“Let’s face it, even daytime television
is more inspiring than your sermons.”

Ray Sutton’s 5-point Covenant model is crucial when it comes to making sense of the judgments of God, both the blessings and the curses. As he says in his book That You May Prosper, “Everyone talks about the Covenant, but nobody does anything about it.”

When I was writing Totus Christus, I thought it was only natural that the 7-point Creation pattern and the 5-point Covenant pattern could be combined. Transcendence is Light. Testing and Ethics matched. The positive and negative Sanctions were quite obviously the two goats on the Day of Atonement (Ebal and Gerizim). So it was only a matter of figuring out how the 5 of Words becomes a 7 in history. [1]

I recently found that James Jordan covered this in his occasional paper, An Introduction to the Seven-fold Covenant Model with Notes on the Five-fold Covenant Model. But how many people have read that? Show of hands, please. How to get this across at a popular level?

John Piper says that pastors should be compassionate men who have backbones of steel. Doug Wilson says that some churches are doctrinally pure, but unloving. They are all backbone, all bone, no flesh. Other churches are all flesh, all gooey love, a body with no skeleton. Sin divides Law-Word from Life, but God is able to put these two together, and it takes a miracle (Ezekiel 37). It is the work of the Spirit to form and fill, to marry head and body, structure and glory.

Eric Rauch did write a great summary of Ray’s ground-breaking book a while back, [2] but Ray’s technical approach attracts the retentive among us: the lawyers. I think it was Jordan who remarked that the Bible has been in the hands of the lawyers for 1000 years — far too long. Lawyers love rules and regulations. They like to have all the boxes ticked. They are legal accountants. Their books get written and filed, just in case the IRS does an audit. (I don’t think Ray’s book is that technical, but it’s still way above the level of most Christians.)

Sure, the Lord is a lawyer, but none of His books is dusty-on-the-shelf. His laws are Bridal. He might give us a long list of Covenant conditions, but then He gives us narrative, and we see how the same pattern plays out in history. Word becomes flesh, and flesh is filled with Spirit. The lawyers rarely get beyond Word, so the saints turn to “Christian” fiction, and the surrounding post-Christian culture turns to Buffy, Harry Potter, House, People and Manga for their stories. Let’s face it, even daytime television is more inspiring than your sermons.

That’s what I want to achieve with this book: to give a detailed summary of Ray’s book, but then tie it to the Bible Matrix. After all, postmoderns love narrative. Showing how the Law is inseparably married to the narrative would have great benefits. And I pray the Spirit would use this to open more Christians’ minds to the wonders of the Torah and the foundations it lays for the rest of the Bible.

The benefits for interpretation are great: we begin to see Israel’s sins in the light of the transgressed documents, and to identify the Covenant lawsuits as what they are, an area where most evangelical scholars fail dismally. (Why do they insist on ignoring literary structure and allusion? Ah, they have the minds of lawyers. They see the letter and not the Spirit!)

And the benefits for application would be greater: Covenant obedience and postmillennialism would suddenly make sense (and not be branded as works righteousness and right-wing political fantasy respectively). Instead of being suckered by Christianised socialism (Baalism) [3], teaching a prosperity gospel (materialism), or fighting it with a poverty gospel (gnosticism), the modern evangelical church would understand “good success” as God does — spiritual and material prosperity within a transformed church and state.

If you have any thoughts on what would make this a good book (besides canning the idea altogether), please let me know. Eric has very kindly agreed to the use of his article.

Hopefully, it will be better than Matrix sequels tend to be.

Do you think THE KINGDOM KEY would be a more suitable subtitle?

______________________________________
[1] See Lambs in Limbo.
[2] See A Jaw-Dropping Book.
[3] See Baal’s Stimulus Package.

Brian McLaren’s twists and turns are too subtle for a generation of Christians left vulnerable by ministers who don’t teach the Bible. Erich Rauch of American Vision is very helpfully working his way through Brian McLaren’s latest book, A New Kind of Christianity.

