Let God Speak: Hermeneutics

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Greetings and welcome to the Divine Line. Today on the program we are going to do a deep dive into the subject of hermeneutics.

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Only a year ago, this would have been something that you would have done maybe to help people prepare for engaging in certain apologetic activities or preaching through books of the

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Bible or whatever, but we are doing the program today because of a fundamental shift in the perspective of how to do hermeneutics amongst

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Reformed people, and it is a major change.

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Those of us who have been doing it the same way for decades used to do it the same way as pretty much all the people that are now making the change.

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They're the ones that have changed. They know it and they admit it, but they're making an argument for it, and so it's important that those of us who are deeply troubled by this change have the opportunity to give a response and leave it to others to make the decision as to where they're going to go.

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I have been contacted by numerous students in numerous schools who have confirmed that they are indeed being taught this new methodology, and they have to a person encouraged me to respond and to continue responding to it, and so we are going to be doing that on the program today.

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So, letting God speak. Hermeneutics is the science and process of interpreting written language, and I'm not denying that there is not a hermeneutical level to be found in regards to spoken language as well, obviously, but in this particular,

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I mean, there's so many directions we could go, so many trails that we could travel today.

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We only have a certain amount of time. It's going to be a much longer program than normal, but still, given the amount of material that needs to be covered and the depth to which we want to try to go to make sure that we're doing so properly, we're going to limit our scope just a little bit.

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I am quite certain that there will be many people who will expand the scope on their own.

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So, hermeneutics, the science and process of interpreting written language. Every written document must be interpreted, even this one.

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It is inevitable and unavoidable. Even what is on the screen, this is a single sentence at the bottom of the screen.

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It is written in the sense that I have used letters and the English language to express it, but it must be interpreted.

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And as anyone who's been on Twitter knows, there are many people who struggle at basic interpretation of the basic language.

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The whole idea of critical thought and careful listening and logic is not real high on the priority list of education in our day.

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And so, we all know that people can just say something in written form on Twitter.

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It can be clear. It can be grammatically correct. The context was known, and yet people will come up with the most amazing interpretations of what it was that you said.

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Sometimes I'm just left sitting there staring at the screen going, how did that happen? So, there are problems in this area today.

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We're not really going to be focusing so much upon that either. We are primarily, obviously as Christians right now, looking at the subject of the interpretation of Scripture and the interpretation, the relationship of Scripture to Christian truth as a whole.

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So, hermeneutics in this context is going to involve us in issues of the relationship of Scripture to tradition, however that's defined, and to the passing on of Christian truth from generation to generation.

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It seems very clear to me that the New Testament teaches that Christian truth is something that can be, and indeed must be, and it is a part of God's purpose that it be communicated from generation to generation without mutation.

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One of the glorious beauties of the Christian faith, and certainly something that has been very, very important to me over the years, is to consider in church history the differences that we have had with those in the past and the samenesses.

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So, in other words, what is definitional? What is core? What can be communicated in written form from generation to generation?

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And as Christians, what does the Spirit of God then want to accomplish in this world through that communication of that divine truth?

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These are all issues, as you can see, lots and lots of issues to get to today. Is interpretation just a personal thing?

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Can there be, and when we're doing these if we could pop that up on the screen so people could see it real clearly, is interpretation just a personal thing?

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Can there be a consistent objective meaning in a written text that is communicable into the future?

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That's what I was just referring to just now. Can there be a consistent objective meaning in a written text that is communicable into the future?

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There are a lot of people that would question that. There'll be a lot of people who say no, there cannot be.

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There are skeptics in that area. But is interpretation just a personal thing?

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Is it just simply a matter of we sit around in Sunday school and we read a text of Scripture and say, how do you feel about that?

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How do you feel about that? Or is there a consistent objective meaning?

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What about the historic argument about allegorical interpretation? Is the literal meaning the only meaning?

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Is there a spiritual meaning and a natural meaning of the words, for example?

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We will get into aspects of this in the future discussion here, but there are different genres of literature contained in the

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Apocalyptic. You have epistolatory literature, the epistles, the letters of Paul. You've got the

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Gospels. You have historical works. You have poetry. There's lots of different kinds of literature in the

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Bible. Most of us can naturally sense that you're not going to interpret an epistle written by Paul to a church in the same way, or at least you shouldn't, in the same way as an

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Apocalyptic book or poetry, things along these lines.

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We recognize this, but when we talk about a natural meaning and a spiritual meaning, when

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Paul identifies the church to which he's writing and says,

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God's blessings be upon you, something along those lines, is the basic meaning of the words a low -level meaning?

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Because a pagan walking by could look over your shoulder, read it, and go, well, that's what it means. If the pagan can read it, then that's not really all that important.

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Is there not a higher meaning that that is supposed to have for a spiritual person?

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Where does that enter into these things? We've all seen the result of people claiming special insight to interpretation of the

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Bible. I've, unfortunately, had more of that than I would probably like to have.

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Rich has probably had a whole lot more than me, because he answers the phone, and so there are always people we get...

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I don't know, he doesn't even bother to show me most of the stuff that comes in the P .O. Box. It's printed out in blue and red letters and bold and underlined, and there are just folks out there that really have the insight, and they somehow feel that we need to know what that insight is on their end, on our end as well.

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So anyways, is there a spiritual meaning and a natural meaning of the words?

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And who's to say? Who's to say? Obviously, for example, you go to Salt Lake City, and you talk to a believing

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Mormon, and they can point you to numerous places where Joseph Smith, he looked at certain texts of Scripture, and he said this means this, and that means that, and he's a prophet, and therefore we believe that.

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And so there are texts of the Old Testament that he went to in Ezekiel, for example, and said that these were prophecies of himself, of the coming forth of the

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Book of Mormon, all sorts of things like this. And who is to say?

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If you give spiritual authority to individuals, to churches, to organizations, to a succession of people, they're going to tell you, you know, they're going to say, we'll say, we'll tell you what is and what is not tradition, what is and what is not revelation.

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Lots of folks will tell you those things. What about tradition? The Bible talks about tradition.

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The Bible even uses tradition language to talk about the passing on of the gospel message.

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What about tradition? What about the use of typology, for example? This is a type of that, that's a type of that.

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There are many, many, many questions that have to be addressed as we move into this area, and honestly, a lot of folks, a lot of churches do not want to necessarily address these things because it can be so complicated, and it can raise so many questions, and it seems like they're, in my experience, there is a maturity that comes over time that allows you to navigate these things more successfully, but young Christians, immature

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Christians that don't have a balance, that are blown about by every wind of doctrine the scripture says, tend to be the people that really grab onto this stuff, and elders in the church know how much time you can end up having to spend in those, in those contexts.

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There's so many questions. So let's, let's give an example as we start here of the subject of typology.

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I'm going to give you this quote. I'd like you to think about it and listen to what it says.

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The study of biblical typology can easily consume an avid reader or an amateur detective.

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It's fascinating to search out the ways in which, as Saint Augustine said, the New Testament is concealed in the

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Old, and the Old is revealed in the New. Typology uncovers a hidden dimension to every page of the scripture.

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Careful study shows us that God writes history the way men write words, and that He is an author of supremely subtle artistry and meticulous craft.

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He wastes no words in revelation. Nothing is incidental or accidental in God's providence.

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Typology is liberating. It frees us from the slavish reading of biblical texts in isolation from all other biblical texts and isolation from tradition.

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Typology can also be illuminating, revealing the richness of passages that had formerly seemed obscure or trivial.

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Now, these words could have been written by all sorts of people today.

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I think these words could appear in the writings of many of those who today are speaking about the great tradition and are speaking about a new way of hermeneutics and getting away from modern exegesis and modern ways of interpreting the

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Bible, and we need to see the typology and the allegory, and there's a lot of people who could say these things today.

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But who wrote these words? Well, those are the words of Dr. Scott Hahn in his book

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Hail Holy Queen, page 89. Now, you can go back to,

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I think, around 2005. I think it was around there is when we did an entire series of dividing lines in response to Dr.

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Hahn's book when it came out. If you're not familiar with who Scott Hahn is, I think he's still teaching at the

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University of Steubenville. I could be wrong about that. I haven't really checked up on him too much in the past few years, but he, along with Jerry Matatix, were two of the most famous converts to Roman Catholicism from Presbyterianism at that time period, well, back in the 90s, late 80s, early 90s, and so while Matatix has not remained in the mainstream

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Roman Catholic Church, he's a set of... well, last I heard he was a set of acants and stuff like that. Hahn has carved out for himself an interesting area where he does

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Roman Catholic theology with a Presbyterian spin, and so he's quite an interesting person.

