then to the American churchstate situation as it was intend by the constitutional founders. Government in the Bible The dominant Old Testament sense of governance is kingship or monarchy, even though in surveying the range of possibilities for locating the central Old Testament theological idea, G. Hasel did not especially favor the centrality of kingship.883 Whether truly the center of Old Testament thought (as it seems to me), kingship/monarchy is certainly its leading idea of governance. Several elements point in this direction. For one, the form in which God persistently deals with both creation generally and man in particular is the covenant or more precisely treaty—a legal-political instrument of kings in the ancient Near East. Treaties throughout the region are enacted mostly under the sovereignty of kings or persons possessing kingly bearings or promise, including God himself. Similarly, in the ancient Near East, the formation of a people to live in relation to a deity is an act of that deity’s kingship. In addition, certain texts speak of God as King in a kind of general or sweeping way (Psa 10:16; 24:7-10; 29:10; 44:4; 47:2, 6, 7; 68:24; 84:3; 95:3, 96, 98). Exodus 15, in a poem of the Lord’s deliverance of Israel from Egypt, concludes, “the LORD will reign for ever and ever (15:18).” Beside these basic elements, both the Old and New Testament repeatedly affirm that the final form of God’s activity among men is a kingdom (2 Sam 7; Rev 11, 19-20). And from the earliest history of the region—the pre-Israelite

A convenient and brief collection of the Greek and Roman documents the constitutional fathers read profusely was put together by Meyer Reinhold in connection with the American 200-year anniversary in 1976. He called it The Classic Pages: Classical Reading of Eighteenth-Century Americans (Philadelphia: The American Philological Association, 1975). 883 Fifty years ago, W. Eichrodt began his Theology of the Old Testament, 2 vols, trans J. A. Baker (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961), with the observation “That which binds together indivisibly the two realms of the Old and New Testaments—different in externals though they may be—is the irruption of the Kingship of God into this world and its establishment here (1:26).” Cf. G. Hasel, Old Testament Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), pp. 117-143.

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Sumerians, Canaanites and Egyptians—kingship was thought to be normal government. For the Sumerians, kingship was “lowered from heaven.” It is little wonder that the Old Testament is so filled with the idea of the kingdom of God. Nor is it anything unusual that its trajectory goes straight through the New Testament which lands the plan of God in the final new heavens and new earth—the eternal kingdom of God. A qualifying feature of God’s kingship in the Hebrew Bible is the tension between the direct reign of God over the world and over one particular nation (Israel) on one side, and the development of the human monarchy in Israel (monarchy) on the other. The Old Testament resolves this conflict by affirming that the human monarchy also began under the kingly sovereignty of God in the time of Saul and David (archaeologically in the transition between Iron Age I and Iron Age II—between 1050 and 950 B. C.). Tension between God’s kingship and human kingship in Israel is the subject of the block of material now found in 1 Samuel 8-12 where Samuel resists a shift from theocracy to kingship; he thought God’s direct divine kingship (without a human monarchy) over Israel was the historic and only acceptable arrangement. Without seeking to resolve the tensions in 1 Samuel 8-12 over theocracy and monarchy here, however, the reality on the ground is that monarchy won out over pure theocracy, and with God’s own approval, permission and even initiative. This shift was both demanded by the people and permitted by God without judgment, and then under-girded by the Lord when he determined that monarchy would be the final form of his reign over Israel and the world (2 Sam 7). He also provided that his perfected earthly king would be His own Son and simultaneously a son of David. The theocratic arrangement of the pre-Israelite nation (Exod-Judges) was not renewed after the exile in Babylon. The kingship of God in its human-Davidic form reappeared in Jesus the Messiah about 6 B. C., when he proclaimed the prophesied kingdom of God to be present in himself. He also proclaimed its future consummation as promised by the prophets. Throughout the earlier Old Testament period and despite the apparently ideal theocratic arrangement, there was a growing preview of the coming human monarchy in Israel. In the New Testament the kingship of God and an earthly messianic monarchy are manifest in a sample or “foretaste” form in Jesus, and projected forward to their climax. As this process was unfolding, it was accompanied by regular references to the kingdoms of human nation-states which reflect the same limited and often struggling human kingship pictured throughout the Old Testament. A broad outline of kingship developments will be satisfactory to illustrate the biblical perspective along with a few exegetical comments as appropriate.

1. Human capacity for kingly rule was already suggested in the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:26-28: Then God said, ‘let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’

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This first expression of human kingship occurs in the power and subjection language of the Bible’s first chapter. These are the same verses discussed in the preceding essay on biblical scenes of culture. Neither of the two technical terms for kingly rule occurs here (malak be king, reign, have dominion; mashal rule, control, govern). Two synonyms of malak and mashal translated “dominion” (radah subdue, obtain control, tread, rule) and “subdue” (kavash make subservient, subjugate) are used instead. While this initial concept of rule extends only to what had been created thus far (Gen 1), the Old Testament continues to use these and several other terms for kings and their activities. It is true that this is not technical kingship language as such, and could be viewed as describing any or all the several forms of governance, if, that is, the Hebrew Bible were aware of other forms of government, which it is not. Whatever is said or done of governing is persistently within the framework of kingship, even when it may not be described in technical monarchial language. There may be a temporary exception to this general principle for the priests of the Ezra-Nehemiah era; but even within this kingless era, its prophets continue to use both the language and images of kingship for the future reign of God (Hag 2:7-9; Zech 9:9; 14:9; Mal 4:2 [referring to the winged sunburst image of divine kingship found throughout ancient Near Eastern iconography]).884 2. Multiple human monarchies would emerge from Abraham. Genesis 17:6: “I will make nations of you; and kings shall come forth from you”; Numbers 23:21: “He [God] has not beheld misfortune in Jacob; nor has he seen trouble in Israel. The LORD their God is with them, and the shout of a king is among them”; 24:7: “Water shall flow from his buckets, and his seed shall be in many waters, his king shall be higher than Agag, and his kingdom shall be exalted”; Deuteronomy 17:14-15: “When . . . you . . . say . . . ‘I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are round about me’; you may indeed set as king over you him whom the LORD your God will choose.”

In the first of these texts, both nations (Heb pl goyim) and kings (Heb pl melekim) are unmistakably plural. Nations refers to the small nation-states around Israel like Moab, Edom or Ammon. Plural melekim (kings) may be limited to Israel’s later kings, but more likely has the same broad reference to kings of both other nations and Israel—all coming from Abraham. More importantly, when governments are referred to they are kingdoms and nothing else. In the second and third texts quoted, straightforward references are made to Israel producing its own kings. That in all cases kingship may have developed, as it almost certainly did, from tribal chieftainships, is not evidence to the contrary. The point is that when a finalized form of government emerged from tribal forms of social organization, what emerged was called by terms like melek or melekim or malkuth (king/kings/kingdom); beyond this, no other form of government is named. “Kingdom” then became the model for the final form of the divine plan in history. This kind of government does not cease even in the very last chapters of Revelation.

3. The early portions of the Old Testament feature a stage of kingship development in which God himself reigns as king over Israel without any earthly king. This arrangement 884

See G. Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), pp. 32-66, especially the images used in illustrations.

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was stabilized by a treaty between God and Israel with the Mosaic law as its operative covenantal constitution. This theocratic arrangement is administered by the charismatic covenant gifts of covenant mediator (at first), prophet, priest and judge; finally, a king emerges (Deut 17). God’s kingship over Israel is alluded to in several passages. Exodus 15:18: “The LORD will reign for ever and ever.” The line climaxes the poem of Yahweh’s deliverance of Israel through the Reed Sea and his defeat of Pharaoh’s armies. On the giving of the law there is no explicit use of kingship language for God himself; but the thought is within the covenant/treaty document embedded in Exodus 19-24. A series of power acts of Yahweh begins the preamble in 19:1-6: a nimbus, thunder, lightning, fire, smoke, and shaking mountain appear as symbols of divine kingship (19:16-20); covenant stipulations occupy chapters 20-23 parallel to regional kings’ stipulations in vassal treaties; and near the end of the treaty document in 24:9-11, Yahweh appears to Moses and his priestly associates while sitting on a sapphire pavement—the throne-floor of his heavenly palace.885 On the related covenant gifts of prophet, priest and judge see respectively Deuteronomy 18:14-22 (prophet), Deuteronomy 18:1-5 (priest), and Judges 3:7-10 (judge). 4. From Abraham until well into the monarchy, a persistent democratic element was present in the treaty arrangement, in which the people of Israel participated responsibly either directly as in treaty renewal gatherings of all Israel or by elder-representatives in confirming the kingship. Moses’ speeches in Deuteronomy made the whole people responsible for activating provisions and procedures which the book established in Israel, including the rise of kingship (Deut 17). Although prophets did not come under this arrangement, the people were responsible to determine by tests the trueness of prophetic claims (Deut 18). In a striking passage in 2 Samuel 5:1-3, a body of Israel’s elders entered a treaty initiated by the divinely appointed David at Hebron: Then all the tribes of Israel came to David at Hebron, and said, ‘Behold, we are your bone and flesh . . . the LORD said to you, You shall be shepherd of my people Israel’ . . . So all the elders of Israel came to the king at Hebron; and King David made a covenant with them at Hebron;

This does not mean Israel had a sort of early democracy like Greece. The action was only a very secondary and limited democratic one under and within the Davidic kingship and kingdom. Kings had councils of elders in the early Mesopotamian states, perhaps with varied degrees of authority in different nations over a long period of time before Israel’s settlement. Such elder councils have been called “primitive democracy,”886 even though monarchy is still the general rule everywhere in the region. Israel’s situation is parallel to this ancient Near Eastern practice.

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The sapphire pavement of Exod 24:10) is another divine kingship symbol signifying the royal precious stone lapis lazuli, which with other precious stones, were used by kings to decorate temples and cities; for details see J. J. Niehaus, Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2008), pp. 83-115 886 H. Frankfort, The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), pp 128-129, 343-344; for some further perspectives on ancient elder councils, see also S. N. Kramer, History Begins at Sumer (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 29-34

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5. Repeated surges toward monarchy developed from initiatives of local or tribal groups of Israelites during Judges (8:22; 9:7-15; 11:4, 10-11), and then from a group of representative elders (2 Sam 5:3). While the Lord at first spoke only to Samuel about anointing a “leader” (nagid, 1 Sam 9:16; 10:1), the narrative soon begins speaking about kingship (10:16, 25; 11:12, 14-15). After Saul is divinely rejected, the Lord spoke of David as king (16:1). A long, tortuous struggle of David followed eventuating in his kingship over Israel (1 Sam 17-2 Sam 1). This process climaxes in 2 Samuel 4 and was solidified into a promise of dynastic succession in 2 Samuel 7. Here David became the model of a charismatic-righteous monarchy and the pattern for a permanent messianic king reigning in an everlasting kingdom (7:11b-16). The prophets repeatedly base their teaching of a coming messianic kingdom on this Samuel text ((Isa 9:6-7; 11:1-16; Jer 23:5-6). More than 400 years later, Ezekiel still appeals to this promise (37:15-28) as does Zechariah after Israel’s return from its exile (Zech 9:9-13; 12:8-14). No hint appears here that the projected line of David and its kingdom will resolve into any other form of government than monarchy; rather evil monarchy resolves into righteous monarchy; that monarchy is a David-like kingdom projected to be the final government of the world under the rule of David’s son in an eternal kingdom. Other than the few notes of all-Israel (a democratic element) or elder representatives’ initiatives (a republican-like detail), there is no sign of anything but monarchy in the whole plan of God. Of course, such “republican” or “democratic” bits and pieces are capable of isolation and independent development when separated from their monarchial framework; but they would have to be set in a context of anti-monarchial thinking with proposed alternatives like democracy, aristocracy or plutocracy as discussed, for example by Aristotle. As they stand, they are details of ancient Mesopotamian and Israelite monarchy and not more. It is Greece, not ancient Israel, where democracy first developed as an alternative to monarchial tyranny. 6. The kingship of God himself is not lost on the prophecies, stories, and enactments of human kings in Israel. The psalmists continue to proclaim the kingship of God even in the midst of Israel’s monarchic history and projection of a final Davidic-messianic kingdom. Psalm 5:2: “Hearken to the sound of my cry, my King and my God, for to thee do I pray”; 10:16: “The LORD is king for ever and ever; the nations shall perish from his land”; Psalm 24:7-8: “Lift up your heads, O gates! And be lifted up, O ancient doors! That the king of glory may come in. Who is the King of glory? The LORD, strong and mighty, the LORD mighty in battle.” The last text is striking in that God himself is thought of as an earthly king who enters Jerusalem, perhaps in a victory celebration. These are only selections intended to represent some varied motifs of this affirmation. In all, at least eighteen such kingship-of-God texts can be found in the Psalms. Nor are they all about the “overall kingdom of God,” let alone a “spiritual kingdom” existing in the hearts of believers; rather, some are worship psalms, some involve intensely personal relationships with God as King, and others are about his kingship on earth centered in Jerusalem. A puzzling tension is present in such texts; God is both down here and up there; he is king of Israel and its human leaders; he is prayed to and worshipped as King; and there are suggestions that he is both divine and human. These tensions seem resolved in a passage like Isaiah 9:6 where the coming Davidic king is both a Davidic descendent and 542

God himself—both divine and human together, merged and joined. The prophets also occasionally speak of the kingship of God in the future messianic age as though there is no Davidic king, even though there is; in fact, kingship belongs to both (Obad 15; Mic 2:13; 4:7; Zech 14:9). This union of divine and human messianic kingship can also be expressed as “. . . the house of David will be like God, like the Angel of the LORD going before them (Zech 12:8).” 7. Jesus spoke repeatedly of his kingdom as present on earth in himself, his deeds and his teaching, and he projects it into the future at his return (Luke 19:11-27 and many other gospel texts). The kingdom is devoid of any violence or subversion against Rome.887 But the kingdom did not come into the world in its political fullness at Jesus’ first advent as prophesied. To compensate for this, and to extend its continuity into the in-history future, Revelation makes the whole biblical salvation history end with the establishment of this same promised kingdom: “You have made [God’s people] to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth (Rev 5:10, NIV)”; Rev 11:15b: “The kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever.”; Rev 20:4b: “They (martyrs and those to whom judging was given) came to life, and reigned with Christ a thousand years.” Despite Jesus’ sustained emphasis on the kingdom, and his notes of his own kingship, he also submitted himself to the Roman presence in Judea, commended centurions, paid the temple tax, and submitted to Pilate’s examination without rancor, hostility, threats or violence. In this manner he exemplifed in his own thought and action the saying that subjects of the Roman Empire owed something to both Caesar and God.888 The famous saying of Jesus on Caesar and God offers a principled division of life into two realms. It is also a seed-form of the situation in which Christians would have to live for at least the following three centuries, and again in the post-Reformation centuries as thought advanced more and more toward a restoration of Jesus’ original division between the two great powers of church and state. Finally, when Revelation thinks of the final kingdom, it thinks with the Old Testament prophets of all the monarchies of the world becoming Christ’s, thus indicating that the Scriptures know nothing of any normative government other than kingdoms or monarchies. In the meantime, Revelation is quite aware of martyrdoms at Roman hands, and thus faces squarely the fact not only of a division between church and state at the end of the first Christian century, but also of hostility between the two realms requiring ultimate rectification by divine force (Rev 16-20). 8. The biblical standard of government as monarchy also carried with it a remarkable number of passages where certain qualities of governance are mentioned—most often justice and righteousness, as for example in the second and fifth stanzas of Psalm 72. These twin concepts are also part of the surrounding nations’ ideals of kingship. Sometimes, but less

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R. Culver, Toward a Biblical View of Civil Government (Chicago: Moody Press, 1974), pp. 182196, correctly against all attempts to make the kingdom of Jesus’ teaching and sayings a spiritual kingdom only. He is also correct that even Jesus’ saying in John 18:36 that “my kingdom is not of this world” is not about the “essential nature” of the kingdom, but a statement about its source (pp. 193-196). 888 Ibid., pp. 192-196.

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frequently than the pair as such, these two criteria are related to such matters as bloodshed and terror (Isa 5:7), care of dependent persons in a kingdom’s population such as widows and orphans (Isa 1:17), and behavior of kings toward other monarchies in their regions (Amos 1-2). The significance of these and other social ethics values cannot, like monarchy itself be relegated to an ancient Near Eastern context, even though they belonged initially within a monarchial framework. They are carried over into New Testament passages about government to which they belong even in the era of the church which is not a monarchy and has no mandate to create monarchies. One can see this in Romans 13, which is about government in general, and has the government of Rome as a monarchy in mind in particular. This transfer from Old Testament concepts to another kind of situation—one in which the church lives without any monarchic structure of its own among the governments of the world—extracts such moral qualities and adapts them to the New Testament situation, as moral values to the activities of governments. We shall see how this “borrowing” of governments’ moral responsibilities functions in the process of adapting biblical values considered as combined divine-human criteria for a decent society. Such adaptations go on apace even with non-monarchies beyond the monarchic period in European nation-states and other forms of government; such adaptations are possible as an extension of biblical moral law (Rom 2:14-16). The well-known ancient Near Eastern pair—righteousness and justice—can be extracted and combined with other values to be mined from appropriate exegesis and moral valuing texts in the Bible, and insights from the classical thought of Greece and Rome. This will be the project of Essay XIII. The conclusion from this survey is quite straightforward: the only government known by the Bible is monarchy. The church exists in its own non-governmental right without monarchial goals or powers; its only government is that of its own internal, charistmatically-based elders and deacons. Therefore, all talk about church as kingdom with any suggestion of power or coercion of governments is out of place in the church era. This observation speaks to all Christian longings and efforts toward Christian theocracy and notions of “Christendom.” Christians will have to observe as a matter of principle, that no form of government is specified in the New Testament for the church as a world political power; it is assumed that it will have to live in some other kind of relation to the governments of the nations in which it lives. Aristocracies, democracies, republics, oligarchies, plutocracies, socialist governments, parliamentary or constitutional monarchies, or other such mixtures of these government types, have all been found in varied stages of human history. Monarchies of the world gradually became perceived as so oppressive that they began to be systematically overthrown or reduced to symbolic status starting in the eighteenth century. Israel’s slavery in Egypt and its deliverance, Greek democratic ideals and Roman republicanism have together fed the development of freedom movements in the western world. With the beneficial results of these movements we in the West continue to live; it is in the context of this pervasive, world-wide development that we have to think about politics and government as people of Christ and the church. What then have been the central concepts of Christian thought about governments under which Christians live?

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Two Modes of Christianity-and-Government Christians without Power

Adverse conditions in which Christians have often found themselves tend to stimulate deep longings to see a government under which they live promote and act upon moral values, or at least pay attention to freedom and morality, even if only articulated at the level of personal or national idealism. But Christians are usually not content to settle for ideals of personal or national morality by government officials, or even lives that look like or actually are Christian. They often look for legislated or high court action which really embody Christian ethical or moral precepts, so that Christian concerns gain the force of law. This situation often carries with it a shadowy form of kingdom thinking, or even forceful and overt claims that the church is moving toward the kingdom of God on earth. This goal prevailed in British and especially American Postmillennialism in which claims were sometimes made that western governments are in fact historically Christian and ought to behave as though they were the kingdom of God. Sometimes this thinking went so far as to claim or imply that such governments, whether in claims to be Christian (as recently in Zambia) or in historical development are Christian in some sense (as in America) or are actually theocracies like ancient Israel. Some even seem to claim that a kingdom theology of the church by rights has divine authority to coercively move a government toward increasing likeness to the biblical kingdom of God in policies and behaviors (as in the Reconstruction Movement). In most such cases, hopes, longings and even crusades fail, and Christians are forced to fall back on some other form of government that lies beyond their theocratic grasp and hopes. Or they simply decide to abide a situation they do not like or approve. Thus, failing dominion by God or the church, they recognize again, with the fathers of the first three centuries, that the political reign of God over the world promised in the prophets still awaits its future and is not invested in the church. Such contexts can become incentives for premillennialism to return or strengthen, since, despite hopes and desires, Christians cannot make the prophesied kingdom come in the form of any government known to them in the present. This situation contributed significantly to a revival of premillennialism after the Civil War and Reconstruction, and into the twentieth century, although a multitude of other forces were in play as well. Under these circumstances, other arrangements become at least tolerable: church and state in a balanced equilibrium as in the historic Byzantine arrangement centered at Constantinople in the middle ages; a state church arrangement such as Christianity’s situation after the Reformation when the emerging states of early modern Europe determined that the church or religion of each European nation-state would be that of its ruler (the state church arrangement); a state willingly or haltingly agreeing to guidance by the churches (as Calvin’s Geneva and Bucer’s Strasbourg); or a church-state separation similar to the idea first suggested by Marsilius of Padua (Italy), then advocated by Wycliffe in England and by Luther in Germany. The latter arrangement was actually practiced by the Anabaptists, and was finally made a constitutional provision by Thomas Jefferson’s advocacy in Virginia and in the constitutional process in America. Another theme often surfacing in times of stress is that a sharp kingdom of God545

kingdom of man distinction more or less similar to church-state separation is articulated in which states become viewed by Christians as demonic. Government behaviors that become mysteriously or irrationally evil will be interpreted as demonically inspired. Christians in such situations (Nazi Germany, for example, or perhaps some fanatically violent Muslims not in power but aiming at it) return again and again to a demonic interpretation of government based on the “principalities and powers” passages in Paul. Even though these passages at times use such language for demonic powers, and Paul uses the same terms for government powers, no passage clearly states that all governments are under demonic grip. Revelation does view a future world empire during the Great Tribulation as becoming demonized and thus the perpetrator of the coming evil. Otherwise, the “rulers, principalities, powers, and authorities” of the epistles are demonic hosts of the spiritual realm that keep humans in their check, not governments; and the other use of these terms for actual governments like the Roman Empire as in Romans 13 are simply terms for governments not viewed thereby as demonic. In the fathers of the first three Christian centuries, when persecution regularly threatened, some added nuances are found. Tertullian (c 180 A. D.) advocates a very strict separation of Christians from the Roman Empire in nearly all respects. In The Military Chaplet he argues that Christians should abstain from government service (reminiscent of some American Fundamentalists of the 1900-1950 era, and early Anabaptists) and all other offices, and should not participate in the Roman army as soldiers since sacrifices to Roman gods are normally part of camp life. He also argues that it is an outrage of irrationality for the empire to propound laws which punish the righteous (Christians). Another tack is represented in the Christian Epistle to Diognetus (c 120 A. D.): Christians are the soul of the world: they ought to be left alone since they are good people; they do not expose their offspring; they offer free hospitality; and they guard their purity. Clement of Alexandria also argues that the church is the soul of the state in his Stromata. Clement, however, actually turns his discussion of government toward law and justice. Justice is a disposition both of the individual and the state. A just society is one which shares all things equally among equals. He thinks private ownership proper even though it should be communalized. Law is the focus of politics: it restrains, punishes, and educates in wisdom. Hence Clement propounds a coordinated or convergent view of the relation of church and government (still Rome, in his case) around rationality, law and good—an advocacy that is possible because the Providence that orders all things cannot be anything but sovereign and good. Clement does not try to force some kind of theocracy. As on most subjects he seeks a rational coordination of what governments and their laws value with what Christians in their thinking selves also value, thus centering a coordinated relationship of church and state in law. Irenaeus, a premillenarian, too thinks government should maintain a public distinction between good and evil by clothing itself and its behavior in law. He knows conflict will be inevitable between Rome and Christianity; he also knows that in the future the kingdom of this world will be end and the kingdom of God established. Thus, with many other early fathers of the church, Irenaeus avoids equating both the church and the Roman Empire with the future kingdom of God. Lactantius (Divine Institutes, Bks 5, 6), likewise a premillenarian, also joins the justice theme. For him a just society is one in which all are equals, but in the sense that all treat each other as equals. Justice is first piety—love for God and obedience to him— 546

then the equal treatment of equals made such by God in creation: all equally spring from one single man; all are in God’s image; all share one sociality, one divine law and one common humanity; all have powers of speech and minds to understand. This kind of thinking is a thoroughly Christianized humanism; it focuses on God’s plan for man-ingeneral, and views cultural capacities as gifts of God. For these thinkers a rational appeal to the best in humanity as a basis for a decent society is probably the best the human race can hope for short of the future kingdom of God on earth. Such coordinated views of church and state owe much of their spirit to Aristotle. These fathers show us some ways to think constructively without possessing state power. On the other hand, Origen and Eusebius, the two best known non-millenarians among the earlier fathers, pursued the idea of Rome as the potential (Origen) or actual (Eusebius) kingdom of Christ. In Origen’s Dialogue with Celsus, Celsus, a Roman antiChristian intellectual, criticized Christianity as a disruptive and disintegrating force in the Roman Empire. He asked what would happen if all men became Christians (for him a horrifying thought). Origen answered that if this happened, the empire would (my italics) dissolve as Celsus feared; but it would be replaced by a better Christian one consisting of a unified and agreeable regime under the singular kingship of God—the empire for which Celsus himself longs. To Celsus’ desire that there be only one king, Origen answered that there already is one—Christ. If all became Christians, the empire under Christ would be superior to all its enemies. Likewise with Celsus’ desire that there be one law (my italics) in the world:, Origen says Christians already have that too, and with it in force the world would be better than Rome. It is clear that Origen is on precisely the same track as other Christians seeking to make governments under which they live Christian. Though reduced to idealistic arguments, he still hopes to persuade Celsus of the superior workability of Christianity based on Celsus’ own articulated positions in the debate. Eusebius lived in a different situation than Origen. Not long after Constantine’s conversion in 313, his mother embarked on a huge church-construction program in Palestine and elsewhere. Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea at the time of Constantine’s conversion and after, gave a speech in Jerusalem at The Dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre: A Speech at the Thirtieth Anniversary of Constantine’s Accession. Eusebius, ecstatic at the turning of the Roman Empire to Christianity, argues that God is the King of all, and has mediated his kingship to man through his vice-King, Christ. The Christian king (Constantine) and empire, therefore, are just what God planned and promised from the beginning, and this wonder came to pass with the Roman Empire turned Christian: the perfected messianic kingdom of the prophetic promises had arrived with Constantine. Hence, for Eusebius, the confusion of the kingdom of God with human government is complete and the hope of Christ’s future kingdom at his Second Coming is all but demolished; the kingdom of God is henceforth identified with the Christianized Roman Empire. Augustine carried this view forward into the middle ages. This development leads us to consider what sorts of things Christians do when they are in power as happened before Eusebius’ very eyes.

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Christians in Power When Christians gain power and government becomes Christian, their thinking and behavior tend to change, sometimes drastically. The still most thorough-going and drastic sea-change example of such a shift is what happened in the Roman Empire with and after the conversion of the emperor Constantine at the beginning of the fourth Christian century (313). The drastic nature of this change lies not so much in a great mass of instantaneous changes for the situation of Christians in the empire or the end of their persecution, as in the steady determination to dominate the non-Christian elements in the empire by force and coercion.889 Specific changes did happen very soon in the Roman Empire; but “drastic” is more meaningful in describing the gradual transformations in kingship and law that followed over the succeeding centuries. The most dramatic changes were in the new formulations of Christian views of kingship and law between Constantine (312) and the death of Charlemagne (814). This five-hundred year period saw an intensely concentrated development of Christian kingship theory and codification of ancient Roman and more recent Christian-Roman law along with its enforcement in the Christianized empire. Many of the Christian-Roman laws were brutally harsh against Jews and heretics, while in a whole agenda of actions, the state undergirded the church with buildings, clerical favors, judgeships, monetary aid, and other amenities. That legal history culminated in Justinian’s Digest of Roman Law (c 560). After the death of Charlemagne (814), the issue of papal and/or bishops’ power in relation to kings and rulers took an oscillating course until the Reformation forced a realignment of powers in the emerging modern states: state churches emerged and the religion of each new European state became that of its ruler; many of these arrangements persist to the present. Another upheaval developed in the eighteenth century with the Euro-American movement favoring not only free churches (churches freed from state control), but replacement of absolute monarchies by constitutional monarchies and democracies. The American rejection of monarchy in 1776-1783 generated a remarkably new democratic republic with such ideas as separation of church and state, prohibition of any church establishment, and prohibition on any religious qualification for public office. These arrangements were not merely though of as good working ideas; rather they were written into the new national Constitution—a situation designed to prohibit any church, or any person on the basis of religious commitment, from gaining political power with legal support of the federal government. What sorts of actions do Christians advocate when in power as they were in Europe from Constantine to Charlemagne, and in a modified sense in European state churches down to the present? In general, Christians not in power but still longing for power argue that they should be tolerated, protected, encouraged, helped or even concretely favored by government.

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Jacque Ellul, The Ethics of Freedom, trans G. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), p. 12, raises this issue already within the first two pages of this major work on ethics: “. . . whenever the church has been in a position of power, it has regarded freedom as the enemy . . . one of the themes which will crop up again and again, namely, the incompatibility between freedom and power.” It continues to surface throughout the remainder of Ellul’s introduction, e.g., p. 15, where he raises it in an allusion to “authoritarianism” when practiced in the name of the resurrection of Jesus. Similar observations about the history are made throughout G. Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity (Eugene OR: Wiph and Stock, 1989).

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The ideas of tolerance and protection, not merely from government interference, but from mob violence, were not new; these ideas were already the view of Luke-Acts in the New Testament; they were also forcefully argued by fathers like Justin Martyr. What was new after Constantine was the encouraged-helped-favored and even enforced aspects of this continuum. Counteracting the severe persecutions of Christians by his predecessors, Constantine moved in opposite directions. He had 50 copies of the Bible made for major bishoprics. He built huge new churches and converted palatial buildings into lavish new sanctuaries— mostly financed by the Roman treasury. He decreed freedom of worship, returned church properties confiscated during persecutions, subsidized churches’ expenses, made grants to clergy, exempted clergy from public service and churches from certain taxes in exchange for their part in relief for the poor, decreed Sunday as a universal day of rest, appointed bishops as judges and employed them as political aides and advisors, presided over church councils, equated himself with the apostles and was buried at Constantinople, his new capital, as the thirteenth among them.890

Constantine’s successors went progressively farther and farther along the road of government Christianizing by force. Gradually pagans and heretics were persecuted to death by the same Christianity that had itself been persecuted by old Rome; pagans were disenfranchised of any remnants of Roman citizenship in the name of God and his truth.

Support of Christianity included gradual undermining of the old paganism. Soon after his conversion, Constantine began withdrawing endowments of pagan Roman temples.891 He removed old statues of deities in Rome and hauled them to his new capitol in 330, not as deities to be worshipped, but at ornaments, leaving the old temples of the western empire emptied of their gods.892 In 341 his son, Constantius, issued an edict which said in part: “. . . let the madness of sacrifices be abolished. For whoever . . . shall celebrate sacrifices, let a punishment appropriate to him and this present decision, be issued.”893 In 423 A. D. the Christian emperor Theodosius decreed that “although pagans that remain ought to be subjected to capital punishment, if at any time they are detected in the abominable sacrifice of demons, let exile and confiscation of goods be their punishment.”894 Heresy received similar treatment from Constantine’s successors. In his digest of ancient and recent Roman law issued at Constantinople, Justinian prohibited all heretics from receiving inheritances from their parents. Rather, “whatever shall be conveyed to a heretic, shall be forfeit (sic) to the public treasury.”895 After 800, Charlemagne, despite his highly constructive



890

E. Cairns, Christianity Through the Centuries: A History of the Christian Church, Rev Ed (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1981), pp. 124-125; J. Gonzales, The Story of Christianity (Peabody MA: Prince Press, 1985), p.123; B. & D. Nystrom, The History of Christianity (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), pp. 51-53. 891 H. Chadwick, “The Early Christian Community,” in J. McManners, ed, The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 58. 892 Gonzalez, op. cit., p. 125. 893 A. J. Ayer, Sourcebook of Ancient Church History (NewYork: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), p. 321. 894 Ibid., p. 372 895 O. and J. O’Donovan, From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook for Christian Political Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 192, citing the Codex of Justinian (529), I.4.22.

