×

Different Literary Genres (part 1)

Listen as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Biblical interpretation in this address from The Gospel Coalition sermon library.


Yesterday we did not finish the entire sequence of points under “Distinguishing Between Absolute and Relative Demands.” Let me finish that up, and then I’ll take some questions.

1. Remember that you too are culturally and theologically located.

By that I mean it is important for each interpreter of the Word to remember that not only are none of us omniscient or perfect in interpretation but we are also sinful. We are locked into worldviews.

Now this fact is used by many, many thinkers in the Western world today to argue finally for some kind of relativism of all knowledge. That’s a mistake in my view. I dealt with that a little bit last year under the double rubric, the new hermeneutic and deconstruction. In fact, this year at Trinity I’ve been trying to work on it a lot more, as I am writing a book at the moment called “Christianity and Pluralism.”

If some of this is of interest to you because of where you are, come and talk with me, and I’ll give you some bibliography. We’ll talk about it. If there were enough interest, I’d displace the last day just to talk about that topic. Although it is true to say we are all culturally located, I am not sure we are locked into solipsism, into some system of thought in which we can only think with ourselves or, in the vision of Stanley Fish, in our own culture, in our own subculture, in our own confessional group.

There are ways of showing, I think, that it is possible for finite, fallen people like you and me, even if we can’t have exhaustive knowledge of the truth, nevertheless to have true knowledge of some truth. That is to say, it is possible, instead of going around and around and around in a circle on these matters, gradually to spiral in more closely to the center, or to use another mathematical model, to approach something the way a curve approaches an axis. It’s called an asymptotic approach.

We may not get there to perfection, but we can understand things truly. Let me give an example. John 3:16 says that God loves the world. What does that mean? Well, if you are an orthodox Christian, you already have a presupposition of God being a transcendent being, someone above space and time, who is nevertheless personal, and you want to understand his love in some kind of personal way. Even so, it’s not a transparent statement.

“God loves the world.” Does this mean his love is quite wonderful because the world is so big or might it mean that his love is so wonderful because the world is so bad? Well, in that case, you have to do some sort of study on how John uses the word world. That’s where you start. Let’s press on. What does love mean?

Tom and Sally walk down the beach, hand in hand, at the end of Easter term. Their exams are over. The pressure is off. They kick off their sandals, and the warm sand squishes between their toes. There is a glorious sunset, the kind of kaleidoscopic arrays you find on the trailing bits of mushy movies when the credits are rising up the screen. As they walk down with the sand blowing in their hair, Tom turns to Sally, gives her hand a little squeeze, and says, “Sally, I love you. I really do.” What does he mean?

To be brutally frank, it’s not intrinsically obvious. He may mean he doesn’t feel much more than like testosterone on legs and wants to go to bed with her. That may be what he means. But if we assume for a moment that he has an ounce of decency, the least he means is something like this: “I cherish you. You are lovely in my eyes. I am drawn to you. I find it hard to imagine living without you. I always want to be with you.” Isn’t that more or less what he means?

Now God says, “I love the world.” What does that mean? Well, if we drop the first possibility, is the second one any better? “I am drawn to you. You’re attractive to me. I cherish you. I can’t imagine existence without you.” Is that what it means? When Tom says, “I love you” to Sally, he does not mean, “Sally, quite frankly you have the most amazingly bulbous nose. You have the stringiest, greasiest hair I have ever confronted, and your halitosis would frighten a pack of elephants, but I love you.”

So what does God mean when he says, “I love you” to the world? Well, I would argue (on biblical grounds I think I could demonstrate it) that God’s love for the world does not turn on how attractive we are in his eyes; it turns finally on his own character. He loves us not because we are so loving and in need of being cherished and the like. Far from it. We are, morally speaking, in his eyes, the people of the bulbous nose, the stringy, greasy hair, and the halitosis, and he loves us anyway. It says more for him than for us.

