Category Archives: Hermeneutics

God’s Light of Light as the Light of Holy Scripture

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Most Christians, or non-Christians, don’t realize that Scripture has an ontology; that it has an orderliness within the taxis of God’s economy for the world; that is, in subservience to the Logos ensarkos, the Word made flesh. Further, since they fail the prior, this then impacts their biblical hermeneutic, to the point that the Bible itself becomes a wax nose of their own making (a self-projection); instead of being allowed to genuinely be God’s Word to us. The Word that pierces to the heart and marrow; the Logos that contradicts us, as we attempt to read Scripture through our self-adulating categories, rather than through God’s Light of Light; indeed, as the Psalmist says “we see light in His Light,” and never vice-versa.

Let Theology Be Theology: On a Doctrine of Angels (and Everything)

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Theological methodology is akin to a biblical hermeneutic. That is, the way we decide to interpret a theological reality, i.e., by what instrumental means, will dictate the way we receive and deploy our sources in an attempt to rightly divide the Word which is truth. Much, if not most, of the so-called Great Tradition of the Latin church, has engaged in the practice of speculation, as they couch that in the authority of the magisterial Catholic or Protestant churches. This is more understandable with the Catholic side of this equation, but less so with the Protestant. I.e., Given the fact that the Protestant side portends the so-called β€˜Scripture-Principle’ as the formal means by which they ostensibly arrive at their biblical-theological conclusions. And yet in the Protestant history of interpretation what the student often finds is that they too, just as much as the Catholics, have imbibed various speculative means to fill in the β€œgaps” of the Scriptural communique. That is to note, that they, often like say, the Angelic Doctor, Thomas Aquinas, or Dionysius the Areopagite, have appealed to neo-Platonic categories of thought, of the chain-of-being logical-causal universe, to think various doctrines.

For our purposes, in the remainder of this writing, I want to focus our attention on the way that Karl Barth offers critique of the above speculative hermeneutic. In this instance, Barth is dealing with the development of a doctrine of angels. He has already surveyed, extensively, the history of interpretation on this matter, starting with Dionysius and moving all the way through to someone no less than Ernst Troelscht. In each case, as Barth demonstrates, while some offering more promising categories for thinking a doctrine of angels than the other, what is the same for all involved is that they each deploy said philosophical and speculative categories to fill in the gaps where Scripture is silent on the nature and order of the angels. In contrast, Barth is indeed, thoroughly committed to the Protestant Scripture-Principle; particularly when it comes to doctrines like the angels, where little can indeed be surmised by way of speculation or philosophical machination. Barth wants to simply stay within the parameters that Scripture alone attests to in regard to the angels. He writes:

5. We have only to add that if we keep to the rule stated and emphasised in 3 and 4 we need not be anxious concerning the knowledge required in 2, whether in respect of the possibility or the correctness and importance of a theological knowledge of the reality of angels. Theology only has to be theology at this point too. It has only to be on its guard against unwittingly becoming philosophy. It has only to accept the discipline of being wholly and exclusively theology. It has only to refrain from seeking rationes probabiles [probable arguments], from also trying to be a little philosophy, whether on hermeneutical or apologetic grounds. If it does this, it cannot be lacking in a concrete objectivity of theme. And in some degree, and in a way which is basically worthy, it will do justice to it. And the theme itself will be sufficiently important to claim it seriously and profitably. Holy Scripture gives us quite enough to think of regarding angels. And it is something positive. We have only to consider what it says in its distinctiveness, and to try to assess it without pre-judgment. Nor does it do so in such a way that we can quickly leave the problem on the pretext that it is merely peripheral. If we wholeheartedly accept angels in the position and role assigned to them in the Bible, in their own place and the way they make themselves so important that we can no longer ignore them when we consider the centre and substance of the biblical message. Again, the Bible is not so obscure in respect of angels that we cannot responsibly draw out certain notions and concepts which are quite adequate for a Christian understanding. All that is required is a firm resolve that the Bible should be allowed both to speak for itself in this matter, i.e., in the course of its message, as a witness of what it understands by the revelation and work of God, and also to be very impressively, and in its own way very eloquently, silent.[1]

