Dominion comes through service … It is idolatrous to seek dominion primarily by political means, whether by domination or anarchic revolution.

From the archives of David P. Field’s blog, Thursday, August 24, 2006.

Doug Wilson’s line, “True postmodernism is theonomic postmillennialism” prompts me to dig up a little heap of quotations which I extracted, in 1993, from some of the theonomist books, mostly published in the previous ten years or so. Theonomists were accused of abandoning evangelism and the church, being obsessed with politics, and seeking to ‘impose’ the kingdom and this series of quotations left me wondering whether the theonomists’ critics were being altogether fair (!).

That was a long time ago. You may not believe it but in those days the evangelical gate-keepers, the self-appointed guardians of the tradition were quite often guilty of not-reading, mis-reading, or mis-representing the works of those they declared a danger to the church even though the theonomists’ entire appeal was to Scripture. I don’t suppose anything like that could happen these days.

These are the books from which the quotations come:

The Changing of the Guard – George Grant
Calvinism Today
Healer of the Nations – Gary North
House Divided – Greg Bahnsen & Kenneth Gentry
Theonomy: An Informed Response – ed. Gary North
Inherit the Earth – Gary North
The Institutes of Biblical Law – R.J. Rushdoony
No Other Standard – Greg Bahnsen
Paradise Restored – David Chilton
Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators – David Chilton
The Reduction of Christianity – Peter Leithart & GaryDeMar
Theonomy in Christian Ethics – Greg Bahnsen
Tools of Dominion – Gary North
Westminister’s Confession – Gary North

And the quotations may as well sit on blogger as on my hard disk …

• It must be stressed that the creation of a Christian nation could be accomplished only as a result of the widespread work of the Holy Spirit, not through some bureaucratic top-down, coercively imposed order on a non-Christian majority by a Christian minority. Healer p.34

• It is the missionary … who is best equipped to begin the bottom-up process of evangelism that ultimately leads to the establishment of a covenanted confederation of Christian nations. Healer p.157

• We must seek reform first in the Church, not in the State. The focus on the State as the primary institution of life is the humanist myth of the age. It must not become the myth of Christian reconstruction. Healer p.287

• What is God’s historic means of making the world better ? The preaching of the gospel. Reduction p.xx

• One of the distinctives of Christian reconstruction is its aversion to the use of politics as the method to bring about social change …. But why all the attention to politics in reconstructionist literature … ? The answer is very simple. Politics has become the saviour of the people. Reconstructionists write about politics and civil government in order to call Christians and non-Christians back to their only Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. Reduction p.21f

• Christian reconstructionists are looking for the transformation of all of society, including families, churches, business establishments, the legal profession, education, economics, journalism, the media and civil government through personal redemption and adherence to the Bible as the standard for godly rule. Reduction p.23

• Dominion comes through service … It is idolatrous to seek dominion primarily by political means, whether by domination or anarchic revolution. Reduction p.25

• Evangelism is the starting point of social transformation. Reduction p.189

• The key to remedying the [present] situation is … regeneration. There is no hope for man except in regeneration … True reform begins with regeneration and then the submission of the believer to the whole law-word of God. Institutes, pp.113, 449, 627

• The chief blessing of the kingdom is forgiveness of sins. Reduction p.217

• It is through the Spirit-filled church, proclaiming the gospel, that the kingdom of Christ extends throughout the world. Reduction, p.220

• The negative reaction to social reform comes from secularized attempts to do what only the gospel can do. This reaction is legitimate but it should not deter Christians from being truly evangelical in their attempts at reform. Reduction, p.286

• The church, not the family or the state is the central institution in history. Informed, p.204

• If we really do need a graduate school in theology, let us finance one. But let us no longer fool the donors into believing that this sort of rarified academic institution is necessary or even useful for training pastors … For now, let us get on with the task at hand: the evangelization of the world. Informed, p.340f

• The authors of this book … know very well that Christian faith centers on the saving work of Jesus Christ. They profess to love the Savior with all their heart. They know that their new life in Him, their new status of being right with God, and their hope of eternal life have been granted to them by the grace of God. They have nothing of which to boast. With Paul they would say, ‘Far be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified unto me and I unto the world’. Having been saved from the world, their concern is to love their Lord with all their heart, soul, strength and mind. They now want to walk in those good works which God intends for them. They make a sincere effort to heed the words of Christ to ‘seek above all the kingdom of God and His righteousness’. They know that this kingdom, for which they pray regularly, will not be consummated until after the return of Jesus Christ and the final judgment, when all believers will then rejoice in a new heaven and earth wherein righteousness dwells. In the meantime they seek to perfect personal holiness in the fear of God and to make all the nations disciples of their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It is only in the light and context of these beliefs and practices that they see and understand their Reconstructionist position in ethics and eschatology. House, p.3f