Now the youngest, least-taught Christian would nevertheless make some sense of “God so loved the world.” Isn’t that right? The one who is taught a little bit more and picks up what world means in John’s gospel might come to another stage of recognition, saying, “Ah yes, God’s love is wonderful, because in John’s gospel the world is the moral order in rebellion, and he loves us anyway. That’s fantastic.”

Then he may do a few more studies on agapao, the Greek verb for love, and then he may think through a little bit more just how God’s love is displayed in Scripture. In each stage, I would want to argue, he or she is cycling in a little closer to what is meant by the truth “God so loved the world.” It’s not so much that the first Christian has it all wrong. The first Christian who is least taught still has a kernel of truth. There may be some misconceptions allied with it, but the core of the matter is still there.

I would want to argue that even after a Christian has thought through what the love of God looks like in Scripture to the point that I’ve taken it, you’re still only on the very beginnings of the threshold. We’ve not thought through what that means with respect to the cross or what that looks like with respect to God’s wrath or what that has to do with the incarnation or what that has to do with an eternal God loving people in space/time history, and on and on and on.

All of those things are tied, through one thematic level or another, to John’s gospel and thence outward to the Canon. They’re legitimate theological concerns that we should be growing into as we grow in knowledge and understanding of God’s Word, but it’s not that at any level we have it completely and totally wrong. You’re cycling in.

Now it is possible to imagine a notion of “God so loved the world” that is completely wrong. One can imagine half a dozen of them very easily. My point here is to argue that because we are finite and fallible, it does not follow that all of our knowledge can correspond to nothing objective in reality. That is a fundamental mistake that seems to be on the verge of a lot of thinkers’ lips, especially in the arts disciplines in universities in the Western world.

It is a classic mistake, and it is ruining the faith of many, many, many young people in universities. One can begin to come back deconstructionism at all kinds of levels, and the subject interests me a great deal, but it is a mistake to go down that road, it seems to me. At the same time, I would be the first one to want to argue that there are things to learn from the new hermeneutic and from deconstruction. One is the fact that we are culturally located. We are theologically located. We cannot escape our own baggage.

One of the wonderful things that the Bible does when God’s Spirit really takes it and puts it into our lives is increasingly transform our whole perspective so that our horizons are changed and we see things we never saw before and we accept a whole worldview into which biblical Christianity really fits and in which it makes sense. Without that kind of change of worldview, the modern secularist can’t make sense of the Bible.

I think the Bible acknowledges all of this. Doesn’t it acknowledge, finally, that spiritual things are spiritually discerned? No one is going to understand the things of God except the Spirit of God as he illumines our minds and hearts. That is not tied exclusively to questions of IQ and the like. Did I burden you last year with the story of my wife’s conversion? Well, let me burden you with the story of my wife’s conversion. This is before she was my wife.

I first met Joy at Cambridge. I was doing a PhD. She was doing graduate studies in education. She was dragged along, not very willingly, to an evangelistic meeting at which I was speaking. She wasn’t a Christian at all. Let the record show she was impressed by neither the message nor the messenger.

In her defense, she claims today that she had fallen down the stairs that day and was feeling a bit bruised and sorry for herself in any case, but the fact of the matter is she did not enjoy the meeting, she did not enjoy the introduction, and at that point she couldn’t have cared less if she ever met me again. However, her roommate, Carol, who is now a missionary in Pakistan whom we support, was a close friend of a friend of mine.

We had gone hill walking and mountain climbing together in Scotland and so on. He had told Carol to look out for me, so she came down to the front afterwards and brought Joy, kicking and screaming, as it were (metaphorically speaking), and introductions were performed. Let the record show I was not interested in her either except as one more person I was going after with the gospel. I was doing a lot of evangelism in the university in those days.

A few weeks later, Carol asked me to go around to her place to talk to a whole group of graduate students in education on the gospel, so I did. I went in. We all sat around the room and acted like students. We chatted back and forth about the gospel for three hours. It went on and on. Eventually they all sort of were filtering out. Joy had sat there all evening and hadn’t said a word. I mean, literally not a word. Not “Boo.”

