My sleep last night was not its usual dreamless gray, and instead I saw an angel in vivid Technicolor, so much more saturated and heart-achy than it ever could have been in eyes-open-real-life. She was just like Updike had told me she would be: “weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen spun on a definite loom.” She interrupted my dream-within-a-dream and coughed loudly until I stirred.

“***,” I muttered, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. “You’re an angel.”

“Mhm.”

“And you’ve been sent by He who made all things?”

“Mhm.”

“Then tell me why He wakes me this night,” I said. “Am I to proclaim as prophet the fiery tongues of His word? Does the Living God bid me serve as king over all I see? Will my pen speak Christ-inspired words to his people?”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Her glow seemed dimmer now. “But know this: You are called.”

“Maybe? Is there nothing definite to be done? Are all God’s children free? Is Nineveh saved? Is there no Ark for me to build? If this is to be my burning bush, then let it be!”

Suddenly her hair turned to flames and lit my bedroom. Tongues of fire kissed the books on my shelf, singeing them. The blazing angel looked bored. She reached over to my bedstand and took my glass of water, pouring it over her head and putting out the fire. “Enough of that,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“These,” she said. The angel gestured to the stacks of books on my desk: Barth, Calvin, Bonhoeffer, Augustine, Luther, Edwards, Aquinas, Schleiermacher, Tertullian. “Your calling. Speak to these dead men and see what kind of God-talk you can dredge up, both old and new. What you will make will fuel the rest of the human enterprise. It will make sense of yourselves in this grand, cosmic waltz. And it will send humanity forth with an awareness of its place and purpose in all history. Most importantly, you will be a steward of hope in a life that disciplines your kind into only seeing the world as it is and not re-imagining the world as it could be. Theologians — and artists and poets and inventors and musicians and dreamers of all stripes — are the greatest enemies of the status quo. They create the conditions of a new and coming world over and over again. This will be you.”

“No. Tell Him I can’t,” I pleaded. “I’m a sham. I’m a fool. I can’t write. I haven’t the mind for it.”

“God loves your mind,” she said. “Learn to use it.”

I perceive a mutual and abiding suspicion between liberal and conservative Christian forces on campus. It is grounded in a conservative perception of liberal Christians as flimsy and compromised and a liberal perception of conservative Christians as backward and fundamentalist. And to a certain degree, both are right about each other, even if only because they have, like water, conformed to the containers ready to receive them. We might say that they are filling the niches that demand (and fund?) them, but I don’t believe that such a situation is acceptable as a status quo. I recall one evangelical friend recounting how a freshman-year visit to Harvard’s Memorial Church left him feeling as though he had been “spiritually raped.” And a liberal friend spoke to me once with pretty shocking contempt for the hateful and disgusting “gay-basher fellowships.” I have worshiped Jesus Christ in Memorial Church and with several of those “gay-basher” fellowships; neither place is the barren spiritual wasteland that my friends would have me believe. But clearly both felt affirmed enough in their opinions to be comfortable speaking so ill of another body of Christians.

This is a problem. It is schism rearing its ugly head: Church organized around ideology rather than community allows conservatives and liberals never to mix, eroding any notion of Christians as people living together with Christ as the foundation. Schism has allowed us to erase the persistent tension that lies at the heart of community life, but it has done so at the cost of the community itself. It massages our bloated Pharisaic egos and gives license to our arrogant belief that We are the True Church.  But it is wrong to train another generation of Christians to believe that “the Communion of Saints” is actually “the Communion of Saints who think exactly the way we do.”  No!  It is the Communion of all those people who find new breath in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, who proclaim the Cross and the empty tomb in a world ravaged by sin and injustice and violence and pain.  It is unconscionable to teach the members of one’s church or body that unless another Christian believes exactly everything that we believe, there is nothing worth listening to.

This is, I’m sure, a very common frustration, and it’s one that I do not have a solution to. But I read last summer about an ancient Christian tradition that may be relevant:

Another consequence of the growth of congregations was that it soon became impossible for all Christians in a particular city to gather together for worship.  The unity of the body of Christ was so important that it seemed that something was lost when in a single city there were several congregations.  In order to preserve and symbolize the bond of unity, the custom arose in some places to send a piece of bread from the communion service in the bishop’s church — the “fragmentum” — to be added to the bread to be used in other churches in the same city.

