Number four, in our presuppositions for reading scripture, is the Bible is a written revelation. The message of scripture is communicated through the medium of words, sentences, paragraphs, etc. This means that we're going to have to pay attention to the particularities of language. It's the words in front of us that mediate the author's intention. To interpret well then, we will have to study the meaning of words in their context. I say in their context because the meaning of words is never cast in stone. One can't simply assign a kind of dictionary definition to a word and expect that word to always conform to that definition. Now a lot of us try to do that with scripture but it's usually, it's almost always a bad idea. It seems to me we need to allow the Bible to speak with all the freedom of expression that we ourselves use. We can just take a couple of English words and see the manifold ways in which we use a word. Take the word bar, B-A-R. We can speak of a candy bar or a bar over the door. A young lawyer passes the bar and then he celebrates by hanging out in a bar.
Used as a verb, we could say that we bar a door or that we're barred from entrance or take the word board, B-O-A-R-D. It can signify a piece of dressed lumber. A person may pay room and board or sit on a board of trustees as a verb, one board's up a window or you board a ship and hope you don't fall overboard. See words have meaning only in context. The Greek word cosmos is often translated world. But it actually has a very diverse semantic, I was going to say semantic range, I should say semantic ranges aren't in English. In their lexicon list no less than eight different meanings for the word cosmos. It can mean order, arrangements, all sorts of things. In the Bible there are literally scores of words as there are in English that have many, many different meanings and the only way to understand the use of the word is to see it in context. Second Peter chapter three verse nine tells us that God is not willing that any should perish. How should we understand the word will here? Actually there are some options. We could understand this text is saying that God has legislated a precept that no one is allowed to perish. It's against God's law that anyone die outside of Christ. That's one way of understanding the word will. Another is that God has sovereignly decreed and affects most certainly that no one will ever perish. So we've gone from a legislative statement to a statement of God's intention. A third way of understanding the word will here is that God is not pleased. He's not delighted when people perish. All three of those are possible within different understandings of the word will. Understandings of the word will that are present in the Bible but not all three of those interpretations is possible for the text. And it's only the context and the analogy of scripture that will help us understand what's the correct interpretation of the statement from Peter. We should also note that different biblical writers have their own peculiar uses of words. Uses of words that are peculiar to them that are not shared with other writers. A famous example here is the difference between Paul and John regarding the word flesh. Paul uses the word very negatively. For him it doesn't mean the body but the sin principle. A principle which resides in the human heart but radiates out to all the members of man. John however uses the word flesh positively. It refers to humanity in its natural created earthliness. For him it means it does mean the flesh. It means the body as in the word became flesh. So for John flesh is good. For Paul it's bad. We must be careful with words. The key is context. Fact is context is the first word in good interpretation. It's the second word in good interpretation and it's probably the last word in good interpretation. I actually see as Lewis suggests in an article on literary criticism that words don't mean at all. He said words don't and that's the way he put it. Words don't mean. Sentences mean. Words had meaning only in context but we could actually push this issue and push Lewis I think a bit further. Sentences also can be taken out of context. It's not sentences that mean it's actually thought units which mean it's the thought unit which is the unit of meaning. But a thought unit is kind of hard to define. What's a thought unit? A thought unit begins wherever the idea begins and it ends whenever the idea is over. That might be a sentence. It might be a paragraph. It might be a much longer piece of discourse. But again the issue is context. Now this all sounds kind of scary but there's really nothing magical, mystical, strange about reading in context. We read everything else that way don't we? Everything but the Bible. For some reason we've been trained to read the Bible in a different way than we've been trained to read everything else. If you picked up the newspaper this morning and let's say I took your newspaper away from you and I went through and I numbered all the sentences. And then I said just read me sentence number six that will give me whatever I need. We don't read anything else this way. Reading the Bible contextually is not something we've been taught to do. We've been taught to think not intentionally to be sure but we've been taught to think that the Bible is to be read differently. At least at the interpretive level. We've all heard the story of a young woman who engaged in the questionable practice called lucky dipping. At least what you haven't heard you're about to. Lucky dipping is a method of Bible reading which first of all prays for guidance on the issue whatever it is. And then you blindly open your Bible and you go you put off the evil day and bring near a reign of terror. That's what it said. Anyway this young woman, not gonna do that again. This young woman went to Bible College and of course she went to Bible College for the purpose of getting her MRS degree. And as her graduation date got closer and closer she was no closer to finding a husband. Suzanne just now got it. And so after praying diligently and I know who she got the answer from and I'm not surprised. After praying diligently she lucky dipped into the text and she found Zechariah 9.9. Rejoice greatly O daughter of Zion. Shout in triumph O daughter of Jerusalem. Behold your king is coming to you. He is just and endowed with salvation. Humble and mounted on a donkey, even on a cult. The foul of a donkey. Now surely neither Zechariah nor the Holy Spirit intended this text for her purposes. As the story goes she didn't marry a jockey so now after graduation. Quite simply without a knowledge of context we can make the Bible say whatever we want. And that's the reality that stands behind cults. Far too often we evangelicals have been taught to read the Bible as a series of numbered and hermetically sealed propositions. And it's not meant to be read that way. We need to remember that chapter and verse divisions are artificial. We sometimes speak of verses but the Bible was not written as a collection of verses of self-contained nuggets of wisdom except for the book of Proverbs. Chapter and verse divisions actually did not even appear until after the Reformation period and they appeared for the sake of reference. These divisions should never dictate the boundaries of text. Meaning is more important than such divisions. If you were to just read Romans chapter 1 you would come away with the impression that Paul is meaning to morally beat up on different groups of people. But next day you come back and you're going to read Romans 2 and the very first verse says, and so were some of you. Until you started chapter 2 you really didn't get the point of what Paul was doing in chapter 1. We need to read text rather than verses. Now the emphasis upon words in context is often spoken of as grammatical interpretation. And it's associated with what Luther called the census literalis. Is that term on your outline there for you? The census literalis. Now when we hear that term it means literal sense. But Luther didn't quite mean what we mean when we use the term literal interpretation. When we use that language we usually mean something like immediate, the immediate intuitive sense. That's not what Luther meant. When he used the term census literalis he meant the natural sense of a statement within its literary context. The natural sense within its literary context. We need to be very careful with the idea of literal interpretation. The reformation was intentionally moving with its emphasis upon grammatical interpretation, was intentionally moving away from the medieval idea of allegorical hermeneutics or allegorical interpretation. Basically allegorical interpretation brushes aside all historical contextual linguistic concerns in search for a deeper meaning, a spiritual meaning. A meaning which is not apparent at the surface level of the text. The allegorical method of reading the Bible was championed by people like origin in Alexandria in the second century. Origin had been deeply influenced by platonic philosophy, which tended to devalue the earthly, the historical, the temporal. This rule is if not outright evil it's suspect. Thus when the word of God talks about a mountain or a tree it's not really about those things because those things are bad. Those things cannot be the bearers of meaning. What those things are are really symbols for internal realities, spiritual realities, heavenly realities. When the referendum is one more common here, I hope you can see just when I've said that with that kind of an approach to interpretation, you can pretty much make again, make the Bible say just about whatever you want to. Now the reformation would reject that allegorical approach to the text and allegorical hermeneutics in favor of Luther's notion of the census literalis and in favor of grammatical interpretation. They would add another word here, they would now speak of grammatical interpretation but also add historical to it. Grammatical historical interpretation. Now before we push on to our next point we should say that we can sometimes push grammar too far. We need to take the words in front of us very seriously but we need to realize that words are a kind of symbolic representation. All languages, language represents reality but it never does so absolutely perfectly or exhaustively. The word on the page is not reality itself nor does it correspond to it in a simple one-to-one relationship. The function of language is to create a symbolic model or analog of reality, not stand in place of it. Let me just give you one quick example here, it might help. In Romans chapter 8, verse 29 through 30, Paul tells us that those whom God for new, he also predestined, he also called, he justified them and he glorified them. At a strictly grammatical level it's possible to conclude that Paul is talking about an order of events. That foreknowledge comes first, it's then followed up by predestination and then calling and then justification and glorification. But for good contextual and theological reasons, there is every reason to doubt that such a message was Paul's intent. It looks as if he was actually ganging up different terms to speak to a single reality. He's ganging up language in order to make the point that our election in Christ cannot be exhausted by any one concept, by any one verbal structure. It can't be captured in a word. So while we want to take the text seriously, we need to recognize that words on a page are symbolic. There is a degree of representation. Fifth or our fifth presupposition. The Bible was originally written in a language we don't speak. The Bible is a translated book. Now this isn't a presupposition in the normal sense of the word, but it's a reality that we need to keep in mind. And I mention it here because it follows right on the heels of the recognition of the Bible as a written revelation. We said quite a bit tonight already about the Reformation Commitments. As the Reformers were drawing away from the Roman Catholic Church, they first of all had a commitment to the Bible in its original languages. They were committed to Scripture, to the Principle of Solar Strip Tour, the Bible as the norm of norms. And therefore it was important to get the Bible right, not simply to use any old translation. So there was a return to the biblical languages. But even as that was the case, they knew that most people were not going to learn how to read Hebrew and Greek. So there was also a commitment to the Bible in vernacular, the Bible in translation, the Bible in your language. But we need to realize that all translations are also interpretations. Even before you open your Bible, there's been a lot of interpretation that's been done. Both in terms of the textual critic, we won't have time to discuss that kind of stuff, but the textual critic has to choose the right text. He may have options, what's the right reading for the text. But the translator also makes interpretations. Quite simply, the act of translation is inherently an act of interpretation. You see, words and phrases from one language rarely have exact equivalents in another language. Thus, the translators regularly call upon to make choices regarding the meaning of the text and the best way to render that text into the receptor language. And those choices that the translator makes will affect how you read, how you understand. And that makes the selection of a good translation crucial. Well, let's look here very quickly at some translation strategies. Generally speaking, the newer translations done by carefully selected groups of scholars are more accurate textually than older translations. And the newer translations would include things like the RSV, the NASB rather, the NEB, the Jerusalem Bible, and the new international version. Now, there's a long standing debate among biblical translators about how we ought to translate the Bible. You see, both Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, and Greek, the language of the new, are languages that are very different from English. All three languages have different word orders and different syntactical structures. And often, words or phrases defy simple transference into the receptor language. The question is how linguistically strict at a grammatical level a translation should be? Should it try to stick to the Hebrew and Greek as closely as possible? Or should it seek more of a translation that is a kind of sense for sense of fear? Well, there are some options here. One option is what is called formal equivalence. It's the translation strategy which claims that meaning is to be found primarily in the words and the grammatical particularities of the Hebrew and Greek texts. The translator seeks the closest possible equivalent for a word or idiom. And he stays as close to the original word order as the syntax of the receptor language will allow. A good example here is the New American Standard Bible, the NASB. It follows this understanding of translation. Now, when you read the NASB, you find it's a rather stiff reading Bible. And the reason is it's tried to recapitulate, it's tried to reproduce the original structures of the Hebrew and Greek language as much as it can. It's a very poor Bible for public reading, but it's a very good study Bible, particularly if it's used in tandem with other Bibles. A freer method to translation is the paraphrase approach. It's not as tied to the particularities of language as the formal equivalence approach. And it seeks, or over against that approach, it seeks a sense for sense translation. The paraphrase is more concerned to translate thought units or ideas rather than particular words and grammar. And a couple of examples here would be what was at one time called Good News for Modern Man and even the Living Bible. A third approach, an approach which falls midway between formal equivalence and paraphrase is the dynamic equivalence perspective. And as the name suggests, it seeks to be freer than a strict word for word translation. Yet the dynamic equivalence translation is much closer to the wording of the original Hebrew and Greek text than is a paraphrase. The new international version falls into this category. I'm just thinking of one text here might help. In the book of Amos, chapter two, God is going through the many things that he has done for Israel and of course he keeps coming back and saying, and still you have not returned to me. And at one point he says, I gave you cleanness of teeth. That's what the Hebrew text literally say. I gave you cleanness of teeth. Anyone know what that means? As soon as I tell you about, of course, spamming. Now in a translation, should I say cleanness of teeth or famine? If it was the Living Bible, you'd say famine. So you're going for the idea. Does that make sense? But if you're going for a very strict literal approach, you're going to say cleanness of teeth. I want to make a comment here with the King James version because I think it's interesting. People often think that the King James is an extremely faithful and strict representation of the Hebrew and Greek texts. The reality, however, is that the King James version is an extremely free translation. It could not be called a translation that follows the formal equivalence of philosophy. That's one of the reasons it reads so well. If you read the English King James, it's much better literature than the Hebrew and Greek texts. It reads a whole lot better than Paul. What's also interesting here regarding the King James is that the Puritans already had an English Bible when the King James was done. It was called the Geneva Bible. And when the King James appeared, they thought it was the liberal Bible. It's funny how those trends happen. But sometimes people come close to thinking of the King James Bible next to inspired. It's the Bible, after all, against which all other translations must be measured. But advocates of such a view fail to realize that they need to be careful which King James they're referring to. The King James Bible has been edited or gone through no less than 33 editions. And the present King James is in some ways very different from the original. Talking about the King James allows us to make another point regarding words. Words are dynamic. They change their meaning. They have life spans. They're born and they die. Better yet we can think of words as commodities. They get used up. After they've been used, after they've fulfilled whatever needs they were coined for. They go out of fashion. I'll give you a couple examples here from the King James version. Genesis 2529 says, And Jacob sawed potage. And Esau come from the field and he was faint. Psalm 5 verse 6. Thou shalt destroy them that speak leasing. First Kings 111. Solomon loved many strange women. Well, at least someone's awake. Second Corinthians 8.1. We do you two wits of the grace of God. I'm not sure. I think I know what the Solomon was talking about. I'm not sure about the other ones. Sometimes words simply go out of use. They can... They just die. Other times they don't go out of use. They stick around, but they undergo a transformation of meaning. Our word nice comes from the Latin word nesias, which originally meant something like ignorance. We take it today that when we say someone's nice, we don't mean to say they're stupid. Back during the Elizabethan period, the English word cute meant bolegged. Think about that the next time you use the word cute. Sometimes words change right before our eyes. Within my own lifetime the word gay, which once meant joyous and carefree, has taken on a completely different meaning. When I was in college in Chicago in the 1970s, there was a child care right around the corner from my house. It was called gay time child care. If it's still there, I'm almost certain it must have changed its name. Presumption number six. The Bible is an historical revelation. Last summer together we talked about this very issue that at the structural level the Bible tells a story. That one story which Christians contend tells us the truth about God, ourselves, and our world. We said this one story, this drama of redemption is told in Scripture in terms of creation, fall, redemption, consummation. We also said that this four part story is the overarching theme of Scripture. Now all of this is to suggest that the Bible is concerned primarily with historical truth, not philosophical abstractions, and not pious intuition. The primary redemptive event of the Old Testament was the Exodus. God bringing Israel out of Egypt and the primary redemptive event of the New Testament is the resurrection. God's declaration of victory in bringing Jesus Christ back to life. The Old Testament is insistent that if the Exodus did not happen, the rest of the stories lie. And Paul proclaims, if the resurrection didn't happen, the rest is vain. Quite simply, the word in Scripture is referential to the mighty deeds of God. The Bible is a word indeed revelation. God reveals Himself both through what He has done and what He has said. And most of what He says is about the things He either has done or will do. All of which means hermenitically that a very important question is, what happened? What happened? Those who suggest that the historical question is irrelevant to the biblical story, and a lot of theology does that today. Those who want to suggest that simply do not respect the text at the level in which it itself sees the story as operating. There's an awful lot of theology which will say it's not important what happened. I want to suggest that it is, and why is this such an important question? The answer is this, because God is a person, a particular person. Not an idea, not a feeling, not a theorem, and persons are known only by their historical action in the world. That's what we're going to start next week when we start talking about God. The very character of God as a personal God means that what drives the biblical revelation is historical events and relationships. That's important, and it's important for us. You see, the Bible is able to address us in the fullness of our concrete historicity because it's talking about the fullness of concrete historicity. It's talking about the historical acts of God on our behalf. George Ladd once in critiquing existentialism said this, real existential relevance only comes from historical events. What's really true in our guts only comes from historical reality. Why? Because we're a historical question. Is our historical events crucial? Turn to Exodus chapter 20. Do it right now. We can settle this matter. When we turn to Exodus chapter 20, what are we going to find? The Ten Commandments, right? What does God say just before the First Commandment? I am the God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, right? That's part of the command, actually, because it's saying if I didn't do that, there's no reason to obey me. It's really that simple. But look, you're out of obey. I won you your mind. So if you heard me say something else, I was telling you lie. And I don't think I said that. Since I've been prince said something, just what I just said there. Is that help? Number seven. And the New Testament equivalent to that, of course, would be 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul says, if Christ is not raised, our faith is in vain. Number seven, the Bible is a revelation which is historically removed from us. The group of historical events, which are the concern of biblical revelation, happened a long, long time ago in a land far, far away. Like everything else, publishing follows trends. And the last decade or so, the hot topic in theological publishing has been books on interpretation, books on hermonetics. And interestingly, one of the things that almost all of these books, almost all of these books, concentrates on. And it's interesting because 25 years ago, none of them said anything like this, is the fact that we need to appreciate the great chasm, the great historical cultural chasm between us and the thought world of the Bible. Today, this is sometimes called the principle of distantiation. Is that on there? Because I don't think I can spell it. You're right on the board. The principle of distantiation, all this means, is the strangeness, the otherness of the text. We cannot take the text for granted. We can't presume or assume that our cultural assumptions are the assumptions of the text. The first audience were not like me. They weren't middle-class, white, middle-aged, western, 20th century conservative presbyterians. You see, we often assume a kind of historical contemporaneity with the biblical message. What this means is that we completely ignore the distance. And we assume that people in Scripture thought like we think, that they valued what we value, that they saw life as we saw life, as we see life. And when we do that, what we do is we read in. Again, we isolate our values, our thought world, our perspectives into the text. It's amazing how American evangelicals read Moses as believing in democracy and that sort of stuff. Cecil B. Demille was speaking for all of us. Before we can begin to come to terms with the biblical message and really hear what it's saying, we must recognize and accept the historical, cultural, linguistic disjunction between ourselves and the text. One easy example here may help. In Matthew 5, Jesus tells his hearers that they are the salt of the earth. I actually heard a pastor once preach a sermon that said that Christians add flavor to life. But that's not what Jesus is talking about. Only in understanding of how salt was used in the ancient world will help us. I could say how salt was used before the invention of refrigeration. It's not little of a time ago. Our modern use of salt as a flavor enhancements makes no sense in the text. The reader needs to know that before the invention of refrigeration salt was used as a preservative. It preserved meat. It kept it from putrification. It kept it from erotting. And that's what Jesus is saying. Thus before we can legitimately hear the word of God as it's addressed to us, in our situation, we must seek to understand the original setting. We must seek to hear the word as it was addressed to its first audience. And that means we need to reconstruct the original setting. And here's where we start to move more towards historical interpretation. But if you recall, I said that context is the key to grammatical interpretation. A word has meaning only in context. Context is also the key to historical interpretation or the historical realities of the text. The historical situation can radically alter the meaning of a statement. You're out on a highway at night and it's dark and all of a sudden you get a flat tire and a car rolls up behind you with its lights on. Suddenly they go off and a dark figure gets out of the car and says, hi, I'm a policeman. That statement has a certain comfort. But I don't know, maybe you go off, you're not going to decide to go down the street and go into a bank and hold it up. And some guy taps on the shoulder and says, hi, I'm a policeman. You know, it's got a very different meaning in that second context than in the first. Now the historical context includes such things as the time and culture of the author and his readers. That is to say, the temporal, geographical, ideological and political factors. You see, it makes a difference in understanding whether a prophet wrote before the exile, during the exile, or after the exile. It makes a difference, it matters whether you're talking about the city of Galatia or Corinth in the first century. There were peculiar realities in those cities. And we could go on and on and on quite simply. A good interpreter needs to develop a familiarity with the culture and history of Bible times. That means studies in archaeology, historical studies, anthropology, and many others. Well, I don't want to dig the whole too deep, but I hope you can see that I'm suggesting that interpreting is work. It is. With the right to interpret comes responsibility to do it well. Again, we evangelicals often assume that the Bible should be a simple book, an easy book to grasp. It is. It's primary message that Jesus is the Christ. Beyond that, it's not. Beyond that, it's going to be work. And there are no shortcuts. It takes time. It takes commitment. And again, some people will be better at it than others. One of the things I suggest to people is that they buy a good Bible handbook. The Edmunds Bible handbook. There are many older ones on the market. Haley's. There's a bunch of them. Buy a good Bible handbook. Question. I think that's fine. Actually, I do. I think things like the NIV study Bible are well done. I think reading someone like Calvin, somebody to trust, can be a good idea. Quite frankly, because there are people who have spent far longer on the text than I were you. Even if we don't accept everything they say, we should respect their opinion. The key here is no where the text ends and the commentary begins. For years, I refused to buy an NIV study Bible because I wrote my documentation on C.I. Scofield. You ever hear the Scofield reference Bible? Well, you haven't missed a lot in some ways. One of the problems of the Scofield reference Bible is a problem of all study Bibles of its time where that people confused the word of God and the notes. What happened is that because those notes are on the same page as the inspired word of God, those notes took kind of inspiration. That was a serious problem. How can it be wrong? It says that right here. For that reason, I stayed away from all those kinds of things. Because my students were using the NIV study Bible and they'd say, well, what about the note on this page? And I said, I'm going to have read it and then I'd go back. It's actually pretty good. So then I broke down and bought one as well. I think those things can be healthy. They can be helpful. Just realize again where the text ends and the commentary begins. Does that make sense? Number 73. Oh, no, we're not there yet. Not 73. It's talking about the fact that that interpretation is worth no short cuts, unless there's only about literal interpretation. People sometimes talk about, again, literal interpretation. Unfortunately, those appeals can often sound quite frankly like a kind of laziness. I don't need to do the work. I just interpret scripture literally. If we were to read the Bible literally, and often times that means literally, we'd fall into trouble or we'd get into trouble. Matthew 26 verses 26 to 29 read literalistically suggests that Christians are cannibals. If we read John 14 verses 1 through 4, literalistically, we'd be forced to conclude that God is preparing rooms for us all in Solomon's temple, a building that was torn down or destroyed in 70 AD. We are not literally sheep, and Jesus is most certainly not literally a door. I flew into London one summer and remembered to take my umbrella, but then forgot and left it on the plane. Walked out of Heathrow Airport, and there was a sign that said umbrellas recovered. I thought for a second I'm going in and asking him to find my umbrella, but I knew when I thought about it, that I could not interpret that sign literalistically. Richard Lins actually helps here. He says this, the only way the word literal has any real meaning for us is this. The text ought to be understood as the author literally meant it to be understood. Far too often we bring a kind of literalism to the text, and it becomes an artificial grid, an artificial rigor. And if people did it to you, you wouldn't like it. We use language with a lot of diversity. We use metaphors, we use similes, we use all kinds of conventions all the time. The Bible, the text literally means what the author intended it to me. Number eight, the Bible is a progressive revelation. This means that the Bible is not an all at once revelation. It moves from implicit to explicit, from anticipation to realization, from promise to fulfillment. And that's right there in a story, right? In any story, there's a before and an after, and the difference is important, the same is true in scripture. Now that's important for the issue of interpretation in a number of senses. First of all, we cannot assume that the biblical writers knew everything that we know about the fullness of biblical revelation. It's right here that the principle of the analogy of scripture can sometimes be a problem. What we do is we come to a text, and we then take everything we know about the issue and pour it into the text. Fact of the matter is, all testament characters, in some ways, know less about the story of redemption than you do. We should not read a knowledge of Jesus and the cross into Old Testament writers. If Moses knew Jesus as you and I know Jesus, Moses should have told us, but he did not. Fact of the matter is, Moses did not have the knowledge about the Messiah. That New Testament authors did, and that they wrote. We should be very careful about simply back reading all of that material into the text. That makes sense, folks. Second, or B here. As the story grows, it does change. There are changes in the biblical story. Change is that altar, the former text. This means that while the Old Testament remains the word of God, its imperatives must be understood in light of the fuller revelation of the New Testament. You see, we are not to erect a mound of stones and sacrifice sheep or goats. Even though we can find commands in the book of Leviticus that tell us to do exactly that, those commands have been abrogated in the fuller revelation of the New Testament. One of the realities of any story is that things do change. Even when you are talking about the absolute inspired inherent word of God. Now this does not make the Old Testament obsolete. The Old Testament remains the foundation for the New. In fact, the New Testament cannot be properly understood apart from the Old Testament. Here I wanted to say something about typology as an important interpretive device in Scripture. You can read a couple of pages there in your outline. I sometimes hear students say, why do I need the Old Testament at all? What is all that stuff about? Can I just kind of put to the side the fullness is common Jesus Christ. It sets down a pattern of expectation, a pattern of interpretation. We speak of this pattern under the term typology. Now, typology has been grossly misunderstood in the history of the church. It is often said that a type is a prototype of the archetype. I am going to suggest that is a backwards understanding of typology. It is an unproductive understanding of typology. Rather than thinking of a type as a kind of, we should be thinking of a type as the pattern for. Let's take these two terms here. As a kind of, we would say this, Abraham was a kind of Jesus, was a kind of Christ. Now, what we have to do when we hear that kind of language is we empty Abraham out of his own meaning, and we pour in Christocentric or Christological meaning. That makes sense? So what we are doing then is we are reading the New Testament back into the Old Testament. The reality of the matter is that typology works by the principle of analogous fulfillment. It respects the linear progression of the text. Abraham sets or continues a pattern that will be fulfilled in Jesus. What God is actually doing in history is he is engaging in a series of events. A series of historical events. And that series creates a pattern. There are many patterns in Scripture, and you can learn to recognize some things like water in the Old Testament. Blood, Exodus, and in these patterned events. What people see is, hey, this process here, this pattern is a Yahweh kind of thing. This is the way God does stuff. And you start seeing it some more. Then guess what? Jesus shows up and he is doing, that is the process where you understand who he is. That is the, those provide the interpretive clues. That is why John was able to go, now we got it, now we got it, now we figured it out. We related this to what all is going before. That is why Matthew in his word fulfillment, am I spelling fulfillment right? I have no idea. I can never put the Ls in the right spot. I can do it in Greek. It is play raw, oh. That Jesus comes and he fills up. He comes as the new Moses. And it is not accidental that in the book of Matthew got a story about the baby Jesus going to Egypt and coming out. And then he is giving the sermon on the mount. He is the new Moses. He is the new Israelite. He is the new David. He takes those patterns. He recapitulates them and he fills them up to overflowing. Typology is a very, very important way of interpreting and seeing the new in terms of the old. Again, I have given you a couple of pages there. Number nine. The Bible is a redemptive revelation. The focus of Scripture is its redemptive function. It reveals what God has determined to do is doing and will yet do in order to redeem a sinsick world. This of course relates to the issue of sufficiency. We said that Scripture has everything it needs to fulfill its intended function. And that function is to declare God's mighty deeds in history, his redemptive deeds in history. Now, because the Bible is primarily a redemptive revelation, this suggests that it is not fundamentally a scientific textbook or even an historical textbook. But we need to be careful here. To say the Bible is not a scientific textbook, it is not a textbook on science, is not to say that what it does talk about is scientifically irrelevant. You need to be very careful here and not create a false dichotomy. We can scientifically reflect upon the things that take place in Scripture, that are reported in Scripture. That's legitimate. But we need to realize that Scripture's purpose is not to give us scientifically precise information. Bible, for instance, does not give us any scientific information about how God performs miracles. We don't know. He doesn't buy His Word. That's not a scientific description. It doesn't tell us a whole lot about how He raises the dead. Scientifically, exactly how did God create? Aside from by His Word, I don't know. We can ask such questions. They're fair, they're legitimate. But we should not expect we're going to get answers from the biblical text. Because the Bible is a redemptive revelation, rather than a scientific revelation or some other kind of revelation, it's central focus is upon the redeemer. Here's the point here. Because the Bible is redemptive, the redeemer is front and center. He's the hero of the story. That's what we mean when we say the Bible is a field-centric focus. God is the hero. It's about His redemptive intent. Yeah, there are human beings all over the story. But there are always receivers, bearers, mediators, respondents. We are not the hero. The story is not about us. The story of Genesis 12 is not about Abraham. The story of Exodus 3 is not about Moses. The story of Genesis 6 is not about a guy building a boat. All those texts are about God. Biblical persons, biblical characters should not be treated as moral examples, as moral exemplars. Unless the text specifically tells the reader to treat them as such, and that happens very rarely. Again, if you turn the page, you're going to get a number of pages now on the issue of moralism. And the reason I've given you so much material is because so much of our Sunday school preaching, so much of the sermons we hear, so many of the sermons we hear are about moralistic teaching. Dare to be a Daniel. Esther, listen to the advice of her uncle Mordecai, so you listen to the advice of Mordecai. And on and on. But the fact of the matter is, as you read there, the text does not say, now you listen to the advice of Mordecai. Mordecai is not the hero of the Book of Esther. Esther is not the hero of the Book of Esther. Heyman is the bad guy of the Book of Esther, but the hero of the Book of Esther is the guy who doesn't get spoken about. That providence that makes everything come together, right? That makes the king have a dream that one night where Mordecai is about to be executed. And on and on. There's the hero of the Book of Esther. Who's the hero of Genesis 6, the God who's going to bring judgment so that he can preserve his creation? And on and on. Number 10. The Bible is a book consisting of many types of genre. A fundamental mistake that people make in reading the Bible is that they fail to understand that it employs a number of different types of proclamation. The recognition of genre type is crucial to good reading and to sound interpretation. You see our understanding that a particular text is written in a particular genre sets our expectations for the text. And it helps us develop the questions we will ask of the text. Again, that's no problem for us if you think about it. We do it all the time. Once upon a time. That's a genre indicator. As soon as you hear it, you know to do certain things, right? Suspend disbelief. Read it a certain way. Congratulations. You might already have one ten million dollars. Also a fairy tale. And on and on and on. These are not problems for us. We're used to the idea of genre. We do not read a letter from a selective service. Remember when we used to get those guys? Has anyone hold it up here? You don't read letters. I see the gray hairs and the gray beard and the bald guys. You don't read those in the same way that you read a laundry list. And that's not a problem for us. In two minutes at my house, I go from reading John Frames, Doctor of the Notch of God, to Marie Sundex, where the wild things are. And I know not to confuse the two. The literary critic, Leland Reichen, emphasizes that the interpreter must ask questions of the text that are appropriate to its literary form this way. And you have the quotation there. Any piece of writing must be read in terms of what it is. When we fail to ask literary questions, we go astray. Interpreting figurative expressions as if they were intended literally. Looking for theological propositions in a lyric poem that contain mainly an outpouring of human emotion, et cetera, et cetera. As I was thinking about this today, it struck me. I could make this either very, very convoluted or simply say this. The way to read the Bible well in terms of things like genre is to read the Bible often and read the Bible a lot. Again, we have a tendency. We want to read all the parts the same, but a Psalm does not read like a narrative. A narrative does not read like an epistle. And the way to know how to read the epistles is to read the epistles and read the epistles. To see that Paul is speaking to the church at Corinth, to the church at Galatian, and to see the issues there. And to know that's not the way that the Book of Revelation reads. That's not the way the Book of Genesis reads. Robert. Yeah. The question is, are some genres more authoritative than others? No, they're not more authoritative, but they do make different kinds of truth claims than others genres. One of the principles of hermetic that you read about in the McCartney and Clayton is that didactic literature is more authoritative for the setting of doctrine than narrative is. There's a good reason for that. In the book of Acts, it's very doubtful that Luke means to develop a doctrine of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. What he's doing is he's reciting occasions. However, when you then go to 1 Corinthians 12 through 14, Paul has something to say regarding the gifts of the Spirit that will be relevant too. Does that make sense, Robert? Not only do we have genre, we also have form in scripture. I didn't list all the kinds of genre that was intentional. I'm not going to list all the kinds of form. I'm not going to ask you to recapitulate some list at some point. If you're interested in those kinds of things, look at any good book on hermetic and these will be listed for you. Basically, the difference between form and genre is that genre is a way of looking at a biblical book as a whole. The book of Luke is a gospel. The book of 1 Corinthians is an epistle. A form, however, looks at a smaller unit. It's a category for analyzing relatively small individual literary units. In terms of form and scripture, we see law, dream, lament, parable, dirge, report, lawsuit, and on and on. There will be different principles for different forms. There are a lot of good books on the market for how to interpret parables. Now add to genre and form the fact that the Bible includes many literary devices. Hyperbole, which is quite simply overstatement. Yes, even the biblical authors overstate the case. Paul can do it and he does a good job. Irony, sarcasm, connectike, symbol, simile, riddle, metaphor, euphemism, allegory. In short, the Bible uses language in all the variety and all the diversity that you and I use language. And that means we need to be careful with it. Not all statements communicate the same. Not all statements make their truth claim in exactly the same way. And again, we can just the tip of the iceberg here. And again, a good book here would be fee and store it. A good basic entry level book here. And McCartney and Clayton. Number 11. Fee and Stewart. ST, I heard a question. This was published by Zanderven. Went on 20 years ago now. I bought mine for 99 cents on a US table there. That's probably still about that price. Number 11. The Bible is God's word for us. As we've seen, the reader of Scripture needs to ask a series of historical and literary questions to the text. And we've talked about work. You have to ask historical questions. You have to reconstruct context sometimes. All of those sorts of things. And all of that's legitimate. But we need to remember where we started. What is God's word to us? Sometimes, reading Scripture, theology, and all the rest can end up pretty cold, pretty dry. As we forgot the very reason we came to the text. We should never be satisfied with merely a historical lesson. It's still going to be the case that what it meant is the key to what it means. What the author intended to say is the key for what it means to say here. That's always going to be true. But I can't be satisfied with merely a historical telling. The Bible is a historical revelation. But it's not locked up in its historicity for it addresses us as well as the first audience. And here's where it's real work. The rest was easy up to this point. The rest was predictable. The rest was simply a matter of following good historiographic and linguistic method. Here it's real work. And the only rule that I can cite is that the original intent still controls meaning. A contemporary application of the text will never run roughshod over the historical meaning of the text. Yet the word may be applied in ways unforeseen by the author. Moses didn't know anything about. Automobiles and phone sex and all the rest of the stuff in our world. Credit cards. Yet the word of God is as relevant to all of that as it was to the Middle East in the second millennium BC. We live under different historical circumstances. We confront different historical challenges. And we're presented with different historical opportunities. Then Moses, the question for us finally is what is God's word for us? And our historical and linguistic study should not forget that reality. The demons know how to exegy, but it doesn't say them. If I can give you one more question to ask the text, it might help here. And that's this. How should we be responding to this text? It seems to me that's the operative question that moves us from simply the historical study of the text, the historical exegesis of the text by way of grammatical, historical interpretation, to where we want to be. Number 12, last one in our list. It's kind of a letdown. Biblical interpretation will not solve every issue. And I really want to press this home to you. What we must understand is that our beliefs, as much as we might like to think otherwise, are never simply the products of our engagement with Scripture. Remember, we say we have presuppositions. Even after we have engaged the Word of God, we'll come to some conclusions that are also the product of our confessional traditions, or the traditions we have aligned with. They're the products of a philosophical insight that we've aligned ourselves with. Let me give you one example here. Baptism. Every semester, I have to fight this battle in different courses. The debate between believers baptism and pito baptism is simply not resolvable by way of biblical citation. There, I've said it. Someone finally did. While believers on both sides, let's think about it for a second. Believers on both sides cite the Bible, right? And we earnestly want to be faithful to the Bible, right? No one's going like this. So why don't we agree? The fact of the matter is, on both sides of the aisle, the Bible is not the only thing that informs us. We have all other sorts of commitments that work here. The nature of the church, the function and integrity of the covenant, the means of grace, the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament and on and on. Fact is, there are some issues that the Bible alone will not satisfy. When a Baptist looks at the text to hear, make clearly says, or indicates believers baptism. I now want to respect him when he says that. In fact, I should be respecting him when he says that. But as a pito Baptist, when I read the text, it clearly implies to me pito baptism. And that's why we haven't moved from this. That's why that debate continues. It should continue. But it also tells us that we have more at stake here than simply a reading of scripture. Does that make sense, guys? What happens here in some of these issues, we go looking for the killer text, the trump card, the ace. But then the person is not convinced that we can't figure it out. We have other things here as well. But that's exactly why, here's going to have to tie this all together in 30 seconds. This is exactly why the Reformation pointed to the issue of the analogy of scripture as the primary principle of biblical interpretation. The most important tool we bring to the interpretive process is the mind of Christ. But that mind is achieved only by an immersion into the Word of God. And no matter what the issue is, God gives us the grace that we will allow His Word to shed light upon it.