The above is the desire of the Protestant thinker de jure. Often what happens though, because certain philosophical abstractions vis-Γ -vis doctrines, become so conflated and accreted over time, is that the people (the raza), even the pastors themselves, cannot critically disentangle the imposing philosophy from the Scriptural teaching itself. This happens most unironically to those who are ostensibly some of the most blunt and vociferous about β€œtheir biblicism.” Typically, when confronted with the fact that their doctrine of angels is based not actually on the biblical categories, but the Platonic (or some other) ones, they recoil in a reactionary emote and look at such an idea as the antichrist itself.

Stay genuinely biblical my friends.

[1] Karl Barth,Β Church Dogmatics III/3 Β§50–51 [393] The Doctrine of Creation: Study EditionΒ (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 122–3.

Miscellanies On Barth Reception and the Homoousious as Hermeneutic

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I wrote these for other social media outlets of mine. I thought I’d share them here asΒ miscellanies.Β 

People reject Barth out of hand simply because they’ve been told that Barth is ultimately a liberal (still). But these same people have never actually read Barth enough to know whether that be true or not. Coming from someone, an evangelical conservative Christian (me), who has both read Barth and Barth literature extensively, and published on Barth, these people are simply living in a willful land of ignorance. Granted, Barth’s π‘œπ‘’π‘’π‘£π‘Ÿπ‘’ is extensive. But there are ways into Barth that can introduce you to him without having to read all of him, or even a substantive amount of him. But most will never give him a fair hearing.

One reason Barth is pertinent to theology today is because he elides so much of the pop debates surrounding Reformed and non-Reformed theology; among many other important offerings. He truly offers an π‘’π‘£π‘Žπ‘›π‘”π‘’π‘™π‘–π‘ π‘β„Ž 𝐞𝐯𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞π₯𝐒𝐜𝐚π₯ way forward that is actually true and correspondent with the best of what even a North American evangelical theology has striven for.

There is a hermeneutical logic inherent to the β„Žπ‘œπ‘šπ‘œπ‘œπ‘’π‘ π‘–π‘œπ‘  articulated and thought out at the Council of Nicaea (and post). It offers a ‘depth dimensional’ understanding of Holy Scripture that functions well within what can be called the 𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑒𝑠 π‘™π‘–π‘‘π‘’π‘Ÿπ‘Žπ‘™π‘–π‘ . That is, it understands that the Bible has an ontology (a givenness by God), and thus an antecedent context wherein it comes to make meaningful sense in the π‘π‘Ÿπ‘œπ‘ π‘œπ‘π‘œπ‘› (face) of God in Christ. It realizes that Scripture is simply a π‘ π‘–π‘”π‘›π‘’π‘š (sign) to its π‘Ÿπ‘’π‘  (reality) in Christ in the triune life. The fact that so many would-be exegetes of Scripture gloss right past this in favor of a higher critical approach, ought to be a warning of what being a theologian of glory looks like rather than a theologian of the cross (seeing the unseen things as seen).

On a James Whitean and Leighton Flowersian Naked Reading of the Bible

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Thumbnail created originally by Leighton Flowers (Caleb)

I was listening to James White live today on his Dividing Line vlogcast, and what he reinforces over and over is that he is what some are calling a β€˜biblicist,’ or what I would identify as a solo Scriptura or nuda Scriptura proponent, as far as the way that he approaches Scripture. In this way, James White and his archnemeses, Leighton Flowers, ironically affirm the same bibliology and its attending hermeneutic. It is both modern, postEnlightenment, and Lockean (i.e., tabula rasa) in orientation. That is, it sees Scripture and its reception in a historicist frame of reference. This frame leaves the history of interpretation (i.e., creeds, confessions, catechisms etc.) in the dust, in regard to how White and Flowers receive Scripture. This ironically lends itself to a modernist-naturalist appropriation of and engagement with Holy Scripture, insofar that the Bible, in such a frame, seems to be a β€˜white-slate’ wherein the interpreter has some type of objectivist angle into its exegesis.

