interpreting-scripture-july-august-2010

BIBLICAL STUDIES VS. THEOLOGY? ❘ SLAVERY AND THE BIBLE ❘ AFRICA TODAY ❘ BIBLE, INC.

MODERN REFORMATION INTERPRETING SCRIPTURE

VOLUME

1 9 , N U M B E R 4 , J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 , $ 6 . 5 0

MODERN REFORMATION

TABLE OF CONTENTS j u l y / a u g u s t

2 0 1 0

|

v o l u m e

1 9

n u m b e r

4

Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Ryan Glomsrud Managing Editor Patricia Anders

Interpreting Scripture

Marketing Director Michele Tedrick Department Editors Ryan Glomsrud, Reviews Michael Horton, Final Thoughts Staff | Editors Lori A. Cook, Layout and Design Elizabeth Isaac, Copy Editor Ann Smith, Proofreader Contributing Scholars Michael Allen Peter D. Anders James Bachman J. Todd Billings John Bombaro Jerry Bridges John N. Day Adam S. Francisco David Gibson W. Robert Godfrey T. David Gordon Gillis Harp D. G. Hart Paul Helm John A. Huffman, Jr. Daniel R. Hyde Ken Jones Julius J. Kim Philip J. Lee Jonathan Leeman Richard Lints Korey Maas Keith Mathison R. Albert Mohler, Jr. John Warwick Montgomery Kenneth A. Myers Roger R. Nicole Robert Norris J. I. Packer Craig Parton Mark Pierson Lawrence R. Rast, Jr. Donald P. Richmond Kim Riddlebarger Rick Ritchie David Robertson Rod Rosenbladt Justin Taylor Kate Treick David VanDrunen Gene E. Veith David F. Wells Donald T. Williams William Willimon Todd Wilken Paul F. M. Zahl Modern Reformation © 2010 All rights reserved.

1725 Bear Valley Pkwy.

Escondido, CA 92027 (800) 890-7556

10 Interpreting Scripture

by Scripture Can we learn the whole meaning of Scripture by studying its parts and its parts by learning the whole?

by Michael Horton

16 Ten Theses on the Theological Interpretation of Scripture The author provides a way for reconciliation between biblical studies and theology.

by Kevin J. Vanhoozer

20 Navigating Old Waters through the Fog of the New Atheism Questions about the ethical implications of Scripture enable Christians to reflect more deeply on its teaching and moral wisdom.

by Patrick T. Smith Plus: Why We Don’t Stone Adulterers

24 The Bible and African Christianity In the years between the Africa that David Livingstone found and the Africa of today, the Bible has played a significant role.

by David F. Wells

28 Bible, Inc. Do market-niche translations and selfstudy Bibles undermine Scripture’s proper use, as well as the interpretative community Scripture creates and sustains?

by John Bombaro

info@modernreformation.org www.modernreformation.org ISSN-1076-7169

S UBSCRIPTION I NFORMATION US US Student Canada Europe Other

1 YR 1 YR 1 YR 1 YR 1 YR

$32 $25 $39 $58 $65

COVER: KING WU, KINGS PHOTO/ISTOCKPHOTO

2 YR $58 2 YR $70 2 YR $104 2 YR $118

In This Issue page 2 | Letters page 3 | Family Matters page 4 | Common Grace page 6 Ad Extra page 7 | Interview page 32 | Reviews page 36 | Final Thoughts page 44

J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 1

IN THIS ISSUE

Handle with Care

I

n this issue and the next, we arrive at the heart of our yearlong theme. Thus far we have done a lot of spade work: first in diagnosing the problem of biblical illiteracy in evangelicalism, then in defending the nature of the Bible (inspired and inerrant) that we hope to recover, and most recently by examining what it means to recognize the Bible as the Bible, a canon, the sole authority for the life and faith of the church.

Now that we have this sacred text in our hands, a unified Word reliable and true, how do we go about reading it in order to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ? We do insist that it is the Holy Spirit, working through and never apart from the Word, who accomplishes the work of modern reformation in our hearts and in our churches, yet it is no contradiction to say that we must also reflect upon how to read the Bible faithfully as did the Bereans of Acts 17:10–11. This is the very practical subject that will concern us in these pages, before turning to the content of Scripture in our next issue.

We all are guilty of reading the Bible by looking for what seems most important and pressing to us, sometimes with a stubborn unwillingness to let the text challenge and reshape our seemingly all-important concerns. But Michael Horton warns us against letting “central dogmas” dominate our interpretation of the Bible, even in the case of favorite doctrines such as predestination or union with Christ.

Scripture provides its own clues as to what is important and elemental. We must let our theological hobbyhorses fall by the wayside, he argues, and turn to the rule of faith, for Scripture is its own best interpreter.

But theology is always needed to accomplish this task, argues Wheaton College professor Kevin Vanhoozer, and not simply a linguistic or exegetical approach to the Bible. We may (and must!) parse verbs and diagram sentences, but we also need a wholesale integration of “biblical studies” with “systematic theology.” This is such an important issue for evangelicals today that we later continue the conversation by posing a number of questions to D. A. Carson, professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

There are many things that influence the way Christians read the Bible, and in this issue Patrick Smith of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary pushes back against “New Atheist” critics of Christian ethics with a discussion of the Bible and slavery. Context is crucial for this topic and others, and that is especially true when considering the development of African Christianity under the shadow of European colonialism. We hear so much these days about “cultural transformation,” but Modern Reformation regular David Wells talks about what the merging of commerce, civilization-building, and Christian culture-making has meant for the faith in this part of the world. Globalization and a culture of marketing are ubiquitous; therefore, John Bombaro of Grace Lutheran Church critiques the commodification of the Word of God in treating the Bible as “big business.”

We hope this issue will provide thought-provoking reading in the midst of summer. Let us all take time to consider how best to handle the Word of God with care, for the benefit of our souls.

Ryan Glomsrud Executive Editor

2 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

NEXT ISSUES September/October 2010 Rightly Dividing the Word November/December 2010 Sola Scriptura

LETTERS y o u r

Many thanks for the “PCA Geologists on the Antiquity of the Earth” article (May/June 2010). To place this article in historical perspective, it is generally recognized that the modern “young-earth creation” movement began with the publication of a 1961 book ostensibly based on geology, The Genesis Flood, by Whitcomb and Morris. Those authors postulated that the earth’s geological history is the result of literally earthshaking phenomena that occurred just a few thousand years ago during Noah’s Flood, or “flood geology.” In far too many evangelical circles, Whitcomb and Morris and their “high profile” young-earth creationist progeny have persuaded laypersons that theirs is the only valid scientific and biblical position. Meanwhile, the comparatively reticent voices of the “overwhelming majority” of evangelical old-earth geologists have been all but drowned out.

After nearly fifty years, flood geology has gained zero traction among geologists outside of the young-earth camp. Speaking as a retired oil and gas development engineer who spent thirty years working alongside geologists, I concur with the authors of the article: “Old-earth models work.

Young-earth models do not.”

Jeff Pletcher Centennial, Colorado From earliest to modern times, human reason has been employed as a do-it-yourself substitute for God’s revelation, linking us closely to the first Adam of Eden and distinguishing us from the second Adam in Gethsemane. Such efforts may be driven by appetite, perceived benefit, or a surpassing confidence in extrapolated uniformitarian geology to reveal the way. But realizing that God’s ways are not our ways, as Martin Luther observed in The Bondage of the Will, we cannot make rational comprehension on our part the condition of our cre-

dence in what is the sole prerogative of the Creator. Indeed, lingering mysteries are the very occasions for our subordinate trust in him.

Since the fall of man into sin our human faculties have been a corrupted means to the truth, with science itself a tentative exercise in understanding and historically no refuge from changeable ideas. So let’s just introduce geologists Steven Austin (who has shown the rapid formation of multiple strata at Mount St. Helens) and Andrew Snelling to those still unaware of their findings of discordant isotopic dates of “ancient” rocks, detailed in the 2005 book Thousands…Not Billions, reporting an eight-year study by which the earlier properly cautious Creation Study Committee of the PCA could not have been informed.

t h o u g h t s

a n d

o u r s

theology, the specific question of the age of the earth is not a matter of biblical interpretation as much as it is an issue for readers of the book of nature, and therefore an issue best left to those willing to develop the necessary skills to handle such a marvelous “text” that everywhere displays God’s handiwork.

A few letters we have received display a surprisingly hostile view of scientific readings of the book of nature, once again confusing a high view of Scripture with an exaggerated notion of its scope, function, and purpose in matters creational. Geological questions aside, we prefer a strong theology of creation and general revelation, as well as a biblical understanding of the possibility of its interpretation by believers and unbelievers alike in view of God’s common grace.

Ryan Glomsrud Executive Editor

Charles Faris, MD Port Hueneme, California Note from the Editor: Following our “Inspiration and Inerrancy” issue (March/April 2010), we thought it was important to underline a crucial distinction we think is underdeveloped in some evangelical thinking about Scripture; namely, the difference between inerrancy, as a statement about the nature of Scripture itself, and interpretation, as a matter of how to read the inspired and true text. Many evangelicals confuse a high view of the Bible with specific interpretations, young-earth creationism being just one example. It is for this reason only that we took up a controversial “Ad Extra” topic in the midst of our yearlong theme, “Recovering Scripture.”

Modern Reformation as an organization does not take a view on the age of the earth other than to say that Genesis was not revealed in order to provide a scientific description of origins but as an historical prologue justifying God’s lordship over all creation.

According to the best of Reformation

Modern Reformation Letters to the Editor 1725 Bear Valley Parkway Escondido CA 92027 760.741.1045 fax Letters@modernreformation.org Letters under 200 words are more likely to be printed than longer letters. Letters may be edited for content and length.

J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 3

FAMILY MATTERS r e s o u r c e s

f o r

h o m e s

Church History for Children

A

s a homeschooling mother of eight, I have always found the concept of unit stud-

spersed between the two. I felt the need for a sense of ies fascinating. Find a subject of particular interest to the children and incorpo- continuity. Augustine, Luther, Calvin—and many other rate the curriculum into this study. The original interest will keep the children great men and women of church history—were not motivated. It makes perfect sense. Actually, this method is isolated voices but drew from the tradition of the church not a prerogative of homeschooling situations. I used it as an before them, and we must do the same. elementary teacher many years before homeschooling Second, children will develop a sense of belonging to God’s became a popular word. It is really a form of integrative or church throughout the ages. One of the first things that interdisciplinary teaching. impressed me as I came to Reformed theology was the My dilemma was how to adopt this integrative method covenantal relationship of church membership and family, with my children while retaining a cohesive educational proand the strong sense of belonging it fostered in children. How gram. As I went from the Pythagorean theorem to Victorian meaningful it is for all of us to recite together every Sunday poems to Baroque music, my children’s knowledge seemed the creeds formulated in the first centuries of church history scattered and their perception of history departmentalized and repeated by Christians throughout the ages! What an honor it is to sing God’s praises as they have been sung by this and vague. I thought, If they have to study history in a great cloud of witnesses! As Dr. Robert Godfrey, president and chronological order anyhow, why don’t we incorporate all professor of church history at Westminster Seminary other subjects into that order?

California, is often quoted as saying, “They are our family.”

I bought a huge poster board and drew vertical lines to This point is really connected with the first. When chilindicate the major eras of human history. Then I drew hordren become aware of their participation in the historical izontal lines to organize this history into the different school progress of God’s people, they develop a deeper appreciation subjects—art, music, literature, math, and science. and respect for their tradition and an active desire to preInfluenced by Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There, I serve it. added philosophy and theology. Whether we agree with Third, studying church history will teach our chilSchaeffer’s steps or not, the relation between all these disdren to deal honestly with questions and doubts. It will show how ciplines is obvious.

Children love to learn about the past and are naturally men and women of all times have faced great questions drawn to adventures and stories. It was easy to use this natregarding God, faith, and salvation. My hope is that, as they ural interest and build a corollary of other studies around it. read about Calvin’s struggle to leave a church and belief sysIt was fun to immerse ourselves in each era and understand, tem he had been upholding for years, or Augustine’s intense as much as possible, what motivated people to act and think battle of wills, they will realize the weight of their choices as they did. Soon I realized that a deeper understanding of and the importance of taking seriously the same questions the past, even at a young age, fostered a deeper underand struggles. standing of the present and of the treasury of notions norFourth, as they learn church history, children will realize mally stored in our contemporary minds. In particular, a the inadequacy of simplistic answers. If a child has no idea of the deeper understanding of the history of the church and church’s continuous and conscious effort to examine and Christian thought fosters a deeper understanding of the refine its theological thought throughout the centuries, doctrines, methods, and liturgies we follow today. he/she will think that choosing a belief system is as simple There are several reasons why studying the developas choosing a hairstyle or a favorite football team. The best ment of Christian thought can be useful to children. I will choice will be whatever sounds good. mention some, not in any particular order.

Some years ago in a homeschooling office, I overheard First, by studying church history, children will develop a two mothers talking about religion. “What’s an Arminian?” respect for Christian tradition. One of my original concerns was one asked. They looked it up in the dictionary and found that many of our covenant children (mine included) didn’t something like this (I don’t know what dictionary they seem to have a grasp of the continuity of the progress of used, so I am quoting Merriam-Webster): “Of or relating to God’s people throughout the ages. There was, in a sense, a Arminius or his doctrines opposing the absolute predestigap between the biblical accounts and our lives today, with nation of strict Calvinism and maintaining the possibility of a few inspiring stories of some individual Christians intersalvation for all.”

4 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

They closed the dictionary and said, “Okay, we are Arminian.”

How efficient, I thought. They were able to solve in two minutes a question that serious theologians have debated for centuries.

Today, most people don’t have time to think. They can find most answers on Google or Wikipedia. It’s important for our children to realize that the Reformation didn’t simply start by nailing a piece of paper on a church’s door.

Fifth, a study of church history and tradition fosters a critical mind. As children examine different views (including the different heresies and the answers the church has provided), they will consciously or unconsciously compare different thought systems, instead of accepting blindly and lazily the beliefs passed on by their parents. C. S. Lewis explains this well when he writes: Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books....Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go in the same direction.

To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them. (C. S. Lewis’s introduction to On the Incarnation by Athanasius) Sixth, a study of church history and tradition fosters a tolerant mind. I could also say “a catholic mind,” because this is the meaning I am inferring from the word “tolerant” in this context. When we read the great theologians of our past, we are often impressed by their thorough knowledge of the Christian tradition, including the apostolic and church fathers and the medieval writers. We should teach our children the humility to recognize that we need the wisdom of the ages, a humility that can function as an antidote to our natural arrogance and from the present attraction to simplistic “justme-and-my-Bible” solutions. As many have pointed out, sola Scriptura is not solo Scriptura. “An appreciation of history, and of the doctrinal struggles of the church throughout history, are surely crucial to the avoidance of a narrow sectarianism and self-righteousness in the present” (Carl Trueman, Reckoning with the Past in an Anti-Historical Age).

Finally, a study of church history can foster a realistic view, dispelling romanticized ideas of past golden ages. There was hardly a time when God’s church was not plagued by disunity, heresies, and inner struggles. As we impart this realistic view to our children, in the study of history as well as in our lives, we can teach them to turn their eyes on Christ who has preserved his church in spite of its human frailties.

As the Jew told Giannotto in the second fictional story of Boccaccio’s Decameron, after seeing the terrible corruption of the church in his day (in the fourteenth century): “[Seeing] that your religion continues to spread and to acquire even brighter radiance, I think I am right to see that the Holy Spirit

is at work in it.” Of course, we will not agree with every Christian thinker in our past, but if we respectfully consider their views, we will realize with Lewis that “what is left intact despite all the divisions still appears (as it truly is) an immensely formidable unity” (C. S. Lewis’s introduction to On the Incarnation by Athanasius).

The study of history in general is typically considered alien to the American mindset. According to Jaroslav Pelikan, our nation has “been more hungry for its future than addicted to its past” (Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition). Carl Trueman agrees: We live at a time when innovation is of the order of the day and tradition is at a discount. Whereas in the sixteenth century the very novelty of Luther’s ideas was what made them so suspect and, one might add, so likely to be wrong, nowadays, it is the traditional which is likely to be considered wrong and the novel which is likely to be regarded as more likely true. (Carl Trueman, A Man More Sinned Against than Sinning?)

This is just one more area where we have to train our children to go in a direction that is countercultural.

While homeschooling is a convenient way to teach church history to children, it is not the only way. It can be taught in informal conversations or included in family worship. A chart can still be useful to give an idea of the chronological progress. Try also to read some portions of writings from each time period. It might surprise you to discover how simple some of these can be. Presently, I am reading the Letter to Diognetus to my children, a jewel of Patristic literature. To quote Lewis once again (the whole On the Incarnation

by Athanasius is worth reading in this respect), “The great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator.”

Looking back, I wish I had learned church history at a young age. It would have helped me to face other truthclaims with a more objective frame of mind and prevented me from ever believing feeble attempts at reinventing the theological wheel.

Simonetta Carr is a mother of eight, has written for several newspapers and magazines and has translated the works of several Christian authors into Italian. She is author of the series, “Christian Biographies for Young Readers” (Reformation Heritage Books). She lives in Santee, California, with her husband Thomas and family, and is a member and Sunday school teacher at Christ United Reformed Church.

J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 5

COMMON GRACE G o d ’ s

t r u t h

i n

a r t

a n d

c u l t u r e

Windows

I

had planned on writing about stained-glass windows with their intricate patterns, the

pollen-burdened bees, rippling through the heat of glowing mosaic of their stories, the emanations of their color and fire, but changed my summer…

Returning back to the mind, deciding to write about ordinary, unadorned windows, a common feature in diamond pane in my church that leads my eyes past the churches and homes. Windows are passed by, taken for rafters and toward the cone-festooned pine tree, and sometimes granted amidst all the electronic pyrotechnics that stun and beyond that into a soft, blue and white jigsaw puzzle of sky, I dazzle people in their homes (and churches) nowadays. think it’s fair to say that windows can definitely distract if we Besides the pull of glitzy technology vying for our attention, let them, offering us a convenient diversion if we do not feel colonizing our range of vision, sometimes we pass by the like paying attention to the sermon. Part of the balance lies in beauty of the basic due to familiarity. Perhaps we should seeing windows as a means of supporting, of illustrating the reconsider the wonder of windows; after all, they do open message as well as inducing a proper mood, an atmosphere up enclosed spaces, offering us an entrance to something conducive toward thoughtful consideration of the message. outside of ourselves.

There’s always a temptation to take something good (or bad) In my church, high above the altar, past the rafters, and make it the focus rather than God. Windows, whether beautiful—containing black tracery framing facets of color— there’s a large diamond-shaped window set beneath the or plain, lacking embellishment, can be used to make us vaulted ceiling. It mesmerizes the eyes, naturally drawing think about how instruments, symbols, and metaphors conone’s gaze upwards with its spell of illumination. A tall pine vey much to the thoughtful soul about the greatness and tree framed against a rich blue sky and cream-colored clouds majesty of our triune God. takes up the view, its limbs wavering, now and then, in the wind, sunlight brushing its needles, transforming dark green into glistening gold, offering a glimpse—beyond the clarity of glass—into transcendence, a hint of heaven. Perhaps the Scott Schuleit (M.A. in Christianity and Culture, Knox Theologisense of transcendence it conveys has something to do with cal Seminary) has written book reviews for Tabletalk magazine and the way it reveals and quiets the elements outside while our Ligonier Ministries, and essays for Reformed Perspectives magapastor speaks about eternal things inside. zine and Monergism.com. His poems have appeared in Mars Hill Windows teach us to observe, fostering objectivity by Review, The Penwood Review, Spring Hill Review and Chrisframing a part of the world for consideration, naturally ushtianity and Literature. ering us into a place somewhat distant from all the energy and motion of existence, inducing a posture of awareness, “The Windows” gently prodding us to meditate, to look from a place apart from the flow of things going on around us. Part of the way Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word? windows express this quality seems to be their inherent tenHe is a brittle crazy glass; dency to be objects of gentleness and quietness, filtering out Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford harshness—the glare of the bright sun, the blare of noisy This glorious and transcendent place, To be a window, through thy grace. days—transforming cacophonies into muted symphonies.

