The Preterist Blog ~ 100% Hyperpreterist Free|we can haz rezurekshun?

This was originally posted July 2006 but the information is so darned freakishly awesome, I had to repost. It took me forever to add the new tags to this post.

Continuing in The Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright:

Page 301

It is important to spell out the logic of what he [Paul] is saying, because in 2 Corinthians all this is controversial.  (a) He believes, as a good Pharisaic Jew, that the creator God raises the dead, in the normal sense.  (b) He believes this all the more strongly because he believes that God has arty done in the case of Jesus.  (c) He believes that he is living between Jesus’ resurrection and his own future resurrection.  (d) He therefore claims, and discovers in practice, that God’s power to raise the dead is at work in the present time, one of its results of being that God can and sometimes does rescue his people from what had seemed imminent and certain death.  This is inaugurated eschatology and the service of urgent pastoral need.

Page 314

Anything other than some kind of bodily resurrection, therefore, is simply unthinkable, not only at the level of meaning of individual verses and phrases but at the level of the chapter’s argument as a whole.  ‘Resurrection’ does not refer to some part or aspect of the human being not dying but instead going on into a continuing life in a new mode; it refers to something that does die and it is then given a new life.  This distinction, so often ignored and both popular and scholarly treatments of the topic, and of this chapter, is vital.

The overall structure and logic of the chapter thus confirms what we would have guessed from the direction in which the rest of the letter points: that this is intended by Paul is a long argument in favor of the future bodily resurrection…. There was, in any case, no indication in Judaism either before or after Paul that ‘resurrection’ could mean anything other than ‘bodily’; if Paul was going to argue for something so oxymoronic as a ‘non–bodily resurrection’ he would have done better not to structure his argument such a way as to give the appearance of articulating a Pharisaic, indeed biblical, worldview in which the goodness of the present creation is reaffirmed in the age to come.  Since that is the kind of argument he has composed, at the conclusion of a letter which constantly points this way, no question should remain.  When Paul said ‘resurrection’, he meant ‘bodily resurrection’.

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Repost: Originally posted May 30, 2006

I am continuing in my reading of N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. I am at the point in which he is discussing Philippians Chapter 2 and the exaltation of Christ. Interestingly he brings out Verse 15 in which the Philippian Christians are exhorted that they become blameless and harmless so that they may “shine as a light in the world.” As Wright states (page 228) “this is a deliberate echo of Daniel 12:3, indicating that Paul, here as elsewhere, had thought through the present life and vocation of Christians in terms of the resurrection life which had already, in one sense, begun, even though it was to be completed in the bodily resurrection itself.” Wright continues in footnote 45 on that same page, “we might comment in addition that the poem’s central point — that Jesus was “obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” — places the stress on humiliation, which is the reverse to buy exaltation; but also strongly implies that death itself is to be defeated or reversed, which of course means a resurrection.” - which of course meant something SPECIFIC in this ANE context.

This progressive layering of redemption working from creation to consummation is what hyperpreterism pitifully reduces. Hyperpreterists believe that they have the trump card in Daniel Chapter 12 by stating that the resurrection in that passage is noted as being a first century event. First, it is far from clear that the passage refers to the general physical resurrection at the end of time, and it is absolutely certain that if it does, it does not refer to that event solely. There are many options available to us, one of which being that it is a process that did in fact began in the first century. There are plenty of examples in the New Testament where these solutions are used for our present life, even the present life of the Christians back then who had not experienced the “resurrection” that the Hymenæan preterists claim happened in AD70 (and those poor Christians went through being resurrected and didn’t even realize it!). Thus, whatever resurrection that the first century Christians were still expecting was something different and more than what they were already experiencing. Hyperpreterism offers no such hope. The Gospel is destroyed and the work of Christ is truncated.

Repost: Originally posted 5/10/06

I have been having some limited follow-up discussion with Roderick over at his site after our interview. Michael Bennet has joined the conversation and started with a bang with his regurgigated routine that many of us have already been spammed with by email. He either cannot or will not understand that I “debate” or “discuss” one thing. Perhaps he hasn’t bothered to read my last two articles in which I make that clear. Instead he continues to pursue issues and debates that I am perfectly satisfied have been addressed by others. That is fine, I know my particular calling, and refusals to take “no” for an answer don’t concern me. It is annoying, however, when someone makes it plain that they are so self-absorbed that they cannot be bothered to even understand the other person’s particular focus. I do believe that this particular heresy for some reason has more than its share of adherents who behave that way when it comes to interaction. With all the cultic groups I have dealt with over the years, none have continued to pursue unwelcome debates once told nor ever regularly spammed me.

