A New Ministry: SBTS in the Fall

In God’s great mercy I will be joining the faculty of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the fall. Here’s the story in the Towers Online.

Here’s what I said when I shared this news with our church family at Baptist Church of the Redeemer:

Psalm 139:16, “Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.”

Psalm 139:16 tells us that every day of our lives is written in God’s book before they come to pass. God is sovereign over every day of our lives.

Acts 17:26, “And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place . . .”

Acts 17:26 is describing nations, and it states that God has determined how long a nation will exist and what its boundaries will be. I think the same is true of individuals: God has determined how long we will live on this earth and what the boundaries of our dwelling place will be.

Ephesians 2:10, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

Ephesians 2:10 tells us that God has prepared beforehand good works for us to do.

2 Timothy 2:4, “No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him.”

2 Timothy 2:4 tells us that Christian ministers are like soldiers. Soldiers receive orders, and they obey, seeking to please their superiors.

The circumstances of our lives have made clear that new orders have been given to me.

It has been a high privilege to serve Southwestern Seminary for the past 5 years. The students have been eager to learn, encouraging to me, and what a joy to see them enter the harvest! The administration has been generous to me, always showing a sincere pastoral love, and God blessed me with dear friends in my faculty colleagues.

It has also been an unexpected, unlooked for joy and privilege to serve at Baptist Church of the Redeemer for the last three years. I never intended to get swept up in a church plant, but God blessed us immensely through this group of families who wanted to plant a church. We are so grateful that we were drawn into this endeavor. We have never been happier at a church than we are at Redeemer. We have learned and continue to learn from our brothers and sisters, and I am spurred on by their godliness and devotion. What a privilege to serve such a people!

I would be a fool to choose to leave.

But it has not ultimately come down to my choice. Months of thinking over and praying through this possibility have made me certain that if The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary invited me to join the faculty, it would be the call of God to leave Houston and move to Louisville to labor in a different section of the Lord’s vineyard.

God has opened this door and has called us to this new ministry. We are sad to leave home, family in Texas, and most of all our church, but at the same time we are excited about what the Lord has for us.

Lord willing, I will take up the post of Associate Professor of Biblical Theology at Southern in the Fall of 2008. I am humbled and honored to have the opportunity to serve in this role. May the Lord prosper his Word!

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On a logistical note, if anyone is looking to buy a house in southwest Houston, let’s talk!

Let Athanasius Spur You to Study the Psalms

In his fascinating lecture on “Reading the Psalms Messianically,” Gordon Wenham recommends The Letter of St. Athanasius to Marcellinus on the Interpretation of the Psalms.

Having followed that recommendation, I am now passing it on, and I would also recommend having a listen (or multiple listens) to Wenham’s lecture. The most striking thing, for me, about Athanasius’s letter is his absolutely thorough knowledge of the Psalms! What a gift to be spurred on to a closer and more comprehensive knowledge of the Psalms!

Enjoy.

By the way, if you have the SVS Press edition of Athanasius’s On the Incarnation (the one with the brilliant introduction by C. S. Lewis), the letter to Marcellinus on the interpretation of the Psalms is included as an appendix.

1 & 2 Peter and Jude by David R. Helm

Great preaching is inspiring. When I hear or read great preaching, it makes me want to preach. I often benefit from listening to inspiring preaching in my car on the way to school to teach–listening to John Piper fires me up, reminds me of all that is at stake, points me to the greatness of God’s mercy in Christ, and stimulates my thinking. All of this makes me eager to serve God’s people with urgent love for them and the Lord Jesus by proclaiming the Bible to them and praying the Lord to send the Spirit to set it on fire.

As I’ve mentioned recently, if you’re preaching or teaching a particular book, it is a great help to have your thoughts stimulated by someone else’s efforts to preach that part of Scripture.

The latest installment of the Preaching the Word commentary series arrived on my doorstep last night, and when I read the first two or three sermons in this volume, they made me want to preach! Praise God for the help in good books! Anyone preaching, teaching, or studying 1 Peter, 2 Peter, or Jude should get their hands on this book to have the soil of the mind fertilized by the able proclamation modeled for us by David Helm.

You may know David Helm from his work on The Big Picture Story Bible–if you have kids and don’t have The Big Picture Story Bible, you need to buy it right now and enjoy it with your children. Helm is also the executive director of The Simeon Trust, which Kent Hughes described when Mark Dever interviewed him.

