The two are not mutually exclusive. The every day “new sabbath” doesn’t exclude a pinnacle once a week where we look forward to a “greater Sabbath”. The original Sabbath has been made commonplace by the Resurrection crowning the first day of the week as the greater day of a week raised, so to speak, an octave higher where the “music” of the old Sabbath is part of the harmony, backing the melody it was waiting for all along.
I find it difficult to wade through all of Wrights temple-sabbath theology which I don’t find much meaning in. So I never found the answer to this question regarding what Wright said which made me respond in this way.
I can only explain that this is my usual response to the idea that sin is an obstacle to God and that He cannot abide sinners. This is something which Jesus not only proved wrong by His association with sinners but which He criticized in thinking of Jewish leadership. For example, in the parable of the good Samaritan, the priest goes to the other side of the road to avoid contamination by things unclean while the despised heretical Samaritan stops to help.
This statement;
“We’ve assumed that the ancients were addressing our issues only in a muddled and distorted way, not realizing that they were addressing different questions in different terms.”
brought to mind two things: first, how this nicely describes the foundational YEC problem; second, how one of my ANE professors admonished us, when translating ancient literature, to work at understanding what questions the writers meant to be answering.
Do you mean an obstacle “for” God?
In a way I think it’s a bit prideful to think that any sin we might manage could actually be a barrier. Sure, our sin is an obstacle God had to remove in order to redeem us, but it only looks significant from our side – from God’s side I figure it’s about as difficult as knocking over a house of cards with a bowling ball. Though if I want to go with that imagery, what Jesus did was come around to our side of the house of cards and bring along His own bowling ball. Of course from our side to a human the house of cards looked like a fortress, but that’s just because of our littleness; we lack(ed) the capacity to put things in perspective.
The hard part for Jesus wasn’t the obstacle, it was the conditions on our side of the obstacle. Isaiah tells us that our best righteousness is like diapers with diarrhea; in comparison I shudder at trying to find imagery for what our sin must be like! Yet He waded right on in to the point that Paul could say that Jesus “became sin” for us.
This reminds me of my reaction the first time I heard about the Roman Catholic idea of the Immaculate Conception: did they really think my Jesus was such a wimp that being born in an ordinary sinful human mother was even an issue? The whole doctrine is built on the notion that Jesus had to be like the priest in the parable, changing the path so He wouldn’t get His feet dirty, so to speak. But He is the original “Good Samaritan”, contentedly wading into the ditch with all the crap (some literal) to be found there in order to rescue someone considered as unclean as the ditch itself. That parable isn’t just a lesson for us about who our neighbor is, it’s an invitation to join our Savior as he goes about wading into filthy ditches and rescuing those who have fallen in.
The typical view of religious folks regardless of whether they’re Christian or not is that we have to avoid dirty stuff so none of it can rub off on us. Martin Luther called that a preference for operating with Law because it amounts to the idea that we earn our righteousness; it falls as well into Paul’s category of “the flesh”. But Jesus’ approach to dirty stuff was to roll up His sleeves and leap in, knowing that rather than it making Him dirty His touch could make it clean.
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Yes, of course.
Sin is a huge obstacle to redemption. We cannot keep our sin and expect anything like heaven, because sin destroys us and eventually turns any place into hell. And those with sin are helpless to do anything about it because sin destroys free will and keeps growing to destroy everything else as well. This doesn’t mean people cannot change and overcome these self-destructive habits. But it is rare and can be attributed to the miraculous (no not magic but things which get through to us which few humans could have predicted).
Don’t much care for that way of thinking – sounds self-righteous on the part of the religious to me with very little understanding of the people who are dealing with the problem. It is more a matter of despair than pride. I mean… sure… we have to submit ourselves to God’s care and leave it to Him to find a way to overcome this obstacle, and in that way pride is involved. But that humility is a matter of self-discovery and becomes something else expressed to others. Nor does it mean that our own efforts against sin are worthless.
Not buying into the divine magic worldview, I don’t think so. It is NOT easy and that is why we cannot do it. But that is helping us overcome OUR problem, and not helping God to overcome some problem God has with sin. No magical spells are needed for God to forgive or to love sinners. But taking it for granted that God can just make our sin disappear is another matter and I don’t think that is either true or helpful.
