“The icon and the idol determine two manners of being … not two classes of beings.”1

This essay is about broadening the perspective from which we view the origins of Christianity. The vehicle is a gospel by now perhaps as familiar to students of the New Testament as the canonical four, the Gospel of Thomas. It is well known among specialists that the content of this gospel overlaps with that of the synoptic tradition roughly by half. Also well known, perhaps, is that it presents this commonly-held content in a very different form, the sayings collection, and by consequence, under the supposition of a different theological paradigm: wisdom theology. So, here is a different gospel, a wisdom gospel, in which the words (λóγοι) of Jesus take center stage. Since Helmut Koester and James M. Robinson placed it within the context of Walter Bauer's theory about the diverse nature of earliest Christianity,1 the Gospel of Thomas has become a prime illustration of that diversity. It can help us see the potential of the Jesus tradition to develop in directions we could scarcely fathom before. But can it tell us more?

Paul's correspondence with the Corinthian congregation chronicles the story of an absent leader trying to encourage an often wayward congregation to hold fast to his message of God's reconciling action in Jesus. As the conclusion to 2 Cor 2:14–7:4,1 a unit in which Paul explores the nature of his apostolic relationship with the Corinthian congregation, 2 Cor 7:5–13a portrays Paul's pastoral relationship with the Corinthians as near its breaking point.2 In this passage, Paul looks back to a time (before his current tentative reconciliation with the Corinthians) when Paul's trusted associate Titus had brought him comforting news of the Corinthians’ repentance and renewed faithfulness to the Pauline apostolate.3 Previous studies of Paul's practice of pastoral care in 2 Corinthians have focused on comparing his approach with those advocated in Greco-Roman philosophy. Other studies of 2 Corinthians have attempted to uncover the background of Paul's theology of reconciliation in Isaiah and other texts from Israel's scriptures and have emphasized his appropriation here of the Isaianic motif of comfort from the so-called “Book of Consolation” (Isaiah 40–55). Through an examination of Paul's language of grief (λυπέω/λύπη) and comfort (παρακαλέω/παράκλησιϛ) in 2 Cor 7:5–13a, however, a more complex picture of the roots of Paul's approach to the care of the Corinthian congregation emerges. As I will show, Paul's language of grief and comfort in 2 Cor 7:5–13a differs from broader Greco-Roman understandings of these concepts, such as those we find in the writings of Epictetus. In this pericope Paul draws on his interpretation of the cycle of grief and comfort in not just Second Isaiah but also Lamentations 1–2 in order to call the Corinthians back to faithfulness to the gospel and to give voice to their own experience of loss and consolation.

Apocalyptic studies flourished in the 1970s and early 1980s. This interest probably had something to do with the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and their effects, but I won't go into that issue today. In 1970, Klaus Koch's book Ratlos vor der Apokalyptik was published in Germany. In 1972 it appeared in English under a title more friendly to scholars: The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic. The subtitle, however, preserved the edginess of the original: A Polemical Work on a Neglected Area of Biblical Studies and Its Damaging Effects on Theology and Philosophy.1 My favorite chapter is the one entitled “The Agonized Attempt to Save Jesus from Apocalyptic.” The main title of the English version, as well as the title of the chapter I just mentioned, unfortunately converted a respectable German noun into the substantive use of an adjective with a vague referent.

One salient characteristic of our current situation is the emergence of a growing consensus among theologians and biblical scholars alike that the time has come to “dethrone” historical criticism as the reigning paradigm of scriptural exegesis for the sake of recovering a theological interpretation of the Bible on behalf of the church.1 To illustrate this new development, I have chosen to focus on the arguments of three prominent biblical scholars, each of whom has made a sustained case about the negative effects of historical criticism upon theological exegesis: They are Brevard S. Childs, Christopher R. Seitz, and Dale B. Martin. All three scholars have close ties to Yale and, not surprisingly, they bear a sort of family resemblance to one another inasmuch as their work partakes of theological themes and concerns that have been prominent at that school in recent decades. Notwithstanding their antagonistic posture toward historical criticism, all three are gifted practitioners of the very method whose dominance they seek to overturn. Since I am not a biblical scholar, I must enter into discussion with them as a theologian who is equally concerned about the relations between biblical studies and theology. At the outset, however, it is necessary to clarify that my own theological orientation prevents me from embracing their call to depose historical criticism. As a liberal Protestant for whom historical-critical interpretation of both the biblical and the post-biblical tradition is constitutive of theology's proper task, their initial premise that historical criticism is somehow inimical to a theological treatment of the Bible strikes me as false and misleading. Contrary to the impression given by their explicit formulations, it appears that the real target of their polemics is not historical scholarship per se but, rather, the normative uses to which it is put in theologies informed by it.

THOU ART is an interdisciplinary and christological aesthetics that theorizes an integral relation among Christ, representation, and the formation of human subjectivity. Through a critical poetics it addresses the space of difference between a theological discourse on the creation of human being in the image of God—understood as creation in Christ, Word (logos) incarnate—and a philosophical discourse on the constitution of human subjectivity.