Month: June 2011

Scriptural Hermeneutics

/ Matt Emerson / 3 Comments

This is an excellent quote from Richard Hays on hermeneutics after exegeting 2 Cor 3:1-4:6 in Echoes of Scripture, ch. 4:

The meaning of Scripture is enacted in the Christian community, and only those who participate in the enactment can understand the text. Consequently, the transformation of the community is not the presupposition but also the result and proof of true interpretation. Where God’s spirit is at work, the community (“we all”) is being transformed into the image of Christ and liberated to see, when they read Scripture, that the old covenant prefigured precisely this transformation. (Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, 152)

The quote sums up a number of what I consider to be essential characteristics of a biblically grounded hermeneutic:

  1. Textual – A Christian reading of the Bible pays attention to the words, sentences, paragraphs and books of the Bible in detail (this is not explicit in the quote but it is from the context of the entire chapter)
  2. Pneumatological – A Christian reading of the Bible is rooted in a recognition of the Spirit’s inspiration of the text and in a reliance on the Spirit for understanding (illumination)
  3. Christotelic – A Christian reading of the Bible understands that the purpose of the Scriptures is not only to reveal Christ but to transform his church into his image through the Spirit
  4. Communal – A Christian reading of the Bible takes place in the context of the community of the faithful, the church
  5. Transformational – A Christian reading of the Bible is not only concerned with information but with transformation, namely into the image of Christ
  6. Holistic – A Christian reading of the Bible regards both the Old and New Testaments as the true, complementary, and complete revelation of God through Christ that are to be read in the above ways

Am I missing anything else?

Historical Adam 2.0

/ Matt Emerson / 6 Comments

Kevin DeYoung has asked a similar question to mine about the historical Adam. Essentially his point is that in the genealogies of 1 Chronicles there is no indication from the author that part of the record is mythological or figurative while the rest is historical. You can check it out here.

Just another side note on this issue: after my first post on this a friend questioned whether or not the biblical narrative can be more than history. His question was, in other words, whether the biblical text does more than just relate historical events. My answer was of course yes – the Scriptures are the inspired interpretation of the historical events of God and his people. But that does not make them a- or un-historical. We can recognize both the historical veracity of the biblical record and the inspired interpretation that the Scriptures provide of those events. So when I say “there is no indication from the author that part of the record is mythological or figurative while the rest is historical,” I am not in any way intending to separate the biblical authors’ ability to both relate historical events accurately and interpret history in theologically meaningful ways, but am actually trying to argue that these two things are not separable in Scripture. One can recognize the Bible’s historical accuracy and its ability (or, even stronger, its intention) to interpret history at the same time.

Making James and Paul Play Nice

/ Matt Emerson / 4 Comments

Since all Bible blogging roads lead back to Near Emmaus, and since Brian LePort seems to continually blog about things that I’m already thinking about (get out of my head Brian!) I’m going to piggyback off of another one of his posts today. Yesterday Brian posted on the question of whether or not James and Paul were involved in a dispute or rivalry. While I’m not going to engage with much of his material here, I do want to argue for some similarities between Paul and James, and namely similarities in their writings to Christian churches and their use of Scripture. Paul’s letter to the Romans and James’ epistle both exhibit a number of parallels, including the following.

First, Ryan Armstrong lists parallels between Rom 5:3-5 and James 1:2-4 (suffering produces endurance, etc.), Rom 6:23 and James 1:15-16 (the wages of sin is death), and Rom 2:13 and James 1:22 (doers of the law).[1] None of these parallels is particularly strong in the Greek; they should probably be categorized more as conceptual similarities rather than as textual connections. They do, however, show that James and Paul were at least thinking similar thoughts on different issues.