The aforementioned is problematic for a variety of reasons. One prominent reason is that it ends up working from a petitio principii (circular reasoning). That is to say, it presumes: 1) My interpretation just is the objective reading of the Bible, 2) my interpretation of the Bible is a five-point Calvinist reading of the Bible, 3) therefore the objective reading of the Bible just is a five-point Calvinist reading (or just replace five-point Calvinist with Provisionist reading in Flowers’ case). What this approach fails to appreciate, for one, is that nobody approaches Scripture as a presuppositionless blank-slate; human agents are subjects, and as such we bring a variety of preunderstandings and unchecked a priori commitments to theological paradigms as we read Scripture. We could call this the β€œhermeneutical dilemma.” Neither James White nor his compadre, Leighton Flowers, acknowledge this. And thus, all that they are left to do in their respective debates and correspondences is to sling Scripture right past each other; never critically identifying or checking their theological a prioris at the frontend of their respective readings of Scripture.

But like I was noting, James White, today, as he was talking, in this case about Catholicism, made an absolute distinction between reading Scripture and the history of interpretation of Scripture; as if they inhabit two distinct silos. But they don’t inhabit two distinct silos, instead the history and the biblical exegesis are mutually implicating realities; insofar that human agents are subjectively reading and receiving the text of Holy Scripture. Until White and Flowers can admit this, and until all of their acolytes can come to grasp this, this whole β€œdebate” between them, on five-point Calvinism versus Provisionism, will remain a futile endeavor. Unfortunately, they have many followers, respectively, who they are doing a disservice to. They are teaching young and biologically old, in some cases, Christian hearts and minds to read Scripture rationalistically rather than confessionally (and thus Christologically and Trinitarianly).

In closing, let me refer us to Matthew Levering’s sketch on the Whitean and Flowersian reading of Scripture (viz., what he writes indirectly critiques the Whitean-Flowersian combine of biblical interpretation); as far as its intellectual development and background go. Here Levering also offers an alternative approach that is participatorily grounded in a genuinely christologically and trinitarianly conditioned reading of Holy Scripture.

What happens, then, when Scripture is seen primarily as a linear-historical record of dates and places rather than as a providentially governed (revelatory) conversation with God in which the reader, within the doctrinal and sacramental matrix of the Church, is situated? John Webster points to the disjunction that appears between β€œhistory” and β€œtheology” and remarks on the β€œcomplex legacy of dualism and nominalism in Western Christian theology, through which the sensible and intelligible relams, history and eternity, were thrust away from each other, and creaturely forms (language, action, institutions) denied any capacity to indicate the presence and activity of the transcendent God.” Similary, Lamb contrasts the signs or concepts that can be grasped by modern exegetical methods with the moral and intellectual virtues that are required for a true participatory knowledge and love the realities expressed by the signs or concepts. Lacking the framework of participatory knowledge and love, biblical exegesis is reduced to what Lamb calls β€œa β€˜comparative textology’ Γ  la Spinoza.” Only participatory knowledge and love, which both ground and flow from the reading practices of the Church, can really attain the biblical realities. As Joseph Ratzinger thus observes, the meaning of Scripture is constituted when

the human word and God’s word work together in the singularity of historical events and the eternity of the everlasting Word which is contemporary in every age. The biblical word comes from a real past. It comes not only from the past, however, but at the same time from the eternity of God and it leads us into God’s eternity, but again along the way through time, to which the past, the present and the future belong.

This Christological theology of history, which depends on a metaphysics of participation inscribed in creation, provides the necessary frame for apprehending the true meaning of biblical texts.