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educational and social policies, went farther than this and ordered his armies to get Saxons to become Christians, put away their idols, and accept the Christian faith.896 The war for this goal lasted thirty-three years and nearly decimated the Saxon clans.897 The ideology or theology of Christian kingship was increasingly based on Old Testament kingship with David and Solomon as models to be imitated in detail, and Moses the lawgiver as a guide to decrees, edicts and legislation.

This theology of kingship and its actions and edicts, whether by Roman emperors like Constantine and successors, or Frankish kings like Charlemagne and successors, illustrates the temptations of Christians in power. The same temptations obtain even without on-sight kingly power as with Anglicans and Congregationalists in the American colonies. Kingly power and Christian majorities motivate toward force, disenfranchisement and suppression of resistant elements. In an age in which constitutional monarachies and democratic states have effectively replaced Europe’s Christian monarchies, this dilemma has seen a degree of resolution. But since democracies have replaced monarchic despotism with institutions and policies dominated by freedom and human rights, they now have to be universally reckoned with. It is hard to see how this situation is not an improvement over the absolutism that developed in Western monarchies up to and well beyond the era of the Reformation. Equally or more serious was the papal absolutism that characterized the High Middle Ages (c 1000-1400). The American republic is the foremost extension of this freedom and human rights movement, articulated chiefly in its founding documents, its bill of rights, and the expression of those rights in constitutional amendments. A detailed history of this development and its motivations is beyond the scope of this essay. It is sufficient to state that suppressive power, as in the cases noted above, is no longer possible in the wake of the freedom and human rights movement which finally overwhelmed monarchic Christendom. This means in turn that another solution must be sought to the Christianity and power problem because the ideas of freedom and human rights as operative elements in democratic governments are all but incompatible with coerced Christian values. This development drove Christianity back to the situation under which it began, even though different in many ways from that earlier setting. This seems especially the case as articulated by the American constitutional founders, most notably Jefferson and Madison, and also by evangelical minister, Declaration of Independence signer and Princeton University president John Witherspoon. The one exception to this situation is the extent to which the humanitarian moral elements of biblical Christianity are compatible with the humanitarian interests of the freedom and rights traditions of Greek and Roman thought. To these traditions, the developing freedom philosophy of the eighteenth century Euro-Anglo-American tradition was added as the major force of the American Revolution and its constitutional enactments. It follows that the only way forward, at least for American Christians and other Christians who live in free democracies, is to keep to the separation of church and state, and to let this be the

896

Einhard, “The Life of Charlemagne,” cited in J. F. Scott, A. Hyma and A. Noyes, Readings in Medieval History (New York Crofts & Co., 1933), p. 154. Einhard’s biography of Charlemagne is the only one written by a member of his administration and thus remains the primary source for our knowledge of the king. 897 Ibid., p. 154.

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framework for further creative thinking about government; our best analogy may well be the thinking of Clement of Alexandria as discussed above. Thus, there appears to be no truly workable alternative than some form of church-state separation, whether in the strictest form as in the United States, or in a parliamentary churchstate form with free churches as now exists in many other countries. These constitutional monarchies limit kingship to mostly symbolic roles. Otherwise petty kingships become dictatorships and unstable rule by personal power without serious attention to human rights and the rule of law. Furthermore, it is not compatible with the essential ideas of freedom, universal human rights, and democratic institutions to insist on coercing Christianization of a population on the details of our faith. But to say this is to advocate nothing different than the situation in which our Christian brothers and sisters lived in the first three centuries, except that most modern democracies are no longer forcefully hostile regimes like the Roman Empire. Rather, the church envisioned in the New Testament, as a people free from the Mosaic Law, from the Old Testament monarchy, and from pretences to being the final biblical kingdom of God, appropriately exists under and separate from this world’s governments. Consequently, Christian power ideologies offend both biblical eschatology and the intervening democratic freedom and human rights movement. Coercive Christian government projects, when thought of under biblical kingdom concepts, can only achieve temporary, reduced or attenuated forms of the biblical messianic kingdom, and thus can never fulfill the dominion dreams of Christian power hopes. In the light of historical reality, therefore, it is important to again discuss the roots of American ideas of religious toleration, freedom from Christian coercion, and what came to be called “separation of church and state,” a matter quite different from Fundamentalist separatism. This set of ideas should be seen as an interim arrangement between the failed Christian monarchy movement from Constantine to the American and European revolutions, and the future messianic kingdom of Christ. It is important to be clear on this. The reason is that the idea of America as a Christian nation, with a kind of divine right—if not the (alleged) wisdom—to deny or attack church-state separation in favor of a Christian theocracy, has again energetically asserted itself. This essay will suggest rather that separation of church and state has clear and solid roots in the developing constitutional thinking of Jefferson, Madison, Witherspoon, and the constitutional founders; this set of conditions also represents a return to the conditions envisioned by Jesus and the apostles as the normal situation of the church in the world. These three constitutional era Americans were among the most influential thinkers of their time. Their influence continued in Madison’s draft of the amendments and the process in which they were finally adopted in the meetings of the first Congress. American Separation of Church and State At a meeting of the Michigan Association of Evangelicals I attended in the 1970s with perhaps 500 persons present, Michigan Attorney Frank Kelly urged the group to resist temptations to force their faith on the body politic, and keep to the separation of church and state. He concluded that this arrangement has served both the church and the government well and it ought not to be altered; thus far Kelly. In fact, every attempt to force its will 551

on the whole is a step toward loss of spiritual vitality under any government as the history of European state churches shows. Many evangelicals still envision or newly re-envision some form of church-state union in America, sometimes under bold-sounding terms like Christian “dominion theology.”898 Oddly enough, though, populist promoters tend to work at it in a kind of one-issue-at-a-time manner, even though several outspoken intellectual advocates write about a more holistic picture (R. J. Rushdoony and his followers). Thus it seems worthwhile to ask and answer the question about where the idea of church-state separation in America actually came from and if it really was the constitutional founders’ intent. In his “render to God . . . render to Caesar” saying (Mark 12:17 with context and parallels in Matthew and Luke), Jesus established a conceptual separation between the two spheres—to God and to Caesar—i.e., that two such spheres exist in the context of his movement, and that each requires that something be rendered. Allowing that the history unfolded as it did, Caesar and God were appropriately separated for about 300 years, but were actually rejoined in a new church-state union beginning in 313 A. D. with Constantine’s conversion. While much important action came from that union, it proved remarkably oppressive to many people (as discussed above). Gradually anti-monarchy and freedom ideas overcame the arrangement until the modern European and American states emerged. Beyond Jesus’ statement, Paul’s instructions to Christians on obedience to government expect a normal separation in which government is not implicitly or explicitly Christian, and the church exists in its own right and power. In colonial America, however, both Virginia and the New England colonies sought to establish church-states in which church membership was required for participation in the civil sphere—an expression of their basic Calvinism and its commitment to some elements of Constantine’s church-state union program. Prior to this, and during the Reformation, the much despised and maligned (by the reformers) Anabaptist Reformation had grown; within it Mennonites and Brethren groups, and a little later, Baptists, all sought freedom from government intrusions and impositions. Similarly but in a different sense, William Penn’s Quaker colony in Pennsylvania, Lord Baltimore’s Catholic Maryland colony, and the colony of New York along with New Jersey and Delaware all gained qualified forms of freedom of religion or “tolerance” as their colonial histories developed. Even Pennsylvania, usually thought to be the most tolerant of all religions and groups, had some basic laws requiring Christian observances.899 Many Virginians and New Englanders were increasingly frustrated with the colonial church-states and their laws. Roger Williams tried to insist on tolerance in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but had to leave it or face persecution and death at the hands of an established Congregationalism. He wrote tracts and books about religious freedom and advocated forms of separation and toleration. By the constitutional era, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had lived through a contextual history in Virginia which forced them to think through what sort of arrangement was most workable for everyone. The Virginia

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“Dominion theology” is another name for Christian Reconstructionism—the belief that the church is commissioned to take over the world by force to establish the rule of God, even by military means if necessary. One can get a sense of this movement from most of the web sites under “dominion theology.” 899 J. Butler, “Why Revolutionary America Wasn’t a ‘Christian Nation,’” in Religion and the New Republic, ed J. H. Hutson (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), p. 190.

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constitution, which preceded the U. S. Constitution and its Amendments, separated church and state in Virginia, thus ending its own oppressive church-state establishment.900 The problems of liberty in the New England church-states were boiling throughout the colonies before independence. In fact, most church-states were frustrating enough that they drove many colonists away from churches. Church membership was limited through most of the later colonial era to about 20% of the population.901 So it was a kind of historical given that the best minds of the constitutional era were ready for the First Amendment, even though it did not become part of the Constitution until after ratification by state conventions. The process that led to the First Amendment and its subsequent history produced important papers and statements by both Jefferson and Madison, and another important paper by the Baptist leader Isaac Backus along with interest and lectures at Princeton by evangelical John Witherspoon. These constitutional era documents carry us to a next step not very far in implication from where we have been in the discussion above. “Separation of church and state,” became a short-hand for toleration of all religious groups and a corresponding prohibition of any legislated church establishment.902 The idea Jefferson finally called “a wall of separation between church and state,” was discussed and expressed in varied ways and circumstances in the constitutional era. The following summaries and selections will show the richness of thought on the subject in Witherspoon, Jefferson and Madison. Important Players in the Declaration, Constitution and Ratification Discussion: Toward Church-State Separation John Witherspoon Modern evangelical scholarship on American religious history recognizes John Jay and John Witherspoon as probably the only two explicitly evangelical members of the Continental Congress, signers of the Declaration of Independence, and activists for ratification of the constitution (1787-1788). Both contributed to church-state separation thinking in their work on the Declaration, and in constitutional debates and ratification proceedings. Jay was a lawyer, and Witherspoon the president and professor of Moral Philosophy at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University). Jay was more important as an author of some of the Federalist Papers, while Witherspoon was more important as a teacher of political philosophy and leader of revolutionary era Presbyterians and ministers. Due to this combination, Witherspoon is more important to evangelicals; thus he will be discussed in some detail.

900

T. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVII, gives a list of church legislation that tried to keep Anglicanism intact by law and coercion. Jefferson notes that by the opening of the Revolution, two-thirds of Virginia’s inhabitants were of other denomination; their numbers alone thus forced leniency in applying the church laws still on the books for the whole citizenry. 901 Butler, “Revolutionary America,” p. 191; see also R. Finke and R. Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1980: Winners and Losers in our Religious Economy (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). 902 The documents representing this development and which serve as the basis for this discussion are exhibited as selections on the religious “Aftermath of Revolution” in E. S. Gaustad, ed, A Documentary History of Religion in America. 2 vols (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 2:259-279.

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Witherspoon’s students at Princeton took his course on Moral Philosophy. The course subjects were (1) personal ethics; (2) political philosophy; and (3) jurisprudence. Among the students who took this and other of Witherspoon’s courses were James Madison, Henry Lee, Aaron Burr and other revolutionary era leaders along with many ministers. Varnum Lansing Collins, in one of the most widely cited studies of Witherspoon, gathered the following numbers for Presbyterian ministers educated by Witherspoon: of 188 ministers in the 1789 General Assembly Minutes, 52 or 28% had been trained by Witherspoon at Princeton; 11% of Witherspoon’s clerical graduates became college presidents spread through eight different states.903 Collins also summarized the political outcomes of Witherspoon’s teaching, especially his course on Moral Philosophy: One of his non-ministerial graduates, James Madison, became President of the United States, and Aaron Burr, a Vice-president; and ten became cabinet officers. Young though they were at the time, six were elected members of the Continental Congress. Thirty-nine became United States Representatives and twenty-one were United States Senators; twelve were Governors of States and fifty-six were chosen to State Legislatures. Thirty became judges, three others being appointed Justices of the United State Supreme Court.904

While he was an evangelical Christian, unlike his evangelical counterparts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, he did not work out his political views and his American revolutionary ideas biblically. He rather worked them out by a reasoned appeal to man in his natural state, following the political thought of Aristotle and enlightenment thinkers like Montesquieu, Hutcheson and Pufendorf.905 Near the beginning of his Lectures on Moral Philosophy, one-third of which were on politics, he identified his method as “an inquiry into the nature and grounds of moral obligation by reason, as distinct from revelation,”906 and then criticized Cotton Mather “for thinking that ‘moral philosophy,’ including politics, needed special insights from God’s grace or his revelation.”907 From this inquiry into natural man’s moral sense, he derived three points of human knowledge apart from special (biblical) revelation: (1) knowledge of the difference between right and wrong; (2) a sense of obligation to do the right; and (3) recognition that right acts will bring rewards and wrong acts will bring punishments. From these roots, Witherspoon constructed a set of



903

V. L. Collins, President Witherspoon: A Biography. 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1925), 2:223, cited by J. L. McAllister, “John Witherspoon: Academic Advocate for American Freedom,,” in A Miscellany of American Christianity: Essays in Honor of H. Shelton Smith, Ed S. C. Henry (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1963), p. 191, n..37. 904 Ibid., p. 192. 905 Ibid., passim. 906 J. Witherspoon, Lectures on Moral Philosophy, Lecture III, p. 367, cited by M. Noll in The Search For Christian America (Colorado Springs: Helmers and Howard, 1989), p.90. 907 Ibid. On this point see the remarks of M. Valeri, “Religion and the Culture of the Market in Early New England,” in Perspectives on American Religion and Culture, ed P. Williams (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), pp. 102-103, where he discusses Witherspoon’s rational construction of revolutionary values related to free market economics.

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moral political ideas and values very nearly identical to those articulated by the American constitutional founders, especially Madison and the ideas of his Federalist Paper #10.908 The important thing to note about Witherspoon’s methodological difference between doing theology (using the method of mining scriptural revelation) and doing political thought (using the method of reason engaging man’s nature and sociality) is that such twin methodologies represent a slightly earlier form of what later became Jefferson’s “separation of church and state.” Witherspoon already separated church and state in theological and political thought respectively. Thus Witherspoon cannot be an ideological biblical-politics hero of twentieth century theocratic-tending Christians, since his politics was rationalenlightenment in nature, not theological-revelational, even though the Moral Philosophy lectures at times cite biblical material parallel to his political-social ethics derived from reason. Coincidently, Witherspoon spoke of the derivation of human virtues by reasoned examination of human life and experience as a manifestation of the providence of God in the governance of the world. Why should one be critical of this procedure, especially considering its Christian rootage in both Scripture and the history of theology under the notions of “general revelation” and “special revelation?” Thomas Jefferson

In 1779, Jefferson introduced in the Virginia Legislature a Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom. It was debated and discussed with attempts to compromise its complete religious freedom ideas in favor of some continued form of establishing Christianity. The bill was only for Virginia, but its ideas would grow toward the First Amendment of the federal constitution as one state after another followed suit, but not without further attempts at compromise.909 Jefferson included a long introductory paragraph of explanations to his proposal in which he said, among other things, . . . Almighty God hath created the mind free, . . . all attempts to influence it by temporal

punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on . . . the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others . . . .910



908

McAllister, John Witherspoon, pp. 194-224; cf also M. Noll, Search for Christian America, pp. 88-95. Noll is critical of this methodology, but in reality it was part of the revolutionary era political

thinking. The problem for Noll is that Witherspoon had two methodologies, revelation for theology and reason for politics. It is true that Witherspoon’s political philosophy lacks biblical integration. On the other hand, it is also true that the older biblical material on government knows only of kingship and monarchy, while Jesus separates the realms. Biblical material on the basic democratic values could have been cited. 909 Butler, “Revolutionary America,” pp. 195-196. 910 T. Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 2:545-547, cited by E. Gaustad, A Documentary History of Religion in America, 2 vols (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 1:259-260.

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He included in the introduction an example drawn from the colonial practice of paying ministers from taxes of the whole populace, Christian and non-Christian alike: . . . to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern.911

And to these thoughts he added:

. . . our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions . . . to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty . . . the truth is great and will prevail if left to herself.912

The proposition itself before the Virginia Legislature then reads in part, . . . no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or good, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion . . . the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind . . . .913

This kind of language was clearly moving toward what he later called, in his letter of reply to an inquiry from the Danbury Baptist Association (1802), a “wall of separation between church and state.” James Madison In the 1785 stage of the debate, Madison, a pupil of Witherspoon at Princeton, advanced Jefferson’s arguments against Patrick Henry’s proposal in the Virginia Legislature that the assembly adopt a law that “the Christian Religion shall in all times coming be deemed and held to be the established Religion of this Commonwealth.”914 Against this legislative proposal for Virginia, Madison composed and circulated a “Memorial and Remonstrance” in which he argued that Virginia should tolerate all religions equally and renounce any further attempt to make Christianity in any form the religion of the State of Virginia. Jefferson’s Bill finally passed the Virginia Legislature in 1786 by a 74-20 vote.



911

Ibid., pp. 260-261. Ibid., p. 261. 913 Ibid. Jefferson’s use of “opinions” is to religious opinions here, even where he does not make this qualification; he is not speaking of opinions about other civil or legislated matters. 914 The Papers of James Madison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 8:298-304, cited by Gaustad, Documentary History, 1:262

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912

This victory for tolerance and church-state separation was probably due more to weariness with the harshness of the established church than to Madison’s promotion, although both were significant. Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance” ran to fifteen arguments against Henry’s proposal and successfully defeated it in the state legislature in favor of religious freedom in Virginia. Some excerpts: 1. . . . we hold . . . that Religion . . . can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and that it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. 2. . . . if Religion be exempt from the authority of the Society at large, still less can it be subject to that of the Legislative Body. 4. Above all are [all men] to be considered as retaining a title to the free exercise of Religion according to the dictates of Conscience. 6. . . . it is known that this Religion both existed and flourished, not only without support of human laws, but in spite of every opposition from them, and not only during the period of miraculous aid, but long after it had been left to its own evidence and the ordinary care of Providence. 8. If Religion be not within the cognizance of Civil Government how can its legal establishment be necessary to Civil Government? . . . Such a Government will be best supported by protecting every Citizen in the enjoyment of his Religion with the same equal hand which protects his person and his property. 15. . . . finally, the equal right of every citizen to the free exercise of his Religion according to the dictates of conscience is held by the same tenure as all our other rights.915

It is clear from this thinking that “separation of church and state” is a phrase not yet in use by these founders. But the substance of both Jefferson and Madison’s thought is exactly to that effect. They preferred at the time to speak in terms of “free exercise,” “tolerance [of all sects and religions],” “the same equal hand,” “without support of human laws,” and “exempt from the authority of Society at large,” and other such separating descriptions. Jefferson and Madison succeeded in persuading the Virginia Legislature against any legislating of religion. Madison then “went on as Virginia’s representative in the first congress, to push for an amendment to the newly adopted constitution which would extend the religious liberty won in Virginia to the nation itself.”916 Jefferson’s Church-State Separation Views That Jefferson intended and went on to speak in terms of a principled separation of church and state—contrary to what many patriotic and “Christian America” evangelicals

915

Ibid., reproduced in Gaustad, ibid., pp. 262-266. The source of Madison’s sub-quotes in the above selections is not given by Gaustad. 916 Ibid., p. 262.

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and others want to believe—is clear in his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802 as well as in his thoughts in Query XVII of his Notes on the State of Virginia. The Danbury (Connecticut) Baptists wrote Jefferson as President with a question pursuant to their meeting in Connecticut on October 7, 1801. He thus had first hand experience with a minority group (Baptists) in Connecticut who at the time were still bearing the effects of New England’s church-state situation where religion had not yet been disestablished by the new states, contrary to the First Amendment. The Danbury Baptists complained that in their state, the religious liberties they were entitled to enjoy under the new Constitution were not seen as immutable rights, but as privileges granted by the [Connecticut] legislature, that is, merely favors granted them. His answer does not discuss state matters, but the national provision of the First Amendment. The text of the letter reads: To Messers Nehemiah Dodge, and Others, a committee of the Danbury Baptist association in the state of Connecticut. Gentlemen The affectionate sentiments of esteem and approbation which you are so good as to express towards me, on behalf of the Danbury Baptist Association, give me the highest satisfaction. My duties dictate a faithful and zealous pursuit of the interests of my constituents, & in proportion as they are persuaded of my fidelity to those duties, the discharge of them becomes more and more pleasing. Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties. I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man, and tender you for yourselves & your religious association, assurances of my high respect & esteem.917 Thomas Jefferson Jan.1.1802.

With the words, “. . . thus building a wall of separation between church and state,” he explains how he (now Chief Executive/President) intended the wording of the First Amendment and the Virginia State Constitution’s “separation” clauses to be understood, and how he understood the U. S. Constitution’s First Amendment language. The phrase of 1802 climaxed a long preceding discussion. That discussion gradually and

917

M. Peterson, ed, Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Literary Classics of the United States; Cambridge, England: University of Cambridge, 1984), p. 510. The volume is a collection of selected documents of several types including letters. Peterson included the Danbury Baptist letter reproduced here.

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persistently rejected the Virginia, New England, and other colonial church-states, sought to normalize “tolerance” of all faiths and denominations, and freed churches henceforth from any government control or preference. It would be quibbling over a word hang-up to distinguish “between church and state” from “separation of church and state.” Nowhere in the Constitution or other founding era documents is there a suggestion of intent to establish a Christian theocracy. Nor is there any indication of any such intent among the framers of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or its Amendments. What the documents establish is a liberal people’s democracy with a republican legislative branch and presidency, and an appointed judiciary. It is politically “liberal” in the sense that it grants a participative right to the whole citizenry which it leaves free to do as it sees fit in all matters except those specified in the Articles and Amendments; these provisions are intended to establish the powers of three separated branches and protect the rights of various interests from religious impositions or restrictions. Hence, “liberal” and “free” are actual or virtual synomyms. Jefferson’s famous work, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVII, is also forcefully clear on how thorough he thought this separation should be, i.e., complete in terms of legislated regulation of religion by force or coercion under the laws of the State of Virginia, or (later) any laws of the new Federal Government. He does not argue merely for principle without specifics; rather he illustrates with Virginia’s history of laws against heresy, and punishments over religious offenses accumulated in colonial Virginia. For example, heresy in Virginia was once punishable by burning. Under a later modification, if a person who was raised a Christian denied the being of God or the Trinity or denied that the Christian religion was true or that the Scriptures were of divine authority, he could not hold civil, ecclesiastical or military office upon the first offence. Upon conviction for a second offence he was stripped of the right to sue, to receive any gift or legacy, or to be a guardian, executor or administrator, and subject to three years in prison; if a father, he was denied the right to raise and retain his children who were to be taken by a Virginia court and placed in an orthodox Christian home.918 The Virginia legislature finally abolished such practices and views. And when the nation, including Virginia, adopted the first several Amendments to the U. S. Constitution as a bill of rights, all such laws and punishments had to be abandoned. Thus came freedom of religion to Virginia, fiercely promoted by Jefferson for years before complete freedom of religion and separation of church and state became constitutional law by amendment in 1791. In surveying the whole range of political theories and their history, George Sabine could say, “The rise of the Christian church as a distinct institution entitled to govern the spiritual concerns of mankind in independence of the state, may not unreasonably be described as the most revolutionary event in the history of Western Europe . . . (my italics).”919 One only has to look at the condition of the state churches in Europe and the United Kingdom to see what happens to the church under a state-church arrangement. Luther and the Anabaptists saw the rightness, wisdom and usefulness of a principled separation of church and state, though they shared little else; Calvin, Bucer, and their



918 919

Ibid., p. 284. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (New York: Henry Holt, 1937), p. 180.

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followers after the Reformation did not.920 In America the Calvinist-Congregationalist dominance of the New England colonies and the Anglican dominance in Virginia made church-state separation impossible until the Constitution’s Amendments. Finally the first ten Amendments to the Constitution were ratified by agreed and a required three-fourths of the states on December 15, 1791. Although it took a while, and all such church-state unions finally collapsed, including those of Virginia and even the New England states, though not without struggle.921 Free Churches The development described above belongs to the more general free church movement that began during the Reformation Era in concept and actualization, at least in elementary forms. “Free church” refers to Protestant Christian bodies which came to believe churches should be free from government and government controls of any kind to be their true selves. I do not mean more than this. It is true that other connotations of “free church” may include Christian groups who might emphasize freedom from other historic church bodies that claim universal primacy as the one true church; this type is beyond the scope of this discussion. Nor do I mean to include in this term rejective attitudes toward the creeds, theology, church fathers, or church history as a whole. Some, perhaps many, free church bodies do believe that something went rather theologically wrong in the second century church and that those errors continued to be deepened in the ensuing centuries. In fact, Protestants of almost all stripes believe that the church in fact lost the apostolic preaching of salvation by faith alone. Some churches in this tradition also rejected any involvement of their people in government or in any social structures of their world; such views may likewise be regarded as variants in the free church movement as a whole. However, as a personal viewpoint, I do not include such extreme views here as part of “free church.” Nor do I reject or begrudge the authors of the volume, Free Church and Early Church when they chide the free churches for abandoning the early church, the fathers and the history in the name of massive post-first-century apostacy.922 Their effort to urge the free churches to re-think attitudes to the historic church are welcome, although not necessarily conclusive or final. The current essay is rather interested in church-state relations; but it does seek a place among the views of the free church tradition in its basic form, i.e., the freedom of the churches from government regulation and coercion.



920

Calvin was not an advocate of total dominance of state by church , but he did seek certain kinds of religiously based regulation of Geneva and its churches by the Geneva Council. A recent study of some aspects of Calvin’s relations with the Geneva Council is B. Dennert, “John Calvin’s Movement from the Bible to Theology and Practice,” JETS 54 (2011), pp. 345-365. 921 For more details on Virginia’s church laws and intolerance of other sects and groups, see S. Ahlstrom, Religious History, pp.186-187, 192-193; for documents containing the Virginia colony’s religious intolerance laws, see H. S. Smith, R. T. Handy, and L. A. Loetscher, American Christianity: An Historical Interpretation with Representative Documents, 2 vols (New York: Scribner’s, 1960), 1:41-44, 48-51. 922 D. H. Williams (ed), Free Church and Early Church: Bridging the Historical Divide (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).

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The Anabaptist movement of the Reformation Era, as a form of free church thought, began in Zurich with a group of men who had come to believe that faith in Christ alone for salvation had nullified their Catholic infant baptisms. They met together on January 21, 1525 at the home of Felix Manz near Zurich’s Grossmunster Church where Zwingli preached. After prayer, George Blaurock asked Conrad Grebel to (re)baptize him. Blaurock then baptized the others in the group. With this event the Anabaptist (rebaptizing) movement began.923 Its leaders also grew increasingly frustrated with Zurich’s reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, over his willingness to take guidance from the Zurich city council on church practices, especially Catholic elements needing reformation like the mass and the Lord’s Supper. These Anabaptists had come to agreement that the Scriptures, not the Zurich council were their appropriate source of religious authority. This conflict led to rapid development of the view that government had no authority to determine or regulate church practice, but that all guidance for the church should come from the Scriptures alone. This was the root of the Anabaptist’s view that church and state should be separate. Estep notes after describing further struggles during the later months of 1523: By December 19, Zwingli had completely capitulated to the judgment and authority of the council, arriving at an impossible position as far as Grebel was concerned. In the eyes of the Brethren he had compromised revealed truth in deference to the constituted political authority . . . Harold Bender detects in the break between Zwingli and his youthful critics the beginning of the free church movement. ‘ The decision of Conrad Grebel to refuse to accept the jurisdiction of the Zurich council over the Zurich church is one of the high moments of history, for however obscure it was , it marked the beginning of the modern “free church” movement.’924

Clarifying the matter further, he adds: Their attitude toward authority both united and divided the radicals (Anabaptists). They were agreed in rejecting the role of the state in matters of religion but they were not agreed regarding the ultimate authority in matters of faith and the Christian life. . . . (of the more radical Anabaptists like the Zwickau prophets and Thomas Muntzer, [‘the inspirationists,’] who claimed direct revelations by the Spirit): The inspirationists were not primarily concerned with the visible church. With the Anabaptists, they shared antipathy to reformation by civil authority.925

The free church idea arose very early in colonial Massachusetts as a minority in which Roger Williams’ experienced intolerant Congregationalism within the Massachusetts Bay Colony. These events occurred only a little more than a hundred years after the origin of the the free church idea in Zurich. Williams was born in England in 1603 and was educated at Cambridge, a Puritan center at the time. When he arrived in Boston in 1631

923

W. R. Estep, The Anabaptist Story: An Introduction to Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism, 3rd Rev Ed (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), pp. 13-14. 924 Ibid., p. 18, citing H. Bender, Conrad Grebel (Goshen IN: Mennonite Historical Society, 1950), p. 18. 925 Ibid., p. 22.

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he already had strong convictions about complete separation from the Church of England. Williams also believed the Bay Colony churches should separate their civil from their ecclesiastical estates;926 these views he held in common with the Anabaptist tradition. The Massachusetts Bay settlers, however, were Congregationalists who continued to adhere to the Church of England and could not accept Williams’ views of separation between the civil and ecclesiastical orders. They believed theirs was the true church order and that it must be kept pure, that they were the New Israel in the New Canaan, and that both voting rights and holding civil offices required church membership. They also justified taking land from the Indians (with some exceptions) since the Indians were the New Canaanites blocking the Puritan possession of the Promised Land.927 Williams disagreed with this Puritan construction of their new (American) world, arguing rather that church and state should be separate. Accordingly he was tried for heresy and banished from Massachusetts Bay whence he fled to Rhode Island to found a colony there on land purchased from Indians. In 1643 he returned to England to seek a charter for his Rhode Island colony, and by 1644 he had in hand a charter for Providence Plantation. During this year in England he wrote and published The Bloudy Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (July 15, 1644)—a scathing attack on the practices of the Bay Colony that anticipated the revolutionary era’s use of the term “conscience.” The work included extracts from Scripture and Reason, an anonymous work of 1620 written by an imprisoned heretic arguing similarly against government persecution for reasons of conscience. Williams also drew on Answer to Scripture and Reason by John Cotton,928 who by 1644 was a teacher in the Congregational Church in Boston. In Chapters XXXVI-XL, Williams includes the following points: Fifthly, All Civill States with their Officers of justice in their respective constitutions and administrations are proved essentially Civill, and therefore not Judges, Governours or Defendours of the Spirituall or Christian state and Worship. Sixthly, It is the will and command of God that (since the coming of his Sonne the Lord Jesus) a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and worships, bee granted to all men in all Nations and Countries: and they are only to bee fought against with that Sword which is only (in Soule matters) able to conquer, to wit, the Sword of Gods Spirit, the Word of God. Seventhly, The State of the Land of Israel, the Kings and people thereof in Peace & War, is proved figurative and ceremonial, and no patterne nor president (sic) for any kingdom or civill state in the world to follow. Ninthly, In holding an inforced uniformity of Religion in a civill state, wee must necessarily disclaime our desires and hopes of the Jewes conversion to Christ. Tenthly, An inforced uniformity of Religion throughout a Nation or civill state, confounds the Civill and Religious, denies the principles of Christianity and civility, and that Jesus Christ is come in the Flesh.

