Images of the Church in the New Testament

By Paul Sevier Minear

First published in 1960, Paul Minear's classic work identifies and explicates ninety-six images for the church found in the New Testament. Comprehensive and accessibly written, it has been used in seminary classes for over thirty years. Its range of reach and incredibly rich discussions of the many images and metaphors make this book a splendid resource for students and pastors.

The New Testament Library offers authoritative commentary on every book and major aspect of the New Testament, as well as classic volumes of scholarship. The commentaries in this series provide fresh translations based on the best available ancient manuscripts, offer critical portrayals of the historical world in which the books were created, pay careful attention to their literary design, and present a theologically perceptive exposition of the text.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Release date: Nov 12, 2004
• ISBN: 9781611644852

Paul Sevier Minear

Paul Sevier Minear was Winkley Professor Emeritus of Biblical Theology at Yale Divinity School. Among his numerous books are Images of the Church in the New Testament and The Kingdom and the Power: An Exposition of the New Testament Gospel.

Book preview

IMAGES OF THE CHURCH

IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

THE NEW TESTAMENT LIBRARY

Editorial Board

C. CLIFTON BLACK

JOHN T. CARROLL

BEVERLY ROBERTS GAVENTA

Paul S. Minear

Images of the Church

in the New Testament

Foreword by Leander E. Keck

Original text published in 1960 by The Westminster Press.

© 2004 Westminster John Knox Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Westminster John Knox Press, 100 Witherspoon Street, Louisville, Kentucky 40202-1396.

Scripture quotations from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible are copyright © 1946, 1952, 1971, and 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. and are used by permission.

Published by Westminster John Knox Press

Louisville, Kentucky

This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39.48 standard.

04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13—10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Minear, Paul Sevier, 1906-

Images of the church in the New Testament / Paul S. Minear.

         p. cm. — (New Testament library)

Originally published: Philadelphia : Westminster Press, 1960.

Includes bibliographical referencees and index.

ISBN 0-664-22779-1 (alk. paper)

1. Church—Biblical teaching. 2. Bible. N.T.—Theology.   I. Title.   II Series.

BS2545.C5M5 2005

262′.009’015′dc22

2004050884

To

GEORGE L. MINEAR (1868–1924)

OLIVER J. HOFFMAN (1875–1959)

Other books by Paul S. Minear available

from Westminster John Knox Press

Christians and the New Creation

The Kingdom and the Power

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Preface

The Editors, The New Testament Library

Foreword by Leander E. Keck

I. The Scope and Method of Study

II. Minor Images of the Church

III. The People of God

IV. The New Creation

V. The Fellowship in Faith

VI. The Body of Christ

VII. Interrelation of the Images

VIII. A Postscript

Appendix: Analogies Discussed in the Text

Notes

Index

Authors

Scripture References

Acknowledgments

I wish first of all to recognize a massive debt to my colleagues on the Theological Commission on Christ and the Church who have furnished many fresh insights into the character of New Testament ecclesiology. A second word of gratitude is due to those who made so enjoyable a year’s study in the Netherlands, where this manuscript took shape. Especially helpful were Professor Willem C. van Unnik of the University of Utrecht and Dr. Johanna J. van Dullemen of the U.S. Educational Foundation in the Netherlands. Still another vote of thanks goes to two schools where various chapters were used as lectures: the Theological Institute held by the Nanking Board of Founders in Singapore in 1959; the Perkins School of Theology in Dallas in 1960. Above all, a salute must be given to my wife, whose help, from first draft through the last, has been phenomenal.

PAUL S. MINEAR

February, 1960

PREFACE

The book in your hands was originally published in 1960. There was nothing like it then; over forty years later it remains unparalleled, much less surpassed. Among those conversant with English-speaking biblical scholarship, it still springs to mind when the subject of ecclesiology—the study of the church—is broached. That identification, however, is not spot-on. Unlike its nearest kin thematically and in influence, Avery Dulles’s Models of the Church (1974, 1987), Images of the Church is not a contribution to doctrinal systematics. The present work is an exercise in the replenishment of theological imagination: a comprehensive study of nearly one hundred metaphors or analogies for the church throughout the New Testament. This is no mere register or dry compendium of tropes. Each image’s internal logic and significance are examined, and all are coordinated with the church’s origin in Israel, its expression of God’s new creation, its fellowship in faith, and its membership in Christ’s body. All Christians—Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant—will find here something recognizable and many things strange though equally scriptural. No one, however, should leave it feeling vindicated, for the author’s objective is to remind the contemporary church of the corrective value in all the New Testament’s images and of Christians’ weakness or failure to live in accordance even with those that seem most familiar.

