Archives for September 2014

1. Teaching people to be disciples of Jesus might actually take some wisdom literature/self-help classes on time management, goal seeking, and how to say no to feelings.
2. In the Old Testament, covenant seems to be the more important institution when compared with kinship.
3. Thinking about point 1, young Christians certainly need to understand the gospel before they understand Aristotle (as Luther said in Heidelberg), but, man o man, they really should read some Aristotle (ie, contemporary books on habit formation) if they wish to appropriate the character of Christ because modern evangelical teaching (not all, but much of it that I’m exposed to) does not help.
4. I’ve been making a list of engineering/mathematical problems to spend time on and I found two game theorists that look at the Biblical text using game theory to understand the narratives of the Old Testament. It’s actually not that bad. The one I’ve actually spent time reading it Steven Brams.
5. Make a morning routine every evening before you go to bed if you wish to not regret the rest of your day. Seriously.
6. Thank God that Cal 3 and Physics are covering the exact same type of vectors right now.
7. I don’t understand why kids will play for football coaches at the risk of their lives and not do 5 minutes of homework for people that want to help them get into college.
8. I recently made fun of a class mate for misspelling something in a lab report. Then I misspelled the first word in an email I sent to the lab group. Humble pie.
9. Read Udo Schnelle and Adolf Schlatter to understand your New Testament better. Seriously, what are you waiting for?
10. Oh, read your New Testament first, of course.
11. I’ve gotten to teach about Jesus’ resurrection at church lately, looking at the marvels of the texts that focus on our Lord’s rising from the dead has been riveting for me.

If you’ve learned New Testament Greek, the hope is that the effort has made it worth keeping. It’s similar to karate. Everybody who’s done martial arts for several years of their lives, finds some way to practice every now and then. My wife caught me doing a kata on Saturday. I haven’t been to karate class in 6 years. The problem is that if you get busy you’ll think that you couldn’t possibly keep your Greek in just a few minutes a day. But this is not true. You can.

I’m majoring in Engineering and teaching. I’m having to learn Calculus, C++, Vector Physics, and other weird stuff. Yet, I’ve found strategies for keeping my Greek. Here are some pro-tips:

1. Read for speed.
   1. Purchase an audio Greek Testament and just read one chapter a day while listening. There are some free downloads too. The one I linked to is pronounced like modern Greek. You can find the Erasmian pronunciation too.
   2. Do not pause to catch what you missed. Instead, make it through 3-5 chapters, then in the next 3-5 days, listen to an English audio Bible while you read the same passages. I’ve been listening to Philippians. I’ll start translating a paragraph a day once my ability to read it quickly improves.
   3. Remember, fluency requires that you learn to think in Greek and do so quickly.
2. Memorize Little Bits
   1. Re-sing the songs you learned for your endings.
   2. Memorize favorite verses in Greek. Write them on note cards and practice them throughout the day.
   3. If you are doing exercise one, add a step of underlining one word you do not know each time. Look it up and memorize it throughout the day.
3. Learn Modern Greek
   1. I was a Greek tutor for a Greek family who wanted their child to practice modern Greek. They knew I wasn’t proficient, but they also knew I knew Koine Greek and would be able to grade her work. Learning to read and speak basic contemporary Greek helped me a great deal.
   2. Learning the modern pronunciation makes Greek sound more like a language and less like magic.
4. Read the LXX, the Fathers, and the Pagans
   1. Reading the LXX in Greek, maybe just one Proverb a day can help your vocabulary tremendously.
   2. Plan your week with time to read just one paragraph on the Apostolic Fathers in Greek each week. Set aside 30 minutes and read the whole paragraph, write it, then translate it. If you’re fluent enough to read it without decoding then read a whole chapter.
   3. Go to the Loeb section in your local public library and check out some Greek-English version of a classical author and dig in.

My recent post on Romans has a bit in common with Andrew Perriman’s method outlined here.

Perriman makes this claim about his method for interpreting the New Testament from a narrative-historical frame:

10. If we are to be consistent hermeneutically, I suggest that what principally connects the New Testament with the church today is the continuing historical narrative of God’s people. I think it is misleading to accommodate the historical distance by differentiating between what the text meant and what the text means. It means what it meant. Within the narrative frame there are certainly direct lessons to be learnt, and I do not discount analogical reading, but the New Testament is formative for the church today primarily because it explains what happened at a critical moment in the history of the people of God.

 

I think over all he is correct here, but perhaps what he does not address is that the texts really do “meant what they meant” but their significance for the community that canonized them can change from time period to time period. Paul’s theory of justification did not change during the reformation, it’s significance (rightly or wrongly) became different for the church. Similarly, the Old Testament, despite its historical and literary meaning for its author and original audience, still has a tropological or spiritual function and significance to God’s people today. Bruce Charlton (who is not a Bible scholar, but a Medical Doctor and read in evolutionary theory) points this out very elegantly here.

I think my approach to the New Testament very much mirrors Perriman’s, but I also think that the Scripture carries a significance to believers that is based upon but goes beyond their initial meaning. The very act of canonizing the bible indicates that the books therein are now a collection for the church rather than writings to individual churches.

