From the 1930s comes a form for rating your adequacy as a wife or husband, with a detailed list of merits and demerits.

Tests for Husbands and Wives

When a select portion of the few readers of my blog want to see...

P. J. O'Rourke's commencement address Fairness, idealism and other atrocities recommends reading the Bible for a key piece of political advice

The Bible is very clear about one thing: Using politics to create fairness is a sin. Observe the Tenth Commandment. The first nine commandments concern theological principles and social law: Thou shalt not make graven images, steal, kill, et cetera. Fair enough. But then there's the tenth: 'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's.'

Here are God's basic rules about how we should live, a brief list of sacred obligations and solemn moral precepts. And, right at the end of it we read, 'Don't envy your buddy because he has an ox or a donkey.' Why did that make the top 10? Why would God, with just 10 things to tell Moses, include jealousy about livestock?

Well, think about how important this commandment is to a community, to a nation, to a democracy. If you want a mule, if you want a pot roast, if you want a cleaning lady, don't whine about what the people across the street have. Get rich and get your own.

I didn't like it when Bill Clinton talked about giving america a "New Covenant". And I don't like it when Obama rewrites 1 Corinthians 13.

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Obama Needs a History Lesson: "In defending his stated intent to meet with America's enemies without preconditions, Sen. Obama said: 'I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did, and Truman did.'

That he made this statement, and that it passed without comment by the journalists covering his speech indicates either breathtaking ignorance of history on the part of both, or deceit."

NPR has a discussion with Janice Hale, who was the foundation of Jeremiah Wright's claims about black and white brains, and black children's subject oriented vs object oriented learning style.

Hale says Wright is correct, but then immediately back away from a discussion of "brains" to a discussion of culture.

I wonder if she'll talk about why that doesn't fly because one of the goals/purposes of public education is homogeneity of culture.

Rick Phillips writes Did You Know that Pentecost is this Sunday?

I could be flip and answer, "No, I didn't, because I go to the church where Rick Phillips preached this."

But that would be flip.

Could Instruments Be Idols? R. Scott Clark for A capella psalmody.

Paul Washer - Shocking Message is a sermon from a Southern Baptist Evangelist on the requirement of holiness for true Christian salvation.

Flipping channels:

"Tonight, WWE Wrestling is brought to you by, the Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian!"

Piper and Wright on Righteousness Part 3

This will be all I can cover tonight. After laying out his "exegetical" method, Piper turns to OT texts about God seeking glory for his name. Wright makes a very strong statement about Piper's exegesis "He does some Old Testament work to back that up which I think just fails as exegesis of the passages."

Piper cites Isaiah 48:9-11, Isaiah 43:25, Psalm 79:9, Ezekiel 36:20-23, and Psalm 143:11.

Does Isaiah 48:9-11 show that God's motivation for saving action is deeper that covenant faithfulness? In context, Isaiah 48 is set in a description of God having made promises to Israel about the way God will bring venegence on enemy Babylon (Is. 47). God keeps speaking of the things God told Israel in the deep past, which are now happening, just as he promised, and that even though when he said them, Israel was a rebel, and didn't listen, what he said bears witness. Then God says he defers his anger at their rebellion because of his name's sake? But isn't the very reason God's name is at stake is his having made a particular promise to Israel that now needs to be seen in fulfillment?

Is 43:25 doesn't advance the discussion much, being another text where God's name is mixed in with his saving covenant purposes.

Psalm 79:9 also shows a mixed situation, where Israel calls on God, and Asaph mentions numerous things that should move God to act in salvation, the way the nations have come into God's inheritance (Israel), they defiled the temple; nations that don't call on God's name have devoured Jacob (who presumably does). Verse 10, which Piper doesn't cite, raises a very particular issue as to why God's good name is in jeaopardy

Why should the nations say,
“Where is their God?”
Let the avenging of the outpoured blood of your servants
be known among the nations before our eyes!

