biblical theology

On Fear

October 31, 2019 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

It’s October 31—the day my Presbyterian friends call Reformation Day, but pretty much everybody else calls Halloween. Some
Christians think it’s OK to celebrate Halloween, and others don’t. I’m not going to enter that discussion in this post, but I do want to use the occasion to do a little biblical investigation.

In our culture Halloween is typically associated with fear—haunted houses, goblins, and so on. I suppose an outside observer would find it odd that we humans like to be scared, as long as we know it’s safe—and for some, even because we know it’s not safe.

More seriously, I see a lot of fear in the world around me, fear that seems to come from every direction. In politics, fear of the other guy winning. In health, fear of this or that environmental concern. In parenting, fear of this or that factor hurting my child. Any number of my newsfeed friends comment on a post with a single word: “Scary!”

I’d like to lay out a theology of fear from a single biblical book.

Deuteronomy is at the heart of Scripture. It’s the climax of the Constitution that God himself drew up for his chosen nation. Scholars have noticed that it’s in a specific legal form common in its day, called a “suzerainty covenant.” It establishes a relationship between an emperor and his people, laying out the terms of the relationship—and this covenant is unusually gracious to the conquered people. It puts the lie to the nonsense about the “angry God of the Old Testament.”

And it talks a lot about fear. This very common Hebrew word appears 39 times in 32 chapters in the book—31 times as a verb, 6 times as an adjective, and twice as a noun. And its usage pattern is very interesting.

Did you know that the book says both that we should fear, and that we shouldn’t?

The difference is in the objects.

Here’s what God’s people shouldn’t fear—

The
wilderness (Dt 1.19; 8.15)
The
Canaanites, with whom they’re about to do battle (Dt 1.21, 29; 3.22; 7.18; 20.1,
3; 31.6), specifically
- The
  king of Bashan (Dt 3.2)
- Occupying
  the land (Dt 31.8)

So there’s no need for us to be afraid of our circumstances, or the people who stand in opposition to us.

Hmm. That’s pretty much everything that we fear, isn’t it?

Don’t be afraid.

Not about politics, not about health, not about the environment, not about people.

Let me anticipate an objection. I’m not suggesting that these things aren’t significant, or that they aren’t important. A nation’s political leadership can make life miserable (Pr 28.15), and disease is so devastating that Jesus was moved to heal it (Mk 1.41), and God has given us responsibility to care for creation (Gn 1.28), and sin causes unimaginable grief to God himself.

But we shouldn’t be afraid. We have a heavenly Father, and he is working his plan, and he cares for us (Lk 12.22-32).

God even told his people that the very people they were afraid of were going to be afraid of them (Dt 2.4, 25; 11.25; 28.10). How about that.

But perhaps surprisingly, we’re not supposed to be fearless.

Here’s what God’s people should fear—

There’s only one entry on that list. But Deuteronomy emphasizes this fact far more than the fact that we shouldn’t fear anything else. It gives us lots of information about fearing God—

How should we fear him?

All our days (Dt 4.10; 6.2; 14.23)
Intergenerationally (Dt 4.10; 6.2; 31.13)
By
- keeping his commandments (Dt 5.5, 29; 6.2, 24;
  8.6; 10.12; 13.4, 11; 17.13, 19; 19.20; 21.21; 28.58; 31.12)
- worshipping him (Dt 6.13)
- swearing by his name (Dt 6.13; 10.20)
- loving him (Dt 10.12)
- serving him (Dt 10.12, 20; 13.4)
- clinging to him (Dt 10.20; 13.4)

Why should we fear him?

Because he is “fearsome” (Dt 7.21; 10.17) and
does “awesome” things (Dt 10.21; 28.58)
Because it results in
- Things being well with us (Dt 5.29; 6.24)
- Prolonged days (Dt 6.2, 24)

My natural tendency is to get all this just exactly backwards. I fear temporary and empty stuff, and I find my heart lacking in fear toward the only one who matters.

But here’s the thing.

Fearing God isn’t like fearing everything else. It’s liberating; it’s beneficial; it’s joyous. It’s what we were designed to do.

It fits.