And I think that is wrong… close to what Jesus is talking about as a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (Matthew 12). The Bible tells us good things ultimately come from God and to call them diarrhea is to say this of God. This Augustine/Calvinist thinking that all goodness is poisoned by sin isn’t right. What is good is good – period, and looking for theological excuses to call it evil like they did with Jesus in Matthew 12 is the worst of sins and unforgivable.
So what of Isaiah 64? Verse 6 with the “filthy rags” follows verse 5 where it says God meets those who joyfully work righteousness. The problem is when we do good deeds to justify ourselves. The point is that we cannot erase our sins by a balance book with good deeds. It doesn’t work that way. But the point of Isaiha 64:6 isn’t that nothing anybody does is worth anything in the eyes of God – that just doesn’t agree with the Bible at all.
One of the classic metaphors for sin is leprosy. It starts with a single sore which can be in a place nobody sees. The real problem with sin isn’t how repulsive it makes us but its progressive nature. A sinner can be a really good person which everyone admires – whom even God admires. I think that was the lesson with Israel’s 3 kings. God loved them and they had quite admirable qualities. But it doesn’t change the sin growing underneath to tear all that good in them apart.
But perhaps another good part of that analogy which the Bible doesn’t use is the fact that leprosy isn’t highly contagious and 95% of the time exposure is easily dealt with by our immunes systems. Only a little caution is needed, so fear and total avoidance isn’t needed as long as our own health isn’t neglected.
And yet… this is not completely wrong either. We do have to avoid the conditions which lead to temptation because we are vulnerable.
In listening to people stand up and give their ‘testimony’ I have encountered a fair number of people who are definitely prideful of just how bad their sins were. At one church the pastor set down some tight guidelines about giving testimonies because it had gotten to where people were engaging in trying to make themselves the greatest sinner around – a sort of one-upmanship. Of course they claimed they just wanted to show how great God’s grace is but that’s not how it came across.
I’ve read this five times and can’t figure out how your statement relates to what I said.
You’re saying the prophet screwed up his job of passing on God’s message when he said this:
How then can we be saved?
We are all like one who is unclean,
all our so-called righteous acts are like a menstrual rag in your sight.
We all wither like a leaf;
our sins carry us away like the wind.
That’s the NET version; it goes with the other common use of the term I noted as “diapers with diarrhea”.
Well yeah, that’s the context I was talking about: our efforts on our own before Jesus “switched sides”.
I finished lecture #5, and yes, this is interesting. Dr. Wright mentioned that we are to live “sabbatically”, as though the kingdom of God is here. But of course, there is still plenty of not so pleasant work to do. Perhaps he meant that we are to do even that work as though it’s for the Kingdom of God. I think we will all struggle with that to varying degrees.
I find that Dr. Wright has a way of explaining difficult things of the New Testament in a way that they begin to make sense to me.
Thanks all for the discussion on a very worthwhile lecture series.
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- I’m having difficulty locating that particular sentence in my transcript of Wright’s 5th lecture.
- Googling the sentence, I am taken to BibleProject Podcast / Seventh-Day Rest - Sabbath / Episode 5 where Tim Mackie says: “On the seventh-day, we experienced in time what the tabernacle and temple represented as spaces, which is eternal life with God in a complete creation. The Sabbath is to time what the tabernacle and temple are to space: a cathedral in time.”
- Elsewhere, I found someone who attributes the quote to Rabbi Dr Abraham Joshua Heschel: “The sabbath is to time what the temple and tabernacle are to space. The sabbath is a cathedral in time. On the seventh day we experience in time what the tabernacle and temple represented as spaces which is eternal life, God in the complete creation.”
- Remarkably, I am unable to find Hescel’s quote exactly as phrased in anything he wrote.
- The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man by Abraham Joshua Heschel
- I did find, however, this: “The Sabbath is the most precious present mankind has received from the treasure house of God. All week we think: The spirit is too far away, and we succumb to spiritual absenteeism, or at best we pray: Send us a little of Thy spirit. On the Sabbath the spirit stands and pleads: Accept all excellence from me …”
- And then I remembered: Mark 2:27-28 "Jesus said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”
- Then there’s Matthew 12:68: "But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here. But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”
- And Luke 6:5 "And He was saying to them, ‘The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.’”
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Something I have greatly appreciated ever since I heard it, is that the Sabbath was a feast day and not a fast day. A day to eat your best meat and to drink your best wine.
