New Layout

As I am a man of the people, I have capitulated to the requests of the masses and changed the background at Euangelion (this caused me great pain as I really liked the black background). Please tell me what you think.

Euangelion Rated

Anna Blanch has done a survey of the top 100 biblioblogs according to ChristianColleges.com. This is what she said about Euangelion:

Euangelion: Joel Willits, Assistant Professor in Biblical and Theological Studies at North Park University in Chicago, and Michael Bird, an Australian scholar and lecturer in New Testament at the Highland Theological College in Dingwall, Scotland, are the authors of this blog which is self labelled as a "post post-modern" blog which discusses "New Testament studies, Christian Origins, Theological Exegesis, and following Jesus." A scholarly theological blog which explores a wide range of issues, commentaries, recent book releases and posts in line with their stated telos. My biggest criticism is a painful design which is aesthetically very difficult to read - actually stopped from reading more!

Making the Grade:

Scope - B
Quality - B
Theological Leanings - Protestant (Anglican ?)

(1) Is the black background really that bad? Luke Skywalker wears black! (2) Why are we suddenly Anglican?

David deSilva on the Sacramental Life

I've finally finished reading through David deSilva's Sacramental Life: Spiritual Formation Through the Book of Common Prayer which has been a very rewarding act in my weekly morning routine. I'll leave you with the final words of deSilva:

"The Book of Common Prayer discovers the meaning of both baptism and burial in the Paschal mystery, the death and resurrection of Jesus. This mystery is that those who live forever are the ones who give themselves away to others and to God's cause in the world, who die to self by embodying the mind of Christ and following the leading of the Spirit to complete Christ's work in the world. The question we face between baptism and our own Easter is this: will we live for this mortal life, witnessing to the triumph of Christ's resurrection, the triumph of God over death, proclaiming by our self-giving actoins and courageous witness, 'Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?' (1 Cor. 15.55).!

Key Elements of Pauline Theology

I know that Romans is often touted as a "template" for Pauline theology (see Sheila McGinn, Celebrating Romans: Template for Pauline Theology), but I am beginning to wonder if Galatians is a better example of Paul's raw and radical theology in many respects. Galatians contains a clear explication of Paul's apocalyptic framework (Gal.1.4), participation in Christ (Gal. 2.17, 20; 3.27-28), gospel and justification (2.15-21), Law-Faith antithesis (Gal. 3.1-9), Pauline hermeneutics (Gal. 3.10-14), redemptive-history (Gal. 3.15-5.1), life in the Spirit (Gal. 5.2-6.10), the church as the 'Israel of God' (Gal. 6.16 - see Beale and Kostenberger on that verse), and he gives us some of our best insights into the complexity of early Christianity (Gal. 1.6-2.14; 6.11-16).

Hippolytus and the "Faith of Jesus Christ"

In his tract on the Christ and the Antichrist, Hippolytus discourses about what is going to happen to Christians when the Antichrist comes.

In paragraph 61 it says:

And the words, "upon her head a crown of twelve stars," refer to the twelve apostles by whom the Church was founded. And those, "she, being with child, cries, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered," mean that the Church will not cease to bear from her heart the Word that is persecuted by the unbelieving in the world. "And she brought forth," he says, "a man-child, who is to rule all the nations;" by which is meant that the Church, always bringing forth Christ, the perfect man-child of God, who is declared to be God and man, becomes the instructor of all the nations. And the words, "her child was caught up unto God and to His throne," signify that he who is always born of her is a heavenly king, and not an earthly; even as David also declared of old when he said, "The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit Thou at my right hand, until I make Thine enemies Thy footstool." "And the dragon," he says, "saw and persecuted the woman which brought forth the man-child. And to the woman were given two wings of the great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent." That refers to the one thousand two hundred and threescore days (the half of the week) during which the tyrant is to reign and persecute the Church, which flees from city to city, and seeks concealment in the wilderness among the mountains, possessed of no other defence than the two wings of the great eagle, that is to say, the faith of Jesus Christ, [Iesou Christou pistis] who, in stretching forth His holy hands on the holy tree, unfolded two wings, the right and the left, and called to Him all who believed upon Him, and covered them as a hen her chickens. For by the mouth of Malachi also He speaks thus: "And unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in His wings."

I came across this text quite accidentally a week or so ago and I think it is the clearest reference we have to a subjective genitive of "faith(fulness) of Christ" in relation to Jesus' death on the cross in patristic literature.

