Is the Gospel Good News?

Stanley E. Porter, Hughson T. Ong, Stanley E. Porter, Hughson T. Ong

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781532611322, 9781532611346
• eBook ISBN: 9781532611339
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Is the Gospel Good News? was the theme of the 2015 H. H. Bingham Colloquium at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, held on June 4-5. The fourteen participants in this colloquium presented their own individual perspectives on the theme from three broad vantage points--Bible, theology, and crucial topics. The "good news" that Jesus proclaimed concerning the kingdom of God became the "gospel" proclaimed by his followers throughout church history. This gospel is about the coming of Jesus Christ in fulfillment of God's will for humanity. This volume presents some accounts of how this good news has been understood through the ages and continues to be understood in relation to some of the major topics and issues of our contemporary world. The papers in the Bible section discuss this good news from both Old and New Testament passages and themes. The papers in the Theology section address theological topics in light of the question of what constitutes the good news. Finally, the papers in the Crucial Topics section explore new and different perspectives on ways in which the gospel is good news. This volume highlights diverse perspectives and proposals by scholars from various locations in different stages of their academic careers, resulting in a stimulating discussion of the topic of the gospel as good news.

Crucial Topics

12

Baptism in the Holy Spirit

A Circumcised Heart, A New Disposition

Ronald D. Peters

Introduction

The topic of this chapter stands at the confluence of two separate yet related works. The first is an article in a recent volume of Bible Translator, “The Holy Spirit and a Holy Spirit: Some Observations and a Proposal,” by Clint Tibbs. In his introduction, Tibbs presents the following problem:

Is “the Holy Spirit” of Trinitarian thinking, proposed by the fourth-century fathers Athanasius of Alexandria, the Cappadocians, and Didymus the Blind, the same “holy spirit” expressed by first-century writers of the text of the Greek New Testament?470

Tibbs believes this Trinitarian reading is indeed incorrect. Therefore he proposes the following solution:

I will propose that the New Testament provides evidence for “a spiritual world” populated with a multiplicity of holy spirits. The evidence for this argument is as follows: the anarthrous “a holy spirit”; the anaphoric use of the articular “the spirit” to mean “a spirit”; the generic singular “the spirit of God” as an inclusive rubric for many spirits of God; and the plural “spirits” in the context of divinity.471

I was intrigued by the problem that Tibbs had identified, not so much because I was persuaded by his argument or proposed solution, but by the nature of the evidence he cited and the methodology he employed for its interpretation. As we see, one of the primary pieces of evidence has to do with the presence and absence of the article with regard to the head term spirit, πνεῦμα. He notes that both the presence and the absence of the article are significant, yet he fails to ask, in my opinion, a very important question: how does the presence or absence of the article affect the sense of the head term πνεῦμα? Tibbs’s treatment of the articular and anarthrous constructions reflects the standard approach to the article that has been employed by Greek scholars for centuries.472 When affixed to nouns, the article is viewed as a marker of syntax, specifically of particularities involving structure. It is not viewed as a modifier, as something that enters into a meaningful relationship with the head term so as to have an effect on the sense of the head term, in this case πνεῦμα.

This question that Tibbs leaves unasked is a question that is uppermost in my own mind, which brings us to the second aforementioned work, that is, my own research on the Greek article.473 To summarize, my central thesis is that the function of the article is to characterize the head term as concrete, “as belonging to immediate experience as an actual thing or event.”474 By contrast, parts of speech that routinely take the article, particularly nouns, when anarthrous are characterized as abstract, “as not belonging to immediate experience as an actual thing or event.”475 After reading Tibbs’s article, I could not help but wonder how his argument might...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• The Gospel as Good News
• Bible
• Theology
• Crucial Topics