Denver Seminary

Abstract Due to numerous lexical, syntactical, and historical problems, the interpretation of almost every word in Col 2:15 is contested. In the debate, there is a tendency to argue for one or two possible metaphors, while discarding, ignoring, or relegating the other options to a footnote. But this is not how metaphors work. Therefore, this article surveys images often associated with the participles απεκδυσάμενος and θριαμβεύσας in Col 2:15 and then argues that scholars should not pick one single image over another in the verse. Rather, based on scholarship surrounding metaphors, NT scholars should consider how the multiple metaphors might inform and transform each other.

Dickerson, assistant professor of NT at American Baptist College, inaugurates “Womanist Readings of Scripture” with this treatment of Luke 18:1–8. She is properly upset about the historic and recent atrocities against African Americans in the U.S. and sees the potential of Jesus’s parable for addressing our racism. She believes that Luke’s sole understanding of the passage is encapsulated in v. 1—to pray always and not lose heart—and this is clearly inadequate.Tracing a selective history of pre-20th-century interpretation, Dickerson finds that little other than prayer and perseverance are touted. Drawing more widely from contemporary interpretation, including online sermons, many of them African American, she remains dissatisfied, especially with the stereotyping of the woman as innocent victim and the judge as corrupt. She notes that the biblical background that Jesus’s audience knew well regularly demonstrated that widows would get justice, even if by creative means (comparing especially Tamar, Ruth, Bathsheba, and [from the apocrypha] Judith).In the longest, most unique and fascinating section, Dickerson next illustrates three iconic presentations of African American women in 20th-century film, television, and literature and considers their potential for viewing the widow in the parable along similar lines: (1) “Mammy,” the overweight, nonsexual, devoted childminder for the children of well-to-do whites; (2)—“Jezebel,” the seductive, promiscuous woman who brings down powerful men; and (3) “Sapphire,” who easily morphs into the angry black woman, yet nevertheless gets things accomplished with her tenacity. Dickerson then rewrites and expands the parable from the perspective of each of these three depictions of the persistent widow.A shorter chapter rounds out the volume with a comparison between the judge and three African-American male stereotypes. He can be “cool”—that is, dispassionate, letting nothing faze him; he can be the “Master-Pastor”—the autocratic leader who also often gives in to temptation; or he can be “foolish”—with the classic example being the buffoon in the routine “Here Come Duh Judge”. Again, possibilities for different interpretations for the parable based on each figure are teased out.In keeping with womanist interpretation as a non-totalizing, postmodern option, Dickerson never suggests that any one of her revamped interpretations is the right one, just that they are possibilities. She does, however, seem fairly convinced that what she dubs Luke’s interpretation is wrong. She criticizes my interpretation (The Parables of Jesus, 2nd ed. [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2012]) as perpetuating the stereotypes of widow and judge as innocent and corrupt, respectively. But she never asks how characters in either Jesus’s parables in general or Jewish parables elsewhere function. In fact, they do function as stock characters, but with key surprises that shatter the stereotype at some point. She rightly rejects much of the allegorizing of church history but, in opting for Jülicher’s corrective, has to find all of Luke’s meaning in v. 1, without mining vv. 6–8 for their rich, added complexities. She realizes the parable functions “from the light to the heavy” but fails to observe that Jesus’s “how much more” illustrations consistently function as “how different” as well.In short, I agree with Dickerson’s frustrations at how the parable has often been used, but I am less convinced that her approach(es) can actually get her to her very necessary call for activism and justice. Ironically, David Wells, in Christianity Today (November, 2 1979), already contextualized the parable for a black Chicago neighborhood, depicting prayer as “rebelling against the status quo.” And he used historical-grammatical exegesis.

Seasoned Bible readers scarcely bat an eye every time Jesus speaks of himself as the Son of Man, but newer readers may well ask why he speaks of himself in the third person so often. While this is by far the most common example of “illeism” (the use of third-person forms by a speaker or writer for self-reference) in the Gospels, one also encounters “the Son” (in context often referring to the Son of God), “(the) Christ,” “the Lord,” “the king,” and, especially in John, entire phrases such as “the One whom the Father has sent,” “He who comes down from heaven,” and “He who comes from God.” Why does Jesus talk this way from time to time? More often than not, he uses typical first-person singular forms. Or if the language is attributed to the Evangelists, why do they occasionally portray Jesus as lapsing into illeism?In this published form of his Ph.D. dissertation completed at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Roderick Elledge, now adjunct professor at Southern, investigates these rarely asked questions. Of course, there was the day when Bultmann and others thought Jesus was talking about a coming Son of Man other than himself, but few today take this approach. Noting that only Andrew Malone, in a 2009 journal article, has studied the phenomenon of illeism in the Bible (and there only in the OT) at all systematically, Elledge proceeds to walk through almost every known use of the phenomenon in the OT with characters other than God and then surveys representative uses of the speech of Yahweh speaking illeistically. He similarly dips into representative examples of the speech-pattern in numerous ancient Near Eastern sources before finally turning to the use attributed to Jesus in the Gospels.Individual characters and contexts indicate multiple purposes for illeism, including adding solemnity to oaths, creating a summons to listen, distancing an individual from his or her experiences, showing deference or humility to a superior, and helping to characterize a speaker. By far and away the most common purpose, however, appears to be to indicate a person’s royalty or divinity. With these patterns in mind from the OT and the ancient Near East, Elledge finds that the same two explanations work best with the material ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels. If Elledge’s analysis is at all accurate, then we may add Jesus’s use of illeism to a growing list of items of implicit (i.e., not necessarily titular) Christology that point to Jesus’s divinity.This is certainly a learned dissertation, given the corpora of ancient material Elledge canvasses and the breadth of secondary literature with which he interacts. One cannot fault it for too narrow a scope in what it investigates before ever turning to the NT. Where it is not exhaustive, the texts it investigates do seem representative. And this reviewer is certainly sympathetic to research that would reinforce his own research into the abundance of high Christology attributable to Jesus himself.But why did I just lapse into one sentence of illeism? I suppose to illustrate a certain kind of modesty, conventional in certain academic circles. I doubt that has anything to do with Jesus’s use. But the lapse illustrates the difficulty of analyzing this phenomenon. For someone who already has good reason to suspect Jesus had a robust divine consciousness, Elledge’s entire study seems manifestly plausible. As he has himself stressed, it is not as though illeism is widespread in any ancient corpus, as it is in some forms of modern scholarship. But a study of this kind can scarcely consider all the possible explanations of illeism, text-by-text, so one does wonder how someone less predisposed to the answers Elledge gives for the phenomenon might interpret the same texts.A few glaring mistakes such as “more broader” (p. 49) and “alter” for “altar” (p. 61) occasionally mar what is otherwise a very clear and well-written work. After all the build-up, one might have wished for a lengthier treatment of the material in the Gospels, which comprises just shy of one-fifth of the volume. But overall, this is a very creative, thought-provoking and welcome addition to the study of the Christology of Jesus.

Gregory Boyd’s two-volume study of the ‘violent portraits’ of God in Scripture is at once comprehensive and challenging. It offers more than a mere account of the basic hermeneutical approaches to the ‘terror texts’ of the Old Testament; it is an attempt to specify the centrality of Christ’s work on the cross as a hermeneutical key not only for such texts but also for a range of other areas (atonement, ecclesiology, and eschatology), and a suggestion that inattention to this marks several failures in contemporary hermeneutics. On Boyd’s account, failure to grasp the ‘cruciform hermeneutic’ reveals a deeper failure to grasp the true character of God’s relation to the world; the ability to grasp this point, by contrast, will highlight the properly ‘cruciform’ character of theological readings of divine violence in the Old Testament. The first volume of the work, ‘The Cruciform Hermeneutic’, offers a reflection on the relation of Christology and Scripture. The ‘supremacy of God’s revelation on Calvary’ is the locus of renewed vision with regard to portraits of divine violence, and subsequently theological intelligence can ‘begin to see how these violent portraits actually bear witness to God’s true, cruciform character’ (p. 36). More particularly: because the crucified Christ ‘dwarfs in significance all previous revelations’ (pp. 49–50), a hermeneutical lens is therefore found through which all violent portraits of God ought to be read. Boyd’s suggestion, against competing positions (see ch. 6), is that the cross is the ‘thematic center of Jesus’s identity and mission’ and thus fully displays ‘God’s self-sacrificial, enemy-embracing, nonviolent character’ to which Scripture bears witness (p. 205).