You can’t demonstrate anywhere where the resurrection is spoken of that can’t be connected by a time text or the covenant change Dee Dee - face the fact.

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Repost from April 2006
Yes, I am continuing (albeit very slowly as this isn’t fast-paced action genre reading material) through N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. And he added another log to the bonfire roasting hyperpreterist mythology - the very strong physical resurrection language of the LXX which is, as he said, the air into which the NT writers breathed their own words about resurrection with the terminology being absolutely infused with that meaning.

Page 147 - But the resurrection was not simply a doctrine of the Pharisees and their putative successors, the rabbis. All the evidence suggests that, with the few exceptions noted already, it was widely believed by most Jews around the turn of the common era.

The “resurrection” that Paul accepted was the “resurrection” that the Pharisees accepted and of what that was, i.e. physical and bodily and out of the graves, there is NO doubt.

Page 148 - No second-Temple reader would have doubted that this [Hosea 6:2 and several other OT passages] referred to bodily resurretion.

Page 150 - The evidence of the Septuagint, then, is worth pondering, especially when we consider what, granted certain regular scholarly assumptions, we might have tought we were going to find. After all, here is a Hebrew text being translated into Greek - in Egypt most likely. We might have expected that every reference to resurrection would have been flattened out into something more Platonic (as happened, for instance between 2 Maccabees and 4 Maccabees). We might have expected that the translators would have introduced suggestions of either the Ben-Sirach point of view (forget about a life after death, concentrate on getting this one straight) or that of Pilo (strive to attain diembodied bliss hereafter). They do not. All the indications are that those who translated the Septuagint, and those who read it thereafter (i.e. most Jews, in both Palestine and the Diaspora), would have understood the key Old Testament passages in terms of a more definite ‘resurrection’ sense than the Hebrew would necessarily warrant, and might very likely have heard overtones of ‘resurrection’ in manyplaces where the Hebrew would not have suggested it.

This is all highly interesting in light of the fact that the NT writers very often favoured the LXX over other readings.

In debate, I often find that (and this is unfortunately prominant in certain flavours of futurism) there is a blanket statement, “But this is what the Bible says.” No there is nothing wrong with declaring what the Word says - there is a problem in begging the very question in dispute. Both parties can read what the Bible says, the debate is over what the Bible means by what it says. Though worded somewhat pedantically (and I say that with some envy - I wish I could have crafted such a statement), I find J.P Moreland’s description of this concept in his article, “Truth, Contemporary, Philosophy, and the Postmodern Turn” to be helpful:

A proposition is, minimally, the content of a sentence. For example, “It is raining” and “Es regnet” are two different sentence that express the same proposition. A sentence is a linguistic object consisting in a sense perceptible string of markings formed according to a culturally arbitrary set of syntactical rules, a grammatically well-formed string of spoken or written scratchings/sounds.

Moreland’s larger point is a defense of the correspondence view of truth, but I read the above in light of the larger context of interpretation and said yes, YES, YES!!!!

That’s a keeper.

I just loved this!

TheologyWeb poster Jezz authored this in response to a Jewish participant who was defending against the bold claims of Christianity that the Church is the Israel of God (the good-intentioned but grievousy wrong theology of dispensationalism notwithstanding). The Jewish participant stated that he was “keeping his own turf. ”

Jezz responds:

I can understand you feeling that way - you would not be being true to what you believe if you did not feel that way. But I must respectfully disagree. I do not think that the turf is yours to keep - rather, you are trying to usurp ancestory that is not rightfully yours to usurp. I feel this way because I am being true to what I believe.

Deuteronomy 9:10 (NRSV)] - And the LORD gave me the two stone tablets written with the finger of God; on them were all the words that the Lord had spoken to you at the mountain out of the fire on the day of the assembly.

The last word there, which I have emboldened, is translated in the LXX “ekklhsia” (ekklesia) - which is the same word used in the NT for “Church” (because “ekklesia” actually means “assembly”). Thus, we see that the Church is not a NT phenomena cooked up by Christians. It is a very Jewish idea - and the assembly of God in the OT was the true Israel.

