Book Deals

Christianbook.com's bargin center is worth a visit. I managed to grab Emil Schurer's 5 volume set "A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ" for $39.99 and Gerhard von Rad's “Old Testament Theology” Unabridged one volume edition for $9.99

The Evangelical Pespective of Rev 19.7-9 and More

7 χαίρωμεν καὶ ἀγαλλιῶμεν καὶ δώσωμεν τὴν δόξαν αὐτῷ,
ὅτι ἦλθεν ὁ γάμος τοῦ ἀρνίου καὶ ἡ γυνὴ αὐτοῦ ἡτοίμασεν ἑαυτὴν
8 καὶ ἐδόθη αὐτῇ ἵνα περιβάληται βύσσινον λαμπρὸν καθαρόν·
τὸ γὰρ βύσσινον τὰ δικαιώματα τῶν ἁγίων ἐστίν.
9 Καὶ λέγει μοι· γράψον· μακάριοι οἱ εἰς τὸ δεῖπνον τοῦ γάμου τοῦ ἀρνίου κεκλημένοι. καὶ λέγει μοι· οὗτοι οἱ λόγοι ἀληθινοὶ τοῦ θεοῦ εἰσιν. (Rev 19.7-9)


As I have been working through Rodney Decker’s chapter on Revelation 19 in his fantastic “Koine Greek Reader”, I have been also working through Beale’s excellent commentary in the NIGTC series.

On Rev 19.7-9 Beale writes:

Verse 9 presents a different perspective on the wedding metaphor from vv 7–8. There the bride, the corporate church, was viewed as about to wed the Lamb, but now individual Christians are portrayed as guests at the marriage banquet. Both pictures portray the intimate communion of Christ with believers, but the first focuses on the corporate church and the second on individual members of the church. The same alteration of focus on the community as a whole and the members of the community has been seen in ch. 12 with the woman and her seed (e.g., 12:17). (Beale, G. K. 1999, The book of Revelation : A commentary on the Greek text p.945)

Here Beale manages to affirms a basic evangelical tenant, namely that of “the intimate communion of Christ with believers.” Beale though brilliantly recognizes that here in Revelation the text portrays that communion as not only personal (aka the individual), but also, and this has been a weak point of evangelicalism, the corporate. It won’t do to try and play one against the other.

Economics and Politics In Revelation

As I’ve wrestled with my own sin I’ve been thinking about a theme that runs throughout the Bible which seems woefully neglected in the Church today. While the Bible does certainly call individual to personally trust in God and leave their lives of sin, the Bible also and more repeatedly call the world to leave its political and economic structures and take up God’s kingdom ways of being. As I write this I’m increasingly unhappy with having to make such a distinction between personal sin and the political and economic structures of the world. This is because that I’m increasingly convinced that the ways we organize ourselves politically and economically, and I doubt the two are separable, help determine and shape how we go about our personal lives; that which we think and do.

With the interconnection between economics, politics, and the way we live out our social existence it becomes increasingly difficult to say what determines what. Does our personal rebellion against God determine our political and economic structures? Or do our economic and political structures determine our personal rebellion? I doubt that such a chicken or egg scenario can ever be untangled because the two work hand in hand. Personal rebellion shape and structures our economics and politics, and our politics and economics shapes, structure, and reinforces our persons and their rebellion in a never ending downward spiral. Thankfully a number of very gifted scholars are exploring the political and economic dimension of the Bible.

One of the finest and gifted commentators on the economic and political dimensions of the Bible in my opinon is Richard Bauckham. Time and time again his name comes up as the must read on Revelation. His book “How to Read the Bible Politically” strikes me as one that grasps some of the finer subtleties of the political and economic dimensions of the Bible very exceptionally.

In a talk Bauckham gave on Revelation at Criswell College http://www.criswell.edu/sermon/richard-bauckham/ he captures something of the connection between politics, economics, and the way we live in the world when he says:

Revelation liberates its readers from the dominate worldview, the Roman view of the world in the first century. It exposes the idolatry that from top to bottom infuses and inspires the political, economic, and social realities in which its readers live and it calls them to uncompromising Christian witness to the true God who despite earthly appearances is sovereign over the world. So by seeing the world differently, by being given this fresh imaginative appreciation of what the world is like from God’s perspective, readers are enabled to live and die differently as followers of Jesus’ way of faithful witness to God even in the face of death. They’re empowered to live their allegiance to a different way of being in the world, to the kingdom of God, and to live in hope of the coming of God’s kingdom as the ultimate truth of this world which must prevail over everything that presently opposes God’s rule. (emphasis mine)

Here I believe that Bauckham has hit upon a central theme not only in Revelation but also through out the entire Bible which invites its hearers to reorient themselves around God rather than the world. This different way of seeing the world, as the above quote indicates, involves the totality of existence: the political, economic, and social ways of being in the world that we the Church must attend to if we are to be in any true sense Biblical. The reorientation brings with it personal reformation precisely because how we see things and how we organize ourselves politically, economically and socially are intimately interconnected.

This is important for the Church to grasp. One of the biggest critiques raised against the church here in the U.S. is that the church doesn’t look any different than the world. Divorce rates are the same, and most every day of the week some fallen church leader graces the headlines of the news. Sexual immorality runs rampant throughout the church, and opulent wealth is regularly touted as God’s desire for your life. This I suggest is because the Church here in the U.S. has so capitulated with the political and economic worldview of western liberalism that few are able to adequately distinguish between God’s kingdom and western liberalism. The two or either talked about as if they were one and the same, or they’re routinely ignored. This failure to distinguish between God’s kingdom and western liberalism (or any other alternative socio-political-economic system) has in turn affected at every level how the Church and its members exist in the world. The Church as a body must find new eyes and ears to see and hear the political and economic dimensions of Jesus call to repentance and faithfully begin to embody them if we as individuals hope to personally lead markedly different lives. If we don’t we will continue to see Christians desperately trying to swim against the stream of culture only to be swallowed up by its currents and dashed against the rocks. Let those with ears hear.

Yoder on the practice of prosboul

While reading through "The Politics of Jesus" by Yoder I found this particularly interesting:

“The frequent remission of debts had a serious inconvenience, already indicated in Deuteronomy 13:7-11: it froze credit. Because of this the rabbis, even the most orthodox like Hillel and Shammai, who had become the champions of the strict application of the law of Moses, hesitated to demand the strict application of the jubilee. The closer the sabbatical year came, the more the wealthy hesitated to lend to the poor for fear of losing their capital. Hereby the economic life of the country was paralyzed. The rabbis sought out a solution to this problem. Adroit commentators of the law, they knew how to make it say the opposite of what it ordered.

It was the most congenial among them, the famous Hillel, whom Jesus sometimes quoted, the grandfather of Gamaliel (who was to be in his turn the teacher of Paul), who found a neat solution to the problem.

This solution was called the prosboul. This word probably signifies: pros boule which is Greek for ‘an action formalized before the tribunal.’ According to the treatise Gittin of the Mishnas, Hillel in this way authorized a creditor to transfer to a court the right to recover in his name a debt which the sabbatical year otherwise might have canceled.

The very existence of the proboul proves that, contrary to the
statement of some authors, there was at the time of Jesus a strong current favoring the strict application of the provision of the jubilee for the periodic remission of debts. Otherwise the institution of this procedure of prosboul would have been unnecessary.” (64-65)