Sunday, May 22, 2016

Acts 2 Sermon: The Holy Spirit and the New Community

This is a modified version of a sermon on Acts 2 that I preached at my church in April in a series on Acts called “A Faith in Movement”. I have expanded some of the theological explanations here and modified some of the applications or illustrations. My hope is that this message/teaching helps you see what Pentecost means, why it matters, and how the transformed life of the community that we find at the end of Acts 2 is the direct result of the presence of the Holy Spirit in their midst.  

            The Holy Spirit is a topic that provokes strong reactions. Some Christians respond to any talk of the Spirit with enthusiasm. Others with fear. Some with confusion. Others with a nagging sense of inferiority.
            When I was a missionary in Mexico I knew a missionary who attended a Pentecostal church, and in order to become a member she either had to speak in tongues or be seeking to speak in tongues. She was a mature Christian, yet God had not given her that gift yet at that point in her life. What was she to do? I also met a couple from my church in their 60s who had previously left a charismatic church in part because they felt pressured to speak in tongues and made to feel inferior for not doing so.
            In both of those cases Acts 2 was used within a theological system to create a division within the church between those who were more spiritual, who spoke in tongues, and those who were less spiritual, who did not. I don’t mention these stories to critique Pentecostalism. I respect the majority of Pentecostals as brothers and sisters in Christ and, in spite of having some theological differences, I recognize that often they have powerful ministries that deeply impact their communities with the gospel. I have a lot to learn from my Pentecostal brothers and sisters about living out my faith.
            I mention these stories, rather, because when many of us hear or read Acts 2 we are faced with a nagging question: am I less as a Christian because I don’t speak in tongues or profesy or perform miracles? What I want to show today is that, first, Acts 2 establishes the radical unity of all believers. Far from establishing divisions between more spiritual and less spiritual Christians, Acts 2 shows that every person who has repented and put their faith in Jesus is at an equal level spiritually because we have all received the same Holy Spirit and we are all part of the same body, the church. Second, I want to show that with the power of the Holy Spirit we are called to participate—as a community—in the mission that God has entrusted to us.
            We won’t be able to look at all the details of Acts 2, but today we will focus on seeing what it says about the Holy Spirit and the new community—the church—that came about as a result of the work of the Spirit in the life of these believers. We’ll do so by looking at the context for what happened at Pentecost, what it was that happened at Pentecost, and the result of what happened at Pentecost.

The context for Acts 2
            We see in Acts 1:8 that Jesus left his disciples with a powerful promise before he ascended into heaven. He promised that when the Holy Spirit came upon them they would receive power to be his witnesses. When we study Acts 1 it is clear that this power for witnessing has something to do with the baptism with the Holy Spirit. We also find that Spirit baptism is a significant theme in the gospels. All four of the gospel writers speak of the contrast between John, who baptized with water, and Jesus, who would baptize with the Holy Spirit (Matt 3:11; Mk 1:8; Lk 3:16; Jn 1:33). The baptism with the Holy Spirit is not a peripheral theme, but rather essential to understanding just how it was that Jesus would relate to the new community of the church. Luke picks up the theme again in Acts 1:4-5: “While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is what you have heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now’” (NRSV).
            It is clear from Luke’s narrative that the believers had not yet received Spirit baptism before Jesus’ ascension. While this may seem to contradict John 20:21-23—where Jesus breathes on the disciples and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit”—John’s commissioning narrative is best understood as an anticipation of what would become a reality at Pentecost. This is clear because in Acts 1, after the event in John 20, they were not yet mobilized and engaged in mission. Instead of being out and about among their fellow Jews announcing the good news that God’s kingdom had arrived in the person of Jesus, who was raised from the dead, they were in Jerusalem waiting. Waiting for something that would change them into a community that was on fire for God and that brought the good news of the kingdom to all.
            So what were they waiting for? The disciples were waiting for the event that would forever change their relationship with God—the arrival of God’s Spirit in their hearts, indwelling them and empowering them to take part in the mission Jesus had entrusted to them in Acts 1:8. This qualitatively new presence of God’s Spirit would be the beginning of the fulfillment of the promised new covenant that God would make with his people—that God’s people wouldn’t just come back to the land and fall back into the same sin patterns to face exile again, but that God would put his Spirit in their hearts so that they might obey him. We find this promise in texts like Ezekiel 36:26-27: “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules” (ESV). Ezekiel points to a spiritual regeneration that is completely dependent on God’s initiative with the results that believers would have a new power for obedience that comes from the presence of God’s Spirit in them.
            The gospel of John tells us to expect this mammoth change to come after Jesus was glorified when it says in 7:37-39: “On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, “Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” ’ Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (ESV).
Pentecost, then, marks one of the great turning points in the history of God’s people. Up until this time the Spirit came and anointed leaders for specific tasks, but he didn’t dwell in people’s hearts. Not so any longer. Jesus told them to wait. They waited because they all needed the Spirit. God was going to come to dwell in the whole community, and the whole community would be mobilized for mission.

