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  • From: "Jeffrey B. Gibson" <jgibson000 AT mailhost.chi.ameritech.net>
  • To: Corpus-paul <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Paul's "dying for us" language
  • Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 15:15:38 -0600


Bill Ross wrote:

> {Jeff}
> [snip]
> If this is so, then perhaps we should consider it the case that in using
> such formulae Paul was NOT (primarily, anyway) talking about how gracious
> God is towards "sinners", or how loving Jesus was, so much as he [Paul] is
> specifically engaged in a dialogue with, and an attempted refutation of, the
> claims of the resistance movement regarding where redeeming faithfulness was
> exemplified, and that he was doing this by taking up the movement's language
> and challenging not so much its ideas that Israel needed redemption as its
> claims concerning how that redemption is to be brought about. [snip]
>
> {Bill}
> Jesus' death is consistently related to the forgiveness of sins,
> justification and reckoning as righteous:
>
> Romans 3:
> 23 For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;
> 24 Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in
> Christ Jesus:
> 25 Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood,
> to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past,
> through the forbearance of God;
> 26 To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be
> just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.
>

Bill,

While Jesus' death -- or more importantly, the faithfulness of Jesus (unto
death) --
is often associated in Paul's writings with "justification", justification
itself, let
alone Jesus' death or the "faith of Jesus", is hardly *consistently* linked
to the
"forgiveness of sins". Indeed, except for the passage from Romans that you
quoted,
"justification" is almost *never* found in Paul in association with the idea
of
"forgiveness".

But even if it were, your response seems to beg the question in that it too
readily
assumes that Paul was a good Anselmian (or a good Lutheran) and uses the terms
"justification" and "forgiveness of sins" with the meaning that Anselm and
(Luther)
thought they bore and are to be interpreted within the context of the
understanding of
sin and forgiveness/atonement that they worked with. But this is exactly
what needs
to be *proven*. Proof-texting won't help because that sort of defense or
argumentation
makes no distinction (let alone rarely recognizes the possibility that a
distinction
exists) between what a text "reads" through our filters, and what, within the
context
of Paul's time, it would have been understood as "saying".

Since Paul's "death for others" language is not invented by Paul, but
something that
already, when he takes it up and uses it, has a history of usage, then to
decide what
Paul meant by it, we need first to go to what that history of usage indicates
is the
language's import. And when we do *that*, as well as root Paul firmly in the
social
context in which he then takes the language up, something quite different
from what
you seem to assume is the meaning of the language appears.

Yours,

Jeffrey
--
Jeffrey B. Gibson
7423 N. Sheridan Road #2A
Chicago, Illinois 60626
e-mail jgibson000 AT ameritech.net






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