> The Story of Christianity, by Justo L. González – page 95

This fracture in the early church was caused by size rather than theological battle lines. But reviving this ancient tradition of sharing each other’s Communion bread could at least produce a moment of reflection in which a desire for Christian unity might be kindled in all who partake. Even symbolic steps are steps in the right direction.

What is it Good For?

I was seven when I first saw war.  It was 1995, and NATO had recently entered Bosnia, joining a conflict marked by incredibly brazen war crimes, including ethnic cleansing and brutal mass rape.

As the conflict raged on that September, I watched from the safety of my living room in DC’s posh suburbs.  All I could see of the war — indeed, all most of America could see — was whatever news-media outlets relayed to us from the front.  So the night-vision footage that CNN talking heads analyzed over and over again didn’t really feel like war; it might as well have been a green-and-black fireworks show that was taking place “somewhere else.”

I’ll chalk it up in part to my age, but I don’t think my detachment was unique.  My distance from the violence left me unshaken by war’s gruesome realities and perversions.  The Gospel should snap us out of this placidity and demand that we recognize the way war deforms the soul, even when it is happening halfway around the world.

We look ahead, of course, to a new heaven and a new earth in which all Creation is freed of such ills.  But if we resign ourselves either to a purely apocalyptic eschatology (waiting idly for God to act because the world is so wracked by sin) or to a purely realized eschatology (not expecting God to ever act because it’s all up to us), we cheapen the Gospel.  Instead, Christians should hope constantly for God’s return to, as NT Wright says, “put things to rights,” all the while living into the Kingdom and anticipating life under the final reign of Jesus.  The Cross and the Resurrection call Christians out of passive hope into active, missional hope.

This means living in such a way as to bear witness to the world as it will be — that is, living as a people that loves peace as much as God does.  We ought to consider Isaiah 2 and take seriously what it means to hope actively for a world in which the nations will beat their swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks and tanks into tractors.  What does it mean to live faithfully to Jesus’ proclamation of a new and perpetual Jubilee in a world as yet unredeemed?

It’s not a simple question to answer, and so we tackle one particular aspect of it — war and what Christians ought to think of it — in this issue.  We’re particularly pleased to feature Professors Stanley Hauerwas and Glen Stassen in this issue.  Stassen, of Fuller Theological Seminary, applies his “Just Peacemaking” theory to terrorism to ask what Christians can actively do to seek peace (p. 8).  And Hauerwas, one of the world’s sharpest and most provocative theologians, examines the ties between American civil religion and war (p. 24).  Join us as we think critically and Christianly about war and the lordship of Jesus Christ.

Let us reframe the question: Do we take the hope of Christ seriously enough actually to trust in it?

Nonviolence is a consequence of hearing the glad tidings of the Gospel. It follows from obedience to the messiah who would rather die than take up the sword of revolutionary violence, the God who does not wish for us to pursue temporal peace and justice in the way of Pharoah.

We reject the modernist compromise of Schliermacher and Niebuhr, and we will not accept a sanitized “realist” Christianity that has been run through the meat-grinder to be made palatable to the liberal democratic establishment. Karl Barth initiates this project of liberating God-talk: He puts forth a totalizing Christian vision of how the universe is and ought to be, wresting lordship from convenience and returning it to Christ Jesus. And his student, the Mennonite John Howard Yoder, finishes the fight, demanding that the Church recognize Jesus as Lord of not just our hearts, but our politics, as well.

We must believe so fiercely in this lordship and in the truth of the Gospel – indeed, to the exclusion of many things that others believe – that we adopt nonviolence in part to protect the God-breathcd lives of those who disagree with us. But even more, we must reject violence to protect ourselves from doing as sinners do: killing. We are violent creatures; avowing nonviolence acknowledges our impulse to dominate the weak and meets it head-on. A commitment to peace frees us to claim the truth of the Gospel without becoming Caesar.

Most of all, we must choose nonviolence because we bear witness to a peace that is yet to come, and so we remain faithful to that hope even as we work toward what should be right now. Active nonviolence is how we steadfastly live in anticipation of the Kingdom, already knowing how the story ends: Love wins. Such an ethic trusts in God and affirms our commitment neither to give up nor to idolize our own agency in the drama of history. And in the face of the ultimate sacrifice, as my brother says, “Christians who trust in the Prince of Peace must pray that they will be faithful when the time conics for them to bear witness to the power of God rather than to the power of violence.” Some things are worth dying for – even if for once we actually do have to turn the other cheek.

Samir Paul ’10, Editor-in-Chief of The Harvard Ichthus, is a senior computer science concentrator in Mather House.

Charles Clark, Dartmouth

The question, “When should Christians go to war?” suggests two principal readings. The first reading is, “When support a war politically?” and the second is, “When should Christians fight as soldiers?” Just War Theory, pioneered by Augustine and Aquinas, is primarily concerned with the former, that is, with the actions of nations in forming and executing policies regarding the use of force. One facet of Just War Theory is a set of principles for evaluating the justice of a nation’s entrance into war. These principles mandate that a nation going to war must possess just cause, proper authority, right intention and reasonable hope for success. I accept these principles on the grounds that they discourage self-serving, unnecessarily violent conflicts, which are contrary to the Christian’s responsibility to cultivate peace, while allowing Christians to support wars that seek to address wrongs committed against themselves and others with the measured use of force, which is in keeping with a Christian’s responsibility to enact and defend justice. Moreover Just War Theory allows cooperation on war policy between Christians and non-Christians, which is evidenced by its influence on the United Nations Charter. Christians are responsible for exercising their political rights and praying for those in authority in order that peace may be disrupted only when necessary to establish justice.

As to when individuals should participate in a war directly the New Testament presents Cornelius, a Roman centurion who becomes a Christian. Centurions were career military men with years of experience in battle. Even prior to his conversion, Cornelius is described as “righteous,” and he is not commanded to leave the military in order to follow Christ. So his occupation excludes neither righteousness nor Christian discipleship. And in 2 Timothy 2, Paul compares Timothy’s role as a servant of the Gospel to that of a soldier who dutifully serves his commanding officer. My conclusion from these passages is that the profession of a soldier is as moral or immoral as the actions of the individual soldier in the performance of his duty, which could be said for any profession. Put another way, the question of when Christians should become soldiers is little different from the question of when Christians should become doctors, lawyers, or bankers.

Charles Clark ’11, Editor-in-Chief of the Dartmouth Apologia, is a Dartmouth junior studying Literary Theory and Classical Archaeology.

Jinju Pottenger, Princeton

Murder is strongly condemned in the Bible, from the very first murder of Abel by Cain up through the Ten Commandments and countless times in the New Testament. However, does war fall under the prohibition of murder? The ancient Israelites, under God’s direction, waged wars that offend the secular reader who rejects God’s sovereignty over all life. But elsewhere the Bible comes down strongly on the side of peace, from the Psalms to the Benedictions. In fact, it appears that Ecclesiastes 3:8b, “There is a time for war, and a time for peace,” sums up our relationship with war: Sometimes, war is God’s will and waging it is part of His greater purpose and plan.

However, war as it is fought today could not be fought for purposes further from those of God. Wars of genocide and greed are clearly sinful. Wars that are fought brutally, with the maximization of suffering, are also not condoned. Jus ad bellum and jus in bello both matter.

I would go so far as to say that all wars waged in a modem nation-state system are against God’s will, and ones in which Christians should not participate. The state primarily protects its own interests, which is in radical contrast to God’s call to his children – namely, to act oppositely to our own interests for His sake. Although war is permissible when directly led by God, war for the sake of national security is the same as war for the sake of territorial expansion or other illegitimate reasons. War as nation-states wage it today is sin.

By way of analogy, a nation-state going to war is like an individual whose job requires murder. Both the state and the individual are made more secure by their actions: the former against state failure by warring with threats; the latter against poverty. However, there are other, less sinful options for the individual seeking provision and for the state seeking security.

While war may be permissible for Christians under certain circumstances, in the modern age, it is not so because of the tension between God’s command that we love our enemies and the state’s command that we kill them for the sake of national security. Human life is God-given and God-breathed and can only be taken at His command and without error – namely, not through the system we have now.

Jinju Pottenger ’10 of Princeton’s Revisions, is a senior at the Woodrow Wilson School in Mathey College.

Hans Anderson, Yale

There is a war which we Christians must wage always and in all places: Jesus announced, “I came not to send peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34; cf. Luke 12:51), while Paul clarified, “We do not wage war as the world does; the weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world” (II Corinthians 10:3-4). Christians wage the war of the Spirit, the war against sin and evil (cf. Ephesians 6:12; 1 Peter 2:11). This war is not one from which Christians may choose to abstain, for when a Christian gives her life to Christ, the fallen world declares war upon her (cf. Matthew 24:9; John 15:18). Nor can Christians expect this war to cease (cf. II Corinthians 6:14-16) until darkness is at last dispelled and all things are made new in Christ.

Precisely because Christians wage war against the very kingdom of darkness binding up the world, the perfect Christian life excludes war either of the world or for the world. Jesus blessed the peacemakers (Matthew 5:9), but He did not bless the warriors. Why? “My kingdom is not of this world,” He said; “if it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest” (John 18:36). When Peter cut off a man’s ear to defend Jesus, Jesus rebuked him and healed the victim (inter alia, Luke 22:50-51). If Christ would not permit Peter to fight in His own righteous defense, how could we ever presume to fight in defense of any worldly cause? Jesus healed the servant’s ear to show Christians our proper place vis-à-vis worldly war: We are to minister to the victims of violence rather than to combat even unjust violence with our own.

Of course, certain Christians hold a doctrine of “just war”, as if murder ceased to be sin whenever certain conditions are met. This doctrine is an invention foreign to the faith of the apostles, patristic writers (e.g. John Chrysostom, “On The Priesthood”), and early martyrs (cf. Acts 7:59-60, 14:19-22). There is one condition alone which supersedes God’s interdiction against murder: God’s extraordinary authorization.  Otherwise, Christ calls us to peace. More precisely, He calls us to spiritual war always and in all places against the very temptation which would draw us into worldly war.

Hans Anderson ’10, former Executive Editor of The Yale Logos, is a senior Ethics, Politics, and Economics major in Saybrook College.

In this series, I attempt to assess Second-Temple-era Jewish messianic expectation.  Start at Part I or see all parts in the series.

Perhaps the most familiar conception of the messiah—both to contemporary thinkers and to Second Temple Jews—was the royal figure of the Davidic line: a King. After the Israelite conquest of Canaan, the former nomads’ primitive government began to pale in comparison to more advanced Near-Eastern monarchies.¹ In spite of Samuel’s warnings about exploitative human monarchy, the Israelites caved to social pressures and the rising tide of Philistine conflict to knit together disparate tribes and clans and demanded a king.² Naturally, Mowinckel tells us, Israel assumed not just the governmental structures but also “a great many ideas and conceptions of kingship, the royal ideology, the ‘manner of the kingdom’, its etiquette and customs, the whole pattern of life which was bound up in it”—all acknowledged in the Old Testament.³

Folded into these pagan ideologies was the notion of the divine kingship. Certain elements were syncretized, contextualized, or otherwise watered down for Yahwist consumption. Canaanites believed that their king was literally divine, God in flesh; Israelites gave their king the same absolute authority, but instead decided that the king was divine only in the sense that God imbued him with divine license and wisdom. The New Year was about the rebirth of the pagan king; Israel instead made the New Year about renewing the king’s divine covenant. And any rituals requiring the physicality of the god-king were instead replaced with Israelite symbols or texts—the Ark of the Covenant and the law.⁴

One of the major implications of inheriting the pagan god-king was the difficult notion that even with a divine being in power—a divine man in either the pagan or Hebrew sense—things could still go wrong. In the case of Saul, for instance, it became very clear that if things are not going well for the people, “there must be something wrong with the king himself and his righteousness.”⁵ In this case, the people immediately look to the next king as the potential ideal king who would bring absolute, divine justice and righteousness. This disappointment is soon enough inducted over all possible cases until we arrive at a hope for some future King, a final Anointed One who would not fail.

When this hope is applied to a people conquered, evicted, and scattered across the earth in exile, it takes on a new importance, as it represents the strength and resumption of the covenant and election faith. It is a constant “hope of restoration”—both of a rightful and lasting divine king and of a national order precluded by foreign, pagan invaders.⁶ Prophecy, then, encapsulates this hope and is its guardian through time; and the Messianic King is inextricably tied to the ethos of hope fragilely binding together the scattered nation.