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It’s almost exactly at 17:00 minutes in on the video of lecture 5 where he states this conclusion. He may be quoting somebody else’s idea there (he alludes to this not being any new idea with him just a bit earlier) - but he doesn’t state where he got that particular sentence from in the moment.
It’s all part of the larger idea that “temple” has historically always been the place where heaven and earth are supposed to intersect - where the ‘gods’ would come down to a place of intersection in the natural world.
So this may lead to a followup question then: Is that in defiance of Lessing’s Ditch? Or is it an affirmation of it? Wright goes on to ask, Is the Hebrew narrative here in parallel with the surrounding cultural practices of the times? Or in defiance of it? But then he sets this question aside, and goes on to make his larger point: Stories like the exodus (through and from the sea) are ‘microcosms’ or repetitions of the larger story of creation. Just as the original waters of chaos had to be ordered and land would emerge from all that - so the flood waters later are receded and Mt. Ararat emerges - or the Exodus waters are parted by God leading to victory and tabernacle - these are repetitions of a theme, of God’s creating an ordered space for himself as a dwelling or a ‘place of rest’. The point at which he will be at ease with God’s people.
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- The same theme appears to be repeated at least one again, IMO. At about 25:48, Wright says: “Sabbath was to time what Temple was to space. It was, as one writer puts it, “a tabernacle in time”. Just as Jewish views of the temple cannot fit within the split cosmos of Epicureanism, Jewish views of the Sabbath cannot be fitted into the Enlightenment’s sharp break between past, present, and future; tabernacle and temple belong together as forward-looking symbols, and the Sabbath belongs right there with them. The new age towards which they gesture is the new creation: the completion of the project of Genesis 1 and 2 accomplished through the redemption of the disaster of Genesis 3.”
- I’m beginning to think that, although Hescel’s book: “The Sabbath: A Palace In Time” is about the theme, I’m starting to think it’s such a common ancient Jewish theme, and eerily, modern Jewish theme too. Reaston? Because I came across Tabernacle of Time, an “article”–one of many at aish.com.
- In that particular article, Rabbi Shraga Simmons writes:
- “When Shabbos comes, we immerse in a new dimension, a dimension of time. In this way, Shabbos is qualitatively different. Rather than a holy “place” that we must enter into, Shabbos is a holiness that comes to us, once a week, every week. And while we can always walk away from a Sukkah or leave Israel, Shabbos has a stability and permanence that transcends the limitations of space. It’s an anywhere-in-the-world, expense-free vacation. No travel agent required.”
- I’m avoiding the temptation to quote the whole article.
- In that particular article, Rabbi Shraga Simmons writes:
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This made me think of a show I saw some time ago about all the Japanese who refused to stop fighting even after the war was over. In a sense that describes our situation: there are still a multitude of enemies out there who refuse to stop fighting.
Adding this to what Wright said brings to mind what one scholar a generation or so ago wrote about the Incarnation: that it was in effect an invasion of enemy-held territory, a one-Man invasion that depends on recruiting others out of the enemy ranks. So wherever this invasion has gained partisans the age to come is breaking through into our now.
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- My wheels get stuck in Lessing’s ditch every time I try to drive across it. As a consequence, I’ve decided not to anymore.
- Wright’s 5th lecture is heady stuff. I use to interpret for Deaf in my mid- to late 20’s, in church, college/universities, and hospital settings. It was something I could do, but I hated it because hearing folks just don’t talk to and for the Deaf as a rule. Editing a transcript of Wright’s lecture, I realized that interpreting for him to a Deaf audience would have left them thinking that he was speaking in tongues and enjoying the sound of his own voice.
- That said, I’m inclined to believe that Wright is more right than wrong about Jewish “Sabbath and Temple” cosmology and theology.
- In an effort to find something, other than what Wright has written, that might help me make sense of his “tongue-talk”, I went looking for it and found The Natural Jesus: Christology in N.T. Wright’s Gifford Lectures by Edwin Chr. van Driel, [In: Mitchell D Mallary and Chris Tilling, eds., Jesus, History, and the Question of Natural Theology: An Interdisciplinary Conversation with N.T. Wright (Forthcoming from Oxford University Press)]
- I think I’m beginning to get a handle on what it is, in Wright, that leaves me dissatisfied.
- Suppose he’s correct about the Jewish “Sabbath and Temple” cosmology and theology. So what? Jesus was crucified, buried, and resurrected. I take that as my starting point, which Wright eventually gets to after taking his audience on a long trip back in time to first century Israel.
