Good Question

Q. Peace be with you. I read your response to the question, “Why did Jesus say he wasn’t going to the Festival of Tabernacles and then go?” Your justification didn’t satisfy me. Why should Jesus’ talk be so unclear that people like you need to explain to us? The word of God should be so easy that everybody can understand.

Peace be with you as well. Actually, people who consider the Bible to be the word of God have always believed and understood that it has more than one level of meaning. On the surface, it presents stories, songs, dreams, etc. that are interesting and instructive about life on earth in their own right. That’s why even children can enjoy the Bible starting from a young age. But as we grow and mature mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, we come to recognize that beneath the surface there’s another level of meaning that teaches us about God, especially in his relationship to people.

The parables that Jesus told are an excellent example of this. The Parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, is on its surface a memorable story about character development and family relationships. We are moved when we hear about how the younger son grew from being a reckless and ungrateful youth who grieved his father to become a mature adult who took responsibility for his actions and came to appreciate all he had in his family. We admire and want to emulate the example of the father who generously forgave and restored his penitent son. And we take warning from the older brother’s failure to forgive. All of this teaches us important lessons about life on earth.

But when we also discern the deeper spiritual meaning of this story, we are even more moved to realize that God is like the father in the story, who kept watching for his wayward son and ran to meet him “while he was still a long way off.” We understand that God is eager to forgive and restore us and that God is just waiting for us to begin to turn around before he rushes to greet us. We realize that in terms of our own relationship with God, we need to be like the younger son, who confessed, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.” We should not be like the older brother who refused to forgive and so remained estranged.

Perhaps it is easier to see how Jesus’ parables, as teaching vehicles, likely have such deeper meanings. It’s harder to recognize that the narratives of Jesus’ actual words and actions also have such meanings. But they do, and we should look for a deeper significance whenever we come across something that’s puzzling or distressing. That’s a sign that something more is happening than meets the eye.

So—to return to the example you asked about—when Jesus’ brothers encourage him to go to the Feast of Tabernacles, and he replies, “I am not going up to this festival, because my time has not yet fully come,” but then he goes up to the festival anyway, we shouldn’t simply conclude, “Jesus must have lied.” Instead, we should ask, “Did Jesus mean something different from what we first understood?” If we read the whole gospel thoughtfully and reflect on it, we should recognize the significance of the phrases “go up” and “my time” throughout the work. We will then realize that, as John tells us on another occasion when Jesus also talked about being “lifted up,” he gave this response to his brothers “to show the kind of death he was going to die.” There was a deeper meaning behind his words.

The multiple layers of meaning in the Bible make it a book that we can read and study throughout our lives and continue to get new insights from. It is truly so simple that a child can read it and hear God’s invitation to salvation. But it is also so profound that even after a lifetime of study the most learned scholar must confess, as the psalmist says of God’s awareness of everything about him, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, it is too lofty for me to attain.” This shouldn’t discourage us from reading and studying the Bible; it should only make us more eager to discover more of its hidden treasures.

Q. I’m teaching a Bible overview course on the Old and New Testaments. Please help me understand the progression of the teachings from Jesus and the apostles to Paul. How do they complement each other, and how do they differ? Thank you.

In my first two posts in answer to this question, I suggested that Jesus, and the apostles after him, transformed the dualistic idea of the “kingdom”—you were either in or out—to mean a community that was open to everyone, that was based on faith, and that was a present as well as a future reality. In my third post, I suggested that Paul similarly transformed another dualism. He redefined “flesh” and “spirit” as ways of life rather than parts of the human person; he taught that the human body did not have to drag down the spirit but could become an instrument of “spiritual worship”; and he cautioned that life in the Spirit was not entirely a present reality and so people should continue to respect propriety in their bodies. In this final post, I’d like to show how three New Testament books that seem to come from divergent theological streams—the Gospel of John and the books of Hebrews and Revelation—actually express a vision that’s harmonious with the one Jesus and Paul convey by transforming these two different dualisms.

The Gospel of John, even though it’s a life of Jesus, actually transforms the same spirit-matter dualism that Paul does in his letters, rather than the dualism based on being in or out of the kingdom of God that Jesus transforms in his teaching as presented in the Synoptic Gospels. Jesus, as portrayed by John, repeatedly contrasts what is heavenly, spiritual, and from “above” with what is earthly, material, and here “below.”

