Spirit scholarship - NIV upgrade

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I've been purchasing a lot of teaching materials from Regent College in the last year.  It complements some  reading - in some ways has been a season for getting grounded more deeply. 

Also, I went to a few meetings a little while ago, a conference, where dimensions of the Spirit were very evident; healing and power and prophetic ministry.   

 Wrote some notes afterwards, on how i saw these things intersecting.  This was part of a broader discussion - what follows here is actually based on the fourth set of notes i wrote  describing aspects of the event. 

There is a lot going on when one event needs so much description! So i think this set might stand being turned into a post. 

The earlier notes had more direct description, so I'll only say  there were unusual dimensions of God present. Healings, prophetic activation (ie use of that gift and training as well etc), deliverance stuff during worship or ministry time (well handled as not the main focus of course).  Multiple rich prayer ministry times. Reconciliation with people i didn't know were going.

Whether we are unusual for thinking all that is unusual, is an interesting question. But i get ahead of myself - lets see what Jesus and Paul say.

 First, a Gospel verse.  (And i think its healthy to come to Paul with the Gospels in view- we too often go the other way I think). This verse was coming to mind:

As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’  Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give.  (Matt 10)

What resonated here was the evidence of the Kingdom that the disciples were entrusted with . We could explain it away as ceased, but I’ve seen too many glimpses of it - including at this event  - to believe that is a good explanation. 

Which leaves the question of the biblical account of the dimension of the Spirit in this regard, in the Pauline churches.

 As it happened I went for a  run one morning during the conference – happened to be up to a commentary on Galatians on ipod in an NT survey i was listening to.

So, let me put it like this -  consider Gal 3:1  & 3:5

You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. …. So also Abraham “believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”

So far sounds like good elements of 'reformation theology' I think.  By 'reformation theology' i mean the traditional protestant understanding of the Gospel - of justification by faith, (or better, by grace, through faith)  -  faith in the work of Jesus on the Cross - all of which i agree with.  But I'm also persuaded by current scholars that while the 16th Century Reformation retrieved many valuable keys; it did so in a way that also missed some of the larger picture - that it did not fully get all of Paul, dimensions of the kingdom, role of the covenants, nature of Israel, creation background, etc. I'm sure that's not controversial, and that scholarship since then has of course moved on - but the basic Protestant understanding of the Gospel, of justification, perhaps has not taken all of that in - we still  tend to read Romans like Luther did, as though Paul was really dealing with the corruption of the Catholic church and restoring the individual's path to salvation (will return to some of that in a moment).    

 Anyway, back to Galatians 3.1 and 3.5, where there certainly is a 'reformation like' focus on explaining Jesus death, a strong insistence that this is the main game. Indeed Paul is calling them back to this, away from those who want to put the pagan converts into a Jewish expectation of circumcision etc. 

But consider the middle verses which join it together; which confirm the promise is here and now, and still by grace and faith, rather than Judaic laws. 

You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.

 I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh? Have you experienced so much in vain—if it really was in vain?  So again I ask, does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you by the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard? 

 So also Abraham “believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”   

This is the core of the issue: most NIV bibles are now out of date here – the 2011 NIV has updated the translation of verse 4  (ie “Have you experienced so much in vain”  is now recognized as a better translation than the previous  “Have you suffered so much in vain” – the same word can mean either, but experience is now acknowledged as the better translation in this passage) 

This is a significant change to how that verse reads. And exactly the argument I was listening to as i ran early that conference morning (the recording was from 2006, pre the new translation).  Since then, I’ve heard another scholar teach exactly  that same point (series dated from the 1990s)

Somehow the teaching has more clout when you see it in black and white in the new 2011 version.  Can’t argue its just a few scholars with a particular bent.

Fee made the point (15 years ago) that scholars have mistranslated that suffering/experience word because our own experience - or more exactly, our lack of comparable experience - pre-conditions our reading.

That is, Paul says to Galatians, something many scholars of the era couldn’t hear:

Message of the Cross

        was validated among you by experience of the Spirit and miracles
           
thus confirms God gives righteousness -as evidenced by the gift of His own Spirit and Presence -  to Gentiles!  - through faith in the promise rather than the strictures of Torah  - and reads the key example of promise by grace back into the story of  Abraham.  

(So this is a telling of the national story that shows the promise and grace preceded the Torah and its function - and the experience of the Spirit, among Gentiles, is the practical confirmation that this is true.  Not "God said it and i believed it" - but closer to "God did it and we experienced it". 

                                   

So the true biblical account has  these “cross and justification” terms (classic concerns of ‘reformation theology') woven around an argument that depends, crucially, on an appeal to the experience of the Spirit. 

Various scholars (eg Fee, Watts, Wright) note Paul couldn’t make that argument to many modern churches - couldn't appeal to the dimension of the Spirit (those miracles & the reality of God in your midst) – because the experience of the Spirit is so often muted. Hence the debatable status of being "biblical" by just doctrine.  Here too is the risk of reading our hermeneutic- our interpretive principles - back onto the text. Our lack of experience means we are not equipped to deal with the nuances of Spirit experience which were evidently something Paul could just cite as evidence. 

Thus also the temptation to change ‘experience’ of the Spirit back to  ‘suffering’.  Paul teaches on suffering elsewhere of course - I'm not sidestepping that - but that's not the most likely meaning here. Spirit experience and miracles are the context.

 Paul’s point is the Spirit was not given even to Torah observant Jews – he of all people knows that, having ended up opposed to Christ – hence his argument on the futility of returning to those Jewish laws and customs (and Abraham is of course cited to illustrate that the promise of that blessing of all nations - now fulfilled in the outpouring of the Spirit - was originally given before the Law.).

A number of Fee’s other critiques seem to have influenced the 2011 translation as well (he was on the NIV translation committee) - or i guess the arguments are now  acknowledged as the consensus of best scholarship.  (For example, Paul knows nothing of such terms as a ‘spirit of unity’, or a ‘spirit of wisdom’ – pneuma is never used to mean 'spirit' in that generic way in Greek of the era – Paul always implies the Holy Spirit when he uses pneuma words– hence the capitalization of various spirit references in the 2011 translation.  Most of those instances have been updated - a few remain.
 (Similarly Paul is never far from Torah when he says Law - moral law in general is not usually the point.)  

I think the Bible – and true Pauline theology – is much more Spirit inflected than reformation theology has yet managed to get a handle on, by and large  - that for all the treasures that Luther and Calvin recovered re justification by faith, atonement, election, etc - perhaps there are some biblical dimensions of the centrality the Spirit in the church that they did not fully understand or experience, or perhaps just not emphasize in their writing given the debates of the day - and are still sidestepped in some quarters, given that's the heritage many think of as truest Christianity.   

And yes, my belief is conditioned by experience. But that cuts both ways  - its seems we've also endured poor translations due to lack of experience.   Just as Jesus referred to two sources of error in the Sadducees' reasoning: "You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God" (Matt 22)   - we tend to think the scriptures are sufficient and we can  get it right on that alone; the mistranslation of this Galatians verse is one key example that shows its not the case.

Wright makes the point that the reformers would be the first to say keep deepening faith against the best readings of the Bible.  We shouldn’t ossify their position. 

For other areas where Reformation theology may not be fully biblical, and to return to the point above, consider Luther’s anti-Semitism. I gather this is not a personal blind spot - even less a sin against  the modern idol of 'tolerance'  -  as much as his need to see the Catholic church as the same sort of thing that Paul experienced in Judaism; an oppressive legalistic entity that has obscured the message of faith and grace. That is,  given the historical need to address the abuses of the Catholic church of the era, he identifies with Paul's critique of Judaism - and ends up missing some of what Paul is really saying about Torah and how Spirit fits in that argument.  There might be some parallels between the status of Israel and the Catholic church but a foreshortening results – an inability to see the nuances  - such as the places where Paul argues for the role of the God given Torah (the Law). Similarly I gather Luther tends to easily equate the 'law' with moral self effort in general, and focus on the individual  wrestling with this, and which grace breaks into by the Spirit. That was his story and he finds back it in Scripture - and following him we also find it in Romans. 

But all that perhaps also loses some of the focus of Paul wrestling with the biblical Torah as a  boundary marker of the covenant people, and of Jesus in the trajectory of Israel's history etc.  I don't deny any of the Reformation doctrine - justification by faith alone - I note various scholars are saying these traditional formulations are not incorrect, yet the way we get there can miss some of what Paul is actually saying.  And so for us the structure has got smaller – we hone in on certain polemics and principles in Romans and ignore or downplay others; tend to lose the big argument (the heart of the Gospel might not actually be all about individual justification, although it does include that). 

None of these observations are original of course .

Similarly i don’t think that 'charismatic dimensions' are somehow optional in a fully Pauline theology.

Its not a theory driving me here - this stuff matters. 

So I don't think it was coincidence i happened to hear that Galatians argument on Paul's appeal to the role of the Spirit and miracles in their midst - now upgraded into the NIV's use of experience rather than suffering  - on that morning where so much of it was demonstrated, as it might have been in a Pauline church.

These are deep waters, i guess, but also the children's bread and drink - and i'm not a biblical scholar - just someone rethinking experience in the light of scripture - noting whats happened in the latest version of the NIV.  On the other hand, the children who grow in such environments perhaps wouldn't need to argue their way into it, if it really is the biblical inheritance, as i think it is.