Rolodex entries - Bible — Several stories

Is God just an assemblage of fragmented speculations strung together across millennia by people who were bound by ethnic or other identities and so naturally melded their stories into what was recorded in Scriptures which were eventually handed down to us for different reasons altogether but likewise as a series of historical accidents? I want to see biblical examples of others struggling with this specific question, and then I’ll therein find some peace because I’ll know I’m a brother to that person and bound by the same deep longings and loves which he or she found answers to; I’ll trust those who share in this most essentially human sense and walk. The question will change; it’ll no longer be whether God exists as described, or whether he really did x, y, or z; instead I’ll ask why God, of whom we share knowledge across millennia, has done what he has done. The Bible emphasizes God's self-revelation through His actions, words, and interactions with individuals and communities. Rather than a static identity, God's revelation unfolds dynamically as people engage with Him in different contexts.

When reading the Old and New Testaments, it’s wise to focus exclusively on knowing more of Christ. Delving into the meaning and historical context of any particular passage often leads to distractions. A lot of the Bible is written in ordinary language which is always inexact, so approaching it with pedantic 21st century, post-Enlightenment expectations is to not even give it a fair chance at the profundity it bears-out if we tune-out all of the noise of endless speculations about understanding the meaning according to the Sitz im Leben. It would begin as a book of a people; the Logos who inspired it became one of the people and gave his Spirit to join him.

Let’s consider which scriptures, if any, ring true. Whether the Bible rings true or not is impossible to know if the reader’s thoughts are louder—and these debates about the nature of the text are noisy speculations before experience. I’m a fan of experiential knowledge, so let’s start there.

There are two ways of reading history: there’s the it happened just like this model; and then there’s the this speaks of God way. It might seem like I’ve loaded the deck, but which of the two is the particularly Christian hermeneutic? That’s not to say it didn’t happen like that; sometimes there’s just not a whole lot to be gained from staring at a fact and nodding at it over and over again, affirming that “yup, that happened alright.”

So, with that out of the way, here’s an example of a good reading I found on Samson after a lot of frustration at the surface level silliness that so many spent their time insisting must have happened exactly as described (but without explaining why it should matter): “The rich symbolism of this vivid episode is glimpsed when we begin to understand how “honey from a lion” is a metaphor about good and evil. It is “the story within the story” symbolizing the meaning of Samson’s life. The story of Samson is misread when the obvious, literal answers to the Philistines’ two questions about what is “stronger” and “sweeter” are superficially taken to be the Biblical lesson: Samson is the strongest, and his violent revenge is even sweeter than loving dalliances with Philistine women. A more attentive reading reveals that the subsequent text calls into question the whole cycle of violence that Samson sets in motion at his wedding. His violent reciprocity seeks to punish the Philistines for cheating. Although angry, Samson wants to affirm that truth is more important than power. But he mistakenly keeps on using his strength to escalate violence. The cycle eventually leads to his own death. Samson’s fate illustrates that only a self-sacrificial gambit can bring an end to the cycle of violence. As a man of violence, he destroys all his Philistine enemies through “living by the sword.” But he learns the cost paid for this must be “dying by the sword.” Many have taken Samson to be a symbol of how a human can achieve total victory by accepting the noble path of self-sacrifice. In that respect, he is like Christ, who humbly offers his life. Yet, unlike Christ, Samson’s sacrifice is a violent one, whereas Christ’s commitment to nonviolence makes his sacrifice into an offering that bears witness to benevolence and forgiveness. Out of such a death comes true life, because only such love can truly end violent retaliation. That unusual love is both the sweetest and strongest.” https://bccatholic.ca/voices/c-s-morrissey/samson-s-riddle-gives-a-glimpse-of-divine-logic

Something to consider is this: If an incorrect way of interpreting Scripture has lasted centuries then it may not be a mere bad-yet-attractive idea that has spread; it may be that something of a psychological habit is at work in reaction to the text. Some people act as though ideologies are demons inhabiting the population and we have to guard ourselves against catching one by exposure to it. I think it’s more likely that fallen human beings have typical, predictable habits that we form in response to not only material externalities but also to the immaterial world of ideas.

The historic battles with such ideologies are not always our battles. It’s easy to find one’s position on the front line and fire into the dark, taking aim at what our neighbors to the left or right of us are targeting—without ever actually seeing the target or whether we’ve hit it (never mind the ethical questions this raises). Sometimes there’s no real enemy at all. We’ve trained our senses to hit on every hint of a historic enemy in so many -isms: enthusiasm, Gnosticism, pelagianism, and so on, and I believe this has taken our eyes off of Christ.

Against pragmatism: Are the biblical accounts meant to provide a preponderance of evidence favoring the likelihood of my eternal life in the resurrection through the atoning sacrifice of the Son of the living God? Is this also a reason for the pragmatic approach to prayer? Pragmatism puts me at the center, but we are not at the center, God is; likewise, just as God is to be confessed and not proven, so is our history. And, moreover, Aristotle says the following: “it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits,” and I agree with him.

I believe: I believe true humanity reflects the image of its Creator. The human relationship with the triune God is central to every truly human thought, word, or deed, regardless of the social context, historical paradigm, or scientific project at hand. All that we think and say of creation is either a rendering of God’s image or a vitiation of it. Ephesians 1:9-10: "having made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth—in Him."

We do know: Adam and Eve were the first humans, and their presence and actions in the Garden of Eden had a profound effect on all of creation. This understanding is foundational to the Christian worldview and is affirmed in 1 Corinthians 15:21-22: "For since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive." This verse highlights that the consequences of Adam's sin—specifically death—affected not just himself but all of humanity, pointing to a fundamental rupture in the created order. Furthermore, Romans 8:20-21 states, “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” This suggests that Adam and Eve’s sin had implications beyond humanity, introducing corruption and futility into creation itself.

We should not lose sight of this theocentric understanding of creation, centered on God’s purposes for humanity and creation as a whole. While this view can also be considered anthropocentric—given that it highlights humanity’s central role in the drama of creation and redemption—it ultimately places God and His plan at the center. The Garden of Eden was the initial setting where God’s good creation operated in a special state, free from death and decay, as suggested by the assertion in Genesis 2:17 that death was the consequence for disobedience. Thus, Lutheran theology sees the state of Adam and Eve in the Garden as a special state of preservation, where human immortality was maintained until the Fall.

With regard to dogmatism as something opposed to allegorical reading: Why do people write allegory? The answer must begin with anthropology and extend to a biblical understanding of human nature. Asserting truth dogmatically, however, runs contrary to the very nature of truth-seeking, which is shaped and deepened through the search itself. For Christians, such dogmatism is unwise and even unchristian because it stifles the openness necessary to recognize truth as something revealed rather than controlled. If we understand the human impulse behind creating texts like Genesis, we see that the origins and purposes of allegory and symbolism are meant to guide us toward divine reality, not reduce it to rigid formulas. These forms of expression serve as bridges between human experience and transcendent truths. For Christians, this connection is particularly meaningful because it resonates with the doctrine of revelation, where human stories become vessels through which God discloses Himself. Thus, exploring allegory is not just a literary exercise but a way of discerning how the human imagination is drawn to and participates in the divine.

We don’t know: The Word is given to us to create faith in God (cf. Romans 10:17: “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ”). The Word is not meant to provide exhaustive answers to every scientific or historical question about creation. Lutherans hold to the principle of sola Scriptura, which means that Scripture is sufficient for all matters of faith and doctrine, but it is not a comprehensive scientific textbook. As the Lutheran Confessions state: "The Word of God shall establish articles of faith, and no one else, not even an angel" (Smalcald Articles II, II, 15). Thus, we cannot add speculative interpretations to the Genesis narrative, nor should we insert more information into the text than is explicitly given.

Given this, we do not know definitively whether the six days of creation were 24-hour days in the modern sense or whether they symbolically represent longer periods. The Hebrew word for “day” (yom) used in Genesis 1 can signify a 24-hour day, but it can also mean a longer, indefinite period, such as an era (cf. Genesis 2:4, where yom refers to the entire period of creation). But even if you reject that possibility, insisting that yom must always mean a literal 24-hour day is an entirely meaningless assertion since every metaphor refers to something in the same way as if it were not a metaphor. I don’t mean to be snarky but that’s literally how metaphors work.

Finally, it’s also crucial to remember that when we call something poetry, myth, or historiography, that these are only loose and approximative categories. We can’t, in other words, look at the rest of Scripture and neatly demarcate all the examples of poetry and say “Nope! None of this is like Genesis—therefore Genesis isn’t poetic.”

We don’t know: Given our uncertainty about the length of the days of creation, we don’t know how old the Earth is.

We do know: The Word of God is given to create and sustain faith in God. Whether the universe is 6,000 years old or billions of years old is immaterial to faith because such information does not reveal anything about Jesus Christ or His work of redemption. The Formula of Concord states that the purpose of the Scriptures is to lead to faith in Christ, not to provide exhaustive scientific information (cf. Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration, Article XI). Moreover, St. Augustine in The Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi ad Litteram, Book 1, Chapter 19) warned against dogmatic interpretations of creation that go beyond what is necessary for faith, arguing that "it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics."

In sum, while we do not know the precise details about the days of creation or the age of the Earth, we do know that these questions do not impact the central teachings of faith, which are centered on Christ and His saving work. As the Apostle Paul emphasizes in 1 Corinthians 2:2: “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” Whether the Earth is old or young, what matters is that Scripture reveals God’s love and redemption through Christ, which is the foundation of faith.

We do know: We do know that the flood described in Genesis is presented as a whole-world event. Genesis 7:19 states that “all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered,” and Genesis 6:17 describes the flood as a judgment to destroy “all flesh” in which is the breath of life under heaven. If we take the text at face value, it suggests a global flood that impacted all of creation. From a plain reading, it seems that the intent was to depict a comprehensive destruction, not merely a local catastrophe confined to a specific region.

Interpreting the flood as a global event is consistent with the language used in the narrative, unless we factor in the historical context of the biblical authors and their limited knowledge of the world beyond the Ancient Near East. However, if we maintain a more literal view, it’s reasonable to assume the flood covered the entire planet. This view has been traditionally held by many Christians, but it comes with significant scientific challenges.

One of the biggest challenges to a global flood model is the heat problem. During a global flood, rapid geological processes—such as massive volcanic activity, tectonic shifts, and friction caused by fast-moving water—would generate enormous amounts of heat. This heat would be sufficient to boil the oceans and melt the rock layers, making survival for any life, including those on the Ark, impossible. This problem remains unresolved even within young-Earth creationist models, and simply saying, “God did it miraculously,” doesn’t work if we’re trying to use scientific evidence to support the flood’s occurrence. If we appeal to scientific findings and natural laws to support our points about the flood, then we need to be consistent and address objections raised by those same scientific principles. Invoking miracles only when we hit a roadblock undermines the use of scientific reasoning in the first place.

Is there anything in the Bible that teaches us we must educate ourselves with more than the Scriptures themselves in order to understand them?

How do I connect what I read in the Bible to closing my eyes and talking to Jesus about my problems? How do I know the Bible was written for me, too?

On our worst days, when we read Scripture, we’re either going to believe what our tradition gives as the essential teaching from individual and collective Scriptural readings—expressed in commentaries, Bible footnotes, Bible studies, and sermons—or else we’ll slog through the Old Testament confusedly and then, though relieved to find much easier passage through the New Testament, still come away with a hodge-podge of disjointed sayings and miracle accounts, with bits of good news interspersed. This post will offer some excerpts from a few Old Testament scholars whom I’m going to give a chance to help us wave-away such thoughts so that we might enjoy more good days with the Bible.

Let me add, quickly, what’s becoming my favorite disclaimer: It’s okay to be wrong about much of this. The object of faith unto salvation isn’t everything in the Bible understood precisely as it’s meant to be understood.

I might expect an objection now. Well, that’s a slippery slope! Are you suggesting we can have literal salvation without taking everything in the Bible as scientific historiography?

The answer is that yes, there need to have been innumerable people, places, and events, to fill out our history as God’s people. That history is indeed recorded in Scripture. But we have salvation through faith in Jesus Christ alone, and it’s not our job to gather all of the biblical historical data to inform our faith, so that we know there was a talking snake in a garden long ago — before we can know that we sin, for example. We know we sin by no other reason than our repentance. Through faith we receive eternal life, not through information. That doesn’t mean we can go without the word of God; but it does mean that we can allow the word to speak however it does and trust that it is true (note that this is different than what I criticize as collier faith of believing things are true without even knowing what they are at all)—yes, even sometimes without knowing exactly in what way it is true. If anyone balks at this and claims he knows in what way everything in the Bible is true, then I’d say, “Indeed, let God be true but every man a liar” (Romans 3:4 NKJV).

On Scripture and the wars over its interpretation

If an incorrect way of interpreting Scripture has lasted centuries then it may not be a mere bad-yet-attractive idea that has spread; it may be that something of a psychological habit is at work in reaction to the text. Some people act as though ideologies are demons inhabiting the population and we have to guard ourselves against catching one by exposure to it. I think it’s more likely that fallen human beings have typical, predictable habits that we form in response to not only material externalities but also to the immaterial world of ideas.

I cannot overstate the futility of this exercise. The fact is that there are many truths we believe that are simply different perspectives on the same reality—and yet many theologians will spend their entire intellectual lives fighting with their brothers in Christ over the more precise way of telling the truth. I’m not arguing for a subjectivism; the truth is objective, but we are so hasty to find fault and maintain our historic battles that we don’t realize we’re describing the same things, albeit in different ways.

Let’s consider, for one example, the interpretation of Scripture where one interpretation differs from another but doesn’t contradict it. It may be that one of these is the intended meaning of the author, but that doesn’t mean the other is entirely unhelpful—and it certainly doesn’t mean the two meanings are contradictory.

For a more philosophical sort of debate, consider also the debate over free will in some Christian circles: In the end, it’s not that we’re created as robots naturally unable to make choices of consequence; rather, it’s that the Scriptures describe the state man is in such that we know many of us don’t choose the right way. Without going into the speculative details of this, what’s the essential difference between these two descriptions if they are equally of a single certainty that a man does or does not choose Christ? Insofar as Christ’s atoning work is in view (i.e., not the thoroughness and precision of our thoughts on it), there is no difference. We know when we’ve made a choice for something or someone—so an advocate for free will (who will be labeled Pelagian and dismissed) is likely to recount his experience and affirm that he did indeed choose to be a Christian and follow Christ.

Is he wrong? No, of course not! It’s just that his Christian brother sees faith as at least including a system or web of beliefs, and if someone describes what has happened in a way which goes beyond the formulaic attribution of all causes to God, then that person becomes a target for pious correction. What matters most to the scold in this interaction is witnessing to the doctrinal truth; what matters most to his supposed pelagian brother is witnessing to the experience of being a Christian.

But which way is the more biblical way? I’d argue we have both models in Scripture. There’s a word for the systematizer who accuses his brother, instead of affirming him in his witness: pedantic.

The pedantic theologian will also want to hear his own words spoken back to him as affirmations, but then attribute them to Scripture. For example, if I were to claim that it isn’t certain we should vote or participate in our corrupt government, he will say that God has given us civil authorities… citing a couple of verses in the New Testament. If I were to challenge the scope of applying those verses, there’d be nothing for him to say in reply outside of reiterating what he’d already said. In other words, he has nothing beyond a memorized line. When we really know something to be true, we can answer questions about it and we can entertain hypotheticals to some extent. But this sort of person cannot do that.

Another sampling comes to us by way of the distinctions made by theologians between individual and corporate realities in the body of Christ, the Church. Theologians like Regin Prenter, for example, rightly point to the corporate work of the Holy Spirit. But is there really no place for speaking of individual experience? Why would God waste so much energy on individuals if all that matters is an anonymous mass under the banner of his Son’s name?

Let’s turn to another example of impoverished reasoning employed to discredit others and keep the wars raging between us, this one where bibliology is concerned. It goes something like this: “If you believe you’ve discovered a scientific error in the Bible, therefore you have no epistemic justification for believing anything else in it!” That’s obviously unsound reasoning. It reminds me of the argument I’ve heard that Jonah must have been swallowed by a giant fish because, if he’d not been, then any reference to that story in the NT must also be false. What? It's entirely normal to even reference movies or video games to describe things that actually happen in real life every day. It's fallacious to think everything in a historical document must be material history or else it’s false. That gives the line away to the materialist anyway, by begging the question of material history being the only legitimate or authentic kind. Honestly, it looks and sounds very much like Enlightenment thinking (one of the ideologies such pedants normally think they’ve learned to hate).

To be clear, I’m pointing out the poor reasoning involved in claiming that, if you’re explaining something that has happened and you make reference to a story everyone knows, then everything in that story must be material scientific history (which wasn't even a standard until the Enlightenment) or else the thing that did happen must be a fable. I'm sorry, but I don't know a polite way of addressing that kind of thinking when it puts stumbling blocks to faith. If I told someone he's "like the boy who cried wolf," then it would be inane for him to reply "Aha! There was no such boy!" Or if I said, “This situation reminds me of Pinocchio...” and the reply was: “Pinocchio didn't exist!" then I'd smile, pat him gently on the head, and wish him a good day.

One quick point about inerrancy. It’s so key to emphasize (over and over until they get it) that the term of art, “inerrancy,” and fundamentalism are new. We need to appeal to the oftentimes typical mistrust of enlightenment thinking in fundamentalist circles (esp with regard to skepticism about miracles) and make it clear to them that their inerrancy view is itself a product of enlightenment thinking. Moreover, inerrantists claim this quality of the original texts (because there are copyist errors we all recognize); without the originals, however, this is an entirely useless and immaterial claim. An American sort of inerrantist may think it just makes plain ol' common sense to him that mixing up dates is “lyin’!”. But the Bible is written for all people to see the Truth, Jesus Christ— not just for those who think it’s a book of information to nod at and affirm very sternly that every detail accords with exactly what happened as if it were a laboratory report. Besides, what an utterly useless exercise it would be to read that. Why do we have Scriptures? Is it just to know what happened at such-and-such a time and place? Do people really think that's how God uses Word to make us into Christians?

The fact is that the Old Testament attributes to God words he never spoke. Yes, it is possible to claim both inerrancy and that words attributed to God in the Bible aren't always literal. What are times God spoke that must necessarily be taken as actual records of literal speech for any inerrantist? I’ll delve into this further on—I think the answers aren’t weakly speculative but pretty obvious.

Now, someone who has been helpful to me in a few ways has been the Old Testament scholar, John Walton. But everyone, Walton no less than anyone else, seems to go off the deep-end in whatever direction they’re furiously paddling. For example, John Walton refers to the “serpent” as a “chaos creature” typical of Ancient Near East. Part of that is seeing the serpent isn’t a moral creature—it’s neither good nor bad—and certainly isn’t the Satan of the rest of the Bible. In response, shouldn’t we know from the New Testament that chaos is evil and that whomever speaks chaos into order is satanic? What is the purpose of Walton feigning ignorance about the natures or purposes of personnages and events in the Old Testament just to make ourselves more like the people who first received these words and texts? It’s a neat historical exercise, but the only good it does is to reveal what was still to be illuminated by the light of Christ. It’s illegitimate to make what ancient people thought before the revelation of Jesus Christ what we must think as well.

My reason for pointing this out is to say that I’m not in any one scholar’s camp, like it or not. I believe that God’s Word is teaching every Christian more and more throughout his or her life and to stop at any point and declare x,y, or z, to be the final meaning for all time is to reject the Word as the living Word. That comes with a caveat, of course: there is a great deal more history in the Scriptures than demythologizers would have us believe; for that conversation, I’ll be including a section at the end of this post (some day) on history.

Back to the beginning: How do I connect what I read in the Bible to closing my eyes and talking to Jesus about my problems? How do I know the Bible was written for me, too?

Answer: The Bible tells me about our sin. We know there’s a God. What is our relationship with him? Read the Bible. And believing Christianity is plausible isn’t any more complicated than believing the Creator of our universe can raise his people from the dead. Everything else comes under that.

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Some thoughts I’m still tweaking, clarifying (read with charity):

1. Christology must always be the first consideration. For example, we can’t just set the Word incarnate aside for a moment while we consider the meaning of something in the Old Testament revelation.

2. The Bible is the only Word we have to live by, and there’s a lot of psychological relief from the clarity and focus that gives us. We don’t have to search the stars or our hearts; we don’t even have to worry about finding the right answers in the Scriptures; God will break-in and create faith in us through this means of grace.

3. How often do we think it’s good that our understanding hasn’t changed? Would it be a personal tragedy for the truth to be other than what we thought it was? It’s time to realize that we are all already living together in a tragic space where we’re constantly corrected, like it or not. What standard am I corrected against? Is it not finally my own reasoning?

As someone who has changed his mind about the most important things I can imagine—from one position to its polar opposite and back again several times—one thing I have learned is that clarity isn’t synonymous with honesty. Clarity is a gift received through faith and sort of unfurled by reason. So if I’ve ever wondered whether my naked intellect is somehow above the text as interpreter, it’s true that I do reason about Scripture using the laws of logical reasoning that God has written into the story to guide us along within it; that, however, is obviously not a way of leveraging the orderedness of creation against itself. I’m not, in other words, undermining sola scriptura by using my head when I read about God and creation in Scripture.

The Bible is given to us for this constant correction. There is no contemplation of God by other means. The entire tradition of being taken-up into contemplation of the nature of God in His infinitude has always been hemmed-in by a recognition that we cannot comprehend Him but can only know Him to the extent that He wills to be seen. He gives, we receive. We don’t begin with anything at all that isn’t given to us. The only authentic thoughts about God are therefore those that He gives us, which are those thoughts that begin without us knowing how we’ll end them. That’s the nature of learning: you don’t begin with the summit in view; if you have the summit in view, then you’re already standing atop it.

4. Is God a storyteller? I’ve been thinking about my thirst for travel and discovery of new cultures, languages, arts, and so on. It’s not simply a love of culture or of language but a general fascination with life in its variety—as many stories at once and in as many forms. To consider God a storyteller, however, is a terrifying notion if we take that to mean our lives are the book we should be enthralled with reading. Consider the tragedies that befall us all.

No—I think the divine storyteller analogy is weaker than many imagine it to be, but we can change it a little: God is indeed a storyteller in the Bible but we don’t live in the garden anymore. We have the Bible for our story but it gives in the way that memories give. It is a creative Word—the only such Word—but it creates faith in everlasting life with all of its promises (a new heavens and a new earth which will surely fascinate endlessly), not faith in this world.

Fascinations are a function of desire and we aren’t satisfied by anything that doesn’t promise more of itself. Stories fascinate us because they’re indications of creative life, always promising more of themselves. We cannot trust the fallen world to fascinate as though it promised to give of itself to us; it doesn’t give, but only takes.

