Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Biblical Theology in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
In this address on such an important theme, I want to lay out some of the fundamental questions that are bound up with this topic. I’m going to begin by coming in the side door, if I may. The expression biblical theology, so far as we know, was first coined at the beginning of the 1600s. This does not mean there was no theology that was biblical before the 1600s.
If theology is discourse about God, then as long as there has been a Bible, there has been biblical theology, but the actual expression biblical theology was not used, so far as our written records go in the history of the church, until it was first coined by a chap called Christmann in 1604 in a book that is no longer extant. He wrote a book called Teutsche biblische Theologie, German Biblical Theology.
We know what that book is from other descriptions of it; it has not come down to us. It was really not much more than a fat tract of proof texts to prove German-Lutheran orthodoxy. That was the first book of what came to be called biblical theology. That use, a compendium of texts to prove a certain kind of theological tradition, continued in one form or another for about a century and a half.
In the eighteenth century, there was a very important address by a chap called Johann Gabler at the University of Altdorf in which he tried to distinguish biblical theology from systematic theology. What he meant by systematic, or dogmatic, theology was bound up with a lot of the scholastic Reformed and Lutheran confessional theology that was in Europe at the time.
A lot of it was in line with broad-stream Christian orthodoxy, but there seemed to be a lot more philosophical meandering, a lot more subtle disputation beyond anything the text itself mandated and, from the point of view of Gabler, far too much partisan denominational squabbling and not enough attention to the Bible itself.
So what he proposed was what he called biblical theology, by which he roughly meant a lot of inductive study of the texts as texts, studying them in their own terms, trying to understand them in their categories. Then at the end he said, because we would all be studying the same texts, we would come up to a much higher standard of agreement. At that point, then, it would be appropriate to do far more dogmatics, to do far more systematic theology.
When Gabler is cited today, people remember the first part of what he said (that is, the importance of studying the texts inductively), and they’ve forgotten the last part (that is, how you move from inductive study of the text to systematic theology). Nevertheless, this lecture triggered a whole lot of reflection at the time. There were other writers and thinkers saying something similar but his captured the day. Eventually, there came to be a long-term distinction between biblical theology and systematic theology or dogmatic theology.
By the beginning of the 1800s, we arrive at the first recorded instance of Christians distinguishing between New Testament theology and Old Testament theology. Before that, there was biblical theology; there was biblical theology that was found in the Old Testament and the New Testament. But now people were writing books on New Testament theology and Old Testament theology.
Biblical theology, books along those lines, continued until about 1850 but, with only rare exceptions, not after that. There were exceptions, but they were rare ones. From about 1850 on, most people who were working in the domain of biblical theology wrote New Testament theology or Old Testament theology.
By the time one arrives at the twentieth century, then, the focus on Old Testament theology has broken down into the theology of the Pentateuch and the theology of the Prophets. Then, under the impact of Wellhausen, came the theology of J, E, D, and P, and the theology of smaller and smaller esoteric, and sometimes pretty speculative, units.
Likewise in the New Testament, it’s not a matter anymore of New Testament theology. That’s weakening more and more. Now there’s the theology of the Synoptics, the theology of Paul, and the theology of the Johannine corpus. Then breaking that down, because people no longer believe John wrote all of the Johannine corpus, the theology of John’s gospel, the theology of the Epistles, the theology the of the Apocalypse, the theology of the Paulines, the theology of the deutero-Paulines, then not the theology of the Synoptics but of the Markan church, and so forth.
So the tendency has been toward smaller and smaller and smaller units. Within this framework, then, to try to speak of biblical theology in terms of whole Bible biblical theology seemed like more and more of an esoteric exercise. Now, of course, there have been various kinds of attempts to reverse all of this in one fashion or another. For example, there was a Barthian attempt, a Bultmannian attempt, and so forth.
More recently, there has been the attempt of canonical theology, so-called. Canonical theology has two forms. I might reflect here for a moment just on one form, the form developed by Brevard Childs. Brevard Childs and his coterie of students … Childs himself doesn’t even use the term canonical theology. He doesn’t like it, but that’s what he’s doing, just the same. A rose by any other name …
What he really tries to do is to focus on the final form of the text and how the canonical books, accepted by the church, have been responsibly read by the church over the centuries and to reduplicate that and think it through again, to read the texts in the light of each other to form a whole Bible biblical theology.
At the same time, he wants to preserve the standard distinctions introduced by critical orthodoxy. He’s not suddenly becoming a crypto-conservative in his own lights. He wants to maintain all of those distinctions of source criticism, and so forth, on which he was reared. At the same time, he wants, at the end of the day, to have a whole Bible message for the whole church.
There have been various ways in which that’s been done. Childs himself, of course, worked for many, many years at Yale. Yale Divinity School has produced what has come to be called the Yale school of theology. Now Childs himself rather stands outside the main stream of the Yale school. The Yale school is really captured more by people like Hans Frei and George Lindbeck.
Take George Lindbeck. I recently put a research student onto reading everything Lindbeck has ever written. He’s skimmed through all the books now and taken notes on the things I wanted. He’s almost finished all of his articles. Next we’re heading for all the reviews. Then I’m going to write a little article myself with the title “The Bibliolatry of George Lindbeck.”
George Lindbeck is a very interesting man. He keeps saying things that would stimulate you to say, “Amen!” I’m quite sure. “We ought to be reading our Bibles more. We ought to be teaching the Bible. We ought to be preaching the Bible. The Bible ought to fire our imagination. The Bible ought to shape our worldview. The Bible ought to be how we think about God. Those are the categories we should adopt.” Can’t I get an “Amen” out of you anywhere? Doesn’t that sound pretty positive on the whole?
