The Commands of God

The following is an old-ish paper that I wrote for my final project in my biblical theology class, on the theme "The Commands of God".

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God's commands to man lie close to the heart of the biblical story of redemption. The diversity of biblical material on the subject gives rise to tough questions hermeneutical (how can Paul say that justification is by faith and not works, while James says that it is by faith and works?), theological (why does Paul treat the Old Testament law so negatively if it was given as a gift by God?), and practical (how, if at all, are Christians still obligated to the OT law?). I will attempt to respond to these and other questions from a unified reading of Scripture, assuming the inseparability of faith in God and adherence to His commands, the "obedience of faith". This union of faith with obedience to God's commands is a constant in the Bible; what changes is our grace-enabled success at obeying and the role this plays in salvation history.

God's commands play a prominent role in the primeval history of Genesis, most obviously in the creation-fall narrative of Genesis 2 and 3. God gives the first man one command to live by in the garden: "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die." (Gen 2:16-17 RSV) Of course, the man and his wife disobey God, and a more detailed answer to why they did so than simply "sin" is that they did not trust (i.e. have faith in) God as they should have. "Eve transgressed God's command because she doubted God's goodness ... Adam and Eve were jettisoning childlike dependence upon God by tasting the prohibited fruit."1 In the garden we see a prefiguring of what is to come, especially in Israel's story: we are created for loving relationship with God, neighbor, and creation, the terms of which are specified by God. We obey Him by faith, or we put our faith elsewhere and so disobey. Elsewhere in Genesis we get a more zoomed-out view of God's will for humanity. Genesis 1:28-30 and 9:1-7 come close to our concept of "natural law", being presented as universally binding moral standards for all of humanity, but as they do not factor into later salvation history (except as a ground for condemning the non-Jewish nations, as in the story of Noah), they are not of much interest to us. If anything, they serve as "mission statements" for humanity, setting the overall purpose (creaturely flourishing) that later, more specific commands would aim towards.

With the call of Abraham in Genesis 12, salvation history becomes closely identified with the story of a family. God gives Abraham a command (leave your kin and go to the land I will show you) and a promise (I will make you into a great nation; all the families on earth will be blessed through you). And Abraham obeys. As Paul explains in Romans 4 and Galatians 3, this obedience is closely tied to Abraham's faith, his belief in God and His promises. One does not simply cause the other; Abraham obeys because he believes and works out his faith by obeying. Paul's denial that Abraham was "justified by works" in Romans 4:2 is not meant to lessen the importance of his obedience, but to stress that Abraham did nothing to gain God's favor.2 Hebrews 11 commends Abraham for his faith, but this faith was not only an abstract trust in a higher power; it was manifested in his obedience to God's command to go to Canaan and in his willingness to sacrifice his promised son. To have faith is to demonstrate it. Somewhat like the members of the Trinity or the two natures of Christ, Abraham's "faith and obedience are distinct, but remain undivided."3

But besides his own personal example of faith and obedience, Abraham is also significant for the covenant (another major theme in BT) that God makes with him. Significantly, in Genesis 15 when the covenant is formally established, God ceremonially does so alone, while Abraham is asleep. The message is clear: this covenant is not symmetrical like so many other ancient Near Eastern covenants; God is the one who establishes His covenant with men, and He is the one who moves it forward. Two chapters later, God adds a continuing command to His covenant: the men born into it must be circumcised as a sign of the covenant (Gen 17:10-11). The covenant itself is unconditional, but its blessings depend on faithfulness to its conditions; by disobedience "the benefits of the covenant could be lost for periods of time, but no mention is made of the possibility of cancellation."4 The covenant would become a major component of salvation history and the context for God's future commands to His people, which were not instructions for earning their way into the covenant, but for enjoying its blessings.

We come to the main body of God's commands to His people in the OT, the Mosaic covenant. Again, the precepts of this covenant "are clearly not a means to earn favour with God, not is keeping them necessary to establish a relationship with Yahweh. ... The law must be interpreted within the context of grace."5 Given that it came immediately after God's freeing His people from slavery in Egypt by a variety of miraculous means, it is hard to argue that the law was not given in the context of faith (or it should have been, if not for the peoples' faithlessness). Reminders of God's past acts of faithfulness are interspersed throughout the commands He gives to His people (Exo 20:2, 29:46; Lev 11:45, 19:36, 20:24, 25:38; Num 15:41; Deu 5:6), or more commonly brief reminders that "I am the Lord". The desire to obey God is rooted in our experiential and personal knowledge of who He is and what He has done. In the original giving of the law and especially in its reaffirmation in Deuteronomy, we see that the law is given to Israel for her good (Deu 10:13), that those who keep it may enjoy God's covenant love (Deu 7:9). The covenant itself does not depend on Israel's obedience, only her enjoyment of its blessings.

In Deuteronomy 28, a long list of blessings for obeying the law is enumerated, and a longer list of curses for disobeying. Again, given the law's other statements about itself, it is wise to read these not as God using enticements and threats to make the Israelites do what He wants, but as the positive consequences of either obeying God and experiencing His love as He intended, or of rejecting the author of life and His law, and receiving the negative consequences. The Mosaic law is not so much a statement of abstract ethics, but a blueprint for the corporate life of God's chosen nation, and a testament to how she is to exist as such. If Israel lives consistently (or faith-fully) with how God created her to live (for Israel, in the OT account, is a nation created by God for Himself), her blessedness (not earned by obeying the law, but already there) will be evident to all. If she does not, the result of rejecting God's blessings and prescribed way of being-in-the-world will be equally evident.

The expectations in the Pentateuch of the outcome of Israel's attempts to obey God's law are mixed, as Deuteronomy 30 shows. The second half of the chapter (11-20) is optimistic in tone; "this commandment which I command you this day is not too hard for you, neither is it far off." (30:11) Yet in the first half (1-10), Moses seems to foresee the next few chapters of salvation history. As we know, despite some notable successes Israel ultimately fails to remain faithful to God's law and suffers exile in Babylon as God's appointed punishment. As will become evident later, the failure of the Mosaic covenant is not because of any shortcoming in the law itself, but because of the people to whom it was given, and the outcome that ensued. "The Sinai covenant is a gracious covenant, but the new covenant is inherently superior to the old covenant in terms of its consequences."6

Yet exile is not the end; God's "punishment" is never merely punitive. Breaking the covenant does not equal annulling it. As Moses noted, this exile would be a prelude to God's restoration of His people and the fulfillment of His promise in 30:6-8 to enable them to obey His law more fully. After the warnings of judgment and the Day of the Lord (another major BT theme), many of the prophets envision this restoration in some form. Isaiah and Joel promise the outpouring of the Spirit (Isa 32:15, 44:3; Joel 2:28) after the return from exile. Ezekiel promises a "covenant of peace" between God and His people (37:26) and to put in them a "heart of flesh" identified with His Spirit, to help them obey Him. (36:25-27) Jeremiah similarly promises a "new covenant" in which the law will be written on His peoples' hearts and past transgressions will be forgiven (31:31-34). Hosea brings the charge to Israel that "they have broken my covenant, and transgressed my law" (8:1), but the promises elsewhere in the book (2:14-23, ch. 14) show that though Israel has been faithless and broken God's law, He is still not finished with her. He will restore her and help her to obey Him, fulfilling Deuteronomy 30:6-8.

With this history in mind, the Jews' mixed reaction to Jesus is more understandable. On one hand, Jesus says that "I have come not to abolish [the law and the prophets] but to fulfill them". (Mat 5:17) He identifies love for Him with keeping His commandments and again promises the Spirit, His abiding and graceful presence with His people (Jhn 14:15-26). He even says that the righteousness of His disciples must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees (Mat 5:20)! Clearly Jesus seems intent on bringing out the grace-enabled obedience whose promise is God's merciful answer to the Israelites' disobedience and exile. He is the fulfillment of the prophets' promises of a new covenant in which God will help His people to obey Him aright.

Yet His treatment of the actual commands of the law is sometimes confusing. Christ did not purport to teach the law like contemporary teachers; He virtually ignored it except when answering questions or showing how it foreshadowed His own ministry.7 He radically reinterprets or (depending on your position) waves aside OT commands like the temple tax (Mat 17:24-27), the Sabbath (Mat 12:1-4), and food laws (Mat 15:10-20, Mark 7:14-23), doing so on His own authority. Similarly, in Matthew 5:21-48 (right after saying He came to fulfill the law and that His disciples' righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees) He clarifies and strengthens precepts of the law, essentially telling the people what they "really" mean. Schreiner believes He is merely correcting misinterpretations of the law8 and Scobie considers this strengthening to be part of how Jesus fulfills the Torah,9 but at any rate it seems clear that the obedience Jesus is restoring Israel to is not going to look identical to the obedience Moses had in mind when he was giving the law.

No one talks more about "law" in the New Testament than Paul. Broadly, Paul's statements on the law fit into two main categories. First (and well-known among Protestants) are his negative statements about "works of the law" or simply "works", for example in Romans 3:19-31 and Gal 2:15-16,3:10-14. Passages like these have spurred seemingly endless debates among biblical scholars as to what Paul meant, but at the very least he echoes Jesus' statements about fulfilling the law (Rom 10:4) and similarly transcends it; for Paul it is evident that, in some sense, the Mosaic law does not apply to Christians as it did to the Jews (Rom 7:6). On the other hand, Paul certainly seems to expect ethical conduct and obedience from his congregations (1 Cor 11:1, Phl 4:9), and he even mentions a new "law of Christ" (1 Cor 9:21, Gal 6:2) to which he counts himself and the churches as responsible. In his letters he lays down a variety of commands and teachings for the churches, and inasmuch as he sometimes distinguishes between commands from the Lord and his own teachings (1 Cor 7:12), he usually seems to do so in an exercise of the authority given to him by his revelation of Christ (see Gal 1:11-20).