• It must be understood the Reconstructionists believe that evangelism is the absolute pre-condition to worldwide, postmillennial, theocratic success … We insist that cultural influence and change are to be promoted by God’s people – who are saved by grace alone – at large in their callings, not by the institutional Church as such. House, p.194

• Evangelism, leading to baptism, comes first. House, p.194

• Christian Reconstructionists do not believe that man can be fundamentally changed by changing the conditions of society. Instead we believe that society will be changed when men are first changed inwardly by the Gospel and then seek to apply that change to the spheres of life in which they are involved. Tony Baxter, CT I.4 17

• First and foremost, our emphasis is on the proclamation of the saving power of God through Jesus Christ; and then the regenerate man applying the whole word of God to every sphere of life. Rushdoony, CT II.1 14

• The message of the kingdom of God rests on a concept of salvation which is supernaturally imparted, not politically imparted. Tools, p.38

• The primary need today, as always, is the need for widespread personal repentance before God. Tools, p.39

• The basis for building a Christian society is evangelism and missions that lead to a widespread Christian revival, so that the great mass of earth’s inhabitants will place themselves under Christ’s protection, and voluntarily use His covenantal laws for self-government. Christian reconstruction begins with personal conversion to Christ and self-government under God’s law, then spreads to others through revival and only later does it bring comprehensive changes in civil law, when the vast majority of voters voluntarily agree to live under Biblical blueprints. Tools, p.55

• The key to cultural transformation is the gospel. Productive, p.234

• My slogan is ‘politics fourth’ … it is my concern after individual salvation, church membership and family membership. Westminster’s, p.158

• Politics is not central. The worship of God is central. Changing, p.xx

• What Christians should say in response to humanism’s political theology is that God’s Church, as the institution entrusted by God with His Word and His sacraments, is the central institution of history. Changing, p.xx

• Christian Reconstructionists categorically deny that politics is central to social change. The reformation of the Church is central; every other positive social change will flow from this one. Changing, p.xxi

• The goal of Christian political action then is not to usher in a theocracy but to acknowledge the theocracy that already exists …. Christian political action is not supposed to impose a messianic kingdom from the top down. Only God can lawfully control the hearts of men by imposing His rule …. Christian political action is therefore a bottom-up and inside-out process. Changing, p.11

• The orthodox Christian faith cannot be reduced to personal experiences, academic discussions, or culture-building activity – as important as all these are in varying degrees. The essence of Biblical religion is the worship of God …. True Christian reconstruction of culture is far from being simply a matter of passing Law X and electing Congressman Y. Christianity is not a political cult. It is the divinely ordained worship of the Most High God. Paradise, p.215

• I forthrightly reject any reduction of the sacred message to moralism or politics … the central thrust of the bible is recognized to be the accomplishment and application of salvation to God’s people. Theonomy, p.33f

• I don’t disagree that the issues taken up in Theonomy are of subordinate importance in the Christian life, preaching of the church, range of theological loci etc … Surely the fact that some Christians take up the question of God’s law and its relation to modern penology – and that some write on the subject – does not mean that they believe that subject is the most vital issue for all believers (or even for themselves). No Other, p.43

• We may readily grant that socio-political reconstruction has less urgency than personal spirituality or the church, but this does not bear whatsoever upon the truth or error of the theonomic standard for politics. No Other, p.51

(Pilfered from Tim Gallant’s blog.)

A quote from David Field’s Samuel Rutherford and the Confessionally Christian State:

Evangelical defeatism is a failure of Biblical perspective. After all, the risen Lord Jesus has been given all authority in heaven and on earth and has been made head over all things for the Church; he is the ruler of the kings of the earth and he is currently putting his enemies beneath his feet; he has presumably asked the Father for the nations as his inheritance and the ends of the earth as his possession – and so he will receive them. All nations will bow to Jesus and all kings will serve him and his kingdom will grow to become the largest plant in the garden with the nation-birds finding rest in its branches. His kingdom is the stone which crushed the kingdoms of men in Daniel 2 and which is growing to become a mountain-empire which fills the whole earth. He is the firstborn from among the dead and therefore it is right that in all things he has the first place. He has been highly exalted and not only will every knee bow to him but every knee should bow to him.

Evangelical defeatism is a failure of historical perspective. After all, the statistics are out there. It took 1400 years for 1% of the world’s population to become Christians and then another 360 years for that to double to 2%. Another 170 years saw that grow from 2% to 4% and then, between 1960 and 1990 the proportion of the world’s population made up of Bible-believing Christians rose from 4% to 8%. Now, in 2007, one third of the world’s population confesses that Jesus is Lord and 11% of the world’s population are “evangelical” Christians. The evangelical church is growing twice as fast as Islam and three times as fast as the world’s population. South America is turning Protestant faster than Continental Europe did in the sixteenth century. South Koreans reckon that they can evangelize the whole of North Korea within five years once that country opens up. And then there’s the Chinese church consisting of tens of millions of Christians who have learned to pray, who have confidence in Scripture, who know about spiritual warfare, have been schooled in suffering and are qualified to rule. One day in the next century that Church – tens of millions of Christians trained to die – will be released into global mission and our prayers for the fall of Islam will be answered.
_________________________________
See also Postmillennial Suffering.

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?

You must be logged in to see the rest of this post.

Join now for a year for $15!

One of the big problems with modern theology is its habit of categorising parts of the Bible into literary genres. For sure, the Bible contains historical prose, visions, poetry and songs. But many passages won’t actually fit into these neat little pigeon holes without hamstringing their intended purpose. And as it turns out, these “genre-lisations” are excuses to compromise with humanistic pop-philosophy and pop-history.

The three main gripes I have are misuses of the genres poetry, polemic and apocalyptic.

Poetry

There’s plenty of poetry in the Bible. But Genesis chapters 1-3, or even 1-11, are not poetry. Yes, they are carefully structured and often chiastic (symmetric), but they do not possess the forms of Hebrew poetry.1 Classing them as such is an excuse to relegate them to the realm of ideology instead of history. Yes, the Hebrews were “event orientated” in their literature, but the jury is still out on whether this was actually an oral tradition. Maintaining that Adam couldn’t write (or that Christ’s disciples didn’t write a gospel immediately, a la Dr. John Dickson) is a view based on pop-history, not the Bible.2

Polemic

“A polemic is part of the prophet’s speech, but not the speech of a king. Not to imply it is ‘beneath’ the king, but it seems to be a rhetorical crowbar to pry open ears.”3

The prophets were the Lord’s lawyers, bringing a covenant lawsuit to covenant breakers. This is not technically polemic. Or, it was as polemic as a sheriff turning up on your doorstep to serve papers.

It seems that certain passages of the Bible are classed as ‘polemic’ because we have problems with the actual history, at least, the parts that embarrass us because they ride against pop-history.

The same goes for early Genesis. None of Genesis is polemic for the benefit of Moses’ people. It is not addressed to them, and shows no signs of being an attack on ancient gods or a modification of Ancient Near East suzerainty covenants. Genesis is very clearly the original. The problem is our unbelief.

Neither is Revelation a polemic against Rome, despite what Richard Bauckham says.4 It concerns the Old Covenant people and their compromise with Rome. They were Covenant-breakers, and the Covenant structure is laced throughout the Revelation like brandy in a Christmas pudding (Get a review copy of my book Totus Christus to see this in action).

The only real polemic in the Bible might be the speeches of Job’s accusers, as they stitch their case together to scapegoat him. And they were the bad guys, the snakes in Job’s wilderness.

Apocalyptic

This one applies mainly to Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation. The parts of these prophecies that don’t fit our interpretation of history get relegated to ideology, akin to the Jewish fables of the intertestament era. They lose their grip on actual history.

Sometimes this is understandable. Those who rightly refused to see Ezekiel 38-39′s Gog and Magog as a future battle still found it hard to pin it on something historical (including David Chilton). Jordan figured out that it was fulfilled in the book of Esther, and the Covenant “Egypt to Canaan” structure of Ezekiel confirms this (among many other more minor proofs). The prophecies of Isaiah concern the Restoration Covenant era, but this was an expansion of Israel’s spiritual influence. Because history doesn’t record a physical Jewish empire, the oracles are misunderstood and applied to the first century directly, or to some future Israel (applying oracles that concerned the Restoration of ancient Israel to modern Jews who are actually outside the Covenant!).