The difficulty is, of course, that he has so much bought into postmodernism limitations on our knowledge that he is very nervous about speaking positively and objectively about that to which the text ostensibly refers. That is to say, he’s very leery about talking about what the hermeneutics people call extratextual referentiality, the things outside the text about which the text is ostensibly speaking.
Christians don’t say the Bible saves us. Christians don’t say the ideas in the Bible save us. Christians say God saves us. He saves us by the means of Christ and all that Christ has provided for us. Of course, the Bible tells us about this Christ and gives us all kinds of truths about this Christ that we need to think about and some things we need to believe regarding him, and so forth. Nevertheless, it’s not the ideas that save us. It’s Christ who saves us. It’s God who saves us.
Under the impact of postmodern hesitation, he’s afraid of saying anything objective about anything outside his reading within the church framework of extratextual reference. As a result, he sounds as if he’s really leaning hard on the Bible, but at the crucial point where the Bible insists that it itself is bearing witness to something outside the Bible, there he wants to remain silent.
If you take the most ardent fundamentalist, a really strong conservative fundamentalist, no fundamentalist is a bibliolater in that sense, because the most conservative Christian among us, fundamentalist label or not, will still want to say the Bible is talking about something outside the Bible. If you only go back to the Bible and then stop, isn’t that a kind of bibliolatry? At the end of the day, I don’t want people studying the Bible as an end in itself. It’s a very intellectualist pursuit.
Surely the Bible itself wants us to see the Bible as the means of thinking about God, of things outside the Bible. In that sense, that’s part of the Yale school now. It’s triggered in part by work by Frei, but Childs doesn’t fit into that mold. Childs breaks the mold at Yale and says, “No, no. The Bible is saying true things about things outside the Bible.” So he wants to maintain the importance of history and all the rest, but then he wants this canonical framework.
The question that has to be raised is … What is the warrant for putting it all together? This side of two and a half centuries of detailed critical work, displayed by various stages of belief and unbelief, how do we put the whole Bible together again? On the face of it, the laws of the Old Testament are not all brought over into the New Testament, and there are huge divisions, even amongst Bible-believing Christians, about exactly what laws should continue and how we structure our entire theology along those lines.
To use classical categories, you have dispensationalists on the one hand and covenant theologians on the other. Somewhere in there you have Lutherans, throw in the odd Baptist, and they all have rather different perspectives on how you put New Testament-Old Testament covenantal structures and legal structures together into one Bible. Don’t you?
Then, beyond that, you get down to the little nitty-gritty things, the details of how the New Testament actually quotes the Old Testament. As a result, it’s possible to produce voluminous works saying that, at the end of the day, close inductive study of the Bible has led us (it is often argued) to the conclusion that there are disparate witnesses, disparate religious communities, disparate perspectives as to God, salvation, Jesus, and the gospel, and they can’t all be put together.
What this book does is give us a kind of framework of diverse Christian ideologies. You can be more Johannine, you can be more Pauline, you can be more Isaianic, or whatever, but there’s no way you can put them together to form one unit of thought. Most Christians, then, with a serious view of the Bible, with a high view of Scripture, are very uncomfortable with that sort of conclusion and then want some help if people come along and start saying this is the case. They want some help as to how to put the Bible together responsibly.
When they start doing detail work in particular texts and find out how Paul quotes the Old Testament, how the Synoptic writers quote Psalm 69 as proof texts for things that take place in the passion narrative, how Jesus quotes Psalm 22 when he is on the cross … On the face of it, Psalm 22 isn’t directly talking about anyone being crucified. Gradually, the difficulties mount. We see the glories of fulfilled prophecy. We see the way things hang together in certain respects, but we’re left with a certain kind of unease, are we not?
In 1886, there was a very large commentary written by John Broadus on the gospel of Matthew. John Broadus was a Southern Baptist, the old line of Southern Baptists in the United States who were broadly Reformed, very learned, extraordinarily pious, steeped in the Puritan tradition. His Commentary on Matthew was, in fact, in many respects, a rich book that still repays reading to this day.
One of the intriguing features of Broadus’ Commentary on Matthew is this: In the New Testament, probably the two New Testament writers who are most difficult when it comes to their handling of the Old Testament are Matthew and Hebrews. So as he wrote his Commentary on Matthew, he eventually found all kinds of places where he couldn’t really figure out why Matthew was quoting the Old Testament the way he was.
So he said again and again and again, in more polished prose than I am about to give you but nevertheless in so many words, “I don’t have a clue what Matthew is doing here.” Now in some ways this was a very reverential approach, because he was not presupposing Matthew didn’t know what he was doing here; he was merely confessing his own personal ignorance. He was saying, “Undoubtedly God knows what he’s doing and probably Matthew knows what he’s doing, but I don’t have a clue.” In one sense, there’s a sort of godly humility involved in that, isn’t there?
My own Doktorvater at Cambridge was Barnabas Lindars. His first substantial book was New Testament Apologetic. I don’t know if you’ve read it, but in New Testament Apologetic, the esteemed Barnabas Lindars argues that the New Testament writers, when they quoted the Old Testament, merely ripped texts out of context.