What happened at Pentecost?
            So, what happened in Acts 2? The first thing we see is that there was a great wind and tongues that appeared like fire over each person. Verse 4 also tells us that “they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance”. How should we understand this speaking in tongues here in Acts 2? One thing that is relatively clear is that the tongues that we see at Pentecost are different from the way the gift of tongues operated in 1 Corinthians 12-14. In 1 Corinthians tongues are a gift that require interpretation if they are to be of benefit in corporate church gatherings. Here in Acts no interpreters were needed because they were speaking known languages for people from 15 different parts of the world that were there in Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost.
            In a strict sense, the miracle of tongues at Pentecost wasn’t really necessary. These people could have heard the gospel message and responded without hearing the message in their mother tongue. Presumably these groups of pilgrims to Jerusalem had gotten along just fine during their visit—perhaps they spoke Aramaic, or knew Greek as a second language and were able to make do just fine in Jerusalem with their Greek. If there were some who didn’t know the more widely-known languages, we can assume that some in their group were able to bridge the linguistic gap.
            Nonetheless, God decided to miraculously intervene so that these pious Jews from 15 different regions would hear the message in their own language. I think there are various reasons behind this. First, it showed the disciples that they really had received power to begin their mission. God had shown up in power, and cultural differences were not to be an impediment to the gospel going forth. Second, it caught the attention of the crowd. They might have thought the disciples were drunk, but at least they were paying attention to them! Third, it was a form of clear divine intervention that may have functioned as a sign to those witnessing that the message the disciples preached really was true. This may have been especially important because verse 5 tells us that the Jews who heard their message on Pentecost were “devout” people. What does it take to convince a devout, religious person that they are in need of divine intervention in their life, that they truly need to repent of their sins? It takes a mighty work of God to turn their world upside down and see that far from being okay with God, they were spiritually needy people who needed to respond to God’s Messiah.
Finally, and not least important, I think the miracle of tongues at Pentecost shows that the gospel is meant for everybody. The message of the gospel wasn’t just for the Aramaic-speaking Jews who grew up in Palestine, it was for everyone equally. The gospel is a message for all cultures and can be expressed in all languages. Far from obliterating cultural differences, the gospel affirms the goodness of human cultural and linguistic diversity while calling every culture to recognize its need for Jesus and be transformed by the gospel. This diversity of cultures and languages contributes to the beauty of the church and our grasp of facets of God’s truth that we are often blind to when we only look at things through one cultural or linguistic lens.  
            Peter, then, stands up and makes a speech. Peter’s interpretation in 2:14-21 is essentially quite simple: “this is that”—the pouring out of the Spirit that his hearers had witnessed was the fulfillment of Joel 2:28-32. Peter’s citation of this passage from Joel makes two central points: first, we have arrived at the last days, when God was going to pour out his Spirit. Second, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. In other words, the significance of Pentecost centered on the presence of the Spirit and salvation in the name of the Lord, that is, in the name of Jesus.

