New Creation

Making the World Right

~ Chad Chambers ~ 1 Comment

In light of the events of this week, a few quotes on God’s making the world right.* I hope this vision captures the church, myself included, and we become God’s people – a people working to make what is wrong right.

 

In Galatians, the cross is interpreted not primarily as an atoning sacrifice for forgiveness of sins, but as a cataclysmic event that has broken the power of forces that hold humanity captive, brought the old world to an end, and inaugurated a new creation.

Richard Hays

 

Paul takes his bearings from the good news that in Christ – and thus in the act of new creation – God has invaded the cosmos. Paul does not argue, then, on the basis of a cosmos that remains undisturbed but on the emergence of the new cosmos with its new elements.

J. Louis Martyn

 

In Christ’s death the whole world has been put to death and a new world of possibilities come to birth.

James D. G. Dunn

 

God’s gracious will is to create life, to call into existence things that do not exist…Far from repairing the old cosmos, God is in the process of replacing it. 

J. Louis Martyn (partial summary, partial quote)

 

The new creation is not, however, merely a dream or a vision it takes on empirical reality in the community of God’s people.

Richard Hays

 

Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. (Matthew 6:10)

 

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*All quotes from commentaries on Galatians.

 

Love and Liberation in the Cross of Christ

~ Jessica Parks ~ Leave a comment

I’m continuing to work my way through Gorman’s Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross as well as some feminist responses to theologies of the cross.  It’s been a great benefit to have some really great comments on my last post (Kenosis, Cruciformity, and Feminism) so thank you all for joining in the conversation!

I wanted to share an excerpt from Cruciformity in which Gorman argues that we cannot and need not “liberate the cross from Paul” (p. 376n.21) as some theologians have sought to do. Gorman writes,

Paul’s understanding of the cross does not focus on substitution demanded by a vindictive God but on the love and freedom of both God and Christ that liberates humans from oppressive powers. While it is true that Paul inherits and accepts a sacrificial and even substitutionary understanding of the death of Christ, he places his own emphasis elsewhere. In particular, Paul is concerned to show that Christ’s death is an act of God’s love and of Christ’s love, and that Christ accepted his death voluntarily–even if obediently. He was not the passive recipient of punishment but the initiator of an act of love… God’s sending of Christ was not experienced by Paul fundamentally as an act of violence but as a gift of love for enemies and willful sinners who were simultaneously victims of the evil they embraced.

Paul, then, is not concerned about the details of how atonement occurs, but about the motivation of love behind and in the death, and about the effects of the act of love. It reconciles people to God as it defeats the powers of sin and death, thereby inaugurating a new age–the new age–in which hate and violence have no place. (p. 376)

Gorman notes that his intention is not to downplay “the function of the cross as God’s mans of atonement” but rather his “concern is to stress that Paul does no know a vindictive God but a loving one.” (p. 376n.21) Amen to that!

This focus on motivation and effect is vividly evident in 2 Corinthians 5 in which Paul emphasizes how God demonstrates the initiatory nature of love by willingly taking the first step towards reconciliation–in this the love of God is magnified. The God of Paul’s gospel is the God who loves his creation and is eager to reconcile creation to himself. This passage stands as a loving and necessary rebuke to those who mantra is ‘God hates you’.

I’ve been reading on the atonement (namely, violence and the atonement) for another class and it’s interesting (and helpful!) to see some overlap between my topics of study.  It just goes to show how interconnected and interdependent the different topics and -ologies of the Christian faith are. How we think abut one things affects how we think about another… and so on. And yet, there is so much mystery!

Stay tuned for more thoughts on cruciformity and feminism. My paper is due in two weeks!

Paul’s Apocalyptic Imagination: ‘The Martyn School’

~ Chad Chambers ~ 4 Comments

I have discussed the apocalyptic imagination several times on this blog…

The ‘Lacking’ Apocalyptic Imagination

Holy Apocalyptic, Batman!

…and in my next several posts I want to continue the discussion by highlighting several different views of Paul’s apocalyptic imagination. This first installment discusses:

‘The Martyn School’

  • known for its inaugurated eschatology
  • drawn significantly from Martyn’s work in Galatians

J. Louis Martyn writes, “Paul’s theological point of departure is…the apocalypse of Christ and the power of that apocalypse to create a history.”[1]

The opening and closing of Paul’s letter to the Galatians frame the whole letter in an apocalyptic manner. Galatians begins with a declaration of deliverance as Paul writes, “the Lord Jesus Christ, ‘who gave up his very life for our sins,’ so that he might snatch us out of the grasp of the present evil age, thus acting in accordance with the intention of God our Father.” (1:3b-4).[2] As the result of Jesus Christ’s death “for our sins,” he liberated “us” from the destructive power of the world. Richard Hays writes, “Paul’s gospel declares God’s gracious invasion of the world.”[3] Thus, Paul’s apocalyptic gospel is evident from the letter’s opening words, as he begins Galatians proclaiming deliverance from this evil world through God’s apocalyptic act in the death (1:3-4) and resurrection (1:1) of Jesus Christ.

Galatians closes by focusing on the new that has come. Gal. 6:12-15 contains some of Paul’s most striking language as he explains that the old world has been crucified to him and he to the old world through the cross of Jesus Christ. He writes, “As for me, God forbid that I should boast in anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the cosmos has been crucified to me and I to the cosmos.” (6:14). Nevertheless, Paul does not end with crucifixion, instead concluding with an ecstatic cry, “new creation” (6:15). In 2 Cor. 5:17, Paul explicitly connects “new creation” with being “in Christ” saying, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation,” and the image is the same in Galatians. Those who are “in Christ Jesus” (3:26) receive “the Spirit of [God’s] Son” (4:6) thus they “belong to Christ Jesus” (5:24) and with him they die to the old and live in “new creation” (2:20, 6:14-15).

The beginning and ending of Galatians highlights how Paul views the Christ-event as the act that brings about the death of one world and the inauguration of another. Bruce W. Longenecker writes, “[Paul] envisages the establishment of a new realm of existence. It is a sphere of life wholly differentiated from the ‘cosmos’ that has been crucified to Paul a domain where distinctive patterns of life are operative.”[4] Simply stated, Christ in his death and resurrection rescues “us” from the present evil age and inaugurates new creation. God’s sending of his Son to liberate humanity is the axis around which everything revolves. The old defeated. The new inaugurated. The present altered. To quote at length, Douglas A. Campbell writes,

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.[5]

God has transformed the cosmos by creating a history, a new creation, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

[1] J. Louis Martyn, “Events in Galatia: Modified Covenantal Nomism versus God’s Invasion of the Cosmos in the Singular Gospel: A Response to J.D.G. Dunn and B.R. Gaventa,” in Pauline Theology, vol. 1: Thessalonians, Philippians, Galatians, Philemon, ed. Jouette M. Bassler (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 164.

[2] Translations of Galatians are from Martyn’s commentary. J. Louis Martyn, Galatians, The Anchor Yale Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 3-10. 

[3] Richard B. Hays, Galatians, New Interpreter’s Bible IX (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2000), 202.

[4] Bruce W. Longenecker, The Triumph of Abraham’s God (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1998), 37.

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

Baptized into Christ’s Death

~ Chad Chambers ~ Leave a comment

Last week I asked some questions concerning Paul’s use of συν-compounds and over the next few weeks I am going to unpack those questions. This week I start with “What does it mean to die with Christ?”

I see four themes entangled within this question:

  1. Death’s connection to new life
  2. Our participation in Christ’s death
  3. Christ’s death and reconciliation with God
  4. Death’s connection to suffering

Today – Death’s connection to new life.

We live in a world mortified of death. To grow old, to move towards death, to move into death are sources of shame and embarrassment. In this mindset, death is the enemy who must be fought off at any cost. Thus, we (Western Culture) spend an enormous amount of time, energy, and money seeking to escape death or at least ward off its coming. The sad state of this mentality is that the very thing we are most afraid of controls our thoughts and actions. Our motivation and goal is avoiding death not attaining life. Just don’t let me die!

I believe, however, that Paul sees things very differently. Life is the motivation and life is the goal. That is why he can write, “To live is Christ and to die is gain” (Phil 1:21). Either way for him is life. Death is life with Christ (Phil 1:23) and life is Christ living in you (Gal 2:20). The eternal reality for all in Christ is life but mysteriously for Paul life requires death.

Rom 6:3-4 “Do you know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ were baptized into his death? 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.”

A significant, perhaps the most significant, feature of being in Christ is that in him there is a newness of life; new creation (2 Cor 5:17). Yet, the reality revealed by the glow of the cross and the empty tomb is that new life springs forth from death. Paul writes, “Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him” (Rom 6:8). In other words, life in Christ moves from life towards new life through the doorway of death.

Ironically, it is those in Christ, where life is the motivation and goal, who learn to accept mortal death because the newness of life already experienced in Christ, not our inevitable death, shapes our existence. Death is not feared because we have learned that only by passing through the stench of death do we come to smell the sweetness of new life; in dying with Christ we live in ever-present newness of life.