Windows can also induce nostalgia, leading one back into But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story, the strangeness, the timelessness of memories, like those Making thy life to shine within times as a child when I would lace my fingers on the back of The holy preachers, then the light and glory that special white sofa, resting my chin on my knuckles, More reverend grows, and more doth win; elbows akimbo, and stare, just stare out of our large living Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin. room window in a kind of dreamlike trance at the comedy of neighbors and the lyrical drama of nature. So many things Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one seen while resting there, observing, such as: the irony of When they combine and mingle, bring autumn, of fiery leaves blossoming from the death of green; A strong regard and awe; but speech alone of the downfall of snowflakes weaving into a sparkling whiteDoth vanish like a flaring thing, And in the ear, not conscience, ring. ness over the world; of the mirror-like puddles of spring pool—George Herbert (1593–1633) ing over yellowish grass, reflecting dreams, and the hum of 6 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

AD EXTRA a r t i c l e s

a s i d e

Ignoring the Outcasts: How Plato Taught the Church to Tolerate Oppression

O

n June 24, 1921, a man by the name of John Henry William was burned to death on

such as Michael Horton have emphasized, is not a Saturday night. The Baltimore Afro-American described the climax of the scene: simply that Christians don’t walk the talk; the problem Flames flared up and found their way to William’s goes much further back, thousands of years, to a time when body. Now and again he cried aloud and his body Christians were eagerly merging the good news of Jesus went through horrible contortions. For a time the Christ with the philosophy of Plato. winds carried the flames and smoke directly in his face Platonism taught that the physical world down here— so that he could not speak. Later the winds shifted and including the body—is less real or valuable than the form members of the mob, unaffected, recognized the hymn world up above—the world of the mind. Many Christians he sang as, “Nearer My God to Thee.”1 came to associate sex and other bodily concerns with sininduced earthly mindedness. Suffering—the denial of the American Christians are used to reading such tales of firstbody—became an ideal for its own sake rather than somecentury Christian martyrs or sixteenth-century Protestant thing to be nobly endured if it was required to show love to martyrs. We do not like to acknowledge that hundreds of the neighbor. Asceticism became the Christian ideal, and Christians—both black and white, but like William prethose who were most godly became celibate monks. dominantly black—were martyred in one of the world’s At the same time, in the fourth century, Christians abanbastions of Protestantism: the American South. More than doned the heart of Christ’s assertion that “my kingdom is not one thousand people were lynched in the 1890s alone. One of this world” and united the faith with the power of empire. might question the use of the word “martyr” here, but I use A religion that emphasized the ideal of suffering and the it advisedly. Often these individuals were lynched by organcross now found itself exercising power over others, an izations such as the Ku Klux Klan because they testified exceedingly dangerous mix of ideals. The results were not whether in word or deed to the equality of all men and pretty. The cross was transformed from serving as a symbol women—black or white—in Christ Jesus. of the church’s suffering in love for God and for the lost to One of the great tragedies of church history is that the being a sign of the church’s conquest over pagan enemies: Southern churches did not speak out against such horrors “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the with anything resembling a clear voice. As they had during cross of Jesus going on before.” Christians in positions of years of slavery and would through years of white supremapower found themselves minimizing the bodily suffering of cist segregation, most white churches stammered weakly those subject to them while refusing to do much of signifiagainst extreme forms of racism, but never decisively chalcance about it. Such earthly things, after all, have only a limlenged racism itself as a matter of faith. Churches called slave ited importance. masters to stop raping female slaves and to respect slave marThe Reformation sought to break with these twin errors, riages by not selling one spouse without the other, or chilstressing the goodness of the body and of earthly vocations, dren without their parents, to different masters. But such and questioning, if weakly, the close collusion between secissues rarely became a matter of church discipline. In 1849, ular and spiritual power. John Calvin’s Geneva is well Ida B. Wells told British Christians about the silence of the known for its care for the poor, and Calvin himself spends church on lynching: “American Christians are too busy savmore time in the Institutes of the Christian Religion talking ing the souls of white Christians from burning in hell-fire to about the purpose and work of deacons than about that of save the lives of black ones from presently burning in fires elders. But in the seventeenth century, Platonism reared its kindled by white Christians.”2 ugly head again, this time in the form of the Enlightenment.

For anyone who has any familiarity with fundamentalReason ruled the day, and the intellect was again praised ist or conservative strains of American Christianity, such a above all bodily ideals. John Locke thus wrote, “It is the statement sounds plausible. And the problem, as theologians understanding that sets Man above the rest of sensible Beings, J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 7

and gives him all the Advantage and Dominion which he edged that apartheid is grounded in heresy—yes, they used has over them.”3 the word “heresy.” Racism and other forms of oppression are The result was that doctrines of human rights came to rest not simply faulty applications of the gospel. They are not on a conception of dignity that was itself derived from the idea simply problems of morals. They are denials of the gospel of intellectual merit. Those who were less rational—such as itself when occurring in the church. The refusal of the white savages and barbarians outside of Europe—were not denied Presbyterian Church to ordain black elders in the late nineequal humanity but were certainly denied equal respect and teenth century was a denial of the fact that in Christ Jesus protection. Thomas Jefferson defended the inequality of there is neither Greek nor Jew, neither slave nor free. It was blacks based on intellectual inferiority. The United States a denial of the promise that the gospel of Jesus Christ carries Supreme Court justified the oppression of blacks by asserting reconciling power. that blacks were not persons in the eyes of the law. Similar For the most part, Presbyterian and Reformed churches arguments would later be used to justify abortion in Roe v. have realized their errors in this area, but the problems are Wade, and prominent intellectuals now defend the murder of still with us, and we have much work to do if we are to imithe unborn by reasoning that since fetuses do not have develtate our Lord in reaching out to society’s outcasts. One is still oped rational capabilities, they do not possess the right to life. hard-pressed to find confessional Reformed or Presbyterian All of this is radically alien to the political theology of Calvin, churches that are not exclusively or almost exclusively who believed that everything governments do should be white and middle class. This should be questioned. Why is evaluated by the standard of it that the Reformed tradition charity, that is, Christian love. tends to thrive best among midWhat the two-kingdom doctrine dle-class, educated people? Is it We need to get back to talking about love and politics, and acaperhaps because we are more teaches us is not that the church influenced by a Platonized demic Christian ethicists like Timothy Jackson and Eric Christianity than we think we Gregory are doing it. Jackson has has no concern with these matters, are? Is it because when we developed a careful argument to preach Scripture we often do so the effect that human rights rest but that it approaches them in ways in a way that stresses the impornot on dignity but on the human tance of souls and heaven but entirely different from earthly need for and ability to give love minimizes the importance of as an expression of the image of the resurrection of the body, the coercive politics.

God. For Jackson, all persons new earth, and the very real who can receive and need love physical expression our faith must be loved by other persons and respected and defended must take here and now? by the state.

One of the more positive recent developments among But let me take us back to the Protestant churches in the Reformed churches is the revival of the old Reformation American South. Were Protestants really so influenced by two-kingdom doctrine. This doctrine affirms that Christ’s Platonism and the Enlightenment? Such is the argument kingdom is not of this world and should not ever be conof Kelly Brown Douglas in What’s Faith Got to Do With It? fused with the power of earthly kingdoms—which Christ Douglas writes this book with a clear purpose. She seeks to also rules but in a different way. It is designed to protect a answer the question, Why are black Americans so comperspective of respect for this earth, for the needs of the mitted to a religion that has consistently justified or minibody, and for human society and culture. But there is a danmized their oppression? Her answer is both controversial ger that the two-kingdom doctrine—in a manner similar to and highly plausible. She suggests that blacks rightly perthe doctrine of the spirituality of the church—will be preceive the difference between the Christian gospel and the sented in a Platonized version. I have seen it presented in way its white American professors have often twisted it. ways that suggest the church—the kingdom of God—is She argues powerfully that Platonism and its Enlightmerely about getting our souls to heaven and that the gospel enment variant did make American Protestants minimize is not concerned with the reconciliation of races or the endproblems of injustice and oppression even as they accepted ing of oppression. While it is true that the church must avoid positions of power. Racial segregation was sometimes involvement in the world’s power politics, to deny that the defended as befitting black inferiority, but even those gospel is directly interested in the end of injustice and Christians who challenged such claims often defended segoppression in the church is to fly in the face of biblical regation itself with the doctrine of the spirituality of the teaching from Genesis to Revelation. church, claiming that it is not the church’s business to be What the two-kingdom doctrine teaches us is not that the concerned with earthly injustice. After all, such things are church has no concern with these matters, but that it not as important as heavenly things. approaches them in ways entirely different from earthly coercive This problem is not unique to the American South. politics. That the church’s power is spiritual does not mean Reformed churches played a foundational role in the defense it is not relevant to this world; it means it is an expression of South African apartheid until they very recently acknowlof the power of the Holy Spirit, of the age to come rather 8 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

than of this age. In other words, that the church’s power is spiritual is a statement about means, not concerns. The church must not ally itself with earthly power and make use of coercion or power politics. The church preaches Christ crucified for salvation with all the elements that salvation entails— soul and body, individual and communal, before God and neighbor. These things the church must study and embody.

We must become that commonwealth, that nation of priests, led by our Lord and King Jesus, which God has called us to be—even if we do this as a pilgrim people, aliens in the kingdom of this world.

Millions in America and around the world are still suffering and oppressed. The church has often failed to preach the gospel to such people, failing to present that good news as Christ himself announced was his purpose. There is much

reconciling work to be done as we continue to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Matthew J. Tuininga (M.Div., Westminster Seminary California) is a doctoral student in ethics and society at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He is a licensed exhorter in the United Reformed Churches, and he and his family worship at All Saints Redeemer Church in Decatur, Georgia.

Cited in Kelly Brown Douglas, What’s Faith Got to Do With It?: Black Bodies/Christian Souls (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), 71.

2Cited in Douglas, 110.

3John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Book I.1.1, 43.

1

J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 9

INTERPRETING SCRIPTURE

Interpreting Scripture by Scripture

BY

10 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

M I C H A E L H O RT O N

I N T E R P R E T I N G

A

s Paul reminded Timothy, “All Scripture is inspired

by God and is [therefore] useful for teaching, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16)—all Scripture, not just our “life verses.”

At the same time, the Westminster Confession properly reminds us that not everything in Scripture is equally plain or equally important. We have to interpret the more difficult passages in the light of clearer ones. Scripture interprets Scripture, and we learn the whole meaning of Scripture by studying its parts and its parts by learning the whole. You need the box-top and the puzzle-pieces.

Of course, there is disagreement about which verses are “difficult” and which are “clear,” as well as which are more important. I think we’d all agree that the meaning of Christ’s descent into hell is less clear and less important than his incarnation, active and passive obedience, resurrection, ascension, and return. Nevertheless, on a host of other points the roads diverge. Most evangelicals would place church government in the “Who Cares?” category.

Far from being at the core of the faith, such a view was at least important enough to divide the Reformed tradition over Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational polities.

For Eastern Orthodoxy, episcopacy is essential to the very existence of the church, and Rome takes it one step further, insisting on the primacy of the bishop of Rome.

Even when it comes to the gospel, there are quite different assumptions at play. Eastern Orthodox churches think that the clear and important passages emphasize theosis—a process of being conformed to Christ-likeness that leads to final salvation through a combination of grace and free will. Roman Catholics have traditionally maintained that the clear and important passages teach the reconciliation of humanity in the church through its management of the treasury of merit.

Arminians think that the clear and important passages teach the primacy of God’s love (over other attributes), the universality of grace, and the libertarian free will of human beings. While Reformed theology never teaches God’s sovereignty (predestination) as a central dogma from which every other doctrine is deduced, the love of God and a libertarian view of free will do function that way in standard Arminian systems. Arminians often acknowledge a stand-off: Calvinists enshrine God’s sovereignty and predestination, while they make God’s universal love and human freedom normative. “You have your verses and we have ours,” is the oft-heard shrug that can only weaken the believer’s confidence in the unity, consistency, and reliability of Scripture.

Truth be told, we don’t have “our verses” and they don’t have “their verses.” God has “his verses,” and therefore all of them belong to “us.” If we have “our verses,” then not even these teach what we think they do. After all, Scripture interprets Scripture, and if we feel compelled to embrace some passages over others in order to maintain consistency, we haven’t really understood “our verses.”

Arminian theologians Clark Pinnock and John Sanders share the presupposition that all of God’s attributes are

S C R I P T U R E

B Y

S C R I P T U R E

subservient to his love and that his purpose is to save every person. In fact, he recognizes that these theses function as presuppositions or “axioms” by which exegesis must be tested.1 For example, from Arminian premises Pinnock defends “inclusivism”: the view that even apart from explicit faith in Christ, people are saved if they respond to the light they have been given. He adds, “I agree that inclusivism is not a central topic of discussion in the Bible and that the evidence for it is less than one would like. But the vision of God’s love there is so strong that the existing evidence seems sufficient to me.”2 Here Pinnock seems to admit that a general principle trumps the weak exegetical support of his position. The box-top is more important than the pieces of the puzzle.

For hyper-Calvinists, God’s sovereignty trumps other attributes, and predestination often marginalizes or even cancels out other passages that seem equally clear and important. For example, although Scripture just as clearly and emphatically teaches the universality of God’s external call through the gospel, God’s gracious care for all creatures, and the missionary imperative, hyper-Calvinists simply repeat the “TULIP” passages instead of seriously incorporating the whole teaching of Scripture into their faith and practice. For others, “Reformed” means transformation of every cultural sphere, even when that means marginalizing or even downplaying the soteriological questions that are at the heart of the Reformed confession.

More recently, some argue that “union with Christ,” not predestination, is the central dogma of Reformed theology.

“Central dogma,” however, has a particular meaning. It’s a thesis from which everything else is deduced, rather than a central teaching that emerges inductively from the whole teaching of Scripture.

In the history of Lutheran theology, justification has sometimes functioned as a central dogma that downplays or even contradicts other clear and important teachings of Scripture. Radicalizing Luther’s call to privilege in Scripture “whatever preaches Christ,” many liberal Protestants advanced a “canon-within-a-canon” hermeneutic. We need not accept everything in Scripture, but only that which proclaims Christ. Even in confessional Lutheranism, one may sometimes discern a tendency not only to give proper weight to the Bible’s own testimony to justification, but to treat it as a central dogma from which all other biblical teachings are deduced.

Some conservative evangelicals treat creationism and a literalistic hermeneutic in this manner, with strict dispensationalists reading the Bible primarily as a series of predictions concerning present-day Israel, Armageddon, and a literal millennium. At least in the older version, dominated by the Scofield Study Bible, the seven-dispensation scheme becomes a grid into which all of Scripture is pressed.

The Forest and the Trees n one hand, there is the danger of missing the forest for the trees. Treating the Bible as a catalogue of timeless principles, doctrines, and proverbs,

O

J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 1 1

not impose this unity on Scripture from without. We do not force the pieces to fit, even though deep to cancel out others in Scripture, we cannot endown we might think that they are contradictory. Scripture is shrine one attribute of God above others. There inherently unified in its basic plot and teachings. And yet revelation is a real danger in worshipping an attribute follows redemption. It keeps pace with the history of God’s unfolding rather than God himself. plan. God works differently in varsome expositors assume that they are just restating the ious periods with different covenants. Neither the unity Bible in so many words. A noted pastor once told me, nor the diversity is sacrificed to the other.

“When I’m preaching through the Sermon on the Mount, The Bible not only has diverse genres, it was written by I sound like a legalist; when I’m preaching through diverse human authors “in many times and in many Galatians, I sound like an antinomian.” Although this ways” (Heb 1:1). Because inspiration is organic rather sounds like fidelity to the text—wherever it leads us—it is than mechanical, Scripture reflects the humanity as well problematic for at least two reasons. First, it’s naive. No one as the divinity of its authorship. Galatians is not just a comes to the Bible without presuppositions. We all have restatement of the Sermon on the Mount. Yet both are some doctrinal framework we have acquired over years of part of the same new covenant canon. Therefore, they studying the Bible together with other believers in a simihave to be interpreted together. lar doctrinal background. Second, this assumption underWhen we do this, we discover more richly what each mines confidence in the unity of Scripture. Jesus did not actually means. In Galatians, Paul is talking about the teach legalism and Paul did not teach antinomianism. As an difference between the covenant of law (Sinai) that points apostle commissioned with the authority of Jesus himself forward to Christ by types and shadows, and the and writing under the Spirit’s inspiration, Paul’s message is Abrahamic covenant of promise that is realized in Christ Christ’s message. If we interpret the Sermon on the Mount as the seed in whom all the nations are blessed. In the as something completely unrelated (much less, contradicSermon on the Mount, Jesus is announcing a regime tory) to Galatians, then we haven’t gotten either right. change, as the old covenant theocracy (including its holy Many of us were raised in churches where the pastor wars) gives way to a new society of forgiven and blessed boasted that it took him years to get through one book. heirs who endure persecution and love their enemies for This is the glory of expository preaching, we were told. But Christ’s sake. Jesus and Paul are drawing us into exactly is that a good way to read a story? The historical books of the same reality of the kingdom of grace, though Jesus the Old Testament and the gospels of the New provide the does so as its inaugurator and Paul does so as an apostle, overarching narrative within which the laws and docexploring the ramifications within the unfolding plan of trines make sense. The Epistles are, well, epistles: letters God in history. that were addressed to a particular church (or group of churches) and were generally read aloud as such in pubRestless and Reformed: lic worship. We get a lot out of these letters when we hear Predestination/God’s Sovereignty them read in their entirety, yet it’s also important to ince the “central dogma” thesis cuts across tradiunpack the rich content week by week—always bringing tions, I might as well start with my own. Richard our people back to the basic argument. Typically, the hisMuller and other scholars have systematically distorical books and the Gospels have a storyline and the mantled the idea that predestination operates as a central Epistles have an argument (or series of arguments). But in dogma in Reformed theology. In fact, these historical thethis verse-by-verse approach, both the plot and the arguologians demonstrate that no doctrine functions like that ments can be easily lost to atomistic exegesis. in the Reformed system.

On the other hand, there is a danger of turning a legitNineteenth-century historical theology was especially imate—even important—biblical motif or doctrine into a drawn to the “Great Idea” approach: locating a central dogma from which everything else in the system could be central dogma from which we deduce everything else. This deduced, explained, and contrasted with rival systems. Of is missing the trees for the forest. If the danger in the first course, Calvin defended an Augustinian doctrine of God’s view is to focus on the pieces of the puzzle without the sovereignty and predestination when exegetical and box-top (a broader biblical and systematic theology), this polemical occasion required. This emphasis, however, can view suffers from a tendency to marginalize or even ignore hardly be considered a central dogma from which the important aspects of “the whole counsel of God.” whole system is deduced, especially when it is not even Scripture is a canon. Although it is properly said that mentioned in his summary of the Christian faith (the the Bible is more of a library than a book, because of its Geneva Catechism). Nevertheless, God’s sovereignty and diverse genres and authorship spread over many times and predestination became a way of explaining or criticizing places, there is a unity inherent within the Bible. We do

Just as we can’t use one passage or list of verses

S

12 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

I N T E R P R E T I N G

Calvin and Reformed theology, by friend and foe alike. By contrast, the entire Lutheran system was allegedly deduced from the doctrine of the justification of the ungodly.

Especially in cases of fresh discovery, it’s understandable that God’s sovereign grace swallows our whole horizon. It changes everything. We begin to see passages we had overlooked before. It’s a paradigm shift. But that’s exactly why we have to be careful at just that point: a paradigm can arise naturally from a fresh reading of Scripture or it can be imposed upon Scripture from without. For example, if one has been raised to believe that salvation depends on the individual’s free will, predestination reasserts God’s freedom. God is free to elect and to condemn. But is this merely because God is sovereign? Of course not. There is a kind of teaching of the sovereignty of God that is close to an arbitrary portrait. No, in Scripture we learn that God is free to elect whom he will and to condemn the rest because everyone deserves condemnation. In other words, God’s sovereignty cannot be separated from his justice and righteousness—or from any other attribute, including his love. Just as we can’t use one passage or list of verses to cancel out others in Scripture, we cannot enshrine one attribute of God above others. There is a real danger in worshipping an attribute rather than God himself.