Equally important, this book reacquaints or introduces a new generation to the work of Paul Sevier Minear: a master teacher and exegete who—at this writing, at age ninety-eight—is still publishing theological scholarship that nourishes the church and its academy. In a world that seems functionally atheistic—whose intelligentsia declares itself little more than postmodern—read Minear, who speaks of an Age that explodes all eras in which we locate ourselves, who forbids our evading Scripture that confronts us with the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ.

THE EDITORS

THE NEW TESTAMENT LIBRARY

FOREWORD

Leander E. Keck

Providing an introduction to the work of a teacher to whom one’s debt is undiminished falls somewhere between filial piety and arrogance. Nonetheless, I welcome the opportunity to invite a new generation to think afresh with the New Testament by reading Paul Minear’s unequaled treatment of its view of the church. By exposing the assumptions that frequently have tamed the explosive power of the New Testament, Minear frees the reader to hear its transforming word. Whoever reads Minear carefully risks being changed by the New Testament’s own imaginative vision of what the church is called to be in light of what it is because of God’s act in Christ. Some books intend to settle thorny questions; this one, like Minear’s work as a whole,¹ often unsettles answers. It also generates new questions, usually disturbing ones, in accord with the New Testament itself. At least I found it so. Indeed, I was forewarned.

Watch out for Minear! I hear he’s awfully neoorthodox. Despite this red alert from my college mentor,² I crossed the continent to enter Andover Newton Theological School in 1949, only to find that the great Danger to my recently acquired liberal Protestant theology was on sabbatical in Sweden. Besides, we studied New Testament in the second year. By then our preliminary acquaintance with neoorthodoxy made it more promising than threatening. But who was Paul Minear? The kind of biographical information found in a curriculum vitae can prepare one to read his Images of the Church, for only he could have written this book.

Raised in an Iowa Methodist parsonage, Paul Sevier Minear (b. 1906) received his B.A. from Iowa Wesleyan College (1927), his B.D. in 1930 from Garrett Biblical Institute,³ then a bastion of liberal Methodism, before going to Yale for a Ph.D. (received in 1932). Though in the depth of the Depression, Yale was then being rebuilt,⁴ and the old Divinity School was demolished so that one of the ten new residential colleges (Calhoun) could be built in its place. For a year, the law school served as the divinity school’s home while its new quadrangle was built on Prospect Street. Minear is probably the only person who remembers all three locations. Indeed, he helped transfer books to the new library, whose first librarian, Raymond Morris, he had known at Garrett. The faculty too was in transition. The eminent New Testament Professor, Benjamin W. Bacon, had retired in 1928 (and died in 1932); the Winkley Professor of Biblical Theology, Frank C. Porter, retired in 1927 (and died in 1946). Roland Bainton, having been trained in New Testament, was mastering his new field of church history. New Testament was taught by Carl Kraeling, interested in history and archeology, and by a visiting British scholar, J. Y. Campbell; they supervised Minear’s dissertation, a religionsgeschichtliche study, The Development of Ethical Sanctions in Judaism, Hellenism, and Early Christianity.⁵

After a year at the Hawaii School of Religion, Minear taught New Testament at Garrett for a decade (1934-44) before going to Andover Newton, succeeding Amos Wilder as Norris Professor of New Testament. In 1956, he joined the faculty at Yale Divinity School, from which he retired in 1971. While at Andover Newton, he became an active participant in ecumenical affairs, especially the work of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches (WCC), through which he became well known in both ecclesiastical and theological circles around the globe. In fact, Images of the Church is a major result of this involvement (see below).⁶ After going to Yale, his ecumenical activities accelerated. Together with Theodore Hesburgh, from 1969-70 he was deeply involved in establishing the Ecumenical Institute for Advanced Theological Study, located at Tantur (near Jerusalem), and briefly was its first vice-rector when it opened. Health problems, however, called for a return to the States in 1971, when he also retired from his post at Yale. While at Yale, he was elected president of Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas for 1964-65.⁷ From 1967-88 he was a member of the committee that produced the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Retirement freed him to publish a steady stream of articles and books, many written for nonspecialist readers as well as for the scholars’ guild.⁸ In keeping with his enduring interest in music, he also published Death Set to Music: Masterworks by Bach, Brahms, Penderecki, Bernstein (Atlanta: John Knox, 1987). Now in his ninety-eighth year, he recently published The Seventh Trumpet, or the Hallelujah Chorus in Worship 78 (2004): 24-35. He lives in Guilford, Connecticut, with Gladys, whom he married seventy-five years ago. In 1997 her alma mater, Iowa Wesleyan, awarded her an honorary D.H.L. in recognition of her partnership in Paul’s remarkable career.

