| a 4th century cutting-room floor? | | Date Created: Oct 09, 2004, 07:41 PM |
[this entry concerns a minor issue in the EA-sponsored debate, scroll down for my main report on the evening, "a bad night for Excluders..."]
One of the sillier arguments of Chalke-night came from Stuart, although happily, it was very peripheral to Steve's own position. In his re-envisioned view of what Christendom is and isn't he calmly and confidently told us about a travesty that the later church perpetrated: they began for the first time to emphasise the death of Jesus over the resurrection or his life and teachings. So for instance the creeds which, contrary to everything before them, skip blithely from "born of the virgin Mary" to "crucified under Pontius Pilate." |
| Is this a late emphasis? The oldest Gospel we still have is Mark, and that is precisely the tendency in Mark. De-emphasise the life and teaching, de-emphasise the resurrection, spend a third of the book on One Week in Jesus' life: the Crucifixion. |
| But Paul wrote years and years before Mark was written. What's the tendency in Paul's letters -- or for that matter the other letters? The death of Christ, yes; resurrection, yes -- especially as it impacts our future resurrection, and compared to those things, the life and teaching of Jesus are in the background. |
| And more interesting, occasionally Paul preserves in his letters quotations of the Church -- things that were composed even before he wrote, well-enough known that he can cite them to demonstrate his points. The best-known of these is the Christ hymn in Philippians 2. Guess what? It must have been written by some fourth century dude and time-travelled back to Paul because in it you find that very same jump from Jesus being born as a human to the way that he humbled himself to death on the cross. |
| This is, of course, no surprise to anyone who's read the Lord's Supper, the center point of Jesus' provision for the church, which replaces the Passover Exodus story not with a celebration of Jesus' life nor his resurrection (apart from the general resurrection at the end of the age) but with the symbols of his death, body broken, blood poured out for us. Or Emmaus, when the disciples significantly do not recognize their Lord because of he's resurrected, nor do they recognize him because he teaches them on the way but only when he shares with them that broken bread and poured-out blood-red wine. |
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