E. Randolph Richards, Paul and First-Century Letter Writing: Secretaries, Composition and Collection (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2004).

One of Richards’s emphases regards co-authorship in Paul’s letters.  He argues cogently that Paul’s epistles were, generally speaking, a team effort to some extent.  The plain reading of the text clearly suggests this, e.g., “Paul and Timothy . . . to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi” (Phil 1:1).  Associates listed in the greeting have more typically been seen not as co-authors but as merely present with Paul and sending greetings, or something simliar, perhaps an amanuensis.  Richards thoroughly disabuses the reader of that notion.  He suggests that conservatives have been hesitant to acknowledge listed co-senders as co-authors because of a flawed understanding of inspiration: that it was Paul who was “inspired,” when in reality, it was the writing that partook of the quality of inspiration (225).  I completely concur, based on the use of grafh in 2 Tim 3:16.

Acknowledging co-authors clearly contributes toward a solution as to why Paul’s letters will differ in vocabulary and style, and brings into question the attribution of pseudonymity based on statistical methods for determining an author’s writing style (143).

E. Randolph Richards, Paul and First-Century Letter Writing: Secretaries, Composition and Collection (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2004).

I received this volume a month ago, and have been eagerly devouring it bit by bit. I was enthusiastic about obtaining it, and more enthusiastic after reading it. This is the sort of NT studies volume which I love: one that thoroughly examines some aspect of the historical/cultural context of the NT and brings the results of that research to bear on text and theology, resulting in plausible solutions to challenging questions.

In his volume, Richards minutely examines the practice of letter-writing in the first-century Greco-Roman world. Among other conclusions, he finds that (1) Paul’s “co-senders” were in reality “co-authors” (although Paul’s was the prominent voice), and this may account for differences in style and content within a letter or among letters; (2) Paul almost certainly utilized drafts and revisions of most of his letters; (3) Paul very likely retained copies of his letters (and occasionally drew from them for material in later epistles), a notion which informs proposals of pseudonymity based on close similarity between two letters (e.g., 1 & 2 Thessalonians).

Much more awaits the reader of this volume. I only regret that I was not aware of this work when it was first published.  I will be relating some of Richard’s particularly salient points in upcoming posts.

(The final installment of interesting and representative quotations from James Leo Garrett, Systematic Theology, 2nd edition)

(41) “The New Testament does not prescribe or mandate a detailed system of church polity, or government.” (2:639)

(42) “It is the intention under congregational polity that the congregation govern itself under the lordship of Jesus Christ (Christocracy) and with the leadership of the Holy Spirit (pneumatophoria) with no superior or governing ecclesial bodies (autonomy) and with every member having a voice in its affairs and its decisions (democracy).” (2:664)

(43) “We do well to remember that church unity begins at the congregational level, should never evoke satisfaction until it reaches out to Christians of all nations, and will never be fully realized until it is realized eschatologically.” (2:687)

(44) “The parousia will be to culminate or consummate the kingdom of God, not to initiate, found, or establish it.  Some Christian theologies teach the latter rather than the former.  The ‘theocratic kingdom of God’ accordingly was offered to the Jewish people at the first advent of Jesus, was rejected by such people even as they rejected Jesus as king, was ‘withdrawn’ as an offer, was postponed until the second coming, and hence will be instituted at the second coming.  But such a view of the purpose of the parousia runs counter to the diverse meanings given to the kingdom of God in the Bible, especially to the kingdom as arrived or inaugurated or present in and with the first advent and ministry of Jesus.” (2:778-79)

(45) “The parousia will be intended, following eschatological resurrection and eschatological judgment, to lead to the heavenly, eternal kingdom of God, not to establish an earthly, temporal kingdom.  Premillennialists generally reject such a statement inasmuch as the thousand-year reign of Christ with his saints (Rev.20:2-7) is said by them to be an on-the-earth transitional era between the present historical age and the eternal age.” (2:279)

