New Post at Christianity.Com: Intended Allegory in the Song of Songs?

Over at Christianity.Com I ask whether there is exegetical evidence that Solomon intended an allegorical layer of meaning in the Song of Songs. Here’s the opening:

For a number of years now learned interpreters of Scripture have been telling us that the Song of Songs is (primarily) about human love. I put the word primarily in parentheses in that last sentence for a reason. I had grown so accustomed to the emphasis on human love in the Song that I had begun to assume that’s all modern commentators said about it. As I was recently pondering this, I went back and looked at what they actually say. They typically add a word like “primarily” or “mainly,” leaving the door open to a spiritual meaning of the Song. But then when the get into it, all they talk about is human love.

In this post I want to pose a question: is it possible that Solomon intended the Song to have an allegorical layer of meaning?

Usually when you suggest that the Song is about something more than human love, people roll their eyes and write you off as a prude.

I’m not a prude, okay?

I do think the Song is about human love, and I think human love is great. Really great! I love my wife, and I can’t get over God giving us something so surprising, so pleasing, so good as marriage. Everything that happens within the context of this comprehensive interpersonal union of one man and one woman being one flesh is better than any of the perversions people use to ruin it. So I’m on board with human love in the Song.

My question, though, is whether there’s more to the Song than merely human love, more that Solomon, whom I take to have written the Song (cf. Song 1:1), intended his audience to get from this piece of poetry. I’m not out to defend the history of interpretation by asking this question, but it is worth observing that the idea that the Song has a spiritual meaning has been, well, dominant across the ages. Is there exegetical evidence for it, though?

I consider the exegetical evidence in the rest of the post.

Related: I’m preaching through the Song at Kenwood, and the sermons are on this page.

The Life We Long for: On Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

These words, near the end of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” bounced around in my head as I made my way through Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. The man and son on the road live every day knowing that someone is there to shoot them, just around the bend, in the weeds across the ditch, or coming up behind them. Along with the constant threat, McCarthy’s spare prose builds a world in which trinkets and distractions have been stripped away. Neither color nor sunshine decks this landscape. The story confronts us with characters forced moment by moment to recognize what matters.

“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.”

The man and son in this predicament testify by their very existence that humans must live for others, else there’s no reason to live. And they show us that we cannot live without hope.

World as We Know It

The novel’s opening paragraph invokes Plato, Bunyan, Jonah, and Dante:

“In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. . .”

Like Dante finding himself in a dark wood, McCarthy’s pilgrim will be led through hell to love not by Virgil but by the child. Like Bunyan’s Christian he shoulders his pack, which he will lose on the way to the celestial city. Like Jonah this man’s journey and experience are in themselves a message that calls Ninevites to repentance. Like Plato McCarthy seeks to deliver us from the illusion of the cave to know what is real (“forms” are invoked throughout, as is the image of “philosophers chained to a madhouse wall”).

McCarthy’s pilgrim is loath to wake from dreams of the world as we now know it, and McCarthy calls his audience to repent of discontented distraction and awaken to this world, the world of our dreams. At one point the man finds clean water, “water so sweet that he could smell it,” and he finds “Nothing in his memory anywhere of anything so good.” Savor your next drink of the same.

Like Job’s wife, the man’s wife gave up (the line “Curse God and die” appears in the novel, followed shortly by the suggestive word “Blessed”). She asserted that those who had survived were “the walking dead in a horror film.” She claimed that there was no counterargument, that she hoped “for eternal nothingness.” But the counterargument McCarthy shows—not tells—is faith, hope, and self-giving love. These show the bankruptcy of hopeless, faithless existence that ends in nothingness. The man even pled that his wife not kill herself with the words, “For the love of God, woman. . .”

These Three Remain

McCarthy’s words depict a world of “The frailty of everything revealed at last,” and the story he sets in that world shows that when all else is gone hope, faith, love, and life remain, that a man knows no greater love than to lay down his life for another, that life itself—the fact that we go on living—argues against despair. The birth of the boy was the man’s warrant for hope and faith against the devastated despair of his wife that a child had been born into such a world. The man and his wife responded in opposite ways: to her the child was a sorrow that tore out her heart, to him a miracle aglow with goodness:

“They sat at the window and ate in their robes by candlelight a midnight supper and watched distant cities burn. A few nights later she gave birth in their bed by the light of a drycell lamp. Gloves meant for dishwashing. The improbable appearance of the small crown of the head. Streaked with blood and lank black hair. The rank meconium. Her cries meant nothing to him.”

The alternatives are clear: death/life; despair/hope; selfishness/love. And in this book the good guys choose life, hope, and love. The good guys never give up. The good guys don’t break small promises because it leads to breaking big ones. The good guys carry the fire.

“The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it. Like a dawn before battle. . . . There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasnt about death. He wasnt sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he’d no longer any way to think about at all.

Sharp Contrast

Other religious answers are also contrasted. At one point man and boy encounter a traveler, “a starved and threadbare buddha,” and this traveler regards the world and his experience as though nothing matters. When the man asks the buddha, “How would you know if you were the last man on earth?” The buddha says to the man:

“It woudnt make any difference. When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too.”

The man replies: “I guess God would know it. Is that it?

Buddha: “There is no God.”

The man: “No?”

McCarthy condemns the buddha’s logic by presenting him contradicting himself with the retort: “There is no God and we are his prophets.”

The man meets the buddha’s nonsensical assertion that he is the prophet of a God who does not exist with a counterargument for the buddha’s indifferent rejection of God: “I dont understand how you’re still alive. How do you eat?”

The assertion “There is no God” is answered with the counter-assertion “you’re still alive.” The man seems to be suggesting that life itself is proof of God, evidence against meaninglessness.

To the question “How do you eat?” the begging buddha replies: “People give you things.” With these words the buddha confesses that apart from the Christian virtue of charity he has no hope of life. The man has countered the buddha’s rejection of God with the fact of the buddha’s ongoing life, and the buddha himself has acknowledged that the generosity of others sustains his life. The wider narrative makes plain that generosity and charity spring only from faith in God, from hope that God will deliver and provide, and from love that mimics the very love of Christ, who gave his life that we might live.

As the man and boy move on, the man asks if the buddha will thank the boy for giving him food, but the buddha refuses to do so. Christianity makes gratitude possible, but the buddha will not give the thanks he owes.

This conversation with the buddha shows that love is distinctly Christian. The buddha has no category for love, goodness, or kindness, and the man’s suspicious interchange with him also shows how essential trust is to human communication. God is basic to human kindness and essential to human dignity. That is to say, apart from God there can be neither kindness nor dignity. The buddha will not even wish the man and the boy luck, and McCarthy seems thereby to intimate that a belief in God’s providence undergirds the kind of luck the man knows the buddha will not wish him. As they leave him, the man tells his son, “There’s not a lot of good news on the road” (175). The buddha has no gospel.

The book opens with the man waking to grope for his son, earnest for reassurance that he is there, that they are safe. The book closes with the man going to sleep, choosing not to kill his son before he dies, clearly trusting that though he will not be awake to protect the boy, he can rest knowing that the boy will be safe. For this pilgrim, dying is an act of faith. They have not wandered in a cave but in a world without civilization, a world without forms. The forms are the world we now enjoy, if . . . if McCarthy’s Jonah can lead us to repentance by escorting us through the inferno, pilgrims making their way through the ruins of Vanity Fair. McCarthy seems to want us to know that the life we long for is the life we have.

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This post originally appeared on The Gospel Coalition Blog. For a video of McCarthy on the Oprah Winfrey show that validates the proposal I make here, see this post.

Review of Goldsworthy, Christ-Centered Biblical Theology

This review was originally posted at TGC Reviews

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Graeme Goldsworthy, Christ-Centered Biblical Theology: Hermeneutical Foundations and Principles. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2012. 251pp. $20.00, paper.

Let me begin by saying what Graeme Goldsworthy’s Christ-Centered Biblical Theology: Hermeneutical Foundations and Principles is not. This book is not a sustained argument that Christ is the center of biblical theology, though that view is repeatedly asserted.[1] Nor is this book an exposition of a selection of biblical themes, a book by book trek through the Bible, or a survey of salvation history.

What, then, is it?

The subtitle approaches its content, but more than anything else the book is an explanation and defense of the biblical theology of Donald Robinson. Goldsworthy dedicates the book to Robinson, exposits his schematic approach to biblical theology, defends it as superior to a “Vos–Clowney” model, and concludes with discussions of “Robinson’s typology” and “The Robinson Legacy.”

The main difference between what Goldsworthy terms the Robinson–Hebert[2] model as opposed to that of the Vos–Clowney crowd seems to be in how the divisions or “epochs” of OT history are conceived and made. In distinction from the Vos–Clowney approach, which favors an epochal division of OT history and sees great significance in the Sinai covenant made with Moses, Goldsworthy champions the way the Robinson–Hebert model works less in terms of “epochs” and more in terms of “modes of revelation” (171). Goldsworthy insists that foregrounding Abraham and the eschatology announced by the prophets makes it easier to see how patterns and prophecies are fulfilled in Jesus. He states, “This pattern of recapitulation is the one highlighted by Donald Robinson and Gabriel Hebert and that, in my opinion, provides a better understanding of the matrix of revelation than the pattern of epochs proposed by Vos, Murray and Clowney” (149). Goldsworthy’s view is that the Robinson–Hebert approach makes Moses less a new departure and more an outworking of the covenant with Abraham, and thus better fits the biblical material. Rather than seeing Moses as a prominent new departure, Goldsworthy would see the Bible’s big story breaking down as follows: Creation to Abraham, then David, then the prophets, then fulfillment achieved by Jesus, concluding with the New Creation (26).

Goldsworthy presents this as putting students of the Bible in better position to understand how the New Testament claims fulfillment of the Old. He writes, “As I have been at pains to demonstrate, the typological structure Robinson arrives at differs somewhat from the epochal structures determined by Vos and his disciples. . . . These are not so much epochs as modes of revelation” (171). And then he quotes Robinson on the way the patterns of OT history would find fulfillment in what Christ brings:

There would be a new Exodus, a new redemption from slavery and a new entry into the land of promise . . . a new covenant and a new law . . . . a new Jerusalem . . . a new David . . . a new Temple . . . . It would not be too much to say that Israel’s history, imperfectly experienced in the past, would find its perfect fulfillment “in that day” (173).

This understanding is based on the view that Israel’s prophets use Israel’s past as a paradigm that points to Israel’s future: “The key point is that the prophetic perspectives of the future restoration and ultimate salvation are based on, and follow the pattern of, the salvation history of the past” (133).

I think that Goldsworthy and Robinson are correct about these patterns, but I doubt that the Vos–Clowney crowd would disagree, nor am I convinced their stance on “epochs” and the approach they take to the mosaic covenant hinder them from arriving at similar conclusions.[3] Some of these differences relate to broader, more systematic-theological commitments, as Goldsworthy himself acknowledges when he comments on the Westminster Confession and the 39 Articles (169 n. 11).

There are two issues in this book where I think Goldsworthy could be clearer, one having to do with the center of biblical theology, the other with what biblical theology is and how we are to pursue it. I have argued that the glory of God in salvation through judgment is the center of biblical theology, so I am glad to see that Goldsworthy regards the search for the center as not only valid but necessary. He writes,

The question to be put to those evangelicals who reject a “centre” in favour of a multiplex approach is, what gives the Bible its unity? Once we undertake to describe “A Biblical Theology”, as opposed to “Biblical Theologies”, we are bound to attempt to organize our material on the basis of some central principle theme or person. We cannot assert the unity of the word of God and at the same time relegate its description to the too-hard basket (109).[4]

I am glad that Goldsworthy sees the need for a center, but he could be clearer on what he thinks the center is. It might be objected that the title of this book makes plain what Goldsworthy sees as the center of biblical theology: Christ-Centered Biblial Theology, and at several points in the book he makes affirmations to that effect:

  • “Christ as the centre of biblical theology” (31).
  • “the role of Jesus Christ as the centre to which all Scripture leads” (32).
  • “there is the lack of consensus about the nature, the principles and the method of biblical theology. . . . my main purpose in this investigation is to try to establish an approach that is consistent with biblical presuppositions and that is ultimately Christ-centred” (35).
  • Jesus is “the central subject matter of the Hebrew Scriptures” (45).
  • “evangelical biblical theology should proceed with the presuppositions of the unity of Scripture and the centrality of Christ” (47).
  • “the central role of Jesus Christ” (216).
  • “central focus on Christ” (217).
  • “The sufficiency of Christ stretches to his sufficiency as the fulfilling centre of the whole canon of Scripture” (225).

It would appear from all this that Goldsworthy thinks that Christ is the center of biblical theology, right? Perhaps, but Goldsworthy also says in this book: “Thus I stand by my initial suggestion that the central theme of Scripture is the kingdom of God defined simply as God’s people in God’s place under God’s rule” (75).

Goldsworthy does not offer a discussion that attempts to reconcile these two affirmations. He offers no harmonization of them, so any suggestion as to how he can affirm that both Christ and the kingdom of God are the center of biblical theology would be mere speculation. He needs to clarify this. I can imagine those who contend that the search for a center is “chimerical” (Carson) and “an obsession” (Scobie) citing what Goldsworthy does here as evidence for their cause: an advocate for the idea that biblical theology has a center cannot pick one and actually affirms two different centers in the same book. Ouch.

For my part, I would identify the center of biblical theology with what the biblical authors indicate is God’s ultimate purpose, what they present as being the grand theme out of which every other theme is birthed and to which every other theme flows, and I contend that God’s ultimate purpose is to make known his glory, particularly in displays of justice that highlight his mercy, the supreme example of this being the cross of Christ.[5]

The other area where Goldsworthy could be clearer is on the very definition of biblical theology, which directly affects the method we use to pursue the task. Goldsworthy writes,

So, let us begin with a broadly consensual definition of biblical theology as the discipline that seeks to understand the theological message, or messages, communicated through the variety of literary phenomena within the various books of the Bible (39).

He goes on to say, “By ‘theology’ we mean that which is revealed of God and his ways” (54), having also stated that,

Biblical theology happens when we engage part or all of the biblical text and endeavor to lay bare the theological content that is there. The immediate goal is not the formulation of Christian doctrine for today, but rather an understanding of what this biblical text reveals about God and his ways with his creation (39).

This is fine as far as it goes. The problem is that it does not go very far, nor is it either very descriptive or very precise. Can we not say more than that we are after the “theological message,” that “theology” has to do with what is “revealed of God,” and that we are trying to “lay bare the theological content that is there”?

Goldsworthy also says that “biblical theology is concerned with the structures of revelation and with the ways in which the unity of the biblical canon can be described” (40). What does he mean by “the structures of revelation”? It would seem that he refers here to the “Robinson–Hebert schema” he defends, which he also refers to as “stages of revelation: biblical history, prophetic eschatology and the fulfillment achieved by Christ” (221). Since these “structures” and “stages” of revelation transcend the work of any one biblical author, Goldsworthy appears to be interpreting the work of the divine author as he does biblical theology. This may explain why Goldsworthy does not often engage directly with the biblical text. His brand of biblical theology is more presuppositional, theological, and philosophical than it is exegetical.

This is my biggest concern about Goldsworthy’s approach: which biblical author provides the warrant for the Robinson–Hebert schema? Is this schema an interpretation of a statement made by a biblical author? Is Goldsworthy interpreting the intentions of a particular biblical author? Or is this an interpretation of a reconstructed history derived from multiple biblical books? That is to say, is this an interpretation of particular biblical texts or an interpretation of a historical construct derived from the texts? Or perhaps this is an interpretation of the final form of the canon—and in that case does Goldsworthy envision a human “canonicler” who intended this meaning to arise out of the whole or must he appeal only to the intentions of the divine author?

I would contend that a more precise definition of biblical theology will enable us to pursue a method that is easier to describe, practice, and verify. In my view, it is better to define biblical theology along these lines: biblical theology is the attempt to understand the interpretive perspective of the biblical authors. We are trying to discern the worldview behind the statements they make.[6] We who believe the Bible should also adopt the worldview of the biblical authors.[7] This anchors biblical theology in authorial intent, and we need not bifurcate the intention of the human and divine authors. We know what the divine author intended to communicate because we understand what he inspired the human authors to write.

Defining biblical theology as the pursuit of the interpretive perspective of the biblical authors brings methodological clarity as we focus in on how later biblical authors interpreted earlier Scripture, and with the first biblical author, Moses, we can examine how he has interpreted the events he narrates. These interpretations will be reflected in the choices made regarding what to include or exclude and how what is included has been presented. We have an interpreted account of the world in the Bible, and biblical theology seeks to discern the perspective from which the world has been interpreted.[8] The crafting of narrative and poetry is obviously relevant here, as are intertextuality and typology, and all of this is verifiable as we use criteria for analyzing poetics, quotations, allusions, and echoes to arbitrate such questions as the author’s intentions and whether and how a later author has evoked and interpreted earlier texts. We cannot achieve absolute certainty, but we can be more precise, closer to the text, and more clear about exactly what we are after.[9]

Many of us have learned a great deal from Graeme Goldsworthy. He has done as much as anyone in our day to draw attention to the importance of and need for biblical theology. This book, Christ-Centered Biblical Theology, recounts the personal nature of his own journey, attests his love and appreciation for his teacher, Donald Robinson, and thereby encourages all who serve in like manner to persevere in love for students and passion for the Lord and his Word.


[1] The spelling of the word “center” varies: “centered” is on the cover, but the Aussie “centre” prevails through the text.

[2] Goldsworthy provides an interesting tidbit about Hebert in footnote 10 on page 168, “These concepts of inspiration and authority would mean for Hebert something different from Robinson’s biblicism. Despite this, Hebert as a conservative Anglo-Catholic nevertheless had a high view of Scripture and a clear sense of the structure of Revelation. See A. G. Hebert, The Authority of the Old Testament . . . , and Fundamentalism and the Church of God . . . The latter contains some criticism of evangelical views of Scripture and provoked a response from James I. Packer, ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God . . .” For his own part Goldsworthy repeatedly affirms the unity of the Bible, its status as inspired revelation (e.g., 40–41, 54), that God makes no mistakes, and that the Bible is “self-authenticating, infallible” . . . and that these attributes are “the foundation of a hermeneutic of authorial intent” (43).

[3] Goldsworthy writes, “It is the sensitivity to this, so central to Robinson’s schema, that seems to be missing from the works of Vos and Clowney but brought out to some extent by Dennis Johnson” (134). I wonder if this has more to do with the historical situation and interpretive atmosphere of those named than it has to do with the adoption of a particular approach to conceptualizing OT history.

[4] He also comments on “the delineation of the centre of biblical theology that gives Scripture its unity” (109), and, acknowledging those who raise “the caution about a centre,” he writes, “I regard these men as being overcautious in this matter. Somewhere along the line we have to ask what gives the Scriptures their unity” (216).

[5] See further James M. Hamilton, God’s Glory in Salvation Through Judgment: A Biblical Theology (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010).

[6] Ibid., 41–42, 355.

[7] I think this is what Goldsworthy is after when he writes, “Biblical theology . . . is, after all, a name we give to the divine imperative to the church to listen to God’s Word and to live in submission to its authority” (217).

[8] I pursue these issues further in a forthcoming project, James M. Hamilton, What Is Biblical Theology? (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013).

[9] So if we appeal, for instance, to our exegesis of Galatians 3 to show that Paul understood the promises to Abraham to take priority over the covenant with Moses, and that the covenant with Moses at Sinai flows out of them, we can be more precise and definitive. By contrast, without appeal to Galatians 3, relying on a wide-angle discussion of the OT, Goldsworthy says, “From the foregoing summary of the major persons, places and events in the biblical history, it becomes evident, I believe, that it is more natural to the biblical accounts to understand the watershed in revelation to be David and Solomon, not Moses” (132). Whereas an exegetical discussion of Galatians 3 can be analyzed, Goldsworthy’s claims are more impressionistic, less verifiable.

Typology Preserves Biblical Inerrancy Against Ehrman’s Mistake

Bart Ehrman describes why he left the faith in his book Misquoting Jesus (8–9):

A turning point came in my second semester . . . . we had to write a final term paper on an interpretive crux of our own choosing. I chose a passage in Mark 2, where Jesus is confronted by the Pharisees because his disciples had been walking through a grain field, eating the grain on the Sabbath. Jesus wants to show the Pharisees that “Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath” and so reminds them of what the great King David had done when he and his men were hungry, how they went into the Temple “when Abiathar was the high priest” and at the show bread, which was only for the priests to eat. One of the well-known problems of the passage is that when one looks at the Old Testament passage that Jesus is citing (1 Sam. 21:1–6), it turns out that David did this not when Abiathar was the high priest, but, in fact, when Abiathar’s father Ahimelech was. In other words, this is one of those passages that have been pointed to in order to show that the Bible is not inerrant at all but contains mistakes.

In my paper for Professor Story, I developed a long and complicated argument to the effect that even though Mark indicates this happened “when Abiathar was the high priest,” it doesn’t really mean that Abiathar was the high priest, but that the event took place in the part of the scriptural text that has Abiathar as one of the main characters. My argument was based on the meaning of the Greek words involved and was a bit convoluted. I was pretty sure Professor Story would appreciate the argument, since I knew him as a good Christian scholar who obviously (like me) would never think there could be anything like a genuine error in the Bible. But at the end of my paper he made a simple one-line comment that for some reason went straight through me. He wrote: “Maybe Mark just made a mistake.” I started thinking about it, considering all the work I had put into the paper, realizing that I had had to do some pretty fancy exegetical footwork to get around the problem, and that my solution was in fact a bit of a stretch. I finally concluded, “Hmm . . . maybe Mark did make a mistake.”

Once I made that admission, the floodgates opened. For if there could be one little, picayune mistake in Mark 2, maybe there could be mistakes in other places as well. . . .

I am convinced that Ehrman is mistaken, not Mark. In the passage Ehrman describes, Mark 2:23–28, Mark presents Jesus making a sophisticated interpretive connection by using the name “Abiathar.” That is, neither Mark nor Jesus is in error. Rather, Mark is presenting Jesus using the name Abiathar in the service of a wider, typological connection. I would invite you to consider the questions I ask about this passage in “The Typology of David’s Rise to Power” (13):

Much discussion has been generated by the fact that Mark 2:26 portrays Jesus referring to “the time of Abiathar the high priest,” when it appears that at the time, Ahimelech would have been the high priest. Goppelt simply asserts: “Mark says Abiathar, but that is an error.”[1] But perhaps there are typological forces at work here, too. David did interact with Ahimelech in 1 Samuel 21:1–9, but Abiathar is the priest who escapes from Doeg’s slaughter (22:20). Could the reference to Abiathar be intentional? Could Mark be presenting Jesus as intentionally alluding to Abiathar’s escape from the slaughter of the priests ordered by Saul and carried out by Doeg the Edomite? Could this be a subtle way for Jesus to remind the Pharisees (“Have you never read,” Mark 2:25) that the opposition to David was wicked and murderous? If this is so, the typological connection suggested by the reference to Abiathar in Mark might be that just as Saul and Doeg opposed David and Abiathar’s household, so also the Pharisees are opposing Jesus and his followers.[2]

In the wider context of this paragraph I discuss the flow of the passage in Samuel and the kind of interpretation Mark presents. Thanks to the generosity of The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, a PDF of the essay is free to you.


[1] Goppelt, Typos, 85 n. 106.

[2] Having come to this position, I was pleased to find a similar suggestion in Rikk E. Watts, “Mark,” in Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, ed. G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 141: “If the point is to establish an authoritative precedent, then the actions of Abiathar, as Ahimelech’s son, in taking the ephod to David to become his chief priest and subsequent blessing underscore God’s affirmation of Ahimelech’s decision, his presence with David, and his abandonment of David’s opponent Saul. Not only are Jesus’ disciples justified, but also to oppose them (and, of course, Jesus) is to oppose both ‘David’ and ultimately God, who vindicated him and will also vindicate Jesus.”

Chiasms on the Brain?

I was recently asked some questions about chiasms: Are biblical scholars just bored and seeing things? Would ancient audiences have picked up on them? Is this a widely attested ancient Near Eastern device? Do lay Bible readers have any hope of seeing them or must they consult commentaries?

These are good questions. There are biblical scholars who are very suspicious of chiasms, especially of larger proposals that stretch over whole sections of texts or even whole books. I come down with those who see chiasms as a key structuring device in ancient literature. I would add that it’s not just ancient literature. I think it was a prof I had in college, Skip Hays, who suggested that The Great Gatsby has a paneled structure that is basically chiastic. There are plenty of examples of balanced structures in the world’s literature. Think of the Divine Comedy . . .

Anyway, in a world that didn’t use chapters, chapter titles (the chapter and verse numbers in the Bible were added later–they don’t come from the biblical authors), bold subheadings, and italics, authors seem to have employed chiastic structures, inclusios, and other devices that rely on the repetition of key words, phrases, or thematic concepts to structure their material.

There is evidence that early on the biblical texts were widely memorized, as well as evidence that they were regularly read aloud. I think it plausible that authors expected their audiences to recognize chiastic structures and inclusios formed by the repetition of key words, phrases, and concepts, and if they weren’t caught on first hearing (those accustomed to listening closely to texts being read aloud probably had more facility for hearing such things–I notice that my sons, who have heard us read aloud to them a lot, seem to catch more from a first reading than my wife and I sometimes do) they could be noticed in the memorization/meditation/recitation process.

This is not limited to the ANE, though, because chiasms are also widely attested in the NT. I see a chiastic structure in the whole book of Revelation.

A proposed chiasm is either convincing or unconvincing, isn’t it? We’re dealing with those points on the scale from impossible to unlikely to implausible to possible to plausible to likely to certain . . . Sometimes chiasms are more apparent if the texts are read in the original Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic, though if you’re reading a more literal translation you might still pick it up if you’re paying close attention and thinking hard about how the text hangs together. I think if you were to study a text really closely or memorize it in something like the NASB or ESV or NKJV, you might notice a chiastic structure . . . so commentaries are not the layperson’s only hope of seeing the structure that is there.

The Typology of David’s Rise to Power: Messianic Patterns in the Book of Samuel

What is Typology? How do the biblical authors develop typological connections?

Can we read the Bible the way the biblical authors did?

These are some of the questions I seek to address in an essay that has just appeared in The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology. Thanks to the generosity of the editor, Steve Wellum (author of, with Peter Gentry, Kingdom through Covenant) and SBTS, I have permission to post a PDF of the essay here:

“The Typology of David’s Rise to Power: Messianic Patterns in the Book of Samuel,” SBJT 16.2 (2012): 4–25.

This essay has a history that I want to record. I can remember teaching the book of Acts in Sunday School at Clifton Baptist Church in Louisville when I was a PhD student at SBTS. This was around 2002–2003. I needed the categories and language of typology, but I had neither. Over and over I felt that I could see Luke doing what I would now describe as typology, but I was at a loss to describe it well. It’s really wonderful what knowing the right word for the right thing will enable you to say.

In 2005 I began to work on a project that was eventually published as “The Virgin Will Conceive: Typological Fulfillment in Matthew 1:18–23,” pages 228–47 in Built upon the Rock: Studies in the Gospel of Matthew, ed. John Nolland and Dan Gurtner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). As I was working on what Matthew meant when he claimed fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14 in Matthew 1:18–23, I found my way into the field of typology, and what really introduced me to it was E. Earle Ellis’s Foreword to Leonhard Goppelt’s book Typos.

It was my privilege to preach through 1–2 Samuel at Baptist Church of the Redeemer from July 2006 to January of 2008, and as I worked through Samuel I saw many places where NT authors seemed to have been influenced by the patterns in the book of Samuel. In late January or early February of 2008, while teaching at SWBTS Houston, I was invited to present a Julius Brown Gay lecture at Southern Seminary in Louisville, KY. I decided to use my acquaintance with the book of Samuel gained from preaching the book and do more exploration in the field of typology, so I wrote the essay that is the subject of this post at that time. I presented it as a Julius Brown Gay lecture at Southern Seminary on March 13, 2008. The audio of that presentation (which is me basically reading most of this essay) is here. I was then invited to join the faculty of SBTS, which I was honored to do in August of 2008.

That winter Steve Wellum, editor of SBJT, wanted to publish “The Typology of David’s Rise” with a response from Robert Yarbrough. There was a mixup of communication (for which I’m happy to claim responsibility), and instead of giving Dr. Wellum this essay I wrote another one, “Was Joseph a Type of the Messiah? Tracing the Typological Identification between Joseph, David, and Jesus,” SBJT 12.4 (2008), 52–77. I’m sorry for the mixup in communication, but I’m grateful that I had an opportunity to explore these typological connections further. Writing “Was Joseph a Type?” certainly clarified my own thinking.

Writing is perhaps the best way to learn. Nothing clarifies a concept or thought process in your own mind like the challenge of thinking out exactly what you are trying to say and how to say it.

Because of the way that Earle Ellis introduced me to the subject of typology through his preface to Goppelt’s book and his many other writings, and in gratitude for the kindness he showed me when I was his junior colleague on the SWBTS faculty, I dedicated the lecture, now published as an essay, to him. He died on March 2, 2010.

I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to be one of the faculty on SWBTS’s Oxford Study Tour in the summer of 2005, and Dr. Ellis led our tour of the British Museum. Jason Duesing took this photo of us at that time.

In Houston October 1–6, 2012

My sweet wife grew up in Houston, and then when I finished my PhD at SBTS in 2003, the Lord opened a door for me to teach at the Houston campus of Southwestern Seminary. I had the privilege of teaching there from 2003–2008. In January of 2004 I was ordained to gospel ministry by Providence Baptist Church in Houston, and then in 2005 I was blessed to get involved with the core group of people planting what has become Baptist Church of the Redeemer. It was my privilege to help pastor that flock with some dear fellow-elders from 2005–2008.  We loved Houston because we loved the people of God we had the joy of walking with there, and the Lord’s people there loved us so well.

So getting to go back to Houston feels a bit like going home. My brother and his wife and their new baby even live there!

All this makes me delighted to have the opportunity to teach a class on the Gospel of John at The Bible Seminary in Katy, TX, just west of Houston. The class will meet Monday through Friday, October 1–5, from 8:15am until 4:30pm. If you’re looking to spend a week in the Word, I’d love to see you there.

Then that Friday night, October 5, and Saturday morning, October 6, I’ll be doing three sessions on Biblical Theology at the recently planted Christ Community Church. Lord willing, we’ll be looking at the Song of Songs in biblical theology, then motherhood in biblical theology, then fatherhood in biblical theology.

If you’re in the Houston area (or if you’re within driving distance of Houston!) and we had the joy of interacting there, please consider this an invitation, yea, a plea, old friend. Let’s reconnect – it would be great to spend the week in the Word with you at The Bible Seminary, and then what a privilege to think together about marriage and parenting in biblical theology at Christ Community Church. I would be thrilled to reconnect with you.

Congrats to Andy Naselli on From Typology to Doxology

My good friend Andy Naselli recently completed his second Phd. The first one was done at Bob Jones in Theology and resulted in an important book entitled Let Go and Let God? A Survey and Analysis of Keswick Theology. The second one was done at Trinity under D. A. Carson, and it has now been published as From Typology to Doxology: Paul’s Use of Isaiah and Job in Romans 11:34–35.

This book results from a whole host of good things: Andy is one of the brightest scholars I know, works as hard as anyone I’ve ever met, is one of the most organized men in the world, and he wrote this book on a superlative text under the supervision of the wise, learned, and godly Carson.

I was honored that Andy invited me to write a foreword for the published version of the dissertation, and I’m grateful for permission from both author and publisher to post that foreword here:

The book you hold in your hands deserves close attention for several reasons: it treats a climactic passage in what may be the most important letter ever written by one of the world’s most influential authors. Moreover, in Romans 11:33–36 Paul himself quotes two other great texts, the books of Job and Isaiah. In addition to the significance of the material treated, Andy Naselli’s treatment is notable: this book explains the use Paul makes of Isaiah 40:13 and Job 41:3 in Romans 11:34–35, and the explanation is as insightful and responsible as it is daring and exciting.

It’s not hard to imagine a published dissertation being responsible and insightful, but daring and exciting? Indeed.

Exciting precisely because Andy Naselli dares to understand. The daring claims made here are that Paul gets the Old Testament right; that as Paul quotes the Old Testament, his citations invoke broader passages, and that the flow of thought in those broader passages corresponds to the argument Paul makes. Insight and courage ignite Naselli’s bold contention that Paul’s use of these texts cues us to a wider typological connection that Paul sees between what Isaiah said to the nation of Israel, the experience of Job, and what Paul says the Jewish people will experience in the future. The wood of Naselli’s scholarship, arranged with rigorous care, has been set aflame by his sympathetic analysis of Paul’s perspective, resulting in a sacrifice of praise with a pleasing aroma. Accounting for all the evidence, whether from primary sources or secondary literature, the blazing book yields light and heat.

How could Paul’s citation of Isaiah 40:13 be typological? Because as the quotation of Isaiah 6:9–10 in all four gospels and Acts indicates, the hardening that led to the exile from the land has not yet been lifted (cf. Rom 11:25). The prophesied new exodus and return from exile have been anticipated and inaugurated but not yet consummated. Anticipated in the returns to the land narrated in Ezra and Nehemiah; inaugurated in the death and resurrection of Jesus; there is a sense in which, having rejected the Messiah, Israel remains in exile. Paul is explaining in Romans 11 how God will keep his promise to restore his people, having made them jealous by those who are no people (cf. Deut 32:21 and Rom 11:13–14). The typological pattern of new exodus and return from exile evoked in Isaiah 40, then, is the pattern that will find its antitype, its ultimate fulfillment, when the Redeemer comes from Zion, banishes ungodliness from Jacob, takes away their sin, brings them into the new covenant, “and in this way all Israel will be saved” (Rom 11:26–27). Naselli also draws insightful parallels between the experience of Job and Israel in making the case that Paul’s use of Job 41:3 is also typological.

Andy Naselli shows that Paul’s use of Isaiah 40:13 and Job 41:3 demonstrates that God established a foundation of judgment on which he built a soaring tower of mercy for the praise of his glory in the life of Job and the history of Israel, and this pattern of events will be fulfilled in the future redemption of Israel to which Paul points. To put it another way, Naselli has demonstrated that Paul’s argument here is that God shows his glory in salvation through judgment.

This book deserves the attention of all who care to understand the passages examined here, and more broadly, how the New Testament authors understand the Old. This is an exploration of unsearchable judgments and inscrutable ways (Rom 11:33), pointing to the one whose mind none has mapped, to whom none give counsel or bribes, “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen” (Rom 11:34–36). Let me keep you from it no longer: God’s best to you in this insightful and responsible, daring and exciting read.

In my opinion you should buy this book right now and read it as soon as possible.

New Post at Christianity.com: How I Mark My Bible

Someone recently asked in a comment on some post or other about how I mark my Bible.

I describe the color coding system I use in a post over at Christianity.com. Here’s the introduction:

Do you have a system for marking your Bible as you study? Over the years, I’ve found that if I want to layer reading upon reading and go deeper each time, it helps me to mark my Bible and build on my earlier study notes.

As I read the Bible, I try to make note of repeated words, resumed themes, quotations of earlier passages, and other key ideas. But I don’t want simply to see them and move on. I want to highlight them. This helps me recall connections I’ve seen, and helps me find those key ideas later. Whenever I want an uninfluenced, fresh reading of a Bible passage, I use an unmarked copy.

I try to read large chunks of Bible all at one sitting, whole books if possible, and thoroughly mark them up as I go. Doing this book after book brings out the interconnectedness of individual books and the thick intertextuality of each book of the Bible with all the others.

So, here’s what I like to do when marking my Bible. I use a mechanical pencil, a set of colored pens, colored pencils, and occasionally a highlighter to note things. As I’ve done this over the years, I’ve developed a color code for key ideas:

Continue reading . . .

I. H. Marshall Reviews G. K. Beale

It’s not often that a scholar of the stature of I. Howard Marshall reviews a book by a scholar of the stature of G. K. Beale. Both are men of massive influence, standing, piety, and scholarship.

Both Marshall and Beale have written a New Testament Theology, and Marshall’s review of Beale’s is in Themelios 37.2, which appeared today. Here’s Marshall’s conclusion:

So if you want a survey that will tell you what are the characteristics and distinctive contributions of the individual authors or books of the NT, you will not find it here (although you will be able to find what many of them say or imply on the selected theme of the book), and you will need to turn to such as Frank Matera and Frank Thielman. Similarly, if you want synthetic summaries of the teaching of the NT on the various motifs that it discusses, you will need to turn to such as Donald Guthrie or Tom Schreiner. And if you want a critical discussion of the varied understandings of contemporary scholars, you will need to turn to such as Peter Stuhlmacher. This volume focuses essentially on the biblical basis for NT theology, and I found so many fresh ideas (well, fresh to me) in it that I have read it with excitement and shall need to keep returning to it for fresh stimulus.

I think it’s safe to say that Marshall’s book will also “tell you what are the characteristics and distinctive contributions of the individual authors or books of the NT.”

Anyone interested in biblical theology should read the whole thing.

Related: my review of Beale’s book can be found here.

 

Review of Phillips, God’s Wisdom in Proverbs

Note: Themelios 37.2 has just appeared, in which this review is published. I would note also that what Dan Phillips does in this book, especially with Proverbs 22:6, goes very well with the previous post on child-training in the OT.

Dan Phillips. God’s Wisdom in Proverbs: Hearing God’s Voice in Scripture. The Woodlands, TX: Kress, 2011. xxi + 405pp. $24.99. Printed Caseside.

Dan Phillips is pastor of Copperfield Bible Church in Houston, TX, and he writes regularly with Phil Johnson and Frank Turk at the Pyromaniacs blog. In addition to the volume under review here, Phillips has written The World-Tilting Gospel. Both books come at readers with a deadly seriousness about the gospel and sound doctrine tossed in a breezy light-hearted writing style. The jocular sternness is a jolting combination: Phillips brings a grin to the face then grabs for the throat. He takes the biblical languages seriously too, so while this book does not have an academic feel the Hebrew text of Proverbs is consistently engaged.

God’s Wisdom in Proverbs comes in eight chapters with an epilogue and four appendices. Chapter one presents the essentials for understanding Proverbs: Phillips holds firmly to Solomonic authorship, an issue given 20 pages in appendix one; he interprets Proverbs in harmony with the rest of the Hebrew Bible; and he discusses the book’s structure (relying mainly on the headings), poetry, and parallelism as he orients the reader to the interpretation of the book. Chapter two is a thirty page discussion of Proverbs 1:2–6, and chapter three explores the fear of Yahweh. Chapter four focuses mainly on Proverbs 2:1–6 on the topic of “how to wise up.” Chapter five exposits the teaching of Proverbs on trusting and knowing God. Chapter six synthesizes the teaching of Proverbs on godly relationships, chapter seven does the same for marriage, and chapter 8 rounds out the body of the book with over 60 pages on the teaching of Proverbs on child-training. In the epilogue Phillips addresses the reader who might feel condemned by the high standards set forth in the book of Proverbs: he urges faith in Christ for justification, explaining how the transforming power of the Spirit to regenerate enables people to live according to the wisdom set forth in Proverbs. As mentioned above, appendix one deals with Solomonic authorship of Proverbs. Appendix two looks at “words related to teaching in Proverbs,” appendix three is given to the meaning of Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it” (ESV), and appendix four deals with “preaching and teaching the book of Proverbs.”

In appendix three Phillips takes the position that Proverbs 22:6 is a warning, which he translates as “Start out a youth according to his own way—even should he grow old, he will not turn from it.” Phillips shows how the bare Hebrew “his way” is typically translated such that the “way” referenced is the “right” way, but he contends, with Douglas Stuart and others, that this is an unwarranted addition. The defense Phillips provides for his interpretation of this verse, taking it to state that children will be confirmed in and stay in the way they are trained to go, whether that way is good or bad, is clear and compelling.

The teaching of Proverbs is desperately needed today. As our society descends into decadence, this book of the Bible will give us a backbone and help us to stand, and this applies to everything from fearing God to relating appropriately to others and cultivating marriage and training children, to say nothing of sound economic policy. We need no more “explanations” of Proverbs that nullify its teaching or assume it has no connection to its Old Testament context. Rather, we need balanced, studied, serious, joyful, and wise explanation and application of Proverbs. Enter Dan Phillips. This would be a great book for men’s discipleship groups, for a pastor planning to preach through Proverbs, for the recent graduate, and for much else. We can thank Phillips especially for his balanced and courageous presentation of how parents should use the rod for reproof.

Our day is also a day in which some are calling for “crazy” or “radical” expressions of Christianity. These presentations are seldom seasoned with the whole counsel of God: do they take Old Testament wisdom literature into account? Wouldn’t the Old Testament wisdom literature help us to follow Jesus, who taught people to count the cost of doing so? Often the calls to sell all or leave all appeal to younger people, typically college students, who have few responsibilities, are unmarried, and have no children—the very kinds of people for whom Solomon wrote Proverbs. All Christians today need the message of Proverbs, but it was expressly written to make wise the simple. Proverbs remains God’s word for God’s people. As we seek to follow Christ today, we will only be wholly committed to Jesus when we live by the wisdom the Spirit inspired Solomon to write in Proverbs. Dan Phillips has given us a study that would be a great place to start down the path of acquiring wisdom.

Codex Sinaiticus: A Full Color Facsimile

Nearly all the sacred words are in these full color photos of the pounced parchment scribed with the ancient ink. Living words copied by three maybe four careful hands. God breathed words, every one true, every thought from man and from God. Every utterance worthy of trust. These leaves in these photos passed under no press but were prepared by living hands. Letters embossed by the living, for the living, from the living. This is a book written by hands to be written on hearts.

How many such manuscripts contain both Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible? Not many. Even fewer as early as the 300’s AD. With Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus is one of the two most important manuscripts of the whole Bible in Greek. Codex Sinaiticus is a wonder of the world, a priceless treasure. More than an artifact, though, this book preserves the word of God, presenting an ancient Greek translation from the Old Testament’s Hebrew and the New Testament in its original Greek.

Unless God reveals himself, as this book claims he has, we cannot know him. Without the manuscripts that preserve God’s revelation of himself in the writings of the biblical authors, we have no access to the sacred texts. Is there anything in the world more needed than the word of God? And as one of the most ancient presentations of the word of God in Greek, what can have more value than a witness to the word such as Codex Sinaiticus?

High quality photographs of Codex Sinaiticus are being made available online, and now the British Library and Hendrickson Publishers have brought out a full size, full color facsimile of the whole manuscript. They are selling them. You can buy one. Examine it for yourself. Astonishing. Perhaps you would like to rethink whether there are more important things for you to do than examine the word of God as presented by an ancient manuscript?

The book is handsomely made and finely bound. Lovely in appearance, hefty in weight, imposing in size. The photographs are clear and the text is there for close reading. Lunate sigmas and ligatures, strike-throughs and spelling anomalies, running headers, red ink in places, binding notations from ancient craftsmen, pumice marks from the scribes who scrubbed the hide, follicles from the hair of the goats who gave their skin, tears visible where the parchment was too thin or the scribe too rough, corrections from the very scribe who made the mistake. Everything there to be seen on the thick pages with the color photos in full size.

The new full color facsimile is a vast improvement of the facsimile brought out a century ago by Helen and Kirsopp Lake. No more must a man travel to London, Leipzig, and Mount Sinai to see the whole thing. You can spread this full color facsimile of the thing on the table in front of you—you’ll need a big table.

Who should care most about such a treasure, such a privilege? Should it not be those who most love the words, those for whom these words are sweeter than honey from the comb, those who would heed the call to meditate on them day and night, build their house on the rock foundation they lay, view their world through the lens they grind, and live on the hope that rises in the east. This is our story, our book, Codex Sinaiticus our treasure. On its testimony our faith rests. These are the words that make the foolish wise unto salvation. Why not learn Greek? Why not examine the Codex?

A Biblical Theology of Motherhood

The editor of the Journal of Discipleship and Family Ministry, Timothy Paul Jones, has generously granted me permission to post my essay from the most recent issue (table of contents).

Here’s a taste of “A Biblical Theology of Motherhood“:

What is a biblical theology of motherhood? A biblical theology of anything seeks to describe both the storyline and the network of assumptions and presuppositions and beliefs assumed by the biblical authors as they wrote. The only access we have to what the biblical authors thought or assumed is what they wrote. When we pursue biblical theology, what we are trying to get at is the worldview reflected in the assumptions of the biblical authors, the worldview from which their statements spring, the worldview in which their statements make sense. If we are trying to establish a biblical theology of motherhood, we want to see how motherhood fits in the plot of the Bible’s big story, how it interacts with other aspects of the story, and how these things shed light on the direct statements about motherhood in the songs of the Psalmists, the Proverbs of the sages, and the instructions of the apostles. Story and statements inform one another, each expositing, affirming, and explaining the other. This study will begin with motherhood in the Bible’s story before considering the Bible’s statements about motherhood.

You can read the whole thing here.

The essay has the following subtitles:

A Biblical Theology of Motherhood
Not Good for Man To Be Alone
Motherhood in the Bible’s Story
The Bible’s Statements About Motherhood
Conclusion

Bibliographic info: James M. Hamilton Jr., “A Biblical Theology of Motherhood,”Journal of Discipleship and Family Ministry 2.2 (2012): 6–13.

On a related note, see the review of Created To Be His Help Meet by Tim Challies.

Congrats to Gentry and Wellum on Kingdom through Covenant

I am delighted that the UPS man just dropped this book at our house.

Heartiest congratulations to Peter J. Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum on their book, Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants.

I’m thrilled to see this in print, and I’m excited about the discussion of this book and my own God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology that will take place at ETS this fall.

Here are the details on the session:

SESSION INFORMATION
11/15/2012
3:00 PM-6:10 PM
Frontier Airlines Center — 102 E
Biblical Theology (Invited): Recent Whole-Bible Biblical Theologies

Moderator
Stephen G. Dempster
Crandall University

3:00 PM—3:40pm
Jim Hamilton
Southern Seminary
Why “God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology”?

3:50pm—4:30pm
Peter J. Gentry
Southern Seminary
Kingdom through Covenant and the Glory of God

3:50pm—4:30pm
Steve Wellum
Southern Seminary
From Biblical to Systematic Theology: What “Kingdom through Covenant” is Seeking to Contribute

4:40pm—5:00pm
Respondent
Mark Boda
McMaster Divinity College, McMaster University
Response to James M. Hamilton’s God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology

5:00pm—5:20pm
Respondent
Elmer A. Martens
Fresno Pacific Biblical Seminary
Response to Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum’s Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants

5:30pm—6:10 PM
Panel Discussion

Mark Boda
McMaster Divinity College, McMaster University

Stanley K. Fowler
Heritage Theological Seminary

Peter J. Gentry
Southern Seminary

Jim Hamilton
Southern Seminary

Elmer A. Martens
Fresno Pacific Biblical Seminary

Steve Wellum
Southern Seminary

Craig Carter
Tyndale College, Toronto

—-

I am honored to serve alongside Professors Gentry and Wellum. I don’t consider myself worthy of their company, to say nothing of Tom Schreiner’s, who having written a Pauline Theology and a New Testament Theology will soon bring out his own Whole-Bible Theology.

Other single volume attempts at Whole Bible Biblical Theology include the following:

Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology, 1948

Willem Vangemeren, The Progress of Redemption, 1988

Brevard Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, 1993

Charles H. H. Scobie, The Ways of Our God, 2003

Reinhard Feldmeier and Hermann Spieckermann, God of the Living, 2011

My book appeared in 2010, Gentry and Wellum’s appears now in 2012, and Schreiner’s The King in His Beauty is set to appear in 2013. That means that three of the four larger (600+pg) evangelical attempts at Whole Bible Biblical Theology published in this century have been written by members of the faculty of Southern Seminary.

If you’re interested in biblical theology, let me invite you to check out SBTS. This a great place to study.

Some Thoughts on Preaching the Minor Prophets

How should we approach preaching the Minor Prophets? Should we move through the text chronologically, thematically, book by book, several books per sermon? A friend of mine posed these questions to me, and I thought I’d put my replies here in case they might help others as well.

The Chronological approach would be difficult to nail down, I think, because we don’t have kings listed at the beginning of each one establishing when the prophet ministered – so we’re not exactly sure when Jonah or Joel or Obadiah prophesied.

So without a statement from the author, the chronological approach moves us into historical considerations, and since the author doesn’t make clear historical statements, we’re inching away from authorial intent.

I prefer to stay with authorial intent, and we can say that the author intended to present what he actually said (and in these cases he didn’t say anything about dates or chronology . . .).

So for me the two preferable options would be either to (1) follow the author’s own structure in seeking the structures for your sermons–so you base the sermon or series on the structure of the books themselves (the sections in GGSTJ on these books give my attempt at their structure), or (2) choose a set of themes that you want to teach through–see for example the chart on p. 232 in GGSTJ.

If you look at GGSTJ 229–34, you’ll see that I think the 12 have been arranged to comprise one “book” that communicates a unified message. On p. 234 I summarize Paul House’s description of that message.

If you wanted to do three sermons that covered the whole 12 prophets, my recommendation would be do follow the three bullet points I give on p. 234 that come right out of a book Paul House wrote – he’s footnoted on that page.

My Dad’s Coins

I didn’t feel that I did enough for my Dad this past Father’s Day, and in the early hours of the Monday that followed that Sunday I had a dream about My Dad’s Coins that, it seems to me, was connected to that feeling. Having awakened from that dream, I was having a hard time getting back to sleep. I was thinking about the dream and about the advice that my good friend Denny Burk had given me about incorporating more personal illustrations in my sermons.

So I got out of bed and typed up my account of the dream, then went back to bed and got right to sleep.

Following Denny’s advice, I talked about this dream at the conclusion of my sermon this past Sunday. You can hear it here: Jeremiah 25:15–38, The Cup of Wrath.

Then I edited the written account, added some, and it’s now posted over at Christianity.com. Here’s an excerpt:

There I was in my dream, holding those coins in my hand. They had become priceless to me because of what they signified, and I was horrified that I had almost thrown them away on a cola that wouldn’t have been good for me anyway.

This is how our ignorant, wayward, and weak hearts find their way to sin. We forget the gifts our God and Father has given us. We become unmindful of what his mercy means to us. We neglect the mementos, the testimonies, the stories and songs of the Scriptures.

And all too often we are prepared to cash in our relationship with the living God for filth, filth that would ruin our lives and destroy everything precious and sacred to us. We are ignorant, wayward, and weak enough to throw away the world to come in exchange for a syrupy mixture of caffeine, sugar, and fizzy water, or worse, far worse: shameful things not to be named. God help us get hearts of wisdom.

You can read the whole thing.

God Bless Andrew Peterson

Today at our house we are officially inducting Andrew Peterson into the Hamilton Hall of Fame for his sheer awesomeness. If you’re a regular here at For His Renown, you know that we have taken great delight in Andrew’s music (song) and writings (word), and now he has topped it off with a gift of line (form). The T.H.A.G.s, the Three Honored and Great Subjects, of music, writing, and drawing, are crafts this brother cultivates, and he has blessed us with all three.

We were introduced to his work several years ago when a dear friend gave us his Christmas album Behold the Lamb of God, which may be the best thing to happen to Christmas music since Handel’s Messiah. We loved Resurrection Letters Vol. 2, then Counting Stars, and we eagerly await Light for the Lost Boy. You won’t regret buying these albums. They will enrich your life, open your eyes, deepen your soul, and tell you of the hope that holds through the night.

Then we learned that he wrote books in addition to songs, and we had to have a look. What we saw was startling, intriguing, joy-giving, yea, beautiful. One night as we were reading On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, it got so late I had to put the kids to bed, but I was in storygrip so after I put them to bed I kept reading right on to the end.

Hit that link above and go get your copy. Read and enjoy, then move on to North! Or Be Eaten, whose adventure and sacrifice and resurrection are topped off by the joy of the reunion of a long separated family in The Monster in the Hollows, a joy that rises from the ashes of sorrow and must plunge into the uncertainty of the future. What that future holds awaits the writing of The Warden and the Wolf King.

If you get the books and start now, you can live through the experience of reading them as the story is being written–how often does the chance to do that come along? Books one, two, and three are waiting for you at Amazon or the Rabbit Room. I read them aloud to our kids, and now the ones old enough to read regularly revisit them.

All this brings me to the point of this post. We entered a book review contest, won second place, and the creative generosity of Andrew Peterson resulted in our prize arriving today!

Andrew is in our Hamilton Hall of Fame for this drawing of The Great Library at Ban Rona, replete with a note from the author telling the thrilling tale of the perilous adventure that overtook him as he created the masterpiece.

Praise God for Andrew Peterson, today’s inductee into the Hamilton Hall of Fame, may the Lord bless his every endeavor, and may each of you visit the links to the works of art above, click the Like button, click the Add to Cart button, then enjoy the music and the stories, the lyrics and the love.