R. Albert Mohler Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He is known as a preacher and enjoys his role of cultivating preachers. Mohler has a new book out on preaching from Moody Publishers this year with the title He is Not Silent: Preaching in a Postmodern World. One of his chapters focuses on “preaching the Bible’s big story.” In it he stresses the need for preachers to situate the text they are focusing on within the bigger picture of God’s redemption story. He uses a particularly poignant example playing off of the children’s Sunday School song that starts with the line, “Zaccheus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he.”
…One of the great problems with much evangelical preaching today, and one of the reasons so many saints are not growing to completeness in Jesus Christ, is that so many of our pulpits are filled with what you might call “Zaccheus sermons” — or to put it more bluntly, wee little preaching.
Every Sunday, far too many preachers read a wee little text, apply it in wee little ways to their people’s lives, and then tell everyone to come back next week for another wee little story.
That tendency to isolate our sermons to one tiny piece of biblical text is a major problem, and it also explains why so much evangelical preaching is moralistic. It is easy to pick out a familiar story, make a few points from it about what people should and should not do, and then be done with it. But that kind of preaching will leave a church weak and starving, because the Christians who sit under it never find themselves in the big story of God’s work in the world. If we as preachers want to see our people growing to maturity in Christ, we must give them more than a diet of wee little morality sermons. We must place every text we preach firmly within the grand, sweeping story of the Bible. (p. 89-90, emphasis added)
…Our people can know so much, and yet know nothing, all at the same time. They can have a deep repository of biblical facts and stories, and yet know absolutely nothing about how any of it fits together, or why any of it matters beyond the wee little “moral of the story.” (p. 95)
…We want our people to leave the preaching event asking the right questions. If our preaching is too small, their questions will be equally small. If we neglect the big story — the gospel metanarrative — they will be satisfied with small questions and will live on small insights. They may take home an insight, a story, a principle, or perhaps an anecdote. We should not be satisfied with that. They should not be satisfied with that. Our ambition — our obsession as preachers — should be nothing less than to preach so that the congregation sees the big story of the gospel, the grand narrative of the gospel, through every text we preach. (p. 102-103)
I say “amen” to Mohler’s assessment on this. I’ve heard too many “wee little” sermons in my day. May God grant the rising generation of preachers the wisdom to unpack God’s Word for us in such a way as to highlight the Gospel story and the grand narrative of Scripture!
I was excited to hear recently that Northland International University (formerly Northland Baptist Bible College) was formally accepted by The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and will become Boyce College at Northland. Northland’s president, Daniel Patz and Southern’s president, Albert Mohler announced the news. See this link for a fuller story. The video below provides additional details.
For many independent Baptists, this step is unthinkable – and it marks the end of faithfulness. Another college has capitulated. But have they really? What is the point of breaking off of groups like the Southern Baptist Conference? Wasn’t it to preserve doctrine or take a stand for truth? The SBC turned around, and under Mohler’s leadership among others, the SBC is now a bastion for theological conservatism. Sure Southern has an emphasis on Reformed theology that many Baptists are leery of. But the majority of Southern Baptists do not embrace Reformed theology wholeheartedly. In many respects, the SBC is a mirror image of many groups of independent Baptists. There is a lot of autonomy in the SBC structure. And that Baptist autonomy is part of the problem when it comes to assessing the SBC. The SBC is not completely pure in every respect, because it is not an entity that can cause direct change in a top-down sort of way. The very independence and autonomy that independent fundamental Baptists prize is the reason that many of them view the SBC with suspicion.
Looking at Northland, by joining with Boyce College, Northland continues its overall mission. And in difficult financial times (for all private colleges everywhere) this decision makes sense. Both the SBC and the IFBs who have supported Northland over the years, are driven by a Great Commission calling. Both of them long to stand for truth and equip students to live courageously for Christ in today’s world. Strategic partnerships and inter-dependence among churches and missionaries — that is what we see as we read the book of Acts and study the early years of Church history.