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926

Gaustad, Documentary History, 1:114. Noll, Hatch and Marsden, The Search for Christian America, p. 36. 928 Smith, Handy and Loetscher, American Christianity, 1:151. 927

Twelfthly, lastly, true civility and Christianity may both flourish in a state or Kingdome, notwithstanding the permission of divers and contrary consciences, either of Jew or Gentile.929

William’s thoughts are Anabaptist in tone and details: church and state should be separate: the “sword” has no place in any enforcement of Christianity. Nor was this view a minority of one destined to fade away in the course of time. His views were rather prophetic. Between 1659 and 1661, four Quakers were hanged in Boston by the Congregational churchstate establishment;930 but this was only one case of widespread persecution of dissidents in Christianity-by-law colonies. Quakers and Baptists were also persecuted. Nonetheless, Williams’ separation of church and state prevailed in his Rhode Island Colony. By 1686, William Penn was taking similar positions in Pennsylvania and establishing the proprietary colony’s government on these ideas. Penn’s emphasis on toleration for conscience sake attracted not only persecuted Quakers, but abused Mennonites along with Presbyterians and others. When New Netherlands became English New York in 1664 there was already a variety of diverse religious groups in the colony. In 1687, the Catholic governor of New York reported its religious make-up to include French Calvinists, German Lutherans, Congregationalists, Quakers, Mennonites, Baptists, Roman Catholics and Jews. The English attempted to “establish” Anglicanism in New York, but the extreme minority of actual Anglicans made it the established church only in pretense; the English government paid homage to the Dutch Reformed majority by compensating six Reformed ministers in New York City. In fact, the situation in New York was so diverse that toleration was the only possibility short of chaos. Hence while a formal Anglican establishment existed, disestablishment was the reality by the facts on the ground. In this manner tolerance became the practical disestablishment of religion in New York, and this on-the-ground situation fed easily into the Jefferson-Madison church-state separation thinking. Similar varieties of belief and toleration also prevailed in New Jersey and Delaware.931 Not all free church movements were Anabaptist in doctrine or creed, however, as the preceding account shows. The early movement grew into Mennonites, Baptists, some Puritans, Quakers and Brethren groups. It later spread further into Europe through the work of Methodists on the continent, and influenced the Scottish Free Church separation from the established Church of Scotland in 1843. Similarly the Christian Reformed Church in America originated within the state Reformed Church of the Netherlands among leaders who sought freedom from the Dutch government’s control of its state church.932 A cadre of Reformed ministers had come to regard the state as interfering, disrupting and corrupting the Reformed Church; one of them, H. P. Scholte, led a large group to present day Iowa where they founded Pella. Likewise the nineteenth century saw free churches developing in the Scandinavian countries as well as in England, which had granted toleration in 1689, although not disestablishing the Anglican Church. In Scotland the “disruption” of 1843

929

Ibid., p. 153. Gaustad, Documentary History, 1:114. 931 This summery sketch is from W. S. Hudson and J. Corrigan, Religion in America, 6th Ed (Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), pp. 59-60. 932 L. Oostendorp, H. P. Scholte: Leader of the Secession of 1834 and Founder of Pella [IA] (Franeker, The Netherlands: T. Wever, 1964) includes many details of this secession. 930

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eventuated in the formation of the Free Church of Scotland. James Bannerman, whose ecclesiology was alluded to elsewhere in these essays, was a principal ecclesiologist of the new Scottish Presbyterian Free Church and Professor in that church’s New College, Edinburgh. Bannerman offers views of the church-state relationship which for practical church-state separation issues are about the same as those outlined above in principle. But as his argument develops, more and more compromises with the idea of at least a single government-established denomination are made; he does, however, advocate tolerance of others. Bannerman argues: That the Christian Church and the civil state are essentially different, and rightfully independent the one of the other, [can] be satisfactorily demonstrated from various considerations. . . . To the civil government belongs the power of the sword, as the instrumentality adapted to its purposes. But the Church of Christ, having been established, not to prevent or redress human violence and civil wrong, but rather to promote the grand purpose of God’s grace toward a fallen world, is armed with no such coercive power. . . . This fundamental distinction between the kinds of power wielded respectively by the Church and the state, draws a broad line of demarcation between the two societies, as essentially separate and independent. . . . The Church has no power to assume to itself the powers and prerogatives of the civil magistrate, because those powers and prerogatives, being civil and coercive, are wholly alien to its character and jurisdiction.

These cases in point illustrate the long development of the idea of separation of church and state. That American founders in the sense of colonial era immigrants seeking freedom of religion from persecuting European states came here in part to establish Christianity is a reality, even though motivations were mixed with commercial and other economic interests, and their sailing ships, including the Mayflower brought with them many non-Christians—about half of the Mayflower passengers. Their zeal in establishing church-states in New England, New York and Virginia, as well as in other southern colonies, carried with it self-defeating elements of intolerance and persecution. Those elements generated reactions toward freedom for all religions and sects or denominations without distinction. This contrary view began in America with Roger Williams in Massachusetts, grew with William Penn’s tolerance for all in Pennsylvania after 1681, went through a somewhat checkered history in New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland, and finally came to a principled separation of church and state in Virginia and then in the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution. It is clear that the church-state separation idea of the Constitution’s First Amendment had undergone a long development, although not always in explicit church-state separation language. Sometimes it was discussed in long documents on toleration, usually supported with appeals to the right of individual consciences on the ground that religious convictions were a matter between human beings and God alone. For this stream of thought, matters of religious conscience were considered beyond the reach of the state and state churches. Sometimes tolerance was simply a matter of practice over a long period as in New York. The free church movement in Europe and The United Kingdom continued seeking freedom from government manipulations of its “established” (state) church. Whatever the form, the constitutional founders had a long history to study and on which to base their views, including and especially the sorry history of self-defeating church-state establishments 564

in the colonies.933 Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state” was not a new invention and meant pretty much what it sounded like, considering the history of its development, and the religious intolerance and persecution that generated it. The churches in America, therefore, are in a unique position not only to maintain their distinctive doctrines and practices without interference, but also to listen and learn from each other in the exchange of variant views—an exchange often heated and sometimes hateful. If unity movements rightly see this diversity as an evil to be overcome, they might also consider the creativity and newness of insight into passages and texts crucial to each others’ views; new insights and re-thinking of Christian ideas is a major benefit of free exegesis, and free exchange and debate of theological ideas. By the same token, Christians in a free state are also in a unique position to think new thoughts about government because they are free citizens of both realms. Unfortunately, the extreme creativity and Scripture-searching that has bred new theologies and theological corrections in America, has not been matched by creative new thinking about government. Not only Americans generally, but American Christians as well are mostly dead in the political water, except for limited issue-specific crusades and hot political emotions. When their thinking does jump traditional tracks, it often reverts to the notion that the way forward is return to the past. Premillennial dispensationalism is especially vulnerable to this temptation due to its carelessness about government and culture drawn from Second-Coming-tomorrow beliefs and a corresponding disinterest in its history. This scene is further aggravated by neglect of history in America’s educational institutions which are more preoccupied with studies aimed at economic gain and prosperity than in issues of religion and values. Clearly, free thought, free speech and a free church are everyone’s business in America. A Christian Theology of History? A deeply influential factor in evangelical perceptions of government is the general view of the direction of history—its movement for the better or for the worse. Or, to put it a bit differently, what is the moral direction of governments in history? Or what is the direction of their gross movements in relation to the world’s divinely established moral order? Are they generally grading upward or downward? The logic of this issue is a determinant of the quality of participation or disinterest in governments under which Christians live, since one’s up-or-down view sharply influences attitude, which, when articulated can become a view. Millenarian Christians are generally pre-disposed to a regressive view of history and its events due to the influence of biblical “worse and worse” statements combined with what appears as a final, massive, in-history nightmare before the Second Coming—known in Scripture and millenarian theology as the “Great Tribulation.” The “downer” before the Second Coming is often explained from Revelation’s scenes as the climax of a series of anticipations or adumbrations already showing in events prior to The Tribultion as in Russian, European or Middle Eastern events and affairs—all bad, of course. This skepticism about history in turn is influenced by the serious view of human sinfulness embraced by biblically informed Christians, especially when they almost daily

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Butler, “Revolutionary America,” pp. 190-196.

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think about what they don’t like in the world or its politics. In reaction, the thoughtimpulse is that history under human sinfulness could not go any direction but down. Two biblical books (Daniel, Revelation) do think of a latter-day evil empire which seems to climax a series of other (bad) empires. It is easy to suppose that each of the four kingdoms reviewed in Daniel 2 and 7 grows worse in sequence. “Worse,” however, is only one possible way among several to look at these kingdoms. An equally viable way is to see them as more and more powerful, or more and more extensive (or both), or more and more complex or mixed; or one can look to the value of the metals or their usefulness.934 In Daniel 7, the unique feature, it is true, is that the last kingdom produces a singular anti-God figure which feeds the New Testament descriptions of Antichrist. The kingdoms, however, are not total world empires, but those of the Middle Eastern region. For these reasons it may be doubted that the theme is simply a general “worse and worse” direction of all human history. On any reckoning the Daniel texts do see a major downer near the end of this age; but the near-end downer could occur after a general “up” in the total world flow despite observable declines along the way. In other words, the major nightmare before the Second Coming and kingdom is not necessarily proof of a supposed over-all down-trend, i.e., it does not assume that history in general is also in a gross decline. On the other hand, there is a case to be made for a progressive growth of human history in decency and quality of life935—a trend-up, despite serious declines along the way let alone the anticipated horror brought on by Anti-Christ at the end of the church age, and even though the “mystery of lawlessness” is already at work in the world. Since there is no specific text or passage that states this concept or at least its possibility, the idea of history’s up-trend will have to be constructed by inference from various kinds of history-specifics, theological realities and history-focused biblical texts. These ideas can be summarized and briefly commented rather than detailed. The considerations favoring a progressive or developmental view of history may be grouped into four different types of realities. The first group is a series of observations about history generally. It consists of (1) the gradual growth of democracies and corresponding decline, but certainly not yet disappearance, of tyrannies and dictatorships in the flow of history. Even more striking is the almost total abolition of heavy-handed monarchies and their replacement by constitutional, democratic or symbolic monarchies. Growth of democracies has gradually overwhelmed totalitarian governments. Corresponding to the growth of democracies (2) is the gradual decline of harmful social practices and attitudes of the ancient world, most notably the

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Daniel 7:7 appears to support the power reading (“powerful . . . cruched and devoured . . . trampled”) from the analogy four beasts. For a still very worthwhile discussion that pays careful attention to detail, see C. F. Keil, Biblical Commentary on the Book of Daniel, trans M. G. Easton (Grand Rapids : Eerdmans, 1955), in the chapters of Daniel cited (2, 7). Other commentators have other preferences. The issue of up-trend or down-trend of the whole is not germane to premillennialism as such, although many millenarians favor a down trend. 935 Two worthwhile works of mid- and later twentieth century are J. Baillie, The Belief in Progress (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951 and R. Nisbet, The History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980). Baillie’s is a smaller work, but beautifully written and a good read. He is not an unqualified progressivist, however. He thinks progress has occurred, but mostly in knowledge, science, and social law. He has doubts about progress in religious and moral matters. Nisbet is viewed in some circles as “conservative,” because he embraced economic freedom as a major development in the progress of history toward improved human social conditions.

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decline of the ancient world’s division of populations into slave and free, the growth and economic vitality of the middle class and its workers, and the trend away from conquering monarchies and, after 1950, colonialism. (3) Also of importance is the growth of law and natural rights thought and applications, especially in documents rooting rights in natural law along with proclamations and policies of international peace, and human rights and cooperation organizations—all still quite imperfectly effective. (4) A fourth element is the decline—but not yet disappearance—of racism and race-linked prejudices, and a gradually more positive egalitarianism of all races. Such movements appear to be expressions of the providence of a good God. A second set of concepts encouraging an up-trend in history is a set of ideas about God characteristic of the three great monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the latter being the most inhibited of the three due to its legalistic character and tendency toward jihad when under perceived or assumed threat, persecution or constraint. These general concepts, most forcefully articulated in Judaism and Christianity, are the following. (5) The gradual growth of monotheism—the belief in one God who is both transcendent (out there) and immanent (down here) in his relations with the humanity he created. Affirmation of a single God overcomes the ancient and/or pagan world’s mythologies and legends about the conflicts and passions of multiple gods, especially the idea of different gods as patrons of single nations against other nations and their own gods. The idea of a single God increases the possibilities for a more unified world at peace under one single sovereign deity. Variant thoughts of the nature of the one God, however, tend to create internal conflicts among monotheistic religions—struggles that have proved hard to overcome. (6) Also of great significance is the idea that the One God is good, and that his severe judgments of humanity in history are instrumental to a consequent or emergent good—the notion that evil is self-defeating and its large-scale defeats produce or tend toward new or better social wholes. Human revulsion at genocides and mass abuse generate thought about how nations ought to treat each other and sometimes generate documents of international law, which itself emerged from the stream of Christian thought. Often such overcoming movements, combined with clarifications and definitions of common values from their classical and biblical expressions, moves people and nations along the path toward a moral civil order. (7) Equally forceful in thinking of an up-trending human history is the theological idea that a single good, morally-ordering God is a power for good in his provident supervision and governance of human and national movements emerging from the basic notion of justice. Clearly, deviations occur as in the appearance of spasmodic genocides and oppressive economic systems, or deviant and abusive self-centered tyrannies. But democratic impulses have a way of righting these wrongs, especially when leaders conclude from their own perception that systems are oppressive or demoralizing and cannot generate economic gain or justice. (8) Another gain in thought about God’s providence in history occurs when one adopts Augustine’s rejection of cycles in favor of the lineal character of history. Augustine thought cyclical notions of gross movements inevitably led to pessimism and heavy discouragements to the human spirit. He correctly perceived that a lineal perception of the chain of human events would free the race of the depressing cycles of Greek thought. Repetitions in history do occur; but the insight here is that even if history repeats itself at times and in some sense, the whole shows a gross overall movement of its own. Even with its repetitions and dips, movement is an advancing construct of the activity 567

of the one good God and his active providence in evoking the world’s moral order along an upward but sometimes bumpy line. (9) Christian thought—whether taking the form of no-future-millennium as in amillennialism, of Christ’s-coming-before-the-millennium as in premillennialism, or of Christ’s-coming-after-the-millennium as in postmillennialism —posits a goal of history toward which God’s providence is moving it—the kingdom of God. This is the case whether thought of as occurring here on earth at the end of history, or finally in a divide between heaven and earth and hell after the end of history. The pre- and postmillennial views have the merit against amillennialism, that they embrace a thoroughly earth-scene climax to the human event chain. But amillennialism too with its affirmation of a final judgment and resurrection sustains a lineal-climactic view of history. A third set of ideas relates to Christianity’s distinctive influence on history, in both social advocacies and influence on the idea of historical progress since Augustine.936 These factors in thought about history’s up-trend come from the person and work of Christ, and his influence on the world through gospel and church. (10) The example of Christ’s compassionate miracles inevitably casts its influence on the compassion activity of Christians. Sometimes Christian leaders through the centuries have been caught in the most abhorrent acts of cruelty and coercion. Nonetheless, and in parallel, the influence of Jesus’ example began to exert its power in creative Christian compassion from the beginning. (11) What made the miracles possible was the reality of God incarnating himself in a human being of perfect moral character. This moral example in its simplicity and profundity, and its endlessly reincarnating force in the people of God, expresses itself in the idea that they too, are representatives and cases of this same Christ working in the world through his Spirit. (12) Christ in human flesh not only acted as an example of selfless love, he overcame any suggestion that he was a lone, isolated case of God’s love. Rather he attached to his acts his teaching about love, and defined it in a way that put one’s self and one’s neighbor on precisely the same level of value—loving one’s neighbor as one’s self; he also supported this teaching with a wisdom saying to the effect that we should do to our neighbor as we would have him do to us. (13) Despite their apparent or alleged abandonment of the apostles saving gospel of Christ, the Christian fathers of the second and following centuries developed the notion of Christianity as a superior and massively detailed moral system compared to life in the Roman Empire. This reality was recognized by some thoughtful Romans; but they feared that to adopt it would incur loss of the favor of their old gods, and so continued to resist until the time of Constantine. (14) This comprehensive moral and ethical system in its details produced strong motivations to elevate every area of human life and culture when the ideas were faithfully applied.937 One example was the influence of Christianity on medicine and care of the sick, including the founding of hospitals and more egalitarian-tending universities; the latter in turn stimulated science, research, technologies and other inventions helpful to human life. Christianity’s ameliorating influence on culture is certainly in evidence. A fourth type of thought is more biblical, but mainly confined to the Old Testament, especially the prophet who speaks in the second half of Isaiah (Isaiah 40-66). In this prophet are specific windows to the kind of ameliorating activity of God that makes growth, 568

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Nisbet, Idea of Progress. Stark, Rise of Christianity, discusses major elements of this story.

gain and benefit occur. (15) In this portion of the Bible one idea after another unfolds in which Israel is prophetically projected to be made by God and his Servant-Messiah into something more than it ever was before. (16) In the process Israel will draw all the nations of the earth into its gains under the creative and new-making work of its God. In contrast, John Baillie, in discussing Stoic expressions of Greek and Roman cyclical thinking about history, cites a remarkable passage from the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius—a Stoic thinker—about the monotonous sameness of history. The rational soul . . . traverses the whole universe and the encompassing void, and traces the plan of it; it reaches out also into the infinity of time, comprehends the periodic regeneration of all things, and realizes that our children will see nothing new, just as our fathers saw nothing different (my italics); so that in a sense the man of forty years of age, if he has any sense at all, has, in view of the sameness of things, seen all that has been or ever shall be (my italics).938

These remarks, as Baillie notes, characterize the ancient world’s cyclic view of history— “nothing new,” “nothing different,” “the sameness of things,” “seen all that has been or ever shall be.” The piece from M. Aurelius is an enlightening clue to why the repeated newness thoughts of Second Isaiah are so significantly different in the ancient world. The Israelite linear view of history—at its most acute and stunning in Isaiah 40-66—is one of only a very few enlarged statements of the idea of newness in the ancient world, against the monotonous cyclicalism that knows nothing new in human time; it is also found in lesser expressions in other parts of the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah’s concepts of newness rather encourage a lineal-inclining view of history under God’s providence. (17) Isaiah’s emphasis is that a time will come—and in the prophet’s own time is in its historical beginning—when the Lord himself will make all things new in a new heavens and new earth. The major themes of this promised future history include repeated prophetic statements about the creation of new things (48:1-11), a new exodus through the desert (43:14-21), a new Israel (49:8-21), a new covenant (49:8 and repeatedly through 61:8), a new Jerusalem (62:1-12), and finally a whole new heavens and new earth (65:7-66:22). The latter things are like the earlier things of God, but new and greater and more complete and full. The texts are not about heaven; they are about future, in-history events that mark a final state of human history and which are already beginning.

(18) That these events are already beginning for Isaiah is clear from the repeated references to Cyrus the Persian (44:28; 45:1; cf 45:13; 41:25; 46:11), thought of as the instrument for the beginning of the new world. Isaiah speaks several times over of the fall of Babylon to Cyrus. He calls Israel to leave its Babylonian captivity and return to its land. He foresees its spiritual renewal and the-overflow of its new blessings to the nations who in turn come to bless the redeemed Israel. Israel is urged to renounce its idols as part of its new nationhood and spiritual life. However, the near future return from Babylon to the Land of Israel is constantly mixed with much longer range details which go far beyond the return from Babylon, and finally far beyond even the New Testament. The prophet saw the new world arising out of history 938

Baillie, The Belief in Progress, pp. 46-48, citing M. Aurelius, To Himself, xi, 1.

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as one bundle of God’s acts. In the process of time the prophecy “telescoped” out into many centuries and is still not completely fulfilled. This concept of a gradually unfolding new world is projected to be entirely within history and on the current or new earth with a new heavens as well, whatever this means in detail.

These biblical and historical realities project an up-grade, lineal view of history—a perspective punctuated by divine interventions for moving the whole world forward to a divinely determined climax, with Israel and its Servant-Messiah as renewers of the earth. Through this Israel-centered sequence of events, the blessings promised to Abraham and his offspring for the Gentile world will come to pass. Israel becomes the mediator nation, pulling the world up with its own rise to perfection. Isaiah’s references to Cyrus the Persian (Isa 44:28; 45:1) occur at the beginning of a long poem on this ruler and Yahweh’s relation to him; the poem is the Bible’s widest open window on how God’s providence works for good with an earthly non-Israelite king who does not even know him. Here in one passage are the ingredients of a developing new world under the providence of God, beginning in Isaiah’s time with Cyrus, with elements expanding in some historical form or other until they become the new heavens and new earth. The ingredients are: prosperity mingled with disaster; salvation and righteousness; the sovereignty of God over the process; astonishment at God’s wonderful works; “things to come”; a new and rebuilt Jerusalem; the salvation of the Gentiles; the hidden God of providence;939 elimination of idolatry, sin and rebellion under the reign of the One God; and finally a mediator-messiah who replaces the temporary Cyrus and makes the whole plan operative. There is nothing here of gloomy regression. Rather the new world emerges from the same history and promises as the old world in one continuous line of development and fulfillment,940 and punctuated with God’s saving activity. And so . . . this essay arrives at a multi-factored perspective. The dearth of creative evangelical works on government was a phase of Fundamentalist thinking, while the larger stake of Christianity in governments and the history of states was all along a subject of larger reflection through the ages. The dearth is part of the decline in evangelical interest in government in America, even though it was not necessarily a permanent part of the evangelical witness. In the twentieth century, internal forces among American millenarian Christians continued to inhibit constructive contributions to the subject. Still, despite inhibitions, all Christians have biblical precedents for thought about government. Government, although limited to monarchy in Scripture, nonetheless occupies large segments of Old Testament thought, while the New Testament also contains texts to encourage thinking and action. Christians

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Baillie, Belief in Progress, p. 152. Nisbet, Idea of Progress, argues throughout and repeatedly that the idea of progress is through and through a creation of Christian thought. He stresses throughout the book that it is a consequence in both thought and historical reality of the providence of God, and he cites numerous examples of historians and philosophers of upward progress in human history who recognize it as nothing less than a work of God. One wonders where recent Christian theology has been on this point.

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have a basic central core of ideas about government, as well as more or less positive but sometimes hurtful perspectives when in power, and other more negative attitudes when out of power. In America, Christians are bracketed within an intended constitutional churchstate separation and a non-Christian government in which a useful freedom of the church from political meddling has stimulated productive, varied and vibrant—if sometimes conflicting—forms of Christianity. The main architects of the intended separation of church and state who were in positions to be activist on the issue were evangelical minister John Witherspoon, President of the College of New Jersey, and Virginians Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Much of American church life is in the free church tradition inherited from the Anabaptist sector of the Reformation—a major source of church-state separation thought; this view—which prevailed in the constitutional period—was also stimulated by reaction to harsh colonial church states dominated by theocratic views of the two powers, and opposed to democracy and church-state separation. In certain branches of the free church tradition, historic millenarian beliefs also thrive, while these same beliefs encourage negative thinking about government and its activities. Elements of Christian church-state thinking encourage equilibrium between church and state, while an appreciable body of ideas within Christians’ faith also encourage Christian belief in an upward trend in history—an idea that could be of great stimulus and hope for Christian political thought. Christians generally share with governments a set of goal- and means-values. These values do in fact encourage participation where such goals and the means of reaching them are within the scope of both church and government, including the interests of Christians who embrace dispensational millenarianism. With this observation, we turn to the details of a convergent values view of the church and state relation (Essay XIII).

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ESSAY XIII THE CONVERGENT INTERESTS OF CHURCH AND STATE The Common Value-Goals of Two Created Powers by Dale S. DeWitt The title of this essay is not intended to suggest that all interests of church and government converge; it does mean that some common societal goals of the two entities can be identified, and that enough likenesses of meaning and interest exist that the two can work together toward their achievement, even while co-existing in a principled church and state separation.941 The Scottish Free Church ecclesiologist James Bannerman—a forceful but adaptive and nuanced church-state separatist referred to elsewhere in these essays—thought there were after all “certain ends of an important kind in common” from which to infer a “friendly connection” between church and state.942 He even states, “there is a large class of duties as between man and man, and not as between man and God, which it is the joint province and end of both the Church and the state to promote.”943 He admits that the First Table of the Law (the first five commandments) “will not admit to appertain in any sense to the civil magistrate,” while the Second Table (commandments six through ten) states commandments “which no one can pretend to deny are the concern of the state as much as of the Church.”944 This is already a (Mosaic) law-centered step into the issue; beyond this he does not clarify what he means by a “large class of duties.” The

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R. J. Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), p. 35, gives thought to convergences of Christianity and culture or Christianity and partisan politics. This point is also similar to John Witherspoon’s thinking on church and state in his own revolutionary era context. 942 J. Bannerman, The Church of Christ: A Treatise on the Nature, Powers, Ordinances, Discipline and Government of the Christian Church, 2 vols (1869; reprint by Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh, 1960), 1:114. The same idea is expressed more recently by G. Marsden, “Return to Christian America: A Political Agenda?” in M. Noll, N. Hatch and G. Marsden, The Search for Christian America (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard, 1989), pp. 134-137. 943 Ibid., p. 115. 944 Ibid. Since it is possible that some might care to deny this, a better place to begin is with nonChristian political thinkers and theorists, especially ancient, pre- or otherwise out-biblical expressions of human values as attempted below.

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approach adopted here is not limited to the specific commandments of the Second Table. It does include much of their content while seeking more generally for similar common values in the humanitarian thinking of political philosophers and theorists looking at the common need-goals of humanity, and then for the same values in relevant biblical sources. This was also John Witherspoon’s method during the constitutional period of American development. This essay looks for evidence of confluent end-goal humanitarian values in parallel between non-Christian political thinkers and related scriptural concepts.945 As in the foregoing two essays, this one is mainly interested in dispensational millenarian Christians and a biblical-theological perspective on their participation, given the negative history they have inherited from the Fundamentalists of the early twentieth century. What are the convergent values, how do we find them, and how might our re-engagement in political life be thought of along positive, constructive lines? The Problem of Identifying Values I am writing this segment of the essay on Martin Luther King Day, January 17, 2011. Last evening (Sunday), in a routine local television news note, the reporter spoke about tomorrow’s King memorial and King’s commitment to justice and equality. He could have added freedom as an allusion to the freedom marches and speeches of the 1960s civil rights movement, especially King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the Washington Mall. In another instance only two days later, Neal Conan on “Talk of the Nation (NPR),”946 took a phone call for a guest actor who had worked in a movie about escape from Stalin’s Siberian Gulag; the caller mentioned spontaneously that “all men want shelter, happiness and love.” Nearly two-hundred years earlier, Jefferson had spoken in the Declaration of Independence of all men being created equal with the natural human rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as interests of government. Just these few samples yield common end-values—here (already), justice, equality, life, happiness, freedom, security (shelter) and love. How is it that human beings so easily and naturally articulate these values?947 It appears to be by a kind of common consensus. The first several Amendments to the U. S. Constitution outlined the rights of Americans, thinking of natural human rights which could be named, enumerated and defined. It may be something of a mystery to many people how the idea of a set or list of natural human rights developed in western thought; biblicist Christians cannot imagine any other source than their Scriptures. In fact, however, it is not really much of a mystery; eighteenth

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Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square, p. 35, speaks of a “happy convergence” between Christianity and culture.” He means this, however, in a somewhat different sense than this essay, i.e., he is referring to liberal Christian political thought and biblical political thought. He thinks “the left side of the Democratic Party just happens to take positions that are also mandated by Christian faith”—almost but not quite my meaning. 946 “Talk of the Nation,” Tuesday, January 18, 2011. 947 This way is reminiscent of John Witherspoon’s method of rationally determining a list of social values for a government and its people, as in Lectures on Moral Philosophy, cited and discussed by McAllister, “John Witherspoon: Academic Advocate for American Freedom,” in A Miscellany of American Christianity: Essays in Honor of H. Shelton Smith, ed S. C. Henry (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1961), pp. 194-224.

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century thinkers read through a long history of development of these ideas beginning substantially in Greece with Plato and Aristotle several centuries before Christ. It is not altogether clear to what extent the same values were also influenced by biblical inputs since several such abstract values are also found in the Christian Scriptures, but in the context of redemption, and not of civil government. In Scripture too they sometimes appear as finalor end-point (telic or teleological, in theological language) benefits of Christianity and the biblical gospel of salvation. Some Christians who embrace such values, similarly to the reporter mentioned above and Thomas Jefferson, also think of them as end-goals of the human quest for a decent society, as in the case of C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity. How the apostles adopted such values as end-goals, beyond which there are no more human civil benefits to be gained, is even more obscure; but the reality is that several of them were passed along in the thought stream from the leading Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle, several centuries before the beginning of Christianity. This is not their only source since they also have parallels in the Old Testament (as well as the New)—a part of the Bible completed before Aristotle’s time. So we are dealing with a more or less complex history of human well-being ideas moving along in the ancient world. These scattered examples of certain abstract end-goals frequently spoken of by world citizens of almost every stripe reveal how natural it is for them to think of such matters in the context of participation in political-social life and thought. In fact, one may pick up any newspaper or news magazine just about any day or week, and in reading become strikingly aware how easily and often Americans speak of such end-goal abstractions. People of millenarian beliefs (including its dispensational form) also think in these terms since they too belong to the body politic even though they usually value the Second Coming and future kingdom of peace more than worldly government as the time for mature fullness of such values. Especially in times of perceived danger (legislated health care, gun control, abortion, gay rights, inflated debt, and perceived over-taxation, to cite some at the moment), they too participate in the civil process by articulating one or more of the values (freedom, life or peace), depending on which ones they perceive to be under threat. For example, peace often appears as an end-goal when they feel warweary; among African-Americans, freedom became central as opposed to slavery and segregation, while life became important in the wake of capital punishment and abortion freedom. Without doubt, millenarian Christians, despite their reluctant participation after 1925, do actually participate in the human values process, since they are inevitably part of it by their humanity alone. For the purpose of the point here, it does not matter which value they may emphasize; the important point is that they always have and still do talk about such matters along with all others as though they value them. From 1860 to 2010 they mostly spoke about freedom because of the obvious link since Moody’s time between conservative Republicans and the business community. During the same period, others concerned more about distributive justice than freedom sympathized with Progressives and Democrats. This discussion means that one can see the abstract end-point values by thoughtfully watching for them to appear in public political or social discourse, even if secular or humanistic; one can also find them in the Bible. This way of spotting the elemental societal values is remarkably simple: watch for them to happen in public (or private) speech or literary expressions and you will see them all the time; at the same time, anyone may tease 575

them out of biblical texts by careful attention to detail, thought patterns and implications. This might be called a speech-phenomenon plus biblical method of finding them; but this is not the only way. Theologians of various stripes have also tried to identify them in the dark recesses of innate ideas in the human mind, by their development in the moral theology thought-stream, or by appeal to “natural law,” thought of as a pool of concepts divinely implanted in the human psyche or heart based on Romans 2:15 and emerging as positive law.948 To see what could be found in non-Christian expressions of such end-point or telic values, the web sites of The Humanist Manifesto and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations were checked. In the Humanist Manifesto—certainly no Christian document—there are references to such values as “human advancement and happiness,” “highest ethical values,” “human freedom and dignity,” and the “well-being of humanity as a whole.” Allowing room for differences in how Paul Kurtz (author of the Manifesto) would define these values and how others including Christians would define them, the similarity in what the Manifesto wants for humanity and what Christians have historically wanted, as judged by the end-values of both, are not very different. On the other hand, there is a very great difference between Christians and non-Christians on how humanity gets to such end-goals. The Humanist Manifesto argues it is by scientific and technical knowledge. The United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights is very thorough in its list of rights, but makes very few statements about the modes of securing them in actual life. Christians might disagree with some of its 30 rights, or how they are conceived; but many are the same ones about which this essay will be thinking. If one argues that even these non-Christian declarations are influenced by historic Christian values—and to a degree it is probably true—the point does not explain how Greek and Roman philosophers before Christianity came by them unless they had the Hebrew Scriptures. On any reckoning, no one had those writings before 1200 B. C. since they did not yet exist. Still, various ancient Near Eastern peoples also had and articulated similar end-point values without the Hebrew Bible. How did such values gain currency in the preIsraelite Near East and in pre-Christian Greek and Roman philosohers? The traditional theological answer is that law existed as eternal law in God, was copied into natural law in man at creation, and emerged from human experience as positive laws and their values in history.949 The quest of this essay, however, is for appearance of the values and some situational occasions that make men articulate them. One can easily see that the mechanism by which the values surface is a process of thought about what “ought” to be, then articulation of the “need” of some social group, then the growth of need-thought into “rights,” then the drift of rights into “demands,” and finally the draft of law and its legislative process publicly establishing them—or some such process.950 For the

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No evangelical of the revolutionary-constitutional era made this point with more energy than evangelical John Witherspoon, the President of Princeton University, delegate to the Continental Congress, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and participant in the New Jersey Constitutional Ratification Convention. Witherspoon, however, did not seek the values for government primarily from Scriptural sources, but rationally from the stream of humanitarian political thought and experience. See his Lectures on Moral Philosophy. 949 G. Berkouwer, General Revelation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955), pp. 90-97. 950 Cf ibid., pp.188-190.

