Notes on *Reading Scripture Canonically*
Reading Scripture Canonically: Theological Instincts for Old Testament Interpretation, Mark S. Gignilliat, (Baker Academic, 2019)
Main Idea/Takeaway
How and why should we read the material of Scripture — words, sentences, paragraphs, books, and so forth — in conjunction with Scripture's theological subject matter? (xiv)
Interaction
"Has Sailhamer (JS) described this best in his Old Testament theology on text vs. event"? (15)
"Revelation is in the text." (18)
"Note how JS places canonical reading along criticisms" (21)
"Not less than historical, but absolutely more, and when understood as witness, the question on what to preach is clear. Final form!" (31)
"In short, the canonical approach places highest focus on the text as God has given it to us. And we should preach this way!" (31)
"LXX as a kind of commentary." (71)
"Yes, only because we know that God is the ultimate author of Scripture." (94)
"Intertextuality- relationship between various books of OT; Innertextuality- book's own textual composition; Contextuality- final shape of canon" (100)
"See Michael Reeves, 'Delighting in the Trinity.'" (101)
"But does YHWH 'reveal' himself 'personally' if no particular person should be in view. (see fn.29)" (112)
"We believe God is the ultimate author of Scripture." (113)
"We believe the Bible is ultimately about God and is by God." (113)
"Instincts and Expectations." (116)
"Sounds like reader-determinate meaning which is a slippery slope?! How does this not also open us up to reader response? The answer it seems, is Scripture's subject matter, God. That he is the ultimate author. KJV speaks of canonical fittingness." " (97)
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part 1: Scripture's Material Form
I. Scripture and Canon
II. Sanding with the Grain: Final Form and Canonical Shape
III. Canonical Intentionality
IV. Canon and Textual Criticism: The Search for the Christian Bible
Part 2: Scripture's Subject Matter
V. God as Triune, and Exegetical Metaphysics
VI. The Trinity and the Old Testament
Epilogue
Favorite Quotes by Chapter
Introduction
"The posture, expectations, and (dreaded word) "methods" that one brings to the Holy Scripture will either serve or obstruct Scripture's reason for existence." (xii)
"The New Testament authors and early church theologians read the Old Testament as a Christian witness. This kind of reading instinct and strategy has always been with the church."(xii)
Part 1: Scripture's Material Form
I. Scripture and Canon
"A "canon consciousness" is actually embedded in the literature itself, and it exerted pressure on various religious bodies in the creaturely act of canonization or the forming of set lists." (7)
"While the human and institutional agents attached to the writing, editing, and preserving of the biblical books should never be diminished, Christians around the world today and from the church's inception dive headlong into the Scriptures for the sake of hearing the word of God." (9)
"As this book hopes to demonstrate, the confession of faith regarding Scripture's nature (or ontology, "what it is") impinges on the interpretive approach taken. In other words, the subject matter being studied shapes the interpretive methods used to understand it." (10)
"God's self-determination to be a God in fellowship with humanity. On this account, Scripture is the loving gift of God to his people so they may continually seek him and order their lives toward him, while resting in the confidence that God has not left our desire to know him within the realm of human self-achievement." (11)
"As Webster puts the matter, "Holy Scripture is a function of God. Therefore, Holy Scripture's canonical role as the normative guide for Christian thought and life derives its authority from the loving rule of God. Its textual character remains a dynamic means of continued divine self-disclosure. It is not a static "textual deposit."(11)
"God as object and Scripture as approach are determinate within the redemptive economy for how God orders the goal and means of our theological pursuits." (12)
"The differentiated-though-fitting relationship between God and Scripture demands the church's continued giving of itself to the exegesis of Holy Scripture. Because Scripture is not God, while at the same time remaining a sanctified means for apprehension of God, it follows necessarily that the exegesis of Holy Scripture continues as a never-ceasing activity of Christ's church." (13)
"The prophetic word of God continues to effect repentance in the hearts of hearers around the world." (17)
"The cognitive principle of Scripture, with God as its object of inquiry, shapes the intellectual approach and method of inquiry. While all the elements of a humanly authored document are true of Holy Scripture, the ontological principle will not allow our method of reading to be hemmed in by its creaturely status." (18)
II. Sanding with the Grain: Final Form and Canonical Shape
"But because the canonical approach insists on the character of Israel's Scriptures as witness rather than source, the final form of the biblical text is the privileged form." (25)
"The problem with this newer redactional analysis is that under the guise of diversity the biblical text is subjected to the criteria of rigorous, conceptual coherence which has been defined according to modern rational categories." In other words, a modern account of conceptual coherence may be an imposition onto the authors and shapers of the biblical material." (36)
"Childs had no misgivings about the ends toward which critical tools are used: as an aid to hearing the final form of the text well. Childs's clarity on the goal of such critical utilization comes from his commitment to reading the Old Testament as witness to God's identity and ways with his people." (37)
"Christopher Seitz says it best when he identifies the canonical approach this way: "Canonical reading is therefore not an exact science, but a theological decision about what the proper parameters for interpretation are: the final form presentation and the arrangement and sequencing that it exhibits, over against the simple history of the text's development as this is critically reconstructed." (40)
III. Canonical Intentionality
"The canonical approach, on the other hand, conceives of intentionality more broadly as it identifies the authorial voice of the text with its final form, along with its privileged arrangement and deployment of texts, traditions, or prophetic oracles whose initial intention(s) may have had a more narrow range of effects. One could construe intentionality of this kind as "thick" rather than "thin." A thin account locates intentionality within a narrow frame of individual authorship. A thick account takes into view a providentially constructed understanding of history where a wide range of historical figures and inspired words are deemed relevant to the texts as they come to their full form. The term associated with this particular understanding is canonical intentionality?"(44)
"The recognition of the canon's intention, as a theological understanding of the text's ability, to render God's identity and will for future generations has exegetical warrant." (48)
