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Hermeneutics

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Biblical Interpretation in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library


The apostle reminds us, Lord God, how important it is to be workers who do not need to be ashamed as we rightly interpret the Word of God. To that end we pray that this seminar will be useful. For Christ’s sake, amen.

The outline that was provided for you does not lay out the time distribution. I will spend more time on the biblical trajectories, biblical theology, and more time on interpreting literary genre and that sort of thing. I’m going to focus on two or three issues, but before I do so, I want to cast the net much more broadly. I want to paint a rather broad picture for those who really haven’t been exposed to the discipline of hermeneutics at all. For those of you who have been, this is merely by way of review.

In this regard, then, it is useful to distinguish between what is now often called classical hermeneutics and the hermeneutics of the turn to the subject. Let me explain both of those terms so you see how we’ve gotten to where we are. Classical hermeneutics is not referred to hermeneutics of the ancient world classics, the Greco-Roman world, but to the hermeneutics generated this side of the Reformation and the Enlightenment.

At the risk of caricature, it pictures me, the knower, in the endeavor to understand it, the text. There is classic distinction between the I, the subject, and the thing to be known. In Enlightenment hermeneutics, in Enlightenment interpretation, there is no doubt in most people’s mind that we can know things. We can know things truly, and the trick is to understand what those things are and what rules apply, what principles apply, in order to understand them.

Books like Bernard Ramm’s Protestant Biblical Interpretation fall into that sort of camp, and it is still worth reading. If you’ve never read anything on classical hermeneutics, it’s still well worthwhile reading those books, and they will tell you the importance of learning the original languages, for example. They will tell you something about word studies but warn you against merely studying words, but make sure you understand syntax.

They will have entire sections on various literary forms. What do you do with parables? How do you understand a lament? They will work through the importance of context. We need different contexts. We need the context of a sentence or a paragraph, the context of a book, a corpus, the context of the entire Canon. They’ll wrestle with things like the analogia fidei, the analogy of the faith, about which I’ll say more later.

All of this is under the assumption that there is something out there in the text to be known, and if only I apply the right rules, the right principles, the right hermeneutics, the right principles of interpretation, I can know it. In the worst cases, it can generate a certain kind of ahistorical arrogance. I don’t know what else to call it.

The assumption is that if I can understand the Word of God for myself with the right principles of interpretation operating, then clearly I don’t have to spend a whole lot of time studying the history of interpretation. In other words, if I can do the kind of work Irenaeus or Saint Augustine or John Calvin did, what do I have to study Calvin, Irenaeus, and Augustine for? Why don’t we just study the Bible?

The wholesome bit of that is that you are then going back to the first text. You are going back to Scripture. That’s right. On the other hand, the assumption that there is nothing to be learned by other interpreters has more than a little touch of arrogance to it. As we shall see in due course, it also fails to wrestle with the hard fact that our own cultural and historical locatedness does, to some extent, shape the way we interpret Scripture.

I know that can be pushed too far, but let’s take an easy example or two. Some of my colleagues and I are putting together an organization in North America that we hope will do some good. In this connection, one of the things we did was put together a confessional statement of what we believe as common ground.

The statement has many, many, many points of continuity with classic confessional statements from the past, but some of us were reflecting that if we lived in Africa we would be including sections on demonology and ancestor worship. In fact, we included sections on the limitations of postmodern knowledge and things like that. Does that mean the Africans don’t need to know these things and I don’t need to know anything about ancestor worship?

A kinder reading would simply be that our own cultural locatedness necessarily affects what we think is important, how we integrate things, where we perceive the center to be, and so forth. Classical hermeneutics didn’t think so much along those lines. There was an inevitable understanding amongst the best classical interpreters that, after all, we are limited in our knowledge. We don’t know things as we ought to know about them. After all, God knows everything, and so on.

Yet at the same time, there was an assumption that if you get your hermeneutics right, your principles of interpretation right, then you do not really have to spend a whole lot of time either on your own cultural location or on understanding the history of interpretation in the past. You can go right to the source, drink deeply from the wellsprings of life, and spend your time there.

The strength of this period of hermeneutics is the attractive commitment to understanding the Scriptures themselves without endless footnotes about our own limitations and our own cultural locatedness and our own finiteness. That would be attractive, and I want to come back and say some positive things about that in due course. On the other hand, it is troubling to think just how naÔve some of it could be.

The turn to the subject, then, is a general label that has covered many different movements. Let’s begin with that which was fairly common in Germany about 60 to 80 years ago in that spread, and then take us through the path toward existentialism, and then ultimately postmodern interpretations to where we are today.

In the classic understanding of interpretation, there is the text, and I am the inquirer. I address the text with certain questions, and the text speaks back to me. So it’s a straight line in and a straight line back. With the turn to the subject, the subject becomes not simply a knower but a participant in what now becomes a hermeneutical process, even more a hermeneutical circle, because when I ask questions of the text, they are not neutral questions. They are questions that reflect who I am.

When I hit the text, therefore, with my questions, it’s not as if it were a direct hit but sort of a glancing blow that is affected by the fact that my questions are themselves inevitably slanted. They are a reflection of where I’m coming from, and, therefore, the answer I hear back is the kind of thing I’m open to hearing.

For about 10 years, I worked part time with the World Evangelical Fellowship, and part of my job was to collect theologians from around the world, all with a high view of Scripture, to work on a variety of subjects. We wrote papers together and then sent them out, and everybody was supposed to read them. Then we gathered together in one place and criticized each other’s papers.

Then the criticisms were reincorporated into the next draft, and they all came back to me, I edited them, and out came a book. We did this five times, one book every two years. What was so interesting in this regard, to get these people into the room together, was to recognize with what different perspectives they came.

It wasn’t simply a question of how they greeted each other, although even that was amusing. The Germans would come in and shake everybody’s hand. The Indians would come in with a great deal of this, and the Japanese would come in with a bow and their hands straight, but how far down you bow depends on who has more money, who’s older, who has more degrees, who has a more prestigious job, and I never remember all those rules.

Then the Latins would come in. “Brother!” Mwah! I was brought up in French Canada. I can manage that, but if you have an Arab Christian coming in, it’s usually three kisses, and I never do remember which cheek to start with. It gets a little nerve-racking when you get really close and don’t know whether you’re going to go this way or that way.

I shall not forget the time when Pablo Perez from Mexico descended on an Englishman, who shall remain nameless, who was standing in the corner somewhat intimidated by all this with his hands behind his back in his wonderful Tweed coat. Pablo, who is about 300 pounds, was descending on him with his arms stretched, ready to embrace him. “Brother!” The Englishman looked up and said, “Have we been introduced?”

Then when the discussion itself began.… Because I was always in the chair, I was trying to get everybody to participate, and inevitably some were very, very forceful and others were quite withdrawn and respectful. In a shame culture, you’re not supposed to say anything that embarrasses anybody, so the Japanese would say, “I would like to suggest that it might be possible to wonder if perhaps the blessed apostle Paul might have been saying such-and-such.”

Then the Northern European response would be, “That’s just absolutely ridiculous.” That’s before you got to the substance. When you got to the substance, what was so interesting was that the Africans we had amongst us read Pauline structures again and again in terms of community. The Anglos read Pauline structures again and again in terms of individualism, and neither side actually even contemplated the other side.

It took a wrenching self-examination to wonder, “Do I have this wrong?” It was very wholesome in that context to recognize that there might be another paradigm that you bring to this sort of discussion that forces you to think in terms of, “What did the apostle really mean here?” In other words, you’re now approaching recognizing not only that your questions are shaped by who you are but what you can hear is shaped by who you are.

Once you have heard, that has subtly changed you, so when you ask your next round of questions, what you hear the next time is subtly altered as well. Now instead of having a direct line in and a direct line back, you have the beginnings of what came to be called the hermeneutical circle. Now in the worst case, in the most extreme case, the hermeneutical circle goes on and on, round and round, and you can never say what the text means.

You know me well enough to know that’s not where I’m going to end up, but on the other hand, it is important to see that there is something significant to that hermeneutical circle. We are finite creatures. So from various points of view in Western Europe and beyond, people started facing this turn to the subject and asking what it meant. In Germany, the questions were asked out of a hermeneutical framework. In France, they were asked out of a linguistic framework.

In North America, especially, they were asked of a social science framework. In other words, in North America you’re asking these questions, “What is it in your social background, in your context, that forces you to think along these sorts of lines? The explanations are given in terms of a social science set of frameworks.

In France (to some extent Spain, but especially France), things are tied to the linguistic term, and that eventually generates people like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and people of that order, whereas in Germany, initially it produced people like Ebeling and Fuchs.

All of these people then tried to generate different ways of coming to grips with these tensions. Some of them took it so far as to suggest, in effect, that there is no escape from the hermeneutical circle. You just do go round and round and round, and you cannot speak properly of truth. Others would try to find some way to leave some space for talking about truth that has some reality beyond merely the linguistic formulation of it.

In the case of the Germans, first of all, the aim of the exercise for came to be not understanding the it that was there while you are the subject, but the aim of the exercise came to be called Sprachereignis language event. You’re reading the text, and something like a light comes on. There is a kind of illumination in the text that it almost, as it were, interprets you.

You think you’re interpreting the text, but the text comes on and almost interprets you. Or Wortgeschenhen, a word event, a word happening that takes place in your life. There’s some genuine illumination that takes place at that point, not so much in terms of simply understanding the text but understanding life and experience and the interpretive process or some insight the text gives you because you’re now in this hermeneutical circle.

That itself then generated further discussions. The hermeneutical circle has you going round and round and round, but people pointed out that when you start studying any particular discipline, whether it’s biblical theology or not, you start with  (22:09), but with time you do start to cycle toward something more and better than you once had. Isn’t that the case?

Even in an elementary subject like Greek, when you first start studying Greek, boy, that’s hard. You start reciting it and reciting it and reciting it, and then you go back and recite it some more, and so on. It’s all very elementary, but it’s hard memorizing all that stuff.

After you’re in it six months, all those basic paradigms … you know it cold. You don’t even think about it anymore. After you’ve done two years of it, then even participles seem pretty easy, and the me verbs are a breeze. After you’ve been reading Greek fluently for three or four years and you really enjoy it, you’re reading actually thinking in Greek, and you are no longer even having to do the translation. Your actual reading of the text is in the Greek text.

At the seminary where I teach, we try to get our Greek students to the place where they can not simply work through a text painfully word by word, word by word, with a lexicon not too far away, but even if their Greek is not all that good yet, after they’ve read it and can parse it and see what the syntax is like, to read it and reread it and reread it and reread it until it’s a part of them and they begin to think in Greek. What has happened there?

That does not yet mean that the person who is reading the text knows everything there is to know about Greek. Even someone from Greece doesn’t know all there is to know about Greek. There’s always more to learn. On the other hand, there is transparently progress toward greater knowledge. In other words, when you actually come to the reality of life, you’re not going round and round and round in a circle where there’s no progress in any sense.

So people started speaking not so much of a hermeneutical circle but of a hermeneutical spiral, that you’re heading in toward the subject, as it were, so that although you never, ever hit the thing finally, you can approach things in some significant way. To use an example that was developed out of the philosophy of science.… This has been adapted by a number of people.

If this is an X/Y axis and this measures time and this measures distance from reality, then if you have a child’s understanding of something or other.… The child is still only, let’s say, age 6, and his understanding is a long way from reality, but as that child becomes 12 or 18 or 22 or whatever, then in all kinds of ways that child’s understanding becomes closer and closer to that reality. We know that to be the case.

That child may, at the age of 36, embark on learning Russian and epistemologically be right back here again, but with time, gradually the line moves down again. But it’s an asymptotic approach. For those of you who are mathematically challenged, there is a formula for this, but what it really means, in effect, is you get closer and closer and closer to reality, but you never touch the line. Even 50 billion years into eternity, you will not be omniscient. You will never be omniscient. Your knowledge, therefore, is always, on this model, asymptotic knowledge.

Absolute knowledge belongs only to omniscience, but that reminds us that sometimes.… Now you move into more recent times. Even postmodernism now is looking extremely dated, but in the strong postmodern turn that insists again and again that because we cannot know things absolutely, therefore we cannot really be said to know them, the model is just too strong. It’s useful today to distinguish between hard postmodernism and soft postmodernism.

In hard postmodernism, you keep insisting that the only way you can be said to know something is if you know it exhaustively, truly, objectively, absolutely, and because you cannot ever know that, since you’re finite, therefore you cannot ever be said really to know it. You can know within your own cultural framework. There is cultural truth. There is truth to you. There is truth as you perceive it, but objective truth? You can’t have it, so stop talking about it. That’s hard postmodernism.

The reason it’s hard is because it has set the criterion at omniscience. It has said, in effect, that unless you know what only God can know, you can’t know God. There is a soft postmodernism that recognizes our cultural locatedness but which, nevertheless, insists there is a kind of asymptotic approach to knowledge. There is an appropriate way of talking about human knowledge. Don’t pretend it’s knowledge only God has.

That’s why the Bible can dare to say things like, “I have written to you, Theophilus, that you may know the certainty of the things you were …” That’s not the certainty only God has. For that you would have to be God. Or “These things I have written to you who believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, that you may know …” In other words, the Bible has no difficulty at all talking pretty bluntly about knowledge, but when it does so, it’s assumption everywhere, so we’re still not God. We don’t have omniscient knowledge.

Once you make that caveat and leave a space for this asymptotic approach, then there is some sense in which you can surely know some things. If you allow that amount of space, then you have space also for talking about knowing what Scripture means, knowing what Scripture is saying, knowing the truth of what a passage says while still insisting very strongly that you don’t know it as God knows it.

In principle, your knowledge is revisable because you may get more information. You may get more light. But still, there are some things you can know very strongly about the Bible and other things you will not know nearly so well. In other words, there is also now the question of degrees of certainty and how much you know about different books and different doctrines, different truths, different emphases in Scripture.

There are degrees of sophistication in knowledge, as soon as you recognize that the standard for human knowledge cannot be absolute. You can never be God. Now let me stop there for discussion before I go on to things that are more practically oriented. Questions? Comments? Personal abuse?

Male: Jesus said once that he does not know the hour. Based on the asymptotic discussion, I don’t know if you read or wrote anything about that.

Don Carson: I did write something about it in my Matthew commentary, but it is a very difficult passage. Strictly speaking, it doesn’t belong tightly to our topic here, except insofar as the incarnation belongs to our topic here. We are really distinguishing between what God knows and what human beings know. To confess that Jesus is God is to confess that he has the attributes of God. One of the attributes of God is omniscience, so what is Jesus doing making that sort of confession?

There is a sense in which that utterance of Jesus is of a larger piece. When Jesus is in Jerusalem, he’s not in Jericho, yet God is omnipresent. “How shall I escape from your Spirit? If I fly on the wings of the dawn, you are there. If I descend to the depths of Sheol, you are there.” Moreover, the God of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps, and there’s Jesus having a snooze in the back of a boat. You start going through all of these sorts of things, and you are very quickly into the mystery of the incarnation.

Historically, there have been two ways within an orthodox framework of trying to handle that. Both have problems, but both give some indication of where you need to head. The one sort of approach is well seen in Benjamin B. Warfield’s book on Christology. It’s still worth reading, even though it’s now 120 years old.

At the risk of caricature, he goes through the gospel accounts and starts suggesting, “This bit reflects Christ’s divine nature. This bit reflects Christ’s human nature.” The difficulty remains, however, how you put those together into one person. The danger of that sort of approach is that it reflects a kind of schizophrenic Christ. That’s the nature of it. On the other hand, there is something to it. Otherwise, you could never make claims for his deity either, functionally.

The other approach is some sort of reliance on what’s called kenotic theory, which language is drawn from Philippians, chapter 2. Strictly speaking, that text does not say that the one who was equal with God emptied himself of something. The Greek simply says he emptied himself, and the expression almost certainly simply means, to use a modern paraphrase in English, he made himself a nobody.

Nevertheless, you can ask, as long as you’re not trying to derive it all from that passage, in what sense the eternal Son adapted himself, emptied himself, limited himself by becoming a human being, and how you answer that question puts you along a certain scale as well. If you say that he emptied himself of his deity, then Jesus Christ is no longer God. You might have his humanity, but you no longer have his deity. That’s pretty close to the approach of John A. T. Robinson.

Some have said he doesn’t empty himself of his deity, but he empties himself of the attributes of his deity. The difficulty with that is if you have an animal that looks like a horse, acts like a horse, smells like a horse, and has the attributes of a horse, you have a horse. You have an animal that loses all the attributes of a horse, and who knows what you have. It might be a chimpanzee.

Others say he emptied himself of the use of his divine attributes. That’s not quite right either, since transparently on occasion he does use divine attributes. The forgiving of sins with all the authority of God, for example, not in a derivative sense, is a divine attribute and is understood to be such. Nobody forgives sins but God alone, and rightly so. The question is rightly asked.