I think one of the chief problems we (modern Christians) have with reading Romans is that we do not read with with a sufficiently historical mindset. We want to read Romans theologically and spiritually (as a document about God and our spiritual relationship to God) and this is good.

In so doing though, we can fail to realize that for Paul, God works through persons in history. Paul, of course, does not have the modern concept of history in mind. But what he does have in mind is a real change in the course of the world precisely because of certain concrete things that God has done, is doing, and will do. For instance, Romans 1:16:

Rom 1:16  For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

Paul here, and most commentators I have check agree, that Paul is referring to the beginning of the gospel. Christ preached to his own people first, the apostle’s also preached to Jews (or Judeans) first. Then the gospel went to the Greeks (hellenized Jews or Gentiles). Paul’s letter starts with mention of God’s work in history. But then, for some reason, when we get to Romans 6 and see applications of that history to individual believers, the whole focus in interpretation in popular preaching and writing is upon the individual life with Christ. Thus you hear/read quips like:

If you don’t preach grace in such a way that people think they do not have to do good works, then you’re not preaching grace.

But is Paul saying that in reference to an idea like “Since grace is free, is life a free for all?” Should we so preach grace that people really do not consider repentance? Is the conflict between law and grace truly a conflict between rules and freedom? Or is it rather like Romans 5:19-6:18:

(Rom 5:19) For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.  (20)  Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more,  (21)  so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Paul here is speaking about the law, not merely as a set of rules, but he means that in space-time, the law came to the Israelites in order to increase the trespass. Paul seems to mean the law, as in, the whole covenant that came through Moses. Not a purely graceless system of earning, but the law came partially to make sin worse. But where the sinfulness (among the Israelites) became all the worse, grace came in Christ. So just as death reigned prior to the law and after the law, Christ’s death and resurrection are precisely what it means for grace to abound. Thus, grace reigns through the righteousness of God revealed in the gospel (Romans 1:17). Paul is speaking of the story of Jesus here, not merely concepts in apparent conflict.

(6:1)  What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?  (2)  By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?  (3)  Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  (4)  We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.  (5)  For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.  (6)  We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.

As an historical principal then, sin is no longer in charge. People, particularly the faithful baptized, are positionally and progressively delivered from the clutching hands of sin. The question Paul is asking and answering is, “If the law came to increase the trespass and heightened trespass was precisely wherein grace abounded in the crucifixion of Jesus, the Lord of glory, by the corrupt leaders of the world, then why should we not continue under the law so that God’s grace can spread in a similarly powerful way? Is it not rational to stick with the set-up you have just established?” Paul’s answer is that baptism (read: accepting the gospel) is accepting that God’s grace has already abounded and that a break with sin’s reign has literally been established in history and now it has been established in your life! Paul is applying this real change in history to the lives of individual believers.

(7)  For one who has died has been set free from sin.  (8)  Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.  (9)  We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.  (10)  For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.  (11)  So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.  (12)  Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions.  (13)  Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.  (14)  For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.

Here Paul gives an application for how this can be true. If you have a master (death/sin), but you die you are free from that master. If we have union with Christ, such that he represents us (Romans 5:12-17), then his death is just as good as our own death. He died and was raised, so death and sin have no authority over him. Christians are positionally already in this state, thus they should live accordingly and make progress in overcoming personal sin precisely because one day God will make this positional reality actual. We should do this because we are not longer under law (the system designed to bring about increased sin…like Jesus’ death and its meaning), but under grace (the reign of Jesus who over came death).

(15)  What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!  (16)  Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?  (17)  But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed,  (18)  and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.

So, Paul asks his question again, but with a hint of sarcasm because of what he just established. The rhetorical effect seems to be, “How silly is it then, to live as though the era under the law was still primary even though we know that era has passed? Don’t you realize that you’ve committed yourselves to obey Jesus?” Paul may also be dealing with the potential charge from Christians who see the Jewish law as the primary moral norm, “But without the law, we have no rules…won’t people just sin it up?” One book I have implies that Paul is struggling with the allegedly serious problem of, “If grace, why commands?” But Paul isn’t struggling with that at all. He proposes the solution in Romans 6:17 when he says, in effect, “If you’ve believed the gospel, then you’ve agreed to live by the moral standards contained therein.” I propose, that Paul means the teachings of Jesus reflected in the gospel preached by the early church. Paul even says that the conflict, at the end of the day isn’t really between rules and forgiveness, but between sin and obedience (Romans 6:16). We know from elsewhere in Romans that the obedience is the obedience of faith, or the kind of obedience that is fueled by loyalty to God, and the Lord Jesus, whom he raised from the death (Romans 1:1-7).

Anyhow, if we look, not just for “How does this passage in Romans apply directly to me?” But if we instead ask, “How does it fit into Paul’s argument about the epochal change that comes with the gospel story?” Then we get the personal application and coherent picture that does not leave us with silly notions that people have which cause them to say, “Law is imperative, gospel is blessing,” or other such nonsense.