My college mentor did not disclose how he learned that Minear was awfully neoorthodox or how he had become so while at Garrett. In any case, that transformation—the word is not excessive—proved to be decisive for his subsequent work. One can only imagine what it was like for this yet untenured assistant professor to find his way without a colleague with whom to test his insights and new convictions that took shape as the result of discovering Kierkegaard⁹ and Karl Barth.¹⁰ As a result, Minear came to read the Bible with new eyes. The first outcome was a fresh statement of biblical theology, Eyes of Faith,¹¹ published shortly after he went to Andover Newton, where he benefited from conversations with his colleague in systematic theology, Nels F. S. Ferre.¹² While several articles had signaled what was to come, Eyes of Faith expressed powerfully the new vision of what the Bible requires of its interpreter:¹³ sharing its standpoint,¹⁴ which must be grasped in its wholeness (1). In a rare self-disclosure, Minear confesses that his new way of reading the Bible had been "forced upon me against my own inclination. . . . Over and over again, I have been chagrined to have my convictions reversed. . . . Finally the suspicion dawned that perhaps the strange history within which the apostle stood is the true history within which I too stand (2).¹⁵ The Bible calls for witnesses, not for teachers. It is written from faith to faith; not from objective knowledge to faith, or from faith to objective knowledge. It demands subjective appropriation, not dispassionate evaluation (3). More important than the obvious, vast difference between the world of the Bible and today’s world is the Bible’s internal and intrinsic otherness of the patterns of imagination, an otherness that arouses the greatest listener-resistance (5). It is not accidental that the book’s first footnote is to Barth;¹⁶ another neoorthodox theologian is also cited repeatedly, Emil Brunner.¹⁷ The most frequently cited writer, however, is Kierkegaard, quoted eighteen times. From him Minear learned that [e]xistential concern expels speculative detachment" (19).

It is not surprising, then, that Minear begins Eyes of Faith by emphasizing that in the Bible God is the Subject who speaks, not a problem to be solved; he creates problems through his nearness, his threats, his insistent demands, his irresistible intention. It is not so much that men raise questions about him, but that he raises questions of men (16). Nor is it surprising that a reviewer complained that the argument is hard to follow because Minear adopts Kierkegaardian phraseology and modes of thought. At times he seems to revel in paradox.¹⁸ Indeed! Not for rhetorical effect alone, however, but because thinking with the Bible requires paradox, since it shows repeatedly that one can forget God in the very act of speaking of him (19). Another reviewer claimed that Minear is determined not to permit objectivity in biblical studies and noted that he neglects the wisdom theology that is basic to John.¹⁹ More perceptive was Otto Piper, who had come to Princeton Theological Seminary from Germany in 1937. Piper said the book is full of religious vitality. Its significance cannot easily be overrated. In the field of biblical studies this is the first creative American reaction [that] America produces to the biblical theology and theological renaissance on the Continent.²⁰

Minear’s way of releasing scripture was firmly in place when I entered his class in the fall of 1950. The most important part of this course will take place outside the classroom. So began the Danger I had been told to watch out for. Few of us, however, believed him. But we should have. Not that his lectures lacked significance. But the term was well advanced before we appreciated what was happening. Characteristically, he began by asking what we had discovered in the assigned reading. Then, responding to whatever answer he got, banal or suggestive, he segued into the lecture he had prepared. Once, replying to a question about the birth stories in the Gospels, Minear picked up a copy of Martin Dibelius’s Jungfrauensohn und Krippenkind (1932) and began translating it, commenting as he went.²¹ Fifteen minutes later, he asked, Does that answer your question, Bill? (Bill, like most of us, had forgotten what it was!) The course is memorable also for its unusual scope: after exploring the historical context of early Christianity, we turned—in this sequence!—to Mark, Revelation, and Matthew, leaving Professor Tuck to cover the other twenty-four books in the next term (which he did).