Perhaps it is time to reevaluate the status of the IFB movement. Are churches staying independent just to be different? Are they insular and isolationist or is independence a means to a healthy end? Why must there be three, four or even five IFB churches that have virtually nothing to do with each other in the same town? Why can’t we overlook minor differences and truly stand together for the Gospel? We can respect differences and appreciate distinctives even as we work together around bigger realities and shared Gospel truths. That is what is driving Northland’s actions.
May we see more Christ-honoring inter-dependence in the future. “Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity!” (Ps. 133:1).
Book Details:
• Editor: Gregory K. Beale
• Category: Biblical Theology
• Publisher: Baker Academic (2011)
• Format: hardcover
• Page Count: 1072
• ISBN#: 9780801026973
• List Price: $54.99
• Rating: Must Read
Review:
Christians today are blessed with a wide variety of resources for studying the Bible. In America, it seems that every few months some must-read theology book hits the press and promises to revolutionize our understanding of God’s Word. And many of these books truly are helpful. We really have no excuse for not understanding Scripture more and being more conformed into the likeness of Christ, given the endless resources meant to help us do just this.
At the same time, however, this abundance of resources can serve to puzzle us and leave us lost in an ever expanding maze of theological conundrums. The specialization in biblical studies doesn’t help. Specialists write on the Gospels, or on Paul’s letters, to the virtual exclusion of the input from other New Testament, or Old Testament books. OT specialists develop their understanding and grow in their study completely apart from their NT counterparts. And with the study of God’s Word being so cranial, simple insights and the role of the Holy Spirit’s illumination tend to be ignored. And then today’s scholars often ignore the insights of previous generations, who found Christ throughout the Old Testament, but weren’t versed in the latest scientific insights from form and redaction criticism or literary theory. Many have seen this widening gap, between academia and the church pew, and yearned for scholarship that matters: academic insight for average individuals. And some have hoped for a whole-Bible, biblical theology that would span the differing worlds of OT and NT scholarship and put the entire Bible back together again.
G. K. Beale may have given us just this. His magnum opus is an ambitious project that seeks to integrate the storylines of the Old and New Testaments, and unfold how the New Testament unpacks the promise of the Old as it unfolds for us the glories of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New, Beale displays a masterful grasp on the academy as well as an expert understanding of the second temple Judaistic literature, Ancient Near Eastern writings, and the latest scholarship on both biblical testaments. He is a humble servant of the church, however, and seeks to answer questions the average churchgoer will face and remains ever practical even as he explores a wide array of various topics. And while his book requires careful and (at times) strenuous reading, it truly integrates the entire canon of Scripture in a way that has promise to bring together Old and New Testament scholarship for the service of the church.
The Storyline of the New Testament
The task Beale sets out for himself is huge, and his book is too. With over 960 readable pages, this book will take the average reader some time to conquer. It took me about a year to wade my way through it, although admittedly I tend to be a fickle reader and so left the book for seasons at a time. Beale sets out to explore the unifying center of the New Testament and finds this in a storyline. Each part of the following storyline gets developed in detail and by the end of the book he has adequately proven his thesis. Here is Beale’s NT storyline:
Jesus’s life, trials, death for sinners, and especially resurrection by the Spirit have launched the fulfillment of the eschatological already-not yet new-creational reign, bestowed by grace through faith and resulting in worldwide commission to the faithful to advance this new-creational reign and resulting in judgment for the unbelieving, unto the triune God’s glory. (p. 958, italics and underlining removed)
Recapping the Old Testament
One of my favorite sections in Beale’s work was his few chapters spent detailing the Old Testament’s own storyline. He uses the first three chapters of Genesis as a key for unlocking the story of the entire Old Testament. Adam was to be a vice-regent of God, extending His rule throughout the world. But Adam failed, and was exiled from the Edenic paradise of fellowship with God in a garden-temple. From this wilderness, God called out his people Israel, referred to as God’s firstborn son, and they received an Adamic calling to be vice-regents of God extending the glory of His name as a beacon of light to the nations, centered in their garden-like promised land of paradise – where God would have His name dwell. But they too failed, and were exiled from their special place of fellowship with God. For those unfamiliar with Beale’s extensive work on developing the theme of the Temple throughout the Scripture (cf. Beale’s The Temple and the Church’s Mission, IVP 2004), it is touched on in this section and more fully developed later as Beale turns to the New Testament.
