House Divided part 1 & part 2
My Response #3 to Jon: Found here.
Jon wrote: As Wright point outs there are two basic meanings for resurrection in the Second Temple period. “In each case the referent is concrete: restoratin of Israel (’resurrection’ as metaphorical, denoting socio-political events and investing them with the significance that this will be an act of new creation, of covenant restoration); of human bodies (’resurrection’ as literal, denoting actual re-embodiment). Nothing in the entire Jewish context warrants the suggestion that…that the Jewish literature of the period ’speaks both of a resurrection of the body and a resurrection of the spirit without the body’.” End of discussion.
My response: You’re assuming that the saints who were in Hades did not take part with the living in the “restoration of Israel,” the “act of new creation, of covenant restoration.” There is no basis for that assumption. Beginning at Pentecost, the living –both Pagans and saints– were saved (or “spiritually resurrected”) through faith in the recently shed, age-changing blood of Christ (Acts 10:1-2; 11:14; Eph. 2:6; Rev. 20:4, 6). Did not the dead old covenant saints have the same need as the living old covenant saints? Did they not also have to hear and believe the newly manifested Gospel (“the voice of the Son of God“) and be saved (Jn. 5:25, 28; 1 Peter 4:6)? Did not the saints in Hades have the same need as the living old covenant saints: to be baptized into the universal Body of Christ through faith in His shed blood? Did the dead old covenant saints not participate with the living old covenant saints in regeneration/rebirth? Yes, they did (Isa. 26:19; Matt. 19:28; Rom. 8:29; Col. 1:15, 18; Rev. 1:5). Therefore, the dead were resurrected in the same non-biological way (“new creation”) that the living were resurrected. “Behold, I make all thingsnew” (Rev. 21:5).
Jon wrote: Paul claimed to be a Pharisee. To not really be a Pharisee, yet claim to be and then use the language in the way he did is duplicitous.
My response: Paul was not really a Pharisee? I’m not sure where that came from.
I’m sorry you’re not continuing our “back and forth.” But we can leave it at this:
1. My position is “unexegetical.”
2. I make words mean anything I want.
3. I’m comparable to New Agers and Barack Obama.
4. I deny the divinity of Christ.
And I might add, I kill babies in their cribs and I push old ladies down stairwells.
Thank you, Jon.
David Green
