At the recent (virtual) annual conference of the Christian Medical and Dental Fellowship of Australia the "holy" scribblers made presentations based on their respective chapters in our recent book, To Whom Shall We Go: Faith Responses in Times of Crisis. All of our presentations are available on vimeo.
My slides are here. A video of my presentation is here.
What was the central message of Jesus? The word gospel means "good news". What is this good news? In the Gospel according to Luke, Jesus began his public ministry in the following manner (chapter 4).
16 And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. 17 And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”
20 And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21 And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
I have often wondered about how this passage should be interpreted. In particular, who are the poor, captives, blind, and oppressed? Is this literal (i.e. material) and/or spiritual? For example, is Jesus only concerned with those who are "poor in spirit", enslaved to their sin, and captive to their sin,...?
This fourth chapter of Luke gets even more puzzling because of the reaction of his audience. At first, they are enthused and praise him. But, Jesus challenges them by recounting two incidents from the history of Israel. Their praise turns to anger and they try to kill him! Why?
Image is from here.
These issues are addressed in the last two chapters of A New Heaven and A New Earth: Reclaiming a Biblical Eschatology by Richard Middleton. These chapters are a beautiful culmination of the arguments in the previous chapters. Here is a brief summary of Middleton on "The good news at Nazareth." (chapter 11)
The passage from Isaiah that Jesus reads is Isaiah 61:1-2.
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
2 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;
Middleton points out that the text in Luke (who wrote in Greek and used the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament) is not identical to the text above (translated to English from the original Hebrew text). An important but subtle difference is that Luke's account adds the line "to set at liberty those who are oppressed", which is found in Isaiah 58:6. It is helpful to look at that verse in its context, where God tells Isaiah what to tell his chosen people, Israel, what real worship is.
Yet they seek me daily and delight to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that did righteousness
and did not forsake the judgment of their God;
they ask of me righteous judgments;
they delight to draw near to God.
"Why have we fasted," they say, "and you see it not?"
"Why have we humbled ourselves, and you take no knowledge of it?"
Behold, in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure,and oppress all your workers.4Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fightand to hit with a wicked fist.Fasting like yours this daywill not make your voice to be heard on high.5Is such the fast that I choose,a day for a person to humble himself?Is it to bow down his head like a reed,and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him?Will you call this a fast,and a day acceptable to the Lord?
“Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover him,
and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?
Then shall your light break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up speedily;
your righteousness shall go before you;
the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.
This is clearly saying that real worship involves not just fasting and praying but also being practically concerned for and involved with the hungry, naked, homeless, and oppressed. This makes it hard to take a purely spiritual interpretation of Jesus's pronouncement of the nature of the Kingdom of God. In passing, I note how this all aligns with the judgement of the sheep and goats in Matthew 25. On the other hand, this does not rule out that there is a important spiritual dimension to Jesus mission. Elsewhere he talked about how people were spiritually blind and slaves to sin.
Middleton also puts this "Nazareth manifesto" in the context of the whole creation-fall-redemption-renewal narrative of the whole Bible. He discusses at length how "the year of the Lord's favour" is a reference to the Sabbath year and the year of Jubilee commanded in Leviticus 25. Both years are built around three inter-related ethical practices. The first is that those who were sold into slavery due to indebtedness were to be released. Second, the land is to have a rest, during which time the poor will be able to share in whatever the land produces. Third, in the Jubilee year, there is an economic reset and all land is to be returned to its original owners. "These three practices together embody and an ideal of the periodic breaking of the cycle of poverty and bondage in ancient Israel, They constitute a communal practice, an ethic of redemptive living." In different words, this would make the modern trend of inequality, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer", impossible.
A later post may discuss why the people in the synagogue quickly turned Jesus from a hometown hero to a local villain. They were angry because he told them that the "good news" was also meant for "the other"; those they looked down upon or were their historical enemies.
The last two posts reflected on the nature of the logos and the cosmos. I now consider how are the logos and cosmos to be related.
What is the relationship between Word and World? More specifically what is the relationship between theology and the sciences? How are cosmos and logos in a university to be related? Going back to Plato there are rich and subtle philosophical issues concerning ontology [what is real] and epistemology [what is true] that are still being explored and debated in universities. Could a Christian perspective be even richer?