5. Sometimes it’s easy to get too caught-up in others’ tragic lives and to fall into the error of, as C.S. Lewis put it, putting “God in the dock” (i.e., judging Him). Why worry about what it means biblically—translation: even for God’s existence as described by the Bible—when I witness apparently-absurd tragedies in others’ lives?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Individualism gets a bad rap. We are always in a first-order relationship with God and then, secondarily so to speak, with others. That first relationship is what defines our understanding of His character. The way events in others’ lives bear upon the relationship between the creatures involved and their Creator wasn’t written into my story. Too many of us are asking about other peoples’ stories now as though they were our own, or as if they should impact upon our own relationships with God, and doing so betrays a lack of confidence in the biblical story teller who assures us of His providence in the smallest details that escape our bleary-eyed vision of life as a series of little tragedies. The answer to the risks run by individualism, in other words, is not communitarianism but God-centeredness by making the biblical narrative our narrative and greater context.

6. One of the consequences of reading the Old Testament flatly with the New Testament and with modern history as though nothing has changed since Adam and Eve, is that we’re tempted to put God in the dock again, and judge Him for events like the conquest of Canaan.

Something that has always been true since the Fall has been that men and women are not gods but sinners deserving hell. Why should we be scandalized if we are punished here before we die and descend to Sheol or Hell? How much more of a relief is Christ’s intervention into history then?

A related problem comes from the scholars who teach that the Bible is “monotheizing” but not monotheistic (like many post Vatican II Roman Catholics). By doing so, they preclude any understanding of Scripture as God-breathed and they ignore the fact that the modern reader lives in the same world, and in the same history, as anyone in the Bible. If the Bible is God-breathed, it is breathed by the same God who breathes new life into us.

The idea of progressive monotheizing ultimately reduces to progressive revelation, this time with an extra step of pretending as though we were justified in treating the Scripture as a product of men, subjecting direct/special/divine revelation of God’s character to developments which would necessarily include errors requiring correction. God’s Word, however, cannot develop, though it may be gradually understood by its readers. Scripture is always God’s Word in a complete form; it always was. Each piece of the final puzzle was a complete revelation already. God’s word is inerrant and complete and always was—even before the closing of the canon.

7. Symbols are freighted with memories of real things that repeat in individual lives across history, all within the wider context of the Bible story. It isn’t a handwave to point to a text and read something symbolic into it as a matter of avoiding the historical reality of the event. For example, the Old Testament violence of the warrior Yahweh is useful to us as more than mere history, and is God’s Word to us now because it is so freighted with meaning. It’s only good for us to hear precisely because it’s symbolic. That isn’t to say it isn’t also material history, but why that matters so much when you understand God is speaking to you now through it is beyond me.

8. Let’s move on to the accounts of miracles that have skeptics in knots. Most people want to either downplay or skim-over their importance when they’re not essential or normative or at least common in Christian parlance. For example, the Resurrection is essential, and the multiplying of the loaves is at least normative. Now let’s take the story of Ananias and Sapphira being struck dead without even a chance at repentance. Was this a supernatural event, whereas our own deaths will only be natural ones? I think the problem is assuming there’s such a thing as “supernatural” as opposed to “natural” at all. To my mind, there’s only Creator and creature. Ananias and Sapphira deserved death, as do we, and our Creator is wholly just. Why further complicate it with made up categories like “supernature”? My cessationism, therefore, isn’t one of God’s ceased supernatural intervening works; it’s a cessation of divine revelation, full stop.

We can’t begin any paths to understanding the Bible by believing anything about it a priori because frankly there’s no such thing. There isn’t a view of the Bible from nowhere, so to speak, because all of us creatures are born already immersed in the Bible story, on a path already. We can’t start reading the Bible by trying to take in the whole scope of nature in order to contextualize the Word of God as though it were one key record of the larger story told by Nature because the biblical revelation is the larger story, the greater context. Cessationism is a way of putting Scripture as greater context, the norm, for all thinking about our relationship to God and creation because it places us in the biblical story as those to whom God has finally revealed himself by a chosen means and no other. We have to believe things as they are described by the Bible. For example, I always go to prayer as I’m told to do in the Bible—and I think that’s the right order of things.

I’ve been wondering about whether a sort of cessationism is necessary to believing certain stories in the Bible without being, well, thoughtless? It would certainly make it easier to say that “these things happened then, but we don’t see them now because God made them happen in order to have them recorded in Scripture.” Something like that. Give them a purpose, over and done. After all, the Bible is God’s direct revelation; it would only make sense that the direct revelations would end with the Bible lest there be confusion about the closing of the canon or about the purpose of God’s remarkable actions that only happened in ‘biblical times’. We revere the Bible as God’s Word and we go to it as a unique source of unique events. If the events simply continued in that vein then the Bible would no longer be a unique record.

Believing the historicity of the stories of Ananias and of Achan requires the same reverence for the Bible as the unique source of revelation it is. Not only does it require such reverence but it also inspires the reverence. God did such things in history in order that they would be recorded and given to us in the Word. They’re like inversions of the miraculous, and we have to read them while keeping in mind that our faith is in a God who sustains life at every moment—but a God who also judges us and lets death take us, too.

One last point about cessationism, and this one relates to the charismatic movements. My biggest concern with charismatic churches is that the miraculous is there to demonstrate Christ’s power to save us from hell, not to lengthen legs or even make the blind see. If the latter were true then He has failed big time. Redemption is about our salvation from hell, not from suffering on earth. These are incompatible ends, too; we can’t give it the ol’ “both/and” sophistry treatment because then God arbitrarily heals some and lets the rest of us languish. On the contrary, God paid fully for the sins of the whole world to redeem all of us without exception. If God wants us to have any confidence in what the work of Christ is in our lives, and in what the Bible is given to us to teach, then God would close the canon as He did. The point of Christianity is atonement. The Pentecostals and prosperity gospel churches both distract from the law and gospel center of the entire reason for Christ’s intervention in our world. If Jesus was supposed to come to give us superpowers then He failed on an epic scale. Finally, on that note, a “word from God” is a “word of God” and it’s philosophically inept linguistic torture to attempt to make a difference in the distinction between the two terms.

9. There’s a sense of duty implicit in knowing the Bible to remember what is in the Scripture as frequently as possible, to apply Bible stories to as many areas of your life as possible. That’s as silly, though, as requiring the same of us with regard to math. Do I really filter everything through a Christic lens? Through the Bible? That’s sort of like asking whether I filter everything in life through what I know about mathematics. When I have to count, well sure. But wee should never have to remind ourselves of mathematics when walking and talking normally in everyday life.

Then again, why talk about filters at all? I'm already critical of whatever follows when someone first describes an experience, and then goes on to infer an explanation to render it some deeper meaning. In other words, do we really have to add “because of sin” when we say something like “I’m angry”? That’s the filter, awkwardly set on the first order experience. I don’t think God demands it.

The Westminster Confession points us to the right answer to this objection: “The chief end of man is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.” This does mean always thinking about God, which will invariably lead to what we know of Him through the Word. It is unlike mathematics (or any other subject) because it is the one subject that affects everything in creation. “Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither—whatever they do prospers (Psalm 1:1-3).”

10. Quick note on William Lane Craig’s theory about the creation accounts of Genesis. He calls it “mythohystory”. As far as I can tell. mythohistory is a blurred vision of a true event. It preserves the integrity of the human historian as accurate—but doesn’t account for the God with perfect vision. His theory is fine if we think as Roman Catholics that the Bible contains the Word but it’s not fine if we think it is the Word.

Debates about interpretation will remain tinged with a sense that everything is on the line (i.e., everything the Bible says) so long as we concede that Scripture merely contains God’s Word because we will always wonder where that Word is and how to understand it rather than taking it at face value that all of the Bible, as a whole and in every part, is the Word.

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Read this: https://alc.edu.au/assets/ltj/2017dec/1975-Sasse-Letter-to-Robert-Preus.pdf

And this: https://christforus.org/NewSite/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Notes-on-the-Inerrancy-of-Scripture.pdf ; the same doc is here: https://scholar.csl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4578&context=ctm

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I didn’t just read all the interpretations of divisive or controversial verses and topics and then choose an interpretation among them according to my biases. I’ve written about my confessional subscriptions and what they mean; furthermore, I am able to explain each choice. Crucially, there really aren’t as many differences in interpretation as is often assumed or suggested.

Under this category, I’d include claims about extra-biblical authorities, claims about controverted doctrines, claims about the inerrancy of Scripture or contradictions, claims about the relationship between philosophy and theology, or between history and the other two, and claims about what prayer does. It’s true that some amount of wise discernment is required to see things the way I do, but it’s honestly no more than what reading comprehension and reasoning ability—universally attested and required of a good law school candidate studying for the LSAT—would demand.

One bold, simple, yet entirely justified claim would be that anyone who can summarize my beliefs about how to read Scripture and about what differences divide Christian denominations would agree with me. A good first step in this direction, which may take some of the pressure off, is to understand that not everything is a matter of interpretation; our relationship to Christ, for instance, is not a matter of interpretation—and it is obviously the most essential thing in Christianity.

I have a somewhat obscure explanation of Luther’s Small Catechism by a relatively unknown pastor from years ago. I love it. I think it answers simply but incompletely. Whereas someone may read this explanation of a catechism and skeptically look for imprecisions or incompleteness, I read it and see a pretty good reflection on our relationship with God and the rest of creation.

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Here are some relevant thoughts penned by Hermann Sasse:

“It may happen that an un-Lutheran faith seizes control of the forms of the Lutheran church and that then this church is only externally a Lutheran church. This indicates the danger which threatens every Lutheran church at all times. Missouri is no exception to the rule.

This danger becomes visible in the case of a notable shift of emphasis which can be observed in the theology of the Missouri Synod. …Dr. P. E. Kretzmann begins his book, The Foundations Must Stand! The Inspiration of the Bible and Related Questions (St. Louis, 1936) with a statement on the importance of the doctrine of Inspiration of the Holy Scripture:

We commonly refer to the doctrine of justification by faith alone as the central doctrine of the Christian religion, the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae. But even this fundamental truth of personal faith is not a matter of subjective certainty. Rather, it depends rather, as do all other articles of faith, on the objective certainty of the Word of God as a whole and in all its parts. In this respect the doctrine of Inspiration of the Bible is fundamental for the entire corpus doctrinae (p. 3).

We may assume that any orthodox Presbyterian, Baptist, or Adventists could have written these sentences in precisely this manner. It is, however, our conviction that they can be brought into harmony neither with the theology of Luther nor with the teaching of the Confessions. Reformed Fundamentalism makes the relationship to Christ depend on the relationship to the Bible, as Catholicism makes it depend on the relationship to the church. This is a wrong deduction from the fact that without the Scripture or the oral Word which is based upon the Scripture we would know nothing of Christ. The faith of the Lutheran church in the Scripture is based on her faith in Christ. It is basically faith in Christ, because the Bible, and this is true of the whole Bible, is testimony concerning Christ. Our faith in the Bible as the infallible Word of God is therefore an entirely different faith from the faith of Fundamentalism in the Bible, which at least logically and factually precedes faith in Christ. The conviction that the Scripture from beginning to end is inspired and therefore the inerrant Word of God, whose statements can be trusted absolutely, is not necessarily Christian faith. The orthodox rabbis have the same faith with respect to the Old Testament. The “Christadelphians,” “Jehovah’s Witnesses” and other heretics who deny the true deity of the Son and therefore also the true deity of the Holy Spirit, who therefore do not even know what inspiration in the biblical and Christian sense is (Mt 10:20; Jn 16:13ff.), but make out of the Scripture a book of oracles after the fashion of the heathen sibyls, likewise teach the plenary inspiration and the absolute inerrancy of the Scripture, which shows plainly that this doctrine is not an absolute defense against false doctrine. Least of all does it guard against unbelief. On the contrary! As it was but a brief step from the Orthodoxy of a Hollaz to the Rationalism of a Semler, so also there is but one step from Fundamentalism to unbelief. One can only respect the seriousness with which earnest Reformed Christians desire to hold to the authority of Scripture. But one must also see the tragic reality when human opinions, for instance, concerning the age of the earth, are proclaimed as divinely revealed truths, with the result that with these opinions the authority of the Scripture collapses. What kind of Christianity is that which can be refuted by a photograph of the depths of space, or by the facts—(not theories)—of radioactivity! No, Luther’s mighty faith in the Scriptures as the infallible Word of God has nothing in common with this understanding of the Scripture current in Fundamentalism. One seeks for it in vain in the Lutheran confessional writings.

If the theologians of the Missouri Synod believed that it was necessary to draw up an explicit doctrine of the Holy Scripture, its inspiration and inerrancy, which goes beyond the brief sentences of the Lutheran Confession, in order to oppose the apostasy from the Word of God which was taking place also in Lutheran churches this must be considered a wholly legitimate undertaking. This must be granted, and it is to be regretted that the necessity of such formulation of doctrine was not recognized everywhere. But then Missouri should have formulated a truly Lutheran doctrine of the Holy Scripture, a doctrine which is in complete harmony with the Confession and which takes seriously the principle of the Formula of Concord, that Luther is the foremost teacher of the church of the Augsburg Confession. Instead, the fathers of the Missouri Synod simply took over the doctrine of the later Orthodoxy (Baier, Quenstedt) concerning the Scripture, without even asking themselves the question, whether this doctrine is Lutheran, and whether it can be brought into harmony with the Confession. One need not take this amiss if one considers with what difficulty the fathers of the Lutheran revival also in Germany had to work their way back to the Lutheran doctrine. They were not yet able to see what a deep chasm exists between the understanding of revelation with Luther as compared with the Orthodoxy of the seventeenth century. Today this is different.

Historical research in Lutheran theology has shown how deeply Orthodoxy was influenced by the same Aristotelian philosophy which Luther had banished from dogmatics. We know now that Orthodoxy is a very similar synthesis of the natural (reason) and the supernatural (revelation) knowledge of God as was the scholasticism of the Middle Ages.

Excerpted from “Confession and Theology in the Missouri Synod” (1951), Scripture and the Church: Selected Essays of Hermann Sasse (St. Louis: Concordia Seminary, 1995), 214-217.”

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Brevard Childs: “The widely recognized significance of J. P. Gabler lies in his attempt to establish methodological clarity respecting the subject matter of Biblical Theology. In his now famous oratio of 1787 he set out in the title his basic concern: ‘A discourse on the proper distinction between biblical and dogmatic theology and the correct delimination of their boundaries’ (cf. the ET). Gabler began by sharply distinguishing Biblical Theology which he characterized as a historical discipline ( e genere historico ) from dogmatic theology which he described as didactic in nature. He argued that much of the confusion regarding the Bible had arisen by mixing religion which was transparent and simple with theology which was subtle, subjective and changeable. Gabler then proceeded to set forth various exegetical steps for properly handling the Bible as a historical discipline. First, the text was to be carefully studied and classified according to its historical period, authorship, and linguistic conventions. A second step involved a comparison of the various parts in order to discern the agreement or disagreement of the different biblical authors much as one would handle any other system of philosophy. Only when the interpreter had filtered the biblical material through these two stages was he prepared for the crucial third step of distinguishing in the material that which was universally true ( notiones universae ) from the temporal. This ‘pure Biblical theology’ was then in a form suitable for reflection by dogmatic theology. It was fully consistent with Gabler’s hermeneutics when he subsequently made specific the distinction between ‘ auslegen ’ which was a philological historical interpretation of the text and ‘ erklären ’ which was an attempt to determine the true causes lying behind the particular construals.

…

Thirdly, among many critical scholars there was a growing assumption that Biblical Theology as an academic discipline was largely anachronistic and was an unfortunate vestige from a past era. Gunkel expressed this general attitude toward Biblical Theology in a classic essay when he summarized all the history-of-religion’s arguments against Biblical Theology and concluded: The recently experienced phenomenon of Biblical Theology’s being replaced by the history of Israelite religion is to be explained from the fact that the spirit of historical investigation has now taken the place of a traditional doctrine of inspiration ( RGG 2 , I, 1090f.). At least for a time which extended well into the twentieth century, it looked as if Gunkel’s characterization was being confirmed.

…

By the end of the nineteenth century the full problematic of Biblical Theology had emerged with great clarity. On the one hand, Gabler’s case for the independence of Biblical Theology from dogmatic constraints appeared to many to be fully justified. On the other hand, the pursuit of Biblical Theology as a historical discipline had resulted in the dissolution of the very discipline itself. In the light of this situation, it was a major contribution of G. Ebeling in the 1950s to have clarified the full dimensions of the problems which confronted Biblical Theology in the wake of the historical study of the Bible by means of a classic essay (‘Meaning’). Ebeling makes the following points. First, the theological unity of the Old and New Testaments has become extremely fragile and it seems now impossible to combine the testaments on the same level in order to produce a unified theology. Secondly, the inner unity of each of the respective testaments has been cast into such doubt that a theology of the New Testament consists largely in classifying the discrete theologies of its different authors. Thirdly, the study of the Old and New Testaments as a historical discipline can no longer be limited to the so-called canonical scriptures since this category is ultimately dogmatic and ecclesiastical. Rather, the use of all historical sources which are pertinent to the subject is required without distinction. Finally, the strongest objection has arisen even to the application of the term ‘theology’ in describing the contents of the Bible. At least the term ‘religion’ should be substituted and the traditional terminology of revelation eschewed within the historical enterprise. In sum, the basic question which has emerged in the aftermath of Gabler’s defining of the enterprise as a historical discipline is to what extent the subject matter has been so dismantled as to call into question its very existence and viability. Before this challenge Ebeling has then attempted to address the problem in a programmatic fashion by redefining the discipline of Biblical Theology (96). He writes: Its task would accordingly be defined thus: In ‘biblical theology’ the theologian who devotes himself specially to studying the connection between the Old and New Testaments has to give an account of his understanding of the Bible as a whole, i.e. above all of the theological problems that come of inquiring into the inner unity of the manifold testimony of the Bible. Ebeling’s redefining of the task of Biblical Theology has, in my opinion, made a valuable start toward reconstituting the field. However, because Ebeling has not in fact pursued his proposal further since its publication in 1955, I would like to explore his proposal according to my own concept of the field. I am aware that Ebeling would have developed this definition in a different fashion, but I am grateful for his stimulus and initial insight. First, Ebeling’s definition is, in one sense, a return to a pre-Gabler position in so far as he once again joins the historical and theological elements. The task of Biblical Theology is defined as a modern theologian’s reflection on various aspects of the Bible. The task is not confined simply to a historical description of the original author’s intention.

…

“the task of the responsible exegete is to hear each testament’s own voice, and both to recognize and pursue the nature of the Bible’s diversity. However, an important post-Enlightenment correction is needed which rejects the widespread historicist’s assumption that this historical goal is only objectively realized when the interpreter distances himself from all theology. Thirdly, the biblical theologian’s reflection is directed to the connection between the Old and New Testaments in an effort ‘to give an account of his understanding of the Bible as a whole … inquiring into its inner unity’. Biblical Theology has as its proper context the canonical scriptures of the Christian church, not because only this literature influenced its history, but because of the peculiar reception of this corpus by a community of faith and practice. The Christian church responded to this literature as the authoritative word of God, and it remains existentially committed to an inquiry into its inner unity because of its confession of the one gospel of Jesus Christ which it proclaims to the world. It was therefore a fatal methodological mistake when the nature of the Bible was described solely in categories of the history of religion, a move which could only develop in the direction of contesting the integrity of the canon and of denying the legitimacy of its content as theology. Finally, it is highly significant that Ebeling still speaks of the ‘testimony’ of the Bible. The implications of describing the subject matter of the Bible as witness are crucial in any redefining of the discipline. The role of the Bible is not being understood simply as a cultural expression of ancient peoples, but as a testimony pointing beyond itself to a divine reality to which it bears witness. To speak of the Bible now as scripture further extends this insight because it implies its continuing role for the church as a vehicle of God’s will. Such an approach to the Bible is obviously confessional. Yet the Enlightenment’s alternative proposal which was to confine the Bible solely to the arena of human experience is just as much a philosophical commitment. In sum, the paradox of much of Biblical Theology was its attempt to pursue a theological discipline within a framework of Enlightenment’s assumptions which necessarily resulted in its frustration and dissolution.”

Childs, Brevard S.. Biblical Theology of OT and NT (pp. 5-9). Fortress Press. Édition du Kindle.

…

“A basic feature in the defence of typology was the sharp distinction which its defenders drew between allegory and typology. It was argued that allegory deprecated the role of history and imposed an arbitrary, philosophical reading of the biblical text akin to Philo. W. Vischer’s exegesis ( Witness ) was severely attacked by both Eichrodt and von Rad for being allegorical. In contrast, typology was viewed as an extension of the literal sense of historical events in a subsequent adumbration and served to signal the correspondence between redemptive events in a single history of salvation. Typology was considered closely akin to prophecy and fulfilment and thought to be a major New Testament category in relating to the Old Testament. In a book such as Grelot’s Sens Chrétien de l’Ancien Testament , the typological approach was developed into a full-blown Biblical Theology, but among most critically trained Protestants, even when favourably disposed in principle to the method, typology tended to remain strictly on the periphery, affecting hermeneutical theory rather than actual exegesis (cf. the essays of von Rad and Wolff in Westermann (ed.), Essays ). Certainly the sharpest attack against the typological approach within the modern debate was that launched by James Barr (‘Typology and Allegory’). Barr was at pains to demonstrate that in terms of method there was no basic difference between allegory and typology. Both derive from a ‘resultant system’ in which the text is construed from the perspective of an outside system brought to bear upon it, and that the difference between allegory and typology depends largely upon the content of the resultant system being applied. Further Barr argued that the New Testament seemed unaware of a distinction between typology and allegory on the grounds of history-relatedness. He concluded that the distinction arose largely from a modern event-orientated Biblical Theology—God acts in history—and could not be sustained. In sum, Barr characterized the New Testament’s use of the Old as a different sort of operation from exegesis, and no modern approach such as typology could bridge the discrepancy.

…

In his initial proposal Gabler sought to filter the time-conditioned ideas of the various biblical authors in such a way that one could distil from the biblical material those ‘universal ideas’ which were ‘pure and unmixed with foreign things’. These timeless ideas could then be appropriated into a new dogmatic theology. It is hardly surprising that this legacy of idealistic philosophy which contrasted the particular with the general, the temporal with the eternal, the peripheral with the essential, should continue to find adherents. Particularly for a Christian theology which envisioned Jesus’ message as one which transcended the particularity of Judaism and which summarized the essence of true religion, the Old Testament appeared to be on a lower level of a national cult much in need of filtering. To be sure, this misreading of the two testaments underwent major criticism already in the early decades of the twentieth century, both from the side of radical historical criticism (Wrede, Schweitzer), as well as from kerygmatic theology (Barth, Bultmann). As a result, very few modern biblical scholars were completely comfortable with the static categories of this idealistic philosophical tradition. Nevertheless, the concern to isolate particular ideas or themes from the Bible, when stripped of their overt philosophical overtones, continued to have a certain attraction.”

