Category Archives: Bible & Theology

The traditionalist dilemma: The golden age of output is the golden razor to cut down the contemporaries

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If doctrine as a whole has been ignored in our day, the doctrine of justification has suffered a particular neglect. Written works on justification are noticeably missing from the corpus of recent evangelical literature. [2]  In his introduction to the 1961 reprint of James Buchanan’s landmark work, The Doctrine of Justification, J. I. Packer made note of this:

It is a fact of ominous significance that Buchanan’s classic volume, now a century old, is the most recent full-scale study of justification by faith that English-speaking Protestantism (to look no further) has produced. If we may judge by the size of its literary output, there has never been an age of such feverish theological activity as the past hundred years; yet amid all its multifarious theological concerns it did not produce a single book of any size on the doctrine of justification. If all we knew of the church during the past century was that it had neglected the subject of justification in this way, we should already be in a position to conclude that this has been a century of religious apostasy and decline. [3]

via: Jesus’ Perspective on Sola Fide

I’ve caught Pastor MacArthur a few times on the radio recently, and found his preaching encouraging and convicting. So I don’t mean anything malicious in commenting on the statement above. I am commenting because I think it exemplifies something that is rotten in the “Confessional” Reformed Tradition (scare quotes refer to the fact that I think much of it is, in fact, sub-confessional). And the example really comes not from MacArthur, but from someone else I respect: J. I. Packer.

The bottom line here is that

  1. The contemporary world is condemned for not matching the past “golden age” because it does not match its great”literary output” or continue that age’s level of “feverish theological activity”
  2. The contemporaries who actually do show great literary output and theological activity are regarded as unacceptable by the traditionalists for doing anything more than repeating verbatim the sacred phrases passed on to us from that same golden age.

You simply cannot win. And people who want to think for themselves and study the Reformed Protestant tradition, the Bible, or both, will find a place where they are not subjected to false accusations and attacks.

Wright’s book against Purgatory

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I wrote this a few years ago. But yesterday while doing some clerical work I listened to a horrible and false seminary presentation regarding”the New Perspective” and N. T. Wright, purportedly (and falsely) from a “Reformed” point of view. Rather than waste my time dealing with it, I thought I would just re-post this.

Remembering the Christian Departed
by N. T. Wright
(Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2003)
96 pages
$10.00

Bishop Nicholas Thomas Wright of Durham has a reputation as a first-rate Evangelical apologist (in the wider British sense of the word, “Evangelical”), historian, and Bible scholar, whose work on Jesus and Paul has earned a wide hearing. However, this short work shows him not in the academy doing history and evangelism but in the Church applying his Biblical knowledge to liturgical and pastoral issues. As an American Presbyterian trying to understand what Wright is addressing as a British Anglican, it took me awhile to get a full appreciation (assuming I have attained such a thing) of Wright’s situation. The book reads like a theological tract at first and then addresses an issue in the Church. But, of course, the theological tract didn’t appear simply because Wright felt like spilling out a few pages from his systematics notes. The liturgical calendar issue, with all its implications, is what provoked the tract.

The issue is this. In Britain, at least (I have no idea how widespread this is globally in the Anglican communion), All Saints’ Day (November 1) has been supplemented with an All Souls’ Day (November 2) and even a “Kingdom Season” before Advent in which worshipers are to meditate on their future hope of “heaven.” The impetus for the November 2 day seems to be that celebrating the sure salvation of the saints seems awfully exclusive, and some want to hold up hope for souls in general. Yet, ironically, as Wright points out, the “hope” for souls actually seems part of a lessening of hope for the saints. The Roman Catholic doctrine of Purgatory is being re-animated in many Anglican communions. The hope of the saints is not the Biblical “sure and certain hope,” but a vague continuing journey in a disembodied state.

Of All Souls’ Day, Wright tells us, “After attending several of these annual events, I got to the point a few years ago where I decided that, in conscience, I could do so no longer” (p. 47). He obviously feels quite strongly about these issues and has had to deal with them personally. Of course, Wright realizes that the Church calendar itself is a matter of convention and is only as valuable as wise pastoral practice:

There is nothing ultimately obligatory for a Christian about the keeping of holy days or seasons. Paul warns the Galatians against adopting the Jewish liturgical calendar (Galatians 4.10). Elsewhere he declares that those who observe special days do so to honor the Lord, and that those who regard all days alike do so equally in honor of the Lord (Romans 14.5-6). However, many churches have found that by following the liturgical year in the traditional way they have a solid framework within which to teach and live the gospel, the scriptures, and the Christian life (p. 56).