Is it just me or is this fascinating stuff? Anyways, myself and Michael Whiteton should have an article on this forthcoming very soon.

Australian Family Lives in Slum Dog's Neighbourhood

There is an interesting article in the Sydney Morning Herald about an Australian family who chose to live in the Mumbai slums in order to escape the consumerism of western society. Read about it here. What caught my eye was the quote: "They are strongly motivated by their Christian faith, believing that life is more about caring for others than comfort and success." I wonder if this was similar to life of Christians living in the insulae in quarters of ancient Rome, Corinth, or Thessaloniki.

Book Notice: Seyoon Kim, Christ and Caesar

Seyoon Kim
Christ and Caesar: The Gospel and the Roman Empire in the Writings of Paul and Luke
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008.
Available at Amazon.com

Political readings in Paul are in vogue at the moment whereby Paul's theology (and indeed much of the NT including Luke and Revelation) are said to be deeply subversive to the Roman political edice in general and directly opposed imperial propaganda in particular. Seyoon Kim responds to some of these readings with a powerful critique that has some measure of validity. I think Kim raises some good points about the parallelomania that endemically permeates these studies, the inability of these scholars to do full justice to Romans 13.1-8, and Luke's attempt to show that the Church and Roman society are not entirely incompatible does not fil well with their thesis, and (I would add) some commentators make Paul out to be some kind of liberal college arts professor who is anti-American and anti-Bush to the enth degree.

Even so, I am not convinced by Kim's handling of Acts 17.1-9 (pp. 44-45) that opposition to Caesar is not implied by Paul's gospel as Paul meant something very different to the offence that his gospel actually caused. Second, Kim declares that this counter-imperial message was essentially absent in the early church, but the narrative of the Acts of Paul shows that this is patently false and the two kingdoms were regarded as incompatible. Third, counter pagan propaganda is implied in Israel's national religion which long saw Yahweh as defeating pagan nations and de-throning their Gods (e.g. Isaiah). Fourth, the older studies of Adolf Deissman and William Ramsay I think capture correctly how Paul's epistles have to be situated in the context of the Roman political world. Ramsay wrote: "A universal Paulinism and a universal Empire must either coalesce, or the one must destroy the other". Ramsay is also not cited once by Kim either.

Credit to Kim, he does make some genuinely good criticisms and shows how the pendulum needs to swing away from a Paul who looks like a left-wing political activist. He also argues in the conclusion that we should not expect Christians living in countries under hostile regimes to take up arms in the cause of revolution in order to prove their discipleship, nor should we fear to politically engage the world around us (Kim commends Luke over John the Seer as a model here). Even so, I would urge against pushing Paul and Luke in the direction of a political quietism.

Those wanting more should read Denny Burk's article in JETS (2008): "Is Paul's Gospel Counterimperial? Evaluating the Prospects of the "Fresh Perspective" for Evangelical Theology" for an approach similar to Kim.

Guy Waters on N.T. Wright's new book

Over at the Reformed Forum is an interview with Guy Prentiss Waters about N.T. Wright's new book on Paul and justification. It was a good discussion and Waters' reference to Wright was not entirely negative. I'll offer a few comments:

When the panel began talking about Waters' essay as to how Rom. 10.5 proves the covenant of works, I made several painful facial expressions (much like those I made in relation to a sermon that intended to prove the pre-tribulation rapture from Psalm 110). But as I listened on, the discussion proved indeed worthwhile.

