Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: 2 Corinthians

  • A Brief Thought on Partitioning Epistles

    I’ve just completed reading Frank J. Matera’s II Corinthians: A Commentary in the New Testament Library series.  I’m going to post a few notes in review of that commentary, but this is just a brief note, a passing thought, and definitely not a completed theory.

    There are many cases in which critical theories about authorship strike me as rather well-taken.  First and second Isaiah come to mind with a very striking change in style and theme between chapter 35 (36-39 provide an historical interlude) providing at least a substantial basis to consider multiple authorship.  The entire book gives evidence of collection, and so one shouldn’t be too shocked to see evidence of a seam here and there.

    But in other cases such suggestions seem a bit less well taken, and epistles are one case.  Keep in mind that I’ve done much more study of Isaiah than I have of any New Testament epistle, but still it seems to me that the very nature of an epistle should suggest that it is not necessarily going to be a coherent theological presentation as might be expected of a thesis or dissertation.

    But some of the arguments seem to depend on a slightly too sanitary an image of what an epistle should be.  Second Corinthians reads to me like a letter written by a volatile, emotional, and very intense man.  That he goes from a “that’s OK now” view at the end of chapter 7, invites them to participate in a collection, and then switches back to castigating them about certain other faults in chapter 10 seems out of place if Paul wrote a carefully planned, drafted, and edited letter.  On the other hand if Paul was responding to the situation with mixed emotions–you’re getting it!  some of it!  not all of it!  let me tell you what else you need to do!–then the letter actually seems fairly coherent.

    Matera deals with the literary integrity of 2 Corinthians on pp. 24-32 and then again briefly on pp. 214-215.  I think he makes some excellent arguments.  He doesn’t appeal to anything like the idea I’m presenting here.  He relates this to Paul’s rhetorical goals.  I’m afraid I think that the letter might have been structured better rhetorically (from a certain point of view) if drafted by a committee of bishops, but Paul was hardly to be compared to a committee of bishops!

    I recall the recent pastoral letter from the United Methodist bishops on care for God’s creation, titled God’s Renewed Creation: Call to Hope and Action.  I think that letter should be strongly contrasted to 2 Corinthians.  While I disagree with very little in the bishops’ letter, though in some cases I think they are not doing well in terms of priorities, I nonetheless find the letter boring and unchallenging.  I have heard several of those bishops preach and without exception they produce a better sermon on their own.

    What I’m getting at here is that it seems to me that some critics expect Paul to produce something akin to the bishops’ letter.  Paul was not too likely to do such a thing, so instead we have 2 Corinthians.

  • Looking the Part – on Worldprayr

    No, that’s not a misspelling. @worldprayr is an international prayer organization started on Twitter. Since many of us have been following this organization for some time on Twitter, we’re used to calling it by it’s twitter ID. I wrote a post for the World Prayer Blog which was published today. It is titled Looking the Part and draws heavily from the first 12 verses of 2 Corinthians 4.

    I didn’t mention it there, but I want to do so here–I have been really enjoying Frank J. Matera’s New Testament Library commentary on 2 Corinthians. I’ve been reading through that book rather slowly, and spending a good deal of time with the text of Corinthians. Matera does an exceptional job of both covering the critical issues quickly and providing theological reflection that is relevant to living, teaching, and preaching the message.

    Enjoy, and please comment there.

  • Corporate Identity and the Atonement

    I want to briefly point to something that we often miss in Bible study and theology in the western church–corporate identity. We are very individualistic, and that makes it hard to see when some form of corporate identity is in play.

    This turns up in certain views of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Many view the baptism as a single event for the church on Pentecost, into which the individual believer is incorporated when he or she becomes a part of God’s people, normally through baptism. The separate baptism is a more individual idea. (I think there can be some accommodation between these views; I simply want to point out the corporate identity inherent in at least one of them.)