In short, for the patristic-medieval tradition and for those attuned to it today, history (inclusive of the work of historiography) is an individual and communal conversation with the triune God who creates and redeems historyβ€”and the Bible situates us in history thus understood. (Levering, 23)

Biblical Studies Has Failed the City of God

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I read NT exegetes, particularly in their commentaries on Paul’s theology, and wonder if they ever wonder if they should in fact be doing so from the theo-logic inherent to the homoousion (the notion that Jesus is both fully God and fully human). Most don’t do this, which illustrates the flaw of their discipline-specific training in Biblical Studies. In other words, just as anti-supranaturalism has yeasted the discipline itselfβ€”that is to say, to approach the Bible as if it doesn’t have an inner, antecedent, supranatural reality; and that it can be read purely and critically as a historical artifactβ€”it is this spread of a flawed premise that then informs said exegete’s interpretive conclusions, in this case, about what Paul communicates throughout the corpus of his Apostolic communiques. As a result, such exegetes read Paul based upon a series of ad hoc historical reconstructions, and make their conclusions about say, Paul’s soteriology, contingent upon these reconstructions. But this just won’t do. If so, for one thing, we never would have arrived at the grammar of the Trinity that we did in the early conciliar machinations (because they presumed that Scripture was first received as a confessional reality undergirded by God’s gift of Himself to the world in Jesus Christ). The Bible, for the Christian, is first the Word from the Lord before it becomes a Word at all. If this isn’t underwriting the exegete’s method at the most basic level, then their exegetical conclusions will always run awry of the fact that Scripture is first Holy, before it ever becomes Scripture.

To elaborate a bit further: when I refer to the homoousion as the key to a proper exegesis of Holy Scripture, what I mean to be doing with that is to point to its analogical reality when applied to the β€œhermeneut.” That is to note, that just as the person and work of God are not ripped asunder in the singular person known as Jesus Christ, likewise, a proper reading of Holy Scripture ought never be dissected into a profane historical reading of the text (i.e., higher critical), over against a confessional reading of the text (i.e., churchly). Just as God and [hu]man are inseparably related, yet distinct, in the singular person of Jesus Christ, likewise, a proper reading of Scripture will start with the premise that its ultimate reality has a depth and inner dimension that must take primacy when attempting to rightly divide the Word of God. When an exegete doesn’t do this, I might find some of their conclusions interesting, but beyond that the only depth it might have is the genius that stands behind said readings and historical reconstructions (which in itself, human genius is never enough to pierce the veil of God’s body).

If we were to stay consistent with the logic of my appeal and premise, then we would see such Bible readers and exegetes as adoptionistic rather than orthodox in posture. In other words, just as an adoptionist christology believes that the divine simply β€œadopted” this guy named Jesus to be His dearly beloved Son, not having the ground of His person as the eternal Logos, per se, the Bible readers I have been considering, would approach Scripture as if it is just this β€œHoly Book,” and attempt to understand what it is saying without attending to the fact that Scripture’s ontology itself finds its inner reality not in a nakedly natural form, but as it is given for us in the breath of the Holy Spirit in the face of Jesus Christ. This reception of the Bible, one way or the other, changes how people arrive at their respective exegetical conclusions.

Reading the Bible as a Christian: The Outer and Inner Reality of Scripture

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Scripture has an outer logic and an inner logic. Back in the day this was referred to as its outer and inner clarity (perspicuity of Scripture). In some ways the rift between the disciplines of biblical studies and systematic theology pivots on which one of these the practitioner is focused on. That is to say, the biblical studies folks, typically focus on the outer components of the text; i.e., its grammar, philology, sitz im leben (e.g., historical situadedness), composition, transmission, and other β€œtext critical” factors. Whilst the systematic theology folks focus more on the inner-theo-logic of the text; attempting to β€œlay bare” what is there, and allows the text to make the assertions that it does in its outer realm. But to focus on one or the other is a mistake of β€œEnlightened” proportions.