So some have said, “Well, what he abandons is the independent use of his divine attributes. He only uses them as his Father gives him sanction.” Well, there’s some truth to that. There’s a lot of evidence of that sort of thing in the gospel of John, for example, but if you push that too far, it sounds as if the Son was not subject to his Father’s sanction in eternity, and that’s not quite right either. And so on the discussion goes.

What you discover is that if you push far enough along those two axes, you see how you can begin to try to formulate how to handle a text like the one you mentioned, but at the end of the day, you are left with some degree of mystery about how the eternal God becomes a genuine human being too. But that’s a little farther afield than what we’re doing.

Male: Just so I understand before I ask my question, you were talking about the hermeneutical circle versus the spiral. The spiral, as I understand from what you’re saying, is when you read the text, the text affects you so that the next time you read the text you’re a little bit closer to the text. Would that be a good summary of it?

Don: Yeah.

Male: With that being the case, what would a hard postmodern.… Would he ever get beyond the circle, or where would he see himself?

Don: The hard is going round and round and round, but because he would argue that there is no fulcrum, no alternate point of reference, such that even if you were getting closer you could never know …

Male: Is he saying you have to know something exhaustively before you can actually know it?

Don: He would say you have to know something truly, and you don’t know it truly unless you do know it exhaustively. At a certain level of pragmatics, of course, any postmodern knows you can learn more of a language, but in terms of knowing things as they ultimately are in the universe or something like that, the whole point of that person’s hard postmodernism is, in fact, the recognition that we’re lost, in a sense, because there is no starting point. There is no fulcrum.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Some are and some aren’t. It’s polarized. In literature nowadays, people are actually making distinctions between.… They don’t all use the same terminology but what I call hard and soft postmodernism. In fact, in the emerging church stuff that I’ll do, I will argue that soft postmodernism actually comes through the back door to a chastened realism and hence expressions like critical realism today.

In other words, hard postmodernism pits postmodernism against modernism in very absolute categories. There are two quite different worlds. Once you take a soft postmodernism and a critical, chastened, humble Enlightenment modernism, actually you come to a very similar position epistemologically. I think that’s being recognized by a small but increasing number of people, both within and without the Christian camp. That’s not a uniquely Christian insight, but I think Christians have a vested interest in it.

Male: I was wondering. There’s a phrase that’s used in 2 Timothy 3 about two people who were always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth. How does that fit with what you said?

Don: What Paul is dealing with there is there is a form of study even of Christian things, biblical things, religious things, spiritual things, which somehow so repeatedly and regularly misses the center that even while people get more and more knowledge they don’t have it put together in any way that’s aligned faithfully with the gospel itself, which is Paul’s interest, obviously. It’s in the gospel itself. It’s not in abstract Christological questions.

Anybody who has been in pastoral ministry for a few years knows that this is the case. There are some people like that around, obviously. That actually introduces us to another set of dimensions I haven’t even mentioned here, and I’m not going to spend time on them in this seminar, although it’s not really fair to talk about hermeneutics for very long from a Christian point of view without mentioning these things.

First, there is a sense in which the Christian is actually more radical than most radical postmoderns. The most radical, the hardest postmodern keeps referring to our finitude, not having a fulcrum, but the Christian not only insists on our finitude but also insists on our moral obtuseness, our blindness, our lostness. In that sense, sometimes the university debates have rather cheekily suggested they’re not nearly radical enough.

That kind of lostness does show up again. If you’re long in pastoral ministry, you see people who cannot see things because of huge choices they’ve made in life. There’s a spiritual blindness that really does come to us. The second one, which flows out of that on the other side, is the peculiar role of the Holy Spirit in understanding as well. You still have to come to grips with 1 Timothy 2:14–15.

Again, I would love to go through those texts line by line and unpack them and the relative hermeneutics, but I just don’t have time in what I intend to do this afternoon. Clearly, those are things that take us way outside the debates I’ve introduced so far, but we can’t leave them aside in any detailed  (40:28).

The danger with them, of course, is they can very rapidly descend into another form of mere subjectivity. The trick to having a theological understanding of the role of the Holy Spirit in hermeneutics is not to make it an implicit appeal to subjectivity. You don’t want to do that. It has to be much more sophisticated. But that hasn’t been done and can’t be done.

Male: Isn’t there also radicalness in the Christian parallel to this blindness of the Christian? Isn’t there also radicalness of the Christian claim to truth? “Do the truth and you will know it.” That would be such an opposite radicalness on the Christian actually being there having grasping or even knowing.

Don: In some ways, that returns to the moral dimension again. But there’s a sense in which that also comes to in some forms of postmodern thought, in some forms of existentialist thought. They say that in the 60s in the Paris underground there was this graffiti that said, “To do is to be—Jean-Paul Sartre. To be is to do—Albert Camus. Do be do be do—Frank Sinatra.” What you’re describing is more along the line of Sartre.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Yes, but I guess we try to put that sort of framework into a theoretical understanding about it, but  (42:17).

Male: I was thinking about the asymptotic system you talked about. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”  (42:45)

Don: The question is does fully mean omniscient? I doubt that’s what the context is talking about. He draws a contrast in this age between seeing through a glass darkly ( (43:05) mirror was nothing like the quality of our mirrors) and the way God knows us. The point is God knows us directly and immediately as well as  (43:16).

All of our knowledge of God even now is mediated. It’s mediated by the Spirit. It’s mediated by the Word. Again and again, Scripture insists that because we live in an age of only inaugurated eschatology  (43:29) see Christ face to face. In other words, the fullness there, to me, is the fullness of the immediacy of perception rather than exhaustiveness, because there is so much in Scripture that does insist that we are finite images of God. There is no promise in Scripture that promises us omniscience of understanding.

It’s why, too, Christian thinkers have tried to show how even giving us Scripture as the Word of God involves  (44:04) on God’s part. What does it mean for God to dwell outside the created order, transcendent in that sense, above time and space, and yet talk to us in our limited structure?  (44:24) We shall never escape our finitude, but we shall escape the bands of sin with which  (44:33). So it seems to me that in that context the fullness has to be the immediacy versus the reflective nature  (44:44).

Now let me turn from these sorts of considerations to one subject of practical significance in understanding texts that we sometimes do not think sufficiently about. This is literary genre. How shall we cope with the differences of literary genre in Scripture? The fact of the matter is God has not given us a handbook to systematic theology. He has given us, instead, highly diverse books. Let me make some general remarks, and then we’ll pick up a handful of literary genres and say a few things about them.

First, the briefest of reflection discloses the importance of recognizing different literary genres in their contribution to the Canon and, therefore, to our understanding of the Canon. The most superficial reading gives us history, prose, poetry, lament, parable, fable, as in Jotham’s fable. It gives us letter. It gives us apocalyptic. It gives us many genres within genres. It gives us mashalim, proverbs, but the word mashalim covers a vast array of genres for us today, including proverb, riddle, enigmatic utterance, parable. The word can cover a vast range.

What does Paul mean when he says, “Which things are now  (46:36)”? What does he mean by  (46:38)? These are genre questions. In principle, we understand this when we look at different forms of literature in our own language, different forms of poetry in our own language. Let me remind you of one passage as an illustration. Jeremiah, chapter 20, beginning at verse 14.

“Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying, ‘A child is born to you—a son!’ May that man be like the towns the Lord overthrew without pity. May he hear wailing in the morning, a battle cry at noon. For he did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave, her womb enlarged forever. Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?”

If you’re a literalist, you might begin by observing that Jeremiah wants his mother to be eternally pregnant. You might observe further that Jeremiah wants this wretched man who brought his father the news of Jeremiah’s own birth to be overthrown like the towns the Lord overthrew without pity. Obviously, nobody is going to do that with a genre like this. This is a form of outraged personal lament.

There’s a lashing out against God in powerful images, but to try to take it at some crass literal level is just a huge mistake and actually not only misinterprets it but defangs it. It loses its power as  (48:33) If the text had simply said, “Jeremiah was outraged,” it would lose a huge amount. The outrage is described by what he said. Implicitly, we recognize those sorts of things all the time.

Second, some forms of literature are more congenial to one culture than another. Indeed, the ability to read most literary genres we come to grips with is culture driven. If you walk out of the hotel and see a piece of paper on the ground and you pick it up and in the top left-hand corner it has a date and underneath it has, “Dear John,” and then it has some paragraphs, what do you think you have in your hand?

You almost certainly assume right away, without even thinking about it consciously, that it’s a letter. You won’t think it’s a laundry bill. You won’t think it’s a song. You will think it’s a letter. Supposing you went out and picked up what was transparently a longer, more extended piece of prose, and the very first line says, “Once upon a time …” What do you think you have? You have a fairy tale, which is why the New English Bible’s translation of the opening words of Genesis 11 on the account of the tower of Babel is really perverse. It begins, “Once upon a time.”

It’s Hebrew  (50:17) which is a pretty standard connection. “And it came to pass”  (50:20) but to render that “Once upon a time” is really perverse, because anybody who knows anything about anything understands that’s a signal for a fairy tale. How do you know that? Did anybody ever tell you, “This is the way you begin a fairy tale”? I doubt it. It’s because you’re brought up with so many fairy tales as part of growing up that you just absorb things like that in the culture. You’re taught how to write letters at school, and so forth.

That also means that if a certain kind of literature is not typical of your culture, it’s harder to come to grips with. English speakers have a form of poetry called a limerick. I don’t know a lot of languages, but the languages I do know don’t have any limericks. It’s a peculiar form of poetry. It’s an acquired taste. It has a certain beat, a certain number of lines. It has a certain sense of humor to it. You just have to get familiar with a limerick.

If you move into English from, let’s say, Mandarin, it might take you a while to fathom what’s funny about a limerick, but in due course you can do it. I’m sure that many cultures have other similar sorts of things. Take the Japanese haiku, for example. It’s a 17-syllabic form with certain standard structures to it, a five-five-seven structure  (52:00) and it has to be structured in exactly that way.

There are now English translations of haiku, but instead of having a separate character, it’s now the number of syllables, and it has already perverted something of what the Japanese haiku is about. It’s as close as you can get in an English translation haiku. Yet supposing you have a biblical book that’s written in Japanese full of haikus. How do you translate that? Then you come to the fact that so much of the biblical poetry turns on parallelism, which is not the most obvious way to do poetry in English.

Another way of looking at it.… Until fairly recently, the vast majority of preachers in the English language, and I suspect in most of the languages of Europe as well, prefer to preach from discourse passages.… Galatians, Ephesians, the Sermon on the Mount, then rapidly retreat to Philippians, and then maybe a discourse in John, and then maybe 1 Corinthians. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a very famous English preacher, now has something like 72 or 74 volumes of published sermons in print. Guess how many are from non-discourse passages? One. Only one  (53:26) narrative.

Now in all fairness, he does incorporate a lot of biblical narrative in his expositions of discourse, but that’s just exactly the opposite of what I would observe in sub-Saharan black Africa. When I’m in Africa, it’s hard for me to find able young sub-Saharan black African preachers who can handle Romans. I’ve met a few, but not many. But boy, can they light up the meetings with their handling of narratives. That’s a cultural thing.

Instead of us then retreating to what we’re most comfortable with, surely, if we believe that all of the Word of God is the Word of God, part of our responsibility is to handle the different literary genres. It is to learn to handle them well. Today in much of Western Europe there is a rising interest in narrative exposition again, in narrative text and narrative theology. Not always wisely handled, but nevertheless there is something of that coming back, and it’s not all bad.

That’s another way of saying, in the third place, that even when you do know a literary genre, there are almost always more things to know about it. There are depths you can push so that you come to know more about how narrative fits together. You may be a great reader who reads and reads and reads, and you love stories. You love history. You love biographies. You love fiction. You don’t like science magazines. You don’t like computer textbooks. You don’t like encyclopedia articles, but you like narrative.

That does not necessarily mean you know all there is to know about how plot is put together or how characterization works. Thus, even though you read a lot of narrative, to learn a little bit more about the constituent elements that go into narrative is going to deepen your appreciation of the narrative. The danger is it could make you too analytic so you don’t let the narrative itself have its own power.

Provided you don’t do that, however, you can probe more deeply in a certain kind of literary genre in order to have a better appreciation of it. The danger for preachers is that once they’ve done that, they start preaching their analysis of the narrative instead of preaching the narrative. That’s another  (55:45)

Fourth, different literary genres have different ways of making their rhetorical appeal. The way Romans grabs you and the way John’s gospel grabs you are not exactly the same. John’s gospel, for example, has none of these rhetorical questions. “What shall we say, then? Shall we sin that grace may abound?  (56:24)” There’s none of that sort of thing in John’s gospel.

On the other hand, John’s gospel can picture the scene on the night Jesus is betrayed and say of Judas Iscariot, “And he went out, and it was night.” That’s not just a time marker. There are so many usages of light/darkness, day/night imagery in John’s gospel that have already been established before you get there that you really have to be thick not to see there’s a symbol-ladenness in that sort of utterance, and it’s just in the narrative itself.

Then you’re forced, if you’re a teacher or a preacher, to think how you’re going to get that across in a way that is suitable to the narrative and not make it into a merely dull analytic form. “Now in the 14th place, John says it’s nighttime. This means that …” True, but you just killed it dead. Thus, the interpretation of literary genre involves not only learning how the thing works but learning eventually how to communicate it appropriately as well.

Let me begin with Old Testament history and say some things, most of which are obvious. I want to begin on some contemporary approaches to Old Testament history before we think this through. Let me begin with a book by Hans Frei called The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. His argument stands, in some ways, behind the entire Yale school theology and  (58:33) so it’s important to learn his argument.

His argument is that until the Enlightenment, well into the Enlightenment, when Christians in the Western world read the Bible or heard about the Bible stories that was the world in which they lived. In other words, it was not a world of criticism about the Bible. The biblical narrative framed their world, so they thought in terms of angels  (59:03) framework in which they lived.

Once liberalism comes along as part of the Enlightenment project, there was a desire not to live in the text so much as to get behind the text. You’re now looking for the sources to the text or what really happened to produce the text, what kind of community generated these sorts of texts. So you’re no longer living in the text such that the text constitutes your world. The world in which you live is the world of critical thought. It’s the world of Enlightenment analysis.

So far as the Bible is concerned, therefore, what you are really doing is not living in the Bible, even though you know a whole lot about the Bible. You are living behind the Bible. It’s a question  (59:57) behind the text. So there’s the text, and the critics are on this side, and they’re trying to get behind the text on the other side.

The conservatives, he says, make the mistake of trying to get behind the text also in order to respond to the critics. So they say, “Well, yes, these sources you’re pointing to are really very old sources,” or “This is what really did happen.” They’ll say, “This is really what happened,” but they too are then no longer simply living in the text. They are now in this world of critical thought as well, whether they like it or not, and they too are living behind the text, however much it is a more conservative attempt to get behind the text.

What Frei says is that the biblical narrative has been eclipsed. You pass it by. You’re so busy playing behind the text you’re no longer living in the text. That’s not the domain of your imagination anymore. Your imagination is in the critical world of Enlightenment studies that analyze the text, but it’s not in the text itself. What we need, therefore, is to stop playing all of these intellectual games and actually relive in the biblical text.

That is also the appeal of someone like Lindbeck, for example.… Lindbeck, also Yale, who really by his writings generated what came to be called the Yale school. You read much of Lindbeck, and you hear again and again things which you might go on to say  (1:01:32) you might want to say, “This is wonderful, very insightful. We need to memorize the text again and teach it to our children and have Bible readings in our homes and memory contests. We have to teach more Bible in the church, precisely so that we will actually live in the text.”

But both with Frei and with Lindbeck there is a stinger in the tail, because part of Frei’s analysis in Eclipse of Biblical Narrative is not quite fair. The liberals who wanted to go behind the text wanted to go behind the text because they were convinced that what the text was actually describing wasn’t quite true, whereas the best of the conservatives who were responding to these things were trying to say, “No, what really did take place is really what the text says.”

They were trying to close the gap between what took place and the text itself as generated by the liberals. In other words, they were trying to go behind the text in order to defend the text. Whether they always succeeded or not is neither here nor there. The point is Frei has them doing exactly the same thing and at the very same level, the very same place. They’re both behind the text, no longer living in the text. But now what Frei wants is to live in the text, all right, to fire your imagination, without ever addressing the question, “Yes, but is it true?”

In other words, that question becomes now in postliberal thought, partly out of the impact of the postmodernism of the 70s, a way of ducking all the hard historical questions. This generated, then, endless doctoral dissertations and endless CCs and endless studies and monographs and essays on the theme of irony in the book of Judges or understanding the glory of God in Isaiah the prophet or whatever.