"Does the canon expect its readers to come to it with a set of assumptions and anticipations about the text and the reading process? Can one decision about a reading strategy claim a superior status to others? The canonical approach, in accord with the received reading practices of the church, says yes. When believers read Israel's canon in the anticipation of hearing an authoritative word whose source is the communicative action of God, they read Scripture according to its own intention." (51)
"The glory of the Christian canon is its ability to do this kind of work continually in the life of Christ's church, requiring a robust doctrine of the Holy Spirit to fuel its fire."(55)
"The gap between text and interpreter is not bridged by more refined hermeneutical tools, helpful as these may be. The gap is bridged by a Person." (56)
"John Webster is right to claim, "Whether done well or ill, theology and the study of Scripture are spiritual tasks, and the conditions for their flourishing include spiritual conditions." (56)
IV. Canon and Textual Criticism: The Search for the Christian Bible
"If, however, Scripture functions canonically as the rule of faith for Christian life and doctrine despite questions at the margins regarding the canon's scope, then the settling of the canon's scope is not determinative of the canonical role that Scripture plays even when levels of uncertainty at the margins remain." (75)
V. God as Triune, and Exegetical Metaphysics
"Freewheeling hermeneutical reflections apart from the nitty-gritty details of textual engagement run counter to the material sufficiency of Scripture. Texts and their language matter. At the same time, biblical texts cannot be separated from their subject matter." (86)
"Modern biblical criticism is a rich and varied thing, whose results provide important avenues of inquiry and appreciation for Scripture's linguistic, poetic, and historical depth. But somewhere lurking in the shadows, or perhaps dancing in full view, is the historicist resistance to metaphysics as a critical tool for reading historical texts. Brian Daley does not dance around the issue when he claims that historical criticism often operates "methodologically atheistic." (89)
"When Isaiah or Moses or Jeremiah utter a prophetic word, do not their language and verbal expressions say more than they could grasp?" (93)
"Does the whole Christian canon as a two-Testament witness pressure us to see the Old Testament's subject as our Triune God, with the Tetragrammaton (the divine name YHWH) as best predicated on the essence of God revealed In the tripersonal naming of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit more of this in the next chapter)?" (93)
"Therefore, the prophetic word of the Old Testament is an extension of Yhwh's own revealed self, fitted as it is to the singularity of the divine being in tripersonal relation." (94)
"The source of the Bible's language is the infinite plenitude of the divine being, revealing himself by means of the Word's agency." (94)
VI. The Trinity and the Old Testament
"Moreover, if as Christians we affirm the triune character of our God, then a question regarding the identity of Yhwh in the Old Testament follows. Is Yhwh a persona of the divine essence or the ousia itself? Put in other terms, is Yhwh the Father or the divine essence of three personae?" (101)
"Yhwh's proclamation of his own name is the revelation of his glory. The thirteen middot (attributes) of God listed by Yhwh himself (34:6-7) reveal the character of the divine name and in so doing reveal the character of Yhwh." (106)
"Yhwh's mission to create and redeem does not exhaust the scope of God's being. As various episodes within the Old Testament attest, the being of God resists domestication of any sort."(107)
Epilogue
"The church's long-term health and faithful witness rests on its commitment to seeking after God's Word in Holy Scripture. Of course, other ecclesial matters are important. But a doctrine of Scripture's sufficiency means that the church's access, to what gives it life, the person and work of Jesus Christ, is through the front doors of Holy Scripture." (115)
"Still, it is the open Bible that sustains and energizes every component of pastoral ministry and, for that matter, Christian existence. People need Jesus. And Jesus Christ stands at the door of his own Word and knocks." (117)
Notable Content
Defining Terms. (6)
Canon and Scripture Ontology. (10)
The Canonical Approach in Modern Guise:
"While drawing on the resources and instincts of the church's premodern reading of Scripture, the canonical approach makes judicious use of modern criticism's literary engagement with the text's compositional history. The key term is judicious because the canonical approach makes appreciative use of critical tools while at the same time resisting modern criticism's interpretive goals and methodological hegemony." (25)
Textual Final Form:
"The final form also leaves an interpretive imprint on the text, rendering the whole as more than the sum total of its parts; it is the culmination of God's revealed word in time, and renders an authoritative frame of reference for the parts leading to the whole--a witness to God's revelation rather than a source for critical reconstruction." (27)
Canonical Intentionality:
"The canonical approach conceives of the text's intentionality in the authorial voice of the text's final form. While the religiohistorical phenomena producing the various canonical voices are not denied, the canonical approach understands the text's intentionality as "loosened" from these historical forces for the sake of an enduring witness to divine self-revelation." (46)
See John Sailhamer categories. (48)
Textual Pluriformity/Uniformity:
"The plethora of text and text types discovered in the twentieth century complicates the text-critical pursuit of an "original" Old Testament text. A standard view of the Old Testament's textual history is that a pluriform text type--multiple and divergent texts and text types-in time yielded to a uniform text associated with rabbinic Judaism of the era after AD 70. This chapter makes a different claim: uniformity and pluriformity existed on parallel historical tracks, rather than pluriformity leading genetically into uniformity." (63)
Hebrew or Greek or Both?:
"The translations of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek remain a significant historical and theological phenomenon. Undoubtedly the Septuagint (LXX) played a formative role in the shaping of the New Testament and early Christianity. The evidence suggests that this historical accident tells much about the translatability of the Old Testament, but it does not necessarily place the Septuagint translation above its Hebrew parent text." (76)
Fixity:
"The verbal character of the Old Testament in its literal sense opens up to the future: much like the literal sense of Cézanne's life opens up to the future of his work. Yet in this opening up, the Old Testament's "life" or literal sense or given verbal form is not left behind for greener New Testament pastures. As Cézanne's paintings provide a necessary entry point to the fixity of his life, so too does the trinitarian subject matter of Scripture provide an entry point to the fixity of the Old Testament's verbal character." (98)
Notes on *Words of Life*
Words of Life: Scripture as the Living and Active Word of God, Timothy Ward (IVP, 2009)
Main Idea/Takeaway
When we read the words of Scripture we encounter God in action to reveal himself and redeem sinners through Jesus Christ.