This matter is also the concern of Ezekiel 36:20- 23, but very oddly Piper elides that part of the text from his extended quotation:

But when they came to the nations, wherever they came, they profaned my holy name, in that people said of them, ‘These are the people of the Lord, and yet they had to go out of his land.’ But I had concern for my holy name, which the house of Israel had profaned among the nations to which they came.

I can see, I think, why Wright says this exegesis fails. The reason God's name is at risk of defamation is the covenant promises of God. God made covenant with Israel, and now Israel shows evidence of being out of God's favor? Since God swore (by his name) to keep Israel in covenant, God's name is now threatened unless God will act to deliver his people (and in this case, transform them into those who will no longer be impure and jeopardize their covenant status)

Now I don't want to make the opposite mistake and claim that covenant is "more basic" than God's glory either. But in covenant, God brings concern for his glory economically to bear on creatures and sets for himself the task of keeping his promises in a way that is bound up with his name. Indeed, Hebrews 6:13ff states that in making covenant, God swears by himself to assure that the covenant will be kept. Does that make his name "more basic", or does it inextricably link our experience of God's glory to his covenant promises?

In Jesus, God has sworn again to us, and this assures us of his saving purposes. I'll return to this later, but it seems to me that Hebrew's concern with the covenant's intimate tie with the way God in acting to provide a priestly sacrifice ties the salvation we have in Christ more closely to covenant (as expression of God's name) than a "deeper" reality.

Ian Duguid writes of Ezekiel 36:20

Because though [God] has no compassion on [Israel], God will nonetheless have concern (hamal) for his name, which he has inextricably linked to Israel by entering covenant with them. Because of that sovereign, irrevocable act, mercy not only may but must be shown to Israel... The Lord will act, not for Israel's sake, but for the sake of his own name

So the name is key, but the name is key because of God's involvement in covenant. He can show righteousness and concern for his name by demolishing gentiles like Sodom and Gomorrah, but he cannot defend his name by doing the same to Israel, and the differing factor is his covenant promise.

Psalm 143:11 puts righteousness in parallel with the name of God, but the clever exegetical use of hebrew paralellism doesn't make the point if the theological reason why David puts his name in parallel with God's righteousness is covenant. And David seems to do just that in verse 12

And in your steadfast love you will cut off my enemies,
and you will destroy all the adversaries of my soul,
for I am your servant.

God will act because of his righteousness, here aligned with his chesed: covenant love.

Final note: This blog entry cites Moo's commentary as favoring Wright's perspective, at least on the linkage of righteousness with covenant faithfulness in action. So more grist for the "idiosyncratic" mill.

Piper and Wright on Righteousness Part 2

Piper's first claim about Wright's definition of righteousness as 'covenant faithfulness' is that it isn't deep enough. Instead of telling us what God's righteousness is Wright tells us what it does: "keeps covenant, judges impartially, deals properly with sin, and advocates for the helpless." Piper's list of righteousness is taken from Wright's description of the righteousness of "God the Judge".

In saying that, Piper doesn't want to question that God's righteousness impels him to do these things, but he says that his love, faithfulness, and goodness could also be said to produce these acts, so what is it about righteousness? Piper says his concern in exegetical, not speculative, because the use of the dik- word group in Romans 1-3 and in Romans 9:14 seem to have no clearly covenantal context, and thus need deeper explanation.

His next section, titled "How Does God Decide What Is Right to Do?" is to explore just that question. At the end of a process of reasoning, Piper concludes "the essence of the righteousness of God is his unwaivering faithfulness to uphold the glory of his name," and that is what Man's righteousness is supposed to consist in too.

Thus, swept away is Wright's concern for what would cause a judge in a metaphorical lawcourt to have the quality "righteous" (he judges fairly, e.g. Ezekiel 18:8, he delivers the oppressed, e.g. Psalm 82 and 58), even though Wright's claim is that this is the heart of the matter of righteousness "in the Old Testament and intertestamental sense."

