Bully's Blog

Slogging through the Old Testament with your “daily reading program” sure makes you familiar with it, but those Christians brave enough to actually read it often find themselves wondering what on earth is going on. “Just keep reading your Bible” our pastors tell us, but do you ever get the feeling they don’t have a big grip on it either? “Just stick to the basics. The rest doesn’t matter.” It would sure be easier if pastors actually taught the Bible.

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“…preterism is not merely a way of interpreting New Testament prophecy but also provides a framework for understanding New Testament theology as a whole.”

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The Bible was written for us, not to us. This includes the New Testament. We have evangelicals who take both Old and New Testament prophecies concerning Israel and mistakenly apply them to modern Jews (dispensationalism). But then we also have evangelicals who think that the imminent predictions of judgment throughout the New Testament are still somehow “imminent.” This includes most conservative Christian theologians (even smart guys like D. A. Carson), who treat the epistles as though they were written to us. They make the same error as the dispensationalists, albeit on a smaller scale. This misreads the New Testament. It replaces interpretation with application, and unwittingly makes many verses unnecessarily mysterious to modern Christians.  Continue reading

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It even includes the Ten Words, pot of Manna and Aaron’s rod, so you can teach Word, Sacrament and Government.

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?

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“I began writing this book some ten years ago, although my interest in Hebrew literary structure goes back a decade before that. My fascination with the subject was kindled when I began teaching Old Testament courses in seminary. At that time I was struck by the apparent lack of order within many of the biblical books. Jeremiah seemed hopelessly confused in its organisation; so did Isaiah and Hosea and most of the prophets. Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes appeared to be in almost complete disarray, and even the more orderly historical books, such as Joshua and Kings, showed signs of strangely careless organisation. Why did the biblical authors write like this? I would never write a book, an article, or even a private letter with such carelessness of arrangement.

I was intrigued by the possibility that the Hebrew authors might have organised their compositions according to literary conventions that were different from ours. I began to discover, over a period of years, that several structuring patterns rarely used by us were remarkably common in the books of the Hebrew Bible, particularly chiasmus (symmetry), parallelism, and sevenfold patterns. I was increasingly struck by how often these patterns had been utilised to arrange biblical books…

It was my mother who gave me a love for literature. She read to my brother Stephen and me regularly, from as early as I can remember. I still have many fond memories of those wondrous bedtime stories, whose structures — like the Bible — were designed for the ear, not the eye.”

David A. Dorsey, The Literary Structure of the Old Testament, p.9-10 (Preface).

“Recovering the Old Testament as a text in which Christians live and move and have their being is one of the most urgent tasks before the church. Reading the Reformers is good and right. Christian political activism has its place. Even at their best, however, these can only bruise the heel of a world that has abandoned God. But the Bible—the Bible is a sword to divide joints from marrow, a weapon to crush the head.”

–Peter J. Leithart, A House For My Name, p. 40.