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purpose of this essay we need only concern ourselves with the social manifestation of telic (end-point) humanitarian goals since that is what governments exist to guarantee, as in the positive legal enactments in American law, for example, which has set the values in place in this nation. This is certainly how Jefferson thought of it when he drafted the Declaration of Independence—“when in the course of human events . . . .” In other words, the concern here is not with the theology of natural law, but with the articulation and content of telic or end-point values as they appear in the surfacing of human wants and needs under adverse circumstances as well as in the Christian Scriptures; or as G. Berkouwer puts it, “These ethics are independent of every faith and all metaphysics.”951 This kind of otherwise questionable dogmatic statement has a striking ring of reality when one reads certain highlevel Greek and Roman thinkers and ancient Near Eastern documents with little chance of Hebrew Bible or New Testament influence. Of course, the influence could just possibly be running the other way—from common ancient value-traditions into the Bible—a point that is disputed and still debated. Why might it be hard for American evangelicals to think in terms of a revelation of human benefit values emerging from the stream of human speech and thought rather than limiting themselves to the Bible alone for such values? One obvious reason is that real-life Christians are dominated by certain American Christian preoccupations: personal therapy, physical and emotional; passionate self-expression, raising children in a hostile youth culture; or, for middle aged and older Christians, financial anxieties, political anger, and even Second Coming and prophecy issues fanned by popular media Bible teachers and pulpiteers. But the problem is deeper than these everyday matters. J. Budziszewski, in a very important basic volume of studies on this subject points out that evangelicals have all but forgotten about the historic doctrine of general or natural revelation and its corollary of “common grace.”952 One has to suspect that this historic idea—that God reveals himself in the moral order of human nature and history as a process of common grace to all humanity—is suppressed in evangelicalism because it exists only in theological textbooks (even here it is more or less weakly and mechanically outlined), and only very haltingly filters into the thinking of lay Christians in the pews. The evangelical rank and file does not generally read theological works, and pastors seldom preach on theology, especially “general revelation”; rather, most Christians engage only the simplest forms of theology by individualistic hit-and-miss acquaintance with biblical materials and do-ityourself methods of Christian thought, dominated by passion for immediate gratification or practical help with family life or other like preoccupations guiding their use of the Bible. In this populist process, the historic idea of God revealing himself and his moral-order values in the stream of human history and experience has been dropped or lost on right-now-for

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Ibid., p. 194; Berkouwer’s criticism that the “whole theory” in and behind the United Nations Declaration and other lists of rights and end-values is “highly unsatisfactory because of its lack of depth and clear-cut norms (p. 190),” is actually rhetorical—to foster his further probe into the theology of natural law. 952 J. Budziszewski, Evangelicals in the Public Square (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006). One has to be grateful for his repeated attention to what we can learn from general revelation in human thought and experience. Two substantial works on general revelation by theologians of the later twentieth century are G. Berkouwer, General Revelation and B. Demerest, General Revelation: Historical Views and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1882); Demerest’s work is a history of “general revelation” thought and the issues within and around the notion.

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me, instant-gratification pulpit or personal theology, sometimes in a pop atmosphere with little careful thought.953 Despite the difficulty of humans receiving the knowledge of God due to the darkening and turning away of their minds noted by Paul in Romans 1:18-32, Romans 2:12-16 recognizes that God’s laws in the moral order are in fact known by the combined forces of human action, reaction and conscience. Any awareness of moral and ethical law and its values answers to this text. This does not mean there is salvation here in the deeper spiritual sense of Christ’s salvation by grace. But it does mean that awareness of right and wrong in society is potentially if not actually present, while at the same time the “law-in-the-heart” dogs humans for doing or not doing it; that is, some sense of right and wrong is present in human life by divinely implanted law discovered by trial and error, and guided by conscience responses or reactions, even if externally ignored out of social pressures (roughly R. Niebuhr’s “moral man and immoral society”). But if this process is less conscious for individuals in their private thoughts, it seems more open in their observations and discussions of harmful social behavior, and is certainly more visible in public enactments of law attempting to right human abuses and social shortfalls. In addition, in two Acts passages (14:14-18; 17:24-31), Paul speaks of what the pagan world actually knows of God and the world’s moral order, i.e., it does know something! He does this by observing nature and human behavior—Paul’s two loci for theological and moral knowledge in Romans 1-2. Along with Psalms 8 and 19, these passages are clear evidence that the Bible itself affirms the world’s awareness of God’s existence and nature, and actual moral knowledge from natural human experience, or as Dunn speaks of it in commenting on Romans 2:12-16, “the moral consciousness evident among those outside the [Mosaic] law.”954 Evangelicals’ hesitation to pay much attention

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See, for example the analysis of D. J. Bingham, “Evangelicals, Irenaeus, and the Bible,” in The Free Church and the Early Church, ed D. H. Williams (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 27-38. 954 J. Dunn, Romans 1-8 (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1988), p. 102. With many commentators, Dunn notes how moral consciousness arises from the response or reaction of the conscience to deeds, and apparently takes the metaksu (between, among) in the sense of “between themselves/each other (pl) rather than “meanwhile” referring to the time between actions and the coming judgment. This sense—that Paul has in mind discussion of right and wrong between persons—seems also to be the reference to “accusing” or “commending.” This is the aspect of the text that chiefly bears on the tendency to identify and articulate longings for decency in human discourse noted in the comments above. The allalon (one another, between themselves) seems to refer specifically to human speech and critique of actions between persons, from which emerge agreed values, but not necessarily changed actions. Rather, concepts of right and wrong emerge, but not deeds of goodness, at least not with any fullness or clean motivations. The contextual thought about judgment finally overwhelms any notions of a tendency toward goodness in actual behavior. Man can conceive and discuss the good; but he has difficulty doing it with any fullness, steadiness or purity of motivation. See also Sanday and Headlam, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on The Epistle to the Romans (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1895, 1958), pp 61-62; Kasemann, Commentary on Romans, trans G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), pp. 65-66, reads Sanday and Headlam as preferring the inner thoughts of conscience—single individuals talking to themselves inwardly so to say; but Sanday and Headlam clearly end the discussion by speaking of “the process by which are formed the moral judgements of men upon their fellows (p. 62).” Godet also thought the text was speaking of the inner conversation of humans within their inner selves, not discussion amongst themselves. Even if Paul is only thinking of inner thoughts dialogue, the fact that such an inner dispute occurs at all means it will come out in human expressions. It is certainly right, as with G. Berkouwer, General Revelation, pp. 184-185, to stress that this process is a work of common grace, and that it is a work of God’s law in man; he appears, if I understand him correctly on p. 185, to

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to general revelation or common grace955 is not only unjustified, it is also detrimental to constructive thinking about the human quest for end-point values like equality, freedom and community. It also discourages thinking about the operating modes of arriving at values like truth, love and law, i.e., those observations, thoughts, expressions and actions garnered from experience with the actual moral order under the providence of God. These values—the list will be expanded below—converge with the same values found in the Christian Scriptures. Three final points need to be made before entering on the detaled discussion of convergent interests of state and church. All three points are about how the values appear and function in the Bible. (1) A distinction seems needed between the values in their end-point character beyond which there is no added benefit on the human plane (“telic values,” like peace and justice), and another set of primary non-telic values which are the means or modes (“instrumental values”) of perceiving them—bottom-line attitudes and practices (truth and love, for example) which allow humanity to progress toward the telic or end-point goals. The means-values are important; but they are secondary, not primary. Some values are both instrumental or can be, and at the same time telic in the sense that all telic values at times function as modal values in that they also drive activity toward themselves; for example, justice begets justice. In another way of thinking of the values, they all—whether telic or modal—have a way of interacting on each other in human thought in a kind of interlocking network; in other words, they are interrelated and seem to work most effectively in balanced equilibrium. Also, some values of either type may be more central than others, i.e., some may come back to one of them frequently, while others may be coupled together in biblical sources, and still others are far more prominent and frequent in mention than others. Thus, variety must be recognized. But none of these caveats may be used to rate some values against others in priority or importance as principles of a decent civil sphere, lest their status as values be diminished. No such value can be isolated above the others, lest massive abuses of humanity result from such an arbitrary rating system. And no value, telic or modal is a key to all the rest as though one may say, if we just get peace straight and operational, everything else will fall in place. The slippery nature of this situation is due to human finiteness and sin. (2) Another important distinction is between non-Christian ways of getting to the ultimate values and the Christian way, and the resultant varied nuances between the two ways. The two ways are generally thought of as critical (carefl, precise) human moral reasoning and divine special revelation. Christians certainly engage in moral thought through their observation of human behavior; they are not so biblicistic that they can only think about social moral issues with Bible in hand and eye on the page. However, Christians’ final authority and modes of determining humanitarian values and their meaning or sense in Scripture will always be coupled with the saving gospel of Jesus Christ and its consequent social ethic. Christians also reserve the right to understand the meaning and embrace the same view of the outcomes as discussed here, but in more general terms. Berkouwer, ibid., pp. 188-189, mentions both the Humanist Manifesto and United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a manifestation of this quest in a sense very close to the discussion above. 955 G. Marsden, “Return to Christian America,” pp. 134-137, speaks of common grace as a kind of civic grace that accounts for how natural human reason can discover the values of a decent society; in this respect Marsden’s thought is similar to the argument of this and the preceding essay.

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larger connections of both telic and modal values (the ends and the means) on the basis of biblical foundations. As suggested in earlier parts of this essay, Christianity’s greatest blockages to the freedom of the gospel to work social-governmental benefits in the world are the tendencies to turn the gospel and its social and ethical implications into law in the public square on one hand, or the tendency on the other hand to stay out of the political realm, perhaps because its too dirty or too complicated to think through when life has other more pressing private priorities. (3) This discussion is not mainly about whether or in what sense non-Christian man has any knowledge of God before he receives the gospel; that discussion will continue. Rather it is mostly limited by the framework that has been set and assumed thus far. The discussion is rather about the broad social values that make for a decent society, led and aided by decent governments, and supported by Christian social ethics. The quest is for those values about which man in his finiteness and sin nonetheless thinks about, longs for, and tries to make happen against a nearly overwhelming current of ignorance, evil and distractions. It is about what he thinks when pursuing a decent moral order for human life. The discussion is not about man’s quest for the knowledge of God or entering a personal saving relationship with him; that is the work of the gospel, its proclamation, and its witness in the world, not that of civil social ethics. Instead, this discussion is about the social quest for bearable or even happy human life under human governments; it is also about what kind of values are or ought to be sought in the effort to make the social reality of governance decent or even happy under the conditions of human ignorance, self-centeredness and sin. The very way in which these values are sought, conceived and expressed is evidence for the finiteness and limitations of human reasoning and the horrific burden of human wickedness and evil that endlessly threaten every accomplishment with regression and dissolution the moment a good is achieved. Christians, including millenarians, like many or even most American evangelicals, belong to this quest, as one can observe in listening to their talk about life as well as the talk of political thinkers, journalists and philosophers. This essay is one limited attempt to sketch some of the ends and means they will need to think about as they participate. This is not a discussion of tactics or strategies, but of values of which millenarian and other Christians need to be aware in their inevitable entanglement in government whether unconscious, grudging or positive. It is an exercise in political social ethics. (4) This is not a search for utopia; nor is it social perfectionism. It is more akin to what Glenn Tinder calls “the prophetic vision,” by which he means a morally driven set of values and critique of specific, obvious social wrongs, evil and abuses. This discussion is not such a specific social justice critique, but only a discussion of major values that inevitably guide such a critique. Tinder stresses the endless pitfalls into which the most well-meaning critiques fall, and the way in which preoccupation with one value can run headlong into self-defeating outcomes when a single value at a time blinds its promoters to the other values—either end-point goals or modal ones. All finite human beings can do is work at going somewhere better than the present with such goals. Above all, Christians have no business making absolute claims to a perfect program of social justice, since they

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too are finite and fallible; our whole existence, including our political and social thinking, is still tinged, and will always be, with sins of every sort.956 One feels some regret at having to disappoint zealous American Christians’ widespread belief that constitutional America and its founders were motivated only or mostly by Christian interests and the Christian Bible. Meyer Reinhold’s assemblage of Greek and Roman classical texts read by major constitutional era founders like evangelicals John Jay and John Witherspoon shows that the ideas in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution originated mostly in the political thought of Greeks and Romans,957 and to which they saw parallels in biblical texts. More specifically, he cites sympathetically John Corbin’s neatly put description: “The theory of our Constitution derives from Aristotle, and was put into successful practice in ancient Rome, in eighteenth-century England, and in our early state constitutions, before it was given its most perfect embodiment by the [Constitutional] Convention of 1787.” My gathering of materials for this essay has only reinforced this perception, chiefly my reading in Aristotle’s Politics. Accordingly the search for end-goal values in human, and especially American history must be recognized as coming chiefly from the Greeks, especially Aristotle’s Politics. In fact, the parallels between the Politics and the major American founding documents are so striking and clear that one can only miss them by his or her own blinders. A deep and sad problem is that most American evangelicals, including and especially millenarian Christians, are so narrowly biblicist on social and moral matters that they have little if any idea what is actually in Aristotle and the moral-philosophical political tradition. To make matters worse, the American secondary and higher education curricula acquaint students only very weakly or not at all with the Greek and Roman sources of their political documents, and not at all with biblical parallels. Some Christians are so biblicist that they may even be alarmed with the tiny bit of schoolroom recognition of these classical sources of American political thought. Classical learning has largely faded from sight in favor of “practicality” in the wake of hands-on, money-making professional majors in our combined educational and economic systems. The system is rather bent toward jobs and skills with which to make a living and increase income potential, mixed with excessive partying, sports and massive distractions from electronic gadgets and media. And so the following discussion relies on discovery of the values in the Greek and Roman authors read by the founding fathers, especially John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and on proverbs and law codes of the ancient Near East. But these values are also in our Bibles, although they are not the central path of its subject matter, and are not always easy to spot as general human telic and modal values. And yet, biblical revelation works as a sort of drag-net of its own, carrying other human goods along with its central revelation of Christ and salvation. It contains parallels to those ends-and-means values of pagan political thought. Some of the values are visible in Scripture to a greater extent, some to a lesser extent. For example there is an extensively used vocabulary of justice and righteousness in both biblical testaments. Similarly, peace

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G. Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity( Eugene OR: Wipf and Stock, 1989), especially chapters Two and Four. 957 M. Reinhold, The Classic Pages: Classical Reading of Eighteenth-Century Americans, ed with an Introduction and Notes by M. Reinhold (University Park PA: American Philological Association, 1975), p. 113.

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in multiple aspects is visible in Scripture, as is the idea of life in community. Freedom is visible as a value for a whole people under certain forms of governance in the Old Testament, while in the New Testament it is more focused as a personal benefit of the gospel as against the bondage of the Mosaic Law. It is the same with the instrumental values. Love, truth and law, for example, are major subjects in both testaments, and in the case of love, very visible. The New Testament value on love does not figure in the Greek conception of government, although aspects of it emerge in Paul’s Roman contemporary Seneca, almost certainly without Christian influence. The general result of this situation, largely unrecognized by Christians in the twentieth century, is that the governance values found in Greco-Roman political and other ethical thinkers have parallels in Scripture. When they are viewed together, they promise focal points of thought and action for life under world governments. In fact the moral values of state and church converge upon each other, even though the current normative Christian view is that church and state are separate entities and have separate modes of being and becoming. We shall detail these convergent values and some of their implications in the remainder of this essay. The method chosen for discussing non-Christian and Christian interest in the same values is by using Aristotle and Greek-Roman parallels, and Bible and ancient near eastern parallels. Comparing the values with thoughts of American constitutional founders should not be taken to mean that their value thoughts are limited to these sources. In fact, Aristotle sent a trajectory through western history with his Politics—a trajectory that never fell away. He was perpetuated and developed by the Stoics, by the Roman Cicero, by Roman law, by Persian teachers, and by a host of thinkers through western history down to our own time. One can read a summary of this trajectory and its byways in a work like Sabine’s History of Political Theory and other works like it. The Convergent Values: Telic A few further clarifications seem advisable. By “convergent values” I do not mean formalized partnerships of individuals or churches with government. Church and state are in fact separate in the Amerian founding documents and in the lives of most American readers; it is wise that they be kept separate for the well-being of the appropriate functions of both. I do mean a set of value-goals in which church and state share common interests and concerns, and toward which they can work mutually alone or in agreed cooperation— provided they agree to mutually refrain from encroachment. The two spheres will usually have different ways of working at these goals which may or may not be incompatible with each other. Individual Christians and church bodies should be left free to strategize methods and tactics for achievement of goals discussed below. No legal entanglements should characterize the social actions of churches. Nonetheless, there are goals to be sought for human well-being by both. Financing should also be kept separate in the two spheres unless non-encroachment guarantees in the use of funds can be found, as may be

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the case with the concepts of “Equal Access” and “Charitable Choice.”958 At all costs, party politics should be kept out of pulpits, not merely as a legal matter (which in fact it is), but also as a matter of wisdom. But Christian preaching on moral and ethical values will be necessary because the Bible speaks to the values, even while political party preferences as channels of expression should be left unattached in both church and public pulpits. People should vote for those candidates and public plans representing or approximating the values Christian people see as essential under changing circumstances from election to election. The attempts below to characterize the values as they occur in non- or Pre-Christian sources as well as in biblical and Christian sources, are presented with some variation. The basic method is to identify the values in non-Christian sources—usually pre-Christian, nonbiblical—and to illustrate that and in some aspects, how they were present in those sources. By “how” is meant, the operational senses or meanings they have in such sources. But detailed sketches, say of Aristotle’s meaning(s) for example, would take a full monograph for each value and thus are not workable within the limits and scope of this essay. NonChristian meanings of the values will always be somewhat different from biblical ways of thinking—sometimes with very great differences, and sometimes with only minor ones.959 With these limitations, the treatment will be something of a sketch, and should be viewed realistically as such. The idea that some values may be visible in shared human and biblical thought may be hard for strict biblicist Christians to understand, especially since the historic Christian ideas of general revelation and “common grace” are now almost entirely unknown or misunderstood among American evangelicals. For them, and for all practical purposes, the only source of values is their Bible. Social value-goals of government derived from experience and thought other than the Bible are hardly thought of because they are viewed as coming from “secular humanism,” whether ancient or modern. Some American Christians may think they must have come from some conspiracy or piracy. Or, they must have been intentionally borrowed from Christianity; or perhaps Moses was the source for pre-Christian human value language.960 A long-time favorite idea of Christians is that all such ideas with biblical counterparts stem from a primal revelation to Adam or Noah.

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Sider, The Scandal of Evangelical Politics (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), pp. 188-190, discusses the legislation of the Clinton and G. W. Bush presidencies, in which national and state funds became available for all social service programs including those operated by organizations of any religious group without discrimination, with no definition of “religious,” and providing only that the social service organization can effectively deliver the services it claims to deliver. Unresolved problems still exist in the legality of these concepts as Sider, p. 189, notes. On these provisions, further court tests may occur. In addition, such funds seem to be drying up in 2011 (see S. E. Zylstra, “Shrinking Circle of Protection,” CT 55, 8 [August, 2011]; the article is about loss of state funding in a Roseland, Chicago food mission—the neighborhood of Barak Obama’s activity in Chicago before his election to the U. S. Senate. 959 This critical issue was addressed in the interests of academic disciplines, and the insights into reality they claim as matters of “common grace” (not “saving grace”) to all humanity, by W. D. Dennison, “The Christian Academy: Antithesis, Common Grace, and Plato’s View of the Soul,” JETS 54 (2011):109131. The article is of interest for its cautionary approach to attempts at correlating non-Christian and Christian ideas; but in the end it is much too guided by a well-intentioned narrowness in which Dennison seems to suggest that all non-Christian ideas and thoughts must be prejudged by biblical priorities and as defined by Reformed theologians. This is appropriately cautious but much too limited and prejudicial. 960 See J. Gager, Moses in Greco Roman Paganism (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972). Some Mosaic influence was found for third century B. C. Greeks and later Romans. Mosaic influence is not the source when the values appear in ancient Near Eastern law codes pre-dating even Abraham, and Gager could not find any Mosaic references in or before Aristotle.

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For the biblical form of the values a body of biblical material from both the Old and New Testaments will be sketched, and basic meaning(s) with some detailed connotations noted. In some cases the thinking of people who have worked on the concepts will be summarized whether in non-biblical ancient Near Eastern sources or in biblical usage. Hence, some variety in the ways ideas are characterized can be expected, rather than sifting each category through a mechanical grid of details. With both the non-Christian pagan sources and Israelite-Christian biblical sources, I will try to show how the values are really convergent in sharing common ground. (1) Good. We cannot do better than begin where Aristotle begins in the Politics. The very first sentence of Book I, Chapter 1 reads:

Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for mankind always act to obtain that which they think good. But if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest aims, and in a greater degree than any other, at the highest good.

The same thought is repeated elsewhere in the Politics. For example: Bk III, Ch 6: Well-being is certainly the chief end of both individuals and states.961 Bk III, Ch 9: But a state exists for the sake of a good life and not for the sake of life only . . . a state [is] a community of families and aggregation of families in well-being for the sake of a perfect and self-sufficing life . . . the end of the state is the good life . . . .

But for Aristotle the good is not mere objects or wealth. It is rather happiness defined as virtue, as discussed in his Nichomachean Ethics, Ch 1. Bk I, Ch 5: . . . the highest good is clearly something final . . . we call absolutely final that which is always desired for itself and never as a means to something else. Now happiness more than anything else answers to this description. Bk I, Ch 6: . . . the good of man is activity of soul in accordance with virtue, or, if there are more virtues than one, in accordance with the best and most complete virtue.

Aristotle’s thinking springs from rational observation of human needs, behaviors and relationships, and from observations gathered from the constitutions of over 150 Greek city states; it is quite straightforwardly humanistic. There is no evidence that this notion of “good” stems from anything biblical, since the few references to Moses in Greek writers all come from after Aristotle’s time; there are no references in him to Moses or the Old Testament, and the New Testament did not exist until 400 years later. Christian theology, however, ought to be able to recognize here the presence of what it usually calls “common grace” or “general revelation,” which includes God’s revelation of himself and/or his

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Aristotle, Politics, from L. R. Loomis (ed), Aristotle: On Man In The Universe (New York: Walter Black, n. d.), p. 297; this edition is composed of selections from Aristotle’s major works. All quotations from Aristotle herein are from this edition.

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moral plan in nature, in human experience, in history, and in conscience. Unfortunately these categories are often weakly or scantily defined, and seldom include any details of the humanly derived values under discussion.962 However this may be, it seems clear from these examples that Aristotle thought of general human “good” as an end-goal of the state. In the ancient Near East the resources are more limited. Assyrian vassal treaties use some forms of the Akkadian-Semitic root tuv (Heb tov), “good” in the sense of “benevolence” or “friendship” or even “brotherhood,” as a term for the intent of the relationship of king and vassal. The Akkadian term tuv is also related to peace. Later, during the Neo-Babylonian era (seventh-sixth centuries B.C.), kings use tuv in salutations as wishes for recipients’ welfare, where it has the sense of prosperity and well-being. Still later, tob is used in Aramaic for the administration of justice where it relates to the satisfaction of gaining or holding personal property, of commercial activity and transfer of property by purchase or inheritance.963 Thus to Aristotle’s east, and for several centuries before him, “good” was used for personal gains thought to be tokens of well-being. In the ancient Near East, however, there is no developed thought about general purposes of community or government as in Aristotle, but only modest steps toward his thought. Still, these uses are already expressing “good” as a goal of human life and relations, especially those satisfying gains in material things assumed to provide for human well-being. Perhaps “good” (Heb tov; Gr agathos) is the most general of the whole group of values. In biblical usage, good, like other values identified here, is often stated as a purpose-in-itself or end-goal of human life before God. Biblical good denotes any higher level, emotionally satisfying or pleasing state of or increase in human well-being—social, physical, psychological, spiritual or moral, perhaps all of these.

Deuteronomy is especially interested in good (Heb tov) as the goal of moral action and divine blessing. It sometimes appears in a verb form translated “[that it may go] well with you,” as an outcome of Israel’s obedience to the Lord in its land. The NIV takes some liberty in translating tov (good) as “prosper.” The contextual language is “that you may live . . . and prolong your days in the land.” The freedom of this translation and its context is a case of recognizing a very common meaning of “good” in the Hebrew Bible: “prosper.” A related sense is the notion of a flourishing and productive land (13x in chs 1-11); cf esp. 1:25; 8:7-10 where praises over its lush produce occur with lists of fruits and vegetables, or of cities and towns where “good” means livable, perhaps “secure” or even enjoyable, and houses and towns are thought of as objects or symbols of prosperous life (6:10-11; 8:1012). The West Bank mountains are good, “fine hill country (3:25).” In 28:11 it refers to massive prosperity and visibly increased well-being (cf 30:9). Other uses of the adjective have similar meanings. In 1:14 tov refers to an improved organization of Israel. This usage thinks of good in national more than in individual terms, thus linking with the idea of Israel as community—a “better” arrangement for the whole and Moses as leader. In some texts the moral-ethical sense is visible: good conduct, good behavior or good attitude =



962

Note the discussion in H. C. Theissen, Lectures in Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952), pp. 32-35; C. Baker, A Dispensational Theology (Grand Rapids: Grace Bible College, 1971), pp. 33-36; Baker mentions only revelation through nature and through providence without a broader distinction between general and special revelation. 963 I. Hover-Johag, “tov,” TDOT 5:300-302.

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constructive, helpful, compliant with the Lord of the community; but this sense is subdued in Deuteronomy. Israel will receive “good” from the Lord in the above senses if it does “what is good and right.” This is a case of coupling two end-goals, which in the moral sense become instrumental or modal (12:28): right and good beget (final) good. In 23:6 peace and good are joined as two end-goals. And in a final text (30:15) good is coupled with life for a third time in Deuteronomy. For the most part, however, Deuteronomy is focused on good as prosperity, lushness, fullness, and usefulness in a flourishing and satisfying life. This use applies “good” to objects and actions predominantly, and their benefit to persons and communities. The few uses of “good” in Psalms for helpful deeds from person to person increase in Proverbs. The latter book also attributes “good” to aspects of knowledge or understanding (3:4), teaching (4:2), wisdom (8:11), a word (12:25) and the heart (15:15). As one might expect in this humanitarian book, “good” is frequently a moral quality of certain persons: honesty/straightforwardness as against craftiness (12:2), and faithfulness against faithlessness (14:14). Ecclesiastes is quite like Proverbs with its constant “better”; but the book is dominated by almost hedonistic equations of sensual pleasure with “good” characteristic of man “under the sun.” Ecclesiastes illustrates how the satisfying, pleasant, and prosperous in itself gains only the opposite—a kind of illusory “good.”964 In the prophets, Jeremiah has the most uses (c 40x). Here the sense is the prosperity, gifts, blessings which Yahweh wants Israel to gain and at some time in the future he will actually bestow; but they are nowhere actually visible in Jeremiah’s time. These texts illustrate: 6:16: “Thus says the Lord: ‘Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest (tov, good) for your souls.’” In most of these Old Testament uses, “good” is an end-goal for Israel as Yahweh’s community, parallel in concept to Aristotle’s similar notion of good, but more frequently in considerable detail than in general political terms.

In the New Testament, increase in human well-being is the sense, without the Old Testament’s persistent attention to Israel’s national good. The New Testament use is almost exclusively concentrated on the communication of vital life improvements from God to man and from his people to other humans—fellow-Christians or non-Christians.

The New Testament’s orientation is that “. . . only God is good,” from which flows his interest in human well-being. Interest in human well-being, however, although mostly material as in the Old Testament, is toned by moral-ethical forces set off by the gospel entering life and the mutual care of newly formed Christian church fellowships. The outside world is not neglected in the spread of increased human well-being as Galatians 6:10 and 1 Thessalonians 5:15 clearly show,965 as modest and infrequent as such notices are in the epistles. For the purpose of this essay, Romans 13:4, where “. . . he is God’s servant to do you good (Gr agathos),” is a general purpose of government for all under its power. One notes again how clearly this is stated as an end-point goal: human good is a goal of government. The range of Old Testament meanings crystallizes here: flourish, gain, increase, economic



964

See A. Bowling, “tov,” TWOT 1:346. Also profitable is I. Hover-Johag, ”tov,” TDOT 5:296315, especially on the contextual ancient Near Eastern usage and development of the concept. 965 See D. DeWitt, Dispensational Theology in America (Grand Rapids: Grace Bible College, 2003), pp. 384-389. Since government and its community aims are an aspect of culture, what can generally be said of “good” in relation to the benefits of culture can also be said of government.

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gain, and even happiness,966 with connotations of pleasantness, satisfaction, and desirability of what is longed for or needed, but persistently noted as sourcing in God himself and present on earth as a gift of his moral order. The contextual “he is God’s server (minister) to you . . .” suggests the same increase in richness of life as throughout the Old Testament. Kasemann’s thought that Paul spoke mainly of “upright citizens,” or “ordinary uprightness,” is too weak and drains agathos in both vss 3 and 4 of its enrichment meanings,967 the sense of which is clearly encouraged by the “good” of vs 3. This is clearly servant action of government toward persons to increase their vitality, and so recalls Aristotle’s thoughts about governments and good. This detail of Paul’s government passage goes beyond the frequently heard Christian idea that the main purpose of government is to restrain evil.968 It says there is more than this in government responsibility.

The biblical perspective is theological: good is a blessing and benefit that comes to persons and nations as a gift of God, but also consequent on certain moral behaviors within a morally ordered world; this general sense comports with Aristotle’s “virtue as good.” It is material also, however, and in this biblical materialism there is a special connection with the Old Testament sense of good, as well as further confluence with Aristotle’s thought about human good as a goal of states. (2) Peace. In the case of peace, three pagan illustrations for peace as an endgoal of political action will be sufficient. First, Augustus himself at the conclusion of his victories deposited with the Vestal Virgins four documents, one of which was the Res Gestae. Copies of three portions this long known document have recently been recovered, one in the temple of Rome and Augustus at Ancyra, Turkey, the second a Greek portion found at Apollonia in Pisidia, the third a Latin version found at Antioch in Pisidia.969 In this propagandistic proclamation, Augustus says of his achievements:

When . . . I . . . returned to Rome . . . [I ordered] an altar to Pax Augusta . . . whenever victorious peace is secured [only twice in Roman history before] . . . I conquered the pirates and gave peace to the seas . . . I restored peace to all the provinces of Gaul and Spain and to Germany . . . Peace too I caused to be established in the Alps.

Second, in the famous Fourth Ecologue of the Roman poet Virgil, the famous eulogy of the birth of Augustus and his anticipated peace is celebrated. In it, Virgil says: Now the last age by Cumae’s Sibyl sung . . . Has come and gone, and the majestic roll . . . of circling centuries begins anew . . . With a new breed of man sent down from heaven . . . The iron shall cease, the golden age arise . . . Shall free the earth from never-ceasing fear . . . Heroes with gods commingling . . . Reign [O boy] o’er a world at peace.970



966



970

1-2.

Ibid., 345-346. Kasemann, Roman, p. 358. 968 See F. F. Bruce, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963), p. 238. 969 C. K. Barrett, The New Testament Background: Selected Documents (London: SPCK, 1956), pp. 967

Ibid., pp. 8-9.

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Third, and of much less certain value than the Augustan peace documents and Virgil’s poetry, is the very early, pre-law notion of peace among the pagan Germanic tribes to Rome’s north: Each member [of the tribe] lived within the people’s “peace,” and the law provided especially the regulations necessary to prevent that peace from being broken. Outlawry, the primitive punishment for crime, put a man outside the people’s peace; and injury to a particular person or family, the primitive equivalent of tort, put him outside the peace of the injured party, and the law provided the composition by which feud could be prevented and the peace restored. 971

Peace in this sumary is akin to good in meaning and function and is also a desired quality of community; peace is the opposite of feud. It includes health, completeness and wholeness,972 and as “good” it also entails prosperity. Numerous Old Testament prophetic texts value peace not only as rest (shabbat) from violence, invasion and war, but as an end-goal of the redemptive plan, which it projects to a final victory in the messianic kingdom (Isa 9: 6-7). Hebrew shalom thus is more than the cessation of war and hostilities; rather it is a condition of harmony in which all social dynamics are working with mutual force—a balance of social powers and provisions with equalized strength in all dimensions of society and community. It seems to cover a general flourish of life including health and wealth accumulation and loving relations, especially with the nuance of social and personal harmony. In this it overlaps with both good and love. Sometimes peace refers to a restored balance of things or restored normalcy after imbalance or conflict. The use of the formula “grace, mercy and peace” as a greeting in the Pauline epistles is also suggestive of its end-goal value.

