2024 Summer of Interviews: Craig Carter Interview (2020)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, �But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth. Our slogan tends to be always biblical, always provocative, always in that order, except usually on Wednesdays, because Wednesdays I like to have authors and theologians and to have them on the show so we can talk about issues and theological concerns from systematic theology to hermeneutics.

And I think probably our most popular shows are the Wednesday shows, and I don�t know if that�s because we like our guests so much or that means I talk less. But nonetheless, we have a person on today that I�ve been wanting to have on for quite some time, maybe been thinking about it for about two years, and now he�s graciously decided to be on the show, Dr. Craig Carter.

With his book, 2018, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition, a Baker book. And so, Dr. Craig Carter, thank you for being on No Compromise Radio.

You�re very welcome.

Nice to be with you.

So when I read the book, I thought immediately after I read the first paragraph of the preface, this is my kind of man. And so, here�s how the preface starts, �The conventional wisdom concerning biblical hermeneutics among the vast majority of evangelical biblical scholars today goes something like this and then you give a paragraph and I�ll only give the first sentence or two, �We should interpret the Bible like any other book.

The sole purpose of exegesis is to try to understand what the original author meant to communicate to the original audience in the original situation. The text has only one meaning, namely, what the original human author meant to say.

Allegorical interpretation is dangerous because it allows people to read any meaning whatsoever into the text. And then you have a few other sentences that are very provocative. And then here comes the No Compromise Radio punchline.

In this book, Dr. Carter writes, �I argue that every single component of the conventional wisdom described in the above paragraph is wrong, or at least, at the very least, highly misleading. Is that a microphone drop there?

Did you contemplate long on how to write that first little section there for that, Dr. Carter?

No, I didn�t really. That paragraph was written after the book was written mostly, and it was written in the context of teaching a class on Thursday night to a group of men in my church, about 20 men.

We did a course on hermeneutics for a year, for September to May. And we used the textbook Grasping God�s Word by Duval and Hay. It�s a very popular, well-known hermeneutics book, and that book has some real strength.

It�s very good on the practical side of teaching you how to basically do an enhanced form of inductive Bible study. But it really does emphasize this whole single human author business. And it was the experience of teaching these laymen this course in hermeneutics that really gave me the confidence to write that paragraph, and it all just kind of came out at one time.

It took 10 minutes to write that page, and then it was done, and I never revised it a little bit afterward, because it just came out of a deep place, because it�s one thing to know something as a scholar in your head, to kind of have an opinion about a view.

But then to work with laymen and help them to grasp the truth of God�s Word in an in-depth way, and to teach ideas to them and see them respond, this is what theology is supposed to do. It�s supposed to arise out of the Church, not just be an academic exercise.

So that�s the context out of which that paragraph came. I could see that what I was doing was not misleading or going off the rails, but I was sort of in the process of discovering the way the Church has always read the Bible, and discovering the deep sense of engagement with the Divine Author that can happen in Bible reading and interpretation.

I really wanted to share that. So it means that the book has a bit of an edge. It has a bit of, I hope, seriousness. We�re talking about getting to know God here, and we�re talking about the Church and reality.

We�re not just talking about an academic seminar and people playing games and defending different points of view, almost playfully. No, we�re talking about reading the Word of God and hearing God actually speak to us.

That�s probably one of the reasons why I like the book, not only for the punchy preface but also that it�s set in the context of how do we train people, laymen, and of course ladies need to understand the Bible as well, how do we train them in a local church so they can understand the Scripture?

Dr. Carter, I know the answer to this already, but could you tell our listeners, if they ask the question, interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition, what is the Great Tradition?

The Great Tradition is basically, I started out this book, I started out in 2004 to write a book on the doctrine of God, and this book became necessary as a step toward writing the book on the doctrine of God because I believe that contemporary evangelicals have moved away, well, not just evangelicals, liberals, many Roman Catholics, people all over the theological spectrum, are moving away from the biblical Orthodox view of God, and so I identified the Great Tradition as what the interpretation of the Bible by the early Orthodox Church Fathers that kind of crystallized in the 4th century with Pro-Nicene theology, culminating in Augustine, who passed on that tradition, really laid the foundation for the Middle Ages.

Then it comes to, the doctrine of God comes to its classical expression in the first 43 articles of the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, which is then presupposed by the Reformers and the post-Reformation scholastics as the true doctrine of God.

This doctrine of God underlies, underlay the evangelicals of the evangelical revivals, the Wesleys, the Whitfields, those kind of people, and it continues to be in Reformed theology, for instance, and Old Princeton theology, it continues on.

It also is found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church in the 20th century. I'm talking here primarily about the doctrine of God, the doctrine of God that emerges from Scripture and then carries through this tradition all through Church history and remains today as the foundation of the Christian Church.

Dr. Carter, I was reading the other day the book Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers.

By Christopher Hall, and he said something about a culture of interpretation and mentioned a quote by London, and he said,. And I was just thinking about this culture of interpretation that was, you know, ignoring what has come before and this rugged individualism.

Would you kind of echo the same thing that I just described?

What is that wall? Why is it so impenetrable, and what does it consist of, this rugged individualism? I think a lot of my book is actually exploring that question. What is it about modern—what do modern people assume that makes it hard for them to read the Bible?

The answer to the book to that is long and complicated, because it's not simple, but what it boils down to is certain changes in our metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality and the nature particularly of God's relationship to the world that have taken place in modern Western culture since the Enlightenment.

And for most biblical scholars and theologians, these metaphysical assumptions are not really conscious or visible. They are taken for granted and assumed. They make us read the Bible differently than people before the Enlightenment did.

And so the subtitle of the book is Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis. What is the genius of premodern exegesis? Well, the genius is that premodern readers in the great tradition—not all, of course there were deviations and heretics and everything—but in the great Orthodox tradition, premodern readers were reading the text of Scripture with the same metaphysical assumptions in the back of their mind about the relationship of God to the world as the authors of the biblical text themselves.

And that is what ruptured in the Enlightenment. That is what changed in modernity. In modernity, we read the text with metaphysical assumptions in our mind or in the back of our minds that are antithetical to and incompatible with the metaphysical assumptions of the text itself, which are expressed and described in classical Orthodoxy.

That's why we don't read the Bible the way that the fathers did. That's why, for example, we don't pay attention, as we ought to, to the divine authorial intent as an extension of the literal sense of the text.

That's why we don't see the unity of Scripture. That's why we don't see Christological truth in the Old Testament, for many reasons. Of course, moderns are all over the map, and they have different views on this, and liberals are different from conservatives, and so on.

But if you're asking the question, what makes it hard for modern people to read the Bible with the Great Tradition? I would say the answer is metaphysics.

Talking today to Dr. Craig Carter, his book, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition. I'm looking forward to his next book as well. We'll talk about that in a little bit. Dr. Carter, some of our listeners probably have the same background that I have, and I was taught to take my Bible and, with a literal grammatical hermeneutic, try to understand what the human author was saying with syntax and with words and verbs.

Then, at the very end of the process, I could use the analogy of faith for a checking process to make sure I was doing the right thing. And I would say most of the people I know, that's how they were trained to do hermeneutics.

What's right and or wrong with that kind of interpretive approach to opening your Bible and studying it?

There's nothing wrong with it as far as it goes. It just doesn't go far enough. The tradition we'll call the literal sense is close to what we mean by the intention of the human author. Not always, not exactly, but it's in the ballpark.

And the literal sense is the foundation of the meaning of the text. So the tradition kind of explored two directions. On the one hand, some people in the tradition saw a spiritual sense in the text along with the literal sense.

And that spiritual sense, often allegorical, drifted further and further away. So if you think of the elastic band holding that spiritual sense to the literal sense, it stretched further and further to the breaking point.

And the Church said, yeah, it's possible to go too far in that direction. Then, on the other hand, another group of Church fathers in Antioch focused on making the human literal sense, the human intention of the text, the total meaning.

And so they did the opposite. And the Church said, no, that doesn't go far enough. That doesn't allow us to see Christ as the fulfillment of the Old Testament. It looks like we're reading Christ into the Old Testament.

That can't be right.

So the middle approach that developed in the tradition was to talk about an extended literal sense or an expanded literal sense. You see this in Aquinas, and you also see it, I would argue, you see it working out in Calvin, who kind of comes out as the hero in my book in terms of the moderate middle voice of the tradition, which rounds the meaning in the literal sense, but sees the literal sense as including a Christological sense.

And the way that it does that is to not limit the meaning to the conscious intention of the human author, but also to recognize that the text reflects the conscious intention of the divine author. 1, 9, and 10, Peter is talking about how the prophets in the Old Testament tried to understand what God in them was saying when they made their prophecies.

He's arguing that people like Isaiah didn't even fully understand to deliver. They understood them to a certain extent, but they didn't understand them fully. And looking back in the light of Christ, we understand that Isaiah 53 is actually about Jesus atoning death on the cross.

Thank you, Dr. Carter, for that. That is very helpful. Thinking about laypeople now opening up their Bible and approaching the scriptures, and they have a problem, they can't understand a certain passage or an issue in a passage.

I think it's fair to say that many people, and I think I've done it in the past, would immediately go to their favorite celebrity and say, well, what do they think about the Bible? And of course, there are men who teach the Bible that we could ask the question, what did they say about that passage?

But what are you advocating for? Or how should a person who says, you know what, maybe the celebrity study Bible or commentary isn't the right approach? There are other people in church history that the Holy Spirit has used.

How far should we go back, church fathers, creeds and confessions? What would be another approach when you've got a problem with the scriptures to encapsulate what you're advocating?

I always encourage people to study as far as they can on their own, to start with observation of the text, to really try to observe everything about the text that is possible. When I'm teaching my men observation, interpretation, application, it's relatively easy to teach observation.

There are certain techniques you can teach people that allow them to become very adept at observing details of the text, and that can open the text up considerably. But when it comes to interpretation, the big problem is context.

And putting the text in its context is where lay people find it hard, because they don't know the Bible as a whole. So what we did after that year of hermeneutics, we then started realizing this problem.

We decided the only way to deal with this is to do a survey of the Bible. And so we did a three-year survey of the Old Testament and the intertestamental period, which ended last spring. Every Thursday night, just studying the Old Testament, book by book, section by section.

So last night, I did the second class on Matthew. Next week, we're studying a passage of Matthew. The week after that, we're starting Mark. We'll go right to the New Testament. The point is to invoke knowledge.

I just studied Matthew. And so what I'm wanting them to do is to understand the feeding of the 5 ,000. As they study it this week on their own, they're studying it, but they are also practicing putting it in context, because we just learned that Matthew consists of five blocks of teaching preceded by narrative.

We've learned that fulfillment of the Old Testament yourself.

Very wise. Thank you, Dr. Carter. Do you think some of the problem might be with modern evangelicals, and maybe it's teachers and laymen and laywomen as well, that they misunderstand sola scriptura, and they somehow think that that means it's the Bible alone, and there can be no informed teaching from any other source or tradition?

Do you think it has to do with that?

Yeah, I mean, I try to say in my—I say that, you know, the tradition, the great tradition, is not a higher authority than you.

Humility.

One thing I say to people is, you know, if you come up with an interpretation of a text that is entirely novel, it's probably wrong. Another thing that I say is that when you are confronted with texts that are hard to understand, realize that one of the things the Holy Spirit has given us is the wisdom of the past.

You're probably not the first to wrestle with that text. How have others wrestled with it? So, we need to be humble about teachers. The idea that we only need the Bible ourselves, and ourselves in order to understand it, I mean, the problem with that is that it's true in a sense.

In China, who have limited access to biblical knowledge, and who just read one book of the Bible, it is absolutely true that God the Holy Spirit can work through that book of the Bible, can teach that believer, can regenerate that person, and make that person a real Christian.

The Bible has that much power, because God works in it. So, it is true that, in a sense, all we need is the Bible and the Holy Spirit. But that gets us, that can get us to salvation, but in order to move on to sanctification and maturity in Christ, well, we're going to need teaching in parts of the world where there isn't much teaching.

But the teaching has to come into trouble, because a lot of new believers who are untaught are subject to heresy. So, I guess, basically, what I'm trying to say is that I'm trying not to fall off the ledge on either side.

The real tendency, on the part of some people, the temptation is to replace the Bible with their favorite teacher. And for other people, the temptation is to...

Dr. Carter, thanks for being on the show today. I think I'll just ask you one last question as we go. A little over time, but I think it just would be interesting to me, I guess I could ask you off the air.

Who has received the book, who likes the book the most? I mean, is it as simple as the covenant theologians tend to really like it and dispensationalists don't? Who has received it most warmly, and who has received the book, I don't know what I want to say, most caustically?

Who have you stepped on toes, and who have you really encouraged? Can you think of that answer?

Well, the first review of the book was in the Christian century, and it was negative. And since then, almost all the reviews have been positive. So what's happened is that the liberal, biblical scholars, Southern Baptists, the PCA, but there has been quite a bit of openness, I would say, on the part of younger people in the dispensational stream who are looking for help in patristics and in the tradition.

So I wouldn't say that there's been a lot of pushback from the dispensational side. I would say that the covenant theology people are, of course, yes, definitely more favorable, but I think there have been some people from Bible churches and non-denominational churches who have been very positive toward the book.

And I think it's, in some ways, the book does not fit the usual categories, because I'm not simply arguing for the Westminster view against the Dallas view. It's not that simple. I want to go way back further in Church history to Reformed scholasticism and then to Medieval scholastics, and then ultimately to the Fathers.

And so, in a sense, I'm talking about everybody's roots. And that means it has a broader appeal.

Excellent.

Thank you for that answer. Our folks can go to Amazon and pick up Interpreting Scripture with a Great Tradition, and also on Amazon, releasing April 20th, 2021, Dr. Craig A. Carter, Contemplating God with a Great Tradition, Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism.

Dr. Carter, thank you so much for taking time out of your day today to be on No Compromise.

Radio.

We appreciate you and the book, and I encourage our folks to get it.

Thank you for having me.

I appreciate being on.

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible-teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.