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Missing Lenses: How reading scripture with the first century church can help us find our lost identity
"Challenging, unsettling and infuriating, Dr. Holland's tour de force cannot be ignored."
Dr Peter Head, University of Cambridge, UK.
What if we've been reading scripture the wrong way?
In the individualistic West, it is commonly assumed the Bible is about me and my relationship with God when, as many now agree, it is addressed primarily to the believing community. Written for the non-academic reader, in this updated version of his earlier book, Contours of Pauline Theology, Tom Holland makes a compelling case that in losing this emphasis, critical aspects of the community's central role in God's plan for humanity were inadvertently pushed into the background. This has caused us to not only misread key texts but also to experience far less than what scripture promises regarding our life as a Spirit-filled people.
Holland shows how recovering the communal, Hebraic mindset of the New Testament writers and the Passover-New Exodus storyline on which they relied can help us see scripture, our life together in Christ, and our identity as individuals in an amazing new light!
"Missing Lenses offers non-specialist biblical readers a concisely written, yet amazingly informative text from an evangelical, Reformed perspective concerning a major issue in New Testament Studies: the recovery of the corporate, Hebraic backdrop under-girding earliest Christian thought. Serious Bible study participants from many traditions will enjoy engaging with this volume."
Dr Florence Gillman, University of San Diego, CA, USA.
Dr Peter Head, University of Cambridge, UK.
What if we've been reading scripture the wrong way?
In the individualistic West, it is commonly assumed the Bible is about me and my relationship with God when, as many now agree, it is addressed primarily to the believing community. Written for the non-academic reader, in this updated version of his earlier book, Contours of Pauline Theology, Tom Holland makes a compelling case that in losing this emphasis, critical aspects of the community's central role in God's plan for humanity were inadvertently pushed into the background. This has caused us to not only misread key texts but also to experience far less than what scripture promises regarding our life as a Spirit-filled people.
Holland shows how recovering the communal, Hebraic mindset of the New Testament writers and the Passover-New Exodus storyline on which they relied can help us see scripture, our life together in Christ, and our identity as individuals in an amazing new light!
"Missing Lenses offers non-specialist biblical readers a concisely written, yet amazingly informative text from an evangelical, Reformed perspective concerning a major issue in New Testament Studies: the recovery of the corporate, Hebraic backdrop under-girding earliest Christian thought. Serious Bible study participants from many traditions will enjoy engaging with this volume."
Dr Florence Gillman, University of San Diego, CA, USA.
- GenresTheology
484 pages, Paperback
Published June 6, 2020
About the author
Tom Holland
16 books5 followersTom Holland is a lecturer at the Wales Evangelical School of Theology.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 19, 2020
Whenever someone asks me what I think of N. T. Wright, it’s going to be more than a one sentence answer. I’m going to speak about how I appreciate his scholarship, mention his superb writing skills, and finish with some specific cautions about how I don’t follow many of his conclusions, specifically when it comes to Paul’s theology. I have often wished for someone who could present the storyline of the Bible in the same compelling manner but without the need for so many caveats.
Then I encountered Tom Holland’s work. He might be hard to find because he shares a name with Marvel’s latest rendition of Spiderman and with an ancient historian, but Holland is one of England’s best kept secrets. Holland’s latest book, Missing Lenses, is a lay-level treatment of his more academic work, Contours of Pauline Theology (Mentor: 2010). Missing Lenses is divided into three parts; part 1 covers the Hebrew background of the New Testament, part 2 focuses on the corporate lens in which the Bible is read, and part 3 addresses what Holland calls the “Passover lens.”
Certainly, with all of Holland’s bold claims, readers will not follow him in every jot and tittle of his interpretation. Nevertheless, I want to stand up and cheer when I see an argument for interpreting the Bible not with Western eyes but with eyes firmly fixed on the story of the Bible itself. Furthermore, Holland is clear without being dry, and strongly opinionated while providing necessary caveats. Perhaps next time someone asks me what I think of N. T. Wright, I will first introduce that person to the work of Tom Holland.