In the Hebrew Bible peace includes health, prosperity, security, or spiritual fulfillment of the covenant goals notably in the Psalms and prophets (Psa 37:11; 147:14; Isa 54:13; 66:12, where it is parallel to “wealth”).973 For individuals, “peace” is equal to restored health (Isa 38:16-17), safe return from battle (Josh 10:21), or deliverance from danger (Exod 4:18). Social applications are more frequent than individual ones, like harmony in society (Lev 26:6) for example. Political security is the sense in 2 Kings 20:19; Isaiah 32:18; and Haggai 2:9; hence the idea of order is also suggested.974 But conclusion or absence of war is also an application as one would expect (Jud 5:31; 1 Sam 16:4-5; 1 Kings 2:5; 4:24). Messianic kingdom passages contain extravagant images of peace in that future political venue with its implication of Israel’s restoration as a kind of final victory over its hostile neighbors (Isa 11:6-9; cf 9:6-7).



971

G. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (New York: Henry Holt, 1937), p. 200. This work is older but a very thorough history of political theories and the manner in which they were continually influenced by social and philosophical traditions in their contexts. Still, it is a secondary source. I cannot find similar references, for example, in P. Jones and N. Pennick, A History of Pagan Europe (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1995), notably in their chapter on “The Germanic Peoples.” Sabine in turn bases this summary on M. Smith, The Development of European Law (New York, 1928). These are credible historians, so one accepts their summaries as reliable, but with caution. 972 J. Healey, “Peace,” ABD 3:206-207. 973 E. M. Good, “Peace in the Old Testament, IDB 3:704. 974 Healey, “Peace,” ABD 3:206-207.

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In legal passages such as the Covenant Code (Exod 21-23), the verb shalam is used repeatedly for compensation of losses, in some cases the amount of which is doubled, almost certainly to even out and more than compensate the loss, thus inducing the notion of economic balance and equality by use of excess. In these contexts (Exod 22) the NIV translates the verb shalam “make restitution,” to “cover the loss (22:15).” Spiritually, peace is the product of righteousness (Isa 32:17) before God correcting sin or rebellion; but the Old Testament’s emphasis is on societal applications: upholding truth is peace (Zech 8:19); justice is peace (Isa 39:8); avoidance of wickedness is peace (Psa 34:14); the promised good news of Israel’s release from exile—and the accompanying salvation—is peace (Isa 52:7), even though this is still not individualized, but a community work for Israel. The New Testament continues to use “peace” within this Old Testament range of meanings and internalizes its usage into “peace of mind” or ‘peace of heart and soul,”975 a usage that belongs to “peace with God (Rom 5:1).” At the same time, it also uses the narrower classical Greek meaning of the cessation or absence of overt hostilities.976 Paul embraces peace in its application to Christian prayers for government, i.e., as a goal of such prayers (1 Tim 2:2 using hasuchia, calm). Peace describes the result of a redemptive relationship with God. It includes reconciliation with him, and peace between hostile social or ethnic groups (Eph 2:11ff). Paul’s social use implies that the extravagant claims of world peace advanced by Augustus and his Roman eulogizers and successors, and the people enthralled with his victories, did not materialize and or satisfy; rather Christ is the ultimate peacemaker. As shown above in the essay on “Christianity and Culture” (Essay XI), the finality of peace shows up in Paul’s opening greetings and closing prayers for his letter recipients: grace, mercy and peace (Rom 1:6), or grace and peace (1 Cor 1:3, Eph 1:2, etc.). Peace is usually climactic at the end of a series or clustered with other blessings near the end of a letter (Eph 6:23; 1 Thes 5:23; 2 Thes 3:16). In closing greetings it is occasionally outflanked by grace; but usually as a final value in greetings, peace is the prevailing climax thought.

There is little need to show further parallels to the general use of “peace” as the quest of inter- or intra-national relations. It is endlessly expressed by all kinds of people and nations including at least some ancient Mediterranean regional nations, and many modern nations, peoples and organizations. It thus seems self-evident that the value is near universal. Even aggressively belligerent nations will probably say that peace is the goal of their sword-rattling, although most such want it on their own terms and values. Paul’s instructions to Timothy noted above about prayers of Christians for government are as clear a convergence of Christian and government interests in peace as one could wish. Christians often do not like United Nations proclamations, and may feel that such proclamations and goals for this organization steal the idea from Christians and corrupt its meaning, or ignore the biblical warnings about “peace and security (1 Thes 5:3).” These sometimes off-hand dismissals of world peace efforts overlook the fact that such efforts reflect how elusive the desired peace is. But given the clear evidence for convergence of world peace quests and the interest of our faith in peace as expressed in 1 Timothy 2:1-4, this negativism does not seem justified, and certainly not normal for Christian thought.



975 976

C. Mitton, “Peace in the New Testament,” IDB 3:706. Ibid.

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(3) Freedom. There is modest ancient Semitic political development of the Hebrew root deror (freedom) as well as social and economic development. Incidental commercial uses of deror as well as a few forms of the root khaphash (e.g., khophshi, freed from slavery, Exod 21:5) occur throughout the old and later Babylonian periods (2200-600 B. C.) and in the Hebrew Bible. In Akkadian it refers to remission of (commercial) debts, manumission of private slaves or canceling of services illegally imposed on free persons. Other meanings in Akkadian given by the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary are “become free,” where used for the conclusion of a task, and “move about freely,” of a woman who will not be released and whose debt will stand. Parallels occur in the Alalakh texts from Syria.977 Examples are very scant; they refer to personal economic “releases,” and at least one use is for (personal) release from slavery. One scholar suggests that from the northern Fertile Crescent, the verbal root drifted southwestward into southern Syria and Canaan.978 On any reckoning, there is so far no trace of an ancient Near Eastern political concept or doctrine of freedom.

With Hebrew deror/emancipation, the root’s commercial-economic origins are visible in what happened at the legally ordered Jubilee Sabbath year (Lev 25:10), an event ordered by God to occur every 50th year in Israel; unlike the examples above, the Israelite Jubilee is on a national scale, but still limited to occasional economic situations. In it, alienated lands are to be returned to original occupants (according to the settlement allotments of Joshua 13-21); they are to be released from servitudes incurred by debt slavery. The same law requires that houses in un-walled villages sold during the preceding fifty years be returned to the families of original settlers. Levites have the right to redeem (gain back) their houses in any village or town, walled or un-walled. Jeremiah 34:8ff applies the term to slave emancipation. Apparently during the fifty year interim between Jubilees—even then—Israelite debt slaves were to be cared for or helped through loans without interest (Lev 25:35-38) to be forgiven at the 50th year (25:39-43). Deuteronomy 15:lff (without deror) notes release every seven years from debt servitude, and Isaiah 61:1ff proclaims release of prisoners. 1 Sam 17:25 uses deror for release (freeing) from excessive taxes. With use of deror or khophshi for release of debtors, land-aliens or prisoners on a national scale, the Old Testament moves closer to socio-political interests. Hence in Exodus 21:5, khophshi refers to release of debt slaves, while in Isaiah 58:6 it refers to escape from oppression. Israel’s deliverance from slavery in Egypt is the classic biblical example, but one should also note the slave trading of Tyre and Edom condemned in Amos 1:9-12; such related values thus extend beyond Israel. These texts show that deror and khophshi are becoming a social concept closely related to freedom from slavery in the Old Testament. Still, there is no Israelite development of a political doctrine or philosophy



977

R. North, “deror,” TDOT 3:277, citing CAD I/2, 115; III, 109. These parallels pre-date the Old Testament Hebrew Literature and come from Syria and northern Mesopotamia. 978 Similarly, clay liver models as conveyers of omens about future events seemed to have moved southwest from Mesopatamia to Canaan as is thought for the recently published inscribed liver model published by W. Horowitz and T. Oshima, and A Winitzer, “Hazor 17: Another Clay Liver Model,” IEJ 60, 2 (2010): 133-145; the same appears true for cuneiform and perhaps cylinder seals on their journey from Mesopotamia to Canaan. These cases of cultural drift illustrate details of the more or less common culture in the eastern Mediterranean region.

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of freedom.979 There is use of the concept on a national scale for release from Egyptian servitude with applications to debt slavery and land alienations. Certainly there is no evidence for a universal notion of freedom in a national or ethnic political sense. But there are hints toward the desirability of freedom from certain kinds of bondage or coercion on a national scale. This is a potentially significant development for an entire nation and its constitutional government (the law), but still short of freedom as part of a political philosophy.

For the origins of a concept and doctrine of freedom (eleuthros), Greek thought is the most substantive source. In a partial parallel with Israel and slavery, formative Greek thought also took its direction from the presence of a slave population among the old tribes and aristocracy.980 The sources are chiefly Plato and Aristotle. A polity is essential to a state which is a “community of free men.” This development placed freedom at the center of thinking about the provisions of the state. Free men in a state are a community of friendship. Common laws of the whole polity make it communal and democratic. Laws prohibit infringement of individuals’ right for the good of the whole. A democratic constitution “allows all full citizens the same political rights and thus procures arxein (rule) for the plathos (populace) to the fullest possible degree.”981 Highest among the provisions of Greek city-state freedom is “free speech (parrasia).”982 To this situation belongs its implied individualism, one of the great dangers of a free state. Freedom also applies to the state over against enemies and invaders, and hence connotes security and implies defense.983 It is beyond our scope to follow the intricate line of freedom thought development through its history beyond Greece. Greek thought passed into Europe, but seems to have been muted again by church developments until it began to emerge in post-Reformation political states with help from the Reformation. It appears that the idea of a Christian kingdom of God representing biblical kingdom ideas was a major blockage to its development until the emergence of new freedom thought during the Enlightenment. It also seems clear that the richness of Greek freedom thought had slight previews or adumbrations in the Hebrew Bible as noted above. The Hebrew Bible’s more or less minor but significant contribution to freedom ideas illustrates the greater proportion of Greek and Roman thinking to biblical values in the American founders. Biblical parallels supplemented more fully developed and combined freedom-democracy-law ideas coming primarily from Greece, and to some extent from Rome. Thus, freedom as an end-point for civil government has also undergone an ancient world development by sending its trajectories into the modern world on its own. Christians should recognize an aspect of common grace in this growing concept. The Romans more or less morphed Greek free democracy ideas into a Roman version within the development of Stoicism. Stoicism enlarged freedom thought from Aristotle’s limitation to city states, to a general law of human nature, but—passing completely over intervening developments—retained enough to draw the founders of the American republic into reading and loving them all, both Greek and Roman. To celebrate the 200th anniversary

979

F. Jones, “Freedom,” ABD 2:855-8599. Schlier, “eleutheros,” TDNT 3:487ff. 981 Ibid., p. 489. 982 Ibid., pp. 489-490. 983 Ibid., p. 490-492. 980

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of the American Revolution in 1976, American classical scholar Meyer Reinhold gathered a volume of more than two-hundred pages of selections from the Greek and Roman writers read by the constitutional founders who cited, alluded and sometimes extracted passages from which they took inspiration and guidance. They studied passages on the Roman senate, on freedom, on virtue, morals and happiness in leaders and people, on peace, on mankind’s good, on patriots, on leadership, on mixed constitutions, on property, on equalitarian principles and common laws, and on justice. The selections gathered by Reinhold from Greek and Roman authors illustrate how clearly and strongly these basic ideas developed in Greco-Roman thought, and how the traditions passed into the American world in the eighteenth century through more recent editions. The New Testament vocabulary for freedom is the eleuth-group (eleuthereo, eleutheros, eleutheria), which appears most frequently in John, Romans and Galatians. Four passages posit freedom as a basic, divinely purposed goal of the human race in several senses, which, although used here in redemptive contexts, could not be restricted to redemption. This is because they are thought of as generalized end-goals, which could be extended for their political value as well. The four passages are: John 8:32-36 where freedom is the end of the Son’s work in

redemption: “. . . if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed,” by which he almost certainly meant that they would be freed from a merely “sons of Abraham” status, and tied instead to God; Galatians 5:1 and 5:13 which also think of freedom on the human plane as a benefit conferred by God—an end-goal benefit of salvation, but an end-goal on any reckoning as a divine provision for humanity, beyond which nothing more is to be granted at least at the human level. Freedom, that is, is not the means to something else, but an end-goal. In these texts Paul says, “It is for (the sake of) freedom that Christ has set us free,” using the root eleuth- twice with freedom as a final purpose of redemption on the earthly-human plane; but the most sweeping and universalizing use of the idea is Romans 8:20-21 where Paul thinks of the purpose of God for the whole creation: “creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.” Clearly, this too is an elemental benefit planned by God for the whole human world, i.e., God plans freedom for humanity. Two recipients are thought of as gaining freedom here: believers (sons of God) and the whole creation. The gospel gains a unified personal-spiritual-physical (resurrection) form of freedom in a now-and-then perspective, but Romans 8 thinks of its final divine enactment for the whole creation—a view which correlates creation and redemption.

Thus, if freedom is the purpose of God for humanity, and the biblical documents along with the search for its fullest form also value it, there is basis for suggesting a cooperative interest in the civic sphere, since what Christians embrace is the goal-idea in general as well as its immediate spiritual realization through Christ now. Of course, biblical documents have their own meaning, especially because in the New Testament freedom is a blessing of the gospel. In gospel contexts it refers primarily to freedom from both the law and sin, and freedom toward friendship with God and love for him. Clearly, however, this full biblical view is not what the humanitarian tradition is thinking. Rather, the common ground is freedom as God’s will and plan for man; and it clearly belongs to both the creation realm and the internal redemptive realm—each respectively. Therefore Christians care about both realms because the two realms represent two works

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of God, political creation as a natural world manifestation of the value, even though stated as an end goal, and special redemptive freedom as a spiritual world manifestation of the same. Or to say it yet another way, political freedom is a work of common grace already anticipating a final freedom of creation, while spiritual freedom is a work of redemptive grace anticipating our resurrection; the first is a work for creation, the latter a work of redemption; or, the first is in the realm of general revelation, the latter is in the realm of special revelation. In both worlds, the value is nonetheless the same: freedom is freedom is freedom, and all freedom is God’s freedom since it is his determined end for the world. (4) Justice. Justice too is of very great antiquity. To illustrate, a selection from S. N. Kramer’s History Begins at Sumer is pertinent. Kramer refers to a murder committed at Nippur on the lower Euphrates sometime before c 2000 B. C.; aspects of this story are preserved on clay tablets excavated at the site. The wife of the slain man was informed of the murder, but kept it to herself. Somehow the crime came to the attention of the king, UrNinurta, who referred the case to the Nippur Citizens Assembly. The three murderers were caught, and nine men prosecuted the case before the Assembly. They argued that the wife should be executed with the three guilty men—an attempted argument for guilt as accessory to the crime (knowledge incurs guilt); but the Assembly argued back that the woman was justified in keeping the crime secret since her dead husband had failed to support her. The trial became a precedent in Sumerian legal circles, as shown by discovery of more than one copy of the case recorded on clay tablets at other Sumerian sites in southern Iraq.984 Similarly in Egypt, justice was an essential attribute of the state. In Egypt, justice was apparently not codified in statues (no law code found so far) but was expressed rather in wisdom sayings about human relations. In Egyptian, the word for justice is maat. It was normally dispensed by local rulers who were urged to consider need as their guide. There were stories of injustices in Egypt, however, in which local rulers were accused of lacking principle.985 More broadly, for Egyptians justice was a quality of a good ruler. Egyptian rulers gave speeches on justice; in one such discourse, justice is equated with goodness. Egyptian justice usually stressed mercy and kindness, intelligent perception of situations and adjudication.986 Hence the whole pre- and out-biblical world embraced justice. Pagan Roman law developed it with great interest and in great detail, a reality which finally culminated in the emperor Justinian’s Digest and Codex of Roman law (c 550 A. D). The Germanic tribes also sought it, even in their earliest European settlement period. Justice is also found in Scripture as an element in a decent state or world, and thus a human sphere end in itself in resolution or retribution of conflict. Justice is a criterion of law in the Old Testament as illustrated, for example, in Deuteronomy’s provision of a court system with review and referral already built in (Deut 16-17)—a provision of procedural justice.987 A central Old Testament thought is that God is the judge of all; of this reality,

984

S. N. Kramer, History Begins at Sumer (New York: Anchor Books, 1959;from an earlier edition by Falcon’s Wing Press, 1956), pp. 56-57. 985 H. Frankfort, The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), pp. 82ff. 986 Ibid., pp. 84-85. 987 R. Sider, The Scandal of Evangelical Politics (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), p. 107.

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Jephthah’s call on God to finally decide his case with the Ammonites is sometimes thought the best example.988 Three other senses of justice are visible in the Old Testament: (a) civil justice for cases of dispute, claims or complaints, illustrated in Exodus 18:13-21 and Judges 4:4. One of the most famous in the Old Testament is the case of two women in a dispute over which one was mother of a surviving baby (1 Kings 3:16-28). The case was brought to King Solomon for decision; (b) criminal justice for trial and sentencing of criminal activity prohibited by law of which Deuteronomy 17:2-7 is the Old Testament locus classicus. In the New Testament Romans 13:1-5 also has criminal law in view as an activity of civil government; and (c) distributive or economic justice for the required community spirit of the Old Testament in aiding at least twelve kinds of dependent persons in Israel; the most commonly mentioned are widows, orphans and the poor, and less frequently aliens, workers, and Levites who have no land—the basic economic resource of ancient Israel. A short list of dependents appears for example in Isaiah 1:17. Justice is rooted in law. Corresponding to the Sumerian judicial scene noted above is the fact that laws and law codes were in use in very ancient Mesopotamia. In the preceding essays they were listed as matters of ancient Near Eastern culture. The earliest law codes on which justice is based come from Mesopotamia: family laws and customs recorded on tablets excavated at the site of Nuzi on the upper Tigris River. The texts contain laws on marriage, inheritance, real estate, adoption, commerce and trade.989 Another body of laws is that of Ur-Nammu, the founding ruler of Ur, who ruled there about 2112-2095 B. C., also covering commercial, family, damage and personal harm events, and even (at this early time) judicial procedures. This legal tradition and the issues of justice it addressed continued through the history of early Mesopotamia era by era. Law codes were also operative among the Hittites, and then in Israel with modifications appropriate to its deliverance from Egyptian slavery and its remarkable monotheism.990 Varied judicial and justice philosophies may be detected in these archaeologically varied documents from Israel’s context.991 The point of importance here, however, is only that law codes, their values, and the sense of justice they exhibit, originated before there was any Israel. This is another development of common grace existing in the human processes of life outside the biblical redemptive plan, but feeding into the flow of the latter. Since distributive justice (the just distribution of resources to dependents in Israel’s national life) is the most important for our thinking about life in the democratic world of our time. And since Christians are in a unique position to make it happen outside the courts and at their own initiative, we shall begin with Old Testament examples of that aspect. Two important early biblical passages specifying details of distributive justice are the jubilee laws of Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 15 where further laws of debt-release are outlined.

988

T. Mafico, “Justice,” ABD 3:1127-1129. J. Finegan, Light From the Ancient Past: The Archaeological Background of Judaism and Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), pp. 65-67; Finegan places the practice of the customs and laws of the the Nuzi tablets in the Old Akkadian Period (c 2360-2180 B. C.) although they were written after the Hurrian settlement there (Finegan, pp. 46-48). 990 For a list and texts of the Mesopotamian codes with selections, see J. B. Pritchard, ANET, pp vii, 159-198, 523-526. 991 For a discussion of the development of varied concepts of law under the influence of Stoicism in Greece, see Sabine, History of Political Theory, pp. 148-158.

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Deuteronomy 15 discusses care of the poor with attention to motives, intentions and actions. In other passages, over a dozen kinds of dependent or disadvantaged persons in Israel are mentioned including Levites, resident aliens, widows, orphans, slaves including debt servants, single women, debtors, the poor, aged parents, workers, the deaf, the blind, refugees, captive women, newly married persons, and involuntary homicides (refuge cities);992 all these are cared for or protected with various kinds of laws. Whether or not the prophets cite specific laws, these provisions of distributive justice are assumed in numerous prophetic passages condemning neglect or exploitation.993 During the later monarchy, kings engaged in land expropriations at their own whims are condemned by prophets. Including Psalms, Proverbs and the prophets alone, close to twenty passages speak of the plight or abuse of widows, orphans or aliens. Widows are mentioned most often, widows and orphans fairly frequently, and all three together occasionally. Zechariah 7:10 has an unusual list of four types: the widow, the fatherless (orphans), the alien and the poor. In addition to these vulnerable types, land grabs by Israelite kings, princes, nobles or aristocrats and bureaucrats are condemned (Micah 2:1-2). Ahab’s expropriation of Naboth’s land is the most famous of these incidents due to the author of Kings’ choice to detail the story (2 Kings 21). Probably the most frequently mentioned of Israel’s disadvantaged are the poor, although not always in condemnations of their neglect (more than 113x in Psalms, Proverbs and the prophets); still, the texts condemning their exploitation are frequent. In these same books their oppressors are often the rich, while the elders and leaders are made responsible for their care (e.g., Isa 3:15).

The New Testament has many passages on God’s justice. Justice is usually expressed with one or more members of the dikai-group (justice/righteousness, judgment, just, justification). It often condemns the wicked generally, including and especially the persecutors of the people of God (2 Thes 1:3-10 with two uses of the dikai-group). For our purpose, the adjective dikaios can be noted in its various meanings. Substantially it refers to right attitudes, character, or behavior before God or his law. While dikaios is not used in contexts of distributive justice in the New Testament, the latter is nevertheless as much a responsibility of “the righteous” as any other virtues or qualities. In several cases, “justice,” refers to uprightness of character and behavior so that before a judge one may be so evaluated as in the case of Jesus before Pilate (Matt 27:1924). It can also be used for a judgment about an action or idea as “right” or “just,” as in 2 Peter 1:13, “I think it right,” or applied to God’s manner of dealing with both his people and their persecutors, “it is right for God . . . (2 Thes 1:6; cf Acts 4:19).” It also becomes a designation for those God has “pronounced just,” i.e., “justified” meaning pronounced righteous. Hence also, Jesus is declared to be “just” and holy (Acts 3:13). But justice does not altogether lose the sense of a “just” life; it rather has the sense of the “virtue” of certain people beyond Jesus like the prophets or in the New Testament Zacharias, Elizabeth, Simeon, Joseph; each is called a “just” person. In Paul, the emphasis of certain texts is certainly on persons being just before God—a status gained by faith in Christ whose righteousness God imputes to those who believe (esp



992

D. DeWitt, “The Theology of the Pentateuchal Law Codes,” unpublished paper, Andrews University, 1981. 993 The passages containing these laws in the Pentateuch alone are: Exod 21:1-11; 22:16-31; 23:1-9; Lev 19:9-18, 20-22, 29, 32-37; Deut 15:1-18; 18:1-8; 21:10-14; 22:13-30; 23:15-24:22; list from ibid, p. 74.

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Rom 5:19). But this position with God also expects that “justice” or “uprightness” will characterize the lives of “justified” people, a standard by which God also conducts himself; Titus 1:8 makes dikaios a standard for an “overseer” or elder (bishop; cf Jas 5:16: “the prayer of the righteous,” or 1 Pet 3:12; 4:18; Heb 12:23).994 In one striking passage the idea of social justice appears in explicit terms: Colossians 4:1: “Masters, provide your slaves with what is just/right (dikaion) and fair (or equal/equitable, isotata).” This text, though isolated, clearly makes dikaion both a goal and a resulting condition of the slave when applied. Considering that “righteous” is so often spoken of as a generality referring to the quality of relations between persons, as a quality or status it can easily be extended into works of social justice without disturbing the sense or distorting the meaning. Hence, distributive justice is the most frequently noted of the four types in the New Testament (Gal 2:9-10; 6:10; 2 Cor 8-9; 1 Tim 5:1-11 [referring to a fund for dependent widows]); James 5:1-6 is concerned with just payment of wages to workers, which is a matter of criminal law by Old Testament standards (Deut 24:14-15). These examples cannot be anything but a New Testament continuation of the Old Testament values spinning around Hebrew notions of justice.

Thus it is clearly correct to say that the New Testament applies dikaios to social or distributive justice. Such texts are ground for seeing in the biblical material on justice the basis for conjunction of an already existing, out-biblical notion of governance and human striving with the biblical pursuit of the same value. This situation involves a confluence of what belongs to government supremely and what Christians are also taught by their Scriptures to value, especially before and with God, but in human relations and society as well. Finally, a compound of the root dikai- (ekdikos) is used in Paul’s government passage (Rom 13:4). Here it means “punisher, avenger,” characterizing a governor or king as carrying out retributive or punishing justice on evildoers.995 Paul thinks of it as a function of governance, reached when the evil are punished, and hence also an end-goal of government, though not the only one as this essay is arguing.

(5) Life. Included in life are protection from theft, breaking, personal attack, armed civil violence, invasion, hostile foreign occupation, and protection from all possible natural disasters such as tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, drought, tsunamis and pandemics as well as the whole range of health issues and all other forms of mass disease and wasting. Certainly to be included is protection of fetal life. Safety from all such humanly intended and natural disasters is the responsibility of states, especially in the modern world where these protections have become more and more within the range of human controls. Clearly, however, total security is not possible, especially in the realm of natural disasters. The American Declaration of Independence speaks of governments established to guarantee “Life (my italics), Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” As Jefferson sat writing the Declaration of Independence at his table-desk in a second floor room rented from Jacob Graff at 7th and Market Streets, Philadelphia, what stream of

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994 995

This sketch is based on Schlier, “dikios,” TDNT 2:187-191. BAGD, p. 238

political thought furnished him with the word “Life”?996 Neither he nor the Congress claimed more for the assertion than what it said on its face, although some members may have had their own private nuances. In the Declaration’s immediate context, “rights . . . among which are Life . . . ,” must refer (1) to specific rights of Englishmen since the colonies in question were mostly English in origin and population. The plural “rights” is followed by a short list. Jefferson does not refer to any abstract idea of right or rights as though he has in mind an internally implanted psychic force resident in all human beings. Rather he is referring to the kinds of rights that are external and objective—visible in human relations or natural human social quests: Life, Liberty, pursuit of Happiness—similarly to Aristotle. The socialrelational sense of rights is similar to Aristotle’s sense of “right conduct towards others in which one gives them what is proper,”997 or in the same way receives from others as suggested in “pursuit of Happiness.” He was thinking of life free from abuses and terrors of the British colonial presence. (a) The Declaration itself has many references to George III’s destruction of the quality of colonial life: diminished representation in legislatures; obstruction of justice; occupation armies; quartered soldiers; taxation without the people’s consent or representation; and burning whole towns.998 (b) The Declaration also alludes to unjust colonial deaths: war against the colonies after declaring them outside the king’s protection; constraining captured sea travelers to become executioners of their friends and brothers; incitement of Indians to destruction and slaughter; deaths of slaves in transport; and murdering the very people on whom he has obtruded (thrust forward without request) slaves.999 Jefferson’s “Life” is so common a concept in classical Greek and Roman thinkers, including Aristotle—and one might add, in western literature generally—that it seems unnecessary to illustrate further, except for one added example. Aristotle speaks of “life” in his Politics, Bk III, Ch 9, in relation to the state:

But a state exists for the sake of good life, and not for the sake of life only. If life only were the object, slaves and brute animals might form a state. But they cannot, for they have no share in happiness or in a life of free choice.

The passage is remarkable because of the conjunction of three terms also found in the Declaration: life, happiness and freedom. One notes how easily Aristotle associates these three goal-values. It is hard to think Jefferson had not read this passage.

996

Jefferson’s first draft in his own handwriting is displayed at the web site ushistory.org. In this draft, the word “life” does appear. There are many crossed-out phrases and words with other language substituted between lines, but “life” is not one of them. The changes may have been his own independently, or they may have been made by him as his committee or the Congress made changes. “Life” is not changed in Congress’s revisions either. 997 H. Schlier, “dikios,” TDNT, p. 180. 998 J. G. Hunt, The Essential Thomas Jefferson (Avenel NJ: Random House Value Publishing, 1994), p. 24; also in a letter to J. Randolph less than a year earlier in which he speaks of his “first wish . . . a restoration of our just rights (ibid., p. 21).” His frequent use of this plural shows he is not thinking of a philosophical doctrine of human rights, but of specific, already existing, stated rights of Englishmen, thought of as a set of “right” relations between people and their social-political environment. 999 Ibid., pp. 25-28.

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Is there any conjunction of biblical values with this social notion of life? Reference here is not yet to biblical redemptive concepts and theology, but to a humanitarian sense of life. We are more likely to find it in the Old Testament than in the New, since the New is almost wholly taken up with the redemptive idea of the life of God entering the human stream via the incarnation and resurrection of Christ. There is such a concept of “life” in Scripture; it is also supplemented with divinely revealed qualifications and nuances; it is there, and yields thoughts that comport with the Aristotelian-Jeffersonian sense. In both Hebrew (nephesh) and Greek (zoe, psuche), the terms for life denote the biological-physical vitality of organic entities--animals, man, even plants.1000 The world possesses such vitality by creation (Gen 1: God made both animals and man nephesh hayah, “living life”). In both languages, life is pulsating physical, personal and social vitality. In Greek usage it includes even the vitality of the mind and its thoughts.1001 Its opposite is harm or death which is an occasion for sorrow, wailing and mourning. This value is related to the idea of protection in many Old Testament texts; it appears in the ten commandments, at the stage of tribal government, and then in the monarchy stage of Old Testament history. In the church fathers, it appears in strong opposition to war, capital punishment, or, indeed, any form or advocacy of killing, including abortion and infanticide. R. Stark (Story of Christianity) argues that this very value on life itself, caused Christians to multiply faster than Romans who continued to dissipate themselves with these practices; hence Christianity overwhelmed Rome spiritually and physically over a three-hundred year period.

(6) Equality. Curiously, the equalitarian traditions valued in the founding American documents actually begin with Plato. Plato reviewed various kinds of government: democracy, monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, etc. He thought democracy a fairly bad form of government because it tended to the anarchy of a whole people. So with tongue in cheek, he said: For this you are told is the most beautiful in a city which is under a Democracy, and that for the sake of liberty any one who is naturally of a free spirit chooses to live in it alone. And must not this inbred anarchy . . . descend into private families, and in the end reach even the brutes? . . . But that highest pitch of the liberty of the multitude, how great it is in such a [democratic] city . . . and how great the equality and liberty the wives have with their husbands and husbands with their wives . . . . This now . . . is that government so beautiful and youthful . . . .1002

Aristotle, following him closely in time, is of a different mind on equality, liberty and democracy: The basis of a democratic state is liberty . . . Every city, it is said, must have equality and therefore in a democracy the poor have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme . . . . Such points are common to



1000

R. Bultmann, “zoa,” TDNT 2:832. Ibid, p. 833, where he notes Aristotle’s thought that vous (mind, thought) belongs to the realm of cosmic vitality as a quality of zoa. 1002 Cited by Reinhold, Classic Pages, pp. 116-117, from Plato, The Republic, Bk VIII, trans by H. Spens (Glasgow, 1763). This edition was the one used most in the revolutionary era, and for this reason is used by Reinhold as the version read by the American constitutional era founders.