Waters makes a pertinent observation in that Wright is far more nuanced in his current work than he was in his 1997 volume What Saint Paul Really Said. Wright is genuinely attempting to bring the old and the new together (I'm reminded of Mt. 917). Still, Waters (who studied under E.P. Sanders at Duke) regards the Traditional Reformed view and the New Perspective view as thoroughly incompatibable. That is something that stands in diametrical opposition to my own approach to the matter which has sought to find the common ground between both perspectives. Waters compliments Wright for a covenantal approach and for also emphasizing the unity of the Bible's storyline. He suggest, however, that Wright makes far too much of "exile" rather than "being-in-Adam". I'll say several things here: (1) Certainly Wright does lean on exile very heavily, but for Wright "exile" is essentially a synedoche for a wider story that relates to Israel's role in creation, in appropriating the role of Adam for themselves, and their recapitulation of Adam's plight. What is more, Wright acknowledges that it was precisely the problem of sin that sent Israel into exile in the first place. I remember hearing D.A. Carson relay a conversation he had with Wright and he told Wright that he needs to push the problem back further than exile and back into eden. I think Wright did do that very much so in Resurrection of the Son of God which has a big focus on the creation narrative as providing the background to the resurrection theology of the NT. In other words, Wright's focus on exile is problematic in some respects esp. as a controlling meta-narrative (I have a forthcoming essay on this subject) but hardly at odds with a creation-Adam-sin-Abraham-Israel-Messiah narrative. (2) Waters counters that what Wright needs is a construal of the controlling story along the lines of Adam (covenant of works) and Christ (covenant of grace). If that is what the covenants mean for Waters, I could probably go for that depending on how it pans out in the details. At the Edinburgh dogmatics conference in 2005, Andrew McGowan argued for a basic structure of redemptive-history as comprising of an Adamic administration and a Messianic administration (a la John Murray rebooted). Wright was at the conference and in a conversation with McGowan (I am told) he found that kind of formulation essentially correct and in-line with his own thinking. And it gets better, I'll never forget attending a Bethlehem Institute discussion at ETS which touched on covenant theology and John Piper gave his own view as one is either in Adam or in Christ - those are the categories. Hence, I suspect that there is probably more in common between Wright and Piper on this Adam/Messiah element than is apparent (though I admit that my garnering of evidence on this is admittedly oral to date).

Waters argues that it is biblical to speak of justification according to works when properly understood, but not justification on the basis of works. I concur here. I find Wright often fuzzy and less exact than I'd like him to be on this matter. Even so, the impression that I get is that works are ultimately evidential for Wright rather than instrumental. What tips me off on that is that for Wright justification is forensic and he emphasizes the theme of assurance very strongly in his commentary on Romans 5-8. Assurance is exactly what you don't have in the Tridentine system (Sinclair Ferguson gave an excellent lecture on this topic at a John Murray lecture a few years ago).

On the "Righteousness of God" Waters is correct that it cannot be reduced to God's covenant faithfulness (Mark Seifrid's dictum is that all covenant keeping is righteous but not all righteousness is covenant keeping!). Even so, I do not understand why any Reformed proponent would take out a theological restraining order so as to keep God's righteousness and God's faithfulness to Israel's covenant apart from each other (that is Luther not Calvin!!!). I think Seifrid's point is well taken, but even his SBTS colleague Tom Schreiner thinks that he's gone too far and "separates righteousness too radically from covenant and wrongly traces it only back to creation" (Schreiner, New Testament Theology, 353 . 46). I would point out that relating God's righteousness to his faithfulness to the covenant goes back as far as Ambrosiaster and was also present among the English puritans like George Joye! In my view, the righteousness of God refers to his character and saving activity and it certainly covers God's faithfulness to Israel (hence for the "Jew first" in Rom. 1.16) even if it cannot be reduced to it. By the same taken (contra Tom Schreiner, New Testament Theology), I do not think the righteousness of God is the gift of righteousness from God as it is a far more comprehensive event than this.

For me the highlight came at the 50 minute mark with Waters giving a very good description of how Wright (and me) understand justification as participating in Christ's vindication in his resurrection (Seifrid and Gaffin agree with this for the most part). Believers are thus justified since they participate in Christ and share in his justification. But he proceeds to argue that Wright then telescopes transformation from Romans 6-8 into justification via union with Christ. Here I am not convinced that Wright does that. Wright does regard justification as forensic and even though he doesn't necessarily articulate the duplex gratia as Calvin does, I think he's in a similar ball-park as union with Christ provides the basis for our justification and is the source of our sanctification.

Overall, a very interesting discussion, there are several elements I'd certain demur from Waters on, but I think he makes some genuinely valid observations through out.

Glenn Davies on Children at Communion

Glenn Davies is Anglican Bishop of North Sydney and a former lecturer at Moore Theological College. He wrote a short article entitled "The Lords' Supper for the Lord's Children" which appear in Reformed Theological Review 50.1 (1991) 12-20. In his conclusion he wrote:

The Lord's Supper is for the Lord's people. It is a meal in celebration of the redemption he has won for us. All those to whom this salvation belongs are appropriate guests at the Lord's Table. Participation in the Lord's Supper is participation in Christ. To deny this meal to those who participate in Christ is a travesty of the one body in which we all share. Our covenant children are members of Christ's body and share in Christ. They should therefore share in the one bread and drink and the same cup of blessing which we drink. However this is not to suggest that the warnings [of] 1 Cor 11:27-30 have no relevance for children. Participants in the covenant meal are required to be in covenantal fellowship, and that covenantal fellowship is evidenced, through God's grace, by covenantal obedience. Yet it is a mistake to judge the faithfulness of an individual solely in terms of mature self-understanding or an articulate profession of faith. Evidence of covenant standing is not correlative to one's age. An understanding appropriate to the age, however, does not necessarily imply that children have the ability to articulate the meaning of the sacrament in adult thought forms. Conversely, an inability to give an articulate explanation of the relationship a child sustains to his or her parents does not mean that they have an incorrect understanding of their relationship to them. There is much that may be deficient about or own understanding of the Lord's Supper, as indeed there was for the twelve apostles who first took of it with their Master. Yet the immaturity of their understanding did not prevent their participation in that Supper. The importance of Paul's warnings, however, is whether or not the child is remaining faithful to the covenant in which he or she stands. To deny them the Lord's Supper is to effectively discipline them in the same way we would do a covenant breaker. Their exclusion is tantamount to identifying them with the world, unworthy to eat and drink the body and blood of the Lord. Yet our children belong to God, by the sure promise of his Word signed and sealed in baptism. Let us then feed them with the blessing of Christ, and teach them through the Supper that the priviledge of union and communion with Christ belongs to them. The Lord's Supper is for the Lord's Children.

Friday is for Ad Fontes - Sirach and Wine

Friday night is always red wine and primary sources night for me. Here is my latest reading from Sirach 31:

(25) Let not wine-drinking be the proof of your strength, for wine has been the ruin of many. (26) As the furnace probes the work of the smith, so does wine the hearts of the insolent. (27) Wine is very life to man if taken in moderation. Does he really live who lacks the wine which was created for his joy? (28) Joy of heart, good cheer and merriment are wine drunk freely at the proper time. (29) Headache, bitterness and disgrace is wine drunk amid anger and strife. (30) More and more wine is a snare for the fool; it lessens his strength and multiplies his wounds. (31) Rebuke not your neighbor when wine is served, nor put him to shame while he is merry; Use no harsh words with him and distress him not in the presence of others (NAB).

Paul the Jewish Evangelist

I am currently working on an essay about "Paul's Judaism" (partly inspired by a Mark Nanos stirring paper). I hope to one day return to the subject of Paul as a missionary among the Gentiles and not just too them (see Rom. 1.5 and 1 Cor. 9.20). That I think opens up the possiblity of Paul seeing himself as having some kind of role as an evangelist to Diaspora communities as well even if only in a limited sense with his main role oriented towards non-Jews. But the subject of Jewish evangelism is often rejected in favour of a Sonderweg (special way) of salvation for Jews under the Torah and Mosaic covenant. It's also argued that Israel's "misstep" was its refusal to accept that, with the resurrection of Jesus, God had now opened up a way for Gentiles to enter the Abrahamic family through faith in Christ. The biggest problem I have is that apart from not making sense of Romans 9-11 it implies that the existence of Jewish Christianity was simply a necessary transitional phase or, even worse, a grave mistake. On Jewish evangelism in relation to Romans (esp. 10.14-21!) note the following quotations from Richard Bell and N.T. Wright:

Richard H. Bell (Provoked to Jealousy: The Origin and Purpose of the Jealousy Motif in Romans 9–11 [WUNT 2.63; Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1994], 354-55): ‘Paul’s theology demands a mission to the Jewish people. Provoking Israel to jealousy is no replacement for mission. It is just one possible precursor for mission. The gospel must be preached for it is only the gospel, God’s reconciling word, which can make someone a Christian (Rom. 10.17) … I would maintain that evangelism to Jews is not antisemitism; rather to renounce preaching the liberating gospel to Jewish people is antisemitism’.

N.T. Wright (‘Romans,’ in NIB, ed. Leander E. Keck [12 vols.; Nashville: Abingdon, 2002], 10.697): ‘to imagine that Jews can no longer be welcomed into the family of the Messiah … [that] for Paul, would be the very height of anti-Judaism’.

See further The Berlin Declaration on the Uniqueness of Christ and Jewish Evangelism in Europe Today and the book To the Jew First: The Case for Jewish Evangelism in Scripture and History edited by Darrell Bock and Mitch Glaser.