Childs, Brevard S.. Biblical Theology of OT and NT (pp. 13-15). Fortress Press. Édition du Kindle.

…

“The modern appeal to language as a model for reconstituting Biblical Theology also takes a variety of different forms. German and French linguistic analysis has moved in directions quite distinct from the Anglo-Saxon world. The impact of Heidegger on Bultmann, or of Gadamer on von Rad has been well documented and cannot be pursued in this context (cf. Oeming). My concern is rather to focus on the stimulating proposal of George Lindbeck in his book, The Nature of Doctrine (cf. my New Testament as Canon , Excursus III, 541ff.). Lindbeck’s proposal shares many features with those of Frei, especially that of ‘intratextuality’, but their emphases are distinct and not fully congruent. Lindbeck’s initial proposal of a ‘cultural-linguistic’ approach views religion as a kind of cultural or linguistic framework which shapes all of life and thought. Instead of deriving external features of religion from inner experience it reverses the direction and projects the former as derivative of the latter. The concern of the model lies in exploring the extent to which human experience is shaped, moulded, and constituted by cultural and linguistic forms as a means of construing reality. Doctrines function as rules for speech and action rather than as static propositions. Within the context of the Christian community scripture provided the ‘lexical core’ (81) for Christian discourse. A central feature of Lindbeck’s proposal in relation to the function of scripture is his emphasis on ‘intratextuality’. The meaning of a text does not depend upon an outside referential verification, but scriptural meaning is understood only within a self-related whole. Intratextual theology ‘redescribes reality within the scriptural framework rather than translating scripture into extra scriptural categories. It is the text, so to speak, which absorbs the world, rather than the world the text. A scriptural world is thus able to absorb the universe’ (117), and to become the self-interpreting guide for believing communities. For my part, I am unconvinced that this is the way the Bible actually functions within the church. This proposal of the text creating its own world—some would call it fictive world—into which the reader is drawn has its origins far more in high church liturgical practice than from the Bible. Certainly throughout much of the mediaeval period, liturgy reflected a sharply dualistic concept of reality comprising a realm of the sacred and the profane, and the Bible belonged to the former. However, what is so evident to any modern reader of the Bible is its very concrete, earthly quality which is not different from human experience. The sheer wonder of the gospel message is that into this real world of flesh and blood God has entered, and the call of Christian discipleship is to follow faithfully in this same world. Lindbeck cites approvingly Karl Barth’s phrase ‘the strange new world within the Bible’ as if to suggest that Barth also envisioned drawing a community of faith into the world of the Bible. However, this move hardly does justice to Barth. Rather for him the Bible above all bears witness to a reality outside the text, namely to God, and through the biblical text the reader is confronted with the Word of God who is Jesus Christ. In this regard, I fully agree with R. Thiemann’s uneasiness with this proposal, when in a response to Lindbeck, he sees ‘the real danger that in much of Lindbeck’s essay talk about “text” stands in the place of talk about “God” ’ (378). In sum, to see the Bible as a type of symbol system construing reality into which the reader is invited to enter does not, in my opinion, accord with the model of biblical proclamation, whether by the Old Testament prophets or the New Testament apostles, in which God’s word enters into our world to transform it. Once again as in the case with the literary model, the theological issue turns on doing full justice to both text and reality which remain dialectically related, neither to be separated nor fused.”

Childs, Brevard S.. Biblical Theology of OT and NT (pp. 21-22). Fortress Press. Édition du Kindle.

…

“Central for Irenaeus was the biblical emphasis that God’s order for salvation had extended from creation to its fulfilment in Christ, as God progressively made himself known in creation, law, and prophecy through the divine Logos. Christian scripture bore witness to Jesus Christ as God’s son and saviour who was from the beginning with God and fully active throughout this entire history (IV.20.1ff.). All the economies of God reveal this history of revelation according to its stages which led the church from infancy to perfection. Indeed in his doctrine of ‘recapitulation’ Irenaeus pictured Christ’s joining the end of time with the beginning and thereby encompassing within himself fully the entire experience of Israel and the church (III.21.10–23.8). Because of the unity of God’s salvation, it was absolutely essential to the faith that the two testaments of the Christian Bible be seen as a harmonious witness to the one redemptive purpose in history. Through his use of ‘types’ (IV.14.3) and prophecy (IV.10.1) Irenaeus sought to demonstrate that the two covenants were of the selfsame substance and of the one divine author (IV.9.1) The Rule of Faith (Regula Fidei) Once the scope and function of the Christian Bible had been established, the crucial issue turned on its proper interpretive context. Irenaeus first made use of the ‘rule of truth’, or ‘rule of faith’, in a polemical setting against the arbitrary exegesis of the Gnostics (I.8.1;I.9.4). They disregarded ‘the order and connection’ of scripture and thereby destroyed its truth. They did not understand the true content of scripture and so rearranged its beautiful image of a king into the form of a dog or a fox (I.8.1). The rule-of-faith by which Irenaeus sought to establish a framework of interpretation was once thought by scholars to be a baptismal confession (Kattenbusch), but more recent research (Hägglund, ‘Die Bedeutung’, 103) has confirmed that the rule is a summary of the truth which comprises the faith of the church. It refers to the totality of the faith as the criterion of correct interpretation. It is the content of scripture, but not identical with the Bible; rather, it is that to which scripture points. It is contained in the proclamation of church tradition, but it is not as if the written Bible required an additional oral formulation. Its content is decisive for faith and is reflected in a unified teaching in both its oral and written form. Irenaeus did not see the rule-of-faith as the church’s ‘construal’ of the Bible, but rather as the objective truth of the Apostolic Faith, which has been publically revealed and not concealed in a secret gnosis. There is a succession of true witnesses (IV.26.2). Its truth is unambiguous (III.2.1) and can be demonstrated in the actual history of the past (III.5.1). Yet this truth is not a static deposit from the past, but the ‘living voice’ ( viva vox ) of truth. Irenaeus speaks of the symphony of scripture, of its harmonious proportion (III.11.9). It provides the church with the normative criterion against which critically to measure the Gnostic distortions. In sum, it seems hard to question that Irenaeus was indeed a biblical theologian. Moreover, he has raised a variety of critical hermeneutical problems which are fully relevant to the modern debate. First, he established, once and for all, the centrality of the concept of the Christian Bible which is to be sharply distinguished from the frequent modern designation of the Bible as the Hebrew scriptures plus a New Testament! Secondly, he offered a theocentric focus to the Bible external to the faith in terms of what God has done and is doing which does not find its unity merely in an ecclesiastical construal. Thirdly, in his understanding of a rule-of-faith he not only established a historical trajectory to the faith which joined the church to Israel, but he formulated a theological framework for scriptural interpretation which sought to join the church christologically with the living voice of God according of the truth of its apostolic content without playing Bible and tradition over against each other.”

Childs, Brevard S.. Biblical Theology of OT and NT (p. 31-32). Fortress Press. Édition du Kindle.

…

“Origen’s initial contribution lies in posing the fundamental hermeneutical problem of scripture in a manner far more critical than Irenaeus, and then offering a profoundly christological resolution of the problem. The Bible is the divinely inspired vehicle by which God leads the Christian hearer into the way of the perfection of Jesus Christ. In his famous hermeneutical tractate, On First Principles (IV.1–3), Origen elaborates on the theme of divine inspiration of scripture and the need to read it correctly according to its multiple levels of meaning. He makes an analogy between man consisting of body, soul, and spirit and the three-fold levels of scripture, the literal, moral, and spiritual senses. Yet it is far from clear that Origen intended three independent levels of meaning (cf. Torjesen, 41), and in his actual exegesis he only makes use of the literal and spiritual senses with few exceptions. Louth (112f.) touches the heart of Origen’s interest in the figurative sense in saying that it is not a technique for solving problems, but an act for discerning the mystery of scripture. On the basis of this appeal to a figurative sense within scripture, usually designated by his critics ‘allegorical’, the major modern criticism of Origen sets in. It is alleged that Origen’s approach is ‘an excellent means of finding what you already possess’ (cited by Bigg, 148). Or his exegesis consists in reading the New Testament into the Old (Danielou, 139). Or again, ‘his whole exegesis rests upon the principle that scripture says one thing and means another’ (Tollington, xxvi).”

Childs, Brevard S.. Biblical Theology of OT and NT (pp. 33-34). Fortress Press. Édition du Kindle.

“What is missing in these criticisms of Origen is the failure to understand the structure of his theology as a whole in relation to his exegesis. Fortunately, a more profound and sympathetic analysis of precisely this relationship was first offered by de Lubac, and then brilliantly pursued in the dissertation of K. Torjesen. Torjesen has mounted a very persuasive case for seeing Origen’s understanding of the heart of scripture as the divine pedagogy of Christ, the Logos, who through the earthen form of the text leads the ‘soul’ of its readers by stages into the fulness of redemption. The literal and figurative senses are not two arbitrary levels of the text, but different forms of divine instruction by which the hearer is lead from the external form of the divine mystery into its internal, spiritual sense. Nor is it the case that Origen has simply imposed an alien pagan system on the text such as Neo-Platonism with its loss of all sense of history (cf. Crouzel, 62; Torjesen, 13). The great care with which Origen deals with the historical component has always been difficult to explain according to this common interpretation. Rather, the Logos performs a pedogogy on the level of history which, however, moves beyond the saving doctrines of Christ concealed in the literal sense to its spiritual meaning. Torjesen’s major contribution is in showing through a careful analysis of Origen’s actual exegetical practice the precision of Origen’s method and how it is oriented to a three-way relationship of text, interpretation, and hearer. ‘Exegesis is the mediation of Christ’s redemptive teaching activity to the hearer’ (14). In her treatment of Origen’s homily on Ps. 37 she has illustrated with great clarity how the movement occurs from the literal to the spiritual sense and from the plea of the psalmist to the confession of the hearer (22ff.). Once his method of interpretation is correctly understood then it also becomes apparent why the sharp distinction between allegory and typology, which was still defended by Daniélou, does not apply. In sum, in what sense does Origen’s approach to the Bible make a contribution to the modern discipline of Biblical Theology? First, Origen read the entire Bible as Christian scripture, and he sought to relate its message to its subject matter, God in the form of the Logos. Scripture is a word from God to us on the way toward life in God. Secondly, Origen was vitally concerned to read scripture according to its earthly forms, but then be led from the human to the divine. He did not separate exegesis into so-called descriptive and constructive components, but saw a proper description as one which followed the historical text until it forced the reader to enter into the spiritual sense, which was another stage in the process of the divine pedagogy. Finally, Origen sought to relate the two testaments theologically in terms of the selfsame divine reality, which was its subject matter. Moreover, this subject matter was not the object of idle What is missing in these criticisms of Origen is the failure to understand the structure of his theology as a whole in relation to his exegesis. Fortunately, a more profound and sympathetic analysis of precisely this relationship was first offered by de Lubac, and then brilliantly pursued in the dissertation of K. Torjesen. Torjesen has mounted a very persuasive case for seeing Origen’s understanding of the heart of scripture as the divine pedagogy of Christ, the Logos, who through the earthen form of the text leads the ‘soul’ of its readers by stages into the fulness of redemption. The literal and figurative senses are not two arbitrary levels of the text, but different forms of divine instruction by which the hearer is lead from the external form of the divine mystery into its internal, spiritual sense. Nor is it the case that Origen has simply imposed an alien pagan system on the text such as Neo-Platonism with its loss of all sense of history (cf. Crouzel, 62; Torjesen, 13). The great care with which Origen deals with the historical component has always been difficult to explain according to this common interpretation. Rather, the Logos performs a pedogogy on the level of history which, however, moves beyond the saving doctrines of Christ concealed in the literal sense to its spiritual meaning. Torjesen’s major contribution is in showing through a careful analysis of Origen’s actual exegetical practice the precision of Origen’s method and how it is oriented to a three-way relationship of text, interpretation, and hearer. ‘Exegesis is the mediation of Christ’s redemptive teaching activity to the hearer’ (14). In her treatment of Origen’s homily on Ps. 37 she has illustrated with great clarity how the movement occurs from the literal to the spiritual sense and from the plea of the psalmist to the confession of the hearer (22ff.). Once his method of interpretation is correctly understood then it also becomes apparent why the sharp distinction between allegory and typology, which was still defended by Daniélou, does not apply. In sum, in what sense does Origen’s approach to the Bible make a contribution to the modern discipline of Biblical Theology? First, Origen read the entire Bible as Christian scripture, and he sought to relate its message to its subject matter, God in the form of the Logos. Scripture is a word from God to us on the way toward life in God. Secondly, Origen was vitally concerned to read scripture according to its earthly forms, but then be led from the human to the divine. He did not separate exegesis into so-called descriptive and constructive components, but saw a proper description as one which followed the historical text until it forced the reader to enter into the spiritual sense, which was another stage in the process of the divine pedagogy. Finally, Origen sought to relate the two testaments theologically in terms of the selfsame divine reality, which was its subject matter. Moreover, this subject matter was not the object of idle speculation, but was identified with the person of Jesus Christ who invited his hearers to enter into full redemption beyond the confines of the sacred text.”

Childs, Brevard S.. Biblical Theology of OT and NT (pp. 34-35). Fortress Press. Édition du Kindle.

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Christopher Seitz: “If it’s true that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, then such wisdom is as much a function of being grasped by God’s holiness as it is weighing accounts of his activity and deciding for or against Him. If God were to belong to this latter frame of reference, He would not be the biblical God—He would be a god of moral projection and the question would be “whose morality? whose justice?” The Scriptures of Israel therefore make no distinction between mercy and justice when it comes to fearing God. It belongs to God’s character as God that mystery lies at the heart of mercy and justice. So the psalmist can conclude: “with thee is mercy and forgiveness; therefore you are to be feared.””

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From “The Divine Inspiration of Scripture” by Louis Gaussen : “Scripture has never presented either its manner or its measure as an object of study. What it offers to our faith is solely the inspiration of what they say — the divinity of the book they have written. In this respect it recognises no difference among them. What they say, they tell us, is theopneustic: their book is from God. Whether they recite the mysteries of a past more ancient than the creation, or those of a future more remote than the coming again of the Son of man, or the eternal counsels of the Most High, or the secrets of man’s heart, or the deep things of God — whether they describe their own emotions, or relate what they remember, or repeat contemporary narratives, or copy over genealogies, or make extracts from uninspired documents — their writing is inspired, their narratives are directed from above; it is always God who speaks, who relates, who ordains or reveals by their mouth, and who, in order to do this, employs their personality in different measures: ‘for the Spirit of God has been upon them,’ it is written, ‘and his word has been upon their tongue’ (2 Sam. 23:2).

…

As St Bernard has said of the living works of the regenerated man, ‘that our will does nothing there without grace, but that grace does nothing there without our will,’ so ought we to say, that in Scriptures God has done nothing but by man, and man has done nothing but by God. In fact, it is with divine inspiration as with efficacious grace. In the operations of the Holy Ghost while causing the sacred books to be written, and in those of the same divine agent while converting a soul, and causing it to advance in the ways of sanctification, man is in different respects entirely active and entirely passive. God does all there; man does all there; and it may be said for both of these works what St Paul said of one of them to the Philippians, ‘It is God that worketh in you to will and to do’ (Phil. 2:13). Thus you will see that in the Scriptures the same operations are attributed alternately to God and to man. God converts, and it is man that converts himself. God circumcises the heart, God gives a new heart; and it is man that should circumcise his heart, and make himself a new heart (Deut. 30:6; 10:16). ‘Not only because, in order to obtain such or such an effect, we ought to employ the means to obtain such or such an effect,’ says the famous President Edwards in his admirable remarks against the errors of the Arminians, ‘but because this effect itself is our act, as it is our duty; God producing all, and we acting all.’ Such, then, is the Word of God. It is God speaking in man, God speaking by man, God speaking as man, God speaking for man! (p. 28)

…

‘The spirits of the prophets, says St Paul, are subject to the prophets’ (1 Cor. 14:32). Their intellectual faculties were at the time directed, not suspended. They knew, they felt, they willed, they recollected, they understood, they approved. They could say, ‘It seemed good to me to write’ (Luke 1:3); and, as apostles, ‘It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us’ (Acts 15:28). And the words as well as the thoughts were given them (p.75)

…

Let us follow him [Jesus Christ] from the age of twelve to his descent into the grave, or rather, to his passing into the cloud, in which he went out of sight; and throughout the whole course of that incomparable career, let us see what the Scriptures were in the eye of him who ‘upholds all things by the word of his power’ (Heb. 1:3). First of all, let us contemplate him at the age of twelve years. He grew, like one of the children of men, in wisdom and in stature; he is in the midst of the doctors in the temple of Jerusalem; he ravishes with his answers those who hear him; for, said they, ‘he knows the Scriptures without having studied them’ (John 7:15). Behold him from the time he commenced his ministry. See him filled with the Holy Ghost; he is led into the wilderness, there to sustain, as the first Adam did in Eden, a mysterious contest with the powers of darkness. The impure spirit dares to approach him, bent on his overthrow; but how will the Son of God repel him, even he who had come to destroy the works of the Devil? Solely with the Bible. His only weapon, three successive times, in his divine hands, is the sword of the Spirit, the Bible (Matt. 4:1-11). He quotes, thrice successively, the Book of Deuteronomy (8:3; 6:13; 10:20). On every fresh temptation, he, the Word made flesh, defends himself by a sentence of the oracles of God, and by a sentence, too, the whole force of which lies in the use of a single word, or of two words; first of these words, bread alone; then of those words, Thou shalt worship God.

What an example for us! His whole reply, his whole defence is this: ‘It is written’; ‘Get thee behind me, Satan, for it is written’; and as soon as this terrible and mysterious contest closed, the angles drew near to minister to him.

…

The Word is ever with Jesus; not in his hands, for he knows it thoroughly, but in his memory and in his incomparable heart. … See how it becomes his grand concern to heal men’s diseases and to preach the Scriptures, as it was afterwards to die and to fulfill the Scriptures! See who comes, ‘as his custom was,’ into the synagogue on the Sabbath day; for we are told he taught in their synagogues (Luke 4:15-16). He goes into that at Nazareth; and what do we find him doing there — he, the everlasting Wisdom, possessed by Jehovah in the beginning of his way, brought forth when there were no depths, before the mountains were settled, and before the hills (Prov. 8:22, 25)? He rises and takes the Bible, opens it at Isaiah, reads some words there; then having closed the book, he sits down, and while the eyes of all that are in the synagogue are fastened on him, he begins to say, ‘This day is this Scriptures fulfilled in your ears’ (Luke 4:21).

See him as he passes through Galilee, and mark how he employs himself there. ‘The volume of the book’ is still in his hands; he explains it line by line, word by word; he points out to our respect its most minute expressions, as he would those of ‘the ten words’ uttered on Sinai.

See him once more in Jerusalem, before the pool of Bethesda; what do we find him saying to the people? ‘Search the Scriptures’ (John 5:39).

See him in the holy place, in the midst of which he had dared to say aloud, ‘In this place is one greater than the holy place’ (Matt. 12:6). Follow him into the presence of the Sadducees and the Pharisees, while he reprehends them successively with these words, ‘It is written,’ as he had done in the case of Satan.

Listen to his reply to the Sadducees who denied the resurrection of the body. How does he refute them? By one sole word of an historical passage of the Bible; by a single verb in the past tense. ‘Ye greatly err,’ said he to them, ‘not knowing the scriptures. Have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham!’ It is thus that he proves to them the doctrine of the resurrection. God, on Mount Sinai, 400 years after the death of Abraham, says to Moses, not ‘I was’, but ‘I am’ the God of Abraham; I am that now. There is a resurrection, then; for God is not the God of a few handfuls of dust, the God of the dead, the God of nothing: he is the God of the living. Those men therefore are, in the view of God, still alive (Matt. 22:31-32).

Next, behold him in the presence of the Pharisees. It is again by the letter of the Word that he proceeds to confound them.

Some had by this time followed him into the coasts of Judea beyond Jordan, and came to him asking to be informed what were his doctrines on the subject of marriage and divorce (Matt. 19:3ff.). Now, what followed on the part of Jesus Christ? He might certainly have given an authoritative reply, and announced his own laws on the subject. Is he not himself the King of kings and Lord of lords? But no; it was to the Bible that he made his appeal, still for the same purpose of making it the basis of doctrine; it was to these simple words taken from a purely historical passage in Genesis (1:27; 2:24): ‘Have ye not read, that he which made thme at the beginning made them male and female; so that they twain shall be one flesh? What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder’ (Matt. 19:4-6).

But listen to him, especially when in the temple he would prove to other Pharisees, by the Scriptures, the divinity of the expected Messiah. Here likewise, to demonstrate this, he still insists on the use of a single word, which he proceeds to take from the Book of Psalms: ‘If the Messiah be the son of David,’ said he, ‘how doth David, by the Spirit, call him Lord; saying (at the 110th Psalm), The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand? If David then call him Lord, how is he his son?

How happens it, that among those Pharisees none was found to say in reply, ‘What! do you mean to insist on a single word, and still more on a term borrowed from a poesy eminently lyrical, where the royal Psalmist might, without material consequence, have employed too lively a construction, high-flown expressions, and words which, doubtless, he had not theologically pondered before throwing them into his verses? Would you follow such a mode of minutely interpreting each expression as is at once fanatical and servile? Would you worship the letter of the Scriptures to such an extreme? Would you build a whole doctrine upon a word?’

Yes, I do, is Christ’s reply; yes, I will throw myself on a single word, because that word is God’s! And to cut short all your objections, I tell you that it is by the Spirit that David wrote all the words of his hymns; and I ask you how, ‘if the Messiah be his son, David, by the Spirit, can call him his Lord, when he says, The Lord said unto my Lord?’

Students of God’s Word, and you especially who are to be his ministers, and who, as your preparation for preaching it, would desire first of all to have received it into a good and honest heart, behold what every saying, every single word of the Book of God, was in the regard of your Master. Go and do likewise!

But more than this. Again let us listen to him, even on the cross. There he poured out his soul as an offering for sin; all his bones were out of joint; he was poured out as water; his heart was like wax, melted in the midst of his bowels; his tongue cleaved to his jaws; he was about to give up his spirit to his Father. But, previous to this, what do we find him do? He desires to collect his remaining strength, in order to recite a psalm which the Church of Israel had sung on her religious festivals for a thousand years, and which told over, one after another, all his sorrows and all his prayers: ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani (My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me)?’ (Ps. 22:1; Matt. 21:46). He does even more than this: listen to him. There remained in the Scriptures on word which had not yet been fulfilled. Vinegar had still to be given him on that cross (this the Holy Ghost had declared a thousand years before in the sixty-nineth Psalm). ‘After this,’ it is written, ‘Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst. When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished; and having bowed his head, he gave up the ghost (John 19:28-30).