(46) “The parousia of Jesus Christ is to be a singular coming, not two separate and distinct comings.  Pretribulational premillennialism teaches two comings: ‘the rapture,’ or Christ’s secret coming in the air for his church, and ‘the revelation,’ or Christ’s visible coming to the earth with the church, ’separated by the great tribulation.’” (2:781)

(47) “The Dispensational doctrine of the kingdom is coupled with a very literal hermeneutic, a dispensational division of history, doctrines of eschatological comings and of the rapture of the church, an essentially futurist concept of the kingdom which casts doubt upon its present existence, a tendency to make the death [of] Jesus secondary to a theocratic kingdom in the divine purpose, and an eternal hiatus between Israel and the church.” (2:812)

(48) “Like the doctrines of salvation and sanctification, the kingdom of God involves three temporalities: past, present, and future.  The kingdom of God was related to the kingdom of Israel-Judah and the throne of David and his successors.  The kingdom of God in some sense came with the ministry, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus . . . If the kingdom in some sense came with Jesus, then its present reality, as the apostle Paul made clear, is also to be affirmed.  But it is also necessary to emphasize the future or eschatological aspect of the kingdom.  The present sense of the kingdom is not perfected or fully realized, and only with the parousia of Jesus Christ can the eschatological kingdom be realized.” (2:815)

(49) “The doctrine of the millennium has proved to be very obsessive and quite divisive among Evangelical Protestants, especially in the United States.  It ought not to be an issue over which Christians should break fellowship and form antagonistic camps.  If indeed there is only one biblical text and it is to be found in a highly symbolic book, some Christian caution is to be desired.” (2:845)

(50) “Adherents of the doctrine of eternal punishment must take seriously the cases put forth by both eschatological universalism and annihilationism.  Of the two, universalism poses the more serious problems for the message and mission of the church.” (2:888)

I re-listened recently to Sinclair Ferguson’s outstanding presentation, “Justification and the New Perspective on Paul” (online here).  In passing, he made the following observation about Paul and Stephen, which I found intriguing in that I had never drawn more than an incidental connection between the two men before: Saul happened to be available to hold coats while Stephen was stoned.  But in discussing Romans 7, Ferguson notes,

I actually personally have come to the conviction that when Paul says in Romans 7 that sin revived and he died, and it was when the commandment said ‘You shall not covet’ that he felt himself undone, that in all likelihood what lay behind that was his encounter with Stephen.  I think Luke makes it almost certainly clear in the Acts of the Apostles that Stephen and Saul belonged to the same synagogue in Jerusalem.  And Paul says in Philippians 3 [that] he outstripped everybody.  There was nobody that could hold a candle to him.  But Luke tells us in Acts that there was nobody that could hold a candle to Stephen.  And I suspect that for the very first time in his life, Saul of Tarsus coveted something religious in somebody else that he couldn’t find in himself.  And it’s against that background that Saul of Tarsus was converted.  The intricacies of the relationship between the conversion of Saul and the life of Stephen are far too clear in Paul’s writings as well as in the Acts of the Apostles, I think, to come to any other conclusion.  (1:15:35 – 1:17:00)

(More interesting and representative quotations from James Leo Garrett, Systematic Theology, 2nd edition)

(31) “For many Christian congregations today it is not altogether evident that persons from differing ethnic, linguistic, national, cultural, and economic backgrounds are being united in the bond of Christian fellowship by common access to the Father in and through the Holy Spirit.  Furthermore, the sin of schism seems not to rank very high in the hierarchy of present-day sins inasmuch as new divisions among Christians are defended or justified without specific acknowledgment that schism is a sin.  Still further, the great issue as to the greater actualization of Christian unity and of church unity remains largely unanswered at the beginning of the twenty-first century despite the impact of the Ecumenical Movement.  Although there may be a growing recognition that there is indeed a givenness to Christian unity which survives all our Christian divisions, there is little agreement about structures designed to embody or reflect that unity.” (2:200)

(32) “Protestants, despite their lesser involvement in hierarchical polity, have not escaped the danger of making the Holy Spirit captive to the church. . . . Even the structures of congregational polity in the so-called ‘free churches’ can make the Spirit captive to culture or to the whims of a majority. . . . Three twentieth-century examples of Protestant muzzling of the Holy Spirit have been the defense of racial segregation and discrimination, the acquiescence by some in political totalitarianism, and the surrender to suburban culture in the great cities.” (2:209)