Of course, I had noticed, so I said to her, “Does any of this mean anything to you? Do you respond in any way?”

“No.”

“Well, you have to have some sort of reaction. These are astonishing claims, that a man in history should claim this sort of prerogative and demand this sort of allegiance and insist that you’re in real danger if you don’t bow to him. You have to have some sort of response to that, don’t you?”

“No.” I went after her. Three times.

“No.” Just nothing.

I said, “Well, would you read something if I give it to you?” “Was it written by a Baptist?” she said, knowing my credentials. I said, “No, it was written by a decent C of E clergyman. You can’t get safer than that.” “Well,” she said, “I don’t have much time.” I said, “I didn’t ask you how long it would take you to read it, just whether or not you would. If you’ll read it, I’ll give it to you. If you’re not going to read it, I’ll give it to somebody else.” “Well, okay, but it’ll take me a long time. I’m busy.”

So the next night I pedaled around on my bicycle and dropped off John Stott’s Basic Christianity. I don’t know how many copies of that thing I’ve given away. Anyway, I gave it to her, and I didn’t see her for months and months. Then I bumped into her in the street and said, “Did you read that book I gave you?” She said, “Yes.” “What did you think of it?” She said, “I looked up most of the Bible passages in it too.” That must have taken her a while.

I said, “What did you make of it?” She said, and I quote, “I’ve decided that this Christianity business is all right for good people like you and Carol, but it’s not for me.” Now you tell me how a graduate student in education at Cambridge University (now, it’s not Oxford) can read all of those Bible passages and all this exposition by Stott and conclude that Christianity is for good people. My wife is not retarded. She really isn’t a twit, but that’s what she had concluded.

Even as she said it, my jaw fell open, and I saw placarded before my eyes 1 Corinthians 2:14, “The natural man does not receive the things of God, for they are foolishness to him. They are spiritually discerned.” It takes a revolutionary perspective, and that’s borne about by a lot of means. It can be borne about by teaching and preaching and all the rest, but at the end of the day, it still takes a work of the Spirit of God to change a whole perspective and vision.

I said, “Look, do you have some time?” She said, “A little.” “Let’s go for a walk.” We walked down the towpath at the Cam for two hours, and I expounded justification. For two hours. She became a Christian a few weeks later when she was home. Meanwhile, all that year, Carol, who was Plymouth Brethren background, had abandoned Plymouth Brethren Chapel because Joy wouldn’t darken the door of it and had taken her along to hear John Gwyn-Thomas at St. Paul’s. Yet after all of this teaching, that was Joy’s initial response to all of this material.

Even after we are converted and our general framework is more aligned with the Scripture, we have all kinds of ways of twisting text. I worked for a while with the World Evangelical Fellowship and brought people together from various corners of the globe to talk about issues. In that framework, again and again, I’ve seen Christians from other cultures who come in with a different set of perspectives, reading texts differently.

Now I’m not saying they’re all right. I am saying we need to listen to one another and then find out why we’re interpreting things differently, to push and push and push (maybe I’ll be wrong and she’ll be right or the other way around), to find out why the differences are, to find out what the text actually says. We’re involved in that kind of work all the days of our lives. As long as we’re reading and thinking, our horizons are being expounded to be corrected by the Word.

What that ought to induce is a certain kind of humility, a recognition that we may not have all of the answers right away. There are so many issues that could be brought up in that connection, but it is important to say that. I would love to talk more broadly about the nature of contextualization, but I’ll let that pass. Finally, my last point, and this is the one that really kicks off into the next section, “The Use of the Old Testament in the New.”

2. Many of our judgments about the demands of Jesus, the demands of the Bible, and their universality or otherwise turn finally on our own theological systems.

In other words (this is related to the last point), it’s approaching it more narrowly. Let me give you some easy illustrations first.

There is one whole heritage within evangelicalism, not strong in this country, called dispensationalism. It reads the Bible a certain way. Now quite apart from the way it anticipates certain things taking place at the end of history, it reads, for example, the connection of law and gospel in a certain way.