As Christians we are to come to the text based on the analogy of the incarnation. That is, we are to recognize that just as the Logos of God came in an outer (and real!) physical body, so too on analogy, the text of Scripture comes with this β€œtwo-natures-in-one-person” mode of presentation just the same. As TF Torrance would say, there is a β€œdepth dimension” to Holy Scripture wherein the outer signum (signage) of the text, points beyond itself to its deeper and inner res (reality) in Jesus Christ and the triune God.

To have departments in seminaries and bible colleges that focus on β€œbiblical studies” and/or β€œsystematic theology,” is simply a turn to the Enlightenment way wherein there is continuous competition between the binary of the natural (the outer) and the supranatural (the inner); or the accidents (the outer) and the essence (the inner). This is not the Christian approach to doing biblical studies or theology.

The Bible’s Meaning as Near as Your Next Prayer: On a Biblical Hermeneutics

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For some reason there are many Christians, through the centuries even, who want to make an attempt at reading Holy Scripture without reading it from its God-given context in Jesus Christ. That is to say, there are Christians who want to read the Bible from a christologically contextless frame wherein the Bible becomes a wax-nose given shape by their wits and capacity to marshal the latest reading strategies of the day. But the Bible isn’t a book like that. It isn’t open to naturalist or immanentist frames of reference. It has its whole and its parts altogether, in regard to its res (reality), to its meaning in Jesus Christ and the triune God. To just focus on reading the Bible as literature (as is popular among evangelicals and progressives, secularists and elitists alike) is to completely ignore its confessional frame as a Christian Scripture as Self-given by God for the world in Jesus Christ. In other words, the Bible surely has meaning, indeed it has an intensive meaning that has been given to it through the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. That is to say, all of Scripture, both Old and New Testaments alike have a telos, a meaning that are singularly funded by the life of Christ as its ultimate reality. Some biblical studies folks might want to assert that this is too reductionistic, too restrictive to attempt some type of β€œChristian” reading of Scripture. But this fails to take seriously that the Bible, for the Christian, is the Word of God in written format. None of this is to say that its literary factors, and/or its historically grammatical features aren’t significant towards explicating its outer meaning. It is simply to say that Scripture is indeed Holy because of its inner reality as that is found in Jesus Christ. Folks fail to recognize, often, that everything is suffused with some type of prior or inner context, whether we are conscious of what that is or not. And that prior or inner context informs the way we deploy the various literary and historical tools we have available to us in the hermeneutical process; it shapes the way we arrive at our biblical exegetical and theological conclusions. The art and science of biblical interpretation either lives under its kataphysical reality in Jesus Christ, or it strays wither and hither, here and there, over the arid landscapes and oases we perceive as the contextual factors, and thus meaning factors for Holy writ.

Charles Taylor refers to the aspects, and even the history of modern hermeneutical developments in the following way:

A hermeneutical account is one which strives to make (human) sense of agent and action, and hermeneutical argument tries to show that one account does so better than a rival one. It was recognized early on that this required a kind of circular argument. The aim, in the original context of Bible interpretation, was often to make a particular passage clear which was uncertain or enigmatic. But the reading offered of this passage or verse had to make sense of the whole to make sense of the part. But a question can always be raised; do we understand fully the meaning of the whole? Perhaps the meaning we see in this verse ought to call into question the idea we have of the whole, and lead to a reinterpretation. It is possible to argue in both directions, and hermeneutics involved a kind of circle, where one has to balance potential arguments in either direction against each other.

There is a circle here, but it is not a vicious one. It doesn’t involve the notorious β€œcircular argument”, where one assumes the conclusion among the premises. On the contrary, the attempt is to bring the arguments in both directions into an equilibrium in which one makes maximum sense of the text.

