(August 16, 2017) 3:38 PM What starts as a few light snow flakes soon becomes a blizzard. That’s how I feel whenever I read and meditate on a passage of Scripture. More and more I am hearing the Lord saying to His church, “Come back to original Christianity.” Friends, we’ve elevated how we do church to such a degree that it takes a professional — in many cases, a professional team — to pull it off. If we’re really going to change the world, the process has to become a whole lot simpler. Everyone has to become a servant.

This thought came to mind as I read Phil. 1:1 this morning. Just as a reminder: My habit is to turn to a passage and read it straight through. Then I go back and work through each clause word by word. After this, I spend time pondering, praying, and journaling. Writing my thoughts down helps focus my attention and allows me time to process. You don’t have to be a C. S. Lewis to do this either. (Thankfully.)

First off, here’s another way of rendering the opening verse of the letter. You’ll notice it differs a bit from the rendering I gave you yesterday. That’s perfectly acceptable. Rarely, if ever, is there only one way to render the Greek into English. The only translation I wouldn’t accept from my students is one that would be impossible in English. “Paul and Timothy, slaves of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus in Philippi ….” would not past muster if only because we would never begin a letter like that. That’s simply not “English.” We either have to write “Paul and Timothy, slaves of Christ Jesus, write this letter to …” or something like this:

This letter is from Paul and Timothy, slaves of Christ Jesus. It is for all God’s people in Philippi who are in union with Christ Jesus, including those who oversee and serve.

You may have noticed that my “including those who oversee and serve” is ambiguous, and intentionally so. Paul may be referring to two groups of people here (overseers and servers) or, by employing a figure of speech called hendiadys (Greek for “one-through-two,” that is, one idea expressed through two words) he’s referring to a single group: overseers who serve. In New Testament times, an overseer was someone who “looked after” or “cared for” someone else. Another sense was that of “visiting” someone to check to see how they were doing. The term always carried with it an overtone of love and affection. My daughter, for example, acted like an overseer today when she brought me some homemade soup. This was an act of “overseeing” (episkope) on her part: “oversight that naturally goes on to provide the care and attention appropriate to the ‘personal visitation'” (Strong’s Concordance).

Here Paul seems to be using the term “overseers” more narrowly, that is, as a reference to church leaders, and indeed, “leaders” would also be an acceptable rendering. Who, then, are the servers? In one sense, all Christians alike are servers (diakonoi). In fact, from reading the book of Ephesians, we know that one of the main responsibilities of overseers is to “equip God’s people for works of service” (Eph. 4:11-12). The term “servers” itself takes its name from those in the secular world who were responsible for such functions as the distribution of food and gifts. When Paul uses the term here, he’s probably referring to people in the church who were especially gifted in ministering to the physical and material needs of the congregation or were involved in supervising such ministries.

When, then, of our old friend Mr. Hendiadys? I think he’s still in play here. The Greek allows it, and so does the context. We’ve already noted that Paul and Timothy are explicitly referred to as men who serve Christ Jesus. Likewise, overseers/leaders in the church don’t simply possess a status in the body of Christ. They are those who serve others by attending to their needs. They “care for God’s flock with all the diligence of a shepherd” (1 Pet. 5:2, The Message).

So this was the text I meditated on this morning. In the silence, God spoke to me as clearly as if He were sitting next me. “Dave, are you a genuine servant of Christ Jesus? Is that what people know you for? Or do you just talk about performing the duties of a slave in the service of God and His people? Could you write, ‘Dave, a slave of Christ Jesus’?” We all need to become saints who serve. I do. You do. The church and the world desperately need this. The only person we can orient our life around is Jesus and His example of utter self-abnegation. Under His leadership, we are freed from self. We are free to recede into the group. We are free to serve others, no matter if it’s on a job site or if it’s in delivering soup to a sick and home-bound loved one. We are free to live with intention and purpose. To serve the Lord is our calling. It is our work. It is our vocation, all of us helping out in our preaching, our teaching, our labor, our play, in all the zillions of small ways our imperfect candles can shine. Let’s make a transition to the model of Christianity Paul is setting forth for us in Philippians. This is the heart message of the letter: allowing God to develop the selfless mind of Christ in us so that we can bear God’s image in our attitudes and actions both in the church and in the world.

