Martin Luther believed that “The entire Old Testament refers to Christ and agrees with Him.” Sidney Greidanus, in Preaching Christ from the Old Testament, wrote that in spite of his warnings against allegorical interpretation, Luther continued using this arbitrary method of interpretation. Ironically, while Luther left some limited room for allegorical interpretation, he apparently had no use of typological interpretation, for, as David Dockery puts it, typology with its foreshadowing “annulled the historical presence of Christ in the Old Testament.” The Antioch School “saw shadowy anticipation of what was to come. This meant nothing to Luther. To him, the Old Testament was not a figure of what would be, but a testimony to what always holds true between humankind and God” (Dockery, GTJ I4/2 (1983) 193.[19]
Read moreReview of Bryan Chapell's "Redemptive-Historical View" of Preaching
This post reviews “Redemptive-Historic View” by Bryan Chapell in Scott M. Gibson’s and Matthew D. Kim’s Homiletics and Hermeneutics: Four Views on Preaching Today.
I agree with Byran Chapell when he warns that the redemptive-historical view of forcing Christ into every text has “been abused, in ways that are now obvious to us, by ancient allegorism that sought to make Jesus ‘magically’ appear in every Bible passage through exegetical acrobatics that stretched logic, imagination, and credulity.”[1] This is a candid admission.
Read moreThe Problem of Suffering and Evil, Part Two
Bart Ehrman, one of the most influential atheists/agnostics today admitted: The problem of suffering became for me the problem of faith. After many years of grappling with the problem, trying to explain it, thinking through the explanations that others have offered—some of them pat answers charming for their simplicity, others highly sophisticated and nuanced reflections of serious philosophers and theologians—after thinking about the alleged answers and continuing to wrestle with the problem, about nine or ten years ago I finally admitted defeat, came to realize that I could no longer believe in the God of my tradition, and acknowledged that I was an agnostic: I don’t “know” if there is a God; but I think that if there is one, he certainly isn’t the one proclaimed by the Judeo-Christian tradition, the one who is actively and powerfully involved in this world. And so I stopped going to church (Ehrman, Bart D., God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer, HarperCollins. Kindle Edition, 2009, 3-4).
Read moreFactual Data Sheet for Sermon Preparation for Hebrew Poetry (Proverbs) Part One
I got the idea for “The Factual Data” sheet from reading that Warren W. Wiersbe’s homiletic teacher, Lloyd Perry used a generic “Factual Data” sheet for all sermon preparation. I have adapted “The Factual Data” sheet to the different genres of Scripture instead of one size fits all. I have a "The Factual Data" Sheet also for Pauline Epistles, Narratives (Genesis and Nehemiah), Gospels (Mark), and Hebrew Poetry (Psalms and Proverbs).
Read moreWhat is Progressive Revelation?
A. J. Jacobs gave what is now a well-known TED talk on My Year of Living the Bible in December 2007. He turned that speech into a book entitled: The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. This book was on the NYT bestseller’s list for three months.
A. J. Jacobs, who is an agnostic, did this experiment for one year. Here is the reason for his experiment: “I'm concerned about the rise of religious fundamentalism, and people who say they take the Bible literally, which is, according to some polls, as high as 45 or 50 percent of America. So, I decided, what if you really did take the Bible literally? I decided to take it to its logical conclusion and take everything in the Bible literally, without picking and choosing.”
Here is his first takeaway from one year of seeking to prove the Bible cannot be taken literally: “The first is, thou shalt not take the Bible literally. This became very, very clear, early on. Because if you do, then you end up acting like a crazy person and stoning adulterers.” God’s chosen people in the OT was the nation of Israel. When Jesus came and offered the kingdom and himself as king to the nation, Israel rejected him. In response, Jesus postponed the kingdom and set aside Israel temporarily. The church today is the people of God not the nation of Israel. While God commanded capital punishment for certain sins in the OT with the nation of Israel, God does not command the church to put to death its members for any sin. God takes sin just as seriously today as He did in the Old Testament. According to 1 Corinthians 5, the church does not stone adulterers in this age but rather the church disciplines them.
Read moreWhat is the Historical/Grammatical Method of Interpretation?
Roy Zuck in Basic Bible Interpretation noted that “In the Middle Ages words, phrases, and sentences in the bible had taken on multiple meanings, losing all sense of objectivity.”[1] All of the multiple meanings could not be correct. In chapter three, Zuck asked, “Whose view is valid?” All of the views are not valid.
Read moreAm I the kind of friend I would want to be friends with?
I called a dear friend this week. I met this friend the first week of our college freshman year. He of late has had a difficult life. For some reason, I remembered a book I read years ago: How to Win Friends and Influence People. Why has this book been so popular? This book written by Dale Carnegie in 1936 has sold 30 million copies worldwide. It still sells 250,000 copies annually. The Library of Congress in 2013 ranked this best seller as the 7th most influential book in American history.[1] Why has this self-help book been so popular?
Warren Wiersbe answered: We need Proverbs “Because just about everybody has ‘people problems’ and wants to know how to solve them.”[2] God’s manual on developing people skills was written long before Carnegie’s best seller. God wrote Proverbs to sharpen our people's skills for his glory.
Read moreTwo Contrasting Hermeneutics
Allegorical Method of Interpretation
There are two conflicting methods of interpreting Scripture: The grammatical-historical method and the allegorical method. The grammatical-historical method is the method Roy Zuck is teaching in the book of our review “Basic Bible Interpretation.” This method interprets Scripture in the normal sense of language.
Read moreFIVE PRINCIPLES OF INTERPRETATION
Philip asks the Ethiopian eunuch a hermeneutic question, “Do you understand what you are reading?” The eunuch’s response, “How can I…unless some man explain it to me” (Acts 8:31)?
John in 1 John 2:27 does not contradict: “The anointing which you have received of him abides in you, and you need not that any man teach you.”
Wayne Grudem: "The clarity of Scripture means that the Bible is written in such a way that its teachings are able to be understood by all who will read it" (Systematic Theology, p. 108).
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