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all democracies; for democracy and popular power in their truest form are based upon the recognized principle of democratic justice, that all should count equally. Equality implies that the rich should have no more share in the government than the poor, and should not be the only rulers, but that all should rule equally according to their numbers. In this way men think that they will secure equality and freedom in their state . . . .1003

Aristotle speaks only of citizens, not of the whole population, perhaps two-thirds of which were slaves or resident aliens, and neither of which voted. But he does mean the participation of actual citizens—those free members of the families descended from the old tribes. A final example of egalitarian thinking comes from Polybius, the Roman historian (203-120 B. C.), whose History was read by the American founders especially for its (Aristotelian) view of mixed government. James Monroe used quotations from Polybius to sustain arguments for certain portions of the Virginia Constitution, and John Adams excerpted extensive portions from the History, Bk VI. Says Polybius: . . . each separate power [among the three branches of government] being still counteracted by the rest, might be retained in due position, and the whole government be preserved in equal balance; as a vessel, when impelled to either side by the wind, is kept steady by a contrary force. Thus the dread of the people, to whom a certain share is allotted in the government, restrained the excesses and abuse of royalty.

Whereas Plato (caustically) and Aristotle (seriously) were thinking of the equality of individual citizens, Polybius applies the equality idea to the equal balance of the three main branches of government; the beauty of mixed government is that each branch checks the excesses of the other—an idea of great importance to the American founders. So, again, the non-Christian value of the equality of all citizens, expressed by Jefferson in the Declaration, has roots in the classical non-Christian tradition. But can we find even a hint that any biblical texts or portions thought of “equality” as a kind of end-goal of human existence and its sociality. That humans ought to socially exist in some kind of equalitarian community is a widely believed idea. In American use, it refers to the equal (Greek isos) status and treatment of persons in a society in dignity, rights, opportunity, and before law; it does not refer to an absolute personal equality of gifts and personal capacities. This idea is probably found in the Old Testament, though without the abstract term “equality,” while Paul uses this language for a hoped-for economic levelness among Christians. He views equality as a final goal of giving to poor believers or the conduct of Christian slave-master relations. Once more, the salient point is the end-goal character of his statements.

Prior to Paul, and as an input into his thinking, the Old Testament legislation envisions an egalitarian Israel. This is clear from the fact in Israel’s founding period that no class structure is visible in the documents. This observation is widely agreed to by Old Testament scholars and spoken of as a matter of course. It is seen for example in the settlement in Canaan when land was distributed by lot; no one could purchase a piece of land to his own advantage. Rather, land was an equal gift to all tribes without favoritism



1003

Aristotle, Politics, Bk VI. Ch 2.

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by right, preference or purchase. Unlike other nation-states of the ancient Near East, the law regarded all Israel equally with no varied penalties for one class over another; and the law was equally applicable to all who lived within Israel, alien and Israelite alike. Unlike Greece, all participated in the festivals on the same level, and all were equally responsible for the application of the law to all entities, private and governmental alike. Similarly, the economic life of Israel was ideally one economy with provisions for sharing the wealth between those with more resources and those who fell into land loss and poverty (Lev 25; Deut 15). Archaeologists recognize that what artifact remains are available from the Iron Age I (Israel’s settlement period, 1200–1000 B. C.) show signs of a people in largely egalitarian circumstances.1004 One may note the summary of this phenomenon in Essay XI above. In the New Testament this value (isotas/equality) is used for an end-goal of certain social and economic relationships between Christians. It is stated as an end-in-itself in 2 Corinthians 8:13-14. Paul also thought it suitable for application to social relationships. This is the case in Colossians 4:1 where isotas it is used with the same meaning for a relationship requiring equality between slave and master (NIV, “fair”). In this context it also interfaces with justice (NIV, “right”), but is likewise to be coordinated with such New Testament values as love, law and wisdom, though not directly applied in usage to any of these. Since it is thought of and expressed as a social end-goal of relations or relational actions, and since the social world is an expression of humanity as God’s creation, and since government is merely another such provision, there cannot be much distance between these uses of Paul, modest though they are, and the classical thinkers and writers use of the concept for government.

All tendencies in western law toward rigging the legislative and justice system in favor of the wealthy are rightly viewed as abuses of this basic egalitarian bearing of law, even if on a strictly secular humanitarian basis; even this secular humanitarian perspective, however, fulfills the purpose of God in the gift of law and justice to the created world. Despite the presence of this value in both traditions (humanitarian and biblical), G. Tinder’s cautions about the dangers of an absolute equalitarian social order are to be taken seriously.1005 (7) Happiness. With Jefferson (Declaration of Independence) the value should read “the pursuit of Happiness.” In Aristotle’s thinking “happiness” is the absolute final goal of all human quests, hopes and dreams. The value might not be suitable for inclusion 1004

R. Miller in his remarkable “Gazetteer of Iron I Sites,” expresses reservations about a strict egalitarianism in Israel’s earliest settlement sites. He presents evidence that certain “mother” settements (Dothan, Mizpah, Shechem) show signs of a somewhat higher level of living than the dependent, smaller “daughter” villages surrounding them. But the differences are not very great, and the same modesty of dwellings and pottery found in the Iron I settlement sites generally characterizes the larger sites as well. Larger Iron I fourroom houses than those of the smaller villages appear in the larger sites;for example, some four-room houses may be 14 x 16m in area in the larger sites while in the smaller sites they may be more typically about 9 x 12m or even as small as 7 x 9m, and some painted pottery may also be a difference in larger towns. On any reckoning, no palatial buildings appear, and differences could be due to family or clan size. See R. D. Miller II, “A Gazetteer of Iron I Sites in the North-central Highlands of Palestine,” Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 56, ed R. Averbeck, M Chavalas, and D. Weisberg (Bethesda MD: CDL Press, 2002). 1005 G. Tinder,The Political Meaning of Christianity (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), pp. 186-194.

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were it not for three factors: (a) Aristotle mentions it often as a goal of governance; (b) Jefferson includes it in the Declaration of Independence; and (c) there is a minor but real attestation of it in Acts by Paul in a speech-statement about happiness as a purpose of God for humanity in general. A few examples will show that the value was thought of in the same end-goal way in Greek thought. Like the New Testament, Greek classical poets and thinkers use makarios for a condition of their gods, or for a god-like condition of man (New Testament). For human beings in social contexts including governments, Aristotle’s preferred term is eudaimon meaning “blessed with a good genius,” “fortunate,” or “happy.” He distinguishes makarios from eudaimon with this same god-and-man difference; eudaimon is also used for outward prosperity meaning “wealthy”.1006 In English translations of Aristotle’s Politics, eudaimon or other terms for gladness, happiness or joy are usually translated “happiness.” Aristotle says, for example, about happiness: As every science and undertaking aims at some good, what is in our view the good at which political science aims, and what is the highest of all practical goods? As to its name there is, I may say, a general agreement. The masses and the cultured agree in calling it happiness, and conceive that ‘to live well’ or ‘to do well’ is the same . . . as to be happy.1007 Therefore, we call absolutely final that which is always desired for itself and never as a means to something else. Now happiness more than anything else answers to this description. For happiness we always desire for its own sake and never as a means to something else.1008

With respect to government, he says: The question remains to be discussed whether the happiness of the individual is the same as that of the state, or is different . . . no one denies that they are the same (Politics,VII,

Ch 2).

Now it is evident that that form of government is best in which every man, whoever he is, can act for the best and live happily (Politics VII, Ch 2). A good lawgiver should inquire how states and races of men and communities may participate in a good life, and in the happiness which is attainable by them1009

He goes on to identify happiness with attainment of virtue, especially the four Greek cardinal virtues (courage/andreia, moderation/sophrosuna, justice/dikaiosuna and prudence/sophia). He notes that different persons and different groups define attainment of happiness in different ways depending on class and interests; he also stresses that virtue is not a theory, but can only be rightly seen in virtuous activity. About 2000 years later, Jefferson, no doubt reading Aristotle and other later Stoics following and modifying him down to the

1006

L-S, pp. 708-109. Nichomachean Ethics, I, 2 1008 Ibid., I, 5 1009 Politics, VII, 2. 1007

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second Christian century, reflected the same ideas in his thought that governments exist to secure human rights, among which he includes “the pursuit of Happiness.” In speaking of “pursuit” he also reflects Aristotle’s caution in the last selection above, that government cannot secure happiness for citizens, but only the circumstances of its attainment, while their part is only an inquiry by government leaders and communities about how they can participate in its attainment by the populace. Hence, it is clear that this value too was a feature of pre-Christian thought about the end-goals of government, and a value to which Christians might also contribute in a civil sense (not a redemptive sense) if they could find in their Bibles some encouragement to it. There is a modest connection of a few Hebrew words to Aristotle’s humanistic sense, while in the New Testament, Aristotle’s main terms for happiness do not occur, although a near equivalent (euphrosuna, Acts 14:17) does occur; this example will be discussed below. Some English versions translate Heb asher “happy.” Sometimes Hebrew texts assign a human cause. For example, Leah’s servant Zilpah speaks of her own happiness at the birth of Asher, who is named for the Hebrew word (Gen 30:13). Again, the Queen of Sheba thinks Solomon’s men must be “happy” (asher) with the constant presence of his wisdom in their ears (1 Ki 10:8). Likewise a Psalmist remarks about how happy must a man be who has many children/sons (Psa 127:3-5). But so close does asher come in this sense to “blessed” that sometimes English translators simply translate it “blessed” as in Psalm 144:15 where it is used of relationship with God, and thus comes closer to Greek makarios/ blessed (of a deity). This is also the case with Job 5:17. On the other hand, Malachi 3:15 mentions the (wrongful) happiness of the arrogant. Hebrew barak is close to “happiness” but is still mostly translated “blessed” since it assumes God as the source of human joy in various circumstances, especially a relationship with him, or a way of being in him or rewarded by him. Nonetheless, its sense in most contexts suggests “happiness” as a benefit of being blessed of God. Thus asher may come close to Aristotle’s thought in attributing happiness to pleasing human circumstances; it refers to happiness of government action only in passing, and in this sense is far from Aristotle. Hebrew barak is even farther from Aristotle. The term euphrosune, appearing in Acts 14:17 in Luke’s story of Paul’s speech at Lystra, refers to the effect that God is knowable from his kindly acts toward all humans. Nothing is said about government, but only about God’s “kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons,” and that “he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy (euphrosuna). By taking seriously the historic HebrewChristian idea of God’s general revelation and common grace to all, this text takes on parallel significance to the Greek and Roman ideas of general human happiness. Within this framework humanity is also created by God, and government is one of his in-history establishments. That these creation works are aimed at human “happiness” is affirmed by this lonely appearance of euphrosuna in Acts 14:17. This is a minimal biblical parallel; but it is significant. Even if it is Luke’s term and not Paul’s (which is possible but not likely here), Luke thinks its use appropriate, and he may even have intended to represent Paul as intentionally paralleling Aristotle’s thought with a synonym. Still, it is not used elsewhere in the epistles, and so the case is modest, although present at least in embryo. Hence, a “convergence of values” occurs between non-Christian and biblical thought.

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(8) Community. The human impulse to communitarian life is historic. Plato, Diogenes and the earliest Stoics—the Hellenistic philosophy stream closest to Paul in ethics—envisioned a humanity that “would live as a single “herd” without family and presumably without property, with no distinction of race or rank, and without the need of money or courts of law.”1010 The line of thought followed by early Stoics had input into the Hellenistic kings—the successors of Alexander the Great—in their idea of a unified world monarchy, albeit thoroughly Greek in culture and institutions. This impulse and its expression exists, however, mostly in the dreams of philosophers. Even the communitarian groups that sprang up in the American nineteenth century were a mix of philosophical and religious impulses—the Amana, Shaker, Oneida, Zoar and New Harmony (Indiana) communities, for example.1011 But for the most part the idea of community comes from Aristotle’s Politics, where he begins his discussion of politics with these words (in translation) at the opening of the first chapter: Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for mankind always acts in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims, and in a greater degree than any other, at the highest good.1012

Families form villages and villages form states. The state’s character is that of a union of those who cannot exist without each other, for example the family of which the natural union is between husband and wife, and the master and slave, or at a much larger level, the Greek (the ruler) and the barbarian (the ruled).

When several villages are united in a single community . . . the state comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life.1013

For this essay’s limited purpose, we do not need to critique this analysis; nor do we need to carry it farther, although Aristotle does develop his thoughts in great analytic detail. It is sufficient to understand the value and one of its earliest articulated origins in the most concrete and non-speculative of the classical Greek thinkers. As forceful as Aristotle’s statement of the matter is, it is not the strict communalism of Plato which Aristotle thought unrealistic. In him and after him the idea is modified again and again. And yet, it survives in the reality that any society necessarily has to have some basic shared values within which individual member gives and takes.

1010

Sabine, History of Political Theory, p. 146. C. Nordhoff, The Communistic Societies of the United States: From Personal Observations (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1875; reprint New York: Dover Publications, 1966). Nordhoff visited the communities he wrote about, and thus his is one of the enduring treatments among several on this important subject. I have visited a few of these communities (Amana, Zoar, two Shaker sites, and New Harmony), although they are not just abandoned sites but are kept in repair for tourists. 1012 Aristotle, Politics, Ch 1; the translation is from L. R. Loomis, Aristotle: On Man In the Universe, pp. 249-250. 1013 Ibid., p. 251. 1011

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In reading Aristotle, the founders of the American republic took encouragement for their notion of “Equal Principles of Republican Government.”1014 Other ancient thinkers who voiced this idea were Polybius and Cicero—and many more. The revolutionary era leaders who read them were chiefly Jefferson, Adams and probably Madison; but they were not alone. Meyer Reinhold includes selections from Aristotle’s Politics on slavery, common good, a government of laws, governments with mixed constitutions as the best, the “middle class” as the anchor community, and the three equal branches of government. Aristotle’s Politics was significant for many reasons, not the least of which was that he gathered constitutions from no less than 158 different Greek city-states in his time (fourth century B. C.), and distilled from them what he thought was the best kind of community.1015 The chief expression of the community idea in the American constitutional era was the idea of the union of individual states of which the glue was the Federal Constitution, despite the contentious crisis of its ratification.1016 The Federal Constitution passed through two crises of union—the ratification process by state conventions, which was very tense and uncertain at its beginning, and the Civil War which tested whether the union could survive a sectional conflict. Minor threats along the way also occurred as during the civil rights tensions of the 1960s when some states again invoked “states rights” against the laws of the federal government.

Community in the Old Testament is designated by three Hebrew roots: yakhad, adah and qahal. All three are used for the whole of Israel depending on the aspect in the writer’s mind. Yakhad means togetherness, jointness, commonality, and is used sparingly in the Old Testament, although at Qumran and its scrolls it became a main term for that community. Hebrew edah refers to an assembly or group gathered around its leader as a council or the worshipping “congregation”; it usually applies to a part of the whole. The term qahal refers to a gathering of the whole of Israel assembled for worship, treaty renewals and annual festivals. All-Israel unity, however, goes farther than these basic meanings. The community functions of Israel’s life were common functions of most communities, and remain so today in large measure. We do not need the whole of Norman Gottwald’s social theories to profit from his outline of the dynamics of ancient Israel’s community formation. He outlines the several common interest functions of communities as found in the Old Testament:1017 1) Mutual economic aid for constituent families; 2) Military self-defense through contribution of troop quotas to the tribal levy for protective purposes; 3) Worship celebration and possible production of local [oral] traditions; 4) Judicial community elders for enforcing case laws consonant with a developing tribal and federated consensus on normal communal behavior;



1014

Reinhold, Classic Pages, pp. 113-127. Reinhold produces four favorite passages from Aristotle he found alluded to or extracted in America’s constitutional fathers. 1015 Ibid., pp. 117-121 1016 On the history of ratification by the states, see P. Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). 1017 N. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh (Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 1979), p. 341.

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5) Intermarriage among extended families in the same protective association, preferred and at times obligatory.

Whether or not all of these are stated precisely or fully, the outline is suggestive of what most communities in most parts of the world think are essential functions of parts and wholes. There are probably more such functions like education, for example, that would be part of most communities;1018 but those mentioned by Gottwald from the sociology of the Hebrew Bible were basic to ancient Israel. In the New Testament, oikoumene (empire) and basileia (kingdom) are the broadest social categories for government. Next to these is ethnos/nation, usually for an ethnic entity (unified language, culture, customs and government, but for a smaller unit than the Roman Empire). Ekklesia (assembly of the whole or representatives) is also used for a smaller specialized unit roughly equivalent to “national assembly,” or in the Old Testament sense of the “gathered people of God” with the connotation of “different from the rest of the world,” but also in the narrower sense of a city council (boula). Perhaps Paul comes closest to a term for community with ekklesia/church as “body,” a term for a whole community in Greek. In a sense all such terms are suggestive of the community idea. But the terms ethnos (nation), ekklesia (assembly) and soma (body) are limited to smaller units than a multi-nation large general government. And yet ekklesia suggests that Christians were thinking of themselves as a new community as an alternative to Rome.1019 There is simply no regular term for the idea of community except possibly ekklesia; but it does not refer in Paul’s use to government as such; it does refer to a unit of government in Acts (19:32). Even more than ekklesia, Paul’s term “body” denotes a community. This term is especially forceful when used for an organism of many united parts sharing an expansive list of benefits and internal service gifts that unite it (Eph 1:3-14; 1 Cor 12). It is not, however, a civil community, but a spiritual-social one. Its unity lies not only in its shared gifts and benefits, but also in its mutual ethical responsibilities to its members. And yet the very terms used for it suggest a new earth-community that could finally become a new civic community once its head Christ returns to earth to reign. In the meantime, it seems appropriate to see “body” as at least an analogy to a civil community until its final state arrives with resurrection and reign at the return of Christ. On any reckoning, Paul thinks in terms of community.

Thus a conclusion emerges. There is a set of common goals or end-point values men seek for their human-civic well-being. The articulation of this set of values begins philosophically in Plato, but is crystallized and articulated most clearly by the more practically-minded Aristotle. The values were found in elementary forms in the ancient Near East, and were articulated by Greek and Roman political thinkers from about the

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Abraham Lincoln campaigned partly on a pro-education platform in his first run for the Illinois legislature (in which he lost). During his subsequent successful runs for the legislature, he showed only modest interest in development of primary and secondary education in Illinois (1833-1840). On establishing colleges, he was more interested and active. See P. Simon, Lincoln’s Preparation for Greatness (Norman OK: Universith of Oklahoma Press, 1965), pp. 277-278. 1019 So D. Georgi, Theocracy in Paul’s Praxis and Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991); cf. J. R. Harrison, “Paul and the Imperial Gospel at Thessaloniki,” JSNT 25.1 (2002): 71-96; Harrison gathers many terms in use contemporary with Paul for the Roman emperor or its decrees or acts which the early Christians were applying to themselves or to Jesus.

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time of Aristotle’s death in the fourth century B. C. to about the time of Constantine (early fourth century A. D.). They appear in prominent Roman writers like Cicero, Polybius, Seneca and Plutarch, all of whom were read in Europe, England, and late colonial America during the revolutionary-constitutional period. New editions and translations kept coming from British and American presses and were in abundant supply. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison corresponded about their reading of these classical authors, and discussed them when they had occasion, especially in relation to their work on the U. S. Constitution. There are also biblical counterparts to the values. One sees them without much difficulty in the related vocabulary of the Hebrew Bible, and when Jesus, Paul or other New Testament writers state such values or analogies to them in an end-goal sense. Biblical writers do not by-pass the ultimate goal of God’s glory in human action, but they also think of human personal and social well-being in at least the eight categories identified above. Sometimes their use of end-goal terms is obviously for the human-benefits of biblical redemption as in the case of freedom in Romans 8:21 and Galatians 5:1, 13. But that biblical priority does not undo the end-goal-with-nothing-beyond nature of the thought when focused on human welfare. In other cases, end-point values like equality or good or justice are stated in clear social contexts. An example is “equality” in 2 Corinthinans 8:1314, where it refers to Paul’s goal for the collection, or in Colossians 4:1, where it denotes the final goal of the Christian servant-master relation; it also appears in passages more directly on government such as Romans 13. Hence it seems proper to recognize that civil government goals for the people who live under them, and biblical goals for redemption and its ethics meet as universal values at a point beyond all other particulars of human life. This does not mean the civil and redemptive spheres come to such values in the same way; in fact they get there in quite different ways. Civil ends derive from experience and reason; redemptive forms of the same goals derive from revelation. But the two ways converge at the same points. Therefore it is a more than viable proposal that Christians have an analogous set of human-well-being values that are the goals of redemption, while the civil sphere is able to eke out of human existence the same identical goals. In this way “convergent values,” occur in the interests of both church and state. The convergent interests of this discussion are limited to a set of civil values on which Christian and humanitarian civil thought converge. That some of the values occur in Paul’s government passage of Romans 13 is a sure sign of common interests explicitly stated with common terminology, but limited to the civil sphere. The Convergent Values: Modal By “modal” is meant those more or less universal qualities which are instrumental to achieving the end-goals; one can think of them simply as the means for moving toward or in some measure reaching the end-goals of human existence discussed above. In at least one major passage in his Politics, Aristotle discusses the same distinction I have made in this discussion between final or end-point values and instrumental values by which governments and people reach such goals. In the Nichomachean Ethics, he says near the beginning of Book I (Ch 5) 606

Since there are more ends than one, and some of these ends . . . we desire as means to something else, it is evident that not all are final ends. But the highest good is clearly something final.

And again: Therefore, we call absolutely final that which is always desired for itself and never as a means to something else. Now happiness more than anything else answers to this description, whereas honor, pleasure, intelligence, and every virtue we desire partly for their own sakes (for we should desire them independently of what might result from them), but partly also as a means to happiness, because we suppose they will prove instruments of happiness.

The discussion above expands the list from happiness to another seven values as ends. But it may well be that some of them do at times have instrumental value as ways to gain another value. Aristotle was not arbitrarily isolating and absolutizing happiness. In some places in the Ethics and Politics he also thinks of other of his major values for humanity under government in ways very close to what he says of happiness. It is sufficient to note that Aristotle too thinks of modes or instrumentalities in a way similar to how the concepts are organized here. The instrumental goals follow.

(1) Love. Greeks and Romans did not value love in the New Testament sense. But one of their philosophers—Nero’s court philosopher and Paul’s Roman contemporary, Seneca—was driven to thinking about human relations in ways that approached some of love’s New Testament synonyms—mercy, kindness, gentleness. The reason for movement of thought is Seneca’s disgust—something like Juvenal’s—with the corruption, brutality, meanness and violence into which Roman life was increasingly falling in his and Nero’s time. Nero himself, after a relatively calm first three years, began—in his fourth year (c 60 A. D.)—to enter upon a horrid period of brutality and meanness; in this he relived the same pattern in his predecessors Tiberias, Caligula and Claudius.1020 Thus Sabine notes: Rome has fallen into senility, corruption is everywhere, and despotism is inevitable . . . the mass of men is so vicious and corrupt that it is more merciless than a tyrant . . . . On one hand [Seneca] was intensely conscious of the inherent sinfulness of human nature and on the other his ethics showed the tendency toward humanitarianism which became continually more marked in later Stoicism . . . The sense of human wickedness haunts him and wickedness is ineradicable; no one escapes it and virtue consists rather in an endless struggle for salvation than in its achievement . . . .1021



1020

For these Caesars see Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans Robert Graves (Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1957), pp. 113-246. 1021 Sabine, History of Political Theory, pp. 175, 177; one is reminded of the Satires of Juvenal only a few decades later in which he pictures Rome as the world’s sewer, and cannot imagine any person in his or her right mind continuing to live there. In one scene, he lauds the wisdom of a broken man pulling a hand cart containing all his belongings and exiting the city on a road through its gate. See The Satires of Juvenal, trans R. Humphries (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1858), pp. 33-45

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Seneca’s disgust with Roman corruption, cruelty and hatefulness, pushed him toward a second world of reason, love, kindness, and mercy. He cannot regard Rome as a decent keeper of humanity.1022 Thus in Seneca arises a quest for private love or at least small societies within states or empires where kindness and mercy are actually practiced against the whole monstrous wicked empire; Seneca looks for what Paul offers: the church—“a society rather than a state as Aristotle had thought.”1023 But Seneca does not know or recognize the church, even though it is beginning to form before his very eyes. A few selections from Seneca will illustrate the emergence of this new stage of Stoic thought. Seneca, Letter to Lucilius [on why good men suffer]: Nature never suffers the good to be harmed by the good; between good men and the gods there subsists a friendship, with virtue as its bond . . . god’s course is the same [as fathers disciplining their sons]. He does not treat the good man like a toy, but tries him, hardens him, and readies him for himself . . . . God’s attitude to good men is a father’s; his love for them is a manly love . . . . Do you find it strange that god, who so loves good men that he wishes them to attain pre-eminent goodness . . . ?1024

The second selection is from Seneca’s On Clemency, and is more significant for our theme; it is a plea to Nero to practice mercy as a style and ethic of his imperial rule. It is also more significant because this piece was a favorite of early Christians and later of John Calvin who wrote a commentary on it. In it Seneca speaks of how Nero ought to rule in the hurlyburly of his imperium. I have resolved to write on mercy . . . [Nero should think thoughts like . . .] ‘a man with nothing to commend him but the title of human being will find favor in my sight. Serenity I keep hidden, mercy ever at hand . . . .’ In all men, as I remarked, mercy is a natural quality, but it especially becomes monarchs, for in them it has greater scope for salvation and ampler opportunity to show its effect . . . . Combined with unlimited power, this is the truest temperance of soul and all-embracing love of the human race as of oneself . . . .1025

In the course of this essay Seneca argues from several considerations that mercy is instrumental to certain end-goals including community (common good),1026 happiness and peace,1027 life,1028 good, and security—gains already being realized by Christians.1029 That a civic version of love—less some important New Testament meaning elements, but nonetheless in many respects very close to its main thoughts—arose from Roman philosophy is obvious. In the world of Roman government, this instrumental value gained expression, even in the midst of its moral squalor, by nothing more than Seneca’s reaction

1022

Sabine, History of Political Theory, p. 175. Ibid., p. 176. 1024 M. Hadas (ed), The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), pp.29-31, 1025 Ibid., Seneca, pp. 137-165. 1026 Ibid., pp. 141, 159. 1027 Ibid., p. 143 1028 Ibid. 1029 Ibid., p. 144.

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to evil. Tragically, very soon after Seneca wrote this to Nero—one is tempted to think in reaction to it—Nero dropped the moderation of his early rule and turned brutal. If love was not so prominent a value among constitutional leaders in America, it did find an aggressive civil expression in Abraham Lincoln—as the 2012 film “Lincoln” illustrates. In the Hebrew Bible the two primary words for love are ahav and hesed. Applied to human relations, they cover many aspects of loving relationships both group and individual.



More interest is shown in ahav in the Hebrew Bible than seems the case in related Semitic languages or dialects. It refers to affectionate attachment, with the accent on attachment and oneness. Related ideas are variants of this sense: desire for togetherness, yearning, cleaving, choosing, honoring.1030 Its expressions are sexual love, partiality of parents to family, friendship-comradeship relations, mutual love within the community of Israel, love for neighbors and even enemies, and at its largest point, the mutual love of God and Israel for each other, as well as that of individuals (Prov 15:9): “but [God] loves him who pursues righteousness.” When covenants and treaties are in view, the relation is called hesed, “steadfast love, loving-kindness” to denote expected relations within a legal framework. In all applications the concepts expect loving relationship at both emotional and behavioral levels.1031 A further example of love in the Hebrew Bible that touches both public and private life is loving justice (note the intersection of the two values) as in Psalm 37:28. Love of a father and son is noted in Genesis 22:2, and love of husband and wife in 1 Samuel 18:20. Loving relations create peaceful community. The largest number of applications is inter-personal, inter-familial and interneighboreal, including love for enemies. The prophets stress the responsibilities of kings and princes in caring for several types of dependent persons living within Israel’s national bond. About them it is commanded, “Hate evil, and love good, and establish justice in the gate (Amos 5:15).” The text might seem to divert ahab from its highly personal Old Testament sense in that it urges loving as action; but it really does not do so since the justice to be loved is for the “needy in the gate (5:12)” and “the poor (5:11).” In Amos’ context, all Israel owes this care to the poor and needy (5:1, 4); but the prophets hold kings and princes chiefly responsible. Hence, since they are part of Israel, and are its government, ahav does in fact belong to governance.

In the New Testament, the most frequent Greek word for love is agape; but forms of philos are also used, sometimes in compounds like Philadelphia (brother/sister-love). Agape is self-giving love-action without regard for one’s own well-being, without expectation of return, and in full consideration of others’ needs. These qualities remain within but also move beyond ahav. Jesus’ self-sacrificing love is the model. There is no case of agape as a mode applied to government in the New Testament. The ultimate example is Christ’s self-sacrificial love for the world—a love which cost his life. As with freedom, the inevitable force of this ethical idea in the New Testament could not help being extended into the political realm, due to the intrinsic force of the value. One may not see it often in general public life, but self-sacrificing rescue events in which one 1030



1031

G. Wallis, “ahab,” TDOT 1:102-103. Ibid., p. 115.

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endangers or loses his own life to save another, as in wars and other disasters, show that it happens. This too is a manifestation of God’s “common grace,” as has been noted, and a providential work of God toward creation. Perhaps it is beyond possibility to expect pagan or non-Christian governments to adopt such an ethic, since governments cannot legislate it, although they can legislate distributive justice. They can also encourage and even expect and celebrate this quality in individual persons within a state. It was apparently beyond the capacity of the Roman Empire to do so even at the urging of its state philosopher, Seneca. For Romans, honor was too tangled up with violence and brutality to allow any vision of love to prevail.

Hence, Seneca’s growth in perceptions of love, mercy, kindness, and kindred names for love, shows that in a thoughtful human being, analogous concepts of social relations to those of biblical teaching can develop within the quest for moral order. Thus, the argument for “convergent values” continues. But it is also clear that Seneca lacks the full meaning of agape which grows out of Christ’s sacrificial messianic work aimed at those who attach themselves to him and at the larger world.

(2) Wisdom. The greatest power in the pre- and non-Israelite world to elevate wisdom as a way to achieve the end-goals of the preceding discussion was Egypt. Egypt did not have a corner on wisdom in the ancient Near Eastern world; but it elevated wisdom to a premier position, and left remarkable collections of wisdom sayings and even “books” of wisdom, roughly equivalent in moral value other nations’ laws. Some Egyptian legal procedures have been recovered as well as records of how “courts” dealt with alleged criminals, and “lawsuit” records are known as well as treaty texts. But so far no Egyptian law codes as such have been discovered to equal or parallel those of Mesopotamia and Hatti (the Hittites). Instead, wisdom prevails, and some of its “instruction” is parallel to the “thou shalt not” clauses of biblical law. C. Bullock notes that “Egyptian society was perceived as mirroring the order of the universe,”1032 which suggests that its culture maintained an orderly and stable society. Whatever other modes of attaining the end-values of society or government were in place elsewhere, wisdom taught Egyptians much of what they needed to know for life in a decent society. Two examples will suffice to illustrate Egyptian moral order and its end-goal and modal-goal thought. From The Instruction for King Meri-Ka-Re: Respect the nobles and make thy people to prosper. Establish thy boundaries and thy frontier patrol. It is good to act for the future. Respect a life of attentiveness, for (mere) credulity will (lead) to wretchedness. . . . He who is covetous when (sic) other men possess is a fool, (because) [life] upon earth passes by, it has no length. Happy is he who [is without] sin in it . . . .1033 From The Instruction of King Amen-em-het to his son: Thou that hast appeared as a god, hearken to what I have to say to thee, that thou mayest be king of the land and ruler of the regions, that thou mayest achieve an overabundance of good.1034



1032

C H. Bullock, An Introduction to Old Testament Poetic Books (Chicago: Moody Press, 1979), p. 39, citing M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings, 3 vols (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1973), 1:5. 1033 ANET, p. 415. 1034 ANET, p. 418.