When David sang the sixty-nineth Psalm on Shoshannim and the twenty-second Psalm on Aijeleth, did he know the prophetic meaning of all these words, of those hands and feet that were peirced, of that gall poured out, of that vinegar, of those garments that were parted, of that vesture on which a lot was cast, of that mocking populace, wagging their heads and making mouths? It matters little to us his understanding it; the Holy Ghost at least understood it, and David spake by the Spirit, said Jesus Christ. The heaven and the earth shall pass away; but there was not in that book a jot or tittle that could pass away till all was fulfilled (John 10:35; Matt. 5:18).

Meanwhile, behold something, if possible, more striking still. Jesus Christ rises from the tomb; he has overcome death; he is about to return to the Father, there to resume that glory which he had with the Father before the world began. Let us follow him, then, during those fleeting moments with which he would still favour the earth. What words are now about to proceed from that mouth, again restored to life? Why, words from Holy Scripture. Still he quotes it, explains it, preaches it. See him, first of all, on the way to Emmaus, walking with Cleopas and his friend; afterwards in the upper chamber; and, later still, on the borders of the lake. How is he employed? In expounding the sacred books; he begins with Moses, he continues through all the Prophets and the Psalms; he shows them what had been said concerning him in all the Scriptures; he opens their minds to understand them; he makes their hearts burn within them as he speaks of them (Luke 24:27, 44, 32).

But we have not yet done. All these quotations show us what the Holy Bible was in the eyes of him ‘in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ (Col. 2:3); and ‘by whom all things subsist’ (Col. 1:17). But on the letter of the Scriptures, listen further to two declarations and a last example of our Lord.

‘It is easier,’ says he, ‘for heaven and earth to pass, than for one tittle (keraia) of the law to fall’ (Luke 6:17); and by the law Jesus Christ understood the whole of th eScriptures, and even, more particularly, the Book of Psalms. What terms could possibly be imagined capable of expressing, with greater force and precision, the principle which we defend; that is to say, the authority, the entire divine inspiration, and the perpetuity of all the parts, and of the very letter of the Scriptures? Ye who study God’s Word, here behold the theology of your Master! Be ye then divines after his manner; be your Bible the same as that of the Son of God! Of that not a single tittle can fall.

‘Till heaven and earth pass,’ saith he, ‘one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from this law, till all be fulfilled’ (Matt. 5:18.) All the words of the Scriptures, accordingly, even to the smallest stroke of a letter, are no less than the words of Jesus Christ; for he hath also said, ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away’ (Luke 21:33).

…

Let, then, the Prince of Life, the light of the world, reckon all of us as his scholars! What he believed let us receive. What he respected let us revere. Let us press to our sickly hearts that Word to which he submitted his saviour heart, and all the thoughts of his holy humanity, and to it let us subject all the thoughts of our fallen humanity. There let us look for God, even in its minutest passages; in it let us daily dip the roots of our being, ‘like the tree planted by the rivers of waters, which bringeth forth his fruit in his season, and his leaf shall not wither’ (Ps. 1:3). … (p.89). …”

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From Richard Gaffin (on cessationism) : “The Westminster Confession of Faith, insisting that Scripture is sufficient in our day, holds that "those former ways of God's revealing his will unto his people" have "now ceased" (1.1). We who adhere to that doctrine are thus often called "cessationists." That label carries a lot of baggage. By itself, it's negative. In current debates about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, it suggests what one is against. At the outset, then, we need to correct certain misconceptions about "cessationism."

We do not assert that God's Spirit is no longer actively working in dynamic and dramatic ways. We earnestly believe that he is. What, for instance, can be more powerful and impressive—even miraculous!—than the 180-degree reversal that occurs when the Spirit transforms those dead in their sins into those alive for good works? This involves nothing less than a work of resurrection, of (re-)creation (Eph. 2:1-10). This is awesome indeed!

Nor do we believe that all spiritual gifts have ceased and are no longer present in the church. At issue is the cessation of a limited number of such gifts. The continuation of the large remainder is not in dispute.

People sometimes tell me, "You're putting the Holy Spirit in a box." At least two responses come to mind. First, I do take this charge to heart. It is by no means an imaginary danger that we might unduly limit our expectations of the Spirit's work by our theologizing. We must always remember the incalculability factor that Jesus notes in John 3:8 (the Spirit is like an unpredictable wind). Any sound doctrine of the Spirit's work will be content with an unaccounted-for remainder, an area of mystery.

Secondly, however, as I will try to show, the Holy Spirit himself, "speaking in the Scripture" (Westminster Confession of Faith, 1.10), puts his activity "in a box," if you will—a box of his own sovereign making. The Bible knows nothing of a pure whimsy of the Spirit. The Spirit is indeed the Spirit of ardor, but he is also, and no less, the Spirit of order (1 Cor. 14:33, 40). It's striking that Scripture particularly stresses order in a discussion of spiritual gifts! A perennial challenge to the church is to seek this ordered ardor—or, if you prefer, this ardor-infused order of the Spirit.

First the Foundation, Then the Superstructure

According to the Nicene Creed, the "one holy catholic" church is also "apostolic." What does that mean? What constitutes the apostolicity of the church? Getting a biblical answer to that question is the important first step toward seeing that God's Word teaches that certain gifts of the Spirit have in fact fulfilled their purpose and ceased.

Ephesians 2:11-22 provides as comprehensive an outlook on the New Testament church as any passage in Paul's writings or, for that matter, in the rest of Scripture. Using a favorite biblical metaphor (cf. 1 Pet. 2:4-8), Paul says that the church—composed now of Gentiles as well as Jews—is the great house-building project that God, the master architect-builder, is constructing in the period between Christ's exaltation and his return. The church is "God's household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone" (vss. 19-20).

Two closely related considerations are noteworthy in this description. First, notice that the foundation in view is finished. It is a historically completed entity. When a builder knows what he's doing (as we may assume God does!), he lays the foundation once at the beginning of the project. The foundation doesn't need to be repeatedly relaid. After he lays the foundation, he builds the superstructure on that foundation. From our vantage point today, we are in the period of superstructure-building. Christ has laid the foundation of his church. Now he is building on it.

Secondly, this conclusion is reinforced when we consider exactly how the apostles and prophets, along with Christ, are the church's foundation. For Christ, that plainly consists in his saving work, in his crucifixion and resurrection—"no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ" (1 Cor. 3:11; cf. 15:3-4). But the apostles also belong to the foundation. That is not because the saving work of Christ is somehow incomplete. It is rather because of their witness, a witness—authorized by the exalted Christ himself—which is fully revelatory (e.g., Acts 1:22; Gal. 1:1; 1 Thess. 2:13).

This unique role of the apostles in God's historical unfolding of his saving plan comes to light in Ephesians 2:20. We find a correlation all through the history of salvation to its consummation in Christ (Heb. 1:1-2)—God's word focuses on God's deeds. And so the situation is this: to the foundational once-for-all, finished work of Christ, God joined the foundational once-for-all, finished apostolic witness to that work. God's word focuses on God's deeds. This was the matrix for the eventual emergence of the books of the New Testament.

Ephesians 2:20, then, indicates that the apostles had a temporary, noncontinuing role in the life of the church. Their place was in the important foundation-laying phase of the church's history. Their function was to provide revelatory, infallibly authoritative, canonical witness to the consummation of salvation history in Christ's finished work. That function was fulfilled. It does not belong to the superstructure-building period to follow. It instead provides the completed foundation on which Christ continues to build the superstructure of the church.

Several other lines of New Testament teaching confirm that the office of apostle was temporary. In order for someone to be an apostle, one job prerequisite was to have been an eye and ear witness of Christ before his ascension (Acts 1:21-26). Paul—in 1 Corinthians 15:7-9 (cf. 9:1)—saw himself as meeting this requirement by way of an exception. Along with that, he seems clearly to say here that he is the last of the apostles.

The Pastoral Epistles were largely concerned with making apostolic preparation for the future of the church after the time of the apostles. Two of these letters are addressed to Timothy, whom Paul viewed, more than anyone else in the New Testament, as his personal successor. Yet Paul never called him an apostle. In light of the redemptive-historical rationale already noted, "apostolic succession" in a personal sense is a contradiction in terms. The apostolicity of the church is not secured by an unbroken, outward succession of officeholders that can be traced back to the apostles. It rather consists in steadfast fidelity to the apostles' teaching or tradition (2 Thess. 2:15) as it is inscripturated in the New Testament.

Many in the charismatic movement agree that apostles—in the sense of those who are "first" among the gifts given to the church (1 Cor. 12:28; Eph. 4:11), like the Twelve and Paul—are not present in the church today. In that respect at least—whether or not they realize it—the large majority of today's charismatics are in fact "cessationists." Anyone who recognizes the temporary nature of the apostolate, then, needs to think through—in the light of other New Testament teaching—what further implications this basic cessationist position may carry.

What about Prophecy?

Ephesians 2:20 itself states one such implication—an important one. It affirms that the prophets, along with the apostles, have a foundational role. Who are these prophets? Clearly, they are not the Old Testament prophets. First of all, notice the word order: "apostles and prophets," not "prophets and apostles." More importantly, just a few verses later and in almost identical words, the prophets in view are said to belong to the "now" of the new covenant, in contrast to the "other generations" of past covenant history (Eph. 3:5). Some have recently argued that these prophets are identical to the apostles ("the apostles who are also prophets"). This view is hardly plausible in view of Paul's next reference to apostles and prophets beyond this context (Eph. 4:11: "some to be apostles, some to be prophets"). Ephesians 2:20 clearly implies that prophecy was a temporary gift, given for the foundation-laying period of the church. Therefore, along with the apostles, the New Testament prophets are no longer a present part of the church's life.

What about Tongues?

1 Corinthians 14 deals with prophecy and tongues in far more detail than any other New Testament passage. A quick perusal will show that, like a backbone, a contrast between prophecy and tongues structures the entire chapter (beginning in verses 2-3, continuing throughout, and culminating in verse 39). The broad concern of the apostle's argument is to show the relative superiority or preferability of prophecy to tongues. Prophecy is "greater" because (as speech intelligible to others) it edifies the church, while tongues (unintelligible to others) do not. The immediate proviso, however, is that when tongues are interpreted, they are on a par with prophecy for edifying others (vss. 4-5). Tongues, when uninterpreted, are eclipsed by prophecy. But interpreted tongues are functionally equivalent to prophecy. And so God's Word draws a close tie between prophecy and tongues. We may even say fairly that tongues, as interpretable and to be interpreted (vss. 13, 27), are a mode of prophecy.

What these two gifts have in common, and the reason they can be contrasted in this way, is that both are word gifts. Specifically, both are revelation. Both bring God's word to the church in the primary, original, nonderivative sense.

Verse 30 states explicitly that prophecy is revelation. It is also clear, among other considerations, from the only instances of prophecy in the New Testament, those of Agabus (see Acts 11:27-28; 21:10-11) and the book of Revelation (see Rev. 1:1-3).

That tongues are revelation is plain from verses 14-19. They are inspired speech of the most immediate—indeed, virtually unmediated—kind. In its exercise, the gift of tongues completely bypasses the "mind," in the sense that the intellect of the speaker does not produce what is said. The Holy Spirit so takes over speech capacity and organs that the words spoken are not the speaker's own words in any sense. Also, by speaking of their content as "mysteries" (vs. 2), Paul confirms the fully revelatory character of tongues (as well as their link with prophecy, see 13:2). Elsewhere in the New Testament, at least without any clear exceptions, this word always refers to revelation—more specifically, to the redemptive-historical content of revelation (e.g., Matt. 13:11; Rom. 16:25-26; 1 Tim. 3:16).

From those passages that are most pertinent and decisive, then, a basic explanation for the cessation of prophecy and tongues emerges. By God's wise and gracious design, apostles and prophets played a temporary role in the church's history. They did not continue after its foundation was laid. The redemptive-historical "specs" of God's church-house are such that apostles and prophets are not permanent fixtures (Eph. 2:20). Neither are tongues, since they are tied, as we have seen, to prophecy (1 Cor. 14). They, too, passed out of the life of the church, along with the passing of the apostles and prophets (and other means of bringing God's word).

What about 1 Corinthians 13:8-13?

Many, however, judge that 1 Corinthians 13:8-13 clearly teaches that prophecy and tongues will not cease until the second coming of Christ. To them, this is a "gotcha" text that by itself settles the issue. But does this passage really imply their conclusion?

Look carefully at 1 Corinthians 13:8-13. Notice that its primary thrust is to compare the believer's present and future knowledge. Present knowledge is partial and obscure (vss. 8-9), in contrast to the full, "face-to-face" knowledge that will be ours (vs. 12) with the arrival of "perfection" or perfect knowledge (vs. 10). This "perfection" almost certainly will arrive when Christ returns in power and glory. Does that mean that these gifts will not cease until the Second Coming?

That conclusion goes beyond the aim of this text. The accent of this text is on the character of our present knowledge—in particular, on its partial quality. The particular media of that knowledge are not the point. Paul clearly had a pastoral concern with the proper exercise of prophecy and tongues in the church at Corinth (chapters 12-14). Therefore, it's understandable that he mentioned them in this context. He was not, however, addressing the issue of when they would cease. Rather, he was stressing the partial, opaque character of all our knowledge until Christ returns. This is true no matter by which revelatory means that knowledge comes (including, by implication, even inscripturation). This is also true no matter when those means may cease.

Ephesians 4:11-13 reinforces this interpretation. The exalted Christ "gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, ... until we all reach unity in the faith ... and become mature [or, perfect], attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ." Almost certainly the "unity" and "fullness" of verse 13 is the same state of affairs as the "perfection" in 1 Corinthians 13:10. Ephesians 4:13 perhaps echoes 1 Corinthians 13:10 as well by its use of the word "perfect" or "mature." This is the situation Christ brings by his return. Since that is so, if we read Ephesians 4 as noncessationists insist we should read 1 Corinthians 13, we are left with the unavoidable conclusion that there will be apostles, as well as prophecy and tongues, until the second coming of Christ. Even many noncessationists, however, rightly reject this conclusion.

But how can they consistently do so? In terms of gifts, in relation to the ultimate goal in view, how is this passage any different than 1 Corinthians 13:8-13? Noncessationists who correctly recognize that there are no apostles in the sense of Ephesians 2:20 and 4:11 today can't have it both ways. If these passages teach that prophecy/prophets and tongues continue until the Second Coming, then they also teach that the apostles do as well. But a more sound understanding is simply to recognize that these passages do not even address the question of whether or not prophecy or tongues (or any other gift) will cease before the Second Coming. They leave it an open question, to be settled by other passages.

A dilemma confronts noncessationists. If prophecy and tongues (as they function in the New Testament) continue today, then the noncessationist is faced with the quite practical and troublesome implication that Scripture alone is not a sufficient verbal revelation from God. At best, the canon is relatively closed. Alternatively, if—as most noncessationists insist—"prophecy" and "tongues" today are not revelatory or are less than fully revelatory, then these contemporary phenomena are misnamed. They are something other than the gifts of prophecy and tongues that we find in the New Testament. Noncessationists are caught in a redemptive-historical anachronism. They are seeking within the superstructure-building phase of the church's history that which belonged to its foundation-laying phase. They are involved in the contradictory effort of trying to maintain that the New Testament canon is complete and closed and yet at the same time that the revelatory gifts for the open canon period—gifts for when the New Testament documents were still being written—continue.

But God's Word lifts us out of this dilemma. It shows us that by God's wise and gracious design, prophecy and tongues have completed their task and have ceased. What remains, supremely and solely sufficient and authoritative until Jesus comes, is "the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture" (Westminster Confession of Faith, 1:10).”

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F.F. Bruce on Ananias (in Acts) : “The story of Ananias is to the book of Acts what the story of Achan is to the book of Joshua. In both narratives an act of deceit interrupts the victorious progress of God’s people.” Do you remember Achan? After the victory of the Israelites at the battle of Jericho, Joshua ordered that all of the goods and the wealth of the city were to be devoted to the Lord. The people could keep nothing for themselves. The city of Jericho and its wealth was to be offered as the first fruits to the Lord. It was as if it were the tithe offered from the land of Canaan to the covenant Lord. In Joshua 7:1 it says, “But the Israelites acted unfaithfully in regard to the devoted things; Achan, the son of Carmi of the tribe of Judah, took some of them. So the Lord’s anger burned against Israel.” As a result of this crime Israel was defeated in their next battle. When the sin of Achan was later discovered he, like Ananias in our text, was punished by being put to death. The Lord will not be mocked. He will not tolerate sin. Those who say that the God of the Old Testament is a vengeful and violent God and that the God of the New Testament is a God of love and grace, have never read the whole book! In the Reformed tradition we declare that it is all one revelation. The God of the Bible is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the Sovereign One. He is the Holy One. Apart from his grace, we are all the same as Achan at the battle of Jericho and Ananias and Sapphira in the early Christian Church. It is no wonder that our text concludes in Acts 5:11 by saying, “Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.”

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Continuing down the path we’re on, exploring the possibility that the chief roadblock to belief is ignorance, there’s another pebble in the shoe of believers who spend most of their Bible reading time fighting away doubts in its veracity: contradictions in the Bible. There are six contradictions I’ve picked-out that I think are often avoided as too difficult or troubling for an easy answer. Here they are without the summaries of each problem. I provide what I think are good solutions to the problems without avoiding the harder-to-reconcile details.

The Lukan Census of Quirinius: Josephus misdates many other events. He is not entirely unreliable but he is not infallible either. As “InspiringPhilosophy” quotes John Rhoads, “Josephus might have accidentally placed the census of Quirinius at a later time, by duplicating an event that really happened during the reign of Herod the Great” (Josephus does this in other places in his Antiquities and Jewish Wars). … Josephus’ account number one: “A narrative of a Judas son of the Sepphorean who gathers a group of young disciples around himself and a teacher named Matthias teaching zeal for the law of Moses and the expectation of lasting reward in the face of death. Judas and his followers raid Herod’s Temple to tear down an eagle from its gate and are captured. Herod the Great orders those directly involved to be burned alive. Herod also deposes the previous high priest and promotes Joazar apparently in response to this insurrectionist activity.” Josephus’ account number two: “A catalogue of disturbances plaguing Judea—reported while Archelaus is in Rome seeking confirmation of his father’s will—mentions that Judas the Galilean, son of Hezekiah, active around Sepphoris, Galilee raised an insurrection to raid Herod’s armory. Josephus reports that Archelaus deposes Joazar both before and after his trip to Rome, and for different reasons … while it is not possible to date the activity of Judas son of Hezekiah based on this catalogue of disturbances alone, being sensitive to Josephus’s use of sources, we must be open to the possibility that this insurgency by Judas also occured before the death of Herod the Great.” … “According to Schwartz, this way of reporting events suggests that Josephus no longer considered the taxation revolt as occuring within the reign of Coponius but rather as ‘other’ activity from about the same time—when a delay occurs between the appointment and the installation into office of the new ruler. So, we have reason to suspect that although Josephus originally thought the events occured under the adminsitration of Coponius, he changed his mind.” … Josephus’ account number three: “A teacher named Judas the Galilean—who gathered a group of disciples around himself and another teacher named Sadducand who focused on zeal for the law of moses and willingness to die in the expectation of lasting reward—raised a revolt against the taxation tied to the census of Quirinius. Josephus reports that the high priest Joazar persuaded the people to go along with the census, and Quirinius deposes Joazar before the census is complete. Josephus reported no reappointment for Joazar.” InspiringPhilosophy summarizes this way: “We can make the case that all of these accounts are about the same event which happened before Herod’s death. The main figure in each account is named Judas. He is called the son of Sepphoreos in Jewish Wars but by a different name in Antiquities. … in Galillee there was a city called Sepphoris. … In the second account, he is called Judas the Galilean, son of Hezekiah (Hezekiah was a Galilean bandit that Herod had previously killed). On top of that, Josephus identifies Judas’ home base as Sepphoris. With the third account, there are strong religious similarities to the account of the first Judas. In both accounts, Judas and another teacher gathered a crowd, taught the immortality of the soul in confidence in the face of death. So the partner may be the same, but with the latter just being a nickname. Now if all three are different events, with the first being a different Judas and the second and third being the same Judas who act about 9 years apart, there are some odd features. To start, you have two insurgents active within weeks or months of each other around the time of Herod’s death—both named Judas, both with connections to Sepphoris, both nicknamed, and both connected to a famous father. Allegedly, one was executed by Herod the Great, the other would wait 9-10 years after raiding Herod’s armory and then adopt the same spiritual teachings of the first Judas, only to have his revolt against the taxation and census be opposed by the very same high priest who had opposed the first Judas, even though this high priest was supposedly deposed twice during those ten years. Or, a more likely explanation, is all of these accounts are about the same Judas from different sources that Josephus was relying on and he accidentally repeated this same event three times.” … “If Joazar opposed the Judas figure in the first and the third account, and helped Quirinius in 6 AD as in the third account, it makes no sense for Quirinius to depose him. However, it does better fit with the context if the account took place around the death of Herod the Great. After Herod had died, the mourners of Judas and the teacher Matthias demanded the high priest appointed by Herod the Great be deposed. In order to help ease tensions with the chaos surrounding the death of Herod the Great, removing an unpopular high priest would make sense in this context, and probably would’ve been a strategic move for Quirinius or Archelaus. So Joazar’s removal also fits better if we move it back ten years, shortening his reign as a high priest. Now if the census of Quirinius really took place ten years earlier, why is he not mentioned at all in this earlier time? Well, he might be, just by another name: Sabinus. A procurator from Syria was in Judea named Sabinus, overseeing the affairs of Herod. Sabinus and Quirinius might be the same person, just known by different names in different sources Josephus was relying on. First, Josephus describes their offices in similar ways (Procurator); they both seem to be of consular rank, which would make them of equal rank with Varus. This would explain why Sabinus ignored the request of Varus to not go to Judea and seize the property of Herod the Great. Of Quirinius, we are told he is of consular rank. Third, both seem to be concerned with the tax value of Judea. Fourth, the activity of both seems to be the same at times (Sabinus was on his way to secure Herod’s effects after Herod had died; Quirinius was sent to Judea to assess Herod Archelaus’ property after Archelaus was exiled). … Josephus may have been confused on the source he had and aligned Quirinius with the assessment of Herod Archelaus’ property when in reality it was the assessment of Herod the Great’s property ten years earlier … Both Archelaus and Antipas referred to themselves as Herod, all of Archelaus’s coins are inscribed with Herod, and Josephus at one point does accidentally write King Herod when he most likely meant Archelaus. Finally, Sabinus might not be a proper name but a nickname to mean the Sabine (from the Sabine god, Quirinius; Quirinius was born in a town of ethnic Sabines).” … “Luke refers to Quirinius not as the governor, but as the hegemon, which can also refer to the procurator. … So he might just be referring to a census conducted by Quirinius before he became a governor.”

