Douglas Campbell

Herbert McCabe on Sin, Forgiveness, and God’s Love

~ Mike Skinner ~ 1 Comment

“The initiative is always literally with God. When God forgives our sin, he is not changing his mind about us; he is changing our mind about him. He does not change; his mind is never anything but loving; he is love. The forgiveness of sin is God’s creative and re-creative love making the desert bloom again, bringing us back from dry sterility to the rich luxuriant life bursting out all over the place. When God changes your mind in this way, when he pours out on you his Spirit of new life, it is exhilarating, but it is also fairly painful. There is a trauma of rebirth as perhaps there is a trauma of birth. The exhilaration and the pain that belong to being reborn is what we call contrition, and this is the forgiveness of sin. Contrition is not anxious guilt about sin; it is the continual recognition in hope that the Spirit has come to me as healing my sin.

So it is not literally true that because we are sorry God decides to forgive us. That is a perfectly good story, but it is only a story. The literal truth is that we are sorry because God forgives us. Our sorrow for sin just is the forgiveness of God working within us. Contrition and forgiveness are just two names for the same thing, they are a gift of the Holy Spirit; the re-creative transforming act of God in us. God does not forgive us because of anything he finds in us; he forgives us out of his sheer delight, his exuberant joy in making the desert bloom again.”

– Hebert McCabe, “Hope” in God, Christ and Us, p. 16-17.

I think this is the kind of ground-level theology that would make Stanley Hauerwas and Douglas Campbell happy.
What are your thoughts on the above quote from McCabe?

The Pauline Gospel

~ Chad Chambers ~ 1 Comment

During the twist and turns of the past couple years of thesis research, I have collected lots of quotes that most likely will not make it into the final product. Some of the most fascinating are summaries of Paul’s gospel by different authors, and I thought I would share some of them periodical.  Occasionally, I will even ask a question that points toward an area I find to be a weakness in the summary (or larger proposal). Take note, for the most part I like these summaries but also enjoy asking questions.

What role does the past, the time from creation to Christ, play in either of these summaries?

The Pauline gospel announces a definitive, unsurpassable divine incursion into the world…that both establishes the new axis around which the entire world thereafter revolves and discloses the original meaning of the world as determined in the pretemporal counsel of God. So unlimited is the scope of this divine action that it comprehends not only the end but also the very beginnings – although it takes the highly particular form of an individual human life that reaches its goal not only in death but also in resurrection.

-Francis Watson

 

Nothing can be the same again. Both Paul and his fellow Christians are living in a new reality that, in a sense, only they can understand. In the light of this new reality they understand that Christ has rescued them from a tortured previous reality within which they were oppressed by evil powers. Christ and his followers are presently at war with that evil dominion, and to a degree the war extends through the middle of each Christian community and each Christian person in the form of an ongoing conflict between the flesh and the Spirit. Nevertheless, Christ has effected the decisive act of deliverance and victory. Christians are saved, and dramatically! They have been set free and must now resist the temptation to lapse back into the old, evil, but strangely comfortable reality from which they have been delivered.

-Douglas Campbell (summarizing J. Louis Martyn’s interpretation)

 

Doug Campbell on Freedom

~ Mike Skinner ~ 1 Comment

“In an embodied, complex, and relational situation, freedom is not a matter of sheer choice – the latter being something of a chimera – but of an incremental creation of new possibilities for bodily action that must be learned and internalized. All action is initially the gift of new possible actions from someone else, to which humans can freely and appropriately respond. Freedom is therefore complex, communally mediated, and embodied. Above all, it is learned and hence taught, much as someone is only free to play a violin beautifully after years of practice and instruction, ideally by a maestro. Freedom is the accumulation of smaller freedoms in the sense of growth in possible concrete actions learned from one who has mastered them before hand.”

– Doug Campbell (Four Views on the Apostle Paul, 132-133)

The Righteousness of God: Three Views

~ Chad Chambers ~ 6 Comments

Douglas Campbell writes, “The current debate concerning the meaning of diakosune theou (the righteousness of God) in Paul is immense.”[1] The controversy predominantly centers on whether the ‘righteousness’[2] of God is retributive/punitive or gracious/benevolent in nature. Additionally, scholars dispute as to whether the righteousness of God describes an attribute of God, the activity of God, or relational aspects of God. The complexity of the issues surrounding the translation and interpretation of diakosune theou (the righteousness of God) make it impossible to offer a detailed account of the whole debate, but Douglas Moo, N.T. Wright, and Douglas Campbell’s respective views serve as a suitable introduction. Each perspective will be evaluated according to three categories – character, activity, and product – to allow for a consistent comparison.[3] 

Douglas Moo defines God’s character, in regards to his righteousness, as one who will always do what is right according to the divine nature. At first glance, this is seemingly a common understanding among the three viewpoints until the term “right” is defined in any particularity. For Moo, “what is right” entails God “always acting in accordance with the norm of his own person and promises.”[4] God’s activity of doing “right,” however, is not limited to saving work, instead it includes both God’s saving actions and God’s justice. Thus, God’s activity is to establish the “right” by vindicating some and judging others based upon a determined standard, which according to Moo is justification by faith in Jesus Christ.[5]  Consequently, the product of God’s “right” activity is that those who have been justified by faith receive God’s character; in other words, they attain the moral righteousness required by God.