It thinks that the whole covenant of law has gone. It’s forever past. It’s over. We’re in a new age, a new dispensation now, and that’s different from what will be in a kingdom dispensation still to come. It reads the Bible a certain way, and all of the texts of the Bible get fit into that grid. Then there’s another approach, the more or less standard Protestant approach. It’s best articulated in Reformed theology, but it’s standard right across the board pretty well.

It is the approach that actually comes, on this score, from Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Thomas Aquinas broke all law into three parts: moral, civil, and ceremonial law. What he argues is in the Old Testament, civil law is tied to Israel qua nation. It’s bound up with the fact that the locus of the people of God is tied to a nation. Ceremonial law is tied to the ritual system, and moral law is eternal.

Now, Aquinas argues, civil law passes because the locus of the people of God is no longer a nation; it’s the church, an international non-tribal people. Ceremonial law has passed because the antitypes of ceremonies have arisen in Christ. The only thing that endures, by definition, is moral law. Moral law is defined as that law which endures.

So when you ask, “What then is the connection between Old Testament law and New Testament covenant of grace?” the answer is, so far as the law is concerned, moral law continues absolutely; the other two branches don’t. Then you’re left with the obligation to decide what is moral, perhaps, but at least you have some categories worked out.

That is one large view that predominates in Protestantism. It’s not quite what Lutherans hold. They hold something a little different. Another movement, sometimes called Christian reconstruction or theonomy, argues instead that every law which God has given is in force eternally unless God himself abrogates it, which means that ideally they would like to see Britain, for example, return the law of stoning for execution for crimes that are mandated by Scripture as capital offenses under the Mosaic code.

Now they don’t want this imposed arbitrarily. What they envisage, rather, is such a turning to the gospel in due course that eventually there will be so many Christians who think along these lines they’ll vote it in. That’s the way they envisage the future. That’s the way they think the future should go. From our point of view, it is a way of reading the Bible, holding it together in certain ways, that is almost at the polar extreme of what dispensationalism has to say.

Clearly, then, when you come to all kinds of demands, whether you’re talking about demands on usury in the old covenant or demands on execution by stoning or demands, for that matter, on whether you’re allowed to put two kinds of material together in your fabric, everything turns on these issues. Is this something that is an eternal demand or is it something that is set aside in some way? Clearly, then, it is impossible just to give a local answer to these kinds of texts without addressing the question of the entire theological system.

When one enters, for example, debates about the nature of homosexuality and Christians quote Old Testament texts, let’s say, prohibiting it, the question has to be raised first … What is the ground of the connection between those texts and the new covenant? Secondly … How do other adjacent Old Testament demands relate to the new covenant? What is the rationale? And thirdly … Are similar demands made under the new covenant? There are complex issues that are involved.

Now lest you think I am thereby saying the Bible does not speak clearly on the issue (in my view it does, extraordinarily clearly) it has to be said these issues are appealed to on both sides. For example, if someone cites an Old Testament law prohibiting homosexuality, someone will certainly say, “Yes, but those Christians wouldn’t insist on stoning, would they?”

What is the essence of that charge? The essence of that charge is, “These Christians are being inconsistent, because they are appealing to one part of the law and saying it should be eternal, and looking at another part of the law and saying it is not eternal.” The theonomist would come in and say, “Yes, they both should be there.” Most other Christians would say, “This should be there but not that.” Then the question is, “Why?”

At the end of the day, ultimately, a great number of these sorts of issues turn on how your whole Bible fits together. It’s very important that people see this. Otherwise, single-issue approaches to these things simply cannot be resolved with any degree of unanimity amongst the people of God. There are entire theological systems that are at stake.

The difficulty with addressing them, of course, is that they necessarily impinge on so many fronts that to lay out a pattern, even in a preliminary way, takes a couple of hours. It takes some time to sort of nail things down to particular texts, and usually in the heat of debate, especially if you’re doing it on TV, people don’t want a two-hour debate; they want a sound bite. TV on the whole is not a very good medium for thought.

Now we’re going to turn in a moment to precisely this question of the use of the Old Testament in the New in its various guises and devote the rest of this session and all of next session to it, out of which I hope some of these things will at least begin to emerge, but let me stop here for questions before we press on. If you ask a question I know is going to be answered later, I will tell you and duck it now, but if it’s something pertaining to these 11 points we’ve been considering, now would be a good point to ask it.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: “How much knowledge of the culture of the Old Testament do we need to know before we can actually get something out of the Old Testament?” I don’t have a formula. I can’t answer, “46.35 percent” or something. It’s a very difficult question to answer.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Now that is a much more focused question, and it’s at the heart of a great deal of literary criticism. The question is, “Do we need any knowledge other than what the Bible itself provides in order to understand the Bible?” I would say at certain levels, no … except some reading knowledge. Even that is knowledge, isn’t it? If you’re reading the Bible in your own language, it is some antecedent knowledge.

You bring with it a certain amount of vocabulary, a certain amount of biases, and so on. You need that. Nobody approaches the Bible tabula rasa, as if there’s nothing there at all. Nobody. The only one who could is a brand new infant, and even then there are genes and so on. All it’s capable of is dribbling on it. That’s about all at that point. There’s not going to be much doctrinal input that gets across at that juncture.

On the other hand, the doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture (that is, that Scripture is in principle understandable) is often misunderstood. The doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture does not mean the Bible is perfectly clear to everybody who reads it under every circumstance. The doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture was articulated in the first instance to make it clear that there is no priestly class that has an inside track.

In other words, what was being insisted upon is that it doesn’t take an inside track or a special Spirit-given something to be able to elevate certain people to understand the Word where everybody else, in principle, can’t. In other words, it was articulated in the context of the Reformation debates. It does not mean everybody understands it equivalently.

That’s one of the reasons why there are teachers in the church. I’ll come back to that one too, because it’s going to be tied to some of these issues, as we’ll see in a few moments. Now if that’s the case, then I would want to argue that, for example, studying word meanings at the time in surrounding literature is still part and parcel of studying the text. There are some things to which the text refers that are at least more understandable if one understands something of the surrounding history or the like.

Let me give you an example. I think I may have referred to it last year, but I will refer to it again. In Revelation 3:14–21, the letter to the Laodicean church, John writes and says, “I wish you were either hot or cold, but because you’re lukewarm I’ll spit you out of my mouth.” That has often been misinterpreted to mean that God would prefer people to be spiritually hot or spiritually cold, and nothing is worse than being spiritually lukewarm.

Everybody remembers Laodicea had disgusting lukewarm water, and that’s what is understood. But it has been argued, in my view convincingly, that at the top of the Lycus Valley you have three towns altogether, Hierapolis, Colossae, and Laodicea, only a few miles apart. Hierapolis is known for its hot springs, where people go and take the cure. I have slides of these wonderful calcite formations from the hot springs that have deposited calcium carbonates and the like up and down these hillsides. It’s magnificent. People went there to take the cure.

At Colossae you have the only fresh water in the entire valley. At Laodicea you have the disgusting sludge from piped in water. There was no fresh water there at all, so it was actually piped in (not from Hierapolis but from elsewhere) in stone pipes. You can see the stone pipes today where they’ve broken open. These stone pipes have a deposit of calcium deposited in them. The pipes got smaller and smaller and smaller as this hot water gradually dropped these deposits. It was known throughout the ancient world as nauseating.

Now within that kind of framework, these three cities were known. One had cold water (that was good), one had hot water (that was good), and then there was Laodicea. It had the most nauseating water in the Roman world. “So the cold is good and useful. The hot is good and useful. You’re just tepid and disgusting.”

That is closer, it seems to me, to what the exalted Christ is actually saying to the Laodicean church. “I wish you were cold useful, I wish you were hot useful, but you’re just disgusting. I could throw up at the very sight of you.” That’s literally what he says to the church. “I could vomit you out of my mouth.”