A place to begin is to acknowledge the central role of hermeneutics (how we read and interpret a text), not just the text of the Bible, but also how we “read” the world in which we live. To access the living Word requires engaging the text of the Bible in a manner that uses a “hermeneutical circle (or spiral)”, whereby a specific part of the text is related to its context (chapter, book, whole Bible) in an iterative manner that goes from the part to the whole and back to the whole. Any theology should also be constructed in an iterative interaction with the text. Similarly, a local context (cultural, social, political, economic, linguistic, religious) has to be “read”; this requires observation, recording, analysis, and interpretation. Too often this is done in an intuitive manner without reflection or a basis in evidence. However, this “reading” can be done in a more systematic and reflective manner, drawing from methods in the social sciences. The local context must also be related to the global context and one needs to discern the relationship between the particularity of the local context and universals that describe many contexts.
When relating Word and world things become more complicated, challenging, and rich because these two hermeneutical practices are intertwined, perhaps more than we would like to admit. Again, perhaps the best approach is iterative, whereby both “readings” are done in parallel and allowed to influence one another in a constructive manner. Indeed, Peter Harrison has argued in detail that modern science arose in seventeenth-century Europe because the Protestant Reformation led to new ways of reading the Bible (in particular, a shift from the allegorical to the literal) that in turn led to new ways of “reading” the “book” of nature.
A key issue for the dialogue of logos and cosmos is the tension inherent in the Bible’s picture of the world. The cosmos is God’s creation, made through the logos (John 1:1). Christians need discernment as they live with a tension between the goodness of the creation and the fallen, rebellious nature of the world. What do we affirm and enjoy about the world? What do we deny or critique or resist or seek to redeem? Being made in the image of God, we have an incredible ability to read, analyse, and understand both the Word and the world. Yet, both these processes of observation and understanding are also corrupted by our sinful and rebellious nature. Sometimes we see what we want to see and don’t see what we don’t want to see. Pride, finitude, and self-deception diminish our understanding.
The good-bad tension is present in universities. Some of the logos about the cosmos that is presented to students and "discovered" by researchers reflect God’s truth about His amazing world and some of this knowledge reflects Kingdom values (truth, justice, human dignity, reconciliation, ...). On the other hand, some of this so-called knowledge is false, hostile to God, or does violence to Kingdom values. Universities grew out of medieval monasteries and were centred around theology until the last century. In the monasteries, scholarship was integrated with worship, service, communal life, and virtue. Today universities aspire to be global corporations with multi-billion-dollar budgets. In the process of this transformation from God-centred institutions to powerful businesses, there is less of the good and more of the bad.
For IFES some guidance comes from John Stott. In his book, The Contemporary Christian: An urgent plea for double listening, he discusses listening to the world and to the Word.
How can we develop a Christian mind, which is both shaped by the truths of historic, biblical Christianity, and acquainted with the realities of the contemporary world? How can we relate the Word to the world, understanding the world in the light of the Word, and even understanding the Word in the light of the world? We have to begin with a double refusal. We refuse to become either so absorbed in the Word, that we escape into it and fail to let it confront the world, or so absorbed in the world, that we conform to it and fail to subject it to the judgement of the Word. Escapism and conformity are opposite mistakes, but neither is a Christian option.
In place of this double refusal we are called to double listening, listening both to the Word and to the world. ... We listen to the Word with humble reverence, anxious to understand it, and resolved to believe and obey what we come to understand. We listen to the world with critical alertness, anxious to understand it too, and resolved not necessarily to believe and obey it, but to sympathise with it and to seek grace to discover how the gospel relates to it.
This is the origin of the title of the IFES journal, Word and World: Theological Conversations about the world students live in. How might we go about relating logos and cosmos? John Stott also says the framework of creation-fall-redemption-renewal is helpful for developing Christian thinking on a wide range of issues.
Finally, I come back to the role of local context. There is not one world, but many worlds. The beauty and potential of God’s multi-faceted creation can be seen in the diversity of human cultures and local contexts. Tragically, this diversity also reflects the creativity of human rebellion and sin.
Most discussions about science and theology are dominated by academics embedded in elite Western universities and seminaries. The discussions focus on issues associated with biological evolution, Big Bang cosmology, quantum physics, and human consciousness. Social sciences receive scant attention. It is contentious whether these Western discussions are helpful or relevant to other contexts, particularly in the Majority World.
