discussion questions for better understanding Dr. Tipton's ETS lecture

Well, I’m going to step out on a limb here and post some of my own reflections on the papers given last week at ETS by Westminster’s own Drs. Pete Enns and Lane Tipton. Before I incriminate myself, however, I do wish to echo the sentiments of my brother, Tony Stiff, in saying that both of these men are very dear to me. Studying under both of these men has been a joy and a privilege and I respect both of them as Christians. Initially I typed up these comments as a critique of Dr. Tipton’s proposal. But, having corresponded with Dr. Tipton, whom I consider a friend, it seems that I may have misunderstood his thesis. Nevertheless, I am aware that my (mis?)understanding of Dr. Tipton’s thesis is one shared pretty widely by those whose current area of study is Biblical studies and who have heard the lecture he delivered at ETS. This fact raises the question of whether the Biblical scholars and the systematicians have been largely talking past each other as of late? So I want to offer some questions, the sorts of questions that make up the meat and potatoes of Biblical scholarship, for which it would be helpful to see how Dr. Tipton’s proposal would specifically apply. If we can begin to try to work out how Dr. Tipton’s proposal bears on some of these specific questions, we may be able to begin to clear up some of the thick smog of miscommunication that has been choking our campus in recent days.

I had understood Dr. Tipton to be arguing that if we would appropriately employ the incarnation as an analogue for inspiration, we cannot stop with the assertion that, like Christ, the Bible is fully human and fully divine and leave it at that. Rather we must recognize also that the divine aspect of Scripture precedes, conditions, subordinates the human aspect of Scripture at every point. As with the incarnate Son of God, with the inscripturated Word of God, the divinity has priority over the humanity. So far, so good.

I also (mis?)understood him to be arguing that pneumatology and not anthropology (and, by “anthropology”, I presumed that he meant historical, philological, archaeological, paleographical, literary, and sociological study and the like of that) provides the ultimate context for navigating all hermeneutical questions. Specifically, he claims that this is the case with respect to questions concerning the New Testament’s use of the Old.

Now, I found this claim to be puzzling because it is really hard to see how the bare recognition that the humanity of Scripture is subordinate to the divinity of Scripture helps me to understand why it is that the author of Matthew does what he does with Hosea 11:1 (Matt. 2:15). Matthew is pretty clearly not doing grammatical-historical exegesis here. Why does he use Hosea in this way? While it is very helpful to recognize that this sort of employment of texts was common in the Second Temple period and that, therefore, Matthew’s practice was in accord with the standard hermeneutical practices of the day, it is unclear how recognition of the priority of the divinity of Scripture contributes to my understanding of why Matthew does what he does. In other words, it’s hard to see how that recognition helps me to read and understand Matthew better. What would be helpful for many of us is a clear delineation of exactly how the recognition of the priority of Scripture’s divinity sheds light on the way the New Testament uses the Old and a few examples (perhaps the one I suggested in Matthew 2:15).

Another puzzling piece of Tipton’s thesis is (what I understood to be) his claim that God’s writing of the Ten Commandments with His own finger and without a human mediator should serve as a paradigm for understanding Biblical revelation as a whole. I say that this is puzzling because to acknowledge that God wrote the Ten Commandments without a human mediator is not to remove all hermeneutical problems surrounding the Ten Commandments. For one thing, the Commandments were presumably written, as all writing is, in a language. What language might that have been? Was it the post-10th century-ish Jerusalemite dialect of our MT Pentateuchs? Or an earlier Semitic language that Moses and his contemporaries would actually have been able to understand? Or were the Commandments written in the King’s English? Regardless, the Commandments were not written, per impossible, in some sort of context-less, divine meta-language. To read the Commandments, whether written by the very finger of God or not, requires us to delve into the studies of linguistics, lexicography, grammatology, paleography and so forth. The very employment of human language by God, even without the use of a human mediator, is an incarnational action in that it necessitates our engagement with all of the messy historical questions that the recognition of divine priority was supposed to render superfluous.