After lining out his logical argument, Piper wants to find exegetical support, and he turns to the Old Testament. (I must admit that Piper says a fuller version of his argument is presented in Pages 111- 119 of the Justification of God, so what I say here is limited to what Piper reproduced) This is how Piper describes his "exegetical" approach

The reasoning may sound speculative until one reads the Old Testament with this question in mind and then reads Paul with a view to the relationship between the glory of God and the righteousness of God. What is the highest value that God and the Authors of scripture continually go back to in accounting for the actions of God? The answer is: the glory of God...or sometimes simply his name. There is something far deeper in God that covenant faithfulness. God was not unrighteous before there was a covenant..."The Lord is righteous in all his ways" (Ps 145:17), not just in keeping covenant.

In the next part I will attempt to examine the particular OT texts Piper cites to demonstrate this.

I want to say in passing two things though

1. I am wondering about the division of love, faithfulness, goodness, and righteousness as all possible roots of the covenant-keeping behavior Wright focuses on. I wonder if NOT seeing those all as "one" is impacting the simplicity of God, a factor that Steve Wedgeworth has renewed my appreciation of.

2. I also wonder if this dispute is like one concerning opposing the economic trinity to the ontological. Wright's focus is on what the OT and intertestamental writers believed about the unfolding narrative of history that would lead to their vindication by God (economic). Piper opposes that with concerns about the "deep nature" of what moves God to unfold that narrative, and deal with other matters as well (ontological). But the economic and ontological trinities should not be opposed. Someone should not respond to a preacher saying that in 30 AD, God sent the Spirit to earth to bring about the Kingdom by saying "no, no, the Spirit is eternally spirated by the Father and the Son'

Now at the same time, we don't want anyone denying the eternal procession of the Spirit because of the historical facts about Pentecost. This reminds me of (I think) Joel Garver's criticism of Wright about his tendency to sweep theological reasoning and development away in favor of a "pure" biblical narrative.

Piper and Wright on Righteousness Part I

The recent interview with N.T. Wright where he begins to formulate a reply to Piper's critique The Future of Justification has set me to examining what Wright says here

I’m intrigued that Piper has some positions about the righteousness of God, for instance, which are idiosyncratic. He thinks the word righteousness means “the righteousness of God is a concern for God’s glory.” Righteousness is God’s own concern for God’s glory, and then when God imputes righteousness to believers, he regards them as if they have a concern for God’s glory. He does some Old Testament work to back that up which I think just fails as exegesis of the passages.

Of course, the righteousness of God and the glory of God are intimately connected, but righteousness does have a very specific meaning related to the law-court and the covenant and this meaning can be monitored through Scripture again and again and again and not least in the post-biblical literature. Very interesting that he has a bit saying, “Let’s try leaving the post biblical literature out of it.” In other words, let’s read the New Testament in a vacuum historically. I just don’t think you can do that with any scholarly integrity.

That seems like some very bold claims. I think it is worth looking into those claims, and that is what I propose to do in a series of blog entries. I hope by looking at these to clarify my own understanding of Wright and Piper, and possibly help deal with something else. A common response to the debate is people's personal incredulity that someone of Piper's stature could, as Wright claims, fail to fully grasp the way Wright's new perspective on Paul is functioning. Even though Piper "bends over backwards", is it possible that he still "misunderstands" and reasserts the old paradigm? Shouldn't we chalk all this up to a fatal unclarity in Wright?

The quote above from Wright seems to be a fruitful avenue to pursue. Wright is willing to call Piper's view that the righteousness of God as being at root, His pursuit of self-glory "idiosyncratic". That's one thing to look at. Another thing to look at is the exegesis of the OT passages that Wright claims "just fails". I hope to look at both of these things. The part of Pipers book that this has primary reference to is Chapter 3, particularly pages 62 to 71. It is to there that I turn.

Apropos of my praise of Wright in the interview below, I've been meaning to write up something on a difference I've noticed between Piper and Wright that I think is illuminating.

I've recently been poking around in my copy of Wright's Acts for Everyone, Part II commentary while perusing Piper. Piper hammers (mostly rightly) Wright's claim about "the gospel" denoting the message of Christ's Lordship without denoting "a narrative about how you get saved".

This brought me to ask "What is Wright's understanding of "being saved" that keeps it out of his denotation of the term 'gospel'".

Aside: I could imagine several ways in which the "being saved" part was already included by implication: if a new Emperor was in town, the gospel goes out as good news to the putative loyal subjects. For Piper though, his key question is what about the disloyal subjects? I think that might be resolved by reconfiguring what it mean to present the message as "gospel" in the first place instead of "neutral news". Could Piper not equally ask what was "true" about someone saying "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life" if the listener hated God? But what if the listener was deceived into thinking God didn't love him? And had a horrible plan for him?

In his Everyone commentaries, Wright has a glossary of terms. Helpfully "salvation" was an entry. In it, he references some examples of "salvation" meaning something other than salvation from wrath for sin, like when it means healing.

Intriguingly, He references the Phillipian jailer as an example where it doesn't mean saving from sin.

He cites Bishop Stephen Neill as having taught him that the jailer KNOWS NOTHING of God, wrath against sin, or future judgment in hell. He cries out, not so much "What must I do to avoid the condemnation God's law is bringing me" but "What can I do to get out of this mess I'm in".

And Paul's answer is turn to the world's true Lord.

Now I have no idea if that works out in an ultimate sense. One might, for instance, question whether or not the Jailer did have more understanding, having perhaps heard about the days of commotion caused by Paul's preaching, and having heard the Psalms sung by Paul and Silas in prison.

But it offers an intriguing answer for Wright to give to Piper's questions about the Gospel necessarily including a narrative of how to get "saved" if the Jailer can accept the good news of the world's new Lord without even understanding what he's being saved from.

Trevin Wax Interview with N.T. Wright on Surprised by Hope

Wright makes an awesome distinction between "building the kingdom" and "building for the kingdom" that I expect will become very popular among transformationalist Christains.

"The old social gospel from 100 years ago (though its best exponents were better than this) communicated to people a wrong message that went something like this: Okay, we’ve got to build God’s kingdom. The social gospel is a type of sociological Pelagianism, an attempt to pull society up by its own bootstraps. Of course, those efforts often colluded with a Western post-Enlightenment idea that said: Now that we have got modern science and technology and medicine, we are going to make the world a better place! We’ve had to learn painfully that “that ain’t necessarily so.”

Granted that, speaking of “building for the kingdom” is a way of saying what Jesus talks about when you give someone a cup of cold water. Good works will not go unnoticed, unrewarded. The deeds that one does in Christ and by the Spirit are not wasted.

The example I use in the book is about the stonemason who builds for the cathedral. The architect and the builder have the great design for the cathredal. The stonemason is just told, “You’ve got to carve this bit of stone in this way.” And the stonemason does that and then later looks up and sees his stone halfway up in the cathedral and thinks, “Wow! That’s my"

Maybe its just contingent on who's ox is being gored, but this column by Maureen Dowd on Obama's "failure to close" makes me re-evaluate her talent as a writer

She’s been running ads about it, suggesting he doesn’t have “what it takes” to run the country. Her message is unapologetically emasculating: If he does not have the gumption to put me in my place, when superdelegates are deserting me, money is drying up, he’s outspending me 2-to-1 on TV ads, my husband’s going crackers and party leaders are sick of me, how can he be trusted to totally obliterate Iran and stop Osama?

and

He complains about the politics of scoring points, but to win, you’ve got to score points.

This can't just be me: I haven't even been drinking from Nalgene bottles!

This is why we can't have a "national conversation" about race.

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