Biblical Theology

Mike Bird has posted a link to what looks like a very good blog on Biblical Theology - it's called
Beginning with Moses.

A good understanding of biblical theology, and how the bible holds together, is I think essential for any understanding of any particular part of Scripture. And a blog like this one will be a great help to us all in that.

Carson on Niebuhr and Liberal Christianity

One of the interesting points I noted in Carson's book, Christ and Culture Revisited, was his comments on liberal Christianity.

... for liberal theology, which is one form of what Niebuhr calls "culture Christianity": transparently, Niebuhr is not talking about what C. S. Lewis would call "mere Christians," some of whom happen to hold some more-or-less liberal positions on this detail or that economic policy. "Sociologically, Niebuhr says of them, "they may be interpreted as nonrevolutionaries who find no need for positing 'cracks in time' - fall and incarnation and judgment and resurrection." Indeed, they reject "the whole conception of a once-and-for-all act of redemption." This is pretty fundamental stuff. If that is what liberal Christianity is, then Machen, though he wrote three-quarters of a century ago, was surely right: liberalism is not another denomination or any other kind of legitimate option within Christianity. Rather, it is another religion. (pages 33-34)

For too long I and others in Scotland, and in the Church of Scotland, have tried to make common ground with those who deny that God is creator, that there was a fall into sin which has affected all of humanity, that the eternal Son of God became human, that there will be a final judgment by God upon all humanity, that the cross and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ are God's once for all act of salvation - there is no other salvation apart from that achieved by God in the cross of Christ.

It is time to say clearly, denying these high points of biblical revelation moves one outside of biblical, orthodox Christianity. Any liberty of opinion granted to ministers and elders of the Church of Scotland in relation to the Westminster Confession of Faith, does not and cannot extend to liberty of opinion on these fundamentals of the faith.

Liberal Christianity, so called, is neither liberal nor Christian. As Carson quotes Machen, 'it is another religion', and one which I don't want anything to do with.

Christ and Culture

I picked this book up at Keswick last year and read it when I came home from Keswick this year! Whenever they get bought they all get read!

Carson's conclusion is a good place to start:
To pursue with a passion the robust and nourishing wholeness of biblical theology as the controlling matrix for our reflection on the relations between Christ and culture will, ironically, help us to be far more flexible than the inflexible grids that are often made to stand in the Bible's place. Scripture will mandate that we think holistically and subtyly, wisely and penetratingly, under the Lordship of Christ - utterly dissatisfied with the anesthetic of the culture. The complexity will mandate our service, without insisting that things turn out a certain way: we learn to trust and obey and leave the results to God, for we learn from both Scripture and history that sometimes faithfulness leads to awakening and reformation, sometimes to persecution and violence, and sometimes to both. Because creation gave us embodied existence, and beause our ultimate hope is the resurrection life in the new heaven and the new earth, we will understand that being reconciled to god and bowing to the Lordship of King Jesus cannot possibly be reduced to the privatized religion or a gorm of ostensibly spirituality abstracted from full-orbed bodily existence now. (pages 227-228)

Carson rejects the five options offered by Niebuhr, noting that in his opinion two of these fail the test of being adequately Christian! Carson offers throughout biblical theology as a way of reading the bible which engages us with the bible in our own culture(s) in the hope that this will offer us a Christian way to respond to the challenges of non-Christian and anti-Christian expressions of culture.

Carson at times approves of the definition of culture offered by Geertz:
[T]he culture concept ... denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life. (page 2)
This is helpful, not least in its brevity, and may be useful to others when writing and talking about culture.

On the whole Carson's book is worth reading as it addresses issues of cultural engagement which rightly press in upon the church and our Christian living.

The Trinity and John's Gospel

I picked this book up at EMA in June. I like the series, well, not ever volume, but most of them are very good. Biblical theology is a hobby of mine and this book is a very good example of excellent biblical theology.

The authors give us a really good example of biblical studies providing a strong foundation for theological reflection.

The Bible is, after all, a profoundly theological document. Readings that fail to move beyond literary and genetic/historical issues to substantive doctrinal ones thus fail to grasp the Bible’s main subject matter. (pages 20-21)

No fear with this work, theological reflection is the final aim, but the route to it is through detailed study of the text of scripture. John’s gospel is the source and verse by verse, section by section a detailed account of what John writes about God, and how this is fully Trinitarian is carefully built up. Chapters 2 to 6 are entirely given over to a study and synthesis of what John’s gospel contributes to our understanding of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The biblical studies are excellent, the theological reflections start from the text and build four square upon what has been learned from John’s gospel. Jesus is shown to be God theos, in the whole gospel – note the inclusio 1:1, 18 and 20:28. But also in the references which include Jesus in the monotheistic character and nature of God, theos.

I don’t want to fall into blogging another long book review, although that would be very easy from this great book. Buy the book, read the book and share with me how much you have benefitted from it.

Just one more quote, on the author’s approach to their work:
we have read the Fourth Gospel with awe and wonder and with prayerful dependence upon ‘the Spirit of truth’ (14:17; 15:26; 16:13). (page 23)

May we all so read every page of scripture and find there displayed for us the glory of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.