In other words, they had come to believe Jesus was the Messiah and, justified or not, they believed he had risen from the dead. They had begun to form their theology around their experiences of him. Now they needed some proof texts to demonstrate the point, so they ripped this text out of a context and this text out of a context and this text out of a context, and that’s how the New Testament quotes the Old Testament. That’s the New Testament apologetic.
I suspect most of us in the room would not be entirely happy with that thesis, but on the other hand, we’re not entirely satisfied with Broadus’ approach either. We might respect its reverence, but it would be nice to go a little farther than that. Even if there are some residual questions at the end of the day, we would like to have more answers, perhaps, than we’ve got.
That’s the purpose of this address, to push along these sorts of lines. I would like to think some questions, at least, may be satisfactorily addressed, and you’ll begin to see the internal structure of these things within the Canon itself. Let me list, then, some of the elements that go into these discussions, and then we’ll look at one or two texts as well.
1. The New Testament writers variously quote the Hebrew Tanakh, the Hebrew Canon, or something like the standard Septuagintal translation or sometimes Aramaic paraphrases, the targumim. In other words, they can quote from a diversity of translations, of editions.
What to make of these? Most of these are not difficult. They’re not challenging at all.
Every once in a while, however, the choice of the translation, where the translation in the Greek, the Septuagint, is rather different from what the Hebrew says and where the interpretation in the New Testament actually depends on it, it can raise difficult discussions, difficult flags, that one has to pore over and think through. That line of discussion, I’m not going to pursue here. I’m not going to pursue it primarily because there aren’t enough amongst us who know Greek and Hebrew well enough to follow the discussion. It wouldn’t be the best place to spend time.
If you want to see some preliminary discussion of a couple of really interesting test cases by someone who has thought these matters through and who has a high view of Scripture, there’s a lovely essay by Moises Silva in a book called Scripture and Truth. He wrote, likewise, in Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon. These were two books John Woodbridge and I put together about 20 years ago. Some of these matters are probed there, and you can pursue that line on your own.
2. Does God intend more by any particular biblical text than what the human author intended?
Very frequently, that is the way people have tried to sort things out. “Well, on the face of it, the text seems to mean such and such, but obviously if God later says it means something in addition, then obviously God intended that it should mean more.”
That line of approach has been developed into various tracks across the history of the church. In Catholicism, that became the line that was summarized under the Latin expression, sensus plenior (that is to say, the fuller sense), but in Catholic tradition, the fuller sense was discerned by the magisterial teaching office of the church. That is, ordinary Christians weren’t going to be able to understand enough of the Bible by itself, but the teaching magisterium of the church would find the deeper meaning.
Over against that, the Reformers insisted on claritas Scripturae, the clarity of Scripture, sometimes called the perspicuity of Scripture. But the more you start talking about the perspicuity of Scripture, about Scripture being plain, then when you come across these difficulties where the New Testament quotes the Old Testament and you’re not quite sure what it’s doing, then the less able you are to appeal to God knowing more about it than we do. That is a bit of a double-edged sword, that one.
There is a sense, surely, in which we would want to say God knows more about any text than the author does, just in the sense that God knows more about anything than anyone does. God sees not only the thing itself in all of its fullness but all the possible permutations and combinations and all the kinds of things it is connected to. In that sense, surely God does know more about anything than we do.
Still, if you try to make the meaning of a text substantively different from what the human author meant, then there is a danger of treating the Bible as a source book for esoteric information, a kind of magical book. There’s what the book means on the very surface of things, and then there is a kind of magic bit you’ve got to pick up somehow. That magic bit, where do you get it? Well, in Catholicism, you might get it through sensus plenior and then the magisterial office of the church.
In charismatic circles, you might get it by some special insight from the Spirit, but if that special insight from the Spirit is not warranted by the text in the public arena, at the end of the day, isn’t the truth being somehow divorced from the text? It’s being removed from it. The authority is no longer what the text plainly says but by somebody’s claimed subjective illumination as to what it says.
I have sometimes told this story. If you’ve heard it before, I beg your indulgence. Quite a long time ago, when I was still an undergraduate at McGill University reading chemistry and mathematics, my older sister went and got herself engaged to a chap from a more extreme form of enthusiasm.
As I went home one weekend to meet my future brother-in-law, with all parties feeling one another out a little bit here, it so happened on this particular Saturday I was driving Dad’s car. Next to me was my future brother-in-law, Dennis. Behind him was my sister, and behind me was my father.
As we were driving along, chatting about this and that, somewhere in the course of the conversation, my future brother-in-law ventured that he had been reading in his devotions that morning in Matthew, and the Spirit had taught him that a certain passage in Matthew meant such and such.
In those days, I was even more perverse than I am now, and there was no way I was going to let that one slide, not least because, in fact, I had, in God’s strange timing … God has a sense of humor. He really does. I had just read that passage that morning myself in Greek, because although I was reading chemistry and mathematics, I had some classical Greek under my belt and was trying to get a bit more. By that time, I knew I was heading off to seminary.
So I said, “Well, Dennis, I don’t think that’s what that means. I think you’ve got that by misunderstanding the King James Version,” which I quoted to him. Then I said, “But the Greek says …” and I quoted that to him. Then I had the cheek to translate the Greek for myself and to try to explain what it means.
He said, “Don, that can’t be right because the Spirit has told me it means such and such.” Whereupon my sister piped up from the backseat, “Spiritual things are spiritually discerned, Don,” which sort of told me where I stood. I remember we turned several corners, and then in a moment of magnificent perversity, I said, “Well, I think if you push me, what I’d really say is the Spirit has told me what it means too, and what I say is what I believe the Spirit has taught me that it means.”