When predestination is made the central dogma, Christianity becomes indistinguishable from Islam. I’ve seen and heard a few hyper-Calvinist presentations that extolled the sovereignty of God without ever mentioning Jesus Christ. And yet Calvin said that it is only in Christ that we find our election. I have also heard presentations in which God’s activity in condemnation was treated as equivalent to his activity in salvation. This, however, ignores the clear biblical teaching that has chosen some to be saved from the mass of condemned humanity. There are lots of passages that celebrate God’s mercy in electing grace.

But God is praised as directly and solely responsible for the salvation of the elect, not as directly and solely responsible for the condemnation of the nonelect. That is why the Canons of the Synod of Dort (1618–19)—from which we get the so-called “five points of Calvinism”—affirm that “Reformed churches detest with their whole heart” the view that God is as involved in damnation as he is in salvation. When predestination or the sovereignty of God is made the foundation on which we build a skyscraper of a theological system, we end up picking out some passages of Scripture to stand over others in judgment. It becomes a canon within a canon. This is something Reformed orthodoxy never allowed.

Critics, however, may be forgiven for thinking otherwise. First, there is a growing tendency right now to reduce Reformed theology to the five points of Calvinism.

Sometimes the impression is given that anyone who believes in predestination is Reformed. Of course, that would make Thomas Aquinas as Reformed as R. C. Sproul!

However, these “five points” are themselves a summary of the Canons of Dort, which are much richer and fuller than

S C R I P T U R E

B Y

S C R I P T U R E

that summary. Furthermore, the Canons were drawn up

by Reformed Christians on the Continent (with representatives from the Church of England) as a refutation of Arminianism. They serve along with the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism as a standard for Reformed faith and practice, subordinate to Scripture. The Westminster Standards confess the same faith. Whenever the whole council of God is reduced to a few “fundamentals,” we lose the richness and depth of those very doctrines. Furthermore, when these doctrines are isolated from the broader system of faith and practice, they yield easily to one-sided emphases.

Second, critics often paint Calvinism as hyperCalvinism. And, unfortunately, they may actually encounter people who embody this caricature. Falling into extremes is always a temptation for new converts.

There are popular versions on the ground that do make God’s sovereignty or predestination the center of Scripture.

Of course, we have to interpret Scripture in the light of Scripture. It may be confusing for some people to read verses like this alongside other equally clear passages concerning God’s unconditional election. The problem, however, lies with us. The Spirit who inspired “all Scripture” employs the richly diverse voices of different biblical writers—each with his own personality, style, and even beliefs—while nevertheless teaching a unified message.

God indeed knows how to communicate “in many times and in many ways,” yet without contradiction. So we must beware of flattening out biblical teaching, as if it taught only one truth or even concentrated on one truth.

At the same time, we have to be careful not to turn diversity into contradiction.

Just as often these days, neophyte Calvinists have begun to realize the wealth of classical Reformed emphasis on union with Christ. Perhaps this, rather than predestination, is the central dogma. Among others, such as Max Goebel, Matthias Schneckenburger (1804–48) was particularly successful in defining Reformed Christianity as the champion of union with Christ over and against the Lutheran emphasis on forensic justification.3 This is sometimes used to critique or reevaluate the ordo salutis by contemporary Reformed thinkers.

Surely, if there is any central dogma in Scripture, it is Christ. However, not even Christ’s person and work function as a central dogma. There is an important difference between the centrality of Christ’s person and work in Scripture and a central dogma. A central dogma is a thesis from which everything else is deduced. Such a dogma may even be biblical. But when it functions as a central dogma, it distorts instead of illuminating everything around it.

Reformed exegesis does not start with predestination, the sovereignty of God, justification, or union with Christ.

Its system arises from Scripture rather than being imposed upon Scripture. It does not, however, pretend merely to interpret individual passages apart from an account of the Bible’s own broader motifs. There are three hermeneutiJ U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 1 3

When we read the Bible in the light of its plot, things begin to fall into place. Behind every story, piece of wisdom, hymn, exhortation, and prophecy is the unfolding mystery of Christ and his redemptive work.

this address does not become an experience within our control on the basis of which we can read through the Bible and test whether it “sets forth Christ.” Calvin read the whole Bible expecting to find Christ there.4

Redemptive-Historical Interpretation he same can be said of looking for Christ in all the Scriptures. This has become something of a mantra in Reformed as well as in Lutheran circles. Wilhelm Niesel observes:

Again, this healthy emphasis can become a distortion when it is the focus of exegesis rather than an interpretive lens.

Sometimes we are bewildered by the diversity of the Bible, wondering how Leviticus or Esther bears any relation to the Gospel of Matthew or to Romans. What is the thread that pulls together all of the narratives, laws and wisdom, prophecy, poetry, instruction and exhortation?

There really is a unifying message from Genesis to Revelation, and it is Christ who brings all of the threads together. When we read the Bible in the light of its plot, things begin to fall into place. Behind every story, piece of wisdom, hymn, exhortation, and prophecy is the unfolding mystery of Christ and his redemptive work.

Jesus himself told us how to read the Bible—all of it.

The Pharisees were the guardians of the Bible. For their followers, they were its authoritative interpreters. Yet for them the Bible was primarily a story about Sinai: the covenant that Israel pledged to fulfill all of the commands of his law. It was not the subplot—the “schoolmaster” leading to Christ, as Paul described—but the main thing.

When the Messiah finally arrived, he would drive out the Romans and reinstitute the Jewish theocracy. The Messiah was a means to an end, not—as Paul called Christ—“the end of the law.”

Jesus himself told the religious leaders, “You search the scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:39).

Jesus taught his disciples to read the whole Bible (at that point, the Old Testament) in terms of promise and fulfillment, with himself as the central character (Luke 24:25– 27; 44–45). No matter how well they had memorized certain Bible verses or how quickly they could recall key moments in Israel’s history, the Bible was a mystery to them before Jesus explained it as his story.

Christ is the thread that weaves together all of the various strands of biblical revelation. Apart from him, the plot falls apart into a jumble of characters, unrelated stories, inexplicable laws, and confusing prophecies. The disciples finally seemed to understand this point, since the gospel went from Jerusalem to the Gentile world through their witness. Even Peter, who had denied Christ three times, was able later to write as an apostle:

Reformed theology, just like Lutheran, knows that it is God’s Word which addresses us from the Bible and produces faith and that this Word is Christ himself. But

Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or

cal (interpretive) motifs that we believe arise naturally from the Scriptures themselves: a law-gospel distinction, redemptive-historical exegesis centering on Christ, and a covenantal scheme.

Law and Gospel hen law and gospel function as a central dogma, every sermon—regardless of the passage—sounds the same. Somehow, the sermon has to conform to “Here’s how you’ve blown it” and “Here’s how Christ saves you.” As preaching goes, this may not be the worst thing in the world, but it is not itself an exposition of Scripture.

The Reformers affirmed the importance of distinguishing between law and gospel. It is one of those basic distinctions that a preacher or reader of Scripture must bear in mind when coming to any passage. Nevertheless, it is the passage that must be interpreted. We are not exegeting the categories of law and gospel but the Scriptures in the light of that important distinction.

The third use of the law (to guide believers) is affirmed in the Lutheran as well as Reformed confessions. Our preaching and reading of Scripture should not be embarrassed by the calls in Scripture to wise and grateful living.

Sometimes imperatives die the death of a thousand qualifications, worried as we understandably are that imperatives can lead to self-righteousness or despair. I’ve been reading through Proverbs in family devotions, and while there are remarkable places where Christ is personified as Wisdom, a lot of the book is simply wisdom for daily living. We have to beware of overreacting against one form of reductionism (using the Bible as a handbook for daily principles), only to fall into another form (ignoring its wisdom for daily living). Always bearing the proper distinction between law and gospel, aware that each does different things, we nevertheless need to listen to every word that comes from the mouth of God.

W

T

14 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

I N T E R P R E T I N G

time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look. (1 Pet. 1:10–12) God’s eternal Son is present at the beginning of the story at creation (John 1:1–3; Col. 1:15–20). He is the Rock struck in the wilderness for Israel’s sins (1 Cor. 10:4).

And in the Bible’s closing book he is God’s last Word, too: “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forever more, and I have the keys of Death and Hades” (Rev. 1:17–18). In the heavenly scene, only the Lamb was able to open the scroll containing the revelation of all of history: “And they sang a new song, saying, ‘Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth.”

And everyone in heaven fell down before the Lamb in worship (Rev. 5:9–14). That is the goal of God’s good news.

Many of us were raised in churches that didn’t quite know what to do with the Old Testament, except perhaps to find moral examples: “Dare to be a Daniel!” When we read the Bible in the light of the unfolding plot of redemption around Christ, otherwise unrelated books become a unified canon. Nevertheless, as with law and gospel, a redemptive-historical approach can sometimes turn every sermon into the same sermon. Regardless of the passage, the message is basically creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. Ironically, the very goal of redemptivehistorical preaching is not met, because believers are not led to see how this passage fits within the broader history of God’s purposes in Christ.

Covenantal Scheme eformed theology is covenant theology. God’s unfolding purposes in Christ are realized in a covenantal relationship. Furthermore, classic Reformed theology discerns in Scripture three overarching covenants: the covenant of redemption, made in eternity between the persons of the Godhead with Christ as the mediator of the elect; the covenant of works, made with Adam as the federal representative of humanity; and the covenant of grace, made with believers and their children in Christ as the last Adam.

Once again, this covenant theology can be read out of the Scriptures or it can be imposed upon the Scriptures. In the major Reformed systems, these covenants form the architecture. We don’t always see the architecture of a building—its supporting framework and columns.

Similarly, these covenants are not always explicit in every passage. We need not turn every sermon into a covenant

R

S C R I P T U R E

B Y

S C R I P T U R E

theology lecture in order to interpret the Scriptures covenantally. As with the distinction between law-andgospel and redemptive-historical interpretation, the Bible’s covenant theology is something that we read out of Scripture and bring with us as preachers, hearers, and readers of each text. But we must hear each text, not just repetitions of covenant theology.

There is therefore no “canon within a canon”—all Scripture is God-breathed and therefore useful (that is, canonical) for norming the church’s faith and practice. We need the box-top and the pieces, the forest and the trees.

In fact, it’s the pieces that make up the puzzle and the trees that make up the forest. We need to recover our confidence that the Father who inspired these texts by his Spirit, with his Son as its central content, is Lord of the parts and of the whole. ■

Michael Horton is J. Gresham Machen Professor of Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido).

Clark Pinnock, “Overcoming Misgivings about Evangelical Inclusivism,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, vol. 2, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 33–34.

2Pinnock, 35.

3Matthias Schneckenburger, Vergleichende Darstellung des lutherischen und reformirten Lehrbegriffs, ed. Eduard Güder, 2 vols.

(Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1855).

4Wilhelm Niesel, Reformed Symbolics: A Comparison of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism, trans. David Lewis (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962), 229.

1

Speaking Of…

“T

he primary rule of hermeneutics was called ‘the analogy of faith.’ The

analogy of faith is the rule that Scripture is to interpret Scripture: Sacra Scriptura sui interpres (Sacred Scripture is its own interpreter). This means, quite simply, that no part of Scripture can be interpreted in such a way as to render it in conflict with what is clearly taught elsewhere in Scripture.”

—R. C. Sproul

J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 1 5

INTERPRETING SCRIPTURE

Ten Theses on the Theological Interpretation of Scripture

Introduction: The Ugly Divorce between Theology and Biblical Studies ccording to David Bebbington’s well-known definition, “biblicism” is one of the four marks of evangelicalism, along with substitutionary atonement, conversion, and activism. For years, one of the chief questions fueling my work has been: What does it mean to be biblical? During this time, I witnessed the so-called “battle for the Bible” played out in and between evangelical (and Southern Baptist) churches and seminaries over inerrancy. Today I am involved in a new battle for the Bible, or rather over Bible reading. The issue this time is not inerrancy but interpretation, and the combatants are not conservatives and liberals but biblical scholars and systematic theologians.

“Battle” may be too bellicose a term, though at times the discussion between different academic disciplines does resemble a kind of entrenched warfare, with neither side able to speak the language of the other with fluency.

Moreover, family feuds are often the most painful and intense, especially when what is at stake is possession of the family jewels: the authoritative Scripture of the Old and New Testaments. Whose inspired line is it? Which guild, the exegetical or the dogmatic, is the better keeper of the flame of biblical Christianity?

A

16 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

The answer, for many, is a no-brainer: of course biblical scholars are closer to the Bible, not least by definition. But this assumes that being biblical means being textual in a particular way. Many biblical scholars, however, are content to read the Bible like any other ancient text, studying the original languages and situating texts in their original historical contexts. Often this involves applying critical approaches that bring new historical knowledge to bear on the text’s interpretation. Does recovering a text’s “natural history,” so to speak, enable us to discern the Word of God? Can the grammatical-historical method get beyond descriptions of Israelite and early Christian religion in order to read the Bible as Scripture—as God’s self-communication?

Something new is happening in biblical interpretation—or rather, something old that had disappeared is making a comeback. After two centuries of captivity to Berlin (the university where the divorce between biblical studies and systematic theology became official), some exegetes are beginning to return to Jerusalem to read the Bible in canonical (and ecclesial) context as a unified Word of God to the church today.

BY

K E V I N J . VA N H O O Z E R

T E N

T H E S E S

O N

As with all broken relationships, there are two sides to the story, and to suggest that biblical scholars alone have dropped the ball is only half the truth. If biblical scholars have been insufficiently theological, then theologians have been insufficiently biblical. The temptation for theologians is to read the biblical text in ways that confirm one’s prejudices (and confessional frameworks). Alas, the text offender you will always have with you. Revisionist and conservative theologians alike too often give the impression that they are unwilling to let particular biblical texts get in the way of their marching truth and sweeping generalizations.

Neither the divorce between biblical studies and theology nor the vilification of one by the other of these disciplines serves the church. The fact is that many biblical scholars seek to be faithful to the Bible precisely by attending to its language and historical context. The question is whether and to what extent their Christian faith is operational rather than merely notional when it comes to the thick of the exegetical process. In order to be biblical in its faith, thought, and life, the church needs to know both how to read the Bible as Scripture and something about the tradition of its orthodox interpretation. Exegetes and theologians must work together to develop biblical and theological literacy: canon sense and catholic sensibility.

Ten Theses ebbington’s quadrilateral you know, less so Vanhoozer’s decahedral, a ten-point checklist for fledgling theological interpreters of Scripture. The ten theses are arranged in five pairs: the first term in each pair is properly theological, focusing on some aspect of God’s communicative agency; the second draws out its implications for hermeneutics and biblical interpretation.1

B

1. The nature and function of the Bible are insufficiently grasped unless and until we see the Bible as an element in the economy of triune discourse.2 Those who approach the Bible as Scripture must not abstract it from the Father who ultimately authors it, the Son to whom it witnesses, and the Spirit who inspired and illumines it. Theological interpretation acknowledges the priority of God’s communicative activity as well as the integrity of human authorship. That the Bible is (a) a word of God that (b) speaks to readers in their own day captures the two most important assumptions that all ancient readers implicitly adopted.3 2. An appreciation of the theological nature of the Bible entails a rejection of a methodological atheism that treats the texts as having a “natural history” only.

The Bible is like and unlike other books: like other books, the Bible has authors; unlike other books, its primary author is God. Hence what I call the analogia lectionis or “analogy of reading”: the similarity in reading the Bible like other books is marked by an even greater dissimilarity due to its character as the Word of God. Moreover, God

T H E

T H E O L O G I C A L

I N T E R P R E T A T I O N

O F

S C R I P T U R E

is a living author who intends our participation in his communicative act. Reading the Bible is part of our creaturely and covenantal relationship to God, hence the doctrines that speak to that relationship (for example, sin, regeneration, sanctification, ecclesiology, and so forth) also have a bearing on the act of reading.4 3. The message of the Bible is “finally” about the loving power of God for salvation (Rom. 1:16), the definitive or final gospel Word of God that comes to brightest light in the Word’s final form.

The God who authored Scripture sends his Son and Spirit into the dramatic storyline. The God who led Israel out of Egypt is the same God who raised Jesus from the dead; the one Exodus anticipates the other. This in contrast to Walter Brueggemann’s defiant claim: “It is clear on my reading that the Old Testament is not a witness to Jesus Christ, in any primary or direct sense.”5 Jesus himself interpreted “in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27) and rebuked those who search the Scriptures for eternal life while ignorant of the fact that they bear witness to him (John 5:39).

4. Because God acts in space-time (Israel, Jesus Christ, and the church), theological interpretation requires thick descriptions that plumb the height and depth of history, not only its length.

An exegetical method is only as rich as its conception of history. Exegetes are not outside the world described by the Bible looking in; on the contrary, the Bible describes our world, our history. Adolf Schlatter dedicated himself to enabling biblical scholarship to deal with the presence and work of God in history. However, modern biblical scholarship has by and large hobbled itself to a purely immanent understanding of history as atomistic and linear. In contrast to this thin conception, theological interpreters insist that to be in history is to participate in the field of God’s communicative activity. This gives a very different spin to grammatical-historical exegesis, for “historical” now includes “a participation in realities known by faith.”6 5. Theological interpreters view the historical events recounted in Scripture as ingredients in a unified story ordered by an economy of triune providence.

There is no square inch of human history that is extrinsic to the mission fields of Son and Spirit. The biblical authors are witnesses to a coherent series of events ultimately authored by God. This series of events involves both divine words and divine deeds and, as such, is both revelatory and redemptive.

6. The Old Testament testifies to the same drama of redemption as the New Testament, hence the church rightly reads both testaments together, two parts of a single authoritative script.

Again, this hermeneutical thesis follows from the preceding theological claim. What unifies the canon is Divine J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 1 7

heart” (Heb. 4:12). It can also circumcise our hearts, renew our minds, and transform us (Rom. nity with its own set of idiosyncratic interests, 12:2). We need to recover the practice of reading Scripture in but the divinely appointed context wherein God order to renew our mission and reform our habits. The theologiministers new life via his Word and Spirit. cal interpretation of the Bible is as much if not more a matter of Providence and this in two senses: formally, the Bible is the spiritual formation as it is a procedure readers work on the product of divine authorship; materially, the subject mattext: “God’s employment of the words of Scripture to be an ter of the Bible is the history of God’s covenant faithfulinstrument of his own communicative presence, by which ness. It is the story of how God keeps his word: to Adam, process they are made holy, has its goal and essential counNoah, Abraham, Moses, David, and so on. It follows that terpart in God’s formation of a holy people.”9 the Old and New Testaments are connected at a profound level, for the one story of God’s faithfulness to his 10. The church is that community where good habits of covenant promise is told in two parts. The typological theological interpretation are best formed and where the connections that link the two testaments are grounded on fruit of these habits are best exhibited.

God’s acting consistently through time.7 The Bible’s communicative aim is to foster communion with God and with one another. God calls the church into being to be the community that facilitates this happening.

7. The Spirit who speaks with magisterial authority in the The church is not one more interpretive community with Scripture speaks with ministerial authority in church traits own set of idiosyncratic interests, but the divinely dition. appointed context wherein God ministers new life via his We owe the insight into the unity of the Old and New Word and Spirit. Strictly speaking, “Scripture” makes no Testaments to precritical readers—Fathers and Reformsense apart from the community whose life, thought, and ers—who developed and maintained the Rule of Faith practice it exists to rule and shape. that generated in turn a typological Rule for Reading, in Scholars know deep down that they can and should do which earlier events and persons prefigured later aspects of better than stay within the safe confines of their specialthe person and work of Christ. What might otherwise izations: “For I have the desire to do what is right, but not seem to be an arbitrary history of diverse interpretations the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the interpretive looks different when viewed theologically, for example, as good I want, but the historical-criticism or proof-texting I the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise to send his Spirit to guide do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I his followers into all truth (John 16:13). Viewed in the condo not want, it is no longer I who do it, but interpretive text of the triune economy of communication, the Spirit is habits that have been drilled into me. Wretched reader the prime minister of scriptural understanding, the Rule of that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of secondFaith a prime means of the Spirit’s ministry of the Word.8 ary literature?” Thanks be to God, there is a way forward: the way, truth, and life of collaboration in Christ, where 8. In an era marked by the conflict of interpretations, sainthood and scholarship coexist, and where theological there is good reason provisionally to acknowledge the exegesis and exegetical theology are mutually supportive superiority of catholic interpretation. and equally important.