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This was, in my personal opinion, a horrible book. The argumentation for Mary in it was just really, really bad, but it's a very common kind of argumentation, typology, for the various Marian dogmas that Rome has defined and claims to be a part of Christian tradition, and so these are his words, and this was right before he goes into a text of Scripture that he applies typology to as a part of the overall case for the

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Roman Catholic view of Mary, and if you have ever listened, you've certainly heard me make reference to the fact that I remember many years ago, again, going out on a bike ride, listening to a cassette tape of Jerry Matatix doing this rapid -fire, confidently spoken presentation on Old Testament types of Mary and how these have been explicated by tradition, by the

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Christian tradition, and then dogmatically defined by the authority of the Roman Catholic Church based upon that tradition, and I remember coming back going,

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I don't know how I'd respond to those things, but I had to find out, so I got out a different cassette tape player and put that tape in and got my biblical text out and fired up the probably 8088 style computer at that point in time with a monochrome screen, probably looked a little bit like this screen, but I'm not sure why

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I chose this color thing, but anyway, and I started going through that tape, and I started slowing it down, stopping it, let's look at the references, look, the whole thing fell apart, the whole thing fell apart, he had confidently said that this is the term that's used in the

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Septuagint here, it wasn't, and this is used by Luke over here, and it wasn't, and it was a fraud, but man, it sounded good, and one of the aspects of it was this argument, this assertion that, and look, most of us aren't spending too much time in 1

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Kings thinking about the background of this particular issue, but in 1

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Kings chapter 2, Sobasheba went to King Solomon to speak to him for Adonijah, and the king arose to meet her, bowed before her, and sat on his throne, then he had a throne set for the king's mother, and she sat on his right, then she said,

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I am making one small request of you, do not turn me away, and the king said to her, ask my mother, for I will not turn you away, and so if you're familiar with listening to Roman Catholic apologists, and their use of allegorical and typological interpretations here, you know that what they're saying is, here is a type, here is a picture, in the

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Old Testament, of the king, Jesus. Solomon is frequently,

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I mean, the New Testament specifically uses passages that were about Solomon and applies them to Jesus, right?

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Well, it does, and so the idea being, if Solomon had a throne brought out and placed there, and she is seated upon this throne, then would

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Jesus do less for his mother than Solomon did for his? You see how that works?

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And, you know, you do the same thing with the Ark of the Covenant, and try to tie it into Luke chapter 2, and most of us don't read the scriptures in that way, so when we hear someone doing that, we struggle to know exactly how to respond to that kind of thing.

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We sense that there is an issue here, but we're not exactly sure how to respond to it.

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Now, I would just happen to point out in passing that reading the context very often helps in situations like this, because if you read 1

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Kings chapter 2, and you continue on, uh, the request that she makes of Solomon, not only does

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Solomon not grant her request, but by the end of the day,

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Adonijah is dead, okay? That's what makes you go, for I will not turn you away, but the guy you're asking for is toast.

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Yeah, so the point is, with typology, you don't have to worry about the context, see?

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You don't have to worry about what was actually being communicated, because the type can go beyond that, and not worry about, well, yeah, she got rejected, and Adonijah got himself killed, but we don't have to worry about that.

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It's just this part of it fits into our tradition, our teaching, you see? And so, it works for us.

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That's how we want to do it, so you have this kind of thing happening all the time. Recently, I've been reading a book by Dr.

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Craig Carter, who is one of the primary people being cited repeatedly. Dr. Barrett, Dr.

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Barcelos, everybody at IRBS seemingly is reading this book and promoting this book, and so you need to read what these folks are putting out, and here is a section from it, and don't worry,

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I'm just covering some stuff at the beginning, so we know why it is we're going to be talking about hermeneutics in a making application.

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That's why I said it might be a little bit longer program than normal, but what is prompting such a serious discussion?

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There are many times when I'm listening to Dr. Carter, to the book, that I'm going, okay,

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I agree, I agree, yep, been saying that for years, yep, yep, yep, especially when he is talking about much of modern interpretation.

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For example, one of the areas where I think a lot of modern readers would be going, well,

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I've not heard these people before, is he talks about Brevard Childs, and I'm old enough, and in God's providence,

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I went to Fuller Theological Seminary for my first degree, and that was an experience, that was a difficult experience, it was a challenging experience, but I now know, in God's providence, why all that happened, and so I had to read

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Childs, and I knew what was going on with Childs back then, I was disappointed with some of the stuff that Childs did later, and stuff like that, but I was already involved with apologetics, and so I was already thinking about ultimate authorities, relationship tradition in scripture, you know, started dealing with Roman Catholicism, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, all these different authority structures during that time period, and so there are times that I will be, you know, when he talks about Irenaeus' skapos, the rule of faith, the scope, and he rightly points out, what

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I pointed out in the last program, that when Irenaeus does this, don't know what just happened there, but I'm sort of feeling like the world has become darker, all the lights just dimmed, and I'm not sure why, and Rich is looking at his phone going,

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I did something, but I don't know what I did, hopefully you can still see me in the dark, you can see that, you can see the beard anyway, that is one advantage, is in the dark, it could be an advantage or a disadvantage,

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I suppose, when you think about it, if someone's shooting at me, they'll always be able to find the bright glowing white thing, but anyways, it's not so bright that I can see in the dark with it, but it's getting that way, anyways,

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Moses was in the bulrushes, and yes, okay, don't touch it, you'll break it,

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I saw him playing with something back there, and you know, I've just tried to tell him, once it's working, just take the hands off and leave it alone, okay, where were we, yes,

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Irenaeus, Irenaeus' rule of faith, dealing specifically with the fact that he's dealing with the

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Gnostics, the Gnostics are coming from a completely different worldview than anything that's found anywhere in the Hebrew scriptures, and so there are certain fundamental biblical revelations that they do not start with, that you must start with for the

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Bible to make any sense, and so people will point that and say, see, you can't have solo scriptura, because you need to have this rule of faith, the problem is, that rule of faith is sub -biblical, that is, it is derived from biblical revelation, and so Irenaeus is simply saying, there are definitional things that the scriptures say about the world, that you have to start with, if you don't start with them, you're not gonna understand anything else the

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Bible has to say, that makes perfect sense, so there's things that I hear Dr. Carter saying, yep, yep, yep, yep, and when he's talking about modern, you know, when he starts talking about Schleiermacher and all these folks, look, again,

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Fuller, hours, lectures, historical search for Jesus, the quest for the historical

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Jesus, sorry, I went through it all, didn't enjoy any of it, but I wanted to get good grades, and so I listened, and I read, and now

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I know why, after all these years later, so been there, done that, got the I reject this stuff t -shirt a long, long time ago, but it's the other, it's the fact that in Dr.

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Carter's book, here is, here are your two options that are given to you,

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I wish I'd gotten a higher quality, a little bit pixelated, sorry about that, here are the two sides, and my biggest problem with Dr.

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Carter's book is, where I am, where Reformed theologians and commentators and scholars have been for centuries, just not even represented, it's like we don't even exist, it's either the classical theological interpretation, or it's the modern historical critical interpretation, and so what

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I'm hearing from all the guys at RBS and many other places is, yeah, we were doing modern exegesis, and now we're doing pre -modern exegesis, and when

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I dig into the sources, I'm going, no, we weren't, what are you talking about? We weren't doing metaphysics of Epicurean naturalism, or any of the rest of it, what are you talking about?

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I mean, I've got some commentaries over there, I mean, honestly, if you read Murray's Epistle to the

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Romans, his commentary, Epistle to the Romans, is that what you're getting there? No, not by a long shot, but anyways, let's at least see what the two extremes pointed out here, and then point out that the middle ground, which we've been in for a long, long time, just isn't addressed.

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Contrasting methods of scripture interpretation, well, these would be the two extremes, the problem is, the middle road isn't there.

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The metaphysics is Christian Platonism. I'm going to go ahead, and there are a couple things

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I want to point out here, I think it's important. Christian Platonism.

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Now, Dr. Carter believes that we need to be Christian Platonists.

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There needs to be a, Plato was no Christian, but we, obviously, but we need to have

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Christian Platonism. And the metaphysics of the other side is Epicurean naturalism.

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Now, does that mean Paul was a Christian Platonist, I wonder? I've not heard any of them make that claim, but I do have to wonder about it.

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Under classical theological interpretation, the method of interpretation is faith seeking understanding by means of philosophical meditation on special revelation, which corrects and supplements general revelation.

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Now, I'm not, you're reading, this is taken straight out of the Kindle book, okay? So, means, faith seeking understanding by means of philosophical meditation on special revelation.

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Now, I'll be honest with you, if someone had said in our circles 20 years ago that this is how we interpret, that we do philosophical meditation on special revelation, that would have caused everybody in our group at that time to go, huh?

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But now, oh, things change. Under the modern historical critical interpretation, the method of interpretation is the historical critical approach, which excludes special revelation and relies exclusively on general revelation by employing methodological naturalism.

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Now, are there people to do that? Sure. You know, a lot of what we would call the liberal mainline denominations that fall into naturalistic materialism and things like that, that's all they've got.

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There is no special revelation in the sense of inspiration of the text of scripture or anything like that at all.

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And so, you know, I'm not going to waste the brain cells to remember the chick's name, but there's this, you know,

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Lutheran lady with the colorful stole thing that pops up in Twitter about every year or so with some new wild -eyed heresy.

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That's all they've got. I spend my criticism of liberalism, leftism for a long, long time.

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I don't know why they do theology. They don't believe God's spoken, so why bother? In fact, you know why this program's called the dividing line?

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Because that dividing line is whether you believe God has spoken with clarity and perspicuity and sufficiency or not.

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That's what the dividing line is. That's why we named it that decades and decades ago, coming up on, oh goodness, coming up on 40 years ago.

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Yeah. Next year, next year, 40 years ago. So are there people to do this?

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Yeah. But is there something in here, maybe, possibly, between philosophical meditation of special revelation and excluding special revelation and relying exclusively on general revelation?

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Yeah, that's where Calvin is. That's where the

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Princeton divines were. That's where any of the, you know, that's where Sproul was, and they're in there.

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We're all in there. Any decent, good commentary is in there. There's a chasm that's missing that's not being addressed here.

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Classical theological interpretation, the social location is the church located ideally within Christendom.

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I'm not sure exactly what that means, but there you go.

