Divinity United

There has been a bit of talk with the release of "Son of God" in the theatres within the last two weeks. I have not seen it, but I have seen the full Bible miniseries from which "Son of God" is derived. Through various reviews, I have learned that material was edited out and deleted scenes added. So it would have been worth my time to view the "new" film as a study in modern Gospel redaction. Craig Keener's article in CT highlights the removal of the devil from the "Son of God." I suspect this means that the entire temptation narrative was excised. Keener's article is also provides an in-depth look at the role the devil plays in each of the Gospel narratives. So his review is not so much a review as an excellent mini-study on the devil in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Kenneth R. Morefield in a CT movie review refers to the "Son of God" as "a bit like listening to a pretty good tribute band doing a set list of Top 40...

Continuing with some thoughts and reflections on the "10 hour" miniseries on  The Bible , I want to follow up my comments on the portrayal of angels with some comments on certain characters and the depictions of them. The first I would like to mention is that of John the Baptist. John the Baptist is an extremely important figure in the Gospels. All four Gospels present John as the forerunner of Jesus the Messiah. He is the one who prepares the way, fulfilling prophecies from Malachi 3 and Isaiah 40. Although Luke says that John and Jesus are related, none of the other three Gospels indicate any special relationship between John and Jesus apart from John's baptism of Jesus. "The Bible" portrays John as the sort of eccentric holy man or prophet that he most likely was. John the Baptist led a renewal movement for the forgiveness of sins out in the wilderness in the provocative location of Israel's entry into the promised land (Joshua 3). What I found comp...

I sat in on Ruth Heeg's paper at the Native American Institute of Indigenous Theological Studies Symposium 2013 Friday afternoon. The paper was quite interesting, especially for someone who teaches Greek and challenges students to think about translation. Some sitting near me were less than enthused about the discussion of transitive and intransitive verbs and abstract nouns in Greek, English, and Algonquian languages. At some level, (μεν) I agree with them, but (δε) on the other hand, all of these grammatical details are important for translation, especially when it involves translating a text that means a lot to many people. In her paper, Heeg focused on the translation of Greek abstract nouns in First Nations languages, particularly Algonquian languages such as James Bay Cree, Ojibwe, and Plains Cree, in New Testament doxologies. One passage she used as an example was Rev 4:11: “Worthy art thou, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for thou didst create a...

Just a couple quotes from Robert H. Gundry's essay "Hermeneutic Liberty, Theological Diversity, and Historical Occasionalism in the Biblical Canon" in his book The Old is Better: New Testament Essays in Support of Traditional Interpretations (pp. 1-17). "...the Christ of the NT insists on questioning us before answering us. Here as elsewhere in the Bible the text interprets us before we interpret it" (15). "...it is not enough to know what the Scriptures teach; we also need to discern what is appropriate and inappropriate to be said from them in any given situation" (16).

James L. Kugel has an essay entitled "The Beginning of Biblical Interpretation" in Matthias Henze (ed.), A Companion to Biblical Interpretation in Early Judaism (Eerdmans, 2012), pp. 3-23. The essay is an excellent introduction to interpretation of the Hebrew Bible during the Second Temple period (i.e., "early Judaism"). He notes that such interpretation may be found in later Old Testament books such as Chronicles, the Greek translation(s) of the OT, apocryphal and pseudepigraphal texts (Ben Sira, Jubilees, Wisdom of Solomon, Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs), the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, and Pseudo-Philo. The central piece of the essay are the four assumptions that he argues form "a common attitude and approach to the biblical text" even with the differences of time, location, and content in the texts and authors mentioned above (p. 13, emphasis original). These assumptions are 1) The Bible is a fundamentally cryptic document, which means...

Joel Green offers some helpful insights on theological interpretation in his book Practicing Theological Interpretation: Engaging Biblical Texts for Faith and Formation. In a section of chapter 3 in which he discusses the rule of faith, he states: "...if we want to affirm that scriptural engagement is inescapable for the Christian community, sola Scriptura can never guarantee that one is Christian. Most of us have our own anecdotal evidence for how a plain reading of a biblical passage has been used to support sheer nonsense...This recommends the practice of theological formation as a prerequisite or corequisite for practicing the craft of biblical interpretation. It also proposes at least two contenders for the title 'The Great Problem Facing the Church': is the church's great problem biblical illiteracy , or is it theological amnesia ? (I say both)" (74-75).