The apocalyptic sections of the New Testament suffer that same fate. Dispensationalists don’t understand that these concern a major change in the spiritual realm that was played out upon the first century Jews and the Roman empire, but the confusing imagery used is all firmly rooted in the Bible’s Covenant structure. It speaks a language we don’t understand.

So, these passages may be classed as apocalyptic, but unlike the Archibishop of Canterbury, we cannot conclude that John did see Jesus but it made him insane, and Revelation was the result!5 Nor can we cop out and say Matthew 24 jumped to the end of time, or that Revelation is just a general picture book of the church in the world. These prophecies commanded a moral response from their first audiences. All was to happen soon, upon this generation. Anything after that is just application, however helpful and important this may be. The prophecies are rooted firmly in history (a point which Bauckham makes, despite his misunderstanding of the purpose of the Revelation).

Apocalyptic is by definition a revelation of near historical events. It is not ideology from the subconscious of man for the purpose of rallying the troops or defining cultural identity.

None of these genres are an excuse for gnosticism, which, according to Jordan’s definition is this:

“Throughout history, the Christian Church has had to guard against the heresy of gnosticism. Gnosticism is not an ordinary heresy, because it does not manifest itself as a set of defined beliefs. Rather, gnosticism is a tendency: the tendency to replace the historic facts of Christianity with philosophical ideas. Gnosticism is the tendency to de-historicise and de-physicalise the Christian religion. Gnosticism transforms history into ideology and facts into philosophy. Gnosticism tends to see religion as man’s reflections about God and reality instead of as God’s revelation of Himself and His Word to man. As a tendency, gnosticism has always plagued the Church, and it is alive and well today, openly in ‘liberalism’, and in a more concealed fashion in ‘evangelicalism’.”6

So why is the Bible written the way it is? Peter Leithart writes:

As much as pragmatic Americans might wish it to be otherwise, the Bible is not an answer-book.  It includes advice, and laws, and rules, but a lot of it consists of puzzling prophecy, ancient history, obscure parables and apparently abstract theology.  What are we supposed to get from that?  We ask for an answer key, and God gives us poetry. Can’t we just skip the story and get to the moral?

No we can’t.

God gave us the Bible to guide us, but also – more fundamentally – to form us. By studying the Bible, hearing it, reading it, learning from it, we are being remade.7

So, it is we who are being recategorised, reformed according the Covenant. But we fight against it, and use literary genres to mask our unbelief and make the Bible palatable to an unbelieving world.

I guess this article is a polemic against gnosticism.

_____________

1. “Given the ratio of verbal forms, the statistical evidence for the text [of Genesis] being prose is overwhelming.” See Francis Humphrey, “The meaning of yôm in Genesis 1:1–2:4”, Journal of Creation 21(2):52–55, August 2007. Article online at www.creation.com
2. See James B. Jordan, Toward a Chiastic Understanding of the Gospel According to Matthew, Part 1, Biblical Horizons Newsletter No. 94. “Matthew is the first of the gospels; there can be little doubt of this. The notion that Mark was first because Mark is shorter is nonsensical. Matthew was one of the disciples and was a man of letters. Who better to take notes during Jesus’ lifetime? Moreover, immediately after Pentecost there would have been a demand for a book containing the teaching and works of Jesus. The Jews were a people of the book. Each time God did a great work, a new part of Scripture was written to tell about it. The 3000 converts on the day of Pentecost would have expected such a book, and we can be pretty sure that Matthew set right down to write it. Doubtless he spoke with the other disciples, and perhaps Matthew’s gospel is to some extent a joint work. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that within a month after Pentecost copies of Matthew’s gospel were in circulation.”
3. Sorry, can’t remember where I found this quote.
4. Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation.  The use of “commercial imagery” to describe worship that is used in Revelation begins in Genesis 2 and appears many times throughout the Old Testament. See Worship as Commerce. If you want a handle on that, get into James Jordan’s lectures.
5. “The rantings of John the Divine about his theological rivals are part of the by-product of the very vision of the Living One that shows these ravings for what they are, by showing the radical and unconfined purpose of God in Jesus Christ” … ” we aren’t called to believe and endorse all they say, only to ask ourselves what we are taught here about the strangeness and sometimes the terror of the Word of God to fragile minds.“  Rowan Williams, Open To Judgment, p. 115-116. (Thanks to David Field for this).
6. James B. Jordan, Creation in Six Days, A Defense of the Traditional Reading of Genesis One, Chapter 4: Gnosticism Versus History.
7. Peter J. Leithart, Exhortation, Second Sunday of Trinity.

In 587 BC, the Jews saw the city of Jerusalem fall to the Babylonians and the Temple, built by Solomon nearly 400 years before, destroyed. The experience of this devastating judgment was made all the more bitter because the Edomites, their brothers and next-door neighbours, not only did not come to the aid of the Jews but, far worse, rejoiced in their humiliation, mocked their pain, looted their goods, and handed over their survivors to the Babylonians. The book of Obadiah is a prophecy, probably given shortly after the fall of Jerusalem, which tells of the judgment of Edom and the restoration of God’s people…

Interpretation

The book of Obadiah does not mention the sins of Judah or the destruction of the Temple – it is emphatically not a “sanctuary” book about the relationship with the Father. Similarly, no mention is made of the Babylonians or of what to do in exile – Obadiah is not a “world” book about the relationship with the outsider. Rather, the book of Obadiah is all about the Edomites – about their pride and self-reliance and malice. This is a “land” book about relationship with the “brother”. But who is this “brother” (see vv.10, 12)? The whole book is spoken to or about Edom. But who is Edom?

Edom was the nation which grew from Esau. The story of the twin brothers, Esau and Jacob, the younger of whom, Jacob, was destined by God to rule the elder, is well-known, along with the incidents when Esau sold his birthright to Jacob and Jacob deceived his father Isaac into giving him, rather than Esau, the blessing due to the firstborn. Relations between the two nations which grew from Jacob, later known as Israel, and Esau (father of the Edomites) were rarely any better.

Application

The book of Obadiah is about the particular wickedness of those who have been privileged by their closeness to the people of God and who should have known better than to persecute those people. The post-Christian media in the West. The Protestant-persecuting Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox church in some countries. Muslims who persecute Christians. All of these have enjoyed the privilege of being related to the church of Jesus Christ and thus their malice towards the church is all the more reprehensible.

Excerpts from Opening Up Obadiah by David P. Field
Available for download here.

from davidpfield.blogspot.com

“It’s been a very long time since I looked at Louis Berkhof’s Systematic Theology. But when I was flicking through it today I noticed a section called “Objections to Postmillennialism”. This is in his first paragraph:

There are some very serious objections to the Postmillennial theory.

The fundamental idea of the doctrine – that the whole world will gradually be won for Christ, that the life of all nations will in course of time be transformed by the gospel, that righteousness and peace will reign supreme, and that the blessings of the Spirit will be poured out in richer abundance than before, so that the Church will experience a season of unexampled prosperity just before the coming of the Lord - is not in harmony with the picture of the end of the ages found in Scripture. The Bible teaches indeed that the gospel will spread throughout the world and will exercise a beneficent influence, but does not lead us to expect the conversion of the world, either in this or in a coming age. It stresses the fact that the time immediately preceding the end will be a time of great apostasy, of tribulation and persecution, a time when the faith of many will wax cold, and when they who are loyal to Christ will be subjected to bitter sufferings, and will in some cases even sealed their confession with their blood, Matt. 24:6-14, 21, 22; Luke 18.8; 21.25-28; II Thess. 2:3-12; II Tim. 3:1-6; Rev. 13.

I don’t know about “just” before the coming of the Lord but what I found most striking was that, in my view, every one of the six passages he cites in defence of his objection to postmillennialism has reference to first century events.

There are other things to say about the relationship between postmillennialism and preterism but I thought this remarkable.”

Whenever God does something in redemptive history, the Devil produces a counterfeit. Something I have just noticed about the Revelation is another aspect to this ‘evil twin’ pattern. It is a counterfeit Totus Christus.

After the ascension of Christ, Satan was thrown down from heaven to the Land, and took up residence in Herod’s Temple as Jesus predicted (Matthew 12:45). (Notice that Jesus’ ministry as Adam was heaven-garden-heaven, and Satan’s counterfeit usurping was thus garden-heaven-garden.)

Revelation then moves into a description of two warring armies, the saints with lion faces, and the ‘bad Nazirites.’ The Jews and Judaisers as Jezebel, the false church, are finally destroyed; the true church is massacred but ascends to be with Christ “in the air.”

So the church is Christ’s permanent body. Satan’s brief possession of Judah (Land Beast/False Prophet) and Rome (Sea Beast) was the Totus Diabolus in the Land. He will not be able to do such again until he is released for a short season at the end of World history.

I guess this also means that, in response to the marriage supper of the Lamb, and the faithfulness of Christ to His bride, the best Satan could manage was a one night stand.

1 http://davidpfield.blogspot.com/2006/10/totus-christus.html

Whether we wear a cross around our neck and/or a white lab coat, whether we carry a Koran and/or a microscope we’re all wearing glasses called “what we think and what we think we know up to this point”. Some of those help us see more clearly and some obscure things badly. But, if I can put it like this, our eyeballs are attached to the glasses – the moment we take off the glasses then we see nothing at all. We all have our pre-commitments. We’re all standing somewhere.

Sometimes you’ll hear a “scientist-in-epistemological-denial” or a “campaigning-anti-Christian-scientist” argue as though religious people are the ones with presuppositions and a subjective standpoint whereas scientists are neutral and objective. Real scientists know better: you can’t get out of your own mind in order to think about things.

The Christian version of recognizing this is cheerfully to acknowledge our pre-commitments and renounce all claims to neutrality. We are breathing God’s air as we talk about him, using his gift of sight as we observe things, and spending time which he has given us as we get on with life. The whole earth belongs to Jesus Christ and those who deny that are still walking on his property and breathing his air as they do so.

The anti-Christian version of recognizing this is harder to find. Statements such as, “I realize that I am not neutral; I am already committed to disbelieving the Christian account of things; that is the territory I occupy as I go about my observing and hypothesizing; and I am more than comfortable with the thought that my rejection of God colours everything I see.”

David P. Field, Science and Christianity 6/8, http://davidpfield.blogspot.com

The approach of the book is marked by

1. Immersion in and informed reference to the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures. The use of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Ezra-Nehemiah, Esther, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah is astonishing and enriching at every turn. Use of or comment upon other books along the way are unfailingly stimulating and this applies to NT books as well, not least to Revelation which is greatly illumined by this work on Daniel.

2. Confident deployment of redemptive-historical paradigms which have themselves been recognized through close and repeated study of the whole Bible. In particular, theologico-spatial zones, old creation /new creation eras, and prophet /priest /king roles feature heavily and often have real power to unlock or clarify the subject in hand.

3. The closest of close structural analysis of the sort that comes from multiple readings. Chiasms and parallels and other patterning devices are attended to with great care and in such a way as positively informs the interpretation rather than being mere observations along the path.

4. Seriousness about chronology. This is one of the characteristics of Jordan’s work overall, since he sees emphasis on “ideas” at the expense of history as revealing and strengthening the gnosticism of much contemporary Christianity. The detailed chronological work lying behind his interpretation of Jeremiah and Ezekiel and his resolution of some of the Daniel “difficulties” is awesome.

5. Interpretative weight given to what still gets called “inter-testamental” history. Inter-testamental history is redemptive history and Jordan emphasizes that God speaks to and about that period in the patterns of Daniel 1-6 and in the prophecies of Daniel 1-7.

6. Attention to numerics: word-counts, significant numbers, and the meaning of numbers. There is work here to compare with Bauckham’s work on Revelation.

7. Typology. This is not a “typological” commentary as such because although half of Daniel is narrative, half of it is apocalyptic prophecy. But when you attend to redemptive-historical patterns and to literary structures and sequences and to the importance of history as Jordan does, then, in some sense, all your work will be typological. At the macro-historical this means that Daniel is one of God’s major interpretative words for the entire second phase of the first creation. The first creation has a former days and a latter days and then gives way to the new creation. Daniel tells us about the last centuries and decades of the latter days of the old world.

8. Cheerful (and sometimes curmudgeonly) unfashionableness. Early dating, traditional authorship, defense of biblical chronology, unashamed constant reference to Christ (how could it be otherwise?!), impatience with “unbelieving scholarship”, utter lack of interest in being respected and consistent resolve to be useful. This may be a difficult example for young scholars (like those in Daniel 1!) to follow but it is thoroughly refreshing.

9. Theological creativity at level “Genius”. I thought I knew Jordan’s work reasonably well but over and over and over again there are “aha!” moments. In my copy now there are almost more sentences and paragraphs marked than unmarked!”

“The Handwriting on the Wall” is available from www.americanvision.com
Also available as an e-book.