I would also request that those of you who are in the habit of asking the Lord to bless things would beseech him to help me as I work on the commentary on Revelation for this series. If you happen to hear me preach sometime in the next few years, chances are it will be on Revelation, and Lord willing those sermons will take their place among the other volumes in the Preaching the Word series.

Review of Tsumura’s NICOT volume on 1 Samuel

David Toshio Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel, The New International Commentary on the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007. 720pp. $50.00, Hardcover.

Japan Bible Seminary’s David Toshio Tsumura has given us a fine new commentary on 1 Samuel. He lucidly overviews the history of the modern discussion of the text of 1 Samuel, which, he notes is “allegedly ‘in extremely poor condition’” (3). Against the tendency to emend the Masoretic Text in light of the LXX and the other versions, Tsumura insists that “The primary task of exegetes of ancient texts . . . is to interpret data in its original context, not to alter the data so that they can explain it easily” (8). Tsumura suggests that some difficulties are due not to a corrupt text but to phonetic spellings, misunderstood Hebrew grammatical structures, or idiomatic expressions. He suggests that “A narrative like 1–2 Samuel could have been written, at least partly, as if it was heard or spoken,” thus “the majority of proposed emendations are needless” (10). How might scholars two thousand years from now, whose only recourse to English is what they find in surviving written texts, respond to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying? Would the dialects in Faulkner’s prose be corrected or emended if the English text were compared with the French translation (or even with an English dictionary!)?

Tsumura argues that the “final editing of 1–2 Samuel, with minor adjustments, was probably made no later than the late 10th century b.c.” (11). The Philistines are identified as being from the “Sea Peoples, who migrated from the Aegean” (34). They were uncircumcised but neither unsophisticated nor uncultivated (37). Tsumura provides a fascinating discussion of the historical and religious background of 1–2 Samuel, and his discussion of Grammar and Syntax is informed by both modern linguistics and more traditional grammatical categories.

The traditional threefold division of 1 Samuel is broadly followed: Samuel (1–7), Saul (9–15), and David (16–31). Tsumura sees the purpose of 1 Samuel being to highlight the establishment of the monarchy and the preparation of David (73). He argues that the references to daughter/sons of Belial (e.g., 1:16; 2:12) should be rendered to reflect a person’s connection to the divine name Beliyaal rather than as a “worthless” man or woman (124). He does not explore what this might imply about the way that people in the OT are reckoned in terms of “corporate personality” as belonging either to the “seed of the woman” or to the “seed of the serpent.”

This commentary is very strong on matters textual, grammatical, and historical, and Tsumura allows the rest of the OT to inform his interpretation. But readers should be aware that the commentary gives almost no attention to canonical biblical theology—the flow of redemptive history, the typological patterns between, for instance, Joseph and David, or the ways this flow of redemptive historical patterns might influence and be fulfilled in the NT. For another commentary on 1–2 Samuel that reverses these emphases (little attention to text criticism, grammar, and history, while focusing on canonical biblical theology), see Peter Leithart’s A Son to Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel.

For the most part volumes in this series are very user friendly, but I have two complaints about them: First, it makes no sense to me why the series hides the bibliography between the Introduction and the Commentary. The bibliography would be so much easier to find if it were located in the same place as it may be found in most other volumes: at the back of the book. Second, these are long commentaries read mainly by people who at least know the Greek and Hebrew alphabets. Therefore, all transliteration of Greek and Hebrew in these volumes should be abandoned. Transliteration hinders those who know the languages, and it does not give understanding to those who don’t. While it may help those who have not studied Greek and Hebrew feel more comfortable, how many people know what sounds are signified by the superscripted e’s or the backwards apostrophe? And even if they can sound out the word, sort of, they still don’t know what it means. Down with transliteration!

We congratulate David Toshio Tsumura for this accomplishment. He has advanced the discussion of 1 Samuel, and his bold position on the text of 1–2 Samuel is a refreshing, if controversial, perspective on the reliability of the Masoretic Text. No researcher will be able to ignore this volume, and no preacher will want to be without it.

UPDATE: JT wrote to tell me that Tsumura wrote the study notes on 1-2 Samuel for the ESV Study Bible. One more reason to look forward to its appearance this fall!

Biblical, Baptist Ecclesiology

I’ll be speaking on the most biblical form of ecclesiology at Redeemer Community Church in Katy, TX tomorrow night, Sunday, April 27, 2008 at 7pm.

If you’re in the area, I would love to see you. I’ll be arguing that the most biblical form of ecclesiology is the one practiced historically by Baptist churches: elder-led deacon-served congregationalism.

Hope to see you there!

Review of Messiah in the Old and New Testaments, ed. Stanley E. Porter

Stanley E. Porter, ed., The Messiah in the Old and New Testaments. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007. ix + 268pp. $29.00, paper.

These essays were presented at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in 2004. The collection is preceded by an introduction written by Stanley Porter and concluded with a response, in which each paper is briefly considered, written by Craig Evans. The book is presented in two parts: Part 1: Old Testament and Related Perspective, containing essays that deal with the OT, the Qumran documents, and the literature of early Judaism; and Part 2: New Testament Perspective, containing essays that deal with most of the New Testament (Revelation seems to receive no treatment).

The first essay after Porter’s introduction comes from Tremper Longman, who explores the Law and the Continue reading “Review of Messiah in the Old and New Testaments, ed. Stanley E. Porter”

mp3nasb

Some enterprising folks who believe that “faith comes by hearing” (Rom 10:17) have partnered with the Lockman Foundation to make the NASB available on mp3.

The mp3 files can be kept on the computer, transferred to an mp3 player, or burned onto CD’s. The whole Bible will fit on three mp3 CD’s and takes up 1.6 gb’s of space. $29.95 for the whole Bible is not a bad price.

May the Lord bless the reading and the hearing of his living and active word!

Thanks to Whoever Sent This!

Here at the Hamilton House we’re celebrating the recent birth of a little one, and someone sent us a fitting onesie–fitting, that is, for our family, even though the little baby doesn’t fit in it quite yet. He’ll grow into it!

We don’t know who sent this to us, but we want to thank whoever it was! If you are the giver of this great gift, please do let us know so we can express our enthusiastic appreciation to you more directly.

This is a fitting gift for us because we love Charles Spurgeon, and we consider him one of our forefathers in the faith. In fact, soon after I was accepted into the Ph.D. program at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, we got a dog and named him Spurgeon. It seemed like an appropriate way to celebrate our return to Baptist life. Both my wife and I had grown up in Baptist churches, but during our time at Dallas Theological Seminary we were involved mainly at Northwest Bible Church in Dallas. One of the major factors that brought us back to Baptist life was the encouraging news coming from Southern Seminary, where Dr. Mohler has led a great return to the faith.

How we pray that our children will grow up to love Jesus, the Savior their homeboy, Charles Spurgeon, so faithfully preached!

Responses to Mike Bird’s Questions

My friend Mike Bird posted some questions in response to what is happening at Westminster Seminary with Peter Enns as a result of Enns’s book, Inspiration and Incarnation.

My responses to those questions in the comments section on Bird’s blog became such that I thought it might be useful to post them here.

For the questions, see Mike’s post here. My response was as follows:
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Mike, 

I appreciate Marty’s responses above [the third comment in response to Bird’s post], and I want to add that it seems to me that the way you’ve framed the questions doesn’t exactly match the way that the opposition to Enns understands the issues. 

It may be that the way you’re framing the issues is the way that Enns thinks they should be framed, but I don’t think those who think he doesn’t fit at WTS approach the questions the way you do here. So, I’ll briefly add my two cents on your 4 points, which I think will get at the way the Enns-opposers would think about the issues (I can’t speak for them, but being sympathetic with their concerns, I’m giving you the rationale behind my concerns): 

1. My guess is that they would say there isn’t only one orthodox way of dealing with extra-biblical sources. I suspect they would be very sympathetic with Greg Beale’s objection to the way that Enns narrows things down to only one possible explanation–that the biblical authors shared mythological notions reflected in extra biblical lit–then from this Enns concludes that the biblical authors held some mythological ideas that they wrote up in the Bible. Beale lists 4 different ways that evangelicals have explained the kinds of things that lead Enns to think there are mythological notions in the Bible: 1) biblical polemic against these ideas; 2) general revelation shared by biblical and extra-biblical authors; 3) common reflection of ancient tradition; and 4) a productive use of truth found in extra-biblical literature. (I’m referring to the Beale review in JETS, which I think is worth reading carefully).

All this to say, there isn’t one and only one orthodox way of dealing with these kinds of things, there are many orthodox ways of explaining these things. There are also unorthodox ways of explaining them, and the folks at WTS think that saying that the Bible contains myth is on the unorthodox side. I agree. 

2. Couldn’t it simply be that Genesis 1-3 is engaged in polemics against the false notions current in the day? 

3. With Marty’s points above, I would add that Paul would have held that the Bible was totally true and trustworthy (inerrancy), and I think he would have seen enough manuscripts to recognize that God didn’t re-inspire every scribe who decided to copy a manuscript of a biblical text (the point of saying that the autographs are inspired and inerrant). 

As for the kinds of things we see in Paul’s citation of Isa 59:20 in Rom 11:26-27, we have to take these things on a case by case basis. The Greek translator of Isaiah was working with an unpointed Hebrew text–as was Paul if he was looking at the Hebrew rather than the Greek (I don’t need to tell you that the pointings don’t come in until the middle ages, ca. 6th-7th c. AD, but maybe some readers will benefit from that note). Just a cursory glance at this leads me to think that the Greek translator of Isaiah has carried over the subject from the first half of the line (“the redeemer will come”) to the second half of the line, so that whereas the Masoretes pointed the text to read “to those who turn”–taking ulshavey as a masc. pl. ptcpl in construct with the following word, the Greek translator perhaps read the yod as a vav (easy to do if the tail on the yod was a little long–or maybe it was a vav and the Masoretes misread it as a yod) and perhaps the Greek translator, seeing ulshavo, took this as an infinitive construct whose 3ms (the vav) pronominal suffix pointed back to the subject of the first half of the line, resulting in the reading “and he will turn back ungodliness” in the LXX instead of “and for those who repent of sin” in the Masoretic text. I only put this out as a possibility. A definitive explanation would require, among other things, an examination of the translation technique employed by the Isaiah translator. But this possibility should show that we should not draw overly rash conclusions about the kinds of things we see happening in the texts as we move from the Masoretic text to the Greek translations of the OT to the New Testament. Other changes in Paul’s rendering appear to have come in from the influence of Psalm 14:7. On these issues I highly recommend Peter Gentry’s article, “The Septuagint and the Text of the Old Testament,” BBR 16.2 (2006), 193-218. 

Having said all this, I would also say that my presupposition is that Paul has rightly understood the meaning of the OT text–even if that meaning is dependant upon his interpretation of the wider context of not only Isaiah but the whole OT–and so perhaps Paul does introduce changes (maybe as Earle Ellis argues he selects from all the translations/interpretations known to him) and these changes that Paul introduces into his citations are intended to communicate more clearly what he thinks is the true meaning of the OT text in context. So the variations that we see point us to the way that Paul is interpreting the OT. Now the question becomes, has Paul rightly understood the OT? I think he gets it right, and I think it is incumbent upon us to patiently seek to understand him and not too quickly arrive at the conclusion that Paul has done violence to the OT text or assumed some mythological interpretation. 

Even if Paul is alluding to the movable well, as Enns argues, how do we know that by asserting that the rock was Christ he is not opposing what he views as a silly fable? In several texts Paul calls his audiences to reject Jewish myths that promote speculations (e.g., 1 Tim 1:4). Maybe the movable well thing was one of those speculative myths. In my opinion, Enns has taken what is at best a dubious possibility–that Paul believes in the movable well–and from that dubious possibility Enns wants to construct his doctrine of Scripture. I think his critics who have objected that he’s trying to build a doctrine of Scripture from “problem texts” are right on the money, and I think the Beale is right to point out in his Themelios review that when you count up the problem texts that Enns cites, there aren’t more than a dozen! Maybe as few as 8 to 10.

4. Marty’s answer is very helpful. Schreiner rejects the idea that the prophecy was really made by the historical Enoch, and he states, “It is better to conclude that Jude quoted the pseudepigraphical 1 Enoch and that he also believed that the portion he quoted represented God’s truth. Jude’s wording does not demand that he thought we have an authentic oracle from the historical Enoch. We do not need to conclude, however, that the entire book is part of the canon of Scripture . . . Jude probably cited a part of 1 Enoch that he considered to be a genuine prophecy” [Schreiner cites Moo as being in general agreement with him on this point]. Schreiner then suggests that Jude’s opponents might have valued Enoch, so he quoted this unremarkable prophecy against them, concluding, “Jude simply drew from a part of the work that he considered true” (Schreiner, 1, 2 Peter, Jude, 469-70).

I think that Greg Beale’s three reviews of Enns’s book are worthy of careful study, and I hope that what I have written here is helpful. 

So thankful for the reliability of the Bible! 

Jim

Mitch Maher against Biblical Illiteracy

We are all aware of the growing phenomenon of biblical illiteracy, and I sometimes hear people who minister in churches complain that the mammoth proportions of the problem make it difficult to teach and preach because it is necessary to keep things at such a basic level.

One of my classmates from DTS days, Mitch Maher, has set out to address this problem. He has developed a basic over-view of the whole Bible called “Clarifying the Bible.” You can check it out at  www.clarifyingthebible.com. Mitch was discipled by Tommy Nelson of Denton Bible Church, and I know him from our days together in a Hebrew Exegesis elective. He is a clear and likable communicator, and he knows his stuff. The year we graduated, Mitch was chosen by the faculty to preach in chapel, and one of our profs told me his sermon was one of the best he had heard in the DTS chapel. He now pastors Fellowship Bible Church of Jonesboro, Arkansas.

At the website, you can check out a preview video that will give you a taste for what the DVD looks like, and if you are looking to host a conference, Mitch’s contact info is available.

May the Lord use Mitch and this project to turn the tide of biblical illiteracy in evangelical churches!

Audio of “The Typology of David’s Rise to Power”

Dr. Moore has just posted the links to the text of Graeme Goldsworthy’s addresses on Biblical Theology given this week at SBTS, and he has also linked to the newly posted audio of the Julius Brown Gay Lecture I gave last week, The Typology of David’s Rise to Power: Messianic Patterns in the Book of Samuel (right click, save as).

The Call to Joy and Pain, by Ajith Fernando

The Call to Joy and Pain looks like a great book from Ajith Fernando. It has just been honored among the 2008 Christianity Today Book Award recipients under the category of “The Church/Pastoral Leadership.”

Congratulations to Dr. Fernando and Crossway!

The title captures the Pauline experience of being “sorrowful and yet always rejoicing.” I’m eager to get a chance to read this book. . .

Interview with Justin Hardin on Paul and the Roman Imperial Cult

I met Justin Hardin a few summers ago when I visited Tyndale House, Cambridge. Justin was there doing his Ph.D., and I feel blessed to call him a friend. His dissertation explored the question of whether Paul is engaging the Imperial Cult in Galatians, and he now teaches at Oklahoma Baptist University, but in September he takes up the post recently vacated by David Wenham at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. For a recent “get to know you” interview, see Matthew Montonini’s post here.

Thanks for taking the time for this interview, Justin! It seems to me that many conservative American students of the New Testament are suspicious of the recent interest in the Roman Imperial Cult because it is often accompanied by what is perceived as an anti-American political agenda (and these conservative NT students would be the first to say that this world is not our home and that our citizenship is in heaven). Because of this liberal-conservative political division, I’d like to start with some questions that deal with these kinds of issues (modern politics), then move to questions that deal more directly with our understanding of the New Testament (historical backgrounds and exegesis). My questions are in bold, and Justin’s replies to my questions will be prefaced by his initials, JKH. Continue reading “Interview with Justin Hardin on Paul and the Roman Imperial Cult”

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

It was my joy and privilege to present a lecture yesterday at Southern Seminary on the topic in the title of this post.

For those interested in the presentation, I will update this post with the audio if/when it appears on the SBTS website. For anyone interested in the bibliography and the sections I had to skip, here is the manuscript: The Typology of David’s Rise to Power.

D. A. Carson’s new book: Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor

Just out from Crossway and just arrived in my mail, I’m eager to read this new book by D. A. Carson, Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson. A few years ago Carson had a short piece on his father in the SBJT Forum that was a powerful reminder that faithfulness, not fame, is our standard.

If you’re looking for a devotional biography, look no further. Buy this little book and enjoy the reminder that all God’s people are ordinary people (even the famous ones).