The Role of Eschatology
Beale’s emphasis on the already-not yet, new-creational kingdom, has led many to dismiss his book as one long extensive defense of amillennialism. I would contend that such a dismissal is short-sighted and a biased misreading of his work. His eschatology doesn’t neatly fit into any one theological system, and he prefers the description “inaugurated eschatology.” His discussion of the key terms for “the end times” in both the Old and New Testaments goes a long way toward proving his contention that “in order to understand the NT in its full richness, we must have a keen acquaintance with how the biblical authors viewed the ‘end times'” (p. 16). He argues that the New Testament sees the end times as here in one sense, but not yet fully here. And that the entire New Testament cannot be understood apart from realizing the role eschatology plays. The NT authors understand themselves to be living in the last days, in the beginning fulfillment of what the Old Testament foretold.
New-Creation and Kingdom
Perhaps Beale’s most distinctive contribution to NT biblical theology is his emphasis on the role new-creation plays both in how one understands the kingdom, and in how one understands everything from justification to judgment in the New Testament. Christ’s resurrection was the promise and presence of the new creation, invading our world of space and time. The uncreating of evil has begun, and the recreation of a new world has commenced – and our very spiritual lives with the progress we make in sanctification, is part of God’s making all things new (2 Cor. 5:17, Rev. 21:5).
The Church as End-Time Israel
This is where many people will stumble over Beale’s approach. Some will point to his embrace of the Sabbath and paedo-baptism as errors flowing from his fundamental misunderstanding of the distinction between Israel and the church. I would ask those who will differ fundamentally here to take time to read Beale as there is still much to be gained from his work. But I am convinced his unpacking of the biblical development of the church as end-time Israel is worth the price of the book. He continues his approach of reading Scripture from a grammatical, historical approach – treating the books as the original recipients would have, understanding the genre and tracing out the history of intertestamental biblical interpretation (as an insight into possible ways the NT authors would have understood OT Scripture), and methodically builds an air-tight case for the NT as presenting the church as the heir of the promises made to OT Israel. At this point, I’d like to take some extra time to restate his case for the sake of my readers. And to be clear, Beale is not claiming the church replaces Israel, but that it actually is “the transformed and restored eschatalogical Israel,” being made up of Jew and gentile believers, alike.
Beale finds a “presuppositional basis” for the church being true Israel in some of the hermeneutical presuppositions he claims underlie the exegetical approach of the NT authors. Chief among these is the concept of “the one and the many.” In the OT we often find kings, prophets, or family heads representing their families, or nations who will receive blessing or judgment because of the actions of the “one” representing “the many.” Rom. 5 and 1 Cor. 15 make a similar argument with Christ and Adam. Secondly, Jesus is presented in Scripture as “the true Israel.” And He thus represents the church. Beale elaborates:
Those who identify by faith with Christ, whether Jew or gentile, become identified with him and his identity as true eschatological Israel…. people are identified by faith with Jesus as God’s Son, and so they become “adopted sons of God.” …people become identified by faith with Christ as being in the eschatological image of God, so they begin to regain that image. (p. 652)
And since Israel was a corporate Adam — God’s firstborn — living in its own “garden of Eden,” tasked to do what Adam had failed to do, it follows that Christ as the Second Adam, actually fulfilled what both Adam and Israel was meant to do. Christ as such, is the New Israel – and Beale shows how numerous themes in the New Testament attest to this fact. Then Beale shows how repeatedly throughout the Old Testament, Gentiles were included in Israel and her mission — and now with Christ’s bringing the end-times upon us, the identifying marks required to be a part of Israel of old (circumcision) have been replaced by that of spiritual circumcision and spiritual unity of Christ — who is the head of the church. Beale points out that it is thus the “legal representative” or “corporate” hermeneutic which under-girds this identification of the church as true Israel, rather than an “allegorical or spiritualizing hermeneutic” (p. 655). What Beale then goes on to systematically demonstrate, is that the Old Testament prophecies that Gentiles will become part of the Latter-Day True Israel, using such passages as Is. 49, Ps. 87, Is. 19, Is. 56, Is. 66 and others. Then he shows how the New Testament repeatedly claims that it is in the church that specific prophesies about the restoration of Latter-Day Israel are coming to pass. I appreciate also how he delineates the variety of specific names and descriptors of Israel from the Old Testament are applied to the church – and with so many OT descriptors of Israel given to the church, it is not surprising to see the actual term Israel bestowed on it as well, in Gal. 6:17.
