qa carson004 from james hsiao on Vimeo.

HT: The Center for Gospel Culture

Jesus, God’s promised Rescuer and Ruler, lived our life, died our death and rose again in triumphant vindication as the first fruits of the new creation to bring forgiven sinners together under his gracious reign.

This is a big gospel. This is not the individualistic, works-based, escapist gospel of much of American evangelicalism. It incorporates the whole world, person, and Jesus. It forces us to move beyond decision-based conversions to following Jesus as Lord. It calls us beyond Christianity as private religion into Christianity as public, communal gospel. It’s not a pocket-sized gospel. The gospel is bigger than we think. Now, if we can just lead our churches into renewal, revival, and repentance towards living out a big gospel, a gospel as big as the city, as the world, as the whole of history.

How is this big gospel impacting your church, your leadership? Are you doing anything differently in your church because of the size of this gospel?

Christology ? Missiology ? Ecclesiology

Ed Stetzer advocates that Ecclesiology should precede Missiology.

Christology ? Ecclesiology ? Missiology

Which do you support and why?

Elsewhere I have posted on some of the emerging scholarly debates regarding a counterimperial impulse in Paul’s writing. Of late, I have been reflecting on this theological trend. Why such a preoccupation with counterimperial theology? Is this a product of anti-American sentiment? Perhaps a resurgence in Greco-Roman backgrounds for NT scholarship? Or maybe a political hermeneutic? I suspect all three are at play and that there is no consensus explanation for the spate of literature on counterimperialism in Paul.

However, I am more concerned about hermeneutics than motive. Did Paul intend to convey counterimperial ideas when writing his epistles? Was his word selection based on Greek or Jewish lexicography? Is it an either/or, after all Paul was both missionary and theologian. I engaged some of these issues in my Th.M thesis, Creation in Colossians, and was struck at the time by the hyper-counterimperialism of Walsh and Keesmaat’s Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire. At times, they confuse contemporary implication with Pauline meaning. That said, I have room for Pauline contextualization, which is often counter-cultural; however, I have been careful to not confuse his intended theological meaning with his missiological orientation.

Denny Burk has provided some critical reflection on what he dons “The Fresh Perspective,” language taken from Wright’s writings on Paul. In this issue (vol 51) of JETS, Burk published:“Is Paul’s Gospel Counterimperial? Evaluating the Prospects of the ‘Fresh Perspective’ fro Evangelical Theology.” Although Burk states in anti-imperial thesis up front (314), he adduces convincing reasons to be suspect of the FP hermeneutic. Here are a few:

1. Caution of the use of parallels. Just because a biblical word or concept has a Roman parallel use does not mean that Paul intended it to be an anti-Roman polemic, especially when the word or concept has a rich Jewish origin. After all, Paul quotes and theologizes extensively from the Septuagint (Greek version of the OT). Burk identifies the key linguistic issue: “To what extent are the parallels due merely to the fact that Paul and the imperial cult were drawing from the common stock of Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern part of the Roman Empire?” (317)
2. Caution about the distinction between meaning and implication. Citing E.D. Hirsch’s landmark work on literary interpretation, he writes: “An implication, however, differs in that it is not a part of the author conscious intention, even though it is established by a type that derives from the author’s willed meaning.” (320) In other words, get the author’s intended meaning first, then consider implications second. Make the distinction; don’t confuse possible implication with intended meaning.
3. Caution about the hermeneutics of the FP. Burk points out that much of the hermeneutical ethos of the FP has been generated by the Paul and Politics group from SBL. Richard Horsley, a leading scholar among the Paul in Politics group, clearly articulates a political agenda in the fresh perspective of counterimperial studies: “The aims and agenda of the Paul and Politics group are, broadly, to problematize, interrogate, and re-vision Pauline texts and interpretations, to identify oppressive formulations as well as potentially liberative visions and values…” And here is Burk’s concern–Horsley’s elevation of the post-colonial readers of Paul to the level of “the text being read in the work of interpretation” in Paul. In other words, by trying to accomodate the political concerns of readers, Horsley and his colleagues give those popular readers’ concerns a prominent place in the interpretive task.

~ harold best, unceasing worship, 28

The short answer is “No.” N.T. Wright explains why…

But it remains the case that resurrection, in the world of second-Temple Judaism, was about the restoration of Israel on the one hand and the newly embodied life of all YHWH’s people on the other, with close connections between the two; and that it was thought of as the great event that YHWH would accomplish at the very end of the ‘the present age’, the event which would constitute the ‘age to come’, ha ‘olam haba. Nobody imagined that any individuals had already been raised, or would be raised in advance of that great last day…There are no traditions about a Messiah being raised to life: most Jews of this period hoped for resurrection, many Jews of this period hoped for a Messiah, but nobody put those two hopes together until the early Christians did so. – N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 205