N.T. Wright works chiefly within these same categories, except he places them within a predominantly covenantal framework. Simply stated, the righteousness of God is God’s sure and steadfast love of Israel, which Wright deduces from tying together the interrelated dimensions of covenant, lawcourt, and apocalyptic. The covenantal aspect is that God designed a once for all plan for salvation through Israel to bless the world and God remains exceedingly faithful to this plan. Wright states, “The point of the covenant always was that God would bless the whole world through Abraham’s family.”[6] The lawcourt dimension displays the character of God as that of an impartial judge, who as the creator of the world must rule and judge all creation justly. Thus, God’s activity is focused on a single plan to put the world right, which God established through the covenant with Israel.    For Wright, the decisive, apocalyptic act was that God dealt with sin and rebellion through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus, through Jesus Christ, as a faithful representative of Israel, God’s covenant with Israel has been fulfilled and the world has been declared “right” and granted access to blessings of the covenant. The product of God’s saving action is not, however, that one’s character is changed into the character of God, rather, his/her status is changed before God. In other words, he/she is vindicated by the judge, through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, and brought into the family of God.

Douglas Campbell’s view of the righteousness of God (the deliverance of God) draws specifically from the understanding of Christ as the definitive display of God’s righteousness. He states, “If we know what Christ is, we can infer immediately the content of the righteousness of God.”[7] Thus, Campbell concludes that the definitive character of God is benevolence because Christ exhibits no retributive characteristics in Paul’s writing.  Furthermore, drawing from the Old Testament’s picture of divine kingship, Campbell determines God’s character to be a compassionate king whose sole concern is to act to save an oppressed humanity. God’s kingly activity then is a “saving, liberating, life-giving, eschatological act,”[8] which delivers his oppressed people. Campbell defines this activity in the singular work of Jesus Christ whose death and resurrection liberates a captive humanity.  The product is “fundamentally liberative” and humanity is ontologically transformed, receiving a new flesh free from the powers of death and sin.[9]

[1] Douglas Campbell, The Deliverance of God (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 677.

[2] I have placed ‘righteousness’ in quotes because there is disagreement on how diakosune should be translated. I have chosen ‘righteousness’ solely because this is how it is most often discussed.

[3] Campbell’s methodology for defining diakosune theou differs considerably from the other two views. Campbell’s method starts with Christ as the definitive disclosure of diakosune theou and from this extrapolates its meaning by referring to how Christ is described in Paul. The other views draw on the phrases textual history to elucidate Paul’s meaning. Thus, is a little tenuous to fit Campbell’s definition into these three categories.

[4] Moo, Romans, 84.

[5] Ibid, 88. Moo acknowledges the covenantal framework of diakosune theou, however, he shows from passages, such as Psalm 143 and Daniel 9, that it cannot be tied exclusively to God’s covenant promises.

[6] Wright, Justification (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 67.

[7] Douglas Campbell, The Deliverance of God, 683.

[8] Ibid, 702.

[9] Ibid, 73.

Holy Apocalyptic, Batman!

~ Chad Chambers ~ 1 Comment

I am working on a paper that examines Paul’s apocalyptic imagination through conceptual metaphor. ‘Apocalyptic’ is term fraught with difficulties and the array of explanations offered by scholars range from sublime to ridiculous. I hope to have a post from my paper sometime this week, but the quote below from Douglas Campbell (who can go from sublime to ridiculous sometimes in the same paragraph – you know I love you Campbell!) captures both the importance and difficulty of the term for Pauline theology:

Nothing can be the same again. Both Paul and his fellow Christians are living in a new reality that, in a sense, only they can understand. In the light of this new reality they understand that Christ has rescued them from a tortured previous reality within which they were oppressed by evil powers. Christ and his followers are presently at war with that evil dominion, and to a degree the war extends through the middle of each Christian community and each Christian person in the form of an ongoing conflict between flesh and spirit. Nevertheless, Christ has effected the decisive act of deliverance and victory.  Christians are saved and dramatically! They have been set free and must now resist the temptation to lapse back into the old, evil, but strangely comfortable reality from which they have been delivered.

Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 190.