"The kind of doctrine of Scripture this book will outline is one that aims to demonstrate that its every aspect is shaped from the bottom up by the character and actions of God, and is integrally related to God's being and action, yet without the inert book coming to eclipse the living Savior." (17)
"To encounter the words of Scripture is to encounter God in action." (48)
"Scripture is God in communicative action. Therefore to encounter the words of Scripture is to encounter God in action." (177)
Interaction
To obey/disobey God's words is to obey/disobey God himself. (27)
Central to how we live like Jesus is real is our attentiveness to his word. Our everyday embrace of Jesus's realness is seen in how we relate to His word. (28)
God's actions as an extension of himself. (31)
Trusting God's words is trusting God. (32)
Human language. (34)
See Packer's "Fundamentalism and the Word of God." (41)
The organizing principle. (48)
How to think of 'doctrine' of Scripture. (51)
The covenantal nature of our relationship with God. (52)
Bible as a covenant book. (55)
When we hear the apostolic word. (60)
God is the source of all reliable meaning. (64)
This is not a "canon within a canon," but rather is to say that, because of redemption history, some books are more relevant to the church's life, and the content of the gospel." (85)
What is verbal God-breathedness? Prepositions are breathed out by God in light of the speech act. (86)
Amazing implication for translatability. (90)
Defense of the NIV. (91)
The inner testimony of the Holy Spirit.(93)
While we never shrink back from rational proofs, we are supernaturalists and should never pretend otherwise.(94)
cf. Vanhoozer 'First Theology.' (95)
When we read the words of Scripture, we encounter God in action. (95)
We deny the sufficiency of Scripture when we suppose the Spirit to work apart from the Word. (112)
Primary matters: salvation, life, holiness. Secondary: worship, government, etc. (112)
Word & Spirit. Nothing more is needed, and nothing less. (113)
Foundational to preaching. (121)
On "Preaching in worship and as worship"- This is connected to the bigger question of Who is God?! And his revelation. And what is Scripture? (122)
Sufficiency means that nothing more or less than Word & Spirit is needed to receive God's revelation (& its purpose to save). Clarity means nothing more or less than Word & Spirit is needed to understand God's revelation ( & its purpose to save). (129)
Table of Contents
I. Introduction
II. God and Scripture: a biblical outline
III. The Trinity and Scripture: a theological outline
IV. The Attributes of Scripture: a doctrinal outline
V. The Bible and Christian life: the doctrine of Scripture applied
VI. Summary
Favorite Quotes by Chapter
I. Introduction
"Throughout Christian history, the overwhelmingly predominant view of the Bible has been that it is itself the living and active Word of God. To say that the Bible is the Word of God is to say, putting it another way, that 'what the Bible says, God says'." (9)
"We do not have to choose between 'believing in the Bible' and 'believing in Christ.' As Christians we are called on to do both. In fact one crucial means by which we demonstrate our faith in Christ is by also believing what the Bible says. Perhaps the most straightforward argument for this begins by observing the fact that Jesus himself treated the Jewish Scriptures, our Old Testament, as themselves words from God, and so if we are going to be devoted to him then we must make sure our view of the Scriptures is the same as his." (11)
II. God and Scripture: a biblical outline
"Thus an action of God can be appropriately described both y saying that God's Word has performed an action for which he sent it, and by saying that God himself has performed an action." (25)
"Thus, when Adam and Eve disobey God's spoken command , they fracture their relationship with God himself. From God's side, when the words of his command are set aside by his creatures in favor of their own desires and their own claims of wisdom, then God himself has been set aside." (27)
"Abraham's response to God's words simply is also a response to God himself. His obedience to and trust in God's words are also, at one and the same time, an obedience to and trust in God himself." (28)
"To trust God's covenant promise is not to enter into an agreement with an absentee God; it is to trust the God who has come to you. There is, then, a complex but real relationship between God and his actions, expressed and performed, as they are, through God's words. In philosophical terms, there is an ontological relationship between God and his words. It seems that God's actions, including his verbal actions, are a kind of extension of him." (31)
"Communication from God is therefore communion with God, when met with a response of trust from us." (32)
"God speaks to us human words of promise, such that for us to trust those words is in itself an act of trusting God himself." (32)
"Whatever else may be true of human language, it is quite reasonable to suppose that it has the ability to speak truly of God, both because it was given to us by a God who speaks within himself as eternally three speaking persons, and also because our possession of language, as made in God's image, is analogous to God's communicative capacity. Our language can be made by God to speak truthfully of him because our language has its origin in him and in some way is like his own." (34-35)
"This philosophical assertion continues, sometimes unconsciously and therefore unquestioned, to shape much contemporary rejection of the orthodox doctrine of Scripture. At root, the rejection of Scripture as divine special revelation is often a side effect of the greater rejection of the particularity of Christ as God's ultimate self-revelation in the world. Here should be noted a feature that underlies many discussions about Scripture: people's view of Scripture is often largely determined by their view of Jesus Christ. That is one practical reason why the doctrine of Scripture must be articulated in a way that makes explicit its dependance on the doctrine of Christ." (41)
"Therefore everyone who never met the Word incarnate directly, bit who hears the words of Christ from the disciples, nevertheless encounters the words of the Father and of Christ, who in those words present themselves to us as a covenant-making God." (42)
"Thus to reject the disciples' words, which come from Christ and are about Christ, is to reject God, and so to be liable for condemnation." (42)
"God has identified himself both with Jesus Christ in person and with the passing on by his disciples of the words Jesus brought from the Father, with the result that to reject those human words spoken by the disciples is to reject God." (42)
III. The Trinity and Scripture: a theological outline
"Perfection, necessity, sufficiency, clarity, inspiration and authority. Analysis of the Bible under these headings, as the primary way in which Scripture is described theologically, does indeed sometimes pass too quickly over the complexity of scriptural testimony and teaching on the nature and function of the Bible in relation to God and his purposes." (50)
"Here we are still very much engaged in the vital task of describing Scripture explicitly at every point in the light of the character and actions of God, as revealed and witnessed to in Scripture." (51)
