When Was Galatians Written?

Some Bible books just leave us guessing when they were written (e.g. James). Some give us enough information to say with a great deal of accuracy (e.g. 1 Thessalonians). Others give us enough information that we can narrow it down but not say for certain (e.g. Colossians). Only Galatians seems to give us so much that it becomes uncertain again! In fact, Galatians gives us so much information that it has led some people (e.g. my old tutor John Muddiman) to call into question the reliability of Acts and put together a different timescale altogether.

I'm pretty sure we don't need to do that. I'm pretty sure that the data from Galatians and Acts can all be true, and all fit together, but only if Galatians is Paul's earliest letter, written somewhere between Acts 15:1 and Acts 15:4. This articles explains why, and shows some of the ways that impacts how we read Galatians. [The title of “Paul's earliest letter” is usually given to 1 Thessalonians, written in Acts 18:5.]

The Council of Jerusalem

The big event connected with Galatians is the Council of Jerusalem, described in Acts 15:4-30. It's often thought that Paul writes about it in Galatians 2:1-10, which is one of the reasons for the confusion. If we read Galatians and Acts carefully, it's clear they are different events. It turns out to be most helpful if we track through Paul's visits to Jerusalem from the time of his conversion onwards.

Paul's visits to Jerusalem in Acts

Paul's first visit to Jerusalem after his conversion is in Acts 9:26-30. He was a fairly new convert, having just escaped from a plot to kill him in Damascus. Barnabas trusted him and introduced him to the apostles. He left after another attempt on his life.

Paul's second visit to Jerusalem in Acts is in Acts 11:30. Paul and Barnabas are by this stage elders of the church in Antioch, where, for the first time, lots of Gentiles have become Christians. A prophet called Agabus predicted there would be a serious famine, so the church in Antioch sent aid to the elders of the church in Jerusalem by Barnabas and Paul.

Paul's third visit is to the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. Some people from Judea had come to Antioch and were teaching that Christians needed to be circumcised. Paul and Barnabas were elders of the church in Antioch, but had also already planted churches across Turkey and Cyprus in what we'd now call Paul's First Missionary Journey. Because of the argument, Paul and Barnabas went to Jerusalem to sort it out. In Jerusalem Peter and James both spoke positively about the Gentile conversions and it was decided that they did not need to be circumcised, but that Gentile Christians in Antioch should abstain from meat sacrificed to idols, from eating blood and from sexual immorality. The apostles explicity distance themselves from the people who had been teaching the need to be circumcised (v24).

Paul's fourth visit to Jerusalem is in Acts 18:22 at the end of what is usually called his Second Missionary Journey. He seems to just drop in, having reached Caesarea by boat. We're not told anything that happened, except that he “greeted the church then left for Antioch.”

Paul's visits to Jerusalem in Galatians

In Galatians, there seems to be a conflict between the church in Antioch and Jerusalem, so Paul gives the history of his relations with Jerusalem. His first visit was three years after his conversion, where he went from Damascus to Jerusalem “to get acquainted with Peter” (Gal 1:18). Paul stayed for 15 days and only met Peter and James of the apostles.

Paul's second visit according to Galatians was 14 years later, accompanied by Barnabas and Titus. It was “in response to a revelation” (Gal 2:2). Paul had a private conversation with the leaders of the Jerusalem church, where he set before them the gospel he preached to the Gentiles. They did not require that Titus should be circumcised, and James, Peter and John agreed that he should carry on preaching to the Gentiles. The only requirement they put on him was that he should continue to remember the poor (Gal 2:10).

The situation which led to Paul writing Galatians also happened in Antioch. Peter came to visit (not recorded elsewhere). During Peter's visit, some people arrived from James, the leader of the church in Jerusalem. As a result of their arrival, Peter stopped eating with Gentiles, and the other Jews followed his example. Paul accused him of “forcing Gentiles to follow Jewish customs”. (Gal 2:14). From the rest of the book, it is clear that there was a problem with people requiring gentile Christians to be circumcised.

Comparing Paul's Visits in Acts and Galatians

The traditional view is that Paul's third visit in Acts is the same as his second visit in Galatians. But that doesn't work. For one thing, Paul's argument in Galatians falls apart if he's missed out a trip to Jerusalem. For another, although both involve conversations in Jerusalem between Paul, Peter and James about Gentiles, the outcomes are different. In Galatians, Paul says he's only asked to remember the poor. In Acts, he's also asked to abstain from food sacrificed to idols. In Galatians, he describes himself as timid and fearful, in Acts he is clearly bold and angry. His conversation in Galatians is in private – in Acts it seems to be in public. It makes most sense to say these are talking about two different meetings.

But the traditional view also requires two arguments in Antioch between Paul and some people from Jerusalem about circumcision. The first one leads to the Council of Jerusalem, where it is all agreed. But then there needs to be another argument in the same place between the same people which sparks the writing of Galatians. Little wonder that this view has led some to ditch the reliability of Acts!

Who were the Galatians?

It's further complicated by the question of who the Galatians were. Ethnic Galatia is in north-central Turkey, which wasn't visited by Paul until much later, if at all. This confused Calvin (for example), who somehow managed to argue that the letter was written to churches that he didn't think had been founded yet. However, it's more recently been discovered that for 100 years or so (including the time when Paul was around) there was a larger Roman Province of Galatia which included the cities of Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe, which Paul visited on his first missionary journey in Acts 13-14. These were later split back off into the province of Lycaonia.

So What Actually Happened?

Here's my attempt to say that Acts and Galatians are both right and put all the information together:

Paul's first visit to Jerusalem is described in Acts 9:26-30 and Galatians 1:18-24. It was three years after his conversion, and he wasn't well-known except as someone who had persecuted Christians. He came from Damascus, and Barnabas introduced him to Peter and James. Two weeks later he left, after an attempt on his life.