In the beginning of the first century, the Church (while more-or-less unified) was not monolithic. There were two main factions in the Church - the Sadducees, who denied resurrection, and the Pharisees, who believed in the resurrection (there were also the Zealots and the Essenes, but they weren’t as important for the current story).

Then at around 30 AD we had the first great schism in the Church of God. The schism was primarly from within the party of the Pharisees. Some of the Pharisees came to believe that a certain man, Jesus of Nazareth, was the promised Messiah. Others refused to accept this claim. For forty years, this schism afflicted God’s Church. During this time those who denied that Jesus was the Messiah persecuted those who believed that He was.

Then came the Day of the LORD. Just as it had done in OT times, it came in the form of a foreign army. The army in this case was the Roman army - led by Vespasian and Titus. They destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple - a judgment on the leaders of Israel (ie, the Sanhedrin).

Out of the rubble of Jerusalem two groups of Jews survived - both from the Pharisaical tradition. One of these groups was led by Jochanan ben Zakai, who studied under the great rabbi Gamaliel. With its temple destroyed, this group had to reinterpret the Torah in a way that meant they could worship without the temple. And thus, Rabbinic Judaism was born.

And of course, the other group was led by a bunch of Jews with the title of “apostle” - notably, one Saul of Tarsus, who (like Jochanan ben Zakai) studied under Gamaliel. Unlike the rabbinic sect, this sect did not have the problem of how to handle worship without a temple - they had a temple - the body of Christ, ie the Church of God itself. And this group became known as Messianic Judaism - or, as it is more usually known from its Greek name - Christians. The Christians began to actively proselytise to the Gentiles and accept them into the Church of God.

So you see, the question of “who is the real Church” [ed. note: I think Jezz meant "real Israel"] is not as straightforward as it might at first seem. Both Rabbinic Judaism and Messianic Judaism have their roots in Judaism of the first century (specifically, Pharisaical Judaism). Both have principle founders who studied under the same great rabbi. Thus at first glance, there is no reason to suppose one has a greater claim to “the true Israel” than the other.

But dig a little deeper. On whom did God’s judgment fall in 70 AD? Was it the Messianic Jews? Or was it those Jews who rejected Jesus as the Messiah? It was, of course, the latter. God’s judgment fell on the Temple and the Sanhedrin who were responsible for it. And in judging those who crucified Jesus, God thereby vindicated Jesus and His followers. Thus, His followers were the true assembly of God - the true Israel. Those who rejected Him cut themselves off from Israel. But any time they want back in, they are more than welcome.

Originally posted April 6, 2005

Very often it is claimed it is claimed by hyperpreterists that they do not deny the resurrection - knowing full well that they in fact do. When Group A believes Concept A by the name of Name A and Person B seeks inclusion in Group A but holds Concept B (which is opposed to Concept A) by calling it Name A, and claiming that they do not deny Concept A because they use the same name, but pour Concept B into it - well that is not honest to the real issues. On a superficial level it is corret in the sense that Person B has a doctrine by the same name and doesn’t deny that there needs to be a doctrine dealing with the issue, but on the real meaningful level it is utterly incorrect. This is the exact same word game that is played by some in Mormon circles who will say that they do not deny the Trinity. Of course they do! They are simply using the same name for an entirely differnent concept that is not possible to be harmoniously reconciled with the orthodox concept. These types of radical redefinitions and the unwillingness to be upfront with them is the mark of a cultic belief.

Originally posted March 4, 2005

New posting policy to try to make things easier to find. I am going to go through the old posts and re-tag them. Categories, other than a very few, will be eliminated. One that will stay are ones such as those by Author, Site Updates, and the like. Everything else will be organized by tags. I am going to go through and standardize the tags so that the tag cloud will be meaningful. Tags are easier to edit and add which is the reason I have decided to go this route.

Preteristblog authors… tag your posts as usual. I will go through periodically and standardize them. Don’t worry if your tags aren’t in the standard format, I like to see how you believe your post should be tagged. This is going to take a while to standardize, so please be patient.

The goal is try to make historical items easier to find.

After it was pointed out a list of 101 Prophecies Mr. Green compiled didn’t support his intended case Mr. Green responded by once again employing logical fallacy.  In this case Mr. Green begs the question.  For those of you who don’t understand what “Begging the question” means, the term describes, “…a fallacy in which the premises include the claim that the conclusion is true or (directly or indirectly) assume that the conclusion is true.”  Let’s look at how Mr. Green employed the logical fallacy.  Mr. Green writes,

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