As for the objection that such a census wouldn’t have occured, “a papyrus from the nearby territory of Egypt that dates to 104 AD states that the Prefect of Egypt ordered Egyptians return to their places of origin so the census could be carried out.” … “William Ramsay: ‘We in modern time make the census for one fixed and universal moment, catching our migratory population at the given instant, as if by an instantaneous photograph. The Romans tried to cope in another way with the difficulty of numbering people who might be far from hom, viz., by bringing them at some time during the enrolment-year to their proper and original home; and they permitted them to come for enrolement at any time during the year’.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VclDxog95Ck&t=91s).

Did Jesus tell them to bring a staff? : "Luke agrees with Matthew about the staff. … Mark uses a very general word for taking a staff that usually means to take, carry, or pick up. Matthew uses a different word that usually means to acquire, or locate and obtain. Matthew is saying Jesus doesn’t want His disciples to make excessive preparation. So Mark is saying get up, grab your staff and go; Matthew is saying get up and go, but don’t go out of your way to acquire extra items… The real issue comes up when you look at what Luke says. When it comes to Luke and Mark, they both mean the same word differently. Luke uses Mark’s word, but to mean purchasing / acquiring (like in Matthew’s account but with a different word), and Luke uses an entirely different word for taking or picking up.”

Had Jairus' daughter already died? ; Had Jairus' daughter already died? (another view) . Dave Armstrong: “The solution of the supposed conundrum is in the texts themselves. Austin cited Mark at length (including 5:35) and noted that “Luke’s account is substantially the same.” Matthew, possibly — but not necessarily — using the well-known and established literary technique of compression (which I have addressed elsewhere: including reference to this incident), simply records 4b (his daughter’s death) rather than 4a (his despair in knowing his daughter was dying, and his seeking a healing from Jesus). Matthew uses about 176 words in writing about this event, whereas Mark utilizes around 481 words (2.7 times more than Matthew). It’s not a contradiction. We know from Mark and Luke that he learned of her death while he was still pleading with Jesus to heal her. So where is the problem here? There is none, for anyone who looks fairly at the texts and employs simple common sense. Note that Matthew also includes a section (9:20-22) on the woman with a “hemorrhage” (9:20). It’s a different chronology or order than in the other two accounts, but this is completely normal in 1st century Jewish writing, since that culture had a different conception of chronology than we do today. See, for example, Jacques Doukhan’s book, Hebrew for Theologians: A Textbook for the Study of Biblical Hebrew in Relation to Hebrew Thinking (University Press of America, 1993). He noted that in the Hebrew mind, “the content of time prevails over chronology. Events which are distant in time can, if their content is similar, be regarded as simultaneous.” (p. 206). Likewise, Thorleif Boman, in his book, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1960), devotes 61 pages to the topic of “Time and Space.” He explained that for the Hebrews, “time is determined by its content, and since light is authoritative and decisive, the light was called day and the darkness night even before the creation of the heavenly luminaries (Gen. 1.5).” (p. 131). … Mark devotes ten verses to the same incident of the woman with a hemorrhage (5:24-34), or 3.3 times more than Matthew does, and Luke provides six verses to it (8:43-48), or twice as many as Matthew. Thus, this supports the belief that Matthew is again (?) employing compression (as he is thought by many commentators to habitually do). All three accounts, however, have Jairus — and Jesus — being aware of his daughter’s death (Mt 9:18; Mk 5:35; Lk 8:49), before Jesus goes to heal her (Mt 9:23; Mk 5:37-38; Lk 8:50-51). Problem entirely solved! Matthew merely didn’t mention the part where Jairus told Jesus that his daughter was dying. He gets right to the point and has him telling Jesus (after being informed by a person of his house) that she was already dead (just as Mark and Luke also report the fact of her death). Then Jesus goes (after that report) to heal her, in all three accounts.” Matthew is telescoping the story.

What time of what day was Jesus crucified? : John uses Roman time; Matthew, Mark, and Luke are using Jewish time.

Does the NT misquote the OT? (1) Does the NT misquote the OT (2) :

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Good reflections on difficult passages in Acts.

https://bibleproject.com/blog/the-ascension-of-jesus/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI7N2DirPS9gIVqSZMCh21_AsnEAMYASAAEgLodfD_BwE

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/ascension-of-christ/

https://tftorrance.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/participatio-2012-v3-3-Fergusson-92-107.pdf

https://www2.crcna.org/resources/church-resources/reading-sermons/ananias-and-sapphira-lesson-grace

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From Wengert, Timothy J.. Word of Life Literal and Spiritual Meanings : The Quadriga In his first lecture, Martin Luther presented the traditional framework for biblical interpretation, introducing his students to the medieval Quadriga, a fourfold interpretive schema consisting of one literal meaning and three spiritual meanings. If the word in the text were “Mt. Zion,” for example, it contained four possible fields of meaning: first (literally) as a place in Palestine; second (allegorically)[2] as the church; third (tropologically) as the elect soul; and fourth (anagogically) as heaven and all the saints. To be sure, in order to set proper boundaries for the three spiritual interpretations, students were reminded that any spiritual truth uncovered by this method had to be supported by a literal passage somewhere else in Scripture. These spiritual meanings were governed by three passive gerunds summarizing the three “theological virtues”: credenda (what must be believed, i.e., faith) for allegory, agenda (what must be done, i.e., love) for tropology, and speranda (what must be hoped for, i.e., hope) for anagogy. One prooftext for this method of interpreting Scripture was 2 Corinthians 3:6: “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” Each interpreter was obliged to move beyond the literal, historical meanings of texts (which killed) to discover the deeper, hidden spiritual meanings (which gave life).

This approach to the biblical text reaches all the way back into the patristic period, when one of the first great Christian exegetes, Origen of Alexandria, took over a Platonic method of interpreting the Greek classics that the famous Jewish exegete Philo of Alexandria had already used on the Hebrew Scriptures. Origen argued that there were three levels of biblical interpretation corresponding to three different kinds of Christians.[3] For the hylic believers, simple people embedded in the material world (from the Greek: ὕλη), there were the literal stories. For the psychikoi, those whose souls (from the Greek: ψυχή) yearn for the Good, there was the moral content of Scripture. For the pneumatikoi, the truly spiritual ones (from the Greek: πνεῦμα), there were deeper, spiritual meanings hidden within the text.

This approach found its way into the Western tradition both directly, through translations of Origen’s work into Latin, and indirectly, through Ambrose, bishop of Milan, and from him to Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa. When it came to the Psalter, no interpretation garnered more influence in the West than Augustine’s Expositions on the Psalms, a work on which later interpreters, including Luther, depended for their own work. By the time of Augustine, the strict division among listeners defined by Origen had weakened, as Christians became more and more accustomed to spiritual interpretations of texts. One constant, however, was the conviction that all Scripture should edify its readers or, as 2 Timothy 3:16 insists in the King James Version, be “profitable.” The Quadriga and other schemes for discovering the spiritual meanings of sacred texts allowed the preacher to take passages of questionable value or complete obscurity and find deeper meaning within them. Based on broader suggestions from Augustine, Psalm 137’s repulsive desire to smash Babylonian babies against rocks could come to mean celibate priests smashing incipient, lustful thoughts against the Rock, which is Christ.[4]

Christological Exegesis

Luther also included a second set of prefatory remarks for the printed copies of Psalms that his students used to insert their teacher’s remarks.[5] He insisted—as had the earlier exegetical tradition in the West going back at least to Cassiodorus and, before him, to Augustine and suggested by the New Testament itself—that Christ was the speaker of each psalm. Nicholas of Lyra, in his introduction to the Psalter, used Aristotle’s four causes to distinguish the efficient causes of the psalms (principally God; instrumentally David and other authors) from the material cause, which is Christ, in the mode of divine praise.[6] Perhaps echoing Lyra’s comments, Luther labeled his introduction the “Preface of Jesus Christ” for his first students, insisting that the Psalter actually described Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Such an approach was a combination of allegory (technically speaking, the conversation between Christ and the church) and typology—the insistence that actions described in the Old Testament, such as the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22, foreshadowed an action of Christ in the New, in this case his sacrificial death in humanity’s stead. That the ancient and medieval church employed both the Quadriga and typology in their interpretations of Scripture did not represent an abandonment of biblical truth but an acceptance of methods found in Scripture itself, especially the New Testament. In Galatians 4:24 Paul describes his use of the slave woman and free woman in Genesis as figurative (Greek: ἀλληγορούμενα, from which we derive the word allegory). Or again, in 1 Corinthians 10:4, we learn that the rock from which the Israelites drank was Christ. In Romans 5:14, Paul calls Adam a type (Greek: τύπος) of Christ. In medieval exegesis, theologians worked to accommodate all these meanings to the literal sense of Scripture. In the late Middle Ages, a way of doing theology developed in German-speaking lands, usually labeled by scholars German mysticism and including works by Johannes Tauler and the anonymous author of the Theologia Deutsch.[7] Johann von Staupitz, Luther’s mentor and the head of the Augustinian order in Germany, to which Luther belonged, is sometimes also included in this group. Although Luther himself would not have recognized the designation of mysticism—medieval theology was far broader and less well defined than scholars often imagine—he did recognize the uniqueness of these thinkers, who played an important role in his developing theology especially between 1517 and 1520, when he published two versions of the Theologia Deutsch, praised von Staupitz for having aided him, and championed Tauler as a premier theologian, despite (or because of!) the fact that he wrote exclusively in German.[8] These thinkers, especially Tauler, provided Luther with a way of incorporating the paradoxes and reversals in Scripture into his theology, and thus a way of understanding Scripture that had direct consequences for the hearer, called human logic and reason into question, and drove a hearer to trust in the God who comes in the dust. As we will see, this approach to theology, labeled by Luther the theology of the cross, had far-reaching effects for his Christocentric interpretation of the Bible.

The Literal Meaning(s) of Texts

The interest in spiritual or typological meanings should not cloud the fact that ancient and medieval interpreters also cared deeply about the literal, historical meaning of Scripture. In the ancient church there was often discussion of the facts surrounding a particular biblical event. Unlike Gnostics, who saw the literal meaning of the Old Testament tied to an ignorant, lesser divine being, orthodox Christians insisted that the literal text of the entire Bible was capable of edifying the listener. Moreover, texts like the Pauline Epistles required interpretation of the actual arguments Paul was making in the text. Especially the Epistles were expected to inform readers directly and literally. They provided roadmaps for interpreting other parts of Scripture.

In the early Middle Ages, the so-called Victorines also focused their interpretation of Scripture on the letter and its history.[9] But scholastic interpreters by no means denigrated the literal text in search of moral and spiritual meaning. Thomas Aquinas, for example, insisted on the priority of the literal meaning of texts. Several generations later, Nicholas of Lyra put even more emphasis on the historical-literal text, returning to the Hebrew original and relying on rabbinic sources to help understand difficult Hebrew passages. Although never a strict follower of Lyra’s work, Luther did find plenty of help from that medieval exegete, whose interpretation of the entire Bible was widely available in print at the end of the Middle Ages. A Latin couplet, composed after Luther’s death, insisted that “si Lyra non lyrasset, Luther non saltasset” (if Lyra had not played the lyre, Luther would not have danced). Although this verse exaggerates the connection, it does underscore Luther’s openness to using ancient and medieval sources to interpret Scripture. Indeed, early Lutheran biblical scholars (like those of any age) were always in conversation with their predecessors.[10] Whatever theological and institutional breaks define the relation between Wittenberg and Rome, the strongest continuity arises from their sources for biblical interpretation. Only much more recently in the history of the church have certain forms of biblical interpretation become tradition-denying and thus more dependent on novelty than continuity with past exegetes. But Aquinas and Lyra also developed a more complicated view of the literal meaning of a text. Under most circumstances, only words (verba) signified things (res). But reading certain Old Testament practices and events as types of Christ meant that things could also represent other things (the temple sacrifices as a type of Christ’s sacrifice, circumcision as a type of baptism, the exodus as a type of Christ’s death and resurrection, etc.). This opened up a second level of literal meaning, namely, the prophetic-literal meaning. In the first instance, this second literal meaning was seen as derivative and helpful in distinguishing typology from other forms of spiritual exegesis. In Lyra’s case, it seems to have given him permission to concentrate on the literal texts of the Hebrew Scriptures, although as a Franciscan he was not uninterested in the moral nuggets found in the text and provided a separate collection of those insights. In the early sixteenth century, however, a French humanist interpreter of the psalms, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, defined the historical-literal text as a “killing letter” and saw the exegete’s task to escape it and to focus instead on the prophetic-literal meaning. Luther’s use of Lefèvre in his first Psalms lectures resulted in his distinguishing these two levels of literal meaning and consistently giving preference to the prophetic, as his “Preface of Jesus Christ” made clear.[11] By the time he lectured on Psalms for a second time, from 1519 to 1521, however, Luther’s view had changed dramatically, as he focused on the simple, literal (i.e., historical) meaning of the text and assumed that that meaning had direct application to the believer’s life.

Humanist Methods

Another major component of Luther’s approach to the Bible came from his immediate surroundings and a movement that came to be known as Renaissance humanism. In the twentieth century scholars struggled with definitions of humanism, often viewing it as a precursor to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and rationalism. Moreover, given that Martin Luther engaged in a famous debate over human choice in matters of salvation with the prince of humanists north of the Alps, Erasmus of Rotterdam, it was easy to pit humanism against Luther and Lutheranism. Such a narrow view of this movement has meant that many scholars have overlooked Luther’s indebtedness to it and, at the same time, struggled to understand how some of Luther’s most well-known supporters, such as Philip Melanchthon and Justus Jonas, could so clearly employ humanism’s methods to interpret texts.[12]

Today, scholars overcome this myopic view of humanism in two ways. First, the more that is known about sixteenth-century university life north of the Alps, the more it becomes clear that Erasmus was not the be-all and end-all of the movement, so that his debate with Luther over bound choice has nothing to do directly with Luther’s debt to humanism and its methods. Second, more pragmatic ways to define humanism have allowed researchers to focus more accurately on its method, held in common by all humanists, and separate it from particular viewpoints on specific theological or philosophical topics. No one helped this shift more than Paul Oskar Kristeller, a refugee from Nazi Germany who taught at Columbia University for years and studied Italian humanism. Kristeller noted that while the word humanism stems from nineteenth-century descriptions of the Renaissance, the word ’umaniste was long used by students at Italian universities during the Renaissance to describe teachers and tutors on the edges of university life who taught such things as rhetoric, moral philosophy, history, and (with the influx of Greek-speaking scholars to the Italian peninsula after the fall of Constantinople in 1453) classical Greek.[13] Two slogans defined humanists’ common interests: bonae literae (good letters) and ad fontes ([returning] to the [purest] springs). Around the first, bonae literae, humanists developed a program for purifying the Latin language from medieval neologisms, developing classical styles as defined by Cicero and Quintilian, and reading and imitating the very best literature from the past. Some took this task so seriously that they tried to write and speak Latin exactly as Cicero had, searching for classical expressions to replace the many Greek loanwords that had crept into ecclesiastical Latin (such as ecclesia [church] or episkopos [bishop]). (Erasmus even mocked these strict “Ciceronians” in a sarcastic tract titled Ciceronianus.[14])

Humanists also looked with disdain on scholastic theology, criticizing its dependence on dialectics (logic), its ignorance of rhetoric, and its many neologisms. Around the second, ad fontes, humanists scoured European libraries looking for and publishing ancient classical texts using the new invention of the printing press. They also employed their considerable textual expertise to determine whether such texts were genuine and to purge from them later accretions. North of the Alps, this return to the most ancient sources included a renewed interest in the church fathers. In this interest Erasmus excelled, publishing through the offices of the renowned Basel printer Johannes Froben new editions of Augustine, Jerome, and others. He is best known, however, for producing the first Greek New Testament in 1516, which came out only slightly before a similar project in Spain headed up by Cardinal Ximenes. In 1516, Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum, as he titled it, presented in parallel columns the Greek text and the standard Latin translation, the Vulgate. In a separate volume of notes, the Annotationes in Novum Instrumentum, Erasmus provided specific criticisms of the Vulgate and suggestions for improvement. Here he joined other humanist interpreters, including Lorenzo Valla and Lefèvre, who also proposed corrections to the standard text. In the second edition of 1519 (now renamed the Novum Testamentum), however, Erasmus replaced the Vulgate with his own Latin translation. This meant that from the second edition on, the Annotationes became more and more a defense of his own translation rather than simply suggestions for changes of the Vulgate.

Humanism’s core commitments to good letters and pure sources opened up a different way of reading Scripture. While exegetes in the ancient church, such as Augustine and Chrysostom, often went verse by verse through a biblical text, they and their scholastic descendants could also view texts quite apart from the human authors and any overarching themes that these authors may have had in mind. Humanists, on the contrary, could view texts more holistically, as the product of actual writers and speakers. One could legitimately ask what the overall point was, rather than become submerged in only a quest for the meaning of words and phrases. The humanist interest in rhetoric also meant that exegetes could focus more on the structure of texts and their emotional impact on the reader. At the same time, with a renewed interest in the original languages (first Greek and later also Hebrew), Renaissance interpreters could focus on sacred texts freed from the filter of the Latin Vulgate. All of these matters became of great interest to Luther and his colleagues in Wittenberg. Indeed, using Kristeller’s definition, we can say that Luther himself was a humanist and that the University of Wittenberg under his influence (among others) was becoming an important center of humanist interpretation of Scripture even before the Reformation began.[15] Luther’s Contributions to the Exegetical Method.

All well and good. The first thing to remember is that Luther was indeed dependent on the fifteen hundred years of Christian biblical interpretation that preceded him. He knew and respected it; he used its results and insights throughout his life. This contrasts with the tradition-denying stance of many modern interpreters who have constructed a wall between their “critical” work and the past. But, at the same time, Luther’s early lectures on Psalms, followed quickly by lectures on Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews, also demonstrate that something quite profound was occurring in Luther’s interpretation of the Bible.[16] From “Letter and Spirit” to “Law and Gospel” For one thing, after describing the Quadriga, Luther immediately turned it into an “Octriga,” so to speak, dividing each of the four traditional meanings into two: the killing letter and the life-giving Spirit. Thus any term in Scripture could, on a literal, allegorical, tropological, or anagogical level, cut two ways: as a word that condemned sin and a word that gave life to the redeemed. In this way, Luther was reviving an often-neglected, secondary interpretation of 2 Corinthians 3:6 also found in Augustine.[17] In the old bishop’s On Christian Doctrine, we discover the “Rules of Tychonius,” seven interpretive turns proposed by the moderate Donatist thinker Tychonius, the third of which distinguished commands from promises. And Augustine, in his interpretation of Romans, On the Spirit and the Letter, went to great lengths to distinguish commands and promises as well. But Luther’s own approach reinforced another neglected aspect of biblical interpretation: that the Scripture works on its hearers, putting to death and bringing to life. But what is that life? Here, in another deviation from the standard methods, Luther changed the tropological interpretation to focus not so much on love (as demanded in the Quadriga) but, as he said, “on the righteousness of faith.” Was Luther abandoning traditional spiritual interpretations? Not really, since he continued to provide spiritual interpretations for texts, especially parables, throughout his teaching career. But he surely had reframed the interpreter’s task, no longer asking, What is this text telling me to believe, do, or hope for and how do I get this from the text? but rather, What is this text doing to me? How is it putting me to death and bringing me to life, that is, declaring me righteous? From Christocentric Exegesis to the Cries of the Faithful For another thing, although Luther continued to read Old Testament texts christologically, he nevertheless also discovered another voice in the psalms, what one scholar has called “the faithful synagogue.”[18] Suddenly, Luther radically simplified the interpreter’s task. Instead of asking, first, how are these words Christ’s words and, second, how does his life apply to mine, Luther now discovered that Old Testament believers in God spoke words to God and about God—words that reflect the interpreter’s own needs and life in Christ. When, ten years after those first Psalms lectures, Luther wrote a preface to his German translation of the Psalter, it was the cries of the saints that he most clearly heard.[19] At the same time, and under the influence of German mysticism, Luther developed his theology of the cross—not a theory about the cross regarding the atonement but “the revelation of God under the appearance of the opposite.”[20] This meant that every time Luther saw a text that contradicted human reason, he immediately assumed that it was attacking humanity’s rational hubris and providing a way to look at Scripture and thus God’s heart that directly contradicted and, indeed, destroyed rational explanations of how God ought to act. Thus Christ continued to stand at the heart of the biblical text but hidden under the appearance of the opposite, that is, in the last place one would reasonably look.