With the land promise, Beale once again unpacks how the Old Testament itself leads us to expect that the land is typological, pointing to a greater reality, and that it will become greatly expanded and universalized. And the New Testament shows us just this, as it also brings the church in to the recipients of that very promise (see Rom. 4:13, Matt. 5:5 and others).
Additional Themes
Beale’s work covers a host of additional themes my review cannot cover in detail. He highlights how the expected tribulation of Israel was being experienced by the New Testament church, and still is in most parts of the world today. He gives space to the new-creational marks of the church such as Sabbath observance (although his view on this finds it radically altered through Christ’s work), worship, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, church office and the NT Canon. He looks at the work of the Spirit as part of the inaugurated end-time new creation as a chief theme in the NT story. He also gives space to the Temple and to idolatry and the image of God being restored. He also explores questions such as how much the Old Testament saints would have enjoyed this same experience we do in the NT. And he concludes his book focusing on the glory of God as the purpose for the very storyline itself.
Evaluation
I was told that you don’t pick up a book like this and read through it. You just use it as a resource. And for many that is going to be how they will encounter Beale’s work. Thankfully, it is organized in a very clear way with helpful indexes and a detailed table of contents that is sure to help such a reader. Those who want a taste of Beale’s work could read the first few chapters, and chapter 27 – which recaps the entire work giving each theme a brief yet fairly detailed overview. Others might find it more useful to read through Beale’s section on resurrection or justification, or the question of Israel and the church as they study that topic out further. The footnotes will point you to other important discussions in the book so that you won’t miss something you need in getting Beale’s take on a given subject.
I differ with Beale on a few matters, most notably baptism, but I found the exercise of plodding my way through his work to be immensely helpful. My copy of the book has numerous notes, underlines, and countless dog-eared pages. I have already turned back to parts of this book for the second or even third time now, and know I’ll be returning to this book for many more years in the future. This truly is a monumental work, and one that even a layman like me can appreciate. Granted, I have had some theological training, and at times this book does go deep. But for the most part, Beale’s work is accessible and has takeaways that pastors and teachers as well as students, will benefit from. More importantly, Beale helps one find a compass through the maze of the two testaments of Scripture. And his work is detailed enough to stand the test of time. It carefully explains how the New Testament authors arrived at the conclusions they did, and follows their thoughts after them, reading the Old Testament in a careful and ultimately Christ-centered way. I encourage you to find some space on your shelf for Beale’s A NT Biblical Theology. Dip your toe in, get wet, then take the plunge and bask in the beauty of a fully developed Biblical Theology. You won’t regret it.
Author Info: G. K. Belae (PhD, University of Cambridge) is professor of New Testament and biblical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is the coeditor of the Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament and the author of numerous books, including the Handbook on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament and commentaries on Revelation and 1 and 2 Thessalonians.
I just listened to a fascinating interview where Mark Dever interviews Greg Beale. He focuses on Biblical Theology and begins the interview by asking Beale his opinion on Bible versions and then a litany of different works on Biblical Theology. They are basically in the Westminster Theological Seminary bookstore and talking about a host of different titles.
Then they go into Beale’s background and his studies and books. Very fascinating interview, especially if you’ve read some of Beale’s works. And like Dever would be expected to, he starts off by pointing out the irony that Beale now teaches at Westminster but studied at Dallas Theological Seminary.
Click here to listen to the interview from Nine Marks.