The result of what happened at Pentecost
            After explaining that what they were seeing was the fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy, Peter seized the opportunity that these manifestations of the Holy Spirit provided to preach the message of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. While we’ll skip over the details of Peter’s speech, it is important to note its climax. The climax of Peter’s speech is 2:36: “Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified” (NRSV). This verse is a little perplexing for most of us at first read. How could God make Jesus Lord and Messiah if he already was those things, as Luke 2:11 hinted at? I think that in the light of Luke’s broader narrative in Luke and Acts what he is trying to say is that Jesus already was Lord and Messiah in one sense, but only after his resurrection and ascension does he fully function as Lord and Messiah, pouring out the Holy Spirit as part of the blessings of participating in the Messianic kingdom.
            The reaction of the crowd is simple: if the Messiah has arrived, what should we do? Peter’s response is simple: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (NRSV). What Peter is telling them is something hard to swallow for a pious Jew—you need to look at yourself as an “outsider,” a person in need of God’s forgiveness. You need to convert.
In addition to having their sins forgiven, Peter promised them something else—they would receive the gift of the Spirit. If his hearers responded to the gospel message, they would experience what Peter and the rest of the 120 had just experienced, the indwelling presence of God in them.
It’s interesting to note that we don’t see an explicit repetition of the miracles of speaking in known languages among the 3,000 who converted that day. We aren’t told that all performed miracles, though it is clear that the apostles did so (2:43). This shows us that the point of Pentecost for the 3,000 and for us isn’t so much about having the exact same experience as the 120 disciples. Miraculously speaking in another known language so that others might hear the gospel is not normative for all believers. What is normative is the pouring out of the gift of the Spirit on all who call on the name of Jesus as Lord. The central point of Pentecost is that now, when one repents and puts their faith in Jesus, the forgiveness of sins and gift of the Spirit are available to all. This is why the New Testament says so clearly that “Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him” (Romans 8:9, NRSV). So, there aren’t two classes of Christians: the more spiritual and the less spiritual. Pentecost establishes the radical unity of all believers in a common experience of the Spirit.

What is the baptism in the Holy Spirit?
What, then, can we say about the baptism in the Holy Spirit? This is a point of much disagreement and, sometimes, confusion among evangelical Christians. One time a couple of years ago I went to receive prayer at a healing service at a charismatic mega-church in the U.S. Being a very structured ministry, they had a sheet for me to fill out with personal data, a description of what I was seeking prayer for and where I sought healing, if I had given my life to Christ, and so forth. But I ran into one field where I wasn’t sure exactly what I should say. It asked: “Have you received the baptism in the Holy Spirit? Yes, no, or I don’t know.” Instead of filling out that field I wrote an explanation: “I think so, but it depends how you define it. You would probably say no.”
For many charismatics and Pentecostals, though not all, the baptism in or with the Holy Spirit is considered a second experience of grace, something that happens after conversion, and where speaking in tongues is seen as the “initial evidence” of such a baptism. In other words, the ideal would be that all believers would receive this experience and speak in tongues. There are many reasons that I do not agree with such an interpretation, such as the question in 1 Cor 12:30: “Do all speak in tongues?”, which in both Greek grammar and in context clearly expects a negative response. The point is that there are diversities of giftings. Speaking in tongues is one gift—one that I believe God still gives today to some—but it is never presented as a gift for all believers. It is one gift among many.
Perhaps most importantly, Acts 2 does not show a second experience of the Spirit that goes deeper than that contemplated in verses like Romans 8:9, which says all who belong to Christ have the Spirit. Rather, Acts 2 is the moment that the reality described in Romans 8:9 began, as we see in verses like John 7:37-39 that said the Spirit wouldn’t be given until after Jesus’ glorification. The disciples were true believers before Pentecost, but they did not have the Spirit indwelling them. For that they would have to wait for Jesus to baptize them with the Spirit at Pentecost.
Nonetheless, Pentecostals emphasize something very important that many of the rest of us often forget: the baptism of the Spirit is not just about the Spirit indwelling us. We can’t be content to just know we have the Spirit while not letting ourselves be transformed by the Spirit’s presence. The Spirit indwells us in order to empower us to carry out God’s mission in the world. God wants us to be witnesses to Christ and, in order to speak boldly about the gospel, we need to be constantly filled with the Spirit. Many experiences that a Pentecostal might call baptism in the Spirit are valid, they just aren’t the main point of Acts 2 or what the terminology of Spirit-baptism is really getting at in the Bible.