What would the phrase, “kabbed et-abbika we’et-immika” have communicated, if anything, to an Israelite in Moses’ time? The only way to find out is to delve into the history of the Hebrew language. In fact, the evidence seems to point towards the Ten Commandments, if they come from the days of Moses, being a translation from an earlier Semitic dialect into the later Hebrew dialect of our BHSs. In other words, if we would read our Bibles, some historical work is inevitable. We often forget that this necessary historical work underlies our BHSs, UBSs, lexicons, Weingreen grammars, parsing guides and our English translations. Without that historical, linguistic, paleographical and lexicographical work, no amount of pneumatology is going to make "ha-asarah debarim" readable for you. So the question becomes, Does Tipton mean for his Sinaitic-paradigm for revelation to be a paradigm for hermeneutics? If so, what does that hermeneutic look like? If not, then what does Tipton understand the giving of priority to the divinity of Scripture over Scripture’s humanity to mean practically in the discipline of Biblical scholarship?

It should also be noticed that the sorts of research mentioned above must be applied beyond simple translation of words and phrases if we would understand how larger units of discourse functioned in their contexts. The meaning of discourse units does not lie simply at the level of the units’ words and phrases but extends also to figures of speech, semiotic systems that inform a culture’s figurative language, genres, literary standards and so on. This fact is the reason why comparative literature is another discipline vital for reading the Ten Commandments in their original context. Meredith Kline’s reading of Deuteronomy, and the place of the Ten Words therein, depends upon a knowledge of the structures of Hittite suzerainty treaties and a recognition of affinities between those structures and those of Deuteronomy. The identification of Deuteronomy’s genre as a suzerainty treaty requires, not a stronger awareness of the divinity of Scripture, but paleographic research and studies in comparative literature. Indeed, without such research, the genre and function of Deuteronomy would be significantly obscured. If it is legitimate to associate the Pentateuch with the legal writings of the Ancient Near East, is it also legitimate to associate the OT historical writings with the historiographical practices of the ANE, or the OT creation narratives with the creation narratives of the ANE, or the composition histories of our Scriptures with the compositional practices common to the ANE? Do such associations, per se, amount to prioritizing the humanity of Scripture? Many have (mis?)understood Dr. Tipton’s proposal to be attempting to tacitly demarcate the limits of legitimate literary comparison in Biblical scholarship. Is this perception an instance of miscommunication?

What remains to be done is the fleshing out of specifically what it means for hermeneutics and biblical scholarship to give priority to the divinity of Scripture over the humanity of Scripture. I think that this point was what some were trying to get at in the Q&As. As it stands, it is hard for some of us to see what the hermeneutical payoff of Dr. Tipton’s proposal is or if he meant for his proposal to be one for hermeneutics. I think these are the sorts of questions Biblical scholars would like to see Theologians squarely address and I’m sure there are also questions that Theologians would like to the Biblical scholars squarely address as well. Perhaps what would be helpful for communication at this juncture would be the direct addressing of each others concerns.
I will probably be posting more reflections on these issues out of my conviction that this is a conversation that is long overdue. These are the issues that we, as a church, must wrestle with and my prayer is that this blog may play some small part in our resolving them. I am especially thankful for Dr. Tipton’s taking time out of his holiday to correspond with me on these issues.

a lament for Westminster

Lament

Weep, weep for those
Who do the work of the Lord
with a high look
And a proud heart.
Their voice is lifted up
In the streets, and their cry is heard.
The bruised reed they break
By their great strength, and the smoking flax
They trample.

Weep not for the quenched
(For their God will hear their cry
And the Lord will come to save them)
But weep, weep for the quenchers

For when the Day of the Lord
Is come, and the vales sing
And the hills clap their hands
And the light shines
Then their eyes shall be opened
On a waste place,
Smouldering,
The smoke of the flax bitter
In their nostrils,
Their feet pierced
By broken reed-stems...
Wood, hay, and stubble,
And no grass springing,
And all the birds flown.

Weep, weep for those
Who have made a desert
In the name of the Lord.

-Evangeline Patterson

§

And when He drew near and saw the city He wept over it, saying, "Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace!"

