Monday, November 08, 2010

My ETS and IBR Papers On-Line

For those interested, here are links to my papers in Atlanta:



All on Friday 19 November in Atlanta.

5 comments:

PJ Tibayan said...

I haven't been able to access these papers. Is the link down.

PJ Tibayan said...

Nevermind.... I got it to work. Thanks!

Mick Porter said...

Mike, they're both useful and interesting papers, thanks for making them available.

John Thomson said...

Yep.

Read the first. Really good. Been blogging a bit from a preacher's perspective about IAO. This prompted me to read again 'incorporated righteousness'. Undoubtedly a good paper. Hope it has been widely read.

Emerson Fast said...

Hey Mike,

I read your second one and thoroughly enjoyed your wit and good-natured blessings/criticisms. Being entirely ignorant of Australia's historic relationship with the British Empire, I'd like to ask whether the jovial spirit of your essay adequately reflects the nature of your country's split from those dastardly imperialistic Brits?

On a darker note, your essay seems to presuppose that the historic church's knowledge of the kingdom/cross relationship has been more or less steeped in a dogmatic ignorance from day one. But can this really be a settled presupposition when its basic import has been derived from the writings of scholars who tend to openly admit that they have no expertise in church history? In other words, are you absolutely certain that maintaining somewhat of the lie for the early church can be something more than dilletantish bullshit?

Obviously you balance the matter out significantly in the second portion of your essay, but you can still say things like: " Prof. Wright sounds a few words of caution about creedal constructions of Jesus divorced from their historical referents."

Since when have the creedal constructions been guilty of divorcing the kerygma from its historical referent? Can one conceive of the "crucifixus" in a vacuum, as if the drafters of the apostolic creed thought the word had no linguistic ties to the Roman execution technology? And if so, why the concern in situating this phrase directly after the "passus sub Pontio Pilato"? A mere loquacious addition, perhaps?

Does the "conceptus de Spiritu Sancto" immediately demand the catechumen to delve into the rich narratives of Spirit-empowered births throughout Israel's history or not? And did the early church find a Spiritu Sancto quite different from the one responsible for the "natus ex Maria Virgine" and thus of infinite divide from the Lukan concern for the Isaianic promise of the Redeemer Spirit?

Shall I carry on? Were the catechists speaking idly when they referred to their savior as "Jesum Christum", the Greek variant of the Joshua, the YHWH who saves, the anointed Messiah of Israel's expectation? What about the remissionem peccatorum or perhaps most especially the carnis resurrectionem? No doubt all of these articles speak of the thorough Hellenistic infiltration of the church and its deleterious movement away from the so-called "story of Israel"!

Oh my gosh. Not to sound snobby. Well maybe a little snobby. I'm a Canadian and we too have a moderate ax to grind with British imperialism. But if we remove all of the references to the immediate context of Israel's salvation history from the Apostle's creed, we no longer have much left to call an Apostle's creed!

Who is primordially guilty of dogmatic ignorance here? The dogmatists who flood their symbolums with Israelitic terminology and theology, or the historian who ignores the dogmas in preference for a "Greek dogma" which exists in no other region than the hyletic stratum of his own mind, and which he subsequently uses as a basis for verbal and written attack on the aforementioned church?