Showing posts with label Gordon Fee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gordon Fee. Show all posts

Saturday, December 20, 2014

Gifts of healing

to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles (1 Cor 12:9-10).
According to Gordon Fee, in his revised commentary on 1 Corinthians (Eerdmans 2014):
The plural charismata ["gifts of healings"] probably suggests, not a permanent "gift," as it were, but that each occurrence is a "gift"in its own right. So also with the plurals in the next item [lit. "workings of miracles"], 659.  
[Quoting Bittlinger] "Every healing is a special gift…" 659n134.
That's a potentially revolutionary take on the typical cessationist/noncessationist debate or stalemate. It's not so much that the healer has a "gift of healing," but that each healing is a divine gift. An act of God's gracious merciful kindness. 
It's possible that some Christians are healers, viz. God heals more often through some Christians than others. But it's not a resident ability which the healer can switch on and off at will. It's just that God chooses some Christians to sometimes act in that capacity.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

The eye of a needle

From Gordon Fee in How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth: A Guide to Understanding the Bible (p. 22):
[I]n Mark 10:23 (Matt. 19:23, Luke 18:24), at the conclusion of the story of the rich young man, Jesus says, "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God." He then adds: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom." It is often said that there was a gate in Jerusalem known as the "Needle's Eye," which camels could go through only by kneeling, and with great difficulty. The point of this "interpretation" is that a camel could in fact go through the "Needle's Eye." The trouble with this "exegesis," however, is that it is simply not true. There never was such a gate in Jerusalem at any time in its history. The earliest known "evidence" for that idea is found in the eleventh century (!), in a commentary by a Greek churchman named Theophylact, who had the same difficulty with the text that we do. After all, it is impossible for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, and that was precisely Jesus' point. It is impossible for one who trusts in riches to enter the Kingdom. It takes a miracle for a rich person to get saved, which is quite the point of what follows: "All things are possible with God."