Heidegger, and after him Gadamer and Ricoeur, pointed out that something like the hermeneutical circle obtains in our attempts to understand what I’m calling here β€œhuman meanings”. The β€œtexts” here can be events, passages in the life of individuals or societies, or human history; or we can start from individual experiences feelings, actions, decisions, and try to determine their meaning. Whatever meaning we attribute to the part has to make sense within the whole, whose meaning it also helps determine. The individual decision stands in this relation to the whole segment of my life in which it falls; the revolutionary turning point to the whole period in the history of society which it inflected; my momentary emotional response to the whole pattern of my feelings.

I believe that the notion of a hermeneutical circle can be generalized to understand how we operate with the skeins of interdependent meanings which are central to our human self-understanding, like that of pride versus shame, in contrast to guilt versus innocence, as well as their proper objects, which I mentioned in the first section; or the moral landscapes linking norms, virtues, and positive and negative motivations, which I have been describing in this one. Because here too, any change in one term disturbs the skein, and would have to be ratified by changes in others. Equilibrium can be restored either by making the ratification, or by refusing the original change.

There are examples in the above discussion of arguments in both directions. I argued, for instance, that our approbation of benevolence had to be seen as a putative insight into good, rather than as a brute reaction, because of how this experience opens into a whole chain of hermeneutical reasoning. The argument here runs from the potentiality of the part to generate a certain kind of whole. But there are also arguments in the opposite direction: Nietzsche is too firmly convinced that appeal for mercy cannot be emanate from the slave’s will to power for him to accept its face validity. Equilibrium comes when one has a plausible account on both levels together; or to put it as a double negative, when there is no palpable distortion at either level. And hermeneutical argument usually consists in pointing out something which a rival view distorts or cannot account for.[1]

A lot to process, even in this small section from Taylor. For our purposes, I simply wanted to engage with the Taylor passage to help illustrate the complexities involved in both biblical and other types of hermeneutics, respectively. But what I also wanted to refer us to is the point about the part to the whole and whole to the part in the combine of meaning generation; within the context of text in particular.

Ultimately, for the Christian reader, we already dramatically understand that the whole meaning of the text of Holy Scripture is finally going to climax and realize itself in its inner reality in Jesus Christ. As such, this ought to invite us into the banqueting tables of Christ’s radical potluck of interpretation of Holy writ. That is to say, when we are reading the Bible, whether in its Old or New Testament iterations, what always ought to be informing our understanding of the parts to the whole and the whole to the parts of meaning is that its connective tissue is none-else than Jesus Christ. We ought to learn how to allow this reality to be at the forefronts of our hearts and minds as we approach each and every passage we encounter within the binding of the Book we hold in our hands; more commonly known as the Bible or Holy Scripture. We ought to recognize, as is the case with any hermeneutical endeavor, that all things are a circle. But in the case of reading Holy Scripture the Christian is actively and participatorily brought into the circle of God’s triune life; and that within this circle, as Scripture’s terminating and circulating reality, the Christian has a dialogical means of contextual matter with the very personal-relational reality of Holy Scripture itself. What a joy to be a Christian within the fellowship of the triune life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Indeed, we are not orphaned readers, but readers of Scripture emblazoned with the fiery passion of God’s life of eternal love, one for the other, in the other, and us in the other and singularity of God’s eternal wooing of love and invitation into the life indestructible. So, take up and read Holy Scripture, but do so understanding that its meaning and reality is as near as your next prayer.

[1] Charles Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 218–19.

On Amillennialism: Against the “Replacement Theology” Caricature

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The following is something I wrote in and around 2007; I was still a dyed-in-the-wool dispensationalist when I wrote this. But I was attempting to be as a critical as I possibly could be towards a hermeneutical system, and biblical eschatological position, that I had always been told was heretical and even antisemitic. I was told, by dispensationalism’s best teachers, that amillennialists engaged in a purely allegorical and idealistic interpretation of Holy Scripture; especially when it came to the theology and book of Revelation. And yet as I continued to study and press in further this simply was not the case whatsoever. Maybe some within the amil camp operated or operate that way, but that is not the majority report among amillennial exegetes; nor is it the historic position amongst amillennialists. I might qualify a little bit of what I wrote so many years ago (but not in substance). I turned amil publicly probably fourteen years ago now, and for many exegetical reasons (especially with the help of Richard Bauckham’s work on the book and theology of Revelation).

