About joecrow91

When I'm not at work, I'm an avid reader of theology, especially related to historical Jesus studies, Pauline thought, Church history, and social justice. I hope to produce clear, concise, and interesting book reviews that spark enjoyable conversations about interesting ideas in theology. My wife is also a pretty awesome theology student herself.

Studies in Galatians Episode III: Mariam J. Kamell on Reading Galatians and James Together

Posted on March 18, 2016 by joecrow91

In this, the final post of our series looking at some of the essays in Galatians and Christian Theology, we are turning to Mariam Kamell’s, “Life in the Spirit and Life in Wisdom.” Kamell’s background is in the study of wisdom in the Epistle of James and in Jewish wisdom literature. She is currently a New Testament professor teaching out at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada.

The Apostles Paul and James were spiritual brothers in Christ. However, many get the impression that they must have been testy, quarrelsome siblings. Near the beginning of her piece, Kamell notes that, “There may be no two other epistles in the New Testament that have been so consistently contrasted to each other theologically as Galatians and James” (p.353). Martin Luther, in his typically blunt way, described James as someone who “wanted to guard against those who relied on faith without works, but was unequal to the task” (Word and Sacrament I).

Kamell thinks that many Christians have been too quick to pit Paul and James against each other, spending too much time focusing either on their contentious relationship suggested by Galatians 2 (“certain men came from James”) or “on their different views of the law and Abraham in Galatians 3 and James 2” (p.354). One common way of reading them in light of each other has been to interpret James’s insistence that “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (2:17 NRSV) as meaning that true faith in Christ leads to good works as a necessary consequence of being made a new creation in Christ. An example of this can be found in Reformed theologian Thomas Schreiner’s 2015 book, Faith Alone, where he asserts that “justification is by faith alone, but it is a faith that expresses itself in good works” (p.206).

Rather than strictly focusing directly on the faith vs. works issue in her essay, Kamell instead chooses to compare Paul’s treatment of life in the Spirit in Galatians 5-6 with James’s account of living according to wisdom.
Continue reading →

Why Growing up in Christ Matters

Posted on March 12, 2016 by joecrow91

*A version of this essay previously appeared at Theologues.com (RIP)

In much of Christian culture, a lot of attention gets paid to the need for people to reach a moment of decision and place their faith in Jesus, to be “born again.” This isn’t surprising. After all, beginnings matter, and birth is essential. Jesus Himself used birth as a metaphor during his conversation with Nicodemus early on in John’s Gospel. Jesus told him that in order to see the kingdom of God he needed to be “born from above” (NRSV) or “born again” (NIV). Later on in the same chapter, Jesus also (famously) told him that, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16 NRSV).

So yes, repentance and initial belief in Christ are important, and I don’t want to minimize that. However, I also don’t want to end with that part of the story. New birth in Christ is supposed to lead into the long, painful, and beautiful process of growing up. In his 2010 book, Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing up in Christ, Eugene Peterson notes that the twin metaphors of spiritual birth and growth aren’t meant to stand apart; one is supposed to flow into the other (p.3). However it seems that, in some quarters at least, so much emphasis gets put on making sure people get “saved” that the task of walking with them as they grow to maturity in Christ can be treated like something of an afterthought, and that isn’t healthy. Continue reading →

Studies in Galatians Episode II: John Barclay on the Social Dimensions of God’s Gift in Christ

Posted on March 3, 2016 by joecrow91

Last time, we began our series of posts exploring Galatians and Christian Theology by looking at N.T. Wright’s colorful entry on the prominence of Jesus’ messiahship in Galatians. This time, we are turning a few pages farther on into the book and working through John Barclay’s “Grace and the Countercultural Reckoning of Worth.”

Barclay completed both his undergraduate and doctoral studies at Cambridge and has taught at Durham University since 2003. He’s received quite a bit of attention recently thanks to the long-awaited publication of his book, Paul and the Gift, a systematic and multi-faceted consideration of Paul’s theology of grace. So, maybe it’s timely that we can get a taste of Barclay’s overall project by paying attention to his perspective on the intersection of theology and ethics in Galatians.

While most interpreters have come to agree that the warnings, exhortations, and ethical guidelines given by Paul in Galatians 5-6 are in one way or another integral to the meaning of the letter as a whole, Barclay notes that there is no corresponding consensus regarding exactly how these chapters are related to the ones preceding them (p.306). Finding a satisfying way of dealing with this issue is complicated since “any reading of these verses depends on a reading of the rest of the letter—and vice versa” (p.307). His general approach is to give a fresh consideration of Galatians as a whole, focusing especially on the social implications of the unconditioned nature of God’s gift in Christ (which he often refers to as the “Christ-gift”). Continue reading →

The Vocation of Letter Writing: Christopher Seitz’s Commentary on Colossians

Posted on February 20, 2016 by joecrow91

In his commentary on Colossians, Christopher Seitz, an Old Testament scholar by trade, makes use of a wide array of ancient and modern Christian interpreters to give an irenic, theologically rich, and textually sensitive reading of Paul’s letter. Seitz’s book is part of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series, which takes as its premise the idea that “the Nicene tradition, in all its diversity and controversy, provides the proper basis for the interpretation of the Bible as Christian scripture” and that “dogma clarifies rather than obscures” (p.11).

One of the more unique facets of Seitz’s commentary is his canonical approach. He seeks to interpret Colossians in light of both the larger Pauline corpus of which it is a part, as well as the rest of the Old and New Testaments. He acknowledges from the outset that “canonical readings” have come under fire in the past for being “either a genre mistake or a piety masking illegitimate (‘unhistorical’ in our present parlance) interpretation” (p.50). Consequently, Seitz takes time to respond to these criticisms by giving a more in-depth description of what he thinks the term entails: Continue reading →

Into the Wild: Wilderness in Scripture

Posted on February 14, 2016 by joecrow91

*A version of this essay previously appeared at Theologues.com (RIP)

John Muir, a pioneer conservationist whose efforts helped lead to the creation of America’s national park system, spent decades exploring the lands of the western United States, filling up notebooks with his observations. In one of his more reflective passages, he wrote:

Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods… Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill. Of all the upness accessible to mortals, there is no upness comparable to the mountains (Muir, 1979, p. 235).

From its early days, the environmental movement in the United States has placed high value on the preservation of wilderness. However, within some parts of the Christian world, environmental concerns can be hot button issues. Talk about them too much and you can find yourself potentially being labelled a liberal ‘tree hugger.’ Nevertheless, I want to spend a little time exploring how wilderness is viewed in scripture. Is it always portrayed as desolate, full of danger and without use? Is it ever described in ways more like the reverent language used by John Muir? Continue reading →

Meal, Word, and Prayer: A Review of Andrew B. McGowan’s “Ancient Christian Worship”

Posted on February 3, 2016 by joecrow91

First, a slightly provocative—and hopefully not completely unsubstantiated—claim: It seems to me that Andrew McGowan’s Ancient Christian Worship explicitly tells a story and implicitly makes an argument. In each of his colorful and well-written chapters, McGowan takes people on a trek through the different ways in which ancient Christians worshiped. He introduces readers to influential theologians like Augustine, Origen, and John Chrysostom, sharing ample examples from their writings on worship. McGowan also incorporates archeological research and makes use of fascinating early Christian documents like the Didache and the Apostolic Tradition, which give glimpses of how these ancient communities lived out (or sought to live out) their worship practices.

In other words, McGowan intentionally brings together multiple streams of academic research on early Christian worship in order to tell a coherent introductory narrative of how these worship practices originated and developed, while avoiding the tempting pitfalls of over-simplification and excessive generalization. He’s realistic about what is known, unknown, and unfortunately lost to history regarding how these early believers lived. Continue reading →

Studies in Galatians Episode I: N.T. Wright on Messiahship

Posted on January 21, 2016 by joecrow91

In the summer of 2012, an assorted group of Pauline specialists and other scholars, including people like John Barclay, Richard Hays, and Beverly Roberts Gaventa, gathered at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland for a conference on Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Out of this gathering came Galatians and Christian Theology, an edited volume of the papers given at the meeting.

These essays are divided into three broad categories: Justification, Gospel, and Ethics (pp.x-xi). Over the next few months, we will be periodically exploring a few of the more interesting essays from each of these sections, even as we continue to dive into other books. For now, let’s turn to our first essay, N.T. Wright’s “Messiahship in Galatians?”

It may strike some as odd, but the importance of Jesus’ messiahship in Galatians has long been minimized by certain parts of Pauline studies. These scholars assume that when Paul uses the word Christos in regards to Jesus, it functions basically as a proper name, emptied of most, if not all, messianic content (p.3). Wright rhetorically takes the view of these writers and asks, “Why… would this letter, warning Paul’s gentile converts against the attractions of Judaism, make use of such an obviously Jewish notion as messiahship?” (p.3). As one might expect, Wright intends to show that Jesus’ messiahship actually occupies a central place in Galatians. Continue reading →

The Tales of Jesus: A Review of Stephen Wright’s “Jesus the Storyteller”

Posted on January 9, 2016 by joecrow91

In Jesus the Storyteller, Stephen Wright takes a fresh look at the parables of Jesus, focusing particularly on reading these stories as stories. The first part of the book is a wide-ranging, though necessarily incomplete, survey of how past historical Jesus scholarship has understood the parables.

Since the time of Augustine, these stories of Jesus have often been seen as highly allegorical, making The Good Samaritan, for instance, primarily an allegory for the drama of salvation, with the Samaritan being a symbol for Christ (p.9). Regardless of how spiritualized or overly-imaginative some of these interpretations may have been, they did at least preserve the rich narrative dynamics of these stories, something that was often a casualty of the 19^th and 20^th century “quests” for the historical Jesus (p.9). Continue reading →

The Starting Point of Dogmatic Christology: Ingolf Dalferth’s “Crucified and Resurrected”

Posted on December 28, 2015 by joecrow91

Ingolf Dalferth’s Crucified and Resurrected strikes me as, at heart, a densely-argued exploration of how to properly orient dogmatic Christology. Originally published as Der auferweckte Gekreuzigte in the early 1990’s, Baker Academic has now opened up Dalferth’s work to the English-speaking world through the careful translating efforts of Jo Bennett.

Dalferth tells readers that “dogmatics describes the inner rationality of the Christian way of life” (p.xxi). Thus, one possible way to consider Crucified and Resurrected is as an examination of the inner rationality of how Christians think through God’s saving activity in Jesus Christ. In regards to this subject, though, where should one start?

This brings us to Dalferth’s central argument. He claims that:

The Christian faith confesses the resurrection of Jesus Christ as an eschatological saving event, simply because it proves that not even death prevents God from maintaining living fellowship with those with whom he wants to be together: it demonstrates unequivocally and irrevocably the life-giving power of God’s desire for fellowship and his love for his creation. (p.28)

The more controversial part of his thesis lies in his insistence that it is the confession of Jesus as crucified and resurrected—and not the incarnation—that must form the primary starting point of Christology. This assertion takes place in the context of a dialogue he engages in with progressive scholars on the one hand, and more conservative scholarship on the other. Some more progressive scholars see the doctrine of the incarnation as a later, superfluous addition to Christianity while most more conservative scholars insist on the primacy of incarnational thinking as the christological starting point. Dalferth explains his perspective: Continue reading →

A Review of Mark McEntire’s “A Chorus of Prophetic Voices”

Posted on December 3, 2015 by joecrow91

Mark McEntire, who teaches at Belmont University (and blogs here), is the author of A Chorus of Prophetic Voices, a wide-ranging and interesting introduction to the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible. In the first pages of the book, he gives a brief history of how scholarship has approached these prophetic texts over the last century in order to give some context for where his work fits into the conversation.

The historical-critical method, masterfully represented by figures like Gerhard von Rad, held sway for much of the 20th century and focused on recovering the historical voices of the prophets, embedding them in historical contexts tied to specific periods of Israel’s ancient history. McEntire finds that:

The great accomplishment of these efforts was the grounding of the Israelite prophets in the earthly world of politics, economics, war, and suffering. Materializing the prophets was an effective antidote to the church’s long-held tendency to spiritualize the words of the prophets and read them as a disparate collection of esoteric predictions of the distant future. (p.1)

However, he also points out that this approach had shortcomings, including the undermining of the unity of larger prophetic works into smaller, isolated pieces as part of efforts to devise hypothetical reconstructions for how these books were compiled into their canonical forms.

The historical approach has recently given way to more literary studies of the prophets, which engage with “the final forms of the scrolls as literary works, recognizing that the last stage of their production is the one most responsible for how we view the whole” and emphasize “the scrolls as unified works of literature that constructed imaginative worlds of their own” (pp. 3,6). An important event that helped shift studies in this direction was the publication in 1978 of Walter Brueggemann’s book The Prophetic Imagination. McEntire tells readers that Brueggemann’s work: Continue reading →

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