A more important and more textual parallel, though, lies between Rom 1:17 and James 2:23. Romans 1:17 is a quotation of Hab 2:4, which in turn is an allusion to Gen 15:6 where Abraham’s faith is credited to him as righteousness. As Richard Hays has shown, because Paul has left out the crucial personal possessive pronoun of Hab 2:4 (“his faith”), Rom 1:17 should be taken as showing Paul’s twofold concern for “God’s own righteousness” being shown in the gospel and for “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.“[2] Paul’s use of Hab 2:4, then, combines it’s original intention in Habakkuk of arguing for God’s covenant faithfulness while also making use of its allusion to Gen 15:6 and the need for all men to come to God through faith for justification. Gen 15:6 is also quoted by James 2:23. Thus both passages make reference to passages in the Old Testament that are intended to show how God operates in terms of salvation. Righteousness comes through faith. In other words, both of these writers use allusions ultimately to the same passage of the OT to help their readers understand what they are saying about justification.

This connection is made stronger by what comes after Romans 1 and what comes before James 2. In Rom 2:1-11, Paul argues that God has no partiality, specifically concerning ethnicity, and in James 2:1-13 God is said to have no partiality, specifically between the rich and the poor. Rom 2:6 says that each will be judged according to his works, and James 2:24 says that man is justified by works as well as faith.[3] More parallels could be shown, but the fact that these, along with the one noted by Armstrong between Rom 2:13 and James 1:22, all surround what are arguably the most important statements in each of the books – Romans 1:17 and James 2:23 – should point the reader to the fact that the two passages, and moreover the two books and thus the two corpuses, are clearly connected.

How we interpret these connections, as Richard Hays has noted in Echoes of Scripture (29-33), is of course the million dollar question. I’m inclined to say that they demonstrate that Paul and James are much closer on the issue of justification and even on their articulation of it than some scholars want to allow.

What about you?

[1] Richard Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 41.

[2] Ryan Armstrong, “Canonical Approaches to New Testament Theology: An Evangelical Evaluation of Childs and Trobisch,” Th.M. thesis., Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2007, 104. The last two verses listed are also parallel to Matthew 7:26.

[3] I take ‘justification’ here in the sense that Paul uses ‘judged’ in Romans 2:6.

NT Exegesis Bibliography

/ Matt Emerson / 2 Comments

Ivan Monroy at Trust in Jehovah has put Denver Theological Seminary’s NT Exegesis Bibliography into a convenient PDF format. If you’re interested in that discipline, check out this resource here.

A Canonical Take on Adam and Eve

/ Matt Emerson / 5 Comments

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I haven’t paid much attention to all the hoopla going on in the blogosphere about Adam and Eve and their historicity lately. Suffice it to say that this article in CT seems to have started a flurry of blogging activity concerning the historicity the “First Couple.” I’ll just go ahead and say up front that I believe in the historical veracity of the creation account of Genesis 1-2. (If you want to equate me to Sarah Palin, I suppose you can, but I doubt it would be fruitful for you to read any further.) This doesn’t seem to be the popular view in many of the blogs I’ve seen, but what I don’t want to do here is argue blog post by blog post against a plethora of others’ blog posts. I simply want to offer one piece of evidence that I think points to Adam and Eve being real human beings created by God as the beginning of the human race.That piece of evidence is the genealogical records found in Scripture.

Wherever Scripture records a genealogy that references Adam, they refer to him alongside the contemporaneous figure on which the passage focuses. This means that this issue is not only related to our understanding of Paul in Romans 5 but to the understanding of various writers throughout the corpus of Scripture. To begin, Adam’s narrative is continuous with the (many times genealogical) narrative of Genesis 1-11. This narrative in turn functions to bring the reader to Abraham, a central figure in Genesis and in the OT. There is no break in the story, no indication that the writer of Genesis made a distinction between one section as a “creation myth” and the other as the start of “real history.” Genesis 5:1-5 is especially noteworthy here, as the same man who was created by God in the Garden as the first man is said to have born children, one of whom is a vital part of Genesis’ genealogies, lived to a certain age, and died. This certainly doesn’t sound like an a-historical proto-man myth to me.