You may actually expound the text pretty carefully and see some things that are really there, but what you’re not allowed to ask or answer is, “Is it true?” Not least in the area of narrative that on the face of it purports to be history. In other words, the postliberal approach, while it says many useful things, nevertheless has the biblical narrative text abstracted from what actually took place.

The result is a remarkably intellectualist approach, because the average person in the pew who hears the text expounded, he or she is likely to think this is what the preacher  (1:04:33) He or she is probably not playing the sort of suspension games that postliberals are playing, and thus they can get a pretty good hearing in conservative circles.

Yet if you actually sit one of them down in the corner and say, “Yes, but aren’t you prepared to say that the tomb was empty, Christ really did rise from the dead, his disciples did eat with them, and he actually took some food in his resurrection body and ingested it?” Some of them will say, “Yes, I personally think that.” Others will say, “I don’t know.” Still others will say, “It doesn’t make any difference.”

It’s now the narrative itself is carrying the weight of the emotional impact without the connection between the text and the reality to which it points. In other words, what is being lost in the postliberal handling of historical narrative is what some people call extratextual referentiality. It refers to something outside of the text. At the end of the day, the Bible, we want to say, does not save you by the Bible.

The Bible does not save you by ideas in the Bible. The Bible insists that it is Christ who saves by what he has done in real space-time history, in real space-time thought and action and deed. It’s not ideas about the resurrection that are important. It’s whether or not the resurrection itself took place. So when Paul addresses this sort of question, for example, in 1 Corinthians 15, he starts addressing the question, “Supposing Christ has not risen from the dead. Then what?”

Male:  (1:06:12)

Don: Well, for a start, we’re lost in our trespasses and sins. That first conclusion is based on the assumption that what the Bible says about our universal lostness still remains true, and then if there’s no death attested by the resurrection, then there’s no  (1:06:26) In addition to that, he says, your faith is worthless. The assumption there is that the validity of faith is not its intensity but the truthfulness of its object.

Then he goes so far as to say, “Indeed, you’re of all people most to be pitied.” That is one of the strongest anti-Yale school clauses in all of Scripture, because there’s no  (1:06:55) here with the view that provided it fires your imagination and it is useful to you emotionally and in your self-understanding, whether it actually happened is irrelevant. There’s none of that at all. What he goes so far as to say is if you hold that the resurrection of Christ really did happen when, in fact, it didn’t, not only are you lost and your faith is stupid, but you are just to be pitied.

Thus, it seems to me, that under the impact of the turn to the subject there, they are ducking the objective realities, the extratextual referentialities to which Old Testament history (and New Testament history, for that matter) point. It is important, in other words, when we think about these things to face the difficult questions rather than ducking them. This is not just a Christian insight.

If you’re interested in reading in this area, there’s a book by Meir Sternberg called The Poetics of Biblical Narrative. Sternberg is not a Christian; he’s a Jew, a brilliant scholar. Basically, he takes this sort of school to the woodshed for a good paddling and insists that, at the end of the day, whether we believe them or not, the biblical authors who were giving narrative cast as history were intending to say what happened in history, and he calls it the poetics of biblical narrative.

There’s also a book by Phillips Long. It’s in the Zondervan series on how to treat different parts of Scripture, and his is on interpreting Old Testament history. That’s also well worth reading and sticking in the hands of students. Now then, with that prolegomenon to Old Testament history aside, let me suggest some other things to bear in mind when you’re interpreting history.

First, history is story. Whatever else it is, it is story. We want to say it is story with extratextual referentiality, but it is story. Therefore, many of the things that are important in the interpretation of story are also important in the interpretation of history. In other words, there may be plot development and structured narrative and characterization, all of which are important to try to understand what part of history is being  (1:09:34)

It’s often pointed out that the book of Ruth, for example, has a very large-scale chiasm. You begin with no king, no food, no son, no name. She’s empty. She’s goes back, and there’s just nothing at the bottom. Then the name Naomi, the son Obed, food. There’s nursing and ultimately the king, David. You’ve gone through a kind of cycle of the book itself that helps to frame what the narrative is all about.

To make it merely a psychological profile of this wonderful woman Ruth and nothing more than that is to skip the whole structure of the account. The structure itself is telling you something about what’s important in the narrative. That really comes out of observing that it’s a story, and stories have structure and development. There is artistry involved with storytelling that has its own power.

Take a look at Genesis 39. You will recall that it is the account of the temptation of Joseph, and in consequence of his rebuffing of Potiphar’s wife he ends up in jail. You can preach this sort of chapter as a model for overcoming temptation. There’s plenty of material here that’s well worth thinking about. When Joseph is first taken down into Egypt, he wouldn’t have known the language.

Although he’s pretty soon the chief slave, chief steward in the household, the chronology shows it took him weeks and years to get there. It wouldn’t have happened overnight, which meant he started off mucking out the barn or peeling potatoes or whatever he was doing and gradually earned trust with time. Then when she presents herself and offers herself to him, the reasons he gives for not complying are so very insightful when it comes to trying to wrestle with temptation.

“He refused, ‘With me in charge, my master does not concern himself with anything in the house; everything he owns he has entrusted to my care. No one is greater in this house than I am.’ ” Do you hear that reasoning? That’s the reasoning of a person who values integrity. Somebody in the same circumstances might have said, “Since I’m in charge, I can arrange  (1:13:43) and we have an afternoon to ourselves  (1:13:45).”

In other words, he views great responsibility as a demand to be a person of greater integrity.  (1:13:54) who he is at this point. “My master has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife.” He has a certain kind of view of marriage, which rules out this kind of thing. “How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?” He sees the action not merely  (1:14:13) or merely in marriage terms or merely in terms of his own prospect but with reference to God.

He is refusing to think of this as a mere peccadillo or a momentary fling or something to be excused because, after all, he has no chances of marriage  (1:14:32), but instead, because he used this thing with reference to God, he blackens it right away as sin. He labels it  (1:14:40) There’s all kinds of help along this line.

He moreover refuses to flirt with her. The text says he tries to be away from her as much as he possibly can. When she does assault him finally, he flees. He ends up leaving his coat behind, and he had to be intelligent enough to realize that that was asking for trouble. He preserved his integrity but lost his reputation. If he had stayed with her, he would have lost his integrity but preserved his reputation.  (1:15:12)

 (1:15:14) But you remember that this is a narrative, so you look for the structure of the thing and where it fits into the bigger biblical narrative. One of the things you see right away is how the structure of the chapter is put together. Look at how the chapter begins and ends. After the initial verse, which simply says where he was, verse 2:

“The Lord was with Joseph and he prospered, and he lived in the house of his Egyptian master. When his master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord gave him success in everything he did, Joseph found favor in his eyes and became his attendant. Potiphar put him in charge of his household, and entrusted to his care everything he owned. From the time he put him in charge of his household and of all that he owned, the Lord blessed the household of the Egyptian because of Joseph. The blessing of the Lord was on everything Potiphar did …”

Now we come to the end of the chapter. This now finds Joseph in prison. Verse 20b: “But while Joseph was there in the prison, the Lord was with him; he showed him kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden. So the warden put Joseph in charge of all those held in the prison, and he was made responsible for all that was done there. The warden paid no attention to anything under Joseph’s care …”

In other words, the most superficial reading of the structure of the passage shows that there is, to use a literary term, an inclusio. You begin and end the unit with much the same language, certainly the same themes, which is a literary way of saying, “This is how you’re to read the whole thing. This is what it’s about. This is the envelope that puts it all together.”

What you’re now finding is a much bigger truth. It’s not just that Joseph is faithful in matters of sexual invitations but that Joseph learned the hard way to be a man of integrity under God’s severe hand of providence, such that God’s blessing is on him through his integrity whether he’s a slave or a battered slave in prison. In other words, the blessing of God is not always measured in terms of what the world would call success, what the world would call freedom.

The Lord was with Joseph in prison. The Lord was with Joseph in slavery. Those are hard things to think about in our  (1:17:35) success-driven world today, but those are important things to say. Then the next round of things one would ask about this chapter is, “What is it doing in Genesis in any case? What does it add to the book of Genesis? If you pulled it out, what would you lose from Genesis?”

In other words, you want to ask about the context of this narrative, but we’ll push that one a little farther in a few moments. Then you have to ask, “What is its connection with chapter 38? What is its connection with chapter 39? What does it contribute to the whole book?” We’ll come back to that a little later.

Second, history is not the whole story. That’s so obvious it almost shouldn’t have to be said, but it does have to be said today, because the hard postmodernists are still trying to tell us that if you don’t have the whole it’s slanted. There’s a new book out, for example, by Peter Enns called Inspiration and Incarnation. In my view, it’s a very sloppy book.

One of the reasons it’s such a sloppy book is that in one of the tracks it follows, it says, in effect, that if the historical accounts of Scripture are slanted, biased, then how is it different from any other ancient Near Eastern text and, therefore, why should it be thought inspired? He still wants to end up with some sort of inspired text, but at the end of the day, the reasoning itself is vaguely perverse, because the biblical narratives themselves do not pretend to tell me everything. Of course they are biased. Of course they are slanted.

For example, when you have the account of the exodus, Israel was not the only nation that went into exile. The Old Testament has brief references to other nations going into exile. When Cyrus starts issuing his decrees that enable Israel to come back, undoubtedly the biblical writers see this as a singular providence of God, a singular mark of God, the hand of God in bringing back the people in line with the prophecy of Jeremiah, in line with the repeated utterances that God would gather his people from the ends of the earth, etcetera.

At the same time, there’s not a lot said about how Moab also was given permission to return home, and Edom was granted permission to return home. There was, in fact, a reversal of imperial policy. In the ancient world, there was perceived to be a threefold tie: people, religion, and land. The possibility of revolt as long as that threefold tie was tight was pretty strong. If you could take out one of those  (1:20:37), people, religion, and land, then they were much less likely to rebel.

So one of the reasons why the ancient regional superpowers transported all of the leaders of any culture when they took them was to remove them from the land. The gods and the land are back there, but the people are somewhere else. Then there’s much less ability, let alone incentive, to rebel. On the other hand, that also destroys  (1:21:02). If you do that sort of thing, people start over again as dirt farmers, and that’s destroying your economy.

Well, Cyrus, the first Persian reversal  (1:21:12) understood that only too well, so he wanted people to go back home. It wasn’t just the Israelites. All of the others went back home too, but we’re not told all of that in Scripture. It’s alluded to a couple of times.  (1:21:24) biblical narrative is biased. Of course it’s biased. It has in it what God wants us to have, what is important for our salvation, what is part of the larger biblical narrative that takes us to Christ.

So it is important to keep saying that the text does not give us all of it. Yes,  (1:21:45) the history of the early church, but nothing about Thomas heading off toward India, although that’s almost certainly what happened. There’s very little about how the gospel actually moves down into Africa, and even the European account is pretty thin. It’s really focused on some of the events in Peter’s life and some of the events in Paul’s life, and that’s about it.

Of course, there are some themes beyond that, but it’s not  (1:22:10) history of the early church. We thank God for what we have. These are the bits God wants us to have as part of  (1:22:18) structure of the book. It is important, then, to keep admitting it’s not the whole story, and then to ask why it is God wants us to have this bit. What is it in this bit that is contributing to the larger whole?

Third, history writing, not least Old Testament history writing, is made up of many contributing sub  (1:22:45), so the larger narrative might have a lament, like the lament of Lamech, for example, or a fable, like Jotham’s fable in Judges 9.  (1:22:56) burst in song of praise, the song of Moses. It might have some wisdom references. It might have some prophetic oracles.

Fourth, the unit history stories are part of and must be interpreted within the book, the corpus, and the Canon. Again, it’s worth thinking about what’s going on in  (1:23:45) Have some of you been exposed to the writings of Walter Brueggemann? Walter Brueggemann is a very influential Old Testament scholar.  (1:23:56) He’s an extremely creative writer and thinker. In some ways, he’s one of the old pious liberals come back to life again.

There’s a certain kind of liberal impiety in some sources,  (1:24:13) like C.H. Dodd a generation ago, he was an extremely pious liberal. People said of him and of his ken that he built fabulous super structures after destroying the foundations. Not quite fair, but some truth to it. In some ways, Brueggemann does something similar. He’s a very creative, pious, interesting writer. It’s worth reading him so long as you understand the framework in which he’s writing.

One of the things Brueggemann insists on (it’s one of the things, in fact, that makes him interesting; it’s also one of the things that makes him dangerous) is that unit stories be read independently of their larger literary and theological context. When he reads Genesis 3, for example, the account of the fall, he does not want to read it within the context of Genesis 1–11 or within the context of Genesis or within the context of the Pentateuch or within the context of the Canon but just as an independent story. He starts asking, “What might this mean?”

That’s partly because he has still bought into far more of the old-fashioned source-critical  (1:25:29) sort of worldview than he himself would admit to. That’s part of it, but that’s also why he can afford to be remarkably creative. As he would read Genesis 3, well, human beings are almost heroes.  (1:25:44) their autonomy from this rather arrogant and perverse God, and the fall itself means now, according to God himself, that she and he together now are like God, knowing good and evil.

Then he works through what that expression means, the establishing of good and evil, so part of their humanity has now come to fruition. They, like God, are now establishing good and evil. Earlier God had said that was good, that was good. Now human beings are determining for themselves what is good and evil. That’s what the account is about, he would say.

It doesn’t really fit the account of Genesis 1–11  (1:26:21) the first genealogy. “So-and-so lived so many years and he died. So-and-so lived so many years and he died, and he died, and he died.” It certainly doesn’t fit with Paul in Romans 3. It’s just a huge distortion. One of the reasons Brueggemann is so interesting is because he detaches so many narratives from their corpus and biblical frame of reference that he can afford to be creative.

He’s no longer so limited. It’s no longer so structured. You no longer have to keep asking the tough questions of, “How does this fit within some bigger framework?” But that is a question we would address in theory positively but where we often make mistakes. I think one of the reasons we make mistakes is because our Bibles are not actually divided up into chapters. When the biblical books were first given, they didn’t have chapter numbers and verses. That’s a relatively late addition to help us find things.

Now go back to Genesis 39. In some sense, you can see a literary unit there in the Genesis narrative with this A-B-A kind of inclusio. That’s true, but now when you ask, “What is Genesis 39 doing in the whole Joseph cycle, chapters 37–50 …” What is its contribution to the Joseph cycle within the book of Genesis and even within the Pentateuch and even conceivably within a whole Canon? So what? What’s it doing there?

Then you see immediately that there are larger issues. Still at a fairly superficial level, you read Genesis 38, then you read Genesis 39, and in some ways, Joseph serves as a foil to Judah. In the previous chapter, Judah is not the one in slavery, but he’s the one who’s shacked up with Tamar, his daughter-in-law. So although he has his freedom  (1:28:29) and is happily married and doesn’t have any excuse whatsoever, nevertheless, he’s the one who’s shacking up on the side.

Joseph, who, humanly speaking, is in far more difficult circumstances, is the one who is faithful. So it’s a kind of literary foil, but it’s more than that. After all, this is leading to chapter 40. He ends up in prison, and he’s there for a period of time, and then eventually he has the butler and the baker of Pharaoh  (1:28:59) and he wants to get out  (1:29:01) For all that he trusts the providence of God, he still asks them to be remembered to Pharaoh.

Two more years go by. Nothing happens. He’s still in jail. Nevertheless, in his location in jail, it enables him to interpret their dreams, which enables him to come out, which enables him ultimately to get the attention and ear of Pharaoh, which enables him to become prime minister of Egypt, which enables him, finally, to organize a food relief that ultimately saves his own family.

Within the Joseph cycle, it does bring about the fulfillment of those strange dreams he had as a young man, when the sun and the moon and the stars bow down to him. That’s a bigger issue too, because the Joseph cycle is talking about the ongoing narrative of the messianic line. Humanly speaking, if Joseph had not been called and gotten prepared by God to save all of this food, then not only would a lot of people have died in Egypt, but perhaps his own family would have died too.

After all, that’s why they went down to Egypt: to get food. They were at the edge of starvation. They didn’t know what to do. If it hadn’t been that Egypt was still a bread basket, maybe they would have died entirely. We’re to understand that Joseph, because of his time down in Egypt, actually preserved the messianic line, the Judah line, the Judah who couldn’t keep his zipper up. He preserved that line.

Within a larger economical framework  (1:30:36) Within the Pentateuch, then, the ultimate beginning of the Law but still with this expectation of a prophet like Moses who still is to come  (1:30:50) So if you preach this account without showing what kind of role it has in the book of Genesis and even in biblical theology, you’re missing something huge. There is a sense in which in the peculiar providence of God, Jesus was born  (1:31:08) because Joseph kept his zipper up.

Now I would imagine there’s no way in the mystery of God’s providence that the Messiah was not going to come. If it hadn’t happened that way, it would have happened some other way.  (1:31:23) but isn’t it fascinating that in the actual unfolding of the narrative, Joseph’s faithfulness by God’s grace issues in the preservation of the line that finally ends in Jesus? That’s the truth of the matter.