Some in my old church circles label anything that is not their hard classical dispensationalismβ€”pretrib-premilβ€”as ‘replacement theology,’ or more technically it has been calledΒ supersessionism.Β This is the idea that all the promises made to ethnic Israel, once Christ came and the church was established, were taken over by the church spiritually; and of course this would be antisemitic, and thus antiChrist and heretical (since Jesus is the forever son of David, the forever Man from Nazareth). But this is not what historic amillennialism has entailed; at least not in the Protestant appropriation of it.

Let me add one qualification before I reshare what I wrote years ago: I take the Bible, in principle, to be intensively and radically about Jesus Christ (the One for the many); so did Jesus in His teachings found in John 5 and Luke 24, respectively. As such, the whole point of ethnic Israel’s existence (just as the whole point of creation’s reality in general) is in fact to mediate Christ to and for the world. To elevate human history to a level that makes Jesus an abstraction vis-a-vis ethnic Israel completely inverts the whole inner reality of everything; that makes the nation of Israel the point of salvation and creational history, and not the triune God in the scandal and particularity of Jesus Christ is to end up in another form of replacement theology, another type ofΒ supersessionismΒ wherein the nation of Israel replaces the person of Jesus Christ as the reason and being for all of history. It is a false dilemma dispensationalists offer when they assert that it is either all about the nation of Israel or the person of the Christ. It is a false dilemma because Jesus is continuously the Jew, and thus the fulfillment and reality of what it means to be Jewish before God in an ultimate way. The Christ is the second and greater Adam, which entails the notion that to be in the eternal and heavenly Adam, come to earth, is to be participants in an elevated and life of primacy which is Christ’s for the world. In other words, was Adam an ethnic Jew; was Abraham even an ethnic Jew (see Rom 4)? God’s purposes are ultimately creational/re-creational; they are cosmic, not sectarian; they are concrete, not abstract and dualistic; they are to see this time and God’s time (“eternity”) as coterminous through the analogy and reality of the hypostatic union of God and humanity in theΒ Logos ensarkosΒ (the Word [of God] enfleshed).

Here is how I described amillennialism so many years ago now:

Monergism.com, some years back, picked up a little summary description I wrote somewhere (on-line) on whatΒ AmillennialismΒ entails as an interpretive system. Here’s what I wrote:

The Amillennialist affirms that the people of Israel have not been cast off or replaced, but rather, that the Gentiles have now been included among the Jews in God’s Covenantal promises. In other words, not replacement but expansion. God’s redemptive plan, as first promised to Abraham, was that β€œall nations” would be blessed through him. Israel is, and always has been, saved the same as any other nation: by the promises to the seed, Christ. Amillennialists, do not believe in a literal 1000 year reign of Christ on earth after His second coming. Rather, they affirm that when Christ returns, the resurrection of both the righteous and wicked will take place simultaneously (see John 5), followed by judgment and and the eternal state where heaven and earth merge and Christ reigns forever.

Strong points of Amillennialism

1) It is highly Christocentric: it makes Christ the center of all the biblical covenants (even the β€œLand” covenant or Sinaitic)
2) It notes the universal scope of the Abrahamic Covenant (as key) to interpreting the rest of the biblical covenants
3) It sees salvation history oriented to a person (Christ), instead of a people (the nation of Israel)
4) It emphasizes continuity between the β€œpeople of God” (Israel and the Church are one in Christ Eph. 2:11ff)
5) It provides an ethic that is rooted in creation, and β€œre-creation” (continuity between God’s redemptive work now, carried over into the eternal state then)
6) It emphasizes a trinitarian view of God as it elevates the β€œperson”, Christ Jesus, the second person of the trinity as the point and mediator of all history
7) It flows from a hermeneutic that takes seriously the literary character of the Scriptures (esp. the book of Revelation) [see the quote at Monergism.comΒ here]

One more point of clarification: I am not, of course, your normal Covenantal theology amillennialist. Mongerism [dot] com is. I am “Barthian covenantal,” which is a completely different creature; particularly as that is funded by Barth’s reformulated doctrine of predestination (election-reprobation).