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The value of wisdom/instruction is modal—a path to end-goal values, in one case stated as “happy,” in the other as “good.” These documents are significant since they predate Israel—Meri-ka-re from about the end of the 22nd century B. C., Amen-em-het from the time of the Twelfth Dynasty (20th-18th century B. C.).1035 Egypt has found “instruction” to be both the way to end-goal values, and some of the end-goals themselves. Hence, something like universal goals surface locally or nationally out of thinking about success; certain paths lead to them in a national or even universal manner. Christians informed about “general revelation” and “common grace” will recognize these kinds of knowledge here. Wide-ranging know-how, moral and behavioral good sense, and fear of God are themes of biblical wisdom. Biblical wisdom presumes that sin arises partly from human ignorance and foolishness (lack of forethought and larger thoughtful perspectives on attitudes and action), as well as a kind of intractable disposition to evil akin to the New Testament sense of “organic” sinfulness now part of human nature . The most prominent biblical models of this value in government are Joseph in Egypt and Solomon in Israel. The focal texts for Joseph are in Genesis 37-50; for Solomon the focal text is 1 Kings 3. In Proverbs 8-9, wisdom is viewed as an elemental power in the created order—a highly suggestive theme for the thesis of this essay. Proverbs 9 views it as already grasped by wisdom teachers and communicable to others; the chapter invites people to learn, and thinks of learning as delicious.





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Israel’s wisdom too appears in the form of books and collections of proverbs as well as in other types: love poetry as in the Song of Solomon; epic struggle as in Job; reflections on life as in Ecclesiastes. In Proverbs the wisdom of governance appears now and again, for example, in 16:12-15; 31:4-5, but also in many isolated proverbs, beside other applications like behavior in court, neighbor relations, economics (22:16), and behavior before kings. Wisdom values applied to government show its modal or instrumental function. Proverbs recognizes a certain mystique in headship and power, but insists that kings are subordinate to God himself whose powers are greater (21:1; 25:2) and whose purposes are even more mysterious than kings. This is Proverbs’ way of affirming its ever-present biblical perspective on God’s sovereignty. It is the glory of a king to search out a matter; but it is God’s glory to conceal it (25:2). This proverb is conscious of a head of state’s need to know what is happening in his realm and give thought to it. These proverbs recognize that a king’s searching and knowing is beyond the normal lives of his subjects, because it ranges over his whole realm. Proverbs 25:3 adds that a king’s heart is unsearchable. A king is one of four things which move with stately bearing: a lion (conquering predator), a rooster (strutting parader), a he-goat (wealth and leadership?), and a king with his army around him. These thoughts yield the idea of awesome respect for power. Close to a king’s mystique is a king’s subordination to divine wisdom as a tool of governance—the subject of a series ofPproverbs in 8:12-21-36. Wisdom is a primal power, original in the scheme of things, and a kind of ruler—a thought akin to Paul’s about divinely implanted law (Rom 2:14-16). She possesses prudence, knowledge and discretion, hates evil, pride and arrogance, and loathes deviant behavior and perverse speech; wisdom possesses counsel, good judgment, understanding and power, and is the force by which ANET, pp. 414, 418.

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kings reign and rulers make just laws. She walks the path of righteousness and justice, and when sought for all these qualities, yields rewards of wealth and treasure. Here too, wisdom’s modal character is visible; it leads to justice. Wisdom knows that justice is the main ruling function of a king (16:10-15). It is not an accident that a saying on honest scales and balances (16:11) follows one on kingly justice in 16:10, nor that a story about Solomon’s wise judging occurs near the beginning of his kingly acts (1 Ki 3:16-28). Personal righteousness is the root of justice (16:12), and kings take pleasure in honest lips and truth-speakers (16:13) because without some such basic civil morality grounded in candor and truth, rule cannot be effective or order maintained. Thus a king and his nation need many counselors and advisors. A king’s wrath is death-dealing, but when his face brightens, there is life (16:14-15). Summarily, a just king stabilizes a nation (29:4). A frequent criterion of justice in Proverbs and the Old Testament is the treatment of the poor (“distributive justice,” 28:3; 29:14; 31:8-9); in fact, care of the poor and dependent is a combined individual and government responsibility here and throughout the Old Testament. Another side of justice and a reflection of the king’s mystique is his need and ability to spot destructive forces within his administration (20:8, 26; 25:4-5); wicked rulers are bears and lions in a kingdom (28:15-16). If a king listens to lies, the disease will spread to his officials (29:12). Proverbs thus is conscious that disintegrating elements may enter a government, and is forceful in its thought about kingly discernment, watchfulness and decisiveness in protecting the internal integrity of the realm. These elements belong to the sphere of criminal justice. The instance cited above, of Solomon’s first case in which he had to decide on a conflict between two women, can be regarded as “civil” justice; it does not appear to be a criminal case, but one of deciding fairly who gets the live baby. Proverbs, however, seems to be chiefly focused on distributive and criminal justice, not so much on civil justice. Finally, Proverbs 22:17-24:22 contains a chain of sayings close in wording and order to a chain of Egyptian sayings by the wisdom teacher Amenemopet. This remarkable conjunction of near-identical wisdom thoughts is itself an illustration of what is called here “convergent interests,” and in fact is more precisely actual convergent thoughts.1036

(3) Righteousness/Virtue. Aristotle says righteousness covers all the historic Greek virtues; one can read it as doing so in Christian thought as well. This value denotes the moral duty of persons to decide between right and wrong in interpersonal dealings; it normally includes some measurable reference point like law, wisdom or truth. It is a law-related idea in the Old Testament: righteousness is right behavior as judged by law, especially and precisely the Torah. Republican political thought has always linked a republic with virtue; Bill Bennett’s recent Book of Virtues is a civil attempt to update this idea for Americans, although with apparently little tangible effect. The New Testament takes over the idea of a basic body of social and civil virtues from Greek philosophers, although with modifications and additions. The four Greek cardinal virtues were wisdom, moderation, justice and courage. Aristotle repeats the indispensable value of virtue for the Greek citystate in achieving civil and moral end-goals. This theme of the Greek philosophers is so well known that two brief illustrations will suffice.

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1036

Pritchard, ANET, pp. 1-425.

Politics, Bk VII, Ch 3: If we are right in our view, and happiness is assumed to be virtuous activity, the active life will be best both for the city collectively and for individuals. Politics, Bk VII, Ch 15: Courage and endurance are required for toil, wisdom for leisure, and temperance and justice for both . . . . It is not hard to see why a state that would be happy and good ought to have these same virtues . . . . Wherefore we should not practice virtue after the manner of the Spartans. For they, while agreeing with other men in the idea of the highest good, differ from them in thinking that it may be obtained by the practice of a single virtue.

Aristotle mostly relates virtue—here he specifies the basic four virtues—to the attainment of happiness. But he is thinking of the happiness of the community as a whole and not individuals in isolation, since no Greek political thinker would ever have entertained the idea that individuals have any meaningful existence in isolation. One basic feature of Greek democracy is that the whole free citizen community participates in direct government activity. He also shows here how he can expand virtue into a character quality instrumental to good as well as happiness. The second passage also shows how careful he is to avoid the impression that these quests can be narrowed down to one single thing—a trap of oversimplification into which people easily fall. Thus one can see how in Aristotle’s thought both end-goals and means fall in to an interlocking network of values and modes.

Proverbs is acutely conscious of righteousness in the scheme of things. Kingship is not all unilateral power, justice and judgment. Proverbs cautions against tyrannical rulers (28:16) who lack judgment: when the wicked rule, the people groan (29:2)—an important qualification on kingly or government power. Proverbs also recognizes that love and faithfulness keep a king safe, i.e., these moral qualities calm and stabilize his realm, produce good will and peace (20:28), and secure the throne (20:28). The larger picture of what makes a nation strong, stable and joyous, is a culture of righteousness (11:10; 14:34), which includes the king and people together, and the wisdom qualities of both. Government in Scripture, whether Israel’s or the nations’, is always limited by its practice of the moral order as guided by law, wisdom, justice and righteousness, as the foreign nations’ prophecies show. Righteousness is wisdom. Some qualities of character that repeat Aristotle’s virtues are found in Paul’s lists of qualities called the “fruit of the Spirit” as in Galatians 5:22-23. Sometimes abbreviated lists appear as in Ephesians 4:32; and sometimes lists appear with motive clauses or reasoned support as in Eph 4:25-28 and Romans 12:9-21 (cf 2 Peter 1:5-9 with extended commentary on consequences of moral failure). In a larger perspective, the New Testament takes over a body of social and civic virtues from the Greek philosophers, although usually with some modifications and additions drawn from Christ’s virtues and works. The four Greek cardinal virtues were wisdom, moderation, justice and courage. All four are adapted by the New Testament letter-writers, sometimes with shifts in terminology. A striking example is the New Testament’s paraklasis, comfort/encouragement, newly used to include Greek andreia/courage, manliness—a shift that removes the gender connotation of andreia. It was not possible for Christian thinkers to avoid correlating Greco-Roman philosophical treatments of civic virtue, as the moral dynamics of the ideal city-state with the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 6:22); the Greek virtues were the basic stuff of civil and personal morality and ethics. Paul does not repeat the four cardinal virtues mechanically in their usual Greek

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form, but he often has lists of qualities including them; they are among the qualities he considers essential marks of the Christian person’s character and behavior. These qualities are often listed in connection with group relations as in Galatians 5:22. Here and elsewhere, Paul, unlike the Greeks, includes love as a first priority and the most distinctive of the New Testament virtues.

In Book IV of the City of God, Augustine asks whether one can seriously boast of imperial grandeur (thinking of Rome) when he cannot show how it served the happiness of men. The Roman Empire was rather full of bloodshed, war horror, fear, and people terrorized by ruthless ambition. Rather, to claim grandeur, an empire ought to be ruled by the beneficial goodness of good people and upright lives. Augustine clearly thought Christians were the only fit rulers of empires, since only they know eternal goodness and justice. This thinking certainly applies directly to serious Christians. They have spiritual power and potential virtue, and thus are in a position to be the soul of a nation; perhaps even rulers might emerge from among them. But the moral necessity is not nominal Christians or even the “born again” experience. Virtue occurs when real Christians actually practice the common body of virtues—all of them—found in Aristotle earlier, and New Testament additions sometime later.1037 (4) Learning. Education is also a means to the end-goals in Greek thought. In his discussion of Plato, Sabine features Plato’s attention to education:

A modern reader cannot fail to be astonished at the amount of space devoted to education, and the meticulous care with which the effect of different studies is discussed, or at the way Plato frankly assumes that the state is first and foremost an educational institution.1038

Aristotle integrates education with democracy, devoting the whole of Book VIII of his Politics to the subject. Among other matters, he says: Ch 1: No one will doubt that a lawgiver should direct his attention above all to the education of youth, or that the neglect of education does harm to states. Now for the exercise of any faculty or art, previous training and practice are required . . . The training in things of common interest should be the same for all . . . Ch 2: [It is not] clear whether education should be more concerned with intellectual or with moral virtue . . . Should the useful in life, or should virtue, or should higher knowledge, be the aim of our training? Ch 3: The customary branches of an education are four, namely, (1) reading and writing, (2) gymnastic exercises, (3) music, to which is sometimes added (4) drawing. Of these, reading, writing, and drawing are regarded as useful for the purposes of life in a variety of ways, and gymnastic exercises are thought to infuse courage.



1037

This portion of The City of God is included in O. and J. O’Donovan, From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 138-140. 1038 Sabine, History of Political Theory, p 61.

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Clearly Aristotle embraces the idea that education is essential to the state—so essential that it should be a state function. He embraces the value of several aspects of education, including what is useful, what enlarges the mind, develops character and virtue, and strengthens the body. This advocacy is echoed in certain Old Testament texts and ideas. Aristotle’s point about the lawgiver’s attention to the education of youth is echoed in Deuteronomy’s attention to the education of children in the Mosaic law, which, after all, does include many aspects of life. In the Mosaic documents education in the law is in the hands of parents; but teaching the people the law is also a function of the priesthood; how they interface is not entirely clear in the Old Testament. Generally, Israelite children during the settlement period and early monarchy, had no access to the type of education Plato and Aristotle envision; Israelite education was entirely within the scope of the law and available time in a subsistence agriculture setting; however, Aristotle wrote 600 years later than Moses, and after examining more than 150 other city-state constitutions! Still, Israel’s was a form of education and provided in general for the value of learning (the law) as a means of realizing the divinely outlined end-goals for the nation. At a later time in Israel’s history, wisdom teachers emerged, as Proverbs, other Old Testament wisdom books, and the later Wisdom of Ben Sirach show. Two aspects of learning in ancient Israel deserve notice, since both—though only remotely related—contributed to the idea of learning. The two cases in point come from opposite ends of the learning scale: basic literacy and developed wisdom. For Israel’s settlement period there is modest evidence from archaeology of developing literacy (Iron Age I [c 1200-1000] and into Iron Age IIA [c 1000-900 B. C.]). Two sites (Tel Zayit; Izbet Sartah) in Israel have produced probable practice alphabets (“abecedaries”) dating within the twelfth to the tenth centuries B. C. Tel Zayit produced a stone bowl with an inscribed Hebrew (?) alphabet on its flat side dating from the tenth or possibly late eleventh century B. C.1039 The Izbet Sartah pottery fragment, perhaps dating to the twelfth century B. C. (later 1100s), includes writing a simple story of four lines in addition to the alphabet.1040 Another eleventh-tenth century B. C. writing sample was discovered in 2008 at Khirbet Qeiyafa; it is apparently a message to some royal official, or to Saul, or even to David himself, perhaps by a military commander at the fortress, about some social issues.1041 Since it was found at Qeiyafa above the Elah Valley in the context



1039

R. E. Tappy, P. K. McCarter, M. J. Lundberg and B. Zuckerman, “An Abecedary of the MidTenth Century B. C. E. from the Judean Shephelah,” BASOR 344 (2006):28-30; the bowl (my identification from the photo, not the article’s authors) was used secondarily in a wall of middle tenthh century B. C. date; the stone bowl must date from a somewhat earlier time—perhaps the first half of the tenth century or later part of the eleventh century B. C. The authors think the wall was built atop a pillared house with a flagstone floor—the typical early Israelite pillared house found everywhere in levels dating mostly to Iron Age I and IIa, and built in the case of Tel Zayit as part of a ring of such houses around the shoulder of the settlement mound (ibid., p 19). 1040 W. Shea, “The Izbet Sartah Ostracon,” AUSS 28, 1 (1990): 62; Shea believes the story lines accompanying the abecedary contain a short account of the Philistine capture of the ark, narrated biblically at 1 Sam 4:1b-7:1; on the twelfth century dating of the ostracon, see J. Naveh, “Some Considerations on the Ostracon from Izbet Sartah,” IEJ 28 (1978):31-35. 1041 W. Shea, “The Qeiyafa Ostracon: Separation of Powers in Ancient Israel,” Ugarit-Forschungen 41 (2009): 601-610.

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of what appears to be a fort or military outpost, it may have been delayed in sending or dropped when the fort fell, and never reaching its destination. The Elah Valley below Khirbet Qeiyafa, is near the site of David’s fight with Goliath. These examples seem rightly thought to suggest early Israel’s efforts at literacy. At best, however, this evidence is limited; but the cases in point are promising toward other such discoveries.

The more pertinent example toward the other end of a more developed literacy in Israel is (again) the book of Proverbs. The book glorifies learning about a combination of wise life-ways, including know-how for a good life, virtues of a godly man, and relationship with the God of world order as the source of all wisdom. Proverbs includes a plea for learning in Chapter 9. This impressive poetic piece is about the beauties, delights and values of learning and knowledge. In effect it is the Hebrew counterpart of Aristotle’s discussion of education. Although it comes from an entirely different cultural context (Israel), its goal is similar to that of Aristotle’s education goals. A few basic observations will suggest the poem’s connection with education. (a) Wisdom invites the wayfarer into its house for a banquet—to understanding as opposed to simplicity (Heb peti, naivete). (b) Learning is the main point throughout, especially as the two centered lines of vss 9-10 stress: “instruct” . . . “wiser still” . . . “learning” . . . “wisdom” . . . “understanding,” where the emphasis is on the fear of the Lord and knowledge of the Holy One. (c) Learning wisdom is instrumental to a long life (vss 1112); its rewards are beyond itself (vs 12). (d) Ignorance is folly and un-discipline; even though seeming to taste good, it is death. The thought recalls the Old Testament’s honor of Daniel whose knowledge of the Lord was what determined him, but who nevertheless took in the wisdom of the Babylonians and their literature without judgment (Daniel 1). This learning/wisdom tradition is at its Jewish finest in the intertestamental Wisdom of Ben Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) which organizes its wisdom sayings more topically than does Proverbs. Also pertinent is the New Testament’s note at Acts 7:22: “Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action (NIV)”—a little leap out of the immediate confines of godly wisdom that is the Bible’s main interest, and into the usefulness of other-cultural learning. Paul’s “. . . whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things (Phil 4:8).” The interpretation which forces Christ into this text with the pious-sounding “only Christ is true, noble, right, pure . . . ,” side-steps the intent of this generalized, unqualified benediction. It is rather an open affirmation of potential or actual cultural goods. The last word, “things,” shows its breadth. The biblical case for learning in general is not as straightforward or rationally conceived as Aristotle’s, but is embraced in the foregoing considerations. To be sure, its focus is on godly learning, but the larger perspective in general is also here. The case for truly convergent thinking about the two fields of knowledge in relation to government and its end-values is supported: godly learning enlarges to general learning, even though the latter is sin-tainted whether in motivation, intent or content. In it still flickers the image of God. It also seems clear from experience that the regenerated theological mind and activity, finding the knowledge of God and engaging in the search for truth from its 616

own perspective, will reach out into the larger world for traces of the image still showing itself. This outreach thus coordinates those rays of reality from creation with what has been learned from special biblical revelation. Paul knows that such traces of truth exist in the world as his words atop Mars Hill in Athens testify (Acts 17). There he quoted Greek philosophers about God himself without criticism, and with Luke’s approval. There is valid knowledge in the world, and these texts reflect the reality. (5) Work. It seems obvious and almost banal to state it formally: work is instrumental to good and other end-goals of human community living under the governments of this world; if that weren’t the case, departments of labor would not exist. However, this instrumental value is among the most complex of the instrumentalities. Work belongs to a solvent and viable state, else no revenue for needs only government can meet, or resources for individual good, could be forthcoming. Work is the universal means of sustenance and security in any sense or at any level. If we think in generalities, and seek in ways similar to those above to identify such a value in the Greeks before Christianity, neither Plato nor Aristotle is of much help. No extra-Christian dimension of human thought about work appears in anything like a comprehensive way in their musings. This is due to certain Greek social views. Aristotle avoids the term “work” for citizens. He does use “work” in a positive sense for “the best material for democracy,” i.e., agriculture and animal husbandry. These occupations are best, he thinks, because this element of the population lives by nature, whereas craftsmen, artisans, traders and money lenders live by unnatural devices with which they engage in money-making; such people form the lower part of the “middle class” (his term). He does not deny that they might gain wealth; but if legitimate, what they gain is to be from “natural” processes, i.e., the products of the soil or animal husbandry, for example. Some craftsmen live close to nature which tends to legitimize their activity; but the closer to usury one lives, the more degrading his activity. Legitimate gain must also be for the benefit of the family. Artisans, craftsmen, traders, slaves, resident aliens and foreigners—none of these are or can be citizens. The appropriate activity for citizens (the free class at the top) is philosophy, politics, or military service, none of which he thinks of as work. On the bottom of the social scale would be slaves; slaves do work, i.e., toil, but they work so that “citizens” have time for leisure, i.e., for philosophy and politics. Aristotle thinks of the “labor” or “toil” of slaves and craftsmen as bad and animal-like; nothing in his (or Plato’s) thought values what westerners call “work” in the sense of a whole population’s gainful employment in the dignity of work. And yet what we call “work” had to be done in the Greek city state for society and its government to exist, even though it is the function of mere slaves and craftsmen. Aristotle says, “The class to whom toil is a necessity are either slaves, who minister to the wants of individuals [citizens], [or] craftsmen and laborers, who are servants of the community.”1042 But there are some governments, he adds, in which the desired variety of farmers, breeders, craftsmen and laborers will actually be citizens, a sort of state community he does not favor. In an aristocracy (government of the best), “no man can practice virtue



1042

Politics, Bk III, Ch 5.

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who is living the life of a craftsman or laborer,”1043 a view that is only slightly less the case in a democracy. So Aristotle has no comprehensive notion of labor for all members of the society, but only for slaves, craftsmen and traders. And yet agriculturalists and shepherds do “work” and “work” has no bad connotation when used of them because they are at the high point of the middle class scale due to their dependence on and union with nature. So Aristotle does know that “work” and “toil” have to be done by some segments of the population, and for him such work is instrumental for the benefit of the city-state. Since politics is a major function of citizens, the labor of slaves and craftsmen is instrumental to the good of a state because it allows all “citizens” to do politics, philosophy and military service at leisure. States exist for the prevention of crime and for the sake of trade; the goal of the state is the good life.1044 For our purpose here, then, the question arises about how “work” came to be regarded as the proper activity of all “citizens” as is now the case throughout most the world. L. Hardy observes that this transformation in the value of “work” for all—“all” having become an adjective for a whole population in a good sense (unlike Aristotle)—is quite the opposite of Aristotle’s notion. It was generated by the Protestant Reformers, first by Luther, then by Calvin, and then expanded by later Calvinists. This is how “work” lost its connotations of “outclass” and “slavery,” and became democratic and desirable, and with dignity for all. From this social root, “work” overcame Aristotle’s limits on who could work with good meaning—transformed from underclass kopos/toil to everyone’s ergon/purposeful vocation. The convergence of Christian views of work with the nature of democratic states, and the drastic egalitarian modification of both came directly from protestant theology. This protestant theology of work had its root in biblical teaching about work; it was not merely invented by the Reformers.1045 Aristotle had to discuss work because he saw that at least one end-goal of a state could not be gained without someone’s work; but that instrumental value’s achievement was limited to the role of the slave class and the lower middle class (craftsmen and traders, Aristotle’s terms), while the “citizen” class had other functions—philosophy, politics and military. In one passage he clearly thinks that farmers and shepherds, and especially the latter, make the best soldiers because they live so close to the natural world where as soldiers must live. Among Old Testament books, Proverbs has the fullest thoughts on the subject of work, diligence, and related terms; an enumerated summary will help expose its main ideas. (a) Righteousness and wisdom include work (10:4; 12:27; 14:23. (b) Prosperity and life are the rewards of the diligent righteous (10:16; 21:5). (c) The sluggard is condemned as restless (21:5-6), useless and harmful (10:26), and even helpless (15:19). (d) Just wealth secures one like a fortress secures one’s town (10:15). (e) Just wealth requires generosity to the poor (14:31; 22:9). (f) Greed and hoarding are hated by a community (11:26; 15:27). (g) If one loves wealth only for pleasure, he is sure to lose it (21:17; 23:19-21). It is not an accident that constructive Christian views of work received their greatest force in the Calvinist stream; Proverbs was a major source for Calvin on the nuts and bolts of the Christian’s life in this world, especially the personal and social value of work. There is no

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1043

Ibid. Ibid., Bk III 9. 1045 L. Hardy,The Fabric of This World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), pp. 45-54. 1044

trace in this Hebrew thinking of Aristotle’s social classes; Israel was at first and ideally a classless society. The classes it developed under the monarchy were hurtful to its ideals. The Bible also reflects other, larger aspects of work: (a) its dignity flowing from the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:26-28—man in God’s image and the decree to rule; (b) vocations as callings of God (1 Cor 7:17, 20, 24, on which see (6) below); (c) talents and work gifts as gifts of God (Exod 35:30-36:1; cf Isa 54:16); (d) work as service to God and employers (Eph 6:7-8); and (e) work for support of self, family and others (2 Thes 3:6-15;1 Tim 5:8; Eph 4:28).1046

In this fashion, the Protestant view of work and vocations can be seen developing through its history, stressing the values noted above and encouraging the basic elements of the western and especially American work ethic: work, diligence, service, frugality, dignity. (6) Vocation. This element in human civic experience is the theological root of what is called above, “work.” On this ingredient in the civic mix of instrumental values it is necessary to return to Aristotle as a starting point. Aristotle’s ideas of the three social strata in a city state blocked him from any meaningful notion of work as Israel apparently and Reformation Christianity certainly understood it. In Aristotle, there is no concept of “vocation” as a calling of the one God to all humans toward a kind of work-station/worktalent in life. Nor is there any thought of gifts given for specific crafts or vocations. Aristotle rather thought of human activity as that of classes pre-determined by social location and socially appointed activities—some good and enjoyable, some bad and miserable. The transformation of a non-Christian (Greek) instrumental value into its Christian counterpart took place with the Reformation. There it began to take three new forms. (a) Luther insisted that all vocations were equally callings of God, thus blotting out the limitation of “calling” (by God) to priesthood and monastic life—a notion that developed in medieval Catholicism. Thereby, he thought, many aspects of God’s providence in the natural world were placed in human hands. All legitimate (moral) work is a divine vocation, not just that of priests and monks. By all forms of work, “the needs of humanity are met by working Christians on a day-to-day basis.”1047 (b) Calvin took Luther’s emphasis a step further: divine callings to vocations are also callings to service of God and man simultaneously, from and in which an organically unified social structure benefits as a whole. In this way of thinking, all work is an expression of the image of God in man. Because we cannot all do all things well, there are many different vocations to which humans are called; in fact, the Lord may change our earthly vocations as he sees fit in order to adjust us and the available forms of work for greater social benefit.1048 (c) Gradually, after Calvin, his followers further expanded this interpretation of work to include a process in which Christians would work at reforming sin-infested or fallen social structures in their world. This movement transformed Luther’s individualized sense of personal vocational callings into a broader sphere of activity in redeeming corrupted social structures of any

1046

C. F. H. Henry, Aspects of Christian Social Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), pp. 31-71, has a useful discussion of these and other aspects of the Christian view of work. 1047 Ibid., p. 47. 1048 Ibid., pp. 54-63.

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given state or society. In this manner, “structural evil” can be purged, as for example in the case of American slavery or other forms of structural (legal) worker exploitation. In this way, Calvinism took on a kind of social aggressiveness that at its best sought to gradually improve social institutions and practices, while at its worst tended to generate wars in Europe, South Africa and America, and sometimes a legalistic overbearing spirit as in its attempts to enact and enforce civil Sabbath and anti-usury laws. On any reckoning, the convergence of non-Christian interests in work—as weak as democratic concepts of “good work” were among the Greeks—shows how convergent interests in both end-values and instrumental values under virtually any government may be thought of and engaged. New Testament ideas that encourage such a value on universal work are found in the following summarized passages. Luther’s idea of callings as all-vocational (not just priests and bishops) is to be found in Paul’s passage on the social situations of Christians in 1 Corinthians 7:24 where he views social “stations” or “vocations” as callings of God. It seems strange that this passage should be commonly explained away from this meaning. This is the case in many modern commentators; even Hardy, probably following the recent skepticism about this meaning, avoids this explanation of the passage. Nonetheless, it has been shown in the essay on “Christianity and Culture” that its details do bear Luther’s sense.1049 Calvin’s take on the service functions of work-callings seems well attested in Paul’s passage in Ephesians 6:5-7: “[to slaves] Serve [your masters] wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not men.” For service, Paul’s term is “serve as a slave,” but with the added qualification that service be “well-minded (eunoia),” or “with good thinking.” If slavery to a single master can be such a service for greater good beyond even one’s sense of calling, it seems all the more the case that the idea can be extended to reckoning benefits to society as a whole, and with the implication that such service also makes us servants of the providence of God. The same passages on slavery as a social institution, while not overtly removing it, show how it may be redeemed from at least its most destructive and personally damaging elements. Masters are to treat their slaves with justice and equality (Col 4:1), while slaves are to think of their work as service to God and masters together. Peter’s passage on slaves and masters expands Paul’s thought with an even more socially generic term, identical to the first end-value of good discussed above: “But if you suffer for doing good (author’s italics) and you endure, this is commendable before God (1 Peter 2:20).” The New Testament’s value on “good” now governs even the slave’s beating as an end being served, even though such an end does not justify abuse. So the social connections are “good,” toward the master and God himself—a triangle of social unions among the activites of family and government as Peter’s context specifies (1 Pet 2:13-3:7). Calvinist expansion of both Luther and Calvin’s notions of Christians at work under governments appears to be biblically based and to offer an instrumental goal by which to participate in both society itself and its larger governance.



1049

Fortunately, C. F. H. Henry in Aspects of Christian Social Ethics, pp. 42-44, commends Luther’ understanding of this text.

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With this ennobling and humanly dignifying reconstruction of work under the influence of the Reformation and its social and theological thought-stream, there remains a major task of how to correlate with the inevitable dehumanizing aspect of mass industrial labor, especially the mechanical assembly lines of any form of industrial manufacturing. It will not do to limit this social service thinking to the business community which is hard enough to drain of its avarice, selfishness and narcissism in the grueling quest for wealth. Many laboring jobs in the west have been humanized by the labor movement since the middle of the nineteenth century. But this concept of work reaches into the life of the trash collector, the house-cleaner, the maintenance worker or the meat-packing worker as well as the entrepreneur, the salesman, the investor as well the professional world—the teacher, the politician, the physician, the journalist and the lawyer. The first step is to seek to win all to faith in Christ which opens the window to a new God-centered and biblically oriented view of the world and life. Further efforts are also needed to at least humanize the most difficult vocations, as well as the profit vocations, with new ethical senses, a task clearly waiting for the influence of Christians who themselves serve in those vocations. As governments care about workers’ welfare, so ought Christian churches and their people. (7) Truth. Nothing is more social disease-producing in the life of government and society than the many forms of falsehood in fact, intent and motivation—lying, cheating, stealing, bribery, masking, misleading, deception, cheating and others. If so, nothing either is so essential to the beneficial function of governments, society, human relations, justice and commerce, than truth—in law, in business, in labor, in education, in thought, and in family. This reality is so obviously and universally agreed to, that it (again) seems superfluous to make something of the point; hence again, some brief illustrations from society and Scripture will suffice. “Truth” in the sense I use it here refers to propositions, i.e., full assertions people make (with subject and predicate) that correspond to observable or otherwise universally agreed realities, whether at the private or public level. Jefferson— to return to American constitutional origins—used “truth” this way in the Declaration of Independence when he wrote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men ...

Several observations will highlight Jefferson’s sense of “truth.”

(a) He clearly means by “truth” certain propositions about the best sort of human life under governments; these are spelled out in the sequel: rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, hence several in number. The Bill of Rights, now comprising the first several Amendments, expands Jefferson’s short list. (b) These truths are “self-evident.” J. Rakove thinks Jefferson meant by “selfevident,” not merely obvious, but axiomatic, i.e., an established principle, universally received and clear to all, since at the time this was the sense of “self-evident” truth.”1050 If



1050

J. Rakove, The Annotated U. S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 2009).

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pressed, Jefferson could probably have appealed successfully to Aristotle’s Politics, not for such a use of “truth,” but for the idea that certain conditions established and secured by governments were widely, if not universally agreed. An appeal to Aristotle on this subject would be undergirded by the fact that in preparation for writing his Politics, Aristotle had gathered constitutions of more than 150 Greek city states, from which he took clues about the best conditions for thriving human life. Jefferson would also have appealed, if pressed, to the long-lived revival of Aristotle’s thought and writings which began in the medieval era. Aristotle was then brought forward by the great Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas. From Aquinas, interest in the Greek thinker advanced into the revolutionary eighteenth century. Through use of his works by European political thinkers of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries—Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Montesquieu, Aristotle came to America.1051

The propositional sense of “truth” is a generalized form of Aristotle’s use of the “correspondence” and “coherence” theories of truth—a proposition is “true” if it corresponds to an observable reality and if it is consistent with other established truths. From this it is an easy step to more specific uses of “truth” as a test for the reality of any and all human claims to fact. Not only everyday verbal exchanges are included, but also the sense of antifalsehood called by names like honesty, realism, openness, transparency and the like—all essential to stable discourse especially in law, business, government and all other forms of public speech. Biblically, these senses of truth are suggested by the same or equivalent vocabulary of both the Old and New Testaments; this is the case even though no specific application is made to government in the four New Testament government passages, all of which are concerned about the obedience of Christians to the Roman regime.

