June 13, 2018 Show with Dr. Craig A. Carter on “Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition”

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June 13, 2018: Dr. CRAIG A. CARTER, Professor of Theology at Tyndale University College in Toronto, Ontario & Theologian-in-Residence at Westney Heights Baptist Church in Ajax, Ontario, who will address: “INTERPRETING SCRIPTURE with the GREAT TRADITION”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown
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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,
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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
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Proverbs 27, verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.
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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
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Now here's our host, Chris Arnson. Good afternoon,
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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.
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This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday On this 13th day of June 2018,
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I am delighted to have back as a returning guest today on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr.
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Craig A. Carter, who is professor of theology at Tyndale University College in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and theologian in residence at the
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Westney Heights Baptist Church in Ajax, Ontario. Today we are going to be addressing his book, which came highly recommended, very highly recommended by Dr.
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Richard Barcelos, who is on the faculty over at the IRBS Theological Seminary, which is launching its first semester this
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September. And it is my honor and privilege to welcome you to discuss Interpreting Scripture with the
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Great Tradition, Dr. Craig A. Carter. Well, hi, great to be with you,
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Chris. Yes, I don't know if you were aware that Dr. Richard Barcelos highly recommended your book.
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In fact, he is the one that highly urged me, strongly urged me to interview you on the subject of this book of yours.
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But he also sends his greetings to you. Well, yes, thank you. Richard is a new friend of mine.
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We hadn't known each other well, but he contacted me about this book, and we have been having some good theological conversations.
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Great. Well, I'm going to give our listeners our email address. It's chrisarnsen at gmail .com,
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C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the
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U .S .A., and please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.
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That's chrisarnsen at gmail .com. And before we go into our discussion at hand,
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Dr. Carter, once again, if you could let our listeners know something about Tyndale University College, where you serve as professor of theology, and also the
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West Knee Heights Baptist Church in Ajax, Ontario. Yes, well,
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Tyndale is an interdenominational seminary. It's one of the two largest in Canada.
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It's very multicultural, very many denominations from many different peoples.
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I have people speaking a first language other than English, constituting a strong minority of my class, maybe 40%, and from all different denominations and backgrounds.
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So Tyndale's a very wide latitude of evangelicalism.
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It's similar to, I suppose, Fuller in the States, and it's an old institution.
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It was started, I was the third Bible college founded after Moody and Nyack in New York, and has become a
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Christian university, college, and a seminary, and there are probably about 1 ,300 students involved taking courses at any given time.
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The church I'm a part of is West Knee Heights Baptist. It's a church that was founded in 1990.
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Its senior founding pastor is still on staff. He's 87, and he's still active as a minister.
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The one who succeeded him is also still on staff, although retired, and our third pastor is our current senior pastor.
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So we have about four full -time, three part -time congregations of about 500.
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My role is teaching, preaching, consulting to the deacon's board, buying books at the church library, answering questions.
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And I teach a men's Old Testament survey class, and I do various workshops and so on.
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It's a wonderful church, a very Bible -oriented, Bible -studying church. Most of our adult membership would own an
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ESV study Bible and would be involved in some kind of small group Bible study or something throughout the week, probably about ten different Bible studies running in a given week, men's, women's, mixed, whole thing.
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So it's a wonderful church. I've been there since 2004, and I'm just thrilled to be a part of that congregation.
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Well, praise God, and we'll be giving contact information later on in the program, not only for the university and seminary, but for the church as well.
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There's an interesting title that you have for this book, obviously, Interpreting Scripture with the
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Great Tradition. What is the Great Tradition? Yes, the
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Great Tradition is basically mainstream Christianity. It is rooted in the, it's the theological tradition that's rooted in the
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Old and New Testament. It is brought to the fore by the Church Fathers, Athanasius, the
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Cappadocians, Augustine, carried on by Aquinas and the Reformers, and post -Reformation
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Scholasticism, and then all the conservative forms of Christianity, whether Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or Protestant, down to the present.
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The Great Tradition is a term that I actually first encountered being used by Thomas Oden, and he emphasized that term and the whole idea of the tradition, the
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Orthodox tradition. It's centered on the creeds, the creeds of the undivided
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Church of the first five centuries, primarily the Mycenaean Creed, the Chalcedonian definition, the
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Apostles' Creed, and it's presupposed by the Reformers, and it is, in my understanding of evangelicalism, evangelicalism is a renewal movement within Protestantism designed to breathe new life into Protestantism through revival, but it's not an attempt to change theology.
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So it's basically rooted in the theology of Luther and Calvin, and so Luther and Calvin revised the
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Great Tradition, and they reformed it in the areas of soteriology and the
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Church, and how grace comes to the believer, but they didn't really do anything to change the basic Christological and Trinitarian orthodoxy that has undergirded the
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Church from the beginning to now, and that's basically what I'm referring to in the Great Tradition.
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Well, just to let you know, I happened to have the privilege of interviewing
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Dr. Thomas Oden before he went home to be with the Lord. I interviewed him on July 30th in 2015 on his, what a biography,
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A Change of Heart, a personal and theological memoir, and he was quite a remarkable man.
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At one time, highly beloved amongst liberals, which he was one, and then by God's mercy and grace he was transformed by discovering the true
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Christ and the true Gospel of the Scriptures. Yes, and Thomas Oden pointed out something very, very important that we should all be aware of.
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He said that as we go deeper in each tradition, whether it's
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Methodist or Presbyterian or Baptist or Roman Catholic or Anglican, Lutheran, whatever tradition, if we go deep into the roots of our own tradition, that's where we discover commonalities with other believers.
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And so this means that true ecumenism, or true interdenominational cooperation, true
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Christian unity, needs to be based on the foundations of the faith, the Scriptures and the creeds, not on trying to reconcile all of the other differences and go for some lowest common denominator that offends nobody.
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His understanding of ecumenism was that it should be a positive enterprise that lifts up and exalts that which we have in common, like the divinity of Christ and the doctrine of the
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Trinity, not something that is focused on just trying to be politically inoffensive to everyone.
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I think that's a very important word, and I think you'll be remembered for that. Now, obviously, judging from the title of your book, you believe that much of Christendom is involved in improper exegesis.
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They have a flawed, very flawed hermeneutic. Can you give us some ways and reasons why you think that there needs to be an alternative approach to exegesis and hermeneutics?
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Okay, that's a huge question. And we have two hours. The first half of the book really deals with it, so I'll try to make a start.
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In chapter one, this is how I begin. When I was a young pastor, fresh out of seminary,
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I was pastoring two country churches in Prince Edward Island, Canada, and they always had a
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Good Friday service, a combined Good Friday service. I was going to preach on Isaiah 53, and I knew that Isaiah 53 was about the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.
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But I couldn't figure out for the life of me how I could possibly preach that message and interpret
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Isaiah 53 that way without going against what I had learned in seminary in terms of hermeneutics.
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And because I was taught in seminary that we are to interpret the Bible like any other book, that we're to look for the historical meaning, and by that we mean what the original author meant to say to the original audience in the original situation, and that we are to look for that one single historical meaning, and that's what the text really means.
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But if that's what the text really means, then as I looked at the liberal interpretations of Isaiah 53, so if you go to any liberal commentary like Anchor, ICC, Word, Old Testament Library, you name it, any of these major standard academic critical commentaries, they will tell you that Isaiah 53 is referring to maybe the prophet
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Deutero, Isaiah himself, maybe it's referring to Moses or to Jeremiah, or maybe it's referring to Israel as a corporate entity or a remnant within Israel, but they always put the situation well -grounded in the exilic context that they think that Isaiah 53 is coming from, but it's not about Jesus.
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It's about anything but Jesus. And so then, does that mean that the early Church and the later
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Church, the whole Church, in my book I show that from Irenaeus to John R. W.
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Stott, there is a consistent interpretation of Isaiah 53 as referring to Jesus, and that is grounded in the
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New Testament itself, that all the major New Testament writers quote 8 out of the 12 verses of Isaiah 53 and apply them to Jesus.
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And Stott argues that the apostles must have got this from Jesus himself. He must have been the one to interpret himself in terms of Isaiah 53.
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But if that's true, does that mean the New Testament is wrong? Like, we seem to have a problem between standard academic hermeneutical theory on the one side and the way the
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Church preaches the Old Testament Christological content on the other side, and that's what this book is about.
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I'm saying that there are two traditions that diverge at the point of the Enlightenment, and one tradition moves toward an understanding of the
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Bible in naturalistic terms. It's on a materialistic metaphysics.