I haven’t read anything in from the New Testament there. That’s just reading the Old Testament narrative within the Old Testament narrative. It’s just making sure you see where things are  (1:31:47) That becomes one of the crucial steps in the creation of biblical theology. Questions or comments about this?

Male: I’ve always wondered about this, and I guess  (1:32:10) has written about it as well. I’m not so sure I’d go with his take on it. Why would God …? I don’t even know how to ask this. Basically,  (1:32:23) it’s interesting that the Messiah would come from the Judah line versus the Joseph line. I’m just curious, have you read anything or do you have any take on that, why he would go with Judah versus Joseph?

Don: Don’t forget everyone in the line was corrupt at some point. Even Mary herself in the Magnificat refers to God as her Savior. The whole line needs a savior. The Judah thing has much more to do with primogenitor and things like that than how sanctified it was. It might even have been a mark of grace when Messiah did not come from a more sanctified line.

Even when you come to the genealogy in Matthew 1, at the end of the day, it’s not cleaned up. It preserves the disgraceful bits  (1:33:10) should ever, ever come into the house of God or be established in marriage until the tenth generation. Dear old Ruth, the generation before her, and she’s in line with the Messiah.  (1:33:26) So I don’t see a problem  (1:33:29)

Male: Dr. Carson, may I ask at this point how do you  (1:33:42) narratives in the Old Testament which have miraculous elements, like the  (1:33:48), in terms of its extratextual referentiality?

Don: There is an antecedent question to be raised, and that is the question of miracles per se. If one rules them out right off the bat, then obviously you’re driven to the place where you have to explain things away. You have no choice. If, on the other hand, that is not the frame of reference in which you’re working, and if you hold that particular account has been given describing what actually did take place, miraculous or not, then that has to be the way it’s taught too, it seems to me. So without apology, that should be done.

Let me mention an article in this respect I’ve read very recently. It’s certainly well worth reading. The difficulty is you can’t get this everywhere.  (1:34:46) It’s by Alvin Plantinga called “Two (Or More) Kinds of Scripture Scholarship.” It’s in the book edited by Craig Bartholomew, Stephen Evans, Mary Healy, and others called Behind the Text: History and Biblical Interpretation.

He is not so much an exegete, and he says some things in here I don’t agree with, but in terms of his analysis of what historical critical scholarship looks like.… What he really does is analyze this historical critical thought in terms of various schools of development. One from  (1:36:06), what he calls the  (1:36:10) school of historical criticism, and one from Spinoza, what he calls  (1:36:14) school of historical critical interpretation, and one from  (1:36:18).

He shows their differences and the assumptions writers have when they’re working within these schools of thought in historical critical thought and why Christians simply cannot share those assumptions and, in fact, how those streams of thought become in certain ways self-defeating. It’s a very useful, thought-provoking, rather rich study, well worth reading. I don’t like all of the essays in that book, but that essay is golden. So I try to put those sorts of materials in the hands of my students so that when we come to miracles I’m not embarrassed by them. I insist upon them.

Male: Could you comment on  (1:37:00)?

Don: I’m going to say something about gospel genre in a few moments. I obviously don’t have time to comment on every genre, but I want to say things about two or three genres. Is that all right?

Male: I think it’s very bothering with Brueggemann. Isn’t he destroying the text to begin with? What would the text be, then? The orthodox Christian Jewish tradition has preserved these or even the text that comes down to us, and without that, this way of handling the text by Brueggemann wouldn’t even be possible, because he’s like a parasite. Isn’t that an argument in the debate? What would you say? It’s very bothering. It’s hard to argue against that very creative fantastic …

Don: The only way you can argue against it is in much bigger terms. He himself still wants to preserve the Canon. There is a sense in which more radical critics, those who are committed philosophical naturalists.… What they will say is the scriptural books have no more authority than, let’s say, 1 Enoch or early Christian writings like the Didache or whatever. In one sense, they’re a little more consistent.

Someone like Brueggemann, partly because he has preserved a heritage of piety, wants to say that the Canon really is the Canon because the church has long absorbed it, so that’s the frame of reference in which we must think. On the other hand, the Canon really is no longer for him the norming norm. It’s a frame of reference of inherited books that we think about, but he wants to think about it in this bitty atomistic way, such that there is no one voice in the Canon. At the end of the day, what he’s really denying is that there is one mind behind the whole thing.

Male: The Canon is much more than …

Don: Well, the Canon is just the Canon. It’s 66 books, but it’s not normative. It’s not canon. It’s not the rule. It’s not the measure. It’s the inherited books, but it is not the inspired Word of God. It’s not the norming norm. It’s not the authoritative self-disclosure of God. It’s not the God-breathed words, to use the language of Scripture.

Male:  (1:39:29)

Don: Of course. He would say it’s the Book in the historical sense that we’ve inherited, but that’s it.

Male: But that’s not the way people understand. It’s very exciting with the Da Vinci code, for instance, because everybody thinks about the Bible in sort of  (1:39:47) It becomes exciting because of the context  (1:39:51)

Don: The reason the Da Vinci code becomes exciting for people on the street is precisely because it seems to be thumbing its nose at authority. This is a very anti-communitarian (1:40:01) age.

Male: This is a parallel. You can do something exciting  (1:40:08)

Don: Oh yes, there’s an element of that as well.

Male: Fragments  (1:40:11)

Don: He thinks what he’s doing is right, you would think, because this is a reflection of what scriptural texts really are.  (1:40:20) Therefore, the only way back to  (1:40:26) that is in some larger historical  (1:40:29) Has God disclosed himself in words? Who is Christ?

You’re getting into much huger arguments here, and at the end of the day, he will have a certain kind of immediate cultural appeal, precisely because this is a culture that cherishes diversity and not saying anybody else is wrong. It takes a while to get back into the argument  (1:40:52), but that’s the way it is.  (1:40:55) There are an awful lot of people who read Brueggemann. Brueggemann is a very popular  (1:41:02).

Male:  (1:41:07) couldn’t we say similar things about Brevard Childs? He acknowledges the Canon as an authority  (1:41:17) in actual details he criticizes it.

Don: Yes. In reality, Brevard Childs is much more conservative than Walter Brueggemann. He’s a much better scholar for a start, more detailed. But his connection is with Yale all this time, and he was very heavily influenced by  (1:41:39) The prolegomenon to Brevard Childs  (1:41:44) So he’s the kind of biblical scholar who is the biblical scholar equivalent of Lindbeck, who is the systematic theologian equivalent. So you have Frei, and then it separates down into Lindbeck  (1:41:58)

Brevard Childs, nevertheless, although you’re right to say that, on many issues is far, far more conservative than anybody else in that camp, so he’s always worth reading. On the other hand, he is quite prepared to duck an awful lot of the historical issues just because  (1:42:23) The adoption of the Canon is almost a  (1:42:29) move at some point.

Now obviously, I’m merely giving superficial surveys of some of these genre considerations. Let me press on to another one here. One more point on history that I really haven’t said. This is one where we could easily take another two hours and not even begin to scratch the surface, but it needs to be dealt out there so that you see the issue. Some historical accounts (I’m thinking particularly of some Old Testament stories) have typological significance  (1:43:21)

Let me hasten to say that I’m very suspicious of the kind of typology that is literarily  (1:43:38) You’re reading through the account, and you discover that Rahab’s rope is red, so it’s clearly referring to the blood of Christ. As the spies were saved by this red rope, so we’re saved by the red blood of Christ. That’s just awful stuff.  (1:43:59)

Because some of us have been exposed to that kind of rubbish, we have not seen how deep and structured and coherent is a biblical form of typology. The majority of Old Testament texts that are said to be fulfilled in the New Testament are, in fact, fulfilled typologically. You just have to come to grips with major typology somewhere when you’re starting to do biblical thought.

One of the places to start thinking about this one in detail is narrative. Let’s turn to 2 Samuel, chapter 7, and track this one out a bit. Let me remind you what the text is about, and then outline for you  (1:45:04) This is the account of David wanting to build a temple for God, and God then says, in effect, “No, that’s not what’s going to happen. Your son is going to do it.” Within this context, there are some remarkably  (1:45:21) passages.

To short-circuit a long discussion, let me remind you of what takes place in the preceding chapter. David, when he became king, reigned in Hebron for seven years, and only after seven years did he become king over the 12 tribes, and then took for the first time Jerusalem, ancient Salem, and made his headquarters there. So Jerusalem became the capital.

Before that, the tabernacle had been in various sites, in fact captured once by Philistines, and so forth. It had been in various locations. The previous chapter brings the tabernacle to Jerusalem, so for the first time, you now have tabernacle and priesthood in the same city. They’re divided by Mosaic law into two tribes. The entire ritual connected with the tabernacle is bound up with Levi, and the royal line is bound up exclusively with Judah.

Then more specifically, in the priestly line, the high priestly office is bound up with the Aaronites, and likewise with Judah, the Davidic king is bound up also with David. But at this juncture, for the first time, they had come together in some way in chapter 6. That becomes absolutely crucial for understanding the book of Hebrews, just the collocation of these two chapters.

Now you come to chapter 7. The king was settled in his palace. The Lord had given him rest from his enemies. Then he says to Nathan, “Here I am, living in a palace of cedar, while the ark of God remains in a tent.” It would be really good to unpack those two verses, but we’ll let them pass and note that Nathan thinks it’s a wonderful idea too.

They actually have been thinking about texts in Deuteronomy (yes, I do think that Deuteronomy  (1:47:13)) which predicted that eventually there would be an established place, an established temple in the land to which all the people would come. So David may not only be thinking, “It’s a bit shameful that I’m living in a wonderful palace and there’s this ratty tent outside that’s supposed to be the tabernacle of the living God.”

In addition, he may have thought he was fulfilling Scripture, but in fact, God then intervenes and speaks to Nathan, “Tell David what the Lord says.” Then he gives a variety of reasons why David must not be the one to build this. It would be worth going through those reasons themselves too. I’ll just mention one.

Verses 6–8: “I have not dwelt in a house from the day I brought the Israelites up out of Egypt to this day. I have been moving from place to place with a tent as my dwelling. Wherever I have moved with all the Israelites, did I ever say to any of their rulers whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, ‘Why have you not built me a house of cedar?’“

In other words, at the great turning points in redemptive history, God and God alone gives the commands. “I have commanded it; therefore, don’t you dare take it on.” This is part of a larger development of a theme in Scripture that has to do with God’s aseity, from the Latin a se, “from himself.” God doesn’t need us. Therefore, for us to think at any point that we give God advice on what comes next is perverse. It’s just arrogant.

You don’t read that Abraham, for example, is sitting there in Ur of the Chaldees, and they’ve just gone through Babel, and Abraham starts thinking, “You know, this world is going to the Devil in a teapot. It’s pretty disgusting. God, I have a suggestion. Why don’t you start a whole new humanity? I’ll be great-granddaddy of the whole lot. You can send me wherever you want. I’ll obey you in faith, and you can get a whole new humanity  (1:49:33) Wouldn’t that be a great idea, God?” It’s not the way the thing goes.

When you come to Moses, when Moses does think, as a young man, that he’s going to actually do the cleanup, it doesn’t end very well. It’s not until God intervenes at his own time, his own place, his own choice of person  (1:49:51) spectacularly bring forth fruit. So also here. You start making suggestions to God of when and where the temple should be built, and God tells him  (1:50:03) “To which of my people did I ever say, ‘Do this, do that’? You’re not at a place to tell me what to do.” It’s a remarkable passage.

Then once you’ve gotten through all of God’s reasons why  (1:50:17), then we read in verse 11b, “The Lord declares to you that the Lord himself will establish a house for you.” There’s a pun transparently. When David wants to build a house for God, he means a temple. When God wants to build a house for David, he means a dynasty. So it’s a pun, but it’s an understandable pun.

“When your days are over and you rest with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, who will come from your own body, and I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house for my Name …” So the temple will get built. “… and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father, and he will be my son.”

To whom is that referring? Before you immediately jump and think it could be referring to Jesus, read the next line. You read right away that it has to be Solomon. “When he does wrong, I will punish him with the rod of men, with floggings inflicted by men.” After all, what is David afraid of? He’s not the first king. He has already seen what happened to Saul. He’s not the first king of the unified monarchy. He’s the second. Saul never did get a chance to build a dynasty. He didn’t last that long.  (1:51:46) Jonathan never sat on the throne.

This man who was so spectacular, admired by all, head and shoulders above the lot, at the end of the day, ended up an arrogant man, living in chronic fear of failure, not able to obey simple commands from God, and running around mountainsides trying to kill David. He dies in horrible disgrace. David knows enough about the sin in his own life and sin in his own heart to understand that dynasties based on moral superiority are not likely to last very long.

Even if David makes it to old age, what happens to his son and his grandson and his great-grandson and his great-great-great-grandson? But what God says is, “I’ll build a house for you. I will be his father, and he will be my son.” That’s standard ancient Near Eastern language for enthronement. God is understood to be the ultimate monarch of the people, and the son is to reflect God in some way.… God’s justice, God’s truth, God’s character. So making this person the son, God’s son, is a way of saying he becomes enthroned as God’s king.

“I will be his father, and he will be my son. When he does wrong, I’ll chasten him with the chastenings of men,” we’re told. He will face what later theologians would call temporal judgments. “But my love will never be taken away from him, as I took it away from Saul, whom I removed from before you.” Then this word. Verse 16: “Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.”

David understands that it’s very powerful. If you read the rest of the chapter, the rest of the chapter is one of the finest pieces in the entire chapter. It’s the bit we don’t preach on. We just preach  (1:53:41) What David says in the wake of all that is intensely moving. “What grace is this that has been shown to me?  (1:53:50)” Now instead of offering to do something for God, he recognizes it’s God himself  (1:53:55) God makes people great, not the other way around.

He recognizes himself as the heir of God’s mercy and grace. “I wouldn’t dare to even ask for this,” he goes on to pray, “but because you have promised it, I therefore do ask. I ask you to keep your promise.” It’s really a very moving passage indeed. God is going to build a dynasty for David, and his kingdom will never be destroyed.

Humanly speaking, of course, there are only two ways that could be even theoretically fulfilled: by replacement to replacement to replacement to replacement, to an heir, to an heir, to an heir, to an heir, world without end, amen … unless you finally had a super heir  (1:54:38) There’s not a hint of that here. Not a hint.

Don’t forget.  (1:54:44) about 1000 BC. Already in Isaiah, late eighth-century BC, in words we quote every Christmas all around the world, “For unto us a Son is given, unto us a child is born. He shall reign on the throne of his father David. Of the increase of his kingdom there will be no end, and he shall be called Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.”

You start getting expectations of a Davidic king who’s way up on an ordinary Davidide. In the sixth century BC, in Ezekiel, you have more of these strange prophecies, with God, for example, in Ezekiel 34, saying, “Woe to the false shepherds of Israel.” He means both the kings and the priests who were doing all of these disgusting things. They fleece the flock. They steal the fur. They kill the sheep for mutton, but they’re not really good shepherds.

So Yahweh says about 25 times, “I will be the shepherd of my sheep. I will feed them. I will bring them to green pasture. I will separate sheep from sheep. I will heal them. I will be their shepherd.” Again and again and again until the very end of the chapter when Yahweh says, after having said about 25 times that he will do it, “I will send my servant David to do it.” Thus, there arises within the Old Testament a rising expectation of a Davidide who is more than just a man.

If you read 2 Samuel 7 just by itself, it’s very powerful, but if you read 2 Samuel 7 not only in the context of the book of Samuel but in the context of the Davidic theme as it develops in the Canon, then you start seeing that there’s another picture to start fleshing out. This is so anti-Walter Brueggemann it’s embarrassing, because this is presupposing that, at the end of the day, there is finally one mind behind all this.

Then you start seeing there is a growing anticipation of a great David who will be the ultimate Son, such that finally this text, “I will be his father, and he will be my son,” is picked up in the New Testament and directly applied to Christ. It’s that direct application that bothers us. My own Doktorvater was Barnabas Lindars, who is down at Cambridge. He eventually got the Chair of Manchester.

His first significant book was called New Testament Apologetic, and it was essentially a book that was asking how the New Testament writers quote the Old Testament to defend Christian truth. His argument was basically they come to their convictions about who Jesus is, and then they scramble through the Old Testament and find texts ripped out of their context in order to provide a proof text to prove their points.

In fact, what they’re doing is not paying attention to the Old Testament  (1:58:01) New Testament apologetic, he says, is a pastiche of proof texts ripped out of their Old Testament context. That’s his whole argument. He got a DD for that.  (1:58:12) That’s not quite fair. In many ways it was a really good book. It helped me a great deal in my studies in all kinds of ways. He was a fine stylist.