God’s promised fulfillment of this hope is associated with nobody but David, the only person in the Tanakh whom God himself is said to have anointed, and with whom he founded an eternal covenant.⁷ The prophets foretell his titles and lineage—“Wonderful Counselor-Mighty El-Father of Eternity-Prince of Peace”, the shoot from Jesse, the righteous branch named “Yahweh Our Righteousness”, “the anointed one”. But Isaiah is clear that even as this promised leader is of David’s line, it is not David: “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him,” Isaiah says of the Anointed One, in contrast to the description of David as handsome and ruddy.⁸ This messiah-king was expected to be, if nothing else, a restorer expected by Jews to renew Israelite glory.

In Jesus we see the pagan notions of kingship that Israelites had entertained in one form or another come to pass. That is, Jesus and his death and resurrection narratives take the Near-Eastern conceptions of the sacral king and the Israelite restorative hope found in them, and they play them out in real life. This is Christian apologist C.S. Lewis’s “true myth”—that is, a story told before in myths with echoes or shadows of truth that comes into fruition when it actually happens.

————————————–

- Editor’s Note -

What is it Good For?
by Samir Paul ’10

– The Dispatch –

II: When Should Christians Go To War?
by Samir Paul ’10; Hans Anderson, Yale ’10; Jinju Pottenger, Princeton ’10; and Charles Clark, Dartmouth ’11

– Opinions –

Bonhoeffer and Pacifism
by Anne Goetz ’11

Just Peacemaking in the Context of Terrorism and Nuclear Threat
by Glen H. Stassen, Fuller Theological Seminary

Love and War in the Early Church
by Andrew Forsyth, MTS ’09

War as the Perversion of Creation
by Matthew Cavedon ’11

Let them Sing: Being Christian in a World of War
by Rachel Wagley ’11

– Features -

Must Christians be Pacifists?
by J. Joseph Porter ’12

War and the American Difference
by Stanley Hauerwas, Duke Divinity School

A Hard Glory: “Let Us Go to the ‘Them’”
by Paul G. Nauert ’09

– Books & Arts -

The Good, the Bad, and the Cranky: A Review of Gran Torino
by Jim Shirey ’11

Seven Swans: Elliott Smith Transfigured?
by Andrew Chen ’11

– Fiction & Poetry -

The Red Sweater
by Ann Chao ’09

T H E  V I S I O N  O N  P A T M O S
by Kevin McGrath

Crescentius
by Michael Yashinsky ’11

Sibyl
by Judith Huang ’09

– Art & Photography -

Untitled 1 and Untitled 2
by Shannon Schaubroeck ’12

Untitled (arm)
by Natalie So ’12

- Last Things -

Against Death Itself
by Cameron D. Kirk-Giannini ’11

The notion of the messiah as a prophet is similarly criticized, but there is strong evidence in Jewish scripture that the Prophet was a role the Messiah would fill. Historically, a prophet in the Israelite tradition is literally a spokesperson—he or she is a representative of God to the people. The prophet works with the intention of bringing about change and calling society back to orthodoxy, justice, and faith in God. For Jews, prophets took on a slightly different role than for other near-eastern religions at the time (and even some prophets within Israel itself). Prophets came with a message for the people rather than with a hope of divining some information from God. That is, prophecy was God speaking to his people, rather than the people trying to decode God.

Deuteronomy 18 is the clearest description of this Prophetic role of the messiah: “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him,” the Deuteronomist tells the Israelites as Moses. God adds: “I will raise up for them a prophet like [Moses] from among their brothers; I will put my words in his mouth, and he will tell them everything I command him.”¹ There are two key features here: First, we note the strength of God’s promised calling—again bringing to mind the Calling involved in being chosen and anointed. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations,” God tells Jeremiah.² Similarly, the second Servant Song speaks of the calling of a Messiah in very similar terms.³ “Before I was born the LORD called me; from my birth he has made mention of my name,” the text reads.⁴ These similarities draw a strong connection between the prophet Jeremiah and the messianic figure described in Isaiah.