This dynamic is seen most clearly in the repeated instances where something Jesus says is misunderstood as a reference to what is “below” and he has to explain that he’s actually describing what is “above.” Perhaps the best-known example is when Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be “born again.” Nicodemus responds, “How can someone be born when they are old? Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!” Jesus has to clarify that he is speaking of a spiritual rebirth. (The phrase “born again” uses a resonant term that can actually mean both “again” and “from above.” Nicodemus takes it the first way and Jesus explains that he should have understood it the second way.)

Interestingly, Jesus’ dialogue with Nicodemus is the one place in the Gospel of John where the phrase “kingdom of God” appears. But as Xavier Léon-Dufour observes in To Act According to the Gospel, “In this passage, the term signifies not the ‘reign [that is] coming,’ but the ‘kingdom’ into which one enters, that is, ‘eternal life'” (brackets original). Dufour therefore asks, “What, then, is the Johannine equivalent of basilea tou theou in the sense of the ‘reign of God’?” He notes that some have seen the concepts of “life” and “light” as the equivalents, but he suggests that “while the coming of the reign of God constitutes the central message of the Synoptics, the Johannine text is organized around the idea of the ‘one sent from the Father'” (p. 31). So the equivalent of the kingdom of God breaking into the present is the Son of God coming from above to here below.

This represents a transformation of how the above/below dualism was conceived by others at the time, particularly those in the stream of thought that would coalesce into Gnosticism. An epigram attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a foundational figure within that stream, says, “As it is above, so it is below.” What this means may be illustrated by a saying attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas (which certainly displays proto-Gnostic influences): “I am the light that is over all. I am the All. The All came forth out of me, and to me the All has come. Split a piece of wood—I am there. Lift the stone, and you will find me there.” In other words, there’s actually no distinction between the “above” and the “below”; if we could just see through physical objects, we would recognize that the spiritual is immanent in them.

From this perspective, it would actually be impossible for someone to come from above to below, since the above is already in the below. But the Gospel of John transforms this perspective to the point where Jesus can say, in a key thematic statement, “I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me.” In other places Jesus equates this “will” with the “work” his Father has given him to finish. There would be no place for the language of coming to “finish a work,” either, in the other perspective, because no real change can be effected in a world where the spiritual dwells eternally within the material. But the idea in John that Jesus came to accomplish a “work” connects with the idea in the Synoptic Gospels that Jesus came to inaugurate a “kingdom.”

As for the book of Hebrews, it too presents an above/below dualism, but from the perspective of Platonic thought rather than from that of nascent Gnosticism. This perspective is seen most clearly in places such as those where the author says that the Jewish priests on earth “serve at a sanctuary that is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven.” The implication, in keeping with Platonic thought, is that true or ideal entities exist in a spiritual realm, while anything physical on earth is only a copy or expression of such an ideal. Throughout the book, many other aspects of the old covenant are said to have true or ideal counterparts in spiritual realities. For example, we’re told that when Joshua led the people into the land of Canaan, that wasn’t really the fulfillment of God’s promise to give them “rest.” That promise is still open to anyone who will “rest from their works just as God did from his.” (And God did that outside of the just-finished creation.)

However, this dualism between the true heavenly ideal and the earthly copy or shadow is transformed in much the same way that the Gospel of John transforms the above/below distinction—except that the motion is in the opposite direction. Hebrews emphasizes how Jesus went from below to above: “Christ did not enter a sanctuary made with human hands that was only a copy of the true one; he entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God’s presence.” And because Christ has gone before us to show the way, we can aspire to follow after him. The author says that the heroes of the faith were “longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.” So once again it becomes possible, as a result of the transformation, to move in actuality between the “below” and the “above,” not just in philosophical contemplation or esoteric learning.

Interestingly, the heavenly city of Hebrews is both present and future, both here and there. On the one hand, the author says, “Here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” On the other hand, the author says, “You have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.” This captures the “already” and “not yet” aspect of the kingdom of God as Jesus proclaimed it.