What do you do at this point? You can’t appeal to the text anymore, can you? I wanted to see what he would do. I was being perverse. A few more corners. Then he piped up, “Well, I guess that means the Spirit tells us the Word means different things to different people.” My father cleared his throat, which was the only wise comment in that car that day. So, you see, if you start appealing to an esoteric meaning only in the mind of God that is abstracted too far from Scripture, that gets you into trouble too, doesn’t it?
Yet there is at least one way in which you must appeal to the mind of God beyond the mind of human beings. There may be others, but there’s one, it seems to me, where you must. So instead of just piling problem upon problem, let me hint at one range of solutions, of ways of thinking about the Bible. It is in this troubling and complex area of typology.
If, for the moment, we can understand typologies to refer to patterns of people, relationships, and institutions which God has ordained to disclose something of himself, which patterns follow a certain kind of trajectory toward a culmination, then I would be prepared to argue, for example, that there is a temple typology in Scripture.
Think, for a moment, of first sacrifices … the sacrifices, for example, of Abraham without any structured temple. In fact, there are some allusions to temple ways of thinking all the way back to the garden that I won’t go into it at the moment. Eventually there is a tabernacle that is built according to the Mosaic legislation. When you read the second half of the book of Exodus, again and again and again Moses is told, “Make sure you build it according to the pattern I showed you on the mount,” and it is carefully crafted that way.
Then all of the Levitical systems: what is required for Yom Kippur, what is required for Passover, the early morning sacrifice, the evening sacrifice. It’s all specified … who is to offer it, who is allowed in the Holy Place, who is allowed into the Most Holy Place and when. It’s all specified. Eventually, of course, there is a permanent temple in Jerusalem, built under the reign of Solomon. Its structures are largely parallel to those stipulated for the tabernacle.
We’re told the shekinah glory came down on the temple with such magnificent splendor that the priests were driven out and couldn’t get on with their work. Here then, the high priest, once a year on the Day of Atonement, brought in the blood of bull and goats and offered it in the Most Holy Place on the top of the altar, for his own sins and for the sins of the people, on the top of the ark of the covenant. That continued and continued.
Ezekiel, however, in his large-scale vision of chapters 8 to 11, warns the early exiles that Jerusalem is coming down and so is the temple. They can’t believe it. It would almost be as if God’s own self-disclosure, God’s own provision, is being overthrown. Nevertheless, in a pretty horrifying vision, Ezekiel sees the splendor of the Lord, the glory of the Lord, abandoning (in this vision) the temple and moving over to the mobile throne, which he saw in the opening chapter.
This mobile throne then leaves the city gates and goes up to the Mount of Olives, preparatory to wrath being poured out on the city and the city being destroyed. It’s a way of saying when the city is destroyed under Nebuchadnezzar a few years later, it’s really God’s doing. It’s not, at the end of the day, just Nebuchadnezzar’s doing.
Then what God says to the people through Ezekiel, who are 700 miles away on the banks of the Kebar River is, “But don’t think this means there is no sanctuary left. I will be a sanctuary to you.” It’s temple language. “I will be the temple to you. I will be the sanctuary to you,” as if it is a huge mistake so to limit God to the structure in Jerusalem, that if Jerusalem itself is destroyed and the temple obliterated, God somehow is destroyed. God will continue to be a temple for his people.
Then, of course, in the matter of years, the smaller structure was rebuilt. It was glorified, it was beautified, under King Herod. But on the streets of Palestine, one heard the voice of the Master saying, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it again.” Of course, Jesus said so many enigmatic things, hard to understand, the opponents didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
According to John 2, the disciples didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. But, John comments, after Jesus had risen from the dead, “Then they remembered his words, and they believed the Scriptures.” Now that’s interesting. “They believed the Scriptures.” That is, not only did they come to the point where they saw Jesus was claiming to be himself the temple, the great meeting place between God and human beings …
That’s what the temple was, the great covenantal meeting place between God and human beings where sin was dealt with and where human beings were reconciled to God. Not only did they come to see that Jesus was himself the temple, but that antecedent Scripture had predicted it. Otherwise, what John comments doesn’t make any sense.
They not only remembered Jesus’ words, but they believed the Scriptures. That is, they came to see the significance of that tabernacle and that temple, not only in terms of whatever function it had under the Mosaic covenant, they saw also that institution had a kind of prophetic element to it, a foretelling, an anticipation, that ultimately looked forward to the ultimate temple. There are other uses of temple language in the New Testament, three in particular. I will skip them; I don’t have time.
What is so interesting, however, is the last two chapters of the Bible, Revelation 21 and 22, which bring so many strands of the Bible’s narrative together. There, in addition to all the glories that are present in the new heaven and the new earth, in the New Jerusalem, there are some things that are absent. One of them is this: John writes, “I saw no temple in that city, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.” Isn’t that interesting?
The whole city, in the symbolism of apocalyptic, is built like a cube. Have you ever seen a city built like a cube? Certainly not London. You’re not allowed to have anything higher than Buckingham Palace. But no city is built like a cube, is it? It doesn’t happen. Yet here, the New Jerusalem is pictured as a cube. Why? There’s only one cube in the Old Testament. It’s the Most Holy Place, the place which, heretofore, only the high priest could enter and only then once a year and only then with the prescribed blood.
So it’s a way of saying the entire new heaven and the new earth, configured now as the New Jerusalem … The entire New Jerusalem is always and forever the Most Holy Place. We are all, now, always in the Most Holy Place without further means of mediation. To speak of a temple in that city would be as silly as speaking of a temple within the Most Holy Place. The temple is a mediating structure. You’re already in the Most Holy Place, in the place of God. You no longer need mediating structures. “The Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.”
If you grant that is one of 15 or 20 principle lines of typological continuity that run through Scriptures, the very sinews that tie the Bible storyline together (grant me that, at least), then the question you must ask is … When did the first human authors, who contributed bits along this storyline, first understand where it was all going? The second question is … When did God Almighty understand where it was all going?
Assume there remains any modicum of orthodoxy amongst us. I assume most of us will be happy to acknowledge that God knew where the thing was going from the beginning. At the first introduction of the first element of a long train of typological structures, God knew where that small element would ultimately end up. He knew the end from the beginning. That doesn’t mean the human author got it all. It doesn’t mean the chappies who were working on the silver sockets for the tabernacle had it all figured out. It doesn’t mean Moses had it all figured out.
To understand some great things, undoubtedly, was part of their grasp of the revelation that was given to them. To see, dimly, where it was going, undoubtedly that was part of their heritage and privilege, but to see it in full-orbed New Testament categories or consummation categories? There’s no hint they got all of that. So at that point, aren’t we appealing to a sensus plenior, a fuller sense, that is known in the mind of God even if it is not known in the mind of the individual writers?
Still, before we rush down that track without any control, it’s important to say this fuller sense is progressively unpacked across time. It’s not all there at the beginning, but it is there en archē or from the beginning. When you look back, you can see the trajectory and discover that it is not a distortion.
It is there in principle. It is there in the symbol-laden form from the beginning, even if you don’t see all the directions clearly and all of the consummation until the end. So it does not feel, once you have the whole trajectory laid out in front of you, like a betrayal. It does not feel like a bit of esoteric information. It doesn’t feel like a bit of magic. It doesn’t feel like allegory.
This might be a place to put in a brief aside on the nature of allegory. The word allegory, of course, shows up only once in the Christian Bible. It shows up in Galatians 4. One of the things you have to remember, however, is when the Bible speaks of a certain literary genre, it does not always use genre categories exactly the way we use genre categories.
For us today, a literary genre is measured both in terms of form and function. For us, an allegory means something like this: an allegory is some sort of account (usually a story) where the real meaning is determined by an extratextual grid, an extratextual key. In other words, it’s determined by something outside the text. You’re not going to read the text and get that meaning from the text; you get that from something outside.
For example, in the great allegories of Philo … Go to any decent library. Pull Philo off the shelf and read half a dozen pages. You will discover what allegory looks like. When he’s treating, for example, the history of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he insists Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are real figures in history, but he says their real meanings are the three fundamental principles of a Greek education. Believe it or not, he did not get that from Genesis. In other words, this interpretation depends on an extratextual key. It doesn’t emerge from the text of Genesis.
When Paul refers to certain historical events and then says, “hatina estin allēgoroumena,” or which things are allegorical or which things may be taken allegorically, he does not quite mean what we mean by allegory. He does not mean which things can be interpreted by some allegorical key, by some key extratextual, by some key from the outside. He does not mean that.
It’s more like saying which things are typological or which things have another depth of meaning or which things have another layer to them, and that layer, in Paul’s own understanding of the Old Testament narrative, is determined by the structure of that narrative. It’s more in line with what we call typology than what we call, today, allegory, because Paul insists that if you read the accounts properly in Genesis, you are driven to these sorts of conclusions.
In short, surely we who have a high view of God determined by Scripture will want to say God knows everything about everything and, therefore, knows more about any text than either the writer or the readers can ever know. Yes, that’s all true, but we will want to avoid ascribing to Scripture esoteric meanings that are not driven by the text itself. That will make the Bible become a magic book, a book that is not out there in the open and public arena.
The one crucial exception to insisting the meaning of the text must be born, first and foremost, by the words the biblical human authors used is this area of growing trajectories of typologies. Even there I would want to say at every stage the meaning of the type is along a trajectory that is coherent, it makes sense. God knows the fullness and the consummation of the end from the beginning, but even all the stages along that line fit into a pattern such that the thing is not being constrained by extratextual keys or the like.
3. We may then also look at the kinds of things the New Testament appeals to when it quotes the Old Testament. In rabbinic studies, they’re called the middot, the rules of appropriation of a text.
Rabbis had a whole lot of rules. Some listed seven middot (others thirteen), rules for the appropriation of a text, and there’s no doubt the New Testament, then, can sometimes quote some Old Testament text because a certain word has cropped up which is very important in that passage or a figure has shown up which calls to mind the entire story from the Old Testament.
Sometimes the New Testament writers use rules very similar to the rabbinic rules in calling forth these Old Testament accounts. There are entire books, some of them written by evangelicals, that try to show how the Christian rules of interpretation of the Old Testament are entirely parallel to the rabbinic rules of the interpretation of the Old Testament (that is, these rules of appropriation). If you read Earle Ellis, a great deal, for example, of his writing goes down that track.
Surely even a moment’s reflection will tell you that, as important as some of those insights are, they’re not going to take you very far, because we all are forced to the conclusion that first century unconverted Jewish interpreters of the Old Testament did not handle the Old Testament exactly the same way that first century Christian Jews interpreted the Old Testament.
They’re reading the same book, the Old Testament. So to point out that they have similar rules of appropriation does not explain why one set of people is reading the Old Testament one way, as a document that points to Christ, and another set is reading the same documents another way, as that which does not point to Christ but which is, in some ways, an authorization of first-century Judaism. At very least, one needs to recognize this.
About 20 years ago, a colleague of mine, Doug Moo, wrote a dissertation in which he shows that quite apart from the appropriation techniques, different writers also display what he calls different hermeneutical axioms. That is, not only the techniques by which Old Testament texts are quoted, but underlying interpretive assumptions about the way the text works, about the way it points forward.
Now he does not explain what those hermeneutical axioms are particularly, except he says, after all, they’re Christians who read the Old Testament in a christological way. His dissertation may lend some clarity to this business.
4. We must also distinguish, as has increasingly been done, quotation, allusion, and echo and recognize, as well, under quotation, allusion, and echo that any particular writer may actually quote the Old Testament with an actual clip of words, with quotation marks, had there been such a thing at the time; may allude to the Old Testament explicitly; or may use language in such a way that writers who are familiar with the Old Testament text pick up the echo without us actually having the nerve, quite, to conclude that the author is quoting or alluding to the text.
A writer may do any of these things but in rather different ways.
My father was a church planter, a Baptist minister, working in a bilingual situation for much of his life and then in an all-French situation. When he died, I got his papers. He wrote his diary bilingually, and which language he used depended on what came to the top of his head at that particular … He’d switch, midsentence even, if he thought something went better in the other language. He’d quote a verse of hymn, and then he’d think of another hymn and quote that one in French, and so on.
As a result, when we were brought up, he would quote the Bible at us, either from the King James Version, on which we were reared in English, or from the Louis Segond, in which we were reared in French. If you think there have been disputes in this country over the authenticity of the King James Version, let me introduce you to a whole lot of disputes over the authenticity of the Louis Segond as well. Obviously, the apostle Paul was behind both.
He had this habit of rebuking us by Scripture quotation. If we whined, for example, about anything, he would look at us, and he would say, “This is the day which the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.” Now I’m not sure my father was saying, “This is the fulfillment of that Old Testament text.”
Or if we were rabbiting on, shooting off the mouth in some domain where we knew virtually nothing, he would wait until this had rabbited on long enough. Then he would say, “He wist not what to say, so he said …” Nowadays, that’s such obscure English you don’t even know what passage I’m referring to, do you? Wist, of course, is Old English built out of the verb eidō in Greek. “He did not know what to say, so he said …” It comes from the transfiguration narrative.
There are Peter, James, and John on the mountaintop. The glory is all around, and then two more show up. “He didn’t know what to say, so he said …” My father was not actually referring to the transfiguration narrative, nor was he claiming himself to be Moses or Elijah visiting Jesus. Still less Jesus himself. He was merely quoting by analogy this text which captured Peter in a supreme moment of not knowing what to say but speaking anyway, which vice we children perpetrated pretty constantly and with a great deal of assiduity.
“He wist not what to say, so he said …” was an entirely sufficient rebuke in our particular family where we were brought up with Bible stories. On the other hand, you can quite understand that in some families to quote that wouldn’t mean a blessed thing, would it? What sort of gobbledygook is that? “He wist not what to say, so he said …”
Even if you put it into contemporary English, if you didn’t pick up the allusion, what would it mean? It’s obviously a put down of some sort. You might guess that it comes from a text somewhere, but which text? It’s like sitting at High Table in University College and then all of these esoteric allusions float by you. “I missed that one. Maybe that one was Shakespeare. That was probably Marlowe. I didn’t get the next three.” All of these clever allusions go by. It would be that way, too, if people were quoting the Bible to a biblically illiterate crowd.
I’ve got a daughter in fourth year university. She’s really a music major, but when she can she picks up a course in Shakespearean or other poetry and that sort of thing. Recently, they were studying some Elizabeth Barrett Browning and some T.S. Eliot, and neither the teacher nor the other students in her class could pick up the constant biblical allusions that were being made. They were just going right by them, teacher and students alike. My daughter was picking them up just because she’s been a Bible reader from her infancy.
Yet these echoes, these allusions, are only possible where you have a biblically literate crowd. It is important to remember that when such allusions are made, they may not always be being made in order to score theological points. They may be in terms of ethical analogy, ethical rebuke, using biblical terms just because those are the terms you think about.
My father was so steeped in Louis Segond and in the King James Version that when he talked, he would pack his sentences with one phrase or another from the Sacred Text without even thinking about it. That was the matrix of his discourse. That was the shaping of his speech. That was the formation of his vocabulary.
Likewise, when the New Testament authors use language drawn from the Old Testament, one does sometimes get the impression, occasionally, that New Testament scholars are busy trying to track down every possible deep allusion, when sometimes the New Testament writers might simply be using language that way because they’re steeped in biblical language. One does not want to read in too much too fast. Yet on occasion, such matters can be extraordinarily helpful.
Take a look now, if you will, at John 1. We’ll close with this one. Beginning at verse 14, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. John testifies concerning him. He cries out, saying, ‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.” ’
From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.”
I would be prepared to argue (I have argued elsewhere and at some length) that in these five short verses, John explicitly makes allusion to one Old Testament block several times. Although you can read these five verses and make sense of them on their own, these five verses are considerably enriched if you know what that Old Testament block is. Transparently, John does expect his readers to be biblically literate. His envisaged readership is biblically informed.