The Word of God addresses the one church, local and universal; we are not the first generation to receive illuConclusion: Toward Theological Exegesis mination. It is a bold critic who is prepared to identify his he way forward is to tear in two the disciplinary curown interpretation with “what the Bible says” even when tain that divides biblical studies from theology in the it flies in the face of the Great Tradition. One need not conivory temple, so to effect a reconciliation of these clude from the history of textual effects that the Bible’s alienated parties. Between the original languages and the meaning has changed, only that communities in different doctrinal propositions of the Bible lie various forms of bibtimes and places have searched the Scriptures from their respective situations, enriching our understanding of the lical literature. The literary forms of the Bible are lenses that literal sense. school our imaginations to see and grasp things as wholes: the individual books as a whole, the connection between 9. The end of biblical interpretation is not simply commuthe books and, most importantly, our own world in light of nication—the sharing of information—but communion, a the world of the biblical text. Those who wish to be “bibsharing in the light, life, and love of God. lical” would do well to remember this literary level.

The Word of God is not mocked: we may think we can Theological exegesis is not less but more than grammatical. master it, but it is “living and active,” turning the spotlight Meaning occurs not only on the level of the sentence but on us, “discerning the thoughts and intentions of [our] also of the genre as a whole, which is why our interpre-

The church is not one more interpretive commu-

T

18 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

T E N

T H E S E S

O N

tation must be “lettered,” adept at interpreting the whole panoply of the Bible’s literary forms.

Theological exegesis is not less but more than historical.

Everything depends on exegetes having a theologically “thick” view of history as the field of God’s communicative activity. It is precisely because of this broader divine economy “that the ultimate meaning of texts cannot be simply handed over to the critical biblical scholar.”10 Theological exegesis aims for both understanding and communion with God. To renew our evangelical mission to be a people of the book, then, we must conform our minds, wills, and hearts to the forms of thinking, doing, and feeling inscribed in Scripture. Being biblical is not simply a matter of grasping propositions but rather of learning certain cognitive, volitional, and affective dispositions that are part and parcel of what the Bible communicates.

Understanding without communion is empty; communion without understanding is blind. Joel Green’s comment continues to haunt: “No amount of linguistic training or level of expertise in historical and textual analysis can supersede the more essential ‘preparation’ entailed in such dispositions and postures as acceptance, devotion, attention, and trust.”11 The chief end of biblical studies and theology is to minister understanding of God’s Word. If current disciplinary structures and procedures get in the way of this end, then seminary faculties will need the courage to go against the institutional grain for the sake of forming theological interpreters of Scripture able to minister the Word, even if this means a loss of academic respectability.

It is best to view the new interest in theological interpretation of Scripture in relation to the old task of training ministers of the gospel. Exegesis and theology alike serve the task of Christian proclamation: that distinctive talk about the triune God and the gospel of Jesus Christ that the Bible both generates and governs. The preacher is a “man on a wire,” whose sermons must walk the tightrope between Scripture and the contemporary situation, bringing God’s Word to bear on all of life. The pastortheologian should be evangelicalism’s default public intellectual, with preaching the preferred public mode of theological interpretation of Scripture.12 The health of the church depends on it. ■ Editorial Note: For more discussion on biblical studies and theology, see the interview with D. A. Carson on page 32.

Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Ph.D., Cambridge University) is the Blanchard Professor of Theology at the Wheaton College Graduate School in Wheaton, Illinois. He is the author or editor of sixteen books, including The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Westminster John Knox, 2005; named best theology book of 2006 by Christianity Today), Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and of the forthcoming Pictures at a Biblical Exhibition: Theological

T H E

T H E O L O G I C A L

I N T E R P R E T A T I O N

O F

S C R I P T U R E

Scenes of the Church’s Worship, Witness, and Wisdom (InterVarsity Press, 2010).

For overviews of the emerging field of theological interpretation of the Bible, see J. Todd Billings, The Word of God for the People of God: An Entryway to the Theological Interpretation of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010); Mark Alan Bowald, Rendering the Word in Theological Hermeneutics: Mapping Divine and Human Agency (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007); Stephen Fowl, Theological Interpretation of Scripture (Cascade Companion, 2009); Daniel J. Treier, Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Renewing a Christian Practice (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008).

2See my “Triune Discourse: Theological Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks,” in David Lauber and Daniel J. Treier, eds., Trinitarian Theology for the Church: Scripture, Community, Worship (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 25–78.

3So James Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (Free Press, 2007), 14–16.

4See John Webster, “Hermeneutics in Modern Theology: Some Doctrinal Reflections,” in Word and Church: Essays in Christian Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2001), 47–86.

5Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 107.

6Matthew Levering, Participatory Biblical Exegesis: A Theology of Biblical Interpretation (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2008), 6.

7In his Brazos Theological Commentary, for example, Peter Leithart uses typology to show how the text “points to, anticipates, and foreshadows the gospel of Jesus the Christ” (1 & 2 Kings [Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006], 20).

8The authority of the Rule ultimately rests on its conformity to the biblical text, not community consensus. For a further discussion, see my The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 203–10.

9Murray Rae, “On Reading Scripture Theologically,” Princeton Theological Review 2008, no. 1, 23.

10C. Stephen Evans, “The Bible and the Academy,” in David Lyle Jeffrey and Evans, eds., The Bible and the University (Grand Rapids and Milton Keynes, UK: Zondervan and Paternoster, 2007), 310.

11Joel Green, Seized by Truth: Reading the Bible as Scripture (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 65.

12A longer version of this article, titled “Interpreting Scripture between the Rock of Biblical Studies and the Hard Place of Systematic Theology: The State of the Evangelical (Dis)union,” will be published in a collection, to be edited by Richard Lints, of papers that were originally presented at the “Renewing the Evangelical Mission” conference at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in October 2009.

1

J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 1 9

INTERPRETING SCRIPTURE

Navigating Old Waters through the Fog of the New Atheism Biblical Slavery and Understanding the Text

T

he Bible has long been considered by Christians to be the inspired revelation of God’s loving plan of redemptive history. It is also thought by many to be a source of moral wisdom for disciples of Jesus to live faithfully. Nevertheless, there have been and probably always will be critics of the Christian faith who ridicule the Bible in general and its ethics in particular. Some of these suggest that the desire for Christians to apply the teaching of the Bible in our day is something that ought to be shunned and abandoned altogether. One such group, often dubbed the “New Atheists,” has given renewed attention, passion, disdain, and warning to what they consider the moral ineptness of the Bible. Some consider this form of atheism “new” because the tenor has changed with respect to the kind of critiques given to religious beliefs in general. Once it was considered irrational to believe in God. The “New Atheists” have moved beyond concerns of irrationality to suggest that religious belief in general is morally dangerous and ought not to be tolerated in civilized society.

More specifically, some have highlighted passages in the Bible that certainly appear to be at odds with our presentday sense of morality. These thinkers argue that the Bible 20 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

supports practices and viewpoints that are clearly immoral and downright reprehensible. Among many other issues often appealed to, the subject of slavery is one that comes to the fore. For example, well-known speaker and popular author Sam Harris has claimed: In assessing the moral wisdom of the Bible, it is useful to consider moral questions that have been solved to everyone’s satisfaction. Consider the question of slavery. The entire civilized world now agrees that slavery is an abomination. What moral instruction do we get of Abraham on this subject? Consult the Bible, and you will discover that the creator of the universe clearly expects us to keep slaves.1 He then cites several verses of Scripture from both testaments, such as Leviticus 25:44–46, Exodus 21:7–11, Ephesians 6:5, and 1 Timothy 6:1–4, to make his point about the Bible’s explicit support and promotion of slavery. In light of the biblical teaching on this subject, Harris

BY

P A T R I C K T. S M I T H

N A V I G A T I N G

O L D

highlights what he takes to be irresolvable tensions in the orthodox Christian understanding of the goodness of God, the inspiration of the Bible, and the immorality of slavery as understood in our modern day. The problem that Harris raises can be made more overt when we attempt to formalize his argument in the following way: 1. The Bible is inspired by God. 2. God is an all-loving, morally perfect being.

3. Therefore, the Bible is inspired by an all-loving, morally perfect being.

So far so good, it would seem. But then…

4. Slavery is morally reprehensible.

5. The Bible promotes and supports slavery.

6. Therefore, the Bible promotes and supports what is morally reprehensible.

This preliminary conclusion, of course, should be troubling to many Christians. Moreover, if statements 3 and 6 are correct, then we have a further negative implication.

7. Therefore, an all-loving, morally perfect being promotes and supports what is morally reprehensible.

If this line of reasoning is correct, then it does not take much to see that statement 7 is problematic. Given that Harris thinks the Bible does promote and support slavery, Christians would be hard pressed to acknowledge that God can be all-good, the Bible is inspired by him, and that moral outrage can be expressed at slavery at the same time. To be explicitly clear: 8. If the Bible promotes and supports slavery, then either God is not an all-loving, morally perfect being or God did not inspire the Bible or slavery is not morally reprehensible.

It would seem that something would have to give; therefore pick your poison, so to speak. He takes this conundrum for Christians to reinforce the idea that not only is appeal to the Bible unnecessary, it is detrimental for contemporary morality.

Harris thinks these ethical difficulties are insurmountable as indicated by his statement that “nothing in Christian theology remedies the appalling deficiencies of the Bible on what is perhaps the greatest—and easiest— moral question our society has ever had to face.”2 Navigating through the Fog s it really the case that “nothing in Christian theology remedies [these] appalling deficiencies”? I think this is a bit overstated. It is not as if these passages have not had any theological and ethical reflection given to them in the history of Christian thought. Nevertheless, we must be careful not to gloss over these texts and give soft inter-

I

W A T E R S

T H R O U G H

T H E

F O G

O F

T H E

N E W

A T H E I S M

pretations that do not take into account the harsh realities of the social-cultural context in which the biblical texts on slavery speak. To do so would be disingenuous.

So what can be said in response to Harris’s claims as expressed in the argument given above? Given space limitations, perhaps the best way to approach the matter at hand is to highlight some broad features concerning the biblical teaching on slavery that can mitigate the force of the above argument with respect to premises 4 and 5.

Before fleshing out the details here, let me first say with respect to premise 4 that slavery shows up in different forms often with different connotations. As odd as it may seem initially, while not ideal, it is not immediately clear that we should acknowledge the fact that biblical slavery is “morally reprehensible.” To determine this we need to know the details of how the specific form of slavery was understood and practiced. With respect to premise 5, it should be noted that a proper understanding of the biblical texts shows that the authors of Scripture actually sowed the seeds that would ultimately, though subtly, uproot the institution of slavery in the broader cultural context. The primary consideration is to understand how the biblical teaching differs in morally significant ways from American slavery in the antebellum South and the forms of slavery as practiced in the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) context.

To begin, we should note that the Hebrew term often translated as “slave” in the Old Testament has a wide semantic field that also can be translated as “servant,” “maidservant,” or “worker,” without overall loss of meaning when one understands the concept to which it refers.

The biblical concept here should not be confused with American slavery. As prominent biblical scholar Douglas K. Stuart writes, “When the law was properly followed, persons who were servants/slaves/workers/employees held their positions by reason of a formal contract that related primarily to the job that they had ‘signed up’ to perform, for a period of time, much as one enlists in the military today.”3 This scenario is much different from those practices that “involved the stealing of people of a different race from their homelands, transporting them in chains to a new land, selling them to an owner who possessed them for life without obligation to any restrictions and who could resell them to someone else,”4 as was the case with American slavery. Although there were practices of this nature in the ancient world, the biblical teaching did not permit this behavior among God’s people.

It must be acknowledged, though, that slaves were referred to as being property in the biblical text (cf. Exod.

21: 20–21). As deplorable as it sounds to our modern ears, however, we need to understand the language of people being “bought” and “sold” in light of the institution of slavery in the ANE. A helpful analogy may be found in our modern sports terminology where “players are not actually the property of the team that ‘owns’ them except as regards the exclusive right to their employment as players of that sport.”5 The fact remains that all persons in these categories were to be protected under God’s covenant law.

J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 2 1

Furthermore, slaves in Israel were afforded a number of legal and human rights that differed markedly from the perspectives of the Ancient Near East. First, the Mosaic Law forbade kidnapping people in order to sell them as slaves.

This was considered a capital offense (Deut. 24:7).

Additionally, slaves were not to be oppressed (Deut. 23:15– 16; cf. Exod. 22:21). Also, slaves who were wounded by their masters in certain ways were released as compensation for their injuries (Exod. 21:26–27). Moreover, debt slavery was one common form of service in the Old Testament: individuals or families who had a debt and did not have the means to repay, or those who committed some type of criminal offense (Exod. 22:3), could be “selfsold,” meaning that they offered their labor power as a means of fulfilling the obligation or making restitution. At the end of the seventh year, all debts of Hebrew slaves were to be cancelled (Deut. 15). Although non-Hebrew slaves were not automatically released during the sabbatical year, there was provision made for their being manumitted or formally emancipated. All of these modifications to a large extent were unparalleled in the ANE context. The New Testament teaching also condemns slave trading (1 Tim. 1:10). The apostle Paul emphasizes that persons’ “lower social standing does not diminish [their] value in God’s eyes either as human beings or as Christian believers”6 (Gal. 3:28; Col. 3:11). To be sure, slavery in the Bible is “assumed and tolerated, but it is also moderated.”7 And this provides important insight into understanding these texts.

As harsh as some of the biblical statements appear to be on the surface, we notice that there is still in the Bible an extraordinary countercultural perspective on slaves/servants that provides the seeds of change in the very institution itself when these passages are understood in their context. As John Stott observes concerning this issue: To permit its continuance (like divorce) “because of the hardness of your hearts” is not the same as to condone it….The nineteenth-century campaigners opposed slavery not on the ground that the Bible’s tolerant attitude was a temporary cultural lapse, but on the ground that slavery conflicted with biblical teaching on the dignity of human beings made in the image of God. For the same reason the [Old Testament] law carefully regulated it, making it more humane and providing manumission, while the [New Testament] went further, demanding “justice” for slaves (Colossians 4:1) and declaring that Christian slave and slaveowner are “brothers” (Philemon 16; 1 Timothy 6:2).

Thus, principles were laid down in Scripture with which slavery was perceived with steadily increasing clarity to be incompatible.8 Though there were improvements in the Bible concerning the status of slaves and the institution of slavery, it is still short of God’s ideal. This can be more clearly seen when we place the issue within the broad contours of the biblical plotline of creation, fall, redemption, and consum22 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

mation.9 The trajectory of the biblical narrative is pointing to God’s ideals for human society while taking into account the “limitations of particular human cultures.”10 The biblical teaching concerning this issue “reflects a meeting point between divine/creational ideals and the reality of human sin and evil social structures.”11 What we see in Scripture is a “divine accommodation of God to the realities of fallen human society.”12 As Paul Copan notes: The New Atheism ignores what Christians most likely affirm—that Mosaic legislation isn’t the Bible’s moral pinnacle but rather a springboard anticipating further development or, perhaps more accurately, a pointer back to the loftier moral ideals of Genesis 1– 2; 12:1–3. These ideals affirm the image of God in each person (regardless of gender, ethnicity or social class)….The moral implications from these foundational texts are monumental, though Israel’s history reveals a profound departure from these ideals.13 While questions remain, I hope that one is able to see that the biblical teaching on slavery, though not an ideal state of affairs, should not be thought to be morally reprehensible (contra premise 4 above). It should be clear that it is on higher moral ground than American slavery and other forms of slavery as practiced in the surrounding cultural contexts. Furthermore, even though the Bible regulates the practice, it should not be thought that it actually promotes and supports slavery (contra premise 5 above). Instead, it provides the foundations for the dignity of human beings and supplies the principles to ultimately see that God has a much greater vision for human relationships.

Continuing the Voyage t is in the lack of attention to these broader realities of the biblical context and the conditions surrounding American slavery where I think Harris goes wrong in his accusations. As Christians, we ought not to be intolerant of criticism by others. Perhaps we can be thankful to the attention that Harris and others have raised concerning these issues. When questions about the ethical implications of Scripture are raised, it gives us an opportunity to reflect more deeply on its teaching and the moral wisdom that can be gained from it. The Bible is authoritative for morality insofar as one has appropriately engaged in the task of biblical interpretation and then properly understands how these texts apply in our contemporary context.

Admittedly, this is not always easy to do. But by God’s grace, we strive to navigate the old waters of biblical ethics through a fog of misunderstanding to see clearly the moral wisdom of Scripture for contemporary Christian living. ■

I

Patrick T. Smith is assistant professor of theology and philosophy at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts.

N A V I G A T I N G

O L D

Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 14.

2Harris, 18.

3Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus: The New American Commentary, vol.

2 (Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2006), 475.

4Stuart, 475.

5Stuart, 474.

6Paul Copan, That’s Just Your Interpretation: Responding to Skeptics Who Challenge Your Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2001), 175.

7Andrew Sloane, At Home in a Strange Land: Using the Old Testament in Christian Ethics (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008), 102.

8David L. Edwards and John Stott, Evangelical Essentials: A Lib1

W A T E R S

T H R O U G H

T H E

F O G

O F

T H E

N E W

A T H E I S M

eral-Evangelical Dialogue (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 269.

9For a brief but helpful survey of these broad features see Dennis Hollinger’s discussion in his Head, Hearts and Hand: Bringing Together Christian Thought, Passion and Action (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 46–56.

10Sloane, 109.

11Paul Copan, “Are Old Testament Laws Evil?” in God is Great, God is Good: Why Believing in God is Reasonable and Responsible, eds.

William Lane Craig and Chad Meister (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 138.

12Sloane, 100.

13Copan, “Are Old Testament Laws Evil?” 138.

Why We Don’t Stone Adulterers

By Ryan Glomsrud

T

he Bible is a mysterious book to many people, not least because of the peculiar (and harsh) laws and punishments one finds in the Old Testament. I can recall a discussion of religion and ethics on Larry King Live a number of years ago, when the evangelical guest was asked why he could be so adamant about enforcing the Bible’s morals when the punishments assigned for breaking these rules seemed so outrageous. Obviously we don’t stone people for their sexual activities, so isn’t the sin just as outdated as the punishment? Sadly, the pastor was completely flummoxed as to how to interpret these sections of the Bible.

Calvin and the Reformed offer a few simple guidelines to help you get started solving these alleged conundrums for yourself. Accordingly, there are three different kinds of laws in the Old Testament: ceremonial, civil, and moral.

The ceremonial laws regulated the believing community’s life of worship, including the intricate sacrificial system oriented to the temple. The civil laws pertained to the “nation” of Israel as a unique theocratic society. Some scholars describe these temporary arrangements as a kind of martial law phenomenon, a state of “intrusion ethics” in which the normal order of affairs is suspended and God rules his people directly in a way that hints at the final intrusion of the kingdom of God in the age to come.

Finally, there were and are moral laws written on every human’s conscience; these are the basics of what is right and wrong. Calvin equated this with “natural law” and insisted it could be accessed via general revelation. In that sense, it was rooted in God’s creation of the world (that is, “natural”), and some relative degree of justice in the world is possible because of “common grace”—the superintending work of God that restrains evil and lets the rain fall on the just and on the unjust.

As Christians, we rejoice in the fact that Christ has fulfilled all the law (Rom. 10:4). The ceremonial laws are fulfilled because Jesus was the final and perfect sacrifice (Heb. 10:10–12). The civil laws are abrogated because the church, Israel, is made up of a people in exile without any socio-political expression in this phase of redemptive history. We do not, in other words, live in a period of intrusion ethics. We have no need, therefore, of ecclesiastical officials to govern the affairs of state and nation, nor do we need the sacrifices of goats and bulls to atone for our sins.

But what of the moral laws?