1 Chronicles 1-2, in which the author is concerned to show the genealogical record of King David, begins with Adam as well. He is included with other figures from Israelite history who the author certainly would not have seen as a-historical or simply a figurative tribal head.

Finally, there is Luke 3, the genealogy of Jesus. The same thing said of 1 Chronicles 1-2 can be said here. Luke doesn’t make a distinction between the historical and “figurative” (or other such categories) of people referenced in Jesus’ ancestral record.

Along with these references, there are Hosea 6:7; Rom 5:12, 14; 1 Cor 15:22, 45; 1 Tim 2:13-14; and Jude 1:14. All of these appear to regard Adam as a historical figure, and as the progenitor of the entire human race.

Now, I realize I haven’t dealt with the scientific claims that have spurred these articles and blog posts, and namely the claim that the human race began from at least 10,000 people instead of just 2. But that’s not the point of the post. I will say this, though, in conclusion; for all of those who are calling for Christians, and especially us Palin-supporting knuckle dragging Neanderthal inerrantists, to get with the times and trust science, my brief rejoinder is that for as many things that science has given us, it is neither a fool-proof epistemic source of knowledge nor even a neutral, presupposition-less epistemology. It, like any other mode of knowledge, is prone to error, subject to our own whims and biases, and should not be taken as the only source of information about our past, present or future.

ETS Paper Proposal Accepted

/ Matt Emerson / 9 Comments

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I just received word that I will be presenting my paper, “Christ and the New Creation: The Shape of the Fourfold Gospel Corpus and Acts,” at the 2011 meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in San Francisco in November. I’m excited for two reasons:

  1. I’ve never been to San Francisco but have always wanted to visit.
  2. This paper is an abridged chapter of my dissertation, and I’ll be very interested to hear the feedback on the content from the unlucky souls who decide to attend.

Where in the NT are Joseph and Joshua?

/ Matt Emerson / 11 Comments

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A few weeks ago at Near Emmaus, Brian LePort asked an intriguing question: Why didn’t the Apostle Paul cite the Book of Jonah? The question fueled some conversation but I’m not sure there was ever a definitive answer. Although I didn’t weigh in on the discussion, I’ve been turning the question over in my mind for the last two or three weeks, not so much in relation to why Paul doesn’t cite Jonah but more broadly on why the NT doesn’t use a number of books as sources or figures as types. Jonah is at least cited and used in the Gospels, if not by Paul. Other rich OT imagery isn’t even mentioned by the NT.

For instance, Joseph and Joshua, two figures replete with Second Adam and New Moses imagery, are never cited, mentioned, or alluded to in the NT as types of Christ. They are referenced in Heb 11:21-22 and 4:8 respectively, but as moral examples and not as figures who point to or tell us anything about Christ (thanks to David Stark for clarifying my language here). These men give, at least in my opinion, a strong typological picture of Christ. Of course, some scholars would say that to recognize anything as a type in the OT that is not recognized as such in the NT is illegitimate. But, as G. P. Hupenberger points out in his essay “Introductory Notes in Typology” in G.K. Beale’s The Right Doctrine from the Wrong Texts?,

“Perhaps as a safeguard against interpretive excess, some scholars have suggested that ‘types’ should be limited to those examples which are explicitly identified as such within the New Testament. … While attractive for its restraint, this approach would fail to recognize several…examples for which there is impressive literary evidence of deliberate parallelism” (339).

The literary parallels between Adam and Joseph are particularly striking. Here are several:

  • He is dependent upon God for wisdom and power (Gen 41:16)
  • He discerns between good and evil (41:19)

    1. The word for “thin” is the same word used for “evil” in Hebrew
    2. V. 22 – “good” corn
    3. These should remind us of Gen. 2 and 3 and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil
    4. Joseph can discern between them, unlike Adam
  • He is full of the Spirit of God (41:38)
  • He has dominion and authority over the land under the direction of the Pharaoh (41:40, 44)
  • He is given the land (41:41, 43)
  • He is clothed in the image of the Pharaoh (41:42)
  • He is given a bride by the Pharaoh (41:45)
  • He is fruitful and multiplies (41: 50)
  • Ephraim means “root of fruitfulness
  • He is able to provide for those in need (41:53-56)
  • The nations come to Joseph (41:57)

There are also of course the parallels between Joseph’s relationship to his brothers in Gen 37 and Christ’s relationship with Israel in the Gospels, but these are not directly related to Joseph as a New Adam.

We could say the same thing about Joshua and his connection to Moses. And since the New Adam and New Moses images are used in the NT (or at least in parts of it) to explain who Christ is and what he has done, the question can be asked as to why Joshua and Joseph are never used in those explanations. I wonder particularly about Matthew’s use of the New Moses theme and Paul’s contrast of Adam and Christ in Romans 1-8.

For me, though, there is a rather simple explanation to this question. Other than the easy answer of the Spirit’s inspiration of the biblical authors (and I’m not saying we should ignore that answer, just that we need to add to it), we have the functional answer of the fact that the NT authors were writing occasional books and letters to a specific group of individuals within a certain time frame. I propose that they certainly could have included this material in their books, and that it would have fit nicely in certain places. But they didn’t, and for the above two reasons – the Holy Spirit didn’t inspire them to do so and their own theological reflection was constrained by the practical factors of time, occasion, and purpose.

For those of us who want to reflect on the OT in the 21st century, the point, then, is that the NT should not be considered by us as the end of Christian reflection on it. It is of course the final apostolic and Spirit-inspired reflection (i.e. Scriptural) reflection on it, but in my mind the NT authors never intended for their books and letters to be the end of Christian engagement with the OT. What they have given us, beyond the inspired interpretation of the events of Jesus and the early church and their relation to the OT, is a model for Christian theological reflection on the Hebrew Bible. This is what the Church Fathers and Medieval theologians set about to do – to continue the Christian reading of the OT that had been modeled for them by the NT authors – and is what we can and should be about doing in our reading of the OT today.

One final comment: I’m not writing this to critique Brian’s question – his was slightly different than mine. I was using his post more as a starting point than as a focal point.

(NOTE: I owe the Adam/Joseph parallels to my PhD mentor, Dr. David Hogg. He may have found them elsewhere, but the ones I noted are from a course with him.)

Ephesians 4 and the SBC

/ Matt Emerson / 6 Comments

Yesterday in Sunday school I walked with my class through Ephesians 4, which includes the following from Paul:

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit – just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call – one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is over all and through all and in all (Eph 4:1-6).

In our study of Ephesians we’ve talked about Paul’s emphasis on the unity of the body and specifically about the racial unity of the church. Paul is keen on showing how Gentiles have been grafted into the people of God and urges his readers to live as “one new man” in Christ (2:15). In this section we talked a bit about racial unity, but we also talked about what it means to be unified around God (one Spirit…one Lord…one God and Father of us all) and the gospel (one body…one hope…one faith, one baptism). Even though I didn’t use the language of “theological triage,” I think it’s a helpful way to think about cooperation among Christians and we talked about how a) all Christians around the globe are part of Christ’s one body but that b) denominations exist because we understand certain things differently, especially baptism and church polity, and that c) local congregations and even denominations should not let “tertiary” doctrines or practices divide us.

Therefore it was all the more disturbing, after having studied this passage, to learn of some different events in the last two weeks in churches around the SBC.

First, a friend of mine, who is not white, is being forced out of his church because of his skin color. Obviously, this is in direct contradiction to Paul’s point in Ephesians. This is actually the most disturbing one for me, but I don’t know many of the details and don’t want to share them anyway for his privacy’s sake so I’ll just leave it at that.

Second, another friend, one of my best friends, is being forced out of his church because of his theological stance on a certain issue (I’m sure it won’t take long for you to figure out what that stance is…but I’ll just leave it at that for now). This stance has never in the history of the Church been considered heretical or heterodox, and has strong roots in the history of the SBC. The situation is all the more disturbing because of how it has happened. Although I can’t share all the details, the relevant points are these:

  • My friend never taught, preached on, or publicly or privately alluded to or mentioned his convictions on this issue;
  • One church leader guessed at my friend’s convictions after a teaching series in which my friend used a prominent, non-SBC pastor’s book as a guide (the book had nothing to do with the issue at hand);
  • The church leader had read pejorative articles about this famous pastor in Baptist newspapers, and especially about this pastor’s particular beliefs on this issue;
  • This one leader forced the conflict after a long time of discussion on the issue with my friend. The church leadership decided that it just isn’t what the church believed, even though by their own admission they had never studied it.

Again, my friend was not forced out because he taught something contrary to Scripture, or to Baptist distinctives, or even because he taught anything at all on the issue. He was forced out for merely holding a particular theological stance on one particular issue, a theological stance that is well-grounded in biblical theology and the SBC’s history.

Third, an SBC pastor recently posted a letter on his church website in which he calls for designated giving around SBTS and SEBTS because of their “Calvinistic agenda.” First, I find it humorous that anyone would accuse SEBTS of having a Calvinistic agenda (I can’t speak for SBTS since I’ve never been there, but I seriously doubt their goal is to “make an ‘army’ of Calvinists,” which is what the pastor argues in the article). Second, here we have again dividing lines being drawn where they ought not to be drawn. Perhaps even more disturbing is another article by the same pastor, which argues against multiculturalism in the US. Again, dividing lines are being drawn in places where they shouldn’t be according to Scripture.

I’m writing this as a call to my SBC brothers and sisters: fight for unity. We are called to be unified as a body, and as a denomination when we divide over race and tertiary doctrinal issues, we are not testifying to Christ. We are testifying to our own sinful selfishness and divisiveness. Particularly, let’s fight for unity in two ways:

  • Fight for racial unity. We are clearly not past racism in some of our churches, and that is beyond abhorrent.
  • Fight for doctrinal unity, not on everything but especially on the “main” things, i.e. God and the gospel. Fight for doctrinal unity on Baptist distinctives (i.e. believer’s baptism, congregational polity, etc.). But don’t divide over tertiary issues. As has been stated numerous times by SBC leaders who are calling for unity, the BF&M 2000 is a big enough tent under which many diverse groups of Southern Baptists can unite for the sake of the gospel being proclaimed in all nations.
  • Obviously we can fight for this by proactively promoting and teaching the unity of the body to our people. But we can also fight for it through loving confrontation of those who are obviously not for unity but division (cf. Titus 3:9-11).

Thanks Dr. Black!

/ Matt Emerson / Leave a comment

Thanks to Dr. Dave Black for his shout out this morning:

6:45 AM Please join me in welcoming Matt Emerson, one of my seminary colleagues, to the blogosphere. His blog is called Intertextual Interpretation. You won’t believe his first post.

Although I’m not really sure how to take that last sentence! 🙂

Dr. Black was my Greek teacher in seminary, and in addition to being a brilliant Greek scholar and teacher, he’s a walking example of Christian humility and brotherly love.

It’s in There Somewhere

/ Matt Emerson / 2 Comments

This CNN article has been posted and re-posted frequently yesterday and today, so I thought I might as well, too.

It details how many Americans quote popular phrases as if they’re found in Scripture when they’re actually not there at all.

I’m actually quite fond of one of them – one of my granddad’s favorite sayings was “This too shall pass.” Of course, another one was “He who never tooteth his own horn shall not have his horn tooteth”…

The most damaging pseudo-biblical phrase in the article is, in my opinion, “God helps those who help themselves.” This is a popular one in American culture because of our pervading capitalistic self-help ethos, but it is absolutely contrary to theology and anthropology. The sad part is that it’s quoted as “gospel” not only by those outside the church but inside as well.

I tried to think of a few phrases that the article does not mention, but none came to mind. Can you think of any others that the article left out?