One point in all this is certain: never in the history of the Christian church has. It is the nature of the Bible as canon to be adaptable to the situations and concerns of the ongoing believing communities who find their identity in the biblical story.
God Has A Story Too by James A
Sanders
Promise and Providence
Testament, and those who transmitted the gospel of the kingdom were interested in the history of election."*. We have narrowly escaped losing Sarai and the means to the fulfillment of the promise.
The Freedom of the God of Grace
The New History: Joseph Our Brother
They were tense and so was the rest of the convention, some two thousand people in the hall. Thesis: where the church through the centuries has failed to convince the world that God is the Lord of history, secular education in the methodology of the new history may succeed. Let us look closely now at a biblical story which I daresay is one of the favorites of all of us here.
To identify even unconsciously with Joseph here is comparable to identifying with Christ at the later stage of the biblical story. The writer of the story, who was without question a genius, goes on to attempt to get us to do just that. No, of course not, we say, but by taking evil out of the heart of man.
If Herod and Pilate and the Romans were the bad guys of the time, one wonders who the bad guys are now and in which cradle in which village God is crouching now. America has worked hard in the chancelleries of the world for effecting the independence of Asian an African countries from their former.
Go Tell Them I’ll Be There
God Has A Story Too by James A. Part 1: The Freedom of the God of Grace Grace. The iiame which the prophet Isaiah gave to the child of lsrael's hope is my name, is your name, is the name of the presence of God among men, Immanuel, "God with us.". God's answer in Exodus 33 to Moses' question of who God is, is the very wood of the cross of Jesus Christ.
But the other answer to Moses' question of who God is, in Exodus 3, is the very stone of the cradle of Bethlehem's birth. Ancient Israel's ark of the covenant never contained God: it was but a symbol of his presence. If you know the God of the Bible you know it would be just like him to start such a rumor.
And he did not answer, for truth is judgment, divine judgment It is the judgment of the condemned on the accuser, of the oppressed on the oppressor, of. Careful study of the Bible in its historical and political setting is disturbing, not comforting.
What Happened At Nazareth?
Once that is perceived then programs of sharing the means and wealth of the church and of. A prophet in the Bible is one who interprets the identifying and life-giving tradition of the believing community (in this instance the passage from Isaiah) as a challenge for his contemporaries. The greatest falsehood in the church’s usual reading of the Gospels is that it somehow assumes it is better than first century Judaism and has.
It speaks of the coming of a herald to proclaim the acceptable year of God for the poor, captives, blind. Crushed under the Roman heel and clamped in the claws of the Roman eagle the good, faithful synagogue-goers of Palestine of A.D. It is what we have also done with the message of the angels in the Bethlehem story in Luke 2:14.
And it means that we must rid ourselves of the idea that the church is the Society of the Saved. 34;God" when it means that great chairman of the board in the sky, is in the biblical view worse than communist atheism.
Banquet of the Dispossessed
Most of my working hours currently are spent in translating and interpreting one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The power of the gospel judges us and saves us not by our identifying with Jesus in the lynching scene but by our identifying with the. God's majesty in the Bible is defined and described not in terms of how splendid he is in the company of the gods on Mt.
It was in the home of a rich Pharisee, and Jesus noted how those invited coveted the places of honor at table, the places near the host at the head of the table. Again we must identify with the rich Pharisee to get the power of the judgment of Jesus lesson. In the case of the next paragraph in Luke 14 we have from the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls just such a passage.
And here is one of the many points in the Bible where it is absolutely. It is important to know that the messianic banquet and the messianic battle are seen as two parts of the same eschatological event.
The Passion Of The God Of Power
In The Same Night
Most of the students had fairly clear visions of evil but little constructive vision for. God's grace comes to us even in our folly, indeed came to us even in the tragedy and folly of the late 1960s, judging and by faith redeeming. And thus do we know that we have defiled every gift he has given us by seeking our identity in those gifts instead of in the embrace of the giver.