For Calvin, Christ has redeemed us especially from the consequences of breaking the moral law; he has fulfilled all righteousness and has taken upon himself the curse of the law so that in him we might have abundant life. We then pursue a life of piety out of gratitude. Our adherence to the moral law can profit us nothing in relation to our justification before a holy God, yet it continues to inform all of the interactions between creatures, believer and unbeliever alike. In this sense, the moral law remains in effect such that right is right and wrong is wrong.

What then is the quick answer to the question of stoning adulterers? Our approach flows out of this basic categorization of laws and a Reformed understanding of where we are currently situated in redemptive history. The moral law remains in effect in this qualified way so that adultery is wrong at all times and in all places. But the stoning punishment of Deuteronomy 22:23–24 is no longer in effect because this particular code belonged to the civil law that temporarily governed the nation of Israel but has long since passed away.

Ryan Glomsrud is executive editor of Modern Reformation.

J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 2 3

INTERPRETING SCRIPTURE

The Bible and African Christianity

By David F. Wells

T

here are now more Anglicans in Nigeria than in England. This is a reflection of the stunning growth of Christianity, not only in Nigeria but in many parts of Africa. On any given Sunday in Zambia, for example, 80 percent will now be in a church of some sort.

In 1900, it is estimated, there were only 10 million Christians in all of Africa, but by 2000, there were 360 million—an annual rate of growth close to 17 percent.

As a result, the numerical center of gravity of the Christian world has moved out of Europe and into the global South. The “typical” face of Christianity is no longer white, European, older, and well educated but rather brown or black, young, and somewhat uneducated. This is what Philip Jenkins brought into sharp focus in his 2002 book, The Next Christendom.

Statistics, though, tell only a part of the story. What we do not learn from these statistics is what the level of Christian instruction is in the churches that have grown so extraordinarily, what is actually being believed, whether Christians who attend are having an impact on their society, and what difficulties they face. It is part of this larger story, one that lies behind the statistics, that I want to pick up in this article. I will do this by comparing two points in time about 150 years apart. I am thinking of the Africa that David Livingstone found and the Africa that we know today. I will be thinking of what has transpired between these two points in time. In doing this, I have the role of the Bible in mind in particular.

24 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

Livingstone’s Mission irst, then, let us begin with David Livingstone. This young Scotsman was launched on his missionary way to Africa by an address he heard in London in 1840. The speaker was Sir Thomas Fowell and his subject was slavery. Although the slave trade had been made illegal in Britain in 1807, it nevertheless continued unabated in Africa. The principal culprits were the Portuguese and the Arab traders who came down from the north. Sir Thomas made the argument that the best way to stop Africans from selling each other into slavery for the cloth and guns they wanted was to bring commerce to their continent. Prosperity would take away the incentive that drove part of the slave trade.

Africa, though, was a hard nut to crack, as Livingstone was to discover. In search of ways to open it up to trade, he became the first European to traverse the continent from its east coast to its west, along the way crossing the desert that had stood, as he put it, “as the great obstacle to progress.”1 And in 1858, he secured a grant from the British government to prove that the Zambezi River was navigable. If Livingstone had been proved correct, the heart of Africa could have been opened up for commerce in this way. His dream, however, struck a snag. He stumbled upon the mighty Victoria Falls! At the falls, the Zambezi plunges almost four hundred feet down a vertical face, making any navigation impossible.

During his many other travels, he also discovered something else equally important: Africa was desperately fragmented into thousands of tribes, all with their own kings,

F

T H E

customs, and territories. He saw that without some transcendent Good that could trump mere tribal interest and petty territorial sovereignties, Africa would remain forever divided and therefore always vulnerable to attack from the outside. This transcendent Good, this ground of unity and common purpose in Africa, he believed, could be found in Christian faith.

This, in fact, had been Britain’s plan for India as well, but this part of the colonial enterprise ran into stiff resistance from India’s Hindus and Muslims. In 1858, Queen Victoria renounced any further attempts at Christianizing Britain’s colonies. Livingstone, though, ignored his queen.

He believed that what had failed in India could, and should, succeed in Africa. Thus it was that he came to sum up his life’s work as establishing the connection between three C’s: “Christianity, Commerce and Civilization.”2 Livingstone died in 1863. He heart was cut out and buried under a tree in Africa, and his body was dried, embalmed, and carried back to London where it was entombed in Westminster Abbey. Despite this great national honor, his mission in Africa had actually been a resounding failure in many ways.

At the time of his death, there were only three certain converts from all of his missionary work, though much gospel seed had been sown. But what is most amazing about this story is what happened after his death to the other two C’s: “civilization” and “commerce.” These were simply subsumed under England’s colonial ambitions with large consequences for the Christianity that has now emerged from the shadows of this colonialism.

The Mission of Colonialism n the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, the two most successful colonial powers in Africa were France and Britain. France came to the spoils a little late, and so quite a lot of what she came to possess was desert. Britain, who was there earlier, got the lion’s share.

There have always been conquests in human history.

Usually, though, the conquering nation has left the culture of the conquered people intact, even if they took its possessions and land. That was where colonialism was different. It had more elevated goals. Niall Ferguson says that Britain “dreamed not just of ruling the world, but of redeeming it. It was no longer enough for them to exploit other races: now their aim was to improve them.”3 They did so through British administration, establishing law, and by producing economic stability.4 As empires go, this was a benign rule, but it nevertheless also generated a sense of humiliation among those who had been conquered.

The French thought about Africa in a similar way. They spoke proudly of their mission civilisatrice. This was set forth in a lofty way in 1944 at the Brazzaville Conference. All of their possessions would become as French as were the French themselves. They did have some success in terms of the language, but French culture no more “took” in Africa than did British culture. And both nations, through

I

B I B L E

A N D

A F R I C A N

C H R I S T I A N I T Y

their actions, excited charges of racism in the 1950s and 1960s5 and were condemned in the United Nations.

It is curious how different the story of colonialism could be. Despite having been colonized, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and India have all flourished since their colonial days. In Africa, though, the story has been rather different. Here, it is the deficits of colonialism that seemed to loom much larger, and weigh more heavily, than any benefits.6 What the colonial powers did for Africa is now completely eclipsed by what they did to Africa.

By the 1950s, Britain was exhausted after two world wars and had decided it was time to leave as had France.

By the 1960s, most colonies in Africa had been liberated and the colonial powers had packed up and gone home.

What they left behind, however, was the sour taste among Africans of having been subjugated. On the other side of the equation, they did also leave behind governmental and commercial structures, but these quickly regressed in many countries. In fact, parts of Africa were soon to become little different from what Livingstone had known more than a century earlier.

There has been an enormous amount of literature devoted to understanding what happened. At the very least, we can say that tribal loyalties are far deeper in Africa than are national considerations. The national boundaries that the colonial powers drew in the nineteenth century reflected their conquests and not the human reality on the ground. It is no surprise that when they left, some of the ancient tribal fault lines reappeared, though it is also the case that many tribes also lived peacefully, side by side, and even intermarried. However, Livingstone had seen that tribalism was Africa’s Achilles heel and had sought to address this matter through the connection between his three C’s.

Today, though, Africa is seriously fractured and, partly for this reason, prosperity is a rarity. Indeed, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the poverty that is the direct outcome to its many failed governments, tribal rivalries, civil wars, and the systemic corruption present in so many countries. Despite vast natural resources, Africa is a continent “mired in steaming squalor, misery, deprivation, and chaos. It is in the throes of a seemingly incurable crisis,” George Ayittey writes.7 In 2007, according to the economic formula the International Monetary Fund uses, what the average U.S. citizen could buy, using the dollar in the U.S economy, was what the combined total of the purchasing power was of average citizens in all of the following countries: Angola, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Egypt, Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Or, to put it differently, the average Chadian had 3.7 percent of the purchasing power of the average American, the average Ghanaian had 4.6 percent, and the average Liberian 0.8 percent.

These are cold statistics, but you do not need to know J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 2 5

affluent origins in the West with their sense of entitlement to comfort and health. It is more to practice its truth or it will undermine the very Western than it is Christian.

A few years ago, I was speakScripture it says it upholds. ing with some pastors in Nairobi, Kenya. They told me of what had happened when one these numbers to know that there is deep, gnawing of the most prominent health-and-wealthers had come to poverty in Africa. You see it. It is there in every large city, Nairobi. One of these pastors told me of a woman from his swollen as each one is with the rootless and aimless who church who had sold her house and given the proceeds to congregate there. In Uganda, they are called bayaye. “They this preacher based on his promise that her gift would drift this way and that, sit in the shade, stare, nap,” writes return to her tenfold. It did not. Actually, it went back to Ryszard Kapuscinski. “They have nothing to do. No one is Europe. For the preacher’s next visit, she sold her petrol expecting them. Most often they are hungry…idle, awaitstation, which was her only means of support, and again ing who knows what, living who knows where—the gave him the money. She looked for a big pay-off from gapers of the world.”8 God. The big return never happened. She was left with nothing.

Christianity Enculturated The popularity of this kind of message is obviously he easiest way to understand two of the most impordriven by desperate need and aching deprivation. And, tant developments in recent African Christianity is from a distance, we might marvel at the kind of naivety to think about this background. These developments that leads simple people to give what little they have in a are, first, the response that emerged from the colonialism gamble of this kind. But we should marvel much more at I have just briefly described and, second, the most popuhow cruel and heartless are the preachers who take lar response to the disease and poverty to which I have advantage of these the poor, exploiting them, rather than also just alluded. caring for them as Scripture instructs us to do. If Scripture First, the response to colonialism. In 1966 in Nigeria, is authoritative, the church needs to practice its truth or the All Africa Conference of Churches declared that what it will undermine the very Scripture it says it upholds.

African churches needed was an African theology. An African theology would be different from all Western theChristianity Renewed ologies. In the years that followed, in works such as those frica’s suffering has touched the conscience of the

by John Mbiti and Bolaji Idowu, we came to see what this West. In the last fifty years, about $1 trillion of aid meant. In the interests of redressing wounded African has been given, enough for $1,000 to every man, dignity, this theology asked that the underlying ideas in woman, and child alive today. Massive as this effort has traditional African religion be accepted as part of its digbeen, though, it has not produced the changes that Africa nity. That meant that Christianity in Africa should propneeds. The Western benevolence has failed, and this failure erly be syncretistic and merge with the African spirit. But, underscores the need for a vital Christian faith in Africa. as Tersur Aben argues, this was really about fending off the Much of this aid has been misspent and much of it has insulting European attitude that Africans are “primitive.”9 made its way into the pockets of politicians. It is an old adage And while this desire is entirely understandable, its among aid workers in Africa that the rich have markets and unforeseen theological consequence was to produce yet the poor have bureaucrats.10 What this means is that most simple, ordinary people end up with nothing. In fact, we another version of Protestant liberalism. God’s Word need to go further. Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist became just one word among many others, its revelation trained at Harvard and Oxford and who worked with the neither exclusively true nor therefore finally authoritative.

World Bank, argues that aid, as well intentioned as it has In this version, African Christianity became more African been, has actually stunted Africa’s growth. With respect to than it was Christian. corruption, “Aid is one of its greatest aides,”11 propping up The other response, which adapted to Africa’s poverty the venal who are in power. Not only so, but she argues that and disease, has been equally disastrous though for it has short-circuited the process of producing economic entirely different reasons. It has been brought with the growth and has created a culture of dependency. Western aid invasion of the health-and-wealth Pentecostals. They have come from both Europe and the United States. Ostensibly, has become a disease when well-meaning governments what they have brought, by contrast with the African and rock stars intended it to be a cure. theologies, is an authoritative Word or, at least, an apparThe answer to Africa’s poverty and suffering is, ent word from God. It promises miraculous release from undoubtedly, very complex. Nevertheless, I think we can disease and poverty. It is a message that has become wildly say with certainty that an African Church that is living popular in Africa for reasons too obvious to need stating. with integrity and daily uprightness will do much to hold But let us be clear. This kind of Christianity reflects its in check the corruption that has eaten away at the core of

If Scripture is authoritative, the church needs

T

A

26 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

T H E

so many of Africa’s nations. And it just might be able to moderate tribal tensions, too.

This integrity is no easier to build in Africa than it is in the U.S., but here as there, we can say with certainty that we will not see a church strong in its character and clear in its convictions without the Word of God being preached, taught, believed, and practiced. In this connection, there are two positive developments I need to highlight.

First, in 1994, the Second Pan Africa Christian Leadership Assembly met in Nairobi and, as a result of this meeting, the Africa Bible Commentary was commissioned. In 2006, it was published, a work of 1,600 pages and written by sixty-nine African scholars. The assembly’s reasoning, Tokunboh Adeyemo tells us, was that the leaders present recognized that the church in Africa is a mile wide but only an inch deep and that “deficient knowledge of the Bible and faulty application of its teaching” is the “primary weakness” of the church.12 This work is a magnificent achievement. It will give preachers the tool they need to produce sermons that are biblical, which is exactly what the churches need to hear. This is the key to their health because, as John Stott often said, the pew rarely ever rises above the pulpit.

Second, an ambitious daily Bible study program is currently being written by the Rafiki Foundation and is already in wide circulation in Africa. Although it was conceived for Rafiki’s orphanages, which are in ten African countries, the 30,000-page project is already being used far more widely outside the orphanages. It is a set of 600 lessons covering every book of the Bible. It is written at eight levels. The adult lessons are written first and then converted into seven different grade levels for children.

Not only are there church schools that are now using it to teach the Bible but, in a pilot program, the Uganda government has also introduced it in its public schools. Other governments have expressed interest in doing so, too.

These two developments, and others like them, will not by themselves solve Africa’s deep, complex, and seemingly intractable problems. But they are steps in the right direction. The faith that so many Africans have embraced now needs to be deepened, informed, and instructed so that it might reach greater maturity. The only way lives will be changed, corruption challenged, and the underlying tribal tendencies that lead so easily to self-destruction checked is if God’s truth takes root. This is not a novel conviction.

It is a truth that has to be learned afresh in every generation and in every culture. It is only when the church’s blood becomes “bibline,” as Charles Spurgeon once put it, that its witness becomes effective because its life becomes Christ-like. This is the story of the church’s past, and it is a story from which we need to learn afresh, not only in Africa but also in the United States. ■

B I B L E

A N D

A F R I C A N

C H R I S T I A N I T Y

I. Schapera, ed., Livingstone’s Missionary Correspondence 1841– 1856 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), 131.

2Meriel Buxton, David Livingstone (London: Palgrave, 2001), 19–20.

3Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons of Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 116.

4Don Taylor, The Years of Challenge: The Commonwealth and the British Empire 1945–1958 (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959), 234–35.

5This case was argued vehemently by the Algerian Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 1963).

6Many of these are cited in Samir Amin, Neo-Colonialism in West Africa, trans. Francis McDonagh (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 196.

7George B. N. Ayittey, Africa in Chaos (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 6.

8Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Shadow of the Sun (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 138.

9Tersur A. Aben, African Christian Theology: Illusion and Reality (Bukuru, Nigeria: African Christian Textbooks, 2008), 58.

10William E. Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 165–209.

11Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009), 48.

12Tokunboh Adeyemo, ed., Africa Bible Commentary (Nairobi: Word Alive Publishers, 2006), ix.

1

Speaking Of…

“E

ducation has been given us from above for

the purpose of bringing to the benighted the

knowledge of the Saviour. If you knew the satisfaction of performing a duty, as well as the gratitude to God which the missionary must always feel in being chosen for so noble and sacred a calling, you would feel no hesitation in embracing it. For my own part I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay?”

Dr. David F. Wells is Distinguished Research Professor at GordonConwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts.

—David Livingston

J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 2 7

Bible, Inc.

INTERPRETING SCRIPTURE

by John Bombaro

S

coot over “Big Tobacco,” “Big Pharmacy,” and “Big Oil” and make room for “Big Bible.” While your business may be languishing during the present economic recession—cha-ching!—Bible publishing continues to flourish. A 2003 survey conducted by Zondervan found that the average American household contains 3.9 Bibles,1 sustaining a juggernaut industry with more than 20 million “units” sold annually in the United States.2 The trend has not slowed.

The “Good Book” has turned a good profit every year since 1952 when Thomas Nelson and Sons launched the (then) controversial Revised Standard Version and hit pay dirt. It seems that fat cats prowl not only in Manhattan but in Grand Rapids, Wheaton, and Nashville.

The Problem t is not simply the proliferation of Scripture tomes that troubles the church catholic. That God’s Word is nearly ubiquitously available in hard or paperback (if not digital) should be something to celebrate. Instead, it is (1) the problem of marketing the change of the inherited interpretation of Scripture preserved within the specified spectrum of Christian orthodoxy, (2) the problem of niche translations and, especially, the manifestation of (1) and (2) in (3) the problem of self-study Bibles that undermine its proper use, as well as the interpretative community it creates and sus-

I

28 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

B I B L E ,

tains, a problem we will address in conclusion. In a word, there is an industry agenda causing ecclesiastical fragmentation while promoting radical individualism and autonomous discipleship—notions antithetical to the being of the church and hard to reconcile with the principles of the product peddled. The motive may be fat cats with bottom-line agendas, but the results—at least from a Reformation perspective—sorely impoverish the church.

Reason.com analyst Greg Beato disagrees. He argues that positives outweigh negatives since commercialized renditions of the Bible ultimately benefit those with an interest in the Bible.

Every time a new permutation of the Good Book is added to the marketplace, the competition among publishers intensifies, which in turn inspires these publishers to find new niches to target and new ways to serve their customers. For every genderinclusive translation, there’s a translation that specifically markets itself as the historically accurate alternative to culturally biased revisionism. For every hipster coffee table Bible that preaches the gospel of the United Nations, there’s an American Patriot’s Bible that identifies its ideal customer as “the ordinary man or woman who loves this nation and believes it springs from godly roots.” At this point, the only way to diminish the Bible’s power would be if fundamentalists somehow ended all its questionable commercial permutations, comic book versions, audio interpretations, niche devotionals—everything but the King James [sic] Version in plain black covers. In this light, the Conservative Bible Project is anything but conservative. Like all other versions of the Good Book, the narrow new interpretation broadens the Bible’s overall appeal.3 Notice that Beato’s rationale emerges neither from ecclesiological nor soteriological points of view, but rather from the marriage of financial pragmatics and consumer felt needs. Viewed through the lenses of consumer choice and capitalism, Bible publishing is nothing more than a service provided for “customers,” not necessarily Christians, let alone the corporate body of believers. For publishers contracting the marketing prowess of Madison Avenue, the Bible’s “power” lies in its appeal to niche markets, not in being the sword of the Spirit. Consequently, the purpose of such a production is not so much to expose people to the frequently uncomfortable domain of law and gospel that engenders conformity to God’s will and ways (that is, what people need), as it is to conform the explanation of the text to the comfortable domain of the reader’s subculture or demographic (that is, what people want): hence the glutted “insert-your-race-sex-status-subculture-hereLife-Application-Study-Bible” shelves in contradistinction to the barren and moldering theology shelf. Here, again, post-Kantian subjectivity triumphs over pre-modern objectivity.

I N C .

When fiduciary purposes displace theological onus, it does not take long for “Bible, Inc.” to clamber into bed with niche marketing firms and transform the Word of God into a work of goods (and services). No segment of society is immune to the trend to commodify the Scriptures and handle them as a commonplace consumer item. The spectrum ranges from parody products like Da Jesus Book (translated into Hawaiian Pidgin) to the ultracontrived The Green Bible (please!). Be it The Latino Bible, The Teen Bible, or The Surfers’ Bible, the fact is that these products set forth exegetical paradigms that deliberately obfuscate or abandon theological commitments for the purpose of pandering to purchasers.

Now while the origin of annotating the Scriptures with “apparatus” reaches as far back as the distinctly Calvinist 1560 Geneva Bible, the modern phenomenon has as its immediate antecedent the revolutionary 1909 Scofield Reference Bible. For the first time, commentary was purposely built around the biblical text and did not emerge from a separate and clearly subordinate volume. In other words, the publishers of Scofield were consciously doing exegesis outside the domain of the church, outside codified confessional Christianity, outside the interpretative community, and therefore outside churchly responsibility and accountability—on the very same pages as Holy Writ. If nothing else, proximity to the inspired Word intimated that Scofield’s explanations were quasi-inspired. How much more so when the text itself is altered to accommodate gender-inclusive ideology and such? A new day had dawned: the exegetical work of the Holy Spirit through the church’s rostered ministerium was stymied because he had been voiced over by the programmed study notes of focus group writers. Corporate accountability was lost too when “self-study” rendered the individual a self-feeder and an arbiter of truth.