Wright sees that somehow a nineteenth-century revival of Medieval Roman Catholicism within Anglicanism has coupled with Modern Liberalism to give us, at least by strong implication, purgatory for everyone, though a kinder gentler Purgatory that “isn’t very unpleasant, and … certainly not punitive” (pp. 12-13).

Wright obviously wants, instead, the Gospel for everyone, and sees both the Anglo-Catholicism and the liberalism, to be threats to pastoring God’s people. He tries very hard to be calm and persuasive rather than polemical, but his feelings are obviously fully engaged in the issue. After writing about John Henry Newman’s poem The Dream of Gerontius and how it was “brilliantly set to music” so that it gave a powerful emotional and aesthetic argument for purgatory, he admits: “The reader will deduce, rightly, that I find all this musically glorious, humanly noble, and theologically intolerable” (pp. 9-10).

Thus, for the most part, this little book is a primer on why Anglicans should preserve their Protestant Evangelical heritage. This is not only about Purgatory, but also about how we should regard the saints departed.

Who Count as Saints?
On the distinction alleged between “saints” and “Christians,” Wright insists that Bible gives us a different teaching: “If we are to be true to our foundation charter, then, we must say that all Christians, living and departed, are to be thought of as “saints” (p. 27).

Should We Pray to Saints?
After showing how Hebrews 11, while invoking the saints’ example, remains centered on Christ, Wright goes on to question the invocation of the saints simply on the grounds of an absence of such thing in the Bible: “What I do not find in the New Testament is any suggestion that those at present in heaven/paradise are actively engaged in praying for us in the present life. Nor is there any suggestion that we should ask them to do so.” And again on the same page: “I just don’t see any signs in the early Christian writings to suggest that the actually do that [urge the Father to complete the work of salvation for us], or that we should, so to speak, encourage them to do so by invoking them specifically” (p. 39)

Furthermore,

the practice seems to me to undermine, or actually to deny by implication, something which is promised again and again in the New Testament: immediacy of access to God through Jesus Christ and in the Spirit. When we read some of the greatest passages in the New Testament–the Farewell Discourse in John 13-17, for instance, or the great central section (chapter 5-8) of Paul’s letter to the Romans–we find over and over the clear message that, because of Christ and the Spirit, every single Christian is welcome at any time to come before the Father. If then, a royal welcome awaits you in the throne room itself, for whatever may be on your heart and mind, great or small, why bother hanging around the outer lobby trying to persuade someone there, however distinguished, to go and ask on your behalf? “Through Christ we have access to the Father in one Spirit” (Ephesians 2.18). If Paul could say that to newly converted Gentiles, he can certainly say it to us today. To deny this, even by implication, is to call in question one of the central blessings and privileges of the gospel. The whole point of the letter to the Hebrews is that Jesus Christ himself is “our man at court,” “our man in Heaven.” He, says Paul in Romans 8, is interceding for us; why should we need anyone else?

Purgatory?
In the Medieval Western Church, in addition to the Church Militant on earth, there were two divisions among the departed, those in Purgatory (“expectant”) and those in glory (“triumphant”).

This, then, is my proposal. Instead of the three divisions of the medieval church (triumphant, expectant, militant) I believe that there are only two. The church in heaven/paradise is both triumphant and expectant [of the resurrection]. I do not expect everyone to agree with this conclusion, but I would urge an honest searching of the scriptures to see whether these things be so (p. 41).

Wright’s theological objections to Purgatory encompass two concerns: justification and sanctification. Purgatory has been understood as a place needed so that believing sinners can fulfill God’s requirement of penal satisfaction and as a place needed to complete the process of sanctification. In both these cases, Wright finds the rationale of Purgatory to be contradictory to what “our foundation charter” teaches.

