Bully’s Blog

or James Jordan’s Big Hammer

“My God, it’s full of stars!” 

One of the reasons I appreciate James Jordan is his ability to identify the “universals” in Scripture. Understanding these recurring themes answers many questions and solves many mysteries. These universal “roles” and events all point forward to the events of the first century. For instance, we cannot understand what the apostles meant by the phrase “the sons of God” without checking its history in the Old Testament. [1]

The danger with dealing in all the “big picture” stuff is that it can become self-serving. The heart is deceitfully wicked, and theology can become a kind of escapism, an ideology. Like the worst of the 20th century’s political ideologies, it can be divorced from reality so that in practice it rides roughshod over people to achieve its goals. Any big theology must maintain a big pastoral heart.

Like the un-Christian Zionism that results from the dispensational paradigm, or the arrogant triumphalism that can pull postmillennialism off the road, or the narrow-minded judiciary committee that terrorises the saints with a good but outdated confession, this kind of structure is not deep at all. It is actually a mile wide but only an inch deep. It works the way Satan does: it floods you with truth for the purpose of floating one crucial lie. It is sleight-of-hand that uses one facet of the big picture to abstract it from Love. Like Communism, it justifies breaking eggs to make an omelette. But the eggs are people and the omelette smells of sulphur.

Doug Wilson writes:

“…I agree that the deep structures of Scripture really are there, and that they are both wide and deep. But I also think that hunting for them too readily can prevent some readers from seeing what is right on the surface of the text. Scripture has deep mines—but is also a beautiful landscape.”

I have appreciated very much Pastor Wilson’s focus on practical holiness. We tend to think, “Yeah, I read the Proverbs once,” and forget what we saw. He nails them into us. But is this competition between the basics and the profound universals necessary at all? Are they not complementary? Men are generally better at reading maps, getting the “big picture.” But women are far superior when it comes to the details, and that’s where the devil often hides.

In my experience, the deep structures of the Bible do hammer home the more obvious messages, including personal holiness, just with a bigger hammer. The structure of the entire Bible follows a pattern laid down early in Genesis. The Bible begins with Adam, Eve and the serpent and by its end their “personal” sin has multiplied into the full-grown rebellion of institutions: the Man of Sin, the Harlot and the Beast. The Pharisees and Herodians were blinded to deep needs by their skewed, shallow Jew-centric metanarrative. But the Bible itself is both wide and deep. It has complete integrity. 

Our everyday methods should correspond exactly with our grand narrative. We don’t order purges to prevent further oppression. We don’t turn away the needy from the door because we are saving money to build a refuge. We don’t promise transparency to divert attention from our hidden agenda. God’s tune is the same on the tinwhistle or with full orchestra. At a deep level, for instance, worship is symbolised as commerce — but the Lord still loves just weights and measures in our actual financial accounts. [2] The “universals” are James Jordan’s, and every Bible teacher’s, big hammer.

The deep springs of God support the visible garden landscape. When we dig into God we just find more of the same, only grander. The words on our lips, in our pulpits and on our teleprompters, should be the garden gate to the depths of our hearts and not a clever smokescreen.

I do take Doug’s point about neglecting the obvious. Unbelief always takes shortcuts, however well-developed our theological understanding might be. As it was for Adam in the garden, the first step towards inheriting the earth, towards truly biblical horizons, is to be faithful in the day of small things.

_______________________________________
[1]  See Envy and the Sons of God.
[2] See Worship as Commerce.