    Paul says in Romans 6:3-4:

    Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. (NRSV, cf. 2 Corinthians 4:10-12)

    Again, our baptism incorporates us into God’s people, and by this means we have a part in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

    Applied to atonement theory, I would suggest that this means that there is a sense in which we have each paid the penalty, and that this element is often lost in discussions of the atonement. In particular, placing the reality of the atonement in the courtroom makes it essential an individual act, and an individual attributing [imputation] of Christ’s merits to us.

    I do not mean to suggest that this, by itself, is a theory of the atonement, but rather that we should take the corporate elements of scripture more seriously in forming our understanding of New Testament writing on the subject.

  • 2 Corinthians 3:17-18: Freedom to do What?

    2 Corinthians 3:12-18 (CEV) (from BibleGateway.com).

    This post is less about the exegesis, which I’m only covering briefly, and more about application. I have frequently heard this passage (verses 17 and 18) cited in support of a free and unscripted style of worship. In particular, the phrase “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (NRSV) is often repeated on its own in response to any complaints about order in worship. The intended meaning is that if the Holy Spirit is present in a worship service, then restrictions on how people act in worship and what they do for worship will be removed.

    Now I suspect nobody intends it to mean anything quite so radical, but since it is used in response to questions about order, it is hard to tell where people draw the line. I want to make clear that I consider unscripted worship to be valuable as one approach to worship. My point here is not to challenge the idea of unscripted worship and call for a more liturgical style, but rather to put this text in context. Unscripted worship should be supported in a different way.

    Note also that the terms “charismatic,” “contemporary,” and “free or unscripted” are often used with reference to worship nearly synonymously, but that usage produces a dangerous confusion. A charismatic worship service is most frequently one in which you can expect a manifestation of the gifts of the Spirit (at least as understood by that congregation), such as prophecy or words of knowledge, and sometimes tongues. A contemporary worship service is usually less structured and involves contemporary music, but the structure may simply be different. In one local church, a worship service is planned that uses contemporary praise and worship music, but does so in the context of a very liturgical service that might even be called high church. It will be interesting to see how that develops.

    But 2 Corinthians 3:17-18 has only a very tangential relationship to all of this. If we look for the context, in broad terms Paul is defending his ministry. In this case he has come to a more specific point about the glory of the new covenant ministry. He compares this to his own description of Moses and the way in which the glory of the Lord shone from his face after he had been in God’s presence on the mountain. This is loosely based on Exodus 34, but Paul’s focus is different. First, he describes the purpose of the veil as being to cover not the glory itself, but its fading. Second, Paul switches the location of the veil and its function. It is now placed over the heart of contemporary readers. Paul is alluding to Exodus 34, but not interpreting that story.

    This veil on the heart prevents readers from understanding when they read the law. You could connect this to the way in which it concealed the fading of the glory according to Paul, and understand the readers to still see the old covenant as carrying the glory, while Paul wishes to attribute that glory to the new covenant. In any case, it is necessary for the reader to have that veil removed, otherwise they will not see or understand the new covenant and its glory when they read.

    When someone turns to the Lord, that veil is removed, and they can see that true glory. It is debated whether this is Christ or God the Father, but I tend to prefer Christ. This is not my primary subject. Furnish, whose commentary I am currently working through, maintains that this is God the Father. I think there is a substantial theme in the New Testament that suggests that seeing the scriptures through Christ is the key to new understanding. This is reflected in the Emmaus experience (Luke 24:13-35) and also in the book of Hebrews. Perhaps I’ll expand on this in a later post. (Then again, I’ll probably forget!)

    In any case, when the reader turns to the Lord, the veil is removed (16). Then we are reminded that the Lord is Spirit (skipping a bit of linguistic argument on that phrase), and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. I like the CEV’s rephrasing, “17The Lord and the Spirit are one and the same, and the Lord’s Spirit sets us free. 18So our faces are not covered. They show the bright glory of the Lord, as the Lord’s Spirit makes us more and more like our glorious Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:17-18).