In the celebration of the Holy Communion the whole church is present and the barriers of both time and space have been transcended; for it is in the celebration of the Holy Communion that the church is eschatologized. The picture of the church grows clearer; the picture of the Union Seininary community grows clearer. And one of us strikes a slave of the high priest and cuts off his ear.
Judas' worst fault was that he took the 'advice of the church leaders of his day and for services rendered received an honorarium. May his kingdom come in your lifetime and in your days and in the lifetime of the whole household of faith, speedily and very soon.And say ye: Amen.
Outside The Camp
This material was prepared for Religion Online by Paul Mobley. . workers and the same Semitic root as that of the word Hebrew). Much of this and more is described in the language of the time in "Teaching and Learning: The Old Testament at Union," The Tower (Union Theological Seminary, Fall 1968): 3-5. The tenor of the tinie could be felt in a conversation in my office that fall.
Two such voices were those of Jeremiah during the time of the first siege, andl of the anonymous author of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the time of the second siege. Some of the names of those who testified against him the second time around (Shephatiah, Gedaliah, Jucal,. In referring to the Exodus of ancient Israel and the mysterium tremendum of the Mt.
What about Jeremiah's friends in the sixth century and what of the good Pharisees and Essenes in the first. The eyes of the onlookers are hollow and empty, dissipated in the horror they have come to witness.
It Is Finished
Dora, my wife, was at the time on the faculty of the University of Rochester teaching interpretive dance. The bulk of the canvas centers in the removal of Christ's mutilated body from the cross. Those privy to observe from the top of the ladder down, the angels "with fiery eyes downcast," would have known: they would have known the full meaning of "It is finished.".
To be critically honest we should not find too much in the Greek verb teleo, meaning "accomplish" or "come to an end." Franz Delitzsch in his translation of the New Testament into. It is remarkable how the vicissitudes and victories of the twelve disciples are a portrait of the church since that time. Disappointment and derision were the reaction of the first thief: Yeah, it's over but good.
Jesus' Crucifixion is history's prime example of the miscarriage of justice, the innocent oppressed and unjustly accused. If you are the king of the Jews, get out of this one — if you can.
Through Shattered Concrete Slabs
Students in many parts of the world are expressing it in the manner of the sixties even if in America most campuses are quiet. The economy was good in large measure because of the war, and employment was high. The ancient Pharasaic Jewish doctrine of the resurrection of the dead was always and still is the sign of the awful presence of God.
Could it be that they believe not because they are ignorant but because being at the bottom of the social scale they have a sharper, more poignant view of human fear and folly. Could it be on the other hand that the young people of the world, the fifty percent of the world under the age of responsibility, can see a transcending crack which we cannot see. The freaks of the world are seen to be normal and the madness that has held the world is dissolving.
No, they don't know of the realities of life; they will grow up, we say. Could it be that they have perceived the dire necessity of the transcending crack in the concrete slabs which we adults in Moscow, Peking, London, and Washington have erected between East and West,.
Conclusion: A Biblical Paradigm: The Torah-Christ Story
The Bible is not a guarantor of the eternal value of old Bronze or Iron Age ethics, nor indeed of the mores of the hellenistic period from which the New Testament sprang. Viewing the canon as essentially paradigms of the verbs of God's works, and a putative paradigm suggesting the verbs of our works in the light of God's, issues in a theocentric perspective on the Bible. And out of the answers comes a paradigm of the way God speaks, thinks, and acts in all kinds of different contexts in antiquity, including the New Testament.
The same God is the subject of the verbs of the New Testament gospel as of the verbs of the Old Testament gospel. The Torah-Christ story of the Bible, if one focuses on God's part in it, might be called a divine odyssey. Now what we can see from the point of view of the divine odyssey is that the New Testament really makes this quite bold and scandalous claim that in Christ God committed another salvation or righteousness and that it should be added to the Torah story as a climax, as the ultimate chapter of the whole story or odyssey.
To put it another way, while the arguments and debates in the churches of the second century A.D. But the argument of the New Testament and the early church was that God's divine odyssey did not stop with David in Jerusalem.