First, in regards to Purgatory and justification, Wright appeals to the finished work of Christ on the cross: “I cannot stress sufficiently that if we raise the question of punishment for sin, this is something that has already been dealt with on the cross of Jesus (p. 30). He believes that there have been “crude and unbiblical” versions of this doctrine. Nevertheless “the instincts of the Reformers, if not always their exact expressions, were spot on.” Romans 8.3 assures us that sin has already been condemned by God in the flesh of Jesus on the cross. “The idea that Christians need to suffer punishment for their sins in a post-mortem purgatory, or anywhere else, reveals a straightforward failure to grasp the very heart of what was acheived on the cross.”

With regards to sanctification, Wright thinks that the need for purgatory shows a failure to grasp the Biblical teaching regarding the identity of self with the body, and the role of this life in sanctifying the Christian. For those in union with Christ death puts an end to sin. There is nothing left in the intermediate state to “purge.” The believer is instantly sinless and ready for God’s presence (Wright is quite clear, by the way, that there is an intermediate state, and that believers are present with Jesus immediately at death while they wait for the future resurrection). This world, for believers, is Purgatory. Nothing remains in the next but to enjoy God’s presence and wait for the resurrection.

A major part of this book deals with the Biblical stress on resurrection as the believer’s hope, rather than the intermediate state (though Wright firmly believes in such a state). Wright suspects that the idea of people as essentially disembodied souls leads the need for purgatory. The death of the body becomes an insignificant transition in this view. Thus, the soul is left, essentially unaffected, needing increased sanctification. The result throws the entire Biblical pattern out of shape. According to the Epistles and Gospels, “First there is baptism and faith… The word of the gospel, awakening faith in the heart, is itself the cleansing we require” (p. 32). The struggle with sin continues but the “glorious news” is that the struggle with sin in this life, will give way to the triumph of holiness immediately at death. “Or, to put it the way Paul does: if we have died with Christ, we shall live with him, knowing that Christ being raised from the dead will not die again; and you, in him, must regard and reckon yourselves as dead to sin and alive to God (Romans 6.8-11). ‘Being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ … and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God'” (p. 33).

To the accusation that this quick and easy sanctification seems “arrogant,” “cocksure,” and “triumphalist,” Wright replies, “there is a note of triumph there, and if you try to take that away you will pull the heart of the gospel out with it.”

When the prodigal son put the ring on his finger and the shoes on his feet, was he being arrogant when he allowed his father’s lavish generosity to take its course? Would it not have been far more arrogant, far more clinging to one’s own inverted dignity as a “very humble” penitent, to insist that he should be allowed to wear sackcloth and ashes for a week or two until he’d had time to adjust to the father’s house? No: the complaint about the prodigal’s arrogance, I fear, comes not from the father, but from the older brother. We should beware lest that syndrome destroy our delight in the gospel of the free grace of God. We mustn’t let the upside-down arrogance of those who are too proud to receive free grace prevent us from hearing and receiving the best news in the world.

***

This book has many other things including a critique of the novel “Kingdom season” that belongs with ascension rather than before advent, as well as a demythologizing of Mary’s sainthood over against Roman Catholic claims. This might be a great book to give to a Roman Catholic friend since it isn’t so polemical as to simply enrage him or her, but it is nevertheless brutally honest and challenging.

A couple of things Presbyterians will need to be alert to:

First, Wright seems unwilling to rule out the possibility that prayers for the dead might be appropriate. Putting the issue in my own terminology, the question is whether we pray for things that are already happening or promised to happen. Prayers for the dead were rejected by the Reformers as part of the baggage of Purgatory. Obviously, Wright is opposed to any idea that the dead are in a place where they might have to wait or suffer depending on whether or not they receive more or less mercy. All the dead in Christ receive all the same blessings of God’s presence in that estate, and all are still awaiting the resurrection. But according to Wright we can still ask for them what we already know God is doing and going to do.

Second, while I appreciate Wright’s repudiation of universalism and annihilationism and some related statements, I fear his view of sinners ultimately losing their humanity will bring us back to annihilationism (since why bother to torment a nonhuman?). I think Wright’s view of the image of God as vocation has some promise, but we need to remember that God’s call is irrevocable, and will still exist even if people have lost the opportunity to respond to it.

Despite these quibbles, people who have read about N. T. Wright on the internet are probably going to find this little book surprising. More than one source claims that Wright is seeking some sort of convergence with Roman Catholics and is “redefining” (one of the nicer accusations) the doctrine of justification to do so. If this is true then Wright seems to be seriously lacking in strategic intelligence. Why write a book designed to repudiate the cherished beliefs the more Anglo-catholic believers in the Anglican communion? Either Wright’s ecumenical motivations have been overstated or (more likely in my opinion) his desires for unity, no matter how great they are, are simply not strong enough to overturn his core Evangelical commitments which are evident in the theology of this book.

To put it another way, his ecumenicism only exists in an Evangelical framework. His seeking fellowship with Rome entails a desire for them to embrace the truth rather than the error this book is designed to prevent from growing in the Anglican Church. And if that’s the nature of Wright’s ecumenicism, then it doesn’t sound quite as threatening to Protestant Orthodoxy as it is typically described as being. Wanting Roman Catholics to become Protestant in their beliefs is hardly reason for Protestants to be suspicious of Wright.

(In some ways, by the way, I think Wright would be a more accurate Pauline scholar if he had more Anglo-Catholic sympathy. For in such a case his material on gender and ordination to the gospel ministry would probably be substantially better than it is.)

Overall this is a valuable book on what the Bible says about the believers and their hope at death.

If this be materialism, then fire up the stake and chain me to it

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I just returned from Musoma, Tanzania, a place that could stand for thousands of others such population centers in Africa, or millions if we include Asia.

I want people who are not trusting Jesus as Lord and Savior to do so, in the millions billions.

That is not all I want.

I want people to be able to turn on a spigot in their homes, instead of walking for hours a day with a heavy burden half that time. I want them to see water flow from that spigot that is perfectly safe to drink, not the poison that most of them presently consume.

I want their homes to be protected so that most insects are kept outside, or better, I want them to find a way to kill most of the insects around their homes.

I want their food to be kept off the ground when they prepare it and to have a clean place to eat it.

I want their roads to be smooth and wide to allow trade both ways.

I want them to have cheap and available transportation so they can both trade and work at the places that are most rewarding (which will be where their products and labor are needed the most, by the way).

No, more than that. I want a near generation in Musoma to have the ability to allow their young adult kids to go on a road trip to the West Coast to see the Atlantic without having any serious concerns about the safety involved.

Sooner, I’d like people to be able to travel at night without making special arrangements for a policeman with an AK-47 to accompany them.

I want them to be rich. Understand? I want them to be so wealthy that they no more remember what life is like for them now than we remember what it was like to live in cities in the late 19th and early 20th century when epidemics due to bad water and sanitation were still killing thousands.

I want their babies to live to grow up.

I want someone to see the chlorinator, that uses salt and a car battery to make water safe, and say “I can make that better and cheaper.” I want him to find a way to mass market it and sell it to millions of people in Africa and Asia. And if he gets filthy rich in the process, while he saves the lives of tens of millions, that if fine with me.

I want Westerners to actually see Africa and Asia as an amazing opportunity rather than a charity case that keeps them in death and darkness while lining the pockets of NGOs. Africa is to the Charity Industry what Mars is to NASA. A golden goose.

I want Western governments to realize that poor, corrupt nations are not in our best interests even if it allows us to make them do what we want them to. Rather, a planet full of wealthy nations will bring incredible riches to the West, rather than a planet dominated by poverty.

I want a refrigerator and a freezer in virtually every home.

And yeah, to make this more pointed: We pray for this every time we say, “Thy Kingdom Come.” God wants us to thrive, not linger in death.

A pragmatic answer to the pirate’s accusation

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Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who does it with a great fleet are styled emperor.“

via The biggest pirate of all.

Thus wrote Augustine of Hippo in his City of God.

What is the difference between a pirate and an emperor? The emperor can offer safe passage over the sea. An emperor can get income from both the originating and the destination port cities and so be motivated to not discourage ocean trade. The pirate can only take as much as he can get at the moment. He has no long term basis for income beyond what he is able to hunt down.

Is it “worth it”? I have no idea how anyone can calculate that. God has allowed empires to arise, and not always (or exclusively) as punishments on the people under them.

We might think about modern republican forms of government where office holders only possess a position of power temporarily and have no authority to dictate their successor. Are such people, only able to benefit in the short term from their decisions, going to behave more like an emperor or king who hope to pass on a thriving inheritance to an heir, or like a pirate getting what he can when he can?

In World War I, the American government worked to destroy Christian empires and dethrone royal dynasties. One might ask if we have essentially criminalized family businesses and replace them with publicly traded companies as the only allowable form of corporation.

The results may not be sustainable.

American Empire: The problem is not simply the Bible

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Eventually, anyone who reads the Bible, will realize that “Empire” is not a word that always describes something evil.

Nevertheless, American Christians find something unsavory about the idea of their government functioning as an empire. The debate is usually over the question of fact: an empire is considered evil and what is denied is that America is one.

I, for one, think that the Bible shows us empires that bring progress in human history. But the problem that lurks in the background, never to be explicitly addressed, is the issue of legality. American Christians typically see government as an entity that depends on legality, rather than an area of anarchy. They hear how Constantine (or Solomon?) had to kill a bunch of relatives and think that cannot possibly be Christian.

But the legal framework in the United States, whether best or not, simply does not allow for an empire. And the move toward it has been through actions on the part of government that warp the division of powers beyond recognition. The President is both war initiator and legislator.

So in my judgment, the antipathy to empire is not Biblically naive, even if the explanations for it are. It derives mainly from the Christian instinct to conserve the law what order is already present in society.

Empire may promise power and order abroad, but even if it could possibly deliver on such promises, it can only mean revolutionary regime change at home. And that is all it has meant at home.

Gore Vidal’s ascription of “homosexual” to the “primitive religion” of Christianity

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Just caught some re-broadcast of a 1988 interview of Gore Vidal, a man whose work I don’t know too well, but whom I am inclined to admire. He certainly made his path to hell but he stood out in the steps he took to get there.

Vidal’s interviewed him for his early book (1948, I think), The City and the Pillar, a heroic book about “gays.” Vidal immediately interrupted and said it wasn’t about gays. It was about two normal young men who had an affair. One went on to live a successful “heterosexual” life, and another didn’t.

Vidal went on to compare the very idea of “heterosexual” and “homosexual” as kinds of persons as a fiction. The words are adjectives, he insisted, that describe kinds of sexual actions. Not persons. He spoke of saying one is one or the other as akin to saying one likes the taste of potatoes and another prefers some other food.

On the sexual preference as food preference analogy, I thought Vidal raised a bunch of obvious questions. For example: is Vidal asserting that marital love has nothing to do with sexual exclusiveness. Is he asserting that marriage and family are ridiculous superstitions? It seems to me that he implied that only primitive religious believers could get jealous of an adulterous spouse. I not only disagree with that, I don’t see how Vidal could claim that we should all find it immediately obvious. Yet it seemed to follow naturally from what he said. (I didn’t get to hear all of the interview, so maybe he addressed the issue.)

With that caveat, I was surprised how much I found myself agreeing with Vidal’s basic argument and disagreeing that the error he was combating stemmed from “primitive religion.” On the contrary, I think the idea of a “gay” or “homosexual” person is a sophisticated rationalization unknown in the ancient world.

I don’t know what connection Vidal would allow between Christianity/ies and the Bible, but certainly the Bible, if anything, is more primitive than the forms of the Christian religion that he opposes. And it contains the monotheism that he hates. But the Bible knows nothing of homosexual persons. It condemns sexual acts 1. that violate marriages, 2. that are same-sex, 3. that cross species, and less severely 4. that are outside of marriage.

The only time one finds something approaching types of sexually perverse persons, is in Paul’s list of types of sinners in First Corinthians 6.9 which speaks of two kinds: penetrators and receptors. There is nothing modern about this list. It includes thieves and swindlers–occupations no one will consider an orientation or addiction. Drunkards also makes the list, so perhaps someone can make a case that the sexual types belong in that more slavish category, but nothing in the text demands it.

This is, in fact, the only category that exists in any real way across the globe outside the modern world. I read a few years ago about an Algerian male applying for immigration as a refugee from persecution to Canada (if I remember it right). When one read his testimony it was obviously a completely different conception of sexual “orientation.” As a known receptive partner, he was fair game for rape from all the surrounding males who considered themselves completely normal men.

We see the same thing happening in our prisons (and is allowed and even boasted in as a deterrent for “white collar” criminals by out authorities–May God smash the system).

The idea of a generic same-sex orientation as a kind of person is a modern invention. It is not primitive at all but a sophistication. And I agree with Vidal that it is mainly a delusion.

What is victory in Jesus for?

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Paul tells us to be joyful and thank the Lord in everything.

One possible inference from this is that our lives are supposed to be perpetually exciting and always wonderful.

Just to state the obvious; this is not true.

To be more specific, God restores us and works through us as we faithfully continue in our labors.

Now we command you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away from any brother who is walking in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us, because we were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone’s bread without paying for it, but with toil and labor we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you. It was not because we do not have that right, but to give you in ourselves an example to imitate. For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies. Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living (2 Thessalonians 3:6-12 ESV).

This passage on work reminds us of what the Apostle has already written in this letter:

To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power (1.11)

And,

But we ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers beloved by the Lord, because God chose you as the firstfruits to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth. To this he called you through our gospel, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.

Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word (2:13-17).

So the very tradition to which we must hold, and for which Paul prays that we may be established in every good work, is also a tradition that tells us to reject idleness and embrace work.

Our tendency to separate “good works” from “working for a living” is not helpful in most cases. Working for a living is one aspect of our good work in the Lord.

And it thus requires Gospel encouragement, which the Lord supplies in his word. For example:

When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain (1 Corinthians 15:54-58 ESV).

The point that may need emphasis, is that God does not redeem us from ordinary life to escape into a realm of supernatural power. He redeems us to be the powerful agents of change he created us to be in our ordinary work.

And God promises to give us rest.

The last letter of “The Old Testament”

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We read the Gospels as “New Testament” even though they are about a time when the Gentiles and the Jews were two separate peoples (even if both were believers), the Temple is still central, the dietary and cleanliness laws are still enforced, and animal sacrifice is still practiced. What makes them “New Testament” is that they are written after the death and resurrection of Jesus. Even though they record the old world, they are written in the new world.

But I suspect there is one letter in “The New Testament” that was written in the old world by someone who did not completely know how the new world was about to be brought to birth.

In my opinion, James was written before Jesus died. This has nothing to do with any alleged problems with what James writes about justification and good deeds. (The fact he knows nothing about a Jew-Gentile issue in relation to justification is more relevant to my case). The smoking gun is this:

Name any other “New Testament” epistle that encourages believers to endure through suffering without mentioning the death and resurrection of Jesus as a past event that should give them encouragement and hope.

Beyond that, lets remember that the Gospels give us precious little information about what went on during Jesus three-year ministry. We know from the synoptics that Jesus sent out “missions” (a group of twelve and a group of seventy sent out in pairs) to preach throughout Israel. We lean in John’s Gospels that Jesus disciples baptized, that they had to flee from the Pharisaic persecution because they were baptizing, and that the religious leaders excommunicated those loyal to Jesus. The Gospels also show us groups in households where Jesus could go to teach and receive hospitality (such as the home of Lazarus, Mary, and Martha).

Wouldn’t people loyal to Jesus in different areas, who had received baptism from his representatives, meet regularly for prayer, Bible study, and mutual encouragement? Wouldn’t they invite fellow Jews to join them in the hopes of persuading them?

And could not those who had been cast out of the synagogue view themselves as “diaspora” even if they were geographically still in Israel?

I have toyed with this idea before. Recently, I listened to Jeff Meyers’ lectures on James where he argues that the author is James the son of Zebedee and for an early date. I found the lectures quite good (as well as personally convicting on some issues). But I just think the early date is earlier than he thinks. See also this.

A Scripture Reading and a Brief Exposition, and then a Baptism

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Exodus 10:7-11 Then Pharaoh’s servants said to him, “How long shall this man be a snare to us? Let the men go, that they may serve the LORD their God. Do you not yet understand that Egypt is ruined?” So Moses and Aaron were brought back to Pharaoh. And he said to them, “Go, serve the LORD your God. But which ones are to go?” Moses said, “We will go with our young and our old. We will go with our sons and daughters and with our flocks and herds, for we must hold a feast to the LORD.” But he said to them, “The LORD be with you, if ever I let you and your little ones go! Look, you have some evil purpose in mind. No! Go, the men among you, and serve the LORD, for that is what you are asking.” And they were driven out from Pharaoh’s presence.

 

1 Corinthians 10.1-4 For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ.

1 Corinthians 12.12-26 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.

 

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