"In the overarching narrative of Scripture the two great actions of the Father, following the glory of his creative act and the tragedy of the fall of humankind, are to redeem and to reveal." (52)
"Commandments declare the stipulations of the covenant. Prophecy and epistles, in particular, expound and apply those stipulations in specific contexts; they are, in effect, the covenant preached in different situations. Narrative relates the unfolding events in which God's people have successfully trusted and rejected him, and through which God has faithfully enacted the consequences of his promises , whether in blessing or judgment." (55)
"Psalms give exemplary forms in which a believer can address God in many situations in life while remaining faithfully within the covenant, whether one is full of praise for experience of blessing, or confused and despairing over God's apparent failure to keep his promises. And apocalyptic writing demonstrates graphically the full reality of the present and ultimate consequences of either blessing or cursing that follows from obedience or disobedience to the covenant." (55)
"Yet to see the Bible as 'the book of the covenant' is not simplistic or reductionist. It is rather to recognize Scripture's profound role in the relationship between humanity and God that God wants to establish." (56)
"A very high claim for Scripture is of course being made here: Scripture is an aspect of the action of the sovereign, faithful, self-revealing God in the world, and specifically it is the action by which this God declares his ongoing covenant with his people, climaxed in Christ." (56)
"The strong bonds between ourselves, our actions and the words by which we perform many of our actions is evident in the normal course of life. This is particularly so when we think about the responses that can be made to a promise. For you to say 'I trust you to keep your promise' or 'I trust your promise' or 'I trust your words' is in effect to say the same thing in regard to me. For you to distrust the words of my promise is simply to distrust me. Persons and actions are so intimately identified in interpersonal relationships that actions begin to look like an extension of our personhood in our relationships with others." (59)
"Those who rejected the apostolic proclamation of the gospel of Christ thereby made themselves liable to God's condemnation, because in rejecting those words they had rejected God. Similarly, to hear the words of Christ was directly to hear the speech of God. It follows that to speak of Scripture as the book of the covenant, the ongoing form in which God repeats his covenant promise in the world, ought to lead us to speak of Scripture as in some sense a mode of God's presence in the world." (60)
"As we have seen, we as persons who act in relation to one another are so invested in our words that, by speaking, we act upon both ourselves and one another (e.g. in making you a promise I acquire for myself the responsibility to keep my promise and ascribe to you the obligation to take me at my word, other things being equal). It follows that what you do to my words (to my actions as performed by my words) you do to me." (63)
"A speech act can be as short as a single word ('Go!'), or as long as a unified collection of books (the Bible as God's covenant promise in writing). Therefore when we speak of Scripture as a mode of God's presence, we are asserting that it is in the speech acts of Scripture that God reveals himself by being semantically present to us, as he promises, warns, rebukes, reassures and so on. And this revelation is happening when the words of Scripture are read: when God is performing again, through the reading of Scripture, the same action he performed through those words when they were first written." (66)
"Turretin's response was that 'Christ is our only teacher, in such a sense as that the ministry of the word is not thereby excluded, but necessarily included because now in it only he addresses us ad by it he instructs us." (71)
"Scripture's words are 'Word' not just because he sent them and speaks through them, but also because its words are his actions, the present word-actions of the Word." (71)
"We should read, listen to and hear it preached, in order to find ourselves presented again with Christ and addressed by him. As we encounter the words of Scripture, we are encountering the Son in action, presenting himself to us in his call on us to take up our cross and follow him." (72)
"God's aim in Scripture is to lead us to true devotion to Christ, and obedience to him and love for him, impinging on every area of life and thought." (73)
"To speak of Scripture as in itself divine is therefore to speak of the divine origin of the speech acts of Scripture, a characteristic that follows from their identity as God's speech acts." (78)
"Because of the unity of the Father and the Son in revelation and redemption, Scripture is at the same time the word by which the incarnate and ascended Word, the one in whom all God's covenant promises are fulfilled, continues to act and to present himself semantically so that he may be known in the world over which he has all authority." (78)
"Because the whole of Scripture is breathed-out by God, every part needs to be interpreted in the light of its place in the history of salvation that Scripture unfolds, and in its literary context." (85)
"Verbal inspiration claims that the Bible says exactly what God wants to say because the Holy Spirit was responsible for every word written in Scripture. He is the divine Author behind the human authors." (86)
"It is the speech acts of Scripture (its units of meaning: sentences, paragraphs and books) that have their origin in divine authorship, because authors primarily author speech acts. The individual words are inspired (spoken out by God) to the extent that they come together to express these speech acts." (86)
"Crucial to the Reformers' view of this action of the Spirit is that his illuminating work took place not through the church but through Scripture." (93)
"Whenever we encounter the speech acts of Scripture, we encounter God himself in action. The Father presents himself to us as a God who makes and keeps his Covenant promises. The Son comes to us as the Word of God, knowable to us through his words. The Spirit ministers these words to us, illuminating our minds and hearts, so that in receiving, understanding and trusting them, we receive, know and trust God himself." (95)
IV. The Attributes of Scripture: a doctrinal outline
"Thus a verbal revelation is absolutely necessary if humanity is to know God as he truly is, and to be able to enter into a saving knowledge of God." (101)
"If Scripture alone is claimed to be the supreme authority in Christian thinking and living, that is because both its content (the verbal revelation) and its form (the written Scriptures) are indispensable." (102)
"The whole pattern of God's self-revelation is that he establishes a covenant relationship between himself and his people, and this is a relationship in which he makes himself known. He does not reveal himself exhaustively, but the God he shows himself to be in his covenant relationship is the God he really is." (104)
"The reality of the Trinity, and the purpose of the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension are sufficiently complex that they cannot be mimed or communicated through a religious impulse or sensation; they need to be spoken." (104)