-Luke 19:41-42

musings on the perspicuity of Scripture

“All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.” WCF 1:7
“The uncertainty lies always in the intellectual region, never in the practical. What Paul cares about is plain enough to the true heart, however far from plain to the man whose desire to understand goes ahead of his obedience.” -George Macdonald
Those things necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that only hardness of heart can obscure them. Note, this is not to say that the proper exegesis of a few key passages, like Romans 3 or Galatians 2 or John 10, is so universally plain that the only explanation for someone’s exegeting them otherwise is their wickedness.
Not all passages of nor things in Scripture are alike plain. But there are some things in Scripture that you cannot miss. Jesus is Lord. He is risen. He demands your allegiance and your obedience. If one’s heart is true, the call to discipleship and the sovereignty of Jesus will come through loud and clear. What the Bible cares about is plain enough to the true heart.
Isn’t it marvelous that our New Testaments are composed of a variety of literary genres? The Gospel narratives with Acts, the prosaic epistles which are peppered with hymns, creeds and poems, John’s hymn to the Logos, and, of course, the Apocalypse of John. I wonder if God, in His good providence, gave us such a set of Scriptures precisely so that someone from a culture unaccustomed to following dense argumentation of the Pauline sort, might hear Jesus’ call to discipleship loud and clear in, say, John’s apocalyptic imagery or in following Mark’s telling of Jesus’ story. When I went on a mission to Nepal, our method of gospel communication was not that of rigorous argumentation, a mode of discourse with which most mountain Nepalis were unfamiliar, but of telling the Gospel stories and parables. We engaged them, as best we could, in the manner of speaking they were used to. Perhaps those things which are necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place or sort of Scripture or other, that not only the Western, but the Nepali, the sub-Saharan African, the South American Indian, and many more, in a due use of the ordinary means available to them, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.
Of course, this way of understanding the perspicuity of Scripture assumes that a fairly simple trust in and obedience to Jesus is all that is necessary for salvation. This approach assumes that it is your faith in Christ alone that justifies you rather than your adherence to the doctrine of justification by faith alone. And, of course, many in my tradition, the Reformed, have been awfully muddled on this point, confusing our doctrinal distinctives with the borders of the invisible Church. Many evangelicals and fundamentalists do the same thing. The fruit of such confusion is that we worry endlessly about the intellectual region wherein we, whether we like it or not, find uncertainty, and we woefully neglect those things which Paul and the rest of the Scriptures so clearly care about. Could it be that often our desire to understand trumps our obedience so as to blind ourselves to what our Lord plainly requires of us?

To put it another way: the bounds of God’s mercy and the bounds of orthodoxy are not yet coextensive. How many of us could clearly articulate an orthodox Chalcedonian Christology when we first believed? The truth is something most of us have to grow into (2 Peter 3:17-18; Ephesians 4: 1-16). Perhaps we might think of those things necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation that are so clearly propounded in Scripture, the call to Christian discipleship and the declaration that He is risen, as being the seeds of orthodoxy which, once sown in the good soil of the true heart, will grow to different heights in this age but will not fully flower until we see Him face to face (1 Corinthians 3:5-9; 13:12).

sermons at Christ Community Church

Christ Community Church in Wilmington, NC has just posted some of the sermons from this summer. One from my friend, Tyler Groff, from the Master's Seminary in California:

Soli Deo Gloria (Psalm 115)

And three from yours truly:

Abram: An Unlikely Candidate for a Fresh Start (Genesis 11:27-12:9; Galatians 3:7-14)

Not So With the Sons of Abraham (Genesis 33:1-11; 2 Corinthian 5:17-21; Galatians 3:28-29)

The Hope of the Resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:1-8, 50-58)

The first two represent my first cracks at the impossible ideal of the Westminsterian redemptive-historical sermon. The third was, I think, more for my own peace of mind than anything else.

hooray, election day!

If you too feel like this year's campaigning techniques have hit new lows, you haven't seen anything yet.





Sigh...

guest post from up and coming horror writer, Devon Williams

I am proud to introduce the following scary (belated) Halloween story written by the next Stephen King, R.L. Stine, or J.K. Rowling, my nephew, Devon C. Williams. This story was featured as the entire front page of the Kingswood Elementary School newspaper. [Be warned, this story is a bit creepy, so I would not advise anyone to read it who is prone to have nightmares or who is afraid of ghosts.]

