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Everybody's looking at me. My name is Louie Donaldson, and I teach New Testament here, and it's my privilege to introduce the speaker this morning. Some of you will notice when she stands up that she's not Ted Wardlaw, who is scheduled for this slot, and we have reversed the times. It was originally in order to get her to the airport, although Atlanta's having weather problems, and so

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This may not help her. I have to confess that we all have different things we enjoy about lectures. And for me, I have admired Beth Johnson from a little bit of a distance for years. We have been on some panels together, and she's always impressed me.

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And then I have all these friends who just talk wonderfully about her. as a person and a church member and as a teacher and a colleague. And so I wanted to get to know her. And Ted was nice enough to let me be her host.

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And so now we have the beginning of a friendship. And it's really been a pleasure for me. She is a delightful person. Her lectures, as you know, are

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about the Christian family and the emergence of family dynamics and family values and the enormous confrontation that Christianity has with itself and with the Greco-Roman world over these issues. And I hope you have found them the way I have. I've found them to be exciting, interesting, vaguely irritating, Maybe not vaguely, maybe just kind of irritating.

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And I'm a little nervous about whether or not I'm supposed to still be in a family, or how I'm supposed to be in a family. And if you watch me in my family, you wouldn't understand why. I'm not particularly good at it. And what I'm praying for is that

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that in all these voices, that the Word of God will speak to us in the midst of our promises and that we sometimes keep to these people we love. And her lecture series, as you know, is entitled Life Together in the Household of God, which I think is a wonderful title. And This morning's lecture is entitled A Chorus of Voices.

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I give you Elizabeth Johnson. It's nice to know you're consistent. My students are always a little annoyed, too. It doesn't take them very long to figure out that the center of my canon is the Pauline letters, and it probably has occurred to you also.

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So it will perhaps not be a surprise that I end with Paul as I began with him. Although the apostle has a very strange attitude toward real family life, he uses a stunning amount of kinship language to talk about the Christian community. When believers are baptized into Paul's churches, they come up out of the water crying, Abba, which is the Aramaic word for father.

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Although it occurs only three times in the New Testament, in Romans, Galatians, and Mark, a gospel that I think has numerous affinities with Pauline Christianity, that word Abba has become something of a fighting word in some theological and ecclesiastical circles. I will leave for another day, and for probably other people, the historical question, whether or not we can trace back to Jesus of Nazareth, the usage as a term of direct address to God. For now, it's sufficient for me to consider how that word functions in the three New Testament pericopes where we find it.

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Significantly, importantly, they all concern baptism. Now, I promise you, Gordon McCoskey and I did not conspire before we came to Austin to talk about baptism. But we do, because it's that important. I have learned so much from him, and I really am appreciative of the ways that our thinking has both dovetailed and raised questions in these days with you.

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And I appreciate your hospitality and your attention and interest and engagement. Here again, I have the texts for you. The ones for today are on the last page. And they have this really clever headline, Christian Kinship and the Church as Alternative Household.

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I don't always do a very good job on titles, but I guess I did this time. In both Romans 8 and Galatians 4, Paul says that what happens at baptism is that God adopts believers to be God's children and grants them the status of God's heirs. and joint heirs with Christ. Heirs of God's promise, what he says in Romans, the redemption of our bodies.

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Now there's a sense, of course, in which all human beings are God's children insofar as God has created us. And historically, Israel has always known itself to be God's child. Those who are baptized into the death of Jesus now share that identity, though, whether they're members of Israel or not. Those who were not children become God's children, specifically God's heirs, and they inherit the redemption that God has promised.

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The legal word for adoption that Paul uses, fairly consistently, means to make a son. And that gets obscured sometimes in the translations into English in our interests of inclusive language. But his word means to make a son, to take up a son, because it is commonly sons in the ancient world who inherit the family name and fortune. Specifically, the firstborn son, or should that son die or be disinherited, the designated heir.