"In the light of this, I would define the sufficiency of Scripture in this way: because of the ways in which God has chosen to relate himself to Scripture, Scripture is sufficient as the means by which God continues to present himself to us such that we can know him, repeating through Scripture the covenant promise he has brought to fulfillment in Jesus Christ." (113)
"Human finitude, and particularly sin, are the reasons for our lack of understanding of Scripture, rather than the cause being in some lack of clarity attributable to Scripture itself." (116)
"Expository biblical preaching in fact assumes rather than denies the clarity of Scripture. An expository preacher takes it that his sermon can be judged as either a faithful or an unfaithful exposition of Scripture by his hearers, as they discern for themselves whether his teaching is or is not warranted by his biblical text. His appeal is not 'My teaching is true because I'm an officially appointed preacher' nor is it as heart 'My teaching is true because I am a Spirit-filled and Spirit-anointed preacher.' Those two factors may give added weight to his teaching, but at heart the implied claim of the expository preacher is instead 'My teaching is true because it can be openly seen that what I am saying is in line with the meaning of Scripture'." (121)
"The preacher is not doing something with Scripture that the hearer by definition cannot do, which would be the case if the preacher were appealing primarily to special spiritual anointing or to his holding of an office in the church." (122)
"The authority of Scripture is dependent entirely on the authority of God, and comes about only because of what God has chosen to do in the way he authored Scripture, and because of what he continues to do in presenting himself to us through Scripture as a God we can know and trust."
"It commits us to giving the Bible the sovereign place in our lives that must follow from its central place in relation to God and in his actions." (129)
"The idea that the Bible is 'infallible' means that it does not deceive. To say that the Bible is 'inerrant' is to make the additional claim that it does not assert any errors of fact: whether the Bible refers to events in the life of Christ, or to other details of history and geography, what it asserts is true."
V. The Bible and Christian life: the doctrine of Scripture applied
"Preaching goes as tragically astray when it muses and reflects on those matters it should be proclaiming, as it does when it confidently proclaims what the preacher cannot know, because Scripture is silent." (158)
"For example, if as a preacher I am hesitant that the Spirit will come and act supremely through my preaching of the speech acts of Scripture because he once authored them and is alive to speak to them again, then my preaching, if it is to be proclamatory, will probably take one of two forms. I might end up recommending my own spiritual experience as normative, perhaps using some biblical texts to illustrate my experience, by way of historical precedent. Or I might focus on rehearsing the beliefs and practices of my Christian subculture or denomination, which distinguish us from other groups, with the Bible again reduced to serving as a doctrinal sourcebook, or as a handbook of practical illustrations." (158)
"To claim that one's own human speech about Christ crucified really is God speaking, and that the Holy Spirit comes in power through one's apparently weak speech, seems to run dangerously close to blasphemy. Yet that is clearly the pattern for the extension of the gospel after Pentecost that Christ and the apostles established."(159)
"The New Testament precedent is simply that the preacher can preach and must preach, fearful and trembling because he is given the privilege of speaking God's words and has no power to determine the result of his preaching, but not so fearful that he loses his resolves to know and proclaim Christ and him crucified." (159)
"The Spirit's activity through the speech acts of the Bible now is consistent with his activity in their composition at the level of grammar and meanings back then. The Spirit, as the Spirit of Christ, navigates the church into the future by calling it back to the written Word he authored." (161)
"In the light of this, what the faithful biblical preacher does, and what the Holy Spirit does with Scripture through him, is best described as a contemporary re-enactment of the speech act that the Spirit performed in the original authoring of the text. This notion, that the sermon is itself a redemptive act of God in the present, is common in literature on preaching." (162)
"A biblical text written, for example, to instil in its first readers and hearers a confident hope that at the future coming of Christ their perseverance in the faith will be vindicated performs that same action again in the lives of contemporary believers. It does so in a sermon if the preacher is faithful to the purpose of the original text, and fashions his sermon not just as a speech about hope, but as itself a hope-inspiring action." (163)
"The Spirit is again graciously present in the preached message, if what is preached now is faithful in purpose and content to what he once inspired." (163)
"Properly faithful biblical preaching involves the preacher deliberately seeking to fashion every verbal (and indeed physical) aspect of his preaching in such a way that the Spirit may act through his words in the lives of his hearers, ministering the content of Scripture in accordance with the purpose of Scripture." (163)
"The preacher with a Christian congregation is therefore not bringing something fundamentally new in his sermon. Of course he should be teaching aspects of the biblical faith they are still unaware of, but he is only bringing to light for them from Scripture what is already true of them, explaining more of the truth that is already theirs. At heart he is reminding them of the one thing that has been undeniably true of them ever since they first devoted themselves to the apostolic gospel: that by the work of the Spirit of God they are not what they once were." (169)
"Good preaching exercises something of a 'credal' function in the local church, giving people an interpretative structure in which to make sense of individual parts of Scripture when they encounter them for themselves." (172)
"What we expect from Scripture must be determined entirely by what Scripture is, and the purpose for which God has caused it to be written."(174)
"The norms of grammatical and historical interpretation are not avoided. But interpretation is not an end in itself; reading the Bible is not fundamentally a comprehension exercise. Interpretation should serve only to lead us to an encounter with God as he actually presents himself to us in Scripture." (175)
VI. Summary
"He gives us Scripture as our word of life: the trustworthy, clear and sufficient means of knowing him and remaining in covenant relationship with him, in the power of the Holy Spirit, right up until the day we shall no longer need it, because then we shall see face to face." (179)
Notable Content
The Reformers view of the work of the Word and Spirit together was an argument directed in three directions at once: (93)
Against Roman Catholicism, it asserted that the Spirit required the church only as an instrument, not as the actual dynamic, by which people came to faith.
