Matthew: A Commentary: The Churchbook, Matthew 13-28 by Frederick Dale Bruner

Author:Frederick Dale Bruner [Bruner, Frederick Dale]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Bible Commentary
ISBN: 080284507X
Amazon: B00CPY8APG
Publisher: Eerdmans Pub Co
Published: 2007-06-25T04:00:00+00:00

The decision by some mainline denominations and seminaries to make the biblical languages elective rather than required for ordained ministry is a Sadducean decision; it is proving fatal in churches. Liberal Christianity, "you err, not knowing the Scriptures" Cf. Calvin, 3:30. On ministers learning the biblical languages, Luther is strong: "One cannot preach the Word of God if one does not master the languages. History illumines God's work and God's word, [but] the languages are the scabbards in which the sword of the Spirit is sheathed" (in Meuser, Luther the Preacher, 42-43). But we must beware of a linguistic gnosticism.

Not knowing the Scriptures leads to not knowing "the power of God," Jesus' second etiology. The reverent reading and hearing of Scripture engenders a living experience of God and so a faith in God's power. For, after all, what are the stories of Scripture except one account after another of the power of God? Knowing Scripture and knowing the power of God are cause and effect. Cf. Jerome, 2:152; Bengel, 1:256.

The Pharisees, to a fault, believed they knew rather well what the resurrection would be like; the Sadducees, equally culpably, did not believe in a resurrection at all (compare these two types today). Jesus' first refutation will attack Pharisee know-it-all-ism (v. 30), and his second, Sadducean believe-nothing-ism (vv. 31-32); cf. Schweizer, Mark, 245-46.

22:30 After his accusation Jesus begins his refutation with their despised word: `for in the resurrection." Jesus believes it. "Neither do they marry" (the male activity) "nor are they given in marriage" (the female). To think people still marry in the kingdom betrays a crass resuscitation theory of resurrection, as though life in the kingdom were simply this life slightly or considerably elevated (cf. Mormonism and Islam). It was the Pharisees' error to imagine the resurrection in just such crude ways (Hill, 304), and this crudity no doubt confirmed the Sadducees in their contempt for the idea. (A true doctrine, falsely held, confirms the doctrine's opponents - a phenomenon witnessed all the time. Henry, 332, has good eighteenthcentury examples.) Thus Jesus in this first refutation as much attacks Pharisees who know too much about the resurrection as he does Sadducees who believe too little of it. (Incidentally, this verse in Jesus' teaching, and others like it in Scripture, e.g., Rom 7:1-3; 1 Cor 7:39, keep believers from divinizing marriage; see Elizabeth Achtemeier, The Committed Marriage, 30.)

Jesus, then, does not say that the faithful will be in heaven like angels; he says that they will be like the angels who are in heaven. Nor will believers in the resurrection become angels; they will be "like the angels;" that is to say, the faithful will become very different from what they now are; they will be wonderfully transformed human beings. (Since Sadducees may not have believed in angels, Acts 23:8, Jesus' analogy of angels may have been provocative. Cf. Sand, 444•) The goal of the work of God is not angels or heaven but a transformed humanity on earth (Schlatter, Der

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