A Christological Reading of Holy Scripture Contra the neo-Marcionite “Bible Teachers” of the 21st Century

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Let me be forthrightly clear: to follow a Christologically conditioned reading of Holy Scripture is not to be, at the same time, an implicit Marcionite. It is also not to suggest that the Old Testament history is simply the Hebrew peoples’ progressive knowledge of God, and thusly their writing thereof, as if it isn’t in fact heilsgeschichte, or the story of God’s in-breaking activity all throughout β€˜salvation history,’ providentially and actively orienting and working through the events of said history in order to eventuate the actualization of his pre-destination in Jesus Christ to be for the world and not against it, but with it for all eternity. And yet this is how some very sloppy people, supposed teachers of Scripture (including Brian Zahnd, Wm Paul Young, Brad Jersak, David Bentley Hart et al.), handwave in support of biblical authority without also endorsing the accuracy of the Old Testament’s reality in Jesus Christ. They seem to want to say that the Old Testament is really just the Hebrews’ reflection on God as they wanted Him and thought Him to be; and that it wasn’t until Jesus showed up on the scene, who in an abstract way, takes up the OT and rewrites its reality, and its God, in light of His coming. As if the whole life of Christ is simply a sensus plenior (the full reading of Scripture unknown and even potentially drastically discontinuous with the original authors’ authorial intention). They even want to claim that like the Jesus Seminar, with their color-coded marbles, that they can use Jesus as a cipher to read the OT through; with such thrift and warrant that allows them to discern what in fact is real Scripture and what isn’t (i.e., in the Old Testament-Hebrew Bible). Higher criticize much? In reality most of these jokers are simply parroting what they have read from higher critic in chief, Peter Enns.

This kind of rubbish really shouldn’t be able to stand. It is simply post-Enlightenment rationalism and higher criticism repackaged for the 21st century mind. And this is ironic because these jokers attempt to bypass said modernity by asserting that they are really just forwarding the Bible reading practices of the early church and her respective fathers. This is ironic because their impulses are not being provided for by the church fathers or the early church in general, whatsoever! These jokers have confused some sort of style and mood of retrieval they believe they are inhabiting, with an actual reading and retrieval of the past pre-critical/modern readers of Holy Scripture. And yet their actual motivation is coming from the 18th and 19th centuries, and the Teutonic higher critics of Scripture; the ones who like to positivistically and rationalistically slice and dice Scripture into petri dishes of disparate and defunct books of redaction and various forms found in the history of religions.

Rubbish I say. I have no time for such garbage. Let God be true and every man and woman a liar.

A Brief Word on the Biblical Languages and a Theological Ontology

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The biblical languages often come with a perception of objectivity, like math or something. But the biblical languages are, indeed, languages. Language is fluid, and highly contextual. Learning the biblical languages can be very helpful for studying the Bible; but they aren’t definitive in regard to establishing this or that theological doctrine as true or false, per se. The more significant languages to learn are the theological languages; indeed, what could be called a theological ontology. This is not separate from biblical study; indeed, it establishes it, one way or the other, in a supra type of way. It will help the learner know how to deploy the biblical languages most appropriately, within a theological taxis (order vis a vis God). With a proper theological ontology in place, which I always argue is Christ (Logos) conditioned, the biblical languages come to have their contextual meaning; their heavenly meaning, as that has and continues to confront our lives and this world system. There is always an antecedence to the creaturely realm; which of course includes languages, and the total creational order. God in Christ is that antecedence from within the processions of His eternal and triune life. We come to evangelically know that “antecedent” life in and through the missions, the economy of God’s life for the world in Jesus Christ.