Paul's second visit to Jerusalem is in Acts 11 and Galatians 2:1-10. It was “in response to a revelation” (Gal 2:2), which was the prophecy of a famine from Agabus (Acts 11:28). This visit was for the purpose of giving aid to the church in Jerusalem. While Paul was there, he would naturally have a private conversation with the apostles about the fact that lots of Gentiles were becoming Christians in Antioch. They said that it was a good thing and only asked that they kept on remembering the poor, which is a natural thing to say after the Gentile Christians have just helped you get through a famine. The private conversation isn't recorded in Acts, but it makes sense that it would have happened.

Some time after that, Peter visited Antioch. After he came, there were some people who came from the church in Jerusalem, and claimed to speak for James (though didn't actually – hence his need to make that clear in Acts 15:24). They said that the Gentile Christians needed to be circumcised, otherwise Jewish Christians should stop eating with them. This might have been because Jewish Christians in Jerusalem were starting to be persecuted as “not really Jewish” because they ate with Gentiles. Their proposed solution – the Gentiles should be circumcised. Paul strongly objected to this and therefore wrote a letter (Galatians) to the other majority Gentile churches which he'd just planted warning them against the teaching. He then set off with Barnabas to Jerusalem to take the argument up with James, who the circumcision group claimed to be speaking for.

When they got there in Acts 15:4-30 (after Galatians had been written), they found that the circumcisers weren't actually speaking for James at all; James and Peter agreed with Paul that the Gentiles shouldn't be circumcised, and that Jewish and Gentile Christians should eat together, but suggested a compromise where the Gentile Christians should choose to limit their freedom by abstaining from eating food sacrificed to idols and blood.

That storyline seems to explain all the data well. It also explains other features of Galatians, such as why it seems to be much more argumentative than the discussion of the same issue in Romans, why it identifies the “circumcision group” with James, and why it doesn't have the teaching on the importance of limiting freedom for the sake of the consciences of Christian brothers and sisters which is so characteristic of how Paul handles difficult issues later on (1 Corinthians 8-10, Romans 14).

Old Testament Source Criticism

I spend quite a bit of my life digging into details of the text of the Bible. I love doing it, but I didn't love studying large parts of the OT at university, and I don't like the way it's often taught today. The main reason comes down to two words: source criticism.

Source criticism is about trying to understand the history of a text. A source critic might read Lord of the Rings, for example, and try to work out how the text came to take the form it did. It's much easier if you've got copies of earlier versions, or of the author's working. We don't have those in the case of the Bible, though.

Source criticism can be a useful tool to have when studying the Old Testament. There are a few places where it produces helpful insights. For example, Psalm 89 seems to have been a Psalm about God's goodness in creation, to which someone has added a bit in a different style about God's goodness in making promises to David, to which someone else has added in another style a complaint that God isn't keeping those promises and prayer that he would. Or Amos 4 & 5 seem to be a speech Amos gives in the (Northern) temple, interspersed with some verses of a hymn that's being sung, creating an effect a bit like Simon & Garfunkel singing Silent Night over the evening news. Seeing those aspects of a passage actually help us to understand the meaning of the passage better.

Where Source Criticism gets annoying is when scholars treat it like the main tool they should be using to understand a passage. This is especially true in the Pentateuch, and especially with a theory called the Documentary Hypothesis (JEDP). In that theory, Genesis - Deuteronomy somehow contain the full text of four older documents, called J, E, D and P, and probably the majority of non-evangelical Pentateuch scholars seem to spend most of their time (and most of the space in commentaries) arguing about precisely which bit comes from which source. The result is rather as you'd expect if you read a novel with your main concern being trying to work out how the author had drafted it - you completely miss the point.

C.S. Lewis, who was both an author and an expert on old texts, writes this on Biblical source criticism:

This then is my first bleat. These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can't see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight.

...

My impression is that in the whole of my experience, not one of these guesses [of reviews where others try to reconstruct how he wrote things] has on any point been right; that the method shows a record of one hundred per cent failure. You would expect by mere chance they would hit as often as they miss. But it is my impression that they do no such thing. I can't remember a single hit.

...

They assume that you wrote a story as they would try to write a story; the fact that they would so try explains why they have not produced any stories.

(from Fern Seed and Elephants)

Let's backtrack for a moment. The main reason that the JEDP hypothesis came about in the first place was because the Pentateuch really doesn't read like history as written by a modern westerner. Here's an example:

4 Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. 5 On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.’

6 So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, ‘In the evening you will know that it was the Lord who brought you out of Egypt, 7 and in the morning you will see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we, that you should grumble against us?’ 8 Moses also said, ‘You will know that it was the Lord when he gives you meat to eat in the evening and all the bread you want in the morning, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we? You are not grumbling against us, but against the Lord.’

9 Then Moses told Aaron, ‘Say to the entire Israelite community, “Come before the Lord, for he has heard your grumbling.”’

10 While Aaron was speaking to the whole Israelite community, they looked towards the desert, and there was the glory of the Lord appearing in the cloud.

11 The Lord said to Moses, 12 ‘I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them, “At twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God.”’

Exodus 16:4-12, NIV

The passage clearly says things more than once. It reads like there are two accounts of the same event with slight variations in the same passage. It does not read like it was written by a modern western historian. But there's a simple reason for that - it wasn't written by a modern western historian - it was written by an ancient Israelite, and they wrote rather differently from us.

Take the Psalms, for example. The basic literary technique in Psalms is that you say something, then you say it again using slightly different words - sometimes giving a little more information, sometimes not.

Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord;
let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
2 Let us come before him with thanksgiving
and extol him with music and song.

3 For the Lord is the great God,
the great King above all gods.
4 In his hand are the depths of the earth,
and the mountain peaks belong to him.
5 The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.

Psalm 95:1-5, NIV

No-one in their right mind would suggest that "the Lord is the great God" must have been written by a different person from "the great King above all gods". That's how Hebrew poetry works. So we shouldn't be surprised if Hebrew prose shows some of the same structures. There's often repetition; there's often clarification. It may well be linked to the fact it was originally written in a non-literate culture, so was written to be remembered easily.

But they don't just repeat randomly; there are all kinds of interesting structures in Hebrew prose. One of the most common is the chiasm, where the passage repeats itself in a mirror image around a central verse. Exodus 16 is one of those:

The whole section is exposing the fact that the Israelites are doubting that God is with them. The passage points to the fact that God will show his presence among them by providing them food. It's a carefully constructed work of literary art rather than a badly meshed together group of extracts from sources.

Now a decent commentary will spend more time on the important aspects of the structure rather than JEDP, but most won't. Decent teaching material on the Pentateuch will spend more time discussing structures like that than JEDP, but most doesn't. And that makes me sad.

Did God Have a Wife?

“Did God have a wife?” was the title of a programme on BBC2 yesterday. I didn't bother watching it, because that series isn't about presenting new evidence; it's about recycling old arguments that have been refuted but still hang around like a bad smell in the atheistic corners of the theology faculties of the world. And it depresses me to see the stupid things that people get paid to say on TV and other people accept is true.

Here's their basic argument:
YHWH is the Hebrew personal name for the God of the Old Testament. Someone found an inscription in the area of Israel from the Old Testament period saying “YHWH and his Asherah”. Asherah was a female goddess. Therefore, so the argument goes, the ancient Israelites said that God had a wife, called Asherah. And what you see described in the Old Testament are the attempts to stamp it out.

Here's some background you probably need in order to understand the situation: The main gods in the (“pagan”) Canaanite pantheon around 800BC were called El, Asherah and Ba'al. El and Asherah were married, Ba'al was their son. But Ba'al and Asherah were comparative newcomers – they don't appear on the scene much before 1500BC. So at the time the books of Kings are set, it's El, Asherah and Ba'al; at the time of Abraham, it's just El and some worship of the Sun and Moon.

Now, when Abraham was around, God revealed himself to him as “El”, or variants of “El” like “El Shaddai”, “El Elyon” and so on. I've written more about that here. The traditional argument is that “El” was how they remembered the true God, and Ba'al and Asherah were later additions. The Hebrew conception of El is similar to the Arabic Al, which was later picked up by Mohammed as Allah... It's also similar to the Latin “Deus” and the English “God”, which are used both as a title for the one God but also as labels for the many gods in a polytheistic pantheon.

But at the time of Moses, God revealed himself by the name YHWH as well as El – YHWH is used as a name that's associated with God's promises and with the fact that they come out of Egypt. Interestingly, God first uses the name when Moses basically asks him which God he is, because Moses grew up in polytheistic Egypt. When there is only really one God worshipped at the time of Abraham, God is fine going as just “God”, but when there are lots of gods around, he adds the name YHWH.

So by the time you get to the books of Kings, the followers of Moses' religion use El and YHWH for the same God. Elijah, who is one of the big figures in that religion in about 800BC even had a name that meant “El is YHWH”. The followers of Canaanite paganism had three main gods – El, Asherah and Ba'al. And so the question is whether the two religions were actually merged.

Right, so now to the argument.

The way that ancient history works is that there is often some kind of text that describes what happens. If you're lucky, it's from roughly the same time as the events it describes. If you're very lucky, there are two or more texts. And there may be some archaeology as well, which usually won't be enough to put a complete picture together. Ancient history tends to treat the text as basically reliable, unless there is some contradictory evidence from archaeology or unless the events described are impossible. We shouldn't discard the narrative account unless it clashes with archaeology – that's bad history.

That means that we need to think about what situation the Bible actually describes from about 900BC to 500BC. And what we see is that the people of Israel consistently sliding back into worshipping other gods, starting off with the gods of the Canaanites like Ba'al and Asherah under kings like Ahab and Ahaziah, and moving onto worshipping the gods of the nations around them like Chemosh and Molech. So according to the Old Testament, what you get is people trying to merge Judaism with Canaanite paganism. You get people building Asherah poles in the temple, for example. And the prophets (the ones the OT calls “true prophets” anyway) are consistently criticising them for doing so.

My point is this:
If the Old Testament account is right, then you'd expect that many of the Israelites were worshipping YWHW alongside Asherah and trying to merge Judaism with Canaanite paganism. So you'd expect them to be making statues saying things like YHWH and his Asherah. You'd also expect the OT prophets like Elijah to be condemning them for it.

Does it mean that God had a wife? No.

So what's new?

"God is love" as primary?

There seems to be a common assumption in an awful lot of modern theology that the primary truth about God is that he is love. "God is love" is at least Biblical as a statement (1 John 4:8, 16), and there's a lot of important stuff that can be said about the Trinity from that statement.

But of course, people often load the word "love" with a lot of baggage it wasn't meant to carry, and interpret "God is love" in a way that contradicts large chunks of the rest of the Bible.

But why should "God is love" be primary at all? Why not "God is light; in him there is no darkness at all." (1 John 1:5). After all, it's in the same book. But I don't think either "God is love" or "God is light" is the number one candidate for a three word description beginning "God is...". Nor is "Truth", "Life" or "Wisdom", though there may be something to be said for each of those.