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God's first adoption of Israel, as Paul says in Romans 9, is the initiation of that covenant relationship with Israel that God initiates and Israel responds to. God initiates again, Israel responds again. It's what Walter Brueggemann calls mutuality between incommensurate partners.

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Parenthetically, that's one of the reasons that I find the language of covenant problematic for talking about marriage. today, because it is always an incommensurate, an unequal relationship initiated by the stronger party. Once that was a fairly truthful description of marriage, today it's somewhat less so. And I appreciate, as a consequence, the way liturgies for weddings have begun to use the covenant language about baptism instead to say,

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that people are engaging in the creation of a new household within the covenant that God initiates in baptism. But anyway, in baptism, Paul says that the adoption, the sonship, is granted to everyone who trusts in the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. So there are the two that are in Paul. The third use of the word Abba is in Mark's passion narrative.

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As Jesus prays to God, in the garden just before his arrest. The sacramental language is subtle, although clear, I think. Abba, Father, Jesus says, for you all things are possible.

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Remove this cup from me, yet not what I want, but what you want. The context makes clear that the cup of which Jesus speaks is the cup of his imminent death, but it is also the cup that Christians share at the Lord's Supper. The allusion to baptism in his address to God with that characteristic language, Abba, might be less clear in Mark were it not for a previous episode in chapter 10, when James and John come seeking positions of honor in Jesus' realm, only to be assured that they will indeed drink the cup that he drinks.

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and be baptized with the baptism with which he is baptized. Mark invites his Christian readers to hear in these two episodes, and throughout the book, references to Jesus' death and to disciples' call to share that death, specifically as the call is initiated in baptism and marked by the community's sharing of the Lord's Supper. When believers rise from the waters of baptism, they're granted the status of adopted children who are permitted to call God Abba as Jesus does, and to embrace his redeeming death for themselves so completely that they are able to lay down their own lives for the world God loves. and for which Christ died.

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At the table of the Lord, the Church reclaims for itself over and over again both the reality of Jesus' death for sin and the power in the Church to live a cruciform life until the Lord comes. Now, to speak of God as Father continues to be a bitterly contested and divisive matter in the Church. And I fear it is more often avoided than addressed. The gender-specific title Father for God has become, in some circles, part of a nonsensical syllogism that goes roughly, if God is Father and fathers are male, then God is male.

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Or Even further, as Mary Daly once put it, if God is male, then male is God. This is nonsense, of course. We all know that it is nonsense.

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But that doesn't alter the fact that some segments of the church are repeatedly injured by obsessive and even deliberately aggressive gender-specific masculine names or titles for God. while other segments of the church fear the very abandonment of orthodox Christian confession in the refusal to speak of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Responses to bad theology, I'm afraid, are often bad theology. And this time, that has happened.

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Not always, there are a lot of helpful people, and I'm not going to answer this question by any means. But responses to this kind of bad theology have sometimes replaced bickering with avoidance, a refusal to use any kind of anthropomorphic language about God at all, a refusal to talk about the first person of the Trinity with any personal language, much less kinship language, to ignore rather than discuss the function of the metaphor, Father, and to replace kinship language about God with language that talks about function. Sometimes you don't let people talk about God the Father, you insist they talk about God the Creator.

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Not Jesus the Son, but Jesus the Savior. Now, I really cannot do justice to all these thorny matters of language about God. I simply want to point out that in Paul's letters, the metaphor Father functions more frequently to speak of God as testator, that is the one who makes the will and bequeaths, than as male parent or even as authority figure.

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Marianne Mai Thompson shows rather adroitly that when Paul talks about God as Father, he refers to the phenomenon of inheritance. God is the Father of Jesus because Jesus inherits from God the promise of salvation. God is the Father of Jesus because Jesus inherits the promise of salvation. And then as Christian believers share with Jesus the right to call God Abba, we too inherit God's promise.