The Hebrew word for “truth” is emeth, meaning “firm,” “solid,” or “valid,” hence what is “true” or “truth.” Quell’s investigation of the term in the Hebrew Bible found that it was often used in legal contexts, but not always or only in the sense of a formal law court or trial or hearing, but of what can be investigated or probed for its “validity” or “accuracy” or reality.1052 It denotes what rests on solid or authentic sensory data confirmed by inquiry or the validity of a promise. Hence mostly, but not exclusively, it refers to human words as in Genesis 42:16: (of Joseph to his brothers about why they are in Egypt) “. . . your words will be tested to see if you are telling the truth.” Actual judicial scenes also occur as in Isaiah 43:9 where the nations are asked to produce witnesses “to prove they were right, so that others may hear and say, ‘It is true,’” i.e., that they did or did not accurately foretell the return of Israel to its land as did Israel’s prophets. In morelike an actual “court” scene, Zechariah urges “Speak the truth to each other and render true and sound judgment in your courts . . . (Zech 8:16).” These samples of emeth belong to larger governmental connections—courts, investigation of claims or allegations, or the otherwise public character or public implications of statements people make as verifiable.1053 Hebrew emeth clearly refers to societal, governmental and interpersonal transparency and truthfulness—the reality of human speech claims. The value is also instrumental for peace and community, or as the Lord finally says in the Zechariah text just quoted (8:19), “. . .

1051

On the constitutional founders’ use of Aristotle and the foregoing European political thinkers, see Reinhold, Classic Pages, pp. 117-121. 1052 G. Quell, “emeth,” TDOT 1:232-235. 1053 Examples are from Quell, ibid, pp 233-234.

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therefore love truth and peace,” which looks like a case in point of the instrumental values “love” and “truth” leading to the end-value “peace,” but stated so as to encourage “love” of both truth and peace,” i.e., both are to be sought and embraced—the means and the end—as public values. In the New Testament, Greek alatheia, “truth,” is dominantly used for the reality of God in Christ confronting man with his sin and distance from God, and with the available salvation; this use is dominant in the twenty examples of John’s Gospel. Hence it is sometimes employed as a characteristic of the gospel as well (Gal 2:5). For this essay’s limited purpose, the question arises about whether the New Testament has a more generalized use for “truth” in human to human communications and for “truth” that is more public, social and universal than its narrowed use for revelation—a personalistic sense of “truth” meaning interpersonal “revelation” of selves as reality.1054 (a) Both Jesus and Paul speak of themselves telling the truth (Luke 4:25: “I assure you,” NIV; Rom 9:1; cf “in truthful speech,” 2 Cor 6:7; cf 1 Tiim 2:7) and not falsifying. Although what they say is of theological import, these examples are simply about truth in human communication. (b) In Ephesians 4:25, Paul urges his Christian readers to “speak truth (no article, general meaning), each one with his neighbor” as a way of insuring community integrity: “put off falsehood . . . for we are all members of one body.” While this is strictly for Christians in personal community relationships, it is certainly safe to see an analogy to any society or state as a point of community wholeness. (c) In a still broader reference, although about the general moral revelation of God to all men, Paul says what may be known of God from creation is truth; but it is suppressed by mankind in its sin (Rom 1:18-21). The point of the passage is that human suppression of the truth about God yields moral consequences including all kinds of wickedness, because what is suppressed includes knowledge of “God’s righteous decree (1:32).” In this way, the moral order of the world is knowable from the knowledge of God, which corresponds to the internal law of Romans 2:12-16. This is not a statement directly about government; but it is about human social relations in which good and bad and right and wrong come up for apostolic discussion. In fact, Paul complements these thoughts about social man with his statement in Romans 13 about government as the keeper of the same moral order where good and evil occur. These texts are about human thought and truth in social intercourse which inevitably occurs within the larger framework of government. In such communications the “personalist” sense of truth combines with the “propositional” sense of truth. The material here is limited in direct references to government; but it is clear that “truth” belongs to life in the moral order of the world, and this reality will always touch and be touched by government.

Christians thus are invested in “truth” in their own personal communication with others, but also in the larger social and governed world as well. Thus what I’ve called “convergent interests” exist with “truth” as with other categories of ends and means. (8) Law. In the ancient Near East, Egypt alone was without a law code; rather it apparently relied on accumulated wisdom traditions as a kind of surrogate for codified law. Otherwise law codes have been found by archaeologists among the Hittites, Sumerians,

1054

This personalist sense of truth is characteristic of “personalist” philosophers and theologians like Ferdinand Ebner, Martin Buber, and several theologians including Emil Brunner and Karl Barth.

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Assyrians, and Babylonians from a time before Israel’s law was given. In ancient Near Eastern law codes a fixed class structure that divided the population into free and slave prevailed so that the same offenses had harsher penalties among the slave class than among the free. In Israel there was no such class structure; slaves and aliens were treated with equity in the same way as native Israelites, because slavery was only for presumed temporary financial collapse or debt; it was not based on two fixed classes, chattel thinking, or race. This egalitarian tendency of Israelite law was an intentional social leveling at least partially in reaction to Israel’s slave experience in Egypt—all were equally slaves; all are now equally free. This social situation was part of the radicalism of Israel’s national deliverance from Egyptian slavery. Beyond the ancient Near Eastern law codes, Greeks and Romans had their own lawgivers who were several in number. By Aristotle and the later Roman lawyers’ times, their codes had been modified, even though remnants of earlier codes persisted to the time of Justinian and beyond—the mid sixth century and after. Law among the Greeks was at bottom a religious concept1055 in which the gods gave laws and were worshipped for this gift. Marriage, procreation, the erotic life, common meals, gymnastic schools, the use of weapons and especially the honoring and burial of the dead all come under the concept. The establishment and regulation of the Nemean games can be described as nomos no less than a political order and constitution . . . . Nomos broadens out into the (divine) law of the world . . . . This rootage in the divine sphere, which always persists, gives to Greek nomos its characteristic significance and true strength.1056

The Greek tradition generally thinks of written law, religious traditions, custom and unwritten legal traditions as a whole. There is no contradiction between attributing law to the gods, to a human lawgiver, to custom or to an oracle;1057 all four sources are variably mentioned in Greek literature before the Christian era. Aristotle argues that customary laws have more weight and relate to more important matters than written laws.1058 Since this essay follows Aristotle as the most important source of developed and developing democratic government traditions in the west, a few highlights of his thinking will be useful. For Aristotle, law is the root of equity in specific cases of justice and specific acts of human relation when the subjects are already equals on other grounds, for example, by social custom or by constitutions. He also distinguishes good laws from bad, good and bad law administrators, and law as the rule of reason.1059 The distinction between good and bad laws opens him to the idea of changes in laws for the good of the whole. Wise lawyers and



1055

H. Kleinknecht, “nomos,” TDNT 4:1024. Ibid. , pp 1024, 1025. 1057 Ibid., p. 1025. 1058 Aristotle, Politics, Bk III, 16. He even states in the same section that “a man may be a safer ruler than the written law, but not a safer ruler than the customary law.” There is a striking similarity here to Jewish oral law of the New Testament period, and even to early Christian views of oral tradition. 1059 Ibid., Bk II, Ch 8.

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jurists can find defects in laws and constitutions and devise remedies for the defects.1060 He discusses the role of judges and jurymen who fill in the details of existing law case by case since the codified law or constitutions cannot cover every possible case—a strikingly flexible and realistic thought.1061 For him, the oft-heard complaint of Americans--that the U. S. Supreme Court ought to be stripped of any ability to make laws in deference to separation of powers—would not be impressive; his view was more realistic. He also observes that law overcomes the limited or harmful whims of a ruler’s passions, which means that law represents reason over passion in issues of justice.1062 Laws and constitutions should be distinguished with law serving the principles of constitutions. Laws are a surety of justice between alliance members, but they have no real power to make individual citizens good and just persons in character; in this way he recognizes the limits of law as well as its useful functions1063 in a manner not unlike the apostle Paul—at least in a few texts.

Aristotle was not a lawyer but a philosopher; his remarks on law in the Politics are limited to scattered references when appropriate under related subjects. While the Greeks had law codes (Draco’s Code earlier; Solon’s laws later), the most extensive development of law in the classical world came from Roman jurists and lawyers. This long development of Roman law climaxed in Justinian’s Code and Digest of Roman law about the middle of the sixth Christian century at Constantinople. Justinian’s laws then became a basis of European, British and American law. Thus the long western legal tradition is virtually without break. Law in Scripture (and the ancient Near East) is closely related to treaties or covenants between gods, kings and nations. International legal traditions are also the root of treaty and law in the Hebrew Bible.1064 Treaties are devised to regulate human behavior under the conditions of evil, ignorance and prejudice. The law in Israel is its constitution—in a way quite different from Aristotle’s sharp distinction between law and constitution—and functions as Yahweh’s total will for Israel. Israel thus lived under a theocratic arrangement in which Yahweh chose Israel as his own people and Israel agreed to live under his will (Exod 19-24). This does not mean, however, that Israel’s law is a “spiritual law” without application to the civil or social sphere. On the contrary, Israel’s law is many-factored, including spiritual as well as social and political aspects. Thus in Israel, the law of God is Israel’s civil law as well as its spiritual, priestly, social and economic law. The many statements of the law to the effect that Israel’s obedience to it will bring about Yahweh’s blessing also show how decidedly instrumental the law was as a means to realizing the endpoint goals of national life: final values like good, freedom, justice, peace, community and life are all planned to eventuate as benefits from keeping the law. The Old Testament’s law as an instrumental value therefore converges with the Greek and Roman value on law as a means to certain final values beyond which there is no more to be gained on earth. But in Israelite law and life, obedience is also a condition to Israel’s long-term realization of the



1060

Ibid., Bk III, Ch 16. Ibid., Bk III, Ch 15. 1062 bid., Bk III, Ch 16 1063 Ibid., Bk III, Ch 11. 1064 W. Gutbrod, “nomos,” TDNT 4:1036. For this basic concept and context of law in the Hebrew Bible, Exodus 19:5-6 is normative. 1061

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promise of the final kingdom of God on earth; in this sense there is a tie with Israel’s lineal view of history, an element lacking in Greco-Roman and other ancient Near Eastern law. In the New Testament, several Pauline passages make statements about the source, function or use of law in a general civic sense. Calvin, the Reformer-lawyer-theologian, readily recognized three major uses of law in Scripture; (a) restraint of man’s passions, abusiveness or rage; (b) preparation for receiving Christ by showing mankind its sins; and (c) instruction of humans in the details of righteousness. Law in the civil sphere functions in all three forms and in that it restrains or compels human behavior under force, instructs all in their need of Christ, and at the same time teaches justice and other related goods. These “uses” of law easily move into the civil-governmental sphere by extension.

Romans 2:12-16 teaches that law is built into human life. The moral contents of law are determined by the responses or reactions of conscience (Rom 2:14-15; cf Isa 24:5). This process yields not a body of codified law, but a moral sense from conscience reflex to actions. This combination of human actions judged by conscience potentially or actually grows into law when Paul adds that thought about the action-conscience process1065 among Gentiles (who do not have the [Mosaic] law) yields reproaches (katagoreo accuse, reproach; or in a legal sense, bring charges in court)1066 or defenses (apologeomai, speak in one’s defense) that might or actually do become positive civil law. The verbs used would normally be verbs of speaking. Verbalizing the actions-conscience-thought process is also suggested by “between one another” (or possibly “among each other”). The suggestion of this exegesis, which is not visible in many commentaries,1067 is that discussion of moral or immoral actions occurs in human verbal exchanges as everyone knows, and that such discussions yield moral judgments on the rightness or wrongness of human behavior. This is the implication of Paul’s observation that the action-conscience-thought process yields moral knowledge (but not necessarily moral behavior). Viewing the passage’s language as verbalized discussion of the process increases the potential for right and wrong judgments which may become codified in the laws of governments. It seems incredible that Paul should not have known this by observation of the process in both Greek and Roman law, as well as in Jewish law and its practice in Jewish courts. Nonetheless, he is thinking here mainly of human actions in the face of God’s justice; the application to the civil sphere seems obvious; it is a lawyers’ thinking about the theological-moral roots of law. A second passage with a clear civil implication, though not a direct application, is Paul’s thought about the restraining force of law over human behavior (1 Tim 1:9-11): . . . understanding this that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, immoral persons, sodomites, kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, in accordance with the glorious gospel of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted.



1065

See E. Kasemann, Commentary on Romans, trans G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), p. 65, who refers to “the process described.” 1066 BAGD, p. 423. 1067 But see W. Sanday and A. C. Headlam, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 5th ed (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1895), p. 61, who recognize the verbalization implied in the language of Romans 2:15.

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The RSV reads “the law” in the first line, but there is no article in the Greek text; Paul must be thinking of law generally, and perhaps Roman or Greek law in parallel with the Mosaic law. Calvin is certainly correct in seeing a general sense of law as restraint on human rage in this text. It is hard not to see here at least some allusion to degenerated Roman social life under the influence of the terrible examples of Tiberias, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, all of whose behavior encouraged nightmarish actions by their Roman subjects. The final passage is Romans 13—Paul’s passage on Christians and government. No less than three terms for law appear in this passage, so there can hardly be any further question about interest in government law. The three terms in order of appearance are: diataga/ordinance (13:2); nomos/law (13:8, 10); entola/command, order (13:9). The term diataga does not refer to any specific Roman law, decree or ordinance, but to government itself as God’s law in principle: the “powers” are God’s ordinance—a kind of “let there be government” as it were. Nomos refers to law not government as such, but a government’s law is its body of case laws and ordinances in the same way that nomos denotes the whole body of Mosaic case laws and ordinances.. With entola the reference is to specific individual case laws and decrees that give legally binding commands, used here of specific prohibitions and orders of the Mosaic law, perhaps thought of as analogous to Roman law (13:9). Curiously, in 13:8, Paul calls the Mosaic law “the other law.” This reading assumes against the majority of commentators that “the other” goes with “law” so as to read “He who loves has fulfilled the other law. . . ,” rather than with “He who loves[, i.e.,] the other [person] has fulfilled [the] law,”1068 as in most translations. Grammatically, to take “the other” as the object of “love” leaves “law” hanging with no definite article as the object of the verb when the context is clear that he has the Mosaic law in mind. Consequently, “the other law” implies that the whole discussion since 13:1 is the law of government(s) thought of generally. “The other law,” as the context suggests, is thus the Mosaic Law, as shown by the fact that he immediately offers two quotes from it. This is no more strange than the use of nomos for the universal law written in human hearts as in Romans 2:14-16 or 1 Timothy 1:8-9.

Nothing discussed in earlier parts of this essay is more obviously a convergence of biblical thought about law with extra-biblical thought about law. The text in Romans 2:15 about law written in the heart and 1 Timothy 1:8-9 about law as restrainer of human wickedness support the related text in Romans 13. Essential elements of law in the world are provided in these texts. Church-State Separation and Convergent Values These two essays on church and state seem to have re-created the church-state tensions of American post-Reformation thought in yet another form. The form and thesis of this discussion thus raises the issue of how the telic and instrumental values coordinate with a thorough-going Christian view of politics and Christian action. The discussion to follow will offer some further perspectives on several related issues without claiming to finally resolve them or to achieve any new ground in the age-long discussion of Christianity and government.

1068

According to Dunn, Romans 9-16 (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1988), p. 776; Zahn, Marxsen and Leenhardt adopt this exegesis against the majority of commentators. The objection that nowhere else does Paul use “love” absolutely (without an object), is not significant. See Dunn, p. 776.

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It seems clear that no absolute separation of church and state is possible, but only a qualified or provisional separation. Ronald Sider makes this point with his usual force. Increasingly throughout the world, there is widespread agreement on key elements of religious freedom: individuals should be free to believe, worship, and act in conformity with their religious beliefs (even convert to another religion) without interference from the state; religious institutions (churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, etc) should be free to organize and engage in activities in keeping with their mission without interference from the state. . . . Does that mean that “church and state” must be totally separate, totally unrelated? No.1069

Sider goes on to develop his “no” on total separation by setting his discussion in the context of larger concepts of Christ’s lordship and kingdom.1070 As noted already in Essay XII, he invokes these two concepts about Christ’s relation (and that of his people) to government in ways insufficiently cautious about their implications for dominion of church over state. He does not argue for church over state; but these two ideas (lordship an kingdom) have biblical meanings that might inadvertently encourage aggressive theocratic thinking and activities even within the given American legal framework of separation. If this is so, it seems to be a recipe for potential on-going conflict rather than a cooperative relationship which this essay advocates. When conflict happens, the church will likely be the loser, since the state has more resources for force: churches do not have police or armies, and when they have tried to raise them, the results have been dubious at best. Still, Sider is correct: absolute separation is not possible. How is this the case? For one thing, the entire list of final and modal value-goals discussed above assumes there are some matters on which church and state have like moral obligations. For this program of value-pursuits by both churches and states to even be proposed, let alone worked out into form(s) of joint action, some actual relation has to exist. Secondly, Christians live under their own national laws and are urged to obey them (Rom 13) in detail: Christians vote by the voting laws, drive by traffic laws, use publicly built and maintained roads and buildings, buy and sell real estate under state regulations, incorporate both businesses and churches under corporation or charter laws, benefit from health care legislation, pay taxes, and enjoy the benefits of protection, clean water, sewage disposal and trash collection. On the other side, churches minister to Christians who are also citizens: they take care of brothers and sisters’ needs of love, interest, and community; they rejoice and mourn with people in life’s great transitions and struggles—marriages, births, deaths, employments, and family relations; they offer endless encouragement to virtuous qualities expected of Christians which answer to government interest in citizen morality; many churches build and maintain hospitals, nursing homes, orphanages, and schools, all of which are parallel in interest to government in its responsibilities to its constituents. Christians serve in and pray for armies and police forces, teach in public schools, and serve government in all kinds of offices and tasks. Christians engage in welfare projects, help the poor, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, build homes for the homeless or poor, and sometimes protest and fight

1069

Sider, Scandal of Evangelical Politics, p. 179. At least one passage (1 Tim 6:15) is conscious that the manifestation of Jesus’ full kingship and rule is reserved for the time of his future return. 1070 Ibid., pp 180-181.

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injustice. Thus, no total separation is possible. What they do need is a set of values with which to think about what is essential—something like those proposed here. Another principled but modified church-state separation viewpoint is represented by James Bannerman, the Scottish Free Church ecclesiologist of the mid-nineteenth century whom these essays have cited as an example of nineteenth century ecclesiology. Bannerman gradually qualifies what at first looks like a strong and principled church-state separation plea in his famous work, The Church of Christ. Finally he identifies four areas of necessary correlation within a principled church-state separation framework: (1) the use of oaths administrated by states in the name of God to certify truth or obligations; (2) the unrestricted freedom of the church to proclaim the saving gospel of Christ; (3) legal aspects of marriage administered by the state; (4) enforcement of the Sabbath.1071 These points seemed to Bannerman sufficient for the life of the church in Scotland in the mid-nineteenth century. But they were also in part throwbacks to earlier European church-state concepts of Christendom and Christian control. Some of his points have permanent validity; some seem quaint and legalistic in our time. Clearly, some qualifications are necessary to even a strongly principled advocacy of church-state separation. As the preceding paragraph suggests, there is more than a set of principles here; there are rather almost countless specifics of necessary connection from both ends of the church-state spectrum. Further, it seems worthwhile to note some relevant details of Mark Noll’s summary of “Evangelicals in the American Founding and Evangelical Political Mobilization Today.”1072 Noll joins several other evangelical Christian scholars in an attempt to correct popular misconceptions about principles and details of the constitutional founders’ Christianity— most of which involve romantic, unrealistic views of alleged Christian intentions in drafting the founding documents. He makes important points about this well-known makeover by well-meaning evangelicals in the twenty-first century. (1) The constitutional founders were not evangelical Christians in the twentieth and twenty-first century sense; only founders’ era participants John Witherspoon, Patrick Henry and John Jay adhered to any form of evangelicalism. Rather, the large majority of founders were either office-holders in traditional, mostly liturgical Protestant churches (dominantly Anglican, Congregational or Presbyterian), or they were non-Trinitarian deists; as a whole they were not personalconversion/biblicist evangelicals.1073 (2) Evangelicals of the Declaration and Constitution era did not participate in the constitutional process in large part because they were going a different direction than the constitutional founders, i.e., they were dominantly revivalist Methodists and Baptists, and were developing an alternative to the main-line churches of the constitutional founders. That difference was the principle of volunteerism in both church life and social justice concerns. Traditional non-revivalist Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Anglicans did what they did from within denominational structures,



1071



1073

1072

137-158.

Bannerman, The Church of Christ, 1:135-148. In J. Hutson, (ed), Religion and the New Republic (New York: Roman and Littlefield, 2000), pp.

Only Witherspoon would qualify by this aspect of evangelicalism. But he was no theocratist as the recent fair-minded study of him by J. H. Morrison, John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic (South Bend IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1905) points out.

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not by founding para-church social agencies.1074 (3) Most importantly for this essay, the growing volunteer-revivalist-evangelical movement which emerged rapidly after 1800 was adopting the founders’ free-church/separation of church-state ideas as against the traditional Congregationalist, Presbyterian and Anglican hesitation due to their historic investment in state-church establishments in England, Scotland and Ireland, and throughout most colonies. In this rapid investment in the founders’ church-state separation ideas, the evangelical voluntary-church and voluntary-help agency movement was working forcefully against the current of traditional churches with state-church histories and within the current of church-state separation. Of course, the traditional-church constitutional founders were themselves exceptional in their American denominations by breaking with these traditions; the traditional-church revivalists were also exceptions. But regardless of these variables, the constitutional era’s leadership rested [their own convictions] on two shared assumptions: first that the moral goods promoted by the churches coincided with the moral goods promoted by the government, and, second, that the churches had a role to plan in making the moral calculus of [Jeffersonian] republicanism actually work.1075 . . . In these efforts, the main evangelical groups were largely successful in meeting the challenge posed by the [constitutional] founders by aiming not at establishment, but at provision of private moral capital to sustain the republic.1076 (Italics are mine throughout the quote.)

These circumstances of the founding era indicate that it was not the intention of the constitutional founders—not even Witherspoon—to establish a legally settled Christian nation with a Christian Constitution.1077 The sources, especially and clearly Witherspoon included, show a trend in the opposite direction—the establishment of a politically just state based on the history of rational thought about government beginning chiefly with Aristotle. Finally, how do the values in the biblical and Christian sources differ from their appearance in the humanitarian tradition? Some details of the discussion above have noted varied meaning nuances but not radical differences in use of primary terms, except for the value the Bible places on love. John Witherspoon, a politically active evangelical minister, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and president of (what became) Princeton University, distinguished three meaning levels in a baccalaureate sermon he

See ibid. Witherspoon should probably be seen as in a kind of no-man’s land in this scene. He was a strongly evangelical Presbyterian, but was variably non-committal or critical of the revivals that occurred at Princeton; see pp. 25-26. Witherspoon stressed personal salvation in Christ very strongly; but he seems to have had misgivings about revivalism. 1075 Ibid., p. 150. 1076 Ibid., p. 151. 1077 Morrison, John Witherspoon, pp. 122-128, shows that Witherspoon’s thought is clearly an amalgam of Scottish Enlightenment, Lockean liberalism, and Reformed Protestantism. Politically, the first two of these three are strongest; religiously, the Protestant Reformation strain is strongest. But Morrison thinks the revolutionary era’s ideas of freedom of religion from government compulsion grew out of Calvin’s thought about resistance to government coercion, even though his followers and Calvin himself were less than ideal embodiments of this idea. The concept came to America in a more or less latent form through the Calvinistic Puritans.

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preached yearly at Princeton to every graduating class of his presidency, beginning in 1775. The sermon was entitled “Christian Magnanimity,” a virtue already discussed by Aristotle in Nichomachean Ethics. “Magnanimity means something like “large-minded generosity” or “loftiness of spirit.” In the sermon Witherspoon distinguished magnanimity as (1) a natural quality, (2) a moral virtue, and (3) a Christian grace.1078 While certainly not finally definitive, this differentiation is suggestive of another way to think of sixteen values outlined above. As natural qualities the values are perceived and advocated as necessities of natural rights and social order rooted in moral law; as moral virtues they appear when practiced with visible effect to encourage mutual social good to the extent possible from natural interest in human well-being; as Christian graces they are works and powers of God and thus gain enriched senses and the force of a sovereign God’s will in moving toward the ultimate goal of the kind of world he envisions and will finally bring about. There is no philosophically developed view in the Bible of the state during the church age, except for four brief government texts in the New Testament epistles. These texts expand Jesus’ Godand-Caesar saying; but they hardly qualify as philosophical. Instead, the biblical concepts and terms as a whole, for both the final and instrumental goals, parallel the Greco-Roman humanistic and ancient Near Eastern moral traditions in an incidental way—as it were by bits and pieces. They nevertheless affirm the values. A few final observations will suggest some aspects of biblical thought and language that yield different senses than the Greek humanitarian and ancient Near Eastern traditions, and thus some aspects of their biblical uniqueness. (1) The humanitarian values in Scripture occur in a context of higher sensitivity to sin and human shortfall. This implies what both Witherspoon the evangelical Christian, and his most politically famous pupil—James Madison, the constitutional genius—both stressed: human dispositions toward evil tend to corrupt or abuse the values. Therefore systems of checks and balances among branches of government are employed to restrain the potential power under the influence of evil.1079 (2) The values of a decent society also require that communities recognize forces that cultivate virtue in order to encourage the moral quality of a citizenry; for this, the church and its various agencies and service spin-offs are major agencies. Thus the American constitutional founders considered the important role religion should play in a democratic republic (for them, some form of Christianity); but they did not try to establish it or any one denominational representative of it by law. (3) The distinctive Christian emphasis on love—a value of which the Greek humanist tradition did not think highly—enhances other values together in their mutual balance and interactions, but without overshadowing or absorbing them. One notices the connection in a simple statement like Isaiah 61:8: “. . . I, the LORD love justice.” (4) At the same time, the biblical context of the values is governed by the sovereignty of a God who embodies the values in balance, especially the instrumental ones, in the qualities of his own person and being. People who relate to him personally through the biblical plan of salvation in Christ are in a position to gain embodiment of the values in their lives through a triangular relation

1078

J. Witherspoon, Works 2:601, cited by L. G. Tait, The Piety of John Witherspoon (Louisville: Geneva Press, 2001), p. 175. 1079 On this feature of Witherspoon and Madison’s thought, see Morrison, John Witherspoon, pp. 37-43.

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between God himself, their own persons, and the larger social ties within which they live. The power of this triangle to produce a decent society seems obvious when Christians take these realities seriously; if they do not, then the culture in which they live will dull out the virtue-generating power of the gospel; they cannot force or legislate it. (5) In Scripture the values discussed above operate in the world as its moral order. The same God who created man as a moral being providentially guides the history of the earth toward his own determined end—the kingdom of God. The nations may rage; but their rage is abated by the good providence of God working through the moral order he created. Thus from a biblical standpoint, the world is not alone as modern secular thinking imagines. As long as humanity lives under sin and severe finiteness, and is unaware of or refuses to accept the divine provision of Christ, it will struggle all the harder to maintain just government and a virtuous society, and in the end may fail. Still, government will inevitably happen even without Christ. This is why the world does not need the Christian revelation to form governments; natural moral law will always tend to establish governments of more of less just laws; and yet, just laws do not make a virtuous or just individual, even though it is easy to misjudge or make light of their educative force. Rather, Christianity adds qualities and powers to this whole which have had and will continue to have an ameliorating force for good in the history of states, even though the tendency to coercion at times spoils the potential gains of a free and tolerant Christianity and/or state. And— the continued presence of sin, finiteness and self-interest may at times lead Christians far off the track in their social thinking. Because of the implanted moral law in human life, Christians cannot begrudge the formation of civil law and just government merely because it is not explicitly Christian; but they also know that the gospel has great force toward justice and righteousness, and so they will always seek to make its uprighting power felt in the life of the governments under which they live. Hence, a qualified separation of church and state is the best of possibilities for the remainder of the church age. Conclusion Despite the difficulties apologists have had in trying to establish solid ground for a human moral code by perception and reason from history and experience, one can find both final-goal values and modal-goal values commonly articulated among thoughtful people by simply listening for them in oral speech or in writing. Sometimes they appear in national founding documents like the American Declaration of Independence or in international documents like the United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights, or even The Humanist Manifesto. To use such materials as sources for universal goal-values does not imply or necessitate a mindless adoption of every detail in them. They do, however, provide materials for an outline of common human values based on actual needs. A common set of humanitarian values as the end-goals of governments and churches is not hard to establish. The leading Greek and Roman thinkers of the pre-Christian and early Christian centuries thought deeply about government, social organization, human needs and law, entirely outside the influence of either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. They created political theory traditions which made their way through the on-going stream of both Christian and non-Christian thinkers on government and social end-goals. This tradition begins substantially as early as Plato and was continued in much more realistic and detailed forms by the more practically-minded Aristotle in his Ethics and Politics. From Aristotle especially, many such values and ideas made their way into the modern world through almost continuous new editions, and finally into the thought of America’s constitutional founders in the persons of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and 632

James Madison, to cite three major American examples. (John Witherspoon retired from the process before the Constitutional Convention of the summer of 1787.) The end-goal values of governments can be identified from this tradition as at least: good, peace, freedom, justice, life, equality, happiness and community. Aristotle also recognized that other goals are instrumental or means to the realization of the end goals. Accordingly, one may add the following instrumental goals to the final-goal list: love, wisdom, virtue, learning, work, vocation, truth and law. This set of combined final and instrumental values is not only visible in the political traditions stemming from Aristotle, but also in various biblical passages if one looks for them and is sensitive to how they are thought of in various scriptural texts. It is true that in the Bible, these values often appear in relation to the biblical redemptive plan. But in most cases of ties with the redemptive plan, they are stated so as to suggest they are end-goals in the sense that they exist as divinely established general goals for humanity’s well-being without any indication of further earthly benefit. Freedom is an outstanding case in point as is “good,” and certainly happiness and community are near the top in priority. What makes this a viable correlation of ends for Christians is the historic theological concept that God is both Redeemer and Creator. Thus in creation, specific end- and means-values are found through the reality that God, having built in a kind of extra in humanity (moral values capacity), also dispenses “common grace” to creation. To this he further adds special forms and graces (“redemptive grace”) through the history of redemption centered in the primary biblical themes of Christ, Salvation and the Spirit. The end- and meansgoals can be coordinated to make up an agenda of common, convergent interests for both state and church. This is not a call to the church to abandon the saving gospel for a new form of the social gospel; we are not faced with such either-or extremes. It is rather a call for recognition that the social ethics of a redeemed people of God does have extensions into the world of government and its just goals. When those goals and the means of reaching them meet, as in like goals of humanitarian political ethics thinkers, the two are on common moral ground. Christians ought—by the biblical ethics they necessarily embrace—to care about joining social action when it converges with the just concerns of the governments under which they live. Nor does the logic of this situation fly in the face of dispensational millenarian faith. In fact, people of this type of theology are in the best possible position to embrace a separation of church and state that includes common end- and means-values because they are not caught in the logic of whole-kingdom-now types of Christian thought. Despite this freedom from kingdom-now passions, many people of dispensational conviction have been unwittingly caught in current theocratic logic due to its present evangelical popularity.1080 Neither does their faith box them into any form of a total world renunciation, since their Bibles give them much social instruction—a body of teaching which assumes Christians of the church age will continue to live in the real world of society and government. 1080

Two recent further calls for social ethics and quasi-dominion theology are P. Wagner’s Dominion! How Kingdom Action Can Change the World (Grand Rapids: Chosen Books, 2008) and R. Moore’s thoughtful article, “The Kingdom of God in the Social Ethics of Carl F. H. Henry: A Twenty-First Century Evanagelical Reappraisal,” JETS 55, 2 (June, 2012), pp. 377-397. Both studies advocate kingdom theology as the social ethics framework for the church-in-the-world. Both also issue qualifications and warnings about the dangers of churchly political power. But the warnings seem paltry compared to the force of the kingdom ideas they advance. Coercive Christian action receives certain kinds of nuanced encouragement from these studies. It is wiser to avoid this confusion of church and kingdom, and follow a conjunctive approach in recognition of the the available values from western political and biblical thought combined as an alternative approach to church-state relations.

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