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The social location is the secularized research university within a secularizing post -Christendom society.

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Well, again, if these are your two choices, they're rather stark, aren't they?

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Number four of the result is the handing on of the core orthodoxy of the ecumenical creeds.

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Who, I would just ask in passing, who gets to define what the core orthodoxy is?

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Because I can assure you, if that's a recognition that, for example, the

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Second Nicene Council in its discussion of images used biblical argumentation, and this is interesting because it'd be really hard for these folks to not argue that the

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Second Nicene Council's biblical argumentation is part of the great tradition, but it's laughably foolish.

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It's horrible. It's childishly bad, but it's got to be part of the great tradition.

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So is there a filter there? So is that not core orthodoxy? Who gets to decide? They thought it was.

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They thought all of it was core orthodoxy. Number four, the result is the new religion of salvation through technology, education, and social progress, i .e.

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progressivism. So we can see, okay, all of this goes way over that direction, okay?

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But the question is, how far does that go? And what happened to everything in between, where the rest of us have been for a long, long time, where you accept special revelation, and you believe in the grammatical historical interpretation of scripture, and you believe in special revelation, and the unity of scripture, and the inspiration of scripture, but you do not believe that Christian Platonism is even slightly relevant to the proper interpretation of the use of the

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Old Testament Book of Revelation? That's just not there. It's maddening because it's like, what happened to that part?

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And we're not told. But that gives you an idea of what it is that's going on here.

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Now, one more up -to -date example, and then we can start getting into some of the specifics.

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This was from yesterday on Twitter. You can't get too much more up -to -date than that,

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I don't think. This is a thread on Twitter. I'll give the author here when we get to the end, that I thought really sort of helped to summarize the conversation that's going on.

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God cannot be contained or examined in a Petri dish or Excel spreadsheet, and neither can his word.

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Okay, who's going to argue with that, right? I mean, no one's going to argue that God can be contained in a

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Petri dish or an Excel spreadsheet. And, of course, his word can't either, but it does not follow that there are not objective, in this world, realities of God's word that we can examine and must examine.

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I think it's vital to examine the manuscripts at Romans 5 .1 and the textual variation between the subjunctive and the other manuscripts there, whether it's an indicative or a subjunctive verb that's found in Romans 5 .1.

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That's something that needs to be analyzed. That needs to be something that is examined. There is a place for that.

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Why? Because God gave us his word in history and in time. God works in history and time, and therefore there is that aspect, and we dare not miss that.

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We dare not miss that. Looking for an exegetical method that feeds your craving for a predictable outcome every single time.

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Every single time. And in every single text, risks idolatry of reason over faith.

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Now, again, I'm not totally sure what is being said here. I don't know what your craving is, but the best reading would be, you don't want to look for an exegetical method that just simply produces what you want to produce.

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That'd be the nicest way of reading it. But there needs to be an exegetical method that will give the same meaning to my grandchildren as it did to my grandparents.

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Yes? I mean, there's a fair amount of time in between those two.

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And you could argue that if you have a development of tradition over time, that maybe that's something that shouldn't exist.

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But I think when you read, you know, the language in Jude, the ones for all delivered to the saints faith, that that means that there is an objective sameness that allows us to be worshiping

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God in the same way despite the changes in the world around us. And that means you do need an exegetical method that will consistently honor the

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Word of God by communicating it to generation after generation because it is seeking to tap into and reveal that objective meaning that's in the text itself if there is an objective meaning.

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We certainly, I certainly believe there is. But there are some people that say that there isn't.

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This is not to say, of course, that there aren't faithful approaches and hermeneutical moves.

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I'll be honest with you. I've seen, I've been starting to see this a few times. I'm not sure what a hermeneutical move is.

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But faithful approaches and hermeneutical moves, one can and should make.

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But it's a very modern and novel idea in church history. I'll have to admit,

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I'm seeing a lot of claims being made by people about church history that, you know,

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I don't know everything there is to know about church history, but I've been teaching it for over 30 years.

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And I'm just getting the feeling that it's being turned into Plato, to be formed into whatever you want it to be formed into.

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And there are kids, and they literally are kids, that are making claims about church history.

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And I'm just sitting here going, I'm sorry, kid, you ain't old enough to have read enough yet to be saying the stuff you say.

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So I'm a little skeptical when I see the church history claim.

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Okay, yeah, all right, anyway. But it's a very modern and novel idea in church history that we treat scripture, quote, like any other book, end quote, such that it becomes just another object to observe and dissect.

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Now, this has become very important because I am going to say that there are certain aspects of hermeneutics where we do treat the

39:22

Bible like any other book. We have to, for a simple reason.

39:28

The Bible itself says men spoke. And so when it comes to language, grammar, syntax, we can't do the, oh, this was

39:40

Koine Greek was actually Holy Spirit Greek. Did you know there was a whole period of time where people believe that?

39:46

Before we started discovering the papyri and things like that, Koine Greek seemed so different from classical

39:54

Greek that there was, for a while, the theory that the New Testament was, God actually used a new language.

40:00

He created a new language just for the New Testament. Now, we know now that's silly, but there were people who believed that.

40:09

And so, so much of our advances in our knowledge of the history of the text and the meaning of the text, lexicography, has come from a recognition that we can dig into the fact that the

40:25

Bible has been revealed in time. You know, you can go to Jerusalem and we can find the

40:31

Garden of Gethsemane. I've been there. Is that treating the Bible like it's just any other book because you can go and find the places historically?

40:40

No, it's because the Bible tells us a historical story. God acted in time and he spoke in human language.

40:49

And so we have to start with what he gave us, which is the common possession of human language.

40:56

And so on that level, yes, you do, like any other book, you deal with its text, you deal with its manuscripts, you deal with its language.

41:07

You just don't stop there. And I'm still amazed that I'm hearing people actually pretend that that's what we were doing only 20 years ago amongst

41:17

Reformed Baptists or something, is we were just, we were treating it like any other book. And no, we weren't.

41:24

I've never done that. It's like a new whole history is being made up that never actually existed.

41:32

I was there. I remember. My memory's not that bad yet. It's actually pretty good. It's short -term memory that I have a problem with, not long -term memory.

41:40

I remember what you were saying back then, and none of you guys who wrote this stuff were saying the stuff you're saying now. And you know it.

41:46

You know it. It must bug you when I point the camera and say, you know it, because you know it.

41:52

You do. So like any other book, in those places where it overlaps with every other book, in how it exists in history, how it's been transmitted in manuscripts, how it's written in human language, that doesn't mean you stop there.

42:11

That doesn't mean that there's not a supernatural unity to the book. Every book I've ever written,

42:16

I've written a few, is founded upon the idea that there is a supernatural unity to Scripture.

42:24

And I didn't come up with that. That's been what we've been teaching for a long, long, long, long time.

42:33

So it's important to say that. So the quote continues on. Scripture is not a special book among other books.

42:46

It is the very revelation of the triune God. Well, it is the very revelation of the triune God, and that makes it a special book among other books, because God has chosen to reveal it in such a way that we will be able to read it, and we will be able to transmit and translate it into languages and do all sorts of stuff like that.

43:05

Under his providential inspiration, it was written in particular times and places, but isn't bound by them.

43:12

Isn't bound by them. Okay, right. It has a meaning outside of the time period in which it was written, but I think it's really obvious that when you interpret the

43:31

Corinthian epistles, that you should pay attention to what was going on in Corinth.

43:37

You should pay attention to the book of Revelation. You need to be paying attention to what's going on in God's working in history, and the destruction of Jerusalem, and all sorts of stuff like that.

43:52

So it's not bound by them, but it's influenced by them. That is an important aspect of it. You can't ignore that.

43:59

This is why we see unity and interconnectedness in these 66 disparate books. Yes, they are all the word of God.

44:07

They are men speaking in different languages at different times in different contexts, but what they're saying comes from God.

44:14

Agree wholeheartedly. The infinite God graciously stoops down to us in our creaturely finitude through inspiration, incarnation, and indwelling.

44:23

So we don't view scripture as a problem to solve, may it never be. No, we humble ourselves in faith, reading scripture to meet

44:31

God, not figure him out. Well, the only thing I would...

44:36

that last line there bothers me. It's not a matter of to figure him out in some disrespectful creaturely fashion, but God does not want us to worship him in ignorance either.

44:47

He doesn't. That's pagan worship. So he's revealed us that we may know him, and therefore be able to worship him aright.

44:56

And this bears repeating. The Bible's so, and this is the big thing I'm seeing, and this is why

45:02

I'm doing it. This is a big thing that I'm seeing right now in all this stuff.

45:10

And this bears repeating. The Bible's primary locus of meaning is not the inaccessible mind of the human author.

45:20

So what I'm hearing, I've heard a number of people saying that when they were in seminary, they were taught that what you do is you want to know what the intention of the author was to communicate to his primary audience.

45:37

And they're criticizing that. They're saying, that's all I was ever... that's what exegesis was, is you just need to find out.

45:45

And so now we have the inaccessible mind of the human author, because they're dead. They're dead. So you can't get into the inaccessible mind of the human author any longer, you see?

45:54

Now, I cannot debate whether these men were actually taught that that's all you're doing, or that was the first step.

46:05

That was a primary and important step before you do other steps of interpretation, because I was certainly taught much more than just simply, well, once you've got the original author's intention, that's it.

46:19

You're done. You can go play golf now, or do whatever. That was not my experience. But if you listen to some people, that's sort of what they're saying their experience was.

46:29

We have this inaccessible mind of the human author. The primary locus is in the words they wrote, which are

46:41

God's words that he told them to write. The God and Word who is outside of time and space and transcends time and space.

46:52

Now, again, on one level, you can go, sure, agree with all of that. At the same time, men spoke.

47:03

And Paul's grammar and vocabulary and syntax is different than Mark's, and certainly different than John's, and a whole lot different than the writer to the

47:16

Hebrews. That's reality. Can't ignore it. It's important.

47:24

So you have to, you can't just start closing off areas. Especially, you also cannot close off areas of study because they've been abused by liberals.

47:34

That would pretty much close off everything. Liberals are going to abuse things.

47:42

Just because someone's abused it doesn't mean that we stop studying it. A good way to engage and learn a different idiom when it comes to hermeneutics is to read folks like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Jean As is

47:54

Gregory Nazianzus, Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, Luther, or Calvin.

47:59

Now, I've read all these individuals, not everything they've written, but I've read from all these individuals that I can assure you, you will find a tremendous amount of variation.

48:12

I mean, Justin Martyr doesn't, we don't, there's good evidence he doesn't even have a complete canon, okay?

48:20

That impacts Justin's theology, his conclusions, his interpretations, hermeneutics. The man never took off the philosopher's pallium.

48:29

He was a Greek philosopher. But anyway, all have nuanced approaches but shared sensibilities about what the

48:38

Bible is and that's Brandon Smith, professor at Cedarville. And this just gives you some of the vibe that we are experiencing right now.

48:52

Okay, one last thing. I know you're sitting here going, you keep saying one last thing. Here's Dr.

48:59

Carter. And this just, it sort of speaks for itself.

49:04

It really speaks for itself in some senses. The big thing we're hearing about now is the great tradition, the great tradition.

49:17

Never heard any Reformed Baptist ever make reference to it until recent years.

49:23

But now it's the be -all and end -all. It's a big thing. The first person to ever use that terminology to me was a leading textual critical scholar in 2019 in Munster.

49:34

Munster, West Germany. Just dated myself. Munster, Germany. So what is the great tradition, you may be asking?

49:44

Well, let's find out. The great tradition was a three -legged stool.

49:53

That made me stop immediately. You know why it made me? Because how many times, if you've listened to any of our debates with Roman Catholics on soul scriptura, you have heard them talk about the three -legged stool.

50:07

In their context, it's not made up of this, but they talk about this mixed source of authority.

50:16

Scripture, tradition, magisterium. Scripture, tradition, magisterium. All the time. Three -legged stool. So the great tradition was a three -legged stool made up of spiritual exegesis,

50:31

Nicene dogma, and Christian, I have to open this one up,

50:41

Christian Platonist metaphysics. Now, I'll be honest with you, in our day, if you're trying to sell the great tradition, you just lost pretty much everybody.

50:54

Because most everybody's going, spiritual exegesis.

51:01

Is that what they do on Channel 21? You know, TBN? Spiritual exegesis?

51:07

Because the spirits exegete and stuff for them all the time. Nicene dogma.

51:15

You mean the Nicene Creed? The Deity of Christ? Homo Eusebius? And Christian Platonist metaphysics.

51:23

Well, you know, if I wanted to absolutely make sure that no one showed up at a study, because I didn't want to do the study.

51:35

I wanted to go catch a movie that night. I would announce it was going to be on Christian Platonist metaphysics, and even

51:42

I wouldn't show up. So yeah. So there's your three -legged stool.

51:49

Spiritual exegesis, Nicene dogma, and Christian Platonist metaphysics.

51:55

I didn't write it. By pressing deep into the meaning of the text contemplatively.

52:06

Again, for a lot of folks, you're going, what?

52:12

And I look at this and I go, yeah, I've read this stuff before. I've had to read the contemplative classics of the mystics from the medieval period.

52:26

So yeah. Okay. All right. But it's not being defined here for us.

52:33

And our author's a Baptist. And so we're going, okay.

52:39

Pressing deep into the meaning of the text contemplatively. Spiritual exegesis yielded the

52:47

Trinitarian and Christological dogmas, which in turn generated certain metaphysical doctrines, such as creation ex nihilo, and the reality of the spiritual realm.

52:59

Now, I want you to note something here. We're not going to spend much more time on that. But spiritual exegesis yielded the

53:09

Trinitarian and Christological dogma. Why do you think that would catch my attention really quickly?

53:20

Because I spend a great deal of time seeking to present the

53:27

Christian faith outside the bounds of the Christian faith. And that includes to people who already hold beliefs, theological beliefs, that would exclude

53:41

Nicene dogma, specifically that Jesus is fully

53:47

God. The doctrine of the Trinity, central aspect of Christian theology.

53:55

But how do you present, when I went into what was at the time the second largest mosque in the

54:04

Southern Hemisphere of the world, in Durban, South Africa, and defended the deity of Christ in front of over a thousand people, most of whom were

54:17

Muslims. How could I do that utilizing spiritual exegesis, which is derived contemplatively?

54:33

How do you do that? Well, you can. And so if the

54:40

Trinitarian Christological dogmas come from a special contemplative form of spiritual exegesis, then they cannot be communicated to people outside the

54:48

Christian faith. And so you really can't defend these things outside the Christian faith. It's the end of apologetic.

54:56

And I think there would be some people who would go, and that's fine. I really do think there might be some people going, yeah, that's fine.

55:05

But then, which in turn generated certain metaphysical doctrines, such as creation ex nihilo.

55:10

I thought there was, I thought that was sort of the necessary conclusion of Isaiah 40 to 48.

55:17

And the reality of the spiritual realm. I honestly think an atheist could read the

55:26

New Testament and go, that says there's a spiritual realm. But anyway, the metaphysics then created a hospitable context for further spiritual exegesis, in which the interpreter penetrated through the literal sense, origin lives, to that to which the text referred, the spiritual or heavenly realities that led upward eventually to participation in the divine radiance.

56:04

I was thinking about maybe asking Rich to give his own paraphrase of that. But the look on his face would indicate that that would probably be a useless attempt on my part.

56:22

Rich is not impressed right now. I'm just, I'm just letting you know. So, it continues.

56:28

Let's finish this up. Let's finish the introduction up. Yeah, okay.

56:36

It was all based on a sacramental ontology.

56:43

Again, my fellow Baptist brothers, you want to look me in the eye and tell me that we were talking about sacramental ontology 20 years ago?

56:57

What were we doing? We weren't talking about the Trinity back then? Were we just wasting our time?

57:05

Making minced meat out of the confession, as one person put it recently? This was all based on a sacramental ontology, in which creaturely things, words, were taken up into the divine and made into signs which conveyed the reality to which they pointed.

57:27

Now, again, this language is very common. But it's very common in certain

57:33

Eastern Orthodox writings, in the mystics, within Roman Catholicism. This is very, very, very common language.

57:40

You would encounter it, read Levering and others, you'll see where the connections are.

57:47

Very, very quickly. Great tradition exegesis. So, not just the great tradition, but now, great tradition exegesis was and is a profoundly spiritual and moral act.

58:03

Listen to this. In which the interpreter, who succeeds,

58:10

I don't know about you, but succeeds in grasping the true res or subject matter of the text.

58:22

It sounds like a spiritual accomplishment. This is the language of the monastery.

58:29

This is the language of monasticism. This is the language of the medieval period, where you're seeking to accomplish certain heights of contemplation, which is why you would pray the hours and you'd be up at three o 'clock in the morning.

58:50

Yes, this is the same language. So, you grasp, succeeds in grasping the true res or subject matter of the text.

59:01

And when you do this, you are irrevocably transformed in the process, sanctified and turned into one who possesses eternal life.

59:21

Do you see that? That's soteriology. And the one thing that these guys are running from is a question

59:30

I asked last time and I will ask again. What is the gospel of the great tradition? Because this is soteriology.

59:38

Sanctification, possessing eternal life, the result of doing great tradition exegesis.

59:49

Greg Carter, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition, page 111. At least according to my Kindle version, you know how sometimes that works.

59:58

You see why we're doing this? You see why we have students in these schools that are going, help, what's going on here?

01:00:09

Everything's changing. Yeah, it is. And some of us are going to respond and challenge it and say, there's some problems here.

01:00:21

All right, fundamentals of hermeneutics. Hey, right at one hour. I did not plan it that way, but it worked out.

01:00:29

Fundamentals of hermeneutics, lexicography, grammar, syntax, genre, close context, far context.

01:00:36

Got it? We can move on, right? No, obviously not. That doesn't sound overly, you know, one of the advantages, that doesn't sound overly spiritual.

01:00:47

Let me tell you something. I wrote a book, didn't bring it with me. I wrote a book, probably put a collection of them on the wall or something like that because I frequently have to grab them one way or the other.

01:01:02

I wrote a book in response to Harold Camping. Remember all that? Nobody remembers much of that anymore. Poor Harold has gone the way of the world.

01:01:11

But in that book, I responded to Harold Camping's attack upon the church and how the church did interpretation of the

01:01:20

Bible because he was into numerology and just wild -eyed interpretation that he would come up with.

01:01:29

One of the points I that book was this. If we believe God has spoken, but we believe men spoke from God as they were carried along by the

01:01:40

Holy Spirit, the greatest way for me or any other minister of the gospel to show respect for the

01:01:49

Word of God and the only way for us to stand before the people of God and to be able to say, thus saith the

01:01:56

Lord, is not to have a spiritual experience of contemplation.