Negatively against the sixteenth-century Radical Reformation, it asserted that the Spirit regularly illuminated minds through the content of the written Word.
Positively, it served to demonstrate the faithfulness and consistency of God in revelation.
Notes on *Fundamentalism and the Word of God*
Fundamentalism and the Word of God, J. I. Packer (IVP, 1958)
Spurgeon: “Defend the Bible? I would as soon defend a lion.”
Main Idea
Evangelical theology, in line with historic Christian doctrine, believes the Bible is the word of God, and should be thus defended against the assaults of Liberalism/subjectivism.
"In fact, the cause of the division is, from one point of view, the deepest doctrinal divergence of all- disagreement as to the principle of authority: for there can be no stable agreement on anything between those who disagree here. Through treating the position of Evangelicals as mere bits and pieces and failing to ask why they believe the things they do believe, the critics have misses this issue altogether. Yet it is the heart of the controversy, and it is here that our discussion must center." (17)
"The scriptural approach to Scripture is thus to regard it as God's written testimony to Himself. When we call the Bible the Word of God, we mean, or should mean, that its message constitutes a single utterance of which God is the author. What Scripture says, He says. When we hear or read Scripture, that which impinges on our mind (whether we realize it or not) is the speech of God Himself." (89)
"Evangelicals, it is said, cling to the idea of biblical infallibility as drowning men cling to a straw- not because it is worthy of their trust, but because they want something to cling to and there is nothing else within reach. We can now see how perverse a misunderstanding this is. the evangelical certainty of the trustworthiness and authority of Scripture is of exactly the same sort, and rests on exactly the same basis, as the Church's certainty of the Trinity, or the incarnation, or any other catholic doctrine. God has declared it; Scripture embodies it; the Spirit exhibits it to believers; and they humbly receive it, as they are bound to do." (122)
"We have seen what the real issues are: the authority of Christ and of Scripture; the relation between the Bible and reason; the method of theology, and the meaning of repentance; the choice between Evangelicalism and Subjectivism." (176)
Interaction
The question of Scripture is really, "What think ye of Christ?" (59)
The message of Scripture is Jesus. He is the key. (84)
See Vanhoozer, "First Theology" (86)
JIP is suspicious of the Biblical Theology movement in its earliest days, c.1950s. (155)
Liberalism repeats the same assault on Christianity that has been since its beginning: the contribution of sinful man to the work of Christ, which obscures Christ's glory. (173)
We, following the Reformation heritage, must oppose Liberalism today as the Reformers opposed Medieval Catholicism. (173)
Table of Contents
Foreword
I. 'Fundamentalists' under Fire
II. What is 'Fundamentalism'?
III. Authority
IV. Scripture
V. Faith
VI. Reason
VII. Liberalism
VIII. Conclusion
Favorite Quotes by Chapter
Foreword:
This book is a constructive re-statement of evangelical principles, aiming to fix the right approach to the Bible.
I. Fundamentalists Under Fire
Liberal critics are not going after mere evangelical practice, but actual principle. They consider the idea of biblical inerrancy to be unreasonable in our modern times.
And many of these critics blame Fundamentalists for being too parochial. They consider them to not get everything wrong — they’re not heretics — but they need to adjust a few things here and there. “If only Fundementalists would abandon their isolationism and come into these [more mainline] movements!”
JIP calls this analysis just flat wrong ...
“It reflects two characteristic weaknesses of ecumenical theology. The first is the tendency to treat every theological tradition as no more than a loosely linked collection of isolated insights, brought together by the mere accident of history. But the evangelical faith is a systematic and integrated whole, built on a single foundation; and they must be understood and assessed as such. ... [there actually is a major doctrinal issue separating the two sides, Mainlines and Fundamentalists] ... in fact, the cause of the division is, from one point of view, the deepest doctrinal divergence of all – disagreement as to the principle of authority: there could be no stable agreement on anything between those who disagree here. Through treating the position of evangelicals as mere bits and pieces and failing to ask why they believe the things that they do believe, the critics have missed this issue altogether. Yet it is the heart of the controversy, and it is here to our discussion must center.” (17)
“Our first task must be to test all the words of men by the authoritative Word of God, to receive only what Scripture endorses, and to reject all that is contrary to it.” (19)
II. What Is Fundamentalism?
On the connection between Christology and the doctrine of Scripture. As Timothy Ward also says, "people's view of Scripture is often largely determined by their view of Jesus Christ" (Words of Life, 41).