Luther the Humanist

Luther’s humanism reveals itself in several aspects of his biblical interpretation. Not only did he rediscover the lively and life-giving history of the text in the faithful synagogue, but he also showed profound interest in the effect of the biblical text on the reader and hearer, one of Renaissance humanism’s greatest concerns for all literature. In addition, from the very beginning of his career as a teacher of the church, Luther showed a profound interest in the original languages of the text. In the case of Hebrew, we know that already in the lectures on the psalms Luther was familiar with the work by Johannes Reuchlin on the Hebrew text of the penitential psalms and that he was teaching himself Hebrew. In the case of Greek, Luther’s Romans lectures prove that as soon as Erasmus’s Greek text was available, Luther procured a copy and began teaching himself Greek and using Erasmus’s Annotationes on the text.[21] Moreover, he was sufficiently confident in his own interpretation of Romans and Galatians that he even disagreed with the Dutchman on his approach to Paul’s letters, which Luther gleaned especially from Erasmus’s prefaces to the books of the New Testament and from his sophisticated paraphrases of Paul’s letters also published at this time. Luther’s Legacy In combination with these interests, Luther and his colleagues in Wittenberg began to develop their own unique approach to Scripture, which will be the topic of the following chapters. First, the Wittenberg exegetes, for all their concern for the meaning of the words, the literary style, and the historical context, did not limit the meaning of the text to these things. Instead, they universally assumed that meaning encompasses two things: the historical and literary definition of a text and its effect on the readers and hearers. In so doing, they took the very different interests of dialectics (logic) and rhetoric and bound them together. While grammar and logic could determine what the biblical text was saying, rhetoric always inquired after the effect of that written or spoken text on its readers and hearers. Only in combination could an exegete uncover a biblical passage’s true meaning. Second, because Wittenberg’s exegetes believed the meaning of a text combines both definition and effect, they always viewed Scripture in terms of what they called “law and gospel.” For them, the law always accuses—not just as a statement of fact but also as a description of effect, where accusation always brings about guilt, terror, and death. At the same time, the gospel always forgives the guilty, comforts the terrified, and brings to life those dead in unbelief by making them believers. From this perspective, the Holy Spirit is always working through the Word of God to make believers. Of course, third, the exegetes’ understanding that the goal of the text is faith did not undermine for them the importance of figuring out what the biblical text actually says. Here, a host of humanist techniques for interpreting ancient text came into play. Greek and Hebrew became irreplaceable tools for the exegete. Understanding both the logic and the rhetoric of the biblical authors allowed new insights into the text, as exegetes investigated the overarching unity of literary documents rather than succumbing to the temptation to reduce the Bible to a golden chain of unrelated moral or doctrinal nuggets. Knowledge of history also helped place the texts into their proper contexts. The more one knew about Israel and the early church, the better one was equipped to understand Scripture. This approach guaranteed that Wittenberg’s exegetes would also be looking for the center of a biblical book and interpreting texts not slavishly, verse by verse, but dynamically through the author’s own field of meaning. It is no accident that Philip Melanchthon was the first exegete who provided a rhetorical outline of Romans or that his and Luther’s student Caspar Cruciger Sr. was the first to argue that John 20:30–31 revealed John’s intent for his entire Gospel. Nor is it surprising that Luther and Melanchthon insisted that Romans provided the center of the entire Scripture, without which interpretation always devolved into legalism. Fourth, one way that Wittenberg theologians uncovered the effect of the biblical text was by appreciating how it attacked human logic. While “theologians of glory,” as Luther nicknamed them in his Heidelberg Disputation, sought out what is strong and (thus) logical, the theologian of the cross found God working in the last place anyone would reasonably look: on the cross, in weakness and foolishness. This view calls into question a certain penchant among later Protestant theologians to define Scripture’s inspiration in terms of its strength (unfailing and inerrant). Instead, the Scripture works as Word of God in the weakness and foolishness of the cross by working Christ’s death and resurrection on the hearer, putting to death and bringing to life, destroying unbelief and creating faith, that is, doing an alien work before doing its proper work. This theology also sheds light on Wittenbergers’ insistence that justification by faith alone implies understanding the righteousness of faith as a Hebraism, depicting what happens in foro, that is, in a court where the convicted sinner is declared, simply declared, righteous—not on the basis of any merit or worthiness but strictly from the mercy of God.[22] This declaring sinners to be what they are not (namely, righteous) is itself contra-rational, indeed, contradictory to all Aristotelian and Ciceronian definitions of righteousness that insisted on giving “to each his [or her] own.” To be sure, the believing sinner gives to God what belongs to God by confessing God to be righteous in judgment, but at the same time sinners receive what properly speaking could never be their own. Rather than basing justification on the logic of the courtroom, the Wittenberg exegetes insist on true illogic. The judge “breaks the law” by upsetting the “just” order of things and establishing a justice based on mercy—itself a foolish contradiction of humanity’s reasonable view of righteousness. In this very act, the accusing law comes to its proper end, and the sinner is clothed in Christ’s righteousness. Only when theologians replace the foolishness of this declaration with the inner logic of making someone pay to balance justice and mercy do forensic justification and the imputation of an alien righteousness revert to a theology of glory and, in Wittenberg’s eyes, undermine the very heart of the gospel and its proper interpretation.”

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Luther’s preface to the book of Romans is a great entry-point into the Bible and what it’s given for.

https://pages.uoregon.edu/dluebke/Reformations441/LutherPrefaceRomans.html :

This letter is truly the most important piece in the New Testament. It is purest Gospel. It is well worth a Christian's while not only to memorize it word for word but also to occupy himself with it daily, as though it were the daily bread of the soul. It is impossible to read or to meditate on this letter too much or too well. The more one deals with it, the more precious it becomes and the better it tastes. Therefore I want to carry out my service and, with this preface, provide an introduction to the letter, insofar as God gives me the ability, so that every one can gain the fullest possible understanding of it. Up to now it has been darkened by glosses [explanatory notes and comments which accompany a text] and by many a useless comment, but it is in itself a bright light, almost bright enough to illumine the entire Scripture.

To begin with, we have to become familiar with the vocabulary of the letter and know what St. Paul means by the words law, sin, grace, faith, justice, flesh, spirit, etc. Otherwise there is no use in reading it.

You must not understand the word law here in human fashion, i.e., a regulation about what sort of works must be done or must not be done. That's the way it is with human laws: you satisfy the demands of the law with works, whether your heart is in it or not. God judges what is in the depths of the heart. Therefore his law also makes demands on the depths of the heart and doesn't let the heart rest content in works; rather it punishes as hypocrisy and lies all works done apart from the depths of the heart. All human beings are called liars (Psalm 116), since none of them keeps or can keep God's law from the depths of the heart. Everyone finds inside himself an aversion to good and a craving for evil. Where there is no free desire for good, there the heart has not set itself on God's law. There also sin is surely to be found and the deserved wrath of God, whether a lot of good works and an honorable life appear outwardly or not.

Therefore in chapter 2, St. Paul adds that the Jews are all sinners and says that only the doers of the law are justified in the sight of God. What he is saying is that no one is a doer of the law by works. On the contrary, he says to them, "You teach that one should not commit adultery, and you commit adultery. You judge another in a certain matter and condemn yourselves in that same matter, because you do the very same thing that you judged in another." It is as if he were saying, "Outwardly you live quite properly in the works of the law and judge those who do not live the same way; you know how to teach everybody. You see the speck in another's eye but do not notice the beam in your own."

Outwardly you keep the law with works out of fear of punishment or love of gain. Likewise you do everything without free desire and love of the law; you act out of aversion and force. You'd rather act otherwise if the law didn't exist. It follows, then, that you, in the depths of your heart, are an enemy of the law. What do you mean, therefore, by teaching another not to steal, when you, in the depths of your heart, are a thief and would be one outwardly too, if you dared. (Of course, outward work doesn't last long with such hypocrites.) So then, you teach others but not yourself; you don't even know what you are teaching. You've never understood the law rightly. Furthermore, the law increases sin, as St. Paul says in chapter 5. That is because a person becomes more and more an enemy of the law the more it demands of him what he can't possibly do.

In chapter 7, St. Paul says, "The law is spiritual." What does that mean? If the law were physical, then it could be satisfied by works, but since it is spiritual, no one can satisfy it unless everything he does springs from the depths of the heart. But no one can give such a heart except the Spirit of God, who makes the person be like the law, so that he actually conceives a heartfelt longing for the law and henceforward does everything, not through fear or coercion, but from a free heart. Such a law is spiritual since it can only be loved and fulfilled by such a heart and such a spirit. If the Spirit is not in the heart, then there remain sin, aversion and enmity against the law, which in itself is good, just and holy.

You must get used to the idea that it is one thing to do the works of the law and quite another to fulfill it. The works of the law are every thing that a person does or can do of his own free will and by his own powers to obey the law. But because in doing such works the heart abhors the law and yet is forced to obey it, the works are a total loss and are completely useless. That is what St. Paul means in chapter 3 when he says, "No human being is justified before God through the works of the law." From this you can see that the schoolmasters [i.e., the scholastic theologians] and sophists are seducers when they teach that you can prepare yourself for grace by means of works. How can anybody prepare himself for good by means of works if he does no good work except with aversion and constraint in his heart? How can such a work please God, if it proceeds from an averse and unwilling heart?

But to fulfill the law means to do its work eagerly, lovingly and freely, without the constraint of the law; it means to live well and in a manner pleasing to God, as though there were no law or punishment. It is the Holy Spirit, however, who puts such eagerness of unconstained love into the heart, as Paul says in chapter 5. But the Spirit is given only in, with, and through faith in Jesus Christ, as Paul says in his introduction. So, too, faith comes only through the word of God, the Gospel, that preaches Christ: how he is both Son of God and man, how he died and rose for our sake. Paul says all this in chapters 3, 4 and 10.

That is why faith alone makes someone just and fulfills the law; faith it is that brings the Holy Spirit through the merits of Christ. The Spirit, in turn, renders the heart glad and free, as the law demands. Then good works proceed from faith itself. That is what Paul means in chapter 3 when, after he has thrown out the works of the law, he sounds as though the wants to abolish the law by faith. No, he says, we uphold the law through faith, i.e. we fulfill it through faith.

Sin in the Scriptures means not only external works of the body but also all those movements within us which bestir themselves and move us to do the external works, namely, the depth of the heart with all its powers. Therefore the word do should refer to a person's completely falling into sin. No external work of sin happens, after all, unless a person commit himself to it completely, body and soul. In particular, the Scriptures see into the heart, to the root and main source of all sin: unbelief in the depth of the heart. Thus, even as faith alone makes just and brings the Spirit and the desire to do good external works, so it is only unbelief which sins and exalts the flesh and brings desire to do evil external works. That's what happened to Adam and Eve in Paradise (cf. Genesis 3).

That is why only unbelief is called sin by Christ, as he says in John, chapter 16, "The Spirit will punish the world because of sin, because it does not believe in me." Furthermore, before good or bad works happen, which are the good or bad fruits of the heart, there has to be present in the heart either faith or unbelief, the root, sap and chief power of all sin. That is why, in the Scriptures, unbelief is called the head of the serpent and of the ancient dragon which the offspring of the woman, i.e. Christ, must crush, as was promised to Adam (cf. Genesis 3). Grace and gift differ in that grace actually denotes God's kindness or favor which he has toward us and by which he is disposed to pour Christ and the Spirit with his gifts into us, as becomes clear from chapter 5, where Paul says, "Grace and gift are in Christ, etc." The gifts and the Spirit increase daily in us, yet they are not complete, since evil desires and sins remain in us which war against the Spirit, as Paul says in chapter 7, and in Galations, chapter 5. And Genesis, chapter 3, proclaims the enmity between the offspring of the woman and that of the serpent. But grace does do this much: that we are accounted completely just before God. God's grace is not divided into bits and pieces, as are the gifts, but grace takes us up completely into God's favor for the sake of Christ, our intercessor and mediator, so that the gifts may begin their work in us.

In this way, then, you should understand chapter 7, where St. Paul portrays himself as still a sinner, while in chapter 8 he says that, because of the incomplete gifts and because of the Spirit, there is nothing damnable in those who are in Christ. Because our flesh has not been killed, we are still sinners, but because we believe in Christ and have the beginnings of the Spirit, God so shows us his favor and mercy, that he neither notices nor judges such sins. Rather he deals with us according to our belief in Christ until sin is killed.

Faith is not that human illusion and dream that some people think it is. When they hear and talk a lot about faith and yet see that no moral improvement and no good works result from it, they fall into error and say, "Faith is not enough. You must do works if you want to be virtuous and get to heaven." The result is that, when they hear the Gospel, they stumble and make for themselves with their own powers a concept in their hearts which says, "I believe." This concept they hold to be true faith. But since it is a human fabrication and thought and not an experience of the heart, it accomplishes nothing, and there follows no improvement.

Faith is a work of God in us, which changes us and brings us to birth anew from God (cf. John 1). It kills the old Adam, makes us completely different people in heart, mind, senses, and all our powers, and brings the Holy Spirit with it. What a living, creative, active powerful thing is faith! It is impossible that faith ever stop doing good. Faith doesn't ask whether good works are to be done, but, before it is asked, it has done them. It is always active. Whoever doesn't do such works is without faith; he gropes and searches about him for faith and good works but doesn't know what faith or good works are. Even so, he chatters on with a great many words about faith and good works.

Faith is a living, unshakeable confidence in God's grace; it is so certain, that someone would die a thousand times for it. This kind of trust in and knowledge of God's grace makes a person joyful, confident, and happy with regard to God and all creatures. This is what the Holy Spirit does by faith. Through faith, a person will do good to everyone without coercion, willingly and happily; he will serve everyone, suffer everything for the love and praise of God, who has shown him such grace. It is as impossible to separate works from faith as burning and shining from fire. Therefore be on guard against your own false ideas and against the chatterers who think they are clever enough to make judgements about faith and good works but who are in reality the biggest fools. Ask God to work faith in you; otherwise you will remain eternally without faith, no matter what you try to do or fabricate.

Now justice is just such a faith. It is called God's justice or that justice which is valid in God's sight, because it is God who gives it and reckons it as justice for the sake of Christ our Mediator. It influences a person to give to everyone what he owes him. Through faith a person becomes sinless and eager for God's commands. Thus he gives God the honor due him and pays him what he owes him. He serves people willingly with the means available to him. In this way he pays everyone his due. Neither nature nor free will nor our own powers can bring about such a justice, for even as no one can give himself faith, so too he cannot remove unbelief. How can he then take away even the smallest sin? Therefore everything which takes place outside faith or in unbelief is lie, hypocrisy and sin (Romans 14), no matter how smoothly it may seem to go.

You must not understand flesh here as denoting only unchastity or spirit as denoting only the inner heart. Here St. Paul calls flesh (as does Christ in John 3) everything born of flesh, i.e. the whole human being with body and soul, reason and senses, since everything in him tends toward the flesh. That is why you should know enough to call that person "fleshly" who, without grace, fabricates, teaches and chatters about high spiritual matters. You can learn the same thing from Galatians, chapter 5, where St. Paul calls heresy and hatred works of the flesh. And in Romans, chapter 8, he says that, through the flesh, the law is weakened. He says this, not of unchastity, but of all sins, most of all of unbelief, which is the most spiritual of vices.

On the other hand, you should know enough to call that person "spiritual" who is occupied with the most outward of works as was Christ, when he washed the feet of the disciples, and Peter, when he steered his boat and fished. So then, a person is "flesh" who, inwardly and outwardly, lives only to do those things which are of use to the flesh and to temporal existence. A person is "spirit" who, inwardly and outwardly, lives only to do those things which are of use to the spirit and to the life to come.

Unless you understand these words in this way, you will never understand either this letter of St. Paul or any book of the Scriptures. Be on guard, therefore against any teacher who uses these words differently, no matter who he be, whether Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, Origen or anyone else as great as or greater than they. Now let us turn to the letter itself.

The first duty of a preacher of the Gospel is, through his revealing of the law and of sin, to rebuke and to turn into sin everything in life that does not have the Spirit and faith in Christ as its base. [Here and elsewhere in Luther's preface, as indeed in Romans itself, it is not clear whether "spirit" has the meaning "Holy Spirit" or "spiritual person," as Luther has previously defined it.] Thereby he will lead people to a recognition of their miserable condition, and thus they will become humble and yearn for help. This is what St Paul does. He begins in chapter 1 by rebuking the gross sins and unbelief which are in plain view, as were (and still are) the sins of the pagans, who live without God's grace. He says that, through the Gospel, God is revealing his wrath from heaven upon all mankind because of the godless and unjust lives they live. For, although they know and recognize day by day that there is a God, yet human nature in itself, without grace, is so evil that it neither thanks nor honors God. This nature blinds itself and continually falls into wickedness, even going so far as to commit idolatry and other horrible sins and vices. It is unashamed of itself and leaves such things unpunished in others.

In chapter 2, St. Paul extends his rebuke to those who appear outwardly pious or who sin secretly. Such were the Jews, and such are all hypocrites still, who live virtuous lives but without eagerness and love; in their heart they are enemies of God's law and like to judge other people. That's the way with hypocrites: they think that they are pure but are actually full of greed, hate, pride and all sorts of filth (cf. Matthew 23). These are they who despise God's goodness and, by their hardness of heart, heap wrath upon themselves. Thus Paul explains the law rightly when he lets no one remain without sin but proclaims the wrath of God to all who want to live virtuously by nature or by free will. He makes them out to be no better than public sinners; he says they are hard of heart and unrepentant.

In chapter 3, Paul lumps both secret and public sinners together: the one, he says, is like the other; all are sinners in the sight of God. Besides, the Jews had God's word, even though many did not believe in it. But still God's truth and faith in him are not thereby rendered useless. St. Paul introduces, as an aside, the saying from Psalm 51, that God remains true to his words. Then he returns to his topic and proves from Scripture that they are all sinners and that no one becomes just through the works of the law but that God gave the law only so that sin might be perceived.

Next St. Paul teaches the right way to be virtuous and to be saved; he says that they are all sinners, unable to glory in God. They must, however, be justified through faith in Christ, who has merited this for us by his blood and has become for us a mercy seat [cf. Exodus 25:17, Leviticus 16:14ff, and John 2:2] in the presence of God, who forgives us all our previous sins. In so doing, God proves that it is his justice alone, which he gives through faith, that helps us, the justice which was at the appointed time revealed through the Gospel and, previous to that, was witnessed to by the Law and the Prophets. Therefore the law is set up by faith, but the works of the law, along with the glory taken in them, are knocked down by faith.

In chapters 1 to 3, St. Paul has revealed sin for what it is and has taught the way of faith which leads to justice. Now in chapter 4 he deals with some objections and criticisms. He takes up first the one that people raise who, on hearing that faith make just without works, say, "What? Shouldn't we do any good works?" Here St. Paul holds up Abraham as an example. He says, "What did Abraham accomplish with his good works? Were they all good for nothing and useless?" He concludes that Abraham was made righteous apart from all his works by faith alone. Even before the "work" of his circumcision, Scripture praises him as being just on account of faith alone (cf. Genesis 15). Now if the work of his circumcision did nothing to make him just, a work that God had commanded him to do and hence a work of obedience, then surely no other good work can do anything to make a person just. Even as Abraham's circumcision was an outward sign with which he proved his justice based on faith, so too all good works are only outward signs which flow from faith and are the fruits of faith; they prove that the person is already inwardly just in the sight of God.

St. Paul verifies his teaching on faith in chapter 3 with a powerful example from Scripture. He calls as witness David, who says in Psalm 32 that a person becomes just without works but doesn't remain without works once he has become just. Then Paul extends this example and applies it against all other works of the law. He concludes that the Jews cannot be Abraham's heirs just because of their blood relationship to him and still less because of the works of the law. Rather, they have to inherit Abrahams's faith if they want to be his real heirs, since it was prior to the Law of Moses and the law of circumcision that Abraham became just through faith and was called a father of all believers. St. Paul adds that the law brings about more wrath than grace, because no one obeys it with love and eagerness. More disgrace than grace come from the works of the law. Therefore faith alone can obtain the grace promised to Abraham. Examples like these are written for our sake, that we also should have faith.

In chapter 5, St. Paul comes to the fruits and works of faith, namely: joy, peace, love for God and for all people; in addition: assurance, steadfastness, confidence, courage, and hope in sorrow and suffering. All of these follow where faith is genuine, because of the overflowing good will that God has shown in Christ: he had him die for us before we could ask him for it, yes, even while we were still his enemies. Thus we have established that faith, without any good works, makes just. It does not follow from that, however, that we should not do good works; rather it means that morally upright works do not remain lacking. About such works the "works-holy" people know nothing; they invent for themselves their own works in which are neither peace nor joy nor assurance nor love nor hope nor steadfastness nor any kind of genuine Christian works or faith.

Next St. Paul makes a digression, a pleasant little side-trip, and relates where both sin and justice, death and life come from. He opposes these two: Adam and Christ. What he wants to say is that Christ, a second Adam, had to come in order to make us heirs of his justice through a new spiritual birth in faith, just as the old Adam made us heirs of sin through the old fleshy birth.

…

In chapter 6, St. Paul takes up the special work of faith, the struggle which the spirit wages against the flesh to kill off those sins and desires that remain after a person has been made just. He teaches us that faith doesn't so free us from sin that we can be idle, lazy and self-assured, as though there were no more sin in us. Sin is there, but, because of faith that struggles against it, God does not reckon sin as deserving damnation. Therefore we have in our own selves a lifetime of work cut out for us; we have to tame our body, kill its lusts, force its members to obey the spirit and not the lusts. We must do this so that we may conform to the death and resurrection of Christ and complete our Baptism, which signifies a death to sin and a new life of grace. Our aim is to be completely clean from sin and then to rise bodily with Christ and live forever.

St. Paul says that we can accomplish all this because we are in grace and not in the law. He explains that to be "outside the law" is not the same as having no law and being able to do what you please. No, being "under the law" means living without grace, surrounded by the works of the law. Then surely sin reigns by means of the law, since no one is naturally well-disposed toward the law. That very condition, however, is the greatest sin. But grace makes the law lovable to us, so there is then no sin any more, and the law is no longer against us but one with us.

This is true freedom from sin and from the law; St. Paul writes about this for the rest of the chapter. He says it is a freedom only to do good with eagerness and to live a good life without the coercion of the law. This freedom is, therefore, a spiritual freedom which does not suspend the law but which supplies what the law demands, namely eagerness and love. These silence the law so that it has no further cause to drive people on and make demands of them. It's as though you owed something to a moneylender and couldn't pay him. You could be rid of him in one of two ways: either he would take nothing from you and would tear up his account book, or a pious man would pay for you and give you what you needed to satisfy your debt. That's exactly how Christ freed us from the law. Therefore our freedom is not a wild, fleshy freedom that has no obligation to do anything. On the contrary, it is a freedom that does a great deal, indeed everything, yet is free of the law's demands and debts.

…

Next St. Paul sketches further the nature of sin and the law. It is the law that makes sin really active and powerful, because the old man gets more and more hostile to the law since he can't pay the debt demanded by the law. Sin is his very nature; of himself he can't do otherwise. And so the law is his death and torture. Now the law is not itself evil; it is our evil nature that cannot tolerate that the good law should demand good from it. It's like the case of a sick person, who cannot tolerate that you demand that he run and jump around and do other things that a healthy person does.

…

Then St. Paul shows how spirit and flesh struggle with each other in one person. He gives himself as an example, so that we may learn how to kill sin in ourselves. He gives both spirit and flesh the name "law," so that, just as it is in the nature of divine law to drive a person on and make demands of him, so too the flesh drives and demands and rages against the spirit and wants to have its own way. Likewise the spirit drives and demands against the flesh and wants to have its own way. This feud lasts in us for as long as we live, in one person more, in another less, depending on whether spirit or flesh is stronger. Yet the whole human being is both: spirit and flesh. The human being fights with himself until he becomes completely spiritual.

In chapter 8, St. Paul comforts fighters such as these and tells them that this flesh will not bring them condemnation. He goes on to show what the nature of flesh and spirit are. Spirit, he says, comes from Christ, who has given us his Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit makes us spiritual and restrains the flesh. The Holy Spirit assures us that we are God's children no matter how furiously sin may rage within us, so long as we follow the Spirit and struggle against sin in order to kill it. Because nothing is so effective in deadening the flesh as the cross and suffering, Paul comforts us in our suffering. He says that the Spirit, [cf. previous note about the meaning of "spirit."] love and all creatures will stand by us; the Spirit in us groans and all creatures long with us that we be freed from the flesh and from sin. Thus we see that these three chapters, 6, 7 and 8, all deal with the one work of faith, which is to kill the old Adam and to constrain the flesh.