The book of Revelation shares much of this same perspective. It envisions God’s temple as ultimately a heavenly reality (for example, “Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and within his temple was seen the ark of his covenant”). However, once again reversing the direction, Revelation anticipates that “the Holy City, Jerusalem,” will “come down out of heaven from God”  after “the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah.” The conception here, therefore, is also of an already/not yet kingdom. In some passages in Revelation (like this one), the kingdom is expected as a future reality, while in others believers are said to be already living in the kingdom. For example, early in the book John describes himself to the recipients as their “brother and companion in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus.”

An important difference between Revelation and Hebrews is that in Revelation, the opposite of “true” is “false” rather than “copy.” At the beginning and end of the book, Jesus is identified as “Faithful and True.” By contrast, we hear in between about false apostles and a false prophet who deceive people who aren’t faithful to Jesus, and before we glimpse the heavenly city of Jerusalem, we see a grotesque vision of the earthly city of Babylon, which “led all the nations astray by her magic spells.” The challenge for readers of Revelation is not to distinguish earthly copies from heavenly originals, but to distinguish false influences and illegitimate rulers from true ones here on earth.

This actually brings us full circle, back to the Johannine writings, and specifically to the letters of John. In the first letter, the reality (and even possibility) of Jesus coming to earth—from above to below—becomes the test of true belief as opposed to false. This is expressed in the vivid terminology of “realized eschatology” (that is, the “already” aspect of the kingdom): “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.”

I hope these reflections have been helpful to you. I recognize that they are not comprehensive or systematic, but I hope they may nevertheless point you in some directions that will be fruitful for your own thinking and teaching. Thanks again for your question.

Q. At the end of 2 Thessalonians, Paul writes, “With my own hand I write this greeting. This is the way I sign every letter; this is how I write.” Paul does do something similar at the end of Galatians. He writes, “See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand!” But there is nothing like this in his other letters. So why does Paul say that he signs all of his letters when he doesn’t?

We should probably translate the statement in 2 Thessalonians that you’re asking about more like this: “The greeting of Paul, by my own hand. This is the distinguishing mark in all epistles—thus I write.” It’s important to realize that the “distinguishing mark in all epistles” is not an explicit “greeting of Paul,” but rather something he would write “by his own hand.”

In other words, I think that if we had the originals of Paul’s epistles, we would find that he actually did “sign” his letters, in a sense, by hand-writing a short passage at the end of each one for authentication.

Q. I’m teaching a Bible overview course on the Old and New Testaments. Please help me understand the progression of the teachings from Jesus and the apostles to Paul. How do they complement each other, and how do they differ? Thank you.

In my first post in response to this question, I suggested that Jesus’ teaching represented a “transformed dualism.” His Jewish contemporaries envisioned a world in which people were either in or out of a kingdom that was the possession of a particular ethnic group, that was based on law-keeping, and that was expected in the future. Jesus replaced that vision with one in which people were either in or out of a kingdom that was open to everyone on earth, that was based on faith, and that was already present, in addition to being expected in the future. In my second post, I showed how the apostles came to share and confirm the understanding of the “kingdom” that Jesus had presented.

In this post I’d like to show that the teaching of Paul constitutes the transformation of a different dualism, but that it ends up articulating the very same vision of what God is doing in the world with the coming of Jesus.

I should note that in his letters preserved in the New Testament, Paul, since he was Jewish himself, actually did address many of the same issues that Jesus did. He insists, for example, that righteousness (understood as right standing with God, more relational than legal) cannot be based on keeping the law; it must be based on faith (implicit trust in God). He says in Romans, “No one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law . . . but now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known . . . This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.” This assertion leads Paul directly to affirm another key teaching of Jesus, that the kingdom of God is not exclusively hereditary, but rather open to anyone, Jew or Gentile: “Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, since there is only one God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith.”

However, because Paul also moved in Greek circles—he was uniquely equipped to be the “apostle to the Gentiles” because he was trained in Greek language, culture, and philosophy in addition to being educated as a rabbi—he expanded the discussion to address a further dualism. Greeks thought in terms of a distinction between spirit and matter. They envisioned people as spirits that had trapped in physical bodies. These spirits would ultimately be released at the time of death, but in the meantime people needed to do everything they could to overcome being dragged down from the heights of spiritual experience by their bodies. For example, they might attempt, through ascetic practices, to mortify their bodies to weaken their influence, or they might try to empower their minds and spirits through knowledge and philosophy or through visionary experiences.