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God bequeaths redemption and the Holy Spirit as its earnest to those whom God adopts. The result is emphatically corporate in addition to individual. This new family, created by God's adoption of believers in the church, is a community composed of both Jews and Gentiles, a household rather than an aggregate of relatives with individual private relationships to the father. So the creation of that family is reflected first in Paul's language in Galatians 6 about the household of faith, and then developed rather logically by his successor in Ephesians to talk about the household of God, where the church even becomes a dwelling place for God.

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Now, a brief detour into the thicket of the function of language. particularly individual words in human communication. This may be more of a swamp than a thicket, but I promise not to stay very long. Joachim Jeremias wrote a very influential but wrong-headed discussion of the name Abba, the word Abba, Father, in Aramaic, which gave mid-20th century Christians a very cozy sense of intimacy with God

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and reinforced their sense of superiority over Jews who didn't get to have that cozy, intimate relationship with God. I was assured all my life that aba means daddy or papa or some kind of private language used only by little children for a tender and loving father instead of the usual word father. Problem is, it ain't so. Subsequent research, notably by James Barr, Mary Rose D'Angelo, and now Mary Ann Mai Thompson, has responded both to Jeremias' indefensible claims about Jesus' self-consciousness.

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The root of his argument was that Jesus called God Abba because he had an unprecedented kind of relationship with God, and he knew it. And he was willing to bequeath or share that unprecedented intimacy with God with Christian believers. It was further appropriation of Jeremias's argument that made extra claims for Christian experience and reinforced the implicit or perhaps even explicit anti-Semitism of the argument. The title of Barr's essay from 1988, Abba Isn't Daddy, is precisely on point.

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The Abba debate offers, though-- and that's why I make this detour-- an important cautionary tale about the nature of human language. The smallest unit of human communication, as JP Lew says, is not a word. It's not even a sentence. The smallest unit of human communication is a paragraph.

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The individual words we use to talk about God, or about ourselves, or our experience, derive their meanings not from the words themselves, but from the ways that we use those words. So, back from the detour. Paul says Christians are adopted by God in baptism, and they become siblings not only of each other, but of Christ himself, joint heirs with Christ of God's redemptive legacy. The notion that all the children in a family might inherit is startling.

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It offends against the principle of primogenitor, the privilege of the firstborn, the firstborn son. Now, I'm the adoptive mother of two daughters. So it pains me a little to remember that Greco-Roman families almost never adopted girls. They adopted boys with the purpose of attaining sons who would become heirs.

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Lots of girl babies were readily available, but they were generally taken up as slaves, not as children, not as daughters. Even as today, there are many more girl children exposed, abandoned, than boys. So Paul says, and this is what makes adoption of believers so alarming, Paul says God gives to everyone whom God adopts in baptism the inheritance that belongs to Christ. And this is the reason, then, that Paul addresses his letters to his brothers and sisters.

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So far as we can tell, to call somebody your brother or sister in especially a religious group is ubiquitous in early Christianity. I don't know of very many Christian communities where they don't use the language of brother and sister. It's not unique even to Christians. Other philosophical and religious groups use the language of brother and sister to talk about the members of a group.

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It's not unique, but it is distinctive of Christians to call each other's siblings. Now, Paul says that God is the Father of Christ and the Father of believers, and they are therefore brothers and sisters of Christ and of each other. He further develops the kinship language, though, when he calls himself the father of his congregations, as well as their brother. He tells Philemon, I have become Onesimus' father.

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And he says to the Corinthians, In Christ Jesus, I became your father through the gospel. That also is fairly common for teachers in the ancient world to call themselves, their students, fathers, because one of the roles of the Father is to teach and to guide the children into righteous living. That may be the reason that Matthew tells his church, Call no one on earth Father, because there's one who is Father, the heavenly one. Paul doesn't seem to share Matthew's distaste for the title, though, perhaps because he uses virtually every family role to describe himself at one point or another.

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Another one of his really favorite self-designations is slave of Christ. Now remember, we think of that as an economic reality. In antiquity, a slave, even in our own heritage, but especially in Greco-Roman society, a slave is a member of the household. It doesn't mean they're not in bondage, it just means they're part of the family.

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And it's a phrase, when Paul uses it about himself, that he's a slave of Christ, it obviously points to his obedience to Christ and his belonging to Christ as Lord, but it also appropriates for himself and for his mission the honor and authority of the one to whom he belongs. Every member of a household carries the identity and the honor of the whole family. In fact, the chief end of family membership is to further the interests of the pater familius,

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to obey his will and to increase his stature. So the apostle speaks not on his own authority, but on the authority of the one who has sent him to preach. And thus, he carries with him as Christ's slave, Christ's honor. Elsewhere, Paul twists the metaphor of father around rather violently when he tells the Corinthians, whom he's already called his father,

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He says he's their father. He also says that he has fed them with milk. Now that's not so startling until you remember we're talking about people who have yet to discover infant formula and baby bottles. To feed a baby milk is something only mothers can do.

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And then, even more alarmingly, he says to the Galatians that he is in labor again with them. until Christ is formed in them, as though he is both, simultaneously, the pregnant mother who gives birth to the congregation, a second time no less, and the midwife who's ready to deliver the baby of the congregation, who is Christ the Lord. Beverly Goventa has found in Paul's employment of paternal and maternal images consistent pattern that is telling.

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When what is at stake is Paul's establishment of a given congregation or the origin of someone's faith, he calls himself Father, as he does, for example, with Onesimus. When, on the other hand, Paul talks about the nurture of the church or its continuing faithfulness, its identity, in Galatians, its identity as a law-free mission to Gentiles, Then he employs maternal images and metaphors. When those Gentile Galatians are at risk of abandoning their very identity as God's children by embracing the law, the apostle is again pregnant with the congregation.

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Now I find it telling, significant, that this ascetic, celibate man, who seems to care very little about the birth and nurture of real babies in real homes, cares so passionately about the birth and nurture, the parenting, of Christian congregations, and that he uses both maternal and paternal imagery to describe that parenting. Not only does Paul care passionately as a parent, he is empowered as apostle to become both father and mother to his assemblies, as the situations require.

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In a culture of strict gender hierarchy and authority, there's something strange, even jarring, about this capacity to bend and stretch the language of kinship, to talk about ministry. Nowhere, though nowhere is Paul's jarring use of family language so prominent as it is in 1 Thessalonians 2. And this time, if you're looking in the NRSV, it's not going to look the same at all.

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It's the last paragraph here. In 1 Thessalonians 2, he talks about his apostolic mission this way. Although we might have been able to throw our weight around as apostles of Christ, we instead became babies in your midst, as a wet nurse might care tenderly for her own children. So because we long for you, we're determined to hand over to you not only the gospel of God, but even our own lives, because you've become beloved to us.

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For you remember, brothers and sisters, our labor and toil, How we worked night and day so we might not weigh any of you down when we preached to you the gospel of God. Your witnesses, as is God. How we came to you believers in a holy and just and blameless way, as you know.

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How with each one of you we were as a father with his own children, because we were exhorting you and pleading with you and testifying to you that you might walk in a way worthy of the God who calls you into his own glorious realm. So when we were orphaned from you, brothers and sisters, for a brief season, and only physically, not emotionally, we longed all the more eagerly to see you in person. Now, a couple of those metaphors deserve exploration. Wet nurses are frequently held up in antiquity as the epitome of love and kindness.

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Sometimes, even more than real mothers, people wax eloquent about their love for their nurses. In a lot of wealthy homes, the nurse is closer to the child than the mother is. Secondly, and probably because of that, the picture of the wet nurse is a common emblem of gentle instruction among philosophers of the day. That is, philosophers tell themselves that they are acting like wet nurses who accommodate their teaching to their students so that they can hear it as their own limitations allow.

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They're gentle, they're not harsh. However, Nobody that we know of uses both the image of the infant and the wet nurse to describe himself. In fact, those philosophers were always eager for their students to get beyond the baby stage so that they're no longer in need of a nurse.

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For Paul, the apostolic mission takes on the astonishing vulnerability of a newborn or even an orphan We were orphaned from you, brothers and sisters. The mission can be a newborn or an orphan at the mercy of the church's reception of it. The mission can be a loving, nursing mother caring for the infant.

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It can be the guiding authority of a father who urges and pleads. And all of them in the same paragraph, because that mission is cruciform in character, shaped by the love and vulnerability of the cross of Jesus Christ. This is what Paul Elsewhere describes as power made perfect in weakness, or wisdom revealed in foolishness.

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While he seems to have scant regard for conventional families, as we understand them, he has a remarkably high view of the church as household. A household in which God is Abba, the firstborn is Christ, all the children are heirs with Christ, and the rigid boundaries that prescribe life in the Greco-Roman patriarchal household are constantly blurred and bent, if not dispensed with altogether by the demands of the gospel mission. Now, I find it instructive to consider the strengths and the weaknesses of the different visions of family life whose voices we have listened to.

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The power of apocalyptic disorientation is that it dethrones the cultural idol of the patriarchal household. It frees those enslaved to conventional domestic roles, welcomes the radical newness of the gospel, and invites us all to live as the body of Christ, joined together in our very bodies. We ought, I think, to pay particular attention, though, to Paul's conviction that married sex is not the prime virtue of Christian domesticity, even though it has value and is to be honored.

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So also, the apocalyptic disorientation of the early church shows that a variety of household arrangements can bear self-sacrificing witness to Jesus' death and serve the Christian mission. Now, the weaknesses of such a radical view are significant. There are not many people who have the apocalyptic empowerment of celibacy.

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Both Jesus and Paul reject the notion that the church can impose celibacy on people who do not have the charismatic gift for it though, and we should too. Charismatic life on the edge of the turning eons is difficult for mere mortals to sustain over a long period of time. The church as alternative household is finally not enough on its own to sustain people who have real toddlers or teenagers or aging parents in a society that is light years removed from Greco-Roman antiquity.

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We need to be very clear about what really happens when parents bring their children to the font and take them home as their brothers and sisters. I have a friend named Madeline who was baptized at the age of three, and her well-educated parents told her that baptism meant joining God's family. The mourning of the sacrament, they could not pinned Madeline down to get her dressed for church because she put on this humongous temper tantrum, screaming, until finally they figured out, or she told them, I don't want to be in another family, I want to stay in this family.

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Out of the mouths of babes, right? The conflict between staying in this family and becoming part of God's family is a real part of discipleship, and we dare not gloss it over as mere symbolic language or empty phrases. And finally, to speak lightly or carelessly of the church as family leaves dangerous room, I think, for clergy to become parents who infantilize

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or abuse congregations, particularly when we find it so difficult to understand ministry the way Paul does, marked by weakness and humiliation instead of glory and power. Those are warnings. Now, Luke and 1 Peter seem to offer something of a middle way through this thicket, although I think we do well to remember other middle ways that have compromised the church's faithfulness in the past. My seminary was founded on the principle that there ought to be theologically trained ministers who knew how to interpret the middle way.

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That is, the middle way between the brutality of unfettered slavery on the one hand and the economic danger of emancipation on the other. That was not a happy moment in church history. But the advantage of theological reorientation in this, as it were, middle way of family life is that it adapts the earlier radical lifestyle to the exigencies of life in the real world without sacrificing too much faithfulness. Luke and 1 Peter reappropriate some Old Testament family values like clan loyalty and the otherness of faithful life in the world.

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caring for widows and orphans and sharing all things in common, envisions a church in which people's needs are met, even as believers respond wholeheartedly to Jesus' call to leave everything and follow Him. The weaknesses of this dance, though, are real. The communal life of the church in Acts is probably as idealized as is the Bible's talk of Jubilee. Luke's own story about Ananias and Sapphira demonstrates the pervasive power of personal property and individual freedom to pervert and distort the Christian community's best intentions.

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Just as I suspect there were few in ancient Israel who really freed their slaves or really remitted debts at the Jubilee. Furthermore, Luke's attempt to replace the prevailing values of the empire with gospel values means that he sometimes blurs the boundaries between the two. I mean, you look at how many of those stories are about rich and well-born people who are models of faith. In 1 Peter, the helplessness of that Christian community in its hostile environment results

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in an inevitable capitulation to the evils of slavery and patriarchal household order, even if it is a subversive capitulation. I confess that I find it a little difficult to name the strengths of the ecclesiastical domestication represented by Paul's theological descendants. This is a picture of Christian family life that's done more violence to women in the African diaspora than any other. And it continues to impoverish the parts of Christ's church where people's gifts for ministry are evaluated in terms of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity.

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I sometimes think these Christian texts are akin to what Phyllis Tribble calls texts of terror. in the Old Testament. Nevertheless, I feel impelled to listen with what I have of empathy for the exigencies of the pastor and the Pauline school and the forces that shaped their retreat from central elements of Pauline Christianity. Ephesians, Colossians, and the pastoral epistles all come from situations that their authors deemed threatening to the very existence of the church.

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Heresies within and hostility without forge in these authors a determination to preserve the church's life against its enemies at almost any cost. Despite their unfortunate views of family life, then their convictions about God's faithfulness to the church are particularly worth holding fast. The anti-imperial Christology of the pastoral epistles reminds us that Christ alone is Lord, never any social structures.

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even if the pastor would never draw the same conclusions I do. The weaknesses of this approach are all too obvious. What gets domesticated here is not only the household, but the wild unpredictability and freedom of the spirit in the creation that is being invaded by God's new creation. Paul's descendants reversed

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his conviction that the real family is the church and individual families are created in its image. Instead, the church is created in the image of the traditional household. It's a mirror of the Greco-Roman family with clergy who are patriarchs who reign over their wives, slaves, and children. These texts privilege those who are already privileged in the world.

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And they reinforce, however inadvertently and unintentionally, values that stand in some tension with the gospel of Christ. As with one another, perhaps, we do well to remember Jesus' command to forgive as we have been forgiven. While we may forgive the pastor for operating more from fear than from faith, as he reinstitutes pagan domestic virtue, We dare not allow his words to oppress the least of Jesus' brothers and sisters.

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Now, theological lessons offered by a comparison of these different voices, these different attitudes toward family life, are as much about the Bible as they are about families and family values. I don't think it's possible to harmonize these different voices into a single one. lest we replace them with a synthesis of our own making. Now that's a perennial pitfall of attempts to do biblical theology.

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So, since the church has historically chosen the path of ecclesiastical domestication over the other options, perhaps we ought instead to choose another one, to atone for the damage wrought over the centuries. If we do, though, we unavoidably place ourselves in the untenable position of trying to relive the ancient past in a modern world. We are not Mediterranean people of the first century.

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We are Western, post-industrial, even post-Christian moderns. Might we perhaps then find another way to listen for the voice of God among these competing visions, a way that honors what's most evangelical in each of them? Well, I see three ways to make our conversation with the Bible about family life fair and fruitful, and to keep it open to the movement of God's Spirit without absolutizing one or another of these different voices in the New Testament. First, we must recognize that the multiple human voices in the exegetical and theological conversation

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reflect the multiplicity of biblical voices. The diversity in the canon suggests a rightful and proper diversity of family configurations within the household of God. We dare not let one particular model, whether the patriarchal household, the communal ideal of the Jerusalem church, or charismatic preference for celibacy, we dare not let one of those become obligatory for all. Second, the cross as hermeneutical yardstick.

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That language comes from my teacher, Chris Becker. The cross as hermeneutical yardstick suggests that the voices of the powerless and the marginal belong at the center of this debate, not on the edges. If you want to know where God is, you look for the least, the weakest, the most foolish. The people who matter most in this conversation are those with the quietest voices.

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And those of us with power need to listen more often than we speak. That is because the cross turns everything upside down and makes the last first and the first last. The wise foolish and the foolish wise and it makes even the dead alive.

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And third, in our somewhat myopic focus on North American mainline Christianity's internal feuding about family values, let us not lose sight of larger and far more dangerous threats to family life in the world that God loves and for which Christ died. Virtually every resident of a homeless shelter is separated or estranged from family because of persistent poverty, mental illness, or substance abuse. Thousands of families cower in fear every night from guns and bombs while we lovingly tuck our children into bed. Palestinian and Israeli families bury their children and parents day after day after day.

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Iraqi families cling to each other in the rubble of their former homes and hide from the fury of suicide bombers. The majority of the world's hungry are women and their children. Little ones as young as four and five huddled together every night alone under bridges and in doorways of Latin American cities. The most compelling Christian family values are those that finally have a lot less to do with sex and a lot more to do with the love of God that seeks the lost and saves the hopeless.

00:44:27.140 - 00:44:57.020

In Genesis 24, God reminds Jacob that all the families of the earth shall be blessed because of the covenant God made with Abraham and Sarah. And the writer of Ephesians echoes that promise by calling God the one from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. It is only when such faithfulness and the cruciform life of the church Mark our life together as the household of God.

00:44:57.020 - 00:45:29.860

It is only then that the individual households we create within it will be blessed. Thank you. All right. Did I reorient it or just leave it muddy?

00:45:32.100 - 00:45:37.180

Yes. Yeah. Yes. A little of both.

00:45:37.220 - 00:45:44.180

Thank you. Yeah. Do you want to take one more question or should we stand and stretch? I'm at your disposal.

00:45:44.180 - 00:45:59.380

Do you want to have a comment or question? Well, what does Abba mean? It means father. Okay.

00:46:04.820 - 00:46:24.340

I think it's really important to remember what happens when you live in a world of translation. The fact that it's in another language. These are Greek-speaking Christians who use an Aramaic word, and they do it apparently because they think Jesus did. That in itself is not particularly astonishing.

00:46:24.340 - 00:46:37.860

You think about worship language in our context. It's always the foreign words that are the last to change. We still say hallelujah, amen, hosanna, maranatha. All those are words that we don't even bother to translate.

00:46:37.860 - 00:46:50.020

We just borrow them from their original. Worship language is very slow to change. The only place we ever use Elizabethan English is in the Lord's Prayer. Right?

00:46:51.140 - 00:47:11.460

What? Yeah. But in worship, we just plain hold on to the past, because that's the character of worship language. And from the very beginning, I think, those Aramaic-speaking Christians understood what was happening as being adopted by God.

00:47:12.180 - 00:47:49.680

Paul uses that language even though he doesn't speak Aramaic, and in the liturgical life of the church, it stays in the language of Jesus. It's a world of translation people don't people who speak Greek don't know what Abba means. in talking about inclusive, the father for the Jews, as well as fathers for the Greeks that are the Aramaic. And is that pushing that language too far?

00:47:52.000 - 00:48:22.120

You'd have trouble making the case on the basis of the language itself. The unity of the church, the Jew and Gentile in the church, is absolutely essential because of the unity of God. But I think I'd make that case on the basis of the whole letter to the Romans, rather than just the word father in one language and the word father in another language. I think we don't know what they thought they were saying.

00:48:22.640 - 00:48:38.560

But when we use words in foreign languages, they tend to take on a kind of aura. They're a little bit more holy. because they're not our language. But then we get the translation that says, aba means hopater.

00:48:45.670 - 00:49:00.790

They really want to stretch, don't they? Thank you for wonderful lectures. They've been enlightening and challenging, and I hope you're all provoked now to go read these texts again. And

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That would be the best. That would be the best. And what we wish for you now is Godspeed from here to Atlanta. And thank you again for visiting us and sharing with us all these wonderful insights.

00:49:12.240 - 00:49:34.850

Thank you. Thank you. Don't go away because Ted Wardlaw is here and he has a -- see he has his stuff right with him ready to go. But you have my personal permission to stand and stretch for a minute.