Book Details:
• Authors: Andreas J. Köstenberger and Richard D. Patterson
• Category: Hermeneutics / Theology
• Publisher: Kregel (2011)
• Format: hardcover
• Page Count: 896
• ISBN#: 9780825430473
• List Price: $46.99
• Rating: Must Read
Review:
I have handled my fair share of textbooks over the years. I’ve also used a variety of Bible commentaries, Bible dictionaries, theology resources and biblical study tools. But I have never come across a more comprehensive and accessible resource for handling the Word of God than Invitation to Biblical Interpretation: Exploring the Hermeneutical Triad of History, Literature, and Theology by Andreas J. Köstenberger and Richard D. Patterson. This new 900 page book has truly set a new standard when it comes to Christian academic resources. In its thoroughness and detail, usability and accessibility, scholarship and piety, this work is simply unmatched. And I am not alone in this assessment, the book’s opening 13 pages contain no less than 39 endorsements from a wide range of leading evangelical scholars. And the fact that this is a hermeneutics textbook makes such widespread acclaim all the more surprising.
While the book is designed for the classroom, I read through the book from the standpoint of an educated layman looking for a resource on interpreting Scripture. This book proved to be more than just a resource tool, it is a virtual stand-alone hermeneutics course in and of itself, with a limitless supply of suggested books and articles for additional reading and self-study.
The book unfolds Köstenberger and Patterson’s “hermeneutical triad” as an overarching approach to interpretation. This triad consists of history (archaeology, culture, manners and customs, and other historical matters), literature (canon, genres, linguistics), and theology (biblical theology). But before getting into the heart of the book, the authors reveal their philosophical approach to interpreting Scripture, which I find incredibly helpful:
[W]e don’t start with words; we start with the canon. For example, this is also how we would interpret, say, a play by Shakespeare. We don’t just analyze the words in a given sentence; we first try to learn more about Shakespeare, his background, the time in which he wrote, surveying his major works, and so on, before finally settling on a particular play. Even then we might read a good summary before eventually delving in and starting to read the play. When we encounter a given word with which we are unfamiliar, we would not stop reading, because we are more concerned about following the general flow than identifying individual word meanings. Thus we don’t start with analyzing the details of the biblical text (word study); we start with the whole (canon).
What is more, we also don’t start out pretending the Bible is just like any other book, because we don’t believe it is. Rather, our purpose here is not to study just any form of human communication; our purpose is to study the Bible–the inerrant, inspired Word of God…. Ultimately, this is God’s canon, conveyed in the genres intended by God, and communication of God’s discourses using God’s words (without of course denying human instrumentality , style and authorship). Thus, we don’t introduce the notion of the Bible being “special” at some point later in the interpretive process (as if it were immaterial to the early stages of general hermeneutics) but put it front and center in the organization of the book. (pg. 25-26)
I hold that both of these points are incredibly important. We have to encounter God’s Word from a big picture approach that pays attention to authorial intent, but we also have to recognize the Divine Author behind the text.
After explaining their method, the authors more right into focusing on each element of the triad. A brief overview of the history of hermeneutics is given and then the matters of history, archaeology and the historical context of the times of the Bible are discussed at a fairly high level, but with many particular examples. This is helpfully fleshed out in a “sample exegesis” section which concludes most chapters. The research into how the Canaanites viewed the god Baal (the god of storms) helps us appreciate what is at stake when Elijah announces that Yahweh has suspended all rain (and all storms).
After discussing the role that history plays, the authors then devote the lion’s share of the work to the discussion of literature. The canon, its development and current shape, is explored as to how that should shape our interpretation, and a brief theology of the OT and the NT are sketched. The minor prophets offer an example where both the message of the books themselves need to be understood as well as their particular literary arrangement as “the book of the twelve”. I really appreciated this emphasis on canonical interpretation, which the authors define as: “a faithful effort to hear the way in which God addresses his people in and through the text of Scripture as it testifies to God in Christ” but it is not so much a method as “a practice of theological reading” (pg. 157).
The discussion of Genre covers OT historical narrative, poetry and wisdom literature, prophecy, NT historical narrative, parables, epistles and apocalyptic literature. Some genres are covered more in depth than others, with epistles and prophecy perhaps getting pride of place. The discussions give numerous examples and flesh out the why and how in an extremely clear and careful manner. Wise cautions and helpful insights abound. No real theological biases are detectable except perhaps a bias against full preterism. The authors don’t rush to make judgement calls on how everyone must read prophecy or view Revelation, either. At times I felt they must be historic premil, yet they stressed the symbolic nature of Revelation, as per its genre. The discussions take care to root themselves as much as possible in analysis of the biblical text rather than forcing foreign genre considerations onto textual data. I found the discussion of parables extremely helpful and balanced, not advocating a rigid “one-point” approach to parables yet not aiming for a no-holds-barred allegorical free-for-all, either.
