"The fact that the book came out after Gordon Fee’s Pauline Christology has afforded me the opportunity to interact with Fee’s arguments that “our great God and Savior” refer to the Father rather than the Son. I disagree with him on this, and argue that the epithet speaks of Jesus Christ."I'd be really interested to see how this kind argument can be made, especially since Fee's book is on my radar anyway. Too bad the book is $55.96 on Amazon. Perhaps he'll blog about this dialogue with Fee in particular at some point.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
#221 Semantics and The Deity of Christ
Dan Wallace, director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, announced a book he authored based on his doctoral dissertation regarding (from what I can tell) grammatical pointers to Christ's divinity. In summarizing his work, he says something I'd never thought about:
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3 comments:
Wallace's monograph is definitely worth the price, Alex.
An earlier, albeit truncated, critique of Fee's view can be found in Putting Jesus in His Place, which I coauthored with Rob Bowman.
Rob later expanded upon the arguments in our book for a piece published in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society.
Thanks for the pointer Ed. Come to think of it, I've come across mention of your book before on the Parchment and Pen blog. I've added it to my Amazon wishlist where it appears to have an overall 5-star rating. So you know where I'm coming from, I'm not a big fan of contemporary apologetics, but I am very interested in discovering the early church's views on the deity of Christ, specifically Paul's view.
It looks like your book tackles this issue specifically so I'll be interested to see that. I did the "look inside this book" feature on Amazon and it looks like part 4 relates the actions of Jesus revealing his deity. If you've read N.T. Wright's "Jesus and the Victory of God," you know that he consistently equates Christ's actions with actions which would have been expected by a second temple Jew of Yahweh. I'm curious how much, if at all, you interacted with Wright in preparation for your book?
I understand your concern with popular apologetics, Alex. I trust that endorsements from the likes of Larry Hurtado, Richard Bauckham, I. Howard Marshall, Martin Hengel, et al., speak to the fact that our book doesn't fit the stereotypical mold.
As for Wright, I've been seriously studying his works for over a decade now. If I remember correctly, we reference various works of Wright's about a half dozen times in the endnotes. We also quote him favorably a few times in the main body of the book. As a New Testament specialist by training (and an "apologist" only by extension), I have a profound appreciation for Wright's scholarship.
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