But what Beato and others do not seem to get is that, although the Bible is the best-selling book being consumed, it is being consumed differently from how it was fifty or a hundred years ago. It is not just the marketing that has changed but the marketplace. Consumers get Bibles for a different purpose: they expect to get something different from it than earlier generations did, namely, autobiography, not metanarrative. So, whereas at one time Bibles were commonly purchased to translate the individual into the interpretative community, now the Bible is all too frequently interpreted by focus-group commentators to translate individuals into their self-referential market sectors. Such an approach has moved beyond missiological contextual accommodation to shameless capitulation to our narcissistic culture. Consumer surveys are taken. Consumers would like the Bible to say “x” and “y” and the marketplace gives them what they want— techniques for personal enhancement and self-affirmation in an isolating context—in other words, law instead of gospel. The reason they do so emerges from the fact that publishing corporations define readers as “consumers,” not “Christians.”

J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 2 9

words, the Christian gospel is a gospel with an public inescapably public message— may be the church’s established or traditional he’s not so much your Lord as the Lord. Nothing should militate ruling principles of biblical interpretation that against an egocentric approach to the Bible like being part of a recognize the Bible’s self-presenting, self-intercrowd of readers that spans hundreds and thousands of years. preting nature.

Thus, Scripture interpretation In an altogether different way, God expands the person should be public and social, accountable and responsible, by incorporating him into the church, where exegetical not demographically tailored to generate particulate conWord ministry binds the baptized together so that there is sumer groups alienated from one another in their hearing neither Jew nor Gentile, rich nor poor, male nor female, and reading of the Bible. In short, honest interpretation black nor white. The Bible is to have that unifying effect— resonates with the larger orthodox tradition of the church just like the Eucharist. Such sex, race, age, and wealth difand fosters requisite ecclesial unity in what we—as the ferences are nonessential in the body of Christ. Niche church catholic—believe, teach, and confess. translations and demographic self-study Bibles, however, The church’s curacy of the Bible’s built hermeneutical work in the opposite direction where discriminatory eleguidelines is aimed to keep interpretations and underments are identity making. standings within the text because, uniquely and dynamically, biblical interpretation begins within the Bible itself.

The Solution A good definition of biblical hermeneutics, then, may be he Bible is to be read like a roadmap. No one instincthe church’s established or traditional ruling principles of tively knows how to read a map until he is taught biblical interpretation that recognize the Bible’s self-preand oriented to its legend or key. And no one can senting, self-interpreting nature. quite teach you about a map like a guide who is native to Biblical hermeneutics is important because the meanthat land. When it comes to reading the Bible, that guide ing of Scripture pertains to matters of life and death. is the church and the legend is biblical hermeneutics, not Moreover, good hermeneutics is essential because there a publishing company or niche commentators. Some time are many bad and false interpretations. These are the ago, Michael Horton stated the solution to isogetical readunfortunate results of the reader, translator, or commening (i.e., reading the Bible in isolation, with only your tator failing to acknowledge that the Bible is already selfdemographic) of Scripture: “Read with the Church.”4 interpreted as the history of the divine work of There is a necessity to reading in and with the church. redemption. Consequently, dishonesty in interpretation “No one is neutral,” explains David Ford, “everyone stands (call it “contrived exegesis”) results when the same text— somewhere—where do you stand in relation to issues that say, the NIV—is “applied” (actually exegeted) in countless, might affect your interpretation of the text? What about even contradictory, ways. To avoid bad interpretations, your own context and its special concerns and biases? readers must engage the biblical text not with particular What is your ‘interest’ in this text? Why are you engaged doctrines, much less ideological or cultural urgencies, but with it?”5 Likewise, Colin Gunton says, “Scripture is never within the interpretive community that yields to the overapproached without some presuppositions or expectations, arching biblical theology that self-governs the self-intereven though they may be undermined or revised when the pretation of the text as a whole, as well as in all its parts. text is studied.”6 Acknowledging the limitations of our Another important reason for doing biblical hermeneuown market- or culture-driven presuppositions, experitics within the interpretive community is that the biblical ences, and desires is the first step in the prevention of text does not belong to us: It’s not our word but God’s Word falling susceptible to wrongful interpretations and manu(Matt. 24:35; Mark 7:13; Eph. 6:17; 2 Tim. 3:16). The factured exegesis and, instead, allowing the church to church must yield to the fact that God has crafted his own guide our understanding of the text. roadmap along with the clues for reading it. This has been Horton, Ford, and Gunton ask us to be conscious of our the traditional hermeneutical approach of the orthodox need for the church to which the Christian, by definition, Christian church and it demands integrity on our part: We belongs. By participating in the wider and historic church cannot take liberty with the Word of God in either transcommunity of theological interpreters possessing establation or explanation if we intend to be responsible interlished parameters, we prevent ourselves from engaging in preters of the self-presenting, self-interpreting sacred text. self-serving or individualistic interpretations that are fruitAbove all, this means doing sound exegesis—explaining less to the wider community of believers (1 Cor. 12:7) and the text according to its story and the interpretive paramdishonest to the text. We must keep in mind that God’s eters in continuity with the apostolic tradition. revelation is a public revelation (Matt. 28:19; Acts 26:26) Due to the self-interpreting character and nature of and his theology a public theology (Gal. 1, 2). In other the Bible, the foremost criterion for a theological reading

A good definition of biblical hermeneutics, then,

T

30 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

B I B L E ,

of Scripture is to let the Scripture present itself, which it does in a unified historic manner by presenting Jesus Christ as both its central focus and chief interpreter of theology. When we allow Scripture to present itself, then we lend ourselves to a Christ-centered, theological interpretation. In short, Scripture instructs the reader to read obedient to its own internal hermeneutic among the body of believers. “Big Bible” routinely gets this wrong by telling the story of “us,” not “him.” The call to all readers, then, is to read obediently, to endeavor to read the Bible in a Christocentric fashion, and thereby to learn firstly about God in whose light we begin to understand ourselves within the body of Christ. This in turn informs us as to how we are to live and to serve God’s kingdom in every situation and circumstance. The call to “Bible, Inc.” is to let the Scriptures speak for themselves and have readers learn to read, not in isolation with predetermined placement (“This is your group and therefore this is how you are to read and to consume”), but with the church.

We cannot read obediently as an isolated individual segregated in the church. That idea is antithetical to what it means to be Christian. There need to be check-andbalance systems in place to protect us from ourselves, our culture, our times. Christian orthodoxy does just that through the place of Scripture in the Divine Service or Mass, lectionary readings (promoting a reading of the text that connects with Old and New Testaments), exegesis and exposition of the text by duly called and ordained ministerium, and with confessional accountability. Perhaps if this were more the case, “Big Bible” might not overshadow the church in her curacy. ■

Rev. John J. Bombaro (Ph.D., King’s College, University of London) is the parish minister at Grace Lutheran Church in San Diego, California, and a lecturer in theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego.

Greg Beato, “The Greatest Story Ever Sold: How Bible Publishers Went Forth and Multiplied,” Reason.com (February 2010): http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/19/the-greatestbusiness-story-ev.

2Stephen Brown, “Harry Potter Brand Wizard,” BusinessWeek (18 July 2005).

3Beato, “The Greatest Story Ever Sold.”

4Michael Horton, “Knowing What You’re Looking for in the Bible,” Modern Reformation (July/August 1999), 11.

5David Ford, Theology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 137.

6Colin Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 85.

1

I N C .

Join the Conversation!

Have you ever considered writing for Modern Reformation?

Here’s your chance! We’re continuing these departments in 2010 and we want your words to be featured in them.

“Open Exchange”: A forum for reader response. If you’ve ever read an article printed in our pages and thought that something else needed to be added, this is the place for your contribution.

“Ex Auditu”: Examples of Christ-centered sermons. Christ-centered preaching is sadly rare in all our circles. Have you heard or preached a good sermon? Send in the transcript to give others a model to follow.

“Preaching from the Choir”: Perspectives on music in the church. Beyond the old “worship wars,” we want to give people a way to think about the music we sing in formal worship contexts and in our private worship. Draw attention to the resources that matter.

“Family Matters”: Resources for home.

Catechism resources, ways of teaching theology to children, help with holiday themes: this is the place to direct others to resources you’ve found helpful in your efforts to be faithful at home.

“Borrowed Capital”: Witnessing to Christ in our age. Where do you start in your witness for Christ? How do apologetics play a role in your evangelism? Got a story or a helpful idea? Share it with others in this space.

“Common Grace”: God’s truth in art and culture. God gives gifts to both believer and unbeliever. How do we see those gifts expressed in the art and culture surrounding the church? In this space, we want to hear from artists and cultural observers looking for glimpses of grace in life.

Intrigued? Ready to write? Send your 850-word essay (Ex Auditu sermons can be longer) to editor@modernreformation.org.

Be sure to tell us in which department you think your essay belongs and send all your contact information. If we decide to run your work, we’ll extend your subscription by one year.

J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N 3 1

INTERVIEW f o r

d i a l o g u e

i n

a n d

o u t

o f

o u r

c i r c l e s

An Interview with D. A. Carson

Why Can’t We Just Read the Bible?

In 2003, White Horse Inn co-host Michael Horton interviewed D. A. Carson, Research Professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. As we feel this subject is still relevant—especially to this issue on “Interpreting Scripture” and in particular to Kevin Vanhoozer’s article (see page 16) on biblical studies versus theology—we are printing it here for our readers.

Since you work in the field of New Testament studies, you must occasionally run into people who wonder if systematic theology is friend or foe. Is New Testament scholarship undermined by an attempt to find logical correlations? Doesn’t sola Scriptura—Scripture alone— imply that all I really need to do is read my Bible?

Certainly there are a lot of people who think that, and historically, in this country, there have been a number of seminaries deeply suspicious not only of systematic theology but of historical theology. They seem to give the impression, sometimes taught explicitly, that provided you have your hermeneutics right, your principles of biblical interpretation, then all you have to do is turn the crank and out falls biblical truth. And there is a sense in which I want to sympathize with this thinking—although I will turn around and critique it—that at the end of the day our final authority is not in our systematic theology or in any creed; our final authority is still Scripture. In theory, everything is revisable by more light from Scripture.

And a layperson can read the Scriptures and understand the Scriptures.

Absolutely. It is important to keep saying that. There is no esoteric guild of specialist priests who impose a certain kind of interpreta-

3 2 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

tion on the conscience of believers.

And even in practical experience you sometimes see that, don’t you?

Occasionally you’ll find an old woman or man who is semi-literate, and yet such people may have read their Bibles through again and again. Although they can’t selfconsciously make all the correlations a sophisticated systematics can make, nevertheless they have a kind of nose for error and heresy.

Somebody comes along with some screwball idea, and they can immediately say about forty verses that make them question something or other.

Sort of the way we question our grammar, yet don’t know the rules for it.

Exactly right. And in that sense you want to say even at a practical level, I want people to read and reread their Bibles. God himself says, “This is the one to whom I will look: he who is of a contrite spirit and who trembles at my word.” So it really is important to say that before you start putting in footnotes about the importance of presuppositions and structures and all the rest.

How do you as a New Testament scholar who trains pastors in a seminary environment answer the common objection: “All I really need is the Bible, give me the original languages. I really don’t need

systematic or historical theology because I’m working with the primary source. I don’t need to learn about what other people have thought about the Bible when I have access to the Bible directly”?

And, “Systems tend to press the exegetical data through a grid.

Verses aren’t allowed to speak for themselves. By the time a system gets hold of the Scriptures, the Scriptures have become a wax nose”? First of all, do you hear this in evangelical or other circles, and how do you respond?

I think that charge was more common fifteen years ago than it is today, because one of the effects of postmodernism, for good or ill, is to recognize that we do think out of systems, that we do bring our biases with us. To be frank, I think we began that way of looking at things in late modernism rather than in postmodernism, but I think that’s changing. I think there’s a converse danger now, that every interpretive opinion becomes so equivalent to every other interpretive opinion that it’s difficult to say what’s right or what’s wrong. There are, nevertheless, some people who still take the other stance. Culture is always highly diverse; people come from different backgrounds to any seminary. There is a sense in which, again, I want to be sympathetic. It is possible for your system—or, for that matter, for your epistemology—to be so well in place that it is incorrigible. It cannot be corrected by Scripture; it no longer really listens, and everything gets filtered through it. Even the best interpreters, the most experienced pastors, all of us, do

this sometimes unwittingly. Three years later I could be studying the same passage again and think, “Uhoh, I really blew that one,” and I realize I brought my baggage with me. So there is a danger along those lines.

But the converse danger of thinking you can do it all yourself from scratch is no less pernicious, and maybe more so. Take an analogy from science: no scientist has to start proving the existence of molecules every time he or she begins an experiment in chemistry.

There are all kinds of givens based on what has already been thought through, discovered, or demonstrated before; but every once in a while, one of the scientific theories gets overturned because of new evidence. Nevertheless, any scientist brings an awful lot of presupposition to the next round of experimentation or the like. Similarly, no one, absolutely no one, can read the Bible without some pre-understanding, for example, of God; even if the person is an atheist, the god whose existence he or she is denying is still some kind of god. So you cannot approach the text without bringing baggage with you, in terms of what words mean, in terms of values— whether you think this is serious or not, whether it’s right or wrong—it affects all of it. Then on top of that, it’s sometimes the person who claims to be independent of systems who is, in fact, most shanghaied by a system. So that someone in the West, for example, who is steeped in individualism, will come to a text such as Galatians 3 and interpret the function of the law as a paidagogas, a schoolmaster, a tutor to lead us to Christ entirely in individualistic terms because we live in the individualistic world of the West. Whereas the context shows that Paul is thinking primarily of salvation historically; that is, of the function of the law from the giving of the law all the way to Christ.

He’s thinking of its function across history, and no doubt that has a bearing on how we think of the

law’s function today. But it’s not primarily talking about the application of the law to the individual; it’s primarily talking about how we should think about the law in its role in redemptive history. We might miss that simply because we’re individualists steeped in Western heritage.

Do you think there has been a lot of polarization where systematicians aren’t always very good exegetes and exegetes aren’t very good systematicians? These groups are sort of suspicious of each other, and sometimes that filters into the ministry and the pulpit. Is the forest and the trees analogy useful here? You either sacrifice the trees to the forest in some systematic approaches, or you have painstaking detail on this tree and that tree, but no sense of a forest.

Is that the balance we need to strike?

That’s certainly part of it. I think also that the danger springs from a culture of specialization—more and more knowledge about less and less—so that a person who really is on top of the exegetical literature quite frankly just doesn’t have time to be right on top of the systematic literature, and vice versa. I’ve sometimes told students who say they want to do a Ph.D. in systematic theology, that one doctorate won’t do—they’ll need at least five: one or two in New Testament, at least one in Old Testament, a couple in church history, one in philosophy, and then they can do one in systematics. That’s the problem—the nature of the discipline is integrative and synthetic. If instead people do systematics without any grasp of Scripture, they’re likely to cut themselves off from what they confess to be their authority base, and so they’re not really rigorous.

On the other hand, it has to be said that there are large numbers of New Testament scholars and writers who think so atomistically that they’re ashamed to link two thoughts together. Everything has

to be peculiarly narrow. If they can’t find a whole system in a particular text, they don’t dare link it to some other text where they might help to construct a system.

Everything is atomistic.

So if we end up having suspicions of any kind of organization of Scripture, then we’re going to have trouble with the analogy of Scripture interpreting Scripture— we’re going to become masters of irony in Matthew or experts on the Johannine understanding of “X.” But to see the Bible as a canonical unity is what is increasingly difficult these days and that affects systematic theology.

It not only affects systematic theology but is implicitly a denial without explicitly saying so; it is an implicit denial of God’s authorship of Scripture. If there’s one mind behind Scripture, then even after you’ve put in all of the explanations about the diversity of genre, vocabulary, idiolect, historical position and stance, and all the rest, there is still one mind behind Scripture. And unless that mind is schizophrenic or utterly confused or terribly fragmented, none of which presumably we want to postulate about God, then there is some sort of cohesion to Scripture, and thus a purely atomistic exegesis is in fact an implicit denial of the inspiration and authority of Scripture. That, in my view, is really frightening.

So in your estimation, Old and New Testament scholars ought to be at least good enough systematic theologians to see the unity of the canon.

Yes, absolutely. Not only does Scripture warrant you to construct some sort of system or cohesion, the system—whether you like it or not— is going to help you or hinder you in your interpretation of Scripture. In other words, the Christian who believes that Scripture teaches the deity of Christ does not have to prove that point every time he or J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 3 3

she comes back to the text—that’s part of the given; whereas a naturalist interpreter of Scripture denies that point and therefore will inevitably not see what other people see in Scripture. So your systematic theology needs to be good because—again, whether you like it or not—it is filtering your reading of Scripture. There is a sense in which Scripture shapes your systematic theology, and that is the direction in which things should ultimately go; nevertheless, your theology—how rigorously and carefully it is constructed, the baggage you bring—is your systematic.

Whether it’s a nicely thought through systematic or not, you bring baggage. And this helps you or hinders you in your interpretation of Scripture: the questions you put to a text, the kinds of answers you give, your knowledge of how the text has been interpreted in the past by other Christians and so on—all of these filter into how good an exegete you are. And I would want to argue that ideally, provided we still let Scripture speak and the ultimate authority base is in Scripture, responsible knowledge of historical theology and responsible knowledge of systematics will enrich our exegesis of Scripture rather than limit it.

You mentioned a sort of neo-fundamentalism on the right as a problem initially. Do you think when it comes to this question of systematic theology, there is a suspicion for different reasons both on the left and on the right of systematic theology—that the suspicion on the right is something close to what we generally refer to as biblicism, where certainly anybody who thought that just by finding a doctrine taught on the surface of a cluster of texts is the only way you could justify believing in a particular doctrine? You run into problems with the Trinity.

You run into problems with the two natures of Christ. Here you have to engage in a synthetic 3 4 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

operation where you’re taking the fruit of exegesis and analyzing it in its logical connections. Do you think this is too little understood, that there are so many assumptions, such as belief in the Trinity, that are really the product of the church’s reflection on the implications of what is taught in Scripture, rather than a lot of direct references?

Where systematic theology tries to bring together what is genuinely taught in Scripture to make sense of them, then you’re talking about the implications of Scripture. So it is important to see that in any systematic system there are different levels of authority base grounded in Scripture. In other words, I think I should always be open to thinking afresh about how some bits can be put together, just as I should always be open to correction in exegesis. It is what Scripture says that has the final voice, rather than precisely how I’ve got the bits together.

There is a good analogy from computers. You want the direct line of flow to be from Scripture through biblical theology with input from historical theology to construct your systematic theology.

But the fact of the matter is, there are also feedback loops—information loops that go back and reshape how you do any bit of it. Now, you don’t want the loops to take over the final voice. But at the same time, those loops do shape you whether you like it or not, and therefore you need to use them intelligently.

Does that also suggest that a systematic theological reading of Scripture is no less a reading of Scripture than any other approach?

That’s true. The danger is that sometimes a systematic reading of Scripture that tends to be atemporal—it’s looking for the logical cohesions—may start overlooking the historical grounding of texts. So it is a reading of Scripture, but just

because it is systematic does not necessarily mean it is correct. It has to be, in principle, revisable. Or it might be one lens, but it’s not the only thing that’s to be said.

Let’s take the current debates, for example, about justification by grace through faith and the whole New Perspective on Paul. There is no doubt in my mind that the New Perspective has brought up some weaknesses in some systematics that have developed especially in the last century or so, not least in German Lutheranism and so forth—questioned rightly from the basis of sources whether or not the simple merit theology we have read into Second Temple Judaism is exactly right. There’s no doubt that this is correct. On the other hand, when it has gone as far as it has to construct whole new systems of theology, in my view not only is the exegesis wrong but the history is wrong and now the systematics are wrong as well. Some of the debates talk as if nobody has ever thought about this before. Whereas careful reading of history shows they have been thrashed through at deep levels, without anybody wanting to say that Luther or Melanchthon or Calvin got it all right, nevertheless it’s important to recognize that there has been deep analysis of this before. Thus, there is a kind of a tension until you sort it out and come to grips with whatever new historical insight has been provided, while at the same time not losing what has been genuinely found in Scripture and promulgated as the confession of the church.

What do you think of Geerhardus Vos’s comment: “Biblical theology draws a line”—meaning the historical unfolding of redemption and revelation— “and systematic theology draws a circle,” showing the logical relations? Is that a fair description, do you think, of the differences and are both needed?

The circle part of the analogy is less tight as an analogy. But it seems to

me he is right to say that biblical theology organizes its material first and foremost in a linear way. That is to say, it takes into account time; it is working things out across redemptive history. There are other elements to biblical theology as well. Instead of asking what the doctrine of God is, it is more likely to ask about the contribution of the book of Isaiah to the doctrine of God. In other words, it listens more closely to the peculiar contributions of individual books and corpora and so on. In that sense, it is more textually driven. Whereas systematic theology—precisely because it is looking at the whole and tends to be more interested also in relating the whole to the contemporary culture—does that better than biblical theology. It nevertheless is, for the same reason, one step removed from the text, and there is a sense in which one needs to be mature in the arena of biblical theology— there’s another Ph.D. to throw in there—before one constructs a really text-sensitive systematic theology. I think it’s one of the reasons a fair number of systematic theologies today are really less biblically driven than historically driven.

They say they’re doing systematic theology, but what they’re really doing is throwing in a few texts here and there and then interacting deeply with the Reformed tradition or the Lutheran tradition or the Wesleyan tradition or whatever, and not really interacting all that much with the text. I think we need more systematicians who, though informed by historical theology, are steeped in biblical theology and have a good competence in basic exegesis and historical questions as well.

There are going to be a lot of people who think this is fairly interesting, but that it’s like listening to a conversation on NPR about physics.

It’s interesting, but it’s not my field.

Why should the average Christian not say that about systematic theology?

Because every Christian—I don’t care how old you are in the Lord or how learned you are or how much schooling you’ve had—every time he or she opens the Bible is bringing baggage to the text. In that sense, all of us are systematicians, whether we like it or not. That is simply inescapable. It is part of being a thinking, sentient being.

Therefore the only question is whether or not it’s good theology that we bring to the text.

One thing you can do if you’re a reading Christian is make sure you mix your reading; in other words, you ought to read some commentaries. If you’ve never read a commentary, start at a light level with “The Bible Speaks Today” series— things that actually work from the text, that are edifying, informed, godly. But you also need to read some biblical theology and some systematic theology, just as you also need to read some books on prayer and on mission as well. In other words, I think serious reading Christians need to read broadly rather than to read only one kind of literature. If you read only one kind of literature, that shapes you too in a way that may not be all that helpful.

I think of the person sitting at home thinking about the benefits of doing what you’re talking about here but doesn’t have the foggiest idea of where to begin, and so just reading the oneminute Bible devotional every day is about as much as can be handled at this point. How do you stretch that person to go the next step and what resources would you recommend?

Martyn Lloyd-Jones once spoke with a group of medical students who complained that in the midst of their training and the ferocious work hours they really didn’t even have time to read the Bible and have their devotions and so on. He bristled and said, “I am a doctor. I have been where you are. You have time for what you want to

do.” After a long pause he said, “I make only one exception: the mother of preschool-aged children does not have time and emotional resources.”

It is important to recognize, too, that there are stages of life where you really don’t have time to do much, and you shouldn’t feel guilty about it. Children will sap you. If you have three children under the age of six, forget serious reading unless you have the money for a nanny. When our youngest finally went off to kindergarten, we celebrated that day—I took my wife out for lunch. Only then could she get back into reading again. It’s the way life is. You have to be realistic.

Having said that, I think for a lot of laypeople it’s important to read more than a verse a day—a verse a day to keep the devil away. It’s important to read large chunks of Scripture, to read the Bible through.

And at the risk of wanting to become a peddler, that’s really why I wrote the two-volume set For the Love of God: A Daily Companion for Discovering the Riches of God’s Word (Crossway, 2006). It’s based on the Bible reading system by Robert Murray McCheyne (1813–43), so that a person is reading through the whole Bible but at the same time reading some edifying material that is building a whole biblical theology.

McCheyne’s reading is four chapters a day, which is probably too much for some people. On January 1, you would read Genesis 1, Ezra 1, Matthew 1, and Acts 1.

After one year of this, you would have gone through the New Testament and the Psalms twice, and the rest of the Old Testament once. But if, on the other hand, you were simply to read two of the four columns a day, then you would cover that same amount of material over two years, which is doable. So in volume 1, I wrote a one-page meditation on one of the chapters in the first two columns, and volume 2 is on one of the chapters in (continued on page 43) J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 3 5

REVIEWS w h a t ’ s

b e i n g

r e a d

Worship and Life between the Already and the Not Yet

“E

schatology... precedes everything,” writes Rev. Jason Stellman in

Word and Sacrament, the ordinary means of God’s grace to sinners the preface to Dual Citizens. Life on earth can only be understood and thus, ironically, that which is most relevant to those we long to through the lens of what lies beyond: we can understand the past see converted and to those of us who already believe. During the and present only in light of God’s promises for the future. rest of the week, on the other hand, we pursue distinction This is the underlying premise of Stellman’s book, a richly in our work and other cultural engagements, whether this biblical devotional exposition of two-kingdom theology or, takes the form of withdrawing from the world into Christian as Stellman puts it in enclaves with our own aesthetic and political communities, his subtitle, Worship and or seeking to redeem the brokenness of the fallen world in Life between the Already which we live by our own cultural activity. In either form, and the Not Yet. the legitimacy of the kingdom of the world as it stands is Dual citizenship is an denied; it becomes an object for us either to reject or to apt metaphor for the redeem rather than, as Stellman puts it, “a stage...on which two-kingdom theology the divine drama [can] be performed.” espoused by Martin Criticism of two-kingdom theology can be found within Luther. Christians, Reformed circles, particularly from those who take a neoStellman argues, are Kuyperian, transformationist approach to the cultural mancitizens of two kingdate given to the church. Stellman does not deny that the doms—one heavenly Christian will go about his mundane life in a manner distinct and eternal, the other from the nonbeliever, with different motivations, and potenearthly and temporal tially with world-changing effect. But he argues against in which we are but conflating the laudable efforts of Christians to seek ecopilgrims living in exile. nomic justice or cultural renewal with the mission of the The primary purpose church. It is not we who serve God by transforming the of Stellman’s book is to world; rather, we are transformed by God’s service to us as work through the imwe respond in faith to his call to worship. We live in light of plications of this worldthe grand narrative that eclipses our horizons, in which all Dual Citizens: Worship view. In contrast to the history is leading to a consummation secured by God’s triand Life between the Already and the Not Yet theocratic nation of old umph in weakness on the cross of Christ. We are thus free covenant Israel, called of investing our individual battles against the world, flesh,

by Jason J. Stellman to withdraw from the and devil with ultimate consequences; in Stellman’s words, Reformation Trust, 2009 surrounding nations in we avoid letting “the existential tail wag the eschatological 193 pages (hardcover), $18.00 all aspects of life, the dog” (88). church under the new covenant is called to be cultically (in Stellman applies this premise to various arenas of its worship) but not culturally (in its worldly engagement) Christian worship and life in the pages of Dual Citizens. In a distinct. chapter titled “Subversive Sabbatarianism,” he portrays the Churches frequently reverse these two precepts, argues Sabbath as a day for Christians to withdraw from cultural Stellman. Seeking relevance in the eyes of nonbelievers, we activity, which is legitimate but not ultimate. The impulse to tone down our distinctions from the world on Sunday transform society cannot be the primary motivation for morning. Archaic liturgy is stripped away, along with diskeeping the Sabbath, which lies rather in God’s call to wortinctly Christian language and culture and even, in the ship; and while the saints are called to full cultural particiextreme, the potentially offensive marks of the church, pation Monday through Saturday, “it is precisely the

3 6 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

believer’s cultural withdrawal on Sunday that serves to challenge and subvert the assumptions of this fleeting age” (58). Stellman elaborates on the same principle in two later chapters on the church’s relationship to the world in which it passes its pilgrimage. Though full of God’s gifts, which we are in as much danger of enjoying too little as too much, it is also only a temporary realm, subject in the end to judgment and futility. The Christian who maintains a balance between these two is preserved from boredom with the world by gratitude for God’s many blessings within it, but also from a disillusionment deriving from a quest for satisfaction from what must ultimately pass away.

Dual Citizens is best read as an exposition of the Christian life in light of two-kingdom theology, rather than as a fully argued defense of the position. The book covers a significant swathe of doctrine, presenting a wealth of scriptural and extrabiblical resources (including references to U2, Sting, and Facebook) in an approachable manner. Naturally, not all receive as full a treatment as one would like, and skeptics will find lacunae in its articulation of a sharp divide between the sacred and the profane. Stellman’s exposition of eschatological themes from the book of Revelation is lucid and helpful, for instance, but passes over the extent to which these chapters allude to the primeval history of Genesis.

Stellman cites G. K. Beale’s work on Revelation but does not interact with Beale’s work (i.e., The Temple and the Church’s Mission, IVP, 2004), tracing the redemptive-historical trajectory that ends in consummation and begins in the garden, where the cultural mandate to fill the earth and subdue it was initially given. As transformationists find support for their stance in Beale’s argument (and the similar work of Geerhardus Vos) that the same mandate is recapitulated throughout Scripture, including the call of Abram to be a blessing to all nations and the Great Commission that underlies the present mission of the church to fill the earth with God’s presence and rule, some exegetical work in this field would have been appropriate.

Undoubtedly, however, the work of renewal and redemption belongs ultimately to the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son, to whom Stellman devotes his very helpful final chapter. The misidentification of the world as a restoration project resting on our shoulders, rather than the arena for God’s work of redemption, represents a great threat to modern Christians’ apprehension of the gospel.

Against this threat, Stellman’s call to the church to preserve its distinction in seeking its sole nourishment attending to the proclamation of the truth of the gospel and to the ordinary means of grace offered in worship is most welcome.

Nathan Barczi is an economist, and an elder at Christ the King Presbyterian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and son.

Word Pictures: Knowing God Through Story & Imagination

By Brian Godawa IVP Books, 2009 208 pages (paperback), $16.00 Brian Godawa is a member of a growing cadre of savvy evangelicals who are making a place for themselves in Hollywood. He is known in the entertainment industry for his screenwriting, having written, among other things, To End All Wars (2001) and the PBS documentary The Wall of Separation (2006).

Within evangelical circles he is perhaps better known for his book Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom & Discernment (IVP, 2002). Its title tells the tale. It is essentially worldview critique applied to popular film. It proved helpful to the many people who wanted to venture outside the ghetto of “Christian films” in safety.

Whereas his earlier book was essentially defensive in posture, his latest, Word Pictures: Knowing God Through Story & Imagination, encourages Christians to create visual art with the goal of communicating a Christian worldview. Like Hollywood Worldviews, it comes with an impressive set of endorsements.

Mr. Godawa makes his case with a good deal of postmodern panache. He informs us that the problem with modern Christianity is modernity. Most evangelicals are just too logocentric and rational. What the world needs is a more sensual, more visual Christianity. His prescription is a return to what he calls the “equal ultimacy” of word and image.

He begins with showing how images are already present in the biblical text. Chapter 2, “Literary vs. Literal,” is worth the price of the book. Here he points out something every literary artist already knows—most people don’t know how to read.

Fruitful reading depends on two things: first, observing the conventions of the genre you’re reading; and second, doing so tacitly—by feel. (Consulting a guide is like consulting a rulebook at Wrigley Field. When you’re looking at the rules, you’re not watching baseball.) But most folks don’t even know there are rules for literature, let alone different rules for different genres. Instead they rely on a standard set of rules they’ve absorbed by osmosis. As the old saying goes, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” so they hammer away. Since modern people want Bibles that are flat-footed and factual, they miss subtle and allusive appeals to the imagination. Sadly, this preference for propositional truth at times subverts the Bible’s persuasive beauty.

But subversion isn’t always a bad thing. Whereas chapter 2 scolds moderns for subverting biblical literature through bad reading, chapter 6 (“Subversion”) encourages us to J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 3 7

read culture properly with the goal of subverting it. Here Godawa uses the apostle Paul at Mars Hill to show how it is done. His treatment of Acts 17 is helpful, particularly in demonstrating how Paul, for most of his address, worked within the storyline of Stoic teaching, waiting until the very end to introduce the resurrection and its radical implications.

It’s worthwhile to pause and remind ourselves that Paul was not a postmodernist. Radical postmodernists, in their enthusiasm for autonomous texts, untether cultural and literary narratives, leaving them to float along with no basis in reality. But here the apostle Paul demonstrates that history and truth are not merely modern preoccupations. The Bible is a record of real events, literary tropes notwithstanding.

Stoicism was subverted not merely rhetorically but in fact by God. Don’t credit nifty storytelling; credit an empty tomb.

Chapters 3 through 5 take up the quest for “equal ultimacy” in earnest: “Word versus Image,” “Iconoclasm,” and “Incarnation.” Notice a progression?

Chapters 3 and 4 assail the primacy of words, using the modifier “mere” with distressing frequency, as in “mere words.” But the whole tenor of the argument struck me as off-key. Throughout most of the Bible, “word” does not denote “proposition” or “idea” or “rationality” but the richly evocative image of something spoken.

In both testaments, wonderfully ambiguous Hebrew and Greek words connect God’s speaking to God’s breathing life into dead things. That’s one reason why, when ancient Jews and Christians gathered, they came to listen rather than to see. Sometimes they listened to stories, other times to poetry, and sometimes they even listened to propositions. But the important thing was that they listened to words from God. And the hope was that faith would result from hearing them, and with faith, life.

This brings us to Godawa’s use of the word “incarnation” in chapter 5: “Images are concrete expressions of abstract ideas, the existential embodiment of the rational word.

Images, whether they are stories, pictures or music, are incarnations of ideas—words made flesh” (102).

What should we say to this? This appeal to the incarnation appears to be the keystone of his argument. But it fails.

The differences between what humans do with their arts and what God did in the incarnation makes the analogy unpersuasive. The second person of the Trinity is not an idea, he is a person. In the actual incarnation, the Son takes on flesh to redeem what he has already made and in so doing remakes it; whereas Godawa’s view seems to imply that “concrete expressions” make “abstract ideas” real to those with whom we communicate. In the biblical incarnation, the conferral of reality moves in the other direction.

In our day of PowerPoint preaching and JumboTron talking heads, Word Pictures will likely find a ready audience. But do people really need more emotionally charged imagery, or do they need the real presence? Where must we look to find it? This is why I come away from Word Pictures even more committed to the divinely ordained media for communicating the gospel, Word and Sacrament. Whatever power our arts have to communicate saving grace, they derive from 3 8 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

them. Our arts do not make them more real. The movement is in the other direction. As artists as diverse as Rembrandt and Flannery O’Connor have shown, whatever reality our arts convey, they receive from the means of grace.

C. R. Wiley is pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Manchester in Manchester, Connecticut. He writes young adult fiction under his pen name, Mortimus Clay. He is also the founder of Edwards Institute for Apologetics and the Arts.

The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University

By Kevin Roose Grand Central Publishing, 2009 336 pages (hardcover), $24.99 Liberty University may conjure up different thoughts, ideas, and emotions for Christians from diverse backgrounds, denominations, and geographical regions.

But for the nonbeliever, these emotions are no doubt even stronger. “Fundamentalist,” “intolerant,” “homophobic,” and “irrational” are just some adjectives that probably come to the minds of many, regardless of their Christian or secular leanings.

Kevin Roose, author of The Unlikely Disciple, held many of these same views. As a result, during his sophomore year at Brown University—long a bastion of broadminded, liberal higher education—he determined he would spend his “semester abroad” at Liberty, attempting to gain a deeper understanding of the mindset, the ideology, and the hearts and minds behind what he saw as radical fundamentalism.

Roose, the son of Quakers from a liberal Midwestern college town, did not grow up in the world of American evangelicalism and therefore sought answers, hoping to immerse himself within America’s largest evangelical university.

In so doing, Roose found his friends and family questioning him, wondering what he could possibly gain from such an experience, and worrying about how and if he would return. Upon receiving his acceptance into Liberty and prior to arriving, Roose spent time with a friend who had grown up in the evangelical church, learning the Christian-ese necessary to survive at “Bible Boot Camp” and finding out just what would be expected of him during his time “abroad.” In order to infiltrate the scene, he knew he would need to speak the language.

Throughout his time at Liberty, Roose was intent on doing all he could to truly understand the university and the peo-

ple within and behind it. He immersed himself in Friday night Bible studies (not exactly his experience at Brown on a Friday night), frequently going to the prayer chapel with a dorm hall mate just to pray, attending support sessions for both chronic masturbators called “Every Man’s Battle” and for homosexuals (while he stated he was neither), involving himself in a one-on-one Bible study with a college pastor, spending spring break in Florida doing street evangelism and, ironically, being granted the last interview with Jerry Falwell.

Through all of his experiences, Roose found himself repeatedly confounded as he began friendships with likeminded people, fell romantically for a girl, learned about prayer, theology, and the Bible, and discovered that Jerry Falwell seemed a likeable man in person. All the while, he was continually confronted with peers who made derogatory comments about homosexuals, including a roommate who continually called him an inflammatory name. He noticed, however, that his professors were not allowed to, nor did they wish to, think or seek outside their fundamentalist box. Rather, they wished only to indoctrinate and insisted that their view was absolute truth. They insisted upon six-day creationism, with no scientific examination of evolution. They demanded political ideology to the point that a College Democrat’s club was outlawed on campus.

They were adamant about pretribulation end-times eschatology. Openness to discussing and exploring alternatives, even within a Christian framework, was simply not optional.

Amid the confusion, Roose grew to love many of his peers, to respect some of his professors, and to find some level of comfort in the Christian lifestyle to which he grew somewhat accustomed. He seemed to seek answers to difficult questions, yet held true to his familial and cultural roots. He was open and honest in his assessment, all the while staying true to his personal perspective. I was struck throughout the book by the manner in which he consistently faced his questions about God, salvation, works righteousness, even doubt. Throughout his semester at Liberty University, Roose learned there was much to like about the school, although there remained a great deal to question and about which to be concerned. Coming from the Ivy League, he found the academic challenge of Liberty to be formidable, in some cases because he simply lacked the cultural capital necessary to navigate the evangelical world, including a background in the biblical text.

From a personal perspective, I was not surprised by anything I read. The author’s narrative was fair and unbiased. In fact, I believe he found himself surprised by his own personal transformation. As he states on his website (www.kevinroose.com), “Some of the religious lessons I learned there have stayed with me to this day.” My personal lack of surprise, however, does not mean I am not disappointed in how evangelicals can appear before the nonbelieving world. Liberty’s culture and mistreatment of homosexuals is dismaying. The language used to refer to homosexuals is in no way winsome.

The idea that one would pay cash fines for drinking alcohol, having premarital sex, or even simply kissing a person of the opposite sex is ridiculous to me. Ultimately, the misunder-

standing of common grace and seeking truth is what I find to be the most unsettling components of Liberty’s educational perspective, as reported by Roose.

I appreciate Kevin Roose’s willingness to approach Liberty with an open mind. I appreciate his honesty in sharing his perspectives before, during, and after his time “abroad.” I appreciate that after returning to Brown he went back to Liberty and apologized for having lied to so many friends and colleagues. I appreciate his willingness to continue to seek the truth. In so reading, I was continually reminded that such seeking is truly a result of God’s relentless pursuit of us.

