This is a very scholarly book. How do I know? Two things. First, in the Preface Dr. Chapman lists those he believes will be interested in the book: “scholars of Judaism in antiquity,” “students of early Jewish and Christian interactions,” and “scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity.” A few of my friends fall into one of those categories but not many. The second reason I know this is a scholarly book is that throughout the book Chapman quotes from Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, and Aramaic sources, without always including an English translation.

            So, you may ask, why am calling attention to Ancient Jewish and Christian Perceptions of Crucifixion? It is true that I am honored to call David Chapman a friend, but I feel no obligation from our friendship to post something about his book. Nor is this blog turning in a new direction to become a resource of interest only or primarily to scholars in academia. My reason is that I am convinced this book will be of interest to one other group—admittedly not too large—not mentioned by Chapman in his Preface.

            Each generation finds an offense in the Christian gospel. Tim Keller recently commented that Muslims don’t like Jesus’ teaching to turn the other cheek while they approve of his teaching on marriage, while the average person in Manhattan loves the notion of nonviolent response but finds Jesus’ thinking about marriage and sexual morality grating and out-of-touch. If the gospel is truly a word from God to a human race that is deeply broken because it refuses the grace of its Creator, Redeemer, and Judge we should expect that something in that gospel will be offensive to them, will cut sharply across the grain of their hubris and insistence on autonomy.

            In our postmodern western world at the beginning of the 21^st century one place of offense in the gospel is the necessity of Christ’s death—and in such a gruesome fashion—in order for redemption to be possible. Why didn’t God just forgive us? Isn’t the Son dying on the cross at the insistence of the Father a form of divine child abuse? Isn’t the notion of blood sacrifice a rather primitive, even barbaric conception that suggests Christianity needs some updating?

            Those of us outside the world of academic scholarship who want to learn from the scholars who do the heavy research will profit from Ancient Jewish and Christian Perceptions of Crucifixion. The book helps us understand how Christ’s crucifixion was perceived by those who heard of it and how the biblical accounts can be better set within their historical and social contexts as we seek to explain their meaning. Certainly there is far more detail in this careful work than is needed for the average conversation on the necessity and significance of Jesus’ crucifixion, but that it can be a helpful resource I have no doubt.

            One thing Chapman’s study did for me is explain how the topic of crucifixion (in the broadest sense) is not limited to the New Testament and the Old Testament prophesies, but has echoes far back into the narratives of Old Testament history. Suspension (sometimes after death by stoning) of the body, hanging, and impalement all were often equated in the ancient mind with crucifixion (in the narrower sense we think of it in Roman times) and appear as far back in the biblical record as the story of Joshua when the Israelites are first entering the land promised to them by God. Just as the death penalty evokes strong reaction today, these even more public and gruesome displays of execution did not go unnoticed and unremarked.

            The fact that the cross is an embarrassment to the postmodern secular mind must not be allowed to cause us to quietly ignore it as we engage our world. A gospel without the cross is not the gospel of Christ, nor does such a gospel have power to save. Faithfully witnessing to the kingdom does not mean allowing the world to shape our message, it means out thinking the world so that its opposition to the gospel is met with truth spoken with quiet confidence and compelling reasoning. Ancient Jewish and Christian Perceptions of Crucifixion can help in that process. We are indebted to David Chapman for the many hours he spent squirreled away in libraries in the research for this book, a task to which he is called and gifted.

Book recommended: Ancient Jewish and Christian Perceptions of Crucifixion? By David W. Chapman (Grand Rapids, MI; Baker, 2008) 262 pages + appendix + bibliography + indices.

Photo: the author with Drs David and Tasha Chapman.

The first week of January I will be once again teaching a 2-credit course, “Film & Theology” at Covenant Theological Seminary in St Louis. It’s rather intensive (4 straight days, 8:30-12 noon, 1-4 pm) but a delight for me. It seems undeniable that film is a primary story-telling medium—perhaps the primary story-telling medium—in our postmodern world. Being able to explore that with the next generation of leaders in the church, and demonstrate how we can be part of that cultural dialogue is a very good way to spend a week. After all, good films raise the same issues that are addressed in the biblical gospel—the perennial questions of life and reality.