The consequences of the Spirit’s presence in us
The presence of the Spirit, then, is the central reality. But the presence of the Spirit has consequences. This gift of the Spirit is to transform us to live a radically different kind of life.
The first thing we notice about the effects of the arrival of the Spirit on the 3,000 converts is that they were incorporated into the life of the community. This was no individualist “me and Jesus” gospel. In fact, it is probably instructive that Acts 2:41-42 doesn’t tell us that 3,000 people accepted Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior, as true as that may have been. Rather, it tells us: “So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (NRSV). For these 3,000 new converts baptism was a fundamentally communal way of making the commitment to follow Jesus as Lord. When Luke tells us 3,000 people were added, we might ask what they were added to. While the word “church” does not appear explicitly, it is clear from the context that to respond to Peter’s sermon meant becoming part of this new community. When God saves us he doesn’t just become our Father and give us his Spirit so that we might relate to him as sons and daughters. He also gives us brothers and sisters with whom we are to devote ourselves “to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers”. This communal dimension of salvation and the experience of the Spirit is highlighted beautifully in 1 Corinthians 12:13: “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit” (NRSV).
            The life of the new community was characterized by four basic components: the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, breaking of bread, and prayer. Dedication to the apostles’ teaching was essential because the New Testament still had not been written. Listening to the apostles was the way to know what Jesus did and taught. This teaching by the part of the apostles was a fundamental part of fulfilling the Great Commission of Matthew 28:18-20. Jesus called his disciples to make disciples of all nations, to baptize them, and to teach them to obey all that he commanded them. From the first week of the life of the church, we see them putting this into practice, starting from Jerusalem as Acts 1:8 had said.
            For us today dedication to the apostles’ teaching means that we must let our lives be permeated with Scripture. While it is easy for some of us to fall into an overly cognitive focus, where we know lots of biblical truth that we don’t put into practice, the problem is not study in and of itself. Less study is not the solution, but rather more action. Study is important because the stark reality is that we cannot put into practice what we do not know. God has given us his word. Are we ready to listen? Many years ago Michael Card wrote a song that beautifully expresses the importance of hearing God’s voice in Scripture, called “Will You Not Listen?” Part of the song says:

Is not He who formed the ear
Worth the time it takes to hear?
Should He who formed our lips for speaking
Be not heeded when He speaks?

Will you not listen?
Why won't you listen?
God has spoken love to us
Why will you not listen?

If we aren’t listening to God’s voice in Scripture, we ought to examine what attitudes might lie behind that fact. Dedicating ourselves to the study of Scripture doesn’t have to take one prescribed form. It can happen individually, and there are a lot of ways of doing private devotions. But in the early church it happened primarily in community. In the church we are to hear and respond to God’s word, as individuals and as a community.
This brings us to our second point, fellowship. The Greek word for “fellowship” simply means something like “having things in common,” whether that be activities, food, or other things. The key point is that they were involved in each others’ lives. We see in Acts 2:44-45 that fellowship implied a radical generosity and hospitality: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need” (NRSV).
            For whom are we willing to sell property and share so freely? Perhaps if we’re honest we’ll say that we wouldn’t do it for anyone. But, if there were someone we would do that for, it is almost certainly for someone who is family. These first followers of Christ saw their fellow believers as family. The model of generosity here also challenges a common Christian mentality about generosity: a lot of people seem to think that if they tithe they have done their duty. God gets his 10%, and 90% is left for me. But the model of life we find at the end of Acts 2 shows that 100% of our resources belong to God. Every one of us has to be radically honest in evaluating our priorities. How do I spend my finances? How do I spend my time? Am I stewarding everything I have in a way that seeks the best for the community of believers? I know I still have quite a ways to grow in reaching that point.
            One aspect of having things in common was the breaking of bread. Breaking of bread may refer to sharing regular meals in common or may refer to the Lord’s Supper. I find it most likely that both are in view here, especially considering that the two weren’t nearly as distinct in the earliest churches as they are today. The key point is that the early Christians ate together. Simple, to be sure, but profound. Eating others’ food and entering their homes is one of the most important ways of building community. When one lives as a missionary in another culture, it becomes obvious quite quickly how important it is to accept the food that one is given. To reject another’s food is to reject that person and their culture; to eat together establishes the relationship.
Finally, they prayed together, constantly recognizing their dependence on God and seeking for God’s kingdom to expand further. And expand it did. People converted daily (2:47). These may have been people present at Pentecost who needed a little more time to process and be convinced. Maybe they were others who were absent. Regardless of who they were, the community was mobilized immediately, and God kept intervening miraculously doing miracles through the apostles (2:43).
            Acts 1:8 was being fulfilled! Not just the 120, but now over 3,000 believers had God’s Spirit dwelling in them and giving them power to testify to the gospel with their words and to live a transformed life of radical generosity in community.