The Kingswood Ghost

There was once a nice school named Kingswood and the kids were very nice.
Then on the day October 12, something happened. On that night all the windows
flashed!!! When the kids went to school the next day they all took turns riding the elevator except one boy named Hunter. He went up the stairs. One step broke and he fell into the basement. Hunter looked all around the basement to find a way out. Then, all of a sudden there was a noise coming from behind him. It got louder and louder. Then, Hunter saw a hand! It was white and he also saw red eyes. Then Hunter fainted. When he woke up, he realized he was only dreaming.
Hunter was curious about his dream so he decided to walk to Kingswood. He looked out the window. It was very black and there was a full moon. Hunter looked at the calendar and it was Friday the 13th! He went outside with his robe and went to the school. He saw a kid in the window but it was 1:30 in the morning. The kid was really a ghost and it flew out the window! Hunter screamed very loud. He decided to go into the school. He could not see anything it was so dark. Then, all of a sudden, he heard a scream. Hunter ran to the stairs. He stopped because he remembered what happened in his dream. So, he took the elevator. On the second floor, he saw a vampire. It started to chase after him. Hunter got the fire extinguisher and whacked the vampire in the head and ran into one of the classrooms. He saw the ghost come back in the window with another kid. Hunter looked on the internet to find out how to get rid of a ghost. It said you need to spray 3 gallons of mud on the ghost. And the ghost started to fly back out the window to get more children. So Hunter ran out of the classroom. The vampire started to wake up. So Hunter ran to the elevator. He was so worried he jammed the button. The elevator started to go sideways then up! He realized he was going up in the sky! The vampire jumped up on the elevator. The vampire made a big hole and Hunter jumped out and bounced off a trampoline in a backyard. Then the vampire fell and died and the ghost was never seen again……except on Friday the 13th at Kingswood Elementary School!!!

on papers, pipe-smoking, and the price of sparrows these days

I suppose I haven't written much in the way of updating y'all on what I've been up to lately. Part of the reason for that is that there is just so little going on in my life that wouldn't bore most folks to tears. So instead I have usually opted for posting on far more engrossing subjects like Jonathan Edwards' view of the will, Goldbach's conjecture, the Jeremiah scrolls from Qumran and the like. Hasn't it been thrilling? But, just to try to balance things out a little bit, here's a little update on what I'm up to.

It's paper season here at Westminster and so for the past few weeks I've been ransacking mine and the school's libraries for information relevant to my paper topics. I'm writing two exegesis papers: one on Jesus weeping over Jerusalem in Luke 19 and one on the reconciliation of Jacob and Esau in Genesis 33 (a passage I preached this past summer). I'm also writing a church history paper for which I haven't quite settled on a subject. It'll almost certainly have something to do with evangelical, Reformed and/or Fundamentalist biblical scholarship in America in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Is everybody asleep yet?

On top of research for my essays, I'm having to do a lot of translating and reading and I'm helping out with the youth group at church. So things are a little hectic.

In youth group we've been reading through Don Miller's book, Blue Like Jazz. Well, correction: I've been reading through Don Miller's book, Blue Like Jazz. The high school guys that I'm discipling are just like I was at their age and so, since there are no Cliff's Notes for the book, none of them have really read it. But no worries. It's still a good time to hang out with them, if a little unstructured, and I'm really enjoying the book even if nobody else in my group is.

To help soothe my mind in this most chaotic of seasons, I've taken up pipe smoking. Pipe smoking has a certain ritualism to it. You have to pack the pipe just so and then light it just so. Every now and again you have to move the tobacco to the middle of the bowl with your tamper and sometimes you have to relight it. It's a bit like fiddling with a campfire on a backpacking trip, except on a much smaller scale...and it smells better...and I'm not in the woods somewhere...and I've showered recently. Ok, so it's not like that at all. But anyways, the smell is great! The aroma of the tobacco simultaneously restores and stimulates the mind haggard from being overworked. Even if the intellectual caliber of our conversations doesn't actually improve while we smoke, it sure feels like it does. The pipe goes well with Scotch, but a pitcher of lager and some good friends are probably the best complement for the pipe.

With paper and translation deadlines coming up and finals just on the horizon, I'm trying not to worry much. I just try to keep reminding myself that the going rate for sparrows is two for a penny and yet not one of them falls to the ground without my Father's say so. And I'm worth a lot more than a sparrow...

aren't I?

chronological snobbery & postmodernism

“‘Why - damn it - it’s medieval’, I exclaimed; for I still had all the chronological snobbery of my period and used the names of earlier periods as abuse… Barfield made short work of what I have called my ‘chronological snobbery’, the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find out why it went out of date. Was it refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also ‘a period’, and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.”
-C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, chapter 13

Well, having had a week to cogitate on the things we heard at the WTS emerging church conference, I have to say that one thing which we who have some sympathy for the emerging church need to be on our guard against is a sort of chronological snobbery towards theologians and theologies of the past. Simply noting that a thinker did his or her work in the 4th century BC or the 17th century or the 19th century or whatever has never weighed heavily in my mind for or against the truth or falsehood of his or her claims nor the cogency or lack thereof of his or her arguments. Only as I found myself being swept up by the savvy and chic of making the “hermeneutical turn” and the glitz and glamour of being “relevant” did chronological snobbery begin to creep into my heart. You see, most of my college education consisted of studying arguments laid out by men from centuries and even millennia past that continue to vex and compel undergraduates and professors emeritus alike. Philosophical and theological arguments do not come with expiration dates on them, but rather they, unless refuted, have indefinite shelf-lives.
But our snobbery is often a tad more subtle than Lewis’ had been before Barfield laid into him. We tend to pay lip-service to those who have gone before us in the Christian theological tradition by saying that they “were good for their times” or that “I would have sided with him had I been there in his day,” and then, having given them this formal nod of approval, we proceed to ignore them, not unlike the teen who patiently pretends to hang on his Grandmother’s every word of advice while simultaneously discounting everything she says as quaint, antique, hopelessly behind the times and, therefore, utterly negligible. Often our recognition of past thinkers having been “bound by their contexts” is simply a means of justifying treating them with a sort of benign neglect and, though we would deny it, we do sometimes functionally use the names of earlier periods as terms of abuse (read, “you modernist/rationalist...jerk”). (Perhaps we need to be reminded that at the resurrection we may have occasion to personally explain to Calvin, Hodge, the Scholastics, Medievals and the like why we slandered and disregarded them so.) Of course, we will acknowledge in a show of epistemic humility that we too are “context bound” and that someday our notions may grow stale and useless as well. But what is important is that the contexts by which we are bound are the current ones and the contexts which bound our forebears are not. We tend to think of ideas as being like manna in the wilderness which, if eaten immediately, will nourish us, but, if stored, will be full of maggots by morning.
In my estimation this line of reasoning uncritically assumes the false premise that the contexts by which thinkers were bound in the past have nothing in common with the contexts by which we are bound presently. But a moment’s reflection upon this premise, once baldly stated, reveals it for the sham that it is. Is our context one of religious and philosophical pluralism wherein Christianity is but one (marginal) voice among many? So it was in the days of Justin Martyr. Is our context one in which we can look back upon a checkered history of an imperialism that is petering out before our very eyes? So it was in the days of Augustine. In fact, many of the arguments used by the Skeptics of Augustine’s day are essentially the same as some of the ones being dressed up and trotted out as critiques of Foundationalism today. We are neither so wise nor so special a case as to be able to afford ignoring those who have gone before us in the theological enterprise. Powdered wig or no, Jonathan Edwards said some things that continue to demand our attention and even our assent. We need to recognize that many elements of our own context have analogues in the contexts of the great Christian figures of the past and some of their ideas and arguments may well still be of service to the church. When we believe them to be faulty they deserve our respectful critique and straightforward disagreement rather than a patronizing tip of our the hats before we go on about our business as though they had never said anything worthy of our consideration.
I’m not advocating a sort of naïve traditionalism that makes theologically normative a figment of our historical imaginations but rather a critical interaction with the theological tradition that eschews prejudice against thinkers of different times as much as it eschews prejudice against contemporary thinkers of different nationalities and ethnicities, one that weighs arguments according to their respective merits rather than according to their currency. Only then will the Reformed or emerging Christian truly be like a householder who brings out of his treasure both what is new and what is old.

all your Amos are belong to us

I just finished butchering Amos for my class on the Prophets and my translation sounds a bit like this: