This Sunday we are discussing 1:18 – 3:20. This section is all about idolatry sin and death. It is great stuff.

In particular, Paul wants his readers to see that the foundation of all sin is a decision to turn away from submission to God and instead fashioning God’s in our own image. It is this fundamental decision that start all of humanity down the road away from the power of God’s righteousness and into a head on collision with the purposes and will of God.

Luke Timothy Johnson has a wonderful commentary on Romans that I find so very compelling. In his comments on this section, he suggests that Paul’s conception of sin is not just as a moral category but also a relational one. (Ie. We are not just breaking the rules, we are rebelling against God.) Based upon this he suggests that for Paul, sin is not the opposite of virtue (which is our common understanding), but rather sin is the opposite of faith. In that section, LTJ writes this:

Idolatry begins where faith begins, in the perception of human existence as contingent and needy. But whereas faith accepts such contingency as also a gift from a loving creator from whom both existence and worth derive, idolatry refuses a dependent relationship on God. It seeks to establish one’s own existence and worth apart from the claim of God by effort and striving (“works”) of one’s own.

That is great stuff. You may want to read it again.

How will I respond to the reality of my frailty? My first impulse is very Greek. I want to be important – to write important books, to impress people and change history so that I will be remembered. I know that some of my readers are classics scholars so you can correct me but I remember learning about this ancient Greek notion called arête which meant something like excellence but it also implied a sort of greatness that lived beyond this life. I wanted that. In fact sometimes I still want it.

I think that in our culture the most popular response is denial. By scrambling for as much control as possible we insist, “I am not frail, I am the master of my universe.” I suppose this is the response of secular humanism.

At least for the last 200 years, the opposite option has been available in nihilism. We can decide that our frailty is emblematic of our ultimate meaninglessness.

There are other responses I suppose.

How will you respond to the reality of your own frailty?

Are you trying to establish your value and permanence through striving on your own?

Will you accept this reality as a “gift from a loving creator from whom both existence and worth derive?”

on the walk

-Ethan

I love these genre studies. In fact I love all the intro stuff and think that all of it is vital to informed and honest Bible study. [Some of you have encountered my SAGA mnemonic, Setting Author, Genre, Audience.] But I must say that the genre issue has a place dear to my heart for at least two reasons.

First, the consequence of ignoring or misunderstanding the genre are serious. American readers are in general poorly educated to distinguish genre because we are so literarily unsophisticated. This makes us easy marks for advertisers, statisticians, journalists and politicians. We basically have two conscious categories; fiction and non-fiction (or even more crudely fact or fiction.) I have heard people remark, “It is a fact that X% of people do this.” Unfortunately Statistics are in general not facts. They are at best estimates and often they are deliberately designed to be persuasive.

When we approach the Bible with just the right mixture of genre naivety and pious submission, we of course assume that the Bible cannot be fiction and so it must be facts, or history, or doctrinal propositions or something like that. This genre error can cause major problems. It renders the poetry of scripture almost unusable and it severely weakens the power of much of the Biblical narrative. Will Willimon makes a similar point in an excellent article on preaching in the latest Leadership magazine. [I'd link to it but it is print only.] I won’t even get into the damage done to Genesis and Revelation because we don’t take the time to study genre, because I would rather get to my second point which is happy.

Genre study can open up a text like we never imagined. In my teaching (and maybe here) I plan to talk about Romans is an almost perfect example of a diatribe. This was an established literary form of its day and Paul uses it to great effect in Romans. There are many examples of scripture that positively unfold when we see how the text is interacting with many other texts like it. In the ancient world, many genre had strict structural guidelines and different sections of a text had different important functions. Consequently we can learn more about the authors intent when we see how the genre is used (and perhaps subverted) and how the genre is connected to the content. As time goes on I may comment on some specific examples of how knowing the genre and other literary conventions provides insight that is hidden to American readers.
For now I will leave with two examples about how genre functions.

Whenever I teach a NT letter, I always want to talk a bit about the letter form in the Roman Empire so that people can notice how the form is used and changed for Christian purposes. In these settings I have tried to show how even today we have some genres that have consistent structures: 5 paragraph theme. AP Wire report, etc.

My previous best example of this was a great old joke.

What happens when you play a country song backward?…

He gets his dog back, his truck back, his house back and his wife back.

I have a new best example. Check out this Youtube video of a group that has deconstructed the pop romance song and produced this excellent (and hilarious) peace of genre analysis. The song is called Title of the Song.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc1Js9P3urw[/youtube]

See you on the walk,

Ethan Magness