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It tries to interpret the Bible as a human writing. And the other tradition, and that dominates the
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Academy, and the other tradition is the pulpit tradition, if you will. It's the tradition of the
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Christian Church, and it dominates the preaching of the Church. And so what we've got right now is an unresolved set of problems between academic theory, even in its conservative forms, let alone its liberal forms, and the preaching of the
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Church. Is the Old Testament really about Jesus Christ? Did the apostles just read
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Jesus in? Are we just reading him in? When we say David is a type of Christ or Moses is a type of Christ, is that just reading
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Jesus into the Old Testament? And I think that if it's just reading him in, well, then the
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Jews are perfectly within their rights to accuse us of usurping their scriptures and doing something inappropriate.
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But this is the debate that Paul was having with the Jews in the synagogue, as the book of Acts describes him going from city to city.
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In every synagogue, every first Sabbath day in every city, you'd go into the synagogue and reason with the
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Jews from the scriptures that Jesus was the Messiah. And so some Jews believed
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Jesus was the Messiah and some believed he was not. And the basis of which way they went depended on whether they saw the
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Old Testament as speaking of Christ or whether they didn't. Paul said Christ is in the
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Old Testament. Other Jews said, no, he's not. And on that basis, they divide it. So this is the most fundamental theological issue that one can imagine.
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This is the foundation of the Church. Either the Old Testament is a prophecy of Christ or it is not. So that's the problem
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I'm dealing with. We have a listener in Bangor, Maine, John, who says,
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I have heard that in the Orthodox Jewish synagogues, they will not read aloud
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Isaiah 53. Is this true or is it just a rumor spread amongst we who are
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Christians? I do not know personally. I suspect that it's one of those rumors that a story that is spread is sort of apocryphal.
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I mean, I have heard, I have friends who do Jewish evangelism in Jews for Jesus. And they've talked about reading
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Isaiah 53 to an ordinary Jewish person on the street in Israel.
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And that person being convinced that what they're reading is from the New Testament.
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Because it sounds so much like Christ. Right. That actually lends credence to what
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I just, where a listener was saying. Well, that's right. So I don't know what the rules are in the Orthodox seminary or what the practices are, but it's one of those stories that could be true because it has plausibility.
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There are certainly a lot of Jewish people who, upon hearing Isaiah 53, they just can't believe that that is in the
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Old Testament and that that is there. And it's because Isaiah 53 powerfully testifies to Jesus Christ.
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There's no doubt about it. It's an objective reality. And so any hermeneutical approach that cannot see that must have a problem somewhere.
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Well, John in Bangor, Maine, please give us your full mailing address there in Bangor, Maine, because you have won a free copy of Interpreting Scripture with a
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Great Tradition, compliments of our friends at Baker Books, specifically Baker Academic.
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And be a little patient in waiting for the book because the books have not yet arrived.
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They are on their way, though we have been reassured by the good folks at Baker. So thank you very much for contributing your great question today.
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And those will be shipped out to, or should I say that book will be shipped out to you by our friends at cvbbs .com,
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Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, who ships out. All of our winners in the Iron Trip and Zion Radio audience, the
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Bibles and books and DVDs and CDs and other things they win by submitting questions like you just did.
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Thank you very much for your contribution today. Let's see here.
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We have a first time questioner, Denny in Farmington, Minnesota.
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Hello, Dr. Craig Carter. I have a rather short question, though it probably has a long answer and implications.
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What do you think about the relation between presuppositionalism or covenantal apologetics and Thomism or the classical tradition?
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I myself am of a Vantillian tradition and have noticed how many seemed to have scorned it in favor of Thomism.
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However, from my view, I don't think they are necessarily enemies. If I were to describe myself more specifically,
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I would be a Vantillian who leans and uses the classical tradition.
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I feel that proper presuppositionalism may help to correct certain aspects of the classical tradition, but ultimately are not enemies.
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Maybe I am ignorant of certain conflicts that exist, and if so, it would be good and interesting to see what they are.
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Thanks, Denny in Farmington, Minnesota. Well, I would recommend that the questioner is in a very similar place to where I am.
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It's not that I—I think that Vantill pointed out something very important when he talked about the importance that presuppositions play in our intellectual theorizing and thinking.
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And so I'm not really interested in bashing
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Vantill. I do stand more in the classical tradition, and I find that—but
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I want to say two things. I think, first, that Thomism—many people use the word
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Thomism and they think they know what they're talking about, and many times what they are trying to convey is more assumed than explained.
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And so one person says Thomism, another person hears Thomism, they think they're hearing something, and it's all very vague, but it's never explicitly clarified what exactly
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Thomism is. It's somehow connected with the 13th century Roman Catholic scholar
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Thomas Aquinas, isn't it? Well, of course, but the issue is, is
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Thomas some sort of an innovator who is trying to bring the pagan
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Aristotle into Christianity and replace the previous Christian tradition with Aristotelian ideas?
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Or is Thomas somebody who is summing up and bringing to fruition the classic
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Nicene faith? And I work on the doctrine of God, I'm writing a book on the doctrine of God right now, and I think the questions 1 to 43 of the
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Summa Theologica are very much a locus classicus of the
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Christian doctrine of God. And one of the things that I have learned—and there's a Thomistic resource movement going on, people are rereading
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Thomas, and especially getting into his biblical commentaries, which have been not studied very well or understood very well up to this point.
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And Thomas, instead of being presented as a philosopher and an Aristotelian, he's more of an
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Augustinian, and he is certainly using
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Aristotle where Aristotle is helpful, but he is not really, I don't think, altering his
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Augustinian or his Nicene convictions. But rather, he's a faithful Church Father who continues the doctrine of God that we see in the
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Bible. For example, I was studying the Cappadocians, and then after reading the
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Cappadocians, and I then read the section in the
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Summa Theologica on analogy, and while the Cappadocians didn't use the exact terminology in the way
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Thomas did, Thomas is more precise about it and more clear about it, but he was essentially saying the same thing.
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And that was revelatory to me. That made me stop and say, you know,
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Thomas is much more deeply rooted in the tradition than I was given to believe.
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Part of the problem with Thomas is a lot of people, the only contact they have with his thoughts will be in a philosophy course, either an introductory course or a philosophy of religion course, and there will be some excerpts from his
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Summa Theologica, the more philosophical excerpts, about the existence of God. And that's all that they will know about Thomas.
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I did an honored BA in philosophy, and that's basically what I came away knowing about Thomas. I came away knowing that he had some arguments for the existence of God, and then
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I learned about Hume and Kant's critique of them, and that was it. But I did not see Thomas as deeply rooted in the tradition,
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I was not taught that Thomas was primarily... Did you know his day job was commenting on Scripture? That was what he lectured on most of the time, and he wrote many commentaries on John, on Hebrews, on Isaiah, on many books of the
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Bible, and so this new understanding of Thomas, and I would point to scholars like Matthew Lebring, he would be an outstanding example of somebody who can get you straightened out on Thomas.
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Jill Emery, the French scholar, people like that. So Thomas is more representative of the tradition, and then secondly,
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Van Til and Thomas as not necessarily enemies. I would just point to one book that's coming out that I think holds great promise for clarifying this question.
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It's by J .V. Fesco, and it's called Reforming Apologetics, Retrieving the
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Classic Reformed Approach to Defending the Faith. And he's going to be my guest discussing that in about two weeks or so.
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Really? Well, I'm really looking forward to reading that book, because I think that he is very up on these questions, and he will have a lot of good things to say about it.
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Great. Thank you, Denny, in Farmington, Minnesota. And not only have you won a free copy of Dr.
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Carter's book that we are addressing right now, Interpreting Scripture with a
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Great Tradition, you have also won a free New American Standard Bible since you are a first -time questioner.
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Please make sure we have your full mailing address there in Farmington, Minnesota, and I hope that you keep sending in questions for guests in the future on Iron Sherpa's Iron Radio.
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Thank you very much. Before I move on from Thomism, I have had guests on this program who are
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Reformed, and some of them are very hostile against Thomism, and they say that it is destroying the fabric of Reformed theology.
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Some of them had a great deal of disappointment with the late
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Dr. R .C. Sproul over his connection with it. Are they misunderstanding this?
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Is it really that much of a threat to a Reformed understanding of Scripture?
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What is the reason they get so angry, other than the fact that Thomas Aquinas was clearly a
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Catholic scholar from the 13th century, but obviously there is a mixture of those who are among the
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Church Fathers in relationship to how Roman they were. Some were obviously teaching before the
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Catholic Church was truly Roman, but if you could explain to me, because I lack a lot of knowledge on this subject as well.
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Well, there was no Roman Catholic Church prior to the Reformation. It really crystallized as a result of the
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Reformation. So you're saying that Trent was really what gave birth to the Roman Catholic Church?
