How the New Testament Authors Read the Old

Depending on who you are, the following statement might seem either utterly obvious or pure wishful thinking: The writers of the New Testament actually believed that the Old Testament was all about Jesus Christ. Let me explain why this is a post worth writing. For a long time I've been basically convinced that the Old Testament contained several prophecies of the coming Messiah, and that the New Testament writers thought that Jesus fulfilled those prophecies. Most Christians would admit as much. But it was only recently that I starting "collecting" New Testament references which show the specific ways that they thought Jesus was revealed in the Old Testament. The fairly startling result when these texts are compared is that, according to New Testament, (1) several Old Testament characters had specific knowledge of Jesus, (2) Jesus was an active agent in Old Testament events, and (3) the whole substance of the Old Testament reveals Jesus (not just a few scattered prophecies).

Here are the details: Abraham "rejoiced that he would see my [Jesus'] day" (Jn.8:56); Moses was emboldened to give up the easy life in in Pharoah's court to serve God because he "considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt" (Heb. 11:26); the exodus itself, as well as supernatural intervention of God in the Sinai desert was actually the work of Jesus: "Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe" (Jude 5); the "spiritual rock" from which the Israelites drank in the desert was none other than "Christ" (1 Cor. 10:4); the message of "eternal life" to which the Old Testament bears witness is a message centered on Christ (John 5:39). The Old Testament prophets specifically wrestled with the details of Christ's sufferings and future glories (1 Pet.1:11). In fact, the sin-atoning death, burial, and third-day resurrection of Christ are foretold in the Old Testament (1 Cor. 15:3-4). Isaiah understood his call as a prophet to be about Christ, since "Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him" (Jn.12:41). And, at the broadest level, the Law, Prophets, and the Psalms reveal the entire gospel, including the church's mission to preach Christ to the nations (Luke 24:25-27;44-47).

The upshot: if we agree that the New Testament (and Jesus) got all of this right, we should always read the Old Testament looking for hints and whispers of Christ. Christ's person and work are not incidental or occasional themes, but make up the very warp-and-woof of those old books. If, as the New Testament suggests, the pre-incarnate Christ haunts even the details of the narratives in the Pentateuch, let's keep our eyes open for other ways that Christ may be revealed there. Want a guide-book for this kind of Christ-centered Old Testament study? A great primer is Edmund Clowny's The Unfolding Mystery: Discovering Christ in the Old Testament.

Note on One Kind of Good Ecumenism

Let's face it, some Christian traditions have been better at living out certain aspects of the Biblical vision of the Christian life than others. Would anyone doubt, for example, that the charismatic movement -- all theological criticisms aside -- has done a pretty good job modeling fervency in prayer? So here's the point about ecumenism: sometimes we'll find that people in another tradition are living out an aspect of our own doctrine in a better way than we are -- and they may not even officially confess that doctrine themselves. I have plenty of friends, for example, who pray with a fervency and confidence that assumes God is sovereign over all events in the world, though if you asked them they'd articulate a strong free-will theology. Yet, to watch them pray reminds me that my own beliefs about God's sovereignty should make me more like them when I pray, and less like my often tentative, low-horizon self. In such places we can learn from sometimes very different traditions without becoming relativistic about doctrine itself.

March Book Recommendation

D.A. Carson's great little book, Exegetical Fallacies, is an extended list of mistakes that people often make when they think they are proving something "from the Bible." Sadly, many people have become skeptical about any arguments based on "what the Bible says" because they have observed how others have made the Bible say anything and everything. However, the modern adage, "you can prove anything with the Bible," is not true according to Carson. Most erroneous and subjective interpretations of Scripture are also guilty of breaking some classical rules of argumentation. These common fallacies, if they were understood by those seeking to interpret the Bible, would prevent a lot of hanky-panky as well as many honest mistakes. Some of Carson's list of exegetical offenders are partiuclar to the world of biblical interpretation, but many are straight out of a logic textbook. Christians, especially, need to be clear about how to move from text to interpretation, and how not to. To the extent that we are sloppy about this, we can destroy confidence that the Bible is anything other than a spiritual springboard, a wordy Rorshach that carries no particular meaning apart from what our own minds bring to it. Pick up Exegetical Fallacies if you've never seen it, and be prepared for an interpretive tune-up.