This side of heaven there is nothing sweeter than communing with our Creator, whether in nature or in His word. Let’s become the careful listeners He seeks. Paul’s overriding concern in Philippians is the advance of the Gospel. Since this is the case, it seems obvious that we should read the letter — including its opening salutation — as explicitly paradigmatic. It’s all well and good to point out a “nominative absolute” or a “dative of address” or a “genitive of possession” here and there, but such observations simply don’t go far enough. In fact, I’d say that stopping there without considering the paradigmatic force of such constructions is to do a grave disservice to the Greek student since it implies that Greek exists for itself and not as a foundation for life-changing truth. What is being modeled in Philippians, even in the very first paragraph, is the need to live a “cruciform” life — a mind in keeping with the Gospel. “Don’t do anything out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves” (2:3). By elevating Timothy’s name to the same level as his own, Paul is doing exactly that. And what united Paul and Timothy was nothing less than their mutual participation in the Gospel. This is what makes Paul’s admonition to Euodia and Syntyche in 4:2 all the more poignant. These women had at one time contended side by side with Paul in the cause of the Gospel, but now they needed to be entreated to agree with each other in the Lord. Paul seems to be saying that every one of us in the church needs to have the same mindset, despite our many differences. The propagation of the Gospel ever and always hangs on a unified church. But for this to happen we must sacrificially give ourselves for the sake of others, because this is what the Gospel is all about. To miss this central message in Phil. 1:1 is to miss the letter altogether and to miss the very heart of what it means to be a Christian. The Spirit never sows division and pride. The best, most joyful, and most genuine Christians I know are those who gladly serve others as slaves of Christ Jesus. Seeing this great truth being played out in the opening verse of Philippians makes the study of the Greek text all the more beautiful for me.

(August 18, 2017) 8:18 AM William Varner’s vlog on Phil. 1:2 has been posted. It’s an excellent overview of the Greek text. A few additional observations, for what they’re worth.

1) This greeting is more than mere phatic communication. “(By “phatic” I mean communication that seeks to reach out and engage someone. A handshake is such a gesture. It’s more than a polite social convention but indicates an attempt to “contact” another person in a warm and personal  fashion.) The greeting here in Phil 1:1 is like every other greeting in the Pauline letters in that it points to the blessings of grace and peace, not in a general sense, but as needed by the readers.

2) Grace is mentioned first. Thus at the very beginning of his letter, Paul subtly reminds the Philippian Christians that their life in Christ is a gift of God’s grace they’ve received through simple faith, not through obedience to the ceremonies of the Jewish law. This is key to understanding later portions of the letter in which Paul issues an invective against (apparently) Jewish Christians who promote circumcision and law-keeping among Gentile Christians (see 3:2 ff.).

3) Few seem to remark on the position of the “peace” blessing. Paul could have written “Grace and peace to you.” Instead, he wrote “Grace to you, and peace.” Here “peace” is set off in the Greek text, quite possibly for emphasis. There’s little question that the issue of disharmony is one of Paul’s major concerns in writing this brief letter. Peace is (at least) the cessation of hostilities (again, see 4:2, where Euodia and Syntyche are singled out). But peace involves much than that. If the background of Paul’s use of the word here is Hebraic in nature (shalom), as Will suggests, then the idea would also include concepts of wholeness, spiritual health, vitality, and well-being. As Paul will state in 2:12, “You are, as a congregation, in your relationships with one another, to live out the salvation [Gerald Hawthorne: spiritual health] Christ has brought you.” As Fee points out (p. 104), “This is therefore not a text dealing with individual salvation but an ethical text dealing with the outworking of salvation in the believing community for the sake of the world.” Once again, the letter’s theme is evident: Harmonious relationships in the church for the sake of the Gospel. This implication of “peace” in 1:2 should not be overlooked.

4) Finally, as Will points out, this passage is loaded with theology, and, I might add, theology that foreshadows some of the main subthemes of the letter. A rich example is Paul’s use of “Lord” (kurios) to refer to Jesus. Without doubt, in a city like Philippi, which was a Roman colony where citizens took their civic duties very seriously indeed, the term “Lord” would have been a reminder for the believers there that their ultimate allegiance is not to Caesar (who loved to use the title kurios with reference to himself) but to another kurios, whose coming from heaven is now awaited with eager anticipation (3:20). It is to this Lord, who died the death of a common criminal but was raised from the dead, God gave the name that is above all names, the name of the Lord God Himself. One can scarcely miss the theological connotations.

How, then, are we to render verse 2? Wycliffe’s SSA (Semantic Structural Analysis) of Philippians suggests something like this (I’ve modified it a bit):

We pray that God, who is our Father, and Jesus Christ, who is our Lord, will continue to act graciously toward you and will, in addition, continue to cause you to have peace/be peaceful.

Let’s not forget, though, that “peace” seems to be set apart for special emphasis.

(August 19, 2017) 8:28 AM Here’s yet another takeaway from Phil. 1:1. (Yes, Dave’s beating a dead horse.)

Paul greets the church and then its leaders.

Please don’t overlook this, friends. Let’s be real. You and I would have greeted the pastor and then the people. Not so Paul.