    There is a specific type of freedom here, the freedom to see God’s glory as displayed in the new covenant. When we can do that, then we are able to look there, and this results in our transformation. There is nothing here said about styles of worship directly.

    I do, however, think there is a slight implication about worship. There is a point here to experiencing the presence of God, and in worship, we can hope this happens. But it happens in different ways for different people. I am led into God’s presence through Bach, Handel, and sometimes Haydn, for example. My wife truly enters worship through contemporary music. I like a good order of worship; she prefers freedom and flexibility. This passage provides us a direction to look as a result of our time of worship, whether of hearing the word of the Lord spoken, reading it, or anything else. We long to look upon God’s glory, to the extent that we can, and allow him to transform us. That is not Paul’s point, however.

    It is important to see commonly used passages such as this in context, because they often get a quite heavy weight of baggage all their own in the context of the church community, sometimes ending up used for something that would be quite foreign to the one who originally wrote them. New ideas may be valid, but they need to be supported in other ways.

  • Augsburg NT Commentary on 2 Corinthians

    I took a detour from working through 2 Corinthians with the Anchor Bible commentary and read Frederick W. Danker’s volume II Corinthians in the Augsburg Commentary on the New Testament series.

    This is a 214 page commentary, but has more content than you might expect because it doesn’t include the Biblical text along with the commentary. That can be slightly inconvenient, but on the other hand it does mean more content in a smaller book.

    I really enjoyed reading through this commentary. Danker is an extremely good writer. Commentators don’t have many opportunities to be eloquent, but he manages it from time to time when discussing the theology and application.

    Danker covers critical issues, discussing the question of the unity of the letter. He presents the reasons for the various divisions, but he also presents reasons mostly from rhetorical criticism as to why the book might be more unified than is often thought.

    The highlights of this commentary include:

    • Extensive discussion of rhetorical issues
    • Outstanding discussion of Greek culture
    • Extensive quotation of parallels, primarily from Greek culture, but also from Hebrew backgrounds
    • Frequent helpful comments on theology and application useful for preachers.

    It’s out of print, as I believe most good books are, but there are still used copies available, or you can do what I did and get it from a library.

  • Ambiguity in 2 Corinthians 2:5

    This is a brief note expanding my query about ambiguous passages. I have discussed passage that are ambiguous in Greek, but where translating them ambiguously in English results in a different range of options from those a Greek reader would likely perceive.

    This passage seems to me to be a case in which one must make a choice, and the English provides no option for ambiguity. If one is required to reflect ambiguity, just how can one do it?

    The question is whether “apo merous” in 2 Corinthians 2:5 should be taken as referring to some of the Corinthians, as in “he grieved some of you” or it could mean that various Corinthians have been grieved to a different extent. Furnish attempts to reflect both:

    Now if some one has caused grief, he has caused it not to me but to some extent (I don’t want to exaggerate) to all of you. [p. 153]

    He comments:

    The tr. offered here (cf. NEB, NIV) permits either of these meanings, and Paul may indeed have intended to qualify his statement in both respects. [p. 155]

    I don’t hear the English statement in the same balance as it seems Furnish is stating it, and as I read the Greek text. I’d be interested in how you read or hear this, especially if you read Greek.

  • Anchor Bible: 2 Corinthians – Introduction

    One of my more esoteric goals in life is to complete a study of every book of the Bible form the original languages working with a commentary that takes critical issues into account. I have read the Bible through in its original languages. This is a different type of study. I will generally read other sources, but I choose one critical commentary that I think should be pretty solid, and I study the book with that on.

    In the case of 2 Corinthians, I chose the Anchor Bible Commentary by Victor Paul Furnish. It’s a 620 page (without front matter) volume that does interact intensively with some of the major critical theories, and also looks carefully at the theology of the book. I have used the Anchor Bible commentary in a number of my studies, and generally have found them to be fine volumes.