I think there are two possibilities much stronger than either. After all, we're never told that "God is love, love, love", but we are told that he is "holy, holy, holy." Actually, we're told that as many times as we are told that God is love (Isaiah 6:3, Rev 4:8), and we're told that God is holy quite a lot more (Lev 11:44, Lev 11:45; Josh 24:19; 1 Sam 6:20; Ps 22:3; 99:9; Isaiah 5:16; 1 Pe 1:16 for starters). So I'd say "God is holy" is much closer to being his primary attribute that "God is love" on the basis of the Biblical evidence.

The other possibility of course is "God is Jesus".

Now imagine what modern theology would be like if we started with the truth that God is holy rather than the truth that he is love.

Doctrine and Liberalism

Fulcrum are republishing a classic book on their website. In the first chapter, Alister McGrath explains why he gave up on theological liberalism. Well worth a read if that's your sort of thing.

Joseph

Some scholars like to claim that as few of the events described in the Bible actually happened. It isn't at all rare to find people who say that Biblical history starts at about the time of Hezekiah (2 Kings) or David (2 Samuel), and that the earlier stuff is all myth. There are even some people who claim that the history starts in Ezra.

Of course, I don't agree with them, and I think it's a very cavalier approach to history to ignore the only documents we have that describe much of the earlier history. But outside the Bible, there isn't much evidence either way for events before David - Israel wasn't settled then in a way that produces much in the way of archaeology. There's some from the time of Joshua, but that's contested because it isn't clear and could be made to fit half a dozen very different scenarios.

And then something like this comes along. They've found some coins in Egypt from the right sort of time which seem to refer to Joseph. That's Joseph the son of Jacob (as in Genesis) rather than Joseph the husband of Mary. If these are real, they blow massive amounts of liberal Biblical scholarship out of the water. I believe the previous record for the oldest Biblical character referred to in an archaeological inscription was David (c. 1000 BC), but that was from a while later referring to the kings of Jerusalem as "sons of David". If this is the same Joseph, it pushes it right back to about 1600BC...

Right Use of the Old Testament

I was reading 1 Timothy 1 this morning, and realised that it could have been written to some modern Biblical scholars.

As I urged you when I went into Macedonia, stay there in Ephesus so that you may command certain persons not to teach false doctrines any longer or to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies. Such things promote controversial speculations rather than advancing God's work—which is by faith. The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Some have departed from these and have turned to meaningless talk. They want to be teachers of the law, but they do not know what they are talking about or what they so confidently affirm.

We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers. And it is for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.

1 Timothy 1:3-11, TNIV

People shouldn't waste their time on myths, endless genealogies, or source criticism of the OT. The purpose of the Law (and Paul's examples all seem to be related to the 10 Commandments here) is not to give us insight into its sources or its relation to other ANE codes of law, but to tell people who are living wrongly how to live rightly.

Monotheism and Monolatrism

In my last post, I wrote quite a bit of dull academic stuff about monotheism in ancient Israel and in modern academic theology. This post should hopefully be more relevant and interesting.

What the Old Testament often teaches isn't monotheism – the belief that only one god actually exists. What the Bible tends to teach instead is monolatrism. A few definitions will help:

Monotheism: - the belief that only one god exists
Henotheism: - worshipping only one god without denying the existence of other gods
Monolatrism: - the belief that there is only one god who is worth worshipping.

I think monolatrism is actually quite a sensible approach. If you're standing next to the temple of Baal, it's quite hard to persuade people that Baal doesn't really exist. Finding proof that something doesn't exist is usually very hard outside mathematics. What the prophets argued was that Baal was useless and wasn't worth worshipping. He couldn't save people, he couldn't call down fire on sacrifices, he wasn't worth worshipping.

Today, the idols are often different. There aren't many people who worship statues of Baal around. But there are plenty of people who worship football teams, or money, or success, or pleasure. And what we are to show them isn't that their gods don't exist, but that they aren't worth worshipping – it isn't worth giving your life to a football team or to money or to pleasure. But it is worth giving your life to God.

It actually makes far more sense to teach monolatrism than monotheism when you're speaking to people who don't agree with you. So it isn't surprising that that's what the prophets did in the Old Testament. And, contrary to a lot of modern theologians, it doesn't show that they're on a journey from polytheism to monotheism.

Monotheism in History

Sorry for not posting much recently - I've been away on a conference. Thoughts from that at some point...

At the moment, I'm reading The Church in an Age of Revolution by Alec Vidler. It's good as a kind of overview of the church in Britain and bits of Europe from 1789 to somewhere in the mid 1900s. One of the big events during that time is the rise of liberal Biblical interpretation and liberal scholarship challenging the authority of Scripture. One of the things that annoys me about the book is Vidler's continuing description of those who keep teaching the same truths and keep on teaching the Bible as reliable as "naive". That in itself could be a very naive description. Just because something is written by a "scholar" doesn't mean it's true, and especially not when the scholarship is done as shoddily as a lot of the stuff which was seen to challenge the Bible.

I don't even think that whole area should be described as "theology". After all, theology is about knowing and studying God ("theos"), just as biology is about knowing about and studying life ("bios"). But we cannot know God without him revealing himself to us, and if he hasn't revealed himself, as many so-called "theologians" claim, then we can't know him or study him. Anyway, enough of the rant. To the point.

One of the big areas in which the Bible is often attacked as unreliable is the way it describes the development of Israelite beliefs about God. Many modern scholars claim that Israel started out polytheistic, and developed via henotheism (believing that one god is much more important than the others) at the time of Hezekiah and Josiah (700s and 600s BC) to monotheism (belief that there's only one God) at the time of the exile (500s BC). They believe this partly because that is how they think religions develop (though without much evidence because they've never watched a religion develop), and partly because the archaeological evidence shows that there were lots of idols of different gods, particularly Asherah and Baal, around for the few hundred years before Hezekiah. And then because they think that the idea of monotheism only comes along in the 500s BC, they say that all the bits of the Bible that teach monotheism must have been written after that, and so you get most of the OT written during the Exile.