Shortly after I finished The Unlikely Disciple, I began reading Finding God at Harvard (Zondervan, 1997). I was struck by the different tenor of the book as its author and contributors admitted to God’s movement upon their hearts, upon God’s reaching down and filling them with wisdom and knowledge as they sought truth through science, literature, art, and service at one of America’s most esteemed yet secular universities. The difference in the approach to learning and knowledge was stark between intellectuals at Harvard who wanted to truly know God more deeply and those at Liberty who seemed to think they had all of the answers.

The Unlikely Disciple was a quick, fascinating read that will not turn anyone’s world upside down, but will provide some laughs, moments of bewilderment, and not a little insight into areas where we as evangelicals must think more clearly and change our approach as we seek to share the good news with those around us.

Timothy P. Wiens (Ph.D. in education, St. Mary’s University of Minnesota) is headmaster of Boston Trinity Academy in Dorchester, Massachusetts.

Modern Reformation invites you to submit a book review for publication in an upcoming issue. Thoughtful Christians should examine the most important books of the day, and we want you to evaluate books both good and bad from your reformational perspective.

Submit your review of 1,000 words or less in an e-mail to reviews@modernreformation.org.

Please reference the guidelines at www.modernreformation.org/submissions.

J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 3 9

Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630–1965 Edited by Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Leigh E. Schmidt, and Mark Valeri Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006 372 pages (paperback), $24.95

The Shaping of Ulster Presbyterian Belief & Practice 1770–1840

By Andrew R. Holmes Oxford University Press, 2006 395 pages (hardcover), $99.00 Does the average worship service of a local Presbyterian congregation say anything in general about the human condition? Does it reveal much about the township or county in which its members reside? Is it possible, in other words, to generalize about topics other than religion on the basis of a small church’s weekly service?

Social scientists of various stripes might resort to the categories of the profane and the holy to discern deeper meanings in the sermon-dominant order of worship. Academics in the humanities might also theorize about man’s innate desire for meaning or peace (not to mention sleep) to explain the long prayer before the offering. But have these explanations missed the substance of the Presbyterian service?

Religion poses problems for scholars that other parts of human existence do not. A religious tradition or communion separates the world into those who belong and those who don’t. Because religion is inherently exclusive and particular, the generalizations demanded by academics are difficult to make.

The books under review show that as a human enterprise religion is inherently parochial, and they illustrate the problems of trying to generalize on the basis of particular faiths.

The problems involved in generalizing from religious particulars are most obvious in Practicing Protestants. The scholars who contribute to it are part of an initial foray into the exotic world of religious practice, a place usually reserved for anthropologists but seldom of interest to historians. Their purpose is to narrate the history of Protestant devotion to theorize about Christian practice.

4 0 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

In the introduction the editors, Maffly-Kipp of the University of North Carolina and Schmidt from Princeton University, outline two approaches to the subject of Christian practice that emboldens them to tackle the subject. (For all of their expertise, academics are a generally timid lot when it comes to a subject so messy and divisive, hence the need for “paradigms” or “constructs” by which to save one’s reputation.)

One paradigm stresses the regulative or coercive nature of religious devotion. Because rational, autonomous selves should be free to practice religion as they see fit, the assumption goes, the study of religion has often been suspicious of practices that force individuals to conform to an authoritative pattern. As the editors explain, this paradigm examines the way that practice is “regulated by exterior social conditions and maintained conscious and unconscious submission.”

The second paradigm comes from Christian scholars looking for “more meaningful processes of spiritual formation.” Unlike the other approach, the spiritual-formation construct tends toward advocacy; that is, examining the past to help saints flourish spiritually in the present.

The contributors, however, adopt a historical approach.

It suits the academics assembled in the book, and it seemingly avoids the suspicion inherent in the first paradigm and the advocacy involved in the second. At the same time, these historians propose to find “kernels of insight” that might contribute to “renewed faith.”

The success of this effort will, of course, depend on the eye of the evaluator, but the investigation of Christian practice offered in this book will generally disappoint those belonging to a specific tradition or communion.

Practicing Protestants contains twelve chapters that range chronologically from the colonial American era to the twentieth century. The practices included are journal writing and forgiveness (not absolution) from the Puritan era, missions to Hawaii, Mission Revival Church architecture, patterns of cultivating nationalist identity among Koreans in Hawaii, and missions to the Ojibwa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; divine healing, prayer, and glossolalia among proto-evangelicals in the early twentieth century; and cosmopolitanism, dance, and visual arts among mainline Protestants in the twentieth century.

Call me parochial (there are worse names), but this believer found little in this odd assortment that yields spiritual enrichment or renews faith. The same would likely go for most Protestants except members of the Church of God in Christ, the only communion to receive sustained attention.

Practicing Protestants fails ultimately because these scholars, as scholars, cannot abandon their critical distance long enough to find the “kernels of insight” or spiritual assistance that the editors stated as one of the book’s purposes. Of course, historians generally write for the guild of professional historians. But the book promised more. It was supposed to be useful for the actual practice of Protestant Christianity.

For instance, Heather Warren’s chapter on divine healing concludes that to receive the laying on of hands was to “defy a central premise of Reformation theology and to reject the authority of medical experts” and to stretch certain “normative constructions of gender without transgressing their limits.”

Even the chapter on the Church of God in Christ by Anthea D. Butler interprets the subject more for secular than religious consumption: the sanctified life assisted women in “wresting away power from dominant males.”

On the other side of the coin, Butler does suggest that contemporary Christian gospel music artists have forgotten the sanctified roots of music in holiness churches.

The inability of these authors to take Christian practices on their own terms, rather than using them to say something about American society in general, appears to stem from the editors’ stated strategy of knitting together “the history of Christian practice with the history of American culture and society.” This approach is like weaving together the analysis of Memorial Day parades with the study of Sunday morning worship. Isn’t it conceivable that a certain devotional exercise says as much about Christianity as it does about the nationality or sex, class, and gender of the practicing Protestant?

The distinctness of Christian practices from political, social, or psychological ones is one of David Holmes’s working assumptions in The Shaping of Ulster Presbyterian Belief & Practice. In contrast to religious historians who have approached the subject in order to account for Irish Presbyterian political support for British rule, Holmes, a research fellow at Queen’s University in Belfast, takes Presbyterianism on its own terms and tries to account for the revitalization of Calvinistic communions during the first half of the nineteenth century. To put the matter too briefly, Holmes contends that rather than undermining Presbyterian practices with a generic evangelicalism, the revivals of the nineteenth century actually reinforced Reformed forms of devotion.

By no means an easy (or inexpensive) read because of its length and interaction with “existing literature,” Holmes’s book is one of the better on Presbyterian history in some time. It is a valuable resource on the way that Presbyterian communions conducted their witness and nurtured their members, and could well be instructive for contemporary Presbyterians who desire an account— without having to do the research themselves—of the ways that Presbyterians worshiped, observed the Sabbath, conducted prayer meetings, and buried their dead.

In effect, Holmes functions as a redactor of the Westminster Assembly, whose Confession of Faith, Catechisms, Directories for Public and Family Worship, and Psalter have informed Presbyterian practice since the mid-seventeenth century. Here is evidence of how Presbyterians were complying with and adapting the Reformed tradition.

At the same time, he has little to say directly about politics or Irish society. This does not mean his account shows no

awareness of contemporary political and social developments. Yet, as much as Holmes situates the ideals of Presbyterian practice in the realities of modernizing Irish society, his purpose is to understand the religion of Presbyterians, not the society in which Irish Presbyterians lived. This makes Holmes’s book highly instructive for Presbyterians; without surprise, it is of little value for students of either Northern Ireland or humanity more generally.

The dynamic these books appear to illustrate is that the more a scholar pays attention to the details of a particular religious tradition, the better the scholarship. The reason is that particularity does more justice to the intentions of the practitioners than approaches that use religion to generalize about social, cultural, or political circumstances.

A religious practice is inherently religious, and to ignore the shape of its religiosity in hopes of finding another point of significance is to deny its source. Conversely, the more exact the exploration of specific religious teachings and practices, the less its appeal.

This means that believers looking for insights from the academy will find few in Andrew Holmes. They will also have trouble locating university presses to publish the works by scholars like him. And when they do, they will have to pay close to three figures.

D. G. Hart is author and editor of more than twenty books on American religious history and is currently writing a global history of Calvinism for Yale University Press.

POINT OF CONTACT: BOOKS YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE READING The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece

By Eric Siblin Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009 336 pages (hardcover), $24.00 The theme of this provocative little book is: “Jewish rock music critic meets German Lutheran Baroque composer.” I am not making this up.

The author, Eric Siblin, is a former pop music critic for the Montreal Gazette. After submerging himself in countless rock and pop concerts, Siblin concluded that the “Top 40 tunes had overstayed their J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 4 1

welcome in [his] auditory cortex, and the culture surrounding rock music had worn thin.” He discovered, to his eternal gratitude, that the cello suites of J. S. Bach “offered a way out of the jam.” By choosing Bach over a Bono concert one fateful autumn evening in 2000, Siblin embarked on an almost decade-long obsession over what most serious musicologists consider the greatest solo instrumental set ever conceived: Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. It led Siblin from the adolescent world of his Fender guitar to what the renowned Italian cello soloist and conductor Mario Brunello called “the absolute perfection” of Bach’s cello suites.

Brunello, by the way, should know what he is talking about—he lugged his cello to the summit of Mt. Fuji in Japan in 2007 just to play selections from the cello suites.

As he put it, “At the summit of the mountain, man is closest to God and the absolute. Bach’s music comes closest to the absolute and to perfection.”

But Siblin’s intensely personal journey through the life and work of Bach (and the fascinating rediscovery of the cello suites in the twentieth century by the brilliant Spaniard Pablo Casals) does not overshadow the profound revelatory gem offered by this thin work, namely, that there are people within the inner sanctum of pop culture looking for a back door to escape the grind of largely superficial and transient popular musical forms. One wonders if there are legions of seekers like Siblin who can follow the eastern star of Bach’s cello suites to the Babe in the Manger as preached

by Bach in his Christmas cantatas.

In Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, Siblin finds out why the renowned Russian cellist Mischa Maisky called them his “personal Bible,” why Casals began each day with them, why Yo-Yo Ma commissioned six films to accompany them, why they have been played at weddings, at tributes to 9/11, and in parlors, academic town halls, taverns, and cathedrals throughout the world, and why the late columnist-author-Bach aficionado William F. Buckley, Jr. argued that Bach would still be considered the greatest composer in music history, even if he died before going to Leipzig in 1723 (but after composing the cello suites) and before writing his two-hundred-plus known cantatas, three known passions, and the cosmic Mass in B Minor. The cello suites happen to fall into that exact slot just before Bach left the Calvinist prince of Cothen for the high Lutheran orthodoxy of Leipzig.

This book does not offer anything particularly new or startling about Bach or the development of this monumental instrumental work. Its technical difficulty is legendary— one needs to know no more on this topic than that Casals (a skilled and internationally acclaimed solo cellist) practiced it daily for twelve years before attempting it in public. If Siblin’s bibliography is indicative of anything, the author may not even be familiar with the works of the basic biographers of Bach such as Whittaker, Geiringer, Terry, Leaver, or Stiller. That matters little. Siblin steers largely clear of committing a much deeper and more significant mortal sin.

While showing he is familiar with the worn-out attempt to 4 2 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

connect Bach to an effort to impregnate his manuscripts with cabalistic numerological signs (i.e., Bach as the glazedeyed mystic trying to build in subliminal, and usually egotistical, numeric codes into every measure), and Bach’s supposed rampant anti-Semitism “evidenced” in his reliance on St. John the Eyewitness as the text for the passion of that name, Siblin zeroes in on the sheer power and organic perfection of the high art and aesthetics found in Bach that pushes the sensitive listener in awe to the foot of Mt. Sinai and then to the foot of Mt. Calvary. More remarkable than that, the Jewish Siblin treats Bach’s Lutheran orthodoxy with serious regard, which is more than one can say for theological liberals such as the supposedly Lutheran Albert Schweitzer of the last century (with Lutheran friends like that, one needs no enemies) or even many current Bach scholars (such as Harvard’s Christoph Wolff) who consider Bach’s Lutheranism an embarrassing vestige of preEnlightenment religiosity.

This book makes two terribly important points, one unintentionally apologetical and the other one intentionally theological.

First, the apologetical point: The original manuscripts of all six suites have been lost. Siblin spends substantial time tracing the possible whereabouts of the original works (if there is any glaring weakness with Siblin, it is surely found in his tendency to enjoy engaging in speculation, but he at least labels it as such and steers that bus away from the inevitable intellectual ditch it goes into with other authors).

That, however, has not resulted in historical scholars casting doubt on the cello suites nor has it created any concern with dating the suites to approximately 1720. The connection to biblical authorship and dating could not be clearer. While higher critics muse as to authorship and dating of the Gospels based on non-textual philosophical speculations, centering their claims on the use of phantom documents such as “Q,” the fact is that the absence of original manuscripts has presented no problem whatsoever for authorship and dating of the biblical documents. Our copies of the gospel records, for example, come so early and in such magnitude and quality as to eliminate any serious doubt they were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The four Gospel writers are either eyewitnesses of the events they transcribe (Matthew and John) or they record the efforts of the closest associates of eyewitnesses (Mark and Luke) who sifted through the “many infallible proofs” that these events in fact happened exactly as set forth.

This is why experienced trial lawyers investigating the manuscript trail of the Gospels inevitably end up concluding that those foundational four books alone are clearly primary source material and are the best attested works of all antiquity (see John Warwick Montgomery, Lord Hailsham, Edwin Bennet, Simon Greenleaf, Hugo Grotius, and Sir Norman Anderson).

Second, this book makes an important theological statement as to where Bach’s music inevitably leads the serious unbeliever. Siblin finds that Bach’s commitment to perfecting his art to the fullest of all his substantial gifts (despite hav-

ing twenty children and more professional responsibilities than any five megachurch pastors combined) took Siblin down this path: When I was practicing alone in my Bach shed [note: Siblin actually began to take cello lessons during his born-again experience with Bach], with fifty-odd amateurs doing the same elsewhere, each in their own way trying their best to nail the music, it struck me as amazing how much this one individual has given to posterity. How many children and students, professionals and amateurs, virtuosos and maestros, not to mention listeners, have done what we were doing for three hundred years, trying to master something purely aesthetic, trying to break a code that connects us to something greater, more accomplished, more perfect than ourselves. I’m not sure what that something is.

I think Siblin has a pretty good start on finding out what that “something” is.

May Siblin’s tribe indeed increase. He is an Israelite in whom there is no guile. He admits to Bach’s choral works

being “challenging to twenty-first century ears” because of some decidedly “downbeat lyrics” such as these noted by Siblin and found in Cantata No. 179: My sins sicken me Like pus in my bones; Help me, Jesus, Lamb of God For I am sinking in deepest slime.

If the God of creativity can use cello suites based on French dance forms to lead a Jewish rock music critic to the foot of the holy Mt. Sinai, may it also lead him and a legion of others to the foot of a cross raised atop another holy mountain where the only begotten Son of the Father died for the “pus” of J. S. Bach and indeed for the “pus” of the whole world.

Craig Parton is a trial lawyer and a partner in a major law firm in Santa Barbara, California, and U.S. director of the International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism and Human Rights in Strasbourg, France (www.apologeticsacademy.eu). He is author of three books, most recently Religion on Trial (Wipf & Stock, 2008).

Interview with D. A. Carson (continued from page 35) the second two columns. This way you are actually reading through all of Scripture but getting some biblical-theological meditation, reflection that aims to be edifying but also aims to give you a way of looking at the whole Bible—a whole interpretative grid rather than simply a kind of disparate verse to give you an instant edifying kick but isn’t teaching you how to think. So there are tools like that around; mine is certainly not the only one.

If a person is beginning to look for commentaries, I think this is one area where good pastors can help. If I were returning to pastoral ministry today, one of the first things I would try to get hold of would be the bookstall, because often churches with bookstalls have the most amazing sentimental rubbish there. It really is important

either to control that yourself or to give it to somebody with really good judgment. This can become an immense resource.

There are resources for pastors, too—books that survey New Testament commentaries, for example, at all kinds of levels. If you become interested in a study in Romans or in Habakkuk, a good pastor can tell you—or if they don’t know, they can find out in fifteen minutes on a computer—what books to start with if you’ve never read anything at all in the area. It really is important to talk to people about that.

Even a junior pastor or someone with seminary training who feels constrained to start preaching from the Psalms might well ask a more experienced pastor: “What are the best three commentaries I must read to get going on this? Where do I start?” Ask questions. Nobody

knows everything, but there’s always somebody around who either knows the answers or knows somebody who does know the answers.

The same needs to be said in the arena of systematic theology. If you’ve never read anything, then a one-volume work on systematic theology designed for laypeople by someone like J. I. Packer is one way to go. There are lots of knowwhat-you-believe sorts of books to start you off thinking synthetically, and then you can move up to the more serious ones.

J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 4 3

FINAL THOUGHTS f r o m

t h e

d e s k

o f

t h e

e d i t o r - i n - c h i e f

Alive and Kicking

H

ow can a reasonable person have confidence in a book as divinely inspired when

now spreading in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, it requires so much interpretive energy, has provoked so many contradictory and its faithful interpretation fuels works of justice teachings, and perhaps even justified horrible atrocities as modern slavery? This and charity under even the most repressive regimes. issue has begun to address some of those concerns, but it Far from provoking a conflict between the Bible and scimight raise as many questions as it answers. Why bother? ence, Copernicus and Galileo were just as convinced that For people who like everything simple, tidy, and black they were properly interpreting Scripture as were their sciand white, the Bible will be a perennially frustrating book. entific and ecclesiastical critics.

It will have to be pared down to a “Cliff’s Notes” version that Even the history of debate and division within the church leaves out all the interesting bits and just gets down to busiover the proper interpretation of Scripture does more to ness. As John Bombaro has reminded us, there are plenty highlight than to downgrade its significance. Various schools of “Bibles” for people of this temperament, but I suspect that emerge in every living discipline, offering elaborate argureaders will eventually burn out on the whole matter. ments and evidence for their interpretations of reality. It is It has often been noted that the Bible is more of a library a sign of vitality when scientific programs are challenged, revised, or even overthrown and new paradigms emerge. than a book. To be sure, it’s a canon—unified both by its The same is true in the church. divine authorship (the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit) and Of course, it is a tragedy that Christians are not wholly its progressive revelation of Christ from Genesis to united in their faith and practice. Nevertheless, ongoing Revelation. Yet it’s also a rich treasury of diverse human debates over the interpretation of Scripture demonstrate authors, styles, points of view, and genres. that the dramatic narrative, doctrines, commands, and worIf one wants a book that is neat and tidy, reduced simship that we find in the Bible remain vital and relevant in plistically to a few fundamentals, maybe one should read an our world today. automotive manual or Chicken Soup for the Soul. It is true that In short, it is because God’s Word says so much, in so wars have not been waged over such books. Emperors have many different ways, across so many ages and with so much never felt obliged to get involved over the correct interpredepth, that it continues to provoke wonder, consternation, tation of manuals of personal piety. Universities have not poured their energies into wrangles about the historical distortion, praise, faith, cynicism, and division. One may integrity and reliability of the Book of Mormon, the Vedas, argue with considerable evidence that the Bible has been or Joel Osteen’s best-sellers. Even in discussions of the misinterpreted at crucial points throughout the church’s Qur’an, at least in the West, it doesn’t seem that such queshistory. It’s impossible, however, to conclude that it has tions are decisive in considering its academic value. Its true, been—or is today—a dead letter. refined and well-educated elites never justified kidnapping, enslaving, selling, and torturing Africans by appealing to the Norse legends or even Shakespeare.

Michael Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation.

Yet for a millennium and a half, many of the greatest artists, poets, philosophers, scientists, and politicians have debated, followed, and twisted the Bible. It has been exploited by totalitarian regimes and democratic revolutions. Even convoluted interpretations in the interests of genocide and slavery point out the fact that corrupt minds felt obliged to use the Bible somehow for moral legitimacy in the wider culture. One may find direct support in Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and The Descent of Man for racism and the eugenics movement popularized by the Nazis and alive and well in Western universities today. Nevertheless, wild distortions of Scripture are always more effective in gaining widespread approval. Despite all this, the gospel is 4 4 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G