    This time I’m going to blog a bit about the experience as I study through. Using my own study methods, I’ve been reading the book through daily for the last couple of weeks, using different translations and getting an overview. Today I read the introduction, which occupies 57 pages. Most of it is fairly straightforward, dealing with dating the book and looking at where it fits with what we know of the life of Paul. Of those pages 18 deal with the history and the culture of Roman Corinth. Following that we get a substantial history of Christianity in Corinth as it is known from other sources.

    The entire introduction is good, and is expected of an Anchor Bible volume. But the section on the literary integrity of the book is exceptional, working through the logic that has been applied, and should be applied to various theories of authorship. One important point is made on page 38: “Any proponent of a partition hypothesis is under an obligation to offer some plausible explanation(s) of how originally independent units could have come to be combined into a literary whole.” That’s an often disregarded point.

    Dr. Furnish does accept one partitioning of 2 Corinthians. He believes chapters 1-9 represent one letter, and 10-13 a follow-up letter. His hypothesis for the combination of the two elements is that the two were put together as a collection, and joined by the simple expedient of dropping the ending salutations of one and the opening salutation of the other. He even provides examples of such collection practices in the ancient world. In doing so, however, he rejects a large number of very complex hypotheses.

    I’ll be reading the comments on the relevant passages with some interest to see how strongly he bolsters his case.

    For those interested, the introduction is followed by about 35 pages labeled “Select Bibliography.” All I can say is that I would hate to imagine what would have happened had the author not been selective!

  • Becoming Righteous and Becoming Rich

    I’m currently doing some study in 2 Corinthians for some of my personal study, partly because I became interested in the structure of the book when studying 2 Corinthians 5:21. I blogged about that previously, looking at the interpretations of Wright and Piper. In that post I obliquely questioned whether 2 Corinthians 5:21 was such a good penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) text in the first place. Some further reading has made me question this further.

    The specific verse that started me thinking is 2 Corinthians 8:9. Here we have the following:

    For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that he became poor for our sake, though he was rich, so that we, through his poverty might become rich. [my own very formal translation] — 2 Corinthians 8:9

    In English translation, the verse looks more grammatically parallel to 5:21 than it is in the Greek. In fact the vocabulary and structure is not very parallel at all, but semantically it seem to be it is. In the one case Jesus is made sin, so that we can be made “righteousness,” while in the other he becomes poor (Trinitarians should have no problem with the change from “made” to “become” in this case), so that we might become rich. On the off chance that someone might suspect me of teaching a prosperity doctrine let me note that in the context of 2 Corinthians, this is clearly a spiritual state of riches.

    Now in this second verse, would we talk about either impartation or imputation? We might, of course, talk about impartation, though in fact the spiritual riches are probably to be seen as a gift. But more likely it’s a change of state; riches are imparted, not richness, if that makes any sense. (Remember these are preliminary thoughts!)

    I would note further that 3:18 refers to a continuing transformation, i.e. a process, while 5:17, we have the reference to new creation. Frankly throughout the book it looks to me as though Paul is talking about something more like radical transformation than like imputation. If it’s impartation, it’s something that can happen over time.

    I would suggest that the best interpretation here would follow something along these lines: There is a transformation when one becomes part of the community of Christ. This is what is referred to as the “new creation.” This transformation continues as one lives inside that community or is a citizen of the kingdom of God. A citizen of God’s kingdom is by definition rich. The transformation continues until we leave this body behind, and put on the new one, where we also face God’s judgment (5:1-10). This is the soteriology that lies behind Paul’s defense of the apostolic calling.

    As of the moment, I see no proper place where one can import the forensic elements of PSA into this passage, and thus whatever one decides on the meanings of specific terms in 2 Corinthians 5:21 it is not a text about forensic justification.

    Of course, I continue to study the book. In my next post I’m going to start blogging my way through a commentary I’m currently using in my study of the book.

  • Wright and Piper on 2 Corinthians 5:21

    A fair number of pixels have been lit up over the issue of how 2 Corinthians 5:21 is to be interpreted, and specifically how this relates to our understanding of justification. N. T. Wright has an interesting article on how “the righteousness of God” should be understood in this passage. This article was dismissed by Adrian Warnock as “wholly unconvincing” though he fails to tell us why.

    Somewhat more interesting is Piper’s response to the article in his book The Future of Justification. (A PDF of the book is available here.) In the introduction he calls the article “one of the most eccentric articles in all his work” (p. 24). He dedicates chapter 11 to a response.

    There is a fundamental assumption that Piper makes, that there is one, and only one way to understand justification. For him, justification is a fact, not a metaphor. It is the core reality. Metaphors can be used to describe it, but it is the real thing. I emphasize this repeatedly, because it underlies many of the arguments that Piper makes. For him, it would be quite inadequate to suggest that a different metaphor was in play in a different verse, and thus perhaps it might be understood differently.

    (more…)

  • Keeping up with the Justification Debate

    I am doing some reading before I respond to a couple of posts, but I did want to link to some interesting stuff.

    Both Mark Olson (Pseudo-polymath) and Anne (Heart, Mind, Soul, and Strength) have written posts discussing justification from a perspective other than the judicial/penal substitution approach. Their posts simply confirm to me that there are many, many valid ways to talk about the sacrifice that Jesus made on our behalf, and that penal substitution is just one of those. Unlike some, I do not wish to discard it, but I also will not make it the one and only metaphor.

    Adrian Warnock has posted twice, first Legalism, Racism, and the First Century Jew, to which I will respond later at some length. I find much to object to in that short post, but I’m also working through Piper’s comments in their context before I blow off steam.

    The second one is 2 Corinthians 5 and Romans 5 – Two Critical Passages on Justification in which he links an article that I had linked earlier, and says:

    If you are interested in seeing an example of this, there is an article by Wright on 2 Corinthians 5:21 [PDF-HN] that I must say I found wholly unconvincing.

    I see a great deal of “finding unconvincing” but I see remarkably little actual exegetical argument. The primary form of argument appears to be theological. If the question is whether the new perspectives on Paul differ from prior theological statements, then we can cheerfully answer yes, and go on. But for me the question is whether the new perspective gets us closer to correctly understanding Paul and what he has to say.

    One of the keys here is to understand the paradigm shift that several interpreters have taken. If you do not accept that paradigm shift, you are likely not to accept Wright’s specific exegesis of 2 Corinthians 5:21. That is not surprising, since he is dealing with that verse in the context of that new paradigm. (I am not overly fond of “paradigm shift,” as a term, or at least I don’t think I am, but it seems to me that the new perspectives on Paul do justify that term.)

    Peter Kirk blogged on this same topic, and brings up a number of points. I have to say that anyone who implies that Augustine was a theological pygmy is likely to get my favorable attention! But more importantly, Peter points to one side issue, and that is the way in which (some?) reformed theology can make God look like he is a bit veracity-challenged, and can’t truly tell whether people are righteous or not.

    Meanwhile, the view that I am working towards is a rejection of the “Reformed” idea that Christians remain sinners in actual fact but are nevertheless, by a legal fiction, counted as righteous in Christ. Instead of this, the picture I have, based on various biblical passages such as Ephesians 4:22-24, is that the Christian consists of two separate persons or personalities: the “old self” (in some versions “old man”, but to be understood of course in a gender generic sense) born by natural birth who is a sinner, guilty, condemned to death and destined to die; and the “new self” born of the Spirit and into Christ, who is righteous, holy, free from condemnation, will not die, and indeed is already living eternal life in God’s kingdom. . . .

    Just so. Like Peter, I continue to be in flux on some of these issues. There are boundary lines that I’m fairly certain of, but others I’m studying a great deal, but Peter’s paragraph is one of those that strikes me as promising. When I read it, I feel that he is “with” Paul in a significant way. Perhaps he’ll have to adjust some, as he says, but he’s going the right direction.

    I will be blogging a bit more on 2 Corinthians 5 from an exegetical point of view, hopefully in the next few days.