See my full review on Books at a Glance: https://www.booksataglance.com/book-r...
Then I encountered Tom Holland’s work. He might be hard to find because he shares a name with Marvel’s latest rendition of Spiderman and with an ancient historian, but Holland is one of England’s best kept secrets. Holland’s latest book, Missing Lenses, is a lay-level treatment of his more academic work, Contours of Pauline Theology (Mentor: 2010). Missing Lenses is divided into three parts; part 1 covers the Hebrew background of the New Testament, part 2 focuses on the corporate lens in which the Bible is read, and part 3 addresses what Holland calls the “Passover lens.”
Certainly, with all of Holland’s bold claims, readers will not follow him in every jot and tittle of his interpretation. Nevertheless, I want to stand up and cheer when I see an argument for interpreting the Bible not with Western eyes but with eyes firmly fixed on the story of the Bible itself. Furthermore, Holland is clear without being dry, and strongly opinionated while providing necessary caveats. Perhaps next time someone asks me what I think of N. T. Wright, I will first introduce that person to the work of Tom Holland.
See my full review on Books at a Glance: https://www.booksataglance.com/book-r...
August 16, 2019
What does it mean that we were buried with Christ in our baptism (Rom 6:4)? Or that our baptism freed us from sin (Rom 6:6-7)? These verses have caused me trouble over the years and I’m sure I’m not alone. Does Paul say that baptism is required for salvation? Or are the unbaptised saved but not freed from sin? Usually the answer goes something like this: when you believed in Jesus, you died to sin and were raised to new life, like Jesus, and your baptism at church symbolizes that reality. But what if our radical individualism has caused us two miss something massive in these verses? In Missing Lenses, Tom Holland thinks that we approach verses like this with a wrong perspective that quickly leads us astray. Holland wants nothing less than to reshape how we read scripture and think about our relationship to Christ and his body.
MISSING LENSES
The book is divided into three parts. Part one recovers the Hebraic backdrop to Paul’s thought. It is here that Holland wants to correct four errors that have led the academy and the church astray. The first error is that the early church abandoned its Jewish heritage due to Gentile influx. The second error—often an overreaction to the first—is that first-century Jewish literature is the key to understanding the NT. Rather, the OT is the key to understanding the NT. The third error is that understanding Greek culture is the key to understanding the NT. No, while Greek language was used, the ideas are thoroughly Jewish. The fourth error is to miss the importance of context for understanding a word’s meaning. So what context is appropriate for understanding the NT? In contrast, Holland finds the answer in the storyline of the OT, particularly its expectation of a New Exodus through a new David.
Part two takes a deep dive into the concept of corporate solidarity. This section largely revolves around re-thinking Romans 5-8. The ideas in this section are many and complex, so adequate summary is impossible. However, the essence of Holland’s argument is that, building upon the New Exodus paradigm, “these passages should be read consistently from a corporate perspective first before making individual application” (p89). For example, as Israel was enslaved to Egypt, so all humanity is enslaved to Sin (Satan). As all Israel was baptized into Moses in the Exodus, the whole church was baptized into Jesus in his death and resurrection. Paul’s emphasis is less on individuals being mapped to Jesus’ experience of death and resurrection; rather, Jesus led the entire church—present and future—through the waters of death and new life, and individuals who believe join that community. This is what Paul means in Romans 6. The passage is not about the individual and their baptism in water, but the rebirth of church in the New Exodus from slavery to Sin. Humans have been in a covenant with death, and only death itself will free them from it. This shift from individual to community results in a radical re-reading of Romans and numerous striking insights along the way.
