Bully's Blog

or Typology: Deadly Weapon or game of Scattergories?

“Chiastic literary analysis has completely destroyed liberal literary criticism. Liberalism is in tatters, bleeding and dying. Liberalism cannot survive Dorsey’s chiastic proof of the total unity of Isaiah, for instance. Dorsey finds loads of 7-fold chiasms in the Bible. I’ve found scores more, quite independently. What Dorsey does not see is that these are recaps of the chiasm of the 7 days in Genesis 1. And that’s good, because it means he did not go through the Bible forcing passages into heptamerous chiasms. He just found them there, and others can see that these track Genesis 1 as ‘new creation’ passages.”

—James B. Jordan, A Reply on the Nature of the Psalter, Biblical Horizons blog, biblicalhorizons.wordpress.com, referring to David A. Dorsey, The Literary Structure of the Old Testament.

If chiastic literary analysis (along with typology as I posted recently) is such a powerful weapon against a modernist interpretation of the Bible, why are these methods of study shunned by those who oppose liberal theology? Why are theologians hauled over the coals for using it if it leaves the enemy in shreds?

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“Assyria dominated the ancient world in the centuries before the exile of Judah. Sometime during the reign of Jeroboam II of Israel (832–792 bc), and probably toward the latter part of that reign, the Israelite prophet Jonah had been used by God to convert the city Nineveh and all its citizens to the worship of the true God. Jonah 3:5 and 4:11 indicate that God showed His mercy to the children of the city, so that we are entitled to assume that there were God-fearing people alive for the next seventy or so years in Assyria…

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David Chilton’s The Days of Vengeance gets downloaded from my site over 30 times a day (add that up for three years!). It’s a great commentary, but Jordan’s lectures use the Bible instead of Josephus to interpret Revelation. Chilton was peeping through the keyhole. Jordan throws open the door. These are cutting edge and, I believe, indispensable for anyone with an interest in preterism.

Available here, or from www.wordmp3.com

Days of Vengeance is on this page (near the bottom).

The Son has promised to meet us two places: in our sin and in our weakness. He will rejoice in our glory, but only if we have first encountered Him in our humility. As sinners, we must meet Him in our sin, and as creatures, as newborn babies, as little children, we must meet Him in our weakness. Good works, maturity, and glory must be the outflow of that encounter, not the basis of it.

RITE REASONS No. 59: The Second Word V: On Images and Art, Part 3 
James B. Jordan  www.biblicalhorizons.com

This way a silhouette before heaven’s smile
That way a solitary shadow upon prison walls
August yet base
Is the profile of man. Continue reading

 It is impossible to impose any foreign worldview, modern or otherwise, onto the Bible. It will never be accommodated to the current ephemera. It comes in like a sword and violates our thinking until we think the way God does. Then it has dambusting consequences in every area of life.

It is a weapon to crush the head, to bring death and resurrection in us, and in the world. It carves up nations like a sacrifice and makes them a pleasing aroma to God. It rebuilds cultures from the inside out, and is the fount of all western society, art, literature (and literacy), music, government and charity.

And western atheism is in reality a black leech hanging off this grandeur, a little horn with a big mouth, totally dependent on the longsuffering and mercy of Christ the ascended King. 

Secular humanism is but a perversion of Christianity. As a ‘Christianity without Christ’, and thus bankrupt, it can only ever survive on borrowed capital. It is a temporary wart.

This is the intro to one JBA’s Amazon booklist. Too good a quote to pass up:

“In recent years postliberal theology and certain strands of Reformed thought have seen typology and chiasm as an essential method of biblical study.

While some forms of postmodernity are helpful to the church, most are not as avant garde as they pretend.

Ironically, liberals and most conservatives have the same method of bible study: you the individual must learn as many facts about the text as possible, importing back into the text foreign paradigms (or more accurately, bad foreign paradigms).

Typology, however, provides a subtle but deadly maneuver against modernity: it challenges modernity’s use of reason and forces it to think in terms of story and symbol, which by definition it can’t do.”

Yes, conservatives, he means you.

(Pic: the optic chiasma)

One major difference between Jordan and other preterists is his identification of Paul’s “man of sin.” Jordan is correct in naming the Herods rather than Nero because he understands biblical typology better.

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From Peter Leithart today:

“With what disgust, contempt, and hatred Christ must look upon every second of our lives, the reviewing of which must be a long torture for us, were such a judgment in our future!”

These are the words of a Presbyterian minister, writing in a prominent evangelical magazine. He’s trying to refute the belief that we’ll be judged according to works at the last day. He’s wrong on that point.  Continue reading

A brilliant thought (I think) from shotgun over at the AV forum:

I’m currently reading Gary North’s commentary on Genesis, “The Dominion Covenant.”  It is probably one of the most enlightening books I’ve ever read, especially in terms of economics.

Anyway, I ran across some ideas that might serve to savage any and all attempts to intertwine the Genesis account with modern theories of evolution. (Gary North doesn’t apply these conclusions in this way. This speculation is all Shotgun.)

Gary North says this:

Under covenantal dominion, cursed nature’s restraints are progressively lifted. (Pg. 84)

He claims earlier that the “Earth was never designed to be autonomous.” 

It seems to me that those who would posit long periods of time before man arose (as man) are implying that the Earth (and nature without man) has some sort of autonomous purpose apart from man. Implicit then, in systems like those of Hugh Ross, is the assumption of an autonomous sphere of sovereignty allocated to nature. 

This cannot be true since there is no neutrality. In seeking to critique theistic evolutionary models, then, we should be on the lookout for any implications of an autonomous wilderness.