The two semesters could hardly have been more different, for Minear neither confused nor conflated introducing the New Testament itself with introducing New Testament criticism. While our secondary readings did not neglect the latter, Minear spent little time justifying form criticism or explaining the differences, for instance, between Bultmann’s and Dibelius’s classifications of the Jesus traditions. Instead, he taught us to ask the form critics’ questions: How is Jesus’ saying related to the rest of the pericope? Who would have valued the story? How did the passage function in the liturgical life of the early church? He also practiced redaction criticism before it had a name, by showing how the Evangelists used the Jesus traditions in their differing situations.²² In a way, Hybert Pollard was right: because Minear was very neoorthodox, the New Testament became for us less an object to be interpreted than a subject that interpreted us.²³ What we experienced in the classroom was reinforced by reading The Kingdom and the Power (1950; now republished by Westminster John Knox Press; see below).

At the end of that memorable semester, my classmate J. Louis Martyn and I made appointments with Minear (unknown to each other) to talk about pursuing a Ph.D. in New Testament; and so began a friendship that has enriched me for more than half a century—and an ongoing engagement with our teacher’s work.²⁴ Minear, astute teacher that he was, did not conceal from us the arduous dimensions of what we were determined to undertake. He also began to prepare us by offering a seminar in New Testament eschatology, a Greek exegesis course in 1 Peter, and in our senior year a course on Romans—for me, transforming. Seven years later, when I began teaching Romans, I followed his precedent by beginning with chapters 14-15, because it was both pedagogically and theologically useful to see how the apostle linked the relentless theology in chapters 1-11 to the troubled Christian community in Rome before examining this theology in detail. Later, Minear’s The Obedience of Faith made public what he had taught in class.²⁵ Of all his books, it is the one cited most often by other exegetes, though most of them, including myself, think that in deciding which part of Romans was addressed to which group in Rome Minear had pushed the evidence too far. Nonetheless, the book still has the merit of anchoring firmly Paul’s theology in the life of the church. In its own way, Images of the Church extends that emphasis to the whole New Testament. Before Images appeared, however, Westminster Press published The Kingdom and the Power.²⁶

I have long regarded The Kingdom and the Power as the most original presentation of New Testament Theology produced in North America—perhaps the only original one, since most others largely try to cultivate the roses in gardens already planted. This very originality probably accounts for its massive neglect by colleagues in the field. Nonetheless, rereading it has confirmed my judgment, precisely because it is what its subtitle announces: "An Exposition of the New Testament Gospel" (my italics). Instead of describing doctrines (God, Christ, sin, and so forth) or reconstructing the (alleged) development of early Christian thought, Minear draws on the diverse New Testament writings to expound, from varying but complementary angles, the import of the one event to which they all point: God’s act in Jesus. Whereas his colleagues took great care to distinguish one writer’s thought from the others, Minear sought, and found, their unity and often displayed it by citing, in the same paragraph, diverse writers like Mark, Paul, 1 Peter, and John of Patmos.²⁷

The book largely foregoes engaging scholarly opinions; instead, it resolutely concentrates on the New Testament itself (with some attention to the Old Testament). It is the logic of the New Testament (108), determined throughout by the Christ-event, that Minear explores by concentrating on the nexus between Christ and the believer. In doing so, he probes the implications of the New Testament’s own assumptions and language (as he had done in Eyes of Faith), particularly its persistent conviction that, because the Christ-event is God’s eschatological act, for the believer it terminates one world and inaugurates its definitive alternative. For Minear, the apocalyptic eschatology that pervades the whole New Testament is not a husk from which the kernel, the abiding message, must be extracted but, rather, the unavoidable part of that message.²⁸ The offense that must be overcome lies not in the gospel’s rootedness in ancient apocalyptic mythology but in our resistance to its astounding claims and promises. The New Testament’s thought

is so alien to the contemporary mind, its pattern of accents is so different, its logic so tightly woven by a strange loom of events, that one does not know where to begin in the effort to assimilate it. . . . [O]ne must understand the interacting wholeness of the perspective before attempting the needed work of translation. . . . [T]he gospel is not the sum of so many verses; it is a simple message that one must first understand in its integral simplicity. . . . [T]he gospel is tantalizing because it is so different, but unless it were different, it would not be a gospel (232–33).

It is not the relative differences among the New Testament writers that interest Minear (though he does not ignore them) but the one definitive difference between the gospel and the world, between the power of Satan’s deceptions and God’s truth in Christ.²⁹ Instead of explaining the origins of the two-age motif, basic in New Testament eschatology, or demythologizing it into anthropology,³⁰ Minear explores the logic of this governing perspective. What the book aims for is not the correct historical understanding of the observer’s mind but the reader’s faithful avowal of the will, as summoned by the gospel.

Important here is noting how Kingdom’s treatment of the New Testament’s language prepares the way for Images of the Church. Since the whole New Testament expounds the meaning of one event, the disclosed paradigm of God’s way of dealing with the human condition, Minear claims that "underneath the prolix metaphors³¹ lies the stark reality of a single choice facing each disciple (146).³² Accordingly, just as the believer knows that the whole purpose of God is behind each expression of God’s concern (123), so one learns that the world’s hostility is not expressed in exactly the same way twice (128). Therefore, more is required than grasping the images and motifs one at a time, for it is the coherence of the whole that must be understood. Moreover, the gospel demands that the mind of its auditors be changed radically, that the presuppositions and criteria of that mind be transformed. . . . And a mind is not really transformed when it absorbs ideas one at a time into its previous structure (232-33). That would be mere modification or co-optation. The New Testament gospel calls for repentance, or conversion. Minear can see his task as expressing the New Testament gospel instead of simply explaining it, because he is convinced that its writers’ vocabulary was adequate for conveying the good news and that we need to make the effort to learn their language and to use it. And that entails pondering not only what they said but also why they said it and how their words disclose the inner orientation of mind and spirit (12); that is, Minear listens for what had happened to them to make them want to say what they said (45). He hopes their language will regenerate (not duplicate) the disciples’ experience in today’s readers. And that experience places all believers in a community obligated to live by the Jesus-paradigm, for God’s act made him the first-born among many brethren" (Rom 8:29), as spelled out in the Christ-hymn in Philippians 2:6-11, the leitmotif of Minear’s whole book.

In reading Images of the Church it is useful to bear in mind some of Minear’s observations about the church in The Kingdom and the Power. For example, [w]here the sovereignty of Jesus is actualized in word and deed, there is . . . the church (49); or, When a man dies with Christ, he dies to all the social groupings of the old age and is raised as a member of the body of Christ . . . , incorporated into the new fellowship and the new family. Israel is reborn in the rebirth of the individual. The Church comes into existence in the same event as does the new man (106). For Minear, body of Christ, new family, Israel, and new man are not expressions of distinct ecclesiologies but complementary images for the same reality. Further, the church is as exposed to the assaults of Satan as were Jesus and his first disciples. Indeed, all the sins of the world: ambition and apathy, greed and hate, caste prejudice and adultery—yes, the whole repertoire of the devil’s lusts are found in it (171). Therefore, the Church finds its solidarity in the need for forgiveness, not in the achievement of a stated level of righteousness. . . . Any judgment of the tares [alluding to Matt 13:24-30] that proceeds from self-righteousness simply conceals the sins of the judges (172). Still, each member becomes a bearer of historical destiny, just as Christ’s church is a corporate bearer of historical destiny, with a mission for the whole world (218). Important, then, is not what century we live in but whether we live in the old age or the new, for the battles and the issues are the same; apart from faith, [we] belong to the same old age as did the unbelievers [in the first century] (234). Also today, God and Satan are battling for the souls of men, and the place of battle is creation-wide and history-long (220). The church is not a demilitarized zone but the corporate battleground where God’s love in Christ creates both final struggle and final victory, for a conflict not precipitated by this love cannot be a final conflict (227).

Although Images of the Church contains not a single reference to The Kingdom and the Power, only the author of the latter could have written the former. Still, the two books are quite different in tone (thus, the conflict with Satan is much more muted in Images), not because Minear has mellowed during the intervening decade, but because the books are the fruits of quite different efforts. Whereas Kingdom, like Eyes of Faith, expressed Minear’s determination to state the results of his own struggle to grasp the radical otherness of the gospel, Images is the result of an assignment given the author by an agency of the World Council of Churches.³³ If concentration on the radically other gospel makes Kingdom a Protestant work, Images is deliberately ecumenical in its starting point, perspective, and method, as the author points out without mentioning Kingdom (14). Only so could it contribute to an ongoing, multisided conversation among representatives of churches with differing and divisive doctrines about the church and its mission—each said to be faithful to the New Testament. Minear’s task was formidable: to help the churches get beyond their entrenched positions by exposing them to the New Testament’s own ways of talking about the church. Moreover, the WCC was not yet ten years old (its first Assembly occurred in 1948), and though Roman Catholics were not part of it (and still are not), Vatican II was yet to come. It is a mark of Minear’s achievement that Images is reported to have had unequaled influence when Vatican II did convene. In any case, with this book Minear provided all communions a fresh way of understanding the church: Instead of writing an ecclesiology based on precisely formulated, denotative, doctrines, he explores the New Testament’s kaleidoscopic, evocative, connotative images of the believing community

Despite the difference in tone, Images carries forward Minear’s treatment of New Testament language found in Kingdom. Important is the introductory chapter of Images in which he discusses the nature of images and metaphors (sometimes called analogies) as well as the role of imagination—a theme to which he returns in the postscript. Just as Kingdom eschews restating the New Testament in abstract language (i.e., replacing metaphors with doctrines), so Images asserts that the church has not, during the centuries later, been able to improve on their panorama of pictures for expressing their self-awareness as the people of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, and the body of Christ; yet the images are not themselves the reality to which they point (251). Moreover, just as Kingdom saw a single, radical gospel unifying the New Testament, so Images claims that through all the analogies the New Testament writers were speaking of a single reality, a single realm of activity, a single magnitude. The purpose of every comparison is to point beyond itself (222). Like Kingdom, also for Images [I]t is the Referent behind all the references that explains why the same metaphors could be used for the life of the individual believer, for the life of the separate congregations, and for the whole community of faith . . . and why New Testament authors could confuse metaphors, with a nonchalance hardly to be equaled in any other literature (224); [t]he images as a whole fuse together the ministry of Christ, variously conceived [i.e., expressed in concepts], with the ministry of his people as a whole (262).

In addition to the challenge of writing for a diverse and divided ecumenical readership, Minear faced also the procedural problem: how to discuss meaningfully the New Testament’s ninety-six images of the church (see the roster on 268-69). Minear neither treats them chronologically nor orders them according to authors. Instead, after briefly discussing minor images (admittedly implying difficult choices), he clusters them according to major motifs: the people of God (thereby linking the church with Israel), the new creation (allowing him to discuss the church’s universality), and the social or communal dimension.³⁴ Only after discussing the clustered images does he turn to the body of Christ (ch. 6), leaving to chapter 7 the Interrelation of the Images, in which the body of Christ is related to each of the three motifs. With this procedure, Minear makes it difficult for any particular communion to exalt its own self-image as the closest to the New Testament. The Minear who in Eyes of Faith and The Kingdom and the Power confronted the individual with the New Testament’s single, radical gospel now confronted each church’s dominant ecclesiology with the plurality of New Testament images. But not simply in order to be different. Rather, because he is convinced that "church images exert their pristine power only when they are the genuine product of a vital communal imagination and when that imagination uses them to correct its own self-understanding, as a confession of its sin in not conforming to those images" (258, italics added). This conviction is one reason the book deserves careful reading today.

Reading Minear’s Images of the Church in the New Testament profitably may be more demanding today than it was when first published, at least partly because, having been told that much of the Bible must be overcome if there is to be justice, today’s readers may find it hard to think with it. Some will find Images to be a period piece, an interesting residue from an era that is ever more remote even for those who lived through it. Others may welcome it precisely because, coming from a different time, it is free of both jeremiads and celebrations of the current church scene. Such readers will find a way of thinking about the church that can take them beyond the fissures in current church life. Instead of blaming the book written four decades ago for not addressing today’s controversies over who may be ordained, or issues like the relation between the church and Judaism (including the state of Israel), or for not anticipating the resurgence of evangelical Christianity and the explosion of Pentecostalism, these readers will ask whether the New Testament’s ways of imaging the church can enliven their own imaginations and so energize afresh their commitment to the gospel. A book that does that deserves to be reprinted—and read.

1.   The extensive Minear corpus (see n. 8, below) invites examination and assessment; to my knowledge, only C. Freeman Sleeper has attempted it in Some American Contributions to New Testament Interpretation in Interpretation 20 (1966): 322-39, part of which was devoted also to the work of Amos Wilder.

2.   J. Hybert Pollard, a Missouri Baptist with a Ph.D. in New Testament from Boston University, was Professor of Religion at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. It was he who introduced me to historical criticism in biblical study; his required course in the life of Jesus used a small book of the same title, published in 1917, by Harris Franklin Rall, Minear’s teacher of systematic theology at Garrett.