Often doctrine elevates the “pastorate” as the highest calling in life. This isn’t true, because it omits Christian engineers and school teachers and housewives and janitors and every other “calling” in life you can think of. If non-pastors are second-class citizens in the kingdom, then you’ve just excluded millions from Gospel work. You know, the Gospel is proclaimed as clearly through a mother changing her baby’s diaper as through the labor of preparing and delivering a sermon. But, you say, there’s “the call.” Yes there is. And this call, in the New Testament, is not what you might think it is. In the New Testament, one’s calling encompasses far more than one’s vocation (or avocation for that matter). Just read Eph. 4:1 or 2 Thess. 1:11. We can all lived called lives, Gospel lives, in every imaginable context. This includes, of course, the calling to serve your church as a loving, caring, overseer/elder/pastor/shepherd — faithfully leading, teaching, admonishing, and loving the flock. (See John 10 for what a loving shepherd looks like.) That may involve a career/profession or it may not. We need you, pastors! But you may also serve the Lord as a teacher (as I try to do). Maybe this morning you punched a time clock. It really doesn’t matter that much. The manner in which I treat my students, the way in which I prepare and deliver my lectures, the dignity with which I regard my pupils, the courtesy I extend to them by answering their emails in a timely manner, the effort I put into developing them as teachers in their own right, the example I set before them as a Christ-minded man, the way I treat my faculty colleagues — this is the called life I am asked to pursue as a professional Greek teacher. This might not seem like much, but it is. Friend, live out your calling today. If you’re one of my dear students, please remember that you don’t have to wait until you graduate to begin serving King Jesus. To become a fulltime missionary you don’t have to wait until you deputize and deploy. A missional life most often shows up quietly in our work places and neighborhoods (even during 5K races). My dream for you is to be exactly who you were created to be by God. My dream is to see all of us in fulltime Christian ministry. My dream is for all God’s people (the “saints” of Phil. 1:1) to be smitten with Jesus, so much so that there’s nothing they’d rather do than serve Him like a selfless slave, as Paul and Timothy did. But at no point should you ever think of yourself as somehow less than “called” because you are not employed by a local church. We are all God’s servants, sheep and shepherds alike. Yours might seem like small work. In fact, you might not think it’s Christian service at all. Let God surprise you.

May God make us all worthy of our high calling today.

(August 25, 2017) 8:18 AM In his outstanding commentary on Philippians, Gerald Hawthorne calls our attention to the textual variants in the Greek text of Phil. 1:9.

πεπληρωμένοι καρπὸν δικαιοσύνης τὸν διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ εἰς δόξαν καὶ ἔπαινον θεοῦ.

Most manuscripts read “to the glory and praise of God.” Some, however, have “to the glory and praise of me,” while one papyrus manuscript (p46) reads “to the glory of God and to the praise of me.” When I first saw these variants years ago, I felt a twinge of sadness in my heart. Self-praise is uniquely unbecoming to the Christian. Yet that’s the same question we face every day in a myriad of ways. It’s so easy for us to “esteem ourselves as better than others” (to paraphrase Paul’s words in Phil. 2:3). But when we drag our pride kicking and screaming into the glorious light of the Gospel, we can see it for what it is. It is possible to bend the universe too sharply toward our own agendas and accomplishments. That’s why in Pauline theology, in New Testament theology, and I dare say in biblical theology in general, there’s little or no place for human pride, human accomplishment, or human achievement, apart from the sheer grace of God. Even when we work “harder than the rest,” we are still what we are “by the grace of God” (1 Cor. 15:10). I suspect we very much underestimate the sin of pride in our evangelical circles. But without humility of mind, says Paul, there can be no unity (Phil. 2:3). I worry sometimes that we consider “success” to be the product of our own diligence more than God’s working in our lives. “Humility” is a slippery concept. It is so tempting to go along with the crowd, to bend, to make believe our accomplishments are really ours. The truth is, “We have this treasure in jars of clay so that the surpassing greatness of the power might be of God, and not of us” (2 Cor. 4:7).

To the scribe of p46: You are so funny, dude. And to my Greek students who think that the art and science of New Testament textual criticism is, well, overkill: Sorry about that. We Greek profs try not to put unreasonable “shoulds” and “should nots” on you guys. But when it comes to textual variants, we have no choice. (You can sort this out with your therapist one day.) Let me pause to acknowledge the fear button I may have just pushed. The last thing I want to do is to terrify my beloved students. But we can’t decide between variants if we don’t know what we’re dealing with. I know this is hard stuff, but it’s not impossible stuff. Just as loving parents tell their kids, “Get out of bed and do your chores,” so loving Greek profs are preparing their docents to accurately handle the word of truth. Better to read a primer on New Testament textual criticism than to be entirely apathetic and blatantly hypocritical.