(33) “Has the French parliament with its numerous political parties each striving for its own ends, and their corresponding representation become the unconscious model for some churches and denominations?  Have governments dominated by one party, notably the Communist, with their reduction of all opposition to mere formalities become the pattern for others?  Has the practice of voting become so politicized through factional strife as to obscure any possible guidance by the Spirit?   Such present-day influences of the political upon the ecclesial are opposite to the fact that radical Protestantism’s decisions by consensus through the Spirit in an earlier era were taken from the ecclesial sphere and applied in the political with a resultant boost for democracy.” (2:21-11)

(34) (quotation from Dale Moody) “The faith that fizzles before the finish has had a flaw from the first.” (2:269)

(35) “For Christians to think that they can effectively announce to unbelievers the divine word of reconciliation while they are utterly unreconciled to their fellow Christians is an anomaly for which there is no legitimation in the Scriptures.  Reconciliation must be acted as well as spoken.  Hence television ’sound-bites’ cannot effectively displace all career missionaries.” (2:333)

(36) “Discipleship is the discipline of continuance in Christ.” (2:381)

(37) “Strong congregational life and serious congregational participation in the world mission of Christianity would seem to depend upon storehouse tithing or some other equivalent degree of giving.” (2:246)

(38) “Prayer is not intended to be the means of bringing ‘a reluctant God’ to do the will of human beings. . . . Rather it seeks to bring human wills into subordination to God’s will so that God can bless such human beings and accomplish his will and purpose.” (2:443-44).

(39) “Election is not primarily a riddle to be unraveled but rather a great mystery that is to evoke thankful worship.” (2:479)

(40) “The Southern Baptists, probably more than any Christan body espousing believer’s baptism, today face an acute problem by virtue of the diminishing age at which very young children, usually from Christian families, are being baptized and received into church membership — a trend which some see as movement toward infant baptism.”

(More interesting and representative quotations from James Leo Garrett, Systematic Theology, 2nd edition)

(21) “The present-day Women’s Liberation movement, so far as it draws from Judaism and Christianity and from the principles of political democracy, may serve the good purpose of seeking and obtaining much-deserved civic equality and non-discriminatory economic opportunity for women and protection from personal abuse.  But, insofar as it draws upon naturalistic, humanistic, antimonogamous, antifamilial, antimaternal, defeminizing, and lesbian presuppositions, it may serve the evil and anti-Christian purpose of downgrading the particularities of womanhood and woman’s complementarity vis-à-vis man and of undermining the strength of the monogamous family at a most crucial time in social and religious history.” (1:495)

(22) “Recalling the words of the children’s nursery rhyme, one can easily think of Augustine’s doctrine of unfallen Adam as a ‘Humpty Dumpty’ view.” (1:548)

(23) “Although the life situation sermon common to the twentieth-century pulpit has had little or no place for such, we ought not to regard the proclamation of the law in its revelatory or accusative function as a thing of the past.” (1:579)

(24) “Jesus is the continuing refutation of the concept of the impassibility of God.” (1:622)

(25) “It is not necessary, in order to defend or protect the sinlessness of Jesus, to affirm that Jesus could not have sinned.” (1:656)

(26) “It would seem that the church’s proclamation should be exclusivist so as not to promise salvation outside the conscious acceptance of Jesus and the gospel but that in God’s sovereign freedom he may effectively work outside the boundaries of exclusivism.” (1:663)

(27) “Never has the hyphen been used with greater significance than in the term ‘the God-man’” (1:697)

(28) “Living under the dominion or sovereignty of Jesus the Lord was normative for the early Christians.  To make this dominion an optional feature of the Christian life, as some Evangelical Christians have tended to do in the recent past, is a distortion of Christian teaching.  To reckon that receiving Jesus as Savior is absolutely necessary for becoming a Christian but that to reckon Jesus as Lord of one’s life is optional for Christians is indeed an error that cannot establish its validity from the New Testament.” (1:705)