An additional quote from John Webster's conclusion to his essay "Jesus Christ" in the Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology... "Christology responds to the self-communicative presence of its object in the twofold work of exegesis and dogmatics. Exegesis is not the same as study of the history of biblical literature and religion in their settings. Modern evangelicals have sometimes been bedazzled by the range and sophistication of historical procedures at their disposal, and busied themselves to master them in the hope of outbidding their opponents. But historical studies are the servant of exegesis, not its master. One thing which evangelical doctrines of the sufficiency of Scripture ought to have secured is that the ultimate resource is the text, not what can be reconstructed about what lies behind the text, for the text is an act of God's self-disclosure. The fruits of the immense labors of evangelical New Testament scholars are by no means negligibl...

Continuing through The Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology (ed. Timothy Larsen and Daniel J. Treier), John Webster presents a dense and sharp critique of evangelical theology on Christology in his essay "Jesus Christ." Any evangelical theology of Jesus or even NT study of Jesus should take into account Webster's challenges. Here are two such comments: "Contemporary evangelical historians of Jesus and his early followers are certainly more sophisticated then their forbears, and a good deal more relaxed about the need to defend the viability of confessional orthodoxy or the reliability and authority of the apostolic witnesses. What they have in common with earlier work is the fact that their arguments are historical, not theological, and direct themselves primarily to historical reason rather than the judgment of faith. In this sense, they continue the evangelical tradition of Christology "from below" -- not in the sense of proposing a "lo...

In David C. Steinmetz's, 1980 essay "The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis" in Theology Today , he cites the Alexandrian church father Origen: "Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning existed without the sun and moon and stars? And that the first day, if we may so call it, was even without a heaven? And who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, 'planted a paradise eastward in Eden,' and set in it a visible and palpable 'tree of life,' of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life; and again that one could partake of 'good and evil' by masticating the fruit taken from the tree of that name? And when God is said to 'walk in the paradise in the cool of the day' and Adam to hide himself behind a tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate...

Reading through a section of John Ashton's Understanding the Fourth Gospel , I ran across a classic Ashton comment that I can't pass up. Ashton sides with the hermeneutic of the original audience/original meaning of the text against postmodernism. "The greatest challenge [to the theory of the Johannine community], according to Kysar, is 'the question of the locus of meaning '. Perhaps it is true that 'a text means differently as it is interpreted by different readers'. Nevertheless, swimming as strongly as I can against the tide of postmodernism, I still believe that it makes sense to look for the meaning that the first readers of a text would have found in it. There is no obvious decline in the study and composition of books on history, and these are still separated from fiction and historical novels in all the bookshops that I know. I trust that the worst of Kysar's fears are ill-founded." -- pp. 23-24.

"The challenge of the Christian interpreter in our day is to hear the full range of notes within all Scripture, to wrestle with the theological implication of this biblical witness, and above all, to come to grips with the agony of our age before a living God who still speaks through the Prophets and Apostles." --the concluding sentence of Brevard S. Childs, "Psalm 8 in the Context of the Christian Canon," Interpretation 23.1 (1969), 20-31 (31).

The October edition of First Things , which I have just had a chance to look through, has a review of Pope Benedict XVI's second volume of Jesus of Nazareth ( "Reading the Gospels with Benedict XVI" , pp. 35-40).   The review by Bruce Marshall is a good read, especially given that I do want to read Ratzinger's work on Jesus. There are a number of things about the review that could be mentioned, but I do want to note a discussion that comes toward the end of the review about the relationship between Biblical Studies and Theology. What sparks these comments by Marshall is the "frosty reception" that the he says the pope's book has been given by biblical scholars. He states that among other things: "...the book was dismissed as a misbegotten hybrid of critical scholarship and Catholic devotion..." (p. 39). And yes, that would cause some problems for the more historical-critically minded biblical scholar. Marshall continues, "Undeterred by...

The cover story for this month's (October 2011) Christianity Today is an article by J. Todd Billings entitled "How to Read the Bible: New strategies for interpreting Scripture turn out to be not so new--and deepen our life in Christ" . The article introduces some of the main themes and scholars in the field of theological interpretation of Scripture. Billings makes some excellent points and is challenging about the place of a theological hermeneutic in relation to historical-critical exegesis and also in relation to the Church's engagement of Scripture in the context of worship and devotion. One quick quote (for now), pp. 25-26: "Instead of providing a detailed blueprint, a theological reading [of Scripture] brings a map for a journey. Our map does not give all the answers about a particular text. Instead, our reading sends us on a journey in which God in Scripture encounters us again and again, both with comforting signs of his presence and surprises that conf...

It is less than a month until the Wycliffe Centre for Scripture and Theology fall meeting 2011 . The program looks to be interesting and engaging. One of the presenters is Tyndale's own Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Dr. Stanley Walters (PhD, Yale). The meeting will take place at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto on Friday, October 21. The program is as follows: Discussion will focus on Isaiah 9 in reception history, and on connections here with Legaspi's recent book,  The Death of Scripture & the Rise of Biblical Studies (OUP, 2010). Time Participants Friday, 21 October 2011 9:30 am Ephraim Radner Greeting & Introduction 10:00 am Gary Anderson Isaiah 9 with a focus TBD 11:00 am Michael Legaspi Isaiah 9 and the work of Robert Lowth 12:00 pm Stanley Walters Review of Legaspi’s The Death of Scripture… 1:00 pm everybody Lunch provided for attendees & presenters 2:00 pm Joseph Mangina Response to morning presentations...

Here are some comments by Graeme Goldsworthy in his book Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics: Foundations and Principles of Evangelical Biblical Interpretation . The comments come from his chapter "The Gospel and the Theological Dimension (II): Biblical and Systematic Theology." "The biblical theological dimension in hermeneutics is thus the major way of addressing the question of the gap between the text and the reader. It allows the reader to find where he or she actually fits into the totality of biblical revelation. If done with care, it will then provide the valid links between the meaning of a text in its own context and its application to the modern reader. The offending gap is the theological distance of texts from the modern reader. But, if the gap is uniformly closed by the reader to give an undifferentiated immediacy to all texts, the result is hermeneutical chaos. Some forms of pietism and 'Spirit-driven' subjective theology result in such an approach, whi...

Timothy George has an excellent article on the shift in biblical interpretation toward theological exegesis and history of interpretation/reception history in the March 2011 First Things . The article is entitled 'Reading the Bible with the Reformers: We ought to read Scripture the way Luther and Calvin did' and is not so much about Luther and Calvin as it is about renewed interest in the importance of theological hermeneutics and the avoidance the Enlightenment division between academic study Scripture and the devotional study of Scripture. Early in the article, George addresses the problem of 'biblical presentism' in which the main focus of biblical interpretation is to answer the question: 'What is the Bible saying to us now?' George traces this perspective to Friedrich Schleiermacher and argues that the Protestant acceptance the historical-critical method of biblical interpretation was a response to this sort of feeling-centered, biblical presentism. But ...

I am teaching Isaiah in the NT this semester and one of the books we are reading for the course is Three Views on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology) . In the third major essay, Peter Enns makes some comments on studying the Bible's historical context. He states (p. 170-171): "My reason for fronting the issue of the NT hermeneutical context is not an attempt to place historical study 'over' Scripture somehow. Rather, I simply wish to acknowledge that God himself, in Scripture, has spoken in time and space, and we honor him by taking seriously those contexts in which he, by his wisdom, has chosen to speak. To engage in such historical investigation is not to suggest that God's Word is somehow a slave to historical circumstances, but it is a reminder that the Bible is not a heavenly treatise, hurled down to earth from an Olympian height, or a Platonic ideal kept at a safe distance from the human drama. Rather, God is the L...