Bully's Blog

A great deal of the theological reflection on the nature of God (at least that which I come across) is human ruminations disengaged from most of the Bible, ie. the Old Testament. It gets treated as a vestigial organ bigger than the body it’s part of. Is this because the Old Testament conflicts more sharply with the modern and post-modern worldviews than the epistles?

How many theologians could take the book of Judges and write a commentary that is critical of secular humanism like James Jordan did? How many used the Law as the basis for a working theory of biblical economics like Gary North? How many see the outworking of the Trinity in the structures of family, community and church government like Peter Leithart and Doug Wilson – or in the Land-splitting, saint gathering, sin expelling events in Zechariah 14 (AD70) for that matter? How many theologians see both the Creation week and the history of the first century church in Leviticus 1? (Jordan)

Disengaged from all the Scriptures, our ruminations are disengaged from reality. Such true contemplation of God eventually brings dambusting consequences to culture. But if we won’t reject the pop-science/pop-history foundations of secular humanism, we have no hope of thwarting it. We waste our time attempting to accommodate the Bible to current ephemera. The Bible doesn’t work that way. It comes in like a sword and violates our thinking until we think the way God does.

The anti-intellectualists’ faith is limited to their ‘heart’. The academics’ gets limited to their heads. It’s just philosophy, and it’s just as sneaky. That’s not how God works in the history He gave to us. We say we want to explore Him but won’t read the map.

Time to truly engage with the text – all of it. The so-called ‘Christ event’ echoes right through the Bible back to Eden in manifold colours. We can only understand Him truly with a biblical theology that is both historical and typological. That is how Christ has revealed Himself.

These are the things the best theologians are tackling. Anything we come up with outside of that is short-lived twaddle, the rubber sword of the gnostic.

I guess my point is that we say we start with Christ, but we have tunnel vision when it comes to the Bible.