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Does the New Testament reinterpret the Old Testament? No. Instead, the New Testament and specifically the Holy Spirit through the New Testament writings reveals the real meaning of the Old Testament. By using the word “reveal,” I mean the more technical sense of apocalypse—an unveiling or revelation.*
Here are a couple reasons why I argue that the Spirit unveils the meaning of the Old Testament. [Read more…] about Does The New Testament Reinterpret the Old Testament?
The Gospel of John aims to persuade readers that “Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31).
The means by which the Gospel communicates its purpose is eye-witness testimony. The evangelist identifies himself as “the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true” (John 21:24).
Putting the purpose and mode of delivery together, we can say that John as an eyewitness of Jesus Christ carefully selected and organized his Gospel book so that readers would believe and have life in the name of Jesus, the Christ and the Son of God. [Read more…] about What Is the Gospel of John about?
Have you ever wondered how to make a theological argument? While many tools can help us make arguments, there are four overlapping steps to making a theological argument. Here they are: [Read more…] about How to Make a Theological Argument
Why do we read the Bible? Ask yourself this question. What’s the point? “Do I read to understand history? Do genealogies, timelines, and charts sum up my reading habits?” If so, you probably read to understand history. “Do I read Genesis 1 to argue for evolutionary creationism?” If so, you probably read Genesis 1 to buffer a preferred scientific theory.
And while we can read the Bible and ask any question from it, we need to realize that Holy Scripture has a purpose, which directs how we ought to read Genesis 1 or any text for that matter.
When we read the Bible, we intuitively get its meaning. If we read a story about Abraham, we know that characters move through a story until its conclusion. If we read Proverbs, we know that we read wise sayings.
Yet our intuition mostly comes by way of basic education: we learned how to read and understand stories. So we apply what we’ve learned in school and in life to the Bible. And we attend a church where we hear the Bible preached. For that reason, we also have learned how to apply the Bible to our lives.
What we call intuition in large part derives from experience and education. And so it is worth considering how we get meaning from the Bible since we all bring something to the text. The question should be: are we bringing beneficial assumptions when we read it?
Here are four main ways that I see us reading Scripture to grasp its meaning. By looking at each, we can grow in our awareness of how we read the Bible and hopefully become more skilled at reading Scripture through this knowledge.
The famous historian Adolf Harnack once asserted, “The attempts at deducing the genesis of the Church’s doctrinal system from the theology of Paul, or from compromises between Apostolic doctrinal ideas, will always miscarry; for they fail to note that to the most important premises of the Catholic doctrine of faith belongs an element which we cannot recognise as dominant in the New Testament, viz., the Hellenic spirit.”*
And it is not that he sees this difference between Jewish and Greek thought as a minor divergence. He claims, “Judaism and Hellenism in the age of Christ were opposed to each other.”** Harnack’s thesis, I would suggest, still predominates today, even if heavily nuanced and rebuffed largely by Hengel.
Yet the idea that Greek thought with its metaphysical interest or abstracted language does not match the biblical idiom of the Bible is beyond false. [Read more…] about Hellenism Wasn’t Such a Bad Thing