Second, we note the comparison to Moses. Some scholars would suggest that the mention of “a prophet like [Moses]” in Deuteronomy 18 is not about a single Great Prophet, but rather about Israel’s broader prophetic tradition.⁵ The verse, these scholars say, points to all of the prophets after Moses who had yet to arise—Samuel, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, etc. But the post-Mosaic addition to the book says that “there has never been another prophet like Moses,” meaning that while there are prophets like Moses in that they serve the same basic purpose, there are none in his “preeminence.”^{6 7} So if the “prophet like Moses” does not refer to just any other Israelite prophet, it must refer to a special one—ostensibly, Jesus.

If it is still not clear that the scripture itself refers to a single Great Prophet rather than to the Mosaic prophetic line, the treatment of Deuteronomy 18 in the Acts of the Apostles, an early text, certifies that Jewish Christians at the time had an eschatological Prophet in mind. The passage comes up twice, once brought up by Peter (3:17-23) and later by Stephen (7:37), both with strongly implied references to Jesus as the prophet like Moses. Furthermore, Luke Timothy Johnson observes that Stephen’s telling of the Moses narrative is structured to correspond very closely to the Jesus story—a parallel that sets up Moses as a prophetic and messianic prefiguration of Jesus.⁸

Returning to the Servant Songs, we can see messianic Prophethood described further. Along with the analog to Jeremiah described earlier, the second Servant Song and Isaiah 61—the opening remarks of Jesus’ public ministry—include strong language about “the office of a prophet.”⁹ “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor,” the future Messiah says in Isaiah.¹⁰ “[God] made my mouth like a sharpened sword,” he says elsewhere in the book. “In the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me into a polished arrow and concealed me in his quiver.”¹¹ Oswalt uses this passage as proof that Isaiah refers to a Great Prophet and not to a king or to all of Israel.

No, for the weapon of the Servant is his mouth. He will accomplish God’s will not by military force but by a revelation of God’s word. The power of God’s word had been demonstrated again and again by the prophets. It was the power to break down and build up. As the preeminent prophet, the Messiah would hold that power in the fullest and purest manner.¹²

Again we see strong parallels with past prophets—notably, God putting his words into Jeremiah’s mouth and His famous retort to Moses’ issue with public speaking: “Who gave man his mouth? Who makes him deaf or mute? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the LORD? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.”^{13 14} The prophet we meet in this scripture is “not one of a coming king, but of a servant who comes in a manner similar to the prophets.”¹⁵ Indeed, most of Jesus’ public ministry focuses on a call to renewal, a call to return to faith, peace, and justice—an operation consistent with past prophets.

In addition to proclamation, one other hallmark of prophethood that scholars note is the office of suffering. Prophets, as individuals meant to enforce accountability upon God’s people, were often incredibly unpopular, and so in the Jewish prophetic tradition, suffering is almost as common as the proclamations that cause it for the prophet. Jeremiah is notable for his sufferings—he is taunted, imprisoned, and even thrown into a pit to die.¹⁶ The Servant Song casts the Messiah in a similar light, portraying him as a willful, mournful sufferer, wounded for those he came to save.¹⁷ “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” he says in Luke.¹⁸

The scriptures confirm that Jews at the time at least had some notion that Jesus might be a prophet—indeed, that he might even be the reincarnation of a prophet from a different age. “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets,” Peter tells Jesus when his master asks who the people say he is. Jesus then asks Peter what he himself thinks, but the key is that in doing so, Jesus neither confirms nor denies the suspicions of the people, leaving his prophethood on the table.¹⁹ Additionally, as mentioned before, the walkers on the Road to Emmaus also demonstrate that Jesus as a messianic Prophet was a concept in play.

——————–

The case for Jesus as a messianic priest figure is most explicitly laid out in the anonymous letter to the Hebrews. The author devotes a chapter to framing Jesus as a High Priest. The key, the writer says, is that “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.”¹ The High Priest, he goes on to say, is selected by God to represent humanity and must be called—so he must be anointed and endowed with special divine authority.

The author appeals to Psalm 110, considered one of the most clearly eschatological messianic in the Psalter: “You are a priest forever,” writes the Psalmist, “in the order of Melchizedek.” Melchizedek is the King of Salem and a priest of YHWH who meets Abraham (at the time still Abram) and blesses the patriarch with a sacrifice of bread and wine. Abraham then volunteers a tenth of all of his possessions to Melchizedek as a show of respect.