- But what Wright does, IMO, is to try to discourage anyone from focusing on “getting away from earth”, … as if earth will let any of us do so. Truth be told, I don’t think any of us are getting out of here alive, and odds are that earth isn’t going to last forever.
- I consider it to be a fact: Jesus’ crucified body was in a tomb on the Sabbath and the Temple was destroyed by the Romans around 70 C.E. I, for one, never got attached to either one, … and don’t have a problem letting either one go. The Sabbath and the Temple, for me, are and will be when I am with Jesus, or wherever he sends me, and the last place I expect that to be is right here on earth for the rest of eternity, after my carcass has moldered in the grave or my ashes have been scattered.
- Till then, I have hope, faith, and gratitude.
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I think that is the most astute summary of everything important, right there. I think Wright would agree with that, though I’m unable to recall if or where he may have said so in the same way you just did there.
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From Lecture 5, at about 7:52.
- The idea of Temple Cosmology familiar to students of the Hebrew Bible and Judaica is a recent arrival in New Testament scholarship. As with other new fads we risk overstatement in one direction and willful ignorance in the other. You can’t imagine how many footnotes belong to that last sentence.
- I hope that disciplined historical imagination will enable us to understand how Jesus’ contemporaries understood the relationship between heaven and earth and between the present and the future, and the role of humans within that, so that we may grasp what the shockingly new gospel meant within its own world. So Temple and Sabbath and image—elements of a cosmic narrative filling the earth, filling the temple. Some scriptural highlights: Psalm 72 prays that Israel’s king will fulfill God’s purpose by doing worldwide justice and mercy, particularly for the helpless and vulnerable. And the Psalm ends “Blessed be Yahweh the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things. Blessed be His glorious name forever. May His glory fill the whole earth. Amen and amen.”
- This theme is echoed in Isaiah 11 and Habakkuk 2 which speak of the knowledge of Yahweh or the knowledge of the glory of Yahweh, filling the whole earth. In Isaiah, as in the Psalm, this is the result of the Messiah’s wise and just rule. In a similar way, the promise and warning in Numbers 14, “that all the earth shall be filled with Yahweh’s glory” is responding to the people’s rebellious panic over the report of the spies. Yahweh is fed up. He’s promised to go with them. His glory appears at the tent of meeting, But they need to know that this glory is simply one stage en route to a larger glory filling, worldwide. We’re reminded of Solomon’s statement: the highest heaven can’t contain God, so how much less this little house.
- That link between the divine glory, first filling the tabernacle and then filling the whole earth, is echoed in Isaiah’s vision in chapter 6: verse 1 has the hem of Yahweh’s robe filling the temple, verse 3: the Seraph sing that his glory fills the whole earth; verse 4 the house is filled with smoke. The filling of the house points to the filling of the whole earth. We might actually have figured this out already, from the way in which Psalm 72 and Isaiah 11 and Habakkuk 2 have the promise of cosmic glory filling which reflects the notion of glory that fills the wilderness Tabernacle in Exodus 40 or Solomon’s Temple in I Kings 8 or, indeed, Ezekiel’s new temple at the end of the Book of Ezekiel. In other words, Israel’s God promises to do in and for all creation what He has done in tabernacle and temple. Again, we know this makes no sense within split-level epicurean cosmology. Nor would this appeal to the Stoic for whom divinity permeates everything anyway but doesn’t seem to make all the difference we might want. It certainly wouldn’t be welcome to the Platonist for whom earth is a mere shadow of true reality and of the end of the hoped-for ultimate goal. But these ancient Israelite references to glorious divine filling are actually just the tip of the iceberg. They point to the remarkable new wave within biblical studies which is now exploring the connection between cosmos and cult, between creation and shrine, between particularly Genesis 1 and 2 on the one hand and the tabernacle and temple on the other.