Conclusion
            Pentecost was the democratization of the experience of the Holy Spirit. It’s not that there are no longer leaders with more authority and responsibility in a church. But now the Holy Spirit dwells in every believer, not just leaders anointed for a special ministry. Part of what Pentecost shows us and we find as a reality in the rest of Acts is that every believer is anointed with the Spirit to be a part of God’s mission. As Joel had prophesied, the power of the Spirit came on sons, daughters, young men, old men, and male and female servants. In the church, ministry is the work of all, because we all have been given important gifts and roles in body, the church. No gift is more important than another. There is no hierarchy of gifts where some are more spiritual or more important. All are equally indispensable parts of the body.
            What, then, are some final take away lessons from Pentecost for us today? First, we are called to live out the reality of the power that we have been given. The Holy Spirit already lives in us! But we don’t always live with his power. We must seek to be filled with the Holy Spirit in order to see in our lives the kind of Spirit-transformed community we find in Acts 2. From Pentecostals we can learn the importance of living in the power of the Spirit that indwells us, recognizing that God desires to transform us and work through us far more powerfully than we often allow him to.
            Second, we are called to experience the Spirit’s power in community. None of us has all, or even the majority, of the spiritual gifts. The Holy Spirit gives each of us power to play out our part in building up the church and participating in his mission in the world. How are we using these gifts for the good of the body?
            Third, mission flows from the organic life of the community. God calls us to be dedicated to things like the apostles’ teaching through the study of Scripture, to fellowship, to sharing meals together, and to praying together. While church programs are not bad in themselves, it is difficult to sustain successful programs without this organic community life. Programs ought to be a structured expression of organic community life and a context for deepening that life, not a replacement for it. The world skeptically looks at a church who looks far from the reality we find in Acts 2. Before many will believe, they want to see that this gospel and this kingdom we talk about actually transform lives in reality. So, God is calling us to be a living example of what we preach with our words through the way we live in community.
            We can only do this when God himself indwells and renews our hearts. So, let us live out the reality that that is what God has done for us in establishing the new community of the Spirit on that Pentecost nearly 2,000 years ago.

Saturday, December 19, 2015

2015 reading: The most helpful books that have informed my teaching

Last year I made a list of my top 10 books of the year. This year my reading was so overwhelmingly related to the courses I taught or research projects I was working on that I don't really know how to meaningfully rank the books. And, like last year, many of the most important books I read are not the recent releases, but books that have proven themselves over the last several years or decades and come to be key titles in their field. So, I have organized my reading by course (with other books at the end) and commented on some books I found particularly helpful or interesting.

I don't write this post to try to brag about how many books I've read (I am a professor, and I realize that most people in other jobs, including pastors, wouldn't have nearly the opportunity to read as much, especially heavy academic works), but to give an idea of what goes into the classes I teach, what kinds of ideas I have been grappling with, and give a few pointers to interesting things to read for those interested. As fair warning, many of the reflections I give on these books are pretty academic. If that doesn't interest you that's totally normal, but I know there are some readers who will find those comments useful, and this post is for them.

Asterisks (*) indicate books I mention in my comments.


Church History 1 course

The main primary texts I read in preparing the course:
  • Tertullian. “On Baptism.”
  • Cyprian. “On the Unity of the Church.”
  • Athanasius, La encarnación del verbo [On the Incarnation].
  • Gregory of Nazianzus. “Oration 40, The Oration on Holy Baptism.”
  • Augustine. “On the Spirit and the Letter”; “On the Predestination of the Saints”; Confessions, book 7.
  • Boethius, La consolación de la filosofía, libro V (The Consolation of Philosophy, Book 5).
  • *Anselm, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man).
  • Thomas Aquinas, sections of the Summa Theologica on the death of Christ, merits, and justification.
  • John Duns Scotus, a short section where he argues for the immaculate conception of Mary.