Importantly to the author of Hebrews, Melchizedek is a clear type of the messiah and, furthermore, that Jesus fits that role. He lays out three main relevant reasons in the seventh and eighth chapters of Hebrews: First, Melchizedek’s name means “King of Righteousness.” Second, his kingship was over Salem, which is to say that he was the “King of Peace.”² The author of Hebrews would likely point to prophetic scripture such as Isaiah 9 and the foretelling of the messiah as a “Prince of Peace” who establishes a kingdom of righteousness as confirmation of this connection.³ Finally, the writer reads the lack of biographical or genealogical information on Melchizedek as a suggestion of timelessness and eternity. Melchizedek as a character lacks parents or context, and is thus in a sense begotten in the text rather than made by his parents—along this same vein, the messiah, as a priest in Melchizedek’s order, is eternal. “Without father or mother, without genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life, like the Son of God,” the writer tells us, “he remains a priest forever.”⁴

The author of Hebrews makes his case for why this eternal priest is important; essentially, a priest who lives forever and is blameless is the strongest possible advocate for humankind. It is ultimately in Jesus’ sacrifice, the author of Hebrews tells his Jewish audience, that Jesus fulfills the role of the High Priest. He sidesteps the sacral system to express the truth of sacrifice more boldly, decisively, and eternally: Jesus lays down the sacrifice not in a temple made with hands but rather in the space after which the earthly temple is modeled; he offers not a sinless though dumb animal, but rather himself—a fully conscious, fully sinless Self. “How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!” Indeed, Jesus’ sacrifice almost becomes the Platonic Ideal of the Sacrifice, and Christ the Ideal of the High Priest. He is at the heart of a covenant sealed not in the blood of a third party animal but rather in the blood of God and the High Priest himself.

These are only some of the parallels—indeed, early Jewish Christians would certainly have seen the connection between the wine and bread offered by both Melchizedek and Christ; and as active participants in the Hebrew sacral system, their appreciation for the centrality of bloodshed to a covenant with God would be only greater than our own.⁵

Still, while it is clear and relatively straightforward to draw these ties, we must be wary of submitting to ex post facto theologizing if our concern is truly to discern what Jewish Christians at the time thought. Fortunately, Hebrews is a relatively early snapshot of some Jewish Christian thought. Though its authorship is unknown, it is very likely that it was written before 70 CE, or else the writer most certainly would have folded the destruction of the Second Temple into his argument to a Jewish audience. Moreover, there are clear references to the active practice of Jewish sacrifice.^{6 7} It is difficult to imagine that these would be unaddressed were the text from after the razing of the temple.

Even with a legitimately dated Hebrews, there seems to be very little in the Levitical texts that feature the High Priest most prominently to suggest a significant High-Priest dimension to an eschatological High-Priest figure. “[N]owhere does the Pentateuch or any succeeding Old Testament text suggest that when the faithful in Israel worshiped at the tabernacle or later in the temple, they looked to the Aaronic high priest as a foreshadowing of a future messianic high priest” in the same way as they might have for kings of the Davidic line, writes Block.⁸

Some scholars concur with him on this point, but relatively recent discoveries as well as non-canonical Jewish texts suggest otherwise. The future high priest “is a central eschatological figure in much of the Qumran literature,” writes Hays, citing the work of Marinus de Jonge.⁹ While this by no means establishes the eschatological high priest as a popular type that people expected of a messiah figure, it—along with Hebrews—does prove that the notion did exist at the time and that some in Roman Judea were watching actively for it.

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In this series, I attempt to assess Second-Temple-era Jewish messianic expectation.  Start at Part I or see all parts in the series.

Elsewhere in scripture, however, we find a more eschatological messiah foretold.   The prophet Daniel makes some clear references to an eschatological messiah as opposed to a temporary political one, describing a vision he had:

“Seventy ‘sevens’ are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the most holy.