New Blog

My newest friend from the virtual world of biblioblogdom is Michael Whiteton, a graduate student at Dallas Theological Seminary. I've only known Michael for just over a week and already we've co-written a short article about the Pistis Christou debate in the Church Fathers after I happened to discover a juicy text hereto never mentioned in any discussion which Michael greatly contributed to. (I'll post on this some time in the future). He has a blog called Ecce Homo. What is more, he is also a red head! And we know that the world needs more red-head Neutestamentlars than anything else! Tragically he's quite tall and has not yet procured a taste for an Aussie Cab Sav, but with a dozen parachute jumps and a case of Wolf Blass all can be fixed. Go pay a visit to Michael's blog and say hello.

Paternoster 2009 Catalogue

In the latest Paternoster 2009 Catalogue on-line you can find some really good books including, on page 3, the forthcoming The Faith of Jesus Christ edited by myself and Preston M. Sprinkle. This will be one of THE books of 2009 I have to say. I do not know for sure when it is due to be released in the USA by Hendrickson.

Spring 2009 Baker Catalogue

The Baker Publishers Spring 2009 Catalogue is available here which has some great books in Biblical Studies (esp. p. 26) and lots on Calvin as well.

A Second Review of "Saving Righteousness of God"

Over at RBL there is a second review of my book The Saving Righteousness of God by James Sweeney which is very positive (though he painfully notes some of the tragic typographical errors in the book).

The Goal of our Instruction?

What is the goal of biblical exegesis and theological interpretation for the reader, practitioner, and minister? In other words, what is the "goal of our instruction" (1 Tim. 1.5) in the Christian Scriptures? I think Eugene Peterson sums it up well when he says that through the Scriptures “we learn to think accurately, behave morally, preach passionately, sing joyfully, pray honestly, obey faithfully”. (Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005], 182).

Vanhoozer on Theological Method

My advice to systematic theology students in the Evangelical Tradition is to read Vanhoozer as much as they can. He shows that doing theology needs to take into account hermeneutics, speech-act theory, postmodern objections to foundatonalist epistemology, the canon, and critical engagement with Barth. In his essay "The Apostolic Discourse and its Developments" (note the echo of C.H. Dodd) in Scripture's Doctrine and Theology's Bible Vanhoozer narrates his experience in theological method.

"Once upon a time, if asked what in the New Testament was authoritative, I would have replied, 'Revelation.' (On this point, thomists, evangelicals, and Barthians all agree, though they parse 'revelation' differently.) Theology's task, I thought was the extraction of propositional revelation or truth from Scripture and its consequent organization into a consistent conceptual system. Two pictures - one of Scripture as revelation and one of theology as a two-stage process, from descriptive exegesis ('what it meant') to a normative dogmatics ('what it means'') - held me captive. Scripture is not simply a propositional shaft to be exegetically mined and theologically refined like so much textual dross to be purified into systems of philosophy or morality On the contrary, both the form and content of the New Testament are elemetns in the divine drama of revelation and redemption".

I concur here. Some systematicians who have drunk at the well of rationalism proceed in the theological task as if God (by either folly or due to human weakness) gave revelation most unfortunatley in different genres: Law-code, narrative, prophecy, Proverbs, Gospels, Epistles, and Apocalypse. We can navigate our way around this unfortunate circumstance by translating this genred revelation into proposition statements of truths to be believed. For example, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, wrote: "In demonstration, in council, and all rigorous search of truth, sometimes does all; except sometimes the understanding have need to be opened by some apt similitude, and then there is so much use of fancy. But for metaphors, they are in this case utterly excluded. For seeing they openly profess deceit, to admit them into council, or reasoning, were manifest folly." In other words, metaphors are a stupid means of conveying truth (and that probably goes for playwrites as much for God). Yet, our theology should take into account not only the propositional cohere of what God says in Scripture, but also the how of God's self-communication. In other words, form and genre are equally important in our analysis of the divine discourse. Indeed perhaps our theology (and even our preaching) should convey not only what God says, but also how he says it. I tell my students, if you're preaching narrative material then preach narratively; if you're preaching topical material, preach inductively/proverbially; if you're preaching didactic material, then preach deductively/didactically. The same holds for theology does it not? Yet I would add that Alister McGrath has shown the viability of a cognitivist-propositional approach to theology and thus we need not yield to the oldYale crowd with their narrative theology?

On the Two-step mechanism - what it meat to what it means - I admit that this is problematic given the nature of pre-understanding, however, I'm not sure if Vanhoozer's "dance" is necessarily the best option or even the intuition we have in doing theology. Vanhoozer cites Gilbertson's book on exegesis and theology on the Book of Revelation as an example of this, and this is a good book I have reviewed elsewhere and comment on the subject.