In that framework, it is not talking about spiritual temperature. Who would really seriously want to argue that spiritual lukewarmness is worse than spiritual coldness? I would venture that anybody who lived there on sight would have caught a proper interpretation of it in the first instance, but because we’ve been removed from the history and the geography, it does help to get those things put back in place so we can understand the text a little better.

In any case, any reader with any sort of capacity at all could have seen that what God does not like is a church that looks like the Laodicean church: smug, self-satisfied, arrogant, cocksure, feeling quite wealthy. That’s clear to anybody. The main lessons are there, but the precision, the clarity, the particular nuance in this particular idiom … I think those things do depend in this instance on some kind of historical background.

That returns us to what I mentioned yesterday: the scandal of historical particularity. God has disclosed himself to real people in space/time history in real situations, so, inevitably, part of the concern of ministry of the Word is to understand the text in its historical context before one tries to apply it elsewhere.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: “What about Israelis who claim today to be following Old Testament commands in their present-day dealings with the Arabs?” Well, it depends a bit on the Jew, of course. It varies enormously. What I would want to argue in the first place is that no Israeli can follow the Old Testament exactly.

First, because there’s no temple. It can’t be done. It’s one of the reasons for the rise of Mishnah and the halakhot, and so on, all of those laws that were multiplied in order to provide equivalence to the sacrificial system. There is no temple system, and the whole Mosaic code turns, finally, on the priestly system, which cannot be followed.

So inevitably, there is a kind of selection that is already put in in the first instance. Therefore, one is forced back to the antecedent question … What then is being continued and on what basis? Even if you’re an Israeli today, you still have to ask that question, even if you don’t put it in old covenant/new covenant terms. You still have to give a justification for it.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: “How do the ancient versions of the Bible affect our interpretation of Scripture? Should we, therefore, refer back to the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek?” At one level, they make almost no difference at all.

That is to say, any Christian doctrine at all depends for its basis and formulation on so many texts that even if two translations disagree on what a passage says at this point (so that at this point translation A does not support and articulate a doctrine and translation B does), in fact, the doctrine itself depends on so many other supports it makes very little difference to the whole structure of Christian thought. It may make considerable difference to the understanding of this passage or that passage but not to the whole structure of Christian thought.

Secondly, again, precisely because we hold to the fact that God disclosed himself in space/time history (I return to the scandal of historical particularity), inevitably, teachers in the church must in some measure … not primarily, but in some measure … be historians. That’s part of the business. Now not everybody in the church is called to the same level of competence in Greek and Hebrew. I’m not saying that. Of course not.

On the other hand, such knowledge should not be despised. There must be some in the church with it, precisely because God has disclosed himself to us in very particular places, in very particular languages. It’s thrown in in the most remarkable places. Do you remember when Paul in Acts 26 refers back to his Damascus Road experience and tells of the risen Christ, the exalted Christ, addressing him? He says, “He said to me in Aramaic …” It’s a wonderful touch.

In other words, this was not some sort of impressionistic thing. He got zapped and he felt later that this is what he meant when he thought about it. Nor was it some sort of mystical experience. “The exalted Christ was there in blinding glory, and he said to me in Aramaic …” I bet it was good Aramaic.

That is the nature of the Christian disclosure. That means if you want to hear what was said in that language, you ought to learn some Aramaic. Now translation will do for all kinds of purposes at the end of the day, but there ought to be some teachers in the church whose life work it is to help us on that side of things.

That is the nature of the Christian verbal revelation. It is tied to real history and real languages, and it is part of God’s glory to disclose himself that way. This is not something of which to be afraid or ashamed. It is tied to God’s glory. Just as the Word becomes flesh in a real man, at a real place, so the written Word is enfleshed in real history, and the concomitant of that is part of a full understanding … A better understanding of the text, then, is to understand at least something of its cultural located-ness.

 

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.