It’s why likewise, for example, in chapter 3 he can make allusion to the snake being reared on a pole in the wilderness without any further description, and he expects the readers to pick up what he’s talking about. It’s that kind of evidence that shows John does expect a biblically literate readership.
Either that, or you have to infer that he’s a stupid writer. Those are the only options. When you have a book with a lot of allusions to something else, then either the writer is really very insensitive or the writer understands most of his envisaged readers are capable of making the same sorts of connections.
Now that Old Testament block to which I’ve just referred is Exodus 32 to 34. You’ll recall the account. Be of good cheer; I won’t expound all three chapters, but let me remind you of what’s in them. Chapter 32 is the wretched incident of the golden calf. Moses is up on the mountain getting the Law, and he comes down and hears revelry.
His own brother, Aaron, has been complicit in leading the people astray. “Well, I just threw in the gold and out popped a calf,” he says to justify himself, but of course, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. The tablets get broken. Moses is outraged. God is threatening to destroy all the people, and Moses intercedes before God for the people.
Then we read in chapter 33, verse 7, “Moses used to take a tent and pitch it outside the camp some distance away, calling it the ‘tent of meeting.’ ” This is not the tabernacle. The tabernacle has not yet been built, after all, not at this stage. There he sought the face of God. In verse 12, we actually find what Moses is praying to the Lord at this point. “You have been telling me, ‘Lead these people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me.”
Don’t you recall? At the beginning, the deal was Moses would be prepared to go only if the Lord would send someone with him, and that someone was Aaron. Now Aaron is hopelessly compromised. So now Moses feels extraordinarily isolated. “What will you do at this point? You have told me to lead the people, but who will go with me?
You have said, ‘I know you by name and you have found favor with me.’ If you are pleased with me, teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favor with you. Remember that this nation is your people. I didn’t volunteer for this job. They’re not my people. You sort it out.’ The Lord replied, ‘My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.’
Then Moses said to him, ‘If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here.’ ” He’s replying now to the threat of God that he can no longer go with the people. If he goes with the people, his wrath and his holiness will break out and destroy them. With sin and idolatry as rampant as this, how can God go with the people? Now God seems to be saying that maybe he will go with them.
Moses says, “ ‘But if your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?’ And the Lord said to Moses, ‘I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am pleased with you and I know you by name.’ ”
When the tabernacle is built, three tribes are in the north, three in the south, three in the east, three in the west. God manifests himself to his people, and he does go on with them. Despite the threat that he would withdraw, in fact, he goes with them all through the desert years.
“Then Moses said, ‘Now show me your glory.’ ” It’s as if Moses understands that what he needs above all to stabilize himself, his faith, and his perseverance is to see more of God. “And the Lord said, ‘I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.’ ”
“Don’t think, Moses, that your intercessory prayers somehow control everything. They are important, they are mandated, and I respond to them, but you are not in control.” “ ‘But,’ he said, ‘you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.’ ” Then the Lord ordains the scene that then unpacks in chapter 34. Moses is hidden in a cleft of the rock. As he goes by, the Lord intones certain things.
After he’s gone by, Moses is permitted to peek out and see something of the trailing edge of the afterglow of the glory of the Lord. What is it, then, that he intones on the way by? Chapter 34, verse 6: “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness …” Just so far for the moment. Abounding in love and faithfulness, those three words, are checed ‘emeth in Hebrew. Checed is sometimes rendered grace. It’s God’s unmerited favor, covenantally bound.
People have tried to argue against that interpretation, but most have come back to it in recent years. That is exactly right. It’s grace. It’s God’s love, covenantally bound, and it is his unmerited favor. Maintaining God’s grace and favor. Abounding in love (checed) (and faithfulness) ‘emeth.” The Hebrew ‘emeth can be rendered truth.
It’s God’s utter reliability, and his reliability in word is truth. His reliability in promise is that he keeps his promises. So when the queen of Sheba says to Solomon, “Everything that was told me about you was ‘emeth,” what she means is it was a reliable report; it was the truth. Thus it’s possible to render this love and faithfulness equally by grace and truth.
Now go back to John 1. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” But “made his dwelling” is not any standard Greek. It’s literally “and tented amongst us, tabernacled amongst us.” That is, this harks back to the origins of the tabernacle. What is it Moses is doing up on the mountain? He’s receiving not only the Ten Commandments but the instructions for the entire tabernacle. That’s what he’s up there for. But the ultimate temple, the ultimate tabernacle, is not something that was ordained on Mount Sinai, not something that was built by Moses.
No, the ultimate meeting place, the ultimate tabernacle, is the Word becoming flesh, the incarnation, and all that flows from it. This is an anticipation of what is unpacked in chapter 2 when Jesus says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it again.” This is a prologue that anticipates the themes of John’s gospel. On the other hand, it harks back to the first tabernacle. It’s forcing Christians to look forward to what happens but to look backward to the model on which it is built.
“We have seen his glory …” Now the glory theme shows up again and again in the Old Testament. By itself, this does not hark back to chapters 32 to 34 of Exodus, but in relationship to all the other things in these few verses that do, this makes sense, also, of the passage, “Show me your glory.” Isn’t that what Moses cried in chapter 33? “Show me your glory,” and God said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you.”
