Unquestionably the Divine writings are more fruitful in affording resources for any kind of subject. Nor do I hesitate to say that the Scriptures themselves were arranged by the will of GOD in such a manner as to afford material for heretics, inasmuch as I read that there must be heresies, which cannot exist without the Scriptures.  - De praescriptione haereticorum [On the Prescription of Heretics] XXXIX, English trans. T.H.Bindley, 1914.

This seems to speak to the intent of God to give people over to their rebellions.  Tertullian apparently regarded the Scriptures as intentionally written in a manner that would be conducive to distortions in order to prove those who would belong to the Lord and those who would not.  A fascinating proposal to say the least.  This would nuance the doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture and speak to issues of election and connectedly…to revelation.  What are your thoughts on this?

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• What’s with all the aNTiWright hoopla? (iheartbarth.wordpress.com)

Here is the short description of volume 15:

With extensive commentary about their historical context and theological significance, this volume of writings covers a crucial time and an understudied period of Bonhoeffer’s life. It begins during the final period of his illegal work in training Confessing Church seminarians and concludes as he begins his activities in the German resistance. Bridging these two periods is his brief journey to the United States in summer 1939, when he pondered and ultimately rejected a move to the safety of exile. Bonhoeffer’s writings from this transitional period, particularly his New York diary, offer a rare and more deeply personal picture of Bonhoeffer in a time of great inner turmoil.

But what can Paul mean, speaking so of Christ’s body? Neither the bread and cup nor the gathering of the church look like a human body or react as one.

The obvious first suggestion, which turns out to work perfectly on the texts, is that he speaks of the “body of Christ” as he speaks of “bodies” generally. In Paul’s language, someone’s “body” is simply the person him or herself insofar as this person is available to other persons and to him or herself, insofar as the person is an object for other persons and him or herself. It is in that Paul is a body that persecutors can mark him as Christ’s (Gal 6:17); it is in that Paul is a body that he can be seen and interrogated by one of his congregations, or be remote from this possibility (1 Cor 5:3); it is in that Paul is a body that he can discipline his own self (1 Cor 9:27). In Paul’s ontology, such personal availability may or may not be constituted as the biological entity moderns first think of as “a body”; for Paul, a “spiritual” body, whatever that may be, is as much or more a body as is a biological body (1 Cor 15:44).

The church, according to Paul, is the risen body of Christ. She is this because the bread and cup in the congregation’s midst is the very same body of Christ. Paul’s first statement on the matter does not extend quite to this equation. “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:17). But Paul then applies this doctrine to the behavior of the Corinthian congregation: because the Corinthians eat and drink disrespectfully of one another, they fail to “discern” the body of Christ (1 Cor 11:29). We want to ask which body Paul has in mind, the bread about which he has just reported the dominical words “This is my body,” or the congregation that is in fact the offended entity and which he has just earlier called Christ’s body. Paul’s text makes sense only when we grasp that he means both at once, and would reject our question as meaningless.

It is time for theology . . . to let what Paul meant by “body” teach us also what to mean by “body.” . . . We must learn to say: the entity rightly called the body of Christ is whatever object it is that is Christ’s availability to us as subjects; by the promise of Christ, this object is the bread and cup and the gathering of the church around him. There is where creatures can locate him, to respond to his word to them.

No metaphor or ontological evasion should be intended. Sacrament and church are truly Christ’s body for us, because Christ himself takes these same things for the object as which he is available to himself. For the proposition that the church is a human body of the risen Jesus to be ontically and straightforwardly true, all this is required is that Jesus indeed be the Logos of God, so that his self-understanding determines what is real.

The subject that the risen Christ is, is the subject who comes to word in the gospel. The object—the body—that the risen Christ is, is the body in the world to which this word calls our intention, the church around her sacraments. He needs no other body to be a risen man, body and soul. There is and needs to be no other place than the church for him to be embodied, nor in that other place any other entity to be the “real” body of Christ. Heaven is where God takes space in his creation to be present to the whole of it; he does that in the church.

(Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, I.205-06)

So, for Jenson, Christ’s body is who he is in his availability to us. In my estimation, this might be a good way of explaining how we can speak of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist (especially for a Lutheran like Jenson), and how we might similarly speak of the church as the bodily presence of Christ on earth. What do you think?

