Demons as Fallen Angles?

Robin Parry over at Theological Scribbles has an interesting summary of a paper from Dale Martin on the history of demonology, tracing it through the Septuagint and New Testament and showing that the view that demons are fallen angels does not appear in a fully articulated form until Tertullian (2nd/3rd centurty AD).

Torrance on Knowing God as Sinful People

In the preface to Theological Science, Torrance shares the following personal reflection on knowing God as a sinner:

If I may be allowed to speak personally for a moment, I find the presence of God bearing upon my existence and thought so powerfully that I cannot but be convinced of His overwhelming reality and rationality. To doubt the existence of God would be an act of sheer irrationality, for it would mean that my reason had become unhinged from its bond with real being. Yet in knowing God I am deeply aware that my relation to Him has been damaged, that disorder has resulted in my mind, and that it is I who obstruct knowledge of God by getting in between Him and myself, as it were. But I am also aware that His presence presses unrelentingly upon me through the disorder of my mind, for He will not let Himself be thwarted by it, challenging and repairing it, and requiring of me on my part to yield my thoughts to His healing and controlling revelation.

It is only in knowing God that we know we are sinners, that our prideful habits of thinking are the reason we are not able to know God on our own mental power, and thus that we know God only because of the power of his grace.

(PS - The artist that drew this picture of Torrance is HOT!)

Resurrection

"If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men" 1 Cor 15:19.

Does this verse call into question the kind of preaching which addresses itself from beginning to end to those problems we're having with our spouse, kids, job, drug habit, porn addiction, indictment for murder, etc? Of course I see the need to address these concerns in preaching the gospel; Christ's triumph over death certainly has implications for those things we deal with while alive that make us want to die. But our teaching on these day-to-day topics needs to be always and everywhere explicitly tied to our future hope; otherwise all we have is over-hyped advice on how to feel better that usually just doesn't work. As Paul goes on to say,

"If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die" 1 Cor 15:32.

Hauerwas On What Ordained Ministers Actually Do

I've got nothing new to say, but Jason over at Per Crucem ad Lucem posted some thoughts from Stanley Hauerwas on what those that work in professional church ministry are actually paid to do, and his answer is to teach people to speak the Christian language. I think it is worth a quick read for those, like myself, who are preparing for and pursuing the pastorate as a profession.

The Mystery Hidden for Long Ages Past

I just finished reading through Romans. It'll be the rest of my life and more before I feel like I totally understand that book - not because of the complexity but because of the depth of the Gospel it presents in its shattering simplicity.

Paul ends the letter by giving glory to God for the Gospel, which he describes in a startling way for anyone interested in the theology of Scripture and its interpretation.

Now to him who is able to establish you by my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all nations might believe and obey him - to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ! Amen. (Rom 16:25-27)

I understand Paul to be saying that the good news (proclamation) of Jesus Christ, God's provision of a vicarious righteousness in fulfilment of his promises given to Israel throughout its existence, is now revealed in the Old Testament Scriptures as a mystery that had been hidden for a long time before. It is striking to think of this mystery being revealed in Paul's time through Scriptures that had been written hundreds of years earlier. It is not that the revelation had been given earlier and was now illumined by the coming of Christ. Paul says in his introduction that the Gospel had been promised before hand through the OT(1:2), but in light of the letter's conclusion I have to think that the promise was given as mystery hidden until its fulfilment. Though the texts had been written long before, they only revealed that mystery at the resurrection of Christ (1:4). The coming of Christ truly opened the Scriptures to his followers and gave it meaning it could not have previously had. I take Paul here to be prohibiting us from imagining that if those Jews living prior to the resurrection of Christ had just read the relevant messianic texts from the Old Testament (passages from Deuteronomy, the Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and a few smatterings from the Minor Prophets) more clearly, they would have understood that God was going to send his Son to provide a righteousness through faith in Christ's vicarious death and resurrection before it happened. No, this was impossible to conceive, and thus impossible for the Old Testament to reveal, until it happened. But when it did happen, these texts written long ago in ages past revealed what had now just recently happened. Staggering.