The main reason that I think this is bad scholarship is that the archaeological evidence also agrees pretty much perfectly with the Biblical account. After all, the Bible doesn't say that the people of Israel were monotheistic before Hezekiah. In fact, it says they worshipped lots and lots of idols.

Even worse, the Israelites tried to hide their sins from the LORD their God. They built their own local shrines everywhere in Israel - from small towns to large, walled cities. They also built stone images of foreign gods and set up sacred poles for the worship of Asherah on every hill and under every shady tree. They offered sacrifices at the shrines, just as the foreign nations had done before the LORD forced them out of Israel. They did sinful things that made the LORD very angry.

Even though the LORD had commanded the Israelites not to worship idols, they did it anyway. So the LORD made sure that every prophet warned Israel and Judah with these words: "I, the LORD, command you to stop doing sinful things and start obeying my laws and teachings! I gave them to your ancestors, and I told my servants the prophets to repeat them to you."

2 Kings 17:9-13, CEV

The picture the Bible paints isn't one of lots of monotheistic obedient Israelites. It's a picture where there are vast numbers of idols, but God keeps telling them that the idols are a bad idea. What Hezekiah and Josiah do is to try to get rid of the idolatry by returning to monolatry (only worshipping one god, whether or not you believe the others exist).

Hezekiah obeyed the LORD, just as his ancestor David had done. He destroyed the local shrines, then tore down the images of foreign gods and cut down the sacred pole for worshiping the goddess Asherah. He also smashed the bronze snake Moses had made. The people had named it Nehushtan and had been offering sacrifices to it.

2 Kings 18:3-4, CEV

So when people find statues that show people thought that God was married to Asherah, or that they worshipped Baal or whatever, we shouldn't be surprised at all. The archaeological evidence fits the Bible on this one just fine, so we don't need another theory.

Of course, the big difference between the two theories is what happened earlier. The Bible does say that there were a few brief periods much earlier in Israel's history when they only really did worship God and didn't use idols.

Israel served the LORD all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua and had known all the work that the LORD did for Israel.
Joshua 24:31, ESV

There's also the time from early in David's reign until when Solomon introduced idol worship to keep his wives happy - that's somewhere around 1200BC with Joshua and around 1000BC with David and Solomon.

And interestingly enough, when we look at the archaeology for those periods, we find far fewer idols. Finkelstein, for example, found a whole series of villages in the hill country from about 1200BC, with virtually no idols or pig bones. Could this possibly suggest that Israel's later idolatry was not a stage in their religious development forwards, but rather them turning away from their earlier monotheism to idolatry, before finally coming back to monotheism during the exile? In other words, exactly what the Bible says happened....

I was going to write about why teaching henotheism and monolatry are possibly better responses to idolatry than teaching monotheism, but I seem to have written quite enough for now already!

Answering Richard Dawkins?

Some years ago, there was a group of men called the Jesus Seminar. They didn't believe that what the Bible said was true, and they were trying to work out what Jesus actually said. They did so using a rather strange method. They tried looking at what the Bible said that Jesus said, and getting rid of everything that might have been said by the Judaism of the time or by the early Church. Since Jesus was a Jew of the time, and the early Church came into existence largely as a result of what he said and did, those criteria are going to give an awful lot of false negatives. In addition, they wanted it to be in more than one source, but if the gospels were too similar they didn't count them, which is more bad criteria. Using their criteria, what you get out even a sceptical non-Christian historian would pretty much have to admit that Jesus said. But there are a lot of things that Jesus pretty certainly said that they will miss out. But anyway...

As I remember it, they ended up concluding that there was one thing that Jesus absolutely definitely said, which was so different from anything other people were saying, and it's something that we still ignore pretty spectacularly. It was this: "love your enemies".

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.
Luke 6:32-35, TNIV

All too often, we just don't do it. We love people who are like us or people who are nice to us. If people aren't nice to us, we try to be polite back and sometimes pray for them or something. But we don't really love them.

Let's take a clear example. Richard Dawkins. I lived round the corner from him for three years, and the extent of my love for him was not running him over in my car when he was cycling. That's polite, but not exactly what I'd call really loving.

The way that most Christians respond to Richard Dawkins usually seems to be taking one of the following options:

• Ignoring him and hoping he'll go away
• Finding a Christian who knows a bit about science to do a talk
• Writing a badly thought through response
• Finding someone who really has read Richard Dawkins and engaged with him to do a talk or write a book
• Finding someone to do a public debate with Richard Dawkins
• Praying for Richard Dawkins to become a Christian

I don't think any of those should be our first course of action. Some of them are helpful and useful, and some good books have been written on Dawkins. I think our first course of action should be to love him. I sincerely hope there are Christian organisations and churches and individuals who send him a Christmas hamper or something. Not because they want him to pay attention to them, but because they love him.

The way that things should work (e.g. in 1 Peter 3) is this:

• People attack Christians
• We respond by loving them
• People ask us about what we believe
• We tell them about Jesus

Secular Academia and the Bible

There's an interesting discussion around my last post. The question is essentially whether Christians should read the Bible in the same way that secular academics tell them to. So here's my perspective on that.

I think it's important for some Christians to understand how and why secular academics approach the Bible. It's important for them to be able to speak the language of secular academic study, and to learn what they can from it. I hope I've done a bit of that myself.