While the New Exodus changes how we think about community and the individual, part three develops how it affects how we think of salvation. The New Exodus paradigm affects how we think about righteousness, justification, atonement and more. For Holland, Christ’s death should be primarily read through the Passover lens. That is, Christ’s work is fundamentally not an atonement for sin but a redemption from slavery. Justification, then, is less a law-court or accounting image; it is about deliverance and acceptance. Theories of the atonement and debates about justification have gone astray when they neglect the New Exodus background of the NT.
A PROFOUND RE-THINKING OF MAJOR BIBLICAL CONCEPTS
As to the ideas within Missing Lenses, I must admit that I am still processing. With some books, it is easy to make critiques. Perhaps the author is inconsistent or works from a radically different starting point. However, I agree so much with Holland’s foundations that critique is difficult, despite how radically different his exegesis is. Since his exegetical insights are so numerous and profound, it will take significant time to sift through them all.
Most Christians have likely encountered the idea that we moderns are far more individualistic than our biblical forefathers. Many, too, have been told of the importance of the New Exodus theme in the OT. However, no one more than Holland has allowed these insights to radically reshape the interpretation of scripture with such fruitful results.
CONCLUSION
Missing Lenses is a more user-friendly re-presentation—with the help of Ann Weaver—of Tom Holland’s earlier Contours of Pauline Theology. Given that Contous is 392, and Missing Lenses is 420, this is a little ironic. The size is due somewhat to the fact that longer explanations are needed to make up for a lack of non-academic terminology and the need to explain complex ideas and scholarly debates to non-academic readers. In other words, the argumentation of Missing Lenses is no less rigorous than that of an academic book. It reads like a translation of complicated ideas into more readable prose, but not necessarily a re-presentation of those ideas for a popular audience. In this way, Missing Lenses finds itself in a slightly awkward position. Academic readers like myself will wish for greater concision, footnotes, less detailed explanations, and more engagement with scholarship. Non-academic readers—the intended readers—will likely wish for greater concision, less detail, simpler explanations, the bottom line, and more practical relevance. However, those who persevere will be richly rewarded with fresh ideas and a great appreciation for the corporate nature of Christianity, the work of Christ, and how the NT is connected to the OT with greater seamlessness than many realize. For me, a good book inspires profound thought and causes me to dig back into the biblical text. Missing Lenses certainly matches that criteria! This book is well worth the effort.
Tom Holland graciously provided me with a copy of this book, but did not request a positive review.
MISSING LENSES
The book is divided into three parts. Part one recovers the Hebraic backdrop to Paul’s thought. It is here that Holland wants to correct four errors that have led the academy and the church astray. The first error is that the early church abandoned its Jewish heritage due to Gentile influx. The second error—often an overreaction to the first—is that first-century Jewish literature is the key to understanding the NT. Rather, the OT is the key to understanding the NT. The third error is that understanding Greek culture is the key to understanding the NT. No, while Greek language was used, the ideas are thoroughly Jewish. The fourth error is to miss the importance of context for understanding a word’s meaning. So what context is appropriate for understanding the NT? In contrast, Holland finds the answer in the storyline of the OT, particularly its expectation of a New Exodus through a new David.
Part two takes a deep dive into the concept of corporate solidarity. This section largely revolves around re-thinking Romans 5-8. The ideas in this section are many and complex, so adequate summary is impossible. However, the essence of Holland’s argument is that, building upon the New Exodus paradigm, “these passages should be read consistently from a corporate perspective first before making individual application” (p89). For example, as Israel was enslaved to Egypt, so all humanity is enslaved to Sin (Satan). As all Israel was baptized into Moses in the Exodus, the whole church was baptized into Jesus in his death and resurrection. Paul’s emphasis is less on individuals being mapped to Jesus’ experience of death and resurrection; rather, Jesus led the entire church—present and future—through the waters of death and new life, and individuals who believe join that community. This is what Paul means in Romans 6. The passage is not about the individual and their baptism in water, but the rebirth of church in the New Exodus from slavery to Sin. Humans have been in a covenant with death, and only death itself will free them from it. This shift from individual to community results in a radical re-reading of Romans and numerous striking insights along the way.
While the New Exodus changes how we think about community and the individual, part three develops how it affects how we think of salvation. The New Exodus paradigm affects how we think about righteousness, justification, atonement and more. For Holland, Christ’s death should be primarily read through the Passover lens. That is, Christ’s work is fundamentally not an atonement for sin but a redemption from slavery. Justification, then, is less a law-court or accounting image; it is about deliverance and acceptance. Theories of the atonement and debates about justification have gone astray when they neglect the New Exodus background of the NT.
A PROFOUND RE-THINKING OF MAJOR BIBLICAL CONCEPTS
As to the ideas within Missing Lenses, I must admit that I am still processing. With some books, it is easy to make critiques. Perhaps the author is inconsistent or works from a radically different starting point. However, I agree so much with Holland’s foundations that critique is difficult, despite how radically different his exegesis is. Since his exegetical insights are so numerous and profound, it will take significant time to sift through them all.
Most Christians have likely encountered the idea that we moderns are far more individualistic than our biblical forefathers. Many, too, have been told of the importance of the New Exodus theme in the OT. However, no one more than Holland has allowed these insights to radically reshape the interpretation of scripture with such fruitful results.
CONCLUSION
Missing Lenses is a more user-friendly re-presentation—with the help of Ann Weaver—of Tom Holland’s earlier Contours of Pauline Theology. Given that Contous is 392, and Missing Lenses is 420, this is a little ironic. The size is due somewhat to the fact that longer explanations are needed to make up for a lack of non-academic terminology and the need to explain complex ideas and scholarly debates to non-academic readers. In other words, the argumentation of Missing Lenses is no less rigorous than that of an academic book. It reads like a translation of complicated ideas into more readable prose, but not necessarily a re-presentation of those ideas for a popular audience. In this way, Missing Lenses finds itself in a slightly awkward position. Academic readers like myself will wish for greater concision, footnotes, less detailed explanations, and more engagement with scholarship. Non-academic readers—the intended readers—will likely wish for greater concision, less detail, simpler explanations, the bottom line, and more practical relevance. However, those who persevere will be richly rewarded with fresh ideas and a great appreciation for the corporate nature of Christianity, the work of Christ, and how the NT is connected to the OT with greater seamlessness than many realize. For me, a good book inspires profound thought and causes me to dig back into the biblical text. Missing Lenses certainly matches that criteria! This book is well worth the effort.
Tom Holland graciously provided me with a copy of this book, but did not request a positive review.
June 27, 2020
Tom Holland published “Contours of Pauline Theology” in 2004, a scholarly and acclaimed work that helped reorient thinking on Paul the Apostle, and indeed the New Testament as a whole to a more biblical basis. Not long afterwards Ann Weaver read the book while studying for her MTh at what is now Union School of Theology, where the author was on staff. As she testifies, she found it to be a profound blessing personally but she also longed that its radical, refreshing and biblical message could inform the churches back home in America. The rest is history. Ann used her skills as a writer to carefully explain theological terms and concepts in a way that the intelligent “person in the pew” could understand. This was an arduous and sacrificial task, but the result is this gem: “Missing Lenses”.
Such bold claims! But aren’t they dangerous? Some would say, surely nearly 2,000 years on there is nothing new we can learn that is not heretical. But Tom Holland has the highest view of scripture. Early on in his study he was perplexed when Evangelical scholars were content with the use of “set free” in Romans 6: 7 when the Greek word used is translated as “justified” every other time it appears in the New Testament.
