Bully’s Blog

or Preterism is not a Dirty Word

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One thing that has struck me since becoming a preterist is how much evangelicals play down the badness of the baddies in the New Testament, i.e. the unbelieving Jews and Christian Judaisers.

Evangelicals would never believe that Jesus and the apostles were mistaken in their warnings of an imminent judgment (and let’s face it, this imminence is a facet of the New Testament that is inescapable). So the only other option they see as viable is a position that defies logic: an event that was near, at the doors, yet could happen at any time over next few millennia.

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The Art of Interpretation

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! (Romans 11:33)

Hermeneutics is a big word you learn at Bible College. It is the study or practice of interpreting texts in the areas of literature, law and religion.

In literature, discovering the intent of an author can be an enlightening game. In law, one’s life (or life sentence) can hang in the balance of a judge’s interpretation. In religion, besides plumbing the depths of the mind of God, it is an enlightening game in the balance of which many lives hang. God has revealed His mind in His Word, and has also seen fit to give to His people the often difficult job of interpreting it.

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or The Real Hebel

James Jordan was asked whereabouts in the Bible is the best place to start reading it:

We should start in Genesis. What we should really do is pass a law that for five years you may only read Genesis through Joshua over and over again. So you get the foundation… When the Psalms and Ecclesiastes were written, they were written for people who were steeped in the earlier Scriptures. Ecclesiastes is not some mysterious book of philosophy. Ecclesiastes is all about the Feast of Tabernacles. The Feast of Tabernacles is literally the Feast of “Clouds.” That’s what sukkoth means. You get branches down out of a tree to make a little lean-to. Those branches up on that tree are a cloud. When you make a tree-house down here out of those branches, you’ve got your own little cloud. After a week it disintegrates. But God in His cloud, in His Tabernacle, goes on and on.

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or Understanding Apostolic Wine Science

Scholars talk about identifying the “apostolic hermeneutic,” which sounds intimidating. The reason for this phrase is that according to the commonsense rules of interpretation, the apostles are merrily delinquent. They quote many Old Testament texts, rip them out of their historical contexts and claim they are fulfilled in Christ.

Our problem is that the apostles are neither hacks nor mystics. They are authoritative. Some rightly explain that the apostles are just seeing Christ prefigured in the Old Testament Scriptures, which they are, but this explanation is too vague. God’s Word is meticulous.

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I say then, has God cast away His people? Certainly not! For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not cast away His people whom He foreknew. Or do you not know what the Scripture says of Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel, saying, ”LORD, they have killed Your prophets and torn down Your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life”? But what does the divine response say to him? “I have reserved for Myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” Even so then, at this present time there is a remnant according to the election of grace.  Romans 11:1-6

Romans 11 is one of those watershed passages. How one interprets it depends on one’s “plan of the ages” paradigm. If you haven’t read James Jordan’s The Future of Israel Re-examined, you need to. Due to its ramifications for interpretation of much of the New Testament, I believe it should be recognised as one of the most important writings of our time. It puts Romans, and especially chapters 9-11, fairly and squarely within a first century context. All would be fulfilled before AD70. God would make “a short work” in the Land. And He did.

It also helps with the interpretation of Revelation. Christ was a new Moses, just as Elijah was. He ascended and gave a double portion of His Spirit to the church as Elisha. The new body witnessed to Gentiles to provoke the hard-hearted Jews to jealousy. This has nothing to do with our day. It was a process confined to the end of the Old Covenant.

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or Drive-By Typology

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Rome has this whole nutty Oedipus thing going. They want the infantile security of Mary’s breast when God calls them to grow up, to be as individuals men worthy of a bride’s affections, and corporately a bride who adores only her Husband!
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Verifying typological connections is a tricky business. Like driving, it is not a skill but an art. This means that although there are certain rules to follow, above all of that there are situations where being steeped in the types and structures of the Bible is the only way to proceed with wisdom. James Jordan recently commented that any such exegesis should be carried out within the conversation of the church, and:

“The popular notion that everyone should be able to read and exegete the Bible equally, as a result of learning some so-called “science” of hermeneutics, is about as stupid as thinking everyone can write music like Bach and Beethoven by studying the rules of harmony and counterpoint; or that anyone can be a Shakespeare.”

I’m no Shakespeare, but James Jordan’s identification of the biblical “universals” and an explanation of biblical types has helped me enormously. The Bible matrix structure has also helped me enormously. They are typological “systematics.” It is this kind of grounding, like practising scales on a piano, that enables us to more easily identify abuses of typology — such as the claim that Mary is a “New Eve.” Dischordant notes can be used to great effect in great music, but it takes a practised musician to know when it is within a greater “harmony” and when it is not. This is beyond the basic scales.

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or How Not to Read the Bible

We moderns have not been trained in how to read texts, let alone ancient ones. Reading texts requires not only an understanding of what is said but an appreciation of how it is said. Consequently, the sacred texts are simply scanned for information that supports what we have already received or they are mishandled entirely. T. David Gordon asserts that this is the reason modern preaching is so disappointing and unengaging. See Why Johnny Can’t Preach and Threshing the Text. We won’t allow the Bible to say anything new.

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or Submissible Evidence According to Paul

“…it is instructive that when the issue was so decisively drawn with his legalist opponents, Paul, at the climax of his argument, appealed to an allegory to refute the gainsayers of grace…”

Warren Gage writes:

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or OT as Mostly an Accommodation to Ancient Pop-Culture?

The Modern Evangelical Bible Academy, Model 2300X.

In his new book Deep Exegesis, Peter Leithart has a great chapter called “The Text is a Husk: Modern Hermeneutics”. To distill his chapter down to its basic essence, he says that distilling the Scriptures down to their basic essence is not what God intends. The text is not a kernel hidden in a husk that can be discarded. We are not to heave our Bibles down to the threshingfloor. Every word of Scripture has significance.

Leithart presents a fascinating history of this methodology and the philosophies behind its various forms. Then he turns on “the good guys.”

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Excerpts from Peter Leithart’s new book, Deep Exegesis: The Mystery of Reading Scripture:

“My insight, if such it is, into the workings of humour was reinforced and generalised when I watched Shrek, a movie that I now tell my students is a gold mine of hermeneutical insight. All the funny parts of that film assume that the viewer has information the movie does not provide, information from three main sources: nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and popular culture, especially movies…”

Johannine Jokes

…How does all this apply to our reading of Scripture? Scripture has the same literary properties as the texts we have been examining. Just as Eliot read Dante who read Virgil who read Homer, so Matthew had read Jeremiah, who knew Kings (or wrote it), and the writer of Kings had read the Hexateuch. Let us look at some examples. Let me tell some biblical jokes, again taken from John 9.

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