Disney and the Other Kingdom

I just got back from Disney World yesterday, a family trip sponsored by my very generous father-in-law. Wow. Would you believe that the Orlando Disney employs fifty-seven thousand people on a forty-seven square mile piece of land? No kidding. After four days, we only scratched the surface of what's there. Even the details impressed me: all the grounds were spotless, the "cast members" cheerful, even the landscaping was show-stopping. For all of my high-brow critiques of Disney and its believe-in-your-dreams humanism, its portrayal of increasingly sexed-up princesses, etc., Disney World was a load of fun, especially with our two year-old, Willa. I'm trying to sort through the fact that I was, myself, a little starstruck when we met Minnie-Mouse at the "character dinner". Willa too was starstruck - shaking, actually. Beyond just Minnie, she was, in a sense, catechized into a mastery of the whole pantheon of Disney characters that prowl around the park. A week ago she only knew how to say "Minnie-Mouse" and "Cinderella", but now she can verbally identify Mickey, Goofy, Pluto, Snow White, the Little Mermaid, and Chip and Dale. Some of this makes me nervous. While we bought very little merchandise, she has no-doubt formed a myriad of positive associations with Disney images that will influence her buying choices for years to come. She, and we, had such an ongoing feast of dazzling entertainment that my wife and I wonder if life after Orlando will seem drab. I.e., it's nine o'clock, where are the fireworks? I vaguely feel the scrutiny of Neil Postman from beyond the grave, for at the end of the four long days we had, it seemed, nearly entertained ourselves to death.

Some of this makes me think that the best Christian response to the arresting power of Disney World is to be sure that our preaching and liturgy tells as compelling a story as Walt's. In a way, Disney lays down the gauntlet when it comes to enthralling an audience. And while the business of the church is not to entertain people, certainly our story - the creation, fall, and redemption of the world through the Passion of Christ, and the future culmination of his kingdom at his final return - surely this is, as Dorothy Sayers said, "the most exciting drama ever staged." Why shouldn't we also seek to capture the imagination of our young people, but about a greater Prince Charming, a more enduring Kingdom, and a real Lion King? After a week at Disney World, to bore people with the gospel seems more sinful than it did before. If the kiss of the bridegroom in the Song of Solomon is, as Bernard of Clairvaux said it is, the kiss of Christ on the lips of his people, and if that kiss raises us from the sleep of spiritual death -- well then, the otherwise enchanting tale of Sleeping Beauty starts to look a little derivative. One of the reasons the church can confidently take up Disney's implicit challenge is that we have the better story -- the True Myth, as J.R.R. Tolkien would have said.

None of this is to say that Disney's kingdom is in direct competition with the kingdom of God. If Tolkien had seen the nightly parade through the streets of the Magic Kingdom, wouldn't he tell us it is a true, however dim, reflection of the future procession of the saints through the gold streets in the kingdom of God? If so, he would have been right. This is why the Christian response to Disney World can not be a one-sided critique. It is somehow right to be swept up by the kernel of truth and beauty that is here. There is such a thing as scrooginess, afterall, and to be unmoved by something like the (four times a day) coronation of pauper-turned-princess Cinderella, complete with royal anthem playing from a thousand speakers, all against the backdrop of the fabulously illuminated palace (fiberglass construction not withstanding) is to be guilty of a wonder deficit. When the myths that are played out on the various park rides and animatronic stage shows are really good, as they often are, glimmers of the gospel are usually just under the surface (as anecdotal evidence, I cite the number of Lion King sermon illustrations preached from American pulpits a few years ago). And, now that Disney owns the Narnia film franchise and has opened a proto Narnia-experience at their Disney-MGM Studios park, the gospel/fairy tale gap has become even narrower when walking the golden streets of Disney World.

But, on the other hand, to try to presently create an explicitly Christian version of Disney's spectacle is to fail to realize that such a final version of the kingdom is a future reality, not a present one (take note, founders of the new Ave Maria town in Florida). Maybe that's why after four days in the park, for all of the fun we were having, it was beginning to feel a tinge like escapism. While the forty-seven square-mile Disney World is a near utopia, once in a while you are reminded that outside the walls of this kingdom there exists a world that is still fallen. A USA Today headline I saw while waiting for the shuttle to EPCOT broke the spell for a moment: "Alabama churches burned 'as a joke,' suspects say." EPCOT means Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. In its best aspects, that's what Disney really is -- a prototype of a future City, but one that we'll have to wait for. So, taken in measured doses, the Disney experience is fun in some of the highest senses of the word. But, as a family, we'll need to remind ourselves this week that God has called us, for the present time, to be pilgrims on the way to the Celestial City -- and not to hole-up for too long in imitations of that place, however legitimately enchanting. And on those warm winter nights in Orlando, schmoozing with the princesses, Disney World was certainly that.

Scientific Knowledge vs. Religious Knowledge

This post is inspired by the problem that fans of science often have with the reasonableness of holding Chrisitan religious beliefs, and the twin problem that makes Chrisitans often nervous about applauding the sciences. My case is that both problems often result in failing to distinguish the properly separate spheres of scientific knowledge and religious knowledge.

Science, everyone agrees, arrives at truth-claims by using the apparatus of the natural world, in order to make conclusions about the things in the natural world. That is, science as a human endeavor is concerned about testable physical causes and reactions in the world of matter, both living and non-living. Even when its hypotheses are not actually testable, science thinks that it's conclusions are at least testable in principle, given enough time, money, improved technology, etc. Christians, of all people, should be glad and optimistic about the possibility and value of scientific conclusions because they believe (on scriptural grounds, no less) that God has made and approves of the physical world, and that he has made it in in an orderly way that generally conforms to basic physical laws. To put this another way, Christians have deep theological reasons (deeper than some other religious traditions) to be champions of the knowledge that science provides.

But science is not in the business of commenting on the role of non-physical realities, like God. It simply has no tools to weigh in on questions like "Does God exist?" "What is the meaning of life?" and, "What's the difference between right and wrong?" If such questions are meaningful at all, they are not meaningful because of any objects or events in the physical world. This in no sense makes science an enemy of such religious questions, but serves to remind us that such questions cannot be settled with the physical tools of the laboratory. Problems result when fans of science (against the advice of most scientists) make this kind of a move: "Unless science can show me evidence for why a certain religious belief is true, it is unreasonable for me to believe it." Philosophers would call this a "category mistake." Religious knowledge, whatever it is, is not derived by the rules that properly govern the formation of scientific knowlege.

In everyday life we understand that there are different types of knowledge, some of which allow us to reasonably hold beliefs that we have no scientific ground for. My favorite example of this is the inutitive knowledge of the "hunch". When we say that we have a hunch about something, we specifically mean that we can't cite any particular evidence (and certainly not scientific evidence) for some belief that we find ourselves in possession of. It is often reasonable to act on hunches even though it is not "scientifically reasonable" to do so. While "hunch knowledge" is not as objectively testable or even as regularly reliable as "scientific knowledge", it is the fool that completely ignores her hunches for those reasons!

Is "religious knowlege" like "hunch knowlege"? In many ways "no", but in one important way "yes": both show an alternate and reasonable means of gaining certain beliefs that are not the result of scientific inquiry. If an invisible and non-material God exists, science (by definition) will have no evidence to offer one way or another. If God does exist, and I come to believe that he does, the reasonableness of my belief will be grounded on different criteria than the canons of the scientific method. Again, saying this does not slight science in any way.

Oftentimes the secular critique of religious belief is on the grounds that we are irrationally dismissing the gains of scientific knowledge if we come to hold any untestable religious beliefs. But this is to wrongly think that all knowledge must be scientifically derived. Science itself would place no such limits on us and how we form proper beliefs. The opposite mistake is the sometimes Christian hostility toward the sciences that results from forgetting that God made a physical world that has observable, testable processes that can be discovered without reference to the supernatural. It is not unspiritual to pursue the sciences -- if anything, it honors the God who set the world up in such a way that invites us to examine its mechanisms and complexity. While some religious beliefs refer to physical things and historical events (especially in Christianity), including the miraculous suspension of normal physical laws, the basic beliefs of Christanity are not unreasonable by any judgment from science.

The last sentence will raise in some minds a good question about the rules for another category of belief, "historical knowledge". On what grounds to can we claim that a certain event happened in a certain way and for certain reasons? History deals with events in the physical world that are, therefore, somewhat open to scienfic conjecture -- but not fully, given the amazing number of unknown variables and unobservabe causes that go into any one event. Events of ancient history are even harder to study, given the often paucity of sources. It's not hard to see why history, as an academic discipline, has sometimes been considered a science, and at other times an art. Since Chrisitanity rises or falls based on whether or not certain events took place in first-century Palestine, several important Christian beliefs should be considered claims to "historical knowlege". Here, things get more interesting, because both Christians and non-believers are properly operating on the same turf, dealing with the same category of knowlege. The reasonableness of the Christian beliefs about the life, death, and resurrection Jesus Christ is based, in part, on whether or not Christians are using the canons of historical knowledge propery or improperly, and, whether they have the right canons at all. This is a much more slippery debate, given the slippery nature of historiography in general. Yet (I think) the Christians make a strong case, though the reasons for saying so will require another post.

Why Did Jesus Die? or, Avoiding a Reduced Gospel

The previous post which argued that we ought to be able to affirm BOTH the new-creation-inaugurating aspect of Jesus' death AND the sin-atoning accomplishment of it leads me to a broader observation: sometimes those of us who speak about the value of Jesus' death on the cross tend to reduce the benefits of it to one or two areas while the Bible itself seems happily to move between many. While some of these benefits are overlapping, none of the following five are easily reduced to a single achievement: Because of the cross 1) the sinner's impurity is cleansed through a sacrifice (Heb.9:13-14), 2) Jesus pays a ransom for the debt that sin has created (Matt.6:12; Mark 10:45; 1 Tim.2:6), 3) Jesus conquers the power of sin, death, and the devil (Col.1:12-14, 2:14-15), 4) the personal hostility between God and the sinner is removed (Rom.5:10), 5) the legal judgment of sin was transferred from the human law-breaker to Jesus (Gal.3:13). While it may be true that the church sometimes makes the mistake of emphasizing some of these benefits while neglecting others, we should resist the temptation to respond to one kind of reductionism with another. Not just biblically, but even intuitively, would we not expect that the multiple manifestations of falleness from which creation suffers would all be reversed by the work of Christ (even if only in an inaugurated extent)? This is the long-awaited Savior of the whole sinful creation, afterall, and his arrival brings a restoration "far as the curse is found", not just to the curse as summarized by one family of biblical images of falleness. Broken bodies will one day be given resurrected bodies like his in which to experience a restored world, but also they will enjoy the forgiveness of a God they have offended, the cleansing from their shame, a victory over spiritual and temporal powers that used to enslave them, etc. To put this another way, when we spot the limitations of some theory of the cross, we should remember that a limitation is not necessarily an un-truth. Did the old "ransom theory" of the atonement have its problems? Yes, but this doesn't free us from somehow including the clear ransom metaphors used in the New Testament to complete our view of the atonement. Is N.T. Wright mistaken if he does not believe that the imputation of our sin for Christ's righteousness is a New Testament teaching? Yes, but that doesn't detract from the value of his work on the new creation themes surrounding Jesus' work which is manifestly biblical if we open our eyes to it. Christ announces a big gospel, good news all around, and not easily reduced. Our preaching, to stay scripturally balanced, should probably dance between all the New Testament portraits of what Jesus accomplished. A good example of the both/and approach to the cross (and the resurrection) can be seen in Michael Horton's responses to Frederica Mathewes-Green in The Church in Emerging Culture: Five Perspectives, pp.143-190).

My One Tiny Problem with N.T. Wright

I just listened to three fantastic N.T. Wright lectures from a weekend seminar he gave recently in Oxford. His central claim was that the New Testament theme of God enacting a "new creation" is the most central biblical theme to explain what God is up to in redemptive history. Contrast this with the assumption of much of platonized Evangelicalism which says that God is primarily in the business of transporting individuals from this world to the ethereal heavenly realm, from the body to the realm of the spirit, etc. Jesus' resurrection is the inauguration of the new creation, God will one day renew the whole present cosmos from its groaning and fallenness in a like manner, that is, a manner that allows for great continuity between present world and the future new heavens and new earth. To speak this way is a cure for the dualism that makes the Bible into an instruction manual to get us out of this world and into a different realm of being, which is heaven.

As much as I love what Wright brings to the table, my lingering concern is what I seem to never hear him saying: the Bible, even given all of its new creation themes, also tells us that what allows anyone to experience the new creation is that Jesus has first atoned for his sins. I've always thought that the links between Jesus death and the Passover provide a strong reason to see atonement near the heart of Jesus' mission. Granted, the atonement for our sins is more of a means to an end (a restored friendhship with God) than a final redemptive benefit in itself. Wright mentions the Passover context of Jesus' death, but relies instead the allusions that the original Exodus Passover would have made to an act of divine re-creation, specifically, that the typical image of God conquering a watery chaos to bring forth a new creation is what the Red Sea crossing and birth of his covenant people is all about. Wright's evidence is strong that the Red Sea crossing of the Exodus is thick with new creation motifs (which I never saw before, apart from Israel in the desert as a new Adam), but why not affirm this AS WELL AS the atonement motif? After all, the only people who experienced the "new creation" of the Red Sea crossing were those whose lives were saved by the lamb's blood on the doorpost the night before. Can't we admit to both the substituionary atonement and new creation as important motifs? The first describes the entrance mechanism and the second, the nature of the kingdom itself, but both are important. To emphasize God's new creation without dealing with the atonement seems to underappreciate Chist's office as priest (even while doing a good job with his kingly office). In fairness, Wright may not really deny any of this. He is, after all, trying to draw our attention to certain biblical themes that we have often missed (new creation) rather than to articulate an exhaustive system. But still, something in me wishes that I'd hear a few more bones occassionaly tossed to the substitutionary atonement motif that seems so central to the Old and New Testament way of describing how it is possible for a sinner to get right with God. To be sure, thanks to Wright, we will not forget that a forgiven sinner will experience God's full redemption in a renewed body, in a renewed cosmos, not somewhere up in the ether.

Molinism and Acts 13:48

Molinism (after the Jesuit Louis de Molina, 1535-1600) suggests that God only contingently knows the future free choices of human beings, such as a person's decision to put his faith in Christ. The contingency is whether or not the person does, actually, come to such a belief, for before such a decision is made, it does not exist in a way that can be known. This means that God does not logically know the outcome of free choices until they are actually made (though temporally, he would know the decision before it takes place). So while temporally God may know what a person's future free choice will be, he knows it only on the basis of what he forsees their future decision to be.

A prima facie read of certain Bible verses seem to challenge such a view, however. For examle, Acts 13:48, "When the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and honored the word of the Lord; and all who were appointed for eternal life believed." A natural interpretation of this verse suggests that God had first appointed these Gentiles to become believers, only after which (and because of which) they did come to believe upon hearing Paul's message. They were first appointed to believe (by God, presumably -- who else?) and only later did actually believe. "Appoint" is quite an active verb, so it appears that God has done something more with regard to these Gentiles than merely know of their future freely chosen faith.

A Molinist must, it seems to me, disagree with something in such an interpretation of Acts 13:48. And, of course, often we must correct our prima facie readings of a particular text. Other scriptures themselves may sway us, or, perhaps we realize our first view has internal inconsistencies, etc. So here's my concern about Molinism: what would possibly lead me to abandon my prima facie reading of Acts 13:48 in favor of a Molinistic solution that would, somehow, deny that God actively appointed these Gentiles to believe? It seems that Molinists are generally motivated by a philosophical contradiction they perceive between saying a given event is both determined by God and also determined by a human being. Is that concern legitimate enough to pry us loose from the natural reading here?

I don't think so. A simple affirmation that God pre-appoints certain uncoerced human choices is not necessarily a philosophical contradiction. The Bible's mention in Acts 13:48 that God appointed Gentiles to believe is "simple" in that it doesn't tell us anything about the mechanisms of agency in either the divine or human will. Admittedly, we would be guilty of a philosophical contradiction if we said that God freely determined the outcome of that event in a simultaneous and exactly similar way that free Gentile wills determined it. But no one is making that claim (that I know of). The Bible does not say how God can determine an event that is also freely chosen by a human, it just says he does, without indulging us in the details. But someone might respond, "Knowing the details wouldn't change anything, since even what it said is a contradiction." But this is only the case if God's agency operates enough like human agency that there isn't room for both to act freely to produce the same event. Granted this would be impossible if talking about two humans (I can't predetermine that my wife will eat pizza with me tonight and then claim she has an equally free choice whether to eat it or not). Isn't it quite possible, then, that God knows something we don't about divine agency that makes it different than ours? Why opt for a philophical solution like Molinism that forces us to nearly deny the face value of a text like Acts 13:48, not to mention that necessarily rests on determinations about the mechanics of divine causality that do not seem to be revealed to us? The alternative is to give the Bible the benefit of the doubt about what is possible within God's mysterious ways.


These are just some opening thoughts, mostly to myself.

Christian Philosophers and Divine Agency

My philospher friend Mark Case (Ph.D. Cornell) and I had a short discusssion the other day about the nature of free-will. Apparently, the majority of Christian philosophers, following Alvin Plantinga, tend to think that human free-will is not compatible with the kind of determinism that states that if one could know everything about the universe, then one could predict any future event. But where would this leave the likes of Jonathan Edwards and his position on free will? Edwards seemed to say that God does have such perfect knowledge, but that humans still do, in fact, have a kind of free-will in the sense that they can always choose in favor of their preferences. Is this just too shallow a sense of free-will to deserve the name, according to Plantinga, et. al.? In a somewhat related observation, my nagging sense has been than we don't know enough about the nature of divine agency to state, philosophically, that God can't determine a human decision without violating all senses of free-agency in the human chooser. Isn't it conceivable that God could act on an object (like a human will) in a way unlike ways that we would (such as coercion, brainwashing, etc.) and thereby allow that God can foreordain (in God's way) a human choice that nonetheless allows that choice to still be called "free"? Isn't it a potential err to make quick analogies between zero-sum events of agency in the world of our normal experience with what need not be zero-sum events when we're dealing with an agent like God who gets his work done God-knows-how? I need to think more about this (and my later post on Molinism goes deeper into this issue).

Phone Dedication