Re: The Word of God? [was Re: ...Yak butter.]

..Torah was in some sense "an incarnational symbol for Judaism. It was not only the word from God but the living presence of God's word with and for the people of Israel" ....

Reconciling this with my second paragraph (below) is straightforward: If God's written laws stick their fingers into your life all day long, of necessity they affect you and assert the power of God over you. So the laws become the Word of God as I've described it.

But what an alien word!

If you take statements literally from Exodus through Deuteronomy about Moses' relationship to God, you might conclude Moses was superior to Jesus. There's got to be a catch. The NT says the catch is that the law came through angels (Acts 7:38,53; Galatians 3:19; Hebrews 2:2). But that leaves us with a lot of explaining to do concerning word usage in the "Books of Moses."

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Robert Schneider<mailto:rjschn39@bellsouth.net>
  To: Don Winterstein<mailto:dfwinterstein@msn.com> ; asa<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
  Sent: Thursday, June 01, 2006 6:02 AM
  Subject: The Word of God? [was Re: ...Yak butter.]

  I picked up N. T. Wright's The Challenge of Jesus this morning, and flipped to a passage that has relevance for this discussion. It sent me back to Torah and noted that Exodus 20 begins, "Then God spoke all these words: I am the Lord your God, etc.--the Decalogue follows, and then throughout the rest of the Pentateuch other portions of the laws. Now, is one to take it literally that YHWH spoke the words and Moses wrote them down? Or that Moses was like the other prophets, e.g., Jeremiah, inspired but speaking in his own style?

  Wright refers to rabbinical scholar Jacob Neusner's A Rabbi Talks about Jesus. Neusner asserts that at the time of Jesus Torah was in some sense "an incarnational symbol for Judaism. It was not only the word from God but the living presence of God's word with and for the people of Israel" (Wright's summation). Thus, when Jesus (Matt. 5-7 et alia) announces and embodies a new Torah, Wright says, he was making "the implicit claim that in his teaching and in his presence as teacher, the living God was somehow present."

  In my Anglican tradition the Bible is often spoken of as incarnational: divine (i.e., Spirit-inspired) and human at the same time, in a way shrouded in mystery. Where I see the extreme literalism of people like Morris, Sr., going astray is that it implicitly denies the incarnational nature of the text. This is aside from his often fanciful eisegeses of certain texts, especially Genesis 1.

  Bob

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: Don Winterstein<mailto:dfwinterstein@msn.com>
    To: Glenn Morton<mailto:glennmorton@entouch.net> ; asa<mailto:asa@calvin.edu> ; Bill Hamilton<mailto:williamehamiltonjr@yahoo.com>
    Sent: Thursday, June 01, 2006 8:25 AM
    Subject: Re: A profound disturbance found in Yak butter.

    Now that my memory is getting into gear, let me modify my second paragraph (below): In previous investigations I did indeed find one instance where "word of the LORD (YHWH)" referred to contents of scriptures. This was in the Chronicles account of King Josiah's discovery of the Book of the Law (2 Chron. 34). Josiah says with reference to the contents of that book, "...Our fathers have not kept the word of the LORD...." (The parallel account in 2 Kings 22 quotes him as saying, "...Our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book....")

    Most of the time "word of the LORD" in the OT refers to messages transmitted (in ways we don't understand) from God to prophets or messages orally proclaimed by prophets to targeted recipients. I interpret this to mean that words become the Word of God if and only if they actually affect people. Words sitting unread in a book are hence not the Word of God, even though at one time those words may have been the Word of God to some individual or group. When those same words affect people who read them today, they may become the Word of God to those people. If, on the other hand, they go in one ear and out the other, they have not become the Word of God. If the words are not "living and active," they are not the Word of God but merely words. It's subjective. The Word of God is not an object but a power, a force.

    Don
Received on Fri Jun 2 03:01:03 2006