Fee Gordon Quotes

Show me a church's songs and I'll show you their theology.

A text cannot mean what it could never have meant for its original readers/hearers.

Interpretation that aims at, or thrives on, uniqueness can usually be attributed to pride (an attempt to “outclever” the rest of the world), a false understanding of spirituality (wherein the Bible is full of deeply buried truths waiting to be mined by the spiritually sensitive person with special insight), or vested interests (the need to support a theological bias, especially in dealing with texts that seem to go against that bias).

The concern of the scholar is primarily with what the text meant; the concern of the layperson is usually with what it means. The believing scholar insists that we must have both. Reading the Bible with an eye only to its meaning for us can lead to a great deal of nonsense as well as to every imaginable kind of error—because it lacks controls. Fortunately, most believers are blessed with at least a measure of that most important of all hermeneutical skills—common sense.

God has made us this way, in his own image, because he himself is a personal, relational being.

Our theology and experience of the Spirit must be more interwoven if our experienced life of the Spirit is to be more effective.

1. Old Testament narratives are not allegories or stories filled with hidden meanings

Truly Christian conduct is not predicated on whether I have the right to do something, but whether my conduct is helpful to those about me.

the primary goal of salvation: an eschatological people, who together live the life of the future in the present age as they await the final consummation.

One reads Paul poorly who does not recognize that for him the presence of the Spirit, as an experienced and living reality, was the crucial matter for Christian life, from beginning to end.

One crucial thing to keep in mind as you read any Hebrew narrative is the presence of God in the narrative. In any biblical narrative, God is the ultimate character, the supreme hero of the story.

For Paul the fact that both Jews and Gentiles are included in God’s family is the most remarkable aspect of this newly formed fellowship. In Christ’s death God has triumphed over the former prejudices on both sides (Eph 2: 14–18).

The key to life in the Spirit for some is to spend much more quiet time in thanksgiving and praise for what God has done—and is doing, and promises to do—and less time on introspection, focused on your failure to match up to the law.

to be saved” in the Pauline view means to become part of the people of God, who by the Spirit are born into God’s family and therefore joined to one another as one body, whose gatherings in the Spirit form them into God’s temple. God is not simply saving diverse individuals and preparing them for heaven; rather he is creating a people for his name, among whom God can dwell and who in their life together will reproduce God’s life and character in all its unity and diversity.

The genius of the biblical story is what it tells us about God himself: a God who sacrifices himself in death out of love for his enemies; a God who would rather experience the death we deserved than to be apart from the people he created for his pleasure; a God who himself bore our likeness, experienced our creatureliness, and carried our sins so that he might provide pardon and reconciliation; a God who would not let us go, but who would pursue us—all of us, even the worst of us—so that he might restore us into joyful fellowship with himself; a God who in Christ Jesus has so forever identified with his beloved creatures that he came to be known and praised as “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Pet 1:3).

Paul says the fulfillment of this promised blessing for the Gentiles is in their having experienced the Spirit as a living and dynamic reality. The blessing of Abraham, therefore, is not simply “justification by faith.” Rather, it refers to the life of the future now available to Jew and Gentile alike, achieved through the death of Christ but applied through the dynamic ministry of the Spirit—and all of this by faith.

Paul can hardly help himself: his focus and concern are always on the people as a whole. Though entered individually, salvation is seldom if ever thought of simply as a one-on-one relationship with God. While such a relationship is included, to be sure, “to be saved” means especially to be joined to the people of God. In this sense, the third-century church father Cyprian had it right: there is no salvation outside the church, because God is saving a people for his name, not a miscellaneous, unconnected set of individuals.

Whether one likes it or not, every reader is at the same time an interpreter. That is, most of us assume as we read that we also understand what we read. We also tend to think that our understanding is the same thing as the Holy Spirit’s or human author’s intent. However, we invariably bring to the text all that we are, with all of our experiences, culture, and prior understandings of words and ideas. Sometimes what we bring to the text, unintentionally to be sure, leads us astray, or else causes us to read all kinds of foreign ideas into the text.

For many in the Arminian tradition, who emphasize the believer’s free will and responsibility, texts like Romans 8:30; 9:18 – 24; Galatians 1:15; and Ephesians 1:4 – 5 are something of an embarrassment. Likewise many Calvinists have their own ways of getting around what is said quite plainly in passages like 1 Corinthians 10:1 – 13; 2 Peter 2:20 – 22; and Hebrews 6:4 – 6. Indeed our experience as teachers is that students from these traditions seldom ask what these texts mean; they want only to know “how to get around” what these various passages seem clearly to affirm!

New Testament scholar Dr. Gordon Fee said that life is a wilderness, and a compass doesn’t help very much. A map certainly doesn’t help because you have to know where you are for starters. What you need in a place you’ve never been before is a guide. Jesus becomes the Guide to the Father’s house.

This leads us to note further, that in any case the reader of an English Bible is already involved in interpretation. For translation is in itself a (necessary) form of interpretation. Your Bible, whatever translation you use, which is your beginning point, is in fact the end result of much scholarly work. Translators are regularly called upon to make choices regarding meanings, and their choices are going to affect how you understand.

Although they were the Christian church in Corinth, an inordinate amount of Corinth was yet in them, emerging in a number of attitudes and behaviors that required radical surgery without killing the patient. This is what 1 Corinthians attempts to do.

Our 1 Corinthians is an occasional, ad hoc response to the situation that had developed in the Corinthian church between the time Paul left the city, sometime in A.D. 51-52,13 and the writing of our letter approximately three years later. The difficulty in determining the nature of that situation is intrinsic to the text. Paul

Above everything else, as fulfillment of the new covenant[2] the Spirit marked the return of the lost presence of God.

First, we must recognize his own sense of continuity with his heritage. Paul sees himself and his churches as being in a direct line with the people of God in the Old Testament; and despite his deep convictions about the radical implications of the coming of Christ and the Spirit, he regularly reaffirms that continuity. He includes a primarily Gentile church in the events of the exodus: “all our forefathers were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea” (1 Cor 10:1–2).

In urging his readers in Ephesians 4:30 “not to grieve the Holy Spirit of God,” Paul uses the language of Isaiah 63:10, the one certain place in the Old Testament where the concept of the divine presence with Israel in tabernacle and temple is specifically equated with “the Holy Spirit of Yahweh.

own spirits (Rom 8:16), has desires that are in opposition to the flesh (Gal 5:17), helps us in our weakness (Rom 8:26), intercedes in our behalf (Rom 8:26–27), works all things together for our ultimate good (Rom 8:28),[5] strengthens believers (Eph 3:16), and is grieved by our sinfulness (Eph 4:30). Furthermore, the fruit of the Spirit’s indwelling are the personal attributes of God (Gal 5:22–23).

However, as Gordon Fee has argued, it is doubtful whether Paul ever uses the language of “spirit” without some reference to the Holy Spirit. Here, then, while the immediate reference may be, indeed, to Paul’s own “spirit,” it is his spirit as taken up into the Holy Spirit. His “presence” with the Colossians, then, is not a simple “you will be in my thoughts and prayers,” but involves a profound corporate sense of identity, based on and mediated by the Spirit of God.

Historically the church has understood the nature of Scripture much the same as it has understood the person of Christ—the Bible is at the same time both human and divine.

Regarding Wisdom: "It is not a matter of cleverness and quick-ness or skill in expression or age... it is a matter of orientation to God, out of which comes the ability to please him.

Even though the Word was originally given in a concrete historical context, its uniqueness centers in the fact that, though historically given and conditioned, this Word is ever a living Word.

Because the Bible is God’s message, it has eternal relevance; it speaks to all humankind, in every age and in every culture. Because it is the word of God, we must listen — and obey. But because God chose to speak his word through human words in history, every book in the Bible also has historical particularity; each document is conditioned by the language, time, and culture in which it was originally written (and in some cases also by the oral history it had before it was written down). Interpretation of the Bible is demanded by the “tension” that exists between its eternal relevance and its historical particularity.

God made us whole people: and in Christ he has redeemed us wholly. According to the Christian view there is no dichotomy between body and spirit that either indulges the body because it is irrelevant or punishes it so as to purify the spirit. This pagan view of physical existence creeps into Christian theology in any number of subtle ways, including the penchant on the part of some to “save souls” while caring little for people’s material needs. Not the immortality of the soul but the resurrection of the body, is the Christian creed, based on NT revelation.

Hemos tomado en serio el comentario de Gordon Fee: “Muéstrame los cantos de una iglesia y yo te mostraré su teología”. Sabemos que las personas necesitan cantos que los alimenten, no simplemente cantos que los hagan sentir bien. Aquí hay maneras específicas en que hemos tratado de que la música sirva a la letra.

Building the church with human wisdom or eloquent speech that circumvents the Cross is building with wood, hay, and stubble.

The problem with all of this, of course, is that it tends to leave us with little that is normative for two broad areas of concern — Christian experience and Christian practice. There is no express teaching on such matters as the mode of baptism, the age of those who are to be baptized, which charismatic phenomenon is to be in evidence when one receives the Spirit, or the frequency of the Lord’s Supper, to cite but a few examples. Yet these are precisely the areas where there is so much division among Christians. Invariably, in such cases people argue that this is what the earliest believers did, whether such practices are merely described in the narratives of Acts or found by implication from what is said in the Epistles. Scripture simply does not expressly command that baptism must be by immersion, or that infants are to be baptized, or that all genuine conversions must be as dramatic as Paul’s, or that Christians are to be baptized in the Spirit evidenced by tongues as a second work of grace, or that the Lord’s Supper is to be celebrated every Sunday. What do we do, then, with something like baptism by immersion? What does Scripture say? In this case it can be argued from the meaning of the word itself, from the one description of baptism in Acts of going “down into the water” and coming “up out of the water” (8:38 – 39), and from Paul’s analogy of baptism as death, burial, and resurrection (Rom 6:1 – 3) that immersion was the presupposition of baptism in the early church. It was nowhere commanded precisely because it was presupposed. On the other hand, it can be pointed out that without a baptismal tank in the local church in Samaria (!), the people who were baptized there would have had great difficulty being immersed. Geographically, there simply is no known supply of water there to have made immersion a viable option. Did they pour water over them, as an early church manual, the Didache (ca. AD 100), suggests should be done where there is not enough cold, running water or tepid, still water for immersion? We simply do not know, of course. The Didache makes it abundantly clear that immersion was the norm, but it also makes it clear that the act itself is far more important than the mode. Even though the Didache is not a biblical document, it is a very early, orthodox Christian document, and it may help us by showing how the early church made pragmatic adjustments in this area where Scripture is not explicit. The normal (regular) practice served as the norm. But because it was only normal, it did not become normative. We would probably do well to follow this lead and not confuse normalcy with normativeness in the sense that all Christians must do a given thing or else they are disobedient to God’s Word.

Everyone has a theology [that is, some rudimentary view of God and the world on the basis of which they live]; the question is not whether you have a theology—you do—but whether you have a good one.

Rather than the reflective theology of the scholar or classroom, his is a “task theology,” the theologizing that takes place in the marketplace,

The occasional nature of the Epistles also means that they are not first of all theological treatises; they are not compendia of Paul's or Peter's theology. There is theology implied, but it is always "task theology," theology being written for or brought to bear on the task at hand.

Open access journals offer free access to their contents, but charge the authors of those articles a significant publication fee after their papers have been accepted. Some

When a church met in this kind of household, where they would gather in the atrium, the semipublic area where business was regularly carried on, the householder would naturally serve as the leader of the house church. That is, by the very sociology of things, it would never have occurred to them that a person from outside the household would come in and lead what was understood as simply an extension of the household. To put it plainly, the church is not likely to gather in a person’s house unless the householder also functioned as its natural leader. Thus

Because the Bible is God’s Word, it has eternal relevance; it speaks to all humankind, in every age and in every culture.

The problem with a “free” translation, on the other hand, especially for study purposes, is that the translator updates the original author too much…On the one hand, these renditions often have especially fresh and vivid ways of expressing some old truths and have thus each served to stimulate contemporary Christians to take a fresh look at their Bibles. On the other hand, such a “translation” often comes very close to being a commentary, but without other options made available to the reader. Therefore, as stimulating as these can sometimes be, they are never intended to be a person’s only Bible; and the reader needs constantly to check particularly eye-catching moments against a true translation or a commentary to make sure that not too much freedom has been taken.

…( God’s) goal was not simply to fit individuals for heaven but to create a people who by the power of the Spirit lived out the life of the future (the life of God Himself) in the present age… The Spirit as the experienced, empowering return of God’s own personal presence in and among us, Who enables us to live as a radically eschatological people in the present world while we await the consummation.” -Gordon Fee

Imprecatory psalms. Imprecatory psalms (Ps 12; 35; 52; 57—59; 69; 70; 83; 109; 137; 140) are usually lament psalms where the writer’s bitterness and desire for vindication are especially predominant. This leads to such statements as Psalm 137:8- 9, “[Happy is] he who seizes your infants / and dashes them against the rocks.” Such statements are shocking to modern sensitivities and cause many to wonder at the ethical standards of the biblical writers. However, several points must be made. The writer is actually pouring out his complaint to God regarding the exile, as in Psalm 137. He is also heeding the divine command of Deuteronomy 32:35 (Rom 12:19), “It is mine to avenge; I will repay.” Finally, as Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart note, the author is calling for judgment on the basis of the covenant curses (Deut 28:53-57; 32:25), which make provision for the complete annihilation of the transgressors, even family members (2003:221). The hyperbolic language is common in such emotional passages. In short, these do not really contradict the New Testament teaching to love our enemies. When we can pour out our animosity to God, that very act opens the door to acts of kindness akin to Romans 12:20 (Prov 25:21-22). In fact, meditation on and application of these psalms could be therapeutic to those who have suffered traumatic hurt (such as child abuse). By pouring out one’s natural bitterness to God, the victim could be freed to “love the unlovely.” We must remember that the same David who penned all the above except for Psalm 83 and Psalm 137 showed great mercy and love to Saul. When you have called out for justice after being deeply wounded (like the martyred saints in Rev 6:9-11), Romans 12:19 is actually being fulfilled because the vengeance is truly left with God, freeing you to forgive your enemy.

The book of Jeremiah is a constant reminder of God’s faithfulness to his word in Deuteronomy that his elect will be cursed by exile for their unfaithfulness to Yahweh but will be restored at a later time with the hope of a new covenant—which was fulfilled through Jesus Christ, David’s “righteous Branch” (Jer 23:5).

The resurrection of Christ marked the beginning of the End, the turning of the ages.

God is not simply saving diverse individuals and preparing them for heaven; rather he is creating a people for his name, among whom God can dwell and who in their life together will reproduce God’s life and character in all its unity and diversity.

The thing that should most strike you when coming to John’s Gospel from having read the Synoptics is how different it is. Not only is the basic scene of Jesus’ ministry different (Jerusalem instead of Galilee), but the whole ministry looks quite different. Here you find no messianic secret (Jesus is openly confessed as Messiah from the start); no parables (but rich use of symbolic language); no driving out of demons; no narratives of the testing in the desert, the Transfiguration, or the Lord’s Supper. Rather than placing emphasis on the kingdom of God, the emphasis is on Jesus himself (the Life who gives eternal life); rather than short, pithy, memorable sayings, the teaching comes most often in long discourses.

By the presence of the Spirit, God’s love, played out to the full in Christ, is an experienced reality in the heart of the believer. This is what the Spirit has so richly “shed abroad in our hearts.” If we are not thus overtaken by God himself at this crucial point, then all else is lost, and we are without peace, groveling before God, living with little real hope, and experiencing present sufferings as a cause for complaint and despair rather than for “boasting.

I begin with a singular and passionate conviction: that the proper aim of all true theology is doxology. Theology that does not begin and end in worship is not biblical at all, but is rather the product of western philosophy.

The message of the Bible transcends its original audience, but it cannot be severed from its original audience. As Gordon Fee and Douglas Stewart note, “A text cannot mean what it never could have meant to its author or his or her readers.”4

As a distillation of some of the things we have talked about in this chapter, we present here a brief list of hermeneutical guidelines that we hope will serve you well whenever you read the Old Testament Pentateuchal law. Keeping these principles in mind may help you to avoid mistaken applications of the law while seeing its instructive and faith-building character. 1. Do see the Old Testament law as God’s fully inspired word for you. 2. Don’t see the Old Testament law as God’s direct command to you. 3. Do see the Old Testament law as the basis for the old covenant, and therefore for Israel’s history. 4. Don’t see the Old Testament law as binding on Christians in the new covenant except where specifically renewed. 5. Do see God’s justice, love, and high standards revealed in the Old Testament law. 6. Don’t forget to see that God’s mercy is made equal to the severity of the standards. 7. Do see the Old Testament law as a paradigm — providing examples for the full range of expected behavior. 8. Don’t see the Old Testament law as complete. It is not technically comprehensive. 9. Do remember that the essence of the law (the Ten Commandments and the two chief laws) is repeated in the Prophets and renewed in the New Testament. 10. Don’t expect the Old Testament law to be cited frequently by the Prophets or the New Testament. Legal citation was first introduced only in the Roman era, long after the Old Testament was complete. 11. Do see the Old Testament law as a generous gift to Israel, bringing much blessing when obeyed. 12. Don’t see the Old Testament law as a grouping of arbitrary, annoying regulations limiting people’s freedom.

This theological concern—God's essential character on display in Christ, who redeems us to share that likeness—also underlies the other well-known themes in this letter: suffering, joy, unity, pressing on toward the prize. The proper response to hardship is, as in the Psalter, to "rejoice in the Lord always," for "the Lord is near" (4:4-5). The Lord is