He became a good friend before he died, and eventually I edited a Festschrift in his honor. After all, honor to whom honor is due, and he was a fine scholar  (1:58:37) Do I think, nevertheless, that he understood the Bible? No, he did not. At this deep, deep level he really misunderstood it rather severely.

What is going on here is a kind of trajectory. It’s established somewhere, and when the first point of the trajectory is introduced, it’s doubtful how many people see just where the trajectory is going to go. Eventually, the trajectory points get filled in, and you can show that in the Old Testament, later writers are already reflecting back on 2 Samuel 7. They’re beginning to establish where the trajectory goes.

If the trajectory goes along this line, then ultimately, the ultimate Davidide who comes and fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah 9 and of Ezekiel 34 and of Micah 5 is already foreseen all the way back in here, “I will be his father, and he will be my son,” as part of a living trajectory, so that the ultimate Son who is pointed must fit into this whole trajectory.

There is an anticipated type so that the application of 2 Samuel 7:14 to Christ is not by a direct proof-texting method, where it’s ripped out of the context. It rather is by an indirect typological method that understands how stories themselves, wrapped again and again around each other, point forward, point forward, and point forward until there’s a whole trajectory that can truly be said to be fulfilled.

Male: So that bit in verse 14 when he says, “When he does wrong, I will punish him with the rod of men,” that’s obviously not part of  (2:00:50)

Don: Correct. When we think of the expression suffering servant, most of us automatically think of the suffering servant in Psalms and Isaiah, but there are quite a lot of suffering passages in David. Psalm 69, for example, has three quotes in it that are applied to Jesus’ suffering in the passion narratives.

There is a sense in which David also becomes a prototypical suffering servant, such that the great movements in his life that anticipate his relationship to his heavenly Father ultimately become part of this trajectory that points forward, but that doesn’t mean everything that happens in his life (Bathsheba, for example) points forward.

It points forward within a structured account of the turning points of the significant bits that are part of this God/man relationship, pointing to the greater Son. That’s also why Psalm 22 can be picked up on the lips of the Lord Jesus himself. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” You have to read that  (2:01:56) within the context of Psalm 22. You just have to. So typology is not a simple thing. It’s complex.

Male: You said it needs controlled. Where do you find the controls? Does it have to be expressed, such as these examples  (2:02:24)? Are there unexpressed controls?

Don: The undisputed ones, the most important ones, the ones that drive so much, I think are controlled pretty explicitly in one text or another. It’s one of the reasons I like to teach the Greek text of the epistle to the Hebrews, because it gives so many of those controls worked out. It’s thinking them all through for you from one side.

Nevertheless, even in the epistle to the Hebrews there is one very remarkable passage that answers your question in a rather striking way. Hebrews, chapter 9. This is where the writer draws a connection between the worship of the old earthly tabernacle and what Christ offers as his sacrifice in the heavenly tabernacle  (2:03:25) this wonderful passage about the blood of Christ obtains eternal redemption, and so forth.

But the description of what was in the old earthly tabernacle, verses 1–15, the various things that are mentioned, and then verse 5: “Above the ark were the cherubim of the Glory, overshadowing the atonement cover. But we cannot discuss these things in detail now,” which surely gives you the impression that he could have.

I think that actually, when you get enough of the genuine, in my view, indisputable ones (they’re obviously indisputable in some sense  (2:04:02)) the central ones and the theological textual rationales for them, you get enough of them under your belt, and you start seeing what to do with these things.  (2:04:13) I just came from another conference, and it ended up with an exposition by Phil Ryken of Jeremiah 25 that was absolutely superb.

Most of it was the handling of Jeremiah 25 but in the context of Jeremiah, but the cautious trajectory forward was very ably, believably, and credibly done, even though there was no direct quotation from Jeremiah 25  (2:04:51) But that’s from somebody who has been a master at doing the obvious ones for a long time. If people make those connections too early or without having seen how they’re done  (2:05:03) So for your first 25 years of ministry, just use the ones  (2:05:12)

Male: Just so I understand you correctly, on the Davidic covenant it would be wrong to assume that the son is anyone other than Solomon in that context.

Don: Yes, correct.

Male: But going back with your critique about Brueggemann, if there is one mind behind all of Scripture.… We hear a lot about the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament. I’m just wondering why we don’t hear about the opposite, the use of the New Testament in the Old Testament, when you go back to passages like the suffering servant and some of these other things, since there is one mind behind it. I can understand the argument against that except when you use the concept of one mind behind all of Scripture.

Don: Well, in the first place, part of what you’re saying turns on the use of use. When people speak of the use of the Old Testament in the New, they mean the authors actually quoted it and, thus, used it. To say that the Old Testament authors used the New Testament and quoted it would be so profoundly anachronistic as to be embarrassing.

On the other hand, there is a subset of this whole discussion today called intertextuality, and that is another whole subject we haven’t even approached here. Intertextuality, at the risk of a caricature, comes in two forms. Some forms of intertextuality really are no more than the use of the Old Testament in the New in large contexts  (2:06:48), but some authors are prepared to examine what reflection on the New Testament text does for interpreting the Old Testament texts. Thus there is a dependence both ways.

That itself, then, divides into two camps. Amongst those who are in the strong postmodern camp, there’s a form of intertextuality that I think is extremely dangerous, because the meaning is not in the text, but it’s the meaning that the reader finds. Old historical criticism was looking for meaning behind the text. The new postmoderns are finding meaning in front of the text, where the reader is.

In a strong postmodern form, then, that reader can find the bits and pieces that go into that meaning from all over the place. You can thus find the meaning, in part, from the impress of later New Testament texts on the Old Testament text as the interpreter is understanding them and come up with all kinds of creative bits that will make even Walter Brueggemann  (2:08:02)

So there is a kind of postmodern reading of the meaning of the text in front of the text  (2:08:10) intertextuality that is doing exactly what you just described but in a way that would probably curl your hair. But even there, there is a kind of use of intertextuality on that one that I think is right. Let me come in that through the side door.

There is a school of thought even amongst evangelicals that says when you’re preaching from the Old Testament you must bring all the Old Testament assumptions with you. So if you’re preaching through Jeremiah and go on weeks and weeks and weeks, wandering through Jeremiah, and you’re not even going to mention Jesus  (2:09:00) new covenant and a couple of things like that, but apart from that, you know.

There’s a sense in which that’s a healthy reaction against the kind of preaching of Jeremiah that treats Jeremiah merely as a quarry for systematic theology texts, and you start reading much later texts back into the Old Testament without any historical awareness of the rootedness of Jeremiah in the sixth century. Then it’s horrible stuff.

But reaction against that kind of  (2:09:31) entire systematic corpus into a sixth-century BC text has sometimes led people to preach Jeremiah so narrowly they don’t see where the trajectories are. They don’t see where things are going. I would say that faithful teaching and preaching of Jeremiah within a Christian camp means you must not only help people see what the text is saying in the sixth century but to see how it fits within the corpus of the Prophets, within the corpus of the Old Testament.

It’s picked up by Jesus and understood so as to see the ways in which it is pointing to the whole, and thus while you’re there, you can also establish on textual grounds … you’re not just making it up … on textually significant pointed grounds how it does point forward and finds its fulfillment in Christ and the gospel and so forth. The roots of biblical theology are many. One of the roots is, in fact, typology, and one of the groundings of typology is Old Testament history. So we’ve finally gotten back to my point. Further questions or comments?

Male: In a sense, coming back to the same point, I think, could we not say nevertheless that we, as Christians, read the Old Testament from the New? So we are not really reading as if we only could read the historical  (2:11:03) as it unfolded in salvation history, but I think your point  (2:11:09) You said the use of the New Testament. I wouldn’t use this term, but to say that to read the Old Testament through Christ. Wouldn’t that be something that you were …?

Male: I was thinking more along the line of the ultimate author sort of thing. As far as the timeline, we’re limited that way. I don’t want to be anachronistic in reading back into the Old Testament something, but the fact that he has inspired the whole work, I’m thinking is there a possibility where you can take some things …

To use an example, my Old Testament professor told me, “We don’t know that the serpent was necessarily Satan if we just read Genesis, but if you take into consideration Romans and Revelation, yes, we do know.” Is that something that’s legitimate to do while I’m going through Genesis 3? When I’m preaching, that’s one thing, but when I’m doing some research in maybe a scholarly setting, is that something that’s allowable?

I’m generally told, “No, you’re not allowed to do that,” but I’m trying to figure out the connection. With the author ultimately being the Lord, I’m not so sure why I can’t do that. I guess that’s what I was really looking for, if that narrows it down a little bit.

Don: Let me just go back to that one a bit first. In that particular case, I would say that anybody with a high view of Scripture (which is not saying any more than there is one final mind behind the whole thing) must make the connection. There are different ways of saying it. If you’re preaching or teaching or lecturing or writing on Genesis 3 …

I’ve used Genesis 3 many times in university missions. I love to expound the opening chapters of Genesis in university missions, because it’s the foundation of so much. Then you can say things like, “Here this critter is clearly evil, and later Scripture identifies him unambiguously as Satan.  (2:13:12) You don’t have to say more than that.

Male: It’s certainly true in a sermon or if you’re talking evangelistically.

Don:  (2:13:24)

Male: But if I was in an Old Testament class with an Old Testament professor, let’s say even a Jewish scholar, for me to identify that serpent as Satan would probably get me in a lot of hot water  (2:13:37)

Don: It would depend on the Jewish scholar, because there are Jewish scholars  (2:13:42), but if you try to identify the serpent as Satan from the point of view of Christian Scripture, which this conservative Jewish scholar does not recognize as Scripture, then obviously the rules of the game of discussion in that particular class will be a little bit different, but if you’re talking as a Christian at all, then that’s a slightly different matter.

If you’re a Christian, whether you’re a Christian scholar or a Christian preacher, then by all means I would say you are morally obligated to put things together where you can, but that does not give the warrant for overlooking the fact that although God transcends space-time history, you don’t. The form of the revelation God has given is a historical form.

Just because he inhabits eternity does not necessarily mean he has given us atemporal bits of revelation. He has, in fact, given us proverbs and things like that  (2:14:47), but even then they’re in Hebrew, which is cultural phenomenon, and it’s not Masoretic Hebrew. It’s Hebrew of tenth-century BC or sixth century or whatever, and thus it is  (2:15:05) cultural phenomenon. The development of these trajectories is a long time.

Now if you put it in terms of  (2:15:14) if you say Christians must read, do read the Old Testament from a New Testament perspective, then I would say inevitably we cannot escape the fact, and we shouldn’t try to escape the fact that we’re twentieth and twenty-first-century believers who look at things from our vantage point, but that’s not quite what some evangelical preachers are saying.

They want to distance themselves. They want to go through what the old hermeneutic people would call  (2:15:46). They want to distance themselves from a Christian understanding of the New Testament to try to read the Old Testament within the frame of reference of those givens and those givens alone, and there are a lot of evangelical preachers who try to do that.

I would say that is a mistake. It’s a serious mistake. You have to do that at a certain level to understand as carefully as you can what was understood at this particular frame of redemptive history, but you must also try to ask, “And where does that frame of redemptive history go within the Old Testament? Where does it find its fulfillment in the New?”

So that when you hit that line of trajectory, at certain points you explain where those things go in order to show their fulfillment in Christ, but you don’t want to do it in such an anachronistic way that you’re reading back all of that into the Old Testament without explaining how you actually got there, where the connections were. You don’t want to read it anachronistically either.

Male: May I just say  (2:16:49) My point would have been actually to take the point of  (2:16:55) You mentioned first of all that  (2:16:58) Jeremiah only on the basis of the text. Let us say I think we cannot preach on a psalm which speaks only about  (2:17:07) without mentioning that we have also the Sermon on the Mount.

That’s what I meant. Fully understanding and acknowledging that we have to start with the first setting of the text. There are points, I think, where we cannot preach as if we didn’t know about the New Testament  (2:17:26). Would you perhaps comment on that?

Don: Yes. On that particular one, I’m going to be inclined to warn against. I mean, I agree with you, so what I’m saying is not contradicting what you’re saying. It’s a further footnote. There are some Christians who think of God as he presents himself in the Old Testament as a God of revenge and anger and wrath and judgment, and in the New Testament, turn the other cheek and be nice and all that. So the move from the Old to the New is of strictness to grace or something like that.

It’s important to keep saying that in the Old Testament God presents himself as a God who is slow to anger and full of mercy. He will not always chide. As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear him. He remembers their frame. He knows they are dust. Meanwhile, in the New Testament, you have fewer discussions of genocide and wiping out peoples and  (2:18:21) and all that in historical terms, but you have far, far, far more on hell and judgment.

You read the closing verses of Revelation 14 and Revelation 20, and it makes Old Testament accounts seem pretty tame. It seems to me that as you move from the old covenant to the new, you don’t move from wrath to grace. Rather, as you move from the old to the new, just as the picture of God’s love is ratcheted up in further self-disclosure, so the pictures of God’s judgment are ratcheted up in further self-disclosure.

The reason we don’t believe that is because we don’t easily believe in hell. We’re more terrified of temporal judgment than of eternal judgment. But on any sober reading of Scripture, it seems to me that both the pictures of God’s wrath and the pictures of God’s grace are both ratcheted up with time. In the case of the psalms of revenge, the psalms of malediction, you don’t, in the first case, have to go to the Sermon on the Mount to show the counterweight, but even within the Psalms themselves and elsewhere.

Now also you do want to see where this is leading to the cross, but on the other hand, I just wanted to put in a footnote that I don’t want surreptitiously to give the impression that God back there has a bad temper, and now he has turned out to be a pretty nice God.

Male: If we look at historical in another way, the way the church has expounded on these texts, and the way the church throughout history has preached on these texts, and even the movement between the Old Testament and the New Testament, we look at it historically. Theology would even be more important than the historical emphasis, but that would be an important aspect to lift. Also today we have other approaches too. The literary framing of the Bible will be equally important. Perhaps we could as well emphasize that.

That will be interesting in this discussion, I think, and other perspectives as well would be not equally important perhaps or relevant, but the  (2:20:31) historical, and primarily the theological framing would be the most important for the Christian church. As a theologian, I would try to argue that. An exegete would say the historical. That’s the question we were debating here, but the  (2:20:52) historical will be ultimately very important  (2:20:55) other such approaches that are historically interested and oriented.

Particularly the theologian who wants to be a good theologian has to be very concerned about history, but a historian expounding on the Old Testament within the framing of the church has to be, I think, a theologian. That is the must you were talking about. Is this kind of just the emphasis of the historical concern? I just want to kind of emphasize the theological, but you’re doing that all the time but in other terms, I think.

Don: Well, actually, if you take a look at the outline I briefly provided, there’s a little category in there for different forms of criticism and what they  (2:21:44) but also narrative criticism and the older literary criticism and what place they all play. Part of the problem is that we have headed toward a form of reductionism in which we try to hold all forms of things at bay while using only one tool, and that is a huge mistake.

In fact, I’ve already started moving that direction by talking about history, like Genesis 39, as story. As soon as you start talking about history as story, then you’re into narrative criticism, and then you’re into literary criticism. They too hang together. I’ve tried to get there through the back door, as it were, and then I’ll short-circuit a couple of things when I get back.

We only have so many hours. I have to make some choices when I get back whether I pick up any more literary genres, if I take a bit more time on wisdom and a bit of time on gospels, and then I’ll come to the kinds of concerns you’re talking about. When people start saying the theological reading should be king, everything depends on what is meant by theological reading, for what a lot of people mean by theological reading is an atemporal, systematic reading.

I think that’s a mistake.  (2:23:00) Kevin Vanhoozer and I are at the moment writing a book on relationship between biblical and systematic theology. If Scripture is the norming norm, the fact of the matter is that Scripture is not given to us primarily in the categories of an atemporal theology. If, in fact, by theology you mean something bigger, so that it is a God-oriented reading, then I agree with you.

Male: The question as it was raised went this way. I don’t think the things you were speaking about before were. You were much into narrative criticism and so forth, but I still want to say that if you look at it historically, the way the church has handled these texts has not been systematic theology but  (2:24:00) theology that has been the primary interest.

If you look at Luther, Irenaeus, or Origen’s way of treating these texts, it has not been the modern or even postmodern historical awareness. To be more precise, the commentaries that are being written these days by, for instance, Robert Jenson on the Song of Songs would be very interesting, I think, in precisely this discussion that you are initiating.

Don: I’m not sure that’s quite fair from the point of view of  (2:24:39) I would argue that the New Testament writers themselves distinguish themselves from Jewish interpreters of the Old Testament precisely by their historical  (2:24:52) and that that is preserved in the earliest part of the patristic period then waters down in a variety of ways and is recaptured by the Reformers.

I think Luther and Calvin do it in different ways, but they capture (partly because they’ve been hit by the Renaissance) a historical reading of Scripture that is really quite different from Jewish reading. So the distinction between an atemporal and a temporal systematic theology you just have to address or we’ll fall into all kinds of traps that we must not fall back into.

Now what I’m going to do much more quickly is say a little bit about the genre of wisdom, because that is such an unfamiliar genre. Then I’ll say a little bit about the genre of gospel, but both of these are very preliminary sorts of reflections. One could go on for many hours on both of these subjects, but let me say a little bit about these two genres before we press on to other considerations.

Let me say in the strongest terms that if you are going to preach or teach from Proverbs you must purchase the two-volume commentary by Bruce Waltke. It is sheer unadulterated gold. It is superb. It gives you a whole theological education just in commentary. Very rarely do you read a commentary that is accurate on the Hebrew, understands that sort of thing, understands the time and situation, the literary genre, and is profoundly theological.

One of the reasons some people are trying to produce now what they’re calling theological commentaries is because so many commentaries are not theological. In my judgment,  (2:28:27) to produce commentaries that are ostensibly theological that are removed from detailed knowledge of genre and history and all of that.

Here is a commentary that has all of that put together in superb ways. This is a commentary that is rich on biblical theology, canonical stuff, systematic stuff. It’s just good on every front. It’s in the NICOT series, New International Commentary on the Old Testament, and it’s pure gold. Sell your shirt. Sell a child if you’re into slavery or something. Maybe not quite that far, but this is very high priority on any serious Christian’s serious reading list.

Having said that, some of what I’m going to give you now is stolen gratefully from him. We’ve done conferences together, so I listened to him on some of this sort of thing long before his book came out, and I have certainly been influenced by him in ways that I myself may not even recognize. So if you find anything useful here, I probably borrowed it from him without even knowing it.

Now wisdom in the Old Testament operates on two levels. This is an analogy, but it’s a useful analogy. It operates downstairs and upstairs. Downstairs, wisdom has to do with the structure of everything in God’s universe. Even before anything exists, in God’s mind wisdom shapes everything. Hence Proverbs 8:22.

In this framework, it is the glory of God to conceal a thing. It is bound up with the entire structure of everything, and God knows it all. It’s foundational for everything else. That’s why it’s the downstairs one. It’s the downstairs floor, the ground floor, on which everything else is built. Thus it embraces all of the proverbs, for example, that talk about God’s providence or God’s wisdom or God’s watch care over everything. It’s the foundation of everything in God’s universe.

Upstairs, it is a skill that is usefully divided into four principal rooms. First, it’s a skill to survive. For example, Proverbs 30:24: “Four things on earth are small, yet they are extremely wise: Ants are creatures of little strength, yet they store up their food in the summer; coneys [rock badgers] are creatures of little power, yet they make their home in the crags; locusts have no king, yet they advance together in ranks; a lizard can be caught with the hand, yet it is found in kings’ palaces.” They’re all considered wise.

Clearly, they’re not wise in the sense of having a high IQ or giving great insight in difficult situations. The point is in each case, granted what they are, they all know how to survive. In the case of creatures like ants, they store up their food in their summer. In other words, they know how to prepare for the future, for the lean time.

The coneys, rock badgers, make their home in the crags. They know how to survive by building in places that are secure. They hide from the evils and from the other predators, because they make their homes in the crags and hide among the rocks, and thus they know how to be secure. Locusts have no king, yet they advance together in ranks. Every sort of their predators can take them out, but they come in such swarming ranks and they go through the land and devastate it.

They just take over. They know the promise and power of community. So the first know the power of preparation for the future. The second know the power of security and secure places. The third have the power of community. The fourth, the lizard can be caught with the hand, yet it is found in kings’ palaces. They have latched their future to being absolutely everywhere, and they’re irrepressible.

Now all of the proverbs that deal with that sort of thing are really saying in God’s created order there is a God-given skill to survive. It’s not talking about wisdom in a philosophical sense or application of the Bible to life or IQ or anything like that. It is saying you may be a detestable little lizard, but one of the wisdoms God gives you is the skill to survive.

Secondly, it can be a technical skill. This shows up as early as Exodus 28:30, where those who are going to create the  (2:33:42) and all the necessary bits for the tabernacle are said to have certain wisdom. That’s not how we use wisdom today, but it’s pretty common in Scripture.

So here we have Moses instructed by God in Exodus 28, “Have Aaron your brother brought to you from among the Israelites, along with his sons Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar, so they may serve me as priests. Make sacred garments for your brother Aaron, to give him dignity and honor. Tell all the skilled men to whom I have given wisdom in such matters that they are to make garments …”

The wisdom he has given them again is not insight into relationships or anything. It’s wisdom so as to do all the gold filigree work and all the careful embroidery and silver sockets. They had wisdom in skill. It’s in that sense, likewise, that in the Old Testament, musicians, for example, may be considered wise, or people who can do leather work or create a lovely building, what we would consider art. It’s, I think, in Scripture considered wisdom. It’s a certain kind of skill.

We foolishly make artists a kind of rank up. “Oh, he has an artistic temperament.”  (2:35:00) but from God’s point of view, this doesn’t make them better or anything. This is skill. She plays the flute magnificently. He’s wonderful on the violin, and it’s a skill. No doubt it has been trained in certain measure, but it’s wisdom in that sense.

Third, administrative skill. This is very important in the account of Solomon, but it goes back farther than that. Deuteronomy 1:15, where Moses talks about devolution, distributing power, and so on. “So I took the leading men of your tribes, wise and respected men, and appointed them to have authority over you—as commanders of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties and tens …” It’s the wisdom of administration, social structure, hierarchy of things.

It’s likewise reflected in the great account of Solomon. Do you remember when Solomon is asked by God, “Ask what you want, and I’ll give it to you”? He asks for wisdom, and God commends him. Then the dear chap manages to have 300 wives and 700 concubines and makes a right mess of his life in all kinds of ways, and you think, “If the wisest man on earth makes a mess like that, good grief! What chance is there for the rest of us?”

The reason we find that so difficult is because we’re thinking in the contemporary use of wisdom, whereas Solomon is not. Solomon is thinking of wisdom in terms of exercising the administrative skill a king needs, which includes justice. The examples of his wisdom are the justice he exacts, for example, for the two women who are both claiming the son. It’s not just that he was shrewd in thinking up some sort of trick, but he really did administrative justice in that case.

The kinds of administrative structures that reflect something of the justice and righteousness of God, so that the nation flourishes and grows with excellent economics, making silver as common as stone on the streets and gold as common as silver, and so forth. All of this is good administration. It’s wisdom, but that doesn’t mean that made him a moral person. It didn’t make him a spiritual person. It was a very important thing to ask for when he was becoming king, because that’s what he was called to do, but by itself it didn’t make him covenantally faithful.

The fourth one might be called social skill. This is especially strong in Proverbs. It’s how to relate to  (2:37:36), friends, employers, employees, slaves, the poor, the rich. It’s how to relate to everybody, and especially God. Because so much of social skill is bound up with seeking, there are many, many proverbs about the tongue and judgment calls. “It’s better to live in that than that.” It’s an evaluation of what is important in the whole social dimension of life. How to live in God’s universe in the fear of God.

Now within that framework, wisdom literature can be broken down into a variety of subgenres. There’s wisdom proverb, for example. There’s wisdom as drama. The wisdom label is also used to reflect the book of Job, which is cast as a major drama. Very often these wisdom sorts of books, whether it’s Ecclesiastes or Proverbs or it’s drama like Job, however complex and nuanced they are, they eventually set things up into some sort of ultimate polarity.

Wisdom sets things up finally in polarities. You see it in little proverbs. “It’s better to live on the corner of a rooftop in peace than down in the house with a nagging wife.” There’s your polarity. “This is good. This is bad.” Likewise, in the book of Job, at the end of the day, there’s a certain massive vision of trusting God even in the midst of suffering that’s unjust and all the rest, because God knows the end and the beginning and you do not. There’s a massive polarity.

At the end of the day, even though Job has to repent for how close he gets to questioning God, yet at the same time, the theology of the miserable comforters is soundly rebuked, and Job has to pray for them. There’s a kind of polarity  (2:39:43) It’s one of the reasons why Psalm 1 is sometimes called a wisdom psalm.

You have “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or seat in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that brings forth its fruit in its season. Whatever he does prospers.”

Okay, there’s the just. Then the unjust follows. “Not so the wicked! Not so! They are like chaff that the wind blows away. Therefore, they will not stand.” So you’re one or the other. Then the final closing summary: “The Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked perishes.” You have this absolute polarity.

Then you stop and think, “Whoa! Wait. Only two ways to live? What about David? He was a man after God’s own heart, but he manages to shack up with Bathsheba and then bump off her husband. One wonders what he would have done if he hadn’t been a man after God’s own heart.” The polarities seem a bit strange when you look at us. Two ways to live, but with all of our inconsistencies, isn’t it more like a spectrum?

Now you suddenly realize that you’re in a genre question. Narrative has the capacity for building up all the nuances and the footnotes and the exceptions and how compromised we are. That’s what narrative does, but wisdom literature sets out polarities, and thus there is a place in human life, as well as in the Canon, for both.

Thus, at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, you have Jesus as the great wisdom preacher. You either enter into the narrow gate, and not many find it, but the broad way goes to destruction, and many there be who go in there. “Oh no, I don’t want that. I’ll go in an in-between-sized gate.” You can’t do that. In wisdom literature you have a polarity to make.

You build a house on rock and it withstands the storm, or you build a house on sand and it crumbles in the first hurricane. “Well, not me. I’m going to use hard-packed clay myself.” You can’t do that. It’s wisdom literature. You have these absolute polarities that force choice and preserve ideals, but at the same time, Jesus himself is so in the norm really flexible and patient and forbearing with sinners and handles people differently.

What he says to Nicodemus is not what he says to the woman at the well, which is not what he says to Zacchaeus. There’s a flexibility and a subtleness and a gentleness in all that he does. At the same time, he can be a wisdom preacher with absolute polarities. If I had time, I could show you that in the New Testament there are books that bring these absolute polarities together with real flexibility.

In this connection, then, because it does speak in such polarized terms, it’s wrong to think of proverbs as case law. It’s wrong to think of proverbs as universal promise. For example, Proverbs 26:4–5: “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.” If you think of Proverbs as case law or universal promise, you’re going to have trouble with those two.

The Bill Gothard school of methods.… Some of you don’t know what it is, but you haven’t lost too much. He makes some very good points, but the Bill Gothard school of ethics treats everything as case law. “ ‘Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.’ God says it. It’s a promise. It’s universal. It has no exceptions. I believe it. Therefore, if one of your kids comes off the rails, whose fault is it?”

Whoa! Wait a minute. That’s a genre proverb. The fact of the matter is very often you can see where the parents have gone wrong and their kids go astray. Yes, often you can, but you’re not a pastor for many years before you find families where, in all fairness, you cannot rightly blame the parents for the peculiar rebellions of the kids. As good and stable as families even possibly  (2:44:06).

I’ve seen kids, for example, from families that are really wonderful. Four kids who are really terrific, and then one was seduced by a pedophile, corrupted, and ended up a long-term homosexual. It happened in what was thought to be a secure environment in school. Are you going to blame the parents for that? The fact of the matter is proverbs don’t put in the footnotes. They don’t give you the nuance of narrative. They don’t provide you with universal promises.

“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” It’s part of the skill set of social structure as God has ordained it in his created order, and as a result, it’s important to take that on seriously, but to treat it as an absolute promise to which there are no exceptions or footnotes is to misunderstand what the text is doing. You can see that most clearly when you put two of these proverbs side by side that seem to be telling you to go in different directions.

“Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.” You can see from the second line a bit of what the writer has in mind, why you need both, but if you just take the actual instruction itself and make it a universal commandment, case law, you have real problems. “Do not answer a fool according to his folly. Answer a fool according to his folly.”

The second line shows you some of the nuance of where you put it. “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself.” It reminds you of the kinds of things Paul says in the Pastoral Epistles. Don’t go on and on endlessly about genealogies. You just get dragged down into more and more debate about narrow things that have you fighting over little bits and pieces. But the other one, “Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes,” is important too. There are some people who really need to be laughed at.

My favorite illustration of this.… We have a chap on our faculty called Perry Downs. He’s in his mid-60s now. He had two daughters of his own. They’re both married with their own children. He and his wife were also foster parents over the years to 30 different children, some for a year, some for a few months. He knows kids. He’s one of these fellows with an irrepressible sense of humor, absolutely irrepressible.

So he has learned to be a really terrific communicator with young people. Not long ago, he was asked to give a talk at a junior college near us. A junior college is like the first two years of university. This was an evening course for people on religion, so they had one night for Buddhism and another night for Hinduism. The three-hour evening they had for Christianity, they brought in a Catholic priest, an Anglican minister, and Perry.

Now because God has a sense of humor, on that particular occasion the Anglican priest arrived drunk. I’m not suggesting that all Anglicans are drunk, but this particular  (2:47:03) was. The Catholic priest in this particular case had just gotten his PhD and was very impressed with himself and went right over the heads of everybody in this group of 18- and 19-year-olds. Then there was Perry, who could communicate with any  (2:47:21).

He stole the show, quite frankly. He really was  (2:47:25) trying to get across what basic biblical Christianity is. Then in the question and answer period afterwards, the first question came from a young woman, probably 18, not God’s gift to scholarship, chewing gum. “Yeah, but, Dr. Downs, what about all the Hindus?” Perry gasped and said, “I didn’t think about that. I’m going to have to start all over again.”

It takes a certain personality to get away with that. The whole class  (2:48:01) Then he said, “No, I want to take your questions. I don’t really mean to laugh at you, but I don’t want you to think for a moment that you can destroy 2,000 years of thoughtful, committed, suffering Christianity by one smart question.” What had he done? He’d answered a fool according to her folly so that others wouldn’t become like her.

You have to be a good teacher to get away with that, but he is a good teacher. You have to be very careful that you don’t use your position of power simply to mock people. Nevertheless, a wise teacher will know when to answer a fool according to his or her folly and when not to. But the explanation is not put down there for you. This is Proverbs.

If you want to understand how to handle the proverbs well in the ministry.… How many sermon series have you heard that have taken 15 weeks to go through the book of Proverbs? Read Bruce Waltke, and you’ll see how to do it. Enough of that. I wish I had time for more, but I want to say something about gospels. I’m going to skip Old Testament prophet. I’m going to skip oracles. I’m going to skip a lot of things.

Again, there’s so much that could be said in terms of the background of what a gospel is. I want to get to the heart of some issues. It’s important to recognize, for example, the parallels between gospels and Greco-Roman biographies. It’s important to recognize how many subgenres are in gospels, for example, narrative parable, beatitude, apocalypse, history, genealogy, confessional bits. I don’t have time to deal with that.

The first thing to say, I think, is that in the first century, gospel was not a literary genre. It really is important to see that. It came to be, but it wasn’t at first. The earliest manuscripts, the earliest textual evidence.… This is nicely laid out by  (2:49:59) (and others) who does some first-class work in this regard.

The earliest manuscripts for all four of our canonical gospels were “The Gospel According to Matthew, the Gospel According to Luke, the Gospel According to John,” and so on. What was meant by that was not the literary structure we call a gospel written by Matthew. What was meant was the good news according to Matthew.

In other words, there was understood to be one gospel, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news of Jesus Christ, to which witness was borne by various people. In other words, the four gospels were not at first gospels, if I may put it that way. They were not perceived to be some different literary genre, something strange called the gospel or a gospel. They were perceived to be the bearing of witness of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John respectively to the gospel, the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In that connection, what you see so tellingly is that they have certain broad commonalities that are necessary to be that which there’s witness to the gospel, including the beginnings of Jesus, however beginnings is understood, whether in a context like John’s gospel, with the Word becoming flesh and living for a while amongst us, or in Luke’s gospel, with the Holy Spirit coming upon Mary, or in Mark’s gospel, or whatever.

The beginnings of his ministry tied up with John the Baptist. His work and ministry and miracles and interaction and confrontation of the demonic and all the rest climaxing in the passion narrative and resurrection accounts, because you don’t have the good news unless you have all of that. Eventually, these became so normative in the church they came to be called the gospel of Matthew, Matthew’s gospel, Mark’s gospel, and thus gospel became a literary genre term, for lack of a better word, and already that’s happening in the second century.

That means, therefore, that when you see the first-century roots, when you see things like the gospel of Thomas or the gospel of Judas or the gospel of Peter and a whole lot of other pseudonymous gospels from late second and third century, you really are dealing with another kettle of fish. The gospel of Thomas, so-called, which the more radical skeptics are trying to read back into the first century.… There’s just no good evidence that it’s earlier than mid-second century.

The reason, in the first instance, why you cannot consider it fundamental is because nobody in the first century would have called it a gospel. It’s made up of 114 sayings. There are two tiny little snippets of historical material, and there is no narrative that brings you to the passion and resurrection. None. Nothing. It’s not the gospel, the good news of Thomas. By this time, you have a genre of literature that are called gospels, and Gnostic heretics are putting together their material in order to get across their teachings, but it has no good news about Jesus.

The so-called gospel of Judas, which has been in the air for a long time.… I can’t say how it has been portrayed in all of your countries, but in many, many places, the description has been very slippery. The first reference we have of the gospel of Thomas in any literature is by Irenaeus about 180. Irenaeus refers to a gospel of Thomas. It’s in his book Against Heresies. He’s referring to it as part of his refutation of Gnostic heresies at the beginning of the second century.

The gospel of Judas that we’re talking about is from a late third- or early fourth-century document. When the media say it is probably authentic (and it probably is), it’s probably authentically the gospel of Judas to which Irenaeus refers, but that does not mean it is a gospel or of Judas. It’s authentically the gospel of Judas that Irenaeus refers to. That’s probably correct.

In that sense, it is probably authentically that, but when ordinary people hear a voice on television saying it’s authentic, they think, “Oh, it was actually written by Judas, then. This is really giving another very big slant on things.” When you actually read the document.… And you can. A lot of it was published on the net very early and is now available on book

It has been known since about 1972 or something like that. It has taken this long before somebody has bothered to translate it. Read it for yourself. It won’t shake your faith in the slightest. It is of a piece with the Gnostic materials of the late second and third century. The material is not rooted in Palestine. It’s not rooted in history. It’s not rooted in genuine interactions with people.

It’s rooted in heretical early third-century Gnostic heresy. It has nothing to do with the historic Judas, nothing to do with Palestine, and it’s not authentic in that sense at all. The biggest thing about it is it’s not bearing witness to the gospel, because you don’t have the gospel unless you have the account of Jesus’ death and resurrection and atoning sacrifice. You just don’t.

Likewise, when you have books today that start trying to teach the teaching of Jesus, for example, apart from the passion and resurrection narrative, that is a profoundly perverse interpretation of our canonical gospels, because they were never put together as separate teaching. “Oh yes, by the way, there is a kind of sad story at the end  (2:55:58) Yes, it does have a happy ending. It’s a resurrection. How that’s all related to the teaching, who knows? The really important teaching is the stuff about the kingdom of God and giving to the poor.”

No, the only responsible way you can read our canonical gospels in the light of first-century understanding is precisely that this is the one gospel of Jesus Christ attested by these varying voices of witness, and that always integrates the teaching with the passion and resurrection narratives. So much so that some people have said (not entirely accurately, but you understand what they mean) that the four canonical gospels are basically passion and resurrection narratives with long introductions.

That means you’re far more likely to get an accurate understanding of how the Gospels work at the hands of somebody who reads them as whole books ending up in the cross and the resurrection than if you try to read too myopically or too atomistically. As a good example of this.… I disagree with a bit of what he has done here and there, but as a very good example of a book that’s trying to put things together in the light of the cross and resurrection, see Peter Bolt’s little volume in the NSBT (New Studies in Biblical Theology) series.

It’s called The Cross from a Distance. It’s really a biblical theological reading of Mark’s gospel. It’s reading the whole of the gospel accounts in the light of  (2:57:31) takes you to the cross and resurrection, which is how you have to read the Gospels. That doesn’t mean I agree with every jot and tittle of his interpretation, but the method is essentially right. The approach is essentially right. Then you discover how much the cross permeates the whole, because, after all, this is the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Second, whenever they were written (and there’s a lot of room for dispute), what they purport to depict is the period between the Old Testament and the post-Easter apostolic church. I don’t know how to stress that strongly enough. That is crucial. The reason it’s crucial is because on virtually any dating of the Gospels, most or all of them were written after most or all of our letters. So when historians put things together, they’re often trying to put things together in the sequence of which was written first.

They want to read Paul on 1 Thessalonians or Galatians, depending on which one they thought was written first, and the  (2:58:50) and that sort of thing before they come to read the Gospels, and thus they try to argue that the theology of the Gospels is later than the theology of the Epistles. The implications for teaching, preaching, and understanding are huge, and in my judgment, with all due respect, profoundly mistaken.

Once again, there’s a smidgen of truth in this approach, but it’s only a smidgen. Let’s take an analogy. Supposing somebody were to write a history of World War II, writing, let’s say, about 1955 and written by one of the Allies. So now we’re trying to locate the author in his or her place in history. He’s on the winning side and at the time of a fair bit of triumphalism. In the US, the Eisenhower years. Over here, Europe rebuilding itself pretty fast and money flourishing. The economy is going very well. It’s before the troubles of the 60s.

Yet there is now the Cold War already going on. So how will the thing be written? At a certain level, of course …  (3:00:04) William Shirer wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. If you read that sort of account, an awful lot of it goes through the actual scenes of what happened. There’s a lot of data and information, the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Pacific, the so-called Battle of the Bulge in Europe in late ‘44 … All of these things are going to be in all of the histories, no matter when they’re written.

Now suppose you get another history of World War II written about 1975 by somebody in the West. How will that sound? Well, now you’re just coming to the end of the Vietnam War. Almost certainly when a person writes a description of the Second World War, there’s going to be some contrasts made for the readers between that war, which was a war with certain moral values that were being contested …

But here there’s compromise and inefficiency, and it’s unclear and morally ambiguous. Who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys? That’s the way it’s going to be seen. Now you write it in 1995. The Cold War is all over, and the Towers have not yet come down. Now you’re writing in 2005. The Towers have come down. Do you see what I mean? In every case, the actual  (3:01:40) of content of describing that Second World War is going to be remarkably similar, but there may be an editorial sense that is a bit different.

What you would not be able to do in any of these histories of World War II is reconstruct the post-World War II history of the West on the basis of these ostensible histories of World War II simply by the stances adopted by the particular authors. If you know that history accurately, then by reading those particular works you could probably guess where they fit in, more or less, into this sequence. They do have a kind of editorial stance. That is correct.

But you wouldn’t be able to reconstruct all of the history of all of that post-war trauma and event, drama, victory and defeat, moral ambiguity, and all the rest. What an awful lot of the critics want us to do is to reconstruct the history of the church on the basis of their redaction critical reading of the theology of the individual gospels, even though the Gospels themselves purport to be writing about what took place in the life and ministry of Jesus, Messiah,  (3:02:55)

The only way you can do that is by assuming that they are not historical to begin with. If you start giving them good marks for history, although you can discern the slightly different editorial stances of the various canonical gospels (and the independence of John in this regard over against the Synoptics in certain respects, although there’s less independence than you think), yet there is no way on God’s green earth you can recreate the early history of the church from the Gospels.

Meanwhile, the gospel writers themselves are claiming that their presentation of what takes place in the life and times of Jesus the Messiah is what establishes the foundation for all the theology that is, in fact, found in the Epistles. Thus, the kind of approach to biblical theology that begins with the Epistles and moves to the Gospels is, in my judgment, profoundly methodologically flawed. You have to begin with Jesus, and the only real axis we have to Jesus is in the Gospels.

That’s why some of the work of Paul Barnett is so important. Paul Barnett, both in a small book in the NSBT series and in a 550-page book, which tries to begin with Jesus and the Gospels as the foundation of everything else that comes in the New Testament (he’s working on a second book now called The Apostles), is trying to reorder the whole thing in line with making Jesus at the beginning. Isn’t that an awful thought?

I suggest to you that it’s the only responsible way of thinking through, understanding, interpreting, theologizing about, and reaching from the Gospels. Otherwise, I want to argue,  (3:04:34) let alone a theologian, there’s something profoundly perverse and debunking of Jesus to it all.

One more thing I’ll say about the Gospels. If the reasoning is right at this point, and I’m persuaded that it is, there’s a further thing that falls out of the reading of the Gospels. The conversion of people.… Let’s call it generically the coming to faith in Jesus of people in the narratives of the Gospels is, in one respect, qualitatively different from any of our own coming to faith. It’s very important to see that. Let me explain that. It is important for how you preach and teach the Gospels.

How Peter comes to faith, I’m arguing, is, in one respect, radically different from how any of us come to faith, because Peter’s full coming to what we would call Christian faith depends at least in part on his living long enough, on his waiting long enough to live right through the cross, resurrection, and ascension. In other words, he’s in a peculiar place in redemptive history so that his coming to full Christian faith depends on waiting for certain events to take place.

Not just waiting for his own maturation. We all face that, and in that regard he is parallel to us in certain respects. But even when Jesus is hanging on the cross or when he’s in the tomb, the disciples themselves are not in an upper room saying, “Yes! I can hardly wait till Sunday.” They still don’t have a category for a crucified Messiah. For them it’s an oxymoron. Messiahs win. They don’t get crucified.

That means all of their own utterances and all the descriptions of them coming to faith in all four of the gospels, without exception, are in some ways qualitatively different from our coming to faith, because we live after those salvation historical events. We may have to wait until we understand a bit more. We may have to wait until God has given us by his Spirit real conviction of sin.

We may have to wait until we really do believe that Jesus has risen from the dead. We don’t have to wait until Jesus rises from the dead. The entailment of that is it is methodologically and theologically wrong to use the Gospels first and foremost as paradigms of discipleship, as paradigms of how you come to faith, as paradigms of what it means to become a Christian.

It’s not that there’s nothing that’s said that’s useful in that regard. On the other hand, I worry about endless doctoral dissertations on discipleship in Mark. Not because there’s nothing to be said about discipleship in Mark, but I want to make sure that what is first and foremost said about Mark is what Mark says about Jesus. The Gospels were written as the good news about Jesus. It’s the gospel of Jesus Christ according to Mark.

So in your teaching and preaching of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, you must first and foremost ask in every  (3:07:55) in every unit of thought, in every chapter, “What is this telling us about Jesus, about the King, about why he’s here, about his understanding  (3:08:05) the cross, about how it fulfills Old Testament antecedent revelation?” Out of this you get a whole understanding of how important Jesus is, who Jesus is, what he has done, what he came for, what the gospel is.

Now within that matrix, I don’t mind also saying some things about discipleship and obedience and the importance of faith and all the rest, but even then, you quickly have to put in the footnote that acknowledges that their coming to faith is a bit different from ours in that they still have to wait for those great turning points in redemptive history.

Otherwise, you yourself, no matter how high a view of Scripture you have, are beginning to treat the Gospels anachronistically. Now there are huge things that could be said at this juncture, but let me pause and throw it open to question, comment, or personal abuse.

Male: You’re emphasizing the historical aspects again. That is necessary, of course, but I get the impression that redaction criticism, as it has developed during the recent decades or 50 years or so, is a threat somehow, that we should emphasize the history and not the presuppositions by the redactors.

Don: I’ll come to redaction criticism in a couple of minutes actually.

Male: But still, the history as such. I mean, the object of history is there somehow in the different and various accounts, but I think there used to be a time when …  (3:09:48) in his thesis recently about this emphasis on the cross and resurrection, particularly in Lutheran contexts, that Christendom was nothing before the resurrection and the Christ events, so to speak, narrowly understood.

In meeting that, I think the challenge would be  (3:10:16) and others would meet very nicely, I think, to bring them together. I think that’s a construction, really, to divide the history before the cross and resurrection, and that is what has happened. More literal theologians have tended to emphasize only the post-resurrection perspective and reading back all the time.

There’s a risk, I think, to listen too much to that. The challenge today will be to bring.… You can’t understand the cross and resurrection without having the history all the time, but also the other way around. There is a reading back. There is a redaction perspective all the way through, because at the beginning of the gospel of Mark you have that theological perspective there right from the outset, but that doesn’t stand in opposition at all with the history.

Don: I don’t think, with respect, that you’ve understood  (3:11:20), because I’m just about as theological as you can get. Let me come at this a slightly different way. This is coming through the side door, and it’s going to take three or four minutes, but I see no other way of getting it across quickly.

What is the difference between Paul’s reading of Old Testament texts before the Damascus Road and after? There is a huge amount of literature on this subject. For example, a lot of the work of  (3:12:00) and others, who tried to show that the principles of New Testament use of the Old Testament are entirely in line with Jewish Midot, their rules of interpretation. A lot of the work is really good. It’s really  (3:12:12) compelling.

The problem is the harder you push that line, the harder you face the problem. Paul and certain Palestinian Jews (or to put it differently, Paul before he’s a Christian and after he’s a Christian) are reading the same sacred texts, but they’re coming out with different conclusions. What hermeneutical difference is at stake?

Of course there’s the personal one. He believes that Christ is alive. I’m not  (3:12:39) work of the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, is there any hermeneutical difference whatsoever? I would argue that there are three or four. I’ll just mention one  (3:12:48) If you asked a first-century conservative Palestinian Jew, “How do you please God?” he would answer, “By obeying Torah.”

“How then does Isaiah please God?”

“By obeying Torah.”

“How does David please God?”

“By obeying Torah.”

“How does Moses please God?”

“By obeying Torah.”

“How does Abraham please God?”

“By obeying Torah.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa! The Mosaic legislation, the Mosaic witness, Torah in that sense had not been given at the time of Abraham.” A first-century conservative Palestinian Jew would have replied, “Yes, but Genesis itself says, ‘Abraham kept all my statutes.’ So it must have been that Abraham received a private revelation of God’s Torah, because that’s how you please God.”

“How did Enoch please God?”

“By obeying Torah.”

“Wait, wait! He’s only seventh from Adam.”

“Yes, but it says he walked with God. We know what it means to walk with God. There are many texts that point out that walking with God is bound up with obeying Torah, so he must have received a private revelation from God.”

What is happening in that hermeneutic? What’s happening in that hermeneutic is that Torah, the Mosaic code in particular, is being elevated to the level of hermeneutical control through what we call the Old Testament canonical texts. Now along comes Paul, and at this juncture he’s a Christian. What he does in Romans 4, Galatians 3, and other passages, what Hebrews does repeatedly …

Let’s just take Galatians 3. What does he say in Galatians 3? He says you can’t read the Old Testament text that way. You have to see that a promise was given to Abraham before the Law was given. The promise was given to Abraham that in him and in his seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed, and he believed God, and that was counted to him as righteousness.

That promise is unconditional, Paul says, such that when the Law was added later, it could not overturn the promise. Why, then, was the Law given? Then he works it all out in Galatians. What’s the difference hermeneutically between that and the conservative Palestinian Jew? The difference is Paul is insisting on reading the Old Testament account in historical sequence. He is refusing to give to Torah an atemporal hermeneutical control over the whole.

Thus, when he tries to evangelize, he is not simply saying, “Listen, it doesn’t matter what you think of the Old Testament. If you just see who Jesus is, then we’ll find a proof text in the Old Testament and make it work out.” He would acknowledge that he did need the Damascus Road experience and the work of the Spirit to make him see, but once he has seen, he has so reread the Old Testament he now sees things in the Old Testament that he didn’t see before, and this has involved a hermeneutical shift.

One of the elements of a hermeneutical shift is that he’s reading the text salvation historically. He’s reading them in a chronological sequence. He does the same thing, for example, in Romans 4, when he argues, “Did circumcision come before the coming of Abraham or after? Is Abraham justified by faith before circumcision or after?” It makes a huge difference for the place and function of circumcision.

Hebrews does the same kind of thing when it argues, for example, in Hebrews 8 … There are more sophisticated ones in chapters 3–4 and again in chapter 7, but in Hebrews 8, if God promises a new covenant, quoting Jeremiah, then implicitly, we’re told in Hebrews 8:13, the old covenant is rendered obsolete and is going to pass away.

That’s a salvation historical reading again. The covenant is already there. Now he’s promised a new covenant. That means this one cannot be the final enduring one. In fact, the argument is more sophisticated than that already when you have in chapter 3 and chapter 4 the argument about Sabbath and rest.

They’re quoting Psalm 95  (3:16:59) does is say Psalm 95 comes after the people have entered into the Promised Land, yet in Psalm 95, at the time of David, God is already saying, “Today, if you do not harden your heart as in the days of provocation.”  (3:17:15) “Do not harden your heart. Then I will receive you. Otherwise, you will never enter into my rest.”

You think, “Wait a minute. At the time of the exodus, entering into the rest was entering into the Promised Land.” The first people who got out, got out, but many died in the wilderness. They never got in. They hardened their hearts, so they never entered into God’s rest. But the next generation, the author says, did get in under Joshua.

Even though they did get in under Joshua, yet centuries later, God is still saying, “Today, if you don’t harden your heart, you can enter into my rest,” which means that entering into the Promised Land cannot be entering into the ultimate rest. It can only be a step along the line. Then eventually he extends this  (3:18:00) what does Psalm 95 mean by saying, “Enter into my rest”? Where is God at rest? Then he harks back to Genesis 2.