Paul offers a different perspective on the dualism between “spirit” and “flesh.” He conceives and explains both of those things not as parts of the human being but as ways of living. The “flesh” is a way of life that is self-assertive, self-indulgent, and rebellious against God. The “spirit” is a way of life that is completely submitted to God’s influence and direction. (Accordingly some versions of the Bible say “Spirit” in various places, meaning the Holy Spirit. Translators and interpreters of the Bible have a difficult time knowing whether, in any given place, Paul is referring to a person’s spirit or to God’s Spirit influencing that person.)

Paul’s teaching that the “flesh” and the “Spirit” are two ways of life, while dependent on Greek conceptions, actually enabled him to answer a question that arose from the discussion within Judaism about faith and the law: If people are not required to keep the law, but simply to have faith, what’s to keep them from running wild? Paul explains, once again in Romans, that the “righteous requirement of the law” can be “fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” “The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God,” he says; “it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so.” But “those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires,” and so they spontaneously do what the law requires—not just avoiding what it says to avoid, but doing positively the good things it is designed to promote.

Just as Jesus transformed the understanding of the kingdom by explaining that it was something that was in one sense already present, not something that would arrive exclusively in the future, so Paul transformed the understanding of living in the realm of the “Spirit” by explaining that it was something that was not entirely present yet, but whose ultimate realization was still in the future. Paul devoted much attention in letters such as 1 Corinthians to correcting misinformed practices that were based on a belief that people can already live in the realm of the Spirit to such an extent that what they do in our bodies doesn’t matter—indeed, that they should flaunt their freedom from their bodies’ downward drag by engaging in all sorts of activities that would otherwise be immoral or idolatrous. In theological terms, this was “over-realized eschatology.” That is, it was too much “already” and not enough “not yet.” Paul corrects this presumption of an already-realized kingdom by saying ironically to the Corinthians, “Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! You have begun to reign—and that without us! How I wish that you really had begun to reign so that we also might reign with you!”

But Paul also had to correct others, in letters such as Colossians, who were still trying to mortify their bodies through ascetic practices. “Since you have been raised with Christ,” he told the Colossians, “set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.” In this case it was too much “not yet” and not enough “already.”

Either way, however, Paul made clear that the way of life that he called “the Spirit” had begun with the coming of Jesus. “When the set time had fully come,” Paul wrote to the Galatians, “God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship. Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts.” In this sense, the “flesh” and the “Spirit” are also two periods of time. The “flesh,” the time of rebellion against God, began with humanity’s first disobedience. The “Spirit,” the time of return to living under God’s authority and guiding influence, began with Jesus’ incarnation. When God’s purposes are fulfilled, ultimately life in the Spirit will completely displace life in the flesh. Gordon Fee brilliantly captures how these two ways of life can also be periods of time in a statement he makes about followers of Jesus: “Marked by Christ’s death and resurrection and identified as God’s people by the gift of the Spirit, they live the life of the future in the present.”

So Paul engaged a dualism between spirit and matter that believed both were parts of the human being; that saw freeing the spirit from the body as the means of salvation; and that believed this deliverance could be accomplished comprehensively in the present. Paul transformed this dualism by teaching a new understanding of the “spirit” and the “flesh” as two different ways of life; by holding that “spiritual worship” consisted of offering one’s body to God as a “living sacrifice” (this must have made some Greeks’ heads spin); and by cautioning that the life of the Spirit had not yet fully arrived: “We ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.”

In my final post in this series, I’ll discuss how the gospel and letters of John and the books of Hebrews and Revelation, though they seem to reflect divergent theological streams, nevertheless contribute to a harmonious New Testament understanding of these issues.

Q. I’m teaching a Bible overview course on the Old and New Testaments. Please help me understand the progression of the teachings from Jesus and the apostles to Paul. How do they complement each other, and how do they differ? Thank you.