One model for the logos-cosmos dialogue is provided by the Ph.D. program in Contextual Theology at Asian Theological Seminary in Manilla. Later I may discuss in more detail a few key elements of the philosophy of the program. These include a focus “on empowering local faith communities on empowering the faith community by giving it a language and praxis in its formation, growth, and service in the setting/s in which it finds itself”, bringing the local into dialogue with the global, and inter-disciplinarity.
In the previous post, I reflected on the richness of the concept of the logos, a word that is at the heart of what universities should be about and central to Christian theology. In this post, I consider the word cosmos which is used extensively in the New Testament. In the third post, I will discuss ways to relate the logos (Word) and the cosmos (world).
According to the Wikipedia entry on cosmos,
The philosopher Pythagoras first used the term cosmos (κόσμος) for the order of the universe. The term became part of modern language in the 19th century when geographer–polymath Alexander von Humboldt resurrected the use of the word from the ancient Greek, assigned it to his five-volume treatise, Kosmos, which influenced modern and somewhat holistic perception of the universe as one interacting entity.
Humboldt University of Berlin is considered to be the model for modern research universities. It is named after Alexander Humboldt and his older brother, Wilhelm, who was its founder.
The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. (John 1:9-10)For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (3:16)I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. (17:14-18)Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world – the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life – comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives for ever. (1 John 2:15-17)Then the seventh angel sounded; and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, " The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ; and He will reign forever and ever." (Revelation 11:15)
The Greek word kosmos means by derivation 'the ordered world'. It is used in the New Testament, but not in LXX [the Septuagint], sometimes for what we should call the 'universe', the created world, described in the Old Testament as 'all things' or 'heaven and earth' (Acts 17:2). The 'world' in this sense was made by the Word (John 1:10); …But, because mankind is the most important part of the universe, the word kosmos is more often used in the limited sense of human beings, being a synonym for hē oikoumenē gė, 'the inhabited earth', also translated in the New Testament by 'world'. It is into this 'world' that men are born, and in it they live till they die (John 26: 21). It was all the kingdoms of this world that the devil offered to give to Christ if He would worship him (Matthew 4:8,9). It was this world, the world of men and women of flesh and blood, that God loved (John 3:16).It is, however, an axiom of the Bible that this world of human beings, the climax of the divine creation, the world that God made especially to reflect His glory, is now in rebellion against Him…And so, very frequently in the New Testament, and particularly in the Johannine writings, the word kosmos has a sinister significance. It is not the world as God intended it to be, but 'this world’ set over against God, following its own wisdom and living by the light of its own reason (1 Corinthians 1:21), not recognizing the Source of all true life and illumination (John 1:10).
• physical creation (the world in which we live);• whole human race, (the world of nations);• place of rebellion and opposition to God (the world of sin and judgment, the world of all the resulting suffering, poverty and pain);• object of God’s love and mission of redemption in history;• new creation (the world to come).
is simultaneously the wonderfully good creation of God and the horrendously wicked theatre of human and satanic rebellion against God. As we reflect on what it means to bring ‘the whole gospel to the whole world’, this is a duality that we must keep in mind. For it is this tension between the positive and negative conceptions of ‘the world’—both equally biblical—that drives so many dimensions of our missional engagement in and with the world.
John starts positively… attributing the whole creation (panta) to the work of Christ ‘the Word’ (Jn.1:3). And we remain positive with the language of incarnation—the Word has come ‘into the world’ (kosmos; Jn. 1:9-10)—a note that is repeated to the end of the book, as Jesus brings light and life and truth into the world (Jn. 3:19; 6:33; 8:12; 9:5; 12:46-47; 18:37).John uses the word kosmos 72 times, and more than 40 of those occur in chapters 13-17, describing Jesus’ final conversations with his disciples and prayer to his Father, and almost all… references to ‘the world’ are negative. … in 1 John, where kosmos occurs 22 times and all negative, except for the words of hope that Jesus died for the sins of the whole world (2:2).Paul uses kosmos 47 times (and aion 31 times). As we have seen, Paul can certainly use kosmos to speak of the whole of God’s good creation (though he tends more often to use ta panta and/or ‘heaven and earth’ for that).Nevertheless, the majority of Paul’s uses of kosmos speak of it as the place of sin, rebellion and the judgment of God (e.g., Rom. 3:6, 19; 5:12-13; 1 Cor. 11:32)