It's also important that they don't accept all of secular academic conclusions about the Bible without critically examining them. There is no such thing as a neutral viewpoint when it comes to human academic endeavour, especially in theology. Some of the conclusions are helpful and valid. For example, recognising that a large section of the book of Joshua is in the same genre as a lot of Ancient Near Eastern victory lists, and therefore it doesn't necessarily all need to have happened at the same time or in that order, is important and helpful for understanding the book and its relation to history.

But a large portion of secular academic study of the Bible rests on the presupposition that God does not act directly in this world, and God does not speak in the way that Jesus (for example) claims that he does. I disagree with that presupposition on philosophical and experiential grounds, and therefore I feel at liberty to disagree with those conclusions of secular academia that rest on that presupposition. There are other bad presuppositions too, but that's the biggest one.

Because of that, and because Christianity is not fundamentally about getting a first at Oxford in Theology (though it's nice when that happens, it's really not very important!) but about being in a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, the priority of the Christian minister should be to teach what is true rather than just what the academics say.

That doesn't mean that what we do is at all academically irresponsible. The quotation I cited last time can be read as answering the simple question "Given the Christian understanding of Jesus as God, and the Apostles as inspired by God's Spirit, how should we read the Old Testament?" It was written by the former professor of Old Testament and hermeneutics at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia...

As a comment for my previous post, Speaker for the Dead made this good point.

If Jesus is the Son of God, our reading of the Old Testament should center around that fact... But if a Christian can demonstrate that the NT is an inspired document quite unlike any other, he is entirely justified in using it to analyze other inspired texts.

"The Secrets of the Twelve Disciples"

Just watching / watched this program on Channel 4. As with so many of these things, it's got some good and widely acknowledged information (James as leader of the Jerusalem Church, Thomas in India, conflict in the early church over Jews / Gentiles), and tries to say that a lot of it has been suppressed to make it look like a big conspiracy with the Vatican as the evildoers. Sometimes they were, and often they weren't.

There's an interesting mix of scholars and crackpot conspiracy theorists. The stories seems to fall into several main groups:

• focusing on well-acknowledged stuff (Thomas in India) which they find crackpots to deny and then claim that the deniers represent the church establishment
• focusing on well-acknowledged stuff (Peter in Rome) which they find ultra-sceptical people (described as neutral) to deny and then focus only on the most controversial aspects of it (are the bones identified as Peter's bones really his?) and focus on the potential vested interest. There was even an ossuary (bone box) from Jerusalem labelled "Simon son of Jonah" which the guy who found it claimed wasn't Peter, but the presenter claimed had to be. The classic test is the question as to if, in 2000 years people found a tomb labelled "Elizabeth daughter of George" in the wrong place, would they think it was the remains of Queen Elizabeth II?
• really dubious stuff (James in Compostella) that they get church people to defend

The whole thing seemed to strike me as very anti-Catholic. Now I'm not the greatest lover of Roman Catholicism in the world, though I know some good Catholics and the current Pope seems generally excellent, but it seemed to be decidedly nasty. Why the hatred of Catholicism? That's what I'd like to know... (but I could make some good guesses, mostly to do with embryology and authority claims)

Religious Pluralism

Time for some quotes on religious pluralism. Sorry for the lack of blogging - a combination of quizzing, work and my girlfriend getting back might be to blame.

First up, some unintentionally contradictory ones from the same page of an utterly awful book:

The infinity and ineffability of God-Mystery demands religious pluralism and forbids any one religion from having the “only” or “final” word.

Pluralism tells us that there is no “one” that can be imposed on the “many”.

Paul Knitter, The Myth of Christian Uniqueness

So, does that "one" which can't be imposed include pluralism then?

And a sensible one from Michael Green, which gets thought provoking too.

I find it ironic that people object to the proclamation of the Christian gospel these days because so many other faiths jostle on the doorstep of our global village. What's new? The variety of faiths in antiquity was even greater than it is today. And the early Christians, making as they did ultimate claims for Jesus, met the problem of other faiths head-on from the very outset. Their approach was interesting... They did not denounce other faiths. They simply proclaimed Jesus with all the power and persuasiveness at their disposal.

Michael Green

Quotes on Christology

Here are some quotes from my reading on 20th century Christology.

I find it very hard to see how someone can base faith on a narrative which they hold to be historically fictitious.
Mark Edwards

Grasped in its proper Trinitarian depth, the gospel narrative not only breaks down all human perceptions of beauty, goodness, and truth, but reorients these broken perceptions around the centre to which it bears witness, and in this way reconstitutes and perfects them. Jesus' cross and resurrection are like a magnetic point around which history and culture take on a shape which could not be anticipated from any perspective they themselves provide, and which they could not otherwise have assumed. This single point of fact contains a meaning that surpasses, consummated and embraces every other projected meaning.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama

One of the consequences of the Western Church's two centuries of fumbling with the historical-critical method is a loss of any sense of the connection between the classical doctrines of the Church and the text of scripture.
David Yeago

What is so profoundly odd about Philippians 2:10-11 is that it identifies the prophesied universal acknowledgement of the unique deity of YHWH with the universal cultic acclamation of an apparent “other”, Jesus of Nazareth. The difficulty is palpable: if “there is no other” how can the bending of knees and the loosing of tongues at the name of some other be compatible, much less identified with the recognition of the “glory” of the God of Israel?
David Yeago

A reduction in Jesus Christ's saving significance is precisely what Arius's present-day representatives want, for implicit in much modern critique of ancient theology is the supposition that we do not really require saving because in some sense we are intrinsically able to save ourselves, in some way we are already implicitly or potentially divine.
Colin Gunton

Does God Suffer? Part 2

Part 1 | Part 3 | Part 4

Dealing with Traditional Philosophy

In part 1, I described the traditional philosophical view of why God can't suffer. The problems with that are twofold.

First, God isn't ontologically dependent on us - we can't make God suffer, but he can choose to suffer for us and because of us. This is actually just the doctrine of grace.

The LORD did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. 8 But it was because the LORD loved you and kept the oath he swore to your forefathers that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
Deuteronomy 7:7-8, NIV

God didn't choose Israel because he had to - he did it because he wanted to. There wasn't anything about Israel that forced him to do it. In the same way, there isn't anything about us that can force God to suffer. But God can still love us, by his own choice, and that might well affect whether he suffers.

The second problem is that suffering doesn't imply the sort of change that God doesn't do. The Bible teaches that God doesn't change, but also that he acts and that he was incarnate. In 500BC, God wasn't incarnate as a man. In AD20, he was. When we say that God doesn't change, if we are being true to the Bible or to the idea of the Incarnation, then we need to be careful what we mean by "change".

Wayne Grudem describes what the Bible teaches about God's unchangingness as follows:

God is unchanging in his being, perfections, purposes and promises, yet God does act and feel emotions, and he acts and feels differently in response to different situations. This attribute of God is also called God's immutability.
Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology

I think Grudem is unhelpful when he says God feels emotions. God feels love, anger, compassion and so on, but when God feels them they don't change, they aren't wrongly motivated, they're always totally consistent with his character. I would say they're like emotions, but it's truer to say that emotions are a bit like them.

When we have that understanding of what it means for God to be unchanging, it starts to become clear that it doesn't actually mean that God can't suffer. There's also the possibility that God might suffer eternally - I'll discuss that more later.

Jurgen Moltmann

I've avoided talking about dead Germans up until now. But Moltmann is really important here because if you read any modern books on God and suffering, they always spend a lot of time discussing his views, which have been very influential. And in true Monty Python style, he isn't dead yet either.

Moltmann effectively centres his whole theology on the question of God and suffering, even on the question of what it means for God to be with us in our suffering. Here's probably his most famous passage, which starts with a quote from a Holocaust survivor.

“The SS hanged two Jewish men and a youth in front of the whole camp. The men died quickly, but the death throes of the youth lasted for half an hour. 'Where is God? Where is he?' someone asked behind me. As the youth still hung in torment in the noose after a long time, I heard the man call again, 'Where is God now?' And I heard a voice in myself answer: 'Where is he? He is here. He is hanging there on the gallows...'”

Any other answer would be blasphemy. There cannot be any other Christian answer to the question of this torment. To speak here of a God who could not suffer would make God a demon. To speak here of an absolute God would make God an annihilating nothingness. To speak here of an indifferent God would condemn man to indifference.

Moltmann sees the idea of God being crucified as central, even to the point where it twists large chunks of the rest of his theology. He also sees the answer to the problem of suffering as being that as God is crucified, he takes into himself all the suffering in the whole world, past, present and future. So God is seen as sharing in and participating in the suffering of the world.

Along with many modern theologians who put God's suffering central, Moltmann tends to end up in panentheism - the belief that God is in everything and everything is in God.

In part 3, I'll look at the traditional understanding of how / whether God suffered when Jesus was on the cross, and whether it's enough.

General Revelation

I've had to do quite a bit of reading recently on the idea of General Revelation and Natural Theology - basically what we can tell about God from looking at the world around us.

I still think Calvin's treatment of it is about as good as they come. He points out that we should be able to tell lots about God from creation, but that we can't see all of it, and we often get bits wrong because we're sinful and blind, and because the blindness and the sinfulness are linked, it's our fault that we don't see God more clearly in the world.

What's interesting though is seeing what the Bible tells us we should be able to tell about God from the world around us.

• That God is real
• That God is powerful beyond our understanding (e.g. Job 38)
• That God is wise beyond our understanding (e.g. Isaiah 55:8-9)
• That God is reliable (e.g. Jeremiah 33:25-26)
• That we should obey God (e.g. Jeremiah 8:7-9, 18:13-15)
• That God is patient

In other words, what we should be able to know about God from the world around us isn't enough that we can be saved. But it is enough that we should be able to see that we desperately need saving, and that we can trust God to do it. It's enough to point us to Jesus, but not enough to replace him.

Being able to see God in the universe doesn't mean that we have authority or power over God - it's because he graciously made us as human beings and made the universe in such a way that we could tell a bit about him from it.

Those things we can tell about God from the universe actually sum up lots of the reasons I enjoyed studying physics so much...

I could put in lots of stuff here about the Barth / Brunner debate, but I can't be bothered, and I don't think it would help that much.

Respect to the Catholics

You've sometimes got to hand it to the Roman Catholics...

I'm doing a theology degree at a secular university which has some Catholic (and some Protestant) bits attached. Today I went to a class which was meant to be part of an 8 class series covering modern theology, given by a Catholic visiting fellow at the university. And what was he using as his only text for the 8 week course?

The Roman Catholic Catechism.

By comparison, a parallel class was spending the first week thinking about Bultmann (who I'd characterise as an atheist existentialist desperately trying to be a Christian without giving up the atheism or the existentialism).

Now I'm not sure I'd have the guts even to consider basing an 8 week theology course in a secular university on the 39 Articles, or the UCCF DB, or the Westminster Confession, or the C of E catechism, unless it was specifically specified as the subject for the course.

Whether it's wise to do so or not is a completely different question. But respect to the Catholics for having the guts to try...

Pannenberg, Brunner, Barth - Revelation

For the last two days, I've been (meant to be) reading some modern (some even German-speaking) theologians. All of them seem to give at best a mixed bag, in terms of both comprehensibility and truthfulness, but here are some of the highlights...