In chapters 9, 10 and 11, St. Paul teaches us about the eternal providence of God. It is the original source which determines who would believe and who wouldn't, who can be set free from sin and who cannot. Such matters have been taken out of our hands and are put into God's hands so that we might become virtuous. It is absolutely necessary that it be so, for we are so weak and unsure of ourselves that, if it depended on us, no human being would be saved. The devil would overpower all of us. But God is steadfast; his providence will not fail, and no one can prevent its realization. Therefore we have hope against sin.

But here we must shut the mouths of those sacriligeous and arrogant spirits who, mere beginners that they are, bring their reason to bear on this matter and commence, from their exalted position, to probe the abyss of divine providence and uselessly trouble themselves about whether they are predestined or not. These people must surely plunge to their ruin, since they will either despair or abandon themselves to a life of chance.

You, however, follow the reasoning of this letter in the order in which it is presented. Fix your attention first of all on Christ and the Gospel, so that you may recognize your sin and his grace. Then struggle against sin, as chapters 1-8 have taught you to. Finally, when you have come, in chapter 8, under the shadow of the cross and suffering, they will teach you, in chapters 9-11, about providence and what a comfort it is. [The context here and in St. Paul's letter makes it clear that this is the cross and passion, not only of Christ, but of each Christian.] Apart from suffering, the cross and the pangs of death, you cannot come to grips with providence without harm to yourself and secret anger against God. The old Adam must be quite dead before you can endure this matter and drink this strong wine. Therefore make sure you don't drink wine while you are still a babe at the breast. There is a proper measure, time and age for understanding every doctrine.

…

It seems that St. Paul, in writing this letter, wanted to compose a summary of the whole of Christian and evangelical teaching which would also be an introduction to the whole Old Testament. Without doubt, whoever takes this letter to heart possesses the light and power of the Old Testament. Therefore each and every Christian should make this letter the habitual and constant object of his study. God grant us his grace to do so. Amen.

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ONE OF THE MOST important attributes of Science is its perpetual restlessness. It is constantly developing, changing its aspect, transforming and renewing itself, expanding and progressing without surcease. Its victories and conquests are but starting-points for fresh triumphs, and its achievements form the preparatory bases for new attainments. The structures that it builds for itself with stones quarried by analysis and arranged architectonically by synthesis— resplendent palaces of the human intellect—are not destined to endure forever. They permit us to gaze from their rooftops and through their windows upon the area stretching in front of them and upon the road leading forward, and they serve as lighthouses that illumine this path before us. But sometimes it happens that one of these edifices, which for a given period was distinguished for its strength and stability and its capacity to withstand ordinary winds and even extraordinary storms, begins, in the course of time, to totter and inclines to fall, be it because the ground on which it was erected was not sufficiently solid, or because the stones of its walls and pillars were not hewn from enduring rock, or because the work of the builders was not done well, or for all these reasons together. Then it behoves us to abandon the building and to continue our way forward until we succeed in finding a fitting site on which to establish a new structure in place of the old.
Cassuto, Umberto Moshe David. The Documentary Hypothesis . VARDA BOOKS. Édition du Kindle.

Yes, and maybe…

I want interject something here, as Cassuto has just reminded me of another tragicomic cohort of Bible readers struggling to know creation without giving up the ghost of transcendance.

…Just maybe naturalists aren’t the only builders!

To learn anything at all is to have reasoned; and rational thought about the Bible isn’t an alternative to reading the Bible any more than walking in the park is an alternative to walking with the Lord. We don’t always have to choose, in other words, between thinking rationally and believing God’s word. It might seem absurd to have to commit a defense of “thinking” to writing like this, but as we go on it should become clear why I’m such a position as to mount a defense for rationality.

Now, I’m a Lutheran, so I have to add a quick disclaimer here because I should expect the objection that reason does indeed sometimes fail us, and does so precisely in ways that cannot be reconciled but must only be accepted in creaturely humility. To preempt this criticism, therefore, the boundaries of my assertion are narrow enough that what I’m claiming is not a universal endorsement of Reason as equal to Revelation. Stated differently, just because we can reason about Scripture, that doesn’t mean we should disagree with Luther about forcing coherence where we’re ignorant of it in the Bible! All it means is that intellectual naïveté isn’t righteous innocence.

The topic we’ll be discussing is whether science conflicts with the Bible. Scientific theories like that of evolution aren’t the exhaustive descriptions of causes and effects in creation; they’re descriptions of our observations producing empirical, falsifiable, predictions that we can use not only as stories about the past but also to make technological advances here and now.

Yes, it’s obviously true that there are atheists in the sciences who overstate the explanatory power of evolution. But why do so many Christians use their model or worldview to assess and ultimately discard theories such as evolution within the natural sciences? Why play by their rules? All it does is concede to shallow, godless, cynics (who happen to be capable scientists within whatever narrow field of expertise) the ownership of every rational pursuit of understanding creation. Doing so leaves us with some sort of quasi-quietistic and rote recitation of the book of Genesis—as if it either doesn’t matter that we should understand anything more than what’s in the letters on those pages, or as if deepened understanding should come by enchantment after years committed to staring at the same words and saying nothing else.

Augustine:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

With regard to the age of the earth, there are two camps in a battle for allegiance to two different accounts of our history as God’s creatures: Old Earth Creationists and Young Earth Creationists. Neither camp considered below disagrees over the fact of our fallen creatureliness or God’s holiness and mercy towards us. Something to keep in mind, then, as I try to navigate the frontlines in what follows, is whether we may even stand to gain in knowledge of God or man by engaging from either side of the thoroughly-entrenched and passionately-charged militias of amateur philosopher-historians.

The greatest difficulty for Old Earth Creationists is somehow shoe-horning an Adam and Eve into their timeline—a timeline which is grounded in the current consensus understanding of scientists in the relevant field(s) of study. But sciences progress with new information. Naturalists and proponents of scientism may not understand the philosophy of science, but the current consensus on any given topic will without a doubt change. The greatest difficulty for young earth creationists, on the other hand, is that their knowledge of creation will never progress with new information.

When I climbed several peaks in the Pacific Northwest, at the summits of a couple of them were seashells embedded in the rocks. The young earth creationist would see this and immediately start brainstorming excuses, rather than wondering at the causes. The trend I’ve seen is to funnel every possible explanation into one Great Flood bin and, well, that’s all she wrote. In the case of discovering evidence for an old earth, Young Earth Creationists end-up doing bad science and bad philosophy as they devise ways God or Satan might be tricking us all into thinking those seashells got to mountain summits millions of years ago when it was actually quite recent. Such people can’t let an uncertainty remain, but begin conjuring theories about things to which Scripture doesn’t even speak. In other words, they depart from the Bible and begin doing natural science and philosophy in order to prove something that didn’t need to be proved.

There’s a big difference between these two camps then, and I’ve probably made it clear by now that, while both sides are problematic, I find the Young Earth camp to be more deeply compromised. I can only be charitable in trusting that both factions take the word of God as their only absolute certainty (that isn’t to say that I’m an Old Earth Creationist, however, as I haven’t taken a position. In fact, my whole point in all of this is partly to show the folly in taking either position).

But certainty about what precisely? As I’ve said before, considering a thing true (or certain) is empty and useless unless you know what that thing actually is. In this case, it is what I’ll simply call creating faith. Scripture is given for creating faith and to that end it is certain and true. This is a good place to issue a brief reminder that, in all of my writing, I want to at some point deliver my readers from their anxiety about whether it matters that they and others around them were wrong on a given set of beliefs. One of the brilliant things about the purpose of Scripture is that the word of God is effective in creating faith; God does what He intends for us by it. The objection might come that this is too reductionistic—that Scripture is given for more than making us wise to our salvation. I’d reply that the objects of faith are always Christ and eternity; when therefore we talk about what is “certain” we must necessarily limit ourselves to what is absolute and eternal. I reject, for instance, the view that Bible is there primarily to inform us of data about the dead past, of which our salvation would be one token fact. I reject such a characterization of the Bible as a mere database. What is created in us by the word of God is the only absolute certainty we’ll have in life because it is eternal and unchanging.

Proponents of Young Earth Creationism, on the other hand, reacting to silly claims by atheists in the academy of supposed naturalistic scientific consensus, offer “alternative scientific hypotheses”—ventures into theories about 24 hour days and so on that are entirely unnecessary and a bit ridiculous when they could’ve just ignored the naturalists’ claims of consensus against the true dogmatic claims of Scripture to begin with (none of which have to do with how many hours are in God’s workday, for example). There is something to be said for God’s prerogative for divine intervention or suspension of natural laws. God couldn’t have been restricted by a universal operating system in his very inventing it.

Joel Heck concurs:

the creation of the universe is a series of miracles of God, not a naturally occurring sequence of events; we need not expect everything in this chapter to follow the “laws” of nature (which, incidentally, were made by God)! The real problem with this argument against the creation of light before the creation of the light-bearers is that it addresses creation from a purely naturalistic point of view. This interpretation assumes that God is not working outside of the laws of nature. At the end of time there will be no light-bearers either, as Peter tells us, “The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be will be laid bare” (2 Peter 3:10). There won’t be a sun or a moon or stars. Revelation 22:5 states, “There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light.” If we can have light in heaven after the sun has disappeared, we can have light before the sun was created.
Heck, Joel. In the Beginning, God: Creation from God's Perspective . Concordia Publishing House. Édition du Kindle.

But then he wanders-off in the cornfield a bit before coming back to his senses.

Some conclude that God created the earth and the universe with the appearance of age, with light created already in transit from the stars to the earth. A more likely explanation is that the speed of light was much greater when God first created than it is now. We need not assume a constant rate for the speed of light during creation week. The time travel problem can also be addressed through the relative nature of time itself.37 Finally, we have to admit that we do not know exactly how God did it. Sometimes we have to affirm that He did create without our having to know more than the text tells us. That He created is more important than how He created.
Heck, Joel. In the Beginning, God: Creation from God's Perspective . Concordia Publishing House. Édition du Kindle.

Sometimes I wonder whether apologists for a literalistic reading of Genesis try to prove too much and only end-up asserting what their opponents had insisted was the case all along. He began this paragraph by overextending his understanding of physics in order to parry a purely naturalistic account of creation—only to conclude his thought with a disciplined and conservative estimation of the important lessons which God teaches us in Genesis that even a mythicist would support. Why couldn’t he have just left out the first bit about the speed of light being “much greater when…”?

Heck eventually lands on the same bedrock as every Christian should because I think he knows, deep-down, what the every book of the Bible is given for: The Book of Genesis is for creating faith.

To be sure, I do believe there was a real, historical, first pair of human beings like us; importantly, however, I also believe that science won’t ever disprove that fact (though it hypothetically could do so—just as nothing we discover will disprove the Resurrection, though hypothetically some kind of ridiculous archeological find would do it). If it were incontrovertible that there never existed an Adam and Eve original pair of human beings, Christian beliefs would have to change. But all of these fundamentalist reactionaries need to stop projecting their fears that this could happen by making enemies of people who aren’t their enemies. We can keep the Scriptures as God’s inerrant word and even trust that, in faith, we won’t ever be deceived by whatever supposed consensus of atheists in the natural science—folks who don’t understand the progression of their own field of knowledge (but who think they’ve finally landed on the Truth rather than us).

Here’s an article that we can slow-walk through to see my point : https://witness.lcms.org/2018/concerning-six-day-creation/

"Just as science will forever have a problem with Jesus being God and man, with His virgin birth, or with His resurrection, so science will forever scoff at or, at best, view the creation account in Genesis as mythology."

"Science" isn't a person that can "have problems" with Jesus, even as a manner of speaking. This is why it was important to me to clarify my understanding that sciences are methods and that our knowledge of God's creation (which is good and worth knowing more about!) progresses by them—just as it does when we hurt ourselves too many times and "discover" that fire burns by repeated experiences and some reflection on them.

“Though I’m no scientist, I’ve had challenges myself believing that the creation accounts are history. When will a talking snake appear believable to reason? How, in the face of the dominant theory of evolution, will the special creation of Adam out of dust and in a flash appear reasonable? And what of Eve from a rib? How can I possibly hold to an actual creation of all things in six natural days?”

He keeps pitting "science" and "reason" against Scripture and I seriously don't know why he does it. I find it entirely reasonable that Jesus rose from the dead. All that means is that I think it's true; it doesn't mean that I think natural sciences will confirm it to me. By implying as much, this author actually begs the question as to naturalism being the guide and source of all truth claims! This is an extremely important point to get across to folks like him because I don't think he knows it.

“You simply cannot stretch the days of Genesis 1 into eons in order to somehow accommodate science or evolutionary theory (or even some version of Old Earth Creationism based on a non-literal understanding of a “day”) in any meaningful or coherent way.”

Science or evolutionary theory? Who? What? All I know is that nobody needs to be accommodated. I know some people have tried to do this but it's not a good look.

“Either the account in Genesis 1–2 is myth, or it is history — albeit, history written in a profoundly simple way to express profound truths. There is no middle ground.”

What is he talking about? Material history and myth are pretty recent as categories we use to classify texts this way, so it's a little self-defeating to start treating them as dogmatic or as the only options.

“Why do I believe that the creation accounts are historical? I believe them because I believe in Jesus Christ as my Savior.”

This is called poisoning the well. It preemptively discredits the opponent on questionable grounds. The obvious implication, whether the author intended it or not, is that someone who doesn't believe "creation accounts are historical" (which apparently means 24 hour days) doesn't believe in Jesus.

For an alternative view, I do believe in God creating the universe ex nihilo, in the historic Adam and Eve, and in the historic Jonah, etc.—but many church leaders such as the author of this article deploy all these easily refuted arguments that are nothing more than tilting at windmills (because science, as the author even says late in the article, is not the enemy). That’s my chief annoyance with the Young Earth Creationists (viz., that they make enemies of golems and strawmen).

“What about our faithful scientists and others who struggle with these issues? There will always be a struggle between faith and reason.”

Yes, but the struggle is because of sin. It's not because we can't be trusted to see that 2+2=4!

“If I reject what Scripture teaches as history about creation, why should I not then reject everything else (including the resurrection itself) that appears contrary to reason?”

There it is again! The ol' slippery slope rears its ugly head. I think I've said enough about how terrible this is—well, no, I'll say one more thing: It's an appeal to reason! Ironic, isn’t it?

——————————————————————————————————————————————————

I’ve just returned to this post to edit-in some long passages from Ronald Osborn, whose book I just started. It turns out (thankfully) that I’m not crazy or first to have many of these criticisms.

“In support of these strong assertions about the meaning of Genesis, literalists have often relied on stock arguments incestuously circulated in creationist literature. Much ink has been spilled, for example, seeking to show that the Hebrew word for “day,” yom, in Genesis 1 means “day” in the sense of a literal twenty-four-hour period rather than a symbolic eon or age as in allegorical readings (which are also essentially concordist in their approach). This is undoubtedly correct. Allegorical readings that suppose a one-to-one symbolical correspondence between the days of Genesis and historical epochs are entirely unconvincing. Few literalists would conclude, however, from the numerous references in Scripture to the “hand” of God—an equally literal word—that the Creator of the universe possesses a physical body or that the theological meanings of these passages require that God possess ten literal fingers. Pointing out that yom in Genesis semantically means “day” hardly settles the question of what kind of literature Genesis is, how it ought to function in the life of Christian faith, or what it is actually bearing witness to as far as scientific questions are concerned.
…
The greatest problem with strict literalism’s “plain” reading approach to Genesis, however, is that it is not nearly plain or literal enough. Creationists have treated Genesis as a story that is all surface with no depth that must now be validated or “proved” through—irony of ironies—the tools of a thoroughly rationalistic, quantifying and materialistic science. But the demand for scientific and historical correspondence—the criterion of “truth” demanded by modern, post-Enlightenment minds—introduces unwholesome new layers of complexity to our readings. These layers are not located inside the text, drawing us into its mysterious and undisclosed depths as I have attempted to do in my reading in chapter one, but rather are piled on top of the story from without, strangling its poetic and doxological heart. At one time, the cutting edge of “creation science” included the search for proof that the firmament of Genesis 1:6 was a literal hardened canopy of polarized hydrogen ice crystals.
…
The tragic irony of strict literalism and “scientific” creationism, I am suggesting, is that it presents itself as the great opponent of scientism when it is in fact one of scientism’s most acute manifestations. The kind of fideism that declares Scripture to be the highest guide to truth as over and against modern science while simultaneously insisting that the authority of Genesis is contingent upon its scientific veracity is, on closer examination, no fideism at all. It is, rather, scientism’s reactionary doppelganger and pale mimetic rival, enraptured by the very thing it seeks to resist. The results are healthy neither for science nor for the life of faith. Literalism, French sociologist and theologian Jacques Ellul wrote, is a “paper pope” that “transforms the freedom of faith into an arrested system that cannot avoid being scholastic in intellectual form.”11 There is an authentic and profound fideism represented by thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Blaise Pascal and Fyodor Dostoevsky, who understood where the proper locus of Christian faith must be and who insisted that believers fully absorb rather than apologetically explain away intellectual challenges to faith so that they might know what a demanding thing faith really is.
…
The move to exclude “natural theology” from science was first championed not by Darwin but by Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle, who saw that the metaphysical mixing of modern empirical methods with religious teleology resulted not only in bad science but also in a corruption of true faith. God’s transcendence theologically requires a radical distinction between God as Creator and the operations of the universe through secondary causes that can be empirically observed and tested through inductive and deductive methods. Methodological atheism was necessary, Newton and Boyle maintained, not to protect science from religion but to protect theology from diminishment, trivialization and manipulation by scientists.3 There are nevertheless good reasons to think of theology—in a very different sense than creationists have conceived—as a “scientific” endeavor that pursues systematic knowledge acquisition and that includes (in Kuhnian terms) incommensurable paradigms and (in Lakatosian terms) both progressive and degenerating research programs. A progressive theological research agenda will readily be distinguished from a degenerating one by its ever-expanding compass of fresh insights and its ability to make surprising sense not only of long-standing difficulties but also of unforeseen challenges and new data as they arise. It will lead to the recognition or discovery of new theological insights and provide vital inspiration and resources for their elaboration. Its primary mode is not one of defensive or fantastical ad hoc apologetics but rather of fearless exploration in openness to new knowledge from a wide array of sources. In this light, it is hard not to conclude that “scientific” creationism and strict literalism on Genesis represent not only a degenerating scientific paradigm but a degenerating theological paradigm as well. Perhaps the most widely deployed auxiliary theory in the protective belt that encircles strict literalism on Genesis is the claim that only young earth or young life creationists take seriously the authority of Scripture. Yet if the lives and witnesses of actual believers matter at all to our thinking, this claim is demonstrably false. Numerous believers with unimpeachable credentials as scientists, as theologians and as biblical scholars, hold very high views of the Bible’s authority while embracing nonliteralistic readings of Genesis. What they have challenged is not the inspiration or authority of Scripture but the appropriateness of rigid hermeneutical approaches to the Bible that treat the creation narratives as a scientific-historical record.”
Osborn, Ronald E.. Death Before the Fall: Biblical Literalism and the Problem of Animal Suffering (pp. 49-50, 52, 55-58, 71-73). InterVarsity Press. Édition du Kindle.

For myself, I prefer to take the bird’s eye view of the battlefield with Augustine: “If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?” This indicates a practical reason for caring about the Young Earth Creation vs. Old Earth Creation debate. All one has to do is Google "why I left (insert church denomination here)," or ask any young person why they stopped attending, and this will be near the top of the list. We need to stop needlessly, stupidly, scandalizing the church.

And, briefly, when folks argue that there was no physical death before the fall, sometimes their arguments smuggle in the heretical view that spiritual death doesn’t have the sort of weighty reality that physical death has. The objection is always that it isn’t just spiritual death. But spiritual death is unto eternal damnation—so why would physical death be such an absolutely critical thing to take away from a reading couched in the greater context of God’s word about eternal consequences? Sometimes I find William Lane Craig’s answer to this question convincing: “It would be outlandish to think that each person is born physically immortal and then by sinning brings physical mortality upon himself. But each person might be reasonably said to bring spiritual death upon himself in virtue of his sinning. Evildoing is spiritually deadly and alienates us from God, so that spiritual death can be a consequence of sin even if not a punishment for sin for those who have no law. … Paul describes Adam as the first man, physical or natural (psychikos), from the earth, made of dust. He was the first human being that God made, formed by Him out of the dust of the earth, and therefore having a natural body. In saying that we all bear the image of the one made of dust, Paul is saying that each of us has a natural body (sōma psychikon), made of dust, and therefore mortal. … Although we might think that physical death is the result of Adam’s sin, Paul does not affirm this. Gordon Fee comments on I Corinthians 15.45, “The first Adam, who became a living psychē was thereby given a psychikos body at creation, a body subject to decay and death. … The last Adam, on the other hand, whose ‘spiritual (glorified) body’ was given at his resurrection, … is himself the source of the pneumatikos life as well as the pneumatikos body.” On this view Adam was created with a mortal natural body. So for Paul, Adam is created with a sōma psychikon; he does not obtain one by sinning. Paul thus implies that physical mortality is the natural human condition. In saying that in Adam all die, Paul may be saying that in virtue of sharing a common human nature with Adam we share in his natural mortality. … Genesis 3.19, “you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” supports the natural mortality of Adam and Eve due to their physical constitution. Moreover, if Adam and Eve were naturally immortal, then why have a Tree of Life in the Garden at all? It would serve no physical purpose in paradise. The Tree serves to rejuvenate its eater physically, not spiritually, hence, the concern in Genesis 3.22 about fallen man’s eating from the Tree and living forever (n.b. not his being spiritually regenerated). John Day thus reports that among Old Testament scholars “the majority scholarly view nowadays” is that Adam and Eve were mortal in the Garden, as implied by Gen 3.22. C John Collins further points out that in Genesis “The ‘death’ that Gen. 2:17 threatens is human ‘spiritual death,’ namely, alienation from God. This becomes clear once we see what happens to the human pair when they disobey in Genesis 3.” The only sense in which physical death might be seen as a consequence of sin is indirect: it is a consequence of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden, cutting off any hope of immortality, symbolized by the Tree of Life. As Day nicely phrases it, “What has happened is that they have missed out on a chance of immortality.”” (https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/the-relation-between-adams-sin-and-death ; cf. “This understanding of Genesis 2–3 fits well with Augustine’s three categories for human mortality before the fall, after the fall, and after consummation: possible not to die, not possible not to die, and not possible to die (City of God, XXII.30). Adam before the fall was not doomed to die. Yet, Adam before the fall also did not have the consummated/glorified body, the fullness of the living forever tied to the tree of life. Thus, Adam before the fall was still awaiting confirmation in eternal life.” https://henrycenter.tiu.edu/2018/05/was-adam-created-mortal-or-immortal-getting-beyond-the-labels/ ).