3.   Now Garrett-Evangelical Seminary, the result of a merger with Evangelical Theological School, a seminary of the Evangelical United Brethren, which merged with the Methodist Episcopal Church to form The United Methodist Church.

4.   In addition to ten residential colleges, several other buildings transformed the campus; among them were the Hall of Graduate Studies, the Law School, and Sterling Library.

5.   The dissertation was revised and published later as And Great Shall Be Your Reward: The Origins of Christian Views of Salvation (Yale Studies in Religion 12; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941).

6.   Another fruit is Christian Hope and the Second Coming (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), resulting from participation in conversations leading to the Second Assembly of the WCC (1954), whose theme was Jesus Christ, the Hope of the World. This book, after a general treatment of early Christian eschatology, explores certain images associated with the parousia: the clouds, the thief, the naked man, the defeat of the dragon, the earthquake, the keys of heaven, and the trumpet. These studies presage Minear’s treatment of images of the church.

7.   His presidential address, Ontology and Ecclesiology in the Apocalypse was published in New Testament Studies 12 (1966): 89-105, and is included in his collected essays, The Bible and the Historian: Breaking the Silence About God in Biblical Studies (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002).

8.   Among those written for nonspecialists are John: The Martyr’s Gospel (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984); Christians and the New Creation: Genesis Motifs in the New Testament (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994); and The Good News According to Matthew: A Training Manual for Prophets (St. Louis: Chalice, 2000). A select bibliography, compiled by Richard H. Minear and included in Paul Minear’s Christians and the New Creation, lists 23 books, 43 essays in symposia, and 94 articles in professional and popular journals as well as curriculum resources for church education. From this highly diverse corpus, Minear recently selected and edited 21 items for The Bible and the Historian.

9.   Later, with Paul S. Morimoto, Minear published Kierkegaard and the Bible: An Index (Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1953): a roster of biblical passages discussed by Kierkegaard.

10.   But see his Rich Memories, Huge Debts in How Karl Barth Changed My Mind, ed. D. K. McKim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 47-51. See also his earlier essay, Barth’s Commentary on Romans 1922-1972, or Karl Barth vs. the Exegetes in Footnotes to a Theology: Karl Barth Colloquium of 1972, ed. Martin Rumscheidt (published at an unspecified place by the Corporation for the Publication of Academic Studies in Religion in Canada, 1974), 8-29.

11.   Eyes of Faith: A Study in the Biblical Point of View (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1946).

12.   The book’s acknowledgments also mention fruitful conversations with Richard Kroner, a theologian from Germany then at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and J. Leslie Dunstan, former General Secretary of the Hawaiian Board of Missions and later Minear’s colleague at Andover Newton—neither of whom was a fellow biblical scholar.

13.   For example, Wanted, A Biblical Theology, Theology Today 1 (1944): 47-58; Time and the Kingdom, Journal of Religion 24 (1944): 77-88.

14.   The opening paragraph makes this clear: "If there is to be a communication [between an artist and the viewer], the onlooker need not share the painter’s views but he must share the painter’s point of viewing. He need not agree with his standpoint, but he must stand at the same point" (Minear’s italics).

15.   The tension between the Bible’s view of history and time and that of the historical critic has been a theme running through Minear’s work. See, for instance, his contribution to Neutestamentliche Studien für Rudolf Bultmann, ed. W. Eltester; Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 21 (Berlin: Alfred Töpelmann, 1954), 15-23. Here he asks (rather autobiographically): "What happens . . . when we discover in the Bible attitudes toward time which not only claim to be true, but which also commend themselves to us with increasing power? The entire hermeneutical system [in historical criticism] is placed in question (19-20, italics added). Further, no methodology whose presuppositions on time are limited to the old age will be adequate to cope with the historicity of the new age or with the temporal collision between the times" (20-21).

16.   The Word of God and the Word of Man (New York: Harper, 1928), ch. 2.

17.   Emil Brunner’s The Divine-Human Encounter (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1943) is cited five times. Significantly, the German title was Wahrheit als Begegnung (Truth as Encounter [1938]). One is not surprised, then, that Minear says that God’s command always finds man in the situation of disobedience (Eyes of Faith, 49), or "Standing at the perspective center of the divine-human encounter, Biblical writers assume . . . that each event is the outcome of the confluence and conflict of wills, that