In my first post in response to this question, I suggested that Jesus’ teaching represented a “transformed dualism.” He redefined the “kingdom” as something that included people of all backgrounds, that was based on faith rather than law-keeping, and that was a present reality as well as a future one.

In this post I’d like to show that the apostles are portrayed in the book of Acts as affirming the understanding that Jesus taught of the “kingdom.” I will include Paul among the apostles here, since Acts shows how he worked alongside the ones whom Jesus chose and appointed during his earthly ministry. But I’ll discuss Paul’s writings separately, in my next post, and show how he transformed a further dualism. At the end of this post I’ll also look briefly at the general epistles and show how the letters of some of the other apostles confirm the impression we get from the book of Acts. (I’ll treat the letters of John, however, in my discussion of the Gospel of John in my final post.)

Acts suggests that even after Jesus’ resurrection, his disciples were still expecting a kingdom that would belong to the Jewish people. They asked him just before he ascended to heaven, “Is this the time when you are going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” Jesus responded that it wasn’t for them to know such dates or times, but that instead they should be his witnesses “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

Already that discouraged a Jewish-only understanding of the kingdom. And as the disciples fanned out to be witnesses as Jesus commanded, they found that first Greek-speaking Jews, and then Samaritans, and then even Gentiles were receptive to the faith they were proclaiming. Peter, to whom Jesus had given a leading position among the apostles, expressed the discovery this way: “Now I truly understand that God doesn’t show favoritism, but in every nation the person who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”

But even after the apostles and the whole Christian community accepted that non-Jews could be part of the “kingdom,” many still thought that everyone’s participation needed to be based on the law. This issue created such a controversy that a great meeting was ultimately held in Jerusalem to settle the matter. At this meeting there was much debate, in which many argued that the Gentiles did need to keep the law. But Peter finally stood up and insisted, “God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”

By the time of this meeting, Paul, who had previously opposed the church violently, had been converted and sent out to bring the good news to the Gentiles. He came with his co-worker Barnabas, and the whole meeting listened in rapt attention as they told about “the signs and wonders God had done among the Gentiles through them.” Finally James, the brother of Jesus and a respected elder of the church in Jerusalem, suggested that the Gentiles be welcomed into the community on the basis of faith, but that they also be asked to observe a few specific provisions of the law. His reason was that “the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.” In other words, the Gentiles were being asked this in order not to scandalize people who knew about the law and would have expected followers of Jesus, who was still seen then as a Jewish teacher, not to do things like eating blood or eating food that had been offered to idols.

So the apostles ultimately upheld the ideas of a kingdom that was open to everyone on earth and that was based on faith. They also proclaimed the kingdom as a present reality, not just a future one. For example, at the end of his first missionary journey (into the Roman province of Asia), after nearly being killed himself by a hostile mob, Paul told the new believers in Jesus, “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.” Paul didn’t mean they had to suffer hardships now in order to enter the kingdom in the future; he meant that they were entering the kingdom now, and suffering for it.

We see this same understanding of a present kingdom in the general epistles, even though they also envision a future kingdom. James, for example, says that the commandment to “love your neighbor as you love yourself” is a “royal law.” That is, it’s the law of a kingdom, or a law made by a king, or perhaps even the law on which this kingdom is based. So life in this present community is actually life in a kingdom—and it’s a kingdom of mutual love, not one governed by a code of laws that must be meticulously observed.

For his part, when Peter writes his first letter to believers throughout the western part of the Roman Empire, he tells them that they are “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession.” This is language that was applied specifically to the Israelites in the Old Testament. Here Peter applies it to a community that consists of both Jews and Gentiles, and like James he invokes the “kingdom” concept inherent in the term “royal.” But Peter also tells these same believers, in his second letter, “Make every effort to confirm your calling and election. For if you do these things, you will never stumble, and you will receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” So the kingdom is future as well as present.

The apostles, therefore, came to share and proclaim Jesus’ own transformed vision of the kingdom. As I said in my first post, your question deserves a much more extensive treatment; I’ve offered only a very brief sketch here. But I hope I’m tracing out an outline for you, and that you’ll be able to see where you can plug in your own insights and those of others.

In my next post I’ll show how Paul transformed a further dualism to arrive at an identical vision of what God was doing in the world.