Barth on Scripture and the Legitimate Form of Apostolic Succession

In between my regular diet of T. F. Torrance and books on theology of Scripture, I'm slowly making my way through Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics I.1. Barth is famous for being odd on Scripture, but I find him wonderfully odd. In fact, his oddness makes more 'normal' accounts of Scripture (by which I mean those that start from humanity's need for an infallible source of truth, e.g. Warfield) seem odd. In I.1, his approach to speaking about what Scripture is really took me by a wonderful surprise. Scripture comes in the middle of his introduction of the threefold form of the Word of God, which he briefly introduces in in I.1 in the order of knowing (Church Proclamation, Holy Scripture, Jesus Christ) and will largely expand in the opposite order of being (Jesus Christ, Holy Scripture, Church Proclamation) in I.2 - I'll get through it all eventually.

What I found wonderfully odd in its first appearance in I.1 is that Barth's way of getting to speaking of what Scripture is was in contrast to the Roman Catholic doctrine of apostolic succession. He makes a plea that Protestants be careful to reject the Roman doctrine for the right reasons; apostolic succession cannot be fully rejected as such, but only in its peculiar Roman form in which the manner of succession relates to formal office rather than spiritual service. That is, the spiritual service of the Roman pontiff is seen as included within and guaranteed by the possession of the formal office of the bishop of Rome. As wrong as this is, it is right, argues Barth, that we see the present Church as succeeding the apostles. The Church's proclamation of the Gospel, which is what makes the Church what it is, must rest on a basis external to itself; the Church does not contain its own Gospel, but points past itself to an expectation of a future revelation of God in Christ based on the decisive past revelation of God in Christ. This basis of the Church's proclamation in Jesus Christ is passed from Christ to the world by the apostles so that the Church cannot point to itself as the proper validation of its message but must point to the apostles and therefore seek to succeed them as proclaimers of Christ. However, this succession has to take the proper form. In Roman Catholicism, the current successor of Peter in essence replaces Peter so that in pointing to apostolic testimony for the validation of its proclamation, the Church merely points to itself as the apostolic Church. Barth, however, argues that the current Church in its succession of the apostles cannot seek to replace them but must stand always under them. Scripture is what allows us to succeed the apostles in this way.

Now that I've set it up, here is the paragraph that made me happy and I wanted to share:

The apostolic succession of the Church must mean that it is guided by the Canon, that is, by the prophetic and apostolic word as the necessary rule of every word that is valid in the Church. It must mean that the Church enters into the succession of the prophets and apostles in their office of proclamation, and does so in such a way that their proclamation freely and independently precedes, while that of the Church is related to it, is ventured in obedience on the basis of it, is measured by it, and replaces it only as and to the extent that it conforms to it. It must mean that the Church always admits the free power of their proclamation over it. As far as the idea of a living succession is concerned everything depends on the antecessor being regarded as alive and having free power over against the successor. But if, as here, the antecessor has long since died, this can happen only if his proclamation has been fixed in writing and if it is acknowledged that he still has life and free power over the Church to-day in this written word of his. On the written nature of the Canon, on its character as scriptura sacra, hangs his autonomy and independence, and consequently his free power over against the Church and the living nature of the succession.

Love it.

Hauerwas on Spontaneous Prayer

I've been reading Stanley Hauerwas's recently published memoirs, Hannah's Child. This, I confess, is the first Hauerwas book I've read, but it certainly won't be the last. Throughout the book he goes back and forth between narrating the major events of his life and offering theological reflection on them. I found this short paragraph against spontaneous prayer worth sharing:

I do not trust prayer to spontaneity. Most "spontaneous prayers" turn out, upon analysis, to be anything but spontaneous. Too often they conform to formulaic patterns that include ugly phrases such as, "Lord, we just ask you..." Such phrases are gestures of false humility, suggesting that God should give us what we want because what we want is not all that much. I pray that God will save us from that "just." (255)

He goes on to explain that, because of his distrust of spontaneous prayer, he writes the prayers he prays before the classes he teaches and offers the following, a prayer he wrote for a class he would be teaching on Columbus Day, as an example:

Dear God, our lives are made possible by the murders of he past - civilization is built on slaughters. Acknowledging our debt to killers frightens and depresses us. We fear judging, so we say, "That's in the past." We fear to judge because in judging we are judged. Help us, however, to learn to say "no," to say, "Sinners though we are, that was and is wrong." May we do so with love. Amen. (256)