(29) “In democratic societies which have no human royalty Christians may be somewhat reluctant or less emphatic about Christ’s present kingship.  Those who major on the futurity of God’s kingdom often exclude from their theology Christ’s present, though not future, kingship.  Those who too readily equate the church and the kingdom of God tend to obscure, if not deny the future dimensions of Christ’s kingship.” (1:709)

(30) (regarding a “composite exposition of the saving work of Jesus Christ”) “The atonement consists of the death-resurrection of the Lord Jesus, the twofold event which comprises the saving work of the eternal and incarnate Messianic Son of God, in its nature a historical act of eternal consequence — the penal substitutionary and propitiatory sacrifice which is both consistent with God’s righteousness and expressive of God’s love and which demonstrates God’s triumph over sin, death, and Satan, by means of which repentant, believing sinners are drawn through the forgiveness of sins to reconciliation with God and enter into the fellowship of Christ’s death-resurrection, marked by the new life of cross-bearing and following in His steps in the new community of the forgiven.” (2:58)

(More interesting and representative quotations from James Leo Garrett, Systematic Theology, 2nd edition)

(11) “. . . we must be prepared to acknowledge that our very interpretation of texts of the Bible may have been influenced by one or more of the other channels of authority — church and tradition, the divine-human encounter, or a specific human culture or civilization.” (1:207)

(12) “The teaching about God or the gods is central to and significant for any religion.  Religions do not rise to heights above their conception of deity.  Christian theology has no more basic task than the explication of the being of God.” (1:213)

(13) (In relation to clustering divine attributes around the central attributes of holiness and love) “Eternity is the duration of God’s holiness.  Constancy is the continuing stability of God’s holiness.  Wisdom is the truth of God’s holiness.  Knowledge is the cognitive reality of God’s holiness.  Power is the strength of God’s holiness.  Jealousy, anger, and wrath are the reaction of God’s holiness to sin.  Glory is the recognized manifestation of God’s holiness as majesty.” (1:264)  ”Patience or forbearance is the persistence of God’s love.  Faithfulness is the reliability of God’s love.  Mercy-kindness is the deep compassion of God’s love.  Grace is the free and undeserved condescension of God’s love.  Suffering is the assumed and endured pain of God’s love.” (1:292)

(14) “The task of explicating the Christian doctrine of creation at the beginning of the twenty-first century does not begin with scientific observation or with philosophical speculation or with legislative maneuvering; rather it begins with the exegesis of pertinent texts in the Old and the New Testaments and their proper correlation.  The Bible bears witness to the creative activity of God, and that witness is fundamental to anything that Christians today can believe and teach about creation.” (1:340)

(15) “Creation is an expression of the free activity of God as Creator.  Strictly speaking, creation was not necessary.  God did not create in order to bring himself to completion.  Nor did he create because he was driven to do so by external compulsion.” (1:348)

(16) “Even while the arguments for and against ‘creation science’ continue, a counter warning needs to be given against that too facile harmonization of revelation and science, of Genesis and geology, anthropology, and biology so that legitimate scientific investigation may be hindered or ignored and biblical writings put to uses never intended by their human authors or by God.” (1:371)

(17) (Regarding determinism and free will) “. . . because of the influence of Stoic fatalism and because of forms of interpretation of the Christian doctrines of predestination and foreordination, Christian theology has tended to subject human beings to determinism, with the result that the responsible human decision-making as to sinning/not sinning and obedience/disobedience which is so evident in the Bible is obscured or denied.” (1:383)

(18) “Not all suffering permitted by God is necessarily ordained by God.” (1:392)

(19) “In a sea of callous humankind and amid religious movements that show little of the glory and power of the one God, miracles may be part of God’s contemporary doings.” (1:412)

(20) “There seems to be at present no agreed upon harmonization of early Genesis and anthropology.  Because of the genuine difficulties which have not been fully resolved, it is fitting to be cautious as to any final statement of the question.” (1:474)

This post and the four following posts will present a total of fifty representative quotations from James Leo Garrett’s Systematic Theology, 2nd edition.  These quotations are intended to acquaint the reader with the tenor of Garrett’s writing, and to present significant or well-stated points of Garrett’s theology.

(1) “I have not written these two volumes of systematic theology on the basis of a prior commitment to or the adoption of any philosophical system or philosophical motif in the light of which the doctrines of Christianity ought to be interpreted.  Rather I have proceeded from the premise that good systematic theology ought to be based on the fruitage of biblical theology and the history of Christian doctrine.  Hence I have made every effort to locate, interpret, and correlate all the pertinent Old and New Testament texts or passages and the more significant statements from the patristic period to the modern age before undertaking any formulation of my own.” (1:ix)

(2) “Every statement about the doctrines of the Christian religion is in some sense a theological statement, and every Christian who reflects upon and speaks about his faith is in some sense a theologian.” (1:3)

(3) “Systematic theology is the orderly exposition of the doctrines of Christianity as its formulator in the context of his/her confessional tradition understands them, according to an integrated and interrelated method, using the Bible, the Christian tradition, Christian experience, and possibly other sources and hopefully in the idiom of those to whom it is addressed.” (1:16)

(4) (On the exclusivity of the Christian message) “This Christian claim at its best is not a manifestation of human achievement and hence not an instance of human or ‘parochial’ pride, but it points to the glorification of God in Jesus Christ.” (1:79)

(5) “The inclination, the presupposition, or the attitude of a particular human being can play an even greater role in reference to the ‘convinceability’ of the theistic arguments than the cogency of any argument.  One’s religious beliefs or unbeliefs are not founded on ‘pure reason,’ that is, reason devoid of inclination, feeling, or choice.” (1:103)

(6) (Is special revelation propositional or personal?) “Propositionalism rightly stresses that God has employed human languages, including key words and concepts, in his self-disclosure through Israel and in Jesus Christ and that God has spoken and not merely acted in revelation with the result that revealed truth is not meaningless jargon.  Relationalism rightly stresses that divine revelation is not dispensed information about God that does not transform the recipients with the result that revelation can never be rightly divorced from its liberating, saving, reconciling, and transforming effects upon human beings.” (1:115)

(7) “The greatest single need with respect to the doctrine of inspiration is for balance between divine agency and human involvement in the coming to be of the books of the Old and the New Testaments.” (1:135)

(8) “A collation of all sermon texts and all biblical passages read in worship services for a period of fifteen or twenty years in a given congregation . . . would provide empirical evidence as to whether that congregation functions with a ‘canon within the canon.’” (1:143)

(9) “To the extent that positivist and/or historicist presuppositions have shaped the work of some users of the historical-critical method, the criticisms and fears of the opponents of the method, especially Fundamentalists in the Anglo-American setting, have not been without foundation.” (1:171)

(10) (Regarding the inerrancy debate) “. . . those who engage in theological controversy and warfare over these matters, insisting on the rightness of their own conclusions and the wrongness of those conclusions advanced by others, stand under the mandate of Jesus Christ concerning love for and among his disciples (John 13:34-35).” (1:192)

James Leo Garrett, Systematic Theology: Biblical, Historical, and Evangelical, 2 vols. (North Richland Hills, TX: BIBAL Press, 2000).

Garrett, a moderately conservative Baptist theologian, published his intermediate-level theology in two volumes in 1990/1995, a revision of the two volumes in 2000/2001, and a third revision of volume one in 2007.  His magnum opus is well-organized and well-documented.  Vocabulary is accessible, yet not simplistic.  Writing style is generally clear, though not particularly engaging.  Chapters are a bite-sized fifteen pages on average, helpfully organized with outline in the text and chapter summary at the close.  Indices (subject, author, Scripture) are good overall.¹ Greek and Hebrew words are always transliterated. In the first reference to a particular theologian, Garrett usually and usefully provides birth and death dates, along with the complete name (e.g., Millard John Erickson). A bibliography would be a welcome addition, though admittedly a lengthy one.

Garrett describes his work as “biblical, historical, and evangelical.” In dealing with topics directly addressed in Scripture, Garrett does typically move self-consciously from biblical data to historical theology to contemporary formulation(s) that fall within the spectrum of evangelical beliefs. This is a proper methodology because it begins with the divine, not the human, while balancing the twentieth-century’s perspective with that of the church through the centuries. Garrett does recognize the impact of cultural context and presuppositions upon theological work (1:24, 26, 207), and is very conscious of his method of treatment. He consciously surveys various approaches to a topic and justifies his particular approach. He is at home in the works of major theologians throughout church history² but majors in the works of Baptist theologians.³

Much of Garrett’s work is merely descriptive, leaving the reader to infer which position Garrett himself supports of those he presents. Often, after presenting biblical data and historical formulations, he eliminates one or several views and tacitly affirms the potential validity of the rest without supporting any one view. If one is looking for a thesis-and-argument approach with clearly stated conclusions, Garrett’s work will be a disappointment. His approach is that of a historical theologian, not a dogmatician, and the value of the work is in its comprehensive survey of options, not in proposed solutions to theological problems.

________

¹The quality of the subject indices does seem uneven. That in volume 1 was obviously (and admittedly) hurriedly put together, as evidenced by the inconsistent formatting and typographical errors. Further, while the index in volume one references over 400 subjects, that in volume two references only slightly more than 300 subjects in spite of the second volume having 200 more pages.

² He refers most often to Augustine (94), Brunner (91), Calvin (89), Barth (72), Luther (53), Aquinas (41), and Origen (38) (parenthetical references are the number of references in the author indices of both volumes combined).

³ He refers most often to Millard Erickson (109), W. T. Conner (97), Dale Moody (83), E. Y. Mullins (50), A. H. Strong (47), John Leadley Dagg (23), and James Petigru Boyce (21). Unusually for a major Baptist theologian, Carl F. H. Henry (13) seems quite underrepresented.

James Leo Garrett, Systematic Theology: Biblical, Historical, and Evangelical, 2 vols. (North Richland Hills, TX: BIBAL Press, 2000), 709-903.

Garrett avers that after physical death, a human enters an intermediate state of disembodiment.  He does not enter purgatory or experience soul-sleep, nor does he cease to exist.  He has no opportunity to obtain a post-mortem salvation, for his destiny is fixed.  Only a single general eschatological resurrection will occur, transforming believers’ bodies into a glorified state.  Immortality is not a quality inherent in the human soul, but is attained through Christ.

The second coming of Christ in power and glory will consummate the kingdom of God, bring about the resurrection of the dead, and inaugurate the final judgment for all men.  Garrett denies the rapture of the church, seeing only a single coming of Christ.  The kingdom of God had its advent “with and through Jesus” (2:804) and is a present reality.

Garrett considers dispensationalism as an “extremist” position, and agrees with Hoekema’s critique and rejection of it.  Among other complaints, Hoekema claims that dispensationalism short-changes biblical unity, falsely teaches distinct divine purposes for Israel and the church, wrongly predicts a future earthly millennial kingdom and a restoration of Israel to the land, and incorrectly teaches the possibility of people being regenerated after the return of Christ.  Further, Garrett claims that no historic Baptist confession reflects a distinctly dispensational position.  While Garrett notes both strengths and weaknesses of non-dispensational premillennialism, postmillennialism, and amillennialism, he presents only perceived weaknesses of dispensational premillennialism.  Garrett seems most comfortable with an amillenial stance, although he fails to specify his position.

A final judgment is rooted in the character of God and certain to occur.  Jesus Christ will judge all humanity on the basis of their works.  Garrett rejects the dispensational teaching of multiple eschatological judgments, instead seeing only “one universal and simultaneous eschatological judgment” (2:862).  Garrett also rejects eschatological universalism and annihilationism; the unrighteous will enter hell, understood “in terms of eternal separation from God and punishment by God” (2:888).  The righteous will enter heaven, enjoying eternal fellowship with God and eternal freedom from sin, suffering, and death.