Secondary sources:
  • González, Justo L. Historia del Cristianismo, tomo 1 [History of Christianity, vol. 1.] This was the assigned textbook for the course.
  • González, Justo L. Historia del pensamiento cristiano. [History of Christian Thought.] (I read many chapters of the book to supplement class preparation.)
  • Jenkins, Philip. The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How it Died. (Half read.)
  • *Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600), vol. 1 of The Christian Tradition.
  • *Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600-1700), vol. 2 of The Christian Tradition.
  • *Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Growth of Medieval Theology (600-1300), vol. 3 of The Christian Tradition.
  • *Pelikan, Jaroslav. Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700), vol. 4 of The Christian Tradition. (I’ve read about half of it at this point.)

I could say a lot about the books I read preparing to teach church history, but I can sum up my overall impressions in two short imperatives: Read primary source texts of the Fathers; read Pelikan’s The Christian Tradition. I have had the goal of reading Pelikan’s 5-volume masterpiece on the history of the development of doctrine for the last ten years, but given that I read it at about 10-15 pages an hour, it just takes a lot of time. As an undergraduate, I slogged through the first two volumes, but didn’t make it past that as it was very heavy going. Coming back to Pelikan nine or ten years later with a lot more theological perspective, I got a ton out of these books. At times Pelikan is frustrating because he writes as if you know who he’s talking about and as if there is no need to precisely locate key thinkers or debates chronologically. But, if one has enough of a framework for understanding church history (reading Gonzalez’s books helped here), his books are brilliant. Don’t read Pelikan expecting him to reinforce your preconceived ideas of what history must have been like. He is brutally honest with the reality of what was believed, taught, and confessed by the church over the centuries and has a pretty strong resistance to partisan interpretations of history. Obviously, he isn’t fully objective—no author is—but he has a way of putting the reader in touch with the original sources such that the reader has to come to terms with what was being taught at that point in history. For understanding how the church has evolved to teach what it has throughout history, this has been the most helpful thing I have read.

In terms of the primary sources, I probably got the most out of reading Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man), his philosophical defense of the necessity of the incarnation on the basis of atonement theory. I had heard (and had ingrained in me) the general argument before, but had never read much of the actual text. Basically, Anselm says that humanity has offended God’s honor through sin, incurring an infinite debt, since God is infinite. God cannot forgive that debt of honor without satisfaction, so he requires a sacrifice that will satisfy his honor. A human being must offer the sacrifice, but only God is able to provide such an infinite sacrifice. Therefore, the incarnation is the only way of satisfying the debt and procuring the forgiveness of sins for fallen humanity since one and the same subject is divine and human, fulfilling the necessary requirements. Anselm’s approach has limitations if one approaches it looking for a comprehensive Christology or atonement theory, but overall I was very impressed with the argument and underwhelmed by the way that modern critics of Anselm (I’m thinking of books like Mark Baker and Joel Green’s Recovering the Scandal of the Cross) critique Anselm severely for failing to accomplish what he never set out to accomplish. If Anselm wrote in an attempt to show philosophically why the incarnation was necessary, I don’t think it is fair to critique him for not including certain biblical aspects of the atonement. While I would modify Anselm’s view to be in line with a penal substitutionary view of the atonement, there is no reason to see a satisfaction or substitutionary model as excluding the idea of Christ as victor over evil or the reality that the cross serves as a moral example. All of these are complementary, but we shouldn’t underestimate the brilliance of Anselm’s way of working out the question just because he largely focuses on satisfaction. I found it very interesting to debate Anselm's approach in class with students in comparison with the perspective of Thomas Aquinas.


Ethics course
  • Atiencia, Jorge. Victoria sobre la corrupción [Victory over Corruption].
  • Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Ethics. (Partially read.)
  • *Brownson, James. Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships.
  • Lamb, Jonathan. Integridad: Liderando bajo la mirada de Dios. [Integrity: Leading while God is watching.]
  • Stassen, Glen and David Gushee. La ética del reino [Kingdom Ethics]. (I used a number of chapters as required reading for the course.)
  • Yarhouse, Mark. Homosexuality and the Christian: A Guide for Parents, Pastors, and Friends.
  • Wright, Christopher J. H. Old Testament Ethics for the People of God. (I only read about a quarter of it, but what I read is excellent!)

Certainly the most interesting and polemical book I read while working on my Ethics course was James Brownson’s Bible, Gender, Sexuality. Brownson is part of the Reformed Church in America and has written perhaps the most important scholarly book seeking to defend homosexual relationships on the basis of Biblical exegesis. I am not convinced by his argument, but I think that more conservative evangelicals like myself must interact with the kinds of arguments we find in Brownson or we will find ourselves irrelevant in the current debates. If you find yourself wondering how someone who knows the Bible well might end up affirming gay marriage, read Brownson. (As a side note, convincing my students that we should actually take these kinds of arguments seriously was not easy. I don’t think that this issue is a gray area where Christians can just agree to disagree, but I do think it is important to listen seriously to the arguments of those I disagree with and respond to those arguments as real arguments.)

To give an example of the kind of argument Brownson uses, we can consider his discussion of how the concept of what is “degrading” or “shameless” functions in Romans 1. He says, “What is degrading and shameless about the behavior described in Romans 1:24-27 is that it is driven by excessive, self-seeking lust, that it knows no boundaries or restraints, and that it violates established gender roles of that time and culture, understood in terms of masculine rationality and honor” (p. 218). From my perspective, a significant problem with Brownson’s argument is that he basically says that Paul affirms whatever the society would have affirmed regarding what was shameful and that that was normatively applicable in his time, but not today. Given that we are not in a different redemptive-historical moment from Paul, why is it that today we are at liberty to modify what is deemed shameful and so are not bound by Paul’s instruction in a more direct manner? There is a lot more to explore on this point and many others, but it’s worth reading for the way it makes you grapple with a lot of nuances of the Biblical texts that are easy to overlook. I also appreciate, though have my reservations about, his focus on the "moral logic" of the texts rather than just the fine points of exegetical debate. In my view, he at times uses the "moral logic" he finds to contradict what the text seems to plainly say.


Theology I Online course
  • *Bavinck, Herman. En el Principio: Fundamentos de la Teología de la Creación, cap. 1, “La creación”. [In the Beginning: Foundations of the Theology of Creation, ch. 1, “The Creation”.] (Required reading for students.)
  • Erickson, Millard. Teología cristiana. [Christian Theology] (10 chapters, required reading for students.)
  • Grudem, Wayne. Teología sistemática. [Systematic Theology] (11 chapters, required reading for students.)

All of these readings were assigned for class. While I only assigned about 35 pages of Bavinck, his writing was brilliant (though perhaps a bit too dense for the students—I’ll have to reconsider whether to use it next time) and piqued my interest in his theology, which I had never read before. What I love about this section of Bavinck is how he shows that the doctrine of creation is about far more than just debates over how old the earth is. He brings in a substantial analysis of different worldviews, contrasting what belief in creation means as compared to perspectives like pantheism.


Christology research
  • Alfaro, Sammy. Divino Compañero: Towards a Hispanic Pentecostal Christology. (Partially read.)
  • Chaves, Joao. Evangelicals and Liberation Revisited: An Inquiry into the Possibility of an Evangelical-Liberationist Theology. (Partially read.)
  • *García, Alberto L. Cristología: Cristo Jesús, centro y praxis del pueblo de Dios. [Christology: Christ Jesus, Center and Praxis of the People of God.]
  • *Gavrilyuk, Paul L. The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought.
  • Green, Gene, Stephen Pardue, and K. K. Yeo, eds. Jesus without Borders: Christology in the Majority World.
  • *Sobrino, Jon. Christ the Liberator.
  • Sobrino, Jon. Jesus the Liberator.
  • Weinandy, Thomas. Does God Suffer?

I have been rereading and going deeper in many of the areas related to my final research paper for a Christology course that I took as part of my Master’s degree, looking at the intersection of the question of divine (im)passibility—that is, whether and in what sense God can suffer—and the liberation christology of Jon Sobrino. The key questions are: How does God suffer? How does that relate to his ability to save/liberate us? While I would not consider myself to be generally sympathetic to liberation theology, I think there are many positive insights that can be gained from interacting with such theologians (though often there’s a lot more chaff than wheat). For example, Sobrino has interesting insights on the connections between the resurrection and justice for victims of oppression (this can be related to the general loss of the vision of the social dimension of the new creation in much of Christian thought), on the importance of the historical life of Jesus for christology, and on the limitations of the creeds of the early church (even while he affirms them) and the ways they produce functional docetism. Considering how central liberation theology has been in Latin American theology, it is essential to interact with it to some extent to be taken seriously in speaking about Jesus in a Latin American context, as one can see in a chapter on Latin American christology in Green, Pardue, and Yeo, on the one hand, and Alfaro's attempts at constructing a Hispanic Pentecostal Christology, on the other hand.