“Know and understand this: From the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens.’ It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble. After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be cut off and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary.¹

Setting aside for a moment the obscure language, the references to “everlasting” righteousness and to “seal up vision and prophecy” read as pointers to an “end”— one final messianic action that feels more eternal than the promise for a king.  Any and all prophecy, Walther Eichrodt writes, looks “to the break-up of the old world, to bring about the beginnings of a new development, the nucleus of a new world-order, and to perfect this into a second creation.”² Eichrodt chooses not to draw such a difference between “simple time” and “eschatological time,” instead contending that because prophecy revolves around this new world-order, the two are inextricably intertwined and inseparable.  So some sense of both eschatology and immediacy are both implicit in any prophecy.  Still, many scholars maintain that it is worthwhile to draw such a distinction and that eschatology might be defined as “those promises that speak of a future with significant discontinuities from the present.”³

All this only adds to the confusion over what Jews at the time of Jesus really expected of a coming messiah.  The general consensus amongst scholars so far is that there was no universal vision for what a messiah would look like.   Within the Christian scriptures themselves there is confusion amongst Jewish expectations: John the Baptist, Jesus’ forerunner and cousin, “expects the Messiah to be a warrior in the tradition of Daniel 7, Zechariah 14, and Malachi 4.”⁴ Even before Jesus’ public ministry begins, John trades in fiery, aggressive rhetoric befitting a fighter: “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire,” he says.⁵ In contrast, just after Jesus’ death, the walkers on the Road to Emmaus frame Jesus more as a prophet and wonderworker, saying that “He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people.”⁶ They also looked to Jesus for some kind of redemptive hope: “We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.”⁷ So there was some disagreement about what a messiah would look like, and there was little enforcement provided by scripture.

Still, while there is no singular or monolithic vision for what first-century Jews expected of the messiah⁸, there were common thematic elements elucidated in scripture that Jews would have expected in some form or another: most notably a priest (prefigured by Melchizidek and the Levitical order in the Torah), a warrior-king (prefigured by David in the Writings), and a prophet (prefigured by many of the Hebrew Prophets, especially Jeremiah).  We will explore each of these three roles, what Jewish scriptural precedent suggests about their relation to a messiah, and what early Jewish Christians saw in Jesus to meet these expectations.

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In this series, I attempt to assess Second-Temple-era Jewish messianic expectation.  Start at Part I or see all parts in the series.

Anointing itself is a concept that encompasses more than just the single word, and so it is appropriate to consider the notion more broadly than just “he who is anointed.” It begins as a tradition for the consecration of physical objects—Jacob anoints an altar he makes to God in Genesis¹—the rules for which are articulated in the Mosaic Law in Exodus 30. As the Torah progresses, priests are anointed², and Longman tells us that “we come to the conclusion that one who is anointed is set apart for special service to God.”³

Soon, however, we see a radical shift in the use of the root word MSH, and a move “from the realm of the cult to the realm of the court” brings us to a setting where almost all anointing has to do with setting aside the Jewish monarch.⁴ This practice was most likely adopted by the Israelites from the inhabitants of Canaan.⁵ Perhaps the most famous account of a kingly anointing is Samuel finding David amongst all of Jesse’s sons in 1 Samuel 16: “So Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the presence of his brothers, and from that day on the Spirit of the LORD came upon David in power.”⁶

Though we see here the authoritative equivalent of crowning, the most important element of the account is the second clause—“from that day on the Spirit of the LORD came upon David in power.” Anointing, then, means not just a consecration or a setting apart, but a legitimate divine transfer of authority and power. Whereas the anointments of objects might have constituted more of a dedication or sacrificial purpose, the anointments of the priests and kings we see in the Torah and the Writings are clear demonstrations of divine license.

Moreover, anointment serves as a reminder of God’s covenants, first with the priests who would preserve the Law and practice, and then with the kings who would lay claim to the Davidic covenant laid out in 2 Samuel 7:

The LORD declares to you that the LORD himself will establish a house for you: When your days are over and you rest with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, who will come from your own body, and I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father, and he will be my son. When he does wrong, I will punish him with the rod of men, with floggings inflicted by men. But my love will never be taken away from him, as I took it away from Saul, whom I removed from before you. Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.⁷

Our first major hurdle comes in deciding what the long-term implications of God’s covenant and anointment are. Though this covenant promises that the line of David will endure “forever,” there is still no real sense from it that there will be one messianic figure at the end of time, as Christians view Jesus. That is, the key promise of the Davidic line here seems to be a series of normal, mortal kings and seems to take place in “simple time” rather than in apocalyptic “eschatological time.”⁸

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