I’m not entirely convinced of Craig’s sort of spiritual death view. Adam and Eve are cut-off from the source of immortality. They had naturally mortal bodies in a sense but in a way that was sustainable. So, in other words, being cast from the garden did bring physical death. It isn’t a question of nature or essence but of access to the garden and life previous to the earth’s curses. Death in every place and across every species, in general, is not necessarily the consequence of the fall, but it may be; death in our world outside of the garden now, on cursed ground, having lost our conditional access to everlasting life, is certainly the result of the fall. Now are access to everlasting life is restored.

I’ll close with an appeal to knowing God’s peace, and to avoiding entrapments that would keep us unwilling or too afraid to know anything more about history. When I know Christ’s peace and joy, I sometimes think to myself that every story, every history, and every science is a servant to this. This is what the Bible is for, and those are the encounters I pray everyone will have.

Genesis

“And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the middle of the waters, and let it be a barrier between waters and waters.’ The traditional rendering for Hebrew raqia' is ‘firmament,’ an English word that refers to ‘the arch or vault of heaven overhead, in which the clouds and the stars appear; the sky or heavens.’ The English word is derived from the Latin firmamentum, meaning something firm or solid. The main objection to using ‘firmament’ in Genesis 1 is that the word does not suit modern scientific understandings of the atmosphere and space. That should actually be seen as an advantage. Genesis 1 is not written in the parlance of a modern astronomer. That is why Rupert of Deutz, writing in the twelfth century, could say that it was speaking ‘in the manner of common people’ to refer to a firmament with floodgates ‘for heaven is not something solid or hard’” (p.72 Gen 1-11, Bray and Hobbins).

“‘There were giants on the earth in those days (as well as later), as the sons of God used to go in to the daughters of man, who would bear sons to them. Those were the mighty men of old, the men of name.’ The word rendered ‘giants’ is difficult. Many translations merely reproduce it in English letters: ‘Nephilim.’ A quite literal rendering would be ‘fallen ones’ (Aquila). ‘Giants’ is found in the Septuagint and Vulgate, and it is the traditional English rendering. It is drawn from the word’s other appearance, in Numbers 13:33, where it refers to giants. The connection between that passage and this one is implied by the phrase ‘as well as later.’ Although Richard Elliott Friedman’s translation has ‘Nephilim,’ he describes the sense of connection among biblical passages that supports the traditional rendering ‘giants’: ‘Some Bible stories are virtually self-contained. Even though they may have implications elsewhere in the Tanak, we can still read them as sensible, comprehensible individual units. But this account of the giants is an example of another type of story: those whose elements are widely separated, distributed across great stretches of the narrative…We can read each of these stories without noticing that they ar a connected account, building to a climactic scene, but obviously we miss something that way. Such widely distributed stories are there because the Bible is not a loose collection of stories. It is an intricate, elegant, exquisite, long work with continuity and coherence. When we know our Bible well, we read this story about the giants in creation, and we are aware that they will play a part in the tragedy of the wilderness generation, that Joshua will defeat them, and that David will face the most famous (and last?) of them.’ A different rendering is found in Tyndale, who has ‘tirantes’ (with Luther, who has ‘tyrannen’). That choice, too, has support from the ancient translations (Symmachus: ‘violent ones’), as well as from the history of interpretation…” (p.149 Gen 1-11, Bray and Hobbins).

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Continuing down this path, exploring the possibility that the chief roadblock to belief is ignorance, there’s another pebble in the shoe of believers who spend most of their Bible reading time fighting away doubts in its veracity: contradictions in the Bible. There are six contradictions I’ve picked-out that I think are often avoided as too difficult or troubling for an easy answer. Here they are without the summaries of each problem. I provide what I think are good solutions to the problems without avoiding the harder-to-reconcile details.

The number of people at the Exodus: Colin J. Humphreys states: “(i) A new mathematical analysis is presented of the large numbers of people at the Exodus recorded in the book of Numbers. (ii) This analysis is based on assuming to be correct the statement in Num. iii that there were ‘273 firstborn Israelites who exceed the number of Levites’. This statement, plus some reasonable assumptions, leads to mathematical equations for the number of men of military age (over 20 years) and for the number of Levite men which can be compared to the corresponding figures given in Numbers. How Many People Were in the Exodus from Egypt? (iii) The comparison demonstrates that the word ‘lp, which has a range of meanings, should have been interpreted as ‘troop’ rather than ‘thousand’. It then follows that the total number of military men aged over 20 years in the census following the Exodus was 5550 not the 603,550 recorded in Numbers. (iv) Another figure to emerge from this mathematical analysis is that there were 8 to 9 males (aged over one month) in the average Israelite family at the time of the Exodus, which is consistent with the Israelites multiplying greatly while they were in Egypt (Exod. i 7). (v) The average number of military men (aged over 20) per troop was about 10, which is consistent with the known sizes of military troops at that time from the El-Amarna tablets. It is suggested that a troop may have comprised the men of military age from about two families. (vi) The number of Levite men (over one month old) in the census was 1000 rather than the 22000 recorded in Numbers. The average size of a team of priests was about 50. (vii) The analysis supports and extends the theory of Mendenhall except that we suggest the figures refer to the time of the wilderness period following the Exodus rather than to a later period as in the Mendenhall theory. (viii) If there were 5550 men aged over 20 at the Exodus, this implies a total of about 10,000 men aged over one month and hence about 20,000 men and women. To this must be added the 1000 Levite men aged over one month and about 1000 Levite women. Therefore, as a round number, the total of men, women and children at the Exodus was about 20,000.”

Elisha and the bears: Here’s Peter Leithart: “In his taped lectures on Kings, James Jordan has provided a more satisfactory interpretation of the passage. Jordan points out the exodus-conquest pattern of 2 Kings 1-2. Elijah and Elisha leave the land (through the parted waters of Jordan, just as Israel left Egypt through the Red Sea), Elijah ascends and cannot be found (like Moses), and Elisha returns as Elijah’s successor (again through the parted Jordan, just as Israel entered Canaan). Elisha is clearly presented as a new Joshua, who enters the land to heal it and to purge it of Canaanites. He meets the “young lads” at Bethel, a center of the golden calf cult (1 Ki. 12:25-33). Jordan suggests that the “lads” are priests or at least assistants to the priests who serve the shrine at Bethel. Cursing the 42 “lads” is part of the new Joshua’s conquest of the land.

Jordan’s interpretation is supported by the fact that na`ar (“boy”) sometimes carries the connotation of “official” or “steward.” It denotes someone who is in a subordinate position without implying anything about age. Mephibosheth’s servant Ziba is called a na`ar of Saul’s house (2 Sam. 16:1), and he was clearly no “lad,” since he had fifteen sons of his own (2 Sam. 19:17). Boaz would have been a fool to put a “boy” in charge of his reapers, but his foreman is called a na`ar in Ruth 2:5-6. These examples suggest that na`ar might be translated as “official” in other passages as well (cf. 1 Ki. 20:13-15).

The same can be said for the other term used to the describe the 42, yeled. While this word normally refers to humans and animals of young age (even fetuses, Ex. 21:22), it is also used in reference to older persons. When Jeroboam led a delegation to Rehoboam to ask for relief from Solomon’s heavy yoke, Rehoboam consulted with the yeladim“who grew up with him and stood before him” (1 Ki. 12:8). How old were these young men? Verse 8 indicates that they were about the same age as Rehoboam, and 1 Kings 14:21 tells us that Rehoboam was 41 when he began to reign. Thus, the “young men” were about 40 when they gave their foolish counsel. They are called yeladim both because they were younger than the elders whose counsel Rehoboam rejected and because they were Rehoboam’s subordinates; that they “stood before” Rehoboam suggests that they were his personal servants and confidants, holding the office of “prince’s friend.” In any case, this passage shows that the usage of yeled is not restricted to young children and teenagers.

Elisha, thus, did not instigate a slaughter of babies or infants or little children, but instead called down curses on the “officials” of the idolatrous shrine of Bethel. As the new Joshua, he was beginning his herem war against the shrines of the Israelo-Canaanites who dominated the northern kingdom.” … “he also links the 42 “boys” with the 42 members of the house of Ahab who are slaughtered in 2 Kings 10:14: “Elisha’s actions against the group . . . should be viewed as one component within the larger context of a protracted struggle that emanates from the cultic activity of Bethel and elsewhere under the aegis of royal sponsorship. That Elisha then proceeds to Carmel and on to Samaria as the chapter ends (2:25) amplifies the scope of the ideological battle, lately contested by Elijah and now poised to continue by this agent who has received the inheritance of a double portion of his master’s spirit” (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/leithart/2018/01/bears-of-god/).”

What time of what day was Jesus crucified? : John uses Roman time; Matthew, Mark, and Luke are using Jewish time.

Does the NT misquote the OT? (1) Does the NT misquote the OT (2) : This is a matter of textual variants.

Lessons from the fig tree: Lessons from the fig tree

The USCCB notes that Matthew played fast and loose with times and dates. Interesting take guys, but I can’t say I agree.

“* [21:12–17] Matthew changes the order of (Mk 11:11, 12, 15) and places the cleansing of the temple on the same day as the entry into Jerusalem, immediately after it. The activities going on in the temple area were not secular but connected with the temple worship. Thus Jesus’ attack on those so engaged and his charge that they were making God’s house of prayer a den of thieves (Mt 21:12–13) constituted a claim to authority over the religious practices of Israel and were a challenge to the priestly authorities. Mt 21:14–17 are peculiar to Matthew. Jesus’ healings and his countenancing the children’s cries of praise rouse the indignation of the chief priests and the scribes (Mt 21:15). These two groups appear in the infancy narrative (Mt 2:4) and have been mentioned in the first and third passion predictions (Mt 16:21; 20:18). Now, as the passion approaches, they come on the scene again, exhibiting their hostility to Jesus.

* [21:18–22] In Mark the effect of Jesus’ cursing the fig tree is not immediate; see Mk 11:14, 20. By making it so, Matthew has heightened the miracle. Jesus’ act seems arbitrary and ill-tempered, but it is a prophetic action similar to those of Old Testament prophets that vividly symbolize some part of their preaching; see, e.g., Ez 12:1–20. It is a sign of the judgment that is to come upon the Israel that with all its apparent piety lacks the fruit of good deeds (Mt 3:10) and will soon bear the punishment of its fruitlessness (Mt 21:43). Some scholars propose that this story is the development in tradition of a parable of Jesus about the destiny of a fruitless tree, such as Lk 13:6–9. Jesus’ answer to the question of the amazed disciples (Mt 21:20) makes the miracle an example of the power of prayer made with unwavering faith (Mt 21:21–22).”

So here’s the timeline.

Mark: Mark reports that Jesus is coming from Bethany to Jerusalem the day after the triumphal entry when He sees a fig tree and curses it. Then Jesus cleanses the Temple, evening comes, and they go out of the city. In the morning they see the same tree withered and Jesus makes a parable of it.

Matthew: Matthew reports that after* the triumphal entry, Jesus cleanses the Temple. The next morning, as He’s coming from Bethany on the way back into Jerusalem (returning to the city), Jesus sees a fig tree**, curses it, and makes a parable of it.

*At some point.

**I’d say this is not the first time He encounters the fig tree.

Main idea: There are simply too many ways the data align for one account or the other to be flubbed or fibbed.

If I’d been there, I’d describe what happened this way: Three days, two nights. Triumphal entry, then Jesus stays the first night in Bethany***. The next morning, He curses the fig tree, then He cleanses the Temple, and stays a second night in Bethany. The next morning, Jesus returns to Jerusalem, stops at the same the fig tree on the way there, repeats the curse, and offers the parable.

***Which we don’t hear about in Matthew

In both accounts, Jesus tells the parable about the cursed fig tree on the morning following the Temple cleansing. The only discrepancy is missing data: Matthew doesn’t report on the first time they encountered the fig tree and neither accounts say that Jesus repeated the curse. Missing information isn’t a contradiction. The only real challenge is imagining Jesus repeating the same curse—which isn’t nothing, but I don’t think it’s a dealbreaker for inerrancy.

On Delay: There’s another aspect of the delay of the parousia I haven’t heard mentioned yet: it’s just plain good life advice. The only way to live is full of hope and as though the consummation of your hope may be imminent or many years from now.

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When I read my Bible, at the bottom of every page there are footnotes. Most of these footnotes are the products of uncertainties. When I read my Bible, I want the word of God—not yet another scholarly discussion on what the Academy thinks the Word might maybe possibly could’ve been (depending on our current archeological recovery of ancient fragments). Does that mean I should blithely dismiss scholarship and live in a fantasyland where those uncertainties don’t exist? No, because if they mattered enough for a footnote, they matter enough for at least one blog post.

The Septuagint and the Masoretic texts in Jeremiah 31:32 have very different meanings. Which thing did God say to Jeremiah? Hebrews quotes the masoretic text, which says God told Jeremiah, “I showed no concern for them.” But when I flip back to Jeremiah, God says to him, “I was their husband”. When I read Hebrews, God tells Jeremiah one thing. When I read Jeremiah, God tells Jeremiah something else. In Hebrew, that’s one letter difference in one word. Clearly someone goofed in their copy work.

The problem with that is that we don’t seem to know what God said to Jeremiah. Sure, we can get the “gist” of it and this tiny discrepancy doesn’t change dogmas—but is that all we read the Bible for? Reaffirming a shortlist of dogmas that came from the parts of the Bible about which we’re certain? Of course not!

Christians believe Jesus Christ is the Lord of history. That means He guides all things—the manner in which we got our Bibles included. According to my best understanding of the principle behind those who advocate for the received text (KJV-onlyism), the Protestant reformation was also a reformation of the manuscript tradition. If I were in that camp, I would argue that Christians know whom exactly God guided (the folks who put together the TR) by their confessions and by the self-authenticating Scripture in the KJV — rather than knowing who was specially, divinely guided, by any claims to authority or archeological discoveries of better texts. According to this view, God didn’t just guard and recover the gospel but the canon, too. He is the Lord of history! Then again, this would mean God has only preserved the real Bible in small English speaking American denominations. Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, on the other hand, have it that God decided to guard the truth through specific people whom we know by their offices rather than by their confessions. I don’t like either of these options.

But why bother with any of this? What is a theologically significant reason for trying to get back to the autographs with academic research? If we say that it is absolutely certain that uncovering new variants yields no theologically significant result -- that is, if we preclude the possibility entirely that something could be discovered that changes entire books of the New Testament -- then we have the absurd result that, by definition, no content of Scripture can have ever affected theology; after all, by the first premise we asserted that Scripture and theology were of separate, non-overlapping categories. If we have the verses of Scripture as our sole source for dogma, then why is it impossible that dogma should change if we had more verses of Scripture? Textual variants may be small and seemingly irrelevant, but that doesn’t mean every future discovery of new variants won’t be more significant. As Christians, we cannot claim that some textual variant is the Word of God whereas another isn’t on the basis of the first one being found in an older manuscript fragment. That’s not how we know if something is the Word of God—not, at least, if we’re going to consider the Bible self-authenticating.

In response, we’d have two arguments available to us. The first would be that theology -- our received doctrines in particular -- isn't solely derived from information in the Bible, but is perhaps received alongside the Bible. Moreover, we'd claim that no such discoveries are even possible for no other reason than this: that God in his providence would not have allowed us to be so deceived for 2,000 years. That is the argument for Sacred Tradition, especially as defined by Yves Congar in the Roman Catholic tradition of the twentieth century. Moreover, if we have to uncover the true readings now, then it’s too late to say that there was a plenary Scripture for everyone who came before us. Discovering the truth of what God says in the Bible would be a matter of dialectic or historical consensus. That is precisely the thrust of JH Newman's presentation of God's providence.

One thing is certain. All Christians, whether they know it or not, at least implicitly trust that God’s hand isn’t only in the autographs but is also in the recovery of every manuscript tradition, their eventual compilation, and canonization. Otherwise, who knows what could change if it’s all a matter of what imperfect people have cobbled together, unguided by God? God is not the deist’s Watchmaker; He didn’t disappear from history after inspiring the original texts! If the preservation, recovery, and canonization of whatever manuscript traditions were uniquely guided by God, then we begin talking about God’s activity in far more than the inspiration of an original text (e.g. Holy Tradition of Roman Catholicism, or the KJV advocate’s divine preservation of the received text during the Reformation). But what should the non-Roman Catholic, non-Eastern Orthodox, non-KJV onlyist, Christian believe about the relationship between the Word and all the various manuscript traditions with their variants?

It is a rather common sense worry that if the Bible is God's Word, and the real Bible equals the autographs (the original manuscripts), then what we can say with total certainty is not that we know what the Bible says, but what the scribes say the Bible says. If this is so, then it should seem absurd that scholars are still trying to uncover the autographs with research because our Bible has been treated as the word of God for 2,000 years already; either it was the Word for all those years or it wasn’t. In other words, it’s too late. Discovering the truth of what God says in the Bible cannot be a matter of dialectic or of historical scholarly consensus.

Without further ado, here is my answer to the question of uncertain textual variants: We know God’s Word chiefly and most intimately by its work in our lives and not by holding various manuscripts up to scientific standards, looking for markers to indicate what is or isn’t the Word. That means we should begin to think about these problems by first keeping in mind that God grabs ahold of us and turns our lives around. The Bible isn’t the sole Source of Christian belief -- God is! We are not convinced by hypotheticals which allow for the non-existence of God at the helm of history. Our ignorance of how God uses what are clearly different textual traditions that comprise his Word reflects our limits and failures and no one else’s. The ending to the Lord’s Prayer, for example, seems to be something that was incorporated into the text because, since we find it in the Didache, there’s good reason to believe that it was in the liturgy of the early church. If we didn’t know this, then all we’d know would be that “for thine is the kingdom…” was just something that '“was added” — as if it were an arbitrary, uninspired, insignificant, fact of history. Why does it matter that it was in the liturgy? Because that was the Divine Service : a place where the Word was delivered to the saints in the Christian churches.

Additional helps:

https://lutherantheology.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/scripture-and-faith/ (Hermann Sasse) ; https://www.christforus.org/Papers/Content/Luther%20and%20Biblical%20Infallibility.pdf (Robert Preus) ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaX6z-tIM_E , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY-DKVNRfGs (Jeff Kloha) ; https://ethosinstitute.sg/poisonous-snakes/ ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UByE-mr-2vE

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What about the general weirdness of what we read in the Bible? In a sense, we’re spoiled by good writing today that simply didn’t exist back then. Events were told bluntly, and we often have to use our imaginations to fill in the detail if that matters to us. Think of how often someone or some group of people were suddenly struck dead—and the story moves on without another mention of them. This is very strange to us. But it may help to imagine the film version of the event with all of the detail, the mourning, the conversations before and after, and so on.

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Additional resources: https://alc.edu.au/assets/ltj/2017dec/1975-Sasse-Letter-to-Robert-Preus.pdf (although I tend to disagree with what he may be saying with regard to the immortality of the soul and to the Documentary Hypothesis). Especially note the following: “If Missouri has now to rethink its theology one of the first tasks will be to re-examine the philosophical presuppositions of your traditional theology.” It is crucial to understand that such presuppositions exist and are clearly visible.

And this: https://christforus.org/NewSite/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Notes-on-the-Inerrancy-of-Scripture.pdf ; the same doc is here: https://scholar.csl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4578&context=ctm

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On baptism: I love everything in the Bible because it’s all inspired by my Father, Creator, and Redeemer—not because I understand everything in it. That’s the essence of faith, too. It’s receiving God’s gifts with gratitude and hopeful expectation for what’s to come without knowing precisely what that will be.

Our relationships with God and with each other are defined explicitly in commandments and implicitly in the rest of the Bible; yet we treat what’s implicit as explicit and argue endlessly, thereby constantly breaking the explicit commandments centered on loving our neighbors. Or, we simply ignore our neighbors because they’re not in our churches (because we disagree on these doctrines). Nobody who genuinely loves his neighbor as he ought to love him would be so contemptuously disinterested in what his neighbor believes about Christ that he would plug his ears to any opposing arguments over what’s merely implicit in the Bible—the things over which honest exegetes have struggled since the earliest Christian centuries.

So what can we know about baptism if we consider Scripture alone?

We surely receive an increase in our faith in our baptism into Christ, but if we receive this by faith then how can baptism create faith? The way to answer this is by recalling that the entire process of faith—its creation, sustenance, and growth—is attributed to God's action through the means of grace. So baptism itself doesn’t create the faith; God creates faith through means of grace, including baptism. The power of baptism lies in God's Word and promise. When God speaks His Word through the person baptizing in his name, the waters of baptism become in some sense eternal life-giving waters. This Word of God is what creates faith. As Luther says in the Small Catechism, "For without God's word the water is plain water and no Baptism. But with the word of God it is a Baptism, that is, a gracious water of life and a washing of regeneration in the Holy Ghost" (SC IV, 3).

In Jesus' conversation with Nicodemus in John 3:1-21, when he totally confounds Nicodemus with his phrase "born again" (or "born from above"), why didn’t Jesus just tell him needed to receive baptism in that cleansing ritual? Because the more important matter and the primary focus of Jesus' message was the necessity of a spiritual rebirth which apparently goes beyond mere ritual. Nicodemus, a Pharisee and member of the Jewish ruling council, would have been well-acquainted with various Jewish purification rituals, including baptism. However, Jesus points to a deeper need. The Jewish purification rites, including mikvahs (ritual baths), were focused on outward cleanliness and symbolic purification. Jesus, however, speaks of being "born of water and the Spirit" (John 3:5), highlighting that this new birth is not merely a physical or symbolic act but involves the powerful work of the Holy Spirit. This is a fundamental shift from external ritual to internal spiritual transformation. While Nicodemus might have expected a discussion on ritual purification, Jesus reveals that entrance into the Kingdom of God requires a transformation that only God can accomplish through baptism and the work of the Holy Spirit. This teaching underscores the shift from external ritual to internal spiritual renewal.

We are neither justified by the gifts we receive through faith (like baptism), nor by faith itself as if it were a work earning our ticket to heaven (like so many Calvinists make things out to be). We're justified by God declaring Christ's righteousness to be our own. But wait a minute — don't we receive his righteousness through baptism and the other gifts we receive through faith? Another way of asking this: Are we justified by the righteousness of Christ before, during, or after, we receive the gifts that convey that very justifying righteousness? The problem with this line of questioning is that it omits the key doctrine that God creates faith by his Word—the very same Word delivered to us in baptism and elsewhere which creates our faith. We’re not justified by the gifts we receive in faith—the virtue or stance of trusting receptivity of the Holy Spirit—and we’re not justified by having that very faith in which we receive those gifts. Instead, God declares us just or righteous, and in declaring it so, he creates our faith in it being so on Christ’s account.

To be continued.