The discussion on analyzing the language of literature was extraordinarily helpful. The authors emphasize looking at how the larger sections of the text relate to one another (discourse analysis) rather than just doing word studies. They give a helpful overview of some technical points of Hebrew and Greek (as well as English) grammar, and even point out occasional problems with the lexical approach of even such classic works as Kittel’s TDNT, and stress the role of context and semantic range in determining meaning. They also include a helpful section covering 12 exegetical fallacies with plenty of examples to illustrate the discussion. They also discuss figurative language and how we can recognize and interpret it.
The book then shows how to put everything together. The third tier of the triad, theology actually begins this process by stressing that we make our theological connections based on the text, which is the essence of biblical theology. After discussing the nature and method of biblical theology, the book closes with an exceedingly helpful chapter that offers a method for preaching through the various genres and applying the message of the text to the lives of people today. This chapter includes a discussion of Bible software tools and commentaries and other resources, but spends the bulk of the time discussing how to preach through all the various genres that were discussed earlier in the book. Cautions, challenges, methods, and sample outlines make this section especially practical and useful in the context of a daily ministry. An appendix is also included that has a short list of the best commentaries to get on each book of the Bible as well as other important resources to have handy.
My biggest critique of the book would be that it doesn’t go on to cover in detail absolutely everything I would want it to! But that is hardly fair, and it would make for a more unmanageable and unwieldy tool. I do have one bit of criticism, however. I would have liked to see the “how to” section at the end, with the example of how to preach through the genres more clearly called out from the sections covering the genre. For example, the section covering Proverbs in the chapter on Wisdom literature doesn’t deal with some of the pastoral concerns such as whether proverbs apply universally to all situations or not. Yet this concern is addressed in the how to section in the last chapter. I think a clearer link would have served those of us who will use the book more as a reference work than a seminary text book. My only additional quibble is that the assignments and bibliography from the previous chapter blend right in with the introductory objectives and outline for the next chapter. The formatting of the book just seems a bit odd in that regard.
Mentioning the bibliographies leads me to one more positive feature of the book. Each chapter has a selected bibliography for additional reading, and then in the footnotes, specific articles or books are called out that will be pertinent to the topic at hand. The footnotes and bibliography are usually helpful and accessible, rather than merely technical and scholarly.
As the book closes, the authors warn their readers against just putting this book on the shelf and ignoring this material. Instead the reader is encouraged that this book can “serve as a point of departure for a lifetime of studying and preaching or teaching the Bible” (pg. 727). I would most heartily concur. This book deserves pride of place on the shelf of anyone studying, preaching or teaching the Bible. Even where one may have a different theological bent or a disagreement with the authors, the book still will prove useful.
Invitation to Biblical Interpretation truly is a must-read, need-to-get book. It is evangelical scholarship at its best, and cannot be ignored. If you are not employing the techniques and practices put forth in this book, you owe it to yourself, at the very least, to read it and justify why you are not. This book can’t do the hard work of faithful exegesis for you, but it can set you in the right direction and prevent you from stumbling at all the wrong places. You really need to get this book!
Author Info: Andreas J. Köstenberger (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is Senior Professor of New Testament and Biblical Theology and Director of PhD Studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is also editor of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society.
Richard D. Patterson (PhD, University of California, Los Angeles) is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Liberty University.
R. Albert Mohler Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He is known as a preacher and enjoys his role of cultivating preachers. Mohler has a new book out on preaching from Moody Publishers this year with the title He is Not Silent: Preaching in a Postmodern World. One of his chapters focuses on “preaching the Bible’s big story.” In it he stresses the need for preachers to situate the text they are focusing on within the bigger picture of God’s redemption story. He uses a particularly poignant example playing off of the children’s Sunday School song that starts with the line, “Zaccheus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he.”
I just listened to a fascinating 