Christian messianic ethics celebrates and anticipates the presence of God in history.  It wants to practice the unconditioned within the conditioned and the last things in the next to last.  In the economic dimension, God is present in bread; in healing, as health.  In the political dimension God is present as the dignity of the human being; in the cultural dimension, as solidarity.  In the ecological area, God is present as peace with nature; in the personal area, in the certainty of the heart.  Every form of his presence is veiled and sacramental; it is not yet a presence face-to-face.  God’s presence encounters human persons in the concrete messianic form of his liberation from hunger, oppression, alienation, enmity and despair.  These messianic forms of his presence point at the same time, however, beyond themselves to a greater presence, and finally to that present in which ‘God will be all in all.’

God’s real presence as bread, as freedom, as community, as peace and as certainty thus have the character of exploding the present.  To act ethically in a Christian sense means to participate in God’s history in the midst of our own history, to participate in the comprehensive process of God’s liberation of the world, and to discover our own role in this, according to our own calling and abilities.  A messianic ethic makes people into co-operators fo the kingdom of God.  It assumes that the kingdom of God is already here in concrete, if hidden, form.  Messianic ethics integrates suffering people into God’s history in this world; it is fulfilled by the hope of the completion of God’s history in the world by God himself.

Messianic ethics makes everyday life into a feast of God’s rule, just as Jesus did.  The messianic feast becomes everyday life.  As Athanasius once said, ‘the resurrected Christ makes life a feast, a feast without end.’  As we celebrate the presence of God’s kingdom by identifying with and serving the needs of the poor, the downtrodden, the lonely, and the powerless, Christian ethics becomes a sacrament.  Then in our normal daily life in the world, politics becomes worship (Rom. 12:1-2).

In his second post, he gives a great summary of the New Perspective as well as a number of (not elaborated) criticisms. McKnight notes that the NPP is first of all a new perspective on first century Judaism–it was not a works righteousness religion. He also notes that the NPP is not a coherent or monolithic theology that can be compared to Reformed theology, for example. He says these two points are key to understanding NPP.

That level-headed reflection won’t come from me, because I still haven’t read the book. Instead, I will redirect you to Ben Myers’ thoughts on the book, posted a couple of days ago. It’s a great article and I’m having difficulty choosing a portion to quote here.

Myers notes that Bell’s book calls is indebted to Eastern Orthodox theology, in particular the notion of Christ descending to hell and setting its captives free–effectively breaking the power of hell.

Some critics have questioned Bell’s orthodoxy – especially his emphasis on the universality of salvation. But the most striking thing about his approach is its deep indebtedness to Eastern Orthodox tradition. The Orthodox churches have always emphasised the universality of Christ’s work – not only his death and resurrection, but also his descent into hell. The Orthodox liturgy proclaims that hell was emptied by Christ: ‘Hell’s gatekeepers trembled before you; you raised with you the dead from every age.’ In another part of the liturgy, Orthodox Christians sing: ‘Rising from the tomb, you broke the bonds of Hades and destroyed the sentence of death, O Lord, delivering all from the snares of the enemy.’

…As [Russian Orthodox] Archbishop Hilarion argues, the universal scope of Christ’s work doesn’t necessarily mean that all will be saved. But it means that even hell itself is no longer a place of separation from God. Christ has penetrated into the depths of hell, flooding its darkness with the light of love. Hell has become a site of divine activity, a venue of divine love. ‘If I make my bed in Hades, you are there’ (Psalm 139:8). Thus the torment of hell can only be understood as the torment of love. Hell’s power is abolished – but someone might still reject God to such an extent that even love becomes a torment, an unbearable ‘scourge’.

I recommend the entire post. It’s refreshing.

And yes, I can connect this to Barth. Says Myers:

The hostile reaction to Bell among North American evangelicals reminds me of the way some people responded to the great Reformed theologian, Karl Barth. Barth placed so much emphasis on God’s grace that his critics called him a universalist. But in Barth’s view, both universalism and its denial are errors. The important thing is to uphold the absolute freedom of grace: if grace is free, then we should neither deny nor affirm universal salvation. It’s not our decision to make – ‘salvation belongs to the Lord!’ (Psalm 3:8). Yet Barth thought the ferocious condemnation of universalism exposed something pathological in the Christian mindset. When he was accused of promoting universalism, he once replied: ‘Strange Christianity, whose most pressing anxiety seems to be that God’s grace might prove to be all too free …, that hell, instead of being populated with so many people, might prove to be empty!’

Barth’s reply expresses precisely how I feel about the whole universalist/Rob Bell issue: heaven forbid the thought that Christ save everyone!