All of these books were quite interesting in one way or another, but two stand out. Alberto García’s short introduction to Christology is probably the best go-to introductory book on Christology that I have run across in Spanish. García writes from a confessionally Lutheran perspective, but is interesting for the ways that he integrates discussion of the church fathers, solid Lutheran theology, and draws in some positive insights of certain liberation theologians, without losing theological balance in the process (apart from his last chapter, where he was trying as a Protestant to find positive theological value in devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe and other expressions of popular piety, which just left me scratching my head). It was refreshing to read someone who can on one page talk about the value of a Christology from below (starting with the historical life of Jesus) and later defend a penal substitution model of the atonement.

The other book that was incredibly interesting and well-written was Paul Gavrilyuk’s The Suffering of the Impassible God. I largely agree with Gavrilyuk’s opening chapter, “The Case Against the Theory of Theology’s Fall into Hellenistic Philosophy,” where he takes on the Hellenization thesis, that is, the idea that early church theology became hijacked by Greek thought. He does a great job of showing how even when the early councils were using philosophical categories, they often did so in ways that countered many of the live options in the intellectual climate of their day. Surprisingly, I see parallels between some of Gavrilyuk’s arguments and some of Jon Sobrino’s arguments in Christ the Liberator regarding how to interpret the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon (instead of being supremely negative about the councils, as many contextual theologians are, he sees in them a creative and useful inculturation, but one that had real limits). While I am generally sympathetic to Gavrilyuk’s approach to the question of whether God is impassible (he says “yes, in himself God is impassible, but in the incarnation God suffers in the person of the Son through the human nature the Son assumed”), there is one point where I strongly disagree. Gavrilyuk says that if God is inherently passible (that is, if God can suffer even apart from the incarnation, as many contemporary theologians claim), then the incarnation is unnecessary. This seems to me to be a completely unwarranted conclusion, since he would need to establish that divine suffering apart from the incarnation could be redemptive, something he simply hasn’t done. One could enlist quite a number of arguments to make this point, but the first one I think of is Anselm's argument for the incarnation that I mentioned above, which sees the redemptive value not just in suffering, but in the identity of the one suffering, that is, the God-man who can represent man before God while providing an infinitely valuable sacrifice.


Other books
  • Arthurs, Jeffrey. Predicando con variedad [Preaching with Variety].
  • Donner, Theo. El texto que interpreta al lector [The Text that Interprets the Reader.]
  • Sendek, Elizabeth. Griego para Sancho [Greek for Sancho, the beginning Greek textbook we use here at the seminary.]
  • Taylor, Richard A. “Haggai.” In Haggai, Malachi. New American Commentary.
  • *Vella, Jane. Taking Learning to Task: Creative Strategies for Teaching Adults.

Jane Vella’s book became my go-to book in seeking to design class activities for my Church History 1 course. While it is a little hard to follow at points, it has a lot of great ideas for creating engaging lesson plans around learning tasks that follow the sequence of "Induction-Input-Implementation-Integration."


Other books partially read
  • *Franz, Raymond. Crisis of Conscience.
  • Friedman, Thomas. The World is Flat.
  • Ladd, George. El Nuevo Testamento y la crítica. [The New Testament and Criticism.]
  • Lingenfelter, Judith and Sherwood. Teaching Cross-Culturally: An Incarnational Model for Learning and Teaching.
  • Palacios, Marco. Violencia pública en Colombia (1958-2010). [Public Violence in Colombia (1958-2010)].
  • Wright, David F. Infant Baptism in Historical Perspective.


Raymond Franz’s Crisis of Conscience is a personal narrative (an exposé of sorts) from someone who was formerly in the highest level of leadership among the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but later left the organization disillusioned at what he found in the process. I haven’t gotten too far, but it looks very interesting for understanding aspects of how the JWs operated during some of the most formative years theologically in the organization (the 1970s, when many thought the world would end, but it didn’t).