Tom Holland was one of the first of a growing number of scholars to see that we in the West have been reading the New Testament as a Greek rather than a Jewish text. Though the language was Greek, the thinking behind it was Hebraic and solidly rooted in the Old Testament. So what characterises a Greek mindset? It is individualistic and influenced by philosophers like Plato. The New Testament was written by Jews except for Luke. Jewish thought is communal. The epistles were largely written to churches. The first hearers would have listened in their congregations and the lessons learned would have firstly been as they affected the gathered church, and only then the individual. We today have our own Bibles and often read them by ourselves and our default setting is to put ourselves in the text and forget about the church. We also assume terms such as temple of the Holy Spirit, old and new man refer to us individually when they refer to the church and communities of the unredeemed and redeemed respectively.
What Tom Holland (with the help of Ann Weaver) is doing is removing the Greek overlay on our “lenses”. It wasn’t there originally but once the Christian church became largely Gentile from the second and third centuries, Greco-Roman concepts started to obscure the message. Today, we are used to redemption being explained by reference to the Roman slave market. But the original hearers instinctively would have gone to the Exodus event in the Old Testament. Justification would not have been illustrated by reference to the Roman law court but entry into God’s covenant.
The author thrillingly shows the unity of the whole of Scripture within the “Paschal New Exodus “ motif. The Egyptian and Babylonian Exoduses are used by Isaiah and others to point forward to the Messiah and the New Covenant community. The Passover is key in understanding the work of Christ, dying as the First Born for his people. At the Transfiguration Jesus referred to his coming Exodus: his death, resurrection and ascension. Ezekiel 45 prophesied the merging of the Day of Atonement and the Passover and they are fulfilled at Calvary. Throughout the Old and New Testament marital imagery underscores God’s relationship with Israel / the Church.
I am convinced that “Missing Lenses” can be a real blessing to the Church in the West. It may well help remove harmful introspection and promote a humble, confident and thankful spirit among the churches.
Such bold claims! But aren’t they dangerous? Some would say, surely nearly 2,000 years on there is nothing new we can learn that is not heretical. But Tom Holland has the highest view of scripture. Early on in his study he was perplexed when Evangelical scholars were content with the use of “set free” in Romans 6: 7 when the Greek word used is translated as “justified” every other time it appears in the New Testament.
Tom Holland was one of the first of a growing number of scholars to see that we in the West have been reading the New Testament as a Greek rather than a Jewish text. Though the language was Greek, the thinking behind it was Hebraic and solidly rooted in the Old Testament. So what characterises a Greek mindset? It is individualistic and influenced by philosophers like Plato. The New Testament was written by Jews except for Luke. Jewish thought is communal. The epistles were largely written to churches. The first hearers would have listened in their congregations and the lessons learned would have firstly been as they affected the gathered church, and only then the individual. We today have our own Bibles and often read them by ourselves and our default setting is to put ourselves in the text and forget about the church. We also assume terms such as temple of the Holy Spirit, old and new man refer to us individually when they refer to the church and communities of the unredeemed and redeemed respectively.
What Tom Holland (with the help of Ann Weaver) is doing is removing the Greek overlay on our “lenses”. It wasn’t there originally but once the Christian church became largely Gentile from the second and third centuries, Greco-Roman concepts started to obscure the message. Today, we are used to redemption being explained by reference to the Roman slave market. But the original hearers instinctively would have gone to the Exodus event in the Old Testament. Justification would not have been illustrated by reference to the Roman law court but entry into God’s covenant.
The author thrillingly shows the unity of the whole of Scripture within the “Paschal New Exodus “ motif. The Egyptian and Babylonian Exoduses are used by Isaiah and others to point forward to the Messiah and the New Covenant community. The Passover is key in understanding the work of Christ, dying as the First Born for his people. At the Transfiguration Jesus referred to his coming Exodus: his death, resurrection and ascension. Ezekiel 45 prophesied the merging of the Day of Atonement and the Passover and they are fulfilled at Calvary. Throughout the Old and New Testament marital imagery underscores God’s relationship with Israel / the Church.
I am convinced that “Missing Lenses” can be a real blessing to the Church in the West. It may well help remove harmful introspection and promote a humble, confident and thankful spirit among the churches.
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