Now think how the glory theme is unpacked in John’s gospel. The first miracle, the turning of the water into wine in chapter 2 … We’re told at the end of it, “The disciples saw his glory,” but by chapter 12, where does the glory lie? Jesus is glorified; he returns to the glory he had with the Father before the world began, precisely by going to the shame and ignominy of the cross. He is glorified in shame. He is glorified in the cross. Where is the greatest glory? Is it on the Mount of Transfiguration? There’s no report of the Mount of Transfiguration in John’s gospel.
The greatest glory is precisely in the cross and resurrection. “Show me your glory.” “I will make all my goodness pass in front of you.” Can any thinking Christian not make that connection, when you get connection after connection after connection in these verses back to chapters 32 to 34 of Exodus? “… who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Full of checed ‘emeth, This is bound up with God’s covenantal promises and his disclosure to Moses himself.
I don’t have time to go through all of these. Pick up verse 16. The NIV has, “From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another.” It sounds like Christmas presents piled around a tree, but a literal translation is, “From his fullness we have all received grace replacing grace, grace instead of grace.” That’s what the preposition is here. “From his fullness we have all received a grace replacing a grace.” Do you want to know what that means? Read the next verse.
“For the law was given through Moses.” That was a great grace! That was full of grace and truth, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Grace and truth, par excellence, came through him. Oh, yes, there was a tabernacle, but Jesus is the true tabernacle. Yes, there was glory, but here’s the true glorification. Yes, the law was given through Moses; that was a great grace, but grace and truth, par excellence, come through Jesus Christ. Biblically informed readers are expected to pick up on those connections. They’re expected to.
When I was still an undergraduate at McGill, I befriended a Muslim Pakistani. He was twice my age. I was still, after all, an undergraduate, and he was doing doctoral studies in Islam. McGill has a very fine Islamic institute. He had left his wife and two children behind. He was in his mid-40s, and he was working on his PhD. As I got to know him, it transpired he was trying to convert me. It never dawned on me that he was trying to convert me until three or four months had gone by. I was a bit thick.
I brought him to his first Christian church. About November of that year, it dawned on me he didn’t have a Bible, so I gave him his first Bible. He said, “Where should I start reading?” I didn’t know; I was reading chemistry, for goodness’ sake. I said, “Well, maybe John’s gospel. Start there.”
Typical Asian, he didn’t read the way we read, the idea being to get through as many pages as possible per hour so we can put it down on a reading report somewhere, but to think meditatively and reflectively about everything they read and maybe memorize it and think deeply about it. I could tell you of many interesting conversations with him.
At Christmas, then, he had nowhere else to go, so I brought him home to Ottawa where my parents were then living. It transpired that my father had heart trouble and spent most of the Christmas season in the hospital. Dear ol’ Mohammed Yusuf Guraya was left very largely on his own. By the end of the period, it was clear Dad was going to make it; he was fine. I asked if I could have the car to take Guraya around to show him some of the sites of Ottawa.
Ottawa is our capital city, and it’s quite a pretty town. Even though it was the middle of winter, there was a lot to see. In those days, security was much less, so that even the Capitol buildings, which are sort of pseudo-gothic structure, really quite lovely, were open to the public with guided tours, and so forth. So we did one of these guided tours toward the end of the day.
The tour guide brought us through the rogues’ gallery of Canadian prime ministers, the rotunda at the back where some of the National Collection is held, the Senate chamber, the House of Commons, and so on. (Yes, we do mix our terms like that.) Then eventually, he brought us back to the central foyer, the entrance hall, where there are some huge pillars.
At the top of each pillar there is a fluted arch with a little figure in it. The guide was continuing with his lecture. “This is Aristotle, for government must be based on knowledge. This is Socrates, for government must be based on wisdom. This is Moses, for government must be based on law.” He went all the way round. Lecture over. “Any questions?”
Guraya pipes up. “Where is Jesus Christ?” Well, he had this thick Urdu accent, and the guide didn’t know where this question was coming from, in any case. The question was pretty clear; nevertheless, the guide didn’t know what quarter it was springing from. So he said, “I beg your pardon?” which is what you do when you’re asked a question you can’t answer.
Then Guraya did what internationals do when they are told, “I beg your pardon?” They assume they have not been understood because of their accent, so they speak more slowly and more loudly. “Where is Jesus Christ?!” Now we had an Islamic Pakistani in the Canadian foyer of Parliament asking, three tour groups now of about 30 each, where Jesus is. I was looking for a crack in the ground to fall into. I didn’t know what was going on here anymore than anybody else did. Finally, the guide stumbled, and he said, “Well, why should he be here?”
Guraya looked shocked. He said, “I read in the Christian Bible that the law was given through Moses,” and he pointed up at the figurine, “but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Where is Jesus Christ?” I thought, “Preach it, brother.” He was a Muslim. He understood about God’s sovereignty. He understood about God’s demand. He understood about law. But already he had been captured by someone who is described as full of grace and truth.
If I had known more of the Bible then, I would have brought him back also to the God of the Old Testament, who is not only full of thunder and law but is full of grace and truth in his manifestation even to Moses. But the ultimate manifestation of grace and truth is in the Son who was glorified on a horrible cross. The links are there. The links are there. John presupposes his readers are sufficiently biblically literate to pick them up.
In case we haven’t picked them up even by this time, the very last verse of the section says, “No one has seen God at any time.” That’s picking up what God himself says in Exodus 33. “No one has seen God at any time,” but the unique one, himself God, he has disclosed him. Let us pray.
Our Father, none of us understands your Word the way we ought to. Have mercy on us. Open up not only our understanding but our wills, our hearts, so that we may have a passion not only for grasping but for performing. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