Thus, we saw that it is only the end of all events which could bring in the final self-manifestation of Jahweh, the perfection of his revelation.... the witness of the New Testament is that in the fate of Jesus Christ the end is not only seen ahead of time, but is experienced by means of a foretaste. For, in him, the resurrection of the dead has already taken place, though to all other men this is still something yet to be experienced.

...

Now the history of the world is only visible when one stands at its end... With the resurrection of Jesus, the end of history has already occurred, although it does not strike us in this way. It is through the resurrection that God has substantiated his deity in an ultimate way and is now manifest as the God of all men. It is only the eschatological character of the Christ event that establishes that there will be no further self-manifestation of God beyond this event. Thus, the end of the world will be on a cosmic scale what has already happened in Jesus.

Wolfhart Pannenberg, Dogmatic Theses of the Concept of Revelation

As a rule the modern man does not understand the claim of Christianity to be a religion of revelation, and he therefore rejects it. The most characteristic element of the present age, and that which distinguishes it from earlier periods in history, is the almost complete disappearance of the sense of transcendence and the consciousness of revelation.

Emil Brunner, Revelation and Reason

All the Church need do is just this: After any exegesis propounded in it, even the very best, it has to realise afresh the distinction between text and commentary and to let the text speak again without let or hindrance, so that it will experience the lordship of this free power...

...

Thus God does reveal himself in statements, through the medium of speech, and indeed of human speech. His word is always this or that word spoken by the prophets and apostles and proclaimed in the Church. The personal character of God's Word is not, therefore, to be played off against its verbal or spiritual character.

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics

German Theologians

I don't like admitting when I don't understand something. I'm fine with admitting that I'm not exactly the greatest person in the world at a lot of practical stuff, but if I don't understand something, I either blame it on poor explanation or on the concept itself not making sense. So with the plot of Transformers or the intellectual coherence of Marcus Borg's thoughts about Jesus or the assumptions underlying much of modern source criticism, I'm happy and reasonably confident saying that the emperor does indeed have no clothes. By contrast, with modern particle physics, I was convinced there was something I didn't get, and I went away and worked at it (even after messing up an exam) until I realised that I was assuming that quarks actually existed in a real sense and once I realised that they didn't exist in the same way I had thought they did, it all made sense.

On one hand, I don't want to throw away almost the whole of German-language theology since Kant in the late 1700s. (Added for clarification - up to the publication of Barth's Commentary on Romans in 1919, but still with a lot of rubbish since then.) It's got to mean something, and probably something useful I can learn from. But on the other hand, almost every time I read something theological which was originally written in German, my gut reaction is that it's meaningless overly verbose drivel resting on an absence of underlying logical thought processes.

I don't think it's the theological ideas per se. I can understand Hume and Dawkins and Sanders and Borg and Edwards and Pascal and Calvin and Luther and Wright and even Mowinckel. I don't agree with all of them, and some of them are hard work, but I can at least understand their ideas and see where they are coming from. But anything originally written in German from Kant onwards just seems to make virutally no sense. The same also applies to some English writers who have been heavily influenced by Germans - Torrance, for example.

And it's only with theology. I'm fine reading Thomas Mann (in translation). Just about the only exception is Bonhoeffer...

This leaves me in a bit of a quandary. I think I have the following options:

• German as a language is fundamentally unsuited to theological thought (but this seems ludicrous - I'm fine reading Luther or Melanchthon, but maybe that's because they did lots of work in Latin). And I know other people who are generally sensible who seem fine reading German theology.
• There's either some mental deficiency in me or some important underlying concept I haven't grasped or been taught from roughly the time of Kant or earlier.
• German language theologians, or their translators, look down on Rowan Williams because they think he is too populist and clear. Obscurantism is seen as a virtue.
• Kant, or someone, made some fundamental mistakes which dramatically undermine his intelligibility to someone who thinks fairly scientifically (which I do). These have been perpetuated since.
• Monty Python were right

Here's an example of what I mean, from a book originally written in German which is meant to explain modern theology clearly to people who don't already know it.

But Kant immediately adds "we have here to deal with a natural and inevitable illusion," with a dialectic "inherent in and inseparable from human reason". Hence we are not dealing with illusion in the ordinary, purely subjective sense but with an epistemological and anthropological necessity; one might almost say with an existential element of existence. Pure reason simply cannot avoid producing transcendental ideas which have no starting point in observation. Indeed, it cannot but think of itself (as soul), of its object (as world) and of all objects of thought in general (as God). Of these pure "objects" of thought we have no knowledge, "but a problematic concept only." "The transcendental (subjective) reality, at least of pure concepts of reason, depends on our being led to such ideas by a necessary syllogism of reason". Kant struggles with the language in order to grasp these syllogisms, "rather to be called sophistical (vernunftelnde) than rational (vernunftschlusse)" in both their positive and negative implications.

H. Berkhof, Two Hundred Years of Theology, p2

I think I understand some of what it's saying, but it reads too much like the output of the postmodernism generator for me to be sure...

"Rational Scepticism"

In deciding which passages he will accept, [the "rational skeptic"] proceeds on the a priori assumption that miracles can't happen. So he automatically writes off any Biblical account of a wondrous happening which suggests that there is an order of reality transcending the observable regularities of nature and occasionally breaking in upon them. Nor is rational skepticism content with jettisoning the Bible's miracle stories. It also dismisses other passages on the grounds that they reflect the ignorance and prejudice of a particular age, or the propaganda interests of the Church at a particular stage of its development. Its basic rule of Biblical interpretation is: "When in doubt, throw it out." And the highest scores in the game of radical reductionism are awarded to pedagogues who find the most novel and far-fetched reasons for doubting that any part of the Bible really means what it says.

Louis Cassels, Your Bible [1967]

hat tip to CQOD.