- Now here we must be careful. We don’t know … I don’t know, and actually I don’t think anyone knows in what sequence the relevant texts were written or edited. So we can’t easily say ”Well, this one came first obviously. That one’s influenced by it”. And it would be easy to miss the all-important sense of a narrative, because Genesis 1 and 2 up are given to us as the start of a project. Eschatology or at least a telos, a goal, is in view from the start:: this is going somewhere. What matters, as far as I’m concerned and I think we should be concerned, is how reflective second temple Jews might have thought about the relevant texts, and then how the radically new proposals of the early Christians resonated within that world. The central proposal explored by many writers today is that the Pentateuch offers what Harvard’s Jon Levinson calls “a homology”: between the creation story in Genesis 1 and the construction of the tabernacle in the closing chapters of Ezekiel. For Levinson, this goes both ways. The sanctuary is depicted in Exodus as a miniature world, a micro cosmos, while the creation itself, at least in priestly circles, was seen as a macro temple. Genesis 1 describes the building of God’s palace, Heaven on Earth together, for God to live in with humans in the middle of it.
- Now some people have cautioned that we should see it only as one way traffic: that Tabernacle and Temple may be small working models of creation. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that creation was already seen as a temple. That argument can go this way and that, but here we meet the question of uhrzeit and endzeit: “The first time in the last time”. Are the shrines, tabernacle, and Solomon’s Temple … are they trying to go back to the original creation, or are they going on to a supposed cosmic goal? I’d go for the latter myself, but from a second temple perspective, we should stress two things: first, all these sources would be read within the well-known forward-moving, implicit canonical narrative with new elements being added to an existing picture. You’d never have guessed Abraham or Moses from Genesis one, and two new elements are added, but without needing to suppose that everything was coded ly present in Genesis one or two already. But second, those who knew the texts would easily make inferences in both directions whether or not the original text was designed like that. You know how it is, once you recognize a family likeness in a child you may find that the grandparent can remind you of the child as well as the child of the grandparent. You might even see things in the grandparent’s face that you hadn’t noticed before.
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An on-line article for those who are interested: The end repeats the beginning
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@Terry_Sampson, thank you for taking the time!! I think your choice of quotes lays out the first part of the argument Wright makes in lecture 5 – in a 5 minute read! No small feat. ; )
(Your copy editing is outstanding as well.)
After carefully describing what Wright believes was the Jewish understanding of the meanng of temple and sabbath, he ties the argument to Jesus.
25:12
This points to our second theme. Just as ancient Israelites believed that heaven and earth were not far apart but overlapped and interlocked, so some of them seem to have believed that the age to come might be anticipated during the present age.
26:23
Biblical eschatology resists the idea that if the kingdom of God were to arrive, it would mean obliterating the present world or at least shoving it to one side.
28:36
Any claim that Israel’s God has become king or is becoming King carries the implication that the true Sabbath has arrived and the true temple is being built.
33:57
This means that the idea of Sabbath as eschatologial marker of God’s coming enthronement can be clearly seen in the second temple Jewish world producing a context for Jesus’ declaration that the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.
And Wright goes on to talk about the meaning of temple and sabbath theology the he is laying out for humans, but I will need to come back to this later today.
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I think Lessing’s Ditch is an illusion generated by presumption.
William Lane Craig addresses the Ditch here:
I read that once when following a rabbit trail of “for further reading” internet connections.
I understand that temptation!
I think that’s a piece of Wright’s point. I see it as the Temple being a limited intersection of heaven and earth, but then Jesus is the Temple, and after His Ascension He is no longer limited and through Him the Temple extends into each of us. Thus being with Christ is being in the Temple at the same time as being in Christ is being the Temple.
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I had to pause the video to laugh for a bit because I know just how many footnotes some things in scholarship can accrue.
Excellent recommendation.
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True confession: I don’t know what you’re getting at here, @Mervin_Bitikofer.
Another true confession: Lane lost me in the avalanche of words and metaphors, @St.Roymond and I think he may have lost the ditch as well. Here’s a brief review of Lessing:
In his religious and philosophical writings he defended the faithful Christian’s right for freedom of thought. He argued against the belief in revelation and the holding on to a literal interpretation of the Bible by the predominant orthodox doctrine through a problem later to be called Lessing’s Ditch. Lessing outlined the concept of the religious “Proof of Power”: How can miracles continue to be used as a base for Christianity when we have no proof of miracles? Historical truths which are in doubt cannot be used to prove metaphysical truths (such as God’s existence). As Lessing says it: “That, then, is the ugly great ditch which I cannot cross, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make that leap.”[12]
From
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing - Wikipedia
Lessing’s ditch analogy is straight-forward and understandable. Maybe Craig can be made so and with many fewer words?
I thought Craig was “straight-forward and understandable”. 