The Greeks who knew the “unseen things” of God

The group of people criticised in Romans 1:18-32 is said to have known the truth about God and to have known God but also to have departed from that knowledge by worshipping and serving the creature rather the creator. Jason Staples has argued that this can be said only of Israel, not of the gentiles because only Israel has known God.

I want to have another look at this conundrum, because it occurs to me that there may be a very straightforward way to explain how this may be said of the Greeks. I will suggest that Paul was aware of Greek philosophical traditions that intuited, from reflection on the nature of things, the existence of a supreme and perhaps sole deity, but he bemoaned the fact that this enlightened view was swamped by the dominant religious culture of idol-worship.

Read more...
The argument of Galatians: justification by faith in a new future
As much as any other of Paul’s letters, Galatians is written with an eschatological narrative frame firmly in place. It’s not immediately obvious—it’s been squeezed to the periphery by the argument about faith and the Jewish Law which dominates the letter. But that does not mean that eschatology… ( | 3 comments)
The skeletal narrative of the Synoptic Gospels
Some more sketchy notes on the Synoptic narrative for my teaching at St Johns Nottingham before moving on—rather hesitantly—to John’s Gospel. The story told about Jesus and the coming kingdom of God in the Synoptic Gospels does not stand on its own; it is not a self-contained narrative. It is… ( | 4 comments)
The kingdom of God: a down-to-earth explanation
Tomorrow in Nottingham we will be looking at the narrative skeleton of the Synoptic Gospels as an outworking of the history of second temple Judaism and as the ground for the emergence of the church in the third century. I shall quote Wright’s criterion of “double similarity”, though perhaps not… ( | 4 comments)
The rich man, Lazarus and Abraham
I’ve written about the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Lk. 16:19-31) a couple of times (see below), mainly for the purpose of dismissing the popular doctrine of hell. I missed an intriguing intertextual detail, however, that is attributed to Simon Perry in a Wikipedia article, though Nolland… ( | 2 comments)
The proclamation of the gospel is the “narration of past history” (Hengel)
I’m currently teaching an Introduction to the New Testament class at St John’s Nottingham. I started last week with a quotation from Martin Hengel: “There cannot… be any proclamation of the gospel which is not at the same time a narration of past history.” That can be taken in different ways, but… ( | 9 comments)
Ethnocentrism, universalism, and new creation: an overstated salvation-historical paradigm
I said last week that I would expand on my critique of Donald Hagner’s diagrammatic representation of Old Testament salvation history in his The New Testament: A Historical and Theological Introduction. As he sees it, the biblical story plays out against the backdrop of the “reality of a… ( | 8 comments)
History and theology: off the charts
A major part of my general argument is that the modern church thinks of the New Testament as theology (or beliefs) set in a historical context and thinks that the historical context is of much less importance than the theology. My contention is that the New Testament gives us the opposite… ( | 16 comments)