He’s making a whole salvation historical connection. I wish I had time to work through the passage in detail. My rest in Genesis 2, the Sabbath rest from the Ten Commandments, the further promise of rest in Psalm 95 that cannot be reduced to the entrance to the Promised Land.… He has a whole trajectory building up this way, which turns absolutely on a salvation historical reading that is ultimately fulfilled in the coming of Christ.

We enter into God’s rest by ceasing from our labors as God ceased from his. Even then, it tracks forward to the ultimate consummation. We are supposed to press on, as the Israelites in the wilderness had to press on, or else we might come out from our sin but not press into the consummation. There’s a whole trajectory that all depends on a certain salvation historical sequence.

Now what I’m arguing is not that this is history over against theology. Not at all. I don’t want that for a second. I’m with you entirely. The trouble is that in much of this discussion, history has been abstracted from theology and then pit against each other, and there I’m with you 100 percent. I detest it with a passion.

At the same time, I also want to insist that one of the distinctive hermeneutical things the New Testament writers do when they read the Old Testament, as compared with first-century conservative Palestinian Jews, was to insist that the texts as given to us are in historical sequence and can only drive you toward a Christian interpretation by seeing that in salvation historical sequence.

What I want to argue is that that was understood by the New Testament writers. It was understood by the earliest church. By the end of the patristic period, the historical consciousness was beginning to be lost, such that now ministers are becoming priests. Eventually, Communion becomes a sacrifice. The church building eventually becomes a temple, none of which is in the New Testament.

There were ups and downs several times during church history, but one of the big turning points was precisely the Reformation, because both Luther and Calvin, in slightly different ways, started understanding the Old Testament/New Testament connection in historical terms again, and then I think that tended to be lost in the post-Reformation scholastics.

When it was picked up again in what became the biblical theology movement, it tended to be picked up by more liberal people, and then it went off into a track that ultimately divided theology and history, and it took a while for  (3:20:45), on the one hand, and a number of other nineteenth-century greats to try and pull it together into a form of biblical theology that was not dividing history and theology but was nevertheless saying, “History is crucial within the biblical text for understanding theology aright.”

In this connection, I want to say, likewise, the Gospels themselves are part of that trajectory, and if you don’t see it, then what you end up doing ultimately is displacing the significance of Christ as the great turning point in redemptive history to establish everything. Have I redeemed myself?

Male: Thank you.

Don: I’m entirely with you if your concern is history against theology or history abstracted from theology. I couldn’t agree with you more.

Male: Back to the wisdom genre, I’m wondering how one teaches and even applies wisdom statements when there’s this polarity. For example, wisdom teaching in Jesus versus nuance.

Don: That’s a big question.

Male: Yeah, I realize it may be too big.

Don: What I would argue is that both are needed, but they have to be applied carefully. Let me give you an example from another New Testament book. The New Testament book that, in my judgment, puts these two strands together … the absolutes on one hand and the nuance of life and experience and  (3:22:13) on the other … is 1 John.

On the one hand, you have from 1 John 1:6 to 2:2 these statements written to Christians. “If you say that you don’t sin or you haven’t sinned, you’re a liar, and the truth is not in you. The fact of the matter is you’re calling God a liar, because he says that we have sinned and we do sin. I’m not saying this to sanction your sin,” he says, “but nevertheless, if we sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous, and he is the propitiation for our sins.”

It’s all cast in terms of the fact Christians are going to sin, Christians have sinned, Christians do sin, and you’d better admit it. The only hope you have is Christ and the cross. Then from 2:3 on, you have what  (3:23:05) used to call  (3:23:07) of life, these very, very strong  (3:23:10) that say, “Unless you love the brothers, you’re not a Christian. Unless you believe certain Christological truth, you’re not a Christian. Unless you obey Christ, you’re not a Christian.”

There’s a moral test, a social test, a love test, and a truth test. It’s not best two of three or grading on the curve. It’s cast in highly absolute terms, nowhere more strongly than in 1 John 3:9–10. This language is shocking, isn’t it? Our English translations, in fact, try to fudge it a bit to make it less shocking. Start at 3:7: “Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. He who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. He who does what is sinful is of the devil.” Hear the polarities? Absolute polarities. Nothing like chapter 1.

“He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work. No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God.”

Even that is too weak for what the Greek says. They inserted words like continue in or go on to try to handle the present tense, yet that is bleeding the present tense too much. The present tense does project the aspect of the practice of something or the process of something, but to translate it in this heavy-handed way almost suggests, “Well, as long as you don’t go on and on and on sinning but sin once in a while, it’s not too bad.” It’s just not the way the language reads. It’s very, very absolutist. What do you do with that?

When I was a boy in school in grade seven we had a teacher called Mr. Cooper. Mr. Cooper was a World War II vet who wished he had remained in the Canadian army, and he wanted to run a grade 7 classroom like a parade square, and that wasn’t going to work. He was not God’s gift to teaching. When the decibel level of the class got up around 140, he would sometimes stand to his feet, put his fingers under the lip of the big oak desk on a hard floor, and slam it down.

“That’s only one-tenth of my strength!” as if we  (3:25:28) He was really bad as a teacher. He had all kinds of things he detested. One of them was chewing gum. “You cannot chew gum.” If he caught you chewing gum, he would get up, pick up the dust bin at the front of his desk, and go and hold it under your nose and glare at you, and then recite:

A gum-chewing boy and a cud-chewing cow

Look so much alike, yet different somehow.

What is the difference? I see it now.

‘Tis the thoughtful look in the face of the cow.

“Spit!” What was Mr. Cooper saying? Let us analyze Wasn’t he saying something like, “Gum chewing is not done here; you cannot chew gum here”? If I had stuck up my hand in row three and said, “Ontologically speaking, Mr. Cooper, you’re mistaken. You say I cannot do it? I’m doing it …” The problem with that response, of course, is that when Mr. Cooper says, “You cannot chew gum here,” he’s not uttering an ontological remark. It’s a moral imperative.

Not every use of cannot is an ontological use. So I went through all of the instances in the New Testament that use cannot or do not with a negation, and a significant percentage are not ontological structures at all; they’re moral imperatives. Now do you see what’s being said? “Gum chewing is not done here.” In the church of Jesus Christ, sinning is not done here. You cannot sin here.

It quite misses the point to say, “Excuse me, Pastor. I’m doing it.” The point is in the church of Jesus Christ sinning is not done here. It is always without excuse. It is always forbidden. It is always without warrant. Unbelief is wretched. Lovelessness is inexcusable. Disobedience is defiance of almighty God. It is inexcusable. It is not done here. You cannot sin here. You have God’s nature in you. But God help us. We do it anyway.

This side of the consummation, you’d better understand that you will do it and our only hope is to go back to the cross to Jesus Christ, the advocate with the Father. He’s the propitiation for our sin. If you don’t live with that tension, you don’t even understand the first step of sanctification. That’s a gospel  (3:28:02) It’s not legalism; it’s a gospel  (3:28:08)

So I think that when you put together the absolutes, the danger of putting together absolutes without seeing this kind of thing in Scripture because you’re afraid of the moral decay of the age, so you start hitting all the absolutist passages, is you either produce people who get discouraged because they can’t live up to it or you produce self-righteous hypocrites.

You produce a new generation of legalists who are constantly putting a fence around Torah and claiming that they’re in and everybody else who doesn’t match their standards is out. That’s what you produce, whereas the gospel  (3:28:46) maintain the purity of the standards and a community of God’s people who are broken and still  (3:28:51)

So there are questions of genre, history, balance, and the way the Canon is put together coming together in ways that are profoundly significant for how you understand the Word of God and how you apply it to human life and times. Pastoral significance  (3:29:08) These are not merely theoretical questions. Further questions or comments?

Male:  (3:29:18)

Don: Yes, there is some truth to what you’re saying. The danger of the approach is constantly seeing the Gospels as a reflection of late first-century church and discipleship and this sort of thing. It tends to focus a bit too much on anthropology instead of seeing how Christ is theologically right at the center. I agree with that entirely. See what God is doing in redemptive history.

At the end of the day, lest you be afraid again, I’m not suggesting that there’s no place for systematic theology. The fundamental difference between systematic theology and biblical theology, as far as I can see, is this. What I’m about to say is disputed. Systematic theology tends to ask atemporal questions and give atemporal answers, and that’s legitimate. What is God like?  (3:30:22) What is sin? What does the cross do? It tends to do so in ways that are meant to address concretely the situation in which we live, move, and have our being.

Biblical theology answers and asks questions in greater conformity to the Bible’s storyline. It refuses to lose that historical dimension. I’m not for a moment saying that you cannot legitimately summarize what the Bible says about God and make an atemporal statement about God. Use the language of the Westminster Confession, for example, or  (3:30:58) or whatever you’re going to use, and put together a summary of the attributes of God.

Of course you could do that, and of course you can think atemporally about all kinds of important matters. The danger is of reading all of that summary of what has been disclosed across all progress of redemption back into a particular text that had not given quite so much at that time. You still want to say and show how that text is on the trajectory to grounding all of this material, because otherwise the theology remains ungrounded from the Bible.

You must still do that, but at the end of the day, to read all the Bible atemporally ultimately gets you into hermeneutical difficulties with the biblical texts themselves, which must remain the norming norm. That’s another huge topic.  (3:31:53) one whole PhD seminar just on that issue. What is the relationship between biblical and systematic?

I want to do a couple of things now. I was going to do something on the place of redaction criticism. I will simply make one summarizing comment here. Insofar as any particular tool is legitimate (and there are abuses of all the tools), always be suspicious of that form of hermeneutics that tries to hold a whole set of tools constant while you just play with one. That is the very substance of the great  (3:32:36) dissertation. It is an abomination on the face of the earth. It is bound to historical text.

The one thing that can be said for it is that it does introduce a certain amount of methodological rigor, but the methodological rigor is bound to historic text. It is far better to take into account  (3:32:55), the history of interpretation and how it has been worked out, and where there’s narrative, the narrative flow  (3:33:01), then all your syntax, and where clearly one source has been dependent upon another (for example, Chronicles on Kings and Samuel), you have to understand where the differences are, and that’s a redaction critical sort of approach.

You have to understand where you are in redemptive history, and you must understand how it all adds up and how things came to be confessed in the church. All of those things are all important, but they are all important to come back to trying to understand what the text says as the norming norm. Otherwise, you end up domesticating Scripture instead of trying to let Scripture have the reforming power.

Now I wish I had time to tease that one out a great deal. Instead, what I’m going to do is give one or two other instances of these trajectories that run through Scripture. I’ve hinted a wee bit at the one on rest, for example, and I’ve barely touched these sorts of things. Let me pick up another one. This is going to be the merest sketch, but it shows the sort of thing I have in mind. I think there are about 20 of these, and there are many, many more small ones that are not major. There are about 20 really major ones.

Let’s take the theme of temple, tabernacle. One of the most important books on the subject recently is by Greg Beale on the temple, again in the NSBT series. He argues that there is a sense in which temple symbolism and temple structure, temple thought, goes all the way back to creation itself, where God abides with his people. Temple language is not used there, but the symbolism probably is right. Probably there’s a foundation even there. We’ll skip the patriarchs, although more could be said there.

Eventually you come to tabernacle, and with the tabernacle, you get an entire priestly structure and sacrificial system, the high feasts of the year, where the covenant people of God are to come before Yahweh three times a year, and the significance of Yom Kippur, as we call it (it’s always in Hebrew  (3:35:12), the Day of Atonement), where the priest offers up the blood of bull and goat for his own sins and for the sins of the people, and then Passover with the sacrifice of a lamb, and then the morning and evening sacrifice, and so on.

Tabernacle really becomes the God-ordained, God-given place. After all, 33 times or so in Exodus you get statements like, “Make sure you build it according to the pattern shown you on the mount. Most did everything according to the pattern shown …” It’s a God-ordained system, a God-ordained structure, by which sinful people meet him. They meet around the temple.

Within that framework, there’s a lot more that could be said about the sins at various times. When the people are in the Promised Land, for example. Initially, the glory comes on the tabernacle, and when the glory comes upon it, only the high priest can enter the Most Holy Place only once a year. No one else is allowed in. No non-Levite is allowed into the first square.

When the glory leaves, then the people of God are led through the wilderness, following the pattern of the glory, and it’s just a bunch of tents. People can take them down and carry them on their shoulder, because the real thing is not all the skins and the silver sockets and the veil and the cast cherubim. The real crucial thing is whether God is present.

Then, of course, there are the wanderings, where it’s set up in different places. It’s stolen by the Philistines and returned, but now the ark has only the tables; it doesn’t have the other two elements in it. Eventually the temple is built. When the temple is built in the time of Solomon.… Don’t forget now. This now in Jerusalem, after David has tried to do it, with the promise of a kingly structure  (3:37:04) all now in Jerusalem.

When this happens, the glory descends on the temple again. It descends in such powerful manifestation all the priests and the Levites are all scattered on the other side. They cannot withstand the glory of God  (3:37:19) But the dynasty goes down. There’s a divided monarchy. Eventually, the temple is destroyed. That’s unthinkable. Do you realize how much Jeremiah and Exodus are given over to those sorts of debates?

Think of the great vision in Ezekiel 8–11. Ezekiel is transported 700 miles by the Spirit from the banks of the Kebar River to this temple, and he sees all the abominations and the sins and the corruptions  (3:37:50) “Son of man, do you see what they’re doing? And I’ll show you worse than this.”

Eventually, what he sees is that the glory abandons the temple and parks on the mobile throne chariot, which he has seen already in the inaugural vision, which crosses the Kidron Valley, abandons the city, and parks on top of the Mount of Olives looking over the city, which is a way in the vision of saying God is abandoning the temple. It’s not going to be the meeting place anymore.

So when four and a half years later, Nebuchadnezzar comes in with his troops and razes the city to the ground, you’re not to understand that Nebuchadnezzar’s troops are stronger than God’s troops or Nebuchadnezzar’s god is stronger than God. This is Yahweh’s judicial position against his own people, against the city, against Jerusalem, against the temple.

Then in chapter 11, when Ezekiel is actually explaining all of this to the exiles after he has come out of his vision, he says, “Don’t worry. Don’t you see? God will be a sanctuary.” In other words, where God is there is a sanctuary. There is a temple. Eventually, they do rebuild, and then you work through Nehemiah and Ezra. A lot of things can be learned from those books as well. At the end of the day, there is no depiction of the glory coming  (3:39:03)

Then one day in Palestine a voice is heard saying, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again.”  (3:39:10) Jesus’ disciples didn’t understand. John says so explicitly in chapter 2. “But after he had risen from the dead, then they remembered his words and they believed the Scriptures.”

In other words, they saw a trajectory developing so that the ultimate meeting place between God and human beings was not the masonry, glory or no glory. The ultimate meeting place was the ultimate temple, Jesus himself. That’s part of a whole set of trajectories about Jesus is the ultimate Priest. He’s the ultimate Lamb. He’s the ultimate temple. He’s the ultimate rest. One of these things is he’s the temple.

From that image comes two other small derivations, one fairly big one and one small one. One small antitypical derivation is the church is the temple of the living God. There’s no indication of any church building ever being a temple, but the church is the meeting place between God and human beings. It’s where God manifests himself today to others, and the concerns of the world are brought back to God in the context of the church.

In one or two passages only, our bodies are the temple of the living God … until we get to the book of Revelation, where it’s all ratcheted up  (3:40:17) heavenly tabernacle, heavenly temple, where Christ goes in and offers his sacrifice. Then you come to the book of Revelation, and the whole thing gets jiggered one more time. You come to the final vision in Revelation 21–22. “I saw no temple in that city, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.”

What does the city look like? It’s built like a cube. There’s only one cube in the Old Testament. Not just the temple; the Most Holy Place. Now everybody is there. In the Old Testament temple, in the Old Testament Most Holy Place, only the high priest only once a year, but now all of God’s people are.… No wonder you don’t need a temple there. The whole city is the Most Holy Place, because where God is, that is where God’s people  (3:41:04)

What I’m saying is that if you’re a Christian preacher, a Christian thinker, a Christian teacher, a Christian “understander,” then if you are expounding any of these texts  (3:41:18) At some point.… You can’t do it all the time. You can’t do it every Sunday. It would do your head in if you did it all the time. But at some point, you must teach people, whether they’re your students or the people in your parish or whatever, where that little bit stands in the trajectory that takes them to the New Jerusalem.

It will help them put their Bibles together. It will help them understand what the Word of God is saying, and it will help them not only see in what sense the church is the temple, in which Jesus is the supreme temple, but cry out with people in every generation, crying, “Even so, yes, come, Lord Jesus,” because they want to press on toward the place where we need no building temple  (3:42:00) We are forever and always  (3:42:02)

I think you can do that with about 20 principled biblical theological trajectories to Scripture that hold the text together, and not to do it is to rob the people of God of the very tendons that hold their Bibles together and of the structures that undergird all of their systematic theology as well. To quote Billy Graham, “May the Lord bless y’all real good.”