Those words are a fitting tribute in and of themselves to Sanders’ work, published forty years earlier than Fredriksen’s. But am I alone in noting a further tribute, a visual homage to Sanders? Not identical, I know, but is the cover design of the more recent volume intended to evoke that of the earlier?

My colleague Robyn Whitaker composed a brief article on the Bible and same-sex relations. In the process, she asked me for a quotation that she could use in summarising my view of one of the relevant texts: Romans 1:28–28. This is what I said:

“Paul shares a stereotypical Jewish distrust of Graeco-Roman same sex activity, but is simply not talking about loving partnerships between people with same sex orientation.”

The article, originally written for The Conversation, was then syndicated by the ABC and so received substantial circulation. In response to the article as a whole, and especially to the claim made by Whitaker and supported by me, that Romans 1 is not really about orientation, Lionel Windsor composed a response piece (theoretically directed at articles by Whitaker and Amy Jill Levine, but really focused almost exclusively on the former) pointing out that Bill Loader’s recent and well-received work on Romans 1 argues that Paul did understand that there could be something akin to sexual orientation, and that he condemned it anyway. In the ABC version of that piece my quotation wasn’t mentioned, although I now note that my initial hunch as to why is confirmed by the original version of Windsor’s article on the ‘Thinking of God’ website. Windsor goes on to consider the way in which his account of Paul’s gospel makes sense of Paul’s rhetoric in Romans 1.

My response can be found here. It isn’t the easiest read, perhaps, if the nuances of the debate aren’t familiar to you. But the intention was to challenge to some extent Windsor’s reading of Loader, and offer an alternative account of the way that we connect Paul’s theology (his ‘big idea’) to his ethics.

A couple of things have occurred to me in the process of stepping into this debate:

The first is that I have yet to receive a single challenging, questioning, accusatory, or intemperate email about what I wrote; in contrast to Whitaker, whose position on the biblical texts I explicitly support. Within a day of her article appearing she received numerous emails questioning not only her views, but her authority to express them, and the validity of her Christian faith and academic credentials. Of course it may simply be that my persuasive skills are such that those who have told Robyn she is going to hell have all changed their minds and will be voting ‘Yes’ in the forthcoming survey. But somehow I doubt it. It could simply be that my article has dropped into the abyss of online comment on this issue and that very few people have read it. But there are other possible explanations. The first is the likelihood that as a middle aged, cis-gendered, white, straight male I am benefitting from all of the unspoken forms of insulation and protection that are afforded me. Certainly at least one person has taken the time to wrte to Robyn and attack her for what is stated in the quotation from me.

The second possible explanation is that, in composing a slightly technical response to a response to an article, I left my own position on the issue unclear. So let me be clear, for what it is worth. I support the position that has been carefully articulated by others: by Robyn, by Bill Loader himself (whose work, like Robyn’s, is marked by the admirable qualities of exegetical care and hermeneutical honesty); by my own Pastor Simon Holt. I am not an Australian citizen, but if I were I would be voting ‘Yes’ in the forthcoming survey. I support a change in the legislation to enable marriage between people of the same sex, and I see no biblical or theological warrant for denying its legitimacy.

I have been an Accordance customer now for almost 17 years, and I couldn’t do my work without it. For those who don’t know what I am talking about, Accordance is the premier Biblical Studies software (IMHO) currently available. I add modules every year or so, and the quality and precision of the work that goes in to making original language texts and resources available is impeccable.

Anyway, all of which is an introduction to the fact that some of the Accordance staff will be in Melbourne during September, and will be offering training events across Queensland, NSW and here in Melbourne. The Melbourne details are:

David Bentley Hart undertook this new translation of the New Testament in the spirit of “etsi doctrina non daretur,” “as if doctrine is not given.” Reproducing the texts’ often fragmentary formulations without augmentation or correction, he has produced a pitilessly literal translation, one that captures the texts’ impenetrability and unfinished quality while awakening readers to an uncanniness that often lies hidden beneath doctrinal layers.

The early Christians’ sometimes raw, astonished, and halting prose challenges the idea that the New Testament affirms the kind of people we are. Hart reminds us that they were a company of extremists, radical in their rejection of the values and priorities of society not only at its most degenerate, but often at its most reasonable and decent. “To live as the New Testament language requires,” he writes, “Christians would have to become strangers and sojourners on the earth, to have here no enduring city, to belong to a Kingdom truly not of this world. And we surely cannot do that, can we?”

The last sentence of that description is unpacked in detail by Bentley Hart in an essay here, which gives a small example of the translation (of James 5:1–6). It includes the following:

I do not mean merely that most of us find the moral requirements laid out in Christian scripture a little onerous, though of course we do. Therein lies the deep comfort provided by the magisterial Protestant fantasy that the apostle Paul inveighed against something called “works-righteousness” in favor of a purely extrinsic “justification” by grace—which, alas, he did not…Rather, I mean that most of us would find Christians truly cast in the New Testament mold fairly obnoxious: civically reprobate, ideologically unsound, economically destructive, politically irresponsible, socially discreditable, and really just a bit indecent.

“The Effects of the Historical Jesus: Table-Fellowship as Test Case”

In this paper I survey recent methodological developments in historical Jesus studies, assessing the historiographical, theological, and practical benefits of the ‘turn to memory’ in recent scholarship (the work of Schröter, Dunn, Allison, Keith, Le Donne, Rodriguez). These developments can be summarized as a shift away from the notion of access to the historical Jesus by means of a ‘quest’, towards an approach to the historical Jesus through consideration of the ‘effects’ of his life and teaching. These methodological observations will then be illustrated and tested through consideration of one aspect of the tradition: the importance of memories of Jesus ‘at table’. Rather than searching for relative levels of ‘authenticity’ in the gospel traditions relating to table-fellowship, attention will be given to the weight and shape of the early Christian movement’s memories. It will be suggested that presence of such memories in the Jesus tradition and emerging Jesus movement (the ‘effects’) can only be explained on the basis of characteristic and meaningful incidents (the ‘events’) to which we have no direct access, but about which we must responsibly speculate. I engage in such speculation by proposing three trajectories that emerge out of originating events in the ministry of Jesus at table: towards inclusion, ritualization, and transformation. I conclude by arguing that contemporary forms of Christian community and discipleship should continue to manifest these ‘effects of the historical Jesus’.

There are number of other good looking papers in the biblical studies area (or related) including:

David is giving a paper entitled “Ethnicity, Race, Religion: Categories of Analysis and Contexts of Interpretation in the Study of Judaism and Early Christianity” with a response from Professor Mark Brett of Whitley College.

I will be giving a paper entitled “Intra-Jewish Polemic in Paul and Qumran: A Comparative Investigation”, and Emmanuel Nathan from ACU will be responding.

There will also be four short papers in the afternoon from NT PhD students and scholars here in Melbourne. The poster is below with details of registration etc.

Alan was an outstanding historian of the early church with a PhD from Harvard in the English Reformation. He was a Mennonite, shaped by that tradition, deeply committed to the values of peacemaking and radical discipleship, and throughout his life was involved in serving the Mennonite church as a theological educator, leader, and missionary (bringing the gifts of his tradition to the wild, unevangelized territory of North London and the UK – a mission field if ever there was one). But to remember him as a Mennonite is to obscure the contribution that he and Ellie have made to the wider church. As a mentor, leader, speaker, teacher and writer, Alan engaged with and embraced the church in its full catholicity. He was as at home in convents and monasteries as he was in cell groups and conferences. His academic work, most specifically his final book on The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, is a gift that crosses confessional boundaries.

But above all I will remember Alan as a friend. He arrived to take up leadership at the Centre for Christianity and Culture at Regent’s Park College in Oxford just after I left to take up my first pastorate in Reading. But I soon became involved in the Thursday night table-group that met in Oxford weekly, and of which Alan and Ellie were indispensable members. The memories of common purpose, mutual commitment, deep listening and much, much laughter that marked the experience of that group shaped all who participated in it. Together, Alan and Ellie preached at our wedding, in the customary Kreider fashion in which each took it in turn to speak a sentence seamlessly emerging out of what the other had just said said. And when we were discerning important moves, first to Manchester and Northern Baptist College, where Alan and Ellie had also taught, and then to Australia, Alan was on hand to listen and to pose the important questions about vocation, and commitment, and what it meant to serve Christ through serving the church.

In an essay that I co-authored with Brian Haymes, published in a collection that celebrated and honoured Alan and Ellie’s legacy, we closed our discussion of friendship by citing and commenting on Bonhoeffer’s famous prison poem “The Friend”. It is with great thanks for Alan’s witness that we can now, in death, commend him into the peace of God that he embodied in life.

God Revealed and Hidden: Barth’s Exegesis of Romans 11:33–36

Responding to the call for papers that explore the theme of ‘Reading Romans with Barth’, this paper considers the climax of Paul’s theological exposition in Romans: the doxology of Romans 11:33–36. In the 2^nd edition of the Römerbrief Barth makes explicit the summative importance of this passage in relation to the central theme of Romans: ‘that in Christ Jesus the Deus absconditus is as such the Deus revelatus’. As such, the passage forms an inclusio with Rom 1:16–17 and proclaims God to be the God of victory and of mercy ‘in this hiddenness’. Taking Barth’s exposition in the commentary as a starting point, I explicitly connect his exegetical treatment to the more explicitly dogmatic considerations of CD I.2 and the doctrine of revelation. The paper then considers how Barth’s insight into the relation between revelation and mystery, forged in the context of post WW1 German theology, coheres backwards and forwards in time with other deeply contextual theological accounts. Looking back, I consider Paul’s situational rhetoric in the argument of Romans and the role of 11:33–36 to his account of salvation history directed at conflicts in the Roman house churches. Moving forwards, I note the close connection to Katherine Sonderegger’s recent treatment of divine omnipresence in Part II of her Systematic Theology, an explicitly dogmatic treatment that is both exegetical in shape and contextual in orientation.

Am I missing something? Are there German language commentaries on Galatians that I should be consulting?