As part of that class, I schedule at least three (and will probably use 4) films to watch in class, and then discuss. After all, talking about engaging an art form but not actually practicing it is not a wise way to develop discernment. There are a multitude of good films I’d like to watch with my students but have to decide on four. I have several qualifications:

            1. The film must be worth discussing. Every movie can be talked about, and usually is, but some movies are very limited in the themes they explore or the depth to which that exploration occurs.

            2. Depictions of sexuality or violence must be moderate. Since we live in a post-Christian and fallen world, it is inevitable that there will be aspects to people’s stories that reflect less than full righteousness. Even the Scriptures contain such stories. Still, since this is an academic setting, the viewers have less discretion as to whether they will choose to see the films. And since there are plenty of fine films that are moderate in how they depict such realities, choosing films that will not produce problems for weaker believers is a responsibility I wish to assume as the instructor.

            3. The film should be easily defensible. I am teaching this course at a Theological Seminary, an institution I happen to like a great deal. I not only teach there, I did my theological studies there. Covenant is part of a denomination in which there are people who are quick to object to whatever they happen to disapprove, and for some movies is on the list. Some of these folks are cultural warriors, some are ideological conservatives, and none have the self-awareness to realize their expressions of “being offended” are actually attempts to control others via the legalisms they spawn. I am pleased that Covenant Seminary offers courses like the one I teach and I want to choose films to watch in class that I can argue are worth seeing and are vital expressions of issues that the church needs to engage.

Films that I have shown in classes in the past include Run Lola Run (1998; R); Nanking (2007; R); Wit (2001; PG-13); Stranger than Fiction (2006; PG-13); and 13 Conversations about One Thing (2001; R).

My question is this: What films would you suggest I show in class? Or to put it another way, which movies would you like the future leaders in the church to discuss during the week they spend with me?

A note in a faculty memo from James Pakala, librarian at Covenant Seminary (St Louis, MO):

The Christian Century August 10, 2010 – Four American myths are listed (p. 9) from Claude S. Fischer’s Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character (U of Chicago Press, 2010). Despite the myth: a) Americans changed location less in recent decades than either in the middle of the 20^th century or in the early 19^th century; b) Americans have not turned away from religion, as membership has remained proportionately higher than in eras prior to the mid-20^th century; c) crime rates by 2000 were almost down to 1950 levels; and d) destitution is lower.

Source: Select Items #277.

The [Apostles’] Creed is a summary of the Big Story. And like the biblical drama of redemption, the story the Creed proclaims is not just about things that happened a long time ago. Part of the story still lies in front of us, in an event in the future. And this event is so crucial to the story told that Scripture characteristically refers to it as our “hope.”

Hope is such an essential aspect of human existence that it would not be too much to say that what we hope for as our ultimate destiny is really an extension of and perhaps the clearest indicator of what we most value. Hope is not simply what we expect to happen, but what we long for, what we pray the future will be. How we see the future, the ultimate future, is the key to grasping everything else about us right now. Tell me your hope and I will know your heart, how you understand yourself, and how you relate to everything else. When we get a glimpse into where God is taking his people and the world, we begin to win an appreciation of what God considers worthy and valuable, what he loves. So when we talk about the Christian hope, we are talking about what God cares about, what he considers worthy of his concern and of the redemptive work of Christ. God's promise of the future is the Christian hope.

Amazingly, the Creed declares that the historic church’s hope is “the resurrection of the body.” I say “amazingly” because the Creed does not, as many might expect, identify heaven as the believer’s hope. When Christians talk about the point and goal of salvation, what they hope for, it is almost always going to heaven. Indeed, if we were to judge by two millennia of Christian art and hymnody, popular literature and piety, we would have to conclude that the Christian faith is fundamentally about the belief that the point of salvation is going to heaven. Yet the Creed does not say that. It declares the Christian hope as the resurrection of the body. To see what is at stake here, let's review a bit of the story behind the Creed. The world in which the Apostles’ Creed was born was deeply influenced by Platonic dualism, which, by the late third century, had been informing the worldview assumptions of the Greco-Roman world for half a millennium. Quasi-Christian sects such as Gnosticism and Marcionism, and religious philosophies such as Manichaeism and Neo-Platonism, were well known. There were some different beliefs and commitments among these groups, but if you scratched any of them they bled Platonic dualism.

