The divine drama and God's upside down logic (Some great quotes form Tim Gombis)

I am reading Tim Gombis' The Drama of Ephesians. Here are some really good quotes.

"[B]ecause we are not the only actors on the cosmic stage and because the powers and authorities who rule the present evil age are intimately bound up with cultures in every part of the world, skillful and faithful performance of the drama of God's redemption is necessarily going to involve our being cultural critics. Culture is not neutral, and the various, multifaceted, complex and subtle ways of life and thought that are up and running in our culture at every level are perverted on some way by the fallen and malignant powers and authorities." (p 32)

"God defeats the powers through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is a radically subversive way of doing things. The cross turns everything on its head - God wins by losing; the powers lose by winning. The powers' triumph over Christ on the cross was their own defeat; and Christ's defeat won him victory." (p 88)

"This is radically subversive of the normal way of doing things. According to corrupted social logic of how things work in the world, we get things done by winning or by dominating others. We typically manipulate situations to bring about certain ends and goals. We win by winning. We triumph by triumphing. If that means that there are losers or that we have to step on people as we advance our goals, so be it. We win in personal encounters through power moves and intimations. We must dominate others, grab for power and exploit the weak.

But this is not God's way. God does not act according to the conventions of perverted human imagining. God comes in weakness, and his logic is upside down if we look at it in human terms. Jesus speaks from this logic when he says that the one who seeks to save his life will lose it and the one who loses his life will save it (Mk 8:35). Elsewhere, Paul draws out this subversive way that God works when he says that God's way of working is foreign to the power-hungry cosmic rulers. In 1 Corinthians 2:8, he says that if the rulers of this age had understood God's upside-down logic, God's wisdom of working his power through weakness, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory..." (p 88)

"Ephesians is not a doctrinal treatise in the scholastic sense of that term. It is, rather, a drama in which Paul portrays the powerful, reality-altering, cosmic-transforming acts of God in Christ to redeem God's world and save God's people for the glory of his name." (15)

On Ephesians 4:15, most English translations have "speaking the truth in love". But Gombis thinks that "Paul uses it [ie. the Greek word for "truth"] in a verbal sense, indicating that truth is something that the church is to do, not just to know and to speak." Then Gombis uses 4:20-21 to show that "Paul is referring to Jesus' life as the master performance of the truth and the church's task of studying Jesus' life - his words, his actions, his way with people. Studying Jesus, according to Paul, gives us wisdom as we set about to perform the drama of the gospel." (p 16)