The other NT epistles offer a diversity of perspectives on how obedience to the new covenant moves beyond obedience to the old. Hebrews shows in detail how Christ is the culmination of the whole Torah, especially the priesthood and sacrificial system. The author connects this to Christian ethics by noting that "when there is a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change in the law as well" (7:12); in chapter 13, he does not shy from giving commands from this new law. James' epistle says some things about practical obedience that cause much consternation among supporters of "justification by faith alone", such as "so faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead" (2:17) or "a man is justified by works and not by faith alone" (2:24). Paul's statements will be explained in more detail later; for now, suffice it to say that since they are not in dialogue, James uses the terms "faith" and "works" in different ways than Paul (albeit closer to our 'normal' definitions of them) and is asking "about the relation between the profession of faith and action consonant with it."10 The witnesses of Paul and James, when taken together, are strong evidence for the unity of faith and works in the Bible.

Throughout the biblical witness we thus see the consistent affirmation of both faith (as trust) in the God who saves and obedience to His commands. No ranking or dichotomy between the two is possible (or at least intended). The rest of the paper will address questions and complications that jump out (at least to me) in response to the biblical narrative of God's commands. Perhaps the most obvious is: if the Bible consistently presents God as desiring from humans the "obedience of faith", what are we to make of the diversity of views relating to God's commands found in the Bible, from Deuteronomy to Psalms to Matthew to Romans? Put another way, what is the progression within biblical revelation in the treatment of God's commands? I contend that they change in two ways: in their scope and in their outcome.

First, whereas most of the OT is primarily the history of God's chosen nation of Israel and her history of trying to live as such, in the NT we see Gentiles as well as Jews called to be His. This point is frequently skimmed over in modern theology, but it was a major shift in the early (initially Jewish) church, requiring a church council to resolve (Acts 15). Paul devotes significant space in several of his letters, particularly Galatians, Philippians, and Romans, to addressing the tensions the inclusion of Gentiles in the formerly all-Jewish people of God raises.

Second, we see a progression throughout the biblical narrative regarding the outcome of God's commands to His people. During the Exodus, Israel is overawed by God's acts of redemption and perhaps inspired by memories of the patriarchs walking with God, so that the people are able to say, "All that the Lord has spoken we will do." (Exo 19:8) But this confidence soon meets with reality; the Israelites have barely moved into their new home before widespread apathy and disregard for the law settles in (e.g. in the book of Judges). Though Israel's history has several high points such as good kings like David, Solomon, and Josiah, it ultimately leads to disobedience and exile—a pattern mirrored, probably intentionally, in the creation-fall story of Genesis 2-3. The prophets express hope for a new covenant in which God's spirit will give believers new hearts and help them to obey Him at last, which is just what we see Jesus inaugurate—though the old order of sin still remains. We will not continue to sin forever; God helps us to live the way for which He made us.

Several more questions branch off from this answer. First, if our fulfilling the law (in its original purpose, not necessarily in its specific commands) is part of God's aim in salvation history, what are we to make of Paul's negative statements about the law? If the law was given by a good God as a gift to His chosen people, how can Paul say that it "consigned all things to sin" and "confined" us (Gal 3:22-23), or contrast the righteousness of the law Moses demanded with the righteousness of faith Christians are to have (Rom 10:1-9)? If "by works of the law shall no one be justified" (Gal 2:16), why was it given at all?

As Schreiner says, the New Perspective on Paul has much to say to the common conflation of Paul's "works of the law" with an amalgam of Pelagianism, medieval Catholic morality, and the modern American "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality under the heading of "legalism" or "works righteousness", all of which would have been nowhere on Paul's first-century radar. Nowhere in the Mosaic law does God command the Jews to be legalists; as I have tried to show, obedience to God's commands has never been opposed to faith, or at least it was never meant to be. A call to strict obedience does not imply a denial of the importance of faith. Schreiner, however, still sees legalism (which he defines as "the view that human works function as the ultimate basis of one's salvation on the last day"11) in passages like Rom 3:27-4:8, 9:30-10:13; Phl 3:2-11; Gal 2:16-21, 3:10-14. But advocates of the New Perspective do not consider these passages "problem verses" or try to sweep them under the rug. Rather, they explain that the "boasting" the Jews partake in and the "righteousness" or "justification" they valued did not concern their attempts to prove themselves to God (they believed they were already "in" with God and did not have to earn their way) but that this very state of being "in", shown by their possession of the Torah, made them superior to the other nations and gave them some kind of privileged status in God's plan.12 The Jews had come to see God's plan of salvation as being for them rather than through them.

By Paul's time shift has taken place within Judaism between Moses and Jesus to this more nationalistic kind of legalism in which possessing the commandments is more decisive than practicing them, rather than the kind Schreiner envisions. The Jews have forgotten the original purpose of the covenants and of the law that was to serve as their guide for abiding in them. God never intended to simply elect Israel out of the sinful world; the purpose of Israel's election, going all the way back to His promise to Abraham in Gen 12:3, was to bless and save all the nations of the world. The law was given to Israel to help her do this, to be holy and separate from the other nations and to ultimately serve as God's cure for the sin and corruption raging in His creation. But Israel failed to obey the law; she became part of the problem. And more than that, especially in the post-exilic period we see the Jews misusing the law as a way of maintaining their separation from (and assumed superiority over) the nations who did not have it. The way of life that was supposed to be redemptive for the nations became a wall blocking them from God. (Mat 23:13) "'Works of the law' cannot justify because God has redefined his people through the faithfulness of the Messiah."13 This kind of abuse, not the obedience of faith commanded by Moses, is what Paul is talking about by his term "works of the law" (or "works of Torah"). When he states in Gal 2:16 that we are not justified by works of the law but by faith, he means that "obedience to the Mosaic law was no longer the distinguishing mark of the people of God. They were now distinguished by their faith in Jesus Christ and participation in his spirit."14

With this in mind, we can make better sense of Paul's actual answer to the question "why was the law given?" in Gal 3:19. He says, somewhat ambiguously, "It was added because of transgressions till the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made". The law is not opposed to the promises of God, but it cannot deliver them (v. 21), not because of any flaw in it but because of the people to whom it was given. In the following verses we see him expand on the law's role: it somehow "confined" the Jews until Christ came to fulfill it (v. 22-23); it acted as their paidagogos (variously translated as "custodian", "guardian", "babysitter"...) until Christ came (v. 24); it was their "guardian" leading them until they came into the inheritance God had appointed for them (4:1-2). All of these point to a purpose for the law similar to that of John the Baptist, of "preparing the way" for the climax of God's redemption in Jesus. Unlike the agitators to whom Paul was responding, he saw the law as a good, but temporary stage in the fulfillment of God's promises to Abraham. "It is essential that the law be regarded as temporary, if its curse is to give way to blessing and if its demand is not to obstruct the realization of the promise."15

A related question, perhaps even more obvious: if God gives us His Spirit to help us to finally obey His commands as He intended, why did He not simply give the Spirit at Mount Sinai, or in Ur, or in the garden? Why the long period of backsliding before the advent of Christ? It seems as though He did not give the Israelites what they needed to obey Him, so He shouldn't have been surprised at their failure. Rather than answering this question directly, I will question it. This kind of question, I think, is based on a very mechanistic view of our obedience that aims to reduce spiritual truths to simple equations: Humans + Law = Disobedience, Humans + Law + Spirit = Growing obedience, and so on. If this were the case, if humans are in some sense ontologically unable to obey God without His Spirit, then the fault of Israel's disobedience would ultimately fall on Him. Given the unacceptability of this, I conclude that this question may be based on too strong a concept of human depravity.

We can learn from eastern theology here, which—while acknowledging the problem of sin—also holds that man's freedom to do good is restricted, not destroyed,16 and his nature remains essentially good17 (Wilson; mention how this emphasizes sin's alien nature and allows Christ to fully share in our nature) (see Rom 7:15-25, esp. 17). "Because we are created in the image of God (Gn 1:26), there is an indelible goodness in our nature that can never be undone";18 this is a valuable counterpoint to the Reformed view of humanity that can border on reveling in our incorrigible bad-ness. Israel's disobedience was not ontologically inevitable (her periodic successes at obeying the law would seem to belie this), but nonetheless it happened because of her free acts of disobedience, and she could not deal with it herself. God's restoration of Israel and giving of the Spirit are less like fixing a broken circuit and more like what they truly (albeit metaphorically) are: restoring a marriage, or reconciling a trespasser to oneself.

Finally, a very common and practical question: how, if at all, do God's commands in the OT apply to Christians today? Paul repeatedly makes clear (as does Peter, in Acts 15:7-11) that we are "discharged from the law" (Rom 7:6), not simply because it was impossible all along and grace is God’s “plan B” for salvation but because the Mosaic law, besides not being given with the grace to obey it and thus seeming to hold the Jews "captive" in their sins (Gal 3:23), also served to set up a division between Jews and Gentiles which has now been obliterated by Jesus. (Eph 2:11-16) Paul warns against returning to "works of the law" not because, as is commonly supposed, they represent a universal human tendency to Pelagian attempts at "works righteousness", but because they entail slavery to a covenant which, while gracious, was only intended to be temporary (Gal 3:24-25), and because they would re-create the obsolete division within God's covenant people between Jew and Gentile, a notion which Paul rebuts in strong terms (Gal 3:28). He similarly emphasizes faith not as a counter-principle opposed and excluded from any kind of active "works", but to mean particularly the faith of the early Church in Jesus Christ. "For Paul, the expression 'works (of law)' refers not to morality in general but to the practice of the law within the Jewish community; and the expression 'faith (of Jesus Christ)' refers not to a willingness to receive God's grace as a free gift and to renounce reliance on one's own achievements, but to the Christian confession of Jesus as the Messiah and the social reorientation this entails (cf. Gal 2:16)."19

What I take from this is that we, as Christians, are no longer directly subject to anything in the Mosaic law. Rather, we are subject to the "law of Christ", or the "law of faith" (Rom 3:27), by which we fulfill the law/Torah (Rom 3:31) as Christ did before us (Mat 5:17). We don't have to search for some hermeneutical principle by which to decide which parts of the law still apply to us today (e.g. the "ceremonial"/"civil"/"moral" division); by following the teachings of Christ as communicated by the apostles, we can have faith that we are fulfilling the law of Moses. Scobie writes that Jesus focused His teaching on the ethical dimension of the law and deemphasized its ritual and ceremonial demands (using these terms descriptively); "Jesus' "fulfilling" of the law constitutes a new righteousness that is available for all humankind, not just for those bound by the ritual and ceremonial requirements of the Torah."20

Throughout the Bible God is seen to state His will for us in the form of commands; these are not arbitrary rules, tests of obedience, or a way to try to justify ourselves before Him, but reflections of His character and love for us in a particular part of salvation history. He has always desired from His image-bearers the obedience of faith not merely because He likes to be in control or get His way, but because by obeying we live the way He created us to live and grow into His likeness as well as His image. As God's redeemed covenant people, those who are "in Christ" (see Rom 6), we are to abide in the "law of Christ", and the Spirit He sent to us (Jhn 16:7), God's grace abiding and working in us, helps us to do so as we are conformed to Christ's image. Far from the burdensome rules they are often depicted as, the commands of God are an integral part of the narrative of BT; in different, equally biblical senses, they are both what we are saved from and saved to.

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1. Thomas R. Schreiner, “The Commands of God” in Central Themes of Biblical Theology: Mapping Unity in Diversity (eds. Scott J. Hafemann and Paul R. House; Grand Rapids: InterVarsityPress, 2007), 69.
2. Francis Watson, Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles: Beyond the New Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 262.
3. Schreiner, “The Commands of God”, 71.
4. Andrew E. Hill and John H. Walton, A Survey of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), 91.
5. Schreiner, “The Commands of God”, 73.
6. Schreiner, “The Commands of God”, 75.
7. T. Desmond Alexander et al., New Dictionary of Biblical Theology: Exploring the Unity and Diversity of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 636.
8. Schreiner, “The Commands of God”, 99.
9. Charles H.H. Scobie, The Ways of Our God: An Approach to Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 772.
10. Scobie, The Ways of Our God, 782.
11. Schreiner, “The Commands of God”, 89.
12. Tom Wright, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2009), 185.
13. Wright, Justification, 97.
14. Desmond et al., New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, 636.
15. Watson, Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles, 133.
16. Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 223-224.
17. Lukas Wilson, “Original Sin and the Orthodox Church,” Once Delivered Faith, 5 July 2014, (21 August 2014); rather than a denial of the power of sin, this assertion emphasizes its foreignness to the way God made us and the impossibility of some sinister “second creation” that altered our nature. It should also be noted that if we really have a “sinful nature” that Jesus was free from, then He did not fully share our nature and, in Orthodox thinking, could not have fully redeemed it.
18. The Orthodox Study Bible (eds. Jack Norman Sparks et al.; Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008), 1534.
19. Watson, Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles, 121.
20. Scobie, The Ways of Our God, 773.

My Journey, Part 8: Back to the Gospel

This is part 8 of my rebooted series on my journey from Evangelicalism to Eastern Orthodoxy. The full series can be found here:

1	Back to the beginning
2	Cracks appear
3	Questions multiply
4	Questioning the "gospel"
5	The big question
6	A better hermeneutic
7	Explorations in epistemology
7.5	Excursus on oversystematization
8	Back to the gospel
9	The new direction
10	Ecclesiological foundations
11.1	Sola scriptura
11.2	The insufficiency of Scripture
11.25	Addenda on sola scriptura
11.3	Holy Tradition
12	Bridging the cracks
13.1	Orthodoxy and Genesis 1–3
13.2	A Better Atonement (Against Penal Substitution)
13.3	Faith Alone?
13.4	The Colour and the Shape of the Gospel
14	Worshipping with the Church
15	Mary, Saints, Baptism, and Other Odds/Ends
16	Looking Back, Coming Home

Through all of this thinking about the nature of the Bible and what we do with it, I never lost sight of the goal. I sought to understand what this all-important "gospel" was all about now that I'd acknowledged that the pat answers I'd been hearing weren't sufficient. I faced questions like "Why did Jesus have to die on the cross?", "How do faith and works relate for the Christian?", the simple question "What is salvation, really?", and the big one: "How do the Testaments fit together?". Everything seemed open to revision, but somehow this no longer bothered me. After all that God had brought me through, I was beginning to trust Him even without having neat answers at the moment. It was while searching for answers to questions like these that I began the present series on the Gospel.

Why did Jesus have to die on the cross?
This is the classic question of atonement, for which numerous theories have been advanced. I began searching for ways to think about the atonement that view sin, salvation, etc. in more of a "relational" way, whatever that meant (certainly not in the oversystematized way I described last time).

When we say Jesus destroyed sin on the cross, to avoid spiritual object thinking, we must consider 'sin' to mean 'separation from God of those united with Him.' (2013-6-9)

The penal substitutionary atonement theory seemed dependent on the juridical, spiritual-object definition of sin that I had grown quite tired of, and I instead began taking interest in the atonement theories held by the early church; Christus Victor and ransom theory seemed especially promising. Having learned about atonement only through the Reformed tradition, though, it was hard for me to fully shift my thinking to these new lenses.

Somewhat related to this, I was trying to see the cross as just one part of Jesus' redemptive work, alongside the resurrection and perhaps His whole life. I realized that emphasizing the crucifixion exclusively above these things was not pious, but a distortion of the true gospel, whatever it was. Part of putting it into perspective was acknowledging a fact that we forget surprisingly easily by fitting the cross into a theological system of salvation: God was dead. And we killed Him. Before my Good Friday post on the oft-forgotten tragedy of the cross, I journaled:

By making Jesus' death seem inevitable, fitting into my theology like a neat puzzle piece, I lessen the shock value of the cross. God not only became a man, but we killed Him horribly. ... The crucifixion was a defeat, not a victory. (2014-1-12)

I overstated my point here, since (as I would learn) the victory of the resurrection can't be separated from the defeat of the cross, but I was on the right track by seeking a theology that affirmed both.

How do faith and works relate for the Christian?
With somewhat more success, I sought to see past the dichotomy we had set up between human and divine agency, to see what role works could play in a Christian:

Faith is not simply a reduced cost of admission, it is an openness and desire to live as God's covenant people. The problem with salvation by works, basically, is not that it is intrinsically bad or prideful, but that it is impossible. The pride comes in if you delude yourself otherwise. In other words, faith doesn't simply replace works for us. Rather, the faithfulness of Christ fulfills in us what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not—He makes us righteous, just as the law commanded. Faith is not a soteriological substitute for works, but a recognition and acceptance of the supremacy of Christ, to do in us what we couldn't do ourselves. Works are still important—but because of our union with Christ our actions are also the power of God working through us. (Phil 2:12-13) (2014-1-30)

I was slowly coming to a more integrated view of faith and works as partners, not opponents. Taking up faith doesn't have to mean setting aside our own effort as if it were something bad. Faith does not simply mean ceasing to try to save ourselves and trusting in Christ's work instead; it is not simply an alternative to human effort, and the two are not opposite poles. Instead (as Paul describes in those verses which are the clearest description of synergism I knew of), by faith we recognize and trust in the mystery that because of the Holy Spirit, our own actions and decisions also become God's "willing and working" in us for His good pleasure. I started to see the perfect union of divinity and humanity that Jesus embodied as a pattern for the Christian life.

What is salvation, really?
Through this, though, I was still unsure about the nature of this salvation that we attained to through God's faithful working in us. I sought to thinking about it in a "relational" way, whatever that meant, not as a metaphysical "thing" that we simply need to get and defend.

I've been thinking about salvation as a spiritual object again, as something that God ties up with a proverbial bow and hands to us in exchange for either faith or good works. But again, this is a disconnected, non-relational way of thinking of it. (2014-1-30)

In our rush to "get in" (and to theologize about how "getting in" is easy and doesn't depend on us even though we have to make a decision, and about how once you're "in" it's impossible to come back "out"), could we be losing sight of just what "in" entails?

Protestants take a very minimalist view of salvation, like a student asking, 'what's the least I need to do to pass?' There are no right answers to wrong questions. (2014-1-24)

Admittedly, I was being unfair and overgeneralizing here. But I do think "salvation" is commonly thought of as something atomic, indivisible, all-or-nothing, devoid of degree, so we can slip into thinking that once we "have" salvation we're good and everything else is just icing on the cake, a little like how you can get a passing grade on that final exam and then forget everything you learned. It's the assumption behind "threshold evangelism". If this view of salvation is "minimalist" (in that we seek to reduce salvation to its essential essence and hold fast to that over everything else as what's truly important), I sought a "maximalist" understanding, whatever that looked like. I expected that it would do away with the distinction between salvation and sanctification and instead encompass both as part of the same process, and that it would not focus so much on individuals that it seemed to forget about the larger scope of God's redemptive purpose.

How do the testaments fit together?
The question of the testaments saw the most progress, partly because it was the number-one thing wreaking havoc on my faith so I spent the most time and attention on it. Presaging my entry on 2014-1-30 about how faith fulfills the law, I tried to see the law not as a list of dos and don'ts from which Christ sets us free, but as a covenant of God with a definite redemptive purpose, which Christ now fulfills.

Perhaps the law is not to be ultimately understood in terms of its provisions and requirements, but the kind of people and society it was meant to produce—perfectly bearing God's image, living in Shalom. So the 'righteous requirement of the law' in Romans 8:4 is not referring to doing all the rules, but the requirement to become this kind of people. And Christ's fulfilling it does not mean somehow checking all the boxes of the law, but enabling us to be transformed into His perfect, godly likeness. … In other words, what if the requirement of the law is not just to do certain things, but to be a certain people? (2013-8-25)

This helped to make sense of how Jesus could fulfill the law when he so cavalierly bent or broke the letter of it, and taught others to do the same. But more than this, what really helped answer my questions about how the covenants/testaments fit together was this wonderful thing called...

The New Perspective on Paul

Before I can define the New Perspective, I have to clearly define the "Old Perspective": it is the traditional (for Protestants) reading of Paul's letters (especially Romans, Galatians, and Philippians) as being, first and foremost, about how sinful people "get right with God" and go from the condemnation and death brought by sin to forgiveness and eternal life, which is considered to be the meaning of Paul's term "justification". In the Lutheran flavor of the Old Perspective, the law is something frightful and oppressive that constantly shows us our sin by contrasting it with God's impossibly high standards in order to drive us toward our savior Jesus, who fulfills this law on our behalf so that we can know God in His grace and receive Christ's "alien righteousness" by which alone we are justified. In the Reformed flavor, the law may serve this purpose, but we are not merely saved by Jesus from it but to it, to obey it not out of our dead, fallen sinful nature and feeble self-effort but by the life given to us by Christ and the empowering of the Holy Spirit, God working in us to do what we cannot do for ourselves. In this way "Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes". (Rom 10:4)

This reading of Paul should be highly familiar for evangelicals, lying close to the heart of the "Gospel". The New Perspective, in contrast, reads these parts of Paul as being "about" something quite different: the destruction of racial and ethnic barriers between Jew and Gentile, and the creation of one united people of God from both groups when they were formerly enemies. "Works of the law", then, is read not as shorthand for "human moral effort", "works righteousness", or "pulling yourself up by your spiritual bootstraps", but as "boundary markers" in the Torah (remember that "Torah" simply means "law" and both are expressed by the same Greek word, nomos) that were being used to mark out a distinctively Jewish identity for the early Christians that left Gentile believers out in the cold. "Justification" is read not so much metaphysically, as "getting right with God" spiritually, but sociologically, as being shown to be right with God, adopted into His covenant people.

A quick tour of the New Perspective

I first learned about the New Perspective through the writings of the former Anglican bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright, who I already knew and respected even before that. In his book
Justification (in which he responds to John Piper's critique and makes the case for his understanding of the New Perspective), Wright explains that first-century Jews (such as Jesus, His apostles, and His Pharisaic opponents) were not given to theologizing about what happens after you die or how to be accepted into heaven. Their concept of heaven was not otherworldly, but pointedly this-worldly. The narrative in which they saw themselves was not one in which all people are innately sinful and justly condemned to hell unless they could acquire some kind of salvific righteousness to cover their sins. All of these were concerns of Luther and the late medieval Catholic Church, but not of first-century Judaism.

Instead, their narrative was one in which they, the children of Abraham, had been chosen by God out of all the nations (ethnoi, also translated "Gentiles") to be His people, His treasured possession, given promises of divine blessing and favor and an unending line of Davidic kingship (1 Kings 2:4). This was drastically at odds with Israel's present situation, kingless and instead subjected to rule by one foreign power after another. In a very real sense, even though the Jews were back in the promised land with a rebuilt temple, their exile was still ongoing. The fulfillment of God's promises to them had still not come. So they eagerly hoped to see God prove true to His promises; some took a more passive, fatalistic view (especially the sectarian Essenes) while others (e.g. the Zealots) took a more active approach, seeking to overthrow the Romans and restore Israel's place by violent uprising. The Jews awaited the coming of the Messiah to bring about this fulfillment, though the person of the Messiah was actually not as essential as the promises themselves, however God chose to fulfill them. All clung jealously to "works of Torah", the signs of their election by God (especially circumcision and the law), to show that they belonged not to the ethnoi but were the chosen nation of God who would soon be vindicated (or justified) when He restored them.

What Paul was doing, then, was presenting Jesus was the fulfillment of God's promises, albeit in an unexpected way. (Hence the controversy among the Jews, messianic and non-) But he was not simply answering Israel's cries for national liberation and promised (tangible) blessings with a metaphysical system for salvation from sin and death through individual reconciliation with God. If that was what Jesus had come to inaugurate, He would not have been crucified because no one would have understood Him enough to be angry. Instead, Paul argued, God's promises had been fulfilled not at the end of the age but in the middle of it, and not for all of Israel but for one man, Jesus. What was the meaning of this? In particular, what was the meaning of Jesus' surprising acceptance of Gentiles? Had He forgotten to whom the promises had been made? In response, Paul takes a step back and reminds his readers that before the law had been given, even before circumcision, Abraham found favor with God—by faith. And God's promises to Abraham which he believed never promised some kind of exclusive blessing of Israel and Israel alone. Rather, God told him that "in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." Israel was supposed to be the means by which God's promises and blessing would come to the whole world. Salvation of the Gentiles is not some unexpected development, argues Paul; it was the plan from the start. The law was given as a tutor and guide for Israel, but it was not meant to permanently separate her from the nations; it was supposed to shape her into God's blessing to them.

But because of Israel's misconception that God's promises were for her instead of through her, the promises had gotten "stuck" and did not come to fruition. Israel became part of the larger problem of sin and death rather than its solution. What was needed was a faithful Israelite who would lead the Jews to their intended obedience and bring God's blessing to the whole world. And this is just what Jesus came to do. So, trying to sum up, when Paul talks about justification, he is not referring to the process by which an individual is "made right" with God. Again, this would have been a total non-sequitur for Paul's audience. He is talking about who is part of God's covenant people, and how you can tell. Formerly the Gentiles had been excluded; now they were invited, apart from the law that had been used to exclude them. Paul's Judaizer opponents in Galatians, like many other Jews, believed that the law of Moses was what marked out those who would be vindicated/justified by God; it was not what "made them right" with God but simply how they stayed in His covenant and demonstrated their membership. But, Paul argues, the boundary marker of God's people is not obedience to the law, but faith in Jesus Christ, the one God has chosen to unite His people and fulfill His promises at last.

Later, I also read Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles by Francis Wright, which offered an interesting attempt to move "beyond the New Perspective" (the book's subtitle). Watson very consciously calls attention to the immediate context and specific purpose of Paul's letters; he tries to show what, specifically, Paul was saying, addressing, and doing through them, in response to the tendency to read them as systematic theology. Specifically, he argues that Paul is trying to establish Christianity as a new religion and not simply a new sect of Judaism, hence his rejection of the Jewish law and embrace of the faith of Jesus Christ as its foundation. He is rightly wary of the possibility of overcompensating for the Old Perspective and understanding "justification" only sociologically. Watson does seem to go too far toward portraying Paul as opposing Judaism simply because it is not Christianity (rather than opposing it insofar as it has rejected and excluded itself from God's redemptive plan), but he offers an interesting and valuable counterbalance to Wright.

The value of the New Perspective

My study of the New Perspective on Paul was very helpful for understanding the gospel, more than anything else, for three main reasons:

First, the New Perspective reading of Paul is much more contextually sensitive than the Old—to both Paul's historical context and the literary context of his letters. I think Wright's criticism that the Old Perspective today is a result of reading Scripture with "nineteenth-century eyes and sixteenth-century questions" is accurate. We assume that Paul shared Luther's late medieval concerns with the metaphysical salvation of the soul, along with his heavily Catholic-influenced definitions of "works" and "merit". I began to become suspicious of this, and saw a possible key to resolving the seemingly inescapable tension between the Testaments:

The 'life' promised in Lev 18:5 can't be eschatological life. This wasn't anywhere on Israel's radar. (2014-2-3)

But I repeat the question I asked before: what if Paul is not simply laying down abstract doctrine for the church to believe at all times, but is writing contextually to particular churches facing particular problems? The New Perspective (especially as represented by Watson) takes this question seriously. It recognizes the historical realities of Paul's situation and his purpose in writing his letters and reads them through this lens, not our modern concerns about how one "gets saved". It recognizes that Paul was not writing systematic theology in his letters. Rather than taking people for a ride along the "Romans road" or calling a collection of prooftexts from all over Paul's letters "the gospel", the New Perspective sagely fits them into Paul's larger situation as the apostle to the Gentiles. It makes a serious, honest attempt to find what Paul was actually trying to say and do through his letters, getting beneath how we have interpreted him through the centuries.

Second, as I mentioned in my post on the impersonal gospel, the New Perspective recognizes that justification, and the gospel in general, is not about us. Of course any evangelical will be the first to stress that "it's not about us, it's about God"—but does the theology really show that? The "gospel" as commonly stated is about what God does—for us. It is too often seen, primarily, as a message of personal, metaphysical salvation. We view it as a sign of Jesus' great love for us that we can consider His sacrifice on the cross to have been "for" us, personally. As I expressed on 2013-1-10, I was getting tired of this kind of individualism.

How is the gospel usually stated in evangelicalism? 'God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, so He sent Jesus so that your sin could be forgiven and you can have a personal relationship with Him.' With such a personal understanding of the gospel—as being all about you and God—is it any wonder that so many American Christians have a self-centered faith? (2013-1-10)

I thought about all the historical narrative and Jew/Gentile language as if it were the backdrop to God's continuing mission of saving individual souls—which He doesn't always succeed at! (2014-2-25)

The grand gospel narrative, for Paul, is not metaphysical but historical. (2014-2-25)

The New Perspective, in contrast, doesn't just say that it's all about God, it demonstrates it. By situating Paul's message firmly in its historical context it reveals the historical and cosmic dimensions of salvation as well as the metaphysical, as something grand and epic that doesn't just boil down to you and Jesus. Rather than making the gospel somehow less personal, this change makes it into something superpersonal, that draws me up out of myself and my own life into an unimaginably vast and ongoing historical salvation plan for the whole world that I am called to take part in.

Third, and most obviously, the NPP alleviates most (if not all) of the confusion I'd been having about how the Old and New Testaments fit together. By showing how the Mosaic law was a gift in its original context, how the Jews could be called to obey it without this constituting a call to seek "works righteousness", what place deeds have in the life of Christian faith, and how Paul's opposition of "works of the law" and "faith of Jesus Christ" doesn't mean that the Mosaic law itself is a bad thing but that it had been misused, it effectively cured the confusion I was having about the gospel apparently being a God-given solution to a God-given problem.

---

In such possibilities I saw the seeds of a new, better theology, one that would be an effective answer to the doubts that had sprang up like weeds and would help me to live out the gospel more authentically than I had ever been able to before. But this vision of the gospel seemed like just that—a vision, an ideal, something expressed in airy theology that we can and should strive for but shouldn't expect to see consistently realized in the real Church, work in progress that she is. It seemed like I would have to work out this theology myself essentially from scratch. I didn't know of any church that demonstrated it, certainly not in the Twin Cities.

My Journey, Part 5: The Big Question

This is part 5 of my rebooted series on my journey from Evangelicalism to Eastern Orthodoxy. The full series can be found here:

1	Back to the beginning
2	Cracks appear
3	Questions multiply
4	Questioning the "gospel"
5	The big question
6	A better hermeneutic
7	Explorations in epistemology
7.5	Excursus on oversystematization
8	Back to the gospel
9	The new direction
10	Ecclesiological foundations
11.1	Sola scriptura
11.2	The insufficiency of Scripture
11.25	Addenda on sola scriptura
11.3	Holy Tradition
12	Bridging the cracks
13.1	Orthodoxy and Genesis 1–3
13.2	A Better Atonement (Against Penal Substitution)
13.3	Faith Alone?
13.4	The Colour and the Shape of the Gospel
14	Worshipping with the Church
15	Mary, Saints, Baptism, and Other Odds/Ends
16	Looking Back, Coming Home

As much as I had begun questioning the gospel I'd been taught, all of these questions were still at least somewhat external. Though I was growing tired of hearing them, I didn't believe these teachings were actually true, and I was fine with simply not believing them, or at least seeking to modify them into a better form. At least at first, I expected to still remain an evangelical after doing so. What I was struggling against were caricatures and 'bad habits' of the evangelicalism I saw around me—something that I have more recently been tempted to forget. I 'knew' they weren't true and sought better alternatives; they didn't have to characterize the Church.

But there was one doubt that plagued me singularly, wreaking havoc on my ability to see any kind of coherent biblical narrative or make sense of large swaths of Scripture. It wasn't a disagreement with something I was being taught; in fact, it was an issue I almost never even heard mentioned. It was an apparently inescapable contradiction in what the Bible itself said. And not just something surface-level that could be explained away by an appeal to genre or ancient literary conventions, like the disparate genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, but a fundamental discontinuity in the theology and overarching narrative of the Bible. It could be stated succinctly:

Is the gospel a God-given solution to a God-given problem?

My starting point

It began as an offshoot of my quasi-dispensationalist dissatisfaction with biblical interpretation that seemed to disregard the original context and meaning of a passage in favor of its retrospective, 'Christological' meaning. Applying this, evangelical theology viewed the law in light of Christ: it was given to point out our sin by contrasting it with God's standard of perfection, both to mitigate sin and to convict us of it to point us toward Jesus. (Rom 3:20, Gal 3:19) The law was like a stern babysitter or tutor (Gal 3:24) that imprisoned us in our sins, condemning them but not healing them, until Christ should come and set us free. Everyone's default state is to be sinful, under the law's curse (Gal 3:13). 'Sin' is, in some form, trying to add some kind of law to the all-sufficient salvific work of Christ, trying to be justified apart from Him, which is impossible (Rom 3:20). By faith in Christ, we are justified apart from the law (Rom 3:28) as Christ takes the curse and penalty of the law on Himself and gives us life. (Rom 3:24-25) 

This is, roughly, the view of the law I was given: we start out under law, which screams to us, "Sinner!", and by nature objects of God's righteous wrath (Eph 2:3), but thanks to Christ we are no longer under law but under grace (Rom 6:14), able to either live free from the law's demands or finally fulfill them by His grace, not our own moral effort. My church kind of waffles between the Lutheran and Reformed extremes on the law, but from either perspective it's clear that salvation has always been by grace through faith; we were never expected to save ourselves by obeying the law.

Cracks appear

In the biblical theology class of 2012-2013 I took at my church, I started thinking and wondering more critically about how the Old and New Testaments, or the covenants of law and grace, fit together. Part of this was simply the practical question: how do the precepts of the Mosaic law relate to us as Christians today? We talk about how the purpose of the law is to convict us of sin—so why aren't we letting us convict it of breaking the Sabbath (Exo 20:8-11), not circumcising our children (Gen 17:9-14), eating pork (Lev 11:7-8), or wearing different kinds of fibers (Lev 19:19)? Reflecting on these differences between the Mosaic law and how Christians seem called to live, I (reluctantly) gravitated towards a view that, again, seems shockingly dispensational to me today.

I think each covenant is a way God chooses to relate with His people and how He chooses His people. There is nothing intrinsic or necessary to His nature about either covenant. They are totally arbitrary—there is no ethical concept of 'good' apart from God's commands, and right is right only because He says so. What troubles me isn't that there is no external definition of good apart from God, but that His decrees are not intrinsically based on His nature—either in the old covenant, or presumably the new. Each covenant has its own system of ethics. (2012-9-23) 

But continuing that journal entry, I glimpsed (maybe for the first time) the troubling implications of this view of the covenants. I couldn't see how God could make such a covenant with the Israelites, but so radically change it at the advent of Christ and, in doing so, reveal that the original covenant was deeply inadequate.

The bad news is not the good news. Showing the hopelessness of Israel's condition under the law does not equate to promising Jesus. … So the question becomes, why did God make a doomed, futile covenant with His 'chosen' people? (2012-9-23)

I was beginning to think about this law-grace dynamic historically. The view of the law as existing to show us our hopeless sinful condition and drive us to Jesus as our savior worked on an individual level for modern people—but I was getting tired of thinking of salvation in individual terms. On a national, historical level, it made no sense. The law was given to Israel specifically as a nation, not to all of humanity as individuals. And it was given over a thousand years before Christ came. So what are we to make of the plight of God's 'chosen' people the Israelites, who spent all that time with a flawed, imperfect (Hbr 7:18) covenant that could only point out their sin but offer no solution, with only a distant, poorly-seen hope of the future Messiah (to say nothing of the other nations)? What kind of a gift is this for a good God to give His children? Why did He leave them for so long with only half the gospel—the bad half? I kept thinking about the implications:

The law doesn't 'point to Jesus' because the provision for what to do if/when you break the law is contained in it. If it was put in place to show us our transgressions, then why aren't we repenting of our failure to make the sacrifices, or wear the right clothing—if it is by our failure to uphold the law that we are condemned? (2012-9-24) 

Again: if the Mosaic law really was given to point out our sin, why do we refuse to let so much of it do its convicting work? I began to suspect that we had lost the ability to think about the 'law' in its original context, and could only see it Christocentrically.

I looked for a better way to think about the law and how it related to salvation, later writing:

God didn't give the Israelites, His people, a faulty system to keep them from being saved. The thing that saved them, then like now, was faith. The punishment associated with breaking the law was temporal, not eternal—they broke the covenant, so He punished them as He'd warned from the beginning. They had to earn God's blessings, but not salvation. But at any rate, works were never the basis for man's relationship with God, but faith—faith inextricably tied to obedience. We do not obey God to be 'saved', we obey because he is Lord and we love Him. The gospel does not free us from having to obey God, it frees us to obey Him as He intended. (2012-12-11)

I was beginning to see beyond the simplistic 'faith vs. works' dichotomy, that the law was not simply about "works" that could never save, but that justification was always from faith. Giving the law was not equivalent to commanding them to seek salvation by works. I hinted at a concept I would expand on later, that obeying the law might not be for the sake of earning your salvation by "works" but about enjoying the blessings of pre-existing salvation. My view was kind of similar to the Reformed one (especially that last sentence), still well within the bounds of evangelical orthodoxy. Unfortunately, the biggest problem with this perception of law and grace was the Bible.

Why does God seem to command people to seek life through [the law] if it was never intended? ... God never wanted Pharisees—He never intended for anyone to actually try to be justified by obeying the law. So how do you explain His commanding them to obey it all so they would live? I picture Him saying it with a wink—'By the way, this is all impossible, but just play along.' If God never intended anyone to be saved by the law, why was He so emphatic about obeying it so you might live? Lev 18:5, Deu 6:25... And this after the establishment in Abraham of justification by faith—what were they supposed to think? 'Wait, so if we disobey the law, does that nullify our righteousness by faith?' (2012-12-13) 

It almost seems like God did expect the Israelites to be justified by law. Was the whole system of law a big joke, delivered with a wink, with Christ the punchline that God expected the Israelites to 'get'? 'You will be declared righteous by obeying the whole law (only you can't, this way doesn't work, you just have to believe like Abraham)' (2013-1-12)

If God never intended for people to seek salvation through the law, why did He tell them to and say they could do it? [Deu 30:11-14] If Abraham had already established the precedent of salvation by faith, why was the law then given at all? (2013-1-20)

This view of faith and obedience made much better sense of the Old Testament than saying that God gave the Israelites the law simply so they would fail at it, realize their hopeless sinfulness, and turn to Jesus. I wanted to believe that God had never sent the Jews from Mount Sinai on a hopeless quest for self-justification by works. But standing firmly in opposition to this more optimistic view of the law was the apostle Paul.

The problem of Paul

I was back to my meta-question of "why does the Bible not say what it means?" But it got worse as I realized the tension was not just between the Bible and evangelical teaching, but (as far as I could tell) within the Bible itself. God told the Israelites to seek life and righteousness by keeping His commands.

You shall therefore keep my statutes and my ordinances, by doing which a man shall live: I am the LORD. (Lev 18:5 RSV)

And it will be righteousness for us, if we are careful to do all this commandment before the LORD our God, as he has commanded us.' (Deu 6:25 RSV)

And further, in Moses' final, summary address to the Israelites at the end of Deuteronomy, he tells them that they are able to obey the law today, not after Christ rescues them. There is no hint of the law being impossible; the message simply seems to be that you are able to obey this law, so you should.

"For this commandment which I command you this day is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it. (Deu 30:11-14 RSV)

So then how can Paul say that no one will be justified (or, equivalently, declared righteous) through the law, that no one could ever follow it, and that it simply brings knowledge of sin?

For no human being will be justified in his sight by works of the law, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. (Rom 3:20 RSV)

We ourselves, who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, yet who know that a man is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ, and not by works of the law, because by works of the law shall no one be justified. (Gal 2:15-16 RSV)

Paul's answer to the question "why the law?" seemed to fit the evangelical teaching: it was added "because of transgressions", to consign all things to sin, to confine us, to be our "custodian" (Greek: paidagogos, as in "pedagogy"), to lead us to justification through faith in Christ.

This is what I mean: the law, which came four hundred and thirty years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void. For if the inheritance is by the law, it is no longer by promise; but God gave it to Abraham by a promise. Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, till the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made; and it was ordained by angels through an intermediary. Now an intermediary implies more than one; but God is one. Is the law then against the promises of God? Certainly not; for if a law had been given which could make alive, then righteousness would indeed be by the law. But the scripture consigned all things to sin, that what was promised to faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed. So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; (Gal 3:17-25 RSV)

In Romans 10, Paul mourns his fellow Jews who have not found their righteousness in Jesus, but sought to establish their own righteousness by law—yet he describes this righteousness by citing Leviticus 18:5! In other words, he seems to be saying that God commanded the Jews to seek the righteousness through the law that led them to reject the righteousness of Jesus, for which they are now condemned!

Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened. For, being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law, that every one who has faith may be justified. Moses writes that the man who practices the righteousness which is based on the law shall live by it. [Lev 18:25] (Rom 10:1-5 RSV)

Hebrews' treatment of the law was, if possible, even worse. The law that was supposed to have been given by a perfect God to His chosen people as a treasured gift was called "weak" and "useless", merely a shadow of the grace to come, whose sacrificial system was secretly defective.

On the one hand, a former commandment is set aside because of its weakness and uselessness (for the law made nothing perfect); on the other hand, a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God. (Heb 7:18-19 RSV)

For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices which are continually offered year after year, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered? If the worshipers had once been cleansed, they would no longer have any consciousness of sin. But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sin year after year. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins. (Heb 10:1-4 RSV)

This was my biggest doubt yet. I tried reading those verses every way I could think of, looking for some way to avoid the seemingly inescapable contradiction between them. Paul's view of the law not only seemed incommensurably different from the view depicted in Deuteronomy, it turned salvation history into a farce. At worst, the law seemed to be something that Jesus saves us from; at best, it was a stopgap measure, a deliberately ineffectual solution to the problem of sin which Jesus would later solve in earnest. Neither view made any sense in light of the fact that the law was itself given by God, supposedly for a redemptive purpose. I kept looking for ways to make sense of this tension, to coherently tie together the old and new covenants, but each time I came up with an idea, another unaccountably strange verse from Paul would jump out at me and shoot it down. That darned Paul!

Accepting doubt

By early 2013, my faith was in shambles as as result of all of these doubts about both what the Bible said and the questions my biblical theology class was raising. What really didn't help matters was that, at first, I was reluctant to address my growing doubts. I saw it as allowing my intellect to control and lead my relationship with God, which I knew was bad. Early in the fall semester, still wrestling with my doubts about God's goodness, I journaled:

I thought the answer was just to trust God more, in spite of my doubt, to not let it come between us. But that doesn't mean I set it aside and let it grow. It means I deal with it to know God better. But what else was I supposed to conclude from all the times I heard Christianity contrasted with an 'intellectual assent'? It led me to deny a (big) part of who I am. I didn't rigorously answer these doubts before because I thought having complete answers was unimportant. (2012-9-26)

What Don Miller's railing against Christianity as 'lists and formulas' seems to say, my questions don't matter, I just have to 'know God relationally'. But suspecting someone to be a liar puts a damper on a relationship. (2012-10-2)

I realized that I couldn't simply marginalize my intellect and "trust Jesus" instead, or put my relationship with Him ahead of "having all the answers", as I viewed my questioning quest. These things couldn't be set in opposition to each other without denying a vital part of who and why God had made me to be. My doubts weren't being actively suppressed, but it did feel like they were being swept aside or relativized.

In the tradition I'm from, questions aren't so much fearfully suppressed as they are buried under 'the gospel' or a wash of platitudes. (2013-1-2)

Not long after this I published my post on the denial of doubt, which expanded on an idea I had had on the value of doubt a few months ago:

This is why skepticism is needed—it is so easy to believe that my ineptitude in missions in a serious problem that must be repented of, that I am not properly applying the great commission to my life, to get swept up in the evangelical tide and accept it 'on faith' as a given, labeling your doubts as sin. Because God calls us to put on faith—in what?—and cast off doubt. If the church stops questioning and doubting itself, it veers off into catastrophe. (2012-11-2)

So I held onto my doubt, rather than simply 'laying it down' for the sake of a shallow 'faith' that shied from tough questions. My 'faith' (actually my ability to make rational sense of Christian theology) reached its nadir in late January 2013. As I described in my post on sola scriptura, I finally admitted to God what I had been fervently denying for so long: "Your Word has contradictions in it. What do I do now?" It was then that I think I realized what faith truly was.

I am unwilling to reject God even as my mind is telling me to do so and doubting. So my intellect and will are distinct after all. If God really is faithful, it doesn't matter whether I believe that He is. The 'strength' of my belief is secondary—that is, my certainty/level of understanding. (2013-1-27)

For the first time, I actually saw that my faith was different from my intellectual conception of Christianity. The latter was utterly defeated, yet somehow I still had faith. I still wanted to trust and believe in God. Even when He made absolutely no sense to me and I could see no reason to trust Him, I continued to trust Him to bring me light and restore order in my troubled soul. The day after, I reflected:

I think God is separating my faith/will and intellect from each other. I now have to learn how to have faith that isn't coterminous with rational thought. (2013-1-28) 

In a post on my big doubt last February, I came to some preliminary conclusions about the relationship between the covenants. I tried to free the Mosaic law from the straitjacket our exclusive focus on its Christocentric meaning had become and situate it in its ancient Near Eastern context. I tentatively concluded that the context in which the law was viewed and the way it was treated had changed from when it was initially given to the first century AD. I was still a long way from figuring out the questions raised by Paul, but my admission about the Bible and discovery of a faith that wasn't in thrall to reason had freed me to begin to seek a new, better way to approach Scripture.

Comparative Study and Ancient Near Eastern Theology

The following is a research paper I wrote for my latest course, "The Bible in its World".

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Introduction to Comparative Study

The advent of archaeological and cultural study of the ancient Near East (ANE) since the mid-nineteenth century has been a double-edged sword for Christian thought. The discovery through comparative study of extensive parallels between the Hebrew Old Testament and contemporary ANE cultures has led some to point to the similarities as evidence of the Bible's "merely human" status, while others emphasize the differences to defend its inspiration. In truth, these discoveries reveal many fascinating similarities and differences; in their differences they show how the Old Testament, though thoroughly situated in its cultural backdrop, steps beyond it to reveal a God who is simultaneously grander and more intimate than the gods of Israel's neighbors. But especially in their similarities they also carry implications for our hermeneutics which are worth considering.

The comparative study of ANE cultures began with the excavation of the library of the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal in ancient Ninevah, when thousands of clay tablets with writing were discovered. (Enns 23) Written in Akkadian (the language of ancient Assyria and Babylon), the tablets contained texts on law, economics, and history, as well as private letters (Enns 25), but of present interest were the religious writings. These writings were similar to parts of the Old Testament; they included a creation story and a flood story with some parallels with the corresponding accounts in Genesis. Since then, we have collected many more ancient Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian writings, which reveal a portrait of ANE religion that is at once quite different from and intriguingly similar to the religion presented in the Bible. Theology is almost everywhere in ANE literature because, unlike us, ancient people had no concept of a natural/supernatural divide. Rather, "every aspect of what we call the natural world was associated with some deity in the ancient Near East. The result is that the term 'natural world' would be meaningless or nonsensical to them. There was nothing about the world that was natural...everything was imbued with the supernatural (another artificial category)." (Walton1 97)

A Summary of Ancient Near Eastern Theological Writings

The deepest parallels with the Old Testament are found in Sumerian and, later, Akkadian literature, which is not too surprising since, as Enns rightly points out, the family of Abraham, the first Hebrew patriarch, was originally from Babylon and shared in the Babylonian religion (see Gen 11:26-32, Josh 24:2). (Enns 52-53) One of the most well-known and frequently-cited Akkadian writings is a creation story, Enuma Elish (the first line of the myth, which translates to "When on high..."), which is dated to the Old Babylonian period, the early second millennium B.C. (Pritchard 60) It opens with a scene of primordial chaos: "When on high the heaven had not been named/Firm ground below had not been called by name.../When no gods whatever had been brought into being/Uncalled by name, their destinies undetermined..." Only Apsu, Mummu, and Tiamat, representing the intermingled primordial waters of chaos, exist, and they proceed to give birth to gods, who in turn give birth to more gods.

It is worth mentioning at this point that the gods were coterminous with entities or functions in the visible world, so besides a pantheon, the world was also being created and set in order. "The cosmic deities were manifest in that element of the cosmos with which they were associated, and had some jurisdiction there. ... Hence cosmogony (cosmic origin), cosmology, theogony, and theology are all inextricably intertwined." (Walton1 97)

At any rate, the primordial gods are annoyed by the noise and restlessness of their divine offspring and plot to destroy them. "With the birth of the gods from chaos, a new principle—movement, activity—has come into the world. The new beings contrast sharply with the forces of chaos that stand for rest and inactivity." (Frankfort 173) The new gods are alarmed when they hear of this, until the wise god Ea/Enki comes forward with a plan. Using a magic spell, he kills Apsu and traps Mummu with a string through his nose. Tiamat plans to retaliate against the gods with the forces of chaos and her second husband, Kingu. After Ea fails to defeat her, the gods convene and appoint Ea's son Marduk as their leader and champion; he defeats the forces of chaos, slays Tiamat, and splits the halves of her body into the sky and the earth. Following this, Marduk organizes the stars and calendar and, to ease the toilsome labor of the gods, creates mankind to serve them. The other gods honor Marduk and give him fifty names representing different aspects of his being.

Atrahasis, though much more fragmentary than Enuma Elish in its preservation, also shows numerous parallels with Genesis, or more specifically the flood narrative in Genesis 6-9. The myth begins "when the gods were humans", or when gods and men had not been separated. After separating humanity out in order to assist in their toilsome labor, the gods decide to wipe them out—not for their sins, but because they are becoming too numerous and noisy, preventing the gods from sleeping. They attempt to destroy mankind with a variety of means, and eventually a flood, but one man, titled Atrahasis ("Exceeding Wise") (Pritchard 104), hears of their plans and prays to Ea/Enki for deliverance. Ea instructs him to build an ark on which to bring his family and the animals, and so mankind is delivered.

There are quite a few older Sumerian myths, which involve many of the same gods as the Akkadian ones (and serve as their precursors). In Enki and Ninhursag, we are introduced to the paradise of Dilmun, which is introduced as being "pure" and "clean", along with further descriptions that seem to evoke Biblical parallels of the redeemed creation: "The lion kills not/The wolf snatches not the lamb..." (Pritchard 38) But here they actually express a problem: "animals and people were incognizant of how they were to function." (Walton1 45) So we also hear that "the raven utters no cries", "The dove droops not its head", "Its old man says 'I am not an old man'", and other incongruities that seem less positive. So Enki brings fresh water to the island to establish a city there. Enki proceeds to plant seeds and father more gods which are all given functions, including one who is to be the lord of Dilmun. Sumerian mythology also has The Deluge, another tale of a family being delivered through a flood on a boat, and several myths about the hero Gilgamesh, which are continued into Akkadian literature.

Egyptian mythology, though less similar to the Old Testament than that of Akkadia, could certainly have made a mark on it given the time the Israelites spent in Egypt. In contrast to Mesopotamian thought, which (its people dependent on the instability of the weather and two great rivers for survival) was more resigned in its attitudes toward the gods (Frankfort 127), Egypt was protected on all sides by sea and desert and lived off the reliable rhythms of the Nile and the sun.

This reliability gave rise to a civilization more impressed by human success, which was thought to carry over into the next life. "There was a youthful and self-reliant arrogance, because there had been no setbacks. Man was enough in himself. The gods? Yes, they were off there somewhere, and they had made this good world, to be sure; but the world was good because man was himself master, without need for the gods." (Frankfort 96) This was especially true in the Old Kingdom, the first age of Egyptian dominance, when the Pyramids were constructed. After its collapse swept away these values, two great changes came to Egyptian values: "a decline in the emphasis on position and material property as being the good of this life, with a corresponding shift of emphasis to proper social action as being the good." (Frankfort 106-106) People sought immortality through the mark they made in the world and on others, rather than an impressive monument. After the fall of the Middle Kingdom and the transition to the New Kingdom/Egyptian empire, the "good life" in Egypt became more communal, conforming to societal norms, fatalistic, and focused on the afterlife rather than this world.

The Egyptians, like the Mesopotamians, saw their civilization as a cosmic state, governed and ruled by the gods—especially the Pharaoh, "the land's representative among the gods". (Frankfort 64) They were the center of the universe, the norm against which all other peoples were judged. (Frankfort 37-38) Like the Mesopotamians, they saw their gods as humanlike and of the same basic substance as humans, just grander and more powerful. The most basic Egyptian creation myth had the self-created creator god Atum rising from the waters of chaos on a primeval hillock (which was evoked in the shape of the pyramids), from which he created the other gods representing the cosmos. Atum is also named as Re (the sun god) and Nun, the waters themselves, demonstrating how the divisions between gods were frequently fuzzy in Egyptian mythology.

One of the most interesting ANE creation accounts is found in the Memphite Theology. It dates to the beginning of Egyptian history, when they had made the capital of the upper and lower kingdoms at Memphis. This meant that Ptah, the god of Memphis, had become the ruling god, his city the center of the universe. Evoking the early creation story, Ptah is associated with Nun, the primordial waters from which Atum emerged; therefore, Ptah is the true progenitor of the other gods. What happens next is interesting: the heart and the tongue are presented as the instruments by which Ptah gave life to the other gods, and by controlling every other member of the body, they demonstrate that Ptah (as the creative agents heart and tongue) is still active "in everything that lives". (Pritchard 5) It's a surprisingly philosophical take on creation reminiscent of God speaking creation into being in Genesis, and also interesting in how it includes the earlier creation story.

Drawing Comparisons

It goes without saying that in many ways related to its religious thought Israel was quite different from, even unique among, its neighbors. One of the most obvious differences, which is frequently mentioned in comparative study on all levels, is Hebrew monotheism vs. the general rule of polytheism in the surrounding pagan nations. This difference ran deeper than simply believing in one or multiple deities; in ANE paganism, the whole phenomenal world was a multiply-personified "Thou"  rather than an "It", saturated with the divine. This was true for both the Egyptians (Frankfort 41) and the Mesopotamians (Frankfort 130). In contrast the Hebrews believed in a single God who created and ruled the whole world (Psa 24:1), but was not personified or contained in any part of it, and in fact the second commandment prohibited any physical representations of the Lord. The first two chapters of Amos show how, unlike pagan deities who ruled over individual cities in piecemeal fashion, the Lord exercised His will and passed judgment over all peoples (even those who were thought to be under other gods). "The 'national god' concept is for Israel broken and discarded." (Frankfort 226)

But at the same time, this difference shouldn't be overstated. A few times in the Old Testament a "divine council" is mentioned (see Psalms 29, 82, 89). In 1 Kings 22 we see the council in deliberation, and it may also be the "we" of Isaiah 6:8 or Genesis 1:26; 3:22; 11:7. This council is likely related to the divine assembly by which, the Mesopotamians believed, the gods governed the universe similarly to how they governed their city-states. "The general assembly in the cosmic state was therefore an assembly of gods. ...the highest authority in the universe. (Frankfort 136)

Of course the parallel is not exact—God is clearly supreme in His council, and in Genesis He enacts its decisions personally—but in light of the implication in Isaiah 40:14 that God consulted no one in the creation, this concept of the divine council, or "monotheism lite", seems like an idea that was not revealed to Israel but brought into their religion as background knowledge and slowly abandoned, or at least modified. "The thinking about it is adjusted in the Bible so that it is in line with the revelation about the nature of God." (Walton1 95) In other words, for God's purposes of revelation it doesn't seem as important for God to make clear whether or not He keeps a divine council as it is for Him to teach about Himself by taking the Israelites' preexisting idea of a divine assembly and teaching about Himself by modifying it. This is a pattern that we will see in other parallels.

Perhaps even more significant than the difference in the number of deities between Israel and its peers was the difference in the nature of deity. This was perhaps its biggest break from its ANE background, which saw the gods as humanlike. "The Egyptian gods were very human, with human weaknesses and varying moods." (Frankfort 67) They displayed inconsistencies in personality and function; they had limitations; they could suffer injury and die. The Mesopotamians took this even further; "the gods not infrequently run up against their own established ordinances" (von Soden 185), so that one god would face the judgment of the divine assembly (which coincided with the god's city being destroyed). The gods had a second home in the temples, where their effigies ate like normal humans (fed by the priests). (von Soden 188) People could take on the identities of the gods to reenact cosmic drama. (Frankfort 199-200) And the gods were essentially consubstantial with their functions in the phenomenal world, where they labored to carry out their assigned functions (me) in the sustenance of the universe. In Atrahasis, the gods created humans to relieve them of the toilsome work involved with keeping the cosmos running.

The contrasts with the God of the Old Testament here are obvious. The Lord is transcendent, ruling the created world but not truly residing in it (though His presence was believed to dwell especially in the Most Holy Place). In Genesis 1, no mention is made of God's origin, and He creates with a word rather than procreation or any other physical means, a process which is only echoed in the Memphite theology. Whereas Egyptian thought saw humans and deities as being consubstantial, different only by degree, the Lord made clear that He was utterly unlike His people: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isa 55:8-9 ESV) Again, "All the nations are as nothing before him, they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness. To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him?" (Isa 40:17-18) The pagan gods of the ANE were viewed as preeminent within the world, but the Lord was viewed as preeminent above the world.

Besides being singular and transcendent, one other group of differences I see regarding the beliefs of Israel and its ancient neighbors regarded how God (or the gods) was thought to interact with His people. Throughout the Old Testament God is shown taking initiative and speaking to people, either directly or later through prophets. Here was a God who clearly had a will and a plan for people, and who was quite upfront in communicating to them when He wanted. "For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as the Lord our God is to us, whenever we call upon him?" (Deu 4:7) Other ANE gods were thought to be capricious, their wills mysterious and largely unknowable, except in part, through various means of divination (which is expressly proscribed in the Mosaic law—see Lev 19:26,31; Deu 18:10-12). Jacobsen records an interesting case about a Mesopotamian king who painstakingly figured out whether and how to build a temple to his god via dream interpretation and the consultation of multiple gods. (Frankfort 189-190)

Besides the contrasts in the nature of divine revelation, the content also tended to be different. Prophecy in the ANE served to legitimize the reign of the king or advise him; "in contrast to Israel ethical demands were scarcely uttered in the form of threatening speeches." (von Soden 196) For example, Enuma Elish, in the form we have it today, appears to have had the character of Enlil changed to Marduk, the god of Babylon, to explain Babylon's rise as the capital of the empire. Similarly in Egypt, myths served to explain or legitimize the way things were. Hebrew prophecy was often more anti-establishment because the establishment (the monarchy or temple worship) was part of the problem. You simply don't see anything like the prophetic polemics—God warning and accusing His people—of the OT in other ANE literature. More generally, there is little sense of an ongoing cosmic story or of the gods having a larger "plan" for their people; people simply sought the favor of the gods to uphold the cosmic order and avoid or mollify their immediate displeasure.

But to dwell on these similarities too long would be to give an impression that I want to avoid, that the Old Testament is quite different than contemporary literature, and this because of its divine inspiration. Many surface-level differences between Israel and its neighbors are based on deeper similarities, ways that they "breathe the same air" (Enns 27). I will describe a few of them more shortly:

• Cosmology. Israel and its peers all held roughly the same view of the layout of the cosmos, which was as standard then as the Big Bang Theory is today. As Walton explains, this view was based on simple observation and reasoning, from which ancient peoples got the idea of the earth being a flat disc, the sky being a solid dome to hold up rain water, mountains at the edge of the world holding up the dome, water under the earth with pillars supporting the solid land, and so on. (Walton2 27-28) This same cosmos is depicted in Biblical language that we usually consider "poetic" or "phenomenological" but is in fact more literal, like Gen 7:11, Job 38:4-38, or Amos 9:6.
• Functional ontology. This is one of the biggest ways in which the thinking of ANE peoples differed from ours. As modern people, we think with a material ontology—"the belief that something exists by virtue of its physical properties and its ability to be experienced by the senses." (Walton2 22) So when we read that "God created the heavens and the earth", for instance, we think about this creation in material terms, which makes it hard for us to understand how ancient people thought about existence in a different, functional way. "In the ancient world something came into existence when is was separated out in a distinct entity, given a function, and given a name." (Walton1 88) We see this quite clearly, among many places, in the beginnings of Enuma Elish or Enki and Ninhursag, which describe the pre-creation state as unnamed and nonfunctional. Likewise, in Genesis we don't see God creating things ex nihilo (as is commonly supposed) so much as separating light from dark, water from water, water from earth, and then giving these things names and functions.
• Afterlife. The Ancient Hebrews had much less of a developed view of what lay after death than the later second temple Jews, and the view they did have was most similar to that of their eastern neighbors. Mesopotamians saw the underworld as a "shadow existence" (von Soden 201); one could only live on through his or her children, or perhaps through deeds performed in life. Likewise the Hebrew concept of Sheol, somewhat equivalent with "death" or "the grave", was thought to be under the earth (Amos 9:2), a place of decay (Isa 14:9-11) and forgetfulness (Psa 6:5) where people are separated from God after death. Particularly, it is at least heavily implied to be the destination of everyone (Ecc 3:20), not just the wicked, as in Mesopotamia; there is no concept of a final judgment or a separate destination for the righteous.
• "The good life" as a reward for obedience. "In [Mesopotamia,] a civilization that sees the whole universe as a state, obedience must necessarily stand out as a prime virtue." (Frankfort 202) Man was created to be the servant of the gods, and if he is a good servant, he will be rewarded like any other, with "earthly success...the highest values in Mesopotamian life: health and long life, honored standing in the community, many sons, wealth." (Frankfort 205) Similarly, at the end of the reiteration of the Mosaic covenant in Deuteronomy 27-28 and 30, the Lord's blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience are (extensively) spelled out in largely material terms (see especially 28:3-6,16-19). If there is no otherworldly reward to look forward to, then it stands to reason that any rewards for obedience will have to be given in this lifetime.
• The righteous sufferer. But, of course, this formula does not always hold. The author of Ecclesiastes describes the all-too-common situation: "There is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man who prolongs his life in his evildoing." (7:15) Or, as it is more recently asked, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" Of course the Old Testament has the book of Job which addresses this question in detail through extensive dialogues, ending with Job humbly submitting to God's will after being shown the lord's majesty and his own smallness. The Mesopotamian work whose title is translated "I will praise the lord of wisdom" (that is, Marduk) portrays essentially the same situation, and comes to a similar conclusion: "The ways of the gods may seem inexplicable to man, but that is because man lacks the deeper understanding which actuates the gods. And though man may be plunged into the deepest despair, the gods do not abandon him; he shall and must trust to [sic] their mercy and goodness." (Frankfort 216)

One other similarity which I have found especially thought-provoking is the often-cited problem of "divine violence". The warfare against the native Canaanites, which often seems to border on genocide (see Josh 10-11) is clearly stated to be by divine order (see Josh 9:24). There are plenty of examples of this elsewhere in the Bible, such as the tenth plague in Egypt (Exo 11:1-12:30), the celebrated destruction of Pharaoh's army in the Red Sea (Exo 14-15), Jael's slaying of Sisera in Judges 4, which earned her the title "most blessed of women" (5:24), or the imprecation against the Babylonians in Psalm 137:9: "Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!"

This portrayal clashes not just with our modern sensibilities, but also with the depiction of God we see through Jesus, who explicitly tells us to be peacemakers (Matt 5:9), to love our enemies and not to resist the evildoer (Matt 5:38-48), and that "all who take the sword will perish by the sword." (Matt 26:52) And yet "whoever has seen me has seen the Father"! (Jhn 14:9) In the New Testament, God seems much less tribalistic and more interested in other nations, beyond simply using Israel to punish them, so that John sees "a great multitude...from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages" (Rev 7:9) in his vision of the coming kingdom. This revelation of God as interested in every nation doesn't seem to have really gotten into peoples' heads in the Old Testament, or indeed until after Christ (see the amazement in Acts 11:18).

This tension is only increased as we realize how Israel was resembling its Mesopotamian neighbors (though told not to follow their abominable practices, Deu 18:9-14), who had a "tendency to view what was, in purely human terms, a naked conflict of force as a legal procedure in the state of the gods, as an execution of a divine verdict". (Frankfort 195) For example, in the Moabite inscription, the Moabite king Mesha (see 2 Kgs 3:4) describes how his god Chemosh told him to take Nebo from Israel, mentioning how Chemosh "drove [the king of Israel] out before me" (Pritchard 320). (See Deu 11:23)

Applications of Comparative Study

What kind of implications can we draw from this comparative study? I can count at least three, two helpful and one more difficult (or, at least, thought-provoking). Says Enns, "a contemporary evangelical doctrine of Scripture must account for the Old Testament as an ancient Near Eastern phenomenon by going beyond the mere observation of that fact to allowing that fact to affect how we think about Scripture." (Enns 67) I hope to begin to do this in the remainder of this paper.

First, to state the obvious, comparative study can be a great aid to exegesis for those who believe the true meaning of Scripture is found in the "literal" sense: the meaning the author intended to convey to his original audience. Our different modern context can lead us to read Biblical texts in ways that may seem straightforward or "commonsense" to us, yet bear little resemblance to the authorial intent. Simply translating the text from one language to another is not enough; the challenge of hermeneutics is to translate the context from one culture to another. Comparative study has the potential to reshape how we read the creation and flood stories in Genesis, the Mosaic law, books of history, and more. (Chapter 2 of Inspiration and Incarnation addresses this opportunity in detail)

Second, on a more holistic level, comparative study helps us to glimpse the human side of Scripture, which is easily forgotten in a strictly modern context, swept away in claims about "divine inspiration". This is the most helpful point I've read from Peter Enns: the Bible is both divinely inspired and thoroughly human, like Jesus; "Christ's incarnation is analogous to Scripture's 'incarnation'." (Enns 18) The Bible's human nature doesn't threaten or lessen its inspiration any more than Jesus' divinity was diminished by His putting on flesh. Enns calls this the "incarnational analogy". Reading the Bible incarnationally means seeing it as inspired truth situated in a particular time, place, and culture, all of which shape the way this truth is expressed or simply meant.

Third, the apparent contradictions or intrabiblical diversity in some of the areas compared (especially regarding the "divine council", afterlife, definition of "the good life" and divine violence) should raise questions about how we read Scripture. Does God really consult a council of divine beings? Do people go to Sheol, heaven, or somewhere else when they die? The Bible doesn't seem to give a single answer on these and other questions as we might expect. But by looking below the surface of diverse biblical texts to find what was meant to their original audiences rather than what was simply said, we gain clues to fitting them into the great story that God has told in the world, and continues to tell.

The comparative study of the Old Testament and contemporary ANE nations has spurred considerable change in how even more conservative Christians read their Bibles, and it will probably continue to do so well into the future. It has been something of a Pandora's box, at once enlightening and challenging us by showing us how Israel's understanding of its God was (and was not) different from its neighbors. This comparison, while not threatening the inspiration of Scripture, forces us to think about how it is inspired. And it is a mirror, showing us our own modern preunderstandings by contrast with those of the Biblical authors. This is a paradox of the Christian life I have been realizing: we have been blessed to know the Truth, yet in this life we are constantly questioning the nature of the truth we think we know. Our knowledge of biblical truth is truly knowledge only if it leads us to greater knowledge and love of our God. The apostle couldn't have said it better: "If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God." (1 Cor 8:2-3)