Oh that they had such a heart as this always,
to fear me and to keep all my commandments,
that it might go well with them and with their descendants forever! (Dt 5.29)

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Sometimes We Fight, Part 6

January 24, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

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In my last post we worked through the Apostle Peter’s sermon at Pentecost (Acts 2), looking for doctrinal content. Here’s what we came up with, in systematic theological terms:

Bibliology

The Hebrew scriptures are God’s Word (Ac 2.17) and therefore reliable (Ac 2.16).

Theology Proper

God directs history (Ac 2.23).
God does miracles; history includes some number of supernatural events (Ac 2.22).

Christology

Jesus did miracles (Ac 2.22).
Jesus died by crucifixion and rose again (Ac 2.23-24, 32).
Jesus continues his divine work from heaven (Ac 2.33-34).
Jesus is God (Ac 2.36).
Jesus is Christ, the fulfillment of the Hebrew messianic prophecies (Ac 2.36).

Pneumatology

There is a Holy Spirit (Ac 2.17).

Anthropology

People are sinful (Ac 2.40).

Soteriology

Salvation is available to all peoples (Ac 2.18, 21, 39).
Salvation is available freely (Ac 2.21) through repentance (Ac 2.38).

Eschatology

There is a coming “Day of Yahweh” (Ac 2.20).

When we put all this into our chart, we end up with something like this. (I’ve truncated our data slightly for simplicity’s sake.)

Where do we go from here? Well, we repeat this same process on the other apostolic sermons in Acts, filling in the other columns on our chart. A quick result might look something like this, though a more careful study—which you’ll do, right?—would yield more doctrines in the first column.

And then you see where the overlaps are—which doctrines are most emphasized in this database of sermons. For illustration purposes I’ve simply counted the number of sermons in which each doctrine appears and then sorted the list on that column, with the most common doctrines at the top. You can see that “quick and dirty” result here.

What are the biggest ideas?

The deity of Christ
Forgiveness of sins
The death and resurrection of Christ / witnesses
The reliability of Scripture
Repentance

It’s no surprise that our list includes “the gospel” as defined by Paul in 1Co 15.3-4.

Now, we’re not done yet. As I noted in a previous post in this series, we need to evaluate the other datasets that my friend Tom Wheeler identified in his dissertation, and then we need to compare all the lists we end up with to see if there are patterns there—which there are—as justification for producing a “meta-list,” which should serve as a pretty good indicator of What We’re Going to Fight About.

And then we need to decide where to draw the line. How far down the list do we decide this is a doctrine that isn’t “emphasized”? How far down the list do we go before we decide that we’re not going to fight about that one? I’d suggest that that’s a literary-analysis question: where do you draw the line at emphasis?

Tom’s dissertation has done a good job of that already. But you can do that work yourself, you know. You don’t have to be a scholar like Tom; with the Word and the illuminating work of the indwelling Holy Spirit, you have all the tools you need to do this study for yourself. Maybe you’ll notice something he didn’t. And even if you don’t, you’ll benefit immensely from the study, and you’ll approach doctrinal controversies in this polarized and freaked-out world with a calmness and a confidence that will communicate grace, mercy, and peace to all those around you.

That’s worth the effort, right?

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Application 1 Application 2

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Sometimes We Fight, Part 5

January 21, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

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Last time I explained my thinking on why we should evaluate the doctrines taught in the apostles’ preaching as recorded in the book of Acts, as a step toward identifying the essential doctrines of the Christian faith—the things we ought to fight about. And I pause to remind my reader (all 1 of you) that we’re also determining, by their absence from this list, the doctrines that are not worth fighting about.

If you’ve done your homework from the last post—you don’t expect to really learn anything worthwhile by just reading blog posts, do you?—you downloaded my little chart as a working template and read through at least some of the sermons in Acts to list what doctrines they asserted.

How about if I go through the first one, and we can see how your list compares to mine?

The first sermon is Peter’s famous discourse at Pentecost in Acts 2, where he refutes the observers’ initial observations and explains what’s really going on with the sound and the fire and the inexplicable speech.

Let’s scan the text to see what we find.

Ac 2.16—What you’re seeing is a fulfillment of a prophetic scripture from long ago. Peter’s initial statement implies—strongly—that we should expect ancient scriptural prophecies to be fulfilled. And this in turn implies the truthfulness of scripture, even in its predictions. Lest I be accused of bringing my bias to the research, I’ve avoided using the explosive term inerrancy, but I would observe that “truthfulness” means the same thing.
Ac 2.17—In citing his source, Peter includes its claim that Joel’s words are what “God says” (NASB), and he says nothing that would soften the blunt statement. Joel’s words are the words of God, accurately recorded.
Ac 2.17—God has a Spirit that can be “poured forth.” Maybe not enough here to support a distinct person of the Spirit, but wording that is certainly consistent with that concept.
Ac 2.18—God’s empowering work extends to “bondslaves, both men and women.” His work is not limited by our social constructs.
Ac 2.20—There is a coming “Day of Yahweh.” We can’t tell this from just Acts 2, but the prophets gave us a lot of information about this coming day, and again, Peter seems to take it at face value.
Ac 2.21—Salvation comes to those who “call on the name of Yahweh.” This verse alone doesn’t tell us whether “salvation” here is physical rescue from catastrophe or spiritual salvation in the theological sense, but further study can settle this question pretty conclusively in favor of the latter.
Ac 2.22—Jesus did miracles. This has implications about both Jesus and the fact of the supernatural, of miracles.
Ac 2.23—God’s doing what happens, even when it seems disastrous—as the recent execution of Jesus certainly had seemed to Peter and the other disciples.
Ac 2.23—Jesus died as a direct result of the crucifixion. Yes, he was really dead.
Ac 2.24—Jesus rose from the dead. Really.
Ac 2.25—Here’s another fulfilled prophecy. We should expect that.
Ac 2.27—The resurrection was specifically predicted.
Ac 2.30—Like Joel, David was accurately reporting words directly from God himself.
Ac 2.31—David was speaking not of himself (Ac 2.29), but of Christ.
Ac 2.32—The resurrection again, this time with witnesses.
Ac 2.33—The living Jesus is the agent behind what is happening at Pentecost—namely, the coming of the Spirit.
Ac 2.34—Jesus is alive and active in heaven, the presence of God.
Ac 2.36—Jesus is “Lord.” It’s true that the Greek word here (kurios) can mean simply “sir,” similar to Elizabethan English (“Good day, my lord”). But since it often cannot have that meaning (e.g. Jn 20.28), and since the Jews used it to translate the name Yahweh in their Greek scriptures, this statement is much more likely claiming deity for Jesus.
Ac 2.36—Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one—by implication prophet, priest, and king—the fulfillment of the entire Hebrew scriptures.
Ac 2.38—Forgiveness of sins comes from repentance and baptism and brings “the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Note that the presence of sin as part of the human condition is assumed. [Sidebar: here I’m simply listing what Peter is saying; this is what theologians call “biblical theology.” No, I don’t believe that baptism is necessary for the forgiveness of sins; that conviction comes from a comparison of this passage with others, which we call “systematic theology”—and which is not my purpose here.]
Ac 2.39—Again, God’s plan includes both Jews (“you and your children”) and Gentiles (“all who are far off”); God’s plan overwhelms our cultural and social barriers.
Ac 2.40—“This generation” is “perverse.”

How did you do? How did I do? Are there unfounded or biased assumptions in my list? How about yours?

Next time we’ll give some thought to what we’ve found so far and where we go from here.

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Sometimes We Fight, Part 4

January 17, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

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So when believers disagree about doctrine—about their interpretations of what the Scripture says—how do we decide whether these disagreements are worth making an issue about?

A friend of mine, Tom Wheeler, wrote his PhD
dissertation on that very question at the same time I was writing mine. For folks who are near Greenville, it’s available in the BJU library; for folks who aren’t, there’s interlibrary loan. :-) Tom looks at a number of ways we can discern which doctrines are most important, and better yet, he does so without killing you with boring dissertationish prose. It’s a valuable piece of work.

I won’t give away all his ideas, but here are a few—

We can look at what the apostles emphasized in
their sermons in the New Testament.
We can look at the context of NT references to
“the faith” or “doctrine” (e.g. 1Ti 6.3).
We can look at NT confessions of faith (e.g. Mt
16.13-16).

There are other places we can look as well. And then we can compare all the doctrines indicated by those different methods and see where the substantial overlaps are.

I’d like to look more closely at the first suggestion: NT apostolic preaching. This idea isn’t original to Tom; earlier in the 20^th century, C. H. Dodd nearly made a whole career out of the study of the NT “kerygma,” or preaching—though I would disagree with a whole bunch of his conclusions. And the concept was studied long before Dodd as well.

Why would the apostolic preaching help us answer the question? Several reasons—

Directed by the Spirit himself, the apostles
were ordained by Jesus himself to relay inerrantly the facts and significance
of his earthly ministry (Jn 14.25-26; Jn 15.26-27; 16.12-15). They’re going to
relate the most important stuff, and they’re going to get it right.
While several apostles—Matthew, John, Peter,
Paul—wrote portions of the New Testament, not everything they wrote was of
primary doctrinal importance, as Paul
himself said.
But there is a record of several sermons, almost
all of them preached to unbelievers with the purpose of defining this new
“religion.” If the sermon is definitional, it’s going to highlight the uniquely
identifying ideas.
All the apostolic sermons are contained in the
book of Acts.
- Peter preaches several—
  - The foundational explanation of Christianity at
    Pentecost (Acts 2.14-36)
  - The popular explanation of the healing of the
    lame man in the temple (Acts 3.12-26)
  - The official explanation before the Sanhedrin
    (Acts 4.8-12)
  - The Sanhedrin defense of the apostles’ continued
    preaching (Acts 5.29-32)
  - The introduction of Christianity to Cornelius,
    the first Gentile inquirer (Acts 10.34-43)
- As does Paul—
  - His first “synagogue homily” in Pisidian Antioch
    (Acts 13.16-41). This is likely very similar to all his later synagogue
    preaching, which is not recorded for us.
  - His sermon to a pagan audience at Mars Hill in
    Athens, which is rhetorically very different from his synagogue sermon but
    evidences similar doctrinal content (Acts 17.22-31).
  - His “farewell address” to the Ephesian elders
    (Acts 20.17-35). This is unique in that the audience consists of believers.
  - His defense of his ministry to the angry Jewish
    mob in Jerusalem (Acts 22.1-21)
  - His defense before Felix, the Judean governor
    (Acts 24.10-21)
  - His report to Festus, the new governor, and
    Agrippa, the figurehead king, after his appeal to Caesar (Acts 26.1-29).

The last two are different in that they are mostly personal reports of his conversion experience, but they do have doctrinal content as well.

There are other sermons in Acts, most notably Stephen’s defense before his execution (ch 7), but since Stephen is not an apostle, we’ll set him aside.

Now. What we can do is list the doctrinal content of each of these sermons and then compare the lists to see whether there’s a pattern. Do the apostles emphasize the same doctrines throughout their recorded preaching? If they do, then we can argue that these are the defining doctrines, without which Christianity is not Christianity at all—and that they are thus worth fighting for.

So here’s your homework. I’ve made a chart for you. Download it and fill it out by reading each of the sermons noted above. Next time we’ll talk about what we’ve found.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Application 1 Application 2

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Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 3: Too Many Cooks

August 14, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

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Part 1 Part 2

And so we come to the evidence: objective evidence that the Bible is, um, unnatural, extraordinary, not like any other books. I’d suggest two lines of such evidence; we’ll look at the first one today, and a related topic later in the week. Next week, we’ll get to Door Number 2.

Door Number 1. Writing a book is hard. Just getting the facts right is hard enough (more about that next time); but doing it artfully, in a way that pleases the attentive reader, is really, really hard. Literary critics delight themselves in finding such artful devices in serious literature—for example, in noting how Willa Cather uses the imagery of wilting flowers to foreshadow the crumbling of the protagonist in the short story “Paul’s Case,” or how Dickens contrasts polar extremes in A Tale of Two Cities, or how an episode of Seinfeld weaves together a seemingly impossible number of storylines so they all come to resolution at the last moment: in one episode George, pretending to be a marine biologist to impress his girlfriend, pulls Kramer’s golf ball from the blowhole of a beached whale. (OK, that last one was ridiculous, and involves stretching the definition of literature almost to the breaking point. But give me some slack; I’m making a point here.)

The Bible does that: it tells a story—or rather, narrates and evaluates a history—in an artful way, bringing it to a resolution that leaves us amazed and deeply satisfied. (How is that evidence of the supernatural? If Dickens can do it, why do we have to bring God into the picture? Fair question. I’ll get to that in a minute.)

The Torah

The Bible consists of two parts: the Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament began its life as the Hebrew Scriptures. The Jews call it the “Tanakh,” which is not really a Hebrew word; it’s an acronym, like NASA or YOLO. The “T” stands for Torah, or “teaching,” which is the first 5 books of the OT. In the Torah we read about the origin of the earth, then that of the nation of Israel, then of the covenant that God made with Israel at Sinai, including its stipulations. There’s a lot of talk (especially in Leviticus) of the priesthood, its clothing, its sacrifices, its calendar. Details.

The priests had to do everything a certain way. The amount of detail is overwhelming. Each sacrifice had its own purpose, timing, and procedure. And to the reader’s surprise—it doesn’t work. Oh, God forgives the sins of the sacrificer, and of the nation, but the sacrifices don’t really work. Every morning there’s a sacrifice, and by mid-afternoon the priests have to do it again. The next morning, the cycle starts anew. Every year there’s a Passover, and the next year they have to do another one. The sacrifices don’t last, and that means they don’t really work.

We finish the Torah with a nagging sense of disappointment. We want a priest who can make a sacrifice that works—one sacrifice that gets the job done. We want a priest who knows how to priest.

The Prophets

The “N” in Tanakh stands for nebi’im, or “prophets.” In the prophets we meet men who bring messages from God. But frankly, they’re disappointing too. Many of the messages are obscure. Nathan the prophet tells David that God will build him a house through his son, whom he names as Solomon (2Sam 7). But then he says the son will reign forever. How’s that going to work? And some of the messages are downright bizarre—what’s with Ezekiel’s vision of the wheel in wheel in a wheel (Ezk 1)?

Why are the prophecies so—hard?! Why can’t a prophet tell us—better yet, show us—clearly what God is like, what he wants, how we can know him? We want a prophet who knows how to prophet.

The Writings

The “Kh” in Tanakh stands for khethubim, or “writings.” In the writings we meet the kings—their story in Chronicles, their writing in Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. We want them to succeed. Saul the Tall is (not surprisingly ????) a failure, and God himself selects David, a man after his own heart, and we think he’ll succeed. But he fails suddenly and spectacularly, and his family disintegrates. His son Solomon begins well; God gives him practically infinite wisdom. But by the end he’s worshiping idols. Solomon’s son splits the kingdom, and after that the kings in David’s line are successful only rarely and incompletely.

We finish the Writings, and the Tanakh, disappointed in the kings, wishing for a king who knows how to king. It’s all disappointing, all unfulfilled potential, all promise and no really satisfying fulfillment.

And then we turn the page.

The New Testament

We meet “Jesus Christ, the son of David, the Son of Abraham” (Mat 1.1)—perfect prophet, priest, king, who reveals God to us perfectly (Jn 1.1-18), who offers—himself!—as the perfect and final offering (Heb 10.1-13), who reigns now and forever in perfect righteousness and justice (Lk 1.33; Rev 11:15). The Gospels tell us what he said and did; Acts tells us about his successors; the epistles tell us what it all means; and Revelation tells us how it all ends.

A perfect story. Plot, character, storyline. Rising action, climax, denouement. Coherence, bookended by a perfect world destroyed (Gen 1-11) and a better world restored (Rev 21-22).

So how does that evidence a divine source? If Homer and Shakespeare and Dickens and Faulkner could do it, why couldn’t an ancient writer?

Here’s the thing. There was no “ancient writer.” There were about 40 of them, living across about 1500 years. (Yes, critical scholars would say more like 1000 years, but even if they’re right—and they’re not—the point still stands.) None of the writers ever met most of the other writers.

So how did they do it? How did they write a coherent, cohesive, artful narrative? It wasn’t some talented editor who came along at the end and pieced it all together from earlier sources; the OT was in place and ordered before any of the NT was written. The OT writers couldn’t possibly have known the end, and the NT writers couldn’t possibly have influenced or edited the OT writers.

Only an editor could do that. An editor who oversaw the entire process, beginning to end.

An Editor.

PS To be fair, if a book contradicts itself, it’s not really coherent. There are lots of accusations of contradiction in the Bible. In the next post, we’ll talk about that.

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