We invited Tony and May Vigil to come with us. It was nice to spend a day with them…
…and with members of our PIU family Lian Stae and Celia Atoigue
Saturday, June 18, 2016
An Afternoon at Sea
Wednesday, June 15, 2016
Paul and the Faithfulness of God Chapter 10, Part 6
Wright now moves on to 2 Corinthians 3 to show that this idea of election redefined around the Messiah and the Spirit (with both juridical and participationist implications) is a central part of Paul's thought (New Covenant).
The spirit has redefined ‘election’, the covenant status of the people of God. The covenant is not now a matter of possessing or hearing the Mosaic law. It is a matter of the transformation of the heart, wrought by the spirit. 983
He then moves to Philippians 3.2-11 to show that "Paul’s argument is solely about ‘covenant membership’ and its redefinition through pistis" (984). The promises to Israel have been fulfilled in Christ, without circumcision or torah, and God's people now show their "covenant status" through hearts and lives changed through the Spirit.
To belong to God’s freshly defined people, one must be ‘in him’, wearing the badge of pistis which was the sign of his own solo accomplishment of Israel’s vocation (‘faithfulness’). Being ‘in the Messiah’, as clearly here as anywhere in Paul, is the new way of saying ‘in Israel’. Not to draw that conclusion would be to deny that he really was the Messiah, which for Paul would mean denying that he had been raised from the dead. 989
Paul has neatly expressed the past, present and future tenses of what it means to be a Messiah-person: the righteous status already given ‘in the Messiah’; the present sharing of his sufferings; the future resurrection. 991
Wright sees Colossians 2 as a warning against returning to Judaism from Christ and going back to "temple, circumcision and torah," much like the warning in Galatians.
Once we cut through the complex language, these are the three things he wants to get across, and they are striking indeed: temple, circumcision, Torah. This can only be a veiled warning against the attractions of the Jewish way of life. 992–993
Wright now moves to Romans 3.21-4.25 to show that God's truth and righteousness are shown, despite human sin, with the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant through Jesus Christ. This would be the solution to the sin problem and the “setting right” of the world . The Old Covenant was unable to do that and thus God did it through the faithful Messiah Jesus.
The helplessness of God’s people causes them to cast themselves on the truth and righteousness of God. That is the underlying logic of Romans 3:20, solidly supported in the passage that now follows. 996
Whereas in most biblical and post-biblical thought the divine covenant faithfulness was appealed to in favour of what God might do for Israel, here the point is what God always planned to do through Israel, and has now done through the faithfulness of the Messiah, the ‘faithfulness’ which led to and climaxed in his self-giving to death. 998
Election is therefore redefined, not just around the Messiah and his faithful death, but around the Messiah’s faithful people. This new people is composed, not only of Gentiles, of course, but of Jews and Gentiles alike who display this pistis, the badge of membership...this radical reworking of election is not the abolition of Torah, but what Torah intended all along. 1001–1002
Section 4 continues to show that covenant membership was always based on faith in the promises of God by Abraham, and by those who imitate his faith in God's promises of life and worldwide kingdom. "The character of ‘faith’ alters depending what sort of God one believes in." (1006) Abraham trusted that God was a promise keeping God and God rewarded him.
The strands of Genesis 15 are thus tied together. The whole seed; the whole inheritance; guaranteed through the Messiah, as himself the gift of the one God, to all those who share (by the spirit, Paul might have said) the faith of Abraham. Election redefined. 1007
Romans 5-8 continues the theme of "righteousness" from chapter 1-4 by showing how the declaration of righteousness in the present is assured in the future. This happens through the death of the old nature and separation from the Adamic curse (7), resulting in attachment to Christ, and the indwelling Spirit to transform the believer. Paul sees this as a "new exodus" defined around Messiah Jesus. First, Christ recapitulates the mission of Israel successfully, and then gives the Spirit, so that God's worldwide people can do the same as "joint-heirs" with Him.
Those who belong to the Messiah are now, he suggests, married to him, in a fruitbearing relationship. The obvious echoes are of the relationship of YHWH with his people, a theme which comes into prominence precisely in the context of the ‘divorce’ of exile and the ‘remarriage’ of return. 1010
The ‘new Exodus’ theme, like so much else in Romans and Galatians, is rooted in the divine promise made to Abraham. The covenant promises in Genesis 15 were focused on the seed and the inheritance; the patriarch was told that the seed would obtain the inheritance by first being enslaved and then being rescued and brought home to their promised land. This Passover-sequence—liberation from slavery by coming through the Red Sea, arriving on Sinai and being given the Torah and finally being led by the presence of YHWH himself in the pillar of cloud and fire until they arrived in the land—this sequence is now recapitulated, majestically in chapters 6–8. 1013–1014
But what is of most concern to Paul, speaking as he says ‘to those who know the law’ (7:1), is to tell the story of Israel because it is the story of the world’s redemption...One cannot, in other words, appreciate the fruit which grows in Romans 8 unless one has understood the roots—the very Jewish roots—in Romans 7. 1015
The resurrection from the dead, the ultimate hope of Israel, the gateway to the ‘life of the coming age’, is the prospect for those who through the spirit constitute the renewed (though still suffering) ‘elect’, the transformed and now worldwide people of the one God. 1020
Wright concludes the section on Romans 5-8 by discussing the role of the Spirit in leading and transforming the believer and focuses on the covenant language (love) at the end of chapter 8 which assures that the declaration made with the believers initial faith will correspond with the final approval at the judgment.
But the idea of being ‘led’ by the spirit, on this journey through the wilderness to the ‘promised land’, indicates that the implicit temple-theme of 8:9–11 is being followed through in terms of the guiding presence of God himself in the wilderness tabernacle, in the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night...And this means that, for Paul, the indwelling spirit is taking the place, within the church as a whole and within each of the Messiah’s people, of that fiery, cloudy pillar, the living and dangerous presence of God himself. 1023
The unbreakable covenant love of YHWH for his people, arguably the most central expression of Israel’s election, has been focused on, and revealed in, the son. And this unbreakable love is the secure resting-place of all those who, by the spirit, are ‘in the Messiah’. This is not something other than ‘justification by faith’. This is what justification looks like in solid reality: battered, but believing; suffering, yet sustained by the spirit; dying, but knowing that death itself has been defeated. 1025
Between (1) the beginning of the work of the spirit and (2) its triumphant conclusion, Paul envisages a spirit-led life which does not in any way contribute to initial justification, or to the consequent assurance of final justification which that initial justification brings, but transforms the life of the person who has already come to faith. 1030
Wright then moves on to the role of torah in his view of election. Torah was not just laws for the nation of Israel, but it was a story about what God is like and what he wants in relationship that is revealed in the nation of Israel. It was never meant to be a law code that people could keep and become right with God. That was why sacrifices were required. Throughout its history Israel failed to be what God called them to be. Torah bound people in Adam's sin, but "drawing ‘sin’ onto one place, in order that it might be condemned there (1034), it prepared for Jesus to take the curse of the law/covenant upon himself and fulfill it. Belief in Christ and the transformation of the Spirit upholds and fulfills the torah.
Paul saw Torah not simply as a set of commands, but as a narrative: the story of creation and covenant, of Adam and Abraham, focused particularly on Exodus and finally articulated in the covenantal warnings and promises at the end of Deuteronomy. All this Paul fully affirmed as divine in origin, positive in intent, and fulfilled (albeit in unexpected ways) through the gospel. 1033
Torah is actually upheld through Messiah-faith. Again and again Paul speaks of the work of the spirit as enabling people to fulfil Torah in a way previously impossible. 1037
Wright's conclusion...
The promise that one day YHWH would return to the temple, rescuing his people and bringing justice to the world, turned into the announcement that he had indeed returned, in and as his people’s representative. He was himself, in some sense, the one who built the temple and the one who would dwell in it. And the temple he built was not made of timber and stone, but of flesh and blood. Here the major themes of Paul’s thought meet and merge: Israel’s God, coming back to rescue his people and the world and to dwell with them for ever; Israel itself, God’s people, redefined around the Messiah and spirit who were themselves the means and mode of that dwelling. 1041
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
Sunday Afternoon in the Back Yard
Everyone got in some serious play time
Friday, June 10, 2016
PIU June Newsletter
The latest PIU Newsletter, the 2016 Year in Review issue, is now available on the PIU web site. You can find it here.
Here is my President’s Message from page 1…
I was talking to one of our alumni the other day. He was a little surprised that I did not remember what year he graduated. I still remember the names, the actions, and fond memories of our graduates. Sometimes the graduation years seem to meld into one another. My excuse is that I am getting old. I have been president for over 13 years and have participated in 14 graduations during that time. Overall I have been part of over 20 graduations.
Maybe it is hard to remember which year is which because so many things stay the same in our graduating students. Of course, most are Micronesian, though we have graduates from many countries. But no matter where they are from, the similarities are still there. We see young men and women going out to graduate schools, jobs, and community service who are well prepared with a biblical world view and focused on mission. They are able to think and communicate in ways that will make the islander voice heard throughout the world. That voice will be heard out of their experiences in the Christian community at PIU.
Sure, some things are different now. We have more liberal studies than biblical studies graduates, though they all leave with at least 24 credits in Bible and theology. They have widened their perspective from just serving God in the church to being part of the church, serving God in their homes and wider communities. Our seminary has provided an upgraded level of education to prepare those who will serve by leading their churches into the future. Future graduates will serve with a degree that may include a new Liberal Studies emphasis in business and improved teacher education programs. Our values, based on God’s Word, stay the same, even as we make changes to apply those values to a changing world.
As we close out the 2015-2016 academic year, let us pray that we hold on to the values that have led us over the last 40 years and work to make the changes in the future continue to support those values.
This issue includes a student profile of Biblical Studies student Jones Rufes, a map showing where some of our alumni are now working and many pictures from the just completed school year. You can download the newsletter here or write to me at dowen@piu.edu and I will email you a pdf. copy.
Thursday, June 09, 2016
Paul and the Faithfulness of God Chapter 10, Part 5
Next Wright looks at Paul's understanding of the "shape of justification." He insists that "justification" must be understood as the end of a "clear sequence of ideas." "Justification by grace through faith in the present time on the basis of the work of the Messiah—comes as the crucial seventh and final element in this sequence." (926) The sequence is that 1) God as Creator is committed to making the world right again in the age to come, 2) The world cannot be put right until humans are made right, 3) God will make things right through covenant 4) "The covenant will be the means of sorting out the problem of universal human idolatry and sin (934)," 5) All the above steps point toward a final judgment when God will set things right.
The various Pauline uses of the dikaios root (‘justification’) take for granted the belief (a) that Israel was chosen, with a purpose, by the creator God; (b) that this purpose had to do with the creator’s ultimate plan to set the whole creation to rights; and (c) that this purpose was to be taken forward through the setting to rights of human beings. 925
The covenant is indeed the answer to the forensic problem—but it is the covenant as fulfilled in the faithful obedience of the Messiah and the outpouring of the spirit...In the language of ‘righteousness’ and ‘justification’, already implicit in the covenantal train of thought, Paul found the perfect vehicle to explain how the covenant God, through the Messiah and the spirit, had dealt with the deeper problem of human sin, including Jewish sin. 933
‘Law-court’ language expresses, in a non-transferable way, something vital and central about the determination of the creator God to put all things right at last. One cannot, of course, make the law court the only matrix of understanding, even for ‘justification’. We need covenant, eschatology, participation and much besides. Equally, though, one cannot marginalize ‘forensic’ language and hope to escape scot-free. 934
The future verdict will consist, according to Paul, of the gift of ‘life’: the dikaioma that meant ‘death’ is matched by the dikaioma that meant ‘life’...Once again we note the dovetailing of forensic and covenantal ideas. The ‘verdict’ here, and in 8:33–34, is certainly ‘forensic’, but the idea of the two verdicts of ‘life’ and ‘death’ is certainly ‘covenantal’, as in Deuteronomy 30:15–20 and elsewhere. And once again the whole thing is ‘incorporative’. The place where the verdict ‘no condemnation’ is issued is precisely ‘in Messiah Jesus.’ 936.
Once the first 5 ideas of the sequence are understood, the key points 6-7 make sense. Wright sees Romans 1-8 as a unified explanation of an "inaugurated/incorporative forensic/covenantal eschatology" in which the acts of Messiah Jesus are the decisive expression of God's righteousness which inaugurates the coming kingdom promised in the Abrahamic Covenant and developed in the rest of the OT. Justification in the present is a declaration of God, based on Jesus' death and resurrection, of righteous status before God which will result in an assures final justification in the final judgment. This is assured because believers are incorporated in Christ and the indwelling Spirit works in producing a faithful life.
Christian living is not a zero-sum game, so that either ‘God does it all’ or ‘we do it all’. That false notion is always raised whenever anyone draws attention to Paul’s strong words about a final justification on the basis of the whole life, with the constant implication that unless one simply says ‘God does it all’ we are forfeiting assurance, or even salvation itself. 940
The entire Jew-plus-Gentile family, now designated as ‘Abraham’s seed’, has that title because they are ‘in him’ and ‘belong to him’ (Galatians 3:26–29); and the badge of that belonging is of course pistis, the ‘faith’ which believes that the one God raised Jesus from the dead (Romans 4:24–25; 10:9). 944
The first thing to get clear, then, is that the word ‘justification’, within its forensic sense, refers very precisely to the declaration of the righteous God that certain people are now ‘in the right’, despite everything that might appear to the contrary. 948
So how does this work out practically? The Spirit calls the person to belief through the Gospel. This is a gift of God. God then declares the person to be part of his covenant family and forgives his/her sins. Subsequent transformation is inevitable as the Spirit works in the life of the believer and the believer responds.
The ‘faith’ in Paul’s sense is not valued for a ‘quality’ it possesses in itself. It is defined entirely by, and in terms of, its object. 952
The point about the ‘call’ is that it is not ‘an invitation to enjoy a new kind of religious experience’. It is a sovereign summons to acknowledge the risen Jesus as lord. It, like the ‘faith’ which it inspires, is all about Jesus, not about oneself. 955
‘Justification’ is the declaration of the one God, on the basis of the death of Jesus: this really is my adopted child, a member of Abraham’s covenant family, whose sins are forgiven. And that declaration, in the present, anticipates exactly the final verdict which can also be described as ‘adoption’ (all this language, of course, reflects Israel’s ‘adoption’ as ‘God’s son’ at the Exodus): ‘we who have the first fruits of the spirit’s life within us are groaning within ourselves, as we eagerly await our adoption, the redemption of our body’ (Romans 8:23). 958–959
Wright now comes to his conclusion that the main point of justification is the declaration of the covenantal inclusion of all people who believe in the Messiah into God's family. God's purpose from the beginning was to "save" the world through humanity, but he had to save humanity first. The symbol of this is baptism which pictures the new life, new family and new unity produced by what Christ has done and what the indwelling Spirit now produces. Unity of God's people is God's intended present result of justification.
The reason the divine declaration ‘righteous’ is issued, on the basis of the Messiah’s death and ‘for the benefit of all believers’, is to constitute that single family, whatever its moral or ethnic background, as the worldwide company which the covenant God had always promised to Abraham. 960
Baptism is as it were the public celebration of justification by faith, the active and visible summoning up of the Exodus-events which were themselves freshly encoded in the death and resurrection of Jesus and the constitution of the believing community as the Exodus-people who have firmly and decisively left Egypt behind and are being led by the spirit to their inheritance. 963
Wright now moves on to validating this view of justification through the exegesis of key passages in Paul's letters. He sees the central meaning of the concept of "justification" to be "declared to be in God's family" in Galatians, with the forensic layer of meaning brought out in the concept in Romans, as Paul thought through the implications of it. He begins this study with Galatians 2.15-4.11. Paul pictures here the redefining of election around the faithful death and resurrection of Jesus as an "Exodus event." The faithful of all the world will now be pronounced righteous at the final judgment, and this must be lived out through the Spirit in the present.
'So that we might be justified’ in Galatians 2:16 does not simply mean ‘so that we might attain a righteous standing before God’, though that is obviously part of the core meaning of the term. Rather, it must mean, in order for the sentence to work in its context, ‘so that we might be declared to be members of God’s single family.’ 968
The unity of the Messiah’s people, especially in their table-fellowship, thus flows as a non-negotiable imperative from the gospel itself. 970
Here is the redefinition of election, writ clear, cognate both with Romans 2:25–29 and with Romans 4:9–17: the covenant is renewed through the divine spirit, and Jews who want now to belong to Abraham’s renewed family must be spirit-people and faith-people. 973
In 1 Corinthians this idea that the present declaration of God brings the future judgment into present actuality is assumed even in church life and discipline. In the church "the verdict of the future is enacted in the present (979)."
Even when (Paul) is not discussing ‘justification’ as such, his mind regularly and easily works on the basis that the coming day of judgment has already arrived in the present in the Messiah, and is to be implemented and applied in the community in the power of the spirit. That is the basis on which he declares that what will be true about the future must become true in the present life of the church. 980
Wednesday, June 08, 2016
PIU Summer Ministry: Addie Namelo
I asked Addie why she was interested in this type of internship ministry: “I just like helping people in general.”
Are you nervous?: “I knew this was going to be hard but as I told myself, ‘Don’t think things are far-fetched or out of reach, have faith, pray and go for it!’”
This is Addie’s support raising brochure below. She has already raised the necessary airfare and just needs to raise her additional miscellaneous expenses (about $500) to have enough for the summer. Support info is in the brochure below.
S U M M E R M I S S I O N I N T E R N S H I P
Dear Family & Friends,
As you all know, my name is Addie Mary Namelo. I am 21 years old and currently attending school at Pacific Islands University in Mangilao, Guam as a 3rd year college student.
I am writing to inform you of an awesome opportunity I have this summer through my school. I will be going on a mission trip at the end of June to New Jersey and New York City. I will be interning at Liebenzell Mission, USA headquarters in Schooley’s Mountain, New Jersey. I will serve at different churches and have the opportunity to go into New York City to help the homeless ministries by giving out food, clothing, most importantly sharing the gospel. I will be working with a partner and friend Scott Refilong who is also a student at Pacific Islands University. We plan to use our talent in music to share about Micronesia, our culture, and our school.
I am so excited to see how God will use me this summer. There will be a German impact team going to New Jersey as well and we have been informed that we will also be working alongside their team.
We are praying for a strong support team. First, through prayers, please pray for the ministry through the summer. Pray that we may be lead by the spirit and to do everything for his glory and not ours.
Secondly, for the cost of the plane ticket and traveling expenses. We will need to raise $2500.00 in just a few short weeks. Thankfully, we will be housed and fed when we get there. The hostess will also be renting a car for me to use while I am there. My prayer is that this summer will help me overcome the fear of reaching out to the unknown. I pray that we will not be afraid of rejection, but have the sense of urgency to do God’s work in whatever way that may be. Thank you for your time, support, and prayers.
In Christ’s Love,
Addie Mary Namelo
Please send your donations to Pacific Islands University with “Addie’s Mission Trip” in the memo. 172 Kinney’s Rd, Mangilao, GU 96913
Ready For Rainy Season on Guam
Here are a couple more pictures of the campus