Matthew 5:17–18,
17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.
III. Authority
“The real question concerns the principle of authority.” (41)
“The problem of authority is the most fundamental problem that the Christian church ever faces. This is because Christianity is built on truth: that is to say, on the content of a divine revelation. Christianity announces salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, in and through whom that revelation came to completion; but faith in Jesus Christ is possible only where the truth concerning him is known.” (42)
Two classes of doctrinal division:
1) a common view of the Bible as the final authority, but different only as to what it teaches
2) divided views on authority, such as Protestants and Rome; (same would apply to Evangelicals and Liberals)
There are three distinct authorities to which final appeal might be made:
Holy Scripture (Evangelical)
Church Tradition (Rome)
Christian Reason (Liberal)
Evangelical view of authority:
“To learn the mind of God, one must consult His written Word. What Scripture says, God says. The Bible is inspired in the sense of being word-for-word God-given.” 47
“The proper ground for believing a thing is that God says it in His written Word, and a readiness to take God’s word and accept what he asserts in the Bible is thus fundamental to faith.” 49
The Teaching of Jesus:
“The fact we have to face is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnate, who claimed divine authority for all that he did and taught, both confirmed the absolute authority of the Old Testament for others and submitted to it unreservedly himself.” (55)
“In conjunction with the teachings of Jesus, the written word of the Old Testament retains is full, divine authority. Attempts have been made by some who reject Christ’s view of the Old Testament to evade the force of this conclusion. This could be done only by denying Christ’s authority altogether. Christ’s claim to be divine is either true or false. If it is true, his person guarantees the truth of all the rest of his teaching (for a divine person cannot lie or err); therefore, his view of the Old Testament is true. If his claim is false, there is no compelling reason to believe anything else that he said. If we accept Christ’s claims, therefore, we commit ourselves to believe all that he taught—on this authority. If we refuse to believe some part of what he taught, we are in effect denying him to be the divine Messiah – on our own authority. The question, “What think ye of the Old Testament?”, resolves into the question, “What think ye of Christ?” And our answer to the first proclaims our answer to the second.” (59)
“The apostles clearly grasped their Master’s of teaching about Scripture. They proclaimed Christianity as the fulfillment of Scripture. They preached the authority of Christ on the basis of the authority of the Old Testament. They argued from Scripture, quoting its words as the speech of God. Indeed, they laid claim to the Old Testament as a Christian book. The oracles of God, entrusted to the Jews, had been written primarily, they maintained, for the benefit of Christian believers. ‘Whatsoever things were written beforehand were written for our learning.’ The events in the wilderness in Moses’s day ‘were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come.’ The prophets who spoke of the sufferings and glory of Christ ‘were serving not themselves but you, in the things which have now been announced to you by those who preached the good news to you.’ The reckoning of righteousness to believing Abraham was recorded ‘not for his sake alone, but for ours also.’ The Old Testament Scripture were ‘able to make you wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.’ To Christians, who held the key to its meaning, the Old Testament was luminous, though to those who veiled their hearts by refusing to find its meaning in Christ it remained obscure.” *(62-62)
Rom 15:4; 1 Cor. 10:11; 1 Peter 1:12, Rom 4:23; 2 Tim 3:15
“Apostolic utterances are the truth of Christ and possess the authority of Christ; they are to be received as words of God, because what they convey is, in fact, the word of God.” 64
“To deny the normative authority of Scripture over the church is the misconceive the nature of Christianity, and, in effect, to deny the Lordship of Christ. If the teaching of Christ and the apostles is to rule the church, the church must be ruled by Scripture.” (69)
“The words and lives of Christian men must be in continual process of reformation by the written Word of their God.” (69)
“We may never assume the complete rightness of our own established ways of thought and practice and excuse ourselves the duty of testing and reforming them by Scripture.” (70)
“Scripture has complete and final authority over the church as a self-contained, self interpreting revelation from God. This is what evangelicals are concerned above all to maintain. What Scripture says, God says; and what God says in Scripture is to be the rule of faith and life in his church.” (73)
IV. Scripture
Scripture itself is alone competent to judge our doctrine of Scripture (76)
The Divine Origin of Scripture:
"Inspiration is to be defined as a supernatural, providential influence of God's Holy Spirit upon the human authors which caused them to write what He wished to be written for the communication of revealed truth to others." (77)
"The Bible excludes the idea of a frustrated Deity. 'Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven, and in earth. He was well able to prepare, equip and overrule sinful human writers so that they wrote nothing but what He intended; and Scripture tells us that this is what in fact He did. We are to think of the Spirit's inspiring activity, and, for that matter, of all His regular operations in and upon human personality, as (to use an old but valuable technical term) concursive; that is, as exercised in, through and by means of the writers' own activity, in such a way that their thinking and writing was both free and spontaneous on their part and divinely elicited and controlled, and what they wrote was not only their own work but also God's work." (80)
"But it is more than a library of books by human authors; it is a single book with a single author — God the Spirit — a single theme — God the Son, and the Father's saving purposes, which all revolve round Him. Our Lord is therefore the key to Scripture, and its focal center; there is a sense in which all bears witness of Him, and in this common reference the heterogenous contents of the Bible find their unity. Not that all parts of Scripture are equally important, or witness to Chris and the kingdom of God in the same way. But no part of Scripture is without its bearing on these central topics, and no part of Scripture is rightly understood if read without its reference." (84-85).
"The biblical concept of Scripture, then, is of a single, though complex, God-given message, set down in writing in God-given words; a message which God has spoken and still speaks." (88)
"Leave man to guess God's mind and purpose, and he will guess wrong; he can know it only by being told it. Moreover, the whole purpose of God's mighty acts is to bring man to know Him by faith' and Scripture knows no foundation for faith but the spoken word of God, inviting our trust in Him on the basis of what He has done for us. Where there is no word from God, faith cannot be." (92)
"God's Word is affirmed to be infallible because God Himself is infallible; the infallibility of Scripture is simply the infallibility of God speaking. What Scripture says is to be received as the infallible Word of the infallible God, and to assert biblical inerrancy and infallibility is just to confess faith in (i) the divine origin of the Bible and (ii)the truthfulness and trustworthiness of God." (96)
"The authority of Christ requires us to receive as God's Word all that the Bible asserts. No other attitude to biblical assertions is theologically warrantable." (100)
"God's Word is not presented in Scripture in the form of a theological system, but it admits of being stated in that form, an, indeed, requires to be so stated before we can properly grasp it- grasp it, that is, as a whole. Every text has its immediate context in the passage from which it comes, its broader context in the book to which it belongs, and its ultimate context in the Bible as a whole; and it needs to be rightly related to each of these contexts if its character, scope, and significance is to be adequately understood." (101)
"Fanciful spiritualizing, so far from yielding God's meaning, actually obscured it. The literal sense is itself the spiritual sense, coming from God and leading to Him." (104)
"Christians are bound to receive the Bible as God's Word written on the authority of Christ, not because they can prove it such by independent enquiry, but because as disciples they trust their divine Teacher." (108)
"But without the Spirit's help there can be no grasp of the message of Scripture, no conviction of the truth of Scripture, and no faith in the God of Scripture. Without the Spirit, nothing is possible but spiritual blindness and unbelief." (112)
V. Faith
"Just as the Spirit teaches all Christians to receive as authoritative articles of faith the doctrines which the Scriptures assert, so He teaches them to regard as an authoritative articles of faith the doctrines which the Scriptures assert, so He teaches them to regard as an authoritative source of doctrine the Scriptures which assert them." (121)
VI. Reason
'All truth is God's truth; facts, as such, are sacred, and nothing is more un-Christian than to run away from them." (127)
"Whereas the non-Christian is led by faithless reason, the Christian should be guided by reasoning faith." (128)
"Sinners are no more ready to acknowledge God in their thinking, by allowing His utterances authority over their judgment, than they are to acknowledge God in their actions, by allowing his utterances authority over their behavior." (139)
"Christian believers, who acknowledge the authority of Christ as a Teacher in other matters, ought equally to acknowledge it in their approach to the Bible; they should receive Scripture as He did, accepting its claim to be divinely inspired and true and studying it as such." (141)
"This is the only road to intellectual freedom, and its sole safeguard is the principle of absolute subjection to Scripture." (143)
"If anyone in the present debate lacks intellectual freedom, it is rather those whose minds are governed by the tyrannical modern axiom that what is newest must be truest, what is old must be out-of date, and change is always progress; those who feel they must deny what Christ affirmed about Scripture rather than break with nineteenth- century ideas of what assumptions are 'scientific' and what are not; those in the grip of a theological neuroses that makes them regard rationalistic principles of biblical criticism as an inviolable sacred cow." (143-144)
VII. Liberalism
"To defer to God's Word is an act of faith; any querying and editing of it on our own initiative is an exhibition of unbelief."(153)
"To accept all is consistent; to reject all is consistent; but no third course is consistent." (163)
"If man's judgment is to be the measure of some things in Scripture , why not of all things? If we are entitled to desupernaturalize the faith in part, why not altogether? It is hard to respect the liberal half-way houses, however much acuteness and learning goes into their erection; for they are arbitrary through and through." (163)
"History shows that Christian witness is strong and effective only when believers are humble enough to believe nothing less about God than His own Word tells us." (163)
"The apologetic strategy that would attract converts by the flattery of accommodating the gospel to the 'wisdom' of sinful man was condemned by Paul nineteen centuries ago, and the past hundred years have provided a fresh demonstration of its bankruptcy. The world may call its compromises 'progressive' and 'enlightened' (those are its names for all forms of thought that pander to its conceit); those who produce them will doubtless, by a natural piece of wishful thinking, call them 'bold' and 'courageous', and perhaps 'realistic' and 'wholesome'; but the Bible condemns them as sterile aberrations. And the Church cannot hope to recover its power till it resolves to turn its back on them." (168)
VIII. Conclusion
"The Bible asks to be regarded as a God-given, error-free, self-interpreting unity, true and trustworthy in all that it teaches." (169)
"The fact is that here we are faced in principle with a choice between historic Evangelicalism and modern Subjectivism."(170)
"Once men reverse the proper relation between Scripture and their own thinking and start judging biblical statements about God by their private ideas of God, instead of vice versa, their knowledge of the Creator is in imminent danger of perishing, and with it the whole idea of supernatural redemption." (171-172)
"Evangelical theology is bound to oppose the attitude which under-values the gift of Scripture and presumes to correct the inerrant Word of God, just as it will oppose all misguided endeavors to supplement by human merit the perfect righteousness of Christ."(174)
Notable Content
Two classes of doctrinal division: (44)
1) a common view of the Bible as the final authority, but different only as to what it teaches
2) divided views on authority, such as Protestants and Rome; (same would apply to Evangelicals and Liberals)
Packer is suspicious of the Biblical Theology Movement in its early days (see 151-160)
Four reasons why Liberalism is faulty (see 160-163)