“Due to the strong influence that he has as a “pastor to pastors,” any time McLaren releases a new book it is a pretty big deal within the walls of the church. And because he is giving voice to concerns that many pastors and church leaders have expressed and thought about themselves, his writings indirectly resonate from American pulpits nearly every Sunday morning. His newest book, A New Kind of Christianity, claims to describe what Christianity might look like if it were “not afraid of questions.” Questions are a really big part of McLaren’s ministry. In fact, the subtitle of the book is: “Ten Questions that are Transforming the Faith.” Now I am certainly in favor of questions; I think that far too many people are far too easily satisfied with conventional ways of thinking and doing things. I agree with McLaren that questions can effect change; but I disagree with him and his book’s subtitle because it’s not the questions that cause the progress, it’s the answers. And unfortunately, this is where McLaren is his weakest.”

Rauch carefully untangles the truth from the distortions in McLaren’s questions, and demonstrates the false assumptions that lead this modern thinker astray when it comes to the Bible.

“While [McLaren's position] may have all the trappings and appearances of being a humble and contrite way of interpreting the Bible, the reality is that McLaren’s “new way” is nothing more than the “old way” of theological liberalism. He may claim that his way is neither conservative nor liberal, but he is only half-right; it is liberal to the core. McLaren seems to be under the impression that all liberal interpreters that came before him were looking for ways to “explain away” the text, but in actuality most theological liberalism is the result of trying to do exactly what McLaren is recommending: getting “into” the text, where God can speak to our modern sensibilities through His “ancient” words. This has always been a driving force behind theological liberalism: adapting the Scriptures to the contemporary culture, rather than the culture to the Scriptures. Without explicitly saying it, McLaren portrays conservatives as being crusty, old “Bible-thumpers” who don’t spend more than a second or two thinking about what the Bible actually says, and liberals as ones who want to take every opportunity to discredit the Bible as being untrue. With this (false) antithesis squarely in place, McLaren rides through the battle—with unstained uniform—as the keeper of the proverbial middleground; a sort of hermeneutical Rodney King, naively wondering why we can’t all just get along.

…McLaren makes the correct observation that both the conservative and the liberal ways of interpreting the Bible—at least as far as he has defined conservative and liberal ways to be—gives a great deal of authority to the interpreters themselves. This is undoubtedly true. In fact, this very thing was pointed out to Martin Luther when he was undertaking the task of translating the Bible into German. Putting the words of Scripture into the hands and imaginations of everyone makes everyone an interpreter and, in a sense, gives them power to “be as God,” deciding good and evil for themselves. Luther understood this, but also understood that Truth was worth the risk. Simply by reading McLaren’s book and his way of interpreting and understanding the Bible, I make myself a potential convert to his way of reading and understanding. In actuality, this is exactly what he wants. He wrote his book to influence his readers with his way. He says he is fed up with “careless preachers [who] use the Bible as a club or sword to dominate or wound, [who] discredit the Bible in a way that no skeptic can” (p. 69). I, too, am fed up with this, but I am not quite ready to follow McLaren in a wholesale abandonment of the historicity of the book of Job (for example) as being an “archetypal theological opera” (p. 95). An honest reading of Job seems to indicate that the events that it speaks of are real and actual, not literary devices that are inviting us into “conversation.” My dusty “conservative” hermeneutic may not sell as many books as McLaren’s new and updated liberal one, but, in truth, this is where the real heart of the “authority” question lies.

When McLaren—who is admittedly not a trained theologian—makes judgments about a particular book of the Bible’s overall meaning, he is exercising the very power over the text that he accuses conservatives and liberals of having. It is significant that McLaren has never been to seminary; he does indeed find details and connections in the Scripture that most seminary-trained men will blow right past in their surface-level search for doctrinal application. It is also significant that McLaren was trained in literature because he seems to be incapable of reading the Bible as anything other than a God-inspired (whatever that means to him) work of fiction. This is why I find it so fascinating that McLaren accuses the early church fathers of bringing Greek philosophy into their reading of the Bible, when in reality the fathers were reading the Bible the very way he claims to be recommending.”

A New View of an Old Faith

A New Kind of Authority

A New Kind of Narrative

A New Kind of God

A New Kind of Jesus

A New Kind of Gospel