Two Bargain Books at Wesley-Owen

For those in the UK, in the latest Wesley-Owen catalogue there is a stack of Paternoster books going cheap as chips which I recommend:

1. Tim Chester, From Creation to New Creation - excellent for giving small groups and Sunday school classes an introduction to the biblical storyline. (RRP £8.99, Now £4.50). Blurb: "The Bible is the story of God's salvation. Despite our fall into sin, and the recurrent rejection of God's rule, God promised to make Abraham into a 'great nation' and to 'bless' him. Yet what does this mean? How are we to interpret this promise of salvation? Looking at God's covenantal promises with Abraham, Moses and David, Tim Chester presents the 'big picture'? of the Bible and helps Christians understand the part in relation to the whole."

2. Petrus Grabe, New Covenant, New Community - the best introduction to the concept of covenant in the Bible, Second Temple Jewish literature, and Patristic literature that I've seen. (RRP £ 17.99, Now £ 8.99). Blurb: "The concept of 'covenant' is a crucial component in understanding God and his actions throughout salvation history. New Covenant, New Community looks at covenant in the Old and New Testaments and the history of Christian interpretation, and makes a substantial contribution to biblical theological studies in this area. What are the elements of continuity and discontinuity in terms of the covenant concept between the Old and New Testaments? Can we truly speak of a 'new' covenant that is distinct from the old? What are the implications of a biblical understanding of covenant for the community of faith - then and now? These are just a few of the many questions Grabe addresses in this far-reaching, well-researched and highly accessible study."

Intro to the Apocryphal Gospels

Paul Foster (Edinburgh Uni) has a new book with OUP called The Apocryphal Gospels: A Very Short Introduction. The blurb states:

"This Very Short Introduction offers a clear, accessible, and concise account of the apocryphal gospels--exploring their origins, their discovery, and discussing how the various texts have been interpreted both within and outside the Church. Looking at texts ranging from the Gospels from Nag Hammadi to the Dialogues with the Risen Savior, Paul Foster shows how the apocryphal gospels reflect the diversity that existed within early Christianity, and considers the extent to which they can be used to reconstruct an accurate portrait of the historical Jesus. Foster demonstrates how close analysis of text, contents, and context are vital in assessing the value and authenticity of such ancient documents. Including discussions of controversies and case-studies such as the alleged hoax surrounding the discovery of Secret Mark, Foster concludes that the non-canonical texts, considered in the correct context, can help us reach a more complete understanding of the multi-faceted nature of early Christianity."

See also his other volume The non-canonical Gospels which is an edited collection of previously published works from Expository Times.

Martyn on Galatians (2) Paul and Apocalpyticism

1. In his Galatians commentary, J.L. Martyn refers to the "Apocalyptic Theology in Galatians," and he mentions to two different tracks of Jewish apocalytpicism: (1) Cosmological apocalyptic eschatology which focuses on how evil anti-God powers have taken over rule of this world leading human beings into idolatry and thus slavery, and God will fight a glorious apocalyptic war against these powers and save his elect from their wicked machinations; and (2) Forensic apocalyptic eschatology where things have gone wrong because human beings have rejected God, thereby bringing corruption, death, and pervsion on the world. Thus, God sets before the people Two Ways: the way of death and the way of life. Human beings must chose one over the other and thus give an account of themselves on the final day. In Martyn's thinking the Galatian intruders held to forensic apocalyptic eschatology and Paul held to cosmological apocalyptic eschatology. The problem I have is: (1) I think we can find evidence of cosmological and forensic apocalyptic eschatology in Paul's letters. (2) I think part of the problem of the Galatian intruders was that they lacked the eschatological framework of Paul and saw the Mosaic/Sinaitic era as continuing on into the era of the Messiah, whereas Paul infers a far more radical and abrupt disjunction between these two eras.

2. To you all you young theological students and Ph.D candidates remember this: don't ever talk about "apocalyptic". The word "apocalyptic" is an adjective not a noun. You can have an apocalyptic worldview (i.e. apocalyptic eschatology), you can have apocalytpicism (i.e. a sociological phenomenon like Waco or the Qumran community), you can have apocalyptic writings (i.e. an apocalypse) - but do not refer to "apocalyptic" as an actual entity in and of itself.

3. Also, for an introduction to Apocalyptic Literature, I imagine Stephen Cook's new volume on the subject will be a worthwhile read.