McKnight on the most "influential books"

Hi: I'm not posting this to necesarily to start a conversation -- I just thought you might find McKnight's discussion of the most influential books in his life interesting. After you watch this, we can return to the previous thread about influencing culture. McKnight is a voracious reader as well as prolific writer.



... By-the-way, McKnight started out teaching at a seminary, but decided to move to a liberal arts college in order to have greater influence on unchurched young people ... a good example of what we were talking about in the previous thread.

Justification and New Perspective

Scot McKnight posted a topic about some current theological debate regarding justification and atonement on his jesuscreed blog today. Some of it revolves around something called the “new perspective on Paul” and includes a debate between John Piper and Tom Wright.

My apologies to those of you that do not like substantial theological discussion but let’s talk about this. Brian and I have been chatting off and on about various perspectives of the atonement and this post by McKnight makes a good springboard into that discussion. For the more activist oriented, you can check out of this and go to skunklings.com and participate in some possibility thinking for mission.

I am pasting in some of McKnight post. To read the entire post or to participate in the discussion on jesuscreed click here. Even if you are not very familiar with 20th century theologians, if you click on the links below you can get a quick overview of the development of this area of Pauline studies.

.................

…How do you understand the "new perspective on Paul"? What do you think is its primary contribution? Which of the new perspective writers do you read the most and why and what do you like about them? How significant do you think this debate is?

First, there is no such thing as the new perspective if one think it refers to some body of doctrine. The New Perspective, therefore, deserves a brief sketch as to how it arose and what it means.

….McKnight gives a brief historiography here of the development of the new perspective leading up to N.T. Wright….

Then along came, and only then did along he come, N.T. Wright. Wright built upon Sanders and Dunn, to be sure, but he paved his own ground -- building in important ways upon C.H. Dodd and GB Caird -- by pursuing the "end of exile" themes in his early Pauline studies and then his Jesus studies, and then returned to Paul when the New Perspective had taken hold -- and he added to it, supplemented it, and has taken much of the heat by the critics. Wright has refashioned justification less in terms of personal conversion and more in terms of "who is in the people of God." And he has now added to all of this a new dimension, an anti-imperial reading of Paul and earliest Christianity -- and that had little to do with either Sanders or Dunn.

But at the bottom of these folks is a belief that Christians have misunderstood Judaism as a works religion and at stake is a profound (changed) orientation to the human problem in much of Reformed and Lutheran thinking: namely, that humans want to earn their place before God, that their fundamental problem is the attempt to establish themselves before God. The New Perspective, in one way or another, does not see this as the problem Paul himself faced and therefore to read Paul in light of this problem misreads Paul in important ways. I call this traditional reading the Augustinian approach to Paul, and I wish more of the critics of the New Perspective would give this Augustinian basis, which most of them think is actually Pauline, more attention. The New Perspective says, "well, yes, perhaps" but that is not what Paul was going on about when he was engaged with his opponents. The issue was not anthropological but both salvation-historical (more Sanders) and ecclesial (both Dunn and Wright). That's how I see things.

The issue then is how to read Paul in his historical context. This is the Protestant approach and many of us think that far too many of the critics of the New Perspective, instead of re-examining the Bible in its historical context, have appealed instead to the Tradition as established by Luther and Calvin. This leads me to another point...

Bibliography:
1976, Krister Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentile.
1979, E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion.
1982, James Dun, Jesus, Paul and the Law.
.....................Paul Among Jews and Gentile.
Tom Wright, Justification: God's Plan & Paul's Vision.
John Piper, The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright.

Parakeet Practice

McKnight identifies "blue parakeets" as those sections of Scripture that don't seem to fit into our [personal, denominational, churchly, etc] organizing schema for the Bible. Of course, the identity of a "blue parakeet" can vary by observer! For some, the violent OT passages where God judges the Canaanites in the harshest possible terms are blue parakeets; for others, passages that [appear to?] teach female subordination are blue parakeets; for still others, passages that teach God's intention to save everyone (various kinds of universalism) are parakeets, just as graphic descriptions of hell are parakeets for others.
So let's try a case study together: consider these lines from Psalm 8: "What is man that thou are mindful of him, the son of man that you care about him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the angels, and crowned him with glory and honor." Let's set these lines alongside Job's complaint, "What is man that you make so much of him, that you give him so much attention, that you examine him every morning and test him every moment" (Job 7:17-18, but it's a good idea to read all of chapter 7 to get the flow).
Question: which passage [if either] is the blue parakeet for you? Why?

Birdwatching I

Scot McKnight (see his jesuscreed blog on beliefnet) recently published The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How you Read the Bible. John Meadows recommended it, so I picked up a copy and was helped and challenged by reading it. I propose we spend a couple of conversations discussing it. I'd recommend you read it, but will provide a short summary of each section so that you can participate in the discussion without having to read the book ("Covenant Thinklings, where you can talk big without actually having to do any work!").

To get us into things, here's an assignment from the book:

Read chapter 19 in Leviticus (the subhead in your Bible may say something like "Various Laws." After reading through the chapter, make a list of the "laws" that you think are still "for God's people today," the ones that "no longer apply," and the ones that make you say, "Huh? No idea what to do here" (which likely means that it "no longer applies," so maybe you only have to make two lists after all!)

Now: on what basis did you assign various "laws" to the first or second (or third) list? It would probably be best to pick one example from each list and tell us how you made the call.

Appropriate humor is to be encouraged.