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Yeah, I mean, when we talk about Trent, then we're talking about something very specific and that's very problematic from a
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Protestant Reformed perspective. But when we're talking about the 13th century, it's a different situation.
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Nobody in the 13th century has yet rejected the Reformation. Now, I would say that as you read
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Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica, I tell my students that the best stuff is at the beginning, and it gets worse as it goes on.
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And by the end, when you come to Mary and the Sacraments and the Mass, we have a lot of disagreements with Thomas.
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But in the Trinitarian and Christological Orthodoxy, that's where we have the common faith.
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And there's a lot of confusion here, and I think part of the confusion originates from Ben Chull's unrelenting hostility toward Thomas.
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And he had a very overly schematic way of understanding
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Thomas as putting together faith and reason in such a way that the reason that was being combined with faith was essentially unregenerate reason.
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And if you understand Thomism in that way, it sounds really bad, and it is bad, would be bad.
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But that's not really what the historical Thomas was about. And I think that what's interesting here, and what we need to ask ourselves, is why is it that if you go back to the 16th and 17th century
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Reformed tradition, if you look at Francis Turretin, he's quoting Thomas Aquinas all the time.
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If you look at John Owen, he's a Reformed Thomist. He's talking about Thomas Aquinas all the time.
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My mentor, the late John Webster, was moving towards Thomas more and more at the end of his life, despite the
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Barthian discomfort with Thomas as John was moving away from that aspect of Barthian thought.
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Why is it that the early Reformed tradition was so comfortable with Thomas? And when people say, well,
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Calvin was against the scholastics, Richard Muller, the great Church historian at Calvin Seminary, he has shown very convincingly that John Calvin had somebody in mind when he talked about the scholastics in the
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Institutes. And he had in mind specifically the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris.
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And he had in mind the nominalist scholasticism of the 15th century that had arisen after Thomas Aquinas and was really in tension with Thomas Aquinas on very many key points.
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So when John Calvin is talking about the scholastics, he's not talking about Thomas Aquinas per se.
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He's talking about a different kind of scholasticism that owes more to people like William of Ockham than it does to people like Thomas Aquinas.
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And so that's why Turretin and Owens and others in the 17th century did not reject
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Thomas Aquinas, but found much abuse in Thomas Aquinas and found much of value there.
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So I think that the modern Vantillian movement in, you know,
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I mean, I guess I just, I find J. Gresham Machen to be far more helpful in analyzing liberalism, because this is what this is.
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It's all about what is, how do we understand liberal theology? How do we understand why it arose and how it arose and what's bad about it?
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And Vantill has a set of answers for that. I like Machen's answers better. In Machen's book,
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What is Christianity?, he's talking, he says basically that Protestant liberalism is a separate religion.
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And he even says that the Roman Catholic Church, understood as a conservative
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Roman Catholic Church, is, he understands that to have much more in common with the
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Reformed faith than the Reformed faith has with liberal Protestantism. And that's because of this bedrock basis of Trinitarian Christological orthodoxy that we share, which we don't share with the liberals.
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So I guess I just have a different way of conceiving of what is liberal theology and what went wrong from the
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Vantillians in terms of analyzing what it is that needs to be rejected. In my understanding, what needs to be rejected is not so much the
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Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy of Thomas Aquinas, but rather what needs to be rejected is primarily the unreformed
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Roman tradition of the 17th and 18th century, and then the liberal
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Protestant tradition. By the way, if anybody listening wants to get a hold of the classic work by J.
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Gresham Machen, founder of the orthodox Presbyterian denomination during the fundamentalist modernist controversy, you can get
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Christianity and Liberalism from CVBBS .com. CVBBS .com,
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who sponsored the Iron Sharpens Iron radio program. And make sure that you tell Todd and Patty Jennings that you heard about that book from Chris Ornsen on Iron Sharpens Iron radio.
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We're going to... That's what I meant to mention, Chris. You're right. Yes. And I want to read to you, before we go to our first break, a question that I actually forwarded to you,
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Dr. Carter, so you could look it over during the break. But I'll read it now, and you can answer it later.
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Joey in Clifton, New Jersey says, Dear Dr. Carter, listening to your comments, you seem to contrast the great tradition with modern liberal forms of interpretation that would deny the supernatural aspect of scripture.
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But you also seem to contrast it with more mainstream hermeneutics that miss the
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Christocentric nature of the Old Testament. So I'm wondering, are you contrasting the great tradition with liberalism or with other orthodox forms of interpretation?
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Can you please clarify this? That's Joey in Clifton, New Jersey, and we'll have you answer that when we return from the break.
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If anybody else would like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisornsen at gmail .com. chrisornsen at gmail .com.
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Give us your first name, city and state and country of residence if you live outside the USA. And please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.
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Don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr. Craig A. Carter after these messages from our sponsors.
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Our time will be lively, useful, and I assure you, never dull. Join us this Saturday at 12 noon eastern time for a visit to the pastor's study, because everyone needs a pastor.
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1. Charles Haddon Spurgeon once said,
36:39
Give yourself unto reading. The man who never reads will never be read. He who never quotes will never be quoted.
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He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains proves he has no brains of his own.
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You need to read. Solid Ground Christian Books is a publisher and book distributor who takes these words of the
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Prince of Preachers to heart. The mission of Solid Ground Christian Books is to bring back treasures of the past to minister to Christians in the present and future, and to publish new titles that address burning issues in the church and the world.
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Since its beginning in 2001, Solid Ground has been committed to publish God -centered,
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Christ -exalting books for all ages. We invite you to go treasure hunting at solid -ground -books .com.
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That's solid -ground -books .com and see what priceless literary gems from the past or present you can unearth from Solid Ground.
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Solid Ground Christian Books is honored to be a weekly sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. And don't forget
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Why not purchase a gift that the Lord will use, God willing, to lead someone to eternal life, like a book from Solid Ground Christian Books?
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Without his advertising dollars, we would likely not remain on the air. Thank you so much.
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Jennifer and the folks at Blind Dog Coffee sent me a fantastic assortment of coffee, a big box of different coffees.
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They don't even know that I'm doing this right now. This was not sent to me so that I would give them free advertising.
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I just am so in love with this coffee that I want to plug it, and I also want to return the kindness that they have demonstrated towards me by sending me this box of coffee, which
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BlindDogCoffee .com. And thank you very much once again, Jennifer in Gardnerville, Nevada, for your kindness and keep sending in questions for our guests on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.
39:32
And we are back now with our guest today, Dr. Craig A. Carter, professor of theology at Tyndale University College, and we are discussing his book,
39:42
Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition. Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,
39:48
chrisarnson at gmail .com. And please give us your first name, your city and state, and country of residence if you live outside of the
39:55
USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.
40:02
And we had just a moment ago a question that I read to you and also emailed to you,
40:11
Dr. Carter, and I will read it again for our listeners who may have just tuned in.
40:17
This is a question from Joey in Clifton, New Jersey. And Joey says, let's see here,
40:26
I've got to enlarge the font again because I accidentally exited out of Joey's question.
40:33
Dear Dr. Carter, listening to your comments, you seem to contrast the Great Tradition with modern liberal forms of interpretation that would deny the supernatural aspect of Scripture.
40:44
But you also seem to contrast it with more mainstream hermeneutics that miss the Christocentric nature of the
40:50
Old Testament. So I'm wondering, are you contrasting the Great Tradition with liberalism or with other orthodox forms of interpretation?
40:57
Can you please clarify? Well, the short answer to the question is that I am contrasting the
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Great Tradition with both liberalism and forms of interpretation that miss the
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Christocentric nature of the Old Testament. But in order to clarify what
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I see is going on here, let me just try to explain. When, in the
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Enlightenment, a theory of hermeneutics began to be developed for interpreting the
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Scripture, and that theory sees the Scripture as a human book, and it sees interpretation as an intellectual, historical exercise.
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This tradition has become dominant among non -Christians, and it has become very strong in liberal
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Protestantism, and it has even begun now to affect the Roman Catholic interpretation as well.
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And it is also becoming influential within evangelical seminaries and schools of theology.
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So sometimes evangelicals are looking at theories of hermeneutics in which they do two things.
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Number one, they seem to affirm the idea that we should read the Bible as if it was a human book.
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In other words, using methodological naturalism to interpret it. And they also join in the criticism of all pre -modern exegesis as subjective and as not important.
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Those are the two points that I want to critique. I think that what we need to do is reform our understanding, our theory of hermeneutics.
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And we need to go back to the beginning, and we need to begin with deciding, what is the Bible? And if we believe it is a supernatural revelation from God, a unique book in all the world, then we can't interpret it like any other book.
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We have to interpret it on the basis of inspiration. So we don't use methodological naturalism.
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Um, for example, let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. Um, there's a quotation at the beginning of chapter 7 from Augustine, uh, commenting on Psalm 31.
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Here's what Augustine says. Let us now listen to something our Lord said on the cross. Into your hands
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I commit my spirit, Luke 23, 46. When we hear those words of his in the gospel and recognize them as part of this psalm, we should not doubt that here in this psalm it is
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Christ himself who is speaking. The gospel makes it clear. He had good reasons for making the words of the psalm his own, for he wanted to teach you that in the psalm he is speaking.
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Look for him in it. I would suggest that if we follow Augustine's advice there, and if we agree with him that Jesus was meaning to point us to seeing the psalms as him speaking to us, and Augustine saw, uh, examples of psalms where David would speak prophetically about the coming
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Messiah. He saw other psalms where Christ himself was speaking, like in Psalm 22, and he saw other psalms where the
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Father speaks and the Son speaks, um, and, and like Psalm 110. So he has these,
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Augustine has this idea that, that the, that when we read the psalms, reading the psalms
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Christologically means reading the psalms as if, as if Christ is not just future endpoint to which they point, but Christ is the origination of the psalm itself.
44:39
Christ is behind the psalm. He's bringing the psalm into existence. The psalm, the presence of the psalm in our, in our
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Bible is a result of Christ's activity inspiring through the Holy Spirit. And that gives us a different way of reading the psalms.
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So we're not looking for, we're not asking, what is the faith of Israel? We're not asking questions about the historical
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David and what did he believe and which situation in Israel? I mean, we can ask those questions, but they don't exhaust the meaning of the psalm, because Christ is actually speaking in the psalms and through the psalms, as well as being spoken of about, being spoken about in the psalm.
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What I'm suggesting to you is that the naturalistic hermeneutics that the
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Enlightenment has is inadequate, and I suspect the listener, the, uh, the questioner would agree with that.
45:28
What I'm simply trying to point out is that these, the naturalistic presuppositions, which in my view ruined the interpretation of Scripture, have made their way into the hermeneutical theory that we say we uphold as evangelicals.
45:44
And it is conflicting with the way we actually preach the Bible. So I'm suggesting that the way we actually preach the
45:52
Scriptures in the Church should be used to reform the Academy's theory of hermeneutics.
45:58
This is a very counterintuitive thing. While we talk, we Westerners always want theory first, and then that defines our practice.
46:05
And we think if we just get our theory straight, everything else will be fine. And I'm saying, no, I think we need to look at the practice of the
46:12
Church first and see how the Church does interpret Scripture. Look at how the Apostles interpreted the
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Old Testament, and then use that to construct our theory. And what I'm saying is that such a theory will have a lot less indebtedness to the
46:28
Enlightenment and to the assumptions that came out of the Enlightenment, and they will have a lot more indebtedness to the
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Apostles and to the great tradition. Well, thank you, Joey, in Clifton, New Jersey. Make sure that you get us your full mailing address there in Clifton, because you have also won a free copy of Interpreting Scripture with a
46:47
Great Tradition, compliments of our friends at Baker Academic, and also compliments of our friends at CVBBS .com,
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Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, who will be shipping it out to you at no charge to you or to us. We have
47:02
Joe in Slovenia, who says, Dear Brothers Chris and Craig, thank you both for bringing us the meatier topics so much in need in the spiritually protein -starved
47:15
Church. In the book Endorsements, I was intrigued by this statement,
47:23
Carter's contemplative logic is irrefutable, if Scripture participates in the
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Word of God, then we are surely right to see Christ sacramentally present also in the
47:35
Old Testament Scriptures. Please unpack what that means, what is meant by contemplative logic,
47:42
Scripture participates in the Word of God, and Christ sacramentally is present in the
47:49
Old Testament Scriptures. Thanks for giving us substantial things to chew on. That's Joe in Slovenia.
47:55
That's a great question, and I thank the questioner for that. That gets to the heart of my project.
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So, to take it step by step, contemplative logic is this. My understanding of theology is that we read
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Scripture, we do exegesis, we come up with exegetical results, and then we meditate.
48:16
We contemplate those exegetical results, we ask philosophical questions, we think about it, we reflect on it, we chew on it, we pray over it, we let
48:28
God speak to us, and we ask God to help us to understand it. And what we...that's
48:34
what contemplative logic...that's what I mean by...and I think that theology is primarily contemplative.
48:40
It's not primarily pragmatic. So I would contrast contemplative versus pragmatic. Most modern theology is done for the purpose of answering the question, what are we to do?
48:51
How should we live? How should we act? And it's very much, you know, how do we have a successful family life?
49:00
You know, you see this in evangelical preaching. The focus is all on, how can the Bible be useful to you?
49:05
How can we make it practical and make it relevant to us?
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We have our concerns, we know what we want, and can the Bible be made relevant to what we already know and what we already want?
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I think that's problematic. That's frankly shallow. What we need to do is to sit before Scripture and sit before God until we grasp what
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His priorities are, and what He wants, and what He thinks is valuable. And then we need to bring our concerns into line with His.
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In other words, this is a theocentric approach to theology rather than an anthropocentric approach.
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Now, the sacramental business is this. I'm proposing that there are metaphysical assumptions that we need to make in order to interpret
49:58
Scripture properly. We need to see the world in a certain way. We need to see the world as God's creation, and we need to see creation as the result of Christ's work, so that creation reveals
50:11
Christ, and Christ speaks through creation, and then Christ speaks in His Word, and then He's revealed in the
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Incarnation, and His Word testifies to Him. And there's a unity to truth that is there, so that there are ways in which we can understand truth by looking at God's revealed, created order in the light of His Word, and they mutually illumine each other, and we come to a deeper understanding of God through doing this sort of thing.
50:40
And this is a sacramental approach. Now, we live in a modern world where that's become passé.
50:47
The modern world is mechanistic. Nature is just a bunch of atoms in motion, and it's a bunch of matter and energy interacting according to the laws of physics.
50:59
There's no order. There's no teleology. There's no structure. There's no purpose to it. Nature is just a bunch of stuff that randomly happens.
51:07
But I would contend that the Christian worldview does not believe that. The Christian worldview of the great tradition sees nature as the creation of God, and it sees
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Christ as pervading nature, and therefore, when we read Scripture, we are entering into the contemplation of all truth.
51:26
The writers that I think have done the most to portray this kind of a worldview in the 20th century were
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J .R. Tolkien and C .S. Lewis. And so if you want to understand what I mean by a sacramental understanding of the world, if you read their fiction, read the
51:42
Chronicles of Narnia and the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion in particular, and those are the writings in which they present a vision of nature as God's creation so that it has meaning and order and structure to it, and that meaning and order and structure is illumined by special revelation in Scripture.
52:00
And so as we contemplate Scripture and the world, we are coming to a metaphysical understanding of what is real, what is reality.
52:08
And that's the context for interpreting Scripture. I don't think we can understand Scripture without a high understanding of miracles and a high understanding of providence, but we only get those if we have a sacramental or a theological metaphysics.
52:22
I mean, there are different terms. Some people call it a sacramental ontology. Some people call it theological metaphysics of Nicaea.
52:29
Some people call it Christian Platonism. We can call it many things, but one thing we know it's not, and the thing that it's in contrast to at all times, it is in contrast to philosophical naturalism.
52:42
It's in contrast to the idea of materialism. It is a view of nature that is infused with God, and so it's a great question.
52:52
I think that that metaphysical background is important for developing a proper hermeneutics of Scripture.
53:00
Well, thank you, Joe, in Slovenia. You have also won a free copy of Dr.
53:05
Carter's book that we were addressing, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition. Thank you so much for providing an
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American address where your daughter lives in Georgia so that CVBBS .com can ship it out to her at a much more affordable price.
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And keep listening and keep spreading the word about Iron Trip and Zion Radio in Slovenia and beyond. We're going to our midway break, which is a longer break.
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It's a 12 -minute break. Please be patient with us. This is a longer break because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1
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So please be patient. Take this time to write down questions for our guest, Dr. Craig A. Carter, and also write down the information provided by our advertisers.
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Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Charles Haddon Spurgeon once said,
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You need to read. Solid Ground Christian Books is a publisher and book distributor who takes these words of the
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Since its beginning in 2001, Solid Ground has been committed to publish God -centered,
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Christ -exalting books for all ages. We invite you to go treasure hunting at solid -ground -books .com.
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That's solid -ground -books .com and see what priceless literary gems from the past to present you can unearth from Solid Ground.
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Solid Ground Christian Books is honored to be a weekly sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Hi, I'm Buzz Taylor, frequent co -host with Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.
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Well, this is an excellent book. You'll get absolutely free of charge. Taken Up to Heaven by Derek Thomas. If you purchase $50 or more and mention
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Before we return to Dr. Craig A. Carter of Tyndale University College on our theme,
01:05:41
Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition, we just have a couple more announcements to make that are very important. First of all, we have coming up just right around the corner, the
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Fellowship Conference New England being held August 2nd through the 4th at the
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Deering Center Community Church in Portland, Maine. And the speakers at this conference include
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Pastor Tim Conway of the Grace Community Church in San Antonio, Texas, Pastor Mac Tomlinson, who is an author, book editor, and publisher, and pastor of Providence Chapel in Denton, Texas, which is a sponsor of the
01:06:21
Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio program. Pastor Jesse Barrington, who is the pastor of Grace Life Church in Dallas, Texas, which happens to be a sister church of Grace Life Church in Lake City, Florida, who has
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Grace Life Radio as their own ministry, which airs Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio every day, Monday through Friday in a rerun format.
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And last but not least, Pastor Nate Pickowitz, who is the pastor of Harvest Bible Church in Gilmonton Ironworks, New Hampshire.
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He's also the author of Reviving New England and Why We're Protestant.
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Also, all of these men are going to be guests on Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio, so keep your ears open for the next time they come back to the program to bless you with an interview.
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If you'd like to register for the Fellowship Conference New England, go to fellowshipconferencenewengland .com,
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fellowshipconferencenewengland .com, and please make sure you tell the folks at the Fellowship Conference New England that you heard about that event from Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio.
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The next event that we are excited to announce is the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals annual conference, known as the
01:07:38
Quaker Town Conference on Reform Theology, held at Grace Bible Fellowship Church in Quaker Town, Pennsylvania.
01:07:45
I am planning to be there manning an Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio exhibitor's booth, so I hope that you greet me during breaks at my exhibitor's booth at the
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Quaker Town Conference on Reform Theology, which is being held November 9th through the 10th in Quaker Town, Pennsylvania.
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The theme is The Glory of the Cross, and the speakers include David Garner, Ray Ortland, Richard Phillips, Timothy Gibson, and Carlton Wynn.
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If you'd like to register for that event, go to alliancenet .org, alliancenet .org, click on events, and then click on Quaker Town Conference on Reform Theology, The Glory of the
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Cross, November 9th through the 10th in Quaker Town, Pennsylvania. Then we have another one of my favorite events.
01:08:32
This event has been such a blessing to Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio. The contacts that we have made there, invaluable contacts, some of whom have become sponsors of the show and guests on the show and new listeners to the show, and I'm talking about the
01:08:50
G3 Conference being held January 17th through the 19th.
01:08:57
That is Thursday, January 17th through Saturday, January 19th in College Park, Georgia, which is a suburb of Atlanta, at the
01:09:05
Georgia International Convention Center. This is going to be my third year manning an exhibitor's booth at the
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G3 Conference, which stands for, by the way, Grace, Gospel, and Glory, in case you're wondering. Speakers include
01:09:18
Paul Washer, John Piper, David Platt, Stephen Lawson, Vody Baucom, Mark Dever, Conrad Mbewe, who is my favorite preacher of all, alive on the planet
01:09:29
Earth today, pastor of Kibwata Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia, Africa, and president of the
01:09:35
African Christian University, the chancellor, I should say, of African Christian University, Tim Challies, Phil Johnson, the executive director of John MacArthur's ministry.
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Grace to you. Josh Bice, the founder of the G3 Conference, Todd Friel of Wretched TV and Wretched Radio, who's going to be my guest once again on August 2nd,
01:09:55
God willing, here on Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio. Stephen Nichols, the president of Reformation Bible College.
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The Reformation Bible College was founded by the late Dr. R .C. Sproul and Ligonier Ministries. Don and Cindy Curran, Martha Peace, Chip Thornton, Chris King, and Owen Stran.
01:10:13
If you'd like to join me there in College Park, Georgia, this January for the G3 Conference, go to g3conference .com,
01:10:21
g3conference .com, and please tell the folks at the G3 Conference that you heard about that event from Chris Aronson on Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio.
01:10:31
Last but not least, this is the most uncomfortable time during the program, the least comfortable, most uncomfortable.
01:10:40
It's where I have to beg you for money because we really, really need your donations and your advertising.
01:10:46
If you love this show, you don't want it to go away, please go to ironsherpaandzionradio .com, click support, then click, click to donate now, and you can donate instantly with a debit or credit card.
01:10:58
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01:11:07
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01:11:31
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01:11:42
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01:11:49
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01:12:12
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01:12:33
That's chrisarnson at gmail .com, and put advertising in the subject line. That's also the email address, chrisarnson at gmail .com,
01:12:39
where you can send in a question for Dr. Craig A. Carter, Professor of Theology at Tyndale University College in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
01:12:46
We are addressing, if you just tuned us in, the theme, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition, which is also the title of a recent book that he has written, published by Baker Academic, and so we look forward to receiving more questions from you at chrisarnson at gmail .com.
01:13:05
We have a listener, Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who says, when you mentioned before the multicultural makeup of Tyndale University College, I couldn't help but wonder how someone who is very biblically sound is surviving there.
01:13:23
Here in the United States, we are seeing nearly every month, at least, stories on the news about even tenured professors losing their jobs because they are far too conservative for the mindset of the faculty and the student body, and are being fired left and right.
01:13:43
How are you surviving there? Well, I wouldn't say that professors are being fired left and right yet, but I do think that some very worrisome evidences of intolerance and against Christianity have been creeping into both
01:14:03
Canada and the United States in various ways. But Tyndale is not a public university.
01:14:10
It's a private Christian university. It's an evangelical university, and so we are not as far along in terms of secularization as, say, the
01:14:20
University of Toronto or some other public university. But yeah, it's a problem all over the western world, and there is an increasing lack of tolerance for the
01:14:33
Christian worldview and Christian ethical standards, and I think all professors feel that no matter where they're teaching.
01:14:43
So the multicultural makeup that you referred to earlier, is this involving the student body that are being attracted to the evangelical school in spite of whatever religion they may adhere to, or are you more using that term descriptively to mean international and multiracial and that kind of a thing?
01:15:05
Oh, the latter. About 98 % of our students would be Christians, but Toronto is one of the most multicultural cities in the world.
01:15:16
There are, you know, a typical Tyndale classroom looks like the United Nations.
01:15:21
I have people from Africa, from Latin America, from Eastern Europe. I have people who are
01:15:29
Indian, Sri Lankan, Chinese, from Hong Kong. We just have people from all over the world, and Toronto is a country that has had very high, most of the
01:15:42
Canadian immigration has migrated to the large cities, Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal.
01:15:49
And so Toronto is a very multicultural city, and there are many
01:15:55
Christians among all these people who have come from all kinds of countries, and they look to Tyndale as the place to go.
01:16:04
Great. Well, thank you, Harrison, in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. You have also won a free copy of the book we are addressing today,
01:16:12
Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition. You can also pick that up since you are so close to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where CVBBS .com
01:16:24
is located on North Hanover Street in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. You're only about 10 to 15 minutes away, so if you go by there next week, they should have the books from Baker Academic by then.
01:16:35
But if you need it mailed to you, just give us your full mailing address, and we'll have that shipped out to you by CVBBS .com
01:16:41
as soon as they arrive in the mail. The situation involving the hermeneutics of Scripture not only divides conservative from liberal, but there's even, as you know, a great divide within conservative evangelical
01:17:03
Christianity, conservative Protestant Christianity, and do you think that some of your approaches to hermeneutics and exegesis would solve even the great divides between the
01:17:21
Calvinists and Arminians and the cessationists and the charismatics and others? No, I don't pretend that it would do that.
01:17:31
I do think, though, that what I'm aiming for is a more theological way of reading
01:17:39
Scripture, a more theological hermeneutics that I think would be useful in maintaining the faith and not drifting off toward liberalism.
01:17:49
I make a statement in the book that the reading of a biblical text is not a secular act, and that's important, because, you know, there are textbooks that are used widely in evangelical schools that treat hermeneutics as a secular thing, and they discuss non -Christian philosophical positions as the basis for understanding hermeneutics, and so this is a controversial statement.
01:18:18
But I say the act of reading a biblical text is not a secular act, it's a divine human encounter. And nothing is more fundamental to the
01:18:25
Christian life than reading the text of Scripture and submitting one's life to the one who speaks his word through the human words of the inspired text.
01:18:34
And nothing is more damaging to the Christian life than the attempt to secularize this act of reading, because to do so is to act like an atheist.
01:18:43
So if reading in faith is how we become Christians, reading without faith is how we become atheists.
01:18:49
So the stakes are very high, and I think that there are...the concern in evangelicalism that I'm most concerned about is the development of a left -wing kind of evangelicalism that is drifting toward liberal
01:19:07
Protestantism. Evangelicalism has become very broad today, and it includes everything.
01:19:16
I mean, if you want to sell books, you have to appeal to the evangelical market. And unfortunately, the biggest sellers are typically extremely heretical and dangerous.
01:19:27
Well, many of them are, but the fact that they even try to portray themselves as evangelicals in some sense to get an evangelical audience tells you that they're needing to do that.
01:19:39
But I think that the left -wing of evangelicalism is increasingly moving toward basically...
01:19:52
history's repeating itself. Between 1870 and 1930, most of evangelical
01:19:59
Protestantism became liberal, and the remaining evangelicals within the major denominations were forced out.
01:20:07
So that's the founding of Westminster Seminary, and many of the denominations experienced splits at this time.
01:20:17
And I think that this is happening again, and I think we are seeing a generation of evangelicals have been brought up and have come to leadership without ever having personally firsthand experienced liberal
01:20:32
Protestantism for themselves, and they are not aware of how dangerous and how death -dealing it is.
01:20:39
Therefore, they are more open to it and less wary of it.
01:20:45
And because of that, we see some naivete governing the way that evangelicals approach things, and I think that hermeneutics is an example of a discipline where we are not being theological enough, we are not being thoughtful enough, and we are not being careful enough to deal with the philosophical issues that we're...
01:21:09
Because many evangelicals, you know, just... many Christians try to say, I don't want anything to do with metaphysics,
01:21:15
I don't think we need metaphysics. Well, that's really not a viable position, because if I ask you, do you believe that God created the world external, or do you believe that matter and energy are eternal, and that the nature of God's creation is that, at some point in the middle of the process,
01:21:35
He began to fashion it and shape it in a certain way? Which do you believe? Well, no matter which answer you give, you are affirming a metaphysical doctrine.
01:21:45
You're either affirming the metaphysical doctrine of the eternality of matter and energy, or you are affirming creation ex nihilo.
01:21:52
There's no getting away from the fact that you have a metaphysical conviction, unless you just adopt an agnostic view.
01:21:59
But you can't be agnostic about everything. People will eventually have an operative theology.
01:22:04
So what I'm saying is that metaphysics is unavoidable. And so, given that it's unavoidable, what we need to do is to be educated about it.
01:22:11
We need to study the history of it, and we need to understand that that metaphysics can get us in trouble when we're interpreting
01:22:18
Scripture. So that's my plea to the evangelical churches. Let's take the history of metaphysics seriously.
01:22:25
Let's deal with the hermeneutics in such a way that we develop a theological hermeneutics that's rooted in the great tradition, that's rooted in orthodoxy, and that governs our reading of Scripture.
01:22:36
Because otherwise, I think we will just continue to drift and drift and drift in a secularizing direction.
01:22:43
Well, if you could give, especially for our listeners who tuned in late, various examples, as many as you want, even if it's just a couple, of specifically how you have seen
01:22:56
Christians, people that you believe are regenerate, approaching the
01:23:02
Scriptures in a secular way. Well, for example, if we take the
01:23:09
Psalms. For many years, I read the Psalms as a prayer book of ancient
01:23:16
Israel. I read the Psalms for what the Psalms could tell us about, so I'm using myself as an example,
01:23:24
Chris. I read the Psalms for what they could tell us about what ancient Israel believers believed, and how they related to God.
01:23:33
And therefore, I saw the Psalms as models of piety for the people of God.
01:23:38
So the Psalms show us how to be thankful. They show us how to praise. They show us how to respond to God in faith in times of crisis in our lives.
01:23:50
Well, okay, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with all that. But if you said, but if I said to you, that's what the
01:23:57
Psalter means, that would be very reductionistic. Because the
01:24:02
Psalter means that, but it means a lot more. And it's the more that's missing. For example, when we read
01:24:11
Psalm 3 as just about David. Now, Psalm 3, your listeners may recall, is the
01:24:17
Psalm that comes out of that late period in David's life, when Absalom, his son, has rebelled against him and attempted to take the kingship.
01:24:26
And David feels very much persecuted, and he feels very insecure and threatened, and David is struggling with, can he have faith in God in this situation?
01:24:38
Well, the historical setting of that Psalm is a true setting, and it's essential to the interpretation of that Psalm.
01:24:47
No further spiritual meaning could be read into that, should be read into that Psalm, that would contradict that historical meaning.
01:24:54
It means that. But Augustine, when he comes to that Psalm, he sees two further layers of meaning there.
01:25:01
He admits that it's about David in response to the Absalom situation, but Augustine also says this
01:25:08
Psalm gives us insight into the rejection of the Messiah by his own people.
01:25:14
Because what comes through in Psalm 3 is David's personal hurt. And it's one thing for the
01:25:20
Philistines to fight against him. It's even one thing for Saul to be jealous of him and to persecute him.
01:25:27
But this is his own flesh and blood fighting against him now. And this really wounds
01:25:32
David to his soul. And Augustine sees that as being a
01:25:39
Psalm that is talking not just about David's experience, but David functioning as a prophet. By the way,
01:25:44
Peter calls David a prophet in Acts chapter 2 very specifically. But Augustine sees
01:25:51
David as a prophet speaking about the pain of the Messiah's rejection by his own people as he comes.
01:25:59
John 1, that he came to his own and his own received him not. This pain of rejection felt by the
01:26:05
Messiah. David is a type of that, and David is a prophet of that. And so we see that second layer of meaning in Psalm 3.
01:26:13
And then Augustine, after having read the Psalm twice with these two levels of meaning, he reads it yet a third time and he says, we also see here the rejection of the believer.
01:26:24
So as Jesus told his disciples in the upper room the night before his death, he said that, you know, if they persecuted me, they will persecute you.
01:26:34
And in the world, you shall have tribulation. And so Paul describes the church as the body of Christ.
01:26:40
Christ is the head. We are the parts of the body. So we as Christians, and Augustine, by the way, consciously is working with this
01:26:48
Pauline body theology of the church. And Augustine sees the suffering of the church, of the persecuted church, in Psalm 3 as well.
01:26:57
So what is Psalm 3 about? Well, it's about the pain of personal rejection on the part of the
01:27:03
Messiah, of David himself first, but also the Messiah and the Messiah's body, the church.
01:27:10
And so this is why the... I think only this kind of reading of the psalms explains why the psalms have been so beloved by the church throughout history.
01:27:22
A few years ago, I read Saint Benedict's rule for his monks, and I discovered that the monks were to chant the
01:27:32
Psalter, all 150 psalms, every single week. And I thought, wow, that means they're saying the psalms, they're reading and chanting and memorizing the psalms more than any other prior scripture.
01:27:44
And I found that odd, as an Evangelical Protestant. I thought, why not Romans? You know, why not the
01:27:49
Gospels? Why the psalms? And because the Psalter was a hymn book of ancient
01:27:54
Israelite piety that provides models of prayer for us today, but that's all it was to me. It wasn't about the...
01:28:01
it wasn't about Jesus, and it wasn't about the church. But it meant so much more to these monks than and to Benedict.
01:28:08
And Benedict, of course, is standing in a tradition that is universal among the fathers. He's been reading
01:28:15
Augustine, and he's been reading this kind of Christological interpretation of the psalms. And so, for him, the psalms are
01:28:22
Christian. And so, what I discovered was that the
01:28:28
Psalter has meant more to the church than what I, as an Evangelical raised on a conservative hermeneutics, was able to appreciate.
01:28:37
That's a problem. And that's the problem I'm trying to address in this book. We have a question that I will read to you, and then we will go to the break, and you can answer it when we return.
01:28:48
But we have Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who says, can you please differentiate what you are saying from the
01:28:59
Gnostic and mystic practice of vain repetition and opening the mind during meditation that I believe is very dangerous and very heretical?
01:29:13
I hope that you are not endorsing that kind of thing. Can you please tell us if there is a difference?
01:29:18
And you could respond to that when we return from our final break. If anybody else would like to join us with a question of your own, do it now or forever.
01:29:27
Hold your peace, because we're rapidly running out of time. Our email address is chrisarnson gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.
01:29:33
Please give us your first name, city and state and country of residence if you live outside the USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.
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And we are now back with the final 20 minutes or so, 25 minutes or so, with our guest,
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Dr. Craig A. Carter. We are discussing his book today on Interpreting Scripture with the
01:36:04
Great Tradition. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, do so now, because we're rapidly running out of time.
01:36:10
ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Before the break, Dr. Carter, we had a listener,
01:36:16
Arnie, in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who is very nervous. He's wondering if you are promoting a kind of meditation and contemplative meditation that would involve emptying the mind and doing things like the
01:36:30
Gnostics do, vein repetition, and that kind of a thing. Well, that's an interesting question, and of course the answer is no.
01:36:43
But the premise of the question seems to be that ordinary interpretation doesn't require contemplation.
01:36:53
And that's a premise that I want to challenge. I think that good interpretation is a spiritual encounter, and I do believe that it's important that in meditating on Scripture that we open our minds.
01:37:08
Now, the question is, to whom are we opening our minds? I have a man,
01:37:14
I know a man whose wife got involved in some teaching from somebody who, you know, it didn't seem so at the time, but long story short, ended up being somebody who
01:37:28
I think was teaching the kind of thing the has in mind, kind of a
01:37:34
Gnostic New Age teaching on angels, and she became convinced that she was communicating with angels, and that she had a spirit guide who was speaking to her and telling her things.
01:37:46
And one of the things that the spirit told her was that she was not to have normal marital relations with her husband.
01:37:55
Now, I would submit to you that that woman was in touch with a spirit, but it wasn't the Holy Spirit. It was a demon who was posing as an angel in order to win her confidence and draw her down a path to destruction.
01:38:09
And I think that that just highlights the danger of reading and interpreting
01:38:14
Scripture. This is not child's play. This is serious. When we read the
01:38:20
Scripture, we are opening ourselves, and I think a lot of people are not aware of this. They think it's just a secular thing, they think it's easy to do, and they think that they are in control.
01:38:33
You know, the premise seems to be, I, as the autonomous individual, am intellectually investigating a problem.
01:38:40
The problem is, what does the biblical text mean? And I'm in control of this process. The text is just a dead, inner object laying before me, and I'm going to analyze it, and I'm going to study it, and I'm going to interpret it.
01:38:53
And it's just me that's going, that's acting here. There's no one else involved. I don't think that's ever the case.
01:39:00
I think that people deceive themselves into thinking that that's the case in secular hermeneutics, but I think what is really the case is that when we are dealing with spiritual truth about the ultimate nature of reality and the existence of God and good and evil and what we are, how we are to live, we are dealing with truth that has a spiritual dimension and spiritual entities of various kinds, very dark spiritual forces, are always out to deceive us.
01:39:31
Therefore, the kind of contemplative approach that I'm advocating is a form of Christian prayer, where the object is not to empty the mind, but to fill the mind and fixate the mind on the
01:39:42
Word of God. And so we contemplate words in Scripture, and we contemplate images in Scripture, we contemplate texts of Scripture.
01:39:50
We don't just leave our minds open to be filled by any spiritual influence that comes along.
01:39:55
We are attempting to be in contact with God. We are praying. And that's what, and really, interpreting
01:40:01
Scripture is an act of prayer. And that's something that is a theme all through the Church Fathers, that scriptural interpretation is a spiritual discipline that results in sanctification.
01:40:15
And for Augustine, you know, if your interpretation of Scripture is not making you love
01:40:22
God and neighbor more, there's something desperately wrong with your interpretation. Because for him, you can't separate good hermeneutics from growth in the
01:40:33
Christian life. So I think that the idea, the way
01:40:39
I would answer that question is to say, yes, you're right, we have to focus on God, and there's a wrong way to do it, as well as a right way to do it.
01:40:47
It is possible to be deceived. But what I'm challenging is the idea that there is a religious way that is the heretical way, and then there's a secular way that involves just me and a dead text in front of me interpreting it.
01:41:05
I don't think that, I think that's a myth, and I think that the more we think of hermeneutics in that way, the more likely we are to be deceived by dark spiritual forces.
01:41:19
One of the lies they tell us is that, well, all you need to do is use your mind and intellectually understand the words on the page, and that's all you need.
01:41:27
You don't need God, you don't need the Holy Spirit, you don't need grace to understand this Word. That's what
01:41:33
I reject. Well, thank you, Arnie. Please give us your full mailing address, because you have also won a free copy of the book,
01:41:40
Interpreting Scripture with a Great Tradition, by our guest, Dr. Craig A. Carter. Compliments of Baker Academic, and also compliments of our friends at cvbbs .com.
01:41:50
We'll be shipping that out to you. We have a first -time questioner, Tom in Vancouver, Washington, and he says, in all that you are discussing, and that Proverbs chapter 1 verse 9 identifies nothing being new under the sun, how is what you are bringing forth so different than what
01:42:13
Kuyper spoke to in the late 1800s, early 1900s?
01:42:22
I guess the question is, if I understand the question, he is surmising that what
01:42:29
I'm saying is similar to what Kuyper said. Is that the point of the question? In fact, Tom, if you want to give a clarifying email,
01:42:37
Tom in Vancouver, Washington, all's I know is that he wrote, in all that you are discussing, and that Proverbs 1 and 9 identifies nothing being new under the sun, how is what you are bringing forth so different than what
01:42:50
Kuyper, Abraham Kuyper, of course, spoke to in the late 1800s, early 1900s? That's all he wrote. Well, first of all,
01:42:58
I don't claim that anything is new. By the way, if you remember Tom Oden, we mentioned him earlier. Tom Oden said he had a dream, and he was in the
01:43:08
New Haven graveyard, and he found his tombstone, and on the tombstone it was written,
01:43:14
Dear Life, Thomas Oden. He had no new thoughts. He taught no new doctrine, or something like that.
01:43:24
And he found himself strangely comforted, and I would just say amen to that. I have no intention or desire to teach anything new.
01:43:33
In fact, everything that I'm saying about interpreting Scripture goes back to Irenaeus, and Irenaeus knew
01:43:39
Polycarp, and Polycarp was a student of the Apostle John. So, no, there's nothing new here.
01:43:47
I simply actually am arguing in the book for interpreting the
01:43:53
Old Testament the way that the New Testament writers interpret the Old Testament. For example, if you look at Hebrews 10, it's too complicated to get into, but if you look at Hebrews 2 and Hebrews 10, there's two examples of how
01:44:06
Hebrews interprets the Psalms, and Augustine does exactly the same thing, and I think we should do exactly the same thing.
01:44:13
And so, no. New? No, I'm not looking for new at all. Well, thank you,
01:44:18
Tom, in Vancouver, Washington. Not only have you won a free copy of Dr. Carter's book,
01:44:26
The Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition, but since you are a first -time questioner, you've also won a free
01:44:32
New American Standard Bible. Please give us your full mailing address in Vancouver, Washington, so that cvbbs .com
01:44:38
can ship that out to you. We have somebody closer to your neck of the woods,
01:44:43
Dr. Carter. We have Sika Lee in Ponoka, Alberta, Canada, and he says,
01:44:52
Dr. Carter, is your book meant to be readable for simple laymen and to better understand and read the
01:45:00
Bible, or is it so deep in theology that my brain will melt? Yeah, well, first of all,
01:45:12
I think that if you do Google Maps, I think you might find Alberta's further away from Toronto than Western Pennsylvania.
01:45:20
Wow, okay. Shows you how much I know about geography.
01:45:25
Well, it's just sometimes, because it's
01:45:31
Canada, Canada's such a wide country, and 60 % of the population is within 100 miles of the
01:45:36
U .S. border, and so that makes it very spread out from Vancouver to Newfoundland, and so we're often a long ways away from each other.
01:45:46
But yeah, the question is, well, I think my target audience was pastors.
01:45:51
That's the center of the audience. Now, some laypeople who have maybe had a bit of, done a bit of reading in the area of Biblical interpretation would,
01:46:02
I think, find it useful. Certainly other scholars will find it useful, but I think students in college, anybody who took a hermeneutics course in college and experienced any sort of vague dissatisfaction with it or had lingering questions afterwards that didn't reject everything but just had some more questions,
01:46:27
I think that would be the perfect person to read this book. Well, thank you, Sikha Lee.
01:46:33
You have won our final copy of the book that we are addressing today, Interpreting Scripture with the
01:46:39
Great Tradition. We thank you for providing us with a, I know that you're
01:46:45
American, you're North American, but thank you for providing us with an address in the United States where we can have cvbbs .com
01:46:54
ship that to your friend there in the United States who will ship that out to you. So thank you so much for doing that, making it much more affordable for cvbbs .com
01:47:05
to get that book to you. And if it's too deep for you, give it to your pastor or give it to someone else that you think will appreciate it and benefit by it.
01:47:15
Let's see here. We have Susan Margaret in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, who asks,
01:47:26
Could you name two or three prominent evangelical conservative scholars today that you would not mind identifying as those with whom you would disagree on hermeneutics and how to approach exegesis?
01:47:45
Ah, those with whom I disagree. Well, it'd be more fun to name the ones
01:47:50
I agree with. All right, well, do whatever you're comfortable doing. I guess, scanning my shelf of books on hermeneutics, who would
01:48:02
I point out? Um, well,
01:48:09
Stanley Porter is a very well -known academic, and he has some, he has a lack of patience with pre -modern exegesis very often.
01:48:23
I know he teaches a course that starts on history of hermeneutics that starts in the 17th century, and I find that problematic.
01:48:30
Um, Duval and Hayes have written a book called Grasping God's Word, and that's a very popular textbook published by Zondervan, and it's used at a lot of Bible colleges, and it's a book that I've actually used in teaching in my church, and it's at a very basic introductory level, and there's many good things about that book.
01:48:55
For one thing, they integrate the inductive Bible study method into their book, and I'm big on the inductive
01:49:01
Bible study method. I teach that in our church, and we use it, and it's been very, very helpful.
01:49:08
But my complaint about Duval and Hayes is that they dismiss the pre -modern tradition as if it was childish and inept and not to be taken seriously, and they talk about allegory and spiritual meaning of the text as if that was just a recipe for unbridled subjectivism and reading things into the text.
01:49:32
And I think that that is changing slowly. We're seeing less and less of that was more common a way of thinking of pre -modern exegesis 20 years ago.
01:49:43
It was more common 10 years ago. It's getting less and less common. People are becoming more and more aware of what the pre -modern exegesis has to offer, and I think that's changing, but that reflects an older attitude that I think is problematic.
01:49:59
I think also that the idea that allegory is a way of being subjective, and that the fathers all used allegory, and therefore we have to dismiss all of their exegesis.
01:50:14
Here's the problem with that. If we believe that the
01:50:19
Nicene Creed and its expression of the doctrine of the Trinity is the correct teaching of Scripture, we believe that the
01:50:27
Nicene Creed teaches what the Scripture teaches about the doctrine of the Trinity. If it just puts it into language and formulas that are fit for a creed, but it's basically the biblical teaching, well then the question is, how did all of these
01:50:43
Church Fathers in the 4th century, Athanasius, and Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory of Nazianzus, and all the rest of them, how did they manage to understand what the
01:50:55
Bible is teaching correctly if they were all using a method of exegesis that was so bad, and so subjective, and so wrong?
01:51:02
And if this method of exegesis that was used by the Nicene Fathers is so subjective and so individualistic, and if it can make the
01:51:11
Bible to mean anything it wants to mean, that we want it to mean, why has it produced a unified set of interpretations of Scripture?
01:51:25
And I'm talking about the Trinitarian and Christological Orthodoxy that has emerged out of the first five centuries and has remained the bedrock teaching of the
01:51:33
Church, undergirding all decrees and confessions through the Reformation to the modern day. How did such an objective body of truth set forward as an interpretation of the
01:51:45
Bible emerge out of a completely subjectivist hermeneutics?
01:51:51
And I don't know how anybody can answer that question. It must be the case that there's more to their hermeneutics than the popular impression of them gives us to believe.
01:52:04
So I think David Steinmetz got it right in his famous article from a number of years ago called The Superiority of Pre -Critical
01:52:11
Exegesis, because David Steinmetz says that the interpretation of the
01:52:17
Nicene Fathers, the idea of spiritual interpretation, or call it allegorical, the terminology is confusing and difficult, but this idea that there are layers of interpretation in Scripture, the idea that divine authorial intent has to be taken into account alongside human authorial intent, the idea that the
01:52:36
Scripture means what God says through it, that that's the meaning. He says that is the middle road between the single -meaning theory, human single -meaning theory on the one side, and the post -modern reader -response theories on the other.
01:52:54
So the historic tradition is the via media, the middle way, the way of common sense.
01:53:02
So yes, I would believe that a passage of Scripture may have, like I gave example earlier of Psalm 3, it may have more than one meaning, but it doesn't have an unlimited number of meanings, and it doesn't have contradictory meanings.
01:53:17
It can only mean, any extended spiritual sense can only mean something that is consistent with the literal sense.
01:53:28
So I guess that's what I would advocate for, is understanding particularly the
01:53:35
Old Testament as having more than one layer of meaning, but not as contradicting itself, and is in the end finding its unity in Jesus Christ.
01:53:45
And we have once again Denny from, let's see, Farmington, Minnesota.
01:53:51
He just wants to say thank you very much for reading my question to Dr. Carter. I found his answer to be helpful, and thanks for his book as well.
01:54:01
You said during the show that J .V. Fesco will be on in a couple of weeks, right? All's I can tell you is that Dr.
01:54:08
Fesco has said that he would love to come back on the program for another interview, and we are discussing
01:54:14
July. We don't have an exact date yet, so just keep your eyes and ears open for when we have written that in stone on the calendar.
01:54:23
Of course, God can always change anything that we write in stone, but as soon as we get that scheduled...
01:54:31
Yes, go ahead, go ahead. And just say that J .V. Fesco's books, Interpreting Scripture, I think are models of biblical interpretation, and I think that what he's doing is the kind of thing that I want to see more of, and I just want to affirm that.
01:54:49
Great. Well, I want to make sure that you have about three minutes of uninterrupted time to summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners before we go off the air today.
01:55:03
Okay, well, what I really want to get across to people is that the Bible is a unique book, inspired by God, written by 40 authors over a period of 1 ,500 years in three languages, divided into an
01:55:18
Old Testament and a New Testament. It is nevertheless one book, written ultimately by one author, the product of one divine mind.
01:55:29
And this book is a unity centered on Jesus Christ. The Old Testament speaks of Christ and points forward to Him, and Christ speaks through His prophets of the
01:55:40
Old Testament. The New Testament reveals Christ and states His coming, and then
01:55:45
His apostles, under the guidance of His Spirit, explain the meaning of that coming in the
01:55:51
Incarnation, in His life and death and resurrection and ascension and future Second Coming. The Bible is, therefore, a book that is foundational to our understanding of what is true.
01:56:04
And our understanding of true... what is true, I mean everything. It's about God and all things in relation to God.
01:56:14
That's what theology is. And the Bible, therefore, has something to teach us about everything that's important in life.
01:56:21
And what we need is a hermeneutical theory that approaches the Bible on this theological basis, believing in the unity, sufficiency, necessity of Scripture, and seeing
01:56:33
Scripture as a spiritual thing that God uses to teach us and to sanctify us and to save us.
01:56:43
So I want us to read Scripture as God's Word to us.
01:56:48
I don't want to read it as merely a human book, a record of the historical... of the history of human thoughts about God or human responses to God, but I want to see it as God speaking to us today.
01:57:00
And I believe that the Church's... the best preaching of the
01:57:07
Church has always seen this, and I don't want to change a thing about, you know, Charles Spurgeon's preaching was wonderful,
01:57:15
John Stott's preaching was wonderful, Martyn Lloyd -Jones' preaching was wonderful. What needs to change is not the kind of preaching they did.
01:57:24
What I'm calling for that needs to change is a feel... we need a more theological hermeneutics that is able to explain how that preaching is true and right, and how that preaching makes sense of the
01:57:38
Bible, and how the Bible... and what the Bible really is in the light of that preaching. And so that's the burden of this book, and I hope that people will find it helpful.
01:57:49
One of the best comments that I've received so far about the book was that one person said that he was...
01:57:56
he felt like the... like it was such an affirmation of his faith, because the preaching...
01:58:03
the best preaching that he's heard in his lifetime was solidly endorsed by this book and given a better foundation.
01:58:11
That's what I'm out to do. Amen. Well, we are out of time, and I want to make sure our listeners know that if you want to find out more about Baker Publishing and Baker Academic, you can go to bakerpublishinggroup .com,
01:58:28
bakerpublishinggroup .com, the publishers of Interpreting Scripture with a Great Tradition. Of course, you can always purchase 99 % of the books, at least, that we address on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio from cvbbs .com,
01:58:41
our sponsors, cvbbs .com. And if you want to find out more information about Dr.
01:58:49
Craig A. Carter, you can go to tyndale .ca, tyndale .ca,
01:58:56
and if... do you have any other contact information that you care to share? Well, my email is there on the website, just first initial, last name, at tyndale .ca,
01:59:07
ccarter, at tyndale .ca, and I'm always glad to hear from readers. Great, and make sure you make a note on your calendars, folks, that tomorrow we have
01:59:17
Steve Martin, who is the Dean of Students at the IRBS Theological Seminary in Mansfield, Texas, joining us once again on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.
01:59:26
I want to thank you, Dr. Carter, for being our guest again. I want to thank everybody who listened, especially those who took the time to write in questions, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater