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 moreBart 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 moreRoy 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 moreSalvation history is a theological history of God saving fallen humanity that includes creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. The Redemptive-Historical Method converts that view of biblical theology into a method of interpretation, which requires each text be interpreted through the hermeneutic grid of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation.
Read moreChapter One: A Principlizing Model by Walter C. Kaiser, Jr. (Colman M. Mockler Emeritus Distinguished Professor of OT and Ethics and President Emeritus of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts).
Kaiser advocates applying specifics principles from the ancient text to the contemporary culture. Kaiser provides lists and defines six principles that expose euthanasia as wrong. Kaiser draws principles from different text in his opinion to justify women praying and prophesying. The next issue Kaiser deals with is homosexuality. Kaiser states that no one needs to go beyond the Bible to see that homosexuality is condemned in seven passages. Kaiser believes there are principles in the Bible, such as found in the book of Philemon, that teach slaves should be freed. Kaiser teaches that there are adequate principles against abortion and embryonic stem cell research that no one needs to go beyond the Bible.
Read moreSolomon in the only Pilgrim Psalm (Psalm 127) he wrote, challenged us three times in two verses, not to live a “vain” or empty, worthless, or wasted life. John Piper wrote a book entitled Don’t Waste Your Life. In chapter three, he wrote of two women who some might consider to have wasted their lives. In April 2000, Ruby Eliason and Laura Edwards were killed in Cameroon, West Africa. Ruby was over eighty. Single all her life, she poured it out for one great thing: to make Jesus Christ known among the unreached, the poor, and the sick. Laura was a widow, a medical doctor, pushing eighty years old, and serving at Ruby’s side in Cameroon. The brakes failed, the car went over a cliff, and they were both killed instantly…. Was that a tragedy?
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