Did Paul blow it?

For instance, Paul gave the Christian position regarding the structure of a Christian society thus: “In it there is no room for Greek and Jew [social distinction]; circumcised and uncircumcised [religious rite distinction], barbarian, Scythian [cultural distinction], slave, or free man [social, economic distinction]; Christ is everything and everywhere” (Col. 3:11, Moffatt). And in Gal 3:28 he adds: “There is no room for male and female [sex distinction]; you are all one in Christ Jesus.” That is the Christian position—clear, positive, sweeping. And in Peter’s speech at Pentecost he said: “Your sons and daughters shall prophesy”—note “and daughters”—(Acts·2:17, Moffatt).

But in 1 Cor. 14: 34 (Moffatt) Paul enjoins something else: “Women must keep quiet at gatherings of the church. They are not allowed to speak; … as the Law enjoins.” Note that he appeals to “the Law” for authority. Is he falling into the very thing he told the Galatians they were doing? It seems so. Every time Paul tried to put woman in a subordinate position, he appealed to the Old Testament, not to Jesus. Note: “but woman represents the supremacy of man. (Man was not made from woman, woman was made from man; and man was not created for woman, but woman for man.)” (1 Cor. 11:7–9, Moffatt); Here he turns back to the first creation for corroboration for his position—the first creation, not to the new creation in Jesus where “there is no room for male or female.” Again in 1 Tim. 2:12-14 (Moffatt) he says: “I allow no woman to teach or dictate to men, she must keep quiet. For Adam was created first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, it was Eve.” Here he turned to the first Adam for the sustaining of his position—the first Adam, not the Second Adam, Christ. His Christianity slipped a cog. And that slipping back to the pre-Christian has caused much confusion. Paul says that sometimes he was not inspired-he was speaking on his own. This was one of the times. And the ages have suffered because of it.—E. Stanley Jones, Growing Spiritually, 307

<idle musing>
You can not accuse E. Stanley Jones of being a progressive! Yet, he sees something wrong here and isn't afraid to say it: Paul blew it! Paul spoke out of himself and not at the leading of the Spirit!

Just an
</idle musing>

We need a theology that…

We need a theology that teaches us that God does not just give us one chance, but that every time we close a door he opens another one for us.

We need a theology that challenges us not to make mistakes, that takes sin seriously, but which tells us that when we sin, when we make mistakes, we are given the chance to take our place among the broken, among those whose lives are not perfect, the loved sinners, those for whom Christ came.

We need a theology which tells us that a second, third, fourth and fifth chance are just as valid as the first one.

We need a theology that tells us that mistakes are not forever, that they are not even for a lifetime, that time and grace wash clean, that nothing is irrevocable.—Ronald Rolheiser, Forgotten among the Lilies: Learning to Love beyond the Fears, 145

Over my dead body!

Christ’s recapitulation of the human story does not simply invite us into the divine life. There is an objective reality about it; it has happened over our dead bodies, so to speak.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 565 (emphasis original)

See evil for what it is…

Evil is in no way part of God’s good purpose, and cannot be, since it does not have existence as a created good. Evil is neither rationally nor morally intelligible and must simply be loathed and resisted. The beginning of resistance is not to explain, but to see. Seeing is itself a form of action — seeing evil for what it is, not a part of God’s plan, but a colossal x factor in creation, a monstrous contradiction, a prodigious negation that must be identified, denounced, and opposed wherever it occurs.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 434 (emphasis original)

Evil

there has never been a satisfactory account of the origin of evil, and there will be none on this side of the consummation of the kingdom of God. Evil is a vast excrescence, a monstrous contradiction that cannot be explained but can only be denounced and resisted wherever it appears.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 419 (emphasis original)

So, what does it mean?

Thus, “righteousness” does not mean moral perfection. It is not a distant, forbidding characteristic of God that humans are supposed to try to emulate or imitate; there is no good news in that. Instead, the righteousness of God is God’s powerful activity of making right what is wrong in the world. When we read, in both Old and New Testaments, that God is righteous, we are to understand that God is at work in his creation doing right. He is overcoming evil, delivering the oppressed, raising the poor from the dust, vindicating the voiceless victims who have had no one to defend them.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 328 (all emphasis original)

The way is open

In a striking and original act of imagination, the author of Hebrews reinterprets the temple veil as the human flesh of Jesus. Christ has gone ahead of us in his incarnate body as our forerunner, bringing our human nature along with him. The curtain that was a constant reminder of the exclusion of sinful humanity from the presence of God is gone forever. The temple has been figuratively destroyed and “raised up again in three days” in the body of Christ (John 2:19–21). No longer is the sanctuary forbidden, no longer is an intermediary required, no longer is there any restriction on access to the mercy seat and the remission of sin. Now — broadening the tent image to include the temple — there is no longer any hierarchy. The way is open for Gentiles, for women, for laypeople, for sinners of all sorts and conditions.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 269–70

Grace drives the sequence from first to last

It is surely no accident that Paul the Pharisee eschews all talk of repentance in his letters. He distances himself from any concept of repentance preceding, or being necessary for, the setting-aside (or “weakening,” in some versions) of God’s “severe decree.” At the risk of oversimplifying, for Paul the sequence is not sin-repentance-grace-forgiveness, but grace-sin- deliverance-repentance-grace. Grace drives the sequence from first to last.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 192

Sin? Not what you think…

To be in sin, biblically speaking, means something very much more consequential than wrongdoing; it means being catastrophically separated from the eternal love of God. It means to be on the other side of an impassable barrier of exclusion from God’s heavenly banquet. It means to be helplessly trapped inside one’s own worst self, miserably aware of the chasm between the way we are and the way God intends us to be. It means the continuation of the reign of greed, cruelty, rapacity, and violence throughout the world. In view of God’s nature, it is impossible that this state of affairs would be allowed to continue forever. Once we come to know God in Jesus Christ, we can no longer imagine the Father’s joyful banquet continuing into all eternity with the elder brother still standing outside looking in, imprisoned forever in his envy and resentment (Luke 15:25-32). This whole line of thinking exemplifies what we have been saying for several pages now, namely, that we cannot talk about sin for very long without being drawn into doxology. Were it not for the mercy of God surrounding us, we would have no perspective from which to view sin, for we would be entirely subject to it.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 174

There isn't any split!

God is a God of judgment and a God of grace. Both judgment and grace are in the New Testament. And both judgment and grace are in the Old Testament. God is always the same, without change: Father, Son and Holy Ghost.—A.W. Tozer, Experiencing the Presence of God, 156

Tozer for Tuesday

Weed: Christ Is for Us, God Is against Us

Some say that Christ the Son differs from the God the Father. That is one weed I want you to pull out of your mind, never allowing it to grow there. The misconception is that Christ is for us and God is against us. Never was there any truth in that at all. Christ, being God, is for us. And the Father, being God, is for us. And the Holy Ghost, being God, is for us. The Trinity is for us. It was because the Father was for us that the Son came to die for us. The reason that God is for us is why the Son is at the right hand of God now, pleading for us. The Holy Spirit is in our hearts. He is our advocate within. Christ is our advocate above. And all agree. There is no disagreement between the Father and the Son over man.—A.W. Tozer, Experiencing the Presence of God, 155–56

In and through, not over and against!

Closely related is a striking passage in II Corinthians that begins: “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself,” thereby nailing down the indispensable affirmation that the Father is acting, not over against the Son, but through and in the Son, whose will is the same as the Father’s. The awesome transaction is taking place within God.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 100 (emphasis original)

The Trinity did it!

The important thing for our discussion here is Paul's announcement (kerygma) that God, in the person of his sinless Son, put himself voluntarily and deliberately into the condition of greatest accursedness — on our behalf and in our place. This mind-crunching paradox lies at the heart of the Christian message.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 100

It's irreligious!

The crucifixion marks out the essential distinction between Christianity and “religion.” Religion as defined in these pages is either an organized system of belief or, alternatively, a loose collection of ideas and practices, projected out of humanity’s needs and wishes. The cross is “irreligious” because no human being individually or human beings collectively would have projected their hopes, wishes, longings, and needs onto a crucified man. In a PBS television series, The Christians (1981), a studiously impartial narrator said this: “Christianity is the only major religion to have as its central focus the suffering and degradation of its God. The crucifixion is so familiar to us, and so moving, that it is hard to realize how unusual it is as an image of God” (emphasis added [by Rutledge]). The description of the cross as “moving” is noteworthy, but not the point. We focus on the narrator’s (or screenwriter’s) perception of the wrenching unsuitability of a crucifixion as an object of faith. He has come closer than many Christians to understanding not only the abhorrent and irreligious nature of crucifixion as a method of execution but also the unlikelihood of it arising out of religious imagination.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 75 (emphasis original)

The world was changed!

The cross, incomparably vindicated by the resurrection, is the novum, the new factor in human experience, the definitive and world-changing act of God that makes the New Testament proclamation unique in all the world. The claim of the early church was that the historical death of Jesus “under Pontius Pilate,” followed by the metahistorical event of the resurrection, had changed everything for all time.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 61

Too offensive!

The central event of Christianity is too offensive and too much against the grain of religious thought as we know it ever to have emerged out of human religious imagination, no matter how philosophically subtle or humanly moving that religion might be. I personally find parts of the Qur’an and the Bhagavad-Gita quite stirring, but no one has been able to persuade me that there is anything in them equal to “the word of the cross.” Islam teaches that Jesus was not really crucified at all (Qur’an 4:157). John Stott has written, “I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth. . . . But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross . . . plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. . . . There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes divine suffering” (The Cross of Christ [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986], 335–36).—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 57–58 n. 40

The skandalon of the cross

He wants to emphasize the skandalon of the crucifixion. This was not a popular topic in Paul’s time, and it is not a popular topic today. This is hard to understand, especially in view of Paul’s declarations, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (I Cor. 2:2) and “Far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the World” (Gal. 6:14.). It sometimes seems as though the church has willfully decided to ignore the radical content of such passages, concentrating instead on a more generic, less offensive interpretation of Jesus’ death — for example, “Jesus died to show how much he loved us.” That is true, certainly, but it has a bland sound and falls far short of accounting for the particular horror of crucifixion. The question this raises is this: On the cross, was Jesus simply “showing” us something, or was something actually happening?—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 17 (emphasis original)

The Trinity and salvation

One of the currently popular substitutes for the name of the Trinity, “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer,” cannot serve this function because God does not create, redeem, or sustain himself. These terms describe God in relation to us but not within himself, so God’s being (ousia) is not affirmed. When we say “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” however, we are saying that what God is in himself, he also is toward us. The doctrine of the Trinity is therefore a working out of what it means to say that God is love. It tells us that God is love within his own three-personed self, and he is love toward us as we see his action in the Son’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 12 n. 24

The role of the Trinity in the crucifixion

God is the triune God. He is one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus of Nazareth was not a free-floating holy man. If he is not the second person of the Trinitarian Godhead and the only-begotten Son attested in the Nicene Creed, then God’s self was not directly involved at Golgotha. In that case, Jesus would be detached from the eternal plan of God shown forth in the history of Israel, and the cross would be a random event of no more than passing interest.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 12

You can't glamorize it (Good Friday thought)

The crucifixion of a man on a cross outside of the hills of Jerusalem must have been a repulsive thing. There just is no way to glamorize the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Just like the altar in the Old Testament tabernacle was a gory and unpleasant mess, so the cross of Jesus Christ was unpleasant in just about every aspect of it. But the altar in the Old Testament tabernacle foreshadowed the cross of Jesus Christ, and pointed to the one and only acceptable sacrifice for God. To take away the reproach of the cross is to undo God’s remedy for man’s revolt. Not only was the altar in the inner court, but also the laver.—A.W. Tozer, Experiencing the Presence of God, 130–31