01:02:02

It is to do the work to accurately handle what

01:02:07

God has given to us in his Word. So that when I stand in Mesa, Arizona and open the

01:02:16

Word of God and I use God -honoring hermeneutics that is seeking to understand the objective truth that is revealed in that Word, then a person doing the same thing in a different language halfway around the world will be saying the same things, and we are honoring

01:02:32

God and his Word by doing that. And that is a spiritual act of worship and service.

01:02:39

Oh, it means studying lexicography. Yes, it does. Yes, it does.

01:02:45

But that is a spiritual act of worship of God. Don't let anybody steal that from you.

01:02:51

Lexicography is vital. We are so blessed. It's astonishing today the resources we have available to us.

01:02:59

At any one point now I can click on a word and have multiple lexicons open up where men have spent countless hours chasing these words through resources that we did not have a hundred years ago.

01:03:16

We've got it now. We should be thankful for that. It should never be a, oh, lexicon.

01:03:22

We should be so thankful that we have that kind of information available. We need to know what the words mean.

01:03:29

We can't be making them up. It can't just be a tradition. We have discovered, for example, over the past century that there were words in the

01:03:40

King James Version of the Bible that we got wrong because we didn't know at the time. In 1611, we didn't know what it referred to.

01:03:49

And now we know. So lexicography, vitally important. You've got to know what the words meant at the time they were written.

01:04:01

Or you're not dealing with the text. If you want to talk about what the words mean to you today, you have to start with what they meant then.

01:04:11

You can't make application until you start at that point. Or you're not dealing with the text and just stop pretending that you are.

01:04:19

Stop pretending that you are. I can't tell you how many times dealing with people in cults, they've given me an interpretation of the text that was based completely in their modern context.

01:04:30

They could care less what Paul meant or what John meant or what Isaiah meant. That's irrelevant to them.

01:04:37

Well, you're not dealing with the text at that point. And you cannot claim that you are. Lexicography, what the words mean, what they meant.

01:04:45

And that would also be the study of semantic domains. You can't get into all that kind of stuff. Very, very important and very, very useful stuff.

01:04:53

Then when you start looking at text, you've got to look at the grammar. We communicate in certain languages in certain ways.

01:05:05

And when we put words down on a piece of paper, we put them down in a certain order.

01:05:10

In some languages, that order is extremely important. In others, it's not. And in some languages, we use certain forms that indicate how the words relate to one another.

01:05:20

In other languages, it's more position and things like that. Languages are amazingly different from one another.

01:05:27

But there is a grammar to every one. There's a grammar to Hebrew. There's a grammar to Aramaic. There is a grammar to Koine Greek.

01:05:34

And there are different kinds of grammar even in New Testament. Very clearly, Luke, Acts, very classical.

01:05:42

A more formal grammar than certainly 1 John, certainly than Mark, Matthew.

01:05:51

Matthew's grammar is influenced by the fact that the writer obviously was an

01:05:57

Aramaic speaker. And so the grammar determines the relationship of words and hence the meanings from lexicography of those words as the author is expressing himself.

01:06:13

As the author is expressing himself. And the writers of the Bible express themselves in different ways.

01:06:20

It wasn't simply dictated to them. God used the men that he chose to use to write scripture in the way he wanted that scripture to be given to him.

01:06:29

I'm actually seeing some of these folks almost going to the dictation side. It's really weird.

01:06:37

There's no reason for dictation. God's bigger than dictation. Anybody who reads the original languages knows this was not dictated.

01:06:44

But it is exactly what God wanted. And God's big enough to do that because he chose the people, made them the way they were.

01:06:50

There you go. That works. Grammar, vitally important. Syntax, the next step beyond grammar.

01:06:56

Whenever you finish first year Greek, the best way to absolutely deflate someone who's excited they just finished first year

01:07:02

Greek is to tell them about second year Greek and say, ah, you now recognize the genitive ablative form, but there are about 25 forms of those.

01:07:12

And they just like give up and go become an IT guy. Syntax is the relationships of words and clauses to one another, which again, varies from language to language as to how much information that can carry.

01:07:27

But it's extremely important. And some translations are better than others. And we've discovered certain things about ancient languages, even since the days of the

01:07:37

King James, that allow us to be a little bit more accurate than in the past.

01:07:43

And that's an important thing. Genre, I mentioned this before. You always look at what am

01:07:49

I reading here? Am I reading an epistle that was written to a church? Is that different than an epistle that's written to an individual?

01:07:55

Well, in some way. I mean, the pronouns are going to be different, a few things like that, but you might have different language being used in a personal letter than you would something else.

01:08:06

How is that different in the Book of Revelation? Well, everything is different in the Book of Revelation. The Book of Revelation is different in everything. Might be the way to put it.

01:08:12

But you need to look at the genre. And this is really important in, remember last year when we went through Isaiah chapter 40 in response to the

01:08:23

Molinist stuff? What's one of the things that we did is we got into the Hebrew text, recognizing we're looking at Hebrew poetry.

01:08:33

And Hebrew poetry has certain features to it. The fact that you will have repetition of Hebrew parallelism.

01:08:43

This is how Hebrew can paint with deeper colors, in essence.

01:08:49

But if you just wouldn't literally translate it and interpret it, you're going to end up with, well, for example, the

01:09:00

Holy of Holies. We've all heard the Holy of Holies, right? That just simply means the holiest place.

01:09:06

In English, by rendering it in a literal sense, you end up missing what it's actually trying to communicate.

01:09:14

The holiest place. You see? So all these languages, genres will indicate these things.

01:09:23

Close context and far context. So obviously, as we saw in looking at Adonijah and Solomon and Bathsheba, close context, the immediate context, always finish to the end of the paragraph and start at the beginning.

01:09:39

Because very frequently, that's where you find so much that helps you understand what's going on.

01:09:46

But far context would be looking at, if we're looking at Paul's epistles, you'd look at like the

01:09:55

Corinthian correspondence. The close context would be the various parts of 1 Corinthians. And then you have the letter of 1

01:10:03

Corinthians as a whole. But then you have the Corinthian correspondence. That's the next step in going outward from that point.

01:10:09

And then you have Paul's, you could look at prison epistles, you could look at when he's traveling, just at his epistles to churches versus his epistles to individuals.

01:10:21

But then you have the Pauline corpus, all of Paul's writings together. And then you have to go out from there to the

01:10:29

New Testament as a whole. And so your context is circles that get bigger and bigger and bigger.

01:10:36

And it's pretty much here that you end up with the divide between believing exegesis and unbelieving exegesis.

01:10:45

Because the unbeliever can do all this stuff. I remember years ago, back in the old days of KFYI here in Phoenix, they're still around, but I think they don't have a whole lot of local programming much anymore in comparison to what they had in the past.

01:11:02

But there was a talk station, and I went in the studio to do a debate, I think it was on the phone actually, with an atheist.

01:11:12

And it was fascinating because he said, oh yeah, obviously

01:11:17

I've read the Bible. And yeah, the Bible teaches predestination and election, and it's just right there, just obvious.

01:11:23

He could see it. He didn't believe it, but he could see it. He could do all this stuff.

01:11:29

He could accurately handle this stuff. And it doesn't require a regenerate mind to read a

01:11:35

Greek lexicon. So you could do this type of stuff. But it's pretty much here where you get the dividing line as to what it is you're dealing with.

01:11:47

Because he'll say, yeah, it says that there, but it then contradicts itself over here. Or Paul contradicts himself there.

01:11:55

And that's where that earlier dichotomy that we saw just doesn't even begin to address the reality of the fact that you have, in Christian exegesis, the recognition that Jesus taught us this is the

01:12:14

God. And so there has to be consistency. And so it's when you get into the close and the far context that you start recognizing these things.

01:12:27

Let me expand that out a little bit. Context is, in fact, king.

01:12:36

And we talk about the context as saying that includes the author, the audience, the language, the format, the time, and the setting.

01:12:44

And so it is vitally important, if we have the information, to know who the author is.

01:12:50

How wonderful it has been to have information about what

01:13:00

Paul's experience would have been as a first -century Jew. Because he makes reference to things.

01:13:07

He cites from people. And we know about Gamaliel. And we know about Shammai and Hillel.

01:13:15

And that's wonderful stuff. And there have been generations of Christians that did not know any of that stuff.

01:13:22

They didn't know any of that stuff. That doesn't make us better than them. It just means we've been given real great blessing to have even further light that we can have upon the text and upon who the author is.

01:13:34

But there are places we don't know the author. We don't know who wrote certain books of the Bible. Audience?

01:13:42

Don't always know that either. What was the audience of Job? Well, the whole world, I guess you suppose you could say, in a sense.

01:13:49

But when it was first written, was there a specific audience? With Paul's epistles, we know. Vitally important.

01:13:55

Corinthian corresponds again. Wow, there were pagan temples everywhere. Really important. Why is

01:14:01

Paul talking about eating meat sacrificed to idols? Because he's talking to the Corinthians. And that's the only place you can get meat.

01:14:08

Important stuff. If you've got the information, use it. I think that's different than contemplatively thinking about the text.

01:14:21

You can contemplate what it was like to be in Corinth, but that's a different thing. Obviously, language.

01:14:27

What language is being spoken? This raises issues in regards, for example, to the fact, the fundamental fact that 1 and 2

01:14:37

Peter, very different style. And so many people will say, couldn't have been written by the same guy.

01:14:44

Except one of them mentions an amanuensis, a scribe. So that raises issues. Did Peter dictate in Greek?

01:14:53

Or did Peter dictate in Aramaic, and it was translated into Greek by the scribe? That raises questions about the locus of inspiration.

01:15:02

Because it does not say authors are inspired. It's the words that are inspired. But these are vitally important issues.

01:15:09

Language. In Jeremiah, when God gives to his people who are now in Babylonian captivity, the words they're supposed to give their

01:15:20

Babylonian captors when they're invited to worship false gods, he switches from Hebrew to Aramaic. Gives them the very words and the very language they need to say to the people.

01:15:27

Language. Vitally important. By the way, most of the tradition from the early church to the medieval period had access to none of that information.

01:15:40

None of it. Format. What format is the author putting it in?

01:15:49

Is there a reason for the—when you look at Revelation, and you look at the bowls, and look at the vials, and the order of things, the format it's placed in.

01:15:59

The time and the setting. It sure is important to take the time to recognize what's going on in Rome at the time of Jesus' birth.

01:16:10

And the census, and everything—the Pax Romana that's going on. These are all vitally important things that shed a tremendous amount of light.

01:16:19

Let's do a quick example. Let's a text of Scripture.

01:16:30

Now, let's be honest. 99 .995 % of Christians around the world—well,

01:16:38

I suppose I should make that a little bit lower because I suppose some people in Greece, anyways, would be able to wander their way through it because they've seen enough stuff plastered on walls, even though this is point

01:16:49

A Greek and it's in a different form of writing. But this is

01:16:56

Colossians chapter 2, verses 8 through 10. See to it that no one takes you captive, philosophy, so on and so forth.

01:17:05

This is how it appears in Codex Sinaiticus. So you have to remember, we talk about—even when we talk about exegesis of the text today, there have already been steps of interpretation to get to where you're sitting there with your

01:17:26

English Bible, because that's how it started. If you're looking at it, you'll notice that just looks like a long line of capital letters.

01:17:34

Yep, exactly it is. That's how it was written for the first 900 to 1 ,000 years of its history.

01:17:41

Capital letters, no space between words, almost no punctuation. There are a couple interesting things.

01:17:48

There's even a textual variant down here at the bottom, which we won't get into right now because we don't have time to, but that's how it started. And another thing has to be kept in mind is there were a lot of people in the

01:18:02

West, and one of the people that had the most impact in the early formulation of what would become

01:18:09

Western theology, Augustine, wasn't very good at this language at all. And that's not the language that he did theology in.

01:18:16

He did theology in Latin. And there are places where that really has a huge impact.

01:18:24

It really does. So when we look at Colossians chapter 2, and then this is what a pastor would be looking at if he was looking at his

01:18:36

Greek New Testament, preparing to preach on this, and now it's been made much more easily readable.

01:18:45

But you're looking at each of these words has a relationship to other words.

01:18:54

And so we have to look at the context of Colossians. We need to struggle with the fact that Colossians specifically addresses issues related to what we would call today

01:19:11

Gnosticism, or at least Proto -Gnosticism. We need to wrestle with what is he warning them about?

01:19:19

Because this is a warning. See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophias and empty deception.

01:19:32

And why are these empties? Because they're according to the tradition, the parodicin of man.

01:19:38

It's human tradition. According to the elementary principles, the

01:19:43

Stoicaia of the world and not Catechriston.

01:19:50

So Christ is the standard, not these other things.

01:19:57

These are things that we are commanded to look out, make sure no one takes you captive, makes you a captive through philosophy and empty deception.

01:20:10

Christ is the standard. So we have to recognize, we have to be able to identify what these things meant.

01:20:20

And then notice that there is a break, rather than according to Christ.

01:20:26

And then we see a Hati clause, because in him, that is in Christ, dwells

01:20:34

Katoikai, Ponta, Pleromates, Theateta, Somaticos, the fullness of deity in bodily form.

01:20:44

So if he is the incarnate one, if that which makes God, God, and we need to recognize that's different than Theot.

01:20:52

This is Theot. That's found in Romans chapter one. That's God that's translated there,

01:20:58

Godhead. The King James, this is translated Godhead. That's a mistranslation. The King James is misleading. This is a stronger term.

01:21:03

This is that which makes God, God. That which makes God, God dwelt bodily in Jesus Christ. This is where Nicaea gets its dogma from the actual exegesis of the text.

01:21:14

Not some contemplative thinking about it.

01:21:20

You look up what the word means. Dwells bodily.

01:21:27

And in him, you have been made complete, who is the head of all authority and power.

01:21:33

That's Jesus Christ. So all of this is the close context.

01:21:41

So we were looking at lexicography. We looked at Theotitos. We could look at the imperatival form of of blepite.

01:21:49

So we can look up the lexicography. We're doing grammar. We're doing syntax. And then we put this into the context of all of Colossians, and all of Paul's theology, and all the

01:22:03

New Testament. And this is allowing this to have the same meaning for us today as it will have for our grandchildren, and our great -grandchildren, and as it had for those who came before us.

01:22:20

So that we can stand in the same, we'll go ahead and use term, tradition. But it's not a tradition that's derived from outside.

01:22:28

It comes from the consistency of this. So when

01:22:35

I hear people saying, well I was taught that you, you know, all you did was exegesis, was just finding out what the original author intended to communicate to his audience.

01:22:44

If you're not doing that, close the Bible and become a contemplative monk. Because you're no longer dealing with scripture.

01:22:54

Now is that enough? No. I'm not saying that's enough. But you cannot make application, you can't do the the spiritual application until you know what in the world the text is actually saying.

01:23:08

So it's not an either -or, it's a both -and. You need to do the exegesis.

01:23:14

You need to start here. Because if you don't start here, then wherever you are starting becomes your ultimate authority.

01:23:24

It becomes the lens through which you view everything else. If you don't start here, you're not dealing with scripture. You're not dealing with that which is the outermost stuff.

01:23:33

You just have to understand that. So, I'll go ahead and just, it'll look silly for a second, but that's all right.

01:23:42

Anybody picks on that, doesn't matter. But should you only be concerned about historical grammatical exegesis?

01:23:49

What about the fact the Bible is a divine book, that it is God -breathed? Well, believing exegesis must start with the text itself.

01:23:58

Any adoption of an external tradition, filter, lens, or set of creedal or confessional concepts results inevitably in the subjection of scripture itself to uninspired standards.

01:24:11

You can't get away from this. The only way to maintain sola scriptura, and I believe in it,

01:24:21

I'll defend it, and I will never use it as a punchline. The only way to defend sola scriptura is to, first of all, recognize it as a statement about scriptural ontology.

01:24:34

It is the anusta. That makes it absolutely unique. And then, to never place it under the authority of, interpretationally, in any other way, of something outside of itself.

01:24:52

So, do I believe in the Nicene Creed? Yes, because the

01:25:00

Nicene Creed is consistent with the biblical revelation of who

01:25:06

Jesus Christ is. If you believe the Nicene Creed and then use it as your matrix to read the

01:25:14

New Testament, then you have to answer the question, why do you believe the Nicene Creed? Because it's coming from someplace else, and that's going to cause some real problems for you down the line.

01:25:25

You may not know it now, but you'll figure it out once your students are leaving and going other places.

01:25:32

You'll get it at that point. So, inevitably, it will lead to the subjection of scripture itself to uninspired standards if you're not starting in the right place.

01:25:44

But this does not mean that we join the naturalists in our exegesis. This presentation of some kind of dichotomy to where you're either doing what the liberals do, or you're doing the great tradition stuff, is just simply not true.

01:26:04

It's just simply not true. I said I'd grab these. I guess

01:26:14

I'll put them here for the moment. Let me point out, here are two of what

01:26:20

I think are some of the best commentaries on Romans.

01:26:25

John Murray's Epistle to the Romans. Douglas Moos' Epistle to the Romans. Both these men believe the

01:26:32

Bible's Word of God. Both these men seek to harmonize their conclusions with all of scripture.

01:26:43

So they're not reading Romans separate from the canon. They're not reading it separate from inspiration.

01:26:52

But what do both of them do? Both of them do grammatical historical interpretation of the text.

01:26:58

And then when you come to conclusions as to, okay, that means that the text could mean this, this, and this, then what is consistent with the rest of Pauline theology, what's said over in Galatians, that starts to come in because you believe in the inspiration of the entirety of the text.

01:27:22

But they start with grammatical historical interpretation. They're looking at the meanings of words.

01:27:27

They're looking at textual variations. They're looking at grammar and syntax. They start there. And in some instances, you end up with two possibilities, maybe three possibilities.

01:27:41

They're consistent with biblical revelation. They're consistent with Paul's own theology. And we're not sure.

01:27:47

That happens. That happens. It can happen. Now, I think those are great commentaries on Romans because the people who wrote them have very high views of the

01:27:58

Bible. All right, Charles Hodge wrote a book on a commentary on Romans.

01:28:08

It's very, very useful, very, very helpful. It's very useful, very helpful, but it was not as helpful to me as Murray and Mu.

01:28:32

Hodge was more of a theologian, I think, than necessarily a commentator.

01:28:39

Okay, but still very high view of scripture. Like I said, I went to Fuller, and so I have

01:28:46

CEB Cranfield's commentary on Romans. Now, immediately, we're not talking about as consistent a view of the inspiration of scripture.

01:29:00

And I have a bunch of commentaries where I know, okay, this commentary is farther off to my left, and the primary reason why that happens in any context is a view of scripture, not having as high a view of the consistency of scripture.

01:29:22

No question about it. And so I take that into consideration. Now, sometimes, you know, one of the things

01:29:28

I learned is sometimes these guys are really good with the facts, not necessarily with the conclusions.

01:29:34

You can get some real gold out of someone who's to your left.

01:29:39

One of the professors I had for, I remember, five or six classes, five or six different classes, was way off to my left.

01:29:49

I learned a lot from him. And one of the things I learned was to weigh what people to your left are saying, and get the good, and leave the rest behind.

01:30:04

Now, I also have this, ancient Christian commentary on scripture.

01:30:10

Yeah, I've got the paper volumes, but yes, I have the electronic volumes now, too. So when

01:30:16

I do a commentary run on a text, you bet I'll look at that. And you know what

01:30:23

I discovered? It is simply, in the vast majority of instances, it is simply impossible to talk about a great tradition of exegesis.

01:30:37

You will find massive variation of interpretation. And in fact, this morning,

01:30:45

I didn't ask him to do this, he'll testify to this, but Chris Wisnant did a thread on Twitter where he went through Augustine in the

01:30:56

Psalms and just gave numerous examples of Augustine interpreting the

01:31:03

Psalms that exegetically is just indefensible.

01:31:09

It has nothing to do, it could not have been what the author intended, it could not have been what anyone who originally read it understood it to mean.

01:31:20

And so you have to come up with the idea that, well, yeah, all right, so what he's saying is all this stuff, everything you can just simply make application to your current situation in the church, so on and so forth, and you don't have to worry about what it meant to them originally.

01:31:40

And there are now people saying, yeah, that's how the apostles did it. That's a very simplistic way of looking at it, a very simplistic way.

01:31:51

There is no question that the use of the Old Testament in the New is a complicated subject. And I'm going to, please, with all due respect, some of you young guys that are making incredible statements in this area, you don't know the languages enough, you don't know the

01:32:06

Septuagint enough, you don't know the Hebrew well enough to even start to be making the kind of claims you do. It would be good if some of your elders would tell you that, but you're doing it anyway.

01:32:19

But it's a complicated area. It's not simple at all. And that raises the issue of, well, so if you're claiming to interpret as the apostles, so you have an inspired interpretation?

01:32:37

Or is there a difference? Did the apostles get to walk with Jesus and get to see how the

01:32:47

Old Testament was testifying of him in specific ways? Does that mean that we can now look at anything in the

01:32:54

Old Testament, we don't have to worry about any of its historical context anymore, any of its actual meaning as far as words are considered, and as long as we just contemplate a connection to something in the

01:33:04

New Testament, now that's what we're going to do? That is not where we got the 1689. That is not where we got the doctrines of the

01:33:14

Reformation. That's not how we defended it. That's not how we did it.

01:33:20

Keep that in mind. Keep that in mind. Anyway, instead, when we have honestly dealt with the text as written, it is at the level of context that we are constrained to limit our possible readings to those that are consistent with the author and with the scriptures as a whole.

01:33:39

That's where you enter into recognizing the Bible isn't just one book amongst many books.

01:33:46

It is God's revelation. Vitally important at that particular point. Believing exegesis seeks the consistent message of scripture and demands over against the liberals and the naturalists the use of proper studied harmonization of these materials.

01:34:03

Likewise, believing exegesis recognizes the reality of the role of the Holy Spirit in not only giving of the scripture, but in enlightening the mind of the disciple and granting faith to believe and obey.

01:34:16

So like I said, atheists can do the work and can understand the language, but they have absolutely no desire to believe, or to obey, or to submit, or to take the time to see the overall perspective and presentation that's being made.

01:34:35

They don't It is very, very common, and it used to be just the charismatics to say this.

01:34:43

I just cannot believe I'm having to say this to my fellow Baptists, especially Reformed Baptists. But it's very, very common for people to present the idea that there is a spiritual way of dealing with the

01:34:56

Bible, and then there is that scholarly way. That is extremely dangerous.

01:35:05

It makes it impossible for you to have an objective truth you can communicate, both defend it apologetically, communicate it to the next generations.

01:35:18

You can no longer say, thus saith the Lord, because all you can say is, thus saith my contemplation. But the reality is, as I said earlier, the greatest way we show respect for God's Word is doing the work of handling it aright.

01:35:33

And that means we start at the basics. We allow it to speak again.

01:35:41

And if you short -circuit that with any other system of authority, stop claiming to believe in Sola Scriptura.

01:35:48

Just stop, because you don't. You just don't. We're not getting rid of the

01:35:55

Holy Spirit. We are honoring what the Holy Spirit has given to us in objective revelation. Further, believing after Jesus recognizes messianic prophecy, and hence both near and far fulfillment realities in those passages.

01:36:08

I included that paragraph just because I ran into a whole discussion yesterday or day before yesterday, where the idea was being put forward that, well, we need to recognize that, for example, in the book of Hebrews, the writer is interpreting

01:36:28

Old Testament texts as if Jesus had said them. You know, about the, you know,

01:36:33

I've come to do your will. There's actually a fascinating textual variant there. Prepare for me a body, prepare for me an ear.

01:36:38

It's interesting. Anyways, we won't get into that right now. But, and I was reading this stuff going, man, this language,

01:36:46

I've never heard this language before. And then I realized all they're talking about is what we've said for decades, that there is a near and a far fulfillment.

01:36:54

You look at Isaiah 7, 14. It had a meaning in Isaiah's day. Duh. But that's not its only meaning.

01:37:06

It has, it goes beyond that. And so there's no question, but we're coming up with new fancy ways as if we're finding new stuff that no one's ever thought of before.

01:37:17

And it's like, no, we actually did think about this stuff. That's why I included that. These are all givens in any quality, serious exegetical commentary written by sound reform theologians and others over the past centuries.

01:37:30

Like I said, my shelves are filled with commentaries where we weren't doing either the naturalistic stuff or the great tradition stuff.

01:37:40

We were doing stuff that you gotta know. You want to find out what the original author was intending to say, and what the audience would have heard, what the context was, what the language is, the grammar, and how that fits into the entire testimony of scripture, because it's given by the spirit of God.

01:38:00

Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. You can't cut that up. You can't cut that up.

01:38:07

So stop saying, we weren't, we weren't, we've been doing, we've been doing exegesis all wrong, and it makes mincemeat out of the confession.

01:38:14

Baloney! Ba -lo -ny. I can think of one phrase in the confession where you, you guys are all hyped up about, and I can't think of anything else that has any relevance to any of this kind of stuff at all.

01:38:29

It's, it, I don't know what y 'all are drinking, but none of this requires, none of this requires the great tradition,

01:38:40

Christian Platonism, Reformed Thomism, pre -modern hermeneutics, etc., etc.,

01:38:45

etc. We were doing good exegesis, sound exegesis,

01:38:51

God -honoring exegesis. The Bible is one consistent revelation from God, exegesis, long before any of this stuff started seeping in through the walls.

01:39:03

Don't need any of it. Don't need any of it. Not, it's not dependent.

01:39:09

We're not dependent upon it in any way, shape, or form. You can do all that stuff without any reference to any of that kind of stuff.

01:39:16

And by the way, what is the great tradition anyway? I mean,

01:39:21

I read you Dr. Carter's definition of it, and if that's spiritual exegesis,

01:39:30

Nicene dogma, this three -legged stool stuff, and Christian Platonism?

01:39:39

Really? This is where we're going? This is the future of our, of our, Christian Platonism?

01:39:49

By the way, why is it only trustworthy on its doctrine of God, but not its doctrine of what

01:39:58

God has done in Jesus Christ? Because what I'm hearing you all saying is, well, this is really important on the

01:40:05

Trinity, and the relationship of the persons, and divine simplicity, and inseparable operations, and all the stuff that we weren't talking about 15, 20 years ago, but now it's all we talk about, and so it's vitally, vitally important about that, but you don't ever talk about the gospel.

01:40:24

What's the gospel of the great tradition? What's Thomas's gospel? What's the great tradition's gospel of the atonement of Christ?

01:40:35

Atoning the work of Christ. I mean, this is what the triune God has done in time, right? It's not just something is, well, it's, yeah, okay, we've got our differences there.

01:40:43

Well, how do you get to pick and choose? If it's just one great tradition, let me tell you something.

01:40:48

If you're a Baptist, you aren't in that. Oh, but we are in our doctrine of God.

01:40:55

Fine, but you're not. The folks back then would have burned you at the stake.

01:41:02

They would have turned you into a crispy critter, and Aquinas would have agreed, and you know it if you've read the

01:41:09

Summa. You want to talk about the great tradition on baptism? As a

01:41:16

Baptist, really? How do you, why do you get to pick and choose? Oh, it's vitally important we have it over here, but over here we can be maybe biblicists.

01:41:27

Uh -oh, can't have that term anymore. That's a bad word, biblicist.

01:41:33

In fact, I, you know,

01:41:41

I might be able to. Hold on a second. I might be able to pull this up on this, because I, you know, we're using two things there.

01:41:51

Yeah, here. Oh, great. I don't have my reading glasses. I feel like,

01:41:58

I feel like Jim Kirk during the Wrath of Khan. There's a group called the

01:42:06

Davenant Institute that are, they are the Reformed Thomas. They are the ones pushing it.

01:42:11

You know, they are the highbrow. Thomas Aquinas was awesome. He was everything, and they are having a course on Aquinas' ethics.

01:42:22

No, Aristotle's ethics. Sorry, Aristotle. And in the description, it says, modern moral philosophy and theology have been fractured since the

01:42:35

Enlightenment. Outside the church, moral relativism has run amok. Listen to this.

01:42:42

Within the church, Protestants in particular have hamstrung their response to ethics by falling into biblicism.

01:42:56

More recently, there has been a promising renaissance of Aristotelian virtue ethics, the primary form of ethics promoted throughout church history.

01:43:06

But this renaissance has often failed to grasp the prior foundations of virtue as understood by its greatest

01:43:13

Christian exponent, Thomas Aquinas. So we don't want biblicism.

01:43:20

The church has been hamstrung by biblicism. We need

01:43:25

Aristotle as mediated by Aquinas. I'm going to stand here and tell you, the end of this movement is destruction.

01:43:39

The churches that get involved with this will not flourish. Saying that we have been hamstrung by biblicism.

01:43:52

Now, we can be hamstrung by a shallow biblicism.

01:43:57

But let me tell you something. If you want ethics, you're going to get it from God's law, from his word, and no place else.

01:44:04

And you look any place else, you're going to find nothing. Nothing that'll last. Nothing that'll last.

01:44:14

So what is the gospel, the great tradition? This morning,

01:44:20

I was provided with yet another interesting example by good old Pastor Summer, Josh Summer.

01:44:28

This morning, see, May 24th. Today is May 24th. You're watching this later on. 6 .05 a .m.

01:44:36

Pre -modern hermeneutics is the Bible's own method of interpretation.

01:44:44

Anybody who reads the Bible by faith within the context of the church can employ it. This brings even the most astute

01:44:52

Greek and Hebrew scholars to accountability before the faithful laity of Christ's bride.

01:44:58

Now, doesn't that sound wonderful? Doesn't it sound wonderful that there would be a way of holding astute

01:45:07

Greek and Hebrew scholars accountable to the faithful laity of Christ's bride?

01:45:13

That sounds great. And it certainly is important. We don't want anyone to think that Greek and Hebrew scholars are somehow given some special power and authority, like some type of priesthood.

01:45:25

Which, by the way, there is no great tradition without a concept of priesthood. You can't even start to go there.

01:45:33

If you know anything about church history, if you know anything about church history, the great tradition includes, centrally, and Levering will affirm this.

01:45:42

All you guys are saying, well, we need to read. Oh, okay. He'll say the same thing. Sacramental priesthood. Okay. And so there is no accountability before faithful laity in the great tradition, because you have the priesthood.

01:45:55

So this historical stuff just doesn't really work real well. It sounds really great. Doesn't this sound pious?

01:46:01

It's just historically naive. Just really historically naive. But what are pre -modern hermeneutics?

01:46:12

We're not told. We're not told. It just seems to be a reaction against modern hermeneutics, whatever that is.

01:46:24

It's certainly not what Carter describes it as. There are people that do what Carter describes, but he doesn't address the people who don't do that, who do believing exegesis, which includes, fundamentally, starting with the text itself and not with Christian Platonism.

01:46:43

So this is empty. This means nothing. It sounds pious and great, but it has no meaning.

01:46:51

Has no meaning whatsoever. There are lots and lots and lots of other quotes, lots of other statements that have been made.

01:47:03

But we've gone for an hour and 46 minutes already, so lest this only be something listened to by Christian truck drivers.

01:47:13

Not so much while driving, but while they are sitting there watching the pump go past $1 ,200, they fill up their gas tanks.

01:47:21

I do want to conclude with some quotations to demonstrate that we're not just out here on our own doing our thing.

01:47:32

I would like to start with a quotation, and these were provided by Chris Wiseman.

01:47:38

Thank you very much, Chris. He had quoted, put these, and I was like, you know, this is really a good way to finish up.

01:47:49

I went to the second one from Calvin, the first one was from Owen. I went to Calvin and sort of expanded a little bit.

01:47:55

But anyway, listen to what Owen has to say. But whilst they have the same rule, the same objective revelation, the use of the same means to grow spiritually wise in the knowledge of it, they have all the agreement that God hath appointed for them or calls them unto.

01:48:14

To frame for them all in rigid confessions or systems of supposed credible propositions, a procrustes' bed to stretch them upon or crop them under the size of so to reduce them to the same opinion in all things is a vain and fruitless attempt that men have for many generations wearied themselves about and yet continue so to do.

01:48:36

I would point out, I think, still doing so in our very day. Remove out of the way anathemas upon propositions arbitrarily composed and expressed, philosophical conclusions, rules of faith of a mere human composure, or use them no otherwise but only to testify the voluntary consent of men's minds in expressing to their own satisfaction the things which they do believe.

01:49:05

And let men be esteemed to believe and to have attained degrees in the faith according as they are taught of God, with an allowance for everyone's measure of means, light, grace, gifts, which are not things in our own power.

01:49:19

And we shall be nearer unto quietness than most men imagine." When Christians had any unity in the world, the

01:49:28

Bible alone was thought to contain their religion, and everyone endeavored to learn the mind of God out of it, both by their own endeavors and as they were instructed therein by their guide.

01:49:41

Neither did they pursue this work with any other end but only that they might be strengthened in their faith and hope and learn to serve

01:49:49

God and obey him, and so they might come to the blessed enjoyment of him. Nor will there ever,

01:49:56

I fear, be again any unity among them until things are reduced to the same state and condition.

01:50:06

John Owen. Oh, I'm sorry. There's one last paragraph. I knew

01:50:12

I had John Owen in there somewhere. There's the attribution. In a word, leave Christian religion unto its primitive liberty wherein it was believed to be revealed of God and that revelation of it to be contained in the

01:50:29

Scripture, which men searched and studied to become themselves and to teach others to be wise in the knowledge of God and living unto him, and the most of the contests that are in the world will quickly vanish and disappear.

01:50:45

Well, amen to that. John Calvin in commenting on Acts chapter 17, verse 11.

01:50:54

They did only examine Paul's doctrine by the rule and square of the Scripture, even as gold is tried in the fire.

01:51:03

For the Scripture is the true touchstone whereby all doctrines must be tried. If any man say that this kind of trial is doubtful, for as much as the

01:51:13

Scripture is oftentimes doubtful and is interpreted diverse ways, I say that we must also add judgment of the

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Spirit, who is not without cause, called the Spirit of discretion or discernment.

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But the faithful must judge of every doctrine, not otherwise than out of and according to the

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Scripture, having the spirit for their leader and guide. And by this means is refuted the sacrilegious quip or quibble of the

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Papists, because there can be nothing gathered certainly out of the Scriptures. Faith doth depend only upon the determination of the church.

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You hear that? You hear that? For when the Spirit of God commends the men of Thessalonica, he prescribes to us a rule in their example.

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And in vain should we search the Scriptures unless they have in them light enough to teach us.

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Therefore, let this remain as a most sure maxim, that no doctrine is worthy to be believed but that which we find to be grounded in the

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Scriptures. The Pope will have all that receive without any more ado whatsoever he blunders out at his pleasure.

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But shall he be preferred before Paul concerning whose preaching it was lawful for the disciples to make inquisition?

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And let us not that this is and let us not that this is not spoken of any pretended counsel, but of a small assembly of men whereby it better appears that every man is called to read the

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Scripture. I will stand with those men on that issue any day.

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They didn't need to become Christian Platonists. They didn't need to become

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Reformed Thomists. And I say to my Reformed Baptist brethren,

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I do not know what has captured your mind to find such fascination in these bobbles and bangles of the world's wisdom.

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I am simply saying to you, you have changed. And it is not a good change.

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It will not lead to good conclusions. It is one thing for us to have meaningful and good conversations over such things as what

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God considers ad intra in regards to his attributes. That is one area of discussion.

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But the great danger that I am seeing is right here.

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On the sufficiency of Scripture and Scripture alone as our sole infallible rule of faith, not as interpreted through the lens of Christian Platonism, not as interpreted through the lens of Thomas Aquinas, the other disputes should not lead to permanent division.

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This dispute must and will unless there is an immediate recognition of the danger right in front of you.

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Some of us are trying in our fallible and halting ways to put out a word of warning.

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We are trying. And it is not a final proof that we once stood on the same ground on this matter, because we once did.

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But the reality is, you have changed. You have changed on this topic. You say it in your own presentations.

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Yes, I used to believe this. Now I believe this. And since it is on the very issue of how we interpret

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Scripture, that, to me, is the grave danger.

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And that is why we have had to seek to address this issue. Now, if you're going to respond, and some of you have already started your blog article, do not simply distract from the issue.

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Deal with the substance. Do not do the, well, we're going to accuse you of this.

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Deal with the substance. Answer the question of why you pick only a part of what you call the great tradition.

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Explain what the relationship to this tradition, to Scripture, actually is. What is contemplative exegesis?

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What is spiritual exegesis? What are the rules? And how could you take this out of our small community and take it into the broader world and defend it against Roman Catholics, against Eastern Orthodox?

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How could you do it while being consistent? Don't even bother with all the picayune stuff.

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Don't bother with the mockery. Deal with the substance. Or ask yourself why you can't.

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That is my prayer for you. It truly is. Thank you very much for taking the time to listen to this lengthy discussion.

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I hope, especially for those of you who are studying, who are in seminary, some of you have contacted me,

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I hope and pray that you have been encouraged, the issues have been clarified, and that you will press forward.

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But you will press forward with a confidence in the sufficiency and inspiration of God's Word, that we can know what

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God has given to us, that we do not need to become Christian Platonists or anything else. We do not need those lenses.

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We have the Spirit and we have a perfect Word. Be encouraged. Thank you for watching.