Plato taught that reality is made up of two kinds of substances, two kinds of stuff—material stuff and spiritual stuff—which are always in opposition because they come from two different sources. The spiritual comes from God, the material from some lesser being. The spiritual, being from God, is good. Matter, being of more questionable origin, is less good, perhaps even evil. Human beings are caught right in the middle of this conflict between spirit and matter, between God and what is opposed to God. The tension is built right into our very beings, for we are made of the admixture of the two. The body is material, the soul spiritual. The soul, our true or highest self, is imprisoned in the lowly body, a corrupting bag of flesh. Platonists found something of a pun in the similarity of the word “body” to the word “grave” in Greek: soma, sema. The body (soma) is made for the grave (sema). The body is a tomb. Under such a philosophical regime, redemption is nothing less than the liberation of the soul from the body, the movement from the material realm of earth to the spiritual realm of heaven. That, in a nutshell, is the Platonic story. And under its influence, Christians of the post-New Testament era came to think of the created world as at best irrelevant to the life of the soul—the really real self—and at worst as that from which we must be saved.

The Creed tells a quite different story, one that was intentionally subversive of all dualistic conceptions of human beings and the world. “I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.” No spiritual stuff versus material stuff there, just God and stuff made by God, God and God’s stuff. There is no stuff that isn’t God’s. It’s all his stuff. And all the stuff is good…

The gospel is good news for the world. It is, after all a gospel, glad tidings, and it is good for all things. Paul punctuates this in Colossians 1:15-20. The redemptive work of Christ is for “all things,” “things on earth,” and “things in heaven.” As Anthony Hoekema notes, the promise of the resurrection in Romans 8 means that “God will not be satisfied until the entire universe has been purged of all the effects of man’s fall.” [The Bible and the Future, p. 275.]

We read this same gospel promise in the Old Testament.

     Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;

          let the sea roar, and all that fills it;

          let the field exult and everything in it!

     Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy

          before the LORD, for he comes,

          for he comes to judge the earth. (Ps. 96:11-13)

Resurrection is not just for human beings, it is for creation as well. It will not do for us to make the gospel small, just for human souls. To do that is to say more about what we value than to act as fair brokers of the biblical story. Virtually every biblical term for redemption that we apply to human beings Scripture also applies to the creation. In his commentary on Romans 8, Calvin was not in the least reticent to use the language of resurrection for the entire created order. On verses 19-20 he said: “I understand the passage to have this meaning… No part of the universe is untouched by the longing with which everything in this world aspires to the hope of resurrection.”

The story told by the Creed and the drama of redemption preached by Paul are quite the same. The Messiah will come from heaven to earth, to rescue his people not by snatching them away from the earth but by transforming them and the world by way of resurrection. One way to summarize the entire story is this: God made it, Adam broke it, Jesus fixes it. What is “it?” All things. God’s stuff. The Creed tells that story in its declaration of the resurrection of the body. Paul tells that very same story in Romans 8.

Resurrection is the baseline for our thinking about the future. What came bursting into the first-century world was not a philosophy of world-escape—there were already plenty of those—but the proclamation that Jesus Christ has bodily risen from the grave, that his people will be raised so that they will be like him, and that the Creator promises to rid his world of all that harms and frustrates his works. Whatever we believe about life and death, if it is to be biblical belief, it must be begin with and make sense in terms of the resurrection of the body.

From a sermon preached on Romans 8:18-25 in June 2009 by the Rev Dr Michael Williams, theology professor at Covenant Seminary (St Louis, MO), “